SOME USES OF THIS DISCOVERY
There is some danger in pointing out the obvious. Quick wits, perceiving
at once how obvious the obvious is (though they may never have noticed
it before), will say it is futile and silly to dwell upon it. Pugnacious
people will assume that you mean more than you say, and are attempting
to smuggle in some objectionable dogma under your truisms. Finally,
docile minds, pleased to think you are delivering an oracle for their
edification, will bow before your plain words as before some sacred
mystery. The discernment of essence is subject, I know, to all these
misunderstandings, and before going further I will endeavour to remove
them.
In the first place, a warning to tender idealists. This recognition that
the data of experience are essences is Platonic, but it is a corrective
to all that is sentimental in Platonism, curing it as it were
homœopathically. The realm of essence is not peopled by choice forms or
magic powers. It is simply the unwritten catalogue, prosaic and
infinite, of all the characters possessed by such things as happen to
exist, together with the characters which all different things would
possess if they existed. It is the sum of mentionable objects, of terms
about which, or in which, something might be said. Thus although
essences have the texture and ontological status of Platonic ideas, they
can lay claim to none of the cosmological, metaphysical, or moral
prerogatives attributed to those ideas. They are infinite in number and
neutral in value. Greek minds had rhetorical habits; what told in debate
seemed to them final; and Socrates thought it important to define in
disputation the common natures designated by various words. Plato, who
was initially a poet, had a warmer intuition of his ideas; but it was
still grammar and moral prejudice that led him to select and to deify
them. The quality or function that makes all shepherds shepherds or all
goods good is an essence; but so are all the remaining qualities which
make each shepherd and each good distinguishable from every other. Far
from gathering up the fluidity of existence into a few norms for human
language and thought to be focussed upon, the realm of essence
infinitely multiplies that multiplicity, and adds every undiscriminated
shade and mode of being to those which man has discriminated or which
nature contains. Essence is not something invented or instituted for a
purpose; it is something passive, anything that might be found, every
quality of being; it therefore has not the function of reducing
plurality to unity for the convenience of our poor wits or economy of
language. It is far more garrulous than nature, herself not laconic.
Nor have essences a metaphysical status, so as to exercise a non-natural
control over nature. My doctrine lends no countenance to the human
presumption that whatsoever man notices or names or loves ought to be
more deeply seated in reality or more permanent than what he ignores or
despises. The good is a great magnet over discourse and imagination, and
therefore rightly rules the Platonic world, which is that of moral
philosophy only; but this good is itself defined and chosen by the
humble animal nature of man, demanding to eat and live and love. In the
realm of essence this human good has no pre-eminence, and being an
essence it has no power. The Platonic notion that ideas were models
which things imperfectly imitated expresses admirably the moral nature
of man attaining to self-knowledge and proclaiming clearly his
instinctive demands; or possibly (if the moralist is also a poet plastic
to the wider influences of nature) defining also the demands which
non-human creatures would make on themselves or on us if they had life
and thought. Platonic ideas, in their widest range, express sympathy
with universal life; they are anagrams of moral insight. Hence their
nobility, and constant appeal to minds struggling after perfection,
whether in art or in self-discipline. The spirit, by expressing itself
in them, is fortified, as the artist is by his work taking shape before
his eyes and revealing to him his own hidden intentions and judgements
never expressed. But the realm of essence is no more limited to these
few ideals chosen and projected heavenwards by the aspiration of living
creatures, than the celestial galaxy is limited to the north star.
Excellence is relative to the accidental life of nature which selects
now one essence and now another to be the goal of some thought or
endeavour. In the realm of essence no emphasis falls on these favourite
forms which does not fall equally on every other member of that infinite
continuum. Every bad thing—bad because false to the ideal which its own
nature may propose to it—illustrates an essence quite as accurately as
if it had been good. No essence, except temporarily and by accident, is
the goal of any natural process, much less its motive power.
Thus the discernment of essence, while confirming Platonic logic in the
ideal status which it assigns to the terms of discourse (and discourse
includes all that is mental in sensation and perception), destroys the
illusions of Platonism, because it shows that essences, being
non-existent and omnimodal, can exercise no domination over matter, but
themselves come to light in nature or in thought only as material
exigencies may call them forth and select them. The realm of essence is
a perfect democracy, where everything that is or might be has a right of
citizenship; so that only some arbitrary existential principle—call it
the predispositions in matter or the blindness of absolute will—can be
rendered responsible, in a verbal metaphysics, for things being as they
are, causing them to fall now into this form and now into that, or to
choose one essence rather than another to be their type and ideal. These
chosen types are surrounded in the realm of essence by every monster,
every unexampled being, and every vice; no more vicious there, no more
anomalous or monstrous than any other nature. Seen against that infinite
background even the star-dust of modern astronomy, with its strange
rhythms and laws, and its strange fertility, seems the most curious of
accidents: what a choice for existence to make, when it might have been
anything else! And as to the snug universe which the ancients, and most
men in their daily thoughts, have imagined about them, presided over by
its Olympian deities, or its Jewish God, or its German Will, it is not
only the figment of the most laughable egotism, but even if by chance it
were the actual world, it would be utterly contingent and ephemeral.
This is one hygienic effect of the discovery of essence: it is a
shower-bath for the dreamy moralist, and clears Platonism of
superstition.
On the other hand, the discernment of essence reinstates the Socratic
analysis of knowledge, by showing that essences are indispensable terms
in the perception of matters of fact, and render transitive knowledge
possible. If there were no purely ideal characters present to intuition
yet not existentially a part either of the mind or of the environment,
nothing ulterior could ever be imagined, much less truly conceived.
Every supposed instance of knowledge would be either a bit of sentience
without an object, or an existing entity unrelated to any mind. But an
essence given in intuition, being non-existent in itself and by no means
the object at that moment intended by the animal in his alertness or
pursuit, may become a description of that object. If there is to be
intelligence at all, the immediate must be vehicular. It is so when
animal fancy is turned to the description of things; for then passive
sensibility supplies terms which are in themselves volatile and
homeless, and these terms may be dispersed as names, to christen the
things that receive them, carrying intelligence by its intent to its
objects (objects already selected by animal endeavour) and reporting the
objects to the animal mind by their appearance. What is given becomes in
this manner a sign for what is sought, and a conventional description of
it; and the object originally posited by faith and intent in the act of
living may be ultimately more and more accurately revealed to belief and
to thought. Essences are ideal terms at the command of fancy and of the
senses (whose data are fancies) as words are at the command of a ready
tongue. If thought arises at all, it must think something after some
fashion; and the essences it evokes in intuition enable it to imagine,
to assert, and perhaps truly to know something about what is not itself
nor its own condition: some existing thing or removed event which would
otherwise run on blindly in its own medium, at best overtaking the
animal unawares, or confronting him to no purpose. But when the animate
body responds to circumstances and is sensitive, in various
unprecedented ways, to their variations, it acquires a whole sensuous
vocabulary in which to describe them, colours, sounds, shapes, sizes,
excellences, and defects being the parts of speech in its grammar. It
feels hot or cold according to the season; so that cold and heat become
signs of the seasons for the spirit, the homely poetry in which the
senses render the large facts and the chief influences of nature.
Perhaps even the vegetative soul has her dreams, but in the animal these
floating visions are clarified by watchfulness and can be compared and
contrasted in their character as well as in their occasions; and they
lend intelligence terms in which to think and judge. The toys of sense
become the currency of commerce; ideas, which were only echoes of facts,
serve as symbols for them. Thus intuition of essences first enables the
mind to say something about anything, to think of what is not given, and
to be a mind at all.
A great use of the discovery of essence, then, is to justify the notions
of intelligence and knowledge, otherwise self-contradictory, and to show
how such transcendence of the actual is possible for the animal mind.
The notion of essence is also useful in dismissing and handing over to
physical science, where it belongs, the mooted question concerning the
primary and secondary qualities of matter. There is a profound but
genuine problem here which no logical discrimination and no
psychological analysis can affect, namely: What are the elements of
matter, and by what arrangement or motion of these elements do gross
bodies acquire their various properties? The physical philosophers must
tell us, if they can, how matter is composed: and as they are compelled,
like the rest of us, to begin by studying the aspects and behaviour of
obvious bodies, on the scale of human perception, it is but fair to give
them time, or even eternity, in which to come to a conclusion. But the
question of primary and secondary qualities, as mooted in modern
philosophy, is a false problem. It rests on the presumption that the
data of sense can be and should be constituents of the object in nature,
or at least exactly like its constituents. The object in nature is, for
example, bread I am eating: and the presumption of modern psychologists
is that this object is, or ought to be, composed of my sensations of
contact, colour, temperature, movement, and pleasure in eating it. The
pleasure and the colour, however, soon prove to be reversible according
to the accidents of appetite or jaundice in me, without any change in
the object itself. In the act of eating (overlooked by these
psychologists) I have my radical assurance of that object, know its
place, and continue to testify to its identity. The bread, for animal
faith, is this thing I am eating, and causing to disappear to my
substantial advantage; and although language is clumsy in expressing
this assurance, which runs much deeper than language, I may paraphrase
it by saying that bread is this substance I can eat and turn into my own
substance; in seizing and biting it I determine its identity and its
place in nature, and in transforming it I prove its existence. If the
psychological critics of experience overlooked this animal faith in fact
as they do in theory, their theory itself would have no point of
application, and they would not know what they were talking about, and
would not really be talking about anything. Their data would have no
places and no context. As it is, they continue illegitimately to posit
the bread, as an animal would, and then, in their human wisdom, proceed
to remove from the description of it the colour and the pleasure
concerned, as being mere effects on themselves, while they identify the
bread itself with the remainder of their description hypostatised:
shape, weight, and hardness. But how should some data, when posited,
produce others entirely different, but contemporary, or perhaps earlier?
Evidently these so-called primary qualities are simply those essences
which custom or science continues to use in its description of things:
but meantime the things have evaporated, and the description of them, in
no matter what terms, ought to be idle and useless. All knowledge of
nature and history has become a game of thought, a laborious dream in
which a dim superstition makes me believe that some trains of images are
more prosperous than others.
It is because essences are not discerned that philosophers in so many
ways labour the hopeless notion that there is nothing in sense which is
not first in things. Either perception and knowledge (which are animal
faith) are deputed to be intuition, so that things have to be composed
pictorially, out of the elements of human discourse, as if their
substance consisted of images pressed together like a pack of cards; or
else ideas must be explained as imports from the outer world, prolonging
the qualities of things, as if the organs of sense were only holes in
the skin, through which emanations of things could pass ready-made into
the heart or head, and perhaps in those dark caverns could breed
unnaturally together, producing a monstrous brood of dreams and errors.
But, as a matter of fact, elaborate bodily mechanisms are just as
requisite for seeing as for thinking, and the landscape, as a man sees
it, is no less human than the universe as his philosophy constructs
it—and we know how human that is. Evidences soon accumulate to prove
that no quality in the object is like any datum of sense. Nothing given
exists. Consider, for instance, the water which seems cold to one hand
and warm to the other. Shall the water be called hot or cold? Both,
certainly, if a full description of it, in all its relations and
appearances, is what is sought. But if what is sought is the substance
of the water, properties shown to be relative to my organs of sense
cannot be “real” qualities of that substance. Their original (for they
were still expected to have originals) was accordingly placed elsewhere.
Perhaps the “real” cold might be in the warm hand, and the “real” warmth
in the cold one; or in cold and hot tracts of the brain respectively; or
else “in the mind”—a substance which might endure heat and cold
simultaneously in different parts of itself. Or perhaps the mind was
simply the heat and the cold existing successively, each a feeling
absolute in itself: but in this case a second mind would be required to
observe, remember, and appropriate those existing feelings, and how
should reflection reach those feelings or know at all what they were? If
they are past, how should intuition possess them now? And if they are
only the present data of intuition, need they ever have existed before,
or in any form but that in which I feel them now, when I feel them no
longer?
The notion that knowledge is intuition, that it must either penetrate to
the inner quality of its object or else have no object but the overt
datum, has not been carried out with rigour: if it had, it might have
been sooner abandoned. Rudimentary vital feelings, such as pleasure or
hunger, are not supposed even by the most mythological philosophers to
be drawn from external sources of the same quality. Plato in one place
says of intelligence that there must surely be floods of it in the vast
heavens, as there are floods of light there, whence puny man may draw
his dribblet. He neglects, however, to extend this principle to pain,
pleasure, or hunger. He does not argue that my paltry pains and
pleasures can be but drops sucked in from some vast cosmic reservoir of
these feelings, nor that my momentary hunger could never have improvised
its own quality, but must be only a bit, transferred to my mortal
stomach, of a divine hunger eternally gnawing the whole sky. Yet this is
the principle on which many a candid idolater has supposed, and still
supposes, that light, space, music, and reason, as his intuition renders
them, must permeate the universe.
The illusion is childish, and when we have once discerned essence, it
seems strangely idolatrous. The essences given in intuition are fetched
from no original. The reason, music, space, and light of my imagination
are essences existing nowhere: the intuition of them is quite as
spiritual and quite as personal as my pain, pleasure, or hunger, and
quite as little likely to be drawn from an imaginary store of similar
substances in the world at large. They are dream-lights kindled by my
fancy, like all the terms of discourse; they do not need to be
previously resident either in the object or in the organ of sense. Not
existing at all, they cannot be the causes of their own appearance; nor
would introducing an existing triangle under the skin, or making the
brain triangular, in the least help to display the triangle to
intuition. But if some material thing called a triangle is placed before
me at a suitable distance, my eyes and brain will do the rest, and the
essence dear to Euclid will arise in my mind’s eye. No essence would
ever appear simply because many hypostatic instances of it existed in
the world: a living body must create the intuition and blossom into it,
evoking some spontaneous image. Sense is a faculty of calling names
under provocation; all perception and thought are cries and comments
elicited from the heart of some living creature. They are original,
though not novel, like the feelings of lovers: normal phases of
animation in animals, whose life carries this inner flux of pictures and
currents in the fancy, mixed with little and great emotions and dull
bodily feelings: nothing in all this discourse being a passive copy of
existences elsewhere.
On the other hand, if the so-called primary qualities, taken
pictorially, are just as symbolic as the secondary ones, the secondary,
taken indicatively, are just as true as the primary. They too report
some particularity in the object which, being relative to me, may be of
the highest importance, and being also relative to something in the
constitution of the object, may be a valuable indication of its nature,
like greenness in grapes. The qualities most obviously relative and
reversible, like pleasant and unpleasant, good and bad, are truly
qualities of things in some of their relations. They can all, by
judicious criticism and redistribution, become _true_ expressions of the
life of nature. They have their exits and their entrances at appointed
times, and they supply a perspective view, or caricature, of the world
no less interesting and pungent for being purely egotistical. Artists
have their place, and the animal mind is one of them.
That like knows like is a proverb, and after the manner of proverbs it
is applicable on occasion, but its opposite is so too. Similar minds can
understand the same things, and in that sense can understand each other:
they can share and divine one another’s thoughts. This is because
similar organs under similar stimulation will yield similar intuitions,
revealing the same essence: like knows like by dramatic sympathy and
ideal unanimity. But in sensuous perception the unlike knows the unlike.
Here the organ is not adjusted to a similar organ, like instruments
tuned up to the same key: the adjustment is rather to heterogeneous
events in the environment or remote facts on quite a different scale;
and the images that mediate this knowledge are quite unlike the events
they signify. It would be grotesque to expect a flower to imitate or to
resemble the soil, climate, moisture, and light, or even the seed and
sap, that preside over its budding: but the flower presupposes all these
agencies and is an index to them; an index which may become a sign and a
vehicle of knowledge when it is used as an index by some discursive
observer. Any given essence is normally a true sign for the object or
event which occupies animal attention when that essence appears: as it
is true of arsenic that it is poisonous and of pepper that it is hot,
although the quality of being hot or poisonous cannot possibly be a
material constituent of those substances, nor a copy of such a
constituent. The environment determines the occasions on which
intuitions arise, the psyche—the inherited organisation of the
animal—determines their form, and ancient conditions of life on earth no
doubt determined which psyches should arise and prosper; and probably
many forms of intuition, unthinkable to man, express the facts and the
rhythms of nature to other animal minds. Yet all these various
symbolisms and sensuous dialects may be truly significant, composing
most relevant complications in nature, by which she comments on herself.
To suppose that some of these comments are poetical and others literal
is gratuitous. They are all presumably poetical in form (intuition being
poetry in act) and all expressive in function, and addressed to the
facts of nature in some human and moral perspective, as poetry is too.
The absurdity of wishing to have _intuitions of things_ reaches its
climax when we ask whether things, if nobody looked at them, would still
look as they do. Of course they would still be what they are: but
whether their intrinsic essence, whether they are looked at or not,
_resembles_ such essences as eyes of one sort or another might gather by
looking at them, is an idle question. It is not resemblance but
relevance and closeness of adaptation that render a language expressive
or an expression true. We read nature as the English used to read Latin,
pronouncing it like English, but understanding it very well. If all
other traditions of Latin euphony had been lost, there would have been
no means of discovering in what respect the English pronunciation was a
distortion, although the judicious would have suspected that the Romans
could not have had an Oxonian accent. So each tribe of animals, each
sense, each stage of experience and science, reads the book of nature
according to a phonetic system of its own, with no possibility of
exchanging it for the native sounds: but this situation, though hopeless
in one sense, is not unsatisfactory practically, and is innocently
humorous. It adds to the variety, if not to the gaiety, of experience;
and perhaps a homely accent in knowledge, as in Latin, renders learning
more savoury and familiar, and makes us more willing to read.
It is just because the images given in sense are so very original and
fantastic that understanding can enlarge knowledge by correcting,
combining, and discounting those appearances. Sensible qualities, like
pet names, do very well at home, when no consistent or exact description
of things is required, but only some familiar signal. When it comes to
public business, however, more serious and legal designations have to be
used, and these are what we call science. The description is not less
symbolic but more accurate and minute. It may also involve—as in optics
and psychology—a discovery of the images of sense as distinct from their
original uses as living visions of things; and we may then learn that
our immediate experience was but a diving-board, on which we hardly knew
we were standing in plunging into the world. It was indeed essentially a
theoretic eminence, a place of outlook, intended to fortify and prepare
us for the plunge. Accordingly the symbols of sense are most relevant to
their object at the remove and on the scale on which our daily action
encounters it. In science, analogies and hypotheses, if not microscopes
and telescopes, supply ideas of things more immediate or more remote.
Thus the warmth and the cold felt at once in the same water inform me
more directly about the water in relation to my two hands, than about my
temperature, my brain, or my intuitions; and yet these things too are
involved in that event and may be discovered in it by science. But
science and sense, though differing in their scope, are exactly alike in
their truth; and the views taken by science, though more penetrating and
extensive, are still views: ground plans, elevations, and geometric
projections taking the place of snapshots. All intuitions, whether in
sense or thought, are theoretic: all are appropriate renderings, on some
method and on some scale, of the circumstances in which they arise, and
may serve to describe those circumstances truly: but experience and tact
are requisite, as in the use of any language or technique of art, in
distributing our stock symbols, and fitting the image to the occasion
and the word to the fact.
The notion of essence also relieves the weary philosopher of several
other problems, even more scholastic and artificial, concerning
sensations and ideas, particulars and universals, the abstract and the
concrete. There are no such differences in essences as they are given:
all are equally immediate and equally unsubstantial, equally ideal and
equally complete. Nothing could be more actual and specific than some
unpleasant inner feeling or sentiment, as it colours the passing moment;
yet nothing could be less descriptive of anything further, or vaguer in
its significance, or more ephemeral an index to processes and events
which it does not disclose but which are all its substance. And the
clearest idea—say a geometrical sphere—and the most remote from sense
(if we mean by sense the images actually supplied by the outer organs)
is just such a floating presence, caught and lost again, an essence that
in itself tells me nothing of its validity, nor of a world of fact to
which it might apply. All these current distinctions are extraneous to
essences, which are the only data of experience. The distinctions are
borrowed from various ulterior existential relations subsisting between
facts, some mental and some material, but none of them ever given in
intuition. The mental facts, namely the intuitions to which the essences
appear, may be confused by psychologists with those essences, as the
material things supposed to possess those essences as qualities may be
confused with them by the practical intellect, and both may be called by
the same names; a double equivocation which later enables the
metaphysician, by a double hypostasis of the datum, to say that the
material thing and the mental event are one and the same _given fact_.
We may innocently speak of given facts, meaning those posited in
previous perceptions or referred to in previous discourse: but no fact
can be a given fact in the sense of being a datum of intuition. And it
is entirely on relations between facts not given that those current
distinctions rest. They may often express truly the relative scope of
intuitions, or the manner in which they take place amongst the general
events in nature or arise in the animal body: but in respect to
essences, which are the only terms of actual thought, they are perfectly
unmeaning.
Suppose, for instance, that I see yellow, that my eyes are open, and
that there is a buttercup before me; my intuition (not properly the
essence “yellow” which is the datum) is then called a sensation. If
again I see yellow with my eyes closed, the intuition is called an idea
or a dream—although often in what is called an idea no yellow appears,
but only words. If yet again I see yellow with my eyes open, but there
is no buttercup, the intuition is called a hallucination. These various
situations are curious, and worth distinguishing in optics and in
medical psychology, but for the sceptical scrutiny of experience they
make no difference. What can inform me, when I see yellow simply,
whether my eyes are open or shut, or whether I am awake or dreaming, or
what functions material buttercups may have in psycho-physical
correlation, or whether there is anything physical or anything psychical
in the world, or any world at all? These notions are merely
conventional, imported knowledge or imported delusion. Such extraneous
circumstances, whether true or false, cannot alter in the least the
essence which I have before me, nor its sort of reality, nor its status
in respect to my intuition of it.
Suppose again that I am at sea and feel the ship rocking. This feeling
is called external perception; but if I feel nausea, my feeling is
called internal sensation, or emotion, or introspection; and there are
sad psychologists to conclude thence that while the ship rocking is
something physical, and a mere appearance, nausea is something
psychical, and an absolute reality. Why this partiality in distributing
metaphysical dignities amongst things equally obvious? Each essence that
appears appears just as it is, because its appearance defines it, and
determines the whole being that it is or has. Nothing given is either
physical or mental, in the sense of being intrinsically a thing or a
thought; it is just a quality of being. Essences (like “rocking”) which
serve eventually to describe material facts are given in intuitions
which are just as mental as those which supply psychological terms for
describing mental discourse. On the other hand, essences (like “nausea”)
used first perhaps for describing discourse, mark crises in the flux of
matter just as precisely as those which are used to describe material
facts directly; because discourse goes on in animals subject to material
influences. But in neither case can the intuitions—which constitute
discourse and the mental sphere—be ever given in intuition. They are
posited in memory, expectation, and dramatic psychology. The rocking I
feel is called physical, because the essence before me—say coloured
planes crossing—serves to report and designate very much more
complicated and prolonged movements in the ship and the waves; and the
nausea I also feel is called psychical, because it reports nothing
(unless my medical imagination intervenes) but is endured pathetically,
with a preponderating sense of time, change, and danger, as it largely
consists in feeling how long this lasts, how upset I am, and how sick I
am about to be.
Again, if I see yellow once, my experience is called a particular
impression, and its object, yellow, is supposed to exist and to be a
particular too; but if I see yellow again, yellow has mysteriously
become a universal, a general idea, and an abstraction. Yet the datum
for intuition is throughout precisely the same. No essence is abstract,
yet none is a particular thing or event, none is an object of belief,
perception, or pursuit, having a particular position in the context of
nature. Even the intuition, though it is an event, cannot become an
object of pursuit or perception; and its conventional place in history,
when it has been posited and is believed to have occurred, is assigned
to it only by courtesy, at the place and time of its physical support,
as a wife in some countries takes her husband’s name. Not the data of
intuition, but the objects of animal faith, are the particulars
perceived: they alone are the existing things or events to which the
animal is reacting and to which he is attributing the essences which
arise, as he does so, before his fancy. These data of intuition are
universals; they form the elements of such a description of the object
as is at that time possible; they are never that object itself, nor any
part of it. Essences are not drawn out or abstracted from things; they
are given before the thing can be clearly perceived, since they are the
terms used in perception; but they are not given until attention is
stretched upon the thing, which is posited blindly in action; and they
come as revelations, or oracles, delivered by that thing to the mind,
and symbolising it there. In itself, as suspended understanding may
suffer us to recognise it in reflection, each essence is a positive and
complete theme: it is impossible that for experience anything should be
more concrete or individual than is this exact and total appearance
before me. Having never been parts of any perceived object, it is
impossible that given essences should be abstracted from it. Being
obvious and immediate data they cannot even have that congenital
imperfection, that limp, which we might feel in a broken arch, or in the
half of anything already familiar as a whole. But given essences are
indeed visionary, they are unsubstantial; and in that respect they seem
strange and unearthly to an animal expecting to work amongst things
without realising their appearance. Yet ghostly as his instinct may deem
them, they are perfect pictures, with nothing abstract or abstruse in
their specious nature. The abstract is a category posterior to
intuition, and applicable only to terms, such as numbers and other
symbols of mathematics, which have been intentionally substituted for
other essences given earlier, by which they were suggested; but even
these technical terms are abstract only by accident and in function;
they have a concrete essence of their own, and are constitutive elements
of perfectly definite structures in their own plane of being, forming
patterns and running into scales there, like so much music.
Similarly, nothing given in sensation or thought is in the least vague
in itself. Vagueness is an adventitious quality, which a given
appearance may be said to possess in relation to an object presumed to
have other determinations: as the cloud in _Hamlet_ is but a vague camel
or a vague weasel, but for the landscape-painter a perfectly definite
cloud. The vague is merely the _too_ vague for some assumed purpose; and
philosophers with a mania for accuracy, who find all discourse vague
that is discourse about anything in the world of practice, are like
critics of painting who should find all colours and forms vague, when
they had been touched by aerial perspective, or made poetical by the
rich dyes of fancy and expression. That sort of vagueness is perfection
of artistic form, as the other sort of vagueness may be perfection of
judgement: for knowledge lies in thinking aptly about things, not in
becoming like them. If the standard of articulation in science were the
articulation of existence, science would be impossible for an animal
mind, and if it were possible would be useless: because nothing would be
gained for thought by reproducing a mechanism without any adaptation of
its scale and perspective to the nature of the thinker.
If the instincts of man were well adapted to his conditions, his
thoughts, without being more accurate, would not seem confused. As it
is, intuition is most vivid in the act of hunting or taking alarm, just
when mistakes are probable: and any obvious essence is then precipitated
upon the object, and quarrelled with and dismissed if the object does
not sustain it. An essence, however evident, may even be declared absent
and inconceivable, if it cannot be attributed absolutely to the
substance of the object being chased or eaten. The hungry nominalist may
well say to himself: “If the hues of the pheasant are no part of the
bird, whence should he have fetched them? Am I not looking at the very
creature I am pursuing and hoping presently to devour? And as my teeth
and hands cannot possibly add anything to the substance they will seize
upon, how should my eyes do so now? If therefore any alleged image can
be proved to be no part of my object, I must be mistaken in supposing
that I see such an image at all.” This is also the argument of the
primitive painter, who knowing that men have two eyes and their hands
five fingers, will not admit that their image might be less complete. In
this way the wand of that Queen Mab, intuition, is assimilated by a too
materialistic philosophy to a tongue or an antenna, and required to
reach out to the object and stir it up, exploring its intrinsic quality
and structure. But it is a magic wand, and calls up only wild and
ignorant visions, mischievous and gaily invented; and if ever a
philosopher dreams he has fathomed the thing before him in action, that
wand is tickling his nose. Intuition cheats in enriching him, and nature
who whispers all these tales in his ear is laughing at him and fondling
him at the same time. It is a kindly fiction; because the dreams she
inspires are very much to his mind, and the lies she invents for his
benefit are her poetic masterpiece. Practical men despise the poetry of
poets, but they are well pleased with their own. They would be ashamed
of amusements which might defeat their purposes, or mislead them about
the issue of events; but they embrace heartily the ingenuous fictions of
the senses which they almost recognise to be fictions, and even the
early myths and religions of mankind. These they find true enough for
practical and moral purposes; their playfulness is a convenient
compendium for facts too hard to understand; they are the normal poetry
of observation and policy. Fancy disorganises conduct only when it
expresses vice; and then it is the vice that does the mischief, and not
the fancy.
Even philosophers, when they wish to be very plain and economical,
sometimes fall to denying the immediate. Fact-worship, which is an
idolatry of prudence, prejudices them against their own senses, and
against the mind, which is what prudence serves, if it serves anything;
and perhaps they declare themselves incapable of framing images with
fewer determinations than they believe material things to possess. If a
material triangle must have a perfectly defined shape (although at close
quarters matter might elude such confines), or if a material house must
have a particular number of bricks and a particular shade of colour at
each point of its surface, a professed empiricist like Berkeley may be
tempted to deny that he can have an idea of a triangle, _et cetera_,
without such determinations; whereas, however clear his visual images
may have been, it is certain he never could have had, even in direct
perception, an image specifying all the bricks or all the tints of _any_
house, nor the exact measure of _any_ angle. Berkeley himself, I
suspect, was secretly intent upon essence, which in every degree of
conventional determination is its own standard of completeness. But
given essences have any degree of vagueness in respect to the material
or mathematical objects which they may symbolise, and to which Berkeley
in his hasty nominalism wished to assimilate them. He almost turned
given essences into substances, to take the place of those material
things which he had denied. Each essence is certainly not two
contradictory essences at once; but the definitions which render each
precisely what it is lie in the realm of essence, an infinite continuum
of discrete forms, not in the realm of existence. Essences, in order to
appear, do not need to beg leave of what happens to exist, or to draw
its portrait; yet here the trooping essences are, in such gradations and
numbers as intuition may lend them. It is not by hypostatising them as
they come that their roots in matter or their scope in knowledge can be
discovered.
Thus the discrimination of essence has a happy tendency to liberalise
philosophy, freeing it at once from literalness and from scepticism. If
all data are symbols and all experience comes in poetic terms, it
follows that the human mind, both in its existence and in its quality,
is a free development out of nature, a language or music the terms of
which are arbitrary, like the rules and counters of a game. It follows
also that the mind has no capacity and no obligation to copy the world
of matter nor to survey it impartially. At the same time, it follows
that the mind affords a true expression of the world, rendered in vital
perspectives and in human terms, since this mind arises and changes
symptomatically at certain foci of animal life; foci which are a part of
nature in dynamic correspondence with other parts, diffused widely about
them; so that, for instance, alternative systems of religion or science,
if not taken literally, may equally well express the actual operation of
things measured by different organs or from different centres.