THE WATERSHED OF CRITICISM
I have now reached the culminating point of my survey of evidence, and
the entanglements I have left behind me and the habitable regions I am
looking for lie spread out before me like opposite valleys. On the one
hand I see now a sweeping reason for scepticism, over and above all
particular contradictions or fancifulness of dogma. Nothing is ever
present to me except some essence; so that nothing that I possess in
intuition, or actually see, is ever _there_; it can never exist bodily,
nor lie in that place or exert that power which belongs to the objects
encountered in action. Therefore, if I regard my intuitions as knowledge
of facts, all my experience is illusion, and life is a dream. At the
same time I am now able to give a clearer meaning to this old adage; for
life would not be a dream, and all experience would not be illusion, if
I abstained from believing in them. The evidence of data is only
obviousness; they give no evidence of anything else; they are not
witnesses. If I am content to recognise them for pure essences, they
cannot deceive me; they will be like works of literary fiction, more or
less coherent, but without any claim to exist on their own account. If I
hypostatise an essence into a fact, instinctively placing it in
relations which are not given within it, I am putting my trust in animal
faith, not in any evidence or implication of my actual experience. I
turn to an assumed world about me, because I have organs for turning,
just as I expect a future to reel itself out without interruption
because I am wound up to go on myself. To such ulterior things no
manifest essence can bear any testimony. They must justify themselves.
If the ulterior fact is some intuition elsewhere, its existence, if it
happens to exist, will justify that belief; but the fulfilment of my
prophecy, in taking my present dream for testimony to that ulterior
experience, will be found only in the realm of truth—a realm which is
itself an object of belief, never by any possibility of intuition, human
or divine. So too when the supposed fact is thought of as a substance,
its existence, if it is found in the realm of nature, will justify that
supposition; but the realm of nature is of course only another object of
belief, more remote if possible from intuition than even the realm of
truth. Intuition of essence, to which positive experience and certitude
are confined, is therefore always illusion, if we allow our
hypostatising impulse to take it for evidence of anything else.
In adopting this conclusion of so many great philosophers, that all is
illusion, I do so, however, with two qualifications. One is emotional
and moral only, in that I do not mourn over this fatality, but on the
contrary rather prefer speculation in the realm of essence—if it can be
indulged without practical inconvenience—to alleged information about
hard facts. It does not seem to me ignominious to be a poet, if nature
has made one a poet unexpectedly. Unexpectedly nature lent us existence,
and if she has made it a condition that we should be poets, she has not
forbidden us to enjoy that art, or even to be proud of it. The other
qualification is more austere: it consists in not allowing exceptions. I
cannot admit that some particular essence—water, fire, being, atoms, or
Brahma—is the intrinsic essence of all things, so that if I narrow my
imagination to that one intuition I shall have intuited the heart and
the whole of existence. Of course I do not deny that there is water and
that there is being, the former in most things on earth, and the latter
in everything anywhere; but these images or words of mine are not the
things they designate, but only names for them. Desultory and partial
propriety these names may have, but no metaphysical privilege. No more
has the expedient of some modern critics who would take illusion as a
whole and call it the universe; for in the first place they are probably
reverting to belief in discourse, as conventionally conceived, so that
their scepticism is halting; and in the second place, even if human
experience could be admitted as known and vouched for, there would be an
incredible arrogance in positing it as the whole of being, or as itself
confined to the forms and limits which the critic assigns to it. The
life of reason as I conceive it is a mere romance, and the life of
nature a mere fable; such pictures have no metaphysical value, even if
as sympathetic fictions they had some psychological truth.
The doctrine of essence thus renders my scepticism invincible and
complete, while reconciling me with it emotionally.
If now I turn my face in the other direction and consider the prospect
open to animal faith, I see that all this insecurity and inadequacy of
alleged knowledge are almost irrelevant to the natural effort of the
mind to describe natural things. The discouragement we may feel in
science does not come from failure; it comes from a false conception of
what would be success. Our worst difficulties arise from the assumption
that knowledge of existences ought to be literal, whereas knowledge of
existences has no need, no propensity, and no fitness to be literal. It
is symbolic initially, when a sound, a smell, an indescribable feeling
are signals to the animal of his dangers or chances; and it fulfils its
function perfectly—I mean its moral function of enlightening us about
our natural good—if it remains symbolic to the end. Can anything be more
evident than that religion, language, patriotism, love, science itself
speak in symbols? Given essences unify for intuition, in entirely
adventitious human terms, the diffuse processes of nature; the aesthetic
image—the sound, the colour, the expanse of space, the scent, taste, and
sweet or cruel pressure of bodies—wears an aspect altogether unlike the
mechanisms it stands for. Sensation and thought (between which there is
no essential difference) work in a conventional medium, as do literature
and music. The experience of essence is direct; the expression of
natural facts through that medium is indirect. But this indirection is
no obstacle to expression, rather its condition; and this vehicular
manifestation of things may be knowledge of them, which intuition of
essence is not. The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a
sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement
to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form; and much in
the same way the human medium of knowledge can perform its pertinent
synthesis and make its pertinent report all the better when it frankly
abandons the plane of its object and expresses in symbols what we need
to know of it. The arts of expression would be impossible if they were
not extensions of normal human perception. The Greeks recognised that
astronomy and history were presided over by Muses, sisters of those of
tragic and comic poetry; had they been as psychological as modern
reflection has become, they might have had Muses of sight, hearing, and
speech. I think they honoured, if they did not express, this
complementary fact also, that all the Muses, even the most playful, are
witnesses to the nature of things. The arts are evidences of wisdom, and
sources of it; they include science. No Muse would be a humane
influence, nor worthy of honour, if she did not studiously express the
truth of nature with the liberty and grace appropriate to her special
genius.
Philosophers would not have overlooked the fact that knowledge is, and
ought to be, symbolical, if intuition did not exist also, giving them a
taste of something which perhaps they think higher and more satisfying.
Intuition, when it is placid and masterful enough to stand alone, free
from anxiety or delusion about matters of fact, is a delightful
exercise, like play; it employs our imaginative faculty without warping
it, and lets us live without responsibility. The playful and godlike
mind of philosophers has always been fascinated by intuition;
philosophers—I mean the great ones—are the infant prodigies of
reflection. They often take intuition of essence for their single ideal,
and wish to impose it on the workaday thoughts of men; they make a
play-world for themselves which it is glorious to dominate, much as
other men of genius, prolonging the masterfulness of childhood, continue
to play at this or at that in their politics and their religion. But
knowledge of existence has an entirely different method and an entirely
different ideal. It is playful too, because its terms are intuitive and
its grammar or logic often very subjective. Perception, theory,
hypothesis are rapid, pregnant, often humorous; they seize a fact by its
skirts from some unexpected quarter, and give it a nickname which it
might be surprised to hear, such as the rainbow or the Great Bear. Yet
in the investigation of facts all this play of mind is merely
instrumental and indicative: the intent is practical, the watchfulness
earnest, the spirit humble. The mind here knows that it is at school;
and even its fancies are docile. Its nicknames for things and for their
odd ways of behaving are like those which country people give to
flowers; they often pointedly describe how things look or what they do
to us. The ideas we have of things are not fair portraits; they are
political caricatures made in the human interest; but in their partial
way they may be masterpieces of characterisation and insight. Above all,
they are obtained by labour, by investigating what is not given, and by
correcting one impression by another, drawn from the same object—a thing
impossible in the intuition of essences. They therefore conduce to
wisdom, and in their perpetual tentativeness have a cumulative truth.
Consider the reason why, instead of cultivating congenial intuitions, a
man may be drawn to the study of nature at all. It is because things, by
their impact, startle him into attention and a new thought. Such
external objects interest him for what they do, not for what they are;
and knowledge of them is significant, not for the essence it displays to
intuition (beautiful as this may be) but for the events it expresses or
foreshadows. It matters little therefore to the pertinent knowledge of
nature that the substance of things should remain recondite or
unintelligible, if their movement and operation can be rightly
determined on the plane of human perception. It matters little if their
very existence is vouched for only by animal faith and presumption, so
long as this faith posits existence where existence is, and this
presumption expresses a prophetic preadaptation of animal instincts to
the forces of the environment. The function of perception and natural
science is, not to flatter the sense of omniscience in an absolute mind,
but to dignify animal life by harmonising it, in action and in thought,
with its conditions. It matters little if the news these methods can
bring us of the world is fragmentary and is expressed rhetorically; what
matters is that science should be integrated with art, and that the arts
should substitute the dominion of man over circumstances, as far as this
is possible, for the dominion of chance. In this there is no sacrifice
of truth to utility; there is rather a wise direction of curiosity upon
things on the human scale, and within the range of art. Speculation
beyond those limits cannot be controlled, and is irresponsible; and the
symbolic terms in which it must be carried on, even at close quarters,
are the best possible indications for the facts in question. All these
inadequacies and imperfections are proper to perfect signs, which should
be brief and sharply distinguished.
Complete scepticism is accordingly not inconsistent with animal faith;
the admission that nothing given exists is not incompatible with belief
in things not given. I may yield to the suasion of instinct, and
practise the arts with a humble confidence, without in the least
disavowing the most rigorous criticism of knowledge or hypostatising any
of the data of sense or fancy. And I need not do this with a bad
conscience, as Parmenides and Plato and the Indians seem to have done,
when they admitted illusion or opinion as an epilogue to their tight
metaphysics, on the ground that otherwise they would miss their way
home. It is precisely by _not_ yielding to opinion and illusion, and by
_not_ delegating any favourite essences to be the substance of things,
that I aspire to keep my cognitive conscience pure and my practical
judgement sane; because in order to find my way home I am by no means
compelled to yield ignominiously to any animal illusion; what guides me
there is not illusion but habit; and the intuitions which accompany
habit are normal signs for the circle of objects and forces by which
that habit is sustained. The images of sense and science will not delude
me if instead of hypostatising them, as those philosophers did the terms
of their dialectic, I regard them as graphic symbols for home and for
the way there. That such external things exist, that I exist myself, and
live more or less prosperously in the midst of them, is a faith not
founded on reason but precipitated in action, and in that intent, which
is virtual action, involved in perception. This faith, which it would be
dishonest not to confess that I share, does no violence to a sceptical
analysis of experience; on the contrary, it takes advantage of that
analysis to interpret this volatile experience as all animals do and
must, as a set of symbols for existences that cannot enter experience,
and which, since they are not elements in knowledge, no analysis of
knowledge can touch—they are in another realm of being.
I propose now to consider what objects animal faith requires me to
posit, and in what order; without for a moment forgetting that my
assurance of their existence is only instinctive, and my description of
their nature only symbolic. I may know them by intent, based on bodily
reaction; I know them initially as whatever confronts me, whatever it
may turn out to be, just as I know the future initially as whatever is
coming, without knowing what will come. That something confronts me
here, now, and from a specific quarter, is in itself a momentous
discovery. The aspect this thing wears, as it first attracts my
attention, though it may deceive me in some particulars, can hardly fail
to be, in some respects, a telling indication of its nature in its
relation to me. Signs identify their objects for discourse, and show us
where to look for their undiscovered qualities. Further signs, catching
other aspects of the same object, may help me to lay siege to it from
all sides; but signs will never lead me into the citadel, and if its
inner chambers are ever opened to me, it must be through sympathetic
imagination. I might, by some happy unison between my imagination and
its generative principles, intuit the essence which is actually the
essence of that thing. In that case (which may often occur when the
object is a sympathetic mind) knowledge of existence, without ceasing to
be instinctive faith, will be as complete and adequate as knowledge can
possibly be. The given essence will be the essence of the object meant;
but knowledge will remain a claim, since the intuition is not satisfied
to observe the given essence passively as a disembodied essence, but
instinctively affirms it to be the essence of an existence confronting
me, and beyond the range of my possible apprehension. Therefore the most
perfect knowledge of fact is perfect only pictorially, not evidentially,
and remains subject to the end to the insecurity inseparable from animal
faith, and from life itself.
Animal faith being a sort of expectation and open-mouthedness, is
earlier than intuition; intuitions come to help it out and lend it
something to posit. It is more than ready to swallow any suggestion of
sense or fancy; and perhaps primitive credulity, as in a dream, makes no
bones of any contradiction or incongruity in successive convictions, but
yields its whole soul to every image. Faith then hangs like a pendulum
at rest; but when perplexity has caused that pendulum to swing more and
more madly, it may for a moment stop quivering at a point of unstable
equilibrium at the top; and this vertical station may be likened to
universal scepticism. It is a more wonderful and a more promising
equilibrium than the other, because it cannot be maintained; but before
declining from the zenith and desisting from pointing vertically at
zero, the pendulum of faith may hesitate for an instant which way to
fall, if at that uncomfortable height it has really lost all animal
momentum and all ancient prejudice. Before giving my reasons—which are
but prejudices and human—for believing in events, in substances, and in
the variegated truths which they involve, it may be well to have halted
for breath at the apex of scepticism, and felt all the negative
privileges of that position. The mere possibility of it in its purity is
full of instruction; and although I have, for my own part, dwelt upon it
only ironically, by a scruple of method, and intending presently to
abandon it for common sense, many a greater philosopher has sought to
maintain himself acrobatically at that altitude. They have not
succeeded; but an impossible dwelling-place may afford, like a
mountain-top, a good point of view in clear weather from which to map
the land and choose a habitation.