IDENTITY AND DURATION ATTRIBUTED TO ESSENCES
Human beliefs and ideas (which in modern philosophy are called human
knowledge) may be arranged systematically in various different series or
orders. One is the _order of genesis_. The origin of beliefs and ideas,
as of all events, is natural. All origins lie in the realm of matter,
even when the being that is so generated is immaterial, because this
creation or intrusion of the immaterial follows on material occasions
and at the promptings of circumstance. It is safe to say this, although
it may sound dogmatical, since an immaterial being not grafted in this
way upon material events would be undiscoverable; no place, time, or
other relations in nature could be assigned to it, and even if by chance
it existed it would have to exist only for its own benefit, unreported
to any one else. It is accordingly in the realm of matter, in the order
of events in animal life, that I must distribute human beliefs and ideas
if I wish to arrange them in the order of their genesis.
Beliefs and ideas might also be surveyed in the _order of discovery_, as
within the field of human grammar and thought they come to be
discriminated. Such a survey would be a biography of reason, in which I
should neglect the external occasions on which ideas and beliefs arise
and study only the changing patterns which they form in the eye of
thought, as in a kaleidoscope. What would probably come first in the
order of discovery would be goods and evils; or a romantic metaphysician
might turn this experience into a fable, referring goods and evils to a
transcendental will which should pronounce them (for no reason) to be
such respectively. Will or moral bias is actually the background on
which images of objects are gradually deciphered by an awakening
intellect; they all appear initially loaded with moral values and
assigned to rival camps and quarters in the field of action. Discovery
is essentially romantic; there is less clearness in the objects that
appear than there is vehemence in the assertion and choice of them. The
life of reason is accordingly a subject to be treated imaginatively, and
interpreted afresh by every historian with legitimate variations; and if
no theme lies nearer to the heart of man, since it is the history of his
heart, none is more hopelessly the sport of apperception and of dramatic
bias in the telling.
Finally, beliefs and ideas may be marshalled in the _order of evidence_;
and this is the only method that concerns me here. At any juncture in
the life of reason a man may ask himself, as I am doing in this book,
what he is most certain of, and what he believes only on hearsay or by
some sort of suggestion or impulse of his own, which might be suspended
or reversed. Alternative logics and creeds might thus suggest
themselves, raised in different styles of architecture upon the
bed-rock, if there is a bed-rock, of perfect certitude. I have already
discovered what this bed-rock of perfect certitude is; somewhat
disconcertingly, it turns out to be in the regions of the rarest ether.
I have absolute assurance of nothing save of the character of some given
essence; the rest is arbitrary belief or interpretation added by my
animal impulse. The obvious leaves me helpless; for among objects in the
realm of essence I can establish none of the distinctions which I am
most concerned to establish in daily life, such as that between true and
false, far or near, just now and long ago, once upon a time, and in five
minutes. All these terms of course are found there, else I could not
mention them, but they are found only as pictures; each is present only
in essence, without any reason for choosing, asserting, or making it
effective. The very opposite terms, if I am only willing to think of
them, lie sleeping side by side with these which I happen first to have
come upon. All essences and combinations of essences are brother-shapes
in an eternal landscape; and the more I range in that wilderness, the
less reason I find for stopping at anything, or for following any
particular path. Willingly or regretfully, if I wish to live, I must
rouse myself from this open-eyed trance into which utter scepticism has
thrown me. I must allow subterranean forces within me to burst forth and
to shatter that vision. I must consent to be an animal or a child, and
to chase the fragments as if they were things of moment. But which
fragment, and rolling in what direction? I am resigned to being a
dogmatist; but at what point shall my dogmatism begin, and by what first
solicitation of nature?
Starting, as here I should, from absolute certitude—that is, from the
obvious character of some essence—the first object of belief suggested
by that assurance is the _identity_ of this essence in various instances
and in various contexts. This identity in divers cases is not
tautological, as identity would be if I spoke of the identity of any
essence with itself. Identity, to be significant, must be problematical.
I must pick up my pebble twice, so that a juggler might without my
knowledge have substituted another pebble for it in the interval; and
when I say confidently, _the same pebble_, I may always be deceived. My
own thought is not at all unlikely to play this trick on me; it is good
at legerdemain. In attending a second time to what I call the same
essence, I may really summon a different essence before me; my memory
need not retain the first intuition so precisely that its disparity from
the present one can be sensible to me now. Identity of essences given at
different times evidently presupposes time—an immense postulate; and
besides, it presupposes ability in thought to traverse time without
confusion, so that having lived through two intuitions I may correctly
distinguish them as events, whilst correctly identifying their common
object. These are ambitious and highly questionable dogmas. Yet there is
a circumstance in pure intuition of any essence which can insensibly
lead me to those elaborate conclusions, and can lead me at the same time
to posit the natural existence of myself, the possible dupe, having
those intuitions and surviving them, and even the existence of my
natural object, the persisting pebble, which those intuitions described
unanimously.
This circumstance is closely connected with the property of essence
which is most ideal and remote from existence, namely, its eternity.
Eternity, taken intrinsically, has nothing to do with time, but is a
form of being which time cannot usher in nor destroy; it is always
equally real, silent, and indestructible, no matter what time may do, or
what time it may be. But intuition peruses eternal being in time;
consequently, so long as I am attending to an essence, this essence
seems to me _to endure_; and when, after an interval, I revert to it or
to any feature of it, this feature seems to me _to be identical_ with
what it was. This identity and this duration are not properly predicated
of essence in its own realm; they are superfluous epithets essentially,
and almost insults, because they substitute a questionable for an
unquestionable subsistence in the essence. Yet the epithets are well
meant, and indicate fairly enough the aspect which essences present to
moving thought when it plays upon them. Intuition finds essence by
watching, by exerting animal attention. Now when he watches, an animal
thinks that what he watches is watching him with the same intensity and
variability of attention which he is exerting; for attention is
fundamentally an animal uneasiness, fostered by the exigences of life
amid other material beings that can change and jump. Stillness or
constancy in any object accordingly does not seem to an animal eternity
in an essence; it seems rather a suspension of motion in a thing, a
pause for breath, an ominous and awful silence. He is superstitious
about the eternity of essences, as about all their other properties.
This breathless and ghostly duration which he attributes to essences,
treating them like living things, is his confused temporal translation
of their eternity, mixing it with existence, which is the negation of
eternity. Thus he assimilates it to the quasi-permanence in himself
which is transfused with change; for of course he is far from perceiving
that if essences were not natively eternal and nonexistent, it would be
impossible for crawling existence to change from one form to another.
This illusion is inevitable. The dubious and iterative duration proper
to animal life, when the lungs breathe and the mind is appetitive, seems
to this mind a pulsation in all being.
Moreover, in watching any image, it is often possible to observe one
feature in it persisting while another disappears. The man not only says
to himself, “This, and still this,” but he ventures to say, “This, and
again this with a variation.” A variation in _this_? Here, from the
point of view of essence, is a sheer absurdity. _This_ cannot change its
nature, though what we have before us a moment later may be something
but slightly different from _this_; and of course the essence now
brought to view can be slightly different from the one formerly in
evidence only because each is eternally itself, so that the least
variant from it marks and constitutes a different essence. Material
categories such as existence, substance, and change, none of which are
applicable to pure data, are thus insinuated by the animal intellect
into contemplation. They transform intuition into belief; and this
belief, as if it would reinforce essences when they appear and annul
them when they disappear, ultimately posits an imaginary shuffling of
sensible existences—hypostatised essences—dancing about us as we watch
the scene. Even if this hypostasis is retracted afterwards by the
critic, the postulate remains that he is steadily perusing the _same
essence_, or returning to reconsider it. Without this postulate it would
be impossible to say or think anything on any subject. No essence could
be recognised, and therefore no change could be specified. Yet this
necessary belief is one impossible to prove or even to defend by
argument, since all argument presupposes it. It must be accepted as a
rule of the game, if you think the game worth playing.
What shall I say of the probable truth of such fundamental assumptions?
Shall I think them false, because groundless, and shall I say that they
invalidate the whole edifice of natural faith which is raised upon them?
Or shall I say that the experienced security of this edifice justifies
them and implies their truth? Neither; because the happy results and
fertility of an assumption do not prove it true literally, but only
prove it to be suitable, to be worth cultivating as an art and repeating
as a good myth. The axioms of sanity and art must correspond _somehow_
to truth, but the correspondence may be very loose and very partial.
Moreover, the circumstance that even this symbolic rightness is vouched
for only by an experience which would be false in all its records and
memories if this assumption were false, robs such experimental tests of
all logical force. Corroboration is no new argument; if I am deceived
once, I may all the more readily be deceived again. In the perspectives
of experience I cannot, except in these very perspectives, reach the
terms which they posit as self-existent, in order to see whether my
perspectives were rightly drawn. I am in the region of belief mediated
by symbols, in the region of animal faith.