BELIEF IN DEMONSTRATION
The essence which is the object of intuition is probably not simple.
Perhaps nothing that has a character recognisable in reflection can be
utterly simple. The datum may seem purely qualitative, like a smell or
like absolute Being, and yet some plurality may lurk in its very
diffuseness or continuity, giving a foothold for discrimination of
different moments or parts within it. Usually this inward complexity of
given essences is very marked, and a chief element in their nature; but
it is not at all incompatible with the æsthetic and logical
individuality which makes them terms for possible recognition and
discourse. Essences, like things, may be perfectly unambiguous objects
to name or to point to, and may be counted as units, without prejudice
to their internal complexity. My dog is one and the same dog
unmistakably, without prejudice to the possibly infinite complexity of
his organism or the interpenetration of his qualities. In the same way
Euclidean space is a single and definite essence; yet its character is
subject to analysis. I may say it has three dimensions, is necessarily
infinite, without scale, etc. These implications, which I may enumerate
successively, lie in the essence together, and lie there from the
beginning, even if my intuition is slow to disentangle them, or never
does so at all. The simplicity of the essence given at first was a
pregnant simplicity; it had enough character to be identified with the
total and unitary aspect of another essence—Euclidean space
analysed—which may appear later.
Intuition therefore is a view of essence, attention fixed upon it, and
not that essence itself. When I say Euclidean space has three
dimensions, I am counting them; I am proceeding from one specious plane,
or felt direction of motion, to another, and perhaps back again, for the
sake of verification. If this operation is to be a valid survey of the
essence proposed, the plane or directions specified must, so to speak,
stay in their places. Each must remain itself, so that in passing from
it to another, as I do in counting, I may pass to something truly
different, and may be able to revert from this to the original element,
and find it still there, identical with its former self. But, as I have
already discovered, this self-identity of a term to which I revert
cannot be given either in the first intuition of it, nor in the second.
All that either intuition can yield while it endures is the nature of
the datum there, with the terms and relations which are displayed there
within it. Intuition can never yield the relation of its total datum to
anything not given. It cannot refer to the latent at all, since its
object, by definition, is just what is given immediately. To take the
leap from one intuition to another, and assert that they view the same
essence, or have the same intent, I must take my life in my hands and
trust to animal faith. Otherwise all dialectic would be arrested.
Let me assume in the first place that I may steadily peruse the same
essence, and may revert to it on occasion. Let me assume further that in
so doing I may turn passive intuition into analysis, and analysis into
some fresh synthesis of the elements identified and distinguished in the
given essence. Intuition will thus pick up and group together, in
various ways, terms which by hypothesis are identical in these various
settings. It will scrutinise essences piecemeal and successively,
although in their own realm they compose a simultaneous and eternal
manifold. Suppose, for instance, I have reached the conclusion of a
calculation, and the final equation is before me: the inner relations
between its terms are parts of a given essence. Intuition, not
demonstration, synthesises this manifold. This synthetic essence is
therefore no conclusion; it is not an answer nor a deduction; it is not
true. It is simply the pattern of terms which it is; no one of these
terms, for aught I know, having ever figured in any other equation. Thus
any survey which is analytic, so that it gives foothold for
demonstration, or any definition following upon such analysis,
presupposes the repetition of the same essences in different contexts.
This presupposition cannot be justified by the intuition occupying the
mind at any one time. No more can the assurance that a term remains the
same in two successive instances and in two different contexts, nor that
what is asserted by a predicate is asserted of the very subject which
before had been intuited without that predicate. Explication is a
process, a deduction is an event; and although the force of logical
analysis or synthesis does not depend on assuming that fact, but rather
on ignoring it, this fact may be deduced from faith in the validity of
demonstration, which would lapse if this fact were denied. The validity
of demonstration is accordingly a matter of faith only, depending on the
assumption of matters of fact incapable of demonstration. I must believe
that I noted the terms of the argument separately and successively if I
am to assert anything in identifying them or pronouncing them
equivalent, or if the conclusion in which they appear now is to be
relevant in any way to the premises in which they appeared originally.
The force of dialectic, then, lies in identifying terms in isolation
with the same terms in relation; so that even an analytic judgement is
synthetic. To say, for instance, that in “extended colour” “extension”
is involved is analysis; yet to identify the element of extension
abstracted from the first essence with the second essence as a whole, is
synthesis; and it is far from inconceivable that this synthesis should
be erroneous. In the identification of an essence given in one intuition
with something given in another intuition in a superadded context, there
is a postulate that in transcendent intent I am hitting a hidden target.
It is not two similar intuitions taken existentially that are
identified; they are not only admittedly distinct numerically and as
events in the world, but they have, by hypothesis, different total data
before them. It is mind, a spiritual counterpart of attitude and action,
that intends in both cases to consider the same essence. There is
repetition posited; and repetition, if actual, involves adventitious
differences accruing to a term that remains individually identical.
There is a difference in the setting of the same essence here and its
setting there. In judgement, accordingly, there is more than intuition;
there is assumed discourse, involving time, transcendent reference, and
various adventitious surveys of identical objects. Thus if I wish to
believe that any demonstration whatsoever is significant or correct, I
must assume (what I can never demonstrate) that there is an active
intelligence at work, capable of reverting to an old idea like the dog
returning to his vomit: an operation utterly extraneous to the timeless
identity of each element recovered.
In other words, demonstration is an event, even when the thing
demonstrated is not an event. Without adventitious choice of some
starting-point, without selective and cumulative advance, and without
recapitulation, there would be no dialectic. Premises and conclusions
would all be static and separate terms; the dialectical nerve of their
relation would not be laid bare and brought to intuition. I should know
nothing about essence, in the sense of possessing such sciences of it as
mathematics or rhetoric, if the argument were not adventitious to the
subject-matter, casting the light of intuition now along this path and
now along that in a field posited as static, so as to enlarge and
confirm my apprehension of it; for if I lost at one end all that I
gained at the other, my progress would not enrich apprehension, nor ever
twice mean the same thing. Dialectic therefore is a two-edged sword: on
the one hand, if valid, it involves a realm of essence, independent of
it, over which it may range; and on the other hand it involves its own
temporal and progressive existence; since it is a name for the fact that
some part of that realm of essence has been chosen for perusal,
considered at leisure, folded upon itself, as it were, and recognised as
having this or that articulation. Even pure intuition shares (as I shall
try to show presently) this spiritual existence, distinct from the
logical or æsthetic being proper to the essences it apprehends;
intuition itself can hardly be prolonged without winking or re-survey.
But this coming and going of attention, in flashes and in varied
assaults, is even more conspicuous in dialectic; and the validity and
advance of insight in such cases depends on the essences in hand being
constant, in spite of the pulsations of attention upon them and the
variety of relations disclosed successively.
Thus belief in the existence of mental discourse (which is a sort of
experience), whilst of course not demonstrable in itself, is involved in
the validity of any demonstration; and I come to the interesting insight
that dialectic would lose all its force if I renounced my instinctive
faith in my ability to pick up old meanings, to think consecutively, to
correct myself without changing my subject-matter, and in fine to
discourse and to live rationally. Challenge this faith, and
demonstration collapses into the illusion that a demonstration has been
made. If I confine myself to the given essence without admitting
discourse about it, I exclude all analysis of that essence, or even
examination of it. I must simply stare at it, in a blank and timeless
æsthetic trance. If this does not happen, the reason is not dialectical.
No logic could drive me from the obvious, unless I read omens in it
which are not there. The reason for my proclivity to play with ideas, to
lose them and catch them, and pride myself on my ability to keep them
circling without confusion in the air, is a vital reason. This logic is
a fly-wheel in my puffing engine; it is not logic at all. The animal
life which underlies discourse is concerned to discharge its
predetermined responses, which are but few, whenever an occasion
presents itself which will at all do; and all such occasions it calls
the same. It claps some recurrent name on different objects, which is
one source of error or of perpetual inaccuracy in its knowledge of
things; but even before that, in identifying the various instances of
that name, alleging the essence present now to be the same present
before, it runs a risk of error and may slip into self-contradiction. Is
the round square an essence? Certainly; but not in the geometry of
Euclid, because in his geometry the square is one essence and the circle
another, definitely and irreparably distinct from it. The round square
is an essence of comic discourse, actualised when, having confused
names, definitions and ideas, a fumbling or an impudent mind sets about
to identify two incompatibles; and this attempt is no more impossible to
a mind—which is subject to animal vapours—than it is impossible for such
a mind to look for a lost word. The psyche has the lost word in store,
as it has the intuitions of the circle and the square; but the loss of
memory or the confusion of ideas may arise notwithstanding, because the
movement in discourse which should culminate in those intuitions may be
intercepted mechanically, and arrested at a stage where the name is not
yet recovered, or where the words circle and square have fused their
associations and are striving to terminate in the intuition of both as
one. Such stammerings and contradictions make evident the physical basis
of thought and the remote level from which it turns to its ideal object,
like the moth to the star; but this physical basis is really just as
requisite for correcting a logical error as for falling into it. Thus
dialectic, which in intent and deliverance does not trespass beyond the
realm of essence, but only defines some fragment of the same, yet in
fact, if it is to be cogent, must presuppose time, change, and the
persistence of meanings in progressive discourse.
Belief in demonstration, when it is admitted, has inversely some
steadying influence on belief in matters of fact. When poetic idealists
cry that life is a dream, they are indulging in a hyperbole, if they
still venture to compare one illusion with another in beauty or in
duration. Poetry, like demonstration, would not be possible if intuition
of essences could not be sustained and repeated in various contexts. The
poet could not otherwise express cumulative passions nor develop
particular themes. But life is no dream, if it justifies dialectic;
because dialectic explores various parts of the realm of essence—where
everything is steadfast, distinct, and imperishable—with a continuous
and coherent intent, and reaches valid insight into their structure; and
this amount of wakefulness and sanity the dialectical or poetic mind
would have in any case, even in the absence of a material world, of all
moral interests, and of any life except the life of discourse itself.
Nevertheless, if discourse were always a pellucid apprehension of
essential relations, its existence would be little noted; only a very
scrupulous philosopher would insist on it, in view of the selective
order and direction of survey which discourse adds to its
subject-matter. There is, however, a much louder witness to the fact
that discourse exists and is no part of essence, but rather a function
of animal life; and this witness is error. Thought becomes obvious when
things betray it; as they cannot have been false, something else must
have been so, and this something else, which we call thought, must have
existed and must have had a different status from that of the thing it
falsified. Error thus awakens even the laziest philosophy from the dream
of supposing that its own meanderings are nothing but strands in the
texture of its object.
I have now, by the mere consideration of the way in which essence
presents itself, managed to snatch from the jaws of scepticism one
belief familiar to me before I encountered that romantic dragon; namely,
belief in the existence of discourse, or of mind thinking. But be it
observed that I have so far seen reason for reinstating this belief only
in a very attenuated form. Thought here means nothing more than the fact
that some essence is contemplated, and discourse means only that this
essence is approached and surveyed repeatedly or piecemeal, with
partiality, succession, and possible confusion in describing it. Save
for this distinction of intuition from the essence intuited, I have as
yet no object before me that claims existence or solicits belief. The
whole datum is still simply an essence; but by the mere study of that
datum, when this study is reflected upon and admitted, I have
reintroduced a belief which relieves me of what was most obnoxious to
the flesh in my radical scepticism. I have found that even when no
change is perceived in the image before me, my discourse changes its
phases and makes progress in surveying it; so that in discourse I now
admit a sphere of events in which real variations are occurring. I may
now assert, when I perceive a motion, that this intuition of change is
_true_; that is, that it has actually followed upon the intuition of a
static first term, from which my attention has passed to this intuition
of change; and this I may now assert without confusing the essences
given successively, or trying, like animal perception, to knead one
concrete thing out of their incompatible natures. The existence of
changing things or events in nature I may still deny or doubt or ignore;
in the object I shall, with perfect clearness, see only an essence, and
if this happens to be the essence of change, and to present the image of
some motion, that theme will seem to me as determinate, as ideal and as
unchanging as any other, and as little prone to lapse into any different
theme. Any motion seen will be but a fixed image of motion. Actual flux
and actual existence will have their appropriate and sufficient seat in
my thought; I shall conceive and believe, when I reflect on my rapt
contemplations, that I have been ruminating, and passing from one to
another; but these objects will be only the several essences, the
several images or tunes or stories, each always itself, which my mind
picks up or invents or reconsiders.