ESSENCE AND INTUITION
To believe nothing and live immersed in intuition might be the privilege
of a disembodied spirit; and if a man could share it he would not only
be relieved from doubt but would, in one dimension, lose nothing in the
scope of his experience, since the realm of essence, which would still
be open to him, is absolutely infinite, and contains images of all the
events that any existing world could enact, or that all possible worlds
could enact together. Yet all this variety and richness would form a
mosaic, a marble effigy of life, or chronicle of ancient wars. The pangs
and horrors would be there, as well as the beauties, but each would burn
in its eternal place, balancing all the rest, and no anxious eye would
glance hurriedly from one to the other, wondering what the next might
be. The spirit that actually breathes in man is an animal spirit,
transitive like the material endeavours which it expresses; it has a
material station and accidental point of view, and a fevered preference
for one alternative issue over another. It thirsts for news; and this
curiosity, which it borrows of course from the insecurity and
instinctive anxiety of the animal whose spirit it is, is strangely
self-contradictory; because the further it ranges in the service of
animal will, the more the spectacle it discloses rebukes that animal
will and tends to neutralise it. It would indeed not be spirit at all if
it did not essentially tend to discount its accidental point of view,
and to exchange the material station to which it finds itself
unaccountably attached in its birth. In so far as it is spirit, and is
not called back by its animal allegiance to pleasures and ambitions
which pure spirit could not share (since they imply ignorance), it
accordingly tends to withdraw from preoccupation with animal life, from
the bias of time and place, and from all thought of existence. In so
doing, far from perishing, it seems to acquire a more intense, luminous,
and placid being. Since the roots of spirit, at least in man, are in
matter, this would seem to be an illusion; yet the experience is normal,
and no illusion need attach to it, if once the nature of intuition is
understood.
At the vanishing-point of scepticism, which is also the acme of life,
intuition is absorbed in its object. For this reason, philosophers
capable of intense contemplation—Aristotle, for instance, at those
points where his thought becomes, as it were, internal to spirit—have
generally asserted that in the end essence and the contemplation of
essence are identical. Certainly the intuition of essence is oblivious
of itself, and cognisant of essence only, to which it adds nothing
whatever internally, either in character or in intensity; because the
intensity of a thunder-clap is the chief part of its essence, and so the
peculiar intolerableness of each sort of pain, or transitiveness of each
sort of pleasure. If in fact when any such essence is given there had
been nothing prior to this intuition, nothing beside it existentially,
and nothing to follow upon it, this obliviousness to the intuition
itself, as distinct from the given essence, would not be an oversight;
it would be rather an absence of illusion. For it would then have been
an illusion to suppose, as I should in calling the presence of that
essence an intuition of it, that a soul with a history and with other
adventitious qualities had come to contemplate that essence at one
moment in its career. There would really be the essence only, with no
relations other than those perfectly irreversible internal ones to other
essences which define it in its own realm. Those very high numbers, for
instance, which nobody has ever thought of specifically, have no other
relations than those which they have eternally in the series of whole
numbers; they have no place in any man’s life. So too those many forms
of torment for which nature does not provide the requisite instrument,
and which even hell has neglected to exemplify; they remain essences
only, of which fortunately there is no intuition. Evidently the being of
such numbers or such torments is constituted by their essence only, and
has not attained to existence. Yet it is this essential being alone
that, if there was intuition of those numbers or those torments, would
be revealed in intuition; for no external adventitious relations, such
as the intuition has in the life of some soul, would be presented within
it, if (as I assume) nothing but these essences was then given.
It is therefore inevitable that minds singly absorbed in the
contemplation of any essence should attribute the presence and force of
that essence to its own nature, which alone is visible, and not to their
intuition, which is invisible. Thought as it sinks into its object rises
in its deliverance out of the sphere of contingency and change, and
loses itself in that object, sublimated into an essence. This
sublimation is no loss; it is merely absence of distraction. It is the
perfect fruition and fulfilment of that experience. In this manner I can
understand why Aristotle could call the realm of essence, or that part
of it which he had considered, a deity, and could declare sublimely that
its inalienable being was an eternal life. More strictly, it would have
been an eternal actualisation of cognitive life only; animal life would
have ceased, because animal life requires us to pick up and drop the
essences we consider, and to attribute temporal as well as eternal
relations to them; in other words, to regard them not as essences but as
things. But though cognitive life begins with this attention to
practical exigences and is kindled by them, yet its ideal is
sacrificial; it aspires to see each thing clearly and to see all things
together, that is to say, under the form of eternity, and as sheer
essences given in intuition. To cease to live temporally is
intellectually to be saved; it is ἀθανατίζειν, to fade or to brighten
into the truth, and to become eternal. It is the inmost aim and highest
achievement of cognition to cease to be knowledge for a self, to abolish
the bias and transcend the point of view by which knowledge establishes
its perspectives, so that all things may be present equally, and the
truth may be all in all.
All this comes about, however, only subjectively, in that vital and
poetic effort of the mind to understand which begins with a candid
self-forgetfulness and ends in a passionate self-surrender. Seen from
outside, as it takes place psychologically, the matter wears an entirely
different aspect. In reality, essence and the intuition of essence can
never be identical. If all animal predicaments were resolved, there
would be no organ and no occasion for intuition; and intuition ceasing,
no essences would appear. Certainly they would not be abolished by that
accident in their own sphere, and each would be what it would have
seemed if intuition of it had arisen; but they would all be merely
logical or æsthetic themes unrehearsed, as remote as possible from life
or from the intense splendour of divinity. Essence without intuition
would be not merely non-existent (as it always is), but what is worse,
it would be the object of no contemplation, the goal of no effort, the
secret or implicit ideal of no life. It would be valueless. All that joy
and sense of liberation which pure objectivity brings to the mind would
be entirely absent; and essence would lose all its dignity if life lost
its precarious existence.
I believe that Aristotle, and even more mystical spokesmen of the
spirit, would not have ignored this circumstance if they had not taken
so narrow a view of essence. They see it only through some peep-hole of
morals, grammar, or physics; the small part of that infinite realm which
thus becomes visible they take for the whole; or if they feel some
uneasiness at the obvious partiality of this survey, they rather blot
out and blur the part before them, lest it seem arbitrary, instead of
imagining it filled out with all the rest that, in the realm of essence,
cannot help surrounding it. Even Spinoza, who so clearly defines the
realm of essence as an infinite number of kinds of being, each having an
infinite number of variations, calls this infinity of being _substance_;
as if at once to weight it all with existence (a horrible possibility)
and to obliterate its internal distinctions; but distinction, infinitely
minute and indelible distinction of everything from everything else, is
what essence means. Yet people suppose that whatever is non-existent is
nothing—a stupid positivism, like that of saying that the past is
nothing, or the future nothing, or everything nothing of which I happen
to be ignorant. If people reflected that the non-existent, as Leibniz
says, is infinite, that it is everything, that it is the realm of
essence, they would be more cautious in regarding essence as something
selected, superior in itself, and worthy of eternal contemplation. They
would not conceive it as the power or worth in things actual, but rather
as the form of everything and anything.
Value accrues to any part of the realm of essence by virtue of the
interest which somebody takes in it, as being the part relevant to his
own life. If the organ of this life comes to perfect operation, it will
reach intuition of that relevant part of essence. This intuition will be
vital in the highest degree. It will be absorbed in its object. It will
be unmindful of any possibility of lapse in that object, or defection on
its own part; it will not be aware of itself, of time, or of
circumstances. But this intuition will continue to exist, and to exist
in time, and the pulsations of its existence will hardly go on without
some oscillation, and probably a quick evanescence. So the intuition
will be an utterly different thing from the essence intuited: it will be
something existent and probably momentary; it will glow and fade; it
will be perhaps delightful; that is, no essences will appear to it which
are not suffused with a general tint of interest and beauty. The life of
the psyche, which rises to this intuition, determines all the characters
of the essence evoked, and among them its moral quality. But as pure
intuition is life at its best, when there is least rasping and thumping
in its music, a prejudice or presumption arises that _any_ essence is
beautiful and life-enhancing. This platonic adoration of essence is
undeserved. The realm of essence is dead, and the intuition of far the
greater part of it would be deadly to any living creature.
The contemplation of so much of essence as is relevant to a particular
life is what Aristotle called the entelechy or perfect fruition of that
life. If the cosmos were a single animal, as the ancients supposed, and
had an aim and a life which, like human life, could be fulfilled in the
contemplation of certain essences, then a life like that of Aristotle’s
God would be involved in the perfection of nature, if this perfection
was ever attained. Or if, with Aristotle, we suppose that the cosmos has
always been in perfect equilibrium, then a happy intuition of all
relevant essence on the part of the cosmos would actually exist and
would be that sustained, ecstatic, divine life which Aristotle speaks
of. Yet even then the cosmic intuition of essence would not be the
essence it beheld. The intuition would be a natural fact, by accident
perpetual and necessarily selective; because the cosmos _might_ stop
turning at any moment, and certainly the music of those spheres, even
while they rolled well, would not be every sort and any sort of noise,
nor even of music. A different cosmos would have had, or might elsewhere
be having, a different happiness. Each, however, would be a divine life,
as the ancients conceived divinity. It would have such a natural basis
as any life must have, and the consequent warmth and moral colour; for
natural operations lend these values to the visions in which they rest.
The love of certain special essences which animates existence is an
expression of the direction which the movement of existence happens to
have. If the cosmos were a perfect animal—and in its unknown secular
pulsations it may possibly be one—the cosmic intellect in act would not
be the whole of the realm of essence, nor any part of it. It would be
the intuition of so much of essence as that cosmos had for its goal.
The external and naturalistic point of view from which all this appears
is one I have not yet justified critically: I have anticipated it for
the sake of rendering the conception of essence perfectly unambiguous.
But if we start from the realm of essence, which demands no belief, we
may at once find conclusive reasons for believing that sundry intuitions
of parts of it exist in fact. One reason is the selectiveness of
discourse. All essences are always at hand, ready to be thought of, if
any one has the wit to do so. But my discourse takes something up first,
and then, even if it is purely dialectical, passes to some implication
or complement of that idea; and it never exhausts its themes. It
traverses the realm of essence as, in a mosque, some ray of light from
some high aperture might shoot across the sombre carpets: it is a brief,
narrow, shifting, oblique illumination of something vast and rich. The
fact that intuition has a direction is an added proof of its existential
character, and of its complete diversity in nature from the essences it
lights up. Life begins unaccountably and moves irreversably: when it is
prosperous and intelligent, it accumulates its experience of things in a
personal perspective, largely alien to the things themselves. When the
objects surveyed are essences, no one can be prior to any other in their
own sphere: they do not arise at all, and lie in no order of precedence.
When one essence includes another as number two includes number one, it
is as easy and as proper to reach one by dividing two as to reach two by
repeating one. In themselves essences have no genesis; and to repeat one
would be impossible if duality were not begged at the start, as well as
unity, to institute the possibility of repetition. In seizing upon any
particular essence first, discourse is guided by an irrational fatality.
Some chance bit is what first occurs to the mind: I run up against this
or that, for no logical reason. This arbitrary assault of intuition upon
essence is evidence that something not essence, which I call intuition,
has come into play. Thus all discourse, even if it traces ideal
implications, is itself contingent to them, and in its existence
irrational. Animal life is involved in the perusal of essence, just as
animal faith is involved in the trust I put in demonstration. If I
aspired to be a disembodied spirit, I ought to envisage all essences
equally and at once—a monstrous requirement. If I aspire instead to
dwell in the presence only of the pertinent, the beautiful, and the
good, I confess that I am but a natural creature, directed on a small
circle of interests and perfections; and that my intuition in particular
exercises an adventitious choice, and has a private method, in its
survey of essence.
The first existence, then, of which a sceptic who finds himself in the
presence of random essences may gather reasonable proof, is the
existence of the intuition to which those essences are manifest. This is
of course not the object which the animal mind first posits and believes
in. The existence of things is assumed by animals in action and
expectation before intuition supplies any description of what the thing
is that confronts them in a certain quarter. But animals are not
sceptics, and a long experience must intervene before the problem arises
which I am here considering, namely, whether anything need be posited
and believed in at all. And I reply that it is not inevitable, if I am
willing and able to look passively on the essences that may happen to be
given: but that if I consider what they are, and how they appear, I see
that this appearance is an accident to them; that the principle of it is
a contribution from my side, which I call intuition. The difference
between essence and intuition, though men may have discovered it late,
then seems to me profound and certain. They belong to two different
realms of being.