BELIEF IN EXPERIENCE
I have now agreed to believe that discourse is a contingent survey of
essence, partial, recurrent, and personal, with an arbitrary
starting-point and an arbitrary direction of progress. It picks up this
essence or that for no reason that it can assign. However dialectical
the structure of the theme considered may be, so that its various parts
seem to imply one another, the fact that this theme rather than any
other is being considered is a brute fact: and my discourse as a whole
is a sheer accident, initiated, if initiated at all, by some ambushed
power, not only in its existence, but in its duration, direction, and
scope.
Nevertheless this fatality does not raise any problem in that discourse
itself, because it occasions no surprise. Problems are created after
discourse is in full swing, by contradictory presumptions or aching
voids arising within it. There are no problems in nature, and none in
the realm of essence. Existence—the most inexplicable of surds—is itself
no problem in its own eyes: it takes itself blandly for granted, so long
as it is prosperous. This is a healthy dulness on its part, because if
there is no reason why a particular fact should exist rather than any
other, or none at all, there is also no reason why it should not exist.
The philosopher who has learned to make nature the standard of
naturalness will not wonder at it. He will repeat on a large scale that
act of ready submission to fate which every new-born intuition performs
spontaneously. It does not protest against its sudden existence. It is
not surprised at the undeserved favour that has fallen to its share. It
modestly and wisely forgets itself and notes only the obvious,
profoundly self-justified essence which appears before it. That this
essence might just as well, or might far better, have been replaced by
some other is not a suggestion to be possibly gathered from that essence
itself. Nor is the psyche (the ambushed power from which the intuition
actually comes) less self-satisfied and at peace. The psyche, too, takes
her own idiosyncrasy for granted, singular and highly determinate as
this is, and extraordinarily censorious concerning all other things. Her
nature seems to her by right everlasting, and that to which it is the
obvious duty of all other things to adjust themselves. God, too, if we
refer these agreeable fatalities ultimately to his decrees, is conceived
in like manner never to wonder why he exists although evidently nothing
could have previously demanded his existence, or prepared the way for
it, or made it intelligible. Nevertheless the mortal psyche perhaps
thinks she sees the secret even of that, because it was necessary that
God should exist in order to make her own existence perfectly safe,
legitimate, and happy for ever. This assurance is needed, because there
are unfortunately some circumstances that might suggest the opposite.
Before turning to these circumstances, it may be well to observe that
actual discourse, as distinguished from the internal dialectic of
essences, may have any degree of looseness; that is, the terms which it
takes up in succession may have nothing to do with one another
essentially. There is no added paradox in this: what is groundless and
irrational in its inception may well be groundless and irrational in its
procedure, and an appearance that has no reason for arising has no
reason for not yielding to any other appearance, or to vacancy. And yet
sometimes the course of appearances does produce wonder and discontent.
How can this be? If I am not surprised at beginning to exist, or at
finding something before me, since present being cannot contain any
presumption or contradiction against itself, so it would seem that I
should not be surprised at any changes in existence, however radical and
complete. Often, indeed, I am not surprised, but follow the development
of discourse, as in a dream, with perfect acquiescence, or even with a
distinct premonition of what is coming, and eagerness that it should
come. If I were a pure spirit, or even an open mind, this ought to be
always the case. However different essences may be, they cannot in their
own realm exclude or contradict one another; there, infinite diversity
provokes no conflict and imposes no alternatives, and the being of
anything, far from impeding that of other things, seems positively to
invite and to require it, somewhat as every part of Euclidean space, far
from denying the other parts, implies them. Irrelevance is, as it were,
mere distance; and there is nothing strange or evil in quickness of
thought, that should jump from one essence to another altogether
dissimilar to it, or even contrary.
And yet I cannot prolong or intensify discourse without soon coming upon
what I call interruption, confusion, doubt, or contradiction. An impulse
to select, to pursue, and to reject specific essences insinuates itself
into discourse. Why this animosity or this impatience? I do not
disparage, nor subordinate, nor remove the circle from the realm of
essence, when I think of the square and say it is no circle. Why then
should I be angry if I find the one rather than the other? Evidently my
discourse here is not pure contemplation. Of course, no essence is any
other essence; but a clear spirit would not call any two essences
incompatible. Their diversity is part of their being; they _are_
because, each being eternally itself, the two are eternally different.
If they are incompatible, I must ask: Incompatible for what purpose?
Even in calling them contradictory, I am surreptitiously speaking for
some hidden interest, which cannot put up with them both. There is an
inertia or prior direction somewhere, in the region of what I call
myself, that demands one of them, and rejects the other for the innocent
crime of not being that one. The incongruous essence appearing offends
me because I am wedded to an old one, and to its close relations. I will
tolerate nothing but what I meant should come, what fills my niche, and
falls in with my undertaking.
Irrelevance, incongruity, and contradiction are accordingly possible in
discourse only because discourse is not a play of essences but a play of
attention upon them; which attention is no impartial exercise of spirit
but a manifestation of interest, intent, preference, and preoccupation.
A hidden life is at work. If I deny this, because my scepticism eschews
everything hidden, I must consistently abandon all dialectic and revert
to undirected dreaming, without comments on my dream intended to be
veridical: because if the least comment on my dreams were veridical I
must begin at once to reject, in my comments, all the essences
suggesting themselves which deviate from that particular dream I mean to
describe. Meaning, which is my guide in discriminating one suggestion
from another as being the right one, springs from beneath the surface;
it is a nether influence. It is a witness to my psychic life going on
beneath, which can be disturbed by the intrusion of one event, or
furthered by another; and this subterranean impulse breaks out into
judgements about the rightness and wrongness of essences—utterly absurd
and unmeaning judgements if the essences were considered simply in
themselves. If I feel that they clash, if I make a stumbling-block of
their irrelevance or diversity, I prove that I am discoursing about them
for an ulterior purpose, in the service of some alien interest. I am
stringing my pearls; therefore I require them to be of a particular
quality. I am a collector, not a poet; and what concerns me, even in the
purest dialectic or the most desultory dream, is not to explore essence,
but to gather _experience_. The psyche below is busy selecting her food,
fortifying her cave, and discriminating her friends from her enemies;
and in these meanderings of mine over the realm of essence, in spite of
myself, I am only her scout.
By experience I understand a fund of wisdom gathered by living. I call
it a fund of wisdom, rather than merely memory or discursive ideation,
because experience accrues precisely when discrimination amongst given
essences is keenest, when only the relevant is retained or perhaps
noticed, and when the psyche sagaciously interprets data as omens
favourable or unfavourable to her interests, as perilous or inviting,
and, if she goes wrong, allows the event to correct her interpretation.
I think it mere mockery to use the word experience for what is not
learning or gathering knowledge of facts; if experience taught me
nothing it would not be experience, but reverie. Experience accordingly
presupposes intent and intelligence, and it also implies, as will appear
presently, a natural world in which it is possible to learn to live
better by practising the arts.
Intuition is an event, although it reveals only an essence; and in like
manner discourse is an experience, even when its deliverance is mere
dialectic. It is an experience for two reasons: first, because it is
guided unawares by the efforts of the psyche to explore, not the realm
of essence, but the world that controls her fortunes; and secondly,
because the essences unrolled before it, apparently at random and for no
reason, really convey knowledge; in reality they are manifestations to
the psyche of that surrounding world which it concerns her to react upon
wisely. Discourse is hers; and it is full of the names—since images not
auditory may be names also—which she gives to her friends and enemies,
and of her ingenious imaginations concerning their ways. However
original the terms of discourse may be, under the control of the psyche
and her environment they fall into certain rhythms; they run into
familiar sequences; they become virtual and available knowledge of
things, persons, nature, and the gods. Imagination would be very
insecure and inconstant in these constructions, and they would not
become automatic habits in discourse, if instinct within and nature
without did not control the process of discourse, and dictate its
occasions. So controlled, discourse becomes experience.
That discourse is secretly an experience, and may be turned into
knowledge, becomes particularly evident when it is interrupted by
_shocks_. Not only may an essence suddenly present itself which was not
the essence I expected or should have welcomed, but the whole placid
tenor of my thoughts may be arrested or overwhelmed. I may suffer a sort
of momentary and conscious death, in that I survive to feel the
extinction of all that made up my universe, and to face a blank, or a
precipice. When in my placid discourse one thing seemed to contradict
another, they were but rival images in the same field, and I had but to
choose between them, and proceed with the argument. Shock contradicts
nothing, but uproots the whole experience. The lights go out on the
stage, and discourse loses its momentum.
In the sense of contradiction there is probably some element of shock.
The purest æsthetic or logical contemplation hardly goes on without a
throbbing accompaniment of interest, haste, reversals, and
satisfactions; but these dramatic notes are merged in the counterpoint
of the themes surveyed, and I think, prove, and enjoy without noticing
that I do so. But when a clap of thunder deafens me, or a flash of
lightning at once dazzles and blinds me, the fact that something has
_happened_ is far more obvious to me than just what it is that has
occurred; and there are perhaps shocks internal to the psyche in which
the tension of the event reaches a maximum, whilst the nature of it
remains so obscure that perhaps my only sense of it is a question, a
gasp, or a recoil. The feeling present in such a case is, with but
little further qualification, the sheer feeling of experience.
Now experience of the most brutal and dumbest sort may be theoretically
described, and described exhaustively, in terms of the successive
intuition of essences; for loudness, dazzlingness, pain, or terror are
essences or elements of essences like any other data; and when such
essences are present, all is present that it is possible ever to feel in
that direction, and with any degree of intensity. Utter blankness,
intolerable strain, shrieking despair, are just the essences they are,
and they are unrolled and revealed to intuition like any other essences.
But such intuitions, being those proper to the most brutal and
rudimentary life, have a suasion in them out of all proportion to their
articulation, or rather, we might almost say, inversely proportional to
it; as if the more an experience meant the less it cried out, and the
more it cried out the less it meant. The purest discourse is (without
noticing it) an experience, and the blindest experience (also without
noticing it) is a discourse, since we should not call it experience if
it contained no sense of passage, no experiential perspective; but in
proportion as shock cancels discourse and obliterates its own
background, experience becomes mere experience, and inarticulate.
In brute experience, or shock, I have not only a clear indication, for
my ulterior reflection, that I exist, but a most imperious summons at
that very moment to _believe_ in my existence. Discourse, as I first
disentangled the evidence for it from the pure intuition of essence,
seemed to be a progressive observation of the permanent—studious
attention perusing and registering the essential mutual relations of
given terms. But now, when shock interrupts me, discourse suffers
violence. The subject-matter itself takes up arms; one object leaves me
in the lurch, while another, quite irrelevantly, assaults me. And since
my discourse witnesses and records this revolution, I must now assert it
to be a permanent knowledge of the changing.
Shocks _come_: if they did not _come_, if I had not pre-existed, if I
had never been anything more than the intuition of this shock, then this
shock would not be a shock in fact, but only the illusion of a shock,
only the essence of shock speciously persuading me that something had
happened, when in fact nothing had occurred. If the sense of shock does
not deceive me, I must have passed from a state in which the shock was
not yet, into the state in which the shock first startled me; and I must
since have passed from that startled state into another, in which my
intuition covers synthetically the coming, the nature, and the
subsidence of that shock; so that I am aware how startled I was, without
being startled afresh now. A wonderful and ambiguous presence of the
absent and persistence of the receding, which is called _memory_. My
objects have receded, yet I continue to consider them. They are no
longer essences, but facts, and my consideration is not intuition of
something given but faith in something absent, and a persistent
indication of it as still the same object, although my image of it is
constantly changing, is perhaps intermittent, and probably grows
fainter, vaguer, and more erroneous at every instant.
Experience of shock, if not utterly delusive, accordingly establishes
the validity of memory and of transitive knowledge. It establishes
realism. If it be true that I have ever had any experience, I must not
only have existed unawares in order to gather it, but I am justified in
explicitly asserting a whole realm of existence, in which one event may
contain realistic knowledge of another. Experience, even conceived most
critically as a series of shocks overtaking one another and retained in
memory, involves a world of independent existences deployed in an
existing medium. Belief in experience is belief in nature, however
vaguely nature may as yet be conceived, and every empiricist is a
naturalist in principle, however hesitant his naturalism may be in
practice.
Nevertheless shock, like any other datum, intrinsically presents an
essence only, and _might_ be nothing more; but in that case the dogmatic
suasion of it (which alone lends interest to so blank an experience)
would be an illusion. The intuition would be what it is, but it would be
nobody’s intuition, and it would mean nothing. For I should not be a
self, if that intuition made up my whole being, so that it involved no
change in my condition, but was perhaps itself the whole universe. Shock
will not suffer me, while it lasts, to entertain any such hypothesis. It
is itself the most positive, if the blindest, of beliefs; it loudly
proclaims an event; so that if by chance the change which I feel were
merely a feeling within the unity of apperception, shock would be an
illusion, in the only sense in which this can be said of any intuition:
it would incite me to a false belief that something like the given
essence existed. If the change has really occurred, and not merely been
imagined, shock is not only intuition of change, but trouble in a
process of change enveloping that intuition. I am right in positing a
desultory experience in which this intuition is an incident. I am not a
spectator watching this cataract, but a part of the water precipitated
over the edge. Thus if being shocked was, as perhaps it ought to be, the
first sensation in life, it proclaimed the existence of a previous state
without sensation. Unless it is an illusion, which I cannot admit while
I feel it, it implies variation in a voluminous vegetative life in which
the sense of surprise is a true indication of novelty.
Before I had noticed shock, or consented to accept its witness, I had
already admitted, on dialectical grounds, that discourse was a process;
but now that I observe how shocks, more or less violent, interrupt
discourse at every moment, I can call discourse experience. For now I
see that in endeavouring to trace dialectical relations discourse is not
itself dialectical. Sheer chance decides whether it shall pursue
faithfully the theme it may have picked out, as sheer chance decided
that it should pick up that theme in particular. In my theoretical
bewilderment and helplessness before this absolute contingency of all
themes and all data, I am steadied only by animal presumptions, habits,
expectations, or omens, all of which my sceptical reflection must
condemn as utterly arbitrary. I can only say that I am the sport of an
unfathomable destiny; that in these shocks that fall upon me thick and
fast, and in the calmer stretches between them, miscellaneous essences
are revealed to me, most of them gratuitous and mutually irrelevant; and
that if the current of them did not carry me, somewhat congenially, into
a vortex of work and play, I should be condemned for ever to blank
watching and to sheer wonder. The very belief in experience is a
suggestion of instinct, not of experience itself. The steadfastness of
my nature, doggedly retaining its prejudices and assuming its power,
supplies and imposes a routine upon my experience which is far from
existing in my direct intuitions, very shifty in their quality (even
when signs of the same external object) and much mixed with dream. Even
the naturalist has to make up by analogy and presumption (which perhaps
he calls induction) the enormous spaces between and beyond his actual
observations.
Belief in experience is the beginning of that bold instinctive art, more
plastic than the instinct of most animals, by which man has raised
himself to his earthly eminence: it opens the gates of nature to him,
both within him and without, and enables him to transmute his
apprehension, at first merely æsthetic, into mathematical science. This
is so great a step that most minds cannot take it. They stumble, and
remain entangled in poetry and in gnomic wisdom. Science and reasonable
virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day
only partially welcome or understood. Although they bring freedom in the
end, the approach to them seems sacrificial, and many prefer to live in
the glamour of intuition, not having the courage to believe in
experience.