BELIEF IN THE SELF
Experience, when the shocks that punctuate it are reacted upon
instinctively, imposes belief in something far more recondite than
mental discourse, namely, a person or self; and not merely such a
transcendental ego as is requisite intrinsically for any intuition, nor
such a flux of sentience as discourse itself constitutes, but a
substantial being preceding _all_ the vicissitudes of experience, and
serving as an instrument to produce them, or a soil out of which they
grow.
Shock is the great argument of common sense for the existence of
material things, because common sense does not need to distinguish the
order of evidence from the order of genesis. If I know already that a
tile has fallen on my head, my sore head is a proof to me that the tile
was real; but if I start from the pain itself in all innocence, I cannot
draw any inference from it about tiles or the laws of gravity. By common
sense experience is conceived as the effect which the impact of external
things makes on a man when he is able to retain and remember it. As a
matter of fact, of course, shocks usually have an external origin,
although in dreams, madness, apparitions, and in disease generally,
their cause is sometimes internal. But all question concerning the
source of a shock is vain for the sceptic; he knows nothing of sources;
he is asking, not whence shocks come, but to what beliefs they should
lead. In the criticism of knowledge the _argumentum baculaneum_ is
accordingly ridiculous, and fit only for the backs of those who use it.
Why, if I am a spirit beholding essences, should I not feel shocks? Why
are not novelties and surprises as likely themes for my entertainment as
the analysis or synthesis of some theorem or of some picture? All
essences are grist for the mill of intuition, and any order or disorder,
any quality of noise or violence, is equally appropriate in an
experience which, for all I know or as yet believe, is absolute and
groundless. And I call it experience, not because it discloses anything
about the environment which produced it, but because it is composed of a
series of shocks, which I survey and remember.
If, however, consenting to listen to the voice of nature, I ask myself
what a shock can signify, and of what it brings me most unequivocal
evidence, the least hazardous answer will be: evidence of prepossessions
on my part. What shock proves, if it proves anything, is that I have a
nature to which all events and all developments are not equally welcome.
How could any apparition surprise or alarm me, or how could interruption
of any sort overtake me, unless I was somehow running on in a certain
direction, with a specific rhythm? Had I not such a positive nature, the
existence of material things and their most violent impact upon one
another, shattering the world to atoms, would leave me a placid observer
of their movement; whereas a definite nature in me, even if disturbed
only by cross-currents or by absolute accidents within my own being,
would justify my sense of surprise and horror. A self, then, not a
material world, is the first object which I should posit if I wish the
experience of shock to enlarge my dogmas in the strict order of
evidence.
But what sort of a self? In one sense, the existence of intuition is
tantamount to that of a self, though of a merely formal and transparent
one, pure spirit. A self somewhat more concrete is involved in
discourse, when intuition has been deployed into a successive survey of
constant ideal objects, since here the self not only sees, but adds an
adventitious order to the themes it rehearses; traversing them in
various directions, with varying completeness, and suspending or picking
up the consideration of them at will; so that the self involved in
discourse is a thinking mind. Now that I am consenting to build further
dogmas on the sentiment of shock, and to treat it, not as an essence
groundlessly revealed to me, but as signifying something pertinent to
the alarm or surprise with which it fills me, I must thicken and
substantialise the self I believe in, recognising in it a nature that
accepts or rejects events, a nature having a movement of its own, far
deeper, more continuous and more biassed than a discoursing mind: the
self posited by the sense of shock is a living psyche.
This is a most obscure subterraneous object; I am venturing into the
nether world. It is alarming and yet salutary to notice how near to
radical scepticism are the gates of Hades. I shall have occasion later
to consider what the psyche is physically, when I have learned more
about the world in which she figures; she has some stake in it, since
she welcomes or strives against sundry events. So anxious a being must
have but precarious conditions of existence, and yet some native
adaptation to them, since she manages to exist at all. Here I need admit
only this: that the pure spirit involved in any intuition of essence is
in my case repeatedly and somewhat consecutively actualised in a running
mental discourse; that, further, it is employed in remembering, loving,
and hating, so that it almost seems to spring like a wild beast upon its
visions, as upon its prey, and to gnaw and digest them into its own
substance. Spirit, as I shall soon find, is no substance, and has no
interests; all this absurd animal violence may still be nothing but a
dream; and the fact, now agreed upon, that discourse is going on, may
suffice to dispose of these passionate movements. Music, which is
ethereal in its being and, in the objective direction, terminates in
pure essence, nevertheless in its play with pure essence is full of
trepidation, haste, terror, potentiality, and sweetness. If mere sound
can carry such a load, why should not discourse do likewise, in which
images of many other sorts come trooping across the field of intuition?
This is no idle doubt, since the whole Buddhist system is built on
accepting it as a dogma; and transcendentalism, though it talks much of
the self, denies, or ought to deny, its existence, and the existence of
anything; the transcendental self is pure spirit, incoherently
identified with the principle of change, preference, and destiny which
this philosophy calls Will, but which in truth, as I shall find, is
matter. The Buddhists too, in denying the self, are obliged to introduce
an ambiguous equivalent in the heritage of guilt, ignorance, and
illusion which they call Karma. These are ulterior mystifications, which
I mention here only lest I should proceed to posit the natural psyche
without a due sense of the risks I am taking. The natural psyche, being
a habit of matter, is to be described and investigated from without,
scientifically, by a behaviourist psychology; but the critical approach
to it from within, as a postulate of animal faith, is extremely
difficult and fraught with danger. Literary psychology, to which I am
here confined, is at home only in the sentiments and ideas of the adult
mind, as language has expressed them: the deeper it tries to go, the
vaguer its notions; and it soon loses itself in the dark altogether. I
cannot hope to discover, therefore, what precisely this psyche is, this
self of mine, the existence of which is so indubitable to my active and
passionate nature. The evidence for it in shock hardly goes beyond the
instinctive assertion that I existed before, that I am a principle of
steady life, welcoming or rejecting events, that I am a nucleus of
active interests and passions. It will be easy to graft upon these
passions and interests the mental discourse which I had previously
asserted to be going on, and which made up, in this critical
reconstruction of belief, my first notion of myself. And yet here is one
of the dangers of my investigation, because mental discourse is not, and
cannot be, a self nor a psyche. It is all surface; it neither precedes,
nor survives, nor guides, nor posits its data; it merely notes and
remembers them. Discourse is a most superficial function of the self;
and if by the self I was tempted to understand a series of ideas, I
should be merely reverting sceptically to that stage of philosophic
denudation in which I found myself, before I had consented to accept the
evidence of shock in favour of my own existence. I, if I exist, am not
an idea, nor am I the fact that several ideas may exist, one of which
remembers the other. If I exist, I am a living creature to whom ideas
are incidents, like aeroplanes in the sky; they pass over, more or less
followed by the eye, more or less listened to, recognised, or
remembered; but the self slumbers and breathes below, a mysterious
natural organism, full of dark yet definite potentialities; so that
different events will awake it to quite disproportionate activities. The
self is a fountain of joy, folly, and sorrow, a waxing and waning,
stupid and dreaming creature, in the midst of a vast natural world, of
which it catches but a few transient and odd perspectives.