BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE
All knowledge, being faith in an object posited and partially described,
is belief in substance, in the etymological sense of this word; it is
belief in a thing or event subsisting in its own plane, and waiting for
the light of knowledge to explore it eventually, and perhaps name or
define it. In this way my whole past lies waiting for memory to review
it, if I have this faculty; and the whole future of the world in the
same manner is spread out for prophecy, scientific or visionary, to
predict falsely or truly. Yet the future and the past are not ordinarily
called substances; probably because the same material substance is
assumed to run through both. Nevertheless, from the point of view of
knowledge, every event, even if wholly psychological or phenomenal, is a
substance. It is a self-existing fact, open to description from the
point of view of other events, if in the bosom of these other events
there is such plasticity and intent as are requisite for perception,
prophecy, or memory.
When modern philosophers deny material substance, they make substances
out of the sensations or ideas which they regard as ultimate facts. It
is impossible to eliminate belief in substance so long as belief in
existence is retained. A mistrust in existence, and therefore in
substance, is not unphilosophical; but modern philosophers have not
given full expression to this sceptical scruple. They have seldom been
disinterested critics, but often advocates of some metaphysic that
allured them, and whose rivals they wished to destroy. They deny
substance in favour of phenomena, which are hypostatised essences,
because phenomena are individually wholly open to intuition; but they
forget that no phenomenon can intuit another, and that if it contains
knowledge of that other, it must be animated by intent, and besides
existing itself substantially must recognise its object as another
substance, indifferent in its own being to the cognisance which other
substances may take of it. In other words, although each phenomenon in
passing is an object of intuition, all absent phenomena, and all their
relations, are objects of faith; and this faith must be mediated by some
feature in the present phenomenon which faith assumes to be a sign of
the existence of other phenomena elsewhere, and of their order. So that
in so far as the instinctive claims and transcendent scope of knowledge
are concerned, phenomenalism fully retains the belief in substance. In
order to get rid of this belief, which is certainly obnoxious to the
sceptic, a disinterested critic would need to discard all claims to
knowledge, and to deny his own existence, and that of all absent
phenomena.
For my own part, having admitted discourse (which involves time and
existences deployed in time, but synthesised in retrospect), and having
admitted shocks that interrupt discourse and lead it to regard itself as
an experience, and having even admitted that such experience involves a
self beneath discourse, with an existence and movement of its own—I need
not be deterred by any _a priori_ objections from believing in substance
of any sort. For me it will be simply a question of good sense and
circumstantial evidence how many substances I admit, and of what sort.
In the genesis of human knowledge (which I am not attempting to trace
here) the substance first posited is doubtless matter, some alluring or
threatening or tormenting thing. The ego, as Fichte tells us, unaware of
itself, posits a non-ego, and then by reflection posits itself as the
agent in that positing, or as the patient which the activity posited in
the non-ego posits in its turn. But all this positing would be mere
folly, unless it was an intelligent discovery of antecedent facts. Why
should a non-existent ego be troubled with the delirious duty of
positing anything at all? And, if nothing else exists, what difference
could it make what sort of a world the ego posited, or whether it
posited a thousand inconsequential worlds, at once or in succession?
Fichte, however, was far from sharing that absolute freedom in madness
which he attributes to the creative ego; he had a very tight tense mind,
and posited a very tense tight world. His myths about the birth of
knowledge (or rather of systematic imagination) out of unconscious egos,
acts, and positings concealed some modest truths about nature. The
actual datum has a background, and Fichte was too wise to ignore so
tremendous a fact. Romantic philosophy, like romantic poetry, has its
profound ways of recognising its own folly, and so turning it into
tragic wisdom. As a matter of fact, the active ego is an animal living
in a material world; both the ego and the non-ego exist substantially
before acquiring this relation of positing and being posited. The
instinct and ability to posit objects, and the occasion for doing so,
are incidents in the development of animal life. Positing is a symptom
of sensibility in an organism to the presence of other substances in its
environment. The sceptic, like the sick man, is intent on the symptom;
and positing is his name for felt plasticity in his animal responses. It
is not a bad name; because plasticity, though it may seem a passive
thing, is really a spontaneous quality. If the substance of the ego were
not alive, it would not leap to meet its opportunities, it would not
develop new organs to serve its old necessities, and it would not kindle
itself to intuition of essences, nor concern itself to regard those
essences as appearances of the substances with which it was wrestling.
The whole life of imagination and knowledge comes from within, from the
restlessness, eagerness, curiosity, and terror of the animal bent on
hunting, feeding, and breeding; and the throb of being which he
experiences at any moment is not proper to the datum in his mind’s eye—a
purely fantastic essence—but to himself. It is out of his organism or
its central part, the psyche, that this datum has been bred. The living
substance within him being bent, in the first instance, on pursuing or
avoiding some agency in its environment, it projects whatever (in
consequence of its reactions) reaches its consciousness into the locus
whence it feels the stimulus to come, and it thus frames its description
or knowledge of objects. In this way the ego really and sagaciously
posits the non-ego: not absolutely, as Fichte imagined, nor by a
gratuitous fiat, but on occasion and for the best of reasons, when the
non-ego in its might shakes the ego out of its primitive somnolence.
Belief in substance is accordingly identical with the claim to
knowledge, and so fundamental that no evidence can be adduced for it
which does not presuppose it. In recognising any appearance as a witness
to substance and in admitting (or even in rejecting) the validity of
such testimony, I have already made a substance of the appearance; and
if I admit other phenomena as well, I have placed that substance in a
world of substances having a substantial unity. It is not to external
pressure, through evidence or argument, that faith in substance is due.
If the sceptic cannot find it in himself, he will never find it. I for
one will honour him in his sincerity and in his solitude. But I will not
honour him, nor think him a philosopher, if he is a sceptic only
histrionically, in the wretched controversies of the schools, and
believes in substance again when off the stage. I am not concerned about
make-believe philosophies, but about my actual beliefs. It is only out
of his own mouth, or rather out of his own heart, that I should care to
convince the sceptic. Scepticism, if it could be sincere, would be the
best of philosophies. But I suspect that other sceptics, as well as I,
always believe in substance, and that their denial of it is sheer
sophistry and the weaving of verbal arguments in which their most
familiar and massive convictions are ignored.
It might seem ignominious to believe something on compulsion, because I
can’t help believing it; when reason awakes in a man it asks for reasons
for everything. Yet this demand is unreasonable: there cannot be a
reason for everything. It is mere automatic habit in the philosopher to
make this demand, as it is in the common man not to make it. When once I
have admitted the facts of nature, and taken for granted the character
of animal life, and the incarnation of spirit in this animal life, then
indeed many excellent reasons for the belief in substance will appear;
and not only reasons for using the category of substance, and positing
substance of some vague ambient sort, but reasons for believing in a
substance rather elaborately defined and scientifically describable in
many of its habits and properties. But I am not yet ready for that. Lest
that investigation, when undertaken, should ignore its foundations or be
impatient of its limits, I must insist here that trust in knowledge, and
belief in anything to know, are merely instinctive and, in a manner,
pathological. If philosophy were something prior to convention rather
than (as it is) only convention made consistent and deliberate,
philosophy ought to reject belief in substance and in knowledge, and to
entrench itself in the sheer confession and analysis of this belief, as
of all others, without assenting to any of them. But I have found that
criticism has no first principle, that analysis involves belief in
discourse, and that belief in discourse involves belief in substance; so
that any pretensions which criticism might set up to being more profound
than common sense would be false pretensions. Criticism is only an
exercise of reflective fancy, on the plane of literary psychology, an
after-image of that faith in nature which it denies; and in dwelling on
criticism as if it were more than a subjective perspective or play of
logical optics, I should be renouncing all serious philosophy.
Philosophy is nothing if not honest; and the critical attitude, when it
refuses to rest at some point upon vulgar faith, inhibits all belief,
denies all claims to knowledge, and becomes dishonest; because it itself
claims to know.
Does the process of experience, now that I trust my memory to report it
truly, or does the existence of the self, now that I admit its
substantial, dynamic, and obscure life underlying discourse, require me
to posit any other substances? Certainly it does. Experience, for animal
faith, begins by reporting what is not experience; and the life of the
self, if I accept its endeavours as significant, implies an equally
substantial, dynamic, ill-reported world around it, in whose movements
it is implicated. In conveying this feeling, as in all else, experience
_might_ be pure illusion; but if I reject this initial and fundamental
suasion of my cognitive life, it will be hard to find anything better to
put in its place. I am unwilling to do myself so much useless violence
as to deny the validity of primary memory, and assert that I have never,
in fact, had any experience at all; and I should be doing myself even
greater violence if I denied the validity of perception, and asserted
that a thunder-clap, for instance, was only a musical chord, with no
formidable event of any sort going on behind the sound. To be startled
is to be aware that something sudden and mysterious has occurred not far
from me in space. The thunder-clap is felt to be an event in the self
and in the not-self, even before its nature as a sound—its æsthetic
quality for the self—is recognised at all; I first know I am shaken
horribly, and then note how loud and rumbling is the voice of the god
that shakes me. That first feeling of something violent and resistless
happening in the world at large, is accompanied by a hardly less
primitive sense of something gently seething within me, a smouldering
life which that alien energy blows upon and causes to start into flame.
If this be not the inmost texture of experience, I do not know what
experience is. To me experience has not a string of sensations for its
objects; what it brings me is not at all a picture-gallery of clear
images, with nothing before, behind, or between them. What such a
ridiculous psychology (made apparently by studying the dictionary and
not by studying the mind) calls hypotheses, intellectual fictions, or
tendencies to feign, is the solid body of experience, on which what it
calls sensations or ideas hang like flimsy garments or trinkets, or play
like a shifting light and shade. Experience brings belief in substance
(as alertness) _before_ it brings intuition of essences; it is
appetition _before_ it is description. Of course sensation would precede
idea, if by sensation we understood contact with matter, and by idea
pure reverie about ideal things; but if idea means expectation, or
consciousness having intent, and if sensation means æsthetic
contemplation of data without belief, then idea precedes sensation:
because an animal is aware that something is happening long before he
can say to himself what that something is, or what it looks like. The
ultimate datum to which a sceptic may retreat, when he suspends all life
and opinion, some essence, pure and non-existent and out of all relation
to minds, bodies, or events—surely that is not the stuff out of which
experience is woven: it is but the pattern or picture, the æsthetic
image, which the tapestry may ultimately offer to the gazing eye,
incurious of origins, and contemptuous of substance. The radical stuff
of experience is much rather breathlessness, or pulsation, or as Locke
said (correcting himself) a certain uneasiness; a lingering thrill, the
resonance of that much-struck bell which I call my body, the continual
assault of some masked enemy, masked perhaps in beauty, or of some
strange sympathetic influence, like the cries and motions of other
creatures; and also the hastening and rising of some impulse in me in
response. Experience, at its very inception, is a revelation of
_things_; and these things, before they are otherwise distinguished, are
distinguishable into a here and a there, a now and a then, nature and
myself in the midst of nature.
It is a mere prejudice of literary psychology, which uses the grammar of
adult discourse, like a mythology, in which to render primitive
experience—it is a mere prejudice to suppose that experience has only
such categories as colour, sound, touch, and smell. These essences are
distinguished eventually because the senses that present them can be
separated at will, the element each happens to furnish being thus
flashed on or cut off, like an electric light: but far more primitive in
animal experience are such dichotomies as good and bad, near and far,
coming and going, fast and slow, just now and very soon. The first thing
experience reports is the existence of something, merely as existence,
the weight, strain, danger, and lapse of being. If any one should tell
me that this is an abstraction, I should reply that it would seem an
abstraction to a parrot, who used human words without having human
experience, but it is no abstraction to a man, whose language utters
imperfectly, and by a superadded articulation, the life within him.
Aristotle, who so often seems merely grammatical, was not merely
grammatical when he chose substance to be the first of his categories.
He was far more profoundly psychological in this than the British and
German psychologists who discard the notion of substance because it is
not the datum of any separate sense. None of the separate data of sense,
which are only essences, would figure at all in an experience, or would
become terms in knowledge, if a prior interest and faith did not
apprehend them. Animal watchfulness, lying in wait for the signals of
the special senses, lends them their significance, sets them in their
places, and retains them, as descriptions of things, and as symbols in
its own ulterior discourse.
This animal watchfulness carries the category of substance with it,
asserts existence most vehemently, and in apprehension seizes and throws
on the dark screen of substance every essence it may descry. To grope,
to blink, to dodge a blow, or to return it, is to have very radical and
specific experiences, but probably without one assignable image of the
outer senses. Yet a nameless essence, the sense of a moving existence,
is there most intensely present; and a man would be a shameless, because
an insincere, sceptic, who should maintain that this experience exists
_in vacuo_, and does not express, as it feels it does, the operation of
a missile flying, and the reaction of a body threatened or hit: motions
in substance anterior to the experience, and rich in properties and
powers which no experience will ever fathom.
Belief in substance, taken transcendentally, as a critic of knowledge
must take it, is the most irrational, animal, and primitive of beliefs:
it is the voice of hunger. But when, as I must, I have yielded to this
presumption, and proceeded to explore the world, I shall find in its
constitution the most beautiful justification for my initial faith, and
the proof of its secret rationality. This corroboration will not have
any logical force, since it will be only pragmatic, based on begging the
question, and perhaps only a bribe offered by fortune to confirm my
illusions. The force of the corroboration will be merely moral, showing
me how appropriate and harmonious with the nature of things such a blind
belief was on my part. How else should the truth have been revealed to
me at all? Truth and blindness, in such a case, are correlatives, since
I am a sensitive creature surrounded by a universe utterly out of scale
with myself: I must, therefore, address it questioningly but trustfully,
and it must reply to me in my own terms, in symbols and parables, that
only gradually enlarge my childish perceptions. It is as if Substance
said to Knowledge: My child, there is a great world for thee to conquer,
but it is a vast, an ancient, and a recalcitrant world. It yields
wonderful treasures to courage, when courage is guided by art and
respects the limits set to it by nature. I should not have been so cruel
as to give thee birth, if there had been nothing for thee to master; but
having first prepared the field, I set in thy heart the love of
adventure.