ON SOME OBJECTIONS TO BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE
According to those philosophers who look for the foundations of the
universe in their own minds, substance is but a dead and fantastic
thing—a ghost or abstracted shadow of many sensations, impossibly fused
and objectified. These philosophers, in their intense introspection, try
to catch thought alive, and the nearer they come to doing so, the more
unstable and unsubstantial they find it to be. It exists only in the act
of dominating or positing or meaning something; and before this
something can be specified exhaustively, something else has taken its
place, the limits of vision having expanded or its centre shifted. Such
self-observation may be profound, or at least sincere, although what is
true of life in one animal or at one moment might well be false of life
in another instance, and mere nonsense to a different mind. In myself, I
find experience so volatile that no insistence on its unsubstantial
flux, maniacally creative, seems to me exaggerated. But before such
observations of life in the quick can be turned into arguments against
the existence of substance, three assumptions must be made silently, all
three of which are false: first, that thought observes itself; secondly,
that if thought is itself in flux it can observe nothing permanent; and
lastly, that if direct observation offered no illustration of the
permanent, nothing permanent could exist in fact, or could be reasonably
believed to exist.
In the first place, living thought is so far from observing itself, that
some philosophers deny its existence, and the others find the greatest
difficulty in distinguishing it from its various objects. The terms of
pure thought, in which observation is couched and in which it rests, I
have found to be not thoughts but essences; and the objects of thought,
when thought relapses into its animal form of belief, are again not
thoughts but things. If later I contrast the order, rate, and natural
locus of discourse with the movement of events in general which
discourse is considering, I may begin to understand what a curious thing
discourse is, and to have assurance of its existence. The introspection
into which I may ultimately plunge, when I seem to be creating the world
as I think it, is a violently artificial exercise, in which the wheels
of life are reversed; and the knowledge I thus gain of my imaginative
operations would itself be sheer raving, creating a dream about
dreaming, unless these operations were domiciled in a natural being, and
expressed his history and vulgar situation in the natural world; so that
my eventual description, or rather dramatic reconstruction, of my own
experience, is one of the latest forms of my knowledge, and its object
one of the most derivative and insecure. It is a theme for literary
psychology, of which transcendental self-consciousness, or
autobiography, is one variety.
In the second place, permanence rather than change is native to the
prime objects of thought. The only data observable directly are essences
absolutely immutable in their nature, even if the one observed happens
to be the essence of change; since even this, so long as it is present
at all, presents change and nothing but change for ever. Attention of
course is continually drawn from one essence to another; but this
inconstancy in intuition could not be noticed, and could not actually
exist, if the essence which drops out of view and that which succeeds it
were not different, and each, therefore, always itself. Furthermore,
granting that an animal mind is probably always changing in some
respect, it by no means follows that no essence can be retained for more
than one instant under the light of attention. On the contrary, change
that was complete, and that substituted one totally new object for
another totally destroyed, would afford no inkling of its own existence:
only the permanent would ever appear to the mind. What happens is that
some detail changes in a field that does not change, and for that reason
the new element attracts attention, surprise, or joy. To hold something
fast, to watch, to stare, to wait and lie low in the presence of a felt
incubus, are primitive experiences; and the length of crawling time
through which a strain endures is a conspicuous feature in sensation,
especially in pain. This sense of duration doubtless involves the sense
of something changing at the same time—of something coming or continuing
to come as it threatened or as it was demanded—of some pulse of feeling
recurring and mounting towards increased potency or increased fatigue.
Yet in all this setting of cumulative change (which is but a perspective
in the fancy) there often shines a fixed focus of interest; and the
sense of something which lasts, and which remains itself whether I
approach or elude it, is one of the first and loudest notes of
awareness. Perhaps, when my mood is clear and musical, there is some
permanent essence clearly revealed that arouses my curiosity and wonder;
or when the stream runs thick and turbid, the obscure life of the psyche
itself rises to the surface, and yields the primary criterion of
happiness and naturalness in events. In either case in mastering,
recognising, and positing what I find or what I want, I know the
beginnings of speculative joy and of participation in eternity. The flux
touches the eternal at the top of every wave. Whatever thwarts this
achievement, or disturbs the deep rhythms of the life slumbering
beneath, seems illegitimate; and until acquisitive or sexual impulses
are aroused, the dozing animal counts on a perpetual well-being, and any
change seems to it as hateful as it is incredible.
In this way change itself, when it is rhythmic and regular, wears to
intuition the form of sustained being. The life of the body, by its
latent operation, sets a measure and scale for the duration of any
passing vision. There is an ever-present background felt as permanent,
myself always myself; and there is a large identity in the universe
also, familiar and limited in spite of its agitation, like a cage full
of birds. Everything seems to be more or less prolonged; comfort,
digestive warmth, the past still simmering, the brooding potentiality of
things to come, shaping themselves in fancy before they have occurred.
Both sleep and watchfulness are long drawn out, so is the very sense of
movement. Though change be everywhere, it remains everywhere strange and
radically unwelcome: for even when, as in destructive passion or
impatience, it is imperatively sought, it is sought as an escape from an
uncomfortable posture, in the hope of restoring a steady life, and
resting in safety.
Thus the notion of permanence behind change—which is a chief element in
the notion of substance—is trebly rooted in experience; because every
essence that appears is eternally what it is; because many congenial
images and feelings appear lastingly; and because whatever interrupts
the even flow and luxurious monotony of organic life is odious to the
primeval animal.
In the third place, even if direct experience did not illustrate the
permanent, the order of events when reflected on would suggest and
impose a belief in it. I reserve for another occasion all discussion of
the laws of nature or of the constant quantities of matter or energy:
the most ordinary recognition of things being as they were, and
remaining always at hand, posits their substantial nature. Suppose all
intuition was instantaneous; and in one sense it may be said always to
be so, because specious durations have no common scale, and the most
prolonged may be treated as a single moment, as the dome of St. Peter’s
may be seen through a keyhole. Instantaneous intuition, when suspended,
may be suspended only for a moment, and instantly recovered, as when I
blink. Such brief interruptions to perception are bridged over in
primary memory, and do not break the specious identity and continuity of
the object. It does not follow, however, that the interruption is not
felt. On the contrary, it is felt and resented just because beneath it
the object is sensibly continuous. There is a stock optical experiment
in which a pencil is made to cross the field of vision between the eye
and a book, without ever hiding any part of the page. What binocular
vision does in that instance, the persistence of impressions does in the
case of an intermittent stimulus. The interruption is startling and
obvious, but the continuity of the object is obvious too. This
experience may be repeated on a larger scale. The psyche, being
surrounded by substances, is adapted to them, and does not suspend her
adjustments or her beliefs whenever her sensations are interrupted.
Children recognise and identify things and persons more readily than
they distinguish them. As intuition is addressed to terms in discourse
which are eternal in their nature, though the intuition of them is
desultory, so faith and art are addressed to _habits_ in substance,
which without arresting the perpetual and pervasive flux of experience
(nor perhaps that of substance itself) manifest its dynamic permanence;
and, of course, it is on its dynamic side, not pictorially or
intuitively, that substance is conceived, posited, measured, and
trusted.
Hence the discovery, big with scientific consequences, that an existing
thing may endure unchanged, although my experience of it be
intermittent. The object of these recurrent observations is not
conceived, as a sophistical psychology would have it, by feigning that
the _observations_ are not discrete. Every one knows, when he shuts and
opens his eyes, that his vision has been interrupted; the interruption
is the point of the game. The notion that the thing persists was there
from the beginning; until I blinked, I had found it persisting, and I
find it persisting still after I open my eyes again. In considering the
fortunes of the object posited, I simply discard the interruption, as
voluntary and due to a change in myself which I can repeat at will. In
spontaneous thought I never confuse the changes which the thing may
undergo in its own being with the variations in my attention nor (when I
have a little experience) with shifts in my perspectives. I therefore
recognise it to be permanent in relation to my intermittent glimpses of
it; and this without in the least confusing or fusing my different
views, or supposing them to be other than discrete and perhaps
instantaneous.
On the same principle, as education advances, a thing which stimulates
different senses at once or successively is easily recognised to be the
same object; and this, again, is done without in the least fusing or
confusing colour with hardness or sound with shape. And with the growth
of the arts and of experience of the world, the persisting and
continuous engine of nature is clearly conceived as the common object
which all my senses and all my theories describe in their special
languages at their several awakenings. That the syllables are broken
does not make their messages conflicting; on the contrary, they
supplement one another’s blindness, and correct one another’s
exuberance. Substance was their common object from the beginning, faith
in substance not being a consequence of reasoning about appearances, but
an implication of action, and a conviction native to hunger, fear,
feeding, and fighting; as an aid and guide to which the organs of the
outer senses are developed, and rapidly paint their various symbols in
the mind. The euphony and syntax of sense, far from disproving the
existence of substance, arise and change in the act of expressing its
movement, and especially the responsive organisation of that part of it
which is myself.
So much for the objections to the belief in substance which may be
raised from the point of view of self-consciousness, when this is
regarded as the principle of knowledge or even of universal existence,
neither of which it is.
Objections to the belief in substance may also come from a different
quarter (or one ostensibly different), in the name of critical sense and
economy in the interpretation of appearances. Suppose, the empiricist
may say, that your substance exists: how does it help you to explain
anything? You never have seen, and you never will see, anything but
appearances. If you trust your memory (as it is reasonable to do, since
you must, if you are to play the game of discourse at all) you may
assume that appearances have come in a certain order; and if you trust
expectation (for the same bad reason) you may assume that they will come
in somewhat the same order in future. These assumptions are not founded
on any proof or on any real probability, but it is intelligible that you
should make them, because the mind can hardly be asked to discredit its
vistas, when it has nothing else by which to criticise them. But why
should you interpolate amongst appearances, or posit behind them,
something that you can never find? That seems a gratuitous fiction, and
at best a hypostasis of grammar and names. You want a substance because
you use substantives, or because your verbal logic talks in subjects and
predicates.
But let us grant, the empiricist will go on, that your substance is
possible, since everything is possible where ignorance is complete. In
what terms can you conceive it, save in terms of appearance? Or if you
say it exists unconceived, or is inconceivable, it will simply encumber
your philosophy with a metaphysical world, in addition to the given one,
and with the hopeless problem of relating the two.
These empirical objections to the belief in substance might in
strictness be ruled out, since (in so far as they deny substance) they
rest on the same romantic view of self-consciousness as the source of
knowledge and being as do the transcendental objections just considered.
Empiricism, however, has the advantage of being less resolute in folly.
Such terms as appearance, phenomenon, given fact (meaning given essence
_plus_ thing posited), and perception (meaning intuition _plus_ belief)
are all used sophistically to cover the muddles of introspection. They
are not analysed critically, but are allowed to retain in solution many
of the assumptions of common sense. The essence given is confused with
the intuition of it which is not given, but which common sense knows is
implicated. This intuition is then confused with the belief, prompted by
animal impulse and, for analysis, utterly gratuitous, that a thing or
event exists definable by the essence given. This belief finally is
confused with the existence of its object, which it merely posits and
cannot witness. This object, in psychological idealism, is some ulterior
intuition or (as it is called by common sense, which assumes a material
object producing it) some ulterior perception. But it is utterly
impossible that one perception should perceive another, and it is
improper to call an intuition a perception when it has no existing
object.
In consequence of this halting criticism of immediate experience,
empiricism admits the existence of many feelings or ideas deployed in
time and referred to in memory and in social intercourse; and in
admitting this (let me repeat) it admits substance in principle. Such a
flux of feelings or ideas is a permanent hidden substance for purposes
of knowledge, even if each of them, being a momentary life, might not be
called by that name. Each feeling or idea is substantial, however, in
respect to any memory or theory, contained in some other moment, which
may refer to it; and this memory or theory is an appearance of that
substantial but remote fact.
Let us suppose that David Hume, in spite of his corpulence, was nothing
but a train of ideas. Some of these composed his philosophy, and I, when
I endeavour to learn what it was, create in my own mind a fresh train of
ideas which refer to those in the mind of Hume: and for me his opinions
are a substance of which my apprehension is an appearance. My
apprehension, in this case, is conceived to be an apprehension of a
matter of fact, namely, the substance of Hume at some date; and in
studying his philosophy I am learning nothing but history. This is an
implication of empiricism, but is not true to the facts. For when I try
to conceive the philosophy of Hume I am not considering any particular
ideas which may have constituted Hume at one moment of his career; I am
considering an _essence_, his total system, as it would appear when the
_essences_ present in his various reflective moments are collated; and,
therefore, I am really studying and learning a system of philosophy, not
the presumable condition of a dead man’s mind at various historical
moments.
If empiricists were a little more sceptical, they would perceive that in
admitting knowledge of historical facts they have admitted the principle
that the beliefs they call ideas may report the existence of natural
substances. If the substance of this world is a flux, and even a flux of
feelings, it is none the less substantial, like the fire of Heraclitus,
and the existing object of such ideas as may describe it. But this
reasonable faith is obscured by the confusions I mentioned above. The
empiricist forgets that he is asserting the existence of outlying facts,
because he half identifies them with the living fact of his present
belief in them: and, further, because he identifies this living fact,
his belief now, with the essence which it is attributing to those remote
existences. He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much
better at believing than at seeing.
Apart from this unconscious admission of the existence of substances,
the empirical objections to substance in the singular express a distrust
of metaphysics with which I sympathise, and they show a love of home
truths which deserves to be satisfied.
In the first place, the substance in which I am proposing to believe is
not metaphysical but physical substance. It is the varied stuff of the
world which I meet in action—the wood of this tree I am felling, the
wind that is stirring its branches, the flesh and bones of the man who
is jumping out of the way. Belief in substance is not imported into
animal perception by language or by philosophy, but is the soul of
animal perception from the beginning, and the perpetual deliverance of
animal experience. Later, as animal attention is clarified, and animal
experience progresses, the description of these obvious substances may
be refined: the tree, the wind, and the man may reveal their elements
and genesis to more patient observation, and the first aspect they wore
may be found to be a fused and composite appearance of many elaborate
processes within them. But the more diffused substances in operation
which I shall then come upon will be simply the constituents of the
tree, the wind, and the man; they will be just as truly (though more
calculably) the realities I confront and may use in action. They will be
just as open to perception, although instruments or hypotheses may be
required to extend the accidental range of my senses in observing them;
and they will be just as much substances and not essences, that is,
objects of belief posited in action, not images given in intuition. My
notions of substance will therefore be subject to error, and capable of
reform: I may arrive at the belief that earth, air, water, and fire are
the substances in all things; later I may discover that fire is not a
substance, but a form of motion; for earth, air, and water I may come to
substitute the four or five score elements of chemistry, or more or
less; and I may remain in doubt whether light and space and ether are
substances or not. But all these opinions would be equally fantastic,
and equally devoid of truth or falsehood, if there were no substance
before me in the first instance which I was attempting to describe.
By a substance I understand what modern philosophers often call an
“independent object”—a most unfortunate phrase, because precisely at the
moment when a substance or an essence becomes my object, by becoming the
theme of my discourse, it ceases to be independent of me in that
capacity: and when this happens, before the cognitive relation between
me and my object is established, a dynamic relation has probably arisen
between the substance of that object and the substance of myself,
causing me to make that intrusive substance the object of my attention.
When a thing becomes my object it becomes dependent on me ideally, for
being known, and I am probably, directly or indirectly, dependent on it
materially, for having been led to know it. What is independent of
knowledge is substance, in that it has a place, movement, origin, and
destiny of its own, no matter what I may think or fail to think about
it. This self-existence is what the name object jeopardises, and what
the name substance indicates and asserts.
If abuses of language were not inevitable, I should be tempted to urge
philosophers to revert to the etymological and scholastic sense of the
words object and objective, making them refer to whatever is placed
before the mind, as a target to be aimed at by attention. Objective
would then mean present to imagination; and things would become objects
of thought in the same incidental way in which they become objects of
desire. But I will content myself with returning in my own person to the
correct use of the word substance for whatever is self-existent, and
with bestowing the term object on occasion upon any substance, essence,
event, or truth, when it becomes incidentally the theme of discourse.
Substances are called things when found cut up into fragments which move
together and are recognisable individually; and things are called
substances when their diffuse and qualitative existence is thought of
rather than their spatial limits. Flour is a substance and a loaf of
bread is a thing; but there is nothing metaphysical about flour, nor is
there any difference of physical status between a thing and the
substance of it.
But is not the _materia prima_ of Aristotle metaphysical? Is not the
substance of Spinoza metaphysical? Are not souls and Platonic Ideas,
which are also reputed to be substances, perfectly metaphysical?
Of course: and I shall have occasion, when surveying the realm of
matter, to show that these and other metaphysical entities are only
nominal essences, and cannot be the substance of anything.
I think these explanations will suggest to the reader a sufficient
answer to the other points raised by the empiricists against belief in
substance. Substance does not reduplicate natural objects, but is
identical with them. What it might be said to reduplicate (or rather to
back up and to render significant) would be given essences. Certainly
known substances, and other known objects, require to be posited by
animal faith on occasion of intuitions, as that which these intuitions
report. But there is hardly any reduplication here. Such representation
as there is, is probably quite heterogeneous in aspect from its
original, and even when—as in memory or a historical romance—some
specious similarity is presumed, it is a highly selective and idealised
reproduction, in a wholly different medium from the represented facts,
and possessing utterly different functions and conditions of being.
Nature in being discovered is not reproduced, but acquires a new
dimension, and is extraordinarily enriched. Matters are ludicrously
reversed if it is imagined that a pure spirit contemplating essences
could _invent_ a body and a world of matter surrounding it; the body
exists first, and in reacting on its environment kindles intuitions
expressive of its vicissitudes; and the commentary is like that which
any language or chronicle or graphic art creates by existing. Substance
is the speaker and substance is the theme; intuition is only the act of
speaking or hearing, and the given essence is the audible word.
Substance is on the same plane of being as trees and houses, but, like
trees and houses, it is on an entirely different plane of being from the
immediate terms of experience (which are essences) and from experience
itself (which is spirit thinking).
As to the reproach that substance, because it is not an appearance
presented exhaustively, must remain unconceived and inconceivable, it
rests on a false ideal of human knowledge. Intuition of essence is not
knowledge, but fancy and mental sport: and if logic and mathematics are
called sciences, they are such only as expansions of given hypotheses
according to given rules may be sciences, as there is a science of
chess. They are not _true_ nor human, except in the special form in
which actual discourse and actual bodies happen to illustrate them. A
preference for dialectic over knowledge of fact (which is knowledge of
substance) may manifest a poetical and superior spirit, as might a
preference for music over conversation; but it would be vain and
suicidal for human knowledge to transfer that ideal to the general
interpretation of experience. Substance being the object set before me
in action, pursuit, and investigation cannot be antecedently in my
possession, either materially or intellectually; it confronts me as
something challenging respect and demanding study; and its intrinsic
essence must remain always problematical, since I approach it only from
the outside and experimentally. The essences by which it is revealed to
me, and the hypotheses I frame about its nature, are so many
provocations for me to manipulate and examine it, and to call it by
various humorous names, expressive to me of its strange habits. My
natural curiosity, if I am a healthy young animal, will prompt me to do
this eagerly, and to turn my first luminous impressions into triumphant
dogmas; but to pure spirit, when that awakes, all this faith and
knowingness will seem childish.
To pure spirit substance and all its ways must remain always dark,
alien, and impertinent. From the transcendental point of view, which is
that of spirit, substance is an unattainable goal, or object-as-such,
being posited, not possessed. Only essences please this jealous lover of
light, and seem to it sufficient; it hates faith, existence, doubt,
anything ulterior. Substance and truth offend it by their unnecessary
claims; it would gladly brush them aside as superstitious obsessions.
What ghostly thing, it says to itself, is this Speaker behind the voice,
this Meaning behind the vision, this dark Substance behind the fair
appearance? Substance interrupts and besets the spirit in its innocence,
and in its mad play; one substance, which it calls the flesh, torments
it from below, and a kindred substance, which it calls matter, prods,
crushes, and threatens it from without. God also, another substance,
looms before it, commanding and forbidding; and he is terrible in his
wrath and obscurity, until it learns his ways. Yet, as religion shows,
it is possible for the spirit to be tamed and chastened. The fear of
substance may be the beginning of wisdom; and accustomed to the steady
dispensations of that power, the spirit may grow pious and modest, and
happy to be incarnate. God will then become in its eyes a source of
protection and comfort and daily bread, as all substance is to those who
learn how to live with it. When the lessons of experience are thus
accepted, and spirit is domesticated in the world, the belief in
substance explains everything; because _if_ substance exists, a
perpetual dependence in point of destiny, and a perpetual inadequacy in
knowledge are clearly inevitable, and soon come to seem proper and even
fortunate.
As knowledge advances, my conception of substance becomes a map in which
my body is one of the islets charted: the relations of myself to
everything else may be expressed there in their true proportions, and I
shall cease to be an egotist. In the symbolic terms which my map
affords, I can then plan and test my actions (which otherwise I should
perform without knowing it) and trace the course of other events; but I
am myself a substance, moving in the plane of universal substance, not
on the plane of my map; for neither I nor the rest of substance belong
to the realm of pictures, nor exist on that scale and in that flat
dimension. How we exist and what we are substantially must accordingly
remain a problem to the end; even if by chance I should ever hit upon
the essence of substance, nothing could test or maintain that miraculous
moment of clairvoyance. The only sphere in which clairvoyance is normal
is the sphere of mental discourse, one part of which may survey another
in the very terms in which the other unrolled itself in act; as I may
faithfully rehearse my own past or future thinkings, or those of men of
my own mind. The probability of such clairvoyance diminishes as the
similarity of structure and substance between me and the other creature
diminishes; and it vanishes altogether where life dies down; so that in
respect to inorganic substance I am indeed reduced to arbitrary symbols,
at which that substance, if it could know them, would laugh. Yet for my
purposes in studying inorganic substance (which is not interesting to me
in itself) these symbols do very well: they arise on occasion of
substantial events, and therefore appear in the same historical
sequence; so that in surveying the order of my symbols I learn the order
of real events, though my pictures certainly are not portraits of their
substance. Yet even the pictorial quality of these symbols expresses
true variations and variety in the substance of myself: it falls and
rises with my life. For this reason the map I draw of the universe in my
fancy, when I grow studious, becomes a truer and truer map, rendering
the movement of substance within and without me with increasing
precision, though always in an original notation, native to my senses
and intellect.
False ideals of knowledge are also involved in the contention that the
hypothesis of substance does not help to explain appearances, and even
renders appearances inexplicable. What is explanation? In dialectic it
is the utterance, in further words or images, of relations and terms
implied in a given essence: it is the explication of meanings. But facts
have no meaning in that sense. Essences implied ideally in their
essences need never become facts too: otherwise the whole realm of
essence would have to exist in act, and it would be impossible so much
as to begin the survey of that horrible infinitude, for lack of any
principle of emphasis to give me a starting-point, and create a
particular perspective. No: facts are surds, they exemplify fragments of
the realm of essence chosen for no reason: for if a will or reason
choosing anything (say the good) were admitted, that will or reason
would itself be a groundless fact, and an absolute accident. Existence
(as the least insight into essence shows) is necessarily irrational and
inexplicable. It cannot, therefore, contain any principle of explanation
_a priori_; and substance, as I understand the term, being what exists
in itself, it must be also (to borrow the rest of Spinoza’s definition
of it) what is understood through itself, that is, by taking its own
accidental nature as the standard for all explanations. If substance
were some metaphysical principle, some dialectical or moral force, it
might be expected to “explain” existence as a whole; but it ought not
then to be called a substance; at best it would be a harmony or music
which things somehow made. Such a harmony would not exist in things
bodily and individually, rendering their essences existential, but would
supervene upon them and float through them, like those principles which
certain moody metaphysicians have dreamt of, as solving the riddle of
the universe, and have called Sin, Will, Duty, the Good, or the Idea.
Substance, as I understand the word, is nothing of that sort. It is not
metaphysical, but simply whatever the physical substance may be which is
found in things or between them. It therefore cannot “explain” these
things, since they are its parts or instances, and it is simply their
substance. They have one, since they may be cut up, ground into powder,
dissolved into gases, or caused to condense again before our eyes; and
if they are living things, we may observe them devouring and generating
one another, the flux of substance evidently running through them, and
taking on recurrent forms. When these habits of nature are taken (as
they should be taken) as the true principle of explanation, the belief
in substance does become a great means of understanding events. It helps
me to explain their place, date, quality, and quantity, so that I am
able to expect or even to produce them, when the right substances are at
hand. If they were detached facts, not forms regularly taken on by
enduring and pervasive substances, there would be no knowing when,
where, of what sort, or in what numbers they would not assault me; and
my life would not seem life in a tractable world, but an inexplicable
nightmare.
I shall be thought a silly philosopher to mention this, as if it were
not obvious; but why do so many wise philosophers ignore it, and defend
systems which contradict it?
Finally, even if, in a moment of candour, the friend of phenomena was
inclined to allow that substance, so understood, was neither
metaphysical nor undiscoverable nor useless for explaining events, he
might still urge that the belief in substance creates an insoluble
difficulty, because opposite to substance appearance rises at once like
a ghost; and how shall this ghost be laid or what room shall be found
for it in the world of substance which we have posited? In other words,
substance, by hypothesis, is the source of appearances: but how,
remaining substance, can it ever produce them?
Here again the objection arises out of false demands. As at first
substance was condemned on the ground that knowledge should possess its
object as intuition does its data (a demand which would rob knowledge of
all transitive force), so now substance is condemned on the ground that
causation should be dialectical and that reality should be uniform, so
that if substance exists nothing should exist except substance. Whence
these absurd postulates? In the first place, reality (since it includes
the realm of essence) is infinitely omnimodal; and even when reduced to
existence it may certainly take on as many dimensions and as many
varieties as it likes. Substance is not more real than appearance, nor
appearance more real than essence, but only differently real. When the
word reality is used invidiously or eulogistically, it is merely in view
of the special sort of reality which the speaker expects or desires to
find in a particular instance. So when the starving gymnosophist takes a
rope for a serpent, he misses the reality of that, which is lifeless
matter; when the tourist gazing at an Arabic scroll calls it a frieze,
he misses the reality of that, which is a pious sentiment; and when the
millionaire buys a picture for its antiquity and its reputation, he
misses the reality of that, which is a composition. When substance is
asserted, appearance is not denied; its actuality is not diminished, but
a significance is added to it which, as a bare datum, it could not have.
In the second place, in so far as causation is not sheer magic imputed
by laying a superstitious emphasis on those phases which interest me
most in the flux of things, causation is the order of generation in
nature: whatsoever grows out of a certain conjunction in things, and
only out of that conjunction, may be said to be caused by it. Nothing
that happens is groundless, since whatever antecedents it actually has
are adequate to produce it. Yet all that happens is marvellous, because
like existence itself it is unfathomable, and, if we abstract from our
familiarity with it, almost incredible. But the antecedents, the
consequents, and the connection between them are equally remarkable in
this respect, and equally perspicuous. The schoolboy will be delighted
to learn how the refraction of the sun’s rays paints the rainbow on a
shower, or on the spray of the waves; the farmer will perfectly
understand that chickens are hatched from eggs; and I for one (though
other philosophers are less fortunate) can perceive clearly that when
animals react upon things in certain ways these things appear to them in
certain forms; and the fact that they appear does not seem to me (so
simple am I) to militate against their substantial existence.
Certainly neither the awakening of intuition, nor the character of the
essences that appear, can be deduced dialectically from the state of the
substance which produces them; but dialectic traces the implication of
one essence in another and can never issue from the eternal world. It is
perfectly impotent to express, much less to explain, any change or any
existence. If dialectic ruled the world, all implications would always
have been realised, no movement would have been possible, and the very
discourse that pursues dialectic would have been congealed and
identified from the beginning with the essence which it describes.
Existence, change, life, appearance, must be understood to be
unintelligible: on any other assumption the philosopher might as well
tear his hair and go mad at once. But when that assumption has been duly
made, and dialectic has been relegated to an innocuous dignity, the
blossoming of substance into appearance becomes the most amiable of
mysteries. If instead of admitting this evident and familiar kindling of
mind in nature, which makes the charm of childhood, of morning, and of
spring, I supposed that mind could animate no material body, and that
the flame of spirit could rise from no natural hearth, I should not have
a more intelligible world on my hands, but only a very miserable and
ghostly one. I should be foolishly shutting myself up in myopic
ignorance of that great world which is not mine nor like me, although I
belong to it and feed on it unawares. Why should I think it
philosophical to be so unintelligent, or to assert that appearances are
the only possible realities, when these appearances themselves do their
very best to inform me of the opposite? For though the poor things can’t
be actually more than they are, they arrange themselves and troop
together in such a manner that, if I make the least beginning in
understanding them, I gather that they are voices of self-evolving
things, on the same plane of reality as myself. Indeed, without such a
background to lend them a subterranean influence over my own being, they
would be unmeaning creations, and every transition from one to another
of them would be arbitrary. If I am told that appearances are but
loosely and unintelligibly bound to substance, I may reply that without
substance appearances would be far more loosely and unintelligibly bound
to one another. Appearances are at least conventional transcripts of
facts; they are expressions of substance which may serve as signs of its
movements; but what relation, moral or habitual, would each appearance,
if taken absolutely and not as significant of things, retain to the
other appearances that in dreaming or waking might follow upon it? None
whatever: it is only in its organs and its objects that experience
touches anything continuous or measurable and possesses a background on
which to piece together the broken segments of its own orbit. That
substance should be capable of attaining to expression in appearance is
a proof that substance is fertile, not that it is superfluous. On the
contrary, it is certain that if I knew the essence of substance, and if
I made nature the standard of natural necessity, the emergence of
appearance in the form and on the occasions in which it emerges would
seem to me necessary and inevitable.