SUBLIMATIONS OF ANIMAL FAITH
Animal faith, being an expression of hunger, pursuit, shock, or fear, is
directed upon _things_; that is, it assumes the existence of alien
self-developing beings, independent of knowledge, but capable of being
affected by action. While things are running on in the dark, they may be
suddenly seized, appropriated, or destroyed. In other words, animal
faith posits substances, and indicates their locus in the field of
action of which the animal occupies the centre. Being faith in action
and inspired by action, it logically presupposes that the agent is a
substance himself, that can act on other things and be affected by them;
although temporally the substantial existence of the self may not be
posited until later, as one of the things in the world of things.
Meantime in this animal faith, and even in the choice of one essence
rather than another to be presented to intuition, spirit suffers
violence, since spirit is inherently addressed to everything impartially
and is always, in its own principle, ready to be omniscient and just.
For by spirit I understand simply the pure light or actuality of
thought, common to all intuitions, in which essences are bathed if they
are given. At first, as we see in children, spirit is carried away by
the joy of doing or seeing anything; it adopts any passion
unquestioningly, not being a respecter of persons nor at all squeamish;
it is innocently happy in accepting any task and watching any world, if
the body welcomes it. Ultimately, however, the spirit may come to wonder
why it regards all things from the point of view of one body in
particular, which seems to have no prerogative over the others in their
common realm. Justice and charity will then seem to lie in rescinding
this illegitimate pre-eminence of one’s own body: and it may come to be
an ideal of the spirit, not only to extend its view over all time and
all existence, but to exchange its accidental point of view for every
other, and adopt every insight and every interest: an effort which, by a
curious irony, might end in abolishing all interests and all views.
Such moral enlightenment is dangerous to animal life, and incidentally
to the animal faith on which the recognition of existing things hangs in
the first place. If the qualms and ambitions of spirit prevailed in
anybody altogether, as they tend to do in the saint and even in the
philosopher, he would not be able to halt at the just sympathy by which,
preserving animal faith, he would admit and respect the natural
interests of others as he does his own. He would be hurried on to rebel
against these natural interests in himself, would call them vain or
sinful, since the spirit of itself could never justify them, and would
initiate some discipline, mortifying the body and transfiguring the
passions, so as to free himself from that ignominy and bondage. He would
not succeed: but for speculative purposes I will suppose for a moment
that he succeeded. What would occur? He would be happier fasting than
eating, freezing than loving. Not sharing the impulses of his body, he
would regard it as a ridiculous mechanism; and the bodies of others
would be ridiculous mechanisms too, with which he could feel no
sympathy. His sympathy, if it survived at all, would be sublimated into
pity for the spirits chained to those bodies by their sin and ignorance,
and perhaps not even struggling to be free, but suffering in those
prisons perpetual pain and dishonour. He might aspire to save the spirit
in others as in himself; but hardened to his own animal vicissitudes he
would be steeled to theirs (a result even easier to accomplish), and
would be all scorn and lamentations for the life of the world.
I suspend all consideration of this moral issue, and revert to the
variations which animal faith may undergo during this long and always
imperfect transformation.
Things when they are posited are known to be substances. It would be
impossible for a child to be frightened without implicitly believing in
a substance at hand; and it would be impossible for him to attempt to
frighten other people (as children like to do in play) without
implicitly assuming that he is a substance himself. But though his
assurance of substance, in both cases, is complete, his knowledge of it
is superficial. In conceiving his own nature especially, he begins
building at the wrong end, from the weathercock down, not from the
foundations up. Although in action he identifies himself with his body,
as also in vanity and all the passions, yet when he asks himself
deliberately _what_ he is, he may be tempted to say that he is his
thoughts. Or, less analytically, he may feel that he is a soul, a living
spiritual power, a deep will at work in his body and in the world; and
though what he posits in other things is primarily their physical
presence, he will conceive this substance of theirs, particularly when
they are animals, in the same moral terms in which he conceives himself.
He will imagine them to be souls, passionate powers, wills guiding
events. He will not think people spirits to the exclusion of their
bodies, but will conceive their persons confusedly, as souls inhabiting
and using bodies, or as bodies breaking out into some thought or passion
which, once existing, agitates and governs the body that bred it.
Such a thought or passion, while evidently animating the body and
expressing its situation, does not exactly lie within the body; to
localise it there with any literalness or precision is absurd; and a man
feels in his own case that his thoughts and passions _come_ into his
heart, that they are influences visiting him, perhaps demons or
obsessions. He thinks they may pass from one man to another, or perhaps
exist suspended and ambient, in the form of gods or mighty laws. Hence
the notion of spiritual substances; a self-contradictory notion at
bottom, because substance is a material and spirit is an entelechy, or
perfection of function realised; so that (if I may parody Aristotle), if
a candle were a living being, wax would be its substance and light its
spirit. Nevertheless, in the history of philosophy, and even in current
discourse, the notion of spiritual substance was unavoidable. In the
haste of practical life, I count the lights without counting the
candles. Feelings and thoughts pass for the principles of action; I
inevitably stop there, and conceive my enemy as an evil purpose, and my
contradictor as a false thought. And it is in these imagined thoughts
and purposes that I lodge the power which, in action, I am contending
with: although I should be truly contending with ghosts, and trying to
drive essences out of the realm of essence (where each is immovable) if
I did not oppose that power or defeat that purpose in the precise places
and bodies in which it operates. The spirit can be confused with
substance only when it is spirit incarnate. Animal faith could hardly
light on such metaphysical objects unless it was called forth by a
material influence, to which animal faith is the natural response; but
the mind has but vague notions of what a material influence can be, and
therefore attributes the substantiality of which it is intimately aware
to hybrid essences floating before it: hence superstition, myth,
metaphysics, and the materialisation of words.
It is a task for natural philosophy to remove these ghosts, by
discovering the true movement of that living substance on which animal
faith _means_ to be directed, the substance on which the animal depends
and on which he can act. But the human mind naturally breathes its own
atmosphere of myth and dialectic, and evidence of fact pierces this
atmosphere with difficulty, only after much experience of error.
Gradually the wiser heads see that all substances fall together into one
system called nature; and then various metaphysical substances, which at
first seem to inhabit or compose nature, are discovered to be modes of
the single familiar substance called matter. The second Book of _Realms
of Being_ will be devoted to this subject; meantime, I will here draw up
a list of the chief false substances which human faith may rest on when
the characteristic human veil of words and pictures hides the modes of
matter which actually confront the human race in action, and which
therefore, throughout, are the _intended_ object of its faith.
1. _Souls._—These are essentially moral forces, that is, passions or
interests not necessarily self-conscious, conceived as magically ruling
animal bodies and dictating their acts.
This notion fuses three different things, belonging to three distinct
realms of being. The first is a mode of matter, the inherited mechanism
and life of the body, which I am calling the psyche. This is a true
dynamic unit, forming and using the outer organs of the body, a system
of habits relatively complete and self-centred; but it is only the fine
quick organisation within the material animal, and not a different
thing. This is the original soul which savages conceive as leaving the
body in sleep or death, itself a tenuous body of similar aspect and
powers; because they feel that bodily life and action have a principle
which is not visible on the surface, and yet they have no means of
conceiving this principle except as an image or ghost of that very body
which it is needed to control. Were wandering souls and ghosts more
often met with and studied, the question of the true souls of these
creatures would present itself anew: for nothing would be found on the
surface of a ghost to explain its words or its motions, and it would
soon be observed to give up the ghost in its turn. Even in spirit-land
the judicious would have recourse in the end to a behaviourist
psychology. For at the other extreme of human philosophising, the
material psyche reappears. Observation can trace back motions only to
other motions, and outward actions to activities hidden within, but
essentially no less observable; so that the mechanism of the body and
its habits are really the only conceivable mainspring of its behaviour.
The soul again becomes a subtler body within the body: only that instead
of a shadow of the whole man, even as in life he stood, it is a
prodigious network of nerves and tissues, growing in each generation out
of a seed.
Habit, though it is a mode of matter, has a unity or rhythm which
reappears in many different instances: it is a form not of matter but of
behaviour. Matter makes a vortex which reproduces itself, and plays as a
unit amongst the other vortices near it; and the eye can follow the
pleasing figures of the dance, without discerning the atoms or the laws
that compose it. Now the habits of animals exercise a strong influence,
sympathetic or antipathetic, over the kindred observer. He feels what
those habits seek; he reads them as purposes, as tendencies, as efforts
hostile or friendly to the free play of his own habits. The soul
agitating those bodies is therefore in his eyes more than another
ghostly body, which might quit them; it is a passion or a will which is
expressed there. And this unit of discourse, which if actual belongs to
the realm of truth, he regards superstitiously as a substance and a
power. He fancies that he himself is a will and a power reacting upon
other wills and powers: as if these habits or relations could be prior
to the terms that compose them, or could create those terms. It is this
element in the notion of souls that becomes predominant in the belief in
gods and in devils. Something subjective and moral, the dramatic value
which habits in nature have for the observer, is projected by him, and
conceived as a metaphysical power creating those habits. Passions, in
men, are often arrested on words. They are often arrested, as in poetic
love, upon images. And yet the magic of images and words is vicarious:
they would be empty, did not subtle material influences flow through
them, and hide behind them, rendering them exciting to the material soul
of the observer, who in his poetic ecstasy may think he is living in a
pure world of discourse.
Finally, in the notion of souls there is a projection of mental
discourse: this, when it really exists in animals, is a mode of spirit.
Animal life sometimes reaches its entelechy in a stream of intuitions,
expressive of its modifications by the presence of other bodies, or by
the ferments of its own blood. These modes of spirit are in themselves
intangible, unobservable, volatile, and fugitive; and if anything
actual, about which truth and error may arise, may be called
unsubstantial, they are as unsubstantial as possible. But as they arise
in the operations of substance, and are read into these operations when
a sympathetic being observes them, they seem to be a part of what is
observed. But they are in quite another dimension of being, in the realm
of spirit; and spirit, or the intuitions in which it exists, is not a
part of the substance on which animal faith is directed, nor a mode of
it, nor a natural substance at all. It cannot by any possibility be met
with in action, perceived, fought with, nor (if we consider it from
within, in its own being) can it be lodged anywhere in space nor even in
time. It belongs to nature only by its individual outlook and moral
relevance: and we may say of it only by courtesy that it lodges in the
place and time which its organ occupies and in the world which, by
affecting that organ, enters into its specious perspectives. When a man
believes in another man’s thoughts and feelings, his faith is moral, not
animal. Such a spiritual dimension in the substances on which he is
reacting can be revealed to him only by dramatic imagination; only his
instant sympathy can shape, or can correct, his notion of them. In
origin, these tertiary qualities of bodies, imputed to them by literary
psychology (which is an exercise of dramatic insight) are as
superstitious and mythical as the purposes and powers of magical
metaphysics; but the intuitions assigned to other people are _possible_
existences, as those metaphysical chimeras are not; and when the
creature that imputes the intuitions and the one that has them are the
same, or closely akin and close together, he may be absolutely
clairvoyant in imputing them. The mind as conceived by literary
psychology, or as represented by dramatic historians, is hypothetical
discourse, composed of what this psychology calls sensations, ideas, and
emotions. It _may_ exist, or may have existed, very much as conceived;
it would be a substance if idealism were true; but in fact it is a
translation into moral terms, rapid, summary, and prophetic, of an
animal life going on very laboriously and persistently in the dark; and
this animal life is itself no special substance, but a special mode or
vortex in the general substance of nature.
2. _Master-types, or Platonic Ideas._—This is an assimilation of
substances to their names. Words and grammar are professedly notes
indicating the identities and relations of things; but in practice
everything, in being expressed, is conventionalised. The terms of
discourse mark only the forms which things wear on the average, or at
their best, or approximately; and in discourse these conventional terms
soon acquire their own identity and relations, and form a pattern quite
different from that of their objects. Philosophers, who necessarily
employ language, are like naturalists who should study zoology only in a
farmyard: the jungle would disconcert them. An argumentative and
dialectical mind trusts its verbal logic: but a logic, however cogent in
itself, is always of problematical application to facts, since it
describes only one possible world out of an infinite number, and (unless
it is secretly founded on observation) is not likely to describe the
actual one. The logicians themselves, when men of open mind, notice this
fact and lament it; and they bear the actual world a great grudge for
showing so little fidelity to their principles. It is false, they are
convinced, to its true nature, to the ideal it ought to realise, to the
function which you see at every turn that it is endeavouring to fulfil.
So that the dialectician can easily become an idealist of the Platonic
type, by conceiving that the substance of things is not the moving
matter that to-day is one thing and to-morrow another, and that never is
anything perfectly, but that this matter is only what the voice is to a
song, or a book to its message or spirit—a treacherous and subordinate
vehicle of expression; whereas the true object to look for, the source
of the applicability of words to facts at all, is the eternal nature
which an actual thing may illustrate: so that the form of things and not
their matter is their true substance or οὐσία.
This substantiation of ideals, besides leaning on language, leans on a
sort of pragmatism or utilitarianism. Things are called beds if people
may sleep well upon them, and bridles if they serve to rein in a horse:
this function is their essence, in so far as they are beds or bridles at
all, and they are excellent in proportion to the perfection with which
they fulfil this function. And here an ascetic and supernaturalistic
motive begins to play a part in Platonism. For since the substance and
excellence of things lie _merely_ in their moral essence, or in the
fulfilment of the function designated by their names, all superfluous
ornaments, all variations, all hybrid combinations are monstrous. Things
should have only the barely necessary matter in them, and that wholly
obedient to the mastering form. What am I saying? Need things have any
matter in them at all? What could be more ideal than the idea itself, or
more perfect than the function exercised by magic, and without an
instrument? Away, then, with all material embodiments of ideas, even if
these embodiments seem perfect for a moment. Being material, they will
be treacherous and unstable: there will be some alloy of imperfection in
them, some unreality. Fly, then, to the heaven of ideas, absolute and
eternal, as the realm of essence contains them. There at last you will
find the substance which in this world of phenomena you sought in vain.
Things are only appearances; in minding and loving them, and thinking
they can wound us, we are befooled; for the only bread that can feed the
soul is celestial, and the only death that can overtake her is moral
disintegration and the darkness of merely existing without loyalty to
what she ought to be.
This is good ethics: not because our ideal is our substance nor because
our soul in heaven is our true self, but because life is a harmony in
material motions, reproducing themselves, and happiness is a
consciousness of this harmony; so that substance would have no value and
its formations no name but for the choice they make of some eternal
essence to embody, and the purity with which they manifest it. But the
flux of substance is by no means limited to producing but one type of
perfection, or one circle of types. The infinite is open to all
variations; and any particular idea is so far from being the substance
of things, that it acquires its ideal prerogative, as a goal of
aspiration, only when substance has blindly chosen it as a practicable
harmony tending to establish itself and to recur in the local motions of
that substance; and nowhere else, and not for a moment longer, does any
eternal essence possess any authority, express any aspiration, or even
seem to exercise any power.
3. _Phenomena._—When master-types were regarded as the true objects of
knowledge, the instances of these types found in the natural world were
called their appearances or phenomena; but they were not conceived to be
unsubstantial images, thrown off by the celestial type impartially into
all parts of space, like rays from a luminary. Phenomena were understood
to be existences, confined to particular places and times; indeed, in
contrast to the superior sort of being possessed by the types in heaven,
these phenomena were existences _par excellence_: and it was to them
that the philosophy of Heraclitus, that admirable description of
existence, continued to apply. That phenomena appeared was therefore not
the doing of the types alone: these, from their eternal seats, rained
down influence and, as it were, a perpetual invitation to things to
imitate and to mirror them; but before this invitation could be
accepted, or this influence gathered and obeyed, matter must exist
variously distributed and predisposed; so that of all the Ideas, equally
radiating virtue, here one and there another might find expression, and
that imperfectly and for a time only.
Phenomena, then, for Platonism, are simply things: and they are called
appearances not because they are supposed not to exist except in the
mind, but because they are believed to be copies of an original in
heaven far more ideal and akin to the mind than themselves: and also
perhaps because they are so unstable and indefinable, that they elude
our exact knowledge and betray our affections.
Phenomena, however, were supposed to be revealed to us by sense, whereas
thought revealed their types: and this way of putting things has led to
a shift in the meaning of the word phenomenon, so that in modern times
it has been confused with what is called an idea in the mind. Sense
would not reveal phenomena in nature (where Plato supposed them to
arise) if sense meant passive intuition. It would then reveal essences
only: that is, just what Plato found thought to reveal: only that being
merely æsthetic intuition, and not thought about nature and politics and
moral life, the essences revealed would not be Platonic Ideas; for these
were only such essences as expressed the categories of Greek speech, the
perfections of animals, or the other forms of the good. But sense, as
opposed to dialectic, meant for the ancients animal perception and
faith: it included understanding, sagacity, and a belief in matter:
indeed, common speech identified immersion in sense with materialism.
Modern philosophers have conceived sense passively, as mere sensation or
feeling or vision of inert ideas: and the word phenomenon has sometimes
been attracted into the same subjective vortex, and has come to mean a
datum of intuition. So that phenomenalism suggests less a belief in the
phenomena of nature than a disbelief in them, and a reduction of all
natural events to images in particular minds.
The other, and proper, meaning of phenomenon seems to be retained by the
positivists, who deprecate metaphysics, and even literary psychology,
and wish to be satisfied with the data of science. But why use the word
phenomenon for an event or an existence that is substantial, and
manifests nothing deeper? Is it because another substance, not internal
to those events and existences, is supposed to exist somewhere and to be
unknowable? Or is it because the laws of nature, raised to a magical
authority, are made manifest or phenomenal in the facts? Or is it
because the positivists are at heart rather afraid of the psychological
critics of knowledge, and by calling things and events phenomena think
that they may pass for critics themselves, no less prudent and
scientific than if they talked of immediate experience or of ideas in
the mind? If so, it is a sorry expedient and a poor defence. If
phenomena are essences given in intuition they are not the objects nor
the themes of science, nor the facts or events in nature: and essences,
such as the absolutely unprejudiced and unpractical mind may behold
them, are the last things on which a positivist should pin his faith. As
to immediate experience, conceived as an existing process or life, and
as to ideas in the mind, they are names for discourse—the theme of just
that literary psychology which the positivist disdains. And if phenomena
are simply things, as they were to Plato, the positivist (who does not
regard things as weak efforts of nature to realise divine Ideas) should
not call them phenomena, but substances; unless indeed he is a
metaphysician without knowing it, and believes in some unknowable
substance which is not in things.
4. _Truth._—Memory presents many a scene which is not substantial, as is
the world before me now: yet this _now_ is fleeting, and the
unsubstantiality which vitiates the past is in the act of invading the
present. Is not the pre-eminence of the present, then, an illusion, and
is not the reality that panorama which all those presents would present
when equalised and seen under the form of eternity? Is not the invidious
actuality of any part of things a mere appearance, and is not the
substance of them all merely their truth?
This suggestion of memory is reinforced by the suggestions of doubt, of
disputation, and of information by hearsay. In our perplexities we seem
always to be appealing to a metaphysical plenum or standard, which we
call the truth: there all facts are not only evident, but judicial: they
settle our quarrels: they correct our ignorance: they vindicate our
faith. To the discoursing mind, therefore, present things and material
forces may come to seem of little consequence, negligible and
unsubstantial in comparison with the truth which remains immovable,
while things pass before it like clouds across the constellations.
This is legitimate tragedy: the truth is the realm of being to which the
earnest intellect is addressed. The senses and passions may feed on
matter, and fancy may sport in the wilderness of essence: to the earnest
intellect the one exercise seems instrumental and the other wasteful:
what concerns it is the truth. But why is mere experience though it may
fall short of truth, relevant to truth, and helpful in discovering it?
And why is play of fancy, or definition of mere essences, not an avenue
to truth? Because the truth, if not a substance, is a luminous shadow or
penumbra which substance, by its existence and movements, casts on the
field of essence: so that unless a substance existed which was more
physical than truth, truth itself would have no nucleus, and would fade
into identity with the infinite essence of the non-existent. The truth,
however nobly it may loom before the scientific intellect, is
ontologically something secondary. Its eternity is but the wake of the
ship of time, a furrow which matter must plough upon the face of
essence. Truth must have a subject-matter, it must be the truth about
something: and it is the character of this moving object, lending truth
and definition to the truth itself, that is substantial and fundamental
in the universe. A sign that truth is simply fact, though described
under the form of eternity, is the heat and haste of men in asserting
what they think true. It is an object of animal faith, not of pure
contemplation.
5. _Fact._—Those who appeal to fact with unction are philosophers justly
dissatisfied with theory and discourse: they are looking in the
direction of substance. Yet in the conception of fact there is an
element of an opposite kind, for fact is supposed to be obvious as well
as fundamental. Not substance, says the empirical philosopher, which
indeed would be the fact if it existed, but immediate fact, however
unsubstantial, if I can only be sure of it. Unfortunately, the immediate
datum is not a fact at all, but an essence: and even the intuition of
that essence, which he may say is the fact he means, is only a bit of
discourse or theory: the very thing of which he was so distrustful, and
from which his common sense was appealing to the facts. The love of fact
indeed has its revenges, and the word comes sometimes to be used for
inarticulate feeling or intuition of the unutterable—a perfectly
possible and rather common intuition. But at this point a triple
confusion perhaps arises between the given essence of the unutterable,
the incidental intuition of that essence, and the substance of the
natural world which the philosopher is trying to discover. The
unutterableness of the given essence is absurdly transferred to this
substance, which would need to be no less articulate than appearance, if
appearance was to arise from it or express it at all. Such a formless
substance is as far as possible from being the object of animal faith
posited in action and described in perception spontaneously and more
deliberately in theory and discourse. It is as far as possible from
being a fact. And the intuition (which _is_ a fact) will yield cold
comfort to the philosopher who wanted “facts” rather than intuitions.
The facts he wanted were things, and he has been looking for them in the
wrong direction.
More often, however, fact is a name for any pronounced and conspicuous
feature of the natural world, or event assumed to occur in that physical
medium; so that such a fact may well be a mode of substance. It
obviously could neither arise nor be discovered except in a context no
less substantial than itself; for if each fact was a detached existence
it would form a universe by itself, and the eulogistic title of fact
could not belong to it with any better right than to any intuition.
Intuitions, discourse, theories too, taken bodily, are facts; but if
they had no locus in nature, they could convey no knowledge of fact,
being insignificant sensations or isolated worlds, occurring at no
assignable time.
Fact, therefore, when honestly pointed to without metaphysical
interpretation, means a thing or an event against which the speaker has
indubitably run up: as it is a fact that the Atlantic Ocean separates
Europe from America, or that men die. If understood not to mean such
natural facts, but rather the impressions or notions of the mind that
notes them, facts become an impossible sublimation of things: either
actual intuitions, revealing not facts but essences: or alleged
intuitions postulated by literary psychology (which assumes the natural
world, without confessing it, as the field in which these intuitions are
deployed); or finally an undiscoverable atom of sentience cut off from
all relations in a metaphysical void. Such an atom, although it would be
a substance in an absolute sense, if it existed, yet could neither act
nor be acted upon, and therefore would not be the sort of substance that
a practical mind, in love with facts, would be tempted to believe in.
6. _Events._—Although things rather than events are the object of animal
faith, ordinarily it is some event that calls attention to a thing: and
it is intelligible that philosophers, reverting to the study of nature
after their long quarantine in psychological scepticism, should dare to
speak of events as constituting the woof of nature, before they dare to
speak of them as things in flux or as modes of substance. Yet events can
be nothing less. Events are changes, and change implies continuity and
derivation of event from event: otherwise there might be variety in
existence, but there could be no variation, since the phases of the
alleged changes would not follow one another. This continuity and
derivation essential to events suffice to render them events in
substance, or changes in things. Both the medium of events (requisite to
render any two events successive or contiguous) and the quantitative
heritage of each (which it derives from the quantity of its antecedents)
are substantial. Not so any event taken separately, and conceived merely
as a passage of attention from one essence to another: for though the
intuition spanning this transition would be a fact, neither it nor the
terms it played with would be events. I can imagine an exception to this
principle, if a total event exists including the whole process of
creation. Such a total event (also any minute irreducible event if such
existed) would be actually identical with a changing thing or a
substance in flux. But every intermediate event would have arbitrary
limits, being composed of minor events and embedded in greater ones.
Perhaps there is no total and no rudimentary event: the men of science
must decide that point if they can, although I am not confident, that
after they had decided it on the best of evidence, their decision would
prevent the flux of nature from stopping, if they said it must go on, or
from going on, if they said it must stop. However, the mere possibility
that there should be no comprehensive and no least event shows on what
slippery ground we stand if we attempt to make events the ultimate
objects of belief. They are really only half of what changing existence
implies: the other half is substance.
In the effort to halt at events without positing things there is some
vestige of the psychological confusion which identifies intuition with
the essences present to it. An intuition may present a specious event:
it does not follow that it is an event itself, or occurs in time.
Intuitions would indeed not be events if they had no locus in physical
time, and were not members of a series of events occurring in quite
another realm of being from the visionary events which those intuitions
might picture. In order to be events in physical time (even so to speak
by marriage) intuitions must have organs which are parts of the moving
substance of nature. Otherwise they would be pure spirits, out of time,
and out of relation to one another. They are events only because a
natural event, not an intuition, envelops them and lends them a natural
status. Were they only specious events present to another intuition they
would not be events at all, but eternal essences contemplated by an
eternal mind.
Nevertheless, the notion of events comes very near to that of things, as
posited and required in action, and as analysed in physics. The
substance of these things is, by definition, the ground of changing
appearance and the agent in perpetual action: it is therefore
essentially in flux. I cannot say whether this flux is pervasive, so
that nothing whatever in substance remains for any time unchanged, the
constant element in it being only a constant form or quantity of change:
but on the level and scale of human experience, substance is everywhere
the substance of events, not of things immutable. If Heraclitus and
modern physics are right in telling us that the most stable of the
Pyramids is but a mass of events, this truth about substance does not
dissolve substance into events that happen nowhere and to nothing: that
supposition, on the contrary, would paralyse the events. If an event is
to have individual identity and a place amongst other events, it must be
a change which substance undergoes in one of its parts. Otherwise, like
facts and truths taken hypostatically, events would be metaphysical
abstractions, utterly incompatible with that natural status which must
belong to the things posited by animal faith in the heat of action—the
only things in which there is any reason for believing.