BELIEF IN NATURE
Belief in substance, I have seen, is inevitable. The hungry dog _must_
believe that the bone before him is a substance, not an essence; and
when he is snapping at it or gnawing it, that belief rises into
conviction, and he would be a very dishonest dog if, at that moment, he
denied it. For me, too, while I am alive, it would be dishonest to deny
the belief in substance; and not merely dishonest, but foolish: because
if I am observant, observation will bring me strong corroborative
evidence for that belief. Observation itself, of course, assumes a
belief in discourse and in experience; it assumes that I can recognise
essences, remembering their former apparitions and contexts and
comparing the earlier with the present instance of them, or with the
different essences which now appear instead. When I survey my experience
in this way, the order of appearances, as memory or presumption sets it
before me, will confirm the suasion which these appearances exercised
singly, and will show me how very well grounded was the instinct which
told me, when I saw some casual essence, that it was a sign of something
happening in an independent, persisting, self-evolving, indefinitely
vast world. If experience, undergone, imposes belief in substance,
experience studied imposes belief in nature.
The word nature is sometimes written with a capital, as if nature were
some sort of deity or person: and in ancient philosophy and common
speech, powers and habits are attributed to nature which imply a certain
moral idiosyncrasy in that personage. Poets also praise nature, and
theologians rehearse her marvellous ways, in order to show that she
could not have fallen into them of her own accord. All this mythology
about nature is natural, and perhaps shows a better total appreciation
of what nature is than would a precise physics. The precision of physics
is mathematical; it defines an essence; and the attribution of this
mathematical essence to nature, however legitimate, is sure to overlook
many properties which belong to her just as truly, and appear in the
realms of truth or of spirit. One such property, at least, is
fundamental, and is better expressed by personifying nature than by
describing her movements mathematically, I mean, her constancy, the
assumption that we may trust her to be true to herself. In science, some
observed or some hypothetical process is studied and the method or law
of it is ascertained: but there is nothing particularly scientific in
the presumption that this process is all that is going on in the given
case, or that it will recur in other cases. What is called the
uniformity of nature is an assumption made, in respect to the future,
without any evidence, and with proportionately scanty evidence about the
past: where experience confirms it in some particular, the confirmation
itself is good for those instances, up to that time: it tells me nothing
of anything beyond, or of the future. The source of my confidence is
animal faith, the same that inspires confidence in a child towards his
parents, or towards pet animals; and the whole monstrous growth of human
religion is an extension of this sense that nature is a person, or a set
of persons, with constant but malleable characters. As experience
remodels my impulses, I assume that the world will remain amenable to my
new ways; the convert feels he is saved; the philosopher thinks he has
found the key to happiness; the astronomer tells you he has measured the
infinite, and perhaps rolled it up upon itself, and put it in his
pocket. They all express the infantile conviction that nature cannot be
false to what they have already learned or instinctively affirmed of it:
making nature a single and quasi-personal entity, bound tragically to
its past, and pledged more or less wilfully to a particular future. It
is this sense that the world, like a person, has a certain vital unity,
and remains constant or at least consequential in its moral aspects,
that is expressed by calling it nature. Like a being born of a seed, it
has a determinate form, and a normal career, a _nature_, which it cannot
change.
What evidence is there for the existence of nature, in this sense of the
word? If I speak of the universe at large, there can be no evidence. Of
course the universe must be what it is, it must have a character, it
must exemplify an essence; but taken as a whole, it may be a chaos, in
which nothing is predeterminate, nor progressive, nor persistent, and in
which the parts are self-centred and the events spontaneous. A
philosopher who took his own life as a model for conceiving all other
things, ought perhaps to incline to this view; because he is himself,
transcendentally speaking, an absolute centre, and being ignorant of the
sources of his thoughts and actions, may presume that they have no
sources. If under these circumstances he still has the weakness (for it
would be a weakness) to believe in anything else, say in other monads,
he would doubtless allow them an equal liberty; so that in his universe
of monads there would be no common space, no common time, no common type
of character or development, no mutual influence or kindred destiny. I
think the inner life of animals, if we treated each as a moral romance,
apart from its physical setting and influence, would actually present
such a chaos: especially if we imagine what may be the lives of
creatures in other parts of the stellar universe, or out of any relation
with ourselves at all. Such a loose universe could not properly be
called nature. It would not have given us birth, it would not have
nurtured us, it would not surround us with any constant influences or
familiar aspects, it would not bring any seeds to maturity for our
encouragement or warning.
Evidences for the existence of nature must be sought elsewhere, in a
region which a monadologist would regard as internal to each monad, in
that the substances posited by me in obedience to my vital instincts
seem to me to behave as if they were parts of nature. Nature is the
great counterpart of art. What I tuck under my pillow at night, I find
there in the morning. Economy increases my possessions. People all grow
old. Accidents have discoverable causes. There is a possible distinction
between wisdom and folly. But how should all this be, and how could
experience, or the shocks that punctuate it, teach me anything to the
purpose, or lend me any assurance in life not merely a reinforced
blindness and madness on my part, unless substances standing and moving
in ordered ways surrounded me, and I was living in the midst of nature?
Certainly a partial sceptic like Berkeley, closing one eye in the
interests of a sentimental religion, may conceive that nature is not a
system of evolving substances round him affecting his own growth, but a
perpetual illusion, like a dream: a story told him in the dark, a
consecutive miracle of grace or of punishment by which a divine spirit
dazzles and conducts his spirit, without any medium or any occasion. But
if this fairy-tale is to hold good, and to justify the arts of life and
maintain the distinction between vice and virtue, I must be able to
discern the ways of Providence in their routine; everything will happen
exactly as if nature existed, and unrolled itself in a mechanical,
inexorable, and often shocking way; my idealism will merely allow me to
admit miracles, and to hope that to-morrow everything will be well. If I
regard the world of appearance as a mask which the deity wears
inevitably, the very essence of the creator being to create such a
world, the difference between belief in God and belief in nature will be
merely verbal, and I may say with Spinoza, _Deus sive natura_. If on the
contrary God is approachable in himself and would prove a better
companion than nature and sweeter to commune with, why should he terrify
me or delude me with this unworthy disguise? Why should he have
preferred to manifest himself by creating appearances rather than by
creating substances? What secret necessity could have compelled him to
create anything at all, or whispered in his ear these irresponsible
designs? If nature behaves as nature would, is it not simply nature? If
God were there instead would he not behave like God? Or if I say that I
have no right to presume how God should behave, but that wisdom counsels
me to learn his ways by experience, what difference remains between God
and nature, and are they more than two names for the same thing?
If by calling nature God or the work of God, or the language in which
God speaks to us, nothing is meant except that nature is wonderful,
unfathomed, alive, the source of our being, the sanction of morality,
and the dispenser of happiness and misery, there can be no objection to
such alternative terms in the mouth of poets; but I think a philosopher
should avoid the ambiguities which a too poetical term often comports.
The word nature is poetical enough: it suggests sufficiently the
generative and controlling function, the endless vitality and changeful
order of the world in which I live.
Faith in nature restores in a comprehensive way that sense of the
permanent which is dear to animal life. The world then becomes a home,
and I can be a philosopher in it. Perhaps nature is not really constant,
nor single; unless indeed I so stretch and eviscerate the notions of
unity and constancy as to apply them to the total aspect of nature,
under the form of eternity, however incoherent and loose the structure
of that totality may be. But in this æon, in this portion or special
plane of space, a sufficient constancy is discoverable: far greater than
my scope can cover, or my interest require. It is inattention and
prejudice in men, not inconstancy in nature, that keeps them so
ignorant, and the art of government so chaotic. Whenever a little
persistent study of nature is made (as recently in the interest of
mechanical inventions) rapid progress at once follows in the arts: and
art is the true discoverer, the unimpeachable witness to the reality of
nature. The master of any art sees nature from the inside, and works
with her, or she in him. Certainly he does not know _how_ he operates,
nor, at bottom, _why_ he should: but no more does she. His mastery is a
part of her innocence. It happens so, and within limits it prospers. To
that extent he has assurance of power and of support. It is a faith
congruous with his experience that if he could bend his faculties more
accurately to their task, nature would prove indefinitely tractable: and
if a given animal with special organs and a special form of imagination
can progressively master the world, the fact proves that the world is
con-natural with him. I do not mean that it favours his endeavours, much
less that it is composed as his fancy pictures it; I mean only that his
endeavours express one of the formations which nature has fallen into,
for the time in equilibrium with the surrounding formations; and that
his ideas too are in correspondence with the sphere of his motions, and
express his real relations. The possibility of such correspondence and
such equilibrium proves that nature exists, and that the creature that
sustains them is a part of nature.