EVIDENCES OF ANIMATION IN NATURE
The sense that nature is animate, and in particular that men and brutes
have feelings and thoughts, stands in greater need of criticism than of
defence. I assume it before my notions of substance or of nature are
clearly formed, and before I can distinguish animate from inanimate
being. I assume it, not because it is at all evident or probable in
itself, but because I fetch the materials for all my inchoate
conceptions from my own sensibility: and in discourse (which I am busy
with from the beginning) I unwittingly interweave the notion of
animation in gathering my experience of essences and of things. I
attribute an existence to these essences which is proper only to the
light of intuition travelling over them: and I attribute to these
substances moral attributes and sensuous perspectives also borrowed from
my running discourse. This subjective matrix and envelope of all my
knowledge, though I may overlook it, underlies knowledge to the end; so
that I shall never cease to conceive nature as animate and brutes and
men as walking thoughts and passions until I have advanced very far in
scepticism. Even then, except in deliberate theory, my apprehension of
nature will be fabulous and dramatic; so that now that I have officially
reinstated my faith in nature, faith in the animation of nature will
tend to slip in unannounced; somewhat as when an exile is amnestied or a
foreigner naturalised, his parasites (if any) are silently admitted too.
Yet this is not, or need not be, the law; and as it is legality in
opinion that here occupies me, I will inquire whether evidence of
animation (even supposing that nature is animate in fact) could by any
possibility be found at all; and having cleared up that point, I will
inquire further under what control, and with what chances of truth, I
may imaginatively attribute animation to nature in the absence of all
evidence.
Why do I attribute animation to myself, that is, to my body? That my
spirit discovers a world with my body in it, is not the question; the
why of that would be a metaphysical enigma obviously insoluble, arising
out of a trick of thought and inapt application of categories. The point
is why, when I feel a pain, I suppose that it is my back or my stomach
that aches, and not simply my spirit. I think we may distinguish two
reasons. One is that the pain is an element in the perception of my back
or stomach; it is instinct with the loudest and most urgent animal
faith; and it imperatively summons my attention to those obscure
regions, and makes me wonder what is happening there. The other reason
is that the pain may be associated with another observed event in which
my body appears as an integral element, as when my back aches because I
am being thrashed. My nobler thoughts are also known to animate my body
for this external reason. It is my tongue or gesture that announces
them, even to myself. Bad observers, who suppose themselves to see or to
discourse without intervention of their eyes or larynx, imagine that
they are essentially disembodied spirits, to whom all things are
directly perspicuous, and that only a hateful invention of philosophers,
called introjection or bifurcation, has put their minds inside their
bodies. Whether incarnation is or is not a hateful fatality to spirit, I
will not discuss here; but that spirit is incarnate, that it lodges in
the body and looks forth from it on the world, is a fact easily
ascertained by closing the eyes, taking a glass of wine, or blushing at
having made a fool of oneself.
Faith in memory (which is involved in dialectic and in perception) also
reveals to me what animation means, and obliges me to assert its
existence. In dialectic and in perception I assume that recurrent views
are being taken by me of an object identical with itself if an essence,
or continuous with itself if a substance. Such recurrent intuitions or
mentions of the terms of discourse are posited in primary memory, as
well as in reversion to the past after an interval of forgetfulness.
This remembrance is remembrance of animation. It posits thought,
cognitive, synthetic, immaterial; but it posits it as having occurred in
particular conjunctions at particular times, in the vicissitudes of a
particular body, my own, in a material world. These alleged past
intuitions could not be kept apart in memory, nor assumed to have been
spaced at longer or shorter intervals of time, nor to have been enacted
in a particular order, unless they were attributed to the past career of
myself, an animal in the natural world, and grafted upon recognisable
material situations and actions to which those intuitions were relevant.
Nature is the canvas on which, in memory, I paint the perspective of my
personal experience. Even a fictitious memory, or a false experience
like that of a dream, is recognisable as having had a natural occasion
and date, and as painting a particular incredible perspective of the
same world. Otherwise, I should not think I was remembering my past
thoughts, but I should be merely contemplating certain fresh essences.
By animation, then, I understand material life quickened into
intuitions, such as, if rehearsed and developed pertinently, make up a
private experience. The question whether nature is animate does not
regard its substance, but its moral individuation. In how many places is
experience being gathered? What evidence have I that nature thinks and
feels, or that the men and animals think and feel who people nature?
I must discard at once, as incompatible with the least criticism, the
notion that nature or certain parts of nature are known to be animate
because they _behave_ in certain ways. The only behaviour that can give
proof of thinking is thinking itself. If I have ever conceived intuition
or discourse at all, and obtained assurance of its existence, it has
been in my own person, by knowing what I mean and am meaning, what I
feel and have felt; and this posited discourse of mine has assumed, in
my estimation, the character of animation of my body, by virtue of two
additional dogmas which I have accepted: first, the dogma that I am a
substantial being far deeper than my discourse, a psyche or self; and
second, the dogma that this substantial being is in dynamic interplay
with a whole environing system of substances on the same plane with
itself. In this way I have come by my initial instance of animation in
nature, on the model of which I am able to conceive animation in its
other parts.
Now it is obvious that in many parts of nature, and especially in the
language and gestures of men of my own race, I find a setting for mental
discourse exactly similar to the setting into which I have put my own
intuitive experience; so that their words and actions vividly suggest to
me my own thoughts. Just as formerly I incorporated or introjected my
thoughts into my own body, so now I incorporate or introject them into
the bodies moving before me. Imitation contributes to this dramatic
understanding, because I am not confined, when I watch other people, to
remembering what I may have felt when I was in some such situation, or
spoke some such words. Their attitude and language may be novel to me,
and, as we say, a revelation: that is, they may by contagion arouse
unprecedented intuitions in me now, which I unhesitatingly attribute to
them, perhaps with indignation, swearing that such thoughts never could
enter my head, and that I am utterly incapable of such feelings. Yet
this is psychologically false; because if I understand a thought, I have
it; though it may be present as an essence only, without carrying
assent. The irony of the case is that very likely I alone have it, and
not at all the man to whom I attribute it. Even the closest similarity
in language or action is a very abstract similarity, and the concrete
and full current of our two lives, on which the quality of intuitions
depends, may be quite different. All dramatic understanding of which I
am capable is, by hypothesis, _my_ discourse. The most contagious
feelings, the clearest thoughts, of others are clear or contagious only
because I can readily make them my own. I cannot conceive deeper
thoughts than my lead can plumb, nor feelings for which I lack the
organ.
Of course by an abuse of language the word animation might be used to
designate certain kinds of behaviour; as the ancients said the world was
rational because orderly, or the stars intelligent because they kept
going round in circles. So men or women might be said to think because
they speak or because they write books; but it does not follow. The
inner patter of words which I sometimes hear in myself, and which
mystics have called inspiration or (when explosive) speaking with
tongues, is not thinking; it is an object of perception that may suggest
to me a subsequent thought, although often I see, when I try to frame
this thought, that those words make nonsense. It is very true, as I
shall find later, that the fountain of my thoughts, that is, the self
who thinks them, is my psyche, and that movements there guide my
thoughts and render them, as the case may be, intelligent, confused,
rapid, or halting; also supply my language, dictate my feelings, and
determine when my thinking shall begin and where it shall end. But the
light of thought is wanting there, which is the very thinking; and no
fine inspection of behaviour nor interweaving of objects will ever
transmute behaviour into intuition nor objects into the attention which,
falling upon them, turns them from substances or essences into objects
of actual thought. By animation I understand the incarnation in nature,
when it behaves in these ways, of a pure and absolute spirit, an
imperceptible cognitive energy, whose essence is intuition.
Animation being essentially imperceptible and not identical with any
habit or act observable in nature, I see the justification of those
philosophers who say that animals, in so far as science can study them,
are machines; the discoverable part of them is material only, just as is
the rest of nature. But this conclusion being implied only in my
transcendental approach to nature and my knowledge of her, can in no way
prejudge her real constitution, which may be as rich and superabundant
as it likes, without asking my leave or reporting to me her domestic
budget; nor is anything thereby prejudged in respect to the nature or
laws of matter, or the simplicity of its mechanism. Nature seems, at
first blush, to have many levels of habit, irreducible to one another.
As it was only the other day that a hint reached us that gravity and the
first law of motion might be forms of a single principle, so it may be
long before we hear from the biologists that chemical reaction and
animal instinct are forms of the same habit in matter. Even if they are
irreducible to a common principle, they will be two habits of matter,
and nothing more. There is a sense in which every different
manifestation of a principle makes a different principle of it, as the
language of the United States might be said not to be English; but the
alienation of form from form is not a departure from the habit of flux,
complication, dissolution, and temporary arrest which runs through all
language. So nature might be said to have as many irreducible habits as
she has forms; but she has an underlying ground of transformation as
well, on which, I suspect, all those forms are grafted, no more wilfully
diverse nor artificially identical than leaves upon a tree; and when
wiseacres, every day of every year, bring their ponderous proofs that
life is not mechanical, that the human will, by exception, is free, and
that a single disembodied purpose, by magic, makes all things dance
contrarily to their own nature, nature and I wink at each other.
The circumstance that animation, by its very essence, must be
imperceptible, and not a link in any traceable process, renders disproof
of animation anywhere as impossible as proof of it. Those
sentimentalists are short-sighted who in their desire to show that mind
is everywhere, introduce mental forces or interpolate mental links into
their account of physical economy. If thought was discoverable only in
the gaps between motions, no thoughts would be discoverable in nature at
all. I do not presume to say that nature can make no leaps; I leave her
to her own paces; but I do not conceive that, if she shows gaps (and
what is a gap but a transition?) I must hasten to fill them up for her
with alleged intuitions. She may be made up of gaps; they may be her
steps; and if her limbs have strength in them for leaping, let her leap.
Her strides are their own measure; it is only my ignorance or egotism
that can regard any of her ways as abnormal. Thought in myself has not
appeared when my system has broken down, but rather when it has
established quick connections with things about it. Thought is not a
substitute for physical force or physical life, but an expression of
them when they are working at their best. If I may read animation into
nature at all, it must be where her mechanisms are sustained, not where
they are suspended.
There are two stages in the criticism of myth, or dramatic fancy, or the
sort of idealism that sees purposes and intentions and providential
meanings in everything. The first stage treats them angrily as
superstitions; the second treats them smilingly as poetry. I think that
most of the specific thoughts which men attribute to one another are
proper only to the man who attributes them; and the fabulous psychology
of poets and theologians is easy to deride; it has no specific
justification, and the moral truth of it can be felt only by a poetic
mind. Nevertheless, when I consider the inevitable egotism that presides
over the understanding of mind in others, I fear that I am no less
likely to sin through insensibility to the actual life of nature,
because my tight little organs cannot vibrate to alien harmonies, than I
am to sin through a childish anthropomorphism which makes not only the
beasts but even the clouds and the gods discourse like myself. After
all, in attributing human thoughts (with a difference) to non-human
beings, I recognise their parity with myself; my instinct is courteous
or even humble; and my incapacity to speak any moral language but my own
is not only inevitable but healthy and manly. Sages and poets who have
known no language but their own have a richer savour and a deeper wisdom
than witlings full of miscellaneous accomplishments; and when once I
have renounced the pedantic demand that poetry should be prose, I can
allow that myth may do the life of nature less injustice than would the
only alternative open to me, which is silence.
This may be said also about myth regarding myself, I mean the attempts
of memory, self-justifying eloquence, or psycho-analysis to unfold the
riches of my own mind. How much do I know about my own animation? How
much is too fluid to be caught in the sieve of memory, and to be
officially assimilated in verbal soliloquy? When any one asks me what I
think of the weather or of the Prime Minister, does my answer report
anything that I have previously thought? Probably not; my past
impressions are lost, or obliterated by the very question put to me; and
I make bold to invent, on the spur of the moment, a myth about my
sentiments on the subject. The present play of language and fancy may
fairly bring to a head old impressions or ruling impulses; or I may have
occasion to amend my first expression, and obeying a fresh suggestion of
my fancy I may say: No, no; I meant rather this. Whereupon I may proceed
laboriously to create and modulate my opinion, groping perhaps to a
final epigram, which I say expresses just what I think, although I never
thought it before. Such is my discourse when I am really thinking; at
other times it is but the echo of language which I remember to have
formerly used, and therefore call my ideas. It is clear therefore that
even in expressing my own mind when I conceive what I have felt, I have
never really felt just that before. My report is an honest myth.
The case is even worse as regards the emotions. What do I mean when I
talk of my desires, my intentions, or the motives of others? Unless
these things have been actually expressed in words which I can recover,
neither I nor my neighbours have ever had in mind anything like what I
now impute. My desire, in fact, was only a certain alacrity in doing
things which afterwards I see leading to a certain issue; my intention
(if actual at all) was a certain foresight of what the issue might be;
and the motives I assigned to others were but ulterior events imagined
by me which, if they had actually occurred, I suppose would have pleased
those people. The sensations or ideas which may really have accompanied
their actions, or the words they may really have pronounced mentally,
are not within my view; if they were they would probably go a very
little way towards preparing or covering the actions in question. These
actions would turn out to have had subjectively a totally different
complexion from that which I assign to them on seeing them performed.
The very abundance and incessant dream-like prolixity of mental
discourse render it elusive; and the discourse I officially impute to
myself or to others is a subsequent literary fiction, apt if it suggests
the events which the discourse concerned, or excites the emotions which
those events if witnessed would have produced on an observer of my
disposition, but by no means a fiction patterned on any actual former
experience in anybody. My sense of animation in nature, and all my
notions of human experience, are dramatic poetry, and nothing else.
There is therefore no direct evidence of animation in nature anywhere,
but only a strong propensity in me to imagine nature discoursing as I
discourse, because my apprehension of nature is embedded in my
miscellaneous, serried, and private thoughts, and I can hardly clear it
of the mental elements—emotional, pictorial, or dramatic—which encrust
it there. On reflection, however, and by an indirect approach, I can see
good reason for believing that some sort of animation (not at all such
animation as my fancy attributes to it at first) pervades the organic
world; because my psyche is animate; she is the source and seat, as I
have learned to believe, of all my discourse; yet she is not different,
in any observable respect, from the psyches of other animals, nor is she
composed of a different sort of substance from the common earth, light,
and air out of which she has arisen, and by which she is fed; she is but
one in the countless generations of living creatures. Accordingly the
analogy of nature would suggest that the other living creatures in the
world are animate too, and discourse privately no less assiduously and
absurdly than I do. It would even suggest that all the substance of
nature is ready to think, if circumstances allow by presenting something
to think about, and creating the appropriate organ.
The character of this universal animation, or readiness to think, is
inconceivable by me, in so far as its organs or objects differ from my
own. The forms of it are doubtless as various as the forms of material
being; a stone will think like me, in so far as it lives like me. There
are actually some men, a few, who do live like me; these also think like
me; and we can truly understand one another and impute to one another
the very thoughts we severally have. In such rare cases, human discourse
in one man may bring perfect knowledge (though no evidence) of human
discourse in another. In doing the same things and uttering the same
words we have instant assurance of unanimity, in this case not
deceptive; especially when it is not the outer stimulus that is common
to us, but the spontaneous reaction. For this reason gesture or poetry
is a better index to feeling than are events or information coming to
men from outside. What happens to people will never tell you how they
feel; the alien observer misunderstands everything; only he understands
a mind who can share its free and comic expression. For this reason too
psychology is not a science unless it becomes the science of behaviour,
when it ceases to be an account of mental discourse and traces only the
material life of the psyche. In order to communicate thought it is
necessary to impose it.
Moral communication becomes surer in proportion as the discourse to be
reproduced involves more articulation, more distinct turns by which
fidelity in the rendering may be controlled. The form of thought is more
easily transferable than its sensuous elements. Under the same sky, with
the same animal instincts, with the same experience of love, labour, and
war, one race or one age may be totally cut off from another in spirit.
The same language, on the contrary, the same myths, legends, or
histories, may be carried almost unchanged across seas and ages, and may
unite the happier moments of distant peoples. The range of such moral
unity is also easy to discover; I may learn how far languages or
religions are diffused; they create recognisable moral communities.
Indeed, they tyrannise over society, so social are they; and they often
render people who share the same spirit cruel to heretics of their own
flesh and blood. The humanities may prove inhuman; and the less
articulate, more robust instincts of mankind may take their revenge by
stamping the humanities out. Yet the barbarians, who are not divided by
rival traditions, fight all the more incessantly for food and space.
Peoples cannot love one another unless they love the same ideas.