DISCERNMENT OF SPIRIT
Is the existence of spirit evident to spirit, and involved in the
presence of anything? Is its nature simple and obvious? I think there is
something of which this may be said, but not of spirit; for by spirit I
understand not only the passive intuition implied in any essences being
given, but also the understanding and belief that may greet their
presence. Even passive intuition is no datum; there is nothing evident
except the given essence itself. Yet, as I have seen above, the mere
prolongation of this presence, the recognition of this essence as
identical with itself, and the survey of its elements in various orders,
very soon impose upon me a distinction between this essence and my
intuition of it. This intuition is a fact and an event, as the essence
cannot be; so that even if spirit meant nothing but pure consciousness
or the activity of a transcendental ego, it would need to be posited, in
view of the felt continuity of discourse, and could not be an element in
the given essences. If spirit were defined as the common quality of all
appearances, distinguishing them from the rest of the realm of essence
which does not appear, spirit would be reduced to an appearance itself.
It would be like light, something seen, a luminousness in all objects,
not what I understand by it, which is the seeing; not the coloured
lights I may observe, but the exercise of sight as distinguished from
blindness.
The common quality of all appearances is not spirit but mere Being; that
simple and always obvious element to which I referred just now as given
in all essences without distinction, and which some philosophers and
saints have found so unutterably precious. This is all that is common to
all possible appearances, considered in themselves; but animal tension
is not altogether absent even in this abstruse contemplation, and the
sense that appearances are assaulting _me_ thickens my intuition of
their essence into an apprehension of existence, which existence, having
no idea of myself, I of course attribute to them, or to the abstract
common element in their essences, pure Being, which thus becomes in my
eyes absolute existence.
The present stimulus that awakens me out of my material lethargy and
keeps my attention more or less taut is not spirit, although, of course,
the birth of spirit is involved in my awakening. That stimulus is the
strain and rumble of the universal flux, audible in my little sea-shell.
It preserves the same ground-tone (that of a disturbance or a strain) no
matter what image it may bring forth, or even if it brings forth no
images but only a pervasive sense of swimming in safety and bliss. This
budding sentiment of existence is a recognition not of spirit but of
substance, of fact, of force, of an unfathomable mystery.
By spirit I understand the light of discrimination that marks in that
pure Being differences of essence, of time, of place, of value; a living
light ready to fall upon things, as they are spread out in their weight
and motion and variety, ready to be lighted up. Spirit is a fountain of
clearness, decidedly wind-blown and spasmodic, and possessing at each
moment the natural and historical actuality of an event, not the imputed
or specious actuality of a datum. Spirit, in a word, is no phenomenon,
not sharing the æsthetic sort of reality proper to essences when given,
nor that other sort proper to dynamic and material things; its peculiar
sort of reality is to be intelligence in act. Spirit, or the intuitions
in which it is realised, accordingly forms a new realm of being,
silently implicated in the apparition of essences and in the felt
pressure of nature, but requiring the existence of nature to create it,
and to call up those essences before it. By spirit essences are
transposed into appearances and things into objects of belief; and (as
if to compensate them for that derogation from their native status) they
are raised to a strange actuality in thought—a moral actuality which in
their logical being or their material flux they had never aspired to
have: like those rustics and servants at an inn whom a travelling poet
may take note of and afterwards, to their astonishment, may put upon the
stage with applause.
It is implied in these words, when taken as they are meant, that spirit
is not a reality that can be observed; it does not figure among the
_dramatis personæ_ of the play it witnesses. As the author, nature, and
the actors, things, do not emerge from the prompter’s box, or remove
their make-up so as to exhibit themselves to me in their unvarnished
persons, but are satisfied that I should know them only as artists (and
I for my part am perfectly willing to stop there in my acquaintance with
them); so the spirit in me which their art serves is content not to be
put on the stage; that would be far from being a greater honour, or
expressing a truer reality, than that which belongs to it as spectator,
virtually addressed and consulted and required in everything that the
theatre contrives. Spirit can never be observed as an essence is
observed, nor encountered as a thing is encountered. It must be enacted;
and the essence of it (for of course it has an essence) can be described
only circumstantially, and suggested pregnantly. It is actualised in
actualising something else, an image or a feeling or an intent or a
belief; and it can be discovered only by implication in all discourse,
when discourse itself has been posited. The witnesses to the existence
of spirit are therefore the same as those to the existence of discourse;
but when once discourse is admitted, the existence of spirit in it
becomes self-evident; because discourse is a perusal of essence, or its
recurring presence to spirit.
Now in discourse there is more than passive intuition; there is intent.
This element also implies spirit, and in spirit as man possesses it
intent or intelligence is almost always the dominant element. For this
reason I shall find it impossible, when I come to consider the realm of
spirit, to identify spirit with simple awareness, or with consciousness
in the abstract sense of this abused word. Pure awareness or
consciousness suffices to exemplify spirit; and there may be cold
spirits somewhere that have merely that function; but it is not the only
function that only spirits could perform; and the human spirit, having
intent, expectation, belief, and eagerness, runs much thicker than that.
Spirit is a category, not an individual being: and just as the realm of
essence contains an infinite number of essences, each different from the
rest, and each nothing but an essence, so the realm of spirit may
contain any number of forms of spirit, each nothing but a spiritual
fact. Spirit is a fruition, and there are naturally as many qualities of
fruition as there are fruits to ripen. Spirit is accordingly qualified
by the types of life it actualises, and is individuated by the occasions
on which it actualises them. Each occasion generates an intuition
numerically distinct, and brings to light an essence qualitatively
different.
Let me suppose, by way of illustration, that there was a disembodied
spirit addressed to the realm of truth in general, and seeing all things
under the form of eternity. This would be a very special kind of spirit,
and many an essence would be excluded from its intuition; for instance,
the essence of surprise. No doubt it would congratulate itself on this
incapacity, and say with Aristotle that there are things it is better
not to know than to know, at least by experience. The essence of
surprise involves ignorance of the future, and it could never be
realised, or known by intuition, in a spirit to whom the future had
always been known: and to know surprise by experience is the only way of
knowing its essence. It might indeed be known by description, and
defined as a feeling which animals have when they expect one thing and
find another. Such a description may suggest the essence of surprise to
me, who know by intuition what it is to expect and to find; but it would
never suggest that essence to a spirit that had only descriptions to go
by, and who could reach a conception of “expecting” and of “finding”
only in symbols that translated their transitive natures into synthetic
pictures. Thus the essence of surprise would remain for ever excluded
from intuition in a spirit that saw all things under the form of
eternity.
The occasions on which spirit arises in man are the vicissitudes of his
animal life: that is why spirit in him runs so thick. In intent, in
belief, in emotion a given essence takes on a value which to pure spirit
it could not have. The essence then symbolises an object to which the
animal is tentatively addressed, or an event through which he has just
laboured, or which he is preparing to meet. This attitude of the animal
may be confined to inner readjustments in the psyche, not open to gross
external observation; yet it may all the more directly be raised to
consciousness in the form of attention, expectation, deliberation,
memory, or desire. These sentiments form a moving but habitual
background for any particular essence considered; they frame it in, not
only pictorially in a sensuous perspective, but morally, by its ulterior
suggestions, and by the way in which, in surveying the whole field of
intuition, that particular feature in it is approached or attacked or
rejected. In such settings given essences acquire their felt meanings;
and if they should be uprooted from that soil and exhibited in
isolation, they would no longer mean the same thing to the spirit. Like
a note in a melody, or a word in a sentence, they appeared in a field of
essence greater than they; they were never more than a term or a feature
within it. For this reason I imagine that I see things and not essences;
the essences I see incidentally are embedded in the voluminous
ever-present essences of the past, the world, myself, the future;
master-presences which express attitudes of mine appropriate not to an
essence—which is given—but to a thing—which though not given enlists all
my conviction and concern.
Thus intelligence in man, being the spiritual transcript of an animal
life, is transitional and impassioned. It approaches its objects by a
massive attack, groping for them and tentatively spying them before it
discovers them unmistakably. It is energetic and creative, in the sense
of slowly focussing its object within the field of intuition in the
midst of felt currents with a felt direction, themselves the running
expression of animal endeavours. All this intuition of turbulence and
vitality, which a cold immortal spirit could never know, fills the
spirit of man, and renders any contemplation of essences in their own
realm only an interlude for him or a sublimation or an incapacity. It
also renders him more conscious than a purer spirit would be of his own
spirit. For just as I was able to find evidence of intuition in
discourse, which in the motionless vision of essence would have eluded
me, so in intent, expectation, belief, and emotion, the being of my
thoughts rises up and almost hides the vision of my object. Although I
myself am a substance in flux, on the same level as the material thing
that confronts me, the essences that reveal my own being are dramatic
and moral, whereas those that express the thing are sensuous; and these
dramatic and moral essences, although their presence involves spirit
exactly in the same way, and no more deeply, than the presence of the
sensuous essences does, yet seem to suggest its presence more directly
and more voluminously.
Hence the popular identification of spirit with the heart, the breath,
the blood, or the brain; and the notion that my substantial self and the
spirit within me are identical. In fact, they are the opposite poles of
my being, and I am neither the one nor the other exclusively. If I am
spiritually proud and choose to identify myself with the spirit, I shall
be compelled to regard my earthly person and my human thoughts as the
most alien and the sorriest of accidents; and my surprise and
mortification will never cease at the way in which my body and its world
monopolise my attention. If on the contrary I modestly plead guilty to
being the biped that I seem, I shall be obliged to take the spirit
within me for a divine stranger, in whose heaven it is not given me to
live, but who miraculously walks in my garden in the cool of the
evening. Yet in reality, incarnation is no anomaly, and the spirit is no
intruder. It is as much at home in any animal as in any heaven. In me,
it takes my point of view; it is the voice of my humanity; and what
other mansions it may have need not trouble me. Each will provide a
suitable shrine for its resident deity and its native oracle. It is a
prejudice to suppose that spirit is contaminated by the flesh; it is
generated there; and the more varied its instruments and sources are,
the more copiously it will be manifested, and the more unmistakably.
Spiritual minds are the first to recognise the empire of the flesh over
the spirit in the senses, the passions, and even in a too vivid
imagination; and they call these influences the snares of the adversary.
I think they are right in condemning as vain or carnal any impulses
which would disrupt the health of the soul, either directly in the
individual body, or indirectly by loosening such bonds with society as
are requisite for human happiness. I also think, however, that moralists
of this type overlook two considerations of the greatest moment, by
which all the metaphysical background of their maxims is removed, and
what is reasonable in them is put on a naturalistic basis. One
consideration is that, on a small scale and in its own key, every
impulse in man or beast bears its little flame of spirit. How much
longing, how much laughter, how much perception, how much policy and art
in those vices and crimes which the moralist thinks fatal to spirit!
They may render a finer thing impossible (which the moralist should
bethink himself to depict more attractively), but in themselves they are
full of life and light. For this reason crimes and vices, together with
horrible adventures and the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, are
the chosen theme of novelists and playwrights; and the poor public,
having hardly any other intellectual pleasure, gloats on these fictions,
as an imaginative escape from the moral penury not only of their work,
but of their religion. The poets are far more genuine lovers of spirit
in this than their mentors, whose official morality is probably quite
worldly, and insensible to any actually spiritual achievement, because
such achievements are necessarily fugitive, invisible, and
un-productive. The devil was an angel essentially; it was only in the
complicated politics of this world that he missed his way, and became an
enemy of the highest good.
The other consideration that is overlooked is that the spirit which may
discern this highest good is itself a natural passion, and not less an
expression of the flesh—though more justly and broadly—than the random
impulses it condemns. Consider, for instance, the earnestness with which
evil is condemned. If this evil is pain, the objection to it could not
be more instinctive. Why should pure spirit detest pain? A material
accident in the body here absorbs my attention, and strangely persuades
me to be utterly rebellious and impatient at being so absorbed. The
psyche, or the principle of bodily life, is somehow striving against the
event or stimulus which produced the pain (a perfectly harmless essence
to contemplate in itself), because the psyche is congenitally a system
or cycle of habits which that obnoxious event interrupts. It is this
material pressure and effort not to be stifled or rent in any of her
operations that the psyche imposes on the spirit, commanding it to
pronounce it a terrible evil that she should be rent or stifled. These
strange and irrational pronouncements of spirit, calling events good or
evil, are accordingly grounded on nothing but on a creeping or shrinking
of the flesh. If the evil is moral—the eventual defeat of some ideal I
cherish for myself, my children, or my country—what has fixed this
ideal, or declared it to be a good? Suppose this ideal is a life
glorious and unending; is it not obvious that nothing but the momentum
of life, already accidentally working in myself, my children, or my
country, could possibly demand life or determine what forms of life
would be glorious for us? I will not pursue this topic: if the reader
does not understand, he probably never will.
Let me turn to the most intellectual powers of spirit—attention,
synthesis, perception. These too are voices loudly issuing from the
heart of material existence, and proclaiming their origin there not only
by their occasions and external connections, but by their inmost moral
nature. Why does the spirit stop to collect or to recollect anything?
Why not range undisturbed and untrammelled over image after image,
without referring one to another or attempting (always in vain) to
preserve the design of vanished images, or the order of their
appearance, even through the lapse of the sensible elements that filled
them in? Because the animal is forming habits. The psyche is plastic; no
impression can endure unchanged, as if it had been a substantial little
thing in itself, and not a mode, a ripple, in an inherited,
transmissible, ever rejuvenated substance. Scarcely is the impression
received, but it merges in the general sensitiveness or responsiveness
of the organ affected, modifying its previous way of reacting on some
natural object, an object reported not by that impression alone, but by
many others: so that the synthetic unity of apperception (that most
radical of transcendental principles) obeys a compulsion peculiar to
animal economy, which no pure spirit would need to share, the compulsion
to use things as materials, to drop them and forge ahead, or to eat and
to digest them: for the drinking in of light through the eyes, or of
currents from other organs, thereby rearranging the habits of the
nervous system, is very like the consumption of food, restoring the
vegetative functions. Synthesis in thought, correlation, scope, or (as
the phrase is) taking things in, is laborious piety on the spirit’s part
in subservience to the flesh. It is the mental fruit of training, of
care: an inner possession rewarding an outer fidelity.
Pure spirit would never need to _apperceive_ at all; this is an animal
exigency that distracts it from intuition. There is unity in intuition
too, of a nebulous sort, as there must be unity in the universe, since
it is all there is, however loose its structure or unmarked its limits.
Yet in intuition, as in cloud-land, the field is in the act of changing
pervasively; every part shifts more or less. Any feature you may
distinguish fades and refashions itself irresponsibly; and pure spirit
would be perfectly content that it should do so. Perhaps, if it was a
young spirit, it would positively whip up the hoop, or blow and distend
the bubble, for the fun of seeing it run or burst more gloriously; and
it would be happy to think there was no harm done, and nothing left
over. The scene would then be cleared for something utterly fresh. The
synthetic unity of apperception is something imposed by things on
animals, when these things exercise a seductive charm or threaten
mischief. Attention cries halt, it reconnoitres, it takes note, it
throws a lassoo over the horses of Poseidon, lord of the flux. And why?
Because the organs of spirit are structures; they are mechanisms
instituted in nature to keep doing certain things, roughly appropriate
to the environment, itself roughly constant. It is to this approximate
fixity of function and habit that spirit owes its distinct ideas, the
names it gives to things, and its faith in things, which is a true
revelation of their existence—knowledge of them stored for use.
Perception, too, would be a miracle and an impossibility to a spirit
conceived as alien to matter. Perception is a stretching forth of intent
beyond intuition; it is an exercise of intelligence. Intelligence, the
most ideal function of spirit, is precisely its point of closest
intimacy with matter, of most evident subservience to material modes of
being. The life of matter (at least on the human scale, if not at every
depth) is a flux, a passage from this to that, almost forbidding
anything to be simply itself, by immediately turning it, in some
respect, into something different. If the psyche were a closed round of
motions, the spirit it generated (if it generated spirit at all) would
certainly not be perceptive or cognitive, but in some way emotional or
musical—the music of those spheres. But the round of motions which the
psyche is actually wound up to make must be executed in a changeful and
precarious environment, not to speak of changes in her own substance.
She must hunt, fight, find a mate, protect the offspring, defend the den
and the treasure. Perception, intelligence, knowledge accurately
transcribe this mode of being, profoundly alien to repose in intuition
or to drifting reverie. Perception points to what it does not, save by
pointing, know to exist; knowledge is only of the past or the future,
both of which are absent; and intelligence talks and talks to an
interlocutor—the mind of another man or god or an eventual self of one’s
own—whom it can never see and whose replies, conveyed (if at all)
through material channels, it is never sure exist morally, or could be
understood if they did exist. There is no dilemma in the choice between
animal faith and reason, because reason is only a form of animal faith,
and utterly unintelligible dialectically, although full of a pleasant
alacrity and confidence, like the chirping of birds. The suasion of
sanity is physical: if you cut your animal traces, you run mad.
It is impossible to say everything at once, and I have been contrasting
intelligence with intuition, as if intuition were less subject than
intelligence to physical inspiration, or had an independent source. This
is not the case; intuition is itself pathetically animal. Why should I
have awaked at all? Can anything, inwardly considered, be more
gratuitous than consciousness? I am afraid I must be constituted
differently from other people, at least in the reflective faculty,
because it astonishes me to hear so many philosophers talking of spirit
as if its existence explained itself, and denying the possibility of
matter; whereas to me it seems credible, though certainly unnecessary _a
priori_, that matter should exist without being consulted, for it cannot
help itself, suffers nothing, and has no reason to protest; and its
existence is antecedently just as plausible as its non-existence. But
the existence of spirit really demands an explanation; it is a
tremendous paradox to itself, not to say a crying scandal—I mean from a
scientific or logical point of view, because treated as a family secret
the scandal is often delicious, and privately it is in this festive and
poetic medium that I love to dwell. Spirit, since it _can_ ask how it
came to exist, has a right to put the question and to look for an
answer. And it may perhaps find an answer of a sort, although not one
which spirit, in all its moods, will think satisfactory.
Fact can never be explained, since only another fact could explain it:
therefore the existence of a universe rather than no universe, or of one
sort of universe rather than another, must be accepted without demur. In
this very irrationality or contingency of existence, which is inevitable
in any case, I find a clue to the strange presence of spirit in this
world. Spirit, the wakefulness of attention, could not have arisen of
its own accord; it contains no bias, no principle of choice, but is an
impartial readiness to know. It never could have preferred one thing to
another, nor preferred existence for itself to nonexistence, nor _vice
versa_. Attention is not a principle that can select the themes that
shall attract attention: to select them it must already have thought of
them. As far as its own nature is concerned, attention is equally ready
to fall on the just and on the unjust; spirit is equally ready to speak
any language, to quicken any body, and to adopt any interest. An
instance of spirit cannot be determined by spirit itself either in its
occasion, its intensity, or the æsthetic character of the essence
presented to it. Chance, matter, fate—some non-spiritual principle or
other—must have determined what the spirit in me shall behold, and what
it shall endure. Some internal fatality, their own brute existence and
wilfulness, must be responsible for the fact that things are as they
are, and not otherwise. If any instance of spirit was to arise anywhere,
the ground of it (if I speak of grounds at all) must have been
irrational. Spirit has the innocence of a child; it pleads not guilty;
at most it has become, without knowing how, an accomplice after the
fact. It is astonished at everything. It is essentially, wherever it may
be found, unsubstantial and expressive; it is essentially secondary.
Even if in fact some instance of spirit, some isolated intuition, sprang
miraculously into being in an absolute void, and nothing else had ever
existed or would exist, yet logically and in its own eyes that intuition
would be secondary, since no principle internal to spirit, but only
brute chance, would be expressed in the existence of that intuition, and
in the arbitrary choice of the essence that happened to appear there.
Spirit is therefore of its very nature and by its own confession the
voice of something else: it speaks not of itself, but of the Father that
sent it. I am accordingly prepared to find some arbitrary world or other
in existence; and since this arbitrary world obviously has spirit in it,
my problem is reduced to inquiring what features, in this arbitrary
existing world, can have called spirit forth, and made it their living
witness.
I postpone the detail of this inquiry, but I have already indicated how
the life of nature is expressed in the chief phases of spirit.
Wakefulness, common to all these phases, is itself a witness to animal
unrest, appetition, alarm, concern, preparation. It would be inane, as
well as impossible, for me to open my eyes, if in looking I did not
identify my spirit with my material person in its material predicaments,
raising to an actual hypostasis in consciousness its material
sensitiveness to outlying things. Electric influences issuing from these
allow my organs to adjust themselves before grosser contact occurs; and
then intuition is a premonition of material fusion. Organic systems
about to collide send forth this conscious cry or salutation. The
current established may prevent a ruder shock, or may precipitate it,
according to the prepared instinct of the receivers. The intuition
expresses the initial fusion involved in the distant response, as if a
ghostly messenger of oncoming things had rushed like a forerunner into
the audience chamber, announcing their arrival. It is only messengers
that reach the spirit, even in the thick of the fray; but by lending
credence to their hot reports, it can live through the battle, lost in
its mists and passions, and thinking itself to give and to receive the
blows.
For a man, and especially for a philosopher, to suggest that spirit does
not exist may accordingly pass for a delicious absurdity, and the best
of unconscious comedy. If it had been some angel that denied it, because
in his serenity and selflessness he could not discover that he was
alive, we might regard the denial of spirit as the highest proof of
spirituality: but in a material creature struggling to see and to think,
and tossed from one illusion and passion to another, such a denial seems
not only stupid, but ungracious; for a man ought to be very proud of
this dubious spark in his embers, and nurse it more tenderly than the
life of a frail child. Nevertheless I think that those who deny the
existence of spirit, although their language is rash and barbarous, are
honestly facing the facts, and are on the trail of a truth. Spirit is
too near them for them to stop at it in their eagerness to count their
visible possessions; and when they hear the word used, it irritates
them, because they suppose it means some sort of magical power or
metaphysical caloric, alleged to keep bodies alive, and to impose
purposes on nature; purposes which such a prior spirit, being
supernatural and immortal, could have had no reason for choosing. Such a
dynamic spirit would indeed be nothing but an immaterial matter, a
second physical substance distinguished from its grosser partner only in
that we know nothing of it, but assign to its operation all those
results which seem to us inexplicable. Belief in such a spirit is simply
belief in magic; innocent enough at first when it is merely verbal and
childish, but becoming perverse when defended after it has ceased to be
spontaneous. I am not concerned with spirit of that sort, nor with any
kind of nether influences. The investigation of substance and of the
laws of events is the province of physics, and I call everything that
science may discover in that direction physical and not spiritual. Even
if the substance of things should be sentiency, or a bevy of souls, or a
single intense Absolute, it would be nothing but matter to what I call
spirit. It would exercise only material functions in kindling the flame
of actual intuition, and bearing my light thoughts like bubbles upon its
infinite flood. I do not know what matter is in itself: but what
metaphysical idealists call spirit, if it is understood to be
responsible for what goes on in the world and in myself, and to be the
“reality” of these appearances, is, in respect to my spiritual
existence, precisely what I call matter; and I find the description of
this matter which the natural sciences supply much more interesting than
that given by the idealists, much more beautiful, and much more likely
to be true. That there is no spirit in the interstices of matter, where
the magicians look for it, nor at the heart of matter, where many
metaphysicians would place it, needs no proof to one who understands
what spirit is; because spirit is in another realm of being altogether,
and needs the being and movement of matter, by its large sweeping
harmonies, to generate it, and give it wings. It would be a pity to
abandon this consecrated word to those who are grubbing for the atoms of
substance, or speculating about a logic in history, or tabulating the
capers of ghosts; especially as there is the light of intuition, the
principle of actuality in vision and feeling, to call by that name. The
popular uses of the word spiritual support this definition of it;
because intuition, when it thoroughly dominates animal experience,
transmutes it into pure flame, and renders it religious or poetical,
which is what is commonly meant by spiritual.