COMPARISON WITH OTHER CRITICISMS OF KNOWLEDGE
Descartes was the first to begin a system of philosophy with universal
doubt, intended to be only provisional and methodical; but his mind was
not plastic nor mystical enough to be profoundly sceptical, even
histrionically. He could doubt any particular fact easily, with the
shrewdness of a man of science who was also a man of the world; but this
doubt was only a more penetrating use of intelligence, a sense that the
alleged fact might be explained away. Descartes could not lend himself
to the disintegration of reason, and never doubted his principles of
explanation. For instance, in order to raise a doubt about the
applicability of mathematics to existence (for their place in the realm
of essence would remain the same in any case) he suggested that a malign
demon might have been the adequate cause of our inability to doubt that
science. He thus assumed the principle of sufficient reason, a principle
for which there is no reason at all. If any idea or axiom were really _a
priori_ or spontaneous in the human mind, it would be infinitely
improbable that it should apply to the facts of nature. Every genius, in
this respect, is his own malign demon. Nor was this the worst; for
Descartes was not content to assume that reason governs the world—a
notion scandalously contrary to fact, and at bottom contrary to reason
itself, which is but the grammar of human discourse and aspiration
linking mere essences. He set accidental limits to his scepticism even
about facts. “I think, therefore I am,” if taken as an inference is
sound because analytical, only repeating in the conclusion, for the sake
of emphasis, something assumed in the premise. If taken as an
attestation of fact, as I suppose it was meant, it is honest and richly
indicative, all its terms being heavy with empirical connotations. What
is “thinking,” what is “I,” what is “therefore,” and what is
“existence”? If there were no existence there would certainly be no
persons and no thinking, and it may be doubted (as I have indicated
above) that anything exists at all. That any being exists that may be
called “I,” so that I am not a mere essence, is a thousand times more
doubtful, and is often denied by the keenest wits. The persuasion that
in saying “I am” I have reached an indubitable fact, can only excite a
smile in the genuine sceptic. No _fact_ is self-evident; and what sort
of fact is this “I,” and in what sense do I “exist”? Existence does not
belong to a mere datum, nor am I a datum to myself; I am a somewhat
remote and extremely obscure object of belief. Doubtless what I _mean_
by myself is an existence and even a substance; but the rudimentary
phantoms that suggest that object, or that suggest the existence of
anything, need to be trusted and followed out by a laborious empirical
exploration, before I can make out at all what they signify. Variation
alleged, strain endured, persistence assumed—notions which when taken on
faith lead to the assertion of existence and of substance, if they
remained merely notions would prove nothing, disclose nothing, and
assert nothing. Yet such, I suppose, are the notions actually before me
when I say “I am.” As to myself, when I proceed to distinguish that
object in the midst of the moving world, I am roughly my body, or more
accurately, its living centre, master of its organs and seat of its
passions; and this inner life of the body, I suspect, was the rock of
vulgar belief which Descartes found at hand, easy to mount on, after his
not very serious shipwreck. And the rock was well chosen; not because
the existence of my inner man is a simpler or a surer fact than any
other; to a true sceptic this alleged being so busily thinking and
willing and fuming within my body is but a strange feature in the
fantastic world that appears for the moment. Yet the choice of the inner
man as the one certain existence was a happy one, because this sense of
life within me is more constant than other perceptions, and not wholly
to be shaken off except in profound contemplation or in some strange
forms of madness. It was a suitable first postulate for the romantic
psychologist. On this stepping-stone to idealism the father of modern
philosophy, like another Columbus, set his foot with elegance. His new
world, however, would be but an unexplored islet in the world of the
ancients if all he discovered was himself thinking.
Thinking is another name for discourse; and perhaps Descartes, in noting
his own existence, was really less interested in the substance of
himself, or in the fact that he was alive, than in the play of terms in
discourse, which seemed to him obvious. Discourse truly involves spirit,
with its intuition and intent, surveying those terms. And the definition
of the soul, that its essence is to think, being a definition of spirit
and not of a man’s self, supports this interpretation. But discourse, no
less than the existence of a self, needs to be posited, and the
readiness with which a philosopher may do so yields only a candid
confession of personal credulity, not the proof of anything. The
assumption that spirit discoursing exists, and is more evident than any
other existence, leads by a slightly different path to the same
conclusion as the assumption of the self as the fundamental fact. In the
one case discourse will soon swallow up all existence, and in the other
this chosen existence, myself, will evaporate into discourse: but it
will remain an insoluble problem whether I am a transcendental spirit,
not a substance, holding the whole imaginary universe in the frame of my
thought, or whether I am an instance of thinking, a phase of that flux
of sentience which will then be the substance of the world. It is only
if we interpret and develop the Cartesian axiom in the former
transcendental sense that it supplies an instrument for criticism.
Understood in an empirical way, as the confident indication of a
particular fact, it is merely a chance dogma, betraying the
psychological bias of reflection in modern man, and suggesting a
fantastic theory of the universe, conveniently called psychologism; a
theory which fuses the two disparate substances posited by Descartes,
and maintains that while the inner essence of substance everywhere is to
think, or at least to feel, its distribution, movement, and aspect, seen
from without, are those of matter.
In adopting the method of Descartes, I have sought to carry it further,
suspending all conventional categories as well as all conventional
beliefs; so that not only the material world but all facts and all
existences have lost their status, and become simply the themes or
topics which intrinsically they are. Neither myself nor pure spirit is
at all more real in that realm of essence than any other mentionable
thing. When it comes to assertion (which is belief) I follow Descartes
in choosing discourse and (as an implication of discourse) my
substantial existence as the objects of faith least open to reasonable
doubt; not because they are the first objects asserted, nor because
intrinsically they lend themselves to existence better than anything
else, but simply because in taking note of anything whatever I find that
I am assuming the validity of primary memory; in other words, that the
method and the fact of observation are adventitious to the theme. But
the fact that observation is involved in observing anything does not
imply that observation is the only observed fact: yet in this gross
sophism and insincerity the rest of psychologism is entangled.
Hume and Kant seemed sceptics in their day and were certainly great
enemies of common sense, not through any perversity of temper (for both
were men of wise judgement) but through sophistical scruples and
criticism halting at unfortunate places. They disintegrated belief on
particular points of scholastic philosophy, which was but common sense
applied to revelation; and they made no attempt to build on the
foundations so laid bare, but rather to comfort themselves with the
assurance that what survived was practically sufficient, and far
simpler, sounder, and purer than what they had demolished. After the
manner of the eighteenth century, they felt that convention was a burden
and an imposture, not because here and there it misinterpreted nature,
but because it interpreted or defined nature at all; and in their
criticism they ran for a fall. They had nothing to offer in the place of
what they criticised, except the same cheque dishonoured. All their
philosophy, where it was not simply a collapse into living without
philosophy, was retrenchment; and they retrenched in that hand-to-mouth
fashion which Protestantism had introduced and which liberalism was to
follow. They never touched bottom, and nothing could be more gratuitous
or more helpless than their residual dogmas. These consisted in making
metaphysics out of literary psychology; not seeing that the discourse or
experience to which they appealed was a social convention, roughly
dramatising those very facts of the material world, and of animal life
in it, which their criticism had denied.
Hume seems to have assumed that every perception perceived itself. He
assumed further that these perceptions lay in time and formed certain
sequences. Why a given perception belonged to one sequence rather than
to another, and why all simultaneous perceptions were not in the same
mind, he never considered; the questions were unanswerable, so long as
he ignored or denied the existence of bodies. He asserted also that
these perceptions were repeated, and that the repetitions were always
fainter than the originals—two groundless assertions, unless the
transitive force of memory is admitted, and impressions are
distinguished from ideas externally, by calling an intuition an
impression when caused by a present object, visible to a third person,
and calling it an idea when not so caused. Furthermore, he invoked an
alleged habit of perceptions always to follow one another in the same
order—something flatly contrary to fact; but the notion was made
plausible by confusion with the habits of the physical world, where
similar events recur when the conditions are similar. Intuitions no
doubt follow the same routine; but the conditions for an intuition are
not the previous intuitions, but the whole present state of the psyche
and of the environment, something of which the previous intuitions were
at best prophetic symptoms, symptoms often falsified by the event.
All these haltings and incoherences arose in the attempt to conceive
experience divorced from its physical ground and from its natural
objects, as a dream going on _in vacuo_. So artificial an abstraction,
however, is hard to maintain consistently, and Hume, by a happy exercise
of worldly wit, often described the workings of the mind as our social
imagination leads us all vaguely to conceive them. In these inspired
moments he made those acute analyses of our notions of material things,
of the soul, and of cause, which have given him his name as a sceptic.
These analyses are bits of plausible literary psychology, essays on the
origin of common sense. They are not accounts of what the notions
analysed mean, much less scientific judgements of their truth. They are
supposed, however, by Hume and by the whole modern school of idealists,
to destroy both the meaning of these notions and the existence of their
intended objects. Having explained how, perhaps, early man, or a
hypothetical infant, might have reached his first glimmerings of
knowledge that material things exist, or souls, or causes, we are
supposed to have proved that no causes, no souls, and no material things
can exist at all. We are not allowed to ask how, in that case, we have
any evidence for the existence of early man, or of the hypothetical
infant, or of any general characteristics of the human mind, and its
tendencies to feign. The world of literature is sacred to these bookish
minds; only the world of nature and science arouses their suspicion and
their dislike. They think that “experience,” with the habits of thought
and language prevalent in all nations, from Adam down, needs only to be
imagined in order to be known truly. All but this imagined experience
seems to them the work of imagination. While their method of criticism
ought evidently to establish not merely solipsism, but a sort of
solipsism of the present datum, yet they never stop to doubt the whole
comedy of human intercourse, just as the most uncritical instinct and
the most fanciful history represent it to be. How can such a mass of
ill-attested and boldly dogmatic assumptions fail to make the critics of
science uncomfortable in their own house? Is it because the criticism of
dogma in physics, without this dogma in psychology, could never so much
as begin? Is not their criticism at bottom a work of edification or of
malice, not of philosophic sincerity, so that they reject the claim to
knowledge only in respect to certain physical, metaphysical, or
religious objects which the modern mind has become suspicious of, and
hopes to feel freer without? Meantime, they keep their conventional
social assumptions without a qualm, because they need them to justify
their moral precepts and to lend a false air of adequacy to their view
of the world. Thus we are invited to believe that our notions of
material things do not mean what they assert, but being illusions in
their deliverance, really signify only the series of perceptions that
have preceded them, or that, for some unfathomable reason, may be
expected to ensue.
All this is sheer sophistry, and limping scepticism. Certainly the
vulgar notions of nature, and even the scientific ones, are most
questionable; and they may have grown up in the way these critics
suggest; in any case they have grown up humanly. But they are not mere
images; they are beliefs; and the truth of beliefs hangs on what they
assert, not on their origin. The question is whether such an object as
they describe lies in fact in the quarter where they assert it to lie;
the genealogy of these assertions in the mind of the believer, though
interesting, is irrelevant. _It is for science and further investigation
of the object to pronounce on the truth of any belief._ It will remain a
mere belief to the end, no matter how much corroborated and corrected;
but the fact that it is a belief, far from proving that it must be
false, renders it possibly true, as it could not be if it asserted
nothing and had no object beyond itself which it pointed to and
professed to describe. This whole school criticises knowledge, not by
extending knowledge and testing it further, but by reviewing it
maliciously, on the tacit assumption that knowledge is impossible. But
in that case this review of knowledge and all this shrewd psychology are
themselves worthless; and we are reduced, as Hume was in his deeper
moments of insight, to a speechless wonder. So that whilst all the
animals trust their senses and live, philosophy would persuade man alone
not to trust them and, if he was consistent, to stop living.
This tragic conclusion might not have daunted a true philosopher, if
like the Indians he had reached it by a massive moral experience rather
than by incidental sophistries with no hold on the spirit. In that case
the impossibility of knowledge would have seemed but one illustration of
the vanity of life in general. That all is vanity was a theme sometimes
developed by Christian preachers, and even in some late books of the
Bible, with special reservations; but it is an insight contrary to
Hebraic religion, which invokes supernatural or moral agencies only in
the hope of securing earthly life and prosperity for ever. The wisdom
demanded could, therefore, not be negative or merely liberating; and
scepticism in Christian climes has always seemed demoralising. When it
forced itself on the reluctant mind, people either dismissed it as a
game not worth playing and sank back, like Hume, into common sense,
though now with a bad conscience; or else they sought some subterfuge or
equivocation by which knowledge, acknowledged to be worthless, was
nevertheless officially countersigned and passed as legal tender, so
that the earnest practice of orthodoxy, religious or worldly, or both at
once, might go on without a qualm. Evidently, to secure this result, it
was necessary to set up some oracle, independent of natural knowledge,
that should represent some deeper reality than natural knowledge could
profess to reach; and it was necessary that this oracle itself, by a
pious or a wilful oversight, should escape criticism; for otherwise all
was lost. It escaped criticism by virtue of the dramatic illusion which
always fills the sails of argument, and renders the passing conviction
the indignant voice of omniscience and justice. The principle invoked in
criticism, whatever it might be, could not be criticised. It did not
need to be defended: its credentials were the havoc it wrought among
more explicit conventions. And yet, by a mocking fatality, those
discredited conventions had to be maintained in practice, since they are
inevitable for mankind, and the basis, even by their weaknesses, of the
appeal to that higher principle which, in theory, was to revise and
reject them. This higher principle was no alternative view of the world,
no revelation of further facts or destinies; it was the thinking or
dreaming spirit that posited those necessary conventions, and would
itself die if it ceased to posit them. In discrediting the fictions of
spirit we must, therefore, beware of suspending them. We are not asked
to abolish our conception of the natural world, nor even, in our daily
life, to cease to believe in it; we are to be idealists only
north-north-west, or transcendentally; when the wind is southerly, we
are to remain realists. The pronouncements of animal faith have no doubt
been reversed in a higher court, but with this singular proviso, that
the police and the executioner, while reverently acknowledging the
authority of the higher tribunal, must unflinchingly carry out the
original sentence passed by the lower. This escape from scepticism by
ambiguity, and by introducing only cancelled dogmas, was chosen by
German philosophy at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and by
modernism and pragmatism at the end of it.
Kant was thought a sceptic in his day, and called his philosophy
criticism; but his scepticism was very impure and his criticism, though
laborious, was very uncritical. That he was regarded as a great
philosopher in the nineteenth century is due to the same causes that
made Locke seem a great philosopher in the eighteenth, not to any
intrinsic greatness. He announced some revolutionary principles, which
alarmed and excited the public, but he did not carry them out, so that
the public was reassured. In his criticism of knowledge he assumed
without question the Humian sequences of perceptions, although contrary
to his doctrine of time; and, more wisely than Hume, he never abandoned
the general sense that these perceptions had organs and objects beneath
and beyond them; but having cut off, by his malicious criticism of
knowledge, the organs and objects which perceptions notoriously have, he
was forced to forge others, artificial and metaphysical. Instead of the
body, he posited a transcendental ego, the categories of thought, and a
disembodied law of duty; instead of natural substances he posited the
unknowable. I shall revert to these subjects in discussing the realm of
matter, which is where they belong. Here I am concerned only with the
analysis of knowledge, which in Kant was most conscientious, and
valuable in spite of its rationalistic bias and its mythical solutions.
Any intelligent mind comes upon data and takes them for signs of things.
Empirical criticism consists in reverting from these objects of intent,
the things of common sense and science, to the immediate data by which
they are revealed. But since data are not vacantly stared at by an
intelligent being, but are interpreted and combined, there is evidently
a subtler element in knowledge of things than the data which empirical
criticism reverts to: namely, the principles of interpretation, since
the data are read and taken to be significant of existing objects, far
richer and more persistent and more powerful than themselves. These
principles I have summarily called animal faith, not being concerned to
propose any analysis of them that should apply to all minds or to all
objects; for I conceive, for instance, that the future, in other
animals, may be a more frequent and vivid object of animal faith than
the past or the material environment posited by human beings. But Kant,
assuming that mind everywhere must have a single grammar, investigated
very ingeniously what he conceived to be its recondite categories, and
schemata, and forms of intuition: all pompous titles for what Hume had
satirically called tendencies to feign. But Kant, in dishonouring the
intellect, at least studied it devotedly, like an alienist discovering
the logic of madness; and he gave it so elaborate an articulation, and
imposed it so rigorously on all men for ever, that people supposed he
was establishing the sciences on a solid foundation rather than
prescribing for all men a gratuitous uniformity in error. Yet this was
his true meaning: and in spite of its psychological prefaces and
metaphysical epilogues, and in spite of this pedantry about the
necessary forms of all the sciences, the heart of the Kantian system was
the most terrible negation. Among transcendental principles he placed
space, time, and causality; so that, if he had been consistent, he would
have had to regard all multiple and successive existence as imagined
only. Everything conceivable would have collapsed into the act of
conceiving it, and this act itself would have lost its terms and its
purpose, and evaporated into nothing. But not at all; as if aware that
all his conclusions were but curiosities in speculation and academic
humours, he continued to think of experience as progressing in time,
trifled most earnestly with astronomy and geography, and even comforted
the pious with a postulate of immortality, as if time existed otherwise
than in imagination. In fact, these backslidings were his amiable side:
he always retained a certain humanity and wisdom, being much more
thoroughly saturated with his conventional presuppositions than with his
extravagant conclusions.
A philosopher, however, must be taken at his best, or at his worst; in
any case, his pure doctrine must be freed as far as possible from its
personal alloy: and the pure doctrine of Kant was that knowledge is
impossible. Anything I could perceive or think was _ipso facto_ a
creature of my sense or thought. Nature, history, God and the other
world, even a man’s outspread experience, could be things imagined only.
Thought—for it was still assumed that there was thought—was a bubble,
self-inflated at every moment, in an infinite void. All else was
imaginary; no world could be anything but the iridescence of that empty
sphere. And this transcendental thought, so rich in false perspectives,
could it be said to exist anywhere, or at any time, or for any reason?
Here we touch one of those ambiguities and mystifications in which
German philosophy takes refuge when pressed; strong in the attack, it
dissolves if driven to the defensive. Transcendentalism, in so far as it
is critical, is a method only; the principles by which data are
interpreted come into play whenever intelligence is at work. The
occasions for this exercise, as a matter of fact, are found in animal
life; and while every mind, at every moment, is the seat and measure of
its own understanding, and creates its own knowledge (though, of course,
not the objects on which animal life is directed and which it professes
to know) yet the quality and degree of this intelligence may vary
indefinitely from age to age and from animal to animal. Transcendental
principles are accordingly only principles of local perspective, the
grammar of fancy in this or that natural being quickened to imagination,
and striving to understand what it endures and to utter what it deeply
wills. The study of transcendental logic ought, therefore, to be one of
the most humane, tender, tentative of studies: nothing but sympathetic
poetry and insight into the hang and rhythm of various thoughts. It
should be the finer part of literary psychology. But such is not the
transcendentalism of the absolute transcendentalists. For them the
grammar of thought is single and compulsory. It is the method of the
creative fiat by which not this or that idea of the universe, but the
universe itself, comes into being. The universe has only a specious
existence; and the method by which specious existence is evoked in
thought is divine and identical in all thinking.
But why divine, and why always identical? And why any thinking at all,
or any process or variation in discourse, other than the given
perspectives of the present vision? At this point vertigo seizes the
transcendentalist, and he no longer knows what he means. On the one
hand, phenomena cannot be produced by an agency prior to them, for his
first principle is that all existence is phenomenal and exists only in
being posited or discovered. Will, Life, Duty, or whatever he calls this
transcendental agency, by which the illusions of nature and history are
summoned from the vasty deep, cannot be a fact, since all facts are
created by its incantations. On the other hand phenomena cannot be
substantial on their own account, for then they would not be phenomena
but things, and no transcendental magician, himself non-existent and
non-phenomenal, would be needed to produce them.
Absolute transcendentalism—the only radical form of a psychological
criticism of knowledge—is accordingly not a thinkable nor a stable
doctrine. It is merely a habit of speaking ambiguously, with a just
sense for the living movement of thought and a romantic contempt for its
deliverance. Self-consciousness cannot be, as this school strove to make
it, a first principle of criticism: it is far too complex and derivative
for that. But transcendentalism is a legitimate attitude for a poet in
his dramatic reflections and romantic soliloquies; it is the principle
of perspective in thought, the scenic art of the mental theatre. The
fully awakened soul, looking about it in this strange world, may well
believe that it is dreaming. It may review its shifting memories, with a
doubt whether they were ever anything in themselves. It may marshal all
things in ideal perspectives about the present moment, and esteem them
important and even real only in so far as they diversify the mental
landscape. And to compensate it for the visionary character which the
world takes on, it may cultivate the sense (by no means illusory) of
some deep fountain of feeling and fancy within the self. Such wistful
transcendentalism is akin to principles which in India long ago inspired
very deep judgements upon life. It may be practised at will by any
reflective person who is minded to treat the universe, for the time
being, as so much furniture for his dreams.
Yet this attitude, seeing that man is not a solitary god but an animal
in a material and social world, must be continually abandoned. It must
be abandoned precisely when a man does or thinks anything important. Its
own profundity is dreamful, and, so to speak, digestive: action, virtue,
and wisdom sound another note. It is therefore no worthy philosophy; and
in fact the Germans, whose philosophy it is, while so dutiful in their
external discipline, are sentimental and immoral in their spiritual
economy. If a learned and placid professor tells me he is creating the
universe by positing it in his own mind according to eternal principles
of logic and duty, I may smile and admire such an inimitable mixture of
enthusiasm and pedantry, profundity and innocence. Yet there is
something sinister in this transcendentalism, apparently so pure and
blameless; it really expresses and sanctions the absoluteness of a
barbarous soul, stubborn in its illusions, vulgar in its passions, and
cruel in its zeal—cruel especially to itself, as barbarism always is,
because it feeds and dilates its will as if its will were an absolute
power, whereas it is nothing but a mass of foolish impulses and boasts
ending in ignominy. Moreover, transcendentalism cannot even supply a
thorough criticism of knowledge, which would demand that the ideas of
self, of activity, and of consciousness should be disintegrated and
reduced to the immediate. In the immediate, however, there is no
transcendental force nor transcendental machinery, not even a set of
perceptions nor an experience, but only some random essence, staring and
groundless.
I hope I have taken to heart what the schools of Hume and Kant have to
offer by way of disintegrating criticism of knowledge, and that in
positing afresh the notions of substance, soul, nature, and discourse, I
have done so with my eyes open. These notions are all subject to doubt;
but so, also, are the notions proposed instead by psychological
philosophers. None of these have reached the limit of possible doubt;
yet the dogmas they have retained, being romantic prejudices, are
incoherent and incapable of serving as the basis for any reasonable
system: and in a moral sense they are the very opposite of philosophy.
When pressed, their negations end in solipsism and their affirmations in
rhapsody. Far from purging the mind and strengthening it, that it might
gain a clearer and more stable vision of the world, these critics have
bewildered it with a multitude of methods and vistas, the expression of
the confusion reigning in their day between natural science and
religious faith, and between psychology and scepticism.
My endeavour has been to restore these things to their natural places,
without forgetting the assumptions on which they rest. But the chief
difference between my criticism of knowledge and theirs lies in the
conception of knowledge itself. The Germans call knowledge
_Wissenschaft_, as if it were something to be found in books, a
catalogue of information, and an encyclopædia of the sciences. But the
question is whether all this _Wissenschaft_ is knowledge or only
learning. My criticism is criticism of myself: I am talking of what I
believe in my active moments, as a living animal, when I am really
believing something: for when I am reading books belief in me is at its
lowest ebb; and I lend myself to the suasion of eloquence with the same
pleasure (when the book is well written) whether it be the _Arabian
Nights_ or the latest philosophy. My criticism is not essentially a
learned pursuit, though habit may sometimes make my language scholastic;
it is not a choice between artificial theories; it is the discipline of
my daily thoughts and the account I actually give to myself from moment
to moment of my own being and of the world around me. I should be
ashamed to countenance opinions which, when not arguing, I did not
believe. It would seem to me dishonest and cowardly to militate under
other colours than those under which I live. Merely learned views are
not philosophy; and therefore no modern writer is altogether a
philosopher in my eyes, except Spinoza; and the critics of knowledge in
particular seem to me as feeble morally as they are technically.
I should like, therefore, to turn to the ancients and breathe again a
clear atmosphere of frankness and honour; but in the present business
they are not very helpful. The Indians were poets and mystics; and while
they could easily throw off the conventions of vulgar reason, it was
often only to surrender themselves to other conventions, far more
misleading to a free spirit, such as the doctrine of transmigration of
souls; and when, as in Buddhism, they almost vanquished that illusion,
together with every other, their emasculated intellect had nothing to
put in its place. The Greeks on the contrary were rhetoricians; they
seldom or never reverted to the immediate for a foothold in thought,
because the immediate lies below the level of language and of political
convention. But they were disputatious, and in that sense no opinion
escaped their criticism. In this criticism they simply pitted one
plausible opinion against another, supporting each in turn by all
conceivable arguments, based on no matter what prejudices or
presumptions. The result of this forensic method was naturally a
suspense of rational judgement, favourable now to frivolity and now to
superstition. The frivolity appeared in the Sophists who, seeing that
nothing was certain, impudently assumed as true whatever it was socially
convenient to advocate. Protagoras seems to have reduced this bad habit
to an honest system, when he taught that each occasion is, for itself,
the ultimate judge of truth. This, taken psychologically, is evidently
the case: a mind cannot judge on other subjects nor on other evidences
than are open to it when judging. But the judging moment need not judge
truly; and to maintain (as Protagoras does in Plato’s _Dialogue_ and as
some pragmatists have done in our day) that all momentary opinions are
equal in truth, though not equal in value, is to fail in radical
scepticism: for it is to assume many moments, and knowledge (utterly
inexplicable on these principles) of their several sequences and import;
and to assume something even more wanton, a single standard of value by
which to judge them all. Such incoherence is not surprising in sophists
whose avowed purpose in philosophising is to survive and succeed in this
world, or perhaps in the next. Worldly people will readily admit that
some ideas are better than others, even if both sets are equally false.
The interest in truth for its own sake is not a worldly interest, but
the human soul is capable of it; and there might be spirits directed on
the knowledge of truth as upon their only ultimate good, as there might
be spirits addressed exclusively to music. Which arts and sciences are
worth pursuing, and how far, is a question for the moralist, to be
answered in each case in view of the faculties and genius of the persons
concerned, and their opportunities. Socrates may humorously eschew all
science that is useless to cobblers; he thereby expresses his plebeian
hard sense, and his Hellenic joy in discourse and in moral apologues;
but if he allows this pleasant prejudice to blind him to the possibility
of physical discoveries, or of cogent mathematics, he becomes a simple
sophist. The moralist needs true knowledge of nature—even a little
astronomy—in order to practise the art of life in a becoming spirit; and
an agnosticism which was not merely personal, provisional, and humble
would be the worst of dogmas.
A sinking society, with its chaos of miscellaneous opinions, touches the
bottom of scepticism in this sense, that it leaves no opinion
unchallenged. But as a complete suspense of judgement is physically
impossible in a living animal, every sceptic of the decadence has to
accept some opinion or other. Which opinions he accepts, will depend on
his personal character or his casual associations. His philosophy
therefore deserts him at the threshold of life, just when it might cease
to be a verbal accomplishment; in other words, he is at intervals a
sophist, but at no time a philosopher. Nevertheless, among the Greek
sceptics there were noble minds. They turned their scepticism into an
expression of personal dignity and an argument for detachment. In such
scepticism every one who practises philosophy must imitate them; for why
should I pledge myself absolutely to what in fact is not certain?
Physics and theology, to which most philosophies are confined, are
dubious in their first principles: which is not to say that nothing in
them is credible. If we assert that one thing is more probable than
another, as did the sceptics of the Academy, we have adopted a definite
belief, we profess to have some hold on the nature of things at large, a
law seems to us to rule events, and the lust of scepticism in us is
chastened. This belief in nature, with a little experience and good
sense to fill in the picture, is almost enough by way of belief. Nor can
a man honestly believe less. An active mind never really loses the
conviction that it is scenting the way of the world.
Living when human faith is again in a state of dissolution, I have
imitated the Greek sceptics in calling doubtful everything that, in
spite of common sense, any one can possibly doubt. But since life and
even discussion forces me to break away from a complete scepticism, I
have determined not to do so surreptitiously nor at random,
ignominiously taking cover now behind one prejudice and now behind
another. Instead, I have frankly taken nature by the hand, accepting as
a rule in my farthest speculations the animal faith I live by from day
to day. There are many opinions which, though questionable, are
inevitable to a thought attentive to appearance, and honestly expressive
of action. These natural opinions are not miscellaneous, such as those
which the Sophists embraced in disputation. They are superposed in a
biological order, the stratification of the life of reason. In rising
out of passive intuition, I pass, by a vital constitutional necessity,
to belief in discourse, in experience, in substance, in truth, and in
spirit. All these objects may conceivably be illusory. Belief in them,
however, is not grounded on a prior probability, but all judgements of
probability are grounded on them. They express a rational instinct or
instinctive reason, the waxing faith of an animal living in a world
which he can observe and sometimes remodel.
This natural faith opens to me various Realms of Being, having very
different kinds of reality in themselves and a different status in
respect to my knowledge of them. I hope soon to invite the friendly
reader to accompany me in a further excursion through those tempting
fields.
INDEX
Analysis and synthesis, 117-119
Animation, not behaviour, 244-246;
an expression of mechanism, not a substitute, 246, 247;
conceived dramatically, 248, 249
Anthropomorphism excusable, 147, 148
Appearance, two senses of the word, 39, 43
Apperception, timeless, 24, 25, 28-30;
its physical ground, 282
_Arabian Nights_, 67, 160, 305
Aristotle, his metaphysics, vii;
identifies essence with intuition, 126-129;
on God, 130, 131;
on substance, 190;
on entelechies, 217
Arts, creative like the senses, 87, 102
Astronomy, good for moralists, 307
Behaviour, theme of scientific psychology, 243-246
Belief, not implied in intuition, 16;
enacted before it is asserted, 264
Berkeley, alluded to, 58;
his direct intuition, 68;
his nominalism, 97
Brahma, 18, 19, 51
British and German philosophy criticises perception, not memory, 13;
only literature, 254
Buddhism, 306
Causation, 210
Change, feeling of it not a change, 25;
known by faith only, 26;
may be illusion, 30;
fallacious disproofs of it, 31, 32
Common sense, roughly sound, v
Contingency of all existence, 134, 135
Contradiction an essence of discourse, 121, 137
Criticism, empirical and transcendental, 3, 4;
arises by conflict of dogmas, 8;
depends on literary psychology, 187;
should appeal to living beliefs, 305
Data, non-existentials, 45;
universals, 54;
their basis cerebral, 56
Dateless, defined, 270
Democritus, ix, 55
Demonstration, assumes discourse, 115-119
Descartes, 17;
doubts facts only, 289;
_cogito ergo sum_, 290-293
Dialectic, not true unless descriptive, 28;
involves belief in memory, 119, 120
Discourse, an event, 119;
involved in positing anything, 124;
distinguished late, 193
Dogma, how precipitated, 6
Empiricism admits substance, 199-201
Entelechy, 130, 217
Error distinguishes discourse from its objects, 123
_Esse est percipi_, 58
Essences adumbrated, 35, 38, 39, 48;
simile of the costumer’s shop, 70-72;
introduced, 73, 74;
defined further, 75-78;
necessary terms in knowledge, 80-82;
of any complexity, 116, 262;
infinitely comminuted, 129;
without inherent values, 130;
not limited to Platonic ideas, 225
Eternal, defined, 271
Eternity, 112
Euclid, 86, 121;
his space, 116, 117
Events involve substance, 230-232
Everlasting, defined, 271
Evidence, two meanings, 43, 44, 99
Existence, the sense of it, 24, 25, 187, 188;
not a datum, 34-38;
presence to intuition neither sufficient for it nor necessary, 45-47;
its physical definition, 48;
odious to logic, 48, 206;
name for an object of faith, 42;
felt as pure Being posited, 273
Expectation, irrational as hunger, 36
Experience, use of the word, 138;
naturally conditioned, transcendentally primary, 23, 24;
conceived as a life, 57;
is discourse interrupted by shocks, 143;
belief in it imposed by instinct, not by experience itself, 144;
its primitive texture, 188, 189;
imagined experience hypostatised, 255, 256;
reduced to blank feeling or extended to dreams, 260
Explanation, 208
Fact, 228, 229;
never a datum, 91;
denied if regarded as a concept, 60
Faith prior to intuition, 107
Fichte, 62, 63, 184, 185
Future, an assumption, 36;
rash notion of it, 235
God assimilated to nature, 237;
to truth, 268;
to the spirit of a cosmos, 130, 131
Hamlet, 27, 58, 95
Heraclitus, ix, 29
History, dependent for its validity on physics, 13;
interfused with fiction, 160;
partly literary psychology, 253
Hume, his sharp intuition, 67, 68;
criticism by retrenchment, 293;
residual assumptions, 294;
analysis of conventions, 295;
sophistical result, 296, 297
Ideas not beliefs unless action is suggested, 16;
Platonic ideas, 222-224
Identification an act of faith, 117, 119
Identity felt under diverse appearances, 153
Illusion, three ways out of it, 72
Immortal, defined, 271
Indian philosophy, viii, 51-55, 67, 305, 306
Instantaneous, defined, 270
Intelligence expresses animal adjustments, 281
Intent, 100, 137, 166, 167
Interpretation obscures the datum, 67, 68
Introjection, 241
Intuition yields only appearance, 24;
denied by sceptics, 58;
an expression of animal wakefulness, 133;
does not think, 150;
may exist behind observable facts, 258;
divined by sympathy, 221, 250;
most communicable when most articulate, 251
Ionian physics, vii, viii
Kant, 4, 97;
his incoherence, 298;
his analysis of knowledge, 299, 300;
destructive results, 301
Karma, 54
Knowledge, impossible with nothing to know, 60;
is symbolical, 95, 96, 98, 101;
has a removed object, 154;
bridges the flux, 161;
its animal basis, 164, 172;
may recover essences given elsewhere, 168, 169;
not intuition, 170, 171;
the object identified by bodily attitude (illustration of the moon),
172-177;
though symbolical progressive, 177-179;
may be adequate to discourse elsewhere, 207;
when pictorially adequate it is still faith, 107
Life of reason, 109, 110
Literary psychology, 174;
possibly true, 259;
turned into metaphysics, 293, 294
Logic, partly creative, partly descriptive, vi;
not coercive over fact, _ibid._, 2, 3;
studies essence, not truth, 262
Memory, presence of the absent, 141;
is direct, 151;
posits animation, 242;
in a natural setting, 150, 158;
pictorial exactitude possible but worthless, 152, 153;
stationed in the present, which frames the past, 154, 155;
may be truer than experience, 156;
should be selective, 157;
criticised only by fancy, 160
Metaphysics confuses different realms of being, vii, 203, 208, 209, 218
Natural philosophy, vii;
present ferment in it, ix;
progresses in knowledge, 218;
has a poetic side, 234
Nature, the total object of perception, 197, 198;
connotations of the word, 234;
uniformity of nature an assumption, _ibid._;
tested and embodied in art, 236, 239
Nirvana, 51
Object, use and misuse of the word, 202, 203
Order of genesis, of discovery, 109;
of evidence, 110
Pain, 65, 66, 280
Parmenides, 29, 55, 61
Past, an object of faith, 29;
may be illusory, 36, 37
Perception, not intuition but faith expressing a bodily response, 282,
283
Permanence given in experience, 193, 195
Phenomena, in Platonism, 224;
in modern philosophy, 225, 226
Plato, 69, 78, 85, 225, 226, 306
Platonic ideas, selected essences, 77;
hypostatised, 222-224
Positing, propriety of the term, 184
Primary and secondary qualities, 82-90
Protagoras, 306
Psyche, 19, 147, 156. Cf. _Self_
Psychologism, 256, 292
Psychology, scientific and literary, 252;
supports the non-existence of data, 63-66
Pythagoras, ix
Reality, meaning of the term, 33, 34;
eulogistic use of it, 51, 210
Reason, not a force, 186;
principle of sufficient reason, 289
Religious dogmas easily doubted, 11, 12
Scepticism, a conflict of dogmas, 8;
an accident in philosophy, 9;
rich in ideas, 67;
a trance state, 69;
would be the best philosophy if tenable, 100, 186;
deprecated in Christian times, 297
Sceptics in Greece, some sophists, 307;
some true philosophers, 308
Schopenhauer, 68
Self, evidence for its existence, 146;
may be denied, 148, 290;
is obscure, 149;
an almost perpetual object, 291
Sensations and ideas, ambiguous uses of the terms, 86-90, 188, 225
Shock, distinguishes experience from pure discourse, 139, 141;
prompts to belief in the self and in the object, 142
Socrates, his favourite essences, 78;
his utilitarianism in science, 307
Solipsism, untenable if personal, 13;
tenable if of the present moment, 15, 16
Sophists, 306
Soul, genesis of the notion, 216;
analysis of it, 218-221
Spinoza, right on chief issue, viii;
thinks ideas beliefs, 16;
defines the realm of essence, 129;
a philosopher in the better sense, 305
Spirit, non-existential for transcendentalists, 62;
at home in intuition, 125, 126;
implied in it, 147;
ready to be omniscient, 116;
timeless and supernatural in status, 161, 162;
distrusts substance but lives by it, 147;
is no datum, 272;
often more than intuition, 273, 274;
expresses animal life, 276-280;
is not a substance, 286-288
Spiritual substance, a contradiction, 217;
how suggested, _ibid._
Substance, posited by intent expressing animal reaction, 106;
belief in it primordial, 185, 187;
prior to intuition, 188;
revealed on its dynamic side, not pictorially, 197;
not metaphysical, 201, 202;
the material in things, 203;
not duplicated by them, 204;
explains their genesis and distribution, 209;
connects appearances, 212
Surprise, not occasioned by contingency, 136;
incompatible with omniscience, 276
Timeless, defined, 270
Transcendentalism, properly a method only, 25;
its subject and object false, _ibid._;
denies all existences, 59-63;
its ambiguity, 297, 298;
a part of literary psychology, 301;
its metaphysical form, 302;
must be abandoned in practice, 303;
its latent barbarism, 304
Truth, may be conveyed through symbols, 179-181;
mistaken for substance, 226-228;
possible in literary psychology, 259;
not proper to names or values, 263;
ignored by supposing things to change with the views of them,
264-266;
not an existence, not an opinion, not certitude, but the ultimate
description of things in all their relations, 267, 268;
the subjective seat of opinions does not jeopardise it, 306;
may be loved for its own sake, 307
Unity of apperception, 25
Universals, data of intuition, 91, 93
Universe, not known as a whole, vi;
may be a chaos, 235, 237
Vagueness, relative, 94, 95
Variation involves eternal essences, 113, 114
Vedanta, 61
THE END
● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).