England has been curiously served by her philosophers. Personally and
in their first intention they have usually been sturdy Britons; but
their scope has seldom been equal to their sagacity in particular
matters, they have not divined the ultimate drift of their ideas, and
they have often ended by adopting, a little blankly and doggedly, some
foreign or fantastic system, apparently most inexpressive of John Bull.
Nevertheless the exotic tendency in so many British philosophers, as
in so many disaffected British poets, is itself a mark of the British
character. The crust of convention has solidified too soon, and the
suppressed fires issue in little erratic streams that seem of an alien
substance. In speculation as in other things the Englishman trusts
his inner man; his impulse is to soliloquize even in science. At the
same time his inner man dislikes to be too articulate; he is soon at a
stand in direct self-expression; and as a poet may take to describing
nature or Italian passions, so a philosopher may pick up some alien
doctrine that comes to hand, and that seems friendly to his mind; not
understanding it very well, perhaps, in its native quality, but making
it a living companion in his own lucubrations, and a symbol for what
remains hidden but revered in his breast. In this way the Bible or
Plato may serve him to found sects upon exclusively expressing his own
feelings; or remaining a plain Englishman to all practical purposes,
he may become, for his greater private satisfaction, a revolutionary
atheist, a spiritualist, a Catholic, or a Buddhist. In such strange
allegiances something may be due to wayward learning, or to genuine
plasticity of mind and power to feel as very different souls have felt
in other climes; but a part is unmistakable helplessness and dire need,
and a part, perhaps, affectation.
When his own resources fail, however, the most obvious easement and
support for the English inner man are the classical and Anglican
traditions he has been bred in, when these are not too nicely defined
nor too slavishly followed. Most characteristic is John Bull the
theologian, instinct with heresy and practising compromise; but the
rationalistic John Bull is very like him in his alternative way of
securing the same supreme object of thinking what he likes to think.
In both cases he embraces his opinions much more because they are
wholesome and important than because they are certain or clear.
Opinions, he feels, should be summary and safe; they should express the
lessons of experience.
As he conceives it at first, experience does not merely exist, it
teaches. In a sporadic fashion it yields sound satisfactions, clear
warnings, plain facts. It admonishes him to trust his senses, the
reports of reputable travellers and naturalists, Christianity, and
the British constitution, all when duly revised; and on the other
hand to shun popery, scholastic quibbles, absolutism, and revolution.
But evidently experience could never teach him these things if his
inner man did not contribute its decided cravings and aversions.
His inner man detests dictation and loves opportunity; in ideas it
prefers timeliness to finality. Therefore, when his philosophers come
upon the scene they cannot appeal to him by coercive proofs, nor by
the impressive architecture of their systems, nor by disentangling
and setting clearly before him any ultimate ideal. To win his ear
they must rather drive his current convictions home, nearer to their
source in himself; they must invite him to concentrate his empiricism.
For instance, he trusts his senses; and the philosophers can deeply
interest him if they ask him what, precisely, his senses vouch for. Is
it external things? But can he actually see anything except colours,
or touch anything except resistances? Can he feel anything except his
own sensations? By appealing to his honesty, the sophists catch him
in a trap, and he changes his mind in trying to utter it. It will
appear presently, as he pursues his inquiry, that he has no knowledge
of those external things and events which he had been so sure of;
they were mere empty notions, and his genuine experience contained
nothing but the pulses of his inner life, changes in his ideas and
vital temperature, which an accurate autobiography might record. And
the more scrupulously he considers these pulses of his inner life the
less and less will he find in them. He and his whole experience will
soon be reduced to a series of sensations in single file, with nothing
behind them. In reality even this is too much. Although the inertia of
psychological conventions and the romantic habit of self-consciousness
have kept him from perceiving it, even to this day, yet the fact that
a sensation is occurring is not revealed by that sensation itself; no
date, place, or relation to a mind is included in its deliverance, and
no relation to anything before or beyond; so that the bare datum of
sensation is an aesthetic being, not a mental one; an ideal term, not
an event; a universal essence, not a particular fact; and immersion
in sense or in absolute immediate experience, when animal faith and
intelligence are taken away from it, would remove from us every vestige
of the notion that anything exists or that anything happens. But
without pushing analysis so far, the empirical philosophers left John
Bull, when he listened to them, singularly bereft of those comfortable
impedimenta with which he had expected to travel through life--without
a body, without an environment, without a ground, or any natural
perfection or destiny, for his moral being. He had loved exploration,
and had looked forward with the flush of confidence to the knowledge
and power which his discoveries would bring him; but now he saw that
all discoveries were incalculable, arbitrary, and provisional, since
they were not truly discoveries, but only developments.
Here was an odd transformation. The self-educated merchants and
indignant reformers who, thumping their desks dogmatically, had
appealed so roundly to the evidence of their senses, little expected
that their philosophy was directed to turning them in the end into
inarticulate sensualists, rapt in omphalic contemplation of their
states of mind. Some academic idealists, disliking this result, which
cast a slur on the pre-eminence of spirituality and learning, and yet
not being willing or able to give up the method by which that result
had been reached, sought to push the inquiry further, and to come out
of the wood on quite the other side. My sensations, they said, since
I can now survey the whole series they form, must all exist together
in my present apprehension; and as I cannot know them except in this
single and present glance, they never can have existed out of it; so
that I am not really a series of sensations, but only the idea that
I am a series of sensations; in other words, I have become a single
sensation instead of many. To make this clearer the same philosophers
added that this single sensation or thought, which is what I really am,
is also God. Experience now turned out not to be anything that goes
on or happens or is endured; it is the theme of an immutable divine
contemplation and divine satisfaction. I am God in so far as I think
and approve; but the chequered experience which I supposed myself to be
undergoing is merely imputed to myself by God and me in our thinking.
This second conclusion, like the first, has its value for some
temperaments. It brings suddenly before us, as if it were an
accomplished fact, the innate ideal of the intellect: to see the
changing aspects of all things from above, in their true eternal
relations. But this ideal, too, is utterly disparate from that
practical experience and prevision which John Bull prizes so highly and
thinks he possesses; indeed, the sublimity of this view lies precisely
in its tendency to freeze and submerge all experience, transmuting hard
facts and anxious events into painted ships upon a painted ocean, and
for our stumbling and unfinished progress substituting a bound volume
of travels.
What false step could bring British philosophy, in its gropings,
to conclusions so un-English that even those who feel compelled to
propose them do so shamefacedly, with many euphemisms and convenient
confusions, or even fail altogether to understand the tremendous
paradoxes they are repeating? It was a false step at which Hobbes
halted, which Locke took unsuspectingly, and which sent Berkeley and
Hume head over heels: the assumption that facts are known immediately.
In reality none of the facts which the sturdy Briton feels that he
knows--and they are the true facts of nature and of moral life--would
be known to him if he were without tentative intelligence and
instinctive animal faith; indeed, without these the senses would have
no virtue and would inform us of nothing; and cows would not see
grass nor horses hay, but only green or yellow patches, like rapt
empirical philosophers. When Hobbes said that no discourse whatsoever
can end in absolute knowledge of fact, he uttered a great truth, but
he implied a great error, since he implied that sense--meaning the
senseless sensations of idiots--could give such knowledge; whereas
the absolute datum in sense is just as ideal, and just as little
a fact, as the deliverance of the most theoretical discourse; and
absolute knowledge--if we call such apprehension knowledge--can seize
only some aesthetic or logical term, without any given date, place,
or connection in experience. Empiricism in the end must substitute
these ideal essences, on the ground that they are the only data, for
the facts of nature--facts which animal reactions and the beliefs
expressing them are requisite to discover, and which science defines by
the cumulative use of reason. In making this substitution empiricism
passes against its will into sensualism or idealism. Then John Bull
and his philosophers part company: he sticks manfully to his confused
conventional opinions, which after all give him a very tolerable
knowledge of the facts; while they go digging for an absolute knowledge
of fact, which is impossible, in an intuitive cloudland where there
are only aesthetic essences. Hence the bankruptcy of their enterprise.
Immediate data are the counters of experience, but they are the money
of empiricism.
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