Experience is a fine word, but what does it mean? It seems to carry
with it a mixed sense of mastery and disappointment, suggesting
knowledge of a sort with despair of better knowledge. Is it such
contact with events as nobody can avoid, shocks and pressure
endured from circumstances and from the routine of the world? But a
cricket-ball has no experience, although it comes in contact with many
hands, receives hard knocks, and plays its part in the vicissitudes of
a protracted game. There are men in much the same case; they travel,
they undergo an illness or a conversion, and after a little everything
in them is exactly as it was before; [Greek: _pathos_] with them is not
[Greek: _pathos_]; their natures are so faithful to the _a priori_ and
so elastic that they rebound from the evidence of sense and the buffets
of fortune like a rubber bag full of wind; they pass through life with
round eyes open, and a perpetual instinctive babble, and yet in the
moral sense of the word they have no experience, not being mindful
enough to acquire any. It would seem that to gather anything we must
first pause, and that before we can have experience we must have minds.
Yet if we said that experience arose by the operation of mind, would
not all the operations of mind be equally experience? Has not a maniac
probably more and more vivid experience than a man of the world?
Doubtless when people call their fancies or thoughts experience,
they mean to imply that they have an external source, as "religious
experience" is assumed to manifest divine intervention, and "psychical
experience" to prove the self-existence of departed spirits. But
these assumptions are not empirical; and evidently the religious or
psychical experience itself, whatever its cause, is the only empirical
fact in the case. Those who appeal to the _lessons_ of experience are
not empiricists, for these are lessons that only reason can learn.
Experience, as practical people understand it, is not every sort of
consciousness or memory, but only such as is addressed to the facts
of nature and controlled by the influence of those facts; material
contact or derivation is essential to it. Experience is both physical
and mental, the intellectual fruit of a material intercourse. It
presupposes animal bodies in contact with things, and it presupposes
intelligent minds in those bodies, keeping count of the shocks
received, understanding their causes, and expecting their recurrence
as it will actually take place. To these naturalistic convictions
all those ought to have clung who valued experience as a witness
rather than as a sensation; without animals in a natural environment
experience, as contrasted with fancy or intuition, can neither be nor
be conceived. It means so much of knowledge and readiness as is fetched
from contact with events by a teachable and intelligent creature; it is
a fund of wisdom gathered by living in familiar intercourse with things.
But such assumptions are an offence to the expert empiricist. The
moment he comes upon the scene we feel that all we thought experience
had taught us is going to be disproved. "Do you admit," he begins by
asking, "that nothing can be more real than experience?" We do admit
it. "And can you ever know anything that is not experience?" Perhaps
not; and yet would experience be very distinct or very significant
if it was experience of nothing? "Of nothing, indeed," he retorts,
withering us with a scornful glance and the consciousness of his
masked batteries; "as if experience itself was nothing! Experience
is everything; and when you have experience of experience what more
could you ask for, even if you were Doctor Faustus in person? What
spurious little non-empirical particle is this _of_ of yours? And what
illegitimate ghost is this _something else_ that experience should be
_of_? Can you, without confessing to an adulterous intercourse with
what is not experience, explain these natural but disreputable members
of your intellectual family?" We cannot explain them, and we blush.
Yet why should experience arise at all if there is no occasion for it?
"Occasion!" cries the empiricist; "another illegal figment, the old
notion of cause! Is it not notorious that causation is nothing but the
habit which some parts of experience have of following upon others? How
then should the whole of it follow upon any part? Experience cannot
spring from anything, it cannot express anything, and it cannot know
anything, because experience is all there is."
Here is a considerable retrenchment in the scope of our philosophy: no
material world, no soul, and (in the proper sense of the words) no God
and no knowledge. Retrenchment, however, is often a sign of wisdom,
and the retrenching empiricist deserves to be followed, like the
retrenching hermit, into his psychological wilderness, not with a vow
never to return to the world, for that would be precipitate, but in the
hope of sounding, in one direction, the depths of spiritual discipline
and disillusion. And the empirical eremite can taste rare pleasures.
All things, for him, become the appanage of the inner man; and we need
not wonder that the pensive Englishman is ready to be empirical in this
sense and to become an idealist. The _lessons_ of experience, if he was
forced to take them seriously, might tend to dethrone his inner man and
lead him to materialism; but fortunately the lessons of experience,
for an empiricist, can be nothing but little epicycles within it, or
cross-references to its literal text; they cannot spoil its intimate
and romantic nature, which is to be no end of pulsations and no end of
pictures. How dead would anything external or permanent be, even if we
thought we could find it! How abstract would be anything common to all
times and places, how terrible a mocking truth that should overarch
them for ever!
It is true that the romantic empiricist is not very radical; he
commonly stops short of any doubts on the validity of memory, with
all the yarns it spins; his past adventures and his growth are too
fascinating for him to doubt their reality. Sometimes he even trusts
a superstitious prophecy, under the name of logical evolution,
foretelling what his destiny is somehow compelled to be. At other times
he prefers to leave the future ambiguous, so that the next step may
lead him anywhere, perhaps to heaven, provided it is understood that
his career, even there, is always to remain an unfinished voyage in an
uncharted sea. In strictness, however, he has no right to this fond
interest in himself. If he became a perfect empiricist he would trust
experience only if it taught him absolutely nothing, even about his
own past. This is hard for the flesh, and it may not be fair to ask
an empiricist to be heroic in the interests of logic; but if he could
screw his courage up for the plunge, his spirit might find itself
perfectly at home in the new situation. What he might have been or
might have thought, he would dismiss as a dead issue; he would watch
only his present life as it flowed, and he would love exclusively what
he was becoming. There is a sense of safety in being and not thinking
which probably all the animals know, and there is a mystical happiness
in accepting existence without understanding it; but the sense of
safety does not render the animals really safe, and the price they
pay for living in the moment is that they carry nothing over from one
moment to another except bare existence itself. The disadvantage of
radical empiricism is that it shuts out experience.
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