^%l^ UNIVERSITY of CALnUiM-iir. AT LOS ANGELES LIBRARY THE LIFE OF REASON OR THE PHASES OF HUMAN PROGRESS BY GEORGE SANTAYANA INTRODUCTION AND REASON IN COMMON SENSE ij yap vov evtpyeia ^corj NEW YORK •CHARLES SCRIBNP:R'S SONS 192Q Copyright, 1905, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published, February, 1906 ::97 4 J6 94. i Red y qcown CONTENTS INTRODUCTION THE SUBJECT OP THIS WORK, ITS METHOD AND ANTE- CEDENTS Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates. — Efficacious reflection is reason. — ^The Life of Reason a name for all practical thought and all action justified by its fruits in consciousness. — It is the sum of Art. — It has a natural basis which makes it definable. — Modern philosophy not helpful. — Positivism no positive ideal. — Christian philosophy mythical: it misrepresents facts and conditions. — Liberal theology a superstitious attitude toward a natural world. — The Greeks thought straight in both physics and morals. — Heraclitus and the imme- diate. — Democritus and the naturally intelligible. — Socrates and the autonomy of mind. — Plato gave the ideal its full expression. — Aristotle supplied its natural basis. — Philosophy thus complete, yet in need of re- statement. — Plato's myths in lieu of physics. — Aristotle's final causes. — Modem science can avoid such expedi- ents. — ^Transcendentalism true but inconsequential. — Verbal ethics. — Spinoza and the Life of Reason. — Mod- em and classic sources of inspiration Pages 1-32 REASON IN COMMON SENSE CHAPTER I THE BIRTH OF REASON Existence always has an Order, called Chaos when incompatible with a chosen good. — Absolute order, or truth, is static, impotent, indifferent. — In experience order is relative to interests which determine the moral Vi CONTENTS status of all powers. — The discovered conditions of reason not its beginning. — The flux first. — Life the fixation of interests. — Primary dualities. — First gropings. — Instinct the nucleus of reason. — Better and worse the fundamental categories Pages 35-47 CHAPTER II FIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS Dreams before thoughts. — The mind vegetates uncon- trolled save by physical forces. — Internal order super- venes. — Intrinsic pleasure in existence. — Pleasure a good, but not pursued or remembered unless it suffuses an object. — Subhuman delights. — Animal living. — Causes at last discerned. — Attention guided by bodily impulse. Pages 48-63 CHAPTER III THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS Nature man's home. — Difficulties in conceiving nature. — Transcendental qualms. — Thought an aspect of life and transitive. — Perception cumulative and synthetic. — Xo identical agent needed. — Example of the sun. — His prim- itive divinity. — Causes and essences contrasted. — Voracity of intellect. — Can the transcendent be known? — Can the immediate be meant? — Is thought a bridge from sensa- tion to sensation? — Mens naturaliter platonica. — Identity and independence predicated of things Pages 64-S3 CHAPTER IV ON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERT Psychology' as a solvent. — Misconceived role of intel- ligence. — All criticism dogmatic. — A choice of hypoth- eses. — Critics disguised enthusiasts. — Hume's gratuitous scepticism. — Kant's substitute for knowledge. — False sub- jectivity attributed to reason. — Chimerical reconstruc- tion. — The Critique a work on mental architecture.- - Incoherences. — Nature the true system of conditions.-- CONTENTS Vii Artificial pathos in subjectivism. — Berkeley's algebra of perception. — Horror of physics. — Puerility in morals. — Truism and sophism. — Reality is the practical made intelligible. — Vain "realities" and trustworthy "fic- tions " Pages 84-117 CHAPTER V NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED Man's feeble grasp of nature. — Its unity ideal and discoverable only by steady thought. — Mind the erratic residue of existence. — Ghostly character of mind. — Hypos- tasis and criticism both need control. — Comparative con- stancy in objects and in ideas. — Spirit and sense defined by their relation to nature. — Vague notions of nature in- volve vague notions of spirit. — Sense and spirit the life of nature, which science redistributes but does not deny. Pages 118-136 CHAPTER VI DISCOVERT OF FELLOW-MINDS Another background for current experience may be found in alien minds. — Two usual accounts of this con- ception criticised: analogy between bodies, and dramatic dialogue in the soul. — Subject and object empirical, not transcendental, terms. — Objects originally soaked in sec- ondary and tertiary qualities. — Tertiary qualities trans- posed. — Imputed mind consists of the tertiary qualities of perceived body — "Pathetic fallacy" normal, yet ordinarily fallacious. — Case where it is not a fallacy. — • Knowledge succeeds only by accident. — Limits of insight. — Perception of character. — Conduct divined, conscious- ness ignored. — Consciousness untrustworthy. — Metaphor- ical mind. — Summary Pages 137-160 CHAPTER VII CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE AND IN EXISTENCE So-called abstract quaUties primary. — General quali- ties prior to particular things. — Universals are concretions in discourse. — Similar reactions, merged in one habit of reproduction, yield an idea. — Ideas are ideal. — So-called viii CONTENTS abstractions complete facts. — Things concretions of con- cretions. — Ideas prior in the order of knowledge, things in the order of nature. — Aristotle's compromise. — Empiri- cal bias in favour of contiguity. — Artificial divorce of logic from practice. — Their mutual involution. — Rationalistic suicide. — Complementary character of essence and exist- ence Pages 161-183 CHAPTER VIII ^ ON THE EEIiATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS Moral tone of opinions derived from their logical principle. — Concretions in discourse express instinctive re- actions. — Idealism rudimentary. — Naturalism sad. — The soul akin to the eternal and ideal.— Her inexperience. — Platonism spontaneous. — Its essential fidelity to the ideal. — Equal rights of empiricism. — Logic dependent on fact for its importance, and for its subsistence. — Reason and docility. — Applicable thought and clarified experience Pages 184-204 CHAPTER IX HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL Functional relations of mind and body. — They form one natural life. — Artifices involved in separating them. — Con- sciousness expresses vital equilibrium and docility. — Its worthlessness as a cause and value as an expression. — - Thought's march automatic and thereby implicated in events. — Contemplative essence of action. — ^Mechanical efficacy alien to thought's essence. — Consciousness trans- cendental and transcendent. — It is the seat of value. — Apparent utility of pain. — Its real impotence. — Pre- formations involved. — Its untoward significance. — Perfect function not unconscious. — Inchoate ethics. — Thought the entelechy of being. — Its exuberance. . . . Pages 205-235 CHAPTER X THE MEASURE OF VALUES IN REFLECTION •J Honesty in hedonism. — Necessary qualifications. — ^The will must judge. — Injustice inherent in representation. — ^Esthetic and speculative cruelty. — Imputed values : their CONTENTS ix inconstancy. — Methods of control. — Example of fame. — Disproportionate interest in the aesthetic. — Irrational religious allegiance. — Pathetic idealisations. — Inevitable impulsiveness in prophecy. — ^The test a controlled present ideal Pages 236-255 CHAPTER XI SOME ABSTRACT CONDITION8 OF THE IDEAL The ultimate end a resultant. — Demands the substance of ideals. — Discipline of the will. — Demands made prac- tical and consistent. — The ideal natural. — Need of unity and finality. — Ideals of nothing. — Darwin on moral sense. — Conscience and reason compared. — Reason imposes no new sacrifice. — Natural goods attainable and compatible in principle. — Harmony the formal and intrinsic demand of reason Pages 256-268 CHAPTER XII FLUX AND CONSTANCY IN HUMAN NATURE Respectable tradition that human nature is fixed. — Contrary currents of opinion. — Pantheism. — Instability in existences does not dethrone their ideals. — Absolutist philosophy human and halting. — All science a deliverance of momentary thought. — All criticism likewise. — Origins inessential. — Ideals functional. — They are transferable to similar beings. — Authority internal. — Reason autonomous. — Its distribution. — Natural selection of minds. — Living stability. — Continuity necessary to progress. — Limits of variation. Spirit a heritage. — Perfectibility. — Nature and human nature. — Human nature formulated. — Its concrete description reserved for the sequel Pages 269-291 INTRODUCTION THE SUBJECT OF THIS WORK, ITS METHOD AND ANTECEDENTS Progress is Whatever forces may govern human relative to an jifg^ jf they are to be recognised b y ideal which , , , ,i i • i reflection man, must betray themselves m human. creates. experience. Progress in science or re-*! ligion, no less than in morals and art, is a dra- matic episode in man's career, a welcome variation in his habit and state of mind ; although this vari- ation may often regard or propitiate things exter- nal, adjustment to which may be important for his welfare. The importance of these external things, as well as their existence, he can estab- lish only by the function and utility which a rec- ognition of them may have in his life. The en- tire history of progress is a moral drama, a tale man might unfold in a great autobiography, could his myriad heads and countless scintillas of con- sciousness conspire, like the seventy Alexandrian sages, in a single version of the truth committed to each for interpretation. What themes would prevail in such an examination of heart? In what order and with what emphasis would they be recounted? In which of its adventures would Vol. I.— 1 1 2 THE LIFE OF REASON the human race, reviewing its whole experience, acknowledge a progress and a gain? To answer these questions, as they may be answered specu- latively and provisionally by an individual, is the purpose of the following work, j.^^ . A philosopher could hardly have a reflection is higher ambition than to make himself reason. ^ mouth-piccc for the memory and judgment of his race. Yet the most casual con- sideration of affairs already involves an attempt to do the same thing. Keflection is pregnant from the beginning with all the principles of synthesis and valuation needed in the most comprehensive criticism. So soon as man ceases to be wholly immersed in sense, he looks before and after, he regrets and desires; and the moments in which prospect or retrospect takes place constitute the reflective or representative part of his life, in con- trast to the unmitigated flux of sensations in which nothing ulterior is regarded. Eepresenta- tion, however, can hardly remain idle and merely speculative. To the ideal function of envisaging the absent, memory and reflection will add (since they exist and constitute a new complication in being) the practical function of modifying the future. Vital impulse, however, when it is modi- fied by reflection and veers in sympathy with judg- ments pronounced on the past, is properly called reason. Man's rational life consists in those mo- ments in which reflection not only occurs but proves efficacious. What is absent then works in INTRODUCTION 3 the present, and values are imputed where they cannot be felt. Such representation is so far from being merely speculative that its presence alone can raise bodily change to the dignity of action. Reflection gathers experiences together and per- ceives their relative worth; which is as much as to say that it expresses a new attitude of will in the presence of a world better understood and turned to some purpose. The limits of reflection mark those of concerted and rational action; they circumscribe the field of cumulative experience, or, what is the same thing, of profitable living. _ ^., ^ Thus if we use the word life in a The Life of Reason a eulogistic scnse to designate the happy name for aU maintenance against the world of some practical o thought and definite ideal interest, we may say with aU action 'Aristotle that life is reason in opera- justined by _ ^ its fruits in tion. The Life of Reason will then consciousness. ^^ ^ ^^^^ f^^, ^^^^^ ^^^ ^f experience which perceives and pursues ideals — all conduct so controlled and all sense so interpreted as to perfect natural happiness. Without reason, as without memory, there might still be pleasures and pains in existence. To increase those pleasures and reduce those pains would be to introduce an improvement into the sentient world, as if a devil suddenly died in hell or in heaven a new angel were created. Since the beings, however, in which these values would reside, would, by hypothesis, know nothing of one another, and since the betterment would take place 4 THE LIFE OF EEASON unprayed-for and unnoticed, it could hardly be called a progress; and certainly not a progress in man, since man, without the ideal continuity given by memory and reason, would have no moral being. In human progress, therefore, reason is not a casual instrument, having its sole value in its ser- vice to sense; such a betterment in sentience would not be progress unless it were a progress in reason, and the increasing pleasure revealed some object that could please; for without a picture of the situation from which a heightened vitality might flow, the improvement could be neither re- membered nor measured nor desired. The Life of Eeason is accordingly neither a mere means nor a mere incident in human progress; it is the total and embodied progress itself, in which the pleas- ures of sense are included in so far as they can be intelligently enjoyed and pursued. To recount man's rational moments would be to take an in- ventory of all his goods ; for he is not himself (as we say with unconscious accuracy) in the others. If he ever appropriates them in recollection or prophecy, it is only on the ground of some physi- cal relation which they may have to his being. Eeason is as old as man and as prevalent as human nature; for we should not recognise an animal to be human unless his instincts were to some degree conscious of their ends and rendered his ideas in that measure relevant to conduct. Many sensations, or even a whole world of dreams, do not amount to intelligence until the images in INTRODUCTION 5 the mind begin to represent in some way, how- ever symbolic, the forces and realities confronted in action. There may well be intense conscious- ness in the total absence of rationality. Such consciousness is suggested in dreams, in madness, and may be found, for all we know, in the depths of universal nature. Minds peopled only by desultory visions and lusts would not have the dig- nity of human souls even if they seemed to pur- sue certain objects unerringly; for that pursuit would not be illumined by any vision of its goal. Keason and humanity begin with the union of instinct and ideation, when instinct becomes en- lightened, establishes values in its objects, and is turned from a process into an art, while at the same time consciousness becomes practical and cognitive, beginning to contain some symbol or record of the co-ordinate realities among which it arises. Reason accordingly requires the fusion of two types of life, commonly led in the world in well- nigh total separation, one a life of impulse ex- pressed in affairs and social passions, the other a life of reflection expressed in religion, science, and the imitative arts. In the Life of Reason, if it were brought to perfection, intelligence would be at once the universal method of practice and its continual reward. All reflection would then be applicable in action and all action fruitful in hap- piness. Though this be an ideal, yet everyone gives it from time to time a partial embodiment 6 THE LIFE OF REASON when he practises useful arts, when his passions happily lead him to enlightenment, or when his fancy breeds visions pertinent to his ultimate good. Everyone leads the Life of Keuson in so far as he finds a steady light behind the world's glitter and a clear residuum of joy beneath pleas- ure or success. No experience not to be repented of falls without its sphere. Every solution to a doubt, in so far as it is not a new error, every practical achievement not neutralised by a second maladjustment consequent upon it, every consola- tion not the seed of another greater sorrow, may be gathered together and built into this edifice. The Life of Eeason is the happy marriage of two elements — impulse and ideation — which if wholly divorced would reduce man to a brute or to a maniac. The rational animal is generated by the union of these two monsters. He is constituted by ideas which have ceased to be visionary and actions which have ceased to be vain. Thus the Life of Reason is another It IS the sum jj^nie for what, in the widest sense of of Art ^ the word, might be called Art. Opera- tions become arts when their purpose is conscious and their method teachable. In perfect art the whole idea is creative and exists only to be em- bodied, while every part of the product is rational and gives delightful expression to that idea. Like art, again, the Life of Reason is not a power but a result, the spontaneous expression of liberal genius in a favouring environment. Both art and INTRODUCTION 7 reason have natural sources and meet with natural checks; but when a process is turned successfully into an art, so that its issues have value and the ideas that accompany it become practical and cognitive, reflection, finding little that it cannot in some way justify and understand, begins to boast that it directs and has created the world in which it finds itself so much at home. Thus if art could extend its sphere to include every activity in nature, reason, being everywhere exem- plified, might easily think itself omnipotent. This ideal, far as it is from actual realisation, has so dazzled men, that in their religion and mythical philosophy they have often spoken as if it were already actual and efficient. This anticipation amounts, when taken seriously, to a confusion of purposes with facts and of functions with causes, a confusion which in the interests of wisdom and progress it is important to avoid ; but these specu- lative fables, when we take them for what they are — poetic expressions of the ideal — help us to see how deeply rooted this ideal is in man's mind, and afford us a standard by which to measure his approaches to the rational perfection of which he dreams. For the Life of Eeason, being the sphere of all human art, is man's imitation of divinity. To study such an ideal, dimly ex- urai basis pressed though it be in human exist- which makes euce, is no prophetic or visionary un- dertaking. Every genuine ideal has a natural basis; anyone may understand and safely 8 THE LIFE OF REASON interpret it who is attentive to the life from which it springs. To decipher the Life of Reason nothing is needed but an analytic spirit and a judicious love of man, a love quick to distinguish success from failure in his great and confused experiment of living. The historian of reason should not be a romantic poet, vibrating impotently to every im- pulse he finds afoot, without a criterion of excel- lence or a vision of perfection. Ideals are free, but they are neither more numerous nor more variable than the living natures that generate them. Ideals are legitimate, and each initially envisages a genuine and innocent good; but they are not realisable together, nor even singly when they have no deep roots in the world. Neither is the philosopher compelled by his somewhat judi- cial office to be a satirist or censor, without sym- pathy for those tentative and ingenuous passions out of which, after all, his own standards must arise. He is the chronicler of human progress, and to measure that progress he should be equally attentive to the impulses that give it direction and to the circumstances amid which it stumbles toward its natural goal. „ , ^. There is unfortunately no school of Modern phi- '^ . losophy not modern philosophy to which a critique helpful. Q^ human progress can well be at- tached. Almost every school, indeed, can furnish something useful to the critic, sometimes a physical theory, sometimes a piece of logical analysis. We shall need to borrow from cur- INTKODUCTION 9 rent science and speculation the picture they draw of man's conditions and environment, his history and mental habits. These may furnish a theatre and properties for our drama; but they offer no hint of its plot and meaning. A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the mind. One- half the learned world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour, as Don Quixote did his helmet; deputing it, after a series of catastrophes, to be at last sound and invulnerable. The other half, the naturalists who have studied psychology and evolution, look at life from the outside, and the processes of Nature make them forget her uses. „ . . . Bacon indeed had prized science for Positivism ^ no positive adding to the comforts of life, a func- ideai. ^^^^ g^jjj commcmoratcd by positivists in their eloquent moments. Habitually, however, when they utter the word progress it is, in their mouths, a synonym for inevitable change, or at best for change in that direction which they con- ceive to be on the whole predominant. If they combine with physical speculation some elements of morals, these are usually purely formal, to the effect that happiness is to be pursued (probably, alas ! because to do so is a psychological law) ; but what happiness consists in we gather only from casual observations or by putting together their national prejudices and party saws. The truth is that even this radical school, eman- cipated as it thinks itself, is suffering from the after-effects of supernaturalism. Like children 10 THE LIFE OP REASON escaped from school, they find their whole happi- ness in freedom. They are proud of what they have rejected, as if a great wit were required to do so; but they do not know what they want. If you astonish them by demanding what is their positive ideal, further than that there should be a great many people and that they should be all alike, they will say at first that what ought to be is obvious, and later they will submit the matter to a majority vote. They have discarded the machinery in which their ancestors embodied the ideal; they have not perceived that those symbols stood for the Life of Eeason and gave fantastic and embarrassed expression to what, in itself, is pure humanity; and they have thus remained en- tangled in the colossal error that ideals are some- thing adventitious and unmeaning, not having a soil in mortal life nor a possible fulfilment there. The profound and pathetic ideas Christian which inspired Christianity were at- mythicahit tachcd in the beginning to ancient misrepresents myths and soon crystalliscd into many facts and con- __, ... , ditions. i^GW oncs. The mythical manner per- vades Christian philosophy; but myth succeeds in expressing ideal life only by misrep- resenting its history and conditions. This method was indeed not original with the Fathers; they borrowed it from Plato, who appealed to parables himself in an open and harmless fashion, yet with disastrous consequences to his school. Nor was he the first; for the instinct to regard INTKODUCTION 11 poetic fictions as revelations of supernatural facts is as old as the soul's primitive incapacity to dis- tinguish dreams from waking perceptions, sign from thing signified, and inner emotions from external powers. Such confusions, though in a way they obey moral forces, make a rational esti- mate of things impossible. To misrepresent the conditions and consequences of action is no merely speculative error; it involves a false emphasis in character and an artificial balance and co-ordina- tion among human pursuits. When ideals are hypostasised into powers alleged to provide for their own expression, the Life of Eeason cannot be conceived; in theory its field of operation is pre- empted and its function gone, while in practice its inner impulses are turned awry by artificial stimu- lation and repression. The Patristic systems, though weak in their foundations, were extraordinarily wise and com- prehensive in their working out; and while they inverted life they preserved it. Dogma added to the universe fabulous perspectives; it interpolated also innumerable incidents and powers which gave a new dimension to experience. Yet the old world remained standing in its strange setting, like the Pantheon in modern Kome ; and, what is more im- portant, the natural springs of human action were still acknowledged, and if a supernatural disci- pline was imposed, it was only because experience and faith had disclosed a situation in which the pursuit of earthly happiness seemed hopeless. 12 THE LIFE OF REASON Nature was not destroyed by its novel appendages, nor did reason die in the cloister: it hibernated there, and could come back to its own in due sea- son, only a little dazed and weakened by its long confinement. Such, at least, is the situation in Catholic regions, where the Patristic philosophy has not appreciably varied. Among Protestants Christian dogma has taken a new and ambiguous direction, which has at once minimised its disturb- ing effect in practice and isolated its primary illu- sion. The symptoms have been cured and the disease driven in. The tenets of Protestant bodies are Liberal the- notoriously Varied and on principle perstitious subject to change. There is hardly a attitude combination of tradition and spontane- natural world, i^y which has not been tried in some quarter. If we think, however, of broad tendencies and ultimate issues, it appears that in Protestantism myth, without disappear- ing, has changed its relation to reality : instead of being an extension to the natural world myth has become its substratum. Religion no longer re- veals divine personalities, future rewards, and ten- derer Elysian consolations; nor does it seriously propose a heaven to be reached by a ladder nor a purgatory to be shortened by prescribed devotions. It merely gives the real world an ideal status and teaches men to accept a natural life on super- natural grounds. The consequence is that the most pious can give an unvarnished description of INTRODUCTION 13 things. Even immortality and the idea of God are submitted, in liberal circles, to scientific treat- ment. On the other hand, it would be hard to conceive a more inveterate obsession than that which keeps the attitude of these same minds in- appropriate to the objects they envisage. They have accepted natural conditions; they will not accept natural ideals. The Life of Reason has no existence for them, because, although its field is clear, they will not tolerate any human or finite standard of value, and will not suffer extant in- terests, which can alone guide them in action or judgment, to define the worth of life. The after-effects of Hebraism are here contrary to its foundations; for the Jews loved the world so much that they brought themselves, in order to win and enjoy it, to an intense concentration of purpose; but this effort and discipline, which had of course been mythically sanctioned, not only failed of its object, but grew far too absolute and sublime to think its object could ever have been earthly; and the supernatural machir'^ry which was to have secured prosperity, while that still enticed, now had to furnish some worthier object for the passion it had artificially fostered. Fanat- icism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim. An earnestness which is out of proportion to any knowledge or love of real things, which is therefore dark and inward and thinks itself deeper than the earth's foundations — such an earnest- 14 THE LIFE OF REASON ness, until culture turns it into intelligent inter- ests, will naturally breed a new mythology. It will try to place some world of Afrites and shad- owy giants behind the constellations, which it finds too distinct and constant to be its companions or supporters; and it will assign to itself vague and infinite tasks, for which it is doubtless better equipped than for those which the earth now sets before it. Even these, however, since they are parts of an infinite whole, the mystic may (his- trionically, perhaps, yet zealously) undertake; but as his eye will be perpetually fixed on something invisible beyond, and nothing will be done for its own sake or enjoyed in its own fugitive presence, there will be little art and little joy in existence. All will be a tossing servitude and illiberal mist, where the parts will have no final values and the whole no pertinent direction. The Greeks ^^ Greek philosophy the situation is thought far more auspicious. The ancients led a both^physks rational life and envisaged the various and morals, spheres of Speculation as men might whose central interests were rational. In physics they leaped at once to the conception of a dynamic unity and general evolution, thus giving that background to human life which shrewd observa- tion would always have descried, and which mod- ern science has laboriously rediscovered. Two great systems offered, in two legitimate directions, what are doubtless the final and radical accounts of physical being. Heraclitus, describing the im- INTRODUCTION 15 mediate, found it to be in constant and pervasive change: no substances, no forms, no identities „ ,. could be arrested there, but as in the Heraclitus and the im- human soul, SO in nature, all was in- mediate, stability, contradiction, reconstruction, and oblivion. This remains the empirical fact; and we need but to rescind the artificial division which Descartes has taught us to make between nature and life, to feel again the absolute aptness of Heraclitus's expressions. These were thought obscure only because they were so disconcertingly penetrating and direct. The immediate is what nobody sees, because convention and reflection turn existence, as soon as they can, into ideas; a man who discloses the immediate seems profound, yet his depth is nothing but innocence recovered and a sort of intellectual abstention. Mysticism, scepticism, and transcendentalism have all in their various ways tried to fall back on the immediate; but none of them has been ingenuous enough. Each has added some myth, or sophistry, or de- lusive artifice to its direct observation. Heracli- tus remains the honest prophet of immediacy: a mystic without raptures or bad rhetoric, a scep- tic who does not rely for his results on conven- tions unwittingly adopted, a transcendentalist without false pretensions or incongruous dogmas. The immediate is not, however, a good subject for discourse, and the expounders of Heraclitus were not unnaturally blamed for monotony. AH they could do was to iterate their master's maxim, 16 THE LIFE OF REASON and declare everything to be in flux. In suggest- ing laws of recurrence and a reason in which what is common to many might be expressed, Heraclitus had opened the door into another region : had he passed through, his philosophy would have been greatly modified, for permanent forms would have forced themselves on his attention no less than shifting materials. Such a Heraclitus would have anticipated Plato; but the time for such a syn- thesis had not yet arrived. Democritus At the opposite pole from imme- nafufauy ^^^^^ ^^^^ intelligibility. To reduce intelligible. phenomena to constant elements, as similar and simple as possible, and to conceive their union and separation to obey constant laws, is what a natural philosopher will inevitably do so soon as his interest is not merely to utter experience but to understand it. Democritus brought this scientific ideal to its ultimate expres- sion. By including psychic existence in his atomic system, he indicated a problem which natural science has since practically abandoned but which it may some day be compelled to take up. The atoms of Democritus seem to us gross, even for chemistry, and their quality would have to undergo great transformation if they were to support intelligibly psychic being as well ; but that very grossness and false simplicity had its merits, and science must be for ever grateful to the man who at its inception could so clearly formulate its mechanical ideal. That the world is not so in- INTRODUCTION 17 telligible as we could wish is not to be wondered at. In other respects also it fails to respond to our ideals; yet our hope must be to find it more propitious to the intellect as well as to all the arts in proportion as we learn better how to live in it. The atoms of what we call hydrogen or oxygen may well turn out to be worlds, as the stars are which make atoms for astronomy. Their inner or- ganisation might be negligible on our rude plane of being; did it disclose itself, however, it would be intelligible in its turn only if constant parts and constant laws were discernible within each system. So that while atomism at a given level may not be a final or metaphysical truth, it will describe, on every level, the practical and effica- cious structure of the world. We owe to Democ- ritus this ideal of practical intelligibility; and he is accordingly an eternal spokesman of reason. His system, long buried with other glories of the world, has been partly revived; and although it cannot be verified in haste, for it represents an ultimate ideal, every advance in science recon- stitutes it in some particular. Mechanism is not one principle of explanation among others. In natural philosophy, where to explain means to discover origins, transmutations, and laws, mech- anism is explanation itself. Heraclitus had the good fortune of having his physics absorbed by Plato. It is a pity that De- mocritus' physics was not absorbed by Aristotle. For with the flux observed, and mechanism con- VoL. I.— 2 18 THE LIFE OF REASON ceived to explain it, the theory of existence is com- plete; and had a complete physical theory been incorporated into the Socratic philosophy, wisdom would have lacked none of its parts. Democri- tus, however, appeared too late, when ideal sci- ence had overrun the whole field and initiated a verbal and dialectical physics ; so that Aristotle, for all his scientific temper and studies, built his natural philosophy on a lamentable misunder- standing, and condemned thought to confusion for two thousand years. „ , . If the happy freedom of the Greeks Socrates and ^^*' the autonomy from Tcligious dogma made them the of nund. £j.g^ natural philosophers, their happy political freedom made them the first moralists. It was no accident that Socrates walked the Athe- nian agora; it was no petty patriotism that made him shrink from any other scene. His science had its roots there, in the personal independence, in- tellectual vivacity, and clever dialectic of his countrymen. Ideal science lives in discourse; it consists in the active exercise of reason, in sig- nification, appreciation, intent, and self-expres- sion. Its sum total is to know oneself, not as psychology or anthropology might describe a man, but to know, as the saying is, one's own mind. Nor is he who knows his own mind forbidden to change it; the dialectician has nothing to do with future possibilities or with the opinion of anyone but the man addressed. This kind of truth is but adequate veracity; its only object is its own INTRODUCTION 19 intent. Having developed in the spirit the con- sciousness of its meanings and purposes, Socrates rescued logic and ethics for ever from authority. With his friends the Sophists, he made man the measure of all things, after bidding him measure himself, as they neglected to do, by his own ideal. That brave humanity which had first raised its head in Hellas and had endowed so many things in heaven and earth, where everything was hitherto monstrous, with proportion and use, so that man's works might justify themselves to his mind, now found in Socrates its precise defini- tion; and it was naturally where the Life of Eea- son had been long cultivated that it came finally to be conceived. Plato ave Socratcs had, however, a plebeian the ideal its strain in his humanity, and his utili- fuii expression. ^j.-g^j^-gj^^ at least in its expression, hardly did justice to what gives utility to life. His condemnation for atheism — if we choose to take it symbolically — was not altogether unjust: the gods of Greece were not honoured explicitly enough in his philosophy. Human good appeared there in its principle ; you would not set a pilot to mend shoes, because you knew your own purpose; but what purposes a civilised soul might harbour, and in what highest shapes the good might appear, was a problem that seems not to have attracted his genius. It was reserved to Plato to bring the Socratic ethics to its sublimest expression and to elicit from the depths of the Greek conscience 20 THE LIFE OF REASON those ancestral ideals which had inspired its leg- islators and been embodied in its sacred civic tra- ditions. The owl of Minerva flew, as Hegel says, in the dusk of evening; and it was horror at the abandonment of all creative virtues that brought Plato to conceive them so sharply and to preach them in so sad a tone. It was after all but the love of beauty that made him censure the poets; for like a true Greek and a true lover he wished to see beauty flourish in the real world. It was love of freedom that made him harsh to his ideal citizens, that they might be strong enough to preserve the liberal life. And when he broke away from political preoccupations and turned to the inner life, his interpretations proved the abso- lute sufficiency of the Socratic method; and he left nothing pertinent unsaid on ideal love and ideal immortality. Beyond this point no rendering of the suppUedits ^^^^ ^^ Eeasou has ever been carried, natural Aristotlc improved the detail, and gave breadth and precision to many a part. If Plato possessed greater imaginative splendour and more enthusiasm in austerity, Aristotle had perfect sobriety and adequacy, with greater fidel- ity to the common sentiments of his race. Plato, by virtue of his scope and plasticity, together with a certain prophetic zeal, outran at times the limits of the Hellenic and the rational; he saw human virtue so surrounded and oppressed by physical dangers that he wished to give it mythi- INTRODUCTION 21 cal sanctions, and his fondness for transmigra- tion and nether punishments was somewhat more than playful. If as a work of imagination his philosophy holds the first place, Aristotle's has the decisive advantage of being the unalloyed expres- sion of reason. In Aristotle the conception of human nature is perfectly sound ; everything ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development. His ethics, when thoroughly digested and weighed, especially when the meagre outlines are filled in with Plato's more discursive expositions, will seem therefore entirely final. The Life of Reason finds there its classic expli- cation. Philosophy -^s it is improbable that there will thus complete, goon be another people so free from yet in need . -^j. j j j; of resute- prcoccupatious, SO gittcd, and so fer- ment, tunate as the Greeks, or capable in consequence of so well exemplifying humanity, so also it is improbable that a philosopher will soon arise with Aristotle's scope, judgment, or author- ity, one knowing so well how to be both reason- able and exalted. It might seem vain, therefore, to try to do afresh what has been done before with unapproachable success; and instead of writing inferior things at great length about the Life of Reason, it might be simpler to read and to propa- gate what Aristotle wrote with such immortal just- ness and masterly brevity. But times change; and though the principles of reason remain the same the facts of human Life and of human con- 22 THE LIFE OF REASON science alter. A new background, a new basis of application, appears for logic, and it may be use- ful to restate old truths in new words, the better to prove their eternal validity. Aristotle is, in his morals, Greek, concise, and elementary. As a Greek, he mixes with the ideal argument illustra- tions, appreciations, and conceptions which are not inseparable from its essence. In themselves, no doubt, these accessories are better than what in modern times would be substituted for them, being less sophisticated and of a nobler stamp; but to our eyes they disguise what is profound and uni- versal in natural morality by embodying it in images which do not belong to our life. Our direst struggles and the last sanctions of our morality do not appear in them. The pagan world, because its maturity was simpler than our crudeness, seems childish to us. We do not find there our sins and holiness, our love, charity, and honour. The Greek too would not find in our world the things he valued most, things to which he sur- rendered himself, perhaps, with a more constant self-sacrifice — piety, country, friendship, and beau- ty ; and he might add that his ideals were rational and he could attain them, while ours are extrava- gant and have been missed. Yet even if we ac- knowledged his greater good fortune, it would be impossible for us to go back and become like him. To make the attempt would show no sense of real- ity and little sense of humour. We must dress in INTRODUCTION 23 our own clothes, if we do not wish to substitute a masquerade for practical existence. What we can adopt from Greek morals is only the abstract prin- ciple of their development ; their foundation in all the extant forces of human nature and their effort toward establishing a perfect harmony among them. These forces themselves have perceptibly changed, at least in their relative power. Thus we are more conscious of wounds to stanch and wrongs to fight against, and less of goods to at- tain. The movement of conscience has veered; the centre of gravity lies in another part of the character. Another circumstance that invites a restate- ment of rational ethics is the impressive illustra- tion of their principle which subsequent history has afforded. Mankind has been making extraor- dinary experiments of which Aristotle could not dream; and their result is calculated to clarify even his philosophy. For in some respects it needed experiments and clarification. He had been led into a systematic fusion of dialectic with physics, and of this fusion all pretentious modern philosophy is the aggravated extension. Socrates' pupils could not abandon his ideal principles, yet they could not bear to abstain from physics altogether ; they therefore made a mock physics in moral terms, out of which theology was after- ward developed. Plato, standing nearer to Socrates and being no naturalist by disposition, never carried the fatal experiment beyond the 24 THE LIFE OF REASON m3^tliical stage. He accordingly remained the purer moralist, much as Aristotle's judgment may be preferred in many particulars. Their relative position may be roughly indicated by saying that Plato had no physics and that Aristotle's physics was false; so that ideal science in the one suf- fered from want of environment and control, while in the other it suffered from misuse in a sphere where it had no application. What had happened was briefly this : myths in lieu Plato, having studied many sorts of of physics. philosophy and being a bold and uni- versal genius, was not satisfied to leave all physi- cal questions pending, as his master had done. He adopted, accordingly, Heraclitus's doctrine of the immediate, which he now called the realm of phenomena ; for what exists at any instant, if you arrest and name it, turns out to have been an embodiment of some logical essence, such as dis- course might define; in every fact some idea makes its appearance, and such an apparition of the ideal is a phenomenon. Moreover, another philosophy had made a deep impression on Plato's mind and had helped to develop Socratic defini- tions: Parmenides had called the concept of pure Being the only reality; and to satisfy the strong dialectic by which this doctrine was supported and at the same time to bridge the infinite chasm between one formless substance and many appear- ances irrelevant to it, Plato substituted the many Socratic ideas, all of which were relevant to ap- INTRODUCTION 25 pearance, for the one concept of Parmenides. The ideas thus acquired what is called metaphysi- cal subsistence; for they stood in the place of the Eleatic Absolute, and at the same time were the realities that phenomena manifested. The technique of this combination is much to be admired; but the feat is technical and adds nothing to the significance of what Plato has to say on any concrete subject. This barren triumph was, however, fruitful in misunderstandings. The characters and values a thing possessed were now conceived to subsist apart from it, and might even have preceded it and caused its existence; a mechanism composed of values and definitions could thus be placed behind phenomena to con- stitute a substantial physical world. Such a dream could not be taken seriously, until good sense was wholly lost and a bevy of magic spirits could be imagined peopling the infinite and yet carrying on the business of earth. Aristotle re- jected the metaphysical subsistence of ideas, but thought they might still be essences operative in nature, if only they were identified with the life or form of particular things. The dream thus lost its frank wildness, but none of its inherent incongruity: for the sense in which characters and values make a thing what it is, is purely dialectical. They give it its status in the ideal world ; but the appearance of these characters and values here and now is what needs explan- ation in physics, an explanation which can be 26 THE LIFE OF REASON furnished, of course, only by the physical con- catenation and distribution of causes. Aristotle himself did not fail to Aristotle's make this necessary distinction be- final causes. , m • i i j> i Modern sci- twcen eiTicient cause and formal es- encecan scnce; but as his science was only expedients. natural history, and mechanism had no plausibility in his eyes, the efficiency of the cause was always due, in his view, to its ideal quality; as in heredity the father's human character, not his physical structure, might seem to warrant the son's humanity. Every ideal, before it could be embodied, had to pre-exist in some other embodiment; but as when the ulti- mate purpose of the cosmos is considered it seems to lie beyond any given embodiment, the highest ideal must somehow exist disembodied. It must pre-exist, thought Aristotle, in order to supply, by way of magic attraction, a physical cause for per- petual movement in the world. It must be confessed, in justice to this consum- mate philosopher, who is not less masterly in the use of knowledge than unhappy in divination, that the transformation of the highest good into a physical power is merely incidental with him, and due to a want of faith (at that time excusable) in mechanism and evolution. Aristotle's deity is always a moral ideal and every detail in its defini- tion is based on discrimination between the better and the worse. No accommodation to the ways of nature is here allowed to cloud the kingdom of INTEODUCTION 27 heaven ; this deity is not condemned to do whatever happens nor to absorb whatever exists. It is mythi- cal only in its physical application; in moral phi- losophy it remains a legitimate conception. Truth certainly exists, if existence be not too mean an attribute for that eternal realm which is tenanted by ideals; but truth is repugnant to physical or psychical being. Moreover, truth may very well be identified with an impassible intellect, which should do nothing but possess all truth, with no point of view, no animal warmth, and no transi- tive process. Such an intellect and truth are ex- pressions having a different metaphorical back- ground and connotation, but, when thought out, an identical import. They both attempt to evoke that ideal standard which human thought pro- poses to itself. This function is their effective essence. It insures their eternal fixity, and this property surely endows them with a very genuine and sublime reality. What is fantastic is only the dynamic function attributed to them by Aristotle, which obliges them to inhabit some fabulous ex- tension to the physical world. Even this physical efficacy, however, is spiritualised as much as pos- sible, since deity is said to move the cosmos only as an object of love or an object of knowledge may move the mind. Such efficacy is imputed to a hypostasised end, but evidently resides in fact in the functioning and impulsive spirit that conceives and pursues an ideal, endowing it with whatever attraction it may seem to have. The absolute 28 THE LIFE OF EEASON intellect described by Aristotle remains, therefore, as pertinent to the Life of Reason as Plato's idea of the good. Though less comprehensive (for it abstracts from all animal interests, from all pas- sion and mortality), it is more adequate and dis- tinct in the region it dominates. It expresses sublimely the goal of speculative thinking; which is none other than to live as much as may be in the eternal and to absorb and be absorbed in the truth. The rest of ancient philosophy belongs to the decadence and rests in physics on eclecticism and in morals on despair. That creative breath which had stirred the founders and legislators of Greece no longer inspired their descendants. Helpless to control the course of events, they took refuge in abstention or in conformity, and their ethics became a matter of private economy and senti- ment, no longer aspiring to mould the state or give any positive aim to existence. The time was approaching when both speculation and morals were to regard the other world; reason had abdi- cated the throne, and religion, after that brief interregnum, resumed it for long ages. Such are the threads which tradition puts into the hands of an observer who at the present time might attempt to knit the Life of Reason ideally together. The problem is to unite a trustworthy conception of the conditions under which man lives with an adequate conception of his inter- INTRODUCTION 29 ests. Both conceptions, fortunately, lie before us. Heraclitus and Democritus, in systems easily seen to be complementary, gave long ago a picture of nature such as all later observation, down to our own day, has done noth- ing but fill out and confirm. Psychology and physics still repeat their ideas, often with richer detail, but never with a more radical or prophetic glance. Nor does the transcendental philosophy, in spite of its self-esteem, add anything essential. It was a thing taken for granted in dentaiism ancicut and scholastic philosophy that true but in- a being dwelling, like man, in consequential. ... t , ^ < the immediate, whose moments are m flux, needed constructive reason to interpret his experience and paint in his unstable consciousness some symbolic picture of the world. To have reverted to this constructive process and studied its stages is an interesting achievement; but the construction is already made by common-sense and science, and it was visionary insolence in the Germans to propose to make that construc- tion otherwise. Eetrospective self-consciousness is dearly bought if it inhibits the intellect and em- barrasses the inferences which, in its spontaneous operation, it has known perfectly how to make. In the heat of scientific theorising or dialectical argument it is sometimes salutary to be reminded that we are men thinking; but, after all, it is no news. We know that life is a dream, and how should thinking be more ? Yet the thinking must 30 THE LIFE OF EEASON go on, and the only vital question is to what prac- tical or poetic conceptions it is able to lead us. Similarly the Socratic philosophy affords a noble and genuine account of what goods may be realised by living. Modern theory has not done so much to help us here, however, as it has in physics. It seldom occurs to modem moralists that theirs is the science of all good and the art of its attainment; they think only of some set of categorical precepts or some theory of moral sentiments, abstracting altogether from the ideals reigning in society, in science, and in art. They deal with the secondary question What ought I to do? without having answered the primary question, What ought to be? They attach morals to religion rather than to politics, and this religion unhappily long ago ceased to be wisdom expressed in fancy in order to become superstition overlaid with reasoning. They divide man into compartments and the less they leave in the one labelled " morality " the more sub- lime they think their morality is; and sometimes pedantry and scholasticism are carried so far that nothing but an abstract sense of duty remains in the broad region which should contain all human goods. Such trivial sanctimony in morals is doubtless due to artificial views about the conditions of wel- fare; the basis is laid in authority rather than in human nature, and the goal in salvation rather than in happiness. One great modern philoso- INTRODUCTION 31 pher, however, was free from these preconceptions, and might have reconstituted the Life of Eeason had he had a sufficient interest in cul- and the ture. Spinoza brought man back into Life of nature, and made him the nucleus of all moral values, showing how he may recognise his environment and how he may master it. But Spinoza's sympathy with mankind fell short of imagination ; any noble political or poeti- cal ideal eluded him. Everything impassioned seemed to him insane, everything human neces- sarily petty. Man was to be a pious tame animal, with the stars shining above his head. Instead of imagination Spinoza cultivated mysticism, which is indeed an alternative. A prophet in speculation, he remained a levite in sentiment. Little or nothing would need to be changed in his system if the Life of Eeason, in its higher ranges, were to be grafted upon it; but such affiliation is not necessary, and it is rendered unnatural by the lack of sweep and generosity in Spinoza's practical ideals. For moral philosophy we are driven classic sources back, then, upon the ancients ; but not, of inspira- of coursc, for moral inspiration. In- dustrialism and democracy, the French Eevolution, the Eenaissance, and even the Catholic system, which in the midst of ancient illusions enshrines so much tenderness and wisdom, still live in the world, though forgotten by philoso- phers, and point unmistakably toward their several 32 THE LIFE OF EEASON goals. Our task is not to construct but only to interpret ideals, confronting them with one another and with the conditions which, for the most part, they alike ignore. There is no need of refuting anything, for the will which is behind all ideals and behind most dogmas cannot itself be refuted ; but it may be enlightened and led to reconsider its intent, when its satisfaction is seen to be either naturally impossible or inconsistent with better things. The age of controversy is past ; that of interpretation has succeeded. Here, then, is the programme of the following work : Starting with the immediate flux, in which all objects and impulses are given, to describe the Life of Reason; that is, to note what facts and purposes seem to be primary, to show how the con- ception of nature and life gathers around them, and to point to the ideals of thought and action which are approached by this gradual mastering of experience by reason. A great task, which it would be beyond the powers of a writer in this age either to execute or to conceive, had not the Greeks drawn for us the outlines of an ideal culture at a time when life was simpler than at present and individual intelligence more resolute and free. REASON IN COMMON SENSE CHAPTER I THE BIRTH OF EEASOIT WTiether Chaos or Order lay at the beginning of things is a question once much debated in the schools but afterward long in abeyance, not so much because it had been solved as Existence , ± ^ -\ i -i i always has occause One party had been silenced an Order, by social prcssurc. The question is called Chaos ■, -, , • i i whenincom- bouud to Tccur in an age when obser- patibiewitha yatiou and dialectic again freely con- front each other. Naturalists look back to chaos since they observe everything growing from seeds and shifting its character in regen- eration. The order now established in the world may be traeed back to a situation in which it did not appear. Dialecticians, on the other hand, refute this presumption by urging that every collocation of things must have been pre- ceded by another collocation in itself no less defi- nite and precise; and further that some principle of transition or continuity must always have obtained, else successive states would stand in no relation to one another, notably not in the relation of cause and effect, expressed in a natural law, which is presupposed in this instance. Potentiali- 85 36 THE LIFE OF REASON ties are dispositions, and a disposition involves an order, as does also the passage from any specific potentiality into act. Thus the world, we are told, must always have possessed a structure. The two views may perhaps be reconciled if we take each with a qualification. Chaos doubtless has existed and will return — na}', it reigns now, very likely, in the remoter and inmost parts of the universe — if by chaos we understand a nature containing none of the objects we are wont to dis- tinguish, a nature such that human life and human thought would be impossible in its bosom ; but this nature must be presumed to have an order, an order directly importing, if the tendency of its movement be taken into account, all the complexi- ties and beauties, all the sense and reason which exist now. Order is accordingly continual; but only when order means not a specific arrangement, favourable to a given form of life, but any arrange- ment whatsoever. The process by which an ar- rangement which is essentially unstable gradu- ally shifts cannot be said to aim at every stage which at any moment it involves. For the process passes beyond. It presently abolishes all the forms which may have arrested attention and gen- erated love; its initial energy defeats every pur- pose which we may fondly attribute to it. ISTor is it here necessary to remind ourselves that to call results their own causes is always preposter- ous; for in this case even the mythical sense which might be attached to such language is inap- THE BIRTH OF REASON 37 plicable. Here the process, taken in the gross, does not, even by mechanical necessity, support the value which is supposed to guide it. That value is realised for a moment only ; so that if we impute to Cronos any intent to beget his children we must also impute to him an intent to devour them. .^ , Of course the various states of the Absolute order, or world, when we survey them retro- truth, IS spectively, constitute another and now static, im- -^ ■^ ^ potent, indif- static Order called historic truth. To ferent. ^|^|g absolute and impotent order every detail is essential. If we wished to abuse language so much as to speak of will in an " Absolute " where change is excluded, so that nothing can be or be conceived beyond it, we might say that the Ab- solute willed everything that ever exists, and that the eternal order terminated in every fact indis- criminately; but such language involves an after- image of motion and life, of preparation, risk, and subsequent accomplishment, adventures all pre- supposing refractory materials and excluded from eternal truth by its very essence. The only function those traditional metaphors have is to shield con- fusion and sentimentality. Because Jehovah once fought for the Jews, we need not continue to say that the truth is solicitous about us, when it is only we that are fighting to attain it. The universe can wish particular things only in so far as particu- lar beings wish them ; only in its relative capacity can it find things good, and only in its relative capacity can it be good for anything. 38 THE LIFE OF EEASON The efficacious or physical order which exists at any moment in the world and out of which the next moment's order is developed, may accordingly be termed a relative chaos: a chaos, because the values suggested and supported by the second moment could not have belonged to the first; but merely a relative chaos, first because it probably carried values of its own which rendered it an order in a moral and eulogistic sense, and sec- ondly because it was potentially, by virtue of its momentum, a basis for the second moment's values as well. Human life, when it begins to pos- in expen- gggg intrinsic value, is an incipient ence order is ^ relative to Order in the midst of what seems a "hiTd' ^^^^ though, to some extent, a vanish- termine the ing chaos. This reputed chaos can be moral status deciphered and appreciated by man of all powers. ^_ . only in proportion as the order in him- self is confirmed and extended. For man's con- sciousness is evidently practical; it clings to his fate, registers, so to speak, the higher and lower temperature of his fortunes, and, so far as it can, represents the agencies on which those fortunes depend. When this dramatic vocation of con- sciousness has not been fulfilled at all, conscious- ness is wholly confused; the world it envisages seems consequently a chaos. Later, if .experience has fallen into shape, and there are settled cate- gories and constant objects in human discourse, the inference is drawn that the original dis- THE BIKTH OF REASON 39 position of things was also orderly and indeed mechanically conducive to just those feats of instinct and intelligence which have been since accomplished. A theory of origins, of substance, and of natural laws may thus be framed and accepted, and may receive confirmation in the further march of events. It will be observed, how- ever, that what is credibly asserted about the past is not a report which the past was itself able to make when it existed nor one it is now able, in some oracular fashion, to formulate and to impose upon us. The report is a rational construction based and seated in present experience; it has no cogency for the inattentive and no existence for the ignorant. Although the universe, then, may not have come from chaos, human experience cer- tainly has begun in a private and dreamful chaos of its own, out of which it still only partially and momentarily emerges. The history of this awa- kening is of course not the same as that of the environing world ultimately discovered; it is the history, however, of that discovery itself, of the knowledge through which alone the world can be revealed. We may accordingly dispense ourselves from preliminary courtesies to the real universal order, nature, the absolute, and the gods. We shall make their acquaintance in due season and better appreciate their moral status, if we strive merely to recall our own experience, and to retrace the visions and reflections out of which those ap- paritions have grown. 40 THE LIFE OF REASON The discov- To revGit to primordial feeling is an eredcon- exercisG in mental disintegration, not reaEon not ^ f^at of science. We might, indeed, its beginning, as in animal psychology, retrace the situations in which instinct and sense seem first to appear and write, as it were, a genealogy of rea- son based on circumstantial evidence. Eeason was born, as it has since discovered, into a world already wonderfully organised, in which it found its precursor in what is called life, its seat in an animal body of unusual plasticity, and its func- tion in rendering that body's volatile instincts and sensations harmonious with one another and with the outer world on which they depend. It did not arise until the will or conscious stress, by which any modification of living bodies' inertia seems to be accompanied, began to respond to repre- sented objects, and to maintain that inertia not absolutely by resistance but only relatively and indirectly through labour. Eeason has thus super- vened at the last stage of an adaptation which had long been carried on by irrational and even unconscious processes. Nature preceded, with all that fixation of impulses and conditions which gives reason its tasks and its point-d'appui. Nevertheless, such a matrix or cradle for reason belongs only externally to its life. The descrip- tion of conditions involves their previous discov- ery and a historian equipped with many data and many analogies of thought. Such scientific re- sources are absent in those first moments of THE BIRTH OF REASON 41 rational living which we here wish to recall; the first chapter in reason's memoirs would no more entail the description of its real environment than the first chapter in human history would include true accounts of astronomy, psychology, and ani- mal evolution. The flux I^ order to begin at the beginning first. •we must try to fall back on uninter- preted feeling, as the mystics aspire to do. We need not expect, however, to find peace there, for the immediate is in flux. Pure feeling rejoices in a logical nonentity very deceptive to dialectical minds. They often think, when they fall back on elements necessarily indescribable, that they have come upon true nothingness. If they are mys- tics, distrusting thought and craving the large- ness of indistinction, they may embrace this alleged nothingness with joy, even if it seem posi- tively painful, hoping to find rest there through self-abnegation. If on the contrary they are rationalists they may reject the immediate with scorn and deny that it exists at all, since in their books they cannot define it satisfactorily. Both mystics and rationalists, however, are deceived by their mental agility; the immediate exists, even if dialectic cannot explain it. What the rationalist calls nonentity is the substrate and locus of all ideas, having the obstinate reality of matter, the crushing irrationality of existence itself; and one who attempts to override it becomes to that extent an irrelevant rhapsodist, dealing with thin after- 42 THE LIFE OF REASON images of being. Nor has the mystic who sinks into the immediate much better appreciated the sitiiatioii. This immediate is not God but chaos; its nothingness is pregnant, restless, and brutish; it is that from which all things emerge in so far as they have any permanence or value, so that to lapse into it again is a dull suicide and no salva- tion. Peace, which is after all what the mystic seeks, lies not in indistinction but in perfection. If he reaches it in a measure himself, it is by the traditional discipline he still practises, not by his heats or his languors. The seed-bed of reason lies, then, in the imme- diate, but what reason draws thence is momentum and power to rise above its source. It is the per- turbed immediate itself that finds or at least seeks its peace in reason, through which it comes in sight of some sort of ideal permanence. When the tiux manages to form an eddy and to main- tain by breathing and nutrition what we call a life, it affords some slight foothold and object for thought and becomes in a measure like the ark in the desert, a moving habitation for the eternal. ,., ,^ _ Life begins to have some value and Life the fixa- _ *= ationofin- Continuity so soon as there is some- terests. thing definite that lives and something definite to live for. The primacy of will, as Fichte and Schopenhauer conceived it, is a mythi- cal way of designating this situation. Of course a will can have no being in the absence of reali- ties or ideas marking its direction and contrast- THE BIRTH OF REASON 43 ing the eventualities it seeks with those it flies from ; and tendency, no less than movement, needs an organised medium to make it possible, while aspiration and fear involve an ideal world. Yet a principle of choice is not deducible from mere ideas, and no interest is involved in the formal relations of things. All survey needs an arbitrary starting-point; all valuation rests on an irrational bias. The absolute flux cannot be physically ar- rested ; but what arrests it ideally is the fixing of some point in it from which it can be measured and illumined. Otherwise it could show no form and maintain no preference; it would be impos- sible to approach or recede from a represented state, and to suffer or to exert will in view of events. The irrational fate that lodges the tran- scendental self in this or that body, inspires it with definite passions, and subjects it to particular buffets from the outer world — this is the prime condition of all observation and inference, of all failure or success. Primary Those sensations in which a transi- duauties. tiou is Contained need only analysis to yield two ideal and related terms — two points in space or two characters in feeling. Hot and cold, here and there, good and bad, now and then, are dyads that spring into being when the flux accen- tuates some term and so makes possible a dis- crimination of parts and directions in its own movement. An initial attitude sustains incipient interests. What we first discover in ourselves. 44 THE LIFE OF REASON before the influence we obey has given rise to any definite idea, is the working of instincts already in motion. Impulses to appropriate and to reject first teach us the points of the compass, and space itself, like charity, begins at home. First grop- The guidc in early sensuous educa- ings. In- tion is the same that conducts the nucleus of whole Life of Reason, namely, impulse reason. checked by experiment, and experi- ment judged again by impulse. What teaches the child to distinguish the nurse's breast from sundry blank or disquieting presences? What induces him to arrest that image, to mark its associates, and to recognise them with alacrity? The dis- comfort of its absence and the comfort of its possession. To that image is attached the chief satisfaction he knows, and the force of that satisfaction disentangles it before all other images from the feeble and fluid continuum of his life. What first awakens in him a sense of reality is what first is able to appease his unrest. Had the group of feelings, now welded together in fruition, found no instinct in him to awaken and become a signal for, the group would never have persisted; its loose elements would have been allowed to pass by unnoticed and would not have been recognised when they recurred. Experience would have remained absolute inex- perience, as foolishly perpetual as the gurglings of rivers or the flickerings of sunlight in a grove. But an instinct was actually present, so formed as THE BIRTH OF REASON 45 to be aroused by a determinate stimulus; and the image produced by that stimulus, when it came, could have in consequence a meaning and an in- dividuality. It seemed by divine right to signify something interesting, something real, because by natural contiguity it flowed from something per- tinent and important to life. Every accompany- ing sensation which shared that privilege, or in time was engrossed in that function, would ulti- mately become a part of that conceived reality, a quality of that thing. The same primacy of impulses, irrational in themselves but expressive of bodily functions, is observable in the behaviour of animals, and in those dreams, obsessions, and primary passions which in the midst of sophisticated life sometimes lay bare the obscure groundwork of human nature. Eeason's work is there undone. We can observe sporadic growths, disjointed fragments of rational- ity, springing up in a moral wilderness. In the passion of love, for instance, a cause unknown to the sufferer, but which is doubtless the spring- flood of hereditary instincts accidentally let loose, suddenly checks the young man's gayety, dispels his random curiosity, arrests perhaps his very breath; and when he looks for a cause to explain his suspended faculties, he can find it only in the presence or image of another being, of whose char- acter, possibly, he knows nothing and whose beauty may not be remarkable; yet that image pursues him everywhere, and he is dominated by an unac- 46 THE LIFE OF REASON customed tragic earnestness and a new capacity for suffering and joy. If the passion be strong there is no previous interest or duty that will be remembered before it; if it be lasting the whole life may be reorganised by it; it may impose new habits, other manners, and another religion. Yet what is the root of all this idealism? An irra- tional instinct, normally intermittent, such as all dumb creatures share, which has here managed to dominate a human soul and to enlist all the men- tal powers in its more or less permanent service, upsetting their usual equilibrium. This madness, however, inspires method; and for the first time, perhaps, in his life, the man has something to live for. The blind affinity that like a magnet draws all the faculties around it, in so uniting them, suffuses them with an unwonted spiritual light. Better and Here, on a small scale and on a pre- worsethe carious foundation, we may see clearly fundamental '' _ *^ categories. illustrated and foreshadowed that Life of Reason which is simply the unity given to all existence by a mind in love with the good. In the higher reaches of human nature, as much as in the lower, rationality depends on distinguishing the excellent; and that distinction can be made, in the last analysis, only by an irrational impulse. As life is a better form given to force, by which the universal flux is subdued to create and serve a somewhat permanent interest, so rea- son is a better form given to interest itself, by THE BIRTH OF EEASON 47 which it is fortified and propagated, and ulti- mately, perhaps, assured of satisfaction. The substance to which this form is given remains irrational; so that rationality, like all excellence, is something secondary and relative, requiring a natural being to possess or to impute it. When definite interests are recognised and the values of things are estimated by that standard, action at the same time veering in harmony with that esti- mation, then reason has been born and a moral world has arisen. CHAPTER II FIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS Consciousness is a born hermit. Dreams before Though subject, by divine dispensa- thoughts. ^JQjj^ ^Q spells of fervour and apathy, like a singing bird, it is at first quite unconcerned about its own conditions or maintenance. To acquire a notion of such matters, or an interest in them, it would have to lose its hearty simplicity and begin to reflect; it would have to forget the present with its instant joys in order laboriously to conceive the absent and the hypothetical. The body may be said to make for self-preservation, since it has an organic equilibrium which, when not too rudely disturbed, restores itself by growth and co-operative action; but no such principle appears in the soul. Foolish in the beginning and generous in the end, consciousness thinks of nothing so little as of its own interests. It is lost in its objects; nor would it ever acquire even an indirect concern in its future, did not love of things external attach it to their fortunes. At- tachment to ideal terms is indeed what gives con- sciousness its continuity; its parts have no rele- vance or relation to one another save what they 48 M FIRST STEPS 49 acquire by depending on the same body or repre- senting the same objects. Even when conscious- ness grows sophisticated and thinks it cares for itself, it really cares only for its ideals ; the world it pictures seems to it beautiful, and it may inci- dentally prize itself also, when it has come to re- gard itself as a part of that world. Initially, how- ever, it is free even from that honest selfishness; it looks straight out ; it is interested in the move- ments it observes; it swells with the represented world, suffers with its commotion, and subsides, no less willingly, in its interludes of calm. Natural history and psychology arrive at con- sciousness from the outside, and consequently give it an artificial articulation and rationality which are wholly alien to its essence. These sciences infer feeling from habit or expression; so that only the expressible and practical aspects of feel- ing figure in their calculation. But these aspects are really peripheral; the core is an irresponsible, ungoverned, irrevocable dream. Psychologists have discussed perception ad nauseam and become horribly entangled in a combined idealism and physiology; for they must perforce approach the subject from the side of matter, since all science and all evidence are external; nor could they ever reach consciousness at all if they did not observe its occasions and then interpret those occasions dramatically. At the same time, the inferred mind they subject to examination will yield noth- ing but ideas, and it is a marvel how such a dream Vol. I.— 4 50 THE LIFE OF EEASON can regard those natural objects from which the psychologist has inferred it. Perception is in fact no primary phase of consciousness; it is an ulte- rior practical function acquired by a dream which has become symbolic of its conditions, and there- fore relevant to its own destiny. Such relevance and symbolism are indirect and slowly acquired; their status cannot be understood unless we regard them as forms of imagination happily grown sig- nificant. In imagination, not in perception, lies the substance of experience, while knowledge and reason are but its chastened and ultimate form, ~. . . Every actual animal is somewhat The mind -^ vegetates un- dull and somewhat mad. He will at controued times miss his signals and stare va- save by " physical cautly when he might well act, while forces. ^^ other times he will run off into con- vulsions and raise a dust in his own brain to no purpose. These imperfections are so human that we should hardly recognise ourselves if we could shake them off altogether. Not to retain any dul- ness would mean to possess untiring attention and universal interests, thus realising the boast about deeming nothing human alien to us; while to be absolutely without folly would involve perfect self- knowledge and self-control. The intelligent man known to history flourishes within a dullard and holds a lunatic in leash. He is encased in a pro- tective shell of ignorance and insensibility which keeps him from being exhausted and confused by this too complicated world; but that integument FIRST STEPS 51 blinds him at the same time to many of his near* est and highest interests. He is amused by the antics of the brute dreaming within his breast; he gloats on his passionate reveries, an amuse- ment which sometimes costs him very dear. Thus the best human intelligence is still decidedly bar- barous ; it fights in heavy armour and keeps a fool at court. If consciousness could ever have the function of guiding conduct better than instinct can, in the beginning it would be most incompetent for that office. Only the routine and equilibrium which healthy instinct involves keep thought and will at all within the limits of sanity. The predeter- mined interests we have as animals Internal order fortunatcly focus our attention on supervenes, practical things, pulling it back, like a ball with an elastic cord, within the radius of pertinent matters. Instinct alone compels us to neglect and seldom to recall the irrelevant infinity of ideas. Philosophers have sometimes said that all ideas come from experience; they never could have been poets and must have forgotten that they were ever children. The great difficulty in edu- cation is to get experience out of ideas. Shame, conscience, and reason continually disallow and ignore what consciousness presents; and what are they but habit and latent instinct asserting them- selves and forcing us to disregard our midsum- mer madness? Idiocy and lunacy are merely reversions to a condition in which present con- 52 THE LIFE OF KEASON sciousness is in the ascendant and has escaped the control of unconscious forces. We speak of people being " out of their senses," when they have in fact fallen back into them; or of those who have " lost their mind," when they have lost merely that habitual control over consciousness which pre- vented it from flaring into all sorts of obsessions and agonies. Their bodies having become de- ranged, their minds, far from correcting that derangement, instantly share and betray it. A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection. Even in the highest reaches and serenest meditations of science it sometimes breaks through. Even there we are seldom constant enough to conceive a truly natural world; somewhere passionate, fanciful, or magic elements will slip into the scheme and baffle rational ambition. A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit; they lapse only when the corporeal frame that sustains them yields to cir- cumstances and changes its habit. If they are unstable at all, it is because they ordinarily corre- spond to strains and conjunctions which a vig- orous body overcomes, or which dissolve the body altogether. A pain not incidental to the play of practical instincts may easily be recurrent, and it might be perpetual if even the worst habits were not intermittent and the most useless agitations FIEST STEPS 53 exhausting. Some respite will therefore ensue upon pain, but no magic cure. Madness, in like manner, if pronounced, is precarious, but when speculative enough to be harmless or not strong enough to be debilitating, it too may last for ever. An imaginative life may therefore exist para- sitically in a man, hardly touching his action or environment. There is no possibility of exorcis- ing these apparitions by their own power. A nightmare does not dispel itself; it endures until the organic strain which caused it is relaxed either by natural exhaustion or by some external in- fluence. Therefore human ideas are still for the most part sensuous and trivial, shifting with the chance currents of the brain, and representing nothing, so to speak, but personal temperature. Personal temperature, moreover, is sometimes tropical. There are brains like a South Ameri- can jungle, as there are others like an Arabian desert, strewn with nothing but bones. While a passionate sultriness prevails in the mind there is no end to its luxuriance. Languages intricately articulate, flaming mythologies, metaphysical per- spectives lost in infinity, arise in remarkable profusion. In time, however, there comes a change of climate and the whole forest dis- appears. It is easy, from the stand-point of acquired prac- tical competence, to deride a merely imaginative life. Derision, however, is not interpretation, and 54 THE LIFE OF REASON the better method of overcoming erratic ideas is to trace them out dialectically and see if they will not recognise their own fatuity. The most irre- sponsible vision has certain principles of order and valuation by which it estimates itself ; and in these principles the Life of Reason is already broached, however halting may be its development. We should lead ourselves out of our dream, as the Israelites were led out of Egypt, by the promise and eloquence of that dream itself. Otherwise we might kill the goose that lays the golden egg, and by proscribing imagination abolish science. - ^ . . Visionary experience has a first Intnnsic -^ ^ pleasure in value in its possible pleasantness. existence. y^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^ f^^^-^g ^^^^^^ ^^ ^^_ lightful is not to be explained transcendentally : a physiological law may, after the fact, render every instance predictable; but no logical affinity between the formal quality of an experience and the impulse to welcome it will thereby be disclosed. We find, however, that pleasure suffuses certain states of mind and pain others; which is another way of saying that, for no reason, we love the first and detest the second. The polemic which certain moralists have waged against pleasure and in favour of pain is intelligible when we remem- ber that their chief interest is edification, and that ability to resist pleasure and pain alike is a val- uable virtue in a world where action and renun- ciation are the twin keys to happiness. But to deny that pleasure is a good and pain an evil FIKST STEPS 55 is a grotesque affectation : it amounts to giving "good" and " evil " artificial definitions and there- pieasure a ^J reducing ethics to arbitrary verbi- good, age. Not only is good that adherence of the will to experience of which pleasure is the basal example, and evil the corresponding rejec- tion which is the very essence of pain, but when we pass from good and evil in sense to their high- est embodiments, pleasure remains eligible and pain something which it is a duty to prevent. A man who without necessity deprived any person of a pleasure or imposed on him a pain, would be a contemptible knave, and the person so injured would be the first to declare it, nor could the high- est celestial tribunal, if it was just, reverse that sentence. For it suffices that one being, however weak, loves or abhors anything, no "matter how slightly, for that thing to acquire a proportionate value which no chorus of contradiction ringing through all the spheres can ever wholly abolish. ('An experience good or bad in itself remains so for ever, and its inclusion in a more general order of things can only change that totality propor- tionately to the ingredient absorbed, which will infect the mass, so far as it goes, with its own colour. The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign is its total temper. To deny this would seem im- possible, yet it is done daily ; for there is nothing 56 THE LIFE OF REASON people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candour and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost. Pleasures differ sensibly in inten- but not pur- *' sued or re- sity ; but the intensest pleasures are membered ^^^^^ ^^^ blindest, and it is hard to unless it ... suffuses an recall or estimate a feeling with which object. ^^ definite and complex object is conjoined. The first step in making pleasure intelligible and capable of being pursued is to make it pleasure in something. The object it suffuses acquires a value, and gives the pleasure itself a place in rational life. The pleasure can now be named, its variations studied in reference to changes in its object, and its comings and goings foreseen in the order of events. The more articu- late the world that produces emotion the more controllable and recoverable is the emotion itself. Therefore diversity and order in ideas makes the life of pleasure richer and easier to lead. A volu- minous dumb pleasure might indeed outweigh the pleasure spread thin over a multitude of tame perceptions, if we could only weigh the two in one scale; but to do so is impossible, and in memory and prospect, if not in experience, diversified pleasure must needs carry the day. Subhuman Here we come upon a crisis in deUghts. human development which shows clearly how much the Life of Eeason is a natural thing, a growth that a different course of events might well have excluded. Laplace is reported to FIRST STEPS 57 have said on his death-bed that science was mere trifling and that nothing was real but love. Love, for such a man, doubtless involved objects and ideas : it was love of persons. The same revulsion of feeling may, however, be carried further. Lucretius says that passion is a torment because its pleasures are not pure, that is, because they are mingled with longing and entangled in vexatious things. Pure pleasure would be without ideas. Many a man has found in some moment of his life an unutterable joy which made all the rest of it seem a farce, as if a corpse should play it was living. Mystics habitually look beneath the Life- of Eeason for the substance and infinity of happi- ness. In all these revulsions, and many others, there is a certain justification, inasmuch as sys- tematic living is after all an experiment, as is the formation of animal bodies, and the inorganic pulp out of which these growths have come may very likely have had its own incommunicable val- ues, its absolute thrills, which we vainly try to remember and to which, in moments of dissolu- tion, we may half revert. Protoplasmic pleasures and strains may be the substance of consciousness ; and as matter seeks its own level, and as the sea and the flat waste to which all dust returns have a certain primordial life and a certain sublimity, so all passions and ideas, when spent, may re- join the basal note of feeling, and enlarge their volume as they lose their form. This loss of form may not be unwelcome, if it is the formless that, 58 THE LIFE OF REASON by anticipation, speaks through what is surrender- ing its being. Though to acquire or impart form is delightful in art, in thought, in generation, in government, yet a euthanasia of finitude is also known. All is not affectation in the poet who says, "Now more than ever seems it rich to die" ; and, without any poetry or affectation, men may love sleep, and opiates, and every luxurious escape from humanity. The step by which pleasure and pain are at- tached to ideas, so as to be predictable and to become factors in action, is therefore by no means irrevocable. It is a step, however, in the direc- tion of reason; and though reason's path is only one of innumerable courses perhaps open to ex- istence, it is the only one that we are tracing here ; the only one, obviously, which human discourse is competent to trace. Animal \Vhen consciousncss begins to add Uving. diversity to its intensity, its value is no longer absolute and inexpressible. The felt varia- tions in its tone are attached to the observed movement of its objects ; in these objects its values are imbedded. A world loaded with dramatic values may thus arise in imagination ; terrible and delightful presences may chase one another across the void ; life will be a kind of music made by all the senses together. Many animals probably have this form of experience; they are not wholly sub- merged in a vegetative stupor; they can discern what they love or fear. Yet all this is still a FIRST STEPS 59 disordered apparition that reels itself off amid sporadic movements, efforts, and agonies. Now gorgeous, now exciting, now indifferent, the land- scape brightens and fades with the day. If a dog, while sniffing about contentedly, sees afar off his master arriving after long absence, the change in the animal's feeling is not merely in the quantity of pure pleasure; a new circle of sensations ap- pears, with a new principle governing interest and desire; instead of waywardness subjection, instead of freedom love. But the poor brute asks for no reason why his master went, why he has come again, why he should be loved, or why pres- ently while lying at his feet you forget him and begin to grunt and dream of the chase — all that is an utter mystery, utterly unconsidered. Such experience has variety, scenery, and a certain vital rhythm; its story might be told in dithyrambic verse. It moves wholly by inspiration; every event is providential, every act unpremeditated. Absolute freedom and absolute helplessness have met together : you depend wholly on divine favour, yet that unfathomable agency is not distinguish- able from your own life. This is the condition to which some forms of piety invite men to return ; and it lies in truth not far beneath the level of ordinary human consciousness. Causes at "^^^ story which such animal experi- last dis- ence contains, however, needs only to cerned. ^^ better articulated in order to dis- close its underlying machinery. The figures even 60 THE LIFE OF REASON of that disordered drama have their exits and their entrances ; and their cues can be gradually discov- ered by a being capable of fixing his attention and retaining the order of events. Thereupon a third step is made in imaginative experience. As pleas- ures and pains were formerly distributed among objects, so objects are now marshalled into a world. Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, said a poet who stood near enough to fundamental human needs and to the great answer which art and civilisation can make to them, to value the Life of Eeason and think it sublime. To discern causes is to turn vision into knowledge and motion into action. It is to fix the associates of things, so that their respective transformations are col- lated, and they become significant of one another. In proportion as such understanding advances each moment of experience becomes consequen- tial and prophetic of the rest. The calm places in life are filled with power and its spasms with resource. No emotion can overwhelm the mind, for of none is the basis or issue wholly hidden; no event can disconcert it altogether, because it sees beyond. Means can be looked for to escape from the worst predicament; and whereas each moment had been formerly filled with nothing but its own adventure and surprised emotion, each now makes room for the lesson of what went before and surmises what may be the plot of the whole. At the threshold of reason there is a kind of choice. Not all impressions contribute equally to FIEST STEPS 61 the new growth; many, in fact, which were for- merly equal in rank to the best, now grow obscure. Attention ignores them, in its haste to arrive at what is significant of something more. Nor are the principles of synthesis, by which the aristo- cratic few establish their oligarchy, themselves un- equivocal. The first principles of logic are like the senses, few but arbitrary. They might have been quite different and, yet produced, by a now unthinkable method, a language no less significant than the one we speak. Twenty-six letters may suffice for a language, but they are a wretched minority among all possible sounds. So the forms of perception and the categories of thought, which a grammarian's philosophy might think primordial necessities, are no less casual than words or their syntactical order. Why, we may ask, did these forms assert themselves here? What principles of selection guide mental growth ? To give a logical ground for such a selection is evidently impossible, since it is logic itself that is to be accounted for. A natural ground is, in strictness, also irrelevant, since natural connec- tions, where thought has not reduced them to a sort of equivalence and necessity, are mere data and juxtapositions. Yet it is not necessary to leave the question altogether unanswered. By using our senses we may discover, not indeed why each sense has its specific quality or exists at all, but what are its organs and occasions. In like manner we may, by developing the Life of Reason, 62 THE LIFE OF KEASON come to understand its conditions. When con- sciousness awakes the body has, as we long after- Attention ward discover, a definite organisation, guided by Without guidance from reflection bod- bodily im- o pulse. ily processes have been going on, and most precise affinities and reactions have been set up between its organs and the surrounding objects. On these affinities and reactions sense and in- tellect are grafted. The plants are of different nature, yet growing together they bear excellent fruit. It is as the organs receive appropriate stimulations that attention is riveted on definite sensations. It is as the system exercises its natural activities that passion, will, and medita- tion possess the mind. No syllogism is needed to persuade us to eat, no prophecy of happiness to teach us to love. On the contrary, the living organism, caught in the act, informs us how to reason and what to enjoy. The soul adopts the body's aims ; from the body and from its instincts she draws a first hint of the right means to those accepted purposes. Thus reason enters into part- nership with the world and begins to be respected there; which it would never be if it were not ex- pressive of the same mechanical forces that are to preside over events and render them fortunate or unfortunate for human interests. Reason is sig- nificant in action only because it has begun by taking, so to speak, the body's side; that sjTupa- thetic bias enables her to distinguish events per- tinent to the chosen interests, to compare im- FIRST STEPS 63 pulse with satisfaction^ and, by representing a new and circular current in the system, to preside over the formation of better habits, habits expressing more instincts at once and responding to more opportunities. CHAPTER III THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS At first siffht it might seem an idle Nature » • t man's observation that the first task of intel- home. ligence is to represent the environing reality; a reality actually represented in the notion, universally prevalent among men, of a cosmos in space and time, an animated material engine called nature. In trying to conceive nature the mind lisps its first lesson ; natural phenomena are the mother tongue of imagination no less than of science and practical life. Men and gods are not conceivable otherwise than as inhabitants of nature. Early experience knows no mystery which is not somehow rooted in transformations of the natural world, and fancy can build no hope which would not be expressible there. But we are grown so accustomed to this ancient apparition that we may be no longer aware how difficult was the task of conjuring it up. We may even have forgotten the possibility that such a vision should never have arisen at all. A brief excursion into that much abused subject, the psychology of per- ception, may here serve to remind us of the great 64 DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS 65 work which the budding intellect must long ago have accomplished unawares. ^.- ,,. Consider how the shocks out of Difficulties in conceiv- which the uotion of material things is ing nature. ^^ ^^ ^^^-j^ ^^^^ g^j.-j,g ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ soul. Eye and hand, if we may neglect the other senses, transmit their successive impressions, all varying with the position of outer objects and with the other material conditions. A chaos of multi- tudinous impressions rains in from all sides at all hours. Nor have the external or cognitive senses an original primacy. The taste, the smell, the alarming sounds of things are continually distract- ing attention. There are infinite reverberations in memory of all former impressions, together with fresh fancies created in the brain, things at first in no wise subordinated to external objects. All these incongruous elements are mingled like a witches' brew. And more : there are indications that inner sensations, such as those of digestion, have an overpowering influence on the primitive mind, which has not learned to articulate or distinguish permanent needs. So that to the whirl of outer sensations we must add, to reach some notion of what consciousness may contain before the advent of reason, interruptions and lethargies caused by wholly blind internal feelings ; trances such as fall even on comparatively articulate minds in rage, lust, or madness. Against all these bewildering forces the new-born reason has to struggle ; and we need not wonder that the costly experiments and Vol. I.-fi 66 THE LIFE OF KEASON disillusions of the past have not yet produced a complete enlightenment. The onslaught made in the last cen- Transcen- ° dental tury by the transcendental philosophy qualms. upon empirical traditions is familiar to everybody: it seemed a pertinent attack, yet in the end proved quite trifling and unavailing. Thought, we are told rightly enough, cannot be accounted for by enumerating its conditions. A number of detached sensations, being each its own little world, cannot add themselves together nor conjoin themselves in the void. Again, ex- periences having an alleged common cause would not have, merely for that reason, a common object. Nor would a series of successive perceptions, no matter how quick, logically involve a sense of time nor a notion of succession. Yet, in point of fact, when such a succession occurs and a living brain is there to acquire some structural modification by virtue of its own passing states, a memory of that succession and its terms may often supervene. It is quite true also that the simultaneous presence or association of images belonging to different senses does not carry with it by intrinsic necessity any fusion of such images nor any notion of an object having them for its qualities. Yet, in point of fact, such a group of sensations does often merge into a complex image; instead of the elements originally perceptible in isolation, there arises a familiar term, a sort of personal presence. To this felt presence, certain instinctive reactions DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS 67 are attached, and the sensations that may be in- volved in that apparition, when each for any rea- son becomes emphatic, are referred to it as its qualities or its effects. Such complications of course involve the gift of memory, with capacity to survey at once vestiges of many perceptions, to feel their implication and absorption in the present object, and to be carried, by this sense of relation, to the thought that those perceptions have a representative function. And this is a great step. It mani- fests the mind's powers. It illustrates those transformations of cofisciousness the principle of which, when abstracted, we call intelligence. We must accordingly proceed with caution, for we are digging at the very roots of reason. Thought an The chicf perplexity, however, which aspect of besets this subject and makes discus- hfe and "" transitive. sious of it SO oftcu end in a cloud, is quite artificial. Thought is not a mechanical cal- culus, where the elements and the method exhaust the fact. Thought is a form of life, and should be conceived on the analogy of nutrition, genera- tion, and art. Reason, as Hume said with pro- found truth, is an unintelligible instinct. It could not be otherwise if reason is to remain something transitive and existential; for transition is unin- telligible, and yet is the deepest characteristic of existence. Philosophers, however, having per-, ceived that the function of thought is to fix static terms and reveal eternal relations, have inadver- 68 THE LIFE OF KEASON tently transferred to the living act what is true only of its ideal object; and they have expected to find in the process, treated psychologicallj^ that luminous deductive clearness which belongs to the ideal world it tends to reveal. The intelligible, however, lies at the periphery of experience, the surd at its core ; and intelligence is but one centrif- ugal ray darting from the slime to the stars. Thought must execute a metamorphosis; and while this is of course mysterious, it is one of those familiar mysteries, like motion and will, which are more natural than dialectical lucidity itself; for dialectic grows cogent by fulfilling intent, but intent or meaning is itself vital and inexplicable. Perception The process of counting is perhaps cumuia- g^g sijjipig ^n instance as can be found tive and syn- ^ thetic. of a mental operation on sensible data. The clock, let us say, strikes two : if the sensorium were perfectly elastic and after receiving the first blow reverted exactly to its previous state, retain- ing absolutely no trace of that momentary oscil- lation and no altered habit, then it is certain that a sense for number or a faculty of counting could never arise. The second stroke would be re- sponded to with the same reaction which had met the first. There would be no summation of effects, no complication. However numerous the succes- sive impressions might come to be, each would remain fresh and pure, the last being identical in character with the first. One, one, one, would be the monotonous response for ever. Just so gen- DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS 69 erations of ephemeral insects that succeeded one another without transmitting experience might repeat the same round of impressions — an ever- lasting progression without a shadow of progress. Such, too, is the idiofs life: his liquid brain transmits every impulse without resistance and retains the record of no impression. Intelligence is accordingly conditioned by a modification of both structure and consciousness by dint of past events. To be aware that a second stroke is not itself the first, I must retain something of the old sensation. The first must reverberate still in my ears when the second ar- rives, so that this second, coming into a conscious- ness still filled by the first, is a different experi- ence from the first, which fell into a mind perfectly empty and unprepared. Now the new- comer finds in the subsisting One a sponsor to christen it by the name of Two. The first stroke was a simple 1. The second is not simply another 1, a mere iteration of the first. It is V, where the coefiicient represents the reverberating first stroke, still persisting in the mind, and forming a background and perspective against which the new stroke may be distinguished. The meaning of " two," then, is " this after that " or " this again," where we have a simultaneous sense of two things which have been separately perceived but are iden- tified as similar in their nature. Repetition must cease to be pure repetition and become cumulative before it can give rise to the consciousness of repetition. 70 THE LIFE OF REASON The first condition of counting, then, is that the sensorium should retain something of the fiirst impression while it receives the second, or (to state the corresponding mental fact) that the sec- ond sensation should be felt together with a sur- vival of the first from which it is distinguished in point of existence and with which it is identified in point of character. Now, to secure this, it is not enough No identical ^j^^^ ^^^ sensorium should be mate- agent needed. rially continuous, or that a " spiritual substance " or a " transcendental ego " should per- sist in time to receive the second sensation after having received and registered the first. A per- fectly elastic sensorium, a wholly unchanging soul, or a quite absolute ego might remain perfectly identical with itself through various experiences without collating them. It would then remain, in fact, more truly and literally identical than if it were modified somewhat by those successive shocks. Yet a sensorium or a spirit thus un- changed would be incapable of memory, unfit to connect a past perception with one present or to become aware of their relation. It is not identity in the substance impressed, but growing compli- cation in the phenomenon presented, that makes possible a sense of diversity and relation between things. The identity of substance or spirit, if it w^ere absolute, would indeed prevent comparison, because it would exclude modifications, and it is the survival of past modifications within the pres- DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS 71 ent that makes comparisons possible. We may impress any number of forms successively on the same water, and the identity of the substance will not help those forms to survive and accumulate their effects. But if we have a surface that retains our successive stampings we may change the sub- stance from wax to plaster and from plaster to bronze, and the effects of our labour will survive and be superimposed upon one another. It is the actual plastic form in both mind and body, not any unchanging substance or agent, that is effi- cacious in perpetuating thought and gathering experience. Were not Nature and all her parts such models of patience and pertinacity, they never would have succeeded in impressing their existence on some- thing so volatile and irresponsible as thought is. Example of ^ sensation needs to be violent, like the sun. the sun's blinding light, to arrest at- tention, and keep it taut, as it were, long enough for the system to acquire a respectful attitude, and grow predisposed to resume it. A repetition of that sensation will thereafter meet with a pre- pared response which we call recognition ; the con- comitants of the old experience will form them- selves afresh about the new one and by their convergence give it a sort of welcome and inter- pretation. The movement, for instance, by which the face was raised toward the heavens was perhaps one element which added to the first sensation, brightness, a concomitant sensation, height; the 72 THE LIFE OF REASON brightness was not bright merely, but high. Now when the brightness reappears the face will more quickly be lifted up; the place where the bright- ness shone will be looked for; the brightness will have acquired a claim to be placed somewhere. The heat which at the same moment may have burned the forehead will also be expected and, when felt, projected into the brightness, which will now be hot as well as high. So with whatever other sensations time may associate with this group. They will all adhere to the original im- pression, enriching it with an individuality which will render it before long a familiar complex in experience, and one easy to recognise and to com- plete in idea. In the case of so vivid a thing as hivediv^t ^^^ sun's brightness many other sensa- tions beside those out of which science draws the qualities attributed to that heavenly body adhere in the primitive mind to the phenom- enon. Before he is a substance the sun is a god. He is beneficent and necessary no less than bright and high; he rises upon all happy opportunities and sets upon all terrors. He is divine, since all life and fruitfulness hang upon his miraculous revolutions. His coming and going are life and death to the world. As the sensations of light and heat are projected upward together to become attributes of his body, so the feelings of pleasure, safety, and hope which he brings into the soul are projected ipto bis spirit; and to this spirit, moro DISCOVERY OF NATUKAL OBJECTS 73 than to anything else, energy, independence, and substantiality are originally attributed. The emotions felt in his presence being the ultimate issue and term of his effect in us, the counterpart or shadow of those emotions is regarded as the first and deepest factor in his causality. It is his divine life, more than aught else, that underlies his apparitions and explains the influences which he propagates. The substance or independent ex- istence attributed to objects is therefore by no means only or primarily a physical notion. What is conceived to support the physical qualities is a pseudo-psychic or vital force. It is a moral and living object that we construct, building it up out of all the materials, emotional, intellectual, and sensuous, which lie at hand in our consciousness to be synthesised into the hybrid reality which we are to fancy confronting us. To discriminate and redistribute those miscellaneous physical and psy- chical elements, and to divorce the god from the material sun, is a much later problem, arising at a different and more reflective stage in the Life of Eeason. When reflection, turning to the com- Causes and _ . essences prchcnsion of a chaotic experience, contrasted. busics itsclf about recurrences, when it seeks to normalise in some way things coming and going, and to straighten out the causes of events, that reflection is inevitably turned toward some- thing dynamic and independent, and can have no successful issue except in mechanical science. 74 THE LIFE OF KEASON When on the other hand reflection stops to chal- lenge and question the fleeting object, not so much to prepare for its possible return as to conceive its present nature, this reflection is turned no less unmistakably in the direction of ideas, and will terminate in logic or the morphology of being. We attribute independence to things in order to normalise their recurrence. We attribute essences to them in order to normalise their manifesta- tions or constitution. Independence will ulti- mately turn out to be an assumed constancy in material processes, essence an assumed constancy in ideal meanings or points of reference in dis- course. The one marks the systematic distribution of objects, the other their settled character. Voracity of ^^^ ^alk of recurrent perceptions, but inteUect. materially considered no perception recurs. Each recurrence is one of a finite series and holds for ever its place and number in that series. Yet human attention, while it can survey several simultaneous impressions and find them similar, cannot keep them distinct if they grow too numerous. The mind has a native bias and inveterate preference for form and identification. Water does not run down hill more persistently than attention turns experience into constant terms. The several repetitions of one essence given in consciousness will tend at once to be neg- lected, and only the essence itself — the character shared by those sundry perceptions — will stand and become a term in mental discourse. After DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS 75 a few strokes of the clock, the reiterated impres- sions merge and cover one another; we lose count and perceive the quality and rhythm but not the number of the sounds. If this is true of so abstract and mathematical a perception as is count- ing, how emphatically true must it be of con- tinuous and infinitely varied perceptions flowing in from the whole spatial world. Glimpses of the environment follow one another in quick succes- sion, like a regiment of soldiers in uniform; only now and then does the stream take a new turn, catch a new ray of sunlight, or arrest our atten- tion at some break. The senses in their natural play revert con- stantly to familiar objects, gaining impressions which differ but slightly from one another. These slight differences are submerged in apperception, so that sensation comes to be not so much an addi- tion of new items to consciousness as a reburnish- ing there of some imbedded device. Its character and relations are only slightly modified at each fresh rejuvenation. To catch the passing phe- nomenon in all its novelty and idiosyncrasy is a work of artifice and curiosity. Such an exercise does violence to intellectual instinct and involves an aesthetic power of diving bodily into the stream of sensation, having thrown overboard all rational ballast and escaped at once the inertia and the momentum of practical life. Normally every datum of sense is at once devoured by a hungry intellect and digested for the sake of its vital 76 THE LIFE OF EEASON juices. The result is that what ordinarily re- mains in memory is no representative of particu- lar moments or shocks — though sensation, as in dreams, may be incidentally recreated from within — but rather a logical possession, a sense of ac- quaintance with a certain field of reality, in a word, a consciousness of Tcnowledge. But what, we may ask, is this real- Can the ' J ' transcendent ity, which WB boast to kuow ? May not be known? ||^g sccptic justly Contend that nothing is so unknown and indeed unknowable as this pre- tended object of knowledge? The sensations which reason treats so cavalierly were at least something actual while they lasted and made good their momentary claim to our interest; but what is this new ideal figment, unseizable yet ever present, invisible but indispensable, unknowable yet alone interesting or important ? Strange that the only possible object or theme of our knowledge should be something we cannot know. _ ^. . An answer to these doubts will per- Can the im- ^ mediate be haps appear if we ask ourselves what °**°*'' sort of contact with reality would sat- isfy us, and in what terms we expect or desire to possess the subject-matter of our thoughts. Is it simply corroboration that we look for? Is it a verification of truth in sense? It would be un- reasonable, in that case, after all the evidence we demand has been gathered, to complain that the ideal term thus concurrently suggested, the super- sensible substance, reality, or independent object. DISCOVERY OF. NATURAL OBJECTS 77 does not itself descend into the arena of immediate sensuous presentation. Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of some- thing absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace. It is an advance on sensation precisely because it is representative. The terms or goals of thought have for their function to subtend long tracts of sensuous experience, to be ideal links between fact and fact, invisible wires behind the scenes, threads along which inference may run in making phe- nomena intelligible and controllable. An idea that should become an image would cease to be ideal ; a principle that is to remain a principle can never become a fact. A God that you could see with the eyes of the body, a heaven you might climb into by a ladder planted at Bethel, would be parts of this created and interpretable world, not terms in its interpretation nor objects in a spiritual sphere. Now external objects are thought to be principles and sources of experi- ence; they are accordingly conceived realities on an ideal plane. We may look for all the evidence we choose before we declare our inference to be warranted; but we must not ask for something more than evidence, nor expect to know realities without inferring them anew. They are revealed only to understanding. We cannot cease to think and still continue to know. It may be said, however, that principles and external objects are interesting only because they 78 THE LIFE OF REASON symbolise further sensations, that thought is an expedient of finite minds, and that representation Is thought a is a ghostlj process which we crave bridge from ^^ materialise into bodily possession. sensation to ^ x- sensation? We may grow sick of inferring truth and long rather to become reality. Intelligence is after all no compulsory possession; and while some of us would gladly have more of it, others find that they already have too much. The ten- sion of thought distresses them and to represent what they cannot and would not be is not a natural function of their spirit. To such minds experience that should merely corroborate ideas would prolong dissatisfaction. The ideas must be realised; they must pass into immediacy. If real- ity (a word employed generally in a eulogistic sense) is to mean this desired immediacy, no ideal of thought can be real. All intelligible objects and the whole universe of mental discourse would then be an unreal and conventional structure, im- pinging ultimately on sense from which it would derive its sole validity. There would be no need of quarrelling with such a philosophy, were not its use of words rather misleading. Call experience in its existential and immediate aspect, if you will, the sole reality ; that will not prevent reality from having an ideal dimension. The intellectual world will continue to give beauty, meaning, and scope to those bub- bles of consciousness on which it is painted. Real- ity would not be, in that case, what thought aspires DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS 79 io reach. Consciousness is the least ideal of things when reason is taken out of it, Keality would then need thought to give it all those human values of which, in its substance, it would have been wholly deprived; and the ideal would still be what lent music to throbs and significance to being. The equivocation favoured by such language at once begins to appear. Is not thought with all its products a part of experience? Must not sense, if it be the only reality, be sentient some- times of the ideal ? What the site is to a city that is immediate experience to the universe of discourse. The latter is all held materially within the lim- its defined by the former; but if immediate ex- perience be the seat of the moral world, the moral world is the only interesting possession of imme- diate experience. "When a waste is built on, how- ever, it is a violent paradox to call it still a waste ; and an immediate experience that represents the rest of sentience, with all manner of ideal har- monies read into the whole in the act of repre- senting it, is an immediate experience raised to its highest power: it is the Life of Eeason. In vain, then, will a philosophy of intel- naturauter Icctual abstention limit so Platonic a piatomca. ^^^^^ ^g reality to the immediate aspect of existence, when it is the ideal aspect that en- dows existence with character and value, together with representative scope and a certain lien upon eternity. More legitimate, therefore, would be the asser- 80 THE LIFE OF EEASON tion that knowledge reaches reality when it touches its ideal goal. Reality is known when, as in mathematics, a stable and unequivocal object is developed by thinking. The locus or material embodiment of such a reality is no longer in view ; these questions seem to the logician irrelevant. If necessary ideas find no illustration in sense, he deems the fact an argument against the impor- tance and validity of sensation, not in the least a disproof of his ideal knowledge. If no site be found on earth for the Platonic city, its consti- tution is none the less recorded and enshrined in heaven; nor is that the only true ideal that has not where to lay its head. What in the sensualis- tic or mystical system was called reality will now be termed appearance, and what there figured as an imaginary construction borne by the conscious moment will now appear to be a prototype for all existence and an eternal standard for its estima- tion. It is this rationalistic or Platonic system (lit- tle as most men may suspect the fact) that finds a first expression in ordinary perception. When you distinguish your sensations from their cause and laugh at the idealist (as this kind of sceptic is called) who says that chairs and tables exist only in your mind, you are treating a figment of reason as a deeper and truer thing than the moments of life whose blind experience that reason has come to illumine. What you call the evidence of sense is pure confidence in reason. You will DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS 81 not be so idiotic as to make no inferences from your sensations; you will not pin your faith so unimaginatively on momentary appearance as to deny that the world exists when you stop thinking about it. You feel that your intellect has wider scope and has discovered many a thing that goes on behind the scenes, many a secret that would escape a stupid and gaping observation. It is the fool that looks to look and stops at the barely visible : you not only look but see; for you under- stand. Identity and Now the practical burden of such independence understanding, if you take the trouble predicated of "•' •' things. to analyse it, will turn out to be what the sceptic says it is: assurance of eventual sen- sations. But as these sensations, in memory and expectation, are numerous and indefinitely vari- able, you are not able to hold them clearly before the mind ; indeed, the realisation of all the poten- tialities which you vaguely feel to lie in the future is a task absolutely beyond imagination. Yet your present impressions, dependent as they are on your chance attitude and disposition and on a thousand trivial accidents, are far from repre- senting adequately all that might be discovered or that is actually known about the object before you. This object, then, to your apprehension, is not identical with any of the sensations that re- veal it, nor is it exhausted by all these sensations when they are added together; yet it contains nothing assignable but what they might conceiv- VoL. I.— 6 82 THE LIFE OF EEASON ably reveal. As it lies in your fancy, then, this object, the reality, is a complex and elusive entity, the sum at once and the residuum of all particu- lar impressions which, underlying the present one, have bequeathed to it their surviving linkage in discourse and consequently endowed it with a large part of its present character. With this hybrid object, sensuous in its materials and ideal in its locus, each particular glimpse is compared, and is recognised to be but a glimpse, an aspect which the object presents to a particular observer. Here are two identifications. In the first place various sensations and felt relations, which can- not be kept distinct in the mind, fall together into one term of discourse, represented by a sign, a word, or a more or less complete sensuous image. In the second place the new perception is referred to that ideal entity of which it is now called a manifestation and effect. Such are the primary relations of reality and appearance. A reality is a term of discourse based on a psychic complex of memories, associations, and expectations, but constituted in its ideal in- dependence by the assertive energy of thought. An appearance is a passing sensation, recognised as belonging to that group of which the object itself is the ideal representative, and accordingly regarded as a manifestation of that object. Thus the notion of an independent and per- manent world is an ideal term used to mark and as it were to justify the cohesion in space and the DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS 83 recurrence in time of recognisable groups of sen- sations. This coherence and recurrence force the intellect, if it would master experience at all or understand anything, to frame the idea of such a reality. If we wish to defend the use of such an idea and prove to ourselves its necessity, all we need do is to point to that coherence and recur- rence in external phenomena. That brave effort and flight of intelligence which in the beginning raised man to the conception of reality, enabling him to discount and interpret appearance, will, if we retain our trust in reason, raise us continually anew to that same idea, by a no less spontaneous and victorious movement of thought. CHAPTEE IV ON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERY Psychology The English psychologists who first as a solvent, disintegrated the idea of substance, and whose traces we have in general followed in the above account, did not study the question wholly for its own sake or in the spirit of a science that aims at nothing but -a-historical analysis of mind. They had a more or less malicious pur- pose behind their psychology. They thought that if they could once show how metaphysical ideas are made they would discredit those ideas and banish them for ever from the world. If they retained confidence in any notion — as Hobbes in body, Locke in matter and in God, Berkeley in spirits, and Kant, the inheritor of this malicious psychology, in the thing-in-itself and in heaven — it was merely by inadvertence or want of courage. The principle of their reasoning, where they chose to apply it, was always this, that ideas whose materials could all be accounted for in conscious- ness and referred to sense or to the operations of mind were thereby exhausted and deprived of fur- ther validity. Only the unaccountable, or rather the uncriticised, could be true. Consequently the 84 ON SOME CRITICS 85 advance of psychology meant, in this school, the retreat of reason; for as one notion after another was clarified and reduced to its elements it was ipso facto deprived of its function. So far were these philosophers from conceiving that validity and truth are ideal relations, accruing to ideas by virtue of dialectic and use, that while on the one hand they pointed out vital affinities and pragmatic sanctions in the mind's economy they confessed on the other that the outcome of their philosophy was sceptical; for no idea could be found in the mind which was not a phenomenon there, and no inference could be drawn from these phenomena not based on some inherent "tendency to feign." The analysis which was in truth legiti- mising and purifying knowledge seemed to them absolutely to blast it, and the closer they came to the bed-rock of experience the more incapable they felt of building up anything upon it. Self- knowledge meant, they fancied, self-detection ; the representative value of thought decreased as thought grew in scope and elaboration. It became impossible to be at once quite serious and quite intelligent ; for to use reason was to indulge in subjective fiction, while conscientiously to abstain from using it was to sink back upon inarticulate and brutish instinct. In Hume this sophistication was frankly avowed. Philosophy discredited itself; but a man of parts, who loved intellectual games even better than backgammon; might take a hand with the 86 THE LIFE OF REASON wits and historians of his day, until the clock struck twelve and the party was over. Even in Kant, though the mood was more cramped and earnest, the mystical sophistication was quite the same. Kant, too, imagined that the bottom had been knocked out of the world ; that in comparison with some unutterable sort of truth empirical truth was falsehood, and that validity for all pos- sible experience was weak validity, in comparison with validity of some other and unmentionable sort. Since space and time could not repel the accusation of being the necessary forms of percep- tion, space and time were not to be much thought of; and when the sad truth was disclosed that causality and the categories were instruments by which the idea of nature had to be constructed, if such an idea was to exist at all, then nature and causality shrivelled up and were dishonoured together; so that, the soul's occupation being gone, she must needs appeal to some mysterious oracle, some abstract and irrelevant omen within the breast, and muster up all the stern courage of an accepted despair to carry her through this world of mathematical illusion into some green and infantile paradise beyond. . ^ What idea, we may well ask our- role of intern- sclvcs, did these modern philosophers gence. entertain regarding the pretensions of ancient and mediaeval metaphysics ? What under- standing had they of the spirit in which the natural organs of reason had been exercised and ON SOME CKITICS 87 developed in those schools? Frankly, very little; for they accepted from ancient philosophy and from common-sense the distinction between reality and appearance, but they forgot the function of that distinction -and dislocated its meaning, which was nothing but to translate the chaos of percep- tion into the regular play of stable natures and objects congenial to discursive thought and valid in the art of living. Philosophy had been the natural science of perception raised to the reflec- tive plane, the objects maintaining themselves on this higher plane being styled realities, and those still floundering below it being called appearances or mere ideas. The function of envisaging real- ity, ever since Parmenides and Heraclitus, had been universally attributed to the intellect. When the moderns, therefore, proved anew that it was the mind that framed that idea, and that what we call reality, substance, nature, or God, can be reached only by an operation of reason, they made no very novel or damaging discovery. Of course, it is possible to disregard the sugges- tions of reason in any particular case and it is quite possible to believe, for instance, that the hypothesis of an external material world is an erroneous one. But that this hypothesis is erroneous does not fol- low from the fact that it is a hypothesis. To discard it on that ground would be to discard all reasoned knowledge and to deny altogether the validity of thought. If intelligence is assumed to be an or- gan of cognition and a vehicle for truth, a given 88 THE LIFE OF KEASON hypothesis about the causes of perception can only be discarded when a better hypothesis on the same subject has been supplied. To be better such a hypothesis would have to meet the multiplicity of phenomena and their mutations with a more intel- ligible scheme of comprehension and a more useful instrument of control. All criticism Scepticism is always possible while dogmatic. jt is partial. It will remain the privi- lege and resource of a free mind that has elas- ticity enough to disintegrate its own formations and to approach its experience from a variety of sides and with more than a single method. But the method chosen must be coherent in itself and the point of view assumed must be adhered to during that survey; so that whatever reconstruc- tion the novel view may produce in science will be science still, and will involve assumptions and dogmas which must challenge comparison with the dogmas and assumptions they would supplant. People speak of dogmatism as if it were a method to be altogether outgrown and something for which some non-assertive philosophy could furnish a sub- stitute. But dogmatism is merely a matter of degree. Some thinkers and some systems retreat further than others into the stratum beneath cur- rent conventions and make us more conscious of the complex machinery which, working silently in the soul, makes possible all the rapid and facile operations of reason. The deeper this retrospec- tive glance the less dogmatic the philosophy. A ON SOME CRITICS 89 primordial constitution or tendency, however, must always remain, having structure and involving a definite life; for if we thought to reach some wholly vacant and indeterminate point of origin, we should have reached something wholly impotent and indifferent, a blank pregnant with nothing that we wished to explain or that actual experi- ence presented. When, starting with the inevi- table preformation and constitutional bias, we sought to build up a simpler and nobler edifice of thought, to be a palace and fortress rather than a prison for experience, our critical philosophy would still be dogmatic, since it would be built upon inexplicable but actual data by a process of inference underived but inevitable. A choice of ^0 doubt Aristotlc and the scholas- hypotheses. tics Were oftcu Uncritical. They were too intent on building up and buttressing their system on the broad human or religious founda- tions which they had chosen for it. They nursed the comfortable conviction that whatever their thought contained was eternal and objective truth, a copy of the divine intellect or of the world's intel- ligible structure. A sceptic may easily deride that confidence of theirs; their system may have been their system and nothing more. But the way to proceed if we wish to turn our shrewd suspicions and our sense of insecurity into an articulate con- viction and to prove that they erred, is to build another system, a more modest one, perhaps, which will grow more spontaneously and inevitably in 90 THE LIFE OF KEASON the mind out of the data of experience. Obviously the rival and critical theory will make the same tacit claim as the other to absolute validit3^ If all our ideas and perceptions conspire to reinforce the new hypothesis, this will become inevitable and necessary to us. We shall then condemn the other hypothesis, not indeed for having been a hypothesis, which is the common fate of all rational and interpretative thought, but for having been a hypothesis artificial, misleading, and false; one not following necessarily nor intelligibly out of the facts, nor leading to a satisfactory reaction upon them, either in contemplation or in practice. ^ .,. .. Now this is in truth exactly the con- Cntics dis- '' guised enthu- victiou which those malicious psycholo- siasts. gjg^g gecj-etly harboured. Their critical scruples and transcendental qualms covered a robust rebellion against being fooled by authority. They rose to abate abuses among which, as Hobbes said, "the frequency of insignificant speech is one." Their psychology was not merely a cathartic, but a gospel. Their young criticism was sent into the world to make straight the path of a new positivism, as now, in its old age, it is in- voked to keep open the door to superstition. Some of those reformers, like Hobbes and Locke, had at heart the interests of a physical and political mechanism, which they wished to substitute for the cumbrous and irritating constraints of tradi- tion. Their criticism stopped at the frontiers of their practical discontent ; they did not care to ask ON SOME CKITICS 91 how the belief in matter, space, motion, God, or whatever else still retained their allegiance, could withstand the kind of psychology which, as they conceived, had done away with individual essences and nominal powers. Berkeley, whose interests lay in a different quarter, used the same critical method in support of a different dogmatism; armed with the traditional pietistic theory of Providence he undertook with a light heart to demolish the whole edifice which reason and sci- ence had built upon spatial perception. He wished the lay intellect to revert to a pious idiocy in the presence of Nature, lest consideration of her history and laws should breed " mathematical atheists " ; and the outer world being thus reduced to a sensuous dream and to the blur of immediate feeling, intelligence and practical faith would be more unremittingly employed upon Christian mythology. Men would be bound to it by a neces- sary allegiance, there being no longer any rival object left for serious or intelligent consideration. The psychological analysis on which these par- tial or total negations were founded was in a gen- eral way admirable ; the necessary artifices to which it had recourse in distinguishing simple and com- plex ideas, principles of association and inference, were nothing but premonitions of what a physio- logical psychology would do in referring the men- tal process to its organic and external supports; for experience has no other divisions than those it creates in itself by distinguishing its objects 92 THE LIFE OF KEASON and its organs. Reference to external conditions, though seldom explicit in these writers, who imagined they could appeal to an introspection not revealing the external world, was pervasive in them ; as, for instance, where Hume made his fun- damental distinction between impressions and ideas, where the discrimination was based nomi- nally on relative vividness and priority in time, but really on causation respectively by outer objects or by spontaneous processes in the brain. „ . Hume it was who carried this psy- Hume's . , ... gratuitous chological analysis to its goal, giving it scepticism. greater simplicity and universal scope; and he had also the further advantage of not nursing any metaphysical changeling of his own to substitute for the legitimate offspring of human understanding. His curiosity was purer and his scepticism more impartial, so that he laid bare the natural habits and necessary fictions of thought with singular lucidity, and sufficient accuracy for general purposes. But the malice of a psychology intended as a weapon against superstition here recoils on science itself. Hume, like Berkeley, was extremely young, scarce five-and-twenty, when he Vrote his most incisive work ; he was not ready to propose in theory that test of ideas by their utility which in practice he and the whole English school have instinctively adopted. An ulterior test of validity would not have seemed to him sat- isfactory, for though inclined to rebellion and positivism he was still the pupil of that mythical ON SOME CRITICS 93 philosophy which attributed the value of things to their origin rather than to their uses, because it had first, in its parabolic way, erected the high- est good into a First Cause. Still breathing, in spite of himself, this atmosphere of materialised Platonism, Hume could not discover the true origin of anything without imagining that he had destroyed its value. A natural child meant for him an illegitimate one; his philosophy had not yet reached the wisdom of that French lady who asked if all children were not natural. The outcome of his psychology and criticism seemed accord- ingly to be an inhibition of reason; he was left free to choose between the distractions of back- gammon and " sitting down in a forlorn scepti- cism." In his first youth, while disintegrating reflec- tion still overpowered the active interests of his mind, Hume seems to have had some moments of genuine suspense and doubt: but with years and prosperity the normal habits of inference which he had so acutely analysed asserted themselves in his own person and he yielded to the " tendency to feign " so far at least as to believe languidly in the histories he wrote, the compliments he re- ceived, and the succulent dinners he devoured. There is a kind of courtesy in scepticism. It would be an offence against polite conventions to press our doubts too far and question the per- manence of our estates, our neighbours' independ- ent existence, or even the justification of a good 94 THE LIFE OF REASON bishop's faith and income. Against metaphysi- cians, and even against bishops, sarcasm was not without its savour; but the line must be drawn somewhere by a gentleman and a man of the world. Hume found no obstacle in his specula- tions to the adoption of all necessary and useful conceptions in the sphere to which he limited his mature interests. That he never extended this liberty to believe into more speculative and com- prehensive regions was due simply to a voluntary superficiality in his thought. Had he been inter- ested in the rationality of things he would have laboured to discover it, as he laboured to discover that historical truth or that political utility to which his interests happened to attach. Kant' b ti- Kant, like Berkeley, had a private tutefor mysticism in reserve to raise upon the knowledge. r^jng gf scicuce and common-sense. Knowledge was to be removed to make way for faith. This task is ambiguous, and the equivoca- tion involved in it is perhaps the deepest of those confusions with which German metaphysics has since struggled, and which have made it waver between the deepest introspection and the dreari- est mythology. To substitute faith for knowl- edge might mean to teach the intellect humility, to make it aware of its theoretic and transitive function as a faculty for hypothesis and rational fiction, building a bridge of methodical inferences and ideal unities between fact and fact, between endeavour and satisfaction. It might be to remind ON SOME CRITICS 96 US, sprinkling over us, as it were, the Lenten ashes of an intellectual contrition, that our thoughts are air even as our bodies are dust, momentary vehicles and products of an immortal vitality in God and in nature, which fosters and illumines us for a moment before it lapses into other forms. Had Kant proposed to humble and concen- trate into a practical faith the same natural ideas which had previously been taken for absolute knowledge, his intention would have been inno- cent, his conclusions wise, and his analysis free from venom and arriere-pensee. Man, because of his finite and propulsive nature and because he is a pilgrim and a traveller throughout his life, is obliged to have faith : the absent, the hidden, the eventual, is the necessary object of his concern. But what else shall his faith rest in except in what the necessary forms of his perception present to him and what the indispensable categories of his understanding help him to conceive? What possible objects are there for faith except objects of a possible experience? What else should a practical and moral philosophy concern itself with, except the governance and betterment of the real world ? It is surely by using his only possible forms of perception and his inevitable categories of understanding that man may yet learn, as he has partly learned already, to live and prosper in the universe. Had Kant's criticism amounted simply to such a confession of the tentative, prac- tical, and hypothetical nature of human reason, 96 THE LIFE OF REASON it would have been wholly acceptable to the wise; and its appeal to faith would have been nothing but an expression of natural vitality and courage, just as its criticism of knowledge would have been nothing but a better acquaintance with self. This faith would have called the forces of impulse and passion to reason's support, not to its betrayal. Faith would have meant faith in the intellect, a faith naturally expressing man's practical and ideal nature, and the only faith yet sanctioned by its fruits. False Side by side with this reinstatement subjectivity q£ rcason, howcvcr, which was not attnbuted ^ ' to reason. absent f rom Kant's system in its criti- cal phase and in its application to science, there lurked in his substitution of faith for knowledge another and sinister intention. He wished to blast as insignificant, because " subjective," the whole structure of human intelligence, with all the lessons of experience and all the triumphs of human skill, and to attach absolute validity instead to certain echoes of his rigoristic religious education. These notions were surely just as sub- jective, and far more local and transitory, than the common machinery of thought ; and it was actually proclaimed to be an evidence of their sublimity that they remained entirely without practical sanc- tion in the form of success or of happiness. The " categorical imperative " was a shadow of the ten commandments; the postulates of practical reason were the minimal tenets of the most abstract ON SOME CRITICS 97 Protestantism. These fossils, found unaccount- ably imbedded in the old man's mind, he regarded as the evidences of an inward but supernatural revelation. Chimerical re- O^ly the quaint severity of Kant's construction, education and character can make in- telligible to us the restraint he exercised in mak- ing supernatural postulates. All he asserted was his inscrutable moral imperative and a God to re- ward with the pleasures of the next world those who had been Puritans in this. But the same principle could obviously be applied to other cher- ished imaginations : there is no superstition which it might not justify in the eyes of men accus- tomed to see in that superstition the sanction of their morality. For the "practical" proofs of freedom, immortalit}^, and Providence — of which all evidence in reason or experience had previously been denied — exceed in perfunctory sophistry any- thing that can be imagined. Yet this lamentable epilogue was in truth the guiding thought of the whole investigation. Nature had been proved a figment of human imagination so that, once rid of all but a mock allegiance to her facts and laws, we might be free to invent any world we chose and believe it to be absolutely real and independent of our nature. Strange prepossession, that while part of human life and mind was to be an avenue to reality and to put men in relation to external and eternal things, the whole of human life and mind should not be able to do so ! Conceptions Vol. L— 7 98 THE LIFE OF REASON rooted in the very elements of our being, in ou? senses, intellect, and imagination, which had shaped themselves through many generations under a constant fire of observation and disillu- sion, these were to be called subjective, not only in the sense in which all knowledge must obvi- ously be so, since it is knowledge that someone possesses and has gained, but subjective in a dis- paraging sense, and in contrast to some better form of knowledge. But what better form of knowledge is this ? If it be a knowledge of things as they really are and not as they appear, we must remember that reality means what the intellect infers from the data of sense; and yet the prin- ciples of such inference, by which the distinction between appearance and reality is first instituted, are precisely the principles now to be discarded as subjective and of merely empirical validity. " Merely empirical " is a vicious phrase : what is other than empirical is less than empirical, and what is not relative to eventual experience is something given only in present fancy. The gods of genuine religion, for instance, are terms in a continual experience: the pure in heart may see God. If the better and less subjective principle be said to be the moral law, we must remember that the moral law which has practical importance and true dignity deals with facts and forces of the natural world, that it expresses interests and aspirations in which man's fate in time and space, with his pains, pleasures, and aU other empirical ON SOME CRITICS 99 feelings, is concerned. This was not the moral law to which Kant appealed, for this is a part of the warp and woof of nature. His njoral law was a personal superstition, irrelevant to the impulse and need of the world. His notions of the super- natural were those of his sect and generation, and did not pass to his more influential disciples: what was transmitted was simply the contempt for sense and understanding and the practice, author- ised by his modest example, of building air-castles in the great clearing which the Critique was sup- posed to have made. It is noticeable in the series of philosophers from Hobbes to Kant that as the metaphysical residuum diminished the critical and psychologi- cal machinery increased in volume and value. In Hol)bes and Locke, with the beginnings of empiri- cal ps\Thology, there is mixed an abstract mate- rialism ; in Berkeley, with an extension of analytic criticism, a popular and childlike theology, en- tirely without rational development; in Hume, with a completed survey of human habits of idea- tion, a withdrawal into practical conventions; and in Kant, with the conception of the creative under- standing firmly grasped and elaborately worked out, a flight from the natural world altogether. The Critique a The Critique, in spite of some arti- workon ficialitics and pedantries in arrange- architecture. mcut, presented a conception never before attained of the rich architecture of reason. It revealed the intricate organisation, comparable 100 THE LIFE OF REASON to that of the body, possessed by that fine web of intentions and counter-intentions whose pulsations are our thoughts. The dynamic logic of intelli- gence was laid bare, and the hierarchy of ideas, if not always correctly traced, was at least mani- fested in its principle. It was as great an enlarge- ment of Hume's work as Hume's had been of Locke's or Locke's of Hobbes's. And the very fact that the metaphysical residuum practically disappeared — for the weak reconstruction in the second Critique may be dismissed as irrelevant — renders the work essentially valid, essentially a description of something real. It is therefore a great source of instruction and a good compen- dium or store-house for the problems of mind. But the work has been much overestimated. It is the product of a confused though laborious mind. It contains contradictions not merely in- cidental, such as any great novel work must retain (since no man can at once remodel his whole vocabulary and opinions) but contradictions abso- lutely fundamental and inexcusable, like that between the transcendental function of intellect and its limited authority, or that between the efficacy of things-in-themselves and their un- knowability. Kant's assumptions and his conclu- sions, his superstitions and his wisdom, alternate without neutralising each other. That experience is a product of two Incoherences. • . . , . -■ i tt- > factors IS an assumption made by Kant. It rests on a psychological analogy, namely on the ON SOME CRITICS 101 fact that organ and stimulus are both necessary to sensation. That experience is the substance or mat- ter of nature, which is a construction in thought, is Kant's conclusion, based on intrinsic logical analysis. Here experience is evidently viewed as something uncaused and without conditions, being itself the source and condition of all thinkable objects. The relation between the transcen- dental function of experience and its empirical causes Kant never understood. The transcenden- talism which — if we have it at all — must be fun- damental, he made derivative; and the realism, which must then be derivative, he made absolute. Therefore his metaphysics remained fabulous and his idealism sceptical or malicious. Ask what can be meant by " conditions of ex- perience " and Kant's bewildering puzzle solves itself at the word. Condition, like cause, is a term that covers a confusion between dialectical and natural connections. The conditions of ex- perience, in the dialectical sense, are the charac- teristics a thing must have to deserve the name of experience; in other words, its conditions are its nominal essence. If experience be used in a loose sense to mean any given fact or consciousness in general, the condition of experience is merely im- mediacy. If it be used, as it often is in empirical writers, for the shock of sense, its conditions are two : a sensitive organ and an object capable of stimulating it. If finally experience be given its 102 THE LIFE OF REASON highest and most pregnant import and mean a fund of knowledge gathered by living, the condi- tion of experience is intelligence. Taking the word in this last sense, Kant showed in a confused but essentially conclusive fashion that only by the application of categories to immediate data could knowledge of an ordered universe arise; or, in other language, that knowledge is a vista, that it has a perspective, since it is the presence to a given thought of a diffused and articulated land- scape. The categories are the principles of inter- pretation by which the flat datum acquires this perspective in thought and becomes representa- tive of a whole system of successive or collateral existences. The circumstance that experience, in the second sense, is a term reserved for what has certain natural conditions, namely, for the spark flying from the contact of stimulus and organ, led Kant to shift his point of view, and to talk half the time about conditions in the sense of natural causes or needful antecedents. Intelligence is not an ante- cedent of thought and knowledge but their char- acter and logical energy. Synthesis is not a natural but only a dialectical condition of preg- nant experience; it does not introduce such ex- perience but constitutes it. Nevertheless, the whole skeleton and dialectical mould of experi- ence came to figure, in Kant's mythology, as machinery behind the scenes, as a system of non- natural efficient forces, as a partner in a marriage ON SOME CRITICS 103 the issue of which was human thought. The idea could thus suggest itself — favoured also by remem- bering inopportunely the actual psychological situation — that all experience, in every sense of the word, had supernatural antecedents, and that the dialectical conditions of experience, in the highest sense, were efficient conditions of experience in the lowest. It is hardly necessary to observe that absolute experience can have no natural conditions. Ex- istence in the abstract can have no cause; for every real condition would have to be a factor in absolute experience, and every cause would be something existent. Of course there is a modest and non-exhaustive experience — that is, any par- ticular sensation, thought, or life — which it would be preposterous to deny was subject to natural conditions. Saint Lawrence's experience of being roasted, for instance, had conditions; some of them were the fire, the decree of the court, and his own stalwart Christianity. But these conditions are other parts or objects of conceivable experi- ence which, as we have learned, fall into a system with the part we say they condition. In our grop- ing and inferential thought one part true system may become a ground for expecting or of conditions, supposing the other. Nature is then the sum total of its own conditions; the whole object, tbe parts observed pliis the parts interpo- lated, is the self-existent fact. The mind, in its empirical flux, is a part of this complex ; to say it 104 THE LIFE OF REASON is its own condition or that of the other objects is a grotesque falsehood. A babe's casual sensa- tion of light is a condition neither of his own existence nor of his mother's. The true condi- tions are those other parts of the world without which, as we find by experience, sensations of light do not appear. Had Kant been trained in a better school of phi- losophy he might have felt that the phrase "subject- ive conditions " is a contradiction in terms. When we find ourselves compelled to go behind the actual and imagine something antecedent or latent to pave the way for it, we are ipso facto conceiving the potential, that is, the " objective " world. All antecedents, by transcendental necessity, are there- fore objective and all conditions natural. An imagined potentiality that holds together the epi- sodes which are actual in consciousness is the very definition of an object or thing. Nature is the sum total of things potentially observable, some observed actually, others interpolated hypotheti- cally ; and common-sense is right as against Kant's subjectivism in regarding nature as the condition of mind and not mind as the condition of nature. This is not to say that experience and feeling are not the only given existence, from which the mate- rial part of nature, something essentially dynamic and potential, must be intelligently inferred. But are not " conditions " inferred ? . Are they not, in their deepest essence, potentialities and powers? Kant's fabled conditions also are inferred; but ON SOME CRITICS 105 they are inferred illegitimately since the " sub- jective " ones are dialectical characters turned into antecedents, while the thing-in-itself is a natural object without a natural function. Experience alone being given, it is the ground from which its conditions are inferred: its conditions, therefore, are empirical. The secondary position of nature goes with the secondary position of all causes, objects, conditions, and ideals. To have made the conditions of experience metaphysical, and prior in the order of knowledge to experience itself, was simply a piece of surviving Platonism. The form was hypostasised into an agent, and mythical machinery was imagined to impress that form on whatever happened to have it. All this was opposed to Kant's own discovery and to his critical doctrine which showed that the world (which is the complex of those conditions which experience assigns to itself as it develops and progresses in knowledge) is not before experi- ence in the order of knowledge, but after it. His fundamental oversight and contradiction lay in not seeing that the concept of a set of conditions was the precise and exact concept of nature, which he consequently reduplicated, having one nature before experience and another after. The first thus became mythical and the second illusory : for the first, said to condition experience, was a set of verbal ghosts, while the second, which alone could be observed or discovered scientifically, was declared fictitious. The truth is that the single 106 THE LIFE OF REASON nature or set of conditions for experience which the intellect constructs is the object of our thoughts and perceptions ideally completed. This is neither mythical nor illusory. It is, strictly speaking, in its system and in many of its parts, hypothetical ; but the hypothesis is absolutely safe. At whatever point we test it, we find the experi- ence we expect, and the inferences thence made by the intellect are verified in sense at every moment of existence. ._^.^ . , The ambiguity in Kant's doctrine Artificial . . pathos in sub- makcs him a confusing representative jectivism. q£ ^-^^^ criticism of perception which malicious psychology has to offer. When the mind has made its great discovery; when it has recog- nised independent objects, and thus taken a first step in its rational life, we need to know unequivo- cally whether this step is a false or a true one. If it be false, reason is itself misleading, since a hypothesis indispensable in the intellectual mas- tery of experience is a false hypothesis and the detail of experience has no substructure. Now Kant's answer was that the discovery of objects was a true and valid discovery in the field of ex- perience; there were, scientifically speaking, causes for perception which could be inferred from perception by thought. But this inference was not true absolutely or metaphysically because there was a real world beyond possible experience, and there were oracles, not intellectual, by which knowledge of that unrealisable world might be ob- ox SOME CRITICS 107 tained. This mysticism undid the intellectualism which characterised Kant's system in its scientific and empirical application; so that the justifica- tion for the use of such categories as that of cause and substance (categories by which the idea of reality is constituted) was invalidated by the counter-assertion that empirical reality was not true reality but, being an object reached by infer- ential thought, was merely an idea. Nor was the true reality appearance itself in its crude imme- diacy, as sceptics would think; it was a realm of objects present to a supposed intuitive thought, that is, to a non-inferential inference or non-dis- cursive discourse. So that while Kant insisted on the point, which hardly needed pressing, that it is mind that dis- covers empirical reality by making inferences from the data of sense, he admitted at the same time that such use of understanding is legitimate and even necessary, and that the idea of nature so framed has empirical truth. There remained, however, a sense that this empirical truth was somehow insufficient and illusory. Understand- ing was a superficial faculty, and we might by other and oracular methods arrive at a reality that was not empirical. Why any reality — such as God, for instance — should not be just as empirical as the other side of the moon, if experience sug- gested it and reason discovered it, or why, if not suggested by experience and discovered by reason, anything should be called a reality at all or should 108 THE LIFE OF SEASON hold for a moment a man's waking attention — that is what Kant never tells us and never himself knew. Clearer upon this question of perception is the position of Berkeley; we may therefore take him as a fair representative of those critics who seek to invalidate the discovery of material objects. Our ideas, said Berkeley, were in our minds; the material world was patched together out of our ideas; it therefore existed only in our minds. To the suggestion that the idea of the external world is of course in our minds, but that our minds have constructed it by treating sensations as effects of a permanent substance distributed in a permanent space, he would reply that this means nothing, bcause " substance," " permanence," and " space " are non-existent ideas, i.e., they are not images in sense. They might, however, be " notions " like that of " spirit," which Berkeley ingenuously admitted into his system, to be, mys- teriously enough, that which has ideas, algebra of Or they might be (what would do just perception. ^g ^g|| £qj. ^^^^ purposc) that which he elsewhere called them, algebraic signs used to fa- cilitate the operations of thought. This is, indeed, what they are, if we take the word algebraic in a loose enough sense. They are like algebraic signs in being, in respect of their object or sig- nification, not concrete images but terms in a men- tal process, elements in a method of inference. Why, then, denounce them? They could be used ON SOME CRITICS 109 with all confidence to lead us back to the concrete values for which they stood and to the relations which they enabled us to state and discover. Ex- perience would thus be furnished with an intel- ligible structure and articulation, and a psycho- logical analysis would be made of knowledge into its sensuous material and its ideal objects. What, then, was Berkeley's objection to these algebraic methods of inference and to the notions of space, matter, independent existence, and efficient cau- sality which these methods involve? Horror of What liG abhorred was the belief physics. that such methods of interpreting ex- perience were ultimate and truly valid, and that by thinking after the fashion of " mathematical atheists " we could understand experience as well as it can be understood. If the flux of ideas had no other key to it than that system of associations and algebraic substitutions which is called the natural world we should indeed know just as well what to expect in practice and should receive the same education in perception and reflection; but what difference would there be between such an idealist and the most pestilential materialist, save his even greater wariness and scepticism ? Berke- ley at this time — long before days of " Siris " and tar-water — was too ignorant and hasty to under- stand how inane all spiritual or poetic ideals would be did they not express man's tragic dependence on nature and his congruous development in her bosom. He lived in an age when the study and 110 THE LIFE OF REASON dominion of external things no longer served directly spiritual uses. The middle-men had ap- peared, those spirits in whom the pursuit of the true and the practical never leads to possession of the good, but loses itself, like a river in sand, amid irrational habits and passions. He was accord- ingly repelled by whatever philosophy was in him, no less than by his religious prejudices, from sub- mergence in external interests, and he could see no better way of vindicating the supremacy of moral goods than to deny the reality of matter, the finality of science, and the constructive powers of reason altogether. With honest English em- piricism he saw that science had nothing absolute or sacrosanct about it, and rightly placed the value of theory in its humane uses ; but the complement- ary truth escaped him altogether that only the free and contemplative expression of reason, of which science is a chief part, can render anything else humane, useful, or practical. He was accordingly a party man in philosophy, where partisanship is treason, and opposed the work of reason in the theoretical field, hoping thus to advance it in the moral. Of the moral field he had, it need hardly be added, a quite childish and perfunctory concep- Pueriutyin ^io^i- There the prayer-book and the morals. catechism could solve every problem. He lacked the feeling, possessed by all large and mature minds, that there would be no intelligi- bility or value in things divine were they not inter- ON SOME CRITICS 111 pretations and sublimations of things natural. To master the real world was an ancient and not too promising ambition: it suited his youthful radicalism better to exorcise or to cajole it. He sought to refresh the world with a water-spout of idealism, as if to change the names of things could change their values. Away with all arid investi- gation, away with the cold algebra of sense and reason, and let us have instead a direct conversa- tion with heaven, an unclouded vision of the pur- poses and goodness of God; as if there were any other way of understanding the sources of human happiness than to study the ways of nature and man. Converse with God has been the life of many a wiser and sadder philosopher than Berkeley; but they, like Plato, for instance, or Spinoza, have made experience the subject as well as the language of that intercourse, and have thus given the divine revelation some degree of perti- nence and articulation. Berkeley in his positive doctrine was satisfied with the vaguest generali- ties; he made no effort to find out how the con- sciousness that God is the direct author of our incidental perceptions is to help us to deal with them ; what other insights and principles are to be substituted for those that disclose the economy of nature; how the moral difficulties incident to an absolute providentialism are to be met, or how the existence and influence of fellow-minds is to be defended. So that to a piety inspired by con- 112 THE LIFE OF EEASON ventional theology and a psychology that refused to pass, except grudgingly and unintelligently, beyond the sensuous stratum, Berkeley had noth- ing to add by way of philosophy. An insignifi- cant repetition of the truism that ideas are all " in the mind " constituted his total wisdom. To be was to be perceived. That was the great maxim by virtue of which we were asked, if not to refrain from conceiving nature at all, which was perhaps impossible at so late a stage in human develop- ment, at least to refrain from regarding our neces- sary thoughts on nature as true or rational. In- telligence was but a false method of imagination by which God trained us in action and thought; for it was apparently impossible to endow us with a true method that would serve that end. And what shall we think of the critical acumen or prac- tical wisdom of a philosopher who dreamed of some other criterion of truth than necessary impli- cation in thought and action? Truism and ^^ the melodramatic fashion so com- sophism. mon in what is called philosophy we may delight ourselves with such flashes of light- ning as this: esse est percipi. The truth of this paradox lies in the fact that through perception alone can we get at being — a modest and familiar notion which makes, as Plato's " Theaetetus" shows, not a bad point of departure for a serious theory of knowledge. The sophistical intent of it, however, is to deny our right to make a distinction which in fact we do make and which the speaker him- ON SOME CRITICS 113 self is making as he utters the phrase; for he would not be so proud of himself if he thought he was thundering a tautology. If a thing were never perceived, or inferred from perception, we should indeed never know that it existed ; but once perceived or inferred it may be more conducive to comprehension and practical competence to regard it as existing independently of our perception; and our ability to make this supposition is reg- istered in the difference between the two words to he and to he perceived — words which are by no means synonymous but designate two very differ- ent relations of things in thought. Such idealism at one fell swoop, through a collapse of assertive intellect and a withdrawal of reason into self-con- sciousness, has the puzzling character of any clever pun, that suspends the fancy between two incom- patible but irresistible meanings. The art of such sophistry is to choose for an axiom some ambigu- ous phrase which taken in one sense is a truism and taken in another is an absurdity; and then, by showing the truth of that truism, to give out that the absurdity has also been proved. It is a truism to say that I am the only seat or locus of my ideas, and that whatever I know is known by me; it is an absurdity to say that I am the only object of my thought and perception. ReaUtyis To confuse the instrument with its the practi- function and the operation with its cal made '- inteUigibie. meaning has been a persistent foible in modern philosophy. It could thus come about Vol. I.— 8 114 THE LIFE OF REASON that the function of intelligence should be altogether misconceived and in consequence de- nied, when it was discovered that figments of rea- son could never become elements of sense but must always remain, as of course they should, ideal and regulative objects, and therefore objects to which a practical and energetic intellect will tend to give the name of realities. Matter is a reality to the practical intellect because it is a necessary and ideal term in the mastery of experi- ence; while negligible sensations, like dreams, are called illusions by the same authority because, though actual enough while they last, they have no sustained function and no right to practical dominion. Let us imagine Berkeley addressing himself to that infant or animal consciousness which first used the category of substance and passed from its perceptions to the notion of an independent thing. " Beware, my child," he would have said, " you are taking a dangerous step, one which may hereafter produce a multitude of mathematical atheists, not to speak of cloisterfuls of scholastic triflers. Your ideas can exist only in your mind ; if you suffer yourself to imagine them materialised in mid-air and subsisting when you do not per- ceive them, you will commit a great impiety. If you unthinkingly believe that when you shut your eyes the world continues to exist until you open them again, you will inevitably be hurried into an infinity of metaphysical quibbles about the discrete ON SOME CKITICS 115 and the continuous, and you will be so bewildered and deafened by perpetual controversies that the clear light of the gospel will be extinguished in your soul." " But," that tender Peripatetic might answer, "I cannot forget the things about me when I shut my eyes : I know and almost feel their per- sistent presence, and I always find them again, upon trial, just as they were before, or just in that condition to which the operation of natural causes would have brought them in my absence. If I believe they remain and suffer steady and imperceptible transformation, I know what to expect, and the event does not deceive me; but if I had to resolve upon action before knowing whether the conditions for action were to exist or no, I should never understand what sort of a world I lived in." "Ah, my child," the good Bishop would reply, " you misunderstand me. You may indeed, nay, you must, live and think as if everything remained independently real. That is part of your education for heaven, which God in his goodness provides for you in this life. He will send into your soul at every moment the impressions needed to verify your necessary hypotheses and support your hum- ble and prudent expectations. Only you must not attribute that constancy to the things them- selves which is due to steadfastness in the designs of Providence. Think and act as if a material world existed, but do not for a moment believe it to exist." 116 THE LIFE OF REASON Vain " reaii- With this advice, coming reasaur- ties"and inglv from the combined forces of trustworthy » J "fictions." scepticism and religion, we may leave the embryonic mind to its own devices, satisfied that even according to the most malicious psychologists its first step toward the comprehen- sion of experience is one it may congratulate itself on having taken and which, for the present at least, it is not called upon to retrace. The Life of Reason is not concerned with speculation about unthinkable and gratuitous " realities " ; it seeks merely to attain those conceptions which are nec- essary and appropriate to man in his acting and thinking. The first among these, underlying all arts and philosophies alike, is the indispensable conception of permanent external objects, forming in their congeries, shifts, and secret animation the system and life of nature. Note — There is a larger question raised by Berkeley's arguments which I have not attempted to discuss here, namely, whether knowledge is possible at all, and whether any mental representation can be supposed to inform us about anything. Berkeley of course assumed this power in that he continued to believe in God, in other spirits, in the continuity of experience, and in its discoverable laws. His objection to material objects, therefore, could not consist- ently be that they are objects of knowledge rather than absolute feelings, exhausted by their momentary possession in consciousness. It could only be that they are unthink- able and invalid objects, in which the materials of sense are given a mode of existence inconsistent with their nature. But if the only criticism to which material objects were ob- noxious were a dialectical criticism, such as that contained in Kant's antiaomies, the royal road to idealism coveted by ON SOME CRITICS 117 Berkeley would bo blocked ; to be an idea in the mind would not involve lack of cognitive and representative value in that idea. The fact that material objects were represented or conceived would not of itself prove that they could not have a real existence. It would be necessary, to prove their unreality, to study their nature and function and to compare them with such conceptions as those of Providence and a spirit-world in order to determine their relative validity. Such a critical comparison would have augured ill for Berkeley's prejudices ; what Its result might have been we can see in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. In order to escape such evil omens and prevent the collapse of his mystical paradoxes, Berkeley keeps in reserve a much more insidious weapon, the sceptical doubt as to the repre- sentative character of anything mental, the possible illusive- ness of all knowledge. This doubt he invokes in all those turns of thought and phrase in which he suggests that if an idea is in the mind it cannot have its counterpart elsewhere, and that a given cognition exhausts and contains its object. There are, then, two separate maxims in his philosophy, one held consistently, viz. , that nothing can be known which is different in character or nature from the object present to the thinking mind ; the other, held incidentally and incon- sistently, since it is destructive of all predication and knowl- edge, viz., that nothing can exist beyond the mind which is similar in nature or character to the " ideas " within it; or, to put the same thing in other words, that nothing can be re- vealed by an idea which is different from that idea in point of existence. The first maxim does not contradict the ex- istence of external objects in space; the second contradicts every conception that the human mind can ever form, the most airy no less than the grossest. No idealist can go so far as to deny that his memory represents his past experience by inward similarity and conscious intention, or, if he pre- fers this language, that the moments or aspects of the divine mind represent one another and their general system. Else the idealist's philosophy itself would be an insignificant and momentary illusion. CHAPTER V NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED Man's feeble When the mind has learned to dis- grasp of tinguish external objects and to at- tribute to them a constant size, shape, and potency, in spite of the variety and intermit- tence ruling in direct experience, there yet remains a great work to do before attaining a clear, even if superficial, view of the world. An animal's customary habitat may have constant features and their relations in space may be learned by con- tinuous exploration; but probably many other landscapes are also within the range of memory and fancy that stand in no visible relation to the place in which we find ourselves at a given moment. It is true that, at this day, we take it for granted that all real places, as we call them, lie in one space, in which they hold definite geo- metric relations to one another; and if we have glimpses of any region for which no room can be found in the single map of the universe which astronomy has drawn, we unhesitatingly relegate that region to the land of dreams. Since the Elysian Fields and the Coast of Bohemia have no assignable latitude and longitude, we call these 118 NATURE UNIFIED 119 places imaginary, even if in some dream we re- member to have visited them and dwelt there with no less sense of reality than in this single and geometrical world of commerce. It belongs to sanity and common-sense, as men now possess them, to admit no countries unknown to geography and filling no part of the conventional space in three dimensions. All our waking experience is understood to go on in some part of this space, and no court of law would admit evidence relating to events in some other sphere. This principle, axiomatic as it has become, is in no way primitive, since primitive experience is sporadic and introduces us to detached scenes separated by lapses in our senses and attention. These scenes do not hang together in any local contiguity. To construct a chart of the world is a difficult feat of synthetic imagination, not to be performed without speculative boldness and a heroic insensibility to the claims of fancy. Even now most people live without topographical ideas and have no clear conception of the spatial rela- tions that keep together the world in which they move. They feel their daily way about like animals, following a habitual scent, without dom- inating the range of their instinctive wanderings. Eeality is rather a story to them than a system of objects and forces, nor would they think them- selves mad if at any time their experience should wander into a fourth dimension. Vague dramatic and moral laws, when they find any casual ap- 120 THE LIFE OF REASON plication, seem to such dreaming minds more notable truths, deeper revelations of efficacious reality, than the mechanical necessities of the case, which they scarcely conceive of; and in this pri- mordial prejudice they are confirmed by supersti- tious affinities often surviving in their religion and philosophy. In the midst of cities and affairs they are like landsmen at sea, incapable of an in- tellectual conception of their position: nor have they any complete confidence in their principles of navigation. They know the logarithms by rote merely, and if they reflect are reduced to a stupid wonder and only half believe they are in a known universe or will ever reach an earthly port. It would not require superhuman eloquence in some prophetic passenger to persuade them to throw compass and quadrant overboard and steer enthu- siastically for El Dorado. The theory of naviga- tion is essentially as speculative as that of salva- tion, only it has survived more experiences of the judgment and repeatedly brought those who trust in it to their promised land. Its unity ideal The theory that all real objects and and discover- places lie together in one even and able only by , . , . . steady homogencous space, conceived as simi- thought. lar in its constitution to the parts of extension of which we have immediate intuition, is a theory of the greatest practical importance and validity. By its light we carry on all our affairs, and the success of our action while we rely upon it is the best proof of its truth. The imaginative NATUEE UNIFIED 121 parsimony and discipline which such a theory in- volves are balanced by the immense extension and certitude it gives to knowledge. It is at once an act of allegiance to nature and a Magna Charta which mind imposes on the tyrannous world, which in turn pledges itself before the assembled facul- ties of man not to exceed its constitutional privi- lege and to harbour no magic monsters in unattain- able lairs from which they might issue to disturb human labours. Yet that spontaneous intelligence which first enabled men to make this genial dis- covery and take so fundamental a step toward taming experience should not be laid by after this first victory; it is a weapon needed in many sub- sequent conflicts. To conceive that all nature makes one system is only a beginning : the articu- lation of natural life has still to be discovered in detail and, what is more, a similar articulation has to be given to the psychic world which now, by the very act that constitutes Nature and makes her consistent, appears at her side or rather in her bosom. That the unification of nature is eventual and theoretical is a point useful to remember : else the relation of the natural world to poetry, meta- physics, and religion will never become intelligible. Lalandc, or whoever it was, who searched the heavens with his telescope and could find no God, would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope. Yet God existed in man's apprehension long before mathe- 122 THE LIFE OF REASON matics or even, perhaps, before the vault of heaven; for the objectification of the whole mind, with its passions and motives, naturally precedes that abstraction by which the idea of a material world is drawn from the chaos of experience, an abstraction which culminates in such atomic and astronomical theories as science is now familiar with. The sense for life in things, be they small or great, is not derived from the abstract idea of their bodies but is an ancient concomitant to that idea, inseparable from it until it became abstract. Truth and materiality, mechanism and ideal in- terests, are collateral projections from one rolling experience, which shows up one aspect or the other as it develops various functions and dominates itself to various ends. When one ore is abstracted and purified, the residuum subsists in that prime- val quarry in which it originally lay. The failure to find God among the stars, or even the attempt to find him there, does not indicate that human experience affords no avenue to the idea of God — for history proves the contrary — ^but indicates rather the atrophy in this particular man of the imaginative faculty by which his race had attained to that idea. Such an atrophy might indeed become general, and God would in that case dis- appear from human experience as music would dis- appear if universal deafness attacked the race. Such an event is made conceivable by the loss of allied imaginative habits, which is observable in historic times. Yet possible variations in human NATURE UNIFIED 123 faculty do not involve the illegitimacy of such faculties as actually subsist; and the abstract world known to science, unless it dries up the ancient fountains of ideation by its habitual presence in thought, does not remove those parallel dramatisa- tions or abstractions which experience may have suggested to men. What enables men to perceive the unity of nature is the unification of their own wills. A man half-asleep, without fixed purposes, without intellectual keenness or joy in recognition, might graze about like an animal, forgetting each satis- faction in the next and banishing from his frivo- lous mind the memory of every sorrow; what had just failed to kill him would leave him as thought- less and unconcerned as if it had never crossed his path. Such irrational elasticity and innocent improvidence would never put two and two together. Every morning there would be a new world with the same fool to live in it. But let some sobering passion, some serious interest, lend perspective to the mind, and a point of reference will immediately be given for protracted observa- tion; then the laws of nature will begin to dawn upon thought. Every experiment will become a lesson, every event will be remembered as favour- able or unfavourable to the master-passion. At first, indeed, this keen observation will probably be animistic and the laws discovered will be chiefly habits, human or divine, special favours or envious punishments and warnings. But the same 124 THE LIFE OF KEASON constancy of aim which discovers the dramatic con- flicts composing society, and tries to read nature in terms of passion, will, if it be long sustained, discover behind this glorious chaos a deeper mechanical order. Men's thoughts, like the weather, are not so arbitrary as they seem and the true master in observation, the man guided by a steadfast and superior purpose, will see them re- volving about their centres in obedience to quite calculable instincts, and the principle of all their flutterings will not be hidden from his eyes. Belief in indeterminism is a sign of indetermina- tion. No commanding or steady intellect flirts with so miserable a possibility, which in so far as it actually prevailed would make virtue impotent and experience, in its pregnant sense, impossible. Mind the We have said that those objects due* of exist- ^hich caunot be incorporated into the ence. one spacc which the understanding envisages are relegated to another sphere called imagination. We reach here a most important corollary. As material objects, making a single system which fills space and evolves in time, are conceived by abstraction from the flux of sensuous experience, so, pari passu, the rest of experience, with all its other outgrowths and concretions, falls out with the physical world and forms the sphere of mind, the sphere of memory, fancy, and the passions. We have in this discrimination the genesis of mind, not of course in the transcenden- tal sense in which the word mind is extended to NATURE UNIFIED 125 mean the sum total and mere fact of existence — for mind, so taken, can have no origin and indeed no specific meaning — but the genesis of mind as a determinate form of being, a distinguishable part of the universe known to experience and discourse, the mind that unravels itself in meditation, in- habits animal bodies, and is studied in psychology. Mind, in this proper sense of the word, is the residue of existence, the leavings, so to speak, and parings of experience when the material world has been cut out of the whole cloth. Keflection underlines in the chaotic continuum of sense and longing those aspects that have practical signifi- cance; it selects the eflBcacious ingredients in the world. The trustworthy object which is thus re- tained in thought, the complex of connected events, is nature, and though so intelligible an object is not soon nor vulgarly recognised, because human reflection is perturbed and halting, yet every forward step in scientific and practical knowledge is a step toward its clearer definition. At first much parasitic matter clings to that dynamic skeleton. Nature is drawn like a sponge heavy and dripping from the waters of sentience. It is soaked with inefficacious passions and overlaid with idle accretions. Nature, in a word, is at first conceived mythically, dramatically, and retains much of the unintelligible, sporadic habit of ani- mal experience itself. But as attention awakes and discrimination, practically inspired, grows firm and stable, irrelevant qualities are stripped 126 THE LIFE OF REASON off, and the mechanical process, the efficacious in- fallible order, is clearly disclosed beneath. Mean- time the incidental effects, the " secondary quali- ties/' are relegated to a personal inconsequential region; they constitute the realm of appearance, the realm of mind. GhosUy char- Mind is therefore sometimes identi- acter of mind, fied with the Unreal. We oppose, in an antithesis natural to thought and language, the imaginary to the true, fancy to fact, idea to thing. But this thing, fact, or external reality is, as we have seen, a completion and hypostasis of certain portions of experience, packed into such shapes as prove cogent in thought and practice. The stuff of external reality, the matter out of which its idea is made, is therefore continuous with the stuff and matter of our own minds. Their common sub- stance is the immediate flux. This living worm has propagated by fission, and the two halves into which it has divided its life are mind and nature. Mind has kept and clarified the crude appearance, the dream, the purpose that seethed in the mass; nature has appropriated the order, the constant conditions, the causal substructure, disclosed in reflection, by which the immediate flux is ex- plained and controlled. The chemistry of thought has precipitated these contrasted terms, each maintaining a recognisable identity and hav- ing the function of a point of reference for memory and will. Some of these terms or objects of thought we call things and marshal in all their NATURE UNIFIED 127 ideal stability — for there is constancy in their motions and transformations — to make the intel- ligible external world of practice and science. Whatever stuff has not been absorbed in this con- struction, whatever facts of sensation, ideation, or will, do not coalesce with the newest conception of reality, we then call the mind. Raw experience, then, lies at the basis of the idea of nature and approves its reality; while an equal reality belongs to the residue of experience, not taken up, as yet, into that idea. But this resid- ual sensuous reality often seems comparatively unreal because what it presents is entirely without practical force apart from its mechanical asso- ciates. This inconsequential character of what remains over follows of itself from the concretion of whatever is constant and efficacious into the external world. If this fact is ever called in ques- tion, it is only because the external world is vaguely conceived, and loose wills and ideas are thought to govern it by magic. Yet in many ways falling short of absolute precision people recognise that thought is not dynamic or, as they call it, not real. The idea of the physical world is the first flower or thick cream of practical thinking. Being skimmed off first and proving so nutri- cious, it leaves the liquid below somewhat thin and unsavoury. Especially does this result appear when science is still unpruned and mythical, so that what passes into the idea of material nature is much more than the truly causal network of 128 THE LIFE OF REASON forces, and includes many spiritual and moral functions. The material world, as conceived in the first in- stance, had not that clear abstractness, nor the spiritual world that wealth and interest, which they have acquired for modern minds. The complex reactions of man's soul had been objectified together with those visual and tactile sensations which, reduced to a mathematical baldness, now furnish terms to natural science. Mind then dwelt in the world, not only in the warmth and beauty with which it literally clothed material objects, as it still does in poetic perception, but in a literal animistic way; for human passion and reflection were attributed to every object and made a fairy-land of the world. Poetry and religion dis- cerned life in those very places in which sense and understanding perceived body; and when so much of the burden of experience took wing into space, and the soul herself floated almost visibly among the forms of nature, it is no marvel that the poor remnant, a mass of merely personal troubles, an uninteresting distortion of things in individual minds, should have seemed a sad and unsubstan- tial accident. The inner world was all the more ghostly because the outer world was so much alive. Hypostasis This movemcut of thought, which bo^hTeef"" clothed external objects in all the control. wealth of undeciphered dreams, has long lost its momentum and yielded to a contrary tendency. Just as the hypostasis of some terms NATURE UNIFIED 129 in experience is sanctioned by reason, when the objects so fixed and externalised can serve as causes and explanations for the order of eyents, so the criticism which tends to retract that hypos- tasis is sanctioned by reason when the hypostasis has exceeded its function and the external object conceived is loaded with useless ornament. The transcendental and functional secret of such hypostases, however, is seldom appreciated by the headlong mind; so that the ebb no less than the flow of objectification goes on blindly and impul- sively, and is carried to absurd extremes. An age of mythology yields to an age of subjectivity ; rea- son being equally neglected and exceeded in both. The reaction against imagination has left the ex- ternal world, as represented in many minds, stark and bare. All the interesting and vital qualities which matter had once been endowed with have been attributed instead to an irresponsible sensi- bility in man. And as habits of ideation change slowly and yield only piecemeal to criticism or to fresh intuitions, such a revolution has not been carried out consistently, but instead of a thorough renaming of things and a new organisation of thought it has produced chiefly distress and con- fusion. Some phases of this confusion may per- haps repay a moment's attention ; they may enable us, when seen in their logical sequence, to under- stand somewhat better the hypostasising intellect that is trying to assert itself and come to the light through all these gropings. VoL.L-« 130 THE LIFE OF KEASON Comparative What helps in the first place to dis- constancy in closc a permanent obiect is a permanent objects and ^ '' ^ in ideas. scnsation. There is a vast and clear dif- ference between a floating and a fixed feeling ; the latter, in normal circumstances, is present only when continuous stimulation renews it at every moment. Attention may wander, but the objects in the environment do not cease to radiate their influences on the body, which is thereby not allowed to lose the modification which those in- fluences provoke. The consequent perception is therefore always at hand and in its repetitions sub- stantially identical. Perceptions not renewed in this way by continuous stimulation come and go with cerebral currents; they are rare visitors, instead of being, like external objects, members of the household. Intelligence is most at home in the ultimate, which is the object of intent. Those realities which it can trust and continually recover are its familiar and beloved companions. The mists that may originally have divided it from them, and which psychologists call the mind, are gladly forgotten so soon as intelligence avails to pierce them, and as friendly communication can be established with the real world. Moreover, per- ceptions not sustained by a constant external stimulus are apt to be greatly changed when they reappear, and to be changed unaccountably, whereas external things show some method and proportion in their variations. Even when not much changed in themselves, mere ideas fall into NATUEE UNIFIED 131 a new setting, whereas things, unless something else has intervened to move them, reappear in their old places. Finally things are acted upon by other men, but thoughts are hidden from them by divine miracle. Existence reveals reality when the flux discloses something permanent that dominates it. What is thus dominated, though it is the primary existence itself, is thereby degraded to appearance. Percep- tions caused by external objects are, as we have just seen, long sustained in comparison with thoughts and fancies ; but the objects are themselves in flux and a man's relation to them may be even more variable; so that very often a memory or a senti- ment will recur, almost unchanged in character, long after the perception that first aroused it has become impossible. The brain, though mobile, is subject to habit; its formations, while they lapse instantly, return again and again. These ideal objects may accordingly be in a way more real and enduring than things external. Hence no primitive mind puts all reality, or what is most real in reality, in an abstract material universe. It finds, rather, ideal points of reference by which material mutation itself seems to be controlled. An ideal world is recognised from the beginning and placed, not in the immediate foreground, nearer than material things, but much farther off. It has greater substantiality and independence than material objects are credited with. It is divine. 132 THE LIFE OF REASON When agriculture, commerce, or manual crafts have given men some knowledge of nature, the world thus recognised and dominated is far from seeming ultimate. It is thought to lie between two others, both now often called mental, but in their original quality altogether disparate: the world of spiritual forces and that of sensuous appearance. The notions of permanence and in- dependence by which material objects are con- ceived apply also, of course, to everything spirit- ual; and while the dominion exercised by spirits may be somewhat precarious, they are as remote as possible from immediacy and sensation. They come and go; they govern nature or, if they neg- lect to do so, it is from aversion or high indiffer- ence ; they visit man with obsessions and diseases ; they hasten to extricate him from difficulties ; and they dwell in him, constituting his powers of conscience and invention. Sense, on the other hand, is a mere effect, either of body or spirit or of both in conjunction. It gives a vitiated per- sonal view of these realities. Its pleasures are dangerous and unintelligent, and it perishes as it goes. Spirit and Such are, for primitive appercep- brthet'reTa- *^^°' *^^ ^^^^^ ^^^* ^^alms of being: tion to nature, nature, seusc, and spirit. Their frontiers, however, always remain uncertain. Sense, because it is insignificant when made an object, is long neglected by reflection. No at- tempt is made to describe its processes or ally them NATURE UNIFIED 133 systematically to natural changes. Its illusions, when noticed, are regarded as scandals calculated to foster scepticism. The spiritual world is, on the other hand, a constant theme for poetry and speculation. In the absence of ideal science, it can be conceived only in myths, which are naturally as shifting and self -contradictory as they are persistent. They acquire no fixed character until, in dogmatic religion, they are defined with reference to natural events, foretold or reported. Nature is what first acquires a form and then imparts form to the other spheres. Sense admits definition and distribution only as an effect of nature and spirit only as its principle. ' Vague notions The form nature acquires is, how- of nature in- evcr, itsclf vaguc and uncertain and volve vague .,, n i x j /> notions of Can ill scrvc, lor long ages, to denne spirit. the other realms which depend on it for definition. Hence it has been common, for instance, to treat the spiritual as a remote or finer form of the natural. Beyond the moon everything seemed permanent; it was therefore called divine and declared to preside over the rest. The breath that escaped from the lips at death, since it took away with it the spiritual control and miraculous life that had quickened the flesh, was itself the spirit. On the other hand, natural processes have been persistently attributed to spiritual causes, for it was not matter that moved itself but intent that moved it. Thus spirit was barbarously taken for a natural substance and a natural force. It 134 THE LIFE OF REASON was identified with everything in which it was manifested, so long as no natural causes could be assigned for that operation. ^ , If the unification of nature were Sense and spirit the life of complete sense would evidently fall nature. which within it; siuce it is to subtend and science redis- ' _ tributes but sustain the sensible flux that intelli- does not deny, ggj^^g acknowledges first stray mate- rial objects and then their general system. The elements of experience not taken up into the con- stitution of objects remain attached to them as their life. In the end the dynamic skeleton, without losing its articulation, would be clothed again with its flesh. Suppose my notions of as- tronomy allowed me to believe that the sun, sink- ing into the sea, was extinguished every evening, and that what appeared the next morning was his younger brother, hatched in a sun-producing nest to be found in the Eastern regions. My theory would have robbed yesterday's sun of its life and brightness ; it would have asserted that during the night no sun existed anywhere ; but it would have added the sun's qualities afresh to a matter that did not previously possess them, namely, to the imagined egg that would produce a sun for to- morrow. Suppose we substitute for that astron- omy the one that now prevails : we have deprived the single sun — which now exists and spreads its influences without interruption — of its humanity and even of its metaphysical unity. It has become a congeries of chemical substances. The facts re- NATUEE UNIFIED 135 vealed to perception have partly changed their locus and been differently deployed throughout nature. Some have become attached to operations in the human brain. Nature has not thereby lost any quality she had ever manifested; these have merely been redistributed so as to secure a more systematic connection between them all. They are the materials of the system, which has been conceived by making existences continuous, when- ever this extension of their being was needful to render their recurrences intelligible. Sense, which was formerly regarded as a sad distortion of its objects, now becomes an original and congruent part of nature, from which, as from any other part, the rest of nature might be scientifically inferred. Spirit is not less closely attached to nature, although in a different manner. Taken existen- tially it is a part of sense; taken ideally it is the form or value which nature acquires when viewed from the vantage-ground of any interest. Indi- vidual objects are recognisable for a time not because the flux is materially arrested but because it somewhere circulates in a fashion which awakens an interest and brings different parts of the sur- rounding process into definable and prolonged re- lations with that interest. Particular objects may perish yet others may continue, like the series of suns imagined by Ileraclitus, to perform the same office. The function will outlast the particular organ. That interest in reference to which the 136 THE LIFE OF REASON function is defined will essentially determine a perfect world of responsive extensions and con- ditions. These ideals will be a spiritual reality; and they will be expressed in nature in so far as nature supports that regulative interest. Many a perfect and eternal realm, merely potential in ex- istence but definite in constitution, will thus sub- tend nature and be what a rational philosophy might call the ideal. What is called spirit would be the ideal in so far as it obtained expression in nature; and the power attributed to spirit would be the part of nature's fertility by which such expression was secured. CHAPTER VI DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS Another back- When a ghostlj Sphere, containing cur^e"nt °^ memorj and all ideas, has been distin- experience guished from the material world, it Talien m^ni. ^^nds to grow at the expense of the lat- ter, until nature is finally reduced to a mathematical skeleton. This skeleton itself, but for the need of a bridge to connect calculably episode with episode in experience, might be transferred to mind and identified with the scientific thought in which it is represented. But a scientific theory inhabiting a few scattered moments of life can- not connect those episodes among which it is itself the last and the least substantial; nor would such a notion have occurred even to the most reckless sceptic, had the world not possessed another sort of reputed reality — the minds of others — which could serve, even after the supposed extinction of the physical world, to constitute an independent order and to absorb the potentialities of being when immediate consciousness nodded. But other men's minds, being themselves precarious and in- effectual, would never have seemed a possible sub- stitute for nature, to be in her stead the back- 187 138 THE LIFE OF REASON ground and intelligible object of experience. Something constant, omnipresent, infinitely fer- tile is needed to support and connect the given chaos. Just these properties, however, are actu- ally attributed to one of the minds supposed to confront the thinker, namely, the mind of God. The divine mind has therefore always constituted in philosophy either the alternative to nature or her other name : it is par excellence the seat of all potentiality and, as Spinoza said, the refuge of all ignorance. Speculative problems would be greatly clarified, and what is genuine in them would be more easily distinguished from what is artificial, if we could gather together again the original sources for the belief in separate minds and compare these sources with those we have already assigned to the conception of nature. But speculative problems are not alone concerned, for in all social life we envisage fellow-creatures conceived to share the same thoughts and passions and to be similarly affected by events. What is the basis of this con- viction ? What are the forms it takes, and in what sense is it a part or an expression of reason ? This question is difficult, and in broaching it we cannot expect much aid from what philosophers have hitherto said on the subject. For the most part, indeed, they have said nothing, as by nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all. The suggestions which have actually DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS 139 been made in the matter may be reduced to two: first, that we conceive other men's minds by pro- Two usual ac- jccting into their bodies those feelings counts of this -^^rj^ich we immediately perceive to ac- conception . . criticised: Company similar operations in our- selves;, that is, we infer alien minds by analogy; and second, that we are immediately aware of them and feel them to be friendly or hostile counterparts of our own thinking and effort, that is, we evoke them by dramatic imagination. The first suggestion has the advan- analogy °° between tage that it escapes solipsism by a rea- bodies, sonable argument, provided the exist- ence of the material world has already been granted. But if the material world is called back into the private mind, it is evident that every soul supposed to inhabit it or to be expressed in it must follow it thither, as inevitably as the characters and forces in an imagined story must remain with it in the inventor's imagination. When, on the contrary, nature is left standing, it is reason- able to suppose that animals having a similar origin and similar physical powers should have similar minds, if any of them was to have a mind at all. The theory, however, is not satis- factory on other grounds. We do not in reality associate our own grimaces with the feelings that accompany them and subsequently, on recognis- ing similar grimaces in another, proceed to at- tribute emotions to him like those we formerly experienced. Our own grimaces are not easily 140 THE LIFE OF REASON perceived, and other men's actions often reveal passions which we have never had, at least with anything like their suggested colouring and in- tensity. This first view is strangely artificial and mistakes for the natural origin of the belief in question what may be perhaps its ultimate test. The second suggestion, on the other and dramatic ^" ' dialogue in hand, takcs US into a mystic region. the soul. rpj^^^ ^g g^Qj^g ^^g f gl^ gQ^jg Qf Q^j. f gj_ lows by dramatic imagination is doubtless true; but this does not explain how we come to do so, under what stimulus and in what circumstances. Nor does it avoid solipsism; for the felt counter- parts of my own will are echoes within me, while if other minds actually exist they cannot have for their essence to play a game with me in my own fancy. Such society would be mythical, and while the sense for society may well be mythical in its origin, it must acquire some other character if it is to have practical and moral validity. But prac- tical and moral validity is above all what society seems to have. This second theory, therefore, while its feeling for psychological reality is keener, does not make the recognition of other minds in- telligible and leaves our faith in them without justification. Subject and ^^ approaching the subject afresh object empiri- we should do Well to remember that cal, not tran- j . , ,, . « .^ scendentai, crude experience knows nothing of the terms. distinction between subject and object. This distinction is a division in things, a contrast DISCOVEKY OF FELLOW-MINDS 141 established between masses of images which show different characteristics in their modes of exist- ence and relation. If this truth is overlooked, if subject and object are made conditions of experi- ence instead of being, like body and mind, its con- trasted parts, the revenge of fate is quick and ironical ; either subject or object must immediately collapse and evaporate altogether. All objects must become modifications of the subject or all subjects aspects or fragments of the object. Objects origi- ^^^ the fact that crude experience naUy soaked [q innocent of modcm philosophy has in secondary , , . . , , n l j^ and tertiary this important conscqueucc : that lor qualities. crudc experience all data whatever lie originally side by side in the same field ; extension is passionate, desire moves bodies, thought broods in space and is constituted by a visible metamor- phosis of its subject matter. Animism or mythol- ogy is therefore no artifice. Passions naturally reside in the object they agitate — our own body, if that be the felt seat of some pang, the stars, if the pang can find no nearer resting-place. Only a long and still unfinished education has taught men to separate emotions from things and ideas from their objects. This education was needed because crude experience is a chaos, and the quali- ties it jumbles together do not march together in time. Reflection must accordingly separate them, if knowledge (that is, ideas with eventual appli- cation and practical transcendence) is to exist at all. In other words, action must be adjusted to 142 THE LIFE OF REASON certain elements of experience and not to others, and those chiefly regarded must have a certain interpretation put upon them by trained apper- ception. The rest must be treated as moonshine and taken no account of except perhaps in idle and poetic revery. In this way crude experience grows reasonable and appearance becomes knowledge of reality. The fundamental reason, then, why we attribute consciousness to natural bodies is that those bodies, before they are conceived to be merely material, are conceived to possess all the qualities which our own consciousness possesses when we behold them. Such a supposition is far from being a paradox, since only this principle justifies us to this day in believing in whatever we may decide to believe in. The qualities attributed to reality must be qualities found in experience, and if we deny their presence in ourselves {e.g., in the case of omniscience), that is only because the idea of self, like that of matter, has already become special and the region of ideals (in which omni- science lies) has been formed into a third sphere. But before the idea of self is well constituted and before the category of ideals has been conceived at all, every ingredient ultimately assigned to those two regions is attracted into the perceptual vortex for which such qualities as pressure and motion supply a nucleus. The moving image is there- fore impregnated not only with secondary quali- ties — colour, heat, etc. — but with qualities which DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS 143 we may call tertiary, such as pain, fear, joy, malice, feebleness, expectancy. Sometimes these tertiary qualities are attributed to the object in their fulness and just as they are felt. Thus the sun is not only bright and warm in the same way as he is round, but by the same right he is also happy, arrogant, ever-young, and all-seeing; for a suggestion of these tertiary qualities runs through us when we look at him, just as immediately as do his warmth and light. The fact that these imag- inative suggestions are not constant does not im- pede the instant perception that they are actual, and for crude experience whatever a thing pos- sesses in appearance it possesses indeed, no matter how soon that quality may be lost again. The moment when things have most numerous and best defined tertiary qualities is accordingly, for crude experience, the moment when they are most ade- quately manifested and when their inner essence is best revealed ; for it is then that they appear in experience most splendidly arrayed and best equipped for their eventual functions. The sun is a better expression of all his ulterior effects when he is conceived to be an arrogant and all- seeing spirit than when he is stupidly felt to be merely hot; so that the attentive and devout observer, to whom those tertiary qualities are re- vealed, stands in the same relation to an ordinary sensualist, who can feel only the sun's material attributes, as the sensualist in turn stands in to one born blind, who cannot add the sun's bright- 144 THE LIFE OF REASON ness to its warmth except by faith in some hap- pier man's reported intuition. The m}i;hologist or poet, before science exists, is accordingly the man of truest and most adequate vision. His per- suasion that he knows the heart and soul of things is no fancy reached by artificial inference or analogy but is a direct report of his own experi- ence and honest contemplation. More often, however, tertiary quali- quauties tics are somewhat transposed in pro- transposed, jection, as sound in being lodged in the bell is soon translated into sonority, made, that is, into its own potentiality. In the same way pain- fulness is translated into malice or wickedness, terror into hate, and every felt tertiary quality into whatever tertiary quality is in experience its more quiescent or potential form. So religion, which remains for the most part on the level of crude experience, attributes to the gods not only happi- ness — the object's direct tertiary quality — but goodness — its tertiary quality transposed and made potential; for goodness is that disposition which is fruitful in happiness throughout imagined ex- perience. The devil, in like manner, is cruel and wicked as well as tormented. Uncritical science still attributes these transposed tertiary qualities to nature; the mythical notion of force, for instance, being a transposed sensation of effort. In this case we may distinguish two stages or degrees in the transposition : first, before we think of our own pulling, we say the object itself puUs; DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS 145 in the first transposition we say it pulls against us, its pull is the counterpart or rival of ours but it is still conceived in the same direct terms of effort; and in the second transposition this in- termittent effort is made potential or slumbering in what we call strength or force. It is obvious that the feelings at- imputed mind tributcd to other men are nothing but consists of the ° tertiary quaU- the tertiary qualities of their bodies, ties of per- j^^ beiuffs of the same species, however, ceived body. ° r ' ^ these qualities are naturally exceed- ingly numerous, variable, and precise. Nature has made man man's constant study. His thought, from infancy to the drawing up of his last will and testament, is busy about his neigh- bour. A smile makes a child happy; a caress, a moment's sympathetic attention, wins a heart and gives the friend's presence a voluminous and poignant value. In youth all seems lost in losing a friend. For the tertiary values, the emotions attached to a given image, the moral effluence emanating from it, pervade the whole present world. The sense of union, though momentary, is the same that later returns to the lover or the mystic, when he feels he has plucked the heart of life's mystery and penetrated to the peaceful cen- tre of things. What the mystic beholds in his ecstasy and loses in his moments of dryness, what the lover pursues and adores, what the child cries for when left alone, is much more a spirit, a per- son, a haunting mind, than a set of visual sensa- VOL. I.— 10 146 THE LIFE OF REASON tions; yet the visual sensations are connected in- extricably with that spirit, else the spirit would not withdraw when the sensations failed. We are not dealing with an articulate mind whose posses- sions are discriminated and distributed into a mas- tered world where everything has its department, its special relations, its limited importance; we are dealing with a mind all pulp, all confusion, keenly sensitive to passing influences and reacting on them massively and without reserve. This mind is feeble, passionate, and ignorant. Its sense for present spirit is no miracle of intelli- gence or of analogical reasoning ; on the contrary, it betrays a vagueness natural to rudimentary con- sciousness. Those visual sensations suddenly cut off cannot there be recognised for what they are. The consequences which their present disappear- ance may have for subsequent experience are in no wise foreseen or estimated, much less are any inexperienced feelings invented and attached to that retreating figure, otherwise a mere puppet. What happens is that by the loss of an absorbing stimulus the whole chaotic mind is thrown out of gear; the child cries, the lover faints, the mystic feels hell opening before him. All this is a pres- ent sensuous commotion, a derangement in an actual dream. Yet just at this lowest plunge of experience, in this drunkenness of the soul, does the overwhelming reality and externality of the other mind dawn upon us. Then we feel that we are surrounded not by a blue sky or an earth DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS 147 known to geographers but by unutterable and most personal hatreds and loves. For then we allow the half-deciphered images of sense to drag behind them every emotion they have awakened. We endow each overmastering stimulus with all its diffuse effects; and any dramatic potentiality that our dream acts out under that high pressure — and crude experience is rich in dreams — becomes our notion of the life going on before us. We cannot regard it as our own life, because it is not felt to be a passion in our own body, but attaches itself rather to images we see moving about in the world; it is consequently, without hesitation, called the life of those images, or those creatures' souls. "Pathetic ^^^^ pathetic fallacy is accordingly faUacy" nor- what Originally peoples the imagined dinariiy fai- world. All the feclings aroused by lacious. perceived things are merged in those things and made to figure as the spiritual and in- visible part of their essence, a part, moreover, quite as well known and as directly perceived as their motions. To ask why such feelings are objectified would be to betray a wholly sophis- ticated view of experience and its articulation. They do not need to be objectified, seeing they were objective from the beginning, inasmuch as they pertain to objects and have never, any more than those objects, been "subjectified" or localised in the thinker's body, nor included in that train of images which as a whole is known to have in 148 THE LIFE OF REASON that body its seat and thermometer. The ther- mometer for these passions is, on the contrary, the body of another; and the little dream in us, the quick dramatic suggestion which goes with our perception of his motions, is our perception of his thoughts. A sense for alien thought is accordingly at its inception a complete illusion. The thought is one's own, it is associated with an image moving in space, and is uncritically supposed to be a hid- den part of that image, a metaphysical significa- tion attached to its motion and actually existing behind the scenes in the form of an unheard soliloquy. A complete illusion this sense remains in mythology, in animism, in the poetic forms of love and religion. ^ A better mastery of experience will in such cases' dispel those hasty conceits by showing the fundamental divergence which at once manifests itself between the course of phenomena and the feelings associated with them. It will appear beyond question that those feelings were private fancies merged with observation in an un- digested experience. They indicated nothing in the object but its power of arousing emotional and playful reverberations in the mind. Criticism will tend to clear the world of such poetic distor- tion; and what vestiges of it may linger will be avowed fables, metaphors employed merely in con- ventional expression. In the end even poetic power will forsake a discredited falsehood : the poet himself will soon prefer to describe nature in DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS 149 natural terms and to represent human emotions in their pathetic humility, not extended beyond their actual sphere nor fantastically uprooted from their necessary soil and occasions. He will sing the power of nature over the soul, the joys of the soul in the bosom of nature, the beauty visible in things, and the steady march of natural processes, so rich in momentous incidents and collocations. The precision of such a picture will accentuate its majesty, as precision does in the poems of Lucre- tius and Dante, while its pathos and dramatic interest will be redoubled by its truth. Case where it is A primary habit producing wide- not a faUacy. spread illusions may in certain cases become the source of rational knowledge. This possibility will surprise no one who has studied nature and life to any purpose. Nature and life are tentative in all their processes, so that there is nothing exceptional in the fact that, since in crude experience image and emotion are inevitably regarded as constituting a single event, this habit should usually lead to childish absurdities, but also, under special circumstances, to rational insight and morality. There is evidently one case in which the pathetic fallacy is not fallacious, the case in which the object observed happens to be an animal similar to the observer and similarly affected, as for instance when a flock or herd are swayed by panic fear. The emotion which each, as he runs, attributes to the others is, as usual, the emotion he feels himself; but this emotion, fear, 150 THE LIFE OF EEASON is the same which in fact the others are then feel- ing. Their aspect thus becomes the recognised expression for the feeling which really accom- panies it. So in hand-to-hand fighting: the in- tention and passion which each imputes to the other is what he himself feels ; but the imputation is probably just, since pugnacity is a remarkably contagious and monotonous passion. It is awa- kened by the slightest hostile suggestion and is greatly intensified by example and emulation; those we fight against and those we fight with arouse it concurrently and the universal battle-cry that fills the air, and that each man instinctively emits, is an adequate and exact symbol for what is passing in all their souls. Whenever, then, feeling is attributed to an ani- mal similar to the percipient and similarly em- ployed the attribution is mutual and correct. Contagion and imitation are great causes of feel- ing, but in so far as they are its causes and set the pathetic fallacy to work they forestall and correct what is fallacious in that fallacy and turn it into a vehicle of true and, as it were, miraculous insight. ^ , ^ Let the reader meditate for a Knowledge succeeds only moment upon the following point : to by accident, j^jjow reality is, in a way, an impossible pretension, because knowledge means significant representation, discourse about an existence not contained in the knowing thought, and different in duration or locus from the ideas which repre- DISC0\T:RY of FiSLLOW-AnNDS 151 Bent it. But if knowledge does not possess its object how can it intend it? And if knowledge possesses its object, how can it be knowledge or have any practical, prophetic, or retrospective value? Consciousness is not knowledge unless it indicates or signifies what actually it is not. This transcendence is what gives knowledge its cognitive and useful essence, its transitive func- tion and validity. In knowledge, therefore, there must be some such thing as a justified illusion, an irrational pretension by chance fulfilled, a chance shot hitting the mark. For dead logic would stick at solipsism; yet irrational life, as it stumbles along from moment to moment, and multiplies itself in a thousand centres, is somehow amenable to logic and finds uses for the reason it breeds. Now, in the relation of a natural being to simi- lar beings in the same habitat there is just the occasion we require for introducing a miraculous transcendence in knowledge, a leap out of solip- sism which, though not prompted by reason, will find in reason a continual justification. For ter- tiary qualities are imputed to objects by psycho- logical or pathological necessity. Something not visible in the object, something not possibly re- vealed by any future examination of that object, is thus united with it, felt to be its core, its meta- physical truth. Tertiary qualities are emotions or thoughts present in the observer and in his rudimentary consciousness not yet connected with their proper concomitants and antecedents, not yet 152 THE LIFE OF REASON relegated to his private mind, nor explained by his personal endowment and situation. To take these private feelings for the substance of other beings is evidently a gross blunder ; yet this blun- der, without ceasing to be one in point of method, ceases to be one in point of fact when the other being happens to be similar in nature and situa- tion to the mythologist himself and therefore actually possesses the very emotions and thoughts which lie in the mythologist's bosom and are at- tributed by him to his fellow. Thus an imaginary self-transcendence, a rash pretension to grasp an independent reality and to know the unknowable, may find itself accidentally rewarded. Imagina- tion will have drawn a prize in its lottery and the pathological accidents of thought will have begot- ten knowledge and right reason. The inner and unattainable core of other beings will have been revealed to private intuition. Limits of This miracle of insight, as it must insight. seem to those who have not understood its natural and accidental origin, extends only so far as does the analogy between the object and the instrument of perception. The gift of intuition fails in proportion as the observer's bodily habit differs from the habit and body observed. Mis- understanding begins with constitutional diver- gence and deteriorates rapidly into false imputa- tions and absurd myths. The limits of mutual understanding coincide with the limits of similar strueture and common occupation, so that the dis- DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS 153 tortion of insight begins very near home. It is hard to understand the minds of children unless we retain unusual plasticity and capacity to play; men and women do not really understand each other, what rules between them being not so much sympathy as habitual trust, idealisation, or satire ; foreigners' minds are pure enigmas, and those at- tributed to animals are a grotesque compound of uEsop and physiology. When we come to religion the ineptitude of all the feelings attributed to nature or the gods is so egregious that a sober critic can look to such fables only for a pathetic expression of human sentiment and need; while, even apart from the gods, each religion itself is quite unintelligible to infidels who have never fol- lowed its worship sympathetically or learned by contagion the human meaning of its sanctions and formulas. Hence the stupidity and want of in- sight commonly shown in what calls itself the his- tory of religions. We hear, for instance, that Greek religion was frivolous, because its mystic awe and momentous practical and poetic truths escape the Christian historian accustomed to a catechism and a religious morality; and similarly Catholic piety seems to the Protestant an aesthetic indulgence, a religion appealing to sense, because such is the only emotion its externals can awaken in him, unused as he is to a supernatural economy reaching down into the incidents and affections of daily life. Language is an artificial means of establishing 154 THE LIFE OF REASON unanimity and transferring thought from one mind to another. Every symbol or phrase, like every gesture, throws the observer into an attitude to which a certain idea corresponded in the speaker; to fall exactly into the speaker's attitude is exactly to understand. Every impediment to contagion and imitation in expression is an im- pediment to comprehension. For this reason lan- guage, like all art, becomes pale with years ; words and figures of speech lose their contagious and suggestive power; the feeling they once expressed can no longer be restored by their repetition. Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind. Unsure the ebb and flood of thought, The moon comes back, the spirit not. Perception of There is, however, a wholly differ- character. gnt and fai morc positive method of reading the mind, or what in a metaphorical sense is called by that name. This method is to read character. Any object with which we are familiar teaches us to divine its habits; slight indications, which we should be at a loss to enumerate sepa- rately, betray what changes are going on and what promptings are simmering in the organism. DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS 155 Hence the expression of a face or figure ; hence the traces of habit and passion visible in a man and that indescribable something about him which in- spires confidence or mistrust. The gift of read- ing character is partly instinctive, partly a result of experience; it may amount to foresight and is directed not upon consciousness but upon past or eventual action. Habits and passions, however, have metaphorical psychic names, names indicat- ing dispositions rather than particular acts (a dis- position being mythically represented as a sort of wakeful and haunting genius waiting to whisper suggestions in a man's ear). We may accord- ingly delude ourselves into imagining that a pose or a manner which really indicates habit indicates feeling instead. In truth the feeling involved, if conceived at all, is conceived most vaguely, and is only a sort of reverberation or penumbra sur- rounding the pictured activities. Conduct It is a mark of the connoisseur to divined, con- ^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^^^ character and habit and sciousness ig- nored, to divine at a glance all a creature's potentialities. This sort of penetration charac- terises the man with an eye for horse-flesh, the dog-fancier, and men and women of the world. It guides the born leader in the judgments he in- stinctively passes on his subordinates and enemies ; it distinguishes every good judge of human affairs or of natural phenomena, who is quick to detect small but telling indications of events past or brewing. As the weather-prophet reads the 156 THE LIFE OF REASON heavens so the man of experience reads other men. Nothing concerns him less than their conscious- ness ; he can allow that to run itself off when he is sure of their temper and habits. A great master of affairs is usually unsympathetic. His observa- tion is not in the Jeast dramatic or dreamful, he does not yield himself to animal contagion or re- enact other people's inward experience. He is too busy for that, and too intent on his own pur- poses. His observation, on the contrary, is straight calculation and inference, and it some- times reaches truths about people's character and destiny which they themselves are very far from divining. Such apprehension is masterful and odious to weaklings, who think they know them- selves because they indulge in copious soliloquy (which is the discourse of brutes and madmen), but who really know nothing of their own capacity, situation, or fate. If Rousseau, for instance, after writing those Confessions in which candour and ignorance of self are equally conspicuous, had heard some intelli- gent friend, like Hume, draw up in a few words an account of their author's true and contemptible character, he would have been loud in protesta- tions that no such ignoble characteristics existed in his eloquent consciousness ; and they might not have existed there, because his consciousness was a histrionic thing, and as imperfect an expression of his own nature as of man's. When the mind is irrational no practical purpose is served by stop- DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS 157 ping to understand it, because such a mind is irrelevant to practice, and the principles that guide the man's practice can be as well understood by eliminating his mind altogether. So a wise gov- ernor ignores his subjects' religion or concerns himself only with its economic and temperamental aspects; if the real forces that control life are understood, the symbols that represent those forces in the mind may be disregarded. But such a government, like that of the British in India, is more practical than sympathetic. While wise men may endure it for the sake of their material in- terests, they will never love it for itself. There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathised with, while nothing requires a rarer intellectual hero- ism than willingness to see one's equation written out. Consciousness Nevertheless this same algebraic untrustworthy, sense for character plays a large part in human friendship. A chief element in friend- ship is trust, and trust is not to be acquired by reproducing consciousness but only by penetrating to the constitutional instincts which, in determin- ing action and habit, determine consciousness as well. Fidelity is not a property of ideas. It is a virtue possessed pre-eminently by nature, from the animals to the seasons and the stars. But fidelity gives friendship its deepest sanctity, and the respect we have for a man, for his force, abil- ity, constancy, and dignity, is no sentiment evoked by his floating thoughts but an assurance founded 158 THE LIFE OF EEASON on our own observation that his conduct and char- acter are to be counted upon. Smartness and vivacity, much emotion and many conceits, are obstacles both to fidelity and to merit. There is a high worth in rightly constituted natures inde- pendent of incidental consciousness. It consists in that ingrained virtue which under given cir- cumstances would insure the noblest action and with that action, of course, the noblest sentiments and ideas; ideas which would arise spontaneously and would make more account of their objects than of themselves. Metaphorical The exprcssion of habit in psychic °"'i