English poetry and fiction have expressed the inner man far better than British philosophy has defined him. He is a hidden spring, a source of bubbling half-thoughts and characteristic actions, and the philosophers have called him a series of ideas. Ideas are rather his weak point. Idealism, on principle, leaves no room for anything latent; but in a living being, especially in a nice Englishman, what is latent is the chief thing. The vital organs are under the skin and far more complicated, I suspect, than anatomy would lead us to imagine: the case is somewhat as if some giant in remote space should examine the surface of our earth with a glass, measuring its motion round the sun and perhaps round its own axis, but regarding as perfectly inexplicable and unmeaning the coursing of ships, the march of armies and migrations, the change of forests into cornfields, and of cornfields into deserts. So, perhaps, far beyond the reach of any microscope, the politic congregation of atoms within us is busy in its curiously organic and curiously aimless way: sustaining on the whole, until disease or death supervenes, the international peace and commerce of the animal body. How much wireless telegraphy, how many alliances, and how many diplomatic compromises there must be in our system for the human body to live at all! But psychological philosophers, like children, think the whole economy of life the simplest thing in the world: experience, they say, justcomesas it does come; as the boy, asked where he would get the money necessary for all the fine things he said he would do when he was a man, replied, full of empirical wisdom, "Out of my pocket, like papa!" Experience is the paternal pocket of these philosophers; they have not discovered the financial system, the life of the body, which fills that minute and precarious reservoir.
It is not only a stronger glass that the remote giant would need to disclose to him the life of the earth; he would need imagination akin to the human, which such a giant would probably not possess. For suppose anatomy had done its best or its worst, and had completely mapped the machinery of the human automaton; and suppose at the same time the modern dream-readers and diviners had unearthed all a man's infant concupiscences and secret thoughts: there would still be something essential undiscovered. I do not mean that behind the whole physical machinery there would be another material agency, another force or set of events; nor that besides the totality of mental discourse, remembered or unremembered, there would be more thinking elsewhere: the hypothesis is that all that exists in these spheres has been surveyed, and assigned to its place in the evolving system. What has been so far ignored is something on another plane of being altogether, which this automatic life and this mental discourse involve, but do not contain. It is theprincipleof both and of their relation; the system of repetitions, correspondences, developments, and ideal unities created by this march of human life in double column. For instance, men are mortal; they are born; they are begotten by sexual fertilization; they have a childhood; their passions and thoughts flow in a certain general order; and there are units in the human world called persons, nations, interests, purposes. I do not refer to theideasof these things in the mental discourse of this or that man; but to the groups or cycles of facts designated by these ideas. To perceive these groups or cycles requires a certain type of intelligence: but intelligence does not invent them without cause; itfindsthe order which it designates by some word, some metaphor, or some image.
That this order of human life is something natural, and not a fiction of discourse, appears in many ways. The relation of discourse itself to physical life is one proof of it. Mental discourse is the inner luminosity or speech that accompanies dramatic crises in the fortunes of the body; it is not self-generated; it is always theexpressionof another event, then occurring in the body, as is a cry of pain; and it is usually, at the same time, areportof still another event that has already occurred beyond the body, as is a memory or a perception. Feeling and thought are perpetually interrupted and perpetually renewed by something not themselves. Their march, logic, and sanity, no less than their existence, translate into mental language an order proper to material events. A sense of comfort is the symptom of a good digestion; pain expresses a lively discord in the nervous system, and pleasure a lively harmony. When we can scarcely live, because something is stifling us, we hate that thing; and when we breathe more freely because something approaches, we love it. Spirit everywhere expresses the life of nature, and echoes its endeavours; but the animal life which prompts these feelings is itself not arbitrary: it passes through a cycle of changes which are pre-ordained. This predetermined, specific direction of animal life is the key to everything moral; without it no external circumstance could be favourable or unfavourable to us; and spirit within us would have no reason to welcome, to deplore, or to notice anything. What an anomaly it would seem to a free spirit (if there could be such a thing) that it should care particularly for what happens in the body of some animal, or that it should see one set of facts rattier than another, and this in so partial and violent a perspective! But spirit does, and must, do this; and it is an absurd and satanic presumption on its part to profess that it could exist, or be a spirit at all, if it were not the spirit of some body, the voice of some animal heart. To have a station in matter, and to have interests in the material world, are essential to spirit, because spirit is life become articulate, experience focussed in thought and dominated ideally; but experience and life are inconceivable unless an organism with specific capacities and needs finds itself in an environment that stimulates it variously and offers it a conditioned career.
Science as yet has no answer to this most important of all questions, if we wish to understand human nature: namely, How is the body, and how are its senses and passions, determined to develop as they do? We may reply: Because God wills it so; or Because such is the character of the human species; or Because mechanical causes necessitate it. These answers do not increase our scientific understanding in the least; nevertheless they are not wholly vain: for the first tells us that we must be satisfied with ignorance; the second that we must be satisfied with the facts; and the third, which is the most significant, that these facts are analogous in every province of nature. But how dose are these analogies? Mechanism is one habit of matter, and life is another habit of matter; the first we can measure mathematically and forecast accurately, the second we can only express in moral terms, and anticipate vaguely; but that the mechanical habit runs through the vital habit, and conditions it, is made obvious by the dependence of life on food, on time, on temperature, by its routine in health and by its diseases, by its end, and above all by its origin; for it is a habit of matter continuous with other inorganic habits, and (if evolution is true) arising out of them. In any case, life comes from a seed in which it lies apparently dormant and arrested, and from which it is elicited by purely mechanical agencies. On the other hand, the seed reacts on those agencies in a manner as yet inexplicable by what we know of its structure; and its development closely repeats (though perhaps with some spontaneous variation) the phases proper to the species.
To this mysterious but evident predetermination of normal life by the seed the ancients gave the name of soul; but to us the word soul suggests a thinking spirit, or even a disembodied one. It is totally incredible that a thinking spirit should exist in the seed, and should plan and carry out (by what instruments?) the organization of the body; and if so wise and powerful and independent a spirit lay in us from the beginning, or rather long before our birth, how superfluous a labour to beget us at all, and how unkind of it to dangle after it, in addition to its own intelligence, these poor blundering and troubled thoughts of which alone we are aware! Evidently the governing principle in seeds is no soul in this modern sense, no thinking moral being; it is a mysterious habit in matter. Whether this total habit is reducible to minor habits of matter, prevalent in the world at large, is the question debated between mechanical and vitalist psychologists; but it is a stupid controversy. The smallest unit of mechanism is an event as vital, as groundless, and as creative as it is possible for an event to be; it summons fresh essences into existence, which the character of the essences previously embodied in existence by no means implied dialectically. On the other hand, the romantic adventure of life, if it is not a series of miracles and catastrophes observedex post facto, must be a resultant of simpler habits struggling or conspiring together. However minute, therefore, or however comprehensive the units by which natural processes are described, they are equally vital and equally mechanical, equally free and (for an observer with a sufficient range of vision) equally predictable. On the human scale of observation it is the larger habits of living beings that are most easily observed; and the principle of these habits, transmitted by a seed, I call the Psyche: it is either a complex of more minute habits of matter, or a mastering rhythm imposed upon them by the habit of the species. Many Greek philosophers taught that the Psyche was material; and even Plato, although of course his Psyche might eventually take to thinking, regarded it as primarily a principle of motion, growth, and unconscious government; so that the associations of the word Psyche are not repugnant, as are those of the word soul, to the meaning I wish to give to it: that habit in matter which forms the human body and the human mind.[1]
There is, then, in every man a Psyche, or inherited nucleus of life, which from its dormant seminal condition expands and awakes anew in each generation, becoming the person recognized in history, law, and morals. A man's body is a sort of husk of which his Psyche (itself material) is the kernel; and it is out of the predispositions of this living seed, played upon by circumstances, that his character and his mind are formed. The Psyche's first care is to surround itself with outer organs, like a spider with its web; only these organs remain subject to her central control, and are the medium by which she acts upon outer things, and receives, in her patient labour, the solicitations and rebuffs of fortune. The Psyche, being essentially a way of living, a sort of animated code of hygiene and morals, is a very selective principle: she is perpetually distinguishing—in action, if not in words—between good and bad, right and wrong. Choice is the breath of her nostrils. All the senses, instincts, and passions are her scouts. The further she extends her influence the more she feels how dependent she is on external things, and the more feverishly she tries to modify them, so as to render them more harmonious with her own impulses.
At first, when she was only a vegetative Psyche, she waited in a comparatively peaceful mystical torpor for the rain or the sunshine to foster her, or for the cruel winter or barbarous scythe to cut her down; and she never would have survived at all if breeding had not been her chief preoccupation; but she distributed herself so multitudinously and so fast amongst her children, that she has survived to this day. Later, she found a new means of safety and profit in locomotion; and it was then that she began to perceive distinct objects, to think, and to plan her actions—accomplishments by no means native to her. Like the Chinese, she is just as busy by night as by day. Long before sunrise she is at work in her subterranean kitchen over her pots of stewing herbs, her looms, and her spindles; and with the first dawn, when the first ray of intuition falls through some aperture into those dusky spaces, what does it light up? The secret springs of her life? The aims she is so faithfully but blindly pursuing? Far from it. Intuition, floods of intuition, have been playing for ages upon human life: poets, painters, men of prayer, scrupulous naturalists innumerable, have been intent on their several visions; yet of the origin and of the end of life we know as little as ever. And the reason is this: that intuition is not a material organ of the Psyche, like a hand or an antenna; it is a miraculous child, far more alive than herself, whose only instinct is play, laughter, and brooding meditation. This strange child—who could have been his father?—is a poet; absolutely useless and incomprehensible to his poor mother, and only a new burden on her shoulders, because she can't help feeding and loving him. Hesees; which to her is a mystery, because although she has always acted as if, in some measure, she felt things at a distance, she has never seen and never can see anything. Nor are his senses, for all their vivacity, of any use to her. For what do they reveal to him? Always something irrelevant: a shaft of dusty light across the rafters, a blue flame dancing on the coals, a hum, a babbling of waters, a breath of heat or of coolness, a mortal weariness or a groundless joy—all dream-images, visions of a play world, essences painted on air, such as any poet might invent in idleness. Yet the child cares about them immensely: he is full of sudden tears and of jealous little loves. "Hush, my child," says good mother Psyche, "it's all nonsense." It is not for those fantastic visions that she watches: she knits with her eyes shut, and mutters her same old prayers. She has always groped amidst obstacles like a mole pressing on where the earth is softest. She can tell friends from enemies (not always correctly) by a mysterious instinct within her, and the rhythm, as it were, of their approaching step. She is long-suffering and faithful, like Penelope; but when hard-pressed and at bay she becomes fierce. She is terribly absolute then, blindly bent on vengeance and wild destruction. At other times she can melt and be generous; in her beehive she is not only the congregation of workers, but also the queen. Her stubborn old-womanish temper makes her ordinarily unjust to her best impulses and hypocritical about her worst ones. She is artful but not intelligent, least of all about herself. For this reason she can never understand how she gave birth to such a thankless child. She hardly remembers the warm ray from the sun or from some other celestial source which one day pierced to her heart, and begat there this strange uneasiness, this truant joy, which we call thought. Seeing how quick and observant the brat is, she sometimes sends him on errands; but he loiters terribly on the way, or loses it altogether, forgets what he was sent for, and brings home nothing but strange tales about Long-noses and Helmets-of-gold, whom he says he has encountered. He prefers the poppies to the com, and half the mushrooms he picks are of the poisonous variety; he sometimes insists on setting apart his food for imaginary beings called the dead or the gods; and worst of all, he once ravished and married a fairy, whom he called Truth; and he wished to bring her to live with him at home. At that, good mother Psyche naturally put her foot down. No hussies here! Yet there are moments when she relents, when her worn old hands rest in her lap, when she remembers and wonders, and two cold tears trickle down from her blind eyes. What is the good of all her labour? Has it all been, perhaps, for his sake, that he might live and sing and be happy? Even in her green days, in her cool vegetable economy, there had been waste; she had unwittingly put forth flowers she could not see and diffused a fragrance that eluded her. Now her warmer heart has bred this wilder, this diviner folly: a wanton sweetness shed by her longer travail and a flower of her old age. But he forgets her in his selfishness, and she can never, never understand him.
[1]I beg the learned to notice that the Psyche, as I use the term, is not a material atom but a material system, stretching over both time and space; it is not a monad; it has not the unity proper to consciousness; nor is it a mass of "subconscious," mental discourse. The Psyche may be called a substance in respect to mental and moral phenomena which (I think) are based on modes or processes in matter, not on any material particle taken singly; but the Psyche is not a substance absolutely, since its own substance is matter in a certain arrangement—in other words, body. Matter may be called mind-stuff or psychic substance inasmuch as it can become on occasion the substance of a Psyche, and through the Psyche the basis of mind; but of course not in the sense that matter may be an aggregate of thinking spirits. Mental events may be called psychic when we consider their origin rather than their essence, as certain pleasures are called material, although pleasures, in being, are all equally spiritual. "Psychic phenomena" are crudely material, and "psychical research" has for its object, not spirits in another world, but the habits of matter that produce apparitions.
[1]I beg the learned to notice that the Psyche, as I use the term, is not a material atom but a material system, stretching over both time and space; it is not a monad; it has not the unity proper to consciousness; nor is it a mass of "subconscious," mental discourse. The Psyche may be called a substance in respect to mental and moral phenomena which (I think) are based on modes or processes in matter, not on any material particle taken singly; but the Psyche is not a substance absolutely, since its own substance is matter in a certain arrangement—in other words, body. Matter may be called mind-stuff or psychic substance inasmuch as it can become on occasion the substance of a Psyche, and through the Psyche the basis of mind; but of course not in the sense that matter may be an aggregate of thinking spirits. Mental events may be called psychic when we consider their origin rather than their essence, as certain pleasures are called material, although pleasures, in being, are all equally spiritual. "Psychic phenomena" are crudely material, and "psychical research" has for its object, not spirits in another world, but the habits of matter that produce apparitions.
I hear that Oxford is reading Plotinus—a blessed change from Hegel. The pious mind is still in the age of mythology; science has confused its own lessons, for want of a philosopher who should understand them; and what matters, so long as the age of mythology lasts, is that the myths that occupy the fancy should be wise and beautiful, and should teach men to lay up their treasures in heaven. The philosophy of Plotinus does this, and does it magnificently. Like that of Plato and of Aristotle it is little more than a rhetorical inversion or perpetual metaphor, expressing the aim of life under the figure of a cosmos which is animate and which has already attained its perfection. Considering the hurried life which we are condemned to lead, and the shifting, symbolic ideas to which we are confined, it seems hardly worth while to quarrel with such inspired fabulists, or to carp at the cosmic dress in which they present their moralities. Gentle, secluded, scholastic England does well to platonize. It had never ceased to do so. In spite of the restiveness, sometimes, of barbarian blood, in spite of Hebraic religion and Germanic philosophy, the great classical tradition has always been seated here; and England has shared, even if with a little reserve and mistrust, in the ecclesiastical, courtly, military, and artistic heritage of Europe. A genuine child of the past, who is bred to knowledge of the world, and does not plunge into it greedily like a stranger, cannot worship the world; he cannot really be a snob. Those who have profited by a long life cannot possibly identify the divine life with the human. They will not be satisfied with a philosophy that is fundamentally worldly, that cannot lift up its heart except pragmatically, because the good things are hanging from above, or because the long way round by righteousness and the ten commandments may be the shortest cut to the promised land. Their love of wisdom will not be merely provisional, nor their piety a sort of idyllic interlude, penitent but hopeful, comforting itself with the thought that the sour grapes will soon be ripe, and oh, so delicious! They will not remember the flesh-pots of Egypt with an eternal regret, and the flesh-pots of Berlin and New York will not revive their appetite.
Spirit is not an instrument but a realization, a fruition. At every stage, and wherever it peeps out through the interstices of existence, it is a contemplation of eternal things. Eternal things are not other material things by miracle existing for ever in another world; eternal tilings are the essences of all things here, when we consider what they are in themselves and not what, in the world of fortune, they may bring or take away from us personally. That is why piety and prayer are spiritual, when they cease to be magic operations or efforts of a celestial diplomacy: they chief works of this school confess that this is their only theme. Not moral life, much less the natural world, but simply the articulation of knowledge occupies them; and yet, by the hocus-pocus of metaphysics, they substitute this human experience for the whole universe in which it arises. The universe is to be nothing but a flux of perceptions, or a will positing an object, or a tendency to feign that there is a world. It would ill become me, a pupil of this philosophy, to deny its profundity. These are the heart-searchings of "a creature moving about in worlds not realized." It is a wonderful thing to spin out in soliloquy, out of some unfathomed creative instinct, the various phases of one's faith and sensibility, making an inventory of one's intellectual possessions, with some notes on their presumable or reported history. I love the lore of the moral antiquary; I love rummaging in the psychological curiosity shop. The charm of modern life is ambiguous; it lies in self-consciousness. Egotism has its tender developments; there is a sort of engaging purity in its perplexities and faithful labours. The German soul has a great volume, and Hamlet is heroic even in his impotence. When in this little glow-worm which we call man there is so much going on, what must not all nature contain in its immensity? Yet all these advances in analysis and in psychological self-knowledge, far from enriching the modern philosopher and giving him fresh hints for the interpretation of the great world, have been neutralized, under the guise of scepticism, by a total intellectual cramp or by a colossal folly. This thoughtful dog has dropped the substance he held in his mouth, to snatch at the reflection of it which his own mind gave him. It is wonderful with what a light heart, with what self-satisfaction and even boasts, the youngest children of the philosophical family jettison all their heirlooms. Fichte and Nietzsche, in their fervid arrogance, could hardly outdo the mental impoverishment of Berkeley and Hume in their levity: it had really been a sight for the gods to see one of these undergraduates driving matter out of the universe, whilst the other drove out spirit.
How comes it that the word Idea, so redolent of Platonism, has been the fulcrum on which British philosophy has turned in its effort to dislodge Platonism from its foundations, and to lay bare the positive facts? The vicissitudes of words are instructive; they show us what each age understood or forgot in the wisdom of its predecessors, and what new things it discovered to which it gave the old names. The beauty which Plato and the English saw in Ideas was the same beauty; they both found in Ideas the immediate, indubitable object of knowledge. And nevertheless, hugging the same certitude, they became sure of entirely different things.
The word Idea ought to mean any theme which attention has lighted up, any aesthetic or logical essence, so long as it is observed in itself or used to describe some ulterior existence. Amid a thousand metaphysical and psychological abuses of the term this purely ideal signification sometimes reappears in polite speech; for instance when Athalie says, in Racine:
J'ai deux fois, en dormant, revu la même idée.
Here, perhaps by chance, the word is used with absolute propriety and its chief implications are indicated. An Idea is something seen, animmediatepresence; it is something seen in a dream, orimaginary; and it is the same Idea when seen a second time, or auniversal. That universals are present to intuition was the secret of Plato; yet it is the homeliest of truths. It comes to seem a paradox, or even inconceivable, because people suppose they see what they believe they are looking at, which is some particular thing, the object of investigation, of desire, and of action; they overlook the terms of their thought, as they overlook the perspective of the landscape. These terms, which are alone immediate, are all universals. Belief—the expectation, fear, or sense of events hidden or imminent—precedes clear perception; but it is supposed to be derived from it. Perception without belief would be mere intuition of Ideas, and no belief in things or ulterior events could ever be based on it. A seraph who should know only Ideas would be incapable of conceiving any fact, or noting any change, or discovering his own spiritual existence; he would be mathematics actualized, a landscape self-composed, and love spread like butter. The human mind, on the contrary, is the expression of an animal life, swimming hard in the sea of matter. It begins by being the darkest belief and the most helpless discomfort, and it proceeds gradually to relieve this uneasiness and to tincture this blind faith with more and more luminous Ideas, Ideas, in the discovery of facts, are only graphic symbols, the existence and locus of the facts thus described being posited in the first place by animal instinct and watchfulness. If we suspend these eager explorations for a moment, and check our practical haste in understanding the material structure of things and in acting upon them, it becomes perfectly obvious that the data of actual intuition are sounds, figures, movements, landscapes, stories—all universal essences appearing, and perhaps reappearing, as in a trance.
I think that Plato in his youth must have seen his Ideas with this mystical directness, and must have felt the irritation common to mystics at being called back out of that poetic ecstasy into the society of material things. Those essences were like the gods, dear and immortal, however fugitive our vision of them might be; whereas things were in their inmost substance intricate and obscure and treacherously changeable; you could never really know what any of them was, nor what it might become. The Ideas were our true friends, our natural companions, and all our safe knowledge was of them; things were only vehicles by which Ideas were conveyed to us, as the copies of a book are vehicles for its sense.
Nevertheless, the happy intuition of pure essences of all sorts, as life vouchsafes it to the free poet or to the logician, could not satisfy the heart of Plato. He felt the burden, the incessant sweet torment, of the flesh; and when age—as I think we may detect in the changed tone of his thoughts—relieved him of this obsession, which had been also his first inspiration, it only reinforced an obsession of a different kind, the indignation of an aristocrat and the sorrow of a patriot at the doom which hung visibly over his country. The fact that love intervened from the beginning in Plato's vision of the Ideas explains why his Ideas were not the essences actually manifested in experience, as it comes to the cold eye or the mathematical brain. When love looks, the image is idealized; it does their several visions; yet of the origin and of the end of life we know as little as ever. And the reason is this: that intuition is not a material organ of the Psyche, like a hand or an antenna; it is a miraculous child, far more alive than herself, whose only instinct is play, laughter, and brooding meditation. This strange child—who could have been his father?—is a poet; absolutely useless and incomprehensible to his poor mother, and only a new burden on her shoulders, because she can't help feeding and loving him. Hesees; which to her is a mystery, because although she has always acted as if, in some measure, she felt things at a distance, she has never seen and never can see anything. Nor are his senses, for all their vivacity, of any use to her. For what do they reveal to him? Always something irrelevant: a shaft of dusty light across the rafters, a blue flame dancing on the coals, a hum, a babbling of waters, a breath of heat or of coolness, a mortal weariness or a groundless joy—all dream-images, visions of a play world, essences painted on air, such as any poet might invent in idleness. Yet the child cares about them immensely: he is full of sudden tears and of jealous little loves. "Hush, my child," says good mother Psyche, "it's all nonsense." It is not for those fantastic visions that she watches: she knits with her eyes shut, and mutters her same old prayers. She has always groped amidst obstacles like a mole pressing on where the earth is softest. She can tell friends from enemies (not always correctly) by a mysterious instinct within her, and the rhythm, as it were, of their approaching step. She is long-suffering and faithful, like Penelope; but when hard-pressed and at bay she becomes fierce. She is terribly absolute then, blindly bent on vengeance and wild destruction. At other times she can melt and be generous; in her beehive she is not only the congregation of workers, but also the queen. Her stubborn old-womanish temper makes her ordinarily unjust to her best impulses and hypocritical about her worst ones. She is artful but not intelligent, least of all about herself. For this reason she can never understand how she gave birth to such a thankless child. She hardly remembers the warm ray from the sun or from some other celestial source which one day pierced presents actually will be only a few, and not the most welcome, since this world is a most paradoxical, odd, and picturesque object, and not at all the sort of world which the human mind (being a highly specialized part of it) would have made or can easily believe to be real. The Ideas which a philosopher says govern the world are not likely to be its true laws; and, if he has really drawn them from observation, they cannot possibly be all, nor the best, Ideas on which his free mind would have chosen to dwell. The truth, which is a standard for the naturalist, for the poet is only a stimulus; and in many an idealist the poet debauches the naturalist, and the naturalist paralyses the poet. The earth might well upbraid Plato for trying to build his seven-walled cloud-castle on her back, and to circumscribe her in his magic circles. Why should she be forbidden to exhibit any other essences than those authorized by this metaphysical Solon? Why should his impoverished Olympian theology be imposed upon her, and all her pretty dryads and silly fauns, all her harpies and chimeras, be frowned upon and turned into black devils? How these people who would moralize nature hate nature; and if they loved nature, how sweetly and firmly would morality take its human place there without all this delusion and bluster! But I am not concerned so much with the violence done by Plato to nature; nature can take care of herself, and being really the mother even of the most waspish philosopher, with his sting and his wings and his buzzing, she can comfortably find room for him and his system amongst her swarming children. I wish I knew if the real wasps, too, have a philosophy, and what it is; probably as vital and idealistic as that of the Germans. But I am grieved rather at the servitude and at the stark aspect imposed on the Platonic Ideas by their ambition to rule the world. They are like the shorn Samson in the treadmill; they have lost the radiance and the music of Phoebus Apollo. Socrates taught that to do wrong is to suffer harm; and his Ideas, in establishing their absurd theocracy over nature, were compelled to bend their backs to that earth-labour, and to become merely a celestial zoology, a celestial grammar, and a celestial ethics. Heaven had stooped to rule the earth, and the crooked features of the earth had cast their grotesque shadow on heaven.
This is the first chapter in the sad history of Ideas. Now for the second.
The honest Englishman does not care much for Ideas, because in his labour, he is occupied with things and in his leisure with play, or with rest in a haze of emotional indolence: but finding himself, for the most part, deep in the mess of business, he is heartily desirous of knowing the facts; and when, in his scrupulous inquiry into the facts, he finds at bottom only Ideas, and is constrained to become a philosopher against his will, he contrives, out of those very Ideas, to elicit some knowledge of fact. Ideas are not intrinsically facts, but suppositions; they are descriptions offering themselves officiously as testimonials for facts whose character remains problematical, since, if there were no such facts, the Ideas would still be the same; yet, says the melancholy Jaques to himself, "Is it not a fact that I have made this dubious supposition? Am I not entertaining this Idea? This sad but undeniable experience of mine, not the fact which I sought nor the Idea which I found, is the actual fact, and the undeniable existence." Thus the occurrence of any experience, or the existence of any illusion, assumes the names both of fact and of idea in his vocabulary, and the existence of ideas becomes the corner-stone of his philosophy.
The most candid and delightful of English philosophers (who was an Irishman) was Berkeley. In his ardent youth, like Plato, he awoke to pure intuition: he saw Ideas, or at least he saw that he did not see material things; but instead of studying these Ideas for their own sake with a steadier gaze, he took up the disputatious notion of denying that material things existed at all, because he could notseethem. It was a great simplification; and if he had not had conventional and apologetic axes to grind, he might have reached the radical conclusion, familiar to Indian sages, that nothing could exist at all, least of all himself. Language, however, and the Cartesian philosophy, made it easy for him to assume that of course he existed, since he saw these Ideas; and he was led by a malicious demon to add, that the Ideas existed too, since he saw them, so long as they were visible to him. Bat if he existed only in that he saw the Ideas, and the Ideas existed in that he saw them, was there any difference at all between himself seeing and the Ideas seen? None, I am afraid: so that he himself, whom he had proudly called a spirit, would be in truth only a series of ideas (I spell them now with a small i), and the ideas—in which he had not stopped to recognize eternal essences—would be only the pulses of his fugitive existence.
Here is substance for an excellent ironical system of the universe, such as some philosopher in Greece might have espoused; a flux of absolute intensive existences, variously coloured and more or less warm, like the sparks of a rocket. Some scientific philosopher in our day or in the future may be tempted to work out this system, and it might have been the true one. But I see an objection to it from the point of view of British philosophy, which covets knowledge of fact. The philosopher conceiving this system, if the system was true, would be only one of those sparks; he could have no idea except the idea which he was; the whole landscape before him would be but the fleeting nature of himself. Although, therefore, by an infinitely improbable accident, his philosophy might be true, he could have no reason to think it true, and no possibility of not thinking it so. A genuine sceptic might be satisfied with this result, enjoying each moment of his being, and laughing at his own perpetual pretension of knowing anything further. And since extremes meet, such a mocking sceptic might easily become, like Plato, a lover of pure Ideas. If he really abandons all claims, all hopes, all memory which is more than fantasy, and simply enjoys the illusion of the moment, he dwells on an Idea, which is all that an illusion can supply. The immediate has a mystical charm; it unveils some eternal essence, and the extreme of renunciation, like a sacrificial death, brings a supreme security in another sphere. Berkeley and Hume were little more than boys when they fell in love with Ideas; perhaps, if we knew their personal history, we should find that they were little children when they first did so, and that pure Essence was the Beatrice that had secretly inspired all their lives. But though they were youths of genius, there was a touch in them of the prig; the immediate, dear as it is to fresh and honest hearts, was too unconventional for them legally to wed and to take home, as it were, to their worldly relations. In England to love Ideas is to sow one's intellectual wild oats. There may be something healthy and impetuous in that impulse which is engaging; but it must not go too far, and above all it must not be permanent. The British philosopher dips into idealism in order to reform belief, to get rid of dangerous shams or uncongenial dogmas, not for the sake of pure intuition or instant assurance. He wishes to remove impediments to action; he hates great remote objects as he hates popery and policy; imposing things are impositions. Better get rid, if possible, of substance and cause and necessity and abstractions and self and consciousness. The purpose is to reduce everything to plain experience of fact, and to rest neither in pure intuition nor in external existences. For instance, he has two arguments against the existence of matter which he finds equally satisfactory: one that matter cannot exist because he can form no idea of it, and the other that matter cannot exist because it is merely an idea which he forms. He descends to the immediate only for the sake of the ulterior, for the immediate in some other place. If he found himself reduced to essences actually given now, he would be terribly unhappy, and I am sure would renounce philosophy as a bad business, as he did in the person of Hume, his most profound representative.
Thus European speculation, like the Athalie of Racine, has twice in its dreams beheld the same Ideas; but like that uneasy heroine it has been troubled by the sight, and has stretched out its arms to grasp the painted shadow. The first time, instead of Ideas, it found a celestial hierarchy of dominations and powers, a bevy of magic influences, angels, and demons. The second time, instead of Ideas, it found an irrevocable flux of existing feelings, without sense, purpose, connection, or knowledge. Perhaps if on the third occasion the Ideas visited a less burdened and preoccupied soul, that could look on them without apprehension, they might be welcomed for their fair aspect and for the messages they convey from things, without being, in their own persons, either deified or materialized.
Concerning the visions which men have of the gods there is much uncertainty. It is written that no man can see God and live; but I think some evil god or evil man must be spoken of, and that they come nearer to the truth who say that the vision of God brings perfect happiness. I suspect this is true in a humbler and more familiar sense than is intended in discourses about the state of the soul in heaven; for there is a heaven above every place, and the soul mounts to it in all its thoughts and actions, when these are perfect. I incline also to another opinion, which would surprise those religious friends of mine who call me an atheist; namely, that Whenever we see anything, we have, or might have if we chose, a partial vision of God, and a moment of happiness. For all experience comes to us fatally, from an alien source which in physics is called matter, in morals power or will, and in religion God; so that by his power (as I learned when a child in my Spanish catechism) God is present in everything. The same authority added (and how full of meaning that word is to me now!) that he was also present in everything by his essence; since what is brought unimpeachably before us in any vision is some essence which, being absolutely indestructible, is in that respect divine. It is indestructible because, if all trace and memory of it were destroyed, it would in that very obscuration vindicate its essential identity, since notit, but only things different fromit, would now exist. Every essence, therefore, lies eternally at the very foundations of being, and is a part of the divine immutability and necessity; an intrinsic feature in that Nous or Logos which theologians tell us is the second hypostasis of the divine nature. Yet to say that we see God when we see him only in part is perhaps hazardous and open to objection, because a part of anything, separated from the rest, becomes a different being, qualitatively and numerically; and it will be better to speak of our visions as visions of angels or messengers or demigods, having one divine parent and one human. In everything, if we regard it as it is in itself, and not selfishly, we may find an incarnation or manifestation of deity.
How the divinity of our daily visitants shines out at certain moments and then again is obscured by our practical haste and inattention, is admirably expressed in the history of Helen. Her birth was miraculous, and yet quaintly natural, for her father Zeus, having taken the form of a swan when he wooed her mother Leda, she was hatched from a great white egg; and there was always something swanlike in the movements of her neck, in the composure of her carriage, as if borne on still waters, in the scarcely flushed marble of her skin, and in the lightness and amplitude of her floating garments. She was hardly of this world, and it seemed almost a desecration to have wedded her to any mortal. Yet she offered no resistance to love; it was indifferent to her whom she might enamour, or into what nest of robbers she might be carried by force. Was it not violence, she said to herself, to exist on earth at all? What mattered a shade more or less of violence? If she remained in a manner chaste and inviolate, it was only because she was too beautiful to tempt the lusts of men. Neither of her two husbands loved or understood her. Menelaus because he was a dullard, and Paris because he was a rake, approached her as they would have approached any other woman, and they found no great pleasure in her society. Yet wherever she appeared, every one stopped talking and was motionless; and she was worshipped by all who saw her pass at a distance. Supreme beauty is foreign everywhere, yet everywhere has a right of domicile; it opens a window to heaven, and is a cause of suspended animation and, as it were, ecstatic suicide in the heart of mortals.
Helen passed her childhood dazed, but with a pleasing wonder, because she loved her brothers, and they, absorbed though they were habitually in their violent sports, were tender to her. When they died, how gladly would she have followed them and become the third star with them in heaven! But she found herself married to Menelaus the king; and this her first mansion at Sparta, the narrowest of citadels, was far from happy. The palace was a great farm-house, and the talk in it was all of harvests and cattle and horses and wars. The men were boors, and their scruples about sacrifices and auguries annoyed her; being half divine, she felt no need for religion. "What advantage is it," she said in her thoughts, "to be a queen when I am a prisoner, or to be called beautiful where nobody looks at me."
Accordingly it was with a vague hope and a secret desire for vengeance that she heard of the approach of a brilliant stranger, from a far more populous and flourishing city than Sparta, who came with gifts and a glib tongue to view the wonders of the island world. When his eyes fell on her, his unfeigned surprise filled her with exultation. To be so discerned, for her, was to be won. Those eyes could recognize divinity. No doubt he was preparing new fetters for her and new sorrows, but for a moment she would be free, and in following him she would feel herself once more the goddess.
In fact, so long as they sailed the dark-purple sea, or rested in caves or in island bowers, all was pleasantness between them. Their very galley, with its white sails spread, took on something of Helen's beauty, and seemed a cloud wafted across the Aegean, or the swan, her father, riding on the rippled reaches of the Meander. Paris proved a candid and light-hearted lover; never vexed, he was all grace and mastery in small matters: one of those lordly travellers who can feel the charm of nature and of woman in every dime, however exotic, however pure, or however impure; and the incomparable Helen seemed indeed incomparable to his practised mind. He adored her, but he preferred other women. Moreover, she found that at Troy he counted for nothing. He moved amid battles and councils, quite at home in the scene, but never consulted; a prince turned shepherd, a familiar but superfluous ornament, like a fop or a ballet-dancer that everybody smiled upon and nobody respected. It was given him in the end to slay the redoubtable Achilles with a chance arrow, Apollo secretly directing the shaft, but he was no warrior. It was a useless triumph, as his abduction of Helen had been an innocent crime: both were the work of gods laughing at human arrogance. There were doubtless street rhetoricians in Ilium who upbraided Paris and Helen, as there are reasoning philosophers and politicians to-day who attribute the ascendancy or decay of nations to the ideas that prevail there, forgetting to ask why those particular ideas have been embraced by those peoples, when all ideas, in the universal market, are to be had gratis. The wise old Priam and his counsellors knew better. They did not disown Paris for his escapade, as they might so easily have done, nor did they return Helen to her wronged husband, useless as she was at Troy. They knew that the confused battles of earth must be fought over some nominal prize; men and animals will always be fighting for something, not because the thing is necessarily of any value to them, but because they wish to snatch it from one another. Helen had lent her name and image to colour an ancient feud, and make articulate the dull eternal contention between Asia and Europe. It was for existence that each party was fighting; but it added to their courage and self-esteem to say they were fighting for beauty, and that the victory of their side would be a victory for the gods. But the gods were in both camps, and in neither, as in her heart was Helen herself. In her isolation, her conscience sometimes reproached her, and she wondered that she never heard these reproaches from the lips of others. Hector and Priam and the other old men, even the queen and the gossiping women, treated her with deference; but they cared only for Troy and for their own affairs. If less beset than in her strict old home, she was more neglected in these spacious palaces, and no less melancholy. Was it a miracle of generosity that nobody blamed her, or was it a supreme proof of indifference, that standing in the centre of the stage she remained unheeded? Was she so much a goddess that they thought her a statue? Would she be borne away by the victors like an inert Palladium, to be set up elsewhere on a new pedestal? She did not understand that it is not the vision that men have of the gods that works their safety or ruin, but that fatal maladjustments, or natural vigour in them, in shaping their destiny, call that vision down. Nor is it an idle vision; for the sight turns the dreary length of their misery into a tragedy flashing with light and tears; and the presence of Helen on those beleaguered walls, which might have irritated the foolish, consoled the wise. She was not the cause of their danger nor of their coming disaster, as she had not been the cause of the harsh virtues of her Spartan clan; but as those harsh virtues had created her beauty, so the wealth and exuberant civilization of Ilium had recognized it, and made it their own; and she was a glory to both nations, for not every city, of all the cities that perish, has had a queen like her.
When Troy fell at last, when Hector and Paris and Priam were dead, and Aeneas had escaped just in time, she waited, impassible, at the gate of the smoking acropolis, neither glad nor sorry, not ashamed to see her first husband again and his shouting friends—for she despised them—nor unwilling to be removed, as it were, into the evening shadow of her old queenliness. Something told her that in her second life at Sparta she would be more feared and more respected; in her advancing age and intangible isolation she would be as a priestess whom no one—not even Menelaus—would dare to approach. Her crime would be her protection; her rebellion, proudly acknowledged and never retracted in spirit, would lift her above all mankind. Even while still in this world, she would belong to the other.
There is an obscure rumour that after the fall of Troy Helen never returned to Sparta but was spirited away to Egypt, whilst a mere phantasm resembling her accompanied her dull husband back to his dull fastness by the pebbly Eurotas. This turn given to the fable hints darkly at the unearthly truth. Helen was a phantom always and everywhere; so long as men fought for her, taking her image, as it were, for their banner, she presided over a most veritable and bloody battle; but when the battle ceased of itself, and all those heroes that had seen and idolized her were dead, the cerulean colours of that banner faded from it; the shreds of it rotted indistinguishably in the mire, and the hues that had lent it for a moment its terrible magic fled back into the ether, where wind and mist, meteors and sunbeams, never cease to weave them. The passing of Helen was the death of Greece, but Helen herself is its immortality. Yet why seek to interpret the parable? There is more depth of suggestion in these ancient myths than in any abstract doctrine which we may substitute for them. Homer and his companions certainly were not writing intentional allegories; but they had a sense for beauty and a sense for the flux of things, and in those two perceptions the whole philosophy of Ideas is latent. Sight, thought, love arrest essences; and time, perpetually undermining the existence that brings those essences before us, drives them, as fast as we can arrest them, like a sort of upward flaw, back into heaven.
I do not conceive the Judgement of Paris as Rubens has painted it: an agricultural labourer leering at three fat women of the town who have gone into the country for a lark. This disrobing of goddesses, though there may be some ancient authority for it, does not conform to my principles of exegesis, and I pronounce it heretical. Goddesses cannot disrobe, because their attributes are their substance. They are like the images of the Virgin in Spanish churches; if you are so ill-advised, you may take off their crown, their veils, and their stiffly embroidered conical mantle; but what will remain will not be our Lady either of Mercies or of Sorrows, but a pole, with a doll's head and two hands attached. The spell lies in the ornaments, because they alone are symbolical and richly mysterious. Similarly the virtue of those pagan goddesses did not he in what each might be in herself, either as a conscious spirit or as a beautiful titanic body endowed with free and immortal life; their relevant virtue was tutelary, and lay in their patronage of particular crafts or passions in man. For this reason it was not absurd that they should be rivals in beauty. Of course in itself every nature, celestial or even earthly, is incomparable and perfect in its own way. But goddesses may well compete for the prize of beauty in the eyes of a mortal; it is not their persons that he sees or can see, but their herds, born and bred on the mountain-side, Arcadia is full of dirt, hardship, and poverty; sunrise and sunset are heavy to them; they fatten their sheep in order to shear and to slaughter them, and they love a green pasture because it fattens the sheep. So too the eclogues of town poets, and the toy Arcadias of Versailles or of the carnival, in their satin slippers and gilded crooks, are a forced labour, and tedious; at best a new masquerade in which the jaded may continue to make love. But there is a poetic Arcadia none the less, the real Arcadia mirrored in a contemplative mind. Idle vision neither is what it looks at, nor apes it: it is infinitely other, yet in looking forgets itself, and lends its heart gladly to the spectacle. Paris shirked none of the labours or bestialities of the country swain; with a semi-divine tolerance he relished those rough sports and those monotonous pipings: anything a creature can love, some god finds lovable. He tussled with those wenches, and the crude scent of those smoking kettles did not turn his stomach. Had it been less malodorous at court? Was there not more freedom, more laughter, and greater plenty here? If Paris was not a hero, at least he was not a snob. He was a truant prince, a fop become a shepherd, with a body and a mind capable of great things, but doing easy things from choice. In his very softness, since it was voluntary, there was a kind of strength, the strength of indifference, and freedom, and universal derision. And his cynicism was voluptuous. Idle vision in him gilded alike everything it saw. He had chosen, and would never lose, possession of the Immediate.
As to Helen, I have not ignored her. The gods called Paris Alexander, and a private oracle has revealed to me that they also had another name for Helen, which was Doxa or Epiphaneia, that is to say, Glory or Evidence or (being otherwise interpreted) Seeming or Phantom. She was not substantial, but a manifestation of something else. Her beauty was her all, and what was her beauty to herself A myriad potential appearances wait in the intricate recesses of substance, or in the ethereal web of lights and motions that vibrates through the infinite, ready for the quick eye that can discern them. This discernment is at once a birth and a marriage. No sooner is the fair phantom called into existence than she has already leapt, as if carried by destiny, into her lover's arms; for nothing can be more longed for, or more rapturously beautiful when it appears, than perfect evidence is to the mind. And the womb of nature, too, in its dark fertility, must be relieved to bring something to light at last. Yet this rare concourse of desires, and this blissful marriage, proves in the end most unhappy, for there is sin in it.
As all desperate lovers, in the absence of their true love, embrace what best they can find, though a false object, so spirit which, if not entangled in circumstance and heavy with dreams, would embrace the truth, must embrace appearance instead. There is a momentary lyrical joy even in that, because appearance has a being of its own; it has form, like Helen, and magic comings and goings, like visions of the gods: and if spirit were not incarnate and had nothing to fear or pursue, appearance would be the only reality it would care to dwell on. It was princely of Paris to love only the Immediate, but it was inhuman and unwise; and Venus had seduced him not only to his ruin (we must all die sooner or later) but to his disgrace and perpetual misery. A spirit lodged in time, place, and an animal body needs to be mindful of existence; it needs to respect the past, the hidden, the ulterior. It should be satisfied with what beauties are visible from its station, and with such truths as are pertinent to its fate. It should study appearance for the sake of substance. But as the joy of a free spirit is in perfect evidence, in Doxa or Epiphaneia, it inevitably flouts substance and embraces appearance instead. The Rape of Helen is this adulterous substitution, dazzling but criminal.
Now that for some years my body has not been visible in the places it used to haunt (my mind, even then, being often elsewhere), my friends in America have fallen into the habit of thinking me dead, and with characteristic haste and kindness, they are writing obituary notices, as it were, on my life and works. Some of these reach me in this other world—the friendly ones, which their authors send me—and without the aid of any such stratagem as Swift's, I have the strange pleasure of laughing at my own epitaphs. It is not merely the play of vanity that enters into this experience, nor the occasional excuse for being unfair in return; there comes with it a genuine discovery of the general balance of one's character. A man has unrivalled knowledge of the details of his life and feelings, but it is hard for him to compose his personage as it appears in the comedy of the world, or in the eyes of other people. It is not true that contemporaries misjudge a man. Competent contemporaries judge him perfectly, much better than posterity, which is composed of critics no less egotistical and obliged to rely exclusively on documents easily misinterpreted. The contemporary can read more safely between the lines; and if the general public often misjudges the men of its own time, the general public hears little of them. It is guided by some party tag or casual association, by the malignity or delusion of some small coterie that has caught its ear: how otherwise should it judge ideas it has not grasped and people it has not seen? But public opinion is hardly better informed about the past than about the present, and histories are only newspapers published long after the fact.
As to my person, my critics are very gentle, and I am sensible of the kindness, or the diffidence, with which they treat me. I do not mind being occasionally denounced for atheism, conceit, or detachment. One has to be oneself; and so long as the facts are not misrepresented—and I have little to complain of on that score—any judgement based upon them is a two-edged sword: people simply condemn what condemns them. I can always say to myself that my atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests; and that even in this denial I am no rude iconoclast, but full of secret sympathy with the impulses of idolaters. My detachment from things and persons is also affectionate, and simply what the ancients called philosophy: I consent that a flowing river should flow; I renounce that which betrays, and cling to that which satisfies, and I relish the irony of truth; but my security in my own happiness is not indifference to that of others: I rejoice that every one should have his tastes and his pleasures. That I am conceited, it would be folly to deny: what artist, what thinker, what parent does not overestimate his own offspring? Can I suppress an irresistible sense of seeing things clearly, and a keen delight in so seeing them? Frankly, I think these attitudes of mine are justified by the facts; but I entirely understand how offensive they must be to any one who thinks they are not justified, or who fears that they may be. Let the irritant work. The arrows of anger miss their mark. Aimed at some imaginary evil bird in the heavens, they scarcely startle the poet wandering in his dell. He hears them pass over his head and bury their venom far away in the young grass. Far away too his friends are designing his vain cenotaph, and inscribing it with seemly words in large capitals.
On the other hand, in respect to my impersonal opinions, I notice a little bewilderment, and some obtuseness. Of course, if people are repelled by the subject or by the manner (which is an integral part of the thought) and find it all unintelligible, that is no fault of theirs, nor of mine; but I speak of the initiated and of such as are willing to lend their minds to my sort of lucubration. For instance, when more than twenty years ago, I wrote someInterpretations of Poetry and Religion, this is what William James said of them: "What a perfection of rottenness ... how fantastic a philosophy!—as if the 'world of values'wereindependent of existence. It is only asbeingthat one thing is better than another. The idea of darkness is as good as that of light, as ideas. There is more value in light'sbeing." William James was a "radical empiricist," so that for him the being of light could not have meant anything except its being in idea, in experience. The fantastic view must therefore be some other; apparently that in the realm of unrealized essences, apart from any observer, one essence can be better than another. But how could any one attribute such a view to me? The whole contention of my book was that the glow of human emotion lent a value to good poetry which it denied to bad, and to one idea of God which it denied to another. My position in this matter was that of empirical philosophy, and of William James himself. In his book on Pragmatism he says that the being of atoms is just as good as the being of God, if both produce the same effects in human experience; and I remember once mildly protesting to him on that point, and asking him if, apart from these effects on us, the existence of God, assuming God to be conscious, would not have a considerable value in itself; and he replied, "Of course; but I was thinking of ouridea." This was exactly the attitude of my book; I was thinking of our religious and poetic ideas, and reducing their value to what they stood for in the elements of our experience, or in our destiny.
I think I see, however, where the trouble lies. The practical intellect conceives everything as a source of influence. Whether it be matter or other people, or tutelary spirits, that which we envisage in action and passion is not our idea of these objects, but their operation on us, or our operation on them. Now a source of influence cannot be non-existent. Accordingly, what concerns earnest people in their religion is something, they know not what, which is real. They are not interested in forming poetic or dramatic pictures of the gods, as the Greeks did in their mythology, but rather in finding a living God to help them, as even the Greeks did in their home cultus and their oracles. This living God, since he is to operate and to be worked upon, must exist; otherwise the whole practice of religion becomes a farce. So also in love or in science, it would be egotistical and affected to gloat on our own ideal, turning our backs on the adorable person or the natural process before us. It is the danger of empirical and critical philosophy, that it turns our attention stubbornly to the subjective: legitimately, I think, if the purpose is merely to study the growth and logic of our beliefs, but illegitimately, if the purpose is malicious, and if it is assumed that once we have understood how our beliefs are formed we shall abandon them and believe nothing. Empiricism and idealism are, as Kant called them, excellent cathartics, but they are nasty food; and if we try to build them up into a system of the universe the effort is not only self-contradictory (because we ought then to possess only ideas without beliefs) but the result is, in the words of William James, fantastic and rotten.
Now, however much I may have studied the human imagination, I have never doubted that even highly imaginative things, like poetry and religion, express real events, if not in the outer world, at least in the inner growth or discipline of life. Like the daily experience of the senses and like the ideas of science, they forma human language, all the terms of which are poetical and its images dream-images, but which symbolizes things and events beyond it and is controlled from outside. This would be perfectly evident to any other animal who should discover how men see the world or what they think of it: why should we be less intelligent than any other animal would be about ourselves? Enlightenment consists in coming nearer and nearer to the natural objects that lend a practical meaning to our mental discourse; and when the material significance of our dreams is thus discovered, we are lost in admiration at the originality, humour, and pictorial grandeur of the imagery in which our experience comes to us, as we might be at the decorative marvels of tapestry or of stained glass: but now without illusion. For we can now discriminate the rhythms and colour proper to our mental atmosphere from the extrinsic value of discourse as a sign for things and events beyond it. These external things and events make up what we call nature. It is nature, or some part of nature, or some movement of nature occurring within us or affecting us, that is the true existent object of religion, of science, and of love. The rest is a mere image.
My naturalism is sometimes taxed with being dogmatic, and if I were anxious to avoid that reproach, I might easily reduce my naturalism to a definition and say that if experience has any sources whatever, the sum and system of these sources shall be called nature. I know what speculative difficulties cluster about the notion of cause, which in one sense is quite unnecessary to science; but so long as time, process, and derivation are admitted at all, events may be traced back to earlier events which were their sources; and this universal flax of events will be called nature. Any existing persons, and any gods exercising power, will evidently be parts of nature. But I am not concerned to avoid dogmatism on such a point. Every assertion about existence is hazarded, it rests on animal faith, not on logical proof; and every argument to support naturalism, or to rebut it, implies naturalism. To deny that there are any facts (if scepticism can be carried so far) is still to dogmatize, no less than it would be to point to some fact in particular; in either case we descend into the arena of existence, which may betray our confidence. Any fact is an existence which discourse plays about and regards, but does not create. It is the essence of the practical intellect to prophesy about nature, and we must all do it As to the truth of our prophecy, that is always problematical, because nature is whatever nature happens to be; and as to our knowledge, starting as it does from a single point, the present position of the thinker, and falling away rapidly in dearness and certainty as the perspective recedes, it cannot pretend to draw the outlines of naturea priori: yet our knowledge of nature, in our neighbourhood and moral climate, is very considerable, since every known fact is a part of nature. It is quite idle to deny, for instance, that human life depends on cosmic and hygienic influences; or that in the end all human operations must run back somehow to the rotation of the earth, to the rays of the sun, to the moisture and fructification of the soil, to the ferment there of vegetative and dreaming spirits, quickened in animals endowed with locomotion into knowledge of surrounding things: whence the passionate imaginations which we find in ourselves. I know that things might have been arranged otherwise; and some of those alternative worlds may be minutely thought out in myth or in philosophy, in obedience to some dialectical or moral impulse of the human mind; but that all those other worlds are figments of fancy, interesting as poetry is interesting, and that only the natural world, the world of medicine and commerce, is actual, is obvious; so obvious to every man in his sane moments, that I have always thought it idle to argue the point. Argument is not persuasive to madmen; but they can be won over by gentler courses to a gradual docility to the truth. One of these gentler courses is this: to remember that madness is human, that dreams have their springs in the depths of human nature and of human experience; and that the illusion they cause may be kindly and even gloriously dispelled by showing what the solid truth was which they expressed allegorically. Why should one be angry with dreams, with myth, with allegory, with madness? We must not kill the mind, as some rationalists do, in trying to cure it. The life of reason, as I conceive it, is simply the dreaming mind becoming coherent, devising symbols and methods, such as languages, by which it may fitly survey its own career, and the forces of nature on which that career depends. Reason thereby raises our vegetative dream into a poetic revelation and transcript of the truth. That all this life of expression grows up in animals living in the material world is the deliverance of reason itself, in our lucid moments; but my books, being descriptive of the imagination and having perhaps some touches of imagination in them, may not seem to have expressed my lucid moments alone. They were, however, intended to do so; and I ought to have warned my readers more often that such was the case.
I have no metaphysics, and in that sense I am no philosopher, but a poor ignoramus trusting what he hears from the men of science. I rely on them to discover gradually exactly which elements in their description of nature may be literally true, and which merely symbolical: even if they were all symbolical, they would be true enough for me. My naturalism is not at all afraid of the latest theories of space, time, or matter: what I understand of them, I like, and am ready to believe, for I am a follower of Plato in his doctrine that only knowledge of ideas (if we call it knowledge) can be literal and exact, whilst practical knowledge is necessarily mythical in form, precisely because its object exists and is external to us. An arbitrary sign, indication, or name can point to something unambiguously, without at all fathoming its nature, andthereforecan be knowledge of fact: which an aesthetic or logical elucidation of ideas can never be. Every idea of sense or science is a summary sign, on a different plane and scale altogether from the diffuse material facts which it covers: one unexampled colour for many rays, one indescribable note for many vibrations, one picture for many particles of paint, one word for a series of noises or letters. A word is a very Platonic thing: you cannot say when it begins, when it ends, how long it lasts, nor where it ever is; and yet it is the only unit you mean to utter, or normally hear. Platonism is the intuition of essences in the presence of things, in order to describe them: it is mind itself.
I am quite happy in this human ignorance mitigated by pictures, for it yields practical security and poetic beauty: what more can a sane man want? In this respect I think sometimes I am the only philosopher living: I am resigned to being a mind. I have put my hand into the hand of nature, and a thrill of sympathy has passed from her into my very heart, so that I can instinctively see all things, and see myself, from her point of view: a sympathy which emboldens me often to say to her, "Mother, tell me a story." Not the fair Sheherazad herself knew half the marvellous tales that nature spins in the brains of her children. But I must not let go her hand in my wonder, or I might be bewitched and lost in the maze of her inventions.
A workman must not quarrel with his tools, nor the mind with ideas; and I have little patience with those philanthropists who hate everything human, and would reform away everything that men love or can love. Yet if we dwell too lovingly on the human quality and poetic play of ideas, we may forget that they are primarily signs. The practical intellect is always on the watch for ambient existences, in order to fight or to swallow them: and if by chance its attention is arrested at an idea, it will instinctively raise that idea to the throne of power which should be occupied only by the thing which it stands for and poetically describes. Ideas lend themselves to idolatry. There is a continual incidental deception into which we are betrayed by the fictitious and symbolical terms of our knowledge, in that we suppose these terms to form the whole essence of their objects. I think I have never failed to point out this danger of illusion, and to protest against idolatry in thought, so much more frequent and dangerous than the worship of stocks and stones; but at the same time, as such idolatry is almost inevitable, and as the fictions so deified often cover some true force or harmony in nature, I have sometimes been tempted in my heart to condone this illusion. In my youth it seemed as if a scientific philosophy was unattainable; human life, I thought, was at best a dream, and if we were not the dupes of one error, we should be the dupes of another; and whilst of course the critic must make this mental reservation in all his assents, it was perhaps too much to ask mankind to do so; so that in practice we were condemned to overlook the deceptiveness of fable, because there would be less beauty and no more truth in whatever theory might take its place. I think now that this despair of finding a scientific philosophy was premature, and that the near future may actually produce one: not that its terms will be less human and symbolical than those to which we are accustomed, but that they may hug more closely the true movement and the calculable order of nature. The truth, though it must be expressed in language, is not for that reason a form of error. No doubt the popularizers of science will turn its language into a revelation, and its images into idols; but the abstract character of these symbols will render it easier for the judicious to preserve the distinction between the things to be described and the science which describes them.
Was it, I wonder, this touch of sympathy with splendid error, bred in me by long familiarity with religion and philosophy, that offended my honest critics? Now that I show less sympathy with it, will they be better satisfied? I fear the opposite is the case. What they resented was rather that in spite of all my sympathy, and of all my despair about science, it never occurred to me to think those errors true, because they were splendid, except true to the soul. Did they expect that I should seriously debate whether the Ghost inHamletreally came out of Purgatorial fires, and whether Athena really descended in her chariot from Olympus and pulled Achilles by his yellow hair when he was in danger of doing something rash? Frankly, I have assumed—perhaps prematurely—that such questions are settled. I am not able nor willing to write a system of magic cosmology, nor to propose a new religion. I merely endeavour to interpret, as sympathetically and imaginatively as I can, the religion and poetry already familiar to us; and I interpret them, of course, on their better side, not as childish science, but as subtle creations of hope, tenderness, and ignorance.
So anxious was I, when younger, to find some rational justification for poetry and religion, and to show that their magic was significant of true facts, that I insisted too much, as I now think, on the need of relevance to fact even in poetry. Not only did I distinguish good religion from bad by its expression of practical wisdom, and of the moral discipline that makes for happiness in this world, but I maintained that the noblest poetry also must express the moral burden of life and must be rich in wisdom. Age has made me less exacting, and I can now find quite sufficient perfection in poetry, like that of the Chinese and Arabians, without much philosophic scope, in mere grace and feeling and music and cloud-castles and frolic. I assumed formerly that an idea could have depth and richness only if somehow redolent of former experiences of an overt kind. I had been taught to assign no substance to the mind, but to conceive it as a system of successive ideas, the later ones mingling with a survival of the earlier, and forming a cumulative experience, like a swelling musical movement. Now, without ceasing to conceive mental discourse in that way, I have learned, with the younger generation, to rely more on the substructure, on the material and psychical machinery that puts this conscious show on the stage, and pulls the wires. Not that I ever denied or really doubted that this substructure existed, but that I thought it a more prudent and critical method in philosophy not to assume it. Certainly it is a vast assumption; but I see now an irony in scepticism which I did not see when I was more fervid a sceptic; namely, that in addressing anybody, or even myself, I have already made that assumption; and that if I tried to rescind it, I should only be making another, no less gratuitous, and far more extravagant; I should be assuming that the need of making this assumption was a fatal illusion, rather than a natural revelation of the existence of an environment to a living animal. This environment has been called the unknowable, the unconscious and the subconscious—egotistical and absurd names for it, as if its essence was the difficulty we have in approaching it. Its proper names are matter, substance, nature, or soul; and I hope people will learn again to call it by those old names. When living substance is thus restored beneath the surface of experience, there is no longer any reason for assuming that the first song of a bird may not be infinitely rich and as deep as heaven, if it utters the vital impulses of that moment with enough completeness. The analogies of this utterance with other events, or its outlying suggestions, whilst they may render it more intelligible to a third person, would not add much to its inward force and intrinsic beauty. Its lyric adequacy, though of course not independent of nature, would be independent of wisdom. If besides being an adequate expression of the soul, the song expressed the lessons of a broad experience, which that soul had gathered and digested, this fact certainly would lend a great tragic sublimity to that song; but to be poetical or religious intrinsically, the mystic cry is enough.
I notice that men of the world, when they dip into my books, find them consistent, almost oppressively consistent, and to the ladies everything is crystal—clear; yet the philosophers say that it is lazy and self-indulgent of me not to tell them plainly what I think, if I know myself what it is. Because I describe madness sympathetically, because I lose myself in the dreaming mind, and see the world from that transcendental point of vantage, while at the same time interpreting that dream by its presumable motives and by its moral tendencies, these quick and intense reasoners suppose that I am vacillating in my own opinions. My own opinions are a minor matter, and there was usually no need, for the task in hand, that I should put them forward; yet as a matter of fact, since I reached the age of manhood, they have not changed. In my adolescence I thought this earthly life (not unintelligibly, considering what I had then seen and heard of it) a most hideous thing, and I was not disinclined to dismiss it as an illusion, for which perhaps the Catholic epic might be substituted to advantage, as conforming better to the impulses of the soul; and later I liked to regard all systems as alternative illusions for the solipsist; but neither solipsism nor Catholicism were ever anything to me but theoretic poses or possibilities; vistas for the imagination, never convictions. I was well aware, as I am still, that any such vistamaybe taken for true, because all dreams are persuasive while they last; and I have not lost, nor do I wish to lose, a certain facility and pleasure in taking those points of view at will, and speaking those philosophical languages. But though as a child I regretted the fact and now I hugely enjoy it, I have never been able to elude the recurring, invincible, and ironic conviction that whenever I or any other person feign to be living in any of those non-natural worlds, we are simply dreaming awake.