II. HISTORY…

II. HISTORY

[Sidenote: History an artificial memory.]

The least artificial extension of common knowledge is history. Personal recollection supplies many an anecdote, anecdotes collected and freely commented upon make up memoirs, and memoirs happily combined make not the least interesting sort of history. When a man recalls any episode in his career, describes the men that flourished in his youth, or laments the changes that have since taken place, he is an informal historian. He would become one in a formal and technical sense if he supplemented and controlled his memory by ransacking papers, and taking elaborate pains to gather evidence on the events he wished to relate. This systematic investigation, especially when it goes back to first sources, widens the basis for imaginative reconstruction. It buttresses somewhat the frail body of casual facts that in the first instance may have engaged an individual’s attention.

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not what science necessarily rests on. In order to sift evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support that knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

[Sidenote: Second sight requires control.]

It is true that memory sometimes, as in a vision, seems to raise the curtain upon the past and restore it to us in its pristine reality. We may imagine at such moments experience can never really perish, but, though hidden by chance from the roving eye, endures eternally in some spiritual sphere. Such bodily recovery of the past, however, like other telepathic visions, can never prove its own truth. A lapse into by-gone perception, a sense of living the past over with all its vivid minutiæ and trivial concomitants, might involve no true repetition of anything that had previously existed. It might be a fresh experience altogether. The sense of knowing constitutes only a working presumption for experiment to start with; until corroboration comes that presumption can claim no respect from the outsider.

[Sidenote: Nature the theme common to various memories.]

While memory remains a private presumption, therefore, it can be compared with nothing else that might test its veracity. Only when memory is expressed and, in the common field of expression, finds itself corroborated by another memory, does it rise somewhat in dignity and approach scientific knowledge. Two presumptions, when they coincide, make a double assurance. While memory, then, is the basis of all historical knowledge, it is not called history until it enters a field where it can be supported or corrected by evidence. This field is that natural world which all experiences, in so far as they are rational, envisage together. Assertions relating to events in that world can corroborate or contradict one another—something that would be impossible if each memory, like the plot of a novel, moved in a sphere of its own. For memory to meet memory, the two must present objects which are similar or continuous: then they can corroborate or correct each other and help to fix the order of events as they really happened—that is, as they happened independently of what either memory may chance to represent. Thus even the most miraculous and direct recovery of the past needs corroboration if it is to be systematically credited; but to receive corroboration it must refer to some event in nature, in that common world in space and time to which other memories and perceptions may refer also. In becoming history, therefore, memory becomes a portion of natural science. Its assertions are such that any natural science may conceivably support or contradict them.

[Sidenote: Growth of legend.]

Nature and its transformations, however, form too serried and complicated a system for our wayward minds to dominate if left to their spontaneous workings. Whatever is remembered or conceived is at first vaguely believed to have its place in the natural order, all myth and fable being originally localised within the confines of the material world and made to pass for a part of early history. The method by which knowledge of the past is preserved is so subject to imaginative influence that it cannot avail to exclude from history anything that the imagination may supply. In the growth of legend a dramatic rhythm becomes more and more marked. What falls in with this rhythm is reproduced and accentuated whenever the train of memory is started anew. The absence of such cadences would leave a sensible gap—a gap which the momentum of ideation is quick to fill up with some appropriate image. Whatever, on the other hand, cannot be incorporated into the dominant round of fancies is consigned more and more to oblivion.

This consolidation of legend is not intentional. It is ingenuous and for the most part inevitable. When we muse about our own past we are conscious of no effort to give it dramatic unity; on the contrary, the excitement and interest of the process consist in seeming to discover the hidden eloquence and meaning of the events themselves. When a man of experience narrates the wonders he has seen, we listen with a certain awe, and believe in him for his miracles as we believe in our own memory for its arts. A bard’s mechanical and ritualistic habits usually put all judgment on his own part to sleep; while the sanctity attributed to the tale, as it becomes automatically more impressive, precludes tinkering with it intentionally. Especially the allegories and marvels with which early history is adorned are not ordinarily invented with malice prepense. They are rather discovered in the mind, like a foundling, between night and morning. They are divinely vouchsafed. Each time the tale is retold it suffers a variation which is not challenged, since it is memory itself that has varied. The change is discoverable only if some record of the narrative in its former guise, or some physical memorial of the event related, survives to be confronted with the modified version. The modified version itself can make no comparisons. It merely inherits the name and authority of its ancestor. The innocent poet believes his own lies.

Legends consequently acquire a considerable eloquence and dramatic force. These beauties accrue spontaneously, because rhythm and ideal pertinence, in which poetic merit largely lies, are natural formative principles for speech and memory. As symmetry in material structures is a ground for strength, and hills by erosion are worn to pyramids, so it is in thoughts. Yet the stability attained is not absolute, but only such stability as the circumstances require. Dramatic effect is not everywhere achieved, nor is it missed by the narrator where it is wanting, so that even the oldest and best-pruned legends are full of irrelevant survivals, contradictions, and scraps of nonsense. These literary blemishes are like embedded fossils and tell of facts which the mechanism of reproduction, for some casual reason, has not obliterated. The recorder of verbal tradition religiously sets down its inconsistencies and leaves in the transfigured chronicle many tell-tale incidents and remarks which, like atrophied organs in an animal body, reveal its gradual formation. Art and a deliberate pursuit of unction or beauty would have thrown over this baggage. The automatic and pious minstrel carries it with him to the end.

[Sidenote: No history without documents.]

For these reasons there can be no serious history until there are archives and preserved records, although sometimes a man in a privileged position may compose interesting essays on the events and persons of his own time, as his personal experience has presented them to him. Archives and records, moreover, do not absolve a speculative historian from paying the same toll to the dramatic unities and making the same concessions to the laws of perspective which, in the absence of documents, turn tradition so soon into epic poetry. The principle that elicits histories out of records is the same that breeds legends out of remembered events. In both cases the facts are automatically foreshortened and made to cluster, as it were providentially, about a chosen interest. The historian’s politics, philosophy, or romantic imagination furnishes a vital nucleus for reflection. All that falls within that particular vortex is included in the mental picture, the rest is passed over and tends to drop out of sight. It is not possible to say, nor to think, everything at once; and the private interest which guides a man in selecting his materials imposes itself inevitably on the events he relates and especially on their grouping and significance.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. The conditions of expression and even of memory dragoon the facts and put a false front on diffuse experience. What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion. Such falsification is inevitable, and an honest historian is guilty of it only against his will. He would wish, as he loves the truth, to see and to render it entire. But the limits of his book and of his knowledge force him to be partial. It is only a very great mind, seasoned by large wisdom, that can lend such an accent and such a carrying-power to a few facts as to make them representative of all reality.

[Sidenote: The aim is truth.]

Some historians, indeed, are so frankly partisan or cynical that they avowedly write history with a view to effect, either political or literary. Moralising historians belong to this school, as well as those philosophers who worship evolution. They sketch every situation with malice and twist it, as if it were an argument, to bring out a point, much as fashionable portrait-painters sometimes surcharge the characteristic, in order to make a bold effect at a minimum expense of time and devotion. And yet the truly memorable aspect of a man is that which he wears in the sunlight of common day, with all his generic humanity upon him. His most interesting phase is not that which he might assume under the lime-light of satirical or literary comparisons. The characteristic is after all the inessential. It marks a peripheral variation in the honest and sturdy lump. To catch only the heartless shimmer of individuality is to paint a costume without the body that supports it. Therefore a broad and noble historian sets down all within his apperception. His literary interests are forgotten; he is wholly devoted to expressing the passions of the dead. His ideal, emanating from his function and chosen for no extraneous reason, is to make his heroes think and act as they really thought and acted in the world.

Nevertheless the opposite happens, sometimes to a marked and even scandalous degree. As legend becomes in a few generations preposterous myth, so history, after a few rehandlings and condensations, becomes unblushing theory. Now theory—when we use the word for a schema of things’ relations and not for contemplation of them in their detail and fulness—is an expedient to cover ignorance and remedy confusion. The function of history, if it could be thoroughly fulfilled, would be to render theory unnecessary. Did we possess a record of all geological changes since the creation we should need no geological theory to suggest to us what those changes must have been. Hypothesis is like the rule of three: it comes into play only when one of the terms is unknown and needs to be inferred from those which are given. The ideal historian, since he would know all the facts, would need no hypotheses, and since he would imagine and hold all events together in their actual juxtapositions he would need no classifications. The intentions, acts, and antecedents of every mortal would be seen in their precise places, with no imputed qualities or scope; and when those intentions had been in fact fulfilled, the fulfilments too would occupy their modest position in the rank and file of marching existence. To omniscience the idea of cause and effect would be unthinkable. If all things were perceived together and co-existed for thought, as they actually flow through being, on one flat phenomenal level, what sense would there be in saying that one element had compelled another to appear? The relation of cause is an instrument necessary to thought only when thought is guided by presumption. We say, “If this thing had happened, that other thing would have followed”—a hypothesis which would lapse and become unmeaning had we always known all the facts. For no supposition contrary to fact would then have entered discourse.

[Sidenote: Indirect methods of attaining it.]

This ideal of direct omniscience is, however, impossible to attain; not merely accidental frailties, but the very nature of things stands in the way. Experience cannot be suspended or sustained in being, because its very nucleus is mobile and in shifting cannot retain its past phases bodily, but only at best some trace or representation of them. Memory itself is an expedient by which what is hopelessly lost in its totality may at least be partly kept in its beauty or significance; and experience can be enlarged in no other way than by carrying into the moving present the lesson and transmitted habit of much that is past. History is naturally reduced to similar indirect methods of recovering what has lapsed. The historian’s object may be to bring the past again before the mind in all its living reality, but in pursuing that object he is obliged to appeal to inference, to generalisation, and to dramatic fancy. We may conveniently distinguish in history, as it is perforce written by men, three distinct elements, which we may call historical investigation, historical theory, and historical romance.

[Sidenote: Historical research a part of physics.]

Historical investigation is the natural science of the past. The circumstance that its documents are usually literary may somewhat disguise the physical character and the physical principles of this science; but when a man wishes to discover what really happened at a given moment, even if the event were somebody’s thought; he has to read his sources, not for what they say, but for what they imply. In other words, the witnesses cannot be allowed merely to speak for themselves, after the gossiping fashion familiar in Herodotus; their testimony has to be interpreted according to the laws of evidence. The past needs to be reconstructed out of reports, as in geology or archæology it needs to be reconstructed out of stratifications and ruins. A man’s memory or the report in a newspaper is a fact justifying certain inferences about its probable causes according to laws which such phenomena betray in the present when they are closely scrutinised. This reconstruction is often very difficult, and sometimes all that can be established in the end is merely that the tradition before us is certainly false; somewhat as a perplexed geologist might venture on no conclusion except that the state of the earth’s crust was once very different from what it is now.

[Sidenote: Verification here indirect.]

A natural science dealing with the past labours under the disadvantage of not being able to appeal to experiment. The facts it terminates upon cannot be recovered, so that they may verify in sense the hypothesis that had inferred them. The hypothesis can be tested only by current events; it is then turned back upon the past, to give assurance of facts which themselves are hypothetical and remain hanging, as it were, to the loose end of the hypothesis itself. A hypothetical fact is a most dangerous creature, since it lives on the credit of a theory which in turn would be bankrupt if the fact should fail. Inferred past facts are more deceptive than facts prophesied, because while the risk of error in the inference is the same, there is no possibility of discovering that error; and the historian, while really as speculative as the prophet, can never be found out.

Most facts known to man, however, are reached by inference, and their reality may be wisely assumed so long as the principle by which they are inferred, when it is applied in the present, finds complete and constant verification. Presumptions involved in memory and tradition give the first hypothetical facts we count upon; the relations which these first facts betray supply the laws by which facts are to be concatenated; and these laws may then be used to pass from the first hypothetical facts to hypothetical facts of a second order, forming a background and congruous extension to those originally assumed. This expansion of discursive science can go on for ever, unless indeed the principles of inference employed in it involve some present existence, such as a skeleton in a given tomb, which direct experience fails to verify. Then the theory itself is disproved and the whole galaxy of hypothetical facts which clustered about it forfeit their credibility.

[Sidenote: Futile ideal to survey all facts.]

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time in all places. The task is frankly superhuman, because no block of real existence, with its infinitesimal detail, can be recorded, nor if somehow recorded could it be dominated by the mind; and to carry on a survey of this social continuum ad infinitum would multiply the difficulty. The task might also be called infrahuman, because the sort of omniscience which such complete historical science would achieve would merely furnish materials for intelligence: it would be inferior to intelligence itself. There are many things which, as Aristotle says, it is better not to know than to know—namely, those things which do not count in controlling the mind’s fortunes nor enter into its ideal expression. Such is the whole flux of immediate experience in other minds or in one’s own past; and just as it is better to forget than to remember a nightmare or the by-gone sensations of sea-sickness, so it is better not to conceive the sensuous pulp of alien experience, something infinite in amount and insignificant in character.

An attempt to rehearse the inner life of everybody that has ever lived would be no rational endeavour. Instead of lifting the historian above the world and making him the most consummate of creatures, it would flatten his mind out into a passive after-image of diffuse existence, with all its horrible blindness, strain, and monotony. Reason is not come to repeat the universe but to fulfil it. Besides, a complete survey of events would perforce register all changes that have taken place in matter since time began, the fields of geology, astronomy, palæontology, and archæology being all, in a sense, included in history. Such learning would dissolve thought in a vertigo, if it had not already perished of boredom. Historical research is accordingly a servile science which may enter the Life of Reason to perform there some incidental service, but which ought to lapse as soon as that service is performed.

[Sidenote: Historical theory.]

The profit of studying history lies in something else than in a dead knowledge of what happens to have happened. A seductive alternative might be to say that the profit of it lies in understanding what has happened, in perceiving the principles and laws that govern social evolution, or the meaning which events have. We are hereby launched upon a region of physico-ethical speculation where any man with a genius for quick generalisation can swim at ease. To find the one great cause why Borne fell, especially if no one has ever thought of it before, or to expound the true import of the French Revolution, or to formulate in limpid sentences the essence of Greek culture—what could be more tempting or more purely literary? It would ill become the author of this book to decry allegorical expressions, or a cavalierlike fashion of dismissing whole periods and tendencies with a verbal antithesis. We must have exercises in apperception, a work of imagination must be taken imaginatively, and a landscape painter must be suffered to be, at his own risk, as impressionistic as he will. If Raphael, when he was designing the School of Athens, had said to himself that Aristotle should point down to a fact and Plato up to a meaning, or when designing the Disputa had conceived that the proudest of intellects, weary of argument and learning, should throw down his books and turn to revelation for guidance, there would have been much historical pertinence in those conceptions; yet the figures would have been allegorical, contracting into a decorative design events that had been dispersed through centuries and emotions that had only cropped up here and there, with all manner of variations and alloys, when the particular natural situation had made them inevitable. So the Renaissance might be spoken of as a person and the Reformation as her step-sister, and something might be added about the troubles of their home life; but would it be needful in that case to enter a warning that these units were verbal merely, and that the phenomena and the forces really at work had been multitudinous and infinitesimal?

[Sidenote: It is arbitrary.]

In fine, historical terms mark merely rhetorical unities, which have no dynamic cohesion, and there are no historical laws which are not at bottom physical, like the laws of habit—those expressions of Newton’s first law of motion. An essayist may play with historical apperception as long as he will and always find something new to say, discovering the ideal nerve and issue of a movement in a different aspect of the facts. The truly proportionate, constant, efficacious relations between things will remain material. Physical causes traverse the moral units at which history stops, determining their force and duration, and the order, so irrelevant to intent, in which they succeed one another. Even the single man’s life and character have subterranean sources; how should the outer expression and influence of that character have sources more superficial than its own? Yet we cannot trace mechanical necessity down to the more stable units composing a personal mechanism, and much less, therefore, to those composing a complex social evolution. We accordingly translate the necessity, obviously lurking under life’s commonplace yet unaccountable shocks, into verbal principles, names for general impressive results, that play some rôle in our ideal philosophy. Each of these idols of the theatre is visible only on a single stage and to duly predisposed spectators. The next passion affected will throw a differently coloured calcium light on the same pageant, and there will be no end of rival evolutions and incompatible ideal principles crossing one another at every interesting event.

Such a manipulation of history, when made by persons who underestimate their imaginative powers, ends in asserting that events have directed themselves prophetically upon the interests which they arouse. Apart from the magic involved and the mockery of all science, there is a difficulty here which even a dramatic idealist ought to feel. The interests affected are themselves many and contrary. If history is to be understood teleologically, which of all the possible ends it might be pursuing shall we think really endowed with regressive influence and responsible for the movement that is going to realise it? Did Columbus, for instance, discover America so that George Washington might exist and that some day football and the Church of England may prevail throughout the world? Or was it (as has been seriously maintained) in order that the converted Indians of South America might console Saint Peter for the defection of the British and Germans? Or was America, as Hegel believed, ideally superfluous, the absolute having become self-conscious enough already in Prussia? Or shall we say that the real goal is at an infinite distance and unimaginable by us, and useless, therefore, for understanding anything?

In truth, whatever plausibility the providential view of a given occurrence may have is dependent on the curious limitation and selfishness of the observer’s estimations. Sheep are providentially designed for men; but why not also for wolves, and men for worms and microbes? If the historian is willing to accept such a suggestion, and to become a blind worshipper of success, applauding every issue, however lamentable for humanity, and calling it admirable tragedy, he may seem for a while to save his theory by making it mystical; yet presently this last illusion will be dissipated when he loses his way in the maze and finds that all victors perish in their turn and everything, if you look far enough, falls back into the inexorable vortex. This is the sort of observation that the Indian sages made long ago; it is what renders their philosophy, for all its practical impotence, such an irrefragable record of experience, such a superior, definitive perception of the flux. Beside it, our progresses of two centuries and our philosophies of history, embracing one-quarter of the earth for three thousand years, seem puerile vistas indeed. Shall all eternity and all existence be for the sake of what is happening here to-day, and to me? Shall we strive manfully to the top of this particular wave, on the ground that its foam is the culmination of all things for ever?

There is a sense, of course, in which definite political plans and moral aspirations may well be fulfilled by events. Our ancestors, sharing and anticipating our natures, may have had in many respects our actual interests in view, as we may have those of posterity. Such ideal co-operation extends far, where primary interests are concerned; it is rarer and more qualified where a fine and fragile organisation is required to support the common spiritual life. Even in these cases, the aim pursued and attained is not the force that operates, since the result achieved had many other conditions besides the worker’s intent, and that intent itself had causes which it knew nothing of. Every “historical force” pompously appealed to breaks up on inspection into a cataract of miscellaneous natural processes and minute particular causes. It breaks into its mechanical constituents and proves to have been nothing but an effet d’ensemble produced on a mind whose habits and categories are essentially rhetorical.

[Sidenote: A moral critique of the past is possible.]

This sort of false history or philosophy of history might be purified, like so many other things, by self-knowledge. If the philosopher in reviewing events confessed that he was scrutinising them in order to abstract from them whatever tended to illustrate his own ideals, as he might look over a crowd to find his friends, the operation would become a perfectly legitimate one. The events themselves would be left for scientific inference to discover, where credible reports did not testify to them directly; and the causes of events would be left to some theory of natural evolution, to be stated, according to the degree of knowledge attained, in terms more and more exact and mechanical. In the presence of the past so defined imagination and will, however, would not abdicate their rights, and a sort of retrospective politics, an estimate of events in reference to the moral ideal which they embodied or betrayed, might supervene upon positive history. This estimate of evolution might well be called a philosophy of history, since it would be a higher operation performed on the results of natural science, to give a needful basis and illustration to the ideal. The present work is an essay in that direction.

[Sidenote: How it might be just.]

The ideal which in such a review would serve as the touchstone for estimation, if it were an enlightened ideal, would recognise its own natural basis, and therefore would also recognise that under other conditions other ideals, no less legitimate, may have arisen and may have been made the standard for a different judgment on the world. Historical investigation, were its resources adequate, would reveal to us what these various ideals have been. Every animal has his own, and whenever individuals or nations have become reflective they have known how to give articulate expression to theirs. That all these ideals could not have been realised in turn or together is an immense misfortune, the irremediable half-tragedy of life, by which we also suffer. In estimating the measure of success achieved anywhere a liberal historian, who does not wish to be bluntly irrational, will of course estimate it from all these points of view, considering all real interests affected, in so far as he can appreciate them. This is what is meant by putting the standard of value, not in some arbitrary personal dogma but in a variegated omnipresent happiness.

It is by no means requisite, therefore, in disentangling the Life of Reason, to foresee what ultimate form the good might some day take, much less to make the purposes of the philosopher himself, his time, or his nation the test of all excellence. This test is the perpetual concomitant ideal of the life it is applied to. As all could not be well in the world if my own purposes were defeated, so the general excellence of things would be heightened if other men’s purposes also had been fulfilled. Each will is a true centre for universal estimation. As each will, therefore, comes to expression, real and irreversible values are introduced into the world, and the historian, in estimating what has been hitherto achieved, needs to make himself the spokesman for all past aspirations.

If the Egyptian poets sang well, though that conduces not at all to our advantage, and though all those songs are now dumb, the Life of Reason was thereby increased once for all in pith and volume. Brief erratic experiments made in living, if they were somewhat successful in their day, remain successes always: and this is the only kind of success that in the end can be achieved at all. The philosopher that looks for what is good in history and measures the past by the scale of reason need be no impertinent dogmatist on that account. Reason would not be reason but passion if it did not make all passions in all creatures constituents of its own authority. The judgments it passes on existence are only the judgments which existence, so far, has passed on itself, and these are indelible and have their proportionate weight though others of many different types may surround or succeed them.

[Sidenote: Transition to historical romance.]

To inquire what everybody has thought about the world, and into what strange shapes every passionate dream would fain have transformed existence, might be merely a part of historical investigation. These facts of preference and estimation might be made to stand side by side with all other facts in that absolute physical order which the universe must somehow possess. In the reference book of science they would all find their page and line. But it is not for the sake of making vain knowledge complete that historians are apt to linger over heroic episodes and commanding characters in the world’s annals. It is not even in the hope of discovering just to what extent and in how many directions experience has been a tragedy. The mathematical balance of failure and success, even if it could be drawn with accuracy, would not be a truth of moral importance, since whatever that balance might be for the world at large, success and benefit here, from the living point of view, would be equally valid and delightful; and however good or however bad the universe may be it is always worth while to make it better.

What engages the historian in the reconstruction of moral life, such as the past contained, is that he finds in that life many an illustration of his own ideals, or even a necessary stimulus in defining what his ideals are. Where his admiration and his sympathy are awakened, he sees noble aims and great achievements, worthy of being minutely studied and brought vividly before later generations. Very probably he will be led by moral affinities with certain phases of the past to attribute to those phases, in their abstraction and by virtue of their moral dignity, a material efficacy which they did not really have; and his interest in history’s moral will make him turn history itself into a fable. This abuse may be abated, however, by having recourse to impartial historical investigation, that will restore to the hero all his circumstantial impotence, and to the glorious event all its insignificant causes. Certain men and certain episodes will retain, notwithstanding, their intrinsic nobility; and the historian, who is often a politician and a poet rather than a man of science, will dwell on those noble things so as to quicken his own sense for greatness and to burnish in his soul ideals that may have remained obscure for want of scrutiny or may have been tarnished by too much contact with a sordid world.

[Sidenote: Possibility of genuine epics.]

History so conceived has the function of epic or dramatic poetry. The moral life represented may actually have been lived through; but that circumstance is incidental merely and what makes the story worth telling is its pertinence to the political or emotional life of the present. To revive past moral experience is indeed wellnigh impossible unless the living will can still covet or dread the same issues; historical romance cannot be truthful or interesting when profound changes have taken place in human nature. The reported acts and sentiments of early peoples lose their tragic dignity in our eyes when they lose their pertinence to our own aims. So that a recital of history with an eye to its dramatic values is possible only when that history is, so to speak, our own, or when we assimilate it to ours by poetic license.

The various functions of history have been generally carried on simultaneously and with little consciousness of their profound diversity. Since historical criticism made its appearance, the romantic interest in the past, far from abating, has fed eagerly on all the material incidents and private gossip of remote times. This sort of petty historical drama has reflected contemporary interests, which have centred so largely in material possessions and personal careers; while at the same time it has kept pace with the knowledge of minutiæ attained by archæology. When historical investigation has reached its limits a period of ideal reconstruction may very likely set in. Indeed were it possible to collect in archives exhaustive accounts of everything that has ever happened, so that the curious man might always be informed on any point of fact that interested him, historical imagination might grow free again in its movements. Not being suspected of wishing to distort facts which could so easily be pointed to, it might become more conscious of its own moral function, and it might turn unblushingly to what was important and inspiring in order to put it with dramatic force before the mind. Such a treatment of history would reinstate that epic and tragic poetry which has become obsolete; it might well be written in verse, and would at any rate be frankly imaginative; it might furnish a sort of ritual, with scientific and political sanctions, for public feasts. Tragedies and epics are such only in name if they do not deal with the highest interests and destinies of a people; and they could hardly deal with such ideals in an authoritative and definite way, unless they found them illustrated in that people’s traditions.

[Sidenote: Literal truth abandoned.]

Historic romance is a work of art, not of science, and its fidelity to past fact is only an expedient, often an excellent and easy one, for striking the key-note of present ideals. The insight attained, even when it is true insight into what some one else felt in some other age, draws its force and sublimity from current passions, passions potential in the auditor’s soul. Mary Queen of Scots, for instance, doubtless repeated, in many a fancied dialogue with Queen Elizabeth, the very words that Schiller puts into her mouth in the central scene of his play, “Denn ich bin Euer König!” Yet the dramatic force of that expression, its audacious substitution of ideals for facts, depends entirely on the scope which we lend it. Different actors and different readers would interpret it differently. Some might see in it nothing but a sally in a woman’s quarrel, reading it with the accent of mere spite and irritation. Then the tragedy, not perhaps without historic truth, would be reduced to a loud comedy. Other interpreters might find in the phrase the whole feudal system, all the chivalry, legality, and foolishness of the Middle Ages. Then the drama would become more interesting, and the poor queen’s cry, while that of a mind sophisticated and fanatical, would have great pathos and keenness. To reach sublimity, however, that moment would have to epitomise ideals which we deeply respected. We should have to believe in the sanctity of canon law and in the divine right of primogeniture. That a woman may have been very unhappy or that a state may have been held together by personal allegiance does not raise the fate of either to the tragic plane, unless “laws that are not of to-day nor yesterday,” aspirations native to the heart, shine through those legendary misfortunes.

It would matter nothing to the excellence of Schiller’s drama which of these interpretations might have been made by Mary Stuart herself at any given moment; doubtless her attitude toward her rival was coloured on different occasions by varying degrees of political insight and moral fervour. The successful historical poet would be he who caught the most significant attitude which a person in that position could possibly have assumed, and his Mary Stuart, whether accidentally resembling the real woman or not, would be essentially a mythical person. So Electra and Antigone and Helen of Troy are tragic figures absolved from historical accuracy, although possibly if the personages of heroic times were known to us we might find that our highest imagination had been anticipated in their consciousness.

[Sidenote: History exists to be transcended.]

Of the three parts into which the pursuit of history may be divided—investigation, theory, and story-telling—not one attains ideal finality. Investigation is merely useful, because its intrinsic ideal—to know every detail of everything—is not rational, and its acceptable function can only be to offer accurate information upon such points as are worth knowing for some ulterior reason. Historical theory, in turn, is a falsification of causes, since no causes are other than mechanical; it is an arbitrary foreshortening of physics, and it dissolves in the presence either of adequate knowledge or of clear ideals. Finally, historical romance passes, as it grows mature, into epics and tragedies, where the moral imagination disengages itself from all allegiance to particular past facts. Thus history proves to be an imperfect field for the exercise of reason; it is a provisional discipline; its values, with the mind’s progress, would empty into higher activities. The function of history is to lend materials to politics and to poetry. These arts need to dominate past events, the better to dominate the present situation and the ideal one. A good book of history is one that helps the statesman to formulate and to carry out his plans, or that helps the tragic poet to conceive what is most glorious in human destiny. Such a book, as knowledge and ignorance are now mingled, will have to borrow something from each of the methods by which history is commonly pursued. Investigation will be necessary, since the needful facts are not all indubitably known; theory will be necessary too, so that those facts may be conceived in their pertinence to public interests, and the latter may thereby be clarified; and romance will not be wholly excluded, because the various activities of the mind about the same matter cannot be divided altogether, and a dramatic treatment is often useful in summarising a situation, when all the elements of it cannot be summoned up in detail before the mind.

[Sidenote: Its great rôle.]

Fragmentary, arbitrary, and insecure as historical conceptions must remain, they are nevertheless highly important. In human consciousness the indispensable is in inverse ratio to the demonstrable. Sense is the foundation of everything. Without sense memory would be both false and useless. Yet memory rather than sense is knowledge in the pregnant acceptation of the word; for in sense object and process are hardly distinguished, whereas in memory significance inheres in the datum, and the present vouches for the absent. Similarly history, which is derived from memory, is superior to it; for while it merely extends memory artificially it shows a higher logical development than memory has and is riper for ideal uses. Trivial and useless matter has dropped out. Inference has gone a step farther, thought is more largely representative, and testimony conveyed by the reports of others or found in monuments leads the speculative mind to infer events that must have filled the remotest ages. This information is not passive or idle knowledge; it truly informs or shapes the mind, giving it new aptitudes. As an efficacious memory modifies instinct, by levelling it with a wider survey of the situation, so a memory of what human experience has been, a sense of what it is likely to be under specific circumstances, gives the will a new basis. What politics or any large drama deals with is a will cast into historic moulds, an imagination busy with what we call great interests. Great interests are a gift which history makes to the heart. A barbarian is no less subject to the past than is the civic man who knows what his past is and means to be loyal to it; but the barbarian, for want of a trans-personal memory, crawls among superstitions which he cannot understand or revoke and among persons whom he may hate or love, but whom he can never think of raising to a higher plane, to the level of a purer happiness. The whole dignity of human endeavour is thus bound up with historic issues; and as conscience needs to be controlled by experience if it is to become rational, so personal experience itself needs to be enlarged ideally if the failures and successes it reports are to touch impersonal interests.

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III. MECHANISM

[Sidenote: Recurrent forms in nature.]

A retrospect over human experience, if a little extended, can hardly fail to come upon many interesting recurrences. The seasons make their round and the generations of men, like the forest leaves, repeat their career. In this its finer texture history undoubtedly repeats itself. A study of it, in registering so many recurrences, leads to a description of habit, or to natural history. To observe a recurrence is to divine a mechanism. It is to analyse a phenomenon, distinguishing its form, which alone recurs, from its existence, which is irrevocable; and that the flux of phenomena should turn out, on closer inspection, to be composed of a multitude of recurring forms, regularly interwoven, is the ideal of mechanism. The forms, taken ideally and in themselves, are what reflection first rescues from the flux and makes a science of; they constitute that world of eternal relations with which dialectic is conversant. To note here and there some passing illustration of these forms is one way of studying experience. The observer, the poet, the historian merely define what they see. But these incidental illustrations of form (called by Plato phenomena) may have a method in their comings and goings, and this method may in turn be definable. It will be a new sort of constant illustrated in the flux; and this we call a law. If events could be reduced to a number of constant forms moving in a constant medium according to a constant law, a maximum of constancy would be introduced into the flux, which would thereby be proved to be mechanical.

The form of events, abstracted from their material presence, becomes a general mould to which we tend to assimilate new observations. Whatever in particular instances may contravene the accredited rule, we attribute without a qualm to unknown variations in the circumstances, thus saving our faith in order at all hazards and appealing to investigation to justify the same. Only when another rule suggests itself which leaves a smaller margin unaccounted for in the phenomena do we give up our first generalisation. Not even the rudest superstition can be criticised or dislodged scientifically save by another general rule, more exact and trustworthy than the superstition. The scepticism which comes from distrust of abstraction and disgust with reckoning of any sort is not a scientific force; it is an intellectual weakness.

Generalities are indeed essential to understanding, which is apt to impose them hastily upon particulars. Confirmation is not needed to create prejudice. It suffices that a vivid impression should once have cut its way into the mind and settled there in a fertile soil; it will entwine itself at once with its chance neighbours and these adventitious relations will pass henceforth for a part of the fact. Repetition, however, is a good means of making or keeping impressions vivid and almost the only means of keeping them unchanged. Prejudices, however refractory to new evidence, evolve inwardly of themselves. The mental soil in which they lie is in a continual ferment and their very vitality will extend their scope and change their application. Generalisations, therefore, when based on a single instance, will soon forget it and shift their ground, as unchecked words shift their meaning. But when a phenomenon actually recurs the generalisations founded on it are reinforced and kept identical, and prejudices so sustained by events make man’s knowledge of nature.

[Sidenote: Their discovery makes the flux calculable.]

Natural science consists of general ideas which look for verification in events, and which find it. The particular instance, once noted, is thrown aside like a squeezed orange, its significance in establishing some law having once been extracted. Science, by this flight into the general, lends immediate experience an interest and scope which its parts, taken blindly, could never possess; since if we remained sunk in the moments of existence and never abstracted their character from their presence, we should never know that they had any relation to one another. We should feel their incubus without being able to distinguish their dignities or to give them names. By analysing what we find and abstracting what recurs from its many vain incidents we can discover a sustained structure within, which enables us to foretell what we may find in future. Science thus articulates experience and reveals its skeleton.

Skeletons are not things particularly congenial to poets, unless it be for the sake of having something truly horrible to shudder at and to frighten children with: and so a certain school of philosophers exhaust their rhetoric in convincing us that the objects known to science are artificial and dead, while the living reality is infinitely rich and absolutely unutterable. This is merely an ungracious way of describing the office of thought and bearing witness to its necessity. A body is none the worse for having some bones in it, even if they are not all visible on the surface. They are certainly not the whole man, who nevertheless runs and leaps by their leverage and smooth turning in their sockets; and a surgeon’s studies in dead anatomy help him excellently to set a living joint. The abstractions of science are extractions of truths. Truths cannot of themselves constitute existence with its irrational concentration in time, place, and person, its hopeless flux, and its vital exuberance; but they can be true of existence; they can disclose that structure by which its parts cohere materially and become ideally inferable from one another.

[Sidenote: Looser principles tried first.]

Science becomes demonstrable in proportion as it becomes abstract. It becomes in the same measure applicable and useful, as mathematics witnesses, whenever the abstraction is judiciously made and has seized the profounder structural features in the phenomenon. These features are often hard for human eyes to discern, buried as they may be in the internal infinitesimal texture of things. Things accordingly seem to move on the world’s stage in an unaccountable fashion, and to betray magic affinities to what is separated from them by apparent chasms. The types of relation which the mind may observe are multifarious. Any chance conjunction, any incidental harmony, will start a hypothesis about the nature of the universe and be the parent image of a whole system of philosophy. In self-indulgent minds most of these standard images are dramatic, and the cue men follow in unravelling experience is that offered by some success or failure of their own. The sanguine, having once found a pearl in a dunghill, feel a glorious assurance that the world’s true secret is that everything in the end is ordered for everybody’s benefit—and that is optimism. The atrabilious, being ill at ease with themselves, see the workings everywhere of insidious sin, and conceive that the world is a dangerous place of trial. A somewhat more observant intellect may decide that what exists is a certain number of definite natures, each striving to preserve and express itself; and in such language we still commonly read political events and our friend’s actions. At the dawn of science a Thales, observing the ways and the conditions of things somewhat more subtly, will notice that rain, something quite adventitious to the fields, is what covers them with verdure, that the slime breeds life, that a liquid will freeze to stone and melt to air; and his shrewd conclusion will be that everything is water in one disguise or another. It is only after long accumulated observation that we can reach any exact law of nature; and this law we hardly think of applying to living things. These have not yet revealed the secret of their structure, and clear insight is vouchsafed us only in such regions as that of mathematical physics, where cogency in the ideal system is combined with adequacy to explain the phenomena.

[Sidenote: Mechanism for the most part hidden.]

These exact sciences cover in the gross the field in which human life appears, the antecedents of this life, and its instruments. To a speculative mind, that had retained an ingenuous sense of nature’s inexhaustible resources and of man’s essential continuity with other natural things, there could be no ground for doubting that similar principles (could they be traced in detail) would be seen to preside over all man’s action and passion. A thousand indications, drawn from introspection and from history, would be found to confirm this speculative presumption. It is not only earthquakes and floods, summer and winter, that bring human musings sharply to book. Love and ambition are unmistakable blossomings of material forces, and the more intense and poetical a man’s sense is of his spiritual condition the more loudly will he proclaim his utter dependence on nature and the identity of the moving principle in him and in her.

Mankind and all its works are undeniably subject to gravity and to the law of projectiles; yet what is true of these phenomena in bulk seems to a superficial observation not to be true of them in detail, and a person may imagine that he subverts all the laws of physics whenever he wags his tongue. Only in inorganic matter is the ruling mechanism open to human inspection: here changes may be seen to be proportionate to the elements and situation in which they occur. Habit here seems perfectly steady and is called necessity, since the observer is able to deduce it unequivocally from given properties in the body and in the external bodies acting upon it. In the parts of nature which we call living and to which we impute consciousness, habit, though it be fatal enough, is not so exactly measurable and perspicuous. Physics cannot account for that minute motion and pullulation in the earth’s crust of which human affairs are a portion. Human affairs have to be surveyed under categories lying closer to those employed in memory and legend. These looser categories are of every sort—grammatical, moral, magical—and there is no knowing when any of them will apply or in what measure. Between the matters covered by the exact sciences and vulgar experience there remains, accordingly, a wide and nebulous gulf. Where we cannot see the mechanism involved in what happens we have to be satisfied with an empirical description of appearances as they first fall together in our apprehension; and this want of understanding in the observer is what popular philosophy calls intelligence in the world.

[Sidenote: Yet presumably pervasive.]

That this gulf is apparent only, being due to inadequacy and confusion in human perception rather than to incoherence in things, is a speculative conviction altogether trustworthy. Any one who can at all catch the drift of experience—moral no less than physical—must feel that mechanism rules the whole world. There are doubleness and diversity enough in things to satiate the greatest lover of chaos; but that a cosmos nevertheless underlies the superficial play of sense and opinion is what all practical reason must assume and what all comprehended experience bears witness to. A cosmos does not mean a disorder with which somebody happens to be well pleased; it means a necessity from which every one must draw his happiness. If a principle is efficacious it is to that extent mechanical. For to be efficacious a principle must apply necessarily and proportionately; it must assure us that where the factors are the same as on a previous occasion the quotient will be the same also.

Now, in order that the flux of things should contain a repetition, elements must be identified within it; these identical elements may then find themselves in an identical situation, on which the same result may ensue which ensued before. If the elements were not constant and recognisable, or if their relations did not suffice to determine the succeeding event, no observation could be transferred with safety from the past to the future. Thus art and comprehension would be defeated together. Novelties in the world are not lacking, because the elements entering at any moment into a given combination have never before entered into a combination exactly similar. Mechanism applies to the matter and minute texture of things; but its applying there will create, at each moment, fresh ideal wholes, formal unities which mind emanates from and represents. The result will accordingly always be unprecedented in the total impression it produces, in exact proportion to the singularity of the situation in hand. Mechanical processes are not like mathematical relations, because they happen. What they express the form of is a flux, not a truth or an ideal necessity. The situation may therefore always be new, though produced from the preceding situation by rules which are invariable, since the preceding situation was itself novel.

Mechanism might be called the dialectic of the irrational. It is such a measure of intelligibility as is compatible with flux and with existence. Existence itself being irrational and change unintelligible, the only necessity they are susceptible of is a natural or empirical necessity, impinging at both ends upon brute matters of fact. The existential elements, their situation, number, affinities, and mutual influence all have to be begged before calculation can begin. When these surds have been accepted at their face value, inference may set to work among them; yet the inference that mechanism will continue to reign will not amount to certain knowledge until the event inferred has come to give it proof. Calculation in physics differs from pure dialectic in that the ultimate object it looks to is not ideal. Theory here must revert to the immediate flux for its sanction, whereas dialectic is a centrifugal emanation from existence and never returns to its point of origin. It remains suspended in the ether of those eternal relations which forms have, even when found embedded in matter.

[Sidenote: Inadequacy of consciousness.]

If the total flux is continuous and naturally intelligible, why is the part felt by man so disjointed and opaque? An answer to this question may perhaps be drawn from the fact that consciousness apparently arises to express the functions only of extremely complicated organisms. The basis of thought is vastly more elaborate than its deliverance. It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas. The mind starts, therefore, with a tremendous handicap. In order to attain adequate practical knowledge it would have to represent clearly its own conditions; for the purpose of mind is its own furtherance and perfection, and before that purpose could be fulfilled the mind’s interests would have to become parallel to the body’s fortunes. This means that the body’s actual relations in nature would have to become the mind’s favourite themes in discourse. Had this harmony been attained, the more accurately and intensely thought was exercised the more stable its status would become and the more prosperous its undertakings, since lively thought would then be a symptom of health in the body and of mechanical equilibrium with the environment.

The body’s actual relations, however, on which health depends, are infinitely complex and immensely extended. They sweep the whole material universe and are intertwined most closely with all social and passionate forces, with their incalculable mechanical springs. Meantime the mind begins by being a feeble and inconsequent ghost. Its existence is intermittent and its visions unmeaning. It fails to conceive its own interests or the situations that might support or defeat those interests. If it pictures anything clearly, it is only some phantastic image which in no way represents its own complex basis. Thus the parasitical human mind, finding what clear knowledge it has laughably insufficient to interpret its destiny, takes to neglecting knowledge altogether and to hugging instead various irrational ideas. On the one hand it lapses into dreams which, while obviously irrelevant to practice, express the mind’s vegetative instincts; hence art and mythology, which substitute play-worlds for the real one on correlation with which human prosperity and dignity depend. On the other hand, the mind becomes wedded to conventional objects which mark, perhaps, the turning-points of practical life and plot the curve of it in a schematic and disjointed fashion, but which are themselves entirely opaque and, as we say, material. Now as matter is commonly a name for things not understood, men materially minded are those whose ideas, while practical, are meagre and blind, so that their knowledge of nature, if not invalid, is exceedingly fragmentary. This grossness in common sense, like irrelevance in imagination, springs from the fact that the mind’s representative powers are out of focus with its controlling conditions.

[Sidenote: Its articulation inferior to that of its objects.]

In other words, sense ought to correspond in articulation with the object to be represented—otherwise the object’s structure, with the fate it imports; cannot be transferred into analogous ideas. Now the human senses are not at all fitted to represent an organism on the scale of the human body. They catch its idle gestures but not the inner processes which control its action. The senses are immeasurably too gross. What to them is a minimum visibile, a just perceptible atom, is in the body’s structure, very likely, a system of worlds, the inner cataclysms of which count in producing that so-called atom’s behaviour and endowing it with affinities apparently miraculous. What must the seed of animals contain, for instance, to be the ground, as it notoriously is, for every physical and moral property of the offspring? Or what must the system of signals and the reproductive habit in a brain be, for it to co-ordinate instinctive movements, learn tricks, and remember? Our senses can represent at all adequately only such objects as the solar system or a work of human architecture, where the unit’s inner structure and fermentation may be provisionally neglected in mastering the total. The architect may reckon in bricks and the astronomer in planets and yet foresee accurately enough the practical result. In a word, only what is extraordinarily simple is intelligible to man, while only what is extraordinarily complex can support intelligence. Consciousness is essentially incompetent to understand what most concerns it, its own vicissitudes, and sense is altogether out of scale with the objects of practical interest in life.

[Sidenote: Science consequently retarded.]

One consequence of this profound maladjustment is that science is hard to attain and is at first paradoxical. The change of scale required is violent and frustrates all the mind’s rhetorical habits. There is a constant feeling of strain and much flying back to the mother-tongue of myth and social symbol. Every wrong hypothesis is seized upon and is tried before any one will entertain the right one. Enthusiasm for knowledge is chilled by repeated failures and a great confusion cannot but reign in philosophy. A man with an eye for characteristic features in various provinces of experience is encouraged to deal with each upon a different principle; and where these provinces touch or actually fuse, he is at a loss what method of comprehension to apply. There sets in, accordingly, a tendency to use various methods at once or a different one on each occasion, as language, custom, or presumption seems to demand. Science is reduced by philosophers to plausible discourse, and the more plausible the discourse is, by leaning on all the heterogeneous prejudices of the hour, the more does it foster the same and discourage radical investigation.

Thus even Aristotle felt that good judgment and the dramatic habit of things altogether excluded the simple physics of Democritus. Indeed, as things then stood, Democritus had no right to his simplicity, except that divine right which comes of inspiration. His was an indefensible faith in a single radical insight, which happened nevertheless to be true. To justify that insight forensically it would have been necessary to change the range of human vision, making it telescopic in one region and microscopic in another; whereby the objects so transfigured would have lost their familiar aspect and their habitual context in discourse. Without such a startling change of focus nature can never seem everywhere mechanical. Hence, even to this day, people with broad human interests are apt to discredit a mechanical philosophy. Seldom can penetration and courage in thinking hold their own against the miscellaneous habits of discourse; and nobody remembers that moral values must remain captious, and imaginative life ignoble and dark, so long as the whole basis and application of them is falsely conceived. Discoveries in science are made only by near-sighted specialists, while the influence of public sentiment and policy still works systematically against enlightenment.

[Sidenote: and speculation rendered necessary.]

The maladaptation of sense to its objects has a second consequence: that speculation is in a way nobler for man than direct perception. For direct perception is wholly inadequate to render the force, the reality, the subtle relations of the object perceived, unless this object be a shell only, like a work of fine art, where nothing counts but the surface. Since the function of perception is properly to give understanding and dominion, direct perception is a defeat and, as it were, an insult to the mind, thus forced to busy itself about so unintelligible and dense an apparition. Æsthetic enthusiasm cares nothing about what the object inwardly is, what is its efficacious movement and real life. It revels selfishly in the harmonies of perception itself, harmonies which perhaps it attributes to the object through want of consideration. These æsthetic objects, which have no intrinsic unity or cohesion, lapse in the most melancholy and inexplicable fashion before our eyes. Then we cry that beauty wanes, that life is brief, and that its prizes are deceptive. Our minds have fed on casual aspects of nature, like tints in sunset clouds. Imaginative fervour has poured itself out exclusively on these apparitions, which are without relevant backing in the world; and long, perhaps, before this life is over, which we called too brief, we begin to pine for another, where just those images which here played so deceptively on the surface of the flux may be turned into fixed and efficacious realities. Meantime speculation amuses us with prophecies about what such realities might be. We look for them, very likely, in the wrong place, namely, in human poetry and eloquence, or at best in dialectic; yet even when stated in these mythical terms the hidden world divined in meditation seems nobler and, as we say, more real than the objects of sense. For we hope, in those speculative visions, to reach the permanent, the efficacious, the stanch principles of experience, something to rely on in prospect and appeal to in perplexity.

Science, in its prosaic but trustworthy fashion, passes likewise beyond the dreamlike unities and cadences which sense discloses; only, as science aims at controlling its speculation by experiment, the hidden reality it discloses is exactly like what sense perceives, though on a different scale, and not observable, perhaps, without a magic carpet of hypothesis, to carry the observer to the ends of the universe or, changing his dimensions, to introduce him into those infinitesimal abysses where nature has her workshop. In this region, were it sufficiently explored, we might find just those solid supports and faithful warnings which we were looking for with such ill success in our rhetorical speculations. The machinery disclosed would not be human; it would be machinery. But it would for that very reason serve the purpose which made us look for it instead of remaining, like the lower animals, placidly gazing on the pageants of sense, till some unaccountable pang forced us to spasmodic movement. It is doubtless better to find material engines—not necessarily inanimate, either—which may really serve to bring order, security, and progress into our lives, than to find impassioned or ideal spirits, that can do nothing for us except, at best, assure us that they are perfectly happy.

[Sidenote: Dissatisfaction with mechanism partly natural.]

The reigning aversion to mechanism is partly natural and partly artificial. The natural aversion cannot be wholly overcome. Like the aversion to death, to old age, to labour, it is called forth by man’s natural situation in a world which was not made for him, but in which he grew. That the efficacious structure of things should not be intentionally spectacular nor poetical, that its units should not be terms in common discourse, nor its laws quite like the logic of passion, is of course a hard lesson to learn. The learning, however—not to speak of its incidental delights—is so extraordinarily good for people that only with that instruction and the blessed renunciations it brings can clearness, dignity, or virility enter their minds. And of course, if the material basis of human strength could be discovered and better exploited, the free activity of the mind would be not arrested but enlarged. Geology adds something to the interest of landscape, and botany much to the charm of flowers; natural history increases the pleasure with which we view society and the justice with which we judge it. An instinctive sympathy, a solicitude for the perfect working of any delicate thing, as it makes the ruffian tender to a young child, is a sentiment inevitable even toward artificial organisms. Could we better perceive the fine fruits of order, the dire consequences of every specific cruelty or jar, we should grow doubly considerate toward all forms; for we exist through form, and the love of form is our whole real inspiration.

[Sidenote: and partly artificial.]

The artificial prejudice against mechanism is a fruit of party spirit. When a myth has become the centre or sanction for habits and institutions, these habits and institutions stand against any conception incompatible with that myth. It matters nothing that the values the myth was designed to express may remain standing without it, or may be transferred to its successor. Social and intellectual inertia is too great to tolerate so simple an evolution. It divides opinions not into false and true but into high and low, or even more frankly into those which are acceptable and comforting to its ruffled faith and those which are dangerous, alarming, and unfortunate. Imagine Socrates “viewing with alarm” the implications of an argument! This artificial prejudice is indeed modern and will not be eternal. Ancient sages, when they wished to rebuke the atheist, pointed to the very heavens which a sentimental religion would nowadays gladly prove to be unreal, lest the soul should learn something of their method. Yet the Ptolemaic spheres were no more manlike and far less rich in possibilities of life than the Copernican star-dust. The ancients thought that what was intelligible was divine. Order was what they meant by intelligence, and order productive of excellence was what they meant by reason. When they noticed that the stars moved perpetually and according to law, they seriously thought they were beholding the gods. The stars as we conceive them are not in that sense perfect. But the order which nature does not cease to manifest is still typical of all order, and is sublime. It is from these regions of embodied law that intelligibility and power combined come to make their covenant with us, as with all generations.

[Sidenote: Biassed judgments inspired by moral inertia.]

The emotions and the moral principles that are naturally allied to materialism suffer an eclipse when materialism, which is properly a primary or dogmatic philosophy, breathing courage and victory, appears as a destructive force and in the incongruous rôle of a critic. One dogmatism is not fit to criticise another; their conflict can end only in insults, sullenness, and an appeal to that physical drift and irrational selection which may ultimately consign one party to oblivion. But a philosophy does ill to boast of such borrowed triumphs. The next turn of the wheel may crush the victor, and the opinions hastily buried may rise again to pose as the fashionable and superior insights of a later day. To criticise dogmatism it is necessary to be a genuine sceptic, an honest transcendentalist, that falls back on the immediate and observes by what principles of logical architecture the ultimate, the reality discovered, has been inferred from it. Such criticism is not necessarily destructive; some construction and some belief being absolutely inevitable, if reason and life are to operate at all, criticism merely offers us the opportunity of revising and purifying our dogmas, so as to make them reasonable and congruous with practice. Materialism may thus be reinstated on transcendental grounds, and the dogma at first uttered in the flush of intelligent perception, with no scruple or self-consciousness, may be repeated after a thorough examination of heart, on the ground that it is the best possible expression of experience, the inevitable deliverance of thought. So approached, a dogmatic system will carry its critical justification with it, and the values it enshrines and secures will not be doubtful. The emotions it arouses will be those aroused by the experience it explains. Causes having been found for what is given, these causes will be proved to have just that beneficent potency and just that distressing inadequacy which the joys and failures of life show that the reality has, whatever this reality may otherwise be. The theory will add nothing except the success involved in framing it. Life being once for all what it is, no physics can render it worse or better, save as the knowledge of physics, with insight into the causes of our varied fortunes, is itself an achievement and a new resource.

[Sidenote: Positive emotions proper to materialism.]

A theory is not an unemotional thing. If music can be full of passion, merely by giving form to a single sense, how much more beauty or terror may not a vision be pregnant with which brings order and method into everything that we know. Materialism has its distinct æsthetic and emotional colour, though this may be strangely affected and even reversed by contrast with systems of an incongruous hue, jostling it accidentally in a confused and amphibious mind. If you are in the habit of believing in special providences, or of expecting to continue your romantic adventures in a second life, materialism will dash your hopes most unpleasantly, and you may think for a year or two that you have nothing left to live for. But a thorough materialist, one born to the faith and not half plunged into it by an unexpected christening in cold water, will be like the superb Democritus, a laughing philosopher. His delight in a mechanism that can fall into so many marvellous and beautiful shapes, and can generate so many exciting passions, should be of the same intellectual quality as that which the visitor feels in a museum of natural history, where he views the myriad butterflies in their cases, the flamingoes and shell-fish, the mammoths and gorillas. Doubtless there were pangs in that incalculable life, but they were soon over; and how splendid meantime was the pageant, how infinitely interesting the universal interplay, and how foolish and inevitable those absolute little passions. Somewhat of that sort might be the sentiment that materialism would arouse in a vigorous mind, active, joyful, impersonal, and in respect to private illusions not without a touch of scorn.

To the genuine sufferings of living creatures the ethics that accompanies materialism has never been insensible; on the contrary, like other merciful systems, it has trembled too much at pain and tended to withdraw the will ascetically, lest the will should be defeated. Contempt for mortal sorrows is reserved for those who drive with hosannas the Juggernaut car of absolute optimism. But against evils born of pure vanity and self-deception, against the verbiage by which man persuades himself that he is the goal and acme of the universe, laughter is the proper defence. Laughter also has this subtle advantage, that it need not remain without an overtone of sympathy and brotherly understanding; as the laughter that greets Don Quixote’s absurdities and misadventures does not mock the hero’s intent. His ardour was admirable, but the world must be known before it can be reformed pertinently, and happiness, to be attained, must be placed in reason.

[Sidenote: The material world not dead nor ugly,]

Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature’s meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal. A man is not blind, however, because every part of his body is not an eye, nor every muscle in his eye a nerve sensitive to light. Why, then, is nature dead, although it swarms with living organisms, if every part is not obviously animate? And why is the sun dark and cold, if it is bright and hot only to animal sensibility? This senseless lamentation is like the sophism of those Indian preachers who, to make men abandon the illusions of self-love, dilated on the shocking contents of the human body. Take off the skin, they cried, and you will discover nothing but loathsome bleeding and quivering substances. Yet the inner organs are well enough in their place and doubtless pleasing to the microbes that inhabit them; and a man is not hideous because his cross-section would not offer the features of a beautiful countenance. So the structure of the world is not therefore barren or odious because, if you removed its natural outer aspect and effects, it would not make an interesting landscape. Beauty being an appearance and life an operation, that is surely beautiful and living which so operates and so appears as to manifest those qualities.

[Sidenote: nor especially cruel.]

It is true that materialism prophesies an ultimate extinction for man and all his works. The horror which this prospect inspires in the natural man might be mitigated by reflection; but, granting the horror, is it something introduced by mechanical theories and not present in experience itself? Are human things inwardly stable? Do they belong to the eternal in any sense in which the operation of material forces can touch their immortality? The panic which seems to seize some minds at the thought of a merely natural existence is something truly hysterical; and yet one wonders why ultimate peace should seem so intolerable to people who not so many years ago found a stern religious satisfaction in consigning almost the whole human race to perpetual torture, the Creator, as Saint Augustine tells us, having in his infinite wisdom and justice devised a special kind of material fire that might avail to burn resurrected bodies for ever without consuming them. A very real truth might be read into this savage symbol, if we understood it to express the ultimate defeats and fruitless agonies that pursue human folly; and so we might find that it gave mythical expression to just that conditioned fortune and inexorable flux which a mechanical philosophy shows us the grounds of. Our own vices in another man seem particularly hideous; and so those actual evils which we take for granted when incorporated in the current system strike us afresh when we see them in a new setting. But it is not mechanical science that introduced mutability into things nor materialism that invented death.

[Sidenote: Mechanism to be judged by its fruits.]

The death of individuals, as we observe daily in nature, does not prevent the reappearance of life; and if we choose to indulge in arbitrary judgments on a subject where data fail us, we may as reasonably wish that there might be less life as that there might be more. The passion for a large and permanent population in the universe is not obviously rational; at a great distance a man must view everything, including himself, under the form of eternity, and when life is so viewed its length or its diffusion becomes a point of little importance. What matters then is quality. The reasonable and humane demand to make of the world is that such creatures as exist should not be unhappy and that life, whatever its quantity, should have a quality that may justify it in its own eyes. This just demand, made by conscience and not by an arbitrary fancy, the world described by mechanism does not fulfil altogether, for adjustments in it are tentative, and much friction must precede and follow upon any vital equilibrium attained. This imperfection, however, is actual, and no theory can overcome it except by verbal fallacies and scarcely deceptive euphemisms. What mechanism involves in this respect is exactly what we find: a tentative appearance of life in many quarters, its disappearance in some, and its reinforcement and propagation in others, where the physical equilibrium attained insures to it a natural stability and a natural prosperity.

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IV. HESITATIONS IN METHOD

[Sidenote: Mechanism restricted to one-half of existence.]

When Democritus proclaimed the sovereignty of mechanism, he did so in the oracular fashion proper to an ancient sage. He found it no harder to apply his atomic theory to the mind and to the gods than to solids and fluids. It sufficed to conceive that such an explanation might be possible, and to illustrate the theory by a few scattered facts and trenchant hypotheses. When Descartes, after twenty centuries of verbal physics, reintroduced mechanism into philosophy, he made a striking modification in its claims. He divided existence into two independent regions, and it was only in one, in the realm of extended things, that mechanism was expected to prevail. Mental facts, which he approached from the side of abstracted reflection and Platonic ideas, seemed to him obviously non-extended, even when they represented extension; and with them mechanism could have nothing to do. Descartes had recovered in the science of mechanics a firm nucleus for physical theory, a stronghold from which it had become impossible to dislodge scientific methods. There, at any rate, form, mass, distance, and other mathematical relations governed the transformation of things. Yet the very clearness and exhaustiveness of this mechanical method, as applied to gross masses in motion, made it seem essentially inapplicable to anything else. Descartes was far too radical and incisive a thinker, however, not to feel that it must apply throughout nature. Imaginative difficulties due to the complexity of animal bodies could not cloud his rational insight. Animal bodies, then, were mere machines, cleancut and cold engines like so many anatomical manikins. They explained themselves and all their operations, talking and building temples being just as truly a matter of physics as the revolution of the sky. But the soul had dropped out, and Descartes was the last man to ignore the soul. There had dropped out also the secondary qualities of matter, all those qualities, namely, which are negligible in mechanical calculations. Mechanism was in truth far from universal; all mental facts and half the properties of matter, as matter is revealed to man, came into being without asking leave; they were interlopers in the intelligible universe. Indeed, Descartes was willing to admit that these inexplicable bystanders might sometimes put their finger in the pie, and stir the material world judiciously so as to give it a new direction, although without adding to its substance or to its force.

The situation so created gave the literary philosophers an excellent chance to return to the attack and to swallow and digest the new-born mechanism in their facile systems. Theologians and metaphysicians in one quarter and psychologists in another found it easy and inevitable to treat the whole mechanical world as a mere idea. In that case, it is true, the only existences that remained remained entirely without calculable connections; everything was a divine trance or a shower of ideas falling by chance through the void. But this result might not be unwelcome. It fell in well enough with that love of emotional issues, that want of soberness and want of cogency, which is so characteristic of modern philosophers. Christian theology still remained the background and chief point of reference for speculation; if its eclectic dogmas could be in part supported or in part undermined, that constituted a sufficient literary success, and what became of science was of little moment in comparison.

[Sidenote: Men of science not speculative.]

Science, to be sure, could very well take care of itself and proceeded in its patient course without caring particularly what status the metaphysicians might assign to it. Not to be a philosopher is even an advantage for a man of science, because he is then more willing to adapt his methods to the state of knowledge in his particular subject, without insisting on ultimate intelligibility; and he has perhaps more joy of his discoveries than he might have if he had discounted them in his speculations. Darwin, for instance, did more than any one since Newton to prove that mechanism is universal, but without apparently believing that it really was so, or caring about the question at all. In natural history, observation has not yet come within range of accurate processes; it merely registers habits and traces empirical derivations. Even in chemistry, while measure and proportion are better felt, the ultimate units and the radical laws are still problematical. The recent immense advances in science have been in acquaintance with nature rather than in insight. Greater complexity, greater regularity, greater naturalness have been discovered everywhere; the profound analogies in things, their common evolution, have appeared unmistakably; but the inner texture of the process has not been laid bare.

This cautious peripheral attack, which does so much honour to the scientific army and has won it so many useful victories, is another proof that science is nothing but common knowledge extended. It is willing to reckon in any terms and to study any subject-matter; where it cannot see necessity it will notice law; where laws cannot be stated it will describe habits; where habits fail it will classify types; and where types even are indiscernible it will not despise statistics. In this way studies which are scientific in spirit, however loose their results, may be carried on in social matters, in political economy, in anthropology, in psychology. The historical sciences, also, philology and archæology, have reached tentatively very important results; it is enough that an intelligent man should gather in any quarter a rich fund of information, for the movement of his subject to pass somehow to his mind: and if his apprehension follows that movement—not breaking in upon it with extraneous matter—it will be scientific apprehension.

[Sidenote: Confusion in semi-moral subjects.]

What confuses and retards science in these ambiguous regions is the difficulty of getting rid of the foreign element, or even of deciding what the element native to the object is. In political economy, for instance, it is far from clear whether the subject is moral, and therefore to be studied and expressed dialectically, or whether it is descriptive, and so in the end a matter of facts and of mechanics. Are you formulating an interest or tracing a sequence of events? And if both simultaneously, are you studying the world in order to see what acts, in a given situation, would serve your purpose and so be right, or are you taking note of your own intentions, and of those of other people, in order to infer from them the probable course of affairs? In the first case you are a moralist observing nature in order to use it; you are defining a policy, and that definition is not knowledge of anything except of your own heart. Neither you nor any one else may ever take such a single-minded and unchecked course in the world as the one you are excogitating. No one may ever have been guided in the past by any such absolute plan.

For this same reason, if (to take up the other supposition) you are a naturalist studying the actual movement of affairs, you would do well not to rely on the conscious views or intentions of anybody. A natural philosopher is on dangerous ground when he uses psychological or moral terms in his calculation. If you use such terms—and to forbid their use altogether would be pedantic—you should take them for conventional literary expressions, covering an unsolved problem; for these views and intentions have a brief and inconsequential tenure of life and their existence is merely a sign for certain conjunctions in nature, where processes hailing from afar have met in a man, soon to pass beyond him. If they figure as causes in nature, it is only because they represent the material processes that have brought them into being. The existential element in mental facts is not so remote from matter as Descartes imagined. Even if we are not prepared to admit with Democritus that matter is what makes them up (as it well might if “matter” were taken in a logical sense)[B] we should agree that their substance is in mechanical flux, and that their form, by which they become moral unities, is only an ideal aspect of that moving substance. Moral unities are created by a point of view, as right and left are, and for that reason are not efficacious; though of course the existences they enclose, like the things lying to the left and to the right, move in unison with the rest of nature.

People doubtless do well to keep an eye open for morals when they study physics, and vice versa, since it is only by feeling how the two spheres hang together that the Life of Reason can be made to walk on both feet. Yet to discriminate between the two is no scholastic subtlety. There is the same practical inconvenience in taking one for the other as in trying to gather grapes from thistles. A hybrid science is sterile. If the reason escapes us, history should at least convince us of the fact, when we remember the issue of Aristotelian physics and of cosmological morals. Where the subject-matter is ambiguous and the method double, you have scarcely reached a result which seems plausible for the moment, when a rival school springs up, adopting and bringing forward the submerged element in your view, and rejecting your achievement altogether. A seesaw and endless controversy thus take the place of a steady, co-operative advance. This disorder reigns in morals, metaphysics, and psychology, and the conflicting schools of political economy and of history loudly proclaim it to the world.

[Sidenote: “Physic of metaphysic begs defence.”]

The modesty of men of science, their aversion (or incapacity) to carry their principles over into speculation, has left the greater part of physics or the theory of existence to the metaphysicians. What they have made of it does not concern us here, since the result has certainly not been a science; indeed they have obscured the very notion that there should be a science of all existence and that metaphysics, if it is more than a name for ultimate physics, can be nothing but dialectic, which does not look toward existence at all. But the prevalence of a mythical physics, purporting to describe the structure of the universe in terms quite other than those which scientific physics could use, has affected this scientific physics and seriously confused it. Its core, in mechanics, to be sure, could not be touched; and the detail even of natural history and chemistry could not be disfigured: but the general aspect of natural history could be rendered ambiguous in the doctrine of evolution; while in psychology, which attempted to deal with that half of the world which Descartes had not subjected to mechanism, confusion could hold undisputed sway.

[Sidenote: Evolution by mechanism.]

There is a sense in which the notion of evolution is involved in any mechanical system. Descartes indeed had gone so far as to describe, in strangely simple terms, how the world, with all its detail, might have been produced by starting any motion anywhere in the midst of a plenum at rest. The idea of evolution could not be more curtly put forth; so much so that Descartes had to arm himself against the inevitable charge that he was denying the creation, by protesting that his doctrine was a supposition contrary to fact, and that though the world might have been so formed, it was really created as Genesis recorded. Moreover, in antiquity, every Ionian philosopher had conceived a gradual crystallisation of nature; while Empedocles, in his magnificent oracles, had anticipated Darwin’s philosophy without Darwin’s knowledge. It is clear that if the forces that hold an organism together are mechanical, and therefore independent of the ideal unities they subtend, those forces suffice to explain the origin of the organism, and can have produced it. Darwin’s discoveries, like every other advance in physical insight, are nothing but filling for that abstract assurance. They show us how the supposed mechanism really works in one particular field, in one stage of its elaboration. As earlier naturalists had shown us how mechanical causes might produce the miracle of the sunrise and the poetry of the seasons, so Darwin showed us how similar causes might secure the adaptation of animals to their habitat. Evolution, so conceived, is nothing but a detailed account of mechanical origins.

[Sidenote: Evolution by ideal attraction.]

At the same time the word evolution has a certain pomp and glamour about it which fits ill with so prosaic an interpretation. In the unfolding of a bud we are wont to see, as it were, the fulfilment of a predetermined and glorious destiny; for the seed was an epitome or condensation of a full-blown plant and held within it, in some sort of potential guise, the very form which now peeps out in the young flower. Evolution suggests a prior involution or contraction and the subsequent manifestation of an innate ideal. Evolution should move toward a fixed consummation the approaches to which we might observe and measure. Yet evolution, in this prophetic sense of the word, would be the exact denial of what Darwin, for instance, was trying to prove. It would be a return to Aristotelian notions of heredity and potential being; for it was the essence of Aristotle’s physics—of which his theology was an integral part and a logical capping—that the forms which beings approached pre-existed in other beings from which they had been inherited, and that the intermediate stages during which the butterfly shrank to a grub could not be understood unless we referred them to their origin and their destiny. The physical essence and potency of seeds lay in their ideal relations, not in any actual organisation they might possess in the day of their eclipse and slumber. An egg evolved into a chicken not by mechanical necessity—for an egg had a comparatively simple structure—but by virtue of an ideal harmony in things; since it was natural and fitting that what had come from a hen should lead on to a hen again. The ideal nature possessed by the parent, hovering over the passive seed, magically induced it to grow into the parent’s semblance; and growth was the gradual approach to the perfection which this ancestral essence prescribed. This was why Aristotle’s God, though in character an unmistakable ideal, had to be at the same time an actual existence; since the world would not have known which way to move or what was its inner ideal, unless this ideal, already embodied somewhere else, drew it on and infused movement and direction into the world’s structureless substance.

The underlying Platonism in this magical physics is obvious, since the natures that Aristotle made to rule the world were eternal natures. An individual might fail to be a perfect man or a perfect monkey, but the specific human or simian ideal, by which he had been formed in so far as he was formed at all, was not affected by this accidental resistance in the matter at hand, as an adamantine seal, even if at times the wax by defect or impurity failed to receive a perfect impression, would remain unchanged and ready to be stamped perpetually on new material.

[Sidenote: If species are evolved they cannot guide evolution.]

The contrast is obvious between this Platonic physics and a naturalism like that of Darwin. The point of evolution, as selection produces it, is that new species may arise. The very title of Darwin’s book “The Origin of Species” is a denial of Aristotelianism and, in the pregnant sense, of evolution. It suggests that the type approached by each generation may differ from that approached by the previous one; that not merely the degree of perfection, but the direction of growth, may vary. The individual is not merely unfolded from an inner potentiality derived from a like ancestor and carrying with it a fixed eternal ideal, but on the contrary the very ground plan of organisation may gradually change and a new form and a new ideal may appear. Spontaneous variations—of course mechanically caused[C]—may occur and may modify the hereditary form of animals. These variations, superposed upon one another, may in time constitute a nature wholly unlike its first original. This accidental, cumulative evolution accordingly justifies a declaration of moral liberty. I am not obliged to aspire to the nature my father aspired to, for the ground of my being is partly new. In me nature is making a novel experiment. I am the adoring creator of a new spiritual good. My duties have shifted with my shifting faculties, and the ideal which I propose to myself, and alone can honestly propose, is unprecedented, the expression of a moving existence and without authority beyond the range of existences congruous with mine.

[Sidenote: Intrusion of optimism.]

All that is scientific or Darwinian in the theory of evolution is accordingly an application of mechanism, a proof that mechanism lies at the basis of life and morals. The Aristotelian notion of development, however, was too deeply rooted in tradition for it to disappear at a breath. Evolution as conceived by Hegel, for instance, or even by Spencer, retained Aristotelian elements, though these were disguised and hidden under a cloud of new words. Both identify evolution with progress, with betterment; a notion which would naturally be prominent in any one with enlightened sympathies living in the nineteenth century, when a new social and intellectual order was forcing itself on a world that happened largely to welcome the change, but a notion that has nothing to do with natural science. The fittest to live need not be those with the most harmonious inner life nor the best possibilities. The fitness might be due to numbers, as in a political election, or to tough fibre, as in a tropical climate. Of course a form of being that circumstances make impossible or hopelessly laborious had better dive under and cease for the moment to be; but the circumstances that render it inopportune do not render it essentially inferior. Circumstances have no power of that kind; and perhaps the worst incident in the popular acceptance of evolution has been a certain brutality thereby introduced into moral judgment, an abdication of human ideals, a mocking indifference to justice, under cover of respect for what is bound to be, and for the rough economy of the world. Disloyalty to the good in the guise of philosophy had appeared also among the ancients, when their political ethics had lost its authority, just as it appeared among us when the prestige of religion had declined. The Epicureans sometimes said that one should pursue pleasure because all the animals did so, and the Stoics that one should fill one’s appointed place in nature, because such was the practice of clouds and rivers.

[Sidenote: Evolution according to Hegel.]

Hegel possessed a keen scent for instability in men’s attitudes and opinions; he had no need of Darwin’s facts to convince him that in moral life, at least, there were no permanent species and that every posture of thought was an untenable half-way station between two others. His early contact with Protestant theology may have predisposed him to that opinion. At any rate he had no sympathy with that Platonism that allowed everything to have its eternal ideal, with which it might ultimately be identified. Such ideals would be finite, they would arrest the flux, and they would try to break loose from their enveloping conditions. Hegel was no moralist in the Socratic sense, but a naturalist seeking formulas for the growth of moral experience. Instead of questioning the heart, he somewhat satirically described its history. At the same time he was heir to that mythology which had deified the genetic or physical principle in things, and though the traditional myths suffered cruel operations at his hands, and often died of explanation, the mythical principle itself remained untouched and was the very breath of his nostrils. He never doubted that the formula he might find for the growth of experience would be also the ultimate good. What other purpose could the world have than to express the formula according to which it was being generated?

In this honest conviction we see the root, perhaps, of that distaste for correct physics that prevails among many who call themselves idealists. If physics were for some reason to be adored, it would be disconcerting to find in physics nothing but atoms and a void. It is hard to understand, however, why a fanciful formula expressing the evolution of this perturbed universe, and painting it no better than it is, should be more worshipful than an exact formula meant to perform the same office. A myth that enlarged the world and promised a complete transformation of its character might have its charms; but the improvement is not obvious that accrues by making the drift of things, just as it drifts, its own standard. Yet for Hegel it mattered nothing how unstable all ideals might be, since the only use of them was to express a principle of transition, and this principle was being realised, eternally and unawares, by the self-devouring and self-transcending purposes rolling in the flux.

[Sidenote: The conservative interpretation.]

This philosophy might not be much relished if it were more frankly expressed; yet something of the sort floats vaguely before most minds when they think of evolution. The types of being change, they say: in this sense the Aristotelian notion of a predetermined form unfolding itself in each species has yielded to a more correct and more dynamic physics. But the changes, so people imagine, express a predetermined ideal, no longer, of course, the ideal of these specific things, but one overarching the cosmic movement. The situation might be described by saying that this is Aristotle’s view adapted to a world in which there is only one species or only one individual. The earlier phases of life are an imperfect expression of the same nature which the later phases express more fully. Hence the triumphant march of evolution and the assumption that whatever is later is necessarily better than what went before. If a child were simply the partial expression of a man, his single desire would be to grow up, and when he was grown up he would embody all he had been striving for and would be happy for ever after. So if man were nothing but a halting reproduction of divinity and destined to become God, his whole destiny would be fulfilled by apotheosis. If this apotheosis, moreover, were an actual future event, something every man and animal was some day to experience, evolution might really have a final goal, and might lead to a new and presumably better sort of existence—existence in the eternal. Somewhat in this fashion evolution is understood by the party that wish to combine it with a refreshed patristic theology.

[Sidenote: The radical one.]

There is an esoteric way, however, of taking these matters which is more in sympathy both with natural evolution and with transcendental philosophy. If we assert that evolution is infinite, no substantive goal can be set to it. The goal will be the process itself, if we could only open our eyes upon its beauty and necessity. The apotheosis will be retroactive, nay, it has already taken place. The insight involved is mystical, yet in a way more just to the facts than any promise of ulterior blisses. For it is not really true that a child has no other ideal than to become a man. Childhood has many an ideal of its own, many a beauty and joy irrelevant to manhood, and such that manhood is incapable of retaining or containing them. If the ultimate good is really to contain and retain all the others, it can hardly be anything but their totality—the infinite history of experience viewed under the form of eternity. At that remove, however, the least in the kingdom of Heaven is even as the greatest, and the idea of evolution, as of time, is “taken up into a higher unity.” There could be no real pre-eminence in one man’s works over those of another; and if faith, or insight into the equal service done by all, still seemed a substantial privilege reserved for the elect, this privilege, too, must be an illusion, since those who do not know how useful and necessary they are must be as useful and necessary as those who do. An absolute preference for knowledge or self-consciousness would be an unmistakably human and finite ideal—something to be outgrown.

[Sidenote: Megalomania.]

What practically survives in these systems, when their mysticism and naturalism have had time to settle, is a clear enough standard. It is a standard of inclusion and quantity. Since all is needful, and the justifying whole is infinite, there would seem to be a greater dignity in the larger part. As the best copy of a picture, other things being equal, would be one that represented it all, so the best expression of the world, next to the world itself, would be the largest portion of it any one could absorb. Progress would then mean annexation. Growth would not come by expressing better an innate soul which involved a particular ideal, but by assimilating more and more external things till the original soul, by their influence, was wholly recast and unrecognisable. This moral agility would be true merit; we should always be “striving onward.” Life would be a sort of demonic vortex, boiling at the centre and omnivorous at the circumference, till it finally realised the supreme vocation of vortices, to have “their centre everywhere and their circumference nowhere.” This somewhat troubled situation might seem sublime to us, transformed as we too should be; and so we might reach the most remarkable and doubtless the “highest” form of optimism—optimism in hell.

[Sidenote: Chaos in the theory of mind.]

Confusing as these cross-currents and revulsions may prove in the field where mechanism is more or less at home, in the field of material operations, they are nothing to the primeval chaos that still broods over the other hemisphere, over the mental phase of existence. The difficulty is not merely that no mechanism is discovered or acknowledged here, but that the phenomena themselves are ambiguous, and no one seems to know when he speaks of mind whether he means something formal and ideal, like Platonic essences and mathematical truths, or reflection and intelligence, or sensation possessing external causes and objects, or finally that ultimate immediacy or brute actuality which is characteristic of any existence. Other even vaguer notions are doubtless often designated by the word psychical; but these may suffice for us to recognise the initial dilemmas in the subject and the futility of trying to build a science of mind, or defining the relation of mind to matter, when it is not settled whether mind means the form of matter, as with the Platonists, or the effect of it, as with the materialists, or the seat and false knowledge of it, as with the transcendentalists, or perhaps after all, as with the pan-psychists, mind means exactly matter itself.[D]

[Sidenote: Origin of self-consciousness.]

To see how equivocal everything is in this region, and possibly to catch some glimpse of whatever science or sciences might some day define it, we may revert for a moment to the origin of human notions concerning the mind. If either everything or nothing that men came upon in their primitive day-dream had been continuous in its own category and traceable through the labyrinth of the world, no mind and no self-consciousness need ever have appeared at all. The world might have been as magical as it pleased; it would have remained single, one budding sequence of forms with no transmissible substance beneath them. These forms might have had properties we now call physical and at the same time qualities we now call mental or emotional; there is nothing originally incongruous in such a mixture, chaotic and perverse as it may seem from the vantage-ground of subsequent distinctions. Existence might as easily have had any other form whatsoever as the one we discover it to have in fact. And primitive men, not having read Descartes, and not having even distinguished their waking from their dreaming life nor their passions from their environment, might well stand in the presence of facts that seem to us full of inward incongruity and contradiction; indeed, it is only because original data were of that chaotic sort that we call ourselves intelligent for having disentangled them and assigned them to distinct sequences and alternative spheres.

The ambiguities and hesitations of theory, down to our own day, are not all artificial or introduced gratuitously by sophists. Even where prejudice obstructs progress, that prejudice itself has some ancient and ingenuous source. Our perplexities are traces of a primitive total confusion; our doubts are remnants of a quite gaping ignorance. It was impossible to say whether the phantasms that first crossed this earthly scene were merely instinct with passion or were veritable passions stalking through space. Material and mental elements, connections natural and dialectical, existed mingled in that chaos. Light was as yet inseparable from inward vitality and pain drew a visible cloud across the sky. Civilised life is that early dream partly clarified; science is that dense mythology partly challenged and straightened out.

The flux, however, was meantime full of method, if only discrimination and enlarged experience could have managed to divine it. Its inconstancy, for one thing, was not so entire that no objects could be fixed within it, or marshalled in groups, like the birds that flock together. Animals could be readily distinguished from the things about them, their rate of mobility being so much quicker; and one animal in particular would at once be singled out, a more constant follower than any dog, and one whose energies were not merely felt but often spontaneously exerted—a phenomenon which appeared in no other part of the world. This singular animal every one called himself. One object was thus discovered to be the vehicle for perceiving and affecting all the others, a movable seat or tower from which the world might be surveyed.

[Sidenote: The notion of spirit.]

The external influences to which this body, with its discoursing mind, seemed to be subject were by no means all visible and material. Just as one’s own body was moved by passions and thoughts which no one else could see—and this secrecy was a subject for much wonder and self-congratulation—so evidently other things had a spirit within or above them to endow them with wit and power. It was not so much to contain sensation that this spirit was needed (for the body could very well feel) as to contrive plans of action and discharge sudden force into the world on momentous occasions. How deep-drawn, how far-reaching, this spirit might be was not easily determined; but it seemed to have unaccountable ways and to come and go from distant habitations. Things past, for instance, were still open to its inspection; the mind was not credited with constructing a fresh image of the past which might more or less resemble that past; a ray of supernatural light, rather, sometimes could pierce to the past itself and revisit its unchangeable depths. The future, though more rarely, was open to spirit in exactly the same fashion; destiny could on occasion be observed. Things distant and preternatural were similarly seen in dreams. There could be no doubt that all those objects existed; the only question was where they might lie and in what manner they might operate. A vision was a visitation and a dream was a journey. The spirit was a great traveller, and just as it could dart in every direction over both space and time, so it could come thence into a man’s presence or even into his body, to take possession of it. Sense and fancy, in a word, had not been distinguished. As to be aware of vision is a great sign of imagination, so to be aware of imagination is a great sign of understanding.

The spirit had other prerogatives, of a more rational sort. The truth, the right were also spirits; for though often invisible and denied by men, they could emerge at times from their invisible lairs to deal some quick blow and vindicate their divinity. The intermittance proper to phenomena is universal and extreme; only the familiar conception of nature, in which the flux becomes continuous, now blinds us in part to that fact. But before the days of scientific thinking only those things which were found unchanged and which seemed to lie passive were conceived to have had in the interval a material existence. More stirring apparitions, instead of being referred to their material constituents and continuous basis in nature, were referred to spirit. We still say, for instance, that war comes on. That phrase would once have been understood literally. War, being something intermittent, must exist somehow unseen in the interval, else it would not return; that rage, so people would have fancied, is therefore a spirit, it is a god. Mars and Ares long survived the phase of thought to which they owed their divinity; and believers had to rely on habit and the witness of antiquity to support their irrational faith. They little thought how absolutely simple and inevitable had been the grammar by which those figures, since grown rhetorical, had been first imposed upon the world.

[Sidenote: The notion of sense.]

Another complication soon came to increase this confusion. When material objects were discovered and it became clear that they had comparatively fixed natures, it also became clear that with the motions of one’s body all other things seemed to vary in ways which did not amount to a permanent or real metamorphosis in them; for these things might be found again unchanged. Objects, for instance, seemed to grow smaller when we receded from them, though really, as we discovered by approaching and measuring them anew, they had remained unchanged. These private aspects or views of things were accordingly distinguished from the things themselves, which were lodged in an intelligible sphere, raised above anybody’s sensibility and existing independently. The variable aspects were due to the body; they accompanied its variations and depended on its presence and organs. They were conceived vaguely to exist in one’s head or, if they were emotional, in one’s heart; but anatomy would have had some difficulty in finding them there. They constituted what is properly called the mind—the region of sentience, emotion, and soliloquy.

The mind was the region where those aspects which real things present to the body might live and congregate. So understood, it was avowedly and from the beginning a realm of mere appearance and depended entirely on the body. It should be observed, however, that the limbo of divine and ideal things, which is sometimes also called the mind, is very far from depending obviously on the body and is said to do so only by a late school of psychological sceptics. To primitive apprehension spirit, with its ideal prerogatives, was something magical and oracular. Its prophetic intuitions were far from being more trivial than material appearances. On the contrary those intuitions were momentous and inspiring. Their scope was indefinite and their value incalculable in every sense of the word. The disembodied spirit might well be immortal, since absent and dead things were familiar to it. It was by nature present wherever truth and reality might be found. It was prophetic; the dreams it fell into were full of auguries and secret affinities with things to come. Myth and legend, hatched in its womb, were felt to be divinely inspired, and genius seemed to be the Muses’ voice heard in a profound abstraction, when vulgar perception yielded to some kind of clairvoyance having a higher authority than sense. Such a spirit might naturally be expected to pass into another world, since it already dwelt there at intervals, and brought thence its mysterious reports. Its incursions into the physical sphere alone seemed miraculous and sent a thrill of awe through the unaccustomed flesh.

[Sidenote: Competition between the two.]

The ideal element in the world was accordingly regarded at first as something sacred and terrifying. It was no vulgar presence or private product, and though its destiny might be to pass half the time, like Persephone, under ground, it could not really be degraded. The human mind, on the other hand, the region of sentience and illusion, was a familiar affair enough. This familiarity, indeed, for a long time bred contempt and philosophers did not think the personal equation of individuals, or the refraction of things in sense, a very important or edifying subject for study. In time, however, sentience had its revenge. As each man’s whole experience is bound to his body no less than is the most trivial optical illusion, the sphere of sense is the transcendental ground or ratio cognoscendi of every other sphere. It suffices, therefore, to make philosophy retrospective and to relax the practical and dogmatic stress under which the intellect operates, for all the discoveries made through experience to collapse into the experience in which they were made. A complete collapse of objects is indeed inconvenient, because it would leave no starting-point for reasoning and no faith in the significance of reason itself; but partial collapses, now in the region of physics, now in that of logic and morals, are very easy and exciting feats for criticism to perform.

Passions when abstracted from their bodily causes and values when removed from their objects will naturally fall into the body’s mind, and be allied with appearances. Shrewd people will bethink themselves to attribute almost all the body’s acts to some preparatory intention or motive in its mind, and thus attain what they think knowledge of human nature. They will encourage themselves to live among dramatic fictions, as when absorbed in a novel; and having made themselves at home in this upper story of their universe, they will find it amusing to deny that it has a ground floor. The chance of conceiving, by these partial reversals of science, a world composed entirely without troublesome machinery is too tempting not to be taken up, whatever the ulterior risks; and accordingly, when once psychological criticism is put in play, the sphere of sense will be enlarged at the expense of the two rational worlds, the material and the ideal.

[Sidenote: The rise of scepticism.]

Consciousness, thus qualified by all the sensible qualities of things, will exercise an irresistible attraction over the supernatural and ideal realm, so that all the gods, all truths, and all ideals, as they have no place among the sufficing causes of experience, will be identified with decaying sensations. And presently those supposed causes themselves will be retraced and drawn back into the immediate vortex, until the sceptic has packed away nature, with all space and time, into the sphere of sensuous illusion, the distinguishing characteristic of which was that it changed with the changes in the human body. The personal idealists will declare that all body is a part of some body’s mind. Thus, by a curious reversion, the progress of reflection has led to hopeless contradictions. Sense, which was discovered by observing the refraction and intermittence to which appearances were subject, in seeming to be quite different from what things were, now tries to subsist when the things it was essentially contrasted with have been abolished. The intellect becomes a Penelope, whose secret pleasure lies in undoing its ostensible work; and science, becoming pensive, loves to relapse into the dumb actuality and nerveless reverie from which it had once extricated a world.

The occasion for this sophistication is worth noting; for if we follow the thread which we have trailed behind us in entering the labyrinth we shall be able at any moment to get out; especially as the omnivorous monster lurking in its depths is altogether harmless. A moral and truly transcendental critique of science, as of common sense, is never out of place, since all such a critique does is to assign to each conception or discovery its place and importance in the Life of Reason. So administered, the critical cathartic will not prove a poison and will not inhibit the cognitive function it was meant to purge. Every belief will subsist that finds an empirical and logical warrant; while that a belief is a belief and not a sensation will not seem a ground for not entertaining it, nor for subordinating it to some gratuitous assurance. But a psychological criticism, if it is not critical of psychology itself, and thinks to substitute a science of absolute sentience for physics and dialectic, would rest on sophistry and end wholly in bewilderment. The subject-matter of an absolute psychology would vanish in its hands, since there is no sentience which is not at once the effect of something physical and the appearance of something ideal. A calculus of feelings, uninterpreted and referred to nothing ulterior, would furnish no alternative system to substitute for the positive sciences it was seeking to dislodge. In fact, those who call ordinary objects unreal do not, on that account, find anything else to think about. Their exorcism does not lay the ghost, and they are limited to addressing it in uncivil language. It was not idly that reason in the beginning excogitated a natural and an ideal world, a labour it might well have avoided if appearance as it stands made a thinkable or a practical universe.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote B: The term “matter” (which ought before long to reappear in philosophy) has two meanings. In popular science and theology it commonly means a group of things in space, like the atoms of Democritus or the human body and its members. Such matter plainly exists. Its particles are concretions in existence like the planets; and if a given hypothesis describing them turns out to be wrong, it is wrong only because this matter exists so truly and in such discoverable guise that the hypothesis in question may be shown to misrepresent its constitution.

On the other hand, in Aristotle and in literary speech, matter means something good to make other things out of. Here it is a concretion in discourse, a dialectical term; being only an aspect or constituent of every existence, it cannot exist by itself. A state of mind, like everything not purely formal, has matter of this sort in it. Actual love, for instance, differs materially from the mere idea or possibility of love, which is all love would be if the matter or body of it were removed. This matter is what idealists, bent on giving it a grander name, call pure feeling, absolute consciousness, or metaphysical will. These phrases are all used improperly to stand for the existence or presence of things apart from their character, or for the mere strain and dead weight of being. Matter is a far better term to use in the premises, for it suggests the method as well as the fact of brute existence. The surd in experience—its non-ideal element—is not an indifferent vehicle for what it brings, as would be implied by calling it pure feeling or absolute consciousness. Nor is it an act accepting or rejecting objects, as would be implied by calling it will. In truth, the surd conditions not merely the being of objects but their possible quantity, the time and place of their appearance, and their degree of perfection compared with the ideals they suggest. These important factors in whatever exists are covered by the term matter and give it a serious and indispensable rôle in describing and feeling the world.

Aristotle, it may be added, did not adhere with perfect consistency to the dialectical use of this word. Matter is sometimes used by him for substance or for actual beings having both matter and form. The excuse for this apparent lapse is, of course, that what taken by itself is a piece of formed matter or an individual object may be regarded as mere material for something else which it helps to constitute, as wheat is matter for flour, and flour for bread. Thus the dialectical and non-demonstrative use of the term to indicate one aspect of everything could glide into its vulgar acceptation, to indicate one class of things.]

[Footnote C: It has been suggested—what will not party spirit contrive?—that these variations, called spontaneous by Darwin because not predetermined by heredity, might be spontaneous in a metaphysical sense, free acts with no material basis or cause whatsoever. Being free, these acts might deflect evolution—like Descartes’ soul acting on the pineal gland—into wonderful new courses, prevent dissolution, and gradually bring on the kingdom of Heaven, all as the necessary implication of the latest science and the most atheistic philosophy. It may not be needless to observe that if the variations were absolutely free, i.e., intrusions of pure chance, they would tend every which way quite as much as if they were mechanically caused; while if they were kept miraculously in line with some far-off divine event, they would not be free at all, but would be due to metaphysical attraction and a magic destiny prepared in the eternal; and so we should be brought round to Aristotelian physics again.]

[Footnote D: The monads of Leibniz could justly be called minds, because they had a dramatic destiny, and the most complex experience imaginable was the state of but one monad, not an aggregate view or effect of a multitude in fusion. But the recent improvements on that system take the latter turn. Mind-stuff, or the material of mind, is supposed to be contained in large quantities within any known feeling. Mind-stuff, we are given to understand, is diffused in a medium corresponding to apparent space (what else would a real space be?); it forms quantitative aggregates, its transformations or aggregations are mechanically governed, it endures when personal consciousness perishes, it is the substance of bodies and, when duly organised, the potentiality of thought. One might go far for a better description of matter. That any material must be material might have been taken for an axiom; but our idealists, in their eagerness to show that Gefuehl ist Alles, have thought to do honour to feeling by forgetting that it is an expression and wishing to make it a stuff.

There is a further circumstance showing that mind-stuff is but a bashful name for matter. Mind-stuff, like matter, can be only an element in any actual being. To make a thing or a thought out of mind-stuff you have to rely on the system into which that material has fallen; the substantive ingredients, from which an actual being borrows its intensive quality, do not contain its individuating form. This form depends on ideal relations subsisting between the ingredients, relations which are not feelings but can be rendered only by propositions.]

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V. PSYCHOLOGY

[Sidenote: Mind reading not science.]

If psychology is a science, many things that books of psychology contain should be excluded from it. One is social imagination. Nature, besides having a mechanical form and wearing a garment of sensible qualities, makes a certain inner music in the beholder’s mind, inciting him to enter into other bodies and to fancy the new and profound life which he might lead there. Who, as he watched a cat basking in the sun, has not passed into that vigilant eye and felt all the leaps potential in that luxurious torpor? Who has not attributed some little romance to the passer-by? Who has not sometimes exchanged places even with things inanimate, and drawn some new moral experience from following the movement of stars or of daffodils? All this is idle musing or at best poetry; yet our ordinary knowledge of what goes on in men’s minds is made of no other stuff. True, we have our own mind to go by, which presumably might be a fair sample of what men’s minds are; but unfortunately our notion of ourselves is of all notions the most biassed and idealistic. If we attributed to other men only such obvious reasoning, sound judgment, just preferences, honest passions, and blameless errors as we discover in ourselves, we should take but an insipid and impractical view of mankind.

In fact, we do far better: for what we impute to our fellow-men is suggested by their conduct or by an instant imitation of their gesture and expression. These manifestations, striking us in all their novelty and alien habit, and affecting our interests in all manner of awkward ways, create a notion of our friends’ natures which is extremely vivid and seldom extremely flattering.

Such romancing has the cogency proper to dramatic poetry; it is persuasive only over the third person, who has never had, but has always been about to have, the experience in question. Drawn from the potential in one’s self, it describes at best the possible in others. The thoughts of men are incredibly evanescent, merely the foam of their labouring natures; and they doubtless vary much more than our trite classifications allow for. This is what makes passions and fashions, religions and philosophies, so hard to conceive when once the trick of them is a little antiquated. Languages are hardly more foreign to one another than are the thoughts uttered in them. We should give men credit for originality at least in their dreams, even if they have little of it to show elsewhere; and as it was discovered but recently that all memories are not furnished with the like material images, but often have no material images whatever, so it may have to be acknowledged that the disparity in men’s soliloquies is enormous, and that some races, perhaps, live content without soliloquising at all.

[Sidenote: Experience a reconstruction.]

Nevertheless, in describing what happens, or in enforcing a given view of things, we constantly refer to universal experience as if everybody was agreed about what universal experience is and had personally gathered it all since the days of Adam. In fact, each man has only his own, the remnant saved from his personal acquisitions. On the basis of this his residual endowment, he has to conceive all nature, with whatever experiences may have fallen there to the lot of others. Universal experience is a comfortable fiction, a distinctly ideal construction, and no fund available for any one to draw from; which of course is not to deny that tradition and books, in transmitting materially the work of other generations, tend to assimilate us also to their mind. The result of their labours, in language, learning, and institutions, forms a hothouse in which to force our seedling fancy to a rational growth; but the influence is physical, the environment is material, and its ideal background or significance has to be inferred by us anew, according to our imaginative faculty and habits. Past experience, apart from its monuments, is fled for ever out of mortal reach. It is now a parcel of the motionless ether, of the ineffectual truth about what once was. To know it we must evoke it within ourselves, starting from its inadequate expressions still extant in the world. This reconstruction is highly speculative and, as Spinoza noted, better evidence of what we are than of what other men have been.

[Sidenote: The honest art of education.]

When we appeal to general experience, then, what we really have to deal with is our interlocutor’s power of imagining that experience; for the real experience is dead and ascended into heaven, where it can neither answer nor hear. Our agreements or divergences in this region do not touch science; they concern only friendship and unanimity. All our proofs are, as they say in Spain, pure conversation; and as the purpose and best result can be only to kindle intelligence and propagate an ideal art, the method should be Socratic, genial, literary. In these matters, the alternative to imagination is not science but sophistry. We may perhaps entangle our friends in their own words, and force them for the moment to say what they do not mean, and what it is not in their natures to think; but the bent bow will spring back, perhaps somewhat sharply, and we shall get little thanks for our labour. There would be more profit in taking one another frankly by the hand and walking together along the outskirts of real knowledge, pointing to the material facts which we all can see, nature, the monuments, the texts, the actual ways and institutions of men; and in the presence of such a stimulus, with the contagion of a common interest, the plastic mind would respond of itself to the situation, and we should be helping one another to understand whatever lies within the range of our fancy, be it in antiquity or in the human heart. That would be a true education; and while the result could not possibly be a science, not even a science of people’s states of mind, it would be a deepening of humanity in ourselves and a wholesome knowledge of our ignorance.

[Sidenote: Arbitrary readings of the mind.]

In what is called psychology this loose, imaginative method is often pursued, although the field covered may be far narrower. Any generic experience of which a writer pretends to give an exact account must be reconstructed ad hoc; it is not the experience that necessitates the description, but the description that recalls the experience, defining it in a novel way. When La Rochefoucauld says, for instance, that there is something about our friend’s troubles that secretly pleases us, many circumstances in our own lives, or in other people’s, may suddenly recur to us to illustrate that aperçu; and we may be tempted to say, There is a truth. But is it a scientific truth? Or is it merely a bit of satire, a ray from a literary flashlight, giving a partial clearness for a moment to certain jumbled memories? If the next day we open a volume of Adam Smith, and read that man is naturally benevolent, that he cannot but enact and share the vicissitudes of his fellow-creatures, and that another man’s imminent danger or visible torment will cause in him a distress little inferior to that felt by the unfortunate sufferer, we shall probably think this a truth also, and a more normal and a profounder truth than the other. But is it a law? Is it a scientific discovery that can lead us to definite inferences about what will happen or help us to decompose a single event, accurately and without ambiguity, into its component forces? Not only is such a thing impossible, but the Scotch philosopher’s amiable generalities, perhaps largely applicable to himself and to his friends of the eighteenth century, may fail altogether to fit an earlier or a later age; and every new shade of brute born into the world will ground a new “theory of the moral sentiments.”

The whole cogency of such psychology, therefore, lies in the ease with which the hearer, on listening to the analysis, recasts something in his own past after that fashion. These endless rival apperceptions regard facts that, until they are referred to their mechanical ground, show no continuity and no precision in their march. The apperception of them, consequently, must be doubly arbitrary and unstable, for there is no method in the subject-matter and there is less in the treatment of it. The views, however, are far from equal in value. Some may be more natural, eloquent, enlightening, than others; they may serve better the essential purpose of reflection, which is to pick out and bring forward continually out of the past what can have a value for the present. The spiritual life in which this value lies is practical in its associations, because it understands and dominates what touches action; yet it is contemplative in essence, since successful action consists in knowing what you are attempting and in attempting what you can find yourself achieving. Plan and performance will alike appeal to imagination and be appreciated through it; so that what trains imagination refines the very stuff that life is made of. Science is instrumental in comparison, since the chief advantage that comes of knowing accurately is to be able, with safety, to imagine freely. But when it is science and accurate knowledge that we pursue, we should not be satisfied with literature.

[Sidenote: Human nature appealed to rather than described.]

When discourse on any subject would be persuasive, it appeals to the interlocutor to think in a certain dynamic fashion, inciting him, not without leading questions, to give shape to his own sentiments. Knowledge of the soul, insight into human nature and experience, are no doubt requisite in such an exercise; yet this insight is in these cases a vehicle only, an instinctive method, while the result aimed at is agreement on some further matter, conviction and enthusiasm, rather than psychological information. Thus if I declare that the storms of winter are not so unkind as benefits forgot, I say something which if true has a certain psychological value, for it could be inferred from that assertion that resentment is generally not proportionate to the injury received but rather to the surprise caused, so that it springs from our own foolishness more than from other people’s bad conduct. Yet my observation was not made in the interest of any such inferences: it was made to express an emotion of my own, in hopes of kindling in others a similar emotion. It was a judgment which others were invited to share. There was as little exact science about it as if I had turned it into frank poetry and exclaimed, “Blow, blow, thou winter’s wind!” Knowledge of human nature might be drawn even from that apostrophe, and a very fine shade of human feeling is surely expressed in it, as Shakespeare utters it; but to pray or to converse is not for that reason the same thing as to pursue science.

Now it constantly happens in philosophic writing that what is supposed to go on in the human mind is described and appealed to in order to support some observation or illustrate some argument—as continually, for instance, in the older English critics of human nature, or in these very pages. What is offered in such cases is merely an invitation to think after a certain fashion. A way of grasping or interpreting some fact is suggested, with a more or less civil challenge to the reader to resist the suasion of his own experience so evoked and represented. Such a method of appeal may be called psychological, in the sense that it relies for success on the total movement of the reader’s life and mind, without forcing a detailed assent through ocular demonstration or pure dialectic; but the psychology of it is a method and a resource rather than a doctrine. The only doctrine aimed at in such philosophy is a general reasonableness, a habit of thinking straight from the elements of experience to its ultimate and stable deliverance. This is what in his way a poet or a novelist would do. Fiction swarms with such sketches of human nature and such renderings of the human mind as a critical philosopher depends upon for his construction. He need not be interested in the pathology of individuals nor even in the natural history of man; his effort is wholly directed toward improving the mind’s economy and infusing reason into it as one might religion, not without diligent self-examination and a public confession of sin. The human mind is nobody’s mind in particular, and the science of it is necessarily imaginative. No one can pretend in philosophic discussion any more than in poetry that the experience described is more than typical. It is given out not for a literal fact, existing in particular moments or persons, but for an imaginative expression of what nature and life have impressed on the speaker. In so far as others live in the same world they may recognise the experience so expressed by him and adopt his interpretation; but the aptness of his descriptions and analyses will not constitute a science of mental states, but rather—what is a far greater thing—the art of stimulating and consolidating reflection in general.

[Sidenote: Dialectic in psychology.]

There is a second constituent of current psychology which is indeed a science, but not a science of matters of fact—I mean the dialectic of ideas. The character of father, for example, implies a son, and this relation, involved in the ideas both of son and of father, implies further that a transmitted essence or human nature is shared by both. Every idea, if its logical texture is reflected upon, will open out into a curious world constituted by distinguishing the constituents of that idea more clearly and making explicit its implicit structure and relations. When an idea has practical intent and is a desire, its dialectic is even more remarkable. If I love a man I thereby love all those who share whatever makes me love him, and I thereby hate whatever tends to deprive him of this excellence. If it should happen, however, that those who resembled him most in amiability—say by flattering me no less than he did—were precisely his mortal enemies, the logic of my affections would become somewhat involved. I might end either by striving to reconcile the rivals or by discovering that what I loved was not the man at all, but only an office exercised by him in my regard which any one else might also exercise.

These inner lucubrations, however, while they lengthen the moment’s vista and deepen present intent, give no indication whatever about the order or distribution of actual feelings. They are out of place in a psychology that means to be an account of what happens in the world. For these dialectical implications do not actually work themselves out. They have no historical or dynamic value. The man that by mistake or courtesy I call a father may really have no son, any more than Herodotus for being the father of history; or having had a son, he may have lost him; or the creature sprung from his loins may be a misshapen idiot, having nothing ideal in common with his parent. Similarly my affection for a friend, having causes much deeper than discourse, may cling to him through all transformations in his qualities and in his attitude toward me; and it may never pass to others for resembling him, nor take, in all its days, a Platonic direction. The impulse on which that dialectic was based may exhaust its physical energy, and all its implications may be nipped in the bud and be condemned for ever to the limbo of things unborn.

[Sidenote: Spinoza on the passions.]

Spinoza’s account of the passions is a beautiful example of dialectical psychology, beautiful because it shows so clearly the possibilities and impossibilities in such a method. Spinoza began with self-preservation, which was to be the principle of life and the root of all feelings. The violence done to physics appears in this beginning. Self-preservation, taken strictly, is a principle not illustrated in nature, where everything is in flux, and where habits destructive or dangerous to the body are as conspicuous as protective instincts. Physical mechanism requires reproduction, which implies death, and it admits suicide. Spinoza himself, far too noble a mind to be fixed solely on preserving its own existence, was compelled to give self-preservation an extravagant meaning in order to identify it with “intellectual love of God” or the happy contemplation of that natural law which destroyed all individuals. To find the self-preserving man you must take him after he has ceased to grow and before he has begun to love. Self-preservation, being thus no principle of natural history, the facts or estimations classed under that head need to be referred instead to one of two other principles—either to mechanical equilibrium and habit, or to dialectical consistency in judgment.

Self-preservation might express, perhaps, the values which conceived events acquire in respect to a given attitude of will, to an arrested momentary ideal. The actual state of any animal, his given instincts and tensions, are undoubtedly the point of origin from which all changes and relations are morally estimated; and if this attitude is afterward itself subjected to estimation, that occurs by virtue of its affinity or conflict with the living will of another moment. Valuation is dialectical, not descriptive, nor contemplative of a natural process. It might accordingly be developed by seeing what is implied in the self-preservation, or rather expression, of a will which by that dialectic would discover its ideal scope.

Such a principle, however, could never explain the lapse of that attitude itself. A natural process cannot be governed by the ideal relations which conceived things acquire by being represented in one of its moments. Spinoza, however, let himself wander into this path and made the semblance of an attempt, indeed not very deceptive, to trace the sequence of feelings by their mutual implication. The changes in life were to be explained by what the crystallised posture of life might be at a single instant. The arrow’s flight was to be deduced from its instantaneous position. A passion’s history was to be the history of what would have been its expression if it had had no history at all.

[Sidenote: A principle of estimation cannot govern events.]

A man suffered by destiny to maintain for ever a single unchanged emotion might indeed think out its multifarious implications much in Spinoza’s way. It is in that fashion that parties and sects, when somewhat stable, come to define their affinities and to know their friends and enemies all over the universe of discourse. Suppose, for instance, that I feel some titillation on reading a proposition concerning the contrast between Paul’s idea of Peter and Peter’s idea of himself, a titillation which is accompanied by the idea of Spinoza, its external cause. Now he who loves an effect must proportionately love its cause, and titillation accompanied by the idea of its external cause is, Spinoza has proved, what men call love. I therefore find that I love Spinoza. Having got so far, I may consider further, referring to another demonstration in the book, that if some one gives Spinoza joy—Hobbes, for instance—my delight in Spinoza’s increased perfection, consequent upon his joy and my love of him, accompanied by the idea of Hobbes, its external cause, constitutes love on my part for the redoubtable Hobbes as well. Thus the periphery of my affections may expand indefinitely, till it includes the infinite, the ultimate external cause of all my titillations. But how these interesting discoveries are interrupted before long by a desire for food, or by an indomitable sense that Hobbes and the infinite are things I do not love, is something that my dialectic cannot deduce; for it was the values radiating from a given impulse, the implications of its instant object, that were being explicated, not at all the natural forces that carry a man through that impulse and beyond it to the next phase of his dream, a phase which if it continues the former episode must continue it spontaneously, by grace of mechanical forces.

When dialectic is thus introduced into psychology, an intensive knowledge of the heart is given out for distributive knowledge of events. Such a study, when made by a man of genius, may furnish good spiritual reading, for it will reveal what our passions mean and what sentiments they would lead to if they could remain fixed and dictate all further action. This insight may make us aware of strange inconsistencies in our souls, and seeing how contrary some of our ideals are to others and how horrible, in some cases, would be their ultimate expression, we may be shocked into setting our house in order; and in trying to understand ourselves we may actually develop a self that can be understood. Meantime this inner discipline will not enlighten us about the march of affairs. It will not give us a key to evolution, either in ourselves or in others. Even while we refine our aspirations, the ground they sprang from will be eaten away beneath our feet. Instead of developing yesterday’s passion, to-day may breed quite another in its place; and if, having grown old and set in our mental posture, we are incapable of assuming another, and are condemned to carrying on the dialectic of our early visions into a new-born world, to be a schoolmaster’s measuring-rod for life’s infinite exuberance, we shall find ourselves at once in a foreign country, speaking a language that nobody understands. No destiny is more melancholy than that of the dialectical prophet, who makes more rigid and tyrannous every day a message which every day grows less applicable and less significant.

[Sidenote: Scientific psychology a part of biology.]

That remaining portion of psychology which is a science, and a science of matters of fact, is physiological; it belongs to natural history and constitutes the biology of man. Soul, which was not originally distinguished from life, is there studied in its natural operation in the body and in the world. Psychology then remains what it was in Aristotle’s De Anima—an ill-developed branch of natural science, pieced out with literary terms and perhaps enriched by occasional dramatic interpretations. The specifically mental or psychic element consists in the feeling which accompanies bodily states and natural situations. This feeling is discovered and distributed at the same time that bodies and other material objects are defined; for when a man begins to decipher permanent and real things, and to understand that they are merely material, he thereby sets apart, in contrast with such external objects, those images and emotions which can no longer enter into the things’ texture. The images and emotions remain, however, attached to those things, for they are refractions of them through bodily organs, or effects of their presence on the will, or passions fixed upon them as their object.

In parts of biology which do not deal with man observers do not hesitate to refer in the same way to the pain, the desire, the intention, which they may occasionally read in an animal’s aspect. Darwin, for instance, constantly uses psychical language: his birds love one another’s plumage and their æsthetic charms are factors in natural selection. Such little fables do not detract from the scientific value of Darwin’s observations, because we see at once what the fables mean. The description keeps close enough to the facts observed for the reader to stop at the latter, rather than at the language in which they are stated. In the natural history of man such interpretation into mental terms, such microscopic romance, is even easier and more legitimate, because language allows people, perhaps before their feelings are long past, to describe them in terms which are understood to refer directly to mental experience. The sign’s familiarity, to be sure, often hides in these cases a great vagueness and unseizableness in the facts; yet a beginning in defining distinctly the mental phase of natural situations has been made in those small autobiographies which introspective writers sometimes compose, or which are taken down in hospitals and laboratories from the lips of “subjects.” What a man under special conditions may say he feels or thinks adds a constituent phase to his natural history; and were these reports exact and extended enough, it would become possible to enumerate the precise sensations and ideas which accompany every state of body and every social situation.

[Sidenote: Confused attempt to detach the psychic element.]

This advantage, however, is the source of that confusion and sophistry which distinguish the biology of man from the rest of physics. Attention is there arrested at the mental term, in forgetfulness of the situation which gave it warrant, and an invisible world, composed of these imagined experiences, begins to stalk behind nature and may even be thought to exist independently. This metaphysical dream may be said to have two stages: the systematic one, which is called idealism, and an incidental one which pervades ordinary psychology, in so far as mental facts are uprooted from their basis and deprived of their expressive or spiritual character, in order to be made elements in a dynamic scheme. This battle of feelings, whether with atoms or exclusively with their own cohorts, might be called a primitive materialism, rather than an idealism, if idealism were to retain its Platonic sense; for forms and realisations are taken in this system for substantial elements, and are made to figure either as a part or as the whole of the world’s matter.

[Sidenote: Differentia of the psychic.]

Phenomena specifically mental certainly exist, since natural phenomena and ideal truths are concentrated and telescoped in apprehension, besides being weighted with an emotion due to their effect on the person who perceives them. This variation, which reality suffers in being reported to perception, turns the report into a mental fact distinguishable from its subject-matter. When the flux is partly understood and the natural world has become a constant presence, the whole flux itself, as it flowed originally, comes to be called a mental flux, because its elements and method are seen to differ from the elements and method embodied in material objects or in ideal truth. The primitive phenomena are now called mental because they all deviate from the realities to be ultimately conceived. To call the immediate mental is therefore correct and inevitable when once the ultimate is in view; but if the immediate were all, to call it mental would be unmeaning.

The visual image of a die, for instance, has at most three faces, none of them quite square; no hired artificer is needed to produce it; it cannot be found anywhere nor shaken in any box; it lasts only for an instant; thereafter it disappears without a trace—unless it flits back unaccountably through the memory—and it leaves no ponderable dust or ashes to attest that it had a substance. The opposite of all this is true of the die itself. But were no material die in existence, the image itself would be material; for, however evanescent, it would occupy space, have geometrical shape, colour, and magic dynamic destinies. Its transformations as it rolled on the idea of a table would be transformations in nature, however unaccountable by any steady law. Such material qualities a mental fact can retain only in the spiritual form of representation. A representation of matter is immaterial, but a material image, when no object exists, is a material fact. If the Absolute, to take an ultimate case, perceived nothing but space and atoms (perceiving itself, if you will, therein), space and atoms would be its whole nature, and it would constitute a perfect materialism. The fact that materialism was true would not of itself constitute an idealism worth distinguishing from its opposite. For a vehicle or locus exists only when it makes some difference to the thing it carries, presenting it in a manner not essential to its own nature.

[Sidenote: Approach to irrelevant sentience.]

The qualification of being by the mental medium may be carried to any length. As the subject-matter recedes the mental datum ceases to have much similarity or inward relevance to what is its cause or its meaning. The report may ultimately become, like pure pain or pleasure, almost wholly blind and irrelevant to any world; yet such emotion is none the less immersed in matter and dependent on natural changes both for its origin and for its function, since a significant pleasure or pain makes comments on the world and involves ideals about what ought to be happening there.

Mental facts synchronise with their basis, for no thought hovers over a dead brain and there is no vision in a dark chamber; but their tenure of life is independent of that of their objects, since thought may be prophetic or reminiscent and is intermittent even when its object enjoys a continuous existence. Mental facts are similar to their objects, since things and images have, intrinsically regarded, the same constitution; but images do not move in the same plane with things and their parts are in no proportionate dynamic relation to the parts of the latter. Thought’s place in nature is exiguous, however broad the landscape it represents; it touches the world tangentially only, in some ferment of the brain. It is probably no atom that supports the soul (as Leibnitz imagined), but rather some cloud of atoms shaping or remodelling an organism. Mind in this case would be, in its physical relation to matter, what it feels itself to be in its moral attitude toward the same; a witness to matter’s interesting aspects and a realisation of its forms.

[Sidenote: Perception represents things in their practical relation to the body.]

Mental facts, moreover, are highly selective; especially does this appear in respect to the dialectical world, which is in itself infinite, while the sum of human logic and mathematics, though too long for most men’s patience, is decidedly brief. If we ask ourselves on what principle this selection and foreshortening of truth takes place in the mind, we may perhaps come upon the real bond and the deepest contrast between mind and its environment. The infinity of formal truth is disregarded in human thought when it is irrelevant to practice and to happiness; the infinity of nature is represented there in violent perspective, centring about the body and its interests. The seat and starting-point of every mental survey is a brief animal life. A mind seems, then, to be a consciousness of the body’s interests, expressed in terms of what affects that body, as if in the Babel of nature a man heard only the voices that pronounced his name. A mind is a private view; it is gathered together in proportion as physical sensibility extends its range and makes one stretch of being after another tributary to the animal’s life, and in proportion also as this sensibility is integrated, so that every organ in its reaction enlists the resources of every other organ as well. A personal will and intelligence thus arise; and they direct action from within with a force and freedom which are exactly proportionate to the material forces, within and without the body, which the soul has come to represent.

In other words, mind raises to an actual existence that form in material processes which, had the processes remained wholly material, would have had only ideal or imputed being—as the stars would not have been divided into the signs of the Zodiac but for the fanciful eye of astrologers. Automata might arise and be destroyed without any value coming or going; only a form-loving observer could say that anything fortunate or tragic had occurred, as poets might at the budding or withering of a flower. Some of nature’s automata, however, love themselves, and comment on the form they achieve or abandon; these constellations of atoms are genuine beasts. Their consciousness and their interest in their own individuality rescues that individuality from the realm of discourse and from having merely imputed limits.

[Sidenote: Mind the existence in which form becomes actual.]

That the basis of mind lies in the body’s interests rather than in its atoms may seem a doctrine somewhat too poetical for psychology; yet may not poetry, superposed on material existence and supported by it, be perhaps the key to mind? Such a view hangs well together with the practical and prospective character of consciousness, with its total dependence on the body, its cognitive relevance to the world, and its formal disparity from material being. Mind does not accompany body like a useless and persistent shadow; it is significant and it is intermittent. Much less can it be a link in physiological processes, processes irrelevant to its intent and incompatible with its immaterial essence. Consciousness seems to arise when the body assumes an attitude which, being an attitude, supervenes upon the body’s elements and cannot be contained within them. This attitude belongs to the whole body in its significant operation, and the report of this attitude, its expression, requires survey, synthesis, appreciation—things which constitute what we call mentality. This remains, of course, the mentality of that material situation; it is the voice of that particular body in that particular pass. The mind therefore represents its basis, but this basis (being a form of material existence and not matter itself) is neither vainly reduplicated by representation nor used up materially in the process.

Representation is far from idle, since it brings to focus those mechanical unities which otherwise would have existed only potentially and at the option of a roving eye. In evoking consciousness nature makes this delimination real and unambiguous; there are henceforth actual centres and actual interests in the mechanical flux. The flux continues to be mechanical, but the representation of it supervening has created values which, being due to imputation, could not exist without being imputed, while at the same time they could not have been imputed without being attached to one object or event rather than to another. Material dramas are thus made moral and raised to an existence of their own by being expressed in what we call the souls of animals and men; a mind is the entelechy of an organic body.[E] It is a region where form breeds an existence to express it, and destiny becomes important by being felt. Mind adds to being a new and needful witness so soon as the constitution of being gives foothold to apperception of its movement, and offers something in which it is possible to ground an interest.

That Aristotle has not been generally followed in views essentially so natural and pregnant as these is due no doubt to want of thoroughness in conceiving them, not only on the part of his readers but even on his own part; for he treated the soul, which should be on his own theory only an expression and an unmoved mover, as a power and an efficient cause. Analysis had not gone far enough in his day to make evident that all dynamic principles are mechanical and that mechanism can obtain only among objects; but by this time it should no longer seem doubtful that mental facts can have no connection except through their material basis and no mutual relevance except through their objects.

[Sidenote: Attempt at idealistic physics.]

There is indeed a strange half-assumption afloat, a sort of reserved faith which every one seems to respect but nobody utters, to the effect that the mental world has a mechanism of its own, and that ideas intelligently produce and sustain one another. Systematic idealists, to be sure, have generally given a dialectical or moral texture to the cosmos, so that the passage from idea to idea in experience need not be due, in their physics, to any intrinsic or proportionate efficacy in these ideas themselves. The march of experience is not explained at all by such high cosmogonies. They abandon that practical calculation to some science of illusion that has to be tolerated in this provisional life. Their own understanding is of things merely in the gross, because they fall in with some divine plan and produce, unaccountably enough, some interesting harmony. Empirical idealists, on the contrary, in making a metaphysics out of psychology, hardly know what they do. The laws of experience which they refer to are all laws of physics. It is only the “possibilities” of sensation that stand and change according to law; the sensations themselves, if not referred to those permanent possibilities, would be a chaos worse than any dream.

Correct and scrupulous as empiricism may be when it turns its face backward and looks for the seat, the criterion, and the elements of knowledge, it is altogether incoherent and self-inhibited when it looks forward. It can believe in nothing but in what it conceives, if it would rise at all above a stupid immersion in the immediate; yet the relations which attach the moments of feeling together are material relations, implying the whole frame of nature. Psychology can accordingly conceive nothing but the natural world, with its diffuse animation, since this is the only background that the facts suggest or that, in practice, anybody can think of. If empiricism trusted the intellect, and consented to immerse flying experience in experience understood, it would become ordinary science and ordinary common sense. Deprecating this result, for no very obvious reason, it has to balance itself on the thin edge of an unwilling materialism, with a continual protestation that it does not believe in anything that it thinks. It is wholly entangled in the prevalent sophism that a man must renounce a belief when he discovers how he has formed it, and that our ancestors—at least the remoter ones—begin to exist when we discover them.

When Descartes, having composed a mechanical system of the world, was asked by admiring ladies to say something about the passions, what came into his mind was characteristically simple and dialectical. Life, he thought, was a perpetual conflict between reason and the emotions. The soul had its own natural principle to live by, but was diverted from that rational path by the waves of passion that beat against it and sometimes flooded it over. That was all his psychology. Ideal entities in dramatic relations, in a theatre which had to be borrowed, of course, from the other half of the world; because while a material mechanism might be conceived without minds in it, minds in action could not be conceived without a material mechanism—at least a represented one—lying beneath and between. Spinoza made a great improvement in the system by attaching the mind more systematically to the body, and studying the parts which organ and object played in qualifying knowledge; but his conception of mental unities and mental processes remained literary, or at best, as we have seen, dialectical. No shadow of a principle at once psychic and genetic appeared in his philosophy. All mind was still a transcript of material facts or a deepening of moral relations.

[Sidenote: Association not efficient]

The idea of explaining the flow of ideas without reference to bodies appeared, however, in the principle of association. This is the nearest approach that has yet been made to a physics of disembodied mind—something which idealism sadly needs to develop. A terrible incapacity, however, appears at once in the principle of association; for even if we suppose that it could account for the flow of ideas, it does not pretend to supply any basis for sensations. And as the more efficient part of association—association by contiguity—is only a repetition in ideas of the order once present in impressions, the whole question about the march of mental experience goes back to what association does not touch, namely, the origin of sensations. What everybody assumed, of course, was that the order and quality of sensations were due to the body; but their derivation was not studied. Hume ignored it as much as possible, and Berkeley did not sacrifice a great deal when he frankly suggested that the production of sensation must be the direct work of God.

This tendency not to recognise the material conditions of mind showed itself more boldly in the treatment of ideation. We are not plainly aware (in spite of headaches, fatigue, sleep, love, intoxication, and madness) that the course of our thoughts is as directly dependent on the body as is their inception. It was therefore possible, without glaring paradox, to speak as if ideas caused one another. They followed, in recurring, the order they had first had in experience, as when we learn something by heart. Why, a previous verse being given, we should sometimes be unable to repeat the one that had often followed it before, there was no attempt to explain: it sufficed that reverie often seemed to retrace events in their temporal order. Even less dependent on material causes seemed to be the other sort of association, association by similarity. This was a feat for the wit and the poet, to jump from China to Peru, by virtue of some spark of likeness that might flash out between them.

[Sidenote: It describes coincidences.]

Much natural history has been written and studied with the idea of finding curious facts. The demand has not been for constant laws or intelligibility, but for any circumstance that could arrest attention or divert the fancy. In this spirit, doubtless, instances of association were gathered and classified. It was the young ladies’ botany of mind. Under association could be gathered a thousand interesting anecdotes, a thousand choice patterns of thought. Talk of the wars, says Hobbes, once led a man to ask what was the value of a Roman penny. But why only once? The wars must have been often mentioned when the delivering up of King Charles did not enter any mind; and when it did, this would not have led any one to think of Judas and the thirty pence, unless he had been a good royalist and a good Christian—and then only by a curious accident. It was not these ideas, then, in their natural capacity that suggested one another; but some medium in which they worked, once in the world, opened those particular avenues between them. Nevertheless, no one cared to observe that each fact had had many others, never recalled, associated with it as closely as those which were remembered. Nor was the matter taken so seriously that one needed to ask how, among all similar things, similarity could decide which should be chosen; nor how among a thousand contiguous facts one rather than another should be recalled for contiguity’s sake.

[Sidenote: Understanding is based on instinct and expressed in dialectic.]

The best instance, perhaps, of regular association might be found in language and its meaning; for understanding implies that each word habitually calls up its former associates. Yet in what, psychologically considered, does understanding a word consist? What concomitants does the word “horse” involve in actual sentience? Hardly a clear image such as a man might paint; for the name is not confined to recalling one view of one animal obtained at one moment. Perhaps all that recurs is a vague sense of the environment, in nature and in discourse, in which that object lies. The word “kite” would immediately make a different region warm in the world through which the mind was groping. One would turn in idea to the sky rather than to the ground, and feel suggestions of a more buoyant sort of locomotion.

Understanding has to be described in terms of its potential outcome, since the incandescent process itself, as it exists in transit, will not suffer stable terms to define it. Potentiality is something which each half of reality reproaches the other with; things are potential to feeling because they are not life, and feelings are potential to science because they elude definition. To understand, therefore, is to know what to do and what to say in the sign’s presence; and this practical knowledge is far deeper than any echo casually awakened in fancy at the same time. Instinctive recognition has those echoes for the most superficial part of its effect. Because I understand what “horse” means, the word can make me recall some episode in which a horse once figured. This understanding is instinctive and practical and, if the phrase may be pardoned, it is the body that understands. It is the body, namely, that contains the habit and readiness on which understanding hangs; and the sense of understanding, the instant rejection of whatever clashes and makes nonsense in that context, is but a transcript of the body’s education. Actual mind is all above board; it is all speculative, vibrant, the fruit and gift of those menial subterranean processes. Some generative processes may be called psychic in that they minister to mind and lend it what little continuity it can boast of; but they are not processes in consciousness. Processes in consciousness are æsthetic or dialectical processes, focussing a form rather than ushering in an existence. Mental activity has a character altogether alien to association: it is spiritual, not mechanical; an entelechy, not a genesis.

[Sidenote: Suggestion a fancy name for automatism,]

For these and other reasons association has fallen into some disrepute; but it is not easy to say what, in absolute psychology, has come to take its place. If we speak of suggestion, a certain dynamic turn seems to be given to the matter; yet in what sense a perception suggests its future development remains a mystery. That a certain ripening and expansion of consciousness goes on in man, not guided by former collocations of ideas, is very true; for we do not fall in love for the first time because this person loved and these ardent emotions have been habitually associated in past experience. And any impassioned discourse, opening at every turn into new vistas, shows the same sort of vegetation. Yet to observe that consciousness is automatic is not to disclose the mechanism by which it evolves. The theory of spontaneous growth offers less explanation of events, if that be possible, than the theory of association. It is perhaps a better description of the facts, since at least it makes no attempt to deduce them from one another.

[Sidenote: and will another.]

If, on the contrary, a relation implied in the burden or will of the moment be invoked, the connection established, so far as it goes, is dialectical. Where a dialectical correspondence is not found, a material cause would have to be appealed to, Such a half-dialectical psychology would be like Schopenhauer’s, quite metaphysical. It might be a great improvement on an absolute psychology, because it would restore, even if in mythical terms, a background and meaning to life. The unconscious Absolute Will, the avid Genius of the Species, the all-attracting Platonic Ideas are fabulous; but beneath them it is not hard to divine the forces of nature. This volitional school supplies a good stepping-stone from metaphysics back to scientific psychology. It remains merely to substitute instinct for will, and to explain that instinct—or even will, if the term be thought more consoling—is merely a word covering that operative organisation in the body which controls action, determines affinities, dictates preferences, and sustains ideation.

[Sidenote: Double attachment of mind to nature.]

What scientific psychology has to attempt—for little has been accomplished—may be reduced to this: To develop physiology and anthropology until the mechanism of life becomes clear, at least in its general method, and then to determine, by experiment and by well-sifted testimony, what conscious sublimation each of those material situations attains, if indeed it attains any. There will always remain, no doubt, many a region where the machinery of nature is too fine for us to trace or eludes us by involving agencies that we lack senses to perceive. In these regions where science is denied we shall have to be satisfied with landscape-painting. The more obvious results and superficial harmonies perceived in those regions will receive names and physics will be arrested at natural history. Where these unexplained facts are mental it will not be hard to do more systematically what common sense has done already, and to attach them, as we attach love or patriotism, to the natural crises that subtend them.

This placing of mental facts is made easy by the mental facts themselves, since the connection of mind with nature is double, and even when the derivation of a feeling is obscure we have but to study its meaning, allowing it to tell us what it is interested in, for a roundabout path to lead us safely back to its natural basis. It is superfluous to ask a third person what circumstances produce hunger: hunger will lead you unmistakably enough to its point of origin, and its extreme interest in food will not suffer you long to believe that want of nourishment has nothing to do with its cause. And it is not otherwise with higher emotions and ideas. Nothing but sophistry can put us in doubt about what conscience represents; for conscience does not say, square the circle, extinguish mankind so as to stop its sufferings, or steal so as to benefit your heirs. It says, Thou shalt not kill, and it also says, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt. So that conscience, by its import and incidence, clearly enough declares what it springs from—a social tradition; and what it represents—the interests, real or imaginary, of the community in which you were reared.

Where psychology depends on literature, where both its units and its method are poetical, there can be no talk of science. We may as justly, or as absurdly, speak of the spirit of an age or of a religion as of a man’s character or a river’s god. Particulars in illustration may have good historic warrant, but the unities superimposed are ideal. Such metaphors may be very useful, for a man may ordinarily be trusted to continue his practices and a river its beneficent or disastrous floods; and since those rhetorical forms have no existence in nature we may continue to frame them as may be most convenient for discourse.

[Sidenote: Is the subject-matter of psychology absolute being?]

When psychology is a science, then, it describes the flying consciousness that accompanies bodily life. It is the science of feeling or absolute appearance, taken exactly as it seems or feels. Does such a psychology, we may be tempted to ask, constitute scientific knowledge of reality? Is it at last the true metaphysics? This question would have to be answered in the negative, yet not without some previous discriminations. There is honesty in the conviction that sentience is a sort of absolute; it is something which certainly exists. The first Cartesian axiom applies to it, and to feel, even doubtfully, that feeling existed would be to posit its existence. The science that describes sentience describes at least a part of existence. Yet this self-grounding of consciousness is a suspicious circumstance: it renders it in one sense the typical reality and in another sense perhaps the sorriest illusion.

[Sidenote: Sentience is representable only in fancy]

“Reality” is an ambiguous term. If we mean by it the immediate, then sentience would be a part if not the whole of reality; for what we mean by sentience or consciousness is the immediate in so far as we contain it, and whatever self-grounded existence there may be elsewhere can be conceived by us only mythically and on that analogy, as if it were an extension or variation of sentience. Psychology would then be knowledge of reality, for even when consciousness contains elaborate thoughts that might be full of illusions, psychology takes them only as so much feeling, and in that capacity they are real enough. At the same time, while our science terminates upon mere feeling, it can neither discover nor describe that feeling except in terms of something quite different; and the only part of psychology that perhaps penetrates to brute sentience is the part that is not scientific. The knowledge that science reaches about absolute states of mind is relative knowledge; these states of mind are approached from without and are defined by their surrounding conditions and by their ideal objects. They are known by being enveloped in processes of which they themselves are not aware. Apart from this setting, the only feeling known is that which is endured. After the fact, or before, or from any other point of vantage, it cannot be directly revealed; at best it may be divined and re-enacted. Even this possible repetition would not constitute knowledge unless the imaginative reproduction were identified with or attributed to some natural fact; so that an adventitious element would always attach to any recognised feeling, to any feeling reported to another mind. It could not be known at all unless something were known about it, so that it might not pass, as otherwise it would, for a mere ingredient of present sentience.

It is precisely by virtue of this adventitious element that the re-enacted feeling takes its place in nature and becomes an object of knowledge. Science furnishes this setting; the jewel—precious or false—must be supplied by imagination. Romance, dramatic myth, is the only instrument for knowing this sort of “reality.” A flying moment, if at all understood or underpinned, or if seen in its context, would be not known absolutely as it had been felt, but would be known scientifically and as it lay in nature. But dramatic insight, striving to pierce through the machinery of the world and to attain and repeat what dreams may be going on at its core, is no science; and the very notion that the dreams are internal, that they make the interior or substance of bodies, is a crude materialistic fancy. Body, on the contrary, is the substance or instrument of mind, and has to be looked for beneath it. The mind is itself ethereal and plays about the body as music about a violin, or rather as the sense of a page about the print and paper. To look for it within is not to understand what we are looking for.

Knowledge of the immediate elsewhere is accordingly visionary in its method, and furthermore, if, by a fortunate chance, it be true in fact, it is true only of what in itself is but appearance; for the immediate, while absolutely real in its stress or presence, is indefinitely ignorant and false in its deliverance. It knows itself, but in the worst sense of the word knowledge; for it knows nothing of what is true about it, nothing of its relations and conditions. To pierce to this blind “reality” or psychic flux, which is nothing but flying appearance, we must rely on fortune, or an accidental harmony between imitative fancy in us now and original sentience elsewhere. It is accordingly at least misleading to give the name of “reality” to this appearance, which is entirely lost and inconsequential in its being, without trace of its own status, and consequently approachable or knowable only by divination, as a dream might call to another dream.

[Sidenote: The conditions and objects of sentience, which are not sentience, are also real.]

It is preferable to give a more Platonic meaning to the word and to let “reality” designate not what is merely felt diffusely but what is true about those feelings. Then dramatic fancy, psychology of the sympathetic sort, would not be able to reach reality at all. On the other hand scientific psychology, together with all other sciences, would have reality for its object; for it would disclose what really was true about sentient moments, without stopping particularly to sink abstractedly into their inner quality or private semblance. It would approach and describe the immediate as a sentient factor in a natural situation, and show us to what extent that situation was represented in that feeling. This representation, by which the dignity and interest of pure sentience would be measured, might be either pictorial or virtual; that is, a conscious moment might represent the environing world either scientifically, by understanding its structure, or practically, by instinctive readiness to meet it.

[Sidenote: Mind knowable and important in so far as it represents other things.]

What, for instance, is the reality of Napoleon? Is it what a telepathic poet, a complete Browning, might reconstruct? Is it Napoleon’s life-long soliloquy? Or to get at the reality should we have to add, as scientific psychology would, the conditions under which he lived, and their relation to his casual feelings? Obviously if Napoleon’s thoughts had had no reference to the world we should not be able to recover them; or if by chance such thoughts fell some day to our share, we should attribute them to our own mental luxuriance, without suspecting that they had ever visited another genius. Our knowledge of his life, even where it is imaginative, depends upon scientific knowledge for its projection; and his fame and immortality depend on the degree to which his thoughts, being rooted in the structure of the world and pertinent to it, can be rationally reproduced in others and attributed to him. Napoleon’s consciousness might perhaps be more justly identified with the truth or reality of him than could that of most people, because he seems to have been unusually cognisant of his environment and master of the forces at work in it and in himself. He understood his causes and function, and knew that he had arisen, like all the rest of history, and that he stood for the transmissible force and authority of greater things. Such a consciousness can be known in proportion as we, too, possess knowledge, and is worth the pains; something which could not be said of the absolute sentience of Dick or Harry, which has only material being, brute existence, without relevance to anything nor understanding of itself.

The circumstances, open to science, which surround consciousness are thus real attributes of a man by which he is truly known and distinguished. Appearances are the qualities of reality, else realities would be without place, time, character, or interrelation. In knowing that Napoleon was a Corsican, a short man with a fine countenance, we know appearances only; but these appearances are true of the reality. And if the presumable inner appearances, Napoleon’s long soliloquy, were separated from the others, those inner appearances would not belong to Napoleon nor have any home in the knowable world. That which physics, with its concomitant psychology, might discover in a man is the sum of what is true about him, seeing that a man is a concretion in existence, the fragment of a world, and not a definition. Appearances define the constituent elements of his reality, which could not be better known than through their means.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote E: Aristotle called the soul the first entelechy of such a body. This first entelechy is what we should call life, since it is possessed by a man asleep. The French I know but do not use is in its first entelechy; the French I am actually speaking is in its second. Consciousness is therefore the second or actualised entelechy of its body.]

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VI. THE NATURE OF INTENT

[Sidenote: Dialectic better than physics.]

Common knowledge passes from memory to history and from history to mechanism; and having reached that point it may stop to look back, not without misgivings, over the course it has traversed, and thus become psychology. These investigations, taken together, constitute physics, or the science of existence. But this is only half of science and on the whole the less interesting and less fundamental half. No existence is of moment to a man, not even his own, unless it touches his will and fulfils or thwarts his intent. Unless he is concerned that existences should be of specific kinds, unless he is interested in form, he can hardly be interested in being. At the very least in terms of pleasure versus pain, light versus darkness, comfort versus terror, the flying moment must be loaded with obloquy or excellence if its passage is not to remain a dead fact, and to sink from the sphere of actuality altogether into that droning limbo of potentialities which we call matter. Being which is indifferent to form is only the material of being. To exist is nothing if you have nothing to do, if there is nothing to choose or to distinguish, or if those things which belong to a chosen form are not gathered into it before your eyes, to express what we call a truth or an excellence.

Existence naturally precedes any idealisation of it which men can contrive (since they, at least, must exist first), yet in the order of values knowledge of existence is subsidiary to knowledge of ideals. If it be true that a good physics is as yet the predominant need in science, and that man is still most troubled by his ignorance of matters of fact, this circumstance marks his illiberal condition. Without knowledge of existence nothing can be done; but nothing is really done until something else is known also, the use or excellence that existence may have. It is a great pity that those finer temperaments that are naturally addressed to the ideal should have turned their energies to producing bad physics, or to preventing others from establishing natural truths; for if physics were established on a firm basis the idealists would for the first time have a free field. They might then recover their proper function of expressing the mind honestly, and disdain the sorry attempt to prolong confusion and to fish in troubled waters.

[Sidenote: Maladjustments to nature render physics conspicuous and unpleasant.]

Perhaps if physical truth had not been so hugely misrepresented in men’s faith and conduct, it would not need to be minutely revealed or particularly emphasised. When the conditions surrounding life are not rightly faced by instinct they are inevitably forced upon reflection through painful shocks; and for a long time the new habit thus forced upon men brings to consciousness not so much the movement of consciousness itself as the points at which its movement impinges on the external world and feels checks and frictions. Physics thus becomes inordinately conspicuous (as when philology submerges the love of letters) for lack of a good disposition that should allow us to take physics for granted. Much in nature is delightful to know and to keep in mind, but much also (the whole infinite remainder) is obscure and uninteresting; and were we practically well adjusted to its issue we might gladly absolve ourselves from studying its processes. In a world that in extent and complexity so far outruns human energies, physical knowledge ought to be largely virtual; that is, nature ought to be represented by a suitable attitude toward it, by the attitude which reason would dictate were knowledge complete, and not by explicit ideas.

[Sidenote: Physics should be largely virtual.]

The ancients were happily inspired when they imagined that beyond the gods and the fixed stars the cosmos came to an end, for the empyrean beyond was nothing in particular, nothing to trouble one’s self about. Many existences are either out of relation to man altogether or have so infinitesimal an influence on his experience that they may be sufficiently represented there by an atom of star-dust; and it is probable that if, out of pure curiosity, we wished to consider very remote beings and had the means of doing so, we should find the detail of existence in them wholly incommensurable with anything we can conceive. Such beings could be known virtually only, in that we might speak of them in the right key, representing them in appropriate symbols, and might move in their company with the right degree of respectful indifference.

[Sidenote: and dialectic explicit.]

The present situation of science, however, reverses the ideal one. Physics, in so far as it exists, is explicit, and at variance with our acquired attitude toward things; so that we may justly infer, by the shock our little knowledge gives us, that our presumptions and assumptions have been so egregious that more knowledge would give us still greater shocks. Meantime dialectic, or knowledge of ideal things, remains merely virtual. The ideal usually comes before us only in revulsions which we cannot help feeling against some scandalous situation or some intolerable muddle. We have no time or genius left, after our agitated soundings and balings, to think of navigation as a fine art, or to consider freely the sea and sky or the land we are seeking. The proper occupation of the mind is gone, or rather not initiated.

A further bad consequence of this illiberal state is that, among many who have, in spite of the times, adoration in their souls, to adore physics, to worship Being, seems a philosophical religion, whereas, of course, it is the essence of idolatry. The true God is an object of intent, an ideal of excellence and knowledge, not a term belonging to sense or to probable hypothesis or to the prudent management of affairs. After we have squared our accounts with nature and taken sufficient thought for our bodily necessities, the eyes can be lifted for the first time to the eternal. The rest was superstition and the quaking use of a false physics. That appeal to the supernatural which while the danger threatens is but forlorn medicine, after the blow has fallen may turn to sublime wisdom. This wisdom has cast out the fear of material evils, and dreads only that the divine should not come down and be worthily entertained among us. In art, in politics, in that form of religion which is superior, and not inferior, to politics and art, we define and embody intent; and the intent embodied dignifies the work and lends interest to its conditions. So, in science, it is dialectic that makes physics speculative and worthy of a free mind. The baser utilities of material knowledge would leave life itself perfectly vain, if they did not help it to take on an ideal shape. Ideal life, in so far as it constitutes science, is dialectical. It consists in seeing how things hang together perspicuously and how the later phases of any process fill out—as in good music—the tendency and promise of what went before. This derivation may be mathematical or it may be moral; but in either case the data and problem define the result, dialectic being insight into their inherent correspondence.

[Sidenote: Intent is vital and indescribable.]

Intent is one of many evidences that the intellect’s essence is practical. Intent is action in the sphere of thought; it corresponds to transition and derivation in the natural world. Analytic psychology is obliged to ignore intent, for it is obliged to regard it merely as a feeling; but while the feeling of intent is a fact like any other, intent itself is an aspiration, a passage, the recognition of an object which not only is not a part of the feeling given but is often incapable of being a feeling or a fact at all. What happened to motion under the Eleatic analysis happens to intent under an anatomising reflection. The parts do not contain the movement of transition which makes them a whole. Moral experience is not expressible in physical categories, because while you may give place and date for every feeling that something is important or is absurd, you cannot so express what these feelings have discovered and have wished to confide to you. The importance and the absurdity have disappeared. Yet it is this pronouncement concerning what things are absurd or important that makes the intent of those judgments. To touch it you have to enter the moral world; that is, you have to bring some sympathetic or hostile judgment to bear on those you are considering and to meet intent, not by noting its existence, but by estimating its value, by collating it with your own intent. If some one says two and two are five, you are no counter-mathematician when you conscientiously put it down that he said so. Your science is not relevant to his intent until you run some risk yourself in that arena and say, No: two and two are four.

[Sidenote: It is analogous to flux in existence]

Feelings and ideas, when plucked and separately considered, do not retain the intent that made them cognitive or living; yet in their native medium they certainly lived and knew. If this ideality or transcendence seems a mystery, it is such only in the sense in which every initial or typical fact is mysterious. Every category would be unthinkable if it were not actually used. The mystery in this instance has, however, all that can best serve to make a mystery homely and amiable. It is supported by a strong analogy to other familiar mysteries. The fact that intellect has intent, and does not constitute or contain what it envisages, is like the fact that time flows, that bodies gravitate, that experience is gathered, or that existence is suspended between being and not being. Propagation in animals is mysterious and familiar in the same fashion. Cognition, too, is an expedient for vanquishing instability. As reproduction circumvents mortality and preserves a semblance of permanence in the midst of change, so intent regards what is not yet, or not here, or what exists no longer. Thus the pulverisation proper to existence is vanquished by thought, which in a moment announces or commemorates other moments, together with the manner of their approach or recession. The mere image of what is absent constitutes no knowledge of it; a dream is not knowledge of a world like it existing elsewhere; it is simply another more fragile world. What renders the image cognitive is the intent that projects it and deputes it to be representative. It is cognitive only in use, when it is the vehicle of an assurance which may be right or wrong, because it takes something ulterior for its standard.

[Sidenote: It expresses natural life.]

We may give intent a somewhat more congenial aspect if we remember that thought comes to animals in proportion to their docility in the world and to their practical competence. The more plastic a being is to experience, so long as he retains vital continuity and a cumulative structure, the more intelligent he becomes. Intelligence is an expression of adaptation, of impressionable and prophetic structure. What wonder, then, that intelligence should speak of the things that inspire it and that lend it its oracular and practical character, namely, of things at that moment absent and merely potential, in other words, of the surrounding world? Mere feeling might suffice to translate into consciousness each particle of protoplasm in its isolation; but to translate the relations of that particle to what is not itself and to express its response to those environing presences, intent and conscious signification are required. Intellect transcends the given and means the absent because life, of which intellect is the fulfilment or entelechy, is itself absorbed from without and radiated outward. As life depends on an equilibrium of material processes which reach far beyond the individual they sustain in being, so intent is a recognition of outlying existences which sustain in being that very sympathy by which they are recognised. Intent and life are more than analogous. If we use the word life in an ideal sense, the two are coincident, for, as Aristotle says, the act proper to intellect is life.[F] The flux is so pervasive, so subtle in its persistency, that even those miracles which suspend it must somehow share its destiny. Intent bridges many a chasm, but only by leaping across. The life that is sustained for years, the political or moral purpose that may bind whole races together, is condemned to be partly a memory and partly a plan and wholly an ideal. Its scope is nothing but the range to which it can continually extend its sympathies and its power of representation. Its moments have nothing in common except their loyalties and a conspiring interest in what is not themselves.

[Sidenote: It has a material basis.]

This moral energy, so closely analogous to physical interplay, is of course not without a material basis. Spiritual sublimation does not consist in not using matter but in using it up, in making it all useful. When life becomes rational it continues to be mechanical and to take up room and energy in the natural world. That new direction of attention upon form which finds in facts instances of ideas, does not occur without a certain heat and labour in the brain. In its most intimate and supernatural functions intellect has natural conditions. In dreams and madness intent is confused and wayward, in idiocy it is suspended altogether; nor has discourse any other pledge that it is addressing kindred interlocutors except that which it receives from the disposition and habit of bodies. People who have not yet been born into the world have not yet begun to think about it.

There is, of course, an inner dialectical relevance among all propositions that have the same ideal theme, no matter how remote or unknown to one another those who utter the propositions may be; but the medium in which this infinite dialectical network is woven is motionless, and indifferent to the direction in which thought might traverse it; in other words, it is not discourse or intelligence but eternal truth. From the point of view of experience this prior dialectical relation of form to form is merely potential; for the thoughts between which it would obtain need never exist or be enacted. There is society only among incarnate ideas; and it is only by expressing some material situation that an idea is selected out of the infinity of not impossible ideas and promoted to the temporal dignity of actual thought.

[Sidenote: It is necessarily relevant to earth.]

Moreover, even if the faculty of intelligence were disembodied and could exist in a vacuum, it would still be a vain possession if no data were given for it to operate upon and if no particular natural structure, animal, social, or artistic, were at hand for intelligence to ally itself to and defend. Reason would in that case die of inanition; it would have no subject-matter and no sanction, as well as no seat. Intelligence is not a substance; it is a principle of order and of art; it requires a given situation and some particular natural interest to bring it into play. In fact, it is nothing but a name for the empire which conscious, but at bottom irrational, interests attain over the field in which they operate; it is the fruition of life, the token of successful operation.

Every theme or motive in the Life of Reason expresses some instinct rooted in the body and incidental to natural organisation. The intent by which memory refers to past or absent experience, or the intent by which perception becomes recognition, is a transcript of relations in which events actually stand to one another. Such intent represents modifications of structure and action important to life, modifications that have responded to forces on which life is dependent. Both desire and meaning translate into cognitive or ideal energy, into intent, mechanical relations subsisting in nature. These mechanical relations give practical force to the thought that expresses them, and the thought in turn gives significance and value to the forces that subserve it. Fulfilment is mutual, in one direction bringing material potentialities to the light and making them actual and conscious, and in the other direction embodying intent in the actual forms of things and manifesting reason. Nothing could be more ill-considered than the desire to disembody reason. Reason cries aloud for reunion with the material world which she needs not only for a basis but, what concerns her even more, for a theme.

In private and silent discourse, when words and grammar are swathed in reverie, the material basis and reference of thought may be forgotten. Desire and intent may then seem to disport themselves in a purely ideal realm; moral or logical tensions alone may seem to determine the whole process. Meditative persons are even inclined to regard the disembodied life which they think they enjoy at such times as the true and native form of experience; all organs, applications, and expressions of thought they deprecate and call accidental. As some pious souls reject dogma to reach pure faith and suspend prayer to enjoy union, so some mystical logicians drop the world in order to grasp reality. It is an exquisite suicide; but the energy and ideal that sustain such a flight are annihilated by its issue, and the soul drops like a paper balloon consumed by the very flame that wafted it. No thought is found without an organ; none is conceivable without an expression which is that organ’s visible emanation; and none would be significant without a subject-matter lying in the world of which that organ is a part.

[Sidenote: The basis of intent becomes appreciable in language.]

The natural structure underlying intent is latent in silent thought, and its existence might be denied by a sceptical thinker over whose mind the analogies and spirit of physics exercised little influence. This hypothetical structure is not, however, without obvious extensions which imply its existence even where we do not perceive it directly. A smile or a blush makes visible to the observer movements which must have been at work in the body while thought occupied the mind—even if, as more often happens, the blush or smile did not precede and introduce the feeling they suggest, the feeling which in our verbal mythology is said to cause them. No one would be so simple as to suppose that such involuntary signs of feeling spring directly and by miracle out of feeling. They surely continue some previous bodily commotion which determines their material character, so that laughter, for instance, becomes a sign of amusement rather than of rage, which it might just as well have represented, so far as the abstract feeling itself is concerned.

In the same way a sigh, a breath, a word are but the last stage and superficial explosion of nervous tensions, tensions which from the point of view of their other eventual expressions we might call interplaying impulses or potential memories. As these material seethings underlay the budding thought, so the uttered word, when it comes, underlies the perfect conception. The word, in so far as it is material, undeniably continues an internal material process, for aphasia and garrulity have known physical causes. In the vibrations which we call words the hidden complexities of cerebral action fly out, so to speak, into the air; they become recognisable sounds emitted by lips and tongue and received by the ear. The uttered word produces an obvious commotion in nature; through it thought, being expressed in that its material basis is extended outward, becomes at the same moment rational and practical; for its expression enters into the chain of its future conditions and becomes an omen of that thought’s continuance, repetition, and improvement. Thought’s rational function consists, as we then perceive, in expressing a natural situation and improving that situation by expressing it, until such expression becomes a perfect and adequate state of knowledge, which justifies both itself and its conditions. Expression makes thought a power in the very world from which thought drew its being, and renders it in some measure self-sustaining and self-assured.

A thirsty man, let us say, begs for drink. Had his petition been a wordless desire it might have been supposed, though falsely, to be a disembodied and quite immaterial event, a transcendental attitude of will, without conditions or consequences, but somehow with an absolute moral dignity. But when the petition became articulate and audible to a fellow-mortal, who thereupon proceeded to fetch a cup of water, the desire, through the cry that expressed it, obviously asserted itself in the mechanical world, to which it already secretly belonged by virtue of its cause, a parched body. This material background for moral energy, which even an inarticulate yearning would not have lacked, becomes in language an overt phenomenon, linked observably with all other objects and processes.

Language is accordingly an overflow of the physical basis of thought. It is an audible gesture, more refined than the visible, but in the same sense an automatic extension of nervous and muscular processes. Words underlie the thought they are said to express—in truth it is the thought that is the flower and expression of the language—much as the body underlies the mind.

[Sidenote: Intent starts from a datum.]

Language contains, side by side two distinct elements. One is the meaning or sense of the words—a logical projection given to sensuous terms. The other is the sensuous vehicle of that meaning—the sound, sign, or gesture. This sensuous term is a fulcrum for the lever of signification, a point d’appui which may be indefinitely attenuated in rapid discourse, but not altogether discarded. Intent though it vaults high must have something to spring from, or it would lend meaning to nothing. The minimal sensuous term that subsists serves as a clue to a whole system of possible assertions radiating from it. It becomes the sign for an essence or idea, a logical hypostasis corresponding in discourse to that material hypostasis of perceptions which is called an external thing.

The hypostasised total of rational and just discourse is the truth. Like the physical world, the truth is external and in the main potential. Its ideal consistency and permanence serve to make it a standard and background for fleeting assertions, just as the material hypostasis called nature is the standard and background for all momentary perceptions. What exists of truth in direct experience is at any moment infinitesimal, as what exists of nature is, but all that either contains might be represented in experience at one time or another.[G]

[Sidenote: and is carried by a feeling.]

The tensions and relations of words which make grammar or make poetry are immediate in essence, the force of language being just as empirical as the reality of things. To ask a thinker what he means by meaning is as futile as to ask a carpenter what he means by wood; to discover it you must emulate them and repeat their experience—which indeed you will hardly be able to do if some sophist has so entangled your reason that you can neither understand what you see nor assert what you mean. But as the carpenter’s acquaintance with wood might be considerably refined if he became a naturalist or liberalised if he became a carver, so a casual speaker’s sense of what he means might be better focussed by dialectic and more delicately shaded by literary training. Meantime the vital act called intent, by which consciousness becomes cognitive and practical, would remain at heart an indescribable experience, a sense of spiritual life as radical and specific as the sense of heat.

[Sidenote: It demands conventional expression.]

Significant language forms a great system of ideal tensions, contained in the mutual relations of parts of speech, and of clauses in propositions. Of these tensions the intent in a man’s mind at any moment is a living specimen. Experience at that moment may have a significance, a transitive force, that asks to be enshrined in some permanent expression; the more acute and irrevocable the crisis is, the more urgent the need of transmitting to other moments some cognisance of what was once so great. But were this experience to exhale its spirit in a vacuum, using no conventional and transmissible medium of expression, it would be foiled in its intent. It would leave no monument and achieve no immortality in the world of representation; for the experience and its expression would remain identical and perish together, just as a perception and its object would remain identical and perish together if there were no intelligence to discover the material world, to which the perplexing shifts of sensation may be habitually referred. Spontaneous expression, if it is to be recognisable and therefore in effect expressive, labours under the necessity of subordinating itself to an ideal system of expressions, a permanent language in which its spontaneous utterances may be embedded. By virtue of such adoption into a common medium expression becomes interpretable; a later moment may then reconstruct the past out of its surviving memorial.

Intent, beside the form it has in language, where it makes the soul of grammar, has many other modes of expression, in mathematical and logical reasoning, in action, and in those contemplated and suspended acts which we call estimation, policy, or morals. Moral philosophy, the wisdom of Socrates, is merely a consideration of intent. In intent we pass over from existence to ideality, the nexus lying in the propulsive nature of life which could not have been capped by any form of knowledge which was not itself in some way transitive and ambitious. Intent, though it looks away from existence and the actual, is the most natural and pervasive of things. Physics and dialectic meet in this: that the second brings to fruition what the first describes, namely, existence, and that both have their transcendental root in the flux of being. Matter cannot exist without some form, much as by shedding every form in succession it may proclaim its aversion to fixity and its radical formlessness or infinitude. Nor can form, without the treacherous aid of matter, pass from its ideal potentiality into selected and instant being.

[Sidenote: A fable about matter and form.]

In order to live—if such a myth may be allowed—the Titan Matter was eager to disguise his incorrigible vagueness and pretend to be something. He accordingly addressed himself to the beautiful company of Forms, sisters whom he thought all equally beautiful, though their number was endless, and equally fit to satisfy his heart. He wooed them hypocritically, with no intention of wedding them; yet he uttered their names in such seductive accents (called by mortals intelligence and toil) that the virgin goddesses offered no resistance—at least such of them as happened to be near or of a facile disposition. They were presently deserted by their unworthy lover; yet they, too, in that moment’s union, had tasted the sweetness of life. The heaven to which they returned was no longer an infinite mathematical paradise. It was crossed by memories of earth, and a warmer breath lingered in some of its lanes and grottoes. Henceforth its nymphs could not forget that they had awakened a passion, and that, unmoved themselves, they had moved a strange indomitable giant to art and love.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote F: Cf. the motto on the title-page.]

[Footnote G: Not, of course, in human experience, which is incapable of containing the heart of a flea, much less what may be endured in remoter spheres. But if an intelligence were constructed ad hoc there is nothing real that might not fall within the scope of experience. The difference between existence and truth on the one side and knowledge or representation on the other may be reduced to this: that knowledge brings what exists or what is true under apperception, while being diffuses what is understood into an impartial subsistence. As truth is indistinguishable from an absolute motionless intellect, which should no longer be a function of life but merely a static order, so existence is indistinguishable from an absolute motionless experience, which should no longer be a foreshortening or representation of anything. This existence would be motionless in the sense that it would “mark time,” for of course every fact in it might be a fact of transition. The whole system, however, would have a static ideal constitution, since the fact that things change in a certain way or stand in a certain order is as much a fact as any other; and it is not a logical necessity, either, but a brute matter of fact that might well have been otherwise.]

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