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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy
+by George Santayana
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy
+       Five Essays
+
+Author: George Santayana
+
+Release Date: September 17, 2005 [EBook #16712]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME TURNS OF THOUGHT IN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Michael Ciesielski and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+SOME TURNS OF THOUGHT IN
+MODERN PHILOSOPHY
+
+_Five Essays_
+
+
+BY
+
+
+GEORGE SANTAYANA
+
+
+NEW YORK
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+1933
+
+
+
+
+Published under the auspices of
+THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE
+
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+I. Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense                      page 1
+
+Paper read before the Royal Society of Literature on the
+occasion of the Tercentenary of the birth of John Locke.
+With some Supplementary Notes
+
+
+II. Fifty Years of British Idealism                                 48
+
+Reflections on the republication of Bradley's _Ethical Studies_
+
+
+III. Revolutions in Science                                         71
+
+Some Comments on the Theory of Relativity and the new Physics
+
+
+IV. A Long Way Round to Nirvana                                     87
+
+Development of a suggestion found in Freud's _Beyond the
+Pleasure Principle_
+
+
+V. The Prestige of the Infinite                                    102
+
+A review of Julien Benda's _Sketch of a consistent theory of
+the relations between God and the World_
+
+
+The Author's acknowledgments are due to the Editors of _The New Adelphi_,
+_The Dial_, and the _Journal of Philosophy_, in which one or more of these
+Essays originally appeared.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+LOCKE AND THE FRONTIERS OF COMMON SENSE[1]
+
+
+A good portrait of Locke would require an elaborate background. His is not
+a figure to stand statuesquely in a void: the pose might not seem grand
+enough for bronze or marble. Rather he should be painted in the manner of
+the Dutch masters, in a sunny interior, scrupulously furnished with all
+the implements of domestic comfort and philosophic enquiry: the Holy Bible
+open majestically before him, and beside it that other revelation--the
+terrestrial globe. His hand might be pointing to a microscope set for
+examining the internal constitution of a beetle: but for the moment his
+eye should be seen wandering through the open window, to admire the
+blessings of thrift and liberty manifest in the people so worthily busy in
+the market-place, wrong as many a monkish notion might be that still
+troubled their poor heads. From them his enlarged thoughts would easily
+pass to the stout carved ships in the river beyond, intrepidly setting
+sail for the Indies, or for savage America. Yes, he too had travelled, and
+not only in thought. He knew how many strange nations and false religions
+lodged in this round earth, itself but a speck in the universe. There were
+few ingenious authors that he had not perused, or philosophical
+instruments that he had not, as far as possible, examined and tested; and
+no man better than he could understand and prize the recent discoveries of
+"the incomparable Mr Newton". Nevertheless, a certain uneasiness in that
+spare frame, a certain knitting of the brows in that aquiline countenance,
+would suggest that in the midst of their earnest eloquence the
+philosopher's thoughts might sometimes come to a stand. Indeed, the
+visible scene did not exhaust the complexity of his problem; for there was
+also what he called "the scene of ideas", immaterial and private, but
+often more crowded and pressing than the public scene. Locke was the
+father of modern psychology, and the birth of this airy monster, this
+half-natural changeling, was not altogether easy or fortunate.[2]
+
+I wish my erudition allowed me to fill in this picture as the subject
+deserves, and to trace home the sources of Locke's opinions, and their
+immense influence. Unfortunately, I can consider him--what is hardly
+fair--only as a pure philosopher: for had Locke's mind been more profound,
+it might have been less influential. He was in sympathy with the coming
+age, and was able to guide it: an age that confided in easy, eloquent
+reasoning, and proposed to be saved, in this world and the next, with as
+little philosophy and as little religion as possible. Locke played in the
+eighteenth century very much the part that fell to Kant in the nineteenth.
+When quarrelled with, no less than when embraced, his opinions became a
+point of departure for universal developments. The more we look into the
+matter, the more we are impressed by the patriarchal dignity of Locke's
+mind. Father of psychology, father of the criticism of knowledge, father
+of theoretical liberalism, god-father at least of the American political
+system, of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedia, at home he was the ancestor of
+that whole school of polite moderate opinion which can unite liberal
+Christianity with mechanical science and with psychological idealism. He
+was invincibly rooted in a prudential morality, in a rationalised
+Protestantism, in respect for liberty and law: above all he was deeply
+convinced, as he puts it, "that the handsome conveniences of life are
+better than nasty penury". Locke still speaks, or spoke until lately,
+through many a modern mind, when this mind was most sincere; and two
+hundred years before Queen Victoria he was a Victorian in essence.
+
+A chief element in this modernness of Locke was something that had hardly
+appeared before in pure philosophy, although common in religion: I mean,
+the tendency to deny one's own presuppositions--not by accident or
+inadvertently, but proudly and with an air of triumph. Presuppositions are
+imposed on all of us by life itself: for instance the presupposition that
+life is to continue, and that it is worth living. Belief is born on the
+wing and awakes to many tacit commitments. Afterwards, in reflection, we
+may wonder at finding these presuppositions on our hands and, being
+ignorant of the natural causes which have imposed them on the animal mind,
+we may be offended at them. Their arbitrary and dogmatic character will
+tempt us to condemn them, and to take for granted that the analysis which
+undermines them is justified, and will prove fruitful. But this critical
+assurance in its turn seems to rely on a dubious presupposition, namely,
+that human opinion must always evolve in a single line, dialectically,
+providentially, and irresistibly. It is at least conceivable that the
+opposite should sometimes be the case. Some of the primitive
+presuppositions of human reason might have been correct and inevitable,
+whilst the tendency to deny them might have sprung from a plausible
+misunderstanding, or the exaggeration of a half-truth: so that the
+critical opinion itself, after destroying the spontaneous assumptions on
+which it rested, might be incapable of subsisting.
+
+In Locke the central presuppositions, which he embraced heartily and
+without question, were those of common sense. He adopted what he calls a
+"plain, historical method", fit, in his own words, "to be brought into
+well-bred company and polite conversation". Men, "barely by the use of
+their natural faculties", might attain to all the knowledge possible or
+worth having. All children, he writes, "that are born into this world,
+being surrounded with bodies that perpetually and diversely affect them"
+have "a variety of ideas imprinted" on their minds. "External material
+things as objects of Sensation, and the operations of our own minds as
+objects of Reflection, are to me", he continues, "the only originals from
+which all our ideas take their beginnings." "Every act of sensation", he
+writes elsewhere, "when duly considered, gives us an equal view of both
+parts of nature, the corporeal and the spiritual. For whilst I know, by
+seeing or hearing,... that there is some corporeal being without me, the
+object of that sensation, I do more certainly know that there is some
+spiritual being within me that sees and hears."
+
+Resting on these clear perceptions, the natural philosophy of Locke falls
+into two parts, one strictly physical and scientific, the other critical
+and psychological. In respect to the composition of matter, Locke accepted
+the most advanced theory of his day, which happened to be a very old one:
+the theory of Democritus that the material universe contains nothing but a
+multitude of solid atoms coursing through infinite space: but Locke added
+a religious note to this materialism by suggesting that infinite space, in
+its sublimity, must be an attribute of God. He also believed what few
+materialists would venture to assert, that if we could thoroughly examine
+the cosmic mechanism we should see the demonstrable necessity of every
+complication that ensues, even of the existence and character of mind: for
+it was no harder for God to endow matter with the power of thinking than
+to endow it with the power of moving.
+
+In the atomic theory we have a graphic image asserted to describe
+accurately, or even exhaustively, the intrinsic constitution of things, or
+their primary qualities. Perhaps, in so far as physical hypotheses must
+remain graphic at all, it is an inevitable theory. It was first suggested
+by the wearing out and dissolution of all material objects, and by the
+specks of dust floating in a sunbeam; and it is confirmed, on an enlarged
+scale, by the stellar universe as conceived by modern astronomy. When
+today we talk of nuclei and electrons, if we imagine them at all, we
+imagine them as atoms. But it is all a picture, prophesying what we might
+see through a sufficiently powerful microscope; the important
+philosophical question is the one raised by the other half of Locke's
+natural philosophy, by optics and the general criticism of perception. How
+far, if at all, may we trust the images in our minds to reveal the nature
+of external things?
+
+On this point the doctrine of Locke, through Descartes,[3] was also
+derived from Democritus. It was that all the sensible qualities of things,
+except position, shape, solidity, number and motion, were only ideas in
+us, projected and falsely regarded as lodged in things. In the things,
+these imputed or secondary qualities were simply powers, inherent in their
+atomic constitution, and calculated to excite sensations of that character
+in our bodies. This doctrine is readily established by Locke's plain
+historical method, when applied to the study of rainbows, mirrors, effects
+of perspective, dreams, jaundice, madness, and the will to believe: all of
+which go to convince us that the ideas which we impulsively assume to be
+qualities of objects are always, in their seat and origin, evolved in our
+own heads.
+
+These two parts of Locke's natural philosophy, however, are not in perfect
+equilibrium. _All_ the feelings and ideas of an animal must be equally
+conditioned by his organs and passions,[4] and he cannot be aware of what
+goes on beyond him, except as it affects his own life.[5] How then could
+Locke, or could Democritus, suppose that his ideas of space and atoms were
+less human, less graphic, summary, and symbolic, than his sensations of
+sound or colour? The language of science, no less than that of sense,
+should have been recognised to be a human language; and the nature of
+anything existent collateral with ourselves, be that collateral existence
+material or mental, should have been confessed to be a subject for faith
+and for hypothesis, never, by any possibility, for absolute or direct
+intuition.
+
+There is no occasion to take alarm at this doctrine as if it condemned us
+to solitary confinement, and to ignorance of the world in which we live.
+We see and know the world through our eyes and our intelligence, in visual
+and in intellectual terms: how else should a world be seen or known which
+is not the figment of a dream, but a collateral power, pressing and alien?
+In the cognisance which an animal may take of his surroundings--and surely
+all animals take such cognisance--the subjective and moral character of
+his feelings, on finding himself so surrounded, does not destroy their
+cognitive value. These feelings, as Locke says, are signs: to take them
+for signs is the essence of intelligence. Animals that are sensitive
+physically are also sensitive morally, and feel the friendliness or
+hostility which surrounds them. Even pain and pleasure are no idle
+sensations, satisfied with their own presence: they violently summon
+attention to the objects that are their source. Can love or hate be felt
+without being felt towards something--something near and potent, yet
+external, uncontrolled, and mysterious? When I dodge a missile or pick a
+berry, is it likely that my mind should stop to dwell on its pure
+sensations or ideas without recognising or pursuing something material?
+Analytic reflection often ignores the essential energy of mind, which is
+originally more intelligent than sensuous, more appetitive and dogmatic
+than aesthetic. But the feelings and ideas of an active animal cannot help
+uniting internal moral intensity with external physical reference; and the
+natural conditions of sensibility require that perceptions should owe
+their existence and quality to the living organism with its moral bias,
+and that at the same time they should be addressed to the external objects
+which entice that organism or threaten it.
+
+All ambitions must be defeated when they ask for the impossible. The
+ambition to know is not an exception; and certainly our perceptions cannot
+tell us how the world would look if nobody saw it, or how valuable it
+would be if nobody cared for it. But our perceptions, as Locke again said,
+are sufficient for our welfare and appropriate to our condition. They are
+not only a wonderful entertainment in themselves, but apart from their
+sensuous and grammatical quality, by their distribution and method of
+variation, they may inform us most exactly about the order and mechanism
+of nature. We see in the science of today how completely the most accurate
+knowledge--proved to be accurate by its application in the arts--may shed
+every pictorial element, and the whole language of experience, to become a
+pure method of calculation and control. And by a pleasant compensation,
+our aesthetic life may become freer, more self-sufficing, more humbly
+happy in itself: and without trespassing in any way beyond the modesty of
+nature, we may consent to be like little children, chirping our human
+note; since the life of reason in us may well become science in its
+validity, whilst remaining poetry in its texture.
+
+I think, then, that by a slight re-arrangement of Locke's pronouncements
+in natural philosophy, they could be made inwardly consistent, and still
+faithful to the first presuppositions of common sense, although certainly
+far more chastened and sceptical than impulsive opinion is likely to be
+in the first instance.
+
+There were other presuppositions in the philosophy of Locke besides his
+fundamental naturalism; and in his private mind probably the most
+important was his Christian faith, which was not only confident and
+sincere, but prompted him at times to high speculation. He had friends
+among the Cambridge Platonists, and he found in Newton a brilliant example
+of scientific rigour capped with mystical insights. Yet if we consider
+Locke's philosophical position in the abstract, his Christianity almost
+disappears. In form his theology and ethics were strictly rationalistic;
+yet one who was a Deist in philosophy might remain a Christian in
+religion. There was no great harm in a special revelation, provided it
+were simple and short, and left the broad field of truth open in almost
+every direction to free and personal investigation. A free man and a good
+man would certainly never admit, as coming from God, any doctrine contrary
+to his private reason or political interest; and the moral precepts
+actually vouchsafed to us in the Gospels were most acceptable, seeing
+that they added a sublime eloquence to maxims which sound reason would
+have arrived at in any case.
+
+Evidently common sense had nothing to fear from religious faith of this
+character; but the matter could not end there. Common sense is not more
+convinced of anything than of the difference between good and evil,
+advantage and disaster; and it cannot dispense with a moral interpretation
+of the universe. Socrates, who spoke initially for common sense, even
+thought the moral interpretation of existence the whole of philosophy. He
+would not have seen anything comic in the satire of Molière making his
+chorus of young doctors chant in unison that opium causes sleep because it
+has a dormitive virtue. The virtues or moral uses of things, according to
+Socrates, were the reason why the things had been created and were what
+they were; the admirable virtues of opium defined its perfection, and the
+perfection of a thing was the full manifestation of its deepest nature.
+Doubtless this moral interpretation of the universe had been overdone, and
+it had been a capital error in Socrates to make that interpretation
+exclusive and to substitute it for natural philosophy. Locke, who was
+himself a medical man, knew what a black cloak for ignorance and villainy
+Scholastic verbiage might be in that profession. He also knew, being an
+enthusiast for experimental science, that in order to control the movement
+of matter--which is to realise those virtues and perfections--it is better
+to trace the movement of matter materialistically; for it is in the act of
+manifesting its own powers, and not, as Socrates and the Scholastics
+fancied, by obeying a foreign magic, that matter sometimes assumes or
+restores the forms so precious in the healer's or the moralist's eyes. At
+the same time, the manner in which the moral world rests upon the natural,
+though divined, perhaps, by a few philosophers, has not been generally
+understood; and Locke, whose broad humanity could not exclude the moral
+interpretation of nature, was driven in the end to the view of Socrates.
+He seriously invoked the Scholastic maxim that nothing can produce that
+which it does not contain. For this reason the unconscious, after all,
+could never have given rise to consciousness. Observation and experiment
+could not be allowed to decide this point: the moral interpretation of
+things, because more deeply rooted in human experience, must envelop the
+physical interpretation, and must have the last word.
+
+It was characteristic of Locke's simplicity and intensity that he retained
+these insulated sympathies in various quarters. A further instance of his
+many-sidedness was his fidelity to pure intuition, his respect for the
+infallible revelation of ideal being, such as we have of sensible
+qualities or of mathematical relations. In dreams and in hallucinations
+appearances may deceive us, and the objects we think we see may not exist
+at all. Yet in suffering an illusion we must entertain an idea; and the
+manifest character of these ideas is that of which alone, Locke thinks, we
+can have certain "knowledge".
+
+     "These", he writes, "are two very different things and carefully to
+     be distinguished: it being one thing to perceive and know the idea
+     of white or black, and quite another to examine what kind of
+     particles they must be, and how arranged ... to make any object
+     appear white or black." "A man infallibly knows, as soon as ever he
+     has them in his mind, that the ideas he calls white and round are
+     the very ideas they are, and that they are not other ideas which he
+     calls red or square.... This ... the mind ... always perceives at
+     first sight; and if ever there happen any doubt about it, it will
+     always be found to be about the names and not the ideas
+     themselves."
+
+This sounds like high Platonic doctrine for a philosopher of the Left; but
+Locke's utilitarian temper very soon reasserted itself in this subject.
+Mathematical ideas were not only lucid but true: and he demanded this
+truth, which he called "reality", of all ideas worthy of consideration:
+mere ideas would be worthless. Very likely he forgot, in his philosophic
+puritanism, that fiction and music might have an intrinsic charm. Where
+the frontier of human wisdom should be drawn in this direction was clearly
+indicated, in Locke's day, by Spinoza, who says:
+
+     "If, in keeping non-existent things present to the imagination, the
+     mind were at the same time aware that those things did not exist,
+     surely it would regard this gift of imagination as a virtue in its
+     own constitution, not as a vice: especially if such an imaginative
+     faculty depended on nothing except the mind's own nature: that is
+     to say, if this mental faculty of imagination were free".
+
+But Locke had not so firm a hold on truth that he could afford to play
+with fancy; and as he pushed forward the claims of human jurisdiction
+rather too far in physics, by assuming the current science to be literally
+true, so, in the realm of imagination, he retrenched somewhat illiberally
+our legitimate possessions. Strange that as modern philosophy transfers
+the visible wealth of nature more and more to the mind, the mind should
+seem to lose courage and to become ashamed of its own fertility. The
+hard-pressed natural man will not indulge his imagination unless it poses
+for truth; and being half aware of this imposition, he is more troubled at
+the thought of being deceived than at the fact of being mechanised or
+being bored: and he would wish to escape imagination altogether. A good
+God, he murmurs, could not have made us poets against our will.
+
+Against his will, however, Locke was drawn to enlarge the subjective
+sphere. The actual existence of mind was evident: you had only to notice
+the fact that you were thinking. Conscious mind, being thus known to
+exist directly and independently of the body, was a primary constituent of
+reality: it was a fact on its own account.[6] Common sense seemed to
+testify to this, not only when confronted with the "I think, therefore I
+am" of Descartes, but whenever a thought produced an action. Since mind
+and body interacted,[7] each must be as real as the other and, as it were,
+on the same plane of being. Locke, like a good Protestant, felt the right
+of the conscious inner man to assert himself: and when he looked into his
+own mind, he found nothing to define this mind except the ideas which
+occupied it. The existence which he was so sure of in himself was
+therefore the existence of his ideas.
+
+Here, by an insensible shift in the meaning of the word "idea", a
+momentous revolution had taken place in psychology. Ideas had originally
+meant objective terms distinguished in thought-images, qualities,
+concepts, propositions. But now ideas began to mean living thoughts,
+moments or states of consciousness. They became atoms of mind,
+constituents of experience, very much as material atoms were conceived to
+be constituents of natural objects. Sensations became the only objects of
+sensation, and ideas the only objects of ideas; so that the material world
+was rendered superfluous, and the only scientific problem was now to
+construct a universe in terms of analytic psychology. Locke himself did
+not go so far, and continued to assign physical causes and physical
+objects to some, at least, of his mental units; and indeed sensations and
+ideas could not very well have other than physical causes, the existence
+of which this new psychology was soon to deny: so that about the origin of
+its data it was afterwards compelled to preserve a discreet silence. But
+as to their combinations and reappearances, it was able to invoke the
+principle of association: a thread on which many shrewd observations may
+be strung, but which also, when pressed, appears to be nothing but a
+verbal mask for organic habits in matter.
+
+The fact is that there are two sorts of unobjectionable psychology,
+neither of which describes a mechanism of disembodied mental states, such
+as the followers of Locke developed into modern idealism, to the
+confusion of common sense.[8] One unobjectionable sort of psychology is
+biological, and studies life from the outside. The other sort, relying on
+memory and dramatic imagination, reproduces life from the inside, and is
+literary. If the literary psychologist is a man of genius, by the
+clearness and range of his memory, by quickness of sympathy and power of
+suggestion, he may come very near to the truth of experience, as it has
+been or might be unrolled in a human being.[9] The ideas with which Locke
+operates are simply high lights picked out by attention in this nebulous
+continuum, and identified by names. Ideas, in the original ideal sense of
+the word, are indeed the only definite terms which attention can
+discriminate and rest upon; but the unity of these units is specious, not
+existential. If ideas were not logical or aesthetic essences but
+self-subsisting feelings, each knowing itself, they would be insulated for
+ever; no spirit could ever survey, recognise, or compare them; and mind
+would have disappeared in the analysis of mind.
+
+These considerations might enable us, I think, to mark the just frontier
+of common sense even in this debatable land of psychology. All that is
+biological, observable, and documentary in psychology falls within the
+lines of physical science and offers no difficulty in principle. Nor need
+literary psychology form a dangerous salient in the circuit of nature. The
+dramatic poet or dramatic historian necessarily retains the presupposition
+of a material world, since beyond his personal memory (and even within it)
+he has nothing to stimulate and control his dramatic imagination save
+knowledge of the material circumstances in which people live, and of the
+material expression in action or words which they give to their feelings.
+His moral insight simply vivifies the scene that nature and the sciences
+of nature spread out before him: they tell him what has happened, and his
+heart tells him what has been felt. Only literature can describe
+experience for the excellent reason that the terms of experience are moral
+and literary from the beginning. Mind is incorrigibly poetical: not
+because it is not attentive to material facts and practical exigencies,
+but because, being intensely attentive to them, it turns them into
+pleasures and pains, and into many-coloured ideas. Yet at every turn there
+is a possibility and an occasion for transmuting this poetry into science,
+because ideas and emotions, being caused by material events, refer to
+these events, and record their order.
+
+All philosophies are frail, in that they are products of the human mind,
+in which everything is essentially reactive, spontaneous, and volatile:
+but as in passion and in language, so in philosophy, there are certain
+comparatively steady and hereditary principles, forming a sort of orthodox
+reason, which is or which may become the current grammar of mankind. Of
+philosophers who are orthodox in this sense, only the earliest or the most
+powerful, an Aristotle or a Spinoza, need to be remembered, in that they
+stamp their language and temper upon human reason itself. The rest of the
+orthodox are justly lost in the crowd and relegated to the chorus. The
+frailty of heretical philosophers is more conspicuous and interesting: it
+makes up the _chronique scandaleuse_ of the mind, or the history of
+philosophy. Locke belongs to both camps: he was restive in his orthodoxy
+and timid in his heresies; and like so many other initiators of
+revolutions, he would be dismayed at the result of his work. In intention
+Locke occupied an almost normal philosophic position, rendered precarious
+not by what was traditional in it, like the categories of substance and
+power, but rather by certain incidental errors--notably by admitting an
+experience independent of bodily life, yet compounded and evolving in a
+mechanical fashion. But I do not find in him a prickly nest of obsolete
+notions and contradictions from which, fledged at last, we have flown to
+our present enlightenment. In his person, in his temper, in his
+allegiances and hopes, he was the prototype of a race of philosophers
+native and dominant among people of English speech, if not in academic
+circles, at least in the national mind. If we make allowance for a greater
+personal subtlety, and for the diffidence and perplexity inevitable in the
+present moral anarchy of the world, we may find this same Lockian
+eclecticism and prudence in the late Lord Balfour: and I have myself had
+the advantage of being the pupil of a gifted successor and, in many ways,
+emulator, of Locke, I mean William James. So great, at bottom, does their
+spiritual kinship seem to me to be, that I can hardly conceive Locke
+vividly without seeing him as a sort of William James of the seventeenth
+century. And who of you has not known some other spontaneous, inquisitive,
+unsettled genius, no less preoccupied with the marvellous intelligence of
+some Brazilian parrot, than with the sad obstinacy of some Bishop of
+Worcester? Here is eternal freshness of conviction and ardour for reform;
+great keenness of perception in spots, and in other spots lacunae and
+impulsive judgments; distrust of tradition, of words, of constructive
+argument; horror of vested interests and of their smooth defenders; a love
+of navigating alone and exploring for oneself even the coasts already well
+charted by others. Here is romanticism united with a scientific conscience
+and power of destructive analysis balanced by moral enthusiasm. Doubtless
+Locke might have dug his foundations deeper and integrated his faith
+better. His system was no metaphysical castle, no theological acropolis:
+rather a homely ancestral manor house built in several styles of
+architecture: a Tudor chapel, a Palladian front toward the new
+geometrical garden, a Jacobean parlour for political consultation and
+learned disputes, and even--since we are almost in the eighteenth
+century--a Chinese cabinet full of curios. It was a habitable philosophy,
+and not too inharmonious. There was no greater incongruity in its parts
+than in the gentle variations of English weather or in the qualified moods
+and insights of a civilised mind. Impoverished as we are, morally and
+humanly, we can no longer live in such a rambling mansion. It has become a
+national monument. On the days when it is open we revisit it with
+admiration; and those chambers and garden walks re-echo to us the clear
+dogmas and savoury diction of the sage--omnivorous, artless,
+loquacious--whose dwelling it was.
+
+
+[1] Paper read before the Royal Society of Literature on the occasion of
+the Tercentenary of the birth of John Locke.
+
+[2] See note I, p. 26.
+
+[3] See note II, p. 29.
+
+[4] See note III, p. 35.
+
+[5] See note IV, p. 36.
+
+[6] See note V, p. 37.
+
+[7] See note VI, p. 39.
+
+[8] See note VII, p. 43.
+
+[9] See note VIII, p. 46.
+
+
+
+
+SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES
+
+
+I
+
+Page 3. _This airy monster, this half-natural changeling._
+
+Monsters and changelings were pointed to by Locke with a certain
+controversial relish: they proved that nature was not compressed or
+compressible within Aristotelian genera and species, but was a free
+mechanism subject to indefinite change. Mechanism in physics is favourable
+to liberty in politics and morals: each creature has a right to be what it
+spontaneously is, and not what some previous classification alleges that
+it ought to have been. The Protestant and revolutionary independence of
+Locke's mind here gives us a foretaste of Darwin and even of Nietzsche.
+But Locke was moderate even in his radicalisms. A human nature totally
+fluid would of itself have proved anarchical; but in order to stem that
+natural anarchy it was fortunately possible to invoke the conditions of
+prosperity and happiness strictly laid down by the Creator. The
+improvidence and naughtiness of nature was called to book at every turn by
+the pleasures and pains divinely appended to things enjoined and to things
+forbidden, and ultimately by hell and by heaven. Yet if rewards and
+punishments were attached to human action and feeling in this perfectly
+external and arbitrary fashion, whilst the feelings and actions
+spontaneous in mankind counted for nothing in the rule of morals and of
+wisdom, we should be living under the most cruel and artificial of
+tyrannies; and it would not be long before the authority of such a code
+would be called in question and the reality of those arbitrary rewards and
+punishments would be denied, both for this world and for any other. In a
+truly rational morality moral sanctions would have to vary with the
+variation of species, each new race or individual or mode of feeling
+finding its natural joy in a new way of life. The monsters would not be
+monsters except to rustic prejudice, and the changelings would be simply
+experiments in creation. The glee of Locke in seeing nature elude
+scholastic conventions would then lose its savour, since those staid
+conventions themselves would have become obsolete. Nature would henceforth
+present nothing but pervasive metamorphosis, irresponsible and endless. To
+correct the weariness of such pure flux we might indeed invoke the idea of
+a progress or evolution towards something always higher and better; but
+this idea simply reinstates, under a temporal form, the dominance of a
+specific standard, to which nature is asked to conform. Genera and species
+might shift and glide into one another at will, but always in the
+authorised direction. If, on the contrary, transformation had no
+predetermined direction, we should be driven back, for a moral principle,
+to each of the particular types of life generated on the way: as in
+estimating the correctness or beauty of language we appeal to the speech
+and genius of each nation at each epoch, without imposing the grammar of
+one language or age upon another. It is only in so far as, in the midst of
+the flux, certain tropes become organised and recurrent, that any
+interests or beauties can be transmitted from moment to moment or from
+generation to generation. Physical integration is a prerequisite to moral
+integrity; and unless an individual or a species is sufficiently organised
+and determinate to aspire to a distinguishable form of life, eschewing all
+others, that individual or species can bear no significant name, can
+achieve no progress, and can approach no beauty or perfection.
+
+Thus, so long as in a fluid world there is some measure of life and
+organisation, monsters and changelings will always remain possible
+physically and regrettable morally. Small deviations from the chosen type
+or the chosen direction of progress will continue to be called morbid and
+ugly, and great deviations or reversals will continue to be called
+monstrous. This is but the seamy side of that spontaneous predilection,
+grounded in our deepest nature, by which we recognise beauty and nobleness
+at first sight, with immense refreshment and perfect certitude.
+
+
+II
+
+Page 8. _Through Descartes._
+
+Very characteristic was the tireless polemic which Locke carried on
+against Descartes. The outraged plain facts had to be defended against
+sweeping and arbitrary theories. There were no innate ideas or maxims:
+children were not born murmuring that things equal to the same thing were
+equal to one another: and an urchin knew that pain was caused by the
+paternal slipper before he reflected philosophically that everything must
+have a cause. Again, extension was not the essence of matter, which must
+be solid as well, to be distinguishable from empty space. Finally,
+thinking was not the essence of the soul: a man, without dying, might lose
+consciousness: this often happened, or at least could not be prevented
+from happening by a definition framed by a French philosopher. These
+protests were evidently justified by common sense: yet they missed the
+speculative radicalism and depth of the Cartesian doctrines, which had
+struck the keynotes of all modern philosophy and science: for they
+assumed, for the first time in history, the transcendental point of view.
+No wonder that Locke could not do justice to this great novelty: Descartes
+himself did not do so, but ignored his subjective first principles in the
+development of his system; and it was not until adopted by Kant, or rather
+by Fichte, that the transcendental method showed its true colours. Even
+today philosophers fumble with it, patching soliloquy with physics and
+physics with soliloquy. Moreover, Locke's misunderstandings of Descartes
+were partly justified by the latter's verbal concessions to tradition and
+authority. A man who has a clear head, and like Descartes is rendered by
+his aristocratic pride both courteous and disdainful, may readily conform
+to usage in his language, and even in his personal sentiments, without
+taking either too seriously: he is not struggling to free his own mind,
+which is free already, nor very hopeful of freeing that of most people.
+The innate ideas were not explicit thoughts but categories employed
+unwittingly, as people in speaking conform to the grammar of the
+vernacular without being aware that they do so. As for extension being the
+essence of matter, since matter existed and was a substance, it would
+always have been more than its essence: a sort of ether the parts of which
+might move and might have different and calculable dynamic values. The
+gist of this definition of matter was to clear the decks for scientific
+calculation, by removing from nature the moral density and moral magic
+with which the Socratic philosophy had encumbered it. Science would be
+employed in describing the movements of bodies, leaving it for the senses
+and feelings to appreciate the cross-lights that might be generated in the
+process. Though not following the technique of Descartes, the physics of
+our own day realises his ideal, and traces in nature a mathematical
+dynamism, perfectly sufficient for exact prevision and mechanical art.
+
+Similarly, in saying that the essence of the soul was to think, Descartes
+detached consciousness, or actual spirit, from the meshes of all unknown
+organic or invented mental mechanisms. It was an immense clarification and
+liberation in its proper dimension: but this pure consciousness was not a
+soul; it was not the animal psyche, or principle of organisation, life,
+and passion--a principle which, according to Descartes, was material. To
+have called such a material principle the soul would have shocked all
+Christian conceptions; but if Descartes had abstained from giving that
+consecrated name to mere consciousness, he need not have been wary of
+making the latter intermittent and evanescent, as it naturally is. He was
+driven to the conclusion that the soul can never stop thinking, by the
+desire to placate orthodox opinion, and his own Christian sentiments, at
+the expense of attributing to actual consciousness a substantial
+independence and a directive physical force which were incongruous with
+it: a force and independence perfectly congruous with the Platonic soul,
+which had been a mythological being, a supernatural spirit or daemon or
+incubus, incarnate in the natural world, and partly dominating it. The
+relations of such a soul to the particular body or bodies which it might
+weave for itself on earth, to the actions which it performed through such
+bodies, and to the current of its own thoughts, then became questions for
+theology, or for a moralistic theory of the universe. They were questions
+remote from the preoccupations of the modern mind; yet it was not possible
+either for Locke or for Descartes to clear their fresh conceptions
+altogether from those ancient dreams.
+
+What views precisely did Locke oppose to these radical tendencies of
+Descartes?
+
+In respect to the nature of matter, I have indicated above the position
+of Locke: pictorially he accepted an ordinary atomism; scientifically, the
+physics of Newton.
+
+On the other two points Locke's convictions were implicit rather than
+speculative: he resisted the Cartesian theories without much developing
+his own, as after all was natural in a critic engaged in proving that our
+natural faculties were not intended for speculation. All knowledge came
+from experience, and no man could know the savour of a pineapple without
+having tasted it. Yet this savour, according to Locke, did not reside at
+first in the pineapple, to be conveyed on contact to the palate and to the
+mind; but it was generated in the process of gustation; or perhaps we
+should rather say that it was generated in the mind on occasion of that
+process. At least, then, in respect to secondary qualities, and to all
+moral values, the terms of human knowledge were not drawn from the objects
+encountered in the world, but from an innate sensibility proper to the
+human body or mind. Experience--if this word meant the lifelong train of
+ideas which made a man's moral being--was not a source of knowledge but
+was knowledge (or illusion) itself, produced by organs endowed with a
+special native sensibility in contact with varying external stimuli. This
+conclusion would then not have contradicted, but exactly expressed, the
+doctrine of innate categories.
+
+As to the soul, which might exist without thinking, Locke still called it
+an immaterial substance: not so immaterial, however, as not to be conveyed
+bodily with him in his coach from London to Oxford. Although, like Hobbes,
+Locke believed in the power of the English language to clarify the human
+intellect, he here ignored the advice of Hobbes to turn that befuddling
+Latin phrase into plain English. Substance meant body: immaterial meant
+bodiless: therefore immaterial substance meant bodiless body. True,
+substance had not really meant body for Aristotle or the Schoolmen; but
+who now knew or cared what anything had meant for them? Locke scornfully
+refused to consider what a substantial form may have signified; and in
+still maintaining that he had a soul, and calling it a spiritual
+substance, he was probably simply protesting that there was something
+living and watchful within his breast, the invisible moral agent in all
+his thoughts and actions. It was _he_ that had them and did them; and this
+self of his was far from being reducible to a merely logical impersonal
+subject, an "I think" presupposed in all thought: for what would this "I
+think" have become when it was not thinking? On the other hand it mattered
+very little what the _substance_ of a thinking being might be: God might
+even have endowed the body with the faculty of thinking, and of generating
+ideas on occasion of certain impacts. Yet a man was a man for all that:
+and Locke was satisfied that he knew, at least well enough for an honest
+Englishman, what he was. He was what he felt himself to be: and this inner
+man of his was not merely the living self, throbbing now in his heart; it
+was all his moral past, all that he remembered to have been. If, from
+moment to moment, the self was a spiritual energy astir within, in
+retrospect the living present seemed, as it were, to extend its tentacles
+and to communicate its subjectivity to his whole personal past. The limits
+of his personality were those of his memory, and his experience included
+everything that his living mind could appropriate and re-live. In a word,
+_he was his idea of himself_: and this insight opens a new chapter not
+only in his philosophy but in the history of human self-estimation.
+Mankind was henceforth invited not to think of itself as a tribe of
+natural beings, nor of souls, with a specific nature and fixed
+possibilities. Each man was a romantic personage or literary character: he
+was simply what he was thought to be, and might become anything that he
+could will to become. The way was opened for Napoleon on the one hand and
+for Fichte on the other.
+
+
+III
+
+Page 9. __All_ ideas must be equally conditioned._
+
+Even the mathematical ideas which seem so exactly to describe the dynamic
+order of nature are not repetitions of their natural counterpart: for
+mathematical form in nature is a web of diffuse relations enacted; in the
+mind it is a thought possessed, the logical synthesis of those deployed
+relations. To run in a circle is one thing; to conceive a circle is
+another. Our mind by its animal roots (which render it relevant to the
+realm of matter and cognitive) and by its spiritual actuality (which
+renders it original, synthetic, and emotional) is a language, from its
+beginnings; almost, we might say, a biological poetry; and the greater the
+intellectuality and poetic abstraction the greater the possible range. Yet
+we must not expect this scope of speculation in us to go with adequacy or
+exhaustiveness: on the contrary, mathematics and religion, each in its way
+so sure, leave most of the truth out.
+
+
+IV
+
+Page 9. _He cannot be aware of what goes on beyond him, except as it
+affects his own life._
+
+Even that spark of divine intelligence which comes into the animal soul,
+as Aristotle says, from beyond the gates, comes and is called down by the
+exigencies of physical life. An animal endowed with locomotion cannot
+merely feast sensuously on things as they appear, but must react upon them
+at the first signal, and in so doing must virtually and in intent envisage
+them as they are in themselves. For it is by virtue of their real
+constitution and intrinsic energy that they act upon us and suffer change
+in turn at our hands; so that whatsoever form things may take to our
+senses and intellect, they take that form by exerting their material
+powers upon us, and intertwining them in action with our own organisms.
+
+Thus the appearance of things is always, in some measure, a true index to
+their reality. Animals are inevitably engaged in self-transcending action,
+and the consciousness of self-transcending action is self-transcendent
+knowledge. The very nature of animal life makes it possible, within animal
+consciousness, to discount appearance and to correct illusion--things
+which in a vegetative or aesthetic sensibility would not be
+distinguishable from pure experience itself. But when aroused to
+self-transcendent attention, feeling must needs rise to intelligence, so
+that external fact and impartial truth come within the range of
+consciousness, not indeed by being contained there, but by being aimed at.
+
+
+V
+
+Page 19. _Conscious mind was a fact on its own account._
+
+This conscious mind was a man's moral being, and personal identity could
+not extend further than possible memory. This doctrine of Locke's had some
+comic applications. The Bishop of Worcester was alarmed. If actions which
+a hardened sinner had forgotten were no longer his, a short memory would
+be a great blessing in the Day of Judgment. On the other hand, a theology
+more plastic than Stillingfleet's would one day find in this same doctrine
+a new means of edification. For if I may disown all actions I have
+forgotten, may not things not done or witnessed by me in the body be now
+appropriated and incorporated in my consciousness, if only I conceive them
+vividly? The door is then open to all the noble ambiguities of idealism.
+As my consciousness expands, or thinks it expands, into dramatic sympathy
+with universal experience, that experience becomes my own. I may say I
+have been the agent in all past achievements. Emerson could know that he
+was Shakespeare and Caesar and Christ. Futurity is mine also, in every
+possible direction at once; and I am one with the spirit of the universe
+and with God.
+
+Locke reassured the Bishop of Worcester, and was humbly confident that
+Divine Justice would find a way of vindicating Itself in spite of human
+wit. He might have added that if the sin of Adam could not only be imputed
+to us juridically but could actually taint our consciousness--as it
+certainly does if by Adam we understand our whole material heritage--so
+surely the sins done or the habits acquired by the body beyond the scope
+of consciousness may taint or clarify this consciousness now. Indeed, the
+idea we form of ourselves and of our respective experiences is a figment
+of vanity, a product of dramatic imagination, without cognitive import
+save as a reading of the hidden forces, physical or divine, which have
+formed us and actually govern us.
+
+
+VI
+
+Page 19. _Mind and body interacted._
+
+The self which acts in a man is itself moved by forces which have long
+been familiar to common sense, without being understood except
+dramatically. These forces are called the passions; or when the dramatic
+units distinguished are longish strands rather than striking episodes,
+they are called temperament, character, or will; or perhaps, weaving all
+these strands and episodes together again into one moral fabric, we call
+them simply human nature. But in what does this vague human nature reside,
+and how does it operate on the non-human world? Certainly not within the
+conscious sphere, or in the superficial miscellany of experience.
+Immediate experience is the intermittent chaos which human nature, in
+combination with external circumstances, is invoked to support and to
+rationalise. Is human nature, then, resident in each individual soul?
+Certainly: but the soul is merely another name for that active principle
+which we are looking for, to be the seat of our sensibility and the source
+of our actions. Is this psychic power, then, resident in the body?
+Undoubtedly; since it is hereditary and transmitted by a seed, and
+continually aroused and modified by material agencies.
+
+Since this soul or self in the body is so obscure, the temptation is great
+to dramatise its energies and to describe them in myths. Myth is the
+normal means of describing those forces of nature which we cannot measure
+or understand; if we could understand or measure them we should describe
+them prosaically and analytically, in what is called science. But nothing
+is less measurable, or less intelligible to us, in spite of being so near
+us and familiar, as the life of this carnal instrument, so soft and so
+violent, which breeds our sensations and precipitates our actions. We see
+today how the Freudian psychology, just because it is not satisfied with
+registering the routine of consciousness but endeavours to trace its
+hidden mechanism and to unravel its physical causes, is driven to use the
+most frankly mythological language. The physiological processes concerned,
+though presupposed, are not on the scale of human perception and not
+traceable in detail; and the moral action, though familiar in snatches,
+has to be patched by invented episodes, and largely attributed to daemonic
+personages that never come on the stage.
+
+Locke, in his psychology of morals, had at first followed the verbal
+rationalism by which people attribute motives to themselves and to one
+another. Human actions were explained by the alleged pursuit of the
+greater prospective pleasure, and avoidance of the greater prospective
+pain. But this way of talking, though not so poetical as Freud's, is no
+less mythical. Eventual goods and evils have no present existence and no
+power: they cannot even be discerned prophetically, save by the vaguest
+fancy, entirely based on the present impulses and obsessions of the soul.
+No future good, no future evil avails to move us, except--as Locke said
+after examining the facts more closely--when a _certain uneasiness_ in the
+soul (or in the body) causes us to turn to those untried goods and evils
+with a present and living interest. This actual uneasiness, with the dream
+pictures which it evokes, is a mere symptom of the direction in which
+human nature in us is already moving, or already disposed to move. Without
+this prior physical impulse, heaven may beckon and hell may yawn without
+causing the least variation in conduct. As in religious conversion all is
+due to the call of grace, so in ordinary action all is due to the ripening
+of natural impulses and powers within the psyche. The _uneasiness_
+observed by Locke is merely the consciousness of this ripening, before the
+field of relevant action has been clearly discerned.
+
+When all this is considered, the ostensible interaction between mind and
+body puts on a new aspect. There are no _purely mental_ ideas or
+intentions followed by material effects: there are no material events
+followed by a _purely mental_ sensation or idea. Mental events are always
+elements in total natural events containing material elements also:
+material elements form the organ, the stimulus, and probably also the
+object for those mental sensations or ideas. Moreover, the physical strand
+alone is found to be continuous and traceable; the conscious strand, the
+sequence of mental events, flares up and dies down daily, if not hourly;
+and the medley of its immediate features--images, words, moods--juxtaposes
+China and Peru, past and future, in the most irresponsible confusion. On
+the other hand, in human life it is a part of the conscious
+element--intentions, affections, plans, and reasonings--that _explains_
+the course of action: dispersed temporally, our dominant thoughts contain
+the reason for our continuous behaviour, and seem to guide it. They are
+not so much links in a chain of minute consecutive causes--an idea or an
+act of will often takes time to work and works, as it were, only
+posthumously--as they are general overarching moral inspirations and
+resolves, which the machinery of our bodies executes in its own way, often
+rendering our thoughts more precise in the process, or totally
+transforming them. We do roughly what we meant to do, barring accidents.
+The reasons lie deep in our compound nature, being probably inarticulate;
+and our action in a fragmentary way betrays our moral disposition: betrays
+it in both senses of the word betray, now revealing it unawares, and now
+sadly disappointing it.
+
+I leave it for the reader's reflection to decide whether we should call
+such cohabitation of mind with body interaction, or not rather sympathetic
+concomitance, self-annotation, and a partial prophetic awakening to a life
+which we are leading automatically.
+
+
+VII
+
+Page 21. _To the confusion of common sense._
+
+Berkeley and his followers sometimes maintain that common sense is on
+their side, that they have simply analysed the fact of our experience of
+the material world, and if there is any paradox in their idealism, it is
+merely verbal and disappears with familiarity. All the "reality", they
+say, all the force, obduracy, and fertility of nature subsist undiminished
+after we discover that this reality resides, and can only reside, in the
+fixed order of our experience.
+
+But no: analysis of immediate experience will never disclose any fixed
+order in it; the surface of experience, when not interpreted
+materialistically, is an inextricable dream. Berkeley and his followers,
+when they look in this direction, towards nature and the rationale of
+experience and science, are looking away from their own system, and
+relying instead on the automatic propensity of human nature to routine, so
+that we spontaneously prepare for repeating our actions (not our
+experience) and even anticipate their occasions; a propensity further
+biased by the dominant rhythms of the psyche, so that we assume a future
+not so much similar to the past, as better. When developed, this
+propensity turns into trust in natural or divine laws; but it is contrary
+to common sense to expect such laws to operate apart from matter and from
+the material continuity of external occasions. This appears clearly in our
+trust in persons--a radical animal propensity--which is consonant with
+common sense when these persons are living bodies, but becomes
+superstitious, or at least highly speculative, when these persons are
+disembodied spirits.
+
+It is a pity that the beautiful system of Berkeley should have appeared in
+an unspiritual age, when religion was mundane and perfunctory, and the
+free spirit, where it stirred, was romantic and wilful. For that system
+was essentially religious: it put the spirit face to face with God,
+everywhere, always, and in everything it turned experience into a divine
+language for the monition and expression of the inner man. Such an
+instrument, in spiritual hands, might have served to dispel all natural
+illusions and affections, and to disinfect the spirit of worldliness and
+egotism. But Berkeley and his followers had no such thought. All they
+wished was to substitute a social for a material world, precisely because
+a merely social world might make worldly interests loom larger and might
+induce mankind, against the evidence of their senses and the still small
+voice in their hearts, to live as if their worldly interests were absolute
+and must needs dominate the spirit.
+
+Morally this system thus came to sanction a human servitude to material
+things such as ancient materialists would have scorned; and theoretically
+the system did not escape the dogmatic commitments of common sense against
+which it protested. For far from withdrawing into the depths of the
+private spirit, it professed to describe universal experience and the
+evolution of all human ideas. This notion of "experience" originally
+presupposed a natural agent or subject to endure that experience, and to
+profit by it, by learning to live in better harmony with external
+circumstances. Each agent or subject of experience might, at other times,
+become an object of experience also: for they all formed part of a
+material world, which they might envisage in common in their perceptions.
+Now the criticism which repudiates this common material medium, like all
+criticism or doubt, is secondary and partial: it continues to operate with
+all the assumptions of common sense, save the one which it is expressly
+criticising. So, in repudiating the material world, this philosophy
+retains the notion of various agents or subjects gathering experience; and
+we are not expected to doubt that there are just as many streams of
+experience without a world, as there were people in the world when the
+world existed. But the number and nature of these experiences have now
+become undiscoverable, the material persons having been removed who
+formerly were so placed as to gather easily imagined experiences, and to
+be able to communicate them; and the very notion of experience has been
+emptied of its meaning, when no external common world subsists to impose
+that same experience on everybody. It was not knowledge of existing
+experiences _in vacuo_ that led common sense to assume a material world,
+but knowledge of an existing material world led it to assume existing, and
+regularly reproducible, experiences.
+
+Thus the whole social convention posited by empirical idealism is borrowed
+without leave, and rests on the belief in nature for which it is
+substituted.
+
+
+VIII
+
+Page 21. _The literary psychologist may come very near to the truth of
+experience._
+
+Experience cannot be in itself an object of science, because it is
+essentially invisible, immeasurable, fugitive, and private; and although
+it may be shared or repeated, the evidence for that repetition or that
+unanimity cannot be found by comparing a present experience with another
+experience by hypothesis absent. Both the absent experience and its
+agreement with the present experience must be imagined freely and credited
+instinctively, in view of the known circumstances in which the absent
+experience is conceived to have occurred. The only instrument for
+conceiving experience at large is accordingly private imagination; and
+such imagination cannot be tested, although it may be guided and perhaps
+recast by fresh observations or reports concerning the action and language
+of other people. For action and language, being contagious, and being the
+material counterpart of experience in each of us, may voluntarily or
+involuntarily suggest our respective experience to one another, by causing
+each to re-enact more or less accurately within himself the experience of
+the rest. Thus alien thoughts and feelings are revealed or suggested to us
+in common life, not without a subjective transformation increasing, so to
+speak, as the square of the distance: and even the record of experience in
+people's own words, when these are not names for recognisable external
+things, awakens in the reader, in another age or country, quite
+incommensurable ideas. Yet, under favourable circumstances, such
+suggestion or revelation of experience, without ever becoming science, may
+become public unanimity in sentiment, and may produce a truthful and
+lively dramatic literature.
+
+All modern philosophy, in so far as it is a description of experience and
+not of nature, therefore seems to belong to the sphere of literature, and
+to be without scientific value.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+FIFTY YEARS OF BRITISH IDEALISM[10]
+
+
+After fifty years, an old milestone in the path of philosophy, Bradley's
+_Ethical Studies_, has been set up again, as if to mark the distance which
+English opinion has traversed in the interval. It has passed from insular
+dogmatism to universal bewilderment; and a chief agent in the change has
+been Bradley himself, with his scornful and delicate intellect, his wit,
+his candour, his persistence, and the baffling futility of his
+conclusions. In this early book we see him coming forth like a young David
+against every clumsy champion of utilitarianism, hedonism, positivism, or
+empiricism. And how smooth and polished were the little stones in his
+sling! How fatally they would have lodged in the forehead of that
+composite monster, if only it had had a forehead! Some of them might even
+have done murderous execution in Bradley's own camp: for instance, this
+pebble cast playfully at the metaphysical idol called "Law": "It is
+_always_ wet on half-holidays because of the Law of Raininess, but
+_sometimes_ it is _not_ wet, because of the Supplementary Law of
+Sunshine".
+
+Bradley and his friends achieved a notable victory in the academic field:
+philosophic authority and influence passed largely into their hands in all
+English-speaking universities. But it was not exactly from these seats of
+learning that naturalism and utilitarianism needed to be dislodged; like
+the corresponding radicalisms of our day, these doctrines prevailed rather
+in certain political and intellectual circles outside, consciously
+revolutionary and often half-educated; and I am afraid that the braggart
+Goliaths of today need chastening at least as much as those of fifty years
+ago. In a country officially Christian, and especially in Oxford, it is
+natural and fitting that academic authority should belong to orthodox
+tradition--theological, Platonic, and Aristotelian. Bradley, save for a
+few learned quotations, strangely ignored this orthodoxy entrenched
+behind his back. In contrast with it he was himself a heretic, with first
+principles devastating every settled belief: and it was really this
+venerable silent partner at home that his victory superseded, at least in
+appearance and for a season. David did not slay Goliath, but he dethroned
+Saul. Saul was indeed already under a cloud, and all in David's heart was
+not unkindness in that direction. Bradley might almost be called an
+unbelieving Newman; time, especially, seems to have brought his suffering
+and refined spirit into greater sympathy with ancient sanctities.
+Originally, for instance, venting the hearty Protestant sentiment that
+only the Christianity of laymen is sound, he had written: "I am happy to
+say that 'religieux' has no English equivalent". But a later note says:
+"This is not true except of Modern English only. And, in any case, it
+won't do, and was wrong and due to ignorance. However secluded the
+religious life, it may be practical indirectly _if_ through the unity of
+the spiritual body it can be taken as vicarious". The "_if_" here saves
+the principle that all values must be social, and that the social organism
+is the sole moral reality: yet how near this bubble comes to being
+pricked! We seem clearly to feel that the question is not whether
+spiritual life subserves animal society, but whether animal society ever
+is stirred and hallowed into spiritual life.
+
+All this, however, in that age of progress, was regarded as obsolete:
+there was no longer to be any spirit except the spirit of the times. True,
+the ritualists might be striving to revive the latent energies of
+religious devotion, with some dubious help from aestheticism: but against
+the rising tide of mechanical progress and romantic anarchy, and against
+the mania for rewriting history, traditional philosophy then seemed
+helpless and afraid to defend itself: it is only now beginning to recover
+its intellectual courage. For the moment, speculative radicals saw light
+in a different quarter. German idealism was nothing if not self-confident;
+it was relatively new; it was encyclopaedic in its display of knowledge,
+which it could manipulate dialectically with dazzling, if not stable,
+results; it was Protestant in temper and autonomous in principle; and
+altogether it seemed a sovereign and providential means of suddenly
+turning the tables on the threatened naturalism. By developing romantic
+intuition from within and packing all knowledge into one picture, the
+universe might be shown to be, like intuition itself, thoroughly
+spiritual, personal, and subjective.
+
+The fundamental axiom of the new logic was that the only possible reality
+was consciousness.
+
+     "People find", writes Bradley, "a subject and an object correlated
+     in consciousness.... To go out of that unity is for us literally to
+     go out of our minds.... When mind is made only a part of the whole,
+     there is a question which _must_ be answered.... If about any
+     matter we know nothing whatsoever, can we say anything about it?
+     Can we even say that it is? And if it is not in consciousness, how
+     can we know it?... And conversely, if we know it, it cannot be not
+     mind."
+
+Bradley challenged his contemporaries to refute this argument; and not
+being able to do so, many of them felt constrained to accept it, perhaps
+not without grave misgivings. For was it not always a rooted conviction of
+the British mind that knowledge brings material power, and that any
+figments of consciousness (in religion, for instance) not bringing
+material power are dangerous bewitchments, and not properly knowledge?
+Yet it is no less characteristic of the British mind to yield
+occasionally, up to a certain point, to some such enthusiastic fancy,
+provided that its incompatibility with honest action may be denied or
+ignored. So in this case British idealists, in the act of defining
+knowledge idealistically, as the presence to consciousness of its own
+phenomena, never really ceased to assume transcendent knowledge of a
+self-existing world, social and psychological, if not material: and they
+continued scrupulously to readjust their ideas to those dark facts, often
+more faithfully than the avowed positivists or scientific psychologists.
+
+What could ethics properly be to a philosopher who on principle might not
+trespass beyond the limits of consciousness? Only ethical sentiment.
+Bradley was satisfied to appeal to the moral consciousness of his day,
+without seeking to transform it. The most intentionally eloquent passage
+in his book describes war-fever unifying and carrying away a whole people:
+that was the summit of moral consciousness and of mystic virtue. His aim,
+even in ethics, was avowedly to describe that which exists, to describe
+moral experience, without proposing a different form for it. A man must be
+a man of his own time, or nothing; to set up to be better than the world
+was the beginning of immorality; and virtue lay in accepting one's station
+and its duties. The moralist should fill his mind with a concrete picture
+of the task and standards of his age and nation, and should graft his own
+ideals upon that tree; this need not prevent moral consciousness from
+including a decided esteem for non-political excellences like health,
+beauty, or intelligence, which are not ordinarily called virtues by modern
+moralists. Yet they were undeniably good; better, perhaps, than any
+painful and laborious dutifulness; so that the strictly moral
+consciousness might run over, and presently lose itself in "something
+higher". Indeed, even health, beauty, and intelligence, which seemed at
+first so clearly good, might lose their sharpness on a wider view. In the
+panorama that would ultimately fill the mind these so-called goods and
+virtues could not be conceived without their complementary vices and
+evils. Thus all moral consciousness, and even all vital preference might
+ultimately be superseded: they might appear to have belonged to a partial
+and rather low stage in the self-development of consciousness.
+
+With this dissolution of his moral judgments always in prospect, why
+should Bradley, or any idealist, have pursued ethical studies at all?
+Since all phases of life were equally necessary to enrich an infinite
+consciousness, which must know both good and evil in order to merge and to
+transcend them, he could hardly nurse any intense enthusiasm for a
+different complexion to be given to the lives of men. His moral
+passion--for he had it, caustic and burning clear--was purely
+intellectual: it was shame that in England the moral consciousness should
+have been expressed in systems dialectically so primitive as those of the
+positivists and utilitarians. He acknowledged, somewhat superciliously,
+that their hearts were in the right place; yet, if we are to have ethics
+at all, were not their thoughts in the right place also? They were
+concerned not with analysis of the moral consciousness but with the
+conduct of affairs and the reform of institutions. The spectacle of human
+wretchedness profoundly moved them; their minds were bent on transforming
+society, so that a man's station and its duties might cease to be what a
+decayed feudal organisation and an inhuman industrialism had made of them.
+They revolted against the miserable condition of the masses of mankind,
+and against the miserable consolations which official religion, or a
+philosophy like Bradley's, offered them in their misery. The utilitarians
+were at least intent on existence and on the course of events; they wished
+to transform institutions to fit human nature better, and to educate human
+nature by those new institutions so that it might better realise its
+latent capacities. These are matters which a man may modify by his acts
+and they are therefore the proper concern of the moralist. Were they much
+to blame if they neglected to define pleasure or happiness and used
+catch-words, dialectically vague, to indicate a direction of effort
+politically quite unmistakable? Doubtless their political action, like
+their philosophical nomenclature, was revolutionary and relied too much on
+wayward feelings ignorant of their own causes. Revolution, no less than
+tradition, is but a casual and clumsy expression of human nature in
+contact with circumstances; yet pain and pleasure and spontaneous hopes,
+however foolish, are direct expressions of that contact, and speak for the
+soul; whereas a man's station and its duties are purely conventional, and
+may altogether misrepresent his native capacities. The protest of human
+nature against the world and its oppressions is the strong side of every
+rebellion; it was the _moral_ side of utilitarianism, of the rebellion
+against irrational morality.
+
+Unfortunately the English reformers were themselves idealists of a sort,
+entangled in the vehicles of perception, and talking about sensations and
+ideas, pleasures and pains, as if these had been the elements of human
+nature, or even of nature at large: and only the most meagre of verbal
+systems, and the most artificial, can be constructed out of such
+materials. Moreover, they spoke much of pleasure and happiness, and hardly
+at all of misery and pain: whereas it would have been wiser, and truer to
+their real inspiration, to have laid all the emphasis on evils to be
+abated, leaving the good to shape itself in freedom. Suffering is the
+instant and obvious sign of some outrage done to human nature; without
+this natural recoil, actual or imminent, no morality would have any
+sanction, and no precept could be imperative. What silliness to command me
+to pursue pleasure or to avoid it, if in any case everything would be
+well! Save for some shadow of dire repentance looming in the distance, I
+am deeply free to walk as I will. The choice of pleasure for a principle
+of morals was particularly unfortunate in the British utilitarians; it
+lent them an air of frivolity absurdly contrary to their true character.
+Pleasure might have been a fit enough word in the mouth of Aristippus, a
+semi-oriental untouched by the least sense of responsibility, or even on
+the lips of humanists in the eighteenth century, who, however sordid their
+lives may sometimes have been, could still move in imagination to the
+music of Mozart, in the landscape of Watteau or of Fragonard. But in the
+land and age of Dickens the moral ideal was not so much pleasure as
+kindness: this tenderer word not only expresses better the motive at work,
+but it points to the distressing presence of misery in the world, to make
+natural kindness laborious and earnest, and turn it into a legislative
+system.
+
+Bradley's hostility to pleasure was not fanatical: one's station and its
+duties might have their agreeable side. "It is probably good for you", he
+tells us, "to have, say, not less than two glasses of wine after dinner.
+Six on ordinary occasions is perhaps too many; but as to three or four,
+they are neither one way nor the other." If the voluptuary was condemned,
+it was for the commonplace reason which a hedonist, too, might invoke,
+that a life of pleasure soon palls and becomes unpleasant. Bradley's
+objection to pleasure was merely speculative: he found it too "abstract".
+To call a pleasure when actually felt an abstraction is an exquisite
+absurdity: but pleasure, in its absolute essence, is certainly simple and
+indefinable. If instead of enjoying it on the wing, and as an earnest of
+the soul's momentary harmony, we attempt to arrest and observe it, we find
+it strangely dumb; we are not informed by it concerning its occasion, nor
+carried from it by any logical implication to the natural object in which
+it might be found. A pure hedonist ought therefore to be rather relieved
+if all images lapsed from his consciousness and he could luxuriate in
+sheer pleasure, dark and overwhelming. True, such bliss would be rather
+inhuman, and of the sort which we rashly assign to the oyster: but why
+should a radical and intrepid philosopher be ashamed of that? The
+condition of Bradley's Absolute--feeling in which all distinctions are
+transcended and merged--seems to be something of that kind; but there
+would be a strange irony in attributing this mystical and rapturous ideal
+to such ponderous worthies as Mill and Spencer, whose minds were nothing
+if not anxious, perturbed, instrumental, and full of respect for
+variegated facts, and who were probably incapable of tasting pure pleasure
+at all.
+
+But if pleasure, in its pure essence, might really be the highest good for
+a mystic who should be lost in it, it would be no guide to a moralist
+wishing to control events, and to distribute particular pleasures or
+series of pleasures as richly as possible in the world. For this purpose
+he would need to understand human nature and its variable functions, in
+which different persons and peoples may find their sincere pleasures; and
+this knowledge would first lend to his general love of pleasure any point
+of application in the governance of life or in benevolent legislation.
+Some concrete image of a happy human world would take the place of the
+futile truism that pleasure is good and pain evil. This is, of course,
+what utilitarian moralists meant to do, and actually did, in so far as
+their human sympathies extended, which was not to the highest things; but
+it was not what they said, and Bradley had a clear advantage over them in
+the war of words. A pleasure is not a programme: it exists here and not
+there, for me and for no one else, once and never again. When past, it
+leaves the will as empty and as devoid of allegiance as if it had never
+existed; pleasure is sand, though it have the colour of gold. But this is
+evidently true of all existence. Each living moment, each dead man, each
+cycle of the universe leaves nothing behind it but a void which perhaps
+something kindred may refill. A Hegel, after identifying himself for a
+moment with the Absolute Idea, is in his existence no less subject to
+sleepiness, irritation, and death than if he had been modestly satisfied
+with the joys of an oyster. It is only their common form, or their common
+worship, that can give to the quick moments of life any mutual relevance
+or sympathy; and existence would not come at all within sight of a good,
+either momentary or final, if it were not inwardly directed upon realising
+some definite essence. For the rest this essence may be as simple as you
+will, if the nature directed upon it is unified and simple; and it would
+be mere intellectual snobbery to condemn pleasure because it has not so
+many subdivisions in it as an encyclopaedia of the sciences. For the
+moralist pleasure and pain may even be the better guides, because they
+express more directly and boldly the instinctive direction of animal life,
+and thereby mark more clearly the genuine difference between good and
+evil.
+
+We may well say with Bradley that the good is self-realisation; but what
+is the self? Certainly not the feeling or consciousness of the moment, nor
+the life of the world, nor pure spirit. The self that can systematically
+distinguish good from evil is an animal soul. It grows from a seed; its
+potentiality is definite and its fate precarious; and in man it requires
+society to rear it and tradition to educate it. The good is accordingly
+social, in so far as the soul demands society; but it is the nature of the
+individual that determines the kind and degree of sociability that is good
+for him, and draws the line between society that is a benefit and society
+that is a nuisance. To subordinate the soul fundamentally to society or
+the individual to the state is sheer barbarism: the Greeks, sometimes
+invoked to support this form of idolatry, were never guilty of it; on the
+contrary, their lawgivers were always reforming and planning the state so
+that the soul might be perfect in it. Discipline is a help to the spirit:
+but even social relations, when like love, friendship, or sport they are
+spontaneous and good in themselves, retire as far as possible from the
+pressure of the world, and build their paradise apart, simple, and hidden
+in the wilderness; while all the ultimate hopes and assurances of the
+spirit escape altogether into the silent society of nature, of truth, of
+essence, far from those fatuous worldly conventions which hardly make up
+for their tyranny by their instability: for the prevalent moral fashion is
+always growing old, and human nature is always becoming young again.
+World-worship is the expedient of those who, having lost the soul that is
+in them, look for it in things external, where there is no soul: and by a
+curious recoil, it is also the expedient of those who seek their lost soul
+in actual consciousness, where it also is not: for sensations and ideas
+are not the soul but only passing and partial products of its profound
+animal life. Moral consciousness in particular would never have arisen and
+would be gratuitous, save for the ferocious bias of a natural living
+creature, defending itself against its thousand enemies.
+
+Nor would knowledge in its turn be knowledge if it were merely intuition
+of essence, such as the sensualist, the poet, or the dialectician may rest
+in. If the imagery of logic or passion ever comes to convey _knowledge_,
+it does so by virtue of a concomitant physical adjustment to external
+things; for the nerve of real or transcendent knowledge is the notice
+which one part of the world may take of another part; and it is this
+momentous cognisance, no matter what intangible feelings may supply terms
+for its prosody, that enlarges the mind to some practical purpose and
+informs it about the world. Consciousness then ceases to be passive sense
+or idle ideation and becomes belief and intelligence. Then the essences
+which form the "content of consciousness" may be vivified and trippingly
+run over, like the syllables of a familiar word, in the active recognition
+of things and people and of all the ominous or pliable forces of nature.
+For essences, being eternal and non-existent in themselves, cannot come to
+consciousness by their own initiative, but only as occasion and the subtle
+movements of the soul may evoke their forms; so that the fact that they
+are given to consciousness has a natural status and setting in the
+material world, and is part of the same natural event as the movement of
+the soul and body which supports that consciousness.
+
+There is therefore no need of refuting idealism, which is an honest
+examination of conscience in a reflective mind. Refutations and proofs
+depend on pregnant meanings assigned to terms, meanings first rendered
+explicit and unambiguous by those very proofs or refutations. On any
+different acceptation of those terms, these proofs and refutations fall
+to the ground; and it remains a question for good sense, not for logic at
+all, how far the terms in either case describe anything existent. If by
+"knowledge" we understand intuition of essences, idealism follows; but it
+follows only in respect to essences given in intuition: nothing follows
+concerning the seat, origin, conditions, or symptomatic value of such
+intuition, nor even that such intuition ever actually occurs. Idealism,
+therefore, without being refuted, may be hemmed in and humanised by
+natural knowledge about it and about its place in human speculation; the
+most recalcitrant materialist (like myself) might see its plausibility
+during a somewhat adolescent phase of self-consciousness. Consciousness
+itself he might accept and relish as the natural spiritual resonance of
+action and passion, recognising it in its proud isolation and specious
+autonomy, like the mountain republics of Andorra and San Marino.
+
+German idealism is a mighty pose, an attitude always possible to a
+self-conscious and reflective being: but it is hardly a system, since it
+contradicts beliefs which in action are inevitable; it may therefore be
+readily swallowed, but it can never be digested. Neither of its two
+ingredients--romantic scepticism and romantic superstition--agrees
+particularly with the British stomach. Not romantic scepticism: for in
+England an instinctive distrust of too much clearness and logic, a
+difficulty in drawing all the consequences of any principle, soon gave to
+this most radical of philosophies a prim and religious air: its purity was
+alloyed with all sorts of conventions: so much so that we find British
+Hegelians often deeply engaged in psychology, cosmology, or religion, as
+if they took their idealism for a kind of physics, and wished merely to
+reinterpret the facts of nature in an edifying way, without uprooting them
+from their natural places. This has been made easier by giving idealism an
+objective, non-psychological turn: events, and especially feelings and
+ideas, will then be swallowed up in the essences which they display. Thus
+Bradley maintained that two thoughts, no matter how remote from each other
+in time or space, were identically the same, and not merely similar, if
+only they contemplated the same idea. Mind itself ceased in this way to
+mean a series of existing feelings and was identified with intelligence;
+and intelligence in its turn was identified with the Idea or Logos which
+might be the ultimate theme of intelligence. There could be only one mind,
+so conceived, since there could be only one total system in the universe
+visible to omniscience.
+
+As to romantic scepticism, we may see by contrast what it would be, when
+left to itself, if we consider those lucid Italians who have taken up
+their idealism late and with open eyes. In Croce and Gentile the
+transcendental attitude is kept pure: for them there is really no universe
+save spirit creating its experience; and if we ask whence or on what
+principle occasions arise for all this compulsory fiction, we are reminded
+that this question, with any answer which spirit might invent for it,
+belongs not to philosophy but to some special science like physiology,
+itself, of course, only a particular product of creative thought. Thus the
+more impetuously the inquisitive squirrel would rush from his cage, the
+faster and faster he causes the cage to whirl about his ears. He has not
+the remotest chance of reaching his imaginary bait--God, nature, or
+truth; for to seek such things is to presuppose them, and to presuppose
+anything, if spirit be absolute, is to invent it. Even those philosophies
+of history which the idealist may for some secret reason be impelled to
+construct would be superstitious, according to his own principles, if he
+took them for more than poetic fictions of the historian; so that in the
+study of history, as in every other study, all the diligence and sober
+learning which the philosopher may possess are non-philosophical, since
+they presuppose independent events and material documents. Thus perfect
+idealism turns out to be pure literary sport, like lyric poetry, in which
+no truth is conveyed save the miscellaneous truths taken over from common
+sense or the special sciences; and the gay spirit, supposed to be living
+and shining of its own sweet will, can find nothing to live or shine upon
+save the common natural world.
+
+Such at least would be the case if romantic superstition did not
+supervene, demanding that the spirit should impose some arbitrary rhythm
+or destiny on the world which it creates: but this side of idealism has
+been cultivated chiefly by the intrepid Germans: some of them, like
+Spengler and Keyserling, still thrive and grow famous on it without a
+blush. The modest English in these matters take shelter under the wing of
+science speculatively extended, or traditional religion prudently
+rationalised: the scope of the spirit, like its psychological
+distribution, is conceived realistically. It might almost prove an
+euthanasia for British idealism to lose itself in the new metaphysics of
+nature which the mathematicians are evolving; and since this metaphysics,
+though materialistic in effect, is more subtle and abstruse than popular
+materialism, British idealism might perhaps be said to survive in it,
+having now passed victoriously into its opposite, and being merged in
+something higher.
+
+
+[10] _Ethical Studies_, by F.H. Bradley, O.M., LL.D. (Glasgow), late
+Fellow of Merton College, Oxford; second edition revised, with
+additional notes by the Author. Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1927.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+REVOLUTIONS IN SCIENCE
+
+
+Since the beginning of the twentieth century, science has gained notably
+in expertness, and lost notably in authority. We are bombarded with
+inventions; but if we ask the inventors what they have learned of the
+depths of nature, which somehow they have probed with such astonishing
+success, their faces remain blank. They may be chewing gum; or they may
+tell us that if an aeroplane could only fly fast enough, it would get home
+before it starts; or they may urge us to come with them into a dark room,
+to hold hands, and to commune with the dear departed.
+
+Practically there may be no harm in such a division of labour, the
+inventors doing the work and the professors the talking. The experts may
+themselves be inexpert in verbal expression, or content with stock
+phrases, or profoundly sceptical, or too busy to think. Nevertheless,
+skill and understanding are at their best when they go together and adorn
+the same mind. Modern science until lately had realised this ideal: it was
+an extension of common perception and common sense. We could trust it
+implicitly, as we do a map or a calendar; it was not true for us merely in
+an argumentative or visionary sense, as are religion and philosophy.
+Geography went hand in hand with travel, Copernican astronomy with
+circumnavigation of the globe: and even the theory of evolution and the
+historical sciences in the nineteenth century were continuous with liberal
+reform: people saw in the past, as they then learned to conceive it,
+simply an extension of those transformations which they were witnessing in
+the present. They could think they knew the world as a man knows his
+native town, or the contents of his chest of drawers: nature was our home,
+and science was our home knowledge. For it is not intrinsic clearness or
+coherence that make ideas persuasive, but connection with action, or with
+some voluminous inner response, which is readiness to act. It is a sense
+of on-coming fate, a compulsion to do or to suffer, that produces the
+illusion of perfect knowledge.
+
+I call it illusion, although our contact with things may be real, and our
+sensations and thoughts may be inevitable and honest; because nevertheless
+it is always an illusion to suppose that our images are the intrinsic
+qualities of things, or reproduce them exactly. The Ptolemaic system, for
+instance, was perfectly scientific; it was based on careful and prolonged
+observation and on just reasoning; but it was modelled on an image--the
+spherical blue dome of the heavens--proper only to an observer on the
+earth, and not transferable to a universe which is diffuse, centreless,
+fluid, and perhaps infinite. When the imagination, for any reason, comes
+to be peopled with images of the latter sort, the modern, and especially
+the latest, astronomy becomes more persuasive. For although I suspect that
+even Einstein is an imperfect relativist, and retains Euclidean space and
+absolute time at the bottom of his calculation, and recovers them at the
+end, yet the effort to express the system of nature as it would appear
+from _any_ station and to _any_ sensorium seems to be eminently
+enlightening.
+
+Theory and practice in the latest science are still allied, otherwise
+neither of them would prosper as it does; but each has taken a leap in its
+own direction. The distance between them has become greater than the naked
+eye can measure, and each of them in itself has become unintelligible. We
+roll and fly at dizzy speeds, and hear at incredible distances; at the
+same time we imagine and calculate to incredible depths. The technique of
+science, like that of industry, has become a thing in itself; the one
+veils its object, which is nature, as the other defeats its purpose, which
+is happiness. Science often seems to be less the study of things than the
+study of science. It is now more scholastic than philosophy ever was. We
+are invited to conceive organisms within organisms, so minute, so free,
+and so dynamic, that the heart of matter seems to explode into an endless
+discharge of fireworks, or a mathematical nightmare realised in a thousand
+places at once, and become the substance of the world. What is even more
+remarkable--for the notion of infinite organisation has been familiar to
+the learned at least since the time of Leibniz--the theatre of science is
+transformed no less than the actors and the play. The upright walls of
+space, the steady tread of time, begin to fail us; they bend now so
+obligingly to our perspectives that we no longer seem to travel through
+them, but to carry them with us, shooting them out or weaving them about
+us according to some native fatality, which is left unexplained. We seem
+to have reverted in some sense from Copernicus to Ptolemy: except that the
+centre is now occupied, not by the solid earth, but by _any_ geometrical
+point chosen for the origin of calculation. Time, too, is not measured by
+the sun or stars, but by _any_ "clock"--that is, by any recurrent rhythm
+taken as a standard of comparison. It would seem that the existence and
+energy of each chosen centre, as well as its career and encounters, hang
+on the collateral existence of other centres of force, among which it must
+wend its way: yet the only witness to their presence, and the only known
+property of their substance, is their "radio-activity", or the physical
+light which they shed. Light, in its physical being, is accordingly the
+measure of all things in this new philosophy: and if we ask ourselves why
+this element should have been preferred, the answer is not far to seek.
+Light is the only medium through which very remote or very minute
+particles of matter can be revealed to science. Whatever the nature of
+things may be intrinsically, science must accordingly express the universe
+in terms of light.
+
+These reforms have come from within: they are triumphs of method. We make
+an evident advance in logic, and in that parsimony which is dear to
+philosophers (though not to nature), if we refuse to assign given terms
+and relations to any prior medium, such as absolute time or space, which
+cannot be given with them. Observable spaces and times, like the facts
+observed in them, are given separately and in a desultory fashion.
+Initially, then, there are as many spaces and times as there are
+observers, or rather observations; these are the specious times and spaces
+of dreams, of sensuous life, and of romantic biography. Each is centred
+here and now, and stretched outwards, forward, and back, as far as
+imagination has the strength to project it. Then, when objects and events
+have been posited as self-existent, and when a "clock" and a system of
+co-ordinates have been established for measuring them, a single
+mathematical space and time may be deployed about them, conceived to
+contain all things, and to supply them with their respective places and
+dates. This gives us the cosmos of classical physics. But this system
+involves the uncritical notion of light and matter travelling through
+media previously existing, and being carried down, like a boat drifting
+down stream, by a flowing time which has a pace of its own, and imposes it
+on all existence. In reality, each "clock" and each landscape is
+self-centred and initially absolute: its time and space are irrelevant to
+those of any other landscape or "clock", unless the objects or events
+revealed there, being posited as self-existent, actually coincide with
+those revealed also in another landscape, or dated by another "clock". It
+is only by travelling along its own path at its own rate that experience
+or light can ever reach a point lying on another path also, so that two
+observations, and two measures, may coincide at their ultimate terms,
+their starting-points or their ends. Positions are therefore not
+independent of the journey which terminates in them, and thereby
+individuates them; and dates are not independent of the events which
+distinguish them. The flux of existence comes first: matter and light
+distend time by their pulses, they distend space by their deployments.
+
+This, if I understand it, is one half the new theory; the other half is
+not less acceptable. Newton had described motion as a result of two
+principles: the first, inertia, was supposed to be inherent in bodies; the
+second, gravity, was incidental to their co-existence. Yet inherent
+inertia can only be observed relatively: it makes no difference to me
+whether I am said to be moving at a great speed or absolutely at rest, if
+I am not jolted or breathless, and if my felt environment does not change.
+Inertia, or weight, in so far as it denotes something intrinsic, seems to
+be but another name for substance or the principle of existence: in so far
+as it denotes the first law of motion, it seems to be relative to an
+environment. It would therefore be preferable to combine inertia and
+attraction in a single formula, expressing the behaviour of bodies towards
+one another in all their conjunctions, without introducing any inherent
+forces or absolute measures. This seems to have been done by Einstein, or
+at least impressively suggested: and it has been found that the new
+calculations correspond to certain delicate observations more accurately
+than the old.
+
+This revolution in science seems, then, to be perfectly legal, and ought
+to be welcomed; yet only under one important moral condition, and with a
+paradoxical result. The moral condition is that the pride of science
+should turn into humility, that it should no longer imagine that it is
+laying bare the intrinsic nature of things. And the paradoxical result is
+this: that the forms of science are optional, like various languages or
+methods of notation. One may be more convenient or subtle than another,
+according to the place, senses, interests, and scope of the explorer; a
+reform in science may render the old theories antiquated, like the habit
+of wearing togas, or of going naked; but it cannot render them false, or
+itself true. Science, when it is more than the gossip of adventure or of
+experiment, yields practical assurances couched in symbolic terms, but no
+ultimate insight: so that the intellectual vacancy of the expert, which I
+was deriding, is a sort of warrant of his solidity. It is rather when the
+expert prophesies, when he propounds a new philosophy founded on his
+latest experiments, that we may justly smile at his system, and wait for
+the next.
+
+Self-knowledge--and the new science is full of self-knowledge--is a great
+liberator: if perhaps it imposes some retrenchment, essentially it revives
+courage. Then at last we see what we are and what we can do. The spirit
+can abandon its vain commitments and false pretensions, like a young man
+free at last to throw off his clothes and run naked along the sands.
+Intelligence is never gayer, never surer, than when it is strictly formal,
+satisfied with the evidence of its materials, as with the lights of
+jewels, and filled with mounting speculations, as with a sort of laughter.
+If all the arts aspire to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire
+to the condition of mathematics. Their logic is their spontaneous and
+intelligible side: and while they differ from mathematics and from one
+another in being directed in the first instance upon various
+unintelligible existing objects, yet as they advance, they unite: because
+they are everywhere striving to discover in those miscellaneous objects
+some intelligible order and method. And as the emotion of the pure artist,
+whatever may be his materials, lies in finding in them some formal harmony
+or imposing it upon them, so the interest of the scientific mind, in so
+far as it is free and purely intellectual, lies in tracing their formal
+pattern. The mathematician can afford to leave to his clients, the
+engineers, or perhaps the popular philosophers, the emotion of belief: for
+himself he keeps the lyrical pleasure of metre and of evolving equations:
+and it is a pleasant surprise to him, and an added problem, if he finds
+that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify
+them; much as if a composer found that the sailors could heave better when
+singing his songs.
+
+Yet such independence, however glorious inwardly, cannot help diminishing
+the prestige of the arts in the world. If science misled us before, when
+it was full of clearness and confidence, how shall we trust it now that it
+is all mystery and paradox? If classical physics needed this fundamental
+revision, near to experience and fruitful as it was, what revision will
+not romantic physics require? Nor is the future alone insecure: even now
+the prophets hardly understand one another, or perhaps themselves; and
+some of them interlard their science with the most dubious metaphysics.
+Naturally the enemies of science have not been slow to seize this
+opportunity: the soft-hearted, the muddle-headed, the superstitious are
+all raising their voices, no longer in desperate resistance to science,
+but hopefully, and in its name. Science, they tell us, is no longer
+hostile to religion, or to divination of any sort. Indeed, divination is a
+science too. Physics is no longer materialistic since space is now curved,
+and filled with an ether through which light travels at 300,000 kilometres
+per second--an immaterial rate: because if anything material ventured to
+move at that forbidden speed, it would be so flattened that it would cease
+to exist. Indeed, matter is now hardly needed at all; its place has been
+taken by radio-activity, and by electrons which dart and whirl with such
+miraculous swiftness, that occasionally, for no known reason, they can
+skip from orbit to orbit without traversing the intervening positions--an
+evident proof of free-will in them. Or if solids should still seem to be
+material, there are astral bodies as well which are immaterial although
+physical; and as to ether and electricity, they are the very substance of
+spirit. All this I find announced in newspapers and even in books as the
+breakdown of scientific materialism: and yet, when was materialism more
+arrant and barbarous than in these announcements? Something no doubt has
+broken down: but I am afraid it is rather the habit of thinking clearly
+and the power to discern the difference between material and spiritual
+things.
+
+The latest revolution in science will probably not be the last. I do not
+know what internal difficulties, contradictions, or ominous obscurities
+may exist in the new theories, or what logical seeds of change, perhaps of
+radical change, might be discovered there by a competent critic. I base my
+expectation on two circumstances somewhat more external and visible to the
+lay mind. One circumstance is that the new theories seem to be affected,
+and partly inspired, by a particular philosophy, itself utterly insecure.
+This philosophy regards the point of view as controlling or even creating
+the object seen; in other words, it identifies the object with the
+experience or the knowledge of it: it is essentially a subjective,
+psychological, Protestant philosophy. The study of perspectives, which a
+severer critic might call illusions, is one of the most interesting and
+enlightening of studies, and for my own part I should be content to dwell
+almost exclusively in that poetic and moral atmosphere, in the realm of
+literature and of humanism. Yet I cannot help seeing that neither in logic
+nor in natural genesis can perspectives be the ultimate object of science,
+since a plurality of points of view, somehow comparable, must be assumed
+in the beginning, as well as common principles of projection, and ulterior
+points of contact or coincidence. Such assumptions, which must persist
+throughout, seem to presuppose an absolute system of nature behind all the
+relative systems of science.
+
+The other circumstance which points to further revolutions is social. The
+new science is unintelligible to almost all of us; it can be tested only
+by very delicate observations and very difficult reasoning. We accept it
+on the authority of a few professors who themselves have accepted it with
+a contagious alacrity, as if caught in a whirlwind. It has sprung up
+mysteriously and mightily, like mysticism in a cloister or theology in a
+council: a Soviet of learned men has proclaimed it. Moreover, it is not
+merely a system among systems, but a movement among movements. A system,
+even when it has serious rivals, may be maintained for centuries as
+religions are maintained, institutionally; but a movement comes to an end;
+it is followed presently by a period of assimilation which transforms it,
+or by a movement in some other direction. I ask myself accordingly whether
+the condition of the world in the coming years will be favourable to
+refined and paradoxical science. The extension of education will have
+enabled the uneducated to pronounce upon everything. Will the patronage of
+capital and enterprise subsist, to encourage discovery and reward
+invention? Will a jealous and dogmatic democracy respect the
+unintelligible insight of the few? Will a perhaps starving democracy
+support materially its Soviet of seers? But let us suppose that no
+utilitarian fanaticism supervenes, and no intellectual surfeit or
+discouragement. May not the very profundity of the new science and its
+metaphysical affinities lead it to bolder developments, inscrutable to the
+public and incompatible with one another, like the gnostic sects of
+declining antiquity? Then perhaps that luminous modern thing which until
+recently was called science, in contrast to all personal philosophies, may
+cease to exist altogether, being petrified into routine in the
+practitioners, and fading in the professors into abstruse speculations.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+A LONG WAY ROUND TO NIRVANA
+
+
+That the end of life is death may be called a truism, since the various
+kinds of immortality that might perhaps supervene would none of them
+abolish death, but at best would weave life and death together into the
+texture of a more comprehensive destiny. The end of one life might be the
+beginning of another, if the Creator had composed his great work like a
+dramatic poet, assigning successive lines to different characters. Death
+would then be merely the cue at the end of each speech, summoning the next
+personage to break in and keep the ball rolling. Or perhaps, as some
+suppose, all the characters are assumed in turn by a single supernatural
+Spirit, who amid his endless improvisations is imagining himself living
+for the moment in this particular solar and social system. Death in such a
+universal monologue would be but a change of scene or of metre, while in
+the scramble of a real comedy it would be a change of actors. In either
+case every voice would be silenced sooner or later, and death would end
+each particular life, in spite of all possible sequels.
+
+The relapse of created things into nothing is no violent fatality, but
+something naturally quite smooth and proper. This has been set forth
+recently, in a novel way, by a philosopher from whom we hardly expected
+such a lesson, namely Professor Sigmund Freud. He has now broadened his
+conception of sexual craving or _libido_ into a general principle of
+attraction or concretion in matter, like the Eros of the ancient poets
+Hesiod and Empedocles. The windows of that stuffy clinic have been thrown
+open; that smell of acrid disinfectants, those hysterical shrieks, have
+escaped into the cold night. The troubles of the sick soul, we are given
+to understand, as well as their cure, after all flow from the stars.
+
+I am glad that Freud has resisted the tendency to represent this principle
+of Love as the only principle in nature. Unity somehow exercises an evil
+spell over metaphysicians. It is admitted that in real life it is not well
+for One to be alone, and I think pure unity is no less barren and
+graceless in metaphysics. You must have plurality to start with, or
+trinity, or at least duality, if you wish to get anywhere, even if you
+wish to get effectively into the bosom of the One, abandoning your
+separate existence. Freud, like Empedocles, has prudently introduced a
+prior principle for Love to play with; not Strife, however (which is only
+an incident in Love), but Inertia, or the tendency towards peace and
+death. Let us suppose that matter was originally dead, and perfectly
+content to be so, and that it still relapses, when it can, into its old
+equilibrium. But the homogeneous (as Spencer would say) when it is finite
+is unstable: and matter, presumably not being co-extensive with space,
+necessarily forms aggregates which have an inside and an outside. The
+parts of such bodies are accordingly differently exposed to external
+influences and differently related to one another. This inequality, even
+in what seems most quiescent, is big with changes, destined to produce in
+time a wonderful complexity. It is the source of all uneasiness, of life,
+and of love.
+
+     "Let us imagine [writes Freud][11] an undifferentiated vesicle of
+     sensitive substance: then its surface, exposed as it is to the
+     outer world, is by its very position differentiated, and serves as
+     an organ for receiving stimuli.... This morsel of living substance
+     floats about in an outer world which is charged with the most
+     potent energies, and it would be destroyed ... if it were not
+     furnished with protection against stimulation. [On the other hand]
+     the sensitive cortical layer has no protective barrier against
+     excitations emanating from within.... The most prolific sources of
+     such excitations are the so-called instincts of the organism....
+     The child never gets tired of demanding the repetition of a game
+     ... he wants always to hear the same story instead of a new one,
+     insists inexorably on exact repetition, and corrects each deviation
+     which the narrator lets slip by mistake.... According to this, _an
+     instinct would be a tendency in living organic matter impelling it
+     towards reinstatement of an earlier condition_, one which it had
+     abandoned under the influence of external disturbing forces--a kind
+     of organic elasticity, or, to put it another way, the manifestation
+     of inertia in organic life.
+
+     "If, then, all organic instincts are conservative, historically
+     acquired, and directed towards regression, towards reinstatement of
+     something earlier, we are obliged to place all the results of
+     organic development to the credit of external, disturbing, and
+     distracting influences. The rudimentary creature would from its
+     very beginning not have wanted to change, would, if circumstances
+     had remained the same, have always merely repeated the same course
+     of existence.... It would be counter to the conservative nature of
+     instinct if the goal of life were a state never hitherto reached.
+     It must be rather an ancient starting point, which the living being
+     left long ago, and to which it harks back again by all the
+     circuitous paths of development.... _The goal of all life is
+     death...._
+
+     "Through a long period of time the living substance may have ...
+     had death within easy reach ... until decisive external influences
+     altered in such a way as to compel [it] to ever greater deviations
+     from the original path of life, and to ever more complicated and
+     circuitous routes to the attainment of the goal of death. These
+     circuitous ways to death, faithfully retained by the conservative
+     instincts, would be neither more nor less than the phenomena of
+     life as we know it."
+
+Freud puts forth these interesting suggestions with much modesty,
+admitting that they are vague and uncertain and (what it is even more
+important to notice) mythical in their terms; but it seems to me that,
+for all that, they are an admirable counterblast to prevalent follies.
+When we hear that there is, animating the whole universe, an _Élan vital_,
+or general impulse toward some unknown but single ideal, the terms used
+are no less uncertain, mythical, and vague, but the suggestion conveyed is
+false--false, I mean, to the organic source of life and aspiration, to the
+simple naturalness of nature: whereas the suggestion conveyed by Freud's
+speculations is true. In what sense can myths and metaphors be true or
+false? In the sense that, in terms drawn from moral predicaments or from
+literary psychology, they may report the general movement and the
+pertinent issue of material facts, and may inspire us with a wise
+sentiment in their presence. In this sense I should say that Greek
+mythology was true and Calvinist theology was false. The chief terms
+employed in psycho-analysis have always been metaphorical: "unconscious
+wishes", "the pleasure-principle", "the Oedipus complex", "Narcissism",
+"the censor"; nevertheless, interesting and profound vistas may be opened
+up, in such terms, into the tangle of events in a man's life, and a fresh
+start may be made with fewer encumbrances and less morbid inhibition. "The
+shortcomings of our description", Freud says, "would probably disappear if
+for psychological terms we could substitute physiological or chemical
+ones. These too only constitute a metaphorical language, but one familiar
+to us for a much longer time, and perhaps also simpler." All human
+discourse is metaphorical, in that our perceptions and thoughts are
+adventitious signs for their objects, as names are, and by no means copies
+of what is going on materially in the depths of nature; but just as the
+sportsman's eye, which yields but a summary graphic image, can trace the
+flight of a bird through the air quite well enough to shoot it and bring
+it down, so the myths of a wise philosopher about the origin of life or of
+dreams, though expressed symbolically, may reveal the pertinent movement
+of nature to us, and may kindle in us just sentiments and true
+expectations in respect to our fate--for his own soul is the bird this
+sportsman is shooting.
+
+Now I think these new myths of Freud's about life, like his old ones
+about dreams, are calculated to enlighten and to chasten us enormously
+about ourselves. The human spirit, when it awakes, finds itself in
+trouble; it is burdened, for no reason it can assign, with all sorts of
+anxieties about food, pressures, pricks, noises, and pains. It is born, as
+another wise myth has it, in original sin. And the passions and ambitions
+of life, as they come on, only complicate this burden and make it heavier,
+without rendering it less incessant or gratuitous. Whence this fatality,
+and whither does it lead? It comes from heredity, and it leads to
+propagation. When we ask how heredity could be started or transmitted, our
+ignorance of nature and of past time reduces us to silence or to wild
+conjectures. Something--let us call it matter--must always have existed,
+and some of its parts, under pressure of the others, must have got tied up
+into knots, like the mainspring of a watch, in such a violent and unhappy
+manner that when the pressure is relaxed they fly open as fast as they
+can, and unravel themselves with a vast sense of relief. Hence the longing
+to satisfy latent passions, with the fugitive pleasure in doing so. But
+the external agencies that originally wound up that mainspring never
+cease to operate; every fresh stimulus gives it another turn, until it
+snaps, or grows flaccid, or is unhinged. Moreover, from time to time, when
+circumstances change, these external agencies may encrust that primary
+organ with minor organs attached to it. Every impression, every adventure,
+leaves a trace or rather a seed behind it. It produces a further
+complication in the structure of the body, a fresh charge, which tends to
+repeat the impressed motion in season and out of season. Hence that
+perpetual docility or ductility in living substance which enables it to
+learn tricks, to remember facts, and (when the seeds of past experiences
+marry and cross in the brain) to imagine new experiences, pleasing or
+horrible. Every act initiates a new habit and may implant a new instinct.
+We see people even late in life carried away by political or religious
+contagions or developing strange vices; there would be no peace in old
+age, but rather a greater and greater obsession by all sorts of cares,
+were it not that time, in exposing us to many adventitious influences,
+weakens or discharges our primitive passions; we are less greedy, less
+lusty, less hopeful, less generous. But these weakened primitive impulses
+are naturally by far the strongest and most deeply rooted in the organism:
+so that although an old man may be converted or may take up some hobby,
+there is usually something thin in his elderly zeal, compared with the
+heartiness of youth; nor is it edifying to see a soul in which the plainer
+human passions are extinct becoming a hotbed of chance delusions.
+
+In any case each fresh habit taking root in the organism forms a little
+mainspring or instinct of its own, like a parasite; so that an elaborate
+mechanism is gradually developed, where each lever and spring holds the
+other down, and all hold the mainspring down together, allowing it to
+unwind itself only very gradually, and meantime keeping the whole clock
+ticking and revolving, and causing the smooth outer face which it turns to
+the world, so clean and innocent, to mark the time of day amiably for the
+passer-by. But there is a terribly complicated labour going on beneath,
+propelled with difficulty, and balanced precariously, with much secret
+friction and failure. No wonder that the engine often gets visibly out of
+order, or stops short: the marvel is that it ever manages to go at all.
+Nor is it satisfied with simply revolving and, when at last dismounted,
+starting afresh in the person of some seed it has dropped, a portion of
+its substance with all its concentrated instincts wound up tightly within
+it, and eager to repeat the ancestral experiment; all this growth is not
+merely material and vain. Each clock in revolving strikes the hour, even
+the quarters, and often with lovely chimes. These chimes we call
+perceptions, feelings, purposes, and dreams; and it is because we are
+taken up entirely with this mental music, and perhaps think that it sounds
+of itself and needs no music-box to make it, that we find such difficulty
+in conceiving the nature of our own clocks and are compelled to describe
+them only musically, that is, in myths. But the ineptitude of our
+aesthetic minds to unravel the nature of mechanism does not deprive these
+minds of their own clearness and euphony. Besides sounding their various
+musical notes, they have the cognitive function of indicating the hour and
+catching the echoes of distant events or of maturing inward dispositions.
+This information and emotion, added to incidental pleasures in satisfying
+our various passions, make up the life of an incarnate spirit. They
+reconcile it to the external fatality that has wound up the organism, and
+is breaking it down; and they rescue this organism and all its works from
+the indignity of being a vain complication and a waste of motion.
+
+That the end of life should be death may sound sad: yet what other end can
+anything have? The end of an evening party is to go to bed; but its use is
+to gather congenial people together, that they may pass the time
+pleasantly. An invitation to the dance is not rendered ironical because
+the dance cannot last for ever; the youngest of us and the most vigorously
+wound up, after a few hours, has had enough of sinuous stepping and
+prancing. The transitoriness of things is essential to their physical
+being, and not at all sad in itself; it becomes sad by virtue of a
+sentimental illusion, which makes us imagine that they wish to endure, and
+that their end is always untimely; but in a healthy nature it is not so.
+What is truly sad is to have some impulse frustrated in the midst of its
+career, and robbed of its chosen object; and what is painful is to have an
+organ lacerated or destroyed when it is still vigorous, and not ready for
+its natural sleep and dissolution. We must not confuse the itch which our
+unsatisfied instincts continue to cause with the pleasure of satisfying
+and dismissing each of them in turn. Could they all be satisfied
+harmoniously we should be satisfied once for all and completely. Then
+doing and dying would coincide throughout and be a perfect pleasure.
+
+This same insight is contained in another wise myth which has inspired
+morality and religion in India from time immemorial: I mean the doctrine
+of Karma. We are born, it says, with a heritage, a character imposed, and
+a long task assigned, all due to the ignorance which in our past lives has
+led us into all sorts of commitments. These obligations we must pay off,
+relieving the pure spirit within us from its accumulated burdens, from
+debts and assets both equally oppressive. We cannot disentangle ourselves
+by mere frivolity, nor by suicide: frivolity would only involve us more
+deeply in the toils of fate, and suicide would but truncate our misery and
+leave us for ever a confessed failure. When life is understood to be a
+process of redemption, its various phases are taken up in turn without
+haste and without undue attachment; their coming and going have all the
+keenness of pleasure, the holiness of sacrifice, and the beauty of art.
+The point is to have expressed and discharged all that was latent in us;
+and to this perfect relief various temperaments and various traditions
+assign different names, calling it having one's day, or doing one's duty,
+or realising one's ideal, or saving one's soul. The task in any case is
+definite and imposed on us by nature, whether we recognise it or not;
+therefore we can make true moral progress or fall into real errors. Wisdom
+and genius lie in discerning this prescribed task and in doing it readily,
+cleanly, and without distraction. Folly on the contrary imagines that any
+scent is worth following, that we have an infinite nature, or no nature in
+particular, that life begins without obligations and can do business
+without capital, and that the will is vacuously free, instead of being a
+specific burden and a tight hereditary knot to be unravelled. Some
+philosophers without self-knowledge think that the variations and further
+entanglements which the future may bring are the manifestation of spirit;
+but they are, as Freud has indicated, imposed on living beings by external
+pressure, and take shape in the realm of matter. It is only after the
+organs of spirit are formed mechanically that spirit can exist, and can
+distinguish the better from the worse in the fate of those organs, and
+therefore in its own fate. Spirit has nothing to do with infinite
+existence. Infinite existence is something physical and ambiguous; there
+is no scale in it and no centre. The depths of the human heart are finite,
+and they are dark only to ignorance. Deep and dark as a soul may be when
+you look down into it from outside, it is something perfectly natural; and
+the same understanding that can unearth our suppressed young passions, and
+dispel our stubborn bad habits, can show us where our true good lies.
+Nature has marked out the path for us beforehand; there are snares in it,
+but also primroses, and it leads to peace.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE PRESTIGE OF THE INFINITE
+
+
+"The more complex the world becomes and the more it rises above the
+indeterminate, so much the farther removed it is from God; that is to say,
+so much the more impious it is." M. Julien Benda[12] is not led to this
+startling utterance by any political or sentimental grudge. It is not the
+late war, nor the peace of Versailles, nor the parlous state of the arts,
+nor the decay of morality and prosperity that disgusts him with our
+confused world. It is simply overmastering respect for the infinite. _La
+Trahison des Clercs_, or Treason of the Levites, with which he had
+previously upbraided the intellectuals of his time, now appears to consist
+precisely in coveting a part in this world's inheritance, and forgetting
+that the inheritance of the Levites is the Lord: which, being interpreted
+philosophically, means that a philosopher is bound to measure all things
+by the infinite.
+
+This infinite is not rhetorical, as if we spoke of infinite thought or
+infinite love: it is physico-mathematical. Nothing but number, M. Benda
+tells us, seems to him intelligible. Time, space, volume, and complexity
+(which appears to the senses as quality) stretch in a series of units,
+positions, or degrees, to infinity, as number does: and in such
+homogeneous series, infinite in both directions, there will be no fixed
+point of origin for counting or surveying the whole and no particular
+predominant scale. Every position will be essentially identical with every
+other; every suggested structure will be collapsible and reversible; and
+the position and relations of every unit will be indistinguishable from
+those of every other. In the infinite, M. Benda says, the parts have no
+identity: each number in the scale, as we begin counting from different
+points of origin, bears also every other number.
+
+This is no mere mathematical puzzle; the thought has a strange moral
+eloquence. Seen in their infinite setting, which we may presume to be
+their ultimate environment, all things lose their central position and
+their dominant emphasis. The contrary of what we first think of them or of
+ourselves--for instance that we are alive, while they are dead or
+unborn--is also true. Egotism becomes absurd; pride and shame become the
+vainest of illusions. If then it be repugnant to reason that the series of
+numbers, moments, positions, and volumes should be limited--and the human
+spirit has a great affinity to the infinite--all specific quality and
+variety in things must be superficial and deeply unreal. They are masks in
+the carnival of phenomena, to be observed without conviction, and secretly
+dismissed as ironical by those who have laid up their treasure in the
+infinite.
+
+This mathematical dissolution of particulars is reinforced by moral
+considerations which are more familiar. Existence--any specific fact
+asserting itself in any particular place or moment--is inevitably
+contingent, arbitrary, gratuitous, and insecure. A sense of insecurity is
+likely to be the first wedge by which repentance penetrates into the
+animal heart. If a man did not foresee death and fear it, he might never
+come at all to the unnatural thought of renouncing life. In fact, he does
+not often remember death: yet his whole gay world is secretly afraid of
+being found out, of being foiled in the systematic bluff by which it lives
+as if its life were immortal; and far more than the brave young man fears
+death in his own person, the whole life of the world fears to be exorcised
+by self-knowledge, and lost in air. And with good reason: because, whether
+we stop to notice this circumstance or not, every fact, every laborious
+beloved achievement of man or of nature, has come to exist against
+infinite odds. In the dark grab-bag of Being, this chosen fact was
+surrounded by innumerable possible variations or contradictions of it; and
+each of those possibilities, happening not to be realised here and now,
+yet possesses intrinsically exactly the same aptitude or claim to
+existence. Nor are these claims and aptitudes merely imaginary and
+practically contemptible. The flux of existence is continually repenting
+of its choices, and giving everything actual the lie, by continually
+substituting something else, no less specific and no less nugatory.
+_This_ world, _any_ world, exists only by an unmerited privilege. Its
+glory is offensive to the spirit, like the self-sufficiency of some
+obstreperous nobody, who happens to have drawn the big prize in a lottery.
+"The world", M. Benda writes, "inspires me with a double sentiment. I feel
+it to be full of grandeur, because it has succeeded in asserting itself
+and coming to exist; and I feel it to be pitiful, when I consider how it
+hung on a mere nothing that this particular world should never have
+existed." And though this so accidental world, by its manifold beauties
+and excitements, may arouse our romantic enthusiasm, it is fundamentally
+an _unholy_ world. Its creation, he adds in italics, "_is something which
+reason would wish had never taken place_".
+
+For we must not suppose that God, when God is defined as infinite Being,
+can be the creator of the world. Such a notion would hopelessly destroy
+that coherence in thought to which M. Benda aspires. The infinite cannot
+be selective; it cannot possess a particular structure (such, for
+instance, as the Trinity) nor a particular quality (such as goodness). It
+cannot exert power or give direction. Nothing can be responsible for the
+world except the world itself. It has created, or is creating, itself
+perpetually by its own arbitrary act, by a groundless self-assertion which
+may be called (somewhat metaphorically) will, or even original sin: the
+original sin of existence, particularity, selfishness, or separation from
+God. Existence, being absolutely contingent and ungrounded, is perfectly
+free: and if it ties itself up in its own habits or laws, and becomes a
+terrible nightmare to itself by its automatic monotony, that still is only
+its own work and, figuratively speaking, its own fault. Nothing save its
+own arbitrary and needless pressure keeps it going in that round. This
+fatality is impressive, and popular religion has symbolised it in the
+person of a deity far more often recognised and worshipped than infinite
+Being. This popular deity, a symbol for the forces of nature and history,
+the patron of human welfare and morality, M. Benda calls the imperial God.
+
+     "It is clear that these two Gods ... have nothing to do with one
+     another. The God whom Marshal de Villars, rising in his stirrups
+     and pointing his drawn sword heavenwards, thanks on the evening of
+     Denain, is one God: quite another is the God within whose bosom the
+     author of the _Imitation_, in a corner of his cell, feels the
+     nothingness of all human victories."
+
+It follows from this, if we are coherent, that any "return to God" which
+ascetic philosophy may bring about cannot be a social reform, a transition
+to some better form of natural existence in a promised land, a renovated
+earth, or a material or temporal heaven. Nor can the error of creation be
+corrected violently by a second arbitrary act, such as suicide, or the
+annihilation of the universe by some ultimate general collapse. If such
+events happen, they still leave the door open to new creations and fresh
+errors. But the marvel is (I will return to this point presently) that the
+world, in the person of a human individual endowed with reason, may
+perceive the error of its ways and correct it ideally, in the sphere of
+estimation and worship. Such is the only possible salvation. Reason, in
+order to save us, and we, in order to be saved, must both subsist: we must
+both be incidents in the existing world. We may then, by the operation of
+reason in us, recover our allegiance to the infinite, for we are bone of
+its bone and flesh of its flesh: and by our secret sympathy with it we may
+rescind every particular claim and dismiss silently every particular form
+of being, as something unreal and unholy.
+
+An even more cogent reason why M. Benda's God cannot have been the creator
+of the world is that avowedly this God has never existed. We are expressly
+warned that "if God is infinite Being he excludes existence, in so far as
+to exist means to be distinct. In the sense which everybody attaches to
+the word existence, God, as I conceive him, _does not exist_". Of course,
+in the mind of a lover of the infinite, this fact is not derogatory to
+God, but derogatory to existence. The infinite remains the first and the
+ultimate term in thought, the fundamental dimension common to all things,
+however otherwise they may be qualified; it remains the eternal background
+against which they all are defined and into which they soon disappear.
+Evidently, in this divine--because indestructible and necessary--dimension,
+Being is incapable of making choices, adopting paths of evolution, or
+exercising power; it knows nothing of phenomena; it is not their cause
+nor their sanction. It is incapable of love, wrath, or any other passion.
+"I will add", writes M. Benda, "something else which theories of an
+impersonal deity have less often pointed out. Since infinity is
+incompatible with personal being, God is incapable of morality." Thus mere
+intuition and analysis of the infinite, since this infinite is itself
+passive and indifferent, may prove a subtle antidote to passion, to folly,
+and even to life.
+
+I think M. Benda succeeds admirably in the purpose announced in his title
+of rendering his discourse coherent. If once we accept his definitions,
+his corollaries follow. Clearly and bravely he disengages his idea of
+infinity from other properties usually assigned to the deity, such as
+power, omniscience, goodness, and tutelary functions in respect to life,
+or to some special human society. But coherence is not completeness, nor
+even a reasonable measure of descriptive truth; and certain considerations
+are omitted from M. Benda's view which are of such moment that, if they
+were included, they might transform the whole issue. Perhaps the chief of
+these omissions is that of an organ for thought. M. Benda throughout is
+engaged simply in clarifying his own ideas, and repeatedly disclaims any
+ulterior pretensions. He finds in the panorama of his thoughts an idea of
+infinite Being, or God, and proceeds to study the relation of that
+conception to all others. It is a task of critical analysis and religious
+confession: and nothing could be more legitimate and, to some of us, more
+interesting. But whence these various ideas, and whence the spell which
+the idea of infinite Being in particular casts over the meditative mind?
+Unless we can view these movements of thought in their natural setting and
+order of genesis, we shall be in danger of turning autobiography into
+cosmology and inwardness into folly.
+
+One of the most notable points in M. Benda's analysis is his insistence on
+the leap involved in passing from infinite Being to any particular fact or
+system of facts; and again the leap involved in passing, when the
+converted spirit "returns to God", from specific animal interests--no
+matter how generous, social, or altruistic these interests may be--to
+absolute renunciation and sympathy with the absolute. "That a will to
+return to God should arise in the phenomenal world seems to be a miracle
+no less wonderful (though it be less wondered at) than that the world
+should arise in the bosom of God." "Love of man, charity, humanitarianism
+are nothing but the selfishness of the race, by which each animal species
+assures its specific existence." "To surrender one's individuality for the
+benefit of a larger self is something quite different from
+disinterestedness; it is the exact opposite." And certainly, if we
+regarded infinite Being as a cosmological medium--say, empty space and
+time--there would be a miraculous break, an unaccountable new beginning,
+if that glassy expanse was suddenly wrinkled by something called energy.
+But in fact there need never have been such a leap, or such a miracle,
+because there could never have been such a transition. Infinite Being is
+not a material vacuum "in the bosom" of which a world might arise. It is a
+Platonic idea--though Plato never entertained it--an essence, non-existent
+and immutable, not in the same field of reality at all as a world of
+moving and colliding things. Such an essence is not conceivably the seat
+of the variations that enliven the world. It is only in thought that we
+may pass from infinite Being to an existing universe; and when we turn
+from one to the other, and say that now energy has emerged from the bosom
+of God, we are turning over a new leaf, or rather picking up an entirely
+different volume. The natural world is composed of objects and events
+which theory may regard as transformations of a hypothetical energy; an
+energy which M. Benda--who when he comes down to the physical world is a
+good materialist--conceives to have condensed and distributed itself into
+matter, which in turn composed organisms and ultimately generated
+consciousness and reason. But in whatever manner the natural world may
+have evolved, it is found and posited by us in perception and action, not,
+like infinite Being, defined in thought. This contrast is ontological, and
+excludes any derivation of the one object from the other. M. Benda himself
+tells us so; and we may wonder why he introduced infinite Being at all
+into his description of the world. The reason doubtless is that he was not
+engaged in describing the world, except by the way, but rather in
+classifying and clarifying his ideas in view of determining his moral
+allegiance. And he arranged his terms, whether ideal or materials, in a
+single series, because they were alike present to his intuition, and he
+was concerned to arrange them in a hierarchy, according to their moral
+dignity.
+
+Not only is infinite Being an incongruous and obstructive term to describe
+the substance of the world (which, if it subtends the changes in the world
+and causes them, must evidently change with them), but even mathematical
+space and time, in their ideal infinity, may be very far from describing
+truly the medium and groundwork of the universe. That is a question for
+investigation and hypothesis, not for intuition. But in the life of
+intuition, when that life takes a mathematical turn, empty space and time
+and their definable structure may be important themes; while, when the
+same life becomes a discipline of the affections, we see by this latest
+example, as well as by many a renowned predecessor of M. Benda, that
+infinite Being may dominate the scene.
+
+Nor is this eventual dominance so foreign to the natural mind, or such a
+miraculous conversion, as it might seem. Here, too, there is no derivation
+of object from object, but an alternative for the mind. As M. Benda points
+out, natural interests and sympathies may expand indefinitely, so as to
+embrace a family, a nation, or the whole animate universe; we might even
+be chiefly occupied with liberal pursuits, such as science or music; the
+more we laboured at these things and delighted in them, the less ready
+should we be for renunciation and detachment. Must conversion then descend
+upon us from heaven like a thunderbolt? Far from it. We need not look for
+the principle of spiritual life in the distance: we have it at home from
+the beginning. Even the idea of infinite Being, though unnamed, is
+probably familiar. Perhaps in the biography of the human race, or of each
+budding mind, the infinite or indeterminate may have been the primary
+datum. On that homogeneous sensuous background, blank at first but
+secretly plastic, a spot here and a movement there may gradually have
+become discernible, until the whole picture of nature and history had
+shaped itself as we see it. A certain sense of that primitive datum, the
+infinite or indeterminate, may always remain as it were the outstretched
+canvas on which every picture is painted. And when the pictures vanish, as
+in deep sleep, the ancient simplicity and quietness may be actually
+recovered, in a conscious union with Brahma. So sensuous, so intimate, so
+unsophisticated the "return to God" may be for the spirit, without
+excluding the other avenues, intellectual and ascetic, by which this
+return may be effected in waking life, though then not so much in act as
+in intent only and allegiance.
+
+I confess that formerly I had some difficulty in sharing the supreme
+respect for infinite Being which animates so many saints: it seemed to me
+the dazed, the empty, the deluded side of spirituality. Why rest in an
+object which can be redeemed from blank negation only by a blank
+intensity? But time has taught me not to despise any form of vital
+imagination, any discipline which may achieve perfection after any kind.
+Intuition is a broadly based activity; it engages elaborate organs and
+sums up and synthesises accumulated impressions. It may therefore easily
+pour the riches of its ancestry into the image or the sentiment which it
+evokes, poor as this sentiment or image might seem if expressed in words.
+In rapt or ecstatic moments, the vital momentum, often the moral escape,
+is everything, and the achievement, apart from that blessed relief, little
+or nothing. Infinite Being may profit in this way by offering a contrast
+to infinite annoyance. Moreover, in my own way, I have discerned in pure
+Being the involution of all forms. As felt, pure Being may be
+indeterminate, but as conceived reflectively it includes all
+determinations: so that when deployed into the realm of essence, infinite
+or indeterminate Being truly contains entertainment for all eternity.
+
+M. Benda feels this pregnancy of the infinite on the mathematical side;
+but he hardly notices the fact, proclaimed so gloriously by Spinoza, that
+the infinity of extension is only one of an infinity of infinites. There
+is an aesthetic infinite, or many aesthetic infinites, composed of all the
+forms which nature or imagination might exhibit; and where imagination
+fails, there are infinite remainders of the unimagined. The version which
+M. Benda gives us of infinite Being, limited to the mathematical
+dimension, is therefore unnecessarily cold and stark. His one infinity is
+monochrome, whereas the total infinity of essence, in which an infinity of
+outlines is only one item, is infinitely many-coloured. Phenomena
+therefore fall, in their essential variety, within and not without
+infinite Being: so that in "returning to God" we might take the whole
+world with us, not indeed in its blind movement and piecemeal
+illumination, as events occur, but in an after-image and panoramic
+portrait, as events are gathered together in the realm of truth.
+
+On the whole I think M. Benda's two Gods are less unfriendly to one
+another than his aggrieved tone might suggest. This pregnant little book
+ends on a tragic note.
+
+     "Hitherto human self-assertion in the state or the family, while
+     serving the imperial God, has paid some grudging honours, at least
+     verbally, to the infinite God as well, under the guise of
+     liberalism, love of mankind, or the negation of classes. But today
+     this imperfect homage is retracted, and nothing is reverenced
+     except that which gives strength. If anyone preaches human
+     kindness, it is in order to establish a "strong" community
+     martially trained, like a super-state, to oppose everything not
+     included within it, and to become omnipotent in the art of
+     utilising the non-human forces of nature.... The will to return to
+     God may prove to have been, in the history of the phenomenal world,
+     a sublime accident."
+
+Certainly the will to "return to God", if not an accident, is an incident
+in the life of the world; and the whole world itself is a sublime
+accident, in the sense that its existence is contingent, groundless, and
+precarious. Yet so long as the imperial God continues successfully to keep
+our world going, it will be no accident, but a natural necessity, that
+many a mind should turn to the thought of the infinite with awe, with a
+sense of liberation, and even with joy. The infinite God owes all his
+worshippers, little as he may care for them, to the success of the
+imperial God in creating reflective and speculative minds. Or (to drop
+these mythological expressions which may become tiresome) philosophers owe
+to nature and to the discipline of moral life their capacity to look
+beyond nature and beyond morality. And while they may _look_ beyond, and
+take comfort in the vision, they cannot _pass_ beyond. As M. Benda says,
+the most faithful Levite can return to the infinite only in his thought;
+in his life he must remain a lay creature. Yet nature, in forming the
+human soul, unintentionally unlocked for the mind the doors to truth and
+to essence, partly by obliging the soul to attend to things which are
+outside, and partly by endowing the soul with far greater potentialities
+of sensation and invention than daily life is likely to call forth. Our
+minds are therefore naturally dissatisfied with their lot and
+speculatively directed upon an outspread universe in which our persons
+count for almost nothing. These insights are calculated to give our brutal
+wills some pause. Intuition of the infinite and recourse to the infinite
+for religious inspiration follow of themselves, and can never be
+suppressed altogether, so long as life is conscious and experience
+provokes reflection.
+
+Spirit is certainly not one of the forces producing spirit, but neither is
+it a contrary force. It is the actuality of feeling, of observation, of
+meaning. Spirit has no unmannerly quarrel with its parents, its hosts, or
+even its gaolers: they know not what they do. Yet spirit belongs
+intrinsically to another sphere, and cannot help wondering at the world,
+and suffering in it. The man in whom spirit is awake will continue to
+live and act, but with a difference. In so far as he has become pure
+spirit he will have transcended the fear of death or defeat; for now his
+instinctive fear, which will subsist, will be neutralised by an equally
+sincere consent to die and to fail. He will live henceforth in a truer and
+more serene sympathy with nature than is possible to rival natural beings.
+Natural beings are perpetually struggling to live only, and not to die; so
+that their will is in hopeless rebellion against the divine decrees which
+they must obey notwithstanding. The spiritual man, on the contrary, in so
+far as he has already passed intellectually into the eternal world, no
+longer endures unwillingly the continual death involved in living, or the
+final death involved in having been born. He renounces everything
+religiously in the very act of attaining it, resigning existence itself as
+gladly as he accepts it, or even more gladly; because the emphasis which
+action and passion lend to the passing moment seems to him arbitrary and
+violent; and as each task or experience is dismissed in turn, he accounts
+the end of it more blessed than the beginning.
+
+
+[11] The following quotations are drawn from _Beyond the Pleasure
+Principle_, by Sigmund Freud; authorised translation by C.J.M. Hubback.
+The International Psycho-Analytic Press, 1922, pp. 29-48. The italics
+are in the original.
+
+[12] _Essai d'un Discours cohérent sur les Rapports de Dieu et du
+Monde._ Par Julien Benda. Librairie Gallimard, Paris, 1931.
+
+
+
+
+
+
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+Philosophy, by George Santayana
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy
+by George Santayana
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy
+       Five Essays
+
+Author: George Santayana
+
+Release Date: September 17, 2005 [EBook #16712]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME TURNS OF THOUGHT IN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Michael Ciesielski and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
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+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+<div id='frontmatter'>
+<h1>SOME TURNS OF THOUGHT IN
+MODERN PHILOSOPHY</h1>
+
+<h2><i>Five Essays</i></h2>
+
+<div style='height:2pc;'><br /></div>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<div style='height:2pc;'><br /></div>
+
+<h2>GEORGE SANTAYANA</h2>
+
+<div style='height:1pc;'><br /></div>
+
+
+<p class="ctr">NEW YORK<br />
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS<br />
+1933</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">Published under the auspices of<br />
+THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN</p>
+
+</div>
+
+
+<div style='height:3pc;'><br /></div>
+
+
+<div id='tocCon'>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table id='toc' summary='Table of Contents'>
+<tr><th /><th><i>page</i></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#I">I. Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense</a>
+
+<p>Paper read before the Royal Society of Literature
+on the occasion of the Tercentenary of the
+birth of John Locke. With some <a href="#SUPPLEMENTARY_NOTES">Supplementary
+Notes</a></p></td>          <td>1</td></tr>
+
+
+<tr><td><a href="#II">II. Fifty Years of British Idealism</a>
+
+<p>Reflections on the republication of Bradley's
+<i>Ethical Studies</i></p></td> <td>48</td></tr>
+
+
+<tr><td><a href="#III">III. Revolutions in Science</a>
+
+<p>Some Comments on the Theory of Relativity
+and the new Physics</p></td><td>71</td></tr>
+
+
+<tr><td><a href="#IV">IV. A Long Way Round to Nirvana</a>
+
+<p>Development of a suggestion found in Freud's
+<i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle</i></p></td> <td>87</td></tr>
+
+
+<tr><td><a href="#V">V. The Prestige of the Infinite</a>
+
+<p>A review of Julien Benda's <i>Sketch of a consistent
+theory of the relations between God and the World</i></p></td><td>102</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>The Author's acknowledgments are due to the Editors of <i>The New Adelphi</i>,
+<i>The Dial</i>, and the <i>Journal of Philosophy</i>, in which one or more of these
+Essays originally appeared.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1"></a>[1]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+<h2>LOCKE AND THE FRONTIERS OF COMMON SENSE<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></h2>
+
+<p>A good portrait of Locke would require an elaborate background. His is not
+a figure to stand statuesquely in a void: the pose might not seem grand
+enough for bronze or marble. Rather he should be painted in the manner of
+the Dutch masters, in a sunny interior, scrupulously furnished with all
+the implements of domestic comfort and philosophic enquiry: the Holy Bible
+open majestically before him, and beside it that other revelation&mdash;the
+terrestrial globe. His hand might be pointing to a microscope set for
+examining the internal constitution of a beetle: but for the moment his
+eye should be seen wandering through the open window, to admire the
+blessings of thrift and liberty manifest in the people so worthily busy in
+the market-place, wrong as many <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2"></a>[2]</span>a monkish notion might be that still
+troubled their poor heads. From them his enlarged thoughts would easily
+pass to the stout carved ships in the river beyond, intrepidly setting
+sail for the Indies, or for savage America. Yes, he too had travelled, and
+not only in thought. He knew how many strange nations and false religions
+lodged in this round earth, itself but a speck in the universe. There were
+few ingenious authors that he had not perused, or philosophical
+instruments that he had not, as far as possible, examined and tested; and
+no man better than he could understand and prize the recent discoveries of
+"the incomparable Mr Newton". Nevertheless, a certain uneasiness in that
+spare frame, a certain knitting of the brows in that aquiline countenance,
+would suggest that in the midst of their earnest eloquence the
+philosopher's thoughts might sometimes come to a stand. Indeed, the
+visible scene did not exhaust the complexity of his problem; for there was
+also what he called "the scene of ideas", immaterial and private, but
+often more crowded and pressing than the public scene. Locke was the
+father of modern psycho<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3"></a>[3]</span>logy, and the birth of this airy monster, this
+half-natural changeling, was not altogether easy or fortunate.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p>
+
+<p>I wish my erudition allowed me to fill in this picture as the subject
+deserves, and to trace home the sources of Locke's opinions, and their
+immense influence. Unfortunately, I can consider him&mdash;what is hardly
+fair&mdash;only as a pure philosopher: for had Locke's mind been more profound,
+it might have been less influential. He was in sympathy with the coming
+age, and was able to guide it: an age that confided in easy, eloquent
+reasoning, and proposed to be saved, in this world and the next, with as
+little philosophy and as little religion as possible. Locke played in the
+eighteenth century very much the part that fell to Kant in the nineteenth.
+When quarrelled with, no less than when embraced, his opinions became a
+point of departure for universal developments. The more we look into the
+matter, the more we are impressed by the patriarchal dignity of Locke's
+mind. Father of psychology, father of the criticism of knowledge, father
+of theoretical liberalism, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4"></a>[4]</span>god-father at least of the American political
+system, of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedia, at home he was the ancestor of
+that whole school of polite moderate opinion which can unite liberal
+Christianity with mechanical science and with psychological idealism. He
+was invincibly rooted in a prudential morality, in a rationalised
+Protestantism, in respect for liberty and law: above all he was deeply
+convinced, as he puts it, "that the handsome conveniences of life are
+better than nasty penury". Locke still speaks, or spoke until lately,
+through many a modern mind, when this mind was most sincere; and two
+hundred years before Queen Victoria he was a Victorian in essence.</p>
+
+<p>A chief element in this modernness of Locke was something that had hardly
+appeared before in pure philosophy, although common in religion: I mean,
+the tendency to deny one's own presuppositions&mdash;not by accident or
+inadvertently, but proudly and with an air of triumph. Presuppositions are
+imposed on all of us by life itself: for instance the presupposition that
+life is to continue, and that it is worth living. Belief is <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5"></a>[5]</span>born on the
+wing and awakes to many tacit commitments. Afterwards, in reflection, we
+may wonder at finding these presuppositions on our hands and, being
+ignorant of the natural causes which have imposed them on the animal mind,
+we may be offended at them. Their arbitrary and dogmatic character will
+tempt us to condemn them, and to take for granted that the analysis which
+undermines them is justified, and will prove fruitful. But this critical
+assurance in its turn seems to rely on a dubious presupposition, namely,
+that human opinion must always evolve in a single line, dialectically,
+providentially, and irresistibly. It is at least conceivable that the
+opposite should sometimes be the case. Some of the primitive
+presuppositions of human reason might have been correct and inevitable,
+whilst the tendency to deny them might have sprung from a plausible
+misunderstanding, or the exaggeration of a half-truth: so that the
+critical opinion itself, after destroying the spontaneous assumptions on
+which it rested, might be incapable of subsisting.</p>
+
+<p>In Locke the central presuppositions, which he embraced heartily and
+without question, were <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6"></a>[6]</span>those of common sense. He adopted what he calls a
+"plain, historical method", fit, in his own words, "to be brought into
+well-bred company and polite conversation". Men, "barely by the use of
+their natural faculties", might attain to all the knowledge possible or
+worth having. All children, he writes, "that are born into this world,
+being surrounded with bodies that perpetually and diversely affect them"
+have "a variety of ideas imprinted" on their minds. "External material
+things as objects of Sensation, and the operations of our own minds as
+objects of Reflection, are to me", he continues, "the only originals from
+which all our ideas take their beginnings." "Every act of sensation", he
+writes elsewhere, "when duly considered, gives us an equal view of both
+parts of nature, the corporeal and the spiritual. For whilst I know, by
+seeing or hearing,... that there is some corporeal being without me, the
+object of that sensation, I do more certainly know that there is some
+spiritual being within me that sees and hears."</p>
+
+<p>Resting on these clear perceptions, the natural philosophy of Locke falls
+into two parts, one <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7"></a>[7]</span>strictly physical and scientific, the other critical
+and psychological. In respect to the composition of matter, Locke accepted
+the most advanced theory of his day, which happened to be a very old one:
+the theory of Democritus that the material universe contains nothing but a
+multitude of solid atoms coursing through infinite space: but Locke added
+a religious note to this materialism by suggesting that infinite space, in
+its sublimity, must be an attribute of God. He also believed what few
+materialists would venture to assert, that if we could thoroughly examine
+the cosmic mechanism we should see the demonstrable necessity of every
+complication that ensues, even of the existence and character of mind: for
+it was no harder for God to endow matter with the power of thinking than
+to endow it with the power of moving.</p>
+
+<p>In the atomic theory we have a graphic image asserted to describe
+accurately, or even exhaustively, the intrinsic constitution of things, or
+their primary qualities. Perhaps, in so far as physical hypotheses must
+remain graphic at all, it is an inevitable theory. It was first suggested
+by the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8"></a>[8]</span>wearing out and dissolution of all material objects, and by the
+specks of dust floating in a sunbeam; and it is confirmed, on an enlarged
+scale, by the stellar universe as conceived by modern astronomy. When
+today we talk of nuclei and electrons, if we imagine them at all, we
+imagine them as atoms. But it is all a picture, prophesying what we might
+see through a sufficiently powerful microscope; the important
+philosophical question is the one raised by the other half of Locke's
+natural philosophy, by optics and the general criticism of perception. How
+far, if at all, may we trust the images in our minds to reveal the nature
+of external things?</p>
+
+<p>On this point the doctrine of Locke, through Descartes,<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> was also
+derived from Democritus. It was that all the sensible qualities of things,
+except position, shape, solidity, number and motion, were only ideas in
+us, projected and falsely regarded as lodged in things. In the things,
+these imputed or secondary qualities were simply powers, inherent in their
+atomic constitution, and calculated to excite sensations of that character
+in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9"></a>[9]</span>our bodies. This doctrine is readily established by Locke's plain
+historical method, when applied to the study of rainbows, mirrors, effects
+of perspective, dreams, jaundice, madness, and the will to believe: all of
+which go to convince us that the ideas which we impulsively assume to be
+qualities of objects are always, in their seat and origin, evolved in our
+own heads.</p>
+
+<p>These two parts of Locke's natural philosophy, however, are not in perfect
+equilibrium. <i>All</i> the feelings and ideas of an animal must be equally
+conditioned by his organs and passions,<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> and he cannot be aware of what
+goes on beyond him, except as it affects his own life.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> How then could
+Locke, or could Democritus, suppose that his ideas of space and atoms were
+less human, less graphic, summary, and symbolic, than his sensations of
+sound or colour? The language of science, no less than that of sense,
+should have been recognised to be a human language; and the nature of
+anything existent collateral with ourselves, be that collateral existence
+material or mental, should have been confessed to be a subject for faith
+and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10"></a>[10]</span>for hypothesis, never, by any possibility, for absolute or direct
+intuition.</p>
+
+<p>There is no occasion to take alarm at this doctrine as if it condemned us
+to solitary confinement, and to ignorance of the world in which we live.
+We see and know the world through our eyes and our intelligence, in visual
+and in intellectual terms: how else should a world be seen or known which
+is not the figment of a dream, but a collateral power, pressing and alien?
+In the cognisance which an animal may take of his surroundings&mdash;and surely
+all animals take such cognisance&mdash;the subjective and moral character of
+his feelings, on finding himself so surrounded, does not destroy their
+cognitive value. These feelings, as Locke says, are signs: to take them
+for signs is the essence of intelligence. Animals that are sensitive
+physically are also sensitive morally, and feel the friendliness or
+hostility which surrounds them. Even pain and pleasure are no idle
+sensations, satisfied with their own presence: they violently summon
+attention to the objects that are their source. Can love or hate be felt
+without being felt towards something&mdash;something near and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11"></a>[11]</span>potent, yet
+external, uncontrolled, and mysterious? When I dodge a missile or pick a
+berry, is it likely that my mind should stop to dwell on its pure
+sensations or ideas without recognising or pursuing something material?
+Analytic reflection often ignores the essential energy of mind, which is
+originally more intelligent than sensuous, more appetitive and dogmatic
+than aesthetic. But the feelings and ideas of an active animal cannot help
+uniting internal moral intensity with external physical reference; and the
+natural conditions of sensibility require that perceptions should owe
+their existence and quality to the living organism with its moral bias,
+and that at the same time they should be addressed to the external objects
+which entice that organism or threaten it.</p>
+
+<p>All ambitions must be defeated when they ask for the impossible. The
+ambition to know is not an exception; and certainly our perceptions cannot
+tell us how the world would look if nobody saw it, or how valuable it
+would be if nobody cared for it. But our perceptions, as Locke again said,
+are sufficient for our welfare and appro<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12"></a>[12]</span>priate to our condition. They are
+not only a wonderful entertainment in themselves, but apart from their
+sensuous and grammatical quality, by their distribution and method of
+variation, they may inform us most exactly about the order and mechanism
+of nature. We see in the science of today how completely the most accurate
+knowledge&mdash;proved to be accurate by its application in the arts&mdash;may shed
+every pictorial element, and the whole language of experience, to become a
+pure method of calculation and control. And by a pleasant compensation,
+our aesthetic life may become freer, more self-sufficing, more humbly
+happy in itself: and without trespassing in any way beyond the modesty of
+nature, we may consent to be like little children, chirping our human
+note; since the life of reason in us may well become science in its
+validity, whilst remaining poetry in its texture.</p>
+
+<p>I think, then, that by a slight re-arrangement of Locke's pronouncements
+in natural philosophy, they could be made inwardly consistent, and still
+faithful to the first presuppositions of common sense, although certainly
+far more chastened and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13"></a>[13]</span>sceptical than impulsive opinion is likely to be
+in the first instance.</p>
+
+<p>There were other presuppositions in the philosophy of Locke besides his
+fundamental naturalism; and in his private mind probably the most
+important was his Christian faith, which was not only confident and
+sincere, but prompted him at times to high speculation. He had friends
+among the Cambridge Platonists, and he found in Newton a brilliant example
+of scientific rigour capped with mystical insights. Yet if we consider
+Locke's philosophical position in the abstract, his Christianity almost
+disappears. In form his theology and ethics were strictly rationalistic;
+yet one who was a Deist in philosophy might remain a Christian in
+religion. There was no great harm in a special revelation, provided it
+were simple and short, and left the broad field of truth open in almost
+every direction to free and personal investigation. A free man and a good
+man would certainly never admit, as coming from God, any doctrine contrary
+to his private reason or political interest; and the moral precepts
+actually vouchsafed to us in the Gospels were most acceptable, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14"></a>[14]</span>seeing
+that they added a sublime eloquence to maxims which sound reason would
+have arrived at in any case.</p>
+
+<p>Evidently common sense had nothing to fear from religious faith of this
+character; but the matter could not end there. Common sense is not more
+convinced of anything than of the difference between good and evil,
+advantage and disaster; and it cannot dispense with a moral interpretation
+of the universe. Socrates, who spoke initially for common sense, even
+thought the moral interpretation of existence the whole of philosophy. He
+would not have seen anything comic in the satire of Moli&egrave;re making his
+chorus of young doctors chant in unison that opium causes sleep because it
+has a dormitive virtue. The virtues or moral uses of things, according to
+Socrates, were the reason why the things had been created and were what
+they were; the admirable virtues of opium defined its perfection, and the
+perfection of a thing was the full manifestation of its deepest nature.
+Doubtless this moral interpretation of the universe had been overdone, and
+it had been a capital error in Socrates to make that <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15"></a>[15]</span>interpretation
+exclusive and to substitute it for natural philosophy. Locke, who was
+himself a medical man, knew what a black cloak for ignorance and villainy
+Scholastic verbiage might be in that profession. He also knew, being an
+enthusiast for experimental science, that in order to control the movement
+of matter&mdash;which is to realise those virtues and perfections&mdash;it is better
+to trace the movement of matter materialistically; for it is in the act of
+manifesting its own powers, and not, as Socrates and the Scholastics
+fancied, by obeying a foreign magic, that matter sometimes assumes or
+restores the forms so precious in the healer's or the moralist's eyes. At
+the same time, the manner in which the moral world rests upon the natural,
+though divined, perhaps, by a few philosophers, has not been generally
+understood; and Locke, whose broad humanity could not exclude the moral
+interpretation of nature, was driven in the end to the view of Socrates.
+He seriously invoked the Scholastic maxim that nothing can produce that
+which it does not contain. For this reason the unconscious, after all,
+could never have given rise to consciousness. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16"></a>[16]</span>Observation and experiment
+could not be allowed to decide this point: the moral interpretation of
+things, because more deeply rooted in human experience, must envelop the
+physical interpretation, and must have the last word.</p>
+
+<p>It was characteristic of Locke's simplicity and intensity that he retained
+these insulated sympathies in various quarters. A further instance of his
+many-sidedness was his fidelity to pure intuition, his respect for the
+infallible revelation of ideal being, such as we have of sensible
+qualities or of mathematical relations. In dreams and in hallucinations
+appearances may deceive us, and the objects we think we see may not exist
+at all. Yet in suffering an illusion we must entertain an idea; and the
+manifest character of these ideas is that of which alone, Locke thinks, we
+can have certain "knowledge".</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"These", he writes, "are two very different things and carefully to
+be distinguished: it being one thing to perceive and know the idea
+of white or black, and quite another to examine what kind of
+particles they must be, and how arranged ... to make any object
+appear white or black." "A man infallibly knows, as soon as ever he
+has them in his mind, that the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17"></a>[17]</span>ideas he calls white and round are
+the very ideas they are, and that they are not other ideas which he
+calls red or square.... This ... the mind ... always perceives at
+first sight; and if ever there happen any doubt about it, it will
+always be found to be about the names and not the ideas
+themselves."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>This sounds like high Platonic doctrine for a philosopher of the Left; but
+Locke's utilitarian temper very soon reasserted itself in this subject.
+Mathematical ideas were not only lucid but true: and he demanded this
+truth, which he called "reality", of all ideas worthy of consideration:
+mere ideas would be worthless. Very likely he forgot, in his philosophic
+puritanism, that fiction and music might have an intrinsic charm. Where
+the frontier of human wisdom should be drawn in this direction was clearly
+indicated, in Locke's day, by Spinoza, who says:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"If, in keeping non-existent things present to the imagination, the
+mind were at the same time aware that those things did not exist,
+surely it would regard this gift of imagination as a virtue in its
+own constitution, not as a vice: especially if such an imaginative
+faculty depended on nothing except the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18"></a>[18]</span>mind's own nature: that is
+to say, if this mental faculty of imagination were free".</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>But Locke had not so firm a hold on truth that he could afford to play
+with fancy; and as he pushed forward the claims of human jurisdiction
+rather too far in physics, by assuming the current science to be literally
+true, so, in the realm of imagination, he retrenched somewhat illiberally
+our legitimate possessions. Strange that as modern philosophy transfers
+the visible wealth of nature more and more to the mind, the mind should
+seem to lose courage and to become ashamed of its own fertility. The
+hard-pressed natural man will not indulge his imagination unless it poses
+for truth; and being half aware of this imposition, he is more troubled at
+the thought of being deceived than at the fact of being mechanised or
+being bored: and he would wish to escape imagination altogether. A good
+God, he murmurs, could not have made us poets against our will.</p>
+
+<p>Against his will, however, Locke was drawn to enlarge the subjective
+sphere. The actual existence of mind was evident: you had only to notice
+the fact that you were thinking. Conscious mind, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19"></a>[19]</span>being thus known to
+exist directly and independently of the body, was a primary constituent of
+reality: it was a fact on its own account.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> Common sense seemed to
+testify to this, not only when confronted with the "I think, therefore I
+am" of Descartes, but whenever a thought produced an action. Since mind
+and body interacted,<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> each must be as real as the other and, as it were,
+on the same plane of being. Locke, like a good Protestant, felt the right
+of the conscious inner man to assert himself: and when he looked into his
+own mind, he found nothing to define this mind except the ideas which
+occupied it. The existence which he was so sure of in himself was
+therefore the existence of his ideas.</p>
+
+<p>Here, by an insensible shift in the meaning of the word "idea", a
+momentous revolution had taken place in psychology. Ideas had originally
+meant objective terms distinguished in thought-images, qualities,
+concepts, propositions. But now ideas began to mean living thoughts,
+moments or states of consciousness. They became atoms of mind,
+constituents of experience, very <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20"></a>[20]</span>much as material atoms were conceived to
+be constituents of natural objects. Sensations became the only objects of
+sensation, and ideas the only objects of ideas; so that the material world
+was rendered superfluous, and the only scientific problem was now to
+construct a universe in terms of analytic psychology. Locke himself did
+not go so far, and continued to assign physical causes and physical
+objects to some, at least, of his mental units; and indeed sensations and
+ideas could not very well have other than physical causes, the existence
+of which this new psychology was soon to deny: so that about the origin of
+its data it was afterwards compelled to preserve a discreet silence. But
+as to their combinations and reappearances, it was able to invoke the
+principle of association: a thread on which many shrewd observations may
+be strung, but which also, when pressed, appears to be nothing but a
+verbal mask for organic habits in matter.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is that there are two sorts of unobjectionable psychology,
+neither of which describes a mechanism of disembodied mental states, such
+as the followers of Locke developed into modern <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21"></a>[21]</span>idealism, to the
+confusion of common sense.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> One unobjectionable sort of psychology is
+biological, and studies life from the outside. The other sort, relying on
+memory and dramatic imagination, reproduces life from the inside, and is
+literary. If the literary psychologist is a man of genius, by the
+clearness and range of his memory, by quickness of sympathy and power of
+suggestion, he may come very near to the truth of experience, as it has
+been or might be unrolled in a human being.<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> The ideas with which Locke
+operates are simply high lights picked out by attention in this nebulous
+continuum, and identified by names. Ideas, in the original ideal sense of
+the word, are indeed the only definite terms which attention can
+discriminate and rest upon; but the unity of these units is specious, not
+existential. If ideas were not logical or aesthetic essences but
+self-subsisting feelings, each knowing itself, they would be insulated for
+ever; no spirit could ever survey, recognise, or compare them; and mind
+would have disappeared in the analysis of mind.</p>
+
+<p>These considerations might enable us, I think, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22"></a>[22]</span>to mark the just frontier
+of common sense even in this debatable land of psychology. All that is
+biological, observable, and documentary in psychology falls within the
+lines of physical science and offers no difficulty in principle. Nor need
+literary psychology form a dangerous salient in the circuit of nature. The
+dramatic poet or dramatic historian necessarily retains the presupposition
+of a material world, since beyond his personal memory (and even within it)
+he has nothing to stimulate and control his dramatic imagination save
+knowledge of the material circumstances in which people live, and of the
+material expression in action or words which they give to their feelings.
+His moral insight simply vivifies the scene that nature and the sciences
+of nature spread out before him: they tell him what has happened, and his
+heart tells him what has been felt. Only literature can describe
+experience for the excellent reason that the terms of experience are moral
+and literary from the beginning. Mind is incorrigibly poetical: not
+because it is not attentive to material facts and practical exigencies,
+but because, being intensely attentive to them, it <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23"></a>[23]</span>turns them into
+pleasures and pains, and into many-coloured ideas. Yet at every turn there
+is a possibility and an occasion for transmuting this poetry into science,
+because ideas and emotions, being caused by material events, refer to
+these events, and record their order.</p>
+
+<p>All philosophies are frail, in that they are products of the human mind,
+in which everything is essentially reactive, spontaneous, and volatile:
+but as in passion and in language, so in philosophy, there are certain
+comparatively steady and hereditary principles, forming a sort of orthodox
+reason, which is or which may become the current grammar of mankind. Of
+philosophers who are orthodox in this sense, only the earliest or the most
+powerful, an Aristotle or a Spinoza, need to be remembered, in that they
+stamp their language and temper upon human reason itself. The rest of the
+orthodox are justly lost in the crowd and relegated to the chorus. The
+frailty of heretical philosophers is more conspicuous and interesting: it
+makes up the <i>chronique scandaleuse</i> of the mind, or the history of
+philosophy. Locke belongs to both camps: he was restive in his orthodoxy
+and timid <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24"></a>[24]</span>in his heresies; and like so many other initiators of
+revolutions, he would be dismayed at the result of his work. In intention
+Locke occupied an almost normal philosophic position, rendered precarious
+not by what was traditional in it, like the categories of substance and
+power, but rather by certain incidental errors&mdash;notably by admitting an
+experience independent of bodily life, yet compounded and evolving in a
+mechanical fashion. But I do not find in him a prickly nest of obsolete
+notions and contradictions from which, fledged at last, we have flown to
+our present enlightenment. In his person, in his temper, in his
+allegiances and hopes, he was the prototype of a race of philosophers
+native and dominant among people of English speech, if not in academic
+circles, at least in the national mind. If we make allowance for a greater
+personal subtlety, and for the diffidence and perplexity inevitable in the
+present moral anarchy of the world, we may find this same Lockian
+eclecticism and prudence in the late Lord Balfour: and I have myself had
+the advantage of being the pupil of a gifted successor and, in many ways,
+emulator, of Locke, I mean <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25"></a>[25]</span>William James. So great, at bottom, does their
+spiritual kinship seem to me to be, that I can hardly conceive Locke
+vividly without seeing him as a sort of William James of the seventeenth
+century. And who of you has not known some other spontaneous, inquisitive,
+unsettled genius, no less preoccupied with the marvellous intelligence of
+some Brazilian parrot, than with the sad obstinacy of some Bishop of
+Worcester? Here is eternal freshness of conviction and ardour for reform;
+great keenness of perception in spots, and in other spots lacunae and
+impulsive judgments; distrust of tradition, of words, of constructive
+argument; horror of vested interests and of their smooth defenders; a love
+of navigating alone and exploring for oneself even the coasts already well
+charted by others. Here is romanticism united with a scientific conscience
+and power of destructive analysis balanced by moral enthusiasm. Doubtless
+Locke might have dug his foundations deeper and integrated his faith
+better. His system was no metaphysical castle, no theological acropolis:
+rather a homely ancestral manor house built in several styles of
+architecture: a Tudor chapel, a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26"></a>[26]</span>Palladian front toward the new
+geometrical garden, a Jacobean parlour for political consultation and
+learned disputes, and even&mdash;since we are almost in the eighteenth
+century&mdash;a Chinese cabinet full of curios. It was a habitable philosophy,
+and not too inharmonious. There was no greater incongruity in its parts
+than in the gentle variations of English weather or in the qualified moods
+and insights of a civilised mind. Impoverished as we are, morally and
+humanly, we can no longer live in such a rambling mansion. It has become a
+national monument. On the days when it is open we revisit it with
+admiration; and those chambers and garden walks re-echo to us the clear
+dogmas and savoury diction of the sage&mdash;omnivorous, artless,
+loquacious&mdash;whose dwelling it was.</p>
+
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Paper read before the Royal Society of Literature on the
+occasion of the Tercentenary of the birth of John Locke.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="SUPPLEMENTARY_NOTES" id="SUPPLEMENTARY_NOTES"></a>SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<h4><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2">Page 3.</a> <i>This airy monster, this half-natural changeling.</i></h4>
+
+<p>Monsters and changelings were pointed to by Locke with a certain
+controversial relish: they proved that nature was not compressed or
+compressible <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27"></a>[27]</span>within Aristotelian genera and species, but was a free
+mechanism subject to indefinite change. Mechanism in physics is favourable
+to liberty in politics and morals: each creature has a right to be what it
+spontaneously is, and not what some previous classification alleges that
+it ought to have been. The Protestant and revolutionary independence of
+Locke's mind here gives us a foretaste of Darwin and even of Nietzsche.
+But Locke was moderate even in his radicalisms. A human nature totally
+fluid would of itself have proved anarchical; but in order to stem that
+natural anarchy it was fortunately possible to invoke the conditions of
+prosperity and happiness strictly laid down by the Creator. The
+improvidence and naughtiness of nature was called to book at every turn by
+the pleasures and pains divinely appended to things enjoined and to things
+forbidden, and ultimately by hell and by heaven. Yet if rewards and
+punishments were attached to human action and feeling in this perfectly
+external and arbitrary fashion, whilst the feelings and actions
+spontaneous in mankind counted for nothing in the rule of morals and of
+wisdom, we should be living under the most cruel and artificial of
+tyrannies; and it would not be long before the authority of such a code
+would be called in question and the reality of those arbitrary rewards and
+punishments would be denied, both for this world and for any other. In a
+truly rational morality moral sanctions would have <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28"></a>[28]</span>to vary with the
+variation of species, each new race or individual or mode of feeling
+finding its natural joy in a new way of life. The monsters would not be
+monsters except to rustic prejudice, and the changelings would be simply
+experiments in creation. The glee of Locke in seeing nature elude
+scholastic conventions would then lose its savour, since those staid
+conventions themselves would have become obsolete. Nature would henceforth
+present nothing but pervasive metamorphosis, irresponsible and endless. To
+correct the weariness of such pure flux we might indeed invoke the idea of
+a progress or evolution towards something always higher and better; but
+this idea simply reinstates, under a temporal form, the dominance of a
+specific standard, to which nature is asked to conform. Genera and species
+might shift and glide into one another at will, but always in the
+authorised direction. If, on the contrary, transformation had no
+predetermined direction, we should be driven back, for a moral principle,
+to each of the particular types of life generated on the way: as in
+estimating the correctness or beauty of language we appeal to the speech
+and genius of each nation at each epoch, without imposing the grammar of
+one language or age upon another. It is only in so far as, in the midst of
+the flux, certain tropes become organised and recurrent, that any
+interests or beauties can be transmitted from moment to moment or from
+generation to genera<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29"></a>[29]</span>tion. Physical integration is a prerequisite to moral
+integrity; and unless an individual or a species is sufficiently organised
+and determinate to aspire to a distinguishable form of life, eschewing all
+others, that individual or species can bear no significant name, can
+achieve no progress, and can approach no beauty or perfection.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, so long as in a fluid world there is some measure of life and
+organisation, monsters and changelings will always remain possible
+physically and regrettable morally. Small deviations from the chosen type
+or the chosen direction of progress will continue to be called morbid and
+ugly, and great deviations or reversals will continue to be called
+monstrous. This is but the seamy side of that spontaneous predilection,
+grounded in our deepest nature, by which we recognise beauty and nobleness
+at first sight, with immense refreshment and perfect certitude.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+
+<h4>
+    <a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a>
+    <a href="#FNanchor_3_3">Page 8.</a>
+    <i>
+        Through Descartes.
+    </i>
+</h4>
+
+<p>Very characteristic was the tireless polemic which Locke carried on
+against Descartes. The outraged plain facts had to be defended against
+sweeping and arbitrary theories. There were no innate ideas or maxims:
+children were not born murmuring that things equal to the same thing were
+equal to one another: and an urchin knew that pain was caused <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30"></a>[30]</span>by the
+paternal slipper before he reflected philosophically that everything must
+have a cause. Again, extension was not the essence of matter, which must
+be solid as well, to be distinguishable from empty space. Finally,
+thinking was not the essence of the soul: a man, without dying, might lose
+consciousness: this often happened, or at least could not be prevented
+from happening by a definition framed by a French philosopher. These
+protests were evidently justified by common sense: yet they missed the
+speculative radicalism and depth of the Cartesian doctrines, which had
+struck the keynotes of all modern philosophy and science: for they
+assumed, for the first time in history, the transcendental point of view.
+No wonder that Locke could not do justice to this great novelty: Descartes
+himself did not do so, but ignored his subjective first principles in the
+development of his system; and it was not until adopted by Kant, or rather
+by Fichte, that the transcendental method showed its true colours. Even
+today philosophers fumble with it, patching soliloquy with physics and
+physics with soliloquy. Moreover, Locke's misunderstandings of Descartes
+were partly justified by the latter's verbal concessions to tradition and
+authority. A man who has a clear head, and like Descartes is rendered by
+his aristocratic pride both courteous and disdainful, may readily conform
+to usage in his language, and even in his personal sentiments, without
+taking either too <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31"></a>[31]</span>seriously: he is not struggling to free his own mind,
+which is free already, nor very hopeful of freeing that of most people.
+The innate ideas were not explicit thoughts but categories employed
+unwittingly, as people in speaking conform to the grammar of the
+vernacular without being aware that they do so. As for extension being the
+essence of matter, since matter existed and was a substance, it would
+always have been more than its essence: a sort of ether the parts of which
+might move and might have different and calculable dynamic values. The
+gist of this definition of matter was to clear the decks for scientific
+calculation, by removing from nature the moral density and moral magic
+with which the Socratic philosophy had encumbered it. Science would be
+employed in describing the movements of bodies, leaving it for the senses
+and feelings to appreciate the cross-lights that might be generated in the
+process. Though not following the technique of Descartes, the physics of
+our own day realises his ideal, and traces in nature a mathematical
+dynamism, perfectly sufficient for exact prevision and mechanical art.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly, in saying that the essence of the soul was to think, Descartes
+detached consciousness, or actual spirit, from the meshes of all unknown
+organic or invented mental mechanisms. It was an immense clarification and
+liberation in its proper dimension: but this pure consciousness was not a
+soul; it was not the animal psyche, or principle of organisation, life,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32"></a>[32]</span>and passion&mdash;a principle which, according to Descartes, was material. To
+have called such a material principle the soul would have shocked all
+Christian conceptions; but if Descartes had abstained from giving that
+consecrated name to mere consciousness, he need not have been wary of
+making the latter intermittent and evanescent, as it naturally is. He was
+driven to the conclusion that the soul can never stop thinking, by the
+desire to placate orthodox opinion, and his own Christian sentiments, at
+the expense of attributing to actual consciousness a substantial
+independence and a directive physical force which were incongruous with
+it: a force and independence perfectly congruous with the Platonic soul,
+which had been a mythological being, a supernatural spirit or daemon or
+incubus, incarnate in the natural world, and partly dominating it. The
+relations of such a soul to the particular body or bodies which it might
+weave for itself on earth, to the actions which it performed through such
+bodies, and to the current of its own thoughts, then became questions for
+theology, or for a moralistic theory of the universe. They were questions
+remote from the preoccupations of the modern mind; yet it was not possible
+either for Locke or for Descartes to clear their fresh conceptions
+altogether from those ancient dreams.</p>
+
+<p>What views precisely did Locke oppose to these radical tendencies of
+Descartes?</p>
+
+<p>In respect to the nature of matter, I have indicated <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33"></a>[33]</span>above the position
+of Locke: pictorially he accepted an ordinary atomism; scientifically, the
+physics of Newton.</p>
+
+<p>On the other two points Locke's convictions were implicit rather than
+speculative: he resisted the Cartesian theories without much developing
+his own, as after all was natural in a critic engaged in proving that our
+natural faculties were not intended for speculation. All knowledge came
+from experience, and no man could know the savour of a pineapple without
+having tasted it. Yet this savour, according to Locke, did not reside at
+first in the pineapple, to be conveyed on contact to the palate and to the
+mind; but it was generated in the process of gustation; or perhaps we
+should rather say that it was generated in the mind on occasion of that
+process. At least, then, in respect to secondary qualities, and to all
+moral values, the terms of human knowledge were not drawn from the objects
+encountered in the world, but from an innate sensibility proper to the
+human body or mind. Experience&mdash;if this word meant the lifelong train of
+ideas which made a man's moral being&mdash;was not a source of knowledge but
+was knowledge (or illusion) itself, produced by organs endowed with a
+special native sensibility in contact with varying external stimuli. This
+conclusion would then not have contradicted, but exactly expressed, the
+doctrine of innate categories.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34"></a>[34]</span>As to the soul, which might exist without thinking, Locke still called it
+an immaterial substance: not so immaterial, however, as not to be conveyed
+bodily with him in his coach from London to Oxford. Although, like Hobbes,
+Locke believed in the power of the English language to clarify the human
+intellect, he here ignored the advice of Hobbes to turn that befuddling
+Latin phrase into plain English. Substance meant body: immaterial meant
+bodiless: therefore immaterial substance meant bodiless body. True,
+substance had not really meant body for Aristotle or the Schoolmen; but
+who now knew or cared what anything had meant for them? Locke scornfully
+refused to consider what a substantial form may have signified; and in
+still maintaining that he had a soul, and calling it a spiritual
+substance, he was probably simply protesting that there was something
+living and watchful within his breast, the invisible moral agent in all
+his thoughts and actions. It was <i>he</i> that had them and did them; and this
+self of his was far from being reducible to a merely logical impersonal
+subject, an "I think" presupposed in all thought: for what would this "I
+think" have become when it was not thinking? On the other hand it mattered
+very little what the <i>substance</i> of a thinking being might be: God might
+even have endowed the body with the faculty of thinking, and of generating
+ideas on occasion of certain impacts. Yet a man was a man for all that:
+and Locke was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35"></a>[35]</span>satisfied that he knew, at least well enough for an honest
+Englishman, what he was. He was what he felt himself to be: and this inner
+man of his was not merely the living self, throbbing now in his heart; it
+was all his moral past, all that he remembered to have been. If, from
+moment to moment, the self was a spiritual energy astir within, in
+retrospect the living present seemed, as it were, to extend its tentacles
+and to communicate its subjectivity to his whole personal past. The limits
+of his personality were those of his memory, and his experience included
+everything that his living mind could appropriate and re-live. In a word,
+<i>he was his idea of himself</i>: and this insight opens a new chapter not
+only in his philosophy but in the history of human self-estimation.
+Mankind was henceforth invited not to think of itself as a tribe of
+natural beings, nor of souls, with a specific nature and fixed
+possibilities. Each man was a romantic personage or literary character: he
+was simply what he was thought to be, and might become anything that he
+could will to become. The way was opened for Napoleon on the one hand and
+for Fichte on the other.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<h4>
+    <a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a>
+    <a href="#FNanchor_4_4">Page 9.</a>
+    <i>
+        <em>All</em> ideas must be equally conditioned.
+    </i>
+</h4>
+
+<p>Even the mathematical ideas which seem so exactly to describe the dynamic
+order of nature are <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36"></a>[36]</span>not repetitions of their natural counterpart: for
+mathematical form in nature is a web of diffuse relations enacted; in the
+mind it is a thought possessed, the logical synthesis of those deployed
+relations. To run in a circle is one thing; to conceive a circle is
+another. Our mind by its animal roots (which render it relevant to the
+realm of matter and cognitive) and by its spiritual actuality (which
+renders it original, synthetic, and emotional) is a language, from its
+beginnings; almost, we might say, a biological poetry; and the greater the
+intellectuality and poetic abstraction the greater the possible range. Yet
+we must not expect this scope of speculation in us to go with adequacy or
+exhaustiveness: on the contrary, mathematics and religion, each in its way
+so sure, leave most of the truth out.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<h4>
+    <a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a>
+    <a href="#FNanchor_5_5">Page 9.</a>
+    <i>
+        He cannot be aware of what goes on beyond him, except as it affects his own life.
+    </i>
+</h4>
+
+<p>Even that spark of divine intelligence which comes into the animal soul,
+as Aristotle says, from beyond the gates, comes and is called down by the
+exigencies of physical life. An animal endowed with locomotion cannot
+merely feast sensuously on things as they appear, but must react upon them
+at the first signal, and in so doing must virtually and in intent envisage
+them as they are in themselves. For it is by <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37"></a>[37]</span>virtue of their real
+constitution and intrinsic energy that they act upon us and suffer change
+in turn at our hands; so that whatsoever form things may take to our
+senses and intellect, they take that form by exerting their material
+powers upon us, and intertwining them in action with our own organisms.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the appearance of things is always, in some measure, a true index to
+their reality. Animals are inevitably engaged in self-transcending action,
+and the consciousness of self-transcending action is self-transcendent
+knowledge. The very nature of animal life makes it possible, within animal
+consciousness, to discount appearance and to correct illusion&mdash;things
+which in a vegetative or aesthetic sensibility would not be
+distinguishable from pure experience itself. But when aroused to
+self-transcendent attention, feeling must needs rise to intelligence, so
+that external fact and impartial truth come within the range of
+consciousness, not indeed by being contained there, but by being aimed at.</p>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<h4>
+    <a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a>
+    <a href="#FNanchor_6_6">Page 19.</a>
+    <i>
+        Conscious mind was a fact on its own account.
+    </i>
+</h4>
+
+
+<p>This conscious mind was a man's moral being, and personal identity could
+not extend further than possible memory. This doctrine of Locke's had some
+comic applications. The Bishop of Worcester was alarmed. If actions which
+a hardened sinner had <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38"></a>[38]</span>forgotten were no longer his, a short memory would
+be a great blessing in the Day of Judgment. On the other hand, a theology
+more plastic than Stillingfleet's would one day find in this same doctrine
+a new means of edification. For if I may disown all actions I have
+forgotten, may not things not done or witnessed by me in the body be now
+appropriated and incorporated in my consciousness, if only I conceive them
+vividly? The door is then open to all the noble ambiguities of idealism.
+As my consciousness expands, or thinks it expands, into dramatic sympathy
+with universal experience, that experience becomes my own. I may say I
+have been the agent in all past achievements. Emerson could know that he
+was Shakespeare and Caesar and Christ. Futurity is mine also, in every
+possible direction at once; and I am one with the spirit of the universe
+and with God.</p>
+
+<p>Locke reassured the Bishop of Worcester, and was humbly confident that
+Divine Justice would find a way of vindicating Itself in spite of human
+wit. He might have added that if the sin of Adam could not only be imputed
+to us juridically but could actually taint our consciousness&mdash;as it
+certainly does if by Adam we understand our whole material heritage&mdash;so
+surely the sins done or the habits acquired by the body beyond the scope
+of consciousness may taint or clarify this consciousness now. Indeed, the
+idea we form of ourselves and of our respective experi<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39"></a>[39]</span>ences is a figment
+of vanity, a product of dramatic imagination, without cognitive import
+save as a reading of the hidden forces, physical or divine, which have
+formed us and actually govern us.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<h4>
+    <a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a>
+    <a href="#FNanchor_7_7">Page 19.</a>
+    <i>
+        Mind and body interacted.
+    </i>
+</h4>
+
+<p>The self which acts in a man is itself moved by forces which have long
+been familiar to common sense, without being understood except
+dramatically. These forces are called the passions; or when the dramatic
+units distinguished are longish strands rather than striking episodes,
+they are called temperament, character, or will; or perhaps, weaving all
+these strands and episodes together again into one moral fabric, we call
+them simply human nature. But in what does this vague human nature reside,
+and how does it operate on the non-human world? Certainly not within the
+conscious sphere, or in the superficial miscellany of experience.
+Immediate experience is the intermittent chaos which human nature, in
+combination with external circumstances, is invoked to support and to
+rationalise. Is human nature, then, resident in each individual soul?
+Certainly: but the soul is merely another name for that active principle
+which we are looking for, to be the seat of our sensibility and the source
+of our actions. Is this psychic power, then, resident in the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40"></a>[40]</span>body?
+Undoubtedly; since it is hereditary and transmitted by a seed, and
+continually aroused and modified by material agencies.</p>
+
+<p>Since this soul or self in the body is so obscure, the temptation is great
+to dramatise its energies and to describe them in myths. Myth is the
+normal means of describing those forces of nature which we cannot measure
+or understand; if we could understand or measure them we should describe
+them prosaically and analytically, in what is called science. But nothing
+is less measurable, or less intelligible to us, in spite of being so near
+us and familiar, as the life of this carnal instrument, so soft and so
+violent, which breeds our sensations and precipitates our actions. We see
+today how the Freudian psychology, just because it is not satisfied with
+registering the routine of consciousness but endeavours to trace its
+hidden mechanism and to unravel its physical causes, is driven to use the
+most frankly mythological language. The physiological processes concerned,
+though presupposed, are not on the scale of human perception and not
+traceable in detail; and the moral action, though familiar in snatches,
+has to be patched by invented episodes, and largely attributed to daemonic
+personages that never come on the stage.</p>
+
+<p>Locke, in his psychology of morals, had at first followed the verbal
+rationalism by which people attribute motives to themselves and to one
+another. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41"></a>[41]</span>Human actions were explained by the alleged pursuit of the
+greater prospective pleasure, and avoidance of the greater prospective
+pain. But this way of talking, though not so poetical as Freud's, is no
+less mythical. Eventual goods and evils have no present existence and no
+power: they cannot even be discerned prophetically, save by the vaguest
+fancy, entirely based on the present impulses and obsessions of the soul.
+No future good, no future evil avails to move us, except&mdash;as Locke said
+after examining the facts more closely&mdash;when a <i>certain uneasiness</i> in the
+soul (or in the body) causes us to turn to those untried goods and evils
+with a present and living interest. This actual uneasiness, with the dream
+pictures which it evokes, is a mere symptom of the direction in which
+human nature in us is already moving, or already disposed to move. Without
+this prior physical impulse, heaven may beckon and hell may yawn without
+causing the least variation in conduct. As in religious conversion all is
+due to the call of grace, so in ordinary action all is due to the ripening
+of natural impulses and powers within the psyche. The <i>uneasiness</i>
+observed by Locke is merely the consciousness of this ripening, before the
+field of relevant action has been clearly discerned.</p>
+
+<p>When all this is considered, the ostensible interaction between mind and
+body puts on a new aspect. There are no <i>purely mental</i> ideas or
+intentions <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42"></a>[42]</span>followed by material effects: there are no material events
+followed by a <i>purely mental</i> sensation or idea. Mental events are always
+elements in total natural events containing material elements also:
+material elements form the organ, the stimulus, and probably also the
+object for those mental sensations or ideas. Moreover, the physical strand
+alone is found to be continuous and traceable; the conscious strand, the
+sequence of mental events, flares up and dies down daily, if not hourly;
+and the medley of its immediate features&mdash;images, words, moods&mdash;juxtaposes
+China and Peru, past and future, in the most irresponsible confusion. On
+the other hand, in human life it is a part of the conscious
+element&mdash;intentions, affections, plans, and reasonings&mdash;that <i>explains</i>
+the course of action: dispersed temporally, our dominant thoughts contain
+the reason for our continuous behaviour, and seem to guide it. They are
+not so much links in a chain of minute consecutive causes&mdash;an idea or an
+act of will often takes time to work and works, as it were, only
+posthumously&mdash;as they are general overarching moral inspirations and
+resolves, which the machinery of our bodies executes in its own way, often
+rendering our thoughts more precise in the process, or totally
+transforming them. We do roughly what we meant to do, barring accidents.
+The reasons lie deep in our compound nature, being probably inarticulate;
+and our action in a fragmentary way betrays our moral disposition: betrays
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43"></a>[43]</span>it in both senses of the word betray, now revealing it unawares, and now
+sadly disappointing it.</p>
+
+<p>I leave it for the reader's reflection to decide whether we should call
+such cohabitation of mind with body interaction, or not rather sympathetic
+concomitance, self-annotation, and a partial prophetic awakening to a life
+which we are leading automatically.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VII</h3>
+
+<h4>
+    <a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a>
+    <a href="#FNanchor_8_8">Page 21.</a>
+    <i>
+        To the confusion of common sense.
+    </i>
+</h4>
+
+<p>Berkeley and his followers sometimes maintain that common sense is on
+their side, that they have simply analysed the fact of our experience of
+the material world, and if there is any paradox in their idealism, it is
+merely verbal and disappears with familiarity. All the "reality", they
+say, all the force, obduracy, and fertility of nature subsist undiminished
+after we discover that this reality resides, and can only reside, in the
+fixed order of our experience.</p>
+
+<p>But no: analysis of immediate experience will never disclose any fixed
+order in it; the surface of experience, when not interpreted
+materialistically, is an inextricable dream. Berkeley and his followers,
+when they look in this direction, towards nature and the rationale of
+experience and science, are looking away from their own system, and
+relying instead on the automatic propensity of human nature to routine, so
+that we spontaneously prepare for repeating our <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44"></a>[44]</span>actions (not our
+experience) and even anticipate their occasions; a propensity further
+biased by the dominant rhythms of the psyche, so that we assume a future
+not so much similar to the past, as better. When developed, this
+propensity turns into trust in natural or divine laws; but it is contrary
+to common sense to expect such laws to operate apart from matter and from
+the material continuity of external occasions. This appears clearly in our
+trust in persons&mdash;a radical animal propensity&mdash;which is consonant with
+common sense when these persons are living bodies, but becomes
+superstitious, or at least highly speculative, when these persons are
+disembodied spirits.</p>
+
+<p>It is a pity that the beautiful system of Berkeley should have appeared in
+an unspiritual age, when religion was mundane and perfunctory, and the
+free spirit, where it stirred, was romantic and wilful. For that system
+was essentially religious: it put the spirit face to face with God,
+everywhere, always, and in everything it turned experience into a divine
+language for the monition and expression of the inner man. Such an
+instrument, in spiritual hands, might have served to dispel all natural
+illusions and affections, and to disinfect the spirit of worldliness and
+egotism. But Berkeley and his followers had no such thought. All they
+wished was to substitute a social for a material world, precisely because
+a merely social world might make worldly interests loom <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45"></a>[45]</span>larger and might
+induce mankind, against the evidence of their senses and the still small
+voice in their hearts, to live as if their worldly interests were absolute
+and must needs dominate the spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Morally this system thus came to sanction a human servitude to material
+things such as ancient materialists' would have scorned; and theoretically
+the system did not escape the dogmatic commitments of common sense against
+which it protested. For far from withdrawing into the depths of the
+private spirit, it professed to describe universal experience and the
+evolution of all human ideas. This notion of "experience" originally
+presupposed a natural agent or subject to endure that experience, and to
+profit by it, by learning to live in better harmony with external
+circumstances. Each agent or subject of experience might, at other times,
+become an object of experience also: for they all formed part of a
+material world, which they might envisage in common in their perceptions.
+Now the criticism which repudiates this common material medium, like all
+criticism or doubt, is secondary and partial: it continues to operate with
+all the assumptions of common sense, save the one which it is expressly
+criticising. So, in repudiating the material world, this philosophy
+retains the notion of various agents or subjects gathering experience; and
+we are not expected to doubt that there are just as many streams of
+experience without a world, as there were people <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46"></a>[46]</span>in the world when the
+world existed. But the number and nature of these experiences have now
+become undiscoverable, the material persons having been removed who
+formerly were so placed as to gather easily imagined experiences, and to
+be able to communicate them; and the very notion of experience has been
+emptied of its meaning, when no external common world subsists to impose
+that same experience on everybody. It was not knowledge of existing
+experiences <i>in vacuo</i> that led common sense to assume a material world,
+but knowledge of an existing material world led it to assume existing, and
+regularly reproducible, experiences.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the whole social convention posited by empirical idealism is borrowed
+without leave, and rests on the belief in nature for which it is
+substituted.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VIII</h3>
+
+<h4>
+    <a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a>
+    <a href="#FNanchor_9_9">Page 21.</a>
+    <i>
+        The literary psychologist may come very near to the truth of experience.
+    </i>
+</h4>
+
+
+<p>Experience cannot be in itself an object of science, because it is
+essentially invisible, immeasurable, fugitive, and private; and although
+it may be shared or repeated, the evidence for that repetition or that
+unanimity cannot be found by comparing a present experience with another
+experience by hypothesis absent. Both the absent experience and its
+agreement with the present experience must be imagined freely and credited
+instinctively, in view of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47"></a>[47]</span>known circumstances in which the absent
+experience is conceived to have occurred. The only instrument for
+conceiving experience at large is accordingly private imagination; and
+such imagination cannot be tested, although it may be guided and perhaps
+recast by fresh observations or reports concerning the action and language
+of other people. For action and language, being contagious, and being the
+material counterpart of experience in each of us, may voluntarily or
+involuntarily suggest our respective experience to one another, by causing
+each to re-enact more or less accurately within himself the experience of
+the rest. Thus alien thoughts and feelings are revealed or suggested to us
+in common life, not without a subjective transformation increasing, so to
+speak, as the square of the distance: and even the record of experience in
+people's own words, when these are not names for recognisable external
+things, awakens in the reader, in another age or country, quite
+incommensurable ideas. Yet, under favourable circumstances, such
+suggestion or revelation of experience, without ever becoming science, may
+become public unanimity in sentiment, and may produce a truthful and
+lively dramatic literature.</p>
+
+<p>All modern philosophy, in so far as it is a description of experience and
+not of nature, therefore seems to belong to the sphere of literature, and
+to be without scientific value.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48"></a>[48]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h2>FIFTY YEARS OF BRITISH IDEALISM<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></h2>
+
+
+<p>After fifty years, an old milestone in the path of philosophy, Bradley's
+<i>Ethical Studies</i>, has been set up again, as if to mark the distance which
+English opinion has traversed in the interval. It has passed from insular
+dogmatism to universal bewilderment; and a chief agent in the change has
+been Bradley himself, with his scornful and delicate intellect, his wit,
+his candour, his persistence, and the baffling futility of his
+conclusions. In this early book we see him coming forth like a young David
+against every clumsy champion of utilitarianism, hedonism, positivism, or
+empiricism. And how smooth and polished were the little stones in his
+sling! How fatally they would have lodged in the forehead of that
+composite monster, if only it <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49"></a>[49]</span>had had a forehead! Some of them might even
+have done murderous execution in Bradley's own camp: for instance, this
+pebble cast playfully at the metaphysical idol called "Law": "It is
+<i>always</i> wet on half-holidays because of the Law of Raininess, but
+<i>sometimes</i> it is <i>not</i> wet, because of the Supplementary Law of
+Sunshine".</p>
+
+<p>Bradley and his friends achieved a notable victory in the academic field:
+philosophic authority and influence passed largely into their hands in all
+English-speaking universities. But it was not exactly from these seats of
+learning that naturalism and utilitarianism needed to be dislodged; like
+the corresponding radicalisms of our day, these doctrines prevailed rather
+in certain political and intellectual circles outside, consciously
+revolutionary and often half-educated; and I am afraid that the braggart
+Goliaths of today need chastening at least as much as those of fifty years
+ago. In a country officially Christian, and especially in Oxford, it is
+natural and fitting that academic authority should belong to orthodox
+tradition&mdash;theological, Platonic, and Aristotelian. Bradley, save for a
+few learned quotations, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50"></a>[50]</span>strangely ignored this orthodoxy entrenched
+behind his back. In contrast with it he was himself a heretic, with first
+principles devastating every settled belief: and it was really this
+venerable silent partner at home that his victory superseded, at least in
+appearance and for a season. David did not slay Goliath, but he dethroned
+Saul. Saul was indeed already under a cloud, and all in David's heart was
+not unkindness in that direction. Bradley might almost be called an
+unbelieving Newman; time, especially, seems to have brought his suffering
+and refined spirit into greater sympathy with ancient sanctities.
+Originally, for instance, venting the hearty Protestant sentiment that
+only the Christianity of laymen is sound, he had written: "I am happy to
+say that 'religieux' has no English equivalent". But a later note says:
+"This is not true except of Modern English only. And, in any case, it
+won't do, and was wrong and due to ignorance. However secluded the
+religious life, it may be practical indirectly <i>if</i> through the unity of
+the spiritual body it can be taken as vicarious". The "<i>if</i>" here saves
+the principle that all values must be social, and that the social organism
+is the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51"></a>[51]</span>sole moral reality: yet how near this bubble comes to being
+pricked! We seem clearly to feel that the question is not whether
+spiritual life subserves animal society, but whether animal society ever
+is stirred and hallowed into spiritual life.</p>
+
+<p>All this, however, in that age of progress, was regarded as obsolete:
+there was no longer to be any spirit except the spirit of the times. True,
+the ritualists might be striving to revive the latent energies of
+religious devotion, with some dubious help from aestheticism: but against
+the rising tide of mechanical progress and romantic anarchy, and against
+the mania for rewriting history, traditional philosophy then seemed
+helpless and afraid to defend itself: it is only now beginning to recover
+its intellectual courage. For the moment, speculative radicals saw light
+in a different quarter. German idealism was nothing if not self-confident;
+it was relatively new; it was encyclopaedic in its display of knowledge,
+which it could manipulate dialectically with dazzling, if not stable,
+results; it was Protestant in temper and autonomous in principle; and
+altogether it seemed a sovereign and providential means of suddenly
+turning the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52"></a>[52]</span>tables on the threatened naturalism. By developing romantic
+intuition from within and packing all knowledge into one picture, the
+universe might be shown to be, like intuition itself, thoroughly
+spiritual, personal, and subjective.</p>
+
+<p>The fundamental axiom of the new logic was that the only possible reality
+was consciousness.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"People find", writes Bradley, "a subject and an object correlated
+in consciousness.... To go out of that unity is for us literally to
+go out of our minds.... When mind is made only a part of the whole,
+there is a question which <i>must</i> be answered.... If about any
+matter we know nothing whatsoever, can we say anything about it?
+Can we even say that it is? And if it is not in consciousness, how
+can we know it?... And conversely, if we know it, it cannot be not
+mind."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Bradley challenged his contemporaries to refute this argument; and not
+being able to do so, many of them felt constrained to accept it, perhaps
+not without grave misgivings. For was it not always a rooted conviction of
+the British mind that knowledge brings material power, and that any
+figments of consciousness (in religion, for instance) not bringing
+material power are dangerous <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53"></a>[53]</span>bewitchments, and not properly knowledge?
+Yet it is no less characteristic of the British mind to yield
+occasionally, up to a certain point, to some such enthusiastic fancy,
+provided that its incompatibility with honest action may be denied or
+ignored. So in this case British idealists, in the act of defining
+knowledge idealistically, as the presence to consciousness of its own
+phenomena, never really ceased to assume transcendent knowledge of a
+self-existing world, social and psychological, if not material: and they
+continued scrupulously to readjust their ideas to those dark facts, often
+more faithfully than the avowed positivists or scientific psychologists.</p>
+
+<p>What could ethics properly be to a philosopher who on principle might not
+trespass beyond the limits of consciousness? Only ethical sentiment.
+Bradley was satisfied to appeal to the moral consciousness of his day,
+without seeking to transform it. The most intentionally eloquent passage
+in his book describes war-fever unifying and carrying away a whole people:
+that was the summit of moral consciousness and of mystic virtue. His aim,
+even in ethics, was avowedly to describe <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54"></a>[54]</span>that which exists, to describe
+moral experience, without proposing a different form for it. A man must be
+a man of his own time, or nothing; to set up to be better than the world
+was the beginning of immorality; and virtue lay in accepting one's station
+and its duties. The moralist should fill his mind with a concrete picture
+of the task and standards of his age and nation, and should graft his own
+ideals upon that tree; this need not prevent moral consciousness from
+including a decided esteem for non-political excellences like health,
+beauty, or intelligence, which are not ordinarily called virtues by modern
+moralists. Yet they were undeniably good; better, perhaps, than any
+painful and laborious dutifulness; so that the strictly moral
+consciousness might run over, and presently lose itself in "something
+higher". Indeed, even health, beauty, and intelligence, which seemed at
+first so clearly good, might lose their sharpness on a wider view. In the
+panorama that would ultimately fill the mind these so-called goods and
+virtues could not be conceived without their complementary vices and
+evils. Thus all moral consciousness, and even all vital preference <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55"></a>[55]</span>might
+ultimately be superseded: they might appear to have belonged to a partial
+and rather low stage in the self-development of consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>With this dissolution of his moral judgments always in prospect, why
+should Bradley, or any idealist, have pursued ethical studies at all?
+Since all phases of life were equally necessary to enrich an infinite
+consciousness, which must know both good and evil in order to merge and to
+transcend them, he could hardly nurse any intense enthusiasm for a
+different complexion to be given to the lives of men. His moral
+passion&mdash;for he had it, caustic and burning clear&mdash;was purely
+intellectual: it was shame that in England the moral consciousness should
+have been expressed in systems dialectically so primitive as those of the
+positivists and utilitarians. He acknowledged, somewhat superciliously,
+that their hearts were in the right place; yet, if we are to have ethics
+at all, were not their thoughts in the right place also? They were
+concerned not with analysis of the moral consciousness but with the
+conduct of affairs and the reform of institutions. The spectacle <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56"></a>[56]</span>of human
+wretchedness profoundly moved them; their minds were bent on transforming
+society, so that a man's station and its duties might cease to be what a
+decayed feudal organisation and an inhuman industrialism had made of them.
+They revolted against the miserable condition of the masses of mankind,
+and against the miserable consolations which official religion, or a
+philosophy like Bradley's, offered them in their misery. The utilitarians
+were at least intent on existence and on the course of events; they wished
+to transform institutions to fit human nature better, and to educate human
+nature by those new institutions so that it might better realise its
+latent capacities. These are matters which a man may modify by his acts
+and they are therefore the proper concern of the moralist. Were they much
+to blame if they neglected to define pleasure or happiness and used
+catch-words, dialectically vague, to indicate a direction of effort
+politically quite unmistakable? Doubtless their political action, like
+their philosophical nomenclature, was revolutionary and relied too much on
+wayward feelings ignorant of their own causes. Revolution, no less than
+tradi<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57"></a>[57]</span>tion, is but a casual and clumsy expression of human nature in
+contact with circumstances; yet pain and pleasure and spontaneous hopes,
+however foolish, are direct expressions of that contact, and speak for the
+soul; whereas a man's station and its duties are purely conventional, and
+may altogether misrepresent his native capacities. The protest of human
+nature against the world and its oppressions is the strong side of every
+rebellion; it was the <i>moral</i> side of utilitarianism, of the rebellion
+against irrational morality.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately the English reformers were themselves idealists of a sort,
+entangled in the vehicles of perception, and talking about sensations and
+ideas, pleasures and pains, as if these had been the elements of human
+nature, or even of nature at large: and only the most meagre of verbal
+systems, and the most artificial, can be constructed out of such
+materials. Moreover, they spoke much of pleasure and happiness, and hardly
+at all of misery and pain: whereas it would have been wiser, and truer to
+their real inspiration, to have laid all the emphasis on evils to be
+abated, leaving the good to shape itself in freedom. Suffer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58"></a>[58]</span>ing is the
+instant and obvious sign of some outrage done to human nature; without
+this natural recoil, actual or imminent, no morality would have any
+sanction, and no precept could be imperative. What silliness to command me
+to pursue pleasure or to avoid it, if in any case everything would be
+well! Save for some shadow of dire repentance looming in the distance, I
+am deeply free to walk as I will. The choice of pleasure for a principle
+of morals was particularly unfortunate in the British utilitarians; it
+lent them an air of frivolity absurdly contrary to their true character.
+Pleasure might have been a fit enough word in the mouth of Aristippus, a
+semi-oriental untouched by the least sense of responsibility, or even on
+the lips of humanists in the eighteenth century, who, however sordid their
+lives may sometimes have been, could still move in imagination to the
+music of Mozart, in the landscape of Watteau or of Fragonard. But in the
+land and age of Dickens the moral ideal was not so much pleasure as
+kindness: this tenderer word not only expresses better the motive at work,
+but it points to the distressing presence of misery in the world, to make
+natural <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59"></a>[59]</span>kindness laborious and earnest, and turn it into a legislative
+system.</p>
+
+<p>Bradley's hostility to pleasure was not fanatical: one's station and its
+duties might have their agreeable side. "It is probably good for you", he
+tells us, "to have, say, not less than two glasses of wine after dinner.
+Six on ordinary occasions is perhaps too many; but as to three or four,
+they are neither one way nor the other." If the voluptuary was condemned,
+it was for the commonplace reason which a hedonist, too, might invoke,
+that a life of pleasure soon palls and becomes unpleasant. Bradley's
+objection to pleasure was merely speculative: he found it too "abstract".
+To call a pleasure when actually felt an abstraction is an exquisite
+absurdity: but pleasure, in its absolute essence, is certainly simple and
+indefinable. If instead of enjoying it on the wing, and as an earnest of
+the soul's momentary harmony, we attempt to arrest and observe it, we find
+it strangely dumb; we are not informed by it concerning its occasion, nor
+carried from it by any logical implication to the natural object in which
+it might be found. A pure hedonist ought therefore to be rather <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60"></a>[60]</span>relieved
+if all images lapsed from his consciousness and he could luxuriate in
+sheer pleasure, dark and overwhelming. True, such bliss would be rather
+inhuman, and of the sort which we rashly assign to the oyster: but why
+should a radical and intrepid philosopher be ashamed of that? The
+condition of Bradley's Absolute&mdash;feeling in which all distinctions are
+transcended and merged&mdash;seems to be something of that kind; but there
+would be a strange irony in attributing this mystical and rapturous ideal
+to such ponderous worthies as Mill and Spencer, whose minds were nothing
+if not anxious, perturbed, instrumental, and full of respect for
+variegated facts, and who were probably incapable of tasting pure pleasure
+at all.</p>
+
+<p>But if pleasure, in its pure essence, might really be the highest good for
+a mystic who should be lost in it, it would be no guide to a moralist
+wishing to control events, and to distribute particular pleasures or
+series of pleasures as richly as possible in the world. For this purpose
+he would need to understand human nature and its variable functions, in
+which different persons and peoples may <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61"></a>[61]</span>find their sincere pleasures; and
+this knowledge would first lend to his general love of pleasure any point
+of application in the governance of life or in benevolent legislation.
+Some concrete image of a happy human world would take the place of the
+futile truism that pleasure is good and pain evil. This is, of course,
+what utilitarian moralists meant to do, and actually did, in so far as
+their human sympathies extended, which was not to the highest things; but
+it was not what they said, and Bradley had a clear advantage over them in
+the war of words. A pleasure is not a programme: it exists here and not
+there, for me and for no one else, once and never again. When past, it
+leaves the will as empty and as devoid of allegiance as if it had never
+existed; pleasure is sand, though it have the colour of gold. But this is
+evidently true of all existence. Each living moment, each dead man, each
+cycle of the universe leaves nothing behind it but a void which perhaps
+something kindred may refill. A Hegel, after identifying himself for a
+moment with the Absolute Idea, is in his existence no less subject to
+sleepiness, irritation, and death than if he had been modestly <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62"></a>[62]</span>satisfied
+with the joys of an oyster. It is only their common form, or their common
+worship, that can give to the quick moments of life any mutual relevance
+or sympathy; and existence would not come at all within sight of a good,
+either momentary or final, if it were not inwardly directed upon realising
+some definite essence. For the rest this essence may be as simple as you
+will, if the nature directed upon it is unified and simple; and it would
+be mere intellectual snobbery to condemn pleasure because it has not so
+many subdivisions in it as an encyclopaedia of the sciences. For the
+moralist pleasure and pain may even be the better guides, because they
+express more directly and boldly the instinctive direction of animal life,
+and thereby mark more clearly the genuine difference between good and
+evil.</p>
+
+<p>We may well say with Bradley that the good is self-realisation; but what
+is the self? Certainly not the feeling or consciousness of the moment, nor
+the life of the world, nor pure spirit. The self that can systematically
+distinguish good from evil is an animal soul. It grows from a seed; its
+potentiality is definite and its fate precarious; and in man <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63"></a>[63]</span>it requires
+society to rear it and tradition to educate it. The good is accordingly
+social, in so far as the soul demands society; but it is the nature of the
+individual that determines the kind and degree of sociability that is good
+for him, and draws the line between society that is a benefit and society
+that is a nuisance. To subordinate the soul fundamentally to society or
+the individual to the state is sheer barbarism: the Greeks, sometimes
+invoked to support this form of idolatry, were never guilty of it; on the
+contrary, their lawgivers were always reforming and planning the state so
+that the soul might be perfect in it. Discipline is a help to the spirit:
+but even social relations, when like love, friendship, or sport they are
+spontaneous and good in themselves, retire as far as possible from the
+pressure of the world, and build their paradise apart, simple, and hidden
+in the wilderness; while all the ultimate hopes and assurances of the
+spirit escape altogether into the silent society of nature, of truth, of
+essence, far from those fatuous worldly conventions which hardly make up
+for their tyranny by their instability: for the prevalent moral fashion is
+always growing old, and human <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64"></a>[64]</span>nature is always becoming young again.
+World-worship is the expedient of those who, having lost the soul that is
+in them, look for it in things external, where there is no soul: and by a
+curious recoil, it is also the expedient of those who seek their lost soul
+in actual consciousness, where it also is not: for sensations and ideas
+are not the soul but only passing and partial products of its profound
+animal life. Moral consciousness in particular would never have arisen and
+would be gratuitous, save for the ferocious bias of a natural living
+creature, defending itself against its thousand enemies.</p>
+
+<p>Nor would knowledge in its turn be knowledge if it were merely intuition
+of essence, such as the sensualist, the poet, or the dialectician may rest
+in. If the imagery of logic or passion ever comes to convey <i>knowledge</i>,
+it does so by virtue of a concomitant physical adjustment to external
+things; for the nerve of real or transcendent knowledge is the notice
+which one part of the world may take of another part; and it is this
+momentous cognisance, no matter what intangible feelings may supply terms
+for its prosody, that enlarges the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65"></a>[65]</span>mind to some practical purpose and
+informs it about the world. Consciousness then ceases to be passive sense
+or idle ideation and becomes belief and intelligence. Then the essences
+which form the "content of consciousness" may be vivified and trippingly
+run over, like the syllables of a familiar word, in the active recognition
+of things and people and of all the ominous or pliable forces of nature.
+For essences, being eternal and non-existent in themselves, cannot come to
+consciousness by their own initiative, but only as occasion and the subtle
+movements of the soul may evoke their forms; so that the fact that they
+are given to consciousness has a natural status and setting in the
+material world, and is part of the same natural event as the movement of
+the soul and body which supports that consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>There is therefore no need of refuting idealism, which is an honest
+examination of conscience in a reflective mind. Refutations and proofs
+depend on pregnant meanings assigned to terms, meanings first rendered
+explicit and unambiguous by those very proofs or refutations. On any
+different acceptation of those terms, these proofs and re<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66"></a>[66]</span>futations fall
+to the ground; and it remains a question for good sense, not for logic at
+all, how far the terms in either case describe anything existent. If by
+"knowledge" we understand intuition of essences, idealism follows; but it
+follows only in respect to essences given in intuition: nothing follows
+concerning the seat, origin, conditions, or symptomatic value of such
+intuition, nor even that such intuition ever actually occurs. Idealism,
+therefore, without being refuted, may be hemmed in and humanised by
+natural knowledge about it and about its place in human speculation; the
+most recalcitrant materialist (like myself) might see its plausibility
+during a somewhat adolescent phase of self-consciousness. Consciousness
+itself he might accept and relish as the natural spiritual resonance of
+action and passion, recognising it in its proud isolation and specious
+autonomy, like the mountain republics of Andorra and San Marino.</p>
+
+<p>German idealism is a mighty pose, an attitude always possible to a
+self-conscious and reflective being: but it is hardly a system, since it
+contradicts beliefs which in action are inevitable; it may there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67"></a>[67]</span>fore be
+readily swallowed, but it can never be digested. Neither of its two
+ingredients&mdash;romantic scepticism and romantic superstition&mdash;agrees
+particularly with the British stomach. Not romantic scepticism: for in
+England an instinctive distrust of too much clearness and logic, a
+difficulty in drawing all the consequences of any principle, soon gave to
+this most radical of philosophies a prim and religious air: its purity was
+alloyed with all sorts of conventions: so much so that we find British
+Hegelians often deeply engaged in psychology, cosmology, or religion, as
+if they took their idealism for a kind of physics, and wished merely to
+reinterpret the facts of nature in an edifying way, without uprooting them
+from their natural places. This has been made easier by giving idealism an
+objective, non-psychological turn: events, and especially feelings and
+ideas, will then be swallowed up in the essences which they display. Thus
+Bradley maintained that two thoughts, no matter how remote from each other
+in time or space, were identically the same, and not merely similar, if
+only they contemplated the same idea. Mind itself ceased in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68"></a>[68]</span>this way to
+mean a series of existing feelings and was identified with intelligence;
+and intelligence in its turn was identified with the Idea or Logos which
+might be the ultimate theme of intelligence. There could be only one mind,
+so conceived, since there could be only one total system in the universe
+visible to omniscience.</p>
+
+<p>As to romantic scepticism, we may see by contrast what it would be, when
+left to itself, if we consider those lucid Italians who have taken up
+their idealism late and with open eyes. In Croce and Gentile the
+transcendental attitude is kept pure: for them there is really no universe
+save spirit creating its experience; and if we ask whence or on what
+principle occasions arise for all this compulsory fiction, we are reminded
+that this question, with any answer which spirit might invent for it,
+belongs not to philosophy but to some special science like physiology,
+itself, of course, only a particular product of creative thought. Thus the
+more impetuously the inquisitive squirrel would rush from his cage, the
+faster and faster he causes the cage to whirl about his ears. He has not
+the remotest chance of reaching his imaginary <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69"></a>[69]</span>bait&mdash;God, nature, or
+truth; for to seek such things is to presuppose them, and to presuppose
+anything, if spirit be absolute, is to invent it. Even those philosophies
+of history which the idealist may for some secret reason be impelled to
+construct would be superstitious, according to his own principles, if he
+took them for more than poetic fictions of the historian; so that in the
+study of history, as in every other study, all the diligence and sober
+learning which the philosopher may possess are non-philosophical, since
+they presuppose independent events and material documents. Thus perfect
+idealism turns out to be pure literary sport, like lyric poetry, in which
+no truth is conveyed save the miscellaneous truths taken over from common
+sense or the special sciences; and the gay spirit, supposed to be living
+and shining of its own sweet will, can find nothing to live or shine upon
+save the common natural world.</p>
+
+<p>Such at least would be the case if romantic superstition did not
+supervene, demanding that the spirit should impose some arbitrary rhythm
+or destiny on the world which it creates: but this side of idealism has
+been cultivated chiefly by the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70"></a>[70]</span>intrepid Germans: some of them, like
+Spengler and Keyserling, still thrive and grow famous on it without a
+blush. The modest English in these matters take shelter under the wing of
+science speculatively extended, or traditional religion prudently
+rationalised: the scope of the spirit, like its psychological
+distribution, is conceived realistically. It might almost prove an
+euthanasia for British idealism to lose itself in the new metaphysics of
+nature which the mathematicians are evolving; and since this metaphysics,
+though materialistic in effect, is more subtle and abstruse than popular
+materialism, British idealism might perhaps be said to survive in it,
+having now passed victoriously into its opposite, and being merged in
+something higher.</p>
+
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> <i>Ethical Studies</i>, by F.H. Bradley, O.M., LL.D. (Glasgow),
+late Fellow of Merton College, Oxford; second edition revised, with
+additional notes by the Author. Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1927.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71"></a>[71]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h2>REVOLUTIONS IN SCIENCE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Since the beginning of the twentieth century, science has gained notably
+in expertness, and lost notably in authority. We are bombarded with
+inventions; but if we ask the inventors what they have learned of the
+depths of nature, which somehow they have probed with such astonishing
+success, their faces remain blank. They may be chewing gum; or they may
+tell us that if an aeroplane could only fly fast enough, it would get home
+before it starts; or they may urge us to come with them into a dark room,
+to hold hands, and to commune with the dear departed.</p>
+
+<p>Practically there may be no harm in such a division of labour, the
+inventors doing the work and the professors the talking. The experts may
+themselves be inexpert in verbal expression, or content with stock
+phrases, or profoundly sceptical, or too busy to think. Nevertheless,
+skill and understanding are at their best when they go to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72"></a>[72]</span>gether and adorn
+the same mind. Modern science until lately had realised this ideal: it was
+an extension of common perception and common sense. We could trust it
+implicitly, as we do a map or a calendar; it was not true for us merely in
+an argumentative or visionary sense, as are religion and philosophy.
+Geography went hand in hand with travel, Copernican astronomy with
+circumnavigation of the globe: and even the theory of evolution and the
+historical sciences in the nineteenth century were continuous with liberal
+reform: people saw in the past, as they then learned to conceive it,
+simply an extension of those transformations which they were witnessing in
+the present. They could think they knew the world as a man knows his
+native town, or the contents of his chest of drawers: nature was our home,
+and science was our home knowledge. For it is not intrinsic clearness or
+coherence that make ideas persuasive, but connection with action, or with
+some voluminous inner response, which is readiness to act. It is a sense
+of on-coming fate, a compulsion to do or to suffer, that produces the
+illusion of perfect knowledge.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73"></a>[73]</span>I call it illusion, although our contact with things may be real, and our
+sensations and thoughts may be inevitable and honest; because nevertheless
+it is always an illusion to suppose that our images are the intrinsic
+qualities of things, or reproduce them exactly. The Ptolemaic system, for
+instance, was perfectly scientific; it was based on careful and prolonged
+observation and on just reasoning; but it was modelled on an image&mdash;the
+spherical blue dome of the heavens&mdash;proper only to an observer on the
+earth, and not transferable to a universe which is diffuse, centreless,
+fluid, and perhaps infinite. When the imagination, for any reason, comes
+to be peopled with images of the latter sort, the modern, and especially
+the latest, astronomy becomes more persuasive. For although I suspect that
+even Einstein is an imperfect relativist, and retains Euclidean space and
+absolute time at the bottom of his calculation, and recovers them at the
+end, yet the effort to express the system of nature as it would appear
+from <i>any</i> station and to <i>any</i> sensorium seems to be eminently
+enlightening.</p>
+
+<p>Theory and practice in the latest science are still <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74"></a>[74]</span>allied, otherwise
+neither of them would prosper as it does; but each has taken a leap in its
+own direction. The distance between them has become greater than the naked
+eye can measure, and each of them in itself has become unintelligible. We
+roll and fly at dizzy speeds, and hear at incredible distances; at the
+same time we imagine and calculate to incredible depths. The technique of
+science, like that of industry, has become a thing in itself; the one
+veils its object, which is nature, as the other defeats its purpose, which
+is happiness. Science often seems to be less the study of things than the
+study of science. It is now more scholastic than philosophy ever was. We
+are invited to conceive organisms within organisms, so minute, so free,
+and so dynamic, that the heart of matter seems to explode into an endless
+discharge of fireworks, or a mathematical nightmare realised in a thousand
+places at once, and become the substance of the world. What is even more
+remarkable&mdash;for the notion of infinite organisation has been familiar to
+the learned at least since the time of Leibniz&mdash;the theatre of science is
+transformed no less than the actors and the play. The upright walls <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75"></a>[75]</span>of
+space, the steady tread of time, begin to fail us; they bend now so
+obligingly to our perspectives that we no longer seem to travel through
+them, but to carry them with us, shooting them out or weaving them about
+us according to some native fatality, which is left unexplained. We seem
+to have reverted in some sense from Copernicus to Ptolemy: except that the
+centre is now occupied, not by the solid earth, but by <i>any</i> geometrical
+point chosen for the origin of calculation. Time, too, is not measured by
+the sun or stars, but by <i>any</i> "clock"&mdash;that is, by any recurrent rhythm
+taken as a standard of comparison. It would seem that the existence and
+energy of each chosen centre, as well as its career and encounters, hang
+on the collateral existence of other centres of force, among which it must
+wend its way: yet the only witness to their presence, and the only known
+property of their substance, is their "radio-activity", or the physical
+light which they shed. Light, in its physical being, is accordingly the
+measure of all things in this new philosophy: and if we ask ourselves why
+this element should have been preferred, the answer is not far to seek.
+Light <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76"></a>[76]</span>is the only medium through which very remote or very minute
+particles of matter can be revealed to science. Whatever the nature of
+things may be intrinsically, science must accordingly express the universe
+in terms of light.</p>
+
+<p>These reforms have come from within: they are triumphs of method. We make
+an evident advance in logic, and in that parsimony which is dear to
+philosophers (though not to nature), if we refuse to assign given terms
+and relations to any prior medium, such as absolute time or space, which
+cannot be given with them. Observable spaces and times, like the facts
+observed in them, are given separately and in a desultory fashion.
+Initially, then, there are as many spaces and times as there are
+observers, or rather observations; these are the specious times and spaces
+of dreams, of sensuous life, and of romantic biography. Each is centred
+here and now, and stretched outwards, forward, and back, as far as
+imagination has the strength to project it. Then, when objects and events
+have been posited as self-existent, and when a "clock" and a system of
+co-ordinates have been established for measuring them, a single
+mathe<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77"></a>[77]</span>matical space and time may be deployed about them, conceived to
+contain all things, and to supply them with their respective places and
+dates. This gives us the cosmos of classical physics. But this system
+involves the uncritical notion of light and matter travelling through
+media previously existing, and being carried down, like a boat drifting
+down stream, by a flowing time which has a pace of its own, and imposes it
+on all existence. In reality, each "clock" and each landscape is
+self-centred and initially absolute: its time and space are irrelevant to
+those of any other landscape or "clock", unless the objects or events
+revealed there, being posited as self-existent, actually coincide with
+those revealed also in another landscape, or dated by another "clock". It
+is only by travelling along its own path at its own rate that experience
+or light can ever reach a point lying on another path also, so that two
+observations, and two measures, may coincide at their ultimate terms,
+their starting-points or their ends. Positions are therefore not
+independent of the journey which terminates in them, and thereby
+individuates them; and dates are not independent of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78"></a>[78]</span>events which
+distinguish them. The flux of existence comes first: matter and light
+distend time by their pulses, they distend space by their deployments.</p>
+
+<p>This, if I understand it, is one half the new theory; the other half is
+not less acceptable. Newton had described motion as a result of two
+principles: the first, inertia, was supposed to be inherent in bodies; the
+second, gravity, was incidental to their co-existence. Yet inherent
+inertia can only be observed relatively: it makes no difference to me
+whether I am said to be moving at a great speed or absolutely at rest, if
+I am not jolted or breathless, and if my felt environment does not change.
+Inertia, or weight, in so far as it denotes something intrinsic, seems to
+be but another name for substance or the principle of existence: in so far
+as it denotes the first law of motion, it seems to be relative to an
+environment. It would therefore be preferable to combine inertia and
+attraction in a single formula, expressing the behaviour of bodies towards
+one another in all their conjunctions, without introducing any inherent
+forces or absolute measures. This seems <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79"></a>[79]</span>to have been done by Einstein, or
+at least impressively suggested: and it has been found that the new
+calculations correspond to certain delicate observations more accurately
+than the old.</p>
+
+<p>This revolution in science seems, then, to be perfectly legal, and ought
+to be welcomed; yet only under one important moral condition, and with a
+paradoxical result. The moral condition is that the pride of science
+should turn into humility, that it should no longer imagine that it is
+laying bare the intrinsic nature of things. And the paradoxical result is
+this: that the forms of science are optional, like various languages or
+methods of notation. One may be more convenient or subtle than another,
+according to the place, senses, interests, and scope of the explorer; a
+reform in science may render the old theories antiquated, like the habit
+of wearing togas, or of going naked; but it cannot render them false, or
+itself true. Science, when it is more than the gossip of adventure or of
+experiment, yields practical assurances couched in symbolic terms, but no
+ultimate insight: so that the intellectual vacancy of the expert, which I
+was deriding, is a sort of warrant of his solidity. It is <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80"></a>[80]</span>rather when the
+expert prophesies, when he propounds a new philosophy founded on his
+latest experiments, that we may justly smile at his system, and wait for
+the next.</p>
+
+<p>Self-knowledge&mdash;and the new science is full of self-knowledge&mdash;is a great
+liberator: if perhaps it imposes some retrenchment, essentially it revives
+courage. Then at last we see what we are and what we can do. The spirit
+can abandon its vain commitments and false pretensions, like a young man
+free at last to throw off his clothes and run naked along the sands.
+Intelligence is never gayer, never surer, than when it is strictly formal,
+satisfied with the evidence of its materials, as with the lights of
+jewels, and filled with mounting speculations, as with a sort of laughter.
+If all the arts aspire to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire
+to the condition of mathematics. Their logic is their spontaneous and
+intelligible side: and while they differ from mathematics and from one
+another in being directed in the first instance upon various
+unintelligible existing objects, yet as they advance, they unite: because
+they are everywhere striving to discover in those <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81"></a>[81]</span>miscellaneous objects
+some intelligible order and method. And as the emotion of the pure artist,
+whatever may be his materials, lies in finding in them some formal harmony
+or imposing it upon them, so the interest of the scientific mind, in so
+far as it is free and purely intellectual, lies in tracing their formal
+pattern. The mathematician can afford to leave to his clients, the
+engineers, or perhaps the popular philosophers, the emotion of belief: for
+himself he keeps the lyrical pleasure of metre and of evolving equations:
+and it is a pleasant surprise to him, and an added problem, if he finds
+that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify
+them; much as if a composer found that the sailors could heave better when
+singing his songs.</p>
+
+<p>Yet such independence, however glorious inwardly, cannot help diminishing
+the prestige of the arts in the world. If science misled us before, when
+it was full of clearness and confidence, how shall we trust it now that it
+is all mystery and paradox? If classical physics needed this fundamental
+revision, near to experience and fruitful as it was, what revision will
+not romantic physics require? <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82"></a>[82]</span>Nor is the future alone insecure: even now
+the prophets hardly understand one another, or perhaps themselves; and
+some of them interlard their science with the most dubious metaphysics.
+Naturally the enemies of science have not been slow to seize this
+opportunity: the soft-hearted, the muddle-headed, the superstitious are
+all raising their voices, no longer in desperate resistance to science,
+but hopefully, and in its name. Science, they tell us, is no longer
+hostile to religion, or to divination of any sort. Indeed, divination is a
+science too. Physics is no longer materialistic since space is now curved,
+and filled with an ether through which light travels at 300,000 kilometres
+per second&mdash;an immaterial rate: because if anything material ventured to
+move at that forbidden speed, it would be so flattened that it would cease
+to exist. Indeed, matter is now hardly needed at all; its place has been
+taken by radio-activity, and by electrons which dart and whirl with such
+miraculous swiftness, that occasionally, for no known reason, they can
+skip from orbit to orbit without traversing the intervening positions&mdash;an
+evident proof of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83"></a>[83]</span>free-will in them. Or if solids should still seem to be
+material, there are astral bodies as well which are immaterial although
+physical; and as to ether and electricity, they are the very substance of
+spirit. All this I find announced in newspapers and even in books as the
+breakdown of scientific materialism: and yet, when was materialism more
+arrant and barbarous than in these announcements? Something no doubt has
+broken down: but I am afraid it is rather the habit of thinking clearly
+and the power to discern the difference between material and spiritual
+things.</p>
+
+<p>The latest revolution in science will probably not be the last. I do not
+know what internal difficulties, contradictions, or ominous obscurities
+may exist in the new theories, or what logical seeds of change, perhaps of
+radical change, might be discovered there by a competent critic. I base my
+expectation on two circumstances somewhat more external and visible to the
+lay mind. One circumstance is that the new theories seem to be affected,
+and partly inspired, by a particular philosophy, itself utterly insecure.
+This philosophy regards the point of view as controlling or <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84"></a>[84]</span>even creating
+the object seen; in other words, it identifies the object with the
+experience or the knowledge of it: it is essentially a subjective,
+psychological, Protestant philosophy. The study of perspectives, which a
+severer critic might call illusions, is one of the most interesting and
+enlightening of studies, and for my own part I should be content to dwell
+almost exclusively in that poetic and moral atmosphere, in the realm of
+literature and of humanism. Yet I cannot help seeing that neither in logic
+nor in natural genesis can perspectives be the ultimate object of science,
+since a plurality of points of view, somehow comparable, must be assumed
+in the beginning, as well as common principles of projection, and ulterior
+points of contact or coincidence. Such assumptions, which must persist
+throughout, seem to presuppose an absolute system of nature behind all the
+relative systems of science.</p>
+
+<p>The other circumstance which points to further revolutions is social. The
+new science is unintelligible to almost all of us; it can be tested only
+by very delicate observations and very difficult reasoning. We accept it
+on the authority of a few <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85"></a>[85]</span>professors who themselves have accepted it with
+a contagious alacrity, as if caught in a whirlwind. It has sprung up
+mysteriously and mightily, like mysticism in a cloister or theology in a
+council: a Soviet of learned men has proclaimed it. Moreover, it is not
+merely a system among systems, but a movement among movements. A system,
+even when it has serious rivals, may be maintained for centuries as
+religions are maintained, institutionally; but a movement comes to an end;
+it is followed presently by a period of assimilation which transforms it,
+or by a movement in some other direction. I ask myself accordingly whether
+the condition of the world in the coming years will be favourable to
+refined and paradoxical science. The extension of education will have
+enabled the uneducated to pronounce upon everything. Will the patronage of
+capital and enterprise subsist, to encourage discovery and reward
+invention? Will a jealous and dogmatic democracy respect the
+unintelligible insight of the few? Will a perhaps starving democracy
+support materially its Soviet of seers? But let us suppose that no
+utilitarian fanaticism supervenes, and no in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86"></a>[86]</span>tellectual surfeit or
+discouragement. May not the very profundity of the new science and its
+metaphysical affinities lead it to bolder developments, inscrutable to the
+public and incompatible with one another, like the gnostic sects of
+declining antiquity? Then perhaps that luminous modern thing which until
+recently was called science, in contrast to all personal philosophies, may
+cease to exist altogether, being petrified into routine in the
+practitioners, and fading in the professors into abstruse speculations.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87"></a>[87]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<h2>A LONG WAY ROUND TO NIRVANA</h2>
+
+
+<p>That the end of life is death may be called a truism, since the various
+kinds of immortality that might perhaps supervene would none of them
+abolish death, but at best would weave life and death together into the
+texture of a more comprehensive destiny. The end of one life might be the
+beginning of another, if the Creator had composed his great work like a
+dramatic poet, assigning successive lines to different characters. Death
+would then be merely the cue at the end of each speech, summoning the next
+personage to break in and keep the ball rolling. Or perhaps, as some
+suppose, all the characters are assumed in turn by a single supernatural
+Spirit, who amid his endless improvisations is imagining himself living
+for the moment in this particular solar and social system. Death in such a
+universal monologue would be but a change of scene or of metre, while in
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88"></a>[88]</span>scramble of a real comedy it would be a change of actors. In either
+case every voice would be silenced sooner or later, and death would end
+each particular life, in spite of all possible sequels.</p>
+
+<p>The relapse of created things into nothing is no violent fatality, but
+something naturally quite smooth and proper. This has been set forth
+recently, in a novel way, by a philosopher from whom we hardly expected
+such a lesson, namely Professor Sigmund Freud. He has now broadened his
+conception of sexual craving or <i>libido</i> into a general principle of
+attraction or concretion in matter, like the Eros of the ancient poets
+Hesiod and Empedocles. The windows of that stuffy clinic have been thrown
+open; that smell of acrid disinfectants, those hysterical shrieks, have
+escaped into the cold night. The troubles of the sick soul, we are given
+to understand, as well as their cure, after all flow from the stars.</p>
+
+<p>I am glad that Freud has resisted the tendency to represent this principle
+of Love as the only principle in nature. Unity somehow exercises an evil
+spell over metaphysicians. It is admitted that in real life it is not well
+for One to be alone, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89"></a>[89]</span>I think pure unity is no less barren and
+graceless in metaphysics. You must have plurality to start with, or
+trinity, or at least duality, if you wish to get anywhere, even if you
+wish to get effectively into the bosom of the One, abandoning your
+separate existence. Freud, like Empedocles, has prudently introduced a
+prior principle for Love to play with; not Strife, however (which is only
+an incident in Love), but Inertia, or the tendency towards peace and
+death. Let us suppose that matter was originally dead, and perfectly
+content to be so, and that it still relapses, when it can, into its old
+equilibrium. But the homogeneous (as Spencer would say) when it is finite
+is unstable: and matter, presumably not being co-extensive with space,
+necessarily forms aggregates which have an inside and an outside. The
+parts of such bodies are accordingly differently exposed to external
+influences and differently related to one another. This inequality, even
+in what seems most quiescent, is big with changes, destined to produce in
+time a wonderful complexity. It is the source of all uneasiness, of life,
+and of love.</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90"></a>[90]</span></p>
+<blockquote><p>"Let us imagine [writes Freud]<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> an undifferentiated vesicle of
+sensitive substance: then its surface, exposed as it is to the
+outer world, is by its very position differentiated, and serves as
+an organ for receiving stimuli.... This morsel of living substance
+floats about in an outer world which is charged with the most
+potent energies, and it would be destroyed ... if it were not
+furnished with protection against stimulation. [On the other hand]
+the sensitive cortical layer has no protective barrier against
+excitations emanating from within.... The most prolific sources of
+such excitations are the so-called instincts of the organism....
+The child never gets tired of demanding the repetition of a game
+... he wants always to hear the same story instead of a new one,
+insists inexorably on exact repetition, and corrects each deviation
+which the narrator lets slip by mistake.... According to this, <i>an
+instinct would be a tendency in living organic matter impelling it
+towards reinstatement of an earlier condition</i>, one which it had
+abandoned under the influence of external disturbing forces&mdash;a kind
+of organic elasticity, or, to put it another way, the manifestation
+of inertia in organic life.</p>
+
+<p>"If, then, all organic instincts are conservative, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91"></a>[91]</span>historically
+acquired, and directed towards regression, towards reinstatement of
+something earlier, we are obliged to place all the results of
+organic development to the credit of external, disturbing, and
+distracting influences. The rudimentary creature would from its
+very beginning not have wanted to change, would, if circumstances
+had remained the same, have always merely repeated the same course
+of existence.... It would be counter to the conservative nature of
+instinct if the goal of life were a state never hitherto reached.
+It must be rather an ancient starting point, which the living being
+left long ago, and to which it harks back again by all the
+circuitous paths of development.... <i>The goal of all life is
+death....</i></p>
+
+<p>"Through a long period of time the living substance may have ...
+had death within easy reach ... until decisive external influences
+altered in such a way as to compel [it] to ever greater deviations
+from the original path of life, and to ever more complicated and
+circuitous routes to the attainment of the goal of death. These
+circuitous ways to death, faithfully retained by the conservative
+instincts, would be neither more nor less than the phenomena of
+life as we know it."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Freud puts forth these interesting suggestions with much modesty,
+admitting that they are vague and uncertain and (what it is even more
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92"></a>[92]</span>important to notice) mythical in their terms; but it seems to me that,
+for all that, they are an admirable counterblast to prevalent follies.
+When we hear that there is, animating the whole universe, an <i>&Eacute;lan vital</i>,
+or general impulse toward some unknown but single ideal, the terms used
+are no less uncertain, mythical, and vague, but the suggestion conveyed is
+false&mdash;false, I mean, to the organic source of life and aspiration, to the
+simple naturalness of nature: whereas the suggestion conveyed by Freud's
+speculations is true. In what sense can myths and metaphors be true or
+false? In the sense that, in terms drawn from moral predicaments or from
+literary psychology, they may report the general movement and the
+pertinent issue of material facts, and may inspire us with a wise
+sentiment in their presence. In this sense I should say that Greek
+mythology was true and Calvinist theology was false. The chief terms
+employed in psycho-analysis have always been metaphorical: "unconscious
+wishes", "the pleasure-principle", "the Oedipus complex", "Narcissism",
+"the censor"; nevertheless, interesting and profound vistas may be opened
+up, in such terms, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93"></a>[93]</span>into the tangle of events in a man's life, and a fresh
+start may be made with fewer encumbrances and less morbid inhibition. "The
+shortcomings of our description", Freud says, "would probably disappear if
+for psychological terms we could substitute physiological or chemical
+ones. These too only constitute a metaphorical language, but one familiar
+to us for a much longer time, and perhaps also simpler." All human
+discourse is metaphorical, in that our perceptions and thoughts are
+adventitious signs for their objects, as names are, and by no means copies
+of what is going on materially in the depths of nature; but just as the
+sportsman's eye, which yields but a summary graphic image, can trace the
+flight of a bird through the air quite well enough to shoot it and bring
+it down, so the myths of a wise philosopher about the origin of life or of
+dreams, though expressed symbolically, may reveal the pertinent movement
+of nature to us, and may kindle in us just sentiments and true
+expectations in respect to our fate&mdash;for his own soul is the bird this
+sportsman is shooting.</p>
+
+<p>Now I think these new myths of Freud's about <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94"></a>[94]</span>life, like his old ones
+about dreams, are calculated to enlighten and to chasten us enormously
+about ourselves. The human spirit, when it awakes, finds itself in
+trouble; it is burdened, for no reason it can assign, with all sorts of
+anxieties about food, pressures, pricks, noises, and pains. It is born, as
+another wise myth has it, in original sin. And the passions and ambitions
+of life, as they come on, only complicate this burden and make it heavier,
+without rendering it less incessant or gratuitous. Whence this fatality,
+and whither does it lead? It comes from heredity, and it leads to
+propagation. When we ask how heredity could be started or transmitted, our
+ignorance of nature and of past time reduces us to silence or to wild
+conjectures. Something&mdash;let us call it matter&mdash;must always have existed,
+and some of its parts, under pressure of the others, must have got tied up
+into knots, like the mainspring of a watch, in such a violent and unhappy
+manner that when the pressure is relaxed they fly open as fast as they
+can, and unravel themselves with a vast sense of relief. Hence the longing
+to satisfy latent passions, with the fugitive pleasure in doing so. But
+the ex<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95"></a>[95]</span>ternal agencies that originally wound up that mainspring never
+cease to operate; every fresh stimulus gives it another turn, until it
+snaps, or grows flaccid, or is unhinged. Moreover, from time to time, when
+circumstances change, these external agencies may encrust that primary
+organ with minor organs attached to it. Every impression, every adventure,
+leaves a trace or rather a seed behind it. It produces a further
+complication in the structure of the body, a fresh charge, which tends to
+repeat the impressed motion in season and out of season. Hence that
+perpetual docility or ductility in living substance which enables it to
+learn tricks, to remember facts, and (when the seeds of past experiences
+marry and cross in the brain) to imagine new experiences, pleasing or
+horrible. Every act initiates a new habit and may implant a new instinct.
+We see people even late in life carried away by political or religious
+contagions or developing strange vices; there would be no peace in old
+age, but rather a greater and greater obsession by all sorts of cares,
+were it not that time, in exposing us to many adventitious influences,
+weakens or dis<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96"></a>[96]</span>charges our primitive passions; we are less greedy, less
+lusty, less hopeful, less generous. But these weakened primitive impulses
+are naturally by far the strongest and most deeply rooted in the organism:
+so that although an old man may be converted or may take up some hobby,
+there is usually something thin in his elderly zeal, compared with the
+heartiness of youth; nor is it edifying to see a soul in which the plainer
+human passions are extinct becoming a hotbed of chance delusions.</p>
+
+<p>In any case each fresh habit taking root in the organism forms a little
+mainspring or instinct of its own, like a parasite; so that an elaborate
+mechanism is gradually developed, where each lever and spring holds the
+other down, and all hold the mainspring down together, allowing it to
+unwind itself only very gradually, and meantime keeping the whole clock
+ticking and revolving, and causing the smooth outer face which it turns to
+the world, so clean and innocent, to mark the time of day amiably for the
+passer-by. But there is a terribly complicated labour going on beneath,
+propelled with difficulty, and balanced <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97"></a>[97]</span>precariously, with much secret
+friction and failure. No wonder that the engine often gets visibly out of
+order, or stops short: the marvel is that it ever manages to go at all.
+Nor is it satisfied with simply revolving and, when at last dismounted,
+starting afresh in the person of some seed it has dropped, a portion of
+its substance with all its concentrated instincts wound up tightly within
+it, and eager to repeat the ancestral experiment; all this growth is not
+merely material and vain. Each clock in revolving strikes the hour, even
+the quarters, and often with lovely chimes. These chimes we call
+perceptions, feelings, purposes, and dreams; and it is because we are
+taken up entirely with this mental music, and perhaps think that it sounds
+of itself and needs no music-box to make it, that we find such difficulty
+in conceiving the nature of our own clocks and are compelled to describe
+them only musically, that is, in myths. But the ineptitude of our
+aesthetic minds to unravel the nature of mechanism does not deprive these
+minds of their own clearness and euphony. Besides sounding their various
+musical notes, they have the cognitive function of indicating the hour and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98"></a>[98]</span>catching the echoes of distant events or of maturing inward dispositions.
+This information and emotion, added to incidental pleasures in satisfying
+our various passions, make up the life of an incarnate spirit. They
+reconcile it to the external fatality that has wound up the organism, and
+is breaking it down; and they rescue this organism and all its works from
+the indignity of being a vain complication and a waste of motion.</p>
+
+<p>That the end of life should be death may sound sad: yet what other end can
+anything have? The end of an evening party is to go to bed; but its use is
+to gather congenial people together, that they may pass the time
+pleasantly. An invitation to the dance is not rendered ironical because
+the dance cannot last for ever; the youngest of us and the most vigorously
+wound up, after a few hours, has had enough of sinuous stepping and
+prancing. The transitoriness of things is essential to their physical
+being, and not at all sad in itself; it becomes sad by virtue of a
+sentimental illusion, which makes us imagine that they wish to endure, and
+that their end is always untimely; but in a healthy nature it is not so.
+What is truly sad is to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99"></a>[99]</span>have some impulse frustrated in the midst of its
+career, and robbed of its chosen object; and what is painful is to have an
+organ lacerated or destroyed when it is still vigorous, and not ready for
+its natural sleep and dissolution. We must not confuse the itch which our
+unsatisfied instincts continue to cause with the pleasure of satisfying
+and dismissing each of them in turn. Could they all be satisfied
+harmoniously we should be satisfied once for all and completely. Then
+doing and dying would coincide throughout and be a perfect pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>This same insight is contained in another wise myth which has inspired
+morality and religion in India from time immemorial: I mean the doctrine
+of Karma. We are born, it says, with a heritage, a character imposed, and
+a long task assigned, all due to the ignorance which in our past lives has
+led us into all sorts of commitments. These obligations we must pay off,
+relieving the pure spirit within us from its accumulated burdens, from
+debts and assets both equally oppressive. We cannot disentangle ourselves
+by mere frivolity, nor by suicide: frivolity would <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100"></a>[100]</span>only involve us more
+deeply in the toils of fate, and suicide would but truncate our misery and
+leave us for ever a confessed failure. When life is understood to be a
+process of redemption, its various phases are taken up in turn without
+haste and without undue attachment; their coming and going have all the
+keenness of pleasure, the holiness of sacrifice, and the beauty of art.
+The point is to have expressed and discharged all that was latent in us;
+and to this perfect relief various temperaments and various traditions
+assign different names, calling it having one's day, or doing one's duty,
+or realising one's ideal, or saving one's soul. The task in any case is
+definite and imposed on us by nature, whether we recognise it or not;
+therefore we can make true moral progress or fall into real errors. Wisdom
+and genius lie in discerning this prescribed task and in doing it readily,
+cleanly, and without distraction. Folly on the contrary imagines that any
+scent is worth following, that we have an infinite nature, or no nature in
+particular, that life begins without obligations and can do business
+without capital, and that the will is vacuously free, instead of being a
+specific <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101"></a>[101]</span>burden and a tight hereditary knot to be unravelled. Some
+philosophers without self-knowledge think that the variations and further
+entanglements which the future may bring are the manifestation of spirit;
+but they are, as Freud has indicated, imposed on living beings by external
+pressure, and take shape in the realm of matter. It is only after the
+organs of spirit are formed mechanically that spirit can exist, and can
+distinguish the better from the worse in the fate of those organs, and
+therefore in its own fate. Spirit has nothing to do with infinite
+existence. Infinite existence is something physical and ambiguous; there
+is no scale in it and no centre. The depths of the human heart are finite,
+and they are dark only to ignorance. Deep and dark as a soul may be when
+you look down into it from outside, it is something perfectly natural; and
+the same understanding that can unearth our suppressed young passions, and
+dispel our stubborn bad habits, can show us where our true good lies.
+Nature has marked out the path for us beforehand; there are snares in it,
+but also primroses, and it leads to peace.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102"></a>[102]</span></p>
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h2>THE PRESTIGE OF THE INFINITE</h2>
+
+
+<p>"The more complex the world becomes and the more it rises above the
+indeterminate, so much the farther removed it is from God; that is to say,
+so much the more impious it is." M. Julien Benda<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> is not led to this
+startling utterance by any political or sentimental grudge. It is not the
+late war, nor the peace of Versailles, nor the parlous state of the arts,
+nor the decay of morality and prosperity that disgusts him with our
+confused world. It is simply overmastering respect for the infinite. <i>La
+Trahison des Clercs</i>, or Treason of the Levites, with which he had
+previously upbraided the intellectuals of his time, now appears to consist
+precisely in coveting a part in this world's inheritance, and forgetting
+that the inheritance of the Levites is the Lord: which, being interpreted
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103"></a>[103]</span>philosophically, means that a philosopher is bound to measure all things
+by the infinite.</p>
+
+<p>This infinite is not rhetorical, as if we spoke of infinite thought or
+infinite love: it is physico-mathematical. Nothing but number, M. Benda
+tells us, seems to him intelligible. Time, space, volume, and complexity
+(which appears to the senses as quality) stretch in a series of units,
+positions, or degrees, to infinity, as number does: and in such
+homogeneous series, infinite in both directions, there will be no fixed
+point of origin for counting or surveying the whole and no particular
+predominant scale. Every position will be essentially identical with every
+other; every suggested structure will be collapsible and reversible; and
+the position and relations of every unit will be indistinguishable from
+those of every other. In the infinite, M. Benda says, the parts have no
+identity: each number in the scale, as we begin counting from different
+points of origin, bears also every other number.</p>
+
+<p>This is no mere mathematical puzzle; the thought has a strange moral
+eloquence. Seen in their infinite setting, which we may presume to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104"></a>[104]</span>be
+their ultimate environment, all things lose their central position and
+their dominant emphasis. The contrary of what we first think of them or of
+ourselves&mdash;for instance that we are alive, while they are dead or
+unborn&mdash;is also true. Egotism becomes absurd; pride and shame become the
+vainest of illusions. If then it be repugnant to reason that the series of
+numbers, moments, positions, and volumes should be limited&mdash;and the human
+spirit has a great affinity to the infinite&mdash;all specific quality and
+variety in things must be superficial and deeply unreal. They are masks in
+the carnival of phenomena, to be observed without conviction, and secretly
+dismissed as ironical by those who have laid up their treasure in the
+infinite.</p>
+
+<p>This mathematical dissolution of particulars is reinforced by moral
+considerations which are more familiar. Existence&mdash;any specific fact
+asserting itself in any particular place or moment&mdash;is inevitably
+contingent, arbitrary, gratuitous, and insecure. A sense of insecurity is
+likely to be the first wedge by which repentance penetrates into the
+animal heart. If a man did not foresee death <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105"></a>[105]</span>and fear it, he might never
+come at all to the unnatural thought of renouncing life. In fact, he does
+not often remember death: yet his whole gay world is secretly afraid of
+being found out, of being foiled in the systematic bluff by which it lives
+as if its life were immortal; and far more than the brave young man fears
+death in his own person, the whole life of the world fears to be exorcised
+by self-knowledge, and lost in air. And with good reason: because, whether
+we stop to notice this circumstance or not, every fact, every laborious
+beloved achievement of man or of nature, has come to exist against
+infinite odds. In the dark grab-bag of Being, this chosen fact was
+surrounded by innumerable possible variations or contradictions of it; and
+each of those possibilities, happening not to be realised here and now,
+yet possesses intrinsically exactly the same aptitude or claim to
+existence. Nor are these claims and aptitudes merely imaginary and
+practically contemptible. The flux of existence is continually repenting
+of its choices, and giving everything actual the lie, by continually
+substituting something else, no less specific and no less nugatory.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106"></a>[106]</span><i>This</i> world, <i>any</i> world, exists only by an unmerited privilege. Its
+glory is offensive to the spirit, like the self-sufficiency of some
+obstreperous nobody, who happens to have drawn the big prize in a lottery.
+"The world", M. Benda writes, "inspires me with a double sentiment. I feel
+it to be full of grandeur, because it has succeeded in asserting itself
+and coming to exist; and I feel it to be pitiful, when I consider how it
+hung on a mere nothing that this particular world should never have
+existed." And though this so accidental world, by its manifold beauties
+and excitements, may arouse our romantic enthusiasm, it is fundamentally
+an <i>unholy</i> world. Its creation, he adds in italics, "<i>is something which
+reason would wish had never taken place</i>".</p>
+
+<p>For we must not suppose that God, when God is defined as infinite Being,
+can be the creator of the world. Such a notion would hopelessly destroy
+that coherence in thought to which M. Benda aspires. The infinite cannot
+be selective; it cannot possess a particular structure (such, for
+instance, as the Trinity) nor a particular quality (such as goodness). It
+cannot exert power or give <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107"></a>[107]</span>direction. Nothing can be responsible for the
+world except the world itself. It has created, or is creating, itself
+perpetually by its own arbitrary act, by a groundless self-assertion which
+may be called (somewhat metaphorically) will, or even original sin: the
+original sin of existence, particularity, selfishness, or separation from
+God. Existence, being absolutely contingent and ungrounded, is perfectly
+free: and if it ties itself up in its own habits or laws, and becomes a
+terrible nightmare to itself by its automatic monotony, that still is only
+its own work and, figuratively speaking, its own fault. Nothing save its
+own arbitrary and needless pressure keeps it going in that round. This
+fatality is impressive, and popular religion has symbolised it in the
+person of a deity far more often recognised and worshipped than infinite
+Being. This popular deity, a symbol for the forces of nature and history,
+the patron of human welfare and morality, M. Benda calls the imperial God.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"It is clear that these two Gods ... have nothing to do with one
+another. The God whom Marshal de Villars, rising in his stirrups
+and pointing his drawn <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108"></a>[108]</span>sword heavenwards, thanks on the evening of
+Denain, is one God: quite another is the God within whose bosom the
+author of the <i>Imitation</i>, in a corner of his cell, feels the
+nothingness of all human victories."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>It follows from this, if we are coherent, that any "return to God" which
+ascetic philosophy may bring about cannot be a social reform, a transition
+to some better form of natural existence in a promised land, a renovated
+earth, or a material or temporal heaven. Nor can the error of creation be
+corrected violently by a second arbitrary act, such as suicide, or the
+annihilation of the universe by some ultimate general collapse. If such
+events happen, they still leave the door open to new creations and fresh
+errors. But the marvel is (I will return to this point presently) that the
+world, in the person of a human individual endowed with reason, may
+perceive the error of its ways and correct it ideally, in the sphere of
+estimation and worship. Such is the only possible salvation. Reason, in
+order to save us, and we, in order to be saved, must both subsist: we must
+both be incidents in the existing world. We may then, by the operation of
+reason in us, recover our <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109"></a>[109]</span>allegiance to the infinite, for we are bone of
+its bone and flesh of its flesh: and by our secret sympathy with it we may
+rescind every particular claim and dismiss silently every particular form
+of being, as something unreal and unholy.</p>
+
+<p>An even more cogent reason why M. Benda's God cannot have been the creator
+of the world is that avowedly this God has never existed. We are expressly
+warned that "if God is infinite Being he excludes existence, in so far as
+to exist means to be distinct. In the sense which everybody attaches to
+the word existence, God, as I conceive him, <i>does not exist</i>". Of course,
+in the mind of a lover of the infinite, this fact is not derogatory to
+God, but derogatory to existence. The infinite remains the first and the
+ultimate term in thought, the fundamental dimension common to all things,
+however otherwise they may be qualified; it remains the eternal background
+against which they all are defined and into which they soon disappear.
+Evidently, in this divine&mdash;because indestructible and
+necessary&mdash;dimension, Being is incapable of making choices, adopting paths
+of evolution, or exercising power; it knows nothing <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110"></a>[110]</span>of phenomena; it is
+not their cause nor their sanction. It is incapable of love, wrath, or any
+other passion. "I will add", writes M. Benda, "something else which
+theories of an impersonal deity have less often pointed out. Since
+infinity is incompatible with personal being, God is incapable of
+morality." Thus mere intuition and analysis of the infinite, since this
+infinite is itself passive and indifferent, may prove a subtle antidote to
+passion, to folly, and even to life.</p>
+
+<p>I think M. Benda succeeds admirably in the purpose announced in his title
+of rendering his discourse coherent. If once we accept his definitions,
+his corollaries follow. Clearly and bravely he disengages his idea of
+infinity from other properties usually assigned to the deity, such as
+power, omniscience, goodness, and tutelary functions in respect to life,
+or to some special human society. But coherence is not completeness, nor
+even a reasonable measure of descriptive truth; and certain considerations
+are omitted from M. Benda's view which are of such moment that, if they
+were included, they might transform the whole issue. Perhaps the chief of
+these omissions <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111"></a>[111]</span>is that of an organ for thought. M. Benda throughout is
+engaged simply in clarifying his own ideas, and repeatedly disclaims any
+ulterior pretensions. He finds in the panorama of his thoughts an idea of
+infinite Being, or God, and proceeds to study the relation of that
+conception to all others. It is a task of critical analysis and religious
+confession: and nothing could be more legitimate and, to some of us, more
+interesting. But whence these various ideas, and whence the spell which
+the idea of infinite Being in particular casts over the meditative mind?
+Unless we can view these movements of thought in their natural setting and
+order of genesis, we shall be in danger of turning autobiography into
+cosmology and inwardness into folly.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most notable points in M. Benda's analysis is his insistence on
+the leap involved in passing from infinite Being to any particular fact or
+system of facts; and again the leap involved in passing, when the
+converted spirit "returns to God", from specific animal interests&mdash;no
+matter how generous, social, or altruistic these interests may be&mdash;to
+absolute renunciation and sympathy <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112"></a>[112]</span>with the absolute. "That a will to
+return to God should arise in the phenomenal world seems to be a miracle
+no less wonderful (though it be less wondered at) than that the world
+should arise in the bosom of God." "Love of man, charity, humanitarianism
+are nothing but the selfishness of the race, by which each animal species
+assures its specific existence." "To surrender one's individuality for the
+benefit of a larger self is something quite different from
+disinterestedness; it is the exact opposite." And certainly, if we
+regarded infinite Being as a cosmological medium&mdash;say, empty space and
+time&mdash;there would be a miraculous break, an unaccountable new beginning,
+if that glassy expanse was suddenly wrinkled by something called energy.
+But in fact there need never have been such a leap, or such a miracle,
+because there could never have been such a transition. Infinite Being is
+not a material vacuum "in the bosom" of which a world might arise. It is a
+Platonic idea&mdash;though Plato never entertained it&mdash;an essence, non-existent
+and immutable, not in the same field of reality at all as a world of
+moving and colliding things. Such an <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113"></a>[113]</span>essence is not conceivably the seat
+of the variations that enliven the world. It is only in thought that we
+may pass from infinite Being to an existing universe; and when we turn
+from one to the other, and say that now energy has emerged from the bosom
+of God, we are turning over a new leaf, or rather picking up an entirely
+different volume. The natural world is composed of objects and events
+which theory may regard as transformations of a hypothetical energy; an
+energy which M. Benda&mdash;who when he comes down to the physical world is a
+good materialist&mdash;conceives to have condensed and distributed itself into
+matter, which in turn composed organisms and ultimately generated
+consciousness and reason. But in whatever manner the natural world may
+have evolved, it is found and posited by us in perception and action, not,
+like infinite Being, defined in thought. This contrast is ontological, and
+excludes any derivation of the one object from the other. M. Benda himself
+tells us so; and we may wonder why he introduced infinite Being at all
+into his description of the world. The reason doubtless is that he was not
+engaged in describing <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114"></a>[114]</span>the world, except by the way, but rather in
+classifying and clarifying his ideas in view of determining his moral
+allegiance. And he arranged his terms, whether ideal or materials, in a
+single series, because they were alike present to his intuition, and he
+was concerned to arrange them in a hierarchy, according to their moral
+dignity.</p>
+
+<p>Not only is infinite Being an incongruous and obstructive term to describe
+the substance of the world (which, if it subtends the changes in the world
+and causes them, must evidently change with them), but even mathematical
+space and time, in their ideal infinity, may be very far from describing
+truly the medium and groundwork of the universe. That is a question for
+investigation and hypothesis, not for intuition. But in the life of
+intuition, when that life takes a mathematical turn, empty space and time
+and their definable structure may be important themes; while, when the
+same life becomes a discipline of the affections, we see by this latest
+example, as well as by many a renowned predecessor of M. Benda, that
+infinite Being may dominate the scene.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is this eventual dominance so foreign to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115"></a>[115]</span>the natural mind, or such a
+miraculous conversion, as it might seem. Here, too, there is no derivation
+of object from object, but an alternative for the mind. As M. Benda points
+out, natural interests and sympathies may expand indefinitely, so as to
+embrace a family, a nation, or the whole animate universe; we might even
+be chiefly occupied with liberal pursuits, such as science or music; the
+more we laboured at these things and delighted in them, the less ready
+should we be for renunciation and detachment. Must conversion then descend
+upon us from heaven like a thunderbolt? Far from it. We need not look for
+the principle of spiritual life in the distance: we have it at home from
+the beginning. Even the idea of infinite Being, though unnamed, is
+probably familiar. Perhaps in the biography of the human race, or of each
+budding mind, the infinite or indeterminate may have been the primary
+datum. On that homogeneous sensuous background, blank at first but
+secretly plastic, a spot here and a movement there may gradually have
+become discernible, until the whole picture of nature and history had
+shaped itself as we see it. A certain sense of that primitive <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116"></a>[116]</span>datum, the
+infinite or indeterminate, may always remain as it were the outstretched
+canvas on which every picture is painted. And when the pictures vanish, as
+in deep sleep, the ancient simplicity and quietness may be actually
+recovered, in a conscious union with Brahma. So sensuous, so intimate, so
+unsophisticated the "return to God" may be for the spirit, without
+excluding the other avenues, intellectual and ascetic, by which this
+return may be effected in waking life, though then not so much in act as
+in intent only and allegiance.</p>
+
+<p>I confess that formerly I had some difficulty in sharing the supreme
+respect for infinite Being which animates so many saints: it seemed to me
+the dazed, the empty, the deluded side of spirituality. Why rest in an
+object which can be redeemed from blank negation only by a blank
+intensity? But time has taught me not to despise any form of vital
+imagination, any discipline which may achieve perfection after any kind.
+Intuition is a broadly based activity; it engages elaborate organs and
+sums up and synthesises accumulated impressions. It may therefore easily
+pour the riches of its ancestry into the image or the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117"></a>[117]</span>sentiment which it
+evokes, poor as this sentiment or image might seem if expressed in words.
+In rapt or ecstatic moments, the vital momentum, often the moral escape,
+is everything, and the achievement, apart from that blessed relief, little
+or nothing. Infinite Being may profit in this way by offering a contrast
+to infinite annoyance. Moreover, in my own way, I have discerned in pure
+Being the involution of all forms. As felt, pure Being may be
+indeterminate, but as conceived reflectively it includes all
+determinations: so that when deployed into the realm of essence, infinite
+or indeterminate Being truly contains entertainment for all eternity.</p>
+
+<p>M. Benda feels this pregnancy of the infinite on the mathematical side;
+but he hardly notices the fact, proclaimed so gloriously by Spinoza, that
+the infinity of extension is only one of an infinity of infinites. There
+is an aesthetic infinite, or many aesthetic infinites, composed of all the
+forms which nature or imagination might exhibit; and where imagination
+fails, there are infinite remainders of the unimagined. The version which
+M. Benda gives us of infinite Being, limited to the mathe<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118"></a>[118]</span>matical
+dimension, is therefore unnecessarily cold and stark. His one infinity is
+monochrome, whereas the total infinity of essence, in which an infinity of
+outlines is only one item, is infinitely many-coloured. Phenomena
+therefore fall, in their essential variety, within and not without
+infinite Being: so that in "returning to God" we might take the whole
+world with us, not indeed in its blind movement and piecemeal
+illumination, as events occur, but in an after-image and panoramic
+portrait, as events are gathered together in the realm of truth.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole I think M. Benda's two Gods are less unfriendly to one
+another than his aggrieved tone might suggest. This pregnant little book
+ends on a tragic note.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Hitherto human self-assertion in the state or the family, while
+serving the imperial God, has paid some grudging honours, at least
+verbally, to the infinite God as well, under the guise of
+liberalism, love of mankind, or the negation of classes. But today
+this imperfect homage is retracted, and nothing is reverenced
+except that which gives strength. If anyone preaches human
+kindness, it is in order to establish a "strong" community
+martially trained, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119"></a>[119]</span>like a super-state, to oppose everything not
+included within it, and to become omnipotent in the art of
+utilising the non-human forces of nature.... The will to return to
+God may prove to have been, in the history of the phenomenal world,
+a sublime accident."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Certainly the will to "return to God", if not an accident, is an incident
+in the life of the world; and the whole world itself is a sublime
+accident, in the sense that its existence is contingent, groundless, and
+precarious. Yet so long as the imperial God continues successfully to keep
+our world going, it will be no accident, but a natural necessity, that
+many a mind should turn to the thought of the infinite with awe, with a
+sense of liberation, and even with joy. The infinite God owes all his
+worshippers, little as he may care for them, to the success of the
+imperial God in creating reflective and speculative minds. Or (to drop
+these mythological expressions which may become tiresome) philosophers owe
+to nature and to the discipline of moral life their capacity to look
+beyond nature and beyond morality. And while they may <i>look</i> beyond, and
+take comfort in the vision, they cannot <i>pass</i> beyond. As M. Benda says,
+the most faithful Levite can return to the infinite only in his <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120"></a>[120]</span>thought;
+in his life he must remain a lay creature. Yet nature, in forming the
+human soul, unintentionally unlocked for the mind the doors to truth and
+to essence, partly by obliging the soul to attend to things which are
+outside, and partly by endowing the soul with far greater potentialities
+of sensation and invention than daily life is likely to call forth. Our
+minds are therefore naturally dissatisfied with their lot and
+speculatively directed upon an outspread universe in which our persons
+count for almost nothing. These insights are calculated to give our brutal
+wills some pause. Intuition of the infinite and recourse to the infinite
+for religious inspiration follow of themselves, and can never be
+suppressed altogether, so long as life is conscious and experience
+provokes reflection.</p>
+
+<p>Spirit is certainly not one of the forces producing spirit, but neither is
+it a contrary force. It is the actuality of feeling, of observation, of
+meaning. Spirit has no unmannerly quarrel with its parents, its hosts, or
+even its gaolers: they know not what they do. Yet spirit belongs
+intrinsically to another sphere, and cannot help wondering at the world,
+and suffering in it. The man in whom <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121"></a>[121]</span>spirit is awake will continue to
+live and act, but with a difference. In so far as he has become pure
+spirit he will have transcended the fear of death or defeat; for now his
+instinctive fear, which will subsist, will be neutralised by an equally
+sincere consent to die and to fail. He will live henceforth in a truer and
+more serene sympathy with nature than is possible to rival natural beings.
+Natural beings are perpetually struggling to live only, and not to die; so
+that their will is in hopeless rebellion against the divine decrees which
+they must obey notwithstanding. The spiritual man, on the contrary, in so
+far as he has already passed intellectually into the eternal world, no
+longer endures unwillingly the continual death involved in living, or the
+final death involved in having been born. He renounces everything
+religiously in the very act of attaining it, resigning existence itself as
+gladly as he accepts it, or even more gladly; because the emphasis which
+action and passion lend to the passing moment seems to him arbitrary and
+violent; and as each task or experience is dismissed in turn, he accounts
+the end of it more blessed than the beginning.</p>
+
+
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> The following quotations are drawn from <i>Beyond the Pleasure
+Principle</i>, by Sigmund Freud; authorised translation by C.J.M. Hubback.
+The International Psycho-Analytic Press, 1922, pp. 29-48. The italics are
+in the original.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> <i>Essai d'un Discours coh&eacute;rent sur les Rapports de Dieu et du
+Monde.</i> Par Julien Benda. Librairie Gallimard, Paris, 1931.</p></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+<p class="ctr"><small>[<i>Transcriber's note: Footnotes 2-9 in Essay 1: <span class="u">Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense</span> link directly to the pertinent Supplemental Note</i>.]</small></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Turns of Thought in Modern
+Philosophy, by George Santayana
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy
+by George Santayana
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy
+       Five Essays
+
+Author: George Santayana
+
+Release Date: September 17, 2005 [EBook #16712]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME TURNS OF THOUGHT IN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Michael Ciesielski and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+SOME TURNS OF THOUGHT IN
+MODERN PHILOSOPHY
+
+_Five Essays_
+
+
+BY
+
+
+GEORGE SANTAYANA
+
+
+NEW YORK
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+1933
+
+
+
+
+Published under the auspices of
+THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE
+
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+I. Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense                      page 1
+
+Paper read before the Royal Society of Literature on the
+occasion of the Tercentenary of the birth of John Locke.
+With some Supplementary Notes
+
+
+II. Fifty Years of British Idealism                                 48
+
+Reflections on the republication of Bradley's _Ethical Studies_
+
+
+III. Revolutions in Science                                         71
+
+Some Comments on the Theory of Relativity and the new Physics
+
+
+IV. A Long Way Round to Nirvana                                     87
+
+Development of a suggestion found in Freud's _Beyond the
+Pleasure Principle_
+
+
+V. The Prestige of the Infinite                                    102
+
+A review of Julien Benda's _Sketch of a consistent theory of
+the relations between God and the World_
+
+
+The Author's acknowledgments are due to the Editors of _The New Adelphi_,
+_The Dial_, and the _Journal of Philosophy_, in which one or more of these
+Essays originally appeared.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+LOCKE AND THE FRONTIERS OF COMMON SENSE[1]
+
+
+A good portrait of Locke would require an elaborate background. His is not
+a figure to stand statuesquely in a void: the pose might not seem grand
+enough for bronze or marble. Rather he should be painted in the manner of
+the Dutch masters, in a sunny interior, scrupulously furnished with all
+the implements of domestic comfort and philosophic enquiry: the Holy Bible
+open majestically before him, and beside it that other revelation--the
+terrestrial globe. His hand might be pointing to a microscope set for
+examining the internal constitution of a beetle: but for the moment his
+eye should be seen wandering through the open window, to admire the
+blessings of thrift and liberty manifest in the people so worthily busy in
+the market-place, wrong as many a monkish notion might be that still
+troubled their poor heads. From them his enlarged thoughts would easily
+pass to the stout carved ships in the river beyond, intrepidly setting
+sail for the Indies, or for savage America. Yes, he too had travelled, and
+not only in thought. He knew how many strange nations and false religions
+lodged in this round earth, itself but a speck in the universe. There were
+few ingenious authors that he had not perused, or philosophical
+instruments that he had not, as far as possible, examined and tested; and
+no man better than he could understand and prize the recent discoveries of
+"the incomparable Mr Newton". Nevertheless, a certain uneasiness in that
+spare frame, a certain knitting of the brows in that aquiline countenance,
+would suggest that in the midst of their earnest eloquence the
+philosopher's thoughts might sometimes come to a stand. Indeed, the
+visible scene did not exhaust the complexity of his problem; for there was
+also what he called "the scene of ideas", immaterial and private, but
+often more crowded and pressing than the public scene. Locke was the
+father of modern psychology, and the birth of this airy monster, this
+half-natural changeling, was not altogether easy or fortunate.[2]
+
+I wish my erudition allowed me to fill in this picture as the subject
+deserves, and to trace home the sources of Locke's opinions, and their
+immense influence. Unfortunately, I can consider him--what is hardly
+fair--only as a pure philosopher: for had Locke's mind been more profound,
+it might have been less influential. He was in sympathy with the coming
+age, and was able to guide it: an age that confided in easy, eloquent
+reasoning, and proposed to be saved, in this world and the next, with as
+little philosophy and as little religion as possible. Locke played in the
+eighteenth century very much the part that fell to Kant in the nineteenth.
+When quarrelled with, no less than when embraced, his opinions became a
+point of departure for universal developments. The more we look into the
+matter, the more we are impressed by the patriarchal dignity of Locke's
+mind. Father of psychology, father of the criticism of knowledge, father
+of theoretical liberalism, god-father at least of the American political
+system, of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedia, at home he was the ancestor of
+that whole school of polite moderate opinion which can unite liberal
+Christianity with mechanical science and with psychological idealism. He
+was invincibly rooted in a prudential morality, in a rationalised
+Protestantism, in respect for liberty and law: above all he was deeply
+convinced, as he puts it, "that the handsome conveniences of life are
+better than nasty penury". Locke still speaks, or spoke until lately,
+through many a modern mind, when this mind was most sincere; and two
+hundred years before Queen Victoria he was a Victorian in essence.
+
+A chief element in this modernness of Locke was something that had hardly
+appeared before in pure philosophy, although common in religion: I mean,
+the tendency to deny one's own presuppositions--not by accident or
+inadvertently, but proudly and with an air of triumph. Presuppositions are
+imposed on all of us by life itself: for instance the presupposition that
+life is to continue, and that it is worth living. Belief is born on the
+wing and awakes to many tacit commitments. Afterwards, in reflection, we
+may wonder at finding these presuppositions on our hands and, being
+ignorant of the natural causes which have imposed them on the animal mind,
+we may be offended at them. Their arbitrary and dogmatic character will
+tempt us to condemn them, and to take for granted that the analysis which
+undermines them is justified, and will prove fruitful. But this critical
+assurance in its turn seems to rely on a dubious presupposition, namely,
+that human opinion must always evolve in a single line, dialectically,
+providentially, and irresistibly. It is at least conceivable that the
+opposite should sometimes be the case. Some of the primitive
+presuppositions of human reason might have been correct and inevitable,
+whilst the tendency to deny them might have sprung from a plausible
+misunderstanding, or the exaggeration of a half-truth: so that the
+critical opinion itself, after destroying the spontaneous assumptions on
+which it rested, might be incapable of subsisting.
+
+In Locke the central presuppositions, which he embraced heartily and
+without question, were those of common sense. He adopted what he calls a
+"plain, historical method", fit, in his own words, "to be brought into
+well-bred company and polite conversation". Men, "barely by the use of
+their natural faculties", might attain to all the knowledge possible or
+worth having. All children, he writes, "that are born into this world,
+being surrounded with bodies that perpetually and diversely affect them"
+have "a variety of ideas imprinted" on their minds. "External material
+things as objects of Sensation, and the operations of our own minds as
+objects of Reflection, are to me", he continues, "the only originals from
+which all our ideas take their beginnings." "Every act of sensation", he
+writes elsewhere, "when duly considered, gives us an equal view of both
+parts of nature, the corporeal and the spiritual. For whilst I know, by
+seeing or hearing,... that there is some corporeal being without me, the
+object of that sensation, I do more certainly know that there is some
+spiritual being within me that sees and hears."
+
+Resting on these clear perceptions, the natural philosophy of Locke falls
+into two parts, one strictly physical and scientific, the other critical
+and psychological. In respect to the composition of matter, Locke accepted
+the most advanced theory of his day, which happened to be a very old one:
+the theory of Democritus that the material universe contains nothing but a
+multitude of solid atoms coursing through infinite space: but Locke added
+a religious note to this materialism by suggesting that infinite space, in
+its sublimity, must be an attribute of God. He also believed what few
+materialists would venture to assert, that if we could thoroughly examine
+the cosmic mechanism we should see the demonstrable necessity of every
+complication that ensues, even of the existence and character of mind: for
+it was no harder for God to endow matter with the power of thinking than
+to endow it with the power of moving.
+
+In the atomic theory we have a graphic image asserted to describe
+accurately, or even exhaustively, the intrinsic constitution of things, or
+their primary qualities. Perhaps, in so far as physical hypotheses must
+remain graphic at all, it is an inevitable theory. It was first suggested
+by the wearing out and dissolution of all material objects, and by the
+specks of dust floating in a sunbeam; and it is confirmed, on an enlarged
+scale, by the stellar universe as conceived by modern astronomy. When
+today we talk of nuclei and electrons, if we imagine them at all, we
+imagine them as atoms. But it is all a picture, prophesying what we might
+see through a sufficiently powerful microscope; the important
+philosophical question is the one raised by the other half of Locke's
+natural philosophy, by optics and the general criticism of perception. How
+far, if at all, may we trust the images in our minds to reveal the nature
+of external things?
+
+On this point the doctrine of Locke, through Descartes,[3] was also
+derived from Democritus. It was that all the sensible qualities of things,
+except position, shape, solidity, number and motion, were only ideas in
+us, projected and falsely regarded as lodged in things. In the things,
+these imputed or secondary qualities were simply powers, inherent in their
+atomic constitution, and calculated to excite sensations of that character
+in our bodies. This doctrine is readily established by Locke's plain
+historical method, when applied to the study of rainbows, mirrors, effects
+of perspective, dreams, jaundice, madness, and the will to believe: all of
+which go to convince us that the ideas which we impulsively assume to be
+qualities of objects are always, in their seat and origin, evolved in our
+own heads.
+
+These two parts of Locke's natural philosophy, however, are not in perfect
+equilibrium. _All_ the feelings and ideas of an animal must be equally
+conditioned by his organs and passions,[4] and he cannot be aware of what
+goes on beyond him, except as it affects his own life.[5] How then could
+Locke, or could Democritus, suppose that his ideas of space and atoms were
+less human, less graphic, summary, and symbolic, than his sensations of
+sound or colour? The language of science, no less than that of sense,
+should have been recognised to be a human language; and the nature of
+anything existent collateral with ourselves, be that collateral existence
+material or mental, should have been confessed to be a subject for faith
+and for hypothesis, never, by any possibility, for absolute or direct
+intuition.
+
+There is no occasion to take alarm at this doctrine as if it condemned us
+to solitary confinement, and to ignorance of the world in which we live.
+We see and know the world through our eyes and our intelligence, in visual
+and in intellectual terms: how else should a world be seen or known which
+is not the figment of a dream, but a collateral power, pressing and alien?
+In the cognisance which an animal may take of his surroundings--and surely
+all animals take such cognisance--the subjective and moral character of
+his feelings, on finding himself so surrounded, does not destroy their
+cognitive value. These feelings, as Locke says, are signs: to take them
+for signs is the essence of intelligence. Animals that are sensitive
+physically are also sensitive morally, and feel the friendliness or
+hostility which surrounds them. Even pain and pleasure are no idle
+sensations, satisfied with their own presence: they violently summon
+attention to the objects that are their source. Can love or hate be felt
+without being felt towards something--something near and potent, yet
+external, uncontrolled, and mysterious? When I dodge a missile or pick a
+berry, is it likely that my mind should stop to dwell on its pure
+sensations or ideas without recognising or pursuing something material?
+Analytic reflection often ignores the essential energy of mind, which is
+originally more intelligent than sensuous, more appetitive and dogmatic
+than aesthetic. But the feelings and ideas of an active animal cannot help
+uniting internal moral intensity with external physical reference; and the
+natural conditions of sensibility require that perceptions should owe
+their existence and quality to the living organism with its moral bias,
+and that at the same time they should be addressed to the external objects
+which entice that organism or threaten it.
+
+All ambitions must be defeated when they ask for the impossible. The
+ambition to know is not an exception; and certainly our perceptions cannot
+tell us how the world would look if nobody saw it, or how valuable it
+would be if nobody cared for it. But our perceptions, as Locke again said,
+are sufficient for our welfare and appropriate to our condition. They are
+not only a wonderful entertainment in themselves, but apart from their
+sensuous and grammatical quality, by their distribution and method of
+variation, they may inform us most exactly about the order and mechanism
+of nature. We see in the science of today how completely the most accurate
+knowledge--proved to be accurate by its application in the arts--may shed
+every pictorial element, and the whole language of experience, to become a
+pure method of calculation and control. And by a pleasant compensation,
+our aesthetic life may become freer, more self-sufficing, more humbly
+happy in itself: and without trespassing in any way beyond the modesty of
+nature, we may consent to be like little children, chirping our human
+note; since the life of reason in us may well become science in its
+validity, whilst remaining poetry in its texture.
+
+I think, then, that by a slight re-arrangement of Locke's pronouncements
+in natural philosophy, they could be made inwardly consistent, and still
+faithful to the first presuppositions of common sense, although certainly
+far more chastened and sceptical than impulsive opinion is likely to be
+in the first instance.
+
+There were other presuppositions in the philosophy of Locke besides his
+fundamental naturalism; and in his private mind probably the most
+important was his Christian faith, which was not only confident and
+sincere, but prompted him at times to high speculation. He had friends
+among the Cambridge Platonists, and he found in Newton a brilliant example
+of scientific rigour capped with mystical insights. Yet if we consider
+Locke's philosophical position in the abstract, his Christianity almost
+disappears. In form his theology and ethics were strictly rationalistic;
+yet one who was a Deist in philosophy might remain a Christian in
+religion. There was no great harm in a special revelation, provided it
+were simple and short, and left the broad field of truth open in almost
+every direction to free and personal investigation. A free man and a good
+man would certainly never admit, as coming from God, any doctrine contrary
+to his private reason or political interest; and the moral precepts
+actually vouchsafed to us in the Gospels were most acceptable, seeing
+that they added a sublime eloquence to maxims which sound reason would
+have arrived at in any case.
+
+Evidently common sense had nothing to fear from religious faith of this
+character; but the matter could not end there. Common sense is not more
+convinced of anything than of the difference between good and evil,
+advantage and disaster; and it cannot dispense with a moral interpretation
+of the universe. Socrates, who spoke initially for common sense, even
+thought the moral interpretation of existence the whole of philosophy. He
+would not have seen anything comic in the satire of Moliere making his
+chorus of young doctors chant in unison that opium causes sleep because it
+has a dormitive virtue. The virtues or moral uses of things, according to
+Socrates, were the reason why the things had been created and were what
+they were; the admirable virtues of opium defined its perfection, and the
+perfection of a thing was the full manifestation of its deepest nature.
+Doubtless this moral interpretation of the universe had been overdone, and
+it had been a capital error in Socrates to make that interpretation
+exclusive and to substitute it for natural philosophy. Locke, who was
+himself a medical man, knew what a black cloak for ignorance and villainy
+Scholastic verbiage might be in that profession. He also knew, being an
+enthusiast for experimental science, that in order to control the movement
+of matter--which is to realise those virtues and perfections--it is better
+to trace the movement of matter materialistically; for it is in the act of
+manifesting its own powers, and not, as Socrates and the Scholastics
+fancied, by obeying a foreign magic, that matter sometimes assumes or
+restores the forms so precious in the healer's or the moralist's eyes. At
+the same time, the manner in which the moral world rests upon the natural,
+though divined, perhaps, by a few philosophers, has not been generally
+understood; and Locke, whose broad humanity could not exclude the moral
+interpretation of nature, was driven in the end to the view of Socrates.
+He seriously invoked the Scholastic maxim that nothing can produce that
+which it does not contain. For this reason the unconscious, after all,
+could never have given rise to consciousness. Observation and experiment
+could not be allowed to decide this point: the moral interpretation of
+things, because more deeply rooted in human experience, must envelop the
+physical interpretation, and must have the last word.
+
+It was characteristic of Locke's simplicity and intensity that he retained
+these insulated sympathies in various quarters. A further instance of his
+many-sidedness was his fidelity to pure intuition, his respect for the
+infallible revelation of ideal being, such as we have of sensible
+qualities or of mathematical relations. In dreams and in hallucinations
+appearances may deceive us, and the objects we think we see may not exist
+at all. Yet in suffering an illusion we must entertain an idea; and the
+manifest character of these ideas is that of which alone, Locke thinks, we
+can have certain "knowledge".
+
+     "These", he writes, "are two very different things and carefully to
+     be distinguished: it being one thing to perceive and know the idea
+     of white or black, and quite another to examine what kind of
+     particles they must be, and how arranged ... to make any object
+     appear white or black." "A man infallibly knows, as soon as ever he
+     has them in his mind, that the ideas he calls white and round are
+     the very ideas they are, and that they are not other ideas which he
+     calls red or square.... This ... the mind ... always perceives at
+     first sight; and if ever there happen any doubt about it, it will
+     always be found to be about the names and not the ideas
+     themselves."
+
+This sounds like high Platonic doctrine for a philosopher of the Left; but
+Locke's utilitarian temper very soon reasserted itself in this subject.
+Mathematical ideas were not only lucid but true: and he demanded this
+truth, which he called "reality", of all ideas worthy of consideration:
+mere ideas would be worthless. Very likely he forgot, in his philosophic
+puritanism, that fiction and music might have an intrinsic charm. Where
+the frontier of human wisdom should be drawn in this direction was clearly
+indicated, in Locke's day, by Spinoza, who says:
+
+     "If, in keeping non-existent things present to the imagination, the
+     mind were at the same time aware that those things did not exist,
+     surely it would regard this gift of imagination as a virtue in its
+     own constitution, not as a vice: especially if such an imaginative
+     faculty depended on nothing except the mind's own nature: that is
+     to say, if this mental faculty of imagination were free".
+
+But Locke had not so firm a hold on truth that he could afford to play
+with fancy; and as he pushed forward the claims of human jurisdiction
+rather too far in physics, by assuming the current science to be literally
+true, so, in the realm of imagination, he retrenched somewhat illiberally
+our legitimate possessions. Strange that as modern philosophy transfers
+the visible wealth of nature more and more to the mind, the mind should
+seem to lose courage and to become ashamed of its own fertility. The
+hard-pressed natural man will not indulge his imagination unless it poses
+for truth; and being half aware of this imposition, he is more troubled at
+the thought of being deceived than at the fact of being mechanised or
+being bored: and he would wish to escape imagination altogether. A good
+God, he murmurs, could not have made us poets against our will.
+
+Against his will, however, Locke was drawn to enlarge the subjective
+sphere. The actual existence of mind was evident: you had only to notice
+the fact that you were thinking. Conscious mind, being thus known to
+exist directly and independently of the body, was a primary constituent of
+reality: it was a fact on its own account.[6] Common sense seemed to
+testify to this, not only when confronted with the "I think, therefore I
+am" of Descartes, but whenever a thought produced an action. Since mind
+and body interacted,[7] each must be as real as the other and, as it were,
+on the same plane of being. Locke, like a good Protestant, felt the right
+of the conscious inner man to assert himself: and when he looked into his
+own mind, he found nothing to define this mind except the ideas which
+occupied it. The existence which he was so sure of in himself was
+therefore the existence of his ideas.
+
+Here, by an insensible shift in the meaning of the word "idea", a
+momentous revolution had taken place in psychology. Ideas had originally
+meant objective terms distinguished in thought-images, qualities,
+concepts, propositions. But now ideas began to mean living thoughts,
+moments or states of consciousness. They became atoms of mind,
+constituents of experience, very much as material atoms were conceived to
+be constituents of natural objects. Sensations became the only objects of
+sensation, and ideas the only objects of ideas; so that the material world
+was rendered superfluous, and the only scientific problem was now to
+construct a universe in terms of analytic psychology. Locke himself did
+not go so far, and continued to assign physical causes and physical
+objects to some, at least, of his mental units; and indeed sensations and
+ideas could not very well have other than physical causes, the existence
+of which this new psychology was soon to deny: so that about the origin of
+its data it was afterwards compelled to preserve a discreet silence. But
+as to their combinations and reappearances, it was able to invoke the
+principle of association: a thread on which many shrewd observations may
+be strung, but which also, when pressed, appears to be nothing but a
+verbal mask for organic habits in matter.
+
+The fact is that there are two sorts of unobjectionable psychology,
+neither of which describes a mechanism of disembodied mental states, such
+as the followers of Locke developed into modern idealism, to the
+confusion of common sense.[8] One unobjectionable sort of psychology is
+biological, and studies life from the outside. The other sort, relying on
+memory and dramatic imagination, reproduces life from the inside, and is
+literary. If the literary psychologist is a man of genius, by the
+clearness and range of his memory, by quickness of sympathy and power of
+suggestion, he may come very near to the truth of experience, as it has
+been or might be unrolled in a human being.[9] The ideas with which Locke
+operates are simply high lights picked out by attention in this nebulous
+continuum, and identified by names. Ideas, in the original ideal sense of
+the word, are indeed the only definite terms which attention can
+discriminate and rest upon; but the unity of these units is specious, not
+existential. If ideas were not logical or aesthetic essences but
+self-subsisting feelings, each knowing itself, they would be insulated for
+ever; no spirit could ever survey, recognise, or compare them; and mind
+would have disappeared in the analysis of mind.
+
+These considerations might enable us, I think, to mark the just frontier
+of common sense even in this debatable land of psychology. All that is
+biological, observable, and documentary in psychology falls within the
+lines of physical science and offers no difficulty in principle. Nor need
+literary psychology form a dangerous salient in the circuit of nature. The
+dramatic poet or dramatic historian necessarily retains the presupposition
+of a material world, since beyond his personal memory (and even within it)
+he has nothing to stimulate and control his dramatic imagination save
+knowledge of the material circumstances in which people live, and of the
+material expression in action or words which they give to their feelings.
+His moral insight simply vivifies the scene that nature and the sciences
+of nature spread out before him: they tell him what has happened, and his
+heart tells him what has been felt. Only literature can describe
+experience for the excellent reason that the terms of experience are moral
+and literary from the beginning. Mind is incorrigibly poetical: not
+because it is not attentive to material facts and practical exigencies,
+but because, being intensely attentive to them, it turns them into
+pleasures and pains, and into many-coloured ideas. Yet at every turn there
+is a possibility and an occasion for transmuting this poetry into science,
+because ideas and emotions, being caused by material events, refer to
+these events, and record their order.
+
+All philosophies are frail, in that they are products of the human mind,
+in which everything is essentially reactive, spontaneous, and volatile:
+but as in passion and in language, so in philosophy, there are certain
+comparatively steady and hereditary principles, forming a sort of orthodox
+reason, which is or which may become the current grammar of mankind. Of
+philosophers who are orthodox in this sense, only the earliest or the most
+powerful, an Aristotle or a Spinoza, need to be remembered, in that they
+stamp their language and temper upon human reason itself. The rest of the
+orthodox are justly lost in the crowd and relegated to the chorus. The
+frailty of heretical philosophers is more conspicuous and interesting: it
+makes up the _chronique scandaleuse_ of the mind, or the history of
+philosophy. Locke belongs to both camps: he was restive in his orthodoxy
+and timid in his heresies; and like so many other initiators of
+revolutions, he would be dismayed at the result of his work. In intention
+Locke occupied an almost normal philosophic position, rendered precarious
+not by what was traditional in it, like the categories of substance and
+power, but rather by certain incidental errors--notably by admitting an
+experience independent of bodily life, yet compounded and evolving in a
+mechanical fashion. But I do not find in him a prickly nest of obsolete
+notions and contradictions from which, fledged at last, we have flown to
+our present enlightenment. In his person, in his temper, in his
+allegiances and hopes, he was the prototype of a race of philosophers
+native and dominant among people of English speech, if not in academic
+circles, at least in the national mind. If we make allowance for a greater
+personal subtlety, and for the diffidence and perplexity inevitable in the
+present moral anarchy of the world, we may find this same Lockian
+eclecticism and prudence in the late Lord Balfour: and I have myself had
+the advantage of being the pupil of a gifted successor and, in many ways,
+emulator, of Locke, I mean William James. So great, at bottom, does their
+spiritual kinship seem to me to be, that I can hardly conceive Locke
+vividly without seeing him as a sort of William James of the seventeenth
+century. And who of you has not known some other spontaneous, inquisitive,
+unsettled genius, no less preoccupied with the marvellous intelligence of
+some Brazilian parrot, than with the sad obstinacy of some Bishop of
+Worcester? Here is eternal freshness of conviction and ardour for reform;
+great keenness of perception in spots, and in other spots lacunae and
+impulsive judgments; distrust of tradition, of words, of constructive
+argument; horror of vested interests and of their smooth defenders; a love
+of navigating alone and exploring for oneself even the coasts already well
+charted by others. Here is romanticism united with a scientific conscience
+and power of destructive analysis balanced by moral enthusiasm. Doubtless
+Locke might have dug his foundations deeper and integrated his faith
+better. His system was no metaphysical castle, no theological acropolis:
+rather a homely ancestral manor house built in several styles of
+architecture: a Tudor chapel, a Palladian front toward the new
+geometrical garden, a Jacobean parlour for political consultation and
+learned disputes, and even--since we are almost in the eighteenth
+century--a Chinese cabinet full of curios. It was a habitable philosophy,
+and not too inharmonious. There was no greater incongruity in its parts
+than in the gentle variations of English weather or in the qualified moods
+and insights of a civilised mind. Impoverished as we are, morally and
+humanly, we can no longer live in such a rambling mansion. It has become a
+national monument. On the days when it is open we revisit it with
+admiration; and those chambers and garden walks re-echo to us the clear
+dogmas and savoury diction of the sage--omnivorous, artless,
+loquacious--whose dwelling it was.
+
+
+[1] Paper read before the Royal Society of Literature on the occasion of
+the Tercentenary of the birth of John Locke.
+
+[2] See note I, p. 26.
+
+[3] See note II, p. 29.
+
+[4] See note III, p. 35.
+
+[5] See note IV, p. 36.
+
+[6] See note V, p. 37.
+
+[7] See note VI, p. 39.
+
+[8] See note VII, p. 43.
+
+[9] See note VIII, p. 46.
+
+
+
+
+SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES
+
+
+I
+
+Page 3. _This airy monster, this half-natural changeling._
+
+Monsters and changelings were pointed to by Locke with a certain
+controversial relish: they proved that nature was not compressed or
+compressible within Aristotelian genera and species, but was a free
+mechanism subject to indefinite change. Mechanism in physics is favourable
+to liberty in politics and morals: each creature has a right to be what it
+spontaneously is, and not what some previous classification alleges that
+it ought to have been. The Protestant and revolutionary independence of
+Locke's mind here gives us a foretaste of Darwin and even of Nietzsche.
+But Locke was moderate even in his radicalisms. A human nature totally
+fluid would of itself have proved anarchical; but in order to stem that
+natural anarchy it was fortunately possible to invoke the conditions of
+prosperity and happiness strictly laid down by the Creator. The
+improvidence and naughtiness of nature was called to book at every turn by
+the pleasures and pains divinely appended to things enjoined and to things
+forbidden, and ultimately by hell and by heaven. Yet if rewards and
+punishments were attached to human action and feeling in this perfectly
+external and arbitrary fashion, whilst the feelings and actions
+spontaneous in mankind counted for nothing in the rule of morals and of
+wisdom, we should be living under the most cruel and artificial of
+tyrannies; and it would not be long before the authority of such a code
+would be called in question and the reality of those arbitrary rewards and
+punishments would be denied, both for this world and for any other. In a
+truly rational morality moral sanctions would have to vary with the
+variation of species, each new race or individual or mode of feeling
+finding its natural joy in a new way of life. The monsters would not be
+monsters except to rustic prejudice, and the changelings would be simply
+experiments in creation. The glee of Locke in seeing nature elude
+scholastic conventions would then lose its savour, since those staid
+conventions themselves would have become obsolete. Nature would henceforth
+present nothing but pervasive metamorphosis, irresponsible and endless. To
+correct the weariness of such pure flux we might indeed invoke the idea of
+a progress or evolution towards something always higher and better; but
+this idea simply reinstates, under a temporal form, the dominance of a
+specific standard, to which nature is asked to conform. Genera and species
+might shift and glide into one another at will, but always in the
+authorised direction. If, on the contrary, transformation had no
+predetermined direction, we should be driven back, for a moral principle,
+to each of the particular types of life generated on the way: as in
+estimating the correctness or beauty of language we appeal to the speech
+and genius of each nation at each epoch, without imposing the grammar of
+one language or age upon another. It is only in so far as, in the midst of
+the flux, certain tropes become organised and recurrent, that any
+interests or beauties can be transmitted from moment to moment or from
+generation to generation. Physical integration is a prerequisite to moral
+integrity; and unless an individual or a species is sufficiently organised
+and determinate to aspire to a distinguishable form of life, eschewing all
+others, that individual or species can bear no significant name, can
+achieve no progress, and can approach no beauty or perfection.
+
+Thus, so long as in a fluid world there is some measure of life and
+organisation, monsters and changelings will always remain possible
+physically and regrettable morally. Small deviations from the chosen type
+or the chosen direction of progress will continue to be called morbid and
+ugly, and great deviations or reversals will continue to be called
+monstrous. This is but the seamy side of that spontaneous predilection,
+grounded in our deepest nature, by which we recognise beauty and nobleness
+at first sight, with immense refreshment and perfect certitude.
+
+
+II
+
+Page 8. _Through Descartes._
+
+Very characteristic was the tireless polemic which Locke carried on
+against Descartes. The outraged plain facts had to be defended against
+sweeping and arbitrary theories. There were no innate ideas or maxims:
+children were not born murmuring that things equal to the same thing were
+equal to one another: and an urchin knew that pain was caused by the
+paternal slipper before he reflected philosophically that everything must
+have a cause. Again, extension was not the essence of matter, which must
+be solid as well, to be distinguishable from empty space. Finally,
+thinking was not the essence of the soul: a man, without dying, might lose
+consciousness: this often happened, or at least could not be prevented
+from happening by a definition framed by a French philosopher. These
+protests were evidently justified by common sense: yet they missed the
+speculative radicalism and depth of the Cartesian doctrines, which had
+struck the keynotes of all modern philosophy and science: for they
+assumed, for the first time in history, the transcendental point of view.
+No wonder that Locke could not do justice to this great novelty: Descartes
+himself did not do so, but ignored his subjective first principles in the
+development of his system; and it was not until adopted by Kant, or rather
+by Fichte, that the transcendental method showed its true colours. Even
+today philosophers fumble with it, patching soliloquy with physics and
+physics with soliloquy. Moreover, Locke's misunderstandings of Descartes
+were partly justified by the latter's verbal concessions to tradition and
+authority. A man who has a clear head, and like Descartes is rendered by
+his aristocratic pride both courteous and disdainful, may readily conform
+to usage in his language, and even in his personal sentiments, without
+taking either too seriously: he is not struggling to free his own mind,
+which is free already, nor very hopeful of freeing that of most people.
+The innate ideas were not explicit thoughts but categories employed
+unwittingly, as people in speaking conform to the grammar of the
+vernacular without being aware that they do so. As for extension being the
+essence of matter, since matter existed and was a substance, it would
+always have been more than its essence: a sort of ether the parts of which
+might move and might have different and calculable dynamic values. The
+gist of this definition of matter was to clear the decks for scientific
+calculation, by removing from nature the moral density and moral magic
+with which the Socratic philosophy had encumbered it. Science would be
+employed in describing the movements of bodies, leaving it for the senses
+and feelings to appreciate the cross-lights that might be generated in the
+process. Though not following the technique of Descartes, the physics of
+our own day realises his ideal, and traces in nature a mathematical
+dynamism, perfectly sufficient for exact prevision and mechanical art.
+
+Similarly, in saying that the essence of the soul was to think, Descartes
+detached consciousness, or actual spirit, from the meshes of all unknown
+organic or invented mental mechanisms. It was an immense clarification and
+liberation in its proper dimension: but this pure consciousness was not a
+soul; it was not the animal psyche, or principle of organisation, life,
+and passion--a principle which, according to Descartes, was material. To
+have called such a material principle the soul would have shocked all
+Christian conceptions; but if Descartes had abstained from giving that
+consecrated name to mere consciousness, he need not have been wary of
+making the latter intermittent and evanescent, as it naturally is. He was
+driven to the conclusion that the soul can never stop thinking, by the
+desire to placate orthodox opinion, and his own Christian sentiments, at
+the expense of attributing to actual consciousness a substantial
+independence and a directive physical force which were incongruous with
+it: a force and independence perfectly congruous with the Platonic soul,
+which had been a mythological being, a supernatural spirit or daemon or
+incubus, incarnate in the natural world, and partly dominating it. The
+relations of such a soul to the particular body or bodies which it might
+weave for itself on earth, to the actions which it performed through such
+bodies, and to the current of its own thoughts, then became questions for
+theology, or for a moralistic theory of the universe. They were questions
+remote from the preoccupations of the modern mind; yet it was not possible
+either for Locke or for Descartes to clear their fresh conceptions
+altogether from those ancient dreams.
+
+What views precisely did Locke oppose to these radical tendencies of
+Descartes?
+
+In respect to the nature of matter, I have indicated above the position
+of Locke: pictorially he accepted an ordinary atomism; scientifically, the
+physics of Newton.
+
+On the other two points Locke's convictions were implicit rather than
+speculative: he resisted the Cartesian theories without much developing
+his own, as after all was natural in a critic engaged in proving that our
+natural faculties were not intended for speculation. All knowledge came
+from experience, and no man could know the savour of a pineapple without
+having tasted it. Yet this savour, according to Locke, did not reside at
+first in the pineapple, to be conveyed on contact to the palate and to the
+mind; but it was generated in the process of gustation; or perhaps we
+should rather say that it was generated in the mind on occasion of that
+process. At least, then, in respect to secondary qualities, and to all
+moral values, the terms of human knowledge were not drawn from the objects
+encountered in the world, but from an innate sensibility proper to the
+human body or mind. Experience--if this word meant the lifelong train of
+ideas which made a man's moral being--was not a source of knowledge but
+was knowledge (or illusion) itself, produced by organs endowed with a
+special native sensibility in contact with varying external stimuli. This
+conclusion would then not have contradicted, but exactly expressed, the
+doctrine of innate categories.
+
+As to the soul, which might exist without thinking, Locke still called it
+an immaterial substance: not so immaterial, however, as not to be conveyed
+bodily with him in his coach from London to Oxford. Although, like Hobbes,
+Locke believed in the power of the English language to clarify the human
+intellect, he here ignored the advice of Hobbes to turn that befuddling
+Latin phrase into plain English. Substance meant body: immaterial meant
+bodiless: therefore immaterial substance meant bodiless body. True,
+substance had not really meant body for Aristotle or the Schoolmen; but
+who now knew or cared what anything had meant for them? Locke scornfully
+refused to consider what a substantial form may have signified; and in
+still maintaining that he had a soul, and calling it a spiritual
+substance, he was probably simply protesting that there was something
+living and watchful within his breast, the invisible moral agent in all
+his thoughts and actions. It was _he_ that had them and did them; and this
+self of his was far from being reducible to a merely logical impersonal
+subject, an "I think" presupposed in all thought: for what would this "I
+think" have become when it was not thinking? On the other hand it mattered
+very little what the _substance_ of a thinking being might be: God might
+even have endowed the body with the faculty of thinking, and of generating
+ideas on occasion of certain impacts. Yet a man was a man for all that:
+and Locke was satisfied that he knew, at least well enough for an honest
+Englishman, what he was. He was what he felt himself to be: and this inner
+man of his was not merely the living self, throbbing now in his heart; it
+was all his moral past, all that he remembered to have been. If, from
+moment to moment, the self was a spiritual energy astir within, in
+retrospect the living present seemed, as it were, to extend its tentacles
+and to communicate its subjectivity to his whole personal past. The limits
+of his personality were those of his memory, and his experience included
+everything that his living mind could appropriate and re-live. In a word,
+_he was his idea of himself_: and this insight opens a new chapter not
+only in his philosophy but in the history of human self-estimation.
+Mankind was henceforth invited not to think of itself as a tribe of
+natural beings, nor of souls, with a specific nature and fixed
+possibilities. Each man was a romantic personage or literary character: he
+was simply what he was thought to be, and might become anything that he
+could will to become. The way was opened for Napoleon on the one hand and
+for Fichte on the other.
+
+
+III
+
+Page 9. __All_ ideas must be equally conditioned._
+
+Even the mathematical ideas which seem so exactly to describe the dynamic
+order of nature are not repetitions of their natural counterpart: for
+mathematical form in nature is a web of diffuse relations enacted; in the
+mind it is a thought possessed, the logical synthesis of those deployed
+relations. To run in a circle is one thing; to conceive a circle is
+another. Our mind by its animal roots (which render it relevant to the
+realm of matter and cognitive) and by its spiritual actuality (which
+renders it original, synthetic, and emotional) is a language, from its
+beginnings; almost, we might say, a biological poetry; and the greater the
+intellectuality and poetic abstraction the greater the possible range. Yet
+we must not expect this scope of speculation in us to go with adequacy or
+exhaustiveness: on the contrary, mathematics and religion, each in its way
+so sure, leave most of the truth out.
+
+
+IV
+
+Page 9. _He cannot be aware of what goes on beyond him, except as it
+affects his own life._
+
+Even that spark of divine intelligence which comes into the animal soul,
+as Aristotle says, from beyond the gates, comes and is called down by the
+exigencies of physical life. An animal endowed with locomotion cannot
+merely feast sensuously on things as they appear, but must react upon them
+at the first signal, and in so doing must virtually and in intent envisage
+them as they are in themselves. For it is by virtue of their real
+constitution and intrinsic energy that they act upon us and suffer change
+in turn at our hands; so that whatsoever form things may take to our
+senses and intellect, they take that form by exerting their material
+powers upon us, and intertwining them in action with our own organisms.
+
+Thus the appearance of things is always, in some measure, a true index to
+their reality. Animals are inevitably engaged in self-transcending action,
+and the consciousness of self-transcending action is self-transcendent
+knowledge. The very nature of animal life makes it possible, within animal
+consciousness, to discount appearance and to correct illusion--things
+which in a vegetative or aesthetic sensibility would not be
+distinguishable from pure experience itself. But when aroused to
+self-transcendent attention, feeling must needs rise to intelligence, so
+that external fact and impartial truth come within the range of
+consciousness, not indeed by being contained there, but by being aimed at.
+
+
+V
+
+Page 19. _Conscious mind was a fact on its own account._
+
+This conscious mind was a man's moral being, and personal identity could
+not extend further than possible memory. This doctrine of Locke's had some
+comic applications. The Bishop of Worcester was alarmed. If actions which
+a hardened sinner had forgotten were no longer his, a short memory would
+be a great blessing in the Day of Judgment. On the other hand, a theology
+more plastic than Stillingfleet's would one day find in this same doctrine
+a new means of edification. For if I may disown all actions I have
+forgotten, may not things not done or witnessed by me in the body be now
+appropriated and incorporated in my consciousness, if only I conceive them
+vividly? The door is then open to all the noble ambiguities of idealism.
+As my consciousness expands, or thinks it expands, into dramatic sympathy
+with universal experience, that experience becomes my own. I may say I
+have been the agent in all past achievements. Emerson could know that he
+was Shakespeare and Caesar and Christ. Futurity is mine also, in every
+possible direction at once; and I am one with the spirit of the universe
+and with God.
+
+Locke reassured the Bishop of Worcester, and was humbly confident that
+Divine Justice would find a way of vindicating Itself in spite of human
+wit. He might have added that if the sin of Adam could not only be imputed
+to us juridically but could actually taint our consciousness--as it
+certainly does if by Adam we understand our whole material heritage--so
+surely the sins done or the habits acquired by the body beyond the scope
+of consciousness may taint or clarify this consciousness now. Indeed, the
+idea we form of ourselves and of our respective experiences is a figment
+of vanity, a product of dramatic imagination, without cognitive import
+save as a reading of the hidden forces, physical or divine, which have
+formed us and actually govern us.
+
+
+VI
+
+Page 19. _Mind and body interacted._
+
+The self which acts in a man is itself moved by forces which have long
+been familiar to common sense, without being understood except
+dramatically. These forces are called the passions; or when the dramatic
+units distinguished are longish strands rather than striking episodes,
+they are called temperament, character, or will; or perhaps, weaving all
+these strands and episodes together again into one moral fabric, we call
+them simply human nature. But in what does this vague human nature reside,
+and how does it operate on the non-human world? Certainly not within the
+conscious sphere, or in the superficial miscellany of experience.
+Immediate experience is the intermittent chaos which human nature, in
+combination with external circumstances, is invoked to support and to
+rationalise. Is human nature, then, resident in each individual soul?
+Certainly: but the soul is merely another name for that active principle
+which we are looking for, to be the seat of our sensibility and the source
+of our actions. Is this psychic power, then, resident in the body?
+Undoubtedly; since it is hereditary and transmitted by a seed, and
+continually aroused and modified by material agencies.
+
+Since this soul or self in the body is so obscure, the temptation is great
+to dramatise its energies and to describe them in myths. Myth is the
+normal means of describing those forces of nature which we cannot measure
+or understand; if we could understand or measure them we should describe
+them prosaically and analytically, in what is called science. But nothing
+is less measurable, or less intelligible to us, in spite of being so near
+us and familiar, as the life of this carnal instrument, so soft and so
+violent, which breeds our sensations and precipitates our actions. We see
+today how the Freudian psychology, just because it is not satisfied with
+registering the routine of consciousness but endeavours to trace its
+hidden mechanism and to unravel its physical causes, is driven to use the
+most frankly mythological language. The physiological processes concerned,
+though presupposed, are not on the scale of human perception and not
+traceable in detail; and the moral action, though familiar in snatches,
+has to be patched by invented episodes, and largely attributed to daemonic
+personages that never come on the stage.
+
+Locke, in his psychology of morals, had at first followed the verbal
+rationalism by which people attribute motives to themselves and to one
+another. Human actions were explained by the alleged pursuit of the
+greater prospective pleasure, and avoidance of the greater prospective
+pain. But this way of talking, though not so poetical as Freud's, is no
+less mythical. Eventual goods and evils have no present existence and no
+power: they cannot even be discerned prophetically, save by the vaguest
+fancy, entirely based on the present impulses and obsessions of the soul.
+No future good, no future evil avails to move us, except--as Locke said
+after examining the facts more closely--when a _certain uneasiness_ in the
+soul (or in the body) causes us to turn to those untried goods and evils
+with a present and living interest. This actual uneasiness, with the dream
+pictures which it evokes, is a mere symptom of the direction in which
+human nature in us is already moving, or already disposed to move. Without
+this prior physical impulse, heaven may beckon and hell may yawn without
+causing the least variation in conduct. As in religious conversion all is
+due to the call of grace, so in ordinary action all is due to the ripening
+of natural impulses and powers within the psyche. The _uneasiness_
+observed by Locke is merely the consciousness of this ripening, before the
+field of relevant action has been clearly discerned.
+
+When all this is considered, the ostensible interaction between mind and
+body puts on a new aspect. There are no _purely mental_ ideas or
+intentions followed by material effects: there are no material events
+followed by a _purely mental_ sensation or idea. Mental events are always
+elements in total natural events containing material elements also:
+material elements form the organ, the stimulus, and probably also the
+object for those mental sensations or ideas. Moreover, the physical strand
+alone is found to be continuous and traceable; the conscious strand, the
+sequence of mental events, flares up and dies down daily, if not hourly;
+and the medley of its immediate features--images, words, moods--juxtaposes
+China and Peru, past and future, in the most irresponsible confusion. On
+the other hand, in human life it is a part of the conscious
+element--intentions, affections, plans, and reasonings--that _explains_
+the course of action: dispersed temporally, our dominant thoughts contain
+the reason for our continuous behaviour, and seem to guide it. They are
+not so much links in a chain of minute consecutive causes--an idea or an
+act of will often takes time to work and works, as it were, only
+posthumously--as they are general overarching moral inspirations and
+resolves, which the machinery of our bodies executes in its own way, often
+rendering our thoughts more precise in the process, or totally
+transforming them. We do roughly what we meant to do, barring accidents.
+The reasons lie deep in our compound nature, being probably inarticulate;
+and our action in a fragmentary way betrays our moral disposition: betrays
+it in both senses of the word betray, now revealing it unawares, and now
+sadly disappointing it.
+
+I leave it for the reader's reflection to decide whether we should call
+such cohabitation of mind with body interaction, or not rather sympathetic
+concomitance, self-annotation, and a partial prophetic awakening to a life
+which we are leading automatically.
+
+
+VII
+
+Page 21. _To the confusion of common sense._
+
+Berkeley and his followers sometimes maintain that common sense is on
+their side, that they have simply analysed the fact of our experience of
+the material world, and if there is any paradox in their idealism, it is
+merely verbal and disappears with familiarity. All the "reality", they
+say, all the force, obduracy, and fertility of nature subsist undiminished
+after we discover that this reality resides, and can only reside, in the
+fixed order of our experience.
+
+But no: analysis of immediate experience will never disclose any fixed
+order in it; the surface of experience, when not interpreted
+materialistically, is an inextricable dream. Berkeley and his followers,
+when they look in this direction, towards nature and the rationale of
+experience and science, are looking away from their own system, and
+relying instead on the automatic propensity of human nature to routine, so
+that we spontaneously prepare for repeating our actions (not our
+experience) and even anticipate their occasions; a propensity further
+biased by the dominant rhythms of the psyche, so that we assume a future
+not so much similar to the past, as better. When developed, this
+propensity turns into trust in natural or divine laws; but it is contrary
+to common sense to expect such laws to operate apart from matter and from
+the material continuity of external occasions. This appears clearly in our
+trust in persons--a radical animal propensity--which is consonant with
+common sense when these persons are living bodies, but becomes
+superstitious, or at least highly speculative, when these persons are
+disembodied spirits.
+
+It is a pity that the beautiful system of Berkeley should have appeared in
+an unspiritual age, when religion was mundane and perfunctory, and the
+free spirit, where it stirred, was romantic and wilful. For that system
+was essentially religious: it put the spirit face to face with God,
+everywhere, always, and in everything it turned experience into a divine
+language for the monition and expression of the inner man. Such an
+instrument, in spiritual hands, might have served to dispel all natural
+illusions and affections, and to disinfect the spirit of worldliness and
+egotism. But Berkeley and his followers had no such thought. All they
+wished was to substitute a social for a material world, precisely because
+a merely social world might make worldly interests loom larger and might
+induce mankind, against the evidence of their senses and the still small
+voice in their hearts, to live as if their worldly interests were absolute
+and must needs dominate the spirit.
+
+Morally this system thus came to sanction a human servitude to material
+things such as ancient materialists would have scorned; and theoretically
+the system did not escape the dogmatic commitments of common sense against
+which it protested. For far from withdrawing into the depths of the
+private spirit, it professed to describe universal experience and the
+evolution of all human ideas. This notion of "experience" originally
+presupposed a natural agent or subject to endure that experience, and to
+profit by it, by learning to live in better harmony with external
+circumstances. Each agent or subject of experience might, at other times,
+become an object of experience also: for they all formed part of a
+material world, which they might envisage in common in their perceptions.
+Now the criticism which repudiates this common material medium, like all
+criticism or doubt, is secondary and partial: it continues to operate with
+all the assumptions of common sense, save the one which it is expressly
+criticising. So, in repudiating the material world, this philosophy
+retains the notion of various agents or subjects gathering experience; and
+we are not expected to doubt that there are just as many streams of
+experience without a world, as there were people in the world when the
+world existed. But the number and nature of these experiences have now
+become undiscoverable, the material persons having been removed who
+formerly were so placed as to gather easily imagined experiences, and to
+be able to communicate them; and the very notion of experience has been
+emptied of its meaning, when no external common world subsists to impose
+that same experience on everybody. It was not knowledge of existing
+experiences _in vacuo_ that led common sense to assume a material world,
+but knowledge of an existing material world led it to assume existing, and
+regularly reproducible, experiences.
+
+Thus the whole social convention posited by empirical idealism is borrowed
+without leave, and rests on the belief in nature for which it is
+substituted.
+
+
+VIII
+
+Page 21. _The literary psychologist may come very near to the truth of
+experience._
+
+Experience cannot be in itself an object of science, because it is
+essentially invisible, immeasurable, fugitive, and private; and although
+it may be shared or repeated, the evidence for that repetition or that
+unanimity cannot be found by comparing a present experience with another
+experience by hypothesis absent. Both the absent experience and its
+agreement with the present experience must be imagined freely and credited
+instinctively, in view of the known circumstances in which the absent
+experience is conceived to have occurred. The only instrument for
+conceiving experience at large is accordingly private imagination; and
+such imagination cannot be tested, although it may be guided and perhaps
+recast by fresh observations or reports concerning the action and language
+of other people. For action and language, being contagious, and being the
+material counterpart of experience in each of us, may voluntarily or
+involuntarily suggest our respective experience to one another, by causing
+each to re-enact more or less accurately within himself the experience of
+the rest. Thus alien thoughts and feelings are revealed or suggested to us
+in common life, not without a subjective transformation increasing, so to
+speak, as the square of the distance: and even the record of experience in
+people's own words, when these are not names for recognisable external
+things, awakens in the reader, in another age or country, quite
+incommensurable ideas. Yet, under favourable circumstances, such
+suggestion or revelation of experience, without ever becoming science, may
+become public unanimity in sentiment, and may produce a truthful and
+lively dramatic literature.
+
+All modern philosophy, in so far as it is a description of experience and
+not of nature, therefore seems to belong to the sphere of literature, and
+to be without scientific value.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+FIFTY YEARS OF BRITISH IDEALISM[10]
+
+
+After fifty years, an old milestone in the path of philosophy, Bradley's
+_Ethical Studies_, has been set up again, as if to mark the distance which
+English opinion has traversed in the interval. It has passed from insular
+dogmatism to universal bewilderment; and a chief agent in the change has
+been Bradley himself, with his scornful and delicate intellect, his wit,
+his candour, his persistence, and the baffling futility of his
+conclusions. In this early book we see him coming forth like a young David
+against every clumsy champion of utilitarianism, hedonism, positivism, or
+empiricism. And how smooth and polished were the little stones in his
+sling! How fatally they would have lodged in the forehead of that
+composite monster, if only it had had a forehead! Some of them might even
+have done murderous execution in Bradley's own camp: for instance, this
+pebble cast playfully at the metaphysical idol called "Law": "It is
+_always_ wet on half-holidays because of the Law of Raininess, but
+_sometimes_ it is _not_ wet, because of the Supplementary Law of
+Sunshine".
+
+Bradley and his friends achieved a notable victory in the academic field:
+philosophic authority and influence passed largely into their hands in all
+English-speaking universities. But it was not exactly from these seats of
+learning that naturalism and utilitarianism needed to be dislodged; like
+the corresponding radicalisms of our day, these doctrines prevailed rather
+in certain political and intellectual circles outside, consciously
+revolutionary and often half-educated; and I am afraid that the braggart
+Goliaths of today need chastening at least as much as those of fifty years
+ago. In a country officially Christian, and especially in Oxford, it is
+natural and fitting that academic authority should belong to orthodox
+tradition--theological, Platonic, and Aristotelian. Bradley, save for a
+few learned quotations, strangely ignored this orthodoxy entrenched
+behind his back. In contrast with it he was himself a heretic, with first
+principles devastating every settled belief: and it was really this
+venerable silent partner at home that his victory superseded, at least in
+appearance and for a season. David did not slay Goliath, but he dethroned
+Saul. Saul was indeed already under a cloud, and all in David's heart was
+not unkindness in that direction. Bradley might almost be called an
+unbelieving Newman; time, especially, seems to have brought his suffering
+and refined spirit into greater sympathy with ancient sanctities.
+Originally, for instance, venting the hearty Protestant sentiment that
+only the Christianity of laymen is sound, he had written: "I am happy to
+say that 'religieux' has no English equivalent". But a later note says:
+"This is not true except of Modern English only. And, in any case, it
+won't do, and was wrong and due to ignorance. However secluded the
+religious life, it may be practical indirectly _if_ through the unity of
+the spiritual body it can be taken as vicarious". The "_if_" here saves
+the principle that all values must be social, and that the social organism
+is the sole moral reality: yet how near this bubble comes to being
+pricked! We seem clearly to feel that the question is not whether
+spiritual life subserves animal society, but whether animal society ever
+is stirred and hallowed into spiritual life.
+
+All this, however, in that age of progress, was regarded as obsolete:
+there was no longer to be any spirit except the spirit of the times. True,
+the ritualists might be striving to revive the latent energies of
+religious devotion, with some dubious help from aestheticism: but against
+the rising tide of mechanical progress and romantic anarchy, and against
+the mania for rewriting history, traditional philosophy then seemed
+helpless and afraid to defend itself: it is only now beginning to recover
+its intellectual courage. For the moment, speculative radicals saw light
+in a different quarter. German idealism was nothing if not self-confident;
+it was relatively new; it was encyclopaedic in its display of knowledge,
+which it could manipulate dialectically with dazzling, if not stable,
+results; it was Protestant in temper and autonomous in principle; and
+altogether it seemed a sovereign and providential means of suddenly
+turning the tables on the threatened naturalism. By developing romantic
+intuition from within and packing all knowledge into one picture, the
+universe might be shown to be, like intuition itself, thoroughly
+spiritual, personal, and subjective.
+
+The fundamental axiom of the new logic was that the only possible reality
+was consciousness.
+
+     "People find", writes Bradley, "a subject and an object correlated
+     in consciousness.... To go out of that unity is for us literally to
+     go out of our minds.... When mind is made only a part of the whole,
+     there is a question which _must_ be answered.... If about any
+     matter we know nothing whatsoever, can we say anything about it?
+     Can we even say that it is? And if it is not in consciousness, how
+     can we know it?... And conversely, if we know it, it cannot be not
+     mind."
+
+Bradley challenged his contemporaries to refute this argument; and not
+being able to do so, many of them felt constrained to accept it, perhaps
+not without grave misgivings. For was it not always a rooted conviction of
+the British mind that knowledge brings material power, and that any
+figments of consciousness (in religion, for instance) not bringing
+material power are dangerous bewitchments, and not properly knowledge?
+Yet it is no less characteristic of the British mind to yield
+occasionally, up to a certain point, to some such enthusiastic fancy,
+provided that its incompatibility with honest action may be denied or
+ignored. So in this case British idealists, in the act of defining
+knowledge idealistically, as the presence to consciousness of its own
+phenomena, never really ceased to assume transcendent knowledge of a
+self-existing world, social and psychological, if not material: and they
+continued scrupulously to readjust their ideas to those dark facts, often
+more faithfully than the avowed positivists or scientific psychologists.
+
+What could ethics properly be to a philosopher who on principle might not
+trespass beyond the limits of consciousness? Only ethical sentiment.
+Bradley was satisfied to appeal to the moral consciousness of his day,
+without seeking to transform it. The most intentionally eloquent passage
+in his book describes war-fever unifying and carrying away a whole people:
+that was the summit of moral consciousness and of mystic virtue. His aim,
+even in ethics, was avowedly to describe that which exists, to describe
+moral experience, without proposing a different form for it. A man must be
+a man of his own time, or nothing; to set up to be better than the world
+was the beginning of immorality; and virtue lay in accepting one's station
+and its duties. The moralist should fill his mind with a concrete picture
+of the task and standards of his age and nation, and should graft his own
+ideals upon that tree; this need not prevent moral consciousness from
+including a decided esteem for non-political excellences like health,
+beauty, or intelligence, which are not ordinarily called virtues by modern
+moralists. Yet they were undeniably good; better, perhaps, than any
+painful and laborious dutifulness; so that the strictly moral
+consciousness might run over, and presently lose itself in "something
+higher". Indeed, even health, beauty, and intelligence, which seemed at
+first so clearly good, might lose their sharpness on a wider view. In the
+panorama that would ultimately fill the mind these so-called goods and
+virtues could not be conceived without their complementary vices and
+evils. Thus all moral consciousness, and even all vital preference might
+ultimately be superseded: they might appear to have belonged to a partial
+and rather low stage in the self-development of consciousness.
+
+With this dissolution of his moral judgments always in prospect, why
+should Bradley, or any idealist, have pursued ethical studies at all?
+Since all phases of life were equally necessary to enrich an infinite
+consciousness, which must know both good and evil in order to merge and to
+transcend them, he could hardly nurse any intense enthusiasm for a
+different complexion to be given to the lives of men. His moral
+passion--for he had it, caustic and burning clear--was purely
+intellectual: it was shame that in England the moral consciousness should
+have been expressed in systems dialectically so primitive as those of the
+positivists and utilitarians. He acknowledged, somewhat superciliously,
+that their hearts were in the right place; yet, if we are to have ethics
+at all, were not their thoughts in the right place also? They were
+concerned not with analysis of the moral consciousness but with the
+conduct of affairs and the reform of institutions. The spectacle of human
+wretchedness profoundly moved them; their minds were bent on transforming
+society, so that a man's station and its duties might cease to be what a
+decayed feudal organisation and an inhuman industrialism had made of them.
+They revolted against the miserable condition of the masses of mankind,
+and against the miserable consolations which official religion, or a
+philosophy like Bradley's, offered them in their misery. The utilitarians
+were at least intent on existence and on the course of events; they wished
+to transform institutions to fit human nature better, and to educate human
+nature by those new institutions so that it might better realise its
+latent capacities. These are matters which a man may modify by his acts
+and they are therefore the proper concern of the moralist. Were they much
+to blame if they neglected to define pleasure or happiness and used
+catch-words, dialectically vague, to indicate a direction of effort
+politically quite unmistakable? Doubtless their political action, like
+their philosophical nomenclature, was revolutionary and relied too much on
+wayward feelings ignorant of their own causes. Revolution, no less than
+tradition, is but a casual and clumsy expression of human nature in
+contact with circumstances; yet pain and pleasure and spontaneous hopes,
+however foolish, are direct expressions of that contact, and speak for the
+soul; whereas a man's station and its duties are purely conventional, and
+may altogether misrepresent his native capacities. The protest of human
+nature against the world and its oppressions is the strong side of every
+rebellion; it was the _moral_ side of utilitarianism, of the rebellion
+against irrational morality.
+
+Unfortunately the English reformers were themselves idealists of a sort,
+entangled in the vehicles of perception, and talking about sensations and
+ideas, pleasures and pains, as if these had been the elements of human
+nature, or even of nature at large: and only the most meagre of verbal
+systems, and the most artificial, can be constructed out of such
+materials. Moreover, they spoke much of pleasure and happiness, and hardly
+at all of misery and pain: whereas it would have been wiser, and truer to
+their real inspiration, to have laid all the emphasis on evils to be
+abated, leaving the good to shape itself in freedom. Suffering is the
+instant and obvious sign of some outrage done to human nature; without
+this natural recoil, actual or imminent, no morality would have any
+sanction, and no precept could be imperative. What silliness to command me
+to pursue pleasure or to avoid it, if in any case everything would be
+well! Save for some shadow of dire repentance looming in the distance, I
+am deeply free to walk as I will. The choice of pleasure for a principle
+of morals was particularly unfortunate in the British utilitarians; it
+lent them an air of frivolity absurdly contrary to their true character.
+Pleasure might have been a fit enough word in the mouth of Aristippus, a
+semi-oriental untouched by the least sense of responsibility, or even on
+the lips of humanists in the eighteenth century, who, however sordid their
+lives may sometimes have been, could still move in imagination to the
+music of Mozart, in the landscape of Watteau or of Fragonard. But in the
+land and age of Dickens the moral ideal was not so much pleasure as
+kindness: this tenderer word not only expresses better the motive at work,
+but it points to the distressing presence of misery in the world, to make
+natural kindness laborious and earnest, and turn it into a legislative
+system.
+
+Bradley's hostility to pleasure was not fanatical: one's station and its
+duties might have their agreeable side. "It is probably good for you", he
+tells us, "to have, say, not less than two glasses of wine after dinner.
+Six on ordinary occasions is perhaps too many; but as to three or four,
+they are neither one way nor the other." If the voluptuary was condemned,
+it was for the commonplace reason which a hedonist, too, might invoke,
+that a life of pleasure soon palls and becomes unpleasant. Bradley's
+objection to pleasure was merely speculative: he found it too "abstract".
+To call a pleasure when actually felt an abstraction is an exquisite
+absurdity: but pleasure, in its absolute essence, is certainly simple and
+indefinable. If instead of enjoying it on the wing, and as an earnest of
+the soul's momentary harmony, we attempt to arrest and observe it, we find
+it strangely dumb; we are not informed by it concerning its occasion, nor
+carried from it by any logical implication to the natural object in which
+it might be found. A pure hedonist ought therefore to be rather relieved
+if all images lapsed from his consciousness and he could luxuriate in
+sheer pleasure, dark and overwhelming. True, such bliss would be rather
+inhuman, and of the sort which we rashly assign to the oyster: but why
+should a radical and intrepid philosopher be ashamed of that? The
+condition of Bradley's Absolute--feeling in which all distinctions are
+transcended and merged--seems to be something of that kind; but there
+would be a strange irony in attributing this mystical and rapturous ideal
+to such ponderous worthies as Mill and Spencer, whose minds were nothing
+if not anxious, perturbed, instrumental, and full of respect for
+variegated facts, and who were probably incapable of tasting pure pleasure
+at all.
+
+But if pleasure, in its pure essence, might really be the highest good for
+a mystic who should be lost in it, it would be no guide to a moralist
+wishing to control events, and to distribute particular pleasures or
+series of pleasures as richly as possible in the world. For this purpose
+he would need to understand human nature and its variable functions, in
+which different persons and peoples may find their sincere pleasures; and
+this knowledge would first lend to his general love of pleasure any point
+of application in the governance of life or in benevolent legislation.
+Some concrete image of a happy human world would take the place of the
+futile truism that pleasure is good and pain evil. This is, of course,
+what utilitarian moralists meant to do, and actually did, in so far as
+their human sympathies extended, which was not to the highest things; but
+it was not what they said, and Bradley had a clear advantage over them in
+the war of words. A pleasure is not a programme: it exists here and not
+there, for me and for no one else, once and never again. When past, it
+leaves the will as empty and as devoid of allegiance as if it had never
+existed; pleasure is sand, though it have the colour of gold. But this is
+evidently true of all existence. Each living moment, each dead man, each
+cycle of the universe leaves nothing behind it but a void which perhaps
+something kindred may refill. A Hegel, after identifying himself for a
+moment with the Absolute Idea, is in his existence no less subject to
+sleepiness, irritation, and death than if he had been modestly satisfied
+with the joys of an oyster. It is only their common form, or their common
+worship, that can give to the quick moments of life any mutual relevance
+or sympathy; and existence would not come at all within sight of a good,
+either momentary or final, if it were not inwardly directed upon realising
+some definite essence. For the rest this essence may be as simple as you
+will, if the nature directed upon it is unified and simple; and it would
+be mere intellectual snobbery to condemn pleasure because it has not so
+many subdivisions in it as an encyclopaedia of the sciences. For the
+moralist pleasure and pain may even be the better guides, because they
+express more directly and boldly the instinctive direction of animal life,
+and thereby mark more clearly the genuine difference between good and
+evil.
+
+We may well say with Bradley that the good is self-realisation; but what
+is the self? Certainly not the feeling or consciousness of the moment, nor
+the life of the world, nor pure spirit. The self that can systematically
+distinguish good from evil is an animal soul. It grows from a seed; its
+potentiality is definite and its fate precarious; and in man it requires
+society to rear it and tradition to educate it. The good is accordingly
+social, in so far as the soul demands society; but it is the nature of the
+individual that determines the kind and degree of sociability that is good
+for him, and draws the line between society that is a benefit and society
+that is a nuisance. To subordinate the soul fundamentally to society or
+the individual to the state is sheer barbarism: the Greeks, sometimes
+invoked to support this form of idolatry, were never guilty of it; on the
+contrary, their lawgivers were always reforming and planning the state so
+that the soul might be perfect in it. Discipline is a help to the spirit:
+but even social relations, when like love, friendship, or sport they are
+spontaneous and good in themselves, retire as far as possible from the
+pressure of the world, and build their paradise apart, simple, and hidden
+in the wilderness; while all the ultimate hopes and assurances of the
+spirit escape altogether into the silent society of nature, of truth, of
+essence, far from those fatuous worldly conventions which hardly make up
+for their tyranny by their instability: for the prevalent moral fashion is
+always growing old, and human nature is always becoming young again.
+World-worship is the expedient of those who, having lost the soul that is
+in them, look for it in things external, where there is no soul: and by a
+curious recoil, it is also the expedient of those who seek their lost soul
+in actual consciousness, where it also is not: for sensations and ideas
+are not the soul but only passing and partial products of its profound
+animal life. Moral consciousness in particular would never have arisen and
+would be gratuitous, save for the ferocious bias of a natural living
+creature, defending itself against its thousand enemies.
+
+Nor would knowledge in its turn be knowledge if it were merely intuition
+of essence, such as the sensualist, the poet, or the dialectician may rest
+in. If the imagery of logic or passion ever comes to convey _knowledge_,
+it does so by virtue of a concomitant physical adjustment to external
+things; for the nerve of real or transcendent knowledge is the notice
+which one part of the world may take of another part; and it is this
+momentous cognisance, no matter what intangible feelings may supply terms
+for its prosody, that enlarges the mind to some practical purpose and
+informs it about the world. Consciousness then ceases to be passive sense
+or idle ideation and becomes belief and intelligence. Then the essences
+which form the "content of consciousness" may be vivified and trippingly
+run over, like the syllables of a familiar word, in the active recognition
+of things and people and of all the ominous or pliable forces of nature.
+For essences, being eternal and non-existent in themselves, cannot come to
+consciousness by their own initiative, but only as occasion and the subtle
+movements of the soul may evoke their forms; so that the fact that they
+are given to consciousness has a natural status and setting in the
+material world, and is part of the same natural event as the movement of
+the soul and body which supports that consciousness.
+
+There is therefore no need of refuting idealism, which is an honest
+examination of conscience in a reflective mind. Refutations and proofs
+depend on pregnant meanings assigned to terms, meanings first rendered
+explicit and unambiguous by those very proofs or refutations. On any
+different acceptation of those terms, these proofs and refutations fall
+to the ground; and it remains a question for good sense, not for logic at
+all, how far the terms in either case describe anything existent. If by
+"knowledge" we understand intuition of essences, idealism follows; but it
+follows only in respect to essences given in intuition: nothing follows
+concerning the seat, origin, conditions, or symptomatic value of such
+intuition, nor even that such intuition ever actually occurs. Idealism,
+therefore, without being refuted, may be hemmed in and humanised by
+natural knowledge about it and about its place in human speculation; the
+most recalcitrant materialist (like myself) might see its plausibility
+during a somewhat adolescent phase of self-consciousness. Consciousness
+itself he might accept and relish as the natural spiritual resonance of
+action and passion, recognising it in its proud isolation and specious
+autonomy, like the mountain republics of Andorra and San Marino.
+
+German idealism is a mighty pose, an attitude always possible to a
+self-conscious and reflective being: but it is hardly a system, since it
+contradicts beliefs which in action are inevitable; it may therefore be
+readily swallowed, but it can never be digested. Neither of its two
+ingredients--romantic scepticism and romantic superstition--agrees
+particularly with the British stomach. Not romantic scepticism: for in
+England an instinctive distrust of too much clearness and logic, a
+difficulty in drawing all the consequences of any principle, soon gave to
+this most radical of philosophies a prim and religious air: its purity was
+alloyed with all sorts of conventions: so much so that we find British
+Hegelians often deeply engaged in psychology, cosmology, or religion, as
+if they took their idealism for a kind of physics, and wished merely to
+reinterpret the facts of nature in an edifying way, without uprooting them
+from their natural places. This has been made easier by giving idealism an
+objective, non-psychological turn: events, and especially feelings and
+ideas, will then be swallowed up in the essences which they display. Thus
+Bradley maintained that two thoughts, no matter how remote from each other
+in time or space, were identically the same, and not merely similar, if
+only they contemplated the same idea. Mind itself ceased in this way to
+mean a series of existing feelings and was identified with intelligence;
+and intelligence in its turn was identified with the Idea or Logos which
+might be the ultimate theme of intelligence. There could be only one mind,
+so conceived, since there could be only one total system in the universe
+visible to omniscience.
+
+As to romantic scepticism, we may see by contrast what it would be, when
+left to itself, if we consider those lucid Italians who have taken up
+their idealism late and with open eyes. In Croce and Gentile the
+transcendental attitude is kept pure: for them there is really no universe
+save spirit creating its experience; and if we ask whence or on what
+principle occasions arise for all this compulsory fiction, we are reminded
+that this question, with any answer which spirit might invent for it,
+belongs not to philosophy but to some special science like physiology,
+itself, of course, only a particular product of creative thought. Thus the
+more impetuously the inquisitive squirrel would rush from his cage, the
+faster and faster he causes the cage to whirl about his ears. He has not
+the remotest chance of reaching his imaginary bait--God, nature, or
+truth; for to seek such things is to presuppose them, and to presuppose
+anything, if spirit be absolute, is to invent it. Even those philosophies
+of history which the idealist may for some secret reason be impelled to
+construct would be superstitious, according to his own principles, if he
+took them for more than poetic fictions of the historian; so that in the
+study of history, as in every other study, all the diligence and sober
+learning which the philosopher may possess are non-philosophical, since
+they presuppose independent events and material documents. Thus perfect
+idealism turns out to be pure literary sport, like lyric poetry, in which
+no truth is conveyed save the miscellaneous truths taken over from common
+sense or the special sciences; and the gay spirit, supposed to be living
+and shining of its own sweet will, can find nothing to live or shine upon
+save the common natural world.
+
+Such at least would be the case if romantic superstition did not
+supervene, demanding that the spirit should impose some arbitrary rhythm
+or destiny on the world which it creates: but this side of idealism has
+been cultivated chiefly by the intrepid Germans: some of them, like
+Spengler and Keyserling, still thrive and grow famous on it without a
+blush. The modest English in these matters take shelter under the wing of
+science speculatively extended, or traditional religion prudently
+rationalised: the scope of the spirit, like its psychological
+distribution, is conceived realistically. It might almost prove an
+euthanasia for British idealism to lose itself in the new metaphysics of
+nature which the mathematicians are evolving; and since this metaphysics,
+though materialistic in effect, is more subtle and abstruse than popular
+materialism, British idealism might perhaps be said to survive in it,
+having now passed victoriously into its opposite, and being merged in
+something higher.
+
+
+[10] _Ethical Studies_, by F.H. Bradley, O.M., LL.D. (Glasgow), late
+Fellow of Merton College, Oxford; second edition revised, with
+additional notes by the Author. Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1927.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+REVOLUTIONS IN SCIENCE
+
+
+Since the beginning of the twentieth century, science has gained notably
+in expertness, and lost notably in authority. We are bombarded with
+inventions; but if we ask the inventors what they have learned of the
+depths of nature, which somehow they have probed with such astonishing
+success, their faces remain blank. They may be chewing gum; or they may
+tell us that if an aeroplane could only fly fast enough, it would get home
+before it starts; or they may urge us to come with them into a dark room,
+to hold hands, and to commune with the dear departed.
+
+Practically there may be no harm in such a division of labour, the
+inventors doing the work and the professors the talking. The experts may
+themselves be inexpert in verbal expression, or content with stock
+phrases, or profoundly sceptical, or too busy to think. Nevertheless,
+skill and understanding are at their best when they go together and adorn
+the same mind. Modern science until lately had realised this ideal: it was
+an extension of common perception and common sense. We could trust it
+implicitly, as we do a map or a calendar; it was not true for us merely in
+an argumentative or visionary sense, as are religion and philosophy.
+Geography went hand in hand with travel, Copernican astronomy with
+circumnavigation of the globe: and even the theory of evolution and the
+historical sciences in the nineteenth century were continuous with liberal
+reform: people saw in the past, as they then learned to conceive it,
+simply an extension of those transformations which they were witnessing in
+the present. They could think they knew the world as a man knows his
+native town, or the contents of his chest of drawers: nature was our home,
+and science was our home knowledge. For it is not intrinsic clearness or
+coherence that make ideas persuasive, but connection with action, or with
+some voluminous inner response, which is readiness to act. It is a sense
+of on-coming fate, a compulsion to do or to suffer, that produces the
+illusion of perfect knowledge.
+
+I call it illusion, although our contact with things may be real, and our
+sensations and thoughts may be inevitable and honest; because nevertheless
+it is always an illusion to suppose that our images are the intrinsic
+qualities of things, or reproduce them exactly. The Ptolemaic system, for
+instance, was perfectly scientific; it was based on careful and prolonged
+observation and on just reasoning; but it was modelled on an image--the
+spherical blue dome of the heavens--proper only to an observer on the
+earth, and not transferable to a universe which is diffuse, centreless,
+fluid, and perhaps infinite. When the imagination, for any reason, comes
+to be peopled with images of the latter sort, the modern, and especially
+the latest, astronomy becomes more persuasive. For although I suspect that
+even Einstein is an imperfect relativist, and retains Euclidean space and
+absolute time at the bottom of his calculation, and recovers them at the
+end, yet the effort to express the system of nature as it would appear
+from _any_ station and to _any_ sensorium seems to be eminently
+enlightening.
+
+Theory and practice in the latest science are still allied, otherwise
+neither of them would prosper as it does; but each has taken a leap in its
+own direction. The distance between them has become greater than the naked
+eye can measure, and each of them in itself has become unintelligible. We
+roll and fly at dizzy speeds, and hear at incredible distances; at the
+same time we imagine and calculate to incredible depths. The technique of
+science, like that of industry, has become a thing in itself; the one
+veils its object, which is nature, as the other defeats its purpose, which
+is happiness. Science often seems to be less the study of things than the
+study of science. It is now more scholastic than philosophy ever was. We
+are invited to conceive organisms within organisms, so minute, so free,
+and so dynamic, that the heart of matter seems to explode into an endless
+discharge of fireworks, or a mathematical nightmare realised in a thousand
+places at once, and become the substance of the world. What is even more
+remarkable--for the notion of infinite organisation has been familiar to
+the learned at least since the time of Leibniz--the theatre of science is
+transformed no less than the actors and the play. The upright walls of
+space, the steady tread of time, begin to fail us; they bend now so
+obligingly to our perspectives that we no longer seem to travel through
+them, but to carry them with us, shooting them out or weaving them about
+us according to some native fatality, which is left unexplained. We seem
+to have reverted in some sense from Copernicus to Ptolemy: except that the
+centre is now occupied, not by the solid earth, but by _any_ geometrical
+point chosen for the origin of calculation. Time, too, is not measured by
+the sun or stars, but by _any_ "clock"--that is, by any recurrent rhythm
+taken as a standard of comparison. It would seem that the existence and
+energy of each chosen centre, as well as its career and encounters, hang
+on the collateral existence of other centres of force, among which it must
+wend its way: yet the only witness to their presence, and the only known
+property of their substance, is their "radio-activity", or the physical
+light which they shed. Light, in its physical being, is accordingly the
+measure of all things in this new philosophy: and if we ask ourselves why
+this element should have been preferred, the answer is not far to seek.
+Light is the only medium through which very remote or very minute
+particles of matter can be revealed to science. Whatever the nature of
+things may be intrinsically, science must accordingly express the universe
+in terms of light.
+
+These reforms have come from within: they are triumphs of method. We make
+an evident advance in logic, and in that parsimony which is dear to
+philosophers (though not to nature), if we refuse to assign given terms
+and relations to any prior medium, such as absolute time or space, which
+cannot be given with them. Observable spaces and times, like the facts
+observed in them, are given separately and in a desultory fashion.
+Initially, then, there are as many spaces and times as there are
+observers, or rather observations; these are the specious times and spaces
+of dreams, of sensuous life, and of romantic biography. Each is centred
+here and now, and stretched outwards, forward, and back, as far as
+imagination has the strength to project it. Then, when objects and events
+have been posited as self-existent, and when a "clock" and a system of
+co-ordinates have been established for measuring them, a single
+mathematical space and time may be deployed about them, conceived to
+contain all things, and to supply them with their respective places and
+dates. This gives us the cosmos of classical physics. But this system
+involves the uncritical notion of light and matter travelling through
+media previously existing, and being carried down, like a boat drifting
+down stream, by a flowing time which has a pace of its own, and imposes it
+on all existence. In reality, each "clock" and each landscape is
+self-centred and initially absolute: its time and space are irrelevant to
+those of any other landscape or "clock", unless the objects or events
+revealed there, being posited as self-existent, actually coincide with
+those revealed also in another landscape, or dated by another "clock". It
+is only by travelling along its own path at its own rate that experience
+or light can ever reach a point lying on another path also, so that two
+observations, and two measures, may coincide at their ultimate terms,
+their starting-points or their ends. Positions are therefore not
+independent of the journey which terminates in them, and thereby
+individuates them; and dates are not independent of the events which
+distinguish them. The flux of existence comes first: matter and light
+distend time by their pulses, they distend space by their deployments.
+
+This, if I understand it, is one half the new theory; the other half is
+not less acceptable. Newton had described motion as a result of two
+principles: the first, inertia, was supposed to be inherent in bodies; the
+second, gravity, was incidental to their co-existence. Yet inherent
+inertia can only be observed relatively: it makes no difference to me
+whether I am said to be moving at a great speed or absolutely at rest, if
+I am not jolted or breathless, and if my felt environment does not change.
+Inertia, or weight, in so far as it denotes something intrinsic, seems to
+be but another name for substance or the principle of existence: in so far
+as it denotes the first law of motion, it seems to be relative to an
+environment. It would therefore be preferable to combine inertia and
+attraction in a single formula, expressing the behaviour of bodies towards
+one another in all their conjunctions, without introducing any inherent
+forces or absolute measures. This seems to have been done by Einstein, or
+at least impressively suggested: and it has been found that the new
+calculations correspond to certain delicate observations more accurately
+than the old.
+
+This revolution in science seems, then, to be perfectly legal, and ought
+to be welcomed; yet only under one important moral condition, and with a
+paradoxical result. The moral condition is that the pride of science
+should turn into humility, that it should no longer imagine that it is
+laying bare the intrinsic nature of things. And the paradoxical result is
+this: that the forms of science are optional, like various languages or
+methods of notation. One may be more convenient or subtle than another,
+according to the place, senses, interests, and scope of the explorer; a
+reform in science may render the old theories antiquated, like the habit
+of wearing togas, or of going naked; but it cannot render them false, or
+itself true. Science, when it is more than the gossip of adventure or of
+experiment, yields practical assurances couched in symbolic terms, but no
+ultimate insight: so that the intellectual vacancy of the expert, which I
+was deriding, is a sort of warrant of his solidity. It is rather when the
+expert prophesies, when he propounds a new philosophy founded on his
+latest experiments, that we may justly smile at his system, and wait for
+the next.
+
+Self-knowledge--and the new science is full of self-knowledge--is a great
+liberator: if perhaps it imposes some retrenchment, essentially it revives
+courage. Then at last we see what we are and what we can do. The spirit
+can abandon its vain commitments and false pretensions, like a young man
+free at last to throw off his clothes and run naked along the sands.
+Intelligence is never gayer, never surer, than when it is strictly formal,
+satisfied with the evidence of its materials, as with the lights of
+jewels, and filled with mounting speculations, as with a sort of laughter.
+If all the arts aspire to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire
+to the condition of mathematics. Their logic is their spontaneous and
+intelligible side: and while they differ from mathematics and from one
+another in being directed in the first instance upon various
+unintelligible existing objects, yet as they advance, they unite: because
+they are everywhere striving to discover in those miscellaneous objects
+some intelligible order and method. And as the emotion of the pure artist,
+whatever may be his materials, lies in finding in them some formal harmony
+or imposing it upon them, so the interest of the scientific mind, in so
+far as it is free and purely intellectual, lies in tracing their formal
+pattern. The mathematician can afford to leave to his clients, the
+engineers, or perhaps the popular philosophers, the emotion of belief: for
+himself he keeps the lyrical pleasure of metre and of evolving equations:
+and it is a pleasant surprise to him, and an added problem, if he finds
+that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify
+them; much as if a composer found that the sailors could heave better when
+singing his songs.
+
+Yet such independence, however glorious inwardly, cannot help diminishing
+the prestige of the arts in the world. If science misled us before, when
+it was full of clearness and confidence, how shall we trust it now that it
+is all mystery and paradox? If classical physics needed this fundamental
+revision, near to experience and fruitful as it was, what revision will
+not romantic physics require? Nor is the future alone insecure: even now
+the prophets hardly understand one another, or perhaps themselves; and
+some of them interlard their science with the most dubious metaphysics.
+Naturally the enemies of science have not been slow to seize this
+opportunity: the soft-hearted, the muddle-headed, the superstitious are
+all raising their voices, no longer in desperate resistance to science,
+but hopefully, and in its name. Science, they tell us, is no longer
+hostile to religion, or to divination of any sort. Indeed, divination is a
+science too. Physics is no longer materialistic since space is now curved,
+and filled with an ether through which light travels at 300,000 kilometres
+per second--an immaterial rate: because if anything material ventured to
+move at that forbidden speed, it would be so flattened that it would cease
+to exist. Indeed, matter is now hardly needed at all; its place has been
+taken by radio-activity, and by electrons which dart and whirl with such
+miraculous swiftness, that occasionally, for no known reason, they can
+skip from orbit to orbit without traversing the intervening positions--an
+evident proof of free-will in them. Or if solids should still seem to be
+material, there are astral bodies as well which are immaterial although
+physical; and as to ether and electricity, they are the very substance of
+spirit. All this I find announced in newspapers and even in books as the
+breakdown of scientific materialism: and yet, when was materialism more
+arrant and barbarous than in these announcements? Something no doubt has
+broken down: but I am afraid it is rather the habit of thinking clearly
+and the power to discern the difference between material and spiritual
+things.
+
+The latest revolution in science will probably not be the last. I do not
+know what internal difficulties, contradictions, or ominous obscurities
+may exist in the new theories, or what logical seeds of change, perhaps of
+radical change, might be discovered there by a competent critic. I base my
+expectation on two circumstances somewhat more external and visible to the
+lay mind. One circumstance is that the new theories seem to be affected,
+and partly inspired, by a particular philosophy, itself utterly insecure.
+This philosophy regards the point of view as controlling or even creating
+the object seen; in other words, it identifies the object with the
+experience or the knowledge of it: it is essentially a subjective,
+psychological, Protestant philosophy. The study of perspectives, which a
+severer critic might call illusions, is one of the most interesting and
+enlightening of studies, and for my own part I should be content to dwell
+almost exclusively in that poetic and moral atmosphere, in the realm of
+literature and of humanism. Yet I cannot help seeing that neither in logic
+nor in natural genesis can perspectives be the ultimate object of science,
+since a plurality of points of view, somehow comparable, must be assumed
+in the beginning, as well as common principles of projection, and ulterior
+points of contact or coincidence. Such assumptions, which must persist
+throughout, seem to presuppose an absolute system of nature behind all the
+relative systems of science.
+
+The other circumstance which points to further revolutions is social. The
+new science is unintelligible to almost all of us; it can be tested only
+by very delicate observations and very difficult reasoning. We accept it
+on the authority of a few professors who themselves have accepted it with
+a contagious alacrity, as if caught in a whirlwind. It has sprung up
+mysteriously and mightily, like mysticism in a cloister or theology in a
+council: a Soviet of learned men has proclaimed it. Moreover, it is not
+merely a system among systems, but a movement among movements. A system,
+even when it has serious rivals, may be maintained for centuries as
+religions are maintained, institutionally; but a movement comes to an end;
+it is followed presently by a period of assimilation which transforms it,
+or by a movement in some other direction. I ask myself accordingly whether
+the condition of the world in the coming years will be favourable to
+refined and paradoxical science. The extension of education will have
+enabled the uneducated to pronounce upon everything. Will the patronage of
+capital and enterprise subsist, to encourage discovery and reward
+invention? Will a jealous and dogmatic democracy respect the
+unintelligible insight of the few? Will a perhaps starving democracy
+support materially its Soviet of seers? But let us suppose that no
+utilitarian fanaticism supervenes, and no intellectual surfeit or
+discouragement. May not the very profundity of the new science and its
+metaphysical affinities lead it to bolder developments, inscrutable to the
+public and incompatible with one another, like the gnostic sects of
+declining antiquity? Then perhaps that luminous modern thing which until
+recently was called science, in contrast to all personal philosophies, may
+cease to exist altogether, being petrified into routine in the
+practitioners, and fading in the professors into abstruse speculations.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+A LONG WAY ROUND TO NIRVANA
+
+
+That the end of life is death may be called a truism, since the various
+kinds of immortality that might perhaps supervene would none of them
+abolish death, but at best would weave life and death together into the
+texture of a more comprehensive destiny. The end of one life might be the
+beginning of another, if the Creator had composed his great work like a
+dramatic poet, assigning successive lines to different characters. Death
+would then be merely the cue at the end of each speech, summoning the next
+personage to break in and keep the ball rolling. Or perhaps, as some
+suppose, all the characters are assumed in turn by a single supernatural
+Spirit, who amid his endless improvisations is imagining himself living
+for the moment in this particular solar and social system. Death in such a
+universal monologue would be but a change of scene or of metre, while in
+the scramble of a real comedy it would be a change of actors. In either
+case every voice would be silenced sooner or later, and death would end
+each particular life, in spite of all possible sequels.
+
+The relapse of created things into nothing is no violent fatality, but
+something naturally quite smooth and proper. This has been set forth
+recently, in a novel way, by a philosopher from whom we hardly expected
+such a lesson, namely Professor Sigmund Freud. He has now broadened his
+conception of sexual craving or _libido_ into a general principle of
+attraction or concretion in matter, like the Eros of the ancient poets
+Hesiod and Empedocles. The windows of that stuffy clinic have been thrown
+open; that smell of acrid disinfectants, those hysterical shrieks, have
+escaped into the cold night. The troubles of the sick soul, we are given
+to understand, as well as their cure, after all flow from the stars.
+
+I am glad that Freud has resisted the tendency to represent this principle
+of Love as the only principle in nature. Unity somehow exercises an evil
+spell over metaphysicians. It is admitted that in real life it is not well
+for One to be alone, and I think pure unity is no less barren and
+graceless in metaphysics. You must have plurality to start with, or
+trinity, or at least duality, if you wish to get anywhere, even if you
+wish to get effectively into the bosom of the One, abandoning your
+separate existence. Freud, like Empedocles, has prudently introduced a
+prior principle for Love to play with; not Strife, however (which is only
+an incident in Love), but Inertia, or the tendency towards peace and
+death. Let us suppose that matter was originally dead, and perfectly
+content to be so, and that it still relapses, when it can, into its old
+equilibrium. But the homogeneous (as Spencer would say) when it is finite
+is unstable: and matter, presumably not being co-extensive with space,
+necessarily forms aggregates which have an inside and an outside. The
+parts of such bodies are accordingly differently exposed to external
+influences and differently related to one another. This inequality, even
+in what seems most quiescent, is big with changes, destined to produce in
+time a wonderful complexity. It is the source of all uneasiness, of life,
+and of love.
+
+     "Let us imagine [writes Freud][11] an undifferentiated vesicle of
+     sensitive substance: then its surface, exposed as it is to the
+     outer world, is by its very position differentiated, and serves as
+     an organ for receiving stimuli.... This morsel of living substance
+     floats about in an outer world which is charged with the most
+     potent energies, and it would be destroyed ... if it were not
+     furnished with protection against stimulation. [On the other hand]
+     the sensitive cortical layer has no protective barrier against
+     excitations emanating from within.... The most prolific sources of
+     such excitations are the so-called instincts of the organism....
+     The child never gets tired of demanding the repetition of a game
+     ... he wants always to hear the same story instead of a new one,
+     insists inexorably on exact repetition, and corrects each deviation
+     which the narrator lets slip by mistake.... According to this, _an
+     instinct would be a tendency in living organic matter impelling it
+     towards reinstatement of an earlier condition_, one which it had
+     abandoned under the influence of external disturbing forces--a kind
+     of organic elasticity, or, to put it another way, the manifestation
+     of inertia in organic life.
+
+     "If, then, all organic instincts are conservative, historically
+     acquired, and directed towards regression, towards reinstatement of
+     something earlier, we are obliged to place all the results of
+     organic development to the credit of external, disturbing, and
+     distracting influences. The rudimentary creature would from its
+     very beginning not have wanted to change, would, if circumstances
+     had remained the same, have always merely repeated the same course
+     of existence.... It would be counter to the conservative nature of
+     instinct if the goal of life were a state never hitherto reached.
+     It must be rather an ancient starting point, which the living being
+     left long ago, and to which it harks back again by all the
+     circuitous paths of development.... _The goal of all life is
+     death...._
+
+     "Through a long period of time the living substance may have ...
+     had death within easy reach ... until decisive external influences
+     altered in such a way as to compel [it] to ever greater deviations
+     from the original path of life, and to ever more complicated and
+     circuitous routes to the attainment of the goal of death. These
+     circuitous ways to death, faithfully retained by the conservative
+     instincts, would be neither more nor less than the phenomena of
+     life as we know it."
+
+Freud puts forth these interesting suggestions with much modesty,
+admitting that they are vague and uncertain and (what it is even more
+important to notice) mythical in their terms; but it seems to me that,
+for all that, they are an admirable counterblast to prevalent follies.
+When we hear that there is, animating the whole universe, an _Elan vital_,
+or general impulse toward some unknown but single ideal, the terms used
+are no less uncertain, mythical, and vague, but the suggestion conveyed is
+false--false, I mean, to the organic source of life and aspiration, to the
+simple naturalness of nature: whereas the suggestion conveyed by Freud's
+speculations is true. In what sense can myths and metaphors be true or
+false? In the sense that, in terms drawn from moral predicaments or from
+literary psychology, they may report the general movement and the
+pertinent issue of material facts, and may inspire us with a wise
+sentiment in their presence. In this sense I should say that Greek
+mythology was true and Calvinist theology was false. The chief terms
+employed in psycho-analysis have always been metaphorical: "unconscious
+wishes", "the pleasure-principle", "the Oedipus complex", "Narcissism",
+"the censor"; nevertheless, interesting and profound vistas may be opened
+up, in such terms, into the tangle of events in a man's life, and a fresh
+start may be made with fewer encumbrances and less morbid inhibition. "The
+shortcomings of our description", Freud says, "would probably disappear if
+for psychological terms we could substitute physiological or chemical
+ones. These too only constitute a metaphorical language, but one familiar
+to us for a much longer time, and perhaps also simpler." All human
+discourse is metaphorical, in that our perceptions and thoughts are
+adventitious signs for their objects, as names are, and by no means copies
+of what is going on materially in the depths of nature; but just as the
+sportsman's eye, which yields but a summary graphic image, can trace the
+flight of a bird through the air quite well enough to shoot it and bring
+it down, so the myths of a wise philosopher about the origin of life or of
+dreams, though expressed symbolically, may reveal the pertinent movement
+of nature to us, and may kindle in us just sentiments and true
+expectations in respect to our fate--for his own soul is the bird this
+sportsman is shooting.
+
+Now I think these new myths of Freud's about life, like his old ones
+about dreams, are calculated to enlighten and to chasten us enormously
+about ourselves. The human spirit, when it awakes, finds itself in
+trouble; it is burdened, for no reason it can assign, with all sorts of
+anxieties about food, pressures, pricks, noises, and pains. It is born, as
+another wise myth has it, in original sin. And the passions and ambitions
+of life, as they come on, only complicate this burden and make it heavier,
+without rendering it less incessant or gratuitous. Whence this fatality,
+and whither does it lead? It comes from heredity, and it leads to
+propagation. When we ask how heredity could be started or transmitted, our
+ignorance of nature and of past time reduces us to silence or to wild
+conjectures. Something--let us call it matter--must always have existed,
+and some of its parts, under pressure of the others, must have got tied up
+into knots, like the mainspring of a watch, in such a violent and unhappy
+manner that when the pressure is relaxed they fly open as fast as they
+can, and unravel themselves with a vast sense of relief. Hence the longing
+to satisfy latent passions, with the fugitive pleasure in doing so. But
+the external agencies that originally wound up that mainspring never
+cease to operate; every fresh stimulus gives it another turn, until it
+snaps, or grows flaccid, or is unhinged. Moreover, from time to time, when
+circumstances change, these external agencies may encrust that primary
+organ with minor organs attached to it. Every impression, every adventure,
+leaves a trace or rather a seed behind it. It produces a further
+complication in the structure of the body, a fresh charge, which tends to
+repeat the impressed motion in season and out of season. Hence that
+perpetual docility or ductility in living substance which enables it to
+learn tricks, to remember facts, and (when the seeds of past experiences
+marry and cross in the brain) to imagine new experiences, pleasing or
+horrible. Every act initiates a new habit and may implant a new instinct.
+We see people even late in life carried away by political or religious
+contagions or developing strange vices; there would be no peace in old
+age, but rather a greater and greater obsession by all sorts of cares,
+were it not that time, in exposing us to many adventitious influences,
+weakens or discharges our primitive passions; we are less greedy, less
+lusty, less hopeful, less generous. But these weakened primitive impulses
+are naturally by far the strongest and most deeply rooted in the organism:
+so that although an old man may be converted or may take up some hobby,
+there is usually something thin in his elderly zeal, compared with the
+heartiness of youth; nor is it edifying to see a soul in which the plainer
+human passions are extinct becoming a hotbed of chance delusions.
+
+In any case each fresh habit taking root in the organism forms a little
+mainspring or instinct of its own, like a parasite; so that an elaborate
+mechanism is gradually developed, where each lever and spring holds the
+other down, and all hold the mainspring down together, allowing it to
+unwind itself only very gradually, and meantime keeping the whole clock
+ticking and revolving, and causing the smooth outer face which it turns to
+the world, so clean and innocent, to mark the time of day amiably for the
+passer-by. But there is a terribly complicated labour going on beneath,
+propelled with difficulty, and balanced precariously, with much secret
+friction and failure. No wonder that the engine often gets visibly out of
+order, or stops short: the marvel is that it ever manages to go at all.
+Nor is it satisfied with simply revolving and, when at last dismounted,
+starting afresh in the person of some seed it has dropped, a portion of
+its substance with all its concentrated instincts wound up tightly within
+it, and eager to repeat the ancestral experiment; all this growth is not
+merely material and vain. Each clock in revolving strikes the hour, even
+the quarters, and often with lovely chimes. These chimes we call
+perceptions, feelings, purposes, and dreams; and it is because we are
+taken up entirely with this mental music, and perhaps think that it sounds
+of itself and needs no music-box to make it, that we find such difficulty
+in conceiving the nature of our own clocks and are compelled to describe
+them only musically, that is, in myths. But the ineptitude of our
+aesthetic minds to unravel the nature of mechanism does not deprive these
+minds of their own clearness and euphony. Besides sounding their various
+musical notes, they have the cognitive function of indicating the hour and
+catching the echoes of distant events or of maturing inward dispositions.
+This information and emotion, added to incidental pleasures in satisfying
+our various passions, make up the life of an incarnate spirit. They
+reconcile it to the external fatality that has wound up the organism, and
+is breaking it down; and they rescue this organism and all its works from
+the indignity of being a vain complication and a waste of motion.
+
+That the end of life should be death may sound sad: yet what other end can
+anything have? The end of an evening party is to go to bed; but its use is
+to gather congenial people together, that they may pass the time
+pleasantly. An invitation to the dance is not rendered ironical because
+the dance cannot last for ever; the youngest of us and the most vigorously
+wound up, after a few hours, has had enough of sinuous stepping and
+prancing. The transitoriness of things is essential to their physical
+being, and not at all sad in itself; it becomes sad by virtue of a
+sentimental illusion, which makes us imagine that they wish to endure, and
+that their end is always untimely; but in a healthy nature it is not so.
+What is truly sad is to have some impulse frustrated in the midst of its
+career, and robbed of its chosen object; and what is painful is to have an
+organ lacerated or destroyed when it is still vigorous, and not ready for
+its natural sleep and dissolution. We must not confuse the itch which our
+unsatisfied instincts continue to cause with the pleasure of satisfying
+and dismissing each of them in turn. Could they all be satisfied
+harmoniously we should be satisfied once for all and completely. Then
+doing and dying would coincide throughout and be a perfect pleasure.
+
+This same insight is contained in another wise myth which has inspired
+morality and religion in India from time immemorial: I mean the doctrine
+of Karma. We are born, it says, with a heritage, a character imposed, and
+a long task assigned, all due to the ignorance which in our past lives has
+led us into all sorts of commitments. These obligations we must pay off,
+relieving the pure spirit within us from its accumulated burdens, from
+debts and assets both equally oppressive. We cannot disentangle ourselves
+by mere frivolity, nor by suicide: frivolity would only involve us more
+deeply in the toils of fate, and suicide would but truncate our misery and
+leave us for ever a confessed failure. When life is understood to be a
+process of redemption, its various phases are taken up in turn without
+haste and without undue attachment; their coming and going have all the
+keenness of pleasure, the holiness of sacrifice, and the beauty of art.
+The point is to have expressed and discharged all that was latent in us;
+and to this perfect relief various temperaments and various traditions
+assign different names, calling it having one's day, or doing one's duty,
+or realising one's ideal, or saving one's soul. The task in any case is
+definite and imposed on us by nature, whether we recognise it or not;
+therefore we can make true moral progress or fall into real errors. Wisdom
+and genius lie in discerning this prescribed task and in doing it readily,
+cleanly, and without distraction. Folly on the contrary imagines that any
+scent is worth following, that we have an infinite nature, or no nature in
+particular, that life begins without obligations and can do business
+without capital, and that the will is vacuously free, instead of being a
+specific burden and a tight hereditary knot to be unravelled. Some
+philosophers without self-knowledge think that the variations and further
+entanglements which the future may bring are the manifestation of spirit;
+but they are, as Freud has indicated, imposed on living beings by external
+pressure, and take shape in the realm of matter. It is only after the
+organs of spirit are formed mechanically that spirit can exist, and can
+distinguish the better from the worse in the fate of those organs, and
+therefore in its own fate. Spirit has nothing to do with infinite
+existence. Infinite existence is something physical and ambiguous; there
+is no scale in it and no centre. The depths of the human heart are finite,
+and they are dark only to ignorance. Deep and dark as a soul may be when
+you look down into it from outside, it is something perfectly natural; and
+the same understanding that can unearth our suppressed young passions, and
+dispel our stubborn bad habits, can show us where our true good lies.
+Nature has marked out the path for us beforehand; there are snares in it,
+but also primroses, and it leads to peace.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE PRESTIGE OF THE INFINITE
+
+
+"The more complex the world becomes and the more it rises above the
+indeterminate, so much the farther removed it is from God; that is to say,
+so much the more impious it is." M. Julien Benda[12] is not led to this
+startling utterance by any political or sentimental grudge. It is not the
+late war, nor the peace of Versailles, nor the parlous state of the arts,
+nor the decay of morality and prosperity that disgusts him with our
+confused world. It is simply overmastering respect for the infinite. _La
+Trahison des Clercs_, or Treason of the Levites, with which he had
+previously upbraided the intellectuals of his time, now appears to consist
+precisely in coveting a part in this world's inheritance, and forgetting
+that the inheritance of the Levites is the Lord: which, being interpreted
+philosophically, means that a philosopher is bound to measure all things
+by the infinite.
+
+This infinite is not rhetorical, as if we spoke of infinite thought or
+infinite love: it is physico-mathematical. Nothing but number, M. Benda
+tells us, seems to him intelligible. Time, space, volume, and complexity
+(which appears to the senses as quality) stretch in a series of units,
+positions, or degrees, to infinity, as number does: and in such
+homogeneous series, infinite in both directions, there will be no fixed
+point of origin for counting or surveying the whole and no particular
+predominant scale. Every position will be essentially identical with every
+other; every suggested structure will be collapsible and reversible; and
+the position and relations of every unit will be indistinguishable from
+those of every other. In the infinite, M. Benda says, the parts have no
+identity: each number in the scale, as we begin counting from different
+points of origin, bears also every other number.
+
+This is no mere mathematical puzzle; the thought has a strange moral
+eloquence. Seen in their infinite setting, which we may presume to be
+their ultimate environment, all things lose their central position and
+their dominant emphasis. The contrary of what we first think of them or of
+ourselves--for instance that we are alive, while they are dead or
+unborn--is also true. Egotism becomes absurd; pride and shame become the
+vainest of illusions. If then it be repugnant to reason that the series of
+numbers, moments, positions, and volumes should be limited--and the human
+spirit has a great affinity to the infinite--all specific quality and
+variety in things must be superficial and deeply unreal. They are masks in
+the carnival of phenomena, to be observed without conviction, and secretly
+dismissed as ironical by those who have laid up their treasure in the
+infinite.
+
+This mathematical dissolution of particulars is reinforced by moral
+considerations which are more familiar. Existence--any specific fact
+asserting itself in any particular place or moment--is inevitably
+contingent, arbitrary, gratuitous, and insecure. A sense of insecurity is
+likely to be the first wedge by which repentance penetrates into the
+animal heart. If a man did not foresee death and fear it, he might never
+come at all to the unnatural thought of renouncing life. In fact, he does
+not often remember death: yet his whole gay world is secretly afraid of
+being found out, of being foiled in the systematic bluff by which it lives
+as if its life were immortal; and far more than the brave young man fears
+death in his own person, the whole life of the world fears to be exorcised
+by self-knowledge, and lost in air. And with good reason: because, whether
+we stop to notice this circumstance or not, every fact, every laborious
+beloved achievement of man or of nature, has come to exist against
+infinite odds. In the dark grab-bag of Being, this chosen fact was
+surrounded by innumerable possible variations or contradictions of it; and
+each of those possibilities, happening not to be realised here and now,
+yet possesses intrinsically exactly the same aptitude or claim to
+existence. Nor are these claims and aptitudes merely imaginary and
+practically contemptible. The flux of existence is continually repenting
+of its choices, and giving everything actual the lie, by continually
+substituting something else, no less specific and no less nugatory.
+_This_ world, _any_ world, exists only by an unmerited privilege. Its
+glory is offensive to the spirit, like the self-sufficiency of some
+obstreperous nobody, who happens to have drawn the big prize in a lottery.
+"The world", M. Benda writes, "inspires me with a double sentiment. I feel
+it to be full of grandeur, because it has succeeded in asserting itself
+and coming to exist; and I feel it to be pitiful, when I consider how it
+hung on a mere nothing that this particular world should never have
+existed." And though this so accidental world, by its manifold beauties
+and excitements, may arouse our romantic enthusiasm, it is fundamentally
+an _unholy_ world. Its creation, he adds in italics, "_is something which
+reason would wish had never taken place_".
+
+For we must not suppose that God, when God is defined as infinite Being,
+can be the creator of the world. Such a notion would hopelessly destroy
+that coherence in thought to which M. Benda aspires. The infinite cannot
+be selective; it cannot possess a particular structure (such, for
+instance, as the Trinity) nor a particular quality (such as goodness). It
+cannot exert power or give direction. Nothing can be responsible for the
+world except the world itself. It has created, or is creating, itself
+perpetually by its own arbitrary act, by a groundless self-assertion which
+may be called (somewhat metaphorically) will, or even original sin: the
+original sin of existence, particularity, selfishness, or separation from
+God. Existence, being absolutely contingent and ungrounded, is perfectly
+free: and if it ties itself up in its own habits or laws, and becomes a
+terrible nightmare to itself by its automatic monotony, that still is only
+its own work and, figuratively speaking, its own fault. Nothing save its
+own arbitrary and needless pressure keeps it going in that round. This
+fatality is impressive, and popular religion has symbolised it in the
+person of a deity far more often recognised and worshipped than infinite
+Being. This popular deity, a symbol for the forces of nature and history,
+the patron of human welfare and morality, M. Benda calls the imperial God.
+
+     "It is clear that these two Gods ... have nothing to do with one
+     another. The God whom Marshal de Villars, rising in his stirrups
+     and pointing his drawn sword heavenwards, thanks on the evening of
+     Denain, is one God: quite another is the God within whose bosom the
+     author of the _Imitation_, in a corner of his cell, feels the
+     nothingness of all human victories."
+
+It follows from this, if we are coherent, that any "return to God" which
+ascetic philosophy may bring about cannot be a social reform, a transition
+to some better form of natural existence in a promised land, a renovated
+earth, or a material or temporal heaven. Nor can the error of creation be
+corrected violently by a second arbitrary act, such as suicide, or the
+annihilation of the universe by some ultimate general collapse. If such
+events happen, they still leave the door open to new creations and fresh
+errors. But the marvel is (I will return to this point presently) that the
+world, in the person of a human individual endowed with reason, may
+perceive the error of its ways and correct it ideally, in the sphere of
+estimation and worship. Such is the only possible salvation. Reason, in
+order to save us, and we, in order to be saved, must both subsist: we must
+both be incidents in the existing world. We may then, by the operation of
+reason in us, recover our allegiance to the infinite, for we are bone of
+its bone and flesh of its flesh: and by our secret sympathy with it we may
+rescind every particular claim and dismiss silently every particular form
+of being, as something unreal and unholy.
+
+An even more cogent reason why M. Benda's God cannot have been the creator
+of the world is that avowedly this God has never existed. We are expressly
+warned that "if God is infinite Being he excludes existence, in so far as
+to exist means to be distinct. In the sense which everybody attaches to
+the word existence, God, as I conceive him, _does not exist_". Of course,
+in the mind of a lover of the infinite, this fact is not derogatory to
+God, but derogatory to existence. The infinite remains the first and the
+ultimate term in thought, the fundamental dimension common to all things,
+however otherwise they may be qualified; it remains the eternal background
+against which they all are defined and into which they soon disappear.
+Evidently, in this divine--because indestructible and necessary--dimension,
+Being is incapable of making choices, adopting paths of evolution, or
+exercising power; it knows nothing of phenomena; it is not their cause
+nor their sanction. It is incapable of love, wrath, or any other passion.
+"I will add", writes M. Benda, "something else which theories of an
+impersonal deity have less often pointed out. Since infinity is
+incompatible with personal being, God is incapable of morality." Thus mere
+intuition and analysis of the infinite, since this infinite is itself
+passive and indifferent, may prove a subtle antidote to passion, to folly,
+and even to life.
+
+I think M. Benda succeeds admirably in the purpose announced in his title
+of rendering his discourse coherent. If once we accept his definitions,
+his corollaries follow. Clearly and bravely he disengages his idea of
+infinity from other properties usually assigned to the deity, such as
+power, omniscience, goodness, and tutelary functions in respect to life,
+or to some special human society. But coherence is not completeness, nor
+even a reasonable measure of descriptive truth; and certain considerations
+are omitted from M. Benda's view which are of such moment that, if they
+were included, they might transform the whole issue. Perhaps the chief of
+these omissions is that of an organ for thought. M. Benda throughout is
+engaged simply in clarifying his own ideas, and repeatedly disclaims any
+ulterior pretensions. He finds in the panorama of his thoughts an idea of
+infinite Being, or God, and proceeds to study the relation of that
+conception to all others. It is a task of critical analysis and religious
+confession: and nothing could be more legitimate and, to some of us, more
+interesting. But whence these various ideas, and whence the spell which
+the idea of infinite Being in particular casts over the meditative mind?
+Unless we can view these movements of thought in their natural setting and
+order of genesis, we shall be in danger of turning autobiography into
+cosmology and inwardness into folly.
+
+One of the most notable points in M. Benda's analysis is his insistence on
+the leap involved in passing from infinite Being to any particular fact or
+system of facts; and again the leap involved in passing, when the
+converted spirit "returns to God", from specific animal interests--no
+matter how generous, social, or altruistic these interests may be--to
+absolute renunciation and sympathy with the absolute. "That a will to
+return to God should arise in the phenomenal world seems to be a miracle
+no less wonderful (though it be less wondered at) than that the world
+should arise in the bosom of God." "Love of man, charity, humanitarianism
+are nothing but the selfishness of the race, by which each animal species
+assures its specific existence." "To surrender one's individuality for the
+benefit of a larger self is something quite different from
+disinterestedness; it is the exact opposite." And certainly, if we
+regarded infinite Being as a cosmological medium--say, empty space and
+time--there would be a miraculous break, an unaccountable new beginning,
+if that glassy expanse was suddenly wrinkled by something called energy.
+But in fact there need never have been such a leap, or such a miracle,
+because there could never have been such a transition. Infinite Being is
+not a material vacuum "in the bosom" of which a world might arise. It is a
+Platonic idea--though Plato never entertained it--an essence, non-existent
+and immutable, not in the same field of reality at all as a world of
+moving and colliding things. Such an essence is not conceivably the seat
+of the variations that enliven the world. It is only in thought that we
+may pass from infinite Being to an existing universe; and when we turn
+from one to the other, and say that now energy has emerged from the bosom
+of God, we are turning over a new leaf, or rather picking up an entirely
+different volume. The natural world is composed of objects and events
+which theory may regard as transformations of a hypothetical energy; an
+energy which M. Benda--who when he comes down to the physical world is a
+good materialist--conceives to have condensed and distributed itself into
+matter, which in turn composed organisms and ultimately generated
+consciousness and reason. But in whatever manner the natural world may
+have evolved, it is found and posited by us in perception and action, not,
+like infinite Being, defined in thought. This contrast is ontological, and
+excludes any derivation of the one object from the other. M. Benda himself
+tells us so; and we may wonder why he introduced infinite Being at all
+into his description of the world. The reason doubtless is that he was not
+engaged in describing the world, except by the way, but rather in
+classifying and clarifying his ideas in view of determining his moral
+allegiance. And he arranged his terms, whether ideal or materials, in a
+single series, because they were alike present to his intuition, and he
+was concerned to arrange them in a hierarchy, according to their moral
+dignity.
+
+Not only is infinite Being an incongruous and obstructive term to describe
+the substance of the world (which, if it subtends the changes in the world
+and causes them, must evidently change with them), but even mathematical
+space and time, in their ideal infinity, may be very far from describing
+truly the medium and groundwork of the universe. That is a question for
+investigation and hypothesis, not for intuition. But in the life of
+intuition, when that life takes a mathematical turn, empty space and time
+and their definable structure may be important themes; while, when the
+same life becomes a discipline of the affections, we see by this latest
+example, as well as by many a renowned predecessor of M. Benda, that
+infinite Being may dominate the scene.
+
+Nor is this eventual dominance so foreign to the natural mind, or such a
+miraculous conversion, as it might seem. Here, too, there is no derivation
+of object from object, but an alternative for the mind. As M. Benda points
+out, natural interests and sympathies may expand indefinitely, so as to
+embrace a family, a nation, or the whole animate universe; we might even
+be chiefly occupied with liberal pursuits, such as science or music; the
+more we laboured at these things and delighted in them, the less ready
+should we be for renunciation and detachment. Must conversion then descend
+upon us from heaven like a thunderbolt? Far from it. We need not look for
+the principle of spiritual life in the distance: we have it at home from
+the beginning. Even the idea of infinite Being, though unnamed, is
+probably familiar. Perhaps in the biography of the human race, or of each
+budding mind, the infinite or indeterminate may have been the primary
+datum. On that homogeneous sensuous background, blank at first but
+secretly plastic, a spot here and a movement there may gradually have
+become discernible, until the whole picture of nature and history had
+shaped itself as we see it. A certain sense of that primitive datum, the
+infinite or indeterminate, may always remain as it were the outstretched
+canvas on which every picture is painted. And when the pictures vanish, as
+in deep sleep, the ancient simplicity and quietness may be actually
+recovered, in a conscious union with Brahma. So sensuous, so intimate, so
+unsophisticated the "return to God" may be for the spirit, without
+excluding the other avenues, intellectual and ascetic, by which this
+return may be effected in waking life, though then not so much in act as
+in intent only and allegiance.
+
+I confess that formerly I had some difficulty in sharing the supreme
+respect for infinite Being which animates so many saints: it seemed to me
+the dazed, the empty, the deluded side of spirituality. Why rest in an
+object which can be redeemed from blank negation only by a blank
+intensity? But time has taught me not to despise any form of vital
+imagination, any discipline which may achieve perfection after any kind.
+Intuition is a broadly based activity; it engages elaborate organs and
+sums up and synthesises accumulated impressions. It may therefore easily
+pour the riches of its ancestry into the image or the sentiment which it
+evokes, poor as this sentiment or image might seem if expressed in words.
+In rapt or ecstatic moments, the vital momentum, often the moral escape,
+is everything, and the achievement, apart from that blessed relief, little
+or nothing. Infinite Being may profit in this way by offering a contrast
+to infinite annoyance. Moreover, in my own way, I have discerned in pure
+Being the involution of all forms. As felt, pure Being may be
+indeterminate, but as conceived reflectively it includes all
+determinations: so that when deployed into the realm of essence, infinite
+or indeterminate Being truly contains entertainment for all eternity.
+
+M. Benda feels this pregnancy of the infinite on the mathematical side;
+but he hardly notices the fact, proclaimed so gloriously by Spinoza, that
+the infinity of extension is only one of an infinity of infinites. There
+is an aesthetic infinite, or many aesthetic infinites, composed of all the
+forms which nature or imagination might exhibit; and where imagination
+fails, there are infinite remainders of the unimagined. The version which
+M. Benda gives us of infinite Being, limited to the mathematical
+dimension, is therefore unnecessarily cold and stark. His one infinity is
+monochrome, whereas the total infinity of essence, in which an infinity of
+outlines is only one item, is infinitely many-coloured. Phenomena
+therefore fall, in their essential variety, within and not without
+infinite Being: so that in "returning to God" we might take the whole
+world with us, not indeed in its blind movement and piecemeal
+illumination, as events occur, but in an after-image and panoramic
+portrait, as events are gathered together in the realm of truth.
+
+On the whole I think M. Benda's two Gods are less unfriendly to one
+another than his aggrieved tone might suggest. This pregnant little book
+ends on a tragic note.
+
+     "Hitherto human self-assertion in the state or the family, while
+     serving the imperial God, has paid some grudging honours, at least
+     verbally, to the infinite God as well, under the guise of
+     liberalism, love of mankind, or the negation of classes. But today
+     this imperfect homage is retracted, and nothing is reverenced
+     except that which gives strength. If anyone preaches human
+     kindness, it is in order to establish a "strong" community
+     martially trained, like a super-state, to oppose everything not
+     included within it, and to become omnipotent in the art of
+     utilising the non-human forces of nature.... The will to return to
+     God may prove to have been, in the history of the phenomenal world,
+     a sublime accident."
+
+Certainly the will to "return to God", if not an accident, is an incident
+in the life of the world; and the whole world itself is a sublime
+accident, in the sense that its existence is contingent, groundless, and
+precarious. Yet so long as the imperial God continues successfully to keep
+our world going, it will be no accident, but a natural necessity, that
+many a mind should turn to the thought of the infinite with awe, with a
+sense of liberation, and even with joy. The infinite God owes all his
+worshippers, little as he may care for them, to the success of the
+imperial God in creating reflective and speculative minds. Or (to drop
+these mythological expressions which may become tiresome) philosophers owe
+to nature and to the discipline of moral life their capacity to look
+beyond nature and beyond morality. And while they may _look_ beyond, and
+take comfort in the vision, they cannot _pass_ beyond. As M. Benda says,
+the most faithful Levite can return to the infinite only in his thought;
+in his life he must remain a lay creature. Yet nature, in forming the
+human soul, unintentionally unlocked for the mind the doors to truth and
+to essence, partly by obliging the soul to attend to things which are
+outside, and partly by endowing the soul with far greater potentialities
+of sensation and invention than daily life is likely to call forth. Our
+minds are therefore naturally dissatisfied with their lot and
+speculatively directed upon an outspread universe in which our persons
+count for almost nothing. These insights are calculated to give our brutal
+wills some pause. Intuition of the infinite and recourse to the infinite
+for religious inspiration follow of themselves, and can never be
+suppressed altogether, so long as life is conscious and experience
+provokes reflection.
+
+Spirit is certainly not one of the forces producing spirit, but neither is
+it a contrary force. It is the actuality of feeling, of observation, of
+meaning. Spirit has no unmannerly quarrel with its parents, its hosts, or
+even its gaolers: they know not what they do. Yet spirit belongs
+intrinsically to another sphere, and cannot help wondering at the world,
+and suffering in it. The man in whom spirit is awake will continue to
+live and act, but with a difference. In so far as he has become pure
+spirit he will have transcended the fear of death or defeat; for now his
+instinctive fear, which will subsist, will be neutralised by an equally
+sincere consent to die and to fail. He will live henceforth in a truer and
+more serene sympathy with nature than is possible to rival natural beings.
+Natural beings are perpetually struggling to live only, and not to die; so
+that their will is in hopeless rebellion against the divine decrees which
+they must obey notwithstanding. The spiritual man, on the contrary, in so
+far as he has already passed intellectually into the eternal world, no
+longer endures unwillingly the continual death involved in living, or the
+final death involved in having been born. He renounces everything
+religiously in the very act of attaining it, resigning existence itself as
+gladly as he accepts it, or even more gladly; because the emphasis which
+action and passion lend to the passing moment seems to him arbitrary and
+violent; and as each task or experience is dismissed in turn, he accounts
+the end of it more blessed than the beginning.
+
+
+[11] The following quotations are drawn from _Beyond the Pleasure
+Principle_, by Sigmund Freud; authorised translation by C.J.M. Hubback.
+The International Psycho-Analytic Press, 1922, pp. 29-48. The italics
+are in the original.
+
+[12] _Essai d'un Discours coherent sur les Rapports de Dieu et du
+Monde._ Par Julien Benda. Librairie Gallimard, Paris, 1931.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Some Turns of Thought in Modern
+Philosophy, by George Santayana
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