{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_15000/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_15000","id":"gutenberg_15000","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15000","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Philosophy"],"text":"THE LIFE OF REASON\n\nThe Phases of Human Progress\n\nVolumes One Through Five\n\n\nGEORGE SANTAYANA\n\n\nh\u00ea gar noy enhergeia z\u00f4h\u00ea\n\n\n\n\nIn Five Volumes\n\n    Introduction to Life of Reason\n\n    Volume One\n\n    Volume Two\n\n    Volume Three\n\n    Volume Four\n\n    Volume Five\n\n\n\n\nREASON IN COMMON SENSE\n\nVolume One of \u201cThe Life of Reason\u201d\n\nGEORGE SANTAYANA\n\n\nh\u00ea gar noy enhergeia z\u00f4h\u00ea\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\nTHE SUBJECT OF THIS WORK, ITS METHOD AND ANTECEDENTS\n\nProgress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates.\u2014Efficacious\nreflection is reason.\u2014The Life of Reason a name for all practical\nthought and all action justified by its fruits in consciousness.\u2014It is\nthe sum of Art.\u2014It has a natural basis which makes it definable.\u2014Modern\nphilosophy not helpful.\u2014Positivism no positive ideal.\u2014Christian\nphilosophy mythical: it misrepresents facts and conditions.\u2014Liberal\ntheology a superstitious attitude toward a natural world.\u2014The Greeks\nthought straight in both physics and morals.\u2014Heraclitus and the\nimmediate.\u2014Democritus and the naturally intelligible.\u2014Socrates and the\nautonomy of mind.\u2014Plato gave the ideal its full expression.\u2014Aristotle\nsupplied its natural basis.\u2014Philosophy thus complete, yet in need\nof restatement.\u2014Plato\u2019s myths in lieu of physics.\u2014Aristotle\u2019s final\ncauses.\u2014Modern science can avoid such expedients.\u2014Transcendentalism\ntrue but inconsequential.\u2014Verbal ethics.\u2014Spinoza and the Life of\nReason.\u2014Modern and classic sources of inspiration. Pages 1-32\n\n\nREASON IN COMMON SENSE\n\nCHAPTER I\n\nTHE BIRTH OF REASON\n\nExistence always has an Order, called Chaos when incompatible with\na chosen good.\u2014Absolute order, or truth, is static, impotent,\nindifferent.\u2014In experience order is relative to interests which\ndetermine the moral status of all powers.\u2014The discovered conditions\nof reason not its beginning.\u2014The flux first.\u2014Life the fixation of\ninterests.\u2014Primary dualities.\u2014First gropings.\u2014Instinct the nucleus of\nreason.\u2014Better and worse the fundamental categories. Pages 35-47\n\n\nCHAPTER II\n\nFIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS\n\nDreams before thoughts.\u2014The mind vegetates uncontrolled save by\nphysical forces.\u2014Internal order supervenes.\u2014Intrinsic pleasure in\nexistence.\u2014Pleasure a good, but not pursued or remembered unless it\nsuffuses an object.\u2014Subhuman delights.\u2014Animal living.\u2014Causes at last\ndiscerned.\u2014Attention guided by bodily impulse. Pages 48-63\n\n\nCHAPTER III\n\nTHE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS\n\nNature man\u2019s home.\u2014Difficulties in conceiving nature.\u2014Transcendental\nqualms.\u2014Thought an aspect of life and transitive.\u2014Perception\ncumulative and synthetic.\u2014No identical agent needed.\u2014Example of the\nsun.\u2014His primitive divinity.\u2014Causes and essences contrasted.\u2014Voracity\nof intellect.\u2014Can the transcendent be known?\u2014Can the immediate\nbe meant?\u2014Is thought a bridge from sensation to sensation?\u2014_Mens\nnaturaliter platonica_.\u2014Identity and independence predicated of things.\nPages 64-83\n\n\nCHAPTER IV\n\nON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERY\n\nPsychology as a solvent.\u2014Misconceived r\u00f4le of intelligence.\u2014All\ncriticism dogmatic.\u2014A choice of hypotheses.\u2014Critics\ndisguised enthusiasts.\u2014Hume\u2019s gratuitous scepticism.\u2014Kant\u2019s\nsubstitute for knowledge.\u2014False subjectivity attributed to\nreason.\u2014Chimerical reconstruction.\u2014The Critique a work on\nmental architecture.\u2014Incoherences.\u2014Nature the true system of\nconditions.\u2014Artificial pathos in subjectivism.\u2014Berkeley\u2019s algebra\nof perception.\u2014Horror of physics.\u2014Puerility in morals.\u2014Truism and\nsophism.\u2014Reality is the practical made intelligible.\u2014Vain \u201crealities\u201d\nand trustworthy \u201cfictions\u201d. Pages 84-117\n\n\nCHAPTER V\n\nNATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED\n\nMan\u2019s feeble grasp of nature.\u2014Its unity ideal and discoverable only\nby steady thought.\u2014Mind the erratic residue of existence.\u2014Ghostly\ncharacter of mind.\u2014Hypostasis and criticism both need\ncontrol.\u2014Comparative constancy in objects and in ideas.\u2014Spirit and\nsense defined by their relation to nature.\u2014Vague notions of nature\ninvolve vague notions of spirit.\u2014Sense and spirit the life of nature,\nwhich science redistributes but does not deny. Pages 118-136\n\n\nCHAPTER VI\n\nDISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS\n\nAnother background for current experience may be found in alien\nminds.\u2014Two usual accounts of this conception criticised: analogy\nbetween bodies, and dramatic dialogue in the soul.\u2014Subject and\nobject empirical, not transcendental, terms.\u2014Objects originally\nsoaked in secondary and tertiary qualities.\u2014Tertiary qualities\ntransposed.\u2014Imputed mind consists of the tertiary qualities\nof perceived body\u2014\u201cPathetic fallacy\u201d normal, yet ordinarily\nfallacious.\u2014Case where it is not a fallacy.\u2014Knowledge succeeds only by\naccident.\u2014Limits of insight.\u2014Perception of character.\u2014Conduct divined,\nconsciousness ignored.\u2014Consciousness untrustworthy.\u2014Metaphorical\nmind.\u2014Summary. Pages 137-160\n\n\nCHAPTER VII\n\nCONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE AND IN EXISTENCE\n\nSo-called abstract qualities primary.\u2014General qualities prior to\nparticular things.\u2014Universals are concretions in discourse.\u2014Similar\nreactions, merged in one habit of reproduction, yield an idea.\u2014Ideas\nare ideal.\u2014So-called abstractions complete facts.\u2014Things concretions\nof concretions.\u2014Ideas prior in the order of knowledge, things in the\norder of nature.\u2014Aristotle\u2019s compromise.\u2014Empirical bias in favour of\ncontiguity.\u2014Artificial divorce of logic from practice.\u2014Their mutual\ninvolution.\u2014Rationalistic suicide.\u2014Complementary character of essence\nand existence. Pages 161-183\n\n\nCHAPTER VIII\n\nON THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS\n\nMoral tone of opinions derived from their logical\nprinciple.\u2014Concretions in discourse express instinctive\nreactions.\u2014Idealism rudimentary.\u2014Naturalism sad.\u2014The soul akin to\nthe eternal and ideal.\u2014Her inexperience.\u2014Platonism spontaneous.\u2014Its\nessential fidelity to the ideal.\u2014Equal rights of empiricism.\u2014Logic\ndependent on fact for its importance, and for its subsistence.\u2014Reason\nand docility.\u2014Applicable thought and clarified experience. Pages 184-204\n\n\nCHAPTER IX\n\nHOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL\n\nFunctional relations of mind and body.\u2014They form one natural\nlife.\u2014Artifices involved in separating them.\u2014Consciousness expresses\nvital equilibrium and docility.\u2014Its worthlessness as a cause and value\nas an expression.\u2014Thought\u2019s march automatic and thereby implicated in\nevents.\u2014Contemplative essence of action.\u2014Mechanical efficacy alien to\nthought\u2019s essence.\u2014Consciousness transcendental and transcendent.\u2014It\nis the seat of value.\u2014Apparent utility of pain.\u2014Its real\nimpotence.\u2014Preformations involved.\u2014Its untoward significance.\u2014Perfect\nfunction not unconscious.\u2014Inchoate ethics.\u2014Thought the entelechy of\nbeing.\u2014Its exuberance. Pages 205-235\n\n\nCHAPTER X\n\nTHE MEASURE OF VALUES IN REFLECTION\n\nHonesty in hedonism.\u2014Necessary qualifications.\u2014The will must\njudge.\u2014Injustice inherent in representation.\u2014\u00c6sthetic and speculative\ncruelty.\u2014Imputed values: their inconstancy.\u2014Methods of control.\u2014Example\nof fame.\u2014Disproportionate interest in the \u00e6sthetic.\u2014Irrational\nreligious allegiance.\u2014Pathetic idealisations.\u2014Inevitable impulsiveness\nin prophecy.\u2014The test a controlled present ideal. Pages 236-255\n\n\nCHAPTER XI\n\nSOME ABSTRACT CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL\n\nThe ultimate end a resultant.\u2014Demands the substance of\nideals.\u2014Discipline of the will.\u2014Demands made practical and\nconsistent.\u2014The ideal natural.\u2014Need of unity and finality.\u2014Ideals of\nnothing.\u2014Darwin on moral sense.\u2014Conscience and reason compared.\u2014Reason\nimposes no new sacrifice.\u2014Natural goods attainable and compatible in\nprinciple.\u2014Harmony the formal and intrinsic demand of reason. Pages\n256-268\n\n\nCHAPTER XII\n\nFLUX AND CONSTANCY IN HUMAN NATURE\n\nRespectable tradition that human nature is fixed.\u2014Contrary\ncurrents of opinion.\u2014Pantheism.\u2014Instability in existences does\nnot dethrone their ideals.\u2014Absolutist philosophy human and\nhalting.\u2014All science a deliverance of momentary thought.\u2014All\ncriticism likewise.\u2014Origins inessential.\u2014Ideals functional.\u2014They\nare transferable to similar beings.\u2014Authority internal.\u2014Reason\nautonomous.\u2014Its distribution.\u2014Natural selection of minds.\u2014Living\nstability.\u2014Continuity necessary to progress.\u2014Limits of variation.\nSpirit a heritage.\u2014Perfectibility.\u2014Nature and human nature.\u2014Human\nnature formulated.\u2014Its concrete description reserved for the sequel.\nPages 269-291\n\n\n\n\nIntroduction to \u201cThe Life of Reason\u201d\n\n\n[Sidenote: Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates.]\n\nWhatever forces may govern human life, if they are to be recognised by\nman, must betray themselves in human experience. Progress in science or\nreligion, no less than in morals and art, is a dramatic episode in man\u2019s\ncareer, a welcome variation in his habit and state of mind; although\nthis variation may often regard or propitiate things external,\nadjustment to which may be important for his welfare. The importance of\nthese external things, as well as their existence, he can establish only\nby the function and utility which a recognition of them may have in his\nlife. The entire history of progress is a moral drama, a tale man might\nunfold in a great autobiography, could his myriad heads and countless\nscintillas of consciousness conspire, like the seventy Alexandrian\nsages, in a single version of the truth committed to each for\ninterpretation. What themes would prevail in such an examination of\nheart? In what order and with what emphasis would they be recounted? In\nwhich of its adventures would the human race, reviewing its whole\nexperience, acknowledge a progress and a gain? To answer these\nquestions, as they may be answered speculatively and provisionally by an\nindividual, is the purpose of the following work.\n\n[Sidenote: Efficacious reflection is reason.]\n\nA philosopher could hardly have a higher ambition than to make himself a\nmouth-piece for the memory and judgment of his race. Yet the most casual\nconsideration of affairs already involves an attempt to do the same\nthing. Reflection is pregnant from the beginning with all the principles\nof synthesis and valuation needed in the most comprehensive criticism.\nSo soon as man ceases to be wholly immersed in sense, he looks before\nand after, he regrets and desires; and the moments in which prospect or\nretrospect takes place constitute the reflective or representative part\nof his life, in contrast to the unmitigated flux of sensations in which\nnothing ulterior is regarded. Representation, however, can hardly remain\nidle and merely speculative. To the ideal function of envisaging the\nabsent, memory and reflection will add (since they exist and constitute\na new complication in being) the practical function of modifying the\nfuture. Vital impulse, however, when it is modified by reflection and\nveers in sympathy with judgments pronounced on the past, is properly\ncalled reason. Man\u2019s rational life consists in those moments in which\nreflection not only occurs but proves efficacious. What is absent then\nworks in the present, and values are imputed where they cannot be felt.\nSuch representation is so far from being merely speculative that its\npresence alone can raise bodily change to the dignity of action.\nReflection gathers experiences together and perceives their relative\nworth; which is as much as to say that it expresses a new attitude of\nwill in the presence of a world better understood and turned to some\npurpose. The limits of reflection mark those of concerted and rational\naction; they circumscribe the field of cumulative experience, or, what\nis the same thing, of profitable living.\n\n[Sidenote: The Life of Reason a name for all practical thought and all\naction justified by its fruits in consciousness.]\n\nThus if we use the word life in a eulogistic sense to designate the\nhappy maintenance against the world of some definite ideal interest, we\nmay say with Aristotle that life is reason in operation. The _Life of\nReason_ will then be a name for that part of experience which perceives\nand pursues ideals\u2014all conduct so controlled and all sense so\ninterpreted as to perfect natural happiness.\n\nWithout reason, as without memory, there might still be pleasures and\npains in existence. To increase those pleasures and reduce those pains\nwould be to introduce an improvement into the sentient world, as if a\ndevil suddenly died in hell or in heaven a new angel were created. Since\nthe beings, however, in which these values would reside, would, by\nhypothesis, know nothing of one another, and since the betterment would\ntake place unprayed-for and unnoticed, it could hardly be called a\nprogress; and certainly not a progress in man, since man, without the\nideal continuity given by memory and reason, would have no moral being.\nIn human progress, therefore, reason is not a casual instrument, having\nits sole value in its service to sense; such a betterment in sentience\nwould not be progress unless it were a progress in reason, and the\nincreasing pleasure revealed some object that could please; for without\na picture of the situation from which a heightened vitality might flow,\nthe improvement could be neither remembered nor measured nor desired.\nThe Life of Reason is accordingly neither a mere means nor a mere\nincident in human progress; it is the total and embodied progress\nitself, in which the pleasures of sense are included in so far as they\ncan be intelligently enjoyed and pursued. To recount man\u2019s rational\nmoments would be to take an inventory of all his goods; for he is not\nhimself (as we say with unconscious accuracy) in the others. If he ever\nappropriates them in recollection or prophecy, it is only on the ground\nof some physical relation which they may have to his being.\n\nReason is as old as man and as prevalent as human nature; for we should\nnot recognise an animal to be human unless his instincts were to some\ndegree conscious of their ends and rendered his ideas in that measure\nrelevant to conduct. Many sensations, or even a whole world of dreams,\ndo not amount to intelligence until the images in the mind begin to\nrepresent in some way, however symbolic, the forces and realities\nconfronted in action. There may well be intense consciousness in the\ntotal absence of rationality. Such consciousness is suggested in dreams,\nin madness, and may be found, for all we know, in the depths of\nuniversal nature. Minds peopled only by desultory visions and lusts\nwould not have the dignity of human souls even if they seemed to pursue\ncertain objects unerringly; for that pursuit would not be illumined by\nany vision of its goal. Reason and humanity begin with the union of\ninstinct and ideation, when instinct becomes enlightened, establishes\nvalues in its objects, and is turned from a process into an art, while\nat the same time consciousness becomes practical and cognitive,\nbeginning to contain some symbol or record of the co-ordinate realities\namong which it arises.\n\nReason accordingly requires the fusion of two types of life, commonly\nled in the world in well-nigh total separation, one a life of impulse\nexpressed in affairs and social passions, the other a life of reflection\nexpressed in religion, science, and the imitative arts. In the Life of\nReason, if it were brought to perfection, intelligence would be at once\nthe universal method of practice and its continual reward. All\nreflection would then be applicable in action and all action fruitful in\nhappiness. Though this be an ideal, yet everyone gives it from time to\ntime a partial embodiment when he practises useful arts, when his\npassions happily lead him to enlightenment, or when his fancy breeds\nvisions pertinent to his ultimate good. Everyone leads the Life of\nReason in so far as he finds a steady light behind the world\u2019s glitter\nand a clear residuum of joy beneath pleasure or success. No experience\nnot to be repented of falls without its sphere. Every solution to a\ndoubt, in so far as it is not a new error, every practical achievement\nnot neutralised by a second maladjustment consequent upon it, every\nconsolation not the seed of another greater sorrow, may be gathered\ntogether and built into this edifice. The Life of Reason is the happy\nmarriage of two elements\u2014impulse and ideation\u2014which if wholly divorced\nwould reduce man to a brute or to a maniac. The rational animal is\ngenerated by the union of these two monsters. He is constituted by ideas\nwhich have ceased to be visionary and actions which have ceased to be\nvain.\n\n[Sidenote: It is the sum of Art.]\n\nThus the Life of Reason is another name for what, in the widest sense of\nthe word, might be called Art. Operations become arts when their purpose\nis conscious and their method teachable. In perfect art the whole idea\nis creative and exists only to be embodied, while every part of the\nproduct is rational and gives delightful expression to that idea. Like\nart, again, the Life of Reason is not a power but a result, the\nspontaneous expression of liberal genius in a favouring environment.\nBoth art and reason have natural sources and meet with natural checks;\nbut when a process is turned successfully into an art, so that its\nissues have value and the ideas that accompany it become practical and\ncognitive, reflection, finding little that it cannot in some way justify\nand understand, begins to boast that it directs and has created the\nworld in which it finds itself so much at home. Thus if art could extend\nits sphere to include every activity in nature, reason, being everywhere\nexemplified, might easily think itself omnipotent. This ideal, far as it\nis from actual realisation, has so dazzled men, that in their religion\nand mythical philosophy they have often spoken as if it were already\nactual and efficient. This anticipation amounts, when taken seriously,\nto a confusion of purposes with facts and of functions with causes, a\nconfusion which in the interests of wisdom and progress it is important\nto avoid; but these speculative fables, when we take them for what they\nare\u2014poetic expressions of the ideal\u2014help us to see how deeply rooted\nthis ideal is in man\u2019s mind, and afford us a standard by which to\nmeasure his approaches to the rational perfection of which he dreams.\nFor the Life of Reason, being the sphere of all human art, is man\u2019s\nimitation of divinity.\n\n[Sidenote: It has a natural basis which makes it definable.]\n\nTo study such an ideal, dimly expressed though it be in human existence,\nis no prophetic or visionary undertaking. Every genuine ideal has a\nnatural basis; anyone may understand and safely interpret it who is\nattentive to the life from which it springs. To decipher the Life of\nReason nothing is needed but an analytic spirit and a judicious love of\nman, a love quick to distinguish success from failure in his great and\nconfused experiment of living. The historian of reason should not be a\nromantic poet, vibrating impotently to every impulse he finds afoot,\nwithout a criterion of excellence or a vision of perfection. Ideals are\nfree, but they are neither more numerous nor more variable than the\nliving natures that generate them. Ideals are legitimate, and each\ninitially envisages a genuine and innocent good; but they are not\nrealisable together, nor even singly when they have no deep roots in the\nworld. Neither is the philosopher compelled by his somewhat judicial\noffice to be a satirist or censor, without sympathy for those tentative\nand ingenuous passions out of which, after all, his own standards must\narise. He is the chronicler of human progress, and to measure that\nprogress he should be equally attentive to the impulses that give it\ndirection and to the circumstances amid which it stumbles toward its\nnatural goal.\n\n[Sidenote: Modern philosophy not helpful.]\n\nThere is unfortunately no school of modern philosophy to which a\ncritique of human progress can well be attached. Almost every school,\nindeed, can furnish something useful to the critic, sometimes a physical\ntheory, sometimes a piece of logical analysis. We shall need to borrow\nfrom current science and speculation the picture they draw of man\u2019s\nconditions and environment, his history and mental habits. These may\nfurnish a theatre and properties for our drama; but they offer no hint\nof its plot and meaning. A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the\nmind. One-half the learned world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour,\nas Don Quixote did his helmet; deputing it, after a series of\ncatastrophes, to be at last sound and invulnerable. The other half, the\nnaturalists who have studied psychology and evolution, look at life from\nthe outside, and the processes of Nature make them forget her uses.\nBacon indeed had prized science for adding to the comforts of life, a\nfunction still commemorated by positivists in their eloquent moments.\nHabitually, however, when they utter the word progress it is, in their\nmouths, a synonym for inevitable change, or at best for change in that\ndirection which they conceive to be on the whole predominant. If they\ncombine with physical speculation some elements of morals, these are\nusually purely formal, to the effect that happiness is to be pursued\n(probably, alas! because to do so is a psychological law); but what\nhappiness consists in we gather only from casual observations or by\nputting together their national prejudices and party saws.\n\n[Sidenote: Positivism no positive ideal.]\n\nThe truth is that even this radical school, emancipated as it thinks\nitself, is suffering from the after-effects of supernaturalism. Like\nchildren escaped from school, they find their whole happiness in\nfreedom. They are proud of what they have rejected, as if a great wit\nwere required to do so; but they do not know what they want. If you\nastonish them by demanding what is their positive ideal, further than\nthat there should be a great many people and that they should be all\nalike, they will say at first that what ought to be is obvious, and\nlater they will submit the matter to a majority vote. They have\ndiscarded the machinery in which their ancestors embodied the ideal;\nthey have not perceived that those symbols stood for the Life of Reason\nand gave fantastic and embarrassed expression to what, in itself, is\npure humanity; and they have thus remained entangled in the colossal\nerror that ideals are something adventitious and unmeaning, not having a\nsoil in mortal life nor a possible fulfilment there.\n\n[Sidenote: Christian philosophy mythical: it misrepresents facts and\nconditions.]\n\nThe profound and pathetic ideas which inspired Christianity were\nattached in the beginning to ancient myths and soon crystallised into\nmany new ones. The mythical manner pervades Christian philosophy; but\nmyth succeeds in expressing ideal life only by misrepresenting its\nhistory and conditions. This method was indeed not original with the\nFathers; they borrowed it from Plato, who appealed to parables himself\nin an open and harmless fashion, yet with disastrous consequences to his\nschool. Nor was he the first; for the instinct to regard poetic\nfictions as revelations of supernatural facts is as old as the soul\u2019s\nprimitive incapacity to distinguish dreams from waking perceptions, sign\nfrom thing signified, and inner emotions from external powers. Such\nconfusions, though in a way they obey moral forces, make a rational\nestimate of things impossible. To misrepresent the conditions and\nconsequences of action is no merely speculative error; it involves a\nfalse emphasis in character and an artificial balance and co-ordination\namong human pursuits. When ideals are hypostasised into powers alleged\nto provide for their own expression, the Life of Reason cannot be\nconceived; in theory its field of operation is pre-empted and its\nfunction gone, while in practice its inner impulses are turned awry by\nartificial stimulation and repression.\n\nThe Patristic systems, though weak in their foundations, were\nextraordinarily wise and comprehensive in their working out; and while\nthey inverted life they preserved it. Dogma added to the universe\nfabulous perspectives; it interpolated also innumerable incidents and\npowers which gave a new dimension to experience. Yet the old world\nremained standing in its strange setting, like the Pantheon in modern\nRome; and, what is more important, the natural springs of human action\nwere still acknowledged, and if a supernatural discipline was imposed,\nit was only because experience and faith had disclosed a situation in\nwhich the pursuit of earthly happiness seemed hopeless. Nature was not\ndestroyed by its novel appendages, nor did reason die in the cloister:\nit hibernated there, and could come back to its own in due season, only\na little dazed and weakened by its long confinement. Such, at least, is\nthe situation in Catholic regions, where the Patristic philosophy has\nnot appreciably varied. Among Protestants Christian dogma has taken a\nnew and ambiguous direction, which has at once minimised its disturbing\neffect in practice and isolated its primary illusion. The symptoms have\nbeen cured and the disease driven in.\n\n[Sidenote: Liberal theology a superstitious attitude toward a natural\nworld.]\n\nThe tenets of Protestant bodies are notoriously varied and on principle\nsubject to change. There is hardly a combination of tradition and\nspontaneity which has not been tried in some quarter. If we think,\nhowever, of broad tendencies and ultimate issues, it appears that in\nProtestantism myth, without disappearing, has changed its relation to\nreality: instead of being an extension to the natural world myth has\nbecome its substratum. Religion no longer reveals divine personalities,\nfuture rewards, and tenderer Elysian consolations; nor does it seriously\npropose a heaven to be reached by a ladder nor a purgatory to be\nshortened by prescribed devotions. It merely gives the real world an\nideal status and teaches men to accept a natural life on supernatural\ngrounds. The consequence is that the most pious can give an unvarnished\ndescription of things. Even immortality and the idea of God are\nsubmitted, in liberal circles, to scientific treatment. On the other\nhand, it would be hard to conceive a more inveterate obsession than that\nwhich keeps the attitude of these same minds inappropriate to the\nobjects they envisage. They have accepted natural conditions; they will\nnot accept natural ideals. The Life of Reason has no existence for them,\nbecause, although its field is clear, they will not tolerate any human\nor finite standard of value, and will not suffer extant interests, which\ncan alone guide them in action or judgment, to define the worth of life.\n\nThe after-effects of Hebraism are here contrary to its foundations; for\nthe Jews loved the world so much that they brought themselves, in order\nto win and enjoy it, to an intense concentration of purpose; but this\neffort and discipline, which had of course been mythically sanctioned,\nnot only failed of its object, but grew far too absolute and sublime to\nthink its object could ever have been earthly; and the supernatural\nmachinery which was to have secured prosperity, while that still\nenticed, now had to furnish some worthier object for the passion it had\nartificially fostered. Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort\nwhen you have forgotten your aim.\n\nAn earnestness which is out of proportion to any knowledge or love of\nreal things, which is therefore dark and inward and thinks itself deeper\nthan the earth\u2019s foundations\u2014such an earnestness, until culture turns\nit into intelligent interests, will naturally breed a new mythology. It\nwill try to place some world of Afrites and shadowy giants behind the\nconstellations, which it finds too distinct and constant to be its\ncompanions or supporters; and it will assign to itself vague and\ninfinite tasks, for which it is doubtless better equipped than for those\nwhich the earth now sets before it. Even these, however, since they are\nparts of an infinite whole, the mystic may (histrionically, perhaps, yet\nzealously) undertake; but as his eye will be perpetually fixed on\nsomething invisible beyond, and nothing will be done for its own sake or\nenjoyed in its own fugitive presence, there will be little art and\nlittle joy in existence. All will be a tossing servitude and illiberal\nmist, where the parts will have no final values and the whole no\npertinent direction.\n\n[Sidenote: The Greeks thought straight in both physics and morals.]\n\nIn Greek philosophy the situation is far more auspicious. The ancients\nled a rational life and envisaged the various spheres of speculation as\nmen might whose central interests were rational. In physics they leaped\nat once to the conception of a dynamic unity and general evolution, thus\ngiving that background to human life which shrewd observation would\nalways have descried, and which modern science has laboriously\nrediscovered. Two great systems offered, in two legitimate directions,\nwhat are doubtless the final and radical accounts of physical being.\nHeraclitus, describing the immediate, found it to be in constant and\npervasive change: no substances, no forms, no identities could be\narrested there, but as in the human soul, so in nature, all was\ninstability, contradiction, reconstruction, and oblivion. This remains\nthe empirical fact; and we need but to rescind the artificial division\nwhich Descartes has taught us to make between nature and life, to feel\nagain the absolute aptness of Heraclitus\u2019s expressions. These were\nthought obscure only because they were so disconcertingly penetrating\nand direct. The immediate is what nobody sees, because convention and\nreflection turn existence, as soon as they can, into ideas; a man who\ndiscloses the immediate seems profound, yet his depth is nothing but\ninnocence recovered and a sort of intellectual abstention. Mysticism,\nscepticism, and transcendentalism have all in their various ways tried\nto fall back on the immediate; but none of them has been ingenuous\nenough. Each has added some myth, or sophistry, or delusive artifice to\nits direct observation. Heraclitus remains the honest prophet of\nimmediacy: a mystic without raptures or bad rhetoric, a sceptic who does\nnot rely for his results on conventions unwittingly adopted, a\ntranscendentalist without false pretensions or incongruous dogmas.\n\n[Sidenote: Heraclitus and the immediate.]\n\nThe immediate is not, however, a good subject for discourse, and the\nexpounders of Heraclitus were not unnaturally blamed for monotony. All\nthey could do was to iterate their master\u2019s maxim, and declare\neverything to be in flux. In suggesting laws of recurrence and a reason\nin which what is common to many might be expressed, Heraclitus had\nopened the door into another region: had he passed through, his\nphilosophy would have been greatly modified, for permanent forms would\nhave forced themselves on his attention no less than shifting materials.\nSuch a Heraclitus would have anticipated Plato; but the time for such a\nsynthesis had not yet arrived.\n\n[Sidenote: Democritus and the naturally intelligible.]\n\nAt the opposite pole from immediacy lies intelligibility. To reduce\nphenomena to constant elements, as similar and simple as possible, and\nto conceive their union and separation to obey constant laws, is what a\nnatural philosopher will inevitably do so soon as his interest is not\nmerely to utter experience but to understand it. Democritus brought this\nscientific ideal to its ultimate expression. By including psychic\nexistence in his atomic system, he indicated a problem which natural\nscience has since practically abandoned but which it may some day be\ncompelled to take up. The atoms of Democritus seem to us gross, even for\nchemistry, and their quality would have to undergo great transformation\nif they were to support intelligibly psychic being as well; but that\nvery grossness and false simplicity had its merits, and science must be\nfor ever grateful to the man who at its inception could so clearly\nformulate its mechanical ideal. That the world is not so intelligible\nas we could wish is not to be wondered at. In other respects also it\nfails to respond to our ideals; yet our hope must be to find it more\npropitious to the intellect as well as to all the arts in proportion as\nwe learn better how to live in it.\n\nThe atoms of what we call hydrogen or oxygen may well turn out to be\nworlds, as the stars are which make atoms for astronomy. Their inner\norganisation might be negligible on our rude plane of being; did it\ndisclose itself, however, it would be intelligible in its turn only if\nconstant parts and constant laws were discernible within each system. So\nthat while atomism at a given level may not be a final or metaphysical\ntruth, it will describe, on every level, the practical and efficacious\nstructure of the world. We owe to Democritus this ideal of practical\nintelligibility; and he is accordingly an eternal spokesman of reason.\nHis system, long buried with other glories of the world, has been partly\nrevived; and although it cannot be verified in haste, for it represents\nan ultimate ideal, every advance in science reconstitutes it in some\nparticular. Mechanism is not one principle of explanation among others.\nIn natural philosophy, where to explain means to discover origins,\ntransmutations, and laws, mechanism is explanation itself.\n\nHeraclitus had the good fortune of having his physics absorbed by Plato.\nIt is a pity that Democritus\u2019 physics was not absorbed by Aristotle. For\nwith the flux observed, and mechanism conceived to explain it, the\ntheory of existence is complete; and had a complete physical theory been\nincorporated into the Socratic philosophy, wisdom would have lacked none\nof its parts. Democritus, however, appeared too late, when ideal science\nhad overrun the whole field and initiated a verbal and dialectical\nphysics; so that Aristotle, for all his scientific temper and studies,\nbuilt his natural philosophy on a lamentable misunderstanding, and\ncondemned thought to confusion for two thousand years.\n\n[Sidenote: Socrates and the autonomy of mind.]\n\nIf the happy freedom of the Greeks from religious dogma made them the\nfirst natural philosophers, their happy political freedom made them the\nfirst moralists. It was no accident that Socrates walked the Athenian\nagora; it was no petty patriotism that made him shrink from any other\nscene. His science had its roots there, in the personal independence,\nintellectual vivacity, and clever dialectic of his countrymen. Ideal\nscience lives in discourse; it consists in the active exercise of\nreason, in signification, appreciation, intent, and self-expression. Its\nsum total is to know oneself, not as psychology or anthropology might\ndescribe a man, but to know, as the saying is, one\u2019s own mind. Nor is he\nwho knows his own mind forbidden to change it; the dialectician has\nnothing to do with future possibilities or with the opinion of anyone\nbut the man addressed. This kind of truth is but adequate veracity; its\nonly object is its own intent. Having developed in the spirit the\nconsciousness of its meanings and purposes, Socrates rescued logic and\nethics for ever from authority. With his friends the Sophists, he made\nman the measure of all things, after bidding him measure himself, as\nthey neglected to do, by his own ideal. That brave humanity which had\nfirst raised its head in Hellas and had endowed so many things in heaven\nand earth, where everything was hitherto monstrous, with proportion and\nuse, so that man\u2019s works might justify themselves to his mind, now found\nin Socrates its precise definition; and it was naturally where the Life\nof Reason had been long cultivated that it came finally to be conceived.\n\n[Sidenote: Plato gave the ideal its full expression.]\n\nSocrates had, however, a plebeian strain in his humanity, and his\nutilitarianism, at least in its expression, hardly did justice to what\ngives utility to life. His condemnation for atheism\u2014if we choose to\ntake it symbolically\u2014was not altogether unjust: the gods of Greece were\nnot honoured explicitly enough in his philosophy. Human good appeared\nthere in its principle; you would not set a pilot to mend shoes, because\nyou knew your own purpose; but what purposes a civilised soul might\nharbour, and in what highest shapes the good might appear, was a problem\nthat seems not to have attracted his genius. It was reserved to Plato to\nbring the Socratic ethics to its sublimest expression and to elicit from\nthe depths of the Greek conscience those ancestral ideals which had\ninspired its legislators and been embodied in its sacred civic\ntraditions. The owl of Minerva flew, as Hegel says, in the dusk of\nevening; and it was horror at the abandonment of all creative virtues\nthat brought Plato to conceive them so sharply and to preach them in so\nsad a tone. It was after all but the love of beauty that made him\ncensure the poets; for like a true Greek and a true lover he wished to\nsee beauty flourish in the real world. It was love of freedom that made\nhim harsh to his ideal citizens, that they might be strong enough to\npreserve the liberal life. And when he broke away from political\npreoccupations and turned to the inner life, his interpretations proved\nthe absolute sufficiency of the Socratic method; and he left nothing\npertinent unsaid on ideal love and ideal immortality.\n\n[Sidenote: Aristotle supplied its natural basis.]\n\nBeyond this point no rendering of the Life of Reason has ever been\ncarried, Aristotle improved the detail, and gave breadth and precision\nto many a part. If Plato possessed greater imaginative splendour and\nmore enthusiasm in austerity, Aristotle had perfect sobriety and\nadequacy, with greater fidelity to the common sentiments of his race.\nPlato, by virtue of his scope and plasticity, together with a certain\nprophetic zeal, outran at times the limits of the Hellenic and the\nrational; he saw human virtue so surrounded and oppressed by physical\ndangers that he wished to give it mythical sanctions, and his fondness\nfor transmigration and nether punishments was somewhat more than\nplayful. If as a work of imagination his philosophy holds the first\nplace, Aristotle\u2019s has the decisive advantage of being the unalloyed\nexpression of reason. In Aristotle the conception of human nature is\nperfectly sound; everything ideal has a natural basis and everything\nnatural an ideal development. His ethics, when thoroughly digested and\nweighed, especially when the meagre outlines are filled in with Plato\u2019s\nmore discursive expositions, will seem therefore entirely final. The\nLife of Reason finds there its classic explication.\n\n[Sidenote: Philosophy thus complete, yet in need of restatement.]\n\nAs it is improbable that there will soon be another people so free from\npreoccupations, so gifted, and so fortunate as the Greeks, or capable in\nconsequence of so well exemplifying humanity, so also it is improbable\nthat a philosopher will soon arise with Aristotle\u2019s scope, judgment, or\nauthority, one knowing so well how to be both reasonable and exalted. It\nmight seem vain, therefore, to try to do afresh what has been done\nbefore with unapproachable success; and instead of writing inferior\nthings at great length about the Life of Reason, it might be simpler to\nread and to propagate what Aristotle wrote with such immortal justness\nand masterly brevity. But times change; and though the principles of\nreason remain the same the facts of human life and of human conscience\nalter. A new background, a new basis of application, appears for logic,\nand it may be useful to restate old truths in new words, the better to\nprove their eternal validity. Aristotle is, in his morals, Greek,\nconcise, and elementary. As a Greek, he mixes with the ideal argument\nillustrations, appreciations, and conceptions which are not inseparable\nfrom its essence. In themselves, no doubt, these accessories are better\nthan what in modern times would be substituted for them, being less\nsophisticated and of a nobler stamp; but to our eyes they disguise what\nis profound and universal in natural morality by embodying it in images\nwhich do not belong to our life. Our direst struggles and the last\nsanctions of our morality do not appear in them. The pagan world,\nbecause its maturity was simpler than our crudeness, seems childish to\nus. We do not find there our sins and holiness, our love, charity, and\nhonour.\n\nThe Greek too would not find in our world the things he valued most,\nthings to which he surrendered himself, perhaps, with a more constant\nself-sacrifice\u2014piety, country, friendship, and beauty; and he might add\nthat his ideals were rational and he could attain them, while ours are\nextravagant and have been missed. Yet even if we acknowledged his\ngreater good fortune, it would be impossible for us to go back and\nbecome like him. To make the attempt would show no sense of reality and\nlittle sense of humour. We must dress in our own clothes, if we do not\nwish to substitute a masquerade for practical existence. What we can\nadopt from Greek morals is only the abstract principle of their\ndevelopment; their foundation in all the extant forces of human nature\nand their effort toward establishing a perfect harmony among them. These\nforces themselves have perceptibly changed, at least in their relative\npower. Thus we are more conscious of wounds to stanch and wrongs to\nfight against, and less of goods to attain. The movement of conscience\nhas veered; the centre of gravity lies in another part of the character.\n\nAnother circumstance that invites a restatement of rational ethics is\nthe impressive illustration of their principle which subsequent history\nhas afforded. Mankind has been making extraordinary experiments of which\nAristotle could not dream; and their result is calculated to clarify\neven his philosophy. For in some respects it needed experiments and\nclarification. He had been led into a systematic fusion of dialectic\nwith physics, and of this fusion all pretentious modern philosophy is\nthe aggravated extension. Socrates\u2019 pupils could not abandon his ideal\nprinciples, yet they could not bear to abstain from physics altogether;\nthey therefore made a mock physics in moral terms, out of which theology\nwas afterward developed. Plato, standing nearer to Socrates and being no\nnaturalist by disposition, never carried the fatal experiment beyond the\nmythical stage. He accordingly remained the purer moralist, much as\nAristotle\u2019s judgment may be preferred in many particulars. Their\nrelative position may be roughly indicated by saying that Plato had no\nphysics and that Aristotle\u2019s physics was false; so that ideal science in\nthe one suffered from want of environment and control, while in the\nother it suffered from misuse in a sphere where it had no application.\n\n[Sidenote: Plato\u2019s myths in lieu of physics.]\n\nWhat had happened was briefly this: Plato, having studied many sorts of\nphilosophy and being a bold and universal genius, was not satisfied to\nleave all physical questions pending, as his master had done. He\nadopted, accordingly, Heraclitus\u2019s doctrine of the immediate, which he\nnow called the realm of phenomena; for what exists at any instant, if\nyou arrest and name it, turns out to have been an embodiment of some\nlogical essence, such as discourse might define; in every fact some idea\nmakes its appearance, and such an apparition of the ideal is a\nphenomenon. Moreover, another philosophy had made a deep impression on\nPlato\u2019s mind and had helped to develop Socratic definitions: Parmenides\nhad called the concept of pure Being the only reality; and to satisfy\nthe strong dialectic by which this doctrine was supported and at the\nsame time to bridge the infinite chasm between one formless substance\nand many appearances irrelevant to it, Plato substituted the many\nSocratic ideas, all of which were relevant to appearance, for the one\nconcept of Parmenides. The ideas thus acquired what is called\nmetaphysical subsistence; for they stood in the place of the Eleatic\nAbsolute, and at the same time were the realities that phenomena\nmanifested.\n\nThe technique of this combination is much to be admired; but the feat is\ntechnical and adds nothing to the significance of what Plato has to say\non any concrete subject. This barren triumph was, however, fruitful in\nmisunderstandings. The characters and values a thing possessed were now\nconceived to subsist apart from it, and might even have preceded it and\ncaused its existence; a mechanism composed of values and definitions\ncould thus be placed behind phenomena to constitute a substantial\nphysical world. Such a dream could not be taken seriously, until good\nsense was wholly lost and a bevy of magic spirits could be imagined\npeopling the infinite and yet carrying on the business of earth.\nAristotle rejected the metaphysical subsistence of ideas, but thought\nthey might still be essences operative in nature, if only they were\nidentified with the life or form of particular things. The dream thus\nlost its frank wildness, but none of its inherent incongruity: for the\nsense in which characters and values make a thing what it is, is purely\ndialectical. They give it its status in the ideal world; but the\nappearance of these characters and values here and now is what needs\nexplanation in physics, an explanation which can be furnished, of\ncourse, only by the physical concatenation and distribution of causes.\n\n[Sidenote: Aristotle\u2019s final causes. Modern science can avoid such\nexpedients.]\n\nAristotle himself did not fail to Aristotle\u2019s make this necessary\ndistinction between efficient cause and formal essence; but as his\nscience was only natural history, and mechanism had no plausibility in\nhis eyes, the efficiency of the cause was always due, in his view, to\nits ideal quality; as in heredity the father\u2019s human character, not his\nphysical structure, might seem to warrant the son\u2019s humanity. Every\nideal, before it could be embodied, had to pre-exist in some other\nembodiment; but as when the ultimate purpose of the cosmos is considered\nit seems to lie beyond any given embodiment, the highest ideal must\nsomehow exist disembodied. It must pre-exist, thought Aristotle, in\norder to supply, by way of magic attraction, a physical cause for\nperpetual movement in the world.\n\nIt must be confessed, in justice to this consummate philosopher, who is\nnot less masterly in the use of knowledge than unhappy in divination,\nthat the transformation of the highest good into a physical power is\nmerely incidental with him, and due to a want of faith (at that time\nexcusable) in mechanism and evolution. Aristotle\u2019s deity is always a\nmoral ideal and every detail in its definition is based on\ndiscrimination between the better and the worse. No accommodation to the\nways of nature is here allowed to cloud the kingdom of heaven; this\ndeity is not condemned to do whatever happens nor to absorb whatever\nexists. It is mythical only in its physical application; in moral\nphilosophy it remains a legitimate conception.\n\nTruth certainly exists, if existence be not too mean an attribute for\nthat eternal realm which is tenanted by ideals; but truth is repugnant\nto physical or psychical being. Moreover, truth may very well be\nidentified with an impassible intellect, which should do nothing but\npossess all truth, with no point of view, no animal warmth, and no\ntransitive process. Such an intellect and truth are expressions having a\ndifferent metaphorical background and connotation, but, when thought\nout, an identical import. They both attempt to evoke that ideal standard\nwhich human thought proposes to itself. This function is their effective\nessence. It insures their eternal fixity, and this property surely\nendows them with a very genuine and sublime reality. What is fantastic\nis only the dynamic function attributed to them by Aristotle, which\nobliges them to inhabit some fabulous extension to the physical world.\nEven this physical efficacy, however, is spiritualised as much as\npossible, since deity is said to move the cosmos only as an object of\nlove or an object of knowledge may move the mind. Such efficacy is\nimputed to a hypostasised end, but evidently resides in fact in the\nfunctioning and impulsive spirit that conceives and pursues an ideal,\nendowing it with whatever attraction it may seem to have. The absolute\nintellect described by Aristotle remains, therefore, as pertinent to\nthe Life of Reason as Plato\u2019s idea of the good. Though less\ncomprehensive (for it abstracts from all animal interests, from all\npassion and mortality), it is more adequate and distinct in the region\nit dominates. It expresses sublimely the goal of speculative thinking;\nwhich is none other than to live as much as may be in the eternal and to\nabsorb and be absorbed in the truth.\n\nThe rest of ancient philosophy belongs to the decadence and rests in\nphysics on eclecticism and in morals on despair. That creative breath\nwhich had stirred the founders and legislators of Greece no longer\ninspired their descendants. Helpless to control the course of events,\nthey took refuge in abstention or in conformity, and their ethics became\na matter of private economy and sentiment, no longer aspiring to mould\nthe state or give any positive aim to existence. The time was\napproaching when both speculation and morals were to regard the other\nworld; reason had abdicated the throne, and religion, after that brief\ninterregnum, resumed it for long ages.\n\n[Sidenote: Transcendentalism true but inconsequential.]\n\nSuch are the threads which tradition puts into the hands of an observer\nwho at the present time might attempt to knit the Life of Reason ideally\ntogether. The problem is to unite a trustworthy conception of the\nconditions under which man lives with an adequate conception of his\ninterests. Both conceptions, fortunately, lie before us. Heraclitus and\nDemocritus, in systems easily seen to be complementary, gave long ago a\npicture of nature such as all later observation, down to our own day,\nhas done nothing but fill out and confirm. Psychology and physics still\nrepeat their ideas, often with richer detail, but never with a more\nradical or prophetic glance. Nor does the transcendental philosophy, in\nspite of its self-esteem, add anything essential. It was a thing taken\nfor granted in ancient and scholastic philosophy that a being dwelling,\nlike man, in the immediate, whose moments are in flux, needed\nconstructive reason to interpret his experience and paint in his\nunstable consciousness some symbolic picture of the world. To have\nreverted to this constructive process and studied its stages is an\ninteresting achievement; but the construction is already made by\ncommon-sense and science, and it was visionary insolence in the Germans\nto propose to make that construction otherwise. Retrospective\nself-consciousness is dearly bought if it inhibits the intellect and\nembarrasses the inferences which, in its spontaneous operation, it has\nknown perfectly how to make. In the heat of scientific theorising or\ndialectical argument it is sometimes salutary to be reminded that we are\nmen thinking; but, after all, it is no news. We know that life is a\ndream, and how should thinking be more? Yet the thinking must go on,\nand the only vital question is to what practical or poetic conceptions\nit is able to lead us.\n\n[Sidenote: Verbal ethics.]\n\nSimilarly the Socratic philosophy affords a noble and genuine account of\nwhat goods may be realised by living. Modern theory has not done so much\nto help us here, however, as it has in physics. It seldom occurs to\nmodern moralists that theirs is the science of all good and the art of\nits attainment; they think only of some set of categorical precepts or\nsome theory of moral sentiments, abstracting altogether from the ideals\nreigning in society, in science, and in art. They deal with the\nsecondary question What ought I to do? without having answered the\nprimary question, What ought to be? They attach morals to religion\nrather than to politics, and this religion unhappily long ago ceased to\nbe wisdom expressed in fancy in order to become superstition overlaid\nwith reasoning. They divide man into compartments and the less they\nleave in the one labelled \u201cmorality\u201d the more sublime they think their\nmorality is; and sometimes pedantry and scholasticism are carried so far\nthat nothing but an abstract sense of duty remains in the broad region\nwhich should contain all human goods.\n\n[Sidenote: Spinoza and the Life of Reason.]\n\nSuch trivial sanctimony in morals is doubtless due to artificial views\nabout the conditions of welfare; the basis is laid in authority rather\nthan in human nature, and the goal in salvation rather than in\nhappiness. One great modern philosopher, however, was free from these\npreconceptions, and might have reconstituted the Life of Reason had he\nhad a sufficient interest in culture. Spinoza brought man back into\nnature, and made him the nucleus of all moral values, showing how he may\nrecognise his environment and how he may master it. But Spinoza\u2019s\nsympathy with mankind fell short of imagination; any noble political or\npoetical ideal eluded him. Everything impassioned seemed to him insane,\neverything human necessarily petty. Man was to be a pious tame animal,\nwith the stars shining above his head. Instead of imagination Spinoza\ncultivated mysticism, which is indeed an alternative. A prophet in\nspeculation, he remained a levite in sentiment. Little or nothing would\nneed to be changed in his system if the Life of Reason, in its higher\nranges, were to be grafted upon it; but such affiliation is not\nnecessary, and it is rendered unnatural by the lack of sweep and\ngenerosity in Spinoza\u2019s practical ideals.\n\n[Sidenote: Modern and classic sources of inspiration.]\n\nFor moral philosophy we are driven back, then, upon the ancients; but\nnot, of course, for moral inspiration. Industrialism and democracy, the\nFrench Revolution, the Renaissance, and even the Catholic system, which\nin the midst of ancient illusions enshrines so much tenderness and\nwisdom, still live in the world, though forgotten by philosophers, and\npoint unmistakably toward their several goals. Our task is not to\nconstruct but only to interpret ideals, confronting them with one\nanother and with the conditions which, for the most part, they alike\nignore. There is no need of refuting anything, for the will which is\nbehind all ideals and behind most dogmas cannot itself be refuted; but\nit may be enlightened and led to reconsider its intent, when its\nsatisfaction is seen to be either naturally impossible or inconsistent\nwith better things. The age of controversy is past; that of\ninterpretation has succeeded.\n\nHere, then, is the programme of the following work: Starting with the\nimmediate flux, in which all objects and impulses are given, to describe\nthe Life of Reason; that is, to note what facts and purposes seem to be\nprimary, to show how the conception of nature and life gathers around\nthem, and to point to the ideals of thought and action which are\napproached by this gradual mastering of experience by reason. A great\ntask, which it would be beyond the powers of a writer in this age either\nto execute or to conceive, had not the Greeks drawn for us the outlines\nof an ideal culture at a time when life was simpler than at present and\nindividual intelligence more resolute and free.\n\n\n\n\nREASON IN COMMON SENSE\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER I\u2014THE BIRTH OF REASON\n\n\n[Sidenote: Existence always has an Order, called Chaos when incompatible\nwith a chosen good.]\n\nWhether Chaos or Order lay at the beginning of things is a question once\nmuch debated in the schools but afterward long in abeyance, not so much\nbecause it had been solved as because one party had been silenced by\nsocial pressure. The question is bound to recur in an age when\nobservation and dialectic again freely confront each other. Naturalists\nlook back to chaos since they observe everything growing from seeds and\nshifting its character in regeneration. The order now established in the\nworld may be traced back to a situation in which it did not appear.\nDialecticians, on the other hand, refute this presumption by urging that\nevery collocation of things must have been preceded by another\ncollocation in itself no less definite and precise; and further that\nsome principle of transition or continuity must always have obtained,\nelse successive states would stand in no relation to one another,\nnotably not in the relation of cause and effect, expressed in a natural\nlaw, which is presupposed in this instance. Potentialities are\ndispositions, and a disposition involves an order, as does also the\npassage from any specific potentiality into act. Thus the world, we are\ntold, must always have possessed a structure.\n\nThe two views may perhaps be reconciled if we take each with a\nqualification. Chaos doubtless has existed and will return\u2014nay, it\nreigns now, very likely, in the remoter and inmost parts of the\nuniverse\u2014if by chaos we understand a nature containing none of the\nobjects we are wont to distinguish, a nature such that human life and\nhuman thought would be impossible in its bosom; but this nature must be\npresumed to have an order, an order directly importing, if the tendency\nof its movement be taken into account, all the complexities and\nbeauties, all the sense and reason which exist now. Order is accordingly\ncontinual; but only when order means not a specific arrangement,\nfavourable to a given form of life, but any arrangement whatsoever. The\nprocess by which an arrangement which is essentially unstable gradually\nshifts cannot be said to aim at every stage which at any moment it\ninvolves. For the process passes beyond. It presently abolishes all the\nforms which may have arrested attention and generated love; its initial\nenergy defeats every purpose which we may fondly attribute to it. Nor is\nit here necessary to remind ourselves that to call results their own\ncauses is always preposterous; for in this case even the mythical sense\nwhich might be attached to such language is inapplicable. Here the\nprocess, taken in the gross, does not, even by mechanical necessity,\nsupport the value which is supposed to guide it. That value is realised\nfor a moment only; so that if we impute to Cronos any intent to beget\nhis children we must also impute to him an intent to devour them.\n\n[Sidenote: Absolute order, or truth, is static, impotent, indifferent.]\n\nOf course the various states of the world, when we survey them\nretrospectively, constitute another and now static order called historic\ntruth. To this absolute and impotent order every detail is essential. If\nwe wished to abuse language so much as to speak of will in an \u201cAbsolute\u201d\nwhere change is excluded, so that nothing can be or be conceived beyond\nit, we might say that the Absolute willed everything that ever exists,\nand that the eternal order terminated in every fact indiscriminately;\nbut such language involves an after-image of motion and life, of\npreparation, risk, and subsequent accomplishment, adventures all\npre-supposing refractory materials and excluded from eternal truth by\nits very essence. The only function those traditional metaphors have is\nto shield confusion and sentimentality. Because Jehovah once fought for\nthe Jews, we need not continue to say that the truth is solicitous about\nus, when it is only we that are fighting to attain it. The universe can\nwish particular things only in so far as particular beings wish them;\nonly in its relative capacity can it find things good, and only in its\nrelative capacity can it be good for anything.\n\nThe efficacious or physical order which exists at any moment in the\nworld and out of which the next moment\u2019s order is developed, may\naccordingly be termed a relative chaos: a chaos, because the values\nsuggested and supported by the second moment could not have belonged to\nthe first; but merely a relative chaos, first because it probably\ncarried values of its own which rendered it an order in a moral and\neulogistic sense, and secondly because it was potentially, by virtue of\nits momentum, a basis for the second moment\u2019s values as well.\n\n[Sidenote: In experience order is relative to interests, which determine\nthe moral status of all powers.]\n\nHuman life, when it begins to possess intrinsic value, is an incipient\norder in the midst of what seems a vast though, to some extent, a\nvanishing chaos. This reputed chaos can be deciphered and appreciated by\nman only in proportion as the order in himself is confirmed and\nextended. For man\u2019s consciousness is evidently practical; it clings to\nhis fate, registers, so to speak, the higher and lower temperature of\nhis fortunes, and, so far as it can, represents the agencies on which\nthose fortunes depend. When this dramatic vocation of consciousness has\nnot been fulfilled at all, consciousness is wholly confused; the world\nit envisages seems consequently a chaos. Later, if experience has fallen\ninto shape, and there are settled categories and constant objects in\nhuman discourse, the inference is drawn that the original disposition\nof things was also orderly and indeed mechanically conducive to just\nthose feats of instinct and intelligence which have been since\naccomplished. A theory of origins, of substance, and of natural laws may\nthus be framed and accepted, and may receive confirmation in the further\nmarch of events. It will be observed, however, that what is credibly\nasserted about the past is not a report which the past was itself able\nto make when it existed nor one it is now able, in some oracular\nfashion, to formulate and to impose upon us. The report is a rational\nconstruction based and seated in present experience; it has no cogency\nfor the inattentive and no existence for the ignorant. Although the\nuniverse, then, may not have come from chaos, human experience certainly\nhas begun in a private and dreamful chaos of its own, out of which it\nstill only partially and momentarily emerges. The history of this\nawakening is of course not the same as that of the environing world\nultimately discovered; it is the history, however, of that discovery\nitself, of the knowledge through which alone the world can be revealed.\nWe may accordingly dispense ourselves from preliminary courtesies to the\nreal universal order, nature, the absolute, and the gods. We shall make\ntheir acquaintance in due season and better appreciate their moral\nstatus, if we strive merely to recall our own experience, and to retrace\nthe visions and reflections out of which those apparitions have grown.\n\n[Sidenote: The discovered conditions of reason not its beginning.]\n\nTo revert to primordial feeling is an exercise in mental disintegration,\nnot a feat of science. We might, indeed, as in animal psychology,\nretrace the situations in which instinct and sense seem first to appear\nand write, as it were, a genealogy of reason based on circumstantial\nevidence. Reason was born, as it has since discovered, into a world\nalready wonderfully organised, in which it found its precursor in what\nis called life, its seat in an animal body of unusual plasticity, and\nits function in rendering that body\u2019s volatile instincts and sensations\nharmonious with one another and with the outer world on which they\ndepend. It did not arise until the will or conscious stress, by which\nany modification of living bodies\u2019 inertia seems to be accompanied,\nbegan to respond to represented objects, and to maintain that inertia\nnot absolutely by resistance but only relatively and indirectly through\nlabour. Reason has thus supervened at the last stage of an adaptation\nwhich had long been carried on by irrational and even unconscious\nprocesses. Nature preceded, with all that fixation of impulses and\nconditions which gives reason its tasks and its _point-d\u2019appui_.\nNevertheless, such a matrix or cradle for reason belongs only externally\nto its life. The description of conditions involves their previous\ndiscovery and a historian equipped with many data and many analogies of\nthought. Such scientific resources are absent in those first moments of\nrational living which we here wish to recall; the first chapter in\nreason\u2019s memoirs would no more entail the description of its real\nenvironment than the first chapter in human history would include true\naccounts of astronomy, psychology, and animal evolution.\n\n[Sidenote: The flux first.]\n\nIn order to begin at the beginning we must try to fall back on\nuninterpreted feeling, as the mystics aspire to do. We need not expect,\nhowever, to find peace there, for the immediate is in flux. Pure feeling\nrejoices in a logical nonentity very deceptive to dialectical minds.\nThey often think, when they fall back on elements necessarily\nindescribable, that they have come upon true nothingness. If they are\nmystics, distrusting thought and craving the largeness of indistinction,\nthey may embrace this alleged nothingness with joy, even if it seem\npositively painful, hoping to find rest there through self-abnegation.\nIf on the contrary they are rationalists they may reject the immediate\nwith scorn and deny that it exists at all, since in their books they\ncannot define it satisfactorily. Both mystics and rationalists, however,\nare deceived by their mental agility; the immediate exists, even if\ndialectic cannot explain it. What the rationalist calls nonentity is the\nsubstrate and locus of all ideas, having the obstinate reality of\nmatter, the crushing irrationality of existence itself; and one who\nattempts to override it becomes to that extent an irrelevant rhapsodist,\ndealing with thin after-images of being. Nor has the mystic who sinks\ninto the immediate much better appreciated the situation. This immediate\nis not God but chaos; its nothingness is pregnant, restless, and\nbrutish; it is that from which all things emerge in so far as they have\nany permanence or value, so that to lapse into it again is a dull\nsuicide and no salvation. Peace, which is after all what the mystic\nseeks, lies not in indistinction but in perfection. If he reaches it in\na measure himself, it is by the traditional discipline he still\npractises, not by his heats or his languors.\n\nThe seed-bed of reason lies, then, in the immediate, but what reason\ndraws thence is momentum and power to rise above its source. It is the\nperturbed immediate itself that finds or at least seeks its peace in\nreason, through which it comes in sight of some sort of ideal\npermanence. When the flux manages to form an eddy and to maintain by\nbreathing and nutrition what we call a life, it affords some slight\nfoothold and object for thought and becomes in a measure like the ark in\nthe desert, a moving habitation for the eternal.\n\n[Sidenote: Life the fixation of interests.]\n\nLife begins to have some value and continuity so soon as there is\nsomething definite that lives and something definite to live for. The\nprimacy of will, as Fichte and Schopenhauer conceived it, is a mythical\nway of designating this situation. Of course a will can have no being in\nthe absence of realities or ideas marking its direction and contrasting\nthe eventualities it seeks with those it flies from; and tendency, no\nless than movement, needs an organised medium to make it possible, while\naspiration and fear involve an ideal world. Yet a principle of choice is\nnot deducible from mere ideas, and no interest is involved in the formal\nrelations of things. All survey needs an arbitrary starting-point; all\nvaluation rests on an irrational bias. The absolute flux cannot be\nphysically arrested; but what arrests it ideally is the fixing of some\npoint in it from which it can be measured and illumined. Otherwise it\ncould show no form and maintain no preference; it would be impossible to\napproach or recede from a represented state, and to suffer or to exert\nwill in view of events. The irrational fate that lodges the\ntranscendental self in this or that body, inspires it with definite\npassions, and subjects it to particular buffets from the outer\nworld\u2014this is the prime condition of all observation and inference, of\nall failure or success.\n\n[Sidenote: Primary dualities.]\n\nThose sensations in which a transition is contained need only analysis\nto yield two ideal and related terms\u2014two points in space or two\ncharacters in feeling. Hot and cold, here and there, good and bad, now\nand then, are dyads that spring into being when the flux accentuates\nsome term and so makes possible a discrimination of parts and directions\nin its own movement. An initial attitude sustains incipient interests.\nWhat we first discover in ourselves, before the influence we obey has\ngiven rise to any definite idea, is the working of instincts already in\nmotion. Impulses to appropriate and to reject first teach us the points\nof the compass, and space itself, like charity, begins at home.\n\n[Sidenote: First gropings. Instinct the nucleus of reason.]\n\nThe guide in early sensuous education is the same that conducts the\nwhole Life of Reason, namely, impulse checked by experiment, and\nexperiment judged again by impulse. What teaches the child to\ndistinguish the nurse\u2019s breast from sundry blank or disquieting\npresences? What induces him to arrest that image, to mark its\nassociates, and to recognise them with alacrity? The discomfort of its\nabsence and the comfort of its possession. To that image is attached the\nchief satisfaction he knows, and the force of that satisfaction\ndisentangles it before all other images from the feeble and fluid\ncontinuum of his life. What first awakens in him a sense of reality is\nwhat first is able to appease his unrest.\n\nHad the group of feelings, now welded together in fruition, found no\ninstinct in him to awaken and become a signal for, the group would never\nhave persisted; its loose elements would have been allowed to pass by\nunnoticed and would not have been recognised when they recurred.\nExperience would have remained absolute inexperience, as foolishly\nperpetual as the gurglings of rivers or the flickerings of sunlight in a\ngrove. But an instinct was actually present, so formed as to be aroused\nby a determinate stimulus; and the image produced by that stimulus, when\nit came, could have in consequence a meaning and an individuality. It\nseemed by divine right to signify something interesting, something real,\nbecause by natural contiguity it flowed from something pertinent and\nimportant to life. Every accompanying sensation which shared that\nprivilege, or in time was engrossed in that function, would ultimately\nbecome a part of that conceived reality, a quality of that thing.\n\nThe same primacy of impulses, irrational in themselves but expressive of\nbodily functions, is observable in the behaviour of animals, and in\nthose dreams, obsessions, and primary passions which in the midst of\nsophisticated life sometimes lay bare the obscure groundwork of human\nnature. Reason\u2019s work is there undone. We can observe sporadic growths,\ndisjointed fragments of rationality, springing up in a moral wilderness.\nIn the passion of love, for instance, a cause unknown to the sufferer,\nbut which is doubtless the spring-flood of hereditary instincts\naccidentally let loose, suddenly checks the young man\u2019s gayety, dispels\nhis random curiosity, arrests perhaps his very breath; and when he looks\nfor a cause to explain his suspended faculties, he can find it only in\nthe presence or image of another being, of whose character, possibly, he\nknows nothing and whose beauty may not be remarkable; yet that image\npursues him everywhere, and he is dominated by an unaccustomed tragic\nearnestness and a new capacity for suffering and joy. If the passion be\nstrong there is no previous interest or duty that will be remembered\nbefore it; if it be lasting the whole life may be reorganised by it; it\nmay impose new habits, other manners, and another religion. Yet what is\nthe root of all this idealism? An irrational instinct, normally\nintermittent, such as all dumb creatures share, which has here managed\nto dominate a human soul and to enlist all the mental powers in its more\nor less permanent service, upsetting their usual equilibrium. This\nmadness, however, inspires method; and for the first time, perhaps, in\nhis life, the man has something to live for. The blind affinity that\nlike a magnet draws all the faculties around it, in so uniting them,\nsuffuses them with an unwonted spiritual light.\n\n[Sidenote: Better and worse the fundamental categories.]\n\nHere, on a small scale and on a precarious foundation, we may see\nclearly illustrated and foreshadowed that Life of Reason which is simply\nthe unity given to all existence by a mind _in love with the good_. In\nthe higher reaches of human nature, as much as in the lower, rationality\ndepends on distinguishing the excellent; and that distinction can be\nmade, in the last analysis, only by an irrational impulse. As life is a\nbetter form given to force, by which the universal flux is subdued to\ncreate and serve a somewhat permanent interest, so reason is a better\nform given to interest itself, by which it is fortified and propagated,\nand ultimately, perhaps, assured of satisfaction. The substance to which\nthis form is given remains irrational; so that rationality, like all\nexcellence, is something secondary and relative, requiring a natural\nbeing to possess or to impute it. When definite interests are recognised\nand the values of things are estimated by that standard, action at the\nsame time veering in harmony with that estimation, then reason has been\nborn and a moral world has arisen.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER II\u2014FIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS\n\n\n[Sidenote: Dreams before thoughts.]\n\nConsciousness is a born hermit. Though subject, by divine dispensation,\nto spells of fervour and apathy, like a singing bird, it is at first\nquite unconcerned about its own conditions or maintenance. To acquire a\nnotion of such matters, or an interest in them, it would have to lose\nits hearty simplicity and begin to reflect; it would have to forget the\npresent with its instant joys in order laboriously to conceive the\nabsent and the hypothetical. The body may be said to make for\nself-preservation, since it has an organic equilibrium which, when not\ntoo rudely disturbed, restores itself by growth and co-operative action;\nbut no such principle appears in the soul. Foolish in the beginning and\ngenerous in the end, consciousness thinks of nothing so little as of its\nown interests. It is lost in its objects; nor would it ever acquire even\nan indirect concern in its future, did not love of things external\nattach it to their fortunes. Attachment to ideal terms is indeed what\ngives consciousness its continuity; its parts have no relevance or\nrelation to one another save what they acquire by depending on the same\nbody or representing the same objects. Even when consciousness grows\nsophisticated and thinks it cares for itself, it really cares only for\nits ideals; the world it pictures seems to it beautiful, and it may\nincidentally prize itself also, when it has come to regard itself as a\npart of that world. Initially, however, it is free even from that honest\nselfishness; it looks straight out; it is interested in the movements it\nobserves; it swells with the represented world, suffers with its\ncommotion, and subsides, no less willingly, in its interludes of calm.\n\nNatural history and psychology arrive at consciousness from the outside,\nand consequently give it an artificial articulation and rationality\nwhich are wholly alien to its essence. These sciences infer feeling from\nhabit or expression; so that only the expressible and practical aspects\nof feeling figure in their calculation. But these aspects are really\nperipheral; the core is an irresponsible, ungoverned, irrevocable dream.\nPsychologists have discussed perception _ad nauseam_ and become horribly\nentangled in a combined idealism and physiology; for they must perforce\napproach the subject from the side of matter, since all science and all\nevidence is external; nor could they ever reach consciousness at all if\nthey did not observe its occasions and then interpret those occasions\ndramatically. At the same time, the inferred mind they subject to\nexamination will yield nothing but ideas, and it is a marvel how such a\ndream can regard those natural objects from which the psychologist has\ninferred it. Perception is in fact no primary phase of consciousness; it\nis an ulterior practical function acquired by a dream which has become\nsymbolic of its conditions, and therefore relevant to its own destiny.\nSuch relevance and symbolism are indirect and slowly acquired; their\nstatus cannot be understood unless we regard them as forms of\nimagination happily grown significant. In imagination, not in\nperception, lies the substance of experience, while knowledge and reason\nare but its chastened and ultimate form.\n\n[Sidenote: The mind vegetates uncontrolled save by physical forces.]\n\nEvery actual animal is somewhat dull and somewhat mad. He will at times\nmiss his signals and stare vacantly when he might well act, while at\nother times he will run off into convulsions and raise a dust in his own\nbrain to no purpose. These imperfections are so human that we should\nhardly recognise ourselves if we could shake them off altogether. Not to\nretain any dulness would mean to possess untiring attention and\nuniversal interests, thus realising the boast about deeming nothing\nhuman alien to us; while to be absolutely without folly would involve\nperfect self-knowledge and self-control. The intelligent man known to\nhistory nourishes within a dullard and holds a lunatic in leash. He is\nencased in a protective shell of ignorance and insensibility which keeps\nhim from being exhausted and confused by this too complicated world; but\nthat integument blinds him at the same time to many of his nearest and\nhighest interests. He is amused by the antics of the brute dreaming\nwithin his breast; he gloats on his passionate reveries, an amusement\nwhich sometimes costs him very dear. Thus the best human intelligence is\nstill decidedly barbarous; it fights in heavy armour and keeps a fool at\ncourt.\n\n[Sidenote: Internal order supervenes.]\n\nIf consciousness could ever have the function of guiding conduct better\nthan instinct can, in the beginning it would be most incompetent for\nthat office. Only the routine and equilibrium which healthy instinct\ninvolves keep thought and will at all within the limits of sanity. The\npredetermined interests we have as animals fortunately focus our\nattention on practical things, pulling it back, like a ball with an\nelastic cord, within the radius of pertinent matters. Instinct alone\ncompels us to neglect and seldom to recall the irrelevant infinity of\nideas. Philosophers have sometimes said that all ideas come from\nexperience; they never could have been poets and must have forgotten\nthat they were ever children. The great difficulty in education is to\nget experience out of ideas. Shame, conscience, and reason continually\ndisallow and ignore what consciousness presents; and what are they but\nhabit and latent instinct asserting themselves and forcing us to\ndisregard our midsummer madness? Idiocy and lunacy are merely reversions\nto a condition in which present consciousness is in the ascendant and\nhas escaped the control of unconscious forces. We speak of people being\n\u201cout of their senses,\u201d when they have in fact fallen back into them; or\nof those who have \u201clost their mind,\u201d when they have lost merely that\nhabitual control over consciousness which prevented it from flaring into\nall sorts of obsessions and agonies. Their bodies having become\nderanged, their minds, far from correcting that derangement, instantly\nshare and betray it. A dream is always simmering below the conventional\nsurface of speech and reflection. Even in the highest reaches and\nserenest meditations of science it sometimes breaks through. Even there\nwe are seldom constant enough to conceive a truly natural world;\nsomewhere passionate, fanciful, or magic elements will slip into the\nscheme and baffle rational ambition.\n\nA body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its\nenvironment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can\nset themselves no limit; they lapse only when the corporeal frame that\nsustains them yields to circumstances and changes its habit. If they are\nunstable at all, it is because they ordinarily correspond to strains and\nconjunctions which a vigorous body overcomes, or which dissolve the body\naltogether. A pain not incidental to the play of practical instincts may\neasily be recurrent, and it might be perpetual if even the worst habits\nwere not intermittent and the most useless agitations exhausting. Some\nrespite will therefore ensue upon pain, but no magic cure. Madness, in\nlike manner, if pronounced, is precarious, but when speculative enough\nto be harmless or not strong enough to be debilitating, it too may last\nfor ever.\n\nAn imaginative life may therefore exist parasitically in a man, hardly\ntouching his action or environment. There is no possibility of\nexorcising these apparitions by their own power. A nightmare does not\ndispel itself; it endures until the organic strain which caused it is\nrelaxed either by natural exhaustion or by some external influence.\nTherefore human ideas are still for the most part sensuous and trivial,\nshifting with the chance currents of the brain, and representing\nnothing, so to speak, but personal temperature. Personal temperature,\nmoreover, is sometimes tropical. There are brains like a South American\njungle, as there are others like an Arabian desert, strewn with nothing\nbut bones. While a passionate sultriness prevails in the mind there is\nno end to its luxuriance. Languages intricately articulate, flaming\nmythologies, metaphysical perspectives lost in infinity, arise in\nremarkable profusion. In time, however, there comes a change of climate\nand the whole forest disappears.\n\nIt is easy, from the stand-point of acquired practical competence, to\nderide a merely imaginative life. Derision, however, is not\ninterpretation, and the better method of overcoming erratic ideas is to\ntrace them out dialectically and see if they will not recognise their\nown fatuity. The most irresponsible vision has certain principles of\norder and valuation by which it estimates itself; and in these\nprinciples the Life of Reason is already broached, however halting may\nbe its development. We should lead ourselves out of our dream, as the\nIsraelites were led out of Egypt, by the promise and eloquence of that\ndream itself. Otherwise we might kill the goose that lays the golden\negg, and by proscribing imagination abolish science.\n\n[Sidenote: Intrinsic pleasure in existence.]\n\n[Sidenote: Pleasure a good,]\n\nVisionary experience has a first value in its possible pleasantness. Why\nany form of feeling should be delightful is not to be explained\ntranscendentally: a physiological law may, after the fact, render every\ninstance predictable; but no logical affinity between the formal quality\nof an experience and the impulse to welcome it will thereby be\ndisclosed. We find, however, that pleasure suffuses certain states of\nmind and pain others; which is another way of saying that, for no\nreason, we love the first and detest the second. The polemic which\ncertain moralists have waged against pleasure and in favour of pain is\nintelligible when we remember that their chief interest is edification,\nand that ability to resist pleasure and pain alike is a valuable virtue\nin a world where action and renunciation are the twin keys to happiness.\nBut to deny that pleasure is a good and pain an evil is a grotesque\naffectation: it amounts to giving \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cevil\u201d artificial\ndefinitions and thereby reducing ethics to arbitrary verbiage. Not only\nis good that adherence of the will to experience of which pleasure is\nthe basal example, and evil the corresponding rejection which is the\nvery essence of pain, but when we pass from good and evil in sense to\ntheir highest embodiments, pleasure remains eligible and pain something\nwhich it is a duty to prevent. A man who without necessity deprived any\nperson of a pleasure or imposed on him a pain, would be a contemptible\nknave, and the person so injured would be the first to declare it, nor\ncould the highest celestial tribunal, if it was just, reverse that\nsentence. For it suffices that one being, however weak, loves or abhors\nanything, no matter how slightly, for that thing to acquire a\nproportionate value which no chorus of contradiction ringing through all\nthe spheres can ever wholly abolish. An experience good or bad in itself\nremains so for ever, and its inclusion in a more general order of things\ncan only change that totality proportionately to the ingredient\nabsorbed, which will infect the mass, so far as it goes, with its own\ncolour. The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being\nequal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more\npains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign is its total\ntemper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for\nthere is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to\nsuperstition; and candour and a sense of justice are, in such a case,\nthe first things lost.\n\n[Sidenote: but not pursued or remembered unless it suffuses an object.]\n\nPleasures differ sensibly in intensity; but the intensest pleasures are\noften the blindest, and it is hard to recall or estimate a feeling with\nwhich no definite and complex object is conjoined. The first step in\nmaking pleasure intelligible and capable of being pursued is to make it\npleasure in something. The object it suffuses acquires a value, and\ngives the pleasure itself a place in rational life. The pleasure can now\nbe named, its variations studied in reference to changes in its object,\nand its comings and goings foreseen in the order of events. The more\narticulate the world that produces emotion the more controllable and\nrecoverable is the emotion itself. Therefore diversity and order in\nideas makes the life of pleasure richer and easier to lead. A voluminous\ndumb pleasure might indeed outweigh the pleasure spread thin over a\nmultitude of tame perceptions, if we could only weigh the two in one\nscale; but to do so is impossible, and in memory and prospect, if not in\nexperience, diversified pleasure must needs carry the day.\n\n[Sidenote: Subhuman delights.]\n\nHere we come upon a crisis in human development which shows clearly how\nmuch the Life of Reason is a natural thing, a growth that a different\ncourse of events might well have excluded. Laplace is reported to have\nsaid on his death-bed that science was mere trifling and that nothing\nwas real but love. Love, for such a man, doubtless involved objects and\nideas: it was love of persons. The same revulsion of feeling may,\nhowever, be carried further. Lucretius says that passion is a torment\nbecause its pleasures are not pure, that is, because they are mingled\nwith longing and entangled in vexatious things. Pure pleasure would be\nwithout ideas. Many a man has found in some moment of his life an\nunutterable joy which made all the rest of it seem a farce, as if a\ncorpse should play it was living. Mystics habitually look beneath the\nLife of Reason for the substance and infinity of happiness. In all these\nrevulsions, and many others, there is a certain justification, inasmuch\nas systematic living is after all an experiment, as is the formation of\nanimal bodies, and the inorganic pulp out of which these growths have\ncome may very likely have had its own incommunicable values, its\nabsolute thrills, which we vainly try to remember and to which, in\nmoments of dissolution, we may half revert. Protoplasmic pleasures and\nstrains may be the substance of consciousness; and as matter seeks its\nown level, and as the sea and the flat waste to which all dust returns\nhave a certain primordial life and a certain sublimity, so all passions\nand ideas, when spent, may rejoin the basal note of feeling, and enlarge\ntheir volume as they lose their form. This loss of form may not be\nunwelcome, if it is the formless that, by anticipation, speaks through\nwhat is surrendering its being. Though to acquire or impart form is\ndelightful in art, in thought, in generation, in government, yet a\neuthanasia of finitude is also known. All is not affectation in the poet\nwho says, \u201cNow more than ever seems it rich to die\u201d; and, without any\npoetry or affectation, men may love sleep, and opiates, and every\nluxurious escape from humanity.\n\nThe step by which pleasure and pain are attached to ideas, so as to be\npredictable and to become factors in action, is therefore by no means\nirrevocable. It is a step, however, in the direction of reason; and\nthough reason\u2019s path is only one of innumerable courses perhaps open to\nexistence, it is the only one that we are tracing here; the only one,\nobviously, which human discourse is competent to trace.\n\n[Sidenote: Animal living.]\n\nWhen consciousness begins to add diversity to its intensity, its value\nis no longer absolute and inexpressible. The felt variations in its tone\nare attached to the observed movement of its objects; in these objects\nits values are imbedded. A world loaded with dramatic values may thus\narise in imagination; terrible and delightful presences may chase one\nanother across the void; life will be a kind of music made by all the\nsenses together. Many animals probably have this form of experience;\nthey are not wholly submerged in a vegetative stupor; they can discern\nwhat they love or fear. Yet all this is still a disordered apparition\nthat reels itself off amid sporadic movements, efforts, and agonies. Now\ngorgeous, now exciting, now indifferent, the landscape brightens and\nfades with the day. If a dog, while sniffing about contentedly, sees\nafar off his master arriving after long absence, the change in the\nanimal\u2019s feeling is not merely in the quantity of pure pleasure; a new\ncircle of sensations appears, with a new principle governing interest\nand desire; instead of waywardness subjection, instead of freedom love.\nBut the poor brute asks for no reason why his master went, why he has\ncome again, why he should be loved, or why presently while lying at his\nfeet you forget him and begin to grunt and dream of the chase\u2014all that\nis an utter mystery, utterly unconsidered. Such experience has variety,\nscenery, and a certain vital rhythm; its story might be told in\ndithyrambic verse. It moves wholly by inspiration; every event is\nprovidential, every act unpremeditated. Absolute freedom and absolute\nhelplessness have met together: you depend wholly on divine favour, yet\nthat unfathomable agency is not distinguishable from your own life. This\nis the condition to which some forms of piety invite men to return; and\nit lies in truth not far beneath the level of ordinary human\nconsciousness.\n\n[Sidenote: Causes at last discerned.]\n\nThe story which such animal experience contains, however, needs only to\nbe better articulated in order to disclose its underlying machinery. The\nfigures even of that disordered drama have their exits and their\nentrances; and their cues can be gradually discovered by a being capable\nof fixing his attention and retaining the order of events. Thereupon a\nthird step is made in imaginative experience. As pleasures and pains\nwere formerly distributed among objects, so objects are now marshalled\ninto a world. _Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas_, said a poet\nwho stood near enough to fundamental human needs and to the great answer\nwhich art and civilisation can make to them, to value the Life of Reason\nand think it sublime. To discern causes is to turn vision into knowledge\nand motion into action. It is to fix the associates of things, so that\ntheir respective transformations are collated, and they become\nsignificant of one another. In proportion as such understanding advances\neach moment of experience becomes consequential and prophetic of the\nrest. The calm places in life are filled with power and its spasms with\nresource. No emotion can overwhelm the mind, for of none is the basis or\nissue wholly hidden; no event can disconcert it altogether, because it\nsees beyond. Means can be looked for to escape from the worst\npredicament; and whereas each moment had been formerly filled with\nnothing but its own adventure and surprised emotion, each now makes room\nfor the lesson of what went before and surmises what may be the plot of\nthe whole.\n\nAt the threshold of reason there is a kind of choice. Not all\nimpressions contribute equally to the new growth; many, in fact, which\nwere formerly equal in rank to the best, now grow obscure. Attention\nignores them, in its haste to arrive at what is significant of something\nmore. Nor are the principles of synthesis, by which the aristocratic few\nestablish their oligarchy, themselves unequivocal. The first principles\nof logic are like the senses, few but arbitrary. They might have been\nquite different and yet produced, by a now unthinkable method, a\nlanguage no less significant than the one we speak. Twenty-six letters\nmay suffice for a language, but they are a wretched minority among all\npossible sounds. So the forms of perception and the categories of\nthought, which a grammarian\u2019s philosophy might think primordial\nnecessities, are no less casual than words or their syntactical order.\nWhy, we may ask, did these forms assert themselves here? What principles\nof selection guide mental growth?\n\n[Sidenote: Attention guided by bodily impulse.]\n\nTo give a logical ground for such a selection is evidently impossible,\nsince it is logic itself that is to be accounted for. A natural ground\nis, in strictness, also irrelevant, since natural connections, where\nthought has not reduced them to a sort of equivalence and necessity, are\nmere data and juxtapositions. Yet it is not necessary to leave the\nquestion altogether unanswered. By using our senses we may discover, not\nindeed why each sense has its specific quality or exists at all, but\nwhat are its organs and occasions. In like manner we may, by developing\nthe Life of Reason, come to understand its conditions. When\nconsciousness awakes the body has, as we long afterward discover, a\ndefinite organisation. Without guidance from reflection bodily processes\nhave been going on, and most precise affinities and reactions have been\nset up between its organs and the surrounding objects.\n\nOn these affinities and reactions sense and intellect are grafted. The\nplants are of different nature, yet growing together they bear excellent\nfruit. It is as the organs receive appropriate stimulations that\nattention is riveted on definite sensations. It is as the system\nexercises its natural activities that passion, will, and meditation\npossess the mind. No syllogism is needed to persuade us to eat, no\nprophecy of happiness to teach us to love. On the contrary, the living\norganism, caught in the act, informs us how to reason and what to enjoy.\nThe soul adopts the body\u2019s aims; from the body and from its instincts\nshe draws a first hint of the right means to those accepted purposes.\nThus reason enters into partnership with the world and begins to be\nrespected there; which it would never be if it were not expressive of\nthe same mechanical forces that are to preside over events and render\nthem fortunate or unfortunate for human interests. Reason is significant\nin action only because it has begun by taking, so to speak, the body\u2019s\nside; that sympathetic bias enables her to distinguish events pertinent\nto the chosen interests, to compare impulse with satisfaction, and, by\nrepresenting a new and circular current in the system, to preside over\nthe formation of better habits, habits expressing more instincts at once\nand responding to more opportunities.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER III\u2014THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS\n\n\n[Sidenote: Nature man\u2019s home.]\n\nAt first sight it might seem an idle observation that the first task of\nintelligence is to represent the environing reality, a reality actually\nrepresented in the notion, universally prevalent among men, of a cosmos\nin space and time, an animated material engine called nature. In trying\nto conceive nature the mind lisps its first lesson; natural phenomena\nare the mother tongue of imagination no less than of science and\npractical life. Men and gods are not conceivable otherwise than as\ninhabitants of nature. Early experience knows no mystery which is not\nsomehow rooted in transformations of the natural world, and fancy can\nbuild no hope which would not be expressible there. But we are grown so\naccustomed to this ancient apparition that we may be no longer aware how\ndifficult was the task of conjuring it up. We may even have forgotten\nthe possibility that such a vision should never have arisen at all. A\nbrief excursion into that much abused subject, the psychology of\nperception, may here serve to remind us of the great work which the\nbudding intellect must long ago have accomplished unawares.\n\n[Sidenote: Difficulties in conceiving nature.]\n\nConsider how the shocks out of which the notion of material things is to\nbe built first strike home into the soul. Eye and hand, if we may\nneglect the other senses, transmit their successive impressions, all\nvarying with the position of outer objects and with the other material\nconditions. A chaos of multitudinous impressions rains in from all sides\nat all hours. Nor have the external or cognitive senses an original\nprimacy. The taste, the smell, the alarming sounds of things are\ncontinually distracting attention. There are infinite reverberations in\nmemory of all former impressions, together with fresh fancies created in\nthe brain, things at first in no wise subordinated to external objects.\nAll these incongruous elements are mingled like a witches\u2019 brew. And\nmore: there are indications that inner sensations, such as those of\ndigestion, have an overpowering influence on the primitive mind, which\nhas not learned to articulate or distinguish permanent needs. So that to\nthe whirl of outer sensations we must add, to reach some notion of what\nconsciousness may contain before the advent of reason, interruptions and\nlethargies caused by wholly blind internal feelings; trances such as\nfall even on comparatively articulate minds in rage, lust, or madness.\nAgainst all these bewildering forces the new-born reason has to\nstruggle; and we need not wonder that the costly experiments and\ndisillusions of the past have not yet produced a complete\nenlightenment.\n\n[Sidenote: Transcendental qualms.]\n\nThe onslaught made in the last century by the transcendental philosophy\nupon empirical traditions is familiar to everybody: it seemed a\npertinent attack, yet in the end proved quite trifling and unavailing.\nThought, we are told rightly enough, cannot be accounted for by\nenumerating its conditions. A number of detached sensations, being each\nits own little world, cannot add themselves together nor conjoin\nthemselves in the void. Again, experiences having an alleged common\ncause would not have, merely for that reason, a common object. Nor would\na series of successive perceptions, no matter how quick, logically\ninvolve a sense of time nor a notion of succession. Yet, in point of\nfact, when such a succession occurs and a living brain is there to\nacquire some structural modification by virtue of its own passing\nstates, a memory of that succession and its terms may often supervene.\nIt is quite true also that the simultaneous presence or association of\nimages belonging to different senses does not carry with it by intrinsic\nnecessity any fusion of such images nor any notion of an object having\nthem for its qualities. Yet, in point of fact, such a group of\nsensations does often merge into a complex image; instead of the\nelements originally perceptible in isolation, there arises a familiar\nterm, a sort of personal presence. To this felt presence, certain\ninstinctive reactions are attached, and the sensations that may be\ninvolved in that apparition, when each for any reason becomes emphatic,\nare referred to it as its qualities or its effects.\n\nSuch complications of course involve the gift of memory, with capacity\nto survey at once vestiges of many perceptions, to feel their\nimplication and absorption in the present object, and to be carried, by\nthis sense of relation, to the thought that those perceptions have a\nrepresentative function. And this is a great step. It manifests the\nmind\u2019s powers. It illustrates those transformations of consciousness the\nprinciple of which, when abstracted, we call intelligence. We must\naccordingly proceed with caution, for we are digging at the very roots\nof reason.\n\n[Sidenote: Thought an aspect of life and transitive]\n\nThe chief perplexity, however, which besets this subject and makes\ndiscussions of it so often end in a cloud, is quite artificial. Thought\nis not a mechanical calculus, where the elements and the method exhaust\nthe fact. Thought is a form of life, and should be conceived on the\nanalogy of nutrition, generation, and art. Reason, as Hume said with\nprofound truth, is an unintelligible instinct. It could not be otherwise\nif reason is to remain something transitive and existential; for\ntransition is unintelligible, and yet is the deepest characteristic of\nexistence. Philosophers, however, having perceived that the function of\nthought is to fix static terms and reveal eternal relations, have\ninadvertently transferred to the living act what is true only of its\nideal object; and they have expected to find in the process, treated\npsychologically, that luminous deductive clearness which belongs to the\nideal world it tends to reveal. The intelligible, however, lies at the\nperiphery of experience, the surd at its core; and intelligence is but\none centrifugal ray darting from the slime to the stars. Thought must\nexecute a metamorphosis; and while this is of course mysterious, it is\none of those familiar mysteries, like motion and will, which are more\nnatural than dialectical lucidity itself; for dialectic grows cogent by\nfulfilling intent, but intent or meaning is itself vital and\ninexplicable.\n\n[Sidenote: Perception cumulative and synthetic]\n\nThe process of counting is perhaps as simple an instance as can be found\nof a mental operation on sensible data. The clock, let us say, strikes\ntwo: if the sensorium were perfectly elastic and after receiving the\nfirst blow reverted exactly to its previous state, retaining absolutely\nno trace of that momentary oscillation and no altered habit, then it is\ncertain that a sense for number or a faculty of counting could never\narise. The second stroke would be responded to with the same reaction\nwhich had met the first. There would be no summation of effects, no\ncomplication. However numerous the successive impressions might come to\nbe, each would remain fresh and pure, the last being identical in\ncharacter with the first. One, one, one, would be the monotonous\nresponse for ever. Just so generations of ephemeral insects that\nsucceeded one another without transmitting experience might repeat the\nsame round of impressions\u2014an everlasting progression without a shadow\nof progress. Such, too, is the idiot\u2019s life: his liquid brain transmits\nevery impulse without resistance and retains the record of no\nimpression.\n\nIntelligence is accordingly conditioned by a modification of both\nstructure and consciousness by dint of past events. To be aware that a\nsecond stroke is not itself the first, I must retain something of the\nold sensation. The first must reverberate still in my ears when the\nsecond arrives, so that this second, coming into a consciousness still\nfilled by the first, is a different experience from the first, which\nfell into a mind perfectly empty and unprepared. Now the newcomer finds\nin the subsisting One a sponsor to christen it by the name of Two. The\nfirst stroke was a simple 1. The second is not simply another 1, a mere\niteration of the first. It is 1^{1}, where the coefficient represents\nthe reverberating first stroke, still persisting in the mind, and\nforming a background and perspective against which the new stroke may be\ndistinguished. The meaning of \u201ctwo,\u201d then, is \u201cthis after that\u201d or \u201cthis\nagain,\u201d where we have a simultaneous sense of two things which have been\nseparately perceived but are identified as similar in their nature.\nRepetition must cease to be pure repetition and become cumulative before\nit can give rise to the consciousness of repetition.\n\nThe first condition of counting, then, is that the sensorium should\nretain something of the first impression while it receives the second,\nor (to state the corresponding mental fact) that the second sensation\nshould be felt together with a survival of the first from which it is\ndistinguished in point of existence and with which it is identified in\npoint of character.\n\n[Sidenote: No identical agent needed.]\n\nNow, to secure this, it is not enough that the sensorium should be\nmaterially continuous, or that a \u201cspiritual substance\u201d or a\n\u201ctranscendental ego\u201d should persist in time to receive the second\nsensation after having received and registered the first. A perfectly\nelastic sensorium, a wholly unchanging soul, or a quite absolute ego\nmight remain perfectly identical with itself through various experiences\nwithout collating them. It would then remain, in fact, more truly and\nliterally identical than if it were modified somewhat by those\nsuccessive shocks. Yet a sensorium or a spirit thus unchanged would be\nincapable of memory, unfit to connect a past perception with one present\nor to become aware of their relation. It is not identity in the\nsubstance impressed, but growing complication in the phenomenon\npresented, that makes possible a sense of diversity and relation between\nthings. The identity of substance or spirit, if it were absolute, would\nindeed prevent comparison, because it would exclude modifications, and\nit is the survival of past modifications within the present that makes\ncomparisons possible. We may impress any number of forms successively on\nthe same water, and the identity of the substance will not help those\nforms to survive and accumulate their effects. But if we have a surface\nthat retains our successive stampings we may change the substance from\nwax to plaster and from plaster to bronze, and the effects of our labour\nwill survive and be superimposed upon one another. It is the actual\nplastic form in both mind and body, not any unchanging substance or\nagent, that is efficacious in perpetuating thought and gathering\nexperience.\n\n[Sidenote: Example of the sun.]\n\nWere not Nature and all her parts such models of patience and\npertinacity, they never would have succeeded in impressing their\nexistence on something so volatile and irresponsible as thought is. A\nsensation needs to be violent, like the sun\u2019s blinding light, to arrest\nattention, and keep it taut, as it were, long enough for the system to\nacquire a respectful attitude, and grow predisposed to resume it. A\nrepetition of that sensation will thereafter meet with a prepared\nresponse which we call recognition; the concomitants of the old\nexperience will form themselves afresh about the new one and by their\nconvergence give it a sort of welcome and interpretation. The movement,\nfor instance, by which the face was raised toward the heavens was\nperhaps one element which added to the first sensation, brightness, a\nconcomitant sensation, height; the brightness was not bright merely,\nbut high. Now when the brightness reappears the face will more quickly\nbe lifted up; the place where the brightness shone will be looked for;\nthe brightness will have acquired a claim to be placed somewhere. The\nheat which at the same moment may have burned the forehead will also be\nexpected and, when felt, projected into the brightness, which will now\nbe hot as well as high. So with whatever other sensations time may\nassociate with this group. They will all adhere to the original\nimpression, enriching it with an individuality which will render it\nbefore long a familiar complex in experience, and one easy to recognise\nand to complete in idea.\n\n[Sidenote: His primitive divinity.]\n\nIn the case of so vivid a thing as the sun\u2019s brightness many other\nsensations beside those out of which science draws the qualities\nattributed to that heavenly body adhere in the primitive mind to the\nphenomenon. Before he is a substance the sun is a god. He is beneficent\nand necessary no less than bright and high; he rises upon all happy\nopportunities and sets upon all terrors. He is divine, since all life\nand fruitfulness hang upon his miraculous revolutions. His coming and\ngoing are life and death to the world. As the sensations of light and\nheat are projected upward together to become attributes of his body, so\nthe feelings of pleasure, safety, and hope which he brings into the soul\nare projected into his spirit; and to this spirit, more than to\nanything else, energy, independence, and substantiality are originally\nattributed. The emotions felt in his presence being the ultimate issue\nand term of his effect in us, the counterpart or shadow of those\nemotions is regarded as the first and deepest factor in his causality.\nIt is his divine life, more than aught else, that underlies his\napparitions and explains the influences which he propagates. The\nsubstance or independent existence attributed to objects is therefore by\nno means only or primarily a physical notion. What is conceived to\nsupport the physical qualities is a pseudo-psychic or vital force. It is\na moral and living object that we construct, building it up out of all\nthe materials, emotional, intellectual, and sensuous, which lie at hand\nin our consciousness to be synthesised into the hybrid reality which we\nare to fancy confronting us. To discriminate and redistribute those\nmiscellaneous physical and psychical elements, and to divorce the god\nfrom the material sun, is a much later problem, arising at a different\nand more reflective stage in the Life of Reason.\n\n[Sidenote: Causes and essences contrasted.]\n\nWhen reflection, turning to the comprehension of a chaotic experience,\nbusies itself about recurrences, when it seeks to normalise in some way\nthings coming and going, and to straighten out the causes of events,\nthat reflection is inevitably turned toward something dynamic and\nindependent, and can have no successful issue except in mechanical\nscience. When on the other hand reflection stops to challenge and\nquestion the fleeting object, not so much to prepare for its possible\nreturn as to conceive its present nature, this reflection is turned no\nless unmistakably in the direction of ideas, and will terminate in logic\nor the morphology of being. We attribute independence to things in order\nto normalise their recurrence. We attribute essences to them in order to\nnormalise their manifestations or constitution. Independence will\nultimately turn out to be an assumed constancy in material processes,\nessence an assumed constancy in ideal meanings or points of reference in\ndiscourse. The one marks the systematic distribution of objects, the\nother their settled character.\n\n[Sidenote: Voracity of intellect.]\n\nWe talk of recurrent perceptions, but materially considered no\nperception recurs. Each recurrence is one of a finite series and holds\nfor ever its place and number in that series. Yet human attention, while\nit can survey several simultaneous impressions and find them similar,\ncannot keep them distinct if they grow too numerous. The mind has a\nnative bias and inveterate preference for form and identification. Water\ndoes not run down hill more persistently than attention turns experience\ninto constant terms. The several repetitions of one essence given in\nconsciousness will tend at once to be neglected, and only the essence\nitself\u2014the character shared by those sundry perceptions\u2014will stand and\nbecome a term in mental discourse. After a few strokes of the clock,\nthe reiterated impressions merge and cover one another; we lose count\nand perceive the quality and rhythm but not the number of the sounds. If\nthis is true of so abstract and mathematical a perception as is\ncounting, how emphatically true must it be of continuous and infinitely\nvaried perceptions flowing in from the whole spatial world. Glimpses of\nthe environment follow one another in quick succession, like a regiment\nof soldiers in uniform; only now and then does the stream take a new\nturn, catch a new ray of sunlight, or arrest our attention at some\nbreak.\n\nThe senses in their natural play revert constantly to familiar objects,\ngaining impressions which differ but slightly from one another. These\nslight differences are submerged in apperception, so that sensation\ncomes to be not so much an addition of new items to consciousness as a\nreburnishing there of some imbedded device. Its character and relations\nare only slightly modified at each fresh rejuvenation. To catch the\npassing phenomenon in all its novelty and idiosyncrasy is a work of\nartifice and curiosity. Such an exercise does violence to intellectual\ninstinct and involves an \u00e6sthetic power of diving bodily into the stream\nof sensation, having thrown overboard all rational ballast and escaped\nat once the inertia and the momentum of practical life. Normally every\ndatum of sense is at once devoured by a hungry intellect and digested\nfor the sake of its vital juices. The result is that what ordinarily\nremains in memory is no representative of particular moments or\nshocks\u2014though sensation, as in dreams, may be incidentally recreated\nfrom within\u2014but rather a logical possession, a sense of acquaintance\nwith a certain field of reality, in a word, a consciousness of\n_knowledge_.\n\n[Sidenote: Can the transcendent be known?]\n\nBut what, we may ask, is this reality, which we boast to know? May not\nthe sceptic justly contend that nothing is so unknown and indeed\nunknowable as this pretended object of knowledge? The sensations which\nreason treats so cavalierly were at least something actual while they\nlasted and made good their momentary claim to our interest; but what is\nthis new ideal figment, unseizable yet ever present, invisible but\nindispensable, unknowable yet alone interesting or important? Strange\nthat the only possible object or theme of our knowledge should be\nsomething we cannot know.\n\n[Sidenote: Can the immediate be meant?]\n\nAn answer these doubts will perhaps appear if we ask ourselves what sort\nof contact with reality would satisfy us, and in what terms we expect or\ndesire to possess the subject-matter of our thoughts. Is it simply\ncorroboration that we look for? Is it a verification of truth in sense?\nIt would be unreasonable, in that case, after all the evidence we demand\nhas been gathered, to complain that the ideal term thus concurrently\nsuggested, the super-sensible substance, reality, or independent object,\ndoes not itself descend into the arena of immediate sensuous\npresentation. Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour\nand possess _what we mean_. Knowledge is recognition of something\nabsent; it is a salutation, not an embrace. It is an advance on\nsensation precisely because it is representative. The terms or goals of\nthought have for their function to subtend long tracts of sensuous\nexperience, to be ideal links between fact and fact, invisible wires\nbehind the scenes, threads along which inference may run in making\nphenomena intelligible and controllable. An idea that should become an\nimage would cease to be ideal; a principle that is to remain a principle\ncan never become a fact. A God that you could see with the eyes of the\nbody, a heaven you might climb into by a ladder planted at Bethel, would\nbe parts of this created and interpretable world, not terms in its\ninterpretation nor objects in a spiritual sphere. Now external objects\nare thought to be principles and sources of experience; they are\naccordingly conceived realities on an ideal plane. We may look for all\nthe evidence we choose before we declare our inference to be warranted;\nbut we must not ask for something more than evidence, nor expect to know\nrealities without inferring them anew. They are revealed only to\nunderstanding. We cannot cease to think and still continue to know.\n\n[Sidenote: Is thought a bridge from sensation to sensation?]\n\nIt may be said, however, that principles and external objects are\ninteresting only because they symbolise further sensations, that\nthought is an expedient of finite minds, and that representation is a\nghostly process which we crave to materialise into bodily possession. We\nmay grow sick of inferring truth and long rather to become reality.\nIntelligence is after all no compulsory possession; and while some of us\nwould gladly have more of it, others find that they already have too\nmuch. The tension of thought distresses them and to represent what they\ncannot and would not be is not a natural function of their spirit. To\nsuch minds experience that should merely corroborate ideas would prolong\ndissatisfaction. The ideas must be realised; they must pass into\nimmediacy. If reality (a word employed generally in a eulogistic sense)\nis to mean this desired immediacy, no ideal of thought can be real. All\nintelligible objects and the whole universe of mental discourse would\nthen be an unreal and conventional structure, impinging ultimately on\nsense from which it would derive its sole validity.\n\nThere would be no need of quarrelling with such a philosophy, were not\nits use of words rather misleading. Call experience in its existential\nand immediate aspect, if you will, the sole reality; that will not\nprevent reality from having an ideal dimension. The intellectual world\nwill continue to give beauty, meaning, and scope to those bubbles of\nconsciousness on which it is painted. Reality would not be, in that\ncase, what thought aspires to reach. Consciousness is the least ideal\nof things when reason is taken out of it. Reality would then need\nthought to give it all those human values of which, in its substance, it\nwould have been wholly deprived; and the ideal would still be what lent\nmusic to throbs and significance to being.\n\n[Sidenote: Mens naturaliter platonica.]\n\nThe equivocation favoured by such language at once begins to appear. Is\nnot thought with all its products a part of experience? Must not sense,\nif it be the only reality, be sentient sometimes of the ideal? What the\nsite is to a city that is immediate experience to the universe of\ndiscourse. The latter is all held materially within the limits defined\nby the former; but if immediate experience be the seat of the moral\nworld, the moral world is the only interesting possession of immediate\nexperience. When a waste is built on, however, it is a violent paradox\nto call it still a waste; and an immediate experience that represents\nthe rest of sentience, with all manner of ideal harmonies read into the\nwhole in the act of representing it, is an immediate experience raised\nto its highest power: it is the Life of Reason. In vain, then, will a\nphilosophy of intellectual abstention limit so Platonic a term as\nreality to the immediate aspect of existence, when it is the ideal\naspect that endows existence with character and value, together with\nrepresentative scope and a certain lien upon eternity.\n\nMore legitimate, therefore, would be the assertion that knowledge\nreaches reality when it touches its ideal goal. Reality is known when,\nas in mathematics, a stable and unequivocal object is developed by\nthinking. The locus or material embodiment of such a reality is no\nlonger in view; these questions seem to the logician irrelevant. If\nnecessary ideas find no illustration in sense, he deems the fact an\nargument against the importance and validity of sensation, not in the\nleast a disproof of his ideal knowledge. If no site be found on earth\nfor the Platonic city, its constitution is none the less recorded and\nenshrined in heaven; nor is that the only true ideal that has not where\nto lay its head. What in the sensualistic or mystical system was called\nreality will now be termed appearance, and what there figured as an\nimaginary construction borne by the conscious moment will now appear to\nbe a prototype for all existence and an eternal standard for its\nestimation.\n\nIt is this rationalistic or Platonic system (little as most men may\nsuspect the fact) that finds a first expression in ordinary perception.\nWhen you distinguish your sensations from their cause and laugh at the\nidealist (as this kind of sceptic is called) who says that chairs and\ntables exist only in your mind, you are treating a figment of reason as\na deeper and truer thing than the moments of life whose blind experience\nthat reason has come to illumine. What you call the evidence of sense is\npure confidence in reason. You will not be so idiotic as to make no\ninferences from your sensations; you will not pin your faith so\nunimaginatively on momentary appearance as to deny that the world exists\nwhen you stop thinking about it. You feel that your intellect has wider\nscope and has discovered many a thing that goes on behind the scenes,\nmany a secret that would escape a stupid and gaping observation. It is\nthe fool that looks to look and stops at the barely visible: you not\nonly look but _see_; for you understand.\n\n[Sidenote: Identity and independence predicated of things.]\n\nNow the practical burden of such understanding, if you take the trouble\nto analyse it, will turn out to be what the sceptic says it is:\nassurance of eventual sensations. But as these sensations, in memory and\nexpectation, are numerous and indefinitely variable, you are not able to\nhold them clearly before the mind; indeed, the realisation of all the\npotentialities which you vaguely feel to lie in the future is a task\nabsolutely beyond imagination. Yet your present impressions, dependent\nas they are on your chance attitude and disposition and on a thousand\ntrivial accidents, are far from representing adequately all that might\nbe discovered or that is actually known about the object before you.\nThis object, then, to your apprehension, is not identical with any of\nthe sensations that reveal it, nor is it exhausted by all these\nsensations when they are added together; yet it contains nothing\nassignable but what they might conceivably reveal. As it lies in your\nfancy, then, this object, the reality, is a complex and elusive entity,\nthe sum at once and the residuum of all particular impressions which,\nunderlying the present one, have bequeathed to it their surviving\nlinkage in discourse and consequently endowed it with a large part of\nits present character. With this hybrid object, sensuous in its\nmaterials and ideal in its locus, each particular glimpse is compared,\nand is recognised to be but a glimpse, an aspect which the object\npresents to a particular observer. Here are two identifications. In the\nfirst place various sensations and felt relations, which cannot be kept\ndistinct in the mind, fall together into one term of discourse,\nrepresented by a sign, a word, or a more or less complete sensuous\nimage. In the second place the new perception is referred to that ideal\nentity of which it is now called a manifestation and effect.\n\nSuch are the primary relations of reality and appearance. A reality is a\nterm of discourse based on a psychic complex of memories, associations,\nand expectations, but constituted in its ideal independence by the\nassertive energy of thought. An appearance is a passing sensation,\nrecognised as belonging to that group of which the object itself is the\nideal representative, and accordingly regarded as a manifestation of\nthat object.\n\nThus the notion of an independent and permanent world is an ideal term\nused to mark and as it were to justify the cohesion in space and the\nrecurrence in time of recognisable groups of sensations. This coherence\nand recurrence force the intellect, if it would master experience at all\nor understand anything, to frame the idea of such a reality. If we wish\nto defend the use of such an idea and prove to ourselves its necessity,\nall we need do is to point to that coherence and recurrence in external\nphenomena. That brave effort and flight of intelligence which in the\nbeginning raised man to the conception of reality, enabling him to\ndiscount and interpret appearance, will, if we retain our trust in\nreason, raise us continually anew to that same idea, by a no less\nspontaneous and victorious movement of thought.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IV\u2014ON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERY\n\n\n[Sidenote: Psychology as a solvent.]\n\nThe English psychologists who first disintegrated the idea of substance,\nand whose traces we have in general followed in the above account, did\nnot study the question wholly for its own sake or in the spirit of a\nscience that aims at nothing but a historical analysis of mind. They had\na more or less malicious purpose behind their psychology. They thought\nthat if they could once show how metaphysical ideas are made they would\ndiscredit those ideas and banish them for ever from the world. If they\nretained confidence in any notion\u2014as Hobbes in body, Locke in matter\nand in God, Berkeley in spirits, and Kant, the inheritor of this\nmalicious psychology, in the thing-in-itself and in heaven\u2014it was\nmerely by inadvertence or want of courage. The principle of their\nreasoning, where they chose to apply it, was always this, that ideas\nwhose materials could all be accounted for in consciousness and referred\nto sense or to the operations of mind were thereby exhausted and\ndeprived of further validity. Only the unaccountable, or rather the\nuncriticised, could be true. Consequently the advance of psychology\nmeant, in this school, the retreat of reason; for as one notion after\nanother was clarified and reduced to its elements it was _ipso facto_\ndeprived of its function.\n\nSo far were these philosophers from conceiving that validity and truth\nare ideal relations, accruing to ideas by virtue of dialectic and use,\nthat while on the one hand they pointed out vital affinities and\npragmatic sanctions in the mind\u2019s economy they confessed on the other\nthat the outcome of their philosophy was sceptical; for no idea could be\nfound in the mind which was not a phenomenon there, and no inference\ncould be drawn from these phenomena not based on some inherent \u201ctendency\nto feign.\u201d The analysis which was in truth legitimising and purifying\nknowledge seemed to them absolutely to blast it, and the closer they\ncame to the bed-rock of experience the more incapable they felt of\nbuilding up anything upon it. Self-knowledge meant, they fancied,\nself-detection; the representative value of thought decreased as thought\ngrew in scope and elaboration. It became impossible to be at once quite\nserious and quite intelligent; for to use reason was to indulge in\nsubjective fiction, while conscientiously to abstain from using it was\nto sink back upon inarticulate and brutish instinct.\n\nIn Hume this sophistication was frankly avowed. Philosophy discredited\nitself; but a man of parts, who loved intellectual games even better\nthan backgammon, might take a hand with the wits and historians of his\nday, until the clock struck twelve and the party was over. Even in Kant,\nthough the mood was more cramped and earnest, the mystical\nsophistication was quite the same. Kant, too, imagined that the bottom\nhad been knocked out of the world; that in comparison with some\nunutterable sort of truth empirical truth was falsehood, and that\nvalidity for all possible experience was weak validity, in comparison\nwith validity of some other and unmentionable sort. Since space and time\ncould not repel the accusation of being the necessary forms of\nperception, space and time were not to be much thought of; and when the\nsad truth was disclosed that causality and the categories were\ninstruments by which the idea of nature had to be constructed, if such\nan idea was to exist at all, then nature and causality shrivelled up and\nwere dishonoured together; so that, the soul\u2019s occupation being gone,\nshe must needs appeal to some mysterious oracle, some abstract and\nirrelevant omen within the breast, and muster up all the stern courage\nof an accepted despair to carry her through this world of mathematical\nillusion into some green and infantile paradise beyond.\n\n[Sidenote: Misconceived r\u00f4le of intelligence.]\n\nWhat idea, we may well ask ourselves, did these modern philosophers\nentertain regarding the pretensions of ancient and medi\u00e6val metaphysics?\nWhat understanding had they of the spirit in which the natural organs of\nreason had been exercised and developed in those schools? Frankly, very\nlittle; for they accepted from ancient philosophy and from common-sense\nthe distinction between reality and appearance, but they forgot the\nfunction of that distinction and dislocated its meaning, which was\nnothing but to translate the chaos of perception into the regular play\nof stable natures and objects congenial to discursive thought and valid\nin the art of living. Philosophy had been the natural science of\nperception raised to the reflective plane, the objects maintaining\nthemselves on this higher plane being styled realities, and those still\nfloundering below it being called appearances or mere ideas. The\nfunction of envisaging reality, ever since Parmenides and Heraclitus,\nhad been universally attributed to the intellect. When the moderns,\ntherefore, proved anew that it was the mind that framed that idea, and\nthat what we call reality, substance, nature, or God, can be reached\nonly by an operation of reason, they made no very novel or damaging\ndiscovery.\n\nOf course, it is possible to disregard the suggestions of reason in any\nparticular case and it is quite possible to believe, for instance, that\nthe hypothesis of an external material world is an erroneous one. But\nthat this hypothesis is erroneous does not follow from the fact that it\nis a hypothesis. To discard it on that ground would be to discard all\nreasoned knowledge and to deny altogether the validity of thought. If\nintelligence is assumed to be an organ of cognition and a vehicle for\ntruth, a given hypothesis about the causes of perception can only be\ndiscarded when a better hypothesis on the same subject has been\nsupplied. To be better such a hypothesis would have to meet the\nmultiplicity of phenomena and their mutations with a more intelligible\nscheme of comprehension and a more useful instrument of control.\n\n[Sidenote: All criticism dogmatic.]\n\nScepticism is always possible while it is partial. It will remain the\nprivilege and resource of a free mind that has elasticity enough to\ndisintegrate its own formations and to approach its experience from a\nvariety of sides and with more than a single method. But the method\nchosen must be coherent in itself and the point of view assumed must be\nadhered to during that survey; so that whatever reconstruction the novel\nview may produce in science will be science still, and will involve\nassumptions and dogmas which must challenge comparison with the dogmas\nand assumptions they would supplant. People speak of dogmatism as if it\nwere a method to be altogether outgrown and something for which some\nnon-assertive philosophy could furnish a substitute. But dogmatism is\nmerely a matter of degree. Some thinkers and some systems retreat\nfurther than others into the stratum beneath current conventions and\nmake us more conscious of the complex machinery which, working silently\nin the soul, makes possible all the rapid and facile operations of\nreason. The deeper this retrospective glance the less dogmatic the\nphilosophy. A primordial constitution or tendency, however, must always\nremain, having structure and involving a definite life; for if we\nthought to reach some wholly vacant and indeterminate point of origin,\nwe should have reached something wholly impotent and indifferent, a\nblank pregnant with nothing that we wished to explain or that actual\nexperience presented. When, starting with the inevitable preformation\nand constitutional bias, we sought to build up a simpler and nobler\nedifice of thought, to be a palace and fortress rather than a prison for\nexperience, our critical philosophy would still be dogmatic, since it\nwould be built upon inexplicable but actual data by a process of\ninference underived but inevitable.\n\n[Sidenote: A choice of hypotheses.]\n\nNo doubt Aristotle and the scholastics were often uncritical. They were\ntoo intent on building up and buttressing their system on the broad\nhuman or religious foundations which they had chosen for it. They nursed\nthe comfortable conviction that whatever their thought contained was\neternal and objective truth, a copy of the divine intellect or of the\nworld\u2019s intelligible structure. A sceptic may easily deride that\nconfidence of theirs; their system may have been their system and\nnothing more. But the way to proceed if we wish to turn our shrewd\nsuspicions and our sense of insecurity into an articulate conviction and\nto prove that they erred, is to build another system, a more modest one,\nperhaps, which will grow more spontaneously and inevitably in the mind\nout of the data of experience. Obviously the rival and critical theory\nwill make the same tacit claim as the other to absolute validity. If all\nour ideas and perceptions conspire to reinforce the new hypothesis, this\nwill become inevitable and necessary to us. We shall then condemn the\nother hypothesis, not indeed for having been a hypothesis, which is the\ncommon fate of all rational and interpretative thought, but for having\nbeen a hypothesis artificial, misleading, and false; one not following\nnecessarily nor intelligibly out of the facts, nor leading to a\nsatisfactory reaction upon them, either in contemplation or in practice.\n\n[Sidenote: Critics disguised enthusiasts.]\n\nNow this is in truth exactly the conviction which those malicious\npsychologists secretly harboured. Their critical scruples and\ntranscendental qualms covered a robust rebellion against being fooled by\nauthority. They rose to abate abuses among which, as Hobbes said, \u201cthe\nfrequency of insignificant speech is one.\u201d Their psychology was not\nmerely a cathartic, but a gospel. Their young criticism was sent into\nthe world to make straight the path of a new positivism, as now, in its\nold age, it is invoked to keep open the door to superstition. Some of\nthose reformers, like Hobbes and Locke, had at heart the interests of a\nphysical and political mechanism, which they wished to substitute for\nthe cumbrous and irritating constraints of tradition. Their criticism\nstopped at the frontiers of their practical discontent; they did not\ncare to ask how the belief in matter, space, motion, God, or whatever\nelse still retained their allegiance, could withstand the kind of\npsychology which, as they conceived, had done away with individual\nessences and nominal powers. Berkeley, whose interests lay in a\ndifferent quarter, used the same critical method in support of a\ndifferent dogmatism; armed with the traditional pietistic theory of\nProvidence he undertook with a light heart to demolish the whole edifice\nwhich reason and science had built upon spatial perception. He wished\nthe lay intellect to revert to a pious idiocy in the presence of Nature,\nlest consideration of her history and laws should breed \u201cmathematical\natheists\u201d; and the outer world being thus reduced to a sensuous dream\nand to the blur of immediate feeling, intelligence and practical faith\nwould be more unremittingly employed upon Christian mythology. Men would\nbe bound to it by a necessary allegiance, there being no longer any\nrival object left for serious or intelligent consideration.\n\nThe psychological analysis on which these partial or total negations\nwere founded was in a general way admirable; the necessary artifices to\nwhich it had recourse in distinguishing simple and complex ideas,\nprinciples of association and inference, were nothing but premonitions\nof what a physiological psychology would do in referring the mental\nprocess to its organic and external supports; for experience has no\nother divisions than those it creates in itself by distinguishing its\nobjects and its organs. Reference to external conditions, though seldom\nexplicit in these writers, who imagined they could appeal to an\nintrospection not revealing the external world, was pervasive in them;\nas, for instance, where Hume made his fundamental distinction between\nimpressions and ideas, where the discrimination was based nominally on\nrelative vividness and priority in time, but really on causation\nrespectively by outer objects or by spontaneous processes in the brain.\n\n[Sidenote: Hume\u2019s gratuitous scepticism.]\n\nHume it was who carried this psychological analysis to its goal, giving\nit greater simplicity and universal scope; and he had also the further\nadvantage of not nursing any metaphysical changeling of his own to\nsubstitute for the legitimate offspring of human understanding. His\ncuriosity was purer and his scepticism more impartial, so that he laid\nbare the natural habits and necessary fictions of thought with singular\nlucidity, and sufficient accuracy for general purposes. But the malice\nof a psychology intended as a weapon against superstition here recoils\non science itself. Hume, like Berkeley, was extremely young, scarce\nfive-and-twenty, when he wrote his most incisive work; he was not ready\nto propose in theory that test of ideas by their utility which in\npractice he and the whole English school have instinctively adopted. An\nulterior test of validity would not have seemed to him satisfactory, for\nthough inclined to rebellion and positivism he was still the pupil of\nthat mythical philosophy which attributed the value of things to their\norigin rather than to their uses, because it had first, in its parabolic\nway, erected the highest good into a First Cause. Still breathing, in\nspite of himself, this atmosphere of materialised Platonism, Hume could\nnot discover the true origin of anything without imagining that he had\ndestroyed its value. A natural child meant for him an illegitimate one;\nhis philosophy had not yet reached the wisdom of that French lady who\nasked if all children were not natural. The outcome of his psychology\nand criticism seemed accordingly to be an inhibition of reason; he was\nleft free to choose between the distractions of backgammon and \u201csitting\ndown in a forlorn scepticism.\u201d\n\nIn his first youth, while disintegrating reflection still overpowered\nthe active interests of his mind, Hume seems to have had some moments of\ngenuine suspense and doubt: but with years and prosperity the normal\nhabits of inference which he had so acutely analysed asserted themselves\nin his own person and he yielded to the \u201ctendency to feign\u201d so far at\nleast as to believe languidly in the histories he wrote, the compliments\nhe received, and the succulent dinners he devoured. There is a kind of\ncourtesy in scepticism. It would be an offence against polite\nconventions to press our doubts too far and question the permanence of\nour estates, our neighbours\u2019 independent existence, or even the\njustification of a good bishop\u2019s faith and income. Against\nmetaphysicians, and even against bishops, sarcasm was not without its\nsavour; but the line must be drawn somewhere by a gentleman and a man of\nthe world. Hume found no obstacle in his speculations to the adoption of\nall necessary and useful conceptions in the sphere to which he limited\nhis mature interests. That he never extended this liberty to believe\ninto more speculative and comprehensive regions was due simply to a\nvoluntary superficiality in his thought. Had he been interested in the\nrationality of things he would have laboured to discover it, as he\nlaboured to discover that historical truth or that political utility to\nwhich his interests happened to attach.\n\n[Sidenote: Kant\u2019s substitute for knowledge.]\n\nKant, like Berkeley, had a private mysticism in reserve to raise upon\nthe ruins of science and common-sense. Knowledge was to be removed to\nmake way for faith. This task is ambiguous, and the equivocation\ninvolved in it is perhaps the deepest of those confusions with which\nGerman metaphysics has since struggled, and which have made it waver\nbetween the deepest introspection and the dreariest mythology. To\nsubstitute faith for knowledge might mean to teach the intellect\nhumility, to make it aware of its theoretic and transitive function as a\nfaculty for hypothesis and rational fiction, building a bridge of\nmethodical inferences and ideal unities between fact and fact, between\nendeavour and satisfaction. It might be to remind us, sprinkling over\nus, as it were, the Lenten ashes of an intellectual contrition, that our\nthoughts are air even as our bodies are dust, momentary vehicles and\nproducts of an immortal vitality in God and in nature, which fosters and\nillumines us for a moment before it lapses into other forms.\n\nHad Kant proposed to humble and concentrate into a practical faith _the\nsame natural ideas_ which had previously been taken for absolute\nknowledge, his intention would have been innocent, his conclusions wise,\nand his analysis free from venom and _arri\u00e8re-pens\u00e9e_. Man, because of\nhis finite and propulsive nature and because he is a pilgrim and a\ntraveller throughout his life, is obliged to have faith: the absent, the\nhidden, the eventual, is the necessary object of his concern. But what\nelse shall his faith rest in except in what the necessary forms of his\nperception present to him and what the indispensable categories of his\nunderstanding help him to conceive? What possible objects are there for\nfaith except objects of a possible experience? What else should a\npractical and moral philosophy concern itself with, except the\ngovernance and betterment of the real world? It is surely by using his\nonly possible forms of perception and his inevitable categories of\nunderstanding that man may yet learn, as he has partly learned already,\nto live and prosper in the universe. Had Kant\u2019s criticism amounted\nsimply to such a confession of the tentative, practical, and\nhypothetical nature of human reason, it would have been wholly\nacceptable to the wise; and its appeal to faith would have been nothing\nbut an expression of natural vitality and courage, just as its criticism\nof knowledge would have been nothing but a better acquaintance with\nself. This faith would have called the forces of impulse and passion to\nreason\u2019s support, not to its betrayal. Faith would have meant faith in\nthe intellect, a faith naturally expressing man\u2019s practical and ideal\nnature, and the only faith yet sanctioned by its fruits.\n\n[Sidenote: False subjectivity attributed to reason.]\n\nSide by side with this reinstatement of reason, however, which was not\nabsent from Kant\u2019s system in its critical phase and in its application\nto science, there lurked in his substitution of faith for knowledge\nanother and sinister intention. He wished to blast as insignificant,\nbecause \u201csubjective,\u201d the whole structure of human intelligence, with\nall the lessons of experience and all the triumphs of human skill, and\nto attach absolute validity instead to certain echoes of his rigoristic\nreligious education. These notions were surely just as subjective, and\nfar more local and transitory, than the common machinery of thought; and\nit was actually proclaimed to be an evidence of their sublimity that\nthey remained entirely without practical sanction in the form of success\nor of happiness. The \u201ccategorical imperative\u201d was a shadow of the ten\ncommandments; the postulates of practical reason were the minimal tenets\nof the most abstract Protestantism. These fossils, found unaccountably\nimbedded in the old man\u2019s mind, he regarded as the evidences of an\ninward but supernatural revelation.\n\n[Sidenote: Chimerical reconstruction.]\n\nOnly the quaint severity of Kant\u2019s education and character can make\nintelligible to us the restraint he exercised in making supernatural\npostulates. All he asserted was his inscrutable moral imperative and a\nGod to reward with the pleasures of the next world those who had been\nPuritans in this. But the same principle could obviously be applied to\nother cherished imaginations: there is no superstition which it might\nnot justify in the eyes of men accustomed to see in that superstition\nthe sanction of their morality. For the \u201cpractical\u201d proofs of freedom,\nimmortality, and Providence\u2014of which all evidence in reason or\nexperience had previously been denied\u2014exceed in perfunctory sophistry\nanything that can be imagined. Yet this lamentable epilogue was in truth\nthe guiding thought of the whole investigation. Nature had been proved a\nfigment of human imagination so that, once rid of all but a mock\nallegiance to her facts and laws, we might be free to invent any world\nwe chose and believe it to be absolutely real and independent of our\nnature. Strange prepossession, that while part of human life and mind\nwas to be an avenue to reality and to put men in relation to external\nand eternal things, the whole of human life and mind should not be able\nto do so! Conceptions rooted in the very elements of our being, in our\nsenses, intellect, and imagination, which had shaped themselves through\nmany generations under a constant fire of observation and disillusion,\nthese were to be called subjective, not only in the sense in which all\nknowledge must obviously be so, since it is knowledge that someone\npossesses and has gained, but subjective in a disparaging sense, and in\ncontrast to some better form of knowledge. But what better form of\nknowledge is this? If it be a knowledge of things as they really are and\nnot as they appear, we must remember that reality means what the\nintellect infers from the data of sense; and yet the principles of such\ninference, by which the distinction between appearance and reality is\nfirst instituted, are precisely the principles now to be discarded as\nsubjective and of merely empirical validity.\n\n\u201cMerely empirical\u201d is a vicious phrase: what is other than empirical is\nless than empirical, and what is not relative to eventual experience is\nsomething given only in present fancy. The gods of genuine religion, for\ninstance, are terms in a continual experience: the pure in heart may see\nGod. If the better and less subjective principle be said to be the moral\nlaw, we must remember that the moral law which has practical importance\nand true dignity deals with facts and forces of the natural world, that\nit expresses interests and aspirations in which man\u2019s fate in time and\nspace, with his pains, pleasures, and all other empirical feelings, is\nconcerned. This was not the moral law to which Kant appealed, for this\nis a part of the warp and woof of nature. His moral law was a personal\nsuperstition, irrelevant to the impulse and need of the world. His\nnotions of the supernatural were those of his sect and generation, and\ndid not pass to his more influential disciples: what was transmitted was\nsimply the contempt for sense and understanding and the practice,\nauthorised by his modest example, of building air-castles in the great\nclearing which the Critique was supposed to have made.\n\nIt is noticeable in the series of philosophers from Hobbes to Kant that\nas the metaphysical residuum diminished the critical and psychological\nmachinery increased in volume and value. In Hobbes and Locke, with the\nbeginnings of empirical psychology, there is mixed an abstract\nmaterialism; in Berkeley, with an extension of analytic criticism, a\npopular and childlike theology, entirely without rational development;\nin Hume, with a completed survey of human habits of ideation, a\nwithdrawal into practical conventions; and in Kant, with the conception\nof the creative understanding firmly grasped and elaborately worked out,\na flight from the natural world altogether.\n\n[Sidenote: The Critique a word on mental architecture.]\n\nThe Critique, in spite of some artificialities and pedantries in\narrangement, presented a conception never before attained of the rich\narchitecture of reason. It revealed the intricate organisation,\ncomparable to that of the body, possessed by that fine web of\nintentions and counter-intentions whose pulsations are our thoughts. The\ndynamic logic of intelligence was laid bare, and the hierarchy of ideas,\nif not always correctly traced, was at least manifested in its\nprinciple. It was as great an enlargement of Hume\u2019s work as Hume\u2019s had\nbeen of Locke\u2019s or Locke\u2019s of Hobbes\u2019s. And the very fact that the\nmetaphysical residuum practically disappeared\u2014for the weak\nreconstruction in the second Critique may be dismissed as\nirrelevant\u2014renders the work essentially valid, essentially a\ndescription of something real. It is therefore a great source of\ninstruction and a good compendium or store-house for the problems of\nmind. But the work has been much overestimated. It is the product of a\nconfused though laborious mind. It contains contradictions not merely\nincidental, such as any great novel work must retain (since no man can\nat once remodel his whole vocabulary and opinions) but contradictions\nabsolutely fundamental and inexcusable, like that between the\ntranscendental function of intellect and its limited authority, or that\nbetween the efficacy of things-in-themselves and their unknowability.\nKant\u2019s assumptions and his conclusions, his superstitions and his\nwisdom, alternate without neutralising each other.\n\n[Sidenote: Incoherences.]\n\nThat experience is a product of two factors is an assumption made by\nKant. It rests on a psychological analogy, namely on the fact that\norgan and stimulus are both necessary to sensation. That experience is\nthe substance or matter of nature, which is a construction in thought,\nis Kant\u2019s conclusion, based on intrinsic logical analysis. Here\nexperience is evidently viewed as something uncaused and without\nconditions, being itself the source and condition of all thinkable\nobjects. The relation between the transcendental function of experience\nand its empirical causes Kant never understood. The transcendentalism\nwhich\u2014if we have it at all\u2014must be fundamental, he made derivative;\nand the realism, which must then be derivative, he made absolute.\nTherefore his metaphysics remained fabulous and his idealism sceptical\nor malicious.\n\nAsk what can be meant by \u201cconditions of experience\u201d and Kant\u2019s\nbewildering puzzle solves itself at the word. Condition, like cause, is\na term that covers a confusion between dialectical and natural\nconnections. The conditions of experience, in the dialectical sense, are\nthe characteristics a thing must have to deserve the name of experience;\nin other words, its conditions are its nominal essence. If experience be\nused in a loose sense to mean any given fact or consciousness in\ngeneral, the condition of experience is merely immediacy. If it be used,\nas it often is in empirical writers, for the shock of sense, its\nconditions are two: a sensitive organ and an object capable of\nstimulating it. If finally experience be given its highest and most\npregnant import and mean a fund of knowledge gathered by living, the\ncondition of experience is intelligence. Taking the word in this last\nsense, Kant showed in a confused but essentially conclusive fashion that\nonly by the application of categories to immediate data could knowledge\nof an ordered universe arise; or, in other language, that knowledge is a\nvista, that it has a perspective, since it is the presence to a given\nthought of a diffused and articulated landscape. The categories are the\nprinciples of interpretation by which the flat datum acquires this\nperspective in thought and becomes representative of a whole system of\nsuccessive or collateral existences.\n\nThe circumstance that experience, in the second sense, is a term\nreserved for what has certain natural conditions, namely, for the spark\nflying from the contact of stimulus and organ, led Kant to shift his\npoint of view, and to talk half the time about conditions in the sense\nof natural causes or needful antecedents. Intelligence is not an\nantecedent of thought and knowledge but their character and logical\nenergy. Synthesis is not a natural but only a dialectical condition of\npregnant experience; it does not introduce such experience but\nconstitutes it. Nevertheless, the whole skeleton and dialectical mould\nof experience came to figure, in Kant\u2019s mythology, as machinery behind\nthe scenes, as a system of non-natural efficient forces, as a partner in\na marriage the issue of which was human thought. The idea could thus\nsuggest itself\u2014favoured also by remembering inopportunely the actual\npsychological situation\u2014that all experience, in every sense of the\nword, had supernatural antecedents, and that the dialectical conditions\nof experience, in the highest sense, were efficient conditions of\nexperience in the lowest.\n\n[Sidenote: Nature the true system of conditions.]\n\nIt is hardly necessary to observe that absolute experience can have no\nnatural conditions. Existence in the abstract can have no cause; for\nevery real condition would have to be a factor in absolute experience,\nand every cause would be something existent. Of course there is a modest\nand non-exhaustive experience\u2014that is, any particular sensation,\nthought, or life\u2014which it would be preposterous to deny was subject to\nnatural conditions. Saint Lawrence\u2019s experience of being roasted, for\ninstance, had conditions; some of them were the fire, the decree of the\ncourt, and his own stalwart Christianity. But these conditions are other\nparts or objects of conceivable experience which, as we have learned,\nfall into a system with the part we say they condition. In our groping\nand inferential thought one part may become a ground for expecting or\nsupposing the other. Nature is then the sum total of its own conditions;\nthe whole object, the parts observed _plus_ the parts interpolated, is\nthe self-existent fact. The mind, in its empirical flux, is a part of\nthis complex; to say it is its own condition or that of the other\nobjects is a grotesque falsehood. A babe\u2019s casual sensation of light is\na condition neither of his own existence nor of his mother\u2019s. The true\nconditions are those other parts of the world without which, as we find\nby experience, sensations of light do not appear.\n\nHad Kant been trained in a better school of philosophy he might have\nfelt that the phrase \u201csubjective conditions\u201d is a contradiction in\nterms. When we find ourselves compelled to go behind the actual and\nimagine something antecedent or latent to pave the way for it, we are\n_ipso facto_ conceiving the potential, that is, the \u201cobjective\u201d world.\nAll antecedents, by transcendental necessity, are therefore objective\nand all conditions natural. An imagined potentiality that holds together\nthe episodes which are actual in consciousness is the very definition of\nan object or thing. Nature is the sum total of things potentially\nobservable, some observed actually, others interpolated hypothetically;\nand common-sense is right as against Kant\u2019s subjectivism in regarding\nnature as the condition of mind and not mind as the condition of nature.\nThis is not to say that experience and feeling are not the only given\nexistence, from which the material part of nature, something essentially\ndynamic and potential, must be intelligently inferred. But are not\n\u201cconditions\u201d inferred? Are they not, in their deepest essence,\npotentialities and powers? Kant\u2019s fabled conditions also are inferred;\nbut they are inferred illegitimately since the \u201csubjective\u201d ones are\ndialectical characters turned into antecedents, while the\nthing-in-itself is a natural object without a natural function.\nExperience alone being given, it is the ground from which its conditions\nare inferred: its conditions, therefore, are empirical. The secondary\nposition of nature goes with the secondary position of all causes,\nobjects, conditions, and ideals. To have made the conditions of\nexperience metaphysical, and prior in the order of knowledge to\nexperience itself, was simply a piece of surviving Platonism. The form\nwas hypostasised into an agent, and mythical machinery was imagined to\nimpress that form on whatever happened to have it.\n\nAll this was opposed to Kant\u2019s own discovery and to his critical\ndoctrine which showed that the world (which is the complex of those\nconditions which experience assigns to itself as it develops and\nprogresses in knowledge) is not before experience in the order of\nknowledge, but after it. His fundamental oversight and contradiction lay\nin not seeing that the concept of a set of conditions was the precise\nand exact concept of nature, which he consequently reduplicated, having\none nature before experience and another after. The first thus became\nmythical and the second illusory: for the first, said to condition\nexperience, was a set of verbal ghosts, while the second, which alone\ncould be observed or discovered scientifically, was declared fictitious.\nThe truth is that the single nature or set of conditions for experience\nwhich the intellect constructs is the object of our thoughts and\nperceptions ideally completed. This is neither mythical nor illusory. It\nis, strictly speaking, in its system and in many of its parts,\nhypothetical; but the hypothesis is absolutely safe. At whatever point\nwe test it, we find the experience we expect, and the inferences thence\nmade by the intellect are verified in sense at every moment of\nexistence.\n\n[Sidenote: Artificial pathos in subjectivism.]\n\nThe ambiguity in Kant\u2019s doctrine makes him a confusing representative of\nthat criticism of perception which malicious psychology has to offer.\nWhen the mind has made its great discovery; when it has recognised\nindependent objects, and thus taken a first step in its rational life,\nwe need to know unequivocally whether this step is a false or a true\none. If it be false, reason is itself misleading, since a hypothesis\nindispensable in the intellectual mastery of experience is a false\nhypothesis and the detail of experience has no substructure. Now Kant\u2019s\nanswer was that the discovery of objects was a true and valid discovery\nin the field of experience; there were, scientifically speaking, causes\nfor perception which could be inferred from perception by thought. But\nthis inference was not true absolutely or metaphysically because there\nwas a real world beyond possible experience, and there were oracles, not\nintellectual, by which knowledge of that unrealisable world might be\nobtained. This mysticism undid the intellectualism which characterised\nKant\u2019s system in its scientific and empirical application; so that the\njustification for the use of such categories as that of cause and\nsubstance (categories by which the idea of reality is constituted) was\ninvalidated by the counter-assertion that empirical reality was not true\nreality but, being an object reached by inferential thought, was merely\nan idea. Nor was the true reality appearance itself in its crude\nimmediacy, as sceptics would think; it was a realm of objects present to\na supposed intuitive thought, that is, to a non-inferential inference or\nnon-discursive discourse.\n\nSo that while Kant insisted on the point, which hardly needed pressing,\nthat it is mind that discovers empirical reality by making inferences\nfrom the data of sense, he admitted at the same time that such use of\nunderstanding is legitimate and even necessary, and that the idea of\nnature so framed his empirical truth. There remained, however, a sense\nthat this empirical truth was somehow insufficient and illusory.\nUnderstanding was a superficial faculty, and we might by other and\noracular methods arrive at a reality that was not empirical. Why any\nreality\u2014such as God, for instance\u2014should not be just as empirical as\nthe other side of the moon, if experience suggested it and reason\ndiscovered it, or why, if not suggested by experience and discovered by\nreason, anything should be called a reality at all or should hold for a\nmoment a man\u2019s waking attention\u2014that is what Kant never tells us and\nnever himself knew.\n\nClearer upon this question of perception is the position of Berkeley; we\nmay therefore take him as a fair representative of those critics who\nseek to invalidate the discovery of material objects.\n\n[Sidenote: Berkeley\u2019s algebra of perception.]\n\nOur ideas, said Berkeley, were in our minds; the material world was\npatched together out of our ideas; it therefore existed only in our\nminds. To the suggestion that the idea of the external world is of\ncourse in our minds, but that our minds have constructed it by treating\nsensations as effects of a permanent substance distributed in a\npermanent space, he would reply that this means nothing, because\n\u201csubstance,\u201d \u201cpermanence,\u201d and \u201cspace\u201d are non-existent ideas, _i.e._,\nthey are not images in sense. They might, however, be \u201cnotions\u201d like\nthat of \u201cspirit,\u201d which Berkeley ingenuously admitted into his system,\nto be, mysteriously enough, _that which has_ ideas. Or they might be\n(what would do just as well for our purpose) that which he elsewhere\ncalled them, algebraic signs used to facilitate the operations of\nthought. This is, indeed, what they are, if we take the word algebraic\nin a loose enough sense. They are like algebraic signs in being, in\nrespect of their object or signification, not concrete images but terms\nin a mental process, elements in a method of inference. Why, then,\ndenounce them? They could be used with all confidence to lead us back\nto the concrete values for which they stood and to the relations which\nthey enabled us to state and discover. Experience would thus be\nfurnished with an intelligible structure and articulation, and a\npsychological analysis would be made of knowledge into its sensuous\nmaterial and its ideal objects. What, then, was Berkeley\u2019s objection to\nthese algebraic methods of inference and to the notions of space,\nmatter, independent existence, and efficient causality which these\nmethods involve?\n\n[Sidenote: Horror of physics.]\n\nWhat he abhorred was the belief that such methods of interpreting\nexperience were ultimate and truly valid, and that by thinking after the\nfashion of \u201cmathematical atheists\u201d we could understand experience as\nwell as it can be understood. If the flux of ideas had no other key to\nit than that system of associations and algebraic substitutions which is\ncalled the natural world we should indeed know just as well what to\nexpect in practice and should receive the same education in perception\nand reflection; but what difference would there be between such an\nidealist and the most pestilential materialist, save his even greater\nwariness and scepticism? Berkeley at this time\u2014long before days of\n\u201cSiris\u201d and tar-water\u2014was too ignorant and hasty to understand how\ninane all spiritual or poetic ideals would be did they not express man\u2019s\ntragic dependence on nature and his congruous development in her bosom.\nHe lived in an age when the study and dominion of external things no\nlonger served directly spiritual uses. The middle-men had appeared,\nthose spirits in whom the pursuit of the true and the practical never\nleads to possession of the good, but loses itself, like a river in sand,\namid irrational habits and passions. He was accordingly repelled by\nwhatever philosophy was in him, no less than by his religious\nprejudices, from submergence in external interests, and he could see no\nbetter way of vindicating the supremacy of moral goods than to deny the\nreality of matter, the finality of science, and the constructive powers\nof reason altogether. With honest English empiricism he saw that science\nhad nothing absolute or sacrosanct about it, and rightly placed the\nvalue of theory in its humane uses; but the complementary truth escaped\nhim altogether that only the free and contemplative expression of\nreason, of which science is a chief part, can render anything else\nhumane, useful, or practical. He was accordingly a party man in\nphilosophy, where partisanship is treason, and opposed the work of\nreason in the theoretical field, hoping thus to advance it in the moral.\n\n[Sidenote: Puerility in morals.]\n\nOf the moral field he had, it need hardly be added, a quite childish and\nperfunctory conception. There the prayer-book and the catechism could\nsolve every problem. He lacked the feeling, possessed by all large and\nmature minds, that there would be no intelligibility or value in things\ndivine were they not interpretations and sublimations of things\nnatural. To master the real world was an ancient and not too promising\nambition: it suited his youthful radicalism better to exorcise or to\ncajole it. He sought to refresh the world with a water-spout of\nidealism, as if to change the names of things could change their values.\nAway with all arid investigation, away with the cold algebra of sense\nand reason, and let us have instead a direct conversation with heaven,\nan unclouded vision of the purposes and goodness of God; as if there\nwere any other way of understanding the sources of human happiness than\nto study the ways of nature and man.\n\nConverse with God has been the life of many a wiser and sadder\nphilosopher than Berkeley; but they, like Plato, for instance, or\nSpinoza, have made experience the subject as well as the language of\nthat intercourse, and have thus given the divine revelation some degree\nof pertinence and articulation. Berkeley in his positive doctrine was\nsatisfied with the vaguest generalities; he made no effort to find out\nhow the consciousness that God is the direct author of our incidental\nperceptions is to help us to deal with them; what other insights and\nprinciples are to be substituted for those that disclose the economy of\nnature; how the moral difficulties incident to an absolute\nprovidentialism are to be met, or how the existence and influence of\nfellow-minds is to be defended. So that to a piety inspired by\nconventional theology and a psychology that refused to pass, except\ngrudgingly and unintelligently, beyond the sensuous stratum, Berkeley\nhad nothing to add by way of philosophy. An insignificant repetition of\nthe truism that ideas are all \u201cin the mind\u201d constituted his total\nwisdom. To be was to be perceived. That was the great maxim by virtue of\nwhich we were asked, if not to refrain from conceiving nature at all,\nwhich was perhaps impossible at so late a stage in human development, at\nleast to refrain from regarding our necessary thoughts on nature as true\nor rational. Intelligence was but a false method of imagination by which\nGod trained us in action and thought; for it was apparently impossible\nto endow us with a true method that would serve that end. And what shall\nwe think of the critical acumen or practical wisdom of a philosopher who\ndreamed of some other criterion of truth than necessary implication in\nthought and action?\n\n[Sidenote: Truism and sophism.]\n\nIn the melodramatic fashion so common in what is called philosophy we\nmay delight ourselves with such flashes of lightning as this: _esse est\npercipi_. The truth of this paradox lies in the fact that through\nperception alone can we get at being\u2014a modest and familiar notion which\nmakes, as Plato\u2019s \u201cThe\u00e6tetus\u201d shows, not a bad point of departure for a\nserious theory of knowledge. The sophistical intent of it, however, is\nto deny our right to make a distinction which in fact we do make and\nwhich the speaker himself is making as he utters the phrase; for he\nwould not be so proud of himself if he thought he was thundering a\ntautology. If a thing were never perceived, or inferred from perception,\nwe should indeed never know that it existed; but once perceived or\ninferred it may be more conducive to comprehension and practical\ncompetence to regard it as existing independently of our perception; and\nour ability to make this supposition is registered in the difference\nbetween the two words _to be_ and _to be perceived_\u2014words which are by\nno means synonymous but designate two very different relations of things\nin thought. Such idealism at one fell swoop, through a collapse of\nassertive intellect and a withdrawal of reason into self-consciousness,\nhas the puzzling character of any clever pun, that suspends the fancy\nbetween two incompatible but irresistible meanings. The art of such\nsophistry is to choose for an axiom some ambiguous phrase which taken in\none sense is a truism and taken in another is an absurdity; and then, by\nshowing the truth of that truism, to give out that the absurdity has\nalso been proved. It is a truism to say that I am the only seat or locus\nof my ideas, and that whatever I know is known by me; it is an absurdity\nto say that I am the only object of my thought and perception.\n\n[Sidenote: Reality is the practical made intelligible.]\n\nTo confuse the instrument with its function and the operation with its\nmeaning has been a persistent foible in modern philosophy. It could thus\ncome about that the function of intelligence should be altogether\nmisconceived and in consequence denied, when it was discovered that\nfigments of reason could never become elements of sense but must always\nremain, as of course they should, ideal and regulative objects, and\ntherefore objects to which a practical and energetic intellect will tend\nto give the name of realities. Matter is a reality to the practical\nintellect because it is a necessary and ideal term in the mastery of\nexperience; while negligible sensations, like dreams, are called\nillusions by the same authority because, though actual enough while they\nlast, they have no sustained function and no right to practical\ndominion.\n\nLet us imagine Berkeley addressing himself to that infant or animal\nconsciousness which first used the category of substance and passed from\nits perceptions to the notion of an independent thing. \u201cBeware, my\nchild,\u201d he would have said, \u201cyou are taking a dangerous step, one which\nmay hereafter produce a multitude of mathematical atheists, not to speak\nof cloisterfuls of scholastic triflers. Your ideas can exist only in\nyour mind; if you suffer yourself to imagine them materialised in\nmid-air and subsisting when you do not perceive them, you will commit a\ngreat impiety. If you unthinkingly believe that when you shut your eyes\nthe world continues to exist until you open them again, you will\ninevitably be hurried into an infinity of metaphysical quibbles about\nthe discrete and the continuous, and you will be so bewildered and\ndeafened by perpetual controversies that the clear light of the gospel\nwill be extinguished in your soul.\u201d \u201cBut,\u201d that tender Peripatetic might\nanswer, \u201cI cannot forget the things about me when I shut my eyes: I know\nand almost feel their persistent presence, and I always find them again,\nupon trial, just as they were before, or just in that condition to which\nthe operation of natural causes would have brought them in my absence.\nIf I believe they remain and suffer steady and imperceptible\ntransformation, I know what to expect, and the event does not deceive\nme; but if I had to resolve upon action before knowing whether the\nconditions for action were to exist or no, I should never understand\nwhat sort of a world I lived in.\u201d\n\n\u201cAh, my child,\u201d the good Bishop would reply, \u201cyou misunderstand me. You\nmay indeed, nay, you must, live and think _as if_ everything remained\nindependently real. That is part of your education for heaven, which God\nin his goodness provides for you in this life. He will send into your\nsoul at every moment the impressions needed to verify your necessary\nhypotheses and support your humble and prudent expectations. Only you\nmust not attribute that constancy to the things themselves which is due\nto steadfastness in the designs of Providence. _Think and act_ as if a\nmaterial world existed, but do not for a moment _believe_ it to exist.\u201d\n\n[Sidenote: Vain \u201crealities\u201d and trustworthy \u201cfictions.\u201d]\n\nWith this advice, coming reassuringly from the combined forces of\nscepticism and religion, we may leave the embryonic mind to its own\ndevices, satisfied that even according to the most malicious\npsychologists its first step toward the comprehension of experience is\none it may congratulate itself on having taken and which, for the\npresent at least, it is not called upon to retrace. The Life of Reason\nis not concerned with speculation about unthinkable and gratuitous\n\u201crealities\u201d; it seeks merely to attain those conceptions which are\nnecessary and appropriate to man in his acting and thinking. The first\namong these, underlying all arts and philosophies alike, is the\nindispensable conception of permanent external objects, forming in their\ncongeries, shifts, and secret animation the system and life of nature.\n\n     NOTE\u2014There is a larger question raised by Berkeley\u2019s\n     arguments which I have not attempted to discuss here, namely,\n     whether knowledge is possible at all, and whether any mental\n     representation can be supposed to inform us about anything.\n     Berkeley of course assumed this power in that he continued to\n     believe in God, in other spirits, in the continuity of\n     experience, and in its discoverable laws. His objection to\n     material objects, therefore, could not consistently be that\n     they are objects of knowledge rather than absolute feelings,\n     exhausted by their momentary possession in consciousness. It\n     could only be that they are unthinkable and invalid objects,\n     in which the materials of sense are given a mode of existence\n     inconsistent with their nature. But if the only criticism to\n     which material objects were obnoxious were a dialectical\n     criticism, such as that contained in Kant\u2019s antinomies, the\n     royal road to idealism coveted by Berkeley would be blocked;\n     to be an idea in the mind would not involve lack of cognitive\n     and representative value in that idea. The fact that material\n     objects were represented or conceived would not of itself\n     prove that they could not have a real existence. It would be\n     necessary, to prove their unreality, to study their nature and\n     function and to compare them with such conceptions as those of\n     Providence and a spirit-world in order to determine their\n     relative validity. Such a critical comparison would have\n     augured ill for Berkeley\u2019s prejudices; what its result might\n     have been we can see in Kant\u2019s Critique of Pure Reason. In\n     order to escape such evil omens and prevent the collapse of\n     his mystical paradoxes, Berkeley keeps in reserve a much more\n     insidious weapon, the sceptical doubt as to the representative\n     character of anything mental, the possible illusiveness of all\n     knowledge. This doubt he invokes in all those turns of thought\n     and phrase in which he suggests that if an idea is in the mind\n     it cannot have its counterpart elsewhere, and that a given\n     cognition exhausts and contains its object. There are, then,\n     two separate maxims in his philosophy, one held consistently,\n     viz., that nothing can be known which is different in\n     character or nature from the object present to the thinking\n     mind; the other, held incidentally and inconsistently, since\n     it is destructive of all predication and knowledge, viz., that\n     nothing can exist beyond the mind which is similar in nature\n     or character to the \u201cideas\u201d within it; or, to put the same\n     thing in other words, that nothing can be revealed by an idea\n     which is different from that idea in point of existence. The\n     first maxim does not contradict the existence of external\n     objects in space; the second contradicts every conception that\n     the human mind can ever form, the most airy no less than the\n     grossest. No idealist can go so far as to deny that his memory\n     represents his past experience by inward similarity and\n     conscious intention, or, if he prefers this language, that the\n     moments or aspects of the divine mind represent one another\n     and their general system. Else the idealist\u2019s philosophy\n     itself would be an insignificant and momentary illusion.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER V\u2014NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED\n\n\n[Sidenote: Man\u2019s feeble grasp of nature.]\n\nWhen the mind has learned to distinguish external objects and to\nattribute to them a constant size, shape, and potency, in spite of the\nvariety and intermittence ruling in direct experience, there yet remains\na great work to do before attaining a clear, even if superficial, view\nof the world. An animal\u2019s customary habitat may have constant features\nand their relations in space may be learned by continuous exploration;\nbut probably many other landscapes are also within the range of memory\nand fancy that stand in no visible relation to the place in which we\nfind ourselves at a given moment. It is true that, at this day, we take\nit for granted that all real places, as we call them, lie in one space,\nin which they hold definite geometric relations to one another; and if\nwe have glimpses of any region for which no room can be found in the\nsingle map of the universe which astronomy has drawn, we unhesitatingly\nrelegate that region to the land of dreams. Since the Elysian Fields and\nthe Coast of Bohemia have no assignable latitude and longitude, we call\nthese places imaginary, even if in some dream we remember to have\nvisited them and dwelt there with no less sense of reality than in this\nsingle and geometrical world of commerce. It belongs to sanity and\ncommon-sense, as men now possess them, to admit no countries unknown to\ngeography and filling no part of the conventional space in three\ndimensions. All our waking experience is understood to go on in some\npart of this space, and no court of law would admit evidence relating to\nevents in some other sphere.\n\nThis principle, axiomatic as it has become, is in no way primitive,\nsince primitive experience is sporadic and introduces us to detached\nscenes separated by lapses in our senses and attention. These scenes do\nnot hang together in any local contiguity. To construct a chart of the\nworld is a difficult feat of synthetic imagination, not to be performed\nwithout speculative boldness and a heroic insensibility to the claims of\nfancy. Even now most people live without topographical ideas and have no\nclear conception of the spatial relations that keep together the world\nin which they move. They feel their daily way about like animals,\nfollowing a habitual scent, without dominating the range of their\ninstinctive wanderings. Reality is rather a story to them than a system\nof objects and forces, nor would they think themselves mad if at any\ntime their experience should wander into a fourth dimension. Vague\ndramatic and moral laws, when they find any casual application, seem to\nsuch dreaming minds more notable truths, deeper revelations of\nefficacious reality, than the mechanical necessities of the case, which\nthey scarcely conceive of; and in this primordial prejudice they are\nconfirmed by superstitious affinities often surviving in their religion\nand philosophy. In the midst of cities and affairs they are like\nlandsmen at sea, incapable of an intellectual conception of their\nposition: nor have they any complete confidence in their principles of\nnavigation. They know the logarithms by rote merely, and if they reflect\nare reduced to a stupid wonder and only half believe they are in a known\nuniverse or will ever reach an earthly port. It would not require\nsuperhuman eloquence in some prophetic passenger to persuade them to\nthrow compass and quadrant overboard and steer enthusiastically for El\nDorado. The theory of navigation is essentially as speculative as that\nof salvation, only it has survived more experiences of the judgment and\nrepeatedly brought those who trust in it to their promised land.\n\n[Sidenote: Its unity ideal and discoverable only by steady thought.]\n\nThe theory that all real objects and places lie together in one even and\nhomogeneous space, conceived as similar in its constitution to the parts\nof extension of which we have immediate intuition, is a theory of the\ngreatest practical importance and validity. By its light we carry on all\nour affairs, and the success of our action while we rely upon it is the\nbest proof of its truth. The imaginative parsimony and discipline which\nsuch a theory involves are balanced by the immense extension and\ncertitude it gives to knowledge. It is at once an act of allegiance to\nnature and a Magna Charta which mind imposes on the tyrannous world,\nwhich in turn pledges itself before the assembled faculties of man not\nto exceed its constitutional privilege and to harbour no magic monsters\nin unattainable lairs from which they might issue to disturb human\nlabours. Yet that spontaneous intelligence which first enabled men to\nmake this genial discovery and take so fundamental a step toward taming\nexperience should not be laid by after this first victory; it is a\nweapon needed in many subsequent conflicts. To conceive that all nature\nmakes one system is only a beginning: the articulation of natural life\nhas still to be discovered in detail and, what is more, a similar\narticulation has to be given to the psychic world which now, by the very\nact that constitutes Nature and makes her consistent, appears at her\nside or rather in her bosom.\n\nThat the unification of nature is eventual and theoretical is a point\nuseful to remember: else the relation of the natural world to poetry,\nmetaphysics, and religion will never become intelligible. Lalande, or\nwhoever it was, who searched the heavens with his telescope and could\nfind no God, would not have found the human mind if he had searched the\nbrain with a microscope. Yet God existed in man\u2019s apprehension long\nbefore mathematics or even, perhaps, before the vault of heaven; for\nthe objectification of the whole mind, with its passions and motives,\nnaturally precedes that abstraction by which the idea of a material\nworld is drawn from the chaos of experience, an abstraction which\nculminates in such atomic and astronomical theories as science is now\nfamiliar with. The sense for life in things, be they small or great, is\nnot derived from the abstract idea of their bodies but is an ancient\nconcomitant to that idea, inseparable from it until it became abstract.\nTruth and materiality, mechanism and ideal interests, are collateral\nprojections from one rolling experience, which shows up one aspect or\nthe other as it develops various functions and dominates itself to\nvarious ends. When one ore is abstracted and purified, the residuum\nsubsists in that primeval quarry in which it originally lay. The failure\nto find God among the stars, or even the attempt to find him there, does\nnot indicate that human experience affords no avenue to the idea of\nGod\u2014for history proves the contrary\u2014but indicates rather the atrophy\nin this particular man of the imaginative faculty by which his race had\nattained to that idea. Such an atrophy might indeed become general, and\nGod would in that case disappear from human experience as music would\ndisappear if universal deafness attacked the race. Such an event is made\nconceivable by the loss of allied imaginative habits, which is\nobservable in historic times. Yet possible variations in human faculty\ndo not involve the illegitimacy of such faculties as actually subsist;\nand the abstract world known to science, unless it dries up the ancient\nfountains of ideation by its habitual presence in thought, does not\nremove those parallel dramatisations or abstractions which experience\nmay have suggested to men.\n\nWhat enables men to perceive the unity of nature is the unification of\ntheir own wills. A man half-asleep, without fixed purposes, without\nintellectual keenness or joy in recognition, might graze about like an\nanimal, forgetting each satisfaction in the next and banishing from his\nfrivolous mind the memory of every sorrow; what had just failed to kill\nhim would leave him as thoughtless and unconcerned as if it had never\ncrossed his path. Such irrational elasticity and innocent improvidence\nwould never put two and two together. Every morning there would be a new\nworld with the same fool to live in it. But let some sobering passion,\nsome serious interest, lend perspective to the mind, and a point of\nreference will immediately be given for protracted observation; then the\nlaws of nature will begin to dawn upon thought. Every experiment will\nbecome a lesson, every event will be remembered as favourable or\nunfavourable to the master-passion. At first, indeed, this keen\nobservation will probably be animistic and the laws discovered will be\nchiefly habits, human or divine, special favours or envious punishments\nand warnings. But the same constancy of aim which discovers the\ndramatic conflicts composing society, and tries to read nature in terms\nof passion, will, if it be long sustained, discover behind this glorious\nchaos a deeper mechanical order. Men\u2019s thoughts, like the weather, are\nnot so arbitrary as they seem and the true master in observation, the\nman guided by a steadfast and superior purpose, will see them revolving\nabout their centres in obedience to quite calculable instincts, and the\nprinciple of all their flutterings will not be hidden from his eyes.\nBelief in indeterminism is a sign of indetermination. No commanding or\nsteady intellect flirts with so miserable a possibility, which in so far\nas it actually prevailed would make virtue impotent and experience, in\nits pregnant sense, impossible.\n\n[Sidenote: Mind the erratic residue of existence.]\n\nWe have said that those objects which cannot be incorporated into the\none space which the understanding envisages are relegated to another\nsphere called imagination. We reach here a most important corollary. As\nmaterial objects, making a single system which fills space and evolves\nin time, are conceived by abstraction from the flux of sensuous\nexperience, so, _pari passu_, the rest of experience, with all its other\noutgrowths and concretions, falls out with the physical world and forms\nthe sphere of mind, the sphere of memory, fancy, and the passions. We\nhave in this discrimination the _genesis of mind_, not of course in the\ntranscendental sense in which the word mind is extended to mean the sum\ntotal and mere fact of existence\u2014for mind, so taken, can have no origin\nand indeed no specific meaning\u2014but the genesis of mind as a determinate\nform of being, a distinguishable part of the universe known to\nexperience and discourse, the mind that unravels itself in meditation,\ninhabits animal bodies, and is studied in psychology.\n\nMind, in this proper sense of the word, is the residue of existence, the\nleavings, so to speak, and parings of experience when the material world\nhas been cut out of the whole cloth. Reflection underlines in the\nchaotic continuum of sense and longing those aspects that have practical\nsignificance; it selects the efficacious ingredients in the world. The\ntrustworthy object which is thus retained in thought, the complex of\nconnected events, is nature, and though so intelligible an object is not\nsoon nor vulgarly recognised, because human reflection is perturbed and\nhalting, yet every forward step in scientific and practical knowledge is\na step toward its clearer definition. At first much parasitic matter\nclings to that dynamic skeleton. Nature is drawn like a sponge heavy and\ndripping from the waters of sentience. It is soaked with inefficacious\npassions and overlaid with idle accretions. Nature, in a word, is at\nfirst conceived mythically, dramatically, and retains much of the\nunintelligible, sporadic habit of animal experience itself. But as\nattention awakes and discrimination, practically inspired, grows firm\nand stable, irrelevant qualities are stripped off, and the mechanical\nprocess, the efficacious infallible order, is clearly disclosed beneath.\nMeantime the incidental effects, the \u201csecondary qualities,\u201d are\nrelegated to a personal inconsequential region; they constitute the\nrealm of appearance, the realm of mind.\n\n[Sidenote: Ghostly character of mind.]\n\nMind is therefore sometimes identified with the unreal. We oppose, in an\nantithesis natural to thought and language, the imaginary to the true,\nfancy to fact, idea to thing. But this thing, fact, or external reality\nis, as we have seen, a completion and hypostasis of certain portions of\nexperience, packed into such shapes as prove cogent in thought and\npractice. The stuff of external reality, the matter out of which its\nidea is made, is therefore continuous with the stuff and matter of our\nown minds. Their common substance is the immediate flux. This living\nworm has propagated by fission, and the two halves into which it has\ndivided its life are mind and nature. Mind has kept and clarified the\ncrude appearance, the dream, the purpose that seethed in the mass;\nnature has appropriated the order, the constant conditions, the causal\nsubstructure, disclosed in reflection, by which the immediate flux is\nexplained and controlled. The chemistry of thought has precipitated\nthese contrasted terms, each maintaining a recognisable identity and\nhaving the function of a point of reference for memory and will. Some of\nthese terms or objects of thought we call things and marshal in all\ntheir ideal stability\u2014for there is constancy in their motions and\ntransformations\u2014to make the intelligible external world of practice and\nscience. Whatever stuff has not been absorbed in this construction,\nwhatever facts of sensation, ideation, or will, do not coalesce with the\nnewest conception of reality, we then call the mind.\n\nRaw experience, then, lies at the basis of the idea of nature and\napproves its reality; while an equal reality belongs to the residue of\nexperience, not taken up, as yet, into that idea. But this residual\nsensuous reality often seems comparatively unreal because what it\npresents is entirely without practical force apart from its mechanical\nassociates. This inconsequential character of what remains over follows\nof itself from the concretion of whatever is constant and efficacious\ninto the external world. If this fact is ever called in question, it is\nonly because the external world is vaguely conceived, and loose wills\nand ideas are thought to govern it by magic. Yet in many ways falling\nshort of absolute precision people recognise that thought is not dynamic\nor, as they call it, not real. The idea of the physical world is the\nfirst flower or thick cream of practical thinking. Being skimmed off\nfirst and proving so nutritious, it leaves the liquid below somewhat\nthin and unsavoury. Especially does this result appear when science is\nstill unpruned and mythical, so that what passes into the idea of\nmaterial nature is much more than the truly causal network of forces,\nand includes many spiritual and moral functions.\n\nThe material world, as conceived in the first instance, had not that\nclear abstractness, nor the spiritual world that wealth and interest,\nwhich they have acquired for modern minds. The complex reactions of\nman\u2019s soul had been objectified together with those visual and tactile\nsensations which, reduced to a mathematical baldness, now furnish terms\nto natural science. Mind then dwelt in the world, not only in the warmth\nand beauty with which it literally clothed material objects, as it still\ndoes in poetic perception, but in a literal animistic way; for human\npassion and reflection were attributed to every object and made a\nfairy-land of the world. Poetry and religion discerned life in those\nvery places in which sense and understanding perceived body; and when so\nmuch of the burden of experience took wing into space, and the soul\nherself floated almost visibly among the forms of nature, it is no\nmarvel that the poor remnant, a mass of merely personal troubles, an\nuninteresting distortion of things in individual minds, should have\nseemed a sad and unsubstantial accident. The inner world was all the\nmore ghostly because the outer world was so much alive.\n\n[Sidenote: Hypostasis and criticism both need control.]\n\nThis movement of thought, which clothed external objects in all the\nwealth of undeciphered dreams, has long lost its momentum and yielded to\na contrary tendency. Just as the hypostasis of some terms in experience\nis sanctioned by reason, when the objects so fixed and externalised can\nserve as causes and explanations for the order of events, so the\ncriticism which tends to retract that hypostasis is sanctioned by reason\nwhen the hypostasis has exceeded its function and the external object\nconceived is loaded with useless ornament. The transcendental and\nfunctional secret of such hypostases, however, is seldom appreciated by\nthe headlong mind; so that the ebb no less than the flow of\nobjectification goes on blindly and impulsively, and is carried to\nabsurd extremes. An age of mythology yields to an age of subjectivity;\nreason being equally neglected and exceeded in both. The reaction\nagainst imagination has left the external world, as represented in many\nminds, stark and bare. All the interesting and vital qualities which\nmatter had once been endowed with have been attributed instead to an\nirresponsible sensibility in man. And as habits of ideation change\nslowly and yield only piecemeal to criticism or to fresh intuitions,\nsuch a revolution has not been carried out consistently, but instead of\na thorough renaming of things and a new organisation of thought it has\nproduced chiefly distress and confusion. Some phases of this confusion\nmay perhaps repay a moment\u2019s attention; they may enable us, when seen in\ntheir logical sequence, to understand somewhat better the hypostasising\nintellect that is trying to assert itself and come to the light through\nall these gropings.\n\n[Sidenote: Comparative constancy in objects and in ideas]\n\nWhat helps in the first place to disclose a permanent object is a\npermanent sensation. There is a vast and clear difference between a\nfloating and a fixed feeling; the latter, in normal circumstances, is\npresent only when continuous stimulation renews it at every moment.\nAttention may wander, but the objects in the environment do not cease to\nradiate their influences on the body, which is thereby not allowed to\nlose the modification which those influences provoke. The consequent\nperception is therefore always at hand and in its repetitions\nsubstantially identical. Perceptions not renewed in this way by\ncontinuous stimulation come and go with cerebral currents; they are rare\nvisitors, instead of being, like external objects, members of the\nhousehold. Intelligence is most at home in the ultimate, which is the\nobject of intent. Those realities which it can trust and continually\nrecover are its familiar and beloved companions. The mists that may\noriginally have divided it from them, and which psychologists call the\nmind, are gladly forgotten so soon as intelligence avails to pierce\nthem, and as friendly communication can be established with the real\nworld. Moreover, perceptions not sustained by a constant external\nstimulus are apt to be greatly changed when they reappear, and to be\nchanged unaccountably, whereas external things show some method and\nproportion in their variations. Even when not much changed in\nthemselves, mere ideas fall into a new setting, whereas things, unless\nsomething else has intervened to move them, reappear in their old\nplaces. Finally things are acted upon by other men, but thoughts are\nhidden from them by divine miracle.\n\nExistence reveals reality when the flux discloses something permanent\nthat dominates it. What is thus dominated, though it is the primary\nexistence itself, is thereby degraded to appearance. Perceptions caused\nby external objects are, as we have just seen, long sustained in\ncomparison with thoughts and fancies; but the objects are themselves in\nflux and a man\u2019s relation to them may be even more variable; so that\nvery often a memory or a sentiment will recur, almost unchanged in\ncharacter, long after the perception that first aroused it has become\nimpossible. The brain, though mobile, is subject to habit; its\nformations, while they lapse instantly, return again and again. These\nideal objects may accordingly be in a way more real and enduring than\nthings external. Hence no primitive mind puts all reality, or what is\nmost real in reality, in an abstract material universe. It finds,\nrather, ideal points of reference by which material mutation itself\nseems to be controlled. An ideal world is recognised from the beginning\nand placed, not in the immediate foreground, nearer than material\nthings, but much farther off. It has greater substantiality and\nindependence than material objects are credited with. It is divine.\n\nWhen agriculture, commerce, or manual crafts have given men some\nknowledge of nature, the world thus recognised and dominated is far from\nseeming ultimate. It is thought to lie between two others, both now\noften called mental, but in their original quality altogether disparate:\nthe world of spiritual forces and that of sensuous appearance. The\nnotions of permanence and independence by which material objects are\nconceived apply also, of course, to everything spiritual; and while the\ndominion exercised by spirits may be somewhat precarious, they are as\nremote as possible from immediacy and sensation. They come and go; they\ngovern nature or, if they neglect to do so, it is from aversion or high\nindifference; they visit man with obsessions and diseases; they hasten\nto extricate him from difficulties; and they dwell in him, constituting\nhis powers of conscience and invention. Sense, on the other hand, is a\nmere effect, either of body or spirit or of both in conjunction. It\ngives a vitiated personal view of these realities. Its pleasures are\ndangerous and unintelligent, and it perishes as it goes.\n\n[Sidenote: Spirit and sense defined by their relation to nature.]\n\nSuch are, for primitive apperception, the three great realms of being:\nnature, sense, and spirit. Their frontiers, however, always remain\nuncertain. Sense, because it is insignificant when made an object, is\nlong neglected by reflection. No attempt is made to describe its\nprocesses or ally them systematically to natural changes. Its\nillusions, when noticed, are regarded as scandals calculated to foster\nscepticism. The spiritual world is, on the other hand, a constant theme\nfor poetry and speculation. In the absence of ideal science, it can be\nconceived only in myths, which are naturally as shifting and\nself-contradictory as they are persistent. They acquire no fixed\ncharacter until, in dogmatic religion, they are defined with reference\nto natural events, foretold or reported. Nature is what first acquires a\nform and then imparts form to the other spheres. Sense admits definition\nand distribution only as an effect of nature and spirit only as its\nprinciple.\n\n[Sidenote: Vague notions of nature involve vague notions of spirit.]\n\nThe form nature acquires is, however, itself vague and uncertain and can\nill serve, for long ages, to define the other realms which depend on it\nfor definition. Hence it has been common, for instance, to treat the\nspiritual as a remote or finer form of the natural. Beyond the moon\neverything seemed permanent; it was therefore called divine and declared\nto preside over the rest. The breath that escaped from the lips at\ndeath, since it took away with it the spiritual control and miraculous\nlife that had quickened the flesh, was itself the spirit. On the other\nhand, natural processes have been persistently attributed to spiritual\ncauses, for it was not matter that moved itself but intent that moved\nit. Thus spirit was barbarously taken for a natural substance and a\nnatural force. It was identified with everything in which it was\nmanifested, so long as no natural causes could be assigned for that\noperation.\n\n[Sidenote: Sense and spirit the life of nature, which science\nredistributes but does not deny.]\n\nIf the unification of nature were complete sense would evidently fall\nwithin it; it is to subtend and sustain the sensible flux that\nintelligence acknowledges first stray material objects and then their\ngeneral system. The elements of experience not taken up into the\nconstitution of objects remain attached to them as their life. In the\nend the dynamic skeleton, without losing its articulation, would be\nclothed again with its flesh. Suppose my notions of astronomy allowed me\nto believe that the sun, sinking into the sea, was extinguished every\nevening, and that what appeared the next morning was his younger\nbrother, hatched in a sun-producing nest to be found in the Eastern\nregions. My theory would have robbed yesterday\u2019s sun of its life and\nbrightness; it would have asserted that during the night no sun existed\nanywhere; but it would have added the sun\u2019s qualities afresh to a matter\nthat did not previously possess them, namely, to the imagined egg that\nwould produce a sun for to-morrow. Suppose we substitute for that\nastronomy the one that now prevails: we have deprived the single\nsun\u2014which now exists and spreads its influences without\ninterruption\u2014of its humanity and even of its metaphysical unity. It has\nbecome a congeries of chemical substances. The facts revealed to\nperception have partly changed their locus and been differently deployed\nthroughout nature. Some have become attached to operations in the human\nbrain. Nature has not thereby lost any quality she had ever manifested;\nthese have merely been redistributed so as to secure a more systematic\nconnection between them all. They are the materials of the system, which\nhas been conceived by making existences continuous, whenever this\nextension of their being was needful to render their recurrences\nintelligible. Sense, which was formerly regarded as a sad distortion of\nits objects, now becomes an original and congruent part of nature, from\nwhich, as from any other part, the rest of nature might be\nscientifically inferred.\n\nSpirit is not less closely attached to nature, although in a different\nmanner. Taken existentially it is a part of sense; taken ideally it is\nthe form or value which nature acquires when viewed from the\nvantage-ground of any interest. Individual objects are recognisable for\na time not because the flux is materially arrested but because it\nsomewhere circulates in a fashion which awakens an interest and brings\ndifferent parts of the surrounding process into definable and prolonged\nrelations with that interest. Particular objects may perish yet others\nmay continue, like the series of suns imagined by Heraclitus, to perform\nthe same office. The function will outlast the particular organ. That\ninterest in reference to which the function is defined will essentially\ndetermine a perfect world of responsive extensions and conditions. These\nideals will be a spiritual reality; and they will be expressed in nature\nin so far as nature supports that regulative interest. Many a perfect\nand eternal realm, merely potential in existence but definite in\nconstitution, will thus subtend nature and be what a rational philosophy\nmight call the ideal. What is called spirit would be the ideal in so far\nas it obtained expression in nature; and the power attributed to spirit\nwould be the part of nature\u2019s fertility by which such expression was\nsecured.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VI\u2014DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS\n\n\n[Sidenote: Another background for current experience may be found in\nalien minds.]\n\nWhen a ghostly sphere, containing memory and all ideas, has been\ndistinguished from the material world, it tends to grow at the expense\nof the latter, until nature is finally reduced to a mathematical\nskeleton. This skeleton itself, but for the need of a bridge to connect\ncalculably episode with episode in experience, might be transferred to\nmind and identified with the scientific thought in which it is\nrepresented. But a scientific theory inhabiting a few scattered moments\nof life cannot connect those episodes among which it is itself the last\nand the least substantial; nor would such a notion have occurred even to\nthe most reckless sceptic, had the world not possessed another sort of\nreputed reality\u2014the minds of others\u2014which could serve, even after the\nsupposed extinction of the physical world, to constitute an independent\norder and to absorb the potentialities of being when immediate\nconsciousness nodded. But other men\u2019s minds, being themselves precarious\nand ineffectual, would never have seemed a possible substitute for\nnature, to be in her stead the background and intelligible object of\nexperience. Something constant, omnipresent, infinitely fertile is\nneeded to support and connect the given chaos. Just these properties,\nhowever, are actually attributed to one of the minds supposed to\nconfront the thinker, namely, the mind of God. The divine mind has\ntherefore always constituted in philosophy either the alternative to\nnature or her other name: it is _par excellence_ the seat of all\npotentiality and, as Spinoza said, the refuge of all ignorance.\n\nSpeculative problems would be greatly clarified, and what is genuine in\nthem would be more easily distinguished from what is artificial, if we\ncould gather together again the original sources for the belief in\nseparate minds and compare these sources with those we have already\nassigned to the conception of nature. But speculative problems are not\nalone concerned, for in all social life we envisage fellow-creatures\nconceived to share the same thoughts and passions and to be similarly\naffected by events. What is the basis of this conviction? What are the\nforms it takes, and in what sense is it a part or an expression of\nreason?\n\nThis question is difficult, and in broaching it we cannot expect much\naid from what philosophers have hitherto said on the subject. For the\nmost part, indeed, they have said nothing, as by nature\u2019s kindly\ndisposition most questions which it is beyond a man\u2019s power to answer do\nnot occur to him at all. The suggestions which have actually been made\nin the matter may be reduced to two: first, that we conceive other men\u2019s\nminds by projecting into their bodies those feelings which we\nimmediately perceive to accompany similar operations in ourselves, that\nis, we infer alien minds by analogy; and second, that we are immediately\naware of them and feel them to be friendly or hostile counterparts of\nour own thinking and effort, that is, we evoke them by dramatic\nimagination.\n\n[Sidenote: Two usual accounts of this conception criticised:]\n\n[Sidenote: analogy between bodies,]\n\nThe first suggestion has the advantage that it escapes solipsism by a\nreasonable argument, provided the existence of the material world has\nalready been granted. But if the material world is called back into the\nprivate mind, it is evident that every soul supposed to inhabit it or to\nbe expressed in it must follow it thither, as inevitably as the\ncharacters and forces in an imagined story must remain with it in the\ninventor\u2019s imagination. When, on the contrary, nature is left standing,\nit is reasonable to suppose that animals having a similar origin and\nsimilar physical powers should have similar minds, if any of them was to\nhave a mind at all. The theory, however, is not satisfactory on other\ngrounds. We do not in reality associate our own grimaces with the\nfeelings that accompany them and subsequently, on recognising similar\ngrimaces in another, proceed to attribute emotions to him like those we\nformerly experienced. Our own grimaces are not easily perceived, and\nother men\u2019s actions often reveal passions which we have never had, at\nleast with anything like their suggested colouring and intensity. This\nfirst view is strangely artificial and mistakes for the natural origin\nof the belief in question what may be perhaps its ultimate test.\n\n[Sidenote: and dramatic dialogue in the soul.]\n\nThe second suggestion, on the other in hand, takes us into a mystic\nregion. That we evoke the felt souls of our fellows by dramatic\nimagination is doubtless true; but this does not explain how we come to\ndo so, under what stimulus and in what circumstances. Nor does it avoid\nsolipsism; for the felt counterparts of my own will are echoes within\nme, while if other minds actually exist they cannot have for their\nessence to play a game with me in my own fancy. Such society would be\nmythical, and while the sense for society may well be mythical in its\norigin, it must acquire some other character if it is to have practical\nand moral validity. But practical and moral validity is above all what\nsociety seems to have. This second theory, therefore, while its feeling\nfor psychological reality is keener, does not make the recognition of\nother minds intelligible and leaves our faith in them without\njustification.\n\n[Sidenote: Subject and object empirical, not transcendental, terms.]\n\nIn approaching the subject afresh we should do well to remember that\ncrude experience knows nothing of the distinction between subject and\nobject. This distinction is a division in things, a contrast\nestablished between masses of images which show different\ncharacteristics in their modes of existence and relation. If this truth\nis overlooked, if subject and object are made conditions of experience\ninstead of being, like body and mind, its contrasted parts, the revenge\nof fate is quick and ironical; either subject or object must immediately\ncollapse and evaporate altogether. All objects must become modifications\nof the subject or all subjects aspects or fragments of the object.\n\n[Sidenote: Objects originally soaked in secondary and tertiary\nqualities.]\n\nNow the fact that crude experience is innocent of modern philosophy has\nthis important consequence: that for crude experience all data whatever\nlie originally side by side in the same field; extension is passionate,\ndesire moves bodies, thought broods in space and is constituted by a\nvisible metamorphosis of its subject matter. Animism or mythology is\ntherefore no artifice. Passions naturally reside in the object they\nagitate\u2014our own body, if that be the felt seat of some pang, the stars,\nif the pang can find no nearer resting-place. Only a long and still\nunfinished education has taught men to separate emotions from things and\nideas from their objects. This education was needed because crude\nexperience is a chaos, and the qualities it jumbles together do not\nmarch together in time. Reflection must accordingly separate them, if\nknowledge (that is, ideas with eventual application and practical\ntranscendence) is to exist at all. In other words, action must be\nadjusted to certain elements of experience and not to others, and those\nchiefly regarded must have a certain interpretation put upon them by\ntrained apperception. The rest must be treated as moonshine and taken no\naccount of except perhaps in idle and poetic revery. In this way crude\nexperience grows reasonable and appearance becomes knowledge of reality.\n\nThe fundamental reason, then, why we attribute consciousness to natural\nbodies is that those bodies, before they are conceived to be merely\nmaterial, are conceived to possess all the qualities which our own\nconsciousness possesses when we behold them. Such a supposition is far\nfrom being a paradox, since only this principle justifies us to this day\nin believing in whatever we may decide to believe in. The qualities\nattributed to reality must be qualities found in experience, and if we\ndeny their presence in ourselves (_e.g._, in the case of omniscience),\nthat is only because the idea of self, like that of matter, has already\nbecome special and the region of ideals (in which omniscience lies) has\nbeen formed into a third sphere. But before the idea of self is well\nconstituted and before the category of ideals has been conceived at all,\nevery ingredient ultimately assigned to those two regions is attracted\ninto the perceptual vortex for which such qualities as pressure and\nmotion supply a nucleus. The moving image is therefore impregnated not\nonly with secondary qualities\u2014colour, heat, etc.\u2014but with qualities\nwhich we may call tertiary, such as pain, fear, joy, malice,\nfeebleness, expectancy. Sometimes these tertiary qualities are\nattributed to the object in their fulness and just as they are felt.\nThus the sun is not only bright and warm in the same way as he is round,\nbut by the same right he is also happy, arrogant, ever-young, and\nall-seeing; for a suggestion of these tertiary qualities runs through us\nwhen we look at him, just as immediately as do his warmth and light. The\nfact that these imaginative suggestions are not constant does not impede\nthe instant perception that they are actual, and for crude experience\nwhatever a thing possesses in appearance it possesses indeed, no matter\nhow soon that quality may be lost again. The moment when things have\nmost numerous and best defined tertiary qualities is accordingly, for\ncrude experience, the moment when they are most adequately manifested\nand when their inner essence is best revealed; for it is then that they\nappear in experience most splendidly arrayed and best equipped for their\neventual functions. The sun is a better expression of all his ulterior\neffects when he is conceived to be an arrogant and all-seeing spirit\nthan when he is stupidly felt to be merely hot; so that the attentive\nand devout observer, to whom those tertiary qualities are revealed,\nstands in the same relation to an ordinary sensualist, who can feel only\nthe sun\u2019s material attributes, as the sensualist in turn stands in to\none born blind, who cannot add the sun\u2019s brightness to its warmth\nexcept by faith in some happier man\u2019s reported intuition. The\nmythologist or poet, before science exists, is accordingly the man of\ntruest and most adequate vision. His persuasion that he knows the heart\nand soul of things is no fancy reached by artificial inference or\nanalogy but is a direct report of his own experience and honest\ncontemplation.\n\n[Sidenote: Tertiary qualities transposed.]\n\nMore often, however, tertiary qualities are somewhat transposed in\nprojection, as sound in being lodged in the bell is soon translated into\nsonority, made, that is, into its own potentiality. In the same way\npainfulness is translated into malice or wickedness, terror into hate,\nand every felt tertiary quality into whatever tertiary quality is in\nexperience its more quiescent or potential form. So religion, which\nremains for the most part on the level of crude experience, attributes\nto the gods not only happiness\u2014the object\u2019s direct tertiary\nquality\u2014but goodness\u2014its tertiary quality transposed and made\npotential; for goodness is that disposition which is fruitful in\nhappiness throughout imagined experience. The devil, in like manner, is\ncruel and wicked as well as tormented. Uncritical science still\nattributes these transposed tertiary qualities to nature; the mythical\nnotion of force, for instance, being a transposed sensation of effort.\nIn this case we may distinguish two stages or degrees in the\ntransposition: first, before we think of our own pulling, we say the\nobject itself pulls; in the first transposition we say it pulls against\nus, its pull is the counterpart or rival of ours but it is still\nconceived in the same direct terms of effort; and in the second\ntransposition this intermittent effort is made potential or slumbering\nin what we call strength or force.\n\n[Sidenote: Imputed mind consists of the tertiary qualities of perceived\nbody.]\n\nIt is obvious that the feelings attributed to other men are nothing but\nthe tertiary qualities of their bodies. In beings of the same species,\nhowever, these qualities are naturally exceedingly numerous, variable,\nand precise. Nature has made man man\u2019s constant study. His thought, from\ninfancy to the drawing up of his last will and testament, is busy about\nhis neighbour. A smile makes a child happy; a caress, a moment\u2019s\nsympathetic attention, wins a heart and gives the friend\u2019s presence a\nvoluminous and poignant value. In youth all seems lost in losing a\nfriend. For the tertiary values, the emotions attached to a given image,\nthe moral effluence emanating from it, pervade the whole present world.\nThe sense of union, though momentary, is the same that later returns to\nthe lover or the mystic, when he feels he has plucked the heart of\nlife\u2019s mystery and penetrated to the peaceful centre of things. What the\nmystic beholds in his ecstasy and loses in his moments of dryness, what\nthe lover pursues and adores, what the child cries for when left alone,\nis much more a spirit, a person, a haunting mind, than a set of visual\nsensations; yet the visual sensations are connected inextricably with\nthat spirit, else the spirit would not withdraw when the sensations\nfailed. We are not dealing with an articulate mind whose possessions are\ndiscriminated and distributed into a mastered world where everything has\nits department, its special relations, its limited importance; we are\ndealing with a mind all pulp, all confusion, keenly sensitive to passing\ninfluences and reacting on them massively and without reserve.\n\nThis mind is feeble, passionate, and ignorant. Its sense for present\nspirit is no miracle of intelligence or of analogical reasoning; on the\ncontrary, it betrays a vagueness natural to rudimentary consciousness.\nThose visual sensations suddenly cut off cannot there be recognised for\nwhat they are. The consequences which their present disappearance may\nhave for subsequent experience are in no wise foreseen or estimated,\nmuch less are any inexperienced feelings invented and attached to that\nretreating figure, otherwise a mere puppet. What happens is that by the\nloss of an absorbing stimulus the whole chaotic mind is thrown out of\ngear; the child cries, the lover faints, the mystic feels hell opening\nbefore him. All this is a present sensuous commotion, a derangement in\nan actual dream. Yet just at this lowest plunge of experience, in this\ndrunkenness of the soul, does the overwhelming reality and externality\nof the other mind dawn upon us. Then we feel that we are surrounded not\nby a blue sky or an earth known to geographers but by unutterable and\nmost personal hatreds and loves. For then we allow the half-deciphered\nimages of sense to drag behind them every emotion they have awakened. We\nendow each overmastering stimulus with all its diffuse effects; and any\ndramatic potentiality that our dream acts out under that high\npressure\u2014and crude experience is rich in dreams\u2014becomes our notion of\nthe life going on before us. We cannot regard it as our own life,\nbecause it is not felt to be a passion in our own body, but attaches\nitself rather to images we see moving about in the world; it is\nconsequently, without hesitation, called the life of those images, or\nthose creatures\u2019 souls.\n\n[Sidenote: \u201cPathetic fallacy\u201d normal yet ordinarily fallacious.]\n\nThe pathetic fallacy is accordingly what originally peoples the imagined\nworld. All the feelings aroused by perceived things are merged in those\nthings and made to figure as the spiritual and invisible part of their\nessence, a part, moreover, quite as well known and as directly perceived\nas their motions. To ask why such feelings are objectified would be to\nbetray a wholly sophisticated view of experience and its articulation.\nThey do not need to be objectified, seeing they were objective from the\nbeginning, inasmuch as they pertain to objects and have never, any more\nthan those objects, been \u201csubjectified\u201d or localised in the thinker\u2019s\nbody, nor included in that train of images which as a whole is known to\nhave in that body its seat and thermometer. The thermometer for these\npassions is, on the contrary, the body of another; and the little dream\nin us, the quick dramatic suggestion which goes with our perception of\nhis motions, is our perception of his thoughts.\n\nA sense for alien thought is accordingly at its inception a complete\nillusion. The thought is one\u2019s own, it is associated with an image\nmoving in space, and is uncritically supposed to be a hidden part of\nthat image, a metaphysical signification attached to its motion and\nactually existing behind the scenes in the form of an unheard soliloquy.\nA complete illusion this sense remains in mythology, in animism, in the\npoetic forms of love and religion. A better mastery of experience will\nin such cases dispel those hasty conceits by showing the fundamental\ndivergence which at once manifests itself between the course of\nphenomena and the feelings associated with them. It will appear beyond\nquestion that those feelings were private fancies merged with\nobservation in an undigested experience. They indicated nothing in the\nobject but its power of arousing emotional and playful reverberations in\nthe mind. Criticism will tend to clear the world of such poetic\ndistortion; and what vestiges of it may linger will be avowed fables,\nmetaphors employed merely in conventional expression. In the end even\npoetic power will forsake a discredited falsehood: the poet himself will\nsoon prefer to describe nature in natural terms and to represent human\nemotions in their pathetic humility, not extended beyond their actual\nsphere nor fantastically uprooted from their necessary soil and\noccasions. He will sing the power of nature over the soul, the joys of\nthe soul in the bosom of nature, the beauty visible in things, and the\nsteady march of natural processes, so rich in momentous incidents and\ncollocations. The precision of such a picture will accentuate its\nmajesty, as precision does in the poems of Lucretius and Dante, while\nits pathos and dramatic interest will be redoubled by its truth.\n\n[Sidenote: Case where it is not a fallacy.]\n\nA primary habit producing widespread illusions may in certain cases\nbecome the source of rational knowledge. This possibility will surprise\nno one who has studied nature and life to any purpose. Nature and life\nare tentative in all their processes, so that there is nothing\nexceptional in the fact that, since in crude experience image and\nemotion are inevitably regarded as constituting a single event, this\nhabit should usually lead to childish absurdities, but also, under\nspecial circumstances, to rational insight and morality. There is\nevidently one case in which the pathetic fallacy is not fallacious, the\ncase in which the object observed happens to be an animal similar to the\nobserver and similarly affected, as for instance when a flock or herd\nare swayed by panic fear. The emotion which each, as he runs, attributes\nto the others is, as usual, the emotion he feels himself; but this\nemotion, fear, is the same which in fact the others are then feeling.\nTheir aspect thus becomes the recognised expression for the feeling\nwhich really accompanies it. So in hand-to-hand fighting: the intention\nand passion which each imputes to the other is what he himself feels;\nbut the imputation is probably just, since pugnacity is a remarkably\ncontagious and monotonous passion. It is awakened by the slightest\nhostile suggestion and is greatly intensified by example and emulation;\nthose we fight against and those we fight with arouse it concurrently\nand the universal battle-cry that fills the air, and that each man\ninstinctively emits, is an adequate and exact symbol for what is passing\nin all their souls.\n\nWhenever, then, feeling is attributed to an animal similar to the\npercipient and similarly employed the attribution is mutual and correct.\nContagion and imitation are great causes of feeling, but in so far as\nthey are its causes and set the pathetic fallacy to work they forestall\nand correct what is fallacious in that fallacy and turn it into a\nvehicle of true and, as it were, miraculous insight.\n\n[Sidenote: Knowledge succeeds only by accident.]\n\nLet the reader meditate for a moment upon the following point: to know\nreality is, in a way, an impossible pretension, because knowledge means\nsignificant representation, discourse about an existence not contained\nin the knowing thought, and different in duration or locus from the\nideas which represent it. But if knowledge does not possess its object\nhow can it intend it? And if knowledge possesses its object, how can it\nbe knowledge or have any practical, prophetic, or retrospective value?\nConsciousness is not knowledge unless it indicates or signifies what\nactually it is not. This transcendence is what gives knowledge its\ncognitive and useful essence, its transitive function and validity. In\nknowledge, therefore, there must be some such thing as a justified\nillusion, an irrational pretension by chance fulfilled, a chance shot\nhitting the mark. For dead logic would stick at solipsism; yet\nirrational life, as it stumbles along from moment to moment, and\nmultiplies itself in a thousand centres, is somehow amenable to logic\nand finds uses for the reason it breeds.\n\nNow, in the relation of a natural being to similar beings in the same\nhabitat there is just the occasion we require for introducing a\nmiraculous transcendence in knowledge, a leap out of solipsism which,\nthough not prompted by reason, will find in reason a continual\njustification. For tertiary qualities are imputed to objects by\npsychological or pathological necessity. Something not visible in the\nobject, something not possibly revealed by any future examination of\nthat object, is thus united with it, felt to be its core, its\nmetaphysical truth. Tertiary qualities are emotions or thoughts present\nin the observer and in his rudimentary consciousness not yet connected\nwith their proper concomitants and antecedents, not yet relegated to\nhis private mind, nor explained by his personal endowment and situation.\nTo take these private feelings for the substance of other beings is\nevidently a gross blunder; yet this blunder, without ceasing to be one\nin point of method, ceases to be one in point of fact when the other\nbeing happens to be similar in nature and situation to the mythologist\nhimself and therefore actually possesses the very emotions and thoughts\nwhich lie in the mythologist\u2019s bosom and are attributed by him to his\nfellow. Thus an imaginary self-transcendence, a rash pretension to grasp\nan independent reality and to know the unknowable, may find itself\naccidentally rewarded. Imagination will have drawn a prize in its\nlottery and the pathological accidents of thought will have begotten\nknowledge and right reason. The inner and unattainable core of other\nbeings will have been revealed to private intuition.\n\n[Sidenote: Limits of insight]\n\nThis miracle of insight, as it must seem to those who have not\nunderstood its natural and accidental origin, extends only so far as\ndoes the analogy between the object and the instrument of perception.\nThe gift of intuition fails in proportion as the observer\u2019s bodily habit\ndiffers from the habit and body observed. Misunderstanding begins with\nconstitutional divergence and deteriorates rapidly into false\nimputations and absurd myths. The limits of mutual understanding\ncoincide with the limits of similar structure and common occupation, so\nthat the distortion of insight begins very near home. It is hard to\nunderstand the minds of children unless we retain unusual plasticity and\ncapacity to play; men and women do not really understand each other,\nwhat rules between them being not so much sympathy as habitual trust,\nidealisation, or satire; foreigners\u2019 minds are pure enigmas, and those\nattributed to animals are a grotesque compound of \u00c6sop and physiology.\nWhen we come to religion the ineptitude of all the feelings attributed\nto nature or the gods is so egregious that a sober critic can look to\nsuch fables only for a pathetic expression of human sentiment and need;\nwhile, even apart from the gods, each religion itself is quite\nunintelligible to infidels who have never followed its worship\nsympathetically or learned by contagion the human meaning of its\nsanctions and formulas. Hence the stupidity and want of insight commonly\nshown in what calls itself the history of religions. We hear, for\ninstance, that Greek religion was frivolous, because its mystic awe and\nmomentous practical and poetic truths escape the Christian historian\naccustomed to a catechism and a religious morality; and similarly\nCatholic piety seems to the Protestant an \u00e6sthetic indulgence, a\nreligion appealing to sense, because such is the only emotion its\nexternals can awaken in him, unused as he is to a supernatural economy\nreaching down into the incidents and affections of daily life.\n\nLanguage is an artificial means of establishing unanimity and\ntransferring thought from one mind to another. Every symbol or phrase,\nlike every gesture, throws the observer into an attitude to which a\ncertain idea corresponded in the speaker; to fall exactly into the\nspeaker\u2019s attitude is exactly to understand. Every impediment to\ncontagion and imitation in expression is an impediment to comprehension.\nFor this reason language, like all art, becomes pale with years; words\nand figures of speech lose their contagious and suggestive power; the\nfeeling they once expressed can no longer be restored by their\nrepetition. Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a\nrelative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a\nscarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a\nlearned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even\na vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.\n\n    Unsure the ebb and flood of thought,\n    The moon comes back, the spirit not.\n\n[Sidenote: Perception of character]\n\nThere is, however, a wholly different and far more positive method of\nreading the mind, or what in a metaphorical sense is called by that\nname. This method is to read character. Any object with which we are\nfamiliar teaches us to divine its habits; slight indications, which we\nshould be at a loss to enumerate separately, betray what changes are\ngoing on and what promptings are simmering in the organism. Hence the\nexpression of a face or figure; hence the traces of habit and passion\nvisible in a man and that indescribable something about him which\ninspires confidence or mistrust. The gift of reading character is partly\ninstinctive, partly a result of experience; it may amount to foresight\nand is directed not upon consciousness but upon past or eventual action.\nHabits and passions, however, have metaphorical psychic names, names\nindicating dispositions rather than particular acts (a disposition being\nmythically represented as a sort of wakeful and haunting genius waiting\nto whisper suggestions in a man\u2019s ear). We may accordingly delude\nourselves into imagining that a pose or a manner which really indicates\nhabit indicates feeling instead. In truth the feeling involved, if\nconceived at all, is conceived most vaguely, and is only a sort of\nreverberation or penumbra surrounding the pictured activities.\n\n[Sidenote: Conduct divined, consciousness ignored.]\n\nIt is a mark of the connoisseur to be able to read character and habit\nand to divine at a glance all a creature\u2019s potentialities. This sort of\npenetration characterises the man with an eye for horse-flesh, the\ndog-fancier, and men and women of the world. It guides the born leader\nin the judgments he instinctively passes on his subordinates and\nenemies; it distinguishes every good judge of human affairs or of\nnatural phenomena, who is quick to detect small but telling indications\nof events past or brewing. As the weather-prophet reads the heavens so\nthe man of experience reads other men. Nothing concerns him less than\ntheir consciousness; he can allow that to run itself off when he is sure\nof their temper and habits. A great master of affairs is usually\nunsympathetic. His observation is not in the least dramatic or dreamful,\nhe does not yield himself to animal contagion or re-enact other people\u2019s\ninward experience. He is too busy for that, and too intent on his own\npurposes. His observation, on the contrary, is straight calculation and\ninference, and it sometimes reaches truths about people\u2019s character and\ndestiny which they themselves are very far from divining. Such\napprehension is masterful and odious to weaklings, who think they know\nthemselves because they indulge in copious soliloquy (which is the\ndiscourse of brutes and madmen), but who really know nothing of their\nown capacity, situation, or fate.\n\nIf Rousseau, for instance, after writing those Confessions in which\ncandour and ignorance of self are equally conspicuous, had heard some\nintelligent friend, like Hume, draw up in a few words an account of\ntheir author\u2019s true and contemptible character, he would have been loud\nin protestations that no such ignoble characteristics existed in his\neloquent consciousness; and they might not have existed there, because\nhis consciousness was a histrionic thing, and as imperfect an expression\nof his own nature as of man\u2019s. When the mind is irrational no practical\npurpose is served by stopping to understand it, because such a mind is\nirrelevant to practice, and the principles that guide the man\u2019s practice\ncan be as well understood by eliminating his mind altogether. So a wise\ngovernor ignores his subjects\u2019 religion or concerns himself only with\nits economic and temperamental aspects; if the real forces that control\nlife are understood, the symbols that represent those forces in the mind\nmay be disregarded. But such a government, like that of the British in\nIndia, is more practical than sympathetic. While wise men may endure it\nfor the sake of their material interests, they will never love it for\nitself. There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathised with, while\nnothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see\none\u2019s equation written out.\n\n[Sidenote: Consciousness untrustworthy.]\n\nNevertheless this same algebraic sense for character plays a large part\nin human friendship. A chief element in friendship is trust, and trust\nis not to be acquired by reproducing consciousness but only by\npenetrating to the constitutional instincts which, in determining action\nand habit, determine consciousness as well. Fidelity is not a property\nof ideas. It is a virtue possessed pre-eminently by nature, from the\nanimals to the seasons and the stars. But fidelity gives friendship its\ndeepest sanctity, and the respect we have for a man, for his force,\nability, constancy, and dignity, is no sentiment evoked by his floating\nthoughts but an assurance founded on our own observation that his\nconduct and character are to be counted upon. Smartness and vivacity,\nmuch emotion and many conceits, are obstacles both to fidelity and to\nmerit. There is a high worth in rightly constituted natures independent\nof incidental consciousness. It consists in that ingrained virtue which\nunder given circumstances would insure the noblest action and with that\naction, of course, the noblest sentiments and ideas; ideas which would\narise spontaneously and would make more account of their objects than of\nthemselves.\n\n[Sidenote: Metaphorical mind.]\n\nThe expression of habit in psychic metaphors is a procedure known also\nto theology. Whenever natural or moral law is declared to reveal the\ndivine mind, this mind is a set of formal or ethical principles rather\nthan an imagined consciousness, re-enacted dramatically. What is\nconceived is the god\u2019s operation, not his emotions. In this way God\u2019s\ngoodness becomes a symbol for the advantages of life, his wrath a symbol\nfor its dangers, his commandments a symbol for its laws. The deity\nspoken of by the Stoics had exclusively this symbolic character; it\ncould be called a city\u2014dear City of Zeus\u2014as readily as an\nintelligence. And that intelligence which ancient and ingenuous\nphilosophers said they saw in the world was always intelligence in this\nalgebraic sense, it was intelligible order. Nor did the Hebrew prophets,\nin their emphatic political philosophy, seem to mean much more by\nJehovah than a moral order, a principle giving vice and virtue their\nappropriate fruits.\n\n[Sidenote: Summary.]\n\nTrue society, then, is limited to similar beings living similar lives\nand enabled by the contagion of their common habits and arts to\nattribute to one another, each out of his own experience, what the other\nactually endures. A fresh thought may be communicated to one who has\nnever had it before, but only when the speaker so dominates the\nauditor\u2019s mind by the instrumentalities he brings to bear upon it that\nhe compels that mind to reproduce his experience. Analogy between\nactions and bodies is accordingly the only test of valid inference\nregarding the existence or character of conceived minds; but this\neventual test is far from being the source of such a conception. Its\nsource is not inference at all but direct emotion and the pathetic\nfallacy. In the beginning, as in the end, what is attributed to others\nis something directly felt, a dream dreamed through and dramatically\nenacted, but uncritically attributed to the object by whose motions it\nis suggested and controlled. In a single case, however, tertiary\nqualities happen to correspond to an experience actually animating the\nobject to which they are assigned. This is the case in which the object\nis a body similar in structure and action to the percipient himself, who\nassigns to that body a passion he has caught by contagion from it and by\nimitation of its actual attitude. Such are the conditions of\nintelligible expression and true communion; beyond these limits nothing\nis possible save myth and metaphor, or the algebraic designation of\nobserved habits under the name of moral dispositions.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VII\u2014CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE AND IN EXISTENCE\n\n\n[Sidenote: So-called abstract qualities primary.]\n\nIdeas of material objects ordinarily absorb the human mind, and their\nprevalence has led to the rash supposition that ideas of all other kinds\nare posterior to physical ideas and drawn from the latter by a process\nof abstraction. The table, people said, was a particular and single\nreality; its colour, form, and material were parts of its integral\nnature, qualities which might be attended to separately, perhaps, but\nwhich actually existed only in the table itself. Colour, form, and\nmaterial were therefore abstract elements. They might come before the\nmind separately and be contrasted objects of attention, but they were\nincapable of existing in nature except together, in the concrete reality\ncalled a particular thing. Moreover, as the same colour, shape, or\nsubstance might be found in various tables, these abstract qualities\nwere thought to be general qualities as well; they were universal terms\nwhich might be predicated of many individual things. A contrast could\nthen be drawn between these qualities or ideas, which the mind may\nenvisage, and the concrete reality existing beyond. Thus philosophy\ncould reach the familiar maxim of Aristotle that the particular alone\nexists in nature and the general alone in the mind.\n\n[Sidenote: General qualities prior to particular things.]\n\nSuch language expresses correctly enough a secondary conventional stage\nof conception, but it ignores the primary fictions on which convention\nitself must rest. Individual physical objects must be discovered before\nabstractions can be made from their conceived nature; the bird must be\ncaught before it is plucked. To discover a physical object is to pack in\nthe same part of space, and fuse in one complex body, primary data like\ncoloured form and tangible surface. Intelligence, observing these\nsensible qualities to evolve together, and to be controlled at once by\nexternal forces, or by one\u2019s own voluntary motions, identifies them in\ntheir operation although they remain for ever distinct in their sensible\ncharacter. A physical object is accordingly conceived by fusing or\ninterlacing spatial qualities, in a manner helpful to practical\nintelligence. It is a far higher and remoter thing than the elements it\nis compacted of and that suggest it; what habits of appearance and\ndisappearance the latter may have, the object reduces to permanent and\ncalculable principles. It is altogether erroneous, therefore, to view an\nobject\u2019s sensible qualities as abstractions from it, seeing they are its\noriginal and component elements; nor can the sensible qualities be\nviewed as generic notions arising by comparison of several concrete\nobjects, seeing that these concretions would never have been made or\nthought to be permanent, did they not express observed variations and\nrecurrences in the sensible qualities immediately perceived and already\nrecognised in their recurrence. These are themselves the true\nparticulars. They are the first objects discriminated in attention and\nprojected against the background of consciousness.\n\nThe immediate continuum may be traversed and mapped by two different\nmethods. The prior one, because it is so very primitive and rudimentary,\nand so much a condition of all mental discourse, is usually ignored in\npsychology. The secondary method, by which external things are\ndiscovered, has received more attention. The latter consists in the fact\nthat when several disparate sensations, having become recognisable in\ntheir repetitions, are observed to come and go together, or in fixed\nrelation to some voluntary operation on the observer\u2019s part, they may be\nassociated by contiguity and merged in one portion of perceived space.\nThose having, like sensations of touch and sight, an essentially spatial\ncharacter, may easily be superposed; the surface I see and that I touch\nmay be identified by being presented together and being found to undergo\nsimultaneous variations and to maintain common relations to other\nperceptions. Thus I may come to attribute to a single object, the term\nof an intellectual synthesis and ideal intention, my experiences through\nall the senses within a certain field of association, defined by its\npractical relations. That ideal object is thereby endowed with as many\nqualities and powers as I had associable sensations of which to make it\nup. This object is a concretion of my perceptions in space, so that the\nredness, hardness, sweetness, and roundness of the apple are all fused\ntogether in my practical regard and given one local habitation and one\nname.\n\n[Sidenote: Universals are concretions in discourse.]\n\nThis kind of synthesis, this superposition and mixture of images into\nnotions of physical objects, is not, however, the only kind to which\nperceptions are subject. They fall together by virtue of their\nqualitative identity even before their spatial superposition; for in\norder to be known as repeatedly simultaneous, and associable by\ncontiguity, they must be associated by similarity and known as\nindividually repeated. The various recurrences of a sensation must be\nrecognised as recurrences, and this implies the collection of sensations\ninto classes of similars and the apperception of a common nature in\nseveral data. Now the more frequent a perception is the harder it will\nbe to discriminate in memory its past occurrences from one another, and\nyet the more readily will its present recurrence be recognised as\nfamiliar. The perception in sense will consequently be received as a\nrepetition not of any single earlier sensation but of a familiar and\ngeneric experience. This experience, a spontaneous reconstruction based\non all previous sensations of that kind, will be the one habitual _idea_\nwith which recurring sensations will be henceforth identified. Such a\nliving concretion of similars succeeding one another in time, is the\nidea of a nature or quality, the universal falsely supposed to be an\nabstraction from physical objects, which in truth are conceived by\nputting together these very ideas into a spatial and permanent system.\n\nHere we have, if I am not mistaken, the origin of the two terms most\nprominent in human knowledge, ideas and things. Two methods of\nconception divide our attention in common life; science and philosophy\ndevelop both, although often with an unjustifiable bias in favour of one\nor the other. They are nothing but the old principles of Aristotelian\npsychology, association by similarity and association by contiguity.\nOnly now, after logicians have exhausted their ingenuity in criticising\nthem and psychologists in applying them, we may go back of the\ntraditional position and apply the ancient principles at a deeper stage\nof mental life.\n\n[Sidenote: Similar reactions, merged in one habit of reproduction, yield\nan idea.]\n\nAssociation by similarity is a fusion of impressions merging what is\ncommon in them, interchanging what is peculiar, and cancelling in the\nend what is incompatible; so that any excitement reaching that centre\nrevives one generic reaction which yields the idea. These concrete\ngeneralities are actual feelings, the first terms in mental discourse,\nthe first distinguishable particulars in knowledge, and the first\nbearers of names. Intellectual dominion of the conscious stream begins\nwith the act of recognising these pervasive entities, which having\ncharacter and ideal permanence can furnish common points of reference\nfor different moments of discourse. Save for ideas no perception could\nhave significance, or acquire that indicative force which we call\nknowledge. For it would refer to nothing to which another perception\nmight also have referred; and so long as perceptions have no common\nreference, so long as successive moments do not enrich by their\ncontributions the same object of thought, evidently experience, in the\npregnant sense of the word, is impossible. No fund of valid ideas, no\nwisdom, could in that case be acquired by living.\n\n[Sidenote: Ideas are ideal.]\n\nIdeas, although their material is of course sensuous, are not sensations\nnor perceptions nor objects of any possible immediate experience: they\nare creatures of intelligence, goals of thought, ideal terms which\ncogitation and action circle about. As the centre of mass is a body,\nwhile it may by chance coincide with one or another of its atoms, is no\natom itself and no material constituent of the bulk that obeys its\nmotion, so an idea, the centre of mass of a certain mental system, is no\nmaterial fragment of that system, but an ideal term of reference and\nsignification by allegiance to which the details of consciousness first\nbecome parts of a system and of a thought. An idea is an ideal. It\nrepresents a functional relation in the diffuse existences to which it\ngives a name and a rational value. An idea is an expression of life,\nand shares with life that transitive and elusive nature which defies\ndefinition by mere enumeration of its materials. The peculiarity of life\nis that it lives; and thought also, when living, passes out of itself\nand directs itself on the ideal, on the eventual. It is an activity.\nActivity does not consist in velocity of change but in constancy of\npurpose; in the conspiracy of many moments and many processes toward one\nideal harmony and one concomitant ideal result. The most rudimentary\napperception, recognition, or expectation, is already a case of\nrepresentative cognition, of transitive thought resting in a permanent\nessence. Memory is an obvious case of the same thing; for the past, in\nits truth, is a system of experiences in relation, a system now\nnon-existent and never, as a system, itself experienced, yet confronted\nin retrospect and made the ideal object and standard for all historical\nthinking.\n\n[Sidenote: So-called abstractions complete facts.]\n\nThese arrested and recognisable ideas, concretions of similars\nsucceeding one another in time, are not abstractions; but they may come\nto be regarded as such after the other kind of concretions in\nexperience, concretions of superposed perceptions in space, have become\nthe leading objects of attention. The sensuous material for both\nconcretions is the same; the perception which, recurring in different\nobjects otherwise not retained in memory gives the idea of roundness, is\nthe same perception which helps to constitute the spatial concretion\ncalled the sun. Roundness may therefore be carelessly called an\nabstraction from the real object \u201csun\u201d; whereas the peculiar\noptical and muscular feelings by which the sense of roundness is\nconstituted\u2014probably feelings of gyration and perpetual unbroken\nmovement\u2014are much earlier than any solar observations; they are a\nself-sufficing element in experience which, by repetition in various\naccidental contests, has come to be recognised and named, and to be a\ncharacteristic by virtue of which more complex objects can be\ndistinguished and defined. The idea of the sun is a much later product,\nand the real sun is so far from being an original datum from which\nroundness is abstracted, that it is an ulterior and quite ideal\nconstruction, a spatial concretion into which the logical concretion\nroundness enters as a prior and independent factor. Roundness may be\nfelt in the dark, by a mere suggestion of motion, and is a complete\nexperience in itself. When this recognisable experience happens to be\nassociated by contiguity with other recognisable experiences of heat,\nlight, height, and yellowness, and these various independent objects are\nprojected into the same portion of a real space; then a concretion\noccurs, and these ideas being recognised in that region and finding a\nmomentary embodiment there, become the qualities of a thing.\n\nA conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind,\nif you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak, by the\nmind\u2019s inertia and conceptions of things by its activity.\n\n[Sidenote: Things concretions of concretions.]\n\nIdeas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths. A\nconcretion in discourse occurs by repetition and mere emphasis on a\ndatum, but a concretion in existence requires a synthesis of disparate\nelements and relations. An idea is nothing but a sensation apperceived\nand rendered cognitive, so that it envisages its own recognised\ncharacter as its object and ideal: yellowness is only some sensation of\nyellow raised to the cognitive power and employed as the symbol for its\nown specific essence. It is consequently capable of entering as a term\ninto rational discourse and of becoming the subject or predicate of\npropositions eternally valid. A thing, on the contrary, is discovered\nonly when the order and grouping of such recurring essences can be\nobserved, and when various themes and strains of experience are woven\ntogether into elaborate progressive harmonies. When consciousness first\nbecomes cognitive it frames ideas; but when it becomes cognitive of\ncauses, that is, when it becomes practical, it perceives things.\n\n[Sidenote: Ideas prior in the order of knowledge, things in the order of\nnature.]\n\nConcretions of qualities recurrent in time and concretions of qualities\nassociated in existence are alike involved in daily life and\ninextricably ingrown into the structure of reason. In consciousness and\nfor logic, association by similarity, with its aggregations and\nidentifications of recurrences in time, is fundamental rather than\nassociation by contiguity and its existential syntheses; for\nrecognition identifies similars perceived in succession, and without\nrecognition of similars there could be no known persistence of\nphenomena. But physiologically and for the observer association by\ncontiguity comes first. All instinct\u2014without which there would be no\nfixity or recurrence in ideation\u2014makes movement follow impression in an\nimmediate way which for consciousness becomes a mere juxtaposition of\nsensations, a juxtaposition which it can neither explain nor avoid. Yet\nthis juxtaposition, in which pleasure, pain, and striving are prominent\nfactors, is the chief stimulus to attention and spreads before the mind\nthat moving and variegated field in which it learns to make its first\nobservations. Facts\u2014the burdens of successive moments\u2014are all\nassociated by contiguity, from the first facts of perception and passion\nto the last facts of fate and conscience. We undergo events, we grow\ninto character, by the subterraneous working of irrational forces that\nmake their incalculable irruptions into life none the less wonderfully\nin the revelations of a man\u2019s heart to himself than in the cataclysms of\nthe world around him. Nature\u2019s placid procedure, to which we yield so\nwillingly in times of prosperity, is a concatenation of states which can\nonly be understood when it is made its own standard and law. A sort of\nphilosophy without wisdom may seek to subjugate this natural life, this\nblind budding of existence, to some logical or moral necessity; but this\nvery attempt remains, perhaps, the most striking monument to that\nirrational fatality that rules affairs, a monument which reason itself\nis compelled to raise with unsuspected irony.\n\n[Sidenote: Aristotle\u2019s compromise.]\n\nReliance on external perception, constant appeals to concrete fact and\nphysical sanctions, have always led the mass of reasonable men to\nmagnify concretions in existence and belittle concretions in discourse.\nThey are too clever, as they feel, to mistake words for things. The most\nauthoritative thinker on this subject, because the most mature,\nAristotle himself, taught that things had reality, individuality,\nindependence, and were the outer cause of perception, while general\nideas, products of association by similarity, existed only in the mind.\nThe public, pleased at its ability to understand this doctrine and\noverlooking the more incisive part of the philosopher\u2019s teaching, could\ngo home comforted and believing that material things were primary and\nperfect entities, while ideas were only abstractions, effects those\nrealities produced on our incapable minds. Aristotle, however, had a\njuster view of general concepts and made in the end the whole material\nuniverse gravitate around them and feel their influence, though in a\nmetaphysical and magic fashion to which a more advanced natural science\nneed no longer appeal. While in the shock of life man was always coming\nupon the accidental, in the quiet of reflection he could not but recast\neverything in ideal moulds and retain nothing but eternal natures and\nintelligible relations. Aristotle conceived that while the origin of\nknowledge lay in the impact of matter upon sense its goal was the\ncomprehension of essences, and that while man was involved by his animal\nnature in the accidents of experience he was also by virtue of his\nrationality a participator in eternal truth. A substantial justice was\nthus done both to the conditions and to the functions of human life,\nalthough, for want of a natural history inspired by mechanical ideas,\nthis dualism remained somewhat baffling and incomprehensible in its\nbasis. Aristotle, being a true philosopher and pupil of experience,\npreferred incoherence to partiality.\n\n[Sidenote: Empirical bias in favour of contiguity.]\n\nActive life and the philosophy that borrows its concepts from practice\nhas thus laid a great emphasis on association by contiguity. Hobbes and\nLocke made knowledge of this kind the only knowledge of reality, while\nrecognising it to be quite empirical, tentative, and problematical. It\nwas a kind of acquaintance with fact that increased with years and\nbrought the mind into harmony with something initially alien to it.\nBesides this practical knowledge or prudence there was a sort of verbal\nand merely ideal knowledge, a knowledge of the meaning and relation of\nabstract terms. In mathematics and logic we might carry out long trains\nof abstracted thought and analyse and develop our imaginations _ad\ninfinitum_. These speculations, however, were in the air or\u2014what for\nthese philosophers is much the same thing\u2014in the mind; their\napplicability and their relevance to practical life and to objects given\nin perception remained quite problematical. A self-developing science, a\nsynthetic science _a priori_, had a value entirely hypothetical and\nprovisional; its practical truth depended on the verification of its\nresults in some eventual sensible experience. Association was invoked to\nexplain the adjustment of ideation to the order of external perception.\nAssociation, by which association by contiguity was generally\nunderstood, thus became the battle-cry of empiricism; if association by\nsimilarity had been equally in mind, the philosophy of pregnant reason\ncould also have adopted the principle for its own. But logicians and\nmathematicians naturally neglect the psychology of their own processes\nand, accustomed as they are to an irresponsible and constructive use of\nthe intellect, regard as a confused and uninspired intruder the critic\nwho, by a retrospective and naturalistic method, tries to give them a\nlittle knowledge of themselves.\n\n[Sidenote: Artificial divorce of logic from practice.]\n\nRational ideas must arise somehow in the mind, and since they are not\nmeant to be without application to the world of experience, it is\ninteresting to discover the point of contact between the two and the\nnature of their interdependence. This would have been found in the\nmind\u2019s initial capacity to frame objects of two sorts, those compacted\nof sensations that are persistently similar, and those compacted of\nsensations that are momentarily fused. In empirical philosophy the\napplicability of logic and mathematics remains a miracle or becomes a\nmisinterpretation: a miracle if the process of nature independently\nfollows the inward elaboration of human ideas; a misinterpretation if\nthe bias of intelligence imposes _a priori_ upon reality a character and\norder not inherent in it. The mistake of empiricists\u2014among which Kant\nis in this respect to be numbered\u2014which enabled them to disregard this\ndifficulty, was that they admitted, beside rational thinking, another\ninstinctive kind of wisdom by which men could live, a wisdom the\nEnglishmen called experience and the Germans practical reason, spirit,\nor will. The intellectual sciences could be allowed to spin themselves\nout in abstracted liberty while man practised his illogical and inspired\nart of life.\n\nHere we observe a certain elementary crudity or barbarism which the\nhuman spirit often betrays when it is deeply stirred. Not only are\nchance and divination welcomed into the world but they are reverenced\nall the more, like the wind and fire of idolaters, precisely for not\nbeing amenable to the petty rules of human reason. In truth, however,\nthe English duality between prudence and science is no more fundamental\nthan the German duality between reason and understanding.[A] The true\ncontrast is between impulse and reflection, instinct and intelligence.\nWhen men feel the primordial authority of the animal in them and have\nlittle respect for a glimmering reason which they suspect to be\nsecondary but cannot discern to be ultimate, they readily imagine they\nare appealing to something higher than intelligence when in reality they\nare falling back on something deeper and lower. The rudimentary seems to\nthem at such moments divine; and if they conceive a Life of Reason at\nall they despise it as a mass of artifices and conventions. Reason is\nindeed not indispensable to life, nor needful if living anyhow be the\nsole and indeterminate aim; as the existence of animals and of most men\nsufficiently proves. In so far as man is not a rational being and does\nnot live in and by the mind, in so far as his chance volitions and\ndreamful ideas roll by without mutual representation or adjustment, in\nso far as his body takes the lead and even his galvanised action is a\nform of passivity, we may truly say that his life is not intellectual\nand not dependent on the application of general concepts to experience;\nfor he lives by instinct.\n\n[Sidenote: Their mutual involution.]\n\nThe Life of Reason, the comprehension of causes and pursuit of aims,\nbegins precisely where instinctive operation ceases to be merely such by\nbecoming conscious of its purposes and representative of its conditions.\nLogical forms of thought impregnate and constitute practical intellect.\nThe shock of experience can indeed correct, disappoint, or inhibit\nrational expectation, but it cannot take its place. The very first\nlesson that experience should again teach us after our disappointment\nwould be a rebirth of reason in the soul. Reason has the indomitable\npersistence of all natural tendencies; it returns to the attack as waves\nbeat on the shore. To observe its defeat is already to give it a new\nembodiment. Prudence itself is a vague science, and science, when it\ncontains real knowledge, is but a clarified prudence, a description of\nexperience and a guide to life. Speculative reason, if it is not also\npractical, is not reason at all. Propositions irrelevant to experience\nmay be correct in form, the method they are reached by may parody\nscientific method, but they cannot be true in substance, because they\nrefer to nothing. Like music, they have no object. They merely flow, and\nplease those whose unattached sensibility they somehow flatter.\n\nHume, in this respect more radical and satisfactory than Kant himself,\nsaw with perfect clearness that reason was an ideal expression of\ninstinct, and that consequently no rational spheres could exist other\nthan the mathematical and the empirical, and that what is not a datum\nmust certainly be a construction. In establishing his \u201ctendencies to\nfeign\u201d at the basis of intelligence, and in confessing that he yielded\nto them himself no less in his criticism of human nature than in his\npractical life, he admitted the involution of reason\u2014that\nunintelligible instinct\u2014in all the observations and maxims vouchsafed\nto an empiricist or to a man. He veiled his doctrine, however, in a\nsomewhat unfair and satirical nomenclature, and he has paid the price of\nthat indulgence in personal humour by incurring the immortal hatred of\nsentimentalists who are too much scandalised by his tone ever to\nunderstand his principles.\n\n[Sidenote: Rationalistic suicide.]\n\nIf the common mistake in empiricism is not to see the omnipresence of\nreason in thought, the mistake of rationalism is not to admit its\nvariability and dependence, not to understand its natural life.\nParmenides was the Adam of that race, and first tasted the deceptive\nkind of knowledge which, promising to make man God, banishes him from\nthe paradise of experience. His sin has been transmitted to his\ndescendants, though hardly in its magnificent and simple enormity. \u201cThe\nwhole is one,\u201d Xenophanes had cried, gazing into heaven; and that same\nsense of a permeating identity, translated into rigid and logical\nterms, brought his sublime disciple to the conviction that an\nindistinguishable immutable substance was omnipresent in the world.\nParmenides carried association by similarity to such lengths that he\narrived at the idea of what alone is similar in everything, viz., the\nfact that it is. Being exists, and nothing else does; whereby every\nrelation and variation in experience is reduced to a negligible\nillusion, and reason loses its function at the moment of asserting its\nabsolute authority. Notable lesson, taught us like so many others by the\nfirst experiments of the Greek mind, in its freedom and insight, a mind\nled quickly by noble self-confidence to the ultimate goals of thought.\n\nSuch a pitch of heroism and abstraction has not been reached by any\nrationalist since. No one else has been willing to ignore entirely all\nthe data and constructions of experience, save the highest concept\nreached by assimilations in that experience; no one else has been\nwilling to demolish all the scaffolding and all the stones of his\nedifice, hoping still to retain the sublime symbol which he had planted\non the summit. Yet all rationalists have longed to demolish or to\ndegrade some part of the substructure, like those Gothic architects who\nwished to hang the vaults of their churches upon the slenderest possible\nsupports, abolishing and turning into painted crystal all the dead walls\nof the building. So experience and its crowning conceptions were to rest\nwholly on a skeleton of general natures, physical forces being\nassimilated to logical terms, and concepts gained by identification of\nsimilars taking the place of those gained by grouping disparate things\nin their historical conjunctions. These contiguous sensations, which\noccasionally exemplify the logical contrasts in ideas and give them\nincidental existence, were either ignored altogether and dismissed as\nunmeaning, or admitted merely as illusions. The eye was to be trained to\npass from that parti-coloured chaos to the firm lines and permanent\ndivisions that were supposed to sustain it and frame it in.\n\nRationalism is a kind of builder\u2019s bias which the impartial public\ncannot share; for the dead walls and glass screens which may have no\nfunction in supporting the roof are yet as needful as the roof itself to\nshelter and beauty. So the incidental filling of experience which\nremains unclassified under logical categories retains all its primary\nreality and importance. The outlines of it emphasised by logic, though\nthey may be the essential vehicle of our most soaring thoughts, are only\na method and a style of architecture. They neither absorb the whole\nmaterial of life nor monopolise its values. And as each material imposes\nupon the builder\u2019s ingenuity a different type of construction, and\nstone, wood, and iron must be treated on different structural\nprinciples, so logical methods of comprehension, spontaneous though they\nbe in their mental origin, must prove themselves fitted to the natural\norder and affinity of the facts.[B] Nor is there in this necessity any\nviolence to the spontaneity of reason: for reason also has manifold\nforms, and the accidents of experience are more than matched in variety\nby the multiplicity of categories. Here one principle of order and there\nanother shoots into the mind, which breeds more genera and species than\nthe most fertile terrestrial slime can breed individuals.\n\n[Sidenote: Complementary character of essence and existence.]\n\nLanguage, then, with the logic imbedded in it, is a repository of terms\nformed by identifying successive perceptions, as the external world is a\nrepository of objects conceived by superposing perceptions that exist\ntogether. Being formed on different principles these two orders of\nconception\u2014the logical and the physical\u2014do not coincide, and the\nattempt to fuse them into one system of demonstrable reality or moral\nphysics is doomed to failure by the very nature of the terms compared.\nWhen the Eleatics proved the impossibility\u2014_i.e._, the\ninexpressibility\u2014of motion, or when Kant and his followers proved the\nunreal character of all objects of experience and of all natural\nknowledge, their task was made easy by the native diversity between the\nconcretions in existence which were the object of their thought and the\nconcretions in discourse which were its measure. The two do not fit; and\nintrenched as these philosophers were in the forms of logic they\ncompelled themselves to reject as unthinkable everything not fully\nexpressible in those particular forms. Thus they took their revenge upon\nthe vulgar who, being busy chiefly with material things and dwelling in\nan atmosphere of sensuous images, call unreal and abstract every product\nof logical construction or reflective analysis. These logical products,\nhowever, are not really abstract, but, as we have seen, concretions\narrived at by a different method than that which results in material\nconceptions. Whereas the conception of a thing is a local conglomerate\nof several simultaneous sensations, logical entity is a homogeneous\nrevival in memory of similar sensations temporally distinct.\n\nThus the many armed with prejudice and the few armed with logic fight an\neternal battle, the logician charging the physical world with\nunintelligibility and the man of common-sense charging the logical\nworld with abstractness and unreality. The former view is the more\nprofound, since association by similarity is the more elementary and\ngives constancy to meanings; while the latter view is the more\npractical, since association by contiguity alone informs the mind about\nthe mechanical sequence of its own experience. Neither principle can be\ndispensed with, and each errs only in denouncing the other and wishing\nto be omnivorous, as if on the one hand logic could make anybody\nunderstand the history of events and the conjunction of objects, or on\nthe other hand as if cognitive and moral processes could have any other\nterms than constant and ideal natures. The namable essence of things or\nthe standard of values must always be an ideal figment; existence must\nalways be an empirical fact. The former remains always remote from\nnatural existence and the latter irreducible to a logical principle.[C]\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[Footnote A: This distinction, in one sense, is Platonic: but Plato\u2019s\nReason was distinguished from understanding (which dealt with phenomenal\nexperience) because it was a moral faculty defining those values and\nmeanings which in Platonic nomenclature took the title of reality. The\nGerman Reason was only imagination, substituting a dialectical or poetic\nhistory of the world for its natural development. German idealism,\naccordingly, was not, like Plato\u2019s, a moral philosophy hypostasised but\na false physics adored.]\n\n[Footnote B: This natural order and affinity is something imputed to the\nultimate object of thought\u2014the reality\u2014by the last act of judgment\nassuming its own truth. It is, of course, not observable by\nconsciousness before the first experiment in comprehension has been\nmade; the act of comprehension which first imposes on the sensuous\nmaterial some subjective category is the first to arrive at the notion\nof an objective order. The historian, however, has a well-tried and\nmature conception of the natural order arrived at after many such\nexperiments in comprehension. From the vantage-ground of this latest\nhypothesis, he surveys the attempts others have made to understand\nevents and compares them with the objective order which he believes\nhimself to have discovered. This observation is made here lest the\nreader should confuse the natural order, imagined to exist before any\napplication of human categories, with the last conception of that order\nattained by the philosopher. The latter is but faith, the former is\nfaith\u2019s ideal object.]\n\n[Footnote C: For the sake of simplicity only such ideas as precede\nconceptions of things have been mentioned here. After things are\ndiscovered, however, they may be used as terms in a second ideal\nsynthesis and a concretion in discourse on a higher plane may be\ncomposed out of sustained concretions in existence. Proper names are\nsuch secondary concretions in discourse. \u201cVenice\u201d is a term covering\nmany successive aspects and conditions, not distinguished in fancy,\nbelonging to an object existing continuously in space and time. Each of\nthese states of Venice constitutes a natural object, a concretion in\nexistence, and is again analysable into a mass of fused but recognisable\nqualities\u2014light, motion, beauty\u2014each of which was an original\nconcretion in discourse, a primordial term in experience. A quality is\nrecognised by its own idea or permanent nature, a thing by its\nconstituent qualities, and an embodied spirit by fusion into an ideal\nessence of the constant characters possessed by a thing. To raise\nnatural objects into historic entities it is necessary to repeat upon a\nhigher plane that concretion in discourse by which sensations were\nraised to ideas. When familiar objects attain this ideal character they\nhave become poetical and achieved a sort of personality. They then\npossess a spiritual status. Thus sensuous experience is solidified into\nlogical terms, these into ideas of things, and these, recast and smelted\nagain in imagination, into forms of spirit.]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VIII\u2014ON THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS\n\n\n[Sidenote: Moral tone of opinions derived from their logical principle.]\n\nThose who look back upon the history of opinion for many centuries\ncommonly feel, by a vague but profound instinct, that certain\nconsecrated doctrines have an inherent dignity and spirituality, while\nother speculative tendencies and other vocabularies seem wedded to all\nthat is ignoble and shallow. So fundamental is this moral tone in\nphilosophy that people are usually more firmly convinced that their\nopinions are precious than that they are true. They may avow, in\nreflective moments, that they may be in error, seeing that thinkers of\nno less repute have maintained opposite opinions, but they are commonly\nabsolutely sure that if their own views could be generally accepted, it\nwould be a boon to mankind, that in fact the moral interests of the race\nare bound up, not with discovering what may chance to be true, but with\ndiscovering the truth to have a particular complexion. This predominant\ntrust in moral judgments is in some cases conscious and avowed, so that\nphilosophers invite the world to embrace tenets for which no evidence\nis offered but that they chime in with current aspirations or\ntraditional bias. Thus the substance of things hoped for becomes, even\nin philosophy, the evidence of things not seen.\n\nSuch faith is indeed profoundly human and has accompanied the mind in\nall its gropings and discoveries; preference being the primary principle\nof discrimination and attention. Reason in her earliest manifestations\nalready discovered her affinities and incapacities, and loaded the ideas\nshe framed with friendliness or hostility. It is not strange that her\nlatest constructions should inherit this relation to the will; and we\nshall see that the moral tone and affinity of metaphysical systems\ncorresponds exactly with the primary function belonging to that type of\nidea on which they are based. Idealistic systems, still cultivating\nconcretions in discourse, study the first conditions of knowledge and\nthe last interests of life; materialistic systems, still emphasising\nconcretions in existence, describe causal relations, and the habits of\nnature. Thus the spiritual value of various philosophies rests in the\nlast instance on the kind of good which originally attached the mind to\nthat habit and plane of ideation.\n\n[Sidenote: Concretions in discourse express instinctive reactions.]\n\nWe have said that perceptions must be recognised before they can be\nassociated by contiguity, and that consequently the fusion of temporally\ndiffused experiences must precede their local fusion into material\nobjects. It might be urged in opposition to this statement that concrete\nobjects can be recognised in practice before their general qualities\nhave been distinguished in discourse. Recognition may be instinctive,\nthat is, based on the repetition of a felt reaction or emotion, rather\nthan on any memory of a former occasion on which the same perception\noccurred. Such an objection seems to be well grounded, for it is\ninstinctive adjustments and suggested action that give cognitive value\nto sensation and endow it with that transitive force which makes it\nconsciously representative of what is past, future, or absent. If\npractical instinct did not stretch what is given into what is meant,\nreason could never recognise the datum for a copy of an ideal object.\n\n[Sidenote: Idealism rudimentary.]\n\nThis description of the case involves an application or extension of our\ntheory rather than an argument against it. For where recognition is\ninstinctive and a familiar action is performed with absent-minded\nconfidence and without attending to the indications that justify that\naction, there is in an eminent degree a qualitative concretion in\nexperience. Present impressions are merged so completely in structural\nsurvivals of the past that instead of arousing any ideas distinct enough\nto be objectified they merely stimulate the inner sense, remain imbedded\nin the general feeling of motion or life, and constitute in fact a\nheightened sentiment of pure vitality and freedom. For the lowest and\nvaguest of concretions in discourse are the ideas of self and of an\nembosoming external being, with the felt continuity of both; what Fichte\nwould call the Ego, the Non-Ego, and Life. Where no particular events\nare recognised there is still a feeling of continuous existence. We\ntrail after us from our whole past some sense of the continuous energy\nand movement both of our passionate fancies and of the phantasmagoria\ncapriciously at work beyond. An ignorant mind believes itself omniscient\nand omnipotent; those impulses in itself which really represent the\ninertia and unspent momentum of its last dream it regards as the\ncreative forces of nature.\n\nThe first lines of cleavage and the first recognisable bulks at which\nattention is arrested are in truth those shadowy Fichtean divisions:\nsuch are the rude beginnings of logical architecture. In its inability\nto descry anything definite and fixed, for want of an acquired empirical\nbackground and a distinct memory, the mind flounders forward in a dream\nfull of prophecies and wayward identifications. The world possesses as\nyet in its regard only the superficial forms that appear in revery, it\nhas no hidden machinery, no third dimension in which unobserved and\nperpetual operations are going on. Its only terms, in a word, are\nconcretions in discourse, ideas combined in their \u00e6sthetic and logical\nharmonies, not in their habitual and efficacious conjunctions. The\ndisorder of such experience is still a spontaneous disorder; it has not\ndiscovered how calculable are its unpremeditated shocks. The cataclysms\nthat occur seem to have only ideal grounds and only dramatic meaning.\nThough the dream may have its terrors and degenerate at moments into a\nnightmare, it has still infinite plasticity and buoyancy. What\nperceptions are retained merge in those haunting and friendly presences,\nthey have an intelligible and congenial character because they appear as\nparts and effluences of an inner fiction, evolving according to the\nbarbaric prosody of an almost infant mind.\n\nThis is the fairy-land of idealism where only the miraculous seems a\nmatter of course and every hint of what is purely natural is\ndisregarded, for the truly natural still seems artificial, dead, and\nremote. New and disconcerting facts, which intrude themselves\ninopportunely into the story, chill the currents of spontaneous\nimagination and are rejected as long as possible for being alien and\nperverse. Perceptions, on the contrary, which can be attached to the old\npresences as confirmations or corollaries, become at once parts of the\nwarp and woof of what we call ourselves. They seem of the very substance\nof spirit, obeying a vital momentum and flowing from the inmost\nprinciple of being; and they are so much akin to human presumptions that\nthey pass for manifestations of necessary truth. Thus the demonstrations\nof geometry being but the intent explication of a long-consolidated\nideal concretion which we call space, are welcomed by the mind as in a\nsense familiar and as revelations of a truth implicit in the soul, so\nthat Plato could plausibly take them for recollections of prenatal\nwisdom. But a rocket that bursts into sparks of a dozen colours, even if\nexpected, is expected with anxiety and observed with surprise; it\nassaults the senses at an incalculable moment with a sensation\nindividual and new. The exciting tension and lively stimulus may please\nin their way, yet the badge of the accidental and unmeaning adheres to\nthe thing. It is a trivial experience and one quickly forgotten. The\nshock is superficial and were it repeated would soon fatigue. We should\nretire with relief into darkness and silence, to our permanent and\nrational thoughts.\n\n[Sidenote: Naturalism sad.]\n\nIt is a remarkable fact, which may easily be misinterpreted, that while\nall the benefits and pleasures of life seem to be associated with\nexternal things, and all certain knowledge seems to describe material\nlaws, yet a deified nature has generally inspired a religion of\nmelancholy. Why should the only intelligible philosophy seem to defeat\nreason and the chief means of benefiting mankind seem to blast our best\nhopes? Whence this profound aversion to so beautiful and fruitful a\nuniverse? Whence this persistent search for invisible regions and powers\nand for metaphysical explanations that can explain nothing, while\nnature\u2019s voice without and within man cries aloud to him to look, act,\nand enjoy? And when someone, in protest against such senseless oracular\nprejudices, has actually embraced the life and faith of nature and\ntaught others to look to the natural world for all motives and\nsanctions, expecting thus to refresh and marvellously to invigorate\nhuman life, why have those innocent hopes failed so miserably? Why is\nthat sensuous optimism we may call Greek, or that industrial optimism we\nmay call American, such a thin disguise for despair? Why does each melt\naway and become a mockery at the first approach of reflection? Why has\nman\u2019s conscience in the end invariably rebelled against naturalism and\nreverted in some form or other to a cultus of the unseen?\n\n[Sidenote: The soul akin to the eternal and ideal.]\n\nWe may answer in the words of Saint Paul: because things seen are\ntemporal and things not seen are eternal. And we may add, remembering\nour analysis of the objects inhabiting the mind, that the eternal is the\ntruly human, that which is akin to the first indispensable products of\nintelligence, which arise by the fusion of successive images in\ndiscourse, and transcend the particular in time, peopling the mind with\npermanent and recognisable objects, and strengthening it with a\nsynthetic, dramatic apprehension of itself and its own experience.\nConcretion in existence, on the contrary, yields essentially detached\nand empirical unities, foreign to mind in spite of their order, and\nunintelligible in spite of their clearness. Reason fails to assimilate\nin them precisely that which makes them real, namely, their presence\nhere and now, in this order and number. The form and quality of them we\ncan retain, domesticate, and weave into the texture of reflection, but\ntheir existence and individuality remain a datum of sense needing to be\nverified anew at every moment and actually receiving continual\nverification or disproof while we live in this world.\n\n\u201cThis world\u201d we call it, not without justifiable pathos, for many other\nworlds are conceivable and if discovered might prove more rational and\nintelligible and more akin to the soul than this strange universe which\nman has hitherto always looked upon with increasing astonishment. The\nmaterials of experience are no sooner in hand than they are transformed\nby intelligence, reduced to those permanent presences, those natures and\nrelations, which alone can live in discourse. Those materials,\nrearranged into the abstract summaries we call history or science, or\npieced out into the reconstructions and extensions we call poetry or\nreligion, furnish us with ideas of as many dream-worlds as we please,\nall nearer to reason\u2019s ideal than is the actual chaos of perceptual\nexperience, and some nearer to the heart\u2019s desire. When an empirical\nphilosophy, therefore, calls us back from the irresponsible flights of\nimagination to the shock of sense and tries to remind us that in this\nalone we touch existence and come upon fact, we feel dispossessed of our\nnature and cramped in our life. The actuality possessed by external\nexperience cannot make up for its instability, nor the applicability of\nscientific principles for their hypothetical character. The dependence\nupon sense, which we are reduced to when we consider the world of\nexistences, becomes a too plain hint of our essential impotence and\nmortality, while the play of logical fancy, though it remain inevitable,\nis saddened by a consciousness of its own insignificance.\n\n[Sidenote: Her inexperience.]\n\nThat dignity, then, which inheres in logical ideas and their affinity to\nmoral enthusiasm, springs from their congruity with the primary habits\nof intelligence and idealisation. The soul or self or personality, which\nin sophisticated social life is so much the centre of passion and\nconcern, is itself an idea, a concretion in discourse; and the level on\nwhich it swims comes to be, by association and affinity, the region of\nall the more vivid and massive human interests. The pleasures which lie\nbeneath it are ignored, and the ideals which lie above it are not\nperceived. Aversion to an empirical or naturalistic philosophy\naccordingly expresses a sort of logical patriotism and attachment to\nhomespun ideas. The actual is too remote and unfriendly to the dreamer;\nto understand it he has to learn a foreign tongue, which his native\nprejudice imagines to be unmeaning and unpoetical. The truth is,\nhowever, that nature\u2019s language is too rich for man; and the discomfort\nhe feels when he is compelled to use it merely marks his lack of\neducation. There is nothing cheaper than idealism. It can be had by\nmerely not observing the ineptitude of our chance prejudices, and by\ndeclaring that the first rhymes that have struck our ear are the eternal\nand necessary harmonies of the world.\n\n[Sidenote: Platonism spontaneous.]\n\nThe thinker\u2019s bias is naturally favourable to logical ideas. The man of\nreflection will attribute, as far as possible, validity and reality to\nthese alone. Platonism remains the classic instance of this way of\nthinking. Living in an age of rhetoric, with an education that dealt\nwith nothing but ideal entities, verbal, moral, or mathematical, Plato\nsaw in concretions in discourse the true elements of being. Definable\nmeanings, being the terms of thought, must also, he fancied, be the\nconstituents of reality. And with that directness and audacity which was\npossible to the ancients, and of which Pythagoreans and Eleatics had\nalready given brilliant examples, he set up these terms of discourse,\nlike the Pythagorean numbers, for absolute and eternal entities,\nexisting before all things, revealed in all things, giving the cosmic\nartificer his models and the creature his goal. By some inexplicable\nnecessity the creation had taken place. The ideas had multiplied\nthemselves in a flux of innumerable images which could be recognised by\ntheir resemblance to their originals, but were at once cancelled and\nexpunged by virtue of their essential inadequacy. What sounds are to\nwords and words to thoughts, that was a thing to its idea.\n\n[Sidenote: Its essential fidelity to the ideal.]\n\nPlato, however, retained the moral and significant essence of his ideas,\nand while he made them ideal absolutes, fixed meanings antecedent to\ntheir changing expressions, never dreamed that they could be natural\nexistences, or psychological beings. In an original thinker, in one who\nreally thinks and does not merely argue, to call a thing supernatural,\nor spiritual, or intelligible is to declare that it is no _thing_ at\nall, no existence actual or possible, but a value, a term of thought, a\nmerely ideal principle; and the more its reality in such a sense is\ninsisted on the more its incommensurability with brute existence is\nasserted. To express this ideal reality myth is the natural vehicle; a\nvehicle Plato could avail himself of all the more freely that he\ninherited a religion still plastic and conscious of its poetic essence,\nand did not have to struggle, like his modern disciples, with the\narrested childishness of minds that for a hundred generations have\nlearned their metaphysics in the cradle. His ideas, although their\nnatural basis was ignored, were accordingly always ideal; they always\nrepresented meanings and functions and were never degraded from the\nmoral to the physical sphere. The counterpart of this genuine ideality\nwas that the theory retained its moral force and did not degenerate into\na bewildered and idolatrous pantheism. Plato conceived the soul\u2019s\ndestiny to be her emancipation from those material things which in this\nillogical apparition were so alien to her essence. She should return,\nafter her baffling and stupefying intercourse with the world of sense\nand accident, into the native heaven of her ideas. For animal desires\nwere no less illusory, and yet no less significant, than sensuous\nperceptions. They engaged man in the pursuit of the good and taught him,\nthrough disappointment, to look for it only in those satisfactions which\ncan be permanent and perfect. Love, like intelligence, must rise from\nappearance to reality, and rest in that divine world which is the\nfulfilment of the human.\n\n[Sidenote: Equal rights of empiricism.]\n\nA geometrician does a good service when he declares and explicates the\nnature of the triangle, an object suggested by many casual and recurring\nsensations. His service is not less real, even if less obvious, when he\narrests some fundamental concretion in discourse, and formulates the\nfirst principles of logic. Mastering such definitions, sinking into the\ndry life of such forms, he may spin out and develop indefinitely, in the\nfreedom of his irresponsible logic, their implications and congruous\nextensions, opening by his demonstration a depth of knowledge which we\nshould otherwise never have discovered in ourselves. But if the geometer\nhad a fanatical zeal and forbade us to consider space and the triangles\nit contains otherwise than as his own ideal science considers them:\nforbade us, for instance, to inquire how we came to perceive those\ntriangles or that space; what organs and senses conspired in furnishing\nthe idea of them; what material objects show that character, and how\nthey came to offer themselves to our observation\u2014then surely the\ngeometer would qualify his service with a distinct injury and while he\nopened our eyes to one fascinating vista would tend to blind them to\nothers no less tempting and beautiful. For the naturalist and\npsychologist have also their rights and can tell us things well worth\nknowing; nor will any theory they may possibly propose concerning the\norigin of spatial ideas and their material embodiments ever invalidate\nthe demonstrations of geometry. These, in their hypothetical sphere, are\nperfectly autonomous and self-generating, and their applicability to\nexperience will hold so long as the initial images they are applied to\ncontinue to abound in perception.\n\nIf we awoke to-morrow in a world containing nothing but music, geometry\nwould indeed lose its relevance to our future experience; but it would\nkeep its ideal cogency, and become again a living language if any\nspatial objects should ever reappear in sense.\n\nThe history of such reappearances\u2014natural history\u2014is meantime a good\nsubject for observation and experiment. Chronicler and critic can always\napproach experience with a method complementary to the deductive methods\npursued in mathematics and logic: instead of developing the import of a\ndefinition, he can investigate its origin and describe its relation to\nother disparate phenomena. The mathematician develops the import of\ngiven ideas; the psychologist investigates their origin and describes\ntheir relation to the rest of human experience. So the prophet develops\nthe import of his trance, and the theologian the import of the prophecy:\nwhich prevents not the historian from coming later and showing the\norigin, the growth, and the possible function of that maniacal sort of\nwisdom. True, the theologian commonly dreads a critic more than does the\ngeometer, but this happens only because the theologian has probably not\ndeveloped the import of his facts with any austerity or clearness, but\nhas distorted that ideal interpretation with all sorts of concessions\nand side-glances at other tenets to which he is already pledged, so that\nhe justly fears, when his methods are exposed, that the religious heart\nwill be alienated from him and his conclusions be left with no foothold\nin human nature. If he had not been guilty of such misrepresentation, no\nhistory or criticism that reviewed his construction would do anything\nbut recommend it to all those who found in themselves the primary\nreligious facts and religious faculties which that construction had\nfaithfully interpreted in its ideal deductions and extensions. All who\nperceived the facts would thus learn their import; and theology would\nreveal to the soul her natural religion, just as Euclid reveals to\narchitects and navigators the structure of natural space, so that they\nvalue his demonstrations not only for their hypothetical cogency but\nfor their practical relevance and truth.\n\n[Sidenote: Logic dependent on fact for its importance,]\n\nNow, like the geometer and ingenuous theologian that he was, Plato\ndeveloped the import of moral and logical experience. Even his\nfollowers, though they might give rein to narrower and more fantastic\nenthusiasms, often unveiled secrets, hidden in the oracular intent of\nthe heart, which might never have been disclosed but for their lessons.\nBut with a zeal unbecoming so well grounded a philosophy they turned\ntheir backs upon the rest of wisdom, they disparaged the evidence of\nsense, they grew hot against the ultimate practical sanctions furnished\nby impulse and pleasure, they proscribed beauty in art (where Plato had\nproscribed chiefly what to a fine sensibility is meretricious ugliness),\nand in a word they sought to abolish all human activities other than the\none pre-eminent in themselves. In revenge for their hostility the great\nworld has never given them more than a distrustful admiration and,\nconfronted daily by the evident truths they denied, has encouraged\nitself to forget the truths they asserted. For they had the bias of\nreflection and man is born to do more than reflect; they attributed\nreality and validity only to logical ideas, and man finds other objects\ncontinually thrusting themselves before his eyes, claiming his affection\nand controlling his fortunes.\n\nThe most legitimate constructions of reason soon become merely\nspeculative, soon pass, I mean, beyond the sphere of practical\napplication; and the man of affairs, adjusting himself at every turn to\nthe opaque brutality of fact, loses his respect for the higher reaches\nof logic and forgets that his recognition of facts themselves is an\napplication of logical principles. In his youth, perhaps, he pursued\nmetaphysics, which are the love-affairs of the understanding; now he is\nwedded to convention and seeks in the passion he calls business or in\nthe habit he calls duty some substitute for natural happiness. He fears\nto question the value of his life, having found that such questioning\nadds nothing to his powers; and he thinks the mariner would die of old\nage in port who should wait for reason to justify his voyage. Reason is\nindeed like the sad Iphigenia whom her royal father, the Will, must\nsacrifice before any wind can fill his sails. The emanation of all\nthings from the One involves not only the incarnation but the\ncrucifixion of the Logos. Reason must be eclipsed by its supposed\nexpressions, and can only shine in a darkness which does not comprehend\nit. For reason is essentially hypothetical and subsidiary, and can never\nconstitute what it expresses in man, nor what it recognises in nature.\n\n[Sidenote: and for its subsistence.]\n\nIf logic should refuse to make this initial self-sacrifice and to\nsubordinate itself to impulse and fact, it would immediately become\nirrational and forfeit its own justification. For it exists by virtue\nof a human impulse and in answer to a human need. To ask a man, in the\nsatisfaction of a metaphysical passion, to forego every other good is to\nrender him fanatical and to shut his eyes daily to the sun in order that\nhe may see better by the star-light. The radical fault of rationalism is\nnot any incidental error committed in its deductions, although such\nnecessarily abound in every human system. Its great original sin is its\ndenial of its own basis and its refusal to occupy its due place in the\nworld, an ignorant fear of being invalidated by its history and\ndishonoured, as it were, if its ancestry is hinted at. Only bastards\nshould fear that fate, and criticism would indeed be fatal to a bastard\nphilosophy, to one that does not spring from practical reason and has no\nroots in life. But those products of reason which arise by reflection on\nfact, and those spontaneous and demonstrable systems of ideas which can\nbe verified in experience, and thus serve to render the facts calculable\nand articulate, will lose nothing of their lustre by discovering their\nlineage. So the idea of nature remains true after psychology has\nanalysed its origin, and not only true, but beautiful and beneficent.\nFor unlike many negligible products of speculative fancy it is woven out\nof recurrent perceptions into a hypothetical cause from which further\nperceptions can be deduced as they are actually experienced.\n\nSuch a mechanism once discovered confirms itself at every breath we\ndraw, and surrounds every object in history and nature with infinite\nand true suggestions, making it doubly interesting, fruitful, and potent\nover the mind. The naturalist accordingly welcomes criticism because his\nconstructions, though no less hypothetical and speculative than the\nidealist\u2019s dreams, are such legitimate and fruitful fictions that they\nare obvious truths. For truth, at the intelligible level where it\narises, means not sensible fact, but valid ideation, verified\nhypothesis, and inevitable, stable inference. If the idealist fears and\ndeprecates any theory of his own origin and function, he is only obeying\nthe instinct of self-preservation; for he knows very well that his past\nwill not bear examination. He is heir to every superstition and by\nprofession an apologist; his deepest vocation is to rescue, by some\nlogical _tour de force_, what spontaneously he himself would have taken\nfor a consecrated error. Now history and criticism would involve, as he\ninstinctively perceives, the reduction of his doctrines to their\npragmatic value, to their ideal significance for real life. But he\ndetests any admission of relativity in his doctrines, all the more\nbecause he cannot avow his reasons for detesting it; and zeal, here as\nin so many cases, becomes the cover and evidence of a bad conscience.\nBigotry and craft, with a rhetorical vilification of enemies, then come\nto reinforce in the prophet that natural limitation of his interests\nwhich turns his face away from history and criticism; until his system,\nin its monstrous unreality and disingenuousness, becomes intolerable,\nand provokes a general revolt in which too often the truth of it is\nburied with the error in a common oblivion.\n\n[Sidenote: Reason and docility.]\n\nIf idealism is intrenched in the very structure of human reason,\nempiricism represents all those energies of the external universe which,\nas Spinoza says, must infinitely exceed the energies of man. If\nmeditation breeds science, wisdom comes by disillusion, even on the\nsubject of science itself. Docility to the facts makes the sanity of\nscience. Reason is only half grown and not really distinguishable from\nimagination so long as she cannot check and recast her own processes\nwherever they render the moulds of thought unfit for their\nsubject-matter. Docility is, as we have seen, the deepest condition of\nreason\u2019s existence; for if a form of mental synthesis were by chance\ndeveloped which was incapable of appropriating the data of sense, these\ndata could not be remembered or introduced at all into a growing and\ncumulative experience. Sensations would leave no memorial; while logical\nthoughts would play idly, like so many parasites in the mind, and\nultimately languish and die of inanition. To be nourished and employed,\nintelligence must have developed such structure and habits as will\nenable it to assimilate what food comes in its way; so that the\npersistence of any intellectual habit is a proof that it has some\napplicability, however partial, to the facts of sentience.\n\n[Sidenote: Applicable thought and clarified experience.]\n\nThis applicability, the prerequisite of significant thought, is also its\neventual test; and the gathering of new experiences, the consciousness\nof more and more facts crowding into the memory and demanding\nco-ordination, is at once the presentation to reason of her legitimate\nproblem and a proof that she is already at work. It is a presentation of\nher problem, because reason is not a faculty of dreams but a method in\nliving; and by facing the flux of sensations and impulses that\nconstitute mortal life with the gift of ideal construction and the\naspiration toward eternal goods, she is only doing her duty and\nmanifesting what she is. To accumulate facts, moreover, is in itself to\nprove that rational activity is already awakened, because a\nconsciousness of multitudinous accidents diversifying experience\ninvolves a wide scope in memory, good methods of classification, and\nkeen senses, so that all working together they may collect many\nobservations. Memory and all its instruments are embodiments, on a\nmodest scale, of rational activities which in theory and speculation\nreappear upon a higher level. The expansion of the mind in point of\nretentiveness and wealth of images is as much an advance in knowledge as\nis its development in point of organisation. The structure may be\nwidened at the base as well as raised toward its ideal summit, and while\na mass of information imperfectly digested leaves something still for\nintelligence to do, it shows at the same time how much intelligence has\ndone already.\n\nThe function of reason is to dominate experience; and obviously\nopenness to new impressions is no less necessary to that end than is the\npossession of principles by which new impressions may be interpreted.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IX\u2014HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL\n\n[Sidenote: Functional relations of mind and body.]\n\nNothing is more natural or more congruous with all the analogies of\nexperience than that animals should feel and think. The relation of mind\nto body, of reason to nature, seems to be actually this: when bodies\nhave reached a certain complexity and vital equilibrium, a sense begins\nto inhabit them which is focussed upon the preservation of that body and\non its reproduction. This sense, as it becomes reflective and expressive\nof physical welfare, points more and more to its own persistence and\nharmony, and generates the Life of Reason. Nature is reason\u2019s basis and\ntheme; reason is nature\u2019s consciousness; and, from the point of view of\nthat consciousness when it has arisen, reason is also nature\u2019s\njustification and goal.\n\nTo separate things so closely bound together as are mind and body,\nreason and nature, is consequently a violent and artificial divorce, and\na man of judgment will instinctively discredit any philosophy in which\nit is decreed. But to avoid divorce it is well first to avoid unnatural\nunions, and not to attribute to our two elements, which must be\npartners for life, relations repugnant to their respective natures and\noffices. Now the body is an instrument, the mind its function, the\nwitness and reward of its operation. Mind is the body\u2019s entelechy, a\nvalue which accrues to the body when it has reached a certain\nperfection, of which it would be a pity, so to speak, that it should\nremain unconscious; so that while the body feeds the mind the mind\nperfects the body, lifting it and all its natural relations and impulses\ninto the moral world, into the sphere of interests and ideas.\n\nNo connection could be closer than this reciprocal involution, as nature\nand life reveal it; but the connection is natural, not dialectical. The\nunion will be denaturalised and, so far as philosophy goes, actually\ndestroyed, if we seek to carry it on into logical equivalence. If we\nisolate the terms mind and body and study the inward implications of\neach apart, we shall never discover the other. That matter cannot, by\ntransposition of its particles, _become_ what we call consciousness, is\nan admitted truth; that mind cannot _become_ its own occasions or\ndetermine its own march, though it be a truth not recognised by all\nphilosophers, is in itself no less obvious. Matter, dialectically\nstudied, makes consciousness seem a superfluous and unaccountable\naddendum; mind, studied in the same way, makes nature an embarrassing\nidea, a figment which ought to be subservient to conscious aims and\nperfectly transparent, but which remains opaque and overwhelming. In\norder to escape these sophistications, it suffices to revert to\nimmediate observation and state the question in its proper terms: nature\nlives, and perception is a private echo and response to ambient motions.\nThe soul is the voice of the body\u2019s interests; in watching them a man\ndefines the world that sustains him and that conditions all his\nsatisfactions. In discerning his origin he christens Nature by the\neloquent name of mother, under which title she enters the universe of\ndiscourse. Simultaneously he discerns his own existence and marks off\nthe inner region of his dreams. And it behooves him not to obliterate\nthese discoveries. By trying to give his mind false points of attachment\nin nature he would disfigure not only nature but also that reason which\nis so much the essence of his life.\n\n[Sidenote: They form one natural life.]\n\nConsciousness, then, is the expression of bodily life and the seat of\nall its values. Its place in the natural world is like that of its own\nideal products, art, religion, or science; it translates natural\nrelations into synthetic and ideal symbols by which things are\ninterpreted with reference to the interests of consciousness itself.\nThis representation is also an existence and has its place along with\nall other existences in the bosom of nature. In this sense its\nconnection with its organs, and with all that affects the body or that\nthe body affects, is a natural connection. If the word cause did not\nsuggest dialectical bonds we might innocently say that thought was a\nlink in the chain of natural causes. It is at least a link in the chain\nof natural events; for it has determinate antecedents in the brain and\nsenses and determinate consequents in actions and words. But this\ndependence and this efficacy have nothing logical about them; they are\nhabitual collocations in the world, like lightning and thunder. A more\nminute inspection of psycho-physical processes, were it practicable,\nwould doubtless disclose undreamed of complexities and harmonies in\nthem; the mathematical and dynamic relations of stimulus and sensation\nmight perhaps be formulated with precision. But the terms used in the\nequation, their quality and inward habit, would always remain data which\nthe naturalist would have to assume after having learned them by\ninspection. Movement could never be deduced dialectically or graphically\nfrom thought nor thought from movement. Indeed no natural relation is in\na different case. Neither gravity, nor chemical reaction, nor life and\nreproduction, nor time, space, and motion themselves are logically\ndeducible, nor intelligible in terms of their limits. The phenomena have\nto be accepted at their face value and allowed to retain a certain\nempirical complexity; otherwise the seed of all science is sterilised\nand calculation cannot proceed for want of discernible and pregnant\nelements.\n\nHow fine nature\u2019s habits may be, where repetition begins, and down to\nwhat depth a mathematical treatment can penetrate, is a question for\nthe natural sciences to solve. Whether consciousness, for instance,\naccompanies vegetative life, or even all motion, is a point to be\ndecided solely by empirical analogy. When the exact physical conditions\nof thought are discovered in man, we may infer how far thought is\ndiffused through the universe, for it will be coextensive with the\nconditions it will have been shown to have. Now, in a very rough way, we\nknow already what these conditions are. They are first the existence of\nan organic body and then its possession of adaptable instincts, of\ninstincts that can be modified by experience. This capacity is what an\nobserver calls intelligence; docility is the observable half of reason.\nWhen an animal winces at a blow and readjusts his pose, we say he feels;\nand we say he thinks when we see him brooding over his impressions, and\nfind him launching into a new course of action after a silent decoction\nof his potential impulses. Conversely, when observation covers both the\nmental and the physical process, that is, in our own experience, we find\nthat felt impulses, the conceived objects for which they make, and the\nvalues they determine are all correlated with animal instincts and\nexternal impressions. A desire is the inward sign of a physical\nproclivity to act, an image in sense is the sign in most cases of some\nmaterial object in the environment and always, we may presume, of some\ncerebral change. The brain seems to simmer like a caldron in which all\nsorts of matters are perpetually transforming themselves into all sorts\nof shapes. When this cerebral reorganisation is pertinent to the\nexternal situation and renders the man, when he resumes action, more a\nmaster of his world, the accompanying thought is said to be practical;\nfor it brings a consciousness of power and an earnest of success.\n\nCerebral processes are of course largely hypothetical. Theory suggests\ntheir existence, and experience can verify that theory only in an\nindirect and imperfect manner. The addition of a physical substratum to\nall thinking is only a scientific expedient, a hypothesis expressing the\nfaith that nature is mechanically intelligible even beyond the reaches\nof minute verification. The accompanying consciousness, on the other\nhand, is something intimately felt by each man in his own person; it is\na portion of crude and immediate experience. That it accompanies changes\nin his body and in the world is not an inference for him but a datum.\nBut when crude experience is somewhat refined and the soul, at first\nmingled with every image, finds that it inhabits only her private body,\nto whose fortunes hers are altogether wedded, we begin to imagine that\nwe know the cosmos at large better than the spirit; for beyond the\nnarrow limits of our own person only the material phase of things is\nopen to our observation. To add a mental phase to every part and motion\nof the cosmos is then seen to be an audacious fancy. It violates all\nempirical analogy, for the phenomenon which feeling accompanies in crude\nexperience is not mere material existence, but reactive organisation\nand docility.\n\n[Sidenote: Artifices involved in separating them.]\n\nThe limits set to observation, however, render the mental and material\nspheres far from coincident, and even in a rough way mutually\nsupplementary, so that human reflection has fallen into a habit of\ninterlarding them. The world, instead of being a living body, a natural\nsystem with moral functions, has seemed to be a bisectible hybrid, half\nmaterial and half mental, the clumsy conjunction of an automaton with a\nghost. These phases, taken in their abstraction, as they first forced\nthemselves on human attention, have been taken for independent and\nseparable facts. Experience, remaining in both provinces quite sensuous\nand superficial, has accordingly been allowed to link this purely mental\nevent with that purely mechanical one. The linkage is practically not\ndeceptive, because mental transformations are indeed signs of changes in\nbodies; and so long as a cause is defined merely as a sign, mental and\nphysical changes may truly be said to cause one another. But so soon as\nthis form of augury tries to overcome its crude empiricism and to\nestablish phenomenal laws, the mental factor has to fall out of the\nefficient process and be represented there by what, upon accurate\nexamination, it is seen to be really the sign of\u2014I mean by some\nphysiological event.\n\nIf philosophers of the Cartesian school had taken to heart, as the\nGerman transcendentalists did, the _cogito ergo sum_ of their master,\nand had considered that a physical world is, for knowledge, nothing but\nan instrument to explain sensations and their order, they might have\nexpected this collapse of half their metaphysics at the approach of\ntheir positive science: for if mental existence was to be kept standing\nonly by its supposed causal efficacy nothing could prevent the whole\nworld from becoming presently a _b\u00eate-machine._ Psychic events have no\nlinks save through their organs and their objects; the function of the\nmaterial world is, indeed, precisely to supply their linkage. The\ninternal relations of ideas, on the other hand, are dialectical; their\nrealm is eternal and absolutely irrelevant to the march of events. If we\nmust speak, therefore, of causal relations between mind and body, we\nshould say that matter is the pervasive cause of mind\u2019s distribution,\nand mind the pervasive cause of matter\u2019s discovery and value. To ask for\nan efficient cause, to trace back a force or investigate origins, is to\nhave already turned one\u2019s face in the direction of matter and mechanical\nlaws: no success in that undertaking can fail to be a triumph for\nmaterialism. To ask for a justification, on the other hand, is to turn\nno less resolutely in the direction of ideal results and actualities\nfrom which instrumentality and further use have been eliminated. Spirit\nis useless, being the end of things: but it is not vain, since it alone\nrescues all else from vanity. It is called practical when it is\nprophetic of its own better fulfilments, which is the case whenever\nforces are being turned to good uses, whenever an organism is exploring\nits relations and putting forth new tentacles with which to grasp the\nworld.\n\n[Sidenote: Consciousness expresses vital equilibrium and docility.]\n\nWe saw in the beginning that the exigences of bodily life gave\nconsciousness its first articulation. A bodily feat, like nutrition or\nreproduction, is celebrated by a festival in the mind, and consciousness\nis a sort of ritual solemnising by prayer, jubilation, or mourning, the\nchief episodes in the body\u2019s fortunes. The organs, by their structure,\nselect the impressions possible to them from the divers influences\nabroad in the world, all of which, if animal organisms had learned to\nfeed upon them, might plausibly have offered a basis for sensation.\nEvery instinct or habitual impulse further selects from the passing\nbodily affections those that are pertinent to its own operation and\nwhich consequently adhere to it and modify its reactive machinery.\nPrevalent and notable sensations are therefore signs, presumably marking\nthe presence of objects important for the body\u2019s welfare or for the\nexecution of its predestined offices. So that not only are the soul\u2019s\naims transcripts of the body\u2019s tendencies, but all ideas are grafted\nupon the interplay of these tendencies with environing forces. Early\nimages hover about primary wants as highest conceptions do about\nultimate achievements.\n\n[Sidenote: Its worthlessness as a cause and value as an expression]\n\nThought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no\nmotion would be an action, no change a progress; but thought is in no\nway instrumental or servile; it is an experience realised, not a force\nto be used. That same spontaneity in nature which has suggested a good\nmust be trusted to fulfil it. If we look fairly at the actual resources\nof our minds we perceive that we are as little informed concerning the\nmeans and processes of action as concerning the reason why our motives\nmove us. To execute the simplest intention we must rely on fate: our own\nacts are mysteries to us. Do I know how I open my eyes or how I walk\ndown stairs? Is it the supervising wisdom of consciousness that guides\nme in these acts? Is it the mind that controls the bewildered body and\npoints out the way to physical habits uncertain of their affinities? Or\nis it not much rather automatic inward machinery that executes the\nmarvellous work, while the mind catches here and there some glimpse of\nthe operation, now with delight and adhesion, now with impotent\nrebellion? When impulses work themselves out unimpeded we say we act;\nwhen they are thwarted we say we are acted upon; but in neither case do\nwe in the least understand the natural history of what is occurring. The\nmind at best vaguely forecasts the result of action: a schematic verbal\nsense of the end to be accomplished possibly hovers in consciousness\nwhile the act is being performed; but this premonition is itself the\nsense of a process already present and betrays the tendency at work; it\ncan obviously give no aid or direction to the unknown mechanical process\nthat produced it and that must realise its own prophecy, if that\nprophecy is to be realised at all.\n\nThat such an unknown mechanism exists, and is adequate to explain every\nso-called decision, is indeed a hypothesis far outrunning detailed\nverification, although conceived by legitimate analogy with whatever is\nknown about natural processes; but that the mind is not the source of\nitself or its own transformations is a matter of present experience; for\nthe world is an unaccountable datum, in its existence, in its laws, and\nin its incidents. The highest hopes of science and morality look only to\ndiscovering those laws and bringing one set of incidents\u2014facts of\nperception\u2014into harmony with another set\u2014facts of preference. This\nhoped-for issue, if it comes, must come about in the mind; but the mind\ncannot be its cause since, by hypothesis, it does not possess the ideas\nit seeks nor has power to realise the harmonies it desiderates. These\nhave to be waited for and begged of destiny; human will, not controlling\nits basis, cannot possibly control its effects. Its existence and its\nefforts have at best the value of a good omen. They show in what\ndirection natural forces are moving in so far as they are embodied in\ngiven men.\n\n[Sidenote: Thought\u2019s march automatic and thereby implicated in events.]\n\nMen, like all things else in the world, are products and vehicles of\nnatural energy, and their operation counts. But their conscious will, in\nits moral assertiveness, is merely a sign of that energy and of that\nwill\u2019s eventual fortunes. Dramatic terror and dramatic humour both\ndepend on contrasting the natural pregnancy of a passion with its\nconscious intent. Everything in human life is ominous, even the\nvoluntary acts. We cannot, by taking thought, add a cubit to our\nstature, but we may build up a world without meaning it. Man is as full\nof potentiality as he is of impotence. A will that represents many\nactive forces, and is skilful in divination and augury, may long boast\nto be almighty without being contradicted by the event.\n\n[Sidenote: Contemplative essence of action.]\n\nThat thought is not self-directive appears best in the most immaterial\nprocesses. In strife against external forces men, being ignorant of\ntheir deeper selves, attribute the obvious effects of their action to\ntheir chance ideas; but when the process is wholly internal the real\nfactors are more evenly represented in consciousness and the magical,\ninvoluntary nature of life is better perceived. My hand, guided by I\nknow not what machinery, is at this moment adding syllable to syllable\nupon this paper, to the general fulfilment, perhaps, of my felt intent,\nyet giving that intent an articulation wholly unforeseen, and often\ndisappointing. The thoughts to be expressed simmer half-consciously in\nmy brain. I feel their burden and tendency without seeing their form,\nuntil the mechanical train of impulsive association, started by the\nperusal of what precedes or by the accidental emergence of some new\nidea, lights the fuse and precipitates the phrases. If this happens in\nthe most reflective and deliberate of activities, like this of\ncomposition, how much more does it happen in positive action, \u201cThe die\nis cast,\u201d said Caesar, feeling a decision in himself of which he could\nneither count nor weigh the multitudinous causes; and so says every\nstrong and clear intellect, every well-formed character, seizing at the\nsame moment with comprehensive instinct both its purposes and the means\nby which they shall be attained. Only the fool, whose will signifies\nnothing, boasts to have created it himself.\n\nWe must not seek the function of thought, then, in any supposed power to\ndiscover either ends not suggested by natural impulse or means to the\naccomplishment of those irrational ends. Attention is utterly powerless\nto change or create its objects in either respect; it rather registers\nwithout surprise\u2014for it expects nothing in particular\u2014and watches\neagerly the images bubbling up in the living mind and the processes\nevolving there. These processes are themselves full of potency and\npromise; will and reflection are no more inconsequential than any other\nprocesses bound by natural links to the rest of the world. Even if an\natomic mechanism suffices to mark the concatenation of everything in\nnature, including the mind, it cannot rob what it abstracts from of its\nnatural weight and reality: a thread that may suffice to hold the pearls\ntogether is not the whole cause of the necklace. But this pregnancy and\nimplication of thought in relation to its natural environment is purely\nempirical. Since natural connection is merely a principle of arrangement\nby which the contiguities of things may be described and inferred, there\nis no difficulty in admitting consciousness and all its works into the\nweb and woof of nature. Each psychic episode would be heralded by its\nmaterial antecedents; its transformations would be subject to mechanical\nlaws, which would also preside over the further transition from thought\ninto its material expression.\n\n[Sidenote: Mechanical efficacy alien to thought\u2019s essence.]\n\nThis inclusion of mind in nature, however, is as far as possible from\nconstituting the mind\u2019s function and value, or its efficacy in a moral\nand rational sense. To have prepared changes in matter would give no\nrationality to mind unless those changes in turn paved the way to some\nbetter mental existence. The worth of natural efficacy is therefore\nalways derivative; the utility of mind would be no more precious than\nthe utility of matter; both borrow all their worth from the part they\nmay play empirically in introducing those moral values which are\nintrinsic and self-sufficing. In so far as thought is instrumental it is\nnot worth having, any more than matter, except for its promise; it must\nterminate in something truly profitable and ultimate which, being good\nin itself, may lend value to all that led up to it. But this ultimate\ngood is itself consciousness, thought, rational activity; so that what\ninstrumental mentality may have preceded might be abolished without\nloss, if matter suffices to sustain reason in being; or if that\ninstrumental mentality is worth retaining, it is so only because it\nalready contains some premonition and image of its own fulfilment. In a\nword, the value of thought is ideal. The material efficacy which may be\nattributed to it is the proper efficacy of matter\u2014an efficacy which\nmatter would doubtless claim if we knew enough of its secret mechanism.\nAnd when that imputed and incongruous utility was subtracted from ideas\nthey would appear in their proper form of expressions, realisations,\nultimate fruits.\n\n[Sidenote: Consciousness transcendental.]\n\nThe incongruity of making thought, in its moral and logical essence, an\ninstrument in the natural world will appear from a different point of\nview if we shift the discussion for a moment to a transcendental level.\nSince the material world is an object for thought, and potential in\nrelation to immediate experience, it can hardly lie in the same plane of\nreality with the thought to which it appears. The spectator on this side\nof the foot-lights, while surely regarded by the play as a whole, cannot\nexpect to figure in its mechanism or to see himself strutting among the\nactors on the boards. He listens and is served, being at once impotent\nand supreme. It has been well said that\n\n    Only the free divine the laws,\n    The causeless only know the cause.\n\nConversely, what in such a transcendental sense is causeless and free\nwill evidently not be causal or determinant, being something altogether\nuniversal and notional, without inherent determinations or specific\naffinities. The objects figuring in consciousness will have implications\nand will require causes; not so the consciousness itself. The Ego to\nwhich all things appear equally, whatever their form or history, is the\nground of nothing incidental: no specific characters or order found in\nthe world can be attributed to its efficacy. The march of experience is\nnot determined by the mere fact that experience exists. Another\nexperience, differently logical, might be equally real. Consciousness is\nnot itself dynamic, for it has no body, no idiosyncrasy or particular\nlocus, to be the point of origin for definite relationships. It is\nmerely an abstract name for the actuality of its random objects. All\nforce, implication, or direction inhere in the constitution of specific\nobjects and live in their interplay. Logic is revealed to thought no\nless than nature is, and even what we call invention or fancy is\ngenerated not by thought itself but by the chance fertility of nebulous\nobjects, floating and breeding in the primeval chaos. Where the natural\norder lapses, if it ever does, not mind or will or reason can possibly\nintervene to fill the chasm\u2014for these are parcels and expressions of\nthe natural order\u2014but only nothingness and pure chance.\n\n[Sidenote: and transcendent.]\n\nThought is thus an expression of natural relations, as will is of\nnatural affinities; yet consciousness of an object\u2019s value, while it\ndeclares the blind disposition to pursue that object, constitutes its\nentire worth. Apart from the pains and satisfactions involved, an\nimpulse and its execution would be alike destitute of importance. It\nwould matter nothing how chaotic or how orderly the world became, or\nwhat animal bodies arose or perished there; any tendencies afoot in\nnature, whatever they might construct or dissolve, would involve no\nprogress or disaster, since no preferences would exist to pronounce one\neventual state of things better than another. These preferences are in\nthemselves, if the dynamic order alone be considered, works of\nsupererogation, expressing force but not producing it, like a statue of\nHercules; but the principle of such preferences, the force they express\nand depend upon, is some mechanical impulse itself involved in the\ncausal process. Expression gives value to power, and the strength of\nHercules would have no virtue in it had it contributed nothing to art\nand civilisation. That conceived basis of all life which we call matter\nwould be a mere potentiality, an inferred instrument deprived of its\nfunction, if it did not actually issue in life and consciousness. What\ngives the material world a legitimate status and perpetual pertinence in\nhuman discourse is the conscious life it supports and carries in its own\ndirection, as a ship carries its passengers or rather as a passion\ncarries its hopes. Conscious interests first justify and moralise the\nmechanisms they express. Eventual satisfactions, while their form and\npossibility must be determined by animal tendencies, alone render these\ntendencies vehicles of the good. The direction in which benefit shall\nlie must be determined by irrational impulse, but the attainment of\nbenefit consists in crowning that impulse with its ideal achievement.\nNature dictates what men shall seek and prompts them to seek it; a\npossibility of happiness is thus generated and only its fulfilment would\njustify nature and man in their common venture.\n\n[Sidenote: It is the seat of value.]\n\nSatisfaction is the touchstone of value; without reference to it all\ntalk about good and evil, progress or decay, is merely confused\nverbiage, pure sophistry in which the juggler adroitly withdraws\nattention from what works the wonder\u2014namely, that human and moral\ncolouring to which the terms he plays with owe whatever efficacy they\nhave. Metaphysicians sometimes so define the good as to make it a matter\nof no importance; not seldom they give that name to the sum of all\nevils. A good, absolute in the sense of being divorced from all natural\ndemand and all possible satisfaction, would be as remote as possible\nfrom goodness: to call it good is mere disloyalty to morals, brought\nabout by some fantastic or dialectical passion. In excellence there is\nan essential bias, an opposition to the possible opposite; this bias\nexpresses a mechanical impulse, a situation that has stirred the senses\nand the will. Impulse makes value possible; and the value becomes actual\nwhen the impulse issues in processes that give it satisfaction and have\na conscious worth. Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the\nsanction of character.[D]\n\nThat thought is nature\u2019s concomitant expression or entelechy, never one\nof her instruments, is a truth long ago divined by the more judicious\nthinkers, like Aristotle and Spinoza; but it has not met with general\nacceptance or even consideration. It is obstructed by superficial\nempiricism, which associates the better-known aspects of events directly\ntogether, without considering what mechanical  bonds may secretly unite\nthem; it is obstructed also by the traditional mythical idealism, intent\nas this philosophy is on proving nature to be the expression of\nsomething ulterior and non-natural and on hugging the fatal\nmisconception that ideals and eventual goods are creative and miraculous\nforces, without perceiving that it thereby renders goods and ideals\nperfectly senseless; for how can anything be a good at all to which some\nexisting nature is not already directed? It may therefore be worth\nwhile, before leaving this phase of the subject, to consider one or two\nprejudices which might make it sound paradoxical to say, as we propose,\nthat ideals are ideal and nature natural.\n\n[Sidenote: Apparent utility of pain]\n\n[Sidenote: Its real impotence.]\n\nOf all forms of consciousness the one apparently most useful is pain,\nwhich is also the one most immersed in matter and most opposite to\nideality and excellence. Its utility lies in the warning it gives: in\ntrying to escape pain we escape destruction. That we desire to escape\npain is certain; its very definition can hardly go beyond the statement\nthat pain is that element of feeling which we seek to abolish on account\nof its intrinsic quality. That this desire, however, should know how to\ninitiate remedial action is a notion contrary to experience and in\nitself unthinkable. If pain could have cured us we should long ago have\nbeen saved. The bitterest quintessence of pain is its helplessness, and\nour incapacity to abolish it. The most intolerable torments are those\nwe feel gaining upon us, intensifying and prolonging themselves\nindefinitely. This baffling quality, so conspicuous in extreme agony, is\npresent in all pain and is perhaps its essence. If we sought to describe\nby a circumlocution what is of course a primary sensation, we might\nscarcely do better than to say that pain is consciousness at once\nintense and empty, fixing attention on what contains no character, and\narrests all satisfactions without offering anything in exchange. The\nhorror of pain lies in its intolerable intensity and its intolerable\ntedium. It can accordingly be cured either by sleep or by entertainment.\nIn itself it has no resource; its violence is quite helpless and its\nvacancy offers no expedients by which it might be unknotted and\nrelieved.\n\nPain is not only impotent in itself but is a sign of impotence in the\nsufferer. Its appearance, far from constituting its own remedy, is like\nall other organic phenomena subject to the law of inertia and tends only\nto its own continuance. A man\u2019s hatred of his own condition no more\nhelps to improve it than hatred of other people tends to improve them.\nIf we allowed ourselves to speak in such a case of efficacy at all, we\nshould say that pain perpetuates and propagates itself in various ways,\nnow by weakening the system, now by prompting convulsive efforts, now by\nspreading to other beings through the contagion of sympathy or\nvengeance. In fact, however, it merely betrays a maladjustment which\nhas more or less natural stability. It may be instantaneous only; by its\nlack of equilibrium it may involve the immediate destruction of one of\nits factors. In that case we fabulously say that the pain has\ninstinctively removed its own cause. Pain is here apparently useful\nbecause it expresses an incipient tension which the self-preserving\nforces in the organism are sufficient to remove. Pain\u2019s appearance is\nthen the sign for its instant disappearance; not indeed by virtue of its\ninner nature or of any art it can initiate, but merely by virtue of\nmechanical associations between its cause and its remedy. The burned\nchild dreads the fire and, reading only the surface of his life, fancies\nthat the pain once felt and still remembered is the ground of his new\nprudence. Punishments, however, are not always efficacious, as everyone\nknows who has tried to govern children or cities by the rod; suffering\ndoes not bring wisdom nor even memory, unless intelligence and docility\nare already there; that is, unless the friction which the pain betrayed\nsufficed to obliterate permanently one of the impulses in conflict. This\nreadjustment, on which real improvement hangs and which alone makes\n\u201cexperience\u201d useful, does not correspond to the intensity or repetition\nof the pains endured; it corresponds rather to such a plasticity in the\norganism that the painful conflict is no longer produced.\n\n[Sidenote: Preformations involved.]\n\nThreatened destruction would not involve pain unless that threatened\ndestruction were being resisted; so that the reaction which pain is\nsupposed to cause must already be taking place before pain can be felt.\nA will without direction cannot be thwarted; so that inhibition cannot\nbe the primary source of any effort or of any ideal. Determinate\nimpulses must exist already for their inhibition to have taken place or\nfor the pain to arise which is the sign of that inhibition. The child\u2019s\ndread of the fire marks the acceleration of that impulse which, when he\nwas burned, originally enabled him to withdraw his hand; and if he did\nnot now shrink in anticipation he would not remember the pain nor know\nto what to attach his terror. Sight now suffices to awaken the reaction\nwhich touch at first was needed to produce; the will has extended its\nline of battle and thrown out its scouts farther afield; and pain has\nbeen driven back to the frontiers of the spirit. The conflicting\nreactions are now peripheral and feeble; the pain involved in aversion\nis nothing to that once involved in the burn. Had this aversion to fire\nbeen innate, as many aversions are, no pain would have been caused,\nbecause no profound maladjustment would have occurred. The surviving\nattraction, checked by fear, is a remnant of the old disorganisation in\nthe brain which was the seat of conflicting reactions.\n\n[Sidenote: Its untoward significance.]\n\nTo say that this conflict is the guide to its own issue is to talk\nwithout thinking. The conflict is the sign of inadequate organisation,\nor of non-adaptation in the given organism to the various stimuli which\nirritate it. The reconstruction which follows this conflict, when it\nindeed follows, is of course a new and better adaptation; so that what\ninvolves the pain may often be a process of training which directs\nreaction into new and smoother channels. But the pain is present whether\na permanent adaptation is being attained or not. It is present in\nprogressive dissolution and in hopeless and exhausting struggles far\nmore than in education or in profitable correction. Toothache and\nsea-sickness, birth-pangs and melancholia are not useful ills. The\nintenser the pain the more probable its uselessness. Only in vanishing\nis it a sign of progress; in occurring it is an omen of defeat, just as\ndisease is an omen of death, although, for those diseased already,\nmedicine and convalescence may be approaches to health again. Where a\nman\u2019s nature is out of gear and his instincts are inordinate, suffering\nmay be a sign that a dangerous peace, in which impulse was carrying him\nignorantly into paths without issue, is giving place to a peace with\nsecurity in which his reconstructed character may respond without\nfriction to the world, and enable him to gather a clearer experience and\nenjoy a purer vitality. The utility of pain is thus apparent only, and\ndue to empirical haste in collating events that have no regular nor\ninward relation; and even this imputed utility pain has only in\nproportion to the worthlessness of those who need it.\n\n[Sidenote: Perfect function no unconscious.]\n\nA second current prejudice which may deserve notice suggests that an\norgan, when its function is perfect, becomes unconscious, so that if\nadaptation were complete life would disappear. The well-learned routine\nof any mechanical art passes into habit, and habit into unconscious\noperation. The virtuoso is not aware how he manipulates his instrument;\nwhat was conscious labour in the beginning has become instinct and\nmiracle in the end. Thus it might appear that to eliminate friction and\ndifficulty would be to eliminate consciousness, and therefore value,\nfrom the world. Life would thus be involved in a contradiction and moral\neffort in an absurdity; for while the constant aim of practice is\nperfection and that of labour ease, and both are without meaning or\nstandard unless directed to the attainment of these ends, yet such\nattainment, if it were actual, would be worthless, so that what alone\njustifies effort would lack justification and would in fact be incapable\nof existence. The good musician must strive to play perfectly, but,\nalas, we are told, if he succeeded he would have become an automaton.\nThe good man must aspire to holiness, but, alas, if he reached holiness\nhis moral life would have evaporated.\n\nThese melodramatic prophecies, however, need not alarm us. They are\nfounded on nothing but rhetoric and small allegiance to any genuine\ngood. When we attain perfection of function we lose consciousness of the\nmedium, to become more clearly conscious of the result. The eye that\ndoes its duty gives no report of itself and has no sense of muscular\ntension or weariness; but it gives all the brighter and steadier image\nof the object seen. Consciousness is not lost when focussed, and the\nlabour of vision is abolished in its fruition. So the musician, could he\nplay so divinely as to be unconscious of his body, his instrument, and\nthe very lapse of time, would be only the more absorbed in the harmony,\nmore completely master of its unities and beauty. At such moments the\nbody\u2019s long labour at last brings forth the soul. Life from its\ninception is simply some partial natural harmony raising its voice and\nbearing witness to its own existence; to perfect that harmony is to\nround out and intensify that life. This is the very secret of power, of\njoy, of intelligence. Not to have understood it is to have passed\nthrough life without understanding anything.\n\nThe analogy extends to morals, where also the means may be\nadvantageously forgotten when the end has been secured. That leisure to\nwhich work is directed and that perfection in which virtue would be\nfulfilled are so far from being apathetic that they are states of pure\nactivity, by containing which other acts are rescued from utter\npassivity and unconsciousness. Impure feeling ranges between two\nextremes: absolute want and complete satisfaction. The former limit is\nreached in anguish, madness, or the agony of death, when the accidental\nflux of things in contradiction has reached its maximum or vanishing\npoint, so that the contradiction and the flux themselves disappear by\ndiremption. Such feeling denotes inward disorganisation and a hopeless\nconflict of reflex actions tending toward dissolution. The second limit\nis reached in contemplation, when anything is loved, understood, or\nenjoyed. Synthetic power is then at its height; the mind can survey its\nexperience and correlate all the motions it suggests. Power in the mind\nis exactly proportionate to representative scope, and representative\nscope to rational activity. A steady vision of all things in their true\norder and worth results from perfection of function and is its index; it\nsecures the greatest distinctness in thought together with the greatest\ndecision, wisdom, and ease in action, as the lightning is brilliant and\nquick. It also secures, so far as human energies avail, its own\nperpetuity, since what is perfectly adjusted within and without lasts\nlong and goes far.\n\n[Sidenote: Inchoate ethics.]\n\nTo confuse means with ends and mistake disorder for vitality is not\nunnatural to minds that hear the hum of mighty workings but can imagine\nneither the cause nor the fruits of that portentous commotion. All\nfunctions, in such chaotic lives, seem instrumental functions. It is\nthen supposed that what serves no further purpose can have no value, and\nthat he who suffers no offuscation can have no feeling and no life. To\nattain an ideal seems to destroy its worth. Moral life, at that low\nlevel, is a fantastic game only, not having come in sight of humane and\nliberal interests. The barbarian\u2019s intensity is without seriousness and\nhis passion without joy. His philosophy, which means to glorify all\nexperience and to digest all vice, is in truth an expression of pathetic\ninnocence. It betrays a rudimentary impulse to follow every beckoning\nhand, to assume that no adventure and no bewitchment can be anything but\nglorious. Such an attitude is intelligible in one who has never seen\nanything worth seeing nor loved anything worth loving. Immaturity could\ngo no farther than to acknowledge no limits defining will and happiness.\nWhen such limits, however, are gradually discovered and an authoritative\nideal is born of the marriage of human nature with experience, happiness\nbecomes at once definite and attainable; for adjustment is possible to a\nworld that has a fruitful and intelligible structure.\n\nSuch incoherences, which might well arise in ages without traditions,\nmay be preserved and fostered by superstition. Perpetual servile\nemployments and subjection to an irrational society may render people\nincapable even of conceiving a liberal life. They may come to think\ntheir happiness no longer separable from their misery and to fear the\nlarge emptiness, as they deem it, of a happy world. Like the prisoner of\nChillon, after so long a captivity, they would regain their freedom with\na sigh. The wholesome influences of nature, however, would soon revive\ntheir wills, contorted by unnatural oppression, and a vision of\nperfection would arise within them upon breathing a purer air. Freedom\nand perfection are synonymous with life. The peace they bring is one\n\n                       whose names are also rapture, power,\n    Clear sight, and love; for these are parts of peace.\n\n[Sidenote: Thought the entelechy of being.]\n\nThought belongs to the sphere of ultimate results. What, indeed, could\nbe more fitting than that consciousness, which is self-revealing and\ntranscendentally primary, should be its own excuse for being and should\ncontain its own total value, together with the total value of everything\nelse? What could be more proper than that the whole worth of ideas\nshould be ideal? To make an idea instrumental would be to prostitute\nwhat, being self-existent, should be self-justifying. That continual\nabsoluteness which consciousness possesses, since in it alone all heaven\nand earth are at any moment revealed, ought to convince any radical and\nheart-searching philosopher that all values should be continually\nintegrated and realised there, where all energies are being momently\nfocussed. Thought is a fulfilment; its function is to lend utility to\nits causes and to make actual those conceived and subterranean processes\nwhich find in it their ultimate expression. Thought is nature\nrepresented; it is potential energy producing life and becoming an\nactual appearance.\n\n[Sidenote: Its exuberance.]\n\nThe conditions of consciousness, however, are far from being its only\ntheme. As consciousness bears a transcendent relation to the dynamic\nworld (for it is actual and spiritual, while the dynamic is potential\nand material) so it may be exuberant and irresponsibly rich. Although\nits elements, in point of distribution and derivation, are grounded in\nmatter, as music is in vibrations, yet in point of character the result\nmay be infinitely redundant. The complete musician would devote but a\nsmall part of his attention to the basis of music, its mechanism,\npsychology, or history. Long before he had represented to his mind the\ncauses of his art, he would have proceeded to practise and enjoy it. So\nsense and imagination, passion and reason, may enrich the soil that\nbreeds them and cover it with a maze of flowers.\n\nThe theme of consciousness is accordingly far more than the material\nworld which constitutes its basis, though this also is one of its\nthemes; thought is no less at home in various expressions and\nembroideries with which the material world can be overlaid in\nimagination. The material world is conceived by digging beneath\nexperience to find its cause; it is the efficacious structure and\nskeleton of things. This is the subject of scientific retrospect and\ncalculation. The forces disclosed by physical studies are of course not\ndirected to producing a mind that might merely describe them. A force is\nexpressed in many other ways than by being defined; it may be felt,\nresisted, embodied, transformed, or symbolised. Forces work; they are\nnot, like mathematical concepts, exhausted in description. From that\nmatter which might be describable in mechanical formul\u00e6 there issue\nnotwithstanding all manner of forms and harmonies, visible, audible,\nimaginable, and passionately prized. Every phase of the ideal world\nemanates from the natural and loudly proclaims its origin by the\ninterest it takes in natural existences, of which it gives a rational\ninterpretation. Sense, art, religion, society, express nature\nexuberantly and in symbols long before science is added to represent, by\na different abstraction, the mechanism which nature contains.\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[Footnote D: Aristippus asked Socrates \u201cwhether he knew anything good,\nso that if he answered by naming food or drink or money or health or\nstrength or valour or anything of that sort, he might at once show that\nit was sometimes an evil. Socrates, however, knew very well that if\nanything troubles us what we demand is its cure, and he replied in the\nmost pertinent fashion. \u2018Are you asking me,\u2019 he said, \u2018if I know\nanything good for a fever?\u2019 \u2018Oh, no,\u2019 said the other. \u2018Or for sore\neyes?\u2019 \u2018Not that, either.\u2019 \u2018Or for hunger?\u2019 \u2018No, not for hunger.\u2019 \u2018Well,\nthen,\u2019 said he, \u2018if you ask me whether I know a good that is good for\nnothing, I neither know it nor want to know it\u2019\u201d\u2014Xenophon, Memorabilia,\niii., 8.]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER X\u2014THE MEASURE OF VALUES IN REFLECTION\n\n\n[Sidenote: Honesty in hedonism.]\n\nTo put value in pleasure and pain, regarding a given quantity of pain as\nbalancing a given quantity of pleasure, is to bring to practical ethics\na worthy intention to be clear and, what is more precious, an undoubted\nhonesty not always found in those moralists who maintain the opposite\nopinion and care more for edification than for truth. For in spite of\nall logical and psychological scruples, conduct that should not justify\nitself somehow by the satisfactions secured and the pains avoided would\nnot justify itself at all. The most instinctive and unavoidable desire\nis forthwith chilled if you discover that its ultimate end is to be a\npreponderance of suffering; and what arrests this desire is not fear or\nweakness but conscience in its most categorical and sacred guise. Who\nwould not be ashamed to acknowledge or to propose so inhuman an action?\n\nBy sad experience rooted impulses may be transformed or even\nobliterated. And quite intelligibly: for the idea of pain is already the\nsign and the beginning of a certain stoppage. To imagine failure is to\ninterpret ideally a felt inhibition. To prophesy a check would be\nimpossible but for an incipient movement already meeting an incipient\narrest. Intensified, this prophecy becomes its own fulfilment and\ntotally inhibits the opposed tendency. Therefore a mind that foresees\npain to be the ultimate result of action cannot continue unreservedly to\nact, seeing that its foresight is the conscious transcript of a recoil\nalready occurring. Conversely, the mind that surrenders itself wholly to\nany impulse must think that its execution would be delightful. A\nperfectly wise and representative will, therefore, would aim only at\nwhat, in its attainment, could continue to be aimed at and approved; and\nthis is another way of saying that its aim would secure the maximum of\nsatisfaction eventually possible.\n\n[Sidenote: Necessary qualifications.]\n\nIn spite, however, of this involution of pain and pleasure in all\ndeliberate forecast and volition, pain and pleasure are not the ultimate\nsources of value. A correct psychology and logic cannot allow that an\neventual and, in strictness, unpresentable feeling, can determine any\nact or volition, but must insist that, on the contrary, all beliefs\nabout future experience, with all premonition of its emotional quality,\nis based on actual impulse and feeling; so that the source of value is\nnothing but the inner fountain of life and imagination, and the object\nof pursuit nothing but the ideal object, counterpart of the present\ndemand. Abstract satisfaction is not pursued, but, if the will and the\nenvironment are constant, satisfaction will necessarily be felt in\nachieving the object desired. A rejection of hedonistic psychology,\ntherefore, by no means involves any opposition to eud\u00e6monism in ethics.\nEud\u00e6monism is another name for wisdom: there is no other _moral_\nmorality. Any system that, for some sinister reason, should absolve\nitself from good-will toward all creatures, and make it somehow a duty\nto secure their misery, would be clearly disloyal to reason, humanity,\nand justice. Nor would it be hard, in that case, to point out what\nsuperstition, what fantastic obsession, or what private fury, had made\nthose persons blind to prudence and kindness in so plain a matter.\nHappiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence\nremains a mad and lamentable experiment. The question, however, what\nhappiness shall consist in, its complexion if it should once arise, can\nonly be determined by reference to natural demands and capacities; so\nthat while satisfaction by the attainment of ends can alone justify\ntheir pursuit, this pursuit itself must exist first and be spontaneous,\nthereby fixing the goals of endeavour and distinguishing the states in\nwhich satisfaction might be found. Natural disposition, therefore, is\nthe principle of preference and makes morality and happiness possible.\n\n[Sidenote: The will must judge.]\n\nThe standard of value, like every standard, must be one. Pleasures and\npains are not only infinitely diverse but, even if reduced to their\ntotal bulk and abstract opposition, they remain two. Their values must\nbe compared, and obviously neither one can be the standard by which to\njudge the other. This standard is an ideal involved in the judgment\npassed, whatever that judgment may be. Thus when Petrarch says that a\nthousand pleasures are not worth one pain, he establishes an ideal of\nvalue deeper than either pleasure or pain, an ideal which makes a life\nof satisfaction marred by a single pang an offence and a horror to his\nsoul. If our demand for rationality is less acute and the miscellaneous\naffirmations of the will carry us along with a well-fed indifference to\nsome single tragedy within us, we may aver that a single pang is only\nthe thousandth part of a thousand pleasures and that a life so balanced\nis nine hundred and ninety-nine times better than nothing. This\njudgment, for all its air of mathematical calculation, in truth\nexpresses a choice as irrational as Petrarch\u2019s. It merely means that, as\na matter of fact, the mixed prospect presented to us attracts our wills\nand attracts them vehemently. So that the only possible criterion for\nthe relative values of pains and pleasures is the will that chooses\namong them or among combinations of them; nor can the intensity of\npleasures and pains, apart from the physical violence of their\nexpression, be judged by any other standard than by the power they have,\nwhen represented, to control the will\u2019s movement.\n\n[Sidenote: Injustice inherent in representation]\n\nHere we come upon one of those initial irrationalities in the world\ntheories of all sorts, since they are attempts to find rationality in\nthings, are in serious danger of overlooking. In estimating the value of\nany experience, our endeavour, our pretension, is to weigh the value\nwhich that experience possesses when it is actual. But to weigh is to\ncompare, and to compare is to represent, since the transcendental\nisolation and self-sufficiency of actual experience precludes its lying\nside by side with another datum, like two objects given in a single\nconsciousness. Successive values, to be compared, must be represented;\nbut the conditions of representation are such that they rob objects of\nthe values they had at their first appearance to substitute the values\nthey possess at their recurrence. For representation mirrors\nconsciousness only by mirroring its objects, and the emotional reaction\nupon those objects cannot be represented directly, but is approached by\nindirect methods, through an imitation or assimilation of will to will\nand emotion to emotion. Only by the instrumentality of signs, like\ngesture or language, can we bring ourselves to reproduce in some measure\nan absent experience and to feel some premonition of its absolute value.\nApart from very elaborate and cumulative suggestions to the contrary, we\nshould always attribute to an event in every other experience the value\nwhich its image now had in our own. But in that case the pathetic\nfallacy would be present; for a volitional reaction upon an idea in one\nvital context is no index to what the volitional reaction would be in\nanother vital context upon the situation which that idea represents.\n\n[Sidenote: \u00c6sthetic and speculative cruelty.]\n\nThis divergence falsifies all representation of life and renders it\ninitially cruel, sentimental, and mythical. We dislike to trample on a\nflower, because its form makes a kind of blossoming in our own fancy\nwhich we call beauty; but we laugh at pangs we endured in childhood and\nfeel no tremor at the incalculable sufferings of all mankind beyond our\nhorizon, because no imitable image is involved to start a contrite\nthrill in our own bosom. The same cruelty appears in \u00e6sthetic pleasures,\nin lust, war, and ambition; in the illusions of desire and memory; in\nthe unsympathetic quality of theory everywhere, which regards the\nuniformities of cause and effect and the beauties of law as a\njustification for the inherent evils in the experience described; in the\nunjust judgments, finally, of mystical optimism, that sinks so\ncompletely into its subjective commotion as to mistake the suspension of\nall discriminating and representative faculties for a true union in\nthings, and the blur of its own ecstasy for a universal glory. These\npleasures are all on the sensuous plane, the plane of levity and\nunintentional wickedness; but in their own sphere they have their own\nvalue. \u00c6sthetic and speculative emotions make an important contribution\nto the total worth of existence, but they do not abolish the evils of\nthat experience on which they reflect with such ruthless satisfaction.\nThe satisfaction is due to a private flood of emotion submerging the\nimages present in fancy, or to the exercise of a new intellectual\nfunction, like that of abstraction, synthesis, or comparison. Such a\nfaculty, when fully developed, is capable of yielding pleasures as\nintense and voluminous as those proper to rudimentary animal functions,\nwrongly supposed to be more vital. The acme of vitality lies in truth in\nthe most comprehensive and penetrating thought. The rhythms, the sweep,\nthe impetuosity of impassioned contemplation not only contain in\nthemselves a great vitality and potency, but they often succeed in\nengaging the lower functions in a sympathetic vibration, and we see the\nwhole body and soul rapt, as we say, and borne along by the harmonies of\nimagination and thought. In these fugitive moments of intoxication the\ndetail of truth is submerged and forgotten. The emotions which would be\nsuggested by the parts are replaced by the rapid emotion of transition\nbetween them; and this exhilaration in survey, this mountain-top\nexperience, is supposed to be also the truest vision of reality.\nAbsorption in a supervening function is mistaken for comprehension of\nall fact, and this inevitably, since all consciousness of particular\nfacts and of their values is then submerged in the torrent of cerebral\nexcitement.\n\n[Sidenote: Imputed values: their inconstancy.]\n\nThat luminous blindness which in these cases takes an extreme form is\npresent in principle throughout all reflection. We tend to regard our\nown past as good only when we still find some value in the memory of it.\nLast year, last week, even the feelings of the last five minutes, are\nnot otherwise prized than by the pleasure we may still have in recalling\nthem; the pulsations of pleasure or pain which they contained we do not\neven seek to remember or to discriminate. The period is called happy or\nunhappy merely as its ideal representation exercises fascination or\nrepulsion over the present will. Hence the revulsion after physical\nindulgence, often most violent when the pleasure\u2014judged by its\nconcomitant expression and by the desire that heralded it\u2014was most\nintense. For the strongest passions are intermittent, so that the\nunspeakable charm which their objects possess for a moment is lost\nimmediately and becomes unintelligible to a chilled and cheated\nreflection. The situation, when yet unrealised, irresistibly solicited\nthe will and seemed to promise incomparable ecstasy; and perhaps it\nyields an indescribable moment of excitement and triumph\u2014a moment only\nhalf-appropriated into waking experience, so fleeting is it, and so\nunfit the mind to possess or retain its tenser attitudes. The same\nsituation, if revived in memory when the system is in an opposite and\nrelaxed state, forfeits all power to attract and fills the mind rather\nwith aversion and disgust. For all violent pleasures, as Shakespeare\nsays, are cruel and not to be trusted.\n\n    A bliss in proof and, proved, a very woe:\n    Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream ...\n    Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;\n    Past reason hunted and, no sooner had,\n    Past reason hated.\n\n[Sidenote: Methods of control.]\n\nPast reason, indeed. For although an impulsive injustice is inherent in\nthe very nature of representation and cannot be overcome altogether, yet\nreason, by attending to all the evidences that can be gathered and by\nconfronting the first pronouncement by others fetched from every quarter\nof experience, has power to minimise the error and reach a practically\njust estimate of absent values. This achieved rightness can be tested by\ncomparing two experiences, each when it is present, with the same\nconventional permanent object chosen to be their expression. A\nlove-song, for instance, can be pronounced adequate or false by various\nlovers; and it can thus remain a sort of index to the fleeting\nsentiments once confronted with it. Reason has, to be sure, no\nindependent method of discovering values. They must be rated as the\nsensitive balance of present inclination, when completely laden, shows\nthem to stand. In estimating values reason is reduced to data furnished\nby the mechanical processes of ideation and instinct, as in framing all\nknowledge; an absent joy can only be represented by a tinge of emotion\ndyeing an image that pictures the situation in which the joy was felt;\nbut the suggested value being once projected into the potential world,\nthat land of inferred being, this projection may be controlled and\ncorroborated by other suggestions and associations relevant to it, which\nit is the function of reason to collect and compare. A right estimate of\nabsent values must be conventional and mediated by signs. Direct\nsympathies, which suffice for instinctive present co-operation, fail to\ntransmit alien or opposite pleasures. They over-emphasise momentary\nrelations, while they necessarily ignore permanent bonds. Therefore the\nsame intellect that puts a mechanical reality behind perception must put\na moral reality behind sympathy.\n\n[Sidenote: Example of fame.]\n\nFame, for example, is a good; its value arises from a certain movement\nof will and emotion which is elicited by the thought that one\u2019s name\nmight be associated with great deeds and with the memory of them. The\nglow of this thought bathes the object it describes, so that fame is\nfelt to have a value quite distinct from that which the expectation of\nfame may have in the present moment. Should this expectation be foolish\nand destined to prove false, it would have no value, and be indeed the\nmore ludicrous and repulsive the more pleasure its dupe took in it, and\nthe longer his illusion lasted. The heart is resolutely set on its\nobject and despises its own phenomena, not reflecting that its emotions\nhave first revealed that object\u2019s worth and alone can maintain it. For\nif a man cares nothing for fame, what value has it?\n\nThis projection of interest into excellence takes place mechanically and\nis in the first instance irrational. Did all glow die out from memory\nand expectation, the events represented remaining unchanged, we should\nbe incapable of assigning any value to those events, just as, if eyes\nwere lacking, we should be incapable of assigning colour to the world,\nwhich would, notwithstanding, remain as it is at present. So fame could\nnever be regarded as a good if the idea of fame gave no pleasure; yet\nnow, because the idea pleases, the reality is regarded as a good,\nabsolute and intrinsic. This moral hypostasis involved in the love of\nfame could never be rationalised, but would subsist unmitigated or die\nout unobserved, were it not associated with other conceptions and other\nhabits of estimating values. For the passions are humanised only by\nbeing juxtaposed and forced to live together. As fame is not man\u2019s only\ngoal and the realisation of it comes into manifold relations with other\ninterests no less vivid, we are able to criticise the impulse to pursue\nit.\n\nFame may be the consequence of benefits conferred upon mankind. In that\ncase the abstract desire for fame would be reinforced and, as it were,\njustified by its congruity with the more voluminous and stable desire to\nbenefit our fellow-men. Or, again, the achievements which insure fame\nand the genius that wins it probably involve a high degree of vitality\nand many profound inward satisfactions to the man of genius himself; so\nthat again the abstract love of fame would be reinforced by the\nindependent and more rational desire for a noble and comprehensive\nexperience. On the other hand, the minds of posterity, whose homage is\ncraved by the ambitious man, will probably have very false conceptions\nof his thoughts and purposes. What they will call by his name will be,\nin a great measure, a fiction of their own fancy and not his portrait at\nall. Would Caesar recognise himself in the current notions of him, drawn\nfrom some school-history, or perhaps from Shakespeare\u2019s satirical\nportrait? Would Christ recognise himself upon our altars, or in the\nromances about him constructed by imaginative critics? And not only is\nremote experience thus hopelessly lost and misrepresented, but even this\nnominal memorial ultimately disappears.\n\nThe love of fame, if tempered by these and similar considerations, would\ntend to take a place in man\u2019s ideal such as its roots in human nature\nand its functions in human progress might seem to justify. It would be\nrationalised in the only sense in which any primary desire can be\nrationalised, namely, by being combined with all others in a consistent\nwhole. How much of it would survive a thorough sifting and criticism,\nmay well remain in doubt. The result would naturally differ for\ndifferent temperaments and in different states of society. The wisest\nmen, perhaps, while they would continue to feel some love of honour and\nsome interest in their image in other minds, would yet wish that\nposterity might praise them as Sallust praises Cato by saying: _Esse\nquam videri bonus maluit_; he preferred worth to reputation.\n\n[Sidenote: Disproportionate interest in the \u00e6sthetic.]\n\nThe fact that value is attributed to absent experience according to the\nvalue experience has in representation appears again in one of the most\ncurious anomalies in human life\u2014the exorbitant interest which thought\nand reflection take in the form of experience and the slight account\nthey make of its intensity or volume. Sea-sickness and child-birth when\nthey are over, the pangs of despised love when that love is finally\nforgotten or requited, the travail of sin when once salvation is\nassured, all melt away and dissolve like a morning mist leaving a clear\nsky without a vestige of sorrow. So also with merely remembered and not\nreproducible pleasures; the buoyancy of youth, when absurdity is not yet\ntedious, the rapture of sport or passion, the immense peace found in a\nmystical surrender to the universal, all these generous ardours count\nfor nothing when they are once gone. The memory of them cannot cure a\nfit of the blues nor raise an irritable mortal above some petty act of\nmalice or vengeance, or reconcile him to foul weather. An ode of Horace,\non the other hand, a scientific monograph, or a well-written page of\nmusic is a better antidote to melancholy than thinking on all the\nhappiness which one\u2019s own life or that of the universe may ever have\ncontained. Why should overwhelming masses of suffering and joy affect\nimagination so little while it responds sympathetically to \u00e6sthetic and\nintellectual irritants of very slight intensity, objects that, it must\nbe confessed, are of almost no importance to the welfare of mankind? Why\nshould we be so easily awed by artistic genius and exalt men whose works\nwe know only by name, perhaps, and whose influence upon society has been\ninfinitesimal, like a Pindar or a Leonardo, while we regard great\nmerchants and inventors as ignoble creatures in comparison? Why should\nwe smile at the inscription in Westminster Abbey which calls the\ninventor of the spinning-jenny one of the _true_ benefactors of mankind?\nIs it not probable, on the whole, that he has had a greater and less\nequivocal influence on human happiness than Shakespeare with all his\nplays and sonnets? But the cheapness of cotton cloth produces no\nparticularly delightful image in the fancy to be compared with Hamlet or\nImogen. There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly\ndeaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.\n\n[Sidenote: Irrational religious allegiance.]\n\nThe same \u00e6sthetic bias appears in the moral sphere. Utilitarians have\nattempted to show that the human conscience commends precisely those\nactions which tend to secure general happiness and that the notions of\njustice and virtue prevailing in any age vary with its social economy\nand the prizes it is able to attain. And, if due allowance is made for\nthe complexity of the subject, we may reasonably admit that the precepts\nof obligatory morality bear this relation to the general welfare; thus\nvirtue means courage in a soldier, probity in a merchant, and chastity\nin a woman. But if we turn from the morality required of all to the type\nregarded as perfect and ideal, we find no such correspondence to the\nbenefits involved. The selfish imagination intervenes here and\nattributes an absolute and irrational value to those figures that\nentertain it with the most absorbing and dreamful emotions. The\ncharacter of Christ, for instance, which even the least orthodox among\nus are in the habit of holding up as a perfect model, is not the\ncharacter of a benefactor but of a martyr, a spirit from a higher world\nlacerated in its passage through this uncomprehending and perverse\nexistence, healing and forgiving out of sheer compassion, sustained by\nhis inner affinities to the supernatural, and absolutely disenchanted\nwith all earthly or political goods. Christ did not suffer, like\nPrometheus, for having bestowed or wished to bestow any earthly\nblessing: the only blessing he bequeathed was the image of himself upon\nthe cross, whereby men might be comforted in their own sorrows, rebuked\nin their worldliness, driven to put their trust in the supernatural, and\nunited, by their common indifference to the world, in one mystic\nbrotherhood. As men learned these lessons, or were inwardly ready to\nlearn them, they recognised more and more clearly in Jesus their\nheaven-sent redeemer, and in following their own conscience and\ndesperate idealism into the desert or the cloister, in ignoring all\ncivic virtues and allowing the wealth, art, and knowledge of the pagan\nworld to decay, they began what they felt to be an imitation of Christ.\n\nAll natural impulses, all natural ideals, subsisted of course beneath\nthis theoretic asceticism, writhed under its unearthly control, and\nbroke out in frequent violent irruptions against it in the life of each\nman as well as in the course of history. Yet the image of Christ\nremained in men\u2019s hearts and retained its marvellous authority, so that\neven now, when so many who call themselves Christians, being pure\nchildren of nature, are without the least understanding of what\nChristianity came to do in the world, they still offer his person and\nwords a sincere if inarticulate worship, trying to transform that\nsacrificial and crucified spirit, as much as their bungling fancy can,\ninto a patron of Philistia Felix. Why this persistent adoration of a\ncharacter that is the extreme negation of all that these good souls\ninwardly value and outwardly pursue? Because the image of Christ and the\nassociations of his religion, apart from their original import, remain\nrooted in the mind: they remain the focus for such wayward emotions and\nmystic intuitions as their magnetism can still attract, and the value\nwhich this hallowed compound possesses in representation is transferred\nto its nominal object, and Christ is the conventional name for all the\nimpulses of religion, no matter how opposite to the Christian.\n\n[Sidenote: Pathetic idealizations.]\n\nSymbols, when their significance has been great, outlive their first\nsignificance. The image of Christ was a last refuge to the world; it was\na consolation and a new ground for hope, from which no misfortune could\ndrive the worshipper. Its value as an idea was therefore immense, as to\nthe lover the idea of his untasted joys, or to the dying man the idea of\nhealth and invigorating sunshine. The votary can no more ask himself\nwhether his deity, in its total operation, has really blessed him and\ndeserved his praise than the lover can ask if his lady is worth pursuing\nor the expiring cripple whether it would be, in very truth, a benefit to\nbe once more young and whole. That life is worth living is the most\nnecessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible\nof conclusions. Experience, by its passive weight of joy and sorrow, can\nneither inspire nor prevent enthusiasm; only a present ideal will avail\nto move the will and, if realised, to justify it. A saint\u2019s halo is an\noptical illusion; it glorifies his actions whatever their eventual\ninfluence in the world, because they seem to have, when rehearsed\ndramatically, some tenderness or rapture or miracle about them.\n\nThus it appears that the great figures of art or religion, together\nwith all historic and imaginative ideals, advance insensibly on the\nvalues they represent. The image has more lustre than the original, and\nis often the more important and influential fact. Things are esteemed as\nthey weigh in representation. A _memorable thing_, people say in their\neulogies, little thinking to touch the ground of their praise. For\nthings are called great because they are memorable, they are not\nremembered because they were great. The deepest pangs, the highest joys,\nthe widest influences are lost to apperception in its haste, and if in\nsome rational moment reconstructed and acknowledged, are soon forgotten\nagain and cut off from living consideration. But the emptiest\nexperience, even the most pernicious tendency, if embodied in a\npicturesque image, if reverberating in the mind with a pleasant echo, is\nidolised and enshrined. Fortunate indeed was Achilles that Homer sang of\nhim, and fortunate the poets that make a public titillation out of their\nsorrows and ignorance. This imputed and posthumous fortune is the only\nhappiness they have. The favours of memory are extended to those feeble\nrealities and denied to the massive substance of daily experience. When\nlife dies, when what was present becomes a memory, its ghost flits still\namong the living, feared or worshipped not for the experience it once\npossessed but for the aspect it now wears. Yet this injustice in\nrepresentation, speculatively so offensive, is practically excusable;\nfor it is in one sense right and useful that all things, whatever their\noriginal or inherent dignity, should be valued at each moment only by\ntheir present function and utility.\n\n[Sidenote: Inevitable impulsiveness in prophecy.]\n\n[Sidenote: The test a controlled present ideal.]\n\nThe error involved in attributing value to the past is naturally\naggravated when values are to be assigned to the future. In the latter\ncase imagination cannot be controlled by circumstantial evidence, and is\nconsequently the only basis for judgment. But as the conception of a\nthing naturally evokes an emotion different from that involved in its\npresence, ideals of what is desirable for the future contain no warrant\nthat the experience desired would, when actual, prove to be acceptable\nand good. An ideal carries no extrinsic assurance that its realisation\nwould be a benefit. To convince ourselves that an ideal has rational\nauthority and represents a better experience than the actual condition\nit is contrasted with, we must control the prophetic image by as many\ncircumlocutions as possible. As in the case of fame, we must buttress or\nmodify our spontaneous judgment with all the other judgments that the\nobject envisaged can prompt: we must make our ideal harmonise with all\nexperience rather than with a part only. The possible error remains even\nthen; but a practical mind will always accept the risk of error when it\nhas made every possible correction. A rational will is not a will that\nhas reason for its basis or that possesses any other proof that its\nrealisation would be possible or good than the oracle which a living\nwill inspires and pronounces. The rationality possible to the will lies\nnot in its source but in its method. An ideal cannot wait for its\nrealisation to prove its validity. To deserve adhesion it needs only to\nbe adequate as an ideal, that is, to express completely what the soul at\npresent demands, and to do justice to all extant interests.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XI\u2014SOME ABSTRACT CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL\n\n\n[Sidenote: The ultimate end a resultant.]\n\nReason\u2019s function is to embody the good, but the test of excellence is\nitself ideal; therefore before we can assure ourselves that reason has\nbeen manifested in any given case we must make out the reasonableness of\nthe ideal that inspires us. And in general, before we can convince\nourselves that a Life of Reason, or practice guided by science and\ndirected toward spiritual goods, is at all worth having, we must make\nout the possibility and character of its ultimate end. Yet each ideal is\nits own justification; so that the only sense in which an ultimate end\ncan be established and become a test of general progress is this: that a\nharmony and co-operation of impulses should be conceived, leading to the\nmaximum satisfaction possible in the whole community of spirits affected\nby our action. Now, without considering for the present any concrete\nUtopia, such, for instance, as Plato\u2019s Republic or the heavenly\nbeatitude described by theologians, we may inquire what formal qualities\nare imposed on the ideal by its nature and function and by the relation\nit bears to experience and to desire.\n\n[Sidenote: Demands the substance of ideals.]\n\nThe ideal has the same relation to given demands that the reality has to\ngiven perceptions. In the face of the ideal, particular demands forfeit\ntheir authority and the goods to which a particular being may aspire\ncease to be absolute; nay, the satisfaction of desire comes to appear an\nindifferent or unholy thing when compared or opposed to the ideal to be\nrealised. So, precisely, in perception, flying impressions come to be\nregarded as illusory when contrasted with a stable conception of\nreality. Yet of course flying impressions are the only material out of\nwhich that conception can be formed. Life itself is a flying impression,\nand had we no personal and instant experience, importuning us at each\nsuccessive moment, we should have no occasion to ask for a reality at\nall, and no materials out of which to construct so gratuitous an idea.\nIn the same way present demands are the only materials and occasions for\nany ideal: without demands the ideal would have no _locus standi_ or\nfoothold in the world, no power, no charm, and no prerogative. If the\nideal can confront particular desires and put them to shame, that\nhappens only because the ideal is the object of a more profound and\nvoluminous desire and embodies the good which they blindly and perhaps\ndeviously pursue. Demands could not be misdirected, goods sought could\nnot be false, if the standard by which they are to be corrected were\nnot constructed out of them. Otherwise each demand would render its\nobject a detached, absolute, and unimpeachable good. But when each\ndesire in turn has singed its wings and retired before some disillusion,\nreflection may set in to suggest residual satisfactions that may still\nbe possible, or some shifting of the ground by which much of what was\nhoped for may yet be attained.\n\n[Sidenote: Discipline of the will.]\n\n[Sidenote: Demands made practical and consistent.]\n\nThe force for this new trial is but the old impulse renewed; this new\nhope is a justified remnant of the old optimism. Each passion, in this\nsecond campaign, takes the field conscious that it has indomitable\nenemies and ready to sign a reasonable peace, and even to capitulate\nbefore superior forces. Such tameness may be at first merely a\nconsequence of exhaustion and prudence; but a mortal will, though\nabsolute in its deliverances, is very far from constant, and its\nsacrifices soon constitute a habit, its exile a new home. The old\nambition, now proved to be unrealisable, begins to seem capricious and\nextravagant; the circle of possible satisfactions becomes the field of\nconventional happiness. Experience, which brings about this humbler and\nmore prosaic state of mind, has its own imaginative fruits. Among those\nforces which compelled each particular impulse to abate its pretensions,\nthe most conspicuous were other impulses, other interests active in\noneself and in one\u2019s neighbours. When the power of these alien demands\nis recognised they begin, in a physical way, to be respected; when an\nadjustment to them is sought they begin to be understood, for it is only\nby studying their expression and tendency that the degree of their\nhostility can be measured. But to understand is more than to forgive, it\nis to adopt; and the passion that thought merely to withdraw into a\nsullen and maimed self-indulgence can feel itself expanded by sympathies\nwhich in its primal vehemence it would have excluded altogether.\nExperience, in bringing humility, brings intelligence also. Personal\ninterests begin to seem relative, factors only in a general voluminous\nwelfare expressed in many common institutions and arts, moulds for\nwhatever is communicable or rational in every passion. Each original\nimpulse, when trimmed down more or less according to its degree of\nsavageness, can then inhabit the state, and every good, when\nsufficiently transfigured, can be found again in the general ideal. The\nfactors may indeed often be unrecognisable in the result, so much does\nthe process of domestication transform them; but the interests that\nanimated them survive this discipline and the new purpose is really\nesteemed; else the ideal would have no moral force. An ideal\nrepresenting no living interest would be irrelevant to practice, just as\na conception of reality would be irrelevant to perception which should\nnot be composed of the materials that sense supplies, or should not\nre-embody actual sensations in an intelligible system.\n\n[Sidenote: The ideal natural.]\n\nHere we have, then, one condition which the ideal must fulfil: it must\nbe a resultant or synthesis of impulses already afoot. An ideal out of\nrelation to the actual demands of living beings is so far from being an\nideal that it is not even a good. The pursuit of it would be not the\nacme but the atrophy of moral endeavour. Mysticism and asceticism run\ninto this danger, when the intent to be faithful to a supreme good too\nsymbolically presented breeds a superstitious repugnance toward\neverything naturally prized. So also an artificial scepticism can regard\nall experience as deceptive, by contrasting it with the chimera of an\nabsolute reality. As an absolute reality would be indescribable and\nwithout a function in the elucidation of phenomena, so a supreme good\nwhich was good for nobody would be without conceivable value. Respect\nfor such an idol is a dialectical superstition; and if zeal for that\nshibboleth should actually begin to inhibit the exercise of intelligent\nchoice or the development of appreciation for natural pleasures, it\nwould constitute a reversal of the Life of Reason which, if persistently\nindulged in, could only issue in madness or revert to imbecility.\n\n[Sidenote: Need of unity and finality.]\n\n[Sidenote: Ideals of nothing.]\n\nNo less important, however, than this basis which the ideal must have in\nextant demands, is the harmony with which reason must endow it. If\nwithout the one the ideal loses its value, without the other it loses\nits finality. Human nature is fluid and imperfect; its demands are\nexpressed in incidental desires, elicited by a variety of objects which\nperhaps cannot coexist in the world. If we merely transcribe these\nmiscellaneous demands or allow these floating desires to dictate to us\nthe elements of the ideal, we shall never come to a Whole or to an End.\nOne new fancy after another will seem an embodiment of perfection, and\nwe shall contradict each expression of our ideal by every other. A\ncertain school of philosophy\u2014if we may give that name to the systematic\nneglect of reason\u2014has so immersed itself in the contemplation of this\nsort of inconstancy, which is indeed prevalent enough in the world, that\nit has mistaken it for a normal and necessary process. The greatness of\nthe ideal has been put in its vagueness and in an elasticity which makes\nit wholly indeterminate and inconsistent. The goal of progress, beside\nbeing thus made to lie at every point of the compass in succession, is\nremoved to an infinite distance, whereby the possibility of attaining it\nis denied and progress itself is made illusory. For a progress must be\ndirected to attaining some definite type of life, the counterpart of a\ngiven natural endowment, and nothing can be called an improvement which\ndoes not contain an appreciable benefit. A victory would be a mockery\nthat left us, for some new reason, as much impeded as before and as far\nremoved from peace.\n\nThe picture of life as an eternal war for illusory ends was drawn at\nfirst by satirists, unhappily with too much justification in the facts.\nSome grosser minds, too undisciplined to have ever pursued a good either\ntruly attainable or truly satisfactory, then proceeded to mistake that\nsatire on human folly for a sober account of the whole universe; and\nfinally others were not ashamed to represent it as the ideal itself\u2014so\nsoon is the dyer\u2019s hand subdued to what it works in. A barbarous mind\ncannot conceive life, like health, as a harmony continually preserved or\nrestored, and containing those natural and ideal activities which\ndisease merely interrupts. Such a mind, never having tasted order,\ncannot conceive it, and identifies progress with new conflicts and life\nwith continual death. Its deification of unreason, instability, and\nstrife comes partly from piety and partly from inexperience. There is\npiety in saluting nature in her perpetual flux and in thinking that\nsince no equilibrium is maintained for ever none, perhaps, deserves to\nbe. There is inexperience in not considering that wherever interests and\njudgments exist, the natural flux has fallen, so to speak, into a\nvortex, and created a natural good, a cumulative life, and an ideal\npurpose. Art, science, government, human nature itself, are\nself-defining and self-preserving: by partly fixing a structure they fix\nan ideal. But the barbarian can hardly regard such things, for to have\ndistinguished and fostered them would be to have founded a civilisation.\n\n[Sidenote: Darwin on moral sense.]\n\nReason\u2019s function in defining the ideal is in principle extremely\nsimple, although all time and all existence would have to be gathered in\nbefore the applications of that principle could be exhausted. A better\nexample of its essential working could hardly be found than one which\nDarwin gives to illustrate the natural origin of moral sense. A swallow,\nimpelled by migratory instincts to leave a nest full of unfledged young,\nwould endure a moral conflict. The more lasting impulse, memory being\nassumed, would prompt a moral judgment when it emerged again after being\nmomentarily obscured by an intermittent passion. \u201cWhile the mother bird\nis feeding or brooding over her nestlings, the maternal instinct is\nprobably stronger than the migratory; but the instinct which is more\npersistent gains the victory, and at last, at a moment when her young\nones are not in sight, she takes flight and deserts them. When arrived\nat the end of her long journey, and the migratory instinct ceases to\nact, what an agony of remorse each bird would feel if, from being\nendowed with great mental activity, she could not prevent the image\ncontinually passing before her mind of her young ones perishing in the\nbleak north from cold and hunger.\u201d[E] She would doubtless upbraid\nherself, like any sinner, for a senseless perfidy to her own dearest\ngood. The perfidy, however, was not wholly senseless, because the\nforgotten instinct was not less natural and necessary than the\nremembered one, and its satisfaction no less true. Temptation has the\nsame basis as duty. The difference is one of volume and permanence in\nthe rival satisfactions, and the attitude conscience will assume toward\nthese depends more on the representability of the demands compared than\non their original vehemence or ultimate results.\n\n[Sidenote: Conscience and reason compared.]\n\nA passionate conscience may thus arise in the play of impulses differing\nin permanence, without involving a judicial exercise of reason. Nor does\nsuch a conscience involve a synthetic ideal, but only the ideal presence\nof particular demands. Conflicts in the conscience are thus quite\nnatural and would continually occur but for the narrowness that commonly\ncharacterises a mind inspired by passion. A life of sin and repentance\nis as remote as possible from a Life of Reason. Yet the same situation\nwhich produces conscience and the sense of duty is an occasion for\napplying reason to action and for forming an ideal, so soon as the\ndemands and satisfactions concerned are synthesised and balanced\nimaginatively. The stork might do more than feel the conflict of his two\nimpulses, he might do more than embody in alternation the eloquence of\ntwo hostile thoughts. He might pass judgment upon them impartially and,\nin the felt presence of both, conceive what might be a union or\ncompromise between them.\n\nThis resultant object of pursuit, conceived in reflection and in itself\nthe initial goal of neither impulse, is the ideal of a mind occupied by\nthe two: it is the aim prescribed by reason under the circumstances. It\ndiffers from the prescription of conscience, in that conscience is often\nthe spokesman of one interest or of a group of interests in opposition\nto other primary impulses which it would annul altogether; while reason\nand the ideal are not active forces nor embodiments of passion at all,\nbut merely a method by which objects of desire are compared in\nreflection. The goodness of an end is felt inwardly by conscience; by\nreason it can be only taken upon trust and registered as a fact. For\nconscience the object of an opposed will is an evil, for reason it is a\ngood on the same ground as any other good, because it is pursued by a\nnatural impulse and can bring a real satisfaction. Conscience, in fine,\nis a party to moral strife, reason an observer of it who, however, plays\nthe most important and beneficent part in the outcome by suggesting the\nterms of peace. This suggested peace, inspired by sympathy and by\nknowledge of the world, is the ideal, which borrows its value and\npractical force from the irrational impulses which it embodies, and\nborrows its final authority from the truth with which it recognises them\nall and the necessity by which it imposes on each such sacrifices as are\nrequisite to a general harmony.\n\n[Sidenote: Reason imposes no new sacrifice.]\n\nCould each impulse, apart from reason, gain perfect satisfaction,\nit would doubtless laugh at justice. The divine, to exercise\nsuasion, must use an _argumentum ad hominem_; reason must justify\nitself to the heart. But perfect satisfaction is what an\nirresponsible impulse can never hope for: all other impulses,\nthough absent perhaps from the mind, are none the less present in\nnature and have possession of the field through their physical\nbasis. They offer effectual resistance to a reckless intruder. To\ndisregard them is therefore to gain nothing: reason, far from\ncreating the partial renunciation and proportionate sacrifices\nwhich it imposes, really minimises them by making them voluntary\nand fruitful. The ideal, which may seem to wear so severe a frown,\nreally fosters all possible pleasures; what it retrenches is\nnothing to what blind forces and natural catastrophes would\notherwise cut off; while it sweetens what it sanctions, adding to\nspontaneous enjoyments a sense of moral security and an\nintellectual light.\n\n[Sidenote: Natural goods attainable and compatible in principle.]\n\nThose who are guided only by an irrational conscience can hardly\nunderstand what a good life would be. Their Utopias have to be\nsupernatural in order that the irresponsible rules which they call\nmorality may lead by miracle to happy results. But such a magical and\nundeserved happiness, if it were possible, would be unsavoury: only one\nphase of human nature would be satisfied by it, and so impoverished an\nideal cannot really attract the will. For human nature has been moulded\nby the same natural forces among which its ideal has to be fulfilled,\nand, apart from a certain margin of wild hopes and extravagances, the\nthings man\u2019s heart desires are attainable under his natural conditions\nand would not be attainable elsewhere. The conflict of desires and\ninterests in the world is not radical any more than man\u2019s\ndissatisfaction with his own nature can be; for every particular ideal,\nbeing an expression of human nature in operation, must in the end\ninvolve the primary human faculties and cannot be essentially\nincompatible with any other ideal which involves them too.\n\nTo adjust all demands to one ideal and adjust that ideal to its natural\nconditions\u2014in other words, to live the Life of Reason\u2014is something\nperfectly possible; for those demands, being akin to one another in\nspite of themselves, can be better furthered by co-operation than by\nblind conflict, while the ideal, far from demanding any profound\nrevolution in nature, merely expresses her actual tendency and forecasts\nwhat her perfect functioning would be.\n\n[Sidenote: Harmony the formal and intrinsic demand of reason.]\n\nReason as such represents or rather constitutes a single formal\ninterest, the interest in harmony. When two interests are simultaneous\nand fall within one act of apprehension the desirability of harmonising\nthem is involved in the very effort to realise them together. If\nattention and imagination are steady enough to face this implication\nand not to allow impulse to oscillate between irreconcilable tendencies,\nreason comes into being. Henceforth things actual and things desired are\nconfronted by an ideal which has both pertinence and authority.\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[Footnote E: Descent of Man, chapter iii.]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XII\u2014FLUX AND CONSTANCY IN HUMAN NATURE\n\n\n[Sidenote: Respectable tradition that human nature is fixed.]\n\nA conception of something called human nature arises not unnaturally on\nobserving the passions of men, passions which under various disguises\nseem to reappear in all ages and countries. The tendency of Greek\nphilosophy, with its insistence on general concepts, was to define this\nidea of human nature still further and to encourage the belief that a\nsingle and identical essence, present in all men, determined their\npowers and ideal destiny. Christianity, while it transposed the human\nideal and dwelt on the superhuman affinities of man, did not abandon the\nnotion of a specific humanity. On the contrary, such a notion was\nimplied in the Fall and Redemption, in the Sacraments, and in the\nuniversal validity of Christian doctrine and precept. For if human\nnature were not one, there would be no propriety in requiring all men to\npreserve unanimity in faith or conformity in conduct. Human nature was\nlikewise the entity which the English psychologists set themselves to\ndescribe; and Kant was so entirely dominated by the notion of a fixed\nand universal human nature that its constancy, in his opinion, was the\nsource of all natural as well as moral laws. Had he doubted for a moment\nthe stability of human nature, the foundations of his system would have\nfallen out; the forms of perception and thought would at once have lost\ntheir boasted necessity, since to-morrow might dawn upon new categories\nand a modified _a priori_ intuition of space or time; and the avenue\nwould also have been closed by which man was led, through his\nunalterable moral sentiments, to assumptions about metaphysical truths.\n\n[Sidenote: Contrary currents of opinion.]\n\n[Sidenote: Evolution]\n\nThe force of this long tradition has been broken, however, by two\ninfluences of great weight in recent times, the theory of evolution and\nthe revival of pantheism. The first has reintroduced flux into the\nconception of existence and the second into the conception of values. If\nnatural species are fluid and pass into one another, human nature is\nmerely a name for a group of qualities found by chance in certain tribes\nof animals, a group to which new qualities are constantly tending to\nattach themselves while other faculties become extinct, now in whole\nraces, now in sporadic individuals. Human nature is therefore a\nvariable, and its ideal cannot have a greater constancy than the demands\nto which it gives expression. Nor can the ideal of one man or one age\nhave any authority over another, since the harmony existing in their\nnature and interests is accidental and each is a transitional phase in\nan indefinite evolution. The crystallisation of moral forces at any\nmoment is consequently to be explained by universal, not by human, laws;\nthe philosopher\u2019s interest cannot be to trace the implications of\npresent and unstable desires, but rather to discover the mechanical law\nby which these desires have been generated and will be transformed, so\nthat they will change irrevocably both their basis and their objects.\n\n[Sidenote: Pantheism.]\n\nTo this picture of physical instability furnished by popular science are\nto be added the mystical self-denials involved in pantheism. These come\nto reinforce the doctrine that human nature is a shifting thing with the\nsentiment that it is a finite and unworthy one: for every determination\nof being, it is said, has its significance as well as its origin in the\ninfinite continuum of which it is a part. Forms are limitations, and\nlimitations, according to this philosophy, would be defects, so that\nman\u2019s only goal would be to escape humanity and lose himself in the\ndivine nebula that has produced and must invalidate each of his thoughts\nand ideals. As there would be but one spirit in the world, and that\ninfinite, so there would be but one ideal and that indiscriminate. The\ndespair which the naturalist\u2019s view of human instability might tend to\nproduce is turned by this mystical initiation into a sort of ecstasy;\nand the deluge of conformity suddenly submerges that Life of Reason\nwhich science seemed to condemn to gradual extinction.\n\n[Sidenote: Instability in existences does not dethrone their ideals.]\n\nReason is a human function. Though the name of reason has been applied\nto various alleged principles of cosmic life, vital or dialectical,\nthese principles all lack the essence of rationality, in that they are\nnot conscious movements toward satisfaction, not, in other words, moral\nand beneficent principles at all. Be the instability of human nature\nwhat it may, therefore, the instability of reason is not less, since\nreason is but a function of human nature. However relative and\nsubordinate, in a physical sense, human ideals may be, these ideals\nremain the only possible moral standards for man, the only tests which\nhe can apply for value or authority, in any other quarter. And among\nunstable and relative ideals none is more relative and unstable than\nthat which transports all value to a universal law, itself indifferent\nto good and evil, and worships it as a deity. Such an idolatry would\nindeed be impossible if it were not partial and veiled, arrived at in\nfollowing out some human interest and clung to by force of moral inertia\nand the ambiguity of words. In truth mystics do not practise so entire a\nrenunciation of reason as they preach: eternal validity and the capacity\nto deal with absolute reality are still assumed by them to belong to\nthought or at least to feeling. Only they overlook in their description\nof human nature just that faculty which they exercise in their\nspeculation; their map leaves out the ground on which they stand. The\nrest, which they are not identified with for the moment, they proceed\nto regard _de haut en bas_ and to discredit as a momentary manifestation\nof universal laws, physical or divine. They forget that this faith in\nlaw, this absorption in the blank reality, this enthusiasm for the\nultimate thought, are mere human passions like the rest; that they\nendure them as they might a fever and that the animal instincts are\npatent on which those spiritual yearnings repose.\n\n[Sidenote: Absolutist philosophy human and halting.]\n\nThis last fact would be nothing against the feelings in question, if\nthey were not made vehicles for absolute revelations. On the contrary,\nsuch a relativity in instincts is the source of their importance. In\nvirtue of this relativity they have some basis and function in the\nworld; for did they not repose on human nature they could never express\nor transform it. Religion and philosophy are not always beneficent or\nimportant, but when they are it is precisely because they help to\ndevelop human faculty and to enrich human life. To imagine that by means\nof them we can escape from human nature and survey it from without is an\nostrich-like illusion obvious to all but to the victim of it. Such a\npretension may cause admiration in the schools, where self-hypnotisation\nis easy, but in the world it makes its professors ridiculous. For in\ntheir eagerness to empty their mind of human prejudices they reduce its\nrational burden to a minimum, and if they still continue to dogmatise,\nit is sport for the satirist to observe what forgotten accident of\nlanguage or training has survived the crash of the universe and made the\none demonstrable path to Absolute Truth.\n\n[Sidenote: All science a deliverance of momentary thought.]\n\nNeither the path of abstraction followed by the mystics, nor that of\ndirect and, as it avers, unbiassed observation followed by the\nnaturalists, can lead beyond that region of common experience,\ntraditional feeling, and conventional thought which all minds enter at\nbirth and can elude only at the risk of inward collapse and extinction.\nThe fact that observation involves the senses, and the senses their\norgans, is one which a naturalist can hardly overlook; and when we add\nthat logical habits, sanctioned by utility, are needed to interpret the\ndata of sense, the humanity of science and all its constructions becomes\nclearer than day. Superstition itself could not be more human. The path\nof unbiassed observation is not a path away from conventional life; it\nis a progress in conventions. It improves human belief by increasing the\nproportion of two of its ingredients, attentive perception and practical\ncalculus. The whole resulting vision, as it is sustained from moment to\nmoment by present experience and instinct, has no value apart from\nactual ideals. And if it proves human nature to be unstable, it can\nbuild that proof on nothing more stable than human faculty as at the\nmoment it happens to be.\n\n[Sidenote: All criticism likewise.]\n\nNor is abstraction a less human process, as if by becoming very\nabstruse indeed we could hope to become divine. Is it not a commonplace\nof the schools that to form abstract ideas is the prerogative of man\u2019s\nreason? Is not abstraction a method by which mortal intelligence makes\nhaste? Is it not the makeshift of a mind overloaded with its experience,\nthe trick of an eye that cannot master a profuse and ever-changing\nworld? Shall these diagrams drawn in fancy, this system of signals in\nthought, be the Absolute Truth dwelling within us? Do we attain reality\nby making a silhouette of our dreams? If the scientific world be a\nproduct of human faculties, the metaphysical world must be doubly so;\nfor the material there given to human understanding is here worked over\nagain by human art. This constitutes the dignity and value of dialectic,\nthat in spite of appearances it is so human; it bears to experience a\nrelation similar to that which the arts bear to the same, where sensible\nimages, selected by the artist\u2019s genius and already coloured by his\n\u00e6sthetic bias, are redyed in the process of reproduction whenever he has\na great style, and saturated anew with his mind.\n\nThere can be no question, then, of eluding human nature or of conceiving\nit and its environment in such a way as to stop its operation. We may\ntake up our position in one region of experience or in another, we may,\nin unconsciousness of the interests and assumptions that support us,\ncriticise the truth or value of results obtained elsewhere. Our\ncriticism will be solid in proportion to the solidity of the unnamed\nconvictions that inspire it, that is, in proportion to the deep roots\nand fruitful ramifications which those convictions may have in human\nlife. Ultimate truth and ultimate value will be reasonably attributed to\nthose ideas and possessions which can give human nature, as it is, the\nhighest satisfaction. We may admit that human nature is variable; but\nthat admission, if justified, will be justified by the satisfaction\nwhich it gives human nature to make it. We might even admit that human\nideals are vain but only if they were nothing worth for the attainment\nof the veritable human ideal.\n\n[Sidenote: Origins inessential.]\n\nThe given constitution of reason, with whatever a dialectical philosophy\nmight elicit from it, obviously determines nothing about the causes that\nmay have brought reason to its present pass or the phases that may have\npreceded its appearance. Certain notions about physics might no doubt\nsuggest themselves to the moralist, who never can be the whole man; he\nmight suspect, for instance, that the transitive intent of intellect and\nwill pointed to their vital basis. Transcendence in operation might seem\nappropriate only to a being with a history and with an organism subject\nto external influences, whose mind should thus come to represent not\nmerely its momentary state but also its constitutive past and its\neventual fortunes. Such suggestions, however, would be extraneous to\ndialectical self-knowledge. They would be tentative only, and human\nnature would be freely admitted to be as variable, as relative, and as\ntransitory as the natural history of the universe might make it.\n\n[Sidenote: Ideals functional.]\n\nThe error, however, would be profound and the contradiction hopeless if\nwe should deny the ideal authority of human nature because we had\ndiscovered its origin and conditions. Nature and evolution, let us say,\nhave brought life to the present form; but this life lives, these organs\nhave determinate functions, and human nature, here and now, in relation\nto the ideal energies it unfolds, is a fundamental essence, a collection\nof activities with determinate limits, relations, and ideals. The\nintegration and determinateness of these faculties is the condition for\nany synthetic operation of reason. As the structure of the steam-engine\nhas varied greatly since its first invention, and its attributions have\nincreased, so the structure of human nature has undoubtedly varied since\nman first appeared upon the earth; but as in each steam-engine at each\nmoment there must be a limit of mobility, a unity of function and a\nclear determination of parts and tensions, so in human nature, as found\nat any time in any man, there is a definite scope by virtue of which\nalone he can have a reliable memory, a recognisable character, a faculty\nof connected thought and speech, a social utility, and a moral ideal. On\nman\u2019s given structure, on his activity hovering about fixed objects,\ndepends the possibility of conceiving or testing any truth or making\nany progress in happiness.\n\n[Sidenote: They are transferable to similar beings.]\n\nThinkers of different experience and organisation have _pro tanto_\ndifferent logics and different moral laws. There are limits to\ncommunication even among beings of the same race, and the faculties and\nideals of one intelligence are not transferable without change to any\nother. If this historic diversity in minds were complete, so that each\nlived in its own moral world, a science of each of these moral worlds\nwould still be possible provided some inner fixity or constancy existed\nin its meanings. In every human thought together with an immortal intent\nthere is a mortal and irrecoverable perception: something in it perishes\ninstantly, the part that can be materially preserved being proportionate\nto the stability or fertility of the organ that produced it. If the\nfunction is imitable, the object it terminates in will reappear, and two\nor more moments, having the same ideal, will utter comparable messages\nand may perhaps be unanimous. Unanimity in thought involves identity of\nfunctions and similarity in organs. These conditions mark off the sphere\nof rational communication and society; where they fail altogether there\nis no mutual intelligence, no conversation, no moral solidarity.\n\n[Sidenote: Authority internal.]\n\nThe inner authority of reason, however, is no more destroyed because it\nhas limits in physical expression or because irrational things exist,\nthan the grammar of a given language is invalidated because other\nlanguages do not share it, or because some people break its rules and\nothers are dumb altogether. Innumerable madmen make no difference to the\nlaws of thought, which borrow their authority from the inward intent and\ncogency of each rational mind. Reason, like beauty, is its own excuse\nfor being. It is useful, indeed, for living well, when to give reason\nsatisfaction is made the measure of good.\n\nThe true philosopher, who is not one chiefly by profession, must be\nprepared to tread the winepress alone. He may indeed flourish like the\nbay-tree in a grateful environment, but more often he will rather\nresemble a reed shaken by the wind. Whether starved or fed by the\naccidents of fortune he must find his essential life in his own ideal.\nIn spiritual life, heteronomy is suicide. That universal soul sometimes\nspoken of, which is to harmonise and correct individual demands, if it\nwere a will and an intelligence in act, would itself be an individual\nlike the others; while if it possessed no will and no intelligence, such\nas individuals may have, it would be a physical force or law, a dynamic\nsystem without moral authority and with a merely potential or\nrepresented existence. For to be actual and self-existent is to be\nindividual. The living mind cannot surrender its rights to any physical\npower or subordinate itself to any figment of its own art without\nfalling into manifest idolatry.\n\n[Sidenote: Reason autonomous.]\n\nHuman nature, in the sense in which it is the transcendental foundation\nof all science and morals, is a functional unity in each man; it is no\ngeneral or abstract essence, the average of all men\u2019s characters, nor\neven the complex of the qualities common to all men. It is the entelechy\nof the living individual, be he typical or singular. That his type\nshould be odd or common is merely a physical accident. If he can know\nhimself by expressing the entelechy of his own nature in the form of a\nconsistent ideal, he is a rational creature after his own kind, even if,\nlike the angels of Saint Thomas, he be the only individual of his\nspecies. What the majority of human animals may tend to, or what the\npast or future variations of a race may be, has nothing to do with\ndetermining the ideal of human nature in a living man, or in an ideal\nsociety of men bound together by spiritual kinship. Otherwise Plato\ncould not have reasoned well about the republic without adjusting\nhimself to the politics of Buddha or Rousseau, and we should not be able\nto determine our own morality without making concessions to the\ncannibals or giving a vote to the ants. Within the field of an\nanthropology that tests humanity by the skull\u2019s shape, there might be\nroom for any number of independent moralities, and although, as we shall\nsee, there is actually a similar foundation in all human and even in all\nanimal natures, which supports a rudimentary morality common to all, yet\na perfect morality is not really common to any two men nor to any two\nphases of the same man\u2019s life.\n\n[Sidenote: Its distribution.]\n\nThe distribution of reason, though a subject irrelevant to pure logic or\nmorals, is one naturally interesting to a rational man, for he is\nconcerned to know how far beings exist with a congenial structure and an\nideal akin to his own. That circumstance will largely influence his\nhappiness if, being a man, he is a gregarious and sympathetic animal.\nHis moral idealism itself will crave support from others, if not to give\nit direction, at least to give it warmth and courage. The best part of\nwealth is to have worthy heirs, and mind can be transmitted only to a\nkindred mind. Hostile natures cannot be brought together by mutual\ninvective nor harmonised by the brute destruction and disappearance of\neither party. But when one or both parties have actually disappeared,\nand the combat has ceased for lack of combatants, natures not hostile to\none another can fill the vacant place. In proportion to their inbred\nunanimity these will cultivate a similar ideal and rejoice together in\nits embodiment.\n\n[Sidenote: Natural selection of minds.]\n\nThis has happened to some extent in the whole world, on account of\nnatural conditions which limit the forms of life possible in one region;\nfor nature is intolerant in her laxity and punishes too great\noriginality and heresy with death. Such moral integration has occurred\nvery markedly in every good race and society whose members, by adapting\nthemselves to the same external forces, have created and discovered\ntheir common soul. Spiritual unity is a natural product. There are those\nwho see a great mystery in the presence of eternal values and impersonal\nideals in a moving and animal world, and think to solve that dualism, as\nthey call it, by denying that nature can have spiritual functions or\nspirit a natural cause; but nothing can be simpler if we make, as we\nshould, existence the test of possibility. _Ab esse ad posse valet\nillatio_. Nature is a perfect garden of ideals, and passion is the\nperpetual and fertile soil for poetry, myth, and speculation. Nor is\nthis origin merely imputed to ideals by a late and cynical observer: it\nis manifest in the ideals themselves, by their subject matter and\nintent. For what are ideals about, what do they idealise, except natural\nexistence and natural passions? That would be a miserable and\nsuperfluous ideal indeed that was nobody\u2019s ideal of nothing. The\npertinence of ideals binds them to nature, and it is only the worst and\nflimsiest ideals, the ideals of a sick soul, that elude nature\u2019s limits\nand belie her potentialities. Ideals are forerunners or heralds of\nnature\u2019s successes, not always followed, indeed, by their fulfilment,\nfor nature is but nature and has to feel her way; but they are an\nearnest, at least, of an achieved organisation, an incipient\naccomplishment, that tends to maintain and root itself in the world.\n\nTo speak of nature\u2019s successes is, of course, to impute success\nretroactively; but the expression may be allowed when we consider that\nthe same functional equilibrium which is looked back upon as a good by\nthe soul it serves, first creates individual being and with it creates\nthe possibility of preference and the whole moral world; and it is more\nthan a metaphor to call that achievement a success which has made a\nsense of success possible and actual. That nature cannot intend or\npreviously esteem those formations which are the condition of value or\nintention existing at all, is a truth too obvious to demand repetition;\nbut when those formations arise they determine estimation, and fix the\ndirection of preference, so that the evolution which produced them, when\nlooked back upon from the vantage-ground thus gained, cannot help\nseeming to have been directed toward the good now distinguished and\npartly attained. For this reason creation is regarded as a work of love,\nand the power that brought order out of chaos is called intelligence.\n\n[Sidenote: Living stability.]\n\nThese natural formations, tending to generate and realise each its\nideal, are, as it were, eddies in the universal flux, produced no less\nmechanically, doubtless, than the onward current, yet seeming to arrest\nor to reverse it. Inheritance arrests the flux by repeating a series of\nphases with a recognisable rhythm; memory reverses it by modifying this\nrhythm itself by the integration of earlier phases into those that\nsupervene. Inheritance and memory make human stability. This stability\nis relative, being still a mode of flux, and consists fundamentally in\nrepetition. Repetition marks some progress on mere continuity, since it\npreserves form and disregards time and matter. Inheritance is repetition\non a larger scale, not excluding spontaneous variations; while habit and\nmemory are a sort of heredity within the individual, since here an old\nperception reappears, by way of atavism, in the midst of a forward\nmarch. Life is thus enriched and reaction adapted to a wider field; much\nas a note is enriched by its overtones, and by the tensions, inherited\nfrom the preceding notes, which give it a new setting.\n\n[Sidenote: Continuity necessary to progress.]\n\nProgress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When\nchange is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is\nset for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as\namong savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past\nare condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is\nfrivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in\nconsecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and\nbarbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In a\nsecond stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and\nsuggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they\nthus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood and\ntrue progress. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and\nall that happens is at once forgotten; a vain, because unpractical,\nrepetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile\nreadaptation. In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.\nThe hard shell, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it to\ndie down slowly and be gradually chilled; immortality in such a case\nmust have been secured earlier, by giving birth to a generation plastic\nto the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons. Thus old age\nis as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same\ninattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and\ndegenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird\u2019s chirp.\n\n[Sidenote: Limits of variation. Spirit a heritage.]\n\nNot all readaptation, however, is progress, for ideal identity must not\nbe lost. The Latin language did not progress when it passed into\nItalian. It died. Its amiable heirs may console us for its departure,\nbut do not remove the fact that their parent is extinct. So every\nindividual, nation, and religion has its limit of adaptation; so long as\nthe increment it receives is digestible, so long as the organisation\nalready attained is extended and elaborated without being surrendered,\ngrowth goes on; but when the foundation itself shifts, when what is\ngained at the periphery is lost at the centre, the flux appears again\nand progress is not real. Thus a succession of generations or languages\nor religions constitutes no progress unless some ideal present at the\nbeginning is transmitted to the end and reaches a better expression\nthere; without this stability at the core no common standard exists and\nall comparison of value with value must be external and arbitrary.\nRetentiveness, we must repeat, is the condition of progress.\n\nThe variation human nature is open to is not, then, variation in any\ndirection. There are transformations that would destroy it. So long as\nit endures it must retain all that constitutes it now, all that it has\nso far gathered and worked into its substance. The genealogy of progress\nis like that of man, who can never repudiate a single ancestor. It\nstarts, so to speak, from a single point, free as yet to take any\ndirection. When once, however, evolution has taken a single step, say in\nthe direction of vertebrates, that step cannot be retraced without\nextinction of the species. Such extinction may take place while progress\nin other lines is continued. All that preceded the forking of the dead\nand the living branch will be as well represented and as legitimately\ncontinued by the surviving radiates as it could have been by the\nvertebrates that are no more; but the vertebrate ideal is lost for ever,\nand no more progress is possible along that line.\n\n[Sidenote: Perfectibility.]\n\nThe future of moral evolution is accordingly infinite, but its character\nis more and more determinate at every step. Mankind can never, without\nperishing, surrender its animal nature, its need to eat and drink, its\nsexual method of reproduction, its vision of nature, its faculty of\nspeech, its arts of music, poetry, and building. Particular races cannot\nsubsist if they renounce their savage instincts, but die, like wild\nanimals, in captivity; and particular individuals die when not suffered\nany longer to retain their memories, their bodies, or even their master\npassions. Thus human nature survives amid a continual fluctuation of its\nembodiments. At every step twigs and leaves are thrown out that last but\none season; but the underlying stem may have meantime grown stronger and\nmore luxuriant. Whole branches sometimes wither, but others may continue\nto bloom. Spiritual unity runs, like sap, from the common root to every\nuttermost flower; but at each forking in the growth the branches part\ncompany, and what happens in one is no direct concern of the others. The\nproducts of one age and nation may well be unintelligible to another;\nthe elements of humanity common to both may lie lower down. So that the\nhighest things are communicable to the fewest persons, and yet, among\nthese few, are the most perfectly communicable. The more elaborate and\ndeterminate a man\u2019s heritage and genius are, the more he has in common\nwith his next of kin, and the more he can transmit and implant in his\nposterity for ever. Civilisation is cumulative. The farther it goes the\nintenser it is, substituting articulate interests for animal fumes and\nfor enigmatic passions. Such articulate interests can be shared; and\nthe infinite vistas they open up can be pursued for ever with the\nknowledge that a work long ago begun is being perfected and that an\nideal is being embodied which need never be outworn.\n\n[Sidenote: Nature and human nature.]\n\nSo long as external conditions remain constant it is obvious that the\ngreater organisation a being possesses the greater strength he will\nhave. If indeed primary conditions varied, the finer creatures would die\nfirst; for their adaptation is more exquisite and the irreversible core\nof their being much larger relatively; but in a constant environment\ntheir equipment makes them irresistible and secures their permanence and\nmultiplication. Now man is a part of nature and her organisation may be\nregarded as the foundation of his own: the word nature is therefore less\nequivocal than it seems, for every nature is Nature herself in one of\nher more specific and better articulated forms. Man therefore represents\nthe universe that sustains him; his existence is a proof that the cosmic\nequilibrium that fostered his life is a natural equilibrium, capable of\nbeing long maintained. Some of the ancients thought it eternal; physics\nnow suggests a different opinion. But even if this equilibrium, by which\nthe stars are kept in their courses and human progress is allowed to\nproceed, is fundamentally unstable, it shows what relative stability\nnature may attain. Could this balance be preserved indefinitely, no one\nknows what wonderful adaptations might occur within it, and to what\nexcellence human nature in particular might arrive. Nor is it unlikely\nthat before the cataclysm comes time will be afforded for more\nimprovement than moral philosophy has ever dreamed of. For it is\nremarkable how inane and unimaginative Utopias have generally been. This\npossibility is not uninspiring and may help to console those who think\nthe natural conditions of life are not conditions that a good life can\nbe lived in. The possibility of essential progress is bound up with the\ntragic possibility that progress and human life should some day end\ntogether. If the present equilibrium of forces were eternal all\nadaptations to it would have already taken place and, while no essential\ncatastrophe would need to be dreaded, no essential improvement could be\nhoped for in all eternity. I am not sure that a humanity such as we\nknow, were it destined to exist for ever, would offer a more\nexhilarating prospect than a humanity having indefinite elasticity\ntogether with a precarious tenure of life. Mortality has its\ncompensations: one is that all evils are transitory, another that better\ntimes may come.\n\n[Sidenote: Human nature formulated.]\n\nHuman nature, then, has for its core the substance of nature at large,\nand is one of its more complex formations. Its determination is\nprogressive. It varies indefinitely in its historic manifestations and\nfades into what, as a matter of natural history, might no longer be\ntermed human. At each moment it has its fixed and determinate\nentelechy, the ideal of that being\u2019s life, based on his instincts,\nsummed up in his character, brought to a focus in his reflection, and\nshared by all who have attained or may inherit his organisation. His\nperceptive and reasoning faculties are parts of human nature, as\nembodied in him; all objects of belief or desire, with all standards of\njustice and duty which he can possibly acknowledge, are transcripts of\nit, conditioned by it, and justifiable only as expressions of its\ninherent tendencies.\n\n[Sidenote: Its concrete description reserved for the sequel.]\n\nThis definition of human nature, clear as it may be in itself and true\nto the facts, will perhaps hardly make sufficiently plain how the Life\nof Reason, having a natural basis, has in the ideal world a creative and\nabsolute authority. A more concrete description of human nature may\naccordingly not come amiss, especially as the important practical\nquestion touching the extension of a given moral authority over times\nand places depends on the degree of kinship found among the creatures\ninhabiting those regions. To give a general picture of human nature and\nits rational functions will be the task of the following books. The\ntruth of a description which must be largely historical may not be\nindifferent to the reader, and I shall study to avoid bias in the\npresentation, in so far as is compatible with frankness and brevity; yet\neven if some bias should manifest itself and if the picture were\nhistorically false, the rational principles we shall be trying to\nillustrate will not thereby be invalidated. Illustrations might have\nbeen sought in some fictitious world, if imagination had not seemed so\nmuch less interesting than reality, which besides enforces with\nunapproachable eloquence the main principle in view, namely, that nature\ncarries its ideal with it and that the progressive organisation of\nirrational impulses makes a rational life.\n\n\n*** End of Volume I ***\n\n\n\n\nREASON IN SOCIETY\n\nVolume Two of \u201cThe Life of Reason\u201d\n\n\nGEORGE SANTAYANA\n\nh\u00ea gar noy enhergeia z\u00f4h\u00ea\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\nBOOK II.\u2014REASON IN SOCIETY\n\n\nCHAPTER I\n\n\nLOVE\n\nFluid existences have none but ideal goals.\u2014Nutrition and\nreproduction.\u2014Priority of the latter.\u2014Love celebrates the initial\ntriumph of form and is deeply ideal.\u2014Difficulty in describing\nlove.\u2014One-sided or inverted theories about it.\u2014Sexual functions its\nbasis.\u2014Structure the ground of faculty and faculty of duty.\u2014Glory of\nanimal love.\u2014Its degradation when instincts become numerous and\ncompetitive.\u2014Moral censure provoked.\u2014The heart alienated from the\nworld.\u2014Childish ideals.\u2014Their light all focussed on the object of\nlove.\u2014Three environments for love.\u2014Subjectivity of the\npassion.\u2014Machinery regulating choice.\u2014The choice\nunstable.\u2014Instinctive essence of love.\u2014Its ideality.\u2014Its universal\nscope.\u2014Its euthanasia. Pages 3-34\n\n\nCHAPTER II\n\nTHE FAMILY\n\nThe family arises spontaneously.\u2014It harmonises natural\ninterests.\u2014Capacity to be educated goes with immaturity at birth.\u2014The\nnaturally dull achieve intelligence.\u2014It is more blessed to save than to\ncreate.\u2014Parental instinct regards childhood only.\u2014Handing on the torch\nof life.\u2014Adventitious functions assumed by the family.\u2014Inertia in\nhuman nature.\u2014Family tyrannies.\u2014Difficulty in abstracting from the\nfamily.\u2014Possibility of substitutes.\u2014Plato\u2019s heroic\ncommunism.\u2014Opposite modern tendencies.\u2014Individualism in a sense\nrational.\u2014The family tamed.\u2014Possible readjustments and\nreversions.\u2014The ideal includes generation.\u2014Inner values already lodged\nin this function.\u2014Outward beneficence might be secured by experiment.\nPages 35-59\n\n\nCHAPTER III\n\nINDUSTRY, GOVERNMENT, AND WAR\n\nPatriarchal economy.\u2014Origin of the state.\u2014Three uses of\ncivilisation.\u2014Its rationality contingent.\u2014Sources of wealth.\u2014Excess\nof it possible.\u2014Irrational industry.\u2014Its jovial and ingenious\nside.\u2014Its tyranny.\u2014An impossible remedy.\u2014Basis of government.\u2014How\nrationality accrues.\u2014Ferocious but useful despotisms.\u2014Occasional\nadvantage of being conquered.\u2014Origin of free governments.\u2014Their\ndemocratic tendencies.\u2014Imperial peace.\u2014Nominal and real status of\narmies.\u2014Their action irresponsible.\u2014Pugnacity human.\u2014Barrack-room\nphilosophy.\u2014Military virtues.\u2014They are splendid vices.\u2014Absolute value\nin strife.\u2014Sport a civilised way of preserving it.\u2014Who shall found the\nuniversal commonwealth? Pages 60-87\n\n\nCHAPTER IV\n\nTHE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL\n\nEminence, once existing, grows by its own operation.\u2014Its causes natural\nand its privileges just.\u2014Advantage of inequality.\u2014Fable of the belly\nand the members.\u2014Fallacy in it.\u2014Theism expresses better the\naristocratic ideal.\u2014A heaven with many mansions.\u2014If God is defined as\nthe human ideal, apotheosis the only paradise.\u2014When natures differ\nperfections differ too.\u2014Theory that stations actually correspond to\nfaculty.\u2014Its falsity.\u2014Feeble individuality the rule.\u2014Sophistical\nenvy.\u2014Inequality is not a grievance; suffering is.\u2014Mutilation by\ncrowding.\u2014A hint to optimists.\u2014How aristocracies might do good.\u2014Man\nadds wrong to nature\u2019s injury.\u2014Conditions of a just inequality. Pages\n88-113\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER V\n\nDEMOCRACY\n\nDemocracy as an end and as a means.\u2014Natural democracy leads to\nmonarchy.\u2014Artificial democracy is an extension of privilege.\u2014Ideals\nand expedients.\u2014Well-founded distrust of rulers. Yet experts, if\nrational, would serve common interests.\u2014People jealous of eminence.\u2014It\nis representative, but subject to decay.\u2014Ancient citizenship a\nprivilege.\u2014Modern democracy industrial.\u2014Dangers to current\ncivilisation.\u2014Is current civilisation a good?\u2014Horrors of materialistic\ndemocracy.\u2014Timocracy or socialistic aristocracy.\u2014The difficulty the\nsame as in all Socialism.\u2014The masses would have to be plebeian in\nposition and patrician in feeling.\u2014Organisation for ideal ends breeds\nfanaticism.\u2014Public spirit the life of democracy. Pages 114-136\n\n\nCHAPTER VI\n\nFREE SOCIETY\n\nPrimacy of nature over spirit.\u2014All experience at bottom\nliberal.\u2014Social experience has its ideality too.\u2014The self an\nideal.\u2014Romantic egotism.\u2014Vanity.\u2014Ambiguities of fame.\u2014Its possible\nideality.\u2014Comradeship.\u2014External conditions of friendship.\u2014Identity in\nsex required, and in age.\u2014Constituents of friendship.\u2014Personal\nliking.\u2014The refracting human medium for ideas.\u2014Affection based on the\nrefraction.\u2014The medium must also be transparent.\u2014Common interests\nindispensable.\u2014Friendship between man and wife.\u2014Between master and\ndisciple.\u2014Conflict between ideal and natural allegiance.\u2014Automatic\nidealisation of heroes. Pages 137-159\n\n\nCHAPTER VII\n\nPATRIOTISM\n\nThe creative social environment, since it eludes sense, must be\nrepresented symbolically.\u2014Ambiguous limits of a native country,\ngeographical and moral.\u2014Sentimental and political patriotism.\u2014The\nearth and the race the first objects of rational loyalty.\u2014Race, when\ndistinct, the greatest of distinctions.\u2014\u201cPure\u201d races may be morally\nsterile.\u2014True nationality direction on a definite ideal.\u2014Country well\nrepresented by domestic and civic religion.\u2014Misleading identification\nof country with government.\u2014Sporting or belligerent\npatriotism.\u2014Exclusive patriotism rational only when the government\nsupported is universally beneficent.\u2014Accidents of birth and training\naffect the ideal.\u2014They are conditions and may contribute\nsomething.\u2014They are not ends.\u2014The symbol for country may be a man and\nmay become an idol.\u2014Feudal representation sensitive but\npartial.\u2014Monarchical representation comprehensive but\ntreacherous.\u2014Impersonal symbols no advantage.\u2014Patriotism not\nself-interest, save to the social man whose aims are ideal. Pages 160-183\n\n\nCHAPTER VIII\n\nIDEAL SOCIETY\n\nThe gregarious instinct all social instincts in suspense.\u2014It gives rise\nto conscience or sympathy with the public voice.\u2014Guises of public\nopinion.\u2014Oracles and revelations.\u2014The ideal a measure for all\nexistences and no existence itself.\u2014Contrast between natural and\nintellectual bonds.\u2014Appeal from man to God, from real to ideal\nsociety.\u2014Significant symbols revert to the concrete.\u2014Nature a symbol\nfor destiny.\u2014Representative notions have also inherent\nvalues.\u2014Religion and science indirectly cognitive and directly\nideal.\u2014Their opposite outlook.\u2014In translating existence into human\nterms they give human nature its highest exercise.\u2014Science should be\nmathematical and religion anthropomorphic.\u2014Summary of this book. Pages\n184-205\n\n\n\n\nREASON IN SOCIETY\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER I\n\nLOVE\n\n\n[Sidenote: Fluid existences have none but ideal goals.]\n\nIf man were a static or intelligible being, such as angels are thought\nto be, his life would have a single guiding interest, under which all\nother interests would be subsumed. His acts would explain themselves\nwithout looking beyond his given essence, and his soul would be like a\nmusical composition, which once written out cannot grow different and\nonce rendered can ask for nothing but, at most, to be rendered over\nagain. In truth, however, man is an animal, a portion of the natural\nflux; and the consequence is that his nature has a moving centre, his\nfunctions an external reference, and his ideal a true ideality. What he\nstrives to preserve, in preserving himself, is something which he never\nhas been at any particular moment. He maintains his equilibrium by\nmotion. His goal is in a sense beyond him, since it is not his\nexperience, but a form which all experience ought to receive. The inmost\ntexture of his being is propulsive, and there is nothing more intimately\nbound up with his success than mobility and devotion to transcendent\naims. If there is a transitive function in knowledge and an unselfish\npurpose in love, that is only because, at bottom, there is a\nself-reproductive, flying essence in all existence.\n\nIf the equilibrium of man\u2019s being were stable he would need neither\nnutrition, reproduction, nor sense. As it is, sense must renew his ideas\nand guide his instincts otherwise than as their inner evolution would\ndemand; and regenerative processes must strive to repair beneath the\nconstant irreparable lapse of his substance. His business is to create\nand remodel those organisms in which ideals are bred. In order to have a\nsoul to save he must perpetually form it anew; he must, so to speak,\n_earn his own living_. In this vital labour, we may ask, is nutrition or\nreproduction the deeper function? Or, to put the corresponding moral\nquestion, is the body or the state the primary good?\n\n[Sidenote: Nutrition and reproduction]\n\nIf we view the situation from the individual\u2019s side, as\nself-consciousness might view it, we may reply that nutrition is\nfundamental, for if the body were not nourished every faculty would\ndecay. Could nutrition only succeed and keep the body young,\nreproduction would be unnecessary, with its poor pretence at maintaining\nthe mobile human form in a series of examples. On the other hand, if we\nview the matter from above, as science and philosophy should, we may say\nthat nutrition is but germination of a pervasive sort, that the body is\na tabernacle in which the transmissible human spirit is carried for a\nwhile, a shell for the immortal seed that dwells in it and has created\nit. This seed, however, for rational estimation, is merely a means to\nthe existence and happiness of individuals. Transpersonal and continuous\nin its own fluid being, the potential grows personal in its ideal\nfulfilments. In other words, this potentiality is material (though\ncalled sometimes an idea) and has its only value in the particular\ncreatures it may produce.\n\n[Sidenote: Priority of the latter]\n\nReproduction is accordingly primary and more completely instrumental\nthan nutrition is, since it serves a soul as yet non-existent, while\nnutrition is useful to a soul that already has some actuality.\nReproduction initiates life and remains at life\u2019s core, a function\nwithout which no other, in the end, would be possible. It is more\ncentral, crucial, and representative than nutrition, which is in a way\nperipheral only; it is a more typical and rudimentary act, marking the\nideal\u2019s first victory over the universal flux, before any higher\nfunction than reproduction itself has accrued to the animal. To nourish\nan existing being is to presuppose a pause in generation; the nucleus,\nbefore it dissolves into other individuals, gathers about itself, for\nits own glory, certain temporal and personal faculties. It lives for\nitself; while in procreation it signs its own death-warrant, makes its\nwill, and institutes its heir.\n\n[Sidenote: Love celebrates the initial triumph of form and is deeply\nideal.]\n\nThis situation has its counterpart in feeling. Replenishment is a sort\nof delayed breathing, as if the animal had to hunt for air: it\nnecessitates more activity than it contains; it engages external senses\nin its service and promotes intelligence. After securing a dumb\nsatisfaction, or even in preparing it, it leaves the habits it employed\nfree for observation and ideal exercise. Reproduction, on the contrary,\ndepletes; it is an expense of spirit, a drag on physical and mental\nlife; it entangles rather than liberates; it fuses the soul again into\nthe impersonal, blind flux. Yet, since it constitutes the primary and\ncentral triumph of life, it is in itself more ideal and generous than\nnutrition; it fascinates the will in an absolute fashion, and the\npleasures it brings are largely spiritual. For though the\ninstrumentalities of reproduction may seem gross and trivial from a\nconventional point of view, its essence is really ideal, the perfect\ntype, indeed, of ideality, since form and an identical life are therein\nsustained successfully by a more rhythmical flux of matter.\n\nIt may seem fanciful, even if not unmeaning, to say that a man\u2019s soul\nmore truly survives in his son\u2019s youth than in his own decrepitude; but\nthis principle grows more obvious as we descend to simpler beings, in\nwhich individual life is less elaborated and has not intrenched itself\nin so many adventitious and somewhat permanent organs. In vegetables\nsoul and seed go forth together and leave nothing but a husk behind. In\nthe human individual love may seem a mere incident of youth and a\nsentimental madness; but that episode, if we consider the race, is\nindispensable to the whole drama; and if we look to the order in which\nideal interests have grown up and to their superposition in moral\nexperience, love will seem the truly primitive and initiatory passion.\nConsciousness, amused ordinarily by the most superficial processes,\nitself bears witness to the underlying claims of reproduction and is\ndrawn by it for a moment into life\u2019s central vortex; and love, while it\nbetrays its deep roots by the imperative force it exerts and the silence\nit imposes on all current passions, betrays also its ideal mission by\ncasting an altogether novel and poetic spell over the mind.\n\n[Sidenote: Difficulty in describing love.]\n\nThe conscious quality of this passion differs so much in various races\nand individuals, and at various points in the same life, that no account\nof it will ever satisfy everybody.[A] Poets and novelists never tire of\ndepicting it anew; but although the experience they tell of is fresh\nand unparalleled in every individual, their rendering suffers, on the\nwhole, from a great monotony. Love\u2019s gesture and symptoms are noted and\nunvarying; its vocabulary is poor and worn. Even a poet, therefore, can\ngive of love but a meagre expression, while the philosopher, who\nrenounces dramatic representation, is condemned to be avowedly\ninadequate. Love, to the lover, is a noble and immense inspiration; to\nthe naturalist it is a thin veil and prelude to the self-assertion of\nlust. This opposition has prevented philosophers from doing justice to\nthe subject. Two things need to be admitted by anyone who would not go\nwholly astray in such speculation: one, that love has an animal basis;\nthe other, that it has an ideal object. Since these two propositions\nhave usually been thought contradictory, no writer has ventured to\npresent more than half the truth, and that half out of its true\nrelations.\n\n[Sidenote: One-sided or inverted theories about it.]\n\nPlato, who gave eloquent expression to the ideal burden of the passion,\nand divined its political and cosmic message, passed over its natural\nhistory with a few mythical fancies; and Schopenhauer, into whose\nsystem a naturalistic treatment would have fitted so easily, allowed his\nmetaphysics to carry him at this point into verbal inanities; while, of\ncourse, like all profane writers on the subject, he failed to appreciate\nthe oracles which Plato had delivered. In popular feeling, where\nsentiment and observation must both make themselves felt somehow or\nother, the tendency is to imagine that love is an absolute, non-natural\nenergy which, for some unknown reason, or for none at all, lights upon\nparticular persons, and rests there eternally, as on its ultimate goal.\nIn other words, it makes the origin of love divine and its object\nnatural: which is the exact opposite of the truth. If it were once seen,\nhowever, that every ideal expresses some natural function, and that no\nnatural function is incapable, in its free exercise, of evolving some\nideal and finding justification, not in some collateral animal, but in\nan inherent operation like life or thought, which being transmissible in\nits form is also eternal, then the philosophy of love should not prove\npermanently barren. For love is a brilliant illustration of a principle\neverywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the\nfriction of material forces into the light of ideal goods. There can be\nno philosophic interest in disguising the animal basis of love, or in\ndenying its spiritual sublimations, since all life is animal in its\norigin and all spiritual in its possible fruits.\n\n[Sidenote: Sexual functions its basis.]\n\nPlastic matter, in transmitting its organisation, takes various courses\nwhich it is the part of natural history to describe. Even after\nreproduction has become sexual, it will offer no basis for love if it\ndoes not require a union of the two parent bodies. Did germinal\nsubstances, unconsciously diffused, meet by chance in the external\nmedium and unite there, it is obvious that whatever obsessions or\npleasures maturity might bring they would not have the quality which men\ncall love. But when an individual of the opposite sex must be met with,\nrecognised, and pursued, and must prove responsive, then each is haunted\nby the possible other. Each feels in a generic way the presence and\nattraction of his fellows; he vibrates to their touch, he dreams of\ntheir image, he is restless and wistful if alone. When the vague need\nthat solicits him is met by the presence of a possible mate it is\nextraordinarily kindled. Then, if it reaches fruition, it subsides\nimmediately, and after an interval, perhaps, of stupor and vital\nrecuperation, the animal regains his independence, his peace, and his\nimpartial curiosity. You might think him on the way to becoming\nintelligent; but the renewed nutrition and cravings of the sexual\nmachinery soon engross his attention again; all his sprightly\nindifference vanishes before nature\u2019s categorical imperative. That\nfierce and turbid pleasure, by which his obedience is rewarded, hastens\nhis dissolution; every day the ensuing lassitude and emptiness give him\na clearer premonition of death. It is not figuratively only that his\nsoul has passed into his offspring. The vocation to produce them was a\nchief part of his being, and when that function is sufficiently\nfulfilled he is superfluous in the world and becomes partly superfluous\neven to himself. The confines of his dream are narrowed. He moves\napathetically and dies forlorn.\n\nSome echo of the vital rhythm which pervades not merely the generations\nof animals, but the seasons and the stars, emerges sometimes in\nconsciousness; on reaching the tropics in the mortal ecliptic, which the\nhuman individual may touch many times without much change in his outer\nfortunes, the soul may occasionally divine that it is passing through a\nsupreme crisis. Passion, when vehement, may bring atavistic sentiments.\nWhen love is absolute it feels a profound impulse to welcome death, and\neven, by a transcendental confusion, to invoke the end of the\nuniverse.[B] The human soul reverts at such a moment to what an\nephemeral insect might feel, buzzing till it finds its mate in the noon.\nIts whole destiny was wooing, and, that mission accomplished, it sings\nits _Nunc dimittis_, renouncing heartily all irrelevant things, now that\nthe one fated and all-satisfying good has been achieved. Where parental\ninstincts exist also, nature soon shifts her loom: a milder impulse\nsucceeds, and a satisfaction of a gentler sort follows in the birth of\nchildren. The transcendental illusion is here corrected, and it is seen\nthat the extinction the lovers had accepted needed not to be complete.\nThe death they welcomed was not without its little resurrection. The\nfeeble worm they had generated bore their immortality within it.\n\nThe varieties of sexual economy are many and to each may correspond, for\nall we know, a special sentiment. Sometimes the union established is\nintermittent; sometimes it crowns the end of life and dissolves it\naltogether; sometimes it remains, while it lasts, monogamous; sometimes\nthe sexual and social alertness is constant in the male, only periodic\nin the female. Sometimes the group established for procreation endures\nthroughout the seasons, and from year to year; sometimes the males herd\ntogether, as if normally they preferred their own society, until the\ntime of rut comes, when war arises between them for the possession of\nwhat they have just discovered to be the fair.\n\n[Sidenote: Structure the ground of faculty and faculty of duty.]\n\nA naturalist not ashamed to indulge his poetic imagination might easily\npaint for us the drama of these diverse loves. It suffices for our\npurpose to observe that the varying passions and duties which life can\ncontain depend upon the organic functions of the animal. A fish\nincapable of coition, absolved from all care for its young, which it\nnever sees or never distinguishes from the casual swimmers darting\nacross its path, such a fish, being without social faculties or calls to\nco-operation, cannot have the instincts, perceptions, or emotions which\nbelong to social beings. A male of some higher species that feels only\nonce a year the sudden solicitations of love cannot be sentimental in\nall the four seasons: his head-long passion, exhausted upon its present\nobject and dismissed at once without remainder, leaves his senses\nperfectly free and colourless to scrutinise his residual world. Whatever\nfurther fears or desires may haunt him will have nothing mystical or\nsentimental about them. He will be a man of business all the year round,\nand a lover only on May-day. A female that does not suffice for the\nrearing of her young will expect and normally receive her mate\u2019s aid\nlong after the pleasures of love are forgotten by him. Disinterested\nfidelity on his part will then be her right and his duty. But a female\nthat, once pregnant, needs, like the hen, no further co-operation on the\nmale\u2019s part will turn from him at once with absolute indifference to\nbrood perpetually on her eggs, undisturbed by the least sense of\nsolitude or jealousy. And the chicks that at first follow her and find\nshelter under her wings will soon be forgotten also and relegated to the\nmechanical landscape. There is no pain in the timely snapping of the\ndearest bonds where society has not become a permanent organism, and\nperpetual friendship is not one of its possible modes.\n\nTranscendent and ideal passions may well judge themselves to have an\nincomparable dignity. Yet that dignity is hardly more than what every\npassion, were it articulate, would assign to itself and to its objects.\nThe dumbness of a passion may accordingly, from one point of view, be\ncalled the index of its baseness; for if it cannot ally itself with\nideas its affinities can hardly lie in the rational mind nor its\nadvocates be among the poets. But if we listen to the master-passion\nitself rather than to the loquacious arts it may have enlisted in its\nservice, we shall understand that it is not self-condemned because it is\nsilent, nor an anomaly in nature because inharmonious with human life.\nThe fish\u2019s heartlessness is his virtue; the male bee\u2019s lasciviousness is\nhis vocation; and if these functions were retrenched or encumbered in\norder to assimilate them to human excellence they would be merely\ndislocated. We should not produce virtue where there was vice, but\ndefeat a possible arrangement which would have had its own vitality and\norder.\n\n[Sidenote: Glory of animal love.]\n\nAnimal love is a marvellous force; and while it issues in acts that may\nbe followed by a revulsion of feeling, it yet deserves a more\nsympathetic treatment than art and morals have known how to accord it.\nErotic poets, to hide their want of ability to make the dumb passion\nspeak, have played feebly with veiled insinuations and comic effects;\nwhile more serious sonneteers have harped exclusively on secondary and\nsomewhat literary emotions, abstractly conjugating the verb to love.\nLucretius, in spite of his didactic turns, has been on this subject,\ntoo, the most ingenuous and magnificent of poets, although he chose to\nconfine his description to the external history of sexual desire. It is\na pity that he did not turn, with his sublime sincerity, to the inner\nside of it also, and write the drama of the awakened senses, the\npoignant suasion of beauty, when it clouds the brain, and makes the\nconventional earth, seen through that bright haze, seem a sorry fable.\nWestern poets should not have despised what the Orientals, in their\nfugitive stanzas, seem often to have sung most exquisitely: the joy of\ngazing on the beloved, of following or being followed, of tacit\nunderstandings and avowals, of flight together into some solitude to\npeople it with those ineffable confidences which so naturally follow the\noutward proofs of love. All this makes the brightest page of many a\nlife, the only bright page in the thin biography of many a human animal;\nwhile if the beasts could speak they would give us, no doubt, endless\nversions of the only joy in which, as we may fancy, the blood of the\nuniverse flows consciously through their hearts.\n\nThe darkness which conventionally covers this passion is one of the\nsaddest consequences of Adam\u2019s fall. It was a terrible misfortune in\nman\u2019s development that he should not have been able to acquire the\nhigher functions without deranging the lower. Why should the depths of\nhis being be thus polluted and the most delightful of nature\u2019s mysteries\nbe an occasion not for communion with her, as it should have remained,\nbut for depravity and sorrow?\n\n[Sidenote: Its degradation when instincts become numerous and\ncompetitive.]\n\nThis question, asked in moral perplexity, admits of a scientific answer.\nMan, in becoming more complex, becomes less stably organised. His sexual\ninstinct, instead of being intermittent, but violent and boldly\ndeclared, becomes practically constant, but is entangled in many\ncross-currents of desire, in many other equally imperfect adaptations of\nstructure to various ends. Indulgence in any impulse can then easily\nbecome excessive and thwart the rest; for it may be aroused artificially\nand maintained from without, so that in turn it disturbs its neighbours.\nSometimes the sexual instinct may be stimulated out of season by\nexample, by a too wakeful fancy, by language, by pride\u2014for all these\nforces are now working in the same field and intermingling their\nsuggestions. At the same time the same instinct may derange others, and\nmake them fail at their proper and pressing occasions.\n\n[Sidenote: Moral censure provoked.]\n\nIn consequence of such derangements, reflection and public opinion will\ncome to condemn what in itself was perfectly innocent. The corruption of\na given instinct by others and of others by it, becomes the ground for\nlong attempts to suppress or enslave it. With the haste and formalism\nnatural to language and to law, external and arbitrary limits are set to\nits operation. As no inward adjustment can possibly correspond to these\nconventional barriers and compartments of life, a war between nature and\nmorality breaks out both in society and in each particular bosom\u2014a war\nin which every victory is a sorrow and every defeat a dishonour. As one\ninstinct after another becomes furious or disorganised, cowardly or\ncriminal, under these artificial restrictions, the public and private\nconscience turns against it all its forces, necessarily without much\nnice discrimination; the frank passions of youth are met with a grimace\nof horror on all sides, with _rumores senum severiorum_, with an\ninsistence on reticence and hypocrisy. Such suppression is favourable to\ncorruption: the fancy with a sort of idiotic ingenuity comes to supply\nthe place of experience; and nature is rendered vicious and overlaid\nwith pruriency, artifice, and the love of novelty. Hereupon the\nauthorities that rule in such matters naturally redouble their vigilance\nand exaggerate their reasonable censure: chastity begins to seem\nessentially holy and perpetual virginity ends by becoming an absolute\nideal. Thus the disorder in man\u2019s life and disposition, when grown\nintolerable, leads him to condemn the very elements out of which order\nmight have been constituted, and to mistake his total confusion for his\ntotal depravity.\n\n[Sidenote: The heart alienated from the world.]\n\nBanished from the open day, covered with mockery, and publicly ignored,\nthis necessary pleasure flourishes none the less in dark places and in\nthe secret soul. Its familiar presence there, its intimate habitation in\nwhat is most oneself, helps to cut the world in two and to separate the\ninner from the outer life. In that mysticism which cannot disguise its\nerotic affinities this disruption reaches an absolute and theoretic\nform; but in many a youth little suspected of mysticism it produces\nestrangement from the conventional moralising world, which he\ninstinctively regards as artificial and alien. It prepares him for\nexcursions into a private fairy-land in which unthought-of joys will\nblossom amid friendlier magic forces. The truly good then seems to be\nthe fantastic, the sensuous, the prodigally unreal. He gladly forgets\nthe dreary world he lives in to listen for a thousand and one nights to\nhis dreams.\n\n[Sidenote: Childish ideals.]\n\nThis is the region where those who have no conception of the Life of\nReason place the ideal; and an ideal is indeed there but the ideal of a\nsingle and inordinate impulse. A rational mind, on the contrary, moves\nby preference in the real world, cultivating all human interests in due\nproportion. The love-sick and luxurious dream-land dear to irrational\npoets is a distorted image of the ideal world; but this distortion has\nstill an ideal motive, since it is made to satisfy the cravings of a\nforgotten part of the soul and to make a home for those elements in\nhuman nature which have been denied overt existence. If the ideal is\nmeantime so sadly caricatured, the fault lies with the circumstances of\nlife that have not allowed the sane will adequate exercise. Lack of\nstrength and of opportunity makes it impossible for man to preserve all\nhis interests in a just harmony; and his conscious ideal, springing up\nas it too often does in protest against suffering and tyranny, has not\nscope and range enough to include the actual opportunities for action.\nNature herself, by making a slave of the body, has thus made a tyrant of\nthe soul.\n\n[Sidenote: Their light all focussed on the object of love.]\n\nFairy-land and a mystical heaven contain many other factors besides that\nfurnished by unsatisfied and objectless love. All sensuous and verbal\nimages may breed after their own kind in an empty brain; but these\nfantasies are often supported and directed by sexual longings and\nvaguely luxurious thoughts. An Oriental Paradise, with its delicate but\nmindless \u00e6stheticism, is above everything a garden for love. To brood\non such an Elysium is a likely prelude and fertile preparation for\nromantic passion. When the passion takes form it calls fancy back from\nits loose reveries and fixes it upon a single object. Then the ideal\nseems at last to have been brought down to earth. Its embodiment has\nbeen discovered amongst the children of men. Imagination narrows her\nrange. Instead of all sorts of flatteries to sense and improbable\ndelicious adventures, the lover imagines but a single joy: to be master\nof his love in body and soul. Jealousy pursues him. Even if he dreads no\nphysical betrayal, he suffers from terror and morbid sensitiveness at\nevery hint of mental estrangement.\n\n[Sidenote: Three environments for love.]\n\nThis attachment is often the more absorbing the more unaccountable it\nseems; and as in hypnotism the subject is dead to all influences but\nthat of the operator, so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to\nthe one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not\nselected; it is recognised and obeyed. Pre-arranged reactions in the\nsystem respond to whatever stimulus, at a propitious moment, happens to\nbreak through and arouse them pervasively. Nature has opened various\navenues to that passion in whose successful operation she has so much at\nstake. Sometimes the magic influence asserts itself suddenly, sometimes\ngently and unawares. One approach, which in poetry has usurped more\nthan its share of attention, is through beauty; another, less glorious,\nbut often more efficacious, through surprised sense and premonitions of\npleasure; a third through social sympathy and moral affinities.\nContemplation, sense, and association are none of them the essence nor\neven the seed of love; but any of them may be its soil and supply it\nwith a propitious background. It would be mere sophistry to pretend, for\ninstance, that love is or should be nothing but a moral bond, the\nsympathy of two kindred spirits or the union of two lives. For such an\neffect no passion would be needed, as none is needed to perceive beauty\nor to feel pleasure.\n\nWhat Aristotle calls friendships of utility, pleasure, or virtue, all\nresting on common interests of some impersonal sort, are far from\npossessing the quality of love, its thrill, flutter, and absolute sway\nover happiness and misery. But it may well fall to such influences to\nawaken or feed the passion where it actually arises. Whatever\ncircumstances pave the way, love does not itself appear until a sexual\naffinity is declared. When a woman, for instance, contemplating\nmarriage, asks herself whether she really loves her suitor or merely\naccepts him, the test is the possibility of awakening a sexual affinity.\nFor this reason women of the world often love their husbands more truly\nthan they did their lovers, because marriage has evoked an elementary\nfeeling which before lay smothered under a heap of coquetries,\nvanities, and conventions.\n\n[Sidenote: Subjectivity of the passion.]\n\nMan, on the contrary, is polygamous by instinct, although often kept\nfaithful by habit no less than by duty. If his fancy is left free, it is\napt to wander. We observe this in romantic passion no less than in a\nlife of mere gallantry and pleasure. Sentimental illusions may become a\nhabit, and the shorter the dream is the more often it is repeated, so\nthat any susceptible poet may find that he, like Alfred de Musset, \u201cmust\nlove incessantly, who once has loved.\u201d Love is indeed much less exacting\nthan it thinks itself. Nine-tenths of its cause are in the lover, for\none-tenth that may be in the object. Were the latter not accidentally at\nhand, an almost identical passion would probably have been felt for\nsomeone else; for although with acquaintance the quality of an\nattachment naturally adapts itself to the person loved, and makes that\nperson its standard and ideal, the first assault and mysterious glow of\nthe passion is much the same for every object. What really affects the\ncharacter of love is the lover\u2019s temperament, age, and experience. The\nobjects that appeal to each man reveal his nature; but those\nunparalleled virtues and that unique divinity which the lover discovers\nthere are reflections of his own adoration, things that ecstasy is very\ncunning in. He loves what he imagines and worships what he creates.\n\n[Sidenote: Machinery regulating choice.]\n\nThose who do not consider these matters so curiously may feel that to\nrefer love in this way chiefly to inner processes is at once ignominious\nand fantastic. But nothing could be more natural; the soul accurately\nrenders, in this experience, what is going on in the body and in the\nrace. Nature had a problem to solve in sexual reproduction which would\nhave daunted a less ruthless experimenter. She had to bring together\nautomatically, and at the dictation, as they felt, of their\nirresponsible wills, just the creatures that by uniting might reproduce\nthe species. The complete sexual reaction had to be woven together out\nof many incomplete reactions to various stimuli, reactions not\nspecifically sexual. The outer senses had to be engaged, and many\nsecondary characters found in bodies had to be used to attract\nattention, until the deeper instinctive response should have time to\ngather itself together and assert itself openly. Many mechanical\npreformations and reflexes must conspire to constitute a determinate\ninstinct. We name this instinct after its ultimate function, looking\nforward to the uses we observe it to have; and it seems to us in\nconsequence an inexplicable anomaly that many a time the instinct is set\nin motion when its alleged purpose cannot be fulfilled; as when love\nappears prematurely or too late, or fixes upon a creature of the wrong\nage or sex. These anomalies show us how nature is built up and, far from\nbeing inexplicable, are hints that tend to make everything clear, when\nonce a verbal and mythical philosophy has been abandoned.\n\nResponses which we may call sexual in view of results to which they may\nultimately lead are thus often quite independent, and exist before they\nare drawn into the vortex of a complete and actually generative act.\nExternal stimulus and present idea will consequently be altogether\ninadequate to explain the profound upheaval which may ensue, if, as we\nsay, we actually fall in love. That the senses should be played upon is\nnothing, if no deeper reaction is aroused. All depends on the juncture\nat which, so to speak, the sexual circuit is completed and the emotional\ncurrents begin to circulate. Whatever object, at such a critical moment,\nfills the field of consciousness becomes a signal and associate for the\nwhole sexual mood. It is breathlessly devoured in that pause and\nconcentration of attention, that rearrangement of the soul, which love\nis conceived in; and the whole new life which that image is engulfed in\nis foolishly supposed to be its effect. For the image is in\nconsciousness, but not the profound predispositions which gave it place\nand power.\n\n[Sidenote: The choice unstable.]\n\nThis association between passion and its signals may be merely\nmomentary, or it may be perpetual: a Don Juan and a Dante are both\ngenuine lovers. In a gay society the gallant addresses every woman as if\nshe charmed him, and perhaps actually finds any kind of beauty, or mere\nfemininity anywhere, a sufficient spur to his desire. These momentary\nfascinations are not necessarily false: they may for an instant be quite\nabsorbing and irresistible; they may genuinely suffuse the whole mind.\nSuch mercurial fire will indeed require a certain imaginative\ntemperament; and there are many persons who, short of a life-long\ndomestic attachment, can conceive of nothing but sordid vice. But even\nan inconstant flame may burn brightly, if the soul is naturally\ncombustible. Indeed these sparks and glints of passion, just because\nthey come and vary so quickly, offer admirable illustrations of it, in\nwhich it may be viewed, so to speak, under the microscope and in its\nformative stage.\n\nThus Plato did not hesitate to make the love of all wines, under\nwhatever guise, excuse, or occasion, the test of a true taste for wine\nand an unfeigned adoration of Bacchus; and, like Lucretius after him, he\nwittily compiled a list of names, by which the lover will flatter the\nmost opposite qualities, if they only succeed in arousing his\ninclination. To be omnivorous is one pole of true love: to be exclusive\nis the other. A man whose heart, if I may say so, lies deeper, hidden\nunder a thicker coat of mail, will have less play of fancy, and will be\nfar from finding every charm charming, or every sort of beauty a\nstimulus to love. Yet he may not be less prone to the tender passion,\nand when once smitten may be so penetrated by an unimagined tenderness\nand joy, that he will declare himself incapable of ever loving again,\nand may actually be so. Having no rivals and a deeper soil, love can\nripen better in such a constant spirit; it will not waste itself in a\ncontinual patter of little pleasures and illusions. But unless the\npassion of it is to die down, it must somehow assert its universality:\nwhat it loses in diversity it must gain in applicability. It must become\na principle of action and an influence colouring everything that is\ndreamt of; otherwise it would have lost its dignity and sunk into a dead\nmemory or a domestic bond.\n\n[Sidenote: Instinctive essence of love.]\n\nTrue love, it used to be said, is love at first sight. Manners have much\nto do with such incidents, and the race which happens to set, at a given\ntime, the fashion in literature makes its temperament public and\nexercises a sort of contagion over all men\u2019s fancies. If women are\nrarely seen and ordinarily not to be spoken to; if all imagination has\nto build upon is a furtive glance or casual motion, people fall in love\nat first sight. For they must fall in love somehow, and any stimulus is\nenough if none more powerful is forthcoming. When society, on the\ncontrary, allows constant and easy intercourse between the sexes, a\nfirst impression, if not reinforced, will soon be hidden and obliterated\nby others. Acquaintance becomes necessary for love when it is necessary\nfor memory. But what makes true love is not the information conveyed by\nacquaintance, not any circumstantial charms that may be therein\ndiscovered; it is still a deep and dumb instinctive affinity, an\ninexplicable emotion seizing the heart, an influence organising the\nworld, like a luminous crystal, about one magic point. So that although\nlove seldom springs up suddenly in these days into anything like a\nfull-blown passion, it is sight, it is presence, that makes in time a\nconquest over the heart; for all virtues, sympathies, confidences will\nfail to move a man to tenderness and to worship, unless a poignant\neffluence from the object envelop him, so that he begins to walk, as it\nwere, in a dream.\n\nNot to believe in love is a great sign of dulness. There are some people\nso indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection must rest\non circumstantial evidence. But a finely constituted being is sensitive\nto its deepest affinities. This is precisely what refinement consists\nin, that we may feel in things immediate and infinitesimal a sure\npremonition of things ultimate and important. Fine senses vibrate at\nonce to harmonies which it may take long to verify; so sight is finer\nthan touch, and thought than sensation. Well-bred instinct meets reason\nhalf-way, and is prepared for the consonances that may follow. Beautiful\nthings, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.\nThe grounds we may bring ourselves to assign for our preferences are\ndiscovered by analysing those preferences, and articulate judgments\nfollow upon emotions which they ought to express, but which they\nsometimes sophisticate. So, too, the reasons we give for love either\nexpress what it feels or else are insincere, attempting to justify at\nthe bar of reason and convention something which is far more primitive\nthan they and underlies them both. True instinct can dispense with such\nexcuses. It appeals to the event and is justified by the response which\nnature makes to it. It is, of course, far from infallible; it cannot\ndominate circumstances, and has no discursive knowledge; but it is\npresumably true, and what it foreknows is always essentially possible.\nUnrealisable it may indeed be in the jumbled context of this world,\nwhere the Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single\nline to stand perfect and unmarred.\n\nThe profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though a\nthousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remain\na background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out we\nsucceed. If we put them by, although in other respects we may call\nourselves happy, we inwardly know that we have dismissed the ideal, and\nall that was essentially possible has not been realised. Love in that\ncase still owns a hidden and potential object, and we sanctify, perhaps,\nwhatever kindnesses or partialities we indulge in by a secret loyalty to\nsomething impersonal and unseen. Such reserve, such religion, would not\nhave been necessary had things responded to our first expectations. We\nmight then have identified the ideal with the object that happened to\ncall it forth. The Life of Reason might have been led instinctively, and\nwe might have been guided by nature herself into the ways of peace.\n\n[Sidenote: Its ideality.]\n\nAs it is, circumstances, false steps, or the mere lapse of time, force\nus to shuffle our affections and take them as they come, or as we are\nsuffered to indulge them. A mother is followed by a boyish friend, a\nfriend by a girl, a girl by a wife, a wife by a child, a child by an\nidea. A divinity passes through these various temples; they may all\nremain standing, and we may continue our cult in them without outward\nchange, long after the god has fled from the last into his native\nheaven. We may try to convince ourselves that we have lost nothing when\nwe have lost all. We may take comfort in praising the mixed and\nperfunctory attachments which cling to us by force of habit and duty,\nrepeating the empty names of creatures that have long ceased to be what\nwe once could love, and assuring ourselves that we have remained\nconstant, without admitting that the world, which is in irreparable\nflux, has from the first been betraying us.\n\nAshamed of being so deeply deceived, we may try to smile cynically at\nthe glory that once shone upon us, and call it a dream. But cynicism is\nwasted on the ideal. There is indeed no idol ever identified with the\nideal which honest experience, even without cynicism, will not some day\nunmask and discredit. Every real object must cease to be what it seemed,\nand none could ever be what the whole soul desired. Yet what the soul\ndesires is nothing arbitrary. Life is no objectless dream, but\ncontinually embodies, with varying success, the potentialities it\ncontains and that prompt desire. Everything that satisfies at all, even\nif partially and for an instant, justifies aspiration and rewards it.\nExistence, however, cannot be arrested; and only the transmissible forms\nof things can endure, to match the transmissible faculties which living\nbeings hand down to one another. The ideal is accordingly significant,\nperpetual, and as constant as the nature it expresses; but it can never\nitself exist, nor can its particular embodiments endure.\n\n[Sidenote: Its universal scope.]\n\nLove is accordingly only half an illusion; the lover, but not his love,\nis deceived. His madness, as Plato taught, is divine; for though it be\nfolly to identify the idol with the god, faith in the god is inwardly\njustified. That egregious idolatry may therefore be interpreted ideally\nand given a symbolic scope worthy of its natural causes and of the\nmystery it comes to celebrate. The lover knows much more about absolute\ngood and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the\nlatter, too, be lovers in disguise. Logical universals are terms in\ndiscourse, without vital ideality, while traditional gods are at best\nnatural existences, more or less indifferent facts. What the lover comes\nupon, on the contrary, is truly persuasive, and witnesses to itself, so\nthat he worships from the heart and beholds what he worships. That the\ntrue object is no natural being, but an ideal form essentially eternal\nand capable of endless embodiments, is far from abolishing its worth; on\nthe contrary, this fact makes love ideally relevant to generation, by\nwhich the human soul and body may be for ever renewed, and at the same\ntime makes it a thing for large thoughts to be focussed upon, a thing\nrepresenting all rational aims.\n\nWhenever this ideality is absent and a lover sees nothing in his\nmistress but what everyone else may find in her, loving her honestly in\nher unvarnished and accidental person, there is a friendly and humorous\naffection, admirable in itself, but no passion or bewitchment of love;\nshe is a member of his group, not a spirit in his pantheon. Such an\naffection may be altogether what it should be; it may bring a happiness\nall the more stable because the heart is quite whole, and no divine\nshaft has pierced it. It is hard to stanch wounds inflicted by a god.\nThe glance of an ideal love is terrible and glorious, foreboding death\nand immortality together. Love could not be called divine without\nplatitude if it regarded nothing but its nominal object; to be divine it\nmust not envisage an accidental good but the principle of goodness, that\nwhich gives other goods their ultimate meaning, and makes all functions\nuseful. Love is a true natural religion; it has a visible cult, it is\nkindled by natural beauties and bows to the best symbol it may find for\nits hope; it sanctifies a natural mystery; and, finally, when\nunderstood, it recognises that what it worshipped under a figure was\ntruly the principle of all good.\n\nThe loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations. Love would never\ntake so high a flight unless it sprung from something profound and\nelementary. It is accordingly most truly love when it is irresistible\nand fatal. The substance of all passion, if we could gather it together,\nwould be the basis of all ideals, to which all goods would have to\nrefer. Love actually accomplishes something of the sort; being\nprimordial it underlies other demands, and can be wholly satisfied only\nby a happiness which is ultimate and comprehensive. Lovers are vividly\naware of this fact: their ideal, apparently so inarticulate, seems to\nthem to include everything. It shares the mystical quality of all\nprimitive life. Sophisticated people can hardly understand how vague\nexperience is at bottom, and how truly that vagueness supports whatever\nclearness is afterward attained. They cling to the notion that nothing\ncan have a spiritual scope that does not spring from reflection. But in\nthat case life itself, which brings reflection about, would never\nsupport spiritual interests, and all that is moral would be unnatural\nand consequently self-destructive. In truth, all spiritual interests\nare supported by animal life; in this the generative function is\nfundamental; and it is therefore no paradox, but something altogether\nfitting, that if that function realised all it comprises, nothing human\nwould remain outside. Such an ultimate fulfilment would differ, of\ncourse, from a first satisfaction, just as all that reproduction\nreproduces differs from the reproductive function itself, and vastly\nexceeds it. All organs and activities which are inherited, in a sense,\ngrow out of the reproductive process and serve to clothe it; so that\nwhen the generative energy is awakened all that can ever be is virtually\ncalled up and, so to speak, made consciously potential; and love yearns\nfor the universe of values.\n\n[Sidenote: Its euthanasia.]\n\nThis secret is gradually revealed to those who are inwardly attentive\nand allow love to teach them something. A man who has truly loved,\nthough he may come to recognise the thousand incidental illusions into\nwhich love may have led him, will not recant its essential faith. He\nwill keep his sense for the ideal and his power to worship. The further\nobjects by which these gifts will be entertained will vary with the\nsituation. A philosopher, a soldier, and a courtesan will express the\nsame religion in different ways. In fortunate cases love may glide\nimperceptibly into settled domestic affections, giving them henceforth a\ntouch of ideality; for when love dies in the odour of sanctity people\nvenerate his relics. In other cases allegiance to the ideal may appear\nmore sullenly, breaking out in whims, or in little sentimental practices\nwhich might seem half-conventional. Again it may inspire a religious\nconversion, charitable works, or even artistic labours. In all these\nways people attempt more or less seriously to lead the Life of Reason,\nexpressing outwardly allegiance to whatever in their minds has come to\nstand for the ideal. If to create was love\u2019s impulse originally, to\ncreate is its effort still, after it has been chastened and has received\nsome rational extension. The machinery which serves reproduction thus\nfinds kindred but higher uses, as every organ does in a liberal life;\nand what Plato called a desire for birth in beauty may be sublimated\neven more, until it yearns for an ideal immortality in a transfigured\nworld, a world made worthy of that love which its children have so often\nlavished on it in their dreams.\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[Footnote A: The wide uses of the English word love add to the\ndifficulty. I shall take the liberty of limiting the term here to\nimaginative passion, to being in love, excluding all other ways of\nloving. It follows that love\u2014like its shadow, jealousy\u2014will often be\nmerely an ingredient in an actual state of feeling; friendship and\nconfidence, with satisfaction at being liked in return, will often be\nmingled with it. We shall have to separate physiologically things which\nin consciousness exist undivided, since a philosophic description is\nbound to be analytic and cannot render everything at once. Where a poet\nmight conceive a new composite, making it live, a moralist must dissect\nthe experience and rest in its eternal elements.]\n\n[Footnote B: One example, among a thousand, is the cry of Siegfried and\nBr\u00fcnhilde in Wagner:\n\n  Lachend lass\u2019 uns verderben\n  Lachend zu Grunde geh\u2019n.\n  Fahr hin, Walhall\u2019s\n  Leuchtende Welt!...\n  Leb\u2019 wohl, pragende\n  G\u00f6tter Pracht!\n  Ende in Wonne,\n  Du ewig Geschlecht!]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER II\n\nTHE FAMILY\n\n\n[Sidenote: The family arises spontaneously.]\n\nLove is but a prelude to life, an overture in which the theme of the\nimpending work is exquisitely hinted at, but which remains nevertheless\nonly a symbol and a promise. What is to follow, if all goes well, begins\npresently to appear. Passion settles down into possession, courtship\ninto partnership, pleasure into habit. A child, half mystery and half\nplaything, comes to show us what we have done and to make its\nconsequences perpetual. We see that by indulging our inclinations we\nhave woven about us a net from which we cannot escape: our choices,\nbearing fruit, begin to manifest our destiny. That life which once\nseemed to spread out infinitely before us is narrowed to one mortal\ncareer. We learn that in morals the infinite is a chimera, and that in\naccomplishing anything definite a man renounces everything else. He\nsails henceforth for one point of the compass.\n\n[Sidenote: It harmonises natural interests.]\n\nThe family is one of nature\u2019s masterpieces. It would be hard to conceive\na system of instincts more nicely adjusted, where the constituents\nshould represent or support one another better. The husband has an\ninterest in protecting the wife, she in serving the husband. The weaker\ngains in authority and safety, the wilder and more unconcerned finds a\nhelp-mate at home to take thought for his daily necessities. Parents\nlend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow\ntheir parents with a vicarious immortality.\n\n[Sidenote: Capacity to be educated goes with immaturity at birth.]\n\nThe long childhood in the human race has made it possible and needful to\ntransmit acquired experience: possible, because the child\u2019s brain, being\nimmature, allows instincts and habits to be formed after birth, under\nthe influence of that very environment in which they are to operate; and\nalso needful, since children are long incapable of providing for\nthemselves and compel their parents, if the race is not to die out, to\ncontinue their care, and to diversify it. To be born half-made is an\nimmense advantage. Structure performed is formed blindly; the _a priori_\nis as dangerous in life as in philosophy. Only the cruel workings of\ncompulsion and extermination keep what is spontaneous in any creature\nharmonious with the world it is called upon to live in. Nothing but\ncasual variations could permanently improve such a creature; and casual\nvariations will seldom improve it. But if experience can co-operate in\nforming instincts, and if human nature can be partly a work of art,\nmastery can be carried quickly to much greater lengths. This is the\nsecret of man\u2019s pre-eminence. His liquid brain is unfit for years to\ncontrol action advantageously. He has an age of play which is his\napprenticeship; and he is formed unawares by a series of selective\nexperiments, of curious gropings, while he is still under tutelage and\nsuffers little by his mistakes.\n\n[Sidenote: The naturally dull achieve intelligence.]\n\nHad all intelligence been developed in the womb, as it might have been,\nnothing essential could have been learned afterward. Mankind would have\ncontained nothing but doctrinaires, and the arts would have stood still\nfor ever. Capacity to learn comes with dependence on education; and as\nthat animal which at birth is most incapable and immature is the most\nteachable, so too those human races which are most precocious are most\nincorrigible, and while they seem the cleverest at first prove\nultimately the least intelligent. They depend less on circumstances, but\ndo not respond to them so well. In some nations everybody is by nature\nso astute, versatile, and sympathetic that education hardly makes any\ndifference in manners or mind; and it is there precisely that\ngeneration, follows generation without essential progress, and no one\never remakes himself on a better plan. It is perhaps the duller races,\nwith a long childhood and a brooding mind, that bear the hopes of the\nworld within them, if only nature avails to execute what she has planned\non so great a scale.\n\n[Sidenote: It is more blessed to save than to create.]\n\nGeneration answers no actual demand except that existing in the parents,\nand it establishes a new demand without guaranteeing its satisfaction.\nBirth is a benefit only problematically and by anticipation, on the\npresumption that the faculties newly embodied are to be exercised\nsuccessfully. The second function of the family, to rear, is therefore\nhigher than the first. To foster and perfect a life after it has been\nawakened, to co-operate with a will already launched into the world, is\na positive good work. It has a moral quality and is not mere vegetation;\nfor in expressing the agent and giving him ideal employment, it helps\nthe creature affected to employ itself better, too, and to find\nexpression. In propagating and sowing broadcast precarious beings there\nis fertility only, such as plants and animals may have; but there is\ncharity in furthering what is already rooted in existence and is\nstriving to live.\n\nThis principle is strikingly illustrated in religion. When the Jews had\nbecome spiritual they gave the name of Father to Jehovah, who had before\nbeen only the Lord of Armies or the architect of the cosmos. A mere\nsource of being would not deserve to be called father, unless it shared\nits creatures\u2019 nature and therefore their interests. A deity not so much\nresponsible for men\u2019s existence or situation as solicitous for their\nwelfare, who pitied a weakness he could not have intended and was\npleased by a love he could not command, might appropriately be called a\nfather. It then becomes possible to conceive moral intercourse and\nmutual loyalty between God and man, such as Hebrew religion so earnestly\ninsisted on; for both then have the same interests in the world and look\ntoward the same consummations. So the natural relations subsisting\nbetween parents and children become moral when it is not merely\nderivation that unites them, but community of purpose. The father then\nrepresents his children while they are under his tutelage, and afterward\nthey represent him, carrying on his arts and inheriting his mind.\n\n[Sidenote: Parental instinct regards childhood only.]\n\nThese arts in some cases are little more than retarded instincts,\nfaculties that ripen late and that manifest themselves without special\ninstruction when the system is mature. So a bird feeds her young until\nthey are fledged and can provide for themselves. Parental functions in\nsuch cases are limited to nursing the extremely young. This phase of the\ninstinct, being the most primitive and fundamental, is most to be relied\nupon even in man. Especially in the mother, care for the children\u2019s\nphysical well-being is unfailing to the end. She understands the\nvegetative soul, and the first lispings of sense and sentiment in the\nchild have an absorbing interest for her. In that region her skill and\ndelights are miracles of nature; but her insight and keenness gradually\nfade as the children grow older. Seldom is the private and ideal life\nof a young son or daughter a matter in which the mother shows particular\ntact or for which she has instinctive respect. Even rarer is any genuine\ncommunity in life and feeling between parents and their adult children.\nOften the parent\u2019s influence comes to be felt as a dead constraint, the\nmore cruel that it cannot be thrown off without unkindness; and what\nmakes the parents\u2019 claim at once unjust and pathetic is that it is\nfounded on passionate love for a remembered being, the child once wholly\ntheirs, that no longer exists in the man.\n\nTo train character and mind would seem to be a father\u2019s natural office,\nbut as a matter of fact he commonly delegates that task to society. The\nfledgling venturing for the first time into the air may learn of his\nfather and imitate his style of flight; but once launched into the open\nit will find the whole sky full of possible masters. The one ultimately\nchosen will not necessarily be the nearest; in reason it should be the\nmost congenial, from whom most can be learned. To choose an imitable\nhero is the boy\u2019s first act of freedom; his heart grows by finding its\nelective affinities, and it grows most away from home. It will grow also\nby returning there, when home has become a part of the world or a refuge\nfrom it; but even then the profoundest messages will come from religion\nand from solitary dreams. A consequence is that parental influence, to\nbe permanent, requires that the family should be hedged about with high\nbarriers and that the father he endowed with political and religious\nauthority. He can then exercise the immense influence due to all\ntradition, which he represents, and all law, which he administers; but\nit is not his bare instincts as a father that give him this ascendency.\nIt is a social system that has delegated to him most of its functions,\nso that all authority flows through him, and he retails justice and\nknowledge, besides holding all wealth in his hand. When the father,\napart from these official prerogatives, is eager and able to mould his\nchildren\u2019s minds, a new relation half natural and half ideal, which is\nfriendship, springs up between father and son. In this ties of blood\nmerely furnish the opportunity, and what chiefly counts is a moral\nimpulse, on the one side, to beget children in the spirit, and on the\nother a youthful hunger for experience and ideas.\n\n[Sidenote: Handing on the torch of life.]\n\nIf _Nunc dimittis_ is a psalm for love to sing, it is even more\nappropriate for parental piety. On seeing heirs and representatives of\nours already in the world, we are inclined to give them place and trust\nthem to realise our foiled ambitions. They, we fancy, will be more\nfortunate than we; we shall have screened them from whatever has most\nmaimed our own lives. Their purer souls, as we imagine, will reach\nbetter things than are now possible to ours, distracted and abused so\nlong. We commit the blotted manuscript of our lives more willingly to\nthe flames, when we find the immortal text already half engrossed in a\nfairer copy. In all this there is undoubtedly a measure of illusion,\nsince little clear improvement is ordinarily possible in the world, and\nwhile our children may improve upon us in some respects, the devil will\ncatch them unprepared in another quarter. Yet the hope in question is a\ntranscript of primary impersonal functions to which nature, at certain\nlevels, limits the animal will. To keep life going was, in the\nbeginning, the sole triumph of life. Even when nothing but reproduction\nwas aimed at or attained, existence was made possible and ideally stable\nby securing so much; and when the ideal was enlarged so as to include\ntraining and rearing the new generation, life was even better intrenched\nand protected. Though further material progress may not be made easier\nby this development, since more dangers become fatal as beings grow\ncomplex and mutually dependent, a great step in moral progress has at\nany rate been taken.\n\nIn itself, a desire to see a child grow and prosper is just as\nirrational as any other absolute desire; but since the child also\ndesires his own happiness, the child\u2019s will sanctions and supports the\nfather\u2019s. Thus two irrationalities, when they conspire, make one\nrational life. The father\u2019s instinct and sense of duty are now\nvindicated experimentally in the child\u2019s progress, while the son,\nbesides the joy of living, has the pious function of satisfying his\nparent\u2019s hopes. Even if life could achieve nothing more than this, it\nwould have reached something profoundly natural and perfectly ideal. In\npatriarchal ages men feel it is enough to have inherited their human\npatrimony, to have enjoyed it, and to hand it down unimpaired. He who is\nnot childless goes down to his grave in peace. Reason may afterward come\nto larger vistas and more spiritual aims, but the principle of love and\nresponsibility will not be altered. It will demand that wills be made\nharmonious and satisfactions compatible.\n\n[Sidenote: Adventitious functions assumed by the family.]\n\nLife is experimental, and whatever performs some necessary function, and\ncannot be discarded, is a safe nucleus for many a parasite, a\nstarting-point for many new experiments. So the family, in serving to\nkeep the race alive, becomes a point of departure for many institutions.\nIt assumes offices which might have been allotted to some other agency,\nhad not the family pre-empted them, profiting by its established\nauthority and annexing them to its domain. In no civilised community,\nfor instance, has the union of man and wife been limited to its barely\nnecessary period. It has continued after the family was reared and has\nremained life-long; it has commonly involved a common dwelling and\nreligion and often common friends and property. Again, the children\u2019s\nemancipation has been put off indefinitely. The Roman father had a\nperpetual jurisdiction and such absolute authority that, in the palmy\ndays of the Roman family, no other subsisted over it. He alone was a\ncitizen and responsible to the state, while his household were subject\nto him in law, as well as in property and religion. In simple rural\ncommunities the family has often been also the chief industrial unit,\nalmost all necessaries being produced under domestic economy.\n\n[Sidenote: Inertia in human nature.]\n\nNow the instincts and delights which nature associates with reproduction\ncannot stretch so far. Their magic fails, and the political and\nindustrial family, which still thinks itself natural, is in truth casual\nand conventional. There is no real instinct to protect those who can\nalready protect themselves; nor have they any profit in obeying nor, in\nthe end, any duty to do so. A _patria potestas_ much prolonged or\nextended is therefore an abuse and prolific in abuses. The chieftain\u2019s\nmind, not being ruled by paternal instincts, will pursue arbitrary\npersonal ends, and it is hardly to be expected that his own wealth or\npower or ideal interests will correspond with those of his subjects. The\ngovernment and supervision required by adults is what we call political;\nit should stretch over all families alike. To annex this political\ncontrol to fatherhood is to confess that social instinct is singularly\nbarren, and that the common mind is not plastic enough to devise new\norgans appropriate to the functions which a large society involves.\n\nAfter all, the family is an early expedient and in many ways\nirrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be\nnurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees,\nand if lovers had never been tied together by a bond less ethereal than\nideal passion, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a\ndivision of labour would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but\nit would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.\nFor we pay a high price for our conquests in this quarter, and the\nsweets of home are balanced not only by its tenderer sorrows, but by a\nthousand artificial prejudices, enmities, and restrictions. It takes\npatience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer\nunhappiness. Young men escape as soon as they can, at least in fancy,\ninto the wide world; all prophets are homeless and all inspired artists;\nphilosophers think out some communism or other, and monks put it in\npractice. There is indeed no more irrational ground for living together\nthan that we have sprung from the same loins. They say blood is thicker\nthan water; yet similar forces easily compete while dissimilar forces\nmay perhaps co-operate. It is the end that is sacred, not the beginning.\nA common origin unites reasonable creatures only if it involves common\nthoughts and purposes; and these may bind together individuals of the\nmost remote races and ages, when once they have discovered one another.\nIt is difficulties of access, ignorance, and material confinement that\nshut in the heart to its narrow loyalties; and perhaps greater mobility,\nscience, and the mingling of nations will one day reorganise the moral\nworld. It was a pure spokesman of the spirit who said that whosoever\nshould do the will of his _Father who was in heaven_, the same was his\nbrother and sister and mother.\n\n[Sidenote: Family tyrannies.]\n\nThe family also perpetuates accidental social differences, exaggerating\nand making them hereditary; it thus defeats that just moiety of the\ndemocratic ideal which demands that all men should have equal\nopportunities. In human society chance only decides what education a man\nshall receive, what wealth and influence he shall enjoy, even what\nreligion and profession he shall adopt. People shudder at the system of\ncastes which prevails in India; but is not every family a little caste?\nWas a man assigned to his family because he belonged to it in spirit, or\ncan he choose another? Half the potentialities in the human race are\nthus stifled, half its incapacities fostered and made inveterate. The\nfamily, too, is largely responsible for the fierce prejudices that\nprevail about women, about religion, about seemly occupations, about\nwar, death, and honour. In all these matters men judge in a blind way,\ninspired by a feminine passion that has no mercy for anything that\neludes the traditional household, not even for its members\u2019 souls.\n\n[Sidenote: Difficulty in abstracting from the family.]\n\nAt the same time there are insuperable difficulties in proposing any\nsubstitute for the family. In the first place, all society at present\nrests on this institution, so that we cannot easily discern which of our\nhabits and sentiments are parcels of it, and which are attached to it\nadventitiously and have an independent basis. A reformer hewing so near\nto the tree\u2019s root never knows how much he may be felling. Possibly his\nown ideal would lose its secret support if what it condemns had wholly\ndisappeared. For instance, it is conceivable that a communist,\nabolishing the family in order to make opportunities equal and remove\nthe more cruel injustices of fortune, might be drying up that milk of\nhuman kindness which had fed his own enthusiasm; for the foundlings\nwhich he decreed were to people the earth might at once disown all\nsocialism and prove a brood of inhuman egoists. Or, as not wholly\ncontemptible theories have maintained, it might happen that if fathers\nwere relieved of care for their children and children of all paternal\nsuasion, human virtue would lose its two chief stays.\n\n[Sidenote: Possibility of substitutes.]\n\nOn the other hand, an opposite danger is present in this sort of\nspeculation. Things now associated with the family may not depend upon\nit, but might flourish equally well in a different soil. The family\nbeing the earliest and closest society into which men enter, it assumes\nthe primary functions which all society can exercise. Possibly if any\nother institution had been first in the field it might have had a\ncomparable moral influence. One of the great lessons, for example, which\nsociety has to teach its members is that society exists. The child, like\nthe animal, is a colossal egoist, not from a want of sensibility, but\nthrough his deep transcendental isolation. The mind is naturally its own\nworld and its solipsism needs to be broken down by social influence. The\nchild must learn to sympathise intelligently, to be considerate, rather\nthan instinctively to love and hate: his imagination must become\ncognitive and dramatically just, instead of remaining, as it naturally\nis, sensitively, selfishly fanciful.\n\nTo break down transcendental conceit is a function usually confided to\nthe family, and yet the family is not well fitted to perform it. To\nmothers and nurses their darlings are always exceptional; even fathers\nand brothers teach a child that he is very different from other\ncreatures and of infinitely greater consequence, since he lies closer to\ntheir hearts and may expect from them all sorts of favouring services.\nThe whole household, in proportion as it spreads about the child a\nbrooding and indulgent atmosphere, nurses wilfulness and illusion. For\nthis reason the noblest and happiest children are those brought up, as\nin Greece or England, under simple general conventions by persons\ntrained and hired for the purpose. The best training in character is\nfound in very large families or in schools, where boys educate one\nanother. Priceless in this regard is athletic exercise; for here the\ntest of ability is visible, the comparison not odious, the need of\nco-operation clear, and the consciousness of power genuine and therefore\nennobling. Socratic dialectic is not a better means of learning to know\noneself. Such self-knowledge is objective and free from\nself-consciousness; it sees the self in a general medium and measures it\nby a general law. Even the tenderer associations of home might, under\nother circumstances, attach to other objects. Consensus of opinion has a\ndistorting effect, sometimes, on ideal values. A thing which almost\neveryone agrees in prizing, because it has played some part in every\nlife, tends to be valued above more important elements in personal\nhappiness that may not have been shared. So wealth, religion, military\nvictory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. The family might\nwell be, to some extent, a similar idol of the tribe. Everyone has had a\nfather and a mother; but how many have had a friend? Everyone likes to\nremember many a joy and even sorrow of his youth which was linked with\nfamily occasions; but to name a man\u2019s more private memories, attached to\nspecial surroundings, would awaken no response in other minds. Yet these\nother surroundings may have been no less stimulating to emotion, and if\nfamiliar to all might be spoken of with as much conventional effect.\nThis appears so soon as any experience is diffused enough to enable a\ntradition to arise, so that the sentiment involved can find a social\necho. Thus there is a loyalty, very powerful in certain quarters, toward\nschool, college, club, regiment, church, and country. Who shall say that\nsuch associations, had they sprung up earlier and been more zealously\ncultivated, or were they now reinforced by more general sympathy, would\nnot breed all the tenderness and infuse all the moral force which most\nmen now derive from the family?\n\n[Sidenote: Plato\u2019s heroic communism.]\n\nNevertheless, no suggested substitute for the family is in the least\nsatisfactory. Plato\u2019s is the best grounded in reason; but to succeed it\nwould have to count on a degree of virtue absolutely unprecedented in\nman. To be sure, the Platonic regimen, if it demands heroism for its\ninception, provides in its scientific breeding and education a means of\nmaking heroism perpetual. But to submit to such reforming regulations\nmen would first have to be reformed; it would not suffice, as Plato\nsuggested, merely to enslave them and to introduce scientific\ninstitutions by despotic decrees. For in such a case there would be all\nmanner of evasions, rebellions, and corruptions. If marriage founded on\ninclination and mutual consent is so often broken surreptitiously or by\nopen divorce, what should we expect amongst persons united and separated\nby governmental policy? The love of home is a human instinct. Princes\nwho marry for political reasons often find a second household necessary\nto their happiness, although every motive of honour, policy, religion,\nand patriotism makes with overwhelming force against such\nirregularities; and the celibate priesthood, presumably taking its vows\nfreely and under the influence of religious zeal, often revert in\npractice to a sort of natural marriage. It is true that Plato\u2019s citizens\nwere not to be celibates, and the senses would have had no just cause\nfor rebellion; but would the heart have been satisfied? Could passion or\nhabit submit to such regulation?\n\nEven when every concession is made to the god-like simplicity and ardour\nwhich that Platonic race was to show, a greater difficulty appears.\nApparently the guardians and auxiliaries, a small minority in the state,\nwere alone to submit to this regimen: the rest of the people, slaves,\ntradesmen, and foreigners, were to live after their own devices and\nwere, we may suppose, to retain the family. So that, after all, Plato in\nthis matter proposes little more than what military and monastic orders\nhave actually done among Christians: to institute a privileged unmarried\nclass in the midst of an ordinary community. Such a proposal, therefore,\ndoes not abolish the family.\n\n[Sidenote: Opposite modern tendencies.]\n\nThose forms of free love or facile divorce to which radical opinion and\npractice incline in these days tend to transform the family without\nabolishing it. Many unions might continue to be lasting, and the\nchildren in any case would remain with one or the other parent. The\nfamily has already suffered greater transformations than that suggested\nby this sect. Polygamy persists, involving its own type of morals and\nsentiment, and savage tribes show even more startling conventions. Nor\nis it reasonable to dismiss all ideals but the Christian and then invoke\nChristian patience to help us endure the consequent evils, which are\nthus declared to be normal. No evil is normal. Of course virtue is the\ncure for every abuse; but the question is the true complexion of virtue\nand the regimen needful to produce it. Christianity, with its\nnon-political and remedial prescriptions, in the form of prayer,\npenance, and patience, has left the causes of every evil untouched. It\nhas so truly come to call the sinner to repentance that its occupation\nwould be gone if once the sin could be abolished.\n\n[Sidenote: Individualism in a sense rational.]\n\nWhile a desirable form of society entirely without the family is hard to\nconceive, yet the general tendency in historic times, and the marked\ntendency in periods of ripe development, has been toward individualism.\nIndividualism is in one sense the only possible ideal; for whatever\nsocial order may be most valuable can be valuable only for its effect on\nconscious individuals. Man is of course a social animal and needs\nsociety first that he may come safely into being, and then that he may\nhave something interesting to do. But society itself is no animal and\nhas neither instincts, interests, nor ideals. To talk of such things is\neither to speak metaphorically or to think mythically; and myths, the\nmore currency they acquire, pass the more easily into superstitions. It\nwould be a gross and pedantic superstition to venerate any form of\nsociety in itself, apart from the safety, breadth, or sweetness which it\nlent to individual happiness. If the individual may be justly\nsubordinated to the state, not merely for the sake of a future freer\ngeneration, but permanently and in the ideal society, the reason is\nsimply that such subordination is a part of man\u2019s natural devotion to\nthings rational and impersonal, in the presence of which alone he can be\npersonally happy. Society, in its future and its past, is a natural\nobject of interest like art or science; it exists, like them, because\nonly when lost in such rational objects can a free soul be active and\nimmortal. But all these ideals are terms in some actual life, not alien\nends, important to nobody, to which, notwithstanding, everybody is to be\nsacrificed.\n\nIndividualism is therefore the only ideal possible. The excellence of\nsocieties is measured by what they provide for their members. A cumbrous\nand sanctified social order manifests dulness, and cannot subsist\nwithout it. It immerses man in instrumentalities, weighs him down with\natrophied organs, and by subjecting him eternally to fruitless\nsacrifices renders him stupid and superstitious and ready to be himself\ntyrannical when the opportunity occurs. A sure sign of having escaped\nbarbarism is therefore to feel keenly the pragmatic values belonging to\nall institutions, to look deep into the human sanctions of things.\nGreece was on this ground more civilised than Rome, and Athens more than\nSparta. Ill-governed communities may be more intelligent than\nwell-governed ones, when people feel the motive and partial advantage\nunderlying the abuses they tolerate (as happens where slavery or\nnepotism is prevalent), but when on the other hand no reason is\nperceived for the good laws which are established (as when law is based\non revelation). The effort to adjust old institutions suddenly to felt\nneeds may not always be prudent, because the needs most felt may not be\nthe deepest, yet so far as it goes the effort is intelligent.\n\n[Sidenote: The family tamed.]\n\nThe family in a barbarous age remains sacrosanct and traditional;\nnothing in its law, manners, or ritual is open to amendment. The\nunhappiness which may consequently overtake individuals is hushed up or\npositively blamed, with no thought of tinkering with the holy\ninstitutions which are its cause. Civilised men think more and cannot\nendure objectless tyrannies. It is inevitable, therefore, that as\nbarbarism recedes the family should become more sensitive to its\nmembers\u2019 personal interests. Husband and wife, when they are happily\nmatched, are in liberal communities more truly united than before,\nbecause such closer friendship expresses their personal inclination.\nChildren are still cared for, because love of them is natural, but they\nare ruled less and sooner suffered to choose their own associations.\nThey are more largely given in charge to persons not belonging to the\nfamily, especially fitted to supply their education. The whole, in a\nword, exists more and more for the sake of the parts, and the closeness,\nduration, and scope of family ties comes to vary greatly in different\nhouseholds. Barbaric custom, imposed in all cases alike without respect\nof persons, yields to a regimen that dares to be elastic and will take\npains to be just.\n\n[Sidenote: Possible readjustments and reversions.]\n\nHow far these liberties should extend and where they would pass into\nlicense and undermine rational life, is another question. The pressure\nof circumstances is what ordinarily forces governments to be absolute.\nPolitical liberty is a sign of moral and economic independence. The\nfamily may safely weaken its legal and customary authority so long as\nthe individual can support and satisfy himself. Children evidently never\ncan; consequently they must remain in a family or in some artificial\nsubstitute for it which would be no less coercive. But to what extent\nmen and women, in a future age, may need to rely on ties of\nconsanguinity or marriage in order not to grow solitary, purposeless,\nand depraved, is for prophets only to predict. If changes continue in\nthe present direction much that is now in bad odour may come to be\naccepted as normal. It might happen, for instance, as a consequence of\nwoman\u2019s independence, that mothers alone should be their children\u2019s\nguardians and sole mistresses in their houses; the husband, if he were\nacknowledged at all, having at most a pecuniary responsibility for his\noffspring. Such an arrangement would make a stable home for the\nchildren, while leaving marriage dissoluble at the will of either party.\n\nIt may well be doubted, however, whether women, if given every\nencouragement to establish and protect themselves, would not in the end\nfly again into man\u2019s arms and prefer to be drudges and mistresses at\nhome to living disciplined and submerged in some larger community.\nIndeed, the effect of women\u2019s emancipation might well prove to be the\nopposite of what was intended. Really free and equal competition between\nmen and women might reduce the weaker sex to such graceless inferiority\nthat, deprived of the deference and favour they now enjoy, they should\nfind themselves entirely without influence. In that case they would have\nto begin again at the bottom and appeal to arts of seduction and to\nmen\u2019s fondness in order to regain their lost social position.\n\n[Sidenote: The ideal includes generation.]\n\nThere is a certain order in progress which it is impossible to retract.\nAn advance must not subvert its own basis nor revoke the interest which\nit furthers. While hunger subsists the art of ploughing is rational; had\nagriculture abolished appetite it would have destroyed its own\nrationality. Similarly no state of society is to be regarded as ideal in\nwhich those bodily functions are supposed to be suspended which created\nthe ideal by suggesting their own perfect exercise. If old age and death\nwere abolished, reproduction, indeed, would become unnecessary: its\npleasures would cease to charm the mind, and its results\u2014pregnancy,\nchild-birth, infancy\u2014would seem positively horrible. But so long as\nreproduction is necessary the ideal of life must include it. Otherwise\nwe should be constructing not an ideal of life but some dream of\nnon-human happiness, a dream whose only remnant of ideality would be\nborrowed from such actual human functions as it still expressed\nindirectly. The true ideal must speak for all necessary and compatible\nfunctions. Man being an inevitably reproductive animal his reproductive\nfunction must be included in his perfect life.\n\n\n[Sidenote: Inner values already lodged in this function.]\n\nNow, any function to reach perfection it must fulfil two conditions: it\nmust be delightful in itself, endowing its occasions and results with\nideal interest, and it must also co-operate harmoniously with all other\nfunctions so that life may be profitable and happy. In the matter of\nreproduction nature has already fulfilled the first of these conditions\nin its essentials. It has indeed super-abundantly fulfilled them, and\nnot only has love appeared in man\u2019s soul, the type and symbol of all\nvital perfection, but a tenderness and charm, a pathos passing into the\nfrankest joy, has been spread over pregnancy, birth, and childhood. If\nmany pangs and tears still prove how tentative and violent, even here,\nare nature\u2019s most brilliant feats, science and kindness may strive not\nunsuccessfully to diminish or abolish those profound traces of evil. But\nreproduction will not be perfectly organised until the second condition\nis fulfilled as well, and here nature has as yet been more remiss.\nFamily life, as Western nations possess it, is still regulated in a very\nbungling, painful, and unstable manner. Hence, in the first rank of\nevils, prostitution, adultery, divorce, improvident and unhappy\nmarriages; and in the second rank, a morality compacted of three\ninharmonious parts, with incompatible ideals, each in its way\nlegitimate: I mean the ideals of passion, of convention, and of reason;\nadd, besides, genius and religion thwarted by family ties, single lives\nempty, wedded lives constrained, a shallow gallantry, and a dull virtue.\n\n[Sidenote: Outward beneficence might be secured by experiment.]\n\nHow to surround the natural sanctities of wedlock with wise custom and\nlaw, how to combine the maximum of spiritual freedom with the maximum of\nmoral cohesion, is a problem for experiment to solve. It cannot be\nsolved, even ideally, in a Utopia. For each interest in play has its\nrights and the prophet neither knows what interests may at a given\nfuture time subsist in the world, nor what relative force they may have,\nnor what mechanical conditions may control their expression. The\nstatesman in his sphere and the individual in his must find, as they go,\nthe best practical solutions. All that can be indicated beforehand is\nthe principle which improvements in this institution would comply with\nif they were really improvements. They would reform and perfect the\nfunction of reproduction without discarding it; they would maintain the\nfamily unless they could devise some institution that combined intrinsic\nand representative values better than does that natural artifice, and\nthey would recast either the instincts or the laws concerned, or both\nsimultaneously, until the family ceased to clash seriously with any of\nthese three things: natural affection, rational nurture, and moral\nfreedom.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER III\n\nINDUSTRY, GOVERNMENT, AND WAR\n\n\n[Sidenote: Patriarchal economy.]\n\nWe have seen that the family, an association useful in rearing the\nyoung, may become a means of further maintenance and defence. It is the\nfirst economic and the first military group. Children become servants,\nand servants, being adopted and brought up in the family, become like\nother children and supply the family\u2019s growing wants. It was no small\npart of the extraordinary longing for progeny shown by patriarchal man\nthat children were wealth, and that by continuing in life-long\nsubjection to their father they lent prestige and power to his old age.\nThe daughters drew water, the wives and concubines spun, wove, and\nprepared food. A great family was a great estate. It was augmented\nfurther by sheep, goats, asses, and cattle. This numerous household,\nbound together by personal authority and by common fortunes, was\nsufficient to carry on many rude industries. It wandered from pasture to\npasture, practised hospitality, watched the stars, and seems (at least\nin poetic retrospect) to have been not unhappy. A Roman adage has\ndeclared that to know the world one household suffices; and one\npatriarchal family, in its simplicity and grandeur, seems to have given\nscope enough for almost all human virtues. And those early men, as Vico\nsays, were sublime poets.\n\n[Sidenote: Origin of the state.]\n\nNevertheless, such a condition can only subsist in deserts where those\nwho try to till the soil cannot grow strong enough to maintain\nthemselves against marauding herdsmen. Whenever agriculture yields\nbetter returns and makes the husbandman rich enough to support a\nprotector, patriarchal life disappears. The fixed occupation of land\nturns a tribe into a state. Plato has given the classic account of such\na passage from idyllic to political conditions. Growth in population and\nin requirements forces an Arcadian community to encroach upon its\nneighbours; this encroachment means war; and war, when there are fields\nand granaries to protect, and slaves and artisans to keep at their\ndomestic labours, means fortifications, an army, and a general. And to\nmatch the army in the field another must be maintained at home, composed\nof judges, priests, builders, cooks, barbers, and doctors. Such is the\ninception of what, in the literal sense of the word, may be called\ncivilisation.\n\n[Sidenote: Three uses of civilisation.]\n\nCivilisation secures three chief advantages: greater wealth, greater\nsafety, and greater variety of experience. Whether, in spite of this,\nthere is a real\u2014that is, a moral\u2014advance is a question impossible to\nanswer off-hand, because wealth, safety, and variety are not absolute\ngoods, and their value is great or small according to the further values\nthey may help to secure. This is obvious in the case of riches. But\nsafety also is only good when there is something to preserve better than\ncourage, and when the prolongation of life can serve to intensify its\nexcellence. An animal\u2019s existence is not improved when made safe by\nimprisonment and domestication; it is only degraded and rendered passive\nand melancholy. The human savage likewise craves a freedom and many a\ndanger inconsistent with civilisation, because independent of reason. He\ndoes not yet identify his interests with any persistent and ideal\nharmonies created by reflection. And when reflection is absent, length\nof life is no benefit: a quick succession of generations, with a small\nchance of reaching old age, is a beautiful thing in purely animal\neconomy, where vigour is the greatest joy, propagation the highest\nfunction, and decrepitude the sorriest woe. The value of safety,\naccordingly, hangs on the question whether life has become reflective\nand rational. But the fact that a state arises does not in itself imply\nrationality. It makes rationality possible, but leaves it potential.\n\n[Sidenote: Its rationality contingent.]\n\nSimilar considerations apply to variety. To increase the number of\ninstincts and functions is probably to produce confusion and to augment\nthat secondary and reverberating kind of evil which consists in\nexpecting pain and regretting misfortune. On the other hand, a perfect\nlife could never be accused of monotony. All desirable variety lies\nwithin the circle of perfection. Thus we do not tire of possessing two\nlegs nor wish, for the sake of variety, to be occasionally lunatics.\nAccordingly, an increase in variety of function is a good only if a\nunity can still be secured embracing that variety; otherwise it would\nhave been better that the irrelevant function should have been developed\nby independent individuals or should not have arisen at all. The\nfunction of seeing double adds more to the variety than to the spice of\nlife. Whether civilisation is a blessing depends, then, on its ulterior\nuses. Judged by those interests which already exist when it arises, it\nis very likely a burden and oppression. The birds\u2019 instinctive economy\nwould not be benefited by a tax-gatherer, a recruiting-sergeant, a sect\nor two of theologians, and the other usual organs of human polity.\n\nFor the Life of Reason, however, civilisation is a necessary condition.\nAlthough animal life, within man and beyond him, has its wild beauty and\nmystic justifications, yet that specific form of life which we call\nrational, and which is no less natural than the rest, would never have\narisen without an expansion of human faculty, an increase in mental\nscope, for which civilisation is necessary. Wealth, safety, variety of\npursuits, are all requisite if memory and purpose are to be trained\nincreasingly, and if a steadfast art of living is to supervene upon\ninstinct and dream.\n\n[Sidenote: Sources of wealth.]\n\nWealth is itself expressive of reason for it arises whenever men,\ninstead of doing nothing or beating about casually in the world, take to\ngathering fruits of nature which they may have uses for in future, or\nfostering their growth, or actually contriving their appearance. Such is\nman\u2019s first industrial habit, seen in grazing, agriculture, and mining.\nAmong nature\u2019s products are also those of man\u2019s own purposeless and\nimitative activity, results of his idle ingenuity and restlessness. Some\nof these, like nature\u2019s other random creations, may chance to have some\nutility. They may then become conspicuous to reflection, be strengthened\nby the relations which they establish in life, and be henceforth called\nworks of human art. They then constitute a second industrial habit and\nthat other sort of riches which is supplied by manufacture.\n\n[Sidenote: Excess of it possible.]\n\nThe amount of wealth man can produce is apparently limited only by time,\ninvention, and the material at hand. It can very easily exceed his\ncapacity for enjoyment. As the habits which produce wealth were\noriginally spontaneous and only crystallised into reasonable processes\nby mutual checks and the gradual settling down of the organism into\nharmonious action, so also the same habits may outrun their uses. The\nmachinery to produce wealth, of which man\u2019s own energies have become a\npart, may well work on irrespective of happiness. Indeed, the industrial\nideal would be an international community with universal free trade,\nextreme division of labour, and no unproductive consumption. Such an\narrangement would undoubtedly produce a maximum of riches, and any\nobjections made to it, if intelligent, must be made on other than\nuniversal economic grounds. Free trade may be opposed, for instance\n(while patriotism takes the invidious form of jealousy and while peace\nis not secure), on the ground that it interferes with vested interests\nand settled populations or with national completeness and\nself-sufficiency, or that absorption in a single industry is\nunfavourable to intellectual life. The latter is also an obvious\nobjection to any great division of labour, even in liberal fields; while\nany man with a tender heart and traditional prejudices might hesitate to\ncondemn the irresponsible rich to extinction, together with all paupers,\nmystics, and old maids living on annuities.\n\nSuch attacks on industrialism, however, are mere skirmishes and express\nprejudices of one sort or another. The formidable judgment industrialism\nhas to face is that of reason, which demands that the increase and\nspecification of labour be justified by benefits somewhere actually\nrealised and integrated in individuals. Wealth must justify itself in\nhappiness. Someone must live better for having produced or enjoyed these\npossessions. And he would not live better, even granting that the\npossessions were in themselves advantages, if these advantages were\nbought at too high a price and removed other greater opportunities or\nbenefits. The belle must not sit so long prinking before the glass as to\nmiss the party, and man must not work so hard and burden himself with so\nmany cares as to have no breath or interest left for things free and\nintellectual. Work and life too often are contrasted and complementary\nthings; but they would not be contrasted nor even separable if work were\nnot servile, for of course man can have no life save in occupation, and\nin the exercise of his faculties; contemplation itself can deal only\nwith what practice contains or discloses. But the pursuit of wealth is a\npursuit of instruments. The division of labour when extreme does\nviolence to natural genius and obliterates natural distinctions in\ncapacity. What is properly called industry is not art or self-justifying\nactivity, but on the contrary a distinctly compulsory and merely\ninstrumental labour, which if justified at all must be justified by some\nulterior advantage which it secures. In regard to such instrumental\nactivities the question is always pertinent whether they do not produce\nmore than is useful, or prevent the existence of something that is\nintrinsically good.\n\n[Sidenote: Irrational industry.]\n\nOccidental society has evidently run in this direction into great\nabuses, complicating life prodigiously without ennobling the mind. It\nhas put into rich men\u2019s hands facilities and luxuries which they trifle\nwith without achieving any dignity or true magnificence in living,\nwhile the poor, if physically more comfortable than formerly, are not\nmeantime notably wiser or merrier. Ideal distinction has been sacrificed\nin the best men, to add material comforts to the worst. Things, as\nEmerson said, are in the saddle and ride mankind. The means crowd out\nthe ends and civilisation reverts, when it least thinks it, to\nbarbarism.\n\n[Sidenote: Its jovial and ingenious side.]\n\nThe acceptable side of industrialism, which is supposed to be inspired\nexclusively by utility, is not utility at all but pure achievement. If\nwe wish to do such an age justice we must judge it as we should a child\nand praise its feats without inquiring after its purposes. That is its\nown spirit: a spirit dominant at the present time, particularly in\nAmerica, where industrialism appears most free from alloy. There is a\ncurious delight in turning things over, changing their shape,\ndiscovering their possibilities, making of them some new contrivance.\nUse, in these experimental minds, as in nature, is only incidental.\nThere is an irrational creative impulse, a zest in novelty, in\nprogression, in beating the other man, or, as they say, in breaking the\nrecord. There is also a fascination in seeing the world unbosom itself\nof ancient secrets, obey man\u2019s coaxing, and take on unheard-of shapes.\nThe highest building, the largest steamer, the fastest train, the book\nreaching the widest circulation have, in America, a clear title to\nrespect. When the just functions of things are as yet not discriminated,\nthe superlative in any direction seems naturally admirable. Again, many\npossessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to\nmake his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many\nexertions. An experimental materialism, spontaneous and divorced from\nreason and from everything useful, is also confused in some minds with\ntraditional duties; and a school of popular hierophants is not lacking\nthat turns it into a sort of religion and perhaps calls it idealism.\nImpulse is more visible in all this than purpose, imagination more than\njudgment; but it is pleasant for the moment to abound in invention and\neffort and to let the future cash the account.\n\n[Sidenote: Its tyranny.]\n\nWealth is excessive when it reduces a man to a middleman and a jobber,\nwhen it prevents him, in his preoccupation with material things, from\nmaking his spirit the measure of them. There are Nibelungen who toil\nunderground over a gold they will never use, and in their obsession with\nproduction begrudge themselves all holidays, all concessions to\ninclination, to merriment, to fancy; nay, they would even curtail as\nmuch as possible the free years of their youth, when they might see the\nblue, before rendering up their souls to the Leviathan. Visible signs of\nsuch unreason soon appear in the relentless and hideous aspect which\nlife puts on; for those instruments which somehow emancipate themselves\nfrom their uses soon become hateful. In nature irresponsible wildness\ncan be turned to beauty, because every product can be recomposed into\nsome abstract manifestation of force or form; but the monstrous in man\nhimself and in his works immediately offends, for here everything is\nexpected to symbolise its moral relations. The irrational in the human\nhas something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in\nthe maniac, the miser, the drunkard, or the ape. A barbaric\ncivilisation, built on blind impulse and ambition, should fear to awaken\na deeper detestation than could ever be aroused by those more beautiful\ntyrannies, chivalrous or religious, against which past revolutions have\nbeen directed.\n\n[Sidenote: An impossible remedy.]\n\nBoth the sordidness and the luxury which industrialism may involve,\ncould be remedied, however, by a better distribution of the product. The\nriches now created by labour would probably not seriously debauch\nmankind if each man had only his share; and such a proportionate return\nwould enable him to perceive directly how far his interests required him\nto employ himself in material production and how far he could allow\nhimself leisure for spontaneous things\u2014religion, play, art, study,\nconversation. In a world composed entirely of philosophers an hour or\ntwo a day of manual labour\u2014a very welcome quantity\u2014would provide for\nmaterial wants; the rest could then be all the more competently\ndedicated to a liberal life; for a healthy soul needs matter quite as\nmuch for an object of interest as for a means of sustenance. But\nphilosophers do not yet people nor even govern the world, and so simple\na Utopia which reason, if it had direct efficacy, would long ago have\nreduced to act, is made impossible by the cross-currents of instinct,\ntradition, and fancy which variously deflect affairs.\n\n[Sidenote: Basis of government.]\n\nWhat are called the laws of nature are so many observations made by man\non a way things have of repeating themselves by replying always to their\nold causes and never, as reason\u2019s prejudice would expect, to their new\nopportunities. This inertia, which physics registers in the first law of\nmotion, natural history and psychology call habit. Habit is a physical\nlaw. It is the basis and force of all morality, but is not morality\nitself. In society it takes the form of custom which, when codified, is\ncalled law and when enforced is called government. Government is the\npolitical representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of\ninertia; it is by no means a representative of reason. But, like any\nmechanical complication, it may become rational, and many of its forms\nand operations may be defended on rational grounds. All natural\norganisms, from protoplasm to poetry, can exercise certain ideal\nfunctions and symbolise in their structure certain ideal relations.\nProtoplasm tends to propagate itself, and in so doing may turn into a\nconscious ideal the end it already tends to realise; but there could be\nno desire for self-preservation were there not already a self\npreserved. So government can by its existence define the commonwealth\nit tends to preserve, and its acts may be approved from the point of\nview of those eventual interests which they satisfy. But government\nneither subsists nor arises because it is good or useful, but solely\nbecause it is inevitable. It becomes good in so far as the inevitable\nadjustment of political forces which it embodies is also a just\nprovision for all the human interests which it creates or affects.\n\n[Sidenote: How rationality accrues.]\n\nSuppose a cold and hungry savage, failing to find berries and game\nenough in the woods, should descend into some meadow where a flock of\nsheep were grazing and pounce upon a lame lamb which could not run away\nwith the others, tear its flesh, suck up its blood, and dress himself in\nits skin. All this could not be called an affair undertaken in the\nsheep\u2019s interest. And yet it might well conduce to their interest in the\nend. For the savage, finding himself soon hungry again, and\ninsufficiently warm in that scanty garment, might attack the flock a\nsecond time, and thereby begin to accustom himself, and also his\ndelighted family, to a new and more substantial sort of raiment and\ndiet. Suppose, now, a pack of wolves, or a second savage, or a disease\nshould attack those unhappy sheep. Would not their primeval enemy defend\nthem? Would he not have identified himself with their interests to this\nextent, that their total extinction or discomfiture would alarm him\nalso? And in so far as he provided for their well-being, would he not\nhave become a good shepherd? If, now, some philosophic wether, a lover\nof his kind, reasoned with his fellows upon the change in their\ncondition, he might shudder indeed at those early episodes and at the\ncontribution of lambs and fleeces which would not cease to be levied by\nthe new government; but he might also consider that such a contribution\nwas nothing in comparison with what was formerly exacted by wolves,\ndiseases, frosts, and casual robbers, when the flock was much smaller\nthan it had now grown to be, and much less able to withstand decimation.\nAnd he might even have conceived an admiration for the remarkable wisdom\nand beauty of that great shepherd, dressed in such a wealth of wool; and\nhe might remember pleasantly some occasional caress received from him\nand the daily trough filled with water by his providential hand. And he\nmight not be far from maintaining not only the rational origin, but the\ndivine right of shepherds.\n\nSuch a savage enemy, incidentally turned into a useful master, is called\na conqueror or king. Only in human experience the case is not so simple\nand harmony is seldom established so quickly. The history of Asia is\nreplete with examples of conquest and extortion in which a rural\npopulation living in comparative plenty is attacked by some more\nferocious neighbour who, after a round of pillage, establishes a quite\nunnecessary government, raising taxes and soldiers for purposes\nabsolutely remote from the conquered people\u2019s interests. Such a\ngovernment is nothing but a chronic raid, mitigated by the desire to\nleave the inhabitants prosperous enough to be continually despoiled\nafresh. Even this modicum of protection, however, can establish a\ncertain moral bond between ruler and subject; an intelligent government\nand an intelligent fealty become conceivable.\n\n[Sidenote: Ferocious but useful despotisms.]\n\nNot only may the established r\u00e9gime be superior to any other that could\nbe substituted for it at the time, but some security against total\ndestruction, and a certain opportunity for the arts and for personal\nadvancement may follow subjugation. A moderate decrease in personal\nindependence may be compensated by a novel public grandeur; palace and\ntemple may make amends for hovels somewhat more squalid than before.\nHence, those who cannot conceive a rational polity, or a co-operative\ngreatness in the state, especially if they have a luxurious fancy, can\ntake pleasure in despotism; for it does not, after all, make so much\ndifference to an ordinary fool whether what he suffers from is another\u2019s\noppression or his own lazy improvidence; and he can console himself by\nsaying with Goldsmith:\n\n  How small, of all that human hearts endure,\n  The part which laws or kings can cause or cure.\n\nAt the same time a court and a hierarchy, with their interesting pomp\nand historic continuity, with their combined appeal to greed and\nimagination, redeem human existence from pervasive vulgarity and allow\nsomebody at least to strut proudly over the earth. Serfs are not in a\nworse material condition than savages, and their spiritual opportunities\nare infinitely greater; for their eye and fancy are fed with visions of\nhuman greatness, and even if they cannot improve their outward estate\nthey can possess a poetry and a religion. It suffices to watch an\nOriental rabble at prayer, or listening in profound immobility to some\nwandering story-teller or musician, to feel how much such a people may\nhave to ruminate upon, and how truly Arabian days and Arabian Nights go\ntogether. The ideas evolved may be wild and futile and the emotions\nsavagely sensuous, yet they constitute a fund of inner experience, a\nrich soil for better imaginative growths. To such Oriental cogitations,\nfor instance, carried on under the shadow of uncontrollable despotisms,\nmankind owes all its greater religions.\n\nA government\u2019s origin has nothing to do with its legitimacy; that is,\nwith its representative operation. An absolutism based on conquest or on\nreligious fraud may wholly lose its hostile function. It may become the\nnucleus of a national organisation expressing justly enough the people\u2019s\nrequirements. Such a representative character is harder to attain when\nthe government is foreign, for diversity in race language and local ties\nmakes the ruler less apt involuntarily to represent his subjects; his\nmeasures must subserve their interests intentionally, out of sympathy,\npolicy, and a sense of duty, virtues which are seldom efficacious for\nany continuous period. A native government, even if based on initial\noutrage, can more easily drift into excellence; for when a great man\nmounts the throne he has only to read his own soul and follow his\ninstinctive ambitions in order to make himself the leader and spokesman\nof his nation. An Alexander, an Alfred, a Peter the Great, are examples\nof persons who with varying degrees of virtue were representative\nrulers: their policy, however irrationally inspired, happened to serve\ntheir subjects and the world. Besides, a native government is less\neasily absolute. Many influences control the ruler in his aims and\nhabits, such as religion, custom, and the very language he speaks, by\nwhich praise and blame are assigned automatically to the objects loved\nor hated by the people. He cannot, unless he be an intentional monster,\noppose himself wholly to the common soul.\n\n[Sidenote: Occasional advantage of being conquered.]\n\nFor this very reason, however, native governments are little fitted to\nredeem or transform a people, and all great upheavals and regenerations\nhave been brought about by conquest, by the substitution of one race and\nspirit for another in the counsels of the world. What the Orient owes to\nGreece, the Occident to Rome, India to England, native America to Spain,\nis a civilisation incomparably better than that which the conquered\npeople could ever have provided for themselves. Conquest is a good means\nof recasting those ideals, perhaps impracticable and ignorant, which a\nnative government at its best would try to preserve. Such inapt ideals,\nit is true, would doubtless remodel themselves if they could be partly\nrealised. Progress from within is possible, otherwise no progress would\nbe possible for humanity at large. But conquest gives at once a freer\nfield to those types of polity which, since they go with strength,\npresumably represent the better adjustment to natural conditions, and\ntherefore the better ideal. Though the substance of ideals is the will,\ntheir mould must be experience and a true discernment of opportunity; so\nthat while all ideals, regarded _in vacuo_, are equal in ideality, they\nare, under given circumstances, very diverse in worth.\n\n[Sidenote: Origin of free governments.]\n\nWhen not founded on conquest, which is the usual source of despotism,\ngovernment is ordinarily based on traditional authority vested in elders\nor patriarchal kings. This is the origin of the classic state, and of\nall aristocracy and freedom. The economic and political unit is a great\nhousehold with its lord, his wife and children, clients and slaves. In\nthe interstices of these households there may be a certain floating\nresiduum\u2014freedmen, artisans, merchants, strangers. These people, while\nfree, are without such rights as even slaves possess; they have no share\nin the religion, education, and resources of any established family.\nFor purposes of defence and religion the heads of houses gather together\nin assemblies, elect or recognise some chief, and agree upon laws,\nusually little more than extant customs regulated and formally\nsanctioned.\n\n[Sidenote: Their democratic tendencies.]\n\nSuch a state tends to expand in two directions. In the first place, it\nbecomes more democratic; that is, it tends to recognise other influences\nthan that which heads of families\u2014_patres conscripti_\u2014possess. The\npeople without such fathers, those who are not patricians, also have\nchildren and come to imitate on a smaller scale the patriarchal economy.\nThese plebeians are admitted to citizenship. But they have no such\nreligious dignity and power in their little families as the patricians\nhave in theirs; they are scarcely better than loose individuals,\nrepresenting nothing but their own sweet wills. This individualism and\nlevity is not, however, confined to the plebeians; it extends to the\npatrician houses. Individualism is the second direction in which a\npatriarchal society yields to innovation. As the state grows the family\nweakens; and while in early Rome, for instance, only the _pater\nfamilias_ was responsible to the city, and his children and slaves only\nto him, in Greece we find from early times individuals called to account\nbefore public judges. A federation of households thus became a republic.\nThe king, that chief who enjoyed a certain hereditary precedence in\nsacrifices or in war, yields to elected generals and magistrates whose\npower, while it lasts, is much greater; for no other comparable power\nnow subsists in the levelled state.\n\nModern Europe has seen an almost parallel development of democracy and\nindividualism, together with the establishment of great artificial\ngovernments. Though the feudal hierarchy was originally based on\nconquest or domestic subjection, it came to have a fanciful or\nchivalrous or political force. But gradually the plebeian classes\u2014the\nburghers\u2014grew in importance, and military allegiance was weakened by\nbeing divided between a number of superposed lords, up to the king,\nemperor, or pope. The stronger rulers grew into absolute monarchs,\nrepresentatives of great states, and the people became, in a political\nsense, a comparatively level multitude. Where parliamentary government\nwas established it became possible to subordinate or exclude the monarch\nand his court; but the government remains an involuntary institution,\nand the individual must adapt himself to its exigencies. The church\nwhich once overshadowed the state has now lost its coercive authority\nand the single man stands alone before an impersonal written law, a\nconstitutional government, and a widely diffused and contagious public\nopinion, characterised by enormous inertia, incoherence, and blindness.\nContemporary national units are strongly marked and stimulate on\noccasion a perfervid artificial patriotism; but they are strangely\nunrepresentative of either personal or universal interests and may yield\nin turn to new combinations, if the industrial and intellectual\nsolidarity of mankind, every day more obvious, ever finds a fit organ to\nexpress and to defend it.\n\n[Sidenote: Imperial peace.]\n\nA despotic military government founded on alien force and aiming at its\nown magnificence is often more efficient in defending its subjects than\nis a government expressing only the people\u2019s energies, as the predatory\nshepherd and his dog prove better guardians for a flock than its own\nwethers. The robbers that at their first incursion brought terror to\nmerchant and peasant may become almost immediately representative organs\nof society\u2014an army and a judiciary. Disputes between subjects are\nnaturally submitted to the invader, under whose laws and good-will alone\na practical settlement can now be effected; and this alien tribunal,\nbeing exempt from local prejudices and interested in peace that taxes\nmay be undiminished, may administer a comparatively impartial justice,\nuntil corrupted by bribes. The constant compensation tyranny brings,\nwhich keeps it from at once exhausting its victims, is the silence it\nimposes on their private squabbles. One distant universal enemy is less\noppressive than a thousand unchecked pilferers and plotters at home. For\nthis reason the reader of ancient history so often has occasion to\nremark what immense prosperity Asiatic provinces enjoyed between the\nperiods when their successive conquerors devastated them. They\nflourished exceedingly the moment peace and a certain order were\nestablished in them.\n\n[Sidenote: Nominal and real status of armies.]\n\nTyranny not only protects the subject against his kinsmen, thus taking\non the functions of law and police, but it also protects him against\nmilitary invasion, and thus takes on the function of an army. An army,\nconsidered ideally, is an organ for the state\u2019s protection; but it is\nfar from being such in its origin, since at first an army is nothing but\na ravenous and lusty horde quartered in a conquered country; yet the\ncost of such an incubus may come to be regarded as an insurance against\nfurther attack, and so what is in its real basis an inevitable burden\nresulting from a chance balance of forces may be justified in\nafter-thought as a rational device for defensive purposes. Such an\nulterior justification has nothing to do, however, with the causes that\nmaintain armies or military policies: and accordingly those virginal\nminds that think things originated in the uses they may have acquired,\nhave frequent cause to be pained and perplexed at the abuses and\nover-development of militarism. An insurance capitalised may exceed the\nvalue of the property insured, and the drain caused by armies and navies\nmay be much greater than the havoc they prevent. The evils against which\nthey are supposed to be directed are often evils only in a cant and\nconventional sense, since the events deprecated (like absorption by a\nneighbouring state) might be in themselves no misfortune to the people,\nbut perhaps a singular blessing. And those dreaded possibilities, even\nif really evil, may well be less so than is the hateful actuality of\nmilitary taxes, military service, and military arrogance.\n\n[Sidenote: Their action irresponsible.]\n\nNor is this all: the military classes, since they inherit the blood and\nhabits of conquerors, naturally love war and their irrational\ncombativeness is reinforced by interest; for in war officers can shine\nand rise, while the danger of death, to a brave man, is rather a spur\nand a pleasing excitement than a terror. A military class is therefore\nalways recalling, foretelling, and meditating war; it fosters artificial\nand senseless jealousies toward other governments that possess armies;\nand finally, as often as not, it precipitates disaster by bringing about\nthe objectless struggle on which it has set its heart.\n\n[Sidenote: Pugnacity human.]\n\nThese natural phenomena, unintelligently regarded as anomalies and\nabuses, are the appanage of war in its pristine and proper form. To\nfight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they\nwill fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because\nthey dislike each other\u2019s looks, or because they have met walking in\nopposite directions. To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked\nat an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood. To fight for a\nreason and in a calculating spirit is something your true warrior\ndespises; even a coward might screw his courage up to such a reasonable\nconflict. The joy and glory of fighting lie in its pure spontaneity and\nconsequent generosity; you are not fighting for gain, but for sport and\nfor victory. Victory, no doubt, has its fruits for the victor. If\nfighting were not a possible means of livelihood the bellicose instinct\ncould never have established itself in any long-lived race. A few men\ncan live on plunder, just as there is room in the world for some beasts\nof prey; other men are reduced to living on industry, just as there are\ndiligent bees, ants, and herbivorous kine. But victory need have no good\nfruits for the people whose army is victorious. That it sometimes does\nso is an ulterior and blessed circumstance hardly to be reckoned upon.\n\n[Sidenote: Barrack-room philosophy.]\n\nSince barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists. There\nare panegyrists of war who say that without a periodical bleeding a race\ndecays and loses its manhood. Experience is directly opposed to this\nshameless assertion. It is war that wastes a nation\u2019s wealth, chokes its\nindustries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be\ngoverned by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to\nbreed the next generation. Internecine war, foreign and civil, brought\nabout the greatest set-back which the Life of Reason has ever suffered;\nit exterminated the Greek and Italian aristocracies. Instead of being\ndescended from heroes, modern nations are descended from slaves; and it\nis not their bodies only that show it. After a long peace, if the\nconditions of life are propitious, we observe a people\u2019s energies\nbursting their barriers; they become aggressive on the strength they\nhave stored up in their remote and unchecked development. It is the\nunmutilated race, fresh from the struggle with nature (in which the best\nsurvive, while in war it is often the best that perish) that descends\nvictoriously into the arena of nations and conquers disciplined armies\nat the first blow, becomes the military aristocracy of the next epoch\nand is itself ultimately sapped and decimated by luxury and battle, and\nmerged at last into the ignoble conglomerate beneath. Then, perhaps, in\nsome other virgin country a genuine humanity is again found, capable of\nvictory because unbled by war. To call war the soil of courage and\nvirtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.\n\n[Sidenote: Military virtues.]\n\nMilitary institutions, adventitious and ill-adapted excrescences as they\nusually are, can acquire rational values in various ways. Besides\noccasional defence, they furnish a profession congenial to many, and a\nspectacle and emotion interesting to all. Blind courage is an animal\nvirtue indispensable in a world full of dangers and evils where a\ncertain insensibility and dash are requisite to skirt the precipice\nwithout vertigo. Such animal courage seems therefore beautiful rather\nthan desperate or cruel, and being the lowest and most instinctive of\nvirtues it is the one most widely and sincerely admired. In the form of\nsteadiness under risks rationally taken, and perseverance so long as\nthere is a chance of success, courage is a true virtue; but it ceases to\nbe one when the love of danger, a useful passion when danger is\nunavoidable, begins to lead men into evils which it was unnecessary to\nface. Bravado, provocativeness, and a gambler\u2019s instinct, with a love of\nhitting hard for the sake of exercise, is a temper which ought already\nto be counted among the vices rather than the virtues of man. To delight\nin war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain,\nand a positive crime in the statesman.\n\nDiscipline, or the habit of obedience, is a better sort of courage which\nmilitary life also requires. Discipline is the acquired faculty of\nsurrendering an immediate personal good for the sake of a remote and\nimpersonal one of greater value. This difficult wisdom is made easier by\ntraining in an army, because the great forces of habit, example and\nsocial suasion, are there enlisted in its service. But these natural\naids make it lose its conscious rationality, so that it ceases to be a\nvirtue except potentially; for to resist an impulse by force of habit or\nexternal command may or may not be to follow the better course.\n\nBesides fostering these rudimentary virtues the army gives the nation\u2019s\nsoul its most festive and flaunting embodiment. Popular heroes, stirring\nepisodes, obvious turning-points in history, commonly belong to military\nlife.\n\n[Sidenote: They are splendid vices.]\n\nNevertheless the panegyrist of war places himself on the lowest level on\nwhich a moralist or patriot can stand and shows as great a want of\nrefined feeling as of right reason. For the glories of war are all\nblood-stained, delirious, and infected with crime; the combative\ninstinct is a savage prompting by which one man\u2019s good is found in\nanother\u2019s evil. The existence of such a contradiction in the moral world\nis the original sin of nature, whence flows every other wrong. He is a\nwilling accomplice of that perversity in things who delights in\nanother\u2019s discomfiture or in his own, and craves the blind tension of\nplunging into danger without reason, or the idiot\u2019s pleasure in facing a\npure chance. To find joy in another\u2019s trouble is, as man is constituted,\nnot unnatural, though it is wicked; and to find joy in one\u2019s own\ntrouble, though it be madness, is not yet impossible for man. These are\nthe chaotic depths of that dreaming nature out of which humanity has to\ngrow.\n\n[Sidenote: Absolute value in strife.]\n\nIf war could be abolished and the defence of all interests intrusted to\ncourts of law, there would remain unsatisfied a primary and therefore\nineradicable instinct\u2014a love of conflict, of rivalry, and of victory.\nIf we desire to abolish war because it tries to do good by doing harm,\nwe must not ourselves do an injury to human nature while trying to\nsmooth it out. Now the test and limit of all necessary reform is vital\nharmony. No impulse can be condemned arbitrarily or because some other\nimpulse or group of interests is, in a Platonic way, out of sympathy\nwith it. An instinct can be condemned only if it prevents the\nrealisation of other instincts, and only in so far as it does so. War,\nwhich has instinctive warrant, must therefore be transformed only in so\nfar as it does harm to other interests. The evils of war are obvious\nenough; could not the virtues of war, animal courage, discipline, and\nself-knowledge, together with gaiety and enthusiasm, find some harmless\noccasion for their development?\n\n[Sidenote: Sport a civilised way of preserving it.]\n\nSuch a harmless simulacrum of war is seen in sport. The arduous and\ncompetitive element in sport is not harmful, if the discipline involved\nbrings no loss of faculty or of right sensitiveness, and the rivalry no\nrancour. In war states wish to be efficient in order to conquer, but in\nsport men wish to prove their excellence because they wish to have it.\nIf this excellence does not exist, the aim is missed, and to discover\nthat failure is no new misfortune. To have failed unwittingly would have\nbeen worse; and to recognise superiority in another is consistent with a\nrelatively good and honourable performance, so that even nominal failure\nmay be a substantial success. And merit in a rival should bring a\nfriendly delight even to the vanquished if they are true lovers of sport\nand of excellence. Sport is a liberal form of war stripped of its\ncompulsions and malignity; a rational art and the expression of a\ncivilised instinct.\n\n[Sidenote: Who shall found the universal commonwealth?]\n\nThe abolition of war, like its inception, can only be brought about by a\nnew collocation of material forces. As the suppression of some nest of\npiratical tribes by a great emperor substitutes judicial for military\nsanctions among them, so the conquest of all warring nations by some\nimperial people could alone establish general peace. The Romans\napproached this ideal because their vast military power stood behind\ntheir governors and pr\u00e6tors. Science and commerce might conceivably\nresume that lost imperial function. If at the present day two or three\npowerful governments could so far forget their irrational origin as to\nrenounce the right to occasional piracy and could unite in enforcing the\ndecisions of some international tribunal, they would thereby constitute\nthat tribunal the organ of a universal government and render war\nimpossible between responsible states. But on account of their\nirrational basis all governments largely misrepresent the true interests\nof those who live under them. They pursue conventional and captious ends\nto which alone public energies can as yet be efficiently directed.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IV\n\nTHE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL\n\n\n[Sidenote: Eminence, once existing, grows by its own.]\n\n\u201cTo him that hath shall be given,\u201d says the Gospel, representing as a\nprinciple of divine justice one that undoubtedly holds in earthly\neconomy. A not dissimilar observation is made in the proverb:\n\u201cPossession is nine-tenths of the law.\u201d Indeed, some trifling\nacquisition often gives an animal an initial advantage which may easily\nroll up and increase prodigiously, becoming the basis of prolonged good\nfortune. Sometimes this initial advantage is a matter of natural\nstructure, like talent, strength, or goodness; sometimes an accidental\naccretion, like breeding, instruction, or wealth. Such advantages grow\nby the opportunities they make; and it is possible for a man launched\ninto the world at the right moment with the right equipment to mount\neasily from eminence to eminence and accomplish very great things\nwithout doing more than genially follow his instincts and respond with\nardour, like an Alexander or a Shakespeare, to his opportunities. A\ngreat endowment, doubled by great good fortune, raises men like these\ninto supreme representatives of mankind.\n\n[Sidenote: Its causes natural and its privileges just.]\n\nIt is no loss of liberty to subordinate ourselves to a natural leader.\nOn the contrary, we thereby seize an opportunity to exercise our\nfreedom, availing ourselves of the best instrument obtainable to\naccomplish our ends. A man may be a natural either by his character or\nby his position. The advantages a man draws from that peculiar structure\nof his brain which renders him, for instance, a ready speaker or an\ningenious mathematician, are by common consent regarded as legitimate\nadvantages. The public will use and reward such ability without jealousy\nand with positive delight. In an unsophisticated age the same feeling\nprevails in regard to those advantages which a man may draw from more\nexternal circumstances. If a traveller, having been shipwrecked in some\nexpedition, should learn the secrets of an unknown land, its arts and\nresources, his fellow-citizens, on his return, would not hesitate to\nfollow his direction in respect to those novel matters. It would be\nsenseless folly on their part to begrudge him his adventitious eminence\nand refuse to esteem him of more consequence than their uninitiated\nselves. Yet when people, ignoring the natural causes of all that is\ncalled artificial, think that but for an unlucky chance they, too, might\nhave enjoyed the advantages which raise other men above them, they\nsometimes affect not to recognise actual distinctions and abilities, or\nstudy enviously the means of annulling them. So long, however, as by the\noperation of any causes whatever some real competence accrues to anyone,\nit is for the general interest that this competence should bear its\nnatural fruits, diversifying the face of society and giving its\npossessor a corresponding distinction.\n\n[Sidenote: Advantage of inequality.]\n\nVariety in the world is an unmixed blessing so long as each distinct\nfunction can be exercised without hindrance to any other. There is no\ngreater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as\nif it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know\nthat many are, have been, and will be better than he. Grant that no one\nis positively degraded by the great man\u2019s greatness and it follows that\neveryone is exalted by it. Beauty, genius, holiness, even power and\nextraordinary wealth, radiate their virtue and make the world in which\nthey exist a better and a more joyful place to live in. Hence the\ninsatiable vulgar curiosity about great people, and the strange way in\nwhich the desire for fame (by which the distinguished man sinks to the\ncommon level) is met and satisfied by the universal interest in whatever\nis extraordinary. This avidity not to miss knowledge of things notable,\nand to enact vicariously all singular r\u00f4les, shows the need men have of\ndistinction and the advantage they find even in conceiving it. For it is\nthe presence of variety and a nearer approach somewhere to just and\nideal achievement that gives men perspective in their judgments and\nopens vistas from the dull foreground of their lives to sea, mountain,\nand stars.\n\nNo merely idle curiosity shows itself in this instinct; rather a mark of\nhuman potentiality that recognises in what is yet attained a sad\ncaricature of what is essentially attainable. For man\u2019s spirit is\nintellectual and naturally demands dominion and science; it craves in\nall things friendliness and beauty. The least hint of attainment in\nthese directions fills it with satisfaction and the sense of realised\nexpectation. So much so that when no inkling of a supreme fulfilment is\nfound in the world or in the heart, men still cling to the notion of it\nin God or the hope of it in heaven, and religion, when it entertains\nthem with that ideal, seems to have reached its highest height. Love of\nuniformity would quench the thirst for new outlets, for perfect, even if\nalien, achievements, and this, so long as perfection had not been\nactually attained, would indicate a mind dead to the ideal.\n\n[Sidenote: Fable of the belly and the members.]\n\n[Sidenote: Fallacy in it.]\n\nMenenius Agrippa expressed very well the aristocratic theory of society\nwhen he compared the state to a human body in which the common people\nwere the hands and feet, and the nobles the belly. The people, when they\nforgot the conditions of their own well-being, might accuse themselves\nof folly and the nobles of insolent idleness, for the poor spent their\nlives in hopeless labour that others who did nothing might enjoy all.\nBut there was a secret circulation of substance in the body politic, and\nthe focussing of all benefits in the few was the cause of nutrition and\nprosperity to the many. Perhaps the truth might be even better expressed\nin a physiological figure somewhat more modern, by saying that the\nbrain, which consumes much blood, well repays its obligations to the\nstomach and members, for it co-ordinates their motions and prepares\ntheir satisfactions. Yet there is this important difference between the\nhuman body and the state, a difference which renders Agrippa\u2019s fable\nwholly misleading: the hands and feet have no separate consciousness,\nand if they are ill used it is the common self that feels the weariness\nand the bruises. But in the state the various members have a separate\nsensibility, and, although their ultimate interests lie, no doubt, in\nco-operation and justice, their immediate instinct and passion may lead\nthem to oppress one another perpetually. At one time the brain,\nforgetting the members, may feast on opiates and unceasing music; and\nagain, the members, thinking they could more economically shift for\nthemselves, may starve the brain and reduce the body politic to a colony\nof vegetating microbes. In a word, the consciousness inhabiting the\nbrain embodies the functions of all the body\u2019s organs, and responds in a\ngeneral way to all their changes of fortune, but in the state every\ncell has a separate brain, and the greatest citizen, by his existence,\nrealises only his own happiness.\n\n[Sidenote: Theism expresses better the aristocratic ideal.]\n\nFor an ideal aristocracy we should not look to Plato\u2019s Republic, for\nthat Utopia is avowedly the ideal only for fallen and corrupt states,\nsince luxury and injustice, we are told, first necessitated war, and the\nguiding idea of all the Platonic regimen is military efficiency.\nAristocracy finds a more ideal expression in theism; for theism imagines\nthe values of existence to be divided into two unequal parts: on the one\nhand the infinite value of God\u2019s life, on the other the finite values of\nall the created hierarchy. According to theistic cosmology, there was a\nmetaphysical necessity, if creatures were to exist at all, that they\nshould be in some measure inferior to godhead; otherwise they would have\nbeen indistinguishable from the godhead itself according to the\nprinciple called the identity of indiscernibles, which declares that two\nbeings exactly alike cannot exist without collapsing into an undivided\nunit. The propagation of life involved, then, declension from pure\nvitality, and to diffuse being meant to dilute it with nothingness. This\ndeclension might take place in infinite degrees, each retaining some\nvestige of perfection mixed, as it were, with a greater and greater\nproportion of impotence and nonentity. Below God stood the angels, below\nthem man, and below man the brute and inanimate creation. Each sphere,\nas it receded, contained a paler adumbration of the central perfection;\nyet even at the last confines of existence some feeble echo of divinity\nwould still resound. This inequality in dignity would be not only a\nbeauty in the whole, to whose existence and order such inequalities\nwould be essential, but also no evil to the creature and no injustice;\nfor a modicum of good is not made evil simply because a greater good is\nelsewhere possible. On the contrary, by accepting that appointed place\nand that specific happiness, each servant of the universal harmony could\nfeel its infinite value and could thrill the more profoundly to a music\nwhich he helped to intone.\n\n[Sidenote: A heaven with many mansions.]\n\nDante has expressed this thought with great simplicity and beauty. He\nasks a friend\u2019s spirit, which he finds lodged in the lowest circle of\nparadise, if a desire to mount higher does not sometimes visit him; and\nthe spirit replies:\n\n\u201cBrother, the force of charity quiets our will, making us wish only for\nwhat we have and thirst for nothing more. If we desired to be in a\nsublimer sphere, our desires would be discordant with the will of him\nwho here allots us our divers stations\u2014something which you will see\nthere is no room for in these circles, if to dwell in charity be needful\nhere, and if you consider duly the nature of charity. For it belongs to\nthe essence of that blessed state to keep within the divine purposes,\nthat our own purposes may become one also. Thus, the manner in which we\nare ranged from step to step in this kingdom pleases the whole kingdom,\nas it does the king who gives us will to will with him. And his will is\nour peace; it is that sea toward which all things move that his will\ncreates and that nature fashions.\u201d[C]\n\n[Sidenote: If God is defined as the human ideal, apotheosis the only\nparadise.]\n\nSuch pious resignation has in it something pathetic and constrained,\nwhich Dante could not or would not disguise. For a theism which, like\nAristotle\u2019s and Dante\u2019s, has a Platonic essence, God is really nothing\nbut the goal of human aspiration embodied imaginatively. This fact makes\nthese philosophers feel that whatever falls short of divinity has\nsomething imperfect about it. God is what man ought to be; and man,\nwhile he is still himself, must yearn for ever, like Aristotle\u2019s cosmos,\nmaking in his perpetual round a vain imitation of deity, and an eternal\nprayer. Hence, a latent minor strain in Aristotle\u2019s philosophy, the\nhopeless note of paganism, and in Dante an undertone of sorrow and\nsacrifice, inseparable from Christian feeling. In both, virtue implies a\ncertain sense of defeat, a fatal unnatural limitation, as if a pristine\nideal had been surrendered and what remained were at best a compromise.\nAccordingly we need not be surprised if aspiration, in all these men,\nfinally takes a mystical turn; and Dante\u2019s ghostly friends, after\npropounding their aristocratic philosophy, to justify God in other men\u2019s\neyes, are themselves on the point of quitting the lower sphere to which\nGod had assigned them and plunging into the \u201csea\u201d of his absolute\necstasy. For, if the word God stands for man\u2019s spiritual ideal, heaven\ncan consist only in apotheosis. This the Greeks knew very well. They\ninstinctively ignored or feared any immortality which fell short of\ndeification; and the Christian mystics reached the same goal by less\novert courses. They merged the popular idea of a personal God in their\nforetaste of peace and perfection; and their whole religion was an\neffort to escape humanity.\n\n[Sidenote: When natures differ perfections differ too.]\n\nIt is true that the theistic cosmology might hear a different\ninterpretation. If by deity we mean not man\u2019s ideal\u2014intellectual or\nsensuous\u2014but the total cosmic order, then the universal hierarchy may\nbe understood naturalistically so that each sphere gives scope for one\nsort of good. God, or the highest being, would then be simply the life\nof nature as a whole, if nature has a conscious life, or that of its\nnoblest portion. The supposed \u201cmetaphysical evil\u201d involved in finitude\nwould then be no evil at all, but the condition of every good. In\nrealising his own will in his own way, each creature would be perfectly\nhappy, without yearning or pathetic regrets for other forms of being.\nSuch forms of being would all be unpalatable to him, even if\nconventionally called higher, because their body was larger, and their\nsoul more complex. Nor would divine perfection itself be in any sense\nperfection unless it gave expression to some definite nature, the\nentelechy either of the celestial spheres, or of scientific thought, or\nof some other actual existence. Under these circumstances, inhabitants\neven of the lowest heaven would be unreservedly happy, as happy in their\nway as those of the seventh heaven could be in theirs. No pathetic note\nwould any longer disquiet their finitude. They would not have to\nrenounce, in sad conformity to an alien will, what even for them would\nhave been a deeper joy. They would be asked to renounce nothing but\nwhat, for them, would be an evil. The overruling providence would then\nin truth be fatherly, by providing for each being that which it inwardly\ncraved. Persons of one rank would not be improved by passing into the\nso-called higher sphere, any more than the ox would be improved by being\ntransformed into a lark, or a king into a poet.\n\nMan in such a system could no more pine to be God than he could pine to\nbe the law of gravity, or Spinoza\u2019s substance, or Hegel\u2019s dialectical\nidea. Such naturalistic abstractions, while they perhaps express some\nelement of reality or its total form, are not objects corresponding to\nman\u2019s purposes and are morally inferior to his humanity. Every man\u2019s\nideal lies within the potentialities of his nature, for only by\nexpressing his nature can ideals possess authority or attraction over\nhim. Heaven accordingly has really many mansions, each truly heavenly to\nhim who would inhabit it, and there is really no room for discord in\nthose rounds. One ideal can no more conflict with another than truth can\njostle truth; but men, or the disorganised functions within a given\nindividual, may be in physical conflict, as opinion may wrestle with\nopinion in the world\u2019s arena or in an ignorant brain. Among ideals\nthemselves infinite variety is consistent with perfect harmony, but\nmatter that has not yet developed or discovered its organic affinities\nmay well show groping and contradictory tendencies. When, however, these\nembryonic disorders are once righted, each possible life knows its\nnatural paradise, and what some unintelligent outsider might say in\ndispraise of that ideal will never wound or ruffle the self-justified\ncreature whose ideal it is, any more than a cat\u2019s aversion to water will\ndisturb a fish\u2019s plan of life.\n\n[Sidenote: Theory that stations actually correspond to faculty.]\n\nAn aristocratic society might accordingly be a perfect heaven if the\nvariety and superposition of functions in it expressed a corresponding\ndiversity in its members\u2019 faculties and ideals. And, indeed, what\naristocratic philosophers have always maintained is that men really\ndiffer so much in capacity that one is happier for being a slave,\nanother for being a shopkeeper, and a third for being a king. All\nprofessions, they say, even the lowest, are or may be vocations. Some\nmen, Aristotle tells us, are slaves by nature; only physical functions\nare spontaneous in them. So long as they are humanely treated, it is,\nwe may infer, a benefit for them to be commanded; and the contribution\ntheir labour makes toward rational life in their betters is the highest\ndignity they can attain, and should be prized by them as a sufficient\nprivilege.\n\nSuch assertions, coming from lordly lips, have a suspicious optimism\nabout them; yet the faithful slave, such as the nurse we find in the\ntragedies, may sometimes have corresponded to that description. In other\nregions it is surely true that to advance in conventional station would\noften entail a loss in true dignity and happiness. It would seldom\nbenefit a musician to be appointed admiral or a housemaid to become a\nprima donna. Scientific breeding might conceivably develop much more\nsharply the various temperaments and faculties needed in the state; and\nthen each caste or order of citizens would not be more commonly\ndissatisfied with its lot than men or women now are with their sex. One\ntribe would run errands as persistently as the ants; another would sing\nlike the lark; a third would show a devil\u2019s innate fondness for stoking\na fiery furnace.\n\n[Sidenote: Its falsity.]\n\nAristocracy logically involves castes. But such castes as exist in\nIndia, and the social classes we find in the western world, are not now\nbased on any profound difference in race, capacity, or inclination. They\nare based probably on the chances of some early war, reinforced by\ncustom and perpetuated by inheritance. A certain circulation,\ncorresponding in part to proved ability or disability, takes place in\nthe body politic, and, since the French Revolution, has taken place\nincreasingly. Some, by energy and perseverance, rise from the bottom;\nsome, by ill fortune or vice, fall from the top. But these readjustments\nare insignificant in comparison with the social inertia that perpetuates\nall the classes, and even such shifts as occur at once re-establish\nartificial conditions for the next generation. As a rule, men\u2019s station\ndetermines their occupation without their gifts determining their\nstation. Thus stifled ability in the lower orders, and apathy or\npampered incapacity in the higher, unite to deprive society of its\nnatural leaders.\n\n[Sidenote: Feeble individuality the rule.]\n\nIt would be easy, however, to exaggerate the havoc wrought by such\nartificial conditions. The monotony we observe in mankind must not be\ncharged to the oppressive influence of circumstances crushing the\nindividual soul. It is not society\u2019s fault that most men seem to miss\ntheir vocation. Most men have no vocation; and society, in imposing on\nthem some chance language, some chance religion, and some chance career,\nfirst plants an ideal in their bosoms and insinuates into them a sort of\nracial or professional soul. Their only character is composed of the\nhabits they have been led to acquire. Some little propensities betrayed\nin childhood may very probably survive; one man may prove by his dying\nwords that he was congenitally witty, another tender, another brave.\nBut these native qualities will simply have added an ineffectual tint to\nsome typical existence or other; and the vast majority will remain, as\nSchopenhauer said, _Fabrikwaaren der Natur_.\n\nVariety in human dreams, like personality among savages, may indeed be\ninwardly very great, but it is not efficacious. To be socially important\nand expressible in some common medium, initial differences in temper\nmust be organised into custom and become cumulative by being imitated\nand enforced. The only artists who can show great originality are those\ntrained in distinct and established schools; for originality and genius\nmust be largely fed and raised on the shoulders of some old tradition. A\nrich organisation and heritage, while they predetermine the core of all\npossible variations, increase their number, since every advance opens up\nnew vistas; and growth, in extending the periphery of the substance\norganised, multiplies the number of points at which new growths may\nbegin. Thus it is only in recent times that discoveries in science have\nbeen frequent, because natural science until lately possessed no settled\nmethod and no considerable fund of acquired truths. So, too, in\npolitical society, statesmanship is made possible by traditional\npolicies, generalship by military institutions, great financiers by\nestablished commerce.\n\nIf we ventured to generalise these observations we might say that such\nan unequal distribution of capacity as might justify aristocracy should\nbe looked for only in civilised states. Savages are born free and equal,\nbut wherever a complex and highly specialised environment limits the\nloose freedom of those born into it, it also stimulates their capacity.\nUnder forced culture remarkable growths will appear, bringing to light\npossibilities in men which might, perhaps, not even have been\npossibilities had they been left to themselves; for mulberry leaves do\nnot of themselves develop into brocade. A certain personal idiosyncrasy\nmust be assumed at bottom, else cotton damask would be as good as silk\nand all men having like opportunities would be equally great. This\nidiosyncrasy is brought out by social pressure, while in a state of\nnature it might have betrayed itself only in trivial and futile ways, as\nit does among barbarians.\n\n[Sidenote: Sophistical envy.]\n\nDistinction is thus in one sense artificial, since it cannot become\nimportant or practical unless a certain environment gives play to\nindividual talent and preserves its originality; but distinction\nnevertheless is perfectly real, and not merely imputed. In vain does the\nman in the street declare that he, too, could have been a king if he had\nbeen born in the purple; for that potentiality does not belong to him as\nhe is, but only as he might have been, if _per impossibile_ he had not\nbeen himself. There is a strange metaphysical illusion in imagining that\na man might change his parents, his body, his early environment, and\nyet retain his personality. In its higher faculties his personality is\nproduced by his special relations. If Shakespeare had been born in Italy\nhe might, if you will, have been a great poet, but Shakespeare he could\nnever have been. Nor can it be called an injustice to all of us who are\nnot Englishmen of Queen Elizabeth\u2019s time that Shakespeare had that\nadvantage and was thereby enabled to exist.\n\nThe sense of injustice at unequal opportunities arises only when the two\nenvironments compared are really somewhat analogous, so that the\nillusion of a change of r\u00f4les without a change of characters may retain\nsome colour. It was a just insight, for instance, in the Christian fable\nto make the first rebel against God the chief among the angels, the\nspirit occupying the position nearest to that which he tried to usurp.\nLucifer\u2019s fallacy consisted in thinking natural inequality artificial.\nHis perversity lay in rebelling against himself and rejecting the\nhappiness proper to his nature. This was the maddest possible way of\nrebelling against his true creator; for it is our particular finitude\nthat creates us and makes us be. No one, except in wilful fancy, would\nenvy the peculiar advantages of a whale or an ant, of an Inca or a Grand\nLama. An exchange of places with such remote beings would too evidently\nleave each creature the very same that it was before; for after a\nnominal exchange of places each office would remain filled and no trace\nof a change would be perceptible. But the penny that one man finds and\nanother misses would not, had fortune been reversed, have transmuted\neach man into the other. So adventitious a circumstance seems easily\ntransferable without undermining that personal distinction which it had\ncome to embitter. Yet the incipient fallacy lurking even in such\nsuppositions becomes obvious when we inquire whether so blind an\naccident, for instance, as sex is also adventitious and ideally\ntransferable and whether Jack and Jill, remaining themselves, could have\nexchanged genders.\n\nWhat extends these invidious comparisons beyond all tolerable bounds is\nthe generic and vague nature proper to language and its terms. The first\npersonal pronoun \u201cI\u201d is a concept so thoroughly universal that it can\naccompany any experience whatever, yet it is used to designate an\nindividual who is really definable not by the formal selfhood which he\nshares with every other thinker, but by the special events that make up\nhis life. Each man\u2019s memory embraces a certain field, and if the\nlandscape open to his vision is sad and hateful he naturally wishes it\nto shift and become like that paradise in which, as he fancies, other\nmen dwell. A legitimate rebellion against evil in his own experience\nbecomes an unthinkable supposition about what his experience might have\nbeen had _he_ enjoyed those other men\u2019s opportunities or even (so far\ncan unreason wander) had _he_ possessed their character. The wholly\ndifferent creature, a replica of that envied ideal, which would have\nexisted in that case would still have called itself \u201cI\u201d; and so, the\ndreamer imagines, that creature would have been himself in a different\nsituation.\n\nIf a new birth could still be called by a man\u2019s own name, the reason\nwould be that the concrete faculties now present in him are the basis\nfor the ideal he throws out, and if these particular faculties came to\nfruition in a new being, he would call that being himself, inasmuch as\nit realised his ideal. The poorer the reality, therefore, the meaner and\nvaguer the ideal it is able to project. Man is so tied to his personal\nendowment (essential to him though an accident in the world) that even\nhis uttermost ideal, into which he would fly out of himself and his\nfinitude, can be nothing but the fulfilment of his own initial\nidiosyncrasies. Whatever other wills and other glories may exist in\nheaven lie not within his universe of aspiration. Even his most\nperversely metaphysical envy can begrudge to others only what he\ninstinctively craves for himself.\n\n[Sidenote: Inequality is not a grievance; suffering is.]\n\nIt is not mere inequality, therefore, that can be a reproach to the\naristocratic or theistic ideal. Could each person fulfil his own nature\nthe most striking differences in endowment and fortune would trouble\nnobody\u2019s dreams. The true reproach to which aristocracy and theism are\nopen is the thwarting of those unequal natures and the consequent\nsuffering imposed on them all. Injustice in this world is not something\ncomparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private\nfate. A bruised child wailing in the street, his small world for the\nmoment utterly black and cruel before him, does not fetch his\nunhappiness from sophisticated comparisons or irrational envy; nor can\nany compensations and celestial harmonies supervening later ever expunge\nor justify that moment\u2019s bitterness. The pain may be whistled away and\nforgotten; the mind may be rendered by it only a little harder, a little\ncoarser, a little more secretive and sullen and familiar with\nunrightable wrong. But ignoring that pain will not prevent its having\nexisted; it must remain for ever to trouble God\u2019s omniscience and be a\npart of that hell which the creation too truly involves.\n\n[Sidenote: Mutilation by crowding.]\n\nThe same curse of suffering vitiates Agrippa\u2019s ingenious parable and the\njoyful humility of Dante\u2019s celestial friends, and renders both equally\nirrelevant to human conditions. Nature may arrange her hierarchies as\nshe chooses and make her creatures instrumental to one another\u2019s life.\nThat interrelation is no injury to any part and an added beauty in the\nwhole. It would have been a truly admirable arrangement to have enabled\nevery living being, in attaining its own end, to make the attainments of\nthe others\u2019 ends possible to them also. An approach to such an\nequilibrium has actually been reached in some respects by the rough\nsifting of miscellaneous organisms until those that were compatible\nalone remained. But nature, in her haste to be fertile, wants to produce\neverything at once, and her distracted industry has brought about\nterrible confusion and waste and terrible injustice. She has been led to\npunish her ministers for the services they render and her favourites for\nthe honours they receive. She has imposed suffering on her creatures\ntogether with life; she has defeated her own objects and vitiated her\nbounty by letting every good do harm and bring evil in its train to some\nunsuspecting creature.\n\nThis oppression is the moral stain that attaches to aristocracy and\nmakes it truly unjust. Every privilege that imposes suffering involves a\nwrong. Not only does aristocracy lay on the world a tax in labour and\nprivation that its own splendours, intellectual and worldly, may arise,\nbut by so doing it infects intelligence and grandeur with inhumanity and\nrenders corrupt and odious that pre-eminence which should have been\ndivine. The lower classes, in submitting to the hardship and meanness of\ntheir lives\u2014which, to be sure, might have been harder and meaner had no\naristocracy existed\u2014must upbraid their fellow-men for profiting by\ntheir ill fortune and therefore having an interest in perpetuating it.\nInstead of the brutal but innocent injustice of nature, what they suffer\nfrom is the sly injustice of men; and though the suffering be less\u2014for\nthe worst of men is human\u2014the injury is more sensible. The\ninclemencies and dangers men must endure in a savage state, in scourging\nthem, would not have profited by that cruelty. But suffering has an\nadded sting when it enables others to be exempt from care and to live\nlike the gods in irresponsible ease; the inequality which would have\nbeen innocent and even beautiful in a happy world becomes, in a painful\nworld, a bitter wrong, or at best a criminal beauty.\n\n[Sidenote: A hint to optimists.]\n\nIt would be a happy relief to the aristocrat\u2019s conscience, when he\npossesses one, could he learn from some yet bolder Descartes that common\npeople were nothing but _b\u00eates-machines_, and that only a groundless\nprejudice had hitherto led us to suppose that life could exist where\nevidently nothing good could be attained by living. If all unfortunate\npeople could be proved to be unconscious automata, what a brilliant\njustification that would be for the ways of both God and man! Philosophy\nwould not lack arguments to support such an agreeable conclusion.\nBeginning with the axiom that whatever is is right, a metaphysician\nmight adduce the truth that consciousness is something self-existent and\nindubitably real; therefore, he would contend, it must be\nself-justifying and indubitably good. And he might continue by saying\nthat a slave\u2019s life was not its own excuse for being, nor were the\nlabours of a million drudges otherwise justified than by the\nconveniences which they supplied their masters with. _Ergo_, those\nservile operations could come to consciousness only where they attained\ntheir end, and the world could contain nothing but perfect and universal\nhappiness. A divine omniscience and joy, shared by finite minds in so\nfar as they might attain perfection, would be the only life in\nexistence, and the notion that such a thing as pain, sorrow, or hatred\ncould exist at all would forthwith vanish like the hideous and\nridiculous illusion that it was. This argument may be recommended to\napologetic writers as no weaker than those they commonly rely on, and\ninfinitely more consoling.\n\n[Sidenote: How aristocracies might do good.]\n\nBut so long as people remain on what such an invaluable optimist might\ncall the low level of sensuous thought, and so long as we imagine that\nwe exist and suffer, an aristocratic regimen can only be justified by\nradiating benefit and by proving that were less given to those above\nless would be attained by those beneath them. Such reversion of benefit\nmight take a material form, as when, by commercial guidance and military\nprotection, a greater net product is secured to labour, even after all\nneedful taxes have been levied upon it to support greatness. An\nindustrial and political oligarchy might defend itself on that ground.\nOr the return might take the less positive form of opportunity, as it\ndoes when an aristocratic society has a democratic government. Here the\npeople neither accept guidance nor require protection; but the existence\nof a rich and irresponsible class offers them an ideal, such as it is,\nin their ambitious struggles. For they too may grow rich, exercise\nfinancial ascendancy, educate their sons like gentlemen, and launch\ntheir daughters into fashionable society. Finally, if the only\naristocracy recognised were an aristocracy of achievement, and if public\nrewards followed personal merit, the reversion to the people might take\nthe form of participation by them in the ideal interests of eminent men.\nHoliness, genius, and knowledge can reverberate through all society. The\nfruits of art and science are in themselves cheap and not to be\nmonopolised or consumed in enjoyment. On the contrary, their wider\ndiffusion stimulates their growth and makes their cultivation more\nintense and successful. When an ideal interest is general the share\nwhich falls to the private person is the more apt to be efficacious. The\nsaints have usually had companions, and artists and philosophers have\nflourished in schools.\n\nAt the same time ideal goods cannot be assimilated without some training\nand leisure. Like education and religion they are degraded by\npopularity, and reduced from what the master intended to what the people\nare able and willing to receive. So pleasing an idea, then, as this of\ndiffused ideal possessions has little application in a society\naristocratically framed; for the greater eminence the few attain the\nless able are the many to follow them. Great thoughts require a great\nmind and pure beauties a profound sensibility. To attempt to give such\nthings a wide currency is to be willing to denaturalise them in order to\nboast that they have been propagated. Culture is on the horns of this\ndilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must\nbecome mean. These alternatives can never be eluded until some purified\nand high-bred race succeeds the promiscuous bipeds that now blacken the\nplanet.\n\n[Sidenote: Man adds wrong to nature\u2019s injury.]\n\nAristocracy, like everything else, has no practical force save that\nwhich mechanical causes endow it with. Its privileges are fruits of\ninevitable advantages. Its oppressions are simply new forms and vehicles\nfor nature\u2019s primeval cruelty, while the benefits it may also confer are\nonly further examples of her nice equilibrium and necessary harmony. For\nit lies in the essence of a mechanical world, where the interests of its\nproducts are concerned, to be fundamentally kind, since it has formed\nand on the whole maintains those products, and yet continually cruel,\nsince it forms and maintains them blindly, without considering\ndifficulties or probable failures. Now the most tyrannical government,\nlike the best, is a natural product maintained by an equilibrium of\nnatural forces. It is simply a new mode of mechanical energy to which\nthe philosopher living under it must adjust himself as he would to the\nweather. But when the vehicle of nature\u2019s inclemency is a heartless man,\neven if the harm done be less, it puts on a new and a moral aspect. The\nsource of injury is then not only natural but criminal as well, and the\nresult is a sense of wrong added to misfortune. It must needs be that\noffence come, but woe to him by whom the offence cometh. He justly\narouses indignation and endures remorse.\n\n[Sidenote: Conditions of a just inequality.]\n\nNow civilisation cannot afford to entangle its ideals with the causes of\nremorse and of just indignation. In the first place nature in her slow\nand ponderous way levels her processes and rubs off her sharp edges by\nperpetual friction. Where there is maladjustment there is no permanent\nphysical stability. Therefore the ideal of society can never involve the\ninfliction of injury on anybody for any purpose. Such an ideal would\npropose for a goal something out of equilibrium, a society which even if\nestablished could not maintain itself; but an ideal life must not tend\nto destroy its ideal by abolishing its own existence. In the second\nplace, it is impossible on moral grounds that injustice should subsist\nin the ideal. The ideal means the perfect, and a supposed ideal in which\nwrong still subsisted would be the denial of perfection. The ideal state\nand the ideal universe should be a family where all are not equal, but\nwhere all are happy. So that an aristocratic or theistic system in order\nto deserve respect must discard its sinister apologies for evil and\nclearly propose such an order of existences, one superposed upon the\nother, as should involve no suffering on any of its levels. The\nservices required of each must involve no injury to any; to perform them\nshould be made the servant\u2019s spontaneous and specific ideal. The\nprivileges the system bestows on some must involve no outrage on the\nrest, and must not be paid for by mutilating other lives or thwarting\ntheir natural potentialities. For the humble to give their labour would\nthen be blessed in reality, and not merely by imputation, while for the\ngreat to receive those benefits would be blessed also, not in fact only\nbut in justice.\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[Footnote C: Paradiso. Canto III., 70-87.]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER V\n\nDEMOCRACY\n\n\n[Sidenote: Democracy as an end and as a means.]\n\n[Sidenote: Natural democracy leads to monarchy.]\n\nThe word democracy may stand for a natural social equality in the body\npolitic or for a constitutional form of government in which power lies\nmore or less directly in the people\u2019s hands. The former may be called\nsocial democracy and the latter democratic government. The two differ\nwidely, both in origin and in moral principle. Genetically considered,\nsocial democracy is something primitive, unintended, proper to\ncommunities where there is general competence and no marked personal\neminence. It is the democracy of Arcadia, Switzerland, and the American\npioneers. Such a community might be said to have also a democratic\ngovernment, for everything in it is naturally democratic. There will be\nno aristocracy, no prestige; but instead an intelligent readiness to\nlend a hand and to do in unison whatever is done, not so much under\nleaders as by a kind of conspiring instinct and contagious sympathy. In\nother words, there will be that most democratic of governments\u2014no\ngovernment at all. But when pressure of circumstances, danger, or\ninward strife makes recognised and prolonged guidance necessary to a\nsocial democracy, the form its government takes is that of a rudimentary\nmonarchy, established by election or general consent. A natural leader\npresents himself and he is instinctively obeyed. He may indeed be freely\ncriticised and will not be screened by any pomp or traditional mystery;\nhe will be easy to replace and every citizen will feel himself radically\nhis equal. Yet such a state is at the beginnings of monarchy and\naristocracy, close to the stage depicted in Homer, where pre-eminences\nare still obviously natural, although already over-emphasised by the\nforce of custom and wealth, and by the fission of society into divergent\nclasses.\n\n[Sidenote: Artificial democracy is an extension of privilege.]\n\nPolitical democracy, on the other hand, is a late and artificial\nproduct. It arises by a gradual extension of aristocratic privileges,\nthrough rebellion against abuses, and in answer to restlessness on the\npeople\u2019s part. Its principle is not the absence of eminence, but the\ndiscovery that existing eminence is no longer genuine and\nrepresentative. It is compatible with a very complex government, great\nempire, and an aristocratic society; it may retain, as notably in\nEngland and in all ancient republics, many vestiges of older and less\ndemocratic institutions. For under democratic governments the people\nhave not created the state; they merely control it. Their suspicions\nand jealousies are quieted by assigning to them a voice, perhaps only a\nveto, in the administration; but the state administered is a prodigious\nself-created historical engine. Popular votes never established the\nfamily, private property, religious practices, or international\nfrontiers. Institutions, ideals, and administrators may all be such as\nthe popular classes could never have produced; but these products of\nnatural aristocracy are suffered to subsist so long as no very urgent\nprotest is raised against them. The people\u2019s liberty consists not in\ntheir original responsibility for what exists\u2014for they are guiltless of\nit\u2014but merely in the faculty they have acquired of abolishing any\ndetail that may distress or wound them, and of imposing any new measure,\nwhich, seen against the background of existing laws, may commend itself\nfrom time to time to their instinct and mind.\n\n[Sidenote: Ideals and expedients.]\n\nIf we turn from origins to ideals, the contrast between social and\npolitical democracy is no less marked. Social democracy is a general\nethical ideal, looking to human equality and brotherhood, and\ninconsistent, in its radical form, with such institutions as the family\nand hereditary property. Democratic government, on the contrary, is\nmerely a means to an end, an expedient for the better and smoother\ngovernment of certain states at certain junctures. It involves no\nspecial ideals of life; it is a question of policy, namely, whether the\ngeneral interest will be better served by granting all men (and perhaps\nall women) an equal voice in elections. For political democracy, arising\nin great and complex states, must necessarily be a government by deputy,\nand the questions actually submitted to the people can be only very\nlarge rough matters of general policy or of confidence in party leaders.\n\nWe may now add a few reflections about each kind of democracy, regarding\ndemocratic government chiefly in its origin and phases (for its function\nis that of all government) and social democracy chiefly as an ideal,\nsince its origin is simply that of society itself.\n\n[Sidenote: Well-founded distrust of rulers. Yet experts, if rational,\nwould serve common interests.]\n\nThe possibility of intelligent selfishness and the prevalence of a\nselfishness far from intelligent unite to make men wary in intrusting\ntheir interests to one another\u2019s keeping. If passion never overcame\nprudence, and if private prudence always counselled what was profitable\nalso to others, no objection could arise to an aristocratic policy. For\nif we assume a certain variety in endowments and functions among men, it\nwould evidently conduce to the general convenience that each man should\nexercise his powers uncontrolled by the public voice. The government,\nhaving facilities for information and ready resources, might be left to\ndetermine all matters of policy; for its members\u2019 private interests\nwould coincide with those of the public, and even if prejudices and\nirrational habits prevented them from pursuing their own advantage, they\nwould surely not err more frequently or more egregiously in that respect\nthan would the private individual, to whose ignorant fancy every\ndecision would otherwise have to be referred.\n\nThus in monarchy every expedient is seized upon to render the king\u2019s and\nthe country\u2019s interests coincident; public prosperity fills his\ntreasury, the arts adorn his court, justice rendered confirms his\nauthority. If reason were efficacious kings might well be left to govern\nalone. Theologians, under the same hypothesis, might be trusted to draw\nup creeds and codes of morals; and, in fact, everyone with a gift for\nmanagement or creation might be authorised to execute his plans. It is\nin this way, perhaps, that some social animals manage their affairs, for\nthey seem to co-operate without external control. That their instinctive\nsystem is far from perfect we may safely take for granted; but\ngovernment, too, is not always adequate or wise. What spoils such a\nspontaneous harmony is that people neither understand their own\ninterests nor have the constancy to pursue them systematically; and\nfurther, that their personal or animal interests may actually clash, in\nso far as they have not been harmonised by reason.\n\nTo rationalise an interest is simply to correlate it with every other\ninterest which it at all affects. In proportion as rational interests\npredominate in a man and he esteems rational satisfactions above all\nothers, it becomes impossible that he should injure another by his\naction, and unnecessary that he should sacrifice himself. But the worse\nand more brutal his nature is, and the less satisfaction he finds in\njustice, the more need he has to do violence to himself, lest he should\nbe doing it to others. This is the reason why preaching, conscious\neffort, and even education are such feeble agencies for moral reform:\nonly selection and right breeding could produce that genuine virtue\nwhich would not need to find goodness unpalatable nor to say, in\nexpressing its own perversities, that a distaste for excellence is a\ncondition of being good. But when a man is ill-begotten and foolish, and\nhates the means to his own happiness, he naturally is not well fitted to\nsecure that of other people. Those who suffer by his folly are apt to\nthink him malicious, whereas he is the first to suffer himself and knows\nthat it was the force of circumstances and a certain pathetic\nhelplessness in his own soul that led him into his errors.\n\n[Sidenote: People jealous of eminence.]\n\nThese errors, when they are committed by a weak and passionate ruler,\nare not easily forgiven. His subjects attribute to him an intelligence\nhe probably lacks; they call him treacherous or cruel when he is very\nlikely yielding to lazy habits and to insidious traditions. They see in\nevery calamity that befalls them a proof that his interests are\nradically hostile to theirs, whereas it is only his conduct that is so.\nAccordingly, in proportion to their alertness and self-sufficiency, they\nclamour for the right to govern themselves, and usually secure it.\nDemocratic government is founded on the decay of representative\neminence. It indicates that natural leaders are no longer trusted merely\nbecause they are rich, enterprising, learned, or old. Their spontaneous\naction would go awry. They must not be allowed to act without control.\nMen of talent may be needed and used in a democratic state; they may be\noccasionally _hired_; but they will be closely watched and directed by\nthe people, who fear otherwise to suffer the penalty of foolishly\nintrusting their affairs to other men\u2019s hands.\n\nA fool, says a Spanish proverb, knows more at home than a wise man at\nhis neighbour\u2019s. So democratic instinct assumes that, unless all those\nconcerned keep a vigilant eye on the course of public business and\nfrequently pronounce on its conduct, they will before long awake to the\nfact that they have been ignored and enslaved. The implication is that\neach man is the best judge of his own interests and of the means to\nadvance them; or at least that by making himself his own guide he can in\nthe end gain the requisite insight and thus not only attain his\npractical aims, but also some political and intellectual dignity.\n\n[Sidenote: It is representative.]\n\nAll just government pursues the general good; the choice between\naristocratic and democratic forms touches only the means to that end.\nOne arrangement may well be better fitted to one place and time, and\nanother to another. Everything depends on the existence or non-existence\nof available practical eminence. The democratic theory is clearly wrong\nif it imagines that eminence is not naturally representative. Eminence\nis synthetic and represents what it synthesises. An eminence not\nrepresentative would not constitute excellence, but merely extravagance\nor notoriety. Excellence in anything, whether thought, action, or\nfeeling, consists in nothing but representation, in standing for many\ndiffuse constituents reduced to harmony, so that the wise moment is\nfilled with an activity in which the upshot of the experience concerned\nis mirrored and regarded, an activity just to all extant interests and\nspeaking in their total behalf. But anything approaching such true\nexcellence is as rare as it is great, and a democratic society,\nnaturally jealous of greatness, may be excused for not expecting true\ngreatness and for not even understanding what it is. A government is not\nmade representative or just by the mechanical expedient of electing its\nmembers by universal suffrage. It becomes representative only by\nembodying in its policy, whether by instinct or high intelligence, the\npeople\u2019s conscious and unconscious interests.\n\n[Sidenote: But subject to decay.]\n\nDemocratic theory seems to be right, however, about the actual failure\nof theocracies, monarchies, and oligarchies to remain representative and\nto secure the general good. The true eminence which natural leaders may\nhave possessed in the beginning usually declines into a conventional and\nbaseless authority. The guiding powers which came to save and express\nhumanity fatten in office and end by reversing their function. The\ngovernment reverts to the primeval robber; the church stands in the way\nof all wisdom. Under such circumstances it is a happy thing if the\npeople possess enough initiative to assert themselves and, after\nclearing the ground in a more or less summary fashion, allow some new\norganisation, more representative of actual interests, to replace the\nold encumbrances and tyrannies.\n\n[Sidenote: Ancient citizenship a privilege.]\n\nIn the heroic ages of Greece and Rome patriotism was stimulated in\nmanifold ways. The city was a fatherland, a church, an army, and almost\na family. It had its own school of art, its own dialect, its own feasts,\nits own fables. Every possible social interest was either embodied in\nthe love of country or, like friendship and fame, closely associated\nwith it. Patriotism could then be expected to sway every mind at all\ncapable of moral enthusiasm. Furthermore, only the flower of the\npopulation were citizens. In rural districts the farmer might be a\nfreeman; but he probably had slaves whose work he merely superintended.\nThe meaner and more debasing offices, mining, sea-faring, domestic\nservice, and the more laborious part of all industries, were relegated\nto slaves. The citizens were a privileged class. Military discipline and\nthe street life natural in Mediterranean countries, kept public events\nand public men always under everybody\u2019s eyes: the state was a bodily\npresence. Democracy, when it arose in such communities, was still\naristocratic; it imposed few new duties upon the common citizens, while\nit diffused many privileges and exemptions among them.\n\n[Sidenote: Modern democracy industrial.]\n\nThe social democracy which is the ideal of many in modern times, on the\nother hand, excludes slavery, unites whole nations and even all mankind\ninto a society of equals, and admits no local or racial privileges by\nwhich the sense of fellowship may be stimulated. Public spirit could not\nbe sustained in such a community by exemptions, rivalries, or ambitions.\nNo one, indeed, would be a slave, everyone would have an elementary\neducation and a chance to demonstrate his capacity; but he would be\nprobably condemned to those occupations which in ancient republics were\nassigned to slaves. At least at the opening of his career he would find\nhimself on the lowest subsisting plane of humanity, and he would\nprobably remain on it throughout his life. In other words, the citizens\nof a social democracy would be all labourers; for even those who rose\nto be leaders would, in a genuine democracy, rise from the ranks and\nbelong in education and habits to the same class as all the others.\n\n[Sidenote: Dangers to current civilisation.]\n\nUnder such circumstances the first virtue which a democratic society\nwould have to possess would be enthusiastic diligence. The motives for\nwork which have hitherto prevailed in the world have been want,\nambition, and love of occupation: in a social democracy, after the first\nwas eliminated, the last alone would remain efficacious. Love of\noccupation, although it occasionally accompanies and cheers every sort\nof labour, could never induce men originally to undertake arduous and\nuninteresting tasks, nor to persevere in them if by chance or\nwaywardness such tasks had been once undertaken. Inclination can never\nbe the general motive for the work now imposed on the masses. Before\nlabour can be its own reward it must become less continuous, more\nvaried, more responsive to individual temperament and capacity.\nOtherwise it would not cease to repress and warp human faculties.\n\nA state composed exclusively of such workmen and peasants as make up the\nbulk of modern nations would be an utterly barbarous state. Every\nliberal tradition would perish in it; and the rational and historic\nessence of patriotism itself would be lost. The emotion of it, no doubt,\nwould endure, for it is not generosity that the people lack. They\npossess every impulse; it is experience that they cannot gather, for in\ngathering it they would be constituting those higher organs that make up\nan aristocratic society. Civilisation has hitherto consisted in\ndiffusion and dilution of habits arising in privileged centres. It has\nnot sprung from the people; it has arisen in their midst by a variation\nfrom them, and it has afterward imposed itself on them from above. All\nits founders in antiquity passed for demi-gods or were at least inspired\nby an oracle or a nymph. The vital genius thus bursting forth and\nspeaking with authority gained a certain ascendency in the world; it\nmitigated barbarism without removing it. This is one fault, among\nothers, which current civilisation has; it is artificial. If social\ndemocracy could breed a new civilisation out of the people, this new\ncivilisation would be profounder than ours and more pervasive. But it\ndoubtless cannot. What we have rests on conquest and conversion, on\nleadership and imitation, on mastership and service. To abolish\naristocracy, in the sense of social privilege and sanctified authority\nwould be to cut off the source from which all culture has hitherto\nflowed.\n\n[Sidenote: Is current civilisation a good?]\n\nCivilisation, however, although we are wont to speak the word with a\ncertain unction, is a thing whose value may be questioned. One way of\ndefending the democratic ideal is to deny that civilisation is a good.\nIn one sense, indeed, social democracy is essentially a reversion to a\nmore simple life, more Arcadian and idyllic than that which aristocracy\nhas fostered. Equality is more easily attained in a patriarchal age than\nin an age of concentrated and intense activities. Possessions, ideal and\nmaterial, may be fewer in a simple community, but they are more easily\nshared and bind men together in moral and imaginative bonds instead of\ndividing them, as do all highly elaborate ways of living or thinking.\nThe necessaries of life can be enjoyed by a rural people, living in a\nsparsely settled country, and among these necessaries might be counted\nnot only bread and rags, which everyone comes by in some fashion even in\nour society, but that communal religion, poetry, and fellowship which\nthe civilised poor are so often without. If social democracy should\ntriumph and take this direction it would begin by greatly diminishing\nthe amount of labour performed in the world. All instruments of luxury,\nmany instruments of vain knowledge and art, would no longer be produced.\nWe might see the means of communication, lately so marvellously\ndeveloped, again disused; the hulks of great steamers rusting in\nharbours, the railway bridges collapsing and the tunnels choked; while a\nrural population, with a few necessary and perfected manufactures, would\nspread over the land and abandon the great cities to ruin, calling them\nseats of Babylonian servitude and folly.\n\nSuch anticipations may seem fantastic, and of course there is no\nprobability that a reaction against material progress should set in in\nthe near future, since as yet the tide of commercialism and population\ncontinues everywhere to rise; but does any thoughtful man suppose that\nthese tendencies will be eternal and that the present experiment in\ncivilisation is the last the world will see?\n\n[Sidenote: Horrors of materialistic democracy.]\n\nIf social democracy, however, refused to diminish labour and wealth and\nproposed rather to accelerate material progress and keep every furnace\nat full blast, it would come face to face with a serious problem. By\nwhom would the product be enjoyed? By those who created it? What sort of\npleasures, arts, and sciences would those grimy workmen have time and\nenergy for after a day of hot and unremitting exertion? What sort of\nreligion would fill their Sabbaths and their dreams? We see how they\nspend their leisure to-day, when a strong aristocratic tradition and the\npresence of a rich class still profoundly influence popular ideals.\nImagine those aristocratic influences removed, and would any head be\nlifted above a dead level of infinite dulness and vulgarity? Would\nmankind be anything but a trivial, sensuous, superstitious,\ncustom-ridden herd? There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and\nanonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every\nbudding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce\nstupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the claws\nof a dragon. Anyone would be a hero who should quell the monster. A\nforeign invader or domestic despot would at least have steps to his\nthrone, possible standing-places for art and intelligence; his\nsupercilious indifference would discountenance the popular gods, and\nallow some courageous hand at last to shatter them. Social democracy at\nhigh pressure would leave no room for liberty. The only freeman in it\nwould be one whose whole ideal was to be an average man.\n\n[Sidenote: Timocracy or socialistic democracy.]\n\nPerhaps, however, social democracy might take a more liberal form. It\nmight allow the benefits of civilisation to be integrated in eminent\nmen, whose influence in turn should direct and temper the general life.\nThis would be timocracy\u2014a government by men of merit. The same\nabilities which raised these men to eminence would enable them to\napprehend ideal things and to employ material resources for the common\nadvantage. They would formulate religion, cultivate the arts and\nsciences, provide for government and all public conveniences, and\ninspire patriotism by their discourse and example. At the same time a\nnew motive would be added to common labour, I mean ambition. For there\nwould be not only a possibility of greater reward but a possibility of\ngreater service. The competitive motive which socialism is supposed to\ndestroy would be restored in timocracy, and an incentive offered to\nexcellence and industry. The country\u2019s resources would increase for the\nvery reason that somebody might conceivably profit by them; and everyone\nwould have at least an ideal interest in ministering to that complete\nlife which he or his children, or whoever was most capable of\nappreciation, was actually to enjoy.\n\nSuch a timocracy (of which the Roman Church is a good example) would\ndiffer from the social aristocracy that now exists only by the removal\nof hereditary advantages. People would be born equal, but they would\ngrow unequal, and the only equality subsisting would be equality of\nopportunity. If power remained in the people\u2019s hands, the government\nwould be democratic; but a full development of timocracy would allow the\nproved leader to gain great ascendancy. The better security the law\noffered that the men at the top should be excellent, the less restraint\nwould it need to put upon them when once in their places. Their eminence\nwould indeed have been factitious and their station undeserved if they\nwere not able to see and do what was requisite better than the community\nat large. An assembly has only the lights common to the majority of its\nmembers, far less, therefore, than its members have when added together\nand less even than the wiser part of them.\n\nA timocracy would therefore seem to unite the advantages of all forms of\ngovernment and to avoid their respective abuses. It would promote\nfreedom scientifically. It might be a monarchy, if men existed fit to\nbe kings; but they would have to give signs of their fitness and their\nhonours would probably not be hereditary. Like aristocracy, it would\ndisplay a great diversity of institutions and superposed classes, a\nstimulating variety in ways of living; it would be favourable to art and\nscience and to noble idiosyncrasies. Among its activities the\nculminating and most conspicuous ones would be liberal. Yet there would\nbe no isolation of the aristocratic body; its blood would be drawn from\nthe people, and only its traditions from itself. Like social democracy,\nfinally, it would be just and open to every man, but it would not\ndepress humanity nor wish to cast everybody in a common mould.\n\n[Sidenote: The difficulty the same as in all Socialism.]\n\nThere are immense difficulties, however, in the way of such a Utopia,\nsome physical and others moral. Timocracy would have to begin by\nuprooting the individual from his present natural soil and transplanting\nhim to that in which his spirit might flourish best. This proposed\ntransfer is what makes the system ideally excellent, since nature is a\nmeans only; but it makes it also almost impossible to establish, since\nnature is the only efficacious power. Timocracy can arise only in the\nfew fortunate cases where material and social forces have driven men to\nthat situation in which their souls can profit most, and where they find\nno influences more persuasive than those which are most liberating. It\nis clear, for instance, that timocracy would exclude the family or\ngreatly weaken it. Soul and body would be wholly transferred to that\nmedium where lay the creature\u2019s spiritual affinities; his origins would\nbe disregarded on principle, except where they might help to forecast\nhis disposition. Life would become heartily civic, corporate,\nconventual; otherwise opportunities would not be equal in the beginning,\nnor culture and happiness perfect in the end, and identical. We have\nseen, however, what difficulties and dangers surround any revolution in\nthat ideal direction.\n\nEven less perfect polities, that leave more to chance, would require a\nmoral transformation in mankind if they were to be truly successful.\n\nA motive which now generates political democracy, impatience of\nsacrifice, must, in a good social democracy, be turned into its\nopposite. Men must be glad to labour unselfishly in the spirit of art or\nof religious service: for if they labour selfishly, the higher organs of\nthe state would perish, since only a few can profit by them materially;\nwhile if they neglect their work, civilisation loses that intensive\ndevelopment which it was proposed to maintain. Each man would need to\nforget himself and not to chafe under his natural limitations. He must\nfind his happiness in seeing his daily task grow under his hands; and\nwhen, in speculative moments, he lifts his eyes from his labour, he must\nfind an ideal satisfaction in patriotism, in love for that complex\nsociety to which he is contributing an infinitesimal service. He must\nlearn to be happy without wealth, fame, or power, and with no reward\nsave his modest livelihood and an ideal participation in his country\u2019s\ngreatness. It is a spirit hardly to be maintained without a close\norganisation and much training; and as military and religious\ntimocracies have depended on discipline and a minute rule of life, so an\nindustrial timocracy would have to depend on guilds and unions, which\nwould make large inroads upon personal freedom.\n\n[Sidenote: The masses would have to be plebeian in position and\npatrician in feeling.]\n\nThe question here suggests itself whether such a citizen, once having\naccepted his humble lot, would be in a different position from the\nplebeians in an aristocracy. The same subordination would be imposed\nupon him, only the ground assigned for his submission would be no longer\nself-interest and necessity, but patriotic duty. This patriotism would\nhave to be of an exalted type. Its end would not be, as in industrial\nsociety, to secure the private interests of each citizen; its end would\nbe the glory and perfection of the state as imagination or philosophy\nmight conceive them. This glory and perfection would not be a benefit to\nanyone who was not in some degree a philosopher and a poet. They would\nseem, then, to be the special interests of an aristocracy, not indeed an\naristocracy of wealth or power, but an aristocracy of noble minds.\nThose whose hearts could prize the state\u2019s ideal perfection would be\nthose in whom its benefits would be integrated. And the common citizen\nwould find in their existence, and in his own participation in their\nvirtue, the sole justification for his loyalty.\n\nIdeal patriotism is not secured when each man, although without natural\neminence, pursues his private interests. What renders man an imaginative\nand moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which\ncould not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion,\nscience, and art. All these aims, in a well-knit state, are covered by\nthe single passion of patriotism; and then a conception of one\u2019s\ncountry, its history and mission becomes the touchstone of every ideal\nimpulse. Timocracy requires this kind of patriotism in everybody; so\nthat if public duty is not to become a sacrifice imposed on the many for\nthe sake of the few, as in aristocracy, the reason can only be that the\nmany covet, appreciate, and appropriate their country\u2019s ideal glories,\nquite as much as the favoured class ever could in any aristocracy.\n\n[Sidenote: Organisation for ideal ends breeds fanaticism.]\n\nIs this possible? What might happen if the human race were immensely\nimproved and exalted there is as yet no saying; but experience has given\nno example of efficacious devotion to communal ideals except in small\ncities, held together by close military and religious bonds and having\nno important relations to anything external. Even this antique virtue\nwas short-lived and sadly thwarted by private and party passion. Where\npublic spirit has held best, as at Sparta or (to take a very different\ntype of communal passion) among the Jesuits, it has been paid for by a\nnotable lack of spontaneity and wisdom; such inhuman devotion to an\narbitrary end has made these societies odious. We may say, therefore,\nthat a zeal sufficient to destroy selfishness is, as men are now\nconstituted, worse than selfishness itself. In pursuing prizes for\nthemselves people benefit their fellows more than in pursuing such\nnarrow and irrational ideals as alone seem to be powerful in the world.\nTo ambition, to the love of wealth and honour, to love of a liberty\nwhich meant opportunity for experiment and adventure, we owe whatever\nbenefits we have derived from Greece and Rome, from Italy and England.\nIt is doubtful whether a society which offered no personal prizes would\ninspire effort; and it is still more doubtful whether that effort, if\nactually stimulated by education, would be beneficent. For an\nindoctrinated and collective virtue turns easily to fanaticism; it\nimposes irrational sacrifices prompted by some abstract principle or\nhabit once, perhaps, useful; but that convention soon becomes\nsuperstitious and ceases to represent general human excellence.\n\n[Sidenote: Public spirit the life of democracy.]\n\nNow it is in the spirit of social democracy to offer no prizes. Office\nin it, being the reward of no great distinction, brings no great honour,\nand being meanly paid it brings no great profit, at least while honestly\nadministered. All wealth in a true democracy would be the fruit of\npersonal exertion and would come too late to be nobly enjoyed or to\nteach the art of liberal living. It would be either accumulated\nirrationally or given away outright. And if fortunes could not be\ntransmitted or used to found a great family they would lose their chief\nimaginative charm. The pleasures a democratic society affords are vulgar\nand not even by an amiable illusion can they become an aim in life. A\nlife of pleasure requires an aristocratic setting to make it interesting\nor really conceivable. Intellectual and artistic greatness does not need\nprizes, but it sorely needs sympathy and a propitious environment.\nGenius, like goodness (which can stand alone), would arise in a\ndemocratic society as frequently as elsewhere; but it might not be so\nwell fed or so well assimilated. There would at least be no artificial\nand simulated merit; everybody would take his ease in his inn and sprawl\nunbuttoned without respect for any finer judgment or performance than\nthat which he himself was inclined to. The only excellence subsisting\nwould be spontaneous excellence, inwardly prompted, sure of itself, and\ninwardly rewarded. For such excellence to grow general mankind must be\nnotably transformed. If a noble and civilised democracy is to subsist,\nthe common citizen must be something of a saint and something of a hero.\nWe see therefore how justly flattering and profound, and at the same\ntime how ominous, was Montesquieu\u2019s saying that the principle of\ndemocracy is virtue.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VI\n\nFREE SOCIETY\n\n\n[Sidenote: Primacy of nature over spirit.]\n\nNatural society unites beings in time and space; it fixes affection on\nthose creatures on which we depend and to which our action must be\nadapted. Natural society begins at home and radiates over the world, as\nmore and more things become tributary to our personal being. In marriage\nand the family, in industry, government, and war, attention is riveted\non temporal existences, on the fortunes of particular bodies, natural or\ncorporate. There is then a primacy of nature over spirit in social life;\nand this primacy, in a certain sense, endures to the end, since all\nspirit must be the spirit of something, and reason could not exist or be\nconceived at all unless a material organism, personal or social, lay\nbeneath to give thought an occasion and a point of view, and to give\npreference a direction. Things could not be near or far, worse or\nbetter, unless a definite life were taken as a standard, a life lodged\nsomewhere in space and time. Reason is a principle of order appearing in\na subject-matter which in its subsistence and quantity must be an\nirrational datum. Reason expresses purpose, purpose expresses impulse,\nand impulse expresses a natural body with self-equilibrating powers.\n\nAt the same time, natural growths may be called achievements only\nbecause, when formed, they support a joyful and liberal experience.\nNature\u2019s works first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke;\nmechanical processes have interesting climaxes only from the point of\nview of the life that expresses them, in which their ebb and flow grows\nimpassioned and vehement. Nature\u2019s values are imputed to her\nretroactively by spirit, which in its material dependence has a logical\nand moral primacy of its own. In themselves events are perfectly\nmechanical, steady, and fluid, not stopping where we see a goal nor\navoiding what we call failures. And so they would always have remained\nin crude experience, if no cumulative reflection, no art, and no science\nhad come to dominate and foreshorten that equable flow of substance,\narresting it ideally in behalf of some rational interest.\n\nThus it comes to pass that rational interests have a certain ascendancy\nin the world, as well as an absolute authority over it; for they arise\nwhere an organic equilibrium has naturally established itself. Such an\nequilibrium maintains itself by virtue of the same necessity that\nproduced it; without arresting the flux or introducing any miracle, it\nsustains in being an ideal form. This form is what consciousness\ncorresponds to and raises to actual existence; so that significant\nthoughts are something which nature necessarily lingers upon and seems\nto serve. The being to whom they come is the most widely based and\nsynthetic of her creatures. The mind spreads and soars in proportion as\nthe body feeds on the surrounding world. Noble ideas, although rare and\ndifficult to attain, are not naturally fugitive.\n\n[Sidenote: All experience at bottom liberal.]\n\nConsciousness is not ideal merely in its highest phases; it is ideal\nthrough and through. On one level as much as on another, it celebrates\nan attained balance in nature, or grieves at its collapse; it prophesies\nand remembers, it loves and dreams. It sees even nature from the point\nof view of ideal interests, and measures the flux of things by ideal\nstandards. It registers its own movement, like that of its objects,\nentirely in ideal terms, looking to fixed goals of its own imagining,\nand using nothing in the operation but concretions in discourse. Primary\nmathematical notions, for instance, are evidences of a successful\nreactive method attained in the organism and translated in consciousness\ninto a stable grammar which has wide applicability and great\npersistence, so that it has come to be elaborated ideally into\nprodigious abstract systems of thought. Every experience of victory,\neloquence, or beauty is a momentary success of the same kind, and if\nrepeated and sustained becomes a spiritual possession.\n\n[Sidenote: Social experience has its ideality too.]\n\nSociety also breeds its ideal harmonies. At first it establishes\naffections between beings naturally conjoined in the world; later it\ngrows sensitive to free and spiritual affinities, to oneness of mind and\nsympathetic purposes. These ideal affinities, although grounded like the\nothers on material relations (for sympathy presupposes communication),\ndo not have those relations for their theme but rest on them merely as\non a pedestal from which they look away to their own realm, as music,\nwhile sustained by vibrating instruments, looks away from them to its\nown universe of sound.\n\n[Sidenote: The self an ideal.]\n\nIdeal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination. Its\npersonages are all mythical, beginning with that brave protagonist who\ncalls himself I and speaks all the soliloquies. When most nearly\nmaterial these personages are human souls\u2014the ideal life of particular\nbodies\u2014or floating mortal reputations\u2014echoes of those ideal lives in\none another. From this relative substantiality they fade into notions of\ncountry, posterity, humanity, and the gods. These figures all represent\nsome circle of events or forces in the real world; but such\nrepresentation, besides being mythical, is usually most inadequate. The\nboundaries of that province which each spirit presides over are vaguely\ndrawn, the spirit itself being correspondingly indefinite. This\nambiguity is most conspicuous, perhaps, in the most absorbing of the\npersonages which a man constructs in this imaginative fashion\u2014his idea\nof himself. \u201cThere is society where none intrudes;\u201d and for most men\nsympathy with their imaginary selves is a powerful and dominant emotion.\nTrue memory offers but a meagre and interrupted vista of past\nexperience, yet even that picture is far too rich a term for mental\ndiscourse to bandy about; a name with a few physical and social\nconnotations is what must represent the man to his own thinkings. Or\nrather it is no memory, however eviscerated, that fulfils that office. A\nman\u2019s notion of himself is a concretion in discourse for which his more\nconstant somatic feelings, his ruling interests, and his social\nrelations furnish most of the substance.\n\n[Sidenote: Romantic egotism.]\n\nThe more reflective and self-conscious a man is the more completely will\nhis experience be subsumed and absorbed in his perennial \u201cI.\u201d If\nphilosophy has come to reinforce this reflective egotism, he may even\nregard all nature as nothing but his half-voluntary dream and encourage\nhimself thereby to give even to the physical world a dramatic and\nsentimental colour. But the more successful he is in stuffing everything\ninto his self-consciousness, the more desolate will the void become\nwhich surrounds him. For self is, after all, but one term in a primitive\ndichotomy and would lose its specific and intimate character were it no\nlonger contrasted with anything else. The egotist must therefore people\nthe desert he has spread about him, and he naturally peoples it with\nmythical counterparts of himself. Sometimes, if his imagination is\nsensuous, his alter-egos are incarnate in the landscape, and he creates\na poetic mythology; sometimes, when the inner life predominates, they\nare projected into his own forgotten past or infinite future. He will\nthen say that all experience is really his own and that some\ninexplicable illusion has momentarily raised opaque partitions in his\nomniscient mind.\n\n[Sidenote: Vanity.]\n\nPhilosophers less pretentious and more worldly than these have sometimes\nfelt, in their way, the absorbing force of self-consciousness. La\nRochefoucauld could describe _amour propre_ as the spring of all human\nsentiments. _Amour propre_ involves preoccupation not merely with the\nidea of self, but with that idea reproduced in other men\u2019s minds; the\nsoliloquy has become a dialogue, or rather a solo with an echoing\nchorus. Interest in one\u2019s own social figure is to some extent a material\ninterest, for other men\u2019s love or aversion is a principle read into\ntheir acts; and a social animal like man is dependent on other men\u2019s\nacts for his happiness. An individual\u2019s concern for the attitude society\ntakes toward him is therefore in the first instance concern for his own\npractical welfare. But imagination here refines upon worldly interest.\nWhat others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when\nknown, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves. Nothing could better\nprove the mythical character of self-consciousness than this extreme\nsensitiveness to alien opinions; for if a man really knew himself he\nwould utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a\nsubject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.\nIndeed, those opinions would hardly seem to him directed upon the\nreality at all, and he would laugh at them as he might at the stock\nfortune-telling of some itinerant gypsy.\n\nAs it is, however, the least breath of irresponsible and anonymous\ncensure lashes our self-esteem and sometimes quite transforms our plans\nand affections. The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most\ninveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age. We crave support in\nvanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that\nsphere; for however persistent and passionate such prejudices may be, we\nknow too well that they are woven of thin air. A hostile word, by\nstarting a contrary imaginative current, buffets them rudely and\nthreatens to dissolve their being.\n\n[Sidenote: Ambiguities of fame.]\n\nThe highest form of vanity is love of fame. It is a passion easy to\nderide but hard to understand, and in men who live at all by imagination\nalmost impossible to eradicate. The good opinion of posterity can have\nno possible effect on our fortunes, and the practical value which\nreputation may temporarily have is quite absent in posthumous fame. The\ndirect object of this passion\u2014that a name should survive in men\u2019s\nmouths to which no adequate idea of its original can be attached\u2014seems\na thin and fantastic satisfaction, especially when we consider how\nlittle we should probably sympathise with the creatures that are to\nremember us. What comfort would it be to Virgil that boys still read him\nat school, or to Pindar that he is sometimes mentioned in a world from\nwhich everything he loved has departed? Yet, beneath this desire for\nnominal longevity, apparently so inane, there may lurk an ideal ambition\nof which the ancients cannot have been unconscious when they set so high\na value on fame. They often identified fame with immortality, a subject\non which they had far more rational sentiments than have since\nprevailed.\n\n[Sidenote: Its possible ideality.]\n\nFame, as a noble mind conceives and desires it, is not embodied in a\nmonument, a biography, or the repetition of a strange name by strangers;\nit consists in the immortality of a man\u2019s work, his spirit, his\nefficacy, in the perpetual rejuvenation of his soul in the world. When\nHorace\u2014no model of magnanimity\u2014wrote his _exegi monumentum_, he was\nnot thinking that the pleasure he would continue to give would remind\npeople of his trivial personality, which indeed he never particularly\ncelebrated and which had much better lie buried with his bones. He was\nthinking, of course, of that pleasure itself; thinking that the delight,\nhalf lyric, half sarcastic, which those delicate cameos had given him\nto carve would be perennially renewed in all who retraced them. Nay,\nperhaps we may not go too far in saying that even that impersonal\nsatisfaction was not the deepest he felt; the deepest, very likely,\nflowed from the immortality, not of his monument, but of the subject and\npassion it commemorated; that tenderness, I mean, and that disillusion\nwith mortal life which rendered his verse immortal. He had expressed,\nand in expressing appropriated, some recurring human moods, some mocking\nrenunciations; and he knew that his spirit was immortal, being linked\nand identified with that portion of the truth. He had become a little\nspokesman of humanity, uttering what all experience repeats more or less\narticulately; and even if he should cease to be honoured in men\u2019s\nmemories, he would continue to be unwittingly honoured and justified in\ntheir lives.\n\nWhat we may conceive to have come in this way even within a Horace\u2019s\napprehension is undoubtedly what has attached many nobler souls to fame.\nWith an inversion of moral derivations which all mythical expression\ninvolves we speak of fame as the reward of genius, whereas in truth\ngenius, the imaginative dominion of experience, is its own reward and\nfame is but a foolish image by which its worth is symbolised. When the\nVirgin in the Magnificat says, \u201cBehold, from henceforth all generations\nshall call me blessed,\u201d the psalmist surely means to express a\nspiritual exaltation exempt from vanity; he merely translates into a\nrhetorical figure the fact that what had been first revealed to Mary\nwould also bless all generations. That the Church should in consequence\ndeem and pronounce her blessed is an incident describing, but not\ncreating, the unanimity in their religious joys. Fame is thus the\noutward sign or recognition of an inward representative authority\nresiding in genius or good fortune, an authority in which lies the whole\nworth of fame. Those will substantially remember and honour us who keep\nour ideals, and we shall live on in those ages whose experience we have\nanticipated.\n\nFree society differs from that which is natural and legal precisely in\nthis, that it does not cultivate relations which in the last analysis\nare experienced and material, but turns exclusively to unanimities in\nmeanings, to collaborations in an ideal world. The basis of free society\nis of course natural, as we said, but free society has ideal goals.\nSpirits cannot touch save by becoming unanimous. At the same time public\nopinion, reputation, and impersonal sympathy reinforce only very general\nfeelings, and reinforce them vaguely; and as the inner play of sentiment\nbecomes precise, it craves more specific points of support or\ncomparison. It is in creatures of our own species that we chiefly scent\nthe aroma of inward sympathy, because it is they that are visibly moved\non the same occasions as ourselves; and it is to those among our\nfellow-men who share our special haunts and habits that we feel more\nprecise affinities. Though the ground for such feeling is animal contact\nand contagion, its deliverance does not revert to those natural\naccidents, but concerns a represented sympathy in represented souls.\nFriendship, springing from accidental association, terminates in a\nconsciousness of ideal and essential agreement.\n\n[Sidenote: Comradeship.]\n\nComradeship is a form of friendship still akin to general sociability\nand gregariousness. When men are \u201cin the same boat together,\u201d when a\ncommon anxiety, occupation, or sport unites them, they feel their human\nkinship in an intensified form without any greater personal affinity\nsubsisting between them. The same effect is produced by a common\nestrangement from the rest of society. For this reason comradeship lasts\nno longer than the circumstances that bring it about. Its constancy is\nproportionate to the monotony of people\u2019s lives and minds. There is a\nlasting bond among schoolfellows because no one can become a boy again\nand have a new set of playmates. There is a persistent comradeship with\none\u2019s countrymen, especially abroad, because seldom is a man pliable and\npolyglot enough to be at home among foreigners, or really to understand\nthem. There is an inevitable comradeship with men of the same breeding\nor profession, however bad these may be, because habits soon monopolise\nthe man. Nevertheless a greater buoyancy, a longer youth, a richer\nexperience, would break down all these limits of fellowship. Such\nclingings to the familiar are three parts dread of the unfamiliar and\nwant of resource in its presence, for one part in them of genuine\nloyalty. Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a\nman of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like\nhome.\n\n[Sidenote: External conditions of friendship.]\n\nThough comradeship is an accidental bond, it is the condition of ideal\nfriendship, for the ideal, in all spheres, is nothing but the accidental\nconfirming itself and generating its own standard. Men must meet to\nlove, and many other accidents besides conjunction must conspire to make\na true friendship possible. In order that friendship may fulfil the\nconditions even of comradeship, it is requisite that the friends have\nthe same social status, so that they may live at ease together and have\ncongenial tastes. They must further have enough community of occupation\nand gifts to give each an appreciation of the other\u2019s faculty; for\nqualities are not complementary unless they are qualities of the same\nsubstance. Nothing must be actual in either friend that is not potential\nin the other.\n\n[Sidenote: Identity in sex required.]\n\nFor this reason, among others, friends are generally of the same sex,\nfor when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their\nreasons are always different. So that while intellectual harmony between\nmen and women is easily possible, its delightful and magic quality lies\nprecisely in the fact that it does not arise from mutual understanding,\nbut is a conspiracy of alien essences and a kissing, as it were, in the\ndark. As man\u2019s body differs from woman\u2019s in sex and strength, so his\nmind differs from hers in quality and function: they can co-operate but\ncan never fuse. The human race, in its intellectual life, is organised\nlike the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and\nessentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is\na queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but\npassive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without\njustice. Friendship with a woman is therefore apt to be more or less\nthan friendship: less, because there is no intellectual parity; more,\nbecause (even when the relation remains wholly dispassionate, as in\nrespect to old ladies) there is something mysterious and oracular about\na woman\u2019s mind which inspires a certain instinctive deference and puts\nit out of the question to judge what she says by masculine standards.\nShe has a kind of sibylline intuition and the right to be irrationally\n_\u00e0 propos_. There is a gallantry of the mind which pervades all\nconversation with a lady, as there is a natural courtesy toward children\nand mystics; but such a habit of respectful concession, marking as it\ndoes an intellectual alienation as profound as that which separates us\nfrom the dumb animals, is radically incompatible with friendship.\n\n[Sidenote: and in age.]\n\nFriends, moreover, should have been young together. Much difference in\nage defeats equality and forbids frankness on many a fundamental\nsubject; it confronts two minds of unlike focus: one near-sighted and\nwithout perspective, the other seeing only the background of present\nthings. While comparisons in these respects may be interesting and\nborrowings sometimes possible, lending the older mind life and the\nyounger mind wisdom, such intercourse has hardly the value of\nspontaneous sympathy, in which the spark of mutual intelligence flies,\nas it should, almost without words. Contagion is the only source of\nvalid mind-reading: you must imitate to understand, and where the\nplasticity of two minds is not similar their mutual interpretations are\nnecessarily false. They idealise in their friends whatever they do not\ninvent or ignore, and the friendship which should have lived on energies\nconspiring spontaneously together dies into conscious appreciation.\n\n[Sidenote: Constituents of friendship.]\n\nAll these are merely permissive conditions for friendship; its positive\nessence is yet to find. How, we may ask, does the vision of the general\n_socius_, humanity, become specific in the vision of a particular friend\nwithout losing its ideality or reverting to practical values? Of course,\nindividuals might be singled out for the special benefits they may have\nconferred; but a friend\u2019s only gift is himself, and friendship is not\nfriendship, it is not a form of free or liberal society, if it does not\nterminate in an ideal possession, in an object loved for its own sake.\nSuch objects can be ideas only, not forces, for forces are subterranean\nand instrumental things, having only such value as they borrow from\ntheir ulterior effects and manifestations. To praise the utility of\nfriendship, as the ancients so often did, and to regard it as a\npolitical institution justified, like victory or government, by its\nmaterial results, is to lose one\u2019s moral bearings. The value of victory\nor good government is rather to be found in the fact that, among other\nthings, it might render friendship possible. We are not to look now for\nwhat makes friendship useful, but for whatever may be found in\nfriendship that may lend utility to life.\n\n[Sidenote: Personal liking.]\n\nThe first note that gives sociability a personal quality and raises the\ncomrade into an incipient friend is doubtless sensuous affinity.\nWhatever reaction we may eventually make on an impression, after it has\nhad time to soak in and to merge in some practical or intellectual\nhabit, its first assault is always on the senses, and no sense is an\nindifferent organ. Each has, so to speak, its congenial rate of\nvibration and gives its stimuli a varying welcome. Little as we may\nattend to these instinctive hospitalities of sense, they betray\nthemselves in unjustified likes and dislikes felt for casual persons and\nthings, in the _je ne sais quoi_ that makes instinctive sympathy. Voice,\nmanner, aspect, hints of congenial tastes and judgments, a jest in the\nright key, a gesture marking the right aversions, all these trifles\nleave behind a pervasive impression. We reject a vision we find\nindigestible and without congruity to our inner dream; we accept and\nincorporate another into our private pantheon, where it becomes a\nlegitimate figure, however dumb and subsidiary it may remain.\n\nIn a refined nature these sensuous premonitions of sympathy are seldom\nmisleading. Liking cannot, of course, grow into friendship over night as\nit might into love; the pleasing impression, even if retained, will lie\nperfectly passive and harmless in the mind, until new and different\nimpressions follow to deepen the interest at first evoked and to remove\nits centre of gravity altogether from the senses. In love, if the field\nis clear, a single glimpse may, like Tristan\u2019s potion, produce a violent\nand irresistible passion; but in friendship the result remains more\nproportionate to the incidental causes, discrimination is preserved,\njealousy and exclusiveness are avoided. That vigilant, besetting,\ninsatiable affection, so full of doubts and torments, with which the\nlover follows his object, is out of place here; for the friend has no\nproperty in his friend\u2019s body or leisure or residual ties; he accepts\nwhat is offered and what is acceptable, and the rest he leaves in peace.\nHe is distinctly not his brother\u2019s keeper, for the society of friends is\nfree.\n\n[Sidenote: The refracting human medium for ideas.]\n\nFriendship may indeed come to exist without sensuous liking or\ncomradeship to pave the way; but unless intellectual sympathy and moral\nappreciation are powerful enough to react on natural instinct and to\nproduce in the end the personal affection which at first was wanting,\nfriendship does not arise. Recognition given to a man\u2019s talent or virtue\nis not properly friendship. Friends must desire to live as much as\npossible together and to share their work, thoughts, and pleasures.\nGood-fellowship and sensuous affinity are indispensable to give\nspiritual communion a personal accent; otherwise men would be\nindifferent vehicles for such thoughts and powers as emanated from them,\nand attention would not be in any way arrested or refracted by the human\nmedium through which it beheld the good.\n\n[Sidenote: Affection based on the refraction.]\n\nNo natural vehicle, however, is indifferent; no natural organ is or\nshould be transparent. Transparency is a virtue only in artificial\ninstruments, organs in which no blood flows and whose intrinsic\noperation is not itself a portion of human life. In looking through a\nfield-glass I do not wish to perceive the lenses nor to see rainbows\nabout their rim; yet I should not wish the eye itself to lose its\npigments and add no dyes to the bulks it discerns. The sense for colour\nis a vital endowment and an ingredient in human happiness; but no\nvitality is added by the intervention of further media which are not\nthemselves living organs.\n\nA man is sometimes a coloured and sometimes a clear medium for the\nenergies he exerts. When a thought conveyed or a work done enters alone\ninto the observer\u2019s experience, no friendship is possible. This is\nalways the case when the master is dead; for if his reconstructed\npersonality retains any charm, it is only as an explanation or conceived\nnexus for the work he performed. In a philosopher or artist, too,\npersonality is merely instrumental, for, although in a sense pervasive,\na creative personality evaporates into its expression, and whatever part\nof it may not have been translated into ideas is completely negligible\nfrom the public point of view. That portion of a man\u2019s soul which he has\nnot alienated and objectified is open only to those who know him\notherwise than by his works and do not estimate him by his public\nattributions. Such persons are his friends. Into their lives he has\nentered not merely through an idea with which his name may be\nassociated, nor through the fame of some feat he may have performed, but\nby awakening an inexpressible animal sympathy, by the contagion of\nemotions felt before the same objects. Estimation has been partly\narrested at its medium and personal relations have added their homely\naccent to universal discourse. Friendship might thus be called ideal\nsympathy refracted by a human medium, or comradeship and sensuous\naffinity colouring a spiritual light.\n\n[Sidenote: The medium must also be transparent.]\n\nIf we approach friendship from above and compare it with more ideal\nloyalties, its characteristic is its animal warmth and its basis in\nchance conjunctions; if we approach it from below and contrast it with\nmere comradeship or liking, its essence seems to be the presence of\ncommon ideal interests. That is a silly and effeminate friendship in\nwhich the parties are always thinking of the friendship itself and of\nhow each stands in the other\u2019s eyes; a sentimental fancy of that sort,\nin which nothing tangible or ulterior brings people together, is rather\na feeble form of love than properly a friendship. In extreme youth such\na weakness may perhaps indicate capacity for friendship of a nobler\ntype, because when taste and knowledge have not yet taken shape, the\nonly way, often, in which ideal interests can herald themselves is in\nthe guise of some imagined union from which it is vaguely felt they\nmight be developed, just as in love sexual and social instincts mask\nthemselves in an unreasoning obsession, or as for mystic devotion every\nideal masks itself in God. All these sentimental feelings are at any\nrate mere preludes, but preludes in fortunate cases to more\ndiscriminating and solid interests, which such a tremulous overture may\npossibly pitch on a higher key.\n\n[Sidenote: Common interests indispensable.]\n\nThe necessity of backing personal attachment with ideal interests is\nwhat makes true friendship so rare. It is found chiefly in youth, for\nyouth best unites the two requisite conditions\u2014affectionate comradeship\nand ardour in pursuing such liberal aims as may be pursued in common.\nLife in camp or college is favourable to friendship, for there generous\nactivities are carried on in unison and yet leave leisure for playful\nexpansion and opportunity for a choice in friends. The ancients, so long\nas they were free, spent their whole life in forum and pal\u00e6stra, camp,\ntheatre, and temple, and in consequence could live by friendship even in\ntheir maturer years; but modern life is unfavourable to its continuance.\nWhat with business cares, with political bonds remote and invisible,\nwith the prior claims of family, and with individualities both of mind\nand habit growing daily more erratic, early friends find themselves very\nsoon parted by unbridgeable chasms. For friendship to flourish personal\nlife would have to become more public and social life more simple and\nhumane.\n\n[Sidenote: Friendship between man and wife.]\n\nThe tie that in contemporary society most nearly resembles the ancient\nideal of friendship is a well-assorted marriage. In spite of\nintellectual disparity and of divergence in occupation, man and wife are\nbound together by a common dwelling, common friends, common affection\nfor children, and, what is of great importance, common financial\ninterests. These bonds often suffice for substantial and lasting\nunanimity, even when no ideal passion preceded; so that what is called a\nmarriage of reason, if it is truly reasonable, may give a fair promise\nof happiness, since a normal married life can produce the sympathies it\nrequires.\n\n[Sidenote: Between master and disciple.]\n\nWhen the common ideal interests needed to give friendship a noble strain\nbecome altogether predominant, so that comradeship and personal liking\nmay be dispensed with, friendship passes into more and more political\nfellowships. Discipleship is a union of this kind. Without claiming any\nshare in the master\u2019s private life, perhaps without having ever seen\nhim, we may enjoy communion with his mind and feel his support and\nguidance in following the ideal which links us together. Hero-worship is\nan imaginative passion in which latent ideals assume picturesque shapes\nand take actual persons for their symbols. Such companionship, perhaps\nwholly imaginary, is a very clear and simple example of ideal society.\nThe unconscious hero, to be sure, happens to exist, but his existence is\nirrelevant to his function, provided only he be present to the\nidealising mind. There is or need be no comradeship, no actual force or\ninfluence transmitted from him. Certain capacities and tendencies in the\nworshipper are brought to a focus by the hero\u2019s image, who is thereby\nfirst discovered and deputed to be a hero. He is an unmoved mover, like\nAristotle\u2019s God and like every ideal to which thought or action is\ndirected.\n\nThe symbol, however, is ambiguous in hero-worship, being in one sense\nideal, the representation of an inner demand, and in another sense a\nsensible experience, the representative of an external reality.\nAccordingly the symbol, when highly prized and long contemplated, may\neasily become an idol; that in it which is not ideal nor representative\nof the worshipper\u2019s demand may be imported confusedly into the total\nadored, and may thus receive a senseless worship. The devotion which\nwas, in its origin, an ideal tendency grown conscious and expressed in\nfancy may thus become a mechanical force vitiating that ideal. For this\nreason it is very important that the first objects to fix the soul\u2019s\nadmiration should be really admirable, for otherwise their accidental\nblemishes will corrupt the mind to which they appear _sub specie boni_.\n\n[Sidenote: Conflict between ideal and natural allegiance.]\n\nDiscipleship and hero-worship are not stable relations. Since the\nmeaning they embody is ideal and radiates from within outward, and since\nthe image to which that meaning is attributed is controlled by a real\nexternal object, meaning and image, as time goes on, will necessarily\nfall apart. The idol will be discredited. An ideal, ideally conceived\nand known to be an ideal, a spirit worshipped in spirit and in truth,\nwill take the place of the pleasing phenomenon; and in regard to every\nactual being, however noble, discipleship will yield to emulation, and\nworship to an admiration more or less selective and critical.\n\n[Sidenote: Automatic idealisation of heroes.]\n\nA disembodied ideal, however, is unmanageable and vague; it cannot\nexercise the natural and material suasion proper to a model we are\nexpected to imitate. The more fruitful procedure is accordingly to\nidealise some historical figure or natural force, to ignore or minimise\nin it what does not seem acceptable, and to retain at the same time all\nthe unobjectionable personal colour and all the graphic traits that can\nhelp to give that model a persuasive vitality. This poetic process is\nall the more successful for being automatic. It is in this way that\nheroes and gods have been created. A legend or fable lying in the mind\nand continually repeated gained insensibly at each recurrence some new\neloquence, some fresh congruity with the emotion it had already\nawakened, and was destined to awake again. To measure the importance of\nthis truth the reader need only conceive the distance traversed from the\nAchilles that may have existed to the hero in Homer, or from Jesus as he\nmight have been in real life, or even as he is in the gospels, to Christ\nin the Church.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VII\n\nPATRIOTISM\n\n\n[Sidenote: The creative social environment, since it eludes sense, must\nbe represented symbolically.]\n\nThe mythical social idea most potent over practical minds is perhaps the\nidea of country. When a tribe, enlarged and domiciled, has become a\nstate, much social feeling that was before evoked by things visible\nloses its sensuous object. Yet each man remains no less dependent than\nformerly on his nation, although less swayed by its visible presence and\nexample; he is no less concerned, materially and ideally, in the\nfortunes of the community. If a sense for social relations is to endure,\nsome symbol must take the place of the moving crowd, the visible\nstronghold, and the outspread fields and orchards that once made up his\ncountry; some intellectual figment must arise to focus political\ninterests, no longer confined to the crops and the priest\u2019s medicinal\nauguries. It is altogether impossible that the individual should have a\ndiscursive and adequate knowledge of statecraft and economy. Whatever\nidea, then, he frames to represent his undistinguished political\nrelations becomes the centre of his patriotism.\n\nWhen intelligence is not keen this idea may remain sensuous. The\nvisible instruments of social life\u2014chieftains, armies, monuments, the\ndialect and dress of the district, with all customs and pleasures\ntraditional there\u2014these are what a sensuous man may understand by his\ncountry. Bereft of these sensations he would feel lost and incapable;\nthe habits formed in that environment would be galled by any other. This\nfondness for home, this dread of change and exile, is all the love of\ncountry he knows. If by chance, without too much added thought, he could\nrise to a certain poetic sentiment, he might feel attachment also to the\nlandscape, to the memorable spots and aspects of his native land. These\nobjects, which rhetoric calls sacred, might really have a certain\nsanctity for him; a wave of pious emotion might run over him at the\nsight of them, a pang when in absence they were recalled. These very\nthings, however, like the man who prizes them, are dependent on a much\nlarger system; and if patriotism is to embrace ideally what really\nproduces human well-being it should extend over a wider field and to\nless picturable objects.\n\n[Sidenote: Ambiguous limits of a native country, geographical and\nmoral.]\n\nTo define one\u2019s country is not so simple a matter as it may seem. The\nhabitat of a man\u2019s youth, to which actual associations may bind him, is\nhardly his country until he has conceived the political and historical\nforces that include that habitat in their sphere of influence and have\ndetermined its familiar institutions. Such forces are numerous and\ntheir spheres include one another like concentric rings. France, for\ninstance, is an uncommonly distinct and self-conscious nation, with a\nlong historic identity and a compact territory. Yet what is the France a\nFrenchman is to think of and love? Paris itself has various quarters and\nmoral climates, one of which may well be loved while another is\ndetested. The provinces have customs, temperaments, political ideals,\nand even languages of their own. Is Alsace-Lorraine beyond the pale of\nFrench patriotism? And if not, why utterly exclude French-speaking\nSwitzerland, the Channel Islands, Belgium, or Quebec? Or is a Frenchman\nrather to love the colonies by way of compensation? Is an Algerian Moor\nor a native of Tonquin his true fellow-citizen? Is Tahiti a part of his\n\u201ccountry\u201d? The truth is, if we look at the heart of the matter, a\nProtestant born in Paris is less a Frenchman than is a Catholic born in\nGeneva.\n\nIf we pass from geography to institutions the same vagueness exists.\nFrance to one man represents the Revolution, to another the Empire, to a\nthird the Church, and the vestiges of the _ancien r\u00e9gime_. Furthermore,\nhow far into the past is patriotism to look? Is Charlemagne one of the\nglories of French history? Is it Julius C\u00e6sar or Vicingetorix that is to\nwarm the patriotic heart? Want of reflection and a blind subservience to\nthe colours of the map has led some historians to call Roman victories\ndefeats suffered by their country, even when that country is essentially\nso Roman, for instance, as Spain. With as good reason might a Sicilian\nor a Florentine chafe under the Latin conquest, or an American blush at\nthe invasion of his country by the Pilgrim Fathers. Indeed, even\ngeographically, the limits and the very heart of a man\u2019s country are\noften ambiguous. Was Alexander\u2019s country Macedon or Greece? Was General\nLee\u2019s the United States or Virginia? The ancients defined their country\nfrom within outward; its heart was the city and its limits those of that\ncity\u2019s dominion or affinities. Moderns generally define their country\nrather stupidly by its administrative frontiers; and yet an Austrian\nwould have some difficulty in applying even this conventional criterion.\n\n[Sidenote: Sentimental and political patriotism.]\n\nThe object of patriotism is in truth something ideal, a moral entity\ndefinable only by the ties which a man\u2019s imagination and reason can at\nany moment recognise. If he has insight and depth of feeling he will\nperceive that what deserves his loyalty is the entire civilisation to\nwhich he owes his spiritual life and into which that life will presently\nflow back, with whatever new elements he may have added. Patriotism\naccordingly has two aspects: it is partly sentiment by which it looks\nback upon the sources of culture, and partly policy, or allegiance to\nthose ideals which, being suggested by what has already been attained,\nanimate the better organs of society and demand further embodiment. To\nlove one\u2019s country, unless that love is quite blind and lazy, must\ninvolve a distinction between the country\u2019s actual condition and its\ninherent ideal; and this distinction in turn involves a demand for\nchanges and for effort. Party allegiance is a true form of patriotism.\nFor a party, at least in its intent, is an association of persons\nadvocating the same policy. Every thoughtful man must advocate some\npolicy, and unless he has the misfortune to stand quite alone in his\nconception of public welfare he will seek to carry out that policy by\nthe aid of such other persons as advocate it also.\n\n[Sidenote: The earth and the race the first objects of rational\nloyalty.]\n\nThe springs of culture, which retrospective patriotism regards, go back\nin the last instance to cosmic forces. The necessity that marshals the\nstars makes possible the world men live in, and is the first general and\nlaw-giver to every nation. The earth\u2019s geography, its inexorable\nclimates with their flora and fauna, make a play-ground for the human\nwill which should be well surveyed by any statesman who wishes to judge\nand act, not fantastically, but with reference to the real situation.\nGeography is a most enlightening science. In describing the habitat of\nman it largely explains his history. Animal battles give the right and\nonly key to human conflicts, for the superadded rational element in man\nis not partisan, but on the contrary insinuates into his economy the\nnovel principle of justice and peace. As this leaven, however, can\nmingle only with elements predisposed to receive it, the basis of reason\nitself, in so far as it attains expression, must be sought in the\nnatural world. The fortunes of the human family among the animals thus\ncome to concern reason and to be the background of progress.\n\nWithin humanity the next sphere of interest for a patriot is the race\nfrom which he is descended, with its traditional languages and\nreligions. Blood is the ground of character and intelligence. The fruits\nof civilisation may, indeed, be transmitted from one race to another and\nconsequently a certain artificial homogeneity may be secured amongst\ndifferent nations; yet unless continual intermarriage takes place each\nrace will soon recast and vitiate the common inheritance. The fall of\nthe Roman Empire offered such a spectacle, when various types of\nbarbarism, with a more or less classic veneer, re-established themselves\neverywhere. Perhaps modern cosmopolitanism, if not maintained by\ncommerce or by permanent conquest, may break apart in the same way and\nyield to local civilisations no less diverse than Christendom and Islam.\n\n[Sidenote: Race, when distinct, the greatest of distinctions.]\n\nCommunity of race is a far deeper bond than community of language,\neducation, or government. Where one political system dominates various\nraces it forces their common culture to be external merely. This is\nperhaps the secret of that strange recrudescence of national feeling,\napart often from political divisions, which has closely followed the\nFrench Revolution and the industrial era. The more two different peoples\ngrow alike in externals the more conscious and jealous they become of\ndiversity in their souls; and where individuals are too insignificant to\npreserve any personality or distinction of their own, they flock\ntogether into little intentional societies and factious groups, in the\nhope of giving their imagination, in its extremity, some little food and\ncomfort. Private nationalities and private religions are luxuries at\nsuch a time in considerable demand. The future may possibly see in the\nOccident that divorce between administrative and ideal groups which is\nfamiliar in the Orient; so that under no matter what government and with\nutter cosmopolitanism in industry and science, each race may guard its\nown poetry, religion, and manners. Such traditions, however, would\nalways be survivals or revivals rather than genuine expressions of life,\nbecause mind must either represent nature and the conditions of action\nor else be content to persist precariously and without a function, like\na sort of ghost.\n\n[Sidenote: \u201cPure\u201d races may be morally sterile.]\n\nSome races are obviously superior to others. A more thorough adjustment\nto the conditions of existence has given their spirit victory, scope,\nand a relative stability. It is therefore of the greatest importance not\nto obscure this superiority by intermarriage with inferior stock, and\nthus nullify the progress made by a painful evolution and a prolonged\nsifting of souls. Reason protests as much as instinct against any\nfusion, for instance, of white and black peoples. Mixture is in itself\nno evil if the two nations, being approximately equal, but having\ncomplementary gifts, can modify them without ultimate loss, and possibly\nto advantage. Indeed the so-called pure races, since their purity has\ngone with isolation and inexperience, have borne comparatively little\nspiritual fruit. Large contact and concentrated living bring out native\ngenius, but mixture with an inferior stock can only tend to obliterate\nit. The Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, the English were never so great as\nwhen they confronted other nations, reacting against them and at the\nsame time, perhaps, adopting their culture; but this greatness fails\ninwardly whenever contact leads to amalgamation.\n\nThere is something unmistakably illiberal, almost superstitious, in\nstanding on race for its own sake, as if origins and not results were of\nmoral value. It matters nothing what blood a man has, if he has the\nright spirit; and if there is some ground for identifying the two (since\nmonkeys, however educated, are monkeys still) it is only when blood\nmeans character and capacity, and is tested by them, that it becomes\nimportant. Nor is it unjust to level the individual, in his political\nand moral status, with the race to which he belongs, if this race holds\nan approved position. Individual gifts and good intentions have little\nefficacy in the body politic if they neither express a great tradition\nnor can avail to found one; and this tradition, as religion shows, will\nfalsify individual insights so soon as they are launched into the public\nmedium. The common soul will destroy a noble genius in absorbing it, and\ntherefore, to maintain progress, a general genius has to be invoked; and\na general genius means an exceptional and distinct race.\n\n[Sidenote: True nationality direction on a definite ideal.]\n\nEnvironment, education, fashion, may be all powerful while they last and\nmay make it seem a prejudice to insist on race, turning its assumed\nefficacy into a sheer dogma, with fanatical impulses behind it; yet in\npractice the question will soon recur: What shall sustain that\nomnipotent fashion, education, or environment? Nothing is more\ntreacherous than tradition, when insight and force are lacking to keep\nit warm. Under Roman dominion, the inhabitants of Sparta still submitted\nto the laws of Lycurgus and their life continued to be a sort of\nritualistic shadow of the past. Those enfranchised helots thought they\nwere maintaining a heroic state when, in fact, they were only turning\nits forms into a retrospective religion. The old race was practically\nextinct; ephors, gymnasia, and common meals could do nothing to\nrevive it. The ways of the Roman world\u2014a kindred promiscuous\npopulation\u2014prevailed over that local ritual and rendered it\nperfunctory, because there were no longer any living souls to understand\nthat a man might place his happiness in his country\u2019s life and care\nnothing for Oriental luxury or Oriental superstition, things coming to\nflatter his personal lusts and make him useless and unhappy.\n\nInstitutions without men are as futile as men without institutions.\nBefore race can be a rational object for patriotism there must exist a\n_traditional genius_, handed down by inheritance or else by adoption,\nwhen the persons adopted can really appreciate the mysteries they are\ninitiated into. Blood could be disregarded, if only the political ideal\nremained constant and progress was sustained, the laws being modified\nonly to preserve their spirit. A state lives in any case by exchanging\npersons, and all spiritual life is maintained by exchanging expressions.\nLife is a circulation; it can digest whatever materials will assume a\nform already determined ideally and enable that form to come forth more\nclearly and be determined in more particulars. Stagnant matter\nnecessarily decays and in effect is false to the spirit no less than a\nspirit that changes is false to itself.\n\n[Sidenote: Country well represented by domestic and civic religion.]\n\nThe spirit of a race is a mythical entity expressing the individual soul\nin its most constant and profound instincts and expanding it in the\ndirection in which correct representation is most easily possible, in\nthe direction of ancestors, kinsmen, and descendants. In ancient cities,\nwhere patriotism was intense, it was expressed in a tribal and civic\nreligion. The lares, the local gods, the deified heroes associated with\nthem, were either ancestors idealised or ideals of manhood taking the\nform of patrons and supernatural protectors. Jupiter Capitolinus and the\nSpirit of Rome were a single object. To worship Jupiter in that Capitol\nwas to dedicate oneself to the service of Rome. A foreigner could no\nmore share that devotion than a neighbour could share the religion of\nthe hearth without sharing by adoption the life of the family. Paganism\nwas the least artificial of religions and the most poetical; its myths\nwere comparatively transparent and what they expressed was comparatively\nreal. In that religion patriotism and family duties could take\nimaginable forms, and those forms, apart from the inevitable tinge of\nsuperstition which surrounded them, did not materially vitiate the\nallegiance due to the actual forces on which human happiness depends.\n\n[Sidenote: Misleading identification of country with government.]\n\n[Sidenote: Sporting or belligerent patriotism.]\n\nWhat has driven patriotism, as commonly felt and conceived, so far from\nrational courses and has attached it to vapid objects has been the\ninitial illegitimacy of all governments. Under such circumstances,\npatriotism is merely a passion for ascendency. Properly it animates the\narmy, the government, the aristocracy; from those circles it can\npercolate, not perhaps without the help of some sophistry and\nintimidation, into the mass of the people, who are told that their\ngovernment\u2019s fortunes are their own. Now the rabble has a great\npropensity to take sides, promptly and passionately, in any spectacular\ncontest; the least feeling of affinity, the slightest emotional\nconsonance, will turn the balance and divert in one direction\nsympathetic forces which, for every practical purpose, might just as\nwell have rushed the other way. Most governments are in truth private\nsocieties pitted against one another in the international arena and\ngiving meantime at home exhibitions of eloquence and more rarely of\nenterprise; but the people\u2019s passions are easily enlisted in such a\ngame, of course on the side of their own government, just as each\ncollege or region backs its own athletes, even to the extent of paying\ntheir bills. Nations give the same kind of support to their fighting\ngovernments, and the sporting passions and illusions concerned are what,\nin the national game, is called patriotism.\n\nWhere parties and governments are bad, as they are in most ages and\ncountries, it makes practically no difference to a community, apart from\nlocal ravages, whether its own army or the enemy\u2019s is victorious in war,\nnor does it really affect any man\u2019s welfare whether the party he happens\nto belong to is in office or not. These issues concern, in such cases,\nonly the army itself, whose lives and fortunes are at stake, or the\nofficial classes, who lose their places when their leaders fall from\npower. The private citizen in any event continues in such countries to\npay a maximum of taxes and to suffer, in all his private interests, a\nmaximum of vexation and neglect. Nevertheless, because he has some son\nat the front, some cousin in the government, or some historical\nsentiment for the flag and the nominal essence of his country, the\noppressed subject will glow like the rest with patriotic ardour, and\nwill decry as dead to duty and honour anyone who points out how perverse\nis this helpless allegiance to a government representing no public\ninterest.\n\n[Sidenote: Exclusive patriotism rational only when the government\nsupported is universally beneficent.]\n\nIn proportion as governments become good and begin to operate for the\ngeneral welfare, patriotism itself becomes representative and an\nexpression of reason; but just in the same measure does hostility to\nthat government on the part of foreigners become groundless and\nperverse. A competitive patriotism involves ill-will toward all other\nstates and a secret and constant desire to see them thrashed and\nsubordinated. It follows that a good government, while it justifies this\ngovernmental patriotism in its subjects, disallows it in all other men.\nFor a good government is an international benefit, and the prosperity\nand true greatness of any country is a boon sooner or later to the whole\nworld; it may eclipse alien governments and draw away local populations\nor industries, but it necessarily benefits alien individuals in so far\nas it is allowed to affect them at all.\n\nAnimosity against a well-governed country is therefore madness. A\nrational patriotism would rather take the form of imitating and\nsupporting that so-called foreign country, and even, if practicable, of\nfusing with it. The invidious and aggressive form of patriotism, though\ninspired generally only by local conceit, would nevertheless be really\njustified if such conceit happened to be well grounded. A dream of\nuniversal predominance visiting a truly virtuous and intelligent people\nwould be an aspiration toward universal beneficence. For every man who\nis governed at all must be governed by others; the point is, that the\nothers, in ruling him, shall help him to be himself and give scope to\nhis congenial activities. When coerced in that direction he obeys a\nforce which, in the best sense of the word, _represents_ him, and\nconsequently he is truly free; nor could he be ruled by a more native\nand rightful authority than by one that divines and satisfies his true\nnecessities.\n\n[Sidenote: Accidents of birth and training affect the ideal.]\n\nA man\u2019s nature is not, however, a quantity or quality fixed unalterably\nand _a priori_. As breeding and selection improve a race, so every\nexperience modifies the individual and offers a changed basis for future\nexperience. The language, religion, education, and prejudices acquired\nin youth bias character and predetermine the directions in which\ndevelopment may go on. A child might possibly change his country; a man\ncan only wish that he might change it. Therefore, among the true\ninterests which a government should represent, nationality itself must\nbe included.\n\n[Sidenote: They are conditions and may contribute something.]\n\nMechanical forces, we must not weary of repeating, do not come merely to\nvitiate the ideal; they come to create it. The historical background of\nlife is a part of its substance and the ideal can never grow\nindependently of its spreading roots. A sanctity hangs about the sources\nof our being, whether physical, social, or imaginative. The ancients who\nkissed the earth on returning to their native country expressed nobly\nand passionately what every man feels for those regions and those\ntraditions whence the sap of his own life has been sucked in. There is a\nprofound friendliness in whatever revives primordial habits, however\nthey may have been overlaid with later sophistications. For this reason\nthe homelier words of a mother tongue, the more familiar assurances of\nan ancestral religion, and the very savour of childhood\u2019s dishes, remain\nalways a potent means to awaken emotion. Such ingrained influences, in\ntheir vague totality, make a man\u2019s true nationality. A government, in\norder to represent the general interests of its subjects, must move in\nsympathy with their habits and memories; it must respect their\nidiosyncrasy for the same reason that it protects their lives. If\nparting from a single object of love be, as it is, true dying, how much\nmore would a shifting of all the affections be death to the soul.\n\n[Sidenote: They are not ends.]\n\nTenderness to such creative influences is a mark of profundity; it has\nthe same relation to political life that transcendentalism has to\nscience and morals; it shrinks back into radical facts, into centres of\nvital radiation, and quickens the sense for inner origins. Nationality\nis a natural force and a constituent in character which should be\nreckoned with and by no means be allowed to miss those fruits which it\nalone might bear; but, like the things it venerates, it is only a\nstarting-point for liberal life. Just as to be always talking about\ntranscendental points of reference, primordial reality, and the self to\nwhich everything appears, though at first it might pass for spiritual\ninsight, is in the end nothing but pedantry and impotence, so to be\nalways harping on nationality is to convert what should be a recognition\nof natural conditions into a ridiculous pride in one\u2019s own oddities.\nNature has hidden the roots of things, and though botany must now and\nthen dig them up for the sake of comprehension, their place is still\nunder ground, if flowers and fruits are to be expected. The private\nloyalties which a man must have toward his own people, grounding as they\nalone can his morality and genius, need nevertheless to be seldom\nparaded. Attention, when well directed, turns rather to making immanent\nracial forces blossom out in the common medium and express themselves in\nways consonant with practical reason and universal progress. A man\u2019s\nfeet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the\nworld.\n\nWhat a statesman might well aim at would be to give the special\nsentiments and gifts of his countrymen such a turn that, while\ncontinuing all vital traditions, they might find less and less of what\nis human alien to their genius. Differences in nationality, founded on\nrace and habitat, must always subsist; but what has been superadded\nartificially by ignorance and bigotry may be gradually abolished in view\nof universal relations better understood. There is a certain plane on\nwhich all races, if they reach it at all, must live in common, the plane\nof morals and science; which is not to say that even in those activities\nthe mind betrays no racial accent. What is excluded from science and\nmorals is not variety, but contradiction. Any community which had begun\nto cultivate the Life of Reason in those highest fields would tend to\nlive rationally on all subordinate levels also; for with science and\nmorality rationally applied the best possible use would be made of every\nlocal and historical accident. Where traditions had some virtue or\nnecessity about them they would be preserved; where they were remediable\nprejudices they would be superseded.\n\n[Sidenote: The symbol for country may be a man and may become an idol.]\n\nAt the birth of society instincts existed, needful to the animal and\nhaving a certain glorious impetuosity about them, which prompted common\naction and speech, and a public morality, and men were led to construct\nmyths that might seem to justify this co-operation. Paternal authority\ncould easily suggest one symbol for social loyalty: the chief, probably\na venerable and imperious personage, could be called a father and obeyed\nas a natural master. His command might by convention be regarded as an\nexpression of the common voice, just as the father\u2019s will is by nature\nthe representative of his children\u2019s interests. Again, the members of\neach community were distinguished from their enemies by many a sign and\ncustom; these signs and customs might also become a graphic symbol for\nthe common life.\n\nBoth these cases suggest how easily a symbol takes the place of its\nobject and becomes an idol. If the symbol happens to be a man there are\nnatural human sentiments awakened by him; and whatever respect his\ncharacter or gifts may inspire, whatever charm there may be in his\nperson, whatever graciousness he may add to his official favours or\ncommands, increase immensely his personal ascendency. A king has a great\nopportunity to make himself loved. This scope given to private\ninclination is what, to ordinary fancy, makes royalty enviable; few envy\nits impersonal power and historic weight. Yet if a king were nothing but\na man surrounded by flatterers, who was cheered when he drove abroad,\nthere would be little stability in monarchy. A king is really the\nstate\u2019s hinge and centre of gravity, the point where all private and\nparty ambitions meet and, in a sense, are neutralised. It is not easy\nfor factions to overturn him, for every other force in the state will\ninstinctively support him against faction. His elevation above everyone,\nthe identity of his sober interests with those of the state at large, is\ncalculated to make him the people\u2019s natural representative; his word has\ntherefore a genuine authority, and his ascendency, not being invidious,\nis able to secure internal peace, even when not enlightened enough to\ninsure prosperity or to avoid foreign wars. Accordingly, whenever a\nmonarchy is at all representative time has an irresistible tendency to\nincrease its prestige; the king is felt to be the guardian as well as\nthe symbol of all public greatness.\n\nMeantime a double dislocation is possible here: patriotism may be wholly\nidentified with personal loyalty to the sovereign, while the sovereign\nhimself, instead of making public interests his own, may direct his\npolicy so as to satisfy his private passions. The first confusion leads\nto a conflict between tradition and reason; the second to the ruin of\neither the state or the monarchy. In a word, a symbol needs to remain\ntransparent and to become adequate; failing in either respect, it misses\nits function.\n\n[Sidenote: Feudal representation sensitive but partial.]\n\nThe feudal system offers perhaps the best illustration of a patriotism\nwholly submerged in loyalty. The sense of mutual obligation and service\nwas very clear in this case; the vassal in swearing fealty knew\nperfectly well what sort of a bargain he was striking. A feudal\ngovernment, while it lasted, was accordingly highly responsive and\nresponsible. If false to its calling, it could be readily disowned, for\nit is easy to break an oath and to make new military associations,\nespecially where territorial units are small and their links accidental.\nBut this personal, conscious, and jealous subordination of man to man\nconstituted a government of insignificant scope. Military functions were\nalone considered and the rest was allowed to shift for itself. Feudalism\ncould have been possible only in a barbarous age when the arts existed\non sufferance and lived on by little tentative resurrections. The feudal\nlord was a genuine representative of a very small part of his vassal\u2019s\ninterests. This slight bond sufficed, however, to give him a great\nprestige and to stimulate in him all the habits and virtues of a\nresponsible master; so that in England, where vestiges of feudalism\nabound to this day, there is an aristocracy not merely titular.\n\n[Sidenote: Monarchical representation comprehensive but treacherous.]\n\nA highly concentrated monarchy presents the exactly opposite phenomenon.\nHere subordination is involuntary and mutual responsibility largely\nunconscious. On the other hand, the scope of representation is very wide\nand the monarch may well embody the whole life of the nation. A great\ncourt, with officers of state and a standing army, is sensitive to\nnothing so much as to general appearances and general results. The\ninvisible forces of industry, morality, and personal ambition that\nreally sustain the state are not studied or fomented by such a\ngovernment; so that when these resources begin to fail, the ensuing\ncatastrophes are a mystery to everybody. The king and his ministers\nnever cease wondering how they can be so constantly unfortunate.\n\nSo long, however, as the nation\u2019s vital force is unspent and taxes and\nsoldiers are available in plenty, a great monarchy tends to turn those\nresources to notable results. The arts and sciences are encouraged by\nthe patronage of men of breeding and affairs; they are disciplined into\na certain firmness and amplitude which artists and scholars, if left to\nthemselves, are commonly incapable of. Life is refined; religion itself,\nunless fanaticism be too hopelessly in the ascendant, is co-ordinated\nwith other public interests and compelled to serve mankind; a liberal\nlife is made possible; the imagination is stimulated and set free by\nthat same brilliant concentration of all human energies which defeats\npractical liberty. At the same time luxury and all manner of conceits\nare part and parcel of such a courtly civilisation, and its best\nproducts are the first to be lost; so that very likely the dumb forces\nof society\u2014hunger, conscience, and malice\u2014will not do any great harm\nwhen they destroy those treacherous institutions which, after giving the\nspirit a momentary expression, had become an offence to both spirit and\nflesh. Observers at the time may lament the collapse of so much\nelegance and greatness; but nature has no memory and brushes away\nwithout a qualm her card-castle of yesterday, if a new constructive\nimpulse possesses her to-day.\n\n[Sidenote: Impersonal symbols no advantage.]\n\nWhere no suitable persons are found to embody the state\u2019s unity, other\nsymbols have to be chosen. Besides the gods and their temples, there are\nthe laws which may, as among the Jews and Mohammedans, become as much a\nfetich as any monarch, and one more long-lived; or else some traditional\npolicy of revenge or conquest, or even the country\u2019s name or flag, may\nserve this symbolic purpose. A trivial emblem, which no thinking man can\nsubstitute for the thing signified, is not so great an advantage as at\nfirst sight it might seem; for in the first place men are often\nthoughtless and adore words and symbols with a terrible earnestness;\nwhile, on the other hand, an abstract token, because of its natural\ninsipidity, can be made to stand for anything; so that patriotism, when\nit uses pompous words alone for its stimulus, is very apt to be a cloak\nfor private interests, which the speaker may sincerely conceive to be\nthe only interests in question.\n\n[Sidenote: Patriotism not self-interest, save to the social man whose\naims are ideal.]\n\nThe essence of patriotism is thus annulled, for patriotism does not\nconsist in considering the private and sordid interests of others as\nwell as one\u2019s own, by a kind of sympathy which is merely vicarious or\nepidemic selfishness; patriotism consists rather in being sensitive to\na set of interests which no one could have had if he had lived in\nisolation, but which accrue to men conscious of living in society, and\nin a society having the scope and history of a nation. It was the vice\nof liberalism to believe that common interests covered nothing but the\nsum of those objects which each individual might pursue alone; whereby\nscience, religion, art, language, and nationality itself would cease to\nbe matters of public concern and would appeal to the individual merely\nas instruments. The welfare of a flock of sheep is secured if each is\nwell fed and watered, but the welfare of a human society involves the\npartial withdrawal of every member from such pursuits to attend instead\nto memory and to ideal possessions; these involve a certain conscious\ncontinuity and organisation in the state not necessary for animal\nexistence. It is not for man\u2019s interest to live unless he can live in\nthe spirit, because his spiritual capacity, when unused, will lacerate\nand derange even his physical life. The brutal individualist falls into\nthe same error into which despots fall when they declare war out of\npersonal pique or tax the people to build themselves a pyramid, not\ndiscerning their country\u2019s interests, which they might have\nappropriated, from interests of their own which no one else can share.\n\nDemocracies, too, are full of patriots of this lordly stripe, men whose\npatriotism consists in joy at their personal possessions and in desire\nto increase them. The resultant of general selfishness might conceivably\nbe a general order; but though intelligent selfishness, if universal,\nmight suffice for good government, it could not suffice for nationality.\nPatriotism is an imaginative passion, and imagination is ingenuous. The\nvalue of patriotism is not utilitarian, but ideal. It belongs to the\nfree forms of society and ennobles a man not so much because it nerves\nhim to work or to die, which the basest passions may also do, but\nbecause it associates him, in working or dying, with an immortal and\nfriendly companion, the spirit of his race. This he received from his\nancestors tempered by their achievements, and may transmit to posterity\nqualified by his own.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VIII\n\nIDEAL SOCIETY\n\n\n[Sidenote: The gregarious instinct all social instincts in suspense.]\n\nTo many beings\u2014to almost all that people the earth and sky\u2014each soul\nis not attached by any practical interest. Some are too distant to be\nperceived; the proximity of others passes unnoticed. It is far from\nrequisite, in pursuing safety, that every strange animal be regarded as\neither a friend or an enemy. Wanton hostilities would waste ammunition\nand idle attachments would waste time. Yet it often happens that some of\nthese beings, having something in common with creatures we are wont to\nnotice, since we stand to them in sexual, parental, or hostile\nrelations, cannot well go unobserved. Their presence fills us with a\nvague general emotion, the arrested possibility at once of sexual, of\nparental, and of hostile actions. This emotion is gregarious or\nimpersonally social. The flock it commonly regards may be described as\nan aggregate in which parents and children have been submerged, in which\nmates are not yet selected, and enemies not yet descried.\n\nGregarious sentiment is passive, watchful, expectant, at once powerful\nand indistinct, troubled and fascinated by things merely possible. It\nrenders solitude terrible without making society particularly\ndelightful. A dull feeling of familiarity and comfort is all we can\nreasonably attribute to uninterrupted trooping together. Yet banishment\nfrom an accustomed society is often unbearable. A creature separated\nfrom his group finds all his social instincts bereft of objects and of\npossible exercise; the sexual, if by chance the sexual be at the time\nactive; the parental, with all its extensions; and the combative, with\nall its supports. He is helpless and idle, deprived of all resource and\nemployment. Yet when restored to his tribe, he merely resumes a normal\nexistence. All particular feats and opportunities are still to seek.\nCompany is not occupation. Society is like the air, necessary to breathe\nbut insufficient to live on.\n\nSimilar beings herding together in the same places are naturally subject\nto simultaneous reactions, and the sense of this common reaction makes\npossible the conception of many minds having a common experience. The\nelements of this experience they express to one another by signs. For\nwhen spontaneous reactions occur together in many animals, each, knowing\nwell his own emotion, will inevitably take the perceived attitude and\ngesture of his fellows for its expression\u2014for his own attitude and\ngesture he knows nothing of; and he will thus possess, without further\ninstruction, the outward sign for his inner experience.\n\n[Sidenote: It gives rise to conscience or sympathy with the public\nvoice.]\n\nIt is see how a moral world can grow out of these primary intuitions.\nKnowing, for instance, the expression of anger, a man may come to find\nanger directed against himself; together with physical fear in the\npresence of attack, he will feel the contagion of his enemy\u2019s passion,\nespecially if his enemy be the whole group whose reactions he is wont to\nshare, and something in him will strive to be angry together with the\nrest of the world. He will perfectly understand that indignation against\nhimself which in fact he instinctively shares. This self-condemning\nemotion will be his sense of shame and his conscience. Words soon come\nto give definition to such a feeling, which without expression in\nlanguage would have but little stability. For when a man is attracted to\nan act, even if it be condemned by others, he views it as delightful and\neligible in itself; but when he is forced, by the conventional use of\nwords, to attach to that act an opprobrious epithet, an epithet which he\nhimself has always applied with scorn, he finds himself unable to\nsuppress the emotion connoted by the word; he cannot defend his\nrebellious intuition against the tyranny of language; he is inwardly\nconfused and divided against himself, and out of his own mouth convicted\nof wickedness.\n\nA proof of the notable influence that language has on these emotions may\nbe found in their transformations. The connivance of a very few persons\nis sufficient to establish among them a new application of eulogistic\nterms; it will suffice to suppress all qualms in the pursuance of their\ncommon impulse and to consecrate a new ideal of character. It is\naccordingly no paradox that there should be honour among thieves,\nkindness among harlots, and probity among fanatics. They have not lost\ntheir conscience; they have merely introduced a flattering heresy into\nthe conventional code, to make room for the particular passion indulged\nin their little world.\n\n[Sidenote: Guises of public opinion.]\n\nSympathy with the general mind may also take other forms. Public\nopinion, in a vivacious and clear-headed community, may be felt to be\nthe casual and irresponsible thing which in truth it is. Homer, for\ninstance, has no more solemn vehicle for it than the indefinite and\nunaccountable [Greek: tis]. \u201cSo,\u201d he tells us, \u201csomebody or anybody\nsaid.\u201d In the Greek tragedians this unauthoritative entity was replaced\nby the chorus, an assemblage of conventional persons, incapable of any\noriginal perception, but possessing a fund of traditional lore, a just\nif somewhat encumbered conscience, and the gift of song. This chorus was\ntherefore much like the Christian Church and like that celestial choir\nof which the church wishes to be the earthly echo. Like the church, the\ntragic chorus had authority, because it represented a wide, if\nill-digested, experience; and it had solemnity, because it spoke in\narchaic tropes, emotional and obscure symbols of prehistoric conflicts.\nThese sacramental forms retained their power to move in spite of their\nlittle pertinence to living issues, partly on account of the mystery\nwhich enshrouded their forgotten passion and partly on account of the\nfantastic interpretations which that pregnant obscurity allowed.\n\n[Sidenote: Oracles and revelations.]\n\nFar more powerful, however, are those embodiments of the general\nconscience which religion furnishes in its first and spontaneous phase,\nas when the Hebrew prophets dared to cry, \u201cSo saith the Lord.\u201d Such\nfaith in one\u2019s own inspiration is a more pliable oracle than tradition\nor a tragic chorus, and more responsive to the needs and changes of the\nhour. Occidental philosophers, in their less simple and less eloquent\nmanner, have often repeated that arrogant Hebraic cry: they have told us\nin their systems what God thinks about the world. Such pretensions would\nbe surprising did we not remind ourselves of the obvious truth that what\nmen attribute to God is nothing but the ideal they value and grope for\nin themselves, and that the commandments, mythically said to come from\nthe Most High, flow in fact from common reason and local experience.\n\nIf history did not enable us to trace this derivation, the ever-present\npractical standard for faith would sufficiently indicate it; for no one\nwould accept as divine a revelation which he felt to be immoral or found\nto be pernicious. And yet such a deviation into the maleficent is always\npossible when a code is uprooted from its rational soil and\ntransplanted into a realm of imagination, where it is subject to all\nsorts of arbitrary distortions. If the sexual instinct should attach us\n(as in its extensions and dislocations it sometimes does) to beings\nincapable of satisfying it or of uniting with us in propagating the\nrace, we should, of course, study to correct that aberration so that our\njoys and desires might march in step with the possible progress of the\nworld. In the same way, if the gregarious instinct should bring us into\nthe imagined presence of companions that really did not exist, or on\nwhose attitude and co-operation our successes in no way depended, we\nshould try to lead back our sense of fellowship to its natural\nfoundations and possible sanctions.\n\nSociety exists so far as does analogous existence and community of ends.\nWe may, in refining the social instinct, find some fellowship in the\nclouds and in the stars, for these, though remote, are companions of our\ncareer. By poetic analogy we may include in the social world whatever\nhelps or thwarts our development, and is auxiliary to the energies of\nthe soul, even if that object be inanimate. Whatever spirit in the past\nor future, or in the remotest regions of the sky, shares our love and\npursuit, say of mathematics or of music, or of any ideal object,\nbecomes, if we can somehow divine his existence, a partner in our joys\nand sorrows, and a welcome friend.\n\n[Sidenote: The ideal a measure for all existences and no existence\nitself.]\n\nThose ideal objects, however, for whose sake all revolutions in space\nand time may be followed with interest, are not themselves members of\nour society. The ideal to which all forces should minister is itself no\nforce or factor in its own realisation. Such a possible disposition of\nthings is a mere idea, eternal and inert, a form life might possibly\ntake on and the one our endeavours, if they were consistent, would wish\nto impose on it. This ideal itself, however, has often been expressed in\nsome mythical figure or Utopia. So to express it is simply to indulge an\ninnocent instinct for prophecy and metaphor; but unfortunately the very\ninnocence of fancy may engage it all the more hopelessly in a tangle of\nbad dreams. If we once identify our Utopia or other ideal with the real\nforces that surround us, or with any one of them, we have fallen into an\nillusion from which we shall emerge only after bitter disappointments;\nand even when we have come out again into the open, we shall long carry\nwith us the desolating sense of wasted opportunities and vitiated\ncharacters. For to have taken our purposes for our helpers is to have\ndefeated the first and ignored the second; it is to have neglected\nrational labour and at the same time debauched social sense.\n\nThe religious extensions of society should therefore be carefully\nwatched; for while sometimes, as with the Hebrew prophets, religion\ngives dramatic expression to actual social forces and helps to intensify\nmoral feeling, it often, as in mystics of all creeds and ages, deadens\nthe consciousness of real ties by feigning ties which are purely\nimaginary. This self-deception is the more frequent because there float\nbefore men who live in the spirit ideals which they look to with the\nrespect naturally rendered to whatever is true, beautiful, or good; and\nthe symbolic rendering of these ideals, which is the rational function\nof religion, may be confused with its superstitious or utilitarian\npart\u2014with exploiting occult forces to aid us in the work of life.\n\nOccult forces may indeed exist, and they may even be so disposed that\nthe ideal is served by their agency; but the most notable embodiment of\na principle is not itself a principle, being only an instance, and the\nmost exact fulfilment of a law is not a law, being simply an event. To\ndiscover a law may meantime be the most interesting of events, and the\nimage or formula that expresses a principle may be the most welcome of\nintellectual presences. These symbols, weighted with their wide\nsignificance, may hold the mind and attract its energies into their\nvortex; and human genius is certainly not at its worst when employed in\nframing a good myth or a good argument. The lover of representation, be\nhe thinker or dramatist, moves by preference in an ideal society. His\ncommunion with the world is half a soliloquy, for the personages in his\ndialogue are private symbols, and being symbols they stand for what is\nnot themselves; the language he imputes to them is his own, though it\nis their ways that prompt him to impute that language to them. Plastic\nimages of his own making and shifting are his sole means of envisaging\neternal principles and ultimate substances, things ideal and potential,\nwhich can never become phenomenal in their own persons.\n\n[Sidenote: Contrast between natural and intellectual bonds.]\n\nIt is an inspiring thought, and a true one, that in proportion as a\nman\u2019s interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates\nand expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach\nthe same impersonal level of ideas\u2014a level which his own influence may\nhelp them to maintain. Patriotism envisages this ideal life in so far as\nit is locally coloured and grounded in certain racial aptitudes and\ntraditions; but the community recognised in patriotism is imbedded in a\nlarger one embracing all living creatures. While in some respects we\nfind sympathy more complete the nearer home we remain, in another sense\nthere is no true companionship except with the universe. Instinctive\nsociety, with its compulsory affections, is of course deeper and more\nelementary than any free or intellectual union. Love is at once more\nanimal than friendship and more divine; and the same thing may be said\nof family affection when compared with patriotism. What lies nearer the\nroots of our being must needs enjoy a wider prevalence and engage the\nsoul more completely, being able to touch its depths and hush its\nprimordial murmurs.\n\nOn the other hand, the free spirit, the political and speculative\ngenius in man, chafes under those blind involutions and material bonds.\nNatural, beneficent, sacred, as in a sense they may be, they somehow\noppress the intellect and, like a brooding mother, half stifle what they\nfeed. Something drives the youth afield, into solitude, into alien\nfriendships; only in the face of nature and an indifferent world can he\nbecome himself. Such a flight from home and all its pieties grows more\nurgent when there is some real conflict of temper or conscience between\nthe young man and what is established in his family; and this happens\noften because, after all, the most beneficent conventions are but\nmechanisms which must ignore the nicer sensibilities and divergences of\nliving souls.\n\n[Sidenote: Appeal from man to God, from real to ideal society.]\n\nCommon men accept these spiritual tyrannies, weak men repine at them,\nand great men break them down. But to defy the world is a serious\nbusiness, and requires the greatest courage, even if the defiance touch\nin the first place only the world\u2019s ideals. Most men\u2019s conscience,\nhabits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual\ncomforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally\nsuggested them. To reverse this process, to consult one\u2019s own experience\nand elicit one\u2019s own judgment, challenging those in vogue, seems too\noften audacious and futile; but there are impetuous minds born to\ndisregard the chances against them, even to the extent of denying that\nthey are taking chances at all. For in the first instance it never\noccurs to the inventor that he is the source of his new insight; he\nthinks he has merely opened his eyes and seen what, by an inconceivable\nfolly, the whole world had grown blind to. Wise men in antiquity, he\nimagines, saw the facts as he sees them, as the gods see them now, and\nas all sane men shall see them henceforward.\n\nThus, if the innovator be a religious soul, grown conscious of some new\nspiritual principle, he will try to find support for his inspiration in\nsome lost book of the law or in some early divine revelation corrupted,\nas he will assert, by wicked men, or even in some direct voice from\nheaven; no delusion will be too obvious, no re-interpretation too\nforced, if it can help him to find external support somewhere for his\nspontaneous conviction. To denounce one authority he needs to invoke\nanother, and if no other be found, he will invent or, as they say, he\nwill postulate one. His courage in facing the actual world is thus\nsupported by his ability to expand the world in imagination. In\nseparating himself from his fellow-men he has made a new companion out\nof his ideal. An impetuous spirit when betrayed by the world will cry,\n\u201cI know that my redeemer liveth\u201d; and the antiphonal response will come\nmore wistfully after reflection:\n\n  \u201cIt fortifies my soul to know\n  That though I wander, Truth is so.\u201d\n\n[Sidenote: Significant symbols revert to the concrete.]\n\nThe deceptions which nature practises on men are not always cruel. These\nare also kindly deceptions which prompt him to pursue or expect his own\ngood when, though not destined to come in the form he looks for, this\ngood is really destined to come in some shape or other. Such, for\ninstance, are the illusions of romantic love, which may really terminate\nin a family life practically better than the absolute and chimerical\nunions which that love had dreamed of. Such, again, are those illusions\nof conscience which attach unspeakable vague penalties and repugnances\nto acts which commonly have bad results, though these are impossible to\nforecast with precision. When disillusion comes, while it may bring a\nmomentary shock, it ends by producing a settled satisfaction unknown\nbefore, a satisfaction which the coveted prize, could it have been\nattained, would hardly have secured. When on the day of judgment, or\nearlier, a man perceives that what he thought he was doing for the\nLord\u2019s sake he was really doing for the benefit of the least, perhaps,\nof the Lord\u2019s creatures, his satisfaction, after a moment\u2019s surprise,\nwill certainly be very genuine.\n\n[Sidenote: Nature a symbol for destiny.]\n\nSuch kindly illusions are involved in the symbolic method by which\ngeneral relations and the inconceivably diffuse reality of things have\nto be apprehended. The stars are in human thought a symbol for the\nsilent forces of destiny, really embodied in forms beyond our\napprehension; for who shall say what actual being may or may not\ncorrespond to that potentiality of life or sensation which is all that\nthe external world can be to our science? When astrology invented the\nhoroscope it made an absurdly premature translation of celestial\nhieroglyphics into that language of universal destiny which in the end\nthey may be made to speak. The perfect astronomer, when he understood at\nlast exactly what pragmatic value the universe has, and what fortunes\nthe stars actually forebode, would be pleasantly surprised to discover\nthat he was nothing but an astrologer grown competent and honest.\n\n[Sidenote: Representative notions have also inherent values.]\n\nIdeal society belongs entirely to this realm of kindly illusion, for it\nis the society of symbols. Whenever religion, art, or science presents\nus with an image or a formula, involving no matter how momentous a\ntruth, there is something delusive in the representation. It needs\ntranslation into the detailed experience which it sums up in our own\npast or prophecies elsewhere. This eventual change in form, far from\nnullifying our knowledge, can alone legitimise it. A conception not\nreducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not\nexchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a\nfraud. And yet there is another aspect to the matter. Symbols are\npresences, and they are those particularly congenial presences which we\nhave inwardly evoked and cast in a form intelligible and familiar to\nhuman thinking. Their function is to give flat experience a rational\nperspective, translating the general flux into stable objects and making\nit representable in human discourse. They are therefore precious, not\nonly for their representative or practical value, implying useful\nadjustments to the environing world, but even more, sometimes, for their\nimmediate or \u00e6sthetic power, for their kinship to the spirit they\nenlighten and exercise.\n\nThis is prevailingly true in the fine arts which seem to express man\neven more than they express nature; although in art also the symbol\nwould lose all its significance and much of its inward articulation if\nnatural objects and eventual experience could be disregarded in\nconstructing it. In music, indeed, this ulterior significance is reduced\nto a minimum; yet it persists, since music brings an ideal object before\nthe mind which needs, to some extent, translation into terms no longer\nmusical\u2014terms, for instance, of skill, dramatic passion, or moral\nsentiment. But in music pre-eminently, and very largely in all the arts,\nexternal propriety is adventitious; so much can the mere presence and\nweight of a symbol fill the mind and constitute an absolute possession.\n\n[Sidenote: Religion and science indirectly cognitive and directly\nideal.]\n\nIn religion and science the overt purpose of symbols is to represent\nexternal truths. The inventors of these symbols think they are merely\nuncovering a self-existent reality, having in itself the very form seen\nin their idea. They do not perceive that the society of God or Nature\nis an ideal society, nor that these phantoms, looming in their\nimagination, are but significant figments whose existent basis is a\nminute and indefinite series of ordinary perceptions. They consequently\nattribute whatever value their genial syntheses may have to the object\nas they picture it. The gods have, they fancy, the aspect and passions,\nthe history and influence which their myth unfolds; nature in its turn\ncontains hypostatically just those laws and forces which are described\nby theory. Consequently the presence of God or Nature seems to the\nmythologist not an ideal, but a real and mutual society, as if\ncollateral beings, endowed with the conceived characters, actually\nexisted as men exist. But this opinion is untenable. As Hobbes said, in\na phrase which ought to be inscribed in golden letters over the head of\nevery talking philosopher: _No discourse whatsoever can end in absolute\nknowledge of fact_. Absolute knowledge of fact is immediate, it is\nexperiential. We should have to _become_ God or Nature in order to know\nfor a fact that they existed. Intellectual knowledge, on the other hand,\nwhere it relates to existence, is faith only, a faith which in these\nmatters means trust. For the forces of Nature or the gods, if they had\ncrude existence, so that we might conceivably become what they are,\nwould lose that causal and that religious function which are their\nessence respectively. They would be merely collateral existences, loaded\nwith all sorts of irrelevant properties, parts of the universal flux,\nmembers of a natural society; and while as such they would have their\nrelative importance, they would be embraced in turn within an\nintelligible system of relations, while their rights and dignities would\nneed to be determined by some supervening ideal. A nature existing in\nact would require metaphysics\u2014the account of a deeper nature\u2014to\nexpress its relation to the mind that knew and judged it. Any actual god\nwould need to possess a religion of his own, in order to fix his ideal\nof conduct and his rights in respect to his creatures or rather, as we\nshould then be, to his neighbours. This situation may have no terrors\nfor the thoughtless; but it evidently introduces something deeper than\nNature and something higher than God, depriving these words of the best\nsense in which a philosopher might care to use them.\n\n[Sidenote: Their opposite outlook.]\n\nThe divine and the material are contrasted points of reference required\nby the actual. Reason, working on the immediate flux of appearances,\nreaches these ideal realms and, resting in them, perforce calls them\nrealities. One\u2014the realm of causes\u2014supplies appearances with a basis\nand calculable order; the other\u2014the realm of truth and\nfelicity\u2014supplies them with a standard and justification. Natural\nsociety may accordingly be contrasted with ideal society, not because\nNature is not, logically speaking, ideal too, but because in natural\nsociety we ally ourselves consciously with our origins and\nsurroundings, in ideal society with our purposes. There is an immense\ndifference in spirituality, in ideality of the moral sort, between\ngathering or conciliating forces for action and fixing the ends which\naction should pursue. Both fields are ideal in the sense that\nintelligence alone could discover or exploit them; yet to call nature\nideal is undoubtedly equivocal, since its ideal function is precisely to\nbe the substance and cause of the given flux, a ground-work for\nexperience which, while merely inferred and potential, is none the less\nmechanical and material. The ideality of nature is indeed of such a sort\nas to be forfeited if the trusty instrument and true antecedent of human\nlife were not found there. We should be frivolous and inconstant, taking\nour philosophy for a game and not for method in living, if having set\nout to look for the causes and practical order of things, and having\nfound them, we should declare that they were not _really_ casual or\nefficient, on the strange ground that our discovery of them had been a\nfeat of intelligence and had proved a priceless boon. The absurdity\ncould not be greater if in moral science, after the goal of all effort\nhad been determined and happiness defined, we declared that this was not\n_really_ the good.\n\nThose who are shocked at the assertion that God and Nature are ideal,\nand that their contrasted prerogatives depend on that fact, may, of\ncourse, use the same words in a different way, making them synonymous,\nand may readily \u201cprove\u201d that God or Nature exists materially and has\nabsolute being. We need but agree to designate by those terms the sum of\nexistences, whatever they (or it) may be to their own feeling. Then the\nontological proof asserts its rights unmistakably. Science and religion,\nhowever, are superfluous if what we wish to learn is that there is\nSomething, and that All-there-is must assuredly be All-there-is.\nEcstasies may doubtless ensue upon considering that Being is and\nNon-Being is not, as they are said to ensue upon long enough considering\none\u2019s navel; but the Life of Reason is made of more variegated stuff.\nScience, when it is not dialectical, describes an ideal order of\nexistences in space and time, such that all incidental facts, as they\ncome, may fill it in and lend it body. Religion, when pure, contemplates\nsome pertinent ideal of intelligence and goodness. Both religion and\nscience live in imaginative discourse, one being an aspiration and the\nother a hypothesis. Both introduce into the mind an ideal society.\n\nThe Life of Reason is no fair reproduction of the universe, but the\nexpression of man alone. A theory of nature is nothing but a mass of\nobservations, made with a hunter\u2019s and an artist\u2019s eye. A mortal has no\ntime for sympathy with his victim or his model; and, beyond a certain\nrange, he has no capacity for such sympathy. As in order to live he must\ndevour one-half the world and disregard the other, so in order to think\nand practically to know he must deal summarily and selfishly with his\nmaterials; otherwise his intellect would melt again into endless and\nirrevocable dreams. The law of gravity, because it so notably unifies\nthe motions of matter, is something which these motions themselves know\nnothing of; it is a description of them in terms of human discourse.\nSuch discourse can never assure us absolutely that the motions it\nforecasts will occur; the sensible proof must ensue spontaneously in its\nown good time. In the interval our theory remains pure presumption and\nhypothesis. Reliable as it may be in that capacity, it is no replica of\nanything on its own level existing beyond. It creates, like all\nintelligence, a secondary and merely symbolic world.\n\n[Sidenote: In translating existence into human terms they give human\nnature its highest exercise.]\n\nWhen this diversity between the truest theory and the simplest fact,\nbetween potential generalities and actual particulars, has been\nthoroughly appreciated, it becomes clear that much of what is valued in\nscience and religion is not lodged in the miscellany underlying these\ncreations of reason, but is lodged rather in the rational activity\nitself, and in the intrinsic beauty of all symbols bred in a genial\nmind. Of course, if these symbols had no real points of reference, if\nthey were symbols of nothing, they could have no great claim to\nconsideration and no rational character; at most they would be agreeable\nsensations. They are, however, at their best good symbols for a\ndiffused experience having a certain order and tendency; they render\nthat reality with a difference, reducing it to a formula or a myth, in\nwhich its tortuous length and trivial detail can be surveyed to\nadvantage without undue waste or fatigue. Symbols may thus become\neloquent, vivid, important, being endowed with both poetic grandeur and\npractical truth.\n\nThe facts from which this truth is borrowed, if they were rehearsed\nunimaginatively, in their own flat infinity, would be far from arousing\nthe same emotions. The human eye sees in perspective; its glory would\nvanish were it reduced to a crawling, exploring antenna. Not that it\nloves to falsify anything. That to the worm the landscape might possess\nno light and shade, that the mountain\u2019s atomic structure should be\nunpicturable, cannot distress the landscape gardener nor the poet; what\nconcerns them is the effect such things may produce in the human fancy,\nso that the soul may live in a congenial world.\n\nNaturalist and prophet are landscape painters on canvases of their own;\neach is interested in his own perception and perspective, which, if he\ntakes the trouble to reflect, need not deceive him about what the world\nwould be if not foreshortened in that particular manner. This special\ninterpretation is nevertheless precious and shows up the world in that\nlight in which it interests naturalists or prophets to see it. Their\nfigments make their chosen world, as the painter\u2019s apperceptions are\nthe breath of his nostrils.\n\n[Sidenote: Science should be mathematical and religion anthropomorphic.]\n\nWhile the symbol\u2019s applicability is essential to its worth\u2014since\notherwise science would be useless and religion demoralising\u2014its power\nand fascination lie in its acquiring a more and more profound affinity\nto the human mind, so long as it can do so without surrendering its\nrelevance to practice. Thus natural science is at its best when it is\nmost thoroughly mathematical, since what can be expressed mathematically\ncan speak a human language. In such science only the ultimate material\nelements remain surds; all their further movement and complication can\nbe represented in that kind of thought which is most intimately\nsatisfactory and perspicuous. And in like manner, religion is at its\nbest when it is most anthropomorphic; indeed, the two most spiritual\nreligions, Buddhism and Christianity, have actually raised a man,\noverflowing with utterly human tenderness and pathos, to the place\nusually occupied only by cosmic and thundering deities. The human heart\nis lifted above misfortune and encouraged to pursue unswervingly its\ninmost ideal when no compromise is any longer attempted with what is not\nmoral or human, and Prometheus is honestly proclaimed to be holier than\nZeus. At that moment religion ceases to be superstitious and becomes a\nrational discipline, an effort to perfect the spirit rather than to\nintimidate it.\n\n[Sidenote: Summary of this book.]\n\nWe have seen that society has three stages\u2014the natural, the free, and\nthe ideal. In the natural stage its function is to produce the\nindividual and equip him with the prerequisites of moral freedom. When\nthis end is attained society can rise to friendship, to unanimity and\ndisinterested sympathy, where the ground of association is some ideal\ninterest, while this association constitutes at the same time a personal\nand emotional bond. Ideal society, on the contrary, transcends\naccidental conjunctions altogether. Here the ideal interests themselves\ntake possession of the mind; its companions are the symbols it breeds\nand possesses for excellence, beauty, and truth. Religion, art, and\nscience are the chief spheres in which ideal companionship is found. It\nremains for us to traverse these provinces in turn and see to what\nextent the Life of Reason may flourish there.\n\n\n*** End of Volume Two ***\n\n\n\n\nREASON IN RELIGION\n\nVolume Three of \u201cThe Life of Reason\u201d\n\n\nGEORGE SANTAYANA\n\n\nh\u00ea gar noy enhergeia z\u00f4h\u00ea\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\nREASON IN RELIGION\n\n\nCHAPTER I\n\nHOW RELIGION MAY BE AN EMBODIMENT OF REASON\n\nReligion is certainly significant, but not literally true.\u2014All religion\nis positive and particular.\u2014It aims at the Life of Reason, but largely\nfails to attain it.\u2014Its approach imaginative.\u2014When its poetic method\nis denied its value is jeopardised.\u2014It precedes science rather than\nhinders it.\u2014It is merely symbolic and thoroughly human. Pages 3-14\n\n\nCHAPTER II\n\nRATIONAL ELEMENTS IN SUPERSTITION\n\nFelt causes not necessary causes.\u2014Mechanism and dialectic ulterior\nprinciples.\u2014Early selection of categories.\u2014Tentative rational\nworlds.\u2014Superstition a rudimentary philosophy.\u2014A miracle, though\nunexpected, more intelligible than a regular process.\u2014Superstitions\ncome of haste to understand.\u2014Inattention suffers them to\nspread.\u2014Genius may use them to convey an inarticulate wisdom. Pages\n15-27\n\n\nCHAPTER III\n\nMAGIC, SACRIFICE, AND PRAYER\n\nFear created the gods.\u2014Need also contributed.\u2014The real evidences of\nGod\u2019s existence.\u2014Practice precedes theory in religion.\u2014Pathetic,\ntentative nature of religious practices.\u2014Meanness and envy in the gods,\nsuggesting sacrifice.\u2014Ritualistic arts.\u2014Thank-offerings.\u2014The\nsacrifice of a contrite heart.\u2014Prayer is not utilitarian in\nessence.\u2014Its supposed efficacy magical.\u2014Theological puzzles.\u2014A real\nefficacy would be mechanical.\u2014True uses of prayer.\u2014It clarifies the\nideal.\u2014It reconciles to the inevitable.\u2014It fosters spiritual life by\nconceiving it in its perfection.\u2014Discipline and contemplation are their\nown reward. Pages 28-48\n\n\nCHAPTER IV\n\nMYTHOLOGY\n\nStatus of fable in the mind.\u2014It requires genius.\u2014It only half\ndeceives.\u2014Its interpretative essence.\u2014Contrast with\nscience.\u2014Importance of the moral factor.\u2014Its submergence.\u2014Myth\njustifies magic.\u2014Myths might be metaphysical.\u2014They appear ready made,\nlike parts of the social fabric.\u2014They perplex the\nconscience.\u2014Incipient myth in the Vedas.\u2014Natural suggestions soon\nexhausted.\u2014They will be carried out in abstract fancy.\u2014They may become\nmoral ideals.\u2014The Sun-god moralised.\u2014The leaven of religion is moral\nidealism. Pages 49-68\n\n\nCHAPTER V\n\nTHE HEBRAIC TRADITION\n\nPhases of Hebraism.\u2014Israel\u2019s tribal monotheism.\u2014Problems\ninvolved.\u2014The prophets put new wine in old bottles.\u2014Inspiration and\nauthority.\u2014Beginnings of the Church.\u2014Bigotry turned into a\nprinciple.\u2014Penance accepted.\u2014Christianity combines optimism and\nasceticism.\u2014Reason smothered between the two.\u2014Religion made an\ninstitution. Pages 69-82\n\n\nCHAPTER VI\n\nTHE CHRISTIAN EPIC\n\nThe essence of the good not adventitious but expressive.\u2014A universal\nreligion must interpret the whole world.\u2014Double appeal of\nChristianity.\u2014Hebrew metaphors become Greek myths.\u2014Hebrew philosophy\nof history identified with Platonic cosmology.\u2014The resulting orthodox\nsystem.\u2014The brief drama of things.\u2014Mythology is a language and must be\nunderstood to convey something by symbols. Pages 83-98\n\n\nCHAPTER VII\n\nPAGAN CUSTOM AND BARBARIAN GENIUS INFUSED INTO CHRISTIANITY\n\nNeed of paganising Christianity.\u2014Catholic piety more human than the\nliturgy.\u2014Natural pieties.\u2014Refuge taken in the supernatural.\u2014The\nepisodes of life consecrated mystically.\u2014Paganism chastened, Hebraism\nliberalised.\u2014The system post-rational and founded on despair.\u2014External\nconversion of the barbarians.\u2014Expression of the northern genius within\nCatholicism,\u2014Internal discrepancies between the two.\u2014Tradition and\ninstinct at odds in Protestantism.\u2014The Protestant spirit remote from\nthat of the gospel.\u2014Obstacles to humanism.\u2014The Reformation and\ncounter-reformation.\u2014Protestantism an expression of character.\u2014It has\nthe spirit of life and of courage, but the voice of inexperience.\u2014Its\nemancipation from Christianity. Pages 99-126\n\n\nCHAPTER VIII\n\nCONFLICT OF MYTHOLOGY WITH MORAL TRUTH\n\nMyth should dissolve with the advance of science.\u2014But myth is confused\nwith the moral values it expresses.\u2014Neo-Platonic revision.\u2014It made\nmythical entities of abstractions.\u2014Hypostasis ruins ideals.\u2014The Stoic\nrevision.\u2014The ideal surrendered before the physical.\u2014Parallel\nmovements in Christianity.\u2014Hebraism, if philosophical, must be\npantheistic.\u2014Pantheism, even when psychic, ignores ideals.\u2014Truly\ndivine action limited to what makes for the good.\u2014Need of an opposing\nprinciple.\u2014The standard of value is human.\u2014Hope for happiness makes\nbelief in God. Pages 127-147\n\n\nCHAPTER IX\n\nTHE CHRISTIAN COMPROMISE\n\nSuspense between hope and disillusion.\u2014Superficial solution.\u2014But from\nwhat shall we be redeemed?\u2014Typical attitude of St. Augustine.\u2014He\nachieves Platonism.\u2014He identifies it with Christianity.\u2014God the\ngood.\u2014Primary and secondary religion.\u2014Ambiguous efficacy of the good\nin Plato.\u2014Ambiguous goodness of the creator in Job.\u2014The\nManicheans.\u2014All things good by nature.\u2014The doctrine of creation\ndemands that of the fall.\u2014Original sin.\u2014Forced abandonment of the\nideal.\u2014The problem among the Protestants.\u2014Pantheism accepted.\u2014Plainer\nscorn for the ideal.\u2014The price of mythology is superstition. Pages\n148-177\n\n\nCHAPTER X\n\nPIETY\n\nThe core of religion not theoretical.\u2014Loyalty to the sources of our\nbeing.\u2014The pious \u00c6neas.\u2014An ideal background required.\u2014Piety accepts\nnatural conditions and present tasks.\u2014The leadership of instinct is\nnormal.\u2014Embodiment essential to spirit.\u2014Piety to the gods takes form\nfrom current ideals.\u2014The religion of humanity.\u2014Cosmic piety. Pages\n178-192\n\n\nCHAPTER XI\n\nSPIRITUALITY AND ITS CORRUPTIONS\n\nTo be spiritual is to live in view of the ideal.\u2014Spirituality\nnatural.\u2014Primitive consciousness may be spiritual.\u2014Spirit crossed by\ninstrumentalities.\u2014One foe of the spirit is worldliness.\u2014The case for\nand against pleasure.\u2014Upshot of worldly wisdom.\u2014Two supposed escapes\nfrom vanity: fanaticism and mysticism.\u2014Both are irrational.\u2014Is there a\nthird course?\u2014Yes, for experience has intrinsic, inalienable\nvalues.\u2014For these the religious imagination must supply an ideal\nstandard. Pages 193-213\n\n\nCHAPTER XII\n\nCHARITY\n\nPossible tyranny of reason.\u2014Everything has its rights.\u2014Primary and\nsecondary morality.\u2014Uncharitable pagan justice is not just.\u2014The doom\nof ancient republics.\u2014Rational charity.\u2014Its limits.\u2014Its mythical\nsupports.\u2014There is intelligence in charity.\u2014Buddhist and Christian\nforms of it.\u2014Apparent division of the spiritual and the natural. Pages\n214-228\n\n\nCHAPTER XIII\n\nTHE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE\n\nThe length of life a subject for natural science.\u2014\u201cPsychical\u201d\nphenomena.\u2014Hypertrophies of sense.\u2014These possibilities affect physical\nexistence only.\u2014Moral grounds for the doctrine.\u2014The necessary\nassumption of a future.\u2014An assumption no evidence.\u2014A solipsistic\nargument.\u2014Absoluteness and immortality transferred to the gods.\u2014Or to\na divine principle in all beings.\u2014In neither case is the individual\nimmortal.\u2014Possible forms of survival.\u2014Arguments from retribution and\nneed of opportunity.\u2014Ignoble temper of both.\u2014False optimistic\npostulate involved.\u2014Transition to ideality. Pages 229-250\n\n\nCHAPTER XIV\n\nIDEAL IMMORTALITY\n\nOlympian immortality the first ideal.\u2014Its indirect attainment by\nreproduction.\u2014Moral acceptance of this compromise.\u2014Even vicarious\nimmortality intrinsically impossible.\u2014Intellectual victory over\nchange.\u2014The glory of it.\u2014Reason makes man\u2019s divinity and his\nimmortality.\u2014It is the locus of all truths.\u2014Epicurean immortality,\nthrough the truth of existence.\u2014Logical immortality, through objects of\nthought.\u2014Ethical immortality, through types of excellence. Pages 251-273\n\n\nCHAPTER XV\n\nCONCLUSION\n\nThe failure of magic and of mythology.\u2014Their imaginative value.\u2014Piety\nand spirituality justified.\u2014Mysticism a primordial state of\nfeeling.\u2014It may recur at any stage of culture.\u2014Form gives substance\nits life and value. Pages 274-279\n\n\n\n\nREASON IN RELIGION\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER I\n\nHOW RELIGION MAY BE AN EMBODIMENT OF REASON\n\n\n[Sidenote: Religion certainly significant.]\n\nExperience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon\u2019s,\nthat \u201ca little philosophy inclineth man\u2019s mind to atheism, but depth in\nphilosophy bringeth men\u2019s minds about to religion.\u201d In every age the\nmost comprehensive thinkers have found in the religion of their time and\ncountry something they could accept, interpreting and illustrating that\nreligion so as to give it depth and universal application. Even the\nheretics and atheists, if they have had profundity, turn out after a\nwhile to be forerunners of some new orthodoxy. What they rebel against\nis a religion alien to their nature; they are atheists only by accident,\nand relatively to a convention which inwardly offends them, but they\nyearn mightily in their own souls after the religious acceptance of a\nworld interpreted in their own fashion. So it appears in the end that\ntheir atheism and loud protestation were in fact the hastier part of\ntheir thought, since what emboldened them to deny the poor world\u2019s faith\nwas that they were too impatient to understand it. Indeed, the\nenlightenment common to young wits and worm-eaten old satirists, who\nplume themselves on detecting the scientific ineptitude of\nreligion\u2014something which the blindest half see\u2014is not nearly\nenlightened enough: it points to notorious facts incompatible with\nreligious tenets literally taken, but it leaves unexplored the habits of\nthought from which those tenets sprang, their original meaning, and\ntheir true function. Such studies would bring the sceptic face to face\nwith the mystery and pathos of mortal existence. They would make him\nunderstand why religion is so profoundly moving and in a sense so\nprofoundly just. There must needs be something humane and necessary in\nan influence that has become the most general sanction of virtue, the\nchief occasion for; art and philosophy, and the source, perhaps, of the\nbest human happiness. If nothing, as Hooker said, is \u201cso malapert as a\nsplenetic religion,\u201d a sour irreligion is almost as perverse.\n\n[Sidenote: But not literally true.]\n\nAt the same time, when Bacon penned the sage epigram we have quoted he\nforgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men\u2019s\nminds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges\nthem. It would be pitiful indeed if mature reflection bred no better\nconceptions than those which have drifted down the muddy stream of time,\nwhere tradition and passion have jumbled everything together.\nTraditional conceptions, when they are felicitous, may be adopted by the\npoet, but they must be purified by the moralist and disintegrated by\nthe philosopher. Each religion, so dear to those whose life it\nsanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that\nhas adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and\nprobably contradicts itself. What religion a man shall have is a\nhistorical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak. In\nthe rare circumstances where a choice is possible, he may, with some\ndifficulty, make an exchange; but even then he is only adopting a new\nconvention which may be more agreeable to his personal temper but which\nis essentially as arbitrary as the old.\n\n[Sidenote: All religion is positive and particular.]\n\nThe attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not\nmore hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no\nreligion in particular. A courier\u2019s or a dragoman\u2019s speech may indeed be\noften unusual and drawn from disparate sources, not without some mixture\nof personal originality; but that private jargon will have a meaning\nonly because of its analogy to one or more conventional languages and\nits obvious derivation from them. So travellers from one religion to\nanother, people who have lost their spiritual nationality, may often\nretain a neutral and confused residuum of belief, which they may\negregiously regard as the essence of all religion, so little may they\nremember the graciousness and naturalness of that ancestral accent which\na perfect religion should have. Yet a moment\u2019s probing of the\nconceptions surviving in such minds will show them to be nothing but\nvestiges of old beliefs, creases which thought, even if emptied of all\ndogmatic tenets, has not been able to smooth away at its first\nunfolding. Later generations, if they have any religion at all, will be\nfound either to revert to ancient authority, or to attach themselves\nspontaneously to something wholly novel and immensely positive, to some\nfaith promulgated by a fresh genius and passionately embraced by a\nconverted people. Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked\nidiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message\nand in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens\nand the mysteries propounds are another world to live in; and another\nworld to live in\u2014whether we expect ever to pass wholly into it or\nno\u2014is what we mean by having a religion.\n\n[Sidenote: It aims at the Life of Reason.]\n\nWhat relation, then, does this great business of the soul, which we call\nreligion, bear to the Life of Reason? That the relation between the two\nis close seems clear from several circumstances. The Life of Reason is\nthe seat of all ultimate values. Now the history of mankind will show us\nthat whenever spirits at once lofty and intense have seemed to attain\nthe highest joys, they have envisaged and attained them in religion.\nReligion would therefore seem to be a vehicle or a factor in rational\nlife, since the ends of rational life are attained by it. Moreover, the\nLife of Reason is an ideal to which everything in the world should be\nsubordinated; it establishes lines of moral cleavage everywhere and\nmakes right eternally different from wrong. Religion does the same\nthing. It makes absolute moral decisions. It sanctions, unifies, and\ntransforms ethics. Religion thus exercises a function of the Life of\nReason. And a further function which is common to both is that of\nemancipating man from his personal limitations. In different ways\nreligions promise to transfer the soul to better conditions. A\nsupernaturally favoured kingdom is to be established for posterity upon\nearth, or for all the faithful in heaven, or the soul is to be freed by\nrepeated purgations from all taint and sorrow, or it is to be lost in\nthe absolute, or it is to become an influence and an object of adoration\nin the places it once haunted or wherever the activities it once loved\nmay be carried on by future generations of its kindred. Now reason in\nits way lays before us all these possibilities: it points to common\nobjects, political and intellectual, in which an individual may lose\nwhat is mortal and accidental in himself and immortalise what is\nrational and human; it teaches us how sweet and fortunate death may be\nto those whose spirit can still live in their country and in their\nideas; it reveals the radiating effects of action and the eternal\nobjects of thought.\n\nYet the difference in tone and language must strike us, so soon as it is\nphilosophy that speaks. That change should remind us that even if the\nfunction of religion and that of reason coincide, this function is\nperformed in the two cases by very different organs. Religions are many,\nreason one. Religion consists of conscious ideas, hopes, enthusiasms,\nand objects of worship; it operates by grace and flourished by prayer.\nReason, on the other hand, is a mere principle or potential order, on\nwhich, indeed, we may come to reflect, but which exists in us ideally\nonly, without variation or stress of any kind. We conform or do not\nconform to it; it does not urge or chide us, nor call for any emotions\non our part other than those naturally aroused by the various objects\nwhich it unfolds in their true nature and proportion. Religion brings\nsome order into life by weighting it with new materials. Reason adds to\nthe natural materials only the perfect order which it introduces into\nthem. Rationality is nothing but a form, an ideal constitution which\nexperience may more or less embody. Religion is a part of experience\nitself, a mass of sentiments and ideas. The one is an inviolate\nprinciple, the other a changing and struggling force. And yet this\nstruggling and changing force of religion, seems to direct man toward\nsomething eternal. It seems to make for an ultimate harmony within the\nsoul and for an ultimate harmony between the soul and all the soul\ndepends upon. So that religion, in its intent, is a more conscious and\ndirect pursuit of the Life of Reason than is society, science, or art.\nFor these approach and fill out the ideal life tentatively and\npiecemeal, hardly regarding the goal or caring for the ultimate\njustification of their instinctive aims. Religion also has an\ninstinctive and blind side, and bubbles up in all manner of chance\npractices and intuitions; soon, however, it feels its way toward the\nheart of things, and, from whatever quarter it may come, veers in the\ndirection of the ultimate.\n\n[Sidenote: But largely fails to attain it.]\n\nNevertheless, we must confess that this religious pursuit of the Life of\nReason has been singularly abortive. Those within the pale of each\nreligion may prevail upon themselves to express satisfaction with its\nresults, thanks to a fond partiality in reading the past and generous\ndraughts of hope for the future; but any one regarding the various\nreligions at once and comparing their achievements with what reason\nrequires, must feel how terrible is the disappointment which they have\none and all prepared for mankind. Their chief anxiety has been to offer\nimaginary remedies for mortal ills, some of which are incurable\nessentially, while others might have been really cured by well-directed\neffort. The Greek oracles, for instance, pretended to heal our natural\nignorance, which has its appropriate though difficult cure, while the\nChristian vision of heaven pretended to be an antidote to our natural\ndeath, the inevitable correlate of birth and of a changing and\nconditioned existence. By methods of this sort little can be done for\nthe real betterment of life. To confuse intelligence and dislocate\nsentiment by gratuitous fictions is a short-sighted way of pursuing\nhappiness. Nature is soon avenged. An unhealthy exaltation and a\none-sided morality have to be followed by regrettable reactions. When\nthese come, the real rewards of life may seem vain to a relaxed\nvitality, and the very name of virtue may irritate young spirits\nuntrained in any natural excellence. Thus religion too often debauches\nthe morality it comes to sanction, and impedes the science it ought to\nfulfil.\n\n[Sidenote: Its approach imaginative.]\n\nWhat is the secret of this ineptitude? Why does religion, so near to\nrationality in its purpose, fall so far short of it in its texture and\nin its results? The answer is easy: Religion pursues, rationality\nthrough the imagination. When it explains events or assigns causes, it\ngives imaginative substitute for science. When it gives; precepts,\ninsinuates ideals, or remoulds aspiration, it is an imaginative\nsubstitute for wisdom\u2014I mean for the deliberate and impartial pursuit\nof all good. The conditions and the aims of life are both represented in\nreligion poetically, but this poetry tends to arrogate to itself literal\ntruth and moral authority, neither of which it possesses. Hence the\ndepth and importance of religion become intelligible no less than its\ncontradictions and practical disasters. Its object is the same as that\nof reason, but its method is to proceed by intuition and by unchecked\npoetical conceits. These are repeated and vulgarised in proportion to\ntheir original fineness and significance, till they pass for reports of\nobjective truth and come to constitute a world of faith, superposed upon\nthe world of experience and regarded as materially enveloping it, if not\nin space at least in time and in existence. The only truth of religion\ncomes from its interpretation of life, from its symbolic rendering of\nthat moral, experience which it springs out of and which it seeks to\nelucidate. Its falsehood comes from the insidious misunderstanding which\nclings to it, to the effect that these poetic conceptions are not merely\nrepresentations of experience as it is or should be, but are rather\ninformation about experience or reality elsewhere\u2014an experience and\nreality which, strangely enough, supply just the defects betrayed by\nreality and experience here.\n\n[Sidenote: When its poetic method is denied its value is jeopardised.]\n\nThus religion has the same original relation to life that poetry has;\nonly poetry, which never pretends to literal validity, adds a pure value\nto existence, the value of a liberal imaginative exercise. The poetic\nvalue of religion would initially be greater than that of poetry itself,\nbecause religion deals with higher and more practical themes, with sides\nof life which are in greater need of some imaginative touch and ideal\ninterpretation than are those pleasant or pompous things which ordinary\npoetry dwells upon. But this initial advantage is neutralised in part by\nthe abuse to which religion is subject, whenever its symbolic rightness\nis taken for scientific truth. Like poetry, it improves the world only\nby imagining it improved, but not content with making this addition to\nthe mind\u2019s furniture\u2014an addition which might be useful and\nennobling\u2014it thinks to confer a more radical benefit by persuading\nmankind that, in spite of appearances, the world is really such as that\nrather arbitrary idealisation has painted it. This spurious satisfaction\nis naturally the prelude to many a disappointment, and the soul has\ninfinite trouble to emerge again from the artificial problems and\nsentiments into which it is thus plunged. The value of religion becomes\nequivocal. Religion remains an imaginative achievement, a symbolic\nrepresentation of moral reality which may have a most important function\nin vitalising the mind and in transmitting, by way of parables, the\nlessons of experience. But it becomes at the same time a continuous\nincidental deception; and this deception, in proportion as it is\nstrenuously denied to be such, can work indefinite harm in the world and\nin the conscience.\n\n[Sidenote: It precedes science rather than hinders it.]\n\nOn the whole, however, religion should not be conceived as having taken\nthe place of anything better, but rather as having come to relieve\nsituations which, but for its presence, would have been infinitely\nworse. In the thick of active life, or in the monotony of practical\nslavery, there is more need to stimulate fancy than to control it.\nNatural instinct is not much disturbed in the human brain by what may\nhappen in that thin superstratum of ideas which commonly overlays it.\nWe must not blame religion for preventing the development of a moral and\nnatural science which at any rate would seldom have appeared; we must\nrather thank it for the sensibility, the reverence, the speculative\ninsight which it has introduced into the world.\n\n[Sidenote: It is merely symbolic and thoroughly human.]\n\nWe may therefore proceed to analyse the significance and the function\nwhich religion has had at its different stages, and, without disguising\nor in the least condoning its confusion with literal truth, we may allow\nourselves to enter as sympathetically as possible into its various\nconceptions and emotions. They have made up the inner life of many\nsages, and of all those who without great genius or learning have lived\nsteadfastly in the spirit. The feeling of reverence should itself be\ntreated with reverence, although not at a sacrifice of truth, with which\nalone, in the end, reverence is compatible. Nor have we any reason to be\nintolerant of the partialities and contradictions which religions\ndisplay. Were we dealing with a science, such contradictions would have\nto be instantly solved and removed; but when we are concerned with the\npoetic interpretation of experience, contradiction means only variety,\nand variety means spontaneity, wealth of resource, and a nearer approach\nto total adequacy.\n\nIf we hope to gain any understanding of these matters we must begin by\ntaking them out of that heated and fanatical atmosphere in which the\nHebrew tradition has enveloped them. The Jews had no philosophy, and\nwhen their national traditions came to be theoretically explicated and\njustified, they were made to issue in a puerile scholasticism and a\nrabid intolerance. The question of monotheism, for instance, was a\nterrible question to the Jews. Idolatry did not consist in worshipping a\ngod who, not being ideal, might be unworthy of worship, but rather in\nrecognising other gods than the one worshipped in Jerusalem. To the\nGreeks, on the contrary, whose philosophy was enlightened and ingenuous,\nmonotheism and polytheism seemed perfectly innocent and compatible. To\nsay God or the gods was only to use different expressions for the same\ninfluence, now viewed in its abstract unity and correlation with all\nexistence, now viewed in its various manifestations in moral life, in\nnature, or in history. So that what in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics\nmeets us at every step\u2014the combination of monotheism with\npolytheism\u2014is no contradiction, but merely an intelligent variation of\nphrase to indicate various aspects or functions in physical and moral\nthings. When religion appears to us in this light its contradictions and\ncontroversies lose all their bitterness. Each doctrine will simply\nrepresent the moral plane on which they live who have devised or adopted\nit. Religions will thus be better or worse, never true or false. We\nshall be able to lend ourselves to each in turn, and seek to draw from\nit the secret of its inspiration.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER II\n\nRATIONAL ELEMENTS IN SUPERSTITION\n\n\nWe need not impose upon ourselves the endless and repulsive task of\ndescribing all the superstitions that have existed in the world. In his\nimpotence and laziness the natural man unites any notion with any other\nin a loose causal relation. A single instance of juxtaposition, nay, the\nmere notion and dream of such a combination, will suffice to arouse fear\nor to prompt experimental action.\n\n[Sidenote: Felt causes not necessary causes.]\n\nWhen philosophers have objected to Hume\u2019s account of causation that he\ngave no sufficient basis for the _necessary_ influence of cause on\neffect, they have indulged in a highly artificial supposition. They have\nassumed that people actually regard causes as necessary. They suppose\nthat before we can feel the interdependence of two things in experience\nwe must have an unshakable conviction that their connection is necessary\nand universal. But causation in such an absolute sense is no category of\npractical thinking. It appears, if at all, only in dialectic, in ideal\napplications of given laws to cases artificially simplified, where the\nterms are so defined that their operation upon one another is involved\nin the notion of them. So if we say that an unsupported weight _must_\nfall to the ground, we have included in the word \u201cweight\u201d the notion of\na downward strain. The proposition is really trifling and identical. It\nmerely announces that things which tend to fall to the ground tend to\nfall to the ground, and that heavy things are heavy. So, when we have\ncalled a thing a cause, we have defined it as that which involves an\neffect, and if the effect did not follow, the title of cause would no\nlonger belong to the antecedent. But the necessity of this sequence is\nmerely verbal. We have never, in the presence of the antecedent, the\nassurance that the title of cause will accrue to it. Our expectation is\nempirical, and we feel and assert nothing in respect to the necessity of\nthe expected sequence.\n\n[Sidenote: Mechanism and dialectic ulterior principles.]\n\nA cause, in real life, means a justifying circumstance. We are\nabsolutely without insight into the machinery of causation, notably in\nthe commonest cases, like that of generation, nutrition, or the\noperation of mind on matter. But we are familiar with the more notable\nsuperficial conditions in each case, and the appearance in part of any\nusual phenomenon makes us look for the rest of it. We do not ordinarily\nexpect virgins to bear children nor prophets to be fed by ravens nor\nprayers to remove mountains; but we may believe any of these things at\nthe merest suggestion of fancy or report, without any warrant from\nexperience, so loose is the bond and so external the relation between\nthe terms most constantly associated. A quite unprecedented occurrence\nwill seem natural and intelligible enough if it falls in happily with\nthe current of our thoughts. Interesting and significant events,\nhowever, are so rare and so dependent on mechanical conditions\nirrelevant to their value, that we come at last to wonder at their\nself-justified appearance apart from that cumbrous natural machinery,\nand to call them marvels, miracles, and things to gape at. We come to\nadopt scientific hypotheses, at least in certain provinces of our\nthought, and we lose our primitive openness and simplicity of mind.\nThen, with an unjustified haste, we assert that miracles are impossible,\ni.e., that nothing interesting and fundamentally natural can happen\nunless all the usual, though adventitious, _mise-en-sc\u00e8ne_ has been\nprepared behind the curtain.\n\nThe philosopher may eventually discover that such machinery is really\nneeded and that even the actors themselves have a mechanism within them,\nso that not only their smiles and magnificent gestures, but their heated\nfancy itself and their conception of their r\u00f4les are but outer effects\nand dramatic illusions produced by the natural stage-carpentry in their\nbrains. Yet such eventual scientific conclusions have nothing to do with\nthe tentative first notions of men when they begin to experiment in the\nart of living. As the seeds of lower animals have to be innumerable, so\nthat in a chance environment a few may grow to maturity, so the seeds\nof rational thinking, the first categories of reflection, have to be\nmultitudinous, in order that some lucky principle of synthesis may\nsomewhere come to light and find successful application. Science, which\nthinks to make belief in miracles impossible, is itself belief in\nmiracles\u2014in the miracles best authenticated by history and by daily\nlife.\n\n[Sidenote: Early selection of categories.]\n\nWhen men begin to understand things, when they begin to reflect and to\nplan, they divide the world into the hateful and the delightful, the\navoidable and the attainable. And in feeling their way toward what\nattracts them, or in escaping what they fear, they at first follow\npassively the lead of instinct: they watch themselves live, or rather\nsink without reserve into their living; their reactions are as little\nforeseen and as naturally accepted as their surroundings. Their ideas\nare incidents in their perpetual oscillation between apathy and passion.\nThe stream of animal life leaves behind a little sediment of knowledge,\nthe sand of that auriferous river; a few grains of experience remain to\nmark the path traversed by the flood. These residual ideas and\npremonitions, these first categories of thought, are of any and every\nsort. All the contents of the mind and all the threads of relation that\nweave its elements together are alike fitted, for all we can then see,\nto give the clue to the labyrinth in which we find ourselves wandering.\n\nThere is _prima facie_ no ground for not trying to apply to experience\nsuch categories, for instance, as that of personal omnipotence, as if\neverything were necessarily arranged as we may command or require. On\nthis principle children often seem to conceive a world in which they are\nastonished not to find themselves living. Or we may try aesthetic\ncategories and allow our reproductive imagination\u2014by which memory is\nfed\u2014to bring under the unity of apperception only what can fall within\nit harmoniously, completely, and delightfully. Such an understanding,\nimpervious to anything but the beautiful, might be a fine thing in\nitself, but would not chronicle the fortunes of that organism to which\nit was attached. It would yield an experience\u2014doubtless a highly\ninteresting and elaborate experience\u2014but one which could never serve as\nan index to successful action. It would totally fail to represent its\nconditions, and consequently would imply nothing about its continued\nexistence. It would be an experience irrelevant to conduct, no part,\ntherefore, of a Life of Reason, but a kind of lovely vapid music or\nparasitic dream.\n\nNow such dreams are in fact among the first and most absorbing\nformations in the human mind. If we could penetrate into animal\nconsciousness we should not improbably find that what there accompanies\ninstinctive motions is a wholly irrelevant fancy, whose flaring up and\nsubsidence no doubt coincide with the presence of objects interesting to\nthe organism and causing marked reactions within it; yet this fancy may\nin no way represent the nature of surrounding objects nor the eventual\nresults, for the animal\u2019s consciousness, of its own present experience.\n\n[Sidenote: Tentative rational worlds.]\n\nThe unlimited number of possible categories, their arbitrariness and\nspontaneity, may, however, have this inconvenience, that the categories\nmay be irrelevant to one another no less than to the natural life they\nought to express. The experience they respectively synthesise may\ntherefore be no single experience. One pictured world may succeed\nanother in the sphere of sensibility, while the body whose sensibility\nthey compose moves in a single and constant physical cosmos. Each little\nmental universe may be intermittent, or, if any part of it endures while\na new group of ideas comes upon the stage, there may arise\ncontradictions, discords, and a sense of lurking absurdity which will\ntend to disrupt thought logically at the same time that the processes of\nnutrition and the oncoming of new dreams tend to supplant it\nmechanically. Such drifting categories have no mutual authority. They\nreplace but do not dominate one another, and the general conditions of\nlife\u2014by conceiving which life itself might be surveyed\u2014remain entirely\nunrepresented.\n\nWhat we mean, indeed, by the natural world in which the conditions of\nconsciousness are found and in reference to which mind and its purposes\ncan attain practical efficacy, is simply the world constructed by\ncategories found to yield a constant, sufficient, and consistent object.\nHaving attained this conception, we justly call it the truth and\nmeasure the intellectual value of all other constructions by their\naffinity to that rational vision.\n\nSuch a rational vision has not yet been attained by mankind, but it\nwould be absurd to say that because we have not fully nor even\nproximately attained it, we have not gained any conception whatever of a\nreliable and intelligible world. The modicum of rationality achieved in\nthe sciences gives us a hint of a perfect rationality which, if\nunattainable in practice, is not inconceivable in idea. So, in still\nmore inchoate moments of reflection, our ancestors nursed even more\nisolated, less compatible, less adequate conceptions than those which\nleave our philosophers still unsatisfied. The categories they employed\ndominated smaller regions of experience than do the categories of\nhistory and natural science; they had far less applicability to the\nconduct of affairs and to the happy direction of life as a whole. Yet\nthey did yield vision and flashes of insight. They lighted men a step\nahead in the dark places of their careers, and gave them at certain\njunctures a sense of creative power and moral freedom. So that the\nnecessity of abandoning one category in order to use a better need not\ninduce us to deny that the worse category could draw the outlines of a\nsort of world and furnish men with an approach to wisdom. If our\nancestors, by such means, could not dominate life as a whole, neither\ncan we, in spite of all progress. If literal truth or final\napplicability cannot be claimed for their thought, who knows how many\nand how profound the revolutions might be which our own thought would\nhave to suffer if new fields of perception or new powers of synthesis\nwere added to our endowment?\n\n[Sidenote: Superstition a rudimentary philosophy.]\n\n[Sidenote: A miracle, though unexpected, more intelligible than a\nregular process.]\n\nWe sometimes speak as if superstition or belief in the miraculous was\ndisbelief in law and was inspired by a desire to disorganise experience\nand defeat intelligence. No supposition could be more erroneous. Every\nsuperstition is a little science, inspired by the desire to understand,\nto foresee, or to control the real world. No doubt its hypothesis is\nchimerical, arbitrary, and founded on a confusion of efficient causes\nwith ideal results. But the same is true of many a renowned philosophy.\nTo appeal to what we call the supernatural is really to rest in the\nimaginatively obvious, in what we ought to call the natural, if natural\nmeant easy to conceive and originally plausible. Moral and individual\nforces are more easily intelligible than mechanical universal laws. The\nformer domesticate events in the mind more readily and more completely\nthan the latter. A miracle is so far from being a contradiction to the\ncausal principle which the mind actually applies in its spontaneous\nobservations that it is primarily a better illustration of that\nprinciple than an event happening in the ordinary course of nature. For\nthe ground of the miracle is immediately intelligible; we see the mercy\nor the desire to vindicate authority, or the intention of some other\nsort that inspired it. A mechanical law, on the contrary, is only a\nrecord of the customary but reasonless order of things. A merely\ninexplicable event, manifesting no significant purpose, would be no\nmiracle. What surprises us in the miracle is that, contrary to what is\nusually the case, we can see a real and just ground for it. Thus, if the\nwater of Lourdes, bottled and sold by chemists, cured all diseases,\nthere would be no miracle, but only a new scientific discovery. In such\na case, we should no more know why we were cured than we now know why we\nwere created. But if each believer in taking the water thinks the effect\nmorally conditioned, if he interprets the result, should it be\nfavourable, as an answer to his faith and prayers, then the cure becomes\nmiraculous because it becomes intelligible and manifests the obedience\nof nature to the exigencies of spirit. Were there no known ground for\nsuch a scientific anomaly, were it a meaningless irregularity in events,\nwe should not call it a miracle, but an accident, and it would have no\nrelation to religion.\n\n[Sidenote: Superstitions come of haste to understand.]\n\nWhat establishes superstitions is haste to understand, rash confidence\nin the moral intelligibility of things. It turns out in the end, as we\nhave laboriously discovered, that understanding has to be circuitous and\ncannot fulfil its function until it applies mechanical categories to\nexistence. A thorough philosophy will become aware that moral\nintelligibility can only be an incidental ornament and partial harmony\nin the world. For moral significance is relative to particular interests\nand to natures having a constitutional and definite bias, and having\nconsequently special preferences which it is chimerical to expect the\nrest of the world to be determined by. The attempt to subsume the\nnatural order under the moral is like attempts to establish a government\nof the parent by the child\u2014something children are not averse to. But\nsuch follies are the follies of an intelligent and eager creature,\nrestless in a world it cannot at once master and comprehend. They are\nthe errors of reason, wanderings in the by-paths of philosophy, not due\nto lack of intelligence or of faith in law, but rather to a premature\nvivacity in catching at laws, a vivacity misled by inadequate\ninformation. The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false\nphilosophy. The mind\u2019s reactions anticipate in such cases its sufficient\nnourishment; it has not yet matured under the rays of experience, so\nthat both materials and guidance are lacking for its precocious\norganising force. Superstitious minds are penetrating and narrow, deep\nand ignorant. They apply the higher categories before the lower\u2014an\ninversion which in all spheres produces the worst and most pathetic\ndisorganisation, because the lower functions are then deranged and the\nhigher contaminated. Poetry anticipates science, on which it ought to\nfollow, and imagination rushes in to intercept memory, on which it ought\nto feed. Hence superstition and the magical function of religion; hence\nthe deceptions men fall into by cogitating on things they are ignorant\nof and arrogating to themselves powers which they have never learned to\nexercise.\n\n[Sidenote: Inattention suffers them to spread.]\n\nIt is now generally acknowledged that workers of miracles, prophets,\nsoothsayers, and inspired or divinely appointed men may, like\nmetaphysicians, be quite sincere and fully believe they possess the\npowers which they pretend to display. In the case of the more\nintelligent, however, this sincerity was seldom complete, but mixed with\na certain pitying or scornful accommodation to the vulgar mind.\nSomething unusual might actually have happened, in which case the\nreference of it to the will that welcomed it (without, of course, being\nable to command it unconditionally) might well seem reasonable. Or\nsomething normal might have been interpreted fancifully, but to the\ngreater glory of God and edification of the faithful; in which case the\nincidental error might be allowed to pass unchallenged out of respect\nfor the essential truths thus fortified in pious minds. The power of\nhabit and convention, by which the most crying inconsistencies and\nhypocrisies are soon put to sleep, would facilitate these accommodations\nand render them soon instinctive; while the world at large, entirely\nhypnotised by the ceremonious event and its imaginative echoes, could\nnever come to close quarters with the facts at all, but could view them\nonly through accepted preconceptions. Thus elaborate machinery can arise\nand long endure for the magical service of man\u2019s interests. How deeply\nrooted such conventions are, how natural it is that they should have\ndominated even civilised society, may best be understood if we consider\nthe remnants of such habits in our midst\u2014not among gypsies or\nprofessional wonder-workers but among reflecting men.\n\n[Sidenote: Genius may use them to convey an inarticulate wisdom.]\n\nSome men of action, like C\u00e6sar and Napoleon, are said to have been\nsuperstitious about their own destiny. The phenomenon, if true, would be\nintelligible. They were masterful men, men who in a remarkable degree\npossessed in their consciousness the sign and sanction of what was\nhappening in the world. This endowment, which made them dominate their\ncontemporaries, could also reveal the sources and conditions of their\nown will. They might easily come to feel that it was destiny\u2014the total\nmovement of things\u2014that inspired, crowned, and ruined them. But as they\ncould feel this only instinctively, not by a systematic view of all the\nforces in play, they would attach their voluminous sense of fatality to\nsome chance external indication or to some ephemeral impulse within\nthemselves; so that what was essentially a profound but inarticulate\nscience might express itself in the guise of a superstition.\n\nIn like manner Socrates\u2019 Demon (if not actually a playful fable by which\nthe sage expressed the negative stress of conscience, the \u201cthou shalt\nnot\u201d of all awe-inspiring precepts) might be a symbol for latent wisdom.\nSocrates turned a trick, played upon him by his senses, into a message\nfrom heaven. He taught a feeble voice\u2014senseless like all ghostly\nvoices\u2014to sanction precepts dictated by the truly divine element within\nhimself. It was characteristic of his modest piety to look for some\nexternal sign to support reason; his philosophy was so human, and man is\nobviously so small a part of the world, that he could reasonably\nsubordinate reason at certain junctures. Its abdication, however, was\nhalf playful, for he could always find excellent grounds for what the\ndemon commanded.\n\nIn much the same manner the priests at Delphi, when they were prudent,\nmade of the Pythia\u2019s ravings oracles not without elevation of tone and\nwith an obvious political tendency. Occasions for superstition which\nbaser minds would have turned to sheer lunacy or silly fears or\nnecromantic clap-trap were seized by these nobler natures for a good\npurpose. A benevolent man, not inclined to scepticism, can always argue\nthat the gods must have commanded what he himself knows to be right; and\nhe thinks it religion on his part to interpret the oracle accordingly,\nor even to prompt it. In such ways the most arbitrary superstitions take\na moral colour in a moral mind; something which can come about all the\nmore easily since the roots of reason and superstition are intertwined\nin the mind, and society has always expressed and cultivated them\ntogether.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER III\n\nMAGIC, SACRIFICE, AND PRAYER\n\n\n[Sidenote: Fear created the gods.]\n\nThat fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief\ncould be on so great a subject. To recognise an external power it is\nrequisite that we should find the inner stream and tendency of life\nsomehow checked or disturbed; if all went well and acceptably, we should\nattribute divinity only to ourselves. The external is therefore evil\nrather than good to early apprehension\u2014a sentiment which still survives\nin respect to matter; for it takes reflection to conceive that external\nforces form a necessary environment, creating as well as limiting us,\nand offering us as many opportunities as rebuffs. The first things which\na man learns to distinguish and respect are things with a will of their\nown, things which resist his casual demands; and so the first sentiment\nwith which he confronts reality is a certain animosity, which becomes\ncruelty toward the weak and fear and fawning before the powerful. Toward\nmen and animals and the docile parts of nature these sentiments soon\nbecome defined accurately, representing the exact degree of friendliness\nor use which we discover in these beings; and it is in practical terms,\nexpressing this relation to our interests, that we define their\ncharacters. Much remains over, however, which we cannot easily define,\nindomitable, ambiguous regions of nature and consciousness which we know\nnot how to face; yet we cannot ignore them, since it is thence that\ncomes what is most momentous in our fortunes\u2014luck, disease, tempest,\ndeath, victory. Thence come also certain mysterious visitations to the\ninner mind\u2014dreams, apparitions, warnings. To perceive these things is\nnot always easy, nor is it easy to interpret them, while the great\nchanges in nature which, perhaps, they forebode may indeed be watched\nbut cannot be met intelligently, much less prevented. The feeling with\nwhich primitive man walks the earth must accordingly be, for the most\npart, apprehension; and what he meets, beyond the well-conned ways of\nhis tribe and habitat, can be nothing but formidable spirits.\n\n[Sidenote: Need also contributed.]\n\nImpotence, however, has a more positive side. If the lightning and\nthunder, startling us in our peace, suddenly reveal unwelcome powers\nbefore which we must tremble, hunger, on the contrary, will torment us\nwith floating ideas, intermittent impulses to act, suggesting things\nwhich would be wholly delightful if only we could find them, but which\nit becomes intolerable to remain without. In this case our fear, if we\nstill choose to call it so, would be lest our cravings should remain\nunsatisfied, or rather fear has given place to need; we recognise our\ndependence on external powers not because they threaten but because they\nforsake us.\n\n[Sidenote: The real evidences of God\u2019s existence.]\n\nObvious considerations like these furnish the proof of God\u2019s existence,\nnot as philosophers have tried to express it after the fact and in\nrelation to mythical conceptions of God already current, but as mankind\noriginally perceived it, and (where religion is spontaneous) perceives\nit still. There is such an order in experience that we find our desires\ndoubly dependent on something which, because it disregards our will, we\ncall an external power. Sometimes it overwhelms us with scourges and\nwonders, so that we must marvel at it and fear; sometimes it removes, or\nafter removing restores, a support necessary to our existence and\nhappiness, so that we must cling to it, hope for it, and love it.\nWhatever is serious in religion, whatever is bound up with morality and\nfate, is contained in those plain experiences of dependence and of\naffinity to that on which we depend. The rest is poetry, or mythical\nphilosophy, in which definitions not warranted in the end by experience\nare given to that power which experience reveals. To reject such\narbitrary definitions is called atheism by those who frame them; but a\nman who studies for himself the ominous and the friendly aspects of\nreality and gives them the truest and most adequate expression he can is\nrepeating what the founders of religion did in the beginning. He is\ntheir companion and follower more truly than are the apologists for\nsecond-hand conceptions which these apologists themselves have never\ncompared with the facts, and which they prize chiefly for\nmisrepresenting actual experience and giving it imaginary extensions.\n\nReligion is not essentially an imposture, though it might seem so if we\nconsider it as its defenders present it to us rather than as its\ndiscoverers and original spokesmen uttered it in the presence of nature\nand face to face with unsophisticated men. Religion is an interpretation\nof experience, honestly made, and made in view of man\u2019s happiness and\nits empirical conditions. That this interpretation is poetical goes\nwithout saying, since natural and moral science, even to-day, are\ninadequate for the task. But the mythical form into which men cast their\nwisdom was not chosen by them because they preferred to be imaginative;\nit was not embraced, as its survivals are now defended, out of\nsentimental attachment to grandiloquent but inaccurate thoughts.\nMythical forms were adopted because none other were available, nor could\nthe primitive mind discriminate at all between the mythical and the\nscientific. Whether it is the myth or the wisdom it expresses that we\ncall religion is a matter of words. Certain it is that the wisdom is\nalone what gives the myth its dignity, and what originally suggested it.\nGod\u2019s majesty lies in his operation, not in his definition or his image.\n\n[Sidenote: Practice precedes theory in religion.]\n\nFear and need, then, bring us into the presence of external powers,\nconceived mythically, whose essential character is to be now terrible,\nnow auspicious. The influence is real and directly felt; the gods\u2019\nfunction is unmistakable and momentous, while their name and form, the\nfabulous beings to which that felt influence is imputed, vary with the\nresources of the worshipper\u2019s mind and his poetic habits. The work of\nexpression, the creation of a fabulous environment to derive experience\nfrom, is not, however, the first or most pressing operation employing\nthe religious mind. Its first business is rather the work of\npropitiation; before we stop to contemplate the deity we hasten to\nappease it, to welcome it, or to get out of its way. Cult precedes fable\nand helps to frame it, because the feeling of need or fear is a\npractical feeling, and the ideas it may awaken are only incidental to\nthe reactions it prompts. Worship is therefore earlier and nearer to the\nroots of religion than dogma is.\n\n[Sidenote: Pathetic, tentative nature of religious practices.]\n\nAt the same time, since those reactions which are directly efficacious\ngo to form arts and industrial habits, and eventually put before us the\nworld of science and common-sense, religious practice and thought are\nconfined to the sphere in which direct manipulation of things is\nimpossible. Cultus is always distinguishable from industry, even when\nthe worshipper\u2019s motives are most sordid and his notions most material;\nfor in religious operations the changes worked or expected can never be\ntraced consecutively. There is a break, often a complete diversity and\ndisproportion, between effort and result. Religion is a form of rational\nliving more empirical, looser, more primitive than art. Man\u2019s\nconsciousness in it is more immersed in nature, nearer to a vegetative\nunion with the general life; it bemoans division and celebrates harmony\nwith a more passive and lyrical wonder. The element of action proper to\nreligion is extremely arbitrary, and we are often at a loss to see in\nwhat way the acts recommended conduce at all to the result foretold.\n\nAs theoretical superstition stops at any cause, so practical\nsuperstition seizes on any means. Religion arises under high pressure:\nin the last extremity, every one appeals to God. But in the last\nextremity all known methods of action have proved futile; when resources\nare exhausted and ideas fail, if there is still vitality in the will it\nsends a supreme appeal to the supernatural. This appeal is necessarily\nmade in the dark: it is the appeal of a conscious impotence, of an\navowed perplexity. What a man in such a case may come to do to\npropitiate the deity, or to produce by magic a result he cannot produce\nby art, will obviously be some random action. He will be driven back to\nthe place where instinct and reason begin. His movement will be\nabsolutely experimental, altogether spontaneous. He will have no reason\nfor what he does, save that he must do something.\n\n[Sidenote: Meanness and envy in the gods, suggesting sacrifice.]\n\nWhat he will do, however, will not be very original; a die must fall on\nsome one of its six faces, shake it as much as you please. When Don\nQuixote, seeking to do good absolutely at a venture, let the reins drop\non Rocinante\u2019s neck, the poor beast very naturally followed the highway;\nand a man wondering what will please heaven can ultimately light on\nnothing but what might please himself. It is pathetic to observe how\nlowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the\ndeity, and from what a hard-pressed and bitter existence they have been\ndrawn. To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to\nbe obeyed blindly and punctiliously\u2014these have been thought points of\nhonour with the gods, for which they would dispense favours and\npunishments on the most exorbitant scale. Indeed, the widespread\npractice of sacrifice, like all mutilations and penances, suggests an\neven meaner jealousy and malice in the gods; for the disciplinary\nfunctions which these things may have were not aimed at in the\nbeginning, and would not have associated them particularly with\nreligion. In setting aside the fat for the gods\u2019 pleasure, in\nsacrificing the first-born, in a thousand other cruel ceremonies, the\nidea apparently was that an envious onlooker, lurking unseen, might\npoison the whole, or revenge himself for not having enjoyed it, unless a\npart\u2014possibly sufficient for his hunger\u2014were surrendered to him\nvoluntarily. This onlooker was a veritable demon, treated as a man\ntreats a robber to whom he yields his purse that his life may be spared.\n\nTo call the gods envious has a certain symbolic truth, in that earthly\nfortunes are actually precarious; and such an observation might inspire\ndetachment from material things and a kind of philosophy. But what at\nfirst inspires sacrifice is a literal envy imputed to the gods, a spirit\nof vengeance and petty ill-will; so that they grudge a man even the good\nthings which they cannot enjoy themselves. If the god is a tyrant, the\nvotary will be a tax-payer surrendering his tithes to secure immunity\nfrom further levies or from attack by other potentates. God and man will\nbe natural enemies, living in a sort of politic peace.\n\n[Sidenote: Ritualistic arts.]\n\nSacrifices are far from having merely this sinister meaning. Once\ninaugurated they suggest further ideas, and from the beginning they had\nhappier associations. The sacrifice was incidental to a feast, and the\nplenty it was to render safe existed already. What was a bribe, offered\nin the spirit of barter, to see if the envious power could not be\nmollified by something less than the total ruin of his victims, could\neasily become a genial distribution of what custom assigned to each: so\nmuch to the chief, so much to the god, so much to the husbandman. There\nis a certain openness, and as it were the form of justice, in giving\neach what is conventionally his due, however little he may really\ndeserve it. In religious observances this sentiment plays an important\npart, and men find satisfaction in fulfilling in a seemly manner what is\nprescribed; and since they know little about the ground or meaning of\nwhat they do, they feel content and safe if at least they have done it\nproperly. Sacrifices are often performed in this spirit; and when a\nbeautiful order and religious calm have come to dignify the performance,\nthe mind, having meantime very little to occupy it, may embroider on the\ngiven theme. It is then that fable, and new religious sentiments\nsuggested by fable, appear prominently on the scene.\n\n[Sidenote: Thank-offerings.]\n\nIn agricultural rites, for instance, sacrifice will naturally be offered\nto the deity presiding over germination; that is the deity that might,\nperhaps, withdraw his favour with disastrous results. He commonly\nproves, however, a kindly and responsive being, and in offering to him a\nfew sheaves of corn, some barley-cakes, or a libation from the vintage,\nthe public is grateful rather than calculating; the sacrifice has become\nan act of thanksgiving. So in Christian devotion (which often follows\nprimitive impulses and repeats the dialectic of paganism in a more\nspeculative region) the redemption did not remain merely expiatory. It\nwas not merely a debt to be paid off and a certain quantum of suffering\nto be endured which had induced the Son of God to become man and to take\nup his cross. It was, so the subtler theologians declared, an act of\naffection as much as of pity; and the spell of the doctrine over the\nhuman heart lay in feeling that God wished to assimilate himself to man,\nrather than simply from above to declare him forgiven; so that the\nincarnation was in effect a rehabilitation of man, a redemption in\nitself, and a forgiveness. Men like to think that God has sat at their\ntable and walked among them in disguise. The idea is flattering; it\nsuggests that the courtesy may some day be returned, and for those who\ncan look so deep it expresses pointedly the philosophic truth of the\nmatter. For are not the gods, too, in eternal travail after their ideal,\nand is not man a part of the world, and his art a portion of the divine\nwisdom? If the incarnation was a virtual redemption, the truest\nincarnation was the laborious creation itself.\n\n[Sidenote: The sacrifice of a contrite heart.]\n\nIf sacrifice, in its more amiable aspect, can become thanksgiving and an\nexpression of profitable dependence, it can suffer an even nobler\ntransformation while retaining all its austerity. Renunciation is the\ncorner-stone of wisdom, the condition of all genuine achievement. The\ngods, in asking for a sacrifice, may invite us to give up not a part of\nour food or of our liberty but the foolish and inordinate part of our\nwills. The sacrifice may be dictated to us not by a jealous enemy\nneeding to be pacified but by a far-seeing friend, wishing we may not be\ndeceived. If what we are commanded to surrender is only what is doing us\nharm, the god demanding the sacrifice is our own ideal. He has no\ninterests in the case other than our own; he is no part of the\nenvironment; he is the goal that determines for us how we should proceed\nin order to realise as far as possible our inmost aspirations. When\nreligion reaches this phase it has become thoroughly moral. It has\nceased to represent or misrepresent material conditions, and has learned\nto embody spiritual goods.\n\nSacrifice is a rite, and rites can seldom be made to embody ideas\nexclusively moral. Something dramatic or mystical will cling to the\nperformance, and, even when the effect of it is to purify, it will bring\nabout an emotional catharsis rather than a moral improvement. The mass\nis a ritual sacrifice, and the communion is a part of it, having the\nclosest resemblance to what sacrifices have always been. Among the\ndevout these ceremonies, and the lyric emotions they awaken, have a\nquite visible influence; but the spell is mystic, the god soon recedes,\nand it would be purely fanciful to maintain that any permanent moral\neffect comes from such an exercise. The Church has felt as much and\nintroduced the confession, where a man may really be asked to consider\nwhat sacrifices he should make for his part, and in what practical\ndirection he should imagine himself to be drawn by the vague Dionysiac\ninfluences to which the ritual subjects him.\n\n[Sidenote: Prayer is not utilitarian in essence.]\n\nAs sacrifice expresses fear, prayer expresses need. Common-sense thinks\nof language as something meant to be understood by another and to\nproduce changes in his disposition and behaviour, but language has\npre-rational uses, of which poetry and prayer are perhaps the chief. A\nman overcome by passion assumes dramatic attitudes surely not intended\nto be watched and interpreted; like tears, gestures may touch an\nobserver\u2019s heart, but they do not come for that purpose. So the fund of\nwords and phrases latent in the mind flow out under stress of emotion;\nthey flow because they belong to the situation, because they fill out\nand complete a perception absorbing the mind; they do not flow primarily\nto be listened to. The instinct to pray is one of the chief avenues to\nthe deity, and the form prayer takes helps immensely to define the power\nit is addressed to; indeed, it is in the act of praying that men\nformulate to themselves what God must be, and tell him at great length\nwhat they believe and what they expect of him. The initial forms of\nprayer are not so absurd as the somewhat rationalised forms of it.\nUnlike sacrifice, prayer seems to be justified by its essence and to be\ndegraded by the transformations it suffers in reflection, when men try\nto find a place for it in their cosmic economy; for its essence is\npoetical, expressive, contemplative, and it grows more and more\nnonsensical the more people insist on making it a prosaic, commercial\nexchange of views between two interlocutors.\n\nPrayer is a soliloquy; but being a soliloquy expressing need, and being\nfurthermore, like sacrifice, a desperate expedient which men fly to in\ntheir impotence, it looks for an effect: to cry aloud, to make vows, to\ncontrast eloquently the given with the ideal situation, is certainly as\nlikely a way of bringing about a change for the better as it would be to\nchastise one\u2019s self severely, or to destroy what one loves best, or to\nperform acts altogether trivial and arbitrary. Prayer also is magic, and\nas such it is expected to do work. The answer looked for, or one which\nmay be accepted instead, very often ensues; and it is then that\nmythology begins to enter in and seeks to explain by what machinery of\ndivine passions and purposes that answering effect was produced.\n\n[Sidenote: Its supposed efficacy magical.]\n\nMagic is in a certain sense the mother of art, art being the magic that\nsucceeds and can establish itself. For this very reason mere magic is\nnever appealed to when art has been found, and no unsophisticated man\nprays to have that done for him which he knows how to do for himself.\nWhen his art fails, if his necessity still presses, he appeals to magic,\nand he prays when he no longer can control the event, provided this\nevent is momentous to him. Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is a\ndesperate effort to work further and to be efficient beyond the range of\none\u2019s powers. It is not the lazy who are most inclined to prayer; those\npray most who care most, and who, having worked hard, find it\nintolerable to be defeated.\n\n[Sidenote: Theological puzzles.]\n\nNo chapter in theology is more unhappy than that in which a material\nefficacy is assigned to prayer. In the first place the facts contradict\nthe notion that curses can bring evil or blessings can cure; and it is\nnot observed that the most orthodox and hard-praying army wins the most\nbattles. The facts, however, are often against theology, which has to\nrely on dialectical refinements to explain them away; but unfortunately\nin this instance dialectic is no less hostile than experience. God must\nknow our necessities before we ask and, if he is good, must already have\ndecided what he would do for us. Prayer, like every other act, becomes\nin a providential world altogether perfunctory and histrionic; we are\ncompelled to go through it, it is set down for us in the play, but it\nlacks altogether that moral value which we assign to it. When our\nprayers fail, it must be better than if they had succeeded, so that\nprayer, with all free preference whatsoever, becomes an absurdity. The\ntrouble is much deeper than that which so many people find in\ndeterminism. A physical predetermination, in making all things\nnecessary, leaves all values entire, and my preferences, though they\ncannot be efficacious unless they express preformed natural forces, are\nnot invalidated ideally. It is still true that the world would have been\nbetter to all eternity if my will also could have been fulfilled. A\nprovidential optimism, on the contrary, not merely predetermines events\nbut discounts values; and it reduces every mortal aspiration, every\npang of conscience; every wish that things should be better than they\nare, to a blind impertinence, nay, to a sacrilege. Thus, you may not\npray that God\u2019s kingdom may come, but only\u2014what is not a prayer but a\ndogma\u2014that it has come already. The mythology that pretends to justify\nprayer by giving it a material efficacy misunderstands prayer completely\nand makes it ridiculous, for it turns away from the heart, which prayer\nexpresses pathetically, to a fabulous cosmos where aspirations have been\nturned into things and have thereby stifled their own voices.\n\n[Sidenote: A real efficacy would be mechanical.]\n\nThe situation would not be improved if we surrendered that mystical\noptimism, and maintained that prayer might really attract super-human\nforces to our aid by giving them a signal without which they would not\nhave been able to reach us. If experience lent itself to such a theory\nthere would be nothing in it more impossible than in ordinary telepathy;\nprayer would then be an art like conversation, and the exact personages\nand interests would be discoverable to which we might appeal. A\ncelestial diplomacy might then be established not very unlike primitive\nreligions. Religion would have reverted to industry and science, to\nwhich the grosser spirits that take refuge under it have always wished\nto assimilate it. But is it really the office of religion to work upon\nexternal powers and extract from them certain calculable effects? Is it\nan art, like empiric medicine, and merely a dubious and mystic\nindustry? If so, it exists only by imperfection; were it better\ndeveloped it would coincide with those material and social arts with\nwhich it is identical in essence. Successful religion, like successful\nmagic, would have passed into the art of exploiting the world.\n\n[Sidenote: True uses of prayer.]\n\nWhat successful religion really should pass into is contemplation,\nideality, poetry, in the sense in which poetry includes all imaginative\nmoral life. That this is what religion looks to is very clear in prayer\nand in the efficacy which prayer consistently can have. In rational\nprayer the soul may be said to accomplish three things important to its\nwelfare: it withdraws within itself and defines its good, it\naccommodates itself to destiny, and it grows like the ideal which it\nconceives.\n\n[Sidenote: It clarifies the ideal.]\n\nIf prayer springs from need it will naturally dwell on what would\nsatisfy that necessity; sometimes, indeed, it does nothing else but\narticulate and eulogise what is most wanted and prized. This object will\noften be particular, and so it should be, since Socrates\u2019 prayer \u201cfor\nthe best\u201d would be perfunctory and vapid indeed in a man whose life had\nnot been spent, like Socrates\u2019, in defining what the best was. Yet any\nparticular good lies in a field of relations; it has associates and\nimplications, so that the mind dwelling on it and invoking its presence\nwill naturally be enticed also into its background, and will wander\nthere, perhaps to come upon greater goods, or upon evils which the\ncoveted good would make inevitable. An earnest consideration, therefore,\nof anything desired is apt to enlarge and generalise aspiration till it\nembraces an ideal life; for from almost any starting-point the limits\nand contours of mortal happiness are soon descried. Prayer, inspired by\na pressing need, already relieves its importunity by merging it in the\ngeneral need of the spirit and of mankind. It therefore calms the\npassions in expressing them, like all idealisation, and tends to make\nthe will conformable with reason and justice.\n\n[Sidenote: It reconciles to the inevitable.]\n\nA comprehensive ideal, however, is harder to realise than a particular\none: the rain wished for may fall, the death feared may be averted, but\nthe kingdom of heaven does not come. It is in the very essence of prayer\nto regard a denial as possible. There would be no sense in defining and\nbegging for the better thing if that better thing had at any rate to be.\nThe possibility of defeat is one of the circumstances with which\nmeditation must square the ideal; seeing that my prayer may not be\ngranted, what in that case should I pray for next? Now the order of\nnature is in many respects well known, and it is clear that all\nrealisable ideals must not transgress certain bounds. The practical\nideal, that which under the circumstances it is best to aim at and pray\nfor, will not rebel against destiny. Conformity is an element in all\nreligion and submission in all prayer; not because what must be is\nbest, but because the best that may be pursued rationally lies within\nthe possible, and can be hatched only in the general womb of being. The\nprayer, \u201cThy will be done,\u201d if it is to remain a prayer, must not be\ndegraded from its original meaning, which was that an unfulfilled ideal\nshould be fulfilled; it expressed aspiration after the best, not\nwillingness to be satisfied with, anything. Yet the inevitable must be\naccepted, and it is easier to change the human will than the laws of\nnature. To wean the mind from extravagant desires and teach it to find\nexcellence in what life affords, when life is made as worthy as\npossible, is a part of wisdom and religion. Prayer, by confronting the\nideal with experience and fate, tends to render that ideal humble,\npractical, and efficacious.\n\n[Sidenote: It fosters spiritual life by conceiving it in its\nperfection.]\n\nA sense for human limitations, however, has its foil in the ideal of\ndeity, which is nothing but the ideal of man freed from those\nlimitations which a humble and wise man accepts for himself, but which a\nspiritual man never ceases to feel as limitations. Man, for instance, is\nmortal, and his whole animal and social economy is built on that fact,\nso that his practical ideal must start on that basis, and make the best\nof it; but immortality is essentially better, and the eternal is in many\nways constantly present to a noble mind; the gods therefore are\nimmortal, and to speak their language in prayer is to learn to see all\nthings as they do and as reason must, under the form of eternity. The\ngods are furthermore no respecters of persons; they are just, for it is\nman\u2019s ideal to be so. Prayer, since it addresses deity, will in the end\nblush to be selfish and partial; the majesty of the divine mind\nenvisaged and consulted will tend to pass into the human mind.\n\nThis use of prayer has not been conspicuous in Christian times, because,\ninstead of assimilating the temporal to the eternal, men have\nassimilated the eternal to the temporal, being perturbed fanatics in\nreligion rather than poets and idealists. Pagan devotion, on the other\nhand, was full of this calmer spirit. The gods, being frankly natural,\ncould be truly ideal. They embodied what was fairest in life and loved\nmen who resembled them, so that it was delightful and ennobling to see\ntheir images everywhere, and to keep their names and story perpetually\nin mind. They did not by their influence alienate man from his\nappropriate happiness, but they perfected it by their presence. Peopling\nall places, changing their forms as all living things must according to\nplace and circumstance, they showed how all kinds of being, if perfect\nin their kind, might be perfectly good. They asked for a reverence\nconsistent with reason, and exercised prerogatives that let man free.\nTheir worship was a perpetual lesson in humanity, moderation, and\nbeauty. Something pre-rational and monstrous often peeped out behind\ntheir serenity, as it does beneath the human soul, and there was\ncertainly no lack of wildness and mystic horror in their apparitions.\nThe ideal must needs betray those elemental forces on which, after all,\nit rests; but reason exists to exorcise their madness and win them over\nto a steady expression of themselves and of the good.\n\n[Sidenote: Discipline and contemplation are their own reward.]\n\n\nPrayer, in fine, though it accomplishes nothing material, constitutes\nsomething spiritual. It will not bring rain, but until rain comes it may\ncultivate hope and resignation and may prepare the heart for any issue,\nopening up a vista in which human prosperity will appear in its\nconditioned existence and conditional value. A candle wasting itself\nbefore an image will prevent no misfortune, but it may bear witness to\nsome silent hope or relieve some sorrow by expressing it; it may soften\na little the bitter sense of impotence which would consume a mind aware\nof physical dependence but not of spiritual dominion. Worship,\nsupplication, reliance on the gods, express both these things in an\nappropriate parable. Physical impotence is expressed by man\u2019s appeal for\nhelp; moral dominion by belief in God\u2019s omnipotence. This belief may\nafterwards seem to be contradicted by events. It would be so in truth if\nGod\u2019s omnipotence stood for a material magical control of events by the\nvalues they were to generate. But the believer knows in his heart, in\nspite of the confused explanations he may give of his feelings, that a\nmaterial efficacy is not the test of his faith. His faith will survive\nany outward disappointment. In fact, it will grow by that discipline and\nnot become truly religious until it ceases to be a foolish expectation\nof improbable things and rises on stepping-stones of its material\ndisappointments into a spiritual peace. What would sacrifice be but a\nrisky investment if it did not redeem us from the love of those things\nwhich it asks us to surrender? What would be the miserable fruit of an\nappeal to God which, after bringing us face to face with him, left us\nstill immersed in what we could have enjoyed without him? The real use\nand excuse for magic is this, that by enticing us, in the service of\nnatural lusts, into a region above natural instrumentalities, it\naccustoms us to that rarer atmosphere, so that we may learn to breathe\nit for its own sake. By the time we discover the mechanical futility of\nreligion we may have begun to blush at the thought of using religion\nmechanically; for what should be the end of life if friendship with the\ngods is a means only? When thaumaturgy is discredited, the childish\ndesire to work miracles may itself have passed away. Before we weary of\nthe attempt to hide and piece out our mortality, our concomitant\nimmortality may have dawned upon us. While we are waiting for the\ncommand to take up our bed and walk we may hear a voice saying: Thy sins\nare forgiven thee.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IV\n\nMYTHOLOGY\n\n\n[Sidenote: Status of fable in the mind.]\n\nPrimitive thought has the form of poetry and the function of prose.\nBeing thought, it distinguishes objects from the experience that reveals\nthem and it aspires to know things as they are; but being poetical, it\nattributes to those objects all the qualities which the experience of\nthem contains, and builds them out imaginatively in all directions,\nwithout distinguishing what is constant and efficacious in them. This\nprimitive habit of thought survives in mythology, which is an\nobservation of things encumbered with all they can suggest to a dramatic\nfancy. It is neither conscious poetry nor valid science, but the common\nroot and raw material of both. Free poetry is a thing which early man is\ntoo poor to indulge in; his wide-open eyes are too intently watching\nthis ominous and treacherous world. For pure science he has not enough\nexperience, no adequate power to analyse, remember, and abstract; his\nsoul is too hurried and confused, too thick with phantoms, to follow\nabstemiously the practical threads through the labyrinth. His view of\nthings is immensely overloaded; what he gives out for description is\nmore than half soliloquy; but his expression of experience is for that\nvery reason adequate and quite sincere. Belief, which we have come to\nassociate with religion, belongs really to science; myths are not\nbelieved in, they are conceived and understood. To demand belief for an\nidea is already to contrast interpretation with knowledge; it is to\nassert that that idea has scientific truth. Mythology cannot flourish in\nthat dialectical air; it belongs to a deeper and more ingenuous level of\nthought, when men pored on the world with intense indiscriminate\ninterest, accepting and recording the mind\u2019s vegetation no less than\nthat observable in things, and mixing the two developments together in\none wayward drama.\n\n[Sidenote: It requires genius.]\n\nA good mythology cannot be produced without much culture and\nintelligence. Stupidity is not poetical. Nor is mythology essentially a\nhalf-way house between animal vagueness in the soul and scientific\nknowledge. It is conceivable that some race, not so dreamful as ours,\nshould never have been tempted to use psychic and passionate categories\nin reading nature, but from the first should have kept its observations\nsensuous and pure, elaborating them only on their own plane,\nmathematically and dialectically. Such a race, however, could hardly\nhave had lyric or dramatic genius, and even in natural science, which\nrequires imagination, they might never have accomplished anything. The\nHebrews, denying themselves a rich mythology, remained without science\nand plastic art; the Chinese, who seem to have attained legality and\ndomestic arts and a tutored sentiment without passing through such\nimaginative tempests as have harassed us, remain at the same time\nwithout a serious science or philosophy. The Greeks, on the contrary,\nprecisely the people with the richest and most irresponsible myths,\nfirst conceived the cosmos scientifically, and first wrote rational\nhistory and philosophy. So true it is that vitality in any mental\nfunction is favourable to vitality in the whole mind. Illusions incident\nto mythology are not dangerous in the end, because illusion finds in\nexperience a natural though painful cure. Extravagant error is unstable,\nunless it be harmless and confined to a limbo remote from all\napplications; if it touches experience it is stimulating and brief,\nwhile the equipoise of dulness may easily render dulness eternal. A\ndeveloped mythology shows that man has taken a deep and active interest\nboth in the world and in himself, and has tried to link the two, and\ninterpret the one by the other. Myth is therefore a natural prologue to\nphilosophy, since the love of ideas is the root of both. Both are made\nup of things admirable to consider.\n\n[Sidenote: It only half deceives.]\n\nNor is the illusion involved in fabulous thinking always so complete and\nopaque as convention would represent it. In taking fable for fact, good\nsense and practice seldom keep pace with dogma. There is always a race\nof pedants whose function it is to materialise everything ideal, but the\ngreat world, half shrewdly, half doggedly, manages to escape their\ncontagion. Language may be entirely permeated with myth, since the\naffinities of language have much to do with men gliding into such\nthoughts; yet the difference between language itself and what it\nexpresses is not so easily obliterated. In spite of verbal traditions,\npeople seldom take a myth in the same sense in which they would take an\nempirical truth. All the doctrines that have flourished in the world\nabout immortality have hardly affected men\u2019s natural sentiment in the\nface of death, a sentiment which those doctrines, if taken seriously,\nought wholly to reverse. Men almost universally have acknowledged a\nProvidence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions\nand fears in the presence of events; and yet, if Providence had ever\nbeen really trusted, those preferences would all have lapsed, being seen\nto be blind, rebellious, and blasphemous. Prayer, among sane people, has\nnever superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end; a proof\nthat the sphere of expression was never really confused with that of\nreality. Indeed, such a confusion, if it had passed from theory to\npractice, would have changed mythology into madness. With rare\nexceptions this declension has not occurred and myths have been taken\nwith a grain of salt which not only made them digestible, but heightened\ntheir savour.\n\nIt is always by its applicability to things known, not by its\nrevelation of things unknown and irrelevant, that a myth at its birth\nappeals to mankind. When it has lost its symbolic value and sunk to the\nlevel of merely false information, only an inert and stupid tradition\ncan keep it above water. Parables justify themselves but dogmas call for\nan apologist. The genial offspring of prophets and poets then has to be\nkept alive artificially by professional doctors. A thing born of fancy,\nmoulded to express universal experience and its veritable issues, has to\nbe hedged about by misrepresentation, sophistry, and party spirit. The\nvery apologies and unintelligent proofs offered in its defence in a way\nconfess its unreality, since they all strain to paint in more plausible\ncolours what is felt to be in itself extravagant and incredible.\n\n\n[Sidenote: Its interpretative essence.]\n\nYet if the myth was originally accepted it could not be for this falsity\nplainly written on its face; it was accepted because it was understood,\nbecause it was seen to express reality in an eloquent metaphor. Its\nfunction was to show up some phase of experience in its totality and\nmoral issue, as in a map we reduce everything geographically in order to\noverlook it better in its true relations. Had those symbols for a moment\ndescended to the plane of reality they would have lost their meaning and\ndignity; they would tell us merely that they themselves existed bodily,\nwhich would be false, while about the real configuration of life they\nwould no longer tell us anything. Such an error, if carried through to\nthe end, would nullify all experience and arrest all life. Men would be\nreacting on expressions and meeting with nothing to express. They would\nall be like word-eating philosophers or children learning the catechism.\n\nThe true function of mythical ideas is to present and interpret events\nin terms relative to spirit. Things have uses in respect to the will\nwhich are direct and obvious, while the inner machinery of these same\nthings is intricate and obscure. We therefore conceive things roughly\nand superficially by their eventual practical functions and assign to\nthem, in our game, some counterpart of the interest they affect in us.\nThis counterpart, to our thinking, constitutes their inward character\nand soul. So conceived, soul and character are purely mythical, being\narrived at by dramatising events according to our own fancy and\ninterest. Such ideas may be adequate in their way if they cover all the\nuses we may eventually find in the objects they transcribe for us\ndramatically. But the most adequate mythology is mythology still; it\ndoes not, like science, set things before us in the very terms they will\nwear when they are gradually revealed to experience. Myth is expression,\nit is not prophecy. For this reason myth is something on which the mind\nrests; it is an ideal interpretation in which the phenomena are digested\nand transmuted into human energy, into imaginative tissue.\n\n[Sidenote: Contrast with science.]\n\nScientific formulas, on the contrary, cry aloud for retranslation into\nperceptual terms; they are like tight-ropes, on which a man may walk but\non which he cannot stand still. These unstable symbols lead, however, to\nreal facts and define their experimental relations; while the mind\nreposing contentedly in a myth needs to have all observation and\nexperience behind it, for it will not be driven to gather more. The\nperfect and stable myth would rest on a complete survey and steady\nfocussing of all interests really affecting the one from whose point of\nview the myth was framed. Then each physical or political unit would be\nendowed with a character really corresponding to all its influence on\nthe thinker. This symbol would render the diffuse natural existences\nwhich it represented in an eloquent figure; and since this figure would\nnot mislead practically it might be called true. But truth, in a myth,\nmeans a sterling quality and standard excellence, not a literal or\nlogical truth. It will not, save by a singular accident, represent their\nproper internal being, as a forthright unselfish intellect would wish to\nknow it. It will translate into the language of a private passion the\nsmiles and frowns which that passion meets with in the world.\n\n[Sidenote: Importance of the moral factor.]\n\nThere are accordingly two factors in mythology, a moral consciousness\nand a corresponding poetic conception of things. Both factors are\nvariable, and variations in the first, if more hidden, are no less\nimportant than variations in the second. Had fable started with a clear\nperception of human values, it would have gained immensely in\nsignificance, because its pictures, however wrong the external notions\nthey built upon, would have shown what, in the world so conceived, would\nhave been the ideals and prizes of life. Thus Dante\u2019s bad cosmography\nand worse history do not detract from the spiritual penetration of his\nthought, though they detract from its direct applicability. Had nature\nand destiny been what Dante imagined, his conception of the values\ninvolved would have been perfect, for the moral philosophy he brought\ninto play was Aristotelian and rational. So his poem contains a false\ninstance or imaginary rehearsal of true wisdom. It describes the Life of\nReason in a fantastic world. We need only change man\u2019s situation to that\nin which he actually finds himself, and let the soul, fathomed and\nchastened as Dante left it, ask questions and draw answers from this\nsteadier dream.\n\n[Sidenote: Its submergence.]\n\nMyth travels among the people, and in their hands its poetic factor\ntends to predominate. It is easier to carry on the dialectic or drama\nproper to a fable than to confront it again with the facts and give them\na fresh and more genial interpretation. The poet makes the fable; the\nsophist carries it on. Therefore historians and theologians discuss\nchiefly the various forms which mythical beings have received, and the\ninternal logical or moral implications of those hypostases. They would\ndo better to attend instead to the moral factor. However interesting a\nfable may be in itself, its religious value lies wholly in its revealing\nsome function which nature has in human life. Not the beauty of the god\nmakes him adorable, but his dispensing benefits and graces. Side by side\nwith Apollo (a god having moral functions and consequently inspiring a\nfervent cult and tending himself to assume a moral character) there may\nbe a Helios or a Pha\u00ebthon, poetic figures expressing just as well the\nsun\u2019s physical operation, and no less capable, if the theologian took\nhold of them, of suggesting psychological problems. The moral factor,\nhowever, was not found in these minor deities. Only a verbal and\nsensuous poetry had been employed in defining them; the needs and hopes\nof mankind had been ignored. Apollo, on the contrary, in personifying\nthe sun, had embodied also the sun\u2019s relations to human welfare. The\nvitality, the healing, the enlightenment, the lyric joy flowing into\nman\u2019s heart from that highest source of his physical being are all\nbeautifully represented in the god\u2019s figure and fable. The religion of\nApollo is therefore a true religion, as religions may be true: the\nmythology which created the god rested on a deep, observant sense for\nmoral values, and drew a vivid, if partial, picture of the ideal,\nattaching it significantly to its natural ground.\n\n[Sidenote: Myth justifies magic.]\n\nThe first function of mythology is to justify magic. The weak hope on\nwhich superstition hangs, the gambler\u2019s instinct which divines in\nphenomena a magic solicitude for human fortunes, can scarcely be\narticulated without seeking to cover and justify itself by some fable. A\nmagic function is most readily conceived and defined by attributing to\nthe object intentions hostile or favourable to men, together with human\nhabits of passion and discourse. For lack of resources and observations,\nreason is seldom able to discredit magic altogether. Reasonable men are\nforced, therefore, in order to find some satisfaction, to make magic as\nintelligible as possible by assimilating it to such laws of human action\nas may be already mastered and familiar. Magic is thus reduced to a sort\nof system, regulated by principles of its own and naturalised, as it\nwere, in the commonwealth of science.\n\n[Sidenote: Myths might be metaphysical.]\n\nSuch an avowed and defended magic usually takes one of two forms. When\nthe miracle is interpreted dramatically, by analogy to human life, we\nhave mythology; when it is interpreted rationalistically, by analogy to\ncurrent logic or natural science, we have metaphysics or theosophy. The\nmetaphysical sort of superstition has never taken deep root in the\nwestern world. Pythagorean mysteries and hypnotisations, although\nperiodically fashionable, have soon shrivelled in our too salubrious and\nbiting air. Even such charming exotics as Plato\u2019s myths have not been\nable to flourish without changing their nature and passing into ordinary\ndramatic mythology\u2014into a magic system in which all the forces, once\nterms in moral experience, became personal angels and demons. Similarly\nwith the Christian sacraments: these magic rites, had they been\nestablished in India among a people theosophically minded, might have\nfurnished cues to high transcendental mysteries. Baptism might have been\ninterpreted as a symbol for the purged and abolished will, and Communion\nas a symbol for the escape from personality. But European races, though\ncredulous enough, are naturally positivistic, so that, when they were\ncalled upon to elucidate their ceremonial mysteries, what they lit upon\nwas no metaphysical symbolism but a material and historical drama.\nCommunion became a sentimental interview between the devout soul and the\nperson of Christ; baptism became the legal execution of a mythical\ncontract once entered into between the first and second persons of the\nTrinity. Thus, instead of a metaphysical interpretation, the extant\nmagic received its needful justification through myths.\n\n[Sidenote: They appear ready made, like parts of the social fabric.]\n\nWhen mythology first appears in western literature it already possesses\na highly articulate form. The gods are distinct personalities, with\nattributes and histories which it is hard to divine the source of and\nwhich suggest no obvious rational interpretation. The historian is\ntherefore in the same position as a child who inherits a great religion.\nThe gods and their doings are _prima facie_ facts in his world like any\nother facts, objective beings that convention puts him in the presence\nof and with which he begins by having social relations. He envisages\nthem with respect and obedience, or with careless defiance, long before\nhe thinks of questioning or proving their existence. The attitude he\nassumes towards them makes them in the first instance factors in his\nmoral world. Much subsequent scepticism and rationalising philosophy\nwill not avail to efface the vestiges of that early communion with\nfamiliar gods. It is hard to reduce to objects of science what are\nessentially factors in moral intercourse. All thoughts on religion\nremain accordingly coloured with passion, and are felt to be, above all,\na test of loyalty and an index to virtue. The more derivative,\nunfathomable, and opaque is the prevalent idea of the gods, the harder\nit is for a rational feeling to establish itself in their regard.\nSometimes the most complete historical enlightenment will not suffice to\ndispel the shadow which their moral externality casts over the mind. In\nvain do we discard their fable and the thin proofs of their existence\nwhen, in spite of ourselves, we still live in their presence.\n\n[Sidenote: They perplex the conscience.]\n\nThis pathetic phenomenon is characteristic of religious minds that have\noutgrown their traditional faith without being able to restate the\nnatural grounds and moral values of that somehow precious system in\nwhich they no longer believe. The dead gods, in such cases, leave\nghosts behind them, because the moral forces which the gods once\nexpressed, and which, of course, remain, remain inarticulate; and\ntherefore, in their dumbness, these moral forces persistently suggest\ntheir only known but now discredited symbols. To regain moral\nfreedom\u2014without which knowledge cannot be put to its rational use in\nthe government of life\u2014we must rediscover the origin of the gods,\nreduce them analytically to their natural and moral constituents, and\nthen proceed to rearrange those materials, without any quantitative\nloss, in forms appropriate to a maturer reflection.\n\nOf the innumerable and rather monotonous mythologies that have\nflourished in the world, only the Gr\u00e6co-Roman and the Christian need\nconcern us here, since they are by far the best known to us and the best\ndefined in themselves, as well as the only two likely to have any\ncontinued influence on the western mind. Both these systems pre-suppose\na long prior development. The gods of Greece and of Israel have a\nfull-blown character when we first meet them in literature. In both\ncases, however, we are fortunate in being able to trace somewhat further\nback the history of mythology, and do not depend merely on philosophic\nanalysis to reach the elements which we seek.\n\n[Sidenote: Incipient myth in the Vedas.]\n\nIn the Vedic hymns there survives the record of a religion remarkably\nlike the Greek in spirit, but less dramatic and articulate in form. The\ngods of the Vedas are unmistakably natural elements. Vulcan is there\nnothing but fire, Jupiter nothing but the sky. This patriarchal people,\nfresh from the highlands, had not yet been infected with the manias and\ndiseases of the jungle. It lived simply, rationally, piously, loving all\nnatural joys and delighted with all the instruments of a rude but pure\ncivilisation. It saluted without servility the forces of nature which\nministered to its needs. It burst into song in the presence of the\nmagnificent panorama spread out before it\u2014day-sky and night-sky, dawn\nand gloaming, clouds, thunder and rain, rivers, cattle and horses,\ngrain, fruit, fire, and wine. Nor were the social sanctities neglected.\nCommemoration was made of the stages of mortal life, of the bonds of\nlove and kinship, of peace, of battle, and of mourning for the dead. By\na very intelligible figure and analogy the winds became shepherds, the\nclouds flocks, the day a conqueror, the dawn a maid, the night a wise\nsibyl and mysterious consort of heaven. These personifications were\ntentative and vague, and the consequent mythology was a system of\nrhetoric rather than of theology. The various gods had interchangeable\nattributes, and, by a voluntary confusion, quite in the manner of later\nHindu poetry, each became on occasion any or all of the others.\n\nHere the Indian pantheistic vertigo begins to appear. Many dark\nsuperstitions, no doubt, bubbled up in the torrent of that plastic\nreverie; for this people, clean and natural as on the whole it appears,\ncannot have been without a long and ignoble ancestry. The Greeks\nthemselves, heirs to kindred general traditions, retained some childish\nand obscene practices in their worship. But such hobgoblins naturally\nvanish under a clear and beneficent sun and are scattered by healthy\nmountain breezes. A cheerful people knows how to take them lightly, play\nwith them, laugh at them, and turn them again into figures of speech.\nAmong the early speakers of Sanskrit, even more than among the Greeks,\nthe national religion seems to have been nothing but a poetic\nnaturalism.\n\nSuch a mythology, however, is exceedingly plastic and unstable. If the\npoet is observant and renews his impressions, his myths will become more\nand more accurate descriptions of the facts, and his hypotheses about\nphenomena will tend to be expressed more and more in terms of the\nphenomena themselves; that is, will tend to become scientific. If, on\nthe contrary and as usually happens, the inner suggestions and fertility\nof his fables absorb his interest, and he neglects to consult his\nexternal perceptions any further, or even forgets that any such\nperceptions originally inspired the myth, he will tend to become a\ndramatic poet, guided henceforth in his fictions only by his knowledge\nand love of human life.\n\n[Sidenote: Natural suggestions soon exhausted.]\n\n[Sidenote: They will be carried out in abstract fancy.]\n\nWhen we transport ourselves in fancy to patriarchal epochs and Arcadian\nscenes, we can well feel the inevitable tendency of the mind to\nmythologise and give its myths a more and more dramatic character. The\nphenomena of nature, unintelligible rationally but immensely impressive,\nmust somehow be described and digested. But while they compel attention\nthey do not, after a while, enlarge experience. Husbandmen\u2019s lore is\nprofound, practical, poetic, superstitious, but it is singularly\nstagnant. The cycle of natural changes goes its perpetual round and the\nploughman\u2019s mind, caught in that narrow vortex, plods and plods after\nthe seasons. Apart from an occasional flood, drought, or pestilence,\nnothing breaks his laborious torpor. The most cursory inspection of\nfield and sky yields him information enough for his needs. Practical\nknowledge with him is all instinct and tradition. His mythology can for\nthat very reason ride on nature with a looser rein. If at the same time,\nhowever, his circumstances are auspicious and he feels practically\nsecure, he will have much leisure to ripen inwardly and to think. He\nhasten to unfold in meditation the abstract potentialities of his mind.\nHis social and ideal passions, his aptitude for art and fancy, will\narouse within him a far keener and more varied experience than his outer\nlife can supply. Yet all his fortunes continue to be determined by\nexternal circumstances and to have for their theatre this given and\nuncontrollable world. Some conception of nature and the gods\u2014that is,\nin his case, some mythology\u2014must therefore remain before him always and\nstand in his mind for the real forces controlling experience.\n\nHis moral powers and interests have meantime notably developed. His\nsense for social relations has grown clear and full in proportion as his\nobservation of nature has sunk into dull routine. Consequently, the\nmyths by which reality is represented lose, so to speak, their\nbirthright and first nationality. They pass under the empire of abstract\ncogitation and spontaneous fancy. They become naturalised in the mind.\nThe poet cuts loose from nature and works out instead whatever hints of\nhuman character or romantic story the myth already supplies. Analogies\ndrawn from moral and passionate experience replace the further\nportraiture of outer facts. Human tastes, habits, and dreams enter the\nfable, expanding it into some little drama, or some mystic anagram of\nmortal life. While in the beginning the sacred poet had transcribed\nnothing but joyous perceptions and familiar industrial or martial\nactions, he now introduces intrigue, ingenious adventures, and heroic\npassions.\n\n[Sidenote: They may become moral ideals.]\n\nWhen we turn from the theology of the Vedas to that of Homer we see this\nrevolution already accomplished. The new significance of mythology has\nobscured the old, and was a symbol for material facts has become a\ndrama, an apologue, and an ideal. Thus one function of mythology has\nbeen nothing less than to carry religion over from superstition into\nwisdom, from an excuse and apology for magic into an ideal\nrepresentation of moral goods. In his impotence and sore need a man\nappeals to magic; this appeal he justifies by imagining a purpose and a\ngod behind the natural agency. But after his accounts with the phenomena\nare settled by his own labour and patience, he continues to be\nfascinated by the invisible spirit he has evoked. He cherishes this\nimage; it becomes his companion, his plastic and unaccountable witness\nand refuge in all the exigencies of life. Dwelling in the mind\ncontinually, the deity becomes acclimated there; the worship it receives\nendows it with whatever powers and ideal faculties are most feared or\nhonoured by its votary. Now the thunder and the pestilence which were\nonce its essence come to be regarded as its disguises and its foils.\nFaith comes to consist in disregarding what it was once religion to\nregard, namely, the ways of fortune and the conditions of earthly\nhappiness. Thus the imagination sets up its ideals over against the\nworld that occasioned them, and mythology, instead of cheating men with\nfalse and magic aids to action, moralises them by presenting an ideal\nstandard for action and a perfect object for contemplation.\n\n[Sidenote: The sun-god moralised.]\n\nIf we consider again, for instance, Apollo\u2019s various attributes and the\nendless myths connected with his name, we shall find him changing his\nessence and forgetting to be the material sun in order to become the\nlight of a cultivated spirit. At first he is the sky\u2019s child, and has\nthe moon for twin sister. His mother is an impersonation of darkness and\nmystery. He travels yearly from the hyperborean regions toward the\nsouth, and daily he traverses the firmament in a chariot. He sleeps in a\nsea-nymph\u2019s bosom or rises from the dawn\u2019s couch. In all this we see\nclearly a scarcely figurative description of the material sun and its\nmotions. A quasi-scientific fancy spins these fables almost inevitably\nto fill the vacuum not yet occupied by astronomy. Such myths are indeed\ncompacted out of wonders, not indeed to add wonder to them (for the\noriginal and greatest marvel persists always in the sky), but to\nentertain us with pleasant consideration of them and with their\nassimilation to our own fine feats. This assimilation is unavoidable in\na poet ignorant of physics, whom human life must supply with all his\nvocabulary and similes. Fortunately in this need of introducing romance\ninto phenomena lies the leaven that is to leaven the lump, the subtle\ninfluence that is to moralise religion. For presently Apollo becomes a\nslayer of monsters (a function no god can perform until he has ceased to\nbe a monster himself), he becomes the lovely and valorous champion of\nhumanity, the giver of prophecy, of music, of lyric song, even the\npatron of medicine and gymnastics.\n\n[Sidenote: The leaven of religion is moral idealism.]\n\nWhat a humane and rational transformation! The spirit of Socrates was\nolder than the man and had long been at work in the Greeks. Interest\nhad been transferred from nature to art, from the sources to the fruits\nof life. We in these days are accustomed as a matter of course to\nassociate religion with ideal interests. Our piety, unlike our barbarous\npantheistic theology, has long lost sight of its rudimentary material\nobject, and habituated us to the worship of human sanctity and human\nlove. We have need all the more to remember how slowly and reluctantly\nreligion has suffered spiritualisation, how imperfectly as yet its\nsuperstitious origin has been outgrown. We have need to retrace with the\ngreatest attention the steps by which a moral value has been insinuated\ninto what would otherwise be nothing but a medley of magic rites and\npoetic physics. It is this submerged idealism which alone, in an age\nthat should have finally learned how to operate in nature and how to\nconceive her processes, could still win for religion a philosopher\u2019s\nattention or a legislator\u2019s mercy.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER V\n\nTHE HEBRAIC TRADITION\n\n\n[Sidenote: Phases of Hebraism.]\n\nAs the Vedas offer a glimpse into the antecedents of Greek mythology, so\nHebrew studies open up vistas into the antecedents of Christian dogma.\nChristianity in its Patristic form was an adaptation of Hebrew religion\nto the Gr\u00e6co-Roman world, and later, in the Protestant movement, a\nreadaptation of the same to what we may call the Teutonic spirit. In the\nfirst adaptation, Hebrew positivism was wonderfully refined, transformed\ninto a religion of redemption, and endowed with a semi-pagan mythology,\na pseudo-Platonic metaphysics, and a quasi-Roman organisation. In the\nsecond adaptation, Christianity received a new basis and standard in the\nspontaneous faith of the individual; and, as the traditions thus\nundermined in principle gradually dropped away, it was reduced by the\nGerman theologians to a romantic and mystical pantheism. Throughout its\ntransformations, however, Christianity remains indebted to the Jews not\nonly for its founder, but for the nucleus of its dogma, cult, and\nethical doctrine. If the religion of the Jews, therefore, should\ndisclose its origin, the origin of Christianity would also be manifest.\n\nNow the Bible, when critically studied, clearly reveals the source, if\nnot of the earliest religion of Israel, at least of those elements in\nlater Jewish faith which have descended to us and formed the kernel of\nChristian revelation. The earlier Hebrews, as their own records depict\nthem, had a mythology and cultus extremely like that of other Semitic\npeoples. It was natural religion\u2014I mean that religion which naturally\nexpresses the imaginative life of a nation according to the conceptions\nthere current about the natural world and to the interest then uppermost\nin men\u2019s hearts. It was a religion without a creed or scripture or\nfounder or clergy. It consisted in local rites, in lunar feasts, in\nsoothsayings and oracles, in legends about divine apparitions\ncommemorated in the spots they had made holy. These spots, as in all the\nrest of the world, were tombs, wells, great trees, and, above all, the\ntops of mountains.\n\n[Sidenote: Israel\u2019s tribal monotheism.]\n\nA wandering tribe, at once oppressed and aggressive, as Israel evidently\nwas from the beginning is conscious of nothing so much as of its tribal\nunity. To protect the tribe is accordingly the chief function of its\ngod. Whatever character Jehovah may originally have had, whether a\nstorm-god of Sinai or of Ararat, or a sacred bull, or each of these by\naffinity and confusion with the other, when the Israelites had once\nadopted him as their god they could see nothing essential in him but his\npower to protect them in the lands they had conquered. To this\nexclusive devotion of Jehovah to Israel, Israel responded by a devotion\nto Jehovah no less exclusive. They neglected, when at home, the worship\nof every other divinity, and later even while travelling abroad; and\nthey tended to deny altogether, first the comparable power and finally\neven the existence of other gods.\n\n[Sidenote: Problems involved.]\n\nIsrael was a small people overshadowed by great empires, and its\npolitical situation was always highly precarious. After a brief period\nof comparative vigour under David and Solomon (a period afterward\nidealised with that oriental imagination which, creating so few glories,\ndreams of so many) they declined visibly toward an inevitable absorption\nby their neighbours. But, according to the significance which religion\nthen had in Israel, the ruin of the state would have put Jehovah\u2019s\nhonour and power in jeopardy. The nation and its god were like body and\nsoul; it occurred to no one as yet to imagine that the one could survive\nthe other. A few sceptical and unpatriotic minds, despairing of the\nrepublic, might turn to the worship of Baal or of the stars invoked by\nthe Assyrians, hoping thus to save themselves and their private fortunes\nby a timely change of allegiance. But the true Jew had a vehement and\nunshakable spirit. He could not allow the waywardness of events to upset\nhis convictions or the cherished habits of his soul. Accordingly he\nbethought himself of a new way of explaining and meeting the imminent\ncatastrophe.\n\nThe prophets, for to them the revolution in question was due, conceived\nthat the cause of Israel\u2019s misfortunes might be not Jehovah\u2019s weakness\nbut his wrath\u2014a wrath kindled against the immorality, lukewarmness, and\ninfidelity of the people. Repentance and a change of life, together with\na purification of the cultus, would bring back prosperity. It was too\nlate, perhaps, to rescue the whole state. But a remnant might be saved\nlike a brand from the burning, to be the nucleus of a great restoration,\nthe seed of a mighty people that should live for ever in godliness and\nplenty. Jehovah\u2019s power would thus be vindicated, even if Israel were\nruined; nay, his power would be magnified beyond anything formerly\nconceived, since now the great powers of Asia would be represented as\nhis instruments in the chastisement of his people.\n\n[Sidenote: The prophets put new wine in old bottles.]\n\nThese views, if we regarded them from the standpoint common in theology\nas attempts to re-express the primitive faith, would have to be\ncondemned as absolutely heretical and spurious. But the prophets were\nnot interpreting documents or traditions; they were publishing their own\npolitical experience. They were themselves inspired. They saw the\nidentity of virtue and happiness, the dependence of success upon\nconduct. This new truth they announced in traditional language by saying\nthat Jehovah\u2019s favour was to be won only by righteousness and that vice\nand folly alienated his goodwill. Their moral insight was genuine; yet\nby virtue of the mythical expression they could not well avoid and in\nrespect to the old orthodoxy, their doctrine was a subterfuge, the first\nof those after-thoughts and ingenious reinterpretations by which faith\nis continually forced to cover up its initial blunders. For the Jews had\nbelieved that with such a God they were safe in any case; but now they\nwere told that, to retain his protection, they must practice just those\nvirtues by which the heathen also might have been made prosperous and\ngreat. It was a true doctrine, and highly salutary, but we need not\nwonder that before being venerated the prophets were stoned.\n\nThe ideal of this new prophetic religion was still wholly material and\npolitical. The virtues, emphasised and made the chief mark of a\nreligious life, were recommended merely as magic means to propitiate the\ndeity, and consequently to insure public prosperity. The thought that\nvirtue is a natural excellence, the ideal expression of human life,\ncould not be expected to impress those vehement barbarians any more than\nit has impressed their myriad descendants and disciples, Jewish,\nChristian, or Moslem. Yet superstitious as the new faith still remained,\nand magical as was the efficacy it attributed to virtue, the fact that\nvirtue rather than burnt offerings was now endowed with miraculous\ninfluence and declared to win the favour of heaven, proved two things\nmost creditable to the prophets: in the first place, they themselves\nloved virtue, else they would hardly have imagined that Jehovah loved\nit, or have believed it to be the only path to happiness; and in the\nsecond place, they saw that public events depend on men\u2019s character and\nconduct, not on omens, sacrifices, or intercessions. There was\naccordingly a sense for both moral and political philosophy in these\ninspired orators. By assigning a magic value to morality they gave a\nmoral value to religion. The immediate aim of this morality\u2014to\npropitiate Jehovah\u2014was indeed imaginary, and its ultimate aim\u2014to\nrestore the kingdom of Israel\u2014was worldly; yet that imaginary aim\ncovered, in the form of a myth, a sincere consecration to the ideal,\nwhile the worldly purpose led to an almost scientific conception of the\nprinciples and movement of earthly things.\n\n[Sidenote: Inspiration and authority.]\n\nTo this transformation in the spirit of the law, another almost as\nimportant corresponded in the letter. Scripture was codified,\nproclaimed, and given out formally to be inspired by Jehovah and written\nby Moses. That all traditions, legends, and rites were inspired and\nsacred was a matter of course in antiquity. Nature was full of gods, and\nthe mind, with its unaccountable dreams and powers, could not be without\nthem. Its inventions could not be less oracular than the thunder or the\nflight of birds. Israel, like every other nation, thought its traditions\ndivine. These traditions, however, had always been living and elastic;\nthe prophets themselves gave proof that inspiration was still a vital\nand human thing. It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that while\nthe prophets were preparing their campaign, under pressure of the same\nthreatened annihilation, the same puritanical party should have edited a\nnew code of laws and attributed it retroactively to Moses. While the\nprophet\u2019s lips were being touched by the coal of fire, the priests and\nking in their conclave were establishing the Bible and the Church. It is\neasy to suspect, from the accounts we have, that a pious fraud was\nperpetrated on this occasion; but perhaps the finding of a forgotten\nbook of the Law and its proclamation by Josiah, after consulting a\ncertain prophetess, were not so remote in essence from prophetic\nsincerity. In an age when every prophet, seeing what was needful\npolitically, could cry, \u201cSo saith the Lord,\u201d it could hardly be\nillegitimate for the priests, seeing what was expedient legally, to\ndeclare, \u201cSo said Moses.\u201d Conscience, in a primitive and impetuous\npeople, may express itself in an apocryphal manner which in a critical\nage conscience would altogether exclude. It would have been hardly\nconceivable that what was obviously right and necessary should not be\nthe will of Jehovah, manifested of old to the fathers in the desert and\nnow again whispered in their children\u2019s hearts. To contrive a stricter\nobservance was an act at once of experimental prudence\u2014a means of\nmaking destiny, perhaps, less unfavourable\u2014and an act of more fervent\nworship\u2014a renewal of faith in Jehovah, to whose hands the nation was\nintrusted more solemnly and irrevocably than ever.\n\n[Sidenote: Beginnings of the Church.]\n\nThis pious experiment failed most signally. Jerusalem was taken, the\nTemple destroyed, and the flower of the people carried into exile. The\neffect of failure, however, was not to discredit the Law and the\nCovenant, now once for all adopted by the unshakable Jews. On the\ncontrary, when they returned from exile they re-established the\ntheocracy with greater rigour than ever, adding all the minute\nobservances, ritualistic and social, enshrined in Leviticus. Israel\nbecame an ecclesiastical community. The Temple, half fortress, half\nsanctuary, resounded with perpetual psalms. Piety was fed on a sense at\nonce of consecration and of guidance. All was prescribed, and to fulfil\nthe Law, precisely because it involved so complete and, as the world\nmight say, so arbitrary a regimen, became a precious sacrifice, a\ncontinual act of religion.\n\n[Sidenote: Bigotry turned into a principle.]\n\nDogmas are at their best when nobody denies them, for then their\nfalsehood sleeps, like that of an unconscious metaphor, and their moral\nfunction is discharged instinctively. They count and are not defined,\nand the side of them that is not deceptive is the one that comes\nforward. What was condemnable in the Jews was not that they asserted the\ndivinity of their law, for that they did with substantial sincerity and\ntruth. Their crime is to have denied the equal prerogative of other\nnations\u2019 laws and deities, for this they did, not from critical insight\nor intellectual scruples, but out of pure bigotry, conceit, and\nstupidity. They did not want other nations also to have a god. The moral\ngovernment of the world, which the Jews are praised for having first\nasserted, did not mean for them that nature shows a generic benevolence\ntoward life and reason wherever these arise. Such a moral government\nmight have been conceived by a pagan philosopher and was not taught in\nIsrael until, selfishness having been outgrown, the birds and the\nheathen were also placed under divine protection. What the moral\ngovernment of things meant when it was first asserted was that Jehovah\nexpressly directed the destinies of heathen nations and the course of\nnature itself for the final glorification of the Jews.\n\nNo civilised people had ever had such pretensions before. They all\nrecognised one another\u2019s religions, if not as literally true (for some\nfamiliarity is needed to foster that illusion), certainly as more or\nless sacred and significant. Had the Jews not rendered themselves odious\nto mankind by this arrogance, and taught Christians and Moslems the same\nfanaticism, the nature of religion would not have been falsified among\nus and we should not now have so much to apologise for and to retract.\n\n[Sidenote: Penance accepted.]\n\nIsrael\u2019s calamities, of which the prophets saw only the beginning,\nworked a notable spiritualisation in its religion. The happy thought of\nattributing misfortune to wickedness remained a permanent element in the\ncreed; but as no scrupulous administration of rites, no puritanism, no\ngood conscience, could avail to improve the political situation, it\nbecame needful for the faithful to reconsider their idea of happiness.\nSince holiness must win divine favour, and Israel was undoubtedly holy,\nthe marks of divine favour must be looked for in Israel\u2019s history. To\nhave been brought in legendary antiquity out of Egypt was something; to\nhave been delivered from captivity in Babylon was more; yet these signs\nof favour could not suffice unless they were at the same time emblems of\nhope. But Jewish life had meantime passed into a new phase: it had\nbecome pietistic, priestly, almost ascetic. Such is the might of\nsuffering, that a race whose nature and traditions were alike\npositivistic could for the time being find it sweet to wash its hands\namong the innocent, to love the beauty of the Lord\u2019s house, and to\npraise him for ever and ever. It was agreed and settled beyond cavil\nthat God loved his people and continually blessed them, and yet in the\nworld of men tribulation after tribulation did not cease to fall upon\nthem. There was no issue but to assert (what so chastened a spirit could\nnow understand) that tribulation endured for the Lord was itself\nblessedness, and the sign of some mystical election. Whom the Lord\nloveth he chasteneth; so the chosen children of God were, without\nparadox, to be looked for among the most unfortunate of earth\u2019s\nchildren.\n\n[Sidenote: Christianity combines optimism and asceticism.]\n\nThe prophets and psalmists had already shown some beginnings of this\nasceticism or inverted worldliness. The Essenes and the early Christians\nmade an explicit reversal of ancient Jewish conceptions on this point\nthe corner-stone of their morality. True, the old positivism remained in\nthe background. Tribulation was to be short-lived. Very soon the kingdom\nof God would be established and a dramatic exchange of places would\nensue between the proud and the humble. The mighty would be hurled from\ntheir seat, the lowly filled with good things. Yet insensibly the\nconception of a kingdom of God, of a theocracy, receded or became\nspiritualised. The joys of it were finally conceived as immaterial\naltogether, contemplative, and reserved for a life after death. Although\nthe official and literal creed still spoke of a day of judgment, a\nresurrection of the body, and a New Jerusalem, these things were\ninstinctively taken by Christian piety in a more or less symbolic sense.\nA longing for gross spectacular greatness, prolonged life, and many\nchildren, after the good old Hebraic fashion, had really nothing to do\nwith the Christian notion of salvation. Salvation consisted rather in\nhaving surrendered all desire for such things, and all expectation of\nhappiness to be derived from them. Thus the prophet\u2019s doctrine that not\nprosperity absolutely and unconditionally, but prosperity merited by\nvirtue, was the portion of God\u2019s people changed by insensible gradations\nto an ascetic belief that prosperity was altogether alien to virtue and\nthat a believer\u2019s true happiness would be such as Saint Francis paints\nit: upon some blustering winter\u2019s night, after a long journey, to have\nthe convent door shut in one\u2019s face with many muttered threats and\ncurses.\n\n[Sidenote: Reason smothered between the two.]\n\nIn the history of Jewish and Christian ethics the pendulum has swung\nbetween irrational extremes, without ever stopping at that point of\nequilibrium at which alone rest is possible. Yet this point was\nsometimes traversed and included in the gyrations of our tormented\nancestral conscience. It was passed, for example, at the moment when the\nprophets saw that it was human interest that governed right and wrong\nand conduct that created destiny. But the mythical form in which this\nnovel principle naturally presented itself to the prophets\u2019 minds, and\nthe mixture of superstition and national bigotry which remained in their\nphilosophy, contaminated its truth and were more prolific and contagious\nthan its rational elements. Hence the incapacity of so much subsequent\nthinking to reach clear ideas, and the failure of Christianity, with its\nprolonged discipline and opportunities, to establish a serious moral\neducation. The perpetual painful readjustments of the last twenty\ncenturies have been adjustments to false facts and imaginary laws; so\nthat neither could a worthy conception of prosperity and of the good be\nsubstituted for heathen and Hebrew crudities on that subject, nor could\nthe natural goals of human endeavour come to be recognised and\nformulated, but all was left to blind impulse or chance tradition.\n\n[Sidenote: Religion made an institution.]\n\nThese defeats of reason are not to be wondered at, if we may indeed\nspeak of the defeat of what never has led an army. The primitive\nnaturalism of the Hebrews was not yet superseded by prophetic doctrines\nwhen a new form of materialism arose to stifle and denaturalise what was\nrational in those doctrines. Even before hope of earthly empire to be\nsecured by Jehovah\u2019s favour had quite vanished, claims had arisen to\nsupernatural knowledge founded on revelation. Mythology took a wholly\nnew shape and alliance with God acquired a new meaning and implication.\nFor mythology grew, so to speak, double; moral or naturalistic myths\nwere now reinforced by others of a historical character, to the effect\nthat the former myths had been revealed supernaturally. At the same time\nthe sign of divine protection and favour ceased to be primarily\npolitical. Religion now chiefly boasted to possess the Truth, and with\nthe Truth to possess the secret of a perfectly metaphysical and\nposthumous happiness. Revelation, enigmatically contained in Scripture,\nfound its necessary explication in theology, while the priests, now\nguardians of the keys of heaven, naturally enlarged their authority over\nthe earth. In fine, the poetic legends and patriarchal worship that had\nformerly made up the religion of Israel were transformed into two\nconcrete and formidable engines\u2014the Bible and the Church.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VI\n\nTHE CHRISTIAN EPIC\n\n\n[Sidenote: The essence of the good not adventitious but expressive.]\n\nRevolutions are ambiguous things. Their success is generally\nproportionate to their power of adaptation and to the reabsorption\nwithin them of what they rebelled against. A thousand reforms have left\nthe world as corrupt as ever, for each successful reform has founded a\nnew institution, and this institution has bred its new and congenial\nabuses. What is capable of truly purifying the world is not the mere\nagitation of its elements, but their organisation into a natural body\nthat shall exude what redounds and absorb or generate what is lacking to\nthe perfect expression of its soul.\n\nWhence fetch this seminal force and creative ideal? It must evidently\nlie already in the matter it is to organise; otherwise it would have no\naffinity to that matter, no power over it, and no ideality or value in\nrespect to the existences whose standard and goal it was to be. There\ncan be no goods antecedent to the natures they benefit, no ideals prior\nto the wills they define. A revolution must find its strength and\nlegitimacy not in the reformer\u2019s conscience and dream but in the temper\nof that society which he would transform; for no transformation is\neither permanent or desirable which does not forward the spontaneous\nlife of the world, advancing those issues toward which it is already\ninwardly directed. How should a gospel bring glad tidings, save by\nannouncing what was from the beginning native to the heart?\n\n[Sidenote: A universal religion must interpret the whole world.]\n\nNo judgment could well be shallower, therefore, than that which condemns\na great religion for not being faithful to that local and partial\nimpulse which may first have launched it into the world. A great\nreligion has something better to consider: the conscience and\nimagination of those it ministers to. The prophet who announced it first\nwas a prophet only because he had a keener sense and clearer premonition\nthan other men of their common necessities; and he loses his function\nand is a prophet no longer when the public need begins to outrun his\nintuitions. Could Hebraism spread over the Roman Empire and take the\nname of Christianity without adding anything to its native inspiration?\nIs it to be lamented that we are not all Jews? Yet what makes the\ndifference is not the teaching of Jesus\u2014which is pure Hebraism reduced\nto its spiritual essence\u2014but the worship of Christ\u2014something perfectly\nGreek. Christianity would have remained a Jewish sect had it not been\nmade at once speculative, universal, and ideal by the infusion of Greek\nthought, and at the same time plastic and devotional by the adoption of\npagan habits. The incarnation of God in man, and the divinisation of man\nin God are pagan conceptions, expressions of pagan religious sentiment\nand philosophy. Yet what would Christianity be without them? It would\nhave lost not only its theology, which might be spared, but its\nspiritual aspiration, its artistic affinities, and the secret of its\nmetaphysical charity and joy. It would have remained unconscious, as the\nGospel is, that the hand or the mind of man can ever construct anything.\nAmong the Jews there were no liberal interests for the ideal to express.\nThey had only elementary human experience\u2014the perpetual Oriental round\nof piety and servitude in the bosom of a scorched, exhausted country. A\ndisillusioned eye, surveying such a world, could find nothing there to\ndetain it; religion, when wholly spiritual, could do nothing but succour\nthe afflicted, understand and forgive the sinful, and pass through the\nsad pageant of life unspotted and resigned. Its pity for human ills\nwould go hand in hand with a mystic plebeian insensibility to natural\nexcellence. It would breathe what Tacitus, thinking of the liberal life,\ncould call _odium generis humani_; it would be inimical to human genius.\n\n[Sidenote: Double appeal of Christianity.]\n\nThere were, we may say, two things in Apostolic teaching which rendered\nit capable of converting the world. One was the later Jewish morality\nand mysticism, beautifully expressed in Christ\u2019s parables and maxims,\nand illustrated by his miracles, those cures and absolutions which he\nwas ready to dispense, whatever their sins, to such as called upon his\nname. This democratic and untrammelled charity could powerfully appeal\nto an age disenchanted with the world, and especially to those lower\nclasses which pagan polity had covered with scorn and condemned to\nhopeless misery. The other point of contact which early Christianity had\nwith the public need was the theme it offered to contemplation, the\nphilosophy of history which it introduced into the western world, and\nthe delicious unfathomable mysteries into which it launched the fancy.\nHere, too, the figure of Christ was the centre for all eyes. Its\nlowliness, its simplicity, its humanity were indeed, for a while,\nobstacles to its acceptance; they did not really lend themselves to the\nmetaphysical interpretation which was required. Yet even Greek fable was\nnot without its Apollo tending flocks and its Demeter mourning for her\nlost child and serving in meek disguise the child of another. Feeling\nwas ripe for a mythology loaded with pathos. The humble life, the\nhomilies, the sufferings of Jesus could be felt in all their\nincomparable beauty all the more when the tenderness and tragedy of\nthem, otherwise too poignant, were relieved by the story of his\nmiraculous birth, his glorious resurrection, and his restored divinity.\n\n[Sidenote: Hebrew metaphors become Greek myths.]\n\nThe gospel, thus grown acceptable to the pagan mind, was, however, but a\ngrain of mustard-seed destined to branch and flower in its new soil in\na miraculous manner. Not only was the Greek and Roman to refresh himself\nunder its shade, but birds of other climates were to build their nests,\nat least for a season, in its branches. Hebraism, when thus expanded and\npaganised, showed many new characteristics native to the minds which had\nnow adopted and transformed it. The Jews, for instance, like other\nOrientals, had a figurative way of speaking and thinking; their poetry\nand religion were full of the most violent metaphors. Now to the classic\nmind violent and improper metaphors were abhorrent. Uniting, as it did,\nclear reason with lively fancy, it could not conceive one thing to _be_\nanother, nor relish the figure of speech that so described it, hoping by\nthat unthinkable phrase to suggest its affinities. But the classic mind\ncould well conceive transformation, of which indeed nature is full; and\nin Greek fables anything might change its form, become something else,\nand display its plasticity, not by imperfectly being many things at\nonce, but by being the perfection of many things in succession. While\nmetaphor was thus unintelligible and confusing to the Greek,\nmetamorphosis was perfectly familiar to him. Wherever Hebrew tradition,\naccordingly, used violent metaphors, puzzling to the Greek Christian, he\nrationalised them by imagining a metamorphosis instead; thus, for\ninstance, the metaphors of the Last Supper, so harmless and vaguely\nsatisfying to an Oriental audience, became the doctrine of\ntransubstantiation\u2014a doctrine where images are indeed lacking to\nillustrate the concepts, but where the concepts themselves are not\nconfused. For that bread should _become_ flesh and wine blood is not\nimpossible, seeing that the change occurs daily in digestion; what the\nassertion in this case contradicts is merely the evidence of sense.\n\nThus at many a turn in Christian tradition a metaphysical mystery takes\nthe place of a poetic figure; the former now expressing by a little\nmiraculous drama the emotion which the latter expressed by a tentative\nphrase. And the emotion is thereby immensely clarified and strengthened;\nit is, in fact, for the first time really expressed. For the idea that\nChrist stands upon the altar and mingles still with our human flesh is\nan explicit assertion that his influence and love are perpetual; whereas\nthe original parable revealed at most the wish and aspiration, contrary\nto fact, that they might have been so. By substituting embodiment for\nallegory, the Greek mind thus achieved something very congenial to its\nhabits: it imagined the full and adequate expression, not in words but\nin existences, of the emotion to be conveyed. The Eucharist is to the\nLast Supper what a centaur is to a horseman or a tragedy to a song.\nSimilarly a Dantesque conception of hell and paradise embodies in living\ndetail the innocent apologue in the gospel about a separation of the\nsheep from the goats. The result is a chimerical metaphysics,\ncontaining much which, in reference to existing facts, is absurd; but\nthat metaphysics, when taken for what it truly is, a new mythology,\nutters the subtler secrets of the new religion not less ingeniously and\npoetically than pagan mythology reflected the daily shifts in nature and\nin human life.\n\n[Sidenote: Hebrew philosophy of history identified with Platonic\ncosmology.]\n\nMetaphysics became not only a substitute for allegory but at the same\ntime a background for history. Neo-Platonism had enlarged, in a way\nsuited to the speculative demands of the time, the cosmos conceived by\nGreek science. In an intelligible region, unknown to cosmography and\npeopled at first by the Platonic ideas and afterward by Aristotle\u2019s\nsolitary God, there was now the Absolute One, too exalted for any\npredicates, but manifesting its essence in the first place in a supreme\nIntelligence, the second hypostasis of a Trinity; and in the second\nplace in the Soul of the World, the third hypostasis, already relative\nto natural existence. Now the Platonists conceived these entities to be\npermanent and immutable; the physical world itself had a meaning and an\nexpressive value, like a statue, but no significant history. When the\nJewish notion of creation and divine government of the world presented\nitself to the Greeks, they hastened to assimilate it to their familiar\nnotions of imitation, expression, finality, and significance. And when\nthe Christians spoke of Christ as the Son of God, who now sat at his\nright hand in the heavens, their Platonic disciples immediately thought\nof the Nous or Logos, the divine Intelligence, incarnate as they had\nalways believed in the whole world, and yet truly the substance and\nessence of divinity. To say that this incarnation had taken place\npre-eminently, or even exclusively, in Christ was not an impossible\nconcession to make to pious enthusiasm, at least if the philosophy\ninvolved in the old conception could be retained and embodied in the new\northodoxy. Sacred history could thus be interpreted as a temporal\nexecution of eternal decrees, and the plan of salvation as an ideal\nnecessity. Cosmic scope and metaphysical meaning were given to Hebrew\ntenets, so unspeculative in their original intention, and it became\npossible even for a Platonic philosopher to declare himself a Christian.\n\n[Sidenote: The resulting orthodox system.]\n\nThe eclectic Christian philosophy thus engendered constitutes one of the\nmost complete, elaborate, and impressive products of the human mind. The\nruins of more than one civilisation and of more than one philosophy were\nransacked to furnish materials for this heavenly Byzantium. It was a\nmyth circumstantial and sober enough in tone to pass for an account of\nfacts, and yet loaded with enough miracle, poetry, and submerged wisdom\nto take the place of a moral philosophy and present what seemed at the\ntime an adequate ideal to the heart. Many a mortal, in all subsequent\nages, perplexed and abandoned in this ungovernable world, has set sail\nresolutely for that enchanted island and found there a semblance of\nhappiness, its narrow limits give so much room for the soul and its\npenitential soil breeds so many consolations. True, the brief time and\nnarrow argument into which Christian imagination squeezes the world must\nseem to a speculative pantheist childish and poor, involving, as it\ndoes, a fatuous perversion of nature and history and a ridiculous\nemphasis laid on local events and partial interests. Yet just this\nviolent reduction of things to a human stature, this half-innocent,\nhalf-arrogant assumption that what is important for a man must control\nthe whole universe, is what made Christian philosophy originally\nappealing and what still arouses, in certain quarters, enthusiastic\nbelief in its beneficence and finality.\n\nNor should we wonder at this enduring illusion. Man is still in his\nchildhood; for he cannot respect an ideal which is not imposed on him\nagainst his will, nor can he find satisfaction in a good created by his\nown action. He is afraid of a universe that leaves him alone. Freedom\nappals him; he can apprehend in it nothing but tedium and desolation, so\nimmature is he and so barren does he think himself to be. He has to\nimagine what the angels would say, so that his own good impulses (which\ncreate those angels) may gain in authority, and none of the dangers that\nsurround his poor life make the least impression upon him until he\nhears that there are hobgoblins hiding in the wood. His moral life, to\ntake shape at all, must appear to him in fantastic symbols. The history\nof these symbols is therefore the history of his soul.\n\n[Sidenote: The brief drama of things.]\n\nThere was in the beginning, so runs the Christian story, a great\ncelestial King, wise and good, surrounded by a court of winged musicians\nand messengers. He had existed from all eternity, but had always\nintended, when the right moment should come, to create temporal beings,\nimperfect copies of himself in various degrees. These, of which man was\nthe chief, began their career in the year 4004 B.C., and they would live\non an indefinite time, possibly, that chronological symmetry might not\nbe violated, until A.D. 4004. The opening and close of this drama were\nmarked by two magnificent tableaux. In the first, in obedience to the\nword of God, sun, moon, and stars, and earth with all her plants and\nanimals, assumed their appropriate places, and nature sprang into being\nwith all her laws. The first man was made out of clay, by a special act\nof God, and the first woman was fashioned from one of his ribs,\nextracted while he lay in a deep sleep. They were placed in an orchard\nwhere they often could see God, its owner, walking in the cool of the\nevening. He suffered them to range at will and eat of all the fruits he\nhad planted save that of one tree only. But they, incited by a devil,\ntransgressed this single prohibition, and were banished from that\nparadise with a curse upon their head, the man to live by the sweat of\nhis brow and the woman to bear children in labour. These children\npossessed from the moment of conception the inordinate natures which\ntheir parents had acquired. They were born to sin and to find disorder\nand death everywhere within and without them.\n\nAt the same time God, lest the work of his hands should wholly perish,\npromised to redeem in his good season some of Adam\u2019s children and\nrestore them to a natural life. This redemption was to come ultimately\nthrough a descendant of Eve, whose foot should bruise the head of the\nserpent. But it was to be prefigured by many partial and special\nredemptions. Thus, Noah was to be saved from the deluge, Lot from Sodom,\nIsaac from the sacrifice, Moses from Egypt, the captive Jews from\nBabylon, and all faithful souls from heathen forgetfulness and idolatry.\nFor a certain tribe had been set apart from the beginning to keep alive\nthe memory of God\u2019s judgments and promises, while the rest of mankind,\nabandoned to its natural depravity, sank deeper and deeper into crimes\nand vanities. The deluge that came to punish these evils did not avail\nto cure them. \u201cThe world was renewed[A] and the earth rose again above\nthe bosom of the waters, but in this renovation there remained eternally\nsome trace of divine vengeance. Until the deluge all nature had been\nexceedingly hardy and vigorous, but by that vast flood of water which\nGod had spread out over the earth, and by its long abiding there, all\nsaps were diluted; the air, charged with too dense and heavy a moisture,\nbred ranker principles of corruption. The early constitution of the\nuniverse was weakened, and human life, from stretching as it had\nformerly done to near a thousand years, grew gradually briefer. Herbs\nand roots lost their primitive potency and stronger food had to be\nfurnished to man by the flesh of other animals.... Death gained upon\nlife and men felt themselves overtaken by a speedier chastisement. As\nday by day they sank deeper in their wickedness, it was but right they\nshould daily, as it were, stick faster in their woe. The very change in\nnourishment made manifest their decline and degradation, since as they\nbecame feebler they became also more voracious and blood-thirsty.\u201d\n\nHenceforth there were two spirits, two parties, or, as Saint Augustine\ncalled them, two cities in the world. The City of Satan, whatever its\nartifices in art, war, or philosophy, was essentially corrupt and\nimpious. Its joy was but a comic mask and its beauty the whitening of a\nsepulchre. It stood condemned before God and before man\u2019s better\nconscience by its vanity, cruelty, and secret misery, by its ignorance\nof all that it truly behoved a man to know who was destined to\nimmortality. Lost, as it seemed, within this Babylon, or visible only\nin its obscure and forgotten purlieus, lived on at the same time the\nCity of God, the society of all the souls God predestined to salvation;\na city which, however humble and inconspicuous it might seem on earth,\ncounted its myriad transfigured citizens in heaven, and had its\ndestinies, like its foundations, in eternity. To this City of God\nbelonged, in the first place, the patriarchs and the prophets who,\nthroughout their plaintive and ardent lives, were faithful to what\nechoes still remained of a primeval revelation, and waited patiently for\nthe greater revelation to come. To the same city belonged the magi who\nfollowed a star till it halted over the stable in Bethlehem; Simeon, who\ndivined the present salvation of Israel; John the Baptist, who bore\nwitness to the same and made straight its path; and Peter, to whom not\nflesh and blood, but the spirit of the Father in heaven, revealed the\nLord\u2019s divinity. For salvation had indeed come with the fulness of time,\nnot, as the carnal Jews had imagined it, in the form of an earthly\nrestoration, but through the incarnation of the Son of God in the Virgin\nMary, his death upon a cross, his descent into hell, and his\nresurrection at the third day according to the Scriptures. To the same\ncity belonged finally all those who, believing in the reality and\nefficacy of Christ\u2019s mission, relied on his merits and followed his\ncommandment of unearthly love.\n\nAll history was henceforth essentially nothing but the conflict between\nthese two cities; two moralities, one natural, the other supernatural;\ntwo philosophies, one rational, the other revealed; two beauties, one\ncorporeal, the other spiritual; two glories, one temporal, the other\neternal; two institutions, one the world, the other the Church. These,\nwhatever their momentary alliances or compromises, were radically\nopposed and fundamentally alien to one another. Their conflict was to\nfill the ages until, when wheat and tares had long flourished together\nand exhausted between them the earth for whose substance they struggled,\nthe harvest should come; the terrible day of reckoning when those who\nhad believed the things of religion to be imaginary would behold with\ndismay the Lord visibly coming down through the clouds of heaven, the\nangels blowing their alarming trumpets, all generations of the dead\nrising from their graves, and judgment without appeal passed on every\nman, to the edification of the universal company and his own unspeakable\njoy or confusion. Whereupon the blessed would enter eternal bliss with\nGod their master and the wicked everlasting torments with the devil whom\nthey served.\n\nThe drama of history was thus to close upon a second tableau: long-robed\nand beatified cohorts passing above, amid various psalmodies, into an\ninfinite luminous space, while below the damned, howling, writhing, and\nhalf transformed into loathsome beasts, should be engulfed in a fiery\nfurnace. The two cities, always opposite in essence, should thus be\nfinally divided in existence, each bearing its natural fruits and\nmanifesting its true nature.\n\nLet the reader fill out this outline for himself with its thousand\ndetails; let him remember the endless mysteries, arguments, martyrdoms,\nconsecrations that carried out the sense and made vital the beauty of\nthe whole. Let him pause before the phenomenon; he can ill afford, if he\nwishes to understand history or the human mind, to let the apparition\nfloat by unchallenged without delivering up its secret. What shall we\nsay of this Christian dream?\n\n[Sidenote: Mythology is a language and must be understood to convey\nsomething by symbols.]\n\nThose who are still troubled by the fact that this dream is by many\ntaken for a reality, and who are consequently obliged to defend\nthemselves against it, as against some dangerous error in science or in\nphilosophy, may be allowed to marshal arguments in its disproof. Such,\nhowever, is not my intention. Do we marshal arguments against the\nmiraculous birth of Buddha, or the story of Cronos devouring his\nchildren? We seek rather to honour the piety and to understand the\npoetry embodied in those fables. If it be said that those fables are\nbelieved by no one, I reply that those fables are or have been believed\njust as unhesitatingly as the Christian theology, and by men no less\nreasonable or learned than the unhappy apologists of our own ancestral\ncreeds. Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We\nneither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are\njust, for knowing so human a passion. That he harbours it is no\nindication of a want of sanity on his part in other matters. But while\nwe acquiesce in his experience, and are glad he has it, we need no\narguments to dissuade us from sharing it. Each man may have his own\nloves, but the object in each case is different. And so it is, or should\nbe, in religion. Before the rise of those strange and fraudulent Hebraic\npretensions there was no question among men about the national,\npersonal, and poetic character of religious allegiance. It could never\nhave been a duty to adopt a religion not one\u2019s own any more than a\nlanguage, a coinage, or a costume not current in one\u2019s own country. The\nidea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic, representation of\ntruth and life is simply an impossible idea. Whoever entertains it has\nnot come within the region of profitable philosophising on that subject.\nHis science is not wide enough to cover all existence. He has not\ndiscovered that there can be no moral allegiance except to the ideal.\nHis certitude and his arguments are no more pertinent to the religious\nquestion than would be the insults, blows, and murders to which, if he\ncould, he would appeal in the next instance. Philosophy may describe\nunreason, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[Footnote A: Bossuet: Discours sur l\u2019histoire universelle, Part II,\nChap. I.]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VII\n\nPAGAN CUSTOM AND BARBARIAN GENIUS INFUSED INTO CHRISTIANITY\n\n\n[Sidenote: Need of paganising Christianity.]\n\nThe western intellect, in order to accept the gospel, had to sublimate\nit into a neo-Platonic system of metaphysics. In like manner the western\nheart had to render Christianity congenial and adequate by a rich\ninfusion of pagan custom and sentiment. This adaptation was more gentle\nand facile than might be supposed. We are too much inclined to impute an\nabstract and ideal Christianity to the polyglot souls of early\nChristians, and to ignore that mysterious and miraculous side of later\npaganism from which Christian cultus and ritual are chiefly derived. In\nthe third century Christianity and devout paganism were, in a religious\nsense, closely akin; each differed much less from the other than from\nthat religion which at other epochs had borne or should bear its own\nname. Had Julian the Apostate succeeded in his enterprise he would not\nhave rescued anything which the admirers of classic paganism could at\nall rejoice in; a disciple of Iamblichus could not but plunge headlong\ninto the same sea of superstition and dialectic which had submerged\nChristianity. In both parties ethics were irrational and morals corrupt.\nThe political and humane religion of antiquity had disappeared, and the\nquestion between Christians and pagans amounted simply to a choice of\nfanaticisms. Reason had suffered a general eclipse, but civilisation,\nalthough decayed, still subsisted, and a certain scholastic discipline,\na certain speculative habit, and many an ancient religious usage\nremained in the world. The people could change their gods, but not the\nspirit in which they worshipped them. Christianity had insinuated itself\nalmost unobserved into a society full of rooted traditions. The first\ndisciples had been disinherited Jews, with religious habits which men of\nother races and interests could never have adopted intelligently; the\nChurch was accordingly wise enough to perpetuate in its practice at\nleast an indispensable minimum of popular paganism. How considerable\nthis minimum was a glance at Catholic piety will suffice to convince us.\n\n[Sidenote: Catholic piety more human than the liturgy.]\n\nThe Gr\u00e6co-Jewish system of theology constructed by the Fathers had its\nliturgical counterpart in the sacraments and in a devout eloquence which\nmay be represented to us fairly enough by the Roman missal and breviary.\nThis liturgy, transfused as it is with pagan philosophy and removed\nthereby from the Oriental directness and formlessness of the Bible,\nkeeps for the most part its theological and patristic tone. Psalms\nabound, Virgin, and saints are barely mentioned, a certain universalism\nand concentration of thought upon the Redemption and its speculative\nmeaning pervades the Latin ritual sung behind the altar-rails. But any\none who enters a Catholic church with an intelligent interpreter will at\nonce perceive the immense distance which separates that official and\nimpersonal ritual from the daily prayers and practices of Catholic\npeople. The latter refer to the real exigences of daily life and serve\nto express or reorganise personal passions. While mass is being\ncelebrated the old woman will tell her beads, lost in a vague rumination\nover her own troubles; while the priests chant something unintelligible\nabout Abraham or Nebuchadnezzar, the housewife will light her\nwax-candles, duly blessed for the occasion, before Saint Barbara, to be\nprotected thereby from the lightning; and while the preacher is\nrepeating, by rote, dialectical subtleties about the union of the two\nnatures in Christ\u2019s person, a listener\u2019s fancy may float sadly over the\nmystery of love and of life, and (being himself without resources in the\npremises) he may order a mass to be said for the repose of some departed\nsoul.\n\nIn a Catholic country, every spot and every man has a particular patron.\nThese patrons are sometimes local worthies, canonised by tradition or by\nthe Roman see, but no less often they are simply local appellations of\nChrist or the Virgin, appellations which are known theoretically to\nrefer all to the same _numen_, but which practically possess diverse\nreligious values; for the miracles and intercessions attributed to the\nVirgin under one title are far from being miracles and intercessions\nattributable to her under another. He who has been all his life devout\nto Loreto will not place any special reliance on the Pillar at\nSaragossa. A bereaved mother will not fly to the Immaculate Conception\nfor comfort, but of course to Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. Each\nreligious order and all the laity more or less affiliated to it will\ncultivate special saints and special mysteries. There are also\nparticular places and days on which graces are granted, as not on\nothers, and the quantity of such graces is measurable by canonic\nstandards. So many days of remitted penance correspond to a work of a\ncertain merit, for there is a celestial currency in which mulcts and\nremissions may be accurately summed and subtracted by angelic recorders.\nOne man\u2019s spiritual earnings may by gift be attributed and imputed to\nanother, a belief which may seem arbitrary and superstitious but which\nis really a natural corollary to fundamental doctrines like the\natonement, the communion of saints, and intercession for the dead and\nliving.\n\n[Sidenote: Natural pieties.]\n\nAnother phase of the same natural religion is seen in frequent\nfestivals, in the consecration of buildings, ships, fields, labours, and\nseasons; in intercessions by the greater dead for the living and by the\nliving for the lesser dead\u2014a perfect survival of heroes and penates on\nthe one hand and of pagan funeral rites and commemorations on the\nother. Add Lent with its carnival, ember-days, all saints\u2019 and all\nsouls\u2019, Christmas with its magi or its Saint Nicholas, Saint Agnes\u2019s and\nSaint Valentine\u2019s days with their profane associations, a saint for\nfinding lost objects and another for prospering amourettes, since all\ngreat and tragic loves have their inevitable patrons in Christ and the\nVirgin, in Mary Magdalene, and in the mystics innumerable. This, with\nwhat more could easily be rehearsed, makes a complete paganism within\nChristian tradition, a paganism for which little basis can be found in\nthe gospel, the mass, the breviary, or the theologians.\n\nYet these accretions were as well authenticated as the substructure, for\nthey rested on human nature. To feel, for instance, the special efficacy\nof your village Virgin or of the miraculous Christ whose hermitage is\nperched on the overhanging hill, is a genuine experience. The principle\nof it is clear and simple. Those shrines, those images, the festivals\nassociated with them, have entered your mind together with your earliest\nfeelings. Your first glimpses of mortal vicissitudes have coincided with\nthe awe and glitter of sacramental moments in which those _numina_ were\ninvoked; and on that deeper level of experience, in those lower reaches\nof irrationalism in which such impressions lie, they constitute a mystic\nresource subsisting beneath all conventions and overt knowledge. When\nthe doctors blunder\u2014as they commonly do\u2014the saints may find a cure;\nafter all, the saints\u2019 success in medicine seems to a crude empiricism\nalmost as probable as the physicians\u2019. Special and local patrons are the\noriginal gods, and whatever religious value speculative and cosmic\ndeities retain they retain surreptitiously, by virtue of those very\nbonds with human interests and passionate desires which ancestral demons\nonce borrowed from the hearth they guarded, the mountain they haunted,\nor the sacrifice they inhaled with pleasure, until their hearts softened\ntoward their worshippers. In itself, and as a minimised and retreating\ntheology represents it, a universal power has no specific energy, no\ndeterminate interest at heart; there is nothing friendly about it nor\nallied to your private necessities; no links of place and time fortify\nand define its influence. Nor is it rational to appeal for a mitigation\nof evils or for assistance against them to the very being that has\ndecreed and is inflicting them for some fixed purpose of its own.\n\n[Sidenote: Refuge taken in the supernatural.]\n\nPaganism or natural religion was at first, like so many crude religious\nnotions, optimistic and material; the worshipper expected his piety to\nmake his pot boil, to cure his disease, to prosper his battles, and to\nrender harmless his ignorance of the world in which he lived. But such\nfaith ran up immediately against the facts; it was discountenanced at\nevery turn by experience and reflection. The whole of nature and life,\nwhen they are understood at all, have to be understood on an opposite\nprinciple, on the principle that fate, having naturally furnished us\nwith a determinate will and a determinate endowment, gives us a free\nfield and no favour in a natural world. Hence the retreat of religion to\nthe supernatural, a region to which in its cruder forms it was far from\nbelonging. Now this retreat, in the case of classic paganism, took place\nwith the decay of military and political life and would have produced an\nascetic popular system, some compound of Oriental and Greek traditions,\neven if Christianity had not intervened at that juncture and opportunely\npre-empted the ground.\n\n[Sidenote: The episodes of life consecrated mystically.]\n\nChristianity, as we have seen, had elements in it which gave it a\ndecisive advantage; its outlook was historical, not cosmic, and\nconsequently admitted a non-natural future for the individual and for\nthe Church; it was anti-political and looked for progress only in that\nregion in which progress was at that time possible, in the private soul;\nit was democratic, feminine, and unworldly; its Oriental deity and\nprophets had a primitive simplicity and pathos not found in pagan heroes\nor polite metaphysical entities; its obscure Hebrew poetry opened, like\nmusic, an infinite field for brooding fancy and presumption. The\nconsequence was a doubling of the world, so that every Christian led a\ndual existence, one full of trouble and vanity on earth, which it was\npiety in him to despise and neglect, another full of hope and\nconsolation in a region parallel to earth and directly above it, every\npart of which corresponded to something in earthly life and could be\nreached, so to speak, by a Jacob\u2019s ladder upon which aspiration and\ngrace ascended and descended continually. Birth had its sacramental\nconsecration to the supernatural in baptism, growth in confirmation,\nself-consciousness in confession, puberty in communion, effort in\nprayer, defeat in sacrifice, sin in penance, speculation in revealed\nwisdom, art in worship, natural kindness in charity, poverty in\nhumility, death in self-surrender and resurrection. When the mind grew\ntired of contemplation the lips could still echo some pious petition,\nkeeping the body\u2019s attitude and habit expressive of humility and\npropitious to receiving grace; and when the knees and lips were\nthemselves weary, a candle might be left burning before the altar, to\nwitness that the desire momentarily forgotten was not extinguished in\nthe heart. Through prayer and religious works the absent could be\nreached and the dead helped on their journey, and amid earthly\nestrangements and injustices there always remained the church open to\nall and the society of heaven.\n\n[Sidenote: Paganism chastened, Hebraism liberalised.]\n\nNothing is accordingly more patent than that Christianity was paganised\nby the early Church; indeed, the creation of the Church was itself what\nto a Hebraising mind must seem a corruption, namely, a mixing of pagan\nphilosophy and ritual with the Gospel. But this sort of constitutive\ncorruption would more properly be called an adaptation, an absorption,\nor even a civilisation of Hebraism; for by this marriage with paganism\nChristianity fitted itself to live and work in the civilised world. By\nthis corruption it was completed and immensely improved, like\nAnglo-Saxon by its corruption through French and Latin; for it is always\nan improvement in religion, whose business is to express and inspire\nspiritual sentiment, that it should learn to express and inspire that\nsentiment more generously. Paganism was nearer than Hebraism to the Life\nof Reason because its myths were more transparent and its temper less\nfanatical; and so a paganised Christianity approached more closely that\nideality which constitutes religious truth than a bare and intense\nHebraism, in its hostility to human genius, could ever have done if\nisolated and unqualified.\n\n[Sidenote: The system post-rational and founded on despair.]\n\nThe Christianity which the pagans adopted, in becoming itself pagan,\nremained a religion natural to their country and their heart. It\nconstituted a paganism expressive of their later and calamitous\nexperience, a paganism acquainted with sorrow, a religion that had\npassed through both civilisation and despair, and had been reduced to\ntranslating the eclipsed values of life into supernatural symbols. It\nbecame a post-rational religion. Of course, to understand such a system\nit is necessary to possess the faculties it exercises and the experience\nit represents. Where life has not reached the level of reflection,\nreligion and philosophy must both be pre-rational; they must remain\ncrudely experimental, unconscious of the limits of excellence and life.\nUnder such circumstances it is obviously impossible that religion should\nbe reconstituted on a supernatural plane, or should learn to express\nexperience rather than impulse. Now the Christianity of the gospels was\nitself post-rational; it had turned its back on the world. In this\nrespect the mixture with paganism altered nothing; it merely reinforced\nthe spiritualised and lyric despair of the Hebrews with the personal and\nmetaphysical despair of the Romans and Greeks. For all the later classic\nphilosophy\u2014Stoic, Sceptic, or Epicurean\u2014was founded on despair and was\npost-rational. Pagan Christianity, or Catholicism, may accordingly be\nsaid to consist of two elements: first, the genius of paganism, the\nfaculty of expressing spiritual experience in myth and external symbol,\nand, second, the experience of disillusion, forcing that pagan\nimagination to take wing from earth and to decorate no longer the\npolitical and material circumstances of life, but rather to remove\nbeyond the clouds and constitute its realm of spirit beyond the veil of\ntime and nature, in a posthumous and metaphysical sphere. A mythical\neconomy abounding in points of attachment to human experience and in\ngenial interpretations of life, yet lifted beyond visible nature and\nfilling a reported world, a world believed in on hearsay or, as it is\ncalled, on faith\u2014that is Catholicism.\n\nWhen this religion was established in the Roman Empire, that empire was\nitself threatened by the barbarians who soon permeated and occupied it\nand made a new and unhappy beginning to European history. They adopted\nChristianity, not because it represented their religious needs or\ninspiration, but because it formed part of a culture and a social\norganisation the influence of which they had not, in their simplicity,\nthe means to withstand. During several ages they could only modify by\ntheir misunderstandings and inertia arts wholly new to their lives.\n\n[Sidenote: External conversion of the barbarians.]\n\nWhat sort of religion these barbarians may previously have had is beyond\nour accurate knowledge. They handed down a mythology not radically\ndifferent from the Gr\u00e6co-Roman, though more vaguely and grotesquely\nconceived; and they recognised tribal duties and glories from which\nreligious sanctions could hardly have been absent. But a barbarian mind,\nlike a child\u2019s, is easy to convert and to people with what stories you\nwill. The Northmen drank in with pleased astonishment what the monks\ntold them about hell and heaven, God the Father and God the Son, the\nVirgin and the beautiful angels; they accepted the sacraments with vague\ndocility; they showed a qualified respect, often broken upon, it is\ntrue, by instinctive rebellions, for a clergy which after all\nrepresented whatever vestiges of learning, benevolence, or art still\nlingered in the world. But this easy and boasted conversion was fanciful\nonly and skin-deep. A non-Christian ethics of valour and honour, a\nnon-Christian fund of superstition, legend, and sentiment, subsisted\nalways among medi\u00e6val peoples. Their soul, so largely inarticulate,\nmight be overlaid with churchly habits and imprisoned for the moment in\nthe panoply of patristic dogma; but pagan Christianity always remained a\nreligion foreign to them, accepted only while their minds continued in a\nstate of helpless tutelage. Such a foreign religion could never be\nunderstood by them in its genuine motives and spirit. They were without\nthe experience and the plastic imagination which had given it birth. It\nmight catch them unawares and prevail over them for a time, but even\nduring that period it could not root out from barbarian souls anything\nopposed to it which subsisted there. It was thus that the Roman Church\nhatched the duck\u2019s egg of Protestantism.\n\n[Sidenote: Expression of the northern genius within Catholicism.]\n\nIn its native seats the Catholic system prompts among those who inwardly\nreject it satire and indifference rather than heresy, because on the\nwhole it expresses well enough the religious instincts of the people.\nOnly those strenuously oppose it who hate religion itself. But among\nconverted barbarians the case was naturally different, and opposition to\nthe Church came most vehemently from certain religious natures whose\ninstincts it outraged or left unsatisfied. Even before heresy burst\nforth this religious restlessness found vent in many directions. It\nendowed Christianity with several beautiful but insidious gifts, several\nincongruous though well-meant forms of expression. Among these we may\ncount Gothic art, chivalrous sentiment, and even scholastic philosophy.\nThese things came, as we know, ostensibly to serve Christianity, which\nhas learned to regard them as its own emanations. But in truth they\nbarbarised Christianity just as Greek philosophy and worship and Roman\nhabits of administration had paganised it in the beginning. And\nbarbarised Christianity, even before it became heretical, was something\nnew, something very different in temper and beauty from the pagan\nChristianity of the South and East.\n\nIn the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, as it flourished in the North,\nthe barbarian soul, apprenticed to monkish masters, appeared in all its\nchildlike trust, originality, and humour. There was something touching\nand grotesque about it. We seem to see a child playing with the toys of\nage, his green hopes and fancies weaving themselves about an antique\nmetaphysical monument, the sanctuary of a decrepit world. The structure\nof that monument was at first not affected, and even when it had been\nundermined and partially ruined, its style could not be transformed,\nbut, clad in its northern ivy, it wore at once a new aspect. To races\nwithout experience\u2014that is, without cumulative traditions or a visible\npast\u2014Christianity could be nothing but a fairy story and a gratuitous\nhope, as if they had been told about the Sultan of Timbuctoo and\npromised that they should some day ride on his winged Arabian horses.\nThe tragic meaning of the Christian faith, its immense renunciation of\nall things earthly and the merely metaphysical glory of its transfigured\nlife, commonly escaped their apprehension, as it still continues to do.\nThey listened open-mouthed to the missionary and accepted his\nasseverations with unsuspecting emotion, like the Anglo-Saxon king who\nlikened the soul to a bird flying in and out of a tent at night, about\nwhose further fortunes any account would be interesting to hear. A seed\nplanted in such a virgin and uncultivated soil must needs bring forth\nfruit of a new savour.\n\n[Sidenote: Internal discrepancies between the two.]\n\nIn northern Christianity a fresh quality of brooding tenderness\nprevailed over the tragic passion elsewhere characteristic of Catholic\ndevotion. Intricacy was substituted for dignity and poetry for rhetoric;\nthe basilica became an abbey and the hermitage a school. The feudal ages\nwere a wonderful seed-time in a world all gaunt with ruins. Horrors were\nthere mingled with delicacies and confusion with idyllic peace. It was\nhere a poet\u2019s childhood passed amid the crash of war, there an\nalchemist\u2019s old age flickering away amid cobwebs and gibberish.\nSomething jocund and mischievous peeped out even in the cloister;\ngargoyles leered from the belfry, while ivy and holly grew about the\ncross. The Middle Ages were the true renaissance. Their Christianity was\nthe theme, the occasion, the excuse for their art and jollity, their\ncuriosity and tenderness; it was far from being the source of those\ndelightful inventions. The Crusades were not inspired by the Prince of\nPeace, to whose honour they were fancifully and passionately dedicated;\nso chivalry, Gothic architecture, and scholastic philosophy were profane\nexpressions of a self-discovering genius in a people incidentally\nChristian. The barbarians had indeed been indoctrinated, they had been\nintroduced into an alien spiritual and historic medium, but they had not\nbeen made over or inwardly tamed. It had perhaps been rendered easier\nfor them, by contact with an existing or remembered civilisation, to\nmature their own genius, even in the act of confusing its expression\nthrough foreign accretions. They had been thereby stimulated to civilise\nthemselves and encouraged also to believe themselves civilised somewhat\nprematurely, when they had become heirs merely to the titles and\ntrappings of civilisation.\n\nThe process of finding their own art and polity, begun under foreign\nguidance, was bound on the whole to diverge more and more from its Latin\nmodel. It consisted now of imitation, now of revulsion and fanciful\noriginality; never was a race so much under the sway of fashions.\nFashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without\nreason and imitation without benefit. It marks very clearly that margin\nof irresponsible variation in manners and thoughts which among a people\nartificially civilised may so easily be larger than the solid core. It\nis characteristic of occidental society in medi\u00e6val and modern times,\nbecause this society is led by people who, being educated in a foreign\nculture, remain barbarians at heart. To this day we have not achieved a\nreally native civilisation. Our art, morals, and religion, though deeply\ndyed in native feeling, are still only definable and, indeed,\nconceivable by reference to classic and alien standards. Among the\nnorthern races culture is even more artificial and superinduced than\namong the southern; whence the strange phenomenon of snobbery in\nsociety, affectation in art, and a violent contrast between the educated\nand the uneducated, the rich and the poor, classes that live on\ndifferent intellectual planes and often have different religions. Some\neducated persons, accordingly, are merely students and imbibers; they\nsit at the feet of a past which, not being really theirs, can produce no\nfruit in them but sentimentality. Others are merely _protestants_; they\nare active in the moral sphere only by virtue of an inward rebellion\nagainst something greater and overshadowing, yet repulsive and alien.\nThey are conscious truants from a foreign school of life.\n\n[Sidenote: Tradition and instinct at odds in Protestantism.]\n\nIn the Protestant religion it is necessary to distinguish inner\ninspiration from historical entanglements. Unfortunately, as the whole\ndoctrinal form of this religion is irrelevant to its spirit and imposed\nfrom without, being due to the step-motherly nurture it received from\nthe Church, we can reach a conception of its inner spirit only by\nstudying its tendency and laws of change or its incidental expression in\nliterature and custom. Yet these indirect symptoms are so striking that\neven an outsider, if at all observant, need not fear to misinterpret\nthem. Taken externally, Protestantism is, of course, a form of\nChristianity; it retains the Bible and a more or less copious selection\nof patristic doctrines. But in its spirit and inward inspiration it is\nsomething quite as independent of Judea as of Rome. It is simply the\nnatural religion of the Teutons raising its head above the flood of\nRoman and Judean influences. Its character may be indicated by saying\nthat it is a religion of pure spontaneity, of emotional freedom, deeply\nrespecting itself but scarcely deciphering its purposes. It is the\nself-consciousness of a spirit in process of incubation, jealous of its\npotentialities, averse to definitions and finalities of any kind because\nit can itself discern nothing fixed or final. It is adventurous and\npuzzled by the world, full of rudimentary virtues and clear fire,\nenergetic, faithful, rebellious to experience, inexpert in all matters\nof art and mind. It boasts, not without cause, of its depth and purity;\nbut this depth and purity are those of any formless and primordial\nsubstance. It keeps unsullied that antecedent integrity which is at the\nbottom of every living thing and at its core; it is not acquainted with\nthat ulterior integrity, that sanctity, which might be attained at the\nsummit of experience through reason and speculative dominion. It\naccordingly mistakes vitality, both in itself and in the universe, for\nspiritual life.\n\n[Sidenote: The Protestant spirit remote from that of the gospel.]\n\nThis underlying Teutonic religion, which we must call Protestantism for\nlack of a better name, is anterior to Christianity and can survive it.\nTo identify it with the Gospel may have seemed possible so long as, in\nopposition to pagan Christianity, the Teutonic spirit could appeal to\nthe Gospel for support. The Gospel has indeed nothing pagan about it,\nbut it has also nothing Teutonic; and the momentary alliance of two such\ndisparate forces must naturally cease with the removal of the common\nenemy which alone united them. The Gospel is unworldly, disenchanted,\nascetic; it treats ecclesiastical establishments with tolerant contempt,\nconforming to them with indifference; it regards prosperity as a danger,\nearthly ties as a burden, Sabbaths as a superstition; it revels in\nmiracles; it is democratic and antinomian; it loves contemplation,\npoverty, and solitude; it meets sinners with sympathy and heartfelt\nforgiveness, but Pharisees and Puritans with biting scorn. In a word, it\nis a product of the Orient, where all things are old and equal and a\nprofound indifference to the business of earth breeds a silent dignity\nand high sadness in the spirit. Protestantism is the exact opposite of\nall this. It is convinced of the importance of success and prosperity;\nit abominates what is disreputable; contemplation seems to it idleness,\nsolitude selfishness, and poverty a sort of dishonourable punishment. It\nis constrained and punctilious in righteousness; it regards a married\nand industrious life as typically godly, and there is a sacredness to\nit, as of a vacant Sabbath, in the unoccupied higher spaces which such\nan existence leaves for the soul. It is sentimental, its ritual is\nmeagre and unctuous, it expects no miracles, it thinks optimism akin to\npiety, and regards profitable enterprise and practical ambition as a\nsort of moral vocation. Its Evangelicalism lacks the notes, so prominent\nin the gospel, of disillusion, humility, and speculative detachment. Its\nbenevolence is optimistic and aims at raising men to a conventional\nwell-being; it thus misses the inner appeal of Christian charity which,\nbeing merely remedial in physical matters, begins by renunciation and\nlooks to spiritual freedom and peace.\n\nProtestantism was therefore attached from the first to the Old\nTestament, in which Hebrew fervour appears in its worldly and\npre-rational form. It is not democratic in the same sense as\npost-rational religions, which see in the soul an exile from some other\nsphere wearing for the moment, perhaps, a beggar\u2019s disguise: it is\ndemocratic only in the sense of having a popular origin and bending\neasily to popular forces. Swayed as it is by public opinion, it is\nnecessarily conventional in its conception of duty and earnestly\nmaterialistic; for the meaning of the word vanity never crosses the\nvulgar heart. In fine, it is the religion of a race young, wistful, and\nadventurous, feeling its latent potentialities, vaguely assured of an\nearthly vocation, and possessing, like the barbarian and the healthy\nchild, pure but unchastened energies. Thus in the Protestant religion\nthe faith natural to barbarism appears clothed, by force of historical\naccident, in the language of an adapted Christianity.\n\n[Sidenote: Obstacles to humanism.]\n\nAs the Middle Ages advanced the new-born human genius which constituted\ntheir culture grew daily more playful, curious, and ornate. It was\nnaturally in the countries formerly pagan that this new paganism\nprincipally flourished. Religion began in certain quarters to be taken\nphilosophically; its relation to life began to be understood, that it\nwas a poetic expression of need, hope, and ignorance. Here prodigious\nvested interests and vested illusions of every sort made dangerous the\npath of sincerity. Genuine moral and religious impulses could not be\neasily dissociated from a system of thought and discipline with which\nfor a thousand years they had been intimately interwoven. Scepticism,\ninstead of seeming, what it naturally is, a moral force, a tendency to\nsincerity, economy, and fine adjustment of life and mind to\nexperience\u2014scepticism seemed a temptation and a danger. This situation,\nwhich still prevails in a certain measure, strikingly shows into how\nartificial a posture Christianity has thrown the mind. If scepticism,\nunder such circumstances, by chance penetrated among the clergy, it was\nnot favourable to consistency of life, and it was the more certain to\npenetrate among them in that their ranks, in a fat and unscrupulous age,\nwould naturally be largely recruited by men without conscience or ideal\nambitions. It became accordingly necessary to reform something; either\nthe gay world to suit the Church\u2019s primitive austerity and asceticism,\nor the Church to suit the world\u2019s profane and general interests. The\nlatter task was more or less consciously undertaken by the humanists who\nwould have abated the clergy\u2019s wealth and irrational authority, advanced\npolite learning, and, while of course retaining Christianity\u2014for why\nshould an ancestral religion be changed?\u2014would have retained it as a\nform of paganism, as an ornament and poetic expression of human life.\nThis movement, had it not been overwhelmed by the fanatical Reformation\nand the fanatical reaction against it, would doubtless have met with\nmany a check from the Church\u2019s sincere zealots; but it could have\novercome them and, had it been allowed to fight reason\u2019s battle with\nreason\u2019s weapons, would ultimately have led to general enlightenment\nwithout dividing Christendom, kindling venomous religious and national\npassions, or vitiating philosophy.\n\n[Sidenote: The Reformation and counter-reformation.]\n\nIt was not humanism, however, that was destined to restrain and soften\nthe Church, completing by critical reflection that paganisation of\nChristianity which had taken place at the beginning instinctively and of\nnecessity. There was now another force in the field, the virgin\nconscience and wilfulness of the Teutonic races, sincerely attached to\nwhat they had assimilated in Christianity and now awakening to the fact\nthat they inwardly abhorred and rejected the rest. This situation, in so\nuncritical an age, could be interpreted as a return to primitive\nChristianity, though this had been in truth, as we may now perceive,\nutterly opposed to the Teutonic spirit. Accordingly, the humanistic\nmovement was crossed and obscured by another, specifically religious and\nostensibly more Christian than the Church. Controversies followed, as\npuerile as they were bloody; for it was not to be expected that the\npeoples once forming the Roman Empire were going to surrender their\nancestral religion without a struggle and without resisting this new\nbarbarian invasion into their imaginations and their souls. They might\nhave suffered their Christianised paganism to fade with time; worldly\nprosperity and arts might have weaned them gradually from their\nsupernaturalism, and science from their myths; but how were they to\nabandon at once all their traditions, when challenged to do so by a\nforeign supernaturalism so much poorer and cruder than their own? What\nhappened was that they intrenched themselves in their system, cut\nthemselves off from the genial influences that might have rendered it\ninnocuous, and became sectaries, like their opponents. Enlightenment was\nonly to come after a recrudescence of madness and by the mutual\nslaughter of a fresh crop of illusions, usurpations, and tyrannies.\n\n[Sidenote: Protestantism an expression of character.]\n\nIt would be easy to write, in a satirical vein, the history of\nProtestant dogma. Its history was foreseen from the beginning by\nintelligent observers. It consisted in a gradual and inevitable descent\ninto a pious scepticism. The attempt to cling to various intermediate\npositions on the inclined plane that slopes down from ancient revelation\nto private experience can succeed only for a time and where local\ninfluences limit speculative freedom. You must slide smilingly down to\nthe bottom or, in horror at that eventuality, creep up again and reach\nout pathetically for a resting-place at the top. To insist on this\nrather obvious situation, as exhibited for instance in the Anglican\nChurch, would be to thresh straw and to study in Protestantism only its\nfeeble and accidental side. Its true essence is not constituted by the\nChristian dogmas that at a given moment it chances to retain, but by the\nspirit in which it constantly challenges the others, by the expression\nit gives to personal integrity, to faith in conscience, to human\ninstinct courageously meeting the world. It rebels, for instance,\nagainst the Catholic system of measurable sins and merits, with rewards\nand punishments legally adjusted and controlled by priestly as well as\nby divine prerogative. Such a supernatural mechanism seems to an\nindependent and uncowed nature a profanation and an imposture. Away, it\nsays, with all intermediaries between the soul and God, with all\nmeddlesome priestcraft and all mechanical salvation. Salvation shall be\nby faith alone, that is, by an attitude and sentiment private to the\nspirit, by an inner co-operation of man with the world. The Church shall\nbe invisible, constituted by all those who possess this necessary faith\nand by no others. It really follows from this, although the conclusion\nmay not be immediately drawn, that religion is not an adjustment to\nother facts or powers, or to other possibilities, than those met with in\ndaily life and in surrounding nature, but is rather a spiritual\nadjustment to natural life, an insight into its principles, by which a\nman learns to identify himself with the cosmic power and to share its\nmultifarious business no less than its ulterior security and calm.\n\n[Sidenote: It has the spirit of life.]\n\nProtestantism, in this perfectly instinctive trustfulness and\nself-assertion, is not only prior to Christianity but more primitive\nthan reason and even than man. The plants and animals, if they could\nspeak, would express their attitude to their destiny in the Protestant\nfashion. \u201cHe that formed us,\u201d they would say, \u201clives and energises\nwithin us. He has sealed a covenant with us, to stand by us if we are\nfaithful and strenuous in following the suggestions he whispers in our\nhearts. With fidelity to ourselves and, what is the same thing, to him,\nwe are bound to prosper and to have life more and more abundantly for\never.\u201d This attitude, where it concerns religion, involves two\ncorollaries: first, what in accordance with Hebrew precedent may be\ncalled symbolically faith in God, that is, confidence in one\u2019s own\nimpulse and destiny, a confidence which the world in the end is sure to\nreward; and second, abomination of all contrary religious tenets and\npractices\u2014of asceticism, for instance, because it denies the will; of\nidolatry and myth, because they render divinity concrete rather than\nrelative to inner cravings and essentially responsive; finally of\ntradition and institutional authority, because these likewise jeopardise\nthe soul\u2019s experimental development as, in profound isolation, she\nwrestles with reality and with her own inspiration.\n\n[Sidenote: and of courage.]\n\nIn thus meeting the world the soul without experience shows a fine\ncourage proportionate to its own vigour. We may well imagine that lions\nand porpoises have a more masculine assurance that God is on their side\nthan ever visits the breast of antelope or jelly-fish. This assurance,\nwhen put to the test in adventurous living, becomes in a strong and\nhigh-bred creature a refusal to be defeated, a gallant determination to\nhold the last ditch and hope for the best in spite of appearances. It is\na part of Protestantism to be austere, energetic, unwearied in some\nlaborious task. The end and profit are not so much regarded as the mere\nhabit of self-control and practical devotion and steadiness. The point\nis to accomplish something, no matter particularly what; so that\nProtestants show on this ground some respect even for an artist when he\nhas once achieved success. A certain experience of ill fortune is only a\nstimulus to this fidelity. So great is the antecedent trust in the world\nthat the world, as it appears at first blush, may be confidently defied.\n\n[Sidenote: but the voice of inexperience.]\n\nHence, in spite of a theoretic optimism, disapproval and proscription\nplay a large part in Protestant sentiment. The zeal for righteousness,\nthe practical expectation that all shall be well, cannot tolerate\nrecognised evils. Evils must be abolished or at least hidden; they must\nnot offend the face of day and give the lie to universal sanctimony.\nThis austerity and repression, though they involve occasional hypocrisy,\nlead also to substantial moral reconstruction. Protestantism, springing\nfrom a pure heart, purifies convention and is a tonic to any society in\nwhich it prominently exists. It has the secret of that honest simplicity\nwhich belongs to unspoiled youth, that keen integrity native to the\nungalled spirit as yet unconscious of any duplicity in itself or of any\ninward reason why it should fail. The only evils it recognises seem so\nmany challenges to action, so many conditions for some glorious\nunthought-of victory. Such a religion is indeed profoundly ignorant, it\nis the religion of inexperience, yet it has, at its core, the very\nspirit of life. Its error is only to consider the will omnipotent and\nsacred and not to distinguish the field of inevitable failure from that\nof possible success. Success, however, would never be possible without\nthat fund of energy and that latent resolve and determination which\nbring also faith in success. Animal optimism is a great renovator and\ndisinfectant in the world.\n\n[Sidenote: Its emancipation from Christianity.]\n\nIt was this youthful religion\u2014profound, barbaric, poetical\u2014that the\nTeutonic races insinuated into Christianity and substituted for that\nlast sigh of two expiring worlds. In the end, with the complete\ncrumbling away of Christian dogma and tradition, Absolute Egotism\nappeared openly on the surface in the shape of German speculative\nphilosophy. This form, which Protestantism assumed at a moment of high\ntension and reckless self-sufficiency, it will doubtless shed in turn\nand take on new expressions; but that declaration of independence on the\npart of the Teutonic spirit marks emphatically its exit from\nChristianity and the end of that series of transformations in which it\ntook the Bible and patristic dogma for its materials. It now bids fair\nto apply itself instead to social life and natural science and to\nattempt to feed its Protean hunger directly from these more homely\nsources.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VIII\n\nCONFLICT OF MYTHOLOGY WITH MORAL TRUTH\n\n\n[Sidenote: Myth should dissolve with the advance of science.]\n\nThat magic and mythology have no experimental sanction is clear so soon\nas experience begins to be gathered together with any care. As magic\nattempts to do work by incantations, so myth tries to attain knowledge\nby playing with lies. The attempt is in the first instance inevitable\nand even innocent, for it takes time to discriminate valid from\nvalueless fancies in a mind in which they spring up together, with no\nintrinsic mark to distinguish them. The idle notion attracts attention\nno less than the one destined to prove significant; often it pleases\nmore. Only watchful eyes and that rare thing, conscience applied to\nmemory, can pluck working notions from the gay and lascivious vegetation\nof the mind, or learn to prefer Cinderella to her impudent sisters. If a\nmyth has some modicum of applicability or significance it takes root all\nthe more firmly side by side with knowledge. There are many subjects of\nwhich man is naturally so ignorant that only mythical notions can seem\nto do them justice; such, for instance, are the minds of other men.\nMyth remains for this reason a constituent part even of the most\nrational consciousness, and what can at present be profitably attempted\nis not so much to abolish myth as to become aware of its mythical\ncharacter.\n\nThe mark of a myth is that it does not interpret a phenomenon in terms\ncapable of being subsumed under the same category with that phenomenon\nitself, but fills it out instead with images that could never appear\nside by side with it or complete it on its own plane of existence. Thus\nif meditating on the moon I conceive her other side or the aspect she\nwould wear if I were travelling on her surface, or the position she\nwould assume in relation to the earth if viewed from some other planet,\nor the structure she would disclose could she be cut in halves, my\nthinking, however fanciful, would be on the scientific plane and not\nmythical, for it would forecast possible perceptions, complementary to\nthose I am trying to enlarge. If, on the other hand, I say the moon is\nthe sun\u2019s sister, that she carries a silver bow, that she is a virgin\nand once looked lovingly on the sleeping Endymion, only the fool never\nknew it\u2014my lucubration is mythical; for I do not pretend that this\nembroidery on the aspects which the moon actually wears in my feeling\nand in the interstices of my thoughts could ever be translated into\nperceptions making one system with the present image. By going closer to\nthat disc I should not see the silver bow, nor by retreating in time\nshould I come to the moment when the sun and moon were actually born of\nLatona. The elements are incongruous and do not form one existence but\ntwo, the first sensible, the other only to be enacted dramatically, and\nhaving at best to the first the relation of an experience to its symbol.\nThese fancies are not fore-tastes of possible perceptions, but are free\ninterpretations or translations of the perceptions I have actually had.\n\nMythical thinking has its roots in reality, but, like a plant, touches\nthe ground only at one end. It stands unmoved and flowers wantonly into\nthe air, transmuting into unexpected and richer forms the substances it\nsucks from the soil. It is therefore a fruit of experience, an ornament,\na proof of animal vitality; but it is no _vehicle_ for experience; it\ncannot serve the purposes of transitive thought or action. Science, on\nthe other hand, is constituted by those fancies which, arising like\nmyths out of perception, retain a sensuous language and point to further\nperceptions of the same kind; so that the suggestions drawn from one\nobject perceived are only ideas of other objects similarly perceptible.\nA scientific hypothesis is one which represents something continuous\nwith the observed facts and conceivably existent in the same medium.\nScience is a bridge touching experience at both ends, over which\npractical thought may travel from act to act, from perception to\nperception.\n\n[Sidenote: But myth is confused with the moral values it expresses.]\n\nTo separate fable from knowledge nothing is therefore requisite except\nclose scrutiny and the principle of parsimony. Were mythology merely a\npoetic substitute for natural science the advance of science would\nsufficiently dispose of it. What remained over would, like the myths in\nPlato, be at least better than total silence on a subject that interests\nus and makes us think, although we have no means of testing our thoughts\nin its regard. But the chief source of perplexity and confusion in\nmythology is its confusion with moral truth. The myth which originally\nwas but a symbol substituted for empirical descriptions becomes in the\nsequel an idol substituted for ideal values. This complication, from\nwhich half the troubles of philosophy arise, deserves our careful\nattention.\n\nEuropean history has now come twice upon the dissolution of mythologies,\nfirst among the Stoics and then among the Protestants. The circumstances\nin the two cases were very unlike; so were the mythical systems that\nwere discarded; and yet the issue was in both instances similar. Greek\nand Christian mythology have alike ended in pantheism. So soon as the\nconstructions of the poets and the Fathers were seen to be ingenious\nfictions, criticism was confronted with an obvious duty: to break up the\nmythical compound furnished by tradition into its elements, putting on\none side what natural observation or actual history had supplied, and on\nthe other what dramatic imagination had added. For a cool and\ndisinterested observer the task, where evidence and records were not\nwanting, would be simple enough. But the critic in this case would not\nusually be cool or disinterested. His religion was concerned; he had no\nother object to hang his faith and happiness upon than just this\ntraditional hybrid which his own enlightenment was now dissolving. To\nwhich part should he turn for support? In which quarter should he\ncontinue to place the object of his worship?\n\n[Sidenote: Neo-Platonic revision.]\n\nFrom the age of the Sophists to the final disappearance of paganism\nnearly a thousand years elapsed. A thousand years from the infliction of\na mortal wound to the moment of extinction is a long agony. Religions do\nnot disappear when they are discredited; it is requisite that they\nshould be replaced. For a thousand years the augurs may have laughed,\nthey were bound nevertheless to stand at their posts until the monks\ncame to relieve them. During this prolonged decrepitude paganism lived\non inertia, by accretions from the Orient, and by philosophic\nreinterpretations. Of these reinterpretations the first was that\nattempted by Plato, and afterward carried out by the neo-Platonists and\nChristians into the notion of a supernatural spiritual hierarchy;\nabove, a dialectical deity, the hypostasis of intellect and its\nontological phases; below, a host of angels and demons, hypostases of\nfaculties, moral influences, and evil promptings. In other words, in the\ndiremption of myths which yielded here a natural phenomenon to be\nexplained and there a moral value to be embodied, Platonism attached\ndivinity exclusively to the moral element. The ideas, which were\nessentially moral functions, were many and eternal; their physical\nembodiments were adventitious to them and constituted a lapse, a\nmisfortune to be wiped out by an eventual reunion of the alienated\nnature with its own ideal. Religion in such a system necessarily meant\nredemption. In this movement paganism turned toward the future, toward\nsupernatural and revealed religion, and away from its own naturalistic\nprinciple. Revelation, as Plato himself had said, was needed to guide a\nmind which distrusted phenomena and recoiled from earthly pursuits.\n\n[Sidenote: It made mythical entities of abstractions.]\n\nThis religion had the strength of despair, but all else in it was\nweakness. Apart from a revelation which, until Christianity appeared,\nremained nebulous and arbitrary, there could be no means of maintaining\nthe existence of those hypostasised moral entities. The effort to\nseparate them from the natural functions which they evidently expressed\ncould not succeed while any critical acumen or independence subsisted in\nthe believer. Platonism, to become a religion, had to appeal to\nsuperstition. Unity, for instance (which, according to Plato himself, is\na category applicable to everything concomitantly with the complementary\ncategory of multiplicity, for everything, he says, is evidently both one\nand many)\u2014unity could not become the One, an independent and supreme\ndeity, unless the meaning and function of unity were altogether\nforgotten and a foolish idolatry, agape at words, were substituted for\nunderstanding. Some one had to come with an air of authority and report\nhis visions of the One before such an entity could be added to the\ncatalogue of actual existences. The reality of all neo-Platonic\nhypostasis was thus dependent on revelation and on forgetting the\nmeaning once conveyed by the terms so mysteriously transfigured into\nmetaphysical beings.\n\n[Sidenote: Hypostasis ruins ideals.]\n\nThis divorce of neo-Platonic ideas from the functions they originally\nrepresented in human life and discourse was found in the end to defeat\nthe very interest that had prompted it\u2014enthusiasm for the ideal.\nEnthusiasm for the ideal had led Plato to treat all beauties as\nstepping-stones toward a perfect beauty in which all their charms might\nbe present together, eternally and without alloy. Enthusiasm for the\nideal had persuaded him that mortal life was only an impeded effort to\nfall back into eternity. These inspired but strictly unthinkable\nsuggestions fell from his lips in his zeal to express how much the\nburden and import of experience exceeded its sensuous vehicle in\npermanence and value. A thousand triangles revealed one pregnant\nproportion of lines and areas; a thousand beds and bridles served one\nperpetual purpose in human life, and found in fulfilling it their\nessence and standard of excellence; a thousand fascinations taught the\nsame lesson and coalesced into one reverent devotion to beauty and\nnobility wherever they might bloom. It was accordingly a poignant sense\nfor the excellence of real things that made Plato wish to transcend\nthem; his metaphysics was nothing but a visionary intuition of values,\nan idealism in the proper sense of the word. But when the momentum of\nsuch enthusiasm remained without its motive power, and its transcendence\nwithout its inspiration in real experience, idealism ceased to be an\nidealisation, an interpretation of reality reaching prophetically to its\ngoals. It became a super-numerary second physics, a world to which an\nexistence was attributed which could be hardly conceived and was\ncertainly supported by no evidence, while that significance which it\nreally possessed in reference to natural processes was ignored, or even\ndenied. An idealism which had consisted in understanding and\ndiscriminating values now became a superstition incapable of discerning\nexistences. It added a prodigious fictitious setting to the cosmos in\nwhich man had to operate; it obscured his real interests and possible\nhappiness by seeking to transport him into that unreal environment, with\nits fantastic and disproportionate economy; and, worst of all, it\nrobbed the ideal of its ideality by tearing it up from its roots in\nnatural will and in experienced earthly benefits. For an ideal is not\nideal if it is the ideal of nothing. In that case it is only a ghostly\nexistence, with no more moral significance or authority in relation to\nthe observer than has any happy creature which may happen to exist\nsomewhere in the unknown reaches of the universe.\n\n[Sidenote: The Stoic revision.]\n\nMeantime, a second reinterpretation of mythology was attempted by the\nStoics. Instead of moving forward, like Plato, toward the\nsupernaturalism that was for so many ages to dominate the world, the\nStoics, with greater loyalty to pagan principles, reverted to the\nnatural forces that had been the chief basis for the traditional\ndeities. The progress of philosophy had given the Stoics a notion of the\ncosmos such as the early Aryan could not have possessed when he recorded\nand took to heart his scattered observations in the form of divine\ninfluences, as many and various as the observations themselves. To the\nStoics the world was evidently one dynamic system. The power that\nanimated it was therefore one God. Accordingly, after explaining away\nthe popular myths by turning them somewhat ruthlessly into moral\napologues, they proceeded to identify Zeus with the order of nature.\nThis identification was supported by many traditional tendencies and\nphilosophic hints. The resulting concept, though still mythical, was\nperhaps as rationalistic as the state of science at the time could\nallow. Zeus had been from the beginning a natural force, at once serene\nand formidable, the thunderer no less than the spirit of the blue. He\nwas the ruler of gods and men; he was, under limitations, a sort of\ngeneral providence. Anaxagoras, too, in proclaiming the cosmic function\nof reason, had prepared the way for the Stoics in another direction.\nThis \u201creason,\u201d which in Socrates and Plato was already a deity, meant an\norder, an order making for the good. It was the name for a principle\nmuch like that which Aristotle called Nature, an indwelling prophetic\ninstinct by which things strive after their perfection and happiness.\nNow Aristotle observed this instinct, as behoved a disciple of Socrates,\nin its specific cases, in which the good secured could be discriminated\nand visibly attained. There were many souls, each with its provident\nfunction and immutable guiding ideal, one for each man and animal, one\nfor each heavenly sphere, and one, the prime mover, for the highest\nsphere of all. But the Stoics, not trained in the same humane and\ncritical school, had felt the unity, of things more dramatically and\nvaguely in the realm of physics. Like Xenophanes of old, they gazed at\nthe broad sky and exclaimed, \u201cThe All is One.\u201d Uniting these various\ninfluences, they found it easy to frame a conception of Zeus, or the\nworld, or the universal justice and law, so as to combine in it a\ndynamic unity with a provident reason. A world conceived to be material\nand fatally determined was endowed with foresight of its own changes,\nperfect internal harmony, and absolute moral dignity. Thus mythology,\nwith the Stoics, ended in pantheism.\n\n[Sidenote: The ideal surrendered before the physical.]\n\nBy reducing their gods to a single divine influence, and identifying\nthis in turn with natural forces, the Stoics had, in one sense, saved\nmythology. For no one would be inclined to deny existence or power to\nthe cosmos, to the body the soul of which was Zeus. Pantheism, taken\ntheoretically, is only naturalism poetically expressed. It therefore was\na most legitimate and congenial interpretation of paganism for a\nrationalistic age. On the other hand, mythology had not been a mere\npoetic physics; it had formulated the object of religion; it had\nembodied for mankind its highest ideals in worshipful forms. It was when\nthis religious function was transferred to the god of pantheism that the\nparadox and impossibility of the reform became evident. Nature neither\nis nor can be man\u2019s ideal. The substitution of nature for the\ntraditional and ideal object of religion involves giving nature moral\nauthority over man; it involves that element of Stoicism which is the\nsynonym of inhumanity. Life and death, good and ill fortune, happiness\nand misery, since they flow equally from the universal order, shall be\ndeclared, in spite of reason, to be equally good. True virtue shall be\nreduced to conformity. He who has no ideal but that nature should\npossess her actual constitution will be wise and superior to all\nflattery and calamity; he will be equal in dignity to Zeus. He who has\nany less conformable and more determinate interests will be a fool and a\nworm.\n\nThe wise man will, meantime, perform all the offices of nature; he will\nlend his body and his mind to her predestined labours. For pantheistic\nmorals, though post-rational, are not ascetic. In dislodging the natural\nideal from the mind, they put in its place not its supernatural\nexaggeration but a curtailment of it inspired by despair. The passions\nare not renounced on the ground that they impede salvation or some\nvisionary ecstasy; they are merely chilled by the sense that their\ndefeat, when actual, is also desirable. As all the gods have been\nreduced to one substance or law, so all human treasures are reduced to\none privilege\u2014that of fortitude. You can always consent, and by a\nforced and perpetual conformity to nature lift yourself above all\nvicissitudes. Those tender and tentative ideals which nature really\nbreeds, and which fill her with imperfect but genuine excellences, you\nwill be too stolid to perceive or too proud to share.\n\nThus the hereditary taint of mythology, the poison of lies, survived in\nthe two forms of philosophic paganism which it concerns us to study. In\nPlato\u2019s school, myth helped to hypostasise the ideas and, by divorcing\nthem from their natural basis, to deprive them of their significance and\nmoral function, and render the worship of them superstitious. In the\nStoa the surviving mythological element turned nature, when her unity\nand order had been perceived, into an idol; so that the worship of her\nblasted all humane and plastic ideals and set men upon a vain and\nfanatical self-denial. Both philosophies were post-rational, as befitted\na decadent age and as their rival and heir, Christianity, was also.\n\n[Sidenote: Parallel movements in Christianity.]\n\nChristianity had already within itself a similar duality; being a\ndoctrine of redemption, like neo-Platonism, it tended to deny the\nnatural values of this life; but, being a doctrine of creation and\nprovidential government, comparable in a way to the Stoic, it had an\nineradicable inward tendency toward pantheism, and toward a consequent\nacceptance of both the goods and evils of this world as sanctioned and\nrequired by providence.\n\n[Sidenote: Hebraism, if philosophical, must be pantheistic.]\n\nThe horror which pantheism has always inspired in the Church is like\nthat which materialism inspires in sentimental idealists; they attack it\ncontinually, not so much because anybody else defends it as because they\nfeel it to be implied unmistakably in half their own tenets. The\nnon-Platonic half of Christian theology, the Mosaic half, is bound to\nbecome pantheism in the hands of a philosopher. The Jews were not\npantheists themselves, because they never speculated on the relation\nwhich omnipotence stood in to natural forces and human acts. They\nconceived Jehovah\u2019s omnipotence dramatically, as they conceived\neverything. He might pounce upon anything and anybody; he might subvert\nor play with the laws of nature; he might laugh at men\u2019s devices, and\nturn them to his own ends; his craft and energy could not but succeed in\nevery instance; but that was not to say that men and nature had no will\nof their own, and did not proceed naturally on their respective ways\nwhen Jehovah happened to be busy elsewhere. So soon, however, as this\ndramatic sort of omnipotence was made systematic by dialectic, so soon\nas the doctrines of creation, omniscience, and providential government\nwere taken absolutely, pantheism was clearly involved. The consequences\nto moral philosophy were truly appalling, for then the sins God punished\nso signally were due to his own contrivance. The fervours of his saints,\nthe fate of his chosen people and holy temples, became nothing but a\npuppet-show in his ironical self-consciousness.\n\n[Sidenote: Pantheism, even when psychic, ignores ideals.]\n\nThe strangest part of this system, or what would seem so if its\nantecedents were not known, is that it is only half-conscious of its\nphysical temper, and in calling itself an idealism (because it makes\nperception and will the substance of their objects), thinks itself an\nexpression of human aspirations. This illusion has deep historical\nroots. It is the last stage of a mythical philosophy which has been\nearnestly criticising its metaphors, on the assumption that they were\nnot metaphorical; whereby it has stripped them of all significance and\nreduced them at last to the bare principle of inversion. Nothing is any\nlonger idealised, yet all is still called an idealism. A myth is an\ninverted image of things, wherein their moral effects are turned into\ntheir dramatic antecedents\u2014as when the wind\u2019s rudeness is turned into\nhis anger. When the natural basis of moral life is not understood, myth\nis the only way of expressing it theoretically, as eyes too weak to see\nthe sun face to face may, as Plato says, for a time study its image\nmirrored in pools, and, as we may add, inverted there. So the good,\nwhich in itself is spiritual only, is transposed into a natural power.\nAt first this amounts to an amiable misrepresentation of natural things;\nthe gods inhabit Mount Olympus and the Elysian Fields are not far west\nof Cadiz. With the advance of geography the mythical facts recede, and\nin a cosmography like Hegel\u2019s, for instance, they have disappeared\naltogether; but there remain the mythical values once ascribed to those\nideal objects but now transferred and fettered to the sad realities that\nhave appeared in their place. The titles of honour once bestowed on a\nfabled world are thus applied to the real world by right of inheritance.\n\n[Sidenote: Truly divine action limited to what makes for the good.]\n\nNothing could be clearer than the grounds on which pious men in the\nbeginning recognise divine agencies. We see, they say, the hand of God\nin our lives. He has saved us from dangers, he has comforted us in\nsorrow. He has blessed us with the treasures of life, of intelligence,\nof affection. He has set around us a beautiful world, and one still more\nbeautiful within us. Pondering all these blessings, we are convinced\nthat he is mighty in the world and will know how to make all things good\nto those who trust in him. In other words, pious men discern God in the\nexcellence of things. If all were well, as they hope it may some day be,\nGod would henceforth be present in everything. While good is mixed with\nevil, he is active in the good alone. The pleasantness of life, the\npreciousness of human possessions, the beauty and promise of the world,\nare proof of God\u2019s power; so is the stilling of tempests and the\nforgiveness of sins. But the sin itself and the tempest, which\noptimistic theology has to attribute just as much to God\u2019s purposes, are\nnot attributed to him at all by pious feeling, but rather to his\nenemies. In spite of centuries wasted in preaching God\u2019s omnipotence,\nhis omnipotence is contradicted by every Christian judgment and every\nChristian prayer. If the most pious of nations is engaged in war, and\nsuffers a great accidental disaster, such as it might expect to be safe\nfrom, _Te deums_ are sung for those that were saved and _Requiems_ for\nthose that perished. God\u2019s office, in both cases, is to save only. No\none seriously imagines that Providence does more than _govern_\u2014that is,\nwatch over and incidentally modify the natural course of affairs\u2014not\neven in the other world, if fortunes are still changeable there.\n\n[Sidenote: Need of an opposing principle.]\n\nThe criterion of divine activity could not be placed more squarely and\nunequivocally in the good. Plato and Aristotle are not in this respect\nbetter moralists than is an unsophisticated piety. God is the ideal, and\nwhat manifests the ideal manifests God. Are you confident of the\npermanence and triumph of the things you prize? Then you trust in God,\nyou live in the consciousness of his presence. The proof and measure of\nrationality in the world, and of God\u2019s power over it, is the extent of\nhuman satisfactions. In hell, good people would disbelieve in God, and\nit is impious of the trembling devils to believe in him there. The\nexistence of any evil\u2014and if evil is felt it exists, for experience is\nits locus\u2014is a proof that some accident has intruded into God\u2019s works.\nIf that loyalty to the good, which is the prerequisite of rationality,\nis to remain standing, we must admit into the world, while it contains\nanything practically evil, a principle, however minimised, which is not\nrational. This irrational principle may be inertia in matter, accidental\nperversity in the will, or ultimate conflict of interests. Somehow an\nelement of resistance to the rational order must be introduced\nsomewhere. And immediately, in order to distinguish the part furnished\nby reason from its irrational alloy, we must find some practical test;\nfor if we are to show that there is a great and triumphant rationality\nin the world, in spite of irrational accidents and brute opposition, we\nmust frame an idea of rationality different from that of being. It will\nno longer do to say, with the optimists, the rational is the real, the\nreal is the rational. For we wish to make a distinction, in order to\nmaintain our loyalty to the good, and not to eviscerate the idea of\nreason by emptying it of its essential meaning, which is action\naddressed to the good and thought envisaging the ideal. To pious\nfeeling, the free-will of creatures, their power, active or passive, of\nindependent origination, is the explanation of all defects; and\neverything which is not helpful to men\u2019s purposes must be assigned to\ntheir own irrationality as its cause. Herein lies the explanation of\nthat paradox in religious feeling which attributes sin to the free will,\nbut repentance and every good work to divine grace. Physically\nconsidered\u2014as theology must consider the matter\u2014both acts and both\nvolitions are equally necessary and involved in the universal order; but\npractical religion calls divine only what makes for the good. Whence it\nfollows at once that, both within and without us, what is done well is\nGod\u2019s doing, and what is done ill is not.\n\n[Sidenote: The standard of value is human.]\n\nThus what we may call the practical or Hebrew theory of cosmic\nrationality betrays in plainest possible manner that reason is primarily\na function of human nature. Reason dwells in the world in so far as the\nworld is good, and the world is good in so far as it supports the wills\nit generates\u2014the excellence of each creature, the value of its life,\nand the satisfaction of its ultimate desires. Thus Hebrew optimism could\nbe moral because, although it asserted in a sense the morality of the\nuniverse, it asserted this only by virtue of a belief that the universe\nsupported human ideals. Undoubtedly much insistence on the greatness of\nthat power which made for righteousness was in danger of passing over\ninto idolatry of greatness and power, for whatever they may make. Yet\nthese relapses into Nature-worship are the more rare in that the Jews\nwere not a speculative people, and had in the end to endow even Job with\nhis worldly goods in order to rationalise his constancy. It was only by\na scandalous heresy that Spinoza could so change the idea of God as to\nmake him indifferent to his creatures; and this transformation, in spite\nof the mystic and stoical piety of its author, passed very justly for\natheism; for that divine government and policy had been denied by which\nalone God was made manifest to the Hebrews.\n\nIf Job\u2019s reward seems to us unworthy, we must remember that we have\nsince passed through the discipline of an extreme moral idealism,\nthrough a religion of sacrifice and sorrow. We should not confuse the\nprinciple that virtue must somehow secure the highest good (for what\nshould not secure it would not be virtue) with the gross symbols by\nwhich the highest good might be expressed at Jerusalem. That Job should\nrecover a thousand she-asses may seem to us a poor sop for his long\nanguish of mind and body, and we may hardly agree with him in finding\nhis new set of children just as good as the old. Yet if fidelity had led\nto no good end, if it had not somehow brought happiness to somebody,\nthat fidelity would have been folly. There is a noble folly which\nconsists in pushing a principle usually beneficent to such lengths as to\nrender it pernicious; and the pertinacity of Job would have been a case\nof such noble folly if we were not somehow assured of its ultimate\nfruits. In Christianity we have the same principle, save that the fruits\nof virtue are more spiritually conceived; they are inward peace, the\nsilence of the passions, the possession of truth, and the love of God\nand of our fellows. This is a different conception of happiness,\nincomplete, perhaps, in a different direction. But were even this\nattenuated happiness impossible to realise, all rationality would vanish\nnot merely from Christian charity and discipline, but from the whole\nChristian theory of creation, redemption, and judgment. Without some\nwindow open to heaven, religion would be more fantastic than worldliness\nwithout being less irrational and vain.\n\n[Sidenote: Hope for happiness makes belief in God.]\n\nRevelation has intervened to bring about a conception of the highest\ngood which never could have been derived from an impartial synthesis of\nhuman interests. The influence of great personalities and the fanaticism\nof peculiar times and races have joined in imposing such variations from\nthe natural ideal. The rationality of the world, as Christianity\nconceived it, is due to the plan of salvation; and the satisfaction of\nhuman nature, however purified and developed, is what salvation means.\nIf an ascetic ideal could for a moment seem acceptable, it was because\nthe decadence and sophistication of the world had produced a great\ndespair in all noble minds; and they thought it better that an eye or a\nhand which had offended should perish, and that they should enter blind\nand maimed into the kingdom of heaven, than that, whole and seeing, they\nshould remain for ever in hell-fire. Supernatural, then, as the ideal\nmight seem, and imposed on human nature from above, it was yet accepted\nonly because nothing else, in that state of conscience and imagination,\ncould revive hope; nothing else seemed to offer an escape from the\nheart\u2019s corruption and weariness into a new existence.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IX\n\nTHE CHRISTIAN COMPROMISE\n\n\nThe human spirit has not passed in historical times through a more\ncritical situation or a greater revulsion than that involved in\naccepting Christianity. Was this event favourable to the life of Reason?\nWas it a progress in competence, understanding, and happiness? Any\nabsolute answer would be misleading. Christianity did not come to\ndestroy; the ancient springs were dry already, and for two or three\ncenturies unmistakable signs of decadence had appeared in every sphere,\nnot least in that of religion and philosophy. Christianity was a\nreconstruction out of ruins. In the new world competence could only be\nindirect, understanding mythical, happiness surreptitious; but all three\nsubsisted, and it was Christianity that gave them their necessary\ndisguises.\n\n[Sidenote: Suspense between hope and disillusion.]\n\nThe young West had failed in its first great experiment, for, though\nclassic virtue and beauty and a great classic state subsisted, the force\nthat had created them was spent. Was it possible to try again? Was it\nnecessary to sit down, like the Orient, in perpetual flux and eternal\napathy? This question was answered by Christianity in a way, under the\ncircumstances, extremely happy. The Gospel, on which Christianity was\nfounded, had drawn a very sharp contrast between this world and the\nkingdom of heaven\u2014a phrase admitting many interpretations. From the\nJewish millennium or a celestial paradise it could shift its sense to\nmean the invisible Church, or even the inner life of each mystical\nspirit. Platonic philosophy, to which patristic theology was allied, had\nmade a contrast not less extreme between sense and spirit, between life\nin time and absorption in eternity. Armed with this double dualism,\nChristianity could preach both renunciation and hope, both asceticism\nand action, both the misery of life and the blessing of creation. It\neven enshrined the two attitudes in its dogma, uniting the Jewish\ndoctrine of a divine Creator and Governor of this world with that of a\ndivine Redeemer to lead us into another. Persons were not lacking to\nperceive the contradiction inherent in such an eclecticism; and it was\nthe Gnostic or neo-Platonic party, which denied creation and taught a\npure asceticism, that had the best of the argument. The West, however,\nwould not yield to their logic. It might, in an hour of trouble and\nweakness, make concessions to quietism and accept the cross, but it\nwould not suffer the naturalistic note to die out altogether. It\npreferred an inconsistency, which it hardly perceived, to a complete\nsurrender of its instincts. It settled down to the conviction that God\ncreated the world _and_ redeemed it; that the soul is naturally good\n_and_ needs salvation.\n\n[Sidenote: Superficial solution.]\n\nThis contradiction can be explained exoterically by saying that time and\nchanged circumstances separate the two situations: having made the world\nperfect, God redeems it after it has become corrupt; and whereas all\nthings are naturally good, they may by accident lose their excellence,\nand need to have it restored. There is, however, an esoteric side to the\nmatter. A soul that may be redeemed, a will that may look forward to a\nsituation in which its action will not be vain or sinful, is one that in\ntruth has never sinned; it has merely been thwarted. Its ambition is\nrational, and what its heart desires is essentially good and ideal. So\nthat the whole classic attitude, the faith in action, art, and\nintellect, is preserved under this protecting cuticle of dogma; nothing\nwas needed but a little courage, and circumstances somewhat more\nfavourable, for the natural man to assert himself again. A people\nbelieving in the resurrection of the flesh in heaven will not be averse\nto a reawakening of the mind on earth.\n\n[Sidenote: But from what shall we be redeemed?]\n\nAnother pitfall, however, opens here. These contrasted doctrines may\nchange r\u00f4les. So long as by redemption we understand, in the mystic way,\nexaltation above finitude and existence, because all particularity is\nsin, to be redeemed is to abandon the Life of Reason; but redemption\nmight mean extrication from untoward accidents, so that a rational life\nmight be led under right conditions. Instead of being like Buddha, the\nredeemer might be like Prometheus. In that case, however, the creator\nwould become like Zeus\u2014a tyrant will responsible for our conditions\nrather than expressive of our ideal. The doctrine of creation would\nbecome pantheism and that of redemption, formerly ascetic, would\nrepresent struggling humanity.\n\n[Sidenote: Typical attitude of St. Augustine.]\n\nThe seething of these potent and ambiguous elements can be studied\nnowhere better than in Saint Augustine. He is a more genial and complete\nrepresentative of Christianity than any of the Greek Fathers, in whom\nthe Hebraic and Roman vitality was comparatively absent. Philosophy was\nonly one phase of Augustine\u2019s genius; with him it was an instrument of\nzeal and a stepping-stone to salvation. Scarcely had it been born out of\nrhetoric when it was smothered in authority. Yet even in that precarious\nand episodic form it acquired a wonderful sweep, depth, and technical\nelaboration. He stands at the watershed of history, looking over either\nland; his invectives teach us almost as much of paganism and heresy as\nhis exhortations do of Catholicism. To Greek subtlety he joins Hebrew\nfervour and monkish intolerance; he has a Latin amplitude and (it must\nbe confessed) coarseness of feeling; but above all he is the illumined,\nenraptured, forgiven saint. In him theology, however speculative,\nremains a vehicle for living piety; and while he has, perhaps, done more\nthan any other man to materialise Christianity, no one was ever more\ntruly filled with its spirit.\n\n[Sidenote: He achieves Platonism.]\n\nSaint Augustine was a thorough Platonist, but to reach that position he\nhad to pass in his youth through severe mental struggles. The difficult\ntriumph over the sensuous imagination by which he attained the\nconception of intelligible objects was won only after long discipline\nand much reading of Platonising philosophers. Every reality seemed to\nhim at first an object of sense: God, if he existed, must be\nperceptible, for to Saint Augustine\u2019s mind also, at this early and\nsensuous stage of its development, _esse_ was _percipi_. He might never\nhave worked himself loose from these limitations, with which his vivid\nfancy and not too delicate eloquence might easily have been satisfied,\nhad it not been for his preoccupation with theology. God must somehow be\nconceived; for no one in that age of religious need and of theological\npassion felt both more intensely than Saint Augustine. If sensible\nobjects alone were real, God must be somewhere discoverable in space; he\nmust either have a body like the human, or be the body of the universe,\nor some subtler body permeating and moving all the rest.\n\nThese conceptions all offered serious dialectical difficulties, and,\nwhat was more to the point, they did not satisfy the religious and\nidealistic instinct which the whole movement of Saint Augustine\u2019s mind\nobeyed. So he pressed his inquiries farther. At length meditation, and\nmore, perhaps, that experience of the flux and vanity of natural things\non which Plato himself had built his heaven of ideas, persuaded him that\nreality and substantiality, in any eulogistic sense, must belong rather\nto the imperceptible and eternal. Only that which is never an object of\nsense or experience can be the root and principle of experience and\nsense. Only the invisible and changeless can be the substance of a\nmoving show. God could now be apprehended and believed in precisely\nbecause he was essentially invisible: had he anywhere appeared he could\nnot be the principle of all appearance; had he had a body and a _locus_\nin the universe, he could not have been its spiritual creator. The\nultimate objects of human knowledge were accordingly ideas, not things;\nprinciples reached by the intellect, not objects by any possibility\noffered to sense. The methodological concepts of science, by which we\npass from fact to fact and from past perception to future, did not\nattract Augustine\u2019s attention. He admitted, it is true, that there was a\nsubordinate, and to him apparently uninteresting, region governed by\n\u201c_certissima ratione vel experientia_,\u201d and he even wished science to be\nallowed a free hand within that empirical and logical sphere. A mystic\nand allegorical interpretation of Scripture was to be invoked to avoid\nthe puerilities into which any literal interpretation\u2014of the creation\nin six days, for instance\u2014would be sure to run. Unbelievers would thus\nnot be scandalised by mythical dogmas \u201cconcerning things which they\nmight have actually experienced, or discovered by sure calculation.\u201d\n\nScience was to have its way in the field of calculable experience; that\nregion could be the more readily surrendered by Augustine because his\nattention was henceforth held by those ideal objects which he had so\nlaboriously come to conceive. These were concepts of the contemplative\nreason or imagination, which envisages natures and eternal essences\nbehind the variations of experience, essences which at first receive\nnames, becoming thus the centres of rational discourse, then acquire\nvalues, becoming guides to action and measures of achievement, and\nfinally attract unconditional worship, being regarded as the first\ncauses and ultimate goals of all existence and aspiration.\n\n[Sidenote: He identifies it with Christianity.]\n\nThis purely Platonic philosophy, however, was not to stand alone. Like\nevery phase of Saint Augustine\u2019s speculation, it came, as we have said,\nto buttress or express some religious belief. But it is a proof of his\ndepth and purity of soul that his searching philosophic intuition did\nmore to spiritualise the dogmas he accepted from others than these\ndogmas could do to denaturalise his spontaneous philosophy. Platonic\nideas had by that time long lost their moral and representative value,\ntheir Socratic significance. They had become ontological entities,\nwhereas originally they had represented the rational functions of life.\nThis hypostasis of the rational, by which the rational abdicates its\nmeaning in the effort to acquire a metaphysical existence, had already\nbeen carried to its extreme by the Neo-Platonists. But Saint Augustine,\nwhile helpless as a philosopher to resist that speculative realism, was\nable as a Christian to infuse into those dead concepts some of the human\nblood which had originally quickened them. Metaphysics had turned all\nhuman interests into mythical beings, and now religion, without at all\ncondemning or understanding that transformation, was going to adopt\nthose mythical beings and turn them again into moral influences. In\nSaint Augustine\u2019s mind, fed as it was by the Psalmist, the Platonic\nfigments became the Christian God, the Christian Church, and the\nChristian soul, and thus acquired an even subtler moral fragrance than\nthat which they had lost when they were uprooted by a visionary\nphilosophy from the soil of Greek culture.\n\n[Sidenote: God the good.]\n\nSaint Augustine\u2019s way of conceiving God is an excellent illustration of\nthe power, inherent in his religious genius and sincerity, of giving\nlife and validity to ideas which he was obliged to borrow in part from a\nfabulous tradition and in part from a petrified metaphysics. God, to\nhim, was simply the ideal eternal object of human thought and love. All\nideation on an intellectual plane was a vague perception of the divine\nessence. \u201cThe rational soul understands God, for it understands what\nexists always unchanged.\u201d ... \u201cGod is happiness; and in him and from\nhim and through him all things are happy which are happy at all. God is\nthe good and the beautiful.\u201d He was never tired of telling us that God\nis not true but the truth _(i.e._, the ideal object of thought in any\nsphere), not good but the good _(i.e._, the ideal object of will in all\nits rational manifestations). In other words, whenever a man, reflecting\non his experience, conceived the better or the best, the perfect and the\neternal, he conceived God, inadequately, of course, yet essentially,\nbecause God signified the comprehensive ideal of all the perfections\nwhich the human spirit could behold in itself or in its objects. Of this\ndivine essence, accordingly, every interesting thing was a\nmanifestation; all virtue and beauty were parcels of it, tokens of its\nsuperabundant grace. Hence the inexhaustible passion of Saint Augustine\ntoward his God; hence the sweetness of that endless colloquy in prayer\ninto which he was continually relapsing, a passion and a sweetness which\nno one will understand to whom God is primarily a natural power and only\naccidentally a moral ideal.\n\n[Sidenote: Primary and secondary religion.]\n\nHerein lies the chief difference between those in whom religion is\nspontaneous and primary\u2014a very few\u2014those in whom it is imitative and\nsecondary. To the former, divine things are inward values, projected by\nchance into images furnished by poetic tradition or by external nature,\nwhile to the latter, divine things are in the first instance objective\nfactors of nature or of social tradition, although they have come,\nperhaps, to possess some point of contact with the interests of the\ninner life on account of the supposed physical influence which those\nsuper-human entities have over human fortunes. In a word, theology, for\nthose whose religion is secondary, is simply a false physics, a doctrine\nabout eventual experience not founded on the experience of the past.\nSuch a false physics, however, is soon discredited by events; it does\nnot require much experience or much shrewdness to discover that\nsupernatural beings and laws are without the empirical efficacy which\nwas attributed to them. True physics and true history must always tend,\nin enlightened minds, to supplant those misinterpreted religious\ntraditions. Therefore, those whose reflection or sentiment does not\nfurnish them with a key to the moral symbolism and poetic validity\nunderlying theological ideas, if they apply their intelligence to the\nsubject at all, and care to be sincere, will very soon come to regard\nreligion as a delusion. Where religion is primary, however, all that\nworldly dread of fraud and illusion becomes irrelevant, as it is\nirrelevant to an artist\u2019s pleasure to be warned that the beauty he\nexpresses has no objective existence, or as it would be irrelevant to a\nmathematician\u2019s reasoning to suspect that Pythagoras was a myth and his\nsupposed philosophy an abracadabra. To the religious man religion is\ninwardly justified. God has no need of natural or logical witnesses, but\nspeaks himself within the heart, being indeed that ineffable attraction\nwhich dwells in whatever is good and beautiful, and that persuasive\nvisitation of the soul by the eternal and incorruptible by which she\nfeels herself purified, rescued from mortality, and given an inheritance\nin the truth. This is precisely what Saint Augustine knew and felt with\nremarkable clearness and persistence, and what he expressed unmistakably\nby saying that every intellectual perception is knowledge of God or has\nGod\u2019s nature for its object.\n\nProofs of the existence of God are therefore not needed, since his\nexistence is in one sense obvious and in another of no religious\ninterest. It is obvious in the sense that the ideal is a term of moral\nexperience, and that truth, goodness, and beauty are inevitably\nenvisaged by any one whose life has in some measure a rational quality.\nIt is of no religious interest in the sense that perhaps some physical\nor dynamic absolute might be scientifically discoverable in the dark\nentrails of nature or of mind. The great difference between religion and\nmetaphysics is that religion looks for God at the top of life and\nmetaphysics at the bottom; a fact which explains why metaphysics has\nsuch difficulty in finding God, while religion has never lost him.\n\nThis brings us to the grand characteristic and contradiction of Saint\nAugustine\u2019s philosophy, a characteristic which can be best studied,\nperhaps, in him, although it has been inherited by all Christian\ntheology and was already present in Stoic and Platonic speculation,\nwhen the latter had lost its ethical moorings. This is the idea that the\nsame God who is the ideal of human aspiration is also the creator of the\nuniverse and its only primary substance.\n\n[Sidenote: Ambiguous efficacy of the good in Plato.]\n\nIf Plato, when he wrote that fine and profound passage in the sixth book\nof the Republic, where he says that the good is the cause of all\nintelligence in the mind and of all intelligibility in the object, and\nindeed the principle of all essence and existence\u2014if Plato could have\nforeseen what his oracular hyperbole was to breed in the world, we may\nwell believe that he would have expunged it from his pages with the same\nseverity with which he banished the poets from his State. In the lips of\nSocrates, and at that juncture in the argument of the Republic, those\nsentences have a legitimate meaning. The good is the principle of\nbenefit, and the philosophers who are to rule the state will not be\nalienated by their contemplations from practical wisdom, seeing that the\nidea of the good\u2014_i.e._, of the advantageous, profitable, and\nbeneficial\u2014is the highest concept of the whole dialectic, that in\nreference to which all other ideas have place and significance. If we\nventured to extend the interpretation of the passage, retaining its\nspirit, into fields where we have more knowledge than Plato could have,\nwe might say that the principle of the good generates essence and\nexistence, in the sense that all natural organs have functions and\nutilities by which they establish themselves in the world, and that the\nsystem of these useful functions is the true essence or idea of any\nliving thing. But the Socratic origin and sense of such a passage as\nthis, and of others (in the Tim\u00e6us, for instance) allied to it, was soon\nlost in the headlong idolatry which took possession of the neo-Platonic\nschool; and it was through this medium that Saint Augustine received his\nPlatonic inspiration. The good no longer meant, as it did to Plato, the\nprinciple of benefit everywhere, but it meant the good Being; and this,\nfor a Christian, could naturally be none other than God; so that the\nidea that the good was the creator of all essence and existence now\nassumed a marvellously Mosaic significance. Here was one of those bits\nof primeval revelation which, it was explained, had survived in the\nheathen world. The hypostasis of moral conceptions, then, and of the\nidea of the good in particular, led up from the Platonic side to the\ndoctrine of creation.\n\n[Sidenote: Ambiguous goodness of the creator in Job.]\n\nThe history of the conception among the Jews was entirely different, the\nelement of goodness in the creator being there adventitious and the\nelement of power original. Jehovah for Job was a universal force,\njustified primarily by his omnipotence; but this physical authority\nwould in the end, he hoped, be partly rationalised and made to clash\nless scandalously with the authority of justice. Among the Greeks, as\nwas to be expected, the idea of justice was more independent and\nentire; but once named and enshrined, that divinity, too, tended to\nabsoluteness, and could be confused with the physical basis of\nexistence. In the Stoic philosophy the latter actually gained the upper\nhand, and the problem of Job reappeared on the horizon. It did not rise\ninto painful prominence, however, until Christian times, when absolute\nmoral perfection and absolute physical efficacy were predicated of God\nwith equal emphasis, if not among the people who never have conceived\nGod as either perfectly good or entirely omnipotent, at least among the\ntheologians. If not all felt the contradiction with equal acuteness, the\nreason doubtless was that a large part of their thought was perfunctory\nand merely apologetic: they did not quite mean what they said when they\nspoke of perfect goodness; and we shall see how Saint Augustine himself,\nwhen reduced to extremities, surrendered his loyalty to the moral ideal\nrather than reconsider his traditional premisses.\n\n[Sidenote: The Manicheans.]\n\nHow tenaciously, however, he clung to the moral in the religious, we can\nsee by the difficulty he had in separating himself from the Manicheans.\nThe Manicheans admitted two absolutes, the essence of the one being\ngoodness and of the other badness. This system was logically weak,\nbecause these absolutes were in the first place two, which is one\ncontradiction, and in the second place relative, which is another. But\nin spite of the pitfalls into which the Manicheans were betrayed by\ntheir pursuit of metaphysical absolutes, they were supported by a moral\nintuition of great truth and importance. They saw that an essentially\ngood principle could not have essential evil for its effect. These moral\nterms are, we may ourselves feel sure, relative to existence and to\nactual impulse, and it may accordingly be always misleading to make them\nthe essence of metaphysical realities: good and bad may be not\nexistences but qualities which existences have only in relation to\ndemands in themselves or in one another. Yet if we once launch, as many\nmetaphysicians would have us do, into the hypostasis of qualities and\nrelations, it is certainly better and more honest to make contradictory\nqualities into opposed entities, and not to render our metaphysical\nworld unmeaning as well as fictitious by peopling it with concepts in\nwhich the most important categories of life are submerged and\ninvalidated. Evil may be no more a metaphysical existence than good is;\nboth are undoubtedly mere terms for vital utilities and impediments; but\nif we are to indulge in mythology at all, it is better that our\nmythology should do symbolic justice to experience and should represent\nby contrasted figures the ineradicable practical difference between the\nbetter and the worse, the beautiful and the ugly, the trustworthy and\nthe fallacious. To discriminate between these things in practice is\nwisdom, and it should be the part of wisdom to discriminate between them\nin theory.\n\nThe Manicheans accordingly attributed what is good in the world to one\npower and what is bad to another. The fable is transparent enough, and\nwe, who have only just learned to smile at a personal devil, may affect\nto wonder that any one should ever have taken it literally. But in an\nage when the assertive imagination was unchecked by any critical sense,\nsuch a device at least avoided the scandal of attributing all the evils\nand sins of this world to a principle essentially inviolate and pure. By\navoiding what must have seemed a blasphemy to Saint Augustine, as to\nevery one whose speculation was still relevant to his conscience and to\nhis practical idealism, the Manicheans thus prevailed on many to\noverlook the contradictions which their system developed so soon as its\nfigments were projected into the sphere of absolute existences.\n\n[Sidenote: All things good by nature.]\n\nThe horror with which an idealistic youth at first views the truculence\nof nature and the turpitude of worldly life is capable of being softened\nby experience. Time subdues our initial preferences by showing us the\ncomplexity of moral relations in this world, and by extending our\nimaginative sympathy to forms of existence and passion at first\nrepulsive, which from new and ultra-personal points of view may have\ntheir natural sweetness and value. In this way, Saint Augustine was\nultimately brought to appreciate the catholicity and scope of those\nGreek sages who had taught that all being was to itself good, that evil\nwas but the impediment of natural function, and that therefore the\nconception of anything totally or essentially evil was only a petulance\nor exaggeration in moral judgment that took, as it were, the bit in its\nteeth, and turned an incidental conflict of interests into a\nmetaphysical opposition of natures. All definite being is in itself\ncongruous with the true and the good, since its constitution is\nintelligible and its operation is creative of values. Were it not for\nthe limitations of matter and the accidental crowding and conflict of\nlife, all existing natures might subsist and prosper in peace and\nconcord, just as their various ideas live without contradiction in the\nrealm of conceptual truth. We may say of all things, in the words of the\nGospel, that their angels see the face of God. Their ideals are no less\ncases of the good, no less instances of perfection, than is the ideal\nlocked in our private bosom. It is the part of justice and charity to\nrecognise this situation, in view of which we may justly say that evil\nis always relative and subordinate to some constituted nature in itself\na standard of worth, a point of departure for the moral valuation of\neventual changes and of surrounding things. Evil is accordingly\naccidental and unnatural; it follows upon the maladaptation of actions\nto natures and of natures to one another. It can be no just ground for\nthe condemnation of any of those natural essences which only give rise\nto it by their imperfect realisation.\n\nThe Semitic idea of creation could now receive that philosophical\ninterpretation which it so sadly needed. Primordially, and in respect to\nwhat was positive in them, all things might he expressions of the good;\nin their essence and ideal state they might be said to be created by\nGod. For God was the supreme ideal, to which all other goods were\nsubordinate and instrumental; and if we agree to make a cosmogony out of\nmorals and to hypostasise the series of rational ideals, taken in the\ninverse order, into a series of efficient causes, it is clear that the\nhighest good, which is at the end of the moral scale, will now figure as\na first cause at the beginning of the physical sequence. This operation\nis what is recorded and demanded in the doctrine of creation: a doctrine\nwhich would lose its dogmatic force if we allowed either the moral\nideality or the physical efficacy of the creator to drop out of sight.\nIf the moral ideality is sacrificed, we pass to an ordinary pantheism,\nwhile if the physical efficacy is surrendered, we take refuge in a\nnaturalistic idealism of the Aristotelian type, where the good is a\nfunction of things and neither their substance nor their cause.\n\n[Sidenote: The doctrine of creation demands that of the fall.]\n\nTo accept the doctrine of creation, after it had become familiar, was\nnot very hard, because the contradiction it contains could then be set\ndown to our imperfect apprehension. The unintelligibility of matters of\nfact does not lead us to deny them, but merely to study them; and when\nthe creation was accepted as a fact, its unintelligibility became\nmerely a theological problem and a religious mystery, such as no mortal\nphilosophy can be without. But for Saint Augustine the situation was\nwholly different. A doctrine of the creation had to be constructed: the\ndisparate ideas had to be synthesised which posterity was afterward to\nregard as the obvious, if not wholly reconcilable, attributes of the\ndeity. The mystery could not then be recognised; it had to be made. And\nSaint Augustine, with his vital religion, with his spontaneous adoration\nof God the ideal, could not attribute to that ideal unimpeded efficacy\nin the world. To admit that all natures were essentially good might\ndispel the Manichean fancy about an Evil Absolute engaged in single\ncombat with an Absolute Good; but insight into the meaning and the\nnatural conditions of evil could only make its presence more obvious and\nits origin more intimately bound up with the general constitution of the\nworld. Evil is only imperfection; but everything is imperfect. Conflict\nis only maladaptation, but there is maladaptation everywhere. If we\nassume, then, what the doctrine of creation requires, that all things at\nfirst proceeded out of the potency of the good\u2014their matter and form,\ntheir distribution and their energies, being wholly attributable to the\nattraction of the ultimately best\u2014it is clear that some calamity must\nhave immediately supervened by which the fountains of life were defiled,\nthe strength of the ideal principle in living things weakened, and the\nmortal conflict instituted which not only condemns all existent things\nultimately to perish, but hardly allows them, even while they painfully\nendure, to be truly and adequately themselves.\n\nOriginal sin, with the fall of the angels and of man for its mythical\nground, thus enters into the inmost web of Augustinian philosophy. This\nfact cannot be too much insisted upon, for only by the immediate\nintroduction of original sin into the history of the world could a man\nto whom God was still a moral term believe at all in the natural and\nfundamental efficacy of God in the cosmos. The doctrine of the fall made\nit possible for Saint Augustine to accept the doctrine of the creation.\nBoth belonged to the same mythical region in which the moral values of\nlife were made to figure as metaphysical agents; but when once the\nmetaphysical agency of the highest good was admitted into a poetic\ncosmogony, it became imperative to admit also the metaphysical agency of\nsin into it; for otherwise the highest good would be deprived of its\nideal and moral character, would cease to be the entelechy of rational\nlife, and be degraded into a flat principle of description or synthesis\nfor experience and nature as they actually are. God would thus become a\nnatural agent, like the fire of Heraclitus, in which human piety could\ntake an interest only by force of traditional inertia and\nunintelligence, while the continued muttering of the ritual prevented\nmen from awaking to the disappearance of the god. The essence of deity,\nas Augustine was inwardly convinced, was correspondence to human\naspiration, moral perfection, and ideality. God, therefore, as the\nManicheans, with Plato and Aristotle before them, had taught, could be\nthe author of good only; or, to express the same thing in less\nfigurative and misleading language, it was only the good in things that\ncould contribute to our idea of divinity. What was evil must, therefore,\nbe carried up into another concept, must be referred, if you will, to\nanother mythical agent; and this mythical agent in Saint Augustine\u2019s\ntheology was named sin.\n\n[Sidenote: Original sin.]\n\nEverything in the world which obscured the image of the creator or\nrebelled against his commandments (everything, that is, which prevented\nin things the expression of their natural ideals) was due to sin. Sin\nwas responsible for disease of mind and body, for all suffering, for\ndeath, for ignorance, perversity, and dulness. Sin was responsible\u2014so\ntruly _original_ was it\u2014for what was painful and wrong even in the\nanimal kingdom, and sin\u2014such was the paradoxical apex of this inverted\nseries of causes\u2014sin was responsible for sin itself. The insoluble\nproblems of the origin of evil and of freedom, in a world produced in\nits every fibre by omnipotent goodness, can never be understood until we\nremember their origin. They are artificial problems, unknown to\nphilosophy before it betook itself to the literal justification of\nfables in which the objects of rational endeavour were represented as\ncauses of natural existence. The former are internal products of life,\nthe latter its external conditions. When the two are confused we reach\nthe contradiction confronting Saint Augustine, and all who to this day\nhave followed in his steps. The cause of everything must have been the\ncause of sin, yet the principle of good could not be the principle of\nevil. Both propositions were obviously true, and they were contradictory\nonly after the mythical identification of the God which meant the ideal\nof life with the God which meant the forces of nature.\n\n[Sidenote: Forced abandonment of the ideal.]\n\nIt would help us little, in trying to understand these doctrines, to\nwork over the dialectic of them, and to express the contradiction in\nsomewhat veiled terms or according to new pictorial analogies. Good and\nevil, in the context of life, undoubtedly have common causes; but that\nsystem which involves both is for that very reason not an ideal system,\nand to represent it as such is simply to ignore the conscience and the\nupward effort of life. The contradiction can be avoided only by\nrenouncing the meaning of one of the terms; either, that is, by no\nlonger regarding the good as an absolute creator, but merely as a\npartial result or tendency in a living world whose life naturally\ninvolves values, or else by no longer conceiving God as the ideal term\nin man\u2019s own existence. The latter is the solution adopted by\nmetaphysicians generally, and by Saint Augustine himself when hard\npressed by the exigencies of his double allegiance. God, he tells us, is\njust, although not just as man is, _nor as man should be_. In other\nwords, God is to be called just even when he is unjust in the only sense\nin which the word justice has a meaning among men. We are forced, in\nfact, to obscure our moral concepts and make them equivocal in order to\nbe able to apply them to the efficient forces and actual habits of this\nworld. The essence of divinity is no longer moral excellence, but\nontological and dynamic relations to the natural world, so that the love\nof God would have to become, not an exercise of reason and conscience,\nas it naturally was with Saint Augustine, but a mystical intoxication,\nas it was with Spinoza.\n\nThe sad effects of this degradation of God into a physical power are not\nhard to trace in Augustine\u2019s own doctrine and feeling. He became a\nchampion of arbitrary grace and arbitrary predestination to perdition.\nThe eternal damnation of innocents gave him no qualms; and in this we\nmust admire the strength of his logic, since if it is right that there\nshould be wrong at all, there is no particular reason for stickling at\nthe quantity or the enormity of it. And yet there are sentences which\nfor their brutality and sycophancy cannot be read without\npain\u2014sentences inspired by this misguided desire to apologise for the\ncrimes of the universe. \u201cWhy should God not create beings that he\nforeknew were to sin, when indeed in their persons and by their fates\nhe could manifest both what punishment their guilt deserved and what\nfree gifts he might bestow on them by his favour?\u201d \u201cThinking it more\nlordly and better to do well even in the presence of evil than not to\nallow evil to exist at all.\u201d Here the pitiful maxim of doing evil that\ngood may come is robbed of the excuse it finds in human limitations and\nis made the first principle of divine morality. Repellent and contorted\nas these ultimate metaphysical theories may seem, we must not suppose\nthat they destroyed in Saint Augustine that practical and devotional\nidealism which they contradicted: the region of Christian charity is\nfortunately far wider and far nearer home than that of Christian\napologetics. The work of practical redemption went on, while the\ndialectics about the perfection of the universe were forgotten; and\nSaint Augustine never ceased, by a happy inconsistency, to bewail the\nsins and to combat the heresies which his God was stealthily nursing, so\nthat in their melodramatic punishment his glory might be more\nbeautifully manifested.\n\n[Sidenote: The problem among the protestants.]\n\nIt was Saint Augustine, as we know, who, in spite of his fervid\nCatholicism, was the favourite master of both Luther and Calvin. They\nemphasised, however, his more fanatical side, and this very\npredestinarian and absolutist doctrine which he had prevailed on himself\nto accept. Here was the pantheistic leaven doing its work; and\nconcentration of attention on the Old Testament, given the reformers\u2019\ncontroversial and metaphysical habit of thought, could only precipitate\nthe inevitable. While popular piety bubbled up into all sorts of\nemotional and captious sects, each with its pathetic insistence on some\ntext or on some whimsey, but all inwardly inspired by an earnest\nreligious hunger, academic and cultivated Protestantism became every day\nmore pale and rationalistic. Mediocre natures continued to rehearse the\nold platitudes and tread the slippery middle courses of one orthodoxy or\nanother; but distinguished minds could no longer treat such survivals as\nmore than allegories, historic or mythical illustrations of general\nspiritual truths. So Lessing, Goethe, and the idealists in Germany, and\nafter them such lay prophets as Carlyle and Emerson, had for\nChristianity only an inessential respect. They drank their genuine\ninspiration directly from nature, from history, from the total personal\napprehension they might have of life. In them speculative theology\nrediscovered its affinity to neo-Platonism; in other words, Christian\nphilosophy was washed clean of its legendary alloy to become a pure\ncosmic speculation. It was Gnosticism come again in a very different age\nto men in an opposite phase of culture, but with its logic unchanged.\nThe creation was the self-diremption of the infinite into finite\nexpression, the fall was the self-discovery of this finitude, the\nincarnation was the awakening of the finite to its essential infinity;\nand here, a sufficient number of pages having been engrossed, the\nmatter generally hastened to a conclusion; for the redemption with its\nmeans of application, once the central point in Christianity, was less\npliable to the new pantheistic interpretation. Neo-Platonism had indeed\ncultivated asceticism, ecstasies, and a hope of reabsorption into the\nOne; but these things a modern, and especially a Teutonic, temperament\ncould hardly relish; and though absolutism in a sense must\ndiscountenance all finite interests and dissolve all experience, in\ntheory, into a neutral whole, yet this inevitable mysticism remained, as\nwith the Stoics, sternly optimistic, in order to respond to the vital\nsocial forces which Protestantism embodied. The ethical part of\nneo-Platonism and the corresponding Christian doctrine of salvation had\naccordingly to be discarded; for mystical as the northern soul may\ngladly be in speculation, to satisfy its sentimentality, it hardly can\nbe mystical in action, since it has to satisfy also its interest in\nsuccess and its fidelity to instinct.\n\n[Sidenote: Pantheism accepted.]\n\nAn absolutism which thus encourages and sanctions the natural will is\nStoical and pantheistic; it does not, like Indian and Platonic\nabsolutism, seek to suspend the will in view of some supernatural\ndestiny. Pantheism subordinates morally what it finds to be dependent in\nexistence; its religion bids human reason and interest abdicate before\ncosmic forces, instead of standing out, like Buddhism and Christianity,\nfor salvation, for spiritual extrication, from a world which they\nregard as delusive and fallen. The world of German absolutism, like the\nStoic world, was not fallen. On the contrary, it was divinely inspired\nand altogether authoritative; he alone who did not find his place and\nfunction in it was unholy and perverse. This world-worship, despising\nheartily every finite and rational ideal, gives to impulse and fact,\nwhatever they may be, liberty to flourish under a divine warrant. Were\nthe people accepting such a system corrupt, it would sanction their\ncorruption, and thereby, most probably, lead to its own abandonment, for\nit would bring on an ascetic and supernaturalistic reaction by which its\nconvenient sycophancy would be repudiated. But reflection and piety,\neven if their object be material and their worship idolatrous, exalt the\nmind and raise it above vulgar impulse. If you fetch from contemplation\na theoretic license to be base, your contemplative habit itself will\nhave purified you more than your doctrine will have power to degrade you\nafresh, for training affects instinct much more than opinion can.\nAntinomian theory can flourish blamelessly in a puritan soil, for there\nit instinctively remains theoretical. And the Teutonic pantheists are\nfor the most part uncontaminated souls, puritan by training, and only\ninterested in furthering the political and intellectual efficiency of\nthe society in which they live. Their pantheism under these\ncircumstances makes them the more energetic and turns them into\npractical positivists, docile to their social medium and apologists for\nall its conventions. So that, while they write books to disprove\nnaturalism in natural philosophy where it belongs, in morals where\nnaturalism is treason they are themselves naturalists of the most\nuncritical description, forgetting that only the interests of the finite\nsoul introduce such a thing as good and evil into the world, and that\nnature and society are so far from being authoritative and divine that\nthey have no value whatever save by the services they may render to each\nspirit in its specific and genuine ambitions.\n\n[Sidenote: Plainer scorn for the ideal.]\n\nIndeed, this pantheistic subordination of conscience to what happens to\nexist, this optimism annulling every human ideal, betrays its immoral\ntendency very clearly so soon as it descends from theological seminaries\ninto the lay world. Poets at first begin to justify, on its authority,\ntheir favourite passions and to sing the picturesqueness of a\nblood-stained world. \u201cPractical\u201d men follow, deprecating any reflection\nwhich may cast a doubt on the providential justification of their chosen\nactivities, and on the invisible value of the same, however sordid,\nbrutal, or inane they may visibly be. Finally, politicians learn to\ninvoke destiny and the movement of the age to save themselves the\ntrouble of discerning rational ends and to colour their secret\nindifference to the world\u2019s happiness. The follies thus sanctioned\ntheoretically, because they are involved in a perfect world, would\ndoubtless be perpetrated none the less by the same persons had they\nabsorbed in youth a different religion; for conduct is rooted in deep\ninstincts which affect opinion more than opinion can avail to affect\nthem in turn. Yet there is an added indignity in not preserving a clear\nand honest mind, and in quitting the world without having in some\nmeasure understood and appreciated it.\n\n[Sidenote: The price of mythology is superstition.]\n\nPantheism is mythical and has, as we have just seen, all the subversive\npowers of ordinary superstition. It turns the natural world, man\u2019s\nstamping-ground and system of opportunities, into a self-justifying and\nsacred life; it endows the blameless giant with an inhuman soul and then\nworships the monstrous divinity it has fabricated. It thereby encounters\nthe same dilemma that defeats all mythology when it forgets its merely\npoetic office and trespasses upon moral ground. It must either interpret\nthe natural world faithfully, attributing to the mythical deity the sort\nof life that dramatically suits its visible behaviour, or if it\nidealises and moralises the spectacle it must renounce the material\nreality and efficacy of its gods. Either the cosmic power must cover the\nactual goodness and badness in nature impartially, when to worship it\nwould be idolatrous, or it must cover only the better side of nature,\nthose aspects of it which support and resemble human virtue. In the\nlatter case it is human virtue that mythology is formulating in a\ndramatic fiction, a human ideal that is being illustrated by a poet,\nwho selects for the purpose certain phases of nature and experience. By\nthis idealisation the affinity which things often have to man\u2019s\ninterests may be brought out in a striking manner; but their total and\nreal mechanism is no better represented than that of animals in \u00c6sop\u2019s\nfables. To detect the divergence it suffices to open the eyes; and while\nnature may be rationally admired and cherished for so supporting the\nsoul, it is her eventual ministry to man that makes her admirable, not\nher independent magnitude or antiquity. To worship nature as she really\nis, with all her innocent crimes made intentional by our mythology and\nher unfathomable constitution turned into a caricature of barbarian\npassions, is to subvert the order of values and to falsify natural\nphilosophy. Yet this dislocation of reason, both in its conceptions and\nin its allegiance, is the natural outcome of thinking on mythical lines.\nA myth, by turning phenomena into expressions of thought and passion,\nteaches man to look for models and goals of action in that external\nworld where reason can find nothing but instruments and materials.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER X\n\nPIETY\n\n\n[Sidenote: The core of religion not theoretical.]\n\nHebraism is a striking example of a religion tending to discard\nmythology and magic. It was a Hebraising apostle who said that true\nreligion and undefiled was to visit the fatherless and the widow, and do\nother works of mercy. Although a complete religion can hardly remain\nwithout theoretic and ritual expression, we must remember that after all\nreligion has other aspects less conspicuous, perhaps, than its\nmythology, but often more worthy of respect. If religion be, as we have\nassumed, an imaginative symbol for the Life of Reason, it should contain\nnot only symbolic ideas and rites, but also symbolic sentiments and\nduties. And so it everywhere does in a notable fashion. Piety and\nspirituality are phases of religion no less important than mythology, or\nthan those metaphysical spectres with which mythology terminates. It is\ntherefore time we should quite explicitly turn from religious ideas to\nreligious emotions, from imaginative history and science to imaginative\nmorals.\n\nPiety, in its nobler and Roman sense, may be said to mean man\u2019s\nreverent attachment to the sources of his being and the steadying of his\nlife by that attachment. A soul is but the last bubble of a long\nfermentation in the world. If we wish to live associated with permanent\nracial interests we must plant ourselves on a broad historic and human\nfoundation, we must absorb and interpret the past which has made us, so\nthat we may hand down its heritage reinforced, if possible, and in no\nway undermined or denaturalised. This consciousness that the human\nspirit is derived and responsible, that all its functions are heritages\nand trusts, involves a sentiment of gratitude and duty which we may call\npiety.\n\n[Sidenote: Loyalty to the sources of our being.]\n\nThe true objects of piety are, of course, those on which life and its\ninterests really depend: parents first, then family, ancestors, and\ncountry; finally, humanity at large and the whole natural cosmos. But\nhad a lay sentiment toward these forces been fostered by clear knowledge\nof their nature and relation to ourselves, the dutifulness or cosmic\nemotion thereby aroused would have remained purely moral and historical.\nAs science would not in the end admit any myth which was not avowed\npoetry, so it would not admit any piety which was not plain reason and\nduty. But man, in his perplexities and pressing needs, has plunged, once\nfor all, into imaginative courses through which it is our business to\nfollow him, to see if he may not eventually reach his goal even by\nthose by-paths and dark circumlocutions.\n\n[Sidenote: The pious \u00c6neas.]\n\nWhat makes piety an integral part of traditional religions is the fact\nthat moral realities are represented in the popular mind by poetic\nsymbols. The awe inspired by principles so abstract and consequences so\nremote and general is arrested at their conventional name. We have all\nread in boyhood, perhaps with derision, about the pious \u00c6neas. His piety\nmay have seemed to us nothing but a feminine sensibility, a faculty of\nshedding tears on slight provocation. But in truth \u00c6neas\u2019s piety, as\nVirgil or any Roman would have conceived it, lay less in his feelings\nthan in his function and vocation. He was bearing the Palladium of his\ncountry to a new land, to found another Troy, so that the blood and\ntraditions of his ancestors might not perish. His emotions were only the\nappropriate expression of his priestly office. The hero might have been\nstern and stolid enough on his own martial ground, but since he bore the\nold Anchises from the ruins of Ilium he had assumed a sacred mission.\nHenceforth a sacerdotal unction and lyric pathos belonged rightfully to\nhis person. If those embers, so religiously guarded, should by chance\nhave been extinguished, there could never have been a Vestal fire nor\nany Rome. So that all that Virgil and his readers, if they had any\npiety, revered in the world had been hazarded in those legendary\nadventures. It was not \u00c6neas\u2019s own life or private ambition that was at\nstake to justify his emotion. His tenderness, like Virgil\u2019s own, was\nennobled and made heroic by its magnificent and impersonal object. It\nwas truly an epic destiny that inspired both poet and hero.\n\n[Sidenote: An ideal background required.]\n\nIf we look closer, however, we shall see that mythical and magic\nelements were requisite to lend this loftiness to the argument. Had\n\u00c6neas not been Venus\u2019s son, had no prophetic instinct animated him, had\nno Juno been planning the rise of Carthage, how could the future\ndestinies of this expedition have been imported into it, to lift it\nabove some piratical or desperate venture? Colonists passing in our day\nto America or Australia might conceivably carry with them the seeds of\nempires as considerable as Rome\u2019s. But they would go out thinking of\ntheir private livelihood and convenience, breaking or loosening whatever\npious bonds might unite them to the past, and quite irresponsibly laying\nthe foundations for an unknown future. A poet, to raise them to the\nheight of their unwitting function, would have to endow them with second\nsight and a corresponding breadth of soul and purpose. He would need, in\na word, heroic figures and supernatural machinery.\n\nNow, what supernatural machinery and heroic figures do for an epic poet\npiety does for a race. It endows it, through mythical and magic symbols,\nwith something like a vision or representation of its past and future.\nReligion is normally the most traditional and national of things. It\nembodies and localises the racial heritage. Commandments of the law,\nfeasts and fasts, temples and the tombs associated with them, are so\nmany foci of communal life, so many points for the dissemination of\ncustom. The Sabbath, which a critical age might justify on hygienic\ngrounds, is inconceivable without a religious sanction. The craving for\nrest and emotion expressed itself spontaneously in a practice which, as\nit established itself, had to be sanctioned by fables till the recurrent\nholiday, with all its humane and chastening influences, came to be\nestablished on supernatural authority. It was now piety to observe it\nand to commemorate in it the sacred duties and traditions of the race.\nIn this function, of course, lay its true justification, but the\nmythical one had to be assigned, since the diffused prosaic advantages\nof such a practice would never avail to impose it on irrational wills.\nIndeed, to revert to our illustration, had \u00c6neas foreseen in detail the\nwhole history of Rome, would not his faith in his divine mission have\nbeen considerably dashed? The reality, precious and inestimable as on\nthe whole it was to humanity, might well have shocked him by its\ncruelties, shames, and disasters. He would have wished to found only a\nperfect nation and a city eternal indeed. A want of rationality and\nmeasure in the human will, that has not learned to prize small\nbetterments and finite but real goods, compels it to deceive itself\nabout the rewards of life in order to secure them. That celestial\nmission, those heavenly apparitions, those incalculable treasures\ncarried through many a storm, abused \u00c6Eneas\u2019s mind in order to nerve him\nto his real duty. Yet his illusion was merely intellectual. The mission\nundertaken was truly worth carrying out. Piety thus came to bear the\nfruits of philanthropy in an age when the love of man was inconceivable.\nA dull and visionary intellect could hit on no other way of justifying a\ngood instinct.\n\n[Sidenote: Piety accepts natural conditions and present tasks.]\n\n[Sidenote: The leadership of instinct is normal.]\n\nPhilosophers who harbour illusions about the status of intellect in\nnature may feel that this leadership of instinct in moral life is a sort\nof indignity, and that to dwell on it so insistently is to prolong\nsatire without wit. But the leadership of instinct, the conscious\nexpression of mechanism, is not merely a necessity in the Life of\nReason, it is a safeguard. Piety, in spite of its allegories, contains a\nmuch greater wisdom than a half-enlightened and pert intellect can\nattain. Natural beings have natural obligations, and the value of things\nfor them is qualified by distance and by accidental material\nconnections. Intellect would tend to gauge things impersonally by their\nintrinsic values, since intellect is itself a sort of disembodied and\nuniversal function; it would tend to disregard material conditions and\nthat irrational substratum of reason without which reason would have no\norgans and no points of application. Piety, on the contrary, esteems\nthings apart from their intrinsic worth, on account of their relation to\nthe agent\u2019s person and fortune. Yet such esteem is perfectly rational,\npartiality in man\u2019s affections and allegiance being justified by the\npartial nature and local status of his life. Piety is the spirit\u2019s\nacknowledgment of its incarnation. So, in filial and parental affection,\nwhich is piety in an elementary form, there is a moulding of will and\nemotion, a check to irresponsible initiative, in obedience to the facts\nof animal reproduction. Every living creature has an intrinsic and ideal\nworth; he is the centre of actual and yet more of potential interests.\nBut this moral value, which even the remotest observer must recognise in\nboth parent and child, is not the ground of their specific affection for\neach other, which no other mortal is called to feel their regard. This\naffection is based on the incidental and irrational fact that the one\nhas this particular man for a father, and the other that particular man\nfor a son. Yet, considering the animal basis of human life, an\nattachment resting on that circumstance is a necessary and rational\nattachment.\n\nThis physical bond should not, indeed, disturb the intellect in its\nproper function or warp its judgments; you should not, under guise of\ntenderness, become foolish and attribute to your father or child greater\nstature or cleverness or goodness than he actually possesses. To do so\nis a natural foible but no part of piety or true loyalty. It is one\nthing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just\nimagination. Indeed, piety is never so beautiful and touching, never so\nthoroughly humane and invincible, as when it is joined to an impartial\nintellect, conscious of the relativity involved in existence and able to\nelude, through imaginative sympathy, the limits set to personal life by\ncircumstance and private duty. As a man dies nobly when, awaiting his\nown extinction, he is interested to the last in what will continue to be\nthe interests and joys of others, so he is most profoundly pious who\nloves unreservedly a country, friends, and associations which he knows\nvery well to be not the most beautiful on earth, and who, being wholly\ncontent in his personal capacity with his natural conditions, does not\nneed to begrudge other things whatever speculative admiration they may\ntruly deserve. The ideal in this polyglot world, where reason can\nreceive only local and temporal expression, is to understand all\nlanguages and to speak but one, so as to unite, in a manly fashion,\ncomprehension with propriety.\n\nPiety is in a sense pathetic because it involves subordination to\nphysical accident and acceptance of finitude. But it is also noble and\neminently fruitful because, in subsuming a life under the general laws\nof relativity, it meets fate with simple sincerity and labours in\naccordance with the conditions imposed. Since man, though capable of\nabstraction and impartiality, is rooted like a vegetable to one point\nin space and time, and exists by limitation, piety belongs to the\nequilibrium of his being. It resides, so to speak, at his centre of\ngravity, at the heart and magnetic focus of his complex endowment. It\nexercises there the eminently sane function of calling thought home. It\nsaves speculative and emotional life from hurtful extravagance by\nkeeping it traditional and social. Conventional absurdities have at\nleast this advantage, that they may be taken conventionally and may come\nto be, in practice, mere symbols for their uses. Piety is more closely\nlinked with custom than with thought. It exercises an irrational\nsuasion, moralises by contagion, and brings an emotional peace.\n\n[Sidenote: Embodiment essential to spirit.]\n\nPatriotism is another form of piety in which its natural basis and\nrational function may be clearly seen. It is right to prefer our own\nessential to country to all others, because we are children and citizens\nbefore we can be travellers or philosophers. Specific character is a\nnecessary point of origin for universal relations: a pure nothing can\nhave no radiation or scope. It is no accident for the soul to be\nembodied; her very essence is to express and bring to fruition the\nbody\u2019s functions and resources. Its instincts make her ideals and its\nrelations her world. A native country is a sort of second body, another\nenveloping organism to give the will definition. A specific inheritance\nstrengthens the soul. Cosmopolitanism has doubtless its place, because a\nman may well cultivate in himself, and represent in his nation,\naffinities to other peoples, and such assimilation to them as is\ncompatible with personal integrity and clearness of purpose. Plasticity\nto things foreign need not be inconsistent with happiness and utility at\nhome. But happiness and utility are possible nowhere to a man who\nrepresents nothing and who looks out on the world without a plot of his\nown to stand on, either on earth or in heaven. He wanders from place to\nplace, a voluntary exile, always querulous, always uneasy, always alone.\nHis very criticisms express no ideal. His experience is without\nsweetness, without cumulative fruits, and his children, if he has them,\nare without morality. For reason and happiness are like other\nflowers\u2014they wither when plucked.\n\n[Sidenote: Piety to the gods takes form from current ideals.]\n\nThe object most commonly associated with piety is the gods. Popular\nphilosophy, inverting the natural order of ideas, thinks piety to the\ngods the source of morality. But piety, when genuine, is rather an\nincidental expression of morality. Its sources are perfectly natural. A\nvolitional life that reaches the level of reflection is necessarily\nmoral in proportion to the concreteness and harmony of its instincts.\nThe fruits which such harmonious instincts, expressed in consciousness,\nmay eventually bear, fruits which would be the aim of virtue, are not\nreadily imaginable, and the description of them has long ago been\nintrusted to poets and mythologists. Thus the love of God, for example,\nis said to be the root of Christian charity, but is in reality only its\nsymbol. For no man not having a superabundant need and faculty of loving\nreal things could have given a meaning to the phrase, \u201clove of God,\u201d or\nbeen moved by it to any action. History shows in unequivocal fashion\nthat the God loved shifts his character with the shift in his\nworshippers\u2019 real affections. What the psalmist loves is the beauty of\nGod\u2019s house and the place where his glory dwelleth. A priestly quietude\nand pride, a grateful, meditative leisure after the storms of sedition\nand war, some retired unity of mind after the contradictions of the\nworld\u2014this is what the love of God might signify for the levites. Saint\nJohn tells us that he who says he loves God and loves not his neighbour\nis a liar. Here the love of God is an anti-worldly estimation of things\nand persons, a heart set on that kingdom of heaven in which the humble\nand the meek should be exalted. Again, for modern Catholicism the phrase\nhas changed its meaning remarkably and signifies in effect love for\nChrist\u2019s person, because piety has taken a sentimental turn and centred\non maintaining imaginary personal relations with the Saviour. How should\nwe conceive that a single supernatural influence was actually\nresponsible for moral effects themselves so various, and producing, in\nspite of a consecutive tradition, such various notions concerning their\nobject and supposed source?\n\n[Sidenote: The religion of humanity.]\n\nMankind at large is also, to some minds, an object of piety. But this\nreligion of humanity is rather a desideratum than a fact: humanity does\nnot actually appear to anybody in a religious light. The _nihil homine\nhomini utittus_ remains a signal truth, but the collective influence of\nmen and their average nature are far too mixed and ambiguous to fill the\nsoul with veneration. Piety to mankind must be three-fourths pity. There\nare indeed specific human virtues, but they are those necessary to\nexistence, like patience and courage. Supported on these indispensable\nhabits, mankind always carries an indefinite load of misery and vice.\nLife spreads rankly in every wrong and impracticable direction as well\nas in profitable paths, and the slow and groping struggle with its own\nignorance, inertia, and folly, leaves it covered in every age of history\nwith filth and blood. It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man\u2019s\nwretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility.\nThere is a _fond_ of unhappiness in every bosom, but the depths are\nseldom probed; and there is no doubt that sometimes frivolity and\nsometimes sturdy habit helps to keep attention on the surface and to\ncover up the inner void. Certain moralists, without meaning to be\nsatirical, often say that the sovereign cure for unhappiness is work.\nUnhappily, the work they recommend is better fitted to dull pain than to\nremove its cause. It occupies the faculties without rationalising the\nlife. Before mankind could inspire even moderate satisfaction, not to\nspeak of worship, its whole economy would have to be reformed, its\nreproduction regulated, its thoughts cleared up, its affections\nequalised and refined.\n\nTo worship mankind as it is would be to deprive it of what alone makes\nit akin to the divine\u2014its aspiration. For this human dust lives; this\nmisery and crime are dark in contrast to an imagined excellence; they\nare lighted up by a prospect of good. Man is not adorable, but he\nadores, and the object of his adoration may be discovered within him and\nelicited from his own soul. In this sense the religion of humanity is\nthe only religion, all others being sparks and abstracts of the same.\nThe indwelling ideal lends all the gods their divinity. No power, either\nphysical or psychical, has the least moral prerogative nor any just\nplace in religion at all unless it supports and advances the ideal\nnative to the worshipper\u2019s soul. Without moral society between the\nvotary and his god religion is pure idolatry; and even idolatry would be\nimpossible but for the suspicion that somehow the brute force exorcised\nin prayer might help or mar some human undertaking.\n\n[Sidenote: Cosmic piety.]\n\nThere is, finally, a philosophic piety which has the universe for its\nobject. This feeling, common to ancient and modern Stoics, has an\nobvious justification in man\u2019s dependence upon the natural world and in\nits service to many sides of the mind. Such justification of cosmic\npiety is rather obscured than supported by the euphemisms and\nambiguities in which these philosophers usually indulge in their attempt\nto preserve the customary religious unction. For the more they personify\nthe universe and give it the name of God the more they turn it into a\ndevil. The universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and\nimmense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it\nalike impressive. If we dramatise its life and conceive its spirit, we\nare filled with wonder, terror, and amusement, so magnificent is that\nspirit, so prolific, inexorable, grammatical, and dull. Like all animals\nand plants, the cosmos has its own way of doing things, not wholly\nrational nor ideally best, but patient, fatal, and fruitful. Great is\nthis organism of mud and fire, terrible this vast, painful, glorious\nexperiment. Why should we not look on the universe with piety? Is it not\nour substance? Are we made of other clay? All our possibilities lie from\neternity hidden in its bosom. It is the dispenser of all our joys. We\nmay address it without superstitious terrors; it is not wicked. It\nfollows its own habits abstractedly; it can be trusted to be true to its\nword. Society is not impossible between it and us, and since it is the\nsource of all our energies, the home of all our happiness, shall we not\ncling to it and praise it, seeing that it vegetates so grandly and so\nsadly, and that it is not for us to blame it for what, doubtless, it\nnever knew that it did? Where there is such infinite and laborious\npotency there is room for every hope. If we should abstain from judging\na father\u2019s errors or a mother\u2019s foibles, why should we pronounce\nsentence on the ignorant crimes of the universe, which have passed into\nour own blood? The universe is the true Adam, the creation the true\nfall; and as we have never blamed our mythical first parent very much,\nin spite of the disproportionate consequences of his sin, because we\nfelt that he was but human and that we, in his place, might have sinned\ntoo, so we may easily forgive our real ancestor, whose connatural sin we\nare from moment to moment committing, since it is only the necessary\nrashness of venturing to be without fore-knowing the price or the fruits\nof existence.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XI\n\nSPIRITUALITY AND ITS CORRUPTIONS\n\n\n[Sidenote: To be spiritual is to live in view of the ideal.]\n\nIn honouring the sources of life, piety is retrospective. It collects,\nas it were, food for morality, and fortifies it with natural and\nhistoric nutriment. But a digestive and formative principle must exist\nto assimilate this nutriment; a direction and an ideal have to be\nimposed on these gathered forces. So that religion has a second and a\nhigher side, which looks to the end toward which we move as piety looks\nto the conditions of progress and to the sources from which we draw our\nenergies. This aspiring side of religion may be called Spirituality.\nSpirituality is nobler than piety, because what would fulfil our being\nand make it worth having is what alone lends value to that being\u2019s\nsource. Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the\nsubstance and cause of all things. The gift of existence would be\nworthless unless existence was good and supported at least a possible\nhappiness. A man is spiritual when he lives in the presence of the\nideal, and whether he eat or drink does so for the sake of a true and\nultimate good. He is spiritual when he envisages his goal so frankly\nthat his whole material life becomes a transparent and transitive\nvehicle, an instrument which scarcely arrests attention but allows the\nspirit to use it economically and with perfect detachment and freedom.\n\nThere is no need that this ideal should be pompously or mystically\ndescribed. A simple life is its own reward, and continually realises its\nfunction. Though a spiritual man may perfectly well go through intricate\nprocesses of thought and attend to very complex affairs, his single eye,\nfixed on a rational purpose, will simplify morally the natural chaos it\nlooks upon and will remain free. This spiritual mastery is, of course,\nno slashing and forced synthesis of things into a system of philosophy\nwhich, even if it were thinkable, would leave the conceived logical\nmachine without ideality and without responsiveness to actual interests;\nit is rather an inward aim and fixity in affection that knows what to\ntake and what to leave in a world over which it diffuses something of\nits own peace. It threads its way through the landscape with so little\ntemptation to distraction that it can salute every irrelevant thing, as\nSaint Francis did the sun and moon, with courtesy and a certain\naffectionate detachment.\n\n[Sidenote: Spirituality natural.]\n\nSpirituality likes to say, Behold the lilies of the field! For its\nsecret has the same simplicity as their vegetative art; only\nspirituality has succeeded in adding consciousness without confusing\ninstinct. This success, unfortunately so rare in man\u2019s life as to seem\nparadoxical, is its whole achievement. Spirituality ought to have been a\nmatter of course, since conscious existence has inherent value and there\nis no intrinsic ground why it should smother that value in alien\nambitions and servitudes. But spirituality, though so natural and\nobvious a thing, is subject, like the lilies\u2019 beauty, to corruption. I\nknow not what army of microbes evidently invaded from the beginning the\nsoul\u2019s physical basis and devoured its tissues, so that sophistication\nand bad dreams entirely obscured her limpidity.\n\nNone the less, spirituality, or life in the ideal, must be regarded as\nthe fundamental and native type of all life; what deviates from it is\ndisease and incipient dissolution, and is itself what might plausibly\ndemand explanation and evoke surprise. The spiritual man should be quite\nat home in a world made to be used; the firmament is spread over him\nlike a tent for habitation, and sublunary furniture is even more\nobviously to be taken as a convenience. He cannot, indeed, remove\nmountains, but neither does he wish to do so. He comes to endow the\nmountains with a function, and takes them at that, as a painter might\ntake his brushes and canvas. Their beauty, their metals, their\npasturage, their defence\u2014this is what he observes in them and\ncelebrates in his addresses to them. The spiritual man, though not\nashamed to be a beggar, is cognisant of what wealth can do and of what\nit cannot. His unworldliness is true knowledge of the world, not so\nmuch a gaping and busy acquaintance as a quiet comprehension and\nestimation which, while it cannot come without intercourse, can very\nwell lay intercourse aside.\n\n[Sidenote: Primitive consciousness may be spiritual.]\n\nIf the essence of life be spiritual, early examples of life would seem\nto be rather the opposite. But man\u2019s view of primitive consciousness is\nhumanly biassed and relies too much on partial analogies. We conceive an\nanimal\u2019s physical life in the gross, and must then regard the momentary\nfeelings that accompany it as very poor expressions either of its extent\nor conditions. These feelings are, indeed, so many ephemeral lives,\ncontaining no comprehensive view of the animal\u2019s fortunes. They\naccordingly fail to realise our notion of a spiritual human life which\nwould have to be rational and to form some representation of man\u2019s total\nenvironment and interests. But it hardly follows that animal feelings\nare not spiritual in their nature and, on their narrow basis, perfectly\nideal. The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most\nabsolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral. Very likely, if we\ncould revert to an innocent and absorbed view of our early sensations,\nwe should find that each was a little spiritual universe like Dante\u2019s,\nwith its internal hell, purgatory, and heaven. Cut off, as those\nexperiences were, from all vistas and from sympathy with things remote,\nthey would contain a closed circle of interests, a flying glimpse of\neternity. So an infant living in his mystical limbo, without trailing\nin a literal sense any clouds of glory from elsewhere, might well repeat\non a diminutive scale the beatific vision, insomuch as the only function\nof which he was conscious at all might be perfectly fulfilled by him and\nfelt in its ideal import. Sucking and blinking are ridiculous processes,\nperhaps, but they may bring a thrill and satisfaction no less ideal than\ndo the lark\u2019s inexhaustible palpitations. Narrow scope and low\nrepresentative value are not defects in a consciousness having a narrow\nphysical basis and comparatively simple conditions.\n\n[Sidenote: Spirit crossed by instrumentalities.]\n\nThe spirit\u2019s foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication. His\ninstincts, in becoming many, became confused, and in growing permanent,\ngrew feeble and subject to arrest and deviation. Nature, we may say,\nthrew the brute form back into her cauldron, to smelt its substance\nagain before pouring it into a rational mould. The docility which\ninstinct, in its feebleness, acquired in the new creature was to be\nreason\u2019s opportunity, but before the larger harmony could be established\na sorry chaos was bound to reign in the mind. Every peeping impulse\nwould drop its dark hint and hide its head in confusion, while some\npedantic and unjust law would be passed in its absence and without its\nvote. Secondary activities, which should always be representative, would\nestablish themselves without being really such. Means would be pursued\nas if they were ends, and ends, under the illusion that they were\nforces, would be expected to further some activity, itself without\njustification. So pedantry might be substituted for wisdom, tyranny for\ngovernment, superstition for morals, rhetoric for art.\n\nThis sophistication is what renders the pursuit of reason so perplexing\nand prolonged a problem. Half-formed adjustments in the brain and in the\nbody politic are represented in consciousness by what are called\npassions, prejudices, motives, animosities. None of these felt\nebullitions in the least understands its own causes, effects, or\nrelations, but is hatched, so to speak, on the wing and flutters along\nin the direction of its momentary preference until it lapses, it knows\nnot why, or is crossed and overwhelmed by some contrary power. Thus the\nvital elements, which in their comparative isolation in the lower\nanimals might have yielded simple little dramas, each with its obvious\nideal, its achievement, and its quietus, when mixed in the barbarous\nhuman will make a boisterous medley. For they are linked enough together\nto feel a strain, but not knit enough to form a harmony. In this way the\nunity of apperception seems to light up at first nothing but disunion.\nThe first dawn of that rational principle which involves immortality\nbreaks upon a discovery of death. The consequence is that ideality seems\nto man something supernatural and almost impossible. He finds himself at\nhis awakening so confused that he puts chaos at the origin of the world.\nBut only order can beget a world or evoke a sensation. Chaos is\nsomething secondary, composed of conflicting organisations interfering\nwith one another. It is compounded like a common noise out of jumbled\nvibrations, each of which has its period and would in itself be musical.\nThe problem is to arrange these sounds, naturally so tuneful, into\nconcerted music. So long as total discord endures human life remains\nspasmodic and irresolute; it can find no ideal and admit no total\nrepresentation of nature. Only when the disordered impulses and\nperceptions settle down into a trained instinct, a steady, vital\nresponse and adequate preparation for the world, do clear ideas and\nsuccessful purposes arise in the mind. The Life of Reason, with all the\narts, then begins its career.\n\nThe forces at play in this drama are, first, the primary impulses and\nfunctions represented by elementary values; second, the thin network of\nsignals and responses by which those functions are woven into a total\norgan, represented by discursive thought and all secondary mental\nfigments, and, third, the equilibrium and total power of that new\norganism in action represented by the ideal. Spirituality, which might\nhave resided in the elementary values, sensuous or passionate, before\nthe relational process supervened, can now exist only in the ultimate\nactivity to which these processes are instrumental. Obstacles to\nspirituality in human life may accordingly take the form of an arrest\neither at the elementary values\u2014an entanglement in sense and\npassion\u2014or at the instrumental processes\u2014an entanglement in what in\nreligious parlance is called \u201cthe world.\u201d\n\n[Sidenote: One foe of the spirit is worldliness.]\n\nWorldly minds bristle with conventional morality (though in private they\nmay nurse a vice or two to appease wayward nature), and they are\nrational in everything except first principles. They consider the\nvoluptuary a weak fool, disgraced and disreputable; and if they notice\nthe spiritual man at all\u2014for he is easily ignored\u2014they regard him as a\nuseless and visionary fellow. Civilisation has to work algebraically\nwith symbols for known and unknown quantities which only in the end\nresume their concrete values, so that the journeymen and vulgar\nmiddlemen of the world know only conventional goods. They are lost in\ninstrumentalities and are themselves only instruments in the Life of\nReason. Wealth, station, fame, success of some notorious and outward\nsort, make their standard of happiness. Their chosen virtues are\nindustry, good sense, probity, conventional piety, and whatever else has\nacknowledged utility and seemliness.\n\n[Sidenote: The case for and against pleasure.]\n\nIn its strictures on pleasure and reverie this Philistia is perfectly\nright. Sensuous living (and I do not mean debauchery alone, but the\npalpitations of any poet without art or any mystic without discipline)\nis not only inconsequential and shallow, but dangerous to honour and to\nsincere happiness. When life remains lost in sense or reverts to it\nentirely, humanity itself is atrophied. And humanity is tormented and\nspoilt when, as more often happens, a man disbelieving in reason and out\nof humour with his world, abandons his soul to loose whimseys and\npassions that play a quarrelsome game there, like so many ill-bred\nchildren. Nevertheless, compared with the worldling\u2019s mental mechanism\nand rhetoric, the sensualist\u2019s soul is a well of wisdom. He lives\nnaturally on an animal level and attains a kind of good. He has free and\nconcrete pursuits, though they be momentary, and he has sincere\nsatisfactions. He is less often corrupt than primitive, and even when\ncorrupt he finds some justification for his captious existence. He\nharvests pleasures as he goes which intrinsically, as we have seen, may\nhave the depth and ideality which nature breathes in all her oracles.\nHis experience, for that reason, though disastrous is interesting and\nhas some human pathos; it is easier to make a saint out of a libertine\nthan out of a prig. True, the libertine is pursued, like the animals, by\nunforeseen tortures, decay, and abandonment, and he is vowed to a total\ndeath; but in these respects the worldly man has hardly an advantage.\nThe Babels he piles up may indeed survive his person, but they are\nthemselves vain and without issue, while his brief life has been\nmeantime spent in slavery and his mind cramped with cant and foolish\nambitions. The voluptuary is like some roving creature, browsing on\nnettles and living by chance; the worldling is like a beast of burden,\nnow ill-used and over-worked, now fatted, stalled, and richly\ncaparisoned. \u00c6sop might well have described their relative happiness in\na fable about the wild ass and the mule.\n\n[Sidenote: Upshot of worldly wisdom.]\n\nThus, even if the voluptuary is sometimes a poet and the worldling often\nan honest man, they both lack reason so entirely that reflection revolts\nequally against the life of both. Vanity, vanity, is their common\nepitaph. Now, at the soul\u2019s christening and initiation into the Life of\nReason, the first vow must always be to \u201crenounce the pomps and vanities\nof this wicked world.\u201d A person to whom this means nothing is one to\nwhom, in the end, nothing has meaning. He has not conceived a highest\ngood, no ultimate goal is within his horizon, and it has never occurred\nto him to ask what he is living for. With all his pompous soberness, the\nworldly man is fundamentally frivolous; with all his maxims and cant\nestimations he is radically inane. He conforms to religion without\nsuspecting what religion means, not being in the least open to such an\ninquiry. He judges art like a parrot, without having ever stopped to\nevoke an image. He preaches about service and duty without any\nrecognition of natural demands or any standard of betterment. His moral\nlife is one vast anacoluthon in which the final term is left out that\nmight have given sense to the whole, one vast ellipsis in which custom\nseems to bridge the chasm left between ideas. He denies the values of\nsense because they tempt to truancies from mechanical activity; the\nvalues of reason he necessarily ignores because they lie beyond his\nscope. He adheres to conventional maxims and material quantitative\nstandards; his production is therefore, as far as he himself is\nconcerned, an essential waste and his activity an essential tedium. If\nat least, like the sensualist, he enjoyed the process and expressed his\nfancy in his life, there would be something gained; and this sort of\ngain, though over-looked in the worldling\u2019s maxims, all of which have a\ncategorical tone, is really what often lends his life some propriety and\nspirit. Business and war and any customary task may come to form, so to\nspeak, an organ whose natural function will be just that operation, and\nthe most abstract and secondary activity, like that of adding figures or\nreading advertisements, may in this way become the one function proper\nto some soul. There are Nibelungen dwelling by choice underground and\nhappy pedants in the upper air.\n\nFacts are not wanting for these pillars of society to take solace in, if\nthey wish to defend their philosophy. The time will come, astronomers\nsay, when life will be extinct upon this weary planet. All the delights\nof sense and imagination will be over. It is these that will have turned\nout to be vain. But the masses of matter which the worldlings have\ntransformed with their machinery, and carried from one place to another,\nwill remain to bear witness of them. The collocation of atoms will\nnever be what it would have been if their feet had less continually\nbeaten the earth. They may have the proud happiness of knowing that,\nwhen nothing that the spirit values endures, the earth may still\nsometimes, because of them, cast a slightly different shadow across the\nmoon\u2019s craters.\n\n[Sidenote: Two supposed escapes from vanity:]\n\nThere is no more critical moment in the life of a man and a nation than\nthat in which they are first conscience-stricken and convicted of\nvanity. Failure, exhaustion, confusion of aims, or whatever else it be\nthat causes a revulsion, brings them before a serious dilemma. Has the\nvanity of life hitherto been essential or incidental? Are we to look for\na new ambition, free from all the illusions of natural impulse, or are\nwe rather to renounce all will indiscriminately and fall back upon\nconformity and consummate indifference? As this question is answered in\none way or the other, two different types of unworldly religion arise.\n\n[Sidenote: fanaticism.]\n\nThe first, which heralds a new and unimpeachable special hope, a highest\nduty finally recognised and driving out all lesser motives and\nsatisfactions from the soul, refers vanity to perversity, to error, to a\nsort of original misunderstanding of our own nature which has led us, in\npursuing our worldly interests, to pursue in truth our own destruction.\nThe vanity of life, according to this belief, has been accidental. The\ntaint of existence is not innate vanity but casual sin; what has misled\nus is not the will in general but only the false and ignorant direction\nof a will not recognising its only possible satisfaction. What religion\nin this case opposes to the world is a special law, a special hope, a\nlife intense, ambitious, and aggressive, but excluding much which to an\ningenuous will might seem excellent and tempting. Worldliness, in a\nword, is here met by fanaticism.\n\n[Sidenote: and mysticism.]\n\nThe second type of unworldly religion does not propose to overwhelm the\nold Adam by singleminded devotion to one selected interest, nor does it\nrefer vanity to an accidental error. On the contrary, it conceives that\nany special interest, any claim made by a finite and mortal creature\nupon an infinite world, is bound to be defeated. It is not special acts,\nit conceives, which are sinful, but action and will themselves that are\nintrinsically foolish. The cure lies in rescinding the passionate\ninterests that torment us, not in substituting for them another\nartificial passion more imperious and merciless than the natural\npassions it comes to devour. This form of religion accordingly meets\nworldliness with mysticism. Holiness is not placed in conformity to a\nprescriptive law, in pursuit of a slightly regenerated bliss, nor in\nadvancing a special institution and doctrine. Holiness for the mystic\nconsists rather in universal mildness and insight; in freedom from all\npassion, bias, and illusion; in a disembodied wisdom which accepts the\nworld, dominates its labyrinths, and is able to guide others through\nit, without pursuing, for its own part, any hope or desire.\n\n[Sidenote: Both are irrational.]\n\nIf these two expedients of the conscience convicted of vanity were to be\nsubjected to a critical judgment, they would both be convicted of vanity\nthemselves. The case of fanaticism is not doubtful, for the choice it\nmakes of a special law or institution or posthumous hope is purely\narbitrary, and only to be justified by the satisfaction it affords to\nthose very desires which it boasts to supplant. An oracular morality or\nrevealed religion can hope to support its singular claims only by\nshowing its general conformity to natural reason and its perfect\nbeneficence in the world. Where such justification is wanting the system\nfanatically embraced is simply an epidemic mania, a social disease for\nthe philosopher to study and, if possible, to cure. Every strong passion\ntends to dislodge the others, so that fanaticism may often involve a\ncertain austerity, impetuosity, and intensity of life. This vigour,\nhowever, is seldom lasting; fanaticism dries its own roots and becomes,\nwhen traditionally established, a convention as arbitrary as any fashion\nand the nest for a new brood of mean and sinister habits. The Pharisee\nis a new worldling, only his little world is narrowed to a temple, a\ntribe, and a clerical tradition.\n\nMysticism, as its meditative nature comports, is never so pernicious,\nnor can it be brought so easily round to worldliness again. That its\nbeneficent element is purely natural and inconsistent with a denial of\nwill, we shall have occasion elsewhere to observe. Suffice it here to\npoint out, that even if a moral nihilism could be carried through and\nall definite interests abandoned, the vanity of life would not be\nthereby corrected, but merely exposed. When our steps had been retraced\nto the very threshold of being, nothing better worth doing would have\nbeen discovered on the way. That to suffer illusion is a bad thing might\nordinarily be taken for an axiom, because ordinarily we assume that true\nknowledge and rational volition are possible; but if this assumption is\ndenied, the value of retracting illusions is itself impeached. When\nvanity is represented as universal and salvation as purely negative,\nevery one is left free to declare that it is vain to renounce vanity and\nsinful to seek salvation.\n\nThis result, fantastic though it may at first sight appear, is one which\nmysticism actually comes to under certain circumstances. Absolute\npessimism and absolute optimism are opposite sentiments attached to a\ndoctrine identically the same. In either case no improvement is\npossible, and the authority of human ideals is denied. To escape, to\nstanch natural wounds, to redeem society and the private soul, are then\nmistaken and pitiable ambitions, adding to their vanity a certain touch\nof impiety. One who really believes that the world\u2019s work is all\nprovidentially directed and that whatever happens, no matter how\ncalamitous or shocking, happens by divine right, has a quietistic\nexcuse for license; to check energy by reason, and seek to limit and\nchoose its path, seems to him a puny rebellion against omnipotence,\nwhich works through madness and crime in man no less than through\ncataclysms in outer nature. Every particular desire is vain and bound,\nperhaps, to be defeated; but the mystic, when caught in the expansive\nmood, accepts this defeat itself as needful. Thus a refusal to\ndiscriminate rationally or to accept human interests as the standard of\nright may culminate in a convulsive surrender to passion, just as, when\ncaught in the contractile phase, the same mysticism may lead to\nuniversal abstention.\n\n[Sidenote: Is there a third course?]\n\nMust unworldliness be either fanatical or mystical? That is a question\nof supreme importance to the moral philosopher. On the answer to it\nhangs the rationality of a spiritual life; nay, the existence of\nspirituality itself among the types of human activity. For the fanatic\nand mystic are only spiritual in appearance because they separate\nthemselves from the prevalent interests of the world, the one by a\nspecial persistent aggression, the other by a general passivity and\nunearthly calm. The fanatic is, notwithstanding, nothing but a worldling\ntoo narrow and violent to understand the world, while the mystic is a\nsensualist too rapt and voluptuous to rationalise his sensations. Both\nrepresent arrested forms of common-sense, partial developments of a\nperfectly usual sensibility. There is no divine inspiration in having\nonly one passion left, nor in dreamfully accepting or renouncing all the\npassions together. Spirituality, if identified with such types, might\njustly be called childish. There is an innocent and incredulous\nchildishness, with its useless eyes wide open, just as there is a\nmalevolent and peevish childishness, eaten up with some mischievous\nwhim. The man of experience and affairs can very quickly form an opinion\non such phenomena. He has no reason to expect superior wisdom in those\nquarters. On the contrary, his own customary political and humane\nstandpoint gives him the only authoritative measure of their merits and\npossible uses. \u201cThese sectaries and dreamers,\u201d he will say to himself,\n\u201ccannot understand one another nor the role they themselves play in\nsociety. It is for us to make the best of them we can, taking such\nprudent measures as are possible to enlist the forces they represent in\nworks of common utility.\u201d\n\n[Sidenote: Yes; for experience has intrinsic inalienable values.]\n\nThe philosopher\u2019s task, in these premisses, is to discover an escape\nfrom worldliness which shall offer a rational advance over it, such as\nfanaticism and mysticism cannot afford. Does the Life of Reason differ\nfrom that of convention? Is there a spirituality really wiser than\ncommon-sense? That there is appears in many directions. Worldliness is\narrest and absorption in the instrumentalities of life; but\ninstrumentalities cannot exist without ultimate purposes, and it\nsuffices to lift the eyes to those purposes and to question the will\nsincerely about its essential preferences, to institute a catalogue of\nrational goods, by pursuing any of which we escape worldliness. Sense\nitself is one of these goods. The sensualist at least is not worldly,\nand though his nature be atrophied in all its higher part, there is not\nlacking, as we have seen, a certain internal and abstract spirituality\nin his experience. He is a sort of sprightly and incidental mystic,\ntreating his varied succession of little worlds as the mystic does his\nmonotonous universe. Sense, moreover, is capable of many refinements, by\nwhich physical existence becomes its own reward. In the disciplined play\nof fancy which the fine arts afford, the mind\u2019s free action justifies\nitself and becomes intrinsically delightful. Science not only exercises\nin itself the intellectual powers, but assimilates nature to the mind,\nso that all things may nourish it. In love and friendship the liberal\nlife extends also to the heart. All these interests, which justify\nthemselves by their intrinsic fruits, make so many rational episodes and\npatches in conventional life; but it must be confessed in all candour\nthat these are but oases in the desert, and that as the springs of life\nare irrational, so its most vehement and prevalent interests remain\nirrational to the end. When the pleasures of sense and art, of knowledge\nand sympathy, are stretched to the utmost, what part will they cover and\njustify of our passions, our industry, our governments, our religion?\n\nIt was a signal error in those rationalists who attributed their ideal\nretrospectively to nature that they grotesquely imagined that people\nwere hungry so that they might enjoy eating, or curious in order to\ndelight in discovering the truth, or in love the better to live in\nconscious harmony. Such a view forgets that all the forces of life work\noriginally and fundamentally _a tergo_, that experience and reason are\nnot the ground of preference but its result. In order to live men will\nwork disproportionately and eat all manner of filth without pleasure;\ncuriosity as often as not leads to illusion, and argument serves to\nfoster hatred of the truth; finally, love is notoriously a great\nfountain of bitterness and frequently a prelude to crime and death. When\nwe have skimmed from life its incidental successes, when we have\nharvested the moments in which existence justifies itself, its profound\ndepths remain below in their obscure commotion, depths that breed indeed\na rational efflorescence, but which are far from exhausted in producing\nit, and continually threaten, on the contrary, to engulf it.\n\n[Sidenote: For these the religious imagination must supply an ideal\nstandard.]\n\nThe spiritual man needs, therefore, something more than a cultivated\nsympathy with the brighter scintillation of things. He needs to refer\nthat scintillation to some essential light, so that in reviewing the\nmotley aspects of experience he may not be reduced to culling\nsuperciliously the flowers that please him, but may view in them all\nonly images and varied symbols of some eternal good. Spirituality has\nnever flourished apart from religion, except momentarily, perhaps, in\nsome master-mind, whose original intuitions at once became a religion to\nhis followers. For it is religion that knows how to interpret the casual\nrationalities in the world and isolate their principle, setting this\nprinciple up in the face of nature as nature\u2019s standard and model. This\nideal synthesis of all that is good, this consciousness that over earth\nfloats its congenial heaven, this vision of perfection which gilds\nbeauty and sanctifies grief, has taken form, for the most part, in such\ngrossly material images, in a mythology so opaque and pseudo-physical,\nthat its ideal and moral essence has been sadly obscured; nevertheless,\nevery religion worthy of the name has put into its gods some element of\nreal goodness, something by which they become representative of those\nscattered excellences and self-justifying bits of experience in which\nthe Life of Reason consists.\n\nThat happy constitution which human life has at its best moments\u2014that,\nsays Aristotle, the divine life has continually. The philosopher thus\nexpressed with absolute clearness the principle which the poets had been\nclumsily trying to embody from the beginning. Burdened as traditional\nfaiths might be with cosmological and fanciful matter, they still\npresented in a conspicuous and permanent image that which made all good\nthings good, the ideal and standard of all excellence. By the help of\nsuch symbols the spiritual man could steer and steady his judgment; he\ncould say, according to the form religion had taken in his country, that\nthe truly good was what God commanded, or what made man akin to the\ndivine, or what led the soul to heaven. Such expressions, though taken\nmore or less literally by a metaphysical intellect, did not wholly\nforfeit their practical and moral meaning. God, for a long time, was\nunderstood to command what in fact was truly important, the divine was\nlong the truly noble and beautiful, heaven hardly ever ceased to respond\nto impersonal and ideal aspirations. Under those figures, therefore, the\nideals of life could confront life with clearness and authority. The\nspiritual man, fixing his eyes on them, could live in the presence of\nultimate purposes and ideal issues. Before each immediate task, each\nincidental pleasure, each casual success, he could retain his sweetness\nand constancy, accepting what good these moments brought and laying it\non the altar of what they ought to bring.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XII\n\nCHARITY\n\n\n[Sidenote: Possible tyranny of reason.]\n\nThose whom a genuine spirituality has freed from the foolish enchantment\nof words and conventions and brought back to a natural ideal, have still\nanother illusion to vanquish, one into which the very concentration and\ndeepening of their life might lead them. This illusion is that they and\ntheir chosen interests alone are important or have a legitimate place in\nthe moral world. Having discovered what is really good for themselves,\nthey assume that the like is good for everybody. Having made a tolerable\nsynthesis and purification of their own natures, they require every\nother nature to be composed of the same elements similarly combined.\nWhat they have vanquished in themselves they disregard in others; and\nthe consequence sometimes is that an impossibly simplified and\ninconsiderate regimen is proposed to mankind, altogether\nunrepresentative of their total interests. Spiritual men, in a word, may\nfall into the aristocrat\u2019s fallacy; they may forget the infinite animal\nand vulgar life which remains quite disjointed, impulsive, and\nshort-winded, but which nevertheless palpitates with joys and sorrows,\nand makes after all the bulk of moral values in this democratic world.\n\n[Sidenote: Everything has its rights.]\n\nAfter adopting an ideal it is necessary, therefore, without abandoning\nit, to recognise its relativity. The right path is in such a matter\nrather difficult to keep to. On the one hand lies fanatical insistence\non an ideal once arrived at, no matter how many instincts and interests\n(the basis of all ideals) are thereby outraged in others and ultimately\nalso in one\u2019s self. On the other hand lies mystical disintegration,\nwhich leads men to feel so keenly the rights of everything in particular\nand of the All in general, that they retain no hearty allegiance to any\nhuman interest. Between these two abysses winds the narrow path of\ncharity and valour. The ultimate ideal is absolutely authoritative,\nbecause if any ground were found to relax allegiance to it in any degree\nor for any consideration, that ground would itself be the ideal, found\nto be more nearly absolute and ultimate than the one, hastily so called,\nwhich it corrected. The ultimate ideal, in order to maintain its\nfinality and preclude the possibility of an appeal which should dislodge\nit from its place of authority, must have taken all interests into\nconsideration; it must be universally representative. Now, to take an\ninterest into consideration and represent it means to intend, as far as\npossible, to secure the particular good which that particular interest\nlooks to, and never, whatever measures may be adopted, to cease to look\nback on the elementary impulse as upon something which ought, if\npossible, to have been satisfied, and which we should still go back and\nsatisfy now, if circumstances and the claims of rival interests\npermitted.\n\nJustice and charity are identical. To deny the initial right of any\nimpulse is not morality but fanaticism. However determined may be the\nprohibition which reason opposes to some wild instinct, that prohibition\nis never reckless; it is never inconsiderate of the very impulse which\nit suppresses. It suppresses that impulse unwillingly, pitifully, under\nstress of compulsion and _force majeure_; for reason, in representing\nthis impulse in the context of life and in relation to every other\nimpulse which, in its operation, it would affect mechanically, rejects\nand condemns it; but it condemns it not by antecedent hate but by\nsupervening wisdom. The texture of the natural world, the conflict of\ninterests in the soul and in society, all of which cannot be satisfied\ntogether, is accordingly the ground for moral restrictions and\ncompromises. Whatever the up-shot of the struggle may be, whatever the\nverdict pronounced by reason, the parties to the suit must in justice\nall be heard, and heard sympathetically.\n\n[Sidenote: Primary and secondary morality.]\n\nHerein lies the great difference between first-hand and second-hand\nmorality. The retailers of moral truth, the town-criers that go\nshouting in the streets some sentence passed long ago in reason\u2019s court\nagainst some inadmissible desire, know nothing of justice or mercy or\nreason\u2014three principles essentially identical. They thunder conclusions\nwithout remembering the premisses, and expose their precepts, daily, of\ncourse, grown more thin and unrepresentative, to the aversion and\nneglect of all who genuinely love what is good. The masters of life, on\nthe contrary, the first framers and discoverers of moral ideals, are\npersons who disregard those worn conventions and their professional\ninterpreters: they are persons who have a fresh sense for the universal\nneed and cry of human souls, and reconstruct the world of duty to make\nit fit better with the world of desire and of possible happiness.\nPrimary morality, inspired by love of something naturally good, is\naccordingly charitable and ready to forgive; while secondary morality,\nfounded on prejudice, is fanatical and ruthless.\n\n[Sidenote: Uncharitable pagan justice is not just.]\n\nAs virtue carries with it a pleasure which perfects it and without which\nvirtue would evidently be spurious and merely compulsory, so justice\ncarries with it a charity which is its highest expression, without which\njustice remains only an organised wrong. Of justice without charity we\nhave a classic illustration in Plato\u2019s Republic and in general in the\npagan world. An end is assumed, in this case an end which involves\nradical injustice toward every interest not included in it; and then an\norganism is developed or conceived that shall subserve that end, and\npolitical justice is defined as the harmonious adjustment of powers and\nfunctions within that organism. Reason and art suffice to discover the\nright methods for reaching the chosen end, and the polity thus\nestablished, with all its severities and sacrifices of personal will, is\nrationally grounded. The chosen end, however, is arbitrary, and, in\nfact, perverse; for to maintain a conventional city with stable\ninstitutions and perpetual military efficiency would not secure human\nhappiness; nor (to pass to the individual virtue symbolised by such a\nstate) would the corresponding discipline of personal habits, in the\nservice of vested interests and bodily life, truly unfold the\npotentialities of the human spirit.\n\nPlato himself, in passing, acknowledges that his political ideal is\nsecondary and not ideal at all, since only luxury, corruption, and\nphysical accidents make a military state necessary; but his absorption\nin current Greek questions made him neglect the initial question of all,\nnamely, how a non-military and non-competitive state might be\nestablished, or rather how the remedial functions of the state might be\nforestalled by natural justice and rendered unnecessary. The violence\nwhich such a fallen ideal, with its iniquitous virtues, does to humanity\nappeared only too clearly in the sequel, when Platonism took refuge in\nthe supernatural. The whole pagan world was convicted of injustice and\nthe cities for whose glory the greatest heroes had lived and died were\nabandoned with horror. Only in a catacomb or a hermitage did there seem\nto be any room for the soul. This revulsion, perverse in its own way,\nexpressed rightly enough the perversity of that unjust justice, those\nworldly and arbitrary virtues, and that sad happiness which had enslaved\nthe world.\n\n[Sidenote: The doom of ancient republics.]\n\nPlato could never have answered the question whether his Republic had a\nright to exist and to brush aside all other commonwealths; he could\nnever have justified the ways of man to the rest of creation nor (what\nis more pertinent) to man\u2019s more plastic and tenderer imagination. The\ninitial impulses on which his Republic is founded, which make war,\ndefensive and aggressive, the first business of the state, are not\nirresistible impulses, they do not correspond to ultimate ends. Physical\nlife cannot justify itself; it cannot be made the purpose of those\nrational faculties which it generates; these, on the contrary, are its\nown end. The purpose of war must be peace; the purpose of competition a\nmore general prosperity; the purpose of personal life ideal\nachievements. A polity which should not tend to abolish private lusts,\ncompetition, and war would be an irrational polity. The organisation\nwhich the ancients insisted on within each state, the sacrifices they\nimposed on each class in the community for the general welfare, have to\nbe repeated in that greater commonwealth of which cities and nations are\ncitizens; for their own existence and prosperity depends on conciliating\ninwardly all that may affect them and turning foreign forces, when\ncontact with them is inevitable, into friends. Duty and co-operation\nmust extend as far as do physical bonds, the function of reason being to\nbring life into harmony with its conditions, so as to render it\nself-perpetuating and free. This end can never be attained while the\nscope of moral fellowship is narrower than that of physical interplay.\nAncient civilisation, brilliant in proportion to its inner integration,\nwas brief in proportion to its outer injustice. By defying the external\nforces on which also a commonwealth depends, those commonwealths came to\npremature extinction.\n\n[Sidenote: Rational charity.]\n\nThere is accordingly a justice deeper and milder than that of pagan\nstates, a universal justice called charity, a kind of all-penetrating\ncourtesy, by which the limits of personal or corporate interests are\ntransgressed in imagination. Value is attributed to rival forms of life;\nsomething of the intensity and narrowness inherent in the private will\nis surrendered to admiration and solicitude for what is most alien and\nhostile to one\u2019s self. When this imaginative expansion ends in\nneutralising the will altogether, we have mysticism; but when it serves\nmerely to co-ordinate felt interests with other actual interests\nconceived sympathetically, and to make them converge, we have justice\nand charity. Charity is nothing but a radical and imaginative justice.\nSo the Buddhist stretches his sympathy to all real beings and to many\nimaginary monsters; so the Christian chooses for his love the diseased,\nthe sinful, the unlovely. His own salvation does not seem to either\ncomplete unless every other creature also is redeemed and forgiven.\n\n[Sidenote: Its limits.]\n\nSuch universal solicitude is rational, however, only when the beings to\nwhich it extends are in practical efficient relations with the life that\nwould co-operate with theirs. In other words, charity extends only to\nphysical and discoverable creatures, whose destiny is interwoven\ndynamically with our own. Absolute and irresponsible fancy can be the\nbasis of no duty. If not to take other real forces and interests into\naccount made classic states unstable and unjust, to take into\nconsideration purely imaginary forces yields a polity founded on\nsuperstition, one unjust to those who live under it. A compromise made\nwith non-existent or irrelevant interests is a wrong to the real\ninterests on which that sacrifice is imposed gratuitously. All\nsacrifices exacted by mere religion have accordingly been inhuman; at\nbest they have unintentionally made some amends by affording abstract\ndiscipline or artistic forms of expression. The sacrifice must be\nfruitful in the end and bring happiness to somebody: otherwise it\ncannot long remain tender or beautiful.\n\n[Sidenote: Its mythical supports.]\n\nCharity is seldom found uncoloured by fables which illustrate it and\nlend it a motive by which it can justify itself verbally.\nMetempsychosis, heaven and hell, Christ\u2019s suffering for every sinner,\nare notions by which charity has often been guided and warmed. Like myth\neverywhere, these notions express judgments which they do not originate,\nalthough they may strengthen or distort them in giving them expression.\nThe same myths, in cruel hands, become goads to fanaticism. That natural\nsensitiveness in which charity consists has many degrees and many\ninequalities; the spirit bloweth where it listeth. Incidental\ncircumstances determine its phases and attachments in life. Christian\ncharity, for instance, has two chief parts: first, it hastens to relieve\nthe body; then, forgetting physical economy altogether, it proceeds to\nredeem the soul. The bodily works of mercy which Christians perform with\nso much tact and devotion are not such as philanthropy alone would\ninspire; they are more and less than that. They are more, because they\nare done with a certain disproportionate and absolute solicitude, quite\napart from ultimate benefit or a thought of the best distribution of\nenergies; they are also less, because they stop at healing, and cannot\npass beyond the remedial and incidental phase without ceasing to be\nChristian. The poor, says Christian charity, we have always with us;\nevery man must be a sinner\u2014else what obligation should he have to\nrepent?\u2014and, in fine, this world is essentially the kingdom of Satan.\nCharity comes only to relieve the most urgent bodily needs, and then to\nwean the heart altogether from mortal interests. Thus Christianity\ncovers the world with hospitals and orphanages; but its only positive\nlabours go on in churches and convents, nor will it found schools, if\nleft to itself, to teach anything except religion. These offices may be\nperformed with more or less success, with more or less appeal to the\nmiraculous; but, with whatever mixture of magic and policy, Christian\ncharity has never aimed at anything but healing the body and saving the\nsoul.\n\n[Sidenote: There is intelligence in charity.]\n\nChrist himself, we may well feel, did not affect publicans and sinners,\nignorant people and children, in order to save them in the regimental\nand prescriptive fashion adopted by the Church. He commanded those he\nforgave to sin no more and those he healed to go, as custom would have\nit, to the priest. He understood the bright good that each sinner was\nfollowing when he stumbled into the pit. For this insight he was loved.\nTo be rebuked in that sympathetic spirit was to be comforted; to be\npunished by such a hand was to be made whole. The Magdalene was forgiven\nbecause she had loved much; an absolution which rehabilitates the\nprimary longing that had driven her on, a longing not insulted but\ncomprehended in such an absolution, and purified by that comprehension.\nIt is a charitable salvation which enables the newly revealed deity to\nbe absolutely loved. Charity has this art of making men abandon their\nerrors without asking them to forget their ideals.\n\n[Sidenote: Buddhist and Christian forms of it.]\n\nIn Buddhism the same charity wears a more speculative form. All beings\nare to be redeemed from the illusion which is the fountain of their\ntroubles. None is to be compelled to assume irrationally an alien set of\nduties or other functions than his own. Spirit is not to be incarcerated\nperpetually in grotesque and accidental monsters, but to be freed from\nall fatality and compulsion. The goal is not some more flattering\nincarnation, but escape from incarnation altogether. Ignorance is to be\nenlightened, passion calmed, mistaken destiny revoked; only what the\ninmost being desiderates, only what can really quiet the longings\nembodied in any particular will, is to occupy the redeemed mind. Here,\nthough creative reason is wholly wanting, charity is truly understood;\nfor it avails little to make of kindness a vicarious selfishness and to\nuse neighbourly offices to plunge our neighbour deeper into his\nfavourite follies. Such servile sympathy would make men one another\u2019s\naccomplices rather than friends. It would treat them with a weak\npromiscuous favour, not with true mercy and justice. In charity there\ncan be nothing to repent of, as there so often is in natural love and in\npartisan propaganda. Christians have sometimes interpreted charity as\nzeal to bring men into their particular fold; or, at other times, when\nenthusiasm for doctrine and institutes has cooled, they have interpreted\ncharity to be mere blind co-operation, no matter in what.\n\nThe Buddhists seem to have shown a finer sense in their ministry,\nknowing how to combine universal sympathy with perfect spirituality.\nThere was no brow-beating in their call to conversion, no new tyranny\nimposed of sanctioned by their promised deliverance. If they could not\nrise to a positive conception of natural life, this inability but marks\nthe well-known limitations of Oriental fancy, which has never been able\nto distinguish steadily that imagination which rests on and expresses\nmaterial life from that which, in its import, breaks loose from the\ngiven conditions of life altogether, and is therefore monstrous and\ndreamful. But at least Buddhism knew how to sound the heart and pierce\nto the genuine principles of happiness and misery. If it did not venture\nto interpret reason positively, it at least forbore to usurp its inward\nand autonomous authority, and did not set up, in the name of salvation,\nsome new partiality, some new principle of distress and illusion. In\ndestroying worldliness this religion avoided imposture. The clearing it\nmade in the soul was soon overgrown again by the inexorable Indian\njungle; but had a virile intellect been at hand, it would have been free\nto raise something solid and rational in the space so happily swept\nclean of all accumulated rubbish.\n\n[Sidenote: Apparent division of the spiritual and the natural.]\n\nAgainst avarice, lust, and rancour, against cruel and vain national\nambitions, tenderer and more recollected minds have always sought some\nasylum: but they have the seldom possessed enough knowledge of nature\nand of human life to distinguish clearly the genuine and innocent goods\nwhich they longed for, and their protest against \u201cthe world\u201d has too\noften taken on a mystical and irrational accent. Charity, for instance,\nin its profounder deliverances, has become a protest against the\nillusion of personality; whereby existence and action seem to be wholly\ncondemned after their principle has been identified with selfishness. An\nartificial puzzle is thus created, the same concept, selfishness or an\nirrational partiality and injustice in the will, being applied to two\nprinciples of action, the one wrong and the other necessary. Every man\nis necessarily the seat of his own desires, which, if truly fulfilled,\nwould bring him satisfaction; but the objects in which that satisfaction\nmay be found, and the forces that must co-operate to secure it, lie far\nafield, and his life will remain cramped and self-destructive so long as\nhe does not envisage its whole basis and co-operate with all his\npotential allies.\n\nThe rationality which would then be attained is so immensely exalted\nabove the microscopic vision and punctiform sensibility of those who\nthink themselves practical, that speculative natures seem to be\nproclaiming another set of interests, another and quite miraculous life,\nwhen they attempt to thaw out and vivify the vulgar mechanism; and the\nsense of estrangement and contradiction often comes over the spiritually\nminded themselves, making them confess sadly that the kingdom of heaven\nis not of this world. As common morality itself falls easily into\nmythical expressions and speaks of a fight between conscience and\nnature, reason and the passions, as if these were independent in their\norigin or could be divided in their operation, so spiritual life even\nmore readily opposes the ideal to the real, the revealed and heavenly\ntruth to the extant reality, as if the one could be anything but an\nexpression and fulfilment of the other. Being equal convinced that\nspiritual life is authoritative and possible, and that it is opposed to\nall that earthly experience has as yet supplied, the prophet almost\ninevitably speaks of another world above the clouds and another\nexistence beyond the grave; he thus seeks to clothe in concrete and\nimaginable form the ideal to which natural existence seems to him wholly\nrebellious. Spiritual life comes to mean life abstracted from politics,\nfrom art, from sense, even in the end from morality. Natural motives\nand natural virtues are contrasted with those which are henceforth\ncalled supernatural, and all the grounds and sanctions of right living\nare transferred to another life. A doctrine of immortality thus becomes\nthe favourite expression of religion. By its variations and greater or\nless transparency and ideality we can measure the degree of spiritual\ninsight which has been reached at any moment.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XIII\n\nTHE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE\n\n\n[Sidenote: The length of life a subject for natural science.]\n\nAt no point are the two ingredients of religion, superstition and moral\ntruth, more often confused than in the doctrine of immortality, yet in\nnone are they more clearly distinguishable. Ideal immortality is a\nprinciple revealed to insight; it is seen by observing the eternal\nquality of ideas and validities, and the affinity to them native to\nreason or the cognitive energy of mind. A future life, on the contrary,\nis a matter for faith or presumption; it is a prophetic hypothesis\nregarding occult existences. This latter question is scientific and\nempirical, and should be treated as such. A man is, forensically\nspeaking, the same man after the nightly break in his consciousness.\nAfter many changes in his body and after long oblivion, parcels of his\nyouth may be revived and may come to figure again among the factors in\nhis action. Similarly, if evidence to that effect were available, we\nmight establish the resurrection of a given soul in new bodies or its\nactivity in remote places and times. Evidence of this sort has in fact\nalways been offered copiously by rumour and superstition. The operation\nof departed spirits, like that of the gods, has been recognised in many\na dream, or message, or opportune succour. The Dioscuri and Saint James\nthe Apostle have appeared\u2014preferably on white horses\u2014in sundry\nbattles. Spirits duly invoked have repeated forgotten gossip and\nrevealed the places where crimes had been committed or treasure buried.\nMore often, perhaps, ghosts have walked the night without any ostensible\nor useful purpose, apparently in obedience to some ghastly compulsion\nthat crept over them in death, as if a hesitating sickle had left them\nstill hanging to life by one attenuated fibre.\n\n[Sidenote: \u201cPsychical\u201d phenomena.]\n\nThe mass of this evidence, ancient and modern, traditional and\nstatistical, is beneath consideration; the palpitating mood in which it\nis gathered and received, even when ostensibly scientific, is such that\ngullibility and fiction play a very large part in the report; for it is\nnot to be assumed that a man, because he speaks in the first person and\naddresses a learned society, has lost the primordial faculty of lying.\nWhen due allowance has been made, however, for legend and fraud, there\nremains a certain residuum of clairvoyance and telepathy, and an\noccasional abnormal obedience of matter to mind which might pass for\nmagic. There are unmistakable indications that in these regions we touch\nlower and more rudimentary faculties. There seems to be, as is quite\nnatural, a sub-human sensibility in man, wherein ideas are connected\ntogether by bonds so irrational and tenacious that they seem miraculous\nto a mind already trained in practical and relevant thinking. This\nsub-human sense, far from representing important truths more clearly\nthan ordinary apprehension can, reduces consciousness again to a tangle\nof trivial impressions, shots of uncertain range, as if a skin had not\nyet formed over the body. It emerges in tense and disorganised moments.\nIts reports are the more trifling the more startingly literal their\nveracity. It seems to represent a stratum of life beneath moral or\nintellectual functions, and beneath all personality. When proof has been\nfound that a ghost has actually been seen, proof is required that the\nphantom has been rightly recognised and named; and this imputed identity\nis never demonstrable and in most cases impossible. So in the magic\ncures which from time immemorial have been recorded at shrines of all\nreligions, and which have been attributed to wonder-workers of every\nsect: the one thing certain about them is that they prove neither the\ntruth of whatever myth is capriciously associated with them, nor the\ngoodness or voluntary power of the miracle-worker himself. Healer and\nmedium are alike vehicles for some elemental energy they cannot control,\nand which as often as not misses fire; at best they feel a power going\nout of them which they themselves undergo, and which radiates from them\nlike electricity, to work, as chance will have it, good or evil in the\nworld. The whole operation lies, in so far as it really takes place at\nall, on the lowest levels of unintelligence, in a region closely allied\nto madness in consciousness and to sporadic organic impulses in the\nphysical sphere.\n\n[Sidenote: Hypertrophies of sense.]\n\nAmong the blind, the retina having lost its function, the rest of the\nskin is said to recover its primordial sensitiveness to distance and\nlight, so that the sightless have a clearer premonition of objects about\nthem than seeing people could have in the dark. So when reason and the\nordinary processes of sense are in abeyance a certain universal\nsensibility seems to return to the soul; influences at other times not\nappreciable make then a sensible impression, and automatic reactions may\nbe run through in response to a stimulus normally quite insufficient.\nNow the complexity of nature is prodigious; everything that happens\nleaves, like buried cities, almost indelible traces which an eye, by\nchance attentive and duly prepared, can manage to read, recovering for a\nmoment the image of an extinct life. Symbols, illegible to reason, can\nthus sometimes read themselves out in trance and madness. Faint vestiges\nmay be found in matter of forms which it once wore, or which, like a\nperfume, impregnated and got lodgment within it. Slight echoes may\nsuddenly reconstitute themselves in the mind\u2019s silence; and a\nhalf-stunned consciousness may catch brief glimpses of long-lost and\nirrelevant things. Real ghosts are such reverberations of the past,\nexceeding ordinary imagination and discernment both in vividness and in\nfidelity; they may not be explicable without appealing to material\ninfluences subtler than those ordinarily recognised, as they are\nobviously not discoverable without some derangement and hypertrophy of\nthe senses.\n\n[Sidenote: These possibilities affect physical existence only.]\n\nThat such subtler influences should exist is entirely consonant with\nreason and experience; but only a hankering tenderness for superstition,\na failure to appreciate the function both of religion and of science,\ncan lead to reverence for such oracular gibberish as these influences\nprovoke. The world is weary of experimenting with magic. In utter\nseriousness and with immense solemnity whole races have given themselves\nup to exploiting these shabby mysteries; and while a new survey of the\nfacts, in the light of natural science and psychology, is certainly not\nsuperfluous, it can be expected to lead to nothing but a more detailed\nand conscientious description of natural processes. The thought of\nemploying such investigations to save at the last moment religious\ndoctrines founded on moral ideas is a pathetic blunder; the obscene\nsupernatural has nothing to do with rational religion. If it were\ndiscovered that wretched echoes of a past life could be actually heard\nby putting one\u2019s ear long enough to a tomb, and if (_per impossibile_)\nthose echoes could be legitimately attributed to another mind, and to\nthe very mind, indeed, whose former body was interred there, a\nmelancholy chapter would indeed be added to man\u2019s earthly fortunes,\nsince it would appear that even after death he retained, under certain\nconditions, a fatal attachment to his dead body and to the other\nmaterial instruments of his earthly life. Obviously such a discovery\nwould teach us more about dying than about immortality; the truths\ndisclosed, since they would be disclosed by experiment and observation,\nwould be psycho-physical truths, implying nothing about what a truly\ndisembodied life might be, if one were attainable; for a disembodied\nlife could by no possibility betray itself in spectres, rumblings, and\nspasms. Actual thunders from Sinai and an actual discovery of two stone\ntables would have been utterly irrelevant to the moral authority of the\nten commandments or to the existence of a truly supreme being. No less\nirrelevant to a supramundane immortality is the length of time during\nwhich human spirits may be condemned to operate on earth after their\nbodies are quiet. In other words, spectral survivals would at most\nenlarge our conception of the soul\u2019s physical basis, spreading out the\narea of its manifestations; they could not possibly, seeing the\nsurvivals are physical, reveal the disembodied existence of the soul.\n\n[Sidenote: Moral grounds for the doctrine. The necessary assumption of a\nfuture.]\n\nSuch a disembodied existence, removed by its nature from the sphere of\nempirical evidence, might nevertheless be actual, and grounds of a moral\nor metaphysical type might be sought for postulating its reality. Life\nand the will to live are at bottom identical. Experience itself is\ntransitive and can hardly arise apart from a forward effort and\nprophetic apprehension by which adjustments are made to a future\nunmistakably foreseen. This premonition, by which action seeks to\njustify and explain itself to reflection, may be analysed into a group\nof memories and sensations of movement, generating ideal expectations\nwhich might easily be disappointed; but scepticism about the future can\nhardly be maintained in the heat of action. A postulate acted on is an\nact of genuine and dogmatic faith. I not only postulate a morrow when I\nprepare for it, but ingenuously and heartily believe that the morrow\nwill come. This faith does not amount to certitude; I may confess, if\nchallenged, that before to-morrow I and the world and time itself might\nconceivably come to an end together; but that idle possibility, so long\nas it does not slacken action, will not disturb belief. Every moment of\nlife accordingly trusts that life will continue; and this prophetic\ninterpretation of action, so long as action lasts, amounts to continual\nfaith in futurity.\n\n[Sidenote: An assumption no evidence.]\n\nA sophist might easily transform this psychological necessity into a\ndazzling proof of immortality. To believe anything, he might say, is to\nbe active; but action involves faith in a future and in the fruits of\naction; and as no living moment can be without this confidence, belief\nin extinction would be self-contradictory and at no moment a possible\nbelief. The question, however, is not whether every given moment has or\nhas not a specious future before it to which it looks forward, but\nwhether the realisation of such foresight, a realisation which during\nwaking life is roughly usual, is incapable of failing. Now expectation,\nnever without its requisite antecedents and natural necessity, often\nlacks fulfilment, and never finds its fulfilment entire; so that the\nnecessity of a postulate gives no warrant for its verification.\nExpectation and action are constantly suspended together; and what\nhappens whenever thought loses itself or stumbles, what happens whenever\nin its shifts it forgets its former objects, might well happen at\ncrucial times to that train of intentions which we call a particular\nlife or the life of humanity. The prophecy involved in action is not\ninsignificant, but it is notoriously fallible and depends for its\nfulfilment on external conditions. The question accordingly really is\nwhether a man expecting to live for ever or one expecting to die in his\ntime has the more representative and trustworthy notion of the future.\nThe question, so stated, cannot be solved by an appeal to evidence,\nwhich is necessarily all on one side, but only by criticising the value\nof evidence as against instinct and hope, and by ascertaining the\nrelative status which assumption and observation have in experience.\n\nThe transcendental compulsion under which action labours of envisaging a\nfuture, and the animal instinct that clings to life and flees from death\nas the most dreadful of evils are the real grounds why immortality seems\ninitially natural and good. Confidence in living for ever is anterior to\nthe discovery that all men are mortal and to the discovery that the\nthinker is himself a man. These discoveries flatly contradict that\nconfidence, in the form in which it originally presents itself, and all\ndoctrines of immortality which adult philosophy can entertain are more\nor less subterfuges and after-thoughts by which the observed fact of\nmortality and the native inconceivability of death are more or less\nclumsily reconciled.\n\n[Sidenote: A solipsistic argument.]\n\nThe most lordly and genuine fashion of asserting immortality would be to\nproclaim one\u2019s self an exception to the animal race and to point out\nthat the analogy between one\u2019s singular self and others is altogether\nlame and purely conventional. Any proud barbarian, with a tincture of\ntranscendental philosophy, might adopt this tone. \u201cCreatures that\nperish,\u201d he might say, \u201care and can be nothing but puppets and painted\nshadows in my mind. My conscious will forbids its own extinction; it\nscorns to level itself with its own objects and instruments. The world,\nwhich I have never known to exist without me, exists by my co-operation\nand consent; it can never extinguish what lends it being. The death\nprophetically accepted by weaklings, with such small insight and\ncourage, I mock and altogether defy: it can never touch me.\u201d\n\nSuch solipsistic boasts may not have been heard in historic times from\nthe lips of men speaking in their own persons. Language has an\nirresistible tendency to make thought communistic and ideally\ntransferable to others. It forbids a man to say of himself what it would\nbe ridiculous to hear from another. Now solipsism in another man is a\ncomic thing: and a mind, prompted perhaps by hell and heaven to speak\nsolipsistically, is stopped by the laughable echo of its own words, when\nit remembers its bold sayings. Language, being social, resists a virgin\negotism and forbids it to express itself publicly, no matter how well\ngrounded it may be in transcendental logic and in animal instinct.\nSocial convention is necessarily materialistic, since the beginning of\nall moral reasonableness consists in taming the transcendental conceit\nnative to a living mind, in attaching it to its body, and bringing the\nwill that thought itself absolute down to the rank of animals and men.\nOtherwise no man would acknowledge another\u2019s rights or even conceive his\nexistence.\n\n[Sidenote: Absoluteness and immortality transferred to the gods.]\n\nPrimeval solipsism\u2014the philosophy of untamed animal will\u2014has\naccordingly taken to the usual by-paths and expressed itself openly only\nin myth or by a speculative abstraction in which the transcendental\nspirit, for which all the solipsistic privileges were still claimed, was\ndistinguished from the human individual. The gods, it was said, were\nimmortal; and although on earth spirit must submit to the yoke and\nservice of matter, on whose occasions it must wait, yet there existed in\nthe ether other creatures more normally and gloriously compounded, since\ntheir forms served and expressed their minds, which ruled also over the\nelements and feared no assault from time. With the advent of this\nmythology experience and presumption divided their realms; experience\nwas allowed to shape men\u2019s notions of vulgar reality, but presumption,\nwhich could not be silenced, was allowed to suggest a second sphere,\nthinly and momentarily veiled to mortal sense, in which the premonitions\nof will were abundantly realised.\n\nThis expedient had the advantage of endowing the world with creatures\nthat really satisfied human aspirations, such as at any moment they\nmight be. The gods possessed longevity, beauty, magic celerity of\nmovement, leisure, splendour of life, indefinite strength, and practical\nomniscience. When the gods were also expressions for natural forces,\nthis function somewhat prejudiced their ideality, and they failed to\ncorrespond perfectly to what their worshippers would have most\nesteemed; but religious reformers tended to expunge naturalism from\ntheology and to represent the gods as entirely admirable. The Greek\ngods, to be sure, always continued to have genealogies, and the fact of\nhaving been born is a bad augury for immortality; but other religions,\nand finally the Greek philosophers themselves, conceived unbegotten\ngods, in whom the human rebellion against mutability was expressed\nabsolutely.\n\nThus a place was found in nature for the constant and perpetual element\nwhich crude experience seems to contain or at least to suggest.\nUnfortunately the immortal and the human were in this mythology wholly\ndivorced, so that while immortality was vindicated for something in the\nuniverse it was emphatically denied to man and to his works.\nContemplation, to be satisfied with this situation, had to be heroically\nunselfish and resigned; the gods\u2019 greatness and glory had to furnish\nsufficient solace for all mortal defeats. At the same time all criticism\nhad to be deprecated, for reflection would at once have pointed out that\nthe divine life in question was either a personification of natural\nprocesses and thus really in flux and full of oblivion and imperfection,\nor else a hypostasis of certain mental functions and ideals, which could\nnot really be conceived apart from the natural human life which they\ninformed and from which they had been violently abstracted.\n\n[Sidenote: Or to a divine principle in all beings.]\n\nAnother expedient was accordingly found, especially by mystics and\ncritical philosophers, for uniting the mortal and immortal in existence\nwhile still distinguishing them in essence. _Cur Deus Homo_ might be\nsaid to be the theme of all such speculations. Plato had already found\nthe eternal in the form which the temporal puts on, or, if the phrase be\npreferred, had seen in the temporal and existential nothing but an\nindividuated case of the ideal. The soul was immortal, unbegotten,\nimpassible; the bodies it successively inhabited and the experience it\ngathered served merely to bring out its nature with greater or less\ncompleteness. To somewhat the same effect the German transcendentalists\nidentified and distinguished the private and the universal spirit. What\nlived in each man and in each moment was the Absolute\u2014for nothing else\ncould really exist\u2014and the expression which the Absolute there took on\nwas but a transitional phase of its total self-expression, which, could\nit be grasped in its totality, would no longer seem subject to\ncontradiction and flux. An immortal agent therefore went through an\ninfinite series of acts, each transitory and relative to the others, but\nall possessed of inalienable reality and eternal significance. In such\nformulations the divorce was avoided between the intellectual and the\nsensuous factor in experience\u2014a divorce which the myth about immortal\ngods and mortal men had introduced. On the other hand existential\nimmortality was abandoned; only an ideal permanence, only significance,\nwas allowed to any finite being, and the better or future world of which\nancient poets had dreamt, Olympus, and every other heaven, was\naltogether abolished. There was an eternal universe where everything was\ntransitory and a single immortal spirit at no two moments the same. The\nworld of idealism realised no particular ideal, and least of all the\nideal of a natural and personal immunity from death.\n\n[Sidenote: In neither case is the individual immortal.]\n\nFirst, then, a man may refuse to admit that he must die at all; then,\nabashed at the arrogance of that assertion, he may consider the immortal\nlife of other creatures, like the earth and stars, which seem subject to\nno extinction, and he may ascribe to these a perpetual consciousness and\npersonality. Finally, confessing the fabulous character of those\ndeities, he may distinguish an immortal agent or principle within\nhimself, identify it with the inner principle of all other beings, and\ncontrast it with its varying and conditioned expressions. But scarcely\nis this abstraction attained when he must perceive its worthlessness,\nsince the natural life, the concrete aims, and the personal career which\nimmortality was intended to save from dissolution are wholly alien to a\nnominal entity which endures through all change, however fundamental,\nand cohabits with every nature, however hostile and odious to humanity.\nIf immortality is to be genuine, what is immortal must be something\ndefinite, and if this immortality is to concern life and not mere\nsignificance or ideal definition, that which endures must be an\nindividual creature with a fixed nucleus of habits and demands, so that\nits persistence may contain progress and achievement.\n\nHerewith we may dismiss the more direct attempts to conceive and assert\na future life. Their failure drives us to a consideration of indirect\nattempts to establish an unobservable but real immortality through\nrevelation and dogma. Such an immortality would follow on transmigration\nor resurrection, and would be assigned to a supernatural sphere, a\nsecond empirical world present to the soul after death, where her\nfortunes would not be really conceivable without a reconstituted body\nand a new material environment.\n\n[Sidenote: Possible forms of survival.]\n\nMany a man dies too soon and some are born in the wrong age or station.\nCould these persons drink at the fountain of youth at least once more\nthey might do themselves fuller justice and cut a better figure at last\nin the universe. Most people think they have stuff in them for greater\nthings than time suffers them to perform. To imagine a second career is\na pleasing antidote for ill-fortune; the poor soul wants another chance.\nBut how should a future life be constituted if it is to satisfy this\ndemand, and how long need it last? It would evidently have to go on in\nan environment closely analogous to earth; I could not, for instance,\nwrite in another world the epics which the necessity of earning my\nliving may have stifled here, did that other world contain no time, no\nheroic struggles, or no metrical language. Nor is it clear that my\nepics, to be perfect, would need to be quite endless. If what is foiled\nin me is really poetic genius and not simply a tendency toward perpetual\nmotion, it would not help me if in heaven, in lieu of my dreamt-of\nepics, I were allowed to beget several robust children. In a word, if\nhereafter I am to be the same man improved I must find myself in the\nsame world corrected. Were I transformed into a cherub or transported\ninto a timeless ecstasy, it is hard to see in what sense I should\ncontinue to exist. Those results might be interesting in themselves and\nmight enrich the universe; they would not prolong my life nor retrieve\nmy disasters.\n\nFor this reason a future life is after all best represented by those\nfrankly material ideals which most Christians\u2014being Platonists\u2014are\nwont to despise. It would be genuine happiness for a Jew to rise again\nin the flesh and live for ever in Ezekiel\u2019s New Jerusalem, with its\nceremonial glories and civic order. It would be truly agreeable for any\nman to sit in well-watered gardens with Mohammed, clad in green silks,\ndrinking delicious sherbets, and transfixed by the gazelle-like glance\nof some young girl, all innocence and fire. Amid such scenes a man might\nremain himself and might fulfil hopes that he had actually cherished on\nearth. He might also find his friends again, which in somewhat generous\nminds is perhaps the thought that chiefly sustains interest in a\nposthumous existence. But to recognise his friends a man must find them\nin their bodies, with their familiar habits, voices, and interests; for\nit is surely an insult to affection to say that he could find them in an\neternal formula expressing their idiosyncrasy. When, however, it is\nclearly seen that another life, to supplement this one, must closely\nresemble it, does not the magic of immortality altogether vanish? Is\nsuch a reduplication of earthly society at all credible? And the\nprospect of awakening again among houses and trees, among children and\ndotards, among wars and rumours of wars, still fettered to one\npersonality and one accidental past, still uncertain of the future, is\nnot this prospect wearisome and deeply repulsive? Having passed through\nthese things once and bequeathed them to posterity, is it not time for\neach soul to rest? The universe doubtless contains all sorts of\nexperiences, better and worse than the human; but it is idle to\nattribute to a particular man a life divorced from his circumstances and\nfrom his body.\n\n[Sidenote: Arguments from retribution and need of opportunity.]\n\nDogmas about such a posthumous experience find some shadowy support in\nvarious illusions and superstitions that surround death, but they are\ndeveloped into articulate prophecies chiefly by certain moral demands.\nOne of these requires rewards and punishments more emphatic and sure\nthan those which conduct meets with in this world. Another requires\nmerely a more favourable and complete opportunity for the soul\u2019s\ndevelopment. Considerations like these are pertinent to moral\nphilosophy. It touches the notion of duty whether an exact hedonistic\nretribution is to be demanded for what is termed merit and guilt: so\nthat without such supernatural remuneration virtue, perhaps, would be\ndiscredited and deprived of a motive. It likewise touches the ideality\nand nobleness of life whether human aims can be realised satisfactorily\nonly in the agent\u2019s singular person, so that the fruits of effort would\nbe forth-with missed if the labourer himself should disappear.\n\n[Sidenote: Ignoble temper of both.]\n\nTo establish justice in the world and furnish an adequate incentive to\nvirtue was once thought the chief business of a future life. The Hebraic\nreligions somewhat overreached themselves on these points: for the\ngrotesque alternative between hell and heaven in the end only aggravated\nthe injustice it was meant to remedy. Life is unjust in that it\nsubordinates individuals to a general mechanical law, and the deeper and\nlonger hold fate has on the soul, the greater that injustice. A\nperpetual life would be a perpetual subjection to arbitrary power, while\na last judgment would be but a last fatality. That hell may have\nfrightened a few villains into omitting a crime is perhaps credible;\nbut the embarrassed silence which the churches, in a more sensitive age,\nprefer to maintain on that wholesome doctrine\u2014once, as they taught, the\nonly rational basis for virtue\u2014shows how their teaching has to follow\nthe independent progress of morals. Nevertheless, persons are not\nwanting, apparently free from ecclesiastical constraint, who still\nmaintain that the value of life depends on its indefinite prolongation.\nBy an artifice of reflection they substitute vanity for reason, and\nselfish for ingenuous instincts in man. Being apparently interested in\nnothing but their own careers, they forget that a man may remember how\nlittle he counts in the world and suffer that rational knowledge to\ninspire his purposes. Intense morality has always envisaged earthly\ngoods and evils, and even when a future life has been accepted vaguely,\nit has never given direction to human will or aims, which at best it\ncould only proclaim more emphatically. It may indeed be said that no man\nof any depth of soul has made his prolonged existence the touchstone of\nhis enthusiasms. Such an instinct is carnal, and if immortality is to\nadd a higher inspiration to life it must not be an immortality of\nselfishness. What a despicable creature must a man be, and how sunk\nbelow the level of the most barbaric virtue, if he cannot bear to live\nfor his children, for his art, or for country!\n\n[Sidenote: False optimistic postulate involved.]\n\nTo turn these moral questions, however, into arguments for a physical\nspeculation, like that about human longevity, resurrection, or\nmetempsychosis, a hybrid principle is required: thus, even if we have\nanswered those moral questions in the conventional way and satisfied\nourselves that personal immortality is a postulate of ethics, we cannot\ninfer that immortality therefore exists unless we import into the\nargument a tremendous optimistic postulate, to the effect that what is\nrequisite for moral rationality must in every instance be realised in\nexperience.\n\nSuch an optimistic postulate, however, as the reader must have\nrepeatedly observed, is made not only despite all experience but in\nignorance of the conditions under which alone ideals are framed and\nretain their significance. Every ideal expresses individual and specific\ntendencies, proper at some moment to some natural creature; every ideal\ntherefore has for its basis a part only of the dynamic world, so that\nits fulfilment is problematical and altogether adventitious to its\nexistence and authority. To decide whether an ideal can be or will be\nfulfilled we must examine the physical relation between such organic\nforces as that ideal expresses and the environment in which those forces\noperate; we may then perceive how far a realisation of the given aims is\npossible, how far it must fail, and how far the aims in question, by a\nshift in their natural basis, will lapse and yield to others, possibly\nmore capable of execution and more stable in the world. The question of\nsuccess is a question of physics. To say that an ideal will be\ninevitably fulfilled simply because it is an ideal is to say something\ngratuitous and foolish. Pretence cannot in the end avail against\nexperience.\n\n[Sidenote: Transition to ideality.]\n\nNevertheless, it is important to define ideals even before their\nrealisation is known to be possible, because they constitute one of the\ntwo factors whose interaction and adjustment is moral life, factors\nwhich are complementary and diverse in function and may be independently\nascertained. The value of existences is wholly borrowed from their\nideality, without direct consideration of their fate, while the\nexistence of ideals is wholly determined by natural forces, without\ndirect relation to their fulfilment. Existence and ideal value can\ntherefore be initially felt and observed apart, although of course a\ncomplete description would lay bare physical necessity in the ideals\nentertained and inevitable ideal harmonies among the facts discovered.\nHuman life, lying as it does in the midst of a larger process, will\nsurely not be without some congruity with the universe. Every creature\nlends potential values to a world in which it can satisfy some at least\nof its demands and learn, perhaps, to modify the others. Happiness is\nalways a natural and an essentially possible thing, and a total despair,\nsince it ignores those goods which are attainable, can express only a\npartial experience. But before considering in what ways a disciplined\nsoul might make its peace with reality, we may consider what an\nundisciplined soul in the first instance desires; and from this\nstarting-point we may trace her chastening and education, observing the\nideal compensations which may console her for lost illusions.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XIV\n\nIDEAL IMMORTALITY\n\n\n[Sidenote: Olympian immortality the first ideal.]\n\nIn order to give the will to live frank and direct satisfaction, it\nwould have been necessary to solve the problem of perpetual motion in\nthe animal body, as nature has approximately solved it in the solar\nsystem. Nutrition should have continually repaired all waste, so that\nthe cycle of youth and age might have repeated itself yearly in every\nindividual, like summer and winter on the earth. Nor are some hints of\nsuch an equilibrium altogether wanting. Convalescence, sudden good\nfortune, a belated love, and even the April sunshine or morning air,\nbring about a certain rejuvenescence in man prophetic of what is not\nideally impossible\u2014perpetuity and constant reinforcement in his vital\npowers. Had nature furnished the elixir of life, or could art have\ndiscovered it, the whole face of human society would have been changed.\nThe earth once full, no more children would have been begotten and\nparental instincts would have been atrophied for want of function. All\nmen would have been contemporaries and, having all time before them for\ntravel and experiment, would have allied themselves eventually with what\nwas most congenial to them and would have come to be bound only by free\nand friendly ties. They would all have been well known and would have\nacted perpetually in their ultimate and true character, like the\nimmortal gods. One might have loved fixity, like Hestia, and another\nmotion, like Hermes; a third might have been untiring in the plastic\narts, like Heph\u00e6stus, or, like Apollo, in music; while the infinite\nrealms of mathematics and philosophy would have lain open to spirits of\na quality not represented in Homer\u2019s pantheon.\n\nThat man\u2019s primary and most satisfying ideal is something of this sort\nis clear in itself, and attested by mythology; for the great use of the\ngods is that they interpret the human heart to us, and help us, while we\nconceive them, to discover our inmost ambition and, while we emulate\nthem, to pursue it. Christian fancy, because of its ascetic meagreness\nand fear of life, has not known how to fill out the picture of heaven\nand has left it mystical and vague; but whatever paradise it has\nventured to imagine has been modelled on the same primary ideal. It has\nrepresented a society of eternal beings among which there was no\nmarriage nor giving in marriage and where each found his congenial\nmansion and that perfected activity which brings inward peace.\n\nAfter this easy fashion were death and birth conquered in the myths,\nwhich truly interpreted the will to live according to its primary\nintention, but in reality such direct satisfaction was impossible. A\ntotal defeat, on the other hand, would have extinguished the will itself\nand obliterated every human impulse seeking expression. Man\u2019s existence\nis proof enough that nature was not altogether unpropitious, but\noffered, in an unlooked-for direction, some thoroughfare to the soul.\nRoundabout imperfect methods were discovered by which something at least\nof what was craved might be secured. The individual perished, yet not\nwithout having segregated and detached a certain portion of himself\ncapable of developing a second body and mind. The potentialities of this\nseminal portion, having been liberated long after the parent body had\nbegun to feel the shock of the world, could reach full expression after\nthe parent body had begun to decay; and the offspring needed not itself\nto succumb before it had launched a third generation. A cyclical life or\narrested death, a continual motion by little successive explosions,\ncould thus establish itself and could repeat from generation to\ngeneration a process not unlike nutrition; only that, while in nutrition\nthe individual form remains and the inner substance is renewed\ninsensibly, in reproduction the form is renewed openly and the inner\nsubstance is insensibly continuous.\n\n[Sidenote: Its indirect attainment by reproduction.]\n\nReproduction seems, from the will\u2019s point of view, a marvellous\nexpedient involving a curious mixture of failure and success. The\nindividual, who alone is the seat and principle of will, is thereby\nsacrificed, so that reproduction is no response to his original hopes\nand aspirations; yet in a double way he is enticed and persuaded to be\nalmost satisfied: first, in that so like a counterfeit of himself\nactually survives, a creature to which all his ideal interests may be\ntransmitted; and secondly, because a new and as it were a rival aim is\nnow insinuated into his spirit. For the impulse toward reproduction has\nnow become no less powerful, even if less constant, than the impulse\ntoward nutrition; in other words, the will to live finds itself in the\nuncongenial yet inevitable company of the will to have an heir.\nReproduction thus partly entertains the desire to be immortal by giving\nit a vicarious fulfilment, and partly cancels it by adding an impulse\nand joy which, when you think of it, accepts mortality. For love,\nwhether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and\nprompts a man to give his life for his friends. In thus losing his life\ngladly he in a sense finds it anew, since it has now become a part of\nhis function and ideal to yield his place to others and to live\nafterwards only in them. While the primitive and animal side of him may\ncontinue to cling to existence at all hazards and to find the thought of\nextinction intolerable, his reason and finer imagination will build a\nnew ideal on reality better understood, and be content that the future\nhe looks to should be enjoyed by others. When we consider such a natural\ntransformation and discipline of the will, when we catch even a slight\nglimpse of nature\u2019s resources and mysteries, how thin and verbal those\nbelated hopes must seem which would elude death and abolish sacrifice!\nSuch puerile dreams not only miss the whole pathos of human life, but\nignore those specifically mortal virtues which might console us for not\nbeing so radiantly divine as we may at first have thought ourselves.\nNature, in denying us perennial youth, has at least invited us to become\nunselfish and noble.\n\nA first shift in aspiration, a capacity for radical altruism, thus\nsupervenes upon the lust to live and accompanies parental and social\ninterests. The new ideal, however, can never entirely obliterate the old\nand primary one, because the initial functions which the old Adam\nexclusively represented remain imbedded in the new life, and are its\nphysical basis. If the nutritive soul ceased to operate, the\nreproductive soul could never arise; to be altruistic we must first be,\nand spiritual interests can never abolish or cancel the material\nexistence on which they are grafted. The consequence is that death, even\nwhen circumvented by reproduction and relieved by surviving impersonal\ninterests, remains an essential evil. It may be accepted as inevitable,\nand the goods its intrusion leaves standing may be heartily appreciated\nand pursued; but something pathetic and incomplete will always attach to\na life that looks to its own termination.\n\nThe effort of physical existence is not to accomplish anything definite\nbut merely to persist for ever. The will has its first law of motion,\ncorresponding to that of matter; its initial tendency is to continue to\noperate in the given direction and in the given manner. Inertia is, in\nthis sense, the essence of vitality. To be driven from that perpetual\ncourse is somehow to be checked, and an external and hostile force is\nrequired to change a habit or an instinct as much as to deflect a star.\nIndeed, nutrition itself, hunting, feeding, and digestion, are forced\nactivities, and the basis of passions not altogether congenial nor\nideal. Hunger is an incipient faintness and agony, and an animal that\nneeds to hunt, gnaw, and digest is no immortal, free, or essentially\nvictorious creature. His will is already driven into by-paths and\nexpedients; his primitive beatific vision has to be interrupted by\nremedial action to restore it for a while, since otherwise it would\nobviously degenerate rapidly through all stages of distress until its\ntotal extinction.\n\n[Sidenote: Moral acceptance of this compromise.]\n\nThe tasks thus imposed upon the protoplasmic will raise it, we may say,\nto a higher level; to hunt is better sport, and more enlightening, than\nto lie imbibing sunshine and air; and to eat is, we may well think, a\nmore positive and specific pleasure than merely to be. Such judgments,\nhowever, show a human bias. They arise from incapacity to throw off\nacquired organs. Those necessities which have led to the forms of life\nwhich we happen to exemplify, and in terms of which our virtues are\nnecessarily expressed, seem to us, in retrospect, happy necessities,\nsince without them our conventional goods would not have come to appeal\nto us. These conventional goods, however, are only compromises with\nevil, and the will would never have taken to pursuing them if it had not\nbeen dislodged and beaten back from its primary aims. Even food is, for\nthis reason, no absolute blessing; it is only the first and most\nnecessary of comforts, of restorations, of truces and reprieves in that\nbattle with death in which an ultimate defeat is too plainly inevitable;\nfor the pitcher that goes often to the well is at last broken, and a\ncreature that is forced to resist his inward collapse by adventitious\naids will some day find that these aids have failed him, and that inward\ndissolution has become, for some mechanical reason, quite irresistible.\nIt is therefore not only the lazy or mystical will that chafes at the\nneed of material supports and deprecates anxieties about the morrow; the\nmost conventional and passionate mind, when it attains any refinement,\nconfesses the essential servitude involved in such preoccupations by\nconcealing or ignoring them as much as may be. We study to eat as if we\nwere not ravenous, to win as if we were willing to lose, and to treat\npersonal wants in general as merely compulsory and uninteresting\nmatters. Why dwell, we say to ourselves, on our stammerings and\nfailures? The intent is all, and the bungling circumlocutions we may be\ndriven to should be courteously ignored, like a stammerer\u2019s troubles,\nwhen once our meaning has been conveyed.\n\nEven animal passions are, in this way, after-thoughts and expedients,\nand although in a brutal age they seem to make up the whole of life,\nlater it appears that they would be gladly enough outgrown, did the\nmaterial situation permit it. Intellectual life returns, in its freedom,\nto the attitude proper to primitive will, except that through the new\nmachinery underlying reason a more stable equilibrium has been\nestablished with external forces, and the freedom originally absolute\nhas become relative to certain underlying adjustments, adjustments which\nmay be ignored but cannot be abandoned with impunity. Original action,\nas seen in the vegetable, is purely spontaneous. On the animal level\ninstrumental action is added and chiefly attended to, so that the\ncreature, without knowing what it lives for, finds attractive tasks and\na sort of glory in the chase, in love, and in labour. In the Life of\nReason this instrumental activity is retained, for it is a necessary\nbasis for human prosperity and power, but the value of life is again\nsought in the supervening free activity which that adjustment to\nphysical forces, or dominion over them, has made possible on a larger\nscale. Every free activity would gladly persist for ever; and if any be\nfound that involves and aims at its own arrest or transformation, that\nactivity is thereby proved to be instrumental and servile, imposed from\nwithout and not ideal.\n\n[Sidenote: Even vicarious immortality intrinsically impossible.]\n\nNot only is man\u2019s original effort aimed at living for ever in his own\nperson, but, even if he could renounce that desire, the dream of being\nrepresented perpetually by posterity is no less doomed. Reproduction,\nlike nutrition, is a device not ultimately successful. If extinction\ndoes not defeat it, evolution will. Doubtless the fertility of whatever\nsubstance may have produced us will not be exhausted in this single\neffort; a potentiality that has once proved efficacious and been\nactualised in life, though it should sleep, will in time revive again.\nIn some form and after no matter what intervals, nature may be expected\nalways to possess consciousness. But beyond this planet and apart from\nthe human race, experience is too little imaginable to be interesting.\nNo definite plan or ideal of ours can find its realisation except in\nourselves. Accordingly, a vicarious physical immortality always remains\nan unsatisfactory issue; what is thus to be preserved is but a\ncounterfeit of our being, and even that counterfeit is confronted by\nomens of a total extinction more or less remote. A note of failure and\nmelancholy must always dominate in the struggle against natural death.\n\n[Sidenote: Intellectual victory over change.]\n\nThis defeat is not really problematical, or to be eluded by reviving\nill-digested hopes resting entirely on ignorance, an ignorance which\nthese hopes will wish to make eternal. We need not wait for our total\ndeath to experience dying; we need not borrow from observation of\nothers\u2019 demise a prophecy of our own extinction. Every moment\ncelebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor; and the\npossession of memory, by which we somehow survive in representation, is\nthe most unmistakable proof that we are perishing in reality. In\nendowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly\nunimaginable to the unflective creation, the truth of mortality.\nEverything moves in the midst of death, because it indeed _moves_; but\nit falls into the pit unawares and by its own action unmakes and\ndisestablishes itself, until a wonderful visionary faculty is added, so\nthat a ghost remains of what has perished to reveal that lapse and at\nthe same time in a certain sense to neutralise it. The more we reflect,\nthe more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated\nwe shall be by the experience of death; yet, without our knowing it,\nperhaps, this very conviction and experience will have raised us, in a\nway, above mortality. That was a heroic and divine oracle which, in\ninforming us of our decay, made us partners of the gods\u2019 eternity, and\nby giving us knowledge poured into us, to that extent, the serenity and\nbalm of truth. As it is memory that enables us to feel that we are dying\nand to know that everything actual is in flux, so it is memory that\nopens to us an ideal immortality, unacceptable and meaningless to the\nold Adam, but genuine in its own way and undeniably true. It is an\nimmortality in representation\u2014a representation which envisages things\nin their truth as they have in their own day possessed themselves in\nreality. It is no subterfuge or superstitious effrontery, called to\ndisguise or throw off the lessons of experience; on the contrary, it is\nexperience itself, reflection itself, and knowledge of mortality. Memory\ndoes not reprieve or postpone the changes which it registers, nor does\nit itself possess a permanent duration; it is, if possible, less stable\nand more mobile than primary sensation. It is, in point of existence,\nonly an internal and complex kind of sensibility. But in intent and by\nits significance it plunges to the depths of time; it looks still on the\ndeparted and bears witness to the truth that, though absent from this\npart of experience, and incapable of returning to life, they\nnevertheless existed once in their own right, were as living and actual\nas experience is to-day, and still help to make up, in company with all\npast, present, and future mortals, the filling and value of the world.\n\n[Sidenote: The glory of it.]\n\nAs the pathos and heroism of life consists in accepting as an\nopportunity the fate that makes our own death, partial or total,\nserviceable to others, so the glory of life consists in accepting the\nknowledge of natural death as an opportunity to live in the spirit. The\nsacrifice, the self-surrender, remains real; for, though the\ncompensation is real, too, and at moments, perhaps, apparently\noverwhelming, it is always incomplete and leaves beneath an incurable\nsorrow. Yet life can never contradict its basis or reach satisfactions\nessentially excluded by its own conditions. Progress lies in moving\nforward from the given situation, and satisfying as well as may be the\ninterests that exist. And if some initial demand has proved hopeless,\nthere is the greater reason for cultivating other sources of\nsatisfaction, possibly more abundant and lasting. Now, reflection is a\nvital function; memory and imagination have to the full the rhythm and\nforce of life. But these faculties, in envisaging the past or the ideal,\nenvisage the eternal, and the man in whose mind they predominate is to\nthat extent detached in his affections from the world of flux, from\nhimself, and from his personal destiny. This detachment will not make\nhim infinitely long-lived, nor absolutely happy, but it may render him\nintelligent and just, and may open to him all intellectual pleasures and\nall human sympathies.\n\nThere is accordingly an escape from death open to man; one not found by\ncircumventing nature, but by making use of her own expedients in\ncircumventing her imperfections. Memory, nay, perception itself, is a\nfirst stage in this escape, which coincides with the acquisition and\npossession of reason. When the meaning of successive perceptions is\nrecovered with the last of them, when a survey is made of objects whose\nconstitutive sensations first arose independently, this synthetic moment\ncontains an object raised above time on a pedestal of reflection, a\nthought indefeasibly true in its ideal deliverance, though of course\nfleeting in its psychic existence. Existence is essentially temporal\nand life foredoomed to be mortal, since its basis is a process and an\nopposition; it floats in the stream of time, never to return, never to\nbe recovered or repossessed. But ever since substance became at some\nsensitive point intelligent and reflective, ever since time made room\nand pause for memory, for history, for the consciousness of time, a god,\nas it were, became incarnate in mortality and some vision of truth, some\nself-forgetful satisfaction, became a heritage that moment could\ntransmit to moment and man to man. This heritage is humanity itself, the\npresence of immortal reason in creatures that perish. Apprehension,\nwhich makes man so like a god, makes him in one respect immortal; it\nquickens his numbered moments with a vision of what never dies, the\ntruth of those moments and their inalienable values.\n\n[Sidenote: Reason makes man\u2019s divinity.]\n\nTo participate in this vision is to participate at once in humanity and\nin divinity, since all other makes bonds are material and perishable,\nbut the bond between two thoughts that have grasped the same truth, of\ntwo instants that have caught the same beauty, is a spiritual and\nimperishable bond. It is imperishable simply because it is ideal and\nresident merely in import and intent. The two thoughts, the two\ninstants, remain existentially different; were they not two they could\nnot come from different quarters to unite in one meaning and to behold\none object in distinct and conspiring acts of apprehension. Being\nindependent in existence, they can be united by the identity of their\nburden, by the common worship, so to speak, of the same god. Were this\nideal goal itself an existence, it would be incapable of uniting\nanything; for the same gulf which separated the two original minds would\nopen between them and their common object. But being, as it is, purely\nideal, it can become the meeting-ground of intelligences and render\ntheir union ideally eternal. Among the physical instruments of thought\nthere may be rivalry and impact\u2014the two thinkers may compete and\nclash\u2014but this is because each seeks his own physical survival and does\nnot love the truth stripped of its accidental associations and\nprovincial accent. Doctors disagree in so far as they are not truly\ndoctors, but, as Plato would say, seek, like sophists and wage-earners,\nto circumvent and defeat one another. The conflict is physical and can\nextend to the subject-matter only in so far as this is tainted by\nindividual prejudice and not wholly lifted from the sensuous to the\nintellectual plane. In the ether there are no winds of doctrine. The\nintellect, being the organ and source of the divine, is divine and\nsingle; if there were many sorts of intellect, many principles of\nperspective, they would fix and create incomparable and irrelevant\nworlds. Reason is one in that it gravitates toward an object, called\ntruth, which could not have the function it has, of being a focus for\nmental activities, if it were not one in reference to the operations\nwhich converge upon it.\n\nThis unity in truth, as in reason, is of course functional only, not\nphysical or existential. The heats of thought and the thinkers are\ninnumerable; indefinite, too, the variations to which their endowment\nand habits may be subjected. But the condition of spiritual communion or\nideal relevance in these intelligences is their possession of a method\nand grammar essentially identical. Language, for example, is significant\nin proportion to the constancy in meaning which words and locutions\npreserve in a speaker\u2019s mind at various times, or in the minds of\nvarious persons. This constancy is never absolute. Therefore language is\nnever wholly significant, never exhaustively intelligible. There is\nalways mud in the well, if we have drawn up enough water. Yet in\npeaceful rivers, though they flow, there is an appreciable degree of\ntranslucency. So, from moment to moment, and from man to man, there is\nan appreciable element of unanimity, of constancy and congruity of\nintent. On this abstract and perfectly identical function science rests\ntogether with every rational formation.\n\n[Sidenote: and his immortality.]\n\nThe same function is the seat of human immortality. Reason lifts a\nlarger or smaller element in each man to the plane of ideality according\nas reason more or less thoroughly leavens and permeates the lump. No man\nis wholly immortal, as no philosophy is wholly true and no language\nwholly intelligible; but only in so far as intelligible is a language a\nlanguage rather than a noise, only in so far as true is a philosophy\nmore than a vent for cerebral humours, and only in so far as a man is\nrational and immortal is he a man and not a sensorium.\n\nIt is hard to convince people that they have such a gift as\nintelligence. If they perceive its animal basis they cannot conceive its\nideal affinities or understand what is meant by calling it divine; if\nthey perceive its ideality and see the immortal essences that swim into\nits ken, they hotly deny that it is an animal faculty, and invent\nultramundane places and bodiless persons in which it is to reside; as if\nthose celestial substances could be, in respect to thought, any less\nmaterial than matter or, in respect to vision and life, any less\ninstrumental than bodily organs. It never occurs to them that if nature\nhas added intelligence to animal life it is because they belong\ntogether. Intelligence is a natural emanation of vitality. If eternity\ncould exist otherwise than as a vision in time, eternity would have no\nmeaning for men in the world, while the world, men, and time would have\nno vocation or status in eternity. The travail of existence would be\nwithout excuse, without issue or consummation, while the conceptions of\ntruth and of perfection would be without application to experience, pure\ndreams about things preternatural and unreal, vacantly conceived, and\nillogically supposed to have something to do with living issues. But\ntruth and perfection, for the very reason that they are not problematic\nexistences but inherent ideals, cannot be banished from discourse.\nExperience may lose any of its data; it cannot lose, while it endures,\nthe terms with which it operates in becoming experience. Now, truth is\nrelevant to every opinion which looks to truth for its standard, and\nperfection is envisaged in every cry for relief, in every effort at\nbetterment. Opinions, volitions, and passionate refusals fill human\nlife. So that when the existence of truth is denied, truth is given the\nonly status which it ever required\u2014it is conceived.\n\n[Sidenote: It is the locus of all truths.]\n\nNor can any better defense be found for the denial that nature and her\nlife have a status in eternity. This statement may not be understood,\nbut if grasped at all it will not be questioned. By having a status in\neternity is not meant being parts of an eternal existence, petrified or\ncongealed into something real but motionless. What is meant is only that\nwhatever exists in time, when bathed in the light of reflection,\nacquires an indelible character and discloses irreversible relations;\nevery fact, in being recognised, takes its place in the universe of\ndiscourse, in that ideal sphere of truth which is the common and\nunchanging standard for all assertions. Language, science, art,\nreligion, and all ambitious dreams are compacted of ideas. Life is as\nmuch a mosaic of notions as the firmament is of stars; and these ideal\nand transpersonal objects, bridging time, fixing standards, establishing\nvalues, constituting the natural rewards of all living, are the very\nfurniture of eternity, the goals and playthings of that reason which is\nan instinct in the heart as vital and spontaneous as any other. Or\nrather, perhaps, reason is a supervening instinct by which all other\ninstincts are interpreted, just as the _sensus communis_ or\ntranscendental unity of psychology is a faculty by which all perceptions\nare brought face to face and compared. So that immortality is not a\nprivilege reserved for a part only of experience, but rather a relation\npervading every part in varying measure. We may, in leaving the subject,\nmark the degrees and phases of this idealisation.\n\n[Sidenote: Epicurean immortality, through the truth of existence.]\n\nAnimal sensation is related to eternity only by the truth that it has\ntaken place. The fact, fleeting as it is, is registered in ideal history\nand no inventory of the world\u2019s riches, no true confession of its\ncrimes, would ever be complete that ignored that incident. This\nindefeasible character in experience makes a first sort of ideal\nimmortality, one on which those rational philosophers like to dwell who\nhave not speculation enough to feel quite certain of any other. It was a\nconsolation to the Epicurean to remember that, however brief and\nuncertain might be his tenure of delight, the past was safe and the\npresent sure. \u201cHe lives happy,\u201d says Horace, \u201cand master over himself,\nwho can say daily, I have lived. To-morrow let Jove cover the sky with\nblack clouds or flood it with sunshine; he shall not thereby render\nvain what lies behind, he shall not delete and make never to have\nexisted what once the hour has brought in its flight.\u201d Such\nself-concentration and hugging of the facts has no power to improve\nthem; it gives to pleasure and pain an impartial eternity, and rather\ntends to intrench in sensuous and selfish satisfactions a mind that has\nlost faith in reason and that deliberately ignores the difference in\nscope and dignity which exists among various pursuits. Yet the\nreflection is staunch and in its way heroic; it meets a vague and feeble\naspiration, that looks to the infinite, with a just rebuke; it points to\nreal satisfactions, experienced successes, and asks us to be content\nwith the fulfilment of our own wills. If you have seen the world, if you\nhave played your game and won it, what more would you ask for? If you\nhave tasted the sweets of existence, you should be satisfied; if the\nexperience has been bitter, you should be glad that it comes to an end.\n\nOf course, as we have seen, there is a primary demand in man which death\nand mutation contradict flatly, so that no summons to cease can ever be\nobeyed with complete willingness. Even the suicide trembles and the\nascetic feels the stings of the flesh. It is the part of philosophy,\nhowever, to pass over those natural repugnances and overlay them with as\nmuch countervailing rationality as can find lodgment in a particular\nmind. The Epicurean, having abandoned politics and religion and being\nafraid of any far-reaching ambition, applied philosophy honestly enough\nto what remained. Simple and healthy pleasures are the reward of simple\nand healthy pursuits; to chafe against them because they are limited is\nto import a foreign and disruptive element into the case; a healthy\nhunger has its limit, and its satisfaction reaches a natural term.\nPhilosophy, far from alienating us from those values, should teach us to\nsee their perfection and to maintain them in our ideal. In other words,\nthe happy filling of a single hour is so much gained for the universe at\nlarge, and to find joy and sufficiency in the flying moment is perhaps\nthe only means open to us for increasing the glory of eternity.\n\n[Sidenote: Logical immortality, through objects of thought.]\n\nMoving events, while remaining enshrined in this fashion in their\npermanent setting, may contain other and less external relations to the\nimmutable. They may represent it. If the pleasures of sense are not\ncancelled when they cease, but continue to satisfy reason in that they\nonce satisfied natural desires, much more will the pleasures of\nreflection retain their worth, when we consider that what they aspired\nto and reached was no momentary physical equilibrium but a permanent\ntruth. As Archimedes, measuring the hypothenuse, was lost to events,\nbeing engaged in an event of much greater transcendence, so art and\nscience interrupt the sense for change by engrossing attention in its\nissues and its laws. Old age often turns pious to look away from ruins\nto some world where youth endures and where what ought to have been is\nnot overtaken by decay before it has quite come to maturity. Lost in\nsuch abstract contemplations, the mind is weaned from mortal concerns.\nIt forgets for a few moments a world in which it has so little more to\ndo and so much, perhaps, still to suffer. As a sensation of pure light\nwould not be distinguishable from light itself, so a contemplation of\nthings not implicating time in their structure becomes, so far as its\nown deliverance goes, a timeless existence. Unconsciousness of temporal\nconditions and of the very flight of time makes the thinker sink for a\nmoment into identity with timeless objects. And so immortality, in a\nsecond ideal sense, touches the mind.\n\n[Sidenote: Ethical immortality, through types of excellence.]\n\nThe transitive phases of consciousness, however, have themselves a\nreference to eternal things. They yield a generous enthusiasm and love\nof good which is richer in consolation than either Epicurean\nself-concentration or mathematical ecstasy. Events are more interesting\nthan the terms we abstract from them, and the forward movement of the\nwill is something more intimately real than is the catalogue of our past\nexperiences. Now the forward movement of the will is an avenue to the\neternal. What would you have? What is the goal of your endeavour? It\nmust be some success, the establishment of some order, the expression of\nsome experience. These points once reached, we are not left merely with\nthe satisfaction of abstract success or the consciousness of ideal\nimmortality. Being natural goals, these ideals are related to natural\nfunctions. Their attainment does not exhaust but merely liberates, in\nthis instance, the function concerned, and so marks the perpetual point\nof reference common to that function in all its fluctuations. Every\nattainment of perfection in an art\u2014as for instance in government\u2014makes\na return to perfection easier for posterity, since there remains an\nenlightening example, together with faculties predisposed by discipline\nto recover their ancient virtue. The better a man evokes and realises\nthe ideal the more he leads the life that all others, in proportion to\ntheir worth, will seek to live after him, and the more he helps them to\nlive in that nobler fashion. His presence in the society of immortals\nthus becomes, so to speak, more pervasive. He not only vanquishes time,\nby his own rationality, living now in the eternal, but he continually\nlives again in all rational beings.\n\nSince the ideal has this perpetual pertinence to mortal struggles, he\nwho lives in the ideal and leaves it expressed in society or in art\nenjoys a double immortality. The eternal has absorbed him while he\nlived, and when he is dead his influence brings others to the same\nabsorption, making them, through that ideal identity with the best in\nhim, reincarnations and perennial seats of all in him which he could\nrationally hope to rescue from destruction. He can say, without any\nsubterfuge or desire to delude himself, that he shall not wholly die;\nfor he will have a better notion than the vulgar of what constitutes his\nbeing. By becoming the spectator and confessor of his own death and of\nuniversal mutation, he will have identified himself with what is\nspiritual in all spirits and masterful in all apprehension; and so\nconceiving himself, he may truly feel and know that he is eternal.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XV\n\nCONCLUSION\n\n\n[Sidenote: The failure of magic.]\n\nThe preceding analysis of religion, although it is illustrated mainly by\nChristianity, may enable us in a general way to distinguish the rational\ngoal of all religious life. In no sphere is the contrast clearer between\nwisdom and folly; in none, perhaps, has there been so much of both. It\nwas a prodigious delusion to imagine that work could be done by magic;\nand the desperate appeal which human weakness has made to prayer, to\ncastigations, to miscellaneous fantastic acts, in the hope of thereby\nbending nature to greater sympathy with human necessities, is a pathetic\nspectacle; all the more pathetic in that here the very importunity of\nevil, which distracted the mind and allowed it no choice or\ndeliberation, prevented very often those practical measures which, if\nlighted upon, would have instantly relieved the situation. Religion when\nit has tried to do man\u2019s work for him has not only cheated hope, but\nconsumed energy and drawn away attention from the true means of success.\n\n[Sidenote: and of mythology.]\n\n[Sidenote: Their imaginative value.]\n\nNo less useless and retarding has been the effort to give religion the\nfunction of science. Mythology, in excogitating hidden dramatic causes\nfor natural phenomena, or in attributing events to the human values\nwhich they might prevent or secure, has profoundly perverted and\nconfused the intellect; it has delayed and embarrassed the discovery of\nnatural forces, at the same time fostering presumptions which, on being\nexploded, tended to plunge men, by revulsion, into an artificial\ndespair. At the same time this experiment in mythology involved\nwonderful creations which have a poetic value of their own, to offset\ntheir uselessness in some measure and the obstruction they have\noccasioned. In imagining human agents behind every appearance fancy has\ngiven appearances some kinship to human life; it has made nature a mass\nof hieroglyphics and enlarged to that extent the means of human\nexpression. While objects and events were capriciously moralised, the\nmind\u2019s own plasticity has been developed by its great exercise in\nself-projection. To imagine himself a thunder-cloud or a river, the\ndispenser of silent benefits and the contriver of deep-seated universal\nharmonies, has actually stimulated man\u2019s moral nature: he has grown\nlarger by thinking himself so large.\n\nThrough the dense cloud of false thought and bad habit in which religion\nthus wrapped the world, some rays broke through from the beginning; for\nmythology and magic expressed life and sought to express its conditions.\nHuman needs and human ideals went forth in these forms to solicit and to\nconquer the world; and since these imaginative methods, for their very\nineptitude, rode somewhat lightly over particular issues and envisaged\nrather distant goods, it was possible through them to give aspiration\nand reflection greater scope than the meaner exigencies of life would\nhave permitted. Where custom ruled morals and a narrow empiricism\nbounded the field of knowledge, it was partly a blessing that\nimagination should be given an illegitimate sway. Without\nmisunderstanding, there might have been no understanding at all; without\nconfidence in supernatural support, the heart might never have uttered\nits own oracles. So that in close association with superstition and\nfable we find piety and spirituality entering the world.\n\n[Sidenote: Piety and spirituality justified.]\n\nRational religion has these two phases: piety, or loyalty to necessary\nconditions, and spirituality, or devotion to ideal ends. These simple\nsanctities make the core of all the others. Piety drinks at the deep,\nelemental sources of power and order: it studies nature, honours the\npast, appropriates and continues its mission. Spirituality uses the\nstrength thus acquired, remodelling all it receives, and looking to the\nfuture and the ideal. True religion is entirely human and political, as\nwas that of the ancient Hebrews, Romans, and Greeks. Supernatural\nmachinery is either symbolic of natural conditions and moral aims or\nelse is worthless.\n\n[Sidenote: Mysticism a primordial state of feeling.]\n\nThere is one other phase or possible overtone of religion about which a\nword might be added in conclusion. What is called mysticism is a certain\ngenial loosening of convention, whether rational or mythical; the mystic\nsmiles at science and plays with theology, undermining both by force of\nhis insight and inward assurance. He is all faith, all love, all vision,\nbut he is each of these things _in vacuo_, and in the absence of any\nobject.\n\nMysticism can exist, in varied degrees, at any stage of rational\ndevelopment. Its presence is therefore no indication of the worth or\nworthlessness of its possessor. This circumstance tends to obscure its\nnature, which would otherwise be obvious enough. Seeing the greatest\nsaints and philosophers grow mystical in their highest flights, an\ninnocent observer might imagine that mysticism was an ultimate attitude,\nwhich only his own incapacity kept him from understanding. But exactly\nthe opposite is the case. Mysticism is the most primitive of feelings\nand only visits formed minds in moments of intellectual arrest and\ndissolution. It can exist in a child, very likely in an animal; indeed,\nto parody a phrase of Hegel\u2019s, the only pure mystics are the brutes.\nWhen articulation fails in the face of experience; when instinct guides\nwithout kindling any prophetic idea to which action may be inwardly\nreferred; when life and hope and joy flow through the soul from an\nunknown region to an unknown end, then consciousness is mystical. Such\nan experience may suffuse the best equipped mind, if its primordial\nenergies, its will and emotions, much outrun its intelligence. Just as\nat the beginning pure inexperience may flounder intellectually and yet\nmay have a sense of not going astray, a sense of being carried by earth\nand sky, by contagion and pleasure, into its animal paradise; so at the\nend, if the vegetative forces still predominate, all articulate\nexperience may be lifted up and carried down-stream bodily by the\nelementary flood rising from beneath.\n\n[Sidenote: It may recur at any stage of culture.]\n\nEvery religion, all science, all art, is accordingly subject to\nincidental mysticism; but in no case can mysticism stand alone and be\nthe body or basis of anything. In the Life of Reason it is, if I may say\nso, a normal disease, a recurrent manifestation of lost equilibrium and\ninterrupted growth; but in these pauses, when the depths rise to the\nsurface and obliterate what scratches culture may have made there, the\nrhythm of life may be more powerfully felt, and the very disappearance\nof intellect may be taken for a revelation. Both in a social and a\npsychological sense revelations come from beneath, like earthquakes and\nvolcanic eruptions; and while they fill the spirit with contempt for\nthose fragile structures which they so easily overwhelm, they are\nutterly incapable of raising anything on the ruins. If they leave\nsomething standing it is only by involuntary accident, and if they\nprepare the soil for anything, it is commonly only for wild-flowers and\nweeds. Revelations are seldom beneficent, therefore, unless there is\nmore evil in the world to destroy than good to preserve; and mysticism,\nunder the same circumstances, may also liberate and relieve the spirit.\n\n[Sidenote: Form gives substance its life and value.]\n\nThe feelings which in mysticism rise to the surface and speak in their\nown name are simply the ancient, overgrown feelings of vitality,\ndependence, inclusion; they are the background of consciousness coming\nforward and blotting out the scene. What mysticism destroys is, in a\nsense, its only legitimate expression. The Life of Reason, in so far as\nit is life, contains the mystic\u2019s primordial assurances, and his\nrudimentary joys; but in so far as it is rational it has discovered what\nthose assurances rest on, in what direction they may be trusted to\nsupport action and thought; and it has given those joys distinction and\nconnexion, turning a dumb momentary ecstasy into a many-coloured and\nnatural happiness.\n\n\n*** End of Volume Three ***\n\n\n\n\nREASON IN ART\n\nVolume Four of \u201cThe Life of Reason\u201d\n\n\nGEORGE SANTAYANA\n\n\nh\u00ea gar noy enhergeia z\u00f4h\u00ea\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\nREASON IN ART\n\n\nCHAPTER I\n\nTHE BASIS OF ART IN INSTINCT AND EXPERIENCE\n\nMan affects his environment, sometimes to good purpose.\u2014Art is plastic\ninstinct conscious of its aims.\u2014It is automatic.\u2014So are the ideas it\nexpresses.\u2014We are said to control whatever obeys us.\u2014Utility is a\nresult.\u2014The useful naturally stable.\u2014Intelligence is docility.\u2014Art is\nreason propagating itself.\u2014Beauty an incident in rational art,\ninseparable from the others. Pages 3-17\n\n\nCHAPTER II\n\nRATIONALITY OF INDUSTRIAL ART\n\nUtility is ultimately ideal.\u2014Work wasted and chances missed.\u2014Ideals\nmust be interpreted, not prescribed.\u2014The aim of industry is to live\nwell.\u2014Some arts, but no men, are slaves by nature.\u2014Servile arts may\ngrow spontaneous or their products may be renounced.\u2014Art starts from\ntwo potentialities: its material and its problem.\u2014Each must be definite\nand congruous with the other.\u2014A sophism exposed.\u2014Industry prepares\nmatter for the liberal arts.\u2014Each partakes of the other. Pages 18-33\n\n\nCHAPTER III\n\nEMERGENCE OF FINE ART\n\nArt is spontaneous action made stable by success.\u2014It combines utility\nand automatism.\u2014Automatism fundamental and irresponsible.\u2014It is tamed\nby contact with the world.\u2014The dance.\u2014Functions of gesture.\u2014Automatic\nmusic. Pages 34-43\n\n\nCHAPTER IV\n\nMUSIC\n\nMusic is a world apart.\u2014It justifies itself.\u2014It is vital and\ntransient.\u2014Its physical affinities.\u2014Physiology of music.\u2014Limits of\nmusical sensibility.\u2014The value of music is relative to them.\u2014Wonders\nof musical structure.\u2014Its inherent emotions.\u2014In growing specific they\nremain unearthly.\u2014They merge with common emotions, and express such as\nfind no object in nature.\u2014Music lends elementary feelings an\nintellectual communicable form.\u2014All essences are in themselves good,\neven the passions.\u2014Each impulse calls for a possible congenial\nworld.\u2014Literature incapable of expressing pure feelings.\u2014Music may do\nso.\u2014Instability the soul of matter.\u2014Peace the triumph of\nspirit.\u2014Refinement is true strength. Pages 44-67\n\n\nCHAPTER V\n\nSPEECH AND SIGNIFICATION\n\nSounds well fitted to be symbols.\u2014Language has a structure independent\nof things.\u2014Words, remaining identical, serve to identify things that\nchange.\u2014Language the dialectical garment of facts.\u2014Words are wise\nmen\u2019s counters.\u2014Nominalism right in psychology and realism in\nlogic.\u2014Literature moves between the extremes of music and\ndenotation.\u2014Sound and object, in their sensuous presence, may have\naffinity.\u2014Syntax positively representative.\u2014Yet it vitiates what it\nrepresents.\u2014Difficulty in subduing a living medium.\u2014Language\nforeshortens experience.\u2014It is a perpetual mythology.\u2014It may be apt or\ninapt, with equal richness.\u2014Absolute language a possible but foolish\nart Pages 68-86\n\n\nCHAPTER VI\n\nPOETRY AND PROSE\n\nForce of primary expressions.\u2014Its exclusiveness and\nnarrowness.\u2014Rudimentary poetry an incantation or charm.\u2014Inspiration\nirresponsible.\u2014Plato\u2019s discriminating view.\u2014Explosive and pregnant\nexpression.\u2014Natural history of inspiration.\u2014Expressions to be\nunderstood must be recreated, and so changed.\u2014Expressions may be recast\nperversely, humourously, or sublimely.\u2014The nature of prose.\u2014It is more\nadvanced and responsible than poetry.\u2014Maturity brings love of\npractical truth.\u2014Pure prose would tend to efface itself.\u2014Form alone,\nor substance alone, may be poetical.\u2014Poetry has its place in the\nmedium.\u2014It is the best medium possible.\u2014Might it not convey what it is\nbest to know?\u2014A rational poetry would exclude much now thought\npoetical.\u2014All apperception modifies its object.\u2014Reason has its own\nbias and method.\u2014Rational poetry would envelop exact knowledge in\nultimate emotions.\u2014An illustration.\u2014Volume can be found in scope\nbetter than in suggestion Pages 87-115\n\n\nCHAPTER VII\n\nPLASTIC CONSTRUCTION\n\nAutomatic expression often leaves traces in the outer world.\u2014Such\neffects fruitful.\u2014Magic authority of man\u2019s first creations.\u2014Art brings\nrelief from idolatry.\u2014Inertia in technique.\u2014Inertia in\nappreciation.\u2014Adventitious effects appreciated first.\u2014Approach to\nbeauty through useful structure.\u2014Failure of adapted styles.\u2014Not all\nstructure beautiful, nor all beauty structural.\u2014Structures designed for\ndisplay.\u2014Appeal made by decoration.\u2014Its natural rights.\u2014Its alliance\nwith structure in Greek architecture.\u2014Relations of the two in Gothic\nart.\u2014The result here romantic.\u2014The medi\u00e6val artist.\u2014Representation\nintroduced.\u2014Transition to illustration. Pages 116-143\n\n\nCHAPTER VIII\n\nPLASTIC REPRESENTATION\n\nPsychology of imitation.\u2014Sustained sensation involves\nreproduction.\u2014Imitative art repeats with intent to repeat, and in a new\nmaterial.\u2014Imitation leads to adaptation and to knowledge.\u2014How the\nartist is inspired and irresponsible.\u2014Need of knowing and loving the\nsubject rendered.\u2014Public interests determine the subject of art, and\nthe subject the medium.\u2014Reproduction by acting ephemeral.\u2014demands of\nsculpture.\u2014It is essentially obsolete.\u2014When men see groups and\nbackgrounds they are natural painters.\u2014Evolution of painting.\u2014Sensuous\nand dramatic adequacy approached.\u2014Essence of landscape-painting.\u2014Its\nthreatened dissolution.\u2014Reversion to pure decorative design.\u2014Sensuous\nvalues are primordial and so indispensable Pages 144-165\n\n\nCHAPTER IX\n\nJUSTIFICATION OF ART\n\nArt is subject to moral censorship.\u2014Its initial or specific excellence\nis not enough.\u2014All satisfactions, however hurtful, have an initial\nworth.\u2014But, on the whole, artistic activity is innocent.\u2014It is\nliberal, and typical of perfect activity.\u2014The ideal, when incarnate,\nbecomes subject to civil society.\u2014Plato\u2019s strictures: he exaggerates\nthe effect of myths.\u2014His deeper moral objections.\u2014Their\nlightness.\u2014Importance of \u00e6sthetic alternatives.\u2014The importance of\n\u00e6sthetic goods varies with temperaments.\u2014The \u00e6sthetic temperament\nrequires tutelage.\u2014Aesthetic values everywhere interfused.\u2014They are\nprimordial.\u2014To superpose them adventitiously is to destroy them.\u2014They\nflow naturally from perfect function.\u2014Even inhibited functions, when\nthey fall into a new rhythm, yield new beauties.\u2014He who loves beauty\nmust chasten it Pages 166-190\n\n\nCHAPTER X\n\nTHE CRITERION OF TASTE\n\nDogmatism is inevitable but may be enlightened.\u2014Taste gains in\nauthority as it is more and more widely based.\u2014Different \u00e6sthetic\nendowments may be compared in quantity or force.\u2014Authority of vital\nover verbal judgments.\u2014Tastes differ also in purity or\nconsistency.\u2014They differ, finally, in pertinence, and in width of\nappeal.\u2014Art may grow classic by idealising the familiar, or by\nreporting the ultimate.\u2014Good taste demands that art should be rational,\n_i.e._, harmonious with all other interests.\u2014A mere \u201cwork of art\u201d a\nbaseless artifice.\u2014Human uses give to works of art their highest\nexpression and charm.\u2014The sad values of appearance.\u2014They need to be\nmade prophetic of practical goods, which in turn would be suffused with\nbeauty Pages 191-215\n\n\nCHAPTER XI\n\nART AND HAPPINESS\n\nAesthetic harmonies are parodies of real ones, which in turn would be\nsuffused with beauty, yet prototypes of true perfections.\u2014Pros and cons\nof detached indulgences.\u2014The happy imagination is one initially in line\nwith things, and brought always closer to them by experience.\u2014Reason is\nthe principle of both art and happiness.\u2014Only a rational society can\nhave sure and perfect arts.\u2014Why art is now empty and\nunstable.\u2014Anomalous character of the irrational artist.\u2014True art\nmeasures and completes happiness. Pages 216-230\n\n\n\n\nREASON IN ART\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER I\n\nTHE BASIS OF ART IN INSTINCT AND EXPERIENCE\n\n\n[Sidenote: Man affects his environment, sometimes to good purpose.]\n\nMan exists amid a universal ferment of being, and not only needs\nplasticity in his habits and pursuits but finds plasticity also in the\nsurrounding world. Life is an equilibrium which is maintained now by\naccepting modification and now by imposing it. Since the organ for all\nactivity is a body in mechanical relation to other material objects,\nobjects which the creature\u2019s instincts often compel him to appropriate\nor transform, changes in his habits and pursuits leave their mark on\nwhatever he touches. His habitat must needs bear many a trace of his\npresence, from which intelligent observers might infer something about\nhis life and action. These vestiges of action are for the most part\nimprinted unconsciously and aimlessly on the world. They are in\nthemselves generally useless, like footprints; and yet almost any sign\nof man\u2019s passage might, under certain conditions, interest a man. A\nfootprint could fill Robinson Crusoe with emotion, the devastation\nwrought by an army\u2019s march might prove many things to a historian, and\neven the disorder in which a room is casually left may express very\nvividly the owner\u2019s ways and character.\n\nSometimes, however, man\u2019s traces are traces of useful action which has\nso changed natural objects as to make them congenial to his mind.\nInstead of a footprint we might find an arrow; instead of a disordered\nroom, a well-planted orchard\u2014things which would not only have betrayed\nthe agent\u2019s habits, but would have served and expressed his intent. Such\npropitious forms given by man to matter are no less instrumental in the\nLife of Reason than are propitious forms assumed by man\u2019s own habit or\nfancy. Any operation which thus humanises and rationalises objects is\ncalled art.\n\n[Sidenote: Art is plastic instinct conscious of its aim.]\n\nAll art has an instinctive source and a material embodiment. If the\nbirds in building nests felt the utility of what they do, they would be\npractising an art; and for the instinct to be called rational it would\neven suffice that their traditional purpose and method should become\nconscious occasionally. Thus weaving is an art, although the weaver may\nnot be at every moment conscious of its purpose, but may be carried\nalong, like any other workman, by the routine of his art; and language\nis a rational product, not because it always has a use or meaning, but\nbecause it is sometimes felt to have one. Arts are no less automatic\nthan instincts, and usually, as Aristotle observed, less thoroughly\npurposive; for instincts, being transmitted by inheritance and imbedded\nin congenital structure, have to be economically and deeply organised.\nIf they go far wrong they constitute a burden impossible to throw off\nand impossible to bear. The man harassed by inordinate instincts\nperishes through want, vice, disease, or madness. Arts, on the contrary,\nbeing transmitted only by imitation and teaching, hover more lightly\nover life. If ill-adjusted they make less havoc and cause less drain.\nThe more superficial they are and the more detached from practical\nhabits, the more extravagant and meaningless they can dare to become; so\nthat the higher products of life are the most often gratuitous. No\ninstinct or institution was ever so absurd as is a large part of human\npoetry and philosophy, while the margin of ineptitude is much broader in\nreligious myth than in religious ethics.\n\n[Sidenote: It is automatic.]\n\nArts are instincts bred and reared in the open, creative habits acquired\nin the light of reason. Consciousness accompanies their formation; a\ncertain uneasiness or desire and a more or less definite conception of\nwhat is wanted often precedes their full organisation. That the need\nshould be felt before the means for satisfying it have been found has\nled the unreflecting to imagine that in art the need produces the\ndiscovery and the idea the work. Causes at best are lightly assigned by\nmortals, and this particular superstition is no worse than any other.\nThe data\u2014the plan and its execution\u2014as conjoined empirically in the\nfew interesting cases which show successful achievement, are made into a\nlaw, in oblivion of the fact that in more numerous cases such\nconjunction fails wholly or in part, and that even in the successful\ncases other natural conditions are present, and must be present, to\nsecure the result. In a matter where custom is so ingrained and\nsupported by a constant apperceptive illusion, there is little hope of\nmaking thought suddenly exact, or exact language not paradoxical. We\nmust observe, however, that only by virtue of a false perspective do\nideas seems to govern action, or is a felt necessity the mother of\ninvention. In truth invention is the child of abundance, and the genius\nor vital premonition and groping which achieve art, simultaneously\nachieve the ideas which that art embodies; or, rather, ideas are\nthemselves products of an inner movement which has an automatic\nextension outwards; and this extension manifests the ideas. Mere craving\nhas no lights of its own to prophesy by, no prescience of what the world\nmay contain that would satisfy, no power of imagining what would allay\nits unrest. Images and satisfactions have to come of themselves; then\nthe blind craving, as it turns into an incipient pleasure, first\nrecognises its object. The pure will\u2019s impotence is absolute, and it\nwould writhe for ever and consume itself in darkness if perception gave\nit no light and experience no premonition.\n\n[Sidenote: So are the ideas it expresses.]\n\nNow, a man cannot draw bodily from external perception the ideas he is\nsupposed to create or invent; and as his will or uneasiness, before he\ncreates the satisfying ideas, is by hypothesis without them, it follows\nthat creation or invention is automatic. The ideas come of themselves,\nbeing new and unthought-of figments, similar, no doubt, to old\nperceptions and compacted of familiar materials, but reproduced in a\nnovel fashion and dropping in their sudden form from the blue. However\ninstantly they may be welcomed, they were not already known and never\ncould have been summoned. In the stock example, for instance, of groping\nfor a forgotten name, we know the context in which that name should lie;\nwe feel the environment of our local void; but what finally pops into\nthat place, reinstated there by the surrounding tensions, is itself\nunforeseen, for it was just this that was forgotten. Could we have\ninvoked the name we should not have needed to do so, having it already\nat our disposal. It is in fact a palpable impossibility that any idea\nshould call itself into being, or that any act or any preference should\nbe its own ground. The responsibility assumed for these things is not a\ndetermination to conceive them before they are conceived (which is a\ncontradiction in terms) but an embrace and appropriation of them once\nthey have appeared. It is thus that ebullitions in parts of our nature\nbecome touchstones for the whole; and the incidents within us seem\nhardly our own work till they are accepted and incorporated into the\nmain current of our being. All invention is tentative, all art\nexperimental, and to be sought, like salvation, with fear and trembling.\nThere is a painful pregnancy in genius, a long incubation and waiting\nfor the spirit, a thousand rejections and futile birth-pangs, before the\nwonderful child appears, a gift of the gods, utterly undeserved and\ninexplicably perfect. Even this unaccountable success comes only in rare\nand fortunate instances. What is ordinarily produced is so base a\nhybrid, so lame and ridiculous a changeling, that we reconcile ourselves\nwith difficulty to our offspring and blush to be represented by our\nfated works.\n\n[Sidenote: We are said to control whatever obeys us.]\n\nThe propensity to attribute happy events to our own agency, little as we\nunderstand what we mean by it, and to attribute only untoward results to\nexternal forces, has its ground in the primitive nexus of experience.\nWhat we call ourselves is a certain cycle of vegetative processes,\nbringing a round of familiar impulses and ideas; this stream has a\ngeneral direction, a conscious vital inertia, in harmony with which it\nmoves. Many of the developments within it are dialectical; that is, they\ngo forward by inner necessity, like an egg hatching within its shell,\nwarmed but undisturbed by an environment of which they are wholly\noblivious; and this sort of growth, when there is adequate consciousness\nof it, is felt to be both absolutely obvious and absolutely free. The\nemotion that accompanies it is pleasurable, but is too active and proud\nto call itself a pleasure; it has rather the quality of assurance and\nright. This part of life, however, is only its courageous core; about it\nplay all sorts of incidental processes, allying themselves to it in more\nor less congruous movement. Whatever peripheral events fall in with the\ncentral impulse are accordingly lost in its energy and felt to be not so\nmuch peripheral and accidental as inwardly grounded, being, like the\nstages of a prosperous dialectic, spontaneously demanded and instantly\njustified when they come.\n\nThe sphere of the self\u2019s power is accordingly, for primitive\nconsciousness, simply the sphere of what happens well; it is the entire\nunoffending and obedient part of the world. A man who has good luck at\ndice prides himself upon it, and believes that to have it is his destiny\nand desert. If his luck were absolutely constant, he would say he had\nthe _power_ to throw high; and as the event would, by hypothesis,\nsustain his boast, there would be no practical error in that assumption.\nA will that never found anything to thwart it would think itself\nomnipotent; and as the psychological essence of omniscience is not to\nsuspect there is anything which you do not know, so the psychological\nessence of omnipotence is not to suspect that anything can happen which\nyou do not desire. Such claims would undoubtedly be made if experience\nlent them the least colour; but would even the most comfortable and\ninnocent assurances of this sort cease to be precarious? Might not any\nmoment of eternity bring the unimagined contradiction, and shake the\ndreaming god?\n\n[Sidenote: Utility is a result.]\n\nUtility, like significance, is an eventual harmony in the arts and by no\nmeans their ground. All useful things have been discovered as the\nLilliputians discovered roast pig; and the casual feat has furthermore\nto be supported by a situation favourable to maintaining the art. The\nmost useful act will never be repeated unless its secret remains\nembodied in structure. Practice and endeavour will not help an artist to\nremain long at his best; and many a performance is applauded which\ncannot be imitated. To create the requisite structure two preformed\nstructures are needed: one in the agent, to give him skill and\nperseverance, and another in the material, to give it the right\nplasticity. Human progress would long ago have reached its goal if every\nman who recognised a good could at once appropriate it, and possess\nwisdom for ever by virtue of one moment\u2019s insight. Insight,\nunfortunately, is in itself perfectly useless and inconsequential; it\ncan neither have produced its own occasion nor now insure its own\nrecurrence. Nevertheless, being proof positive that whatever basis it\nneeds is actual, insight is also an indication that the extant\nstructure, if circumstances maintain it, may continue to operate with\nthe same moral results, maintaining the vision which it has once\nsupported.\n\n[Sidenote: The useful naturally stable.]\n\nWhen men find that by chance they have started a useful change in the\nworld, they congratulate themselves upon it and call their persistence\nin that practice a free activity. And the activity is indeed rational,\nsince it subserves an end. The happy organisation which enables us to\ncontinue in that rational course is the very organisation which enabled\nus to initiate it. If this new process was formed under external\ninfluences, the same influences, when they operate again, will\nreconstitute the process each time more easily; while if it was formed\nquite spontaneously, its own inertia will maintain it quietly in the\nbrain and bring it to the surface whenever circumstances permit. This is\nwhat is called learning by experience. Such lessons are far from\nindelible and are not always at command. Yet what has once been done may\nbe repeated; repetition reinforces itself and becomes habit; and a clear\nmemory of the benefit once attained by fortunate action, representing as\nit does the trace left by that action in the system, and its harmony\nwith the man\u2019s usual impulses (for the action is felt to be\n_beneficial_), constitutes a strong presumption that the act will be\nrepeated automatically on occasion; _i.e._, that it has really been\nlearned. Consciousness, which willingly attends to results only, will\njudge either the memory or the benefit, or both confusedly, to be the\nground of this readiness to act; and only if some hitch occurs in the\nmachinery, so that rational behaviour fails to takes place, will a\nsurprised appeal be made to material accidents, or to a guilty\nforgetfulness or indocility in the soul.\n\n[Sidenote: Intelligence is docility.]\n\nThe idiot cannot learn from experience at all, because a new process, in\nhis liquid brain, does not modify structure; while the fool uses what he\nhas learned only inaptly and in frivolous fragments, because his\nstretches of linked experience are short and their connections insecure.\nBut when the cerebral plasm is fresh and well disposed and when the\npaths are clear, attention is consecutive and learning easy; a multitude\nof details can be gathered into a single cycle of memory or of potential\nregard. Under such circumstances action is the unimpeded expression of\nhealthy instinct in an environment squarely faced. Conduct from the\nfirst then issues in progress, and, by reinforcing its own organisation\nat each rehearsal, makes progress continual. For there will subsist not\nonly a readiness to act and a great precision in action, but if any\nsignificant circumstance has varied in the conditions or in the\ninterests at stake, this change will make itself felt; it will check the\nprocess and prevent precipitate action. Deliberation or well-founded\nscruple has the same source as facility\u2014a plastic and quick\norganisation. To be sensitive to difficulties and dangers goes with\nbeing sensitive to opportunities.\n\n[Sidenote: Art is reason propagating itself.]\n\nOf all reason\u2019s embodiments art is therefore the most splendid and\ncomplete. Merely to attain categories by which inner experience may be\narticulated, or to feign analogies by which a universe may be conceived,\nwould be but a visionary triumph if it remained ineffectual and went\nwith no actual remodelling of the outer world, to render man\u2019s dwelling\nmore appropriate and his mind better fed and more largely transmissible.\nMind grows self-perpetuating only by its expression in matter. What\nmakes progress possible is that rational action may leave traces in\nnature, such that nature in consequence furnishes a better basis for the\nLife of Reason; in other words progress is art bettering the conditions\nof existence. Until art arises, all achievement is internal to the\nbrain, dies with the individual, and even in him spends itself without\nrecovery, like music heard in a dream. Art, in establishing instruments\nfor human life beyond the human body, and moulding outer things into\nsympathy with inner values, establishes a ground whence values may\ncontinually spring up; the thatch that protects from to-day\u2019s rain will\nlast and keep out to-morrow\u2019s rain also; the sign that once expresses an\nidea will serve to recall it in future.\n\nNot only does the work of art thus perpetuate its own function and\nproduce a better experience, but the process of art also perpetuates\nitself, because it is teachable. Every animal learns something by\nliving; but if his offspring inherit only what he possessed at birth,\nthey have to learn life\u2019s lessons over again from the beginning, with at\nbest some vague help given by their parents\u2019 example. But when the\nfruits of experience exist in the common environment, when new\ninstruments, unknown to nature, are offered to each individual for his\nbetter equipment, although he must still learn for himself how to live,\nhe may learn in a humaner school, where artificial occasions are\nconstantly open to him for expanding his powers. It is no longer merely\nhidden inner processes that he must reproduce to attain his\npredecessors\u2019 wisdom; he may acquire much of it more expeditiously by\nimitating their outward habit\u2014an imitation which, furthermore, they\nhave some means of exacting from him. Wherever there is art there is a\npossibility of training. A father who calls his idle sons from the\njungle to help him hold the plough, not only inures them to labour but\ncompels them to observe the earth upturned and refreshed, and to watch\nthe germination there; their wandering thought, their incipient\nrebellions, will be met by the hope of harvest; and it will not be\nimpossible for them, when their father is dead, to follow the plough of\ntheir own initiative and for their own children\u2019s sake. So great is the\nsustained advance in rationality made possible by art which, being\nembodied in matter, is teachable and transmissible by training; for in\nart the values secured are recognised the more easily for having been\nfirst enjoyed when other people furnished the means to them; while the\nmaintenance of these values is facilitated by an external tradition\nimposing itself contagiously or by force on each new generation.\n\n[Sidenote: Beauty an incident in rational art.]\n\nArt is action which transcending the body makes the world a more\ncongenial stimulus to the soul. All art is therefore useful and\npractical, and the notable \u00e6sthetic value which some works of art\npossess, for reasons flowing for the most part out of their moral\nsignificance, is itself one of the satisfactions which art offers to\nhuman nature as a whole. Between sensation and abstract discourse lies a\nregion of deployed sensibility or synthetic representation, a region\nwhere more is seen at arm\u2019s length than in any one moment could be felt\nat close quarters, and yet where the remote parts of experience, which\ndiscourse reaches only through symbols, are recovered and recomposed in\nsomething like their native colours and experienced relations. This\nregion, called imagination, has pleasures more airy and luminous than\nthose of sense, more massive and rapturous than those of intelligence.\nThe values inherent in imagination, in instant intuition, in sense\nendowed with form, are called \u00e6sthetic values; they are found mainly in\nnature and living beings, but often also in man\u2019s artificial works, in\nimages evoked by language, and in the realm of sound.\n\n[Sidenote: Inseparable from the others.]\n\nProductions in which an \u00e6sthetic value is or is supposed to be\nprominent take the name of fine art; but the work of fine art so defined\nis almost always an abstraction from the actual object, which has many\nnon-\u00e6sthetic functions and values. To separate the \u00e6sthetic element,\nabstract and dependent as it often is, is an artifice which is more\nmisleading than helpful; for neither in the history of art nor in a\nrational estimate of its value can the \u00e6sthetic function of things be\ndivorced from the practical and moral. What had to be done was, by\nimaginative races, done imaginatively; what had to be spoken or made,\nwas spoken or made fitly, lovingly, beautifully. Or, to take the matter\nup on its psychological side, the ceaseless experimentation and ferment\nof ideas, in breeding what it had a propensity to breed, came sometimes\non figments that gave it delightful pause; these beauties were the first\nknowledges and these arrests the first hints of real and useful things.\nThe rose\u2019s grace could more easily be plucked from its petals than the\nbeauty of art from its subject, occasion, and use. An \u00e6sthetic\nfragrance, indeed, all things may have, if in soliciting man\u2019s senses or\nreason they can awaken his imagination as well; but this middle zone is\nso mixed and nebulous, and its limits are so vague, that it cannot well\nbe treated in theory otherwise than as it exists in fact\u2014as a phase of\nman\u2019s sympathy with the world he moves in. If art is that element in the\nLife of Reason which consists in modifying its environment the better\nto attain its end, art may be expected to subserve all parts of the\nhuman ideal, to increase man\u2019s comfort, knowledge, and delight. And as\nnature, in her measure, is wont to satisfy these interests together, so\nart, in seeking to increase that satisfaction, will work simultaneously\nin every ideal direction. Nor will any of these directions be on the\nwhole good, or tempt a well-trained will, if it leads to estrangement\nfrom all other interests. The \u00e6sthetic good will be accordingly hatched\nin the same nest with the others, and incapable of flying far in a\ndifferent air.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER II\n\nRATIONALITY OF INDUSTRIAL ART\n\n\n[Sidenote: Utility is ultimately ideal.]\n\nIf there were anything wholly instrumental or merely useful its\nrationality, such as it was, would be perfectly obvious. Such a thing\nwould be exhaustively defined by its result and conditioned exclusively\nby its expediency. Yet the value of most human arts, mechanical as they\nmay appear, has a somewhat doubtful and mixed character. Naval\narchitecture, for instance, serves a clear immediate purpose. Yet to\ncross the sea is not an ultimate good, and the ambition or curiosity\nthat first led man, being a land-animal, to that now vulgar adventure,\nhas sometimes found moralists to condemn it. A vessel\u2019s true excellence\nis more deeply conditioned than the ship-wright may imagine when he\nprides himself on having made something that will float and go. The best\nbattle-ship, or racing yacht, or freight steamer, might turn out to be a\nworse thing for its specific excellence, if the action it facilitated\nproved on the whole maleficent, and if war or racing or trade could be\nrightly condemned by a philosopher. The rationality of ship-building has\nseveral sets of conditions: the patron\u2019s demands must be first\nfulfilled; then the patron\u2019s specifications have to be judged by the\npurpose he in turn has in mind; this purpose itself has to be justified\nby his ideal in life, and finally his ideal by its adequacy to his total\nor ultimate nature. Error on any of these planes makes the ultimate\nproduct irrational; and if a finer instinct, even in the midst of\nabsorbing subsidiary action, warns a man that he is working against his\nhighest good, his art will lose its savour and its most skilful products\nwill grow hateful, even to his immediate apprehension, infected as they\nwill be by the canker of folly.\n\n[Sidenote: Work wasted and chances missed.]\n\nArt thus has its casuistry no less than morals, and philosophers in the\nfuture, if man should at last have ceased to battle with ghosts, might\nbe called upon to review material civilisation from its beginnings,\ntesting each complication by its known ultimate fruits and reaching in\nthis way a purified and organic ideal of human industry, an ideal which\neducation and political action might help to embody. If nakedness or a\nsingle garment were shown to be wholesomer and more agreeable than\ncomplicated clothes, weavers and tailors might be notably diminished in\nnumber. If, in another quarter, popular fancy should sicken at last of\nits traditional round of games and fictions, it might discover infinite\nentertainment in the play of reality and truth, and infinite novelties\nto be created by fruitful labour; so that many a pleasure might be found\nwhich is now clogged by mere apathy and unintelligence. Human genius,\nlike a foolish Endymion, lies fast asleep amid its opportunities,\nwasting itself in dreams and disinheriting itself by negligence.\n\n[Sidenote: Ideals must be interpreted, not prescribed.]\n\nDescriptive economy, however, will have to make great progress before\nthe concrete ethics of art can be properly composed. History, conceived\nhitherto as a barbarous romance, does not furnish sufficient data by\nwhich the happiness of life under various conditions may be soberly\nestimated. Politics has receded into the region of blind impulse and\nfactional interests, and would need to be reconstituted before it could\napproach again that scientific problem which Socrates and his great\ndisciples would have wished it to solve. Meantime it may not be\npremature to say something about another factor in practical philosophy,\nnamely, the ultimate interests by which industrial arts and their\nproducts have to be estimated. Even before we know the exact effects of\nan institution we can fix to some extent the purposes which, in order to\nbe beneficent, it will have to subserve, although in truth such\nantecedent fixing of aims cannot go far, seeing that every operation\nreacts on the organ that executes it, thereby modifying the ideal\ninvolved. Doubtless the most industrial people would still wish to be\nhappy and might accordingly lay down certain principles which its\nindustry should never transgress, as for instance that production should\nat any price leave room for liberty, leisure, beauty, and a spirit of\ngeneral co-operation and goodwill. But a people once having become\nindustrial will hardly be happy if sent back to Arcadia; it will have\nformed busy habits which it cannot relax without tedium; it will have\ndeveloped a restlessness and avidity which will crave matter, like any\nother kind of hunger. Every experiment in living qualifies the initial\npossibilities of life, and the moralist would reckon without his host if\nhe did not allow for the change which forced exercise makes in instinct,\nadjusting it more or less to extant conditions originally, perhaps,\nunwelcome. It is too late for the highest good to prescribe flying for\nquadrupeds or peace for the sea waves.\n\nWhat antecedent interest does mechanical art subserve? What is the\ninitial and commanding ideal of life by which all industrial\ndevelopments are to be proved rational or condemned as vain? If we look\nto the most sordid and instrumental of industries we see that their\npurpose is to produce a foreordained result with the minimum of effort.\nThey serve, in a word, to cheapen commodities. But the value of such an\nachievement is clearly not final; it hangs on two underlying ideals, one\ndemanding abundance in the things produced and the other diminution in\nthe toil required to produce them. At least the latter interest may in\nturn be analysed further, for to diminish toil is itself no absolute\ngood; it is a good only when such diminution in one sphere liberates\nenergies which may be employed in other fields, so that the total human\naccomplishment may be greater. Doubtless useful labour has its natural\nlimits, for if overdone any activity may impair the power of enjoying\nboth its fruits and its operation. Yet in so far as labour can become\nspontaneous and in itself delightful it is a positive benefit; and to\nits intrinsic value must be added all those possessions or useful\ndispositions which it may secure. Thus one ideal\u2014to diminish\nlabour\u2014falls back into the other\u2014to diffuse occasions for enjoyment.\nThe aim is not to curtail occupation but rather to render occupation\nliberal by supplying it with more appropriate objects.\n\n[Sidenote: The aim of industry is to live well.]\n\nIt is then liberal life, fostered by industry and commerce or involved\nin them, that alone can justify these instrumental pursuits. Those\nphilosophers whose ethics is nothing but sentimental physics like to\npoint out that happiness arises out of work and that compulsory\nactivities, dutifully performed, underlie freedom. Of course matter or\nforce underlies everything; but rationality does not accrue to spirit\nbecause mechanism supports it; it accrues to mechanism in so far as\nspirit is thereby called into existence; so that while values derive\nexistence only from their causes, causes derive value only from their\nresults. Functions cannot be exercised until their organs exist and are\nin operation, so that what is primary in the order of genesis is always\nlast and most dependent in the order of worth. The primary substance of\nthings is their mere material; their first cause is their lowest\ninstrument. Matter has only the values of the forms which it assumes,\nand while each stratification may create some intrinsic ideal and\nachieve some good, these goods are dull and fleeting in proportion to\ntheir rudimentary character and their nearness to protoplasmic thrills.\nWhere reason exists life cannot, indeed, be altogether slavish; for any\noperation, however menial and fragmentary, when it is accompanied by\nideal representation of the ends pursued and by felt success in\nattaining them, becomes a sample and anagram of all freedom.\nNevertheless to arrest attention on a means is really illiberal, though\nnot so much by what such an interest contains as by what it ignores.\nHappiness in a treadmill is far from inconceivable; but for that\nhappiness to be rational the wheel should be nothing less than the whole\nsky from which influences can descend upon us. There would be meanness\nof soul in being content with a smaller sphere, so that not everything\nthat was relevant to our welfare should be envisaged in our thoughts and\npurposes. To be absorbed by the incidental is the animal\u2019s portion; to\nbe confined to the instrumental is the slave\u2019s. For though within such\nactivity there may be a rational movement, the activity ends in a fog\nand in mere physical drifting. Happiness has to be begged of fortune or\nfound in mystical indifference: it is not yet subtended by rational art.\n\n[Sidenote: Some arts, but no men, are slaves by nature.]\n\nThe Aristotelian theory of slavery, in making servile action wholly\nsubservient, sins indeed against persons, but not against arts. It sins\nagainst persons because there is inconsiderate haste in asserting that\nwhole classes of men are capable of no activities, except the physical,\nwhich justify themselves inherently. The lower animals also have\nphysical interests and natural emotions. A man, if he deserves the name,\nmust be credited with some rational capacity: prospect and retrospect,\nhope and the ideal portraiture of things, must to some extent employ\nhim. Freedom to cultivate these interests is then his inherent right. As\nthe lion vindicates his prerogative to ferocity and dignity, so every\nrational creature vindicates his prerogative to spiritual freedom. But a\ntoo summary classification of individuals covers, in Aristotle, a just\ndiscrimination among the arts. In so far as a man\u2019s occupation is merely\ninstrumental and justified only externally, he is obviously a slave and\nhis art at best an evil necessity. For the operation is by hypothesis\nnot its own end; and if the product, needful for some ulterior purpose,\nhad been found ready made in nature, the other and self-justifying\nactivities could have gone on unimpeded, without the arrest or\ndislocation which is involved in first establishing the needful\nconditions for right action. If air had to be manufactured, as dwellings\nmust be, or breathing to be learned like speech, mankind would start\nwith an even greater handicap and would never have come within sight of\nsuch goals as it can now pursue. Thus all instrumental and remedial\narts, however indispensable, are pure burdens; and progress consists in\nabridging them as much as is possible without contracting the basis for\nmoral life.\n\n[Sidenote: Servile arts may grow spontaneous or their products may be\nrenounced.]\n\nThis needful abridgment can take place in two directions. The art may\nbecome instinctive, unconscious of the utility that backs it and\nconscious only of the solicitation that leads it on. In that measure\nhuman nature is adapted to its conditions; lessons long dictated by\nexperience are actually learned and become hereditary habits. So\ninclination to hunt and fondness for nursing children have passed into\ninstincts in the human race; and what if it were a forced art would be\nservile, by becoming spontaneous has risen to be an ingredient in ideal\nlife; for sport and maternity are human ideals. In an opposite direction\nservile arts may be abridged by a lapse of the demand which required\nthem. The servile art of vine-dressers, for instance, would meet such a\nfate if the course of history, instead of tending to make the vintage an\nideal episode and to create worshippers of Bacchus and Priapus, tended\nrather to bring about a distaste for wine and made the whole industry\nsuperfluous. This solution is certainly less happy than the other,\ninsomuch as it suppresses a function instead of taking it up into\norganic life; yet life to be organic has to be exclusive and finite; it\nhas to work out specific tendencies in a specific environment; and\ntherefore to surrender a particular impeded impulse may involve a clear\ngain, if only a compensating unimpeded good thereby comes to light\nelsewhere. If wine disappeared, with all its humane and symbolic\nconsecrations, that loss might bring an ultimate gain, could some less\ntreacherous friend of frankness and merriment be thereby brought into\nthe world.\n\nIn practice servile art is usually mitigated by combining these two\nmethods; the demand subserved, being but ill supported, learns to\nrestrain itself and be less importunate; while at the same time habit\nrenders the labour which was once unwilling largely automatic, and even\noverlays it with ideal associations. Human nature is happily elastic;\nthere is hardly a need that may not be muffled or suspended, and hardly\nan employment that may not be relieved by the automatic interest with\nwhich it comes to be pursued. To this automatic interest other\npalliatives are often added, sometimes religion, sometimes mere dulness\nand resignation; but in these cases the evil imposed is merely\ncounterbalanced or forgotten, it is not remedied. Reflective and\nspiritual races minimise labour by renunciation, for they find it easier\nto give up its fruits than to justify its exactions. Among energetic and\nself-willed men, on the contrary, the demand for material progress\nremains predominant, and philosophy dwells by preference on the\npossibility that a violent and continual subjection in the present might\nissue in a glorious future dominion. This possible result was hardly\nrealised by the Jews, nor long maintained by the Greeks and Romans, and\nit remains to be seen whether modern industrialism can achieve it. In\nfact, we may suspect that success only comes when a nation\u2019s external\ntask happens to coincide with its natural genius, so that a minimum of\nits labour is servile and a maximum of its play is beneficial. It is in\nsuch cases that we find colossal achievements and apparently\ninexhaustible energies. Prosperity is indeed the basis of every ideal\nattainment, so that prematurely to recoil from hardship, or to be\nhabitually conscious of hardship at all, amounts to renouncing\nbeforehand all earthly goods and all chance of spiritual greatness. Yet\na chance is no certainty. When glory requires Titanic labours it often\nfinds itself in the end buried under a pyramid rather than raised upon a\npedestal. Energies which are not from the beginning self-justifying and\nflooded with light seldom lead to ideal greatness.\n\n[Sidenote: Art starts from two potentialities: its material and its\nproblem.]\n\nThe action to which industry should minister is accordingly liberal or\nspontaneous action; and this one condition of rationality in from two\nthe arts. But a second condition is implicit in the first: freedom means\nfreedom in some operation, ideality means the ideality of something\nembodied and material. Activity, achievement, a passage from prospect\nto realisation, is evidently essential to life. If all ends were already\nreached, and no art were requisite, life could not exist at all, much\nless a Life of Reason. No politics, no morals, no thought would be\npossible, for all these move towards some ideal and envisage a goal to\nwhich they presently pass. The transition is the activity, without which\nachievement would lose its zest and indeed its meaning; for a situation\ncould never be achieved which had been given from all eternity. The\nideal is a concomitant emanation from the natural and has no other\npossible status. Those human possessions which are perennial and of\ninalienable value are in a manner potential possessions only. Knowledge,\nart, love are always largely in abeyance, while power is absolutely\nsynonymous with potentiality. Fruition requires a continual recovery, a\nrepeated re-establishment of the state we enjoy. So breath and\nnutrition, feeling and thought, come in pulsations; they have only a\nperiodic and rhythmic sort of actuality. The operation may be sustained\nindefinitely, but only if it admits a certain internal oscillation.\n\nA creature like man, whose mode of being is a life or experience and not\na congealed ideality, such as eternal truth might show, must accordingly\nfind something to do; he must operate in an environment in which\neverything is not already what he is presently to make it. In the actual\nworld this first condition of life is only too amply fulfilled; the real\ndifficulty in man\u2019s estate, the true danger to his vitality, lies not\nin want of work but in so colossal a disproportion between demand and\nopportunity that the ideal is stunned out of existence and perishes for\nwant of hope. The Life of Reason is continually beaten back upon its\nanimal sources, and nations are submerged in deluge after deluge of\nbarbarism. Impressed as we may well be by this ancient experience, we\nshould not overlook the complementary truth which under more favourable\ncircumstances would be as plain as the other: namely, that our deepest\ninterest is after all to live, and we could not live if all acquisition,\nassimilation, government, and creation had been made impossible for us\nby their foregone realisation, so that every operation was forestalled\nby the given fact. The distinction between the ideal and the real is one\nwhich the human ideal itself insists should be preserved. It is an\nessential expression of life, and its disappearance would be tantamount\nto death, making an end to voluntary transition and ideal\nrepresentation. All objects envisaged either in vulgar action or in the\nairiest cognition must be at first ideal and distinct from the given\nfacts, otherwise action would have lost its function at the same moment\nthat thought lost its significance. All life would have collapsed into a\npurposeless datum.\n\nThe ideal requires, then, that opportunities should be offered for\nrealising it through action, and that transition should be possible to\nit from a given state of things. One form of such transition is art,\nwhere the ideal is a possible and more excellent form to be given to\nsome external substance or medium. Art needs to find a material\nrelatively formless which its business is to shape; and this initial\nformlessness in matter is essential to art\u2019s existence. Were there no\nstone not yet sculptured and built into walls, no sentiment not yet\nperfectly uttered in poetry, no distance or oblivion yet to be abolished\nby motion or inferential thought, activity of all sorts would have lost\nits occasion. Matter, or actuality in what is only potentially ideal, is\ntherefore a necessary condition for realising an ideal at all.\n\n[Sidenote: Each must be definite and congruous with the other.]\n\nThis potentiality, however, in so far as the ideal requires it, is a\nquite definite disposition. Absolute chaos would defeat life as surely\nas would absolute ideality. Activity, in presupposing material\nconditions, presupposes them to be favourable, so that a movement\ntowards the ideal may actually take place. Matter, which from the point\nof view of a given ideal is merely its potentiality, is in itself the\npotentiality of every other ideal as well; it is accordingly responsible\nto no ideal in particular and proves in some measure refractory to all.\nIt makes itself felt, either as an opportune material or as an\naccidental hindrance, only when it already possesses definite form and\naffinities; given in a certain quantity, quality, and order, matter\nfeeds the specific life which, if given otherwise, it would impede or\nsmother altogether.\n\n[Sidenote: A sophism exposed]\n\nArt, in calling for materials, calls for materials plastic to its\ninfluence and definitely predisposed to its ends. Unsuitableness in the\ndata far from grounding action renders it abortive, and no expedient\ncould be more sophistical than that into which theodicy, in its\ndesperate straits, has sometimes been driven, of trying to justify as\nconditions for ideal achievement the very conditions which make ideal\nachievement impossible. The given state from which transition is to take\nplace to the ideal must support that transition; so that the desirable\nwant of ideality which plastic matter should possess is merely relative\nand strictly determined. Art and reason find in nature the background\nthey require; but nature, to be wholly justified by its ideal functions,\nwould have to subserve them perfectly. It would have to offer to reason\nand art a sufficient and favourable basis; it would have to feed sense\nwith the right stimuli at the right intervals, so that art and reason\nmight continually flourish and be always moving to some new success. A\npoet needs emotions and perceptions to translate into language, since\nthese are his subject-matter and his inspiration; but starvation,\nphysical or moral, will not help him to sing. One thing is to meet with\nthe conditions inherently necessary for a given action; another thing is\nto meet with obstacles fatal to the same. A propitious formlessness in\nmatter is no sort of evil; and evil is so far from being a propitious\nformlessness in matter that it is rather an impeding form which matter\nhas already assumed.\n\n[Sidenote: Industry prepares matter for the liberal arts.]\n\nOut of this appears, with sufficient clearness, the rational function\nwhich the arts possess. They give, as nature does, a form to matter, but\nthey give it a more propitious form. Such success in art is possible\nonly when the materials and organs at hand are in a large measure\nalready well disposed; for it can as little exist with a dull organ as\nwith no organ at all, while there are winds in which every sail must be\nfurled. Art depends upon profiting by a bonanza and learning to sail in\na good breeze, strong enough for speed and conscious power but placable\nenough for dominion and liberty of soul. Then perfection in action can\nbe attained and a self-justifying energy can emerge out of apathy on the\none hand and out of servile and wasteful work on the other. Art has\naccordingly two stages: one mechanical or industrial, in which untoward\nmatter is better prepared, or impeding media are overcome; the other\nliberal, in which perfectly fit matter is appropriated to ideal uses and\nendowed with a direct spiritual function. A premonition or rehearsal of\nthese two stages may be seen in nature, where nutrition and reproduction\nfit the body for its ideal functions, whereupon sensation and\ncerebration make it a direct organ of mind. Industry merely gives nature\nthat form which, if more thoroughly humane, she might have originally\npossessed for our benefit; liberal arts bring to spiritual fruition the\nmatter which either nature or industry has prepared and rendered\npropitious. This spiritual fruition consists in the activity of turning\nan apt material into an expressive and delightful form, thus filling the\nworld with objects which by symbolising ideal energies tend to revive\nthem under a favouring influence and therefore to strengthen and refine\nthem.\n\n[Sidenote: Each partakes of the other]\n\nIt remains merely to note that all industry contains an element of fine\nart and all fine art an element of industry; since every proximate end,\nin being attained, satisfies the mind and manifests the intent that\npursued it; while every operation upon a material, even one so volatile\nas sound, finds that material somewhat refractory. Before the product\ncan attain its ideal function many obstacles to its transparency and\nfitness have to be removed. A certain amount of technical and\ninstrumental labour is thus involved in every work of genius, and a\ncertain genius in every technical success.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER III\n\nEMERGENCE OF FINE ART\n\n\n[Sidenote: Art is spontaneous action made stable by success.]\n\nAction which is purely spontaneous is merely tentative. Any experience\nof success or utility which might have preceded, if it availed to make\naction sure, would avail to make it also intentional and conscious of\nits ulterior results. Now the actual issue which an action is destined\nto have, since it is something future and problematical, can exert no\ninfluence on its own antecedents; but if any picture of what the issue\nis likely to be accompanies the heat and momentum of action, that\npicture being, of all antecedents in the operation, the one most easily\nremembered and described, may be picked out as essential, and dignified\nwith the name of motive or cause. This will not happen to every\nprophetic idea; we may live in fear and trembling as easily as with an\narrogant consciousness of power. The difference flows from the greater\nor lesser affinity that happens to exist between expectation and\ninstinct. Action remains always, in its initial phase, spontaneous and\nautomatic; it retains an inwardly grounded and perfectly blind tendency\nof its own; but this tendency may agree or clash with the motor\nimpulses subtending whatever ideas may at the same time people the\nfancy. If the blind and the ideal impulses agree, spontaneous action is\nvoluntary and its result intentional; if they clash, the ideas remain\nspeculative and idle, random, ineffectual wishes; while the result, not\nbeing referable to any idea, is put down to fate. The sense of power,\naccordingly, shows either that events have largely satisfied desire, so\nthat natural tendency goes hand in hand with the suggestions of\nexperience, or else that experience has not been allowed to count at all\nand that the future is being painted _a priori_. In the latter case the\nsense of power is illusory. Action will then never really issue in the\nway intended, and even thought will only seem to make progress by\nconstantly forgetting its original direction.\n\nThough life, however, is initially experimental and always remains\nexperimental at bottom, yet experiment fortifies certain tendencies and\ncancels others, so that a gradual sediment of habit and wisdom is formed\nin the stream of time. Action then ceases to be merely tentative and\nspontaneous, and becomes art. Foresight begins to accompany practice\nand, as we say, to guide it. Purpose thus supervenes on useful impulse,\nand conscious expression on self-sustaining automatism. Art lies between\ntwo extremes. On the one side is purely spontaneous fancy, which would\nnever foresee its own works and scarcely recognise or value them after\nthey had been created, since at the next moment the imaginative current\nwould as likely as not have faced about and might be making in the\nopposite direction; and on the other side is pure utility, which would\ndeprive the work of all inherent ideality, and render it inexpressive of\nanything in man save his necessities. War, for instance, is an art when,\nhaving set itself an ideal end, it devises means of attaining it; but\nthis ideal end has for its chief basis some failure in politics and\nmorals. War marks a weakness and disease in human society, and its best\ntriumphs are glorious evils\u2014cruel and treacherous remedies, big with\nnew germs of disease. War is accordingly a servile art and not\nessentially liberal; whatever inherent values its exercise may have\nwould better be realised in another medium. Yet out of the pomp and\ncircumstance of war fine arts may arise\u2014music, armoury, heraldry, and\neloquence. So utility leads to art when its vehicle acquires intrinsic\nvalue and becomes expressive. On the other hand, spontaneous action\nleads to art when it acquires a rational function. Thus utterance, which\nis primarily automatic, becomes the art of speech when it serves to mark\ncrises in experience, making them more memorable and influential through\ntheir artificial expression; but expression is never art while it\nremains expressive to no purpose.\n\n[Sidenote: It combines utility and automatism.]\n\nA good way of understanding the fine arts would be to study how they\ngrow, now out of utility, now out of automatism. We should thus see\nmore clearly how they approach their goal, which can be nothing but the\ncomplete superposition of these two characters. If all practice were art\nand all art perfect, no action would remain compulsory and not justified\ninherently, while no creative impulse would any longer be wasteful or,\nlike the impulse to thrum, symptomatic merely and irrelevant to\nprogress. It is by contributing to the Life of Reason and merging into\nits substance that art, like religion or science, first becomes worthy\nof praise. Each element comes from a different quarter, bringing its\nspecific excellence and needing its peculiar purification and\nenlightenment, by co-ordination with all the others; and this process of\nenlightenment and purification is what we call development in each\ndepartment. The meanest arts are those which lie near the limit either\nof utility or of automatic self-expression. They become nobler and more\nrational as their utility is rendered spontaneous or their spontaneity\nbeneficent.\n\n[Sidenote: Automatism fundamental and irresponsible.]\n\nThe spontaneous arts are older than the useful, since man must live and\nact before he can devise instruments for living and acting better. Both\nthe power to construct machines and the end which, to be useful, they\nwould have to serve, need to be given in initial impulse. There is\naccordingly a vast amount of irresponsible play and loose experiment in\nart, as in consciousness, before these gropings acquire a settled habit\nand function, and rationality begins. The farther back we go into\nbarbarism the more we find life and mind busied with luxuries; and\nthough these indulgences may repel a cultivated taste and seem in the\nend cruel and monotonous, their status is really nearer to that of\nreligion and spontaneous art than to that of useful art or of science.\nCeremony, for instance, is compulsory in society and sometimes truly\noppressive, yet its root lies in self-expression and in a certain\nascendency of play which drags all life along into conventional channels\noriginally dug out in irresponsible bursts of action. This occurs\ninevitably and according to physical analogies. Bodily organs grow\nautomatically and become necessary moulds of life. We must either find a\nuse for them or bear as best we may the idle burden they impose. Of such\nburdens the barbarian carries the greatest possible sum; and while he\npaints the heavens with his grotesque mythologies, he encumbers earth\nwith inventions and prescriptions almost as gratuitous. The fiendish\ndances and shouts, the cruel initiations, mutilations, and sacrifices in\nwhich savages indulge, are not planned by them deliberately nor\njustified in reflection. Men find themselves falling into these\npractices, driven by a tradition hardly distinguishable from instinct.\nIn its periodic fury the spirit hurries them into wars and orgies, quite\nas it kindles sudden flaming visions in their brains, habitually so\ntorpid. The spontaneous is the worst of tyrants, for it exercises a\nneedless and fruitless tyranny in the guise of duty and inspiration.\nWithout mitigating in the least the subjection to external forces under\nwhich man necessarily labours, it adds a new artificial subjection to\nhis own false steps and childish errors.\n\n[Sidenote: It is tamed by contact with the world.]\n\nThis mental vegetation, this fitful nervous groping, is nevertheless a\nsign of life, out of which art emerges by discipline and by a gradual\napplication to real issues. An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream\nof the actual world; he is a highly suggestible mind hypnotised by\nreality. Even barbaric genius may find points of application in the\nworld. These points will be more numerous the more open the eyes have\nbeen, the more docile and intelligent the mind is that gathers and\nrenders back its impressions in a synthetic and ideal form. Intuition\nwill then represent, at least symbolically, an actual situation. Grimace\nand gesture and ceremony will be modified by a sense of their effect;\nthey will become artful and will transform their automatic\nexpressiveness into ideal expression. They will become significant of\nwhat it is intended to communicate and important to know; they will have\nceased to be irresponsible exercises and vents for passing feeling, by\nwhich feeling is dissipated, as in tears, without being embodied and\nintellectualised, as in a work of art.\n\n[Sidenote: The dance.]\n\n[Sidenote: Functions of gesture.]\n\nThe dance is an early practice that passes after this fashion into an\nart. A prancing stallion may transfigure his movements more beautifully\nthan man is capable of doing; for the springs and limits of effect are\nthroughout mechanical, and man, in more than one respect, would have to\nbecome a centaur before he could rival the horse\u2019s prowess. Human\ninstinct is very imperfect in this direction, and grows less happy the\nmore artificial society becomes; most dances, even the savage ones, are\nsomewhat ridiculous. A rudimentary instinct none the less remains, which\nnot only involves a faculty of heightened and rhythmic motion, but also\nassures a direct appreciation of such motion when seen in others. The\nconscious agility, _fougue_, and precision which fill the performer\nbecome contagious and delight the spectator as well. There are indeed\ndances so ugly that, like those of contemporary society, they cannot be\nenjoyed unless they are shared; they yield pleasures of exercise only,\nor at best of movement in unison. But when man was nearer to the animal\nand his body and soul were in happier conjunction, when society, too,\nwas more compulsive over the individual, he could lend himself more\nwillingly and gracefully to being a figure in the general pageant of the\nworld. The dance could then detach itself from its early association\nwith war and courtship and ally itself rather to religion and art. From\nbeing a spontaneous vent for excitement, or a blind means of producing\nit, the dance became a form of discipline and conscious social\ncontrol\u2014a cathartic for the soul; and this by a quite intelligible\ntransition. Gesture, of which the dance is merely a pervasive use, is an\nincipient action. It is conduct in the groping stage, before it has lit\non its purpose, as can be seen unmistakably in all the gesticulation of\nlove and defiance. In this way the dance is attached to life initially\nby its physiological origin. Being an incipient act, it naturally leads\nto its own completion and may arouse in others the beginnings of an\nappropriate response. Gesture is only less catching and less eloquent\nthan action itself. But gesture, while it has this power of suggesting\naction and stimulating the response which would be appropriate if the\naction took place, may be arrested in the process of execution, since it\nis incipient only; it will then have revealed an intention and betrayed\na state of mind. Thus it will have found a function which action itself\ncan seldom fulfil. When an act is done, indications of what it was to be\nare superfluous; but indications of possible acts are in the highest\ndegree useful and interesting. In this way gesture assumes the r\u00f4le of\nlanguage and becomes a means of rational expression. It remains\nsuggestive and imitable enough to convey an idea, but not enough to\nprecipitate a full reaction; it feeds that sphere of merely potential\naction which we call thought; it becomes a vehicle for intuition.\n\nUnder these circumstances, to tread the measures of a sacred dance, to\nmarch with an army, to bear one\u2019s share in any universal act, fills the\nheart with a voluminous silent emotion. The massive suggestion, the\npressure of the ambient will, is out of all proportion to the present\ncall for action. Infinite resources and definite premonitions are thus\nstored up in the soul; and merely to have moved solemnly together is the\nbest possible preparation for living afterwards, even if apart, in the\nconsciousness of a general monition and authority.\n\n[Sidenote: Automatic music.]\n\nParallel to this is the genesis and destiny of music, an art originally\nclosely intertwined with the dance. The same explosive forces that\nagitate the limbs loosen the voice; hand, foot, and throat mark their\nwild rhythm together. Birds probably enjoy the pulsation of their\nsinging rather than its sound. Even human music is performed long before\nit is listened to, and is at first no more an art than sighing. The\noriginal emotions connected with it are felt by participation in the\nperformance\u2014a participation which can become ideal only because, at\nbottom, it is always actual. The need of exercise and self-expression,\nthe force of contagion and unison, bears the soul along before an\nartistic appreciation of music arises; and we may still observe among\ncivilised races how music asserts itself without any \u00e6sthetic intent, as\nwhen the pious sing hymns in common, or the sentimental, at sea, cannot\nrefrain from whining their whole homely repertory in the moonlight. Here\nas elsewhere, instinct and habit are phases of the same inner\ndisposition. What has once occurred automatically on a given occasion\nwill be repeated in much the same form when a similar occasion recurs.\nThus impulse, reinforced by its own remembered expression, passes into\nconvention. Savages have a music singularly monotonous, automatic, and\nimpersonal; they cannot resist the indulgence, though they probably have\nlittle pleasure in it. The same thing happens with customary sounds as\nwith other prescribed ceremonies; to omit them would be shocking and\nwell-nigh impossible, yet to repeat them serves no end further than to\navoid a sense of strangeness or inhibition. These automatisms, however,\nin working themselves out, are not without certain retroactive effects:\nthey leave the system exhausted or relieved, and they have meantime\nplayed more or less agreeably on the senses. The music we make\nautomatically we cannot help hearing incidentally; the sensation may\neven modify the expression, since sensation too has its physical side.\nThe expression is reined in and kept from becoming vagrant, in\nproportion as its form and occasion are remembered. The automatic\nperformer, being henceforth controlled more or less by reflection and\ncriticism, becomes something of an artist: he trains himself to be\nconsecutive, impressive, agreeable; he begins to compare his\nimprovisation with its subject and function, and thus he develops what\nis called style and taste.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IV\n\nMUSIC\n\n\n[Sidenote: Music is a world apart.]\n\nSound readily acquires ideal values. It has power in itself to engross\nattention and at the same time may be easily diversified, so as to\nbecome a symbol for other things. Its direct empire is to be compared\nwith that of stimulants and opiates, yet it presents to the mind, as\nthese do not, a perception that corresponds, part by part, with the\nexternal stimulus. To hear is almost to understand. The process we\nundergo in mathematical or dialectical thinking is called understanding,\nbecause a natural sequence is there adequately translated into ideal\nterms. Logical connections seem to be internally justified, while only\nthe fact that we perceive them here and now, with more or less facility,\nis attributed to brute causes. Sound approaches this sort of ideality;\nit presents to sense something like the efficacious structure of the\nobject. It is almost mathematical; but like mathematics it is adequate\nonly by being abstract; and while it discloses point by point one strain\nin existence, it leaves many other strains, which in fact are interwoven\nwith it, wholly out of account. Music is accordingly, like mathematics,\nvery nearly a world by itself; it contains a whole gamut of experience,\nfrom sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies. Yet this\nsecond existence, this life in music, is no mere ghost of the other; it\nhas its own excitements, its quivering alternatives, its surprising\nturns; the abstract energy of it takes on so much body, that in\nprogression or declension it seems quite as impassioned as any animal\ntriumph or any moral drama.\n\n[Sidenote: It justifies itself.]\n\nThat a pattering of sounds on the ear should have such moment is a fact\ncalculated to give pause to those philosophers who attempt to explain\nconsciousness by its utility, or who wish to make physical and moral\nprocesses march side by side from all eternity. Music is essentially\nuseless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends\nutility to its conditions. That the way in which idle sounds run\ntogether should matter so much is a mystery of the same order as the\nspirit\u2019s concern to keep a particular body alive, or to propagate its\nlife. Such an interest is, from an absolute point of view, wholly\ngratuitous; and so long as the natural basis and expressive function of\nspirit are not perceived, this mystery is baffling. In truth the order\nof values inverts that of causes; and experience, in which all values\nlie, is an ideal resultant, itself ineffectual, of the potencies it can\nconceive. Delight in music is liberal; it makes useful the organs and\nprocesses that subserve it. These agencies, when they support a\nconscious interest in their operation, give that operation its first\nglimmering justification, and admit it to the rational sphere. Just so\nwhen organic bodies generate a will bent on their preservation, they add\na value and a moral function to their equilibrium. In vain should we ask\nfor what purpose existences arise, or become important; that purpose, to\nbe such, must already have been important to some existence; and the\nonly question that can be asked or answered is what recognised\nimportance, what ideal values, actual existences involve.\n\n[Sidenote: It is vital and transient.]\n\nWe happen to breathe, and on that account are interested in breathing;\nand it is no greater marvel that, happening to be subject to intricate\nmusical sensations, we should be in earnest about these too. The human\near discriminates sounds with ease; what it hears is so diversified that\nits elements can be massed without being confused, or can form a\nsequence having a character of its own, to be appreciated and\nremembered. The eye too has a field in which clear distinctions and\nrelations appear, and for that reason is an organ favourable to\nintelligence; but what gives music its superior emotional power is its\nrhythmic advance. Time is a medium which appeals more than space to\nemotion. Since life is itself a flux, and thought an operation, there is\nnaturally something immediate and breathless about whatever flows and\nexpands. The visible world offers itself to our regard with a certain\nlazy indifference. \u201cPeruse me,\u201d it seems to say, \u201cif you will. I am\nhere; and even if you pass me by now and later find it to your advantage\nto resurvey me, I may still be here.\u201d The world of sound speaks a more\nurgent language. It insinuates itself into our very substance, and it is\nnot so much the music that moves us as we that move with it. Its rhythms\nseize upon our bodily life, to accelerate or to deepen it; and we must\neither become inattentive altogether or remain enslaved.\n\n[Sidenote: Its physical affinities.]\n\nThis imperious function in music has lent it functions which are far\nfrom \u00e6sthetic. Song can be used to keep in unison many men\u2019s efforts, as\nwhen sailors sing as they heave; it can make persuasive and obvious\nsentiments which, if not set to music, might seem absurd, as often in\nlove songs and in psalmody. It may indeed serve to prepare the mind for\nany impression whatever, and render the same more intense when it comes.\nMusic was long used before it was loved or people took pains to refine\nit. It would have seemed as strange in primitive times to turn utterance\ninto a fine art as now to make \u00e6sthetic paces out of mourning or\nchild-birth. Primitive music is indeed a wail and a parturition; magical\nand suggestive as it may be, for long ages it never bethinks itself to\nbe beautiful. It is content to furnish a contagious melancholy\nemployment to souls without a language and with little interest in the\nreal world. Barbaric musicians, singing and playing together more or\nless at random, are too much carried away by their performance to\nconceive its effect; they cry far too loud and too unceasingly to\nlisten. A contagious tradition carries them along and controls them, in\na way, as they improvise; the assembly is hardly an audience; all are\nperformers, and the crowd is only a stimulus that keeps every one\ndancing and howling in emulation. This unconsidered flow of early art\nremains present, more or less, to the end. Instead of vague custom we\nhave schools, and instead of swaying multitudes academic example; but\nmany a discord and mannerism survive simply because the musician is so\nsuggestible, or so lost in the tumult of production, as never to\nreconsider what he does, or to perceive its wastefulness.\n\nNevertheless an inherent value exists in all emitted sounds, although\nbarbaric practice and theory are slow to recognise it. Each tone has its\nquality, like jewels of different water; every cadence has its vital\nexpression, no less inherent in it than that which comes in a posture or\nin a thought. Everything audible thrills merely by sounding, and though\nthis perceptual thrill be at first overpowered by the effort and\nexcitement of action, yet it eventually fights its way to the top.\nParticipation in music may become perfunctory or dull for the great\nmajority, as when hymns are sung in church; a mere suggestion of action\nwill doubtless continue to colour the impression received, for a\ntendency to act is involved in perception; but this suggestion will be\nonly an over-tone or echo behind an auditory feeling. Some performers\nwill be singled out from the crowd; those whom the public likes to hear\nwill be asked to continue alone; and soon a certain suasion will be\nexerted over them by the approval or censure of others, so that\nconsciously or unconsciously they will train themselves to please.\n\n[Sidenote: Physiology of music.]\n\nThe musical quality of sounds has a simple physical measure for its\nbasis; and the rate of vibration is complicated by its sweep or\nloudness, and by concomitant sounds. What a rich note is to a pure and\nthin one, that a chord is to a note; nor is melody wholly different in\nprinciple, for it is a chord rendered piece-meal. Time intervenes, and\nthe harmony is deployed; so that in melody rhythm is added, with its\nimmense appeal, to the cumulative effect already secured by rendering\nmany notes together. The heightened effect which a note gets by figuring\nin a phrase, or a phrase in a longer passage, comes of course from the\ntensions established and surviving in the sensorium\u2014a case, differently\nshaded, of chords and overtones. The difference is only that the more\nemphatic parts of the melody survive clearly to the end, while the\ndetail, which if perceived might now clash, is largely lost, and out of\nthe preceding parts perhaps nothing but a certain swing and potency is\npresent at the close. The mind has been raked and set vibrating in an\nunusual fashion, so that the _finale_ comes like a fulfilment after much\npremonition and desire, whereas the same event, unprepared for, might\nhardly have been observed. The whole technique of music is but an\nimmense elaboration of this principle. It deploys a sensuous harmony by\na sort of dialectic, suspending and resolving it, so that the parts\nbecome distinct and their relation vital.\n\n[Sidenote: Limits of musical sensibility.]\n\nSuch elaboration often exceeds the synthetic power of all but the best\ntrained minds. Both in scope and in articulation musical faculty varies\nprodigiously. There is no fixed limit to the power of sustaining a given\nconscious process while new features appear in the same field; nor is\nthere any fixed limit to the power of recovering, under changed\ncircumstances, a process that was formerly suspended. A whole symphony\nmight be felt at once, if the musician\u2019s power of sustained or\ncumulative hearing could stretch so far. As we all survey two notes and\ntheir interval in one sensation (actual experience being always\ntransitive and pregnant, and its terms ideal), so a trained mind might\nsurvey a whole composition. This is not to say that time would be\ntranscended in such an experience; the apperception would still have\nduration and the object would still have successive features, for\nevidently music not arranged in time would not be music, while all\nsensations with a recognisable character occupy more than an instant in\npassing. But the passing sensation, throughout its lapse, presents some\nexperience; and this experience, taken at any point, may present a\ntemporal sequence with any number of members, according to the synthetic\nand analytic power exerted by the given mind. What is tedious and\nformless to the inattentive may seem a perfect whole to one who, as they\nsay, takes it all in; and similarly what is a frightful deafening\ndiscord to a sense incapable of discrimination, for one who can hear the\nparts may break into a celestial chorus. A musical education is\nnecessary for musical judgment. What most people relish is hardly music;\nit is rather a drowsy revery relieved by nervous thrills.\n\n[Sidenote: The value of music is relative to them.]\n\nThe degree to which music should be elaborated depends on the capacity\npossessed by those it addresses. There are limits to every man\u2019s\nsynthetic powers, and to stretch those powers to their limit is\nexhausting. Excitement then becomes a debauch; it leaves the soul less\ncapable of habitual harmony. Especially is such extreme tension\ndisastrous when, as in music, nothing remains to be the fruit of that\nmighty victory; the most pregnant revelation sinks to an illusion and is\ndiscredited when it cannot maintain its inspiration in the world\u2019s\npresence. Everything has its own value and sets up its price; but others\nmust judge if that price is fair, and sociability is the condition of\nall rational excellence. There is therefore a limit to right complexity\nin music, a limit set not by the nature of music itself, but by its\nplace in human economy. This limit, though clear in principle, is\naltogether variable in practice; duly cultivated people will naturally\nplace it higher than the unmusical would. In other words, popular music\nneeds to be simple, although elaborate music may be beautiful to the\nfew. When elaborate music is the fashion among people to whom all music\nis a voluptuous mystery, we may be sure that what they love is\nvoluptuousness or fashion, and not music itself.\n\n[Sidenote: Wonders of musical structure.]\n\nBeneath its hypnotic power music, for the musician, has an intellectual\nessence. Out of simple chords and melodies, which at first catch only\nthe ear, he weaves elaborate compositions that by their form appeal also\nto the mind. This side of music resembles a richer versification; it may\nbe compared also to mathematics or to arabesques. A moving arabesque\nthat has a vital dimension, an audible mathematics, adding sense to\nform, and a versification that, since it has no subject-matter, cannot\ndo violence to it by its complex artifices\u2014these are types of pure\nliving, altogether joyful and delightful things. They combine life with\norder, precision with spontaneity; the flux in them has become\nrhythmical and its freedom has passed into a rational choice, since it\nhas come in sight of the eternal form it would embody. The musician,\nlike an architect or goldsmith working in sound, but freer than they\nfrom material trammels, can expand for ever his yielding labyrinth;\nevery step opens up new vistas, every decision\u2014how unlike those made in\nreal life!\u2014multiplies opportunities, and widens the horizon before him,\nwithout preventing him from going back at will to begin afresh at any\npoint, to trace the other possible paths leading thence through various\nmagic landscapes. Pure music is pure art. Its extreme abstraction is\nbalanced by its entire spontaneity, and, while it has no external\nsignificance, it bears no internal curse. It is something to which a few\nspirits may well surrender themselves, sure that in a liberal\ncommonwealth they will be thanked for their ideal labour, the fruits of\nwhich many may enjoy. Such excursions into ultra-mundane regions, where\norder is free, refine the mind and make it familiar with perfection. By\nanalogy an ideal form comes to be conceived and desiderated in other\nregions, where it is not produced so readily, and the music heard, as\nthe Pythagoreans hoped, makes the soul also musical.\n\n[Sidenote: Its inherent emotions.]\n\nIt must be confessed, however, that a world of sounds and rhythms, all\nabout nothing, is a by-world and a mere distraction for a political\nanimal. Its substance is air, though the spell of it may have moral\naffinities. Nevertheless this ethereal art may be enticed to earth and\nmarried with what is mortal. Music interests humanity most when it is\nwedded to human events. The alliance comes about through the emotions\nwhich music and life arouse in common. For sound, in sweeping through\nthe body and making felt there its kinetic and potential stress,\nprovokes no less interest than does any other physical event or\npremonition. Music can produce emotion as directly as can fighting or\nlove. If in the latter instances the body\u2019s whole life may be in\njeopardy, this fact is no explanation of our concern; for many a danger\nis not felt and there is no magic in the body\u2019s future condition, that\nit should now affect the soul. What touches the soul is the body\u2019s\ncondition at the moment; and this is altered no less truly by a musical\nimpression than by some protective or reproductive act. If emotions\naccompany the latter, they might as well accompany the former; and in\nfact they do. Nor is music the only idle cerebral commotion that enlists\nattention and presents issues no less momentous for being quite\nimaginary; dreams do the same, and seldom can the real crises of life so\nabsorb the soul, or prompt it to such extreme efforts, as can delirium\nin sickness, or delusion in what passes for health.\n\n[Sidenote: In growing specific they remain unearthly.]\n\nThere is perhaps no emotion incident to human life that music cannot\nrender in its abstract medium by suggesting the pang of it; though of\ncourse music cannot describe the complex situation which lends earthly\npassions their specific colour. It is by fusion with many suggested\nemotions that sentiment grows definite; this fusion can hardly come\nabout without ideas intervening, and certainly it could never be\nsustained or expressed without them. Occasions define feelings; we can\nconvey a delicate emotion only by delicately describing the situation\nwhich brings it on. Music, with its irrelevant medium, can never do this\nfor common life, and the passions, as music renders them, are always\ngeneral. But music has its own substitute for conceptual distinctness.\nIt makes feeling specific, nay, more delicate and precise than\nassociation with things could make it, by uniting it with musical form.\nWe may say that besides suggesting abstractly all ordinary passions,\nmusic creates a new realm of form far more subtly impassioned than is\nvulgar experience. Human life is confined to a dramatic repertory which\nhas already become somewhat classical and worn, but music has no end of\nnew situations, shaded in infinite ways; it moves in all sorts of bodies\nto all sorts of adventures. In life the ordinary routine of destiny\nbeats so emphatic a measure that it does not allow free play to feeling;\nwe cannot linger on anything long enough to exhaust its meaning, nor can\nwe wander far from the beaten path to catch new impressions. But in\nmusic there are no mortal obligations, no imperious needs calling us\nback to reality. Here nothing beautiful is extravagant, nothing\ndelightful unworthy. Musical refinement finds no limit but its own\ninstinct, so that a thousand shades of what, in our blundering words, we\nmust call sadness or mirth, find in music their distinct expression.\nEach phrase, each composition, articulates perfectly what no human\nsituation could embody. These fine emotions are really new; they are\naltogether musical and unexampled in practical life; they are native to\nthe passing cadence, absolute postures into which it throws the soul.\n\n[Sidenote: They merge with common emotions, and express such as find no\nobject in nature.]\n\nThere is enough likeness, however, between musical and mundane feeling\nfor the first to be used in entertaining the second. Hence the singular\nprivilege of this art: to give form to what is naturally inarticulate\nand express those depths of human nature which can speak no language\ncurrent in the world. Emotion is primarily about nothing, and much of it\nremains about nothing to the end. What rescues a part of our passions\nfrom this pathological plight, and gives them some other function than\nmerely to be, is the ideal relevance, the practical and mutually\nrepresentative character, which they sometimes acquire. All experience\nis pathological if we consider its ground; but a part of it is also\nrational if we consider its import. The words I am now writing have a\nmeaning not because at this moment they are fused together in my animal\nsoul as a dream might fuse them, however incongruous the situation they\ndepict might be in waking life; they are significant only if this\nmoment\u2019s product can meet and conspire with some other thought speaking\nof what elsewhere exists, and uttering an intuition that from time to\ntime may be actually recovered. The art of distributing interest among\nthe occasions and vistas of life so as to lend them a constant worth,\nand at the same time to give feeling an ideal object, is at bottom the\nsole business of education; but the undertaking is long, and much\nfeeling remains unemployed and unaccounted for. This objectless emotion\nchokes the heart with its dull importunity; now it impedes right action,\nnow it feeds and fattens illusion. Much of it radiates from primary\nfunctions which, though their operation is half known, have only base or\npitiful associations in human life; so that they trouble us with deep\nand subtle cravings, the unclaimed _Hinterland_ of life. When music,\neither by verbal indications or by sensuous affinities, or by both at\nonce, succeeds in tapping this fund of suppressed feeling, it\naccordingly supplies a great need. It makes the dumb speak, and plucks\nfrom the animal heart potentialities of expression which might render\nit, perhaps, even more than human.\n\n[Sidenote: Music lends elementary feelings an intellectual communicable\nform.]\n\nBy its emotional range music is appropriate to all intense occasions: we\ndance, pray, and mourn to music, and the more inadequate words or\nexternal acts are to the situation, the more grateful music is. As the\nonly bond between music and life is emotion, music is out of place only\nwhere emotion itself is absent. If it breaks in upon us in the midst of\nstudy or business it becomes an interruption or alternative to our\nactivity, rather than an expression of it; we must either remain\ninattentive or pass altogether into the realm of sound (which may be\nunemotional enough) and become musicians for the nonce. Music brings its\nsympathetic ministry only to emotional moments; there it merges with\ncommon existence, and is a welcome substitute for descriptive ideas,\nsince it co-operates with us and helps to deliver us from dumb\nsubjection to influences which we should not know how to meet otherwise.\nThere is often in what moves us a certain ruthless persistence, together\nwith a certain poverty of form; the power felt is out of proportion to\nthe interest awakened, and attention is kept, as in pain, at once\nstrained and idle. At such a moment music is a blessed resource. Without\nattempting to remove a mood that is perhaps inevitable, it gives it a\ncongruous filling. Thus the mood is justified by an illustration or\nexpression which seems to offer some objective and ideal ground for its\nexistence; and the mood is at the same time relieved by absorption in\nthat impersonal object. So entertained, the feeling settles. The passion\nto which at first we succumbed is now tamed and appropriated. We have\ndigested the foreign substance in giving it a rational form: its\nenergies are merged in that strength by which we freely operate.\n\nIn this way the most abstract of arts serves the dumbest emotions.\nMatter which cannot enter the moulds of ordinary perception, capacities\nwhich a ruling instinct usually keeps under, flow suddenly into this\nnew channel. Music is like those branches which some trees put forth\nclose to the ground, far below the point where the other boughs\nseparate; almost a tree by itself, it has nothing but the root in common\nwith its parent. Somewhat in this fashion music diverts into an abstract\nsphere a part of those forces which abound beneath the point at which\nhuman understanding grows articulate. It nourishes on saps which other\nbranches of ideation are too narrow or rigid to take up. Those\nelementary substances the musician can spiritualise by his special\nmethods, taking away their reproach and redeeming them from blind\nintensity.\n\n[Sidenote: All essences are in themselves good, even the passions.]\n\nThere is consequently in music a sort of Christian piety, in that it\ncomes not to call the just but sinners to repentance, and understands\nthe spiritual possibilities in outcasts from the respectable world. If\nwe look at things absolutely enough, and from their own point of view,\nthere can be no doubt that each has its own ideal and does not question\nits own justification. Lust and frenzy, revery or despair, fatal as they\nmay be to a creature that has general ulterior interests, are not\nperverse in themselves: each searches for its own affinities, and has a\nkind of inertia which tends to maintain it in being, and to attach or\ndraw in whatever is propitious to it. Feelings are as blameless as so\nmany forms of vegetation; they can be poisonous only to a different\nlife. They are all primordial motions, eddies which the universal flux\nmakes for no reason, since its habit of falling into such attitudes is\nthe ground-work and exemplar for nature and logic alike. That such\nstrains should exist is an ultimate datum; justification cannot be\nrequired of them, but must be offered to each of them in turn by all\nthat enters its particular orbit. There is no will but might find a\nworld to disport itself in and to call good, and thereupon boast to have\ncreated that in which it found itself expressed. But such satisfaction\nhas been denied to the majority; the equilibrium of things has at least\npostponed their day. Yet they are not altogether extinguished, since the\nequilibrium of things is mechanical and results from no preconcerted\nharmony such as would have abolished everything contrary to its own\nperfection. Many ill-suppressed possibilities endure in matter, and peep\ninto being through the crevices, as it were, of the dominant world.\nWeeds they are called by the tyrant, but in themselves they are aware of\nbeing potential gods. Why should not every impulse expand in a congenial\nparadise? Why should each, made evil now only by an adventitious\nappellation or a contrary fate, not vindicate its own ideal? If there is\na piety towards things deformed, because it is not they that are\nperverse, but the world that by its laws and arbitrary standards decides\nto treat them as if they were, how much more should there be a piety\ntowards things altogether lovely, when it is only space and matter that\nare wanting for their perfect realisation?\n\n[Sidenote: Each impulse calls for a possible congenial world.]\n\nPhilosophers talk of self-contradiction, but there is evidently no such\nthing, if we take for the self what is really vital, each propulsive,\ndefinite strain of being, each nucleus for estimation and for pleasure\nand pain. Bach impulse may be contradicted, but not by itself; it may\nfind itself opposed, in a theatre which it has entered it knows not how,\nby violent personages that it has never wished to encounter. The\nenvironment it calls for is congenial with it: and by that environment\nit could never be thwarted or condemned. The lumbering course of events\nmay indeed involve it in rum, and a mind with permanent interests to\ndefend may at once rule out everything inconsistent with possible\nharmonies; but such rational judgments come from outside and represent a\ncompromise struck with material forces. Moral judgments and conflicts\nare possible only in the mind that represents many interests\nsynthetically: in nature, where primary impulses collide, all conflict\nis physical and all will innocent. Imagine some ingredient of humanity\nloosed from its oppressive environment in human economy: it would at\nonce vegetate and flower into some ideal form, such as we see\nexuberantly displayed in nature. If we can only suspend for a moment the\ncongested traffic in the brain, these initial movements will begin to\ntraverse it playfully and show their paces, and we shall live in one of\nthose plausible worlds which the actual world has made impossible.\n\n[Sidenote: Literature incapable of expressing pure feelings.]\n\nMan possesses, for example, a native capacity for joy. There are\nmoments, in friendship or in solitude, when joy is realised; but the\noccasions are often trivial and could never justify in reflection the\nfeelings that then happen to bubble up. Nor can pure joy be long\nsustained: cross-currents of lassitude or anxiety, distracting\nincidents, irrelevant associations, trouble its course and make it\nlanguish, turning it before long into dulness or melancholy. Language\ncannot express a joy that shall be full and pure; for to keep the purity\nnothing would have to be named which carried the least suggestion of\nsadness with it, and, in the world that human language refers to, such a\ncondition would exclude every situation possible. \u201cO joy, O joy,\u201d would\nbe the whole ditty: hence some dialecticians, whose experience is\nlargely verbal, think whatever is pure necessarily thin.\n\n[Sidenote: Music may do so.]\n\nThat feeling should be so quickly polluted is, however, a superficial\nand earthly accident. Spirit is clogged by what it flows through, but at\nits springs it is both limpid and abundant. There is matter enough in\njoy for many a universe, though the actual world has not a single form\nquite fit to embody it, and its too rapid syllables are excluded from\nthe current hexameter. Music, on the contrary, has a more flexible\nmeasure; its prosody admits every word. Its rhythms can explicate every\nemotion, through all degrees of complexity and volume, without once\ndisavowing it. Thus unused matter, which is not less fertile than that\nwhich nature has absorbed, comes to fill out an infinity of ideal forms.\nThe joy condemned by practical exigencies to scintillate for a moment\nuncommunicated, and then, as it were, to be buried alive, may now find\nan abstract art to embody it and bring it before the public, formed into\na rich and constant object called a musical composition. So art succeeds\nin vindicating the forgotten regions of spirit: a new spontaneous\ncreation shows how little authority or finality the given creation has.\n\n[Sidenote: Instability the soul of matter.]\n\nWhat is true of joy is no less true of sorrow, which, though it arises\nfrom failure in some natural ideal, carries with it a sentimental ideal\nof its own. Even confusion can find in music an expression and a\ncatharsis. That death or change should grieve does not follow from the\nmaterial nature of these phenomena. To change or to disappear might be\nas normal a tendency as to move; and it actually happens, when nothing\nideal has been attained, that _not to be thus_ is the whole law of\nbeing. There is then a nameless satisfaction in passing on; which is the\nvirtual ideal of pain and mere willing. Death and change acquire a\ntragic character when they invade a mind which is not ready for them in\nall its parts, so that those elements in it which are still vigorous,\nand would maintain somewhat longer their ideal identity, suffer violence\nat the hands of the others, already mastered by decay and willing to be\nself-destructive. Thus a man whose physiological complexion involves\nmore poignant emotion than his ideas can absorb\u2014one who is\nsentimental\u2014will yearn for new objects that may explain, embody, and\nfocus his dumb feelings; and these objects, if art can produce them,\nwill relieve and glorify those feelings in the act of expressing them.\nCatharsis is nothing more.\n\n[Sidenote: Peace the triumph of spirit.]\n\nThere would be no pleasure in expressing pain, if pain were not\ndominated through its expression. To know how just a cause we have for\ngrieving is already a consolation, for it is already a shift from\nfeeling to understanding. By such consideration of a passion, the\nintellectual powers turn it into subject-matter to operate upon. All\nutterance is a feat, all apprehension a discovery; and this intellectual\nvictory, sounding in the midst of emotional struggles, hushes some part\nof their brute importunity. It is at once sublime and beneficent, like a\ngod stilling a tempest. Melancholy can in this way be the food of art;\nand it is no paradox that such a material may be beautiful when a fit\nform is imposed upon it, since a fit form turns anything into an\nagreeable object; its beauty runs as deep as its fitness, and stops\nwhere its adaptation to human nature begins to fail. Whatever can\ninterest may prompt to expression, as it may have satisfied curiosity;\nand the mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a\ntruth, however unwelcome to the flesh, or discover an actual force,\nhowever unfavourable to given interests. As meditation on death and on\nlife make equally for wisdom, so the expression of sorrow and joy make\nequally for beauty. Meditation and expression are themselves congenial\nactivities with an intrinsic value which is not lessened if what they\ndeal with could have been abolished to advantage. If once it exists, we\nmay understand and interpret it; and this reaction will serve a double\npurpose. At first, in its very act, it will suffuse and mollify the\nunwelcome experience by another, digesting it, which is welcome; and\nlater, by the broader adjustment which it will bring into the mind, it\nwill help us to elude or confront the evils thus laid clearly before us.\n\nCatharsis has no such effect as a sophistical optimism wishes to\nattribute to it; it does not show us that evil is good, or that calamity\nand crime are things to be grateful for: so forced an apology for evil\nhas nothing to do with tragedy or wisdom; it belongs to apologetics and\nan artificial theodicy. Catharsis is rather the consciousness of how\nevil evils are, and how besetting; and how possible goods lie between\nand involve serious renunciations. To understand, to accept, and to use\nthe situation in which a mortal may find himself is the function of art\nand reason. Such mastery is desirable in itself and for its fruits; it\ndoes not make itself responsible for the chaos of goods and evils that\nit supervenes upon. Whatever writhes in matter, art strives to give form\nto; and however unfavourable the field may be for its activity, it does\nwhat it can there, since no other field exists in which it may labour.\n\n[Sidenote: Refinement is true strength.]\n\nSad music pleases the melancholy because it is sad and other men because\nit is music. When a composer attempts to reproduce complex conflicts in\nhis score he will please complex or disordered spirits for expressing\ntheir troubles, but other men only for the order and harmony he may have\nbrought out of that chaos. The chaos in itself will offend, and it is no\npart of rational art to produce it. As well might a physician poison in\norder to give an antidote, or maim in order to amputate. The subject\nmatter of art is life, life as it actually is; but the function of art\nis to make life better. The depth to which an artist may find current\nexperience to be sunk in discord and confusion is not his special\nconcern; his concern is, in some measure, to lift experience out. The\nmore barbarous his age, the more drastic and violent must be his\noperation. He will have to shout in a storm. His strength must needs, in\nsuch a case, be very largely physical and his methods sensational. In a\ngentler age he may grow nobler, and blood and thunder will no longer\nseem impressive. Only the weak are obliged to be violent; the strong,\nhaving all means at command, need not resort to the worst. Refined art\nis not wanting in power if the public is refined also. And as\nrefinement comes only by experience, by comparison, by subordinating\nmeans to ends and rejecting what hinders, it follows that a refined mind\nwill really possess the greater volume, as well as the subtler\ndiscrimination. Its ecstasy without grimace, and its submission without\ntears, will hold heaven and earth better together\u2014and hold them better\napart\u2014than could a mad imagination.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER V\n\nSPEECH AND SIGNIFICATION\n\n\n[Sidenote: Sounds well fitted to be symbols.]\n\nMusic rationalises sound, but a more momentous rationalising of sound is\nseen in language. Language is one of the most useful of things, yet the\ngreater part of it still remains (what it must all have been in the\nbeginning) useless and without ulterior significance. The musical side\nof language is its primary and elementary side. Man is endowed with\nvocal organs so plastic as to emit a great variety of delicately varied\nsounds; and by good fortune his ear has a parallel sensibility, so that\nmuch vocal expression can be registered and confronted by auditory\nfeeling. It has been said that man\u2019s pre-eminence in nature is due to\nhis possessing hands; his modest participation in the ideal world may\nsimilarly be due to his possessing tongue and ear. For when he finds\nshouting and vague moaning after a while fatiguing, he can draw a new\npleasure from uttering all sorts of labial, dental, and gutteral sounds.\nTheir rhythms and oppositions can entertain him, and he can begin to use\nhis lingual gamut to designate the whole range of his perceptions and\npassions.\n\nHere we touch upon one of the great crises in creation. As nutrition at\nfirst established itself in the face of waste, and reproduction in the\nface of death, so representation was able, by help of vocal symbols, to\nconfront that dispersion inherent in experience, which is something in\nitself ephemeral. Merely to associate one thing with another brings\nlittle gain; and merely to have added a vocal designation to fleeting\nthings\u2014a designation which of course would have been taken for a part\nof their essence\u2014would in itself have encumbered phenomena without\nrendering them in any way more docile to the will. But the encumbrance\nin this instance proved to be a wonderful preservative and means of\ncomparison. It actually gave each moving thing its niche and cenotaph in\nthe eternal. For the universe of vocal sounds was a field, like that of\ncolour or number, in which the elements showed relations and transitions\neasy to dominate. It was a key-board over which attention could run back\nand forth, eliciting many implicit harmonies. Henceforth when various\nsounds had been idly associated with various things, and identified with\nthem, the things could, by virtue of their names, be carried over\nmentally into the linguistic system; they could be manipulated there\nideally, and vicariously preserved in representation. Needless to say\nthat the things themselves remained unchanged all the while in their\nefficacy and mechanical succession, just as they remain unchanged in\nthose respects when they pass for the mathematical observer into their\nmeasure or symbol; but as this reduction to mathematical form makes them\ncalculable, so their earlier reduction to words rendered them comparable\nand memorable, first enabling them to figure in discourse at all.\n\n[Sidenote: Language has a structure independent of things.]\n\nLanguage had originally no obligation to subserve an end which we may\nsometimes measure it by now, and depute to be its proper function,\nnamely, to stand for things and adapt itself perfectly to their\nstructure. In language as in every other existence idealism precedes\nrealism, since it must be a part of nature living its own life before it\ncan become a symbol for the rest and bend to external control. The vocal\nand musical medium is, and must always remain, alien, to the spatial.\nWhat makes terms correspond and refer to one another is a relation\neternally disparate from the relation of propinquity or derivation\nbetween existences. Yet when sounds were attached to an event or\nemotion, the sounds became symbols for that disparate fact. The net of\nvocal relations caught that natural object as a cobweb might catch a\nfly, without destroying or changing it. The object\u2019s quality passed to\nthe word at the same time that the word\u2019s relations enveloped the\nobject; and thus a new weight and significance was added to sound,\npreviously nothing but a dull music. A conflict at once established\nitself between the drift proper to the verbal medium and that proper to\nthe designated things; a conflict which the whole history of language\nand thought has embodied and which continues to this day.\n\n[Sidenote: Words remaining identical, serve to identify things that\nchange.]\n\nSuppose an animal going down to a frozen river which he had previously\nvisited in summer. Marks of all sorts would awaken in him an old train\nof reactions; he would doubtless feel premonitions of satisfied thirst\nand the splash of water. On finding, however, instead of the fancied\nliquid, a mass of something like cold stone, he would be disconcerted.\nHis active attitude would be pulled up short and contradicted. In his\nfairyland of faith and magic the old river would have been simply\nannihilated, the dreamt-of water would have become a vanished ghost, and\nthis ice for the moment the hard reality. He would turn away and live\nfor a while on other illusions. When this shock was overgrown by time\nand it was summer again, the original habit might, however, reassert\nitself once more. If he revisited the stream, some god would seem to\nbring back something from an old familiar world; and the chill of that\ntemporary estrangement, the cloud that for a while had made the good\ninvisible, would soon be gone and forgotten.\n\nIf we imagine, on the contrary, that this animal could speak and had\nfrom the first called his haunt _the river_, he would have repeated its\nname on seeing it even when it was frozen, for he had not failed to\nrecognise it in that guise. The variation afterwards noticed, upon\nfinding it hard, would seem no total substitution, but a _change_; for\nit would be the same river, once flowing, that was now congealed. An\nidentical word, covering all the identical qualities in the phenomena\nand serving to abstract them, would force the inconsistent qualities in\nthose phenomena to pass for accidents; and the useful proposition could\nat once be framed that the same river may be sometimes free and\nsometimes frozen.\n\n[Sidenote: Language the dialectical garment of facts.]\n\nThis proposition is true, yet it contains much that is calculated to\noffend a scrupulous dialectician. Its language and categories are not\npurely logical, but largely physical and representative. The notion that\nwhat changes nevertheless endures is a remarkable hybrid. It arises when\nrigid ideal terms are imposed on evanescent existence. Feelings, taken\nalone, would show no identities; they would be lost in changing, or be\nwoven into the infinite feeling of change. Notions, taken alone, would\nallow no lapse, but would merely lead attention about from point to\npoint over an eternal system of relations. Power to understand the\nworld, logical or scientific mastery of existence, arises only by the\nforced and conventional marriage of these two essences, when the actual\nflux is ideally suspended and an ideal harness is loosely flung upon\nthings. For this purpose words are an admirable instrument. They have\ndialectical relations based on an ideal import, or tendency to\ndefinition, which makes their essence their signification; yet they can\nbe freely bandied about and applied for a moment to the ambiguous things\nthat pass through existence.\n\n[Sidenote: Words are wise men\u2019s counters.]\n\nHad men been dumb, an exchange and circulation of images need not have\nbeen wanting, and associations might have arisen between ideals in the\nmind and corresponding reactive habits in the body. What words add is\nnot power of discernment or action, but a medium of intellectual\nexchange. Language is like money, without which specific relative values\nmay well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common\ndenominator. And as money must have a certain intrinsic value of its own\nin order that its relation to other values may be stable, so a word, by\nwhich a thing is represented in discourse, must be a part of that\nthing\u2019s context, an ingredient in the total apparition it is destined to\nrecall. Words, in their existence, are no more universal than gold by\nnature is a worthless standard of value in other things. Words are a\nmaterial accompaniment of phenomena, at first an idle accompaniment, but\none which happens to subserve easily a universal function. Some other\nelement in objects might conceivably have served for a common\ndenominator between them; but words, just by virtue of their\nadventitious, detachable status, and because they are so easily compared\nand manipulated in the world of sound, were singularly well fitted for\nthis office. They are not vague, as any common quality abstracted from\nthings would necessarily become; and though vagueness is a quality only\ntoo compatible with perception, so that vague ideas can exist without\nend, this vagueness is not what makes them universal in their functions.\nIt is one thing to perceive an ill-determined form and quite another to\nattribute to it a precise general predicate. Words, distinct in their\nown category and perfectly recognisable, can accordingly perform very\nwell the function of embodying a universal; for they can be identified\nin turn with many particulars and yet remain throughout particular\nthemselves.\n\n[Sidenote: Nominalism right in psychology and realism in logic]\n\nThe psychology of nominalism is undoubtedly right where it insists that\nevery image is particular and every term, in its existential aspect, a\n_flatum vocis_; but nominalists should have recognised that images may\nhave any degree of vagueness and generality when measured by a\nconceptual standard. A figure having obviously three sides and three\ncorners may very well be present to the mind when it is impossible to\nsay whether it is an equilateral or a rectangular triangle. Functional\nor logical universality lies in another sphere altogether, being a\nmatter of intent and not of existence. When we say that \u201cuniversals\nalone exist in the mind\u201d we mean by \u201cmind\u201d something unknown to\nBerkeley; not a bundle of psychoses nor an angelic substance, but quick\nintelligence, the faculty of discourse. Predication is an act,\nunderstanding a spiritual and transitive operation: its existential\nbasis may well be counted in psychologically and reduced to a stream of\nimmediate presences; but its meaning can be caught only by another\nmeaning, as life only can exemplify life. Vague or general images are as\nlittle universal as sounds are; but a sound better than a flickering\nabstraction can serve the intellect in its operation of comparison and\nsynthesis. Words are therefore the body of discourse, of which the soul\nis understanding.\n\n[Sidenote: Literature moves between the extremes of music and\ndenotation.]\n\nThe categories of discourse are in part merely representative, in part\nmerely grammatical, and in part attributable to both spheres. Euphony\nand phonetic laws are principles governing language without any\nreference to its meaning; here speech is still a sort of music. At the\nother extreme lies that ultimate form of prose which we see in\nmathematical reasoning or in a telegraphic style, where absolutely\nnothing is rhetorical and speech is denuded of every feature not\nindispensable to its symbolic r\u00f4le. Between these two extremes lies the\nbroad field of poetry, or rather of imaginative or playful expression,\nwhere the verbal medium is a medium indeed, having a certain\ntransparency, a certain reference to independent facts, but at the same\ntime elaborates the fact in expressing it, and endows it with affinities\nalien to its proper nature. A pun is a grotesque example of such\ndiremption, where ambiguities belonging only to speech are used to\nsuggest impossible substitutions in ideas. Less frankly, language\nhabitually wrests its subject-matter in some measure from its real\ncontext and transfers it to a represented and secondary world, the world\nof logic and reflection. Concretions in existence are subsumed, when\nnamed, under concretions in discourse. Grammar lays violent hands upon\nexperience, and everything becomes a prey to wit and fancy, a material\nfor fiction and eloquence. Man\u2019s intellectual progress has a poetic\nphase, in which he imagines the world; and then a scientific phase, in\nwhich he sifts and tests what he has imagined.\n\n[Sidenote: Sound and object, in their sensuous presence, may have\naffinity.]\n\nIn what measure do inflection and syntax represent anything in the\nsubject-matter of discourse? In what measure are they an independent\nplay of expression, a quasi-musical, quasi-mathematical veil interposed\nbetween reflection and existence? One who knows only languages of a\nsingle family can give but a biassed answer to this question. There are\ndoubtless many approaches to correct symbolism in language, which\ngrammar may have followed up at different times in strangely different\nways. That the medium in every art has a character of its own, a\ncharacter limiting its representative value, may perhaps be safely\nasserted, and this intrinsic character in the medium antedates and\npermeates all representation. Phonetic possibilities and phonetic habits\nbelong, in language, to this indispensable vehicle; what the throat and\nlips can emit easily and distinguishably, and what sequences can appeal\nto the ear and be retained, depend alike on physiological conditions;\nand no matter how convenient or inconvenient these conditions may be for\nsignification, they will always make themselves felt and may sometimes\nremain predominant. In poetry they are still conspicuous. Euphony,\nmetre, and rhyme colour the images they transmit and add a charm wholly\nextrinsic and imputed. In this immersion of the message in the medium\nand in its intrinsic movement the magic of poetry lies; and the miracle\ngrows as there is more or less native analogy between the medium\u2019s\nmovement and that of the subject-matter.\n\nBoth language and ideas involve processes in the brain. The two\nprocesses may be wholly disparate if we regard their objects only and\nforget their seat, as Athena is in no way linked to an elephant\u2019s tusk;\nyet in perception all processes are contiguous and exercise a single\norganism, in which they may find themselves in sympathetic or\nantipathetic vibration. On this circumstance hangs that subtle congruity\nbetween subject and vehicle which is otherwise such a mystery in\nexpression. If to think of Athena and to look on ivory are congruous\nphysiological processes, if they sustain or heighten each other, then to\nrepresent Athena in ivory will be a happy expedient, in which the very\nnature of the medium will already be helping us forward. Scent and form\ngo better together, for instance, in the violet or the rose than in the\nhyacinth or the poppy: and being better compacted for human perception\nthey seem more expressive and can be linked more unequivocally with\nother sources of feeling. So a given vocal sound may have more or less\nanalogy to the thing it is used to signify; this analogy may be obvious,\nas in onomatopoeia, or subtle, as when short, sharp sounds go with\ndecision, or involved rhythms and vague reverberations with a floating\ndream. What seems exquisite to one poet may accordingly seem vapid to\nanother, when the texture of experience in the two minds differs, so\nthat a given composition rustles through one man\u2019s fancy as a wind might\nthrough a wood, but finds no sympathetic response in the other organism,\nnerved as it may be, perhaps, to precision in thought and action.\n\n[Sidenote: Syntax positively representative.]\n\nThe structure of language, when it passes beyond the phonetic level,\nbegins at once to lean upon existences and to imitate the structure of\nthings. We distinguish the parts of speech, for instance, in\nsubservience to distinctions which we make in ideas. The feeling or\nquality represented by an adjective, the relation indicated by a verb,\nthe substance or concretion of qualities designated by a noun, are\ndiversities growing up in experience, by no means attributable to the\nmere play of sound. The parts of speech are therefore representative.\nTheir inflection is representative too, since tenses mark important\npractical differences in the distribution of the events described, and\ncases express the respective r\u00f4les played by objects in the operation.\n\u201cI struck him and he will strike me,\u201d renders in linguistic symbols a\nmarked change in the situation; the variation in phrase is not\nrhetorical. Language here, though borrowed no doubt from ancestral\npoetry, has left all revery far behind, and has been submerged in the\nLife of Reason.\n\n[Sidenote: Yet it vitiates what it represents.]\n\nThe medium, however, constantly reasserts itself. An example may be\nfound in gender, which, clearly representative in a measure, cuts loose\nin language from all genuine representation and becomes a feature in\nabstract linguistic design, a formal characteristic in expression.\nContrasted sentiments permeate an animal\u2019s dealings with his own sex and\nwith the other; nouns and adjectives represent this contrast by taking\non masculine and feminine forms. The distinction is indeed so important\nthat wholly different words\u2014man and woman, bull and cow\u2014stand for the\nbest-known animals of different sex; while adjectives, where declension\nis extinct, as in English, often take on a connotation of gender and are\napplied to one sex only\u2014as we say a beautiful woman, but hardly a\nbeautiful man. But gender in language extends much farther than sex, and\neven if by some subtle analogy all the masculine and feminine nouns in a\nlanguage could be attached to something suggesting sex in the objects\nthey designate, yet it can hardly be maintained that the elaborate\nconcordance incident upon that distinction is representative of any felt\nquality in the things. So remote an analogy to sex could not assert\nitself pervasively. Thus Horace says:\n\n  Quis _multa_ gracilis te puer in _rosa_\n  perfusis liquidis urget odoribus\n  _grato_, Pyrrha, sub _antro_?\n\nHere we may perceive why the rose was instinctively made feminine, and\nwe may grant that the bower, though the reason escape us, was somehow\nproperly masculine; but no one would urge that a _profusion_ of roses\nwas also intrinsically feminine, or that the _pleasantness_ of a bower\nwas ever specifically masculine to sense. The epithets _multa_ and\n_grato_ take their gender from the nouns, even though the quality they\ndesignate fails to do so. Their gender is therefore non-representative\nand purely formal; it marks an intra-linguistic accommodation. The\nmedium has developed a syntactical structure apart from any intrinsic\nsignificance thereby accruing to its elements. Artificial concordance in\ngender does not express gender: it merely emphasises the grammatical\nlinks in the phrases and makes greater variety possible in the\narrangement of words.\n\n[Sidenote: Difficulty in subduing a living medium.]\n\nThis example may prepare us to understand a general principle: that\nlanguage, while essentially significant viewed in its function, is\nindefinitely wasteful, being mechanical and tentative in its origin. It\noverloads itself, and being primarily music, and a labyrinth of sounds,\nit develops an articulation and method of its own, which only in the\nend, and with much inexactness, reverts to its function of expression.\nHow great the possibilities of effect are in developing a pure medium we\ncan best appreciate in music; but in language a similar development goes\non while it is being applied to representing things. The organ is\nspontaneous, the function adventitious and superimposed. Rhetoric and\nutility keep language going, as centrifugal and centripetal forces keep\na planet in its course. Euphony, verbal analogy, grammatical fancy,\npoetic confusion, continually drive language afield, in its own\ntangential direction; while the business of life, in which language is\nemployed, and the natural lapse of rhetorical fashions, as continually\ndraw it back towards convenience and exactitude.\n\n[Sidenote: Language foreshortens experience.]\n\nBetween music and bare symbolism language has its florid expansion.\nUntil music is subordinated, speech has little sense; it can hardly tell\na story or indicate an object unequivocally. Yet if music were left\nbehind altogether, language would pass into a sort of algebra or vocal\nshorthand, without literary quality; it would become wholly indicative\nand record facts without colouring them ideally. This medium and its\nintrinsic development, though they make the bane of reproduction, make\nthe essence of art; they give representation a new and specific value\nsuch as the object, before representation, could not have possessed.\nConsciousness itself is such a medium in respect to diffuse existence,\nwhich it foreshortens and elevates into synthetic ideas. Reason, too, by\nbringing the movement of events and inclinations to a head in single\nacts of reflection, thus attaining to laws and purposes, introduces into\nlife the influence of a representative medium, without which life could\nnever pass from a process into an art. Language acquires scope in the\nsame way, by its kindly infidelities; its metaphors and syntax lend\nexperience perspective. Language vitiates the experience it expresses,\nbut thereby makes the burden of one moment relevant to that of another.\nThe two experiences, identified roughly with the same concretion in\ndiscourse, are pronounced similar or comparable in character. Thus a\nproverb, by its verbal pungency and rhythm, becomes more memorable than\nthe event it first described would ever have been if not translated into\nan epigram and rendered, so to speak, applicable to new cases; for by\nthat translation the event has become an idea.\n\n[Sidenote: It is a perpetual mythology.]\n\nTo turn events into ideas is the function of literature. Music, which in\na certain sense is a mass of pure forms, must leave its \u201cideas\u201d imbedded\nin their own medium\u2014they are musical ideas\u2014and cannot impose them on\nany foreign material, such as human affairs. Science, on the contrary,\nseeks to disclose the bleak anatomy of existence, stripping off as much\nas possible the veil of prejudice and words. Literature takes a middle\ncourse and tries to subdue music, which for its purposes would be\nfutile and too abstract, into conformity with general experience, making\nmusic thereby significant. Literary art in the end rejects all unmeaning\nnourishes, all complications that have no counterpart in things or no\nuse in expressing their relations; at the same time it aspires to digest\nthat reality to which it confines itself, making it over into ideal\nsubstance and material for the mind. It looks at things with an\nincorrigibly dramatic eye, turning them into permanent unities (which\nthey never are) and almost into persons, grouping them by their\nimaginative or moral affinities and retaining in them chiefly what is\nincidental to their being, namely, the part they may chance to play in\nman\u2019s adventures.\n\nSuch literary art demands a subject-matter other than the literary\nimpulse itself. The literary man is an interpreter and hardly succeeds,\nas the musician may, without experience and mastery of human affairs.\nHis art is half genius and half fidelity. He needs inspiration; he must\nwait for automatic musical tendencies to ferment in his mind, proving it\nto be fertile in devices, comparisons, and bold assimilations. Yet\ninspiration alone will lead him astray, for his art is relative to\nsomething other than its own formal impulse; it comes to clarify the\nreal world, not to encumber it; and it needs to render its native\nagility practical and to attach its volume of feeling to what is\nmomentous in human life. Literature has its piety, its conscience; it\ncannot long forget, without forfeiting all dignity, that it serves a\nburdened and perplexed creature, a human animal struggling to persuade\nthe universal Sphinx to propose a more intelligible riddle.\nIrresponsible and trivial in its abstract impulse, man\u2019s simian chatter\nbecomes noble as it becomes symbolic; its representative function lends\nit a serious beauty, its utility endows it with moral worth.\n\n[Sidenote: It may be apt or inapt, with equal richness.]\n\n[Sidenote: Absolute language a possible but foolish art.]\n\nThese relations, in determining the function of language, determine the\nideal which its structure should approach. Any sort of grammar and\nrhetoric, the most absurd and inapplicable as well as the most\ndescriptive, can be spontaneous; fit organisms are not less natural than\nthose that are unfit. Felicitous genius is so called because it meets\nexperience half-way. A genius which flies in the opposite direction,\nthough not less fertile internally, is externally inept and is called\nmadness. Ineptitude is something which language needs to shake off.\nBetter surrender altogether some verbal categories and start again, in\nthat respect, with a clean slate, than persist in any line of\ndevelopment that alienates thought from reality. The language of birds\nis excellent in its way, and those ancient sages who are reported to\nhave understood it very likely had merely perceived that it was not\nmeant to be intelligible; for it is not to understand nature to reduce\nher childishly to a human scale. Man, who is merged in universal nature\nat the roots of his being, is not without profound irrational intuitions\nby which he can half divine her secret processes; and his heart, in its\nown singing and fluttering, might not wholly misinterpret the birds. But\nhuman discourse is not worth having if it is mere piping, and helps not\nat all in mastering things; for man is intelligent, which is another way\nof saying that he aspires to envisage in thought what he is dealing with\nin action. Discourse that absolved itself from that observant duty would\nnot be cognitive; and in failing to be cognitive it would fail to redeem\nthe practical forces it ignored from their brute externality, and to\nmake them tributary to the Life of Reason. Thus its own dignity and\ncontinued existence depend on its learning to express momentous facts,\nfacts important for action and happiness; and there is nothing which so\nquickly discredits itself as empty rhetoric and dialectic, or poetry\nthat wanders in dim and private worlds. If pure music, even with its\nimmense sensuous appeal, is so easily tedious, what a universal yawn\nmust meet the verbiage which develops nothing but its own iridescence.\nAbsolute versification and absolute dialectic may have their place in\nsociety; they give play to an organ that has its rights like any other,\nand that, after serving for a while in the economy of life, may well\nclaim a holiday in which to disport itself irresponsibly among the fowls\nof the air and the lilies of the field. But the exercise is trivial;\nand if its high priests go through their mummeries with a certain\nunction, and pretend to be wafted by them into a higher world, the\nphenomenon is neither new nor remarkable. Language is a wonderful and\npliant medium, and why should it not lend itself to imposture? A\nsystematic abuse of words, as of other things, is never without some\ninner harmony or propriety that makes it prosper; only the man who looks\nbeyond and sees the practical results awakes to the villainy of it. In\nthe end, however, those who play with words lose their labour, and\npregnant as they feel themselves to be with new and wonderful universes,\nthey cannot humanise the one in which they live and rather banish\nthemselves from it by their persistent egotism and irrelevance.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VI\n\nPOETRY AND PROSE\n\n\n[Sidenote: Force of primary expressions.]\n\nThere is both truth and illusion in the saying that primitive poets are\nsublime. Genesis and the Iliad (works doubtless backed by a long\ntradition) are indeed sublime. Primitive men, having perhaps developed\nlanguage before the other arts, used it with singular directness to\ndescribe the chief episodes of life, which was all that life as yet\ncontained. They had frank passions and saw things from single points of\nview. A breath from that early world seems to enlarge our natures, and\nto restore to language, which we have sophisticated, all its\nmagnificence and truth. But there is more, for (as we have seen)\nlanguage is spontaneous; it constitutes an act before it registers an\nobservation. It gives vent to emotion before it is adjusted to things\nexternal and reduced, as it were, to its own echo rebounding from a\nrefractory world. The lion\u2019s roar, the bellowing of bulls, even the\nsea\u2019s cadence has a great sublimity. Though hardly in itself poetry, an\nanimal cry, when still audible in human language, renders it also the\nunanswerable, the ultimate voice of nature. Nothing can so pierce the\nsoul as the uttermost sigh of the body. There is no utterance so\nthrilling as that of absolute impulse, if absolute impulse has learned\nto speak at all. An intense, inhospitable mind, filled with a single\nidea, in which all animal, social, and moral interests are fused\ntogether, speaks a language of incomparable force. Thus the Hebrew\nprophets, in their savage concentration, poured into one torrent all\nthat their souls possessed or could dream of. What other men are wont to\npursue in politics, business, religion, or art, they looked for from one\nwave of national repentance and consecration. Their age, swept by this\nideal passion, possessed at the same time a fresh and homely vocabulary;\nand the result was an eloquence so elemental and combative, so\nimaginative and so bitterly practical, that the world has never heard\nits like. Such single-mindedness, with such heroic simplicity in words\nand images, is hardly possible in a late civilisation. Cultivated poets\nare not unconsciously sublime.\n\n[Sidenote: Its exclusiveness and narrowness.]\n\nThe sublimity of early utterances should not be hailed, however, with\nunmixed admiration. It is a sublimity born of defect or at least of\ndisproportion. The will asserts itself magnificently; images, like\nthunder-clouds, seem to cover half the firmament at once. But such a\nwill is sadly inexperienced; it has hardly tasted or even conceived any\npossible or high satisfactions. Its lurid firmament is poor in stars. To\nthrow the whole mind upon something is not so great a feat when the\nmind has nothing else to throw itself upon. Every animal when goaded\nbecomes intense; and it is perhaps merely the apathy in which mortals\nare wont to live that keeps them from being habitually sublime in their\nsentiments. The sympathy that makes a sheep hasten after its fellows, in\nvague alarm or in vague affection; the fierce premonitions that drive a\nbull to the heifer; the patience with which a hen sits on her eggs; the\nloyalty which a dog shows to his master\u2014what thoughts may not all these\ninstincts involve, which it needs only a medium of communication to\ntranslate into poetry?\n\nMan, though with less wholeness of soul, enacts the same dramas. He\nhears voices on all occasions; he incorporates what little he observes\nof nature into his verbal dreams; and as each new impulse bubbles to the\nsurface he feels himself on the verge of some inexpressible heaven or\nhell. He needs but to abandon himself to that seething chaos which\nperpetually underlies conventional sanity\u2014a chaos in which memory and\nprophecy, vision and impersonation, sound and sense, are inextricably\njumbled together\u2014to find himself at once in a magic world,\nirrecoverable, largely unmeaning, terribly intricate, but, as he will\nconceive, deep, inward, and absolutely real. He will have reverted, in\nother words, to crude experience, to primordial illusion. The movement\nof his animal or vegetative mind will be far from delightful; it will be\nunintelligent and unintelligible; nothing in particular will be\nrepresented therein; but it will be a movement in the soul and for the\nsoul, as exciting and compulsive as the soul\u2019s volume can make it. In\nthis muddy torrent words also may be carried down; and if these words\nare by chance strung together into a cadence, and are afterwards written\ndown, they may remain for a memento of that turbid moment. Such words we\nmay at first hesitate to call poetry, since very likely they are\nnonsense; but this nonsense will have some quality\u2014some rhyme or\nrhythm\u2014that makes it memorable (else it would not have survived); and\nmoreover the words will probably show, in their connotation and order,\nsome sympathy with the dream that cast them up. For the man himself, in\nwhom such a dream may be partly recurrent, they may consequently have a\nconsiderable power of suggestion, and they may even have it for others,\nwhenever the rhythm and incantation avail to plunge them also into a\nsimilar trance.\n\n[Sidenote: Rudimentary poetry an incantation or charm.]\n\nMemorable nonsense, or sound with a certain hypnotic power, is the\nreally primitive and radical form of poetry. Nor is such poetry yet\nextinct: children still love and compose it and every genuine poet, on\none side of his genius, reverts to it from explicit speech. As all\nlanguage has acquired its meaning, and did not have it in the beginning,\nso the man who launches a new locution, the poet who creates a symbol,\nmust do so without knowing what significance it may eventually acquire,\nand conscious at best only of the emotional background from which it\nemerged. Pure poetry is pure experiment; and it is not strange that\nnine-tenths of it should be pure failure. For it matters little what\nunutterable things may have originally gone together with a phrase in\nthe dreamer\u2019s mind; if they were not uttered and the phrase cannot call\nthem back, this verbal relic is none the richer for the high company it\nmay once have kept. Expressiveness is a most accidental matter. What a\nline suggests at one reading, it may never suggest again even to the\nsame person. For this reason, among others, poets are partial to their\nown compositions; they truly discover there depths of meaning which\nexist for nobody else. Those readers who appropriate a poet and make him\ntheir own fall into a similar illusion; they attribute to him what they\nthemselves supply, and whatever he reels out, lost in his own personal\nrevery, seems to them, like _sortes biblicoe_, written to fit their own\ncase.\n\n[Sidenote: Inspiration irresponsible.]\n\nJustice has never been done to Plato\u2019s remarkable consistency and\nboldness in declaring that poets are inspired by a divine madness and\nyet, when they transgress rational bounds, are to be banished from an\nideal republic, though not without some marks of Platonic regard.\nInstead of fillets, a modern age might assign them a coterie of\nflattering dames, and instead of banishment, starvation; but the result\nwould be the same in the end. A poet is inspired because what occurs in\nhis brain is a true experiment in creation. His apprehension plays with\nwords and their meanings as nature, in any spontaneous variation, plays\nwith her own structure. A mechanical force shifts the kaleidoscope; a\nnew direction is given to growth or a new gist to signification. This\ninspiration, moreover, is mad, being wholly ignorant of its own issue;\nand though it has a confused fund of experience and verbal habit on\nwhich to draw, it draws on this fund blindly and quite at random,\nconsciously possessed by nothing but a certain stress and pregnancy and\nthe pains, as it were, of parturition. Finally the new birth has to be\ninspected critically by the public censor before it is allowed to live;\nmost probably it is too feeble and defective to prosper in the common\nair, or is a monster that violates some primary rule of civic existence,\ntormenting itself to disturb others.\n\n[Sidenote: Plato\u2019s discriminating view.]\n\nPlato seems to have exaggerated the havoc which these poetic dragons can\nwork in the world. They are in fact more often absurd than venomous, and\nno special legislation is needed to abolish them. They soon die quietly\nof universal neglect. The poetry that ordinarily circulates among a\npeople is poetry of a secondary and conventional sort that propagates\nestablished ideas in trite metaphors. Popular poets are the parish\npriests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since\nconverted public. Plato\u2019s quarrel was not so much with poetic art as\nwith ancient myth and emotional laxity: he was preaching a crusade\nagainst the established church. For naturalistic deities he wished to\nsubstitute moral symbols; for the joys of sense, austerity and\nabstraction. To proscribe Homer was a marked way of protesting against\nthe frivolous reigning ideals. The case is much as if we should now\nproscribe the book of Genesis, on account of its mythical cosmogony, or\nin order to proclaim the philosophic truth that the good, being an\nadequate expression to be attained by creation, could not possibly have\npreceded it or been its source. We might admit at the same time that\nGenesis contains excellent images and that its poetic force is\nremarkable; so that if serious misunderstanding could be avoided the\ncensor might be glad to leave it in everybody\u2019s hands. Plato in some\nsuch way recognised that Homer was poetical and referred his works,\nmischievous as they might prove incidentally, to divine inspiration.\nPoetic madness, like madness in prophecy or love, bursts the body of\nthings to escape from it into some ideal; and even the Homeric world,\nthough no model for a rational state, was a cheerful heroic vision,\ncongenial to many early impulses and dreams of the mind.\n\n[Sidenote: Explosive and pregnant expression.]\n\nHomer, indeed, was no primitive poet; he was a consummate master, the\nheir to generations of discipline in both life and art. This appears in\nhis perfect prosody, in his limpid style, in his sense for proportion,\nhis abstentions, and the frank pathos of his portraits and principles,\nin which there is nothing gross, subjective, or arbitrary. The\ninspirations that came to him never carried him into crudeness or\nabsurdity. Every modern poet, though the world he describes may be more\nrefined in spots and more elaborate, is less advanced in his art; for\nart is made rudimentary not by its date but by its irrationality. Yet\neven if Homer had been primitive he might well have been inspired, in\nthe same way as a Bacchic frenzy or a mystic trance; the most blundering\nexplosions may be justified antecedently by the plastic force that is\nvented in them. They may be expressive, in the physical sense of this\nambiguous word; for, far as they may be from conveying an idea, they may\nbetray a tendency and prove that something is stirring in the soul.\nExpressiveness is often sterile; but it is sometimes fertile and capable\nof reproducing in representation the experience from which it sprang. As\na tree in the autumn sheds leaves and seeds together, so a ripening\nexperience comes indifferently to various manifestations, some barren\nand without further function, others fit to carry the parent experience\nover into another mind, and give it a new embodiment there.\nExpressiveness in the former case is dead, like that of a fossil; in the\nlatter it is living and efficacious, recreating its original. The first\nis idle self-manifestation, the second rational art.\n\n[Sidenote: Natural history of inspiration.]\n\nSelf-manifestation, so soon as it is noted and accepted as such, seems\nto present the same marvel as any ideal success. Such self-manifestation\nis incessant, many-sided, unavoidable; yet it seems a miracle when its\nconditions are looked back upon from the vantage ground of their result.\nBy reading spirit out of a work we turn it into a feat of inspiration.\nThus even the crudest and least coherent utterances, when we suspect\nsome soul to be groping in them, and striving to address us, become\noracular; a divine afflatus breathes behind their gibberish and they\nseem to manifest some deep intent. The miracle of creation or\ninspiration consists in nothing but this, that an external effect should\nembody an inner intention. The miracle, of course, is apparent only, and\ndue to an inverted and captious point of view. In truth the tendency\nthat executed the work was what first made its conception possible; but\nthis conception, finding the work responsive in some measure to its\ninner demand, attributes that response to its own magic prerogative.\nHence the least stir and rumble of formative processes, when it\ngenerates a soul, makes itself somehow that soul\u2019s interpreter; and dim\nas the spirit and its expression may both remain, they are none the less\nin profound concord, a concord which wears a miraculous providential\ncharacter when it is appreciated without being understood.\n\n[Sidenote: Expressions to be understood must be recreated, and so\nchanged.]\n\nPrimitive poetry is the basis of all discourse. If we open any ancient\nbook we come at once upon an elaborate language, and on divers\nconventional concepts, of whose origin and history we hear nothing. We\nmust read on, until by dint of guessing and by confronting instances we\ngrow to understand those symbols. The writer was himself heir to a\nlinguistic tradition which he made his own by the same process of\nadoption and tentative use by which we, in turn, interpret his phrases:\nhe understood what he heard in terms of his own experience, and\nattributed to his predecessors (no matter what their incommunicable\nfeelings may have been) such ideas as their words generated in his own\nthinking. In this way expressions continually change their sense; they\ncan communicate a thought only by diffusing a stimulus, and in passing\nfrom mouth to mouth they will wholly reverse their connotation, unless\nsome external object or some recurring human situation gives them a\nconstant standard, by which private aberrations may be checked. Thus in\nthe first phrase of Genesis, \u201cIn the beginning God created the heavens\nand the earth,\u201d the words have a stable meaning only in so far as they\nare indicative and bring us back to a stable object. What \u201cheavens\u201d and\n\u201cearth\u201d stand for can be conveyed by gestures, by merely pointing up and\ndown; but beyond that sensuous connotation their meaning has entirely\nchanged since they were here written; and no two minds, even to-day,\nwill respond to these familiar words with exactly the same images.\n\u201cBeginning\u201d and \u201ccreated\u201d have a superficial clearness, though their\nimplications cannot be defined without precipitating the most intricate\nmetaphysics, which would end in nothing but a proof that both terms were\nambiguous and unthinkable. As to the word \u201cGod,\u201d all mutual\nunderstanding is impossible. It is a floating literary symbol, with a\nvalue which, if we define it scientifically, becomes quite algebraic. As\nno experienced object corresponds to it, it is without fixed indicative\nforce, and admits any sense which its context in any mind may happen to\ngive it. In the first sentence of Genesis its meaning, we may safely\nsay, is \u201ca masculine being by whom heaven and earth were created.\u201d To\nfill out this implication other instances of the word would have to be\ngathered, in each of which, of course, the word would appear with a new\nand perhaps incompatible meaning.\n\n[Sidenote: Expressions may be recast perversely, humorously, or\nsublimely.]\n\nWhenever a word appears in a radically new context it has a radically\nnew sense: the expression in which it so figures is a poetic figment, a\nfresh literary creation. Such invention is sometimes perverse, sometimes\nhumorous, sometimes sublime; that is, it may either buffet old\nassociations without enlarging them, or give them a plausible but\nimpossible twist, or enlarge them to cover, with unexpected propriety, a\nmuch wider or more momentous experience. The force of experience in any\nmoment\u2014if we abstract from represented values\u2014is emotional; so that\nfor sublime poetry what is required is to tap some reservoir of feeling.\nIf a phrase opens the flood-gates of emotion, it has made itself most\ndeeply significant. Its discursive range and clearness may not be\nremarkable; its emotional power will quite suffice. For this reason\nagain primitive poetry may be sublime: in its inchoate phrases there is\naffinity to raw passion and their very blindness may serve to bring that\npassion back. Poetry has body; it represents the volume of experience as\nwell as its form, and to express volume a primitive poet will rely\nrather on rhythm, sound, and condensed suggestion than on discursive\nfulness or scope.\n\n[Sidenote: The nature of prose.]\n\nThe descent from poetry to prose is in one sense a progress. When use\nhas worn down a poetic phrase to its external import, and rendered it an\nindifferent symbol for a particular thing, that phrase has become\nprosaic; it has also become, by the same process, transparent and purely\ninstrumental. In poetry feeling is transferred by contagion; in prose it\nis communicated by bending the attention upon determinate objects; the\none stimulates and the other informs. Under the influence of poetry\nvarious minds radiate from a somewhat similar core of sensation, from\nthe same vital mood, into the most diverse and incommunicable images.\nInterlocutors speaking prose, on the contrary, pelt and besiege one\nanother with a peripheral attack; they come into contact at sundry\nsuperficial points and thence push their agreement inwards, until\nperhaps a practical coincidence is arrived at in their thought.\nAgreement is produced by controlling each mind externally, through a\nseries of checks and little appeals to possible sensation; whereas in\npoetry the agreement, where it exists, is vague and massive; there is an\ninitial fusion of minds under hypnotic musical influences, from which\neach listener, as he awakes, passes into his own thoughts and\ninterpretations. In prose the vehicle for communication is a\nconventional sign, standing in the last analysis for some demonstrable\nobject or controllable feeling. By marshalling specific details a\ncertain indirect suasion is exercised on the mind, as nature herself, by\ncontinual checks and denials, gradually tames the human will. The\nelements of prose are always practical, if we run back and reconstruct\ntheir primitive essence, for at bottom every experience is an original\nand not a copy, a nucleus for ideation rather than an object to which\nideas may refer. It is when these stimulations are shaken together and\nbecome a system of mutual checks that they begin to take on ideally a\nrhythm borrowed from the order in which they actually recurred. Then a\nprophetic or representative movement arises in thought. Before this\ncomes about, experience remains a constantly renovated dream, as poetry\nto the end conspires to keep it. For poetry, while truly poetical, never\nloses sight of initial feelings and underlying appeals; it is\nincorrigibly transcendental, and takes every present passion and every\nprivate dream in turn for the core of the universe. By creating new\nsigns, or by recasting and crossing those which have become\nconventional, it keeps communication massive and instinctive, immersed\nin music, and inexhaustible by clear thought.\n\n\n[Sidenote: It is more advanced and responsible than poetry.]\n\nLying is a privilege of poets because they have not yet reached the\nlevel on which truth and error are discernible. Veracity and\nsignificance are not ideals for a primitive mind; we learn to value them\nas we learn to live, when we discover that the spirit cannot be wholly\nfree and solipsistic. To have to distinguish fact from fancy is so great\na violence to the inner man that not only poets, but theologians and\nphilosophers, still protest against such a distinction. They urge (what\nis perfectly true for a rudimentary creature) that facts are mere\nconceptions and conceptions full-fledged facts; but this interesting\nembryonic lore they apply, in their intellectual weakness, to retracting\nor undermining those human categories which, though alone fruitful or\napplicable in life, are not congenial to their half-formed imagination.\nRetreating deeper into the inner chaos, they bring to bear the whole\nmomentum of an irresponsible dialectic to frustrate the growth of\nrepresentative ideas: In this they are genuine, if somewhat belated,\npoets, experimenting anew with solved problems, and fancying how\ncreation might have moved upon other lines. The great merit that prose\nshares with science is that it is responsible. Its conscience is a new\nand wiser imagination, by which creative thought is rendered cumulative\nand progressive; for a man does not build less boldly or solidly if he\ntakes the precaution of building in baked brick. Prose is in itself\nmeagre and bodiless, merely indicating the riches of the world. Its\ntransparency helps us to look through it to the issue, and the signals\nit gives fill the mind with an honest assurance and a prophetic art far\nnobler than any ecstasy.\n\n[Sidenote: Maturity brings love of practical truth.]\n\nAs men of action have a better intelligence than poets, if only their\naction is on a broad enough stage, so the prosaic rendering of\nexperience has the greater value, if only the experience rendered covers\nenough human interests. Youth and aspiration indulge in poetry; a mature\nand masterful mind will often despise it, and prefer to express itself\nlaconically in prose. It is clearly proper that prosaic habits should\nsupervene in this way on the poetical; for youth, being as yet little\nfed by experience, can find volume and depth only in the soul; the\nhalf-seen, the supra-mundane, the inexpressible, seem to it alone\nbeautiful and worthy of homage. Time modifies this sentiment in two\ndirections. It breeds lassitude and indifference towards impracticable\nideals, originally no less worthy than the practicable. Ideals which\ncannot be realised, and are not fed at least by partial realisations,\nsoon grow dormant. Life-blood passes to other veins; the urgent and\npalpitating interests of life appear in other quarters. While things\nimpossible thus lose their serious charm, things actual reveal their\nnatural order and variety; these not only can entertain the mind\nabstractly, but they can offer a thousand material rewards in\nobservation and action. In their presence, a private dream begins to\nlook rather cheap and hysterical. Not that existence has any dignity or\nprerogative in the presence of will, but that will itself, being\nelastic, grows definite and firm when it is fed by success; and its\nformed and expressible ideals then put to shame the others, which have\nremained vague for want of practical expression. Mature interests centre\non soluble problems and tasks capable of execution; it is at such points\nthat the ideal can be really served. The individual\u2019s dream straightens\nand reassures itself by merging with the dream of humanity. To dwell, as\nirrational poets do, on some private experience, on some emotion without\nrepresentative or ulterior value, then seems a waste of time. Fiction\nbecomes less interesting than affairs, and poetry turns into a sort of\nincompetent whimper, a childish fore-shortening of the outspread world.\n\n[Sidenote: Pure prose would tend to efface itself.]\n\nOn the other hand, prose has a great defect, which is abstractness. It\ndrops the volume of experience in finding bodiless algebraic symbols by\nwhich to express it. The verbal form, instead of transmitting an image,\nseems to constitute it, in so far as there is an image suggested at\nall; and the ulterior situation is described only in the sense that a\nchange is induced in the hearer which prepares him to meet that\nsituation. Prose seems to be a use of language in the service of\nmaterial life. It would tend, in that case, to undermine its own basis;\nfor in proportion as signals for action are quick and efficacious they\ndiminish their sensuous stimulus and fade from consciousness. Were\nlanguage such a set of signals it would be something merely\ninstrumental, which if made perfect ought to be automatic and\nunconscious. It would be a buzzing in the ears, not a music native to\nthe mind. Such a theory of language would treat it as a necessary evil\nand would look forward hopefully to the extinction of literature, in\nwhich it would recognise nothing ideal. There is of course no reason to\ndeprecate the use of vocables, or of any other material agency, to\nexpedite affairs; but an art of speech, if it is to add any ultimate\ncharm to life, has to supervene upon a mere code of signals. Prose,\ncould it be purely representative, would be ideally superfluous. A\nliterary prose accordingly owns a double allegiance, and its life is\namphibious. It must convey intelligence, but intelligence clothed in a\nlanguage that lends the message an intrinsic value, and makes it\ndelightful to apprehend apart from its importance in ultimate theory or\npractice. Prose is in that measure a fine art. It might be called poetry\nthat had become pervasively representative, and was altogether faithful\nto its rational function.\n\n[Sidenote: Form alone, or substance alone, may be poetical.]\n\nWe may therefore with good reason distinguish prosaic form from prosaic\nsubstance. A novel, a satire, a book of speculative philosophy, may have\na most prosaic exterior; every phrase may convey its idea economically;\nbut the substance may nevertheless be poetical, since these ideas may be\nirrelevant to all ulterior events, and may express nothing but the\nimaginative energy that called them forth. On the other hand, a poetic\nvehicle in which there is much ornamental play of language and rhythm\nmay clothe a dry ideal skeleton. So those tremendous positivists, the\nHebrew prophets, had the most prosaic notions about the goods and evils\nof life. So Lucretius praised, I will not say the atoms merely, but even\nfecundity and wisdom. The motives, to take another example, which Racine\nattributed to his personages, were prosaically conceived; a physiologist\ncould not be more exact in his calculations, for even love may be made\nthe mainspring in a clock-work of emotions. Yet that Racine was a born\npoet appears in the music, nobility, and tenderness of his medium; he\nclothed his intelligible characters in magical and tragic robes; the\naroma of sentiment rises like a sort of pungent incense between them and\nus, and no dramatist has ever had so sure a mastery over transports and\ntears.\n\n[Sidenote: Poetry has its place in the medium.]\n\nIn the medium a poet is at home; in the world he tries to render, he is\na child and a stranger. Poetic notions are false notions; in so far as\ntheir function is representative they are vitiated by containing\nelements not present in things. Truth is a jewel which should not be\npainted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.\nThe poetic way of idealising reality is dull, bungling, and impure; a\nbetter acquaintance with things renders such flatteries ridiculous. That\nvery effort of thought by which opaque masses of experience were first\ndetached from the flux and given a certain individuality, seeks to\ncontinue to clarify them until they become as transparent as possible.\nTo resist this clarification, to love the chance incrustations that\nencumber human ideas, is a piece of timid folly, and poetry in this\nrespect is nothing but childish confusion. Poetic apprehension is a\nmakeshift, in so far as its cognitive worth is concerned; it is exactly,\nin this respect, what myth is to science. Approaching its subject-matter\nfrom a distance, with incongruous categories, it translates it into some\nvague and misleading symbol rich in emotions which the object as it is\ncould never arouse and is sure presently to contradict. What lends these\nhybrid ideas their temporary eloquence and charm is their congruity with\nthe mind that breeds them and with its early habits. Falsification, or\nrather clouded vision, gives to poetry a more human accent and a readier\nwelcome than to truth. In other words, it is the medium that asserts\nitself; the apperceptive powers indulge their private humours, and\nneglect the office to which they were assigned once for all by their\ncognitive essence.\n\n[Sidenote: It is the best medium possible.]\n\nThat the medium should so assert itself, however, is no anomaly, the\ncognitive function being an ulterior one to which ideas are by no means\nobliged to conform. Apperception is itself an activity or art, and like\nall others terminates in a product which is a good in itself, apart from\nits utilities. If we abstract, then, from the representative function\nwhich may perhaps accrue to speech, and regard it merely as an operation\nabsorbing energy and occasioning delight, we see that poetic language is\nlanguage at its best. Its essential success consists in fusing ideas in\ncharming sounds or in metaphors that shine by their own brilliance.\nPoetry is an eloquence justified by its spontaneity, as eloquence is a\npoetry justified by its application. The first draws the whole soul into\nthe situation, and the second puts the whole situation before the soul.\n\n[Sidenote: Might it not convey what it is best to know?]\n\nIs there not, we may ask, some ideal form of discourse in which\napperceptive life could be engaged with all its volume and transmuting\npower, and in which at the same time no misrepresentation should be\ninvolved? Transmutation is not erroneous when it is intentional;\nmisrepresentation does not please for being false, but only because\ntruth would be more congenial if it resembled such a fiction. Why\nshould not discourse, then, have nothing but truth in its import and\nnothing but beauty in its form? With regard to euphony and grammatical\nstructure there is evidently nothing impossible in such an ideal; for\nthese radical beauties of language are independent of the\nsubject-matter. They form the body of poetry; but the ideal and\nemotional atmosphere which is its soul depends on things external to\nlanguage, which no perfection in the medium could modify. It might seem\nas if the brilliant substitutions, the magic suggestions essential to\npoetry, would necessarily vanish in the full light of day. The light of\nday is itself beautiful; but would not the loss be terrible if no other\nlight were ever suffered to shine?\n\n[Sidenote: A rational poetry would exclude much now thought poetical.]\n\nThe Life of Reason involves sacrifice. What forces yearn for the ideal,\nbeing many and incompatible, have to yield and partly deny themselves in\norder to attain any ideal at all. There is something sad in all possible\nattainment so long as the rational virtue (which wills such attainment)\nis not pervasive; and even then there is limitation to put up with, and\nthe memory of many a defeat. Rational poetry is possible and would be\ninfinitely more beautiful than the other; but the charm of unreason, if\nunreason seem charming, it certainly could not preserve. In what human\nfancy demands, as at present constituted, there are irrational\nelements. The given world seems insufficient; impossible things have to\nbe imagined, both to extend its limits and to fill in and vivify its\ntexture. Homer has a mythology without which experience would have\nseemed to him undecipherable; Dante has his allegories and his mock\nscience; Shakespeare has his romanticism; Goethe his symbolic characters\nand artificial machinery. All this lumber seems to have been somehow\nnecessary to their genius; they could not reach expression in more\nhonest terms. If such indirect expression could be discarded, it would\nnot be missed; but while the mind, for want of a better vocabulary, is\nreduced to using these symbols, it pours into them a part of its own\nlife and makes them beautiful. Their loss is a real blow, while the\nincapacity that called for them endures; and the soul seems to be\ncrippled by losing its crutches.\n\n[Sidenote: All apperception modifies its object.]\n\nThere are certain adaptations and abbreviations of reality which thought\ncan never outgrow. Thought is representative; it enriches each soul and\neach moment with premonitions of surrounding existences. If discourse is\nto be significant it must transfer to its territory and reduce to its\nscale whatever objects it deals with: in other words, thought has a\npoint of view and cannot see the world except in perspective. This point\nof view is not, for reason, locally or naturally determined; sense alone\nis limited in that material fashion, being seated in the body and\nlooking thence centrifugally upon things in so far as they come into\ndynamic relations with that body. Intelligence, on the contrary, sallies\nfrom that physical stronghold and consists precisely in shifting and\nuniversalising the point of view, neutralising all local, temporal, or\npersonal conditions. Yet intelligence, notwithstanding, has its own\ncentre and point of origin, not explicitly in space or in a natural\nbody, but in some specific interest or moral aim. It translates animal\nlife into moral endeavour, and what figured in the first as a local\nexistence figures in the second as a specific good. Reason accordingly\nhas its essential bias, and looks at things as they affect the\nparticular form of life which reason expresses; and though all reality\nshould be ultimately swept by the eye of reason, the whole would still\nbe surveyed by a particular method, from a particular starting-point,\nfor a particular end; nor would it take much shrewdness to perceive that\nthis nucleus for discourse and estimation, this ideal life, corresponds\nin the moral world to that animal body which gave sensuous experience\nits seat and centre; so that rationality is nothing but the ideal\nfunction or aspect of natural life. Reason is universal in its outlook\nand in its sympathies: it is the faculty of changing places ideally and\nrepresenting alien points of view; but this very self-transcendence\nmanifests a certain special method in life, an equilibrium which a\nfar-sighted being is able to establish between itself and its\ncomprehended conditions. Reason remains to the end essentially human\nand, in its momentary actuality, necessarily personal.\n\n[Sidenote: Reason has its own bias and method.]\n\nWe have here an essential condition of discourse which renders it at\nbottom poetical. Selection and applicability govern all thinking, and\ngovern it in the interests of the soul. Reason is itself a specific\nmedium; so that prose can never attain that perfect transparency and\nmere utility which we were attributing to it. We should not wish to know\n\u201cthings in themselves,\u201d even if we were able. What it concerns us to\nknow about them is merely the service or injury they are able to do us,\nand in what fashion they can affect our lives. To know this would be, in\nso far, truly to know them; but it would be to know them through our own\nfaculties and through their supposed effects; it would be to know them\nby their appearance. A singular proof of the frivolous way in which\nphilosophers often proceed, when they think they are particularly\nprofound, is seen in this puzzle, on which they solemnly ask us to fix\nour thoughts: How is it possible to know reality, if all we can attain\nin experience is but appearance? The meaning of knowledge, which is an\nintellectual and living thing, is here forgotten, and the notion of\nsensation, or bodily possession, is substituted for it; so what we are\nreally asked to consider is how, had we no understanding, we should be\nable to understand what we endure. It is by conceiving what we endure to\nbe the appearance of something beyond us, that we reach knowledge that\nsomething exists beyond us, and that it plays in respect to us a\ndeterminate r\u00f4le. There could be no knowledge of reality if what\nconveyed that knowledge were not felt to be appearance; nor can a medium\nof knowledge better than appearance be by any possibility conceived. To\nhave such appearances is what makes realities knowable. Knowledge\ntranscends sensation by relating it to other sensation, and thereby\nrising to a supersensuous plane, the plane of principles and causes by\nwhich sensibles are identified in character and distributed in\nexistence. These principles and causes are what we call the intelligible\nor the real world; and the sensations, when they have been so\ninterpreted and underpinned, are what we call experience.\n\n[Sidenote: Rational poetry would envelop exact knowledge in ultimate\nemotions.]\n\nIf a poet could clarify the myths he begins with, so as to reach\nultimate scientific notions of nature and life, he would still be\ndealing with vivid feeling and with its imaginative expression. The\nprosaic landscape before him would still be a work of art, painted on\nthe human brain by human reason. If he found that landscape\nuninteresting, it would be because he was not really interested in life;\nif he found it dull and unpoetical, he would be manifesting his small\ncapacity and childish whims. Tragic, fatal, intractable, he might well\nfeel that the truth was; but these qualities have never been absent from\nthat half-mythical world through which poets, for want of a rational\neducation, have hitherto wandered. A rational poet\u2019s vision would have\nthe same moral functions which myth was asked to fulfil, and fulfilled\nso treacherously; it would employ the same ideal faculties which myth\nexpressed in a confused and hasty fashion. More detail would have been\nadded, and more variety in interpretation. To deal with so great an\nobject, and retain his mastery over it, a poet would doubtless need a\nrobust genius. If he possessed it, and in transmuting all existence\nfalsified nothing, giving that picture of everything which human\nexperience in the end would have drawn, he would achieve an ideal\nresult. In prompting mankind to imagine, he would be helping them to\nlive. His poetry, without ceasing to be a fiction in its method and\nideality, would be an ultimate truth in its practical scope. It would\npresent in graphic images the total efficacy of real things. Such a\npoetry would be more deeply rooted in human experience than is any\ncasual fancy, and therefore more appealing to the heart. Such a poetry\nwould represent more thoroughly than any formula the concrete burden of\nexperience; it would become the most trustworthy of companions. The\nimages it had worked out would confront human passion more intelligibly\nthan does the world as at present conceived, with its mechanism half\nignored and its ideality half invented; they would represent vividly the\nuses of nature, and thereby make all natural situations seem so many\nincentives to art.\n\n[Sidenote: An illustration.]\n\nRational poetry is not wholly unknown. When Homer mentions an object,\nhow does he render it poetical? First, doubtless, by the euphony of its\nname or the sensuous glow of some epithet coupled with it. Sometimes,\nhowever, even this ornamental epithet is not merely sensuous; it is very\nlikely a patronymic, the name of some region or some mythical ancestor.\nIn other words, it is a signal for widening our view and for conceiving\nthe object, not only vividly and with pause, but in an adequate historic\nsetting. Macbeth tells us that his dagger was \u201cunmannerly breeched in\ngore.\u201d Achilles would not have amused himself with such a metaphor, even\nif breeches had existed in his day, but would rather have told us whose\nblood, on other occasions, had stained the same blade, and perhaps what\nfather or mother had grieved for the slaughtered hero, or what brave\nchildren remained to continue his race. Shakespeare\u2019s phrase is\ningenious and fanciful; it dazzles for a moment, but in the end it seems\nviolent and crude. What Homer would have said, on the contrary, being\nsimple and true, might have grown, as we dwelt upon it, always more\nnoble, pathetic, and poetical. Shakespeare, too, beneath his occasional\nabsurdities of plot and diction, ennobles his stage with actual history,\nwith life painted to the quick, with genuine human characters, politics,\nand wisdom; and surely these are not the elements that do least credit\nto his genius. In every poet, indeed, there is some fidelity to nature,\nmixed with that irrelevant false fancy with which poetry is sometimes\nidentified; and the degree in which a poet\u2019s imagination dominates\nreality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.\n\n[Sidenote: Volume can be found in scope better than in suggestion.]\n\nBefore prosaic objects are descried, the volume and richness needful for\npoetry lie in a blurred and undigested chaos; but after the common world\nhas emerged and has called on prose to describe it, the same volume and\nrichness may be recovered; and a new and clarified poetry may arise\nthrough synthesis. Scope is a better thing than suggestion, and more\ntruly poetical. It has expressed what suggestion pointed to and felt in\nthe bulk: it possesses what was yearned for. A real thing, when all its\npertinent natural associates are discerned, touches wonder, pathos, and\nbeauty on every side; the rational poet is one who, without feigning\nanything unreal, perceives these momentous ties, and presents his\nsubject loaded with its whole fate, missing no source of worth which is\nin it, no ideal influence which it may have. Homer remains, perhaps, the\ngreatest master in this art. The world he glorified by showing in how\nmany ways it could serve reason and beauty was but a simple world, and\nan equal genius in these days might be distracted by the Babel about\nhim, and be driven, as poets now are, into incidental dreams. Yet the\nideal of mastery and idealisation remains the same, if any one could\nonly attain it: mastery, to see things as they are and dare to describe\nthem ingenuously; idealisation, to select from this reality what is\npertinent to ultimate interests and can speak eloquently to the soul.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VII\n\nPLASTIC CONSTRUCTION\n\n\n[Sidenote: Automatic expression often leaves traces in the outer world.]\n\nWe have seen how arts founded on exercise and automatic self-expression\ndevelop into music, poetry, and prose. By an indirect approach they come\nto represent outer conditions, till they are interwoven in a life which\nhas in some measure gone out to meet its opportunities and learned to\nturn them to an ideal use. We have now to see how man\u2019s reactive habits\npass simultaneously into art in a wholly different region. Spontaneous\nexpression, such as song, comes when internal growth in an animal system\nvents itself, as it were, by the way. At the same time animal economy\nhas playful manifestations concerned with outer things, such as\nburrowing or collecting objects. These practices are not less\nspontaneous than the others, and no less expressive; but they seem more\nexternal because the traces they leave on the environment are more\nclearly marked.\n\nTo change an object is the surest and most glorious way of changing a\nperception. A shift in posture may relieve the body, and in that way\nsatisfy, but the new attitude is itself unstable. Its pleasantness,\nlike its existence, is transient, and scarcely is a movement executed\nwhen both its occasion and its charm are forgotten. Self-expression by\nexercise, in spite of its pronounced automatism, is therefore something\ncomparatively passive and inglorious. A man has hardly _done_ anything\nwhen he has laughed or yawned. Even the inspired poet retains something\nof this passivity: his work is not his, but that of a restless,\nirresponsible spirit passing through him, and hypnotising him for its\nown ends. Of the result he has no profit, no glory, and little\nunderstanding. So the mystic also positively gloats on his own\nnothingness, and puts his whole genuine being in a fancied\ninstrumentality and subordination to something else. Far more virile and\nnoble is the sense of having actually done something, and left at least\nthe temporary stamp of one\u2019s special will on the world. To chop a stick,\nto catch a fly, to pile a heap of sand, is a satisfying action; for the\nsand stays for a while in its novel arrangement, proclaiming to the\nsurrounding level that we have made it our instrument, while the fly\nwill never stir nor the stick grow together again in all eternity. If\nthe impulse that has thus left its indelible mark on things is constant\nin our own bosom, the world will have been permanently improved and\nhumanised by our action. Nature cannot but be more favourable to those\nideas which have once found an efficacious champion.\n\n[Sidenote: Such effects fruitful.]\n\nPlastic impulses find in this way an immediate sanction in the sense of\nvictory and dominion which they carry with them; it is so evident a\nproof of power in ourselves to see things and animals bent out of their\nhabitual form and obedient instead to our idea. But a far weightier\nsanction immediately follows. Man depends on things for his experience,\nyet by automatic action he changes these very things so that it becomes\npossible that by his action he should promote his welfare. He may, of\ncourse, no less readily precipitate his ruin. The animal is more subject\nto vicissitudes than the plant, which makes no effort to escape them or\nto give chase to what it feeds upon. The greater perils of action,\nhowever, are in animals covered partly by fertility, partly by\nadaptability, partly by success. The mere possibility of success, in a\nworld governed by natural selection, is an earnest of progress.\nSometimes, in impressing the environment, a man will improve it: which\nis merely to say that a change may sometimes fortify the impulse which\nbrought it about. As soon as this retroaction is perceived and the act\nis done with knowledge of its ensuing benefits, plastic impulse becomes\nart, and the world begins actually to change in obedience to reason.\n\nOne respect, for instance, in which man depends on things is for the\n\u00e6sthetic quality of his perceptions. If he happens, by a twist of the\nhand, to turn a flowering branch into a wreath, thereby making it more\ninteresting, he will have discovered a decorative art and initiated\nhimself auspiciously into the practice of it. Experimentation may\nfollow, and whenever the new form given to the object improves\nit\u2014_i.e._, increases its interest for the eye\u2014the experimenter will\ntriumph and will congratulate himself on his genius. The garland so\narranged will be said to express the taste it satisfies; insight and\nreason will be mythically thought to have guided the work by which they\nare sustained in being. It is no small harmony, however, that they\nshould be sustained by it. The consonances man introduces into nature\nwill follow him wherever he goes. It will no longer be necessary that\nnature should supply them spontaneously, by a rare adventitious harmony\nwith his demands. His new habit will habitually rear-range her chance\narrangements, and his path will be marked by the beauties he has strewn\nit with. So long as the same plastic impulse continues operative it will\nbe accompanied by knowledge and criticism of its happy results.\nSelf-criticism, being a second incipient artistic impulse, contrasting\nitself with the one which a work embodies, may to some extent modify the\nnext performance. If life is drawn largely into this deepening channel,\nphysical proficiency and its ideal sanctions will develop more or less\nharmoniously into what is called a school of art.\n\n[Sidenote: Magic authority of man\u2019s first creations.]\n\nThe first felt utilities by which plastic instinct is sanctioned are of\ncourse not distinctly \u00e6sthetic, much less distinctly practical; they\nare magical. A stone cut into some human or animal semblance fascinates\nthe savage eye much more than would a useful tool or a beautiful idol.\nThe man wonders at his own work, and petrifies the miracle of his art\ninto miraculous properties in its product. Primitive art is incredibly\nconservative; its first creations, having once attracted attention,\nmonopolise it henceforth and nothing else will be trusted to work the\nmiracle. It is a sign of stupidity in general to stick to physical\nobjects and given forms apart from their ideal functions, as when a\nchild cries for a broken doll, even if a new and better one is at hand\nto replace it. Inert associations establish themselves, in such a case,\nwith that part of a thing which is irrelevant to its value\u2014its material\nsubstance or perhaps its name. Art can make no progress in such a\nsituation. A man remains incorrigibly unhappy and perplexed, cowed, and\nhelpless, because not intelligent enough to readjust his actions; his\nidol must be the self-same hereditary stock, or at least it must have\nthe old sanctified rigidity and stare. Plastic impulse, as yet sporadic,\nis overwhelmed by a brute idolatrous awe at mere existence and\nactuality. What is, what has always been, what chance has associated\nwith one person, alone seems acceptable or conceivable.\n\n[Sidenote: Art brings relief from idolatry.]\n\nIdolatry is by no means incident to art; art, on the contrary, is a\nrelease from idolatry. A cloud, an animal, a spring, a stone, or the\nwhole heaven, will serve the pure idolater\u2019s purpose to perfection;\nthese things have existence and a certain hypnotic power, so that he may\nmake them a focus for his dazed contemplation. When the mind takes to\ngeneralities it finds the same fascination in Being or in the Absolute,\nsomething it needs no art to discover. The more indeterminate,\nimmediate, and unutterable the idol is, the better it induces panic\nself-contraction and a reduction of all discourse to the infinite\nintensity of zero. When idolaters pass from trying to evoke the\nAbsolutely Existent to apostrophising the sun or an ithyphallic bull\nthey have made an immense progress in art and religion, for now their\nidols represent some specific and beneficent function in nature,\nsomething propitious to ideal life and to its determinate expression.\nIsaiah is very scornful of idols made with hands, because they have no\nphysical energy. He forgets that perhaps they represent something, and\nso have a spiritual dignity which things living and powerful never have\nunless they too become representative and express some ideal. Isaiah\u2019s\nconception of Jehovah, for instance, is itself a poetic image, the work\nof man\u2019s brain; and the innocent worship of it would not be idolatry, if\nthat conception represented something friendly to human happiness and to\nhuman art. The question merely is whether the sculptor\u2019s image or the\nprophet\u2019s stands for the greater interest and is a more adequate symbol\nfor the good. The noblest art will be the one, whether plastic or\nliterary or dialectical, which creates figments most truly\nrepresentative of what is momentous in human life. Similarly the least\nidolatrous religion would be the one which used the most perfect art,\nand most successfully abstracted the good from the real.\n\n[Sidenote: Inertia in technique.]\n\nConservatism rules also in those manufactures which are tributary to\narchitecture and the smaller plastic arts. Utility makes small headway\nagainst custom, not only when custom has become religion, but even when\nit remains inert and without mythical sanction. To admit or trust\nanything new is to overcome that inertia which is a general law in the\nbrain no less than elsewhere, and which may be distinguished in\nreflection into a technical and a social conservatism. Technical\nconservatism appears, for instance, in a man\u2019s handwriting, which is so\nseldom improved, even when admitted, perhaps, to be execrable. Every\nartist has his tricks of execution, every school its hereditary,\nirrational processes. These refractory habits are to blame for the rare\nand inimitable quality of genius; they impose excellence on one man and\nrefuse it to a million. A happy physiological structure, by creating a\nmannerism under the special circumstances favourable to expression, may\nlift a man, perhaps inferior in intelligence, to heights which no\ninsight can attain with inferior organs. As a voice is necessary for\nsinging, so a certain quickness of eye and hand is needed for good\nexecution in the plastic arts. The same principle goes deeper.\nConception and imagination are themselves automatic and run in grooves,\nso that only certain forms in certain combinations will ever suggest\nthemselves to a given designer. Every writer\u2019s style, too, however\nvaried within limits, is single and monotonous compared with the ideal\npossibilities of expression. Genius at every moment is confined to the\nidiom it is creating.\n\n[Sidenote: Inertia in appreciation.]\n\nSocial inertia is due to the same causes working in the community at\nlarge. The fancy, for instance, of building churches in the shape of a\ncross has largely determined Christian architecture. Builders were\nprevented by a foregone suggestion in themselves and by their patrons\u2019\ndemands from conceiving any alternative to that convention. Early\npottery, they say, imitates wicker-work, and painted landscape was for\nages not allowed to exist without figures, although even the old masters\nshow plainly enough in their backgrounds that they could love landscape\nfor its own sake. When one link with humanity has been rendered explicit\nand familiar, people assume that by no other means can humanity be\ntouched at all; even if at the same time their own heart is expanding to\nthe highest raptures in a quite different region. The severer Greeks\nreprobated music without words; Saint Augustine complained of chants\nthat rendered the sacred text unintelligible; the Puritans regarded\nelaborate music as diabolical, little knowing how soon some of their\ndescendants would find religion in nothing else. A stupid convention\nstill looks on material and mathematical processes as somehow\ndistressing and ugly, and systems of philosophy, artificially\nmechanical, are invented to try to explain natural mechanism away;\nwhereas in no region can the spirit feel so much at home as among\nnatural causes, or realise so well its universal affinities, or so\nsafely enlarge its happiness. Mechanism is the source of beauty. It is\nnot necessary to look so high as the stars to perceive this truth: the\naction of an animal\u2019s limbs or the movement of a waterfall will prove it\nto any one who has eyes and can shake himself loose from verbal\nprejudices, those debris of old perceptions which choke all fresh\nperception in the soul. Irrational hopes, irrational shames, irrational\ndecencies, make man\u2019s chief desolation. A slight knocking of fools\u2019\nheads together might be enough to break up the ossifications there and\nstart the blood coursing again through possible channels. Art has an\ninfinite range; nothing shifts so easily as taste and yet nothing so\npersistently avoids the directions in which it might find most\nsatisfaction.\n\n[Sidenote: Adventitious effects appreciated first.]\n\nSince construction grows rational slowly and by indirect pressure, we\nmay expect that its most superficial merits will be the first\nappreciated. Ultimate beauty in a building would consist, of course, in\nresponding simultaneously to all the human faculties affected: to the\neye, by the building\u2019s size, form, and colour; to the imagination, by\nits fitness and ideal expression. Of all grounds for admiration those\nmost readily seized are size, elaboration, splendour of materials, and\ndifficulties or cost involved. Having built or dug in the conventional\nway a man may hang before his door some trophy of battle or the chase,\nbearing witness to his prowess; just as people now, not thinking of\nmaking their rooms beautiful, fill them with photographs of friends or\nplaces they have known, to suggest and reburnish in their minds their\ninteresting personal history, which even they, unstimulated, might tend\nto forget. That dwelling will seem best adorned which contains most\nadventitious objects; bare and ugly will be whatever is not concealed by\nsomething else. Again, a barbarous architect, without changing his\nmodel, may build in a more precious material; and his work will be\nadmired for the evidence it furnishes of wealth and wilfulness. As a\ncommunity grows luxurious and becomes accustomed to such display, it may\ncome to seem strange and hideous to see a wooden plate or a pewter\nspoon. A beautiful house will need to be in marble and the sight of\nplebeian brick will banish all satisfaction.\n\nLess irrational, and therefore less vulgar, is the wonder aroused by\ngreat bulk or difficulty in the work. Exertions, to produce a great\nresult, even if it be material, must be allied to perseverance and\nintelligent direction. Roman bridges and aqueducts, for instance, gain\na profound emotional power when we see in their monotonous arches a\nsymbol of the mightiest enterprise in history, and in their decay an\nevidence of its failure. Curiosity is satisfied, historic imagination is\nstimulated, tragic reflection is called forth. We cannot refuse\nadmiration to a work so full of mind, even if no great plastic beauty\nhappens to distinguish it. It is at any rate beautiful enough, like the\nsea or the skeleton of a mountain. We may rely on the life it has made\npossible to add more positive charms and clothe it with imaginative\nfunctions. Modern engineering works often have a similar value; the\nforce and intelligence they express merge in an \u00e6sthetic essence, and\nthe place they hold in a portentous civilisation lends them an almost\nepic dignity. New York, since it took to doing business in towers, has\nbecome interesting to look at from the sea; nor is it possible to walk\nthrough the overshadowed streets without feeling a pleasing wonder. A\ncity, when enough people swarm in it, is as fascinating as an ant-hill,\nand its buildings, whatever other charms they may have, are at least as\ncurious and delightful as sea-shells or birds\u2019 nests. The purpose of\nimprovements in modern structures may be economic, just as the purpose\nof castles was military; but both may incidentally please the\ncontemplative mind by their huge forms and human associations.\n\n[Sidenote: Approach to beauty through useful structure.]\n\nOf the two approaches which barbaric architecture makes to beauty\u2014one\nthrough ornamentation and the other through mass\u2014the latter is in\ngeneral the more successful. An engineer fights with nature hand to\nhand: he is less easily extravagant than a decorator; he can hardly ever\nafford to be absurd. He becomes accordingly more rapidly civilised and\nhis work acquires, in spite of itself, more rationality and a more\npermanent charm. A self-sustaining structure, in art as in life, is the\nonly possible basis for a vital ideal. When the framework is determined,\nwhen it is tested by trial and found to stand and serve, it will\ngradually ingratiate itself with the observer; affinities it may have in\nhis memory or apperceptive habits will come to light; they will help him\nto assimilate the new vision and will define its \u00e6sthetic character.\nWhatever beauty its lines may have will become a permanent possession\nand whatever beauties they exclude will be rejected by a faithful\nartist, no matter how sorely at first they may tempt him. Not that these\nexcluded beauties would not be really beautiful; like fashions, they\nwould truly please in their day and very likely would contain certain\nabsolute excellences of form or feeling which an attentive eye could\nenjoy at any time. Yet if appended to a structure they have no function\nin, these excellences will hardly impose themselves on the next builder.\nBeing adventitious they will remain optional, and since fancy is quick,\nand exotic beauties are many, there will be no end to the variations, in\nendless directions, which art will undergo. Caprice will follow caprice\nand no style will be developed.\n\n[Sidenote: Failure of adapted styles.]\n\nA settled style is perhaps in itself no desideratum. A city that should\nbe a bazaar of all possible architectures, adding a multitude of new\ninventions to samples of every historical style, might have a certain\ninterest; yet carnival can hardly be enjoyed all the year round and\nthere is a certain latent hideousness in masquerades in spite of their\nglitter. Not only are the effects juxtaposed incongruous, but each apart\nis usually shallow and absurd. A perruque cannot bring back courtly\nmanners, and a style of architecture, when revived, is never quite\ngenuine; adaptations have to be introduced and every adaptation, the\nbolder it is, runs the greater risk of being extravagant. Nothing is\nmore pitiable than the attempts people make, who think they have an\nexquisite sensibility, to live in a house all of one period. The\nconnoisseur, like an uncritical philosopher, boasts to have patched his\ndwelling perfectly together, but he has forgotten himself, its egregious\ninhabitant. Nor is he merely a blot in his own composition; his presence\nsecretly infects and denaturalises everything in it. Ridiculous himself\nin such a setting, he makes it ridiculous too by his \u00e6sthetic pose and\nappreciations; for the objects he has collected or reproduced were once\nused and prized in all honesty, when life and inevitable tradition had\nbrought them forth, while now they are studied and exhibited, relics of\na dead past and evidences of a dead present. Historic remains and\nrestorations might well be used as one uses historic knowledge, to serve\nsome living interest and equip the mind for the undertakings of the\nhour. An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.\nIdeas that have long been used may be used still, if they remain ideas\nand have not been congealed into memories. Incorporated into a design\nthat calls for them, traditional forms cease to be incongruous, as words\nthat still have a felt meaning may be old without being obsolete. All\ndepends on men subserving an actual ideal and having so firm and genuine\nan appreciation of the past as to distinguish at once what is still\nserviceable in it from what is already ghostly and dead.\n\n[Sidenote: Not all structure beautiful, nor all beauty structural.]\n\nAn artist may be kept true to his style either by ignorance of all\nothers or by love of his own. This fidelity is a condition of progress.\nWhen he has learned to appreciate whatever is \u00e6sthetically appreciable\nin his problem, he can go on to refine his construction, to ennoble, and\nfinally to decorate it. As fish, flesh, and fowl have specific forms,\neach more or less beautiful and adorned, so every necessary structure\nhas its specific character and its essential associations. Taking his\ncue from these, an artist may experiment freely; he may emphasise the\nstructure in the classic manner and turn its lines into ornament, adding\nonly what may help to complete and unite its suggestions. This\npuritanism in design is rightly commended, but its opposite may be\nadmirable too. We may admit that nudity is the right garment for the\ngods, but it would hardly serve the interests of beauty to legislate\nthat all mortals should always go naked. The veil that conceals natural\nimperfections may have a perfection of its own. Maxims in art are\npernicious; beauty is here the only commandment. And beauty is a free\nnatural gift. When it has appeared, we may perceive that its influence\nis rational, since it both expresses and fosters a harmony of\nimpressions and impulses in the soul; but to take any mechanism\nwhatever, and merely because it is actual or necessary to insist that it\nis worth exhibiting, and that by divine decree it shall be pronounced\nbeautiful, is to be quite at sea in moral philosophy.\n\nBeauty is adventitious, occasional, incidental, in human products no\nless than in nature. Works of art are automatic figments which nature\nfashions through man. It is impossible they should be wholly beautiful,\nas it is impossible that they should offer no foothold or seed-plot for\nbeauty at all. Beauty is everywhere potential and in a way pervasive\nbecause existence itself presupposes a modicum of harmony, first within\nthe thing and then between the thing and its environment. Of this\nenvironment the observer\u2019s senses are in this case an important part.\nMan can with difficulty maintain senses quite out of key with the\nstimuli furnished by the outer world. They would then be useless\nburdens to his organism. On the other side, even artificial structures\nmust be somehow geometrical or proportional, because only such\nstructures hold physically together. Objects that are to be esteemed by\nman must further possess or acquire some function in his economy;\notherwise they would not be noticed nor be so defined as to be\nrecognisable. Out of these physical necessities beauty may grow; but an\nadjustment must first take place between the material stimulus and the\nsense it affects. Beauty is something spiritual and, being such, it\nrests not on the material constitution of each existence taken apart,\nbut on their conspiring ideally together, so that each furthers the\nother\u2019s endeavour. Structure by itself is no more beautiful than\nexistence by itself is good. They are only potentialities or conditions\nof excellence.\n\n[Sidenote: Structures designed for display.]\n\nAn architect, when his main structure is uninteresting, may have\nrecourse to a subsidiary construction. The fa\u00e7ade, or a part of it, or\nthe interior may still have a natural form that lends itself to\nelaboration. This beautiful feature may be developed so as to ignore or\neven conceal the rest; then the visible portion may be entirely\nbeautiful, like the ideal human figure, though no pledges be given\nconcerning the anatomy within. Many an Italian palace has a false front\nin itself magnificent. We may chance to observe, however, that it\novertops its backing, perhaps an amorphous rambling pile in quite\nanother material. What we admire is not so much a fa\u00e7ade as a triumphal\ngateway, set up in front of the house to be its ambassador to the world,\nwearing decidedly richer apparel than its master can afford at home.\nThis was not vanity in the Italians so much as civility to the public,\nto whose taste this flattering embassy was addressed. However our moral\nsense may judge the matter, it is clear that two separate monuments\noccupied the architect in such cases, if indeed inside and outside were\nactually designed by the same hand. Structure may appear in each\nindependently and may be frankly enough expressed. The most beautiful\nfa\u00e7ades, even if independent of their building, are buildings\nthemselves, and since their construction is decorative there is the\ngreater likelihood that their decoration should be structural.\n\nIn relation to the house, however, the fa\u00e7ade in such an extreme case\nwould be an abstract ornament; and so, though the ornament be structural\nwithin its own lines, we have reverted to the style of building where\nconstruction is one thing and decoration another. Applied ornament has\nan indefinite range and there would be little profit in reasoning about\nit. Philosophy can do little more at this point than expose the\nfallacies into which dogmatic criticism is apt to fall. Everything is\ntrue decoration which truly adorns, and everything adorns which enriches\nthe impression and pleasantly entertains the eye. There is a decorative\nimpulse as well as a sense for decoration. As I sit idle my stick makes\nmeaningless marks upon the sand; or (what is nearer to the usual origin\nof ornament) I make a design out of somebody\u2019s initials, or symbolise\nfantastically something lying in my thoughts. We place also one thing\nupon another, the better to see and to think of two things at once.\n\n[Sidenote: Appeal made by decoration.]\n\nTo love decoration is to enjoy synthesis: in other words, it is to have\nhungry senses and unused powers of attention. This hunger, when it\ncannot well be fed by recollecting things past, relishes a profusion of\nthings simultaneous. Nothing is so much respected by unintelligent\npeople as elaboration and complexity. They are simply dazed and overawed\nat seeing at once so much more than they can master. To overwhelm the\nsenses is, for them, the only way of filling the mind. It takes\ncultivation to appreciate in art, as in philosophy, the consummate value\nof what is simple and finite, because it has found its pure function and\nultimate import in the world. What is just, what is delicately and\nsilently adjusted to its special office, and thereby in truth to all\nultimate issues, seems to the vulgar something obvious and poor. What\nastonishes them is the crude and paradoxical jumble of a thousand\nsuggestions in a single view. As the mystic yearns for an infinitely\nglutted consciousness that feels everything at once and is not put to\nthe inconvenience of any longer thinking or imagining, so the barbarian\ncraves the assault of a myriad sensations together, and feels replete\nand comfortable when a sort of infinite is poured into him without ideal\nmediation. As ideal mediation is another name for intelligence, so it is\nthe condition of elegance. Intelligence and elegance naturally exist\ntogether, since they both spring from a subtle sense for absent and\neventual processes. They are sustained by experience, by nicety in\nforetaste and selection. Before ideality, however, is developed, volume\nand variety must be given bodily or they cannot be given at all. At that\nearlier stage a furious ornamentation is the chief vehicle for beauty.\n\n[Sidenote: Its natural rights.]\n\nThat the ornate may be very beautiful, that in fact what is to be\ncompletely beautiful needs to be somehow rich, is a fact of experience\nwhich further justifies the above analysis. For sensation is the matter\nof ideas; all representation is such only in its function; in its\nexistence it remains mere feeling. Decoration, by stimulating the\nsenses, not only brings a primary satisfaction with it, independent of\nany that may supervene, but it furnishes an element of effect which no\nhigher beauty can ever render unwelcome or inappropriate, since any\nhigher beauty, in moving the mind, must give it a certain sensuous and\nemotional colouring. Decoration is accordingly an independent art, to be\npractised for its own sake, in obedience to elementary plastic\ninstincts. It is fundamental in design, for everything structural or\nsignificant produces in the first instance some sensuous impression and\nfigures as a spot or pattern in the field of vision. The fortunate\narchitect is he who has, for structural skeleton in his work, a form in\nitself decorative and beautiful, who can carry it out in a beautiful\nmaterial, and who finally is suffered to add so much decoration as the\neye may take in with pleasure, without losing the expression and\nlucidity of the whole.\n\nIt is impossible, however, to imagine beforehand what these elements\nshould be or how to combine them. The problem must exist before its\nsolution can be found. The forms of good taste and beauty which a man\ncan think of or esteem are limited by the scope of his previous\nexperience. It would be impossible to foresee or desire a beauty which\nhad not somehow grown up of itself and been recognised receptively. A\nsatisfaction cannot be conceived ideally when neither its organ nor its\noccasion has as yet arisen. That ideal conception, to exist, would have\nto bring both into play. The fine arts are butter to man\u2019s daily bread;\nthere is no conceiving or creating them except as they spring out of\nsocial exigencies. Their types are imposed by utility: their\nornamentation betrays the tradition that happens to envelop and\ndiversify them; their expression and dignity are borrowed from the\ncompany they keep in the world.\n\n[Sidenote: Its alliance with structure in Greek architecture.]\n\nThe Greek temple, for instance, if we imagine it in its glory, with all\nits colour and furniture, was a type of human art at its best, where\ndecoration, without in the least restricting itself, took naturally an\nexquisitely subordinate and pervasive form: each detail had its own\nsplendour and refinement, yet kept its place in the whole. Structure and\ndecoration were alike traditional and imposed by ulterior practical or\nreligious purposes; yet, by good fortune and by grace of that\nrationality which unified Greek life, they fell together easily into a\nharmony such as imagination could never have devised had it been invited\nto decree pleasure-domes for non-existent beings. Had the Greek gods\nbeen hideous, their images and fable could not so readily have\nbeautified the place where they were honoured; and had the structural\ntheme and uses of the temple been more complicated, they would not have\nlent themselves so well to decoration without being submerged beneath\nit.\n\n[Sidenote: Relations of the two in Gothic art.]\n\nIn some ways the ideal Gothic church attained a similar perfection,\nbecause there too the structure remained lucid and predominant, while it\nwas enriched by many necessary appointments\u2014altars, stalls, screens,\nchantries\u2014which, while really the _raison d\u2019\u00eatre_ of the whole edifice,\n\u00e6sthetically regarded, served for its ornaments. It may be doubted,\nhowever, whether Gothic construction was well grounded enough in utility\nto be a sound and permanent basis for beauty; and the extreme\ninstability of Gothic style, the feverish, inconstancy of architects\nstraining after effects never, apparently, satisfactory when achieved,\nshows that something was wrong and artificial in the situation. The\nstructure, in becoming an ornament, ceased to be anything else and could\nbe discarded by any one whose fancy preferred a different image.\n\nFor this reason a building like the cathedral of Amiens, where a\nstructural system is put through consistently, is far from representing\nmedi\u00e6val art in its full and ideal essence; it is rather an incidental\nachievement, a sport in which an adventitious interest is, for a moment,\nemphasised overwhelmingly. Intelligence here comes to the fore, and a\nsort of mathematical virtuosity: but it was not mathematical virtuosity\nnor even intelligence to which, in Christian art, the leading r\u00f4le\nproperly belonged. What structural elucidation did for church\narchitecture was much like what scholastic elucidation did for church\ndogma: it insinuated a logic into the traditional edifice which was far\nfrom representing its soul or its genuine value. The dialectic\nintroduced might be admirable in itself, in its lay and abstruse\nrationality; but it could not be applied to the poetic material in hand\nwithout rendering it absurd and sterile. The given problem was\nscientifically carried out, but the given problem was itself fantastic.\nTo vault at such heights and to prop that vault with external buttresses\nwas a gratuitous undertaking. The result was indeed interesting, the\ningenuity and method exhibited were masterly in their way; yet the\nresult was not proportionate in beauty to the effort required; it was\nafter all a technical and a vain triumph.\n\n[Sidenote: The result here romantic.]\n\nThe true magic of that very architecture lay not in its intelligible\nstructure but in the bewildering incidental effects which that structure\npermitted. The part in such churches is better than the symmetrical\nwhole; often incompleteness and accretions alone give grace or\nexpression, to the monument. A cross vista where all is wonder, a side\nchapel where all is peace, strike the key-note here; not that\npunctilious and wooden repetition of props and arches, as a builder\u2019s\nmodel might boast to exhibit them. Perhaps the most beautiful Gothic\ninteriors are those without aisles, if what we are considering is their\nproportion and majesty; elsewhere the structure, if perceived at all, is\ntoo artificial and strange to be perceived intuitively and to have the\nglow of a genuine beauty. There is an over-ingenious mechanism, redeemed\nby its colour and the thousand intervening objects, when these have not\nbeen swept away. Glazed and painted as Gothic churches were meant to be,\nthey were no doubt exceedingly gorgeous. When we admire their structural\nscheme we are perhaps nursing an illusion like that which sentimental\nclassicists once cherished when they talked about the purity of white\nmarble statues and the ideality of their blank and sightless eyes. What\nwe treat as a supreme quality may have been a mere means to medi\u00e6val\nbuilders, and a mechanical expedient: their simple hearts were set on\nmaking their churches, for God\u2019s glory and their own, as large, as high,\nand as rich as possible. After all, an uninterrupted tradition attached\nthem to Byzantium; and it was the sudden passion for stained glass and\nthe goldsmith\u2019s love of intricate fineness\u2014which the Saracens also had\nshown\u2014that carried them in a century from Romanesque to flamboyant. The\nstructure was but the inevitable underpinning for the desired display.\nIf these sanctuaries, in their spoliation and ruin, now show us their\nadmirable bones, we should thank nature for that rational skeleton,\nimposed by material conditions on an art which in its life-time was\ngoaded on only by a pious and local emulation, and wished at all costs\nto be sumptuous and astonishing.\n\n[Sidenote: The medi\u00e6val artist.]\n\nIt was rather in another direction that groping medi\u00e6val art reached its\nmost congenial triumphs. That was an age, so to speak, of epidemic\nprivacy; social contagion was irresistible, yet it served only to make\neach man\u2019s life no less hard, narrow, and visionary than that of every\none else. Like bees in a hive, each soul worked in its separate cell by\nthe same impulse as every other. Each was absorbed in saving itself\nonly, but according to a universal prescription. This isolation in\nunanimity appears in those patient and childlike artists who copied each\nhis leaf or flower, or imagined each his curious angels and devils,\ntaking what was told of them so much to heart that his rendering became\ndeeply individual. The lamp of sacrifice\u2014or perhaps rather of\nignorance\u2014burned in every workshop; much labour was wasted in\nforgetfulness of the function which the work was to perform, yet a\ncertain pathos and expression was infused into the detail, on which all\ninvention and pride had to be lavished. Carvings and statues at\nimpossible elevations, minute symbols hidden in corners, the choice for\narchitectural ornament of animal and vegetable forms, copied as\nattentively and quaintly as possible\u2014all this shows how abstractedly\nthe artist surrendered himself to the given task. He dedicated his\ngenius like the widow\u2019s mite, and left the universal composition to\nProvidence.\n\nNor was this humility, on another side, wholly pious and sacrificial.\nThe Middle Ages were, in their way, merry, sturdy, and mischievous. A\nfresh breath, as of convalescence, breathed through their misery. Never\nwas spring so green and lovely as when men greeted it in a cloistered\ngarden, with hearts quite empty and clean, only half-awakened from a\nlong trance of despair. It mattered little at such a moment where a work\nwas to figure or whether any one should ever enjoy it. The pleasure and\nthe function lay here, in this private revelation, in this playful\ndialogue between a bit of nature and a passing mood. When a Greek\nworkman cut a volute or a moulding, he was not asked to be a poet; he\nwas merely a scribe, writing out what some master had composed before\nhim. The spirit of his art, if that was called forth consciously at\nall, could be nothing short of intelligence. Those lines and none other,\nhe would say to himself, are requisite and sufficient: to do less would\nbe unskilful, to do more would be perverse. But the medi\u00e6val craftsman\nwas irresponsible in his earnestness. The whole did not concern him, for\nthe whole was providential and therefore, to the artist, irrelevant. He\nwas only responsible inwardly, to his casual inspiration, to his\nindividual model, and his allotted block of stone. With these he carried\non, as it were, an ingenuous dialectic, asking them questions by a blow\nof the hammer, and gathering their oracular answers experimentally from\nthe result. Art, like salvation, proceeded by a series of little\nmiracles; it was a blind work, half stubborn patience, half unmerited\ngrace. If the product was destined to fill a niche in the celestial\nedifice, that was God\u2019s business and might be left to him: what\nconcerned the sculptor was to-day\u2019s labour and joy, with the shrewd\nwisdom they might bring after them.\n\n[Sidenote: Representation introduced.]\n\nGothic ornament was accordingly more than ornament; it was sculpture. To\nthe architect sculpture and painting are only means of variegating a\nsurface; light and shade, depth and elaboration, are thereby secured and\naid him in distributing his masses. For this reason geometrical or\nhighly conventionalised ornament is all the architect requires. If his\ndecorators furnish more, if they insist on copying natural forms or\nillustrating history, that is their own affair. Their humanity will\ndoubtless give them, as representative artists, a new claim on human\nregard, and the building they enrich in their pictorial fashion will\ngain a new charm, just as it would gain by historic associations or by\nthe smell of incense clinging to its walls. When the arts superpose\ntheir effects the total impression belongs to none of them in\nparticular; it is imaginative merely or in the broadest sense poetical.\nSo the monumental function of Greek sculpture, and the interpretations\nit gave to national myths, made every temple a storehouse of poetic\nmemories. In the same way every great cathedral became a pious\nstory-book. Construction, by admitting applied decoration, offers a\nsplendid basis and background for representative art. It is in their\ndecorative function that construction and representation meet; they are\nable to conspire in one ideal effect by virtue of the common appeal\nwhich they unwittingly make to the senses. If construction were not\ndecorative it could never ally itself imaginatively to decoration; and\ndecoration in turn would never be willingly representative if the forms\nwhich illustration requires were not decorative in themselves.\n\n[Sidenote: Transition to illustration.]\n\nIllustration has nevertheless an intellectual function by which it\ndiverges altogether from decoration and even, in the narrowest sense\nof the word, from art: for the essence of illustration lies neither\nin use nor in beauty. The illustrator\u2019s impulse is to reproduce\nand describe given objects. He wishes in the first place to force\nobservers\u2014overlooking all logical scruples\u2014to call his work by the\nname of its subject matter; and then he wishes to inform them further,\nthrough his representation, and to teach them to apprehend the real\nobject as, in its natural existence, it might never have been\napprehended. His first task is to translate the object faithfully into\nhis special medium; his second task, somewhat more ambitious, is so to\npenetrate into the object during that process of translation that this\ntranslation may become at the same time analytic and imaginative, in\nthat it signalises the object\u2019s structure and emphasises its ideal\nsuggestions. In such reproduction both hand and mind are called upon to\nconstruct and build up a new apparition; but here construction has\nceased to be chiefly decorative or absolute in order to become\nrepresentative. The \u00e6sthetic element in art has begun to recede before\nthe intellectual; and sensuous effects, while of course retained and\nstill studied, seem to be impressed into the service of ideas.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VIII\n\nPLASTIC REPRESENTATION\n\n\n[Sidenote: Psychology of imitation.]\n\nImitation is a fertile principle in the Life of Reason. We have seen\nthat it furnishes the only rational sanction for belief in any fellow\nmind; now we shall see how it creates the most glorious and interesting\nof plastic arts. The machinery of imitation is obscure but its\nprevalence is obvious, and even in the present rudimentary state of\nhuman biology we may perhaps divine some of its general features. In a\nmotor image the mind represents prophetically what the body is about to\nexecute: but all images are more or less motor, so that no idea,\napparently, can occupy the mind unless the body has received some\nimpulse to enact the same. The plastic instinct to reproduce what is\nseen is therefore simply an uninterrupted and adequate seeing; these two\nphenomena, separable logically and divided in Cartesian psychology by an\nartificial chasm, are inseparable in existence and are, for natural\nhistory, two parts of the same event. That an image should exist for\nconsciousness is, abstractly regarded, a fact which neither involves\nmotion nor constitutes knowledge; but that natural relation to ulterior\nevents which endows that image with a cognitive function identifies it\nat the same time with the motor impulse which accompanies the idea. If\nthe image involved no bodily attitude and prophesied no action it would\nrefer to no eventual existence and would have no practical meaning. Even\nif it _meant_ to refer to something ulterior it would, under those\ncircumstances, miss its aim, seeing that no natural relation connected\nit with any object which could support or verify its asseverations. It\nmight _feel_ significant, like a dream, but its significance would be\nvain and not really self-transcendent; for it is in the world of events\nthat logic must find application, if it cares for applicability at all.\nThis needful bond between ideas and the further existences they forebode\nis not merely a logical postulate, taken on trust because the ideas in\nthemselves assert it; it is a previous and genetic bond, proper to the\nsoil in which the idea flourishes and a condition of its existence. For\nthe idea expresses unawares a present cerebral event of which the\nulterior event consciously looked to is a descendant or an ancestor; so\nthat the ripening of that idea, or its prior history, leads materially\nto the fact which the idea seeks to represent ideally.\n\n[Sidenote: Sustained sensation involves reproduction.]\n\nIn some such fashion we may come to conceive how imitative art is simply\nthe perfection and fulfilment of sensation. The act of apperception in\nwhich a sensation is reflected upon and understood is already an\ninternal reproduction. The object is retraced and gone over in the\nmind, not without quite perceptible movements in the limbs, which sway,\nas it were, in sympathy with the object\u2019s habit. Presumably this\nincipient imitation of the object is the physical basis for apperception\nitself; the stimulus, whatever devious courses it may pursue,\nreconstitutes itself into an impulse to render the object again, as we\nacquire the accent which we often hear. This imitation sometimes has the\nhappiest results, in that the animal fights with one that fights, and\nruns after one that runs away from him. All this happens initially, as\nwe may still observe in ourselves, quite without thought of eventual\nprofit; although if chase leads to contact, and contact stimulates\nhunger or lust, movements important for preservation will quickly\nfollow. Such eventual utilities, however, like all utilities, are\nsupported by a prodigious gratuitous vitality, and long before a\npractical or scientific use of sensation is attained its artistic force\nis in full operation. If art be play, it is only because all life is\nplay in the beginning. Rational adjustments to truth and to benefit\nsupervene only occasionally and at a higher level.\n\n[Sidenote: Imitative art repeats with intent to repeat, and in a new\nmaterial.]\n\nImitation cannot, of course, result in a literal repetition of the\nobject that suggests it. The copy is secondary; it does not iterate the\nmodel by creating a second object on the same plane of reality, but\nreproduces the form in a new medium and gives it a different function.\nIn these latter circumstances lies the imitative essence of the second\nimage: for one leaf does not imitate another nor is each twin the\nother\u2019s copy. Like sensibility, imitation remodels a given being so that\nit becomes, in certain formal respects, like another being in its\nenvironment. It is a response and an index, by which note is taken of a\nsituation or of its possible developments. When a man involuntarily\nimitates other men, he does not become those other persons; he is simply\nmodified by their presence in a manner that allows him to conceive their\nwill and their independent existence, not without growing similar to\nthem in some measure and framing a genuine representation of them in his\nsoul. He enacts what he understands, and his understanding consists\nprecisely in knowing that he is re-enacting something which has its\ncollateral existence elsewhere in nature. An element in the percipient\nrepeats the total movement and tendency of the person perceived. The\nimitation, though akin to what it imitates, and reproducing it, lies in\na different medium, and accordingly has a specific individuality and\nspecific effects. Imitation is far more than similarity, nor does its\nideal function lie in bringing a flat and unmeaning similarity about. It\nhas a representative and intellectual value because in reproducing the\nforms of things it reproduces them in a fresh substance to a new\npurpose.\n\nIf I imitate mankind by following their fashions, I add one to the\nmillion and improve nothing: but if I imitate them under proper\ninhibitions and in the service of my own ends, I really understand them,\nand, by representing what I do not bodily become, I preserve and enlarge\nmy own being and make it relevant ideally to what it physically depends\nupon. Assimilation is a way of drifting through the flux or of letting\nit drift through oneself; representation, on the contrary, is a\nprinciple of progress. To grow by accumulating passions and fancies is\nat best to grow in bulk: it is to become what a colony or a hydra might\nbe. But to make the accretions which time brings to your being\nrepresentative of what you are not, and do not wish to be, is to grow in\ndignity. It is to be wise and prepared. It is to survey a universe\nwithout ceasing to be a mind.\n\n[Sidenote: Imitation leads to adaptation and to knowledge.]\n\nA product of imitative sensibility is accordingly on a higher plane than\nthe original existences it introduces to one another\u2014the ignorant\nindividual and the unknown world. Imitation in softening the body into\nphysical adjustment stimulates the mind to ideal representation. This is\nthe case even when the stimulus is a contagious influence or habit,\nthough the response may then be slavish and the representation vague.\nSheep jumping a wall after their leader doubtless feel that they are not\nalone; and though their action may have no purpose it probably has a\nfelt sanction and reward. Men also think they invoke an authority when\nthey appeal to the _quod semper et ubique et ab omnibus_, and a\nconscious unanimity is a human if not a rational joy. When, however, the\nstimulus to imitation is not so pervasive and touches chiefly a single\nsense, when what it arouses is a movement of the hand or eye retracing\nthe object, then the response becomes very definitely cognitive. It\nconstitutes an observation of fact, an acquaintance with a thing\u2019s\nstructure amounting to technical knowledge; for such a survey leaves\nbehind it a power to reconstitute the process it involved. It leaves an\nefficacious idea. In an idle moment, when the information thus acquired\nneed not be put to instant use, the new-born faculty may work itself out\nspontaneously. The sound heard is repeated, the thing observed is\nsketched, the event conceived is acted out in pantomime. Then imitation\nrounds itself out; an uninhibited sensation has become an instinct to\nkeep that sensation alive, and plastic representation has begun.\n\n[Sidenote: How the artist is inspired and irresponsible.]\n\nThe secret of representative genius is simple enough. All hangs on\nintense, exhaustive, rehearsed sensation. To paint is a way of letting\nvision work; nor should the amateur imagine that while he lacks\ntechnical knowledge he can have in his possession all the ideal burden\nof an art. His reaction will be personal and adventitious, and he will\nmiss the artist\u2019s real inspiration and ignore his genuine successes. You\nmay instruct a poet about literature, but his allegiance is to emotion.\nYou may offer the sculptor your comparative observations on style and\ntaste; he may or may not care to listen, but what he knows and loves is\nthe human body. Critics are in this way always one stage behind or\nbeyond the artist; their operation is reflective and his is direct. In\ntransferring to his special medium what he has before him his whole mind\nis lost in the object; as the marksman, to shoot straight, looks at the\nmark. How successful the result is, or how appealing to human nature, he\njudges afterwards, as an outsider might, and usually judges ill; since\nthere is no life less apt to yield a broad understanding for human\naffairs or even for the residue of art itself, than the life of a man\ninspired, a man absorbed, as the genuine artist is, in his own travail.\nBut into this travail, into this digestion and reproduction of the thing\nseen, a critic can hardly enter. Having himself the ulterior office of\njudge, he must not hope to rival nature\u2019s children in their sportiveness\nand intuition.\n\nIn an age of moral confusion, these circumstances may lead to a strange\nshifting of r\u00f4les. The critic, feeling that something in the artist has\nescaped him, may labour to put himself in the artist\u2019s place. If he\nsucceeded, the result would only be to make him a biographer; he would\nbe describing in words the very intuitions which the artist had rendered\nin some other medium. To understand how the artist felt, however, is not\ncriticism; criticism is an investigation of what the work is good for.\nIts function may be chiefly to awaken certain emotions in the beholder,\nto deepen in him certain habits of apperception; but even this most\n\u00e6sthetic element in a work\u2019s operation does not borrow its value from\nthe possible fact that the artist also shared those habits and emotions.\nIf he did, and if they are desirable, so much the better for him; but\nhis work\u2019s value would still consist entirely in its power to propagate\nsuch good effects, whether they were already present in him or not. All\ncriticism is therefore moral, since it deals with benefits and their\nrelative weight. Psychological penetration and reconstructed biography\nmay be excellent sport; if they do not reach historic truth they may at\nleast exercise dramatic talent. Criticism, on the other hand, is a\nserious and public function; it shows the race assimilating the\nindividual, dividing the immortal from the mortal part of a soul.\n\n[Sidenote: Need of knowing and loving the subject rendered.]\n\nRepresentation naturally repeats those objects which are most\ninteresting in themselves. Even the medium, when a choice is possible,\nis usually determined by the sort of objects to be reproduced.\nInstruments lose their virtue with their use and a medium of\nrepresentation, together with its manipulation, is nothing but a\nvehicle. It is fit if it makes possible a good rendition. All\naccordingly hangs on what life has made interesting to the senses, on\nwhat presents itself persuasively to the artist for imitation; and\nliving arts exist only while well-known, much-loved things imperatively\ndemand to be copied, so that their reproduction has some honest\nnon-\u00e6sthetic interest for mankind. Although subject matter is often said\nto be indifferent to art, and an artist, when his art is secondary, may\nthink of his technique only, nothing is really so poor and melancholy as\nart that is interested in itself and not in its subject. If any remnant\nof inspiration or value clings to such a performance, it comes from a\nsurviving taste for something in the real world. Thus the literature\nthat calls itself purely \u00e6sthetic is in truth prurient; without this\nhalf-avowed weakness to play upon, the coloured images evoked would have\nhad nothing to marshall or to sustain them.\n\n[Sidenote: Public interests determine the subject of art, and the\nsubject the medium.]\n\nA good way to understand schools and styles and to appreciate their\nrespective functions and successes is to consider first what region of\nnature preoccupied the age in which they arose. Perception can cut the\nworld up into many patterns, which it isolates and dignifies with the\nname of things. It must distinguish before it can reproduce and the\nobjects which attention distinguishes are of many strange sorts. Thus\nthe single man, the hero, in his acts of prowess or in his readiness,\nmay be the unit and standard in discourse. It will then be his image\nthat will preoccupy the arts. For such a task the most adequate art is\nevidently sculpture, for sculpture is the most complete of imitations.\nIn no other art can apprehension render itself so exhaustively and with\nsuch recuperative force. Sculpture retains form and colour, with all\nthat both can suggest, and it retains them in their integrity, leaving\nthe observer free to resurvey them from any point of view and drink in\ntheir quality exhaustively.\n\n[Sidenote: Reproduction by acting ephemera.]\n\nThe movement and speech which are wanting, the stage may be called upon\nto supply; but it cannot supply them without a terrible sacrifice, for\nit cannot give permanence to it expression. Acting is for this reason an\ninferior art, not perhaps in difficulty and certainly not in effect, but\ninferior in dignity, since the effort of art is to keep what is\ninteresting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal, and this ideal\nis half frustrated if the representation is itself fleeting and the\nrendering has no firmer subsistence than the inspiration that gave it\nbirth. By making himself, almost in his entirety, the medium of his art,\nthe actor is morally diminished, and as little of him remains in his\nwork, when this is good, as of his work in history. He lends himself\nwithout interest, and after being Brutus at one moment and Falstaff at\nanother, he is not more truly himself. He is abolished by his creations,\nwhich nevertheless cannot survive him.\n\n[Sidenote: High demands of sculpture.]\n\nBeing so adequate a rendering of its object, sculpture demands a perfect\nmastery over it and is correspondingly difficult. It requires taste and\ntraining above every other art; for not only must the material form be\nreproduced, but its motor suggestions and moral expression must be\nrendered; things which in the model itself are at best transitory, and\nwhich may never be found there if a heroic or ideal theme is proposed.\nThe sculptor is obliged to have caught on the wing attitudes momentarily\nachieved or vaguely imagined; yet these must grow firm and harmonious\nunder his hand. Nor is this enough; for sculpture is more dependent than\nother arts on its model. If the statue is to be ideal, _i.e._, if it is\nto express the possible motions and vital character of its subject, the\nmodel must itself be refined. Training must have cut in the flesh those\nlines which are to make the language and eloquence of the marble.\nTrivial and vulgar forms, such as modern sculpture abounds in, reflect\nan undisciplined race of men, one in which neither soul nor body has\ndone anything well, because the two have done nothing together. The\nframe has remained gross or awkward, while the face has taken on a tense\nexpression, betraying loose and undignified habits of mind. To carve\nsuch a creature is to perpetuate a caricature. The modern sculptor is\nstopped short at the first conception of a figure; if he gives it its\ncostume, it is grotesque; if he strips it, it is unmeaning and pitiful.\n\n[Sidenote: It is essentially obsolete.]\n\nGreece was in all these respects a soil singularly favourable to\nsculpture. The success there achieved was so conspicuous that two\nthousand years of essential superfluity have not availed to extirpate\nthe art. Plastic impulse is indeed immortal, and many a hand, even\nwithout classic example, would have fallen to modelling. In the middle\nages, while monumental sculpture was still rudely reminiscent,\nornamental carving arose spontaneously. Yet at every step the\nexperimental sculptor would run up against disaster. What could be seen\nin the streets, while it offered plenty of subjects, offered none that\ncould stimulate his talent. His patrons asked only for illustration and\napplied ornament; his models offered only the smirk and sad humour of a\nstunted life. Here and there his statues might attain a certain\nsweetness and grace, such as painting might perfectly well have\nrendered; but on the whole sculpture remained decorative and infantile.\n\nThe Renaissance brought back technical freedom and a certain\ninspiration, unhappily a retrospective and exotic one. The art cut\npraiseworthy capers in the face of the public, but nobody could teach\nthe public itself to dance. If several great temperaments, under the\nauspices of fashion, could then call up a magic world in which bodies\nstill spoke a heroic language, that was a passing dream. Society could\nnot feed such an artificial passion, nor the schools transmit an\narbitrary personal style that responded to nothing permanent in social\nconditions. Academies continued to offer prizes for sculpture, the nude\ncontinued to be seen in studios, and equestrian or other rhetorical\nstatues continued occasionally to be erected in public squares. Heroic\nsculpture, however, in modern society, is really an anomaly and\nconfesses as much by being a failure. No personal talent avails to\nrescue an art from laboured insignificance when it has no steadying\nfunction in the moral world, and must waver between caprice and\nconvention. Where something modest and genuine peeped out was in\nportraiture, and also at times in that devotional sculpture in wood\nwhich still responded to a native interest and consequently kept its\nsincerity and colour. Pious images may be feeble in the extreme, but\nthey have not the weakness of being merely \u00e6sthetic. The purveyor of\nchurch wares has a stated theme; he is employed for a purpose; and if he\nhas enough technical resource his work may become truly beautiful: which\nis not to say that he will succeed if his conceptions are without\ndignity or his style without discretion. There are good _Mater\ndolorosas_; there is no good _Sacred Heart_.\n\n[Sidenote: When men see groups and backgrounds they are natural\npainters.]\n\nIt may happen, however, that people are not interested in subjects that\ndemand or allow reproduction in bulk. The isolated figure or simple\ngroup may seem cold apart from its natural setting. In rendering an\naction you may need to render its scene, if it is the circumstance that\ngives it value rather than the hero. You may also wish to trace out the\naction through a series of episodes with many figures. In the latter\ncase you might have recourse to a bas-relief, which, although durable,\nis usually a thankless work; there is little in it that might not be\nconveyed in a drawing with distinctness. As some artists, like Michael\nAngelo, have carried the sculptor\u2019s spirit into painting, many more,\nwhen painting is the prevalent and natural art, have produced carved\npictures. It may be said that any work is essentially a picture which is\nconceived from a single quarter and meant to be looked at only in one\nlight. Objects in such a case need not be so truly apperceived and\nappropriated as they would have to be in true sculpture. One aspect\nsuffices: the subject presented is not so much constructed as dreamt.\n\n[Sidenote: Evolution of painting.]\n\nThe whole history of painting may be strung on this single thread\u2014the\neffort to reconstitute impressions, first the dramatic impression and\nthen the sensuous. A summary and symbolic representation of things is\nall that at first is demanded; the point is to describe something\npictorially and recall people\u2019s names and actions. It is characteristic\nof archaic painting to be quite discursive and symbolic; each figure is\ntreated separately and stuck side by side with the others upon a golden\nground. The painter is here smothered in the recorder, in the annalist;\nonly those perceptions are allowed to stand which have individual names\nor chronicle facts mentioned in the story. But vision is really more\nsensuous and rich than report, if art is only able to hold vision in\nsuspense and make it explicit. When painting is still at this stage, and\nis employed on hieroglyphics, it may reach the maximum of decorative\nsplendour. Whatever sensuous glow finer representations may later\nacquire will be not sensuous merely, but poetical; Titians, Murillos,\nor Turners are _colourists in representation_, and their canvases would\nnot be particularly warm or luminous if they represented nothing human\nor mystical or atmospheric. A stained-glass window or a wall of tiles\ncan outdo them for pure colour and decorative magic. Leaving decoration,\naccordingly, to take care of itself and be applied as sense may from\ntime to time require, painting goes on to elaborate the symbols with\nwhich it begins, to make them symbolise more and more of what their\nobject contains. A catalogue of persons will fall into a group, a group\nwill be fused into a dramatic action. Conventional as the separate\nfigures may still be, their attitudes and relations will reconstitute\nthe dramatic impression. The event will be rendered in its own language;\nit will not, to be recognised, have to appeal to words. Thus a symbolic\ncrucifixion is a crucifixion only because we know by report that it is;\na plastic crucifixion would first teach us, on the contrary, what a real\ncrucifixion might be. It only remains to supply the aerial medium and\nmake dramatic truth sensuous truth also.\n\n[Sidenote: Sensuous and dramatic adequacy approached.]\n\nTo work up a sensation intellectually and reawaken all its passionate\nassociations is to reach a new and more exciting sensation which we call\nemotion or thought. As in poetry there are two stages, one pregnant and\nprior to prose and another posterior and synthetic, so in painting we\nhave not only a reversion to sense but an ulterior synthesis of the\nsensuous, its interpretation in a dramatic or poetic vision. Archaic\npainting, with its abstract rendering of separate things, is the prose\nof design. It would not be beautiful at all but for its colour and\ntechnical feeling\u2014that expression of candour and satisfaction which may\npervade it, as it might a Latin rhyme. To correct this thinness and\ndislocation, to restore life without losing significance, painting must\nproceed to accumulate symbol upon symbol, till the original impression\nis almost restored, but so restored that it contains all the\narticulation which a thorough analysis had given it. Such painting as\nTintoretto\u2019s or Paolo Veronese\u2019s records impressions as a cultivated\nsense might receive them. It glows with visible light and studies the\nsensuous appearance, but it contains at the same time an intelligent\nexpression of all those mechanisms, those situations and passions, with\nwhich the living world is diversified. It is not a design in spots,\nmeant merely to outdo a sunset; it is a richer dream of experience,\nmeant to outshine the reality.\n\nIn order to reconstitute the image we may take an abstract\nrepresentation or hieroglyphic and gradually increase its depth and its\nscope. As the painter becomes aware of what at first he had ignored, he\nadds colour to outline, modelling to colour, and finally an observant\nrendering of tints and values. This process gives back to objects their\ntexture and atmosphere, and the space in which they lie. From a\nrepresentation which is statuesque in feeling and which renders figures\nby furnishing a visible inventory of their parts and attributes, the\nartist passes to considering his figures more and more as parts of a\nwhole and as moving in an ambient ether. They tend accordingly to lose\ntheir separate emphasis, in order to be like flowers in a field or trees\nin a forest. They become elements, interesting chiefly by their\ninterplay, and shining by a light which is mutually reflected.\n\n[Sidenote: Essence of landscape-painting.]\n\nWhen this transformation is complete the painting is essentially a\nlandscape. It may not represent precisely the open country; it may even\ndepict an interior, like Velasquez\u2019s Meninas. But the observer, even in\nthe presence of men and artificial objects, has been overcome by the\nmedium in which they swim. He is seeing the air and what it happens to\nhold. He is impartially recreating from within all that nature puts\nbefore him, quite as if his imagination had become their diffused\nmaterial substance. Whatever individuality and moral value these bits of\nsubstance may have they acquire for him, as for nature, incidentally and\nby virtue of ulterior relations consequent on their physical being. If\nthis physical being is wholly expressed, the humanity and morality\ninvolved will be expressed likewise, even if expressed unawares. Thus a\nprofound and omnivorous reverie overflows the mind; it devours its\nobjects or is absorbed into them, and the mood which this active\nself-alienation brings with it is called the spirit of the scene, the\nsentiment of the landscape.\n\nPerception and art, in this phase, easily grow mystical; they are\nreadily lost in primordial physical sympathies. Although at first a\ncertain articulation and discursiveness may be retained in the picture,\nso that the things seen in their atmosphere and relations may still be\ndistinguished clearly, the farther the impartial absorption in them\ngoes, the more what is inter-individual rises and floods the individual\nover. All becomes light and depth and air, and those particular objects\nthreaten to vanish which we had hoped to make luminous, breathing, and\nprofound. The initiated eye sees so many nameless tints and surfaces,\nthat it can no longer select any creative limits for things. There cease\nto be fixed outlines, continuous colours, or discrete existences in\nnature.\n\n[Sidenote: Its threatened dissolution.]\n\nAn artist, however, cannot afford to forget that even in such a case\nunits and divisions would have to be introduced by him into his work. A\nman, in falling back on immediate reality, or immediate appearance, may\nwell feel his mind\u2019s articulate grammar losing its authority, but that\ngrammar must evidently be reasserted if from the immediate he ever\nwishes to rise again to articulate mind; and art, after all, exists for\nthe mind and must speak humanly. If we crave something else, we have not\nso far to go: there is always the infinite about us and the animal\nwithin us to absolve us from human distinctions.\n\nMoreover, it is not quite true that the immediate has no real diversity.\nIt evidently suggests the ideal terms into which we divide it, and it\nsustains our apprehension itself, with all the diversities this may\ncreate. To what I call right and left, light and darkness, a real\nopposition must correspond in any reality which is at all relevant to my\nexperience; so that I should fail to integrate my impression, and to\nabsorb the only reality that concerns me, if I obliterated those points\nof reference which originally made the world figured and visible. Space\nremains absolutely dark, for all the infinite light which we may declare\nto be radiating through it, until this light is concentrated in one body\nor reflected from another; and a landscape cannot be so much as vaporous\nunless mists are distinguishable in it, and through them some known\nobject which they obscure. In a word, landscape is always, in spite of\nitself, a collection of particular representations. It is a mass of\nhieroglyphics, each the graphic symbol for some definite human sensation\nor reaction; only these symbols have been extraordinarily enriched and\nare fused in representation, so that, like instruments in an orchestra,\nthey are merged in the voluminous sensation they constitute together, a\nsensation in which, for attentive perception, they never cease to exist.\n\n[Sidenote: Reversion to pure decorative design.]\n\nImpatience of such control as reality must always exercise over\nrepresentation may drive painting back to a simpler function. When a\ndesigner, following his own automatic impulse, conventionalises a form,\nhe makes a legitimate exchange, substituting fidelity to his\napperceptive instincts for fidelity to his external impressions. When a\nlandscape-painter, revolting against a tedious discursive style, studies\nonly masses of colour and abstract systems of lines, he retains\nsomething in itself beautiful, although no longer representative,\nperhaps, of anything in nature. A pure impression cannot be\nillegitimate; it cannot be false until it pretends to represent\nsomething, and then it will have ceased to be a simple feeling, since\nsomething in it will refer to an ulterior existence, to which it ought\nto conform. This ulterior existence (since intelligence is life\nunderstanding its own conditions) can be nothing in the end but what\nproduced that impression. Sensuous life, however, has its value within\nitself; its pleasures are not significant. Representative art is\naccordingly in a sense secondary; beauty and expression begin farther\nback. They are present whenever the outer stimulus agreeably strikes an\norgan and thereby arouses a sustained image, in which the consciousness\nof both stimulation and reaction is embodied. An abstract design in\noutline and colour will amply fulfil these conditions, if sensuous and\nmotor harmonies are preserved in it, and if a sufficient sweep and depth\nof reaction is secured. Stained-glass, tapestry, panelling, and in a\nmeasure all objects, by their mere presence and distribution, have a\ndecorative function. When sculpture and painting cease to be\nrepresentative they pass into the same category. Decoration in turn\nmerges in construction; and so all art, like the whole Life of Reason,\nis joined together at its roots, and branches out from the vital\nprocesses of sensation and reaction. Diversity arises centrifugally,\naccording to the provinces explored and the degree of mutual checking\nand control to which the various extensions are subjected.\n\n[Sidenote: Sensuous values are primordial and so indispensable.]\n\nOrganisation, both internal and adaptive, marks the dignity and\nauthority which each art may have attained; but this advantage,\nimportant as is must seem to a philosopher or a legislator, is not what\nthe artist chiefly considers. His privilege is to remain capricious in\nhis response to the full-blown universe of science and passion, and to\nbe still sensuous in his highest imaginings. He cares for structure only\nwhen it is naturally decorative. He thinks gates were invented for the\nsake of triumphal arches, and forests for the sake of poets and deer.\nRepresentation, with all it may represent, means to him simply what it\nsays to his emotions. In all this the artist, though in one sense\nfoolish, in another way is singularly sane; for, after all, everything\nmust pass through the senses, and life, whatever its complexity, remains\nalways primarily a feeling.\n\nTo render this feeling delightful, to train the senses to their highest\npotency and harmony in operation, is to begin life well. Were the\nfoundations defective and subject to internal strain there could be\nlittle soundness in the superstructure. \u00c6sthetic activity is far from\nbeing a late or adventitious ornament in human economy; it is an\nelementary factor, the perfection of an indispensable vehicle. Whenever\nscience or morals have done violence to sense they have decreed their\nown dissolution. To sense a rebellious appeal will presently be\naddressed, and the appeal will go against rash and empty dogmas. A keen\n\u00e6sthetic sensibility and a flourishing art mark the puberty of reason.\nFertility comes later, after a marriage with the practical world. But a\nsensuous ripening is needed first, such as myth and ornament betray in\ntheir exuberance. A man who has no feeling for feeling and no felicity\nin expression will hardly know what he is about in his further\nundertakings. He will have missed his first lesson in living\nspontaneously and well. Not knowing himself, he will be all hearsay and\npedantry. He may fall into the superstition of supposing that what gives\nlife value can be something external to life. Science and morals are\nthemselves arts that express natural impulses and find experimental\nrewards. This fact, in betraying their analogy to \u00e6sthetic activity,\nenables them also to vindicate their excellence.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IX\n\nJUSTIFICATION OF ART\n\n\n[Sidenote: Art is subject to moral censorship.]\n\nIt is no longer the fashion among philosophers to decry art. Either its\ninfluence seems to them too slight to excite alarm, or their systems are\ntoo lax to subject anything to censure which has the least glamour or\nideality about it. Tired, perhaps, of daily resolving the conflict\nbetween science and religion, they prefer to assume silently a harmony\nbetween morals and art. Moral harmonies, however, are not given; they\nhave to be made. The curse of superstition is that it justifies and\nprotracts their absence by proclaiming their invisible presence. Of\ncourse a rational religion could not conflict with a rational science;\nand similarly an art that was wholly admirable would necessarily play\ninto the hands of progress. But as the real difficulty in the former\ncase lies in saying what religion and what science would be truly\nrational, so here the problem is how far extant art is a benefit to\nmankind, and how far, perhaps, a vice or a burden.\n\n[Sidenote: Its initial or specific excellence is not enough.]\n\nThat art is _prima facie_ and in itself a good cannot be doubted. It is\na spontaneous activity, and that settles the question. Yet the function\nof ethics is precisely to revise _prima facie_ judgments of this kind\nand to fix the ultimate resultant of all given interests, in so far as\nthey can be combined. In the actual disarray of human life and desire,\nwisdom consists in knowing what goods to sacrifice and what simples to\npour into the supreme mixture. The extent to which \u00e6sthetic values are\nallowed to colour the resultant or highest good is a point of great\ntheoretic importance, not only for art but for general philosophy. If\nart is excluded altogether or given only a trivial r\u00f4le, perhaps as a\nnecessary relaxation, we feel at once that a philosophy so judging human\narts is ascetic or post-rational. It pretends to guide life from above\nand from without; it has discredited human nature and mortal interests,\nand has thereby undermined itself, since it is at best but a partial\nexpression of that humanity which it strives to transcend. If, on the\ncontrary, art is prized as something supreme and irresponsible, if the\npoetic and mystic glow which it may bring seems its own complete\njustification, then philosophy is evidently still prerational or,\nrather, non-existent; for the beasts that listened to Orpheus belong to\nthis school.\n\nTo be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and\n\u00e6sthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so. Intoxication is a\nsad business, at least for a philosopher; for you must either drown\nyourself altogether, or else when sober again you will feel somewhat\nfooled by yesterday\u2019s joys and somewhat lost in to-day\u2019s vacancy. The\nman who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to\nelude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence. He is vexed\nat conditions of excellence that make him conscious of his own\nincompetence and failure. Rather than consider his function, he\nproclaims his self-sufficiency. A way foolishness has of revenging\nitself is to excommunicate the world.\n\nIt is in the world, however, that art must find its level. It must\nvindicate its function in the human commonwealth. What direct acceptable\ncontribution does it make to the highest good? What sacrifices, if any,\ndoes it impose? What indirect influence does it exert on other\nactivities? Our answer to these questions will be our apology for art,\nour proof that art belongs to the Life of Reason.\n\n[Sidenote: All satisfactions, however hurtful, have an initial worth.]\n\nWhen moralists deprecate passion and contrast it with reason, they do\nso, if they are themselves rational, only because passion is so often\n\u201cguilty,\u201d because it works havoc so often in the surrounding world and\nleaves, among other ruins, \u201ca heart high-sorrowful and cloyed.\u201d Were\nthere no danger of such after-effects within and without the sufferer,\nno passion would be reprehensible. Nature is innocent, and so are all\nher impulses and moods when taken in isolation; it is only on meeting\nthat they blush. If it be true that matter is sinful, the logic of this\ntruth is far from being what the fanatics imagine who commonly propound\nit. Matter is sinful only because it is insufficient, or is wastefully\ndistributed. There is not enough of it to go round among the legion of\nhungry ideas. To embody or enact an idea is the only way of making it\nactual; but its embodiment may mutilate it, if the material or the\nsituation is not propitious. So an infant may be maimed at birth, when\nwhat injures him is not being brought forth, but being brought forth in\nthe wrong manner. Matter has a double function in respect to existence;\nessentially it enables the spirit to be, yet chokes it incidentally. Men\nsadly misbegotten, or those who are thwarted at every step by the times\u2019\npenury, may fall to thinking of matter only by its defect, ignoring the\nmaterial ground of their own aspirations. All flesh will seem to them\nweak, except that forgotten piece of it which makes their own spiritual\nstrength. Every impulse, however, had initially the same authority as\nthis censorious one, by which the others are now judged and condemned.\n\n[Sidenote: But, on the whole, artistic activity is innocent.]\n\nIf a practice can point to its innocence, if it can absolve itself from\nconcern for a world with which it does not interfere, it has justified\nitself to those who love it, though it may not yet have recommended\nitself to those who do not. Now art, more than any other considerable\npursuit, more even than speculation, is abstract and inconsequential.\nBorn of suspended attention, it ends in itself. It encourages sensuous\nabstraction, and nothing concerns it less than to influence the world.\nNor does it really do so in a notable degree. Social changes do not\nreach artistic expression until after their momentum is acquired and\ntheir other collateral effects are fully predetermined. Scarcely is a\nschool of art established, giving expression to prevailing sentiment,\nwhen this sentiment changes and makes that style seem empty and\nridiculous. The expression has little or no power to maintain the\nmovement it registers, as a waterfall has little or no power to bring\nmore water down. Currents may indeed cut deep channels, but they cannot\nfeed their own springs\u2014at least not until the whole revolution of\nnature is taken into account.\n\nIn the individual, also, art registers passions without stimulating\nthem; on the contrary, in stopping to depict them it steals away their\nlife; and whatever interest and delight it transfers to their expression\nit subtracts from their vital energy. This appears unmistakably in\nerotic and in religious art. Though the artist\u2019s avowed purpose here be\nto arouse a practical impulse, he fails in so far as he is an artist in\ntruth; for he then will seek to move the given passions only through\nbeauty, but beauty is a rival object of passion in itself. Lascivious\nand pious works, when beauty has touched them, cease to give out what is\nwilful and disquieting in their subject and become altogether\nintellectual and sublime. There is a high breathlessness about beauty\nthat cancels lust and superstition. The artist, in taking the latter for\nhis theme, renders them innocent and interesting, because he looks at\nthem from above, composes their attitudes and surroundings harmoniously,\nand makes them food for the mind. Accordingly it is only in a refined\nand secondary stage that active passions like to amuse themselves with\ntheir \u00e6sthetic expression. Unmitigated lustiness and raw fanaticism will\nsnarl at pictures. Representations begin to interest when crude passions\nrecede, and feel the need of conciliating liberal interests and adding\nsome intellectual charm to their dumb attractions. Thus art, while by\nits subject it may betray the preoccupations among which it springs up,\nembodies a new and quite innocent interest.\n\n[Sidenote: It is liberal.]\n\nThis interest is more than innocent, it is liberal. Not being concerned\nwith material reality so much as with the ideal, it knows neither\nulterior motives nor quantitative limits; the more beauty there is the\nmore there can be, and the higher one artist\u2019s imagination soars the\nbetter the whole flock flies. In \u00e6sthetic activity we have accordingly\none side of rational life; sensuous experience is dominated there as\nmechanical or social realities ought to be dominated in science and\npolitics. Such dominion comes of having faculties suited to their\nconditions and consequently finding an inherent satisfaction in their\noperation. The justification of life must be ultimately intrinsic; and\nwherever such self-justifying experience is attained, the ideal has been\nin so far embodied. To have realised it in a measure helps us to realise\nit further; for there is a cumulative fecundity in those goods which\ncome not by increase of force or matter, but by a better organisation\nand form.\n\n[Sidenote: and typical of perfect activity.]\n\nArt has met, on the whole, with more success than science or morals.\nBeauty gives men the best hint of ultimate good which their experience\nas yet can offer; and the most lauded geniuses have been poets, as if\npeople felt that those seers, rather than men of action or thought, had\nlived ideally and known what was worth knowing. That such should be the\ncase, if the fact be admitted, would indeed prove the rudimentary state\nof human civilisation. The truly comprehensive life should be the\nstatesman\u2019s, for whom perception and theory might be expressed and\nrewarded in action. The ideal dignity of art is therefore merely\nsymbolic and vicarious. As some people study character in novels, and\ntravel by reading tales of adventure, because real life is not yet so\ninteresting to them as fiction, or because they find it cheaper to make\ntheir experiments in their dreams, so art in general is a rehearsal of\nrational living, and recasts in idea a world which we have no present\nmeans of recasting in reality. Yet this rehearsal reveals the glories of\na possible performance better than do the miserable experiments until\nnow executed on the reality.\n\nWhen we consider the present distracted state of government and\nreligion, there is much relief in turning from them to almost any art,\nwhere what is good is altogether and finally good, and what is bad is at\nleast not treacherous. When we consider further the senseless rivalries,\nthe vanities, the ignominy that reign in the \u201cpractical\u201d world, how\ndoubly blessed it becomes to find a sphere where limitation is an\nexcellence, where diversity is a beauty, and where every man\u2019s ambition\nis consistent with every other man\u2019s and even favourable to it! It is\nindeed so in art; for we must not import into its blameless labours the\nbickerings and jealousies of criticism. Critics quarrel with other\ncritics, and that is a part of philosophy. With an artist no sane man\nquarrels, any more than with the colour of a child\u2019s eyes. As nature,\nbeing full of seeds, rises into all sorts of crystallisations, each\nhaving its own ideal and potential life, each a nucleus of order and a\nhabitation for the absolute self, so art, though in a medium poorer than\npregnant matter, and incapable of intrinsic life, generates a semblance\nof all conceivable beings. What nature does with existence, art does\nwith appearance; and while the achievement leaves us, unhappily, much\nwhere we were before in all our efficacious relations, it entirely\nrenews our vision and breeds a fresh world in fancy, where all form has\nthe same inner justification that all life has in the real world. As no\ninsect is without its rights and every cripple has his dream of\nhappiness, so no artistic fact, no child of imagination, is without its\nsmall birthright of beauty. In this freer element, competition does not\nexist and everything is Olympian. Hungry generations do not tread down\nthe ideal but only its spokesmen or embodiments, that have cast in their\nlot with other material things. Art supplies constantly to contemplation\nwhat nature seldom affords in concrete experience\u2014the union of life and\npeace.\n\n[Sidenote: The ideal, when incarnate, becomes subject to civil society.]\n\n[Sidenote: Plato\u2019s strictures: he exaggerates the effect of myths.]\n\nThe ideal, however, would not come down from the empyrean and be\nconceived unless somebody\u2019s thought were absorbed in the conception. Art\nactually segregates classes of men and masses of matter to serve its\nspecial interests. This involves expense; it impedes some possible\nactivities and imposes others. On this ground, from the earliest times\nuntil our own, art has been occasionally attacked by moralists, who have\nfelt that it fostered idolatry or luxury or irresponsible dreams. Of\nthese attacks the most interesting is Plato\u2019s, because he was an artist\nby temperament, bred in the very focus of artistic life and discussion,\nand at the same time a consummate moral philosopher. His \u00e6thetic\nsensibility was indeed so great that it led him, perhaps, into a\nrelative error, in that he overestimated the influence which art can\nhave on character and affairs. Homer\u2019s stories about the gods can\nhardly have demoralised the youths who recited them. No religion has\never given a picture of deity which men could have imitated without the\ngrossest immorality. Yet these shocking representations have not had a\nbad effect on believers. The deity was opposed to their own vices; those\nit might itself be credited with offered no contagious example. In spite\nof the theologians, we know by instinct that in speaking of the gods we\nare dealing in myths and symbols. Some aspect of nature or some law of\nlife, expressed in an attribute of deity, is what we really regard, and\nto regard such things, however sinister they may be, cannot but chasten\nand moralise us. The personal character that such a function would\ninvolve, if it were exercised willingly by a responsible being, is\nsomething that never enters our thoughts. No such painful image comes to\nperplex the plain sense of instinctive, poetic religion. To give moral\nimportance to myths, as Plato tended to do, is to take them far too\nseriously and to belittle what they stand for. Left to themselves they\nfloat in an ineffectual stratum of the brain. They are understood and\ngrow current precisely by not being pressed, like an idiom or a\nmetaphor. The same \u00e6sthetic sterility appears at the other end of the\nscale, where fancy is anything but sacred. A Frenchman once saw in\n\u201cPunch and Judy\u201d a shocking proof of British brutality, destined further\nto demoralise the nation; and yet the scandal may pass. That black\ntragedy reflects not very pretty manners, but puppets exercise no\nsuasion over men.\n\n[Sidenote: His deeper moral objections.]\n\nTo his supersensitive censure of myths Plato added strictures upon music\nand the drama: to excite passions idly was to enervate the soul. Only\nmartial or religious strains should be heard in the ideal republic.\nFurthermore, art put before us a mere phantom of the good. True\nexcellence was the function things had in use; the horseman knew the\nbridle\u2019s value and essence better than the artisan did who put it\ntogether; but a painted bridle would lack even this relation to utility.\nIt would rein in no horse, and was an impertinent sensuous reduplication\nof what, even when it had material being, was only an instrument and a\nmeans.\n\nThis reasoning has been little understood, because Platonists so soon\nlost sight of their master\u2019s Socratic habit and moral intent. They\nturned the good into an existence, making it thereby unmeaning. Plato\u2019s\ndialectic, if we do not thus abolish the force of its terms, is\nperfectly cogent: representative art has indeed no utility, and, if the\ngood has been identified with efficiency in a military state, it can\nhave no justification. Plato\u2019s Republic was avowedly a fallen state, a\nchurch militant, coming sadly short of perfection; and the joy which\nPlato as much as any one could feel in sensuous art he postponed, as a\nman in mourning might, until life should be redeemed from baseness.\n\n[Sidenote: Their rightness.]\n\nNever have art and beauty received a more glowing eulogy than is implied\nin Plato\u2019s censure. To him nothing was beautiful that was not beautiful\nto the core, and he would have thought to insult art\u2014the remodelling of\nnature by reason\u2014if he had given it a narrower field than all practice.\nAs an architect who had fondly designed something impossible, or which\nmight not please in execution, would at once erase it from the plan and\nabandon it for the love of perfect beauty and perfect art, so Plato\nwished to erase from pleasing appearance all that, when its operation\nwas completed, would bring discord into the world. This was done in the\nultimate interest of art and beauty, which in a cultivated mind are\ninseparable from the vitally good. It is mere barbarism to feel that a\nthing is \u00e6sthetically good but morally evil, or morally good but hateful\nto perception. Things partially evil or partially ugly may have to be\nchosen under stress of unfavourable circumstances, lest some worse thing\ncome; but if a thing were ugly it would _thereby_ not be wholly good,\nand if it were _altogether_ good it would perforce be beautiful.\n\nTo criticise art on moral grounds is to pay it a high compliment by\nassuming that it aims to be adequate, and is addressed to a\ncomprehensive mind. The only way in which art could disallow such\ncriticism would be to protest its irresponsible infancy, and admit that\nit was a more or less amiable blatancy in individuals, and not _art_ at\nall. Young animals often gambol in a delightful fashion, and men also\nmay, though hardly when they intend to do so. Sportive self-expression\ncan be prized because human nature contains a certain elasticity and\nmargin for experiment, in which waste activity is inevitable and may be\nprecious: for this license may lead, amid a thousand failures, to some\nreal discovery and advance. Art, like life, should be free, since both\nare experimental. But it is one thing to make room for genius and to\nrespect the sudden madness of poets through which, possibly, some god\nmay speak, and it is quite another not to judge the result by rational\nstandards. The earth\u2019s bowels are full of all sorts of rumblings; which\nof the oracles drawn thence is true can be judged only by the light of\nday. If an artist\u2019s inspiration has been happy, it has been so because\nhis work can sweeten or ennoble the mind and because its total effect\nwill be beneficent. Art being a part of life, the criticism of art is a\npart of morals.\n\n[Sidenote: Importance of \u00e6sthetic alternatives.]\n\nMaladjustments in human society are still so scandalous, they touch\nmatters so much more pressing than fine art, that maladjustments in the\nlatter are passed over with a smile, as if art were at any rate an\nirresponsible miraculous parasite that the legislator had better not\nmeddle with. The day may come, however, if the state is ever reduced to\na tolerable order, when questions of art will be the most urgent\nquestions of morals, when genius at last will feel responsible, and the\ntwist given to imagination will seem the most crucial thing in life.\nUnder a thin disguise, the momentous character of imaginative choices\nhas already been fully recognised by mankind. Men have passionately\nloved their special religions, languages, and manners, and preferred\ndeath to a life flowering in any other fashion. In justifying this\nattachment forensically, with arguments on the low level of men\u2019s named\nand consecrated interests, people have indeed said, and perhaps come to\nbelieve, that their imaginative interests were material interests at\nbottom, thinking thus to give them more weight and legitimacy; whereas\nin truth material life itself would be nothing worth, were it not, in\nits essence and its issue, ideal.\n\nIt was stupidly asserted, however, that if a man omitted the prescribed\nceremonies or had unauthorised dreams about the gods, he would lose his\nbattles in this world and go to hell in the other. He who runs can see\nthat these expectations are not founded on any evidence, on any\nobservation of what actually occurs; they are obviously a _mirage_\narising from a direct ideal passion, that tries to justify itself by\nindirection and by falsehoods, as it has no need to do. We all read\nfacts in the way most congruous with our intellectual habit, and when\nthis habit drives us to effulgent creations, absorbing and expressing\nthe whole current of our being, it not merely biasses our reading of\nthis world but carries us into another world altogether, which we posit\ninstead of the real one, or beside it.\n\nGrotesque as the blunder may seem by which we thus introduce our poetic\ntropes into the sequence of external events or existences, the blunder\nis intellectual only; morally, zeal for our special rhetoric may not be\nirrational. The lovely Phoebus is no fact for astronomy, nor does he\nstand behind the material sun, in some higher heaven, physically\nsuperintending its movements; but Phoebus is a fact in his own region, a\ntoken of man\u2019s joyful piety in the presence of the forces that really\ncondition his welfare. In the region of symbols, in the world of poetry,\nPhoebus has his inalienable rights. Forms of poetry are forms of human\nlife. Languages express national character and enshrine particular ways\nof seeing and valuing events. To make substitutions and extensions in\nexpression is to give the soul, in her inmost substance, a somewhat new\nconstitution. A method of apperception is a spontaneous variation in\nmind, perhaps the origin of a new moral species.\n\nThe value apperceptive methods have is of course largely representative,\nin that they serve more or less aptly to dominate the order of events\nand to guide action; but quite apart from this practical value,\nexpressions possess a character of their own, a sort of vegetative life,\nas languages possess euphony. Two reports of the same fact may be\nequally trustworthy, equally useful as information, yet they may embody\ntwo types of mental rhetoric, and this diversity in genius may be of\nmore intrinsic importance than the raw fact it works upon. The\nnon-representative side of human perception may thus be the most\nmomentous side of it, because it represents, or even constitutes, the\nman. After all, the chief interest we have in things lies in what we can\nmake of them or what they can make of us. There is consequently nothing\nfitted to colour human happiness more pervasively than art does, nor to\nexpress more deeply the mind\u2019s internal habit. In educating the\nimagination art crowns all moral endeavour, which from the beginning is\na species of art, and which becomes a fine art more completely as it\nworks in a freer medium.\n\n[Sidenote: The importance of \u00e6sthetic goods varies with temperaments.]\n\nHow great a portion of human energies should be spent on art and its\nappreciation is a question to be answered variously by various persons\nand nations. There is no ideal _\u00e0 priori_; an ideal can but express, if\nit is genuine, the balance of impulses and potentialities in a given\nsoul. A mind at once sensuous and mobile will find its appropriate\nperfection in studying and reconstructing objects of sense. Its\nrationality will appear chiefly on the plane of perception, to render\nthe circle of visions which makes up its life as delightful as possible.\nFor such a man art will be the most satisfying, the most significant\nactivity, and to load him with material riches or speculative truths or\nprofound social loyalties will be to impede and depress him. The\nirrational is what does not justify itself in the end; and the born\nartist, repelled by the soberer and bitterer passions of the world, may\njustly call them irrational. They would not justify themselves in his\nexperience; they make grievous demands and yield nothing in the end\nwhich is intelligible to him. His picture of them, if he be a dramatist,\nwill hardly fail to be satirical; fate, frailty, illusion will be his\nconstant themes. If his temperament could find political expression, he\nwould minimise the machinery of life and deprecate any calculated\nprudence. He would trust the heart, enjoy nature, and not frown too\nangrily on inclination. Such a Bohemia he would regard as an ideal world\nin which humanity might flourish congenially.\n\n[Sidenote: The \u00e6sthetic temperament requires tutelage.]\n\nA puritan moralist, before condemning such an infantile paradise, should\nremember that a commonwealth of butterflies actually exists. It is not\nany inherent wrongness in such an ideal that makes it unacceptable, but\nonly the fact that human butterflies are not wholly mercurial and that\neven imperfect geniuses are but an extreme type in a society whose\nguiding ideal is based upon a broader humanity than the artist\nrepresents. Men of science or business will accuse the poet of folly,\non the very grounds on which he accuses them of the same. Each will seem\nto the other to be obeying a barren obsession. The statesman or\nphilosopher who should aspire to adjust their quarrel could do so only\nby force of intelligent sympathy with both sides, and in view of the\ncommon conditions in which they find themselves. What ought to be done\nis that which, when done, will most nearly justify itself to all\nconcerned. Practical problems of morals are judicial and political\nproblems. Justice can never be pronounced without hearing the parties\nand weighing the interests at stake.\n\n[Sidenote: \u00c6sthetic values everywhere interfused.]\n\nA circumstance that complicates such a calculation is this: \u00e6esthetic\nand other interests are not separable units, to be compared externally;\nthey are rather strands interwoven in the texture of everything.\n\u00c6sthetic sensibility colours every thought, qualifies every allegiance,\nand modifies every product of human labour. Consequently the love of\nbeauty has to justify itself not merely intrinsically, or as a\nconstituent part of life more or less to be insisted upon; it has to\njustify itself also as an influence. A hostile influence is the most\nodious of things. The enemy himself, the alien creature, lies in his own\ncamp, and in a speculative moment we may put ourselves in his place and\nlearn to think of him charitably; but his spirit in our own souls is\nlike a private tempter, a treasonable voice weakening our allegiance to\nour own duty. A zealot might allow his neighbours to be damned in\npeace, did not a certain heretical odour emitted by them infect the\nsanctuary and disturb his own dogmatic calm. In the same way practical\npeople might leave the artist alone in his oasis, and even grant him a\npittance on which to live, as they feed the animals in a zoological\ngarden, did he not intrude into their inmost conclave and vitiate the\nabstract cogency of their designs. It is not so much art in its own\nfield that men of science look askance upon, as the love of glitter and\nrhetoric and false finality trespassing upon scientific ground; while\nmen of affairs may well deprecate a rooted habit of sensuous absorption\nand of sudden transit to imaginary worlds, a habit which must work havoc\nin their own sphere. In other words, there is an element of poetry\ninherent in thought, in conduct, in affection; and we must ask ourselves\nhow far this ingredient is an obstacle to their proper development.\n\n[Sidenote: They are primordial.]\n\nThe fabled dove who complained, in flying, of the resistance of the air,\nwas as wise as the philosopher who should lament the presence and\ninfluence of sense. Sense is the native element and substance of\nexperience; all its refinements are still parts of it existentially; and\nwhatever excellence belongs specifically to sense is a preliminary\nexcellence, a value antecedent to any which thought or action can\nachieve. Science and morals have but representative authority; they are\nprinciples of ideal synthesis and safe transition; they are bridges\nfrom moment to moment of sentience. Their function is indeed universal\nand their value overwhelming, yet their office remains derivative or\nsecondary, and what they serve to put in order has previously its\nintrinsic worth. An \u00e6sthetic bias is native to sense, being indeed\nnothing but its form and potency; and the influence which \u00e6sthetic\nhabits exercise on thought and action should not be regarded as an\nintrusion to be resented, but rather as an original interest to be built\nupon and developed. Sensibility contains the distinctions which reason\nafterward carries out and applies; it is sensibility that involves and\nsupports primitive diversities, such as those between good and bad, here\nand there, fast and slow, light and darkness. There are complications\nand harmonies inherent in these oppositions, harmonies which \u00e6sthetic\nfaculty proceeds to note; and from these we may then construct others,\nnot immediately presentable, which we distinguish by attributing them to\nreason. Reason may well outflank and transform \u00e6sthetic judgments, but\ncan never undermine them. Its own materials are the perceptions which if\nfull and perfect are called beauties. Its function is to endow the parts\nof sentience with a consciousness of the system in which they lie, so\nthat they may attain a mutual relevance and ideally support one another.\nBut what could relevance or support be worth if the things to be\nbuttressed were themselves worthless? It is not to organise pain,\nugliness, and boredom that reason can be called into the world.\n\n[Sidenote: To superpose them adventitiously is to destroy them.]\n\nWhen a practical or scientific man boasts that he has laid aside\n\u00e6sthetic prejudices and is following truth and utility with a single\neye, he can mean, if he is judicious, only that he has not yielded to\n\u00e6sthetic preference after his problem was fixed, nor in an arbitrary and\nvexatious fashion. He has not consulted taste when it would have been in\nbad taste to do so. If he meant that he had rendered himself altogether\ninsensible to \u00e6sthetic values, and that he had proceeded to organise\nconduct or thought in complete indifference to the beautiful, he would\nbe simply proclaiming his inhumanity and incompetence. A right\nobservance of \u00e6sthetic demands does not obstruct utility nor logic; for\nutility and logic are themselves beautiful, while a sensuous beauty that\nran counter to reason could never be, in the end, pleasing to an\nexquisite sense. \u00c6sthetic vice is not favourable to \u00e6sthetic faculty: it\nis an impediment to the greatest \u00e6sthetic satisfactions. And so when by\nyielding to a blind passion for beauty we derange theory and practice,\nwe cut ourselves off from those beauties which alone could have\nsatisfied our passion. What we drag in so obstinately will bring but a\ncheap and unstable pleasure, while a double beauty will thereby be lost\nor obscured\u2014first, the unlooked-for beauty which a genuine and stable\nsystem of things could not but betray, and secondly the coveted beauty\nitself, which, being imported here into the wrong context, will be\nrendered meretricious and offensive to good taste. If a jewel worn on\nthe wrong finger sends a shiver through the flesh, how disgusting must\nnot rhetoric be in diplomacy or unction in metaphysics!\n\n[Sidenote: They flow naturally from perfect function.]\n\nThe poetic element inherent in thought, affection, and conduct is prior\nto their prosaic development and altogether legitimate. Clear,\nwell-digested perception and rational choices follow upon those primary\ncreative impulses, and carry out their purpose systematically. At every\nstage in this development new and appropriate materials are offered for\n\u00e6sthetic contemplation. Straightness, for instance, symmetry, and rhythm\nare at first sensuously defined; they are characters arrested by\n\u00e6sthetic instinct; but they are the materials of mathematics. And long\nafter these initial forms have disowned their sensuous values, and\nsuffered a wholly dialectical expansion or analysis, mathematical\nobjects again fall under the \u00e6sthetic eye, and surprise the senses by\ntheir emotional power. A mechanical system, such as astronomy in one\nregion has already unveiled, is an inexhaustible field for \u00e6sthetic\nwonder. Similarly, in another sphere, sensuous affinity leads to\nfriendship and love, and makes us huddle up to our fellows and feel\ntheir heart-beats; but when human society has thereupon established a\nlegal and moral edifice, this new spectacle yields new imaginative\ntransports, tragic, lyric, and religious. \u00c6sthetic values everywhere\nprecede and accompany rational activity, and life is, in one aspect,\nalways a fine art; not by introducing inaptly \u00e6sthetic vetoes or\n\u00e6sthetic flourishes, but by giving to everything a form which, implying\na structure, implies also an ideal and a possible perfection. This\nperfection, being felt, is also a beauty, since any process, though it\nmay have become intellectual or practical, remains for all that a vital\nand sentient operation, with its inherent sensuous values. Whatever is\nto be representative in import must first be immediate in existence;\nwhatever is transitive in operation must be at the same time actual in\nbeing. So that an \u00e6sthetic sanction sweetens all successful living;\nanimal efficiency cannot be without grace, nor moral achievement without\na sensible glory.\n\n[Sidenote: Even inhibited functions, when they fall into a new rhythm,\nyield new beauties.]\n\nThese vital harmonies are natural; they are neither perfect nor\npreordained. We often come upon beauties that need to be sacrificed, as\nwe come upon events and practical necessities without number that are\ntruly regrettable. There are a myriad conflicts in practice and in\nthought, conflicts between rival possibilities, knocking inopportunely\nand in vain at the door of existence. Owing to the initial\ndisorganisation of things, some demands continually prove to be\nincompatible with others arising no less naturally. Reason in such cases\nimposes real and irreparable sacrifices, but it brings a stable\nconsolation if its discipline is accepted. Decay, for instance, is a\nmoral and \u00e6sthetic evil; but being a natural necessity it can become the\nbasis for pathetic and magnificent harmonies, when once imagination is\nadjusted to it. The hatred of change and death is ineradicable while\nlife lasts, since it expresses that self-sustaining organisation in a\ncreature which we call its soul; yet this hatred of change and death is\nnot so deeply seated in the nature of things as are death and change\nthemselves, for the flux is deeper than the ideal. Discipline may attune\nour higher and more adaptable part to the harsh conditions of being, and\nthe resulting sentiment, being the only one which can be maintained\nsuccessfully, will express the greatest satisfactions which can be\nreached, though not the greatest that might be conceived or desired. To\nbe interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a\nhappier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. Wisdom\ndiscovers these possible accommodations, as circumstances impose them;\nand education ought to prepare men to accept them.\n\n[Sidenote: He who loves beauty must chasten it.]\n\nIt is for want of education and discipline that a man so often insists\npetulantly on his random tastes, instead of cultivating those which\nmight find some satisfaction in the world and might produce in him some\npertinent culture. Untutored self-assertion may even lead him to deny\nsome fact that should have been patent, and plunge him into needless\ncalamity. His Utopias cheat him in the end, if indeed the barbarous\ntaste he has indulged in clinging to them does not itself lapse before\nthe dream is half formed. So men have feverishly conceived a heaven only\nto find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous. Theodicies that\nwere to demonstrate an absolute cosmic harmony have turned the universe\ninto a tyrannous nightmare, from which we are glad to awake again in\nthis unintentional and somewhat tractable world. Thus the fancies of\neffeminate poets in violating science are false to the highest art, and\nthe products of sheer confusion, instigated by the love of beauty, turn\nout to be hideous. A rational severity in respect to art simply weeds\nthe garden; it expresses a mature \u00e6sthetic choice and opens the way to\nsupreme artistic achievements. To keep beauty in its place is to make\nall things beautiful.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER X\n\nTHE CRITERION OF TASTE\n\n\n[Sidenote: Dogmatism is inevitable but may be enlightened.]\n\nDogmatism in matters of taste has the same status as dogmatism in other\nspheres. It is initially justified by sincerity, being a systematic\nexpression of a man\u2019s preferences; but it becomes absurd when its basis\nin a particular disposition is ignored and it pretends to have an\nabsolute or metaphysical scope. Reason, with the order which in every\nregion it imposes on life, is grounded on an animal nature and has no\nother function than to serve the same; and it fails to exercise its\noffice quite as much when it oversteps its bounds and forgets whom it is\nserving as when it neglects some part of its legitimate province and\nserves its master imperfectly, without considering all his interests.\n\nDialectic, logic, and morals lose their authority and become inept if\nthey trespass upon the realm of physics and try to disclose existences;\nwhile physics is a mere idea in the realm of poetic meditation. So the\nnotorious diversities which human taste exhibits do not become\nconflicts, and raise no moral problem, until their basis or their\nfunction has been forgotten, and each has claimed a right to assert\nitself exclusively. This claim is altogether absurd, and we might fail\nto understand how so preposterous an attitude could be assumed by\nanybody did we not remember that every young animal thinks himself\nabsolute, and that dogmatism in the thinker is only the speculative side\nof greed and courage in the brute. The brute cannot surrender his\nappetites nor abdicate his primary right to dominate his environment.\nWhat experience and reason may teach him is merely how to make his\nself-assertion well balanced and successful. In the same way taste is\nbound to maintain its preferences but free to rationalise them. After a\nman has compared his feelings with the no less legitimate feelings of\nother creatures, he can reassert his own with more complete authority,\nsince now he is aware of their necessary ground in his nature, and of\ntheir affinities with whatever other interests his nature enables him to\nrecognise in others and to co-ordinate with his own.\n\n[Sidenote: Taste gains in authority as it is more and more widely\nbased.]\n\nA criterion of taste is, therefore, nothing but taste itself in its more\ndeliberate and circumspect form. Reflection refines particular\nsentiments by bringing them into sympathy with all rational life. There\nis consequently the greatest possible difference in authority between\ntaste and taste, and while delight in drums and eagle\u2019s feathers is\nperfectly genuine and has no cause to blush for itself, it cannot be\ncompared in scope or representative value with delight in a symphony or\nan epic. The very instinct that is satisfied by beauty prefers one\nbeauty to another; and we have only to question and purge our \u00e6sthetic\nfeelings in order to obtain our criterion of taste. This criterion will\nbe natural, personal, autonomous; a circumstance that will give it\nauthority over our own judgment\u2014which is all moral science is concerned\nabout\u2014and will extend its authority over other minds also, in so far as\ntheir constitution is similar to ours. In that measure what is a genuine\ninstance of reason in us, others will recognise for a genuine expression\nof reason in themselves also.\n\n[Sidenote: Different \u00e6sthetic endowments may be compared in quantity or\nforce.]\n\n\u00c6sthetic feeling, in different people, may make up a different fraction\nof life and vary greatly in volume. The more nearly insensible a man is\nthe more incompetent he becomes to proclaim the values which sensibility\nmight have. To beauty men are habitually insensible, even while they are\nawake and rationally active. Tomes of \u00e6sthetic criticism hang on a few\nmoments of real delight and intuition. It is in rare and scattered\ninstants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for\nhabitual comfort to remembering her past favours. An \u00e6sthetic glow may\npervade experience, but that circumstance is seldom remarked; it figures\nonly as an influence working subterraneously on thoughts and judgments\nwhich in themselves take a cognitive or practical direction. Only when\nthe \u00e6sthetic ingredient becomes predominant do we exclaim, How\nbeautiful! Ordinarily the pleasures which formal perception gives remain\nan undistinguished part of our comfort or curiosity.\n\n[Sidenote: Authority of vital over verbal judgments]\n\nTaste is formed in those moments when \u00e6sthetic emotion is massive and\ndistinct; preferences then grown conscious, judgments then put into\nwords, will reverberate through calmer hours; they will constitute\nprejudices, habits of apperception, secret standards for all other\nbeauties. A period of life in which such intuitions have been frequent\nmay amass tastes and ideals sufficient for the rest of our days. Youth\nin these matters governs maturity, and while men may develop their early\nimpressions more systematically and find confirmations of them in\nvarious quarters, they will seldom look at the world afresh or use new\ncategories in deciphering it. Half our standards come from our first\nmasters, and the other half from our first loves. Never being so deeply\nstirred again, we remain persuaded that no objects save those we then\ndiscovered can have a true sublimity. These high-water marks of \u00e6sthetic\nlife may easily be reached under tutelage. It may be some eloquent\nappreciations read in a book, or some preference expressed by a gifted\nfriend, that may have revealed unsuspected beauties in art or nature;\nand then, since our own perception was vicarious and obviously inferior\nin volume to that which our mentor possessed, we shall take his\njudgments for our criterion, since they were the source and exemplar of\nall our own. Thus the volume and intensity of some appreciations,\nespecially when nothing of the kind has preceded, makes them\nauthoritative over our subsequent judgments. On those warm moments hang\nall our cold systematic opinions; and while the latter fill our days and\nshape our careers it is only the former that are crucial and alive.\n\nA race which loves beauty holds the same place in history that a season\nof love or enthusiasm holds in an individual life. Such a race has a\npre-eminent right to pronounce upon beauty and to bequeath its judgments\nto duller peoples. We may accordingly listen with reverence to a Greek\njudgment on that subject, expecting that what might seem to us wrong\nabout it is the expression of knowledge and passion beyond our range; it\nwill suffice that we learn to live in the world of beauty, instead of\nmerely studying its relics, for us to understand, for instance, that\nimitation is a fundamental principle in art, and that any rational\njudgment on the beautiful must be a moral and political judgment,\nenveloping chance \u00e6sthetic feelings and determining their value. What\nmost German philosophers, on the contrary, have written about art and\nbeauty has a minimal importance: it treats artificial problems in a\ngrammatical spirit, seldom giving any proof of experience or\nimagination. What painters say about painting and poets about poetry is\nbetter than lay opinion; it may reveal, of course, some petty jealousy\nor some partial incapacity, because a special gift often carries with it\ncomplementary defects in apprehension; yet what is positive in such\njudgments is founded on knowledge and avoids the romancing into which\nlitterateurs and sentimentalists will gladly wander. The specific values\nof art are technical values, more permanent and definite than the\nadventitious analogies on which a stray observer usually bases his\nviews. Only a technical education can raise judgments on musical\ncompositions above impertinent auto-biography. The Japanese know the\nbeauty of flowers, and tailors and dressmakers have the best sense for\nthe fashions. We ask them for suggestions, and if we do not always take\ntheir advice, it is not because the fine effects they love are not\ngenuine, but because they may not be effects which we care to produce.\n\n[Sidenote: Tastes differ also in purity or consistency.]\n\nThis touches a second consideration, besides the volume and vivacity of\nfeeling, which enters into good taste. What is voluminous may be\ninwardly confused or outwardly confusing. Excitement, though on the\nwhole and for the moment agreeable, may verge on pain and may be, when\nit subsides a little, a cause of bitterness. A thing\u2019s attractions may\nbe partly at war with its ideal function. In such a case what, in our\nhaste, we call a beauty becomes hateful on a second view, and according\nto the key of our dissatisfaction we pronounce that effect meretricious,\nharsh, or affected. These discords appear when elaborate things are\nattempted without enough art and refinement; they are essentially in bad\ntaste. Rudimentary effects, on the contrary, are pure, and though we may\nthink them trivial when we are expecting something richer, their defect\nis never intrinsic; they do not plunge us, as impure excitements do,\ninto a corrupt artificial conflict. So wild-flowers, plain chant, or a\nscarlet uniform are beautiful enough; their simplicity is a positive\nmerit, while their crudity is only relative. There is a touch of\nsophistication and disease in not being able to fall back on such things\nand enjoy them thoroughly, as if a man could no longer relish a glass of\nwater. Your true epicure will study not to lose so genuine a pleasure.\nBetter forego some artificial stimulus, though that, too, has its charm,\nthan become insensible to natural joys. Indeed, ability to revert to\nelementary beauties is a test that judgment remains sound.\n\nVulgarity is quite another matter. An old woman in a blonde wig, a dirty\nhand covered with jewels, ostentation without dignity, rhetoric without\ncogency, all offend by an inner contradiction. To like such things we\nshould have to surrender our better intuitions and suffer a kind of\ndishonour. Yet the elements offensively combined may be excellent in\nisolation, so that an untrained or torpid mind will be at a loss to\nunderstand the critic\u2019s displeasure. Oftentimes barbaric art almost\nsucceeds, by dint of splendour, in banishing the sense of confusion and\nabsurdity; for everything, even reason, must bow to force. Yet the\nimpression remains chaotic, and we must be either partly inattentive or\npartly distressed. Nothing could show better than this alternative how\nmechanical barbaric art is. Driven by blind impulse or tradition, the\nartist has worked in the dark. He has dismissed his work without having\nquite understood it or really justified it to his own mind. It is rather\nhis excretion than his product. Astonished, very likely, at his own\nfertility, he has thought himself divinely inspired, little knowing that\nclear reason is the highest and truest of inspirations. Other men,\nobserving his obscure work, have then honoured him for profundity; and\nso mere bulk or stress or complexity have produced a mystical wonder by\nwhich generation after generation may be enthralled. Barbaric art is\nhalf necromantic; its ascendancy rests in a certain measure on\nbewilderment and fraud.\n\nTo purge away these impurities nothing is needed but quickened\nintelligence, a keener spiritual flame. Where perception is adequate,\nexpression is so too, and if a man will only grow sensitive to the\nvarious solicitations which anything monstrous combines, he will\nthereby perceive its monstrosity. Let him but enact his sensations, let\nhim pause to make explicit the confused hints that threaten to stupefy\nhim; he will find that he can follow out each of them only by rejecting\nand forgetting the others. To free his imagination in any direction he\nmust disengage it from the contrary intent, and so he must either purify\nhis object or leave it a mass of confused promptings. Promptings\nessentially demand to be carried out, and when once an idea has become\narticulate it is not enriched but destroyed if it is still identified\nwith its contrary. Any complete expression of a barbarous theme will,\ntherefore, disengage its incompatible elements and turn it into a number\nof rational beauties.\n\n[Sidenote: They differ, finally, in pertinence, and in width of appeal.]\n\nWhen good taste has in this way purified and digested some turgid\nmedley, it still has a progress to make. Ideas, like men, live in\nsociety. Not only has each a will of its own and an inherent ideal, but\neach finds itself conditioned for its expression by a host of other\nbeings, on whose co-operation it depends. Good taste, besides being\ninwardly clear, has to be outwardly fit. A monstrous ideal devours and\ndissolves itself, but even a rational one does not find an immortal\nembodiment simply for being inwardly possible and free from\ncontradiction. It needs a material basis, a soil and situation\npropitious to its growth. This basis, as it varies, makes the ideal vary\nwhich is simply its expression; and therefore no ideal can be\nultimately fixed in ignorance of the conditions that may modify it. It\nsubsists, to be sure, as an eternal possibility, independently of all\nfurther earthly revolutions. Once expressed, it has revealed the\ninalienable values that attach to a certain form of being, whenever that\nform is actualised. But its expression may have been only momentary, and\nthat eternal ideal may have no further relevance to the living world. A\ncriterion of taste, however, looks to a social career; it hopes to\neducate and to judge. In order to be an applicable and a just law, it\nmust represent the interests over which it would preside.\n\nThere are many undiscovered ideals. There are many beauties which\nnothing in this world can embody or suggest. There are also many once\nsuggested or even embodied, which find later their basis gone and\nevaporate into their native heaven. The saddest tragedy in the world is\nthe destruction of what has within it no inward ground of dissolution,\ndeath in youth, and the crushing out of perfection. Imagination has its\nbereavements of this kind. A complete mastery of existence achieved at\none moment gives no warrant that it will be sustained or achieved again\nat the next. The achievement may have been perfect; nature will not on\nthat account stop to admire it. She will move on, and the meaning which\nwas read so triumphantly in her momentary attitude will not fit her new\nposture. Like Polonius\u2019s cloud, she will always suggest some new ideal,\nbecause she has none of her own.\n\nIn lieu of an ideal, however, nature has a constitution, and this, which\nis a necessary ground for ideals, is what it concerns the ideal to\nreckon with. A poet, spokesman of his full soul at a given juncture,\ncannot consider eventualities or think of anything but the message he is\nsent to deliver, whether the world can then hear it or not. God, he may\nfeel sure, understands him, and in the eternal the beauty he sees and\nloves immortally justifies his enthusiasm. Nevertheless, critics must\nview his momentary ebullition from another side. They do not come to\njustify the poet in his own eyes; he amply relieves them, of such a\nfunction. They come only to inquire how significant the poet\u2019s\nexpressions are for humanity at large or for whatever public he\naddresses. They come to register the social or representative value of\nthe poet\u2019s soul. His inspiration may have been an odd cerebral rumbling,\na perfectly irrecoverable and wasted intuition; the exquisite quality it\ndoubtless had to his own sense is now not to the purpose. A work of art\nis a public possession; it is addressed to the world. By taking on a\nmaterial embodiment, a spirit solicits attention and claims some kinship\nwith the prevalent gods. Has it, critics should ask, the affinities\nneeded for such intercourse? Is it humane, is it rational, is it\nrepresentative? To its inherent incommunicable charms it must add a\nkind of courtesy. If it wants other approval than its own, it cannot\nafford to regard no other aspiration.\n\nThis scope, this representative faculty or wide appeal, is necessary to\ngood taste. All authority is representative; force and inner consistency\nare gifts on which I may well congratulate another, but they give him no\nright to speak for me. Either \u00e6sthetic experience would have remained a\nchaos\u2014which it is not altogether\u2014or it must have tended to conciliate\ncertain general human demands and ultimately all those interests which\nits operation in any way affects. The more conspicuous and permanent a\nwork of art is, the more is such an adjustment needed. A poet or\nphilosopher may be erratic and assure us that he is inspired; if we\ncannot well gainsay it, we are at least not obliged to read his works.\nAn architect or a sculptor, however, or a public performer of any sort,\nthat thrusts before us a spectacle justified only in his inner\nconsciousness, makes himself a nuisance. A social standard of taste must\nassert itself here, or else no efficacious and cumulative art can exist\nat all. Good taste in such matters cannot abstract from tradition,\nutility, and the temper of the world. It must make itself an interpreter\nof humanity and think esoteric dreams less beautiful than what the\npublic eye might conceivably admire.\n\n[Sidenote: Art may grow classic by idealising the familiar.]\n\nThere are various affinities by which art may acquire a representative\nor classic quality. It may do so by giving form to objects which\neverybody knows, by rendering experiences that are universal and\nprimary. The human figure, elementary passions, common types and crises\nof fate\u2014these are facts which pass too constantly through apperception\nnot to have a normal \u00e6thetic value. The artist who can catch that effect\nin its fulness and simplicity accordingly does immortal work. This sort\nof art immediately becomes popular; it passes into language and\nconvention so that its \u00e6sthetic charm is apparently worn down. The old\nimages after a while hardly stimulate unless they be presented in some\nparadoxical way; but in that case attention will be diverted to the\naccidental extravagance, and the chief classic effect will be missed. It\nis the honourable fate or euthanasia of artistic successes that they\npass from the field of professional art altogether and become a portion\nof human faculty. Every man learns to be to that extent an artist;\napproved figures and maxims pass current like the words and idioms of a\nmother-tongue, themselves once brilliant inventions. The lustre of such\nsuccesses is not really dimmed, however, when it becomes a part of man\u2019s\ndaily light; a retrogression from that habitual style or habitual\ninsight would at once prove, by the shock it caused, how precious those\ningrained apperceptions continued to be.\n\n[Sidenote: or by reporting the ultimate.]\n\nUniversality may also be achieved, in a more heroic fashion, by art that\nexpresses ultimate truths, cosmic laws, great human ideals. Virgil and\nDante are classic poets in this sense, and a similar quality belongs to\nGreek sculpture and architecture. They may not cause enthusiasm in\neverybody; but in the end experience and reflection renew their charm;\nand their greatness, like that of high mountains, grows more obvious\nwith distance. Such eminence is the reward of having accepted discipline\nand made the mind a clear anagram of much experience. There is a great\ndifference between the depth of expression so gained and richness or\nrealism in details. A supreme work presupposes minute study, sympathy\nwith varied passions, many experiments in expression; but these\npreliminary things are submerged in it and are not displayed side by\nside with it, like the foot-notes to a learned work, so that the\nignorant may know they have existed.\n\nSome persons, themselves inattentive, imagine, for instance, that Greek\nsculpture is abstract, that it has left out all the detail and character\nwhich they cannot find on the surface, as they might in a modern work.\nIn truth it contains those features, as it were, in solution and in the\nresultant which, when reduced to harmony, they would produce. It\nembodies a finished humanity which only varied exercises could have\nattained, for as the body is the existent ground for all possible\nactions, in which as actions they exist only potentially, so a perfect\nbody, such as a sculptor might conceive, which ought to be ready for all\nexcellent activities, cannot present them all in act but only the\nreadiness for them. The features that might express them severally must\nbe absorbed and mastered, hidden like a sword in its scabbard, and\nreduced to a general dignity or grace. Though such immersed eloquence be\nat first overlooked and seldom explicitly acknowledged, homage is\nnevertheless rendered to it in the most unmistakable ways. When lazy\nartists, backed by no great technical or moral discipline, think they,\ntoo, can produce masterpieces by summary treatment, their failure shows\nhow pregnant and supreme a thing simplicity is. Every man, in proportion\nto his experience and moral distinction, returns to the simple but\ninexhaustible work of finished minds, and finds more and more of his own\nsoul responsive to it.\n\nHuman nature, for all its margin of variability, has a substantial core\nwhich is invariable, as the human body has a structure which it cannot\nlose without perishing altogether; for as creatures grow more complex a\ngreater number of their organs become vital and indispensable. Advanced\nforms will rather die than surrender a tittle of their character; a fact\nwhich is the physical basis for loyalty and martyrdom. Any deep\ninterpretation of oneself, or indeed of anything, has for that reason a\nlargely representative truth. Other men, if they look closely, will make\nthe same discovery for themselves. Hence distinction and profundity, in\nspite of their rarity, are wont to be largely recognised. The best men\nin all ages keep classic traditions alive. These men have on their side\nthe weight of superior intelligence, and, though they are few, they\nmight even claim the weight of numbers, since the few of all ages, added\ntogether, may be more than the many who in any one age follow a\ntemporary fashion. Classic work is nevertheless always national, or at\nleast characteristic of its period, as the classic poetry of each people\nis that in which its language appears most pure and free. To translate\nit is impossible; but it is easy to find that the human nature so\ninimitably expressed in each masterpiece is the same that, under\ndifferent circumstance, dictates a different performance. The deviations\nbetween races and men are not yet so great as is the ignorance of self,\nthe blindness to the native ideal, which prevails in most of them. Hence\na great man of a remote epoch is more intelligible than a common man of\nour own time.\n\n[Sidenote: Good taste demands that art should be rational, _i.e._,\nharmonious with all other interests.]\n\nBoth elementary and ultimate judgments, then, contribute to a standard\nof taste; yet human life lies between these limits, and an art which is\nto be truly adjusted to life should speak also for the intermediate\nexperience. Good taste is indeed nothing but a name for those\nappreciations which the swelling incidents of life recall and\nreinforce. Good taste is that taste which is a good possession, a friend\nto the whole man. It must not alienate him from anything except to ally\nhim to something greater and more fertile in satisfactions. It will not\nsuffer him to dote on things, however seductive, which rob him of some\nnobler companionship. To have a foretaste of such a loss, and to reject\ninstinctively whatever will cause it, is the very essence of refinement.\nGood taste comes, therefore, from experience, in the best sense of that\nword; it comes from having united in one\u2019s memory and character the\nfruit of many diverse undertakings. Mere taste is apt to be bad taste,\nsince it regards nothing but a chance feeling. Every man who pursues an\nart may be presumed to have some sensibility; the question is whether he\nhas breeding, too, and whether what he stops at is not, in the end,\nvulgar and offensive. Chance feeling needs to fortify itself with\nreasons and to find its level in the great world. When it has added\nfitness to its sincerity, beneficence to its passion, it will have\nacquired a right to live. Violence and self-justification will not pass\nmuster in a moral society, for vipers possess both, and must\nnevertheless be stamped out. Citizenship is conferred only on creatures\nwith human and co-operative instincts. A civilised imagination has to\nunderstand and to serve the world.\n\nThe great obstacle which art finds in attempting to be rational is its\nfunctional isolation. Sense and each of the passions suffers from a\nsimilar independence. The disarray of human instincts lets every\nspontaneous motion run too far; life oscillates between constraint and\nunreason. Morality too often puts up with being a constraint and even\nimagines such a disgrace to be its essence. Art, on the contrary, as\noften hugs unreason for fear of losing its inspiration, and forgets that\nit is itself a rational principle of creation and order. Morality is\nthus reduced to a necessary evil and art to a vain good, all for want of\nharmony among human impulses. If the passions arose in season, if\nperception fed only on those things which action should be adjusted to,\nturning them, while action proceeded, into the substance of ideas\u2014then\nall conduct would be voluntary and enlightened, all speculation would be\npractical, all perceptions beautiful, and all operations arts. The Life\nof Reason would then be universal.\n\nTo approach this ideal, so far as art is concerned, would involve\ndiffusing its processes and no longer confining them to a set of dead\nand unproductive objects called works of art.\n\n[Sidenote: A mere \u201cwork of art\u201d a baseless artifice.]\n\nWhy art, the most vital and generative of activities, should produce a\nset of abstract images, monuments to lost intuitions, is a curious\nmystery. Nature gives her products life, and they are at least equal to\ntheir sources in dignity. Why should mind, the actualisation of nature\u2019s\npowers, produce something so inferior to itself, reverting in its\nexpression to material being, so that its witnesses seem so many fossils\nwith which it strews its path? What we call museums\u2014mausoleums, rather,\nin which a dead art heaps up its remains\u2014are those the places where the\nMuses intended to dwell? We do not keep in show-cases the coins current\nin the world. A living art does not produce curiosities to be collected\nbut spiritual necessaries to be diffused.\n\nArtificial art, made to be exhibited, is something gratuitous and\nsophisticated, and the greater part of men\u2019s concern about it is\naffectation. There is a genuine pleasure in planning a work, in\nmodelling and painting it; there is a pleasure in showing it to a\nsympathetic friend, who associates himself in this way with the artist\u2019s\ntechnical experiment and with his interpretation of some human episode;\nand there might be a satisfaction in seeing the work set up in some\nappropriate space for which it was designed, where its decorative\nquality might enrich the scene, and the curious passer-by might stop to\ndecipher it. The pleasures proper to an ingenuous artist are spontaneous\nand human; but his works, once delivered to his patrons, are household\nfurniture for the state. Set up to-day, they are outworn and replaced\nto-morrow, like trees in the parks or officers in the government. A\ncommunity where art was native and flourishing would have an\nuninterrupted supply of such ornaments, furnished by its citizens in\nthe same modest and cheerful spirit in which they furnish other\ncommodities. Every craft has its dignity, and the decorative and\nmonumental crafts certainly have their own; but such art is neither\nsingular nor pre-eminent, and a statesman or reformer who should raise\nsomewhat the level of thought or practice in the state would do an\ninfinitely greater service.\n\n[Sidenote: Human uses give to works of art their highest expression and\ncharm.]\n\nThe joys of creating are not confined, moreover, to those who create\nthings without practical uses. The merely \u00e6sthetic, like rhyme and\nfireworks, is not the only subject that can engage a playful fancy or be\nplanned with a premonition of beautiful effects. Architecture may be\nuseful, sculpture commemorative, poetry reflective, even, music, by its\nexpression, religious or martial. In a word, practical exigencies, in\ncalling forth the arts, give them moral functions which it is a pleasure\nto see them fulfil. Works may not be \u00e6sthetic in their purpose, and yet\nthat fact may be a ground for their being doubly delightful in execution\nand doubly beautiful in effect. A richer plexus of emotions is concerned\nin producing or contemplating something humanly necessary than something\nidly conceived. What is very rightly called a _sense_ for fitness is a\nvital experience, involving \u00e6sthetic satisfactions and \u00e6sthetic shocks.\nThe more numerous the rational harmonies are which are present to the\nmind, the more sensible movements will be going on there to give\nimmediate delight; for the perception or expectation of an ulterior good\nis a present good also. Accordingly nothing can so well call forth or\nsustain attention as what has a complex structure relating it to many\ncomplex interests. A work woven out of precious threads has a deep\npertinence and glory; the artist who creates it does not need to\nsurrender his practical and moral sense in order to indulge his\nimagination.\n\nThe truth is that mere sensation or mere emotion is an indignity to a\nmature human being. When we eat, we demand a pleasant vista, flowers, or\nconversation, and failing these we take refuge in a newspaper. The\nmonks, knowing that men should not feed silently like stalled oxen,\nappointed some one to read aloud in the refectory; and the Fathers,\nobeying the same civilised instinct, had contrived in their theology\nintelligible points of attachment for religious emotion. A refined mind\nfinds as little happiness in love without friendship as in sensuality\nwithout love; it may succumb to both, but it accepts neither. What is\ntrue of mere sensibility is no less true of mere fancy. The Arabian\nNights\u2014futile enough in any case\u2014would be absolutely intolerable if\nthey contained no Oriental manners, no human passions, and no convinced\nepicureanism behind their miracles and their tattle. Any absolute work\nof art which serves no further purpose than to stimulate an emotion has\nabout it a certain luxurious and visionary taint. We leave it with a\nblank mind, and a pang bubbles up from the very fountain of pleasures.\nArt, so long as it needs to be a dream, will never cease to prove a\ndisappointment. Its facile cruelty, its narcotic abstraction, can never\nsweeten the evils we return to at home; it can liberate half the mind\nonly by leaving the other half in abeyance. In the mere artist, too,\nthere is always something that falls short of the gentleman and that\ndefeats the man.\n\n[Sidenote: The sad values of appearance.]\n\nSurely it is not the artistic impulse in itself that involves such lack\nof equilibrium. To impress a meaning and a rational form on matter is\none of the most masterful of actions. The trouble lies in the barren and\nsuperficial character of this imposed form: fine art is a play of\nappearance. Appearance, for a critical philosophy, is distinguished from\nreality by its separation from the context of things, by its immediacy\nand insignificance. A play of appearance is accordingly some little\nclosed circle in experience, some dream in which we lose ourselves by\nignoring most of our interests, and from which we awake into a world in\nwhich that lost episode plays no further part and leaves no heirs. Art\nas mankind has hitherto practised it falls largely under this head and\ntoo much resembles an opiate or a stimulant. Life and history are not\nthereby rendered better in their principle, but a mere ideal is\nextracted out of them and presented for our delectation in some cheap\nmaterial, like words or marble. The only precious materials are flesh\nand blood, for these alone can defend and propagate the ideal which has\nonce informed them.\n\nArtistic creation shows at this point a great inferiority to natural\nreproduction, since its product is dead. Fine art shapes inert matter\nand peoples the mind with impotent ghosts. What influence it has\u2014for\nevery event has consequences\u2014is not pertinent to its inspiration. The\nart of the past is powerless even to create similar art in the present,\nunless similar conditions recur independently. The moments snatched for\nart have been generally interludes in life and its products parasites in\nnature, the body of them being materially functionless and the soul\nmerely represented. To exalt fine art into a truly ideal activity we\nshould have to knit it more closely with other rational functions, so\nthat to beautify things might render them more useful and to represent\nthem most imaginatively might be to see them in their truth. Something\nof the sort has been actually attained by the noblest arts in their\nnoblest phases. A Sophocles or a Leonardo dominates his dreamful vehicle\nand works upon the real world by its means. These small centres, where\ninterfunctional harmony is attained, ought to expand and cover the whole\nfield. Art, like religion, needs to be absorbed in the Life of Reason.\n\n[Sidenote: They need to be made prophetic of practical goods.]\n\nWhat might help to bring about this consummation would be, on the one\nside, more knowledge; on the other, better taste. When a mind is filled\nwith important and true ideas and sees the actual relations of things,\nit cannot relish pictures of the world which wantonly misrepresent it.\nMyth and metaphor remain beautiful so long as they are the most adequate\nor graphic means available for expressing the facts, but so soon as they\ncease to be needful and sincere they become false finery. The same thing\nhappens in the plastic arts. Unless they spring from love of their\nsubject, and employ imagination only to penetrate into that subject and\ninterpret it with a more inward sympathy and truth, they become\nconventional and overgrown with mere ornament. They then seem ridiculous\nto any man who can truly conceive what they represent. So in putting\nantique heroes on the stage we nowadays no longer tolerate a modern\ncostume, because the externals of ancient life are too well known to us;\nbut in the seventeenth century people demanded in such personages\nintelligence and nobleness, since these were virtues which the ancients\nwere clothed with in their thought. A knowledge that should be at once\nfull and appreciative would evidently demand fidelity in both matters.\nKnowledge, where it exists, undermines satisfaction in what does\nviolence to truth, and it renders such representations grotesque. If\nknowledge were general and adequate the fine arts would accordingly be\nbrought round to expressing reality.\n\n[Sidenote: which in turn would be suffused with beauty.]\n\nAt the same time, if the rendering of reality is to remain artistic, it\nmust still study to satisfy the senses; but as this study would now\naccompany every activity, taste would grow vastly more subtle and\nexacting. Whatever any man said or did or made, he would be alive to its\n\u00e6sthetic quality, and beauty would be a pervasive ingredient in\nhappiness. No work would be called, in a special sense, a work of art,\nfor all works would be such intrinsically; and even instinctive mimicry\nand reproduction would themselves operate, not when mischief or idleness\nprompted, but when some human occasion and some general utility made the\nexercise of such skill entirely delightful. Thus there would need to be\nno division of mankind into mechanical blind workers and half-demented\npoets, and no separation of useful from fine art, such as people make\nwho have understood neither the nature nor the ultimate reward of human\naction. All arts would be practised together and merged in the art of\nlife, the only one wholly useful or fine among them.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XI\n\nART AND HAPPINESS\n\n\n[Sidenote: \u00c6sthetic harmonies are parodies of real ones.]\n\nThe greatest enemy harmony can have is a premature settlement in which\nsome essential force is wholly disregarded. This excluded element will\nrankle in the flesh; it will bring about no end of disorders until it is\nfinally recognised and admitted into a truly comprehensive regimen. The\nmore numerous the interests which a premature settlement combines the\ngreater inertia will it oppose to reform, and the more self-righteously\nwill it condemn the innocent pariah that it leaves outside.\n\nArt has had to suffer much Pharisaical opposition of this sort.\nSometimes political systems, sometimes religious zeal, have excluded it\nfrom their programme, thereby making their programme unjust and\ninadequate. Yet of all premature settlements the most premature is that\nwhich the fine arts are wont to establish. A harmony in appearance only,\none that touches the springs of nothing and has no power to propagate\nitself, is so partial and momentary a good that we may justly call it an\nillusion. To gloat on rhythms and declamations, to live lost in\nimaginary passions and histrionic woes, is an unmanly life, cut off from\npractical dominion and from rational happiness. A lovely dream is an\nexcellent thing in itself, but it leaves the world no less a chaos and\nmakes it by contrast seem even darker than it did. By dwelling in its\nmock heaven art may inflict on men the same kind of injury that any\nirresponsible passion or luxurious vice might inflict. For this reason\nit sometimes passes for a misfortune in a family if a son insists on\nbeing a poet or an actor. Such gifts suggest too much incompetence and\nsuch honours too much disrepute. A man does not avoid real evils by\nhaving visionary pleasures, but besides exposing himself to the real\nevils quite unprotected, he probably adds fancied evils to them in\ngenerous measure. He becomes supersensitive, envious, hysterical; the\nworld, which was perhaps carried away at first by his ecstasies, at the\nnext moment merely applauds his performance, then criticises it\nsuperciliously, and very likely ends by forgetting it altogether.\n\nThus the fine arts are seldom an original factor in human progress. If\nthey express moral and political greatness, and serve to enhance it,\nthey acquire a certain dignity; but so soon as this expressive function\nis abandoned they grow meretricious. The artist becomes an abstracted\ntrifler, and the public is divided into two camps: the dilettanti, who\ndote on the artist\u2019s affectations, and the rabble, who pay him to grow\ncoarse. Both influences degrade him and he helps to foster both. An\natmosphere of dependence and charlatanry gathers about the artistic\nattitude and spreads with its influence. Religion, philosophy, and\nmanners may in turn be infected with this spirit, being reduced to a\nvoluntary hallucination or petty flattery. Romanticism, ritualism,\n\u00e6stheticism, symbolism are names this disease has borne at different\ntimes as it appeared in different circles or touched a different object.\nNeedless to say that the arts themselves are the first to suffer. That\nbeauty which should have been an inevitable smile on the face of\nsociety, an overflow of genuine happiness and power, has to be imported,\nstimulated artificially, and applied from without; so that art becomes a\nsickly ornament for an ugly existence.\n\n[Sidenote: yet prototypes of true perfections.]\n\nNevertheless, \u00e6sthetic harmony, so incomplete in its basis as to be\nfleeting and deceptive, is most complete in its form. This so partial\nsynthesis is a synthesis indeed, and just because settlements made in\nfancy are altogether premature, and ignore almost everything in the\nworld, in type they can be the most perfect settlements. The artist,\nbeing a born lover of the good, a natural breeder of perfections, clings\nto his insight. If the world calls his accomplishments vain, he can,\nwith better reason, call vain the world\u2019s cumbrous instrumentalities, by\nwhich nothing clearly good is attained. Appearances, he may justly urge,\nare alone actual. All forces, substances, realities, and principles are\ninferred and potential only and in the moral scale mere instruments to\nbring perfect appearances about. To have grasped such an appearance, to\nhave embodied a form in matter, is to have justified for the first time\nwhatever may underlie appearance and to have put reality to some use. It\nis to have begun to live. As the standard of perfection is internal and\nis measured by the satisfaction felt in realising it, every artist has\ntasted, in his activity, what activity essentially is. He has moulded\nexistence into the likeness of thought and lost himself in that ideal\nachievement which, so to speak, beckons all things into being. Even if a\nthousand misfortunes await him and a final disappointment, he has been\nhappy once. He may be inclined to rest his case there and challenge\npractical people to justify in the same way the faith that is in them.\n\n[Sidenote: Pros and cons of detached indulgences.]\n\nThat a moment of the most perfect happiness should prove a source of\nunhappiness is no paradox to any one who has observed the world. A hope,\na passion, a crime, is a flash of vitality. It is inwardly congruous\nwith the will that breeds it, yet the happiness it pictures is so\npartial that even while it is felt it may be overshadowed by sinister\nforebodings. A certain unrest and insecurity may consciously harass it.\nWith time, or by a slight widening in the field of interest, this\nsubmerged unhappiness may rise to the surface. If, as is probable, it is\ncaused or increased by the indulgence which preceded, then the only\nmoment in which a good was tasted, the only vista that had opened\ncongenially before the mind, will prove a new and permanent curse. In\nthis way love often misleads individuals, ambition cities, and religion\nwhole races of men. That art, also, should often be an indulgence, a\nblind that hides reality from ill-balanced minds and ultimately\nincreases their confusion, is by no means incompatible with art\u2019s ideal\nessence. On the contrary, such a result is inevitable when ideality is\ncarried at all far upon a narrow basis. The more genuine and excellent\nthe vision the greater havoc it makes if, being inadequate, it\nestablishes itself authoritatively in the soul. Art, in the better\nsense, is a condition of happiness for a practical and labouring\ncreature, since without art he remains a slave; but it is one more\nsource of unhappiness for him so long as it is not squared with his\nnecessary labours and merely interrupts them. It then alienates him from\nhis world without being able to carry him effectually into a better one.\n\n[Sidenote: The happy imagination is one initially in line with things.]\n\nThe artist is in many ways like a child. He seems happy, because his\nlife is spontaneous, yet he is not competent to secure his own good. To\nbe truly happy he must be well bred, reared from the cradle, as it were,\nunder propitious influences, so that he may have learned to love what\nconduces to his development. In that rare case his art will expand as\nhis understanding ripens; he will not need to repent and begin again on\na lower key. The ideal artist, like the ideal philosopher, has all time\nand all existence for his virtual theme. Fed by the world he can help to\nmould it, and his insight is a kind of wisdom, preparing him as science\nmight for using the world well and making it more fruitful. He can then\nbe happy, not merely in the sense of having now and then an ecstatic\nmoment, but happy in having light and resource enough within him to cope\nsteadily with real things and to leave upon them the vestige of his\nmind.\n\n[Sidenote: and brought always closer to them by experience.]\n\nOne effect of growing experience is to render what is unreal\nuninteresting. Momentous alternatives in life are so numerous and the\npossibilities they open up so varied that imagination finds enough\nemployment of a historic and practical sort in trying to seize them. A\nchild plans Towers of Babel; a mature architect, in planning, would lose\nall interest if he were bidden to disregard gravity and economy. The\nconditions of existence, after they are known and accepted, become\nconditions for the only pertinent beauty. In each place, for each\nsituation, the plastic mind finds an appropriate ideal. It need not go\nafield to import something exotic. It need make no sacrifices to whim\nand to personal memories. It rather breeds out of the given problem a\nnew and singular solution, thereby exercising greater invention than\nwould be requisite for framing an arbitrary ideal and imposing it at all\ncosts on every occasion.\n\n[Sidenote: Reason is the principle of both art and happiness.]\n\nIn other words, a happy result can be secured in art, as in life, only\nby intelligence. Intelligence consists in having read the heart and\ndeciphered the promptings latent there, and then in reading the world\nand deciphering its law and constitution, to see how and where the\nheart\u2019s ideal may be embodied. Our troubles come from the colossal\nblunders made by our ancestors (who had worse ancestors of their own) in\nboth these interpretations, blunders which have come down to us in our\nblood and in our institutions. The vices thus transmitted cloud our\nintelligence. We fail in practical affairs when we ignore the conditions\nof action and we fail in works of imagination when we concoct what is\nfantastic and without roots in the world.\n\nThe value of art lies in making people happy, first in practising the\nart and then in possessing its product. This observation might seem\nneedless, and ought to be so; but if we compare it with what is commonly\nsaid on these subjects, we must confess that it may often be denied and\nmore often, perhaps, may not be understood. Happiness is something men\nought to pursue, although they seldom do so; they are drawn away from it\nat first by foolish impulses and afterwards by perverse laws. To secure\nhappiness conduct would have to remain spontaneous while it learned not\nto be criminal; but the fanatical attachment of men, now to a fierce\nliberty, now to a false regimen, keeps them barbarous and wretched. A\nrational pursuit of happiness\u2014which is one thing with progress or with\nthe Life of Reason\u2014would embody that natural piety which leaves to the\nepisodes of life their inherent values, mourning death, celebrating\nlove, sanctifying civic traditions, enjoying and correcting nature\u2019s\nways. To discriminate happiness is therefore the very soul of art, which\nexpresses experience without distorting it, as those political or\nmetaphysical tyrannies distort it which sanctify unhappiness. A free\nmind, like a creative imagination, rejoices at the harmonies it can find\nor make between man and nature; and, where it finds none, it solves the\nconflict so far as it may and then notes and endures it with a shudder.\n\nA morality organised about the human heart in an ingenuous and sincere\nfashion would involve every fine art and would render the world\npervasively beautiful\u2014beautiful in its artificial products and\nbeautiful in its underlying natural terrors. The closer we keep to\nelementary human needs and to the natural agencies that may satisfy\nthem, the closer we are to beauty. Industry, sport, and science, with\nthe perennial intercourse and passions of men, swarm with incentives to\nexpression, because they are everywhere creating new moulds of being and\ncompelling the eye to observe those forms and to recast them ideally.\nArt is simply an adequate industry; it arises when industry is carried\nout to the satisfaction of all human demands, even of those incidental\nsensuous demands which we call \u00e6sthetic and which a brutal industry, in\nits haste, may despise or ignore.\n\nArts responsive in this way to all human nature would be beautiful\naccording to reason and might remain beautiful long. Poetic beauty\ntouches the world whenever it attains some unfeigned harmony either with\nsense or with reason; and the more unfeignedly human happiness was made\nthe test of all institutions and pursuits, the more beautiful they would\nbe, having more numerous points of fusion with the mind, and fusing with\nit more profoundly. To distinguish and to create beauty would then be no\nart relegated to a few abstracted spirits, playing with casual fancies;\nit would be a habit inseparable from practical efficiency. All\noperations, all affairs, would then be viewed in the light of ultimate\ninterests, and in their deep relation to human good. The arts would thus\nrecover their Homeric glory; touching human fate as they clearly would,\nthey would borrow something of its grandeur and pathos, and yet the\ninterest that worked in them would be warm, because it would remain\nunmistakably animal and sincere.\n\n[Sidenote: Only a rational society can have sure and perfect arts.]\n\nThe principle that all institutions should subserve happiness runs\ndeeper than any cult for art and lays the foundation on which the latter\nmight rest safely. If social structure were rational its free expression\nwould be so too. Many observers, with no particular philosophy to\nadduce, feel that the arts among us are somehow impotent, and they look\nfor a better inspiration, now to ancient models, now to the raw\nphenomena of life. A dilettante may, indeed, summon inspiration whence\nhe will; and a virtuoso will never lack some material to keep him busy;\nbut if what is hoped for is a genuine, native, inevitable art, a great\nrevolution would first have to be worked in society. We should have to\nabandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms\nand schools of art, and to discover instead our genuine needs, the forms\nof our possible happiness. To call for such self-examination seems\nrevolutionary only because we start from a sophisticated system, a\nsystem resting on traditional fashions and superstitions, by which the\nwill of the living generation is misinterpreted and betrayed. To shake\noff that system would not subvert order but rather institute order for\nthe first time; it would be an _Instauratio Magna_, a setting things\nagain on their feet.\n\nWe in Christendom are so accustomed to artificial ideals and to\nartificial institutions, kept up to express them, that we hardly\nconceive how anomalous our situation is, sorely as we may suffer from\nit. We found academies and museums, as we found missions, to fan a flame\nthat constantly threatens to die out for lack of natural fuel. Our overt\nideals are parasites in the body politic, while the ideals native to the\nbody politic, those involved in our natural structure and situation,\nare either stifled by that alien incubus, leaving civic life barbarous,\nor else force their way up, unremarked or not justly honoured as ideals.\nIndustry and science and social amenities, with all the congruous\ncomforts and appurtenances of contemporary life, march on their way, as\nif they had nothing to say to the spirit, which remains entangled in a\ncobweb of dead traditions. An idle pottering of the fancy over obsolete\nforms\u2014theological, dramatic, or plastic\u2014makes that by-play to the\nsober business of life which men call their art or their religion; and\nthe more functionless and gratuitous this by-play is the more those who\nindulge in it think they are idealists. They feel they are champions of\nwhat is most precious in the world, as a sentimental lady might fancy\nherself a lover of flowers when she pressed them in a book instead of\nplanting their seeds in the garden.\n\n[Sidenote: Why art is now empty and unstable.]\n\nIt is clear that gratuitous and functionless habits cannot bring\nhappiness; they do not constitute an activity at once spontaneous and\nbeneficent, such as noble art is an instance of. Those habits may indeed\ngive pleasure; they may bring extreme excitement, as madness notably\ndoes, though it is in the highest degree functionless and gratuitous.\nNor is such by-play without consequences, some of which might\nconceivably be fortunate. What is functionless is so called for being\nworthless from some ideal point of view, and not conducing to the\nparticular life considered. But nothing real is dissociated from the\nuniversal flux; everything\u2014madness and all unmeaning cross-currents in\nbeing\u2014count in the general process and discharge somewhere, not without\neffect, the substance they have drawn for a moment into their little\nvortex. So our vain arts and unnecessary religions are not without real\neffects and not without a certain internal vitality. When life is\nprofoundly disorganised it may well happen that only in detached\nepisodes, only in moments snatched for dreaming in, can men see the blue\nor catch a glimpse of something like the ideal. In that case their\nesteem for their irrelevant visions may be well grounded, and their thin\nart and far-fetched religion may really constitute what is best in their\nexperience. In a pathetic way these poor enthusiasms may be justified,\nbut only because the very conception of a rational life lies entirely\nbeyond the horizon.\n\n[Sidenote: Anomalous character of the irrational artist.]\n\nIt is no marvel, when art is a brief truancy from rational practice,\nthat the artist himself should be a vagrant, and at best, as it were, an\ninfant prodigy. The wings of genius serve him only for an escapade,\nenabling him to skirt the perilous edge of madness and of mystical\nabysses. But such an erratic workman does not deserve the name of artist\nor master; he has burst convention only to break it, not to create a new\nconvention more in harmony with nature. His originality, though it may\nastonish for a moment, will in the end be despised and will find no\nthoroughfare. He will meantime be wretched himself, torn from the roots\nof his being by that cruel, unmeaning inspiration; or, if too rapt to\nsee his own plight, he will be all the more pitied by practical men, who\ncannot think it a real blessing to be lost in joys that do not\nstrengthen the character and yield nothing for posterity.\n\nArt, in its nobler acceptation, is an achievement, not an indulgence. It\nprepares the world in some sense to receive the soul, and the soul to\nmaster the world; it disentangles those threads in each that can be\nwoven into the other. That the artist should be eccentric, homeless,\ndreamful may almost seem a natural law, but it is none the less a\nscandal. An artist\u2019s business is not really to cut fantastical capers or\nbe licensed to play the fool. His business is simply that of every keen\nsoul to build well when it builds, and to speak well when it speaks,\ngiving practice everywhere the greatest possible affinity to the\nsituation, the most delicate adjustment to every faculty it affects. The\nwonder of an artist\u2019s performance grows with the range of his\npenetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal\nisolation, considerate of other men\u2019s fate and a great diviner of their\nsecret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance\nthan they could have spoken with to themselves. And the joy of his great\nsanity, the power of his adequate vision, is not the less intense\nbecause he can lend it to others and has borrowed it from a faithful\nstudy of the world.\n\n[Sidenote: True art measures and completes happiness.]\n\nIf happiness is the ultimate sanction of art, art in turn is the best\ninstrument of happiness. In art more directly than in other activities\nman\u2019s self-expression is cumulative and finds an immediate reward; for\nit alters the material conditions of sentience so that sentience becomes\nat once more delightful and more significant. In industry man is still\nservile, preparing the materials he is to use in action. In action\nitself, though he is free, he exerts his influence on a living and\ntreacherous medium and sees the issue at each moment drift farther and\nfarther from his intent. In science he is an observer, preparing himself\nfor action in another way, by studying its results and conditions. But\nin art he is at once competent and free; he is creative. He is not\ntroubled by his materials, because he has assimilated them and may take\nthem for granted; nor is he concerned with the chance complexion of\naffairs in the actual world, because he is making the world over, not\nmerely considering how it grew or how it will consent to grow in future.\nNothing, accordingly, could be more delightful than genuine art, nor\nmore free from remorse and the sting of vanity. Art springs so\ncompletely from the heart of man that it makes everything speak to him\nin his own language; it reaches, nevertheless, so truly to the heart of\nnature that it co-operates with her, becomes a parcel of her creative\nmaterial energy, and builds by her instinctive hand. If the various\nformative impulses afoot in the world never opposed stress to stress and\nmade no havoc with one another, nature might be called an unconscious\nartist. In fact, just where such a formative impulse finds support from\nthe environment, a consciousness supervenes. If that consciousness is\nadequate enough to be prophetic, an art arises. Thus the emergence of\narts out of instincts is the token and exact measure of nature\u2019s success\nand of mortal happiness.\n\n\n*** End of Volume Four ***\n\n\n\n\nREASON IN SCIENCE\n\nVolume Five of \u201cThe Life of Reason\u201d\n\n\nGEORGE SANTAYANA\n\n\nh\u00ea gar noy enhergeia z\u00f4h\u00ea\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\nREASON IN SCIENCE\n\n\nCHAPTER I\n\nTYPES AND AIMS OF SCIENCE\n\nScience still young.\u2014Its miscarriage in Greece.\u2014Its timid reappearance\nin modern times.\u2014Distinction between science and myth.\u2014Platonic status\nof hypothesis.\u2014Meaning of verification.\u2014Possible validity of\nmyths.\u2014Any dreamed-of thing might be experienced.\u2014But science follows\nthe movement of its subject-matter.\u2014Moral value of science.\u2014Its\ncontinuity with common knowledge.\u2014Its intellectual essence.\u2014Unity of\nscience.\u2014In existence, judged by reflection, there is a margin of\nwaste.\u2014Sciences converge from different points of origin.\u2014Two chief\nkinds of science, physics and dialectic.\u2014Their mutual\nimplication.\u2014Their co\u00f6peration.\u2014No science _a priori_.\u2014Role of\ncriticism. Pages 3-38\n\n\nCHAPTER II\n\nHISTORY\n\nHistory an artificial memory.\u2014Second sight requires control.\u2014Nature\nthe theme common to various memories.\u2014Growth of legend.\u2014No history\nwithout documents.\u2014The aim is truth.\u2014Indirect methods of attaining\nit.\u2014Historical research a part of physics.\u2014Verification here\nindirect.\u2014Futile ideal to survey all facts.\u2014Historical theory.\u2014It is\narbitrary.\u2014A moral critique of the past is possible.\u2014How it might be\njust.\u2014Transition to historical romance.\u2014Possibility of genuine\nepics.\u2014Literal truth abandoned.\u2014History exists to be transcended.\u2014Its\ngreat r\u00f4le. Pages 39-68\n\n\nCHAPTER III\n\nMECHANISM\n\nRecurrent forms in nature.\u2014Their discovery makes the flux\ncalculable.\u2014Looser principles tried first.\u2014Mechanism for the most part\nhidden.\u2014Yet presumably pervasive.\u2014Inadequacy of consciousness.\u2014Its\narticulation inferior to that of its objects.\u2014Science consequently\nretarded, and speculation rendered necessary.\u2014Dissatisfaction with\nmechanism partly natural, and partly artificial.\u2014Biassed judgments\ninspired by moral inertia.\u2014Positive emotions proper to\nmaterialism.\u2014The material world not dead nor ugly, nor especially\ncruel.\u2014Mechanism to be judged by its fruits. Pages 69-94\n\n\nCHAPTER IV\n\nHESITATIONS IN METHOD\n\nMechanism restricted to one-half of existence.\u2014Men of science not\nspeculative.\u2014Confusion in semi-moral subjects.\u2014\u201cPhysic of metaphysic\nbegs defence.\u201d\u2014Evolution by mechanism.\u2014Evolution by ideal\nattraction.\u2014If species are evolved they cannot guide\nevolution.\u2014Intrusion of optimism.\u2014Evolution according to Hegel.\u2014The\nconservative interpretation.\u2014The radical one.\u2014Megalomania.\u2014Chaos in\nthe theory of mind.\u2014Origin of self-consciousness.\u2014The notion of\nspirit.\u2014The notion of sense.\u2014Competition between the two.\u2014The rise of\nscepticism. Pages 95-125\n\n\nCHAPTER V\n\nPSYCHOLOGY\n\nMind reading not science.\u2014Experience a reconstruction.\u2014The honest art\nof education.\u2014Arbitrary readings of the mind.\u2014Human nature appealed to\nrather than described.\u2014Dialectic in psychology.\u2014Spinoza on the\npassions.\u2014A principle of estimation cannot govern events.\u2014Scientific\npsychology a part of biology.\u2014Confused attempt to detach the psychic\nelement.\u2014Differentia of the psychic.\u2014Approach to irrelevant\nsentience.\u2014Perception represents things in their practical relation to\nthe body.\u2014Mind the existence in which form becomes actual.\u2014Attempt at\nidealistic physics.\u2014Association not efficient.\u2014It describes\ncoincidences.\u2014Understanding is based on instinct and expressed in\ndialectic.\u2014Suggestion a fancy name for automatism, and will\nanother.\u2014Double attachment of mind to nature.\u2014Is the subject-matter of\npsychology absolute being?\u2014Sentience is representable only in\nfancy.\u2014The conditions and objects of sentience, which are not\nsentience, are also real.\u2014Mind knowable and important in so far as it\nrepresents other things. Pages 126-166\n\n\nCHAPTER VI\n\nTHE NATURE OF INTENT\n\nDialectic better than physics.\u2014Maladjustments to nature render physics\nconspicuous and unpleasant.\u2014Physics should be largely virtual, and\ndialectic explicit.\u2014Intent is vital and indescribable.\u2014It is analogous\nto flux in existence.\u2014It expresses natural life.\u2014It has a material\nbasis.\u2014It is necessarily relevant to earth.\u2014The basis of intent\nbecomes appreciable in language.\u2014Intent starts from a datum, and is\ncarried by a feeling.\u2014It demands conventional expression.\u2014A fable\nabout matter and form. Pages 167-186\n\n\nCHAPTER VII\n\nDIALECTIC\n\nDialectic elaborates given forms.\u2014Forms are abstracted from existence\nby intent.\u2014Confusion comes of imperfect abstraction, or ambiguous\nintent.\u2014The fact that mathematics applies to existence is\nempirical.\u2014Its moral value is therefore contingent.\u2014Quantity submits\neasily to dialectical treatment\u2014Constancy and progress in\nintent.\u2014Intent determines the functional essence of objects.\u2014Also the\nscope of ideals.\u2014Double status of mathematics.\u2014Practical r\u00f4le of\ndialectic.\u2014Hegel\u2019s satire on dialectic.\u2014Dialectic expresses a given\nintent.\u2014Its empire is ideal and autonomous. Pages 187-209\n\n\nCHAPTER VIII\n\nPRERATIONAL MORALITY\n\nEmpirical alloy in dialectic.\u2014Arrested rationality in morals.\u2014Its\nemotional and practical power.\u2014Moral science is an application of\ndialectic, not a part of anthropology.\u2014Estimation the soul of\nphilosophy.\u2014Moral discriminations are natural and inevitable.\u2014A choice\nof proverbs.\u2014Their various representative value.\u2014Conflict of partial\nmoralities.\u2014The Greek ideal.\u2014Imaginative exuberance and political\ndiscipline.\u2014Sterility of Greek example.\u2014Prerational morality among the\nJews.\u2014The development of conscience.\u2014Need of Hebraic devotion to Greek\naims.\u2014Prerational morality marks an acquisition but offers no programme.\nPages 210-232\n\n\nCHAPTER IX\n\nRATIONAL ETHICS\n\nMoral passions represent private interests.\u2014Common ideal interests may\nsupervene.\u2014To this extent there is rational society.\u2014A rational\nmorality not attainable, but its principle clear.\u2014It is the logic of an\nautonomous will.\u2014Socrates\u2019 science.\u2014Its opposition to sophistry and\nmoral anarchy.\u2014Its vitality.\u2014Genuine altruism is natural\nself-expression.\u2014Reason expresses impulses, but impulses reduced to\nharmony.\u2014Self-love artificial.\u2014The sanction of reason is\nhappiness.\u2014Moral science impeded by its chaotic data, and its\nunrecognised scope.\u2014Fallacy in democratic hedonism.\u2014Sympathy a\nconditional duty.\u2014All life, and hence right life, finite and\nparticular. Pages 233-261\n\n\nCHAPTER X\n\nPOST-RATIONAL MORALITY\n\nSocratic ethics retrospective.\u2014Rise of disillusioned moralities.\u2014The\nillusion subsisting in them.\u2014Epicurean refuge in pleasure.\u2014Stoic\nrecourse to conformity.\u2014Conformity the core of Islam, enveloped in\narbitrary doctrines.\u2014The latter alone lend it practical force.\u2014Moral\nambiguity in pantheism.\u2014Under stress, it becomes ascetic and requires a\nmythology.\u2014A supernatural world made by the Platonist out of\ndialectic.\u2014The Hebraic cry for redemption.\u2014The two factors meet in\nChristianity.\u2014Consequent eclecticism.\u2014The negation of naturalism never\ncomplete.\u2014Spontaneous values rehabilitated.\u2014A witness out of\nIndia.\u2014Dignity of post-rational morality.\u2014Absurdities nevertheless\ninvolved.\u2014The soul of positivism in all ideals.\u2014Moribund dreams and\nperennial realities. Pages 262-300\n\n\nCHAPTER XI\n\nTHE VALIDITY OF SCIENCE\n\nVarious modes of revising science.\u2014Science its own best\ncritic.\u2014Obstruction by alien traditions.\u2014Needless anxiety for moral\ninterests.\u2014Science an imaginative and practical art.\u2014Arri\u00e8re-pens\u00e9e in\ntranscendentalism.\u2014Its romantic sincerity.\u2014Its constructive\nimpotence.\u2014Its dependence on common-sense.\u2014Its futility.\u2014Ideal\nscience is self-justified.\u2014Physical science is presupposed in\nscepticism.\u2014It recurs in all understanding of perception.\u2014Science\ncontains all trustworthy knowledge.\u2014It suffices for the Life of Reason.\nPages 301-320\n\n\n\n\nREASON IN SCIENCE\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER I\n\nTYPES AND AIMS OF SCIENCE\n\n\n[Sidenote: Science still young.]\n\nScience is so new a thing and so far from final, it seems to the layman\nso hopelessly accurate and extensive, that a moralist may well feel some\ndiffidence in trying to estimate its achievements and promises at their\nhuman worth. The morrow may bring some great revolution in science, and\nis sure to bring many a correction and many a surprise. Religion and art\nhave had their day; indeed a part of the faith they usually inspire is\nto believe that they have long ago revealed their secret. A critic may\nsafely form a judgment concerning them; for even if he dissents from the\northodox opinion and ventures to hope that religion and art may assume\nin the future forms far nobler and more rational than any they have\nhitherto worn, still he must confess that art and religion have had\nseveral turns at the wheel; they have run their course through in\nvarious ages and climes with results which anybody is free to estimate\nif he has an open mind and sufficient interest in the subject. Science,\non the contrary, which apparently cannot exist where intellectual\nfreedom is denied, has flourished only twice in recorded times: once\nfor some three hundred years in ancient Greece, and again for about the\nsame period in modern Christendom. Its fruits have scarcely begun to\nappear; the lands it is discovering have not yet been circumnavigated,\nand there is no telling what its ultimate influence will be on human\npractice and feeling.\n\n[Sidenote: Its miscarriage in Greece.]\n\nThe first period in the life of science was brilliant but ineffectual.\nThe Greeks\u2019 energy and liberty were too soon spent, and the very\nexuberance of their genius made its expression chaotic. Where every mind\nwas so fresh and every tongue so clever no scientific tradition could\narise, and no laborious applications could be made to test the value of\nrival notions and decide between them. Men of science were mere\nphilosophers. Each began, not where his predecessor had ended, but at\nthe very beginning. Another circumstance that impeded the growth of\nscience was the forensic and rhetorical turn proper to Greek\nintelligence. This mental habit gave a tremendous advantage in\nphilosophy to the moralist and poet over the naturalist or\nmathematician. Hence what survived in Greece after the heyday of\ntheoretic achievement was chiefly philosophies of life, and these\u2014at\nthe death of liberty\u2014grew daily more personal and ascetic. Authority in\nscientific matters clung chiefly to Plato and Aristotle, and this not\nfor the sake of their incomparable moral philosophy\u2014for in ethics that\ndecadent age preferred the Stoics and Epicureans\u2014but just for those\nrhetorical expedients which in the Socratic school took the place of\nnatural science. Worse influences in this field could hardly be\nimagined, since Plato\u2019s physics ends in myth and apologue, while\nAristotle\u2019s ends in nomenclature and teleology.\n\nAll that remained of Greek physics, therefore, was the conception of\nwhat physics should be\u2014a great achievement due to the earlier\nthinkers\u2014and certain hints and guesses in that field. The elements of\ngeometry had also been formulated, while the Socratic school bequeathed\nto posterity a well-developed group of moral sciences, rational in\nprinciple, but destined to be soon overlaid with metaphysical and\nreligious accretions, so that the dialectical nerve and reasonableness\nof them were obliterated, and there survived only miscellaneous\nconclusions, fragments of wisdom built topsy-turvy into the new mythical\nedifice. It is the sad task reserved for historical criticism to detach\nthose sculptured stones from the rough mass in which they have been\nembedded and to rearrange them in their pristine order, thus\nrediscovering the inner Socratic principle of moral philosophy, which is\nnothing but self-knowledge\u2014a circumspect, systematic utterance of the\nspeaker\u2019s mind, disclosing his implicit meaning and his ultimate\npreferences.\n\n[Sidenote: Its timid reappearance in modern times.]\n\nAt its second birth science took a very different form. It left cosmic\ntheories to pantheistic enthusiasts like Giordano Bruno, while in sober\nlaborious circles it confined itself to specific discoveries\u2014the\nearth\u2019s roundness and motion about the sun, the laws of mechanics, the\ndevelopment and application of algebra, the invention of the calculus,\nand a hundred other steps forward in various disciplines. It was a\npatient siege laid to the truth, which was approached blindly and\nwithout a general, as by an army of ants; it was not stormed\nimaginatively as by the ancient Ionians, who had reached at once the\nnotion of nature\u2019s dynamic unity, but had neglected to take possession\nin detail of the intervening tracts, whence resources might be drawn in\norder to maintain the main position.\n\nNevertheless, as discoveries accumulated, they fell insensibly into a\nsystem, and philosophers like Descartes and Newton arrived at a general\nphysics. This physics, however, was not yet meant to cover the whole\nexistent world, or to be the genetic account of all things in their\nsystem. Descartes excluded from his physics the whole mental and moral\nworld, which became, so far as his science went, an inexplicable\naddendum. Similarly Newton\u2019s mechanical principles, broad as they were,\nwere conceived by him merely as a parenthesis in theology. Not until the\nnineteenth century were the observations that had been accumulated given\ntheir full value or in fact understood; for Spinoza\u2019s system, though\nnaturalistic in spirit, was still dialectical in form, and had no\ninfluence on science and for a long time little even on speculation.\n\nIndeed the conception of a natural order, like the Greek cosmos, which\nshall include all existences\u2014gods no less than men, if gods actually\nexist\u2014is one not yet current, although it is implied in every\nscientific explanation and is favoured by two powerful contemporary\nmovements which, coming from different quarters, are leading men\u2019s minds\nback to the same ancient and obvious naturalism. One of these movements\nis the philosophy of evolution, to which Darwin gave such an\nirresistible impetus. The other is theology itself, where it has been\nemancipated from authority and has set to work to square men\u2019s\nconscience with history and experience. This theology has generally\npassed into speculative idealism, which under another name recognises\nthe universal empire of law and conceives man\u2019s life as an incident in a\nprodigious natural process, by which his mind and his interests are\nproduced and devoured. This \u201cidealism\u201d is in truth a system of\nimmaterial physics, like that of Pythagoras or Heraclitus. While it\nworks with fantastic and shifting categories, which no plain naturalist\nwould care to use, it has nothing to apply those categories to except\nwhat the naturalist or historian may already have discovered and\nexpressed in the categories of common prose. German idealism is a\ntranslation of physical evolution into mythical language, which\npresents the facts now in the guise of a dialectical progression, now in\nthat of a romantic drama. In either case the facts are the same, and\njust those which positive knowledge has come upon. Thus many who are not\nbrought to naturalism by science are brought to it, quite unwillingly\nand unawares, by their religious speculations.\n\n[Sidenote: Distinction between science and myth.]\n\nThe gulf that yawns between such idealistic cosmogonies and a true\nphysics may serve to make clear the divergence in principle which\neverywhere divides natural science from arbitrary conceptions of things.\nThis divergence is as far as possible from lying in the merit of the two\nsorts of theory. Their merit, and the genius and observation required to\nframe them, may well be equal, or an imaginative system may have the\nadvantage in these respects. It may even be more serviceable for a while\nand have greater pragmatic value, so long as knowledge is at best\nfragmentary, and no consecutive or total view of things is attempted by\neither party. Thus in social life a psychology expressed in terms of\nabstract faculties and personified passions may well carry a man farther\nthan a physiological psychology would. Or, again, we may say that there\nwas more experience and love of nature enshrined in ancient mythology\nthan in ancient physics; the observant poet might then have fared better\nin the world than the pert and ignorant materialist. Nor does the\ndifference between science and myth lie in the fact that the one is\nessentially less speculative than the other. They are differently\nspeculative, it is true, since myth terminates in unverifiable notions\nthat might by chance represent actual existences; while science\nterminates in concepts or laws, themselves not possibly existent, but\nverified by recurring particular facts, belonging to the same experience\nas those from which the theory started.\n\n[Sidenote: Platonic status of hypothesis.]\n\nThe laws formulated by science\u2014the transitive figments describing the\nrelation between fact and fact\u2014possess only a Platonic sort of reality.\nThey are more real, if you will, than the facts themselves, because they\nare more permanent, trustworthy, and pervasive; but at the same time\nthey are, if you will, not real at all, because they are incompatible\nwith immediacy and alien to brute existence. In declaring what is true\nof existences they altogether renounce existence on their own behalf.\nThis situation has made no end of trouble in ill-balanced minds, not\ndocile to the diversities and free complexity of things, but bent on\ntreating everything by a single method. They have asked themselves\npersistently the confusing question whether the matter or the form of\nthings is the reality; whereas, of course, both elements are needed,\neach with its incommensurable kind of being. The material element alone\nis existent, while the ideal element is the sum of all those\npropositions which are true of what exists materially. Anybody\u2019s\n_knowledge_ of the truth, being a complex and fleeting feeling, is of\ncourse but a moment of existence or material being, which whether found\nin God or man is as far as possible from being that truth itself which\nit may succeed in knowing.\n\n[Sidenote: Meaning of verification.]\n\nThe true contrast between science and myth is more nearly touched when\nwe say that science alone is capable of verification. Some ambiguity,\nhowever, lurks in this phrase, since verification comes to a method only\nvicariously, when the particulars it prophesies are realised in sense.\nTo verify a theory as if it were not a method but a divination of occult\nexistences would be to turn the theory into a myth and then to discover\nthat what the myth pictured had, by a miracle, an actual existence also.\nThere is accordingly a sense in which myth admits substantiation of a\nkind that science excludes. The Olympic hierarchy might conceivably\nexist bodily; but gravitation and natural selection, being schemes of\nrelation, can never exist substantially and on their own behoof.\nNevertheless, the Olympic hierarchy, even if it happened to exist, could\nnot be proved to do so unless it were a part of the natural world open\nto sense; while gravitation and natural selection, without being\nexistences, can be verified at every moment by concrete events occurring\nas those principles require. A hypothesis, being a discursive device,\ngains its utmost possible validity when its discursive value is\nestablished. It _is_ not, it merely _applies_; and every situation in\nwhich it is found to apply is a proof of its truth.\n\nThe case would not be different with fables, were their basis and\nmeaning remembered. But fables, when hypostatised, forget that they,\ntoo, were transitive symbols and boast to reveal an undiscoverable\nreality. A dogmatic myth is in this sorry plight: that the more evidence\nit can find to support it the more it abrogates its metaphysical\npretensions, while the more it insists on its absolute truth the less\nrelevance it has to experience and the less meaning. To try to support\nfabulous dogmas by evidence is tantamount to acknowledging that they are\nmerely scientific hypotheses, instruments of discourse, and methods of\nexpression. But in that case their truth would no longer be supposed to\nlie in the fact that somewhere beyond the range of human observation\nthey descended bodily to the plane of flying existence, and were\nactually enacted there. They would have ceased to resemble the society\nof Olympus, which to prove itself real would need to verify itself,\nsince only the gods and those mortals admitted to their conclave could\nknow for a fact that that celestial gathering existed. On the contrary,\na speculation that could be supported by evidence would be one that\nmight be made good without itself descending to the plane of immediacy,\nbut would be sufficiently verified when diffuse facts fall out as it had\nled us to expect. The myth in such a case would have become transparent\nagain and relevant to experience, which could continually serve to\nsupport or to correct it. Even if somewhat overloaded and poetical, it\nwould be in essence a scientific theory. It would no longer terminate in\nitself; it would point forward, leading the thinker that used it to\neventual facts of experience, facts which his poetic wisdom would have\nprepared him to meet and to use.\n\n[Sidenote: Possible validity of myths.]\n\nIf I say, for instance, that Punishment, limping in one leg, patiently\nfollows every criminal, the myth is obvious and innocent enough. It\nreveals nothing, but, what is far better, it means something. I have\nexpressed a truth of experience and pointed vaguely to the course which\nevents may be expected to take under given circumstances. The\nexpression, though mythical in form, is scientific in effect, because it\ntends to surround a given phenomenon (the crime) with objects on its own\nplane\u2014other passions and sensations to follow upon it. What would be\ntruly mythical would be to stop at the figure of speech and maintain, by\nway of revealed dogma, that a lame goddess of vindictive mind actually\nfollows every wicked man, her sword poised in mid-air. Sinking into that\nreverie, and trembling at its painted truth, I should be passing to the\nundiscoverable and forgetting the hard blows actually awaiting me in the\nworld. Fable, detaining the mind too long in the mesh of expression,\nwould have become metaphysical dogma. I should have connected the given\nfact with imagined facts, which even if by chance real\u2014for such a\ngoddess may, for all we know, actually float in the fourth\ndimension\u2014are quite supernumerary in my world, and never, by any\npossibility, can become parts or extensions of the experience they are\nthought to explain. The gods are demonstrable only as hypotheses, but as\nhypotheses they are not gods.\n\n[Sidenote: Any dreamed-of thing might be experienced.]\n\nThe same distinction is sometimes expressed by saying that science deals\nonly with objects of possible experience. But this expression is\nunfortunate, because everything thinkable, no matter how mythical and\nsupernatural or how far beyond the range of mortal senses, is an object\nof _possible_ experience. Tritons and sea-horses might observe one\nanother and might feel themselves live. The thoughts and decrees said to\noccupy the divine mind from all eternity would certainly be phenomena\nthere; they would be experienced things. Were fables really as\nmetaphysical and visionary as they pretend to be, were they not all the\nwhile and in essence mere symbols for natural situations, they would be\nnothing but reports about other alleged parts of experience. A real\nTriton, a real Creator, a real heaven would obviously be objects open to\nproperly equipped senses and seats of much vivid experience. But a\nTriton after all has something to do with the \u00c6gean and other earthly\nwaters; a Creator has something to do with the origin of man and of his\nhabitat; heaven has something to do with the motives and rewards of\nmoral action. This relevance to given experience and its objects is what\ncuts those myths off from their blameless and gratuitous r\u00f4le of\nreporting experiences that might be going on merrily enough somewhere\nelse in the universe. In calling them myths and denying that what they\ndescribe falls within the purview of science, we do not assert that,\nabsolutely taken, they could not be objects of a possible experience.\nWhat we mean is rather that no matter how long we searched the sea\nwaves, in which it is the essence of our Tritons to disport themselves,\nwe should never find Tritons there; and that if we traced back the\nhistory of man and nature we should find them always passing by natural\ngeneration out of slightly different earlier forms and never appearing\nsuddenly, at the fiat of a vehement Jehovah swimming about in a chaos;\nand finally that if we considered critically our motives and our ideals,\nwe should find them springing from and directed upon a natural life and\nits functions, and not at all on a disembodied and timeless ecstasy.\nThose myths, then, while they intrinsically refer to facts in the given\nworld, describe those facts in incongruous terms. They are symbols, not\nextensions, for the experience we know.\n\n[Sidenote: But science follows the movement of its subject-matter.]\n\nA chief characteristic of science, then, is that in supplementing given\nfacts it supplements them by adding other facts belonging to the same\nsphere, and eventually discoverable by tracing the given object in its\nown plane through its continuous transformations. Science expands\nspeculatively, by the aid of merely instrumental hypotheses, objects\ngiven in perception until they compose a congruous, self-supporting\nworld, all parts of which might be observed consecutively. What a\nscientific hypothesis interpolates among the given facts\u2014the atomic\nstructure of things, for instance\u2014might come in time under the direct\nfire of attention, fixed more scrupulously, longer, or with better\ninstruments upon those facts themselves. Otherwise the hypothesis that\nassumed that structure would be simply false, just as a hypothesis that\nthe interior of the earth is full of molten fire would be false if on\ninspection nothing were found there but solid rock. Science does not\nmerely prolong a habit of inference; it verifies and solves the\ninference by reaching the fact inferred.\n\nThe contrast with myth at this point is very interesting; for in myth\nthe facts are themselves made vehicles, and knowledge is felt to\nterminate in an independent existence on a higher or deeper level than\nany immediate fact; and this circumstance is what makes myth impossible\nto verify and, except by laughter, to disprove. If I attributed the\nstars\u2019 shining to the diligence of angels who lighted their lamps at\nsunset, lest the upper reaches of the world should grow dangerous for\ntravellers, and if I made my romance elaborate and ingenious enough, I\nmight possibly find that the stars\u2019 appearance and disappearance could\ncontinue to be interpreted in that way. My myth might always suggest\nitself afresh and might be perennially appropriate. But it would never\ndescend, with its charming figures, into the company of its evidences.\nIt would never prove that what it terminated in was a fact, as in my\nmetaphysical faith I had deputed and asserted it to be. The angels would\nremain notional, while my intent was to have them exist; so that the\nmore earnestly I held to my fable the more grievously should I be\ndeceived. For even if seraphic choirs existed in plenty on their own\nemotional or musical plane of being, it would not have been their\nhands\u2014if they had hands\u2014that would have lighted the stars I saw; and\nthis, after all, was the gist and starting-point of my whole fable and\nits sole witness in my world. A myth might by chance be a revelation,\ndid what it talks of have an actual existence somewhere else in the\nuniverse; but it would need to be a revelation in order to be true at\nall, and would then be true only in an undeserved and spurious fashion.\nAny representative and provable validity which it might possess would\nassimulate it to science and reduce it to a mere vehicle and instrument\nfor human discourse. It would evaporate as soon as the prophecies it\nmade were fulfilled, and it would claim no being and no worship on its\nown account. Science might accordingly be called a myth conscious of its\nessential ideality, reduced to its fighting weight and valued only for\nits significance.\n\n[Sidenote: Moral value of science.]\n\nA symptom of the divergence between myth and science may be found in the\ncontrary emotions which they involve. Since in myth we interpret\nexperience in order to interpret it, in order to delight ourselves by\nturning it poetically into the language and prosody of our own life, the\nemotion we feel when we succeed is artistic; myth has a dramatic charm.\nSince in science, on the contrary, we employ notional machinery, in\nitself perhaps indifferent enough, in order to arrive at eventual facts\nand to conceive the aspect which given things would actually wear from a\ndifferent point of view in space or time, the emotion we feel when we\nsucceed is that of security and intellectual dominion; science has a\nrational value. To see better what we now see, to see by anticipation\nwhat we should see actually under other conditions, is wonderfully to\nsatisfy curiosity and to enlighten conduct. At the same time, scientific\nthinking involves no less inward excitement than dramatic fiction does.\nIt summons before us an even larger number of objects in their fatal\ndirection upon our interests. Were science adequate it would indeed\nabsorb those passions which now, since they must be satisfied somehow,\nhave to be satisfied by dramatic myths. To imagine how things might have\nbeen would be neither interesting nor possible if we knew fully how\nthings are. All pertinent dramatic emotion, joyous or tragic, would then\ninhere in practical knowledge. As it is, however, science abstracts from\nthe more musical overtones of things in order to trace the gross and\nbasal processes within them; so that the pursuit of science seems\ncomparatively dry and laborious, except where at moments the vista opens\nthrough to the ultimate or leads back to the immediate. Then, perhaps,\nwe recognise that in science we are surveying all it concerns us to\nknow, and in so doing are becoming all that it profits us to be. Mere\namusement in thought as in sportive action is tedious and illiberal: it\nmarks a temperament so imperfectly educated that it prefers idle to\nsignificant play and a flimsy to a solid idea.\n\n[Sidenote: Its continuity with common knowledge.]\n\nThe fact that science follows the subject-matter in its own movement\ninvolves a further consequence: science differs from common knowledge in\nscope only, not in nature. When intelligence arises, when the flux of\nthings begins to be mitigated by representation of it and objects are at\nlast fixed and recognisable, there is science. For even here, in the\npresence of a datum something virtual and potential is called up,\nnamely, what the given thing was a moment ago, what it is growing into,\nor what it is contrasted with in character. As I walk round a tree, I\nlearn that the parts still visible, those that have just disappeared\nand those now coming into view, are continuous and belong to the same\ntree.\n\nThis declaration, though dialectic might find many a mare\u2019s nest in its\nlanguage, is a safe and obvious enough expression of knowledge. It\ninvolves terms, however, which are in the act of becoming potential.\nWhat is just past, what is just coming, though sensibly continuous with\nwhat is present, are partially infected with nonentity. After a while\nhuman apprehension can reach them only by inference, and to count upon\nthem is frankly to rely on theory. The other side of the tree, which\ncommon sense affirms to exist unconditionally, will have to be\nrepresented in memory or fancy; and it may never actually be observed by\nany mortal. Yet, if I continued my round, I should actually observe it\nand know it by experience; and I should find that it had the same status\nas the parts now seen, and was continuous with them. My assertion that\nit exists, while certainly theoretical and perhaps false, is accordingly\nscientific in type. Science, when it has no more scope than this, is\nindistinguishable from common sense. The two become distinct only when\nthe facts inferred cannot be easily verified or have not yet been merged\nwith the notion representing the given object in most men\u2019s minds.\n\nWhere science remains consciously theoretical (being as yet contrasted\nwith ordinary apperception and current thought), it is, ideally\nconsidered, a _pis aller_, an expedient to which a mind must have\nrecourse when it lacks power and scope to hold all experience in hand\nand to view the wide world in its genuine immediacy. As oblivescence is\na gradual death, proper to a being not ideally master of the universal\nflux, but swamped within it, so science is an artificial life, in which\nwhat cannot be perceived directly (because personal limitations forbid)\nmay be regarded abstractly, yet efficaciously, in what we think and do.\nWith better faculties the field of possible experience could be better\ndominated, and fewer of its parts, being hidden from sight, would need\nto be mapped out symbolically on that sort of projection which we call\nscientific inference. The real relations between the parts of nature\nwould then be given in intuition, from which hypothesis, after all, has\nborrowed its schemata.\n\n[Sidenote: Its intellectual essence.]\n\nScience is a half-way house between private sensation and universal\nvision. We should not forget to add, however, that the universal vision\nin question, if it were to be something better than private sensation or\npassive feeling in greater bulk, would have to be intellectual, just as\nscience is; that is, it would have to be practical and to survey the\nflux from a given standpoint, in a perspective determined by special and\nlocal interests. Otherwise the whole world, when known, would merely be\nre-enacted in its blind immediacy without being understood or subjected\nto any purpose. The critics of science, when endowed with any\nspeculative power, have always seen that what is hypothetical and\nabstract in scientific method is somehow servile and provisional;\nscience being a sort of telegraphic wire through which a meagre report\nreaches us of things we would fain observe and live through in their\nfull reality. This report may suffice for approximately fit action; it\ndoes not suffice for ideal knowledge of the truth nor for adequate\nsympathy with the reality. What commonly escapes speculative critics of\nscience, however, is that in transcending hypothesis and reaching\nimmediacy again we should run a great risk of abandoning knowledge and\nsympathy altogether; for if we _became_ what we now represent so\nimperfectly, we should evidently no longer represent it at all. We\nshould not, at the end of our labours, have at all enriched our own\nminds by adequate knowledge of what surrounds us, nor made our wills\njust in view of alien but well-considered interests. We should have lost\nour own essence and substituted for it, not something higher than\nindiscriminate being, but only indiscriminate being in its flat, blind,\nand selfish infinity. The ideality, the representative faculty, would\nhave gone out in our souls, and our perfected humanity would have\nbrought us back to protoplasm.\n\nIn transcending science, therefore, we must not hope to transcend\nknowledge, nor in transcending selfishness to abolish finitude. Finitude\nis the indispensable condition of unselfishness as well as of\nselfishness, and of speculative vision no less than of hypothetical\nknowledge. The defect of science is that it is inadequate or abstract,\nthat the account it gives of things is not full and sensuous enough; but\nits merit is that, like sense, it makes external being present to a\ncreature that is concerned in adjusting itself to its environment, and\ninforms that creature about things other than itself. Science, if\nbrought to perfection, would not lose its representative or ideal\nessence. It would still survey and inform, but it would survey\neverything at once and inform the being it enlightened about all that\ncould affect its interests. It would thus remain practical in effect and\nspeculative in character. In losing its accidental limitations it would\nnot lose its initial bias, its vital function. It would continue to be a\nrational activity, guiding and perfecting a natural being.\n\nPerfect knowledge of things would be as far as possible from identifying\nthe knower with them, seeing that for the most part\u2014even when we call\nthem human\u2014they have no knowledge of themselves. Science, accordingly,\neven when imperfect, is a tremendous advance on absorption in sense and\na dull immediacy. It begins to enrich the mind and gives it some\ninkling, at least, of that ideal dominion which each centre of\nexperience might have if it had learned to regard all others, and the\nrelation connecting it with them, both in thought and in action. Ideal\nknowledge would be an inward state corresponding to a perfect\nadjustment of the body to all forces affecting it. If the adjustment was\nperfect the inward state would regard every detail in the objects\nenvisaged, but it would see those details in a perspective of its own,\nadding to sympathetic reproduction of them a consciousness of their\nrelation to its own existence and perfection.\n\n[Sidenote: Unity of science.]\n\nThe fact that science expresses the character and relation of objects in\ntheir own terms has a further important consequence, which serves again\nto distinguish science from metaphorical thinking. If a man tries to\nillustrate the nature of a thing by assimilating it to something else\nwhich he happens to have in mind at the same time, it is obvious that a\nsecond man, whose mind is differently furnished, may assimilate the same\nobject to a quite different idea: so myths are centrifugal, and the more\nelaborate and delicate they are the more they diverge, like\nwell-developed languages. The rude beginnings of myth in every age and\ncountry bear a certain resemblance, because the facts interpreted are\nsimilar and the minds reading them have not yet developed their special\ngrammar of representation. But two highly developed mythical\nsystems\u2014two theologies, for instance, like the Greek and the\nIndian\u2014will grow every day farther and farther apart. Science, on the\ncontrary, whatever it may start with, runs back into the same circle of\nfacts, because it follows the lead of the subject-matter, and is\nattentive to its inherent transformations.\n\nIf men\u2019s fund of initial perceptions, then, is alike, their science is\nsure to be so; while the embroideries they make upon perception out of\ntheir own resources will differ as much as do the men themselves. Men\nasleep, said Heraclitus, live each in his own world, but awake they live\nin the same world together. To be awake is nothing but to be dreaming\nunder control of the object; it is to be pursuing science to the\ncomparative exclusion of mere mental vegetation and spontaneous myth.\nThus if our objects are the same, our science and our waking lives will\ncoincide; or if there is a natural diversity in our discoveries, because\nwe occupy different points in space and time and have a varying range of\nexperience, these diversities will nevertheless supplement one another;\nthe discovery that each has made will be a possible discovery for the\nothers also. So a geographer in China and one in Babylonia may at first\nmake wholly unlike maps; but in time both will take note of the\nHimalayas, and the side each approaches will slope up to the very crest\napproached by the other. So science is self-confirming, and its most\ndisparate branches are mutually illuminating; while in the realm of\nmyth, until it is surveyed scientifically, there can be nothing but\nmutual repulsion and incapacity to understand. Languages and religions\nare necessarily rivals, but sciences are necessarily allies.\n\n[Sidenote: In existence, judged by reflection, there is a margin of\nwaste.]\n\nThe unity of science can reach no farther than does coherent experience;\nand though coherence be a condition of experience in the more pregnant\nsense of the word\u2014in the sense in which the child or the fool has no\nexperience\u2014existence is absolutely free to bloom as it likes, and no\nlogic can set limits or prescribe times for its irresponsible presence.\nA great deal may accordingly exist which cannot be known by science, or\nbe reached from the outside at all. This fact perhaps explains why\nscience has as yet taken so little root in human life: for even within\nthe limits of human existence, which are tolerably narrow, there is\nprobably no little incoherence, no little lapsing into what, from any\nother point of view, is inconceivable and undiscoverable. Science, for\ninstance, can hardly reach the catastrophes and delights, often so\nvivid, which occur in dreams; for even if a physiological psychology\nshould some day be able to find the causes of these phenomena, and so to\npredict them, it would never enter the dream-world persuasively, in a\nway that the dreamer could appreciate and understand, while he continued\nto dream. This is because that dream-world and the waking world present\ntwo disjointed landscapes, and the figures they contain belong to quite\ndifferent genealogies\u2014like the families of Zeus and of Abraham. Science\nis a great disciplinarian, and misses much of the sport which the\nabsolute is free to indulge in. If there is no inner congruity and\ncommunion between two fields, science cannot survey them both; at best\nin tracing the structure of things presented in one of them, it may come\nupon some detail which may offer a basis or lodgment for the entire\nfabric of the other, which will thus be explained _ab extra_; as the\nchildren of Abraham might give an explanation for Zeus and his progeny,\ntreating them as a phenomenon in the benighted minds of some of Japhet\u2019s\nchildren.\n\nThis brings the Olympian world within the purview of science, but does\nso with a very bad grace. For suppose the Olympian gods really\nexisted\u2014and there is nothing impossible in that supposition\u2014they would\nnot be allowed to have any science of their own; or if they did, it\nwould threaten the children of Abraham with the same imputed unreality\nwith which the latter boast to have extinguished Olympus. In order,\nthen, that two regions of existence should be amenable to a science\ncommon to both and establishing a mutual rational representation between\nthem, it is requisite that the two regions should be congruous in\ntexture and continuous inwardly: the objects present in each must be\ntransformations of the objects present in the other. As this condition\nis not always fulfilled, even within a man\u2019s personal fortunes, it is\nimpossible that all he goes through should be mastered by science or\nshould accrue to him ideally and become part of his funded experience.\nMuch must be lost, left to itself, and resigned to the unprofitable\nflux that produced it.\n\n[Sidenote: Sciences converge from different points of origin.]\n\nA consequence of this incoherence in experience is that science is not\nabsolutely single but springs up in various places at once, as a certain\nconsistency or method becomes visible in this or that direction. These\nindependent sciences might, conceivably, never meet at all; each might\nwork out an entirely different aspect of things and cross the other, as\nit were, at a different level. This actually happens, for instance, in\nmathematics as compared with history or psychology, and in morals as\ncompared with physics. Nevertheless, the fact that these various\nsciences are all human, and that here, for instance, we are able to\nmention them in one breath and to compare their natures, is proof that\ntheir spheres touch somehow, even if only peripherally. Since common\nknowledge, which knows of them all, is itself an incipient science, we\nmay be sure that some continuity and some congruity obtains between\ntheir provinces. Some aspect of each must coincide with some aspect of\nsome other, else nobody who pursued any one science would so much as\nsuspect the existence of the rest. Great as may be the aversion of\nlearned men to one another, and comprehensive as may be their ignorance,\nthey are not positively compelled to live in solitary confinement, and\nthe key of their prison cells is at least in their own pocket.\n\n[Sidenote: Two chief kinds of science, physics and dialectic.]\n\nSome sciences, like chemistry and biology, or biology and anthropology,\nare parted only, we presume, by accidental gaps in human knowledge; a\nmore minute and better directed study of these fields would doubtless\ndisclose their continuity with the fields adjoining. But there is one\ngeneral division in science which cuts almost to the roots of human\nexperience. Human understanding has used from the beginning a double\nmethod of surveying and arresting ideally the irreparable flux of being.\nOne expedient has been to notice and identify similarities of character,\nrecurrent types, in the phenomena that pass before it or in its own\noperations; the other expedient has been to note and combine in one\ncomplex object characters which occur and reappear together. The latter\nfeat which is made easy by the fact that when various senses are\nstimulated at once the inward instinctive reaction\u2014which is felt by a\nprimitive mind more powerfully than any external image\u2014is one and not\nconsciously divisible.\n\nThe first expedient imposes on the flux what we call ideas, which are\nconcretions in discourse, terms employed in thought and language. The\nsecond expedient separates the same flux into what we call things, which\nare concretions in existence, complexes of qualities subsisting in space\nand time, having definable dynamic relations there and a traceable\nhistory. Carrying out this primitive diversity in reflection science\nhas moved in two different directions. By refining concretions in\ndiscourse it has attained to mathematics, logic, and the dialectical\ndevelopments of ethics; by tracing concretions in existence it has\nreached the various natural and historical sciences. Following ancient\nusage, I shall take the liberty of calling the whole group of sciences\nwhich elaborates ideas _dialectic_, and the whole group that describes\nexistences _physics_.\n\nThe contrast between ideal science or dialectic and natural science or\nphysics is as great as the understanding of a single experience could\nwell afford; yet the two kinds of science are far from independent. They\ntouch at their basis and they co-operate in their results. Were\ndialectic made clearer or physics deeper than it commonly is, these\npoints of contact would doubtless be multiplied; but even as they stand\nthey furnish a sufficient illustration of the principle that all science\ndevelops objects in their own category and gives the mind dominion over\nthe flux of matter by discovering its form.\n\n[Sidenote: Their mutual implication.]\n\nThat physics and dialectic touch at their basis may be shown by a double\nanalysis. In the first place, it is clear that the science of existence,\nlike all science, is itself discourse, and that before concretions in\nexistence can be discovered, and groups of coexistent qualities can be\nrecognised, these qualities themselves must be arrested by the mind,\nnoted, and identified in their recurrences. But these terms, bandied\nabout in scientific discourse, are so many essences and pure ideas: so\nthat the inmost texture of natural science is logical, and the whole\nforce of any observation made upon the outer world lies in the constancy\nand mutual relations of the terms it is made in. If down did not mean\ndown and motion motion, Newton could never have taken note of the fall\nof his apple. Now the constancy and relation of meanings is something\n_meant_, it is something created by insight and intent and is altogether\ndialectical; so that the science of existence is a portion of the art of\ndiscourse.\n\nOn the other hand discourse, in its operation, is a part of existence.\nThat truth or logical cogency is not itself an existence can be proved\ndialectically,[A] and is obvious to any one who sees for a moment what\ntruth means, especially if he remembers at the same time that all\nexistence is mutable, which it is the essence of truth not to be. But\nthe knowledge or discovery of truth is an event in time, an incident in\nthe flux of existence, and therefore a matter for natural science to\nstudy.\n\nFurthermore, every term which dialectic uses is originally given\nembodied; in other words, it is given as an element in the actual flux,\nit conies by illustration. Though meaning is the object of an ideal\nfunction, and signification is inwardly appreciable only in terms of\nsignification, yet the ideal leap is made from a material datum: that in\nwhich signification is seen is a fact. Or to state the matter somewhat\ndifferently, truth is not self-generating; if it were it would be a\nfalsehood.\n\nIts eternity, and the infinitude of propositions it contains, remain\npotential and unapproachable until their incidence is found in\nexistence. Form cannot of itself decide which of all possible forms\nshall be real; in their ideality, and without reference to their\nillustration in things, all consistent propositions would be equally\nvalid and equally trivial. Important truth is truth about something, not\ntruth about truth; and although a single datum might suffice to give\nfoothold and pertinence to an infinity of truths, as one atom would\nposit all geometry, geometry, if there were no space, would be, if I may\nsay so, all of the fourth dimension, and arithmetic, if there were no\npulses or chasms in being, would be all algebra. Truth depends upon\nfacts for its perspective, since facts select truths and decide which\ntruths shall be mere possibilities and which shall be the eternal forms\nof actual things. The dialectical world would be a trackless desert if\nthe existent world had no arbitrary constitution. Living dialectic comes\nto clarify existence; it turns into meanings the actual forms of things\nby reflecting upon them, and by making them intended subjects of\ndiscourse.\n\n[Sidenote: Their co-operation.]\n\nDialectic and physics, thus united at their basis, meet again in their\nresults. In mechanical science, which is the best part of physics,\nmathematics, which is the best part of dialectic, plays a predominant\nr\u00f4le; it furnishes the whole method of understanding wherever there is\nany real understanding at all. In psychology and history, too, although\ndialectic is soon choked by the cross-currents of nature, it furnishes\nthe little perspicuousness which there is. We understand actions and\nmental developments when the purposes or ideas contained in any stage\nare carried out logically in the sequel; it is when conduct and growth\nare rational, that is, when they are dialectical, that we think we have\nfound the true secret and significance of them. It is the evident ideal\nof physics, in every department, to attain such an insight into causes\nthat the effects actually given may be thence _deduced_; and deduction\nis another name for dialectic. To be sure, the dialectic applicable to\nmaterial processes and to human life is one in which the terms and the\ncategories needed are still exceedingly numerous and vague: a little\nlogic is all that can be read into the cataract of events. But the hope\nof science, a hope which is supported by every success it scores, is\nthat a simpler law than has yet been discovered will be found to connect\nunits subtler than those yet known; and that in these finer terms the\nuniversal mechanism may be exhaustively rendered. Mechanism is the ideal\nof physics, because it is the infusion of a maximum of mathematical\nnecessity into the flux of real things. It is the aspiration of natural\nscience to be as dialectical as possible, and thus, in their ideal, both\nbranches of science are brought together.\n\nThat the ideal of dialectic is to apply to existence and thereby to\ncoincide with physics is in a sense no less true, although dialecticians\nmay be little inclined to confess it. The direct purpose of deduction is\nto elucidate an idea, to develop an import, and nothing can be more\nirrelevant in this science than whether the conclusion is verified in\nnature or not. But the direct purpose of dialectic is not its ultimate\njustification. Dialectic is a human pursuit and has, at bottom, a moral\nfunction; otherwise, at bottom, it would have no value. And the moral\nfunction and ultimate justification of dialectic is to further the Life\nof Reason, in which human thought has the maximum practical validity,\nand may enjoy in consequence the richest ideal development. If dialectic\ntakes a turn which makes it inapplicable in physics, which makes it\nworthless for mastering experience, it loses all its dignity: for\nabstract cogency has no dignity if the subject-matter into which it is\nintroduced is trivial. In fact, were dialectic a game in which the\ncounters were not actual data and the conclusions were not possible\nprinciples for understanding existence, it would not be a science at\nall. It would resemble a counterfeit paper currency, without intrinsic\nvalue and without commercial convenience. Just as a fact without\nimplications is not a part of science, so a method without application\nwould not be.\n\nThe free excursions of dialectic into non-natural regions may be wisely\nencouraged when they satisfy an interest which is at bottom healthy and\nmay, at least indirectly, bring with it excellent fruits. As musicians\nare an honour to society, so are dialecticians that have a single heart\nand an exquisite patience. But somehow the benefit must redound to\nsociety and to practical knowledge, or these abstracted hermits will\nseem at first useless and at last mad. The logic of nonsense has a\nsubtle charm only because it can so easily be turned into the logic of\ncommon sense. Empty dialectic is, as it were, the ballet of science: it\nruns most neatly after nothing at all.\n\n[Sidenote: No science _a priori_.]\n\nBoth physics and dialectic are contained in common knowledge, and when\ncarried further than men carry them daily life these sciences remain\nessentially inevitable and essentially fallible. If science deserves\nrespect, it is not for being oracular but for being useful and\ndelightful, as seeing is. Understanding is nothing but seeing under and\nseeing far. There is indeed a great mystery in knowledge, but this\nmystery is present in the simplest memory or presumption. The sciences\nhave nothing to supply more fundamental than vulgar thinking or, as it\nwere, preliminary to it. They are simply elaborations of it; they accept\nits pre-suppositions and carry on its ordinary processes. A pretence on\nthe philosopher\u2019s part that he could get behind or below human thinking,\nthat he could underpin, so to speak, his own childhood and the inherent\nconventions of daily thought, would be pure imposture. A philosopher\ncan of course investigate the history of knowledge, he can analyse its\nmethod and point out its assumptions; but he cannot know by other\nauthority than that which the vulgar know by, nor can his knowledge\nbegin with other unheard-of objects or deploy itself in advance over an\nesoteric field. Every deeper investigation presupposes ordinary\nperception and uses some at least of its data. Every possible discovery\n_extends_ human knowledge. None can base human knowledge anew on a\ndeeper foundation or prefix an ante-experimental episode to experience.\nWe may construct a theory as disintegrating as we please about the\ndialectical or empirical conditions of the experience given; we may\ndisclose its logical stratification or physical antecedents; but every\nidea and principle used in such a theory must be borrowed from current\nknowledge as it happens to lie in the philosopher\u2019s mind.\n\n[Sidenote: Role of criticism.]\n\nIf these speculative adventures do not turn out well, the scientific man\nis free to turn about and become the critic and satirist of his foiled\nambitions. He may exhaust scepticism and withdraw into the citadel of\nimmediate feeling, yielding bastion after bastion to the assaults of\ndoubt. When he is at last perfectly safe from error and reduced to\nspeechless sensibility, he will perceive, however, that he is also\nwashed clean of every practical belief: he would declare himself\nuniversally ignorant but for a doubt whether there be really anything to\nknow. This metaphysical exercise is simply one of those \u201cfallings from\nus, vanishings, blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds\nnot realised\u201d which may visit any child. So long as the suspension of\njudgment lasts, knowledge is surely not increased; but when we remember\nthat the enemy to whom we have surrendered is but a ghost of our own\nevoking, we easily reoccupy the lost ground and fall back into an\nordinary posture of belief and expectation. This recovered faith has no\nnew evidences to rest on. We simply stand where we stood before we began\nto philosophise, only with a better knowledge of the lines we are\nholding and perhaps with less inclination to give them up again for no\nbetter reason than the undoubted fact that, in a speculative sense, it\nis always possible to renounce them.\n\nScience, then, is the attentive consideration of common experience; it\nis common knowledge extended and refined. Its validity is of the same\norder as that of ordinary perception, memory, and understanding. Its\ntest is found, like theirs, in actual intuition, which sometimes\nconsists in perception and sometimes in intent. The flight of science is\nmerely longer from perception to perception, and its deduction more\naccurate of meaning from meaning and purpose from purpose. It generates\nin the mind, for each vulgar observation, a whole brood of suggestions,\nhypotheses, and inferences. The sciences bestow, as is right and\nfitting, infinite pains upon that experience which in their absence\nwould drift by unchallenged or misunderstood. They take note, infer, and\nprophesy. They compare prophecy with event; and altogether they\nsupply\u2014so intent are they on reality\u2014every imaginable background and\nextension for the present dream.\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[Footnote A: For instance, in Plato\u2019s \u201cParmenides,\u201d where it is shown\nthat the ideas are not in the mind. We may gather from what is there\nsaid that the ideas cannot be identified with any embodiment of them,\nhowever perfect, since an idea means a nature common to all its possible\nembodiments and remains always outside of them. This is what Plato meant\nby saying that the ideas lay apart from phenomena and were what they\nwere in and for themselves. They were mere forms and not, as a\nmaterialised Platonism afterward fancied, images in the mind of some\npsychological deity. The gods doubtless know the ideas, as Plato tells\nus in the same place: these are the common object of their thought and\nof ours; hence they are not anybody\u2019s thinking process, which of course\nwould be in flux and phenomenal. Only by being ideal (_i.e._, by being a\ngoal of intellectual energy and no part of sensuous existence) can a\nterm be common to various minds and serve to make their deliverances\npertinent to one another.\n\nThat truth is no existence might also be proved as follows: Suppose that\nnothing existed or (if critics carp at that phrase), that a universe did\nnot exist. It would then be true that all existences were wanting, yet\nthis truth itself would endure; therefore truth is not an existence. An\nattempt might be made to reverse this argument by saying that since it\nwould still \u201cbe\u201d true that nothing existed, the supposition is\nself-contradictory, for the truth would \u201cbe\u201d or exist in any case. Truth\nwould thus be turned into an opinion, supposed to subsist eternally in\nthe ether. The argument, however, is a bad sophism, because it falsifies\nthe intent of the terms used. Somebody\u2019s opinion is not what is meant by\nthe truth, since every opinion, however long-lived, may be false.\nFurthermore, the notion that it might have been true that nothing\nexisted is a perfectly clear notion. The nature of dialectic is entirely\ncorrupted when sincerity is lost. No intent can be self-contradictory,\nsince it fixes its own object, but a man may easily contradict himself\nby wavering between one intent and another.]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER II\n\nHISTORY\n\n\n[Sidenote: History an artificial memory.]\n\nThe least artificial extension of common knowledge is history. Personal\nrecollection supplies many an anecdote, anecdotes collected and freely\ncommented upon make up memoirs, and memoirs happily combined make not\nthe least interesting sort of history. When a man recalls any episode in\nhis career, describes the men that flourished in his youth, or laments\nthe changes that have since taken place, he is an informal historian. He\nwould become one in a formal and technical sense if he supplemented and\ncontrolled his memory by ransacking papers, and taking elaborate pains\nto gather evidence on the events he wished to relate. This systematic\ninvestigation, especially when it goes back to first sources, widens the\nbasis for imaginative reconstruction. It buttresses somewhat the frail\nbody of casual facts that in the first instance may have engaged an\nindividual\u2019s attention.\n\nHistory is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be\nsaid to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not\nwhat science necessarily rests on. In order to sift evidence we must\nrely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to\nexpand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has\nto be assumed in order to support that knowledge is impossible to draw.\nMemory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the\nmind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but\na shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of\nthe past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the\noriginal experience which it purports to describe.\n\n[Sidenote: Second sight requires control.]\n\nIt is true that memory sometimes, as in a vision, seems to raise the\ncurtain upon the past and restore it to us in its pristine reality. We\nmay imagine at such moments experience can never really perish, but,\nthough hidden by chance from the roving eye, endures eternally in some\nspiritual sphere. Such bodily recovery of the past, however, like other\ntelepathic visions, can never prove its own truth. A lapse into by-gone\nperception, a sense of living the past over with all its vivid minuti\u00e6\nand trivial concomitants, might involve no true repetition of anything\nthat had previously existed. It might be a fresh experience altogether.\nThe sense of knowing constitutes only a working presumption for\nexperiment to start with; until corroboration comes that presumption can\nclaim no respect from the outsider.\n\n[Sidenote: Nature the theme common to various memories.]\n\nWhile memory remains a private presumption, therefore, it can be\ncompared with nothing else that might test its veracity. Only when\nmemory is expressed and, in the common field of expression, finds itself\ncorroborated by another memory, does it rise somewhat in dignity and\napproach scientific knowledge. Two presumptions, when they coincide,\nmake a double assurance. While memory, then, is the basis of all\nhistorical knowledge, it is not called history until it enters a field\nwhere it can be supported or corrected by evidence. This field is that\nnatural world which all experiences, in so far as they are rational,\nenvisage together. Assertions relating to events in that world can\ncorroborate or contradict one another\u2014something that would be\nimpossible if each memory, like the plot of a novel, moved in a sphere\nof its own. For memory to meet memory, the two must present objects\nwhich are similar or continuous: then they can corroborate or correct\neach other and help to fix the order of events as they really\nhappened\u2014that is, as they happened independently of what either memory\nmay chance to represent. Thus even the most miraculous and direct\nrecovery of the past needs corroboration if it is to be systematically\ncredited; but to receive corroboration it must refer to some event in\nnature, in that common world in space and time to which other memories\nand perceptions may refer also. In becoming history, therefore, memory\nbecomes a portion of natural science. Its assertions are such that any\nnatural science may conceivably support or contradict them.\n\n[Sidenote: Growth of legend.]\n\nNature and its transformations, however, form too serried and\ncomplicated a system for our wayward minds to dominate if left to their\nspontaneous workings. Whatever is remembered or conceived is at first\nvaguely believed to have its place in the natural order, all myth and\nfable being originally localised within the confines of the material\nworld and made to pass for a part of early history. The method by which\nknowledge of the past is preserved is so subject to imaginative\ninfluence that it cannot avail to exclude from history anything that the\nimagination may supply. In the growth of legend a dramatic rhythm\nbecomes more and more marked. What falls in with this rhythm is\nreproduced and accentuated whenever the train of memory is started anew.\nThe absence of such cadences would leave a sensible gap\u2014a gap which the\nmomentum of ideation is quick to fill up with some appropriate image.\nWhatever, on the other hand, cannot be incorporated into the dominant\nround of fancies is consigned more and more to oblivion.\n\nThis consolidation of legend is not intentional. It is ingenuous and for\nthe most part inevitable. When we muse about our own past we are\nconscious of no effort to give it dramatic unity; on the contrary, the\nexcitement and interest of the process consist in seeming to discover\nthe hidden eloquence and meaning of the events themselves. When a man of\nexperience narrates the wonders he has seen, we listen with a certain\nawe, and believe in him for his miracles as we believe in our own memory\nfor its arts. A bard\u2019s mechanical and ritualistic habits usually put all\njudgment on his own part to sleep; while the sanctity attributed to the\ntale, as it becomes automatically more impressive, precludes tinkering\nwith it intentionally. Especially the allegories and marvels with which\nearly history is adorned are not ordinarily invented with malice\nprepense. They are rather discovered in the mind, like a foundling,\nbetween night and morning. They are divinely vouchsafed. Each time the\ntale is retold it suffers a variation which is not challenged, since it\nis memory itself that has varied. The change is discoverable only if\nsome record of the narrative in its former guise, or some physical\nmemorial of the event related, survives to be confronted with the\nmodified version. The modified version itself can make no comparisons.\nIt merely inherits the name and authority of its ancestor. The innocent\npoet believes his own lies.\n\nLegends consequently acquire a considerable eloquence and dramatic\nforce. These beauties accrue spontaneously, because rhythm and ideal\npertinence, in which poetic merit largely lies, are natural formative\nprinciples for speech and memory. As symmetry in material structures is\na ground for strength, and hills by erosion are worn to pyramids, so it\nis in thoughts. Yet the stability attained is not absolute, but only\nsuch stability as the circumstances require. Dramatic effect is not\neverywhere achieved, nor is it missed by the narrator where it is\nwanting, so that even the oldest and best-pruned legends are full of\nirrelevant survivals, contradictions, and scraps of nonsense. These\nliterary blemishes are like embedded fossils and tell of facts which the\nmechanism of reproduction, for some casual reason, has not obliterated.\nThe recorder of verbal tradition religiously sets down its\ninconsistencies and leaves in the transfigured chronicle many tell-tale\nincidents and remarks which, like atrophied organs in an animal body,\nreveal its gradual formation. Art and a deliberate pursuit of unction or\nbeauty would have thrown over this baggage. The automatic and pious\nminstrel carries it with him to the end.\n\n[Sidenote: No history without documents.]\n\nFor these reasons there can be no serious history until there are\narchives and preserved records, although sometimes a man in a privileged\nposition may compose interesting essays on the events and persons of his\nown time, as his personal experience has presented them to him. Archives\nand records, moreover, do not absolve a speculative historian from\npaying the same toll to the dramatic unities and making the same\nconcessions to the laws of perspective which, in the absence of\ndocuments, turn tradition so soon into epic poetry. The principle that\nelicits histories out of records is the same that breeds legends out of\nremembered events. In both cases the facts are automatically\nforeshortened and made to cluster, as it were providentially, about a\nchosen interest. The historian\u2019s politics, philosophy, or romantic\nimagination furnishes a vital nucleus for reflection. All that falls\nwithin that particular vortex is included in the mental picture, the\nrest is passed over and tends to drop out of sight. It is not possible\nto say, nor to think, everything at once; and the private interest which\nguides a man in selecting his materials imposes itself inevitably on the\nevents he relates and especially on their grouping and significance.\n\nHistory is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.\nThe conditions of expression and even of memory dragoon the facts and\nput a false front on diffuse experience. What is interesting is brought\nforward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of\nevents, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are\nendowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their\nactions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual\nachievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain\nburied in absolute oblivion. Such falsification is inevitable, and an\nhonest historian is guilty of it only against his will. He would wish,\nas he loves the truth, to see and to render it entire. But the limits of\nhis book and of his knowledge force him to be partial. It is only a very\ngreat mind, seasoned by large wisdom, that can lend such an accent and\nsuch a carrying-power to a few facts as to make them representative of\nall reality.\n\n[Sidenote: The aim is truth.]\n\nSome historians, indeed, are so frankly partisan or cynical that they\navowedly write history with a view to effect, either political or\nliterary. Moralising historians belong to this school, as well as those\nphilosophers who worship evolution. They sketch every situation with\nmalice and twist it, as if it were an argument, to bring out a point,\nmuch as fashionable portrait-painters sometimes surcharge the\ncharacteristic, in order to make a bold effect at a minimum expense of\ntime and devotion. And yet the truly memorable aspect of a man is that\nwhich he wears in the sunlight of common day, with all his generic\nhumanity upon him. His most interesting phase is not that which he might\nassume under the lime-light of satirical or literary comparisons. The\ncharacteristic is after all the inessential. It marks a peripheral\nvariation in the honest and sturdy lump. To catch only the heartless\nshimmer of individuality is to paint a costume without the body that\nsupports it. Therefore a broad and noble historian sets down all within\nhis apperception. His literary interests are forgotten; he is wholly\ndevoted to expressing the passions of the dead. His ideal, emanating\nfrom his function and chosen for no extraneous reason, is to make his\nheroes think and act as they really thought and acted in the world.\n\nNevertheless the opposite happens, sometimes to a marked and even\nscandalous degree. As legend becomes in a few generations preposterous\nmyth, so history, after a few rehandlings and condensations, becomes\nunblushing theory. Now theory\u2014when we use the word for a schema of\nthings\u2019 relations and not for contemplation of them in their detail and\nfulness\u2014is an expedient to cover ignorance and remedy confusion. The\nfunction of history, if it could be thoroughly fulfilled, would be to\nrender theory unnecessary. Did we possess a record of all geological\nchanges since the creation we should need no geological theory to\nsuggest to us what those changes must have been. Hypothesis is like the\nrule of three: it comes into play only when one of the terms is unknown\nand needs to be inferred from those which are given. The ideal\nhistorian, since he would know all the facts, would need no hypotheses,\nand since he would imagine and hold all events together in their actual\njuxtapositions he would need no classifications. The intentions, acts,\nand antecedents of every mortal would be seen in their precise places,\nwith no imputed qualities or scope; and when those intentions had been\nin fact fulfilled, the fulfilments too would occupy their modest\nposition in the rank and file of marching existence. To omniscience the\nidea of cause and effect would be unthinkable. If all things were\nperceived together and co-existed for thought, as they actually flow\nthrough being, on one flat phenomenal level, what sense would there be\nin saying that one element had compelled another to appear? The relation\nof cause is an instrument necessary to thought only when thought is\nguided by presumption. We say, \u201cIf this thing had happened, that other\nthing would have followed\u201d\u2014a hypothesis which would lapse and become\nunmeaning had we always known all the facts. For no supposition contrary\nto fact would then have entered discourse.\n\n[Sidenote: Indirect methods of attaining it.]\n\nThis ideal of direct omniscience is, however, impossible to attain; not\nmerely accidental frailties, but the very nature of things stands in the\nway. Experience cannot be suspended or sustained in being, because its\nvery nucleus is mobile and in shifting cannot retain its past phases\nbodily, but only at best some trace or representation of them. Memory\nitself is an expedient by which what is hopelessly lost in its totality\nmay at least be partly kept in its beauty or significance; and\nexperience can be enlarged in no other way than by carrying into the\nmoving present the lesson and transmitted habit of much that is past.\nHistory is naturally reduced to similar indirect methods of recovering\nwhat has lapsed. The historian\u2019s object may be to bring the past again\nbefore the mind in all its living reality, but in pursuing that object\nhe is obliged to appeal to inference, to generalisation, and to dramatic\nfancy. We may conveniently distinguish in history, as it is perforce\nwritten by men, three distinct elements, which we may call historical\ninvestigation, historical theory, and historical romance.\n\n[Sidenote: Historical research a part of physics.]\n\nHistorical investigation is the natural science of the past. The\ncircumstance that its documents are usually literary may somewhat\ndisguise the physical character and the physical principles of this\nscience; but when a man wishes to discover what really happened at a\ngiven moment, even if the event were somebody\u2019s thought; he has to read\nhis sources, not for what they say, but for what they imply. In other\nwords, the witnesses cannot be allowed merely to speak for themselves,\nafter the gossiping fashion familiar in Herodotus; their testimony has\nto be interpreted according to the laws of evidence. The past needs to\nbe reconstructed out of reports, as in geology or arch\u00e6ology it needs to\nbe reconstructed out of stratifications and ruins. A man\u2019s memory or the\nreport in a newspaper is a fact justifying certain inferences about its\nprobable causes according to laws which such phenomena betray in the\npresent when they are closely scrutinised. This reconstruction is often\nvery difficult, and sometimes all that can be established in the end is\nmerely that the tradition before us is certainly false; somewhat as a\nperplexed geologist might venture on no conclusion except that the state\nof the earth\u2019s crust was once very different from what it is now.\n\n[Sidenote: Verification here indirect.]\n\nA natural science dealing with the past labours under the disadvantage\nof not being able to appeal to experiment. The facts it terminates upon\ncannot be recovered, so that they may verify in sense the hypothesis\nthat had inferred them. The hypothesis can be tested only by current\nevents; it is then turned back upon the past, to give assurance of facts\nwhich themselves are hypothetical and remain hanging, as it were, to the\nloose end of the hypothesis itself. A hypothetical fact is a most\ndangerous creature, since it lives on the credit of a theory which in\nturn would be bankrupt if the fact should fail. Inferred past facts are\nmore deceptive than facts prophesied, because while the risk of error in\nthe inference is the same, there is no possibility of discovering that\nerror; and the historian, while really as speculative as the prophet,\ncan never be found out.\n\nMost facts known to man, however, are reached by inference, and their\nreality may be wisely assumed so long as the principle by which they\nare inferred, when it is applied in the present, finds complete and\nconstant verification. Presumptions involved in memory and tradition\ngive the first hypothetical facts we count upon; the relations which\nthese first facts betray supply the laws by which facts are to be\nconcatenated; and these laws may then be used to pass from the first\nhypothetical facts to hypothetical facts of a second order, forming a\nbackground and congruous extension to those originally assumed. This\nexpansion of discursive science can go on for ever, unless indeed the\nprinciples of inference employed in it involve some present existence,\nsuch as a skeleton in a given tomb, which direct experience fails to\nverify. Then the theory itself is disproved and the whole galaxy of\nhypothetical facts which clustered about it forfeit their credibility.\n\n[Sidenote: Futile ideal to survey all facts.]\n\nHistorical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character\nof events throughout past time in all places. The task is frankly\nsuperhuman, because no block of real existence, with its infinitesimal\ndetail, can be recorded, nor if somehow recorded could it be dominated\nby the mind; and to carry on a survey of this social continuum _ad\ninfinitum_ would multiply the difficulty. The task might also be called\ninfrahuman, because the sort of omniscience which such complete\nhistorical science would achieve would merely furnish materials for\nintelligence: it would be inferior to intelligence itself. There are\nmany things which, as Aristotle says, it is better not to know than to\nknow\u2014namely, those things which do not count in controlling the mind\u2019s\nfortunes nor enter into its ideal expression. Such is the whole flux of\nimmediate experience in other minds or in one\u2019s own past; and just as it\nis better to forget than to remember a nightmare or the by-gone\nsensations of sea-sickness, so it is better not to conceive the sensuous\npulp of alien experience, something infinite in amount and insignificant\nin character.\n\nAn attempt to rehearse the inner life of everybody that has ever lived\nwould be no rational endeavour. Instead of lifting the historian above\nthe world and making him the most consummate of creatures, it would\nflatten his mind out into a passive after-image of diffuse existence,\nwith all its horrible blindness, strain, and monotony. Reason is not\ncome to repeat the universe but to fulfil it. Besides, a complete survey\nof events would perforce register all changes that have taken place in\nmatter since time began, the fields of geology, astronomy, pal\u00e6ontology,\nand arch\u00e6ology being all, in a sense, included in history. Such learning\nwould dissolve thought in a vertigo, if it had not already perished of\nboredom. Historical research is accordingly a servile science which may\nenter the Life of Reason to perform there some incidental service, but\nwhich ought to lapse as soon as that service is performed.\n\n[Sidenote: Historical theory.]\n\nThe profit of studying history lies in something else than in a dead\nknowledge of what happens to have happened. A seductive alternative\nmight be to say that the profit of it lies in _understanding_ what has\nhappened, in perceiving the principles and laws that govern social\nevolution, or the meaning which events have. We are hereby launched upon\na region of physico-ethical speculation where any man with a genius for\nquick generalisation can swim at ease. To find the one great cause why\nBorne fell, especially if no one has ever thought of it before, or to\nexpound the true import of the French Revolution, or to formulate in\nlimpid sentences the essence of Greek culture\u2014what could be more\ntempting or more purely literary? It would ill become the author of this\nbook to decry allegorical expressions, or a cavalierlike fashion of\ndismissing whole periods and tendencies with a verbal antithesis. We\nmust have exercises in apperception, a work of imagination must be taken\nimaginatively, and a landscape painter must be suffered to be, at his\nown risk, as impressionistic as he will. If Raphael, when he was\ndesigning the _School of Athens_, had said to himself that Aristotle\nshould point down to a fact and Plato up to a meaning, or when designing\nthe _Disputa_ had conceived that the proudest of intellects, weary of\nargument and learning, should throw down his books and turn to\nrevelation for guidance, there would have been much historical\npertinence in those conceptions; yet the figures would have been\nallegorical, contracting into a decorative design events that had been\ndispersed through centuries and emotions that had only cropped up here\nand there, with all manner of variations and alloys, when the particular\nnatural situation had made them inevitable. So the Renaissance might be\nspoken of as a person and the Reformation as her step-sister, and\nsomething might be added about the troubles of their home life; but\nwould it be needful in that case to enter a warning that these units\nwere verbal merely, and that the phenomena and the forces really at work\nhad been multitudinous and infinitesimal?\n\n[Sidenote: It is arbitrary.]\n\nIn fine, historical terms mark merely rhetorical unities, which have no\ndynamic cohesion, and there are no historical laws which are not at\nbottom physical, like the laws of habit\u2014those expressions of Newton\u2019s\nfirst law of motion. An essayist may play with historical apperception\nas long as he will and always find something new to say, discovering the\nideal nerve and issue of a movement in a different aspect of the facts.\nThe truly proportionate, constant, efficacious relations between things\nwill remain material. Physical causes traverse the moral units at which\nhistory stops, determining their force and duration, and the order, so\nirrelevant to intent, in which they succeed one another. Even the single\nman\u2019s life and character have subterranean sources; how should the outer\nexpression and influence of that character have sources more\nsuperficial than its own? Yet we cannot trace mechanical necessity down\nto the more stable units composing a personal mechanism, and much less,\ntherefore, to those composing a complex social evolution. We accordingly\ntranslate the necessity, obviously lurking under life\u2019s commonplace yet\nunaccountable shocks, into verbal principles, names for general\nimpressive results, that play some r\u00f4le in our ideal philosophy. Each of\nthese idols of the theatre is visible only on a single stage and to duly\npredisposed spectators. The next passion affected will throw a\ndifferently coloured calcium light on the same pageant, and there will\nbe no end of rival evolutions and incompatible ideal principles crossing\none another at every interesting event.\n\nSuch a manipulation of history, when made by persons who underestimate\ntheir imaginative powers, ends in asserting that events have directed\nthemselves prophetically upon the interests which they arouse. Apart\nfrom the magic involved and the mockery of all science, there is a\ndifficulty here which even a dramatic idealist ought to feel. The\ninterests affected are themselves many and contrary. If history is to be\nunderstood teleologically, which of all the possible ends it might be\npursuing shall we think really endowed with regressive influence and\nresponsible for the movement that is going to realise it? Did Columbus,\nfor instance, discover America so that George Washington might exist and\nthat some day football and the Church of England may prevail throughout\nthe world? Or was it (as has been seriously maintained) in order that\nthe converted Indians of South America might console Saint Peter for the\ndefection of the British and Germans? Or was America, as Hegel believed,\nideally superfluous, the absolute having become self-conscious enough\nalready in Prussia? Or shall we say that the real goal is at an infinite\ndistance and unimaginable by us, and useless, therefore, for\nunderstanding anything?\n\nIn truth, whatever plausibility the providential view of a given\noccurrence may have is dependent on the curious limitation and\nselfishness of the observer\u2019s estimations. Sheep are providentially\ndesigned for men; but why not also for wolves, and men for worms and\nmicrobes? If the historian is willing to accept such a suggestion, and\nto become a blind worshipper of success, applauding every issue, however\nlamentable for humanity, and calling it admirable tragedy, he may seem\nfor a while to save his theory by making it mystical; yet presently this\nlast illusion will be dissipated when he loses his way in the maze and\nfinds that all victors perish in their turn and everything, if you look\nfar enough, falls back into the inexorable vortex. This is the sort of\nobservation that the Indian sages made long ago; it is what renders\ntheir philosophy, for all its practical impotence, such an irrefragable\nrecord of experience, such a superior, definitive perception of the\nflux. Beside it, our progresses of two centuries and our philosophies of\nhistory, embracing one-quarter of the earth for three thousand years,\nseem puerile vistas indeed. Shall all eternity and all existence be for\nthe sake of what is happening here to-day, and to me? Shall we strive\nmanfully to the top of this particular wave, on the ground that its foam\nis the culmination of all things for ever?\n\nThere is a sense, of course, in which definite political plans and moral\naspirations may well be fulfilled by events. Our ancestors, sharing and\nanticipating our natures, may have had in many respects our actual\ninterests in view, as we may have those of posterity. Such ideal\nco-operation extends far, where primary interests are concerned; it is\nrarer and more qualified where a fine and fragile organisation is\nrequired to support the common spiritual life. Even in these cases, the\naim pursued and attained is not the force that operates, since the\nresult achieved had many other conditions besides the worker\u2019s intent,\nand that intent itself had causes which it knew nothing of. Every\n\u201chistorical force\u201d pompously appealed to breaks up on inspection into a\ncataract of miscellaneous natural processes and minute particular\ncauses. It breaks into its mechanical constituents and proves to have\nbeen nothing but an _effet d\u2019ensemble_ produced on a mind whose habits\nand categories are essentially rhetorical.\n\n[Sidenote: A moral critique of the past is possible.]\n\nThis sort of false history or philosophy of history might be purified,\nlike so many other things, by self-knowledge. If the philosopher in\nreviewing events confessed that he was scrutinising them in order to\nabstract from them whatever tended to illustrate his own ideals, as he\nmight look over a crowd to find his friends, the operation would become\na perfectly legitimate one. The events themselves would be left for\nscientific inference to discover, where credible reports did not testify\nto them directly; and the causes of events would be left to some theory\nof natural evolution, to be stated, according to the degree of knowledge\nattained, in terms more and more exact and mechanical. In the presence\nof the past so defined imagination and will, however, would not abdicate\ntheir rights, and a sort of retrospective politics, an estimate of\nevents in reference to the moral ideal which they embodied or betrayed,\nmight supervene upon positive history. This estimate of evolution might\nwell be called a philosophy of history, since it would be a higher\noperation performed on the results of natural science, to give a needful\nbasis and illustration to the ideal. The present work is an essay in\nthat direction.\n\n[Sidenote: How it might be just.]\n\nThe ideal which in such a review would serve as the touchstone for\nestimation, if it were an enlightened ideal, would recognise its own\nnatural basis, and therefore would also recognise that under other\nconditions other ideals, no less legitimate, may have arisen and may\nhave been made the standard for a different judgment on the world.\nHistorical investigation, were its resources adequate, would reveal to\nus what these various ideals have been. Every animal has his own, and\nwhenever individuals or nations have become reflective they have known\nhow to give articulate expression to theirs. That all these ideals could\nnot have been realised in turn or together is an immense misfortune, the\nirremediable half-tragedy of life, by which we also suffer. In\nestimating the measure of success achieved anywhere a liberal historian,\nwho does not wish to be bluntly irrational, will of course estimate it\nfrom _all_ these points of view, considering all real interests\naffected, in so far as he can appreciate them. This is what is meant by\nputting the standard of value, not in some arbitrary personal dogma but\nin a variegated omnipresent happiness.\n\nIt is by no means requisite, therefore, in disentangling the Life of\nReason, to foresee what ultimate form the good might some day take, much\nless to make the purposes of the philosopher himself, his time, or his\nnation the test of all excellence. This test is the perpetual\nconcomitant ideal of the life it is applied to. As all could not be well\nin the world if my own purposes were defeated, so the general excellence\nof things would be heightened if other men\u2019s purposes also had been\nfulfilled. Each will is a true centre for universal estimation. As each\nwill, therefore, comes to expression, real and irreversible values are\nintroduced into the world, and the historian, in estimating what has\nbeen hitherto achieved, needs to make himself the spokesman for all past\naspirations.\n\nIf the Egyptian poets sang well, though that conduces not at all to our\nadvantage, and though all those songs are now dumb, the Life of Reason\nwas thereby increased once for all in pith and volume. Brief erratic\nexperiments made in living, if they were somewhat successful in their\nday, remain successes always: and this is the only kind of success that\nin the end can be achieved at all. The philosopher that looks for what\nis good in history and measures the past by the scale of reason need be\nno impertinent dogmatist on that account. Reason would not be reason but\npassion if it did not make all passions in all creatures constituents of\nits own authority. The judgments it passes on existence are only the\njudgments which existence, so far, has passed on itself, and these are\nindelible and have their proportionate weight though others of many\ndifferent types may surround or succeed them.\n\n[Sidenote: Transition to historical romance.]\n\nTo inquire what everybody has thought about the world, and into what\nstrange shapes every passionate dream would fain have transformed\nexistence, might be merely a part of historical investigation. These\nfacts of preference and estimation might be made to stand side by side\nwith all other facts in that absolute physical order which the universe\nmust somehow possess. In the reference book of science they would all\nfind their page and line. But it is not for the sake of making vain\nknowledge complete that historians are apt to linger over heroic\nepisodes and commanding characters in the world\u2019s annals. It is not even\nin the hope of discovering just to what extent and in how many\ndirections experience has been a tragedy. The mathematical balance of\nfailure and success, even if it could be drawn with accuracy, would not\nbe a truth of moral importance, since whatever that balance might be for\nthe world at large, success and benefit here, from the living point of\nview, would be equally valid and delightful; and however good or however\nbad the universe may be it is always worth while to make it better.\n\nWhat engages the historian in the reconstruction of moral life, such as\nthe past contained, is that he finds in that life many an illustration\nof his own ideals, or even a necessary stimulus in defining what his\nideals are. Where his admiration and his sympathy are awakened, he sees\nnoble aims and great achievements, worthy of being minutely studied and\nbrought vividly before later generations. Very probably he will be led\nby moral affinities with certain phases of the past to attribute to\nthose phases, in their abstraction and by virtue of their moral dignity,\na material efficacy which they did not really have; and his interest in\nhistory\u2019s moral will make him turn history itself into a fable. This\nabuse may be abated, however, by having recourse to impartial historical\ninvestigation, that will restore to the hero all his circumstantial\nimpotence, and to the glorious event all its insignificant causes.\nCertain men and certain episodes will retain, notwithstanding, their\nintrinsic nobility; and the historian, who is often a politician and a\npoet rather than a man of science, will dwell on those noble things so\nas to quicken his own sense for greatness and to burnish in his soul\nideals that may have remained obscure for want of scrutiny or may have\nbeen tarnished by too much contact with a sordid world.\n\n[Sidenote: Possibility of genuine epics.]\n\nHistory so conceived has the function of epic or dramatic poetry. The\nmoral life represented may actually have been lived through; but that\ncircumstance is incidental merely and what makes the story worth telling\nis its pertinence to the political or emotional life of the present. To\nrevive past moral experience is indeed wellnigh impossible unless the\nliving will can still covet or dread the same issues; historical romance\ncannot be truthful or interesting when profound changes have taken place\nin human nature. The reported acts and sentiments of early peoples lose\ntheir tragic dignity in our eyes when they lose their pertinence to our\nown aims. So that a recital of history with an eye to its dramatic\nvalues is possible only when that history is, so to speak, our own, or\nwhen we assimilate it to ours by poetic license.\n\nThe various functions of history have been generally carried on\nsimultaneously and with little consciousness of their profound\ndiversity. Since historical criticism made its appearance, the romantic\ninterest in the past, far from abating, has fed eagerly on all the\nmaterial incidents and private gossip of remote times. This sort of\npetty historical drama has reflected contemporary interests, which have\ncentred so largely in material possessions and personal careers; while\nat the same time it has kept pace with the knowledge of minuti\u00e6 attained\nby arch\u00e6ology. When historical investigation has reached its limits a\nperiod of ideal reconstruction may very likely set in. Indeed were it\npossible to collect in archives exhaustive accounts of everything that\nhas ever happened, so that the curious man might always be informed on\nany point of fact that interested him, historical imagination might grow\nfree again in its movements. Not being suspected of wishing to distort\nfacts which could so easily be pointed to, it might become more\nconscious of its own moral function, and it might turn unblushingly to\nwhat was important and inspiring in order to put it with dramatic force\nbefore the mind. Such a treatment of history would reinstate that epic\nand tragic poetry which has become obsolete; it might well be written in\nverse, and would at any rate be frankly imaginative; it might furnish a\nsort of ritual, with scientific and political sanctions, for public\nfeasts. Tragedies and epics are such only in name if they do not deal\nwith the highest interests and destinies of a people; and they could\nhardly deal with such ideals in an authoritative and definite way,\nunless they found them illustrated in that people\u2019s traditions.\n\n[Sidenote: Literal truth abandoned.]\n\nHistoric romance is a work of art, not of science, and its fidelity to\npast fact is only an expedient, often an excellent and easy one, for\nstriking the key-note of present ideals. The insight attained, even when\nit is true insight into what some one else felt in some other age, draws\nits force and sublimity from current passions, passions potential in the\nauditor\u2019s soul. Mary Queen of Scots, for instance, doubtless repeated,\nin many a fancied dialogue with Queen Elizabeth, the very words that\nSchiller puts into her mouth in the central scene of his play, \u201c_Denn\nich bin Euer K\u00f6nig!_\u201d Yet the dramatic force of that expression, its\naudacious substitution of ideals for facts, depends entirely on the\nscope which we lend it. Different actors and different readers would\ninterpret it differently. Some might see in it nothing but a sally in a\nwoman\u2019s quarrel, reading it with the accent of mere spite and\nirritation. Then the tragedy, not perhaps without historic truth, would\nbe reduced to a loud comedy. Other interpreters might find in the\nphrase the whole feudal system, all the chivalry, legality, and\nfoolishness of the Middle Ages. Then the drama would become more\ninteresting, and the poor queen\u2019s cry, while that of a mind\nsophisticated and fanatical, would have great pathos and keenness. To\nreach sublimity, however, that moment would have to epitomise ideals\nwhich we deeply respected. We should have to believe in the sanctity of\ncanon law and in the divine right of primogeniture. That a woman may\nhave been very unhappy or that a state may have been held together by\npersonal allegiance does not raise the fate of either to the tragic\nplane, unless \u201claws that are not of to-day nor yesterday,\u201d aspirations\nnative to the heart, shine through those legendary misfortunes.\n\nIt would matter nothing to the excellence of Schiller\u2019s drama which of\nthese interpretations might have been made by Mary Stuart herself at any\ngiven moment; doubtless her attitude toward her rival was coloured on\ndifferent occasions by varying degrees of political insight and moral\nfervour. The successful historical poet would be he who caught the most\nsignificant attitude which a person in that position could possibly have\nassumed, and his Mary Stuart, whether accidentally resembling the real\nwoman or not, would be essentially a mythical person. So Electra and\nAntigone and Helen of Troy are tragic figures absolved from historical\naccuracy, although possibly if the personages of heroic times were known\nto us we might find that our highest imagination had been anticipated\nin their consciousness.\n\n[Sidenote: History exists to be transcended.]\n\nOf the three parts into which the pursuit of history may be\ndivided\u2014investigation, theory, and story-telling\u2014not one attains ideal\nfinality. Investigation is merely useful, because its intrinsic\nideal\u2014to know every detail of everything\u2014is not rational, and its\nacceptable function can only be to offer accurate information upon such\npoints as are worth knowing for some ulterior reason. Historical theory,\nin turn, is a falsification of causes, since no causes are other than\nmechanical; it is an arbitrary foreshortening of physics, and it\ndissolves in the presence either of adequate knowledge or of clear\nideals. Finally, historical romance passes, as it grows mature, into\nepics and tragedies, where the moral imagination disengages itself from\nall allegiance to particular past facts. Thus history proves to be an\nimperfect field for the exercise of reason; it is a provisional\ndiscipline; its values, with the mind\u2019s progress, would empty into\nhigher activities. The function of history is to lend materials to\npolitics and to poetry. These arts need to dominate past events, the\nbetter to dominate the present situation and the ideal one. A good book\nof history is one that helps the statesman to formulate and to carry out\nhis plans, or that helps the tragic poet to conceive what is most\nglorious in human destiny. Such a book, as knowledge and ignorance are\nnow mingled, will have to borrow something from each of the methods by\nwhich history is commonly pursued. Investigation will be necessary,\nsince the needful facts are not all indubitably known; theory will be\nnecessary too, so that those facts may be conceived in their pertinence\nto public interests, and the latter may thereby be clarified; and\nromance will not be wholly excluded, because the various activities of\nthe mind about the same matter cannot be divided altogether, and a\ndramatic treatment is often useful in summarising a situation, when all\nthe elements of it cannot be summoned up in detail before the mind.\n\n[Sidenote: Its great r\u00f4le.]\n\nFragmentary, arbitrary, and insecure as historical conceptions must\nremain, they are nevertheless highly important. In human consciousness\nthe indispensable is in inverse ratio to the demonstrable. Sense is the\nfoundation of everything. Without sense memory would be both false and\nuseless. Yet memory rather than sense is knowledge in the pregnant\nacceptation of the word; for in sense object and process are hardly\ndistinguished, whereas in memory significance inheres in the datum, and\nthe present vouches for the absent. Similarly history, which is derived\nfrom memory, is superior to it; for while it merely extends memory\nartificially it shows a higher logical development than memory has and\nis riper for ideal uses. Trivial and useless matter has dropped out.\nInference has gone a step farther, thought is more largely\nrepresentative, and testimony conveyed by the reports of others or\nfound in monuments leads the speculative mind to infer events that must\nhave filled the remotest ages. This information is not passive or idle\nknowledge; it truly _informs_ or shapes the mind, giving it new\naptitudes. As an efficacious memory modifies instinct, by levelling it\nwith a wider survey of the situation, so a memory of what human\nexperience has been, a sense of what it is likely to be under specific\ncircumstances, gives the will a new basis. What politics or any large\ndrama deals with is a will cast into historic moulds, an imagination\nbusy with what we call great interests. Great interests are a gift which\nhistory makes to the heart. A barbarian is no less subject to the past\nthan is the civic man who knows what his past is and means to be loyal\nto it; but the barbarian, for want of a trans-personal memory, crawls\namong superstitions which he cannot understand or revoke and among\npersons whom he may hate or love, but whom he can never think of raising\nto a higher plane, to the level of a purer happiness. The whole dignity\nof human endeavour is thus bound up with historic issues; and as\nconscience needs to be controlled by experience if it is to become\nrational, so personal experience itself needs to be enlarged ideally if\nthe failures and successes it reports are to touch impersonal interests.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER III\n\nMECHANISM\n\n\n[Sidenote: Recurrent forms in nature.]\n\nA retrospect over human experience, if a little extended, can hardly\nfail to come upon many interesting recurrences. The seasons make their\nround and the generations of men, like the forest leaves, repeat their\ncareer. In this its finer texture history undoubtedly repeats itself. A\nstudy of it, in registering so many recurrences, leads to a description\nof habit, or to natural history. To observe a recurrence is to divine a\nmechanism. It is to analyse a phenomenon, distinguishing its form, which\nalone recurs, from its existence, which is irrevocable; and that the\nflux of phenomena should turn out, on closer inspection, to be composed\nof a multitude of recurring forms, regularly interwoven, is the ideal of\nmechanism. The forms, taken ideally and in themselves, are what\nreflection first rescues from the flux and makes a science of; they\nconstitute that world of eternal relations with which dialectic is\nconversant. To note here and there some passing illustration of these\nforms is one way of studying experience. The observer, the poet, the\nhistorian merely _define_ what they see. But these incidental\nillustrations of form (called by Plato phenomena) may have a method in\ntheir comings and goings, and this method may in turn be definable. It\nwill be a new sort of constant illustrated in the flux; and this we call\na law. If events could be reduced to a number of constant forms moving\nin a constant medium according to a constant law, a maximum of constancy\nwould be introduced into the flux, which would thereby be proved to be\nmechanical.\n\nThe form of events, abstracted from their material presence, becomes a\ngeneral mould to which we tend to assimilate new observations. Whatever\nin particular instances may contravene the accredited rule, we attribute\nwithout a qualm to unknown variations in the circumstances, thus saving\nour faith in order at all hazards and appealing to investigation to\njustify the same. Only when another rule suggests itself which leaves a\nsmaller margin unaccounted for in the phenomena do we give up our first\ngeneralisation. Not even the rudest superstition can be criticised or\ndislodged scientifically save by another general rule, more exact and\ntrustworthy than the superstition. The scepticism which comes from\ndistrust of abstraction and disgust with reckoning of any sort is not a\nscientific force; it is an intellectual weakness.\n\nGeneralities are indeed essential to understanding, which is apt to\nimpose them hastily upon particulars. Confirmation is not needed to\ncreate prejudice. It suffices that a vivid impression should once have\ncut its way into the mind and settled there in a fertile soil; it will\nentwine itself at once with its chance neighbours and these adventitious\nrelations will pass henceforth for a part of the fact. Repetition,\nhowever, is a good means of making or keeping impressions vivid and\nalmost the only means of keeping them unchanged. Prejudices, however\nrefractory to new evidence, evolve inwardly of themselves. The mental\nsoil in which they lie is in a continual ferment and their very vitality\nwill extend their scope and change their application. Generalisations,\ntherefore, when based on a single instance, will soon forget it and\nshift their ground, as unchecked words shift their meaning. But when a\nphenomenon actually recurs the generalisations founded on it are\nreinforced and kept identical, and prejudices so sustained by events\nmake man\u2019s knowledge of nature.\n\n[Sidenote: Their discovery makes the flux calculable.]\n\nNatural science consists of general ideas which look for verification in\nevents, and which find it. The particular instance, once noted, is\nthrown aside like a squeezed orange, its significance in establishing\nsome law having once been extracted. Science, by this flight into the\ngeneral, lends immediate experience an interest and scope which its\nparts, taken blindly, could never possess; since if we remained sunk in\nthe moments of existence and never abstracted their character from their\npresence, we should never know that they had any relation to one\nanother. We should feel their incubus without being able to distinguish\ntheir dignities or to give them names. By analysing what we find and\nabstracting what recurs from its many vain incidents we can discover a\nsustained structure within, which enables us to foretell what we may\nfind in future. Science thus articulates experience and reveals its\nskeleton.\n\nSkeletons are not things particularly congenial to poets, unless it be\nfor the sake of having something truly horrible to shudder at and to\nfrighten children with: and so a certain school of philosophers exhaust\ntheir rhetoric in convincing us that the objects known to science are\nartificial and dead, while the living reality is infinitely rich and\nabsolutely unutterable. This is merely an ungracious way of describing\nthe office of thought and bearing witness to its necessity. A body is\nnone the worse for having some bones in it, even if they are not all\nvisible on the surface. They are certainly not the whole man, who\nnevertheless runs and leaps by their leverage and smooth turning in\ntheir sockets; and a surgeon\u2019s studies in dead anatomy help him\nexcellently to set a living joint. The abstractions of science are\nextractions of truths. Truths cannot of themselves constitute existence\nwith its irrational concentration in time, place, and person, its\nhopeless flux, and its vital exuberance; but they can be true of\nexistence; they can disclose that structure by which its parts cohere\nmaterially and become ideally inferable from one another.\n\n[Sidenote: Looser principles tried first.]\n\nScience becomes demonstrable in proportion as it becomes abstract. It\nbecomes in the same measure applicable and useful, as mathematics\nwitnesses, whenever the abstraction is judiciously made and has seized\nthe profounder structural features in the phenomenon. These features are\noften hard for human eyes to discern, buried as they may be in the\ninternal infinitesimal texture of things. Things accordingly seem to\nmove on the world\u2019s stage in an unaccountable fashion, and to betray\nmagic affinities to what is separated from them by apparent chasms. The\ntypes of relation which the mind may observe are multifarious. Any\nchance conjunction, any incidental harmony, will start a hypothesis\nabout the nature of the universe and be the parent image of a whole\nsystem of philosophy. In self-indulgent minds most of these standard\nimages are dramatic, and the cue men follow in unravelling experience is\nthat offered by some success or failure of their own. The sanguine,\nhaving once found a pearl in a dunghill, feel a glorious assurance that\nthe world\u2019s true secret is that everything in the end is ordered for\neverybody\u2019s benefit\u2014and that is optimism. The atrabilious, being ill at\nease with themselves, see the workings everywhere of insidious sin, and\nconceive that the world is a dangerous place of trial. A somewhat more\nobservant intellect may decide that what exists is a certain number of\ndefinite natures, each striving to preserve and express itself; and in\nsuch language we still commonly read political events and our friend\u2019s\nactions. At the dawn of science a Thales, observing the ways and the\nconditions of things somewhat more subtly, will notice that rain,\nsomething quite adventitious to the fields, is what covers them with\nverdure, that the slime breeds life, that a liquid will freeze to stone\nand melt to air; and his shrewd conclusion will be that everything is\nwater in one disguise or another. It is only after long accumulated\nobservation that we can reach any exact law of nature; and this law we\nhardly think of applying to living things. These have not yet revealed\nthe secret of their structure, and clear insight is vouchsafed us only\nin such regions as that of mathematical physics, where cogency in the\nideal system is combined with adequacy to explain the phenomena.\n\n[Sidenote: Mechanism for the most part hidden.]\n\nThese exact sciences cover in the gross the field in which human life\nappears, the antecedents of this life, and its instruments. To a\nspeculative mind, that had retained an ingenuous sense of nature\u2019s\ninexhaustible resources and of man\u2019s essential continuity with other\nnatural things, there could be no ground for doubting that similar\nprinciples (could they be traced in detail) would be seen to preside\nover all man\u2019s action and passion. A thousand indications, drawn from\nintrospection and from history, would be found to confirm this\nspeculative presumption. It is not only earthquakes and floods, summer\nand winter, that bring human musings sharply to book. Love and ambition\nare unmistakable blossomings of material forces, and the more intense\nand poetical a man\u2019s sense is of his spiritual condition the more loudly\nwill he proclaim his utter dependence on nature and the identity of the\nmoving principle in him and in her.\n\nMankind and all its works are undeniably subject to gravity and to the\nlaw of projectiles; yet what is true of these phenomena in bulk seems to\na superficial observation not to be true of them in detail, and a person\nmay imagine that he subverts all the laws of physics whenever he wags\nhis tongue. Only in inorganic matter is the ruling mechanism open to\nhuman inspection: here changes may be seen to be proportionate to the\nelements and situation in which they occur. Habit here seems perfectly\nsteady and is called necessity, since the observer is able to deduce it\nunequivocally from given properties in the body and in the external\nbodies acting upon it. In the parts of nature which we call living and\nto which we impute consciousness, habit, though it be fatal enough, is\nnot so exactly measurable and perspicuous. Physics cannot account for\nthat minute motion and pullulation in the earth\u2019s crust of which human\naffairs are a portion. Human affairs have to be surveyed under\ncategories lying closer to those employed in memory and legend. These\nlooser categories are of every sort\u2014grammatical, moral, magical\u2014and\nthere is no knowing when any of them will apply or in what measure.\nBetween the matters covered by the exact sciences and vulgar experience\nthere remains, accordingly, a wide and nebulous gulf. Where we cannot\nsee the mechanism involved in what happens we have to be satisfied with\nan empirical description of appearances as they first fall together in\nour apprehension; and this want of understanding in the observer is what\npopular philosophy calls intelligence in the world.\n\n[Sidenote: Yet presumably pervasive.]\n\nThat this gulf is apparent only, being due to inadequacy and confusion\nin human perception rather than to incoherence in things, is a\nspeculative conviction altogether trustworthy. Any one who can at all\ncatch the drift of experience\u2014moral no less than physical\u2014must feel\nthat mechanism rules the whole world. There are doubleness and diversity\nenough in things to satiate the greatest lover of chaos; but that a\ncosmos nevertheless underlies the superficial play of sense and opinion\nis what all practical reason must assume and what all comprehended\nexperience bears witness to. A cosmos does not mean a disorder with\nwhich somebody happens to be well pleased; it means a necessity from\nwhich every one must draw his happiness. If a principle is efficacious\nit is to that extent mechanical. For to be efficacious a principle must\napply necessarily and proportionately; it must assure us that where the\nfactors are the same as on a previous occasion the quotient will be the\nsame also.\n\nNow, in order that the flux of things should contain a repetition,\nelements must be identified within it; these identical elements may then\nfind themselves in an identical situation, on which the same result may\nensue which ensued before. If the elements were not constant and\nrecognisable, or if their relations did not suffice to determine the\nsucceeding event, no observation could be transferred with safety from\nthe past to the future. Thus art and comprehension would be defeated\ntogether. Novelties in the world are not lacking, because the elements\nentering at any moment into a given combination have never before\nentered into a combination exactly similar. Mechanism applies to the\nmatter and minute texture of things; but its applying there will create,\nat each moment, fresh ideal wholes, formal unities which mind emanates\nfrom and represents. The result will accordingly always be unprecedented\nin the total impression it produces, in exact proportion to the\nsingularity of the situation in hand. Mechanical processes are not like\nmathematical relations, because they _happen_. What they express the\nform of is a flux, not a truth or an ideal necessity. The situation may\ntherefore always be new, though produced from the preceding situation by\nrules which are invariable, since the preceding situation was itself\nnovel.\n\nMechanism might be called the dialectic of the irrational. It is such a\nmeasure of intelligibility as is compatible with flux and with\nexistence. Existence itself being irrational and change unintelligible,\nthe only necessity they are susceptible of is a natural or empirical\nnecessity, impinging at both ends upon brute matters of fact. The\nexistential elements, their situation, number, affinities, and mutual\ninfluence all have to be begged before calculation can begin. When these\nsurds have been accepted at their face value, inference may set to work\namong them; yet the inference that mechanism will continue to reign will\nnot amount to certain knowledge until the event inferred has come to\ngive it proof. Calculation in physics differs from pure dialectic in\nthat the ultimate object it looks to is not ideal. Theory here must\nrevert to the immediate flux for its sanction, whereas dialectic is a\ncentrifugal emanation from existence and never returns to its point of\norigin. It remains suspended in the ether of those eternal relations\nwhich forms have, even when found embedded in matter.\n\n[Sidenote: Inadequacy of consciousness.]\n\nIf the total flux is continuous and naturally intelligible, why is the\npart felt by man so disjointed and opaque? An answer to this question\nmay perhaps be drawn from the fact that consciousness apparently arises\nto express the functions only of extremely complicated organisms. The\nbasis of thought is vastly more elaborate than its deliverance. It takes\na wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.\nThe mind starts, therefore, with a tremendous handicap. In order to\nattain adequate practical knowledge it would have to represent clearly\nits own conditions; for the purpose of mind is its own furtherance and\nperfection, and before that purpose could be fulfilled the mind\u2019s\ninterests would have to become parallel to the body\u2019s fortunes. This\nmeans that the body\u2019s actual relations in nature would have to become\nthe mind\u2019s favourite themes in discourse. Had this harmony been\nattained, the more accurately and intensely thought was exercised the\nmore stable its status would become and the more prosperous its\nundertakings, since lively thought would then be a symptom of health in\nthe body and of mechanical equilibrium with the environment.\n\nThe body\u2019s actual relations, however, on which health depends, are\ninfinitely complex and immensely extended. They sweep the whole material\nuniverse and are intertwined most closely with all social and passionate\nforces, with their incalculable mechanical springs. Meantime the mind\nbegins by being a feeble and inconsequent ghost. Its existence is\nintermittent and its visions unmeaning. It fails to conceive its own\ninterests or the situations that might support or defeat those\ninterests. If it pictures anything clearly, it is only some phantastic\nimage which in no way represents its own complex basis. Thus the\nparasitical human mind, finding what clear knowledge it has laughably\ninsufficient to interpret its destiny, takes to neglecting knowledge\naltogether and to hugging instead various irrational ideas. On the one\nhand it lapses into dreams which, while obviously irrelevant to\npractice, express the mind\u2019s vegetative instincts; hence art and\nmythology, which substitute play-worlds for the real one on correlation\nwith which human prosperity and dignity depend. On the other hand, the\nmind becomes wedded to conventional objects which mark, perhaps, the\nturning-points of practical life and plot the curve of it in a schematic\nand disjointed fashion, but which are themselves entirely opaque and, as\nwe say, material. Now as matter is commonly a name for things not\nunderstood, men materially minded are those whose ideas, while\npractical, are meagre and blind, so that their knowledge of nature, if\nnot invalid, is exceedingly fragmentary. This grossness in common sense,\nlike irrelevance in imagination, springs from the fact that the mind\u2019s\nrepresentative powers are out of focus with its controlling conditions.\n\n[Sidenote: Its articulation inferior to that of its objects.]\n\nIn other words, sense ought to correspond in articulation with the\nobject to be represented\u2014otherwise the object\u2019s structure, with the\nfate it imports; cannot be transferred into analogous ideas. Now the\nhuman senses are not at all fitted to represent an organism on the scale\nof the human body. They catch its idle gestures but not the inner\nprocesses which control its action. The senses are immeasurably too\ngross. What to them is a _minimum visibile_, a just perceptible atom, is\nin the body\u2019s structure, very likely, a system of worlds, the inner\ncataclysms of which count in producing that so-called atom\u2019s behaviour\nand endowing it with affinities apparently miraculous. What must the\nseed of animals contain, for instance, to be the ground, as it\nnotoriously is, for every physical and moral property of the offspring?\nOr what must the system of signals and the reproductive habit in a brain\nbe, for it to co-ordinate instinctive movements, learn tricks, and\nremember? Our senses can represent at all adequately only such objects\nas the solar system or a work of human architecture, where the unit\u2019s\ninner structure and fermentation may be provisionally neglected in\nmastering the total. The architect may reckon in bricks and the\nastronomer in planets and yet foresee accurately enough the practical\nresult. In a word, only what is extraordinarily simple is intelligible\nto man, while only what is extraordinarily complex can support\nintelligence. Consciousness is essentially incompetent to understand\nwhat most concerns it, its own vicissitudes, and sense is altogether out\nof scale with the objects of practical interest in life.\n\n[Sidenote: Science consequently retarded.]\n\nOne consequence of this profound maladjustment is that science is hard\nto attain and is at first paradoxical. The change of scale required is\nviolent and frustrates all the mind\u2019s rhetorical habits. There is a\nconstant feeling of strain and much flying back to the mother-tongue of\nmyth and social symbol. Every wrong hypothesis is seized upon and is\ntried before any one will entertain the right one. Enthusiasm for\nknowledge is chilled by repeated failures and a great confusion cannot\nbut reign in philosophy. A man with an eye for characteristic features\nin various provinces of experience is encouraged to deal with each upon\na different principle; and where these provinces touch or actually fuse,\nhe is at a loss what method of comprehension to apply. There sets in,\naccordingly, a tendency to use various methods at once or a different\none on each occasion, as language, custom, or presumption seems to\ndemand. Science is reduced by philosophers to plausible discourse, and\nthe more plausible the discourse is, by leaning on all the heterogeneous\nprejudices of the hour, the more does it foster the same and discourage\nradical investigation.\n\nThus even Aristotle felt that good judgment and the dramatic habit of\nthings altogether excluded the simple physics of Democritus. Indeed, as\nthings then stood, Democritus had no right to his simplicity, except\nthat divine right which comes of inspiration. His was an indefensible\nfaith in a single radical insight, which happened nevertheless to be\ntrue. To justify that insight forensically it would have been necessary\nto change the range of human vision, making it telescopic in one region\nand microscopic in another; whereby the objects so transfigured would\nhave lost their familiar aspect and their habitual context in discourse.\nWithout such a startling change of focus nature can never seem\neverywhere mechanical. Hence, even to this day, people with broad human\ninterests are apt to discredit a mechanical philosophy. Seldom can\npenetration and courage in thinking hold their own against the\nmiscellaneous habits of discourse; and nobody remembers that moral\nvalues must remain captious, and imaginative life ignoble and dark, so\nlong as the whole basis and application of them is falsely conceived.\nDiscoveries in science are made only by near-sighted specialists, while\nthe influence of public sentiment and policy still works systematically\nagainst enlightenment.\n\n[Sidenote: and speculation rendered necessary.]\n\nThe maladaptation of sense to its objects has a second consequence: that\nspeculation is in a way nobler for man than direct perception. For\ndirect perception is wholly inadequate to render the force, the reality,\nthe subtle relations of the object perceived, unless this object be a\nshell only, like a work of fine art, where nothing counts but the\nsurface. Since the function of perception is properly to give\nunderstanding and dominion, direct perception is a defeat and, as it\nwere, an insult to the mind, thus forced to busy itself about so\nunintelligible and dense an apparition. \u00c6sthetic enthusiasm cares\nnothing about what the object inwardly is, what is its efficacious\nmovement and real life. It revels selfishly in the harmonies of\nperception itself, harmonies which perhaps it attributes to the object\nthrough want of consideration. These \u00e6sthetic objects, which have no\nintrinsic unity or cohesion, lapse in the most melancholy and\ninexplicable fashion before our eyes. Then we cry that beauty wanes,\nthat life is brief, and that its prizes are deceptive. Our minds have\nfed on casual aspects of nature, like tints in sunset clouds.\nImaginative fervour has poured itself out exclusively on these\napparitions, which are without relevant backing in the world; and long,\nperhaps, before this life is over, which we called too brief, we begin\nto pine for another, where just those images which here played so\ndeceptively on the surface of the flux may be turned into fixed and\nefficacious realities. Meantime speculation amuses us with prophecies\nabout what such realities might be. We look for them, very likely, in\nthe wrong place, namely, in human poetry and eloquence, or at best in\ndialectic; yet even when stated in these mythical terms the hidden world\ndivined in meditation seems nobler and, as we say, more real than the\nobjects of sense. For we hope, in those speculative visions, to reach\nthe permanent, the efficacious, the stanch principles of experience,\nsomething to rely on in prospect and appeal to in perplexity.\n\nScience, in its prosaic but trustworthy fashion, passes likewise beyond\nthe dreamlike unities and cadences which sense discloses; only, as\nscience aims at controlling its speculation by experiment, the hidden\nreality it discloses is exactly like what sense perceives, though on a\ndifferent scale, and not observable, perhaps, without a magic carpet of\nhypothesis, to carry the observer to the ends of the universe or,\nchanging his dimensions, to introduce him into those infinitesimal\nabysses where nature has her workshop. In this region, were it\nsufficiently explored, we might find just those solid supports and\nfaithful warnings which we were looking for with such ill success in our\nrhetorical speculations. The machinery disclosed would not be human; it\nwould be machinery. But it would for that very reason serve the purpose\nwhich made us look for it instead of remaining, like the lower animals,\nplacidly gazing on the pageants of sense, till some unaccountable pang\nforced us to spasmodic movement. It is doubtless better to find material\nengines\u2014not necessarily inanimate, either\u2014which may really serve to\nbring order, security, and progress into our lives, than to find\nimpassioned or ideal spirits, that can do nothing for us except, at\nbest, assure us that they are perfectly happy.\n\n[Sidenote: Dissatisfaction with mechanism partly natural.]\n\nThe reigning aversion to mechanism is partly natural and partly\nartificial. The natural aversion cannot be wholly overcome. Like the\naversion to death, to old age, to labour, it is called forth by man\u2019s\nnatural situation in a world which was not made for him, but in which he\ngrew. That the efficacious structure of things should not be\nintentionally spectacular nor poetical, that its units should not be\nterms in common discourse, nor its laws quite like the logic of passion,\nis of course a hard lesson to learn. The learning, however\u2014not to speak\nof its incidental delights\u2014is so extraordinarily good for people that\nonly with that instruction and the blessed renunciations it brings can\nclearness, dignity, or virility enter their minds. And of course, if the\nmaterial basis of human strength could be discovered and better\nexploited, the free activity of the mind would be not arrested but\nenlarged. Geology adds something to the interest of landscape, and\nbotany much to the charm of flowers; natural history increases the\npleasure with which we view society and the justice with which we judge\nit. An instinctive sympathy, a solicitude for the perfect working of any\ndelicate thing, as it makes the ruffian tender to a young child, is a\nsentiment inevitable even toward artificial organisms. Could we better\nperceive the fine fruits of order, the dire consequences of every\nspecific cruelty or jar, we should grow doubly considerate toward all\nforms; for we exist through form, and the love of form is our whole real\ninspiration.\n\n[Sidenote: and partly artificial.]\n\nThe artificial prejudice against mechanism is a fruit of party spirit.\nWhen a myth has become the centre or sanction for habits and\ninstitutions, these habits and institutions stand against any conception\nincompatible with that myth. It matters nothing that the values the\nmyth was designed to express may remain standing without it, or may be\ntransferred to its successor. Social and intellectual inertia is too\ngreat to tolerate so simple an evolution. It divides opinions not into\nfalse and true but into high and low, or even more frankly into those\nwhich are acceptable and comforting to its ruffled faith and those which\nare dangerous, alarming, and unfortunate. Imagine Socrates \u201cviewing with\nalarm\u201d the implications of an argument! This artificial prejudice is\nindeed modern and will not be eternal. Ancient sages, when they wished\nto rebuke the atheist, pointed to the very heavens which a sentimental\nreligion would nowadays gladly prove to be unreal, lest the soul should\nlearn something of their method. Yet the Ptolemaic spheres were no more\nmanlike and far less rich in possibilities of life than the Copernican\nstar-dust. The ancients thought that what was intelligible was divine.\nOrder was what they meant by intelligence, and order productive of\nexcellence was what they meant by reason. When they noticed that the\nstars moved perpetually and according to law, they seriously thought\nthey were beholding the gods. The stars as we conceive them are not in\nthat sense perfect. But the order which nature does not cease to\nmanifest is still typical of all order, and is sublime. It is from these\nregions of embodied law that intelligibility and power combined come to\nmake their covenant with us, as with all generations.\n\n[Sidenote: Biassed judgments inspired by moral inertia.]\n\nThe emotions and the moral principles that are naturally allied to\nmaterialism suffer an eclipse when materialism, which is properly a\nprimary or dogmatic philosophy, breathing courage and victory, appears\nas a destructive force and in the incongruous r\u00f4le of a critic. One\ndogmatism is not fit to criticise another; their conflict can end only\nin insults, sullenness, and an appeal to that physical drift and\nirrational selection which may ultimately consign one party to oblivion.\nBut a philosophy does ill to boast of such borrowed triumphs. The next\nturn of the wheel may crush the victor, and the opinions hastily buried\nmay rise again to pose as the fashionable and superior insights of a\nlater day. To criticise dogmatism it is necessary to be a genuine\nsceptic, an honest transcendentalist, that falls back on the immediate\nand observes by what principles of logical architecture the ultimate,\nthe reality discovered, has been inferred from it. Such criticism is not\nnecessarily destructive; some construction and some belief being\nabsolutely inevitable, if reason and life are to operate at all,\ncriticism merely offers us the opportunity of revising and purifying our\ndogmas, so as to make them reasonable and congruous with practice.\nMaterialism may thus be reinstated on transcendental grounds, and the\ndogma at first uttered in the flush of intelligent perception, with no\nscruple or self-consciousness, may be repeated after a thorough\nexamination of heart, on the ground that it is the best possible\nexpression of experience, the inevitable deliverance of thought. So\napproached, a dogmatic system will carry its critical justification with\nit, and the values it enshrines and secures will not be doubtful. The\nemotions it arouses will be those aroused by the experience it explains.\nCauses having been found for what is given, these causes will be proved\nto have just that beneficent potency and just that distressing\ninadequacy which the joys and failures of life show that the reality\nhas, whatever this reality may otherwise be. The theory will add nothing\nexcept the success involved in framing it. Life being once for all what\nit is, no physics can render it worse or better, save as the knowledge\nof physics, with insight into the causes of our varied fortunes, is\nitself an achievement and a new resource.\n\n[Sidenote: Positive emotions proper to materialism.]\n\nA theory is not an unemotional thing. If music can be full of passion,\nmerely by giving form to a single sense, how much more beauty or terror\nmay not a vision be pregnant with which brings order and method into\neverything that we know. Materialism has its distinct \u00e6sthetic and\nemotional colour, though this may be strangely affected and even\nreversed by contrast with systems of an incongruous hue, jostling it\naccidentally in a confused and amphibious mind. If you are in the habit\nof believing in special providences, or of expecting to continue your\nromantic adventures in a second life, materialism will dash your hopes\nmost unpleasantly, and you may think for a year or two that you have\nnothing left to live for. But a thorough materialist, one born to the\nfaith and not half plunged into it by an unexpected christening in cold\nwater, will be like the superb Democritus, a laughing philosopher. His\ndelight in a mechanism that can fall into so many marvellous and\nbeautiful shapes, and can generate so many exciting passions, should be\nof the same intellectual quality as that which the visitor feels in a\nmuseum of natural history, where he views the myriad butterflies in\ntheir cases, the flamingoes and shell-fish, the mammoths and gorillas.\nDoubtless there were pangs in that incalculable life, but they were soon\nover; and how splendid meantime was the pageant, how infinitely\ninteresting the universal interplay, and how foolish and inevitable\nthose absolute little passions. Somewhat of that sort might be the\nsentiment that materialism would arouse in a vigorous mind, active,\njoyful, impersonal, and in respect to private illusions not without a\ntouch of scorn.\n\nTo the genuine sufferings of living creatures the ethics that\naccompanies materialism has never been insensible; on the contrary, like\nother merciful systems, it has trembled too much at pain and tended to\nwithdraw the will ascetically, lest the will should be defeated.\nContempt for mortal sorrows is reserved for those who drive with\nhosannas the Juggernaut car of absolute optimism. But against evils\nborn of pure vanity and self-deception, against the verbiage by which\nman persuades himself that he is the goal and acme of the universe,\nlaughter is the proper defence. Laughter also has this subtle advantage,\nthat it need not remain without an overtone of sympathy and brotherly\nunderstanding; as the laughter that greets Don Quixote\u2019s absurdities and\nmisadventures does not mock the hero\u2019s intent. His ardour was admirable,\nbut the world must be known before it can be reformed pertinently, and\nhappiness, to be attained, must be placed in reason.\n\n[Sidenote: The material world not dead nor ugly,]\n\nOblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have\ngenerally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter.\nIf they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance\nand affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds\nwhich they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in\ncould not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving\nrhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature\u2019s\nmeagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled\nthey spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their\njudgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal. A man\nis not blind, however, because every part of his body is not an eye, nor\nevery muscle in his eye a nerve sensitive to light. Why, then, is nature\ndead, although it swarms with living organisms, if every part is not\nobviously animate? And why is the sun dark and cold, if it is bright and\nhot only to animal sensibility? This senseless lamentation is like the\nsophism of those Indian preachers who, to make men abandon the illusions\nof self-love, dilated on the shocking contents of the human body. Take\noff the skin, they cried, and you will discover nothing but loathsome\nbleeding and quivering substances. Yet the inner organs are well enough\nin their place and doubtless pleasing to the microbes that inhabit them;\nand a man is not hideous because his cross-section would not offer the\nfeatures of a beautiful countenance. So the structure of the world is\nnot therefore barren or odious because, if you removed its natural outer\naspect and effects, it would not make an interesting landscape. Beauty\nbeing an appearance and life an operation, that is surely beautiful and\nliving which so operates and so appears as to manifest those qualities.\n\n[Sidenote: nor especially cruel.]\n\nIt is true that materialism prophesies an ultimate extinction for man\nand all his works. The horror which this prospect inspires in the\nnatural man might be mitigated by reflection; but, granting the horror,\nis it something introduced by mechanical theories and not present in\nexperience itself? Are human things inwardly stable? Do they belong to\nthe eternal in any sense in which the operation of material forces can\ntouch their immortality? The panic which seems to seize some minds at\nthe thought of a merely natural existence is something truly\nhysterical; and yet one wonders why ultimate peace should seem so\nintolerable to people who not so many years ago found a stern religious\nsatisfaction in consigning almost the whole human race to perpetual\ntorture, the Creator, as Saint Augustine tells us, having in his\ninfinite wisdom and justice devised a special kind of material fire that\nmight avail to burn resurrected bodies for ever without consuming them.\nA very real truth might be read into this savage symbol, if we\nunderstood it to express the ultimate defeats and fruitless agonies that\npursue human folly; and so we might find that it gave mythical\nexpression to just that conditioned fortune and inexorable flux which a\nmechanical philosophy shows us the grounds of. Our own vices in another\nman seem particularly hideous; and so those actual evils which we take\nfor granted when incorporated in the current system strike us afresh\nwhen we see them in a new setting. But it is not mechanical science that\nintroduced mutability into things nor materialism that invented death.\n\n[Sidenote: Mechanism to be judged by its fruits.]\n\nThe death of individuals, as we observe daily in nature, does not\nprevent the reappearance of life; and if we choose to indulge in\narbitrary judgments on a subject where data fail us, we may as\nreasonably wish that there might be less life as that there might be\nmore. The passion for a large and permanent population in the universe\nis not obviously rational; at a great distance a man must view\neverything, including himself, under the form of eternity, and when life\nis so viewed its length or its diffusion becomes a point of little\nimportance. What matters then is quality. The reasonable and humane\ndemand to make of the world is that such creatures as exist should not\nbe unhappy and that life, whatever its quantity, should have a quality\nthat may justify it in its own eyes. This just demand, made by\nconscience and not by an arbitrary fancy, the world described by\nmechanism does not fulfil altogether, for adjustments in it are\ntentative, and much friction must precede and follow upon any vital\nequilibrium attained. This imperfection, however, is actual, and no\ntheory can overcome it except by verbal fallacies and scarcely deceptive\neuphemisms. What mechanism involves in this respect is exactly what we\nfind: a tentative appearance of life in many quarters, its disappearance\nin some, and its reinforcement and propagation in others, where the\nphysical equilibrium attained insures to it a natural stability and a\nnatural prosperity.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IV\n\nHESITATIONS IN METHOD\n\n\n[Sidenote: Mechanism restricted to one-half of existence.]\n\nWhen Democritus proclaimed the sovereignty of mechanism, he did so in\nthe oracular fashion proper to an ancient sage. He found it no harder to\napply his atomic theory to the mind and to the gods than to solids and\nfluids. It sufficed to conceive that such an explanation might be\npossible, and to illustrate the theory by a few scattered facts and\ntrenchant hypotheses. When Descartes, after twenty centuries of verbal\nphysics, reintroduced mechanism into philosophy, he made a striking\nmodification in its claims. He divided existence into two independent\nregions, and it was only in one, in the realm of extended things, that\nmechanism was expected to prevail. Mental facts, which he approached\nfrom the side of abstracted reflection and Platonic ideas, seemed to him\nobviously non-extended, even when they represented extension; and with\nthem mechanism could have nothing to do. Descartes had recovered in the\nscience of mechanics a firm nucleus for physical theory, a stronghold\nfrom which it had become impossible to dislodge scientific methods.\nThere, at any rate, form, mass, distance, and other mathematical\nrelations governed the transformation of things. Yet the very clearness\nand exhaustiveness of this mechanical method, as applied to gross masses\nin motion, made it seem essentially inapplicable to anything else.\nDescartes was far too radical and incisive a thinker, however, not to\nfeel that it must apply throughout nature. Imaginative difficulties due\nto the complexity of animal bodies could not cloud his rational insight.\nAnimal bodies, then, were mere machines, cleancut and cold engines like\nso many anatomical manikins. They explained themselves and all their\noperations, talking and building temples being just as truly a matter of\nphysics as the revolution of the sky. But the soul had dropped out, and\nDescartes was the last man to ignore the soul. There had dropped out\nalso the secondary qualities of matter, all those qualities, namely,\nwhich are negligible in mechanical calculations. Mechanism was in truth\nfar from universal; all mental facts and half the properties of matter,\nas matter is revealed to man, came into being without asking leave; they\nwere interlopers in the intelligible universe. Indeed, Descartes was\nwilling to admit that these inexplicable bystanders might sometimes put\ntheir finger in the pie, and stir the material world judiciously so as\nto give it a new direction, although without adding to its substance or\nto its force.\n\nThe situation so created gave the literary philosophers an excellent\nchance to return to the attack and to swallow and digest the new-born\nmechanism in their facile systems. Theologians and metaphysicians in one\nquarter and psychologists in another found it easy and inevitable to\ntreat the whole mechanical world as a mere idea. In that case, it is\ntrue, the only existences that remained remained entirely without\ncalculable connections; everything was a divine trance or a shower of\nideas falling by chance through the void. But this result might not be\nunwelcome. It fell in well enough with that love of emotional issues,\nthat want of soberness and want of cogency, which is so characteristic\nof modern philosophers. Christian theology still remained the background\nand chief point of reference for speculation; if its eclectic dogmas\ncould be in part supported or in part undermined, that constituted a\nsufficient literary success, and what became of science was of little\nmoment in comparison.\n\n[Sidenote: Men of science not speculative.]\n\nScience, to be sure, could very well take care of itself and proceeded\nin its patient course without caring particularly what status the\nmetaphysicians might assign to it. Not to be a philosopher is even an\nadvantage for a man of science, because he is then more willing to adapt\nhis methods to the state of knowledge in his particular subject, without\ninsisting on ultimate intelligibility; and he has perhaps more joy of\nhis discoveries than he might have if he had discounted them in his\nspeculations. Darwin, for instance, did more than any one since Newton\nto prove that mechanism is universal, but without apparently believing\nthat it really was so, or caring about the question at all. In natural\nhistory, observation has not yet come within range of accurate\nprocesses; it merely registers habits and traces empirical derivations.\nEven in chemistry, while measure and proportion are better felt, the\nultimate units and the radical laws are still problematical. The recent\nimmense advances in science have been in acquaintance with nature rather\nthan in insight. Greater complexity, greater regularity, greater\n_naturalness_ have been discovered everywhere; the profound analogies in\nthings, their common evolution, have appeared unmistakably; but the\ninner texture of the process has not been laid bare.\n\nThis cautious peripheral attack, which does so much honour to the\nscientific army and has won it so many useful victories, is another\nproof that science is nothing but common knowledge extended. It is\nwilling to reckon in any terms and to study any subject-matter; where it\ncannot see necessity it will notice law; where laws cannot be stated it\nwill describe habits; where habits fail it will classify types; and\nwhere types even are indiscernible it will not despise statistics. In\nthis way studies which are scientific in spirit, however loose their\nresults, may be carried on in social matters, in political economy, in\nanthropology, in psychology. The historical sciences, also, philology\nand arch\u00e6ology, have reached tentatively very important results; it is\nenough that an intelligent man should gather in any quarter a rich fund\nof information, for the movement of his subject to pass somehow to his\nmind: and if his apprehension follows that movement\u2014not breaking in\nupon it with extraneous matter\u2014it will be scientific apprehension.\n\n[Sidenote: Confusion in semi-moral subjects.]\n\nWhat confuses and retards science in these ambiguous regions is the\ndifficulty of getting rid of the foreign element, or even of deciding\nwhat the element native to the object is. In political economy, for\ninstance, it is far from clear whether the subject is moral, and\ntherefore to be studied and expressed dialectically, or whether it is\ndescriptive, and so in the end a matter of facts and of mechanics. Are\nyou formulating an interest or tracing a sequence of events? And if both\nsimultaneously, are you studying the world in order to see what acts, in\na given situation, would serve your purpose and so be right, or are you\ntaking note of your own intentions, and of those of other people, in\norder to infer from them the probable course of affairs? In the first\ncase you are a moralist observing nature in order to use it; you are\ndefining a policy, and that definition is not knowledge of anything\nexcept of your own heart. Neither you nor any one else may ever take\nsuch a single-minded and unchecked course in the world as the one you\nare excogitating. No one may ever have been guided in the past by any\nsuch absolute plan.\n\nFor this same reason, if (to take up the other supposition) you are a\nnaturalist studying the actual movement of affairs, you would do well\nnot to rely on the conscious views or intentions of anybody. A natural\nphilosopher is on dangerous ground when he uses psychological or moral\nterms in his calculation. If you use such terms\u2014and to forbid their use\naltogether would be pedantic\u2014you should take them for conventional\nliterary expressions, covering an unsolved problem; for these views and\nintentions have a brief and inconsequential tenure of life and their\nexistence is merely a sign for certain conjunctions in nature, where\nprocesses hailing from afar have met in a man, soon to pass beyond him.\nIf they figure as causes in nature, it is only because they represent\nthe material processes that have brought them into being. The\nexistential element in mental facts is not so remote from matter as\nDescartes imagined. Even if we are not prepared to admit with Democritus\nthat matter is what makes them up (as it well might if \u201cmatter\u201d were\ntaken in a logical sense)[B] we should agree that their substance is in\nmechanical flux, and that their form, by which they become moral\nunities, is only an ideal aspect of that moving substance. Moral\nunities are created by a point of view, as right and left are, and for\nthat reason are not efficacious; though of course the existences they\nenclose, like the things lying to the left and to the right, move in\nunison with the rest of nature.\n\nPeople doubtless do well to keep an eye open for morals when they study\nphysics, and _vice versa_, since it is only by feeling how the two\nspheres hang together that the Life of Reason can be made to walk on\nboth feet. Yet to discriminate between the two is no scholastic\nsubtlety. There is the same practical inconvenience in taking one for\nthe other as in trying to gather grapes from thistles. A hybrid science\nis sterile. If the reason escapes us, history should at least convince\nus of the fact, when we remember the issue of Aristotelian physics and\nof cosmological morals. Where the subject-matter is ambiguous and the\nmethod double, you have scarcely reached a result which seems plausible\nfor the moment, when a rival school springs up, adopting and bringing\nforward the submerged element in your view, and rejecting your\nachievement altogether. A seesaw and endless controversy thus take the\nplace of a steady, co-operative advance. This disorder reigns in morals,\nmetaphysics, and psychology, and the conflicting schools of political\neconomy and of history loudly proclaim it to the world.\n\n[Sidenote: \u201cPhysic of metaphysic begs defence.\u201d]\n\nThe modesty of men of science, their aversion (or incapacity) to carry\ntheir principles over into speculation, has left the greater part of\nphysics or the theory of existence to the metaphysicians. What they have\nmade of it does not concern us here, since the result has certainly not\nbeen a science; indeed they have obscured the very notion that there\nshould be a science of all existence and that metaphysics, if it is more\nthan a name for ultimate physics, can be nothing but dialectic, which\ndoes not look toward existence at all. But the prevalence of a mythical\nphysics, purporting to describe the structure of the universe in terms\nquite other than those which scientific physics could use, has affected\nthis scientific physics and seriously confused it. Its core, in\nmechanics, to be sure, could not be touched; and the detail even of\nnatural history and chemistry could not be disfigured: but the general\naspect of natural history could be rendered ambiguous in the doctrine of\nevolution; while in psychology, which attempted to deal with that half\nof the world which Descartes had not subjected to mechanism, confusion\ncould hold undisputed sway.\n\n[Sidenote: Evolution by mechanism.]\n\nThere is a sense in which the notion of evolution is involved in any\nmechanical system. Descartes indeed had gone so far as to describe, in\nstrangely simple terms, how the world, with all its detail, might have\nbeen produced by starting any motion anywhere in the midst of a plenum\nat rest. The idea of evolution could not be more curtly put forth; so\nmuch so that Descartes had to arm himself against the inevitable charge\nthat he was denying the creation, by protesting that his doctrine was a\nsupposition contrary to fact, and that though the world _might_ have\nbeen so formed, it was really created as Genesis recorded. Moreover, in\nantiquity, every Ionian philosopher had conceived a gradual\ncrystallisation of nature; while Empedocles, in his magnificent oracles,\nhad anticipated Darwin\u2019s philosophy without Darwin\u2019s knowledge. It is\nclear that if the forces that hold an organism together are mechanical,\nand therefore independent of the ideal unities they subtend, those\nforces suffice to explain the origin of the organism, and can have\nproduced it. Darwin\u2019s discoveries, like every other advance in physical\ninsight, are nothing but filling for that abstract assurance. They show\nus how the supposed mechanism really works in one particular field, in\none stage of its elaboration. As earlier naturalists had shown us how\nmechanical causes might produce the miracle of the sunrise and the\npoetry of the seasons, so Darwin showed us how similar causes might\nsecure the adaptation of animals to their habitat. Evolution, so\nconceived, is nothing but a detailed account of mechanical origins.\n\n[Sidenote: Evolution by ideal attraction.]\n\nAt the same time the word evolution has a certain pomp and glamour about\nit which fits ill with so prosaic an interpretation. In the unfolding of\na bud we are wont to see, as it were, the fulfilment of a predetermined\nand glorious destiny; for the seed was an epitome or condensation of a\nfull-blown plant and held within it, in some sort of potential guise,\nthe very form which now peeps out in the young flower. Evolution\nsuggests a prior involution or contraction and the subsequent\nmanifestation of an innate ideal. Evolution should move toward a fixed\nconsummation the approaches to which we might observe and measure. Yet\nevolution, in this prophetic sense of the word, would be the exact\ndenial of what Darwin, for instance, was trying to prove. It would be a\nreturn to Aristotelian notions of heredity and potential being; for it\nwas the essence of Aristotle\u2019s physics\u2014of which his theology was an\nintegral part and a logical capping\u2014that the forms which beings\napproached pre-existed in other beings from which they had been\ninherited, and that the intermediate stages during which the butterfly\nshrank to a grub could not be understood unless we referred them to\ntheir origin and their destiny. The physical essence and potency of\nseeds lay in their ideal relations, not in any actual organisation they\nmight possess in the day of their eclipse and slumber. An egg evolved\ninto a chicken not by mechanical necessity\u2014for an egg had a\ncomparatively simple structure\u2014but by virtue of an ideal harmony in\nthings; since it was natural and fitting that what had come from a hen\nshould lead on to a hen again. The ideal nature possessed by the parent,\nhovering over the passive seed, magically induced it to grow into the\nparent\u2019s semblance; and growth was the gradual approach to the\nperfection which this ancestral essence prescribed. This was why\nAristotle\u2019s God, though in character an unmistakable ideal, had to be at\nthe same time an actual existence; since the world would not have known\nwhich way to move or what was its inner ideal, unless this ideal,\nalready embodied somewhere else, drew it on and infused movement and\ndirection into the world\u2019s structureless substance.\n\nThe underlying Platonism in this magical physics is obvious, since the\nnatures that Aristotle made to rule the world were eternal natures. An\nindividual might fail to be a perfect man or a perfect monkey, but the\nspecific human or simian ideal, by which he had been formed in so far as\nhe was formed at all, was not affected by this accidental resistance in\nthe matter at hand, as an adamantine seal, even if at times the wax by\ndefect or impurity failed to receive a perfect impression, would remain\nunchanged and ready to be stamped perpetually on new material.\n\n[Sidenote: If species are evolved they cannot guide evolution.]\n\nThe contrast is obvious between this Platonic physics and a naturalism\nlike that of Darwin. The point of evolution, as selection produces it,\nis that new species may arise. The very title of Darwin\u2019s book \u201cThe\nOrigin of Species\u201d is a denial of Aristotelianism and, in the pregnant\nsense, of evolution. It suggests that the type approached by each\ngeneration may differ from that approached by the previous one; that\nnot merely the degree of perfection, but the direction of growth, may\nvary. The individual is not merely unfolded from an inner potentiality\nderived from a like ancestor and carrying with it a fixed eternal ideal,\nbut on the contrary the very ground plan of organisation may gradually\nchange and a new form and a new ideal may appear. Spontaneous\nvariations\u2014of course mechanically caused[C]\u2014may occur and may modify\nthe hereditary form of animals. These variations, superposed upon one\nanother, may in time constitute a nature wholly unlike its first\noriginal. This accidental, cumulative evolution accordingly justifies a\ndeclaration of moral liberty. I am not obliged to aspire to the nature\nmy father aspired to, for the ground of my being is partly new. In me\nnature is making a novel experiment. I am the adoring creator of a new\nspiritual good. My duties have shifted with my shifting faculties, and\nthe ideal which I propose to myself, and alone can honestly propose, is\nunprecedented, the expression of a moving existence and without\nauthority beyond the range of existences congruous with mine.\n\n[Sidenote: Intrusion of optimism.]\n\nAll that is scientific or Darwinian in the theory of evolution is\naccordingly an application of mechanism, a proof that mechanism lies at\nthe basis of life and morals. The Aristotelian notion of development,\nhowever, was too deeply rooted in tradition for it to disappear at a\nbreath. Evolution as conceived by Hegel, for instance, or even by\nSpencer, retained Aristotelian elements, though these were disguised and\nhidden under a cloud of new words. Both identify evolution with\nprogress, with betterment; a notion which would naturally be prominent\nin any one with enlightened sympathies living in the nineteenth century,\nwhen a new social and intellectual order was forcing itself on a world\nthat happened largely to welcome the change, but a notion that has\nnothing to do with natural science. The fittest to live need not be\nthose with the most harmonious inner life nor the best possibilities.\nThe fitness might be due to numbers, as in a political election, or to\ntough fibre, as in a tropical climate. Of course a form of being that\ncircumstances make impossible or hopelessly laborious had better dive\nunder and cease for the moment to be; but the circumstances that render\nit inopportune do not render it essentially inferior. Circumstances\nhave no power of that kind; and perhaps the worst incident in the\npopular acceptance of evolution has been a certain brutality thereby\nintroduced into moral judgment, an abdication of human ideals, a mocking\nindifference to justice, under cover of respect for what is bound to be,\nand for the rough economy of the world. Disloyalty to the good in the\nguise of philosophy had appeared also among the ancients, when their\npolitical ethics had lost its authority, just as it appeared among us\nwhen the prestige of religion had declined. The Epicureans sometimes\nsaid that one should pursue pleasure because all the animals did so, and\nthe Stoics that one should fill one\u2019s appointed place in nature, because\nsuch was the practice of clouds and rivers.\n\n[Sidenote: Evolution according to Hegel.]\n\nHegel possessed a keen scent for instability in men\u2019s attitudes and\nopinions; he had no need of Darwin\u2019s facts to convince him that in moral\nlife, at least, there were no permanent species and that every posture\nof thought was an untenable half-way station between two others. His\nearly contact with Protestant theology may have predisposed him to that\nopinion. At any rate he had no sympathy with that Platonism that allowed\neverything to have its eternal ideal, with which it might ultimately be\nidentified. Such ideals would be finite, they would arrest the flux, and\nthey would try to break loose from their enveloping conditions. Hegel\nwas no moralist in the Socratic sense, but a naturalist seeking\nformulas for the growth of moral experience. Instead of questioning the\nheart, he somewhat satirically described its history. At the same time\nhe was heir to that mythology which had deified the genetic or physical\nprinciple in things, and though the traditional myths suffered cruel\noperations at his hands, and often died of explanation, the mythical\nprinciple itself remained untouched and was the very breath of his\nnostrils. He never doubted that the formula he might find for the growth\nof experience would be also the ultimate good. What other purpose could\nthe world have than to express the formula according to which it was\nbeing generated?\n\nIn this honest conviction we see the root, perhaps, of that distaste for\ncorrect physics that prevails among many who call themselves idealists.\nIf physics were for some reason to be adored, it would be disconcerting\nto find in physics nothing but atoms and a void. It is hard to\nunderstand, however, why a fanciful formula expressing the evolution of\nthis perturbed universe, and painting it no better than it is, should be\nmore worshipful than an exact formula meant to perform the same office.\nA myth that enlarged the world and promised a complete transformation of\nits character might have its charms; but the improvement is not obvious\nthat accrues by making the drift of things, just as it drifts, its own\nstandard. Yet for Hegel it mattered nothing how unstable all ideals\nmight be, since the only use of them was to express a principle of\ntransition, and this principle was being realised, eternally and\nunawares, by the self-devouring and self-transcending purposes rolling\nin the flux.\n\n[Sidenote: The conservative interpretation.]\n\nThis philosophy might not be much relished if it were more frankly\nexpressed; yet something of the sort floats vaguely before most minds\nwhen they think of evolution. The types of being change, they say: in\nthis sense the Aristotelian notion of a predetermined form unfolding\nitself in each species has yielded to a more correct and more dynamic\nphysics. But the changes, so people imagine, express a predetermined\nideal, no longer, of course, the ideal of these specific things, but one\noverarching the cosmic movement. The situation might be described by\nsaying that this is Aristotle\u2019s view adapted to a world in which there\nis only one species or only one individual. The earlier phases of life\nare an imperfect expression of the same nature which the later phases\nexpress more fully. Hence the triumphant march of evolution and the\nassumption that whatever is later is necessarily better than what went\nbefore. If a child were simply the partial expression of a man, his\nsingle desire would be to grow up, and when he was grown up he would\nembody all he had been striving for and would be happy for ever after.\nSo if man were nothing but a halting reproduction of divinity and\ndestined to become God, his whole destiny would be fulfilled by\napotheosis. If this apotheosis, moreover, were an actual future event,\nsomething every man and animal was some day to experience, evolution\nmight really have a final goal, and might lead to a new and presumably\nbetter sort of existence\u2014existence in the eternal. Somewhat in this\nfashion evolution is understood by the party that wish to combine it\nwith a refreshed patristic theology.\n\n[Sidenote: The radical one.]\n\nThere is an esoteric way, however, of taking these matters which is more\nin sympathy both with natural evolution and with transcendental\nphilosophy. If we assert that evolution is infinite, no substantive goal\ncan be set to it. The goal will be the process itself, if we could only\nopen our eyes upon its beauty and necessity. The apotheosis will be\nretroactive, nay, it has already taken place. The insight involved is\nmystical, yet in a way more just to the facts than any promise of\nulterior blisses. For it is not really true that a child has no other\nideal than to become a man. Childhood has many an ideal of its own, many\na beauty and joy irrelevant to manhood, and such that manhood is\nincapable of retaining or containing them. If the ultimate good is\nreally to contain and retain all the others, it can hardly be anything\nbut their totality\u2014the infinite history of experience viewed under the\nform of eternity. At that remove, however, the least in the kingdom of\nHeaven is even as the greatest, and the idea of evolution, as of time,\nis \u201ctaken up into a higher unity.\u201d There could be no real pre-eminence\nin one man\u2019s works over those of another; and if faith, or insight into\nthe equal service done by all, still seemed a substantial privilege\nreserved for the elect, this privilege, too, must be an illusion, since\nthose who do not know how useful and necessary they are must be as\nuseful and necessary as those who do. An absolute preference for\nknowledge or self-consciousness would be an unmistakably human and\nfinite ideal\u2014something to be outgrown.\n\n[Sidenote: Megalomania.]\n\nWhat practically survives in these systems, when their mysticism and\nnaturalism have had time to settle, is a clear enough standard. It is a\nstandard of inclusion and quantity. Since all is needful, and the\njustifying whole is infinite, there would seem to be a greater dignity\nin the larger part. As the best copy of a picture, other things being\nequal, would be one that represented it all, so the best expression of\nthe world, next to the world itself, would be the largest portion of it\nany one could absorb. Progress would then mean annexation. Growth would\nnot come by expressing better an innate soul which involved a particular\nideal, but by assimilating more and more external things till the\noriginal soul, by their influence, was wholly recast and unrecognisable.\nThis moral agility would be true merit; we should always be \u201cstriving\nonward.\u201d Life would be a sort of demonic vortex, boiling at the centre\nand omnivorous at the circumference, till it finally realised the\nsupreme vocation of vortices, to have \u201ctheir centre everywhere and their\ncircumference nowhere.\u201d This somewhat troubled situation might seem\nsublime to us, transformed as we too should be; and so we might reach\nthe most remarkable and doubtless the \u201chighest\u201d form of\noptimism\u2014optimism in hell.\n\n[Sidenote: Chaos in the theory of mind.]\n\nConfusing as these cross-currents and revulsions may prove in the field\nwhere mechanism is more or less at home, in the field of material\noperations, they are nothing to the primeval chaos that still broods\nover the other hemisphere, over the mental phase of existence. The\ndifficulty is not merely that no mechanism is discovered or acknowledged\nhere, but that the phenomena themselves are ambiguous, and no one seems\nto know when he speaks of mind whether he means something formal and\nideal, like Platonic essences and mathematical truths, or reflection and\nintelligence, or sensation possessing external causes and objects, or\nfinally that ultimate immediacy or brute actuality which is\ncharacteristic of any existence. Other even vaguer notions are doubtless\noften designated by the word psychical; but these may suffice for us to\nrecognise the initial dilemmas in the subject and the futility of trying\nto build a science of mind, or defining the relation of mind to matter,\nwhen it is not settled whether mind means the form of matter, as with\nthe Platonists, or the effect of it, as with the materialists, or the\nseat and false knowledge of it, as with the transcendentalists, or\nperhaps after all, as with the pan-psychists, mind means exactly matter\nitself.[D]\n\n[Sidenote: Origin of self-consciousness.]\n\nTo see how equivocal everything is in this region, and possibly to catch\nsome glimpse of whatever science or sciences might some day define it,\nwe may revert for a moment to the origin of human notions concerning the\nmind. If either everything or nothing that men came upon in their\nprimitive day-dream had been continuous in its own category and\ntraceable through the labyrinth of the world, no mind and no\nself-consciousness need ever have appeared at all. The world might have\nbeen as magical as it pleased; it would have remained single, one\nbudding sequence of forms with no transmissible substance beneath them.\nThese forms might have had properties we now call physical and at the\nsame time qualities we now call mental or emotional; there is nothing\noriginally incongruous in such a mixture, chaotic and perverse as it may\nseem from the vantage-ground of subsequent distinctions. Existence might\nas easily have had any other form whatsoever as the one we discover it\nto have in fact. And primitive men, not having read Descartes, and not\nhaving even distinguished their waking from their dreaming life nor\ntheir passions from their environment, might well stand in the presence\nof facts that seem to us full of inward incongruity and contradiction;\nindeed, it is only because original data were of that chaotic sort that\nwe call ourselves intelligent for having disentangled them and assigned\nthem to distinct sequences and alternative spheres.\n\nThe ambiguities and hesitations of theory, down to our own day, are not\nall artificial or introduced gratuitously by sophists. Even where\nprejudice obstructs progress, that prejudice itself has some ancient and\ningenuous source. Our perplexities are traces of a primitive total\nconfusion; our doubts are remnants of a quite gaping ignorance. It was\nimpossible to say whether the phantasms that first crossed this earthly\nscene were merely instinct with passion or were veritable passions\nstalking through space. Material and mental elements, connections\nnatural and dialectical, existed mingled in that chaos. Light was as yet\ninseparable from inward vitality and pain drew a visible cloud across\nthe sky. Civilised life is that early dream partly clarified; science is\nthat dense mythology partly challenged and straightened out.\n\nThe flux, however, was meantime full of method, if only discrimination\nand enlarged experience could have managed to divine it. Its\ninconstancy, for one thing, was not so entire that no objects could be\nfixed within it, or marshalled in groups, like the birds that flock\ntogether. Animals could be readily distinguished from the things about\nthem, their rate of mobility being so much quicker; and one animal in\nparticular would at once be singled out, a more constant follower than\nany dog, and one whose energies were not merely felt but often\nspontaneously exerted\u2014a phenomenon which appeared in no other part of\nthe world. This singular animal every one called himself. One object was\nthus discovered to be the vehicle for perceiving and affecting all the\nothers, a movable seat or tower from which the world might be surveyed.\n\n[Sidenote: The notion of spirit.]\n\nThe external influences to which this body, with its discoursing mind,\nseemed to be subject were by no means all visible and material. Just as\none\u2019s own body was moved by passions and thoughts which no one else\ncould see\u2014and this secrecy was a subject for much wonder and\nself-congratulation\u2014so evidently other things had a spirit within or\nabove them to endow them with wit and power. It was not so much to\ncontain sensation that this spirit was needed (for the body could very\nwell feel) as to contrive plans of action and discharge sudden force\ninto the world on momentous occasions. How deep-drawn, how far-reaching,\nthis spirit might be was not easily determined; but it seemed to have\nunaccountable ways and to come and go from distant habitations. Things\npast, for instance, were still open to its inspection; the mind was not\ncredited with constructing a fresh image of the past which might more or\nless resemble that past; a ray of supernatural light, rather, sometimes\ncould pierce to the past itself and revisit its unchangeable depths. The\nfuture, though more rarely, was open to spirit in exactly the same\nfashion; destiny could on occasion be observed. Things distant and\npreternatural were similarly seen in dreams. There could be no doubt\nthat all those objects existed; the only question was where they might\nlie and in what manner they might operate. A vision was a visitation and\na dream was a journey. The spirit was a great traveller, and just as it\ncould dart in every direction over both space and time, so it could\ncome thence into a man\u2019s presence or even into his body, to take\npossession of it. Sense and fancy, in a word, had not been\ndistinguished. As to be aware of vision is a great sign of imagination,\nso to be aware of imagination is a great sign of understanding.\n\nThe spirit had other prerogatives, of a more rational sort. The truth,\nthe right were also spirits; for though often invisible and denied by\nmen, they could emerge at times from their invisible lairs to deal some\nquick blow and vindicate their divinity. The intermittance proper to\nphenomena is universal and extreme; only the familiar conception of\nnature, in which the flux becomes continuous, now blinds us in part to\nthat fact. But before the days of scientific thinking only those things\nwhich were found unchanged and which seemed to lie passive were\nconceived to have had in the interval a material existence. More\nstirring apparitions, instead of being referred to their material\nconstituents and continuous basis in nature, were referred to spirit. We\nstill say, for instance, that war _comes on_. That phrase would once\nhave been understood literally. War, being something intermittent, must\nexist somehow unseen in the interval, else it would not return; that\nrage, so people would have fancied, is therefore a spirit, it is a god.\nMars and Ares long survived the phase of thought to which they owed\ntheir divinity; and believers had to rely on habit and the witness of\nantiquity to support their irrational faith. They little thought how\nabsolutely simple and inevitable had been the grammar by which those\nfigures, since grown rhetorical, had been first imposed upon the world.\n\n[Sidenote: The notion of sense.]\n\nAnother complication soon came to increase this confusion. When material\nobjects were discovered and it became clear that they had comparatively\nfixed natures, it also became clear that with the motions of one\u2019s body\nall other things seemed to vary in ways which did not amount to a\npermanent or real metamorphosis in them; for these things might be found\nagain unchanged. Objects, for instance, seemed to grow smaller when we\nreceded from them, though really, as we discovered by approaching and\nmeasuring them anew, they had remained unchanged. These private aspects\nor views of things were accordingly distinguished from the things\nthemselves, which were lodged in an intelligible sphere, raised above\nanybody\u2019s sensibility and existing independently. The variable aspects\nwere due to the body; they accompanied its variations and depended on\nits presence and organs. They were conceived vaguely to exist in one\u2019s\nhead or, if they were emotional, in one\u2019s heart; but anatomy would have\nhad some difficulty in finding them there. They constituted what is\nproperly called the mind\u2014the region of sentience, emotion, and\nsoliloquy.\n\nThe mind was the region where those aspects which real things present\nto the body might live and congregate. So understood, it was avowedly\nand from the beginning a realm of mere appearance and depended entirely\non the body. It should be observed, however, that the limbo of divine\nand ideal things, which is sometimes also called the mind, is very far\nfrom depending obviously on the body and is said to do so only by a late\nschool of psychological sceptics. To primitive apprehension spirit, with\nits ideal prerogatives, was something magical and oracular. Its\nprophetic intuitions were far from being more trivial than material\nappearances. On the contrary those intuitions were momentous and\ninspiring. Their scope was indefinite and their value incalculable in\nevery sense of the word. The disembodied spirit might well be immortal,\nsince absent and dead things were familiar to it. It was by nature\npresent wherever truth and reality might be found. It was prophetic; the\ndreams it fell into were full of auguries and secret affinities with\nthings to come. Myth and legend, hatched in its womb, were felt to be\ndivinely inspired, and genius seemed to be the Muses\u2019 voice heard in a\nprofound abstraction, when vulgar perception yielded to some kind of\nclairvoyance having a higher authority than sense. Such a spirit might\nnaturally be expected to pass into another world, since it already dwelt\nthere at intervals, and brought thence its mysterious reports. Its\nincursions into the physical sphere alone seemed miraculous and sent a\nthrill of awe through the unaccustomed flesh.\n\n[Sidenote: Competition between the two.]\n\nThe ideal element in the world was accordingly regarded at first as\nsomething sacred and terrifying. It was no vulgar presence or private\nproduct, and though its destiny might be to pass half the time, like\nPersephone, under ground, it could not really be degraded. The human\nmind, on the other hand, the region of sentience and illusion, was a\nfamiliar affair enough. This familiarity, indeed, for a long time bred\ncontempt and philosophers did not think the personal equation of\nindividuals, or the refraction of things in sense, a very important or\nedifying subject for study. In time, however, sentience had its revenge.\nAs each man\u2019s whole experience is bound to his body no less than is the\nmost trivial optical illusion, the sphere of sense is the transcendental\nground or _ratio cognoscendi_ of every other sphere. It suffices,\ntherefore, to make philosophy retrospective and to relax the practical\nand dogmatic stress under which the intellect operates, for all the\ndiscoveries made through experience to collapse into the experience in\nwhich they were made. A complete collapse of objects is indeed\ninconvenient, because it would leave no starting-point for reasoning and\nno faith in the significance of reason itself; but partial collapses,\nnow in the region of physics, now in that of logic and morals, are very\neasy and exciting feats for criticism to perform.\n\nPassions when abstracted from their bodily causes and values when\nremoved from their objects will naturally fall into the body\u2019s mind, and\nbe allied with appearances. Shrewd people will bethink themselves to\nattribute almost all the body\u2019s acts to some preparatory intention or\nmotive in its mind, and thus attain what they think knowledge of human\nnature. They will encourage themselves to live among dramatic fictions,\nas when absorbed in a novel; and having made themselves at home in this\nupper story of their universe, they will find it amusing to deny that it\nhas a ground floor. The chance of conceiving, by these partial reversals\nof science, a world composed entirely without troublesome machinery is\ntoo tempting not to be taken up, whatever the ulterior risks; and\naccordingly, when once psychological criticism is put in play, the\nsphere of sense will be enlarged at the expense of the two rational\nworlds, the material and the ideal.\n\n[Sidenote: The rise of scepticism.]\n\nConsciousness, thus qualified by all the sensible qualities of things,\nwill exercise an irresistible attraction over the supernatural and ideal\nrealm, so that all the gods, all truths, and all ideals, as they have no\nplace among the sufficing causes of experience, will be identified with\ndecaying sensations. And presently those supposed causes themselves will\nbe retraced and drawn back into the immediate vortex, until the sceptic\nhas packed away nature, with all space and time, into the sphere of\nsensuous illusion, the distinguishing characteristic of which was that\nit changed with the changes in the human body. The personal idealists\nwill declare that all body is a part of some body\u2019s mind. Thus, by a\ncurious reversion, the progress of reflection has led to hopeless\ncontradictions. Sense, which was discovered by observing the refraction\nand intermittence to which appearances were subject, in seeming to be\nquite different from what things were, now tries to subsist when the\nthings it was essentially contrasted with have been abolished. The\nintellect becomes a Penelope, whose secret pleasure lies in undoing its\nostensible work; and science, becoming pensive, loves to relapse into\nthe dumb actuality and nerveless reverie from which it had once\nextricated a world.\n\nThe occasion for this sophistication is worth noting; for if we follow\nthe thread which we have trailed behind us in entering the labyrinth we\nshall be able at any moment to get out; especially as the omnivorous\nmonster lurking in its depths is altogether harmless. A moral and truly\ntranscendental critique of science, as of common sense, is never out of\nplace, since all such a critique does is to assign to each conception or\ndiscovery its place and importance in the Life of Reason. So\nadministered, the critical cathartic will not prove a poison and will\nnot inhibit the cognitive function it was meant to purge. Every belief\nwill subsist that finds an empirical and logical warrant; while that a\nbelief is a belief and not a sensation will not seem a ground for not\nentertaining it, nor for subordinating it to some gratuitous assurance.\nBut a psychological criticism, if it is not critical of psychology\nitself, and thinks to substitute a science of absolute sentience for\nphysics and dialectic, would rest on sophistry and end wholly in\nbewilderment. The subject-matter of an absolute psychology would vanish\nin its hands, since there is no sentience which is not at once the\neffect of something physical and the appearance of something ideal. A\ncalculus of feelings, uninterpreted and referred to nothing ulterior,\nwould furnish no alternative system to substitute for the positive\nsciences it was seeking to dislodge. In fact, those who call ordinary\nobjects unreal do not, on that account, find anything else to think\nabout. Their exorcism does not lay the ghost, and they are limited to\naddressing it in uncivil language. It was not idly that reason in the\nbeginning excogitated a natural and an ideal world, a labour it might\nwell have avoided if appearance as it stands made a thinkable or a\npractical universe.\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[Footnote B: The term \u201cmatter\u201d (which ought before long to reappear in\nphilosophy) has two meanings. In popular science and theology it\ncommonly means a group of things in space, like the atoms of Democritus\nor the human body and its members. Such matter plainly exists. Its\nparticles are concretions in existence like the planets; and if a given\nhypothesis describing them turns out to be wrong, it is wrong only\nbecause this matter exists so truly and in such discoverable guise that\nthe hypothesis in question may be shown to misrepresent its\nconstitution.\n\nOn the other hand, in Aristotle and in literary speech, matter means\nsomething good to make other things out of. Here it is a concretion in\ndiscourse, a dialectical term; being only an aspect or constituent of\nevery existence, it cannot exist by itself. A state of mind, like\neverything not purely formal, has matter of this sort in it. Actual\nlove, for instance, differs _materially_ from the mere idea or\npossibility of love, which is all love would be if the matter or body of\nit were removed. This matter is what idealists, bent on giving it a\ngrander name, call pure feeling, absolute consciousness, or metaphysical\nwill. These phrases are all used improperly to stand for the existence\nor presence of things apart from their character, or for the mere strain\nand dead weight of being. Matter is a far better term to use in the\npremises, for it suggests the method as well as the fact of brute\nexistence. The surd in experience\u2014its non-ideal element\u2014is not an\nindifferent vehicle for what it brings, as would be implied by calling\nit pure feeling or absolute consciousness. Nor is it an act accepting or\nrejecting objects, as would be implied by calling it will. In truth, the\nsurd conditions not merely the being of objects but their possible\nquantity, the time and place of their appearance, and their degree of\nperfection compared with the ideals they suggest. These important\nfactors in whatever exists are covered by the term matter and give it a\nserious and indispensable r\u00f4le in describing and feeling the world.\n\nAristotle, it may be added, did not adhere with perfect consistency to\nthe dialectical use of this word. Matter is sometimes used by him for\nsubstance or for actual beings having both matter and form. The excuse\nfor this apparent lapse is, of course, that what taken by itself is a\npiece of formed matter or an individual object may be regarded as mere\nmaterial for something else which it helps to constitute, as wheat is\nmatter for flour, and flour for bread. Thus the dialectical and\nnon-demonstrative use of the term to indicate one aspect of everything\ncould glide into its vulgar acceptation, to indicate one class of\nthings.]\n\n[Footnote C: It has been suggested\u2014what will not party spirit\ncontrive?\u2014that these variations, called spontaneous by Darwin because\nnot predetermined by heredity, might be spontaneous in a metaphysical\nsense, free acts with no material basis or cause whatsoever. Being free,\nthese acts might deflect evolution\u2014like Descartes\u2019 soul acting on the\npineal gland\u2014into wonderful new courses, prevent dissolution, and\ngradually bring on the kingdom of Heaven, all as the necessary\nimplication of the latest science and the most atheistic philosophy. It\nmay not be needless to observe that if the variations were absolutely\nfree, _i.e._, intrusions of pure chance, they would tend every which way\nquite as much as if they were mechanically caused; while if they were\nkept miraculously in line with some far-off divine event, they would not\nbe free at all, but would be due to metaphysical attraction and a magic\ndestiny prepared in the eternal; and so we should be brought round to\nAristotelian physics again.]\n\n[Footnote D: The monads of Leibniz could justly be called minds, because\nthey had a dramatic destiny, and the most complex experience imaginable\nwas the state of but one monad, not an aggregate view or effect of a\nmultitude in fusion. But the recent improvements on that system take the\nlatter turn. Mind-stuff, or the material of mind, is supposed to be\ncontained in large quantities within any known feeling. Mind-stuff, we\nare given to understand, is diffused in a medium corresponding to\napparent space (what else would a real space be?); it forms quantitative\naggregates, its transformations or aggregations are mechanically\ngoverned, it endures when personal consciousness perishes, it is the\nsubstance of bodies and, when duly organised, the potentiality of\nthought. One might go far for a better description of matter. That any\nmaterial must be material might have been taken for an axiom; but our\nidealists, in their eagerness to show that _Gefuehl ist Alles_, have\nthought to do honour to feeling by forgetting that it is an expression\nand wishing to make it a stuff.\n\nThere is a further circumstance showing that mind-stuff is but a bashful\nname for matter. Mind-stuff, like matter, can be only an element in any\nactual being. To make a thing or a thought out of mind-stuff you have to\nrely on the _system_ into which that material has fallen; the\nsubstantive ingredients, from which an actual being borrows its\nintensive quality, do not contain its individuating form. This form\ndepends on ideal relations subsisting between the ingredients, relations\nwhich are not feelings but can be rendered only by propositions.]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER V\n\nPSYCHOLOGY\n\n\n[Sidenote: Mind reading not science.]\n\nIf psychology is a science, many things that books of psychology contain\nshould be excluded from it. One is social imagination. Nature, besides\nhaving a mechanical form and wearing a garment of sensible qualities,\nmakes a certain inner music in the beholder\u2019s mind, inciting him to\nenter into other bodies and to fancy the new and profound life which he\nmight lead there. Who, as he watched a cat basking in the sun, has not\npassed into that vigilant eye and felt all the leaps potential in that\nluxurious torpor? Who has not attributed some little romance to the\npasser-by? Who has not sometimes exchanged places even with things\ninanimate, and drawn some new moral experience from following the\nmovement of stars or of daffodils? All this is idle musing or at best\npoetry; yet our ordinary knowledge of what goes on in men\u2019s minds is\nmade of no other stuff. True, we have our own mind to go by, which\npresumably might be a fair sample of what men\u2019s minds are; but\nunfortunately our notion of ourselves is of all notions the most biassed\nand idealistic. If we attributed to other men only such obvious\nreasoning, sound judgment, just preferences, honest passions, and\nblameless errors as we discover in ourselves, we should take but an\ninsipid and impractical view of mankind.\n\nIn fact, we do far better: for what we impute to our fellow-men is\nsuggested by their conduct or by an instant imitation of their gesture\nand expression. These manifestations, striking us in all their novelty\nand alien habit, and affecting our interests in all manner of awkward\nways, create a notion of our friends\u2019 natures which is extremely vivid\nand seldom extremely flattering.\n\nSuch romancing has the cogency proper to dramatic poetry; it is\npersuasive only over the third person, who has never had, but has always\nbeen about to have, the experience in question. Drawn from the potential\nin one\u2019s self, it describes at best the possible in others. The thoughts\nof men are incredibly evanescent, merely the foam of their labouring\nnatures; and they doubtless vary much more than our trite\nclassifications allow for. This is what makes passions and fashions,\nreligions and philosophies, so hard to conceive when once the trick of\nthem is a little antiquated. Languages are hardly more foreign to one\nanother than are the thoughts uttered in them. We should give men credit\nfor originality at least in their dreams, even if they have little of it\nto show elsewhere; and as it was discovered but recently that all\nmemories are not furnished with the like material images, but often\nhave no material images whatever, so it may have to be acknowledged that\nthe disparity in men\u2019s soliloquies is enormous, and that some races,\nperhaps, live content without soliloquising at all.\n\n[Sidenote: Experience a reconstruction.]\n\nNevertheless, in describing what happens, or in enforcing a given view\nof things, we constantly refer to universal experience as if everybody\nwas agreed about what universal experience is and had personally\ngathered it all since the days of Adam. In fact, each man has only his\nown, the remnant saved from his personal acquisitions. On the basis of\nthis his residual endowment, he has to conceive all nature, with\nwhatever experiences may have fallen there to the lot of others.\nUniversal experience is a comfortable fiction, a distinctly ideal\nconstruction, and no fund available for any one to draw from; which of\ncourse is not to deny that tradition and books, in transmitting\nmaterially the work of other generations, tend to assimilate us also to\ntheir mind. The result of their labours, in language, learning, and\ninstitutions, forms a hothouse in which to force our seedling fancy to a\nrational growth; but the influence is physical, the environment is\nmaterial, and its ideal background or significance has to be inferred by\nus anew, according to our imaginative faculty and habits. Past\nexperience, apart from its monuments, is fled for ever out of mortal\nreach. It is now a parcel of the motionless ether, of the ineffectual\ntruth about what once was. To know it we must evoke it within ourselves,\nstarting from its inadequate expressions still extant in the world. This\nreconstruction is highly speculative and, as Spinoza noted, better\nevidence of what we are than of what other men have been.\n\n[Sidenote: The honest art of education.]\n\nWhen we appeal to general experience, then, what we really have to deal\nwith is our interlocutor\u2019s power of imagining that experience; for the\nreal experience is dead and ascended into heaven, where it can neither\nanswer nor hear. Our agreements or divergences in this region do not\ntouch science; they concern only friendship and unanimity. All our\nproofs are, as they say in Spain, pure conversation; and as the purpose\nand best result can be only to kindle intelligence and propagate an\nideal art, the method should be Socratic, genial, literary. In these\nmatters, the alternative to imagination is not science but sophistry. We\nmay perhaps entangle our friends in their own words, and force them for\nthe moment to say what they do not mean, and what it is not in their\nnatures to think; but the bent bow will spring back, perhaps somewhat\nsharply, and we shall get little thanks for our labour. There would be\nmore profit in taking one another frankly by the hand and walking\ntogether along the outskirts of real knowledge, pointing to the material\nfacts which we all can see, nature, the monuments, the texts, the actual\nways and institutions of men; and in the presence of such a stimulus,\nwith the contagion of a common interest, the plastic mind would respond\nof itself to the situation, and we should be helping one another to\nunderstand whatever lies within the range of our fancy, be it in\nantiquity or in the human heart. That would be a true education; and\nwhile the result could not possibly be a science, not even a science of\npeople\u2019s states of mind, it would be a deepening of humanity in\nourselves and a wholesome knowledge of our ignorance.\n\n[Sidenote: Arbitrary readings of the mind.]\n\nIn what is called psychology this loose, imaginative method is often\npursued, although the field covered may be far narrower. Any generic\nexperience of which a writer pretends to give an exact account must be\nreconstructed _ad hoc_; it is not the experience that necessitates the\ndescription, but the description that recalls the experience, defining\nit in a novel way. When La Rochefoucauld says, for instance, that there\nis something about our friend\u2019s troubles that secretly pleases us, many\ncircumstances in our own lives, or in other people\u2019s, may suddenly recur\nto us to illustrate that _aper\u00e7u_; and we may be tempted to say, There\nis a truth. But is it a scientific truth? Or is it merely a bit of\nsatire, a ray from a literary flashlight, giving a partial clearness for\na moment to certain jumbled memories? If the next day we open a volume\nof Adam Smith, and read that man is naturally benevolent, that he cannot\nbut enact and share the vicissitudes of his fellow-creatures, and that\nanother man\u2019s imminent danger or visible torment will cause in him a\ndistress little inferior to that felt by the unfortunate sufferer, we\nshall probably think this a truth also, and a more normal and a\nprofounder truth than the other. But is it a law? Is it a scientific\ndiscovery that can lead us to definite inferences about what will happen\nor help us to decompose a single event, accurately and without\nambiguity, into its component forces? Not only is such a thing\nimpossible, but the Scotch philosopher\u2019s amiable generalities, perhaps\nlargely applicable to himself and to his friends of the eighteenth\ncentury, may fail altogether to fit an earlier or a later age; and every\nnew shade of brute born into the world will ground a new \u201ctheory of the\nmoral sentiments.\u201d\n\nThe whole cogency of such psychology, therefore, lies in the ease with\nwhich the hearer, on listening to the analysis, recasts something in his\nown past after that fashion. These endless rival apperceptions regard\nfacts that, until they are referred to their mechanical ground, show no\ncontinuity and no precision in their march. The apperception of them,\nconsequently, must be doubly arbitrary and unstable, for there is no\nmethod in the subject-matter and there is less in the treatment of it.\nThe views, however, are far from equal in value. Some may be more\nnatural, eloquent, enlightening, than others; they may serve better the\nessential purpose of reflection, which is to pick out and bring forward\ncontinually out of the past what can have a value for the present. The\nspiritual life in which this value lies is practical in its\nassociations, because it understands and dominates what touches action;\nyet it is contemplative in essence, since successful action consists in\nknowing what you are attempting and in attempting what you can find\nyourself achieving. Plan and performance will alike appeal to\nimagination and be appreciated through it; so that what trains\nimagination refines the very stuff that life is made of. Science is\ninstrumental in comparison, since the chief advantage that comes of\nknowing accurately is to be able, with safety, to imagine freely. But\nwhen it is science and accurate knowledge that we pursue, we should not\nbe satisfied with literature.\n\n[Sidenote: Human nature appealed to rather than described.]\n\nWhen discourse on any subject would be persuasive, it appeals to the\ninterlocutor to think in a certain dynamic fashion, inciting him, not\nwithout leading questions, to give shape to his own sentiments.\nKnowledge of the soul, insight into human nature and experience, are no\ndoubt requisite in such an exercise; yet this insight is in these cases\na vehicle only, an instinctive method, while the result aimed at is\nagreement on some further matter, conviction and enthusiasm, rather than\npsychological information. Thus if I declare that the storms of winter\nare not so unkind as benefits forgot, I say something which if true has\na certain psychological value, for it could be inferred from that\nassertion that resentment is generally not proportionate to the injury\nreceived but rather to the surprise caused, so that it springs from our\nown foolishness more than from other people\u2019s bad conduct. Yet my\nobservation was not made in the interest of any such inferences: it was\nmade to express an emotion of my own, in hopes of kindling in others a\nsimilar emotion. It was a judgment which others were invited to share.\nThere was as little exact science about it as if I had turned it into\nfrank poetry and exclaimed, \u201cBlow, blow, thou winter\u2019s wind!\u201d Knowledge\nof human nature might be drawn even from that apostrophe, and a very\nfine shade of human feeling is surely expressed in it, as Shakespeare\nutters it; but to pray or to converse is not for that reason the same\nthing as to pursue science.\n\nNow it constantly happens in philosophic writing that what is supposed\nto go on in the human mind is described and appealed to in order to\nsupport some observation or illustrate some argument\u2014as continually,\nfor instance, in the older English critics of human nature, or in these\nvery pages. What is offered in such cases is merely an invitation to\nthink after a certain fashion. A way of grasping or interpreting some\nfact is suggested, with a more or less civil challenge to the reader to\nresist the suasion of his own experience so evoked and represented. Such\na method of appeal may be called psychological, in the sense that it\nrelies for success on the total movement of the reader\u2019s life and mind,\nwithout forcing a detailed assent through ocular demonstration or pure\ndialectic; but the psychology of it is a method and a resource rather\nthan a doctrine. The only doctrine aimed at in such philosophy is a\ngeneral reasonableness, a habit of thinking straight from the elements\nof experience to its ultimate and stable deliverance. This is what in\nhis way a poet or a novelist would do. Fiction swarms with such sketches\nof human nature and such renderings of the human mind as a critical\nphilosopher depends upon for his construction. He need not be interested\nin the pathology of individuals nor even in the natural history of man;\nhis effort is wholly directed toward improving the mind\u2019s economy and\ninfusing reason into it as one might religion, not without diligent\nself-examination and a public confession of sin. The human mind is\nnobody\u2019s mind in particular, and the science of it is necessarily\nimaginative. No one can pretend in philosophic discussion any more than\nin poetry that the experience described is more than typical. It is\ngiven out not for a literal fact, existing in particular moments or\npersons, but for an imaginative expression of what nature and life have\nimpressed on the speaker. In so far as others live in the same world\nthey may recognise the experience so expressed by him and adopt his\ninterpretation; but the aptness of his descriptions and analyses will\nnot constitute a science of mental states, but rather\u2014what is a far\ngreater thing\u2014the art of stimulating and consolidating reflection in\ngeneral.\n\n[Sidenote: Dialectic in psychology.]\n\nThere is a second constituent of current psychology which is indeed a\nscience, but not a science of matters of fact\u2014I mean the dialectic of\nideas. The character of father, for example, implies a son, and this\nrelation, involved in the ideas both of son and of father, implies\nfurther that a transmitted essence or human nature is shared by both.\nEvery idea, if its logical texture is reflected upon, will open out into\na curious world constituted by distinguishing the constituents of that\nidea more clearly and making explicit its implicit structure and\nrelations. When an idea has practical intent and is a desire, its\ndialectic is even more remarkable. If I love a man I thereby love all\nthose who share whatever makes me love him, and I thereby hate whatever\ntends to deprive him of this excellence. If it should happen, however,\nthat those who resembled him most in amiability\u2014say by flattering me no\nless than he did\u2014were precisely his mortal enemies, the logic of my\naffections would become somewhat involved. I might end either by\nstriving to reconcile the rivals or by discovering that what I loved was\nnot the man at all, but only an office exercised by him in my regard\nwhich any one else might also exercise.\n\nThese inner lucubrations, however, while they lengthen the moment\u2019s\nvista and deepen present intent, give no indication whatever about the\norder or distribution of actual feelings. They are out of place in a\npsychology that means to be an account of what happens in the world. For\nthese dialectical implications do not actually work themselves out. They\nhave no historical or dynamic value. The man that by mistake or courtesy\nI call a father may really have no son, any more than Herodotus for\nbeing the father of history; or having had a son, he may have lost him;\nor the creature sprung from his loins may be a misshapen idiot, having\nnothing ideal in common with his parent. Similarly my affection for a\nfriend, having causes much deeper than discourse, may cling to him\nthrough all transformations in his qualities and in his attitude toward\nme; and it may never pass to others for resembling him, nor take, in all\nits days, a Platonic direction. The impulse on which that dialectic was\nbased may exhaust its physical energy, and all its implications may be\nnipped in the bud and be condemned for ever to the limbo of things\nunborn.\n\n[Sidenote: Spinoza on the passions.]\n\nSpinoza\u2019s account of the passions is a beautiful example of dialectical\npsychology, beautiful because it shows so clearly the possibilities and\nimpossibilities in such a method. Spinoza began with self-preservation,\nwhich was to be the principle of life and the root of all feelings. The\nviolence done to physics appears in this beginning. Self-preservation,\ntaken strictly, is a principle not illustrated in nature, where\neverything is in flux, and where habits destructive or dangerous to the\nbody are as conspicuous as protective instincts. Physical mechanism\nrequires reproduction, which implies death, and it admits suicide.\nSpinoza himself, far too noble a mind to be fixed solely on preserving\nits own existence, was compelled to give self-preservation an\nextravagant meaning in order to identify it with \u201cintellectual love of\nGod\u201d or the happy contemplation of that natural law which destroyed all\nindividuals. To find the self-preserving man you must take him after he\nhas ceased to grow and before he has begun to love. Self-preservation,\nbeing thus no principle of natural history, the facts or estimations\nclassed under that head need to be referred instead to one of two other\nprinciples\u2014either to mechanical equilibrium and habit, or to\ndialectical consistency in judgment.\n\nSelf-preservation might express, perhaps, the values which conceived\nevents acquire in respect to a given attitude of will, to an arrested\nmomentary ideal. The actual state of any animal, his given instincts and\ntensions, are undoubtedly the point of origin from which all changes and\nrelations are morally estimated; and if this attitude is afterward\nitself subjected to estimation, that occurs by virtue of its affinity or\nconflict with the living will of another moment. Valuation is\ndialectical, not descriptive, nor contemplative of a natural process. It\nmight accordingly be developed by seeing what is implied in the\nself-preservation, or rather expression, of a will which by that\ndialectic would discover its ideal scope.\n\nSuch a principle, however, could never explain the lapse of that\nattitude itself. A natural process cannot be governed by the ideal\nrelations which conceived things acquire by being represented in one of\nits moments. Spinoza, however, let himself wander into this path and\nmade the semblance of an attempt, indeed not very deceptive, to trace\nthe sequence of feelings by their mutual implication. The changes in\nlife were to be explained by what the crystallised posture of life might\nbe at a single instant. The arrow\u2019s flight was to be deduced from its\ninstantaneous position. A passion\u2019s history was to be the history of\nwhat would have been its expression if it had had no history at all.\n\n[Sidenote: A principle of estimation cannot govern events.]\n\nA man suffered by destiny to maintain for ever a single unchanged\nemotion might indeed think out its multifarious implications much in\nSpinoza\u2019s way. It is in that fashion that parties and sects, when\nsomewhat stable, come to define their affinities and to know their\nfriends and enemies all over the universe of discourse. Suppose, for\ninstance, that I feel some titillation on reading a proposition\nconcerning the contrast between Paul\u2019s idea of Peter and Peter\u2019s idea of\nhimself, a titillation which is accompanied by the idea of Spinoza, its\nexternal cause. Now he who loves an effect must proportionately love\nits cause, and titillation accompanied by the idea of its external cause\nis, Spinoza has proved, what men call love. I therefore find that I love\nSpinoza. Having got so far, I may consider further, referring to another\ndemonstration in the book, that if some one gives Spinoza joy\u2014Hobbes,\nfor instance\u2014my delight in Spinoza\u2019s increased perfection, consequent\nupon his joy and my love of him, accompanied by the idea of Hobbes, its\nexternal cause, constitutes love on my part for the redoubtable Hobbes\nas well. Thus the periphery of my affections may expand indefinitely,\ntill it includes the infinite, the ultimate external cause of all my\ntitillations. But how these interesting discoveries are interrupted\nbefore long by a desire for food, or by an indomitable sense that Hobbes\nand the infinite are things I do _not_ love, is something that my\ndialectic cannot deduce; for it was the values radiating from a given\nimpulse, the implications of its instant object, that were being\nexplicated, not at all the natural forces that carry a man through that\nimpulse and beyond it to the next phase of his dream, a phase which if\nit continues the former episode must continue it spontaneously, by grace\nof mechanical forces.\n\nWhen dialectic is thus introduced into psychology, an intensive\nknowledge of the heart is given out for distributive knowledge of\nevents. Such a study, when made by a man of genius, may furnish good\nspiritual reading, for it will reveal what our passions mean and what\nsentiments they would lead to if they could remain fixed and dictate all\nfurther action. This insight may make us aware of strange\ninconsistencies in our souls, and seeing how contrary some of our ideals\nare to others and how horrible, in some cases, would be their ultimate\nexpression, we may be shocked into setting our house in order; and in\ntrying to understand ourselves we may actually develop a self that can\nbe understood. Meantime this inner discipline will not enlighten us\nabout the march of affairs. It will not give us a key to evolution,\neither in ourselves or in others. Even while we refine our aspirations,\nthe ground they sprang from will be eaten away beneath our feet. Instead\nof developing yesterday\u2019s passion, to-day may breed quite another in its\nplace; and if, having grown old and set in our mental posture, we are\nincapable of assuming another, and are condemned to carrying on the\ndialectic of our early visions into a new-born world, to be a\nschoolmaster\u2019s measuring-rod for life\u2019s infinite exuberance, we shall\nfind ourselves at once in a foreign country, speaking a language that\nnobody understands. No destiny is more melancholy than that of the\ndialectical prophet, who makes more rigid and tyrannous every day a\nmessage which every day grows less applicable and less significant.\n\n[Sidenote: Scientific psychology a part of biology.]\n\nThat remaining portion of psychology which is a science, and a science\nof matters of fact, is physiological; it belongs to natural history and\nconstitutes the biology of man. Soul, which was not originally\ndistinguished from life, is there studied in its natural operation in\nthe body and in the world. Psychology then remains what it was in\nAristotle\u2019s _De Anima_\u2014an ill-developed branch of natural science,\npieced out with literary terms and perhaps enriched by occasional\ndramatic interpretations. The specifically mental or psychic element\nconsists in the feeling which accompanies bodily states and natural\nsituations. This feeling is discovered and distributed at the same time\nthat bodies and other material objects are defined; for when a man\nbegins to decipher permanent and real things, and to understand that\nthey are merely material, he thereby sets apart, in contrast with such\nexternal objects, those images and emotions which can no longer enter\ninto the things\u2019 texture. The images and emotions remain, however,\nattached to those things, for they are refractions of them through\nbodily organs, or effects of their presence on the will, or passions\nfixed upon them as their object.\n\nIn parts of biology which do not deal with man observers do not hesitate\nto refer in the same way to the pain, the desire, the intention, which\nthey may occasionally read in an animal\u2019s aspect. Darwin, for instance,\nconstantly uses psychical language: his birds love one another\u2019s plumage\nand their \u00e6sthetic charms are factors in natural selection. Such little\nfables do not detract from the scientific value of Darwin\u2019s\nobservations, because we see at once what the fables mean. The\ndescription keeps close enough to the facts observed for the reader to\nstop at the latter, rather than at the language in which they are\nstated. In the natural history of man such interpretation into mental\nterms, such microscopic romance, is even easier and more legitimate,\nbecause language allows people, perhaps before their feelings are long\npast, to describe them in terms which are understood to refer directly\nto mental experience. The sign\u2019s familiarity, to be sure, often hides in\nthese cases a great vagueness and unseizableness in the facts; yet a\nbeginning in defining distinctly the mental phase of natural situations\nhas been made in those small autobiographies which introspective writers\nsometimes compose, or which are taken down in hospitals and laboratories\nfrom the lips of \u201csubjects.\u201d What a man under special conditions may say\nhe feels or thinks adds a constituent phase to his natural history; and\nwere these reports exact and extended enough, it would become possible\nto enumerate the precise sensations and ideas which accompany every\nstate of body and every social situation.\n\n[Sidenote: Confused attempt to detach the psychic element.]\n\nThis advantage, however, is the source of that confusion and sophistry\nwhich distinguish the biology of man from the rest of physics. Attention\nis there arrested at the mental term, in forgetfulness of the situation\nwhich gave it warrant, and an invisible world, composed of these\nimagined experiences, begins to stalk behind nature and may even be\nthought to exist independently. This metaphysical dream may be said to\nhave two stages: the systematic one, which is called idealism, and an\nincidental one which pervades ordinary psychology, in so far as mental\nfacts are uprooted from their basis and deprived of their expressive or\nspiritual character, in order to be made elements in a dynamic scheme.\nThis battle of feelings, whether with atoms or exclusively with their\nown cohorts, might be called a primitive materialism, rather than an\nidealism, if idealism were to retain its Platonic sense; for forms and\nrealisations are taken in this system for substantial elements, and are\nmade to figure either as a part or as the whole of the world\u2019s matter.\n\n[Sidenote: Differentia of the psychic.]\n\nPhenomena specifically mental certainly exist, since natural phenomena\nand ideal truths are concentrated and telescoped in apprehension,\nbesides being weighted with an emotion due to their effect on the person\nwho perceives them. This variation, which reality suffers in being\nreported to perception, turns the report into a mental fact\ndistinguishable from its subject-matter. When the flux is partly\nunderstood and the natural world has become a constant presence, the\nwhole flux itself, as it flowed originally, comes to be called a mental\nflux, because its elements and method are seen to differ from the\nelements and method embodied in material objects or in ideal truth. The\nprimitive phenomena are now called mental because they all deviate from\nthe realities to be ultimately conceived. To call the immediate mental\nis therefore correct and inevitable when once the ultimate is in view;\nbut if the immediate were all, to call it mental would be unmeaning.\n\nThe visual image of a die, for instance, has at most three faces, none\nof them quite square; no hired artificer is needed to produce it; it\ncannot be found anywhere nor shaken in any box; it lasts only for an\ninstant; thereafter it disappears without a trace\u2014unless it flits back\nunaccountably through the memory\u2014and it leaves no ponderable dust or\nashes to attest that it had a substance. The opposite of all this is\ntrue of the die itself. But were no material die in existence, the image\nitself would be material; for, however evanescent, it would occupy\nspace, have geometrical shape, colour, and magic dynamic destinies. Its\ntransformations as it rolled on the idea of a table would be\ntransformations in nature, however unaccountable by any steady law. Such\nmaterial qualities a mental fact can retain only in the spiritual form\nof representation. A representation of matter is immaterial, but a\nmaterial image, when no object exists, is a material fact. If the\nAbsolute, to take an ultimate case, perceived nothing but space and\natoms (perceiving itself, if you will, therein), space and atoms would\nbe its whole nature, and it would constitute a perfect materialism. The\nfact that materialism was true would not of itself constitute an\nidealism worth distinguishing from its opposite. For a vehicle or locus\nexists only when it makes some difference to the thing it carries,\npresenting it in a manner not essential to its own nature.\n\n[Sidenote: Approach to irrelevant sentience.]\n\nThe qualification of being by the mental medium may be carried to any\nlength. As the subject-matter recedes the mental datum ceases to have\nmuch similarity or inward relevance to what is its cause or its meaning.\nThe report may ultimately become, like pure pain or pleasure, almost\nwholly blind and irrelevant to any world; yet such emotion is none the\nless immersed in matter and dependent on natural changes both for its\norigin and for its function, since a significant pleasure or pain makes\ncomments on the world and involves ideals about what ought to be\nhappening there.\n\nMental facts synchronise with their basis, for no thought hovers over a\ndead brain and there is no vision in a dark chamber; but their tenure of\nlife is independent of that of their objects, since thought may be\nprophetic or reminiscent and is intermittent even when its object enjoys\na continuous existence. Mental facts are similar to their objects, since\nthings and images have, intrinsically regarded, the same constitution;\nbut images do not move in the same plane with things and their parts are\nin no proportionate dynamic relation to the parts of the latter.\nThought\u2019s place in nature is exiguous, however broad the landscape it\nrepresents; it touches the world tangentially only, in some ferment of\nthe brain. It is probably no atom that supports the soul (as Leibnitz\nimagined), but rather some cloud of atoms shaping or remodelling an\norganism. Mind in this case would be, in its physical relation to\nmatter, what it feels itself to be in its moral attitude toward the\nsame; a witness to matter\u2019s interesting aspects and a realisation of its\nforms.\n\n[Sidenote: Perception represents things in their practical relation to\nthe body.]\n\nMental facts, moreover, are highly selective; especially does this\nappear in respect to the dialectical world, which is in itself infinite,\nwhile the sum of human logic and mathematics, though too long for most\nmen\u2019s patience, is decidedly brief. If we ask ourselves on what\nprinciple this selection and foreshortening of truth takes place in the\nmind, we may perhaps come upon the real bond and the deepest contrast\nbetween mind and its environment. The infinity of formal truth is\ndisregarded in human thought when it is irrelevant to practice and to\nhappiness; the infinity of nature is represented there in violent\nperspective, centring about the body and its interests. The seat and\nstarting-point of every mental survey is a brief animal life. A mind\nseems, then, to be a consciousness of the body\u2019s interests, expressed in\nterms of what affects that body, as if in the Babel of nature a man\nheard only the voices that pronounced his name. A mind is a private\nview; it is gathered together in proportion as physical sensibility\nextends its range and makes one stretch of being after another tributary\nto the animal\u2019s life, and in proportion also as this sensibility is\nintegrated, so that every organ in its reaction enlists the resources of\nevery other organ as well. A personal will and intelligence thus arise;\nand they direct action from within with a force and freedom which are\nexactly proportionate to the material forces, within and without the\nbody, which the soul has come to represent.\n\nIn other words, mind raises to an actual existence that _form_ in\nmaterial processes which, had the processes remained wholly material,\nwould have had only ideal or imputed being\u2014as the stars would not have\nbeen divided into the signs of the Zodiac but for the fanciful eye of\nastrologers. Automata might arise and be destroyed without any value\ncoming or going; only a form-loving observer could say that anything\nfortunate or tragic had occurred, as poets might at the budding or\nwithering of a flower. Some of nature\u2019s automata, however, love\nthemselves, and comment on the form they achieve or abandon; these\nconstellations of atoms are genuine beasts. Their consciousness and\ntheir interest in their own individuality rescues that individuality\nfrom the realm of discourse and from having merely imputed limits.\n\n[Sidenote: Mind the existence in which form becomes actual.]\n\nThat the basis of mind lies in the body\u2019s interests rather than in its\natoms may seem a doctrine somewhat too poetical for psychology; yet may\nnot poetry, superposed on material existence and supported by it, be\nperhaps the key to mind? Such a view hangs well together with the\npractical and prospective character of consciousness, with its total\ndependence on the body, its cognitive relevance to the world, and its\nformal disparity from material being. Mind does not accompany body like\na useless and persistent shadow; it is significant and it is\nintermittent. Much less can it be a link in physiological processes,\nprocesses irrelevant to its intent and incompatible with its immaterial\nessence. Consciousness seems to arise when the body assumes an attitude\nwhich, being an attitude, supervenes upon the body\u2019s elements and cannot\nbe contained within them. This attitude belongs to the whole body in its\nsignificant operation, and the report of this attitude, its expression,\nrequires survey, synthesis, appreciation\u2014things which constitute what\nwe call mentality. This remains, of course, the mentality of that\nmaterial situation; it is the voice of that particular body in that\nparticular pass. The mind therefore represents its basis, but this basis\n(being a _form_ of material existence and not matter itself) is neither\nvainly reduplicated by representation nor used up materially in the\nprocess.\n\nRepresentation is far from idle, since it brings to focus those\nmechanical unities which otherwise would have existed only potentially\nand at the option of a roving eye. In evoking consciousness nature makes\nthis delimination real and unambiguous; there are henceforth actual\ncentres and actual interests in the mechanical flux. The flux continues\nto be mechanical, but the representation of it supervening has created\nvalues which, being due to imputation, could not exist without being\nimputed, while at the same time they could not have been imputed without\nbeing attached to one object or event rather than to another. Material\ndramas are thus made moral and raised to an existence of their own by\nbeing expressed in what we call the souls of animals and men; a mind is\nthe entelechy of an organic body.[E] It is a region where form breeds an\nexistence to express it, and destiny becomes important by being felt.\nMind adds to being a new and needful witness so soon as the constitution\nof being gives foothold to apperception of its movement, and offers\nsomething in which it is possible to ground an interest.\n\nThat Aristotle has not been generally followed in views essentially so\nnatural and pregnant as these is due no doubt to want of thoroughness in\nconceiving them, not only on the part of his readers but even on his\nown part; for he treated the soul, which should be on his own theory\nonly an expression and an unmoved mover, as a power and an efficient\ncause. Analysis had not gone far enough in his day to make evident that\nall dynamic principles are mechanical and that mechanism can obtain only\namong objects; but by this time it should no longer seem doubtful that\nmental facts can have no connection except through their material basis\nand no mutual relevance except through their objects.\n\n[Sidenote: Attempt at idealistic physics.]\n\nThere is indeed a strange half-assumption afloat, a sort of reserved\nfaith which every one seems to respect but nobody utters, to the effect\nthat the mental world has a mechanism of its own, and that ideas\nintelligently produce and sustain one another. Systematic idealists, to\nbe sure, have generally given a dialectical or moral texture to the\ncosmos, so that the passage from idea to idea in experience need not be\ndue, in their physics, to any intrinsic or proportionate efficacy in\nthese ideas themselves. The march of experience is not explained at all\nby such high cosmogonies. They abandon that practical calculation to\nsome science of illusion that has to be tolerated in this provisional\nlife. Their own understanding is of things merely in the gross, because\nthey fall in with some divine plan and produce, unaccountably enough,\nsome interesting harmony. Empirical idealists, on the contrary, in\nmaking a metaphysics out of psychology, hardly know what they do. The\nlaws of experience which they refer to are all laws of physics. It is\nonly the \u201cpossibilities\u201d of sensation that stand and change according to\nlaw; the sensations themselves, if not referred to those permanent\npossibilities, would be a chaos worse than any dream.\n\nCorrect and scrupulous as empiricism may be when it turns its face\nbackward and looks for the seat, the criterion, and the elements of\nknowledge, it is altogether incoherent and self-inhibited when it looks\nforward. It can believe in nothing but in what it conceives, if it would\nrise at all above a stupid immersion in the immediate; yet the relations\nwhich attach the moments of feeling together are material relations,\nimplying the whole frame of nature. Psychology can accordingly conceive\nnothing but the natural world, with its diffuse animation, since this is\nthe only background that the facts suggest or that, in practice, anybody\ncan think of. If empiricism trusted the intellect, and consented to\nimmerse flying experience in experience understood, it would become\nordinary science and ordinary common sense. Deprecating this result, for\nno very obvious reason, it has to balance itself on the thin edge of an\nunwilling materialism, with a continual protestation that it does not\nbelieve in anything that it thinks. It is wholly entangled in the\nprevalent sophism that a man must renounce a belief when he discovers\nhow he has formed it, and that our ancestors\u2014at least the remoter\nones\u2014begin to exist when we discover them.\n\nWhen Descartes, having composed a mechanical system of the world, was\nasked by admiring ladies to say something about the passions, what came\ninto his mind was characteristically simple and dialectical. Life, he\nthought, was a perpetual conflict between reason and the emotions. The\nsoul had its own natural principle to live by, but was diverted from\nthat rational path by the waves of passion that beat against it and\nsometimes flooded it over. That was all his psychology. Ideal entities\nin dramatic relations, in a theatre which had to be borrowed, of course,\nfrom the other half of the world; because while a material mechanism\nmight be conceived without minds in it, minds in action could not be\nconceived without a material mechanism\u2014at least a represented\none\u2014lying beneath and between. Spinoza made a great improvement in the\nsystem by attaching the mind more systematically to the body, and\nstudying the parts which organ and object played in qualifying\nknowledge; but his conception of mental unities and mental processes\nremained literary, or at best, as we have seen, dialectical. No shadow\nof a principle at once psychic and genetic appeared in his philosophy.\nAll mind was still a transcript of material facts or a deepening of\nmoral relations.\n\n[Sidenote: Association not efficient]\n\nThe idea of explaining the flow of ideas without reference to bodies\nappeared, however, in the principle of association. This is the nearest\napproach that has yet been made to a physics of disembodied\nmind\u2014something which idealism sadly needs to develop. A terrible\nincapacity, however, appears at once in the principle of association;\nfor even if we suppose that it could account for the flow of ideas, it\ndoes not pretend to supply any basis for sensations. And as the more\nefficient part of association\u2014association by contiguity\u2014is only a\nrepetition in ideas of the order once present in impressions, the whole\nquestion about the march of mental experience goes back to what\nassociation does not touch, namely, the origin of sensations. What\neverybody assumed, of course, was that the order and quality of\nsensations were due to the body; but their derivation was not studied.\nHume ignored it as much as possible, and Berkeley did not sacrifice a\ngreat deal when he frankly suggested that the production of sensation\nmust be the direct work of God.\n\nThis tendency not to recognise the material conditions of mind showed\nitself more boldly in the treatment of ideation. We are not plainly\naware (in spite of headaches, fatigue, sleep, love, intoxication, and\nmadness) that the course of our thoughts is as directly dependent on the\nbody as is their inception. It was therefore possible, without glaring\nparadox, to speak as if ideas caused one another. They followed, in\nrecurring, the order they had first had in experience, as when we learn\nsomething by heart. Why, a previous verse being given, we should\nsometimes be unable to repeat the one that had often followed it before,\nthere was no attempt to explain: it sufficed that reverie often seemed\nto retrace events in their temporal order. Even less dependent on\nmaterial causes seemed to be the other sort of association, association\nby similarity. This was a feat for the wit and the poet, to jump from\nChina to Peru, by virtue of some spark of likeness that might flash out\nbetween them.\n\n[Sidenote: It describes coincidences.]\n\nMuch natural history has been written and studied with the idea of\nfinding curious facts. The demand has not been for constant laws or\nintelligibility, but for any circumstance that could arrest attention or\ndivert the fancy. In this spirit, doubtless, instances of association\nwere gathered and classified. It was the young ladies\u2019 botany of mind.\nUnder association could be gathered a thousand interesting anecdotes, a\nthousand choice patterns of thought. Talk of the wars, says Hobbes, once\nled a man to ask what was the value of a Roman penny. But why only once?\nThe wars must have been often mentioned when the delivering up of King\nCharles did not enter any mind; and when it did, this would not have led\nany one to think of Judas and the thirty pence, unless he had been a\ngood royalist and a good Christian\u2014and then only by a curious accident.\nIt was not these ideas, then, in their natural capacity that suggested\none another; but some medium in which they worked, once in the world,\nopened those particular avenues between them. Nevertheless, no one cared\nto observe that each fact had had many others, never recalled,\nassociated with it as closely as those which were remembered. Nor was\nthe matter taken so seriously that one needed to ask how, among all\nsimilar things, similarity could decide which should be chosen; nor how\namong a thousand contiguous facts one rather than another should be\nrecalled for contiguity\u2019s sake.\n\n[Sidenote: Understanding is based on instinct and expressed in\ndialectic.]\n\nThe best instance, perhaps, of regular association might be found in\nlanguage and its meaning; for understanding implies that each word\nhabitually calls up its former associates. Yet in what, psychologically\nconsidered, does understanding a word consist? What concomitants does\nthe word \u201chorse\u201d involve in actual sentience? Hardly a clear image such\nas a man might paint; for the name is not confined to recalling one view\nof one animal obtained at one moment. Perhaps all that recurs is a vague\nsense of the environment, in nature and in discourse, in which that\nobject lies. The word \u201ckite\u201d would immediately make a different region\nwarm in the world through which the mind was groping. One would turn in\nidea to the sky rather than to the ground, and feel suggestions of a\nmore buoyant sort of locomotion.\n\nUnderstanding has to be described in terms of its potential outcome,\nsince the incandescent process itself, as it exists in transit, will\nnot suffer stable terms to define it. Potentiality is something which\neach half of reality reproaches the other with; things are potential to\nfeeling because they are not life, and feelings are potential to science\nbecause they elude definition. To understand, therefore, is to know what\nto do and what to say in the sign\u2019s presence; and this practical\nknowledge is far deeper than any echo casually awakened in fancy at the\nsame time. Instinctive recognition has those echoes for the most\nsuperficial part of its effect. Because I understand what \u201chorse\u201d means,\nthe word can make me recall some episode in which a horse once figured.\nThis understanding is instinctive and practical and, if the phrase may\nbe pardoned, it is the body that understands. It is the body, namely,\nthat contains the habit and readiness on which understanding hangs; and\nthe sense of understanding, the instant rejection of whatever clashes\nand makes nonsense in that context, is but a transcript of the body\u2019s\neducation. Actual mind is all above board; it is all speculative,\nvibrant, the fruit and gift of those menial subterranean processes. Some\ngenerative processes may be called psychic in that they minister to mind\nand lend it what little continuity it can boast of; but they are not\nprocesses in consciousness. Processes in consciousness are \u00e6sthetic or\ndialectical processes, focussing a form rather than ushering in an\nexistence. Mental activity has a character altogether alien to\nassociation: it is spiritual, not mechanical; an entelechy, not a\ngenesis.\n\n[Sidenote: Suggestion a fancy name for automatism,]\n\nFor these and other reasons association has fallen into some disrepute;\nbut it is not easy to say what, in absolute psychology, has come to take\nits place. If we speak of suggestion, a certain dynamic turn seems to be\ngiven to the matter; yet in what sense a perception suggests its future\ndevelopment remains a mystery. That a certain ripening and expansion of\nconsciousness goes on in man, not guided by former collocations of\nideas, is very true; for we do not fall in love for the first time\nbecause this person loved and these ardent emotions have been habitually\nassociated in past experience. And any impassioned discourse, opening at\nevery turn into new vistas, shows the same sort of vegetation. Yet to\nobserve that consciousness is automatic is not to disclose the mechanism\nby which it evolves. The theory of spontaneous growth offers less\nexplanation of events, if that be possible, than the theory of\nassociation. It is perhaps a better description of the facts, since at\nleast it makes no attempt to deduce them from one another.\n\n[Sidenote: and will another.]\n\nIf, on the contrary, a relation implied in the burden or will of the\nmoment be invoked, the connection established, so far as it goes, is\ndialectical. Where a dialectical correspondence is not found, a material\ncause would have to be appealed to, Such a half-dialectical psychology\nwould be like Schopenhauer\u2019s, quite metaphysical. It might be a great\nimprovement on an absolute psychology, because it would restore, even if\nin mythical terms, a background and meaning to life. The unconscious\nAbsolute Will, the avid Genius of the Species, the all-attracting\nPlatonic Ideas are fabulous; but beneath them it is not hard to divine\nthe forces of nature. This volitional school supplies a good\nstepping-stone from metaphysics back to scientific psychology. It\nremains merely to substitute instinct for will, and to explain that\ninstinct\u2014or even will, if the term be thought more consoling\u2014is merely\na word covering that operative organisation in the body which controls\naction, determines affinities, dictates preferences, and sustains\nideation.\n\n[Sidenote: Double attachment of mind to nature.]\n\nWhat scientific psychology has to attempt\u2014for little has been\naccomplished\u2014may be reduced to this: To develop physiology and\nanthropology until the mechanism of life becomes clear, at least in its\ngeneral method, and then to determine, by experiment and by well-sifted\ntestimony, what conscious sublimation each of those material situations\nattains, if indeed it attains any. There will always remain, no doubt,\nmany a region where the machinery of nature is too fine for us to trace\nor eludes us by involving agencies that we lack senses to perceive. In\nthese regions where science is denied we shall have to be satisfied with\nlandscape-painting. The more obvious results and superficial harmonies\nperceived in those regions will receive names and physics will be\narrested at natural history. Where these unexplained facts are mental it\nwill not be hard to do more systematically what common sense has done\nalready, and to attach them, as we attach love or patriotism, to the\nnatural crises that subtend them.\n\nThis placing of mental facts is made easy by the mental facts\nthemselves, since the connection of mind with nature is double, and even\nwhen the derivation of a feeling is obscure we have but to study its\nmeaning, allowing it to tell us what it is interested in, for a\nroundabout path to lead us safely back to its natural basis. It is\nsuperfluous to ask a third person what circumstances produce hunger:\nhunger will lead you unmistakably enough to its point of origin, and its\nextreme interest in food will not suffer you long to believe that want\nof nourishment has nothing to do with its cause. And it is not otherwise\nwith higher emotions and ideas. Nothing but sophistry can put us in\ndoubt about what conscience represents; for conscience does not say,\nsquare the circle, extinguish mankind so as to stop its sufferings, or\nsteal so as to benefit your heirs. It says, Thou shalt not kill, and it\nalso says, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God who brought thee out of\nthe land of Egypt. So that conscience, by its import and incidence,\nclearly enough declares what it springs from\u2014a social tradition; and\nwhat it represents\u2014the interests, real or imaginary, of the community\nin which you were reared.\n\nWhere psychology depends on literature, where both its units and its\nmethod are poetical, there can be no talk of science. We may as justly,\nor as absurdly, speak of the spirit of an age or of a religion as of a\nman\u2019s character or a river\u2019s god. Particulars in illustration may have\ngood historic warrant, but the unities superimposed are ideal. Such\nmetaphors may be very useful, for a man may ordinarily be trusted to\ncontinue his practices and a river its beneficent or disastrous floods;\nand since those rhetorical forms have no existence in nature we may\ncontinue to frame them as may be most convenient for discourse.\n\n[Sidenote: Is the subject-matter of psychology absolute being?]\n\nWhen psychology is a science, then, it describes the flying\nconsciousness that accompanies bodily life. It is the science of feeling\nor absolute appearance, taken exactly as it seems or feels. Does such a\npsychology, we may be tempted to ask, constitute scientific knowledge of\nreality? Is it at last the true metaphysics? This question would have to\nbe answered in the negative, yet not without some previous\ndiscriminations. There is honesty in the conviction that sentience is a\nsort of absolute; it is something which certainly exists. The first\nCartesian axiom applies to it, and to feel, even doubtfully, that\nfeeling existed would be to posit its existence. The science that\ndescribes sentience describes at least a part of existence. Yet this\nself-grounding of consciousness is a suspicious circumstance: it renders\nit in one sense the typical reality and in another sense perhaps the\nsorriest illusion.\n\n[Sidenote: Sentience is representable only in fancy]\n\n\u201cReality\u201d is an ambiguous term. If we mean by it the immediate, then\nsentience would be a part if not the whole of reality; for what we mean\nby sentience or consciousness is the immediate in so far as we contain\nit, and whatever self-grounded existence there may be elsewhere can be\nconceived by us only mythically and on that analogy, as if it were an\nextension or variation of sentience. Psychology would then be knowledge\nof reality, for even when consciousness contains elaborate thoughts that\nmight be full of illusions, psychology takes them only as so much\nfeeling, and in that capacity they are real enough. At the same time,\nwhile our science terminates upon mere feeling, it can neither discover\nnor describe that feeling except in terms of something quite different;\nand the only part of psychology that perhaps penetrates to brute\nsentience is the part that is not scientific. The knowledge that science\nreaches about absolute states of mind is relative knowledge; these\nstates of mind are approached from without and are defined by their\nsurrounding conditions and by their ideal objects. They are known by\nbeing enveloped in processes of which they themselves are not aware.\nApart from this setting, the only feeling known is that which is\nendured. After the fact, or before, or from any other point of vantage,\nit cannot be directly revealed; at best it may be divined and\nre-enacted. Even this possible repetition would not constitute knowledge\nunless the imaginative reproduction were identified with or attributed\nto some natural fact; so that an adventitious element would always\nattach to any recognised feeling, to any feeling reported to another\nmind. It could not be known at all unless something were known about it,\nso that it might not pass, as otherwise it would, for a mere ingredient\nof present sentience.\n\nIt is precisely by virtue of this adventitious element that the\nre-enacted feeling takes its place in nature and becomes an object of\nknowledge. Science furnishes this setting; the jewel\u2014precious or\nfalse\u2014must be supplied by imagination. Romance, dramatic myth, is the\nonly instrument for knowing this sort of \u201creality.\u201d A flying moment, if\nat all _understood_ or underpinned, or if seen in its context, would be\nnot known absolutely as it had been felt, but would be known\nscientifically and as it lay in nature. But dramatic insight, striving\nto pierce through the machinery of the world and to attain and repeat\nwhat dreams may be going on at its core, is no science; and the very\nnotion that the dreams are internal, that they make the interior or\nsubstance of bodies, is a crude materialistic fancy. Body, on the\ncontrary, is the substance or instrument of mind, and has to be looked\nfor beneath it. The mind is itself ethereal and plays about the body as\nmusic about a violin, or rather as the sense of a page about the print\nand paper. To look for it _within_ is not to understand what we are\nlooking for.\n\nKnowledge of the immediate elsewhere is accordingly visionary in its\nmethod, and furthermore, if, by a fortunate chance, it be true in fact,\nit is true only of what in itself is but appearance; for the immediate,\nwhile absolutely real in its stress or presence, is indefinitely\nignorant and false in its deliverance. It knows itself, but in the worst\nsense of the word knowledge; for it knows nothing of what is true about\nit, nothing of its relations and conditions. To pierce to this blind\n\u201creality\u201d or psychic flux, which is nothing but flying appearance, we\nmust rely on fortune, or an accidental harmony between imitative fancy\nin us now and original sentience elsewhere. It is accordingly at least\nmisleading to give the name of \u201creality\u201d to this appearance, which is\nentirely lost and inconsequential in its being, without trace of its own\nstatus, and consequently approachable or knowable only by divination, as\na dream might call to another dream.\n\n[Sidenote: The conditions and objects of sentience, which are not\nsentience, are also real.]\n\nIt is preferable to give a more Platonic meaning to the word and to let\n\u201creality\u201d designate not what is merely felt diffusely but what is true\nabout those feelings. Then dramatic fancy, psychology of the sympathetic\nsort, would not be able to reach reality at all. On the other hand\nscientific psychology, together with all other sciences, would have\nreality for its object; for it would disclose what really was true about\nsentient moments, without stopping particularly to sink abstractedly\ninto their inner quality or private semblance. It would approach and\ndescribe the immediate as a sentient factor in a natural situation, and\nshow us to what extent that situation was represented in that feeling.\nThis representation, by which the dignity and interest of pure sentience\nwould be measured, might be either pictorial or virtual; that is, a\nconscious moment might represent the environing world either\nscientifically, by understanding its structure, or practically, by\ninstinctive readiness to meet it.\n\n[Sidenote: Mind knowable and important in so far as it represents other\nthings.]\n\nWhat, for instance, is the reality of Napoleon? Is it what a telepathic\npoet, a complete Browning, might reconstruct? Is it Napoleon\u2019s life-long\nsoliloquy? Or to get at the reality should we have to add, as scientific\npsychology would, the conditions under which he lived, and their\nrelation to his casual feelings? Obviously if Napoleon\u2019s thoughts had\nhad no reference to the world we should not be able to recover them; or\nif by chance such thoughts fell some day to our share, we should\nattribute them to our own mental luxuriance, without suspecting that\nthey had ever visited another genius. Our knowledge of his life, even\nwhere it is imaginative, depends upon scientific knowledge for its\nprojection; and his fame and immortality depend on the degree to which\nhis thoughts, being rooted in the structure of the world and pertinent\nto it, can be rationally reproduced in others and attributed to him.\nNapoleon\u2019s consciousness might perhaps be more justly identified with\nthe truth or reality of him than could that of most people, because he\nseems to have been unusually cognisant of his environment and master of\nthe forces at work in it and in himself. He understood his causes and\nfunction, and knew that he had _arisen_, like all the rest of history,\nand that he stood for the transmissible force and authority of greater\nthings. Such a consciousness can be known in proportion as we, too,\npossess knowledge, and is worth the pains; something which could not be\nsaid of the absolute sentience of Dick or Harry, which has only material\nbeing, brute existence, without relevance to anything nor understanding\nof itself.\n\nThe circumstances, open to science, which surround consciousness are\nthus real attributes of a man by which he is truly known and\ndistinguished. Appearances are the qualities of reality, else realities\nwould be without place, time, character, or interrelation. In knowing\nthat Napoleon was a Corsican, a short man with a fine countenance, we\nknow appearances only; but these appearances are true of the reality.\nAnd if the presumable inner appearances, Napoleon\u2019s long soliloquy, were\nseparated from the others, those inner appearances would not belong to\nNapoleon nor have any home in the knowable world. That which physics,\nwith its concomitant psychology, might discover in a man is the sum of\nwhat is true about him, seeing that a man is a concretion in existence,\nthe fragment of a world, and not a definition. Appearances define the\nconstituent elements of his reality, which could not be better known\nthan through their means.\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[Footnote E: Aristotle called the soul the first entelechy of such a\nbody. This first entelechy is what we should call life, since it is\npossessed by a man asleep. The French I know but do not use is in its\nfirst entelechy; the French I am actually speaking is in its second.\nConsciousness is therefore the second or actualised entelechy of its\nbody.]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VI\n\nTHE NATURE OF INTENT\n\n\n[Sidenote: Dialectic better than physics.]\n\nCommon knowledge passes from memory to history and from history to\nmechanism; and having reached that point it may stop to look back, not\nwithout misgivings, over the course it has traversed, and thus become\npsychology. These investigations, taken together, constitute physics, or\nthe science of existence. But this is only half of science and on the\nwhole the less interesting and less fundamental half. No existence is of\nmoment to a man, not even his own, unless it touches his will and\nfulfils or thwarts his intent. Unless he is concerned that existences\nshould be of specific kinds, unless he is interested in form, he can\nhardly be interested in being. At the very least in terms of pleasure\nversus pain, light versus darkness, comfort versus terror, the flying\nmoment must be loaded with obloquy or excellence if its passage is not\nto remain a dead fact, and to sink from the sphere of actuality\naltogether into that droning limbo of potentialities which we call\nmatter. Being which is indifferent to form is only the material of\nbeing. To exist is nothing if you have nothing to do, if there is\nnothing to choose or to distinguish, or if those things which belong to\na chosen form are not gathered into it before your eyes, to express what\nwe call a truth or an excellence.\n\nExistence naturally precedes any idealisation of it which men can\ncontrive (since they, at least, must exist first), yet in the order of\nvalues knowledge of existence is subsidiary to knowledge of ideals. If\nit be true that a good physics is as yet the predominant need in\nscience, and that man is still most troubled by his ignorance of matters\nof fact, this circumstance marks his illiberal condition. Without\nknowledge of existence nothing can be done; but nothing is really done\nuntil something else is known also, the use or excellence that existence\nmay have. It is a great pity that those finer temperaments that are\nnaturally addressed to the ideal should have turned their energies to\nproducing bad physics, or to preventing others from establishing natural\ntruths; for if physics were established on a firm basis the idealists\nwould for the first time have a free field. They might then recover\ntheir proper function of expressing the mind honestly, and disdain the\nsorry attempt to prolong confusion and to fish in troubled waters.\n\n[Sidenote: Maladjustments to nature render physics conspicuous and\nunpleasant.]\n\nPerhaps if physical truth had not been so hugely misrepresented in men\u2019s\nfaith and conduct, it would not need to be minutely revealed or\nparticularly emphasised. When the conditions surrounding life are not\nrightly faced by instinct they are inevitably forced upon reflection\nthrough painful shocks; and for a long time the new habit thus forced\nupon men brings to consciousness not so much the movement of\nconsciousness itself as the points at which its movement impinges on the\nexternal world and feels checks and frictions. Physics thus becomes\ninordinately conspicuous (as when philology submerges the love of\nletters) for lack of a good disposition that should allow us to take\nphysics for granted. Much in nature is delightful to know and to keep in\nmind, but much also (the whole infinite remainder) is obscure and\nuninteresting; and were we practically well adjusted to its issue we\nmight gladly absolve ourselves from studying its processes. In a world\nthat in extent and complexity so far outruns human energies, physical\nknowledge ought to be largely virtual; that is, nature ought to be\nrepresented by a suitable attitude toward it, by the attitude which\nreason would dictate were knowledge complete, and not by explicit ideas.\n\n[Sidenote: Physics should be largely virtual.]\n\nThe ancients were happily inspired when they imagined that beyond the\ngods and the fixed stars the cosmos came to an end, for the empyrean\nbeyond was nothing in particular, nothing to trouble one\u2019s self about.\nMany existences are either out of relation to man altogether or have so\ninfinitesimal an influence on his experience that they may be\nsufficiently represented there by an atom of star-dust; and it is\nprobable that if, out of pure curiosity, we wished to consider very\nremote beings and had the means of doing so, we should find the detail\nof existence in them wholly incommensurable with anything we can\nconceive. Such beings could be known virtually only, in that we might\nspeak of them in the right key, representing them in appropriate\nsymbols, and might move in their company with the right degree of\nrespectful indifference.\n\n[Sidenote: and dialectic explicit.]\n\nThe present situation of science, however, reverses the ideal one.\nPhysics, in so far as it exists, is explicit, and at variance with our\nacquired attitude toward things; so that we may justly infer, by the\nshock our little knowledge gives us, that our presumptions and\nassumptions have been so egregious that more knowledge would give us\nstill greater shocks. Meantime dialectic, or knowledge of ideal things,\nremains merely virtual. The ideal usually comes before us only in\nrevulsions which we cannot help feeling against some scandalous\nsituation or some intolerable muddle. We have no time or genius left,\nafter our agitated soundings and balings, to think of navigation as a\nfine art, or to consider freely the sea and sky or the land we are\nseeking. The proper occupation of the mind is gone, or rather not\ninitiated.\n\nA further bad consequence of this illiberal state is that, among many\nwho have, in spite of the times, adoration in their souls, to adore\nphysics, to worship Being, seems a philosophical religion, whereas, of\ncourse, it is the essence of idolatry. The true God is an object of\nintent, an ideal of excellence and knowledge, not a term belonging to\nsense or to probable hypothesis or to the prudent management of affairs.\nAfter we have squared our accounts with nature and taken sufficient\nthought for our bodily necessities, the eyes can be lifted for the first\ntime to the eternal. The rest was superstition and the quaking use of a\nfalse physics. That appeal to the supernatural which while the danger\nthreatens is but forlorn medicine, after the blow has fallen may turn to\nsublime wisdom. This wisdom has cast out the fear of material evils, and\ndreads only that the divine should not come down and be worthily\nentertained among us. In art, in politics, in that form of religion\nwhich is superior, and not inferior, to politics and art, we define and\nembody intent; and the intent embodied dignifies the work and lends\ninterest to its conditions. So, in science, it is dialectic that makes\nphysics speculative and worthy of a free mind. The baser utilities of\nmaterial knowledge would leave life itself perfectly vain, if they did\nnot help it to take on an ideal shape. Ideal life, in so far as it\nconstitutes science, is dialectical. It consists in seeing how things\nhang together perspicuously and how the later phases of any process fill\nout\u2014as in good music\u2014the tendency and promise of what went before.\nThis derivation may be mathematical or it may be moral; but in either\ncase the data and problem define the result, dialectic being insight\ninto their inherent correspondence.\n\n[Sidenote: Intent is vital and indescribable.]\n\nIntent is one of many evidences that the intellect\u2019s essence is\npractical. Intent is action in the sphere of thought; it corresponds to\ntransition and derivation in the natural world. Analytic psychology is\nobliged to ignore intent, for it is obliged to regard it merely as a\nfeeling; but while the feeling of intent is a fact like any other,\nintent itself is an aspiration, a passage, the recognition of an object\nwhich not only is not a part of the feeling given but is often incapable\nof being a feeling or a fact at all. What happened to motion under the\nEleatic analysis happens to intent under an anatomising reflection. The\nparts do not contain the movement of transition which makes them a\nwhole. Moral experience is not expressible in physical categories,\nbecause while you may give place and date for every feeling that\nsomething is important or is absurd, you cannot so express what these\nfeelings have discovered and have wished to confide to you. The\nimportance and the absurdity have disappeared. Yet it is this\npronouncement concerning what things are absurd or important that makes\nthe intent of those judgments. To touch it you have to enter the moral\nworld; that is, you have to bring some sympathetic or hostile judgment\nto bear on those you are considering and to meet intent, not by noting\nits existence, but by estimating its value, by collating it with your\nown intent. If some one says two and two are five, you are no\ncounter-mathematician when you conscientiously put it down that he said\nso. Your science is not relevant to his intent until you run some risk\nyourself in that arena and say, No: two and two are four.\n\n[Sidenote: It is analogous to flux in existence]\n\nFeelings and ideas, when plucked and separately considered, do not\nretain the intent that made them cognitive or living; yet in their\nnative medium they certainly lived and knew. If this ideality or\ntranscendence seems a mystery, it is such only in the sense in which\nevery initial or typical fact is mysterious. Every category would be\nunthinkable if it were not actually used. The mystery in this instance\nhas, however, all that can best serve to make a mystery homely and\namiable. It is supported by a strong analogy to other familiar\nmysteries. The fact that intellect has intent, and does not constitute\nor contain what it envisages, is like the fact that time flows, that\nbodies gravitate, that experience is gathered, or that existence is\nsuspended between being and not being. Propagation in animals is\nmysterious and familiar in the same fashion. Cognition, too, is an\nexpedient for vanquishing instability. As reproduction circumvents\nmortality and preserves a semblance of permanence in the midst of\nchange, so intent regards what is not yet, or not here, or what exists\nno longer. Thus the pulverisation proper to existence is vanquished by\nthought, which in a moment announces or commemorates other moments,\ntogether with the manner of their approach or recession. The mere image\nof what is absent constitutes no knowledge of it; a dream is not\nknowledge of a world like it existing elsewhere; it is simply another\nmore fragile world. What renders the image cognitive is the intent that\nprojects it and deputes it to be representative. It is cognitive only in\nuse, when it is the vehicle of an assurance which may be right or wrong,\nbecause it takes something ulterior for its standard.\n\n[Sidenote: It expresses natural life.]\n\nWe may give intent a somewhat more congenial aspect if we remember that\nthought comes to animals in proportion to their docility in the world\nand to their practical competence. The more plastic a being is to\nexperience, so long as he retains vital continuity and a cumulative\nstructure, the more intelligent he becomes. Intelligence is an\nexpression of adaptation, of impressionable and prophetic structure.\nWhat wonder, then, that intelligence should speak of the things that\ninspire it and that lend it its oracular and practical character,\nnamely, of things at that moment absent and merely potential, in other\nwords, of the surrounding world? Mere feeling might suffice to translate\ninto consciousness each particle of protoplasm in its isolation; but to\ntranslate the relations of that particle to what is not itself and to\nexpress its response to those environing presences, intent and conscious\nsignification are required. Intellect transcends the given and means\nthe absent because life, of which intellect is the fulfilment or\nentelechy, is itself absorbed from without and radiated outward. As life\ndepends on an equilibrium of material processes which reach far beyond\nthe individual they sustain in being, so intent is a recognition of\noutlying existences which sustain in being that very sympathy by which\nthey are recognised. Intent and life are more than analogous. If we use\nthe word life in an ideal sense, the two are coincident, for, as\nAristotle says, the act proper to intellect is life.[F] The flux is so\npervasive, so subtle in its persistency, that even those miracles which\nsuspend it must somehow share its destiny. Intent bridges many a chasm,\nbut only by leaping across. The life that is sustained for years, the\npolitical or moral purpose that may bind whole races together, is\ncondemned to be partly a memory and partly a plan and wholly an ideal.\nIts scope is nothing but the range to which it can continually extend\nits sympathies and its power of representation. Its moments have nothing\nin common except their loyalties and a conspiring interest in what is\nnot themselves.\n\n[Sidenote: It has a material basis.]\n\nThis moral energy, so closely analogous to physical interplay, is of\ncourse not without a material basis. Spiritual sublimation does not\nconsist in not using matter but in using it up, in making it all useful.\nWhen life becomes rational it continues to be mechanical and to take up\nroom and energy in the natural world. That new direction of attention\nupon form which finds in facts instances of ideas, does not occur\nwithout a certain heat and labour in the brain. In its most intimate and\nsupernatural functions intellect has natural conditions. In dreams and\nmadness intent is confused and wayward, in idiocy it is suspended\naltogether; nor has discourse any other pledge that it is addressing\nkindred interlocutors except that which it receives from the disposition\nand habit of bodies. People who have not yet been born into the world\nhave not yet begun to think about it.\n\nThere is, of course, an inner dialectical relevance among all\npropositions that have the same ideal theme, no matter how remote or\nunknown to one another those who utter the propositions may be; but the\nmedium in which this infinite dialectical network is woven is\nmotionless, and indifferent to the direction in which thought might\ntraverse it; in other words, it is not discourse or intelligence but\neternal truth. From the point of view of experience this prior\ndialectical relation of form to form is merely potential; for the\nthoughts between which it would obtain need never exist or be enacted.\nThere is society only among incarnate ideas; and it is only by\nexpressing some material situation that an idea is selected out of the\ninfinity of not impossible ideas and promoted to the temporal dignity of\nactual thought.\n\n[Sidenote: It is necessarily relevant to earth.]\n\nMoreover, even if the faculty of intelligence were disembodied and could\nexist in a vacuum, it would still be a vain possession if no data were\ngiven for it to operate upon and if no particular natural structure,\nanimal, social, or artistic, were at hand for intelligence to ally\nitself to and defend. Reason would in that case die of inanition; it\nwould have no subject-matter and no sanction, as well as no seat.\nIntelligence is not a substance; it is a principle of order and of art;\nit requires a given situation and some particular natural interest to\nbring it into play. In fact, it is nothing but a name for the empire\nwhich conscious, but at bottom irrational, interests attain over the\nfield in which they operate; it is the fruition of life, the token of\nsuccessful operation.\n\nEvery theme or motive in the Life of Reason expresses some instinct\nrooted in the body and incidental to natural organisation. The intent by\nwhich memory refers to past or absent experience, or the intent by which\nperception becomes recognition, is a transcript of relations in which\nevents actually stand to one another. Such intent represents\nmodifications of structure and action important to life, modifications\nthat have responded to forces on which life is dependent. Both desire\nand meaning translate into cognitive or ideal energy, into intent,\nmechanical relations subsisting in nature. These mechanical relations\ngive practical force to the thought that expresses them, and the\nthought in turn gives significance and value to the forces that subserve\nit. Fulfilment is mutual, in one direction bringing material\npotentialities to the light and making them actual and conscious, and in\nthe other direction embodying intent in the actual forms of things and\nmanifesting reason. Nothing could be more ill-considered than the desire\nto disembody reason. Reason cries aloud for reunion with the material\nworld which she needs not only for a basis but, what concerns her even\nmore, for a theme.\n\nIn private and silent discourse, when words and grammar are swathed in\nreverie, the material basis and reference of thought may be forgotten.\nDesire and intent may then seem to disport themselves in a purely ideal\nrealm; moral or logical tensions alone may seem to determine the whole\nprocess. Meditative persons are even inclined to regard the disembodied\nlife which they think they enjoy at such times as the true and native\nform of experience; all organs, applications, and expressions of thought\nthey deprecate and call accidental. As some pious souls reject dogma to\nreach pure faith and suspend prayer to enjoy union, so some mystical\nlogicians drop the world in order to grasp reality. It is an exquisite\nsuicide; but the energy and ideal that sustain such a flight are\nannihilated by its issue, and the soul drops like a paper balloon\nconsumed by the very flame that wafted it. No thought is found without\nan organ; none is conceivable without an expression which is that\norgan\u2019s visible emanation; and none would be significant without a\nsubject-matter lying in the world of which that organ is a part.\n\n[Sidenote: The basis of intent becomes appreciable in language.]\n\nThe natural structure underlying intent is latent in silent thought, and\nits existence might be denied by a sceptical thinker over whose mind the\nanalogies and spirit of physics exercised little influence. This\nhypothetical structure is not, however, without obvious extensions which\nimply its existence even where we do not perceive it directly. A smile\nor a blush makes visible to the observer movements which must have been\nat work in the body while thought occupied the mind\u2014even if, as more\noften happens, the blush or smile did not precede and introduce the\nfeeling they suggest, the feeling which in our verbal mythology is said\nto cause them. No one would be so simple as to suppose that such\ninvoluntary signs of feeling spring directly and by miracle out of\nfeeling. They surely continue some previous bodily commotion which\ndetermines their material character, so that laughter, for instance,\nbecomes a sign of amusement rather than of rage, which it might just as\nwell have represented, so far as the abstract feeling itself is\nconcerned.\n\nIn the same way a sigh, a breath, a word are but the last stage and\nsuperficial explosion of nervous tensions, tensions which from the point\nof view of their other eventual expressions we might call interplaying\nimpulses or potential memories. As these material seethings underlay the\nbudding thought, so the uttered word, when it comes, underlies the\nperfect conception. The word, in so far as it is material, undeniably\ncontinues an internal material process, for aphasia and garrulity have\nknown physical causes. In the vibrations which we call words the hidden\ncomplexities of cerebral action fly out, so to speak, into the air; they\nbecome recognisable sounds emitted by lips and tongue and received by\nthe ear. The uttered word produces an obvious commotion in nature;\nthrough it thought, being expressed in that its material basis is\nextended outward, becomes at the same moment rational and practical; for\nits expression enters into the chain of its future conditions and\nbecomes an omen of that thought\u2019s continuance, repetition, and\nimprovement. Thought\u2019s rational function consists, as we then perceive,\nin expressing a natural situation and improving that situation by\nexpressing it, until such expression becomes a perfect and adequate\nstate of knowledge, which justifies both itself and its conditions.\nExpression makes thought a power in the very world from which thought\ndrew its being, and renders it in some measure self-sustaining and\nself-assured.\n\nA thirsty man, let us say, begs for drink. Had his petition been a\nwordless desire it might have been supposed, though falsely, to be a\ndisembodied and quite immaterial event, a transcendental attitude of\nwill, without conditions or consequences, but somehow with an absolute\nmoral dignity. But when the petition became articulate and audible to a\nfellow-mortal, who thereupon proceeded to fetch a cup of water, the\ndesire, through the cry that expressed it, obviously asserted itself in\nthe mechanical world, to which it already secretly belonged by virtue of\nits cause, a parched body. This material background for moral energy,\nwhich even an inarticulate yearning would not have lacked, becomes in\nlanguage an overt phenomenon, linked observably with all other objects\nand processes.\n\nLanguage is accordingly an overflow of the physical basis of thought. It\nis an audible gesture, more refined than the visible, but in the same\nsense an automatic extension of nervous and muscular processes. Words\nunderlie the thought they are said to express\u2014in truth it is the\nthought that is the flower and expression of the language\u2014much as the\nbody underlies the mind.\n\n[Sidenote: Intent starts from a datum.]\n\nLanguage contains, side by side two distinct elements. One is the\nmeaning or sense of the words\u2014a logical projection given to sensuous\nterms. The other is the sensuous vehicle of that meaning\u2014the sound,\nsign, or gesture. This sensuous term is a fulcrum for the lever of\nsignification, a _point d\u2019appui_ which may be indefinitely attenuated in\nrapid discourse, but not altogether discarded. Intent though it vaults\nhigh must have something to spring from, or it would lend meaning to\nnothing. The minimal sensuous term that subsists serves as a clue to a\nwhole system of possible assertions radiating from it. It becomes the\nsign for an essence or idea, a logical hypostasis corresponding in\ndiscourse to that material hypostasis of perceptions which is called an\nexternal thing.\n\nThe hypostasised total of rational and just discourse is the truth. Like\nthe physical world, the truth is external and in the main potential. Its\nideal consistency and permanence serve to make it a standard and\nbackground for fleeting assertions, just as the material hypostasis\ncalled nature is the standard and background for all momentary\nperceptions. What exists of truth in direct experience is at any moment\ninfinitesimal, as what exists of nature is, but all that either contains\nmight be represented in experience at one time or another.[G]\n\n[Sidenote: and is carried by a feeling.]\n\nThe tensions and relations of words which make grammar or make poetry\nare immediate in essence, the force of language being just as empirical\nas the reality of things. To ask a thinker what he means by meaning is\nas futile as to ask a carpenter what he means by wood; to discover it\nyou must emulate them and repeat their experience\u2014which indeed you will\nhardly be able to do if some sophist has so entangled your reason that\nyou can neither understand what you see nor assert what you mean. But as\nthe carpenter\u2019s acquaintance with wood might be considerably refined if\nhe became a naturalist or liberalised if he became a carver, so a casual\nspeaker\u2019s sense of what he means might be better focussed by dialectic\nand more delicately shaded by literary training. Meantime the vital act\ncalled intent, by which consciousness becomes cognitive and practical,\nwould remain at heart an indescribable experience, a sense of spiritual\nlife as radical and specific as the sense of heat.\n\n[Sidenote: It demands conventional expression.]\n\nSignificant language forms a great system of ideal tensions, contained\nin the mutual relations of parts of speech, and of clauses in\npropositions. Of these tensions the intent in a man\u2019s mind at any moment\nis a living specimen. Experience at that moment may have a significance,\na transitive force, that asks to be enshrined in some permanent\nexpression; the more acute and irrevocable the crisis is, the more\nurgent the need of transmitting to other moments some cognisance of what\nwas once so great. But were this experience to exhale its spirit in a\nvacuum, using no conventional and transmissible medium of expression, it\nwould be foiled in its intent. It would leave no monument and achieve no\nimmortality in the world of representation; for the experience and its\nexpression would remain identical and perish together, just as a\nperception and its object would remain identical and perish together if\nthere were no intelligence to discover the material world, to which the\nperplexing shifts of sensation may be habitually referred. Spontaneous\nexpression, if it is to be recognisable and therefore in effect\nexpressive, labours under the necessity of subordinating itself to an\nideal system of expressions, a permanent language in which its\nspontaneous utterances may be embedded. By virtue of such adoption into\na common medium expression becomes interpretable; a later moment may\nthen reconstruct the past out of its surviving memorial.\n\nIntent, beside the form it has in language, where it makes the soul of\ngrammar, has many other modes of expression, in mathematical and logical\nreasoning, in action, and in those contemplated and suspended acts which\nwe call estimation, policy, or morals. Moral philosophy, the wisdom of\nSocrates, is merely a consideration of intent. In intent we pass over\nfrom existence to ideality, the nexus lying in the propulsive nature of\nlife which could not have been capped by any form of knowledge which was\nnot itself in some way transitive and ambitious. Intent, though it looks\naway from existence and the actual, is the most natural and pervasive of\nthings. Physics and dialectic meet in this: that the second brings to\nfruition what the first describes, namely, existence, and that both have\ntheir transcendental root in the flux of being. Matter cannot exist\nwithout some form, much as by shedding every form in succession it may\nproclaim its aversion to fixity and its radical formlessness or\ninfinitude. Nor can form, without the treacherous aid of matter, pass\nfrom its ideal potentiality into selected and instant being.\n\n[Sidenote: A fable about matter and form.]\n\nIn order to live\u2014if such a myth may be allowed\u2014the Titan Matter was\neager to disguise his incorrigible vagueness and pretend to be\nsomething. He accordingly addressed himself to the beautiful company of\nForms, sisters whom he thought all equally beautiful, though their\nnumber was endless, and equally fit to satisfy his heart. He wooed them\nhypocritically, with no intention of wedding them; yet he uttered their\nnames in such seductive accents (called by mortals intelligence and\ntoil) that the virgin goddesses offered no resistance\u2014at least such of\nthem as happened to be near or of a facile disposition. They were\npresently deserted by their unworthy lover; yet they, too, in that\nmoment\u2019s union, had tasted the sweetness of life. The heaven to which\nthey returned was no longer an infinite mathematical paradise. It was\ncrossed by memories of earth, and a warmer breath lingered in some of\nits lanes and grottoes. Henceforth its nymphs could not forget that they\nhad awakened a passion, and that, unmoved themselves, they had moved a\nstrange indomitable giant to art and love.\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[Footnote F: Cf. the motto on the title-page.]\n\n[Footnote G: Not, of course, in human experience, which is incapable of\ncontaining the heart of a flea, much less what may be endured in remoter\nspheres. But if an intelligence were constructed _ad hoc_ there is\nnothing real that might not fall within the scope of experience. The\ndifference between existence and truth on the one side and knowledge or\nrepresentation on the other may be reduced to this: that knowledge\nbrings what exists or what is true under apperception, while being\ndiffuses what is understood into an impartial subsistence. As truth is\nindistinguishable from an absolute motionless intellect, which should no\nlonger be a function of life but merely a static order, so existence is\nindistinguishable from an absolute motionless experience, which should\nno longer be a foreshortening or representation of anything. This\nexistence would be motionless in the sense that it would \u201cmark time,\u201d\nfor of course every fact in it might be a fact of transition. The whole\nsystem, however, would have a static ideal constitution, since the fact\nthat things change in a certain way or stand in a certain order is as\nmuch a fact as any other; and it is not a logical necessity, either, but\na brute matter of fact that might well have been otherwise.]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VII\n\nDIALECTIC\n\n\n[Sidenote: Dialectic elaborates given forms.]\n\nThe advantage which the mechanical sciences have over history is drawn\nfrom their mathematical form. Mathematics has somewhat the same place in\nphysics that conscience has in action; it seems to be a directive\nprinciple in natural operations where it is only a formal harmony. The\nformalistic school, which treats grammar in all departments as if it\nwere the ground of import rather than a means of expressing it, takes\nmathematics also for an oracular deliverance, springing full-armed out\nof the brain, and setting up a canon which all concrete things must\nconform to. Thus mathematical science has become a mystery which a myth\nmust be constructed to solve. For how can it happen, people ask, that\npure intuition, retreating into its cell, can evolve there a prodigious\nsystem of relations which it carries like a measuring-rod into the world\nand lo! everything in experience submits to be measured by it? What\npre-established harmony is this between the spinning cerebral silkworm\nand nature\u2019s satins and brocades?\n\nIf we but knew, so the myth runs, that experience can show no patterns\nbut those which the prolific Mind has woven, we should not wonder at\nthis necessary correspondence. The Mind having decreed of its own\nmotion, while it sat alone before the creation of the world, that it\nwould take to dreaming mathematically, it evoked out of nothing all\nformal necessities; and later, when it felt some solicitation to play\nwith things, it imposed those forms upon all its toys, admitting none of\nany other sort into the nursery. In other words, perception perfected\nits grammar before perceiving any of its objects, and having imputed\nthat grammar to the materials of sense, it was able to perceive objects\nfor the first time and to legislate further about their relations.\n\nThe most obvious artifices of language are often the most deceptive and\nbring on epidemic prejudices. What is this Mind, this machine existing\nprior to existence? The mind that exists is only a particular department\nor focus of existence; its principles cannot be its own source, much\nless the source of anything in other beings. Mathematical principles in\nparticular are not imposed on existence or on nature _ab extra_, but are\nfound in and abstracted from the subject-matter and march of experience.\nTo exist things have to wear some form, and the form they happen to wear\nis largely mathematical. This being the case, the mind in shaping its\nbarbarous prosody somewhat more closely to the nature of things, learns\nto note and to abstract the form that so strikingly defines them. Once\nabstracted and focussed in the mind, these forms, like all forms, reveal\ntheir dialectic; but that things conform to that dialectic (when they\ndo) is not wonderful, seeing that it is the obvious form of things that\nthe mind has singled out, not without practical shrewdness, for more\nintensive study.\n\n[Sidenote: Forms are abstracted from existence by intent.]\n\nThe difference between ideal and material knowledge does not lie in the\nungenerated oracular character of one of them in opposition to the\nother; in both the data are inexplicable and irrational, and in both\ninvestigation is tentative, observant, and subject to control by the\nsubject-matter. The difference lies, rather, in the direction of\nspeculation. In physics, which is at bottom historical, we study what\nhappens; we make inventories and records of events, of phenomena, of\njuxtapositions. In dialectic, which is wholly intensive, we study what\nis; we strive to clarify and develop the essence of what we find,\nbringing into focus the inner harmonies and implications of forms\u2014forms\nwhich our attention or purpose has defined initially. The intuitions\nfrom which mathematical deduction starts are highly generic notions\ndrawn from observation. The lines and angles of geometers are ideals,\nand their ideal context is entirely independent of what may be their\ncontext in the world; but they are found in the world, and their ideals\nare suggested by very common sensations. Had they been invented, by\nsome inexplicable parthenogenesis in thought, it would indeed have been\na marvel had they found application. Philosophy has enough notions of\nthis inapplicable sort\u2014usually, however, not very recondite in their\norigin\u2014to show that dialectic, when it seems to control existence, must\nhave taken more than one hint from the subject world, and that in the\nrealm of logic, too, nothing submits to be governed without\nrepresentation.\n\n[Sidenote: Confusion comes of imperfect abstraction, or ambiguous\nintent.]\n\nWhen dialectic is employed, as in ethics and metaphysics, upon highly\ncomplex ideas\u2014concretions in discourse which cover large blocks of\nexistence\u2014the dialectician in defining and in deducing often reaches\nnotions which cease to apply in some important respect to the object\noriginally intended. Thus Socrates, taking \u201ccourage\u201d for his theme,\ntreats it dialectically and expresses the intent of the word by saying\nthat courage must be good, and then develops the meaning of good,\nshowing that it means the choice 01 the greater benefit; and finally\nturns about and ends by saying that courage is consequently the choice\nof the greater benefit and identical with wisdom. Here we have a process\nof thought ending in a paradox which, frankly, misrepresents the\noriginal meaning. For \u201ccourage\u201d meant not merely something desirable but\nsomething having a certain animal and psychological aspect. The emotion\nand gesture of it had not been excluded from the idea. So that while\nthe argument proves to perfection that unwise courage is a bad thing, it\ndoes not end with an affirmation really true of the original concept.\nThe instinct which we call courage, with an eye to its psychic and\nbodily quality, is not always virtuous or wise. Dialectic, when it\nstarts with confused and deep-dyed feelings, like those which ethical\nand metaphysical terms generally stand for, is thus in great danger of\nproving unsatisfactory and being or seeming sophistical.\n\nThe mathematical dialectician has no such serious dangers to face. When,\nhaving observed the sun and sundry other objects, he frames the idea of\na circle and tracing out its intent shows that the circle meant cannot\nbe squared, there is no difficulty in reverting to nature and saying\nthat the sun\u2019s circle cannot be squared. For there is no difference in\nintent between the circularity noted in the sun and that which is the\nsubject of the demonstration. The geometer has made in his first\nreflection so clear and violent an abstraction from the sun\u2019s actual\nbulk and qualities that he will never imagine himself to be speaking of\nanything but a concretion in discourse. The concretion in nature is\nnever legislated about nor so much as thought of except possibly when,\nunder warrant of sense, it is chosen to illustrate the concept\ninvestigated dialectically. It does not even occur to a man to ask if\nthe sun\u2019s circle can be squared, for every one understands that the sun\nis circular only in so far as it conforms to the circle\u2019s ideal nature;\nwhich is as if Socrates and his interlocutors had clearly understood\nthat the _virtue_ of courage in an intemperate villain meant only\nwhatever in his mood or action was rational and truly desirable, and had\nthen said that courage, so understood, was identical with wisdom or with\nthe truly rational and desirable rule of life.\n\n[Sidenote: The fact that mathematics applies to existence is empirical.]\n\nThe applicability of mathematics is not vouched for by mathematics but\nby sense, and its application in some distant part of nature is not\nvouched for by mathematics but by inductive arguments about nature\u2019s\nuniformity, or by the character which the notion, \u201ca distant part of\nnature,\u201d already possesses. Inapplicable mathematics, we are told, is\nperfectly thinkable, and systematic deductions, in themselves valid, may\nbe made from concepts which contravene the facts of perception. We may\nsuspect, perhaps, that even these concepts are framed by analogy out of\nsuggestions found in sense, so that some symbolic relevance or\nproportion is kept, even in these dislocated speculations, to the matter\nof experience. It is like a new mythology; the purely fictitious idea\nhas a certain parallelism and affinity to nature and moves in a human\nand familiar way. Both data and method are drawn from applicable\nscience, elements of which even myth, whether poetic or mathematical,\nmay illustrate by a sort of variant or fantastic reduplication.\n\nThe great glory of mathematics, like that of virtue, is to be useful\nwhile remaining free. Number and measure furnish an inexhaustible\nsubject-matter which the mind can dominate and develop dialectically as\nit is the mind\u2019s inherent office to develop ideas. At the same time\nnumber and measure are the grammar of sense; and the more this inner\nlogic is cultivated and refined the greater subtlety and sweep can be\ngiven to human perception. Astronomy on the one hand and mechanical arts\non the other are fruits of mathematics by which its worth is made known\neven to the layman, although the born mathematician would not need the\nsanction of such an extraneous utility to attach him to a subject that\nhas an inherent cogency and charm. Ideas, like other things, have\npleasure in propagation, and even when allowance is made for birth-pangs\nand an occasional miscarriage, their native fertility will always\ncontinue to assert itself. The more ideal and frictionless the movement\nof thought is, the more perfect must be the physiological engine that\nsustains it. The momentum of that silent and secluded growth carries the\nmind, with a sense of pure disembodied vision, through the logical\nlabyrinth; but the momentum is vital, for the truth itself does not\nmove.\n\n[Sidenote: Its moral value is therefore contingent.]\n\nWhether the airy phantoms thus brought into being are valued and\npreserved by the world is an ulterior point of policy which the pregnant\nmathematician does not need to consider in bringing to light the\nlegitimate burden of his thoughts. But were mathematics incapable of\napplication, did nature and experience, for instance, illustrate nothing\nbut Parmenides\u2019 Being or Hegel\u2019s Logic, the dialectical cogency which\nmathematics would of course retain would not give this science a very\nhigh place in the Life of Reason. Mathematics would be an amusement, and\nthough apparently innocent, like a game of patience, it might even turn\nout to be a wasteful and foolish exercise for the mind; because to\ndeepen habits and cultivate pleasures irrelevant to other interests is a\nway of alienating ourselves from our general happiness. Distinction and\na curious charm there may well be in such a pursuit, but this quality is\nperhaps traceable to affinities and associations with other more\nsubstantial interests, or is due to the ingenious temper it denotes,\nwhich touches that of the wit or magician. Mathematics, if it were\nnothing more than a pleasure, might conceivably become a vice. Those\naddicted to it might be indulging an atavistic taste at the expense of\ntheir humanity. It would then be in the position now occupied by\nmythology and mysticism. Even as it is, mathematicians share with\nmusicians a certain partiality in their characters and mental\ndevelopment. Masters in one abstract subject, they may remain children\nin the world; exquisite manipulators of the ideal, they may be erratic\nand clumsy in their earthly ways. Immense as are the uses and wide the\napplications of mathematics, its texture is too thin and inhuman to\nemploy the whole mind or render it harmonious. It is a science which\nSocrates rejected for its supposed want of utility; but perhaps he had\nanother ground in reserve to justify his humorous prejudice. He may have\nfelt that such a science, if admitted, would endanger his thesis about\nthe identity of virtue and knowledge.\n\n[Sidenote: Quantity submits easily to dialectical treatment.]\n\nMathematical method has been the envy of philosophers, perplexed and\nencumbered as they are with the whole mystery of existence, and they\nhave attempted at times to emulate mathematical cogency. Now the\nlucidity and certainty found in mathematics are not inherent in its\nspecific character as the science of number or dimension; they belong to\ndialectic as a whole which is essentially elucidation. The effort to\nexplain meanings is in most cases abortive because these meanings melt\nin our hands\u2014a defeat which Hegel would fain have consecrated, together\nwith all other evils, into necessity and law. But the merit of\nmathematics is that it is so much less Hegelian than life; that it holds\nits own while it advances, and never allows itself to misrepresent its\noriginal intent. In all it finds to say about the triangle it never\ncomes to maintain that the triangle is really a square. The privilege of\nmathematics is simply to have offered the mind, for dialectical\ntreatment, a material to which dialectical treatment could be honestly\napplied. This material consists in certain general aspects of\nsensation\u2014its extensity, its pulsation, its distribution into related\nparts. The wakefulness that originally makes these abstractions is able\nto keep them clear, and to elaborate them infinitely without\ncontradicting their essence.\n\nFor this reason it is always a false step in mathematical science, a\nstep over its brink into the abyss beyond, when we try to reduce its\nelements to anything not essentially sensible. Intuition must continue\nto furnish the subject of discourse, the axioms, and the ultimate\ncriteria and sanctions. Calculation and transmutation can never make\ntheir own counters or the medium in which they move. So that space,\nnumber, continuity, and every other elementary intuition remains at\nbottom opaque\u2014opaque, that is, to mathematical science; for it is no\nparadox, but an obvious necessity, that the data of a logical operation\nshould not be producible by its workings. Reason would have nothing to\ndo if it had no irrational materials. Saint Augustine\u2019s rhetoric\naccordingly covered\u2014as so often with him\u2014a profound truth when he said\nof time that he knew what it was when no one asked him, but if any one\nasked him he did not know; which may be restated by saying that time is\nan intuition, an aspect of crude experience, which science may work with\nbut which it can never arrive at.\n\n[Sidenote: Constancy and progress in intent.]\n\nWhen a concretion is formed in discourse and an intent is attained in\nconsciousness, predicates accrue to the subject in a way which is\nperfectly empirical. Dialectic is not retrospective; it does not consist\nin recovering ground previously surveyed. The accretion of new\npredicates comes in answer to chance questions, questions raised, to be\nsure, about a given theme. The subject is fixed by the mind\u2019s intent and\nit suffices to compare any tentative assertion made about it with that\nintent itself to see whether the expression suggested for it is truly\ndialectical and thoroughly honest. Dialectic verifies by\nreconsideration, by equation of tentative results with fixed intentions.\nIt does not verify, like the sciences of existence, by comparing a\nhypothesis with a new perception. In dialectic no new _perception_ is\nwanted; the goal is to understand the old fact, to give it an aureole\nand not a progeny. It is a transubstantiation of matter, a passage from\nexistence to eternity. In this sense dialectic is \u201csynthetic _a\npriori_\u201d; it analyses an intent which demanded further elucidation and\nhad fixed the direction and principle of its expansion. If this intent\nis abandoned and a new subject is introduced surreptitiously, a fallacy\nis committed; yet the correct elucidation of ideas is a true progress,\nnor could there be any progress unless the original idea were better\nexpressed and elicited as we proceeded; so that constancy in intent and\nadvance in explication are the two requisites of a cogent deduction.\n\nThe question in dialectic is always what is true, what can be said,\nabout _this_; and the demonstrative pronoun, indicating an act of\nselective attention, raises the object it selects to a concretion in\ndiscourse, the relations of which in the universe of discourse it then\nproceeds to formulate. At the same time this dialectical investigation\nmay be full of surprises. Knowledge may be so truly enriched by it that\n_knowledge_, in an ideal sense, only begins when dialectic has given\nsome articulation to being. Without dialectic an animal might follow\ninstinct, he might have vivid emotions, expectations, and dreams, but he\ncould hardly be said to know anything or to guide his life with\nconscious intent. The accretions that might come empirically into any\nfield of vision would not be new predicates to be added to a known\nthing, unless the logical and functional mantle of that thing fell upon\nthem and covered them. While the right of particulars to existence is\ntheir own, granted them by the free grace of heaven, their ability to\nenlarge our knowledge on any particular subject\u2014their relevance or\nincidence in discourse\u2014hangs on their fulfilling the requirements which\nthat subject\u2019s dialectical nature imposes on all its expressions.\n\n[Sidenote: Intent determines the functional essence of objects.]\n\nIt is on this ground, for instance, that the image of a loaf of bread is\nso far from being the loaf of bread itself. External resemblance is\nnothing; even psychological derivation or superposition is nothing; the\nintent, rather, which picks out what that object\u2019s function and meaning\nshall be, alone defines its idea; and this function involves a locus and\na status which the image does not possess. Such admirable iridescence as\nthe image might occasionally put on\u2014in the fine arts, for\ninstance\u2014would not constitute any iridescence or transformation in the\nthing; nor would identity of aspect preserve the thing if its soul, if\nits utility, had disappeared. Herein lies the ground for the essential\nor functional distinction between primary and secondary qualities in\nthings, a distinction which a psychological scepticism has so hastily\ndeclared to be untenable. If it was discovered, said these logicians,\nthat space was perceived through reading muscular sensations, space, and\nthe muscles too, were thereby proved to be unreal. This remarkable\nsophism passed muster in the philosophical world for want of attention\nto dialectic, which might so easily have shown that what a thing _means_\nis spatial distinction and mechanical efficacy, and that the origin of\nour perceptions, which are all equally bodily and dependent on material\nstimulation, has nothing to do with their respective claims to\nhypostasis. It is intent that makes objects objects; and the same\nintent, defining the function of things, defines the scope of those\nqualities which are essential to them. In the flux substances and\nshadows drift down together; it is reason that discerns the difference.\n\n[Sidenote: Also the scope of ideals.]\n\nPurposes need dialectical articulation as much as essences do, and\nwithout an articulate and fixed purpose, without an ideal, action would\ncollapse into mere motion or conscious change. It is notably in this\nregion that elucidation constitutes progress; for to understand the\nproperties of number may be less important than empirically to count;\nbut to see and feel the values of things in all their distinction and\nfulness is the ultimate fruit of efficiency; it is mastery in that art\nof life for which all the rest is apprenticeship. Dialectic of this sort\nis practised intuitively by spiritual minds; and even when it has to be\ncarried on argumentatively it may prove very enlightening. That the\nexcellence of courage is identical with that of wisdom still needs to be\ndriven home; and that the excellence of poetry is identical with that of\nall other things probably sounds like a blind paradox. Yet did not all\nexcellences conspire to one end and meet in one Life of Reason, how\ncould their relative value be estimated, or any reflective sanction be\nfound for them at all? The miscellaneous, captious fancies of the will,\nthe menagerie of moral prejudices, still call for many a Socrates to\ntame them. So long as courage means a grimace of mind or body, the love\nof it is another grimace. But if it meant the value, recognisable by\nreason and diffused through all life, which that casual attitude or\nfeeling might have, then we should be launched upon the quest for\nwisdom.\n\nThe want of integration in moral views is like what want of integration\nwould be in arithmetic if we declared that it was the part of a man and\na Christian to maintain that _my_ two equals four or that a _green_\nfifteen is a hundred. These propositions might have incidental lights\nand shades in people\u2019s lives to make them plausible and precious; but\nthey could not be maintained by one who had clarified his intent in\nnaming and adding. For then the arithmetical relations would be\nabstracted, and their incidental associates would drop out of the\naccount. So a man who is in pursuit of things for the good that is in\nthem must recognise and (if reason avails) must pursue what is good in\nthem all. Strange customs and unheard-of thoughts may then find their\nappropriate warrant; just as in higher mathematical calculations very\nwonderful and unforeseen results may be arrived at, which a man will not\naccept without careful reconsideration of the terms and problem before\nhim; but if he finds the unexpected conclusion flowing from those\npremises, he will have enlarged his knowledge of his art and discovered\na congenial good. He will have made progress in the Socratic science of\nknowing his own intent.\n\n[Sidenote: Double status of mathematics.]\n\nMathematics, for all its applications in nature, is a part of ideal\nphilosophy. It is logic applied to certain simple intuitions. These\nintuitions and many of their developments happen to appear in that\nefficacious and self-sustaining moiety of being which we call material;\nso that mathematics is _per accidens_ the dialectical study of nature\u2019s\nefficacious form. Its use and application in the world rather hide its\ndialectical principle. Mathematics owes its public success to the happy\nchoice of a simple and widely diffused subject-matter; it owes its inner\ncogency, however, to its ideality and the merely adventitious\napplication it has to existence. Mathematics has come to seem the type\nof good logic because it is an illustration of logic in a sphere so\nhighly abstract in idea and so pervasive in sense as to be at once\nmanageable and useful.\n\nThe delights and triumphs of mathematics ought, therefore, to be a great\nencouragement to ideal philosophy. If in a comparatively uninteresting\nfield attention can find so many treasures of harmony and order, what\nbeauties might it not discover in interpreting faithfully ideas nobler\nthan extension and number, concretions closer to man\u2019s spiritual life?\nBut unfortunately the logic of values is subject to voluntary and\ninvoluntary confusions of so discouraging a nature that the flight of\ndialectic in that direction has never been long and, even when short,\noften disastrous. What is needed, as the example of mathematics shows,\nis a steadfast intent and an adventurous inquiry. It would not occur to\na geometer to ask with trepidation what difference it would make to the\nPythagorean proposition if the hypothenuse were said to be wise and\ngood. Yet metaphysicians, confounding dialectic with physics and\nthereby corrupting both, will discuss for ever the difference it makes\nto substance whether you call it matter or God. Nevertheless, no\ndecorative epithets can give substance any other attributes than those\nwhich it has; that is, other than the actual appearances that substance\nis needed to support. Similarly, neither mathematicians nor astronomers\nare exercised by the question whether [Greek: pi] created the ring of\nSaturn; yet naturalists and logicians have not rejected the analogous\nproblem whether the good did or did not create the animals.\n\n[Sidenote: Practical r\u00f4le of dialectic.]\n\nSo long as in using terms there is no fixed intent, no concretion in\ndiscourse with discernible predicates, controversy will rage as\nconceptions waver and will reach no valid result. But when the force of\nintellect, once having arrested an idea amid the flux of perceptions,\navails to hold and examine that idea with perseverance, not only does a\nflash of light immediately cross the mind, but deeper and deeper vistas\nare opened there into ideal truth. The principle of dialectic is\nintelligence itself; and as no part of man\u2019s economy is more vital than\nintelligence (since intelligence is what makes life aware of its\ndestiny), so no part has a more delightful or exhilarating movement. To\nunderstand is pre-eminently to live, moving not by stimulation and\nexternal compulsion, but by inner direction and control. Dialectic is\nrelated to observation as art is to industry; it uses what the other\nfurnishes; it is the fruition of experience. It is not an alternative to\nempirical pursuits but their perfection; for dialectic, like art, has no\nspecial or private subject-matter, nor any obligation to be useless. Its\nsubject-matter is all things, and its function is to compare them in\nform and worth, giving the mind speculative dominion over them. It\nprofits by the flux to fix its signification. This is precisely what\nmathematics does for the abstract form and multitude of sensible things;\nit is what dialectic might do everywhere, with the same incidental\nutility, if it could settle its own attitude and learn to make the\npassions steadfast and calm in the consciousness of their ultimate\nobjects.\n\n[Sidenote: Hegel\u2019s satire on dialectic.]\n\nThe nature of dialectic might be curiously illustrated by reference to\nHegel\u2019s Logic; and though to approach the subject from Hegel\u2019s satirical\nangle is not, perhaps, quite honest or fair, the method has a certain\nspice. Hegel, who despised mathematics, saw that in other departments\nthe instability of men\u2019s meanings defeated their desire to understand\nthemselves. This insecurity in intent he found to be closely connected\nwith change of situation, with the natural mutability of events and\nopinions in the world. Instead of showing, however, what inroads\npassion, oblivion, sophistry, and frivolity may make into dialectic, he\nbethought himself to represent all these incoherences, which are indeed\nsignificant of natural changes, as the march of dialectic itself, thus\nidentified with the process of evolution and with natural law. The\nromance of an unstable and groping theology, full of warm intentions and\nimpossible ideas, he took to be typical of all experience and of all\nscience.\n\nIn that impressionable age any effect of _chiaro-oscuro_ caught in the\nmoonlight of history could find a philosopher to exalt it into the\ndarkly luminous secret of the world. Hegel accordingly decreed that\nmen\u2019s habit of self-contradiction constituted their providential\nfunction, both in thought and in morals; and he devoted his Logic to\nshowing how every idea they embraced (for he never treated an idea\notherwise than as a creed), when pressed a little, turned into its\nopposite. This opposite after a while would fall back into something\nlike the original illusion; whereupon a new change of insight would\noccur and a new thought would be accepted until, the landscape changing,\nattention would be attracted to a fresh aspect of the matter and\nconviction would wander into a new labyrinth of false steps and\nhalf-meanings. The sum total of these wanderings, when viewed from\nabove, formed an interesting picture. A half-mystical, half-cynical\nreflection might take a certain pleasure in contemplating it; especially\nif, in memory of Calvin and the Stoics, this situation were called the\nexpression of Absolute Reason and Divine Will.\n\nWe may think for a moment that we have grasped the elusive secret of\nthis philosophy and that it is simply a Calvinism without Christianity,\nin which God\u2019s glory consists in the damnation of quite all his\ncreatures. Presently, however, the scene changes again, and we recognise\nthat Creator and creation, ideal and process, are identical, so that the\nglory belongs to the very multitude that suffers. But finally, as we rub\nour eyes, the whole revelation collapses into a platitude, and we\ndiscover that this glory and this damnation were nothing but unctuous\nphrases for the vulgar flux of existence.\n\nThat nothing is what we mean by it is perfectly true when we in no case\nknow what we mean. Thus a man who is a mystic by nature may very well\nbecome one by reflection also. Not knowing what he wants nor what he is,\nhe may believe that every shift carries him nearer to perfection. A\ntemperamental and quasi-religious thirst for inconclusiveness and room\nto move on lent a certain triumphant note to Hegel\u2019s satire; he was sure\nit all culminated in something, and was not sure it did not culminate in\nhimself. The system, however, as it might strike a less egotistical\nreader, is a long demonstration of man\u2019s ineptitude and of nature\u2019s\ncontemptuous march over a path paved with good intentions. It is an\nidealism without respect for ideals; a system of dialectic in which a\npsychological flux (not, of course, psychological science, which would\ninvolve terms dialectically fixed and determinate) is made\nsystematically to obliterate intended meanings.\n\n[Sidenote: Dialectic expresses a given intent.]\n\nThis spirited travesty of logic has enough historical truth in it to\nshow that dialectic must always stand, so to speak, on its apex; for\nlife is changeful, and the vision and interest of one moment are not\nunderstood in the next. Theological dialectic rings hollow when once\nfaith is dead; grammar looks artificial when a language is foreign;\nmathematics itself seems shallow when, like Hegel, we have no love for\nnature\u2019s intelligible mechanism nor for the clear structure and\nconstancy of eternal things. Ideal philosophy is a flower of the spirit\nand varies with the soil. If mathematics suffers so little\ncontradiction, it is only because the primary aspects of sensation which\nit elaborates could not lapse from the world without an utter break in\nits continuity. Otherwise though mathematics might not be refuted it\nmight well be despised, like an obsolete ontology. Its boasted necessity\nand universality would not help it at all if experience should change so\nmuch as to present no further mathematical aspect. Those who expect to\npass at death into a non-spatial and super-temporal world, where there\nwill be no detestable extended and unthinking substances, and nothing\nthat need be counted, will find their hard-learned mathematics sadly\nsuperfluous there. The memory of earthly geometry and arithmetic will\ngrow pale amid that floating incense and music, where dialectic, if it\nsurvives at all, will have to busy itself on new intuitions.\n\nSo, too, when the landscape changes in the moral world, when new\npassions or arts make their appearance, moral philosophy must start\nafresh on a new foundation and try to express the ideals involved in the\nnew pursuits. To this extent experience lends colour to Hegel\u2019s\ndialectical physics; but he betrayed, like the sincere pantheist he was,\nthe finite interests that give actual values to the world, and he wished\nto bestow instead a groundless adoration on the law that connected and\ndefeated every ideal. Such a genius, in spite of incisive wit and a\ncertain histrionic sympathy with all experience, could not be truly\nfree; it could not throw off its professional priestcraft, its habit of\nceremonious fraud on the surface, nor, at heart, its inhuman religion.\n\n[Sidenote: Its empire is ideal and autonomous.]\n\nThe sincere dialectician, the genuine moralist, must stand upon human,\nSocratic ground. Though art be long, it must take a short life for its\nbasis and an actual interest for its guide. The liberal dialectician has\nthe gift of conversation; he does not pretend to legislate from the\nthrone of Jehovah about the course of affairs, but asks the ingenuous\nheart to speak for itself, guiding and checking it only in its own\ninterest. The result is to express a given nature and to cultivate it;\nso that whenever any one possessing such a nature is born into the world\nhe may use this calculation, and more easily understand and justify his\nmind. Of course, if experience were no longer the same, and faculties\nhad entirely varied, the former interpretation could no longer serve.\nWhere nature shows a new principle of growth the mind must find a new\nmethod of expression, and move toward other goals. Ideals are not forces\nstealthily undermining the will; they are possible forms of being that\nwould frankly express it. These forms are invulnerable, eternal, and\nfree; and he who finds them divine and congenial and is able to embody\nthem at least in part and for a season, has to that extent transfigured\nlife, turning it from a fatal process into a liberal art.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER VIII\n\nPRERATIONAL MORALITY\n\n\n[Sidenote: Empirical alloy in dialectic.]\n\nWhen a polyglot person is speaking, foreign words sometimes occur to\nhim, which he at once translates into the language he happens to be\nusing. Somewhat in the same way, when dialectic develops an idea,\nsuggestions for this development may come from the empirical field; yet\nthese suggestions soon shed their externality and their place is taken\nby some genuine development of the original notion. In constructing, for\ninstance, the essence of a circle, I may have started from a hoop. I may\nhave observed that as the hoop meanders down the path the roundness of\nit disappears to the eye, being gradually flattened into a straight\nline, such as the hoop presents when it is rolling directly away from\nme. I may now frame the idea of a mathematical circle, in which all\ndiameters are precisely equal, in express contrast to the series of\nellipses, with very unequal diameters, which the floundering hoop has\nillustrated in its career. When once, however, the definition of the\ncircle is attained, no watching of hoops is any longer requisite. The\nellipse can be generated ideally out of the definition, and would have\nbeen generated, like asymptotes and hyperbolas, even if never\nillustrated in nature at all. Lemmas from a foreign tongue have only\nserved to disclose a great fecundity in the native one, and the\nlegitimate word that the context required has supplanted the casual\nstranger that may first have ushered it into the mind.\n\nWhen the idea which dialectic is to elaborate is a moral idea, a purpose\ntouching something in the concrete world, lemmas from experience often\nplay a very large part in the process. Their multitude, with the small\nshifts in aspiration and esteem which they may suggest to the mind,\noften obscures the dialectical process altogether. In this case the\nforeign term is never translated into the native medium; we never make\nout what ideal connection our conclusion has with our premises, nor in\nwhat way the conduct we finally decide upon is to fulfil the purpose\nwith which we began. Reflection merely beats about the bush, and when a\nsufficient number of prejudices and impulses have been driven from\ncover, we go home satisfied with our day\u2019s ranging, and feeling that we\nhave left no duty unconsidered; and our last bird is our final\nresolution.\n\n[Sidenote: Arrested rationality in morals.]\n\nWhen morality is in this way non-dialectical, casual, impulsive,\npolyglot, it is what we may call prerational morality. There is indeed\nreason in it, since every deliberate precept expresses some reflection\nby which impulses have been compared and modified. But such chance\nreflection amounts to moral perception, not to moral science. Reason has\nnot begun to educate her children. This morality is like knowing chairs\nfrom tables and things near from distant things, which is hardly what we\nmean by natural science. On this stage, in the moral world, are the\njudgments of Mrs. Grundy, the aims of political parties and their\nmaxims, the principles of war, the appreciation of art, the commandments\nof religious authorities, special revelations of duty to individuals,\nand all systems of intuitive ethics.\n\n[Sidenote: Its emotional and practical power.]\n\nPrerational morality is vigorous because it is sincere. Actual\ninterests, rooted habits, appreciations the opposite of which is\ninconceivable and contrary to the current use of language, are embodied\nin special precepts; or they flare up of themselves in impassioned\njudgments. It is hardly too much to say, indeed, that prerational\nmorality is morality proper. Rational ethics, in comparison, seems a\nkind of politics or wisdom, while post-rational systems are essentially\nreligions. If we thus identify morality with prerational standards, we\nmay agree also that morality is no science in itself, though it may\nbecome, with other matters, a subject for the science of anthropology;\nand Hume, who had never come to close quarters with any rational or\npost-rational ideal, could say with perfect truth that morality was not\nfounded on reason. Instinct is of course not founded on reason, but\n_vice versa_; and the maxims enforced by tradition or conscience are\nunmistakably founded on instinct. They might, it is true, become\nmaterials for reason, if they were intelligently accepted, compared, and\ncontrolled; but such a possibility reverses the partisan and spasmodic\nmethods which Hume and most other professed moralists associate with\nethics. Hume\u2019s own treatises on morals, it need hardly be said, are pure\npsychology. It would have seemed to him conceited, perhaps, to inquire\nwhat ought really to be done. He limited himself to asking what men\ntended to think about their doings.\n\nThe chief expression of rational ethics which a man in Hume\u2019s world\nwould have come upon lay in the Platonic and Aristotelian writings; but\nthese were not then particularly studied nor vitally understood. The\nchief illustration of post-rational morality that could have fallen\nunder his eyes, the Catholic religion, he would never have thought of as\na philosophy of life, but merely as a combination of superstition and\npolicy, well adapted to the lying and lascivious habits of Mediterranean\npeoples. Under such circumstances ethics could not be thought of as a\nscience; and whatever gradual definition of the ideal, whatever\nprescription of what ought to be and to be done, found a place in the\nthoughts of such philosophers formed a part of their politics or\nreligion and not of their reasoned knowledge.\n\n[Sidenote: Moral science is an application of dialectic, not a part of\nanthropology.]\n\nThere is, however, a dialectic of the will; and that is the science\nwhich, for want of a better name, we must call ethics or moral\nphilosophy. The interweaving of this logic of practice with various\nnatural sciences that have man or society for their theme, leads to much\nconfusion in terminology and in point of view. Is the good, we may ask,\nwhat anybody calls good at any moment, or what anybody calls good on\nreflection, or what all men agree to call good, or what God calls good,\nno matter what all mankind may think about it? Or is true good something\nthat perhaps nobody calls good nor knows of, something with no other\ncharacteristic or relation except that it is simply good?\n\nVarious questions are involved in such perplexing alternatives; some are\nphysical questions and others dialectical. Why any one values anything\nat all, or anything in particular, is a question of physics; it asks for\nthe causes of interest, judgment, and desire. To esteem a thing good is\nto express certain affinities between that thing and the speaker; and if\nthis is done with self-knowledge and with knowledge of the thing, so\nthat the felt affinity is a real one, the judgment is invulnerable and\ncannot be asked to rescind itself. Thus if a man said hemlock was good\nto drink, we might say he was mistaken; but if he explained that he\nmeant good to drink in committing suicide, there would be nothing\npertinent left to say: for to adduce that to commit suicide is not good\nwould be impertinent. To establish that, we should have to go back and\nask him if he valued anything\u2014life, parents, country, knowledge,\nreputation; and if he said no, and was sincere, our mouths would be\neffectually stopped\u2014that is, unless we took to declamation. But we\nmight very well turn to the bystanders and explain what sort of blood\nand training this man possessed, and what had happened among the cells\nand fibres of his brain to make him reason after that fashion. The\ncauses of morality, good or bad, are physical, seeing that they are\ncauses.\n\nThe science of ethics, however, has nothing to do with causes, not in\nthat it need deny or ignore them but in that it is their fruit and\nbegins where they end. Incense rises from burning coals, but it is\nitself no conflagration, and will produce none. What ethics asks is not\nwhy a thing is called good, but whether it is good or not, whether it is\nright or not so to esteem it. Goodness, in this ideal sense, is not a\nmatter of opinion, but of nature. For intent is at work, life is in\nactive operation, and the question is whether the thing or the situation\nresponds to that intent. So if I ask, Is four really twice two? the\nanswer is not that most people say so, but that, in saying so, I am not\nmisunderstanding myself. To judge whether things are _really_ good,\nintent must be made to speak; and if this intent may itself be judged\nlater, that happens by virtue of other intents comparing the first with\ntheir own direction.\n\nHence good, when once the moral or dialectical attitude has been\nassumed, means not what is called good but what is so; that is, what\n_ought_ to be called good. For intent, beneath which there is no moral\njudgment, sets up its own standard, and ideal science begins on that\nbasis, and cannot go back of it to ask why the obvious good is good at\nall. Naturally, there is a reason, but not a moral one; for it lies in\nthe physical habit and necessity of things. The reason is simply the\npropulsive essence of animals and of the universal flux, which renders\nforms possible but unstable, and either helpful or hurtful to one\nanother. That nature should have this constitution, or intent this\ndirection, is not a good in itself. It is esteemed good or bad as the\nintent that speaks finds in that situation a support or an obstacle to\nits ideal. As a matter of fact, nature and the very existence of life\ncannot be thought wholly evil, since no intent is wholly at war with\nthese its conditions; nor can nature and life be sincerely regarded as\nwholly good, since no moral intent stops at the facts; nor does the\nuniversal flux, which infinitely overflows any actual synthesis,\naltogether support any intent it may generate.\n\n[Sidenote: Estimation the soul of philosophy.]\n\nPhilosophers would do a great discourtesy to estimation if they sought\nto justify it. It is all other acts that need justification by this one.\nThe good greets us initially in every experience and in every object.\nRemove from anything its share of excellence and you have made it\nutterly insignificant, irrelevant to human discourse, and unworthy of\neven theoretic consideration. Value is the principle of perspective in\nscience, no less than of rightness in life. The hierarchy of goods, the\narchitecture of values, is the subject that concerns man most. Wisdom is\nthe first philosophy, both in time and in authority; and to collect\nfacts or to chop logic would be idle and would add no dignity to the\nmind, unless that mind possessed a clear humanity and could discern what\nfacts and logic are good for and what not. The facts would remain facts\nand the truths truths; for of course values, accruing on account of\nanimal souls and their affections, cannot possibly create the universe\nthose animals inhabit. But both facts and truths would remain trivial,\nfit to awaken no pang, no interest, and no rapture. The first\nphilosophers were accordingly sages. They were statesmen and poets who\nknew the world and cast a speculative glance at the heavens, the better\nto understand the conditions and limits of human happiness. Before their\nday, too, wisdom had spoken in proverbs. _It is better_ every adage\nbegan: _Better this than that_. Images or symbols, mythical or homely\nevents, of course furnished subjects and provocations for these\njudgments; but the residuum of all observation was a settled estimation\nof things, a direction chosen in thought and life because it was better.\nSuch was philosophy in the beginning and such is philosophy still.\n\n[Sidenote: Moral discriminations are natural and inevitable.]\n\nTo one brought up in a sophisticated society, or in particular under an\nethical religion morality seems at first an external command, a chilling\nand arbitrary set of requirements and prohibitions which the young\nheart, if it trusted itself, would not reckon at a penny\u2019s worth. Yet\nwhile this rebellion is brewing in the secret conclave of the passions,\nthe passions themselves are prescribing a code. They are inventing\ngallantry and kindness and honour; they are discovering friendship and\npaternity. With maturity comes the recognition that the authorised\nprecepts of morality were essentially not arbitrary; that they expressed\nthe genuine aims and interests of a practised will; that their alleged\nalien and supernatural basis (which if real would have deprived them of\nall moral authority) was but a mythical cover for their forgotten\nnatural springs. Virtue is then seen to be admirable essentially, and\nnot merely by conventional imputation. If traditional morality has much\nin it that is out of proportion, much that is unintelligent and inert,\nnevertheless it represents on the whole the verdict of reason. It speaks\nfor a typical human will chastened by a typical human experience.\n\n[Sidenote: A choice of proverbs.]\n\nGnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend\nfor their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost\nevery wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it; so\nthat a man rich in such lore, like Sancho Panza, can always find a\nvenerable maxim to fortify the view he happens to be taking. In respect\nto foresight, for instance, we are told, Make hay while the sun shines,\nA stitch in time saves nine, Honesty is the best policy, Murder will\nout, Woe unto you, ye hypocrites, Watch and pray, Seek salvation with\nfear and trembling, and _Respice finem_. But on the same authorities\nexactly we have opposite maxims, inspired by a feeling that mortal\nprudence is fallible, that life is shorter than policy, and that only\nthe present is real; for we hear, A bird in the hand is worth two in the\nbush, _Carpe diem, Ars longa, vita brevis_. Be not righteous overmuch,\nEnough for the day is the evil thereof, Behold the lilies of the field,\nJudge not, that ye be not judged, Mind your own business, and It takes\nall sorts of men to make a world. So when some particularly shocking\nthing happens one man says, _Cherchez la femme_, and another says, Great\nis Allah.\n\nThat these maxims should be so various and partial is quite intelligible\nwhen we consider how they spring up. Every man, in moral reflection, is\nanimated by his own intent; he has something in view which he prizes, he\nknows not why, and which wears to him the essential and unquestionable\ncharacter of a good. With this standard before his eyes, he observes\neasily\u2014for love and hope are extraordinarily keen-sighted\u2014what in\naction or in circumstances forwards his purpose and what thwarts it;\nand at once the maxim comes, very likely in the language of the\nparticular instance before him. Now the interests that speak in a man\nare different at different times; and the outer facts or measures which\nin one case promote that interest may, where other less obvious\nconditions have changed, altogether defeat it. Hence all sorts of\nprecepts looking to all sorts of results.\n\n[Sidenote: Their various representative value.]\n\nPrescriptions of this nature differ enormously in value; for they differ\nenormously in scope. By chance, or through the insensible operation of\nexperience leading up to some outburst of genius, intuitive maxims may\nbe so central, so expressive of ultimate aims, so representative, I\nmean, of all aims in fusion, that they merely anticipate what moral\nscience would have come to if it had existed. This happens much as in\nphysics ultimate truths may be divined by poets long before they are\ndiscovered by investigators; the _vivida vis animi_ taking the place of\nmuch recorded experience, because much unrecorded experience has\nsecretly fed it. Such, for instance, is the central maxim of\nChristianity, Love thy neighbour as thyself. On the other hand, what is\nusual in intuitive codes is a mixture of some elementary precepts,\nnecessary to any society, with others representing local traditions or\nancient rites: so Thou shalt not kill, and Thou shalt keep holy the\nSabbath day, figure side by side in the Decalogue. When Antigone, in\nher sublimest exaltation, defies human enactments and appeals to\nlaws which are not of to-day nor yesterday, no man knowing whence\nthey have arisen, she mixes various types of obligation in a most\ninstructive fashion; for a superstitious horror at leaving a body\nunburied\u2014something decidedly of yesterday\u2014gives poignancy in her mind\nto natural affection for a brother\u2014something indeed universal, yet\nhaving a well-known origin. The passionate assertion of right is here,\nin consequence, more dramatic than spiritual; and even its dramatic\nforce has suffered somewhat by the change in ruling ideals.\n\n[Sidenote: Conflict of partial moralities.]\n\nThe disarray of intuitive ethics is made painfully clear in the\nconflicts which it involves when it has fostered two incompatible\ngrowths in two centres which lie near enough to each other to come into\nphysical collision. Such ethics has nothing to offer in the presence of\ndiscord except an appeal to force and to ultimate physical sanctions. It\ncan instigate, but cannot resolve, the battle of nations and the battle\nof religions. Precisely the same zeal, the same patriotism, the same\nreadiness for martyrdom fires adherents to rival societies, and fires\nthem especially in view of the fact that the adversary is no less\nuncompromising and fierce. It might seem idle, if not cruel and\nmalicious, to wish to substitute one historical allegiance for another,\nwhen both are equally arbitrary, and the existing one is the more\ncongenial to those born under it; but to feel this aggression to be\ncriminal demands some degree of imagination and justice, and sectaries\nwould not be sectaries if they possessed it.\n\nTruly religious minds, while eager perhaps to extirpate every religion\nbut their own, often rise above national jealousies; for spirituality is\nuniversal, whatever churches may be. Similarly politicians often\nunderstand very well the religious situation; and of late it has become\nagain the general practice among prudent governments to do as the Romans\ndid in their conquests, and to leave people free to exercise what\nreligion they have, without pestering them with a foreign one. On the\nother hand the same politicians are the avowed agents of a quite patent\niniquity; for what is their ideal? To substitute their own language,\ncommerce, soldiers, and tax-gatherers for the tax-gatherers, soldiers,\ncommerce, and language of their neighbours; and no means is thought\nillegitimate, be it fraud in policy or bloodshed in war, to secure this\nabsolutely nugatory end. Is not one country as much a country as\nanother? Is it not as dear to its inhabitants? What then is gained by\noppressing its genius or by seeking to destroy it altogether?\n\nHere are two flagrant instances where prerational morality defeats the\nends of morality. Viewed from within, each religious or national\nfanaticism stands for a good; but in its outward operation it produces\nand becomes an evil. It is possible, no doubt, that its agents are\nreally so far apart in nature and ideals that, like men and mosquitoes,\nthey can stand in physical relations only, and if they meet can meet\nonly to poison or to crush one another. More probably, however, humanity\nin them is no merely nominal essence; it is definable ideally, as\nessences are defined, by a partially identical function and intent. In\nthat case, by studying their own nature, they could rise above their\nmutual opposition, and feel that in their fanaticism they were taking\ntoo contracted a view of their own souls and were hardly doing justice\nto themselves when they did such great injustice to others.\n\n[Sidenote: The Greek ideal.]\n\nHow prerational morality may approach the goal, and miss it, is well\nillustrated in the history of Hellenism. Greek morals may be said to\nhave been inspired by two prerational sentiments, a naturalistic\nreligion and a local patriotism. Could Plato have succeeded in making\nthat religion moral, or Alexander in universalising that patriotism,\nperhaps Greece might have been saved and we might all be now at a very\ndifferent level of civilisation. Both Plato and Alexander failed, in\nspite of the immense and lasting influence of their work; for in both\ncases the after-effects were spurious, and the new spirit was smothered\nin the dull substances it strove to vivify.\n\nGreek myth was an exuberant assertion of the rights of life in the\nuniverse. Existence could not but be joyful and immortal, if it had\nonce found, in land, sea, or air, a form congruous with that element.\nSuch congruity would render a being stable, efficient, beautiful. He\nwould achieve a perfection grounded in skilful practice and in a\nthorough rejection of whatever was irrelevant. These things the Greeks\ncalled virtue. The gods were perfect models of this kind of excellence;\nfor of course the amours of Zeus and Hermes\u2019 trickery were, in their\nhearty fashion, splendid manifestations of energy. This natural divine\nvirtue carried no sense of responsibility with it, but it could not fail\nto diffuse benefit because it radiated happiness and beauty. The\nworshipper, by invoking those braver inhabitants of the cosmos, felt he\nmight more easily attain a corresponding beauty and happiness in his\npaternal city.\n\n[Sidenote: Imaginative exuberance and political discipline.]\n\nThe source of myth had been a genial sympathy with nature. The observer,\nat ease himself, multiplied ideally the potentialities of his being; but\nhe went farther in imagining what life might yield abroad, freed from\nevery trammel and necessity, than in deepening his sense of what life\nwas in himself, and of what it ought to be. This moral reflection,\nabsent from mythology, was supplied by politics. The family and the\nstate had a soberer antique religion of their own; this hereditary\npiety, together with the laws, prescribed education, customs, and\nduties. The city drew its walls close about the heart, and while it\nfostered friendship and reason within, without it looked to little but\nwar. A splendid physical and moral discipline was established to serve a\nsuicidal egoism. The city committed its crimes, and the individual\nindulged his vices of conduct and estimation, hardly rebuked by\nphilosophy and quite unrebuked by religion. Nevertheless, religion and\nphilosophy existed, together with an incomparable literature and art,\nand an unrivalled measure and simplicity in living. A liberal fancy and\na strict civic regimen, starting with different partial motives and\nblind purposes, combined by good fortune into an almost rational life.\n\nIt was inevitable, however, when only an irrational tradition supported\nthe state, and kept it so weak amid a world of enemies, that this state\nshould succumb; not to speak of the mean animosities, the license in\nlife, and the spirit of mockery that inwardly infested it. The myths,\ntoo, faded; they had expressed a fleeting moment of poetic insight, as\npatriotism had expressed a fleeting moment of unanimous effort; but what\nforce could sustain such accidental harmonies? The patriotism soon lost\nits power to inspire sacrifice, and the myth its power to inspire\nwonder; so that the relics of that singular civilisation were scattered\nalmost at once in the general flood of the world.\n\n[Sidenote: Sterility of Greek example.]\n\nThe Greek ideal has fascinated many men in all ages, who have sometimes\nbeen in a position to set a fashion, so that the world in general has\npretended also to admire. But the truth is Hellas, in leaving so many\nheirlooms to mankind, has left no constitutional benefit; it has taught\nthe conscience no lesson. We possess a great heritage from Greece, but\nit is no natural endowment. An artistic renaissance in the fifteenth\ncentury and a historical one in the nineteenth have only affected the\ntrappings of society. The movement has come from above. It has not found\nany response in the people. While Greek morality, in its contents or in\nthe type of life it prescribes, comes nearer than any other prerational\nexperiment to what reason might propose, yet it has been less useful\nthan many other influences in bringing the Life of Reason about. The\nChristian and the Moslem, in refining their more violent inspiration,\nhave brought us nearer to genuine goodness than the Greek could by his\nidle example. Classic perfection is a seedless flower, imitable only by\nartifice, not reproducible by generation. It is capable of influencing\ncharacter only through the intellect, the means by which character can\nbe influenced least. It is a detached ideal, responding to no crying and\nactual demand in the world at large. It never passed, to win the right\nof addressing mankind, through a sufficient novitiate of sorrow.\n\n[Sidenote: Prerational morality among the Jews.]\n\nThe Hebrews, on the contrary, who in comparison with the Greeks had a\nbarbarous idea of happiness, showed far greater moral cohesion under\nthe pressure of adversity. They integrated their purposes into a\nfanaticism, but they integrated them; and the integrity that resulted\nbecame a mighty example. It constituted an ideal of character not the\nless awe-inspiring for being merely formal. We need not marvel that\nabstract commandments should have impressed the world more than concrete\nideals. To appreciate an ideal, to love and serve it in the full light\nof science and reason, would require a high intelligence, and, what is\nrarer still, noble affinities and renunciations which are not to be\nlooked for in an undisciplined people. But to feel the truth and\nauthority of an abstract maxim (as, for instance, Do right and shame the\ndevil), a maxim applicable to experience on any plane, nothing is needed\nbut a sound wit and common honesty. Men know better what is right and\nwrong than what is ultimately good or evil; their conscience is more\nvividly present to them than the fruits which obedience to conscience\nmight bear; so that the logical relation of means to ends, of methods to\nactivities, eludes them altogether. What is a necessary connection\nbetween the given end, happiness, and the normal life naturally\npossessing it, appears to them as a miraculous connection between\nobedience to God\u2019s commands and enjoyment of his favour. The evidence of\nthis miracle astonishes them and fills them with zeal. They are\nstrengthened to persevere in righteousness under any stress of\nmisfortune, in the assurance that they are being put to a temporary test\nand that the reward promised to virtue will eventually be theirs.\n\n[Sidenote: The development of conscience.]\n\nThus a habit of faithfulness, a trust in general principles, is fostered\nand ingrained in generation after generation\u2014a rare and precious\nheritage for a race so imperfectly rational as the human. Reason would\nof course justify the same constancy in well-doing, since a course of\nconduct would not be right, but wrong, if its ultimate issue were human\nmisery. But as the happiness secured by virtue may be remote and may\ndemand more virtue to make it appreciable, the mere rationality of a\nhabit gives it no currency in the world and but little moral glow in the\nconscience. We should not, therefore, be too much offended at the\nillusions which play a part in moral integration. Imagination is often\nmore efficacious in reaching the gist and meaning of experience than\nintelligence can be, just because imagination is less scrupulous and\nmore instinctive. Even physical discoveries, when they come, are the\nfruit of divination, and Columbus had to believe he might sail westward\nto India before he could actually hit upon America. Reason cannot create\nitself, and nature, in producing reason, has to feel her way\nexperimentally. Habits and chance systems of education have to arise\nfirst and exercise upon individuals an irrational suasion favourable to\nrational ends. Men long live in substantial harmony with reality before\nthey recognise its nature. Organs long exist before they reach their\nperfect function. The fortunate instincts of a race destined to long\nlife and rationality express themselves in significant poetry before\nthey express themselves in science.\n\nThe service which Hebraism has rendered to mankind has been\ninstrumental, as that rendered by Hellenism has been imaginative.\nHebraism has put earnestness and urgency into morality, making it a\nmatter of duty, at once private and universal, rather than what paganism\nhad left it, a mass of local allegiances and legal practices. The Jewish\nsystem has, in consequence, a tendency to propaganda and intolerance; a\ntendency which would not have proved nefarious had this religion always\nremained true to its moral principle; for morality is coercive and no\nman, being autonomous, has a right to do wrong. Conscience, thus\nreinforced by religious passion, has been able to focus a general\nabhorrence on certain great scandals\u2014slavery and sodomy could be\npractically suppressed among Christians, and drunkenness among Moslems.\nThe Christian principle of charity also owed a part of its force to\nHebraic tradition. For the law and the prophets were full of mercy and\nloving kindness toward the faithful. What Moses had taught his people\nChrist and his Hellenising disciples had the beautiful courage to preach\nto all mankind. Yet this virtue of charity, on its subtler and more\nmetaphysical side, belongs to the spirit of redemption, to that ascetic\nand quasi-Buddhistic element in Christianity to which we shall presently\nrevert. The pure Jews can have no part in such insight, because it\ncontradicts the positivism of their religion and character and their\nideal of worldly happiness.\n\n[Sidenote: Need of Hebraic devotion to Greek aims.]\n\nAs the human body is said to change all its substance every seven years,\nand yet is the same body, so the Hebraic conscience might change all its\ntenets in seven generations and be the same conscience still. Could this\nabstract moral habit, this transferable earnestness, be enlisted in\nrational causes, the Life of Reason would have gained a valuable\ninstrument. Men would possess the \u201csingle eye,\u201d and the art, so\ndifficult to an ape-like creature with loose moral feelings, of acting\non principle. Could the vision of an adequate natural ideal fall into\nthe Hebraising mind, already aching for action and nerved to practical\nenthusiasm, that ideal vision might become efficacious and be largely\nrealised in practice. The abstract power of self-direction, if\nenlightened by a larger experience and a more fertile genius, might give\nthe Life of Reason a public embodiment such as it has not had since the\nbest days of classic antiquity. Thus the two prerational moralities out\nof which European civilisation has grown, could they be happily\nsuperposed, would make a rational polity.\n\n[Sidenote: Prerational morality marks an acquisition but offers no\nprogramme.]\n\nThe objects of human desire, then, until reason has compared and\nexperience has tested them, are a miscellaneous assortment of goods,\nunstable in themselves and incompatible with one another. It is a happy\nchance if a tolerable mixture of them recommends itself to a prophet or\nfinds an adventitious acceptance among a group of men. Intuitive morality\nis adequate while it simply enforces those obvious and universal laws\nwhich are indispensable to any society, and which impose themselves\neverywhere on men under pain of quick extinction\u2014a penalty which many\nan individual and many a nation continually prefers to pay. But when\nintuitive morality ventures upon speculative ground and tries to guide\nprogress, its magic fails. Ideals are tentative and have to be\ncritically viewed. A moralist who rests in his intuitions may be a good\npreacher, but hardly deserves the name of philosopher. He cannot find\nany authority for his maxims which opposite maxims may not equally\ninvoke. To settle the relative merits of rival authorities and of\nhostile consciences it is necessary to appeal to the only real\nauthority, to experience, reason, and human nature in the living man. No\nother test is conceivable and no other would be valid; for no good man\nwould ever consent to regard an authority as divine or binding which\nessentially contradicted his own conscience. Yet a conscience which is\nirreflective and incorrigible is too hastily satisfied with itself, and\nnot conscientious enough: it needs cultivation by dialectic. It neglects\nto extend to all human interests that principle of synthesis and justice\nby which conscience itself has arisen. And so soon as the conscience\nsummons its own dicta for revision in the light of experience and of\nuniversal sympathy, it is no longer called conscience, but reason. So,\ntoo, when the spirit summons its traditional faiths, to subject them to\na similar examination, that exercise is not called religion, but\nphilosophy. It is true, in a sense, that philosophy is the purest\nreligion and reason the ultimate conscience; but so to name them would\nbe misleading. The things commonly called by those names have seldom\nconsented to live at peace with sincere reflection. It has been felt\nvaguely that reason could not have produced them, and that they might\nsuffer sad changes by submitting to it; as if reason could be the\n_ground_ of anything, or as if everything might not find its\nconsummation in becoming rational.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER IX\n\nRATIONAL ETHICS\n\n\n[Sidenote: Moral passions represent private interests.]\n\n\nIn moral reprobation there is often a fanatical element, I mean that\nhatred which an animal may sometimes feel for other animals on account\nof their strange aspect, or because their habits put him to serious\ninconvenience, or because these habits, if he himself adopted them,\nmight be vicious in him. Such aversion, however, is not a rational\nsentiment. No fault can be justly found with a creature merely for not\nresembling another, or for nourishing in a different physical or moral\nenvironment. It has been an unfortunate consequence of mythical\nphilosophies that moral emotions have been stretched to objects with\nwhich a man has only physical relations, so that the universe has been\nfilled with monsters more or less horrible, according as the forces they\nrepresented were more or less formidable to human life. In the same\nspirit, every experiment in civilisation has passed for a crime among\nthose engaged in some other experiment. The foreigner has seemed an\ninsidious rascal, the heretic a pestilent sinner, and any material\nobstacle a literal devil; while to possess some unusual passion,\nhowever innocent, has brought obloquy on every one unfortunate enough\nnot to be constituted like the average of his neighbours.\n\nEthics, if it is to be a science and not a piece of arbitrary\nlegislation, cannot pronounce it sinful in a serpent to be a serpent; it\ncannot even accuse a barbarian of loving a wrong life, except in so far\nas the barbarian is supposed capable of accusing himself of barbarism.\nIf he is a perfect barbarian he will be inwardly, and therefore morally,\njustified. The notion of a barbarian will then be accepted by him as\nthat of a true man, and will form the basis of whatever rational\njudgments or policy he attains. It may still seem dreadful to him to be\na serpent, as to be a barbarian might seem dreadful to a man imbued with\nliberal interests. But the degree to which moral science, or the\ndialectic of will, can condemn any type of life depends on the amount of\ndisruptive contradiction which, at any reflective moment, that life\nbrings under the unity of apperception. The discordant impulses therein\nconfronted will challenge and condemn one another; and the court of\nreason in which their quarrel is ventilated will have authority to\npronounce between them.\n\nThe physical repulsion, however, which everybody feels to habits and\ninterests which he is incapable of sharing is no part of rational\nestimation, large as its share may be in the fierce prejudices and\nsuperstitions which prerational morality abounds in. The strongest\nfeelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they\nexpress merely physical antipathies.\n\nToward alien powers a man\u2019s true weapon is not invective, but skill and\nstrength. An obstacle is an obstacle, not a devil; and even a moral\nlife, when it actually exists in a being with hostile activities, is\nmerely a hostile power. It is not hostile, however, in so far as it is\nmoral, but only in so far as its morality represents a material\norganism, physically incompatible with what the thinker has at heart.\n\n[Sidenote: Common ideal interests may supervene.]\n\nMaterial conflicts cannot be abolished by reason, because reason is\npowerful only where they have been removed. Yet where opposing forces\nare able mutually to comprehend and respect one another, common ideal\ninterests at once supervene, and though the material conflict may remain\nirrepressible, it will be overlaid by an intellectual life, partly\ncommon and unanimous. In this lies the chivalry of war, that we\nacknowledge the right of others to pursue ends contrary to our own.\nCompetitors who are able to feel this ideal comity, and who leading\ndifferent lives in the flesh lead the same life in imagination, are\nincited by their mutual understanding to rise above that material\nambition, perhaps gratuitous, that has made them enemies. They may\nultimately wish to renounce that temporal good which deprives them of\nspiritual goods in truth infinitely greater and more appealing to the\nsoul\u2014innocence, justice, and intelligence. They may prefer an enlarged\nmind to enlarged frontiers, and the comprehension of things foreign to\nthe destruction of them. They may even aspire to detachment from those\nprivate interests which, as Plato said,[H] do not deserve to be taken\ntoo seriously; the fact that we must take them seriously being the\nignoble part of our condition.\n\nOf course such renunciations, to be rational, must not extend to the\nwhole material basis of life, since some physical particularity and\nefficiency are requisite for bringing into being that very rationality\nwhich is to turn enemies into friends. The need of a material basis for\nspirit is what renders partial war with parts of the world the\ninevitable background of charity and justice. The frontiers at which\nthis warfare is waged may, however, be pushed back indefinitely. Within\nthe sphere organised about a firm and generous life a Roman peace can be\nestablished. It is not what is assimilated that saps a creative will,\nbut what remains outside that ultimately invades and disrupts it. In\nexact proportion to its vigour, it wins over former enemies, civilises\nthe barbarian, and even tames the viper, when the eye is masterful and\nsympathetic enough to dispel hatred and fear. The more rational an\ninstitution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others; for\nthese concessions, being just, propagate its essence. The ideal\ncommonwealth can extend to the limit at which such concessions cease to\nbe just and are thereby detrimental. Beyond or below that limit strife\nmust continue for physical ascendancy, so that the power and the will to\nbe reasonable may not be undermined. Reason is an operation in nature,\nand has its root there. Saints cannot arise where there have been no\nwarriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden\nin the depths.\n\n[Sidenote: To this extent there is rational society.]\n\nPerhaps the art of politics, if it were practised scientifically, might\nobviate open war, religious enmities, industrial competition, and human\nslavery; but it would certainly not leave a free field for all animals\nnor for all monstrosities in men. Even while admitting the claims of\nmonsters to be treated humanely, reason could not suffer them to absorb\nthose material resources which might be needed to maintain rational\nsociety at its highest efficiency. We cannot, at this immense distance\nfrom a rational social order, judge what concessions individual genius\nwould be called upon to make in a system of education and government in\nwhich all attainable goods should be pursued scientifically. Concessions\nwould certainly be demanded, if not from well-trained wills, still from\ninevitable instincts, reacting on inevitable accidents. There is tragedy\nin perfection, because the universe in which perfection arises is\nitself imperfect. Accidents will always continue to harass the most\nconsummate organism; they will flow in both from the outer world and\nfrom the interstices, so to speak, of its own machinery; for a rational\nlife touches the irrational at its core as well as at its periphery. In\nboth directions it meets physical force and can subsist only by\nexercising physical force in return. The range of rational ethics is\nlimited to the intermediate political zone, in which existences have\nattained some degree of natural unanimity.\n\nIt should be added, perhaps, that the frontiers between moral and\nphysical action are purely notional. Real existences do not lie wholly\non one or the other side of them. Every man, every material object, has\nmoral affinities enveloping an indomitable vital nucleus or brute\npersonal kernel; this moral essence is enveloped in turn by untraceable\nrelations, radiating to infinity over the natural world. The stars enter\nsociety by the light and knowledge they afford, the time they keep, and\nthe ornament they lavish; but they are mere dead weights in their\nsubstance and cosmological puzzles in their destiny. You and I possess\nmanifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his\npoor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams. Beyond the little\nspan of his foresight and love, each is merely a physical agency,\npreparing the way quite irresponsibly for undreamt-of revolutions and\nalien lives.\n\n[Sidenote: A rational morality not attainable,]\n\nA truly rational morality, or social regimen, has never existed in the\nworld and is hardly to be looked for. What guides men and nations in\ntheir practice is always some partial interest or some partial\ndisillusion. A rational morality would imply perfect self-knowledge, so\nthat no congenial good should be needlessly missed\u2014least of all\npractical reason or justice itself; so that no good congenial to other\ncreatures would be needlessly taken from them. The total value which\neverything had from the agent\u2019s point of view would need to be\ndetermined and felt efficaciously; and, among other things, the total\nvalue which this point of view, with the conduct it justified, would\nhave for every foreign interest which it affected. Such knowledge, such\ndefinition of purpose, and such perfection of sympathy are clearly\nbeyond man\u2019s reach. All that can be hoped for is that the advance of\nscience and commerce, by fostering peace and a rational development of\ncharacter, may bring some part of mankind nearer to that goal; but the\ngoal lies, as every ultimate ideal should, at the limit of what is\npossible, and must serve rather to measure achievements than to prophesy\nthem.\n\n[Sidenote: but its principle clear.] In lieu of a rational morality,\nhowever, we have rational ethics; and this mere idea of a rational\nmorality is something valuable. While we wait for the sentiments,\ncustoms, and laws which should embody perfect humanity and perfect\njustice, we may observe the germinal principle of these ideal things; we\nmay sketch the ground-plan of a true commonwealth. This sketch\nconstitutes rational ethics, as founded by Socrates, glorified by Plato,\nand sobered and solidified by Aristotle. It sets forth the method of\njudgment and estimation which a rational morality would apply\nuniversally and express in practice. The method, being very simple, can\nbe discovered and largely illustrated in advance, while the complete\nself-knowledge and sympathy are still wanting which might avail to\nembody that method in the concrete and to discover unequivocally where\nabsolute duty and ultimate happiness may lie.\n\n[Sidenote: It is the logic of an autonomous will.]\n\nThis method, the Socratic method, consists in accepting any estimation\nwhich any man may sincerely make, and in applying dialectic to it, so as\nto let the man see what he really esteems. What he really esteems is\nwhat ought to guide his conduct; for to suggest that a rational being\nought to do what he feels to be wrong, or ought to pursue what he\ngenuinely thinks is worthless, would be to impugn that man\u2019s rationality\nand to discredit one\u2019s own. With what face could any man or god say to\nanother: Your duty is to do what you cannot know you ought to do; your\nfunction is to suffer what you cannot recognise to be worth suffering?\nSuch an attitude amounts to imposture and excludes society; it is the\nattitude of a detestable tyrant, and any one who mistakes it for moral\nauthority has not yet felt the first heart-throb of philosophy.\n\n[Sidenote: Socrates\u2019 science.]\n\nMore even than natural philosophy, moral philosophy is something Greek:\nit is the appanage of freemen. The Socratic method is the soul of\nliberal conversation; it is compacted in equal measure of sincerity and\ncourtesy. Each man is autonomous and all are respected; and nothing is\nbrought forward except to be submitted to reason and accepted or\nrejected by the self-questioning heart. Indeed, when Socrates appeared\nin Athens mutual respect had passed into democracy and liberty into\nlicense; but the stalwart virtue of Socrates saved him from being a\nsophist, much as his method, when not honestly and sincerely used, might\nseem to countenance that moral anarchy which the sophists had expressed\nin their irresponsible doctrines. Their sophistry did not consist in the\nprivate _seat_ which they assigned to judgment; for what judgment is\nthere that is not somebody\u2019s judgment at some moment? The sophism\nconsisted in ignoring the living moment\u2019s _intent_, and in suggesting\nthat no judgment could refer to anything ulterior, and therefore that no\njudgment could be wrong: in other words that each man at each moment was\nthe theme and standard, as well as the seat, of his judgment.\n\nSocrates escaped this folly by force of honesty, which is what saves\nfrom folly in dialectic. He built his whole science precisely on that\nintent which the sophists ignored; he insisted that people should\ndeclare sincerely what they meant and what they wanted; and on that\nliving rock he founded the persuasive and ideal sciences of logic and\nethics, the necessity of which lies all in free insight and in actual\nwill. This will and insight they render deliberate, profound,\nunshakable, and consistent. Socrates, by his genial midwifery, helped\nmen to discover the truth and excellence to which they were naturally\naddressed. This circumstance rendered his doctrine at once moral and\nscientific; scientific because dialectical, moral because expressive of\npersonal and living aspirations. His ethics was not like what has since\npassed under that name\u2014a spurious physics, accompanied by commandments\nand threats. It was a pliant and liberal expression of ideals, inwardly\ngrounded and spontaneously pursued. It was an exercise in\nself-knowledge.\n\n[Sidenote: Its opposition to sophistry and moral anarchy.]\n\nSocrates\u2019 liberality was that of a free man ready to maintain his will\nand conscience, if need be, against the whole world. The sophists, on\nthe contrary, were sycophants in their scepticism, and having inwardly\nabandoned the ideals of their race and nation\u2014which Socrates defended\nwith his homely irony\u2014they dealt out their miscellaneous knowledge, or\ntheir talent in exposition, at the beck and for the convenience of\nothers. Their theory was that each man having a right to pursue his own\naims, skilful thinkers might, for money, furnish any fellow-mortal with\ninstruments fitted to his purpose. Socrates, on the contrary, conceived\nthat each man, to achieve his aims must first learn to distinguish them\nclearly; he demanded that rationality, in the form of an examination and\nclarification of purposes, should precede any selection of external\ninstruments. For how should a man recognise anything useful unless he\nfirst had established the end to be subserved and thereby recognised the\ngood? True science, then, was that which enabled a man to disentangle\nand attain his natural good; and such a science is also the art of life\nand the whole of virtue.\n\nThe autonomous moralist differs from the sophist or ethical sceptic in\nthis: that he retains his integrity. In vindicating his ideal he does\nnot recant his human nature. In asserting the initial right of every\nimpulse in others, he remains the spokesman of his own. Knowledge of the\nworld, courtesy, and fairness do not neutralise his positive life. He is\nthoroughly sincere, as the sophist is not; for every man, while he\nlives, embodies and enacts some special interest; and this truth, which\nthose who confound psychology with ethics may think destructive of all\nauthority in morals, is in fact what alone renders moral judgment\npossible and respectable. If the sophist declares that what his nature\nattaches him to is not \u201creally\u201d a good, because it would not be a good,\nperhaps, for a different creature, he is a false interpreter of his own\nheart, and rather discreditably stultifies his honest feelings and\nactions by those theoretical valuations which, in guise of a mystical\nethics, he gives out to the world. Socratic liberality, on the contrary,\nis consistent with itself, as Spinozistic naturalism is also; for it\nexercises that right of private judgment which it concedes to others,\nand avowedly builds up the idea of the good on that natural inner\nfoundation on which everybody who has it at all must inevitably build\nit. This functional good is accordingly always relative and good for\nsomething; it is the ideal which a vital and energising soul carries\nwith it as it moves. It is identical, as Socrates constantly taught,\nwith the useful, the helpful, the beneficent. It is the complement\nneeded to perfect every art and every activity after its own kind.\n\n[Sidenote: Its vitality]\n\nRational ethics is an embodiment of volition, not a description of it.\nIt is the expression of living interest, preference, and categorical\nchoice. It leaves to psychology and history a free field for the\ndescription of moral phenomena. It has no interest in slipping\nfar-fetched and incredible myths beneath the facts of nature, so as to\nlend a non-natural origin to human aspirations. It even recognises, as\nan emanation of its own force, that uncompromising truthfulness with\nwhich science assigns all forms of moral life to their place in the\nmechanical system of nature. But the rational moralist is not on that\naccount reduced to a mere spectator, a physicist acknowledging no\ninterest except the interest in facts and in the laws of change. His own\nspirit, small by the material forces which it may stand for and express,\nis great by its prerogative of surveying and judging the universe;\nsurveying it, of course, from a mortal point of view, and judging it\nonly by its kindliness or cruelty to some actual interest, yet, even so,\ndetermining unequivocally a part of its constitution and excellence. The\nrational moralist represents a force energising in the world,\ndiscovering its affinities there and clinging to them to the exclusion\nof their hateful opposites. He represents, over against the chance\nfacts, an ideal embodying the particular demands, possibilities, and\nsatisfactions of a specific being.\n\nThis dogmatic position of reason is not uncritically dogmatic; on the\ncontrary, it is the sophistical position that is uncritically neutral.\nAll criticism needs a dogmatic background, else it would lack objects\nand criteria for criticism. The sophist himself, without confessing it,\nenacts a special interest. He bubbles over with convictions about the\npathological and fatal origin of human beliefs, as if that could prevent\nsome of them from being more trustworthy and truer than others. He is\ndoubtless right in his psychology; his own ideas have their natural\ncauses and their chance of signifying something real. His scepticism\nmay represent a wider experience than do the fanaticisms it opposes. But\nthis sceptic also lives. Nature has sent her saps abundantly into him,\nand he cannot but nod dogmatically on that philosophical tree on which\nhe is so pungent a berry. His imagination is unmistakably fascinated by\nthe pictures it happens to put together. His judgment falls unabashed,\nand his discourse splashes on in its dialectical march, every\nstepping-stone an unquestioned idea, every stride a categorical\nassertion. Does he deny this? Then his very denial, in its promptness\nand heat, audibly contradicts him and makes him ridiculous. Honest\ncriticism consists in being consciously dogmatic, and conscientiously\nso, like Descartes when he said, \u201cI am.\u201d It is to sift and harmonise all\nassertions so as to make them a faithful expression of actual experience\nand inevitable thought.\n\n[Sidenote: Genuine altruism is natural self-expression.]\n\nNow will, no less than that reason which avails to render will\nconsistent and far-reaching, animates natural bodies and expresses their\nfunctions. It has a radical bias, a foregone, determinate direction,\nelse it could not be a will nor a principle of preference. The knowledge\nof what other people desire does not abolish a man\u2019s own aims. Sympathy\nand justice are simply an expansion of the soul\u2019s interests, arising\nwhen we consider other men\u2019s lives so intently that something in us\nimitates and re-enacts their experience, so that we move partly in\nunison with their movement, recognise the reality and initial legitimacy\nof their interests, and consequently regard their aims in our action, in\nso far as our own status and purposes have become identical with theirs.\nWe are not less ourselves, nor less autonomous, for this assimilation,\nsince we assimilate only what is in itself intelligible and congruous\nwith our mind and obey only that authority which can impose itself on\nour reason.\n\nThe case is parallel to that of knowledge. To know all men\u2019s experience\nand to comprehend their beliefs would constitute the most cogent and\nsettled of philosophies. Thought would then be reasonably adjusted to\nall the facts of history, and judgment would grow more authoritative and\nprecise by virtue of that enlightenment. So, too, to understand all the\ngoods that any man, nay, that any beast or angel, may ever have pursued,\nwould leave man still necessitous of food, drink, sleep, and shelter; he\nwould still love; the comic, the loathsome, the beautiful would still\naffect him with unmistakable direct emotions. His taste might no doubt\ngain in elasticity by those sympathetic excursions into the polyglot\nworld; the plastic or dramatic quality which had enabled him to feel\nother creatures\u2019 joys would grow by exercise and new overtones would be\nadded to his gamut. But the foundations of his nature would stand; and\nhis possible happiness, though some new and precious threads might be\nwoven into it, would not have a texture fundamentally different.\n\nThe radical impulses at work in any animal must continue to speak while\nhe lives, for they are his essence. A true morality does not have to be\nadopted; the parts of it best practised are those which are never\npreached. To be \u201cconverted\u201d would be to pass from one self-betrayal to\nanother. It would be to found a new morality on a new artifice. The\nmorality which has genuine authority exists inevitably and speaks\nautonomously in every common judgment, self-congratulation, ambition, or\npassion that fills the vulgar day. The pursuit of those goods which are\nthe only possible or fitting crown of a man\u2019s life is predetermined by\nhis nature; he cannot choose a law-giver, nor accept one, for none who\nspoke to the purpose could teach him anything but to know himself.\nRational life is an art, not a slavery; and terrible as may be the\nerrors and the apathy that impede its successful exercise, the standard\nand goal of it are given intrinsically. Any task imposed externally on a\nman is imposed by force only, a force he has the right to defy so soon\nas he can do so without creating some greater impediment to his natural\nvocation.\n\n[Sidenote: Reason expresses impulses.]\n\nRational ethics, then, resembles prerational precepts and half-systems\nin being founded on impulse. It formulates a natural morality. It is a\nsettled method of achieving ends to which man is drawn by virtue of his\nphysical and rational constitution. By this circumstance rational ethics\nis removed from the bad company of all artificial, verbal, and unjust\nsystems of morality, which in absolving themselves from relevance to\nman\u2019s endowment and experience merely show how completely irrelevant\nthey are to life. Once, no doubt, each of these arbitrary systems\nexpressed (like the observance of the Sabbath) some practical interest\nor some not unnatural rite; but so narrow a basis of course has to be\ndisowned when the precepts so originating have been swollen into\nuniversal tyrannical laws. A rational ethics reduces them at once to\ntheir slender representative r\u00f4le; and it surrounds and buttresses them\non every side with all other natural ideals.\n\n[Sidenote: but impulses reduced to harmony.]\n\nRational ethics thus differs from the prerational in being complete.\nThere is one impulse which intuitive moralists ignore: the impulse to\nreflect. Human instincts are ignorant, multitudinous, and contradictory.\nTo satisfy them as they come is often impossible, and often disastrous,\nin that such satisfaction prevents the satisfaction of other instincts\ninherently no less fecund and legitimate. When we apply reason to life\nwe immediately demand that life be consistent, complete, and\nsatisfactory when reflected upon and viewed as a whole. This view, as it\npresents each moment in its relations, extends to all moments affected\nby the action or maxim under discussion; it has no more ground for\nstopping at the limits of what is called a single life than at the\nlimits of a single adventure. To stop at selfishness is not particularly\nrational. The same principle that creates the ideal of a self creates\nthe ideal of a family or an institution.\n\n[Sidenote: Self-love artificial.]\n\nThe conflict between selfishness and altruism is like that between any\ntwo ideal passions that in some particular may chance to be opposed; but\nsuch a conflict has no obstinate existence for reason. For reason the\nperson itself has no obstinate existence. The _character_ which a man\nachieves at the best moment of his life is indeed something ideal and\nsignificant; it justifies and consecrates all his coherent actions and\npreferences. But _the man\u2019s life_, the circle drawn by biographers\naround the career of a particular body, from the womb to the\ncharnel-house, and around the mental flux that accompanies that career,\nis no significant unity. All the substances and efficient processes that\nfigure within it come from elsewhere and continue beyond; while all the\nrational objects and interests to which it refers have a trans-personal\nstatus. Self-love itself is concerned with public opinion; and if a man\nconcentrates his view on private pleasures, these may qualify the\nfleeting moments of his life with an intrinsic value, but they leave the\nlife itself shapeless and infinite, as if sparks should play over a\npiece of burnt paper.\n\nThe limits assigned to the mass of sentience attributed to each man are\nassigned conventionally; his prenatal feelings, his forgotten dreams,\nand his unappropriated sensations belong to his body and for that reason\nonly are said to belong to him. Each impulse included within these\nlimits may be as directly compared with the represented impulses of\nother people as with the represented impulses expected to arise later in\nthe same body. Reason lives among these represented values, all of which\nhave their cerebral seat and present efficacy over the passing thought;\nand reason teaches this passing thought to believe in and to respect\nthem equally. Their right is not less clear, nor their influence less\nnatural, because they may range over the whole universe and may await\ntheir realisation at the farthest boundaries of time. All that is\nphysically requisite to their operation is that they should be vividly\nrepresented; while all that is requisite rationally, to justify them in\nqualifying actual life by their influence, is that the present act\nshould have some tendency to bring the represented values about. In\nother words, a rational mind would consider, in its judgment and action,\nevery interest which that judgment or action at all affected; and it\nwould conspire with each represented good in proportion, not to that\ngood\u2019s intrinsic importance, but to the power which the present act\nmight have of helping to realise that good.\n\n[Sidenote: The sanction of reason is happiness.]\n\nIf pleasure, because it is commonly a result of satisfied instinct, may\nby a figure of speech be called the aim of impulse, happiness, by a like\nfigure, may be called the aim of reason. The direct aim of reason is\nharmony; yet harmony, when made to rule in life, gives reason a noble\nsatisfaction which we call happiness. Happiness is impossible and even\ninconceivable to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind driven\nby craving, pleasure, and fear. The moralists who speak disparagingly of\nhappiness are less sublime than they think. In truth their philosophy is\ntoo lightly ballasted, too much fed on prejudice and quibbles, for\nhappiness to fall within its range. Happiness implies resource and\nsecurity; it can be achieved only by discipline. Your intuitive moralist\nrejects discipline, at least discipline of the conscience; and he is\npunished by having no lien on wisdom. He trusts to the clash of blind\nforces in collision, being one of them himself. He demands that virtue\nshould be partisan and unjust; and he dreams of crushing the adversary\nin some physical cataclysm.\n\nSuch groping enthusiasm is often innocent and romantic; it captivates us\nwith its youthful spell. But it has no structure with which to resist\nthe shocks of fortune, which it goes out so jauntily to meet. It turns\nonly too often into vulgarity and worldliness. A snow-flake is soon a\nsmudge, and there is a deeper purity in the diamond. Happiness is hidden\nfrom a free and casual will; it belongs rather to one chastened by a\nlong education and unfolded in an atmosphere of sacred and perfected\ninstitutions. It is discipline that renders men rational and capable of\nhappiness, by suppressing without hatred what needs to be suppressed to\nattain a beautiful naturalness. Discipline discredits the random\npleasures of illusion, hope, and triumph, and substitutes those which\nare self-reproductive, perennial, and serene, because they express an\nequilibrium maintained with reality. So long as the result of endeavour\nis partly unforeseen and unintentional, so long as the will is partly\nblind, the Life of Reason is still swaddled in ignominy and the animal\nbarks in the midst of human discourse. Wisdom and happiness consist in\nhaving recast natural energies in the furnace of experience. Nor is this\nexperience merely a repressive force. It enshrines the successful\nexpressions of spirit as well as the shocks and vetoes of circumstance;\nit enables a man to know himself in knowing the world and to discover\nhis ideal by the very ring, true or false, of fortune\u2019s coin.\n\n[Sidenote: Moral science impeded by its chaotic data.]\n\nWith this brief account we may leave the subject of rational ethics. Its\ndevelopment is impossible save in the concrete, when a legislator,\nstarting from extant interests, considers what practices serve to render\nthose interests vital and genuine, and what external alliances might\nlend them support and a more glorious expression. The difficulty in\ncarrying rational policy very far comes partly from the refractory\nmaterials at hand, and partly from the narrow range within which moral\nscience is usually confined. The materials are individual wills\nnaturally far from unanimous, lost for the most part in frivolous\npleasures, rivalries, and superstitions, and little inclined to listen\nto a law-giver that, like a new Lycurgus, should speak to them of\nunanimity, simplicity, discipline, and perfection. Devotion and\nsinglemindedness, perhaps possible in the cloister, are hard to\nestablish in the world; yet a rational morality requires that all lay\nactivities, all sweet temptations, should have their voice in the\nconclave. Morality becomes rational precisely by refusing either to\naccept human nature, as it sprouts, altogether without harmony, or to\nmutilate it in the haste to make it harmonious. The condition,\ntherefore, of making a beginning in good politics is to find a set of\nmen with well-knit character and cogent traditions, so that there may be\na firm soil to cultivate and that labour may not be wasted in ploughing\nthe quicksands.\n\n[Sidenote: and its unrecognised scope.]\n\nWhen such a starting-point is given, moral values radiate from it to the\nvery ends of the universe; and a failure to appreciate the range over\nwhich rational estimation spreads is a second obstacle to sound ethics.\nBecause of this failure the earnest soul is too often intent on escaping\nto heaven, while the gross politician is suffered to declaim about the\nnational honour, and to promise this client an office, this district a\nfavour, and this class an iniquitous advantage. Politics is expected to\nbe sophistical; and in the soberest parliaments hardly an argument is\nused or an ideal invoked which is not an insult to reason. Majorities\nwork by a system of bribes offered to the more barren interests of men\nand to their more blatant prejudices. The higher direction of their\nlives is relegated to religion, which, unhappily, is apt to suffer from\nhereditary blindness to natural needs and to possible progress. The idea\nthat religion, as well as art, industry, nationality, and science,\nshould exist only for human life\u2019s sake and in order that men may live\nbetter in this world, is an idea not even mooted in politics and perhaps\nopposed by an official philosophy. The enterprise of individuals or of\nsmall aristocratic bodies has meantime sown the world which we call\ncivilised with some seeds and nuclei of order. There are scattered about\na variety of churches, industries, academies, and governments. But the\nuniversal order once dreamt of and nominally almost established, the\nempire of universal peace, all-permeating rational art, and\nphilosophical worship, is mentioned no more. An unformulated conception,\nthe prerational ethics of private privilege and national unity, fills\nthe background of men\u2019s minds. It represents feudal traditions rather\nthan the tendency really involved in contemporary industry, science, or\nphilanthropy. Those dark ages, from which our political practice is\nderived, had a political theory which we should do well to study; for\ntheir theory about a universal empire and a catholic church was in turn\nthe echo of a former age of reason, when a few men conscious of ruling\nthe world had for a moment sought to survey it as a whole and to rule it\njustly.\n\nModern rational ethics, however, or what approaches most nearly to such\na thing, has one advantage over the ancient and medi\u00e6val; it has\nprofited by Christian discipline and by the greater gentleness of modern\nmanners. It has recognised the rights of the dumb majority; it has\nrevolted against cruelty and preventable suffering and has bent itself\non diffusing well-being\u2014the well-being that people want, and not the\nso-called virtues which a supercilious aristocracy may find it\nconvenient to prescribe for them. It has based ethics on the foundation\non which actual morality rests; on nature, on the necessities of social\nlife, on the human instincts of sympathy and justice.\n\n[Sidenote: Fallacy in democratic hedonism.]\n\nIt is all the more to be regretted that the only modern school of ethics\nwhich is humane and honestly interested in progress should have given a\nbad technical expression to its generous principles and should have\nsubstituted a dubious psychology for Socratic dialectic. The mere fact\nthat somebody somewhere enjoys or dislikes a thing cannot give\ndirection to a rational will. That fact indicates a moral situation but\ndoes not prescribe a definite action. A partial harmony or maladjustment\nis thereby proved to exist, but the method is not revealed by which the\nharmony should be sustained or the maladjustment removed. A given\nharmony can be sustained by leaving things as they are or by changing\nthem together. A maladjustment can be removed by altering the\nenvironment or by altering the man. Pleasures may be attached to\nanything, and to pursue them in the abstract does not help to define any\nparticular line of conduct. The particular ideal pre-exists in the\nobserver; the mathematics of pleasure and pain cannot oblige him, for\ninstance, to prefer a hundred units of mindless pleasure enjoyed in\ndreams to fifty units diffused over labour and discourse. He need not\nlimit his efforts to spreading needless comforts and silly pleasures\namong the million; he need not accept for a goal a child\u2019s caprices\nmultiplied by infinity. Even these caprices, pleasures, and comforts\ndoubtless have their claims; but these claims have to be adjudicated by\nthe agent\u2019s autonomous conscience, and he will give them the place they\nfill in his honest ideal of what it would be best to have in the world,\nnot the place which they might pretend to usurp there by a sort of\nphysical pressure. A conscience is a living function, expressing a\nparticular nature; it is not a passive medium where heterogeneous values\ncan find their balance by virtue of their dead weight and number.\n\nA moralist is called upon, first of all, to decide in what things\npleasure ought to be found. Of course his decision, if he is rational,\nwill not be arbitrary; it will conscientiously express his own\nnature\u2014on which alone honest ideals can rest\u2014without attempting to\nspeak for the deafening and inconstant convocation of the whole sentient\nuniverse. Duty is a matter of self-knowledge, not of statistics. A\nliving and particular will therein discovers its affinities, broadens\nits basis, acknowledges its obligations, and co-operates with everything\nthat will co-operate with it; but it continues throughout to unfold a\nparticular life, finding its supports and extensions in the state, the\narts, and the universe. It cannot for a moment renounce its autonomy\nwithout renouncing reason and perhaps decreeing the extinction both of\nits own bodily basis and of its ideal method and policy.\n\n[Sidenote: Sympathy a conditional duty.]\n\nUtilitarianism needs to be transferred to Socratic and dialectical\nground, so that interest in absent interests may take its place in a\nconcrete ideal. It is a noble thing to be sensitive to others\u2019\nhardships, and happy in their happiness; but it is noble because it\nrefines the natural will without enfeebling it, offering it rather a new\nand congenial development, one entirely predetermined by the fundamental\nstructure of human nature. Were man not gregarious, were he not made to\nbe child, friend, husband, and father by turns, his morality would not\nbe social, but, like that of some silk-worm or some seraph, wholly\nindustrious or wholly contemplative. Parental and sexual instincts,\nsocial life and the gift of co-operation carry sympathy implicitly with\nthem, as they carry the very faculty to recognise a fellow-being. To\nmake this sympathy explicit and to find one\u2019s happiness in exercising it\nis to lay one\u2019s foundations deeper in nature and to expand the range of\none\u2019s being. Its limits, however, would be broken down and moral\ndissolution would set in if, forgetting his humanity, a man should bid\nall living creatures lapse with him into a delicious torpor, or run into\na cycle of pleasant dreams, so intense that death would be sure to\nprecede any awakening out of them. Great as may be the advance in\ncharity since the days of Socrates, therefore, the advance is within the\nlines of his method; to trespass beyond them would be to recede.\n\nThis situation is repeated on a broader stage. A statesman entrusted\nwith power should regard nothing but his country\u2019s interests; to regard\nanything else would be treason. He cannot allow foreign sentiment or\nprivate hobbies to make him misapply the resources of his\nfellow-countrymen to their own injury. But he may well have an\nenlightened view of the interests which he serves; he might indeed be\nexpected to take a more profound and enlightened view of them than his\ncountrymen were commonly capable of, else he would have no right to his\neminent station. He should be the first to feel that to inflict injury\nor foster hatred among other populations should not be a portion of a\npeople\u2019s happiness. A nation, like a man, is something ideal.\nIndestructible mountains and valleys, crawled over by any sort of race,\ndo not constitute its identity. Its essence is a certain spirit, and\nonly what enters into this spirit can bind it morally, or preserve it.\n\n[Sidenote: All life, and hence right life, finite and particular.]\n\nIf a drop of water contains a million worlds which I, in swallowing, may\nruin or transform, that is Allah\u2019s business; mine is to clarify my own\nintent, to cling to what ideals may lie within the circle of my\nexperience and practical imagination, so that I may have a natural\nground for my loyalties, and may be constant in them. It would not be a\nrational ambition to wish to multiply the population of China by two, or\nthat of America by twenty, after ascertaining that life there contained\nan overplus of pleasure. To weed a garden, however, would be rational,\nthough the weeds and their interests would have to be sacrificed in the\nprocess. Utilitarianism took up false ground when it made right conduct\nterminate in miscellaneous pleasures and pains, as if in their isolation\nthey constituted all that morality had to consider, and as if respect\noffered to them, somehow in proportion to their quantity, were the true\nconscience. The true conscience is rather an integrated natural will,\nchastened by clear knowledge of what it pursues and may attain. What\nmorality has to consider is the form of life, not its quantity. In a\nworld that is perhaps infinite, moral life can spring only from definite\ncentres and is neither called upon nor able to estimate the whole, nor\nto redress its balance. It is the free spirit of a part, finding its\naffinities and equilibrium in the material whole which it reacts on, and\nwhich it is in that measure enabled to understand.\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[Footnote H: Laws. VII. 803. B.]\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER X\n\nPOST-RATIONAL MORALITY\n\n\n[Sidenote: Socratic ethics retrospective.]\n\nWhen Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational\nethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind. One\nby his irony, another by his frank idealism, and the third by his\npreponderating interest in history and analysis, showed clearly enough\nhow little they dared to hope. They were merely writing an eloquent\nepitaph on their country. They were publishing the principles of what\nhad been its life, gathering piously its broken ideals, and interpreting\nits momentary achievement. The spirit of liberty and co-operation was\nalready dead. The private citizen, debauched by the largesses and petty\nquarrels of his city, had become indolent and mean-spirited. He had\nbegun to question the utility of religion, of patriotism, and of\njustice. Having allowed the organ for the ideal to atrophy in his soul,\nhe could dream of finding some sullen sort of happiness in unreason. He\nfelt that the austere glories of his country, as a Spartan regimen might\nhave preserved them, would not benefit that baser part of him which\nalone remained. Political virtue seemed a useless tax on his material\nprofit and freedom. The tedium and distrust proper to a disintegrated\nsociety began to drive him to artificial excitements and superstitions.\nDemocracy had learned to regard as enemies the few in whom public\ninterest was still represented, the few whose nobler temper and\ntraditions still coincided with the general good. These last patriots\nwere gradually banished or exterminated, and with them died the spirit\nthat rational ethics had expressed. Philosophers were no longer suffered\nto have illusions about the state. Human activity on the public stage\nhad shaken off all allegiance to art or reason.\n\n[Sidenote: Rise of disillusioned moralities.]\n\nThe biographer of reason might well be tempted to ignore the subsequent\nattitudes into which moral life fell in the West, since they all\nembodied a more or less complete despair, and, having abandoned the\neffort to express the will honestly and dialectically, they could\nsupport no moral science. The point was merely to console or deceive the\nsoul with some substitute for happiness. Life is older and more\npersistent than reason, and the failure of a first experiment in\nrationality does not deprive mankind of that mental and moral vegetation\nwhich they possessed for ages in a wild state before the advent of\ncivilisation. They merely revert to their uncivil condition and espouse\nwhatever imaginative ideal comes to hand, by which some semblance of\nmeaning and beauty may be given to existence without the labour of\nbuilding this meaning and beauty systematically out of its positive\nelements.\n\nNot to study these imaginative ideals, partial and arbitrary as they\nare, would be to miss one of the most instructive points of view from\nwhich the Life of Reason may be surveyed: the point of view of its\nsatirists. For moral ideals may follow upon philosophy, just as they may\nprecede it. When they follow, at least so long as they are consciously\nembraced in view of reason\u2019s failure, they have a quite particular\nvalue. Aversion to rational ideals does not then come, as the\nintuitionist\u2019s aversion does, from moral incoherence or religious\nprejudice. It does not come from lack of speculative power. On the\ncontrary, it may come from undue haste in speculation, from a too ready\napprehension of the visible march of things. The obvious irrationality\nof nature as a whole, too painfully brought home to a musing mind, may\nmake it forget or abdicate its own rationality. In a decadent age, the\nphilosopher who surveys the world and sees that the end of it is even as\nthe beginning, may not feel that the intervening episode, in which he\nand all he values after all figure, is worth consideration; and he may\ncry, in his contemplative spleen, that _all_ is vanity.\n\nIf you should still confront him with a theory of the ideal, he would\nnot be reduced, like the pre-rational moralists in a similar case, to\nmere inattention and bluster. If you told him that every art and every\nactivity involves a congruous good, and that the endeavour to realise\nthe ideal in every direction is an effort of which reason necessarily\napproves, since reason is nothing but the method of that endeavour, he\nwould not need to deny your statements in order to justify himself. He\nmight admit the naturalness, the spontaneity, the ideal sufficiency of\nyour conceptions; but he might add, with the smile of the elder and the\nsadder man, that he had experience of their futility. \u201cYou Hellenisers,\u201d\nhe might say, \u201care but children; you have not pondered the little\nhistory you know. If thought were conversant with reality, if virtue\nwere stable and fruitful, if pains and policy were ultimately justified\nby a greater good arising out of them\u2014then, indeed, a life according to\nreason might tempt a philosopher. But unfortunately not one of those\nfond assumptions is true. Human thought is a meaningless phantasmagoria.\nVirtue is a splendid and laborious folly, when it is not a pompous\ngarment that only looks respectable in the dark, being in truth full of\nspots and ridiculous patches. Men\u2019s best laid plans become, in the\ncasual cross-currents of being, the occasion of their bitterest\ncalamities. How, then, live? How justify in our eyes, let us not say the\nways of God, but our own ways?\u201d\n\n[Sidenote: The illusion subsisting in them.]\n\nSuch a position may be turned dialectically by invoking whatever\npositive hopes or convictions the critic may retain, who while he lives\ncannot be wholly without them. But the position is specious and does not\ncollapse, like that of the intuitionist, at the first breath of\ncriticism. Pessimism, and all the moralities founded on despair, are not\npre-rational but post-rational. They are the work of men who more or\nless explicitly have conceived the Life of Reason, tried it at least\nimaginatively, and found it wanting. These systems are a refuge from an\nintolerable situation: they are experiments in redemption. As a matter\nof fact, animal instincts and natural standards of excellence are never\neluded in them, for no moral experience has other terms; but the part of\nthe natural ideal which remains active appears in opposition to all the\nrest and, by an intelligible illusion, seems to be no part of that\nnatural ideal because, compared with the commoner passions on which it\nreacts, it represents some simpler or more attenuated hope\u2014the appeal\nto some very humble or very much chastened satisfaction, or to an utter\nchange in the conditions of life.\n\nPost-rational morality thus constitutes, in intention if not in fact, a\ncriticism of all experience. It thinks it is not, like pre-rational\nmorality, an arbitrary selection from among co-ordinate precepts. It is\nan effort to subordinate all precepts to one, that points to some single\neventual good. For it occurs to the founders of these systems that by\nestranging oneself from the world, or resting in the moment\u2019s pleasure,\nor mortifying the passions, or enduring all sufferings in patience, or\nstudying a perfect conformity with the course of affairs, one may gain\nadmission to some sort of residual mystical paradise; and this thought,\nonce conceived, is published as a revelation and accepted as a panacea.\nIt becomes in consequence (for such is the force of nature) the\nfoundation of elaborate institutions and elaborate philosophies, into\nwhich the contents of the worldly life are gradually reintroduced.\n\nWhen human life is in an acute crisis, the sick dreams that visit the\nsoul are the only evidence of her continued existence. Through them she\nstill envisages a good; and when the delirium passes and the normal\nworld gradually re-establishes itself in her regard, she attributes her\nregeneration to the ministry of those phantoms, a regeneration due, in\ntruth, to the restored nutrition and circulation within her. In this way\npost-rational systems, though founded originally on despair, in a later\nage that has forgotten its disillusions may come to pose as the only\npossible basis of morality. The philosophers addicted to each sect, and\nbrought up under its influence, may exhaust criticism and sophistry to\nshow that all faith and effort would be vain unless their particular\nnostrum was accepted; and so a curious party philosophy arises in which,\nafter discrediting nature and reason in general, the sectary puts\nforward some mythical echo of reason and nature as the one saving and\nnecessary truth. The positive substance of such a doctrine is\naccordingly pre-rational and perhaps crudely superstitious; but it is\nintroduced and nominally supported by a formidable indictment of\nphysical and moral science, so that the wretched idol ultimately offered\nto our worship acquires a spurious halo and an imputed majesty by being\nraised on a pedestal of infinite despair.\n\n[Sidenote: Epicurean refuge in pleasure.]\n\nSocrates was still living when a school of post-rational morality arose\namong the Sophists, which after passing quickly through various phases,\nsettled down into Epicureanism and has remained the source of a certain\nconsolation to mankind, which if somewhat cheap, is none the less\ngenuine. The pursuit of pleasure may seem simple selfishness, with a\ntendency to debauchery; and in this case the pre-rational and\ninstinctive character of the maxim retained would be very obvious.\nPleasure, to be sure, is not the direct object of an unspoiled will; but\nafter some experience and discrimination, a man may actually guide\nhimself by a foretaste of the pleasures he has found in certain objects\nand situations. The criticism required to distinguish what pays from\nwhat does not pay may not often be carried very far; but it may\nsometimes be carried to the length of suppressing every natural instinct\nand natural hope, and of turning the philosopher, as it turned Hegesias\nthe Cyrenaic, into a eulogist of death.\n\nThe post-rational principle in the system then comes to the fore, and we\nsee clearly that to sit down and reflect upon human life, picking out\nits pleasant moments and condemning all the rest, is to initiate a\ncourse of moral retrenchment. It is to judge what is worth doing, not by\nthe innate ambition of the soul, but by experience of incidental\nfeelings, which to a mind without creative ideas may seem the only\nobjects worthy of pursuit. That life ought to be accompanied by pleasure\nand exempt from pain is certain; for this means that what is agreeable\nto the whole process of nature would have become agreeable also to the\nvarious partial impulses involved\u2014another way of describing organic\nharmony and physical perfection. But such a desirable harmony cannot be\ndefined or obtained by picking out and isolating from the rest those\noccasions and functions in which it may already have been reached. These\npartial harmonies may be actual arrests or impediments in the whole\nwhich is to be made harmonious; and even when they are innocent or\nhelpful they cannot serve to determine the form which the general\nharmony might take on. They merely illustrate its principle. The\norganism in which this principle of harmony might find pervasive\nexpression is still potential, and the ideal is something of which, in\nits concrete form, no man has had experience. It involves a propitious\nmaterial environment, perfect health, perfect arts, perfect government,\na mind enlarged to the knowledge and enjoyment of all its external\nconditions and internal functions. Such an ideal is lost sight of when a\nman cultivates his garden-plot of private pleasures, leaving it to\nchance and barbarian fury to govern the state and quicken the world\u2019s\npassions.\n\nEven Aristippus, the first and most delightful of hedonists, who really\nenjoyed the pleasures he advocated and was not afraid of the incidental\npains\u2014even Aristippus betrayed the post-rational character of his\nphilosophy by abandoning politics, mocking science, making his peace\nwith all abuses that fostered his comfort, and venting his wit on all\nambitions that exceeded his hopes. A great temperament can carry off a\nrough philosophy. Rebellion and license may distinguish honourable souls\nin an age of polite corruption, and a grain of sincerity is better, in\nmoral philosophy, than a whole harvest of conventionalities. The\nviolence and shamelessness of Aristippus were corrected by Epicurus; and\na balance was found between utter despair and utter irresponsibility.\nEpicureanism retrenched much: it cut off politics, religion, enterprise,\nand passion. These things it convicted of vanity, without stopping to\ndistinguish in them what might be inordinate from what might be\nrational. At the same time it retained friendship, freedom of soul, and\nintellectual light. It cultivated unworldliness without superstition\nand happiness without illusion. It was tender toward simple and honest\nthings, scornful and bitter only against pretence and usurpation. It\nthus marked a first halting-place in the retreat of reason, a stage\nwhere the soul had thrown off only the higher and more entangling part\nof her burden and was willing to live, in somewhat reduced\ncircumstances, on the remainder. Such a philosophy expresses well the\ngenuine sentiment of persons, at once mild and emancipated, who find\nthemselves floating on the ebb-tide of some civilisation, and enjoying\nits fruits, without any longer representing the forces that brought that\ncivilisation about.\n\n[Sidenote: Stoic recourse to conformity.]\n\nThe same emancipation, without its mildness, appeared in the Cynics,\nwhose secret it was to throw off all allegiance and all dependence on\ncircumstance, and to live entirely on inner strength of mind, on pride\nand inflexible humour. The renunciation was far more sweeping than that\nof Epicurus, and indeed wellnigh complete; yet the Stoics, in\nunderpinning the Cynical self-sufficiency with a system of physics,\nintroduced into the life of the sect a contemplative element which very\nmuch enlarged and ennobled its sympathies. Nature became a sacred\nsystem, the laws of nature being eulogistically called rational laws,\nand the necessity of things, because it might be foretold in auguries,\nbeing called providence. There was some intellectual confusion in all\nthis; but contemplation, even if somewhat idolatrous, has a purifying\neffect, and the sad and solemn review of the cosmos to which the Stoic\ndaily invited his soul, to make it ready to face its destiny, doubtless\nliberated it from many an unworthy passion. The impressive spectacle of\nthings was used to remind the soul of her special and appropriate\nfunction, which was to be rational. This rationality consisted partly in\ninsight, to perceive the necessary order of things, and partly in\nconformity, to perceive that this order, whatever it might be, could\nserve the soul to exercise itself upon, and to face with equanimity.\n\nDespair, in this system, flooded a much larger area of human life;\neverything, in fact, was surrendered except the will to endure whatever\nmight come. The concentration was much more marked, since only a formal\npower of perception and defiance was retained and made the sphere of\nmoral life; this rational power, at least in theory, was the one peak\nthat remained visible above the deluge. But in practice much more was\nretained. Some distinction was drawn, however unwarrantably, between\nexternal calamities and human turpitude, so that absolute conformity and\nacceptance might not be demanded by the latter; although the chief\noccasion which a Stoic could find to practise fortitude and recognise\nthe omnipresence of law was in noting the universal corruption of the\nstate and divining its ruin. The obligation to conform to nature\n(which, strictly speaking, could not be disregarded in any case) was\ninterpreted to signify that every one should perform the offices\nconventionally attached to his station. In this way a perfunctory\ncitizenship and humanity were restored to the philosopher. But the\nrestored life was merely histrionic: the Stoic was a recluse parading\nthe market-place and a monk disguised in armour. His interest and faith\nwere centred altogether on his private spiritual condition. He\ncultivated the society of those persons who, he thought, might teach him\nsome virtue. He attended to the affairs of state so as to exercise his\npatience. He might even lead an army to battle, if he wished to test his\nendurance and make sure that philosophy had rendered him indifferent to\nthe issue.\n\n[Sidenote: Conformity the core of Islam.]\n\nThe strain and artifice of such a discipline, with merely formal goals\nand no hope on earth or in heaven, could not long maintain itself; and\ndoubtless it existed, at a particular juncture, only in a few souls.\nResignation to the will of God, says Bishop Butler, is _the whole of\npiety_; yet mere resignation would make a sorry religion and the\nnegation of all morality, unless the will of God was understood to be\nquite different from his operation in nature. To turn Stoicism into a\nworkable religion we need to qualify it with some pre-rational maxims.\nIslam, for instance, which boasts that in its essence it is nothing but\nthe primitive and natural religion of mankind, consists in abandoning\noneself to the will of God or, in other words, in accepting the\ninevitable. This will of God is learned for the most part by observing\nthe course of nature and history, and remembering the fate meted out\nhabitually to various sorts of men. Were this all, Islam would be a pure\nStoicism, and Hebraic religion, in its ultimate phase, would be simply\nthe eloquence of physics. It would not, in that case, be a moral\ninspiration at all, except as contemplation and the sense of one\u2019s\nnothingness might occasionally silence the passions and for a moment\nbewilder the mind. On recovering from this impression, however, men\nwould find themselves enriched with no self-knowledge, armed with no\nprecepts, and stimulated by no ideal. They would be reduced to enacting\ntheir incidental impulses, as the animals are, quite as if they had\nnever perceived that in doing so they were fulfilling a divine decree.\nEnlightened Moslems, accordingly, have often been more Epicurean than\nStoical; and if they have felt themselves (not without some reason)\nsuperior to Christians in delicacy, in _savoir vivre_, in kinship with\nall natural powers, this sense of superiority has been quite\nrationalistic and purely human. Their religion contributed to it only\nbecause it was simpler, freer from superstition, nearer to a clean and\npleasant regimen in life. Resignation to the will of God being granted,\nexpression of the will of man might more freely begin.\n\n[Sidenote: enveloped in arbitrary doctrines.]\n\nWhat made Islam, however, a positive and contagious novelty was the\nassumption that God\u2019s will might be incidentally revealed to prophets\nbefore the event, so that past experience was not the only source from\nwhich its total operation might be gathered. In its opposition to\ngrosser idolatries Islam might appeal to experience and challenge those\nwho trusted in special deities to justify their worship in face of the\nfacts. The most decisive facts against idolaters, however, were not yet\npatent, but were destined to burst upon mankind at the last day\u2014and\nmost unpleasantly for the majority. Where Mohammed speaks in the name of\nthe universal natural power he is abundantly scornful toward that fond\npaganism which consists in imagining distinct patrons for various\nregions of nature or for sundry human activities. In turning to such\npatrons the pagan regards something purely ideal or, as the Koran\nshrewdly observes, worships his own passions. Allah, on the contrary, is\noverwhelmingly external and as far as possible from being ideal. He is\nindeed the giver of all good things, as of all evil, and while his\nmercies are celebrated on every page of the Koran, these mercies consist\nin the indulgence he is expected to show to his favourites, and the\nexceeding reward reserved for them after their earthly trials. Allah\u2019s\nmercy does not exclude all those senseless and unredeemed cruelties of\nwhich nature is daily guilty; nay, it shines all the more conspicuously\nby contrast with his essential irresponsibility and wanton wrath, a part\nof his express purpose being to keep hell full of men and demons.\n\nThe tendency toward enlightenment which Islam represents, and the limits\nof that enlightenment, may be illustrated by the precept about unclean\nanimals. Allah, we are told, being merciful and gracious, made the world\nfor man\u2019s use, with all the animals in it. We may therefore justly\nslaughter and devour them, in so far as comports with health; but, of\ncourse, we may not eat animals that have died a natural death, nor those\noffered in sacrifice to false gods, nor swine; for to do so would be an\nabomination.\n\n[Sidenote: The latter alone lend it practical force.]\n\nUnfortunately religious reformers triumph not so much by their rational\ninsight as by their halting, traditional maxims. Mohammed felt the unity\nof God like a philosopher; but people listened to him because he\npreached it like a sectary. God, as he often reminds us, did not make\nthe world for a plaything; he made it in order to establish distinctions\nand separate by an immense interval the fate of those who conform to the\ntruth from the fate of those who ignore it. Human life is indeed beset\nwith enough imminent evils to justify this urgent tone in the Semitic\nmoralist and to lend his precepts a stern practical ring, absent from\nmerely Platonic idealisms. But this stringency, which is called\npositivism when the conditions of welfare are understood, becomes\nfanaticism when they are misrepresented. Had Mohammed spoken only of the\ndynamic unity in things, the omnipresence of destiny, and the actual\nconditions of success and failure in the world, he would not have been\ncalled a prophet or have had more than a dozen intelligent followers,\nscattered over as many centuries; but the weakness of his intellect, and\nhis ignorance of nature, made the success of his mission. It is easier\nto kindle righteous indignation against abuses when, by abating them, we\nfurther our personal interests; and Mohammed might have been less\nzealous in denouncing false gods had his own God been altogether the\ntrue one. But, in the heat of his militancy, he descends so far as to\nspeak of _God\u2019s interests_ which the faithful embrace, and of fighting\nin _God\u2019s cause_. By these notions, so crudely pre-rational, we are\nallowed to interpret and discount the pantheistic sublimities with which\nin most places we are regaled; and in order that a morality, too weak to\nbe human, may not wither altogether in the fierce light of the Absolute,\nwe are led to humanise the Absolute into a finite force, needing our\nsupport against independent enemies. So complete is the bankruptcy of\nthat Stoic morality which thinks to live on the worship of That which\nIs.\n\n[Sidenote: Moral ambiguity in pantheism.]\n\nAs extremes are said to meet, so we may say that a radical position is\noften the point of departure for opposite systems. Pantheism, or\nreligion and morality abdicating in favour of physics, may, in practice,\nbe interpreted in contrary ways. To be in sympathy with the Whole may\nseem to require us to outgrow and discard every part; yet, on the other\nhand, there is no obvious reason why Being should love its essence in a\nfashion that involves hating every possible form of Being. The\nworshipper of Being accordingly assumes now one, now the other, of two\nopposite attitudes, according as the society in which he lives is in a\nprerational or a post-rational state of culture. Pantheism is\ninterpreted pre-rationally, as by the early Mohammedans, or by the\nHegelians, when people are not yet acquainted, or not yet disgusted,\nwith worldliness; the Absolute then seems to lend a mystical sanction to\nwhatever existences or tendencies happen to be afoot. Morality is\nreduced to sanctioning reigning conventions, or reigning passions, on\nthe authority of the universe. Thus the Moslems, by way of serving\nAllah, could extend their conquests and cultivate the arts and pleasures\ncongenial to a self-sufficing soul, at once indolent and fierce; while\nthe transcendentalists of our times, by way of accepting their part in\nthe divine business, have merely added a certain speculative loftiness\nto the maxims of some sect or the chauvinism of some nation.\n\n[Sidenote: Under stress, it becomes ascetic and requires a mythology.]\n\nTo accept everything, however, is not an easy nor a tolerable thing,\nunless you are naturally well pleased with what falls to your share.\nHowever the Absolute may feel, a moral creature has to hate some forms\nof being; and if the age has thrust these forms before a man\u2019s eyes, and\nimposed them upon him, not being suffered by his pantheism to blame the\nAbsolute he will (by an inconsistency) take to blaming himself. It will\nbe his finitude, his inordinate claims, his enormous effrontery in\nhaving any will or any preference in particular, that will seem to him\nthe source of all evil and the single blot on the infinite lucidity of\nthings. Pantheism, under these circumstances, will issue in a\npost-rational morality. It will practise asceticism and look for a\nmystical deliverance from finite existence.\n\nUnder these circumstances myth is inevitably reintroduced. Without it,\nno consolation could be found except in the prospect of death and,\nawaiting that, in incidental natural satisfactions; whereby absorption\nin the Absolute might come to look not only impossible but distinctly\nundesirable. To make retreat out of human nature seem a possible\nvocation, this nature itself must, in some myth, be represented as\nunnatural; the soul that this life stifles must be said to come from\nelsewhere and to be fitted to breathe some element far rarer and finer\nthan this sublunary fog.\n\n[Sidenote: A supernatural world made by the Platonist out of dialectic.]\n\nA curious foothold for such a myth was furnished by the Socratic\nphilosophy. Plato, wafted by his poetic vision too far, perhaps, from\nthe utilitarianism of his master, had eulogised concretions in discourse\nat the expense of existences and had even played with cosmological\nmyths, meant to express the values of things, by speaking as if these\nvalues had brought things into being. The dialectical terms thus\ncontrasted with natural objects, and pictured as natural powers,\nfurnished the dogmas needed at this juncture by a post-rational\nreligion. The spell which dialectic can exercise over an abstracted mind\nis itself great; and it may grow into a sacred influence and a positive\nrevelation when it offers a sanctuary from a weary life in the world.\nOut of the play of notions carried on in a prayerful dream wonderful\nmysteries can be constructed, to be presently announced to the people\nand made the core of sacramental injunctions. When the tide of vulgar\nsuperstition is at the flood and every form of quackery is welcome, we\nneed not wonder that a theosophy having so respectable a\ncore\u2014something, indeed, like a true logic misunderstood\u2014should gain\nmany adherents. Out of the names of things and of virtues a mystic\nladder could be constructed by which to leave the things and the virtues\nthemselves behind; but the sagacity and exigencies of the school would\nnot fail to arrange the steps in this progress\u2014the end of which was\nunattainable except, perhaps, in a momentary ecstasy\u2014so that the\nobvious duties of men would continue, for the nonce, to be imposed upon\nthem. The chief difference made in morals would be only this: that the\npositive occasions and sanctions of good conduct would no longer be\nmentioned with respect, but the imagination would be invited to dwell\ninstead on mystical issues.\n\n[Sidenote: The Herbraic cry for redemption.]\n\nNeo-Platonic morality, through a thousand learned and vulgar channels,\npermeated Christianity and entirely transformed it. Original\nChristianity was, though in another sense, a religion of redemption. The\nJews, without dreaming of original sin or of any inherent curse in being\nfinite, had found themselves often in the sorest material straits. They\nhoped, like all primitive peoples, that relief might come by\npropitiating the deity. They knew that the sins of the fathers were\nvisited upon the children even to the third and fourth generation. They\nhad accepted this idea of joint responsibility and vicarious atonement,\nturning in their unphilosophical way this law of nature into a principle\nof justice. Meantime the failure of all their cherished ambitions had\nplunged them into a penitential mood. Though in fact pious and virtuous\nto a fault, they still looked for repentance\u2014their own or the\nworld\u2019s\u2014to save them. This redemption was to be accomplished in the\nHebrew spirit, through long-suffering and devotion to the Law, with the\nHebrew solidarity, by vicarious attribution of merits and demerits\nwithin the household of the faith.\n\nSuch a way of conceiving redemption was far more dramatic, poignant, and\nindividual than the Neo-Platonic; hence it was far more popular and\nbetter fitted to be a nucleus for religious devotion. However much,\ntherefore, Christianity may have insisted on renouncing the world, the\nflesh, and the devil, it always kept in the background this perfectly\nJewish and pre-rational craving for a delectable promised land. The\njourney might be long and through a desert, but milk and honey were to\nflow in the oasis beyond. Had renunciation been fundamental or revulsion\nfrom nature complete, there would have been no much-trumpeted last\njudgment and no material kingdom of heaven. The renunciation was only\ntemporary and partial; the revulsion was only against incidental evils.\nDespair touched nothing but the present order of the world, though at\nfirst it took the extreme form of calling for its immediate destruction.\nThis was the sort of despair and renunciation that lay at the bottom of\nChristian repentance; while hope in a new order of this world, or of one\nvery like it, lay at the bottom of Christian joy. A temporary sacrifice,\nit was thought, and a partial mutilation would bring the spirit\nmiraculously into a fresh paradise. The pleasures nature had grudged or\npunished, grace was to offer as a reward for faith and patience. The\nearthly life which was vain as an experience was to be profitable as a\ntrial. Normal experience, appropriate exercise for the spirit, would\nthereafter begin.\n\n[Sidenote: The two factors meet in Christianity.]\n\nChristianity is thus a system of postponed rationalism, a rationalism\nintercepted by a supernatural version of the conditions of happiness.\nIts moral principle is reason\u2014the only moral principle there is; its\nmotive power is the impulse and natural hope to be and to be happy.\nChristianity merely renews and reinstates these universal principles\nafter a first disappointment and a first assault of despair, by opening\nup new vistas of accomplishment, new qualities and measures of success.\nThe Christian field of action being a world of grace enveloping the\nworld of nature, many transitory reversals of acknowledged values may\ntake place in its code. Poverty, chastity, humility, obedience,\nself-sacrifice, ignorance, sickness, and dirt may all acquire a\nreligious worth which reason, in its direct application, might scarcely\nhave found in them; yet these reversed appreciations are merely\nincidental to a secret rationality, and are justified on the ground that\nhuman nature, as now found, is corrupt and needs to be purged and\ntransformed before it can safely manifest its congenital instincts and\nbecome again an authoritative criterion of values. In the kingdom of God\nmen would no longer need to do penance, for life there would be truly\nnatural and there the soul would be at last in her native sphere.\n\nThis submerged optimism exists in Christianity, being a heritage from\nthe Jews; and those Protestant communities that have rejected the pagan\nand Platonic elements that overlaid it have little difficulty in\nrestoring it to prominence. Not, however, without abandoning the soul of\nthe gospel; for the soul of the gospel, though expressed in the language\nof Messianic hopes, is really post-rational. It was not to marry and be\ngiven in marriage, or to sit on thrones, or to unravel metaphysical\nmysteries, or to enjoy any of the natural delights renounced in this\nlife, that Christ summoned his disciples to abandon all they had and to\nfollow him. There was surely a deeper peace in his self-surrender. It\nwas not a new thing even among the Jews to use the worldly promises of\ntheir exoteric religion as symbols for inner spiritual revolutions; and\nthe change of heart involved in genuine Christianity was not a fresh\nexcitation of gaudy hopes, nor a new sort of utilitarian, temporary\nausterity. It was an emptying of the will, in respect to all human\ndesires, so that a perfect charity and contemplative justice, falling\nlike the Father\u2019s gifts ungrudgingly on the whole creation, might take\nthe place of ambition, petty morality, and earthly desires. It was a\nrenunciation which, at least in Christ himself and in his more spiritual\ndisciples, did not spring from disappointed illusion or lead to other\nunregenerate illusions even more sure to be dispelled by events. It\nsprang rather from a native speculative depth, a natural affinity to\nthe divine fecundity, serenity, and sadness of the world. It was the\nspirit of prayer, the kindliness and insight which a pure soul can fetch\nfrom contemplation.\n\n[Sidenote: Consequent eclecticism.]\n\nThis mystical detachment, supervening on the dogged old Jewish optimism,\ngave Christianity a double aspect, and had some curious consequence in\nlater times. Those who were inwardly convinced\u2014as most religious minds\nwere under the Roman Empire\u2014that all earthly things were vanity, and\nthat they plunged the soul into an abyss of nothingness if not of\ntorment, could, in view of brighter possibilities in another world,\ncarry their asceticism and their cult of suffering farther than a purely\nnegative system, like the Buddhistic, would have allowed. For a\ndiscipline that is looked upon as merely temporary can contradict nature\nmore boldly than one intended to take nature\u2019s place. The hope of\nunimaginable benefits to ensue could drive religion to greater frenzies\nthan it could have fallen into if its object had been merely to silence\nthe will. Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it\ntracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious\nhatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedanism,\nextermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like\nBuddhism, it had looked only to peace and the liberation of souls. It\nlooked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be\ncrowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God. These\nwere rival baits to those which the world fishes with, and were snapped\nat, when seen, with no less avidity. Man, far from being freed from his\nnatural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and\nmuch more disappointing. Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with\nan\u00e6sthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire.\n\nAnother consequence of combining, in the Christian life, post-rational\nwith pre-rational motives, a sense of exile and renunciation with hopes\nof a promised land, was that esoteric piety could choose between the two\nfactors, even while it gave a verbal assent to the dogmas that included\nboth. Mystics honoured the post-rational motive and despised the\npre-rational; positivists clung to the second and hated the first. To\nthe spiritually minded, whose religion was founded on actual insight and\ndisillusion, the joys of heaven could never be more than a symbol for\nthe intrinsic worth of sanctity. To the worldling those heavenly joys\nwere nothing but a continuation of the pleasures and excitements of this\nlife, serving to choke any reflections which, in spite of himself, might\noccasionally visit him about the vanity of human wishes. So that\nChristianity, even in its orthodox forms, covers various kinds of\nmorality, and its philosophical incoherence betrays itself in disruptive\nmovements, profound schisms, and total alienation on the part of one\nChristian from the inward faith of another. Trappist or Calvinist may be\npractising a heroic and metaphysical self-surrender while the\nbusy-bodies of their respective creeds are fostering, in God\u2019s name, all\ntheir hot and miscellaneous passions.\n\n[Sidenote: The negation of naturalism never complete.]\n\nThis contradiction, present in the overt morality of Christendom, cannot\nbe avoided, however, by taking refuge again in pure asceticism. Every\npost-rational system is necessarily self-contradictory. Its despair\ncannot be universal nor its nihilism complete so long as it remains a\ncoherent method of action, with particular goals and a steady faith that\ntheir attainment is possible. The renunciation of the will must stop at\nthe point where the will to be saved makes its appearance: and as this\ndesire may be no less troublesome and insistent than any other, as it\nmay even become a tormenting obsession, the mystic is far from the end\nof his illusions when he sets about to dispel them. There is one\nrational method to which, in post-rational systems, the world is still\nthought to be docile, one rational endeavour which nature is sure to\ncrown with success. This is the method of deliverance from existence,\nthe effort after salvation. There is, let us say, a law of Karma, by\nwhich merit and demerit accruing in one incarnation pass on to the next\nand enable the soul to rise continuously through a series of stages.\nThus the world, though called illusory, is not wholly intractable. It\nprovides systematically for an exit out of its illusions. On this\nrational ordinance of phenomena, which is left standing by an imperfect\nnihilism, Buddhist morality is built. Rational endeavour remains\npossible because experience is calculable and fruitful in this one\nrespect, that it dissolves in the presence of goodness and knowledge.\n\nSimilarly in Christian ethics, the way of the cross has definite\nstations and a definite end. However negative this end may be thought to\nbe, the assurance that it may be attained is a remnant of natural hope\nin the bosom of pessimism. A complete disillusion would have involved\nthe neglect of such an assurance, the denial that it was possible or at\nleast that it was to be realised under specific conditions. That\nconversion and good works lead to something worth attaining is a new\nsort of positivistic hope. A complete scepticism would involve a doubt,\nnot only concerning the existence of such a method of salvation, but\nalso (what is more significant) concerning the importance of applying it\nif it were found. For to assert that salvation is not only possible but\nurgently necessary, that every soul is now in an intolerable condition\nand should search for an ultimate solution to all its troubles, a\nrestoration to a normal and somehow blessed state\u2014what is this but to\nassert that the nature of things has a permanent constitution, by\nconformity with which man may secure his happiness? Moreover, we assert\nin such a faith that this natural constitution of things is discoverable\nin a sufficient measure to guide our action to a successful issue.\nBelief in Karma, in prayer, in sacraments, in salvation is a remnant of\na natural belief in the possibility of living successfully. The remnant\nmay be small and \u201cexpressed in fancy.\u201d Transmigration or an atonement\nmay be chimerical ideas. Yet the mere fact of reliance upon something,\nthe assumption that the world is steady and capable of rational\nexploitation, even if in a supernatural interest and by semi-magical\nmeans, amounts to an essential loyalty to postulates of practical\nreason, an essential adherence to natural morality.\n\nThe pretension to have reached a point of view from which _all_ impulse\nmay be criticised is accordingly an untenable pretension. It is\nabandoned in the very systems in which it was to be most thoroughly\napplied. The instrument of criticism must itself be one impulse\nsurviving the wreck of all the others; the vision of salvation and of\nthe way thither must be one dream among the rest. A single suggestion of\nexperience is thus accepted while all others are denied; and although a\ncertain purification and revision of morality may hence ensue, there is\nno real penetration to a deeper principle than spontaneous reason, no\nrevelation of a higher end than the best possible happiness. One\nsporadic growth of human nature may be substituted for its whole\nluxuriant vegetation; one negative or formal element of happiness may\nbe preferred to the full entelechy of life. We may see the Life of\nReason reduced to straits, made to express itself in a niggardly and\nfantastic environment; but we have, in principle and essence, the Life\nof Reason still, empirical in its basis and rational in its method, its\nsubstance impulse and its end happiness.\n\n[Sidenote: Spontaneous values rehabilitated.]\n\nSo much for the umbilical cord that unites every living post-rational\nsystem to the matrix of human hopes. There remains a second point of\ncontact between these systems and rational morality: the reinstated\nnatural duties which all religions and philosophies, in order to subsist\namong civilised peoples, are at once obliged to sanction and somehow to\ndeduce from their peculiar principles. The most plausible evidence which\na supernatural doctrine can give of its truth is the beauty and\nrationality of its moral corollaries. It is instructive to observe that\na gospel\u2019s congruity with natural reason and common humanity is regarded\nas the decisive mark of its supernatural origin. Indeed, were\ninspiration not the faithful echo of plain conscience and vulgar\nexperience there would be no means of distinguishing it from madness.\nWhatever poetic idea a prophet starts with, in whatever intuition or\nanalogy he finds a hint of salvation, it is altogether necessary that he\nshould hasten to interpret his oracle in such a manner that it may\nsanction without disturbing the system of indispensable natural duties,\nalthough these natural duties, by being attached artificially to\nsupernatural dogmas, may take on a different tone, justify themselves by\na different rhetoric, and possibly suffer real transformation in some\nminor particulars. Systems of post-rational morality are not original\nworks: they are versions of natural morality translated into different\nmetaphysical languages, each of which adds its peculiar flavour, its own\ngenius and poetry, to the plain sense of the common original.\n\n[Sidenote: A witness out of India.]\n\nIn the doctrine of Karma, for instance, experience of retribution is\nideally extended and made precise. Acts, daily experience teaches us,\nform habits; habits constitute character, and each man\u2019s character, as\nHeraclitus said, is his guardian deity, the artisan of his fate. We need\nbut raise this particular observation to a solitary eminence, after the\nmanner of post-rational thinking; we need but imagine it to underlie and\nexplain all other empirical observations, so that character may come to\nfigure as an absolute cause, of which experience itself is an attendant\nresult. Such arbitrary emphasis laid on some term of experience is the\nsource of each metaphysical system in turn. In this case the surviving\ndogma will have yielded an explanation of our environment no less than\nof our state of heart by instituting a deeper spiritual law, a certain\nbalance of merit and demerit in the soul, accruing to it through a\nseries of previous incarnations. This fabulous starting-point was\ngained by an imaginary extension of the law of moral continuity and\nnatural retribution; but when, accepting this starting-point, the\nbeliever went on to inquire what he should do to be saved and to cancel\nthe heavy debts he inherited from his mythical past, he would merely\nenumerate the natural duties of man, giving them, however, a new\nsanction and conceiving them as if they emanated from his new-born\nmetaphysical theory. This theory, apart from a natural conscience and\ntraditional code, would have been perfectly barren. The notion that\nevery sin must be expiated does not carry with it any information about\nwhat acts are sins.\n\nThis indispensable information must still be furnished by common\nopinion. Those acts which bring suffering after them, those acts which\narouse the enmity of our fellows and, by a premonition of that enmity,\narouse our own shame\u2014those are assumed and deputed to be sinful; and\nthe current code of morality being thus borrowed without begging leave,\nthe law of absolute retribution can be brought in to paint the picture\nof moral responsibility in more glaring colours and to extend the vista\nof rewards and punishments into a rhetorical infinite. Buddhistic\nmorality was natural morality intensified by this forced sense of minute\nand boundless responsibility. It was coloured also by the negative,\npessimistic justification which this dogma gives to moral endeavour.\nEvery virtue was to be viewed as merely removing guilt and alleviating\nsuffering, knowledge itself being precious only as a means to that end.\nThe ultimate inspiration of right living was to be hope of perfect\npeace\u2014a hope generously bestowed by nature on every spirit which, being\nlinked to the flux of things, is conscious of change and susceptible of\nweariness, but a hope which the irresponsible Oriental imagination had\ndisturbed with bad dreams. A pathetic feminine quality was thereby\nimparted to moral feeling; we were to be good for pity\u2019s sake, for the\nsake of a great distant deliverance from profound sorrows.\n\n[Sidenote: Dignity of post-rational morality.]\n\nThe pathetic idiosyncrasy of this religion has probably enabled it to\ntouch many a heart and to lift into speculation many a life otherwise\ndoomed to be quite instinctive animal. It has kept morality pure\u2014free\nfrom that admixture of worldly and partisan precepts with which less\npessimistic systems are encumbered. Restraint can be rationally imposed\non a given will only by virtue of evils which would be involved in its\nsatisfaction, by virtue, in other words, of some actual demand whose\ndisappointment would ensue upon inconsiderate action. To save, to cure,\nto nourish are duties far less conditional than would be a supposed duty\nto acquire or to create. There is no harm in merely not being, and\nprivation is an evil only when, after we exist, it deprives us of\nsomething naturally requisite, the absence of which would defeat\ninterests already launched into the world. If there is something in a\npurely remedial system of morality which seems one-sided and extreme, we\nmust call to mind the far less excusable one-sidedness of those\nmoralities of prejudice to which we are accustomed in the Occident\u2014the\nethics of irrational acquisitiveness, irrational faith, and irrational\nhonour. Buddhistic morality, so reasonable and beautifully persuasive,\nrising so willingly to the ideal of sanctity, merits in comparison the\nprofoundest respect. It is lifted as far above the crudities of\nintuitionism as the whisperings of an angel are above a schoolboy\u2019s\ncode.\n\nA certain bias and deviation from strict reason seems, indeed,\ninseparable from any moral reform, from any doctrine that is to be\npractically and immediately influential. Socratic ethics was too perfect\nan expression to be much of a force. Philosophers whose hearts are set\non justice and pure truth often hear reproaches addressed to them by the\nfanatic, who contrasts the conspicuous change in this or that direction\naccomplished by his preaching with the apparent impotence of reason and\nthought. Reason\u2019s resources are in fact so limited that it is usually\nreduced to guerilla warfare: a general plan of campaign is useless when\nonly insignificant forces obey our commands. Moral progress is for that\nreason often greatest when some nobler passion or more fortunate\nprejudice takes the lead and subdues its meaner companions without\nneeding to rely on the consciousness of ultimate benefits hence accruing\nto the whole life. So a pessimistic and merely remedial morality may\naccomplish reforms which reason, with its broader and milder suasion,\nmight have failed in. If certain rare and precious virtues can thus be\ninaugurated, under the influence of a zeal exaggerating its own\njustification, there will be time later to insist on the complementary\ntruths and to tack in the other direction after having been carried\nforward a certain distance by this oblique advance.\n\n[Sidenote: Absurdities nevertheless involved.]\n\nAt the same time neglect of reason is never without its dangers and its\nwaste. The Buddhistic system itself suffers from a fundamental\ncontradiction, because its framers did not acknowledge the actual limits\nof retribution nor the empirical machinery by which benefits and\ninjuries are really propagated. It is an onerous condition which\nreligions must fulfil, if they would prevail in the world, that they\nmust have their roots in the past. Buddhism had its mission of\nsalvation; but to express this mission to its proselytes it was obliged\nto borrow the language of the fantastic metaphysics which had preceded\nit in India. The machinery of transmigration had to serve as a\nscaffolding to raise the monument of mercy, purity, and spirituality.\nBut this fabulous background given to life was really inconsistent with\nwhat was best in the new morality; just as in Christianity the\npost-rational evangelical ideals of redemption and regeneration, of the\nhuman will mystically reversed, were radically incompatible with the\npre-rational myths about a creation and a political providence. The\ndoctrine of Karma was a hypostasis of moral responsibility; but in\nmaking responsibility dynamic and all-explaining, the theory\ndiscountenanced in advance the charitable efforts of Buddhism\u2014the\ndesire to instruct and save every fellow-creature. For if all my\nfortunes depend upon my former conduct, I am the sole artificer of my\ndestiny. The love, the pity, the science, or the prayers of others can\nhave no real influence over my salvation. They cannot diminish by one\ntittle my necessary sufferings, nor accelerate by one instant the period\nwhich my own action appoints for my deliverance. Perhaps another\u2019s\ninfluence might, in the false world of time and space, change the order\nor accidental vesture of my moral experiences; but their quantity and\nvalue, being the exact counterpart of my free merits and demerits, could\nnot be affected at all by those extraneous doings.\n\nTherefore the empirical fact that we can help one another remains in\nBuddhism (as in any retributive scheme) only by a serious inconsistency;\nand since this fact is the sanction of whatever moral efficacy can be\nattributed to Buddhism, in sobering, teaching, and saving mankind,\nanything inconsistent with it is fundamentally repugnant to the whole\nsystem. Yet on that repugnant and destructive dogma of Karma Buddhism\nwas condemned to base its instruction. This is the heavy price paid for\nmythical consolations, that they invalidate the moral values they are\nintended to emphasise. Nature has allowed the innocent to suffer for the\nguilty, and the guilty, perhaps, to die in some measure unpunished. To\ncorrect this imperfection we feign a closed circle of personal\nretributions, exactly proportionate to personal deserts. But thereby,\nwithout perceiving it, we have invalidated all political and social\nresponsibility, and denied that any man can be benefited or injured by\nany other. Our moral ambition has overleaped itself and carried us into\na non-natural world where morality is impotent and unmeaning.\n\n[Sidenote: The soul of positivism in all ideals.]\n\nPost-rational systems accordingly mark no real advance and offer no\ngenuine solution to spiritual enigmas. The saving force each of them\ninvokes is merely some remnant of that natural energy which animates the\nhuman animal. Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man\nat the lowest ebb of his fortunes; it is as far as possible from being\nthe source of that normal vitality which subsequently, if his fortunes\nmend, he may gradually recover. Under the same religion, with the same\nposthumous alternatives and mystic harmonies hanging about them,\ndifferent races, or the same race at different periods, will manifest\nthe most opposite moral characteristics. Belief in a thousand hells and\nheavens will not lift the apathetic out of apathy or hold back the\npassionate from passion; while a newly planted and ungalled community,\nin blessed forgetfulness of rewards or punishments, of cosmic needs or\ncelestial sanctions, will know how to live cheerily and virtuously for\nlife\u2019s own sake, putting to shame those thin vaticinations. To hope for\na second life, to be had gratis, merely because this life has lost its\nsavour, or to dream of a different world, because nature seems too\nintricate and unfriendly, is in the end merely to play with words; since\nthe supernatural has no permanent aspect or charm except in so far as it\nexpresses man\u2019s natural situation and points to the satisfaction of his\nearthly interests. What keeps supernatural morality, in its better\nforms, within the limits of sanity is the fact that it reinstates in\npractice, under novel associations and for motives ostensibly different,\nthe very natural virtues and hopes which, when seen to be merely\nnatural, it had thrown over with contempt. The new dispensation itself,\nif treated in the same spirit, would be no less contemptible; and what\nmakes it genuinely esteemed is the restored authority of those human\nideals which it expresses in a fable.\n\nThe extent of this moral restoration, the measure in which nature is\nsuffered to bloom in the sanctuary, determines the value of\npost-rational moralities. They may preside over a good life, personal\nor communal, when their symbolism, though cumbrous, is not deceptive;\nwhen the supernatural machinery brings man back to nature through\nmystical circumlocutions, and becomes itself a poetic echo of experience\nand a dramatic impersonation of reason. The peculiar accent and emphasis\nwhich it will not cease to impose on the obvious lessons of life need\nnot then repel the wisest intelligence. True sages and true\ncivilisations can accordingly flourish under a dispensation nominally\nsupernatural; for that supernaturalism may have become a mere form in\nwhich imagination clothes a rational and humane wisdom.\n\n[Sidenote: Moribund dreams and perennial realities.]\n\nPeople who speak only one language have some difficulty in conceiving\nthat things should be expressed just as well in some other; a prejudice\nwhich does not necessarily involve their mistaking words for things or\nbeing practically misled by their inflexible vocabulary. So it\nconstantly happens that supernatural systems, when they have long\nprevailed, are defended by persons who have only natural interests at\nheart; because these persons lack that speculative freedom and dramatic\nimagination which would allow them to conceive other moulds for morality\nand happiness than those to which a respectable tradition has accustomed\nthem. Sceptical statesmen and academic scholars sometimes suffer from\nthis kind of numbness; it is intelligible that they should mistake the\nforms of culture for its principle, especially when their genius is not\noriginal and their chosen function is to defend and propagate the local\ntraditions in which their whole training has immersed them. Indeed, in\nthe political field, such concern for decaying myths may have a pathetic\njustification; for however little the life of or dignity of man may he\njeopardised by changes in language, languages themselves are not\nindifferent things. They may be closely bound up with the peculiar\nhistory and spirit of nations, and their disappearance, however\nnecessary and on the whole propitious, may mark the end of some stirring\nchapter in the world\u2019s history. Those whose vocation is not philosophy\nand whose country is not the world may be pardoned for wishing to retard\nthe migrations of spirit, and for looking forward with apprehension to a\nfuture in which their private enthusiasms will not be understood.\n\nThe value of post-rational morality, then, depends on a double\nconformity on its part with the Life of Reason. In the first place some\nnatural impulse must be retained, some partial ideal must still be\ntrusted and pursued by the prophet of redemption. In the second place\nthe intuition thus gained and exclusively put forward must be made the\nstarting-point for a restored natural morality. Otherwise the faith\nappealed to would be worthless in its operation, as well as fanciful in\nits basis, and it could never become a mould for thought or action in a\ncivilised society.\n\n\n\n\nCHAPTER XI\n\nTHE VALIDITY OF SCIENCE\n\n\nThe same despair or confusion which, when it overtakes human purposes,\nseeks relief in arbitrary schemes of salvation, when it overtakes human\nknowledge, may breed arbitrary substitutes for science. There are\npost-rational systems of nature as well as of duty. Most of these are\nmyths hardly worth separating from the post-rational moralities they\nadorn, and have been sufficiently noticed in the last chapter; but a few\naspire to be critical revisions of science, themselves scientific. It\nmay be well, in bringing this book to a close, to review these proposed\nrevisions. The validity of science is at stake, and with it the validity\nof that whole Life of Reason which science crowns, and justifies to\nreflection.\n\n[Sidenote: Various modes of revising science.]\n\nThere are many degrees and kinds of this critical retractation. Science\nmay be accepted bodily, while its present results are modified by\nsuggesting speculatively what its ultimate results might be. This is\nnatural philosophy or legitimate metaphysics. Or science may be accepted\nin part, and in part subjected to control by some other alleged vehicle\nof knowledge. This is traditional or intuitive theology. Or science may\nbe retracted and withdrawn altogether, on the ground that it is but\nmethodological fiction, its facts appearances merely, and its principles\ntendencies to feign. This is transcendentalism; whereupon a dilemma\npresents itself. We may be invited to abstain from all hypostasis or\nhearty belief in anything, and to dwell only on the consciousness of\nimaginative activity in a vacuum\u2014which is radical idealism. Or we may\nbe assured that, science being a dream, we may awake from it into\nanother cosmos, built upon principles quite alien to those illustrated\nin nature or applicable in practice\u2014which is idealism of the mythical\nsort. Finally it may occur to us that the criticism of science is an\nintegral part of science itself, and that a transcendental method of\nsurvey, which marshals all things in the order of their discovery, far\nfrom invalidating knowledge can only serve to separate it from\nincidental errors and to disclose the relative importance of truths.\nScience would then be rehabilitated by criticism. The primary movement\nof the intellect would not be condemned by that subsequent reflection\nwhich it makes possible, and which collates its results. Science, purged\nof all needless realism and seen in its relation to human life, would\ncontinue to offer the only conception of reality which is pertinent or\npossible to the practical mind.\n\nWe may now proceed to discuss these various attitudes in turn.\n\n[Sidenote: Science its own best critic.]\n\nA first and quite blameless way of criticising science is to point out\nthat science is incomplete. That it grows fast is indeed its commonest\nboast; and no man of science is so pessimistic as to suppose that its\ngrowth is over. To wish to supplement science and to regard its\nconclusions as largely provisional is therefore more than legitimate. It\nis actually to share the spirit of inquiry and to feel the impulse\ntoward investigation. When new truths come into view, old truths are\nthereby reinterpreted and put in a new light; so that the acquisitions\nof science not only admit of revision but loudly call for it, not\nwishing for any other authority or vindication than that which they\nmight find in the context of universal truth.\n\nTo revise science in this spirit would be merely to extend it. No new\nmethod, no transverse philosophy, would be requisite or fitted for the\ntask. Knowledge would be transformed by more similar knowledge, not by\nsome verbal manipulation. Yet while waiting for experience to grow and\naccumulate its lessons, a man of genius, who had drunk deep of\nexperience himself, might imagine some ultimate synthesis. He might\nventure to carry out the suggestions of science and anticipate the\nconclusions it would reach when completed. The game is certainly\ndangerous, especially if the prophecy is uttered with any air of\nauthority; yet with good luck and a fine instinct, such speculation may\nactually open the way to discovery and may diffuse in advance that\nvirtual knowledge of physics which is enough for moral and poetic\npurposes. Verification in detail is needed, not so much for its own sake\nas to check speculative errors; but when speculation is by chance well\ndirected and hits upon the substantial truth, it does all that a\ncompleted science would do for mankind; since science, if ever\ncompleted, would immediately have to be summed up again and reduced to\ngeneralities. Under the circumstances of human life, ultimate truth must\nforego detailed verification and must remain speculative. The curse of\nmodern philosophy is only that it has not drawn its inspiration from\nscience; as the misfortune of science is that it has not yet saturated\nthe mind of philosophers and recast the moral world. The Greek\nphysicists, puerile as was their notion of natural mechanism, had a more\nintegral view of things. They understood nature\u2019s uses and man\u2019s\nconditions in an honest and noble way. If no single phenomenon had been\nexplained correctly by any philosopher from Thales to Lucretius, yet by\ntheir frank and studious contemplation of nature they would have\nliberated the human soul.\n\n[Sidenote: Obstruction by alien traditions.]\n\nUnfortunately the supplements to science which most philosophers supply\nin our day are not conceived in a scientific spirit. Instead of\nanticipating the physics of the future they cling to the physics of the\npast. They do not stimulate us by a picture, however fanciful, of what\nthe analogies of nature and politics actually point to; they seek rather\nto patch and dislocate current physics with some ancient myth, once the\nbest physics obtainable, from which they have not learned to extricate\ntheir affections.\n\nSometimes these survivals are intended to modify scientific conceptions\nbut slightly, and merely to soften a little the outlines of a cosmic\npicture to which religion and literature are not yet accustomed. There\nis a school of political conservatives who, with no specific interest in\nmetaphysics, cannot or dare not break with traditional modes of\nexpression, with the customs of their nation, or with the clerical\nclasses. They accordingly append to current knowledge certain\nsentimental postulates, alleging that what is established by tradition\nand what appeals to the heart must somehow correspond to something which\nis needful and true. But their conventional attachment to a religion\nwhich in its original essence was perhaps mystical and revolutionary,\nscarcely modifies, in their eyes, the sum of practical assurances or the\naim of human life. As language exercises some functions which science\ncan hardly assume (as, for instance, in poetry and communication) so\ntheology and metaphysics, which to such men are nothing but languages,\nmight provide for inarticulate interests, and unite us to much that lies\nin the dim penumbra of our workaday world. Ancient revelations and\nmysteries, however incredible if taken literally, might therefore be\nsuffered to nourish undisturbed, so long as they did not clash with any\nclear fact or natural duty. They might continue to decorate with a\nmystical aureole the too prosaic kernel of known truth.\n\n[Sidenote: Needless anxiety for moral interests.]\n\nMythology and ritual, with the sundry divinations of poets, might in\nfact be kept suspended with advantage over human passion and ignorance,\nto furnish them with decent expression. But once indulged, divination is\napt to grow arrogant and dogmatic. When its oracles have become\ntraditional they are almost inevitably mistaken for sober truths. Hence\nthe second kind of supplement offered to science, so that revelations\nwith which moral life has been intertwined may find a place beside or\nbeyond science. The effort is honest, but extraordinarily short-sighted.\nWhatever value those revelations may have they draw from actual\nexperience or inevitable ideals. When the ground of that experience and\nthose ideals is disclosed by science, nothing of any value is lost; it\nonly remains to accustom ourselves to a new vocabulary and to shift\nsomewhat the associations of those values which life contains or\npursues. Revelations are necessarily mythical and subrational; they\nexpress natural forces and human interests in a groping way, before the\nadvent of science. To stick in them, when something more honest and\nexplicit is available, is inconsistent with caring for attainable\nwelfare or understanding the situation. It is to be stubborn and\nnegligent under the cloak of religion. These prejudices are a drag on\nprogress, moral no less than material; and the sensitive conservatism\nthat fears they may be indispensable is entangled in a pathetic\ndelusion. It is conservatism in a ship-wreck. It has not the insight to\nembrace the fertile principles of life, which are always ready to renew\nlife after no matter what natural catastrophe. The good laggards have no\ncourage to strip for the race. Rather than live otherwise, and live\nbetter, they prefer to nurse the memories of youth and to die with a\nretrospective smile upon their countenance.\n\n[Sidenote: Science an imaginative and practical art.]\n\nFar graver than the criticism which shows science to be incomplete is\nthat which shows it to be relative. The fact is undeniable, though the\ninferences made from it are often rash and gratuitous. We have seen that\nscience is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent,\ncommon-sense rounded out and minutely articulated. It is therefore as\nmuch an instinctive product, as much a stepping forth of human courage\nin the dark, as is any inevitable dream or impulsive action. Like life\nitself, like any form of determinate existence, it is altogether\nautonomous and unjustifiable from the outside. It must lean on its own\nvitality; to sanction reason there is only reason, and to corroborate\nsense there is nothing but sense. Inferential thought is a venture not\nto be approved of, save by a thought no less venturesome and\ninferential. This is once for all the fate of a living being\u2014it is the\nvery essence of spirit\u2014to be ever on the wing, borne by inner forces\ntoward goals of its own imagining, confined to a passing apprehension of\na represented world. Mind, which calls itself the organ of truth, is a\npermanent possibility of error. The encouragement and corroboration\nwhich science is alleged to receive from moment to moment may, for aught\nit knows, be simply a more ingenious self-deception, a form of that\ncumulative illusion by which madness can confirm itself, creating a\nwhole world, with an endless series of martyrs, to bear witness to its\nsanity.\n\nTo insist on this situation may seem idle, since no positive doctrine\ncan gain thereby in plausibility, and no particular line of action in\nreasonableness. Yet this transcendental exercise, this reversion to the\nimmediate, may be recommended by way of a cathartic, to free the mind\nfrom ancient obstructions and make it hungrier and more agile in its\nrational faith. Scepticism is harmless when it is honest and universal;\nit clears the air and is a means of reorganising belief on its natural\nfoundations. Belief is an inevitable accompaniment of practice and\nintent, both of which it will cling to all the more closely after a\nthorough criticism. When all beliefs are challenged together, the just\nand necessary ones have a chance to step forward and to re-establish\nthemselves alone. The doubt cast on science, when it is an ingenuous and\nimpartial doubt, will accordingly serve to show what sort of thing\nscience is, and to establish it on a sure foundation. Science will then\nbe seen to be tentative, genial, practical, and humane, full of ideality\nand pathos, like every great human undertaking.\n\n[Sidenote: Arri\u00e8re-pens\u00e9e in transcendentalism.]\n\nUnfortunately a searching disintegration of dogma, a conscientious\nreversion to the immediate, is seldom practised for its own sake. So\nviolent a disturbance of mental habits needs some great social upheaval\nor some revolutionary ambition to bring it about. The transcendental\nphilosophy might never have been put forward at all, had its authors\nvalued it for what it can really accomplish. The effort would have\nseemed too great and the result too nugatory. Their criticism of\nknowledge was not freely undertaken, with the pure speculative motive of\nunderstanding and purifying human science. They were driven on by the\nmalicious psychology of their predecessors, by the perplexities of a\nsophistical scepticism, and by the imminent collapse of traditional\nmetaphysics. They were enticed at the same time by the hope of finding a\nnew basis for the religious myths associated with that metaphysics. In\nconsequence their transcendentalism was not a rehearsal of the Life of\nReason, a retrospect criticising and justifying the phases of human\nprogress. It was rather a post-rational system of theology, the\ndangerous cure to a harmless disease, inducing a panic to introduce a\nfable. The panic came from the assumption (a wholly gratuitous one) that\na spontaneous constructive intellect cannot be a trustworthy instrument,\nthat appearances cannot be the properties of reality, and that things\ncannot be what science finds that they are. We were forbidden to believe\nin anything we might discover or to trust in anything we could see. The\nartificial vacuum thus produced in the mind ached to be filled with\nsomething, and of course a flood of rhetorical commonplaces was at hand,\nwhich might rush in to fill it.\n\n[Sidenote: Its romantic sincerity.]\n\nThe most heroic transcendentalists were but men, and having imagined\nthat logic obliged them to abstain from every sort of hypostasis, they\ncould not long remain true to their logic. For a time, being of a\nbuoyant disposition, they might feel that nothing could be more\nexhilarating than to swim in the void, altogether free from settled\nconditions, altogether the ignorant creators of each moment\u2019s vision.\nSuch a career evidently affords all sorts of possibilities, except\nperhaps the possibility of being a career. But when a man has strained\nevery nerve to maintain an absolute fluidity and a painful fidelity to\nthe immediate, he can hardly be blamed if he lapses at last into some\nflattering myth, and if having satisfied himself that all science is\nfiction he proclaims some fairy-tale to be the truth. The episodes of\nexperience, not being due to any conceivable machinery beneath, might\ncome of mere willing, or at the waving of a dialectical wand. Yet apart\nfrom this ulterior inconsistency and backsliding into credulity,\ntranscendentalism would hear nothing of causes or grounds. All phenomena\nexisted for it on one flat level. We were released from all dogma and\nreinstated in the primordial assurance that we were all there was, but\nwithout understanding what we were, and without any means of controlling\nour destiny, though cheered by the magnificent feeling that that destiny\nwas great.\n\n[Sidenote: Its constructive importance.]\n\nIt is intelligible that a pure transcendentalism of this sort should not\nbe either stable or popular. It may be admired for its analytic depth\nand its persistency in tracing all supposed existences back to the\nexperience that vouches for them. Yet a spirit that finds its only\nexercise in gloating on the consciousness that it is a spirit, one that\nhas so little skill in expression that it feels all its embodiments to\nbe betrayals and all its symbols to be misrepresentations, is a spirit\nevidently impotent and confused. It is self-inhibited, and cannot fulfil\nits essential vocation by reaching an embodiment at once definitive and\nideal, philosophical and true. We may excuse a school that has done one\noriginal task so thoroughly as transcendentalism has thing could be\nsaid of it, would be simply an integral term in the discourse that\ndescribed it. And this discourse, this sad residuum of reality, would\nremain an absolute datum without a ground, without a subject-matter,\nwithout a past, and without a future.\n\n[Sidenote: Its futility.]\n\nIt suffices, therefore, to take the supposed negative implication in\ntranscendentalism a little seriously to see that it leaves nothing\nstanding but negation and imbecility; so that we may safely conclude\nthat such a negative implication is gratuitous, and also that in taking\nthe transcendental method for an instrument of reconstruction its\nprofessors were radically false to it. They took the starting-point of\nexperience, on which they had fallen back, for its ultimate deliverance,\nand in reverting to protoplasm they thought they were rising to God. The\ntranscendental method is merely retrospective; its use is to recover\nmore systematically conceptions already extant and inevitable. It\ninvalidates nothing in science; much less does it carry with it any\nrival doctrine of its own. Every philosophy, even materialism, may find\na transcendental justification, if experience as it develops will yield\nno other terms. What has reason to tremble at a demand for its\ncredentials is surely not natural science; it is rather those mystical\ntheologies or romantic philosophies of history which aspire to take its\nplace. Such lucubrations, even if reputed certain, can scarcely be\nreally credited or regarded in practice; while scientific tenets are\nnecessarily respected, even when they are declared to be fictions. This\nnemesis is inevitable; for the mind must be inhabited, and the ideas\nwith which science peoples it are simply its involuntary perceptions\nsomewhat more clearly arranged.\n\n[Sidenote: Ideal science is self-justified.]\n\nThat the relativity of science\u2014its being an emanation of human life\u2014is\nnothing against its truth appears best, perhaps, in the case of\ndialectic. Dialectic is valid by virtue of an intended meaning and felt\ncongruity in its terms; but these terms, which intent fixes, are\nexternal and independent in their ideal nature, and the congruity\nbetween them is not created by being felt but, whether incidentally felt\nor not, is inherent in their essence. Mathematical thinking is the\nclosest and most intimate of mental operations, nothing external being\ncalled in to aid; yet mathematical truth is as remote as possible from\nbeing personal or psychic. It is absolutely self-justified and is\nnecessary before it is discovered to be so. Here, then, is a conspicuous\nregion of truth, disclosed to the human intellect by its own internal\nexercise, which is nevertheless altogether independent, being eternal\nand indefeasible, while the thought that utters it is ephemeral.\n\n[Sidenote: Physical science is presupposed in scepticism.]\n\nThe validity of material science, not being warranted by pure insight,\ncannot be so quickly made out; nevertheless it cannot be denied\nsystematically, and the misunderstood transcendentalism which belittles\nphysics contradicts its own basis. For how are we supposed to know that\nwhat call facts are mere appearances and what we call objects mere\ncreations of thought? We know this by physics. It is physiology, a part\nof physics, that assures us that our senses and brains are conditions of\nour experience. Were it not for what we know of the outer world and of\nour place in it, we should be incapable of attaching any meaning to\nsubjectivity. The flux of things would then go on in their own medium,\nnot in our minds; and no suspicion of illusion or of qualification by\nmind would attach to any event in nature. So it is in a dream; and it is\nour knowledge of physics, our reliance on the world\u2019s material\ncoherence, that marks our awakening, and that constitutes our discovery\nthat we exist as minds and are subject to dreaming. It is quite true\nthat the flux, as it exists in men, is largely psychic; but only because\nthe events it contains are effects of material causes and the images in\nit are flying shadows cast by solid external things. This is the meaning\nof psychic existence, and its differentia. Mind is an expression,\nweighted with emotion, of mechanical relations among bodies. Suppose the\nbodies all removed: at once the images formerly contrasted with those\nbodies would resume their inherent characteristics and mutual relation;\nthey would become existences in their own category, large, moving,\ncoloured, distributed to right and left; that is, save for their values,\nthey would become material things.\n\n[Sidenote: It recurs in all understanding of perception.]\n\nPhysics is accordingly a science which, though hypothetical and only\nverifiable by experiment, is involved in history and psychology and\ntherefore in any criticism of knowledge. The contradiction would be\ncurious if a man should declare that his ideas were worthless, being due\nto his organs of sense, and that therefore these organs (since he had an\nidea of them) did not exist. Yet on this brave argument idealism chiefly\nrests. It asserts that bodies are mere ideas, because it is through our\nbodies that we perceive them. When physics has discovered the conditions\nunder which knowledge of physics has arisen, physics is supposed to be\nspirited away; whereas, of course, it has only closed its circle and\njustified its sovereignty. Were all science retracted and reduced to\nsymbolic calculation nothing would remain for this calculation to\nsymbolise. The whole force of calling a theory merely a vehicle or\nmethod of thought, leading us to something different from itself, lies\nin having a literal knowledge of this other thing. But such literal\nknowledge is the first stage of science, which the other stages merely\nextend. So that when, under special circumstances, we really appeal to\nalgebraic methods of expression and think in symbols, we do so in the\nhope of transcribing our terms, when the reckoning is over, into the\nlanguage of familiar facts. Were these facts not forthcoming, the\nsymbolic machinery would itself become the genuine reality\u2014since it is\nreally given\u2014and we should have to rest in it, as in the ultimate\ntruth. This is what happens in mythology, when the natural phenomena\nexpressed by it are forgotten. But natural phenomena themselves are\nsymbols of nothing, because they are primary data. They are the\nconstitutive elements of the reality they disclose.\n\n[Sidenote: Science contains all trustworthy knowledge.]\n\nThe validity of science in general is accordingly established merely by\nestablishing the truth of its particular propositions, in dialectic on\nthe authority of intent and in physics on that of experiment. It is\nimpossible to base science on a deeper foundation or to override it by a\nhigher knowledge. What is called metaphysics, if not an anticipation of\nnatural science, is a confusion of it with dialectic or a mixture of it\nwith myths. If we have the faculty of being utterly sincere and of\ndisintegrating the conventions of language and religion, we must confess\nthat knowledge is only a claim we put forth, a part of that unfathomable\ncompulsion by force of which we live and hold our painted world together\nfor a moment. If we have any insight into mind, or any eye for human\nhistory, we must confess at the same time that the oracular substitutes\nfor knowledge to which, in our perplexities, we might be tempted to\nfly, are pathetic popular fables, having no other sanctity than that\nwhich they borrow from the natural impulses they play upon. To live by\nscience requires intelligence and faith, but not to live by it is folly.\n\n[Sidenote: It suffices for the Life of Reason.]\n\nIf science thus contains the sum total of our rational convictions and\ngives us the only picture of reality on which we should care to dwell,\nwe have but to consult the sciences in detail to ascertain, as far as\nthat is possible, what sort of a universe we live in. The result is as\nyet far from satisfactory. The sciences have not joined hands and made\ntheir results coherent, showing nature to be, as it doubtless is, all of\none piece. The moral sciences especially are a mass of confusion.\nNegative, I think, must be the attitude of reason, in the present state\nof science, upon any hypothesis far outrunning the recorded history and\nthe visible habitat of the human race. Yet exactly the same habits and\nprinciples that have secured our present knowledge are still active\nwithin us, and promise further discoveries. It is more desirable to\nclarify our knowledge within these bounds than to extend it beyond them.\nFor while the reward of action is contemplation or, in more modern\nphrase, experience and consciousness, there is nothing stable or\ninteresting to contemplate except objects relevant to action\u2014the\nnatural world and the mind\u2019s ideals.\n\nBoth the conditions and the standards of action lie well within the\nterritory which science, after a fashion, already dominates. But there\nremain unexplored jungles and monster-breeding lairs within our nominal\njurisdiction which it is the immediate task of science to clear. The\ndarkest spots are in man himself, in his fitful, irrational disposition.\nCould a better system prevail in our lives a better order would\nestablish itself in our thinking. It has not been for want of keen\nsenses, or personal genius, or a constant order in the outer world, that\nmankind have fallen back repeatedly into barbarism and superstition. It\nhas been for want of good character, good example, and good government.\nThere is a pathetic capacity in men to live nobly, if only they would\ngive one another the chance. The ideal of political perfection, vague\nand remote as it yet seems, is certainly approachable, for it is as\ndefinite and constant as human nature. The knowledge of all relevant\ntruth would be involved in that ideal, and no intellectual\ndissatisfaction would be felt with a system of ideas that should express\nand illumine a perfect life.","title":"The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":317273}