Scepticism and Animal Faith/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
SOME AUTHORITIES FOR THIS CONCLUSION
The ultimate position of the sceptic, that nothing given exists, may be fortified by the authority of many renowned philosophers who are accounted orthodox; and it will be worth while to stop for a moment to invoke their support, since the scepticism I am defending is not meant to be merely provisional; its just conclusions will remain fixed, to remind me perpetually that all alleged knowledge of matters of fact is faith only, and that an existing world, whatever form it may choose to wear, is intrinsically a questionable and arbitrary thing. It is true that many who have defended this view, in the form that all appearance is illusion, have done so in order to insist all the more stoutly on the existence of something occult which they call reality; but as the existence of this reality is far easier to doubt than the existence of the obvious, I may here disregard that compensatory dogma. I shall soon introduce compensatory dogmas of my own, more credible, I think, than theirs; and I shall attribute existence to a flux of natural events which can never be data of intuition, but only objects of a belief which men and animals, caught in that flux themselves, hazard instinctively. Although a sceptic may doubt all existence, none being involved in any indubitable datum, yet I think good human reasons, apart from irresistible impulse, can be found for positing existing intuitions to which data appear, no less than other existing events and things, which the intuited data report or describe. For the moment, however, I am concerned to justify further the contention of the sceptic that, if we refuse to bow to the yoke of animal faith, we can find in pure intuition no evidence of any existence whatsoever.
There is notably one tenet, namely, that all change is illusion, proper to many deep-voiced philosophers, which of itself suffices to abolish all existence, in the sense which I give to this word. Instead of change they probably posit changeless substance or pure Being; but if substance were not subject to change, at least in its distribution, it would not be the substance of anything found in the world or happening in the mind; it would, therefore, have no more lodgement in existence than has pure Being, which is evidently only a logical term. Pure Being, as far as it goes, is no doubt a true description of everything, whether existent or non-existent; so that if anything exists, pure Being will exist in it; but it will exist merely as pure colour does in all colours, or pure space in all spaces, and not separately nor exclusively. These philosophers, in denying change, accordingly deny all existence. But though many of them have prized this doctrine, few have lived up to it, or rather none have; so that | may pass over the fact that in denying change they have inadvertently denied existence, even to substance and pure Being, because they have inadvertently retained both existence and change. The reality they attributed with so much unction and conviction to the absolute was not that proper to this idea — one of the least impressive which it is possible to contemplate — but was obviously due to the strain of existence and movement within themselves, and to the vast rumble, which hypnotised them, of universal mutation.
It is the Indians who have insisted most sincerely and intrepidly on the non-existence of everything given, even adjusting their moral regimen to this insight. Life is a dream, they say: and all experienced events are illusions. In dfeaming of nature and of ourselves we are deceived, even in imagining that we exist and are deceived and dreaming. Some aver, indeed, that there is a universal dreamer, Brahma, slumbering and breathing deeply in all of us, who is the reality of our dreams, and the negation of them. But as Brahma is emphatically not qualified by any of the forms of illusory existence, but annuls them all, there is no need, for my purpose, of distinguishing him from the reported state of redeemed souls (where many souls are admitted) nor from the Nirvana into which lives flow when they happily cease, becoming at last aware, as it were, that neither they nor anything else has ever existed.
It would be rash, across the chasm of language and tradition that separates me from the Indians, to accuse their formidable systems of self-contradiction. Truth and reality are words which, in the mouths of prophets, have often a eulogistic rather than a scientific force; and if it is better to elude the importunities of existence and to find a sanctuary of intense safety and repose in the notion of pure Being, there may be a dramatic propriety in saying that the view of the saved, from which all memory of the path to salvation is excluded, is the true view, and their condition the only reality; so that they are right in thinking that they have never existed, and we wrong in thinking that we now exist.
Here is an egotism of the redeemed with which, as with other egotisms, I confess I have little sympathy. The blessed, in giving out that I do not exist in my sins, because they cannot distinguish me, appear to me to be deceived. The intrinsic blessedness of their condition cannot turn into a truth this small oversight on their part, however excusable. I suspect, or I like to imagine, that what the Indians mean is rather that the principle of my existence, and of my persuasion that I exist, is an evil principle. It is sin, guilt, passion, and mad will, the natural and universal source of illusion — very much what I am here calling animal faith; and since this assertiveness in me (according to the Indians) is wrong morally, and since its influence alone leads me to posit existence in myself or in anything else, if I were healed morally I should cease to assert existence; and I should, in fact, have ceased to exist.
Now in this doctrine, so stated, lies a great confirmation of my thesis that nothing given exists; because it is only a dark principle, transcendental in respect to the datum (that is, on the hither side of the footlights) that calls up this datum at all, or leads me to posit its existence. It is this sorry self of mine sitting here in the dark, one in this serried pack of open-mouthed fools, hungry for illusion, that is responsible for the spectacle; for if a foolish instinct had not brought me to the playhouse, and if avid eyes and an idealising understanding had not watched the performance, no part of it would have abused me: and if no one came to the theatre, the actors would soon flit away like ghosts, the poets would starve, the scenery would topple over and become rubbish, and the very walls would disappear. Every part of experience, as it comes, is illusion; and the source of this illusion is my animal nature, blindly labouring in a blind world.
Such is the ancient lesson of experience itself, when we reflect upon experience and turn its illusions into instruction: a lesson which a bird-witted empiricism can never learn, though it is daily repeated. But the Indian with a rare sensitiveness joined a rare recollection. He lived: a religious love, a childish absorption in appearances as they come (which busy empiricists do not share), led him to remember them truly, in all their beauty, and therefore to perceive that they were illusions. The poet, the disinterested philosopher, the lover of things distilled into purity, frees himself from belief. This infinite chaos of cruel and lovely forms, he cries, is all deceptive, all unsubstantial, substituted at will for nothing, and soon found to sink into nothing again, and to be nothing in truth.
I will disregard the vehemence with which these saintly scholastics denounce the world and the sinful nature that attaches me to it. I like the theatre, not because I cannot perceive that the play is a fiction, but because I do perceive it; if I thought the thing a fact, I should detest it: anxiety would rob me of all my imaginative pleasure. Even as it is, I often wish the spectacle were less barbarous; but I am not angry because each scene does not last for ever, and is likely to be followed by a thousand others which I shall not witness. Such is the nature of endless comedy, and of experience. But I wish to retain the valuable testimony of the Indians to the non-existence of the obvious. This testimony is the more valuable because the spectacle present to their eyes was tropical; harder, therefore, to master and to smile at than are the political and romantic medleys which fill the mind of Europe. Yet amidst the serpents and hyznas, the monkeys and parrots of their mental jungle, those sages could sit unmoved, too holily incredulous for fear. How infinite, how helpless, how deserving of forgiveness creative error becomes to the eye of understanding, that loves only in pity, and has no concupiscence for what it loves! How like unhappy animals western philosophers seem in comparison, with their fact-worship, their thrift, their moral intolerance, their imaginative poverty, their political zeal, and their subservience to intellectual fashion!
It makes no difference for my purposes if the cosmology of the Indians was fanciful. It could hardly be more extraordinary than the constitution of the material world is in fact, nor more decidedly out of scale with human-data; truth and fancy in this matter equally convict the human senses of illusion. Nor am I out of sympathy with their hope of escaping from the universal hurly-burly into some haven of peace. A philosopher has a haven in himself, of which I suspect the fabled bliss to follow in other lives, or after total emancipation from living, is only a poetic symbol: he has pleasure in truth, and an equal readiness to enjoy the scene or to quit it. Liberation is never complete while life lasts, and is nothing afterwards; but it flows in a measure from this very conviction that all experience is illusion, when this conviction is morally effective, as it was with the Indians. Their belief in transmigration or in Karma is superfluous in this regard, since a later experience could only change the illusion without perfecting the liberation. Yet the mention of some ulterior refuge or substance is indispensable to the doctrine of illusion, and though it may be expressed mythically must be taken to heart too. It points to other realms of being — such as those which I call the realms of matter, truth, and spirit — which by nature cannot be data of intuition but must be posited (if recognised by man at all) by an instinctive faith expressed in action. Whether these ulterior realms exist or not is their own affair: existence may be proper to some, like matter or spirit, and not to others, like truth. But as to the data of intuition, their non-existent and illusory character is implied in the fact that they are given. A datum is by definition a theme of attention, a term in passing thought, a visioned universal. The realm in which it lies, and in which flying intuition discloses it for a moment, is the very realm of non-existence, of inert or ideal being. The Indians, in asserting the non-existence of every term in possible experience, not only free the spirit from idolatry, but free the realm of spirit (which is that of intuition) from limitation; because if nothing that appears exists, anything may appear without the labour and expense of existing; and fancy is invited to range innocently — fancies not murdering other fancies as an existence must murder other existences. While life lasts, the field is thus cleared for innocent poetry and infinite hypothesis, without suffering the judgement to be deceived nor the heart enslaved.
European philosophers, even when called idealists, have seldom reconciled themselves to regarding experience as a creature of fancy. Instead of looking beneath illusion for some principle that might call it forth or perhaps dispel it, as they would if endeavouring to interpret a dream, they have treated it as dreams are treated by the superstitious; that is, they have supposed that the images they saw were themselves substances, or powers, or at least imperfect visions of originals resembling them. In other words, they have been empiricists, regarding appearances as constituents of substance. There have been exceptions, but some of them only prove the rule. Parmenides and Democritus certainly did not admit that the data of sense or imagination existed otherwise than as illusions or conventional signs: but their whole interest, for this reason, skipped over them, and settled heavily on “Being,” or on the atoms and the void, which they severally supposed underlay appearance. Appearance itself thereby acquired a certain vicarious solidity, since it was thought to be the garment of substance; somehow within the visionary datum, or beneath it, the most unobjectionable substance was always to be found. Parmenides could not have admitted, and Democritus had not discovered, that the sole basis of appearances was some event in the brain, in no way resembling them; and that the relation of data to the external events they indicated was that of a spontaneous symbol, like an exclamatory word, and not that of a copy or emanation. The simple ancients supposed (as some of my contemporaries do also) that perception stripped material things of their surface properties, or was actually these surface properties peeled off and lodged in the observer’s head. Accordingly the denial of existence to sensibles and to intelligibles was never hearty until substance was denied also, and nothing existent was any longer supposed to lurk within these appearances or behind them.
All modern idealists have perceived that an actual appearance cannot be a part of a substance that does not appear; the given image has only the given relations; if I assign other relations to it (which I do if I attribute existence to it) I substitute for the pure datum one of two other things: either a substance possessing the same form as that datum, but created and dissolved in its own medium, at its own periods, apart from all observation; or else, a perception of my own, a moment in my experience, carrying the vision of such an image. The former choice simply puts me back at the beginning of physics, when a merely pictorial knowledge of the material world existed, and nothing of its true mechanism and history had been discovered. The latter choice posits human discourse, or as these philosophers call it, experience: and it is certain that the status of a datum in discourse or experience is that of a mere appearance, fluctuating, intermittent, never twice the same, and dependent for its specious actuality on the movement of attention and the shuffling of confused images in the fancy. In other words, what exists — that is, what is carried on through the flux and has changing and external relations — is a life, discourse itself, the voluminous adventures of the mind in its wholeness. This is also what novelists and literary psychologists endeavour to record or to imagine; and the particular data, hardly distinguishable by the aid of a word clapped on to them, are only salient sparks or abstract points of reference for an observer intent on ulterior events. It is ulterior events, the whole of human experience and history as conventionally reported, that is the object of belief in this school, and the true existence.
Ostensibly empiricists seek to reduce this unmanageable object to particular data, and to attribute existence to each scintilla taken separately; but in reality all the relations of these intuitions (which are not relations between the data), their temporal order, subordination to habit and passion, associations, meaning, and embosoming intelligence, are interpolated as if they were matters of course; and indeed they are, because these are the tides of animal life on which the datum sparkles for a moment. Empiricists are interested in practice, and wish to work with as light an intellectual equipment as possible; they therefore attribute existence to “ideas” — meaning intuitions but professing to mean data. If they were interested in these data for their own sake, they would perceive that they are only symbols, like words, used to mark or express the crises in their practical career; and becoming fervid materialists again in their beliefs, as they have always been in their allegiances, they might soon go so far as to deny that there is intuition of data at all: which is a radical way of denying their existence. Discourse and experience would thus drop out of sight altogether, and instead of data of intuition there would be only the pictorial elements of physics — the other possible form in which anything given may be asserted to exist.
If anything, therefore, exists at all when an appearance arises, this existence is not the unit that appears, but either a material fact presenting such an appearance, though constituted by many other relations, or else an actual intuition evoking, creating, or dreaming that non-existent unit. Idealists, if they are thorough, will deny both; for neither a material thing nor an actual intuition has its being in being perceived: both, by definition, exist on their own account, by virtue of their internal energy and natural relations. Therefore either existence apart from givenness is admitted, inconsistently with idealism, or existence is denied altogether. It is allowed, and in fact urged, by all complete idealists that appearance, far from involving the existence of what appears, positively excludes it. Esse est percipi was a maxim recalled by an intelligible literary impulse, as Faust said, Gefühl ist Alles! Yet that maxim was uttered without reflection, because what those who uttered it really meant was the exact opposite, namely, that only spirits, or perhaps one spirit, existed, which were beings perfectly inperceptible. It was the beautiful and profound part of such a sentiment that whatever is pictorial is non-existent. Data could be only forms assumed by animal sensibility, like the camel and the weasel seen by Hamlet in a cloud; as these curious creatures could have no zoological existence in that nebula, so the units of human apperception have no existence anywhere.
When idealists say, therefore, that ideas are the only objects of human knowledge and that they exist only in the mind, their language is incoherent, because knowledge of ideas is not knowledge, and presence to intuition is not existence. But this incoherence enables two different philosophies to use the same formula, to the extreme confusion both of doctrine and feeling. One philosophy under the name idea conceives of a fact or phenomenon, a phase in the flux of fortune or experience, existing at a given moment, and known at other moments to have existed there: in other words, its ideas are recollected events in nature, the subject-matter of psychology and physics. This philosophy, when carried out, becomes materialism; its psychology turns into a record of behaviour and its phenomenalistic view of nature into a mathematical calculus of invisible processes. The other philosophy (which alone concerns me here) under the name idea understands the terms of sensation and thought, and their pictorial or rhetorical synthesis. Since these themes of intuition are called upon to absorb all reality, and no belief is accepted as more than a fresh datum in thought, this philosophy denies the transcendence of knowledge and the existence of anything.
Although the temper of absolute idealists is often far from sceptical, their method is scepticism itself: as appears not only in their criticism of all dogma, but in the reasons they give for their own views. What are these reasons? That the criticism of knowledge proves that actual thinking is the only reality; that the objects of knowledge can live, move, and have their being only within it; that existence is something merely imputed; and that truth is coherence among views having themselves no objects. A fact, these critics say, is a concept. This statement might seem absurd, since a concept means at most the idea or supposition of a fact; but if the statement is taken sympathetically, for what the malicious criticism of knowledge means by it, it amounts to this: that there are no facts, but that what we call facts, and believe to be such, are really only conventional fictions, imaginations of what facts would be if facts were possible at all. That facts are ideals, impossible to realise, is clear on transcendental principles, since a fact would be an event or existence which knowledge would have to approach and lay siege to somehow from the outside, so that for knowledge (the only reality on this system) they would always remain phantoms, creatures of a superstitious instinct, terms for ever posited but never possessed, and therefore perpetually unreal. If fact or truth had any separate being it could not be an integral part of knowledge; what modicum of reality facts or truths can possess they must borrow from knowledge, in which they perforce remain ideals only; so that it is only as unreal that they are real at all. Transcendentalists are sure that knowledge is everything, not because they presume that everything is known, but precisely because they see that there is nothing to know. If anything existed actually, or if there was any independent truth, it would be unknowable, as these voracious thinkers conceive knowledge. The glorious thing about knowledge, in their eyes, is that, as there is nothing to know, knowledge is a free and a sure creation, new and self-grounded for ever.
Transcendentalism, when it is thorough, accordingly agrees with the Indian systems in maintaining that the illusion that given objects exist has itself no existence. Any actual sensation, any instance of thinking, would be a self-existing fact; but facts are only concepts, that is, inert terms in absolute thought: if illusions occurred actually, they would not be concepts but events, and though their visionary objects might be non-existent, the vision of them would exist; and they would be the sort of independent facts which transcendental logic excludes as impossible. Acts of judging or positing or imagining cannot be admitted on this system until they in their turn have been posited in another judgement; that is, until the cease to hide their heads in the obscurity of self-existence, and become purely ideal themes of actual intuition. When they have thus become phenomenal, intent and judgement may posit them and depute them to exist; but the belief that they exist otherwise than as present postulates is always false. Imputed existence is the only existence possible, but must always be imputed falsely. For example, the much-talked-of opinions of ancient philosophers, if they had existed at all, would have had to exist before they became objects of intuition to the historian, or to the reader of history, who judges them to have existed; but such self-existence is repugnant to transcendental logic: it is a ghost cut off from knowledge and from the breath of life in me here and now. Therefore the opinions of philosophers exist only in history, history exists only in the historian, and the historian only in the reader; and the reader himself exists only Bs his self-consciousness, which is not really his own, but absolute consciousness thinking about him or about all things from his point of view. Thus everything exists only ideally, by being falsely supposed to exist. The only knowable reality is unreal because specious, and all other reality is unreal because unknowable.
Transcendentalists are thus driven, like Parmenides and the Vedanta philosophy, to withdraw into a dark interior yet omnipresent principle, the unfathomable force that sets all this illusion going, and at the same time rebukes and annuls the illusion. I am here concerned, let me repeat, with scepticism, not with compensatory dogmas; but for the transcendentalist, who fundamentally abhors substance, the compensatory dogma itself is one more denial of existence. For what, in his system, is this transcendental seat of all illusion, this agent in all judgements and positings? Not an existing spirit, if such a phrase could have a meaning. Absolute thought cannot exist first, before it imputes existence to other things or to itself. If it needed to possess existence before imputing it, as the inexpert in logic might suppose, the whole principle of transcendental criticism would be abandoned and disproved, and nothing would any longer prevent the existence of intuitions or of material things before any one posited them. But if non-existent, what can absolute spirit be? Just a principle, a logic to be embodied, a self-creating programme or duty, asserting itself without any previous instrument, ground, or occasion. Existence is something utterly unworthy of such a transcendental spirit, and repugnant to it. Spirit is here only a name for absolute law, for the fatality or chance that one set of appearances instead of another insists upon arising. No doubt this fatality is welcome to the enthusiast in whom this spirit is awake, and its very groundlessness takes on the form of freedom and creative power to his apprehension: but this sympathy with life, being expressly without any natural basis, is itself a happy accident, and precarious: and sometimes conscience may suddenly turn against it, and call it vain, mad, and criminal. Fichte once said that he who truly wills anything must will that very thing for ever; and this saying may be interpreted consistently with transcendentalism, if it is understood to mean that, since transcendental will is dateless and creates its own universe wherever it exerts itself, the character of this will is unalterable in that phase of it, producing just that vision and that world, which being out of time cannot be devoured by time. But perhaps even Fichte was not free from human weakness, and he may also have meant, or half-meant, that a thorough education, such as Prussia was called to create, could fix the will of mankind and turn it into an unalterable habit ; and that a philosopher could pledge the absolute always to posit the same set of objects. So understood the maxim would be contrary to transcendentalism and to the fervent conviction of Fichte himself, which demanded “new worlds for ever.” Even if he meant only that the principle of perpetual novelty at least was safe and could never be betrayed by the event, he would have contradicted the absolute freedom of “Life” to be what it willed, and his own occasional fears that, somewhere and some day, Life might grow weary, and might consent to be hypnotised and enslaved by the vision of matter which it had created.
But the frailty even of the greatest idealists is nothing against idealism, and the principle that existence is something always imputed, and never found, is not less cogent if idealists, for the sake of courtesy, sometimes say that when existence is imputed necessarily it is imputed truly; and it makes no difference for my object whether they call fiction truth because it is legal, or call legality illusion because it is false. In any case, I can invoke the authority of this whole school, in which consciousness has been studied and described with admirable sincerity, for the thesis I have at heart. They deny with one voice that anything given can exist on its own account, or can be anything but a theme chosen by the spirit, a theme which no substantial thing or event existing outside could ever force the spirit to conceive or to copy. Nothing existent can appear, and nothing specious can exist. An apparition is a thought, its whole life is but mine in thinking it; and whatever monition or significance I may attribute to its presence, it can never be anything but the specious thing it is. In the routine of animal life, an appearance may be normal or abnormal, and animal faith or practical intellect may interpret it in a way practically right or wrong; but in itself every appearance, just because it is an appearance, is an illusion.
Confirmation of this thesis may also be found in an entirely different quarter, in natural history. The sensibility of animals, as judged by their motions and behaviour, is due to their own structure. The surrounding facts and forces are like the sun shining and the rain falling on the just and the unjust; they condition the existence of the animal and reward any apt habits which he may acquire; but he survives mainly by insensibility, and by a sort of pervasive immunity to most of the vibrations that run through him. It is only in very special directions, to very special occasional stimulations, that he develops instinctive responses in special organs: and his intuitions, if he has them, express these reactions. If the stimulus is cut off, the material sources of it may continue to be what they were, but they will not be perceived. If the stimulus, or anything equivalent to it, reaches the brain from any source, as in dreams, the same intuition will appear, in the absence of the material object. The feelings of animals express their bodily habit; they do not express directly either the existence or the character of any external thing. The intent to react on these external things is independent of any presumptive data of intuition and antecedent to their appearance: it is an animal endeavour in pursuit or avoidance, or an animal expectation; but the signals by which intuition may mark the crises of this animal watch or animal struggle are the same signals as appear in a dream, when nothing is afoot. The immediate visionary datum is never the intended object, but always a pathological symptom, a term in discourse, a description proffered at that moment by that feeling for that object, different for each channel of sense, translating digestibility into taste, salubrity into freshness, distance into size, refraction into colour, attitude into outline, distribution into perspective, and immersing everything in a moral medium, where it becomes a good or an evil, as it cannot be save to animal sympathy.
All these transcripts, however original in character, remain symbols in function, because they arise in the act of focussing animal sensibility or animal endeavour upon some external influence. In a healthy life they become the familiar and unmistakable masks of nature, lending to everything in the environment its appropriate aspect in human discourse, its nickname in the human family. For this reason, when imagination works in a void (as it can do in dreams or under the influence of violent passion) it becomes illusion in the bad sense of this word; that is, it is still taken for a symbol, when it is the symbol of nothing. All these data, if by a suspension of practical reference they came to be regarded in themselves, would cease to be illusions cognitively, since no existence would be suggested by any of them; but a practical man might still call them illusions for that very reason, because although free from error they would be devoid of truth. In order to reach existences intent must transcend intuition, and take data for what they mean, not for what they are; it must credit them, as understanding credits words, accepting the passing vision as a warrant for something that once was, or that will be, or that lies in an entirely different medium, that of material being, or of discourse elsewhere. Intuition cannot reveal or discriminate any fact; it is pure fancy; and the more I sink into it, and the more absolute I make it, the more fanciful it becomes. If ever it ceases to mean anything at all, it becomes pure poetry if placid, and mere delirium if intense. So a pain, when it is not sorrow at some event or the sign of some injury or crisis in bodily life, becomes sheer horror, and a sort of wanton little hell, existing absolutely; because the rending of the organism has raised intuition to an extreme intensity without giving it direction upon anything to be found or done in the world, or contemplated in the fancy; and pain, when it reaches distraction, may be said to be that moral monster, intuition devouring itself, or wasted in agony upon nothing.
Thus scientific psychology confirms the criticism of knowledge and the experience of life which proclaim that the immediate objects of intuition are mere appearances and that nothing given exists as it is given.