Part 5 (1/2)
CHAPTER V--NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED
[Sidenote: Man's feeble grasp of nature.]
When the mind has learned to distinguish external objects and to attribute to them a constant size, shape, and potency, in spite of the variety and intermittence ruling in direct experience, there yet remains a great work to do before attaining a clear, even if superficial, view of the world. An animal's customary habitat may have constant features and their relations in s.p.a.ce may be learned by continuous exploration; but probably many other landscapes are also within the range of memory and fancy that stand in no visible relation to the place in which we find ourselves at a given moment. It is true that, at this day, we take it for granted that all real places, as we call them, lie in one s.p.a.ce, in which they hold definite geometric relations to one another; and if we have glimpses of any region for which no room can be found in the single map of the universe which astronomy has drawn, we unhesitatingly relegate that region to the land of dreams. Since the Elysian Fields and the Coast of Bohemia have no a.s.signable lat.i.tude and longitude, we call these places imaginary, even if in some dream we remember to have visited them and dwelt there with no less sense of reality than in this single and geometrical world of commerce. It belongs to sanity and common-sense, as men now possess them, to admit no countries unknown to geography and filling no part of the conventional s.p.a.ce in three dimensions. All our waking experience is understood to go on in some part of this s.p.a.ce, and no court of law would admit evidence relating to events in some other sphere.
This principle, axiomatic as it has become, is in no way primitive, since primitive experience is sporadic and introduces us to detached scenes separated by lapses in our senses and attention. These scenes do not hang together in any local contiguity. To construct a chart of the world is a difficult feat of synthetic imagination, not to be performed without speculative boldness and a heroic insensibility to the claims of fancy. Even now most people live without topographical ideas and have no clear conception of the spatial relations that keep together the world in which they move. They feel their daily way about like animals, following a habitual scent, without dominating the range of their instinctive wanderings. Reality is rather a story to them than a system of objects and forces, nor would they think themselves mad if at any time their experience should wander into a fourth dimension. Vague dramatic and moral laws, when they find any casual application, seem to such dreaming minds more notable truths, deeper revelations of efficacious reality, than the mechanical necessities of the case, which they scarcely conceive of; and in this primordial prejudice they are confirmed by superst.i.tious affinities often surviving in their religion and philosophy. In the midst of cities and affairs they are like landsmen at sea, incapable of an intellectual conception of their position: nor have they any complete confidence in their principles of navigation. They know the logarithms by rote merely, and if they reflect are reduced to a stupid wonder and only half believe they are in a known universe or will ever reach an earthly port. It would not require superhuman eloquence in some prophetic pa.s.senger to persuade them to throw compa.s.s and quadrant overboard and steer enthusiastically for El Dorado. The theory of navigation is essentially as speculative as that of salvation, only it has survived more experiences of the judgment and repeatedly brought those who trust in it to their promised land.
[Sidenote: Its unity ideal and discoverable only by steady thought.]
The theory that all real objects and places lie together in one even and h.o.m.ogeneous s.p.a.ce, conceived as similar in its const.i.tution to the parts of extension of which we have immediate intuition, is a theory of the greatest practical importance and validity. By its light we carry on all our affairs, and the success of our action while we rely upon it is the best proof of its truth. The imaginative parsimony and discipline which such a theory involves are balanced by the immense extension and cert.i.tude it gives to knowledge. It is at once an act of allegiance to nature and a Magna Charta which mind imposes on the tyrannous world, which in turn pledges itself before the a.s.sembled faculties of man not to exceed its const.i.tutional privilege and to harbour no magic monsters in unattainable lairs from which they might issue to disturb human labours. Yet that spontaneous intelligence which first enabled men to make this genial discovery and take so fundamental a step toward taming experience should not be laid by after this first victory; it is a weapon needed in many subsequent conflicts. To conceive that all nature makes one system is only a beginning: the articulation of natural life has still to be discovered in detail and, what is more, a similar articulation has to be given to the psychic world which now, by the very act that const.i.tutes Nature and makes her consistent, appears at her side or rather in her bosom.
That the unification of nature is eventual and theoretical is a point useful to remember: else the relation of the natural world to poetry, metaphysics, and religion will never become intelligible. Lalande, or whoever it was, who searched the heavens with his telescope and could find no G.o.d, would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope. Yet G.o.d existed in man's apprehension long before mathematics or even, perhaps, before the vault of heaven; for the objectification of the whole mind, with its pa.s.sions and motives, naturally precedes that abstraction by which the idea of a material world is drawn from the chaos of experience, an abstraction which culminates in such atomic and astronomical theories as science is now familiar with. The sense for life in things, be they small or great, is not derived from the abstract idea of their bodies but is an ancient concomitant to that idea, inseparable from it until it became abstract.
Truth and materiality, mechanism and ideal interests, are collateral projections from one rolling experience, which shows up one aspect or the other as it develops various functions and dominates itself to various ends. When one ore is abstracted and purified, the residuum subsists in that primeval quarry in which it originally lay. The failure to find G.o.d among the stars, or even the attempt to find him there, does not indicate that human experience affords no avenue to the idea of G.o.d--for history proves the contrary--but indicates rather the atrophy in this particular man of the imaginative faculty by which his race had attained to that idea. Such an atrophy might indeed become general, and G.o.d would in that case disappear from human experience as music would disappear if universal deafness attacked the race. Such an event is made conceivable by the loss of allied imaginative habits, which is observable in historic times. Yet possible variations in human faculty do not involve the illegitimacy of such faculties as actually subsist; and the abstract world known to science, unless it dries up the ancient fountains of ideation by its habitual presence in thought, does not remove those parallel dramatisations or abstractions which experience may have suggested to men.
What enables men to perceive the unity of nature is the unification of their own wills. A man half-asleep, without fixed purposes, without intellectual keenness or joy in recognition, might graze about like an animal, forgetting each satisfaction in the next and banis.h.i.+ng from his frivolous mind the memory of every sorrow; what had just failed to kill him would leave him as thoughtless and unconcerned as if it had never crossed his path. Such irrational elasticity and innocent improvidence would never put two and two together. Every morning there would be a new world with the same fool to live in it. But let some sobering pa.s.sion, some serious interest, lend perspective to the mind, and a point of reference will immediately be given for protracted observation; then the laws of nature will begin to dawn upon thought. Every experiment will become a lesson, every event will be remembered as favourable or unfavourable to the master-pa.s.sion. At first, indeed, this keen observation will probably be animistic and the laws discovered will be chiefly habits, human or divine, special favours or envious punishments and warnings. But the same constancy of aim which discovers the dramatic conflicts composing society, and tries to read nature in terms of pa.s.sion, will, if it be long sustained, discover behind this glorious chaos a deeper mechanical order. Men's thoughts, like the weather, are not so arbitrary as they seem and the true master in observation, the man guided by a steadfast and superior purpose, will see them revolving about their centres in obedience to quite calculable instincts, and the principle of all their flutterings will not be hidden from his eyes.
Belief in indeterminism is a sign of indetermination. No commanding or steady intellect flirts with so miserable a possibility, which in so far as it actually prevailed would make virtue impotent and experience, in its pregnant sense, impossible.
[Sidenote: Mind the erratic residue of existence.]
We have said that those objects which cannot be incorporated into the one s.p.a.ce which the understanding envisages are relegated to another sphere called imagination. We reach here a most important corollary. As material objects, making a single system which fills s.p.a.ce and evolves in time, are conceived by abstraction from the flux of sensuous experience, so, _pari pa.s.su_, the rest of experience, with all its other outgrowths and concretions, falls out with the physical world and forms the sphere of mind, the sphere of memory, fancy, and the pa.s.sions. We have in this discrimination the _genesis of mind_, not of course in the transcendental sense in which the word mind is extended to mean the sum total and mere fact of existence--for mind, so taken, can have no origin and indeed no specific meaning--but the genesis of mind as a determinate form of being, a distinguishable part of the universe known to experience and discourse, the mind that unravels itself in meditation, inhabits animal bodies, and is studied in psychology.
Mind, in this proper sense of the word, is the residue of existence, the leavings, so to speak, and parings of experience when the material world has been cut out of the whole cloth. Reflection underlines in the chaotic continuum of sense and longing those aspects that have practical significance; it selects the efficacious ingredients in the world. The trustworthy object which is thus retained in thought, the complex of connected events, is nature, and though so intelligible an object is not soon nor vulgarly recognised, because human reflection is perturbed and halting, yet every forward step in scientific and practical knowledge is a step toward its clearer definition. At first much parasitic matter clings to that dynamic skeleton. Nature is drawn like a sponge heavy and dripping from the waters of sentience. It is soaked with inefficacious pa.s.sions and overlaid with idle accretions. Nature, in a word, is at first conceived mythically, dramatically, and retains much of the unintelligible, sporadic habit of animal experience itself. But as attention awakes and discrimination, practically inspired, grows firm and stable, irrelevant qualities are stripped off, and the mechanical process, the efficacious infallible order, is clearly disclosed beneath.
Meantime the incidental effects, the ”secondary qualities,” are relegated to a personal inconsequential region; they const.i.tute the realm of appearance, the realm of mind.
[Sidenote: Ghostly character of mind.]
Mind is therefore sometimes identified with the unreal. We oppose, in an ant.i.thesis natural to thought and language, the imaginary to the true, fancy to fact, idea to thing. But this thing, fact, or external reality is, as we have seen, a completion and hypostasis of certain portions of experience, packed into such shapes as prove cogent in thought and practice. The stuff of external reality, the matter out of which its idea is made, is therefore continuous with the stuff and matter of our own minds. Their common substance is the immediate flux. This living worm has propagated by fission, and the two halves into which it has divided its life are mind and nature. Mind has kept and clarified the crude appearance, the dream, the purpose that seethed in the ma.s.s; nature has appropriated the order, the constant conditions, the causal substructure, disclosed in reflection, by which the immediate flux is explained and controlled. The chemistry of thought has precipitated these contrasted terms, each maintaining a recognisable ident.i.ty and having the function of a point of reference for memory and will. Some of these terms or objects of thought we call things and marshal in all their ideal stability--for there is constancy in their motions and transformations--to make the intelligible external world of practice and science. Whatever stuff has not been absorbed in this construction, whatever facts of sensation, ideation, or will, do not coalesce with the newest conception of reality, we then call the mind.
Raw experience, then, lies at the basis of the idea of nature and approves its reality; while an equal reality belongs to the residue of experience, not taken up, as yet, into that idea. But this residual sensuous reality often seems comparatively unreal because what it presents is entirely without practical force apart from its mechanical a.s.sociates. This inconsequential character of what remains over follows of itself from the concretion of whatever is constant and efficacious into the external world. If this fact is ever called in question, it is only because the external world is vaguely conceived, and loose wills and ideas are thought to govern it by magic. Yet in many ways falling short of absolute precision people recognise that thought is not dynamic or, as they call it, not real. The idea of the physical world is the first flower or thick cream of practical thinking. Being skimmed off first and proving so nutritious, it leaves the liquid below somewhat thin and unsavoury. Especially does this result appear when science is still unpruned and mythical, so that what pa.s.ses into the idea of material nature is much more than the truly causal network of forces, and includes many spiritual and moral functions.
The material world, as conceived in the first instance, had not that clear abstractness, nor the spiritual world that wealth and interest, which they have acquired for modern minds. The complex reactions of man's soul had been objectified together with those visual and tactile sensations which, reduced to a mathematical baldness, now furnish terms to natural science. Mind then dwelt in the world, not only in the warmth and beauty with which it literally clothed material objects, as it still does in poetic perception, but in a literal animistic way; for human pa.s.sion and reflection were attributed to every object and made a fairy-land of the world. Poetry and religion discerned life in those very places in which sense and understanding perceived body; and when so much of the burden of experience took wing into s.p.a.ce, and the soul herself floated almost visibly among the forms of nature, it is no marvel that the poor remnant, a ma.s.s of merely personal troubles, an uninteresting distortion of things in individual minds, should have seemed a sad and unsubstantial accident. The inner world was all the more ghostly because the outer world was so much alive.
[Sidenote: Hypostasis and criticism both need control.]
This movement of thought, which clothed external objects in all the wealth of undeciphered dreams, has long lost its momentum and yielded to a contrary tendency. Just as the hypostasis of some terms in experience is sanctioned by reason, when the objects so fixed and externalised can serve as causes and explanations for the order of events, so the criticism which tends to retract that hypostasis is sanctioned by reason when the hypostasis has exceeded its function and the external object conceived is loaded with useless ornament. The transcendental and functional secret of such hypostases, however, is seldom appreciated by the headlong mind; so that the ebb no less than the flow of objectification goes on blindly and impulsively, and is carried to absurd extremes. An age of mythology yields to an age of subjectivity; reason being equally neglected and exceeded in both. The reaction against imagination has left the external world, as represented in many minds, stark and bare. All the interesting and vital qualities which matter had once been endowed with have been attributed instead to an irresponsible sensibility in man. And as habits of ideation change slowly and yield only piecemeal to criticism or to fresh intuitions, such a revolution has not been carried out consistently, but instead of a thorough renaming of things and a new organisation of thought it has produced chiefly distress and confusion. Some phases of this confusion may perhaps repay a moment's attention; they may enable us, when seen in their logical sequence, to understand somewhat better the hypostasising intellect that is trying to a.s.sert itself and come to the light through all these gropings.
[Sidenote: Comparative constancy in objects and in ideas]
What helps in the first place to disclose a permanent object is a permanent sensation. There is a vast and clear difference between a floating and a fixed feeling; the latter, in normal circ.u.mstances, is present only when continuous stimulation renews it at every moment.
Attention may wander, but the objects in the environment do not cease to radiate their influences on the body, which is thereby not allowed to lose the modification which those influences provoke. The consequent perception is therefore always at hand and in its repet.i.tions substantially identical. Perceptions not renewed in this way by continuous stimulation come and go with cerebral currents; they are rare visitors, instead of being, like external objects, members of the household. Intelligence is most at home in the ultimate, which is the object of intent. Those realities which it can trust and continually recover are its familiar and beloved companions. The mists that may originally have divided it from them, and which psychologists call the mind, are gladly forgotten so soon as intelligence avails to pierce them, and as friendly communication can be established with the real world. Moreover, perceptions not sustained by a constant external stimulus are apt to be greatly changed when they reappear, and to be changed unaccountably, whereas external things show some method and proportion in their variations. Even when not much changed in themselves, mere ideas fall into a new setting, whereas things, unless something else has intervened to move them, reappear in their old places. Finally things are acted upon by other men, but thoughts are hidden from them by divine miracle.
Existence reveals reality when the flux discloses something permanent that dominates it. What is thus dominated, though it is the primary existence itself, is thereby degraded to appearance. Perceptions caused by external objects are, as we have just seen, long sustained in comparison with thoughts and fancies; but the objects are themselves in flux and a man's relation to them may be even more variable; so that very often a memory or a sentiment will recur, almost unchanged in character, long after the perception that first aroused it has become impossible. The brain, though mobile, is subject to habit; its formations, while they lapse instantly, return again and again. These ideal objects may accordingly be in a way more real and enduring than things external. Hence no primitive mind puts all reality, or what is most real in reality, in an abstract material universe. It finds, rather, ideal points of reference by which material mutation itself seems to be controlled. An ideal world is recognised from the beginning and placed, not in the immediate foreground, nearer than material things, but much farther off. It has greater substantiality and independence than material objects are credited with. It is divine.
When agriculture, commerce, or manual crafts have given men some knowledge of nature, the world thus recognised and dominated is far from seeming ultimate. It is thought to lie between two others, both now often called mental, but in their original quality altogether disparate: the world of spiritual forces and that of sensuous appearance. The notions of permanence and independence by which material objects are conceived apply also, of course, to everything spiritual; and while the dominion exercised by spirits may be somewhat precarious, they are as remote as possible from immediacy and sensation. They come and go; they govern nature or, if they neglect to do so, it is from aversion or high indifference; they visit man with obsessions and diseases; they hasten to extricate him from difficulties; and they dwell in him, const.i.tuting his powers of conscience and invention. Sense, on the other hand, is a mere effect, either of body or spirit or of both in conjunction. It gives a vitiated personal view of these realities. Its pleasures are dangerous and unintelligent, and it perishes as it goes.