Part 57 (1/2)

Inexperience

Kant says that all our knowledge is founded on experience. But each new small increment of knowledge is not so founded, and our whole knowledge is made up of the acc.u.mulation of these small new increments not one of which is founded upon experience. Our knowledge, then, is founded not on experience but on inexperience; for where there is no novelty, that is to say no inexperience, there is no increment in experience. Our knowledge is really founded upon something which we do not know, but it is converted into experience by memory.

It is like species--we do not know the cause of the variations whose acc.u.mulation results in species and any explanation which leaves this out of sight ignores the whole difficulty. We want to know the cause of the effect that inexperience produces on us.

Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit

We say that everything has a beginning. This is one side of the matter. There is another according to which everything is without a beginning--beginnings, and endings also, being, but as it were, steps cut in a slope of ice without which we could not climb it. They are for convenience and the hardness of the hearts of men who make an idol of cla.s.sification, but they do not exist apart from our sense of our own convenience.

It was a favourite saying with William Sefton Moorhouse [in New Zealand] that men cannot get rich by swopping knives. Nevertheless nature does seem to go upon this principle. Everybody does eat everybody up. Man eats birds, birds eat worms and worms eat man again. It is a vicious circle, yet, somehow or other, there is an increment. I begin to doubt the principle ex nihilo nihil fit.

We very much want a way of getting something out of nothing and back into it again. Whether or no we ever shall get such a way, we see the clearly perceptible arising out of and returning into the absolutely imperceptible and, so far as we are concerned, this is much the same thing. To a.s.sume an unknowable substratum as the source from which all things proceed or are evolved is equivalent to a.s.suming that they come up out of nothing; for that which does not exist for us is for us nothing; that which we do not know does not exist qua us, and therefore it does not exist. When I say ”we,” I mean mankind generally, for things may exist qua one man and not qua another. And when I say ”nothing” I postulate something of which we have no experience.

And yet we cannot say that a thing does not exist till it is known to exist. The planet Neptune existed though, qua us, it did not exist before Adams and Leverrier discovered it, and we cannot hold that its continued non-existence to my laundress and her husband makes it any the less an ent.i.ty. We cannot say that it did not exist at all till it was discovered, that it exists only partially and vaguely to most of us, that to many it still does not exist at all, that there are few to whom it even exists in any force or fullness and none who can realise more than the broad facts of its existence. Neptune has been disturbing the orbits of the planets nearest to him for more centuries than we can reckon, and whether or not he is known to have been doing so has nothing to do with the matter. If A is robbed, he is robbed, whether he knows it or not.

In one sense, then, we cannot say that the planet Neptune did not exist till he was discovered, but in another we can and ought to do so. De non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio; as long, therefore, as Neptune did not appear he did not exist qua us.

The only way out of it is through the contradiction in terms of maintaining that a thing exists and does not exist at one and the same time. So A may be both robbed, and not robbed.

We consider, therefore, that things have a.s.sumed their present shape by course of evolution from a something which, qua us, is a nothing, from a potential something but not an actual, from an actual nothing but a potential not-nothing, from a nothing which might become a something to us with any modification on our parts but which, till such modification has arisen, does not exist in relation to us, though very conceivably doing so in relation to other ent.i.ties. But this Protean nothing, capable of appearing as something, is not the absolute, eternal, unchangeable nothing that we mean when we say ex nihilo nihil fit.

The alternative is that something should not have come out of nothing, and this is saying that something has always existed. But the eternal increateness of matter seems as troublesome to conceive as its having been created out of nothing. I say ”seems,” for I am not sure how far it really is so. We never saw something come out of nothing, that is to say, we never saw a beginning of anything except as the beginning of a new phase of something pre-existent. We ought therefore to find the notion of eternal being familiar, it ought to be the only conception of matter which we are able to form: nevertheless, we are so carried away by being accustomed to see phases have their beginnings and endings that we forget that the matter, of which we see the phase begin and end, did not begin or end with the phase.

Eternal matter permeated by eternal mind, matter and mind being functions of one another, is the least uncomfortable way of looking at the universe; but as it is beyond our comprehension, and cannot therefore be comfortable, sensible persons will not look at the universe at all except in such details as may concern them.

Contradiction in Terms

We pay higher and higher in proportion to the service rendered till we get to the highest services, such as becoming a Member of Parliament, and this must not be paid at all. If a man would go yet higher and found a new and permanent system, or create some new idea or work of art which remains to give delight to ages--he must not only not be paid, but he will have to pay very heavily out of his own pocket into the bargain.

Again, we are to get all men to speak well of us if we can; yet we are to be cursed if all men speak well of us.

So when the universe has gathered itself into a single ball (which I don't for a moment believe it ever will, but I don't care) it will no sooner have done so, than the bubble will burst and it will go back to its gases again.

Contradiction in terms is so omnipresent that we treat it as we treat death, or free-will, or fate, or air, or G.o.d, or the Devil--taking these things so much as matters of course that, though they are visible enough if we choose to see them, we neglect them normally altogether, without for a moment intending to deny their existence.

This neglect is convenient as preventing repet.i.tions the monotony of which would defeat their own purpose, but people are tempted nevertheless to forget the underlying omnipresence in the superficial omniabsence. They forget that its opposite lurks in everything--that there are harmonics of G.o.d in the Devil and harmonics of the Devil in G.o.d.

Contradiction in terms is not only to be excused but there can be no proposition which does not more or less involve one.

It is the fact of there being contradictions in terms, which have to be smoothed away and fused into harmonious acquiescence with their surroundings, that makes life and consciousness possible at all.

Unless the unexpected were sprung upon us continually to enliven us we should pa.s.s life, as it were, in sleep. To a living being no ”It is” can be absolute; wherever there is an ”Is,” there, among its harmonics, lurks an ”Is not.” When there is absolute absence of ”Is not” the ”Is” goes too. And the ”Is not” does not go completely till the ”Is” is gone along with it. Every proposition has got a skeleton in its cupboard.

Extremes

i

Intuition and evidence seem to have something of the same relation that faith and reason, luck and cunning, freewill and necessity and demand and supply have. They grow up hand in hand and no man can say which comes first. It is the same with life and death, which lurk one within the other as do rest and unrest, change and persistence, heat and cold, poverty and riches, harmony and counterpoint, night and day, summer and winter.