At the same time the word evolution has a certain pomp and glamour about it which fits ill with so prosaic an interpretation. In the unfolding of a bud we are wont to see, as it were, the fulfilment of a predetermined and glorious destiny; for the seed was an epitome or condensation of a full-blown plant and held within it, in some sort of potential guise, the very form which now peeps out in the young flower. Evolution suggests a prior involution or contraction and the subsequent manifestation of an innate ideal. Evolution should move toward a fixed consummation the approaches to which we might observe and measure. Yet evolution, in this prophetic sense of the word, would be the exact denial of what Darwin, for instance, was trying to prove. It would be a return to Aristotelian notions of heredity and potential being; for it was the essence of Aristotle’s physics—of which his theology was an integral part and a logical capping—that the forms which beings approached pre-existed in other beings from which they had been inherited, and that the intermediate stages during which the butterfly shrank to a grub could not be understood unless we referred them to their origin and their destiny. The physical essence and potency of seeds lay in their ideal relations, not in any actual organisation they might possess in the day of their eclipse and slumber. An egg evolved into a chicken not by mechanical necessity—for an egg had a comparatively simple structure—but by virtue of an ideal harmony in things; since it was natural and fitting that what had come from a hen should lead on to a hen again. The ideal nature possessed by the parent, hovering over the passive seed, magically induced it to grow into the parent’s semblance; and growth was the gradual approach to the perfection which this ancestral essence prescribed. This was why Aristotle’s God, though in character an unmistakable ideal, had to be at the same time an actual existence; since the world would not have known which way to move or what was its inner ideal, unless this ideal, already embodied somewhere else, drew it on and infused movement and direction into the world’s structureless substance.
The underlying Platonism in this magical physics is obvious, since the natures that Aristotle made to rule the world were eternal natures. An individual might fail to be a perfect man or a perfect monkey, but the specific human or simian ideal, by which he had been formed in so far as he was formed at all, was not affected by this accidental resistance in the matter at hand, as an adamantine seal, even if at times the wax by defect or impurity failed to receive a perfect impression, would remain unchanged and ready to be stamped perpetually on new material.
The contrast is obvious between this Platonic physics and a naturalism like that of Darwin. The point of evolution, as selection produces it, is that new species may arise. The very title of Darwin’s book “The Origin of Species” is a denial of Aristotelianism and, in the pregnant sense, of evolution. It suggests that the type approached by each generation may differ from that approached by the previous one; that not merely the degree of perfection, but the direction of growth, may vary. The individual is not merely unfolded from an inner potentiality derived from a like ancestor and carrying with it a fixed eternal ideal, but on the contrary the very ground plan of organisation may gradually change and a new form and a new ideal may appear. Spontaneous variations—of course mechanically caused[C]—may occur and may modify the hereditary form of animals. These variations, superposed upon one another, may in time constitute a nature wholly unlike its first original. This accidental, cumulative evolution accordingly justifies a declaration of moral liberty. I am not obliged to aspire to the nature my father aspired to, for the ground of my being is partly new. In me nature is making a novel experiment. I am the adoring creator of a new spiritual good. My duties have shifted with my shifting faculties, and the ideal which I propose to myself, and alone can honestly propose, is unprecedented, the expression of a moving existence and without authority beyond the range of existences congruous with mine.
All that is scientific or Darwinian in the theory of evolution is accordingly an application of mechanism, a proof that mechanism lies at the basis of life and morals. The Aristotelian notion of development, however, was too deeply rooted in tradition for it to disappear at a breath. Evolution as conceived by Hegel, for instance, or even by Spencer, retained Aristotelian elements, though these were disguised and hidden under a cloud of new words. Both identify evolution with progress, with betterment; a notion which would naturally be prominent in any one with enlightened sympathies living in the nineteenth century, when a new social and intellectual order was forcing itself on a world that happened largely to welcome the change, but a notion that has nothing to do with natural science. The fittest to live need not be those with the most harmonious inner life nor the best possibilities. The fitness might be due to numbers, as in a political election, or to tough fibre, as in a tropical climate. Of course a form of being that circumstances make impossible or hopelessly laborious had better dive under and cease for the moment to be; but the circumstances that render it inopportune do not render it essentially inferior. Circumstances have no power of that kind; and perhaps the worst incident in the popular acceptance of evolution has been a certain brutality thereby introduced into moral judgment, an abdication of human ideals, a mocking indifference to justice, under cover of respect for what is bound to be, and for the rough economy of the world. Disloyalty to the good in the guise of philosophy had appeared also among the ancients, when their political ethics had lost its authority, just as it appeared among us when the prestige of religion had declined. The Epicureans sometimes said that one should pursue pleasure because all the animals did so, and the Stoics that one should fill one’s appointed place in nature, because such was the practice of clouds and rivers.
Hegel possessed a keen scent for instability in men’s attitudes and opinions; he had no need of Darwin’s facts to convince him that in moral life, at least, there were no permanent species and that every posture of thought was an untenable half-way station between two others. His early contact with Protestant theology may have predisposed him to that opinion. At any rate he had no sympathy with that Platonism that allowed everything to have its eternal ideal, with which it might ultimately be identified. Such ideals would be finite, they would arrest the flux, and they would try to break loose from their enveloping conditions. Hegel was no moralist in the Socratic sense, but a naturalist seeking formulas for the growth of moral experience. Instead of questioning the heart, he somewhat satirically described its history. At the same time he was heir to that mythology which had deified the genetic or physical principle in things, and though the traditional myths suffered cruel operations at his hands, and often died of explanation, the mythical principle itself remained untouched and was the very breath of his nostrils. He never doubted that the formula he might find for the growth of experience would be also the ultimate good. What other purpose could the world have than to express the formula according to which it was being generated?
In this honest conviction we see the root, perhaps, of that distaste for correct physics that prevails among many who call themselves idealists. If physics were for some reason to be adored, it would be disconcerting to find in physics nothing but atoms and a void. It is hard to understand, however, why a fanciful formula expressing the evolution of this perturbed universe, and painting it no better than it is, should be more worshipful than an exact formula meant to perform the same office. A myth that enlarged the world and promised a complete transformation of its character might have its charms; but the improvement is not obvious that accrues by making the drift of things, just as it drifts, its own standard. Yet for Hegel it mattered nothing how unstable all ideals might be, since the only use of them was to express a principle of transition, and this principle was being realised, eternally and unawares, by the self-devouring and self-transcending purposes rolling in the flux.
This philosophy might not be much relished if it were more frankly expressed; yet something of the sort floats vaguely before most minds when they think of evolution. The types of being change, they say: in this sense the Aristotelian notion of a predetermined form unfolding itself in each species has yielded to a more correct and more dynamic physics. But the changes, so people imagine, express a predetermined ideal, no longer, of course, the ideal of these specific things, but one overarching the cosmic movement. The situation might be described by saying that this is Aristotle’s view adapted to a world in which there is only one species or only one individual. The earlier phases of life are an imperfect expression of the same nature which the later phases express more fully. Hence the triumphant march of evolution and the assumption that whatever is later is necessarily better than what went before. If a child were simply the partial expression of a man, his single desire would be to grow up, and when he was grown up he would embody all he had been striving for and would be happy for ever after. So if man were nothing but a halting reproduction of divinity and destined to become God, his whole destiny would be fulfilled by apotheosis. If this apotheosis, moreover, were an actual future event, something every man and animal was some day to experience, evolution might really have a final goal, and might lead to a new and presumably better sort of existence—existence in the eternal. Somewhat in this fashion evolution is understood by the party that wish to combine it with a refreshed patristic theology.
There is an esoteric way, however, of taking these matters which is more in sympathy both with natural evolution and with transcendental philosophy. If we assert that evolution is infinite, no substantive goal can be set to it. The goal will be the process itself, if we could only open our eyes upon its beauty and necessity. The apotheosis will be retroactive, nay, it has already taken place. The insight involved is mystical, yet in a way more just to the facts than any promise of ulterior blisses. For it is not really true that a child has no other ideal than to become a man. Childhood has many an ideal of its own, many a beauty and joy irrelevant to manhood, and such that manhood is incapable of retaining or containing them. If the ultimate good is really to contain and retain all the others, it can hardly be anything but their totality—the infinite history of experience viewed under the form of eternity. At that remove, however, the least in the kingdom of Heaven is even as the greatest, and the idea of evolution, as of time, is “taken up into a higher unity.” There could be no real pre-eminence in one man’s works over those of another; and if faith, or insight into the equal service done by all, still seemed a substantial privilege reserved for the elect, this privilege, too, must be an illusion, since those who do not know how useful and necessary they are must be as useful and necessary as those who do. An absolute preference for knowledge or self-consciousness would be an unmistakably human and finite ideal—something to be outgrown.
What practically survives in these systems, when their mysticism and naturalism have had time to settle, is a clear enough standard. It is a standard of inclusion and quantity. Since all is needful, and the justifying whole is infinite, there would seem to be a greater dignity in the larger part. As the best copy of a picture, other things being equal, would be one that represented it all, so the best expression of the world, next to the world itself, would be the largest portion of it any one could absorb. Progress would then mean annexation. Growth would not come by expressing better an innate soul which involved a particular ideal, but by assimilating more and more external things till the original soul, by their influence, was wholly recast and unrecognisable. This moral agility would be true merit; we should always be “striving onward.” Life would be a sort of demonic vortex, boiling at the centre and omnivorous at the circumference, till it finally realised the supreme vocation of vortices, to have “their centre everywhere and their circumference nowhere.” This somewhat troubled situation might seem sublime to us, transformed as we too should be; and so we might reach the most remarkable and doubtless the “highest” form of optimism—optimism in hell.
Confusing as these cross-currents and revulsions may prove in the field where mechanism is more or less at home, in the field of material operations, they are nothing to the primeval chaos that still broods over the other hemisphere, over the mental phase of existence. The difficulty is not merely that no mechanism is discovered or acknowledged here, but that the phenomena themselves are ambiguous, and no one seems to know when he speaks of mind whether he means something formal and ideal, like Platonic essences and mathematical truths, or reflection and intelligence, or sensation possessing external causes and objects, or finally that ultimate immediacy or brute actuality which is characteristic of any existence. Other even vaguer notions are doubtless often designated by the word psychical; but these may suffice for us to recognise the initial dilemmas in the subject and the futility of trying to build a science of mind, or defining the relation of mind to matter, when it is not settled whether mind means the form of matter, as with the Platonists, or the effect of it, as with the materialists, or the seat and false knowledge of it, as with the transcendentalists, or perhaps after all, as with the pan-psychists, mind means exactly matter itself.[D]
To see how equivocal everything is in this region, and possibly to catch some glimpse of whatever science or sciences might some day define it, we may revert for a moment to the origin of human notions concerning the mind. If either everything or nothing that men came upon in their primitive day-dream had been continuous in its own category and traceable through the labyrinth of the world, no mind and no self-consciousness need ever have appeared at all. The world might have been as magical as it pleased; it would have remained single, one budding sequence of forms with no transmissible substance beneath them. These forms might have had properties we now call physical and at the same time qualities we now call mental or emotional; there is nothing originally incongruous in such a mixture, chaotic and perverse as it may seem from the vantage-ground of subsequent distinctions. Existence might as easily have had any other form whatsoever as the one we discover it to have in fact. And primitive men, not having read Descartes, and not having even distinguished their waking from their dreaming life nor their passions from their environment, might well stand in the presence of facts that seem to us full of inward incongruity and contradiction; indeed, it is only because original data were of that chaotic sort that we call ourselves intelligent for having disentangled them and assigned them to distinct sequences and alternative spheres.
The ambiguities and hesitations of theory, down to our own day, are not all artificial or introduced gratuitously by sophists. Even where prejudice obstructs progress, that prejudice itself has some ancient and ingenuous source. Our perplexities are traces of a primitive total confusion; our doubts are remnants of a quite gaping ignorance. It was impossible to say whether the phantasms that first crossed this earthly scene were merely instinct with passion or were veritable passions stalking through space. Material and mental elements, connections natural and dialectical, existed mingled in that chaos. Light was as yet inseparable from inward vitality and pain drew a visible cloud across the sky. Civilised life is that early dream partly clarified; science is that dense mythology partly challenged and straightened out.
The flux, however, was meantime full of method, if only discrimination and enlarged experience could have managed to divine it. Its inconstancy, for one thing, was not so entire that no objects could be fixed within it, or marshalled in groups, like the birds that flock together. Animals could be readily distinguished from the things about them, their rate of mobility being so much quicker; and one animal in particular would at once be singled out, a more constant follower than any dog, and one whose energies were not merely felt but often spontaneously exerted—a phenomenon which appeared in no other part of the world. This singular animal every one called himself. One object was thus discovered to be the vehicle for perceiving and affecting all the others, a movable seat or tower from which the world might be surveyed.
The external influences to which this body, with its discoursing mind, seemed to be subject were by no means all visible and material. Just as one’s own body was moved by passions and thoughts which no one else could see—and this secrecy was a subject for much wonder and self-congratulation—so evidently other things had a spirit within or above them to endow them with wit and power. It was not so much to contain sensation that this spirit was needed (for the body could very well feel) as to contrive plans of action and discharge sudden force into the world on momentous occasions. How deep-drawn, how far-reaching, this spirit might be was not easily determined; but it seemed to have unaccountable ways and to come and go from distant habitations. Things past, for instance, were still open to its inspection; the mind was not credited with constructing a fresh image of the past which might more or less resemble that past; a ray of supernatural light, rather, sometimes could pierce to the past itself and revisit its unchangeable depths. The future, though more rarely, was open to spirit in exactly the same fashion; destiny could on occasion be observed. Things distant and preternatural were similarly seen in dreams. There could be no doubt that all those objects existed; the only question was where they might lie and in what manner they might operate. A vision was a visitation and a dream was a journey. The spirit was a great traveller, and just as it could dart in every direction over both space and time, so it could come thence into a man’s presence or even into his body, to take possession of it. Sense and fancy, in a word, had not been distinguished. As to be aware of vision is a great sign of imagination, so to be aware of imagination is a great sign of understanding.
The spirit had other prerogatives, of a more rational sort. The truth, the right were also spirits; for though often invisible and denied by men, they could emerge at times from their invisible lairs to deal some quick blow and vindicate their divinity. The intermittance proper to phenomena is universal and extreme; only the familiar conception of nature, in which the flux becomes continuous, now blinds us in part to that fact. But before the days of scientific thinking only those things which were found unchanged and which seemed to lie passive were conceived to have had in the interval a material existence. More stirring apparitions, instead of being referred to their material constituents and continuous basis in nature, were referred to spirit. We still say, for instance, that war comes on. That phrase would once have been understood literally. War, being something intermittent, must exist somehow unseen in the interval, else it would not return; that rage, so people would have fancied, is therefore a spirit, it is a god. Mars and Ares long survived the phase of thought to which they owed their divinity; and believers had to rely on habit and the witness of antiquity to support their irrational faith. They little thought how absolutely simple and inevitable had been the grammar by which those figures, since grown rhetorical, had been first imposed upon the world.
Another complication soon came to increase this confusion. When material objects were discovered and it became clear that they had comparatively fixed natures, it also became clear that with the motions of one’s body all other things seemed to vary in ways which did not amount to a permanent or real metamorphosis in them; for these things might be found again unchanged. Objects, for instance, seemed to grow smaller when we receded from them, though really, as we discovered by approaching and measuring them anew, they had remained unchanged. These private aspects or views of things were accordingly distinguished from the things themselves, which were lodged in an intelligible sphere, raised above anybody’s sensibility and existing independently. The variable aspects were due to the body; they accompanied its variations and depended on its presence and organs. They were conceived vaguely to exist in one’s head or, if they were emotional, in one’s heart; but anatomy would have had some difficulty in finding them there. They constituted what is properly called the mind—the region of sentience, emotion, and soliloquy.
The mind was the region where those aspects which real things present to the body might live and congregate. So understood, it was avowedly and from the beginning a realm of mere appearance and depended entirely on the body. It should be observed, however, that the limbo of divine and ideal things, which is sometimes also called the mind, is very far from depending obviously on the body and is said to do so only by a late school of psychological sceptics. To primitive apprehension spirit, with its ideal prerogatives, was something magical and oracular. Its prophetic intuitions were far from being more trivial than material appearances. On the contrary those intuitions were momentous and inspiring. Their scope was indefinite and their value incalculable in every sense of the word. The disembodied spirit might well be immortal, since absent and dead things were familiar to it. It was by nature present wherever truth and reality might be found. It was prophetic; the dreams it fell into were full of auguries and secret affinities with things to come. Myth and legend, hatched in its womb, were felt to be divinely inspired, and genius seemed to be the Muses’ voice heard in a profound abstraction, when vulgar perception yielded to some kind of clairvoyance having a higher authority than sense. Such a spirit might naturally be expected to pass into another world, since it already dwelt there at intervals, and brought thence its mysterious reports. Its incursions into the physical sphere alone seemed miraculous and sent a thrill of awe through the unaccustomed flesh.
The ideal element in the world was accordingly regarded at first as something sacred and terrifying. It was no vulgar presence or private product, and though its destiny might be to pass half the time, like Persephone, under ground, it could not really be degraded. The human mind, on the other hand, the region of sentience and illusion, was a familiar affair enough. This familiarity, indeed, for a long time bred contempt and philosophers did not think the personal equation of individuals, or the refraction of things in sense, a very important or edifying subject for study. In time, however, sentience had its revenge. As each man’s whole experience is bound to his body no less than is the most trivial optical illusion, the sphere of sense is the transcendental ground or ratio cognoscendi of every other sphere. It suffices, therefore, to make philosophy retrospective and to relax the practical and dogmatic stress under which the intellect operates, for all the discoveries made through experience to collapse into the experience in which they were made. A complete collapse of objects is indeed inconvenient, because it would leave no starting-point for reasoning and no faith in the significance of reason itself; but partial collapses, now in the region of physics, now in that of logic and morals, are very easy and exciting feats for criticism to perform.
Passions when abstracted from their bodily causes and values when removed from their objects will naturally fall into the body’s mind, and be allied with appearances. Shrewd people will bethink themselves to attribute almost all the body’s acts to some preparatory intention or motive in its mind, and thus attain what they think knowledge of human nature. They will encourage themselves to live among dramatic fictions, as when absorbed in a novel; and having made themselves at home in this upper story of their universe, they will find it amusing to deny that it has a ground floor. The chance of conceiving, by these partial reversals of science, a world composed entirely without troublesome machinery is too tempting not to be taken up, whatever the ulterior risks; and accordingly, when once psychological criticism is put in play, the sphere of sense will be enlarged at the expense of the two rational worlds, the material and the ideal.
Consciousness, thus qualified by all the sensible qualities of things, will exercise an irresistible attraction over the supernatural and ideal realm, so that all the gods, all truths, and all ideals, as they have no place among the sufficing causes of experience, will be identified with decaying sensations. And presently those supposed causes themselves will be retraced and drawn back into the immediate vortex, until the sceptic has packed away nature, with all space and time, into the sphere of sensuous illusion, the distinguishing characteristic of which was that it changed with the changes in the human body. The personal idealists will declare that all body is a part of some body’s mind. Thus, by a curious reversion, the progress of reflection has led to hopeless contradictions. Sense, which was discovered by observing the refraction and intermittence to which appearances were subject, in seeming to be quite different from what things were, now tries to subsist when the things it was essentially contrasted with have been abolished. The intellect becomes a Penelope, whose secret pleasure lies in undoing its ostensible work; and science, becoming pensive, loves to relapse into the dumb actuality and nerveless reverie from which it had once extricated a world.
The occasion for this sophistication is worth noting; for if we follow the thread which we have trailed behind us in entering the labyrinth we shall be able at any moment to get out; especially as the omnivorous monster lurking in its depths is altogether harmless. A moral and truly transcendental critique of science, as of common sense, is never out of place, since all such a critique does is to assign to each conception or discovery its place and importance in the Life of Reason. So administered, the critical cathartic will not prove a poison and will not inhibit the cognitive function it was meant to purge. Every belief will subsist that finds an empirical and logical warrant; while that a belief is a belief and not a sensation will not seem a ground for not entertaining it, nor for subordinating it to some gratuitous assurance. But a psychological criticism, if it is not critical of psychology itself, and thinks to substitute a science of absolute sentience for physics and dialectic, would rest on sophistry and end wholly in bewilderment. The subject-matter of an absolute psychology would vanish in its hands, since there is no sentience which is not at once the effect of something physical and the appearance of something ideal. A calculus of feelings, uninterpreted and referred to nothing ulterior, would furnish no alternative system to substitute for the positive sciences it was seeking to dislodge. In fact, those who call ordinary objects unreal do not, on that account, find anything else to think about. Their exorcism does not lay the ghost, and they are limited to addressing it in uncivil language. It was not idly that reason in the beginning excogitated a natural and an ideal world, a labour it might well have avoided if appearance as it stands made a thinkable or a practical universe.
[B] The term “matter” (which ought before long to reappear in philosophy) has two meanings. In popular science and theology it commonly means a group of things in space, like the atoms of Democritus or the human body and its members. Such matter plainly exists. Its particles are concretions in existence like the planets; and if a given hypothesis describing them turns out to be wrong, it is wrong only because this matter exists so truly and in such discoverable guise that the hypothesis in question may be shown to misrepresent its constitution.
On the other hand, in Aristotle and in literary speech, matter means something good to make other things out of. Here it is a concretion in discourse, a dialectical term; being only an aspect or constituent of every existence, it cannot exist by itself. A state of mind, like everything not purely formal, has matter of this sort in it. Actual love, for instance, differs materially from the mere idea or possibility of love, which is all love would be if the matter or body of it were removed. This matter is what idealists, bent on giving it a grander name, call pure feeling, absolute consciousness, or metaphysical will. These phrases are all used improperly to stand for the existence or presence of things apart from their character, or for the mere strain and dead weight of being. Matter is a far better term to use in the premises, for it suggests the method as well as the fact of brute existence. The surd in experience—its non-ideal element—is not an indifferent vehicle for what it brings, as would be implied by calling it pure feeling or absolute consciousness. Nor is it an act accepting or rejecting objects, as would be implied by calling it will. In truth, the surd conditions not merely the being of objects but their possible quantity, the time and place of their appearance, and their degree of perfection compared with the ideals they suggest. These important factors in whatever exists are covered by the term matter and give it a serious and indispensable rôle in describing and feeling the world.
Aristotle, it may be added, did not adhere with perfect consistency to the dialectical use of this word. Matter is sometimes used by him for substance or for actual beings having both matter and form. The excuse for this apparent lapse is, of course, that what taken by itself is a piece of formed matter or an individual object may be regarded as mere material for something else which it helps to constitute, as wheat is matter for flour, and flour for bread. Thus the dialectical and non-demonstrative use of the term to indicate one aspect of everything could glide into its vulgar acceptation, to indicate one class of things.
[C] It has been suggested—what will not party spirit contrive?—that these variations, called spontaneous by Darwin because not predetermined by heredity, might be spontaneous in a metaphysical sense, free acts with no material basis or cause whatsoever. Being free, these acts might deflect evolution—like Descartes’ soul acting on the pineal gland—into wonderful new courses, prevent dissolution, and gradually bring on the kingdom of Heaven, all as the necessary implication of the latest science and the most atheistic philosophy. It may not be needless to observe that if the variations were absolutely free, i.e., intrusions of pure chance, they would tend every which way quite as much as if they were mechanically caused; while if they were kept miraculously in line with some far-off divine event, they would not be free at all, but would be due to metaphysical attraction and a magic destiny prepared in the eternal; and so we should be brought round to Aristotelian physics again.
[D] The monads of Leibniz could justly be called minds, because they had a dramatic destiny, and the most complex experience imaginable was the state of but one monad, not an aggregate view or effect of a multitude in fusion. But the recent improvements on that system take the latter turn. Mind-stuff, or the material of mind, is supposed to be contained in large quantities within any known feeling. Mind-stuff, we are given to understand, is diffused in a medium corresponding to apparent space (what else would a real space be?); it forms quantitative aggregates, its transformations or aggregations are mechanically governed, it endures when personal consciousness perishes, it is the substance of bodies and, when duly organised, the potentiality of thought. One might go far for a better description of matter. That any material must be material might have been taken for an axiom; but our idealists, in their eagerness to show that Gefuehl ist Alles, have thought to do honour to feeling by forgetting that it is an expression and wishing to make it a stuff.
There is a further circumstance showing that mind-stuff is but a bashful name for matter. Mind-stuff, like matter, can be only an element in any actual being. To make a thing or a thought out of mind-stuff you have to rely on the system into which that material has fallen; the substantive ingredients, from which an actual being borrows its intensive quality, do not contain its individuating form. This form depends on ideal relations subsisting between the ingredients, relations which are not feelings but can be rendered only by propositions.
CHAPTER V
PSYCHOLOGY
If psychology is a science, many things that books of psychology contain should be excluded from it. One is social imagination. Nature, besides having a mechanical form and wearing a garment of sensible qualities, makes a certain inner music in the beholder’s mind, inciting him to enter into other bodies and to fancy the new and profound life which he might lead there. Who, as he watched a cat basking in the sun, has not passed into that vigilant eye and felt all the leaps potential in that luxurious torpor? Who has not attributed some little romance to the passer-by? Who has not sometimes exchanged places even with things inanimate, and drawn some new moral experience from following the movement of stars or of daffodils? All this is idle musing or at best poetry; yet our ordinary knowledge of what goes on in men’s minds is made of no other stuff. True, we have our own mind to go by, which presumably might be a fair sample of what men’s minds are; but unfortunately our notion of ourselves is of all notions the most biassed and idealistic. If we attributed to other men only such obvious reasoning, sound judgment, just preferences, honest passions, and blameless errors as we discover in ourselves, we should take but an insipid and impractical view of mankind.
In fact, we do far better: for what we impute to our fellow-men is suggested by their conduct or by an instant imitation of their gesture and expression. These manifestations, striking us in all their novelty and alien habit, and affecting our interests in all manner of awkward ways, create a notion of our friends’ natures which is extremely vivid and seldom extremely flattering.
Such romancing has the cogency proper to dramatic poetry; it is persuasive only over the third person, who has never had, but has always been about to have, the experience in question. Drawn from the potential in one’s self, it describes at best the possible in others. The thoughts of men are incredibly evanescent, merely the foam of their labouring natures; and they doubtless vary much more than our trite classifications allow for. This is what makes passions and fashions, religions and philosophies, so hard to conceive when once the trick of them is a little antiquated. Languages are hardly more foreign to one another than are the thoughts uttered in them. We should give men credit for originality at least in their dreams, even if they have little of it to show elsewhere; and as it was discovered but recently that all memories are not furnished with the like material images, but often have no material images whatever, so it may have to be acknowledged that the disparity in men’s soliloquies is enormous, and that some races, perhaps, live content without soliloquising at all.
Nevertheless, in describing what happens, or in enforcing a given view of things, we constantly refer to universal experience as if everybody was agreed about what universal experience is and had personally gathered it all since the days of Adam. In fact, each man has only his own, the remnant saved from his personal acquisitions. On the basis of this his residual endowment, he has to conceive all nature, with whatever experiences may have fallen there to the lot of others. Universal experience is a comfortable fiction, a distinctly ideal construction, and no fund available for any one to draw from; which of course is not to deny that tradition and books, in transmitting materially the work of other generations, tend to assimilate us also to their mind. The result of their labours, in language, learning, and institutions, forms a hothouse in which to force our seedling fancy to a rational growth; but the influence is physical, the environment is material, and its ideal background or significance has to be inferred by us anew, according to our imaginative faculty and habits. Past experience, apart from its monuments, is fled for ever out of mortal reach. It is now a parcel of the motionless ether, of the ineffectual truth about what once was. To know it we must evoke it within ourselves, starting from its inadequate expressions still extant in the world. This reconstruction is highly speculative and, as Spinoza noted, better evidence of what we are than of what other men have been.
When we appeal to general experience, then, what we really have to deal with is our interlocutor’s power of imagining that experience; for the real experience is dead and ascended into heaven, where it can neither answer nor hear. Our agreements or divergences in this region do not touch science; they concern only friendship and unanimity. All our proofs are, as they say in Spain, pure conversation; and as the purpose and best result can be only to kindle intelligence and propagate an ideal art, the method should be Socratic, genial, literary. In these matters, the alternative to imagination is not science but sophistry. We may perhaps entangle our friends in their own words, and force them for the moment to say what they do not mean, and what it is not in their natures to think; but the bent bow will spring back, perhaps somewhat sharply, and we shall get little thanks for our labour. There would be more profit in taking one another frankly by the hand and walking together along the outskirts of real knowledge, pointing to the material facts which we all can see, nature, the monuments, the texts, the actual ways and institutions of men; and in the presence of such a stimulus, with the contagion of a common interest, the plastic mind would respond of itself to the situation, and we should be helping one another to understand whatever lies within the range of our fancy, be it in antiquity or in the human heart. That would be a true education; and while the result could not possibly be a science, not even a science of people’s states of mind, it would be a deepening of humanity in ourselves and a wholesome knowledge of our ignorance.
In what is called psychology this loose, imaginative method is often pursued, although the field covered may be far narrower. Any generic experience of which a writer pretends to give an exact account must be reconstructed ad hoc; it is not the experience that necessitates the description, but the description that recalls the experience, defining it in a novel way. When La Rochefoucauld says, for instance, that there is something about our friend’s troubles that secretly pleases us, many circumstances in our own lives, or in other people’s, may suddenly recur to us to illustrate that aperçu; and we may be tempted to say, There is a truth. But is it a scientific truth? Or is it merely a bit of satire, a ray from a literary flashlight, giving a partial clearness for a moment to certain jumbled memories? If the next day we open a volume of Adam Smith, and read that man is naturally benevolent, that he cannot but enact and share the vicissitudes of his fellow-creatures, and that another man’s imminent danger or visible torment will cause in him a distress little inferior to that felt by the unfortunate sufferer, we shall probably think this a truth also, and a more normal and a profounder truth than the other. But is it a law? Is it a scientific discovery that can lead us to definite inferences about what will happen or help us to decompose a single event, accurately and without ambiguity, into its component forces? Not only is such a thing impossible, but the Scotch philosopher’s amiable generalities, perhaps largely applicable to himself and to his friends of the eighteenth century, may fail altogether to fit an earlier or a later age; and every new shade of brute born into the world will ground a new “theory of the moral sentiments.”
The whole cogency of such psychology, therefore, lies in the ease with which the hearer, on listening to the analysis, recasts something in his own past after that fashion. These endless rival apperceptions regard facts that, until they are referred to their mechanical ground, show no continuity and no precision in their march. The apperception of them, consequently, must be doubly arbitrary and unstable, for there is no method in the subject-matter and there is less in the treatment of it. The views, however, are far from equal in value. Some may be more natural, eloquent, enlightening, than others; they may serve better the essential purpose of reflection, which is to pick out and bring forward continually out of the past what can have a value for the present. The spiritual life in which this value lies is practical in its associations, because it understands and dominates what touches action; yet it is contemplative in essence, since successful action consists in knowing what you are attempting and in attempting what you can find yourself achieving. Plan and performance will alike appeal to imagination and be appreciated through it; so that what trains imagination refines the very stuff that life is made of. Science is instrumental in comparison, since the chief advantage that comes of knowing accurately is to be able, with safety, to imagine freely. But when it is science and accurate knowledge that we pursue, we should not be satisfied with literature.