There is some danger in pointing out the obvious. Quick wits, perceiving at once how obvious the obvious is (though they may never have noticed it before), will say it is futile and silly to dwell upon it. Pugnacious people will assume that you mean more than you say, and are attempting to smuggle in some objectionable dogma under your truisms. Finally, docile minds, pleased to think you are delivering an oracle for their edification, will bow before your plain words as before some sacred mystery. The discernment of essence is subject, I know, to all these misunderstandings, and before going further I will endeavour to remove them.
In the first place, a warning to tender idealists. This recognition that the data of experience are essences is Platonic, but it is a corrective to all that is sentimental in Platonism, curing it as it were homœopathically. The realm of essence is not peopled by choice forms or magic powers. It is simply the unwritten catalogue, prosaic and infinite, of all the characters possessed by such things as happen to exist, together with the characters which all different things would possess if they existed. It is the sum of mentionable objects, of terms about which, or in which, something might be said. Thus although essences have the texture and ontological status of Platonic ideas, they can lay claim to none of the cosmological, metaphysical, or moral prerogatives attributed to those ideas. They are infinite in number and neutral in value. Greek minds had rhetorical habits; what told in debate seemed to them final; and Socrates thought it important to define in disputation the common natures designated by various words. Plato, who was initially a poet, had a warmer intuition of his ideas; but it was still grammar and moral prejudice that led him to select and to deify them. The quality or function that makes all shepherds shepherds or all goods good is an essence; but so are all the remaining qualities which make each shepherd and each good distinguishable from every other. Far from gathering up the fluidity of existence into a few norms for human language and thought to be focussed upon, the realm of essence infinitely multiplies that multiplicity, and adds every undiscriminated shade and mode of being to those which man has discriminated or which nature contains. Essence is not something invented or instituted for a purpose; it is something passive, anything that might be found, every quality of being; it therefore has not the function of reducing plurality to unity for the convenience of our poor wits or economy of language. It is far more garrulous than nature, herself not laconic.
Nor have essences a metaphysical status, so as to exercise a non-natural control over nature. My doctrine lends no countenance to the human presumption that whatsoever man notices or names or loves ought to be more deeply seated in reality or more permanent than what he ignores or despises. The good is a great magnet over discourse and imagination, and therefore rightly rules the Platonic world, which is that of moral philosophy only; but this good is itself defined and chosen by the humble animal nature of man, demanding to eat and live and love. In the realm of essence this human good has no pre-eminence, and being an essence it has no power. The Platonic notion that ideas were models which things imperfectly imitated expresses admirably the moral nature of man attaining to self-knowledge and proclaiming clearly his instinctive demands; or possibly (if the moralist is also a poet plastic to the wider influences of nature) defining also the demands which non-human creatures would make on themselves or on us if they had life and thought. Platonic ideas, in their widest range, express sympathy with universal life; they are anagrams of moral insight. Hence their nobility, and constant appeal to minds struggling after perfection, whether in art or in self-discipline. The spirit, by expressing itself in them, is fortified, as the artist is by his work taking shape before his eyes and revealing to him his own hidden intentions and judgements never expressed. But the realm of essence is no more limited to these few ideals chosen and projected heavenwards by the aspiration of living creatures, than the celestial galaxy is limited to the north star. Excellence is relative to the accidental life of nature which selects now one essence and now another to be the goal of some thought or endeavour. In the realm of essence no emphasis falls on these favourite forms which does not fall equally on every other member of that infinite continuum. Every bad thing—bad because false to the ideal which its own nature may propose to it—illustrates an essence quite as accurately as if it had been good. No essence, except temporarily and by accident, is the goal of any natural process, much less its motive power.
Thus the discernment of essence, while confirming Platonic logic in the ideal status which it assigns to the terms of discourse (and discourse includes all that is mental in sensation and perception), destroys the illusions of Platonism, because it shows that essences, being non-existent and omnimodal, can exercise no domination over matter, but themselves come to light in nature or in thought only as material exigencies may call them forth and select them. The realm of essence is a perfect democracy, where everything that is or might be has a right of citizenship; so that only some arbitrary existential principle—call it the predispositions in matter or the blindness of absolute will—can be rendered responsible, in a verbal metaphysics, for things being as they are, causing them to fall now into this form and now into that, or to choose one essence rather than another to be their type and ideal. These chosen types are surrounded in the realm of essence by every monster, every unexampled being, and every vice; no more vicious there, no more anomalous or monstrous than any other nature. Seen against that infinite background even the star-dust of modern astronomy, with its strange rhythms and laws, and its strange fertility, seems the most curious of accidents: what a choice for existence to make, when it might have been anything else! And as to the snug universe which the ancients, and most men in their daily thoughts, have imagined about them, presided over by its Olympian deities, or its Jewish God, or its German Will, it is not only the figment of the most laughable egotism, but even if by chance it were the actual world, it would be utterly contingent and ephemeral.
This is one hygienic effect of the discovery of essence: it is a shower-bath for the dreamy moralist, and clears Platonism of superstition.
On the other hand, the discernment of essence reinstates the Socratic analysis of knowledge, by showing that essences are indispensable terms in the perception of matters of fact, and render transitive knowledge possible. If there were no purely ideal characters present to intuition yet not existentially a part either of the mind or of the environment, nothing ulterior could ever be imagined, much less truly conceived. Every supposed instance of knowledge would be either a bit of sentience without an object, or an existing entity unrelated to any mind. But an essence given in intuition, being non-existent in itself and by no means the object at that moment intended by the animal in his alertness or pursuit, may become a description of that object. If there is to be intelligence at all, the immediate must be vehicular. It is so when animal fancy is turned to the description of things; for then passive sensibility supplies terms which are in themselves volatile and homeless, and these terms may be dispersed as names, to christen the things that receive them, carrying intelligence by its intent to its objects (objects already selected by animal endeavour) and reporting the objects to the animal mind by their appearance. What is given becomes in this manner a sign for what is sought, and a conventional description of it; and the object originally posited by faith and intent in the act of living may be ultimately more and more accurately revealed to belief and to thought. Essences are ideal terms at the command of fancy and of the senses (whose data are fancies) as words are at the command of a ready tongue. If thought arises at all, it must think something after some fashion; and the essences it evokes in intuition enable it to imagine, to assert, and perhaps truly to know something about what is not itself nor its own condition: some existing thing or removed event which would otherwise run on blindly in its own medium, at best overtaking the animal unawares, or confronting him to no purpose. But when the animate body responds to circumstances and is sensitive, in various unprecedented ways, to their variations, it acquires a whole sensuous vocabulary in which to describe them, colours, sounds, shapes, sizes, excellences, and defects being the parts of speech in its grammar. It feels hot or cold according to the season; so that cold and heat become signs of the seasons for the spirit, the homely poetry in which the senses render the large facts and the chief influences of nature. Perhaps even the vegetative soul has her dreams, but in the animal these floating visions are clarified by watchfulness and can be compared and contrasted in their character as well as in their occasions; and they lend intelligence terms in which to think and judge. The toys of sense become the currency of commerce; ideas, which were only echoes of facts, serve as symbols for them. Thus intuition of essences first enables the mind to say something about anything, to think of what is not given, and to be a mind at all.
A great use of the discovery of essence, then, is to justify the notions of intelligence and knowledge, otherwise self-contradictory, and to show how such transcendence of the actual is possible for the animal mind.
The notion of essence is also useful in dismissing and handing over to physical science, where it belongs, the mooted question concerning the primary and secondary qualities of matter. There is a profound but genuine problem here which no logical discrimination and no psychological analysis can affect, namely: What are the elements of matter, and by what arrangement or motion of these elements do gross bodies acquire their various properties? The physical philosophers must tell us, if they can, how matter is composed: and as they are compelled, like the rest of us, to begin by studying the aspects and behaviour of obvious bodies, on the scale of human perception, it is but fair to give them time, or even eternity, in which to come to a conclusion. But the question of primary and secondary qualities, as mooted in modern philosophy, is a false problem. It rests on the presumption that the data of sense can be and should be constituents of the object in nature, or at least exactly like its constituents. The object in nature is, for example, bread I am eating: and the presumption of modern psychologists is that this object is, or ought to be, composed of my sensations of contact, colour, temperature, movement, and pleasure in eating it. The pleasure and the colour, however, soon prove to be reversible according to the accidents of appetite or jaundice in me, without any change in the object itself. In the act of eating (overlooked by these psychologists) I have my radical assurance of that object, know its place, and continue to testify to its identity. The bread, for animal faith, is this thing I am eating, and causing to disappear to my substantial advantage; and although language is clumsy in expressing this assurance, which runs much deeper than language, I may paraphrase it by saying that bread is this substance I can eat and turn into my own substance; in seizing and biting it I determine its identity and its place in nature, and in transforming it I prove its existence. If the psychological critics of experience overlooked this animal faith in fact as they do in theory, their theory itself would have no point of application, and they would not know what they were talking about, and would not really be talking about anything. Their data would have no places and no context. As it is, they continue illegitimately to posit the bread, as an animal would, and then, in their human wisdom, proceed to remove from the description of it the colour and the pleasure concerned, as being mere effects on themselves, while they identify the bread itself with the remainder of their description hypostatised: shape, weight, and hardness. But how should some data, when posited, produce others entirely different, but contemporary, or perhaps earlier? Evidently these so-called primary qualities are simply those essences which custom or science continues to use in its description of things: but meantime the things have evaporated, and the description of them, in no matter what terms, ought to be idle and useless. All knowledge of nature and history has become a game of thought, a laborious dream in which a dim superstition makes me believe that some trains of images are more prosperous than others.
It is because essences are not discerned that philosophers in so many ways labour the hopeless notion that there is nothing in sense which is not first in things. Either perception and knowledge (which are animal faith) are deputed to be intuition, so that things have to be composed pictorially, out of the elements of human discourse, as if their substance consisted of images pressed together like a pack of cards; or else ideas must be explained as imports from the outer world, prolonging the qualities of things, as if the organs of sense were only holes in the skin, through which emanations of things could pass ready-made into the heart or head, and perhaps in those dark caverns could breed unnaturally together, producing a monstrous brood of dreams and errors. But, as a matter of fact, elaborate bodily mechanisms are just as requisite for seeing as for thinking, and the landscape, as a man sees it, is no less human than the universe as his philosophy constructs it—and we know how human that is. Evidences soon accumulate to prove that no quality in the object is like any datum of sense. Nothing given exists. Consider, for instance, the water which seems cold to one hand and warm to the other. Shall the water be called hot or cold? Both, certainly, if a full description of it, in all its relations and appearances, is what is sought. But if what is sought is the substance of the water, properties shown to be relative to my organs of sense cannot be “real” qualities of that substance. Their original (for they were still expected to have originals) was accordingly placed elsewhere. Perhaps the “real” cold might be in the warm hand, and the “real” warmth in the cold one; or in cold and hot tracts of the brain respectively; or else “in the mind”—a substance which might endure heat and cold simultaneously in different parts of itself. Or perhaps the mind was simply the heat and the cold existing successively, each a feeling absolute in itself: but in this case a second mind would be required to observe, remember, and appropriate those existing feelings, and how should reflection reach those feelings or know at all what they were? If they are past, how should intuition possess them now? And if they are only the present data of intuition, need they ever have existed before, or in any form but that in which I feel them now, when I feel them no longer?
The notion that knowledge is intuition, that it must either penetrate to the inner quality of its object or else have no object but the overt datum, has not been carried out with rigour: if it had, it might have been sooner abandoned. Rudimentary vital feelings, such as pleasure or hunger, are not supposed even by the most mythological philosophers to be drawn from external sources of the same quality. Plato in one place says of intelligence that there must surely be floods of it in the vast heavens, as there are floods of light there, whence puny man may draw his dribblet. He neglects, however, to extend this principle to pain, pleasure, or hunger. He does not argue that my paltry pains and pleasures can be but drops sucked in from some vast cosmic reservoir of these feelings, nor that my momentary hunger could never have improvised its own quality, but must be only a bit, transferred to my mortal stomach, of a divine hunger eternally gnawing the whole sky. Yet this is the principle on which many a candid idolater has supposed, and still supposes, that light, space, music, and reason, as his intuition renders them, must permeate the universe.
The illusion is childish, and when we have once discerned essence, it seems strangely idolatrous. The essences given in intuition are fetched from no original. The reason, music, space, and light of my imagination are essences existing nowhere: the intuition of them is quite as spiritual and quite as personal as my pain, pleasure, or hunger, and quite as little likely to be drawn from an imaginary store of similar substances in the world at large. They are dream-lights kindled by my fancy, like all the terms of discourse; they do not need to be previously resident either in the object or in the organ of sense. Not existing at all, they cannot be the causes of their own appearance; nor would introducing an existing triangle under the skin, or making the brain triangular, in the least help to display the triangle to intuition. But if some material thing called a triangle is placed before me at a suitable distance, my eyes and brain will do the rest, and the essence dear to Euclid will arise in my mind’s eye. No essence would ever appear simply because many hypostatic instances of it existed in the world: a living body must create the intuition and blossom into it, evoking some spontaneous image. Sense is a faculty of calling names under provocation; all perception and thought are cries and comments elicited from the heart of some living creature. They are original, though not novel, like the feelings of lovers: normal phases of animation in animals, whose life carries this inner flux of pictures and currents in the fancy, mixed with little and great emotions and dull bodily feelings: nothing in all this discourse being a passive copy of existences elsewhere.
On the other hand, if the so-called primary qualities, taken pictorially, are just as symbolic as the secondary ones, the secondary, taken indicatively, are just as true as the primary. They too report some particularity in the object which, being relative to me, may be of the highest importance, and being also relative to something in the constitution of the object, may be a valuable indication of its nature, like greenness in grapes. The qualities most obviously relative and reversible, like pleasant and unpleasant, good and bad, are truly qualities of things in some of their relations. They can all, by judicious criticism and redistribution, become true expressions of the life of nature. They have their exits and their entrances at appointed times, and they supply a perspective view, or caricature, of the world no less interesting and pungent for being purely egotistical. Artists have their place, and the animal mind is one of them.
That like knows like is a proverb, and after the manner of proverbs it is applicable on occasion, but its opposite is so too. Similar minds can understand the same things, and in that sense can understand each other: they can share and divine one another’s thoughts. This is because similar organs under similar stimulation will yield similar intuitions, revealing the same essence: like knows like by dramatic sympathy and ideal unanimity. But in sensuous perception the unlike knows the unlike. Here the organ is not adjusted to a similar organ, like instruments tuned up to the same key: the adjustment is rather to heterogeneous events in the environment or remote facts on quite a different scale; and the images that mediate this knowledge are quite unlike the events they signify. It would be grotesque to expect a flower to imitate or to resemble the soil, climate, moisture, and light, or even the seed and sap, that preside over its budding: but the flower presupposes all these agencies and is an index to them; an index which may become a sign and a vehicle of knowledge when it is used as an index by some discursive observer. Any given essence is normally a true sign for the object or event which occupies animal attention when that essence appears: as it is true of arsenic that it is poisonous and of pepper that it is hot, although the quality of being hot or poisonous cannot possibly be a material constituent of those substances, nor a copy of such a constituent. The environment determines the occasions on which intuitions arise, the psyche—the inherited organisation of the animal—determines their form, and ancient conditions of life on earth no doubt determined which psyches should arise and prosper; and probably many forms of intuition, unthinkable to man, express the facts and the rhythms of nature to other animal minds. Yet all these various symbolisms and sensuous dialects may be truly significant, composing most relevant complications in nature, by which she comments on herself. To suppose that some of these comments are poetical and others literal is gratuitous. They are all presumably poetical in form (intuition being poetry in act) and all expressive in function, and addressed to the facts of nature in some human and moral perspective, as poetry is too.
The absurdity of wishing to have intuitions of things reaches its climax when we ask whether things, if nobody looked at them, would still look as they do. Of course they would still be what they are: but whether their intrinsic essence, whether they are looked at or not, resembles such essences as eyes of one sort or another might gather by looking at them, is an idle question. It is not resemblance but relevance and closeness of adaptation that render a language expressive or an expression true. We read nature as the English used to read Latin, pronouncing it like English, but understanding it very well. If all other traditions of Latin euphony had been lost, there would have been no means of discovering in what respect the English pronunciation was a distortion, although the judicious would have suspected that the Romans could not have had an Oxonian accent. So each tribe of animals, each sense, each stage of experience and science, reads the book of nature according to a phonetic system of its own, with no possibility of exchanging it for the native sounds: but this situation, though hopeless in one sense, is not unsatisfactory practically, and is innocently humorous. It adds to the variety, if not to the gaiety, of experience; and perhaps a homely accent in knowledge, as in Latin, renders learning more savoury and familiar, and makes us more willing to read.
It is just because the images given in sense are so very original and fantastic that understanding can enlarge knowledge by correcting, combining, and discounting those appearances. Sensible qualities, like pet names, do very well at home, when no consistent or exact description of things is required, but only some familiar signal. When it comes to public business, however, more serious and legal designations have to be used, and these are what we call science. The description is not less symbolic but more accurate and minute. It may also involve—as in optics and psychology—a discovery of the images of sense as distinct from their original uses as living visions of things; and we may then learn that our immediate experience was but a diving-board, on which we hardly knew we were standing in plunging into the world. It was indeed essentially a theoretic eminence, a place of outlook, intended to fortify and prepare us for the plunge. Accordingly the symbols of sense are most relevant to their object at the remove and on the scale on which our daily action encounters it. In science, analogies and hypotheses, if not microscopes and telescopes, supply ideas of things more immediate or more remote. Thus the warmth and the cold felt at once in the same water inform me more directly about the water in relation to my two hands, than about my temperature, my brain, or my intuitions; and yet these things too are involved in that event and may be discovered in it by science. But science and sense, though differing in their scope, are exactly alike in their truth; and the views taken by science, though more penetrating and extensive, are still views: ground plans, elevations, and geometric projections taking the place of snapshots. All intuitions, whether in sense or thought, are theoretic: all are appropriate renderings, on some method and on some scale, of the circumstances in which they arise, and may serve to describe those circumstances truly: but experience and tact are requisite, as in the use of any language or technique of art, in distributing our stock symbols, and fitting the image to the occasion and the word to the fact.
The notion of essence also relieves the weary philosopher of several other problems, even more scholastic and artificial, concerning sensations and ideas, particulars and universals, the abstract and the concrete. There are no such differences in essences as they are given: all are equally immediate and equally unsubstantial, equally ideal and equally complete. Nothing could be more actual and specific than some unpleasant inner feeling or sentiment, as it colours the passing moment; yet nothing could be less descriptive of anything further, or vaguer in its significance, or more ephemeral an index to processes and events which it does not disclose but which are all its substance. And the clearest idea—say a geometrical sphere—and the most remote from sense (if we mean by sense the images actually supplied by the outer organs) is just such a floating presence, caught and lost again, an essence that in itself tells me nothing of its validity, nor of a world of fact to which it might apply. All these current distinctions are extraneous to essences, which are the only data of experience. The distinctions are borrowed from various ulterior existential relations subsisting between facts, some mental and some material, but none of them ever given in intuition. The mental facts, namely the intuitions to which the essences appear, may be confused by psychologists with those essences, as the material things supposed to possess those essences as qualities may be confused with them by the practical intellect, and both may be called by the same names; a double equivocation which later enables the metaphysician, by a double hypostasis of the datum, to say that the material thing and the mental event are one and the same given fact. We may innocently speak of given facts, meaning those posited in previous perceptions or referred to in previous discourse: but no fact can be a given fact in the sense of being a datum of intuition. And it is entirely on relations between facts not given that those current distinctions rest. They may often express truly the relative scope of intuitions, or the manner in which they take place amongst the general events in nature or arise in the animal body: but in respect to essences, which are the only terms of actual thought, they are perfectly unmeaning.
Suppose, for instance, that I see yellow, that my eyes are open, and that there is a buttercup before me; my intuition (not properly the essence “yellow” which is the datum) is then called a sensation. If again I see yellow with my eyes closed, the intuition is called an idea or a dream—although often in what is called an idea no yellow appears, but only words. If yet again I see yellow with my eyes open, but there is no buttercup, the intuition is called a hallucination. These various situations are curious, and worth distinguishing in optics and in medical psychology, but for the sceptical scrutiny of experience they make no difference. What can inform me, when I see yellow simply, whether my eyes are open or shut, or whether I am awake or dreaming, or what functions material buttercups may have in psycho-physical correlation, or whether there is anything physical or anything psychical in the world, or any world at all? These notions are merely conventional, imported knowledge or imported delusion. Such extraneous circumstances, whether true or false, cannot alter in the least the essence which I have before me, nor its sort of reality, nor its status in respect to my intuition of it.
Suppose again that I am at sea and feel the ship rocking. This feeling is called external perception; but if I feel nausea, my feeling is called internal sensation, or emotion, or introspection; and there are sad psychologists to conclude thence that while the ship rocking is something physical, and a mere appearance, nausea is something psychical, and an absolute reality. Why this partiality in distributing metaphysical dignities amongst things equally obvious? Each essence that appears appears just as it is, because its appearance defines it, and determines the whole being that it is or has. Nothing given is either physical or mental, in the sense of being intrinsically a thing or a thought; it is just a quality of being. Essences (like “rocking”) which serve eventually to describe material facts are given in intuitions which are just as mental as those which supply psychological terms for describing mental discourse. On the other hand, essences (like “nausea”) used first perhaps for describing discourse, mark crises in the flux of matter just as precisely as those which are used to describe material facts directly; because discourse goes on in animals subject to material influences. But in neither case can the intuitions—which constitute discourse and the mental sphere—be ever given in intuition. They are posited in memory, expectation, and dramatic psychology. The rocking I feel is called physical, because the essence before me—say coloured planes crossing—serves to report and designate very much more complicated and prolonged movements in the ship and the waves; and the nausea I also feel is called psychical, because it reports nothing (unless my medical imagination intervenes) but is endured pathetically, with a preponderating sense of time, change, and danger, as it largely consists in feeling how long this lasts, how upset I am, and how sick I am about to be.
Again, if I see yellow once, my experience is called a particular impression, and its object, yellow, is supposed to exist and to be a particular too; but if I see yellow again, yellow has mysteriously become a universal, a general idea, and an abstraction. Yet the datum for intuition is throughout precisely the same. No essence is abstract, yet none is a particular thing or event, none is an object of belief, perception, or pursuit, having a particular position in the context of nature. Even the intuition, though it is an event, cannot become an object of pursuit or perception; and its conventional place in history, when it has been posited and is believed to have occurred, is assigned to it only by courtesy, at the place and time of its physical support, as a wife in some countries takes her husband’s name. Not the data of intuition, but the objects of animal faith, are the particulars perceived: they alone are the existing things or events to which the animal is reacting and to which he is attributing the essences which arise, as he does so, before his fancy. These data of intuition are universals; they form the elements of such a description of the object as is at that time possible; they are never that object itself, nor any part of it. Essences are not drawn out or abstracted from things; they are given before the thing can be clearly perceived, since they are the terms used in perception; but they are not given until attention is stretched upon the thing, which is posited blindly in action; and they come as revelations, or oracles, delivered by that thing to the mind, and symbolising it there. In itself, as suspended understanding may suffer us to recognise it in reflection, each essence is a positive and complete theme: it is impossible that for experience anything should be more concrete or individual than is this exact and total appearance before me. Having never been parts of any perceived object, it is impossible that given essences should be abstracted from it. Being obvious and immediate data they cannot even have that congenital imperfection, that limp, which we might feel in a broken arch, or in the half of anything already familiar as a whole. But given essences are indeed visionary, they are unsubstantial; and in that respect they seem strange and unearthly to an animal expecting to work amongst things without realising their appearance. Yet ghostly as his instinct may deem them, they are perfect pictures, with nothing abstract or abstruse in their specious nature. The abstract is a category posterior to intuition, and applicable only to terms, such as numbers and other symbols of mathematics, which have been intentionally substituted for other essences given earlier, by which they were suggested; but even these technical terms are abstract only by accident and in function; they have a concrete essence of their own, and are constitutive elements of perfectly definite structures in their own plane of being, forming patterns and running into scales there, like so much music.
Similarly, nothing given in sensation or thought is in the least vague in itself. Vagueness is an adventitious quality, which a given appearance may be said to possess in relation to an object presumed to have other determinations: as the cloud in Hamlet is but a vague camel or a vague weasel, but for the landscape-painter a perfectly definite cloud. The vague is merely the too vague for some assumed purpose; and philosophers with a mania for accuracy, who find all discourse vague that is discourse about anything in the world of practice, are like critics of painting who should find all colours and forms vague, when they had been touched by aerial perspective, or made poetical by the rich dyes of fancy and expression. That sort of vagueness is perfection of artistic form, as the other sort of vagueness may be perfection of judgement: for knowledge lies in thinking aptly about things, not in becoming like them. If the standard of articulation in science were the articulation of existence, science would be impossible for an animal mind, and if it were possible would be useless: because nothing would be gained for thought by reproducing a mechanism without any adaptation of its scale and perspective to the nature of the thinker.
If the instincts of man were well adapted to his conditions, his thoughts, without being more accurate, would not seem confused. As it is, intuition is most vivid in the act of hunting or taking alarm, just when mistakes are probable: and any obvious essence is then precipitated upon the object, and quarrelled with and dismissed if the object does not sustain it. An essence, however evident, may even be declared absent and inconceivable, if it cannot be attributed absolutely to the substance of the object being chased or eaten. The hungry nominalist may well say to himself: “If the hues of the pheasant are no part of the bird, whence should he have fetched them? Am I not looking at the very creature I am pursuing and hoping presently to devour? And as my teeth and hands cannot possibly add anything to the substance they will seize upon, how should my eyes do so now? If therefore any alleged image can be proved to be no part of my object, I must be mistaken in supposing that I see such an image at all.” This is also the argument of the primitive painter, who knowing that men have two eyes and their hands five fingers, will not admit that their image might be less complete. In this way the wand of that Queen Mab, intuition, is assimilated by a too materialistic philosophy to a tongue or an antenna, and required to reach out to the object and stir it up, exploring its intrinsic quality and structure. But it is a magic wand, and calls up only wild and ignorant visions, mischievous and gaily invented; and if ever a philosopher dreams he has fathomed the thing before him in action, that wand is tickling his nose. Intuition cheats in enriching him, and nature who whispers all these tales in his ear is laughing at him and fondling him at the same time. It is a kindly fiction; because the dreams she inspires are very much to his mind, and the lies she invents for his benefit are her poetic masterpiece. Practical men despise the poetry of poets, but they are well pleased with their own. They would be ashamed of amusements which might defeat their purposes, or mislead them about the issue of events; but they embrace heartily the ingenuous fictions of the senses which they almost recognise to be fictions, and even the early myths and religions of mankind. These they find true enough for practical and moral purposes; their playfulness is a convenient compendium for facts too hard to understand; they are the normal poetry of observation and policy. Fancy disorganises conduct only when it expresses vice; and then it is the vice that does the mischief, and not the fancy.
Even philosophers, when they wish to be very plain and economical, sometimes fall to denying the immediate. Fact-worship, which is an idolatry of prudence, prejudices them against their own senses, and against the mind, which is what prudence serves, if it serves anything; and perhaps they declare themselves incapable of framing images with fewer determinations than they believe material things to possess. If a material triangle must have a perfectly defined shape (although at close quarters matter might elude such confines), or if a material house must have a particular number of bricks and a particular shade of colour at each point of its surface, a professed empiricist like Berkeley may be tempted to deny that he can have an idea of a triangle, et cetera, without such determinations; whereas, however clear his visual images may have been, it is certain he never could have had, even in direct perception, an image specifying all the bricks or all the tints of any house, nor the exact measure of any angle. Berkeley himself, I suspect, was secretly intent upon essence, which in every degree of conventional determination is its own standard of completeness. But given essences have any degree of vagueness in respect to the material or mathematical objects which they may symbolise, and to which Berkeley in his hasty nominalism wished to assimilate them. He almost turned given essences into substances, to take the place of those material things which he had denied. Each essence is certainly not two contradictory essences at once; but the definitions which render each precisely what it is lie in the realm of essence, an infinite continuum of discrete forms, not in the realm of existence. Essences, in order to appear, do not need to beg leave of what happens to exist, or to draw its portrait; yet here the trooping essences are, in such gradations and numbers as intuition may lend them. It is not by hypostatising them as they come that their roots in matter or their scope in knowledge can be discovered.
Thus the discrimination of essence has a happy tendency to liberalise philosophy, freeing it at once from literalness and from scepticism. If all data are symbols and all experience comes in poetic terms, it follows that the human mind, both in its existence and in its quality, is a free development out of nature, a language or music the terms of which are arbitrary, like the rules and counters of a game. It follows also that the mind has no capacity and no obligation to copy the world of matter nor to survey it impartially. At the same time, it follows that the mind affords a true expression of the world, rendered in vital perspectives and in human terms, since this mind arises and changes symptomatically at certain foci of animal life; foci which are a part of nature in dynamic correspondence with other parts, diffused widely about them; so that, for instance, alternative systems of religion or science, if not taken literally, may equally well express the actual operation of things measured by different organs or from different centres.