Human beliefs and ideas (which in modern philosophy are called human knowledge) may be arranged systematically in various different series or orders. One is the order of genesis. The origin of beliefs and ideas, as of all events, is natural. All origins lie in the realm of matter, even when the being that is so generated is immaterial, because this creation or intrusion of the immaterial follows on material occasions and at the promptings of circumstance. It is safe to say this, although it may sound dogmatical, since an immaterial being not grafted in this way upon material events would be undiscoverable; no place, time, or other relations in nature could be assigned to it, and even if by chance it existed it would have to exist only for its own benefit, unreported to any one else. It is accordingly in the realm of matter, in the order of events in animal life, that I must distribute human beliefs and ideas if I wish to arrange them in the order of their genesis.

Beliefs and ideas might also be surveyed in the order of discovery, as within the field of human grammar and thought they come to be discriminated. Such a survey would be a biography of reason, in which I should neglect the external occasions on which ideas and beliefs arise and study only the changing patterns which they form in the eye of thought, as in a kaleidoscope. What would probably come first in the order of discovery would be goods and evils; or a romantic metaphysician might turn this experience into a fable, referring goods and evils to a transcendental will which should pronounce them (for no reason) to be such respectively. Will or moral bias is actually the background on which images of objects are gradually deciphered by an awakening intellect; they all appear initially loaded with moral values and assigned to rival camps and quarters in the field of action. Discovery is essentially romantic; there is less clearness in the objects that appear than there is vehemence in the assertion and choice of them. The life of reason is accordingly a subject to be treated imaginatively, and interpreted afresh by every historian with legitimate variations; and if no theme lies nearer to the heart of man, since it is the history of his heart, none is more hopelessly the sport of apperception and of dramatic bias in the telling.

Finally, beliefs and ideas may be marshalled in the order of evidence; and this is the only method that concerns me here. At any juncture in the life of reason a man may ask himself, as I am doing in this book, what he is most certain of, and what he believes only on hearsay or by some sort of suggestion or impulse of his own, which might be suspended or reversed. Alternative logics and creeds might thus suggest themselves, raised in different styles of architecture upon the bed-rock, if there is a bed-rock, of perfect certitude. I have already discovered what this bed-rock of perfect certitude is; somewhat disconcertingly, it turns out to be in the regions of the rarest ether. I have absolute assurance of nothing save of the character of some given essence; the rest is arbitrary belief or interpretation added by my animal impulse. The obvious leaves me helpless; for among objects in the realm of essence I can establish none of the distinctions which I am most concerned to establish in daily life, such as that between true and false, far or near, just now and long ago, once upon a time, and in five minutes. All these terms of course are found there, else I could not mention them, but they are found only as pictures; each is present only in essence, without any reason for choosing, asserting, or making it effective. The very opposite terms, if I am only willing to think of them, lie sleeping side by side with these which I happen first to have come upon. All essences and combinations of essences are brother-shapes in an eternal landscape; and the more I range in that wilderness, the less reason I find for stopping at anything, or for following any particular path. Willingly or regretfully, if I wish to live, I must rouse myself from this open-eyed trance into which utter scepticism has thrown me. I must allow subterranean forces within me to burst forth and to shatter that vision. I must consent to be an animal or a child, and to chase the fragments as if they were things of moment. But which fragment, and rolling in what direction? I am resigned to being a dogmatist; but at what point shall my dogmatism begin, and by what first solicitation of nature?

Starting, as here I should, from absolute certitude—that is, from the obvious character of some essence—the first object of belief suggested by that assurance is the identity of this essence in various instances and in various contexts. This identity in divers cases is not tautological, as identity would be if I spoke of the identity of any essence with itself. Identity, to be significant, must be problematical. I must pick up my pebble twice, so that a juggler might without my knowledge have substituted another pebble for it in the interval; and when I say confidently, the same pebble, I may always be deceived. My own thought is not at all unlikely to play this trick on me; it is good at legerdemain. In attending a second time to what I call the same essence, I may really summon a different essence before me; my memory need not retain the first intuition so precisely that its disparity from the present one can be sensible to me now. Identity of essences given at different times evidently presupposes time—an immense postulate; and besides, it presupposes ability in thought to traverse time without confusion, so that having lived through two intuitions I may correctly distinguish them as events, whilst correctly identifying their common object. These are ambitious and highly questionable dogmas. Yet there is a circumstance in pure intuition of any essence which can insensibly lead me to those elaborate conclusions, and can lead me at the same time to posit the natural existence of myself, the possible dupe, having those intuitions and surviving them, and even the existence of my natural object, the persisting pebble, which those intuitions described unanimously.

This circumstance is closely connected with the property of essence which is most ideal and remote from existence, namely, its eternity. Eternity, taken intrinsically, has nothing to do with time, but is a form of being which time cannot usher in nor destroy; it is always equally real, silent, and indestructible, no matter what time may do, or what time it may be. But intuition peruses eternal being in time; consequently, so long as I am attending to an essence, this essence seems to me to endure; and when, after an interval, I revert to it or to any feature of it, this feature seems to me to be identical with what it was. This identity and this duration are not properly predicated of essence in its own realm; they are superfluous epithets essentially, and almost insults, because they substitute a questionable for an unquestionable subsistence in the essence. Yet the epithets are well meant, and indicate fairly enough the aspect which essences present to moving thought when it plays upon them. Intuition finds essence by watching, by exerting animal attention. Now when he watches, an animal thinks that what he watches is watching him with the same intensity and variability of attention which he is exerting; for attention is fundamentally an animal uneasiness, fostered by the exigences of life amid other material beings that can change and jump. Stillness or constancy in any object accordingly does not seem to an animal eternity in an essence; it seems rather a suspension of motion in a thing, a pause for breath, an ominous and awful silence. He is superstitious about the eternity of essences, as about all their other properties. This breathless and ghostly duration which he attributes to essences, treating them like living things, is his confused temporal translation of their eternity, mixing it with existence, which is the negation of eternity. Thus he assimilates it to the quasi-permanence in himself which is transfused with change; for of course he is far from perceiving that if essences were not natively eternal and nonexistent, it would be impossible for crawling existence to change from one form to another. This illusion is inevitable. The dubious and iterative duration proper to animal life, when the lungs breathe and the mind is appetitive, seems to this mind a pulsation in all being.

Moreover, in watching any image, it is often possible to observe one feature in it persisting while another disappears. The man not only says to himself, “This, and still this,” but he ventures to say, “This, and again this with a variation.” A variation in this? Here, from the point of view of essence, is a sheer absurdity. This cannot change its nature, though what we have before us a moment later may be something but slightly different from this; and of course the essence now brought to view can be slightly different from the one formerly in evidence only because each is eternally itself, so that the least variant from it marks and constitutes a different essence. Material categories such as existence, substance, and change, none of which are applicable to pure data, are thus insinuated by the animal intellect into contemplation. They transform intuition into belief; and this belief, as if it would reinforce essences when they appear and annul them when they disappear, ultimately posits an imaginary shuffling of sensible existences—hypostatised essences—dancing about us as we watch the scene. Even if this hypostasis is retracted afterwards by the critic, the postulate remains that he is steadily perusing the same essence, or returning to reconsider it. Without this postulate it would be impossible to say or think anything on any subject. No essence could be recognised, and therefore no change could be specified. Yet this necessary belief is one impossible to prove or even to defend by argument, since all argument presupposes it. It must be accepted as a rule of the game, if you think the game worth playing.

What shall I say of the probable truth of such fundamental assumptions? Shall I think them false, because groundless, and shall I say that they invalidate the whole edifice of natural faith which is raised upon them? Or shall I say that the experienced security of this edifice justifies them and implies their truth? Neither; because the happy results and fertility of an assumption do not prove it true literally, but only prove it to be suitable, to be worth cultivating as an art and repeating as a good myth. The axioms of sanity and art must correspond somehow to truth, but the correspondence may be very loose and very partial. Moreover, the circumstance that even this symbolic rightness is vouched for only by an experience which would be false in all its records and memories if this assumption were false, robs such experimental tests of all logical force. Corroboration is no new argument; if I am deceived once, I may all the more readily be deceived again. In the perspectives of experience I cannot, except in these very perspectives, reach the terms which they posit as self-existent, in order to see whether my perspectives were rightly drawn. I am in the region of belief mediated by symbols, in the region of animal faith.