To believe nothing and live immersed in intuition might be the privilege of a disembodied spirit; and if a man could share it he would not only be relieved from doubt but would, in one dimension, lose nothing in the scope of his experience, since the realm of essence, which would still be open to him, is absolutely infinite, and contains images of all the events that any existing world could enact, or that all possible worlds could enact together. Yet all this variety and richness would form a mosaic, a marble effigy of life, or chronicle of ancient wars. The pangs and horrors would be there, as well as the beauties, but each would burn in its eternal place, balancing all the rest, and no anxious eye would glance hurriedly from one to the other, wondering what the next might be. The spirit that actually breathes in man is an animal spirit, transitive like the material endeavours which it expresses; it has a material station and accidental point of view, and a fevered preference for one alternative issue over another. It thirsts for news; and this curiosity, which it borrows of course from the insecurity and instinctive anxiety of the animal whose spirit it is, is strangely self-contradictory; because the further it ranges in the service of animal will, the more the spectacle it discloses rebukes that animal will and tends to neutralise it. It would indeed not be spirit at all if it did not essentially tend to discount its accidental point of view, and to exchange the material station to which it finds itself unaccountably attached in its birth. In so far as it is spirit, and is not called back by its animal allegiance to pleasures and ambitions which pure spirit could not share (since they imply ignorance), it accordingly tends to withdraw from preoccupation with animal life, from the bias of time and place, and from all thought of existence. In so doing, far from perishing, it seems to acquire a more intense, luminous, and placid being. Since the roots of spirit, at least in man, are in matter, this would seem to be an illusion; yet the experience is normal, and no illusion need attach to it, if once the nature of intuition is understood.

At the vanishing-point of scepticism, which is also the acme of life, intuition is absorbed in its object. For this reason, philosophers capable of intense contemplation—Aristotle, for instance, at those points where his thought becomes, as it were, internal to spirit—have generally asserted that in the end essence and the contemplation of essence are identical. Certainly the intuition of essence is oblivious of itself, and cognisant of essence only, to which it adds nothing whatever internally, either in character or in intensity; because the intensity of a thunder-clap is the chief part of its essence, and so the peculiar intolerableness of each sort of pain, or transitiveness of each sort of pleasure. If in fact when any such essence is given there had been nothing prior to this intuition, nothing beside it existentially, and nothing to follow upon it, this obliviousness to the intuition itself, as distinct from the given essence, would not be an oversight; it would be rather an absence of illusion. For it would then have been an illusion to suppose, as I should in calling the presence of that essence an intuition of it, that a soul with a history and with other adventitious qualities had come to contemplate that essence at one moment in its career. There would really be the essence only, with no relations other than those perfectly irreversible internal ones to other essences which define it in its own realm. Those very high numbers, for instance, which nobody has ever thought of specifically, have no other relations than those which they have eternally in the series of whole numbers; they have no place in any man’s life. So too those many forms of torment for which nature does not provide the requisite instrument, and which even hell has neglected to exemplify; they remain essences only, of which fortunately there is no intuition. Evidently the being of such numbers or such torments is constituted by their essence only, and has not attained to existence. Yet it is this essential being alone that, if there was intuition of those numbers or those torments, would be revealed in intuition; for no external adventitious relations, such as the intuition has in the life of some soul, would be presented within it, if (as I assume) nothing but these essences was then given.

It is therefore inevitable that minds singly absorbed in the contemplation of any essence should attribute the presence and force of that essence to its own nature, which alone is visible, and not to their intuition, which is invisible. Thought as it sinks into its object rises in its deliverance out of the sphere of contingency and change, and loses itself in that object, sublimated into an essence. This sublimation is no loss; it is merely absence of distraction. It is the perfect fruition and fulfilment of that experience. In this manner I can understand why Aristotle could call the realm of essence, or that part of it which he had considered, a deity, and could declare sublimely that its inalienable being was an eternal life. More strictly, it would have been an eternal actualisation of cognitive life only; animal life would have ceased, because animal life requires us to pick up and drop the essences we consider, and to attribute temporal as well as eternal relations to them; in other words, to regard them not as essences but as things. But though cognitive life begins with this attention to practical exigences and is kindled by them, yet its ideal is sacrificial; it aspires to see each thing clearly and to see all things together, that is to say, under the form of eternity, and as sheer essences given in intuition. To cease to live temporally is intellectually to be saved; it is ἀθανατίζειν, to fade or to brighten into the truth, and to become eternal. It is the inmost aim and highest achievement of cognition to cease to be knowledge for a self, to abolish the bias and transcend the point of view by which knowledge establishes its perspectives, so that all things may be present equally, and the truth may be all in all.

All this comes about, however, only subjectively, in that vital and poetic effort of the mind to understand which begins with a candid self-forgetfulness and ends in a passionate self-surrender. Seen from outside, as it takes place psychologically, the matter wears an entirely different aspect. In reality, essence and the intuition of essence can never be identical. If all animal predicaments were resolved, there would be no organ and no occasion for intuition; and intuition ceasing, no essences would appear. Certainly they would not be abolished by that accident in their own sphere, and each would be what it would have seemed if intuition of it had arisen; but they would all be merely logical or æsthetic themes unrehearsed, as remote as possible from life or from the intense splendour of divinity. Essence without intuition would be not merely non-existent (as it always is), but what is worse, it would be the object of no contemplation, the goal of no effort, the secret or implicit ideal of no life. It would be valueless. All that joy and sense of liberation which pure objectivity brings to the mind would be entirely absent; and essence would lose all its dignity if life lost its precarious existence.

I believe that Aristotle, and even more mystical spokesmen of the spirit, would not have ignored this circumstance if they had not taken so narrow a view of essence. They see it only through some peep-hole of morals, grammar, or physics; the small part of that infinite realm which thus becomes visible they take for the whole; or if they feel some uneasiness at the obvious partiality of this survey, they rather blot out and blur the part before them, lest it seem arbitrary, instead of imagining it filled out with all the rest that, in the realm of essence, cannot help surrounding it. Even Spinoza, who so clearly defines the realm of essence as an infinite number of kinds of being, each having an infinite number of variations, calls this infinity of being substance; as if at once to weight it all with existence (a horrible possibility) and to obliterate its internal distinctions; but distinction, infinitely minute and indelible distinction of everything from everything else, is what essence means. Yet people suppose that whatever is non-existent is nothing—a stupid positivism, like that of saying that the past is nothing, or the future nothing, or everything nothing of which I happen to be ignorant. If people reflected that the non-existent, as Leibniz says, is infinite, that it is everything, that it is the realm of essence, they would be more cautious in regarding essence as something selected, superior in itself, and worthy of eternal contemplation. They would not conceive it as the power or worth in things actual, but rather as the form of everything and anything.

Value accrues to any part of the realm of essence by virtue of the interest which somebody takes in it, as being the part relevant to his own life. If the organ of this life comes to perfect operation, it will reach intuition of that relevant part of essence. This intuition will be vital in the highest degree. It will be absorbed in its object. It will be unmindful of any possibility of lapse in that object, or defection on its own part; it will not be aware of itself, of time, or of circumstances. But this intuition will continue to exist, and to exist in time, and the pulsations of its existence will hardly go on without some oscillation, and probably a quick evanescence. So the intuition will be an utterly different thing from the essence intuited: it will be something existent and probably momentary; it will glow and fade; it will be perhaps delightful; that is, no essences will appear to it which are not suffused with a general tint of interest and beauty. The life of the psyche, which rises to this intuition, determines all the characters of the essence evoked, and among them its moral quality. But as pure intuition is life at its best, when there is least rasping and thumping in its music, a prejudice or presumption arises that any essence is beautiful and life-enhancing. This platonic adoration of essence is undeserved. The realm of essence is dead, and the intuition of far the greater part of it would be deadly to any living creature.

The contemplation of so much of essence as is relevant to a particular life is what Aristotle called the entelechy or perfect fruition of that life. If the cosmos were a single animal, as the ancients supposed, and had an aim and a life which, like human life, could be fulfilled in the contemplation of certain essences, then a life like that of Aristotle’s God would be involved in the perfection of nature, if this perfection was ever attained. Or if, with Aristotle, we suppose that the cosmos has always been in perfect equilibrium, then a happy intuition of all relevant essence on the part of the cosmos would actually exist and would be that sustained, ecstatic, divine life which Aristotle speaks of. Yet even then the cosmic intuition of essence would not be the essence it beheld. The intuition would be a natural fact, by accident perpetual and necessarily selective; because the cosmos might stop turning at any moment, and certainly the music of those spheres, even while they rolled well, would not be every sort and any sort of noise, nor even of music. A different cosmos would have had, or might elsewhere be having, a different happiness. Each, however, would be a divine life, as the ancients conceived divinity. It would have such a natural basis as any life must have, and the consequent warmth and moral colour; for natural operations lend these values to the visions in which they rest. The love of certain special essences which animates existence is an expression of the direction which the movement of existence happens to have. If the cosmos were a perfect animal—and in its unknown secular pulsations it may possibly be one—the cosmic intellect in act would not be the whole of the realm of essence, nor any part of it. It would be the intuition of so much of essence as that cosmos had for its goal.

The external and naturalistic point of view from which all this appears is one I have not yet justified critically: I have anticipated it for the sake of rendering the conception of essence perfectly unambiguous. But if we start from the realm of essence, which demands no belief, we may at once find conclusive reasons for believing that sundry intuitions of parts of it exist in fact. One reason is the selectiveness of discourse. All essences are always at hand, ready to be thought of, if any one has the wit to do so. But my discourse takes something up first, and then, even if it is purely dialectical, passes to some implication or complement of that idea; and it never exhausts its themes. It traverses the realm of essence as, in a mosque, some ray of light from some high aperture might shoot across the sombre carpets: it is a brief, narrow, shifting, oblique illumination of something vast and rich. The fact that intuition has a direction is an added proof of its existential character, and of its complete diversity in nature from the essences it lights up. Life begins unaccountably and moves irreversably: when it is prosperous and intelligent, it accumulates its experience of things in a personal perspective, largely alien to the things themselves. When the objects surveyed are essences, no one can be prior to any other in their own sphere: they do not arise at all, and lie in no order of precedence. When one essence includes another as number two includes number one, it is as easy and as proper to reach one by dividing two as to reach two by repeating one. In themselves essences have no genesis; and to repeat one would be impossible if duality were not begged at the start, as well as unity, to institute the possibility of repetition. In seizing upon any particular essence first, discourse is guided by an irrational fatality. Some chance bit is what first occurs to the mind: I run up against this or that, for no logical reason. This arbitrary assault of intuition upon essence is evidence that something not essence, which I call intuition, has come into play. Thus all discourse, even if it traces ideal implications, is itself contingent to them, and in its existence irrational. Animal life is involved in the perusal of essence, just as animal faith is involved in the trust I put in demonstration. If I aspired to be a disembodied spirit, I ought to envisage all essences equally and at once—a monstrous requirement. If I aspire instead to dwell in the presence only of the pertinent, the beautiful, and the good, I confess that I am but a natural creature, directed on a small circle of interests and perfections; and that my intuition in particular exercises an adventitious choice, and has a private method, in its survey of essence.

The first existence, then, of which a sceptic who finds himself in the presence of random essences may gather reasonable proof, is the existence of the intuition to which those essences are manifest. This is of course not the object which the animal mind first posits and believes in. The existence of things is assumed by animals in action and expectation before intuition supplies any description of what the thing is that confronts them in a certain quarter. But animals are not sceptics, and a long experience must intervene before the problem arises which I am here considering, namely, whether anything need be posited and believed in at all. And I reply that it is not inevitable, if I am willing and able to look passively on the essences that may happen to be given: but that if I consider what they are, and how they appear, I see that this appearance is an accident to them; that the principle of it is a contribution from my side, which I call intuition. The difference between essence and intuition, though men may have discovered it late, then seems to me profound and certain. They belong to two different realms of being.