I have now agreed to believe that discourse is a contingent survey of essence, partial, recurrent, and personal, with an arbitrary starting-point and an arbitrary direction of progress. It picks up this essence or that for no reason that it can assign. However dialectical the structure of the theme considered may be, so that its various parts seem to imply one another, the fact that this theme rather than any other is being considered is a brute fact: and my discourse as a whole is a sheer accident, initiated, if initiated at all, by some ambushed power, not only in its existence, but in its duration, direction, and scope.

Nevertheless this fatality does not raise any problem in that discourse itself, because it occasions no surprise. Problems are created after discourse is in full swing, by contradictory presumptions or aching voids arising within it. There are no problems in nature, and none in the realm of essence. Existence—the most inexplicable of surds—is itself no problem in its own eyes: it takes itself blandly for granted, so long as it is prosperous. This is a healthy dulness on its part, because if there is no reason why a particular fact should exist rather than any other, or none at all, there is also no reason why it should not exist. The philosopher who has learned to make nature the standard of naturalness will not wonder at it. He will repeat on a large scale that act of ready submission to fate which every new-born intuition performs spontaneously. It does not protest against its sudden existence. It is not surprised at the undeserved favour that has fallen to its share. It modestly and wisely forgets itself and notes only the obvious, profoundly self-justified essence which appears before it. That this essence might just as well, or might far better, have been replaced by some other is not a suggestion to be possibly gathered from that essence itself. Nor is the psyche (the ambushed power from which the intuition actually comes) less self-satisfied and at peace. The psyche, too, takes her own idiosyncrasy for granted, singular and highly determinate as this is, and extraordinarily censorious concerning all other things. Her nature seems to her by right everlasting, and that to which it is the obvious duty of all other things to adjust themselves. God, too, if we refer these agreeable fatalities ultimately to his decrees, is conceived in like manner never to wonder why he exists although evidently nothing could have previously demanded his existence, or prepared the way for it, or made it intelligible. Nevertheless the mortal psyche perhaps thinks she sees the secret even of that, because it was necessary that God should exist in order to make her own existence perfectly safe, legitimate, and happy for ever. This assurance is needed, because there are unfortunately some circumstances that might suggest the opposite.

Before turning to these circumstances, it may be well to observe that actual discourse, as distinguished from the internal dialectic of essences, may have any degree of looseness; that is, the terms which it takes up in succession may have nothing to do with one another essentially. There is no added paradox in this: what is groundless and irrational in its inception may well be groundless and irrational in its procedure, and an appearance that has no reason for arising has no reason for not yielding to any other appearance, or to vacancy. And yet sometimes the course of appearances does produce wonder and discontent. How can this be? If I am not surprised at beginning to exist, or at finding something before me, since present being cannot contain any presumption or contradiction against itself, so it would seem that I should not be surprised at any changes in existence, however radical and complete. Often, indeed, I am not surprised, but follow the development of discourse, as in a dream, with perfect acquiescence, or even with a distinct premonition of what is coming, and eagerness that it should come. If I were a pure spirit, or even an open mind, this ought to be always the case. However different essences may be, they cannot in their own realm exclude or contradict one another; there, infinite diversity provokes no conflict and imposes no alternatives, and the being of anything, far from impeding that of other things, seems positively to invite and to require it, somewhat as every part of Euclidean space, far from denying the other parts, implies them. Irrelevance is, as it were, mere distance; and there is nothing strange or evil in quickness of thought, that should jump from one essence to another altogether dissimilar to it, or even contrary.

And yet I cannot prolong or intensify discourse without soon coming upon what I call interruption, confusion, doubt, or contradiction. An impulse to select, to pursue, and to reject specific essences insinuates itself into discourse. Why this animosity or this impatience? I do not disparage, nor subordinate, nor remove the circle from the realm of essence, when I think of the square and say it is no circle. Why then should I be angry if I find the one rather than the other? Evidently my discourse here is not pure contemplation. Of course, no essence is any other essence; but a clear spirit would not call any two essences incompatible. Their diversity is part of their being; they are because, each being eternally itself, the two are eternally different. If they are incompatible, I must ask: Incompatible for what purpose? Even in calling them contradictory, I am surreptitiously speaking for some hidden interest, which cannot put up with them both. There is an inertia or prior direction somewhere, in the region of what I call myself, that demands one of them, and rejects the other for the innocent crime of not being that one. The incongruous essence appearing offends me because I am wedded to an old one, and to its close relations. I will tolerate nothing but what I meant should come, what fills my niche, and falls in with my undertaking.

Irrelevance, incongruity, and contradiction are accordingly possible in discourse only because discourse is not a play of essences but a play of attention upon them; which attention is no impartial exercise of spirit but a manifestation of interest, intent, preference, and preoccupation. A hidden life is at work. If I deny this, because my scepticism eschews everything hidden, I must consistently abandon all dialectic and revert to undirected dreaming, without comments on my dream intended to be veridical: because if the least comment on my dreams were veridical I must begin at once to reject, in my comments, all the essences suggesting themselves which deviate from that particular dream I mean to describe. Meaning, which is my guide in discriminating one suggestion from another as being the right one, springs from beneath the surface; it is a nether influence. It is a witness to my psychic life going on beneath, which can be disturbed by the intrusion of one event, or furthered by another; and this subterranean impulse breaks out into judgements about the rightness and wrongness of essences—utterly absurd and unmeaning judgements if the essences were considered simply in themselves. If I feel that they clash, if I make a stumbling-block of their irrelevance or diversity, I prove that I am discoursing about them for an ulterior purpose, in the service of some alien interest. I am stringing my pearls; therefore I require them to be of a particular quality. I am a collector, not a poet; and what concerns me, even in the purest dialectic or the most desultory dream, is not to explore essence, but to gather experience. The psyche below is busy selecting her food, fortifying her cave, and discriminating her friends from her enemies; and in these meanderings of mine over the realm of essence, in spite of myself, I am only her scout.

By experience I understand a fund of wisdom gathered by living. I call it a fund of wisdom, rather than merely memory or discursive ideation, because experience accrues precisely when discrimination amongst given essences is keenest, when only the relevant is retained or perhaps noticed, and when the psyche sagaciously interprets data as omens favourable or unfavourable to her interests, as perilous or inviting, and, if she goes wrong, allows the event to correct her interpretation. I think it mere mockery to use the word experience for what is not learning or gathering knowledge of facts; if experience taught me nothing it would not be experience, but reverie. Experience accordingly presupposes intent and intelligence, and it also implies, as will appear presently, a natural world in which it is possible to learn to live better by practising the arts.

Intuition is an event, although it reveals only an essence; and in like manner discourse is an experience, even when its deliverance is mere dialectic. It is an experience for two reasons: first, because it is guided unawares by the efforts of the psyche to explore, not the realm of essence, but the world that controls her fortunes; and secondly, because the essences unrolled before it, apparently at random and for no reason, really convey knowledge; in reality they are manifestations to the psyche of that surrounding world which it concerns her to react upon wisely. Discourse is hers; and it is full of the names—since images not auditory may be names also—which she gives to her friends and enemies, and of her ingenious imaginations concerning their ways. However original the terms of discourse may be, under the control of the psyche and her environment they fall into certain rhythms; they run into familiar sequences; they become virtual and available knowledge of things, persons, nature, and the gods. Imagination would be very insecure and inconstant in these constructions, and they would not become automatic habits in discourse, if instinct within and nature without did not control the process of discourse, and dictate its occasions. So controlled, discourse becomes experience.

That discourse is secretly an experience, and may be turned into knowledge, becomes particularly evident when it is interrupted by shocks. Not only may an essence suddenly present itself which was not the essence I expected or should have welcomed, but the whole placid tenor of my thoughts may be arrested or overwhelmed. I may suffer a sort of momentary and conscious death, in that I survive to feel the extinction of all that made up my universe, and to face a blank, or a precipice. When in my placid discourse one thing seemed to contradict another, they were but rival images in the same field, and I had but to choose between them, and proceed with the argument. Shock contradicts nothing, but uproots the whole experience. The lights go out on the stage, and discourse loses its momentum.

In the sense of contradiction there is probably some element of shock. The purest æsthetic or logical contemplation hardly goes on without a throbbing accompaniment of interest, haste, reversals, and satisfactions; but these dramatic notes are merged in the counterpoint of the themes surveyed, and I think, prove, and enjoy without noticing that I do so. But when a clap of thunder deafens me, or a flash of lightning at once dazzles and blinds me, the fact that something has happened is far more obvious to me than just what it is that has occurred; and there are perhaps shocks internal to the psyche in which the tension of the event reaches a maximum, whilst the nature of it remains so obscure that perhaps my only sense of it is a question, a gasp, or a recoil. The feeling present in such a case is, with but little further qualification, the sheer feeling of experience.

Now experience of the most brutal and dumbest sort may be theoretically described, and described exhaustively, in terms of the successive intuition of essences; for loudness, dazzlingness, pain, or terror are essences or elements of essences like any other data; and when such essences are present, all is present that it is possible ever to feel in that direction, and with any degree of intensity. Utter blankness, intolerable strain, shrieking despair, are just the essences they are, and they are unrolled and revealed to intuition like any other essences. But such intuitions, being those proper to the most brutal and rudimentary life, have a suasion in them out of all proportion to their articulation, or rather, we might almost say, inversely proportional to it; as if the more an experience meant the less it cried out, and the more it cried out the less it meant. The purest discourse is (without noticing it) an experience, and the blindest experience (also without noticing it) is a discourse, since we should not call it experience if it contained no sense of passage, no experiential perspective; but in proportion as shock cancels discourse and obliterates its own background, experience becomes mere experience, and inarticulate.

In brute experience, or shock, I have not only a clear indication, for my ulterior reflection, that I exist, but a most imperious summons at that very moment to believe in my existence. Discourse, as I first disentangled the evidence for it from the pure intuition of essence, seemed to be a progressive observation of the permanent—studious attention perusing and registering the essential mutual relations of given terms. But now, when shock interrupts me, discourse suffers violence. The subject-matter itself takes up arms; one object leaves me in the lurch, while another, quite irrelevantly, assaults me. And since my discourse witnesses and records this revolution, I must now assert it to be a permanent knowledge of the changing.

Shocks come: if they did not come, if I had not pre-existed, if I had never been anything more than the intuition of this shock, then this shock would not be a shock in fact, but only the illusion of a shock, only the essence of shock speciously persuading me that something had happened, when in fact nothing had occurred. If the sense of shock does not deceive me, I must have passed from a state in which the shock was not yet, into the state in which the shock first startled me; and I must since have passed from that startled state into another, in which my intuition covers synthetically the coming, the nature, and the subsidence of that shock; so that I am aware how startled I was, without being startled afresh now. A wonderful and ambiguous presence of the absent and persistence of the receding, which is called memory. My objects have receded, yet I continue to consider them. They are no longer essences, but facts, and my consideration is not intuition of something given but faith in something absent, and a persistent indication of it as still the same object, although my image of it is constantly changing, is perhaps intermittent, and probably grows fainter, vaguer, and more erroneous at every instant.

Experience of shock, if not utterly delusive, accordingly establishes the validity of memory and of transitive knowledge. It establishes realism. If it be true that I have ever had any experience, I must not only have existed unawares in order to gather it, but I am justified in explicitly asserting a whole realm of existence, in which one event may contain realistic knowledge of another. Experience, even conceived most critically as a series of shocks overtaking one another and retained in memory, involves a world of independent existences deployed in an existing medium. Belief in experience is belief in nature, however vaguely nature may as yet be conceived, and every empiricist is a naturalist in principle, however hesitant his naturalism may be in practice.

Nevertheless shock, like any other datum, intrinsically presents an essence only, and might be nothing more; but in that case the dogmatic suasion of it (which alone lends interest to so blank an experience) would be an illusion. The intuition would be what it is, but it would be nobody’s intuition, and it would mean nothing. For I should not be a self, if that intuition made up my whole being, so that it involved no change in my condition, but was perhaps itself the whole universe. Shock will not suffer me, while it lasts, to entertain any such hypothesis. It is itself the most positive, if the blindest, of beliefs; it loudly proclaims an event; so that if by chance the change which I feel were merely a feeling within the unity of apperception, shock would be an illusion, in the only sense in which this can be said of any intuition: it would incite me to a false belief that something like the given essence existed. If the change has really occurred, and not merely been imagined, shock is not only intuition of change, but trouble in a process of change enveloping that intuition. I am right in positing a desultory experience in which this intuition is an incident. I am not a spectator watching this cataract, but a part of the water precipitated over the edge. Thus if being shocked was, as perhaps it ought to be, the first sensation in life, it proclaimed the existence of a previous state without sensation. Unless it is an illusion, which I cannot admit while I feel it, it implies variation in a voluminous vegetative life in which the sense of surprise is a true indication of novelty.

Before I had noticed shock, or consented to accept its witness, I had already admitted, on dialectical grounds, that discourse was a process; but now that I observe how shocks, more or less violent, interrupt discourse at every moment, I can call discourse experience. For now I see that in endeavouring to trace dialectical relations discourse is not itself dialectical. Sheer chance decides whether it shall pursue faithfully the theme it may have picked out, as sheer chance decided that it should pick up that theme in particular. In my theoretical bewilderment and helplessness before this absolute contingency of all themes and all data, I am steadied only by animal presumptions, habits, expectations, or omens, all of which my sceptical reflection must condemn as utterly arbitrary. I can only say that I am the sport of an unfathomable destiny; that in these shocks that fall upon me thick and fast, and in the calmer stretches between them, miscellaneous essences are revealed to me, most of them gratuitous and mutually irrelevant; and that if the current of them did not carry me, somewhat congenially, into a vortex of work and play, I should be condemned for ever to blank watching and to sheer wonder. The very belief in experience is a suggestion of instinct, not of experience itself. The steadfastness of my nature, doggedly retaining its prejudices and assuming its power, supplies and imposes a routine upon my experience which is far from existing in my direct intuitions, very shifty in their quality (even when signs of the same external object) and much mixed with dream. Even the naturalist has to make up by analogy and presumption (which perhaps he calls induction) the enormous spaces between and beyond his actual observations.

Belief in experience is the beginning of that bold instinctive art, more plastic than the instinct of most animals, by which man has raised himself to his earthly eminence: it opens the gates of nature to him, both within him and without, and enables him to transmute his apprehension, at first merely æsthetic, into mathematical science. This is so great a step that most minds cannot take it. They stumble, and remain entangled in poetry and in gnomic wisdom. Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood. Although they bring freedom in the end, the approach to them seems sacrificial, and many prefer to live in the glamour of intuition, not having the courage to believe in experience.