Is the existence of spirit evident to spirit, and involved in the presence of anything? Is its nature simple and obvious? I think there is something of which this may be said, but not of spirit; for by spirit I understand not only the passive intuition implied in any essences being given, but also the understanding and belief that may greet their presence. Even passive intuition is no datum; there is nothing evident except the given essence itself. Yet, as I have seen above, the mere prolongation of this presence, the recognition of this essence as identical with itself, and the survey of its elements in various orders, very soon impose upon me a distinction between this essence and my intuition of it. This intuition is a fact and an event, as the essence cannot be; so that even if spirit meant nothing but pure consciousness or the activity of a transcendental ego, it would need to be posited, in view of the felt continuity of discourse, and could not be an element in the given essences. If spirit were defined as the common quality of all appearances, distinguishing them from the rest of the realm of essence which does not appear, spirit would be reduced to an appearance itself. It would be like light, something seen, a luminousness in all objects, not what I understand by it, which is the seeing; not the coloured lights I may observe, but the exercise of sight as distinguished from blindness.

The common quality of all appearances is not spirit but mere Being; that simple and always obvious element to which I referred just now as given in all essences without distinction, and which some philosophers and saints have found so unutterably precious. This is all that is common to all possible appearances, considered in themselves; but animal tension is not altogether absent even in this abstruse contemplation, and the sense that appearances are assaulting me thickens my intuition of their essence into an apprehension of existence, which existence, having no idea of myself, I of course attribute to them, or to the abstract common element in their essences, pure Being, which thus becomes in my eyes absolute existence.

The present stimulus that awakens me out of my material lethargy and keeps my attention more or less taut is not spirit, although, of course, the birth of spirit is involved in my awakening. That stimulus is the strain and rumble of the universal flux, audible in my little sea-shell. It preserves the same ground-tone (that of a disturbance or a strain) no matter what image it may bring forth, or even if it brings forth no images but only a pervasive sense of swimming in safety and bliss. This budding sentiment of existence is a recognition not of spirit but of substance, of fact, of force, of an unfathomable mystery.

By spirit I understand the light of discrimination that marks in that pure Being differences of essence, of time, of place, of value; a living light ready to fall upon things, as they are spread out in their weight and motion and variety, ready to be lighted up. Spirit is a fountain of clearness, decidedly wind-blown and spasmodic, and possessing at each moment the natural and historical actuality of an event, not the imputed or specious actuality of a datum. Spirit, in a word, is no phenomenon, not sharing the æsthetic sort of reality proper to essences when given, nor that other sort proper to dynamic and material things; its peculiar sort of reality is to be intelligence in act. Spirit, or the intuitions in which it is realised, accordingly forms a new realm of being, silently implicated in the apparition of essences and in the felt pressure of nature, but requiring the existence of nature to create it, and to call up those essences before it. By spirit essences are transposed into appearances and things into objects of belief; and (as if to compensate them for that derogation from their native status) they are raised to a strange actuality in thought—a moral actuality which in their logical being or their material flux they had never aspired to have: like those rustics and servants at an inn whom a travelling poet may take note of and afterwards, to their astonishment, may put upon the stage with applause.

It is implied in these words, when taken as they are meant, that spirit is not a reality that can be observed; it does not figure among the dramatis personæ of the play it witnesses. As the author, nature, and the actors, things, do not emerge from the prompter’s box, or remove their make-up so as to exhibit themselves to me in their unvarnished persons, but are satisfied that I should know them only as artists (and I for my part am perfectly willing to stop there in my acquaintance with them); so the spirit in me which their art serves is content not to be put on the stage; that would be far from being a greater honour, or expressing a truer reality, than that which belongs to it as spectator, virtually addressed and consulted and required in everything that the theatre contrives. Spirit can never be observed as an essence is observed, nor encountered as a thing is encountered. It must be enacted; and the essence of it (for of course it has an essence) can be described only circumstantially, and suggested pregnantly. It is actualised in actualising something else, an image or a feeling or an intent or a belief; and it can be discovered only by implication in all discourse, when discourse itself has been posited. The witnesses to the existence of spirit are therefore the same as those to the existence of discourse; but when once discourse is admitted, the existence of spirit in it becomes self-evident; because discourse is a perusal of essence, or its recurring presence to spirit.

Now in discourse there is more than passive intuition; there is intent. This element also implies spirit, and in spirit as man possesses it intent or intelligence is almost always the dominant element. For this reason I shall find it impossible, when I come to consider the realm of spirit, to identify spirit with simple awareness, or with consciousness in the abstract sense of this abused word. Pure awareness or consciousness suffices to exemplify spirit; and there may be cold spirits somewhere that have merely that function; but it is not the only function that only spirits could perform; and the human spirit, having intent, expectation, belief, and eagerness, runs much thicker than that. Spirit is a category, not an individual being: and just as the realm of essence contains an infinite number of essences, each different from the rest, and each nothing but an essence, so the realm of spirit may contain any number of forms of spirit, each nothing but a spiritual fact. Spirit is a fruition, and there are naturally as many qualities of fruition as there are fruits to ripen. Spirit is accordingly qualified by the types of life it actualises, and is individuated by the occasions on which it actualises them. Each occasion generates an intuition numerically distinct, and brings to light an essence qualitatively different.

Let me suppose, by way of illustration, that there was a disembodied spirit addressed to the realm of truth in general, and seeing all things under the form of eternity. This would be a very special kind of spirit, and many an essence would be excluded from its intuition; for instance, the essence of surprise. No doubt it would congratulate itself on this incapacity, and say with Aristotle that there are things it is better not to know than to know, at least by experience. The essence of surprise involves ignorance of the future, and it could never be realised, or known by intuition, in a spirit to whom the future had always been known: and to know surprise by experience is the only way of knowing its essence. It might indeed be known by description, and defined as a feeling which animals have when they expect one thing and find another. Such a description may suggest the essence of surprise to me, who know by intuition what it is to expect and to find; but it would never suggest that essence to a spirit that had only descriptions to go by, and who could reach a conception of “expecting” and of “finding” only in symbols that translated their transitive natures into synthetic pictures. Thus the essence of surprise would remain for ever excluded from intuition in a spirit that saw all things under the form of eternity.

The occasions on which spirit arises in man are the vicissitudes of his animal life: that is why spirit in him runs so thick. In intent, in belief, in emotion a given essence takes on a value which to pure spirit it could not have. The essence then symbolises an object to which the animal is tentatively addressed, or an event through which he has just laboured, or which he is preparing to meet. This attitude of the animal may be confined to inner readjustments in the psyche, not open to gross external observation; yet it may all the more directly be raised to consciousness in the form of attention, expectation, deliberation, memory, or desire. These sentiments form a moving but habitual background for any particular essence considered; they frame it in, not only pictorially in a sensuous perspective, but morally, by its ulterior suggestions, and by the way in which, in surveying the whole field of intuition, that particular feature in it is approached or attacked or rejected. In such settings given essences acquire their felt meanings; and if they should be uprooted from that soil and exhibited in isolation, they would no longer mean the same thing to the spirit. Like a note in a melody, or a word in a sentence, they appeared in a field of essence greater than they; they were never more than a term or a feature within it. For this reason I imagine that I see things and not essences; the essences I see incidentally are embedded in the voluminous ever-present essences of the past, the world, myself, the future; master-presences which express attitudes of mine appropriate not to an essence—which is given—but to a thing—which though not given enlists all my conviction and concern.

Thus intelligence in man, being the spiritual transcript of an animal life, is transitional and impassioned. It approaches its objects by a massive attack, groping for them and tentatively spying them before it discovers them unmistakably. It is energetic and creative, in the sense of slowly focussing its object within the field of intuition in the midst of felt currents with a felt direction, themselves the running expression of animal endeavours. All this intuition of turbulence and vitality, which a cold immortal spirit could never know, fills the spirit of man, and renders any contemplation of essences in their own realm only an interlude for him or a sublimation or an incapacity. It also renders him more conscious than a purer spirit would be of his own spirit. For just as I was able to find evidence of intuition in discourse, which in the motionless vision of essence would have eluded me, so in intent, expectation, belief, and emotion, the being of my thoughts rises up and almost hides the vision of my object. Although I myself am a substance in flux, on the same level as the material thing that confronts me, the essences that reveal my own being are dramatic and moral, whereas those that express the thing are sensuous; and these dramatic and moral essences, although their presence involves spirit exactly in the same way, and no more deeply, than the presence of the sensuous essences does, yet seem to suggest its presence more directly and more voluminously.

Hence the popular identification of spirit with the heart, the breath, the blood, or the brain; and the notion that my substantial self and the spirit within me are identical. In fact, they are the opposite poles of my being, and I am neither the one nor the other exclusively. If I am spiritually proud and choose to identify myself with the spirit, I shall be compelled to regard my earthly person and my human thoughts as the most alien and the sorriest of accidents; and my surprise and mortification will never cease at the way in which my body and its world monopolise my attention. If on the contrary I modestly plead guilty to being the biped that I seem, I shall be obliged to take the spirit within me for a divine stranger, in whose heaven it is not given me to live, but who miraculously walks in my garden in the cool of the evening. Yet in reality, incarnation is no anomaly, and the spirit is no intruder. It is as much at home in any animal as in any heaven. In me, it takes my point of view; it is the voice of my humanity; and what other mansions it may have need not trouble me. Each will provide a suitable shrine for its resident deity and its native oracle. It is a prejudice to suppose that spirit is contaminated by the flesh; it is generated there; and the more varied its instruments and sources are, the more copiously it will be manifested, and the more unmistakably.

Spiritual minds are the first to recognise the empire of the flesh over the spirit in the senses, the passions, and even in a too vivid imagination; and they call these influences the snares of the adversary. I think they are right in condemning as vain or carnal any impulses which would disrupt the health of the soul, either directly in the individual body, or indirectly by loosening such bonds with society as are requisite for human happiness. I also think, however, that moralists of this type overlook two considerations of the greatest moment, by which all the metaphysical background of their maxims is removed, and what is reasonable in them is put on a naturalistic basis. One consideration is that, on a small scale and in its own key, every impulse in man or beast bears its little flame of spirit. How much longing, how much laughter, how much perception, how much policy and art in those vices and crimes which the moralist thinks fatal to spirit! They may render a finer thing impossible (which the moralist should bethink himself to depict more attractively), but in themselves they are full of life and light. For this reason crimes and vices, together with horrible adventures and the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, are the chosen theme of novelists and playwrights; and the poor public, having hardly any other intellectual pleasure, gloats on these fictions, as an imaginative escape from the moral penury not only of their work, but of their religion. The poets are far more genuine lovers of spirit in this than their mentors, whose official morality is probably quite worldly, and insensible to any actually spiritual achievement, because such achievements are necessarily fugitive, invisible, and un-productive. The devil was an angel essentially; it was only in the complicated politics of this world that he missed his way, and became an enemy of the highest good.

The other consideration that is overlooked is that the spirit which may discern this highest good is itself a natural passion, and not less an expression of the flesh—though more justly and broadly—than the random impulses it condemns. Consider, for instance, the earnestness with which evil is condemned. If this evil is pain, the objection to it could not be more instinctive. Why should pure spirit detest pain? A material accident in the body here absorbs my attention, and strangely persuades me to be utterly rebellious and impatient at being so absorbed. The psyche, or the principle of bodily life, is somehow striving against the event or stimulus which produced the pain (a perfectly harmless essence to contemplate in itself), because the psyche is congenitally a system or cycle of habits which that obnoxious event interrupts. It is this material pressure and effort not to be stifled or rent in any of her operations that the psyche imposes on the spirit, commanding it to pronounce it a terrible evil that she should be rent or stifled. These strange and irrational pronouncements of spirit, calling events good or evil, are accordingly grounded on nothing but on a creeping or shrinking of the flesh. If the evil is moral—the eventual defeat of some ideal I cherish for myself, my children, or my country—what has fixed this ideal, or declared it to be a good? Suppose this ideal is a life glorious and unending; is it not obvious that nothing but the momentum of life, already accidentally working in myself, my children, or my country, could possibly demand life or determine what forms of life would be glorious for us? I will not pursue this topic: if the reader does not understand, he probably never will.

Let me turn to the most intellectual powers of spirit—attention, synthesis, perception. These too are voices loudly issuing from the heart of material existence, and proclaiming their origin there not only by their occasions and external connections, but by their inmost moral nature. Why does the spirit stop to collect or to recollect anything? Why not range undisturbed and untrammelled over image after image, without referring one to another or attempting (always in vain) to preserve the design of vanished images, or the order of their appearance, even through the lapse of the sensible elements that filled them in? Because the animal is forming habits. The psyche is plastic; no impression can endure unchanged, as if it had been a substantial little thing in itself, and not a mode, a ripple, in an inherited, transmissible, ever rejuvenated substance. Scarcely is the impression received, but it merges in the general sensitiveness or responsiveness of the organ affected, modifying its previous way of reacting on some natural object, an object reported not by that impression alone, but by many others: so that the synthetic unity of apperception (that most radical of transcendental principles) obeys a compulsion peculiar to animal economy, which no pure spirit would need to share, the compulsion to use things as materials, to drop them and forge ahead, or to eat and to digest them: for the drinking in of light through the eyes, or of currents from other organs, thereby rearranging the habits of the nervous system, is very like the consumption of food, restoring the vegetative functions. Synthesis in thought, correlation, scope, or (as the phrase is) taking things in, is laborious piety on the spirit’s part in subservience to the flesh. It is the mental fruit of training, of care: an inner possession rewarding an outer fidelity.

Pure spirit would never need to apperceive at all; this is an animal exigency that distracts it from intuition. There is unity in intuition too, of a nebulous sort, as there must be unity in the universe, since it is all there is, however loose its structure or unmarked its limits. Yet in intuition, as in cloud-land, the field is in the act of changing pervasively; every part shifts more or less. Any feature you may distinguish fades and refashions itself irresponsibly; and pure spirit would be perfectly content that it should do so. Perhaps, if it was a young spirit, it would positively whip up the hoop, or blow and distend the bubble, for the fun of seeing it run or burst more gloriously; and it would be happy to think there was no harm done, and nothing left over. The scene would then be cleared for something utterly fresh. The synthetic unity of apperception is something imposed by things on animals, when these things exercise a seductive charm or threaten mischief. Attention cries halt, it reconnoitres, it takes note, it throws a lassoo over the horses of Poseidon, lord of the flux. And why? Because the organs of spirit are structures; they are mechanisms instituted in nature to keep doing certain things, roughly appropriate to the environment, itself roughly constant. It is to this approximate fixity of function and habit that spirit owes its distinct ideas, the names it gives to things, and its faith in things, which is a true revelation of their existence—knowledge of them stored for use.

Perception, too, would be a miracle and an impossibility to a spirit conceived as alien to matter. Perception is a stretching forth of intent beyond intuition; it is an exercise of intelligence. Intelligence, the most ideal function of spirit, is precisely its point of closest intimacy with matter, of most evident subservience to material modes of being. The life of matter (at least on the human scale, if not at every depth) is a flux, a passage from this to that, almost forbidding anything to be simply itself, by immediately turning it, in some respect, into something different. If the psyche were a closed round of motions, the spirit it generated (if it generated spirit at all) would certainly not be perceptive or cognitive, but in some way emotional or musical—the music of those spheres. But the round of motions which the psyche is actually wound up to make must be executed in a changeful and precarious environment, not to speak of changes in her own substance. She must hunt, fight, find a mate, protect the offspring, defend the den and the treasure. Perception, intelligence, knowledge accurately transcribe this mode of being, profoundly alien to repose in intuition or to drifting reverie. Perception points to what it does not, save by pointing, know to exist; knowledge is only of the past or the future, both of which are absent; and intelligence talks and talks to an interlocutor—the mind of another man or god or an eventual self of one’s own—whom it can never see and whose replies, conveyed (if at all) through material channels, it is never sure exist morally, or could be understood if they did exist. There is no dilemma in the choice between animal faith and reason, because reason is only a form of animal faith, and utterly unintelligible dialectically, although full of a pleasant alacrity and confidence, like the chirping of birds. The suasion of sanity is physical: if you cut your animal traces, you run mad.

It is impossible to say everything at once, and I have been contrasting intelligence with intuition, as if intuition were less subject than intelligence to physical inspiration, or had an independent source. This is not the case; intuition is itself pathetically animal. Why should I have awaked at all? Can anything, inwardly considered, be more gratuitous than consciousness? I am afraid I must be constituted differently from other people, at least in the reflective faculty, because it astonishes me to hear so many philosophers talking of spirit as if its existence explained itself, and denying the possibility of matter; whereas to me it seems credible, though certainly unnecessary a priori, that matter should exist without being consulted, for it cannot help itself, suffers nothing, and has no reason to protest; and its existence is antecedently just as plausible as its non-existence. But the existence of spirit really demands an explanation; it is a tremendous paradox to itself, not to say a crying scandal—I mean from a scientific or logical point of view, because treated as a family secret the scandal is often delicious, and privately it is in this festive and poetic medium that I love to dwell. Spirit, since it can ask how it came to exist, has a right to put the question and to look for an answer. And it may perhaps find an answer of a sort, although not one which spirit, in all its moods, will think satisfactory.

Fact can never be explained, since only another fact could explain it: therefore the existence of a universe rather than no universe, or of one sort of universe rather than another, must be accepted without demur. In this very irrationality or contingency of existence, which is inevitable in any case, I find a clue to the strange presence of spirit in this world. Spirit, the wakefulness of attention, could not have arisen of its own accord; it contains no bias, no principle of choice, but is an impartial readiness to know. It never could have preferred one thing to another, nor preferred existence for itself to nonexistence, nor vice versa. Attention is not a principle that can select the themes that shall attract attention: to select them it must already have thought of them. As far as its own nature is concerned, attention is equally ready to fall on the just and on the unjust; spirit is equally ready to speak any language, to quicken any body, and to adopt any interest. An instance of spirit cannot be determined by spirit itself either in its occasion, its intensity, or the æsthetic character of the essence presented to it. Chance, matter, fate—some non-spiritual principle or other—must have determined what the spirit in me shall behold, and what it shall endure. Some internal fatality, their own brute existence and wilfulness, must be responsible for the fact that things are as they are, and not otherwise. If any instance of spirit was to arise anywhere, the ground of it (if I speak of grounds at all) must have been irrational. Spirit has the innocence of a child; it pleads not guilty; at most it has become, without knowing how, an accomplice after the fact. It is astonished at everything. It is essentially, wherever it may be found, unsubstantial and expressive; it is essentially secondary. Even if in fact some instance of spirit, some isolated intuition, sprang miraculously into being in an absolute void, and nothing else had ever existed or would exist, yet logically and in its own eyes that intuition would be secondary, since no principle internal to spirit, but only brute chance, would be expressed in the existence of that intuition, and in the arbitrary choice of the essence that happened to appear there. Spirit is therefore of its very nature and by its own confession the voice of something else: it speaks not of itself, but of the Father that sent it. I am accordingly prepared to find some arbitrary world or other in existence; and since this arbitrary world obviously has spirit in it, my problem is reduced to inquiring what features, in this arbitrary existing world, can have called spirit forth, and made it their living witness.

I postpone the detail of this inquiry, but I have already indicated how the life of nature is expressed in the chief phases of spirit. Wakefulness, common to all these phases, is itself a witness to animal unrest, appetition, alarm, concern, preparation. It would be inane, as well as impossible, for me to open my eyes, if in looking I did not identify my spirit with my material person in its material predicaments, raising to an actual hypostasis in consciousness its material sensitiveness to outlying things. Electric influences issuing from these allow my organs to adjust themselves before grosser contact occurs; and then intuition is a premonition of material fusion. Organic systems about to collide send forth this conscious cry or salutation. The current established may prevent a ruder shock, or may precipitate it, according to the prepared instinct of the receivers. The intuition expresses the initial fusion involved in the distant response, as if a ghostly messenger of oncoming things had rushed like a forerunner into the audience chamber, announcing their arrival. It is only messengers that reach the spirit, even in the thick of the fray; but by lending credence to their hot reports, it can live through the battle, lost in its mists and passions, and thinking itself to give and to receive the blows.

For a man, and especially for a philosopher, to suggest that spirit does not exist may accordingly pass for a delicious absurdity, and the best of unconscious comedy. If it had been some angel that denied it, because in his serenity and selflessness he could not discover that he was alive, we might regard the denial of spirit as the highest proof of spirituality: but in a material creature struggling to see and to think, and tossed from one illusion and passion to another, such a denial seems not only stupid, but ungracious; for a man ought to be very proud of this dubious spark in his embers, and nurse it more tenderly than the life of a frail child. Nevertheless I think that those who deny the existence of spirit, although their language is rash and barbarous, are honestly facing the facts, and are on the trail of a truth. Spirit is too near them for them to stop at it in their eagerness to count their visible possessions; and when they hear the word used, it irritates them, because they suppose it means some sort of magical power or metaphysical caloric, alleged to keep bodies alive, and to impose purposes on nature; purposes which such a prior spirit, being supernatural and immortal, could have had no reason for choosing. Such a dynamic spirit would indeed be nothing but an immaterial matter, a second physical substance distinguished from its grosser partner only in that we know nothing of it, but assign to its operation all those results which seem to us inexplicable. Belief in such a spirit is simply belief in magic; innocent enough at first when it is merely verbal and childish, but becoming perverse when defended after it has ceased to be spontaneous. I am not concerned with spirit of that sort, nor with any kind of nether influences. The investigation of substance and of the laws of events is the province of physics, and I call everything that science may discover in that direction physical and not spiritual. Even if the substance of things should be sentiency, or a bevy of souls, or a single intense Absolute, it would be nothing but matter to what I call spirit. It would exercise only material functions in kindling the flame of actual intuition, and bearing my light thoughts like bubbles upon its infinite flood. I do not know what matter is in itself: but what metaphysical idealists call spirit, if it is understood to be responsible for what goes on in the world and in myself, and to be the “reality” of these appearances, is, in respect to my spiritual existence, precisely what I call matter; and I find the description of this matter which the natural sciences supply much more interesting than that given by the idealists, much more beautiful, and much more likely to be true. That there is no spirit in the interstices of matter, where the magicians look for it, nor at the heart of matter, where many metaphysicians would place it, needs no proof to one who understands what spirit is; because spirit is in another realm of being altogether, and needs the being and movement of matter, by its large sweeping harmonies, to generate it, and give it wings. It would be a pity to abandon this consecrated word to those who are grubbing for the atoms of substance, or speculating about a logic in history, or tabulating the capers of ghosts; especially as there is the light of intuition, the principle of actuality in vision and feeling, to call by that name. The popular uses of the word spiritual support this definition of it; because intuition, when it thoroughly dominates animal experience, transmutes it into pure flame, and renders it religious or poetical, which is what is commonly meant by spiritual.