The situation so created gave the literary philosophers an excellent chance to return to the attack and to swallow and digest the new-born mechanism in their facile systems. Theologians and metaphysicians in one quarter and psychologists in another found it easy and inevitable to treat the whole mechanical world as a mere idea. In that case, it is true, the only existences that remained remained entirely without calculable connections; everything was a divine trance or a shower of ideas falling by chance through the void. But this result might not be unwelcome. It fell in well enough with that love of emotional issues, that want of soberness and want of cogency, which is so characteristic of modern philosophers. Christian theology still remained the background and chief point of reference for speculation; if its eclectic dogmas could be in part supported or in part undermined, that const.i.tuted a sufficient literary success, and what became of science was of little moment in comparison.
[Sidenote: Men of science not speculative.]
Science, to be sure, could very well take care of itself and proceeded in its patient course without caring particularly what status the metaphysicians might a.s.sign to it. Not to be a philosopher is even an advantage for a man of science, because he is then more willing to adapt his methods to the state of knowledge in his particular subject, without insisting on ultimate intelligibility; and he has perhaps more joy of his discoveries than he might have if he had discounted them in his speculations. Darwin, for instance, did more than any one since Newton to prove that mechanism is universal, but without apparently believing that it really was so, or caring about the question at all. In natural history, observation has not yet come within range of accurate processes; it merely registers habits and traces empirical derivations.
Even in chemistry, while measure and proportion are better felt, the ultimate units and the radical laws are still problematical. The recent immense advances in science have been in acquaintance with nature rather than in insight. Greater complexity, greater regularity, greater _naturalness_ have been discovered everywhere; the profound a.n.a.logies in things, their common evolution, have appeared unmistakably; but the inner texture of the process has not been laid bare.
This cautious peripheral attack, which does so much honour to the scientific army and has won it so many useful victories, is another proof that science is nothing but common knowledge extended. It is willing to reckon in any terms and to study any subject-matter; where it cannot see necessity it will notice law; where laws cannot be stated it will describe habits; where habits fail it will cla.s.sify types; and where types even are indiscernible it will not despise statistics. In this way studies which are scientific in spirit, however loose their results, may be carried on in social matters, in political economy, in anthropology, in psychology. The historical sciences, also, philology and archaeology, have reached tentatively very important results; it is enough that an intelligent man should gather in any quarter a rich fund of information, for the movement of his subject to pa.s.s somehow to his mind: and if his apprehension follows that movement--not breaking in upon it with extraneous matter--it will be scientific apprehension.
[Sidenote: Confusion in semi-moral subjects.]
What confuses and r.e.t.a.r.ds science in these ambiguous regions is the difficulty of getting rid of the foreign element, or even of deciding what the element native to the object is. In political economy, for instance, it is far from clear whether the subject is moral, and therefore to be studied and expressed dialectically, or whether it is descriptive, and so in the end a matter of facts and of mechanics. Are you formulating an interest or tracing a sequence of events? And if both simultaneously, are you studying the world in order to see what acts, in a given situation, would serve your purpose and so be right, or are you taking note of your own intentions, and of those of other people, in order to infer from them the probable course of affairs? In the first case you are a moralist observing nature in order to use it; you are defining a policy, and that definition is not knowledge of anything except of your own heart. Neither you nor any one else may ever take such a single-minded and unchecked course in the world as the one you are excogitating. No one may ever have been guided in the past by any such absolute plan.
For this same reason, if (to take up the other supposition) you are a naturalist studying the actual movement of affairs, you would do well not to rely on the conscious views or intentions of anybody. A natural philosopher is on dangerous ground when he uses psychological or moral terms in his calculation. If you use such terms--and to forbid their use altogether would be pedantic--you should take them for conventional literary expressions, covering an unsolved problem; for these views and intentions have a brief and inconsequential tenure of life and their existence is merely a sign for certain conjunctions in nature, where processes hailing from afar have met in a man, soon to pa.s.s beyond him.
If they figure as causes in nature, it is only because they represent the material processes that have brought them into being. The existential element in mental facts is not so remote from matter as Descartes imagined. Even if we are not prepared to admit with Democritus that matter is what makes them up (as it well might if "matter" were taken in a logical sense)[B] we should agree that their substance is in mechanical flux, and that their form, by which they become moral unities, is only an ideal aspect of that moving substance. Moral unities are created by a point of view, as right and left are, and for that reason are not efficacious; though of course the existences they enclose, like the things lying to the left and to the right, move in unison with the rest of nature.
People doubtless do well to keep an eye open for morals when they study physics, and _vice versa_, since it is only by feeling how the two spheres hang together that the Life of Reason can be made to walk on both feet. Yet to discriminate between the two is no scholastic subtlety. There is the same practical inconvenience in taking one for the other as in trying to gather grapes from thistles. A hybrid science is sterile. If the reason escapes us, history should at least convince us of the fact, when we remember the issue of Aristotelian physics and of cosmological morals. Where the subject-matter is ambiguous and the method double, you have scarcely reached a result which seems plausible for the moment, when a rival school springs up, adopting and bringing forward the submerged element in your view, and rejecting your achievement altogether. A seesaw and endless controversy thus take the place of a steady, co-operative advance. This disorder reigns in morals, metaphysics, and psychology, and the conflicting schools of political economy and of history loudly proclaim it to the world.
[Sidenote: "Physic of metaphysic begs defence."]
The modesty of men of science, their aversion (or incapacity) to carry their principles over into speculation, has left the greater part of physics or the theory of existence to the metaphysicians. What they have made of it does not concern us here, since the result has certainly not been a science; indeed they have obscured the very notion that there should be a science of all existence and that metaphysics, if it is more than a name for ultimate physics, can be nothing but dialectic, which does not look toward existence at all. But the prevalence of a mythical physics, purporting to describe the structure of the universe in terms quite other than those which scientific physics could use, has affected this scientific physics and seriously confused it. Its core, in mechanics, to be sure, could not be touched; and the detail even of natural history and chemistry could not be disfigured: but the general aspect of natural history could be rendered ambiguous in the doctrine of evolution; while in psychology, which attempted to deal with that half of the world which Descartes had not subjected to mechanism, confusion could hold undisputed sway.
[Sidenote: Evolution by mechanism.]
There is a sense in which the notion of evolution is involved in any mechanical system. Descartes indeed had gone so far as to describe, in strangely simple terms, how the world, with all its detail, might have been produced by starting any motion anywhere in the midst of a plenum at rest. The idea of evolution could not be more curtly put forth; so much so that Descartes had to arm himself against the inevitable charge that he was denying the creation, by protesting that his doctrine was a supposition contrary to fact, and that though the world _might_ have been so formed, it was really created as Genesis recorded. Moreover, in antiquity, every Ionian philosopher had conceived a gradual crystallisation of nature; while Empedocles, in his magnificent oracles, had antic.i.p.ated Darwin"s philosophy without Darwin"s knowledge. It is clear that if the forces that hold an organism together are mechanical, and therefore independent of the ideal unities they subtend, those forces suffice to explain the origin of the organism, and can have produced it. Darwin"s discoveries, like every other advance in physical insight, are nothing but filling for that abstract a.s.surance. They show us how the supposed mechanism really works in one particular field, in one stage of its elaboration. As earlier naturalists had shown us how mechanical causes might produce the miracle of the sunrise and the poetry of the seasons, so Darwin showed us how similar causes might secure the adaptation of animals to their habitat. Evolution, so conceived, is nothing but a detailed account of mechanical origins.
[Sidenote: Evolution by ideal attraction.]
At the same time the word evolution has a certain pomp and glamour about it which fits ill with so prosaic an interpretation. In the unfolding of a bud we are wont to see, as it were, the fulfilment of a predetermined and glorious destiny; for the seed was an epitome or condensation of a full-blown plant and held within it, in some sort of potential guise, the very form which now peeps out in the young flower. Evolution suggests a prior involution or contraction and the subsequent manifestation of an innate ideal. Evolution should move toward a fixed consummation the approaches to which we might observe and measure. Yet evolution, in this prophetic sense of the word, would be the exact denial of what Darwin, for instance, was trying to prove. It would be a return to Aristotelian notions of heredity and potential being; for it was the essence of Aristotle"s physics--of which his theology was an integral part and a logical capping--that the forms which beings approached pre-existed in other beings from which they had been inherited, and that the intermediate stages during which the b.u.t.terfly shrank to a grub could not be understood unless we referred them to their origin and their destiny. The physical essence and potency of seeds lay in their ideal relations, not in any actual organisation they might possess in the day of their eclipse and slumber. An egg evolved into a chicken not by mechanical necessity--for an egg had a comparatively simple structure--but by virtue of an ideal harmony in things; since it was natural and fitting that what had come from a hen should lead on to a hen again. The ideal nature possessed by the parent, hovering over the pa.s.sive seed, magically induced it to grow into the parent"s semblance; and growth was the gradual approach to the perfection which this ancestral essence prescribed. This was why Aristotle"s G.o.d, though in character an unmistakable ideal, had to be at the same time an actual existence; since the world would not have known which way to move or what was its inner ideal, unless this ideal, already embodied somewhere else, drew it on and infused movement and direction into the world"s structureless substance.
The underlying Platonism in this magical physics is obvious, since the natures that Aristotle made to rule the world were eternal natures. An individual might fail to be a perfect man or a perfect monkey, but the specific human or simian ideal, by which he had been formed in so far as he was formed at all, was not affected by this accidental resistance in the matter at hand, as an adamantine seal, even if at times the wax by defect or impurity failed to receive a perfect impression, would remain unchanged and ready to be stamped perpetually on new material.
[Sidenote: If species are evolved they cannot guide evolution.]
The contrast is obvious between this Platonic physics and a naturalism like that of Darwin. The point of evolution, as selection produces it, is that new species may arise. The very t.i.tle of Darwin"s book "The Origin of Species" is a denial of Aristotelianism and, in the pregnant sense, of evolution. It suggests that the type approached by each generation may differ from that approached by the previous one; that not merely the degree of perfection, but the direction of growth, may vary. The individual is not merely unfolded from an inner potentiality derived from a like ancestor and carrying with it a fixed eternal ideal, but on the contrary the very ground plan of organisation may gradually change and a new form and a new ideal may appear. Spontaneous variations--of course mechanically caused[C]--may occur and may modify the hereditary form of animals. These variations, superposed upon one another, may in time const.i.tute a nature wholly unlike its first original. This accidental, c.u.mulative evolution accordingly justifies a declaration of moral liberty. I am not obliged to aspire to the nature my father aspired to, for the ground of my being is partly new. In me nature is making a novel experiment. I am the adoring creator of a new spiritual good. My duties have shifted with my shifting faculties, and the ideal which I propose to myself, and alone can honestly propose, is unprecedented, the expression of a moving existence and without authority beyond the range of existences congruous with mine.
[Sidenote: Intrusion of optimism.]
All that is scientific or Darwinian in the theory of evolution is accordingly an application of mechanism, a proof that mechanism lies at the basis of life and morals. The Aristotelian notion of development, however, was too deeply rooted in tradition for it to disappear at a breath. Evolution as conceived by Hegel, for instance, or even by Spencer, retained Aristotelian elements, though these were disguised and hidden under a cloud of new words. Both identify evolution with progress, with betterment; a notion which would naturally be prominent in any one with enlightened sympathies living in the nineteenth century, when a new social and intellectual order was forcing itself on a world that happened largely to welcome the change, but a notion that has nothing to do with natural science. The fittest to live need not be those with the most harmonious inner life nor the best possibilities.
The fitness might be due to numbers, as in a political election, or to tough fibre, as in a tropical climate. Of course a form of being that circ.u.mstances make impossible or hopelessly laborious had better dive under and cease for the moment to be; but the circ.u.mstances that render it inopportune do not render it essentially inferior. Circ.u.mstances have no power of that kind; and perhaps the worst incident in the popular acceptance of evolution has been a certain brutality thereby introduced into moral judgment, an abdication of human ideals, a mocking indifference to justice, under cover of respect for what is bound to be, and for the rough economy of the world. Disloyalty to the good in the guise of philosophy had appeared also among the ancients, when their political ethics had lost its authority, just as it appeared among us when the prestige of religion had declined. The Epicureans sometimes said that one should pursue pleasure because all the animals did so, and the Stoics that one should fill one"s appointed place in nature, because such was the practice of clouds and rivers.
[Sidenote: Evolution according to Hegel.]
Hegel possessed a keen scent for instability in men"s att.i.tudes and opinions; he had no need of Darwin"s facts to convince him that in moral life, at least, there were no permanent species and that every posture of thought was an untenable half-way station between two others. His early contact with Protestant theology may have predisposed him to that opinion. At any rate he had no sympathy with that Platonism that allowed everything to have its eternal ideal, with which it might ultimately be identified. Such ideals would be finite, they would arrest the flux, and they would try to break loose from their enveloping conditions. Hegel was no moralist in the Socratic sense, but a naturalist seeking formulas for the growth of moral experience. Instead of questioning the heart, he somewhat satirically described its history. At the same time he was heir to that mythology which had deified the genetic or physical principle in things, and though the traditional myths suffered cruel operations at his hands, and often died of explanation, the mythical principle itself remained untouched and was the very breath of his nostrils. He never doubted that the formula he might find for the growth of experience would be also the ultimate good. What other purpose could the world have than to express the formula according to which it was being generated?
In this honest conviction we see the root, perhaps, of that distaste for correct physics that prevails among many who call themselves idealists.
If physics were for some reason to be adored, it would be disconcerting to find in physics nothing but atoms and a void. It is hard to understand, however, why a fanciful formula expressing the evolution of this perturbed universe, and painting it no better than it is, should be more worshipful than an exact formula meant to perform the same office.
A myth that enlarged the world and promised a complete transformation of its character might have its charms; but the improvement is not obvious that accrues by making the drift of things, just as it drifts, its own standard. Yet for Hegel it mattered nothing how unstable all ideals might be, since the only use of them was to express a principle of transition, and this principle was being realised, eternally and unawares, by the self-devouring and self-transcending purposes rolling in the flux.
[Sidenote: The conservative interpretation.]
This philosophy might not be much relished if it were more frankly expressed; yet something of the sort floats vaguely before most minds when they think of evolution. The types of being change, they say: in this sense the Aristotelian notion of a predetermined form unfolding itself in each species has yielded to a more correct and more dynamic physics. But the changes, so people imagine, express a predetermined ideal, no longer, of course, the ideal of these specific things, but one overarching the cosmic movement. The situation might be described by saying that this is Aristotle"s view adapted to a world in which there is only one species or only one individual. The earlier phases of life are an imperfect expression of the same nature which the later phases express more fully. Hence the triumphant march of evolution and the a.s.sumption that whatever is later is necessarily better than what went before. If a child were simply the partial expression of a man, his single desire would be to grow up, and when he was grown up he would embody all he had been striving for and would be happy for ever after.
So if man were nothing but a halting reproduction of divinity and destined to become G.o.d, his whole destiny would be fulfilled by apotheosis. If this apotheosis, moreover, were an actual future event, something every man and animal was some day to experience, evolution might really have a final goal, and might lead to a new and presumably better sort of existence--existence in the eternal. Somewhat in this fashion evolution is understood by the party that wish to combine it with a refreshed patristic theology.
[Sidenote: The radical one.]
There is an esoteric way, however, of taking these matters which is more in sympathy both with natural evolution and with transcendental philosophy. If we a.s.sert that evolution is infinite, no substantive goal can be set to it. The goal will be the process itself, if we could only open our eyes upon its beauty and necessity. The apotheosis will be retroactive, nay, it has already taken place. The insight involved is mystical, yet in a way more just to the facts than any promise of ulterior blisses. For it is not really true that a child has no other ideal than to become a man. Childhood has many an ideal of its own, many a beauty and joy irrelevant to manhood, and such that manhood is incapable of retaining or containing them. If the ultimate good is really to contain and retain all the others, it can hardly be anything but their totality--the infinite history of experience viewed under the form of eternity. At that remove, however, the least in the kingdom of Heaven is even as the greatest, and the idea of evolution, as of time, is "taken up into a higher unity." There could be no real pre-eminence in one man"s works over those of another; and if faith, or insight into the equal service done by all, still seemed a substantial privilege reserved for the elect, this privilege, too, must be an illusion, since those who do not know how useful and necessary they are must be as useful and necessary as those who do. An absolute preference for knowledge or self-consciousness would be an unmistakably human and finite ideal--something to be outgrown.
[Sidenote: Megalomania.]
What practically survives in these systems, when their mysticism and naturalism have had time to settle, is a clear enough standard. It is a standard of inclusion and quant.i.ty. Since all is needful, and the justifying whole is infinite, there would seem to be a greater dignity in the larger part. As the best copy of a picture, other things being equal, would be one that represented it all, so the best expression of the world, next to the world itself, would be the largest portion of it any one could absorb. Progress would then mean annexation. Growth would not come by expressing better an innate soul which involved a particular ideal, but by a.s.similating more and more external things till the original soul, by their influence, was wholly recast and unrecognisable.
This moral agility would be true merit; we should always be "striving onward." Life would be a sort of demonic vortex, boiling at the centre and omnivorous at the circ.u.mference, till it finally realised the supreme vocation of vortices, to have "their centre everywhere and their circ.u.mference nowhere." This somewhat troubled situation might seem sublime to us, transformed as we too should be; and so we might reach the most remarkable and doubtless the "highest" form of optimism--optimism in h.e.l.l.
[Sidenote: Chaos in the theory of mind.]
Confusing as these cross-currents and revulsions may prove in the field where mechanism is more or less at home, in the field of material operations, they are nothing to the primeval chaos that still broods over the other hemisphere, over the mental phase of existence. The difficulty is not merely that no mechanism is discovered or acknowledged here, but that the phenomena themselves are ambiguous, and no one seems to know when he speaks of mind whether he means something formal and ideal, like Platonic essences and mathematical truths, or reflection and intelligence, or sensation possessing external causes and objects, or finally that ultimate immediacy or brute actuality which is characteristic of any existence. Other even vaguer notions are doubtless often designated by the word psychical; but these may suffice for us to recognise the initial dilemmas in the subject and the futility of trying to build a science of mind, or defining the relation of mind to matter, when it is not settled whether mind means the form of matter, as with the Platonists, or the effect of it, as with the materialists, or the seat and false knowledge of it, as with the transcendentalists, or perhaps after all, as with the pan-psychists, mind means exactly matter itself.[D]
[Sidenote: Origin of self-consciousness.]
To see how equivocal everything is in this region, and possibly to catch some glimpse of whatever science or sciences might some day define it, we may revert for a moment to the origin of human notions concerning the mind. If either everything or nothing that men came upon in their primitive day-dream had been continuous in its own category and traceable through the labyrinth of the world, no mind and no self-consciousness need ever have appeared at all. The world might have been as magical as it pleased; it would have remained single, one budding sequence of forms with no transmissible substance beneath them.
These forms might have had properties we now call physical and at the same time qualities we now call mental or emotional; there is nothing originally incongruous in such a mixture, chaotic and perverse as it may seem from the vantage-ground of subsequent distinctions. Existence might as easily have had any other form whatsoever as the one we discover it to have in fact. And primitive men, not having read Descartes, and not having even distinguished their waking from their dreaming life nor their pa.s.sions from their environment, might well stand in the presence of facts that seem to us full of inward incongruity and contradiction; indeed, it is only because original data were of that chaotic sort that we call ourselves intelligent for having disentangled them and a.s.signed them to distinct sequences and alternative spheres.
The ambiguities and hesitations of theory, down to our own day, are not all artificial or introduced gratuitously by sophists. Even where prejudice obstructs progress, that prejudice itself has some ancient and ingenuous source. Our perplexities are traces of a primitive total confusion; our doubts are remnants of a quite gaping ignorance. It was impossible to say whether the phantasms that first crossed this earthly scene were merely instinct with pa.s.sion or were veritable pa.s.sions stalking through s.p.a.ce. Material and mental elements, connections natural and dialectical, existed mingled in that chaos. Light was as yet inseparable from inward vitality and pain drew a visible cloud across the sky. Civilised life is that early dream partly clarified; science is that dense mythology partly challenged and straightened out.
The flux, however, was meantime full of method, if only discrimination and enlarged experience could have managed to divine it. Its inconstancy, for one thing, was not so entire that no objects could be fixed within it, or marshalled in groups, like the birds that flock together. Animals could be readily distinguished from the things about them, their rate of mobility being so much quicker; and one animal in particular would at once be singled out, a more constant follower than any dog, and one whose energies were not merely felt but often spontaneously exerted--a phenomenon which appeared in no other part of the world. This singular animal every one called himself. One object was thus discovered to be the vehicle for perceiving and affecting all the others, a movable seat or tower from which the world might be surveyed.
[Sidenote: The notion of spirit.]
The external influences to which this body, with its discoursing mind, seemed to be subject were by no means all visible and material. Just as one"s own body was moved by pa.s.sions and thoughts which no one else could see--and this secrecy was a subject for much wonder and self-congratulation--so evidently other things had a spirit within or above them to endow them with wit and power. It was not so much to contain sensation that this spirit was needed (for the body could very well feel) as to contrive plans of action and discharge sudden force into the world on momentous occasions. How deep-drawn, how far-reaching, this spirit might be was not easily determined; but it seemed to have unaccountable ways and to come and go from distant habitations. Things past, for instance, were still open to its inspection; the mind was not credited with constructing a fresh image of the past which might more or less resemble that past; a ray of supernatural light, rather, sometimes could pierce to the past itself and revisit its unchangeable depths. The future, though more rarely, was open to spirit in exactly the same fashion; destiny could on occasion be observed. Things distant and preternatural were similarly seen in dreams. There could be no doubt that all those objects existed; the only question was where they might lie and in what manner they might operate. A vision was a visitation and a dream was a journey. The spirit was a great traveller, and just as it could dart in every direction over both s.p.a.ce and time, so it could come thence into a man"s presence or even into his body, to take possession of it. Sense and fancy, in a word, had not been distinguished. As to be aware of vision is a great sign of imagination, so to be aware of imagination is a great sign of understanding.
The spirit had other prerogatives, of a more rational sort. The truth, the right were also spirits; for though often invisible and denied by men, they could emerge at times from their invisible lairs to deal some quick blow and vindicate their divinity. The intermittance proper to phenomena is universal and extreme; only the familiar conception of nature, in which the flux becomes continuous, now blinds us in part to that fact. But before the days of scientific thinking only those things which were found unchanged and which seemed to lie pa.s.sive were conceived to have had in the interval a material existence. More stirring apparitions, instead of being referred to their material const.i.tuents and continuous basis in nature, were referred to spirit. We still say, for instance, that war _comes on_. That phrase would once have been understood literally. War, being something intermittent, must exist somehow unseen in the interval, else it would not return; that rage, so people would have fancied, is therefore a spirit, it is a G.o.d.
Mars and Ares long survived the phase of thought to which they owed their divinity; and believers had to rely on habit and the witness of antiquity to support their irrational faith. They little thought how absolutely simple and inevitable had been the grammar by which those figures, since grown rhetorical, had been first imposed upon the world.
[Sidenote: The notion of sense.]
Another complication soon came to increase this confusion. When material objects were discovered and it became clear that they had comparatively fixed natures, it also became clear that with the motions of one"s body all other things seemed to vary in ways which did not amount to a permanent or real metamorphosis in them; for these things might be found again unchanged. Objects, for instance, seemed to grow smaller when we receded from them, though really, as we discovered by approaching and measuring them anew, they had remained unchanged. These private aspects or views of things were accordingly distinguished from the things themselves, which were lodged in an intelligible sphere, raised above anybody"s sensibility and existing independently. The variable aspects were due to the body; they accompanied its variations and depended on its presence and organs. They were conceived vaguely to exist in one"s head or, if they were emotional, in one"s heart; but anatomy would have had some difficulty in finding them there. They const.i.tuted what is properly called the mind--the region of sentience, emotion, and soliloquy.
The mind was the region where those aspects which real things present to the body might live and congregate. So understood, it was avowedly and from the beginning a realm of mere appearance and depended entirely on the body. It should be observed, however, that the limbo of divine and ideal things, which is sometimes also called the mind, is very far from depending obviously on the body and is said to do so only by a late school of psychological sceptics. To primitive apprehension spirit, with its ideal prerogatives, was something magical and oracular. Its prophetic intuitions were far from being more trivial than material appearances. On the contrary those intuitions were momentous and inspiring. Their scope was indefinite and their value incalculable in every sense of the word. The disembodied spirit might well be immortal, since absent and dead things were familiar to it. It was by nature present wherever truth and reality might be found. It was prophetic; the dreams it fell into were full of auguries and secret affinities with things to come. Myth and legend, hatched in its womb, were felt to be divinely inspired, and genius seemed to be the Muses" voice heard in a profound abstraction, when vulgar perception yielded to some kind of clairvoyance having a higher authority than sense. Such a spirit might naturally be expected to pa.s.s into another world, since it already dwelt there at intervals, and brought thence its mysterious reports. Its incursions into the physical sphere alone seemed miraculous and sent a thrill of awe through the unaccustomed flesh.
[Sidenote: Compet.i.tion between the two.]
The ideal element in the world was accordingly regarded at first as something sacred and terrifying. It was no vulgar presence or private product, and though its destiny might be to pa.s.s half the time, like Persephone, under ground, it could not really be degraded. The human mind, on the other hand, the region of sentience and illusion, was a familiar affair enough. This familiarity, indeed, for a long time bred contempt and philosophers did not think the personal equation of individuals, or the refraction of things in sense, a very important or edifying subject for study. In time, however, sentience had its revenge.
As each man"s whole experience is bound to his body no less than is the most trivial optical illusion, the sphere of sense is the transcendental ground or _ratio cognoscendi_ of every other sphere. It suffices, therefore, to make philosophy retrospective and to relax the practical and dogmatic stress under which the intellect operates, for all the discoveries made through experience to collapse into the experience in which they were made. A complete collapse of objects is indeed inconvenient, because it would leave no starting-point for reasoning and no faith in the significance of reason itself; but partial collapses, now in the region of physics, now in that of logic and morals, are very easy and exciting feats for criticism to perform.
Pa.s.sions when abstracted from their bodily causes and values when removed from their objects will naturally fall into the body"s mind, and be allied with appearances. Shrewd people will bethink themselves to attribute almost all the body"s acts to some preparatory intention or motive in its mind, and thus attain what they think knowledge of human nature. They will encourage themselves to live among dramatic fictions, as when absorbed in a novel; and having made themselves at home in this upper story of their universe, they will find it amusing to deny that it has a ground floor. The chance of conceiving, by these partial reversals of science, a world composed entirely without troublesome machinery is too tempting not to be taken up, whatever the ulterior risks; and accordingly, when once psychological criticism is put in play, the sphere of sense will be enlarged at the expense of the two rational worlds, the material and the ideal.
[Sidenote: The rise of scepticism.]
Consciousness, thus qualified by all the sensible qualities of things, will exercise an irresistible attraction over the supernatural and ideal realm, so that all the G.o.ds, all truths, and all ideals, as they have no place among the sufficing causes of experience, will be identified with decaying sensations. And presently those supposed causes themselves will be retraced and drawn back into the immediate vortex, until the sceptic has packed away nature, with all s.p.a.ce and time, into the sphere of sensuous illusion, the distinguishing characteristic of which was that it changed with the changes in the human body. The personal idealists will declare that all body is a part of some body"s mind. Thus, by a curious reversion, the progress of reflection has led to hopeless contradictions. Sense, which was discovered by observing the refraction and intermittence to which appearances were subject, in seeming to be quite different from what things were, now tries to subsist when the things it was essentially contrasted with have been abolished. The intellect becomes a Penelope, whose secret pleasure lies in undoing its ostensible work; and science, becoming pensive, loves to relapse into the dumb actuality and nerveless reverie from which it had once extricated a world.