Part 11

More interesting, perhaps, it is to note the misconception of reason and knowledge which grew up. Knowledge came more and more to be identified with the reflective and critical consciousness, which is outside reality and life, and judges it from a standpoint of its own. It came to be esteemed only in its formal and abstract shape, and at the expense of the heart and feelings. The antithesis of philosophy (or knowledge strictly so called) according to Plato was mere opinion, accidental and imperfect knowledge. The knowledge which is truly valuable is a knowledge which presupposes the full reality of life, and is the more and more completely articulated theory of it as a whole. It is—abstractly taken—a mere form of unity which has no value except in uniting: it is—taken concretely—the matter, we may say, in complete unity. It is ideal and perfect harmony of thought, appetite, and emotion: or putting it otherwise, the philosopher is one who is not merely a creature of appetite and production, not merely a creature of feeling and practical energy, but a creature, who to both of these superadds an intelligence which sets eyes in the blind forehead of these other powers, and thus, far from superseding them altogether, only raises them into completeness, and realises all that is worthy in their implicit natures. Always these two impulsive tendencies of our nature are guided by some sort of ideas and intelligence, by beliefs and opinions. But they, like their guides, are sporadically emergent, unconnected, and therefore apt to be contradictory. It is to such erratic and occasional ideas, half-truths and deceptions, that philosophy is opposed. Unfortunately for all parties, the antithesis is carried farther. Philosophy and the philosopher are further set in opposition to the faith of the heart, the intimacy and intensity of feeling, the depth of love and trust, which in practice often go along with imperfect ideas. The philosopher is made one who has emancipated himself from the heart and feelings,—a pure intelligence, who is set above all creeds, contemplating all, and holding none. Consistency and clearness become his idol, to be worshipped at any cost, save one sacrifice: and that one sacrifice is the sacrifice of his own self-conceit. For consistency generally means that all is made to harmonise with one assumed standpoint, and that whatever presents discrepancies with this alleged standard is ruthlessly thrown away. Such a philosophy mistakes its function, which is not, as Heine scoffs, to make an intelligible system by rejecting the discordant fragments of life, but to follow reverently, if slowly, in the wake of experience. Such a “perfect sage,” with his parade of reasonableness, may often assume the post of a dictator.

And, above all, intelligence is only half itself when it is not also will. And both are more than mere consciousness. Plato—whom we refer to, because he is the coryphaeus of all the diverse host of Greek philosophy—seems to overestimate or rather to misconceive the place of knowledge. That it is the supreme and crowning grace of the soul, he sees. But he tends to identify it with the supreme or higher soul:—as Aristotle did after him, to be followed by the Stoics and Neo-Platonists. For them the supreme, or almost supreme reality is the intelligence or reason: the soul is only on a second grade of reality, on the borders of the natural or physical world. When Plato takes that line, he turns towards the path of asceticism, and treats the philosophic life as a preparation for that truer life when intelligence shall be all in all, for that better land where “divine dialogues” shall form the staple and substance of spiritual existence. Aristotle,—who less often treads these solitudes,—still extols the theoretic life, when the body and its needs trouble no more, when the activity of reason—the theory of theory—is attained at least as entirely as mortal conditions allow man to be deified. Of the “apathy” and the reasonable conformity of the Stoics, or of the purely negative character of Epicurean happiness (the excision of all that pained) we need not here speak. And in Plotinus and Proclus the deification of mere reason is at any rate the dominant note; whatever protests the larger Greek nature in the former may from time to time offer. The truth which philosophy should have taught was that Mind or intelligence was the element where the inner life culminated and expanded and flourished: the error which it often tended to spread was that intelligence was the higher life of which all other was a degenerate shortcoming, and something valuable on its own account.

It may be that thus to interpret Plato is to do him an injustice. It has been sometimes said that his division of parts or kinds of soul—or his distinction between its fighting horses—tends to destroy the unity of mental life. But perhaps this was exactly what he wanted to convey. There are—we may paraphrase his meaning—three kinds of human being, three types of human life. There is the man or the life of appetite and the flesh: there is the man of noble emotion and energetic depth of soul: there is the life of reasonable pursuits and organised principle. Or, we may take his meaning to be that there are three elements or provinces of mental life, which in all except a few are but imperfectly coherent and do not reach a true or complete unity. Some unity there always is: but in the life of mere appetite and impulse, even when these impulses are our nobler sentiments of love and hatred, the unity falls very far short. Or, as he puts the theme elsewhere, the soul has a passion for self-completion, a love of beauty, which in most is but a misleading lust. It is the business of the philosophic life to re-create or to foster this unity: or philosophy is the persistent search of the soul for its lost unity, the search to see that unity which is always its animating principle, its inner faith. When the soul has reached this ideal—if it can be supposed to attain it (and of this the strong-souled ancient philosophers feel no doubt),—then a change must take place. The love of beauty is not suppressed; it is only made self-assured and its object freed from all imperfection. It is not that passion has ceased; but its nature is so transfigured, that it seems worthy of a nobler name, which yet we cannot give. To such a life, where battle and conflict are as such unknown, we cannot longer give the title of life: and we say that philosophy is in life a rehearsal of death(70). And yet if there be no battle, there is not for that reason mere inaction. Hence, as the Republic concludes, the true philosopher is the complete man. He is the truth and reality which the appetitive and emotional man were seeking after and failed to realise. It is true they at first will not see this. But the whole long process of philosophy is the means to induce this conviction. And for Plato it remains clear that through experience, through wisdom, and through abstract deduction, the philosopher will justify his claim to him who hath ears to hear and heart to understand. If that be so, the asceticism of Plato is not a mere war upon flesh and sense as such, but upon flesh and sense as imperfect truth, fragmentary reality, which suppose themselves complete, though they are again and again confuted by experience, by wisdom, and by mere calculation,—a war against their blindness and shortsightedness.

Essay IV. Psycho-Genesis.

“The key,” says Carus, “for the ascertainment of the nature of the conscious psychical life lies in the region of the unconscious(71).” The view which these words take is at least as old as the days of Leibniz. It means that the mental world does not abruptly emerge a full-grown intelligence, but has a genesis, and follows a law of development: that its life may be described as the differentiation (with integration) of a simple or indifferentiated mass. The terms conscious and unconscious, indeed, with their lax popular uses, leave the door wide open for misconception. But they may serve to mark that the mind is to be understood only in a certain relation (partly of antithesis) to nature, and the soul only in reference to the body. The so-called “superior faculties”—specially characteristic of humanity—are founded upon, and do not abruptly supersede, the lower powers which are supposed to be specially obvious in the animals(72). The individual and specific phenomena of consciousness, which the psychologist is generally supposed to study, rest upon a deeper, less explicated, more indefinite, life of sensibility, which in its turn fades away by immeasurable gradations into something irresponsive to the ordinary tests for sensation and life.

And yet the moment we attempt to leave the daylight of consciousness for the darker sides of sub-conscious life, the risks of misinterpretation multiply. The problem is to some extent the same as confronts the student of the ideas and principles of primitive races. There, the temptation of seeing things through the “spectacles of civilisation” is almost irresistible. So in psychology we are apt to import into the life of sensation and feeling the distinctions and relations of subsequent intellection. Nor is the difficulty lessened by Hegel’s method which deals with soul, sentiency, and consciousness as grades or general characteristics in a developmental advance. He borrows his illustrations from many quarters, from morbid and anomalous states of consciousness,—less from the cases of savages, children and animals. These illustrations may be called a loose induction. But it requires a much more powerful instrument than mere induction to build up a scientific system; a framework of general principle or theory is the only basis on which to build theory by the allegation of facts, however numerous. Yet in philosophic science, which is systematised knowledge, all facts strictly so described will find their place and be estimated at their proper value.

(i.) Primitive Sensibility.

Psychology (with Hegel) takes up the work of science from biology. The mind comes before it as the supreme product of the natural world, the finest flower of organic life, the “truth” of the physical process. As such it is called by the time-honoured name of Soul. If we further go on to say that the soul is the principle of life, we must not understand this vital principle to be something over and above the life of which it is the principle. Such a locally-separable principle is an addition which is due to the analogy of mechanical movement, where a detached agent sets in motion and directs the machinery. But in the organism the principle is not thus detachable as a thing or agent. By calling Soul the principle of life we rather mean that in the vital organism, so far as it _lives_, all the real variety, separation, and discontinuity of parts must be reduced to unity and identity, or as Hegel would say, to _ideality_. To live is thus to keep all differences fluid and permeable in the fire of the life-process. Or to use a familiar term of logic, the Soul is the concept or intelligible unity of the organic body. But to call it a concept might suggest that it is only the conception through which _we_ represent to ourselves the variety in unity of the organism. The soul, however, is more than a mere concept: and life is more than a mere mode of description for a group of movements forming an objective unity. It is a unity, subjective and objective. The organism is one life, controlling difference: and it is also one by our effort to comprehend it. The Soul therefore is in Hegelian language described as the Idea rather than the concept of the organic body. Life is the generic title for this subject-object: but the life may be merely physical, or it may be intellectual and practical, or it may be absolute, i.e. will and know all that it is, and be all that it knows and wills.

Up to this point the world is what is called an external, which is here taken to mean (not a world external to the individual, but) a self-externalised world. That is to say, it is the observer who has hitherto by his interpretation of his perceptions supplied the “Spirit in Nature.” In itself the external world has no inside, no centre: it is we who read into it the conception of a life-history. We are led to believe that a principle of unity is always at work throughout the physical world—even in the mathematical laws of natural operation. It is only intelligible and credible to us as a system, a continuous and regular development. But that system is only a hypothetical idea, though it is held to be a conclusion to which all the evidence seems unequivocally to point. And, even in organic life, the unity, though more perfect and palpable than in the mechanical and inorganic world, is only a perception, a vision,—a necessary mode of realising the unity of the facts. The phenomenon of life reveals as in a picture and an ocular demonstration the conformity of inward and outward, the identity of whole and parts, of power and utterance. But it is still outside the observer. In the function of sensibility and sentiency, however, we stand as it were on the border-line between biology and psychology. At one step we have been brought within the harmony, and are no longer mere observers and reflecters. The sentient not merely is, but is aware that it is. Hitherto as life, it only is the unity in diversity, and diversity in unity, for the outsider, i.e. only implicitly: now it is so for itself, or consciously. And in the first stage it does not know, but feels or is sentient. Here, for the first time, is created the distinction of inward and outward. Loosely indeed we may, like Mr. Spencer, speak of outward and inward in physiology: but strictly speaking, what Goethe says is true, _Natur hat weder Kern noch Schaale_(73). Nature in the narrower sense knows no distinction of the inward and outward in its phenomena: it is a purely superficial order and succession of appearance and event. The Idea which has been visible to an intelligent percipient in the types and laws of the natural world, now _is_, actually is—is in and for itself—but at first in a minimum of content, a mere point of light, or rather the dawn which has yet to expand into the full day.

Spinoza has asserted that “all individual bodies are animate, though in different degrees(74).” Now it is to a great extent this diversity of degree on which the main interest turns. Yet it is well to remember that the abrupt and trenchant separations which popular practice loves are overridden to a deeper view by an essential unity of idea, reducing them to indifference. If, that is, we take seriously the Spinozist unity of Substance, and the continual correlation (to call it no more) of extension and consciousness therein, we cannot avoid the conclusion which even Bacon would admit of something describable as attraction and perception, something subduing diversity to unity. But whether it be well to name this soul or life is a different matter. It may indeed only be taken to mean that all true being must be looked on as a real unity and individuality, must, that is, be conceived as manifesting itself in organisation, must be referred to a self-centred and self-developing activity. But this—which is the fundamental thesis of idealism—is hardly all that is meant. Rather Spinoza would imply that all things which form a real unity must have life—must have inner principle and unifying reality: and what he teaches is closely akin to the Leibnitian doctrine that every substantial existence reposes upon a monad, a unity which is at once both a force and a cognition, a “representation” and an appetite or _nisus_ to act. When Fechner in a series of works(75) expounds and defends the hypothesis that plants and planets are not destitute of soul, any more than man and animals, he only gives a more pronounced expression to this idealisation or spiritualisation of the natural world. But for the moment the point to be noted is that all of this idealistic doctrine is an inference, or a development which finds its _point d’appui_ in the fact of sensation. And the problem of the Philosophy of Mind is just to trace the process whereby a mere shock of sensation has grown into a conception and a faith in the goodness, beauty and intelligence of the world.

Schopenhauer has put the point with his usual picturesqueness. Outward nature presents nothing but a play of forces. At first, however, this force shows merely the mechanical phenomena of pressure and impact, and its theory is sufficiently described by mathematical physics. But in the process of nature force assumes higher types, types where it loses a certain amount of its externality(76), till in the organic world it acquires a peculiar phase which Schopenhauer calls _Will_, meaning by that, however, an organising and controlling power, a tendency or _nisus_ to be and live, which is persistent and potent, but without consciousness. This blind force, which however has a certain coherence and purposiveness, is in the animal organism endowed with a new character, in consequence of the emergence of a new organ. This organ, the brain and nervous system, causes the evolution into clear day of an element which has been growing more and more urgent. The gathering tendency of force to return into itself is now complete: the cycle of operation is formed: and the junction of the two currents issues in the spark of sensation. The blind force now becomes seeing.

But at first—and this is the point we have to emphasise—its powers of vision are limited. Sensibility is either a local and restricted phenomenon: or, in so far as it is not local, it is vague and indefinite, and hardly entitled to the name of sensibility. Either it is a dim, but far-reaching, sympathy with environing existence, and in that case only so-called blind will or feeling: or if it is clear, is locally confined, and at first within very narrow limits. Neither of these points must be lost sight of. On the one hand feeling has to be regarded as the dull and confused stirring of an almost infinite sympathy with the world—a pulse which has come from the far-distant movements of the universe, and bears with it, if but as a possibility, the wealth of an infinite message. On the other hand, feeling at first only becomes real, in this boundless ideality to which its possibilities extend, by restricting itself to one little point and from several points organising itself to a unity of bodily feeling, till it can go on from thence to embrace the universe in distinct and articulate comprehension.

Soul, says Hegel, is not a separate and additional something over and above the rest of nature: it is rather nature’s “’universal immaterialism, and simple ideal life(77).” There were ancient philosophers who spoke of the soul as a self-adjusting number,—as a harmony, or equilibrium(78)—and the moderns have added considerably to the list of these analogical definitions. As definitions they obviously fall short. Yet these things give, as it were, by anticipation, an image of soul, as the “ideality,” which reduces the manifold to unity. The adhesions and cohesions of matter, its gravitating attractions, its chemical affinities and electrical polarities, the intricate out-and-in of organic structure, are all preludes to the true incorporating unity which is the ever-immanent supersession of the endless self-externalism and successionalism of physical reality. But in sentiency, feeling, or sensibility, the unity which all of these imply without reaching, is explicitly present. It is implicitly an all-embracing unity: an infinite,—which has no doors and no windows, for the good reason that it needs none, because it has nothing outside it, because it “expresses” and “envelopes” (however confusedly at first) the whole universe. Thus, even if, with localising phraseology, we may describe mind, where it _appears_ emerging in the natural world, as a mere feeble and incidental outburst,—a rebellion breaking out as in some petty province or isolated region against the great law of the physical realm—we are in so speaking taking only an external standpoint. But with the rise of mind in nature the bond of externalism is implicitly overcome. To it, and where it really is, there is nothing outside, nothing transcendent. Everything which is said to be outside mind is only outside a localised and limited mind—outside a mind which is imperfectly and abstractly realised—not outside mind absolutely. Mind is the absolute negation of externality: not a mere relative negative, as the organism may be biologically described as inner in respect of the environment. To accomplish this negation in actuality, to bring the multiplicity and externality of things into the unity and identity of one Idea, is the process of development of mind from animal sensibility to philosophic knowledge, from appetite to art,—the process of culture through the social state under the influence of religion.

Sentiency or psychic matter (mind-stuff), to begin with, is in some respects like the _tabula rasa_ of the empiricists. It is the possibility—but the real possibility—of intelligence rather than intelligence itself. It is the monotonous undifferentiated inwardness—a faint self-awareness and self-realisation of the material world, but at first a mere vague _psychical protoplasm_ and without defined nucleus, without perceptible organisation or separation of structures. If there is self-awareness, it is not yet discriminated into a distinct and unified self, not yet differentiated and integrated,—soul in the condition of a mere “Is,” which, however, is nothing determinate. It is very much in the situation of Condillac’s statue-man—_une statue organisée intérieurement comme nous, et animée d’un esprit privé de toute espèce d’idées_: alike at least so far that the rigid uniformity of the latter’s envelope prevents all articulated organisation of its faculties. The foundation under all the diversity and individuality in the concrete intelligent and volitional life is a common feeling,—a _sensus communis_—a general and indeterminate susceptibility to influence, a sympathy responsive, but responsive vaguely and equivocally, to all the stimuli of the physical environment. There was once a time, according to primitive legend, when man understood the language of beast and bird, and even surprised the secret converse of trees and flowers. Such fancies are but the exaggeration of a solidarity of conscious life which seems to spread far in the sub-conscious realm, and to narrow the individual’s soul into limited channels as it rises into clear self-perception,

“As thro’ the frame that binds him in His isolation grows defined.”