Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy
George Santayana
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SOME TURNS OF THOUGHT IN
MODERN PHILOSOPHY
_Five Essays_
BY
GEORGE SANTAYANA
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1933
Published under the auspices of
THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
CONTENTS
I. Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense page 1
Paper read before the Royal Society of Literature on the
occasion of the Tercentenary of the birth of John Locke.
With some Supplementary Notes
II. Fifty Years of British Idealism 48
Reflections on the republication of Bradley's _Ethical Studies_
III. Revolutions in Science 71
Some Comments on the Theory of Relativity and the new Physics
IV. A Long Way Round to Nirvana 87
Development of a suggestion found in Freud's _Beyond the
Pleasure Principle_
V. The Prestige of the Infinite 102
A review of Julien Benda's _Sketch of a consistent theory of
the relations between God and the World_
The Author's acknowledgments are due to the Editors of _The New Adelphi_,
_The Dial_, and the _Journal of Philosophy_, in which one or more of these
Essays originally appeared.
I
LOCKE AND THE FRONTIERS OF COMMON SENSE[1]
A good portrait of Locke would require an elaborate background. His is not
a figure to stand statuesquely in a void: the pose might not seem grand
enough for bronze or marble. Rather he should be painted in the manner of
the Dutch masters, in a sunny interior, scrupulously furnished with all
the implements of domestic comfort and philosophic enquiry: the Holy Bible
open majestically before him, and beside it that other revelation--the
terrestrial globe. His hand might be pointing to a microscope set for
examining the internal constitution of a beetle: but for the moment his
eye should be seen wandering through the open window, to admire the
blessings of thrift and liberty manifest in the people so worthily busy in
the market-place, wrong as many a monkish notion might be that still
troubled their poor heads. From them his enlarged thoughts would easily
pass to the stout carved ships in the river beyond, intrepidly setting
sail for the Indies, or for savage America. Yes, he too had travelled, and
not only in thought. He knew how many strange nations and false religions
lodged in this round earth, itself but a speck in the universe. There were
few ingenious authors that he had not perused, or philosophical
instruments that he had not, as far as possible, examined and tested; and
no man better than he could understand and prize the recent discoveries of
"the incomparable Mr Newton". Nevertheless, a certain uneasiness in that
spare frame, a certain knitting of the brows in that aquiline countenance,
would suggest that in the midst of their earnest eloquence the
philosopher's thoughts might sometimes come to a stand. Indeed, the
visible scene did not exhaust the complexity of his problem; for there was
also what he called "the scene of ideas", immaterial and private, but
often more crowded and pressing than the public scene. Locke was the
father of modern psychology, and the birth of this airy monster, this
half-natural changeling, was not altogether easy or fortunate.[2]
I wish my erudition allowed me to fill in this picture as the subject
deserves, and to trace home the sources of Locke's opinions, and their
immense influence. Unfortunately, I can consider him--what is hardly
fair--only as a pure philosopher: for had Locke's mind been more profound,
it might have been less influential. He was in sympathy with the coming
age, and was able to guide it: an age that confided in easy, eloquent
reasoning, and proposed to be saved, in this world and the next, with as
little philosophy and as little religion as possible. Locke played in the
eighteenth century very much the part that fell to Kant in the nineteenth.
When quarrelled with, no less than when embraced, his opinions became a
point of departure for universal developments. The more we look into the
matter, the more we are impressed by the patriarchal dignity of Locke's
mind. Father of psychology, father of the criticism of knowledge, father
of theoretical liberalism, god-father at least of the American political
system, of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedia, at home he was the ancestor of
that whole school of polite moderate opinion which can unite liberal
Christianity with mechanical science and with psychological idealism. He
was invincibly rooted in a prudential morality, in a rationalised
Protestantism, in respect for liberty and law: above all he was deeply
convinced, as he puts it, "that the handsome conveniences of life are
better than nasty penury". Locke still speaks, or spoke until lately,
through many a modern mind, when this mind was most sincere; and two
hundred years before Queen Victoria he was a Victorian in essence.
A chief element in this modernness of Locke was something that had hardly
appeared before in pure philosophy, although common in religion: I mean,
the tendency to deny one's own presuppositions--not by accident or
inadvertently, but proudly and with an air of triumph. Presuppositions are
imposed on all of us by life itself: for instance the presupposition that
life is to continue, and that it is worth living. Belief is born on the
wing and awakes to many tacit commitments. Afterwards, in reflection, we
may wonder at finding these presuppositions on our hands and, being
ignorant of the natural causes which have imposed them on the animal mind,
we may be offended at them. Their arbitrary and dogmatic character will
tempt us to condemn them, and to take for granted that the analysis which
undermines them is justified, and will prove fruitful. But this critical
assurance in its turn seems to rely on a dubious presupposition, namely,
that human opinion must always evolve in a single line, dialectically,
providentially, and irresistibly. It is at least conceivable that the
opposite should sometimes be the case. Some of the primitive
presuppositions of human reason might have been correct and inevitable,
whilst the tendency to deny them might have sprung from a plausible
misunderstanding, or the exaggeration of a half-truth: so that the
critical opinion itself, after destroying the spontaneous assumptions on
which it rested, might be incapable of subsisting.
In Locke the central presuppositions, which he embraced heartily and
without question, were those of common sense. He adopted what he calls a
"plain, historical method", fit, in his own words, "to be brought into
well-bred company and polite conversation". Men, "barely by the use of
their natural faculties", might attain to all the knowledge possible or
worth having. All children, he writes, "that are born into this world,
being surrounded with bodies that perpetually and diversely affect them"
have "a variety of ideas imprinted" on their minds. "External material
things as objects of Sensation, and the operations of our own minds as
objects of Reflection, are to me", he continues, "the only originals from
which all our ideas take their beginnings." "Every act of sensation", he
writes elsewhere, "when duly considered, gives us an equal view of both
parts of nature, the corporeal and the spiritual. For whilst I know, by
seeing or hearing,... that there is some corporeal being without me, the
object of that sensation, I do more certainly know that there is some
spiritual being within me that sees and hears."
Resting on these clear perceptions, the natural philosophy of Locke falls
into two parts, one strictly physical and scientific, the other critical
and psychological. In respect to the composition of matter, Locke accepted
the most advanced theory of his day, which happened to be a very old one:
the theory of Democritus that the material universe contains nothing but a
multitude of solid atoms coursing through infinite space: but Locke added
a religious note to this materialism by suggesting that infinite space, in
its sublimity, must be an attribute of God. He also believed what few
materialists would venture to assert, that if we could thoroughly examine
the cosmic mechanism we should see the demonstrable necessity of every
complication that ensues, even of the existence and character of mind: for
it was no harder for God to endow matter with the power of thinking than
to endow it with the power of moving.
In the atomic theory we have a graphic image asserted to describe
accurately, or even exhaustively, the intrinsic constitution of things, or
their primary qualities. Perhaps, in so far as physical hypotheses must
remain graphic at all, it is an inevitable theory. It was first suggested
by the wearing out and dissolution of all material objects, and by the
specks of dust floating in a sunbeam; and it is confirmed, on an enlarged
scale, by the stellar universe as conceived by modern astronomy. When
today we talk of nuclei and electrons, if we imagine them at all, we
imagine them as atoms. But it is all a picture, prophesying what we might
see through a sufficiently powerful microscope; the important
philosophical question is the one raised by the other half of Locke's
natural philosophy, by optics and the general criticism of perception. How
far, if at all, may we trust the images in our minds to reveal the nature
of external things?
On this point the doctrine of Locke, through Descartes,[3] was also
derived from Democritus. It was that all the sensible qualities of things,
except position, shape, solidity, number and motion, were only ideas in
us, projected and falsely regarded as lodged in things. In the things,
these imputed or secondary qualities were simply powers, inherent in their
atomic constitution, and calculated to excite sensations of that character
in our bodies. This doctrine is readily established by Locke's plain
historical method, when applied to the study of rainbows, mirrors, effects
of perspective, dreams, jaundice, madness, and the will to believe: all of
which go to convince us that the ideas which we impulsively assume to be
qualities of objects are always, in their seat and origin, evolved in our
own heads.
These two parts of Locke's natural philosophy, however, are not in perfect
equilibrium. _All_ the feelings and ideas of an animal must be equally
conditioned by his organs and passions,[4] and he cannot be aware of what
goes on beyond him, except as it affects his own life.[5] How then could
Locke, or could Democritus, suppose that his ideas of space and atoms were
less human, less graphic, summary, and symbolic, than his sensations of
sound or colour? The language of science, no less than that of sense,
should have been recognised to be a human language; and the nature of
anything existent collateral with ourselves, be that collateral existence
material or mental, should have been confessed to be a subject for faith
and for hypothesis, never, by any possibility, for absolute or direct
intuition.
There is no occasion to take alarm at this doctrine as if it condemned us
to solitary confinement, and to ignorance of the world in which we live.
We see and know the world through our eyes and our intelligence, in visual
and in intellectual terms: how else should a world be seen or known which
is not the figment of a dream, but a collateral power, pressing and alien?
In the cognisance which an animal may take of his surroundings--and surely
all animals take such cognisance--the subjective and moral character of
his feelings, on finding himself so surrounded, does not destroy their
cognitive value. These feelings, as Locke says, are signs: to take them
for signs is the essence of intelligence. Animals that are sensitive
physically are also sensitive morally, and feel the friendliness or
hostility which surrounds them. Even pain and pleasure are no idle
sensations, satisfied with their own presence: they violently summon
attention to the objects that are their source. Can love or hate be felt
without being felt towards something--something near and potent, yet
external, uncontrolled, and mysterious? When I dodge a missile or pick a
berry, is it likely that my mind should stop to dwell on its pure
sensations or ideas without recognising or pursuing something material?
Analytic reflection often ignores the essential energy of mind, which is
originally more intelligent than sensuous, more appetitive and dogmatic
than aesthetic. But the feelings and ideas of an active animal cannot help
uniting internal moral intensity with external physical reference; and the
natural conditions of sensibility require that perceptions should owe
their existence and quality to the living organism with its moral bias,
and that at the same time they should be addressed to the external objects
which entice that organism or threaten it.
All ambitions must be defeated when they ask for the impossible. The
ambition to know is not an exception; and certainly our perceptions cannot
tell us how the world would look if nobody saw it, or how valuable it
would be if nobody cared for it. But our perceptions, as Locke again said,
are sufficient for our welfare and appropriate to our condition. They are
not only a wonderful entertainment in themselves, but apart from their
sensuous and grammatical quality, by their distribution and method of
variation, they may inform us most exactly about the order and mechanism
of nature. We see in the science of today how completely the most accurate
knowledge--proved to be accurate by its application in the arts--may shed
every pictorial element, and the whole language of experience, to become a
pure method of calculation and control. And by a pleasant compensation,
our aesthetic life may become freer, more self-sufficing, more humbly
happy in itself: and without trespassing in any way beyond the modesty of
nature, we may consent to be like little children, chirping our human
note; since the life of reason in us may well become science in its
validity, whilst remaining poetry in its texture.
I think, then, that by a slight re-arrangement of Locke's pronouncements
in natural philosophy, they could be made inwardly consistent, and still
faithful to the first presuppositions of common sense, although certainly
far more chastened and sceptical than impulsive opinion is likely to be
in the first instance.
There were other presuppositions in the philosophy of Locke besides his
fundamental naturalism; and in his private mind probably the most
important was his Christian faith, which was not only confident and
sincere, but prompted him at times to high speculation. He had friends
among the Cambridge Platonists, and he found in Newton a brilliant example
of scientific rigour capped with mystical insights. Yet if we consider
Locke's philosophical position in the abstract, his Christianity almost
disappears. In form his theology and ethics were strictly rationalistic;
yet one who was a Deist in philosophy might remain a Christian in
religion. There was no great harm in a special revelation, provided it
were simple and short, and left the broad field of truth open in almost
every direction to free and personal investigation. A free man and a good
man would certainly never admit, as coming from God, any doctrine contrary
to his private reason or political interest; and the moral precepts
actually vouchsafed to us in the Gospels were most acceptable, seeing
that they added a sublime eloquence to maxims which sound reason would
have arrived at in any case.
Evidently common sense had nothing to fear from religious faith of this
character; but the matter could not end there. Common sense is not more
convinced of anything than of the difference between good and evil,
advantage and disaster; and it cannot dispense with a moral interpretation
of the universe. Socrates, who spoke initially for common sense, even
thought the moral interpretation of existence the whole of philosophy. He
would not have seen anything comic in the satire of Moliere making his
chorus of young doctors chant in unison that opium causes sleep because it
has a dormitive virtue. The virtues or moral uses of things, according to
Socrates, were the reason why the things had been created and were what
they were; the admirable virtues of opium defined its perfection, and the
perfection of a thing was the full manifestation of its deepest nature.
Doubtless this moral interpretation of the universe had been overdone, and
it had been a capital error in Socrates to make that interpretation
exclusive and to substitute it for natural philosophy. Locke, who was
himself a medical man, knew what a black cloak for ignorance and villainy
Scholastic verbiage might be in that profession. He also knew, being an
enthusiast for experimental science, that in order to control the movement
of matter--which is to realise those virtues and perfections--it is better
to trace the movement of matter materialistically; for it is in the act of
manifesting its own powers, and not, as Socrates and the Scholastics
fancied, by obeying a foreign magic, that matter sometimes assumes or
restores the forms so precious in the healer's or the moralist's eyes. At
the same time, the manner in which the moral world rests upon the natural,
though divined, perhaps, by a few philosophers, has not been generally
understood; and Locke, whose broad humanity could not exclude the moral
interpretation of nature, was driven in the end to the view of Socrates.
He seriously invoked the Scholastic maxim that nothing can produce that
which it does not contain. For this reason the unconscious, after all,
could never have given rise to consciousness. Observation and experiment
could not be allowed to decide this point: the moral interpretation of
things, because more deeply rooted in human experience, must envelop the
physical interpretation, and must have the last word.
It was characteristic of Locke's simplicity and intensity that he retained
these insulated sympathies in various quarters. A further instance of his
many-sidedness was his fidelity to pure intuition, his respect for the
infallible revelation of ideal being, such as we have of sensible
qualities or of mathematical relations. In dreams and in hallucinations
appearances may deceive us, and the objects we think we see may not exist
at all. Yet in suffering an illusion we must entertain an idea; and the
manifest character of these ideas is that of which alone, Locke thinks, we
can have certain "knowledge".
"These", he writes, "are two very different things and carefully to
be distinguished: it being one thing to perceive and know the idea
of white or black, and quite another to examine what kind of
particles they must be, and how arranged ... to make any object
appear white or black." "A man infallibly knows, as soon as ever he
has them in his mind, that the ideas he calls white and round are
the very ideas they are, and that they are not other ideas which he
calls red or square.... This ... the mind ... always perceives at
first sight; and if ever there happen any doubt about it, it will
always be found to be about the names and not the ideas
themselves."
This sounds like high Platonic doctrine for a philosopher of the Left; but
Locke's utilitarian temper very soon reasserted itself in this subject.
Mathematical ideas were not only lucid but true: and he demanded this
truth, which he called "reality", of all ideas worthy of consideration:
mere ideas would be worthless. Very likely he forgot, in his philosophic
puritanism, that fiction and music might have an intrinsic charm. Where
the frontier of human wisdom should be drawn in this direction was clearly
indicated, in Locke's day, by Spinoza, who says:
"If, in keeping non-existent things present to the imagination, the
mind were at the same time aware that those things did not exist,
surely it would regard this gift of imagination as a virtue in its
own constitution, not as a vice: especially if such an imaginative
faculty depended on nothing except the mind's own nature: that is
to say, if this mental faculty of imagination were free".
But Locke had not so firm a hold on truth that he could afford to play
with fancy; and as he pushed forward the claims of human jurisdiction
rather too far in physics, by assuming the current science to be literally
true, so, in the realm of imagination, he retrenched somewhat illiberally
our legitimate possessions. Strange that as modern philosophy transfers
the visible wealth of nature more and more to the mind, the mind should
seem to lose courage and to become ashamed of its own fertility. The
hard-pressed natural man will not indulge his imagination unless it poses
for truth; and being half aware of this imposition, he is more troubled at
the thought of being deceived than at the fact of being mechanised or
being bored: and he would wish to escape imagination altogether. A good
God, he murmurs, could not have made us poets against our will.
Against his will, however, Locke was drawn to enlarge the subjective
sphere. The actual existence of mind was evident: you had only to notice
the fact that you were thinking. Conscious mind, being thus known to
exist directly and independently of the body, was a primary constituent of
reality: it was a fact on its own account.[6] Common sense seemed to
testify to this, not only when confronted with the "I think, therefore I
am" of Descartes, but whenever a thought produced an action. Since mind
and body interacted,[7] each must be as real as the other and, as it were,
on the same plane of being. Locke, like a good Protestant, felt the right
of the conscious inner man to assert himself: and when he looked into his
own mind, he found nothing to define this mind except the ideas which
occupied it. The existence which he was so sure of in himself was
therefore the existence of his ideas.
Here, by an insensible shift in the meaning of the word "idea", a
momentous revolution had taken place in psychology. Ideas had originally
meant objective terms distinguished in thought-images, qualities,
concepts, propositions. But now ideas began to mean living thoughts,
moments or states of consciousness. They became atoms of mind,
constituents of experience, very much as material atoms were conceived to
be constituents of natural objects. Sensations became the only objects of
sensation, and ideas the only objects of ideas; so that the material world
was rendered superfluous, and the only scientific problem was now to
construct a universe in terms of analytic psychology. Locke himself did
not go so far, and continued to assign physical causes and physical
objects to some, at least, of his mental units; and indeed sensations and
ideas could not very well have other than physical causes, the existence
of which this new psychology was soon to deny: so that about the origin of
its data it was afterwards compelled to preserve a discreet silence. But
as to their combinations and reappearances, it was able to invoke the
principle of association: a thread on which many shrewd observations may
be strung, but which also, when pressed, appears to be nothing but a
verbal mask for organic habits in matter.
The fact is that there are two sorts of unobjectionable psychology,
neither of which describes a mechanism of disembodied mental states, such
as the followers of Locke developed into modern idealism, to the
confusion of common sense.[8] One unobjectionable sort of psychology is
biological, and studies life from the outside. The other sort, relying on
memory and dramatic imagination, reproduces life from the inside, and is
literary. If the literary psychologist is a man of genius, by the
clearness and range of his memory, by quickness of sympathy and power of
suggestion, he may come very near to the truth of experience, as it has
been or might be unrolled in a human being.[9] The ideas with which Locke
operates are simply high lights picked out by attention in this nebulous
continuum, and identified by names. Ideas, in the original ideal sense of
the word, are indeed the only definite terms which attention can
discriminate and rest upon; but the unity of these units is specious, not
existential. If ideas were not logical or aesthetic essences but
self-subsisting feelings, each knowing itself, they would be insulated for
ever; no spirit could ever survey, recognise, or compare them; and mind
would have disappeared in the analysis of mind.
These considerations might enable us, I think, to mark the just frontier
of common sense even in this debatable land of psychology. All that is
biological, observable, and documentary in psychology falls within the
lines of physical science and offers no difficulty in principle. Nor need
literary psychology form a dangerous salient in the circuit of nature. The
dramatic poet or dramatic historian necessarily retains the presupposition
of a material world, since beyond his personal memory (and even within it)
he has nothing to stimulate and control his dramatic imagination save
knowledge of the material circumstances in which people live, and of the
material expression in action or words which they give to their feelings.
His moral insight simply vivifies the scene that nature and the sciences
of nature spread out before him: they tell him what has happened, and his
heart tells him what has been felt. Only literature can describe
experience for the excellent reason that the terms of experience are moral
and literary from the beginning. Mind is incorrigibly poetical: not
because it is not attentive to material facts and practical exigencies,
but because, being intensely attentive to them, it turns them into
pleasures and pains, and into many-coloured ideas. Yet at every turn there
is a possibility and an occasion for transmuting this poetry into science,
because ideas and emotions, being caused by material events, refer to
these events, and record their order.
All philosophies are frail, in that they are products of the human mind,
in which everything is essentially reactive, spontaneous, and volatile:
but as in passion and in language, so in philosophy, there are certain
comparatively steady and hereditary principles, forming a sort of orthodox
reason, which is or which may become the current grammar of mankind. Of
philosophers who are orthodox in this sense, only the earliest or the most
powerful, an Aristotle or a Spinoza, need to be remembered, in that they
stamp their language and temper upon human reason itself. The rest of the
orthodox are justly lost in the crowd and relegated to the chorus. The
frailty of heretical philosophers is more conspicuous and interesting: it
makes up the _chronique scandaleuse_ of the mind, or the history of
philosophy. Locke belongs to both camps: he was restive in his orthodoxy
and timid in his heresies; and like so many other initiators of
revolutions, he would be dismayed at the result of his work. In intention
Locke occupied an almost normal philosophic position, rendered precarious
not by what was traditional in it, like the categories of substance and
power, but rather by certain incidental errors--notably by admitting an
experience independent of bodily life, yet compounded and evolving in a
mechanical fashion. But I do not find in him a prickly nest of obsolete
notions and contradictions from which, fledged at last, we have flown to
our present enlightenment. In his person, in his temper, in his
allegiances and hopes, he was the prototype of a race of philosophers
native and dominant among people of English speech, if not in academic
circles, at least in the national mind. If we make allowance for a greater
personal subtlety, and for the diffidence and perplexity inevitable in the
present moral anarchy of the world, we may find this same Lockian
eclecticism and prudence in the late Lord Balfour: and I have myself had
the advantage of being the pupil of a gifted successor and, in many ways,
emulator, of Locke, I mean William James. So great, at bottom, does their
spiritual kinship seem to me to be, that I can hardly conceive Locke
vividly without seeing him as a sort of William James of the seventeenth
century. And who of you has not known some other spontaneous, inquisitive,
unsettled genius, no less preoccupied with the marvellous intelligence of
some Brazilian parrot, than with the sad obstinacy of some Bishop of
Worcester? Here is eternal freshness of conviction and ardour for reform;
great keenness of perception in spots, and in other spots lacunae and
impulsive judgments; distrust of tradition, of words, of constructive
argument; horror of vested interests and of their smooth defenders; a love
of navigating alone and exploring for oneself even the coasts already well
charted by others. Here is romanticism united with a scientific conscience
and power of destructive analysis balanced by moral enthusiasm. Doubtless
Locke might have dug his foundations deeper and integrated his faith
better. His system was no metaphysical castle, no theological acropolis:
rather a homely ancestral manor house built in several styles of
architecture: a Tudor chapel, a Palladian front toward the new
geometrical garden, a Jacobean parlour for political consultation and
learned disputes, and even--since we are almost in the eighteenth
century--a Chinese cabinet full of curios. It was a habitable philosophy,
and not too inharmonious. There was no greater incongruity in its parts
than in the gentle variations of English weather or in the qualified moods
and insights of a civilised mind. Impoverished as we are, morally and
humanly, we can no longer live in such a rambling mansion. It has become a
national monument. On the days when it is open we revisit it with
admiration; and those chambers and garden walks re-echo to us the clear
dogmas and savoury diction of the sage--omnivorous, artless,
loquacious--whose dwelling it was.
[1] Paper read before the Royal Society of Literature on the occasion of
the Tercentenary of the birth of John Locke.
[2] See note I, p. 26.
[3] See note II, p. 29.
[4] See note III, p. 35.
[5] See note IV, p. 36.
[6] See note V, p. 37.
[7] See note VI, p. 39.
[8] See note VII, p. 43.
[9] See note VIII, p. 46.
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES
I
Page 3. _This airy monster, this half-natural changeling._
Monsters and changelings were pointed to by Locke with a certain
controversial relish: they proved that nature was not compressed or
compressible within Aristotelian genera and species, but was a free
mechanism subject to indefinite change. Mechanism in physics is favourable
to liberty in politics and morals: each creature has a right to be what it
spontaneously is, and not what some previous classification alleges that
it ought to have been. The Protestant and revolutionary independence of
Locke's mind here gives us a foretaste of Darwin and even of Nietzsche.
But Locke was moderate even in his radicalisms. A human nature totally
fluid would of itself have proved anarchical; but in order to stem that
natural anarchy it was fortunately possible to invoke the conditions of
prosperity and happiness strictly laid down by the Creator. The
improvidence and naughtiness of nature was called to book at every turn by
the pleasures and pains divinely appended to things enjoined and to things
forbidden, and ultimately by hell and by heaven. Yet if rewards and
punishments were attached to human action and feeling in this perfectly
external and arbitrary fashion, whilst the feelings and actions
spontaneous in mankind counted for nothing in the rule of morals and of
wisdom, we should be living under the most cruel and artificial of
tyrannies; and it would not be long before the authority of such a code
would be called in question and the reality of those arbitrary rewards and
punishments would be denied, both for this world and for any other. In a
truly rational morality moral sanctions would have to vary with the
variation of species, each new race or individual or mode of feeling
finding its natural joy in a new way of life. The monsters would not be
monsters except to rustic prejudice, and the changelings would be simply
experiments in creation. The glee of Locke in seeing nature elude
scholastic conventions would then lose its savour, since those staid
conventions themselves would have become obsolete. Nature would henceforth
present nothing but pervasive metamorphosis, irresponsible and endless. To
correct the weariness of such pure flux we might indeed invoke the idea of
a progress or evolution towards something always higher and better; but
this idea simply reinstates, under a temporal form, the dominance of a
specific standard, to which nature is asked to conform. Genera and species
might shift and glide into one another at will, but always in the
authorised direction. If, on the contrary, transformation had no
predetermined direction, we should be driven back, for a moral principle,
to each of the particular types of life generated on the way: as in
estimating the correctness or beauty of language we appeal to the speech
and genius of each nation at each epoch, without imposing the grammar of
one language or age upon another. It is only in so far as, in the midst of
the flux, certain tropes become organised and recurrent, that any
interests or beauties can be transmitted from moment to moment or from
generation to generation. Physical integration is a prerequisite to moral
integrity; and unless an individual or a species is sufficiently organised
and determinate to aspire to a distinguishable form of life, eschewing all
others, that individual or species can bear no significant name, can
achieve no progress, and can approach no beauty or perfection.
Thus, so long as in a fluid world there is some measure of life and
organisation, monsters and changelings will always remain possible
physically and regrettable morally. Small deviations from the chosen type
or the chosen direction of progress will continue to be called morbid and
ugly, and great deviations or reversals will continue to be called
monstrous. This is but the seamy side of that spontaneous predilection,
grounded in our deepest nature, by which we recognise beauty and nobleness
at first sight, with immense refreshment and perfect certitude.
II
Page 8. _Through Descartes._
Very characteristic was the tireless polemic which Locke carried on
against Descartes. The outraged plain facts had to be defended against
sweeping and arbitrary theories. There were no innate ideas or maxims:
children were not born murmuring that things equal to the same thing were
equal to one another: and an urchin knew that pain was caused by the
paternal slipper before he reflected philosophically that everything must
have a cause. Again, extension was not the essence of matter, which must
be solid as well, to be distinguishable from empty space. Finally,
thinking was not the essence of the soul: a man, without dying, might lose
consciousness: this often happened, or at least could not be prevented
from happening by a definition framed by a French philosopher. These
protests were evidently justified by common sense: yet they missed the
speculative radicalism and depth of the Cartesian doctrines, which had
struck the keynotes of all modern philosophy and science: for they
assumed, for the first time in history, the transcendental point of view.
No wonder that Locke could not do justice to this great novelty: Descartes
himself did not do so, but ignored his subjective first principles in the
development of his system; and it was not until adopted by Kant, or rather
by Fichte, that the transcendental method showed its true colours. Even
today philosophers fumble with it, patching soliloquy with physics and
physics with soliloquy. Moreover, Locke's misunderstandings of Descartes
were partly justified by the latter's verbal concessions to tradition and
authority. A man who has a clear head, and like Descartes is rendered by
his aristocratic pride both courteous and disdainful, may readily conform
to usage in his language, and even in his personal sentiments, without
taking either too seriously: he is not struggling to free his own mind,
which is free already, nor very hopeful of freeing that of most people.
The innate ideas were not explicit thoughts but categories employed
unwittingly, as people in speaking conform to the grammar of the
vernacular without being aware that they do so. As for extension being the
essence of matter, since matter existed and was a substance, it would
always have been more than its essence: a sort of ether the parts of which
might move and might have different and calculable dynamic values. The
gist of this definition of matter was to clear the decks for scientific
calculation, by removing from nature the moral density and moral magic
with which the Socratic philosophy had encumbered it. Science would be
employed in describing the movements of bodies, leaving it for the senses
and feelings to appreciate the cross-lights that might be generated in the
process. Though not following the technique of Descartes, the physics of
our own day realises his ideal, and traces in nature a mathematical
dynamism, perfectly sufficient for exact prevision and mechanical art.
Similarly, in saying that the essence of the soul was to think, Descartes
detached consciousness, or actual spirit, from the meshes of all unknown
organic or invented mental mechanisms. It was an immense clarification and
liberation in its proper dimension: but this pure consciousness was not a
soul; it was not the animal psyche, or principle of organisation, life,
and passion--a principle which, according to Descartes, was material. To
have called such a material principle the soul would have shocked all
Christian conceptions; but if Descartes had abstained from giving that
consecrated name to mere consciousness, he need not have been wary of
making the latter intermittent and evanescent, as it naturally is. He was
driven to the conclusion that the soul can never stop thinking, by the
desire to placate orthodox opinion, and his own Christian sentiments, at
the expense of attributing to actual consciousness a substantial
independence and a directive physical force which were incongruous with
it: a force and independence perfectly congruous with the Platonic soul,
which had been a mythological being, a supernatural spirit or daemon or
incubus, incarnate in the natural world, and partly dominating it. The
relations of such a soul to the particular body or bodies which it might
weave for itself on earth, to the actions which it performed through such
bodies, and to the current of its own thoughts, then became questions for
theology, or for a moralistic theory of the universe. They were questions
remote from the preoccupations of the modern mind; yet it was not possible
either for Locke or for Descartes to clear their fresh conceptions
altogether from those ancient dreams.
What views precisely did Locke oppose to these radical tendencies of
Descartes?
In respect to the nature of matter, I have indicated above the position
of Locke: pictorially he accepted an ordinary atomism; scientifically, the
physics of Newton.
On the other two points Locke's convictions were implicit rather than
speculative: he resisted the Cartesian theories without much developing
his own, as after all was natural in a critic engaged in proving that our
natural faculties were not intended for speculation. All knowledge came
from experience, and no man could know the savour of a pineapple without
having tasted it. Yet this savour, according to Locke, did not reside at
first in the pineapple, to be conveyed on contact to the palate and to the
mind; but it was generated in the process of gustation; or perhaps we
should rather say that it was generated in the mind on occasion of that
process. At least, then, in respect to secondary qualities, and to all
moral values, the terms of human knowledge were not drawn from the objects
encountered in the world, but from an innate sensibility proper to the
human body or mind. Experience--if this word meant the lifelong train of
ideas which made a man's moral being--was not a source of knowledge but
was knowledge (or illusion) itself, produced by organs endowed with a
special native sensibility in contact with varying external stimuli. This
conclusion would then not have contradicted, but exactly expressed, the
doctrine of innate categories.
As to the soul, which might exist without thinking, Locke still called it
an immaterial substance: not so immaterial, however, as not to be conveyed
bodily with him in his coach from London to Oxford. Although, like Hobbes,
Locke believed in the power of the English language to clarify the human
intellect, he here ignored the advice of Hobbes to turn that befuddling
Latin phrase into plain English. Substance meant body: immaterial meant
bodiless: therefore immaterial substance meant bodiless body. True,
substance had not really meant body for Aristotle or the Schoolmen; but
who now knew or cared what anything had meant for them? Locke scornfully
refused to consider what a substantial form may have signified; and in
still maintaining that he had a soul, and calling it a spiritual
substance, he was probably simply protesting that there was something
living and watchful within his breast, the invisible moral agent in all
his thoughts and actions. It was _he_ that had them and did them; and this
self of his was far from being reducible to a merely logical impersonal
subject, an "I think" presupposed in all thought: for what would this "I
think" have become when it was not thinking? On the other hand it mattered
very little what the _substance_ of a thinking being might be: God might
even have endowed the body with the faculty of thinking, and of generating
ideas on occasion of certain impacts. Yet a man was a man for all that:
and Locke was satisfied that he knew, at least well enough for an honest
Englishman, what he was. He was what he felt himself to be: and this inner
man of his was not merely the living self, throbbing now in his heart; it
was all his moral past, all that he remembered to have been. If, from
moment to moment, the self was a spiritual energy astir within, in
retrospect the living present seemed, as it were, to extend its tentacles
and to communicate its subjectivity to his whole personal past. The limits
of his personality were those of his memory, and his experience included
everything that his living mind could appropriate and re-live. In a word,
_he was his idea of himself_: and this insight opens a new chapter not
only in his philosophy but in the history of human self-estimation.
Mankind was henceforth invited not to think of itself as a tribe of
natural beings, nor of souls, with a specific nature and fixed
possibilities. Each man was a romantic personage or literary character: he
was simply what he was thought to be, and might become anything that he
could will to become. The way was opened for Napoleon on the one hand and
for Fichte on the other.
III
Page 9. __All_ ideas must be equally conditioned._
Even the mathematical ideas which seem so exactly to describe the dynamic
order of nature are not repetitions of their natural counterpart: for
mathematical form in nature is a web of diffuse relations enacted; in the
mind it is a thought possessed, the logical synthesis of those deployed
relations. To run in a circle is one thing; to conceive a circle is
another. Our mind by its animal roots (which render it relevant to the
realm of matter and cognitive) and by its spiritual actuality (which
renders it original, synthetic, and emotional) is a language, from its
beginnings; almost, we might say, a biological poetry; and the greater the
intellectuality and poetic abstraction the greater the possible range. Yet
we must not expect this scope of speculation in us to go with adequacy or
exhaustiveness: on the contrary, mathematics and religion, each in its way
so sure, leave most of the truth out.
IV
Page 9. _He cannot be aware of what goes on beyond him, except as it
affects his own life._
Even that spark of divine intelligence which comes into the animal soul,
as Aristotle says, from beyond the gates, comes and is called down by the
exigencies of physical life. An animal endowed with locomotion cannot
merely feast sensuously on things as they appear, but must react upon them
at the first signal, and in so doing must virtually and in intent envisage
them as they are in themselves. For it is by virtue of their real
constitution and intrinsic energy that they act upon us and suffer change
in turn at our hands; so that whatsoever form things may take to our
senses and intellect, they take that form by exerting their material
powers upon us, and intertwining them in action with our own organisms.
Thus the appearance of things is always, in some measure, a true index to
their reality. Animals are inevitably engaged in self-transcending action,
and the consciousness of self-transcending action is self-transcendent
knowledge. The very nature of animal life makes it possible, within animal
consciousness, to discount appearance and to correct illusion--things
which in a vegetative or aesthetic sensibility would not be
distinguishable from pure experience itself. But when aroused to
self-transcendent attention, feeling must needs rise to intelligence, so
that external fact and impartial truth come within the range of
consciousness, not indeed by being contained there, but by being aimed at.
V
Page 19. _Conscious mind was a fact on its own account._
This conscious mind was a man's moral being, and personal identity could
not extend further than possible memory. This doctrine of Locke's had some
comic applications. The Bishop of Worcester was alarmed. If actions which
a hardened sinner had forgotten were no longer his, a short memory would
be a great blessing in the Day of Judgment. On the other hand, a theology
more plastic than Stillingfleet's would one day find in this same doctrine
a new means of edification. For if I may disown all actions I have
forgotten, may not things not done or witnessed by me in the body be now
appropriated and incorporated in my consciousness, if only I conceive them
vividly? The door is then open to all the noble ambiguities of idealism.
As my consciousness expands, or thinks it expands, into dramatic sympathy
with universal experience, that experience becomes my own. I may say I
have been the agent in all past achievements. Emerson could know that he
was Shakespeare and Caesar and Christ. Futurity is mine also, in every
possible direction at once; and I am one with the spirit of the universe
and with God.
Locke reassured the Bishop of Worcester, and was humbly confident that
Divine Justice would find a way of vindicating Itself in spite of human
wit. He might have added that if the sin of Adam could not only be imputed
to us juridically but could actually taint our consciousness--as it
certainly does if by Adam we understand our whole material heritage--so
surely the sins done or the habits acquired by the body beyond the scope
of consciousness may taint or clarify this consciousness now. Indeed, the
idea we form of ourselves and of our respective experiences is a figment
of vanity, a product of dramatic imagination, without cognitive import
save as a reading of the hidden forces, physical or divine, which have
formed us and actually govern us.
VI
Page 19. _Mind and body interacted._
The self which acts in a man is itself moved by forces which have long
been familiar to common sense, without being understood except
dramatically. These forces are called the passions; or when the dramatic
units distinguished are longish strands rather than striking episodes,
they are called temperament, character, or will; or perhaps, weaving all
these strands and episodes together again into one moral fabric, we call
them simply human nature. But in what does this vague human nature reside,
and how does it operate on the non-human world? Certainly not within the
conscious sphere, or in the superficial miscellany of experience.
Immediate experience is the intermittent chaos which human nature, in
combination with external circumstances, is invoked to support and to
rationalise. Is human nature, then, resident in each individual soul?
Certainly: but the soul is merely another name for that active principle
which we are looking for, to be the seat of our sensibility and the source
of our actions. Is this psychic power, then, resident in the body?
Undoubtedly; since it is hereditary and transmitted by a seed, and
continually aroused and modified by material agencies.
Since this soul or self in the body is so obscure, the temptation is great
to dramatise its energies and to describe them in myths. Myth is the
normal means of describing those forces of nature which we cannot measure
or understand; if we could understand or measure them we should describe
them prosaically and analytically, in what is called science. But nothing
is less measurable, or less intelligible to us, in spite of being so near
us and familiar, as the life of this carnal instrument, so soft and so
violent, which breeds our sensations and precipitates our actions. We see
today how the Freudian psychology, just because it is not satisfied with
registering the routine of consciousness but endeavours to trace its
hidden mechanism and to unravel its physical causes, is driven to use the
most frankly mythological language. The physiological processes concerned,
though presupposed, are not on the scale of human perception and not
traceable in detail; and the moral action, though familiar in snatches,
has to be patched by invented episodes, and largely attributed to daemonic
personages that never come on the stage.
Locke, in his psychology of morals, had at first followed the verbal
rationalism by which people attribute motives to themselves and to one
another. Human actions were explained by the alleged pursuit of the
greater prospective pleasure, and avoidance of the greater prospective
pain. But this way of talking, though not so poetical as Freud's, is no
less mythical. Eventual goods and evils have no present existence and no
power: they cannot even be discerned prophetically, save by the vaguest
fancy, entirely based on the present impulses and obsessions of the soul.
No future good, no future evil avails to move us, except--as Locke said
after examining the facts more closely--when a _certain uneasiness_ in the
soul (or in the body) causes us to turn to those untried goods and evils
with a present and living interest. This actual uneasiness, with the dream
pictures which it evokes, is a mere symptom of the direction in which
human nature in us is already moving, or already disposed to move. Without
this prior physical impulse, heaven may beckon and hell may yawn without
causing the least variation in conduct. As in religious conversion all is
due to the call of grace, so in ordinary action all is due to the ripening
of natural impulses and powers within the psyche. The _uneasiness_
observed by Locke is merely the consciousness of this ripening, before the
field of relevant action has been clearly discerned.
When all this is considered, the ostensible interaction between mind and
body puts on a new aspect. There are no _purely mental_ ideas or
intentions followed by material effects: there are no material events
followed by a _purely mental_ sensation or idea. Mental events are always
elements in total natural events containing material elements also:
material elements form the organ, the stimulus, and probably also the
object for those mental sensations or ideas. Moreover, the physical strand
alone is found to be continuous and traceable; the conscious strand, the
sequence of mental events, flares up and dies down daily, if not hourly;
and the medley of its immediate features--images, words, moods--juxtaposes
China and Peru, past and future, in the most irresponsible confusion. On
the other hand, in human life it is a part of the conscious
element--intentions, affections, plans, and reasonings--that _explains_
the course of action: dispersed temporally, our dominant thoughts contain
the reason for our continuous behaviour, and seem to guide it. They are
not so much links in a chain of minute consecutive causes--an idea or an
act of will often takes time to work and works, as it were, only
posthumously--as they are general overarching moral inspirations and
resolves, which the machinery of our bodies executes in its own way, often
rendering our thoughts more precise in the process, or totally
transforming them. We do roughly what we meant to do, barring accidents.
The reasons lie deep in our compound nature, being probably inarticulate;
and our action in a fragmentary way betrays our moral disposition: betrays
it in both senses of the word betray, now revealing it unawares, and now
sadly disappointing it.
I leave it for the reader's reflection to decide whether we should call
such cohabitation of mind with body interaction, or not rather sympathetic
concomitance, self-annotation, and a partial prophetic awakening to a life
which we are leading automatically.
VII
Page 21. _To the confusion of common sense._
Berkeley and his followers sometimes maintain that common sense is on
their side, that they have simply analysed the fact of our experience of
the material world, and if there is any paradox in their idealism, it is
merely verbal and disappears with familiarity. All the "reality", they
say, all the force, obduracy, and fertility of nature subsist undiminished
after we discover that this reality resides, and can only reside, in the
fixed order of our experience.
But no: analysis of immediate experience will never disclose any fixed
order in it; the surface of experience, when not interpreted
materialistically, is an inextricable dream. Berkeley and his followers,
when they look in this direction, towards nature and the rationale of
experience and science, are looking away from their own system, and
relying instead on the automatic propensity of human nature to routine, so
that we spontaneously prepare for repeating our actions (not our
experience) and even anticipate their occasions; a propensity further
biased by the dominant rhythms of the psyche, so that we assume a future
not so much similar to the past, as better. When developed, this
propensity turns into trust in natural or divine laws; but it is contrary
to common sense to expect such laws to operate apart from matter and from
the material continuity of external occasions. This appears clearly in our
trust in persons--a radical animal propensity--which is consonant with
common sense when these persons are living bodies, but becomes
superstitious, or at least highly speculative, when these persons are
disembodied spirits.
It is a pity that the beautiful system of Berkeley should have appeared in
an unspiritual age, when religion was mundane and perfunctory, and the
free spirit, where it stirred, was romantic and wilful. For that system
was essentially religious: it put the spirit face to face with God,
everywhere, always, and in everything it turned experience into a divine
language for the monition and expression of the inner man. Such an
instrument, in spiritual hands, might have served to dispel all natural
illusions and affections, and to disinfect the spirit of worldliness and
egotism. But Berkeley and his followers had no such thought. All they
wished was to substitute a social for a material world, precisely because
a merely social world might make worldly interests loom larger and might
induce mankind, against the evidence of their senses and the still small
voice in their hearts, to live as if their worldly interests were absolute
and must needs dominate the spirit.
Morally this system thus came to sanction a human servitude to material
things such as ancient materialists would have scorned; and theoretically
the system did not escape the dogmatic commitments of common sense against
which it protested. For far from withdrawing into the depths of the
private spirit, it professed to describe universal experience and the
evolution of all human ideas. This notion of "experience" originally
presupposed a natural agent or subject to endure that experience, and to
profit by it, by learning to live in better harmony with external
circumstances. Each agent or subject of experience might, at other times,
become an object of experience also: for they all formed part of a
material world, which they might envisage in common in their perceptions.
Now the criticism which repudiates this common material medium, like all
criticism or doubt, is secondary and partial: it continues to operate with
all the assumptions of common sense, save the one which it is expressly
criticising. So, in repudiating the material world, this philosophy
retains the notion of various agents or subjects gathering experience; and
we are not expected to doubt that there are just as many streams of
experience without a world, as there were people in the world when the
world existed. But the number and nature of these experiences have now
become undiscoverable, the material persons having been removed who
formerly were so placed as to gather easily imagined experiences, and to
be able to communicate them; and the very notion of experience has been
emptied of its meaning, when no external common world subsists to impose
that same experience on everybody. It was not knowledge of existing
experiences _in vacuo_ that led common sense to assume a material world,
but knowledge of an existing material world led it to assume existing, and
regularly reproducible, experiences.
Thus the whole social convention posited by empirical idealism is borrowed
without leave, and rests on the belief in nature for which it is
substituted.
VIII
Page 21. _The literary psychologist may come very near to the truth of
experience._
Experience cannot be in itself an object of science, because it is
essentially invisible, immeasurable, fugitive, and private; and although
it may be shared or repeated, the evidence for that repetition or that
unanimity cannot be found by comparing a present experience with another
experience by hypothesis absent. Both the absent experience and its
agreement with the present experience must be imagined freely and credited
instinctively, in view of the known circumstances in which the absent
experience is conceived to have occurred. The only instrument for
conceiving experience at large is accordingly private imagination; and
such imagination cannot be tested, although it may be guided and perhaps
recast by fresh observations or reports concerning the action and language
of other people. For action and language, being contagious, and being the
material counterpart of experience in each of us, may voluntarily or
involuntarily suggest our respective experience to one another, by causing
each to re-enact more or less accurately within himself the experience of
the rest. Thus alien thoughts and feelings are revealed or suggested to us
in common life, not without a subjective transformation increasing, so to
speak, as the square of the distance: and even the record of experience in
people's own words, when these are not names for recognisable external
things, awakens in the reader, in another age or country, quite
incommensurable ideas. Yet, under favourable circumstances, such
suggestion or revelation of experience, without ever becoming science, may
become public unanimity in sentiment, and may produce a truthful and
lively dramatic literature.
All modern philosophy, in so far as it is a description of experience and
not of nature, therefore seems to belong to the sphere of literature, and
to be without scientific value.
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