I fear that few of you will have been able to obey Bergson's call
upon you to look towards the sensational life for the fuller knowledge
of reality, or to sympathize with his attempt to limit the divine right
of concepts to rule our mind absolutely. It is too much like looking
downward and not up. Philosophy, you will say, doesn't lie flat on its
belly in the middle of experience, in the very thick of its sand and
gravel, as this Bergsonism does, never getting a peep at anything from
above. Philosophy is essentially the vision of things from above. It
doesn't simply feel the detail of things, it comprehends their
intelligible plan, sees their forms and principles, their categories
and rules, their order and necessity. It takes the superior point of
view of the architect. Is it conceivable that it should ever forsake
that point of view and abandon itself to a slovenly life of immediate
feeling? To say nothing of your traditional Oxford devotion to
Aristotle and Plato, the leaven of T.H. Green probably works still too
strongly here for his anti-sensationalism to be outgrown quickly. Green
more than any one realized that knowledge about things was
knowledge of their relations; but nothing could persuade him that our
sensational life could contain any relational element. He followed the
strict intellectualist method with sensations. What they were not
expressly defined as including, they must exclude. Sensations are not
defined as relations, so in the end Green thought that they could get
related together only by the action on them from above of a
'self-distinguishing' absolute and eternal mind, present to that which
is related, but not related itself. 'A relation,' he said, 'is not
contingent with the contingency of feeling. It is permanent with the
permanence of the combining and comparing thought which alone
constitutes it.'[1] In other words, relations are purely conceptual
objects, and the sensational life as such cannot relate itself
together. Sensation in itself, Green wrote, is fleeting, momentary,
unnameable (because, while we name it, it has become another), and for
the same reason unknowable, the very negation of knowability. Were
there no permanent objects of conception for our sensations to be
'referred to,' there would be no significant names, but only noises,
and a consistent sensationalism must be speechless.[2] Green's
intellectualism was so earnest that it produced a natural and an
inevitable effect. But the atomistic and unrelated sensations which he
had in mind were purely fictitious products of his rationalist fancy.
The psychology of our own day disavows them utterly,[3] and Green's
laborious belaboring of poor old Locke for not having first seen that
his ideas of sensation were just that impracticable sort of thing, and
then fled to transcendental idealism as a remedy,—his belaboring of
poor old Locke for this, I say, is pathetic. Every examiner of the
sensible life in concreto must see that relations of every sort,
of time, space, difference, likeness, change, rate, cause, or what not,
are just as integral members of the sensational flux as terms are, and
that conjunctive relations are just as true members of the flux as
disjunctive relations are.[4] This is what in some recent writings of
mine I have called the 'radically empiricist' doctrine (in distinction
from the doctrine of mental atoms which the name empiricism so often
suggests). Intellectualistic critics of sensation insist that
sensations are disjoined only. Radical empiricism insists that
conjunctions between them are just as immediately given as disjunctions
are, and that relations, whether disjunctive or conjunctive, are in
their original sensible givenness just as fleeting and momentary (in
Green's words), and just as 'particular,' as terms are. Later, both
terms and relations get universalized by being conceptualized and
named.[5] But all the thickness, concreteness, and individuality of
experience exists in the immediate and relatively unnamed stages of it,
to the richness of which, and to the standing inadequacy of our
conceptions to match it, Professor Bergson so emphatically calls our
attention. And now I am happy to say that we can begin to gather
together some of the separate threads of our argument, and see a little
better the general kind of conclusion toward which we are tending. Pray
go back with me to the lecture before the last, and recall what I said
about the difficulty of seeing how states of consciousness can compound
themselves. The difficulty seemed to be the same, you remember, whether
we took it in psychology as the composition of finite states of mind
out of simpler finite states, or in metaphysics as the composition of
the absolute mind out of finite minds in general. It is the general
conceptualist difficulty of any one thing being the same with many
things, either at once or in succession, for the abstract concepts of
oneness and manyness must needs exclude each other. In the particular
instance that we have dwelt on so long, the one thing is the all-form
of experience, the many things are the each-forms of experience in you
and me. To call them the same we must treat them as if each were
simultaneously its own other, a feat on conceptualist principles
impossible of performance.
On the principle of going behind the conceptual function altogether,
however, and looking to the more primitive flux of the sensational life
for reality's true shape, a way is open to us, as I tried in my last
lecture to show. Not only the absolute is its own other, but the
simplest bits of immediate experience are their own others, if that
hegelian phrase be once for all allowed. The concrete pulses of
experience appear pent in by no such definite limits as our conceptual
substitutes for them are confined by. They run into one another
continuously and seem to interpenetrate. What in them is relation and
what is matter related is hard to discern. You feel no one of them as
inwardly simple, and no two as wholly without confluence where they
touch. There is no datum so small as not to show this mystery, if
mystery it be. The tiniest feeling that we can possibly have comes with
an earlier and a later part and with a sense of their continuous
procession. Mr. Shadworth Hodgson showed long ago that there is
literally no such object as the present moment except as an unreal
postulate of abstract thought.[6] The 'passing' moment is, as I already
have reminded you, the minimal fact, with the 'apparition of
difference' inside of it as well as outside. If we do not feel both
past and present in one field of feeling, we feel them not at all. We
have the same many-in-one in the matter that fills the passing time.
The rush of our thought forward through its fringes is the everlasting
peculiarity of its life. We realize this life as something always off
its balance, something in transition, something that shoots out of a
darkness through a dawn into a brightness that we feel to be the dawn
fulfilled. In the very midst of the continuity our experience comes as
an alteration. 'Yes,' we say at the full brightness, 'this is
what I just meant.' 'No,' we feel at the dawning, 'this is not yet the
full meaning, there is more to come.' In every crescendo of sensation,
in every effort to recall, in every progress towards the satisfaction
of desire, this succession of an emptiness and fulness that have
reference to each other and are one flesh is the essence of the
phenomenon. In every hindrance of desire the sense of an ideal presence
which is absent in fact, of an absent, in a word, which the only
function of the present is to mean, is even more notoriously
there. And in the movement of pure thought we have the same phenomenon.
When I say Socrates is mortal, the moment Socrates is
incomplete; it falls forward through the is which is pure
movement, into the mortal which is indeed bare mortal on the
tongue, but for the mind is that mortal, the mortal Socrates, at last satisfactorily disposed of and told off.[7]
Here, then, inside of the minimal pulses of experience, is realized
that very inner complexity which the transcendentalists say only the
absolute can genuinely possess. The gist of the matter is always the
same—something ever goes indissolubly with something else. You cannot
separate the same from its other, except by abandoning the real
altogether and taking to the conceptual system. What is immediately
given in the single and particular instance is always something pooled
and mutual, something with no dark spot, no point of ignorance. No one
elementary bit of reality is eclipsed from the next bit's point of
view, if only we take reality sensibly and in small enough pulses—and
by us it has to be taken pulse-wise, for our span of consciousness is
too short to grasp the larger collectivity of things except nominally
and abstractly. No more of reality collected together at once is extant
anywhere, perhaps, than in my experience of reading this page, or in
yours of listening; yet within those bits of experience as they come to
pass we get a fulness of content that no conceptual description can
equal. Sensational experiences are their 'own others,' then,
both internally and externally. Inwardly they are one with their parts,
and outwardly they pass continuously into their next neighbors, so that
events separated by years of time in a man's life hang together
unbrokenly by the intermediary events. Their names, to be sure,
cut them into separate conceptual entities, but no cuts existed in the
continuum in which they originally came.
If, with all this in our mind, we turn to our own particular
predicament, we see that our old objection to the self-compounding of
states of consciousness, our accusation that it was impossible for
purely logical reasons, is unfounded in principle. Every smallest state
of consciousness, concretely taken, overflows its own definition. Only
concepts are self-identical; only 'reason' deals with closed equations;
nature is but a name for excess; every point in her opens out and runs
into the more; and the only question, with reference to any point we
may be considering, is how far into the rest of nature we may have to
go in order to get entirely beyond its overflow. In the pulse of inner
life immediately present now in each of us is a little past, a little
future, a little awareness of our own body, of each other's persons, of
these sublimities we are trying to talk about, of the earth's geography
and the direction of history, of truth and error, of good and bad, and
of who knows how much more? Feeling, however dimly and subconsciously,
all these things, your pulse of inner life is continuous with them,
belongs to them and they to it. You can't identify it with either one
of them rather than with the others, for if you let it develop into no
matter which of those directions, what it develops into will look back
on it and say, 'That was the original germ of me.'
In principle, then, the real units of our immediately-felt
life are unlike the units that intellectualist logic holds to and makes
its calculations with. They are not separate from their own others, and
you have to take them at widely separated dates to find any two of them
that seem unblent. Then indeed they do appear separate even as their
concepts are separate; a chasm yawns between them; but the chasm itself
is but an intellectualist fiction, got by abstracting from the
continuous sheet of experiences with which the intermediary time was
filled. It is like the log carried first by William and Henry, then by
William, Henry, and John, then by Henry and John, then by John and
Peter, and so on. All real units of experience overlap. Let a
row of equidistant dots on a sheet of paper symbolize the concepts by
which we intellectualize the world. Let a ruler long enough to cover at
least three dots stand for our sensible experience. Then the conceived
changes of the sensible experience can be symbolized by sliding the
ruler along the line of dots. One concept after another will apply to
it, one after another drop away, but it will always cover at least two
of them, and no dots less than three will ever adequately cover it. You falsify it if you treat it conceptually, or by the law of dots.
What is true here of successive states must also be true of
simultaneous characters. They also overlap each other with their being.
My present field of consciousness is a centre surrounded by a fringe
that shades insensibly into a subconscious more. I use three separate
terms here to describe, this fact; but I might as well use three
hundred, for the fact is all shades and no boundaries. Which part of it
properly is in my consciousness, which out? If I name what is out, it
already has come in. The centre works in one way while the margins work
in another, and presently overpower the centre and are central
themselves. What we conceptually identify ourselves with and say we are
thinking of at any time is the centre; but our full self is the
whole field, with all those indefinitely radiating subconscious
possibilities of increase that we can only feel without conceiving, and
can hardly begin to analyze. The collective and the distributive ways
of being coexist here, for each part functions distinctly, makes
connexion with its own peculiar region in the still wider rest of
experience and tends to draw us into that line, and yet the whole is
somehow felt as one pulse of our life,—not conceived so, but felt so.
In principle, then, as I said, intellectualism's edge is broken; it
can only approximate to reality, and its logic is inapplicable to our
inner life, which spurns its vetoes and mocks at its impossibilities.
Every bit of us at every moment is part and parcel of a wider self, it
quivers along various radii like the wind-rose on a compass, and the
actual in it is continuously one with possibles not yet in our present
sight.[8] And just as we are co-conscious with our own momentary
margin, may not we ourselves form the margin of some more really
central self in things which is co-conscious with the whole of us? May
not you and I be confluent in a higher consciousness, and confluently
active there, tho we now know it not?
I am tiring myself and you, I know, by vainly seeking to describe by
concepts and words what I say at the same time exceeds either
conceptualization or verbalization. As long as one continues talking, intellectualism remains in undisturbed possession of the field. The
return to life can't come about by talking. It is an act; to
make you return to life, I must set an example for your imitation, I
must deafen you to talk, or to the importance of talk, by showing you,
as Bergson does, that the concepts we talk with are made for purposes
of practice and not for purposes of insight. Or I must point, point to the mere that of life, and you by inner sympathy must
fill out the what for yourselves. The minds of some of you, I
know, will absolutely refuse to do so, refuse to think in
non-conceptualized terms. I myself absolutely refused to do so for
years together, even after I knew that the denial of
manyness-in-oneness by intellectualism must be false, for the same
reality does perform the most various functions at once. But I hoped
ever for a revised intellectualist way round the difficulty, and it was
only after reading Bergson that I saw that to continue using the
intellectualist method was itself the fault. I saw that philosophy had
been on a false scent ever since the days of Socrates and Plato, that
an intellectual answer to the intellectualist's difficulties
will never come, and that the real way out of them, far from consisting
in the discovery of such an answer, consists in simply closing one's
ears to the question. When conceptualism summons life to justify itself
in conceptual terms, it is like a challenge addressed in a foreign
language to some one who is absorbed in his own business; it is
irrelevant to him altogether—he may let it lie unnoticed. I went thus
through the 'inner catastrophe' of which I spoke in the last lecture; I
had literally come to the end of my conceptual stock-in-trade, I was
bankrupt intellectualistically, and had to change my base. No words of
mine will probably convert you, for words can be the names only of
concepts. But if any of you try sincerely and pertinaciously on your
own separate accounts to intellectualize reality, you may be similarly
driven to a change of front. I say no more: I must leave life to teach
the lesson.
We have now reached a point of view from which the self-compounding
of mind in its smaller and more accessible portions seems a certain
fact, and in which the speculative assumption of a similar but wider
compounding in remoter regions must be reckoned with as a legitimate
hypothesis. The absolute is not the impossible being I once thought it.
Mental facts do function both singly and together, at once, and we
finite minds may simultaneously be co-conscious with one another in a
superhuman intelligence. It is only the extravagant claims of coercive
necessity on the absolute's part that have to be denied by a priori
logic. As an hypothesis trying to make itself probable on analogical
and inductive grounds, the absolute is entitled to a patient hearing.
Which is as much as to say that our serious business from now onward
lies with Fechner and his method, rather than with Hegel, Royce, or
Bradley. Fechner treats the superhuman consciousness he so fervently
believes in as an hypothesis only, which he then recommends by all the
resources of induction and persuasion.
It is true that Fechner himself is an absolutist in his books, not
actively but passively, if I may say so. He talks not only of the
earth-soul and of the star-souls, but of an integrated soul of all
things in the cosmos without exception, and this he calls God just as
others call it the absolute. Nevertheless he thinks only of the
subordinate superhuman souls, and content with having made his
obeisance once for all to the august total soul of the cosmos, he
leaves it in its lonely sublimity with no attempt to define its nature.
Like the absolute, it is 'out of range,' and not an object for
distincter vision. Psychologically, it seems to me that Fechner's God
is a lazy postulate of his, rather than a part of his system positively
thought out. As we envelop our sight and hearing, so the earth-soul
envelops us, and the star-soul the earth-soul, until—what? Envelopment
can't go on forever; it must have an abschluss, a total envelope
must terminate the series, so God is the name that Fechner gives to
this last all-enveloper. But if nothing escapes this all-enveloper, he
is responsible for everything, including evil, and all the paradoxes
and difficulties which I found in the absolute at the end of our third
lecture recur undiminished. Fechner tries sincerely to grapple with the
problem of evil, but he always solves it in the leibnitzian fashion by
making his God non-absolute, placing him under conditions of
'metaphysical necessity' which even his omnipotence cannot violate. His
will has to struggle with conditions not imposed on that will by
itself. He tolerates provisionally what he has not created, and then
with endless patience tries to overcome it and live it down. He has, in
short, a history. Whenever Fechner tries to represent him clearly, his
God becomes the ordinary God of theism, and ceases to be the absolutely
totalized all-enveloper.[9] In this shape, he represents the ideal
element in things solely, and is our champion and our helper and we his
helpers, against the bad parts of the universe.
Fechner was in fact too little of a metaphysician to care for
perfect formal consistency in these abstract regions. He believed in
God in the pluralistic manner, but partly from convention and partly
from what I should call intellectual laziness, if laziness of any kind
could be imputed to a Fechner, he let the usual monistic talk about him
pass unchallenged. I propose to you that we should discuss the question
of God without entangling ourselves in advance in the monistic
assumption. Is it probable that there is any superhuman consciousness
at all, in the first place? When that is settled, the further question
whether its form be monistic or pluralistic is in order.
Before advancing to either question, however, and I shall have to
deal with both but very briefly after what has been said already, let
me finish our retrospective survey by one more remark about the curious
logical situation of the absolutists. For what have they invoked the
absolute except as a being the peculiar inner form of which shall
enable it to overcome the contradictions with which intellectualism has
found the finite many as such to be infected? The many-in-one character
that, as we have seen, every smallest tract of finite experience
offers, is considered by intellectualism to be fatal to the reality of
finite experience. What can be distinguished, it tells us, is separate;
and what is separate is unrelated, for a relation, being a 'between,'
would bring only a twofold separation. Hegel, Royce, Bradley, and the
Oxford absolutists in general seem to agree about this logical
absurdity of manyness-in-oneness in the only places where it is
empirically found. But see the curious tactics! Is the absurdity
reduced in the absolute being whom they call in to relieve it?
Quite otherwise, for that being shows it on an infinitely greater
scale, and flaunts it in its very definition. The fact of its not being
related to any outward environment, the fact that all relations are
inside of itself, doesn't save it, for Mr. Bradley's great argument
against the finite is that in any given bit of it (a bit of
sugar, for instance) the presence of a plurality of characters
(whiteness and sweetness, for example) is self-contradictory; so that
in the final end all that the absolute's name appears to stand for is
the persistent claim of outraged human nature that reality shall
not be called absurd. Somewhere there must be an aspect of it
guiltless of self-contradiction. All we can see of the absolute,
meanwhile, is guilty in the same way in which the finite is.
Intellectualism sees what it calls the guilt, when comminuted in the
finite object; but is too near-sighted to see it in the more enormous
object. Yet the absolute's constitution, if imagined at all, has to be
imagined after the analogy of some bit of finite experience. Take any
real bit, suppress its environment and then magnify it to
monstrosity, and you get identically the type of structure of the
absolute. It is obvious that all your difficulties here remain and go
with you. If the relative experience was inwardly absurd, the absolute
experience is infinitely more so. Intellectualism, in short, strains
off the gnat, but swallows the whole camel. But this polemic against
the absolute is as odious to me as it is to you, so I will say no more
about that being. It is only one of those wills of the wisp, those
lights that do mislead the morn, that have so often impeded the clear
progress of philosophy, so I will turn to the more general positive
question of whether superhuman unities of consciousness should be
considered as more probable or more improbable.
In a former lecture I went over some of the fechnerian reasons for
their plausibility, or reasons that at least replied to our more
obvious grounds of doubt concerning them. The numerous facts of divided
or split human personality which the genius of certain medical men, as
Janet, Freud, Prince, Sidis, and others, have unearthed were unknown in
Fechner's time, and neither the phenomena of automatic writing and
speech, nor of mediumship and 'possession' generally, had been
recognized or studied as we now study them, so Fechner's stock of
analogies is scant compared with our present one. He did the best with
what he had, however. For my own part I find in some of these abnormal
or supernormal facts the strongest suggestions in favor of a superior
co-consciousness being possible. I doubt whether we shall ever
understand some of them without using the very letter of Fechner's
conception of a great reservoir in which the memories of earth's
inhabitants are pooled and preserved, and from which, when the
threshold lowers or the valve opens, information ordinarily shut out
leaks into the mind of exceptional individuals among us. But those
regions of inquiry are perhaps too spook-haunted to interest an
academic audience, and the only evidence I feel it now decorous to
bring to the support of Fechner is drawn from ordinary religious
experience. I think it may be asserted that there are religious
experiences of a specific nature, not deducible by analogy or
psychological reasoning from our other sorts of experience. I think
that they point with reasonable probability to the continuity of our
consciousness with a wider spiritual environment from which the
ordinary prudential man (who is the only man that scientific
psychology, so called, takes cognizance of) is shut off. I shall begin
my final lecture by referring to them again briefly.