The Life of Reason Part 50

Much must be lost, left to itself, and resigned to the unprofitable flux that produced it.

[Sidenote: Sciences converge from different points of origin.]

A consequence of this incoherence in experience is that science is not absolutely single but springs up in various places at once, as a certain consistency or method becomes visible in this or that direction. These independent sciences might, conceivably, never meet at all; each might work out an entirely different aspect of things and cross the other, as it were, at a different level. This actually happens, for instance, in mathematics as compared with history or psychology, and in morals as compared with physics. Nevertheless, the fact that these various sciences are all human, and that here, for instance, we are able to mention them in one breath and to compare their natures, is proof that their spheres touch somehow, even if only peripherally. Since common knowledge, which knows of them all, is itself an incipient science, we may be sure that some continuity and some congruity obtains between their provinces. Some aspect of each must coincide with some aspect of some other, else n.o.body who pursued any one science would so much as suspect the existence of the rest. Great as may be the aversion of learned men to one another, and comprehensive as may be their ignorance, they are not positively compelled to live in solitary confinement, and the key of their prison cells is at least in their own pocket.

[Sidenote: Two chief kinds of science, physics and dialectic.]

Some sciences, like chemistry and biology, or biology and anthropology, are parted only, we presume, by accidental gaps in human knowledge; a more minute and better directed study of these fields would doubtless disclose their continuity with the fields adjoining. But there is one general division in science which cuts almost to the roots of human experience. Human understanding has used from the beginning a double method of surveying and arresting ideally the irreparable flux of being.

One expedient has been to notice and identify similarities of character, recurrent types, in the phenomena that pa.s.s before it or in its own operations; the other expedient has been to note and combine in one complex object characters which occur and reappear together. The latter feat which is made easy by the fact that when various senses are stimulated at once the inward instinctive reaction--which is felt by a primitive mind more powerfully than any external image--is one and not consciously divisible.

The first expedient imposes on the flux what we call ideas, which are concretions in discourse, terms employed in thought and language. The second expedient separates the same flux into what we call things, which are concretions in existence, complexes of qualities subsisting in s.p.a.ce and time, having definable dynamic relations there and a traceable history. Carrying out this primitive diversity in reflection science has moved in two different directions. By refining concretions in discourse it has attained to mathematics, logic, and the dialectical developments of ethics; by tracing concretions in existence it has reached the various natural and historical sciences. Following ancient usage, I shall take the liberty of calling the whole group of sciences which elaborates ideas _dialectic_, and the whole group that describes existences _physics_.

The contrast between ideal science or dialectic and natural science or physics is as great as the understanding of a single experience could well afford; yet the two kinds of science are far from independent. They touch at their basis and they co-operate in their results. Were dialectic made clearer or physics deeper than it commonly is, these points of contact would doubtless be multiplied; but even as they stand they furnish a sufficient ill.u.s.tration of the principle that all science develops objects in their own category and gives the mind dominion over the flux of matter by discovering its form.

[Sidenote: Their mutual implication.]

That physics and dialectic touch at their basis may be shown by a double a.n.a.lysis. In the first place, it is clear that the science of existence, like all science, is itself discourse, and that before concretions in existence can be discovered, and groups of coexistent qualities can be recognised, these qualities themselves must be arrested by the mind, noted, and identified in their recurrences. But these terms, bandied about in scientific discourse, are so many essences and pure ideas: so that the inmost texture of natural science is logical, and the whole force of any observation made upon the outer world lies in the constancy and mutual relations of the terms it is made in. If down did not mean down and motion motion, Newton could never have taken note of the fall of his apple. Now the constancy and relation of meanings is something _meant_, it is something created by insight and intent and is altogether dialectical; so that the science of existence is a portion of the art of discourse.

On the other hand discourse, in its operation, is a part of existence.

That truth or logical cogency is not itself an existence can be proved dialectically,[A] and is obvious to any one who sees for a moment what truth means, especially if he remembers at the same time that all existence is mutable, which it is the essence of truth not to be. But the knowledge or discovery of truth is an event in time, an incident in the flux of existence, and therefore a matter for natural science to study.

Furthermore, every term which dialectic uses is originally given embodied; in other words, it is given as an element in the actual flux, it conies by ill.u.s.tration. Though meaning is the object of an ideal function, and signification is inwardly appreciable only in terms of signification, yet the ideal leap is made from a material datum: that in which signification is seen is a fact. Or to state the matter somewhat differently, truth is not self-generating; if it were it would be a falsehood.

Its eternity, and the infinitude of propositions it contains, remain potential and unapproachable until their incidence is found in existence. Form cannot of itself decide which of all possible forms shall be real; in their ideality, and without reference to their ill.u.s.tration in things, all consistent propositions would be equally valid and equally trivial. Important truth is truth about something, not truth about truth; and although a single datum might suffice to give foothold and pertinence to an infinity of truths, as one atom would posit all geometry, geometry, if there were no s.p.a.ce, would be, if I may say so, all of the fourth dimension, and arithmetic, if there were no pulses or chasms in being, would be all algebra. Truth depends upon facts for its perspective, since facts select truths and decide which truths shall be mere possibilities and which shall be the eternal forms of actual things. The dialectical world would be a trackless desert if the existent world had no arbitrary const.i.tution. Living dialectic comes to clarify existence; it turns into meanings the actual forms of things by reflecting upon them, and by making them intended subjects of discourse.

[Sidenote: Their co-operation.]

Dialectic and physics, thus united at their basis, meet again in their results. In mechanical science, which is the best part of physics, mathematics, which is the best part of dialectic, plays a predominant role; it furnishes the whole method of understanding wherever there is any real understanding at all. In psychology and history, too, although dialectic is soon choked by the cross-currents of nature, it furnishes the little perspicuousness which there is. We understand actions and mental developments when the purposes or ideas contained in any stage are carried out logically in the sequel; it is when conduct and growth are rational, that is, when they are dialectical, that we think we have found the true secret and significance of them. It is the evident ideal of physics, in every department, to attain such an insight into causes that the effects actually given may be thence _deduced_; and deduction is another name for dialectic. To be sure, the dialectic applicable to material processes and to human life is one in which the terms and the categories needed are still exceedingly numerous and vague: a little logic is all that can be read into the cataract of events. But the hope of science, a hope which is supported by every success it scores, is that a simpler law than has yet been discovered will be found to connect units subtler than those yet known; and that in these finer terms the universal mechanism may be exhaustively rendered. Mechanism is the ideal of physics, because it is the infusion of a maximum of mathematical necessity into the flux of real things. It is the aspiration of natural science to be as dialectical as possible, and thus, in their ideal, both branches of science are brought together.

That the ideal of dialectic is to apply to existence and thereby to coincide with physics is in a sense no less true, although dialecticians may be little inclined to confess it. The direct purpose of deduction is to elucidate an idea, to develop an import, and nothing can be more irrelevant in this science than whether the conclusion is verified in nature or not. But the direct purpose of dialectic is not its ultimate justification. Dialectic is a human pursuit and has, at bottom, a moral function; otherwise, at bottom, it would have no value. And the moral function and ultimate justification of dialectic is to further the Life of Reason, in which human thought has the maximum practical validity, and may enjoy in consequence the richest ideal development. If dialectic takes a turn which makes it inapplicable in physics, which makes it worthless for mastering experience, it loses all its dignity: for abstract cogency has no dignity if the subject-matter into which it is introduced is trivial. In fact, were dialectic a game in which the counters were not actual data and the conclusions were not possible principles for understanding existence, it would not be a science at all. It would resemble a counterfeit paper currency, without intrinsic value and without commercial convenience. Just as a fact without implications is not a part of science, so a method without application would not be.

The free excursions of dialectic into non-natural regions may be wisely encouraged when they satisfy an interest which is at bottom healthy and may, at least indirectly, bring with it excellent fruits. As musicians are an honour to society, so are dialecticians that have a single heart and an exquisite patience. But somehow the benefit must redound to society and to practical knowledge, or these abstracted hermits will seem at first useless and at last mad. The logic of nonsense has a subtle charm only because it can so easily be turned into the logic of common sense. Empty dialectic is, as it were, the ballet of science: it runs most neatly after nothing at all.

[Sidenote: No science _a priori_.]

Both physics and dialectic are contained in common knowledge, and when carried further than men carry them daily life these sciences remain essentially inevitable and essentially fallible. If science deserves respect, it is not for being oracular but for being useful and delightful, as seeing is. Understanding is nothing but seeing under and seeing far. There is indeed a great mystery in knowledge, but this mystery is present in the simplest memory or presumption. The sciences have nothing to supply more fundamental than vulgar thinking or, as it were, preliminary to it. They are simply elaborations of it; they accept its pre-suppositions and carry on its ordinary processes. A pretence on the philosopher's part that he could get behind or below human thinking, that he could underpin, so to speak, his own childhood and the inherent conventions of daily thought, would be pure imposture. A philosopher can of course investigate the history of knowledge, he can a.n.a.lyse its method and point out its a.s.sumptions; but he cannot know by other authority than that which the vulgar know by, nor can his knowledge begin with other unheard-of objects or deploy itself in advance over an esoteric field. Every deeper investigation presupposes ordinary perception and uses some at least of its data. Every possible discovery _extends_ human knowledge. None can base human knowledge anew on a deeper foundation or prefix an ante-experimental episode to experience.

We may construct a theory as disintegrating as we please about the dialectical or empirical conditions of the experience given; we may disclose its logical stratification or physical antecedents; but every idea and principle used in such a theory must be borrowed from current knowledge as it happens to lie in the philosopher's mind.

[Sidenote: Role of criticism.]

If these speculative adventures do not turn out well, the scientific man is free to turn about and become the critic and satirist of his foiled ambitions. He may exhaust scepticism and withdraw into the citadel of immediate feeling, yielding bastion after bastion to the a.s.saults of doubt. When he is at last perfectly safe from error and reduced to speechless sensibility, he will perceive, however, that he is also washed clean of every practical belief: he would declare himself universally ignorant but for a doubt whether there be really anything to know. This metaphysical exercise is simply one of those "fallings from us, vanishings, blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realised" which may visit any child. So long as the suspension of judgment lasts, knowledge is surely not increased; but when we remember that the enemy to whom we have surrendered is but a ghost of our own evoking, we easily reoccupy the lost ground and fall back into an ordinary posture of belief and expectation. This recovered faith has no new evidences to rest on. We simply stand where we stood before we began to philosophise, only with a better knowledge of the lines we are holding and perhaps with less inclination to give them up again for no better reason than the undoubted fact that, in a speculative sense, it is always possible to renounce them.

Science, then, is the attentive consideration of common experience; it is common knowledge extended and refined. Its validity is of the same order as that of ordinary perception, memory, and understanding. Its test is found, like theirs, in actual intuition, which sometimes consists in perception and sometimes in intent. The flight of science is merely longer from perception to perception, and its deduction more accurate of meaning from meaning and purpose from purpose. It generates in the mind, for each vulgar observation, a whole brood of suggestions, hypotheses, and inferences. The sciences bestow, as is right and fitting, infinite pains upon that experience which in their absence would drift by unchallenged or misunderstood. They take note, infer, and prophesy. They compare prophecy with event; and altogether they supply--so intent are they on reality--every imaginable background and extension for the present dream.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: For instance, in Plato's "Parmenides," where it is shown that the ideas are not in the mind. We may gather from what is there said that the ideas cannot be identified with any embodiment of them, however perfect, since an idea means a nature common to all its possible embodiments and remains always outside of them. This is what Plato meant by saying that the ideas lay apart from phenomena and were what they were in and for themselves. They were mere forms and not, as a materialised Platonism afterward fancied, images in the mind of some psychological deity. The G.o.ds doubtless know the ideas, as Plato tells us in the same place: these are the common object of their thought and of ours; hence they are not anybody's thinking process, which of course would be in flux and phenomenal. Only by being ideal (_i.e._, by being a goal of intellectual energy and no part of sensuous existence) can a term be common to various minds and serve to make their deliverances pertinent to one another.

That truth is no existence might also be proved as follows: Suppose that nothing existed or (if critics carp at that phrase), that a universe did not exist. It would then be true that all existences were wanting, yet this truth itself would endure; therefore truth is not an existence. An attempt might be made to reverse this argument by saying that since it would still "be" true that nothing existed, the supposition is self-contradictory, for the truth would "be" or exist in any case. Truth would thus be turned into an opinion, supposed to subsist eternally in the ether. The argument, however, is a bad sophism, because it falsifies the intent of the terms used. Somebody's opinion is not what is meant by the truth, since every opinion, however long-lived, may be false.

Furthermore, the notion that it might have been true that nothing existed is a perfectly clear notion. The nature of dialectic is entirely corrupted when sincerity is lost. No intent can be self-contradictory, since it fixes its own object, but a man may easily contradict himself by wavering between one intent and another.]

CHAPTER II

HISTORY

[Sidenote: History an artificial memory.]

The least artificial extension of common knowledge is history. Personal recollection supplies many an anecdote, anecdotes collected and freely commented upon make up memoirs, and memoirs happily combined make not the least interesting sort of history. When a man recalls any episode in his career, describes the men that flourished in his youth, or laments the changes that have since taken place, he is an informal historian. He would become one in a formal and technical sense if he supplemented and controlled his memory by ransacking papers, and taking elaborate pains to gather evidence on the events he wished to relate. This systematic investigation, especially when it goes back to first sources, widens the basis for imaginative reconstruction. It b.u.t.tresses somewhat the frail body of casual facts that in the first instance may have engaged an individual's attention.

History is nothing but a.s.sisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not what science necessarily rests on. In order to sift evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be a.s.sumed in order to support that knowledge is impossible to draw.

Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

[Sidenote: Second sight requires control.]

It is true that memory sometimes, as in a vision, seems to raise the curtain upon the past and restore it to us in its pristine reality. We may imagine at such moments experience can never really perish, but, though hidden by chance from the roving eye, endures eternally in some spiritual sphere. Such bodily recovery of the past, however, like other telepathic visions, can never prove its own truth. A lapse into by-gone perception, a sense of living the past over with all its vivid minutiae and trivial concomitants, might involve no true repet.i.tion of anything that had previously existed. It might be a fresh experience altogether.

The sense of knowing const.i.tutes only a working presumption for experiment to start with; until corroboration comes that presumption can claim no respect from the outsider.

[Sidenote: Nature the theme common to various memories.]

While memory remains a private presumption, therefore, it can be compared with nothing else that might test its veracity. Only when memory is expressed and, in the common field of expression, finds itself corroborated by another memory, does it rise somewhat in dignity and approach scientific knowledge. Two presumptions, when they coincide, make a double a.s.surance. While memory, then, is the basis of all historical knowledge, it is not called history until it enters a field where it can be supported or corrected by evidence. This field is that natural world which all experiences, in so far as they are rational, envisage together. a.s.sertions relating to events in that world can corroborate or contradict one another--something that would be impossible if each memory, like the plot of a novel, moved in a sphere of its own. For memory to meet memory, the two must present objects which are similar or continuous: then they can corroborate or correct each other and help to fix the order of events as they really happened--that is, as they happened independently of what either memory may chance to represent. Thus even the most miraculous and direct recovery of the past needs corroboration if it is to be systematically credited; but to receive corroboration it must refer to some event in nature, in that common world in s.p.a.ce and time to which other memories and perceptions may refer also. In becoming history, therefore, memory becomes a portion of natural science. Its a.s.sertions are such that any natural science may conceivably support or contradict them.

[Sidenote: Growth of legend.]

Nature and its transformations, however, form too serried and complicated a system for our wayward minds to dominate if left to their spontaneous workings. Whatever is remembered or conceived is at first vaguely believed to have its place in the natural order, all myth and fable being originally localised within the confines of the material world and made to pa.s.s for a part of early history. The method by which knowledge of the past is preserved is so subject to imaginative influence that it cannot avail to exclude from history anything that the imagination may supply. In the growth of legend a dramatic rhythm becomes more and more marked. What falls in with this rhythm is reproduced and accentuated whenever the train of memory is started anew.

The absence of such cadences would leave a sensible gap--a gap which the momentum of ideation is quick to fill up with some appropriate image.

Whatever, on the other hand, cannot be incorporated into the dominant round of fancies is consigned more and more to oblivion.

This consolidation of legend is not intentional. It is ingenuous and for the most part inevitable. When we muse about our own past we are conscious of no effort to give it dramatic unity; on the contrary, the excitement and interest of the process consist in seeming to discover the hidden eloquence and meaning of the events themselves. When a man of experience narrates the wonders he has seen, we listen with a certain awe, and believe in him for his miracles as we believe in our own memory for its arts. A bard's mechanical and ritualistic habits usually put all judgment on his own part to sleep; while the sanct.i.ty attributed to the tale, as it becomes automatically more impressive, precludes tinkering with it intentionally. Especially the allegories and marvels with which early history is adorned are not ordinarily invented with malice prepense. They are rather discovered in the mind, like a foundling, between night and morning. They are divinely vouchsafed. Each time the tale is retold it suffers a variation which is not challenged, since it is memory itself that has varied. The change is discoverable only if some record of the narrative in its former guise, or some physical memorial of the event related, survives to be confronted with the modified version. The modified version itself can make no comparisons.

It merely inherits the name and authority of its ancestor. The innocent poet believes his own lies.

Legends consequently acquire a considerable eloquence and dramatic force. These beauties accrue spontaneously, because rhythm and ideal pertinence, in which poetic merit largely lies, are natural formative principles for speech and memory. As symmetry in material structures is a ground for strength, and hills by erosion are worn to pyramids, so it is in thoughts. Yet the stability attained is not absolute, but only such stability as the circ.u.mstances require. Dramatic effect is not everywhere achieved, nor is it missed by the narrator where it is wanting, so that even the oldest and best-pruned legends are full of irrelevant survivals, contradictions, and sc.r.a.ps of nonsense. These literary blemishes are like embedded fossils and tell of facts which the mechanism of reproduction, for some casual reason, has not obliterated.

The recorder of verbal tradition religiously sets down its inconsistencies and leaves in the transfigured chronicle many tell-tale incidents and remarks which, like atrophied organs in an animal body, reveal its gradual formation. Art and a deliberate pursuit of unction or beauty would have thrown over this baggage. The automatic and pious minstrel carries it with him to the end.

[Sidenote: No history without doc.u.ments.]

For these reasons there can be no serious history until there are archives and preserved records, although sometimes a man in a privileged position may compose interesting essays on the events and persons of his own time, as his personal experience has presented them to him. Archives and records, moreover, do not absolve a speculative historian from paying the same toll to the dramatic unities and making the same concessions to the laws of perspective which, in the absence of doc.u.ments, turn tradition so soon into epic poetry. The principle that elicits histories out of records is the same that breeds legends out of remembered events. In both cases the facts are automatically foreshortened and made to cl.u.s.ter, as it were providentially, about a chosen interest. The historian's politics, philosophy, or romantic imagination furnishes a vital nucleus for reflection. All that falls within that particular vortex is included in the mental picture, the rest is pa.s.sed over and tends to drop out of sight. It is not possible to say, nor to think, everything at once; and the private interest which guides a man in selecting his materials imposes itself inevitably on the events he relates and especially on their grouping and significance.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

The conditions of expression and even of memory dragoon the facts and put a false front on diffuse experience. What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion. Such falsification is inevitable, and an honest historian is guilty of it only against his will. He would wish, as he loves the truth, to see and to render it entire. But the limits of his book and of his knowledge force him to be partial. It is only a very great mind, seasoned by large wisdom, that can lend such an accent and such a carrying-power to a few facts as to make them representative of all reality.

[Sidenote: The aim is truth.]

Some historians, indeed, are so frankly partisan or cynical that they avowedly write history with a view to effect, either political or literary. Moralising historians belong to this school, as well as those philosophers who worship evolution. They sketch every situation with malice and twist it, as if it were an argument, to bring out a point, much as fashionable portrait-painters sometimes surcharge the characteristic, in order to make a bold effect at a minimum expense of time and devotion. And yet the truly memorable aspect of a man is that which he wears in the sunlight of common day, with all his generic humanity upon him. His most interesting phase is not that which he might a.s.sume under the lime-light of satirical or literary comparisons. The characteristic is after all the inessential. It marks a peripheral variation in the honest and st.u.r.dy lump. To catch only the heartless shimmer of individuality is to paint a costume without the body that supports it. Therefore a broad and n.o.ble historian sets down all within his apperception. His literary interests are forgotten; he is wholly devoted to expressing the pa.s.sions of the dead. His ideal, emanating from his function and chosen for no extraneous reason, is to make his heroes think and act as they really thought and acted in the world.

Nevertheless the opposite happens, sometimes to a marked and even scandalous degree. As legend becomes in a few generations preposterous myth, so history, after a few rehandlings and condensations, becomes unblushing theory. Now theory--when we use the word for a schema of things' relations and not for contemplation of them in their detail and fulness--is an expedient to cover ignorance and remedy confusion. The function of history, if it could be thoroughly fulfilled, would be to render theory unnecessary. Did we possess a record of all geological changes since the creation we should need no geological theory to suggest to us what those changes must have been. Hypothesis is like the rule of three: it comes into play only when one of the terms is unknown and needs to be inferred from those which are given. The ideal historian, since he would know all the facts, would need no hypotheses, and since he would imagine and hold all events together in their actual juxtapositions he would need no cla.s.sifications. The intentions, acts, and antecedents of every mortal would be seen in their precise places, with no imputed qualities or scope; and when those intentions had been in fact fulfilled, the fulfilments too would occupy their modest position in the rank and file of marching existence. To omniscience the idea of cause and effect would be unthinkable. If all things were perceived together and co-existed for thought, as they actually flow through being, on one flat phenomenal level, what sense would there be in saying that one element had compelled another to appear? The relation of cause is an instrument necessary to thought only when thought is guided by presumption. We say, "If this thing had happened, that other thing would have followed"--a hypothesis which would lapse and become unmeaning had we always known all the facts. For no supposition contrary to fact would then have entered discourse.