evolution, cannot mimic one another, to discover mutually how they
feel. But just because merely human, such an interpretation may remain
always plausible to man; and it would be an admirable entertainment if
there were no danger that it should be taken seriously. The idea Paul
has of Peter, Spinoza observes, expresses the nature of Peter less
than it betrays that of Paul; and so an idea framed by a man of the
consciousness of things in general reveals the mind of that man rather
than the mind of the universe; but the mind of the man too may be
worth knowing, and the illusive hope of discovering everything may
lead him truly to disclose himself. Such a disclosure of the lower
depths of man by himself is M. Bergson's psychology; and the
psychological romance, purporting to describe the inward nature of the
universe, which he has built out of that introspection, is his
metaphysics.

Many a point in this metaphysics may seem strange, fantastic, and
obscure; and so it really is, when dislocated and projected
metaphysically; but not one will be found to be arbitrary; not one
but is based on attentive introspection and perception of the
immediate. Take, for example, what is M. Bergson's starting-point, his
somewhat dazzling doctrine that to be is to last, or rather to feel
oneself endure. This is a hypostasis of "true" (_i.e._ immediately
felt) duration. In a sensuous day-dream past feelings survive in the
present, images of the long ago are shuffled together with present
sensations, the roving imagination leaves a bright wake behind it like
a comet, and pushes a rising wave before it, like the bow of a ship;
all is fluidity, continuity without identity, novelty without
surprise. Hence, too, the doctrine of freedom: the images that appear
in such a day-dream are often congruous in character with those that
preceded, and mere prolongations of them; but this prolongation itself
modifies them, and what develops is in no way deducible or predictable
out of what exists. This situation is perfectly explicable
scientifically. The movement of consciousness will be self-congruous
and sustained when it rests on continuous processes in the same
tissues, and yet quite unpredictable from within, because the direct
sensuous report of bodily processes (in nausea, for instance, or in
hunger) contains no picture of their actual mechanism. Even wholly new
features, due to little crises in bodily life, may appear in a dream
to flow out of what already exists, yet freely develop it; because in
dreams comparison, the attempt to be consistent, is wholly in
abeyance, and also because the new feature will come imbedded in
others which are not new, but have dramatic relevance in the story. So
immediate consciousness yields the two factors of Bergsonian freedom,
continuity and indetermination.

Again, take the somewhat disconcerting assertion that movement exists
when there is nothing that moves, and no space that it moves through.
In vision, perhaps, it is not easy to imagine a consciousness of
motion without some presentation of a field, and of a distinguishable
something in it; but if we descend to somatic feelings (and the more
we descend, with M. Bergson, the closer we are to reality), in
shooting pains or the sense of intestinal movements, the feeling of a
change and of a motion is certainly given in the absence of all idea
of a _mobile_ or of distinct points (or even of a separate field)
through which it moves; consciousness begins with the sense of change,
and the terms of the felt process are only qualitative limits, bred
out of the felt process itself. Even a more paradoxical tenet of our
philosopher's finds it justification here. He says that the units of
motion are indivisible, that they are acts; so that to solve the
riddle about Achilles and the tortoise we need no mathematics of the
infinitesimal, but only to ask Achilles how he accomplishes the feat.
Achilles would reply that in so many strides he would do it; and we
may be surprised to learn that these strides are indivisible, so that,
apparently, Achilles could not have stumbled in the middle of one, and
taken only half of it. Of course, in nature, in what non-Bergsonians
call reality, he could: but not in his immediate feeling, for if he
had stumbled, the real stride, that which he was aware of taking,
would have been complete at the stumbling-point. It is certain that
consciousness comes in stretches, in breaths: all its data are
æsthetic wholes, like visions or snatches of melody; and we should
never be aware of anything were we not aware of something all at once.

When a man has taught himself--and it is a difficult art--to revert in
this way to rudimentary consciousness and to watch himself live, he
will be able, if he likes, to add a plausible chapter to speculative
psychology. He has unearthed in himself the animal sensibility which
has thickened, budded, and crystallised into his present somewhat
intellectual image of the world. He has touched again the vegetative
stupor, the multiple disconnected landscapes, the "blooming buzzing
confusion" which his reason has partly set in order. May he not have
in all this a key to the consciousness of other creatures? Animal
psychology, and sympathy with the general life of nature, are vitiated
both for naturalists and for poets by the human terms they must use,
terms which presuppose distinctions which non-human beings probably
have not made. These distinctions correct the illusions of immediate
appearance in ways which only a long and special experience has
imposed upon us, and they should not be imported into other souls. We
are old men trying to sing the loves of children; we are wingless
bipeds trying to understand the gods. But the data of the immediate
are hardly human; it is probable that at that level all sentience is
much alike. From that common ground our imagination can perhaps start
safely, and follow such hints as observation furnishes, until we learn
to live and feel as other living things do, or as nature may live and
feel as a whole. Instinct, for instance, need not be, as our human
prejudice suggests, a rudimentary intelligence; it may be a parallel
sort of sensibility, an imageless awareness of the presence and
character of other things, with a superhuman ability to change oneself
so as to meet them. Do we not feel something of this sort ourselves in
love, in art, in religion? M. Bergson is a most delicate and charming
poet on this theme, and a plausible psychologist; his method of
accumulating and varying his metaphors, and leaving our intuition to
itself under that artful stimulus, is the only judicious and
persuasive method he could have employed, and his knack at it is
wonderful. We recover, as we read, the innocence of the mind. It seems
no longer impossible that we might, like the wise men in the
story-books, learn the language of birds; we share for the moment the
siestas of plants; and we catch the quick consciousness of the waves
of light, vibrating at inconceivable rates, each throb forgotten as
the next follows upon it; and we may be tempted to play on Shakespeare
and say:

    "Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
     So do _their spirits_ hasten to their end."

Some reader of M. Bergson might say to himself: All this is ingenious
introspection and divination; grant that it is true, and how does that
lead to a new theory of the universe? You have been studying surface
appearances and the texture of primitive consciousness; that is a part
of the internal rumble of this great engine of the world. How should
it loosen or dissolve that engine, as your philosophy evidently
professes that it must? That nature exists we perceive whenever we
resume our intellectual and practical life, interrupted for a moment
by this interesting reversion to the immediate. The consciousness
which in introspection we treat as an object is, in operation, a
cognitive activity: it demonstrates the world. You would never
yourself have conceived the minds of ethereal vibrations, or of birds,
or of ants, or of men suspending their intelligence, if you had known
of no men, ants, birds, or ether. It is the material objects that
suggest to you their souls, and teach you how to conceive them. How
then should the souls be substituted for the bodies, and abolish them?

Poor guileless reader! If philosophers were straightforward men of
science, adding each his mite to the general store of knowledge, they
would all substantially agree, and while they might make interesting
discoveries, they would not herald each his new transformation of the
whole universe. But philosophers are either revolutionists or
apologists, and some of them, like M. Bergson, are revolutionists in the
interests of apologetics. Their art is to create some surprising
inversion of things, some system of the universe contrary to common
apprehension, or to defend some such inverted system, propounded by
poets long ago, and perhaps consecrated by religion. It would not
require a great man to say calmly: Men, birds, even ether-waves, if you
will, feel after this and this fashion. The greatness and the excitement
begin when he says: Your common sense, your practical intellect, your
boasted science have entirely deceived you; see what the real truth is
instead! So M. Bergson is bent on telling us that the immediate, as he
describes it, is the sole reality; all else is unreal, artificial, and a
more or less convenient symbol in discourse--discourse itself being
taken, of course, for a movement in immediate sensibility, which is what
it is existentially, but never for an excursion into an independent
logical realm, which is what it is spiritually and in intent. So we must
revise all our psychological observations, and turn them into
metaphysical dogmas. It would be nothing to say simply: _For immediate
feeling_ the past is contained in the present, movement is prior to that
which moves, spaces are many, disconnected, and incommensurable, events
are indivisible wholes, perception is in its object and identical with
it, the future is unpredictable, the complex is bred out of the simple,
and evolution is creative, its course being obedient to a general
tendency or groping impulse, not to any exact law. No, we must say
instead: _In the universe at large_ the whole past is preserved bodily
in the present; duration is real and space is only imagined; all is
motion, and there is nothing substantial that moves; times are
incommensurable; men, birds, and waves are nothing but the images of
them (our perceptions, like their spirits, being some compendium of
these images); chance intervenes in the flux, but evolution is due to an
absolute Effort which exists _in vacuo_ and is simplicity itself; and
this Effort, without having an idea of what it pursues, nevertheless
produces it out of nothing.

The accuracy or the hollowness of M. Bergson's doctrine, according as
we take it for literary psychology or for natural philosophy, will
appear clearly in the following instance. "Any one," he writes,[3]
"who has ever practised literary composition knows very well that,
after he has devoted long study to the subject, collected all the
documents, and taken all his notes, one thing more is needful before
he can actually embark on the work of composition; namely, an effort,
often a very painful one, to plant himself all at once in the very
heart of the subject, and to fetch from as profound a depth as
possible the momentum by which he need simply let himself be borne
along in the sequel. This momentum, as soon as it is acquired, carries
the mind forward along a path where it recovers all the facts it had
gathered together, and a thousand other details besides. The momentum
develops and breaks up of itself into particulars that might be
retailed _ad infinitum._ The more he advances the more he finds; he
will never have exhausted the subject; and nevertheless if he turns
round suddenly to face the momentum he feels at his back and see what
it is, it eludes him; for it is not a thing but a direction of
movement, and though capable of being extended indefinitely, it is
simplicity itself."

[Footnote 3: "Introduction a la Métaphysique." _Revue de Métaphysique
et de Morale_, Janvier, 1903.]

This is evidently well observed: heighten the tone a little, and you
might have a poem on those joyful pangs of gestation and parturition
which are not denied to a male animal. It is a description of the
_sensation_ of literary composition, of the _immediate experience_ of
a writer as words and images rise into his mind. He cannot summon his
memories explicitly, for he would first have to remember them to do
so; his consciousness of inspiration, of literary creation, is nothing
but a consciousness of pregnancy and of a certain "direction of
movement," as if he were being wafted in a balloon; and just in its
moments of highest tension his mind is filled with mere expectancy and
mere excitement, without images, plans, or motives; and what guides it
is inwardly, as M. Bergson says, simplicity itself. Yet excellent as
such a description is psychologically, it is a literary confession
rather than a piece of science; for scientific psychology is a part of
natural history, and when in nature we come upon such a notable
phenomenon as this, that some men write and write eloquently, we
should at once study the antecedents and the conditions under which
this occurs; we should try, by experiment if possible, to see what
variations in the result follow upon variations in the situation. At
once we should begin to perceive how casual and superficial are those
data of introspection which M. Bergson's account reproduces. Does that
painful effort, for instance, occur always? Is it the moral source, as
he seems to suggest, of the good and miraculous fruits that follow?
Not at all: such an effort is required only when the writer is
overworked, or driven to express himself under pressure; in the
spontaneous talker or singer, in the orator surpassing himself and
overflowing with eloquence, there is no effort at all; only facility,
and joyous undirected abundance. We should further ask whether _all_
the facts previously gathered are recovered, and all correctly, and
what relation the "thousand other details" have to them; and we should
find that everything was controlled and supplied by the sensuous
endowment of the literary man, his moral complexion, and his general
circumstances. And we should perceive at the same time that the
momentum which to introspection was so mysterious was in fact the
discharge of many automatisms long imprinted on the system, a system
(as growth and disease show) that has its internal vegetation and
crises of maturity, to which facility and error in the recovery of the
past, and creation also, are closely attached. Thus we should utterly
refuse to say that this momentum was capable of being extended
indefinitely or was simplicity itself. It may be a good piece of
literary psychology to say that simplicity precedes complexity, for it
precedes complexity in consciousness. Consciousness dwindles and
flares up most irresponsibly, so long as its own flow alone is
regarded, and it continually arises out of nothing, which indeed is
simplicity itself. But it does not arise without real conditions
outside, which cannot be discovered by introspection, nor divined by
that literary psychology which proceeds by imagining what
introspection might yield in others.

There is a deeper mystification still in this passage, where a writer
is said to "plant himself in the very heart of the subject." The
general tenor of M. Bergson's philosophy warrants us in taking this
quite literally to mean that the field from which inspiration draws
its materials is not the man's present memory nor even his past
experience, but the subject itself which that experience and this
memory regard: in other words, what we write about and our latent
knowledge are the same thing. When Shakespeare was composing his
_Antony and Cleopatra,_ for instance, he planted himself in the very
heart of Rome and of Egypt, and in the very heart of the Queen of
Egypt herself; what he had gathered from Plutarch and from elsewhere
was, according to M. Bergson's view, a sort of glimpse of the remote
reality itself, as if by telepathy he had been made to witness some
part of it; or rather as if the scope of his consciousness had been
suddenly extended in one direction, so as to embrace and contain
bodily a bit of that outlying experience. Thus when the poet sifts his
facts and sets his imagination to work at unifying and completing
them, what he does is to pierce to Egypt, Rome, and the inner
consciousness of Cleopatra, to fetch _thence_ the profound momentum
which is to guide him in composition; and it is there, not in the
adventitious later parts of his own mind, that he should find the
thousand other details which he may add to the picture.

Here again, in an exaggerated form, we have a transcript of the
immediate, a piece of really wonderful introspection, spoiled by being
projected into a theory of nature, which it spoils in its turn.
Doubtless Shakespeare, in the heat of dramatic vision, lived his
characters, transported himself to their environment, and felt the
passion of each, as we do in a dream, dictating their unpremeditated
words. But all this is in imagination; it is true only within the
framework of our dream. In reality, of course, Shakespeare never
pierced to Rome nor to Egypt; his elaborations of his data are drawn
from his own feelings and circumstances, not from those of Cleopatra.
This transporting oneself into the heart of a subject is a loose
metaphor: the best one can do is to transplant the subject into one's
own heart and draw _from oneself_ impulses as profound as possible
with which to vivify tradition and make it over in one's own image.
Yet I fear that to speak so is rationalism, and would be found to
involve, to the horror of our philosopher, that life is cognitive and
spiritual, but dependent, discontinuous, and unsubstantial. What he
conceives instead is that consciousness is a stuff out of which things
are made, and has all the attributes, even the most material, of its
several objects; and that there is no possibility of knowing, save by
becoming what one is trying to know. So perception, for him, lies
where its object does, and is some part of it; memory is the past
experience itself, somehow shining through into the present; and
Shakespeare's Cleopatra, I should infer, would have to be some part of
Cleopatra herself--in those moments when she spoke English.

It is hard to be a just critic of mysticism because mysticism can
never do itself justice in words. To conceive of an external actual
Cleopatra and an external actual mind of Shakespeare is to betray the
cause of pure immediacy; and I suspect that if M. Bergson heard of
such criticisms as I am making, he would brush them aside as utterly
blind and scholastic. As the mystics have always said that God was not
far from them, but dwelt in their hearts, meaning this pretty
literally: so this mystical philosophy of the immediate, which talks
sometimes so scientifically of things and with such intimacy of
knowledge, feels that these things are not far from it, but dwell
literally in its heart. The revelation and the sentiment of them, if
it be thorough, is just what the things are. The total aspects to be
discerned in a body _are_ that body; and the movement of those
aspects, when you enact it, _is_ the spirit of that body, and at the
same time a part of your own spirit. To suppose that a man's
consciousness (either one's own or other people's) is a separate fact
over and above the shuffling of the things he feels, or that these
things are anything over and above the feeling of them which exists
more or less everywhere in diffusion--that, for the mystic, is to be
once for all hopelessly intellectual, dualistic, and diabolical. If
you cannot shed the husk of those dead categories--space, matter,
mind, truth, person--life is shut out of your heart. And the mystic,
who always speaks out of experience, is certainly right in this, that
a certain sort of life is shut out by reason, the sort that reason
calls dreaming or madness; but he forgets that reason too is a kind of
life, and that of all the kinds--mystical, passionate, practical,
æsthetic, intellectual--with their various degrees of light and heat,
the life of reason is that which some people may prefer. I confess I
am one of these, and I am not inclined, even if I were able, to
reproduce M. Bergson's sentiments as he feels them. He is his own
perfect expositor. All a critic can aim at is to understand these
sentiments as existing facts, and to give them the place that belongs
to them in the moral world. To understand, in most cases, is intimacy
enough.

Herbert Spencer says somewhere that the yolk of an egg is homogeneous,
the highly heterogeneous bird being differentiated in it by the law of
evolution. I cannot think what assured Spencer of this homogeneity in
the egg, except the fact that perhaps it all tasted alike, which might
seem good proof to a pure empiricist. Leibnitz, on the contrary,
maintained that the organisation of nature was infinitely deep, every
part consisting of an endless number of discrete elements. Here we
may observe the difference between good philosophy and bad. The idea
of Leibnitz is speculative and far outruns the evidence, but it is
speculative in a well-advised, penetrating, humble, and noble fashion;
while the idea of Spencer is foolishly dogmatic, it is a piece of
ignorant self-sufficiency, like that insular empiricism that would
deny that Chinamen were real until it had actually seen them. Nature
is richer than experience and wider than divination; and it is far
rasher and more arrogant to declare that any part of nature is simple
than to suggest the sort of complexity that perhaps it might have. M.
Bergson, however, is on the side of Spencer. After studiously
examining the egg on every side--for he would do more than taste
it--and considering the source and destiny of it, he would summon his
intuition to penetrate to the very heart of it, to its spirit, and
then he would declare that this spirit was a vital momentum without
parts and without ideas, and was simplicity itself. He would add that
it was the free and original creator of the bird, because it is of the
essence of spirit to bestow more than it possesses and to build better
than it knows. Undoubtedly actual spirit is simple and does not know
how it builds; but for that very reason actual spirit does not really
create or build anything, but merely watches, now with sympathetic,
now with shocked attention, what is being created and built for it.
Doubtless new things are always arising, new islands, new persons, new
philosophies; but that the real cause of them should be simpler than
they, that their Creator, if I may use this language, should be
ignorant and give more than he has, who can stomach that?

Let us grant, however, since the thing is not abstractly
inconceivable, that eggs really have no structure. To what, then,
shall we attribute the formation of birds? Will it follow that
evolution, or differentiation, or the law of the passage from the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous, or the dialectic of the concept of
pure being, or the impulse towards life, or the vocation of spirit is
what actually hatches them? Alas, these words are but pedantic and
rhetorical cloaks for our ignorance, and to project them behind the
facts and regard them as presiding from thence over the course of
nature is a piece of the most deplorable scholasticism. If eggs are
really without structure, the true causes of the formation of birds
are the last conditions, whatever they may be, that introduce that
phenomenon and determine its character--the type of the parents, the
act of fertilisation, the temperature, or whatever else observation
might find regularly to precede and qualify that new birth in nature.
These facts, if they were the ultimate and deepest facts in the case,
would be the ultimate and only possible terms in which to explain it.
They would constitute the mechanism of reproduction; and if nature
were no finer than that in its structure, science could not go deeper
than that in its discoveries. And although it is frivolous to suppose
that nature ends in this way at the limits of our casual apprehension,
and has no hidden roots, yet philosophically that would be as good a
stopping place as any other. Ultimately we should have to be satisfied
with some factual conjunction and method in events. If atoms and their
collisions, by any chance, were the ultimate and inmost facts
discoverable, they would supply the explanation of everything, in the
only sense in which anything existent can be explained at all. If
somebody then came to us enthusiastically and added that the Will of
the atoms so to be and move was the true cause, or the Will of God
that they should move so, he would not be reputed, I suppose, to have
thrown a bright light on the subject.

Yet this is what M. Bergson does in his whole defence of metaphysical
vitalism, and especially in the instance of the evolution of eyes by
two different methods, which is his palmary argument. Since in some
molluscs and in vertebrates organs that coincide in being organs of
vision are reached by distinct paths, it cannot have been the
propulsion of mechanism in each case, he says, that guided the
developments, which, being divergent, would never have led to
coincident results, but the double development must have been guided
by a common _tendency towards vision_. Suppose (what some young man in
a laboratory may by this time have shown to be false) that M.
Bergson's observations have sounded the facts to the bottom; it would
then be of the ultimate nature of things that, given light and the
other conditions, the two methods of development will end in eyes;
just as, for a peasant, it is of the ultimate nature of things that
puddles can be formed in two quite opposite ways, by rain falling from
heaven and by springs issuing from the earth; but as the peasant would
not have reached a profound insight into nature if he had proclaimed
the presence in her of a _tendency to puddles_, to be formed in
inexplicably different ways; so the philosopher attains to no profound
insight when he proclaims in her a _tendency to vision._ If those
words express more than ignorance, they express the love of it. Even
if the vitalists were right in despairing of further scientific
discoveries, they would be wrong in offering their verbiage as a
substitute. Nature may possibly have only a very loose hazy
constitution, to be watched and understood as sailors watch and
understand the weather; but Neptune and Æolus are not thereby proved
to be the authors of storms. Yet M. Bergson thinks if life could only
be safely shown to arise unaccountably, that would prove the invisible
efficacy of a mighty tendency to life. But would the ultimate
contexture and miracle of things be made less arbitrary, and less a
matter of brute fact, by the presence behind them of an actual and
arbitrary effort that such should be their nature? If this word
"effort" is not a mere figure of rhetoric, a name for a movement in
things of which the end happens to interest us more than the
beginning, if it is meant to be an effort actually and consciously
existing, then we must proceed to ask: Why did this effort exist? Why
did it choose that particular end to strive for? How did it reach the
conception of that end, which had never been realised before, and
which no existent nature demanded for its fulfilment? How did the
effort, once made specific, select the particular matter it was to
transform? Why did this matter respond to the disembodied effort that
it should change its habits? Not one of these questions is easier to
answer than the question why nature is living or animals have eyes.
Yet without seeking to solve the only real problem, namely, how nature
is actually constituted, this introduction of metaphysical powers
raises all the others, artificially and without occasion. This side
of M. Bergson's philosophy illustrates the worst and most familiar
vices of metaphysics. It marvels at some appearance, not to
investigate it, but to give it an unctuous name. Then it turns this
name into a power, that by its operation creates the appearance. This
is simply verbal mythology or the hypostasis of words, and there would
be some excuse for a rude person who should call it rubbish.

The metaphysical abuse of psychology is as extraordinary in modern
Europe as that of fancy ever was in India or of rhetoric in Greece. We
find, for instance, Mr. Bradley murmuring, as a matter almost too
obvious to mention, that the existence of anything not sentience is
unmeaning to him; or, if I may put this evident principle in other
words, that nothing is able to exist unless something else is able to
discover it. Yet even if discovered the poor candidate for existence
would be foiled, for it would turn out to be nothing but a
modification of the mind falsely said to discover it. Existence and
discovery are conceptions which the malicious criticism of knowledge
(which is the psychology of knowledge abused) pretends to have
discarded and outgrown altogether; the conception of immediacy has
taken their place. This malicious criticism of knowledge is based on
the silent assumption that knowledge is impossible. Whenever you
mention anything, it baffles you by talking instead about your idea of
what you mention; and if ever you describe the origin of anything it
substitutes, as a counter-theory, its theory of the origin of your
description. This, however, would not be a counter-theory at all if
the criticism of knowledge had not been corrupted into a negative
dogma, maintaining that ideas of things are the only things possible
and that therefore only ideas and not things can have an origin.
Nothing could better illustrate how deep this cognitive impotence has
got into people's bones than the manner in which, in the latest
schools of philosophy, it is being disavowed; for unblushing idealism
is distinctly out of fashion. M. Bergson tells us he has solved a
difficulty that seemed hopeless by avoiding a fallacy common to
idealism and realism. The difficulty was that if you started with
self-existent matter you could never arrive at mind, and if you
started with self-existent mind you could never arrive at matter. The
fallacy was that both schools innocently supposed there was an
existing world to discover, and each thought it possible that its view
should describe that world as it really was. What now is M. Bergson's
solution? That no articulated world, either material or psychical,
exists at all, but only a tendency or enduring effort to evolve images
of both sorts; or rather to evolve images which in their finer texture
and vibration are images of matter, but which grouped and
foreshortened in various ways are images of minds. The idea of nature
and the idea of consciousness are two apperceptions or syntheses of
the same stuff of experience. The two worlds thus become substantially
identical, continuous, and superposable; each can merge insensibly
into the other. "To perceive all the influences of all the points of
all bodies would be to sink to the condition of a material object."[4]
To perceive some of these influences, by having created organs that
shut out the others, is to be a mind.

[Footnote 4: _Matière et Mémoire_, p. 38.]

This solution is obtained by substituting, as usual, the ideas of
things for the things themselves and cheating the honest man who was
talking about objects by answering him as if he were talking about
himself. Certainly, if we could limit ourselves to feeling life flow
and the whole world vibrate, we should not raise the question debated
between realists and idealists; but not to raise a question is one
thing and to have solved it is another. What has really been done is
to offer us a history, _on the assumption of idealism,_ of the idea of
mind and the idea of matter. This history may be correct enough
psychologically, and such as a student of the life of reason might
possibly come to; but it is a mere evasion of the original question
concerning the relation of this mental evolution to the world it
occurs in. In truth, an enveloping world is assumed by these
hereditary idealists not to exist; they rule it out _a priori,_ and
the life of reason is supposed by them to constitute the whole
universe. To be sure, they say they transcend idealism no less than
realism, because they mark the point where, by contrast or selection
from other objects, the mind has come to be distinguished: but the
subterfuge is vain, because by "mind" they mean simply the idea of
mind, and they give no name, except perhaps experience, to the mind
that forms that idea. Matter and mind, for these transcendentalists
posing as realists, merge and flow so easily together only because
both are images or groups of images in an original mind presupposed
but never honestly posited. It is in this forgotten mind, also, as
the professed idealists urge, that the relations of proximity and
simultaneity between various lives can alone subsist, if to subsist is
to be experienced.

There is, however, one point of real difference, at least initially,
between the idealism of M. Bergson and that of his predecessors. The
universal mind, for M. Bergson, is in process of actual
transformation. It is not an omniscient God but a cosmic sensibility.
In this sensibility matter, with all its vibrations felt in detail,
forms one moving panorama together with all minds, which are patterns
visible at will from various points of view in that same woof of
matter; and so the great experiment crawls and shoots on, the dream of
a giant without a body, mindful of the past, uncertain of the future,
shuffling his images, and threading his painful way through a
labyrinth of cross-purposes.

Such at least is the notion which the reader gathers from the
prevailing character of M. Bergson's words; but I am not sure that it
would be his ultimate conclusion. Perhaps it is to be out of sympathy
with his spirit to speak of an ultimate conclusion at all; nothing
comes to a conclusion and nothing is ultimate. Many dilemmas, however,
are inevitable, and if the master does not make a choice himself, his
pupils will divide and trace the alternative consequences for
themselves in each direction. If they care most for a real fluidity,
as William James did, they will stick to something like what I have
just described; but if they care most for immediacy, as we may suspect
that M. Bergson does, they will transform that view into something far
more orthodox. For a real fluidity and an absolute immediacy are not
compatible. To believe in real change you must put some trust in
representation, and if you posit a real past and a real future you
posit independent objects. In absolute immediacy, on the contrary,
instead of change taken realistically, you can have only a feeling of
change. The flux becomes an idea in the absolute, like the image of a
moving spiral, always flowing outwards or inwards, but with its centre
and its circumference always immovable. Duration, we must remember, is
simply the sense of lasting; no time is real that is not lived
through. Therefore various lives cannot be dated in a common time, but
have no temporal relations to one another. Thus, if we insist on
immediacy, the vaunted novelty of the future and the inestimable
freedom of life threaten to become (like all else) the given _feeling_
of novelty or freedom, in passing from a given image of the past to a
given image of the future--all these terms being contained in the
present; and we have reverted to the familiar conception of absolute
immutability in absolute life. M. Bergson has studied Plotinus and
Spinoza; I suspect he has not studied them in vain.

Nor is this the only point at which this philosophy, when we live a
while with it, suddenly drops its mask of novelty and shows us a
familiar face. It would seem, for instance, that beneath the drama of
creative evolution there was a deeper nature of things. For apparently
creative evolution (apart from the obstacle of matter, which may be
explained away idealistically) has to submit to the following
conditions: first, to create in sequence, not all at once; second, to
create some particular sequence only, not all possible sequences side
by side; and third, to continue the one sequence chosen, since if the
additions of every new moment were irrelevant to the past, no
sequence, no vital persistence or progress would be secured, and all
effort would be wasted. These are compulsions; but it may also, I
suppose, be thought a _duty_ on the part of the vital impulse to be
true to its initial direction and not to halt, as it well might, like
the self-reversing Will of Schopenhauer, on perceiving the result of
its spontaneous efforts. Necessity would thus appear behind liberty
and duty before it. This summons to life to go on, and these
conditions imposed upon it, might then very plausibly be attributed to
a Deity existing beyond the world, as is done in religious tradition;
and such a doctrine, if M. Bergson should happen to be holding it in
reserve, would perhaps help to explain some obscurities in his system,
such, for instance, as the power of potentiality to actualise itself,
of equipoise to become suddenly emphasis on one particular part, and
of spirit to pursue an end chosen before it is conceived, and when
there is no nature to predetermine it.

It has been said that M. Bergson's system precludes ethics: I cannot
think that observation just. Apart from the moral inspiration which
appears throughout his philosophy, which is indeed a passionate
attempt to exalt (or debase) values into powers, it offers, I should
say, two starting-points for ethics. In the first place, the _élan
vital_ ought not to falter, although it can do so: therefore to
persevere, labour, experiment, propagate, must be duties, and the
opposite must be sins. In the second place, freedom, in adding
uncaused increments to life, ought to do so in continuation of the
whole past, though it might do so frivolously: therefore it is a duty
to be studious, consecutive, loyal; you may move in any direction but
you must carry the whole past with you. I will not say this suggests a
sound system of ethics, because it would be extracted from dogmas
which are physical and incidentally incredible; nor would it represent
a mature and disillusioned morality, because it would look to the
future and not to the eternal; nevertheless it would be deeply
ethical, expressing the feelings that have always inspired Hebraic
morality.

A good way of testing the calibre of a philosophy is to ask what it
thinks of death. Philosophy, said Plato, is a meditation on death, or
rather, if we would do justice to his thought, an aspiration to live
disembodied; and Schopenhauer said that the spectacle of death was the
first provocation to philosophy. M. Bergson has not yet treated of
this subject; but we may perhaps perceive for ourselves the place that
it might occupy in his system.[5] Life, according to him, is the
original and absolute force. In the beginning, however, it was only a
potentiality or tendency. To become specific lives, life had to
emphasise and bring exclusively to consciousness, here and there,
special possibilities of living; and where these special lives have
their chosen boundary (if this way of putting it is not too Fichtean)
they posit or create a material environment. Matter is the view each
life takes of what for it are rejected or abandoned possibilities of
living. This might show how the absolute will to live, if it was to be
carried out, would have to begin by evoking a sense of dead or
material things about it; it would not show how death could ever
overtake the will itself. If matter were merely the periphery which
life has to draw round itself, in order to be a definite life, matter
could never abolish any life; as the ring of a circus or the sand of
the arena can never abolish the show for which they have been
prepared. Life would then be fed and defined by matter, as an artist
is served by the matter he needs to carry on his art.

[Footnote 5: M. Bergson has shown at considerable length that the idea
of non-existence is more complex, psychologically, than the idea of
existence, and posterior to it. He evidently thinks this disposes of
the reality of non-existence also: for it is the reality that he
wishes to exorcise by his words. If, however, non-existence and the
idea of non-existence were identical, it would have been impossible
for me not to exist before I was born: my non-existence then would be
more complex than my existence now, and posterior to it. The initiated
would not recoil from this consequence, but it might open the eyes of
some catechumens. It is a good test of the malicious theory of
knowledge.]

Yet in actual life there is undeniably such a thing as danger and
failure. M. Bergson even thinks that the facing of increased dangers
is one proof that vital force is an absolute thing; for if life were
an equilibrium, it would not displace itself and run new risks of
death, by making itself more complex and ticklish, as it does in the
higher organisms and the finer arts.[6] Yet if life is the only
substance, how is such a risk of death possible at all? I suppose the
special life that arises about a given nucleus of feeling, by
emphasising some of the relations which that feeling has in the
world, might be abolished if a greater emphasis were laid on another
set of its relations, starting from some other nucleus. We must
remember that these selections, according to M. Bergson, are not
apperceptions merely. They are creative efforts. The future
constitution of the flux will vary in response to them. Each mind
sucks the world, so far as it can, into its own vortex. A cross
apperception will then amount to a contrary force. Two souls will not
be able to dominate the same matter in peace and friendship. Being
forces, they will pull that matter in different ways. Each soul will
tend to devour and to direct exclusively the movement influenced by
the other soul. The one that succeeds in ruling that movement will
live on; the other, I suppose, will die, although M. Bergson may not
like that painful word. He says the lower organisms store energy for
the higher organisms to use; but when a sheep appropriates the energy
stored up in grass, or a man that stored up in mutton, it looks as if
the grass and the sheep had perished. Their _élan vital_ is no longer
theirs, for in this rough world to live is to kill. Nothing arises in
nature, Lucretius says, save helped by the death of some other thing.
Of course, this is no defeat for the _élan vital_ in general; for
according to our philosopher the whole universe from the beginning has
been making for just that supreme sort of consciousness which man, who
eats the mutton, now possesses. The sheep and the grass were only
things by the way and scaffolding for our precious humanity. But would
it not be better if some being should arise nobler than man, not
requiring abstract intellect nor artificial weapons, but endowed with
instinct and intuition and, let us say, the power of killing by
radiating electricity? And might not men then turn out to have been
mere explosives, in which energy was stored for convenient digestion
by that superior creature? A shocking thought, no doubt, like the
thought of death, and more distressing to our vital feelings than is
the pleasing assimilation of grass and mutton in our bellies. Yet I
can see no ground, except a desire to flatter oneself, for not
crediting the _élan vital_ with some such digestive intention. M.
Bergson's system would hardly be more speculative if it entertained
this possibility, and it would seem more honest.

[Footnote 6: This argument against mechanism is a good instance of the
difficulties which mythological habits of mind import unnecessarily
into science. An equilibrium would not displace itself! But an
equilibrium is a natural result, not a magical entity. It is
continually displaced, as its constituents are modified by internal
movements or external agencies; and while many a time the equilibrium
is thereby destroyed altogether, sometimes it is replaced by a more
elaborate and perilous equilibrium; as glaciers carry many rocks down,
but leave some, here and there, piled in the most unlikely pinnacles
and pagodas.]

The vital impulse is certainly immortal; for if we take it in the
naturalistic exoteric sense, for a force discovered in biology, it is
an independent agent coming down into matter, organising it against
its will, and stirring it like the angel the pool of Bethesda. Though
the ripples die down, the angel is not affected. He has merely flown
away. And if we take the vital impulse mystically and esoterically, as
the _only_ primal force, creating matter in order to play with it, the
immortality of life is even more obvious; for there is then nothing
else in being that could possibly abolish it. But when we come to
immortality for the individual, all grows obscure and ambiguous. The
original tendency of life was certainly cosmic and not distinguished
into persons: we are told it was like a wireless message sent at the
creation which is being read off at last by the humanity of to-day. In
the naturalistic view, the diversity of persons would seem to be due
to the different material conditions under which one and the same
spiritual purpose must fight its way towards realisation in different
times and places. It is quite conceivable, however, that in the
mystical view the very sense of the original message should comport
this variety of interpretations, and that the purpose should always
have been to produce diverse individuals.

The first view, as usual, is the one which M. Bergson has prevailingly
in mind, and communicates most plausibly; while he holds to it he is
still talking about the natural world, and so we still know what he is
talking about. On this view, however, personal immortality would be
impossible; it would be, if it were aimed at, a self-contradiction in
the aim of life; for the diversity of persons would be due to
impediments only, and souls would differ simply in so far as they
mutilated the message which they were all alike trying to repeat. They
would necessarily, when the spirit was victorious, be reabsorbed and
identified in the universal spirit. This view also seems most
consonant with M. Bergson's theory of primitive reality, as a flux of
fused images, or a mind lost in matter; to this view, too, is
attributable his hostility to intelligence, in that it arrests the
flux, divides the fused images, and thereby murders and devitalises
reality. Of course the destiny of spirit would not be to revert to
that diffused materiality; for the original mind lost in matter had a
very short memory; it was a sort of cosmic trepidation only, whereas
the ultimate mind would remember all that, in its efforts after
freedom, it had ever super added to that trepidation or made it turn
into. Even the abstract views of things taken by the practical
intellect would, I fear, have to burden the universal memory to the
end. We should be remembered, even if we could no longer exist.

On the other more profound view, however, might not personal
immortality be secured? Suppose the original message said: Translate
me into a thousand tongues! In fulfilling its duty, the universe would
then continue to divide its dream into phantom individuals; as it had
to insulate its parts in the beginning in order to dominate and
transform them freely, so it would always continue to insulate them,
so as not to lose its cross-vistas and its mobility. There is no
reason, then, why individuals should not live for ever. But a
condition seems to be involved which may well make belief stagger. It
would be impossible for the universe to divide its images into
particular minds unless it preserved the images of their particular
bodies also. Particular minds arise, according to this philosophy, in
the interests of practice: which means, biologically, to secure a
better adjustment of the body to its environment, so that it may
survive. Mystically, too, the fundamental force is a half-conscious
purpose that practice, or freedom, should come to be; or rather, that
an apparition or experience of practice and freedom should arise; for
in this philosophy appearance is all. To secure this desirable
apparition of practice special tasks are set to various nuclei in felt
space (such, for instance, as the task to see), and the image of a
body (in this case that of an eye) is gradually formed, in order to
execute that task; for evidently the Absolute can see only if it
looks, and to look it must first choose a point of view and an optical
method. This point of view and this method posit the individual; they
fix him in time and space, and determine the quality and range of his
passive experience: they are his body. If the Absolute, then, wishes
to retain the individual not merely as one of its memories but as one
of its organs of practical life, it must begin by retaining the image
of his body. His body must continue to figure in that landscape of
nature which the absolute life, as it pulses, keeps always composing
and recomposing. Otherwise a personal mind, a sketch of things made
from the point of view and in the interests of that body, cannot be
preserved.

M. Bergson, accordingly, should either tell us that our bodies are
going to rise again, or he should not tell us, or give us to
understand, that our minds are going to endure. I suppose he cannot
venture to preach the resurrection of the body to this weak-kneed
generation; he is too modern and plausible for that. Yet he is too
amiable to deny to our dilated nostrils some voluptuous whiffs of
immortality. He asks if we are not "led to suppose" that consciousness
passes through matter to be tempered like steel, to constitute
distinct personalities, and prepare them for a higher existence. Other
animal minds are but human minds arrested; men at last (what men, I
wonder?) are "capable of remembering all and willing all and
controlling their past and their future," so that "we shall have no
repugnance in admitting that in man, though perhaps in man alone,
consciousness pursues its path beyond this earthly life." Elsewhere he
says, in a phrase already much quoted and perhaps destined to be
famous, that in man the spirit can "spurn every kind of resistance and
break through many an obstacle, perhaps even death." Here the tenor
has ended on the inevitable high note, and the gallery is delighted.
But was that the note set down for him in the music? And has he not
sung it in falsetto?

The immediate knows nothing about death; it takes intelligence to
conceive it; and that perhaps is why M. Bergson says so little about
it, and that little so far from serious. But he talks a great deal
about life, he feels he has penetrated deeply into its nature; and yet
death, together with birth, is the natural analysis of what life is.
What is this creative purpose, that must wait for sun and rain to set
it in motion? What is this life, that in any individual can be
suddenly extinguished by a bullet? What is this _elan-vital_, that a
little fall in temperature would banish altogether from the universe?
The study of death may be out of fashion, but it is never out of
season. The omission of this, which is almost the omission of wisdom
from philosophy, warns us that in M. Bergson's thought we have
something occasional and partial, the work of an astute apologist, a
party man, driven to desperate speculation by a timid attachment to
prejudice. Like other terrified idealisms, the system of M. Bergson
has neither good sense, nor rigour, nor candour, nor solidity. It is a
brilliant attempt to confuse the lessons of experience by refining
upon its texture, an attempt to make us halt, for the love of
primitive illusions, in the path of discipline and reason. It is
likely to prove a successful attempt, because it flatters the
weaknesses of the moment, expresses them with emotion, and covers
them with a feint at scientific speculation. It is not, however, a
powerful system, like that of Hegel, capable of bewildering and
obsessing many who have no natural love for shams. M. Bergson will
hardly bewilder; his style is too clear, the field where his just
observations lie--the immediate--is too well defined, and the
mythology which results from projecting the terms of the immediate
into the absolute, and turning them into powers, is too obviously
verbal. He will not long impose on any save those who enjoy being
imposed upon; but for a long time he may increase their number. His
doctrine is indeed alluring. Instead of telling us, as a stern and
contrite philosophy would, that the truth is remote, difficult, and
almost undiscoverable by human efforts, that the universe is vast and
unfathomable, yet that the knowledge of its ways is precious to our
better selves, if we would not live befooled, this philosophy rather
tells us that nothing is truer or more precious than our rudimentary
consciousness, with its vague instincts and premonitions, that
everything ideal is fictitious, and that the universe, at heart, is as
palpitating and irrational as ourselves. Why then strain the inquiry?
Why seek to dominate passion by understanding it? Rather live on;
work, it matters little at what, and grow, it matters nothing in what
direction. Exert your instinctive powers of vegetation and emotion;
let your philosophy itself be a frank expression of this flux, the
roar of the ocean in your little sea-shell, a momentary posture of
your living soul, not a stark adoration of things reputed eternal.

So the intellectual faithlessness and the material servility of the
age are flattered together and taught to justify themselves
theoretically. They cry joyfully, _non peccavi_, which is the modern
formula for confession. M. Bergson's philosophy itself is a confession
of a certain mystical rebellion and atavism in the contemporary mind.
It will remain a beautiful monument to the passing moment, a capital
film for the cinematography of history, full of psychological truth
and of a kind of restrained sentimental piety. His thought has all the
charm that can go without strength and all the competence that can go
without mastery. This is not an age of mastery; it is confused with
too much business; it has no brave simplicity. The mind has forgotten
its proper function, which is to crown life by quickening it into
intelligence, and thinks if it could only prove that it accelerated
life, that might perhaps justify its existence; like a philosopher at
sea who, to make himself useful, should blow into the sail.

IV

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MR. BERTRAND RUSSELL

I. A NEW SCHOLASTICISM

In its chase after idols this age has not wholly forgotten the gods,
and reason and faith in reason are not left without advocates. Some
years ago, at Trinity College, Cambridge, Mr. G.E. Moore began to
produce a very deep impression amongst the younger spirits by his
powerful and luminous dialectic. Like Socrates, he used all the sharp
arts of a disputant in the interests of common sense and of an almost
archaic dogmatism. Those who heard him felt how superior his position
was, both in rigour and in force, to the prevailing inversions and
idealisms. The abuse of psychology, rampant for two hundred years,
seemed at last to be detected and challenged; and the impressionistic
rhetoric that philosophy was saturated with began to be squeezed out
by clear questions, and by a disconcerting demand for literal
sincerity. German idealism, when we study it as a product of its own
age and country, is a most engaging phenomenon; it is full of
afflatus, sweep, and deep searchings of heart; but it is essentially
romantic and egotistical, and all in it that is not soliloquy is mere
system-making and sophistry. Therefore when it is taught by unromantic
people _ex cathedra,_ in stentorian tones, and represented as the
rational foundation of science and religion, with neither of which it
has any honest sympathy, it becomes positively odious--one of the
worst imposture and blights to which a youthful imagination could be
subjected. It is chiefly against the incubus of this celestial monster
that Mr. Moore dared to lift up his eyes; and many a less courageous
or less clear-sighted person was thankful to him for it. But a man
with such a mission requires a certain narrowness and concentration of
mind; he has to be intolerant and to pound a good deal on the same
notes. We need not wonder if Mr. Moore has written rather meagerly,
and with a certain vehemence and want of imagination.

All this, however, was more than made up by the powerful ally who soon
came to his aid. Mr. Bertrand Russell began by adopting Mr. Moore's
metaphysics, but he has given as much as he has received. Apart from
his well-known mathematical attainments, he possesses by inheritance
the political and historical mind, and an intrepid determination to
pierce convention and look to ultimate things. He has written
abundantly and, where the subject permits, with a singular lucidity,
candour, and charm. Especially his _Philosophical Essays_ and his
little book on _The Problems of Philosophy_ can be read with pleasure
by any intelligent person, and give a tolerably rounded picture of the
tenets of the school. Yet it must be remembered that Mr. Russell, like
Mr. Moore, is still young and his thoughts have not assumed their
ultimate form. Moreover, he lives in an atmosphere of academic
disputation which makes one technical point after another acquire a
preponderating influence in his thoughts. His book on _The Problems
of Philosophy_ is admirable in style, temper, and insight, but it
hardly deserves its title; it treats principally, in a somewhat
personal and partial way, of the relation of knowledge to its objects,
and it might rather have been called "The problems which Moore and I
have been agitating lately." Indeed, his philosophy is so little
settled as yet that every new article and every fresh conversation
revokes some of his former opinions, and places the crux of
philosophical controversy at a new point. We are soon made aware that
exact thinking and true thinking are not synonymous, but that one
exact thought, in the same mind, may be the exact opposite of the
next. This inconstancy, which after all does not go very deep, is a
sign of sincerity and pure love of truth; it marks the freshness, the
vivacity, the self-forgetfulness, the logical ardour belonging to this
delightful reformer. It may seem a paradox, but at bottom it is not,
that the vitalists should be oppressed, womanish, and mystical, and
only the intellectualists keen, argumentative, fearless, and full of
life. I mention this casualness and inconstancy in Mr. Russell's
utterances not to deride them, but to show the reader how impossible
it is, at this juncture, to give a comprehensive account of his
philosophy, much less a final judgment upon it.

The principles most fundamental and dominant in his thought are
perhaps the following: That the objects the mind deals with, whether
material or ideal, are what and where the mind says they are, and
independent of it; that some general principles and ideas have to be
assumed to be valid not merely for thought but for things; that
relations may subsist, arise, and disappear between things without at
all affecting these things internally; and that the nature of
everything is just what it is, and not to be confused either with its
origin or with any opinion about it. These principles, joined with an
obvious predilection for Plato and Leibnitz among philosophers, lead
to the following doctrines, among others: that the mind or soul is an
entity separate from its thoughts and pre-existent; that a material
world exists in space and time; that its substantial elements may be
infinite in number, having position and quality, but no extension, so
that each mind or soul might well be one of them; that both the
existent and the ideal worlds may be infinite, while the ideal world
contains an infinity of things not realised in the actual world; and
that this ideal world is knowable by a separate mental consideration,
a consideration which is, however, empirical in spirit, since the
ideal world of ethics, logic, and mathematics has a special and
surprising constitution, which we do not make but must attentively
discover.

The reader will perceive, perhaps, that if the function of philosophy
is really, as the saying goes, to give us assurance of God, freedom,
and immortality, Mr. Russell's philosophy is a dire failure. In fact,
its author sometimes gives vent to a rather emphatic pessimism about
this world; he has a keen sense for the manifold absurdities of
existence. But the sense for absurdities is not without its delights,
and Mr. Russell's satirical wit is more constant and better grounded
than his despair. I should be inclined to say of his philosophy what
he himself has said of that of Leibnitz, that it is at its best in
those subjects which are most remote from human life. It needs to be
very largely supplemented and much ripened and humanised before it can
be called satisfactory or wise; but time may bring these fulfilments,
and meantime I cannot help thinking it auspicious in the highest
degree that, in a time of such impressionistic haste and plebeian
looseness of thought, scholastic rigour should suddenly raise its head
again, aspiring to seriousness, solidity, and perfection of doctrine:
and this not in the interests of religious orthodoxy, but precisely in
the most emancipated and unflinchingly radical quarter. It is
refreshing and reassuring, after the confused, melodramatic ways of
philosophising to which the idealists and the pragmatists have
accustomed us, to breathe again the crisp air of scholastic common
sense. It is good for us to be held down, as the Platonic Socrates
would have held us, to saying what we really believe, and sticking to
what we say. We seem to regain our intellectual birthright when we are
allowed to declare our genuine intent, even in philosophy, instead of
begging some kind psychologist to investigate our "meaning" for us, or
even waiting for the flux of events to endow us with what "meaning" it
will. It is also instructive to have the ethical attitude purified of
all that is not ethical and turned explicitly into what, in its moral
capacity, it essentially is: a groundless pronouncement upon the
better and the worse.

Here a certain one-sidedness begins to make itself felt in Mr.
Russell's views. The ethical attitude doubtless has no _ethical_
ground, but that fact does not prevent it from having a _natural_
ground; and the observer of the animate creation need not have much
difficulty in seeing what that natural ground is. Mr. Russell,
however, refuses to look also in that direction. He insists, rightly
enough, that good is predicated categorically by the conscience; he
will not remember that all life is not moral bias merely, and that, in
the very act of recognising excellence and pursuing it, we may glance
back over our shoulder and perceive how our moral bias is conditioned,
and what basis it has in the physical order of things. This backward
look, when the hand is on the plough, may indeed confuse our ethical
self-expression, both in theory and in practice; and I am the last to
deny the need of insisting, in ethics, on ethical judgments in all
their purity and dogmatic sincerity. Such insistence, if we had heard
more of it in our youth, might have saved many of us from chronic
entanglements; and there is nothing, next to Plato, which ought to be
more recommended to the young philosopher than the teachings of
Messrs. Russell and Moore, if he wishes to be a moralist and a
logician, and not merely to seem one. Yet this salutary doctrine,
though correct, is inadequate. It is a monocular philosophy, seeing
outlines clear, but missing the solid bulk and perspective of things.
We need binocular vision to quicken the whole mind and yield a full
image of reality. Ethics should be controlled by a physics that
perceives the material ground and the relative status of whatever is
moral. Otherwise ethics itself tends to grow narrow, strident, and
fanatical; as may be observed in asceticism and puritanism, or, for
the matter of that, in Mr. Moore's uncivilised leaning towards the
doctrine of retributive punishment, or in Mr. Russell's intolerance
of selfishness and patriotism, and in his refusal to entertain any
pious reverence for the nature of things. The quality of wisdom, like
that of mercy, is not strained. To choose, to love and hate, to have a
moral life, is inevitable and legitimate in the part; but it is the
function of the part as part, and we must keep it in its place if we
wish to view the whole in its true proportions. Even to express justly
the aim of our own life we need to retain a constant sympathy with
what is animal and fundamental in it, else we shall give a false
place, and too loud an emphasis, to our definitions of the ideal.
However, it would be much worse not to reach the ideal at all, or to
confuse it for want of courage and sincerity in uttering our true
mind; and it is in uttering our true mind that Mr. Russell can help
us, even if our true mind should not always coincide with his.

In the following pages I do not attempt to cover all Mr. Russell's
doctrine (the deeper mathematical purls of it being beyond my
comprehension), and the reader will find some speculations of my own
interspersed in what I report of his. I merely traverse after him
three subjects that seem of imaginative interest, to indicate the
inspiration and the imprudence, as I think them, of this young
philosophy.

II. THE STUDY OF ESSENCE

"The solution of the difficulties which formerly surrounded the
mathematical infinite is probably," says Mr. Russell, "the greatest
achievement of which our own age has to boast.... It was assumed as
self-evident, until Cantor and Dedekind established the opposite,
that if, from any collection of things, some were taken away, the
number of things left must always be less than the original number of
things. This assumption, as a matter of fact, holds only of finite
collections; and the rejection of it, where the infinite is concerned,
has been shown to remove all the difficulties that hitherto baffled
human reason in this matter." And he adds in another place: "To
reconcile us, by the exhibition of its awful beauty, to the reign of
Fate ... is the task of tragedy. But mathematics takes us still
further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to
which not only the actual world, but every possible world, must
conform; and even here it builds a habitation, or rather finds a
habitation eternally standing, where our ideals are fully satisfied
and our best hopes are not thwarted. It is only when we thoroughly
understand the entire independence of ourselves, which belongs to this
world that reason finds, that we can adequately realise the profound
importance of its beauty."

Mathematics seems to have a value for Mr. Russell akin to that of
religion. It affords a sanctuary to which to flee from the world, a
heaven suffused with a serene radiance and full of a peculiar
sweetness and consolation. "Real life," he writes, "is to most men a
long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the
possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no
practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying
in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from
which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even
from the pitiful laws of nature, the generations have gradually
created an ordered cosmos where pure thought can dwell as in its
natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can
escape from the dreary exile of the actual world." This study is one
of "those elements in human life which merit a place in heaven." "The
true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than
man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found
in mathematics as surely as in poetry."

This enthusiastic language might have, I should think, an opposite
effect upon some readers to that which Mr. Russell desires. It might
make them suspect that the claim to know an absolute ideal necessity,
so satisfying to one of our passionate impulses, might be prompted by
the same conceit, and subject to the same illusion, as the claim to
know absolute truth in religion. Beauty, when attributed to necessary
relations between logical entities, casts a net of subjectivity over
them; and at this net the omnivorous empiricist might be tempted to
haul, until he fancied he had landed the whole miraculous draught of
fishes. The fish, however, would have slipped through the meshes; and
it would be only his own vital emotion, projected for a moment into
the mathematical world, that he would be able to draw back and hug to
his bosom. Eternal truth is as disconsolate as it is consoling, and as
dreary as it is interesting: these moral values are, in fact, values
which the activity of contemplating that sort of truth has for
different minds; and it is no congruous homage offered to ideal
necessity, but merely a private endearment, to call it beautiful or
good. The case is not such as if we were dealing with existence.
Existence is arbitrary; it is a questionable thing needing
justification; and we, at least, cannot justify it otherwise than by
taking note of some affinity which it may show to human aspirations.
Therefore our private endearments, when we call some existing thing
good or beautiful, are not impertinent; they assign to this chance
thing its only assignable excuse for being, namely, the service it may
chance to render to the spirit. But ideal necessity or, what is the
same thing, essential possibility has its excuse for being in itself,
since it is not contingent or questionable at all. The affinity which
the human mind may develop to certain provinces of essence is
adventitious to those essences, and hardly to be mentioned in their
presence. It is something the mind has acquired, and may lose. It is
an incident in the life of reason, and no inherent characteristic of
eternal necessity.

The realm of essence contains the infinite multitude of Leibnitz's
possible worlds, many of these worlds being very small and simple, and
consisting merely of what might be presented in some isolated moment
of feeling. If any such feeling, however, or its object, never in fact
occurs, the essence that it would have presented if it had occurred
remains possible merely; so that nothing can ever exist in nature or
for consciousness which has not a prior and independent locus in the
realm of essence. When a man lights upon a thought or is interested in
tracing a relation, he does not introduce those objects into the realm
of essence, but merely selects them from the plenitude of what lies
there eternally. The ground of this selection lies, of course, in his
human nature and circumstances; and the satisfaction he may find in
so exercising his mind will be a consequence of his mental disposition
and of the animal instincts beneath. Two and two would still make four
if I were incapable of counting, or if I found it extremely painful to
do so, or if I thought it naive and pre-Kantian of these numbers not
to combine in a more vital fashion, and make five. So also, if I
happen to enjoy counting, or to find the constancy of numbers sublime,
and the reversibility of the processes connecting them consoling, in
contrast to the irrevocable flux of living things, all this is due to
my idiosyncrasy. It is no part of the essence of numbers to be
congenial to me; but it has perhaps become a part of my genius to have
affinity to them.

And how, may I ask, has it become a part of my genius? Simply because
nature, of which I am a part, and to which all my ideas must refer if
they are to be relevant to my destiny, happens to have mathematical
form. Nature had to have some form or other, if it was to exist at
all; and whatever form it had happened to take would have had its
prior place in the realm of essence, and its essential and logical
relations there. That particular part of the realm of essence which
nature chances to exemplify or to suggest is the part that may be
revealed to me, and that is the predestined focus of all my
admirations. Essence as such has no power to reveal itself, or to take
on existence; and the human mind has no power or interest to trace all
essence. Even the few essences which it has come to know, it cannot
undertake to examine exhaustively; for there are many features
nestling in them, and many relations radiating from them, which no
one needs or cares to attend to. The implications which logicians and
mathematicians actually observe in the terms they use are a small
selection from all those that really obtain, even in their chosen
field; so that, for instance, as Mr. Russell was telling us, it was
only the other day that Cantor and Dedekind observed that although
time continually eats up the days and years, the possible future
always remains as long as it was before. This happens to be a fact
interesting to mankind. Apart from the mathematical puzzles it may
help to solve, it opens before existence a vista of perpetual youth,
and the vital stress in us leaps up in recognition of its inmost
ambition. Many other things are doubtless implied in infinity which,
if we noticed them, would leave us quite cold; and still others, no
doubt, are inapprehensible with our sort and degree of intellect.
There is of course nothing in essence which an intellect postulated
_ad hoc_ would not be able to apprehend; but the kind of intellect we
know of and possess is an expression of vital adjustments, and is
tethered to nature.

That a few eternal essences, then, with a few of their necessary
relations to one another, do actually appear to us, and do fascinate
our attention and excite our wonder, is nothing paradoxical. This is
merely what was bound to happen, if we became aware of anything at
all; for the essence embodied in anything is eternal and has necessary
relations to some other essences. The air of presumption which there
might seem to be in proclaiming that mathematics reveals what has to
be true always and everywhere, vanishes when we remember that
everything that is true of any essence is true of it always and
everywhere. The most trivial truths of logic are as necessary and
eternal as the most important; so that it is less of an achievement
than it sounds when we say we have grasped a truth that is eternal and
necessary.

This fact will be more clearly recognised, perhaps, if we remember
that the cogency of our ideal knowledge follows upon our intent in
fixing its object. It hangs on a virtual definition, and explicates
it. We cannot oblige anybody or anything to reproduce the idea which
we have chosen; but that idea will remain the idea it is whether
forgotten or remembered, exemplified or not exemplified in things. To
penetrate to the foundation of being is possible for us only because
the foundation of being is distinguishable quality; were there no set
of differing characteristics, one or more of which an existing thing
might appropriate, existence would be altogether impossible. The realm
of essence is merely the system or chaos of these fundamental
possibilities, the catalogue of all exemplifiable natures; so that any
experience whatsoever must tap the realm of essence, and throw the
light of attention on one of its constituent forms. This is, if you
will, a trivial achievement; what would be really a surprising feat,
and hardly to be credited, would be that the human mind should grasp
the _constitution of nature_; that is, should discover which is the
particular essence, or the particular system of essences, which actual
existence illustrates. In the matter of physics, truly, we are reduced
to skimming the surface, since we have to start from our casual
experiences, which form the most superficial stratum of nature, and
the most unstable. Yet these casual experiences, while they leave us
so much in the dark as to their natural basis and environment,
necessarily reveal each its ideal object, its specific essence; and we
need only arrest our attention upon it, and define it to ourselves,
for an eternal possibility, and some of its intrinsic characters, to
have been revealed to our thought.

Whatever, then, a man's mental and moral habit might be, it would
perforce have affinity to some essence or other; his life would
revolve about some congenial ideal object; he would find some sorts of
form, some types of relation, more visible, beautiful, and satisfying
than others. Mr. Russell happens to have a mathematical genius, and to
find comfort in laying up his treasures in the mathematical heaven. It
would be highly desirable that this temperament should be more common;
but even if it were universal it would not reduce mathematical essence
to a product of human attention, nor raise the "beauty" of mathematics
to part of its essence. I do not mean to suggest that Mr. Russell
attempts to do the latter; he speaks explicitly of the _value_ of
mathematical study, a point in ethics and not directly in logic; yet
his moral philosophy is itself so much assimilated to logic that the
distinction between the two becomes somewhat dubious; and as Mr.
Russell will never succeed in convincing us that moral values are
independent of life, he may, quite against his will, lead us to
question the independence of essence, with that blind gregarious drift
of all ideas, in this direction or in that, which is characteristic of
human philosophising.

III. THE CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM

The time has not yet come when a just and synthetic account of what is
called pragmatism can be expected of any man. The movement is still in
a nebulous state, a state from which, perhaps, it is never destined to
issue. The various tendencies that compose it may soon cease to appear
together; each may detach itself and be lost in the earlier system
with which it has most affinity. A good critic has enumerated
"Thirteen Pragmatisms;" and besides such distinguishable tenets, there
are in pragmatism echoes of various popular moral forces, like
democracy, impressionism, love of the concrete, respect for success,
trust in will and action, and the habit of relying on the future,
rather than on the past, to justify one's methods and opinions. Most
of these things are characteristically American; and Mr. Russell
touches on some of them with more wit than sympathy. Thus he writes:
"The influence of democracy in promoting pragmatism is visible in
almost every page of William James's writing. There is an impatience
of authority, an unwillingness to condemn widespread prejudices, a
tendency to decide philosophical questions by putting them to a vote,
which contrast curiously with the usual dictatorial tone of
philosophic writings.... A thing which simply is true, whether you
like it or not, is to him as hateful as a Russian autocracy; he feels
that he is escaping from a prison, made not by stone walls but by
'hard facts,' when he has humanised truth, and made it, like the
police force in a democracy, the servant of the people instead of
their master. The democratic temper pervades even the religion of the
pragmatists; they have the religion they have chosen, and the
traditional reverence is changed into satisfaction with their own
handiwork. 'The prince of darkness,' James says, 'may be a gentleman,
as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he
can surely be no gentleman,' He is rather, we should say, conceived by
pragmatists as an elected president, to whom we give a respect which
is really a tribute to the wisdom of our own choice. A government in
which we have no voice is repugnant to the democratic temper. William
James carries up to heaven the revolt of his New England ancestors:
the Power to which we can yield respect must be a George Washington
rather than a George III."

A point of fundamental importance, about which pragmatists have been
far from clear, and perhaps not in agreement with one another, is the
sense in which their psychology is to be taken. "The facts that fill
the imaginations of pragmatists," Mr. Russell writes, "are psychical
facts; where others might think of the starry heavens, pragmatists
think of the perception of the starry heavens; where others think of
God, pragmatists think of the belief in God, and so on. In discussing
the sciences, they never think, like scientific specialists, about the
facts upon which scientific theories are based; they think about the
theories themselves. Thus their initial question and their habitual
imaginative background are both psychological." This is so true that
unless we make the substitution into psychic terms instinctively, the
whole pragmatic view of things will seem paradoxical, if not actually
unthinkable. For instance, pragmatists might protest against the
accusation that "they never think about the facts upon which
scientific theories are based," for they lay a great emphasis on
facts. Facts are the cash which the credit of theories hangs upon. Yet
this protest, though sincere, would be inconclusive, and in the end it
would illustrate Mr. Russell's observation, rather than refute it. For
we should presently learn that these facts can be made by thinking,
that our faith in them may contribute to their reality, and may modify
their nature; in other words, these facts are our immediate
apprehensions of fact, which it is indeed conceivable that our
temperaments, expectations, and opinions should modify. Thus the
pragmatist's reliance on facts does not carry him beyond the psychic
sphere; his facts are only his personal experiences. Personal
experiences may well be the basis for no less personal myths; but the
effort of intelligence and of science is rather to find the basis of
the personal experiences themselves; and this non-psychic basis of
experience is what common sense calls the facts, and what practice is
concerned with. Yet these are not the _pragmata_ of the pragmatist,
for it is only the despicable intellectualist that can arrive at them;
and the bed-rock of facts that the pragmatist builds upon is avowedly
drifting sand. Hence the odd expressions, new to literature and even
to grammar, which bubble up continually in pragmatist writings. "For
illustration take the former fact that the earth is flat," says one,
quite innocently; and another observes that "two centuries later,
nominalism was evidently true, because it alone would legitimise the
local independence of cities." Lest we should suppose that the
historical sequence of these "truths" or illusions is, at least, fixed
and irreversible, we are soon informed that the past is always
changing, too; that is (if I may rationalise this mystical dictum),
that history is always being rewritten, and that the growing present
adds new relations to the past, which lead us to conceive or to
describe it in some new fashion. Even if the ultimate inference is not
drawn, and we are not told that this changing idea of the past is the
only past that exists--the real past being unattainable and therefore,
for personal idealism, non-existent--it is abundantly clear that the
effort to distinguish fact from theory cannot be successful, so long
as the psychological way of thinking prevails; for a theory,
psychologically considered, is a bare fact in the experience of the
theorist, and the other facts of his experience are so many other
momentary views, so many scant theories, to be immediately superseded
by other "truths in the plural." Sensations and ideas are really
distinguishable only by reference to what is assumed to lie without;
of which external reality experience is always an effect (and in that
capacity is called sensation) and often at the same time an
apprehension (and in that capacity is called idea).

It is a crucial question, then, in the interpretation of pragmatism,
whether the psychological point of view, undoubtedly prevalent in that
school, is the only or the ultimate point of view which it admits. The
habit of studying ideas rather than their objects might be simply a
matter of emphasis or predilection. It might merely indicate a special
interest in the life of reason, and be an effort, legitimate under
any system of philosophy, to recount the stages by which human
thought, developing in the bosom of nature, may have reached its
present degree of articulation. I myself, for instance, like to look
at things from this angle: not that I have ever doubted the reality of
the natural world, or been able to take very seriously any philosophy
that denied it, but precisely because, when we take the natural world
for granted, it becomes a possible and enlightening inquiry to ask how
the human animal has come to discover his real environment, in so far
as he has done so, and what dreams have intervened or supervened in
the course of his rational awakening. On the other hand, a
psychological point of view might be equivalent to the idealistic
doctrine that the articulation of human thought constitutes the only
structure of the universe, and its whole history. According to this
view, pragmatism would seem to be a revised version of the
transcendental logic, leaving logic still transcendental, that is,
still concerned with the evolution of the categories. The revision
would consist chiefly in this, that empirical verification, utility,
and survival would take the place of dialectical irony as the force
governing the evolution. It would still remain possible for other
methods of approach than this transcendental pragmatism, for instinct,
perhaps, or for revelation, to bring us into contact with
things-in-themselves. A junction might thus be effected with the
system of M. Bergson, which would lead to this curious result: that
pragmatic logic would be the method of intelligence, because
intelligence is merely a method, useful in practice, for the symbolic
and improper representation of reality; while another non-pragmatic
method--sympathy and dream--would alone be able to put us in
possession of direct knowledge and genuine truth. So that, after all,
the pragmatic "truth" of working ideas would turn out to be what it
has seemed hitherto to mankind, namely, no real truth, but rather a
convenient sort of fiction, which ceases to deceive when once its
merely pragmatic value is discounted by criticism. I remember once
putting a question on this subject to Professor James; and his answer
was one which I am glad to be able to record. In relation to his
having said that "as far as the past facts go, there is no difference
... be the atoms or be the God their cause,"[7] I asked whether, if
God had been the cause, apart from the value of the idea of him in our
calculations, his existence would not have made a difference to him,
as he would be presumably self-conscious. "Of course," said Professor
James, "but I wasn't considering that side of the matter; I was
thinking of our idea." The choice of the subjective point of view,
then, was deliberate here, and frankly arbitrary; it was not intended
to exclude the possibility or legitimacy of the objective attitude.
And the original reason for deliberately ignoring, in this way, the
realistic way of thinking, even while admitting that it represents the
real state of affairs, would have been, I suppose, that what could be
verified was always some further effect of the real objects, and never
those real objects themselves; so that for interpreting and predicting
our personal experience only the hypothesis of objects was pertinent,
while the objects themselves, except as so represented, were useless
and unattainable. The case, if I may adapt a comparison of Mr.
Russell's, was as if we possessed a catalogue of the library at
Alexandria, all the books being lost for ever; it would be only in the
catalogue that we could practically verify their existence or
character, though doubtless, by some idle flight of imagination, we
might continue to think of the books, as well as of those titles in
the catalogue which alone could appear to us in experience.
Pragmatism, approached from this side, would then seem to express an
acute critical conscience, a sort of will not to believe; not to
believe, I mean, more than is absolutely necessary for solipsistic
practice.

[Footnote 7: _Pragmatism_, p. 101.]

Such economical faith, enabling one to dissolve the hard materialistic
world into a work of mind, which mind might outflank, was traditional
in the radical Emersonian circles in which pragmatism sprang up. It is
one of the approaches to the movement; yet we may safely regard the
ancestral transcendentalism of the pragmatists as something which they
have turned their back upon, and mean to disown. It is destined to
play no part in the ultimate result of pragmatism. This ultimate
result promises to be, on the contrary, a direct materialistic sort of
realism. This alone is congruous with the scientific affinities of the
school and its young-American temper. Nor is the transformation very
hard to effect. The world of solipsistic practice, if you remove the
romantic self that was supposed to evoke it, becomes at once the
sensible world; and the problem is only to find a place in the mosaic
of objects of sensation for those cognitive and moral functions which
the soul was once supposed to exercise in the presence of an
independent reality. But this problem is precisely the one that
pragmatists boast they have already solved; for they have declared
that consciousness does not exist, and that objects of sensation
(which at first were called feelings, experiences, or "truths") know
or mean one another when they lead to one another, when they are
poles, so to speak, in the same vital circuit. The spiritual act which
was supposed to take things for its object is to be turned into
"objective spirit," that is, into dynamic relations between things.
The philosopher will deny that he has any other sort of mind himself,
lest he should be shut up in it again, like a sceptical and
disconsolate child; while if there threatens to be any covert or
superfluous reality in the self-consciousness of God, nothing will be
easier than to deny that God is self-conscious; for indeed, if there
is no consciousness on earth, why should we imagine that there is any
in heaven? The psychologism with which the pragmatists started seems
to be passing in this way, in the very effort to formulate it
pragmatically, into something which, whatever it may be, is certainly
not psychologism. But the bewildered public may well ask whether it is
pragmatism either.

There is another crucial point in pragmatism which the defenders of
the system are apt to pass over lightly, but which Mr. Russell regards
(justly, I think) as of decisive importance. Is, namely, the pragmatic
account of truth intended to cover all knowledge, or one kind of
knowledge only? Apparently the most authoritative pragmatists admit
that it covers one kind only; for there are two sorts of self-evidence
in which, they say, it is not concerned: first, the dialectical
relation between essences; and second, the known occurrence or
experience of facts. There are obvious reasons why these two kinds of
cognitions, so interesting to Mr. Russell, are not felt by pragmatists
to constitute exceptions worth considering. Dialectical relations,
they will say, are verbal only; that is, they define ideal objects,
and certainty in these cases does not coerce existence, or touch
contingent fact at all. On the other hand, such apprehension as seizes
on some matter of fact, as, for instance, "I feel pain," or "I
expected to feel this pain, and it is now verifying my expectation,"
though often true propositions, are not _theoretical_ truths; they are
not, it is supposed, questionable beliefs but rather immediate
observations. Yet many of these apprehensions of fact (or all,
perhaps, if we examine them scrupulously) involve the veracity of
memory, surely a highly questionable sort of truth; and, moreover,
verification, the pragmatic test of truth, would be obviously
impossible to apply, if the prophecy supposed to be verified were not
assumed to be truly remembered. How shall we know that our expectation
is fulfilled, if we do not know directly that we had such an
expectation? But if we know our past experience directly--not merely
knew it when present, but know now what it was, and how it has led
down to the present--this amounts to enough knowledge to make up a
tolerable system of the universe, without invoking pragmatic
verification or "truth" at all. I have never been able to discover
whether, by that perception of fact which is not "truth" but fact
itself, pragmatists meant each human apprehension taken singly, or the
whole series of these apprehensions. In the latter case, as in the
philosophy of M. Bergson, all past reality might constantly lie open
to retentive intuition, a form of knowledge soaring quite over the
head of any pragmatic method or pragmatic "truth." It looks, indeed,
as if the history of at least personal experience were commonly taken
for granted by pragmatists, as a basis on which to rear their method.
Their readiness to make so capital an assumption is a part of their
heritage from romantic idealism. To the romantic idealist science and
theology are tales which ought to be reduced to an empirical
equivalent in his personal experience; but the tale of his personal
experience itself is a sacred figment, the one precious conviction of
the romantic heart, which it would be heartless to question. Yet here
is a kind of assumed truth which cannot be reduced to its pragmatic
meaning, because it must be true literally in order that the pragmatic
meaning of other beliefs may be conceived or tested at all.

Now, if it be admitted that the pragmatic theory of truth does not
touch our knowledge either of matters of fact or of the necessary
implications of ideas, the question arises: What sort of knowledge
remains for pragmatic theory to apply to? Simply, Mr. Russell answers,
those "working hypotheses" to which "prudent people give only a low
degree of belief." For "we hold different beliefs with very different
degrees of conviction. Some--such as the belief that I am sitting in a
chair, or that 2+2=4--can be doubted by few except those who have had
a long training in philosophy. Such beliefs are held so firmly that
non-philosophers who deny them are put into lunatic asylums. Other
beliefs, such as the facts of history, are held rather less firmly....
Beliefs about the future, as that the sun will rise to-morrow and
that the trains will run approximately as in Bradshaw, may be held
with almost as great conviction as beliefs about the past. Scientific
laws are generally believed less firmly.... Philosophical beliefs,
finally, will, with most people, take a still lower place, since the
opposite beliefs of others can hardly fail to induce doubt. Belief,
therefore, is a matter of degree. To speak of belief, disbelief,
doubt, and suspense of judgment as the only possibilities is as if,
from the writing on the thermometer, we were to suppose that blood
heat, summer heat, temperate, and freezing were the only
temperatures." Beliefs which require to be confirmed by future
experience, or which actually refer to it, are evidently only
presumptions; it is merely the truth of presumptions that empirical
logic applies to, and only so long as they remain presumptions.
Presumptions may be held with very different degrees of assurance, and
yet be acted upon, in the absence of any strong counter-suggestion; as
the confidence of lovers or of religious enthusiasts may be at blood
heat at one moment and freezing at the next, without a change in
anything save in the will to believe. The truth of such presumptions,
whatever may be the ground of them, depends in fact on whether they
are to lead (or, rather, whether the general course of events is to
lead) to the further things presumed; for these things are what
presumptions refer to explicitly.

It sometimes happens, however, that presumptions (being based on
voluminous blind instinct rather than on distinct repeated
observations) are expressed in consciousness by some symbol or myth,
as when a man says he believes in his luck; the presumption really
regards particular future chances and throws of the dice, but the
emotional and verbal mist in which the presumption is wrapped, veils
the pragmatic burden of it; and a metaphysical entity arises, called
luck, in which a man may think he believes rather than in a particular
career that may be awaiting him. Now since this entity, luck, is a
mere word, confidence in it, to be justified at all, must be
transferred to the concrete facts it stands for. Faith in one's luck
must be pragmatic, but simply because faith in such an entity is not
needful nor philosophical at all. The case is the same with working
hypotheses, when that is all they are; for on this point there is some
confusion. Whether an idea is a working hypothesis merely or an
anticipation of matters open to eventual inspection may not always be
clear. Thus the atomic theory, in the sense in which most philosophers
entertain it to-day, seems to be a working hypothesis only; for they
do not seriously believe that there are atoms, but in their ignorance
of the precise composition of matter, they find it convenient to speak
of it as if it were composed of indestructible particles. But for
Democritus and for many modern men of science the atomic theory is not
a working hypothesis merely; they do not regard it as a provisional
makeshift; they regard it as a probable, if not a certain,
anticipation of what inspection would discover to be the fact, could
inspection be carried so far; in other words, they believe the atomic
theory is true. If they are right, the validity of this theory would
not be that of pragmatic "truth" but of pragmatic "fact"; for it would
be a view, such as memory or intuition or sensation might give us, of
experienced objects in their experienced relations; it would be the
communication to us, in a momentary dream, of what would be the
experience of a universal observer. It would be knowledge of reality
in M. Bergson's sense. Pragmatic "truth," on the contrary, is the
relative and provisional justification of fiction; and pragmatism is
not a theory of truth at all, but a theory of theory, when theory is
instrumental.

For theory too has more than one signification. It may mean such a
symbolic or foreshortened view, such a working hypothesis, as true and
full knowledge might supersede; or it may mean this true and full
knowledge itself, a synthetic survey of objects of experience in their
experimental character. Algebra and language are theoretical in the
first sense, as when a man believes in his luck; historical and
scientific imagination are theoretical in the second sense, when they
gather objects of experience together without distorting them. But it
is only to the first sort of theory that pragmatism can be reasonably
applied; to apply it also to the second would be to retire into that
extreme subjectivism which the leading pragmatists have so hotly
disclaimed. We find, accordingly, that it is only when a theory is
avowedly unreal, and does not ask to be believed, that the value of it
is pragmatic; since in that case belief passes consciously from the
symbols used to the eventual facts in which the symbolism terminates,
and for which it stands.

It may seem strange that a definition of truth should have been based
on the consideration of those ideas exclusively for which truth is not
claimed by any critical person, such ideas, namely, as religious myths
or the graphic and verbal machinery of science. Yet the fact is
patent, and if we considered the matter historically it might not
prove inexplicable. Theology has long applied the name truth
pre-eminently to fiction. When the conviction first dawned upon
pragmatists that there was no absolute or eternal truth, what they
evidently were thinking of was that it is folly, in this changing
world, to pledge oneself to any final and inflexible creed. The
pursuit of truth, since nothing better was possible, was to be
accepted instead of the possession of it. But it is characteristic of
Protestantism that, when it gives up anything, it transfers to what
remains the unction, and often the name, proper to what it has
abandoned. So, if truth was no longer to be claimed or even hoped for,
the value and the name of truth could be instinctively transferred to
what was to take its place--spontaneous, honest, variable conviction.
And the sanctions of this conviction were to be looked for, not in the
objective reality, since it was an idle illusion to fancy we could get
at that, but in the growth of this conviction itself, and in the
prosperous adventure of the whole soul, so courageous in its
self-trust, and so modest in its dogmas.

Science, too, has often been identified, not with the knowledge men of
science possess, but with the language they use. If science meant
knowledge, the science of Darwin, for instance, would lie in his
observations of plants and animals, and in his thoughts about the
probable ancestors of the human race--all knowledge of actual or
possible facts. It would not be knowledge of selection or of
spontaneous variation, terms which are mere verbal bridges over the
gaps in that knowledge, and mark the _lacunae_ and unsolved problems
of the science. Yet it is just such terms that seem to clothe
"Science" in its pontifical garb; the cowl is taken for the monk; and
when a penetrating critic, like M. Henri Poincaré, turned his subtle
irony upon them, the public cried that he had announced the
"bankruptcy of science," whereas it is merely the language of science
that he had reduced to its pragmatic value--to convenience and economy
in the registering of facts--and had by no means questioned that
positive and cumulative knowledge of facts which science is attaining.
It is an incident in the same general confusion that a critical
epistemology, like pragmatism, analysing these figments of scientific
or theological theory, should innocently suppose that it was analysing
truth; while the only view to which it really attributes truth is its
view of the system of facts open to possible experience, a system
which those figments presuppose and which they may help us in part to
divine, where it is accidentally hidden from human inspection.

IV. HYPOSTATIC ETHICS

If Mr. Russell, in his essay on "The Elements of Ethics," had wished
to propitiate the unregenerate naturalist, before trying to convert
him, he could not have chosen a more skilful procedure; for he begins
by telling us that "what is called good conduct is conduct which is a
means to other things which are good on their own account; and hence
... the study of what is good or bad on its own account must be
included in ethics." Two consequences are involved in this: first,
that ethics is concerned with the economy of all values, and not with
"moral" goods only, or with duty; and second, that values may and do
inhere in a great variety of things and relations, all of which it is
the part of wisdom to respect, and if possible to establish. In this
matter, according to our author, the general philosopher is prone to
one error and the professed moralist to another. "The philosopher,
bent on the construction of a system, is inclined to simplify the
facts unduly ... and to twist them into a form in which they can all
be deduced from one or two general principles. The moralist, on the
other hand, being primarily concerned with conduct, tends to become
absorbed in means, to value the actions men ought to perform more than
the ends which such actions serve.... Hence most of what they value in
this world would have to be omitted by many moralists from any
imagined heaven, because there such things as self-denial and effort
and courage and pity could find no place.... Kant has the bad eminence
of combining both errors in the highest possible degree, since he
holds that there is nothing good except the virtuous will--a view
which simplifies the good as much as any philosopher could wish, and
mistakes means for ends as completely as any moralist could enjoin."

Those of us who are what Mr. Russell would call ethical sceptics will
be delighted at this way of clearing the ground; it opens before us
the prospect of a moral philosophy that should estimate the various
values of things known and of things imaginable, showing what
combinations of goods are possible in any one rational system, and
(if fancy could stretch so far) what different rational systems would
be possible in places and times remote enough from one another not to
come into physical conflict. Such ethics, since it would express in
reflection the dumb but actual interests of men, might have both
influence and authority over them; two things which an alien and
dogmatic ethics necessarily lacks. The joy of the ethical sceptic in
Mr. Russell is destined, however, to be short-lived. Before proceeding
to the expression of concrete ideals, he thinks it necessary to ask a
preliminary and quite abstract question, to which his essay is chiefly
devoted; namely, what is the right definition of the predicate "good,"
which we hope to apply in the sequel to such a variety of things? And
he answers at once: The predicate "good" is indefinable. This answer
he shows to be unavoidable, and so evidently unavoidable that we might
perhaps have been absolved from asking the question; for, as he says,
the so-called definitions of "good"--that it is pleasure, the desired,
and so forth--are not definitions of the predicate "good," but
designations of the things to which this predicate is applied by
different persons. Pleasure, and its rivals, are not synonyms for the
abstract quality "good," but names for classes of concrete facts that
are supposed to possess that quality. From this correct, if somewhat
trifling, observation, however, Mr. Russell, like Mr. Moore before
him, evokes a portentous dogma. Not being able to define good, he
hypostasises it. "Good and bad," he says, "are qualities which belong
to objects independently of our opinions, just as much as round and
square do; and when two people differ as to whether a thing is good,
only one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know
which is right." "We cannot maintain that for me a thing ought to
exist on its own account, while for you it ought not; that would
merely mean that one of us is mistaken, since in fact everything
either ought to exist, or ought not." Thus we are asked to believe
that good attaches to things for no reason or cause, and according to
no principles of distribution; that it must be found there by a sort
of receptive exploration in each separate case; in other words, that
it is an absolute, not a relative thing, a primary and not a secondary
quality.

That the quality "good" is indefinable is one assertion, and obvious;
but that the presence of this quality is unconditioned is another, and
astonishing. My logic, I am well aware, is not very accurate or
subtle; and I wish Mr. Russell had not left it to me to discover the
connection between these two propositions. Green is an indefinable
predicate, and the specific quality of it can be given only in
intuition; but it is a quality that things acquire under certain
conditions, so much so that the same bit of grass, at the same moment,
may have it from one point of view and not from another. Right and
left are indefinable; the difference could not be explained without
being invoked in the explanation; yet everything that is to the right
is not to the right on no condition, but obviously on the condition
that some one is looking in a certain direction; and if some one else
at the same time is looking in the opposite direction, what is truly
to the right will be truly to the left also. If Mr. Russell thinks
this is a contradiction, I understand why the universe does not
please him. The contradiction would be real, undoubtedly, if we
suggested that the idea of good was at any time or in any relation the
idea of evil, or the intuition of right that of left, or the quality
of green that of yellow; these disembodied essences are fixed by the
intent that selects them, and in that ideal realm they can never have
any relations except the dialectical ones implied in their nature, and
these relations they must always retain. But the contradiction
disappears when, instead of considering the qualities in themselves,
we consider the things of which those qualities are aspects; for the
qualities of things are not compacted by implication, but are
conjoined irrationally by nature, as she will; and the same thing may
be, and is, at once yellow and green, to the left and to the right,
good and evil, many and one, large and small; and whatever verbal
paradox there may be in this way of speaking (for from the point of
view of nature it is natural enough) had been thoroughly explained and
talked out by the time of Plato, who complained that people should
still raise a difficulty so trite and exploded.[8] Indeed, while
square is always square, and round round, a thing that is round may
actually be square also, if we allow it to have a little body, and to
be a cylinder.

[Footnote 8: Plato, _Philebus_, 14, D. The dialectical element in this
dialogue is evidently the basis of Mr. Russell's, as of Mr. Moore's,
ethics; but they have not adopted the other elements in it, I mean the
political and the theological. As to the political element, Plato
everywhere conceives the good as the eligible in life, and refers it
to human nature and to the pursuit of happiness--that happiness which
Mr. Russell, in a rash moment, says is but a name which some people
prefer to give to pleasure. Thus in the _Philebus_ (11, D) the good
looked for is declared to be "some state and disposition of the soul
which has the property of making all men happy"; and later (66, D) the
conclusion is that insight is better than pleasure "as an element in
human life." As to the theological element, Plato, in hypostasising
the good, does not hypostasise it as good, but as cause or power,
which is, it seems to me, the sole category that justifies hypostasis,
and logically involves it; for if things have a ground at all, that
ground must exist before them and beyond them. Hence the whole
Platonic and Christian scheme, in making the good independent of
private will and opinion, by no means makes it independent of the
direction of nature in general and of human nature in particular; for
all things have been created with an innate predisposition towards the
creative good, and are capable of finding happiness in nothing else.
Obligation, in this system, remains internal and vital. Plato
attributes a single vital direction and a single moral source to the
cosmos. This is what determines and narrows the scope of the true
good; for the true good is that relevant to nature. Plato would not
have been a dogmatic moralist, had he not been a theist.]

But perhaps what suggests this hypostasis of good is rather the fact
that what others find good, or what we ourselves have found good in
moods with which we retain no sympathy, is sometimes pronounced by us
to be bad; and far from inferring from this diversity of experience
that the present good, like the others, corresponds to a particular
attitude or interest of ours, and is dependent upon it, Mr. Russell
and Mr. Moore infer instead that the presence of the good must be
independent of all interests, attitudes, and opinions. They imagine
that the truth of a proposition attributing a certain relative quality
to an object contradicts the truth of another proposition, attributing
to the same object an opposite relative quality. Thus if a man here
and another man at the antipodes call opposite directions up, "only
one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know which is
right."

To protect the belated innocence of this state of mind, Mr. Russell,
so far as I can see, has only one argument, and one analogy. The
argument is that "if this were not the case, we could not reason with
a man as to what is right." "We do in fact hold that when one man
approves of a certain act, while another disapproves, one of them is
mistaken, which would not be the case with a mere emotion. If one man
likes oysters and another dislikes them, we do not say that either of
them is mistaken." In other words, we are to maintain our prejudices,
however absurd, lest it should become unnecessary to quarrel about
them! Truly the debating society has its idols, no less than the cave
and the theatre. The analogy that comes to buttress somewhat this
singular argument is the analogy between ethical propriety and
physical or logical truth. An ethical proposition may be correct or
incorrect, in a sense justifying argument, when it touches what is
good as a means, that is, when it is not intrinsically ethical, but
deals with causes and effects, or with matters of fact or necessity.
But to speak of the truth of an ultimate good would be a false
collocation of terms; an ultimate good is chosen, found, or aimed at;
it is not opined. The ultimate intuitions on which ethics rests are
not debatable, for they are not opinions we hazard but preferences we
feel; and it can be neither correct nor incorrect to feel them. We may
assert these preferences fiercely or with sweet reasonableness, and we
may be more or less incapable of sympathising with the different
preferences of others; about oysters we may be tolerant, like Mr.
Russell, and about character intolerant; but that is already a great
advance in enlightenment, since the majority of mankind have regarded
as hateful in the highest degree any one who indulged in pork, or
beans, or frogs' legs, or who had a weakness for anything called
"unnatural"; for it is the things that offend their animal instincts
that intense natures have always found to be, intrinsically and _par
excellence_, abominations.

I am not sure whether Mr. Russell thinks he has disposed of this view
where he discusses the proposition that the good is the desired and
refutes it on the ground that "it is commonly admitted that there are
bad desires; and when people speak of bad desires, they seem to mean
desires for what is bad." Most people undoubtedly call desires bad
when they are generically contrary to their own desires, and call
objects that disgust them bad, even when other people covet them. This
human weakness is not, however, a very high authority for a logician
to appeal to, being too like the attitude of the German lady who said
that Englishmen called a certain object _bread_, and Frenchmen called
it _pain_, but that it really was _Brod_. Scholastic philosophy is
inclined to this way of asserting itself; and Mr. Russell, though he
candidly admits that there are ultimate differences of opinion about
good and evil, would gladly minimise these differences, and thinks he
triumphs when he feels that the prejudices of his readers will agree
with his own; as if the constitutional unanimity of all human animals,
supposing it existed, could tend to show that the good they agreed to
recognise was independent of their constitution.

In a somewhat worthier sense, however, we may admit that there are
desires for what is bad, since desire and will, in the proper
psychological sense of these words, are incidental phases of
consciousness, expressing but not constituting those natural relations
that make one thing good for another. At the same time the words
desire and will are often used, in a mythical or transcendental sense,
for those material dispositions and instincts by which vital and moral
units are constituted. It is in reference to such constitutional
interests that things are "really" good or bad; interests which may
not be fairly represented by any incidental conscious desire. No doubt
any desire, however capricious, represents some momentary and partial
interest, which lends to its objects a certain real and inalienable
value; yet when we consider, as we do in human society, the interests
of men, whom reflection and settled purposes have raised more or less
to the ideal dignity of individuals, then passing fancies and passions
may indeed have bad objects, and be bad themselves, in that they
thwart the more comprehensive interests of the soul that entertains
them. Food and poison are such only relatively, and in view of
particular bodies, and the same material thing may be food and poison
at once; the child, and even the doctor, may easily mistake one for
the other. For the human system whiskey is truly more intoxicating
than coffee, and the contrary opinion would be an error; but what a
strange way of vindicating this real, though relative, distinction, to
insist that whiskey is more intoxicating in itself, without reference
to any animal; that it is pervaded, as it were, by an inherent
intoxication, and stands dead drunk in its bottle! Yet just in this
way Mr. Russell and Mr. Moore conceive things to be dead good and dead
bad. It is such a view, rather than the naturalistic one, that renders
reasoning and self-criticism impossible in morals; for wrong desires,
and false opinions as to value, are conceivable only because a point
of reference or criterion is available to prove them such. If no point
of reference and no criterion were admitted to be relevant, nothing
but physical stress could give to one assertion of value greater force
than to another. The shouting moralist no doubt has his place, but not
in philosophy.

That good is not an intrinsic or primary quality, but relative and
adventitious, is clearly betrayed by Mr. Russell's own way of arguing,
whenever he approaches some concrete ethical question. For instance,
to show that the good is not pleasure, he can avowedly do nothing but
appeal "to ethical judgments with which almost every one would agree."
He repeats, in effect, Plato's argument about the life of the oyster,
having pleasure with no knowledge. Imagine such mindless pleasure, as
intense and prolonged as you please, and would you choose it? Is it
your good? Here the British reader, like the blushing Greek youth, is
expected to answer instinctively, No! It is an _argumentum ad hominem_
(and there can be no other kind of argument in ethics); but the man
who gives the required answer does so not because the answer is
self-evident, which it is not, but because he is the required sort of
man. He is shocked at the idea of resembling an oyster. Yet changeless
pleasure, without memory or reflection, without the wearisome
intermixture of arbitrary images, is just what the mystic, the
voluptuary, and perhaps the oyster find to be good. Ideas, in their
origin, are probably signals of alarm; and the distress which they
marked in the beginning always clings to them in some measure, and
causes many a soul, far more profound than that of the young
Protarchus or of the British reader, to long for them to cease
altogether. Such a radical hedonism is indeed inhuman; it undermines
all conventional ambitions, and is not a possible foundation for
political or artistic life. But that is all we can say against it. Our
humanity cannot annul the incommensurable sorts of good that may be
pursued in the world, though it cannot itself pursue them. The
impossibility which people labour under of being satisfied with pure
pleasure as a goal is due to their want of imagination, or rather to
their being dominated by an imagination which is exclusively human.

The author's estrangement from reality reappears in his treatment of
egoism, and most of all in his "Free Man's Religion." Egoism, he
thinks, is untenable because "if I am right in thinking that my good
is the only good, then every one else is mistaken unless he admits
that my good, not his, is the only good." "Most people ... would admit
that it is better two people's desires should be satisfied than only
one person's.... Then what is good is not good _for me_ or _for you_,
but is simply good." "It is, indeed, so evident that it is better to
secure a greater good for _A_ than a lesser good for _B_, that it is
hard to find any still more evident principle by which to prove this.
And if _A_ happens to be some one else, and _B_ to be myself, that
cannot affect the question, since it is irrelevant to the general
question who _A_ and _B_ may be." To the question, as the logician
states it after transforming men into letters, it is certainly
irrelevant; but it is not irrelevant to the case as it arises in
nature. If two goods are somehow rightly pronounced to be equally
good, no circumstance can render one better than the other. And if the
locus in which the good is to arise is somehow pronounced to be
indifferent, it will certainly be indifferent whether that good arises
in me or in you. But how shall these two pronouncements be made? In
practice, values cannot be compared save as represented or enacted in
the private imagination of somebody: for we could not conceive that an
alien good _was_ a good (as Mr. Russell cannot conceive that the life
of an ecstatic oyster is a good) unless we could sympathise with it in
some way in our own persons; and on the warmth which we felt in so
representing the alien good would hang our conviction that it was
truly valuable, and had worth in comparison with our own good. The
voice of reason, bidding us prefer the greater good, no matter who is
to enjoy it, is also nothing but the force of sympathy, bringing a
remote existence before us vividly _sub specie boni_. Capacity for
such sympathy measures the capacity to recognise duty and therefore,
in a moral sense, to have it. Doubtless it is conceivable that all
wills should become co-operative, and that nature should be ruled
magically by an exact and universal sympathy; but this situation must
be actually attained in part, before it can be conceived or judged to
be an authoritative ideal. The tigers cannot regard it as such, for it
would suppress the tragic good called ferocity, which makes, in their
eyes, the chief glory of the universe. Therefore the inertia of
nature, the ferocity of beasts, the optimism of mystics, and the
selfishness of men and nations must all be accepted as conditions for
the peculiar goods, essentially incommensurable, which they can
generate severally. It is misplaced vehemence to call them
intrinsically detestable, because they do not (as they cannot)
generate or recognise the goods we prize.

In the real world, persons are not abstract egos, like _A_ and _B_, so
that to benefit one is clearly as good as to benefit another. Indeed,
abstract egos could not be benefited, for they could not be modified
at all, even if somehow they could be distinguished. It would be the
qualities or objects distributed among them that would carry, wherever
they went, each its inalienable cargo of value, like ships sailing
from sea to sea. But it is quite vain and artificial to imagine
different goods charged with such absolute and comparable weights; and
actual egoism is not the thin and refutable thing that Mr. Russell
makes of it. What it really holds is that a given man, oneself, and
those akin to him, are qualitatively better than other beings; that
the things they prize are intrinsically better than the things prized
by others; and that therefore there is no injustice in treating these
chosen interests as supreme. The injustice, it is felt, would lie
rather in not treating things so unequal unequally. This feeling may,
in many cases, amuse the impartial observer, or make him indignant;
yet it may, in every case, according to Mr. Russell, be absolutely
just. The refutation he gives of egoism would not dissuade any fanatic
from exterminating all his enemies with a good conscience; it would
merely encourage him to assert that what he was ruthlessly
establishing was the absolute good. Doubtless such conscientious
tyrants would be wretched themselves, and compelled to make sacrifices
which would cost them dear; but that would only extend, as it were,
the pernicious egoism of that part of their being which they had
allowed to usurp a universal empire. The twang of intolerance and of
self-mutilation is not absent from the ethics of Mr. Russell and Mr.
Moore, even as it stands; and one trembles to think what it may become
in the mouths of their disciples. Intolerance itself is a form of
egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it. I cannot
help thinking that a consciousness of the relativity of values, if it
became prevalent, would tend to render people more truly social than
would a belief that things have intrinsic and unchangeable values, no
matter what the attitude of any one to them may be. If we said that
goods, including the right distribution of goods, are relative to
specific natures, moral warfare would continue, but not with poisoned
arrows. Our private sense of justice itself would be acknowledged to
have but a relative authority, and while we could not have a higher
duty than to follow it, we should seek to meet those whose aims were
incompatible with it as we meet things physically inconvenient,
without insulting them as if they were morally vile or logically
contemptible. Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of
others. Beyond the pale of actual unanimity the only possible
unselfishness is chivalry--a recognition of the inward right and
justification of our enemies fighting against us. This chivalry has
long been practised in the battle-field without abolishing the causes
of war; and it might conceivably be extended to all the conflicts of
men with one another, and of the warring elements within each breast.
Policy, hypnotisation, and even surgery may be practised without
exorcisms or anathemas. When a man has decided on a course of action,
it is a vain indulgence in expletives to declare that he is sure that
course is absolutely right. His moral dogma expresses its natural
origin all the more clearly the more hotly it is proclaimed; and
ethical absolutism, being a mental grimace of passion, refutes what it
says by what it is. Sweeter and more profound, to my sense, is the
philosophy of Homer, whose every line seems to breathe the conviction
that what is beautiful or precious has not thereby any right to
existence; nothing has such a right; nor is it given us to condemn
absolutely any force--god or man--that destroys what is beautiful or
precious, for it has doubtless something beautiful or precious of its
own to achieve.

The consequences of a hypostasis of the good are no less interesting
than its causes. If the good were independent of nature, it might
still be conceived as relevant to nature, by being its creator or
mover; but Mr. Russell is not a theist after the manner of Socrates;
his good is not a power. Nor would representing it to be such long
help his case; for an ideal hypostasised into a cause achieves only a
mythical independence. The least criticism discloses that it is
natural laws, zoological species, and human ideals, that have been
projected into the empyrean; and it is no marvel that the good should
attract the world where the good, by definition, is whatever the world
is aiming at. The hypostasis accomplished by Mr. Russell is more
serious, and therefore more paradoxical. If I understand it, it may be
expressed as follows: In the realm of eternal essences, before