In such a nature we see the true union of
the mystic and the man of science--the highest eminence, as I think,
that it is possible to achieve in the world of thought.
the mystic and the man of science--the highest eminence, as I think,
that it is possible to achieve in the world of thought.
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* * * * *
BERTRAND RUSSELL
MYSTICISM AND
LOGIC
AND OTHER ESSAYS
_LONDON_
GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
RUSKIN HOUSE MUSEUM STREET
MYSTICISM AND LOGIC
AND OTHER ESSAYS
BY BERTRAND RUSSELL
_The ABC of Relativity_
_The Analysis of Matter_
_Human Society in Ethics and Politics_
_The Impact of Science on Society_
_New Hopes for a Changing World_
_Authority and the Individual_
_Human Knowledge_
_History of Western Philosophy_
_The Principles of Mathematics_
_Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy_
_The Analysis of Mind_
_Our Knowledge of the External World_
_An Outline of Philosophy_
_The Philosophy of Leibniz_
_An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth_
_Logic and Knowledge_
_The Problems of Philosophy_
_Principia Mathematica_
_Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare_
_Why I am Not a Christian_
_Portraits from Memory_
_My Philosophical Development_
_Unpopular Essays_
_Power_
_In Praise of Idleness_
_The Conquest of Happiness_
_Sceptical Essays_
_The Scientific Outlook_
_Marriage and Morals_
_Education and the Social Order_
_On Education_
_Freedom and Organization_
_Principles of Social Reconstruction_
_Roads to Freedom_
_Practice and Theory of Bolshevism_
_Satan in The Suburbs_
_Nightmares of Eminent Persons_
_First published as "Philosophical Essays"_ _October 1910_
_Second Edition as "Mysticism and Logic"_ _December 1917_
_Third Impression_ _April 1918_
_Fourth Impression_ _February 1919_
_Fifth Impression_ _October 1921_
_Sixth Impression_ _August 1925_
_Seventh Impression_ _January 1932_
_Eighth Impression_ _1949_
_Ninth Impression_ _1950_
_Tenth Impression_ _1951_
_Eleventh Impression_ _1959_
_This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. Apart from any
fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism
or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, 1956, no portion
may be reproduced by any process without written permission.
Enquiry should be made to the publisher. _
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
_by Taylor Garnett Evans & Co. Ltd. ,
Watford, Herts. _
PREFACE
The following essays have been written and published at various times,
and my thanks are due to the previous publishers for the permission to
reprint them.
The essay on "Mysticism and Logic" appeared in the _Hibbert Journal_
for July, 1914. "The Place of Science in a Liberal Education" appeared
in two numbers of _The New Statesman_, May 24 and 31, 1913. "The Free
Man's Worship" and "The Study of Mathematics" were included in a
former collection (now out of print), _Philosophical Essays_, also
published by Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. Both were written in 1902;
the first appeared originally in the _Independent Review_ for 1903,
the second in the _New Quarterly_, November, 1907. In theoretical
Ethics, the position advocated in "The Free Man's Worship" is not
quite identical with that which I hold now: I feel less convinced than
I did then of the objectivity of good and evil. But the general
attitude towards life which is suggested in that essay still seems to
me, in the main, the one which must be adopted in times of stress and
difficulty by those who have no dogmatic religious beliefs, if inward
defeat is to be avoided.
The essay on "Mathematics and the Metaphysicians" was written in 1901,
and appeared in an American magazine, _The International Monthly_,
under the title "Recent Work in the Philosophy of Mathematics. " Some
points in this essay require modification in view of later work.
These are indicated in footnotes. Its tone is partly explained by the
fact that the editor begged me to make the article "as romantic as
possible. "
All the above essays are entirely popular, but those that follow are
somewhat more technical. "On Scientific Method in Philosophy" was the
Herbert Spencer lecture at Oxford in 1914, and was published by the
Clarendon Press, which has kindly allowed me to include it in this
collection. "The Ultimate Constituents of Matter" was an address to
the Manchester Philosophical Society, early in 1915, and was published
in the _Monist_ in July of that year. The essay on "The Relation of
Sense-data to Physics" was written in January, 1914, and first
appeared in No. 4 of that year's volume of _Scientia_, an
International Review of Scientific Synthesis, edited by M. Eugenio
Rignano, published monthly by Messrs. Williams and Norgate, London,
Nicola Zanichelli, Bologna, and Felix Alcan, Paris. The essay "On the
Notion of Cause" was the presidential address to the Aristotelian
Society in November, 1912, and was published in their _Proceedings_
for 1912-13. "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description"
was also a paper read before the Aristotelian Society, and published
in their _Proceedings_ for 1910-11.
LONDON,
_September, 1917_
CONTENTS
_Chapter_ _Page_
I. _Mysticism and Logic_ 1
II. _The Place of Science in a Liberal Education_ 33
III. _A Free Man's Worship_ 46
IV. _The Study of Mathematics_ 58
V. _Mathematics and the Metaphysicians_ 74
VI. _On Scientific Method in Philosophy_ 97
VII. _The Ultimate Constituents of Matter_ 125
VIII. _The Relation of Sense-data to Physics_ 145
IX. _On the Notion of Cause_ 180
X. _Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by
Description_ 209
MYSTICISM AND LOGIC AND OTHER ESSAYS
I
MYSTICISM AND LOGIC
Metaphysics, or the attempt to conceive the world as a whole by means
of thought, has been developed, from the first, by the union and
conflict of two very different human impulses, the one urging men
towards mysticism, the other urging them towards science. Some men
have achieved greatness through one of these impulses alone, others
through the other alone: in Hume, for example, the scientific impulse
reigns quite unchecked, while in Blake a strong hostility to science
co-exists with profound mystic insight. But the greatest men who have
been philosophers have felt the need both of science and of mysticism:
the attempt to harmonise the two was what made their life, and what
always must, for all its arduous uncertainty, make philosophy, to some
minds, a greater thing than either science or religion.
Before attempting an explicit characterisation of the scientific and
the mystical impulses, I will illustrate them by examples from two
philosophers whose greatness lies in the very intimate blending which
they achieved. The two philosophers I mean are Heraclitus and Plato.
Heraclitus, as every one knows, was a believer in universal flux: time
builds and destroys all things. From the few fragments that remain, it
is not easy to discover how he arrived at his opinions, but there are
some sayings that strongly suggest scientific observation as the
source.
"The things that can be seen, heard, and learned," he says, "are what
I prize the most. " This is the language of the empiricist, to whom
observation is the sole guarantee of truth. "The sun is new every
day," is another fragment; and this opinion, in spite of its
paradoxical character, is obviously inspired by scientific reflection,
and no doubt seemed to him to obviate the difficulty of understanding
how the sun can work its way underground from west to east during the
night. Actual observation must also have suggested to him his central
doctrine, that Fire is the one permanent substance, of which all
visible things are passing phases. In combustion we see things change
utterly, while their flame and heat rise up into the air and vanish.
"This world, which is the same for all," he says, "no one of gods or
men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be, an
ever-living Fire, with measures kindling, and measures going out. "
"The transformations of Fire are, first of all, sea; and half of the
sea is earth, half whirlwind. "
This theory, though no longer one which science can accept, is
nevertheless scientific in spirit. Science, too, might have inspired
the famous saying to which Plato alludes: "You cannot step twice into
the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you. " But
we find also another statement among the extant fragments: "We step
and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not. "
The comparison of this statement, which is mystical, with the one
quoted by Plato, which is scientific, shows how intimately the two
tendencies are blended in the system of Heraclitus. Mysticism is, in
essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in
regard to what is believed about the universe; and this kind of
feeling leads Heraclitus, on the basis of his science, to strangely
poignant sayings concerning life and the world, such as:
"Time is a child playing draughts, the kingly power is a child's. "
It is poetic imagination, not science, which presents Time as despotic
lord of the world, with all the irresponsible frivolity of a child. It
is mysticism, too, which leads Heraclitus to assert the identity of
opposites: "Good and ill are one," he says; and again: "To God all
things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and
some right. "
Much of mysticism underlies the ethics of Heraclitus. It is true that
a scientific determinism alone might have inspired the statement:
"Man's character is his fate"; but only a mystic would have said:
"Every beast is driven to the pasture with blows"; and again:
"It is hard to fight with one's heart's desire. Whatever it wishes to
get, it purchases at the cost of soul"; and again:
"Wisdom is one thing. It is to know the thought by which all things
are steered through all things. "[1]
Examples might be multiplied, but those that have been given are
enough to show the character of the man: the facts of science, as they
appeared to him, fed the flame in his soul, and in its light he saw
into the depths of the world by the reflection of his own dancing
swiftly penetrating fire. In such a nature we see the true union of
the mystic and the man of science--the highest eminence, as I think,
that it is possible to achieve in the world of thought.
In Plato, the same twofold impulse exists, though the mystic impulse
is distinctly the stronger of the two, and secures ultimate victory
whenever the conflict is sharp. His description of the cave is the
classical statement of belief in a knowledge and reality truer and
more real than that of the senses:
"Imagine[2] a number of men living in an underground cavernous
chamber, with an entrance open to the light, extending along the
entire length of the cavern, in which they have been confined, from
their childhood, with their legs and necks so shackled that they
are obliged to sit still and look straight forwards, because their
chains render it impossible for them to turn their heads round: and
imagine a bright fire burning some way off, above and behind them,
and an elevated roadway passing between the fire and the prisoners,
with a low wall built along it, like the screens which conjurors
put up in front of their audience, and above which they exhibit
their wonders.
I have it, he replied.
Also figure to yourself a number of persons walking behind this
wall, and carrying with them statues of men, and images of other
animals, wrought in wood and stone and all kinds of materials,
together with various other articles, which overtop the wall; and,
as you might expect, let some of the passers-by be talking, and
others silent.
You are describing a strange scene, and strange prisoners.
They resemble us, I replied.
Now consider what would happen if the course of nature brought them
a release from their fetters, and a remedy for their foolishness,
in the following manner. Let us suppose that one of them has been
released, and compelled suddenly to stand up, and turn his neck
round and walk with open eyes towards the light; and let us suppose
that he goes through all these actions with pain, and that the
dazzling splendour renders him incapable of discerning those
objects of which he used formerly to see the shadows. What answer
should you expect him to make, if some one were to tell him that in
those days he was watching foolish phantoms, but that now he is
somewhat nearer to reality, and is turned towards things more real,
and sees more correctly; above all, if he were to point out to him
the several objects that are passing by, and question him, and
compel him to answer what they are? Should you not expect him to be
puzzled, and to regard his old visions as truer than the objects
now forced upon his notice?
Yes, much truer. . . .
Hence, I suppose, habit will be necessary to enable him to perceive
objects in that upper world. At first he will be most successful in
distinguishing shadows; then he will discern the reflections of men
and other things in water, and afterwards the realities; and after
this he will raise his eyes to encounter the light of the moon and
stars, finding it less difficult to study the heavenly bodies and
the heaven itself by night, than the sun and the sun's light by
day.
Doubtless.
Last of all, I imagine, he will be able to observe and contemplate
the nature of the sun, not as it _appears_ in water or on alien
ground, but as it is in itself in its own territory.
Of course.
His next step will be to draw the conclusion, that the sun is the
author of the seasons and the years, and the guardian of all things
in the visible world, and in a manner the cause of all those things
which he and his companions used to see.
Obviously, this will be his next step. . . .
Now this imaginary case, my dear Glancon, you must apply in all its
parts to our former statements, by comparing the region which the
eye reveals to the prison house, and the light of the fire therein
to the power of the sun: and if, by the upward ascent and the
contemplation of the upper world, you understand the mounting of
the soul into the intellectual region, you will hit the tendency of
my own surmises, since you desire to be told what they are; though,
indeed, God only knows whether they are correct. But, be that as it
may, the view which I take of the subject is to the following
effect. In the world of knowledge, the essential Form of Good is
the limit of our enquiries, and can barely be perceived; but, when
perceived, we cannot help concluding that it is in every case the
source of all that is bright and beautiful,--in the visible world
giving birth to light and its master, and in the intellectual world
dispensing, immediately and with full authority, truth and
reason;--and that whosoever would act wisely, either in private or
in public, must set this Form of Good before his eyes. "
But in this passage, as throughout most of Plato's teaching, there is
an identification of the good with the truly real, which became
embodied in the philosophical tradition, and is still largely
operative in our own day. In thus allowing a legislative function to
the good, Plato produced a divorce between philosophy and science,
from which, in my opinion, both have suffered ever since and are still
suffering. The man of science, whatever his hopes may be, must lay
them aside while he studies nature; and the philosopher, if he is to
achieve truth, must do the same. Ethical considerations can only
legitimately appear when the truth has been ascertained: they can and
should appear as determining our feeling towards the truth, and our
manner of ordering our lives in view of the truth, but not as
themselves dictating what the truth is to be.
There are passages in Plato--among those which illustrate the
scientific side of his mind--where he seems clearly aware of this. The
most noteworthy is the one in which Socrates, as a young man, is
explaining the theory of ideas to Parmenides.
After Socrates has explained that there is an idea of the good, but
not of such things as hair and mud and dirt, Parmenides advises him
"not to despise even the meanest things," and this advice shows the
genuine scientific temper. It is with this impartial temper that the
mystic's apparent insight into a higher reality and a hidden good has
to be combined if philosophy is to realise its greatest possibilities.
And it is failure in this respect that has made so much of idealistic
philosophy thin, lifeless, and insubstantial. It is only in marriage
with the world that our ideals can bear fruit: divorced from it, they
remain barren. But marriage with the world is not to be achieved by an
ideal which shrinks from fact, or demands in advance that the world
shall conform to its desires.
Parmenides himself is the source of a peculiarly interesting strain
of mysticism which pervades Plato's thought--the mysticism which may
be called "logical" because it is embodied in theories on logic. This
form of mysticism, which appears, so far as the West is concerned, to
have originated with Parmenides, dominates the reasonings of all the
great mystical metaphysicians from his day to that of Hegel and his
modern disciples. Reality, he says, is uncreated, indestructible,
unchanging, indivisible; it is "immovable in the bonds of mighty
chains, without beginning and without end; since coming into being and
passing away have been driven afar, and true belief has cast them
away. " The fundamental principle of his inquiry is stated in a
sentence which would not be out of place in Hegel: "Thou canst not
know what is not--that is impossible--nor utter it; for it is the same
thing that can be thought and that can be. " And again: "It needs must
be that what can be thought and spoken of is; for it is possible for
it to be, and it is not possible for what is nothing to be. " The
impossibility of change follows from this principle; for what is past
can be spoken of, and therefore, by the principle, still is.
Mystical philosophy, in all ages and in all parts of the world, is
characterised by certain beliefs which are illustrated by the
doctrines we have been considering.
There is, first, the belief in insight as against discursive analytic
knowledge: the belief in a way of wisdom, sudden, penetrating,
coercive, which is contrasted with the slow and fallible study of
outward appearance by a science relying wholly upon the senses. All
who are capable of absorption in an inward passion must have
experienced at times the strange feeling of unreality in common
objects, the loss of contact with daily things, in which the solidity
of the outer world is lost, and the soul seems, in utter loneliness,
to bring forth, out of its own depths, the mad dance of fantastic
phantoms which have hitherto appeared as independently real and
living. This is the negative side of the mystic's initiation: the
doubt concerning common knowledge, preparing the way for the reception
of what seems a higher wisdom. Many men to whom this negative
experience is familiar do not pass beyond it, but for the mystic it is
merely the gateway to an ampler world.
The mystic insight begins with the sense of a mystery unveiled, of a
hidden wisdom now suddenly become certain beyond the possibility of a
doubt. The sense of certainty and revelation comes earlier than any
definite belief. The definite beliefs at which mystics arrive are the
result of reflection upon the inarticulate experience gained in the
moment of insight. Often, beliefs which have no real connection with
this moment become subsequently attracted into the central nucleus;
thus in addition to the convictions which all mystics share, we find,
in many of them, other convictions of a more local and temporary
character, which no doubt become amalgamated with what was essentially
mystical in virtue of their subjective certainty. We may ignore such
inessential accretions, and confine ourselves to the beliefs which all
mystics share.
The first and most direct outcome of the moment of illumination is
belief in the possibility of a way of knowledge which may be called
revelation or insight or intuition, as contrasted with sense, reason,
and analysis, which are regarded as blind guides leading to the morass
of illusion. Closely connected with this belief is the conception of a
Reality behind the world of appearance and utterly different from it.
This Reality is regarded with an admiration often amounting to
worship; it is felt to be always and everywhere close at hand, thinly
veiled by the shows of sense, ready, for the receptive mind, to shine
in its glory even through the apparent folly and wickedness of Man.
The poet, the artist, and the lover are seekers after that glory: the
haunting beauty that they pursue is the faint reflection of its sun.
But the mystic lives in the full light of the vision: what others
dimly seek he knows, with a knowledge beside which all other knowledge
is ignorance.
The second characteristic of mysticism is its belief in unity, and its
refusal to admit opposition or division anywhere. We found Heraclitus
saying "good and ill are one"; and again he says, "the way up and the
way down is one and the same. " The same attitude appears in the
simultaneous assertion of contradictory propositions, such as: "We
step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not. " The
assertion of Parmenides, that reality is one and indivisible, comes
from the same impulse towards unity. In Plato, this impulse is less
prominent, being held in check by his theory of ideas; but it
reappears, so far as his logic permits, in the doctrine of the primacy
of the Good.
A third mark of almost all mystical metaphysics is the denial of the
reality of Time. This is an outcome of the denial of division; if all
is one, the distinction of past and future must be illusory. We have
seen this doctrine prominent in Parmenides; and among moderns it is
fundamental in the systems of Spinoza and Hegel.
The last of the doctrines of mysticism which we have to consider is
its belief that all evil is mere appearance, an illusion produced by
the divisions and oppositions of the analytic intellect. Mysticism
does not maintain that such things as cruelty, for example, are good,
but it denies that they are real: they belong to that lower world of
phantoms from which we are to be liberated by the insight of the
vision. Sometimes--for example in Hegel, and at least verbally in
Spinoza--not only evil, but good also, is regarded as illusory, though
nevertheless the emotional attitude towards what is held to be Reality
is such as would naturally be associated with the belief that Reality
is good. What is, in all cases, ethically characteristic of mysticism
is absence of indignation or protest, acceptance with joy, disbelief
in the ultimate truth of the division into two hostile camps, the good
and the bad. This attitude is a direct outcome of the nature of the
mystical experience: with its sense of unity is associated a feeling
of infinite peace. Indeed it may be suspected that the feeling of
peace produces, as feelings do in dreams, the whole system of
associated beliefs which make up the body of mystic doctrine. But this
is a difficult question, and one on which it cannot be hoped that
mankind will reach agreement.
Four questions thus arise in considering the truth or falsehood of
mysticism, namely:
I. Are there two ways of knowing, which may be called respectively
reason and intuition? And if so, is either to be preferred to the
other?
II. Is all plurality and division illusory?
III. Is time unreal?
IV. What kind of reality belongs to good and evil?
On all four of these questions, while fully developed mysticism seems
to me mistaken, I yet believe that, by sufficient restraint, there is
an element of wisdom to be learned from the mystical way of feeling,
which does not seem to be attainable in any other manner. If this is
the truth, mysticism is to be commended as an attitude towards life,
not as a creed about the world. The meta-physical creed, I shall
maintain, is a mistaken outcome of the emotion, although this emotion,
as colouring and informing all other thoughts and feelings, is the
inspirer of whatever is best in Man. Even the cautious and patient
investigation of truth by science, which seems the very antithesis of
the mystic's swift certainty, may be fostered and nourished by that
very spirit of reverence in which mysticism lives and moves.
I. REASON AND INTUITION[3]
Of the reality or unreality of the mystic's world I know nothing. I
have no wish to deny it, nor even to declare that the insight which
reveals it is not a genuine insight. What I do wish to maintain--and
it is here that the scientific attitude becomes imperative--is that
insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of
truth, in spite of the fact that much of the most important truth is
first suggested by its means. It is common to speak of an opposition
between instinct and reason; in the eighteenth century, the opposition
was drawn in favour of reason, but under the influence of Rousseau and
the romantic movement instinct was given the preference, first by
those who rebelled against artificial forms of government and thought,
and then, as the purely rationalistic defence of traditional theology
became increasingly difficult, by all who felt in science a menace to
creeds which they associated with a spiritual outlook on life and the
world. Bergson, under the name of "intuition," has raised instinct to
the position of sole arbiter of metaphysical truth. But in fact the
opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct,
intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which
subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it
is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other
beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonising, controlling
force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical
realm, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.
Where instinct and reason do sometimes conflict is in regard to single
beliefs, held instinctively, and held with such determination that no
degree of inconsistency with other beliefs leads to their abandonment.
Instinct, like all human faculties, is liable to error. Those in whom
reason is weak are often unwilling to admit this as regards
themselves, though all admit it in regard to others. Where instinct is
least liable to error is in practical matters as to which right
judgment is a help to survival: friendship and hostility in others,
for instance, are often felt with extraordinary discrimination through
very careful disguises. But even in such matters a wrong impression
may be given by reserve or flattery; and in matters less directly
practical, such as philosophy deals with, very strong instinctive
beliefs are sometimes wholly mistaken, as we may come to know through
their perceived inconsistency with other equally strong beliefs. It is
such considerations that necessitate the harmonising mediation of
reason, which tests our beliefs by their mutual compatibility, and
examines, in doubtful cases, the possible sources of error on the one
side and on the other. In this there is no opposition to instinct as a
whole, but only to blind reliance upon some one interesting aspect of
instinct to the exclusion of other more commonplace but not less
trustworthy aspects. It is such one-sidedness, not instinct itself,
that reason aims at correcting.
These more or less trite maxims may be illustrated by application to
Bergson's advocacy of "intuition" as against "intellect. " There are,
he says, "two profoundly different ways of knowing a thing. The first
implies that we move round the object: the second that we enter into
it. The first depends on the point of view at which we are placed and
on the symbols by which we express ourselves. The second neither
depends on a point of view nor relies on any symbol. The first kind of
knowledge may be said to stop at the _relative_; the second, in those
cases where it is possible, to attain the _absolute_. "[4] The second
of these, which is intuition, is, he says, "the kind of _intellectual
sympathy_ by which one places oneself within an object in order to
coincide with what is unique in it and therefore inexpressible" (p.
6). In illustration, he mentions self-knowledge: "there is one
reality, at least, which we all seize from within, by intuition and
not by simple analysis. It is our own personality in its flowing
through time--our self which endures" (p. 8). The rest of Bergson's
philosophy consists in reporting, through the imperfect medium of
words, the knowledge gained by intuition, and the consequent complete
condemnation of all the pretended knowledge derived from science and
common sense.
This procedure, since it takes sides in a conflict of instinctive
beliefs, stands in need of justification by proving the greater
trustworthiness of the beliefs on one side than of those on the other.
Bergson attempts this justification in two ways, first by explaining
that intellect is a purely practical faculty to secure biological
success, secondly by mentioning remarkable feats of instinct in
animals and by pointing out characteristics of the world which, though
intuition can apprehend them, are baffling to intellect as he
interprets it.
Of Bergson's theory that intellect is a purely practical faculty,
developed in the struggle for survival, and not a source of true
beliefs, we may say, first, that it is only through intellect that we
know of the struggle for survival and of the biological ancestry of
man: if the intellect is misleading, the whole of this merely inferred
history is presumably untrue. If, on the other hand, we agree with him
in thinking that evolution took place as Darwin believed, then it is
not only intellect, but all our faculties, that have been developed
under the stress of practical utility. Intuition is seen at its best
where it is directly useful, for example in regard to other people's
characters and dispositions. Bergson apparently holds that capacity
for this kind of knowledge is less explicable by the struggle for
existence than, for example, capacity for pure mathematics. Yet the
savage deceived by false friendship is likely to pay for his mistake
with his life; whereas even in the most civilised societies men are
not put to death for mathematical incompetence.
In such a nature we see the true union of
the mystic and the man of science--the highest eminence, as I think,
that it is possible to achieve in the world of thought.
In Plato, the same twofold impulse exists, though the mystic impulse
is distinctly the stronger of the two, and secures ultimate victory
whenever the conflict is sharp. His description of the cave is the
classical statement of belief in a knowledge and reality truer and
more real than that of the senses:
"Imagine[2] a number of men living in an underground cavernous
chamber, with an entrance open to the light, extending along the
entire length of the cavern, in which they have been confined, from
their childhood, with their legs and necks so shackled that they
are obliged to sit still and look straight forwards, because their
chains render it impossible for them to turn their heads round: and
imagine a bright fire burning some way off, above and behind them,
and an elevated roadway passing between the fire and the prisoners,
with a low wall built along it, like the screens which conjurors
put up in front of their audience, and above which they exhibit
their wonders.
I have it, he replied.
Also figure to yourself a number of persons walking behind this
wall, and carrying with them statues of men, and images of other
animals, wrought in wood and stone and all kinds of materials,
together with various other articles, which overtop the wall; and,
as you might expect, let some of the passers-by be talking, and
others silent.
You are describing a strange scene, and strange prisoners.
They resemble us, I replied.
Now consider what would happen if the course of nature brought them
a release from their fetters, and a remedy for their foolishness,
in the following manner. Let us suppose that one of them has been
released, and compelled suddenly to stand up, and turn his neck
round and walk with open eyes towards the light; and let us suppose
that he goes through all these actions with pain, and that the
dazzling splendour renders him incapable of discerning those
objects of which he used formerly to see the shadows. What answer
should you expect him to make, if some one were to tell him that in
those days he was watching foolish phantoms, but that now he is
somewhat nearer to reality, and is turned towards things more real,
and sees more correctly; above all, if he were to point out to him
the several objects that are passing by, and question him, and
compel him to answer what they are? Should you not expect him to be
puzzled, and to regard his old visions as truer than the objects
now forced upon his notice?
Yes, much truer. . . .
Hence, I suppose, habit will be necessary to enable him to perceive
objects in that upper world. At first he will be most successful in
distinguishing shadows; then he will discern the reflections of men
and other things in water, and afterwards the realities; and after
this he will raise his eyes to encounter the light of the moon and
stars, finding it less difficult to study the heavenly bodies and
the heaven itself by night, than the sun and the sun's light by
day.
Doubtless.
Last of all, I imagine, he will be able to observe and contemplate
the nature of the sun, not as it _appears_ in water or on alien
ground, but as it is in itself in its own territory.
Of course.
His next step will be to draw the conclusion, that the sun is the
author of the seasons and the years, and the guardian of all things
in the visible world, and in a manner the cause of all those things
which he and his companions used to see.
Obviously, this will be his next step. . . .
Now this imaginary case, my dear Glancon, you must apply in all its
parts to our former statements, by comparing the region which the
eye reveals to the prison house, and the light of the fire therein
to the power of the sun: and if, by the upward ascent and the
contemplation of the upper world, you understand the mounting of
the soul into the intellectual region, you will hit the tendency of
my own surmises, since you desire to be told what they are; though,
indeed, God only knows whether they are correct. But, be that as it
may, the view which I take of the subject is to the following
effect. In the world of knowledge, the essential Form of Good is
the limit of our enquiries, and can barely be perceived; but, when
perceived, we cannot help concluding that it is in every case the
source of all that is bright and beautiful,--in the visible world
giving birth to light and its master, and in the intellectual world
dispensing, immediately and with full authority, truth and
reason;--and that whosoever would act wisely, either in private or
in public, must set this Form of Good before his eyes. "
But in this passage, as throughout most of Plato's teaching, there is
an identification of the good with the truly real, which became
embodied in the philosophical tradition, and is still largely
operative in our own day. In thus allowing a legislative function to
the good, Plato produced a divorce between philosophy and science,
from which, in my opinion, both have suffered ever since and are still
suffering. The man of science, whatever his hopes may be, must lay
them aside while he studies nature; and the philosopher, if he is to
achieve truth, must do the same. Ethical considerations can only
legitimately appear when the truth has been ascertained: they can and
should appear as determining our feeling towards the truth, and our
manner of ordering our lives in view of the truth, but not as
themselves dictating what the truth is to be.
There are passages in Plato--among those which illustrate the
scientific side of his mind--where he seems clearly aware of this. The
most noteworthy is the one in which Socrates, as a young man, is
explaining the theory of ideas to Parmenides.
After Socrates has explained that there is an idea of the good, but
not of such things as hair and mud and dirt, Parmenides advises him
"not to despise even the meanest things," and this advice shows the
genuine scientific temper. It is with this impartial temper that the
mystic's apparent insight into a higher reality and a hidden good has
to be combined if philosophy is to realise its greatest possibilities.
And it is failure in this respect that has made so much of idealistic
philosophy thin, lifeless, and insubstantial. It is only in marriage
with the world that our ideals can bear fruit: divorced from it, they
remain barren. But marriage with the world is not to be achieved by an
ideal which shrinks from fact, or demands in advance that the world
shall conform to its desires.
Parmenides himself is the source of a peculiarly interesting strain
of mysticism which pervades Plato's thought--the mysticism which may
be called "logical" because it is embodied in theories on logic. This
form of mysticism, which appears, so far as the West is concerned, to
have originated with Parmenides, dominates the reasonings of all the
great mystical metaphysicians from his day to that of Hegel and his
modern disciples. Reality, he says, is uncreated, indestructible,
unchanging, indivisible; it is "immovable in the bonds of mighty
chains, without beginning and without end; since coming into being and
passing away have been driven afar, and true belief has cast them
away. " The fundamental principle of his inquiry is stated in a
sentence which would not be out of place in Hegel: "Thou canst not
know what is not--that is impossible--nor utter it; for it is the same
thing that can be thought and that can be. " And again: "It needs must
be that what can be thought and spoken of is; for it is possible for
it to be, and it is not possible for what is nothing to be. " The
impossibility of change follows from this principle; for what is past
can be spoken of, and therefore, by the principle, still is.
Mystical philosophy, in all ages and in all parts of the world, is
characterised by certain beliefs which are illustrated by the
doctrines we have been considering.
There is, first, the belief in insight as against discursive analytic
knowledge: the belief in a way of wisdom, sudden, penetrating,
coercive, which is contrasted with the slow and fallible study of
outward appearance by a science relying wholly upon the senses. All
who are capable of absorption in an inward passion must have
experienced at times the strange feeling of unreality in common
objects, the loss of contact with daily things, in which the solidity
of the outer world is lost, and the soul seems, in utter loneliness,
to bring forth, out of its own depths, the mad dance of fantastic
phantoms which have hitherto appeared as independently real and
living. This is the negative side of the mystic's initiation: the
doubt concerning common knowledge, preparing the way for the reception
of what seems a higher wisdom. Many men to whom this negative
experience is familiar do not pass beyond it, but for the mystic it is
merely the gateway to an ampler world.
The mystic insight begins with the sense of a mystery unveiled, of a
hidden wisdom now suddenly become certain beyond the possibility of a
doubt. The sense of certainty and revelation comes earlier than any
definite belief. The definite beliefs at which mystics arrive are the
result of reflection upon the inarticulate experience gained in the
moment of insight. Often, beliefs which have no real connection with
this moment become subsequently attracted into the central nucleus;
thus in addition to the convictions which all mystics share, we find,
in many of them, other convictions of a more local and temporary
character, which no doubt become amalgamated with what was essentially
mystical in virtue of their subjective certainty. We may ignore such
inessential accretions, and confine ourselves to the beliefs which all
mystics share.
The first and most direct outcome of the moment of illumination is
belief in the possibility of a way of knowledge which may be called
revelation or insight or intuition, as contrasted with sense, reason,
and analysis, which are regarded as blind guides leading to the morass
of illusion. Closely connected with this belief is the conception of a
Reality behind the world of appearance and utterly different from it.
This Reality is regarded with an admiration often amounting to
worship; it is felt to be always and everywhere close at hand, thinly
veiled by the shows of sense, ready, for the receptive mind, to shine
in its glory even through the apparent folly and wickedness of Man.
The poet, the artist, and the lover are seekers after that glory: the
haunting beauty that they pursue is the faint reflection of its sun.
But the mystic lives in the full light of the vision: what others
dimly seek he knows, with a knowledge beside which all other knowledge
is ignorance.
The second characteristic of mysticism is its belief in unity, and its
refusal to admit opposition or division anywhere. We found Heraclitus
saying "good and ill are one"; and again he says, "the way up and the
way down is one and the same. " The same attitude appears in the
simultaneous assertion of contradictory propositions, such as: "We
step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not. " The
assertion of Parmenides, that reality is one and indivisible, comes
from the same impulse towards unity. In Plato, this impulse is less
prominent, being held in check by his theory of ideas; but it
reappears, so far as his logic permits, in the doctrine of the primacy
of the Good.
A third mark of almost all mystical metaphysics is the denial of the
reality of Time. This is an outcome of the denial of division; if all
is one, the distinction of past and future must be illusory. We have
seen this doctrine prominent in Parmenides; and among moderns it is
fundamental in the systems of Spinoza and Hegel.
The last of the doctrines of mysticism which we have to consider is
its belief that all evil is mere appearance, an illusion produced by
the divisions and oppositions of the analytic intellect. Mysticism
does not maintain that such things as cruelty, for example, are good,
but it denies that they are real: they belong to that lower world of
phantoms from which we are to be liberated by the insight of the
vision. Sometimes--for example in Hegel, and at least verbally in
Spinoza--not only evil, but good also, is regarded as illusory, though
nevertheless the emotional attitude towards what is held to be Reality
is such as would naturally be associated with the belief that Reality
is good. What is, in all cases, ethically characteristic of mysticism
is absence of indignation or protest, acceptance with joy, disbelief
in the ultimate truth of the division into two hostile camps, the good
and the bad. This attitude is a direct outcome of the nature of the
mystical experience: with its sense of unity is associated a feeling
of infinite peace. Indeed it may be suspected that the feeling of
peace produces, as feelings do in dreams, the whole system of
associated beliefs which make up the body of mystic doctrine. But this
is a difficult question, and one on which it cannot be hoped that
mankind will reach agreement.
Four questions thus arise in considering the truth or falsehood of
mysticism, namely:
I. Are there two ways of knowing, which may be called respectively
reason and intuition? And if so, is either to be preferred to the
other?
II. Is all plurality and division illusory?
III. Is time unreal?
IV. What kind of reality belongs to good and evil?
On all four of these questions, while fully developed mysticism seems
to me mistaken, I yet believe that, by sufficient restraint, there is
an element of wisdom to be learned from the mystical way of feeling,
which does not seem to be attainable in any other manner. If this is
the truth, mysticism is to be commended as an attitude towards life,
not as a creed about the world. The meta-physical creed, I shall
maintain, is a mistaken outcome of the emotion, although this emotion,
as colouring and informing all other thoughts and feelings, is the
inspirer of whatever is best in Man. Even the cautious and patient
investigation of truth by science, which seems the very antithesis of
the mystic's swift certainty, may be fostered and nourished by that
very spirit of reverence in which mysticism lives and moves.
I. REASON AND INTUITION[3]
Of the reality or unreality of the mystic's world I know nothing. I
have no wish to deny it, nor even to declare that the insight which
reveals it is not a genuine insight. What I do wish to maintain--and
it is here that the scientific attitude becomes imperative--is that
insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of
truth, in spite of the fact that much of the most important truth is
first suggested by its means. It is common to speak of an opposition
between instinct and reason; in the eighteenth century, the opposition
was drawn in favour of reason, but under the influence of Rousseau and
the romantic movement instinct was given the preference, first by
those who rebelled against artificial forms of government and thought,
and then, as the purely rationalistic defence of traditional theology
became increasingly difficult, by all who felt in science a menace to
creeds which they associated with a spiritual outlook on life and the
world. Bergson, under the name of "intuition," has raised instinct to
the position of sole arbiter of metaphysical truth. But in fact the
opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct,
intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which
subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it
is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other
beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonising, controlling
force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical
realm, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.
Where instinct and reason do sometimes conflict is in regard to single
beliefs, held instinctively, and held with such determination that no
degree of inconsistency with other beliefs leads to their abandonment.
Instinct, like all human faculties, is liable to error. Those in whom
reason is weak are often unwilling to admit this as regards
themselves, though all admit it in regard to others. Where instinct is
least liable to error is in practical matters as to which right
judgment is a help to survival: friendship and hostility in others,
for instance, are often felt with extraordinary discrimination through
very careful disguises. But even in such matters a wrong impression
may be given by reserve or flattery; and in matters less directly
practical, such as philosophy deals with, very strong instinctive
beliefs are sometimes wholly mistaken, as we may come to know through
their perceived inconsistency with other equally strong beliefs. It is
such considerations that necessitate the harmonising mediation of
reason, which tests our beliefs by their mutual compatibility, and
examines, in doubtful cases, the possible sources of error on the one
side and on the other. In this there is no opposition to instinct as a
whole, but only to blind reliance upon some one interesting aspect of
instinct to the exclusion of other more commonplace but not less
trustworthy aspects. It is such one-sidedness, not instinct itself,
that reason aims at correcting.
These more or less trite maxims may be illustrated by application to
Bergson's advocacy of "intuition" as against "intellect. " There are,
he says, "two profoundly different ways of knowing a thing. The first
implies that we move round the object: the second that we enter into
it. The first depends on the point of view at which we are placed and
on the symbols by which we express ourselves. The second neither
depends on a point of view nor relies on any symbol. The first kind of
knowledge may be said to stop at the _relative_; the second, in those
cases where it is possible, to attain the _absolute_. "[4] The second
of these, which is intuition, is, he says, "the kind of _intellectual
sympathy_ by which one places oneself within an object in order to
coincide with what is unique in it and therefore inexpressible" (p.
6). In illustration, he mentions self-knowledge: "there is one
reality, at least, which we all seize from within, by intuition and
not by simple analysis. It is our own personality in its flowing
through time--our self which endures" (p. 8). The rest of Bergson's
philosophy consists in reporting, through the imperfect medium of
words, the knowledge gained by intuition, and the consequent complete
condemnation of all the pretended knowledge derived from science and
common sense.
This procedure, since it takes sides in a conflict of instinctive
beliefs, stands in need of justification by proving the greater
trustworthiness of the beliefs on one side than of those on the other.
Bergson attempts this justification in two ways, first by explaining
that intellect is a purely practical faculty to secure biological
success, secondly by mentioning remarkable feats of instinct in
animals and by pointing out characteristics of the world which, though
intuition can apprehend them, are baffling to intellect as he
interprets it.
Of Bergson's theory that intellect is a purely practical faculty,
developed in the struggle for survival, and not a source of true
beliefs, we may say, first, that it is only through intellect that we
know of the struggle for survival and of the biological ancestry of
man: if the intellect is misleading, the whole of this merely inferred
history is presumably untrue. If, on the other hand, we agree with him
in thinking that evolution took place as Darwin believed, then it is
not only intellect, but all our faculties, that have been developed
under the stress of practical utility. Intuition is seen at its best
where it is directly useful, for example in regard to other people's
characters and dispositions. Bergson apparently holds that capacity
for this kind of knowledge is less explicable by the struggle for
existence than, for example, capacity for pure mathematics. Yet the
savage deceived by false friendship is likely to pay for his mistake
with his life; whereas even in the most civilised societies men are
not put to death for mathematical incompetence. All the most striking
of his instances of intuition in animals have a very direct survival
value. The fact is, of course, that both intuition and intellect have
been developed because they are useful, and that, speaking broadly,
they are useful when they give truth and become harmful when they give
falsehood. Intellect, in civilised man, like artistic capacity, has
occasionally been developed beyond the point where it is useful to the
individual; intuition, on the other hand, seems on the whole to
diminish as civilisation increases. It is greater, as a rule, in
children than in adults, in the uneducated than in the educated.
Probably in dogs it exceeds anything to be found in human beings. But
those who see in these facts a recommendation of intuition ought to
return to running wild in the woods, dyeing themselves with woad and
living on hips and haws.
Let us next examine whether intuition possesses any such infallibility
as Bergson claims for it. The best instance of it, according to him,
is our acquaintance with ourselves; yet self-knowledge is proverbially
rare and difficult. Most men, for example, have in their nature
meannesses, vanities, and envies of which they are quite unconscious,
though even their best friends can perceive them without any
difficulty. It is true that intuition has a convincingness which is
lacking to intellect: while it is present, it is almost impossible to
doubt its truth. But if it should appear, on examination, to be at
least as fallible as intellect, its greater subjective certainty
becomes a demerit, making it only the more irresistibly deceptive.
Apart from self-knowledge, one of the most notable examples of
intuition is the knowledge people believe themselves to possess of
those with whom they are in love: the wall between different
personalities seems to become transparent, and people think they see
into another soul as into their own. Yet deception in such cases is
constantly practised with success; and even where there is no
intentional deception, experience gradually proves, as a rule, that
the supposed insight was illusory, and that the slower more groping
methods of the intellect are in the long run more reliable.
Bergson maintains that intellect can only deal with things in so far
as they resemble what has been experienced in the past, while
intuition has the power of apprehending the uniqueness and novelty
that always belong to each fresh moment. That there is something
unique and new at every moment, is certainly true; it is also true
that this cannot be fully expressed by means of intellectual concepts.
Only direct acquaintance can give knowledge of what is unique and new.
But direct acquaintance of this kind is given fully in sensation, and
does not require, so far as I can see, any special faculty of
intuition for its apprehension. It is neither intellect nor intuition,
but sensation, that supplies new data; but when the data are new in
any remarkable manner, intellect is much more capable of dealing with
them than intuition would be. The hen with a brood of ducklings no
doubt has intuition which seems to place her inside them, and not
merely to know them analytically; but when the ducklings take to the
water, the whole apparent intuition is seen to be illusory, and the
hen is left helpless on the shore. Intuition, in fact, is an aspect
and development of instinct, and, like all instinct, is admirable in
those customary surroundings which have moulded the habits of the
animal in question, but totally incompetent as soon as the
surroundings are changed in a way which demands some non-habitual mode
of action.
The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of
philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals,
or to savages, or even to most civilised men. It is hardly to be
supposed, therefore, that the rapid, rough and ready methods of
instinct or intuition will find in this field a favourable ground for
their application. It is the older kinds of activity, which bring out
our kinship with remote generations of animal and semi-human
ancestors, that show intuition at its best. In such matters as
self-preservation and love, intuition will act sometimes (though not
always) with a swiftness and precision which are astonishing to the
critical intellect. But philosophy is not one of the pursuits which
illustrate our affinity with the past: it is a highly refined, highly
civilised pursuit, demanding, for its success, a certain liberation
from the life of instinct, and even, at times, a certain aloofness
from all mundane hopes and fears. It is not in philosophy, therefore,
that we can hope to see intuition at its best. On the contrary, since
the true objects of philosophy, and the habit of thought demanded for
their apprehension, are strange, unusual, and remote, it is here, more
almost than anywhere else, that intellect proves superior to
intuition, and that quick unanalysed convictions are least deserving
of uncritical acceptance.
In advocating the scientific restraint and balance, as against the
self-assertion of a confident reliance upon intuition, we are only
urging, in the sphere of knowledge, that largeness of contemplation,
that impersonal disinterestedness, and that freedom from practical
preoccupations which have been inculcated by all the great religions
of the world. Thus our conclusion, however it may conflict with the
explicit beliefs of many mystics, is, in essence, not contrary to the
spirit which inspires those beliefs, but rather the outcome of this
very spirit as applied in the realm of thought.
II. UNITY AND PLURALITY
One of the most convincing aspects of the mystic illumination is the
apparent revelation of the oneness of all things, giving rise to
pantheism in religion and to monism in philosophy. An elaborate logic,
beginning with Parmenides, and culminating in Hegel and his followers,
has been gradually developed, to prove that the universe is one
indivisible Whole, and that what seem to be its parts, if considered
as substantial and self-existing, are mere illusion. The conception
of a Reality quite other than the world of appearance, a reality one,
indivisible, and unchanging, was introduced into Western philosophy by
Parmenides, not, nominally at least, for mystical or religious
reasons, but on the basis of a logical argument as to the
impossibility of not-being, and most subsequent metaphysical systems
are the outcome of this fundamental idea.
The logic used in defence of mysticism seems to be faulty as logic,
and open to technical criticisms, which I have explained elsewhere. I
shall not here repeat these criticisms, since they are lengthy and
difficult, but shall instead attempt an analysis of the state of mind
from which mystical logic has arisen.
Belief in a reality quite different from what appears to the senses
arises with irresistible force in certain moods, which are the source
of most mysticism, and of most metaphysics. While such a mood is
dominant, the need of logic is not felt, and accordingly the more
thoroughgoing mystics do not employ logic, but appeal directly to the
immediate deliverance of their insight. But such fully developed
mysticism is rare in the West. When the intensity of emotional
conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will
search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in
himself. But since the belief already exists, he will be very
hospitable to any ground that suggests itself. The paradoxes
apparently proved by his logic are really the paradoxes of mysticism,
and are the goal which he feels his logic must reach if it is to be in
accordance with insight. The resulting logic has rendered most
philosophers incapable of giving any account of the world of science
and daily life. If they had been anxious to give such an account, they
would probably have discovered the errors of their logic; but most of
them were less anxious to understand the world of science and daily
life than to convict it of unreality in the interests of a
super-sensible "real" world.
It is in this way that logic has been pursued by those of the great
philosophers who were mystics. But since they usually took for granted
the supposed insight of the mystic emotion, their logical doctrines
were presented with a certain dryness, and were believed by their
disciples to be quite independent of the sudden illumination from
which they sprang. Nevertheless their origin clung to them, and they
remained--to borrow a useful word from Mr. Santayana--"malicious" in
regard to the world of science and common sense. It is only so that we
can account for the complacency with which philosophers have accepted
the inconsistency of their doctrines with all the common and
scientific facts which seem best established and most worthy of
belief.
The logic of mysticism shows, as is natural, the defects which are
inherent in anything malicious. The impulse to logic, not felt while
the mystic mood is dominant, reasserts itself as the mood fades, but
with a desire to retain the vanishing insight, or at least to prove
that it _was_ insight, and that what seems to contradict it is
illusion. The logic which thus arises is not quite disinterested or
candid, and is inspired by a certain hatred of the daily world to
which it is to be applied. Such an attitude naturally does not tend to
the best results. Everyone knows that to read an author simply in
order to refute him is not the way to understand him; and to read the
book of Nature with a conviction that it is all illusion is just as
unlikely to lead to understanding. If our logic is to find the common
world intelligible, it must not be hostile, but must be inspired by a
genuine acceptance such as is not usually to be found among
metaphysicians.
III. TIME
The unreality of time is a cardinal doctrine of many metaphysical
systems, often nominally based, as already by Parmenides, upon logical
arguments, but originally derived, at any rate in the founders of new
systems, from the certainty which is born in the moment of mystic
insight. As a Persian Sufi poet says:
"Past and future are what veil God from our sight.
Burn up both of them with fire! How long
Wilt thou be partitioned by these segments as a reed? "[5]
The belief that what is ultimately real must be immutable is a very
common one: it gave rise to the metaphysical notion of substance, and
finds, even now, a wholly illegitimate satisfaction in such scientific
doctrines as the conservation of energy and mass.
It is difficult to disentangle the truth and the error in this view.
The arguments for the contention that time is unreal and that the
world of sense is illusory must, I think, be regarded as fallacious.
Nevertheless there is some sense--easier to feel than to state--in
which time is an unimportant and superficial characteristic of
reality. Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the
present, and a certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential
to philosophic thought. The importance of time is rather practical
than theoretical, rather in relation to our desires than in relation
to truth. A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by
picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal
world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring
tyrant of all that is. Both in thought and in feeling, even though
time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of
wisdom.
That this is the case may be seen at once by asking ourselves why our
feelings towards the past are so different from our feelings towards
the future. The reason for this difference is wholly practical: our
wishes can affect the future but not the past, the future is to some
extent subject to our power, while the past is unalterably fixed. But
every future will some day be past: if we see the past truly now, it
must, when it was still future, have been just what we now see it to
be, and what is now future must be just what we shall see it to be
when it has become past. The felt difference of quality between past
and future, therefore, is not an intrinsic difference, but only a
difference in relation to us: to impartial contemplation, it ceases to
exist. And impartiality of contemplation is, in the intellectual
sphere, that very same virtue of disinterestedness which, in the
sphere of action, appears as justice and unselfishness. Whoever wishes
to see the world truly, to rise in thought above the tyranny of
practical desires, must learn to overcome the difference of attitude
towards past and future, and to survey the whole stream of time in one
comprehensive vision.
The kind of way in which, as it seems to me, time ought not to enter
into our theoretic philosophical thought, may be illustrated by the
philosophy which has become associated with the idea of evolution, and
which is exemplified by Nietzsche, pragmatism, and Bergson. This
philosophy, on the basis of the development which has led from the
lowest forms of life up to man, sees in _progress_ the fundamental law
of the universe, and thus admits the difference between _earlier_ and
_later_ into the very citadel of its contemplative outlook. With its
past and future history of the world, conjectural as it is, I do not
wish to quarrel.
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* * * * *
BERTRAND RUSSELL
MYSTICISM AND
LOGIC
AND OTHER ESSAYS
_LONDON_
GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
RUSKIN HOUSE MUSEUM STREET
MYSTICISM AND LOGIC
AND OTHER ESSAYS
BY BERTRAND RUSSELL
_The ABC of Relativity_
_The Analysis of Matter_
_Human Society in Ethics and Politics_
_The Impact of Science on Society_
_New Hopes for a Changing World_
_Authority and the Individual_
_Human Knowledge_
_History of Western Philosophy_
_The Principles of Mathematics_
_Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy_
_The Analysis of Mind_
_Our Knowledge of the External World_
_An Outline of Philosophy_
_The Philosophy of Leibniz_
_An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth_
_Logic and Knowledge_
_The Problems of Philosophy_
_Principia Mathematica_
_Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare_
_Why I am Not a Christian_
_Portraits from Memory_
_My Philosophical Development_
_Unpopular Essays_
_Power_
_In Praise of Idleness_
_The Conquest of Happiness_
_Sceptical Essays_
_The Scientific Outlook_
_Marriage and Morals_
_Education and the Social Order_
_On Education_
_Freedom and Organization_
_Principles of Social Reconstruction_
_Roads to Freedom_
_Practice and Theory of Bolshevism_
_Satan in The Suburbs_
_Nightmares of Eminent Persons_
_First published as "Philosophical Essays"_ _October 1910_
_Second Edition as "Mysticism and Logic"_ _December 1917_
_Third Impression_ _April 1918_
_Fourth Impression_ _February 1919_
_Fifth Impression_ _October 1921_
_Sixth Impression_ _August 1925_
_Seventh Impression_ _January 1932_
_Eighth Impression_ _1949_
_Ninth Impression_ _1950_
_Tenth Impression_ _1951_
_Eleventh Impression_ _1959_
_This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. Apart from any
fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism
or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, 1956, no portion
may be reproduced by any process without written permission.
Enquiry should be made to the publisher. _
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
_by Taylor Garnett Evans & Co. Ltd. ,
Watford, Herts. _
PREFACE
The following essays have been written and published at various times,
and my thanks are due to the previous publishers for the permission to
reprint them.
The essay on "Mysticism and Logic" appeared in the _Hibbert Journal_
for July, 1914. "The Place of Science in a Liberal Education" appeared
in two numbers of _The New Statesman_, May 24 and 31, 1913. "The Free
Man's Worship" and "The Study of Mathematics" were included in a
former collection (now out of print), _Philosophical Essays_, also
published by Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. Both were written in 1902;
the first appeared originally in the _Independent Review_ for 1903,
the second in the _New Quarterly_, November, 1907. In theoretical
Ethics, the position advocated in "The Free Man's Worship" is not
quite identical with that which I hold now: I feel less convinced than
I did then of the objectivity of good and evil. But the general
attitude towards life which is suggested in that essay still seems to
me, in the main, the one which must be adopted in times of stress and
difficulty by those who have no dogmatic religious beliefs, if inward
defeat is to be avoided.
The essay on "Mathematics and the Metaphysicians" was written in 1901,
and appeared in an American magazine, _The International Monthly_,
under the title "Recent Work in the Philosophy of Mathematics. " Some
points in this essay require modification in view of later work.
These are indicated in footnotes. Its tone is partly explained by the
fact that the editor begged me to make the article "as romantic as
possible. "
All the above essays are entirely popular, but those that follow are
somewhat more technical. "On Scientific Method in Philosophy" was the
Herbert Spencer lecture at Oxford in 1914, and was published by the
Clarendon Press, which has kindly allowed me to include it in this
collection. "The Ultimate Constituents of Matter" was an address to
the Manchester Philosophical Society, early in 1915, and was published
in the _Monist_ in July of that year. The essay on "The Relation of
Sense-data to Physics" was written in January, 1914, and first
appeared in No. 4 of that year's volume of _Scientia_, an
International Review of Scientific Synthesis, edited by M. Eugenio
Rignano, published monthly by Messrs. Williams and Norgate, London,
Nicola Zanichelli, Bologna, and Felix Alcan, Paris. The essay "On the
Notion of Cause" was the presidential address to the Aristotelian
Society in November, 1912, and was published in their _Proceedings_
for 1912-13. "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description"
was also a paper read before the Aristotelian Society, and published
in their _Proceedings_ for 1910-11.
LONDON,
_September, 1917_
CONTENTS
_Chapter_ _Page_
I. _Mysticism and Logic_ 1
II. _The Place of Science in a Liberal Education_ 33
III. _A Free Man's Worship_ 46
IV. _The Study of Mathematics_ 58
V. _Mathematics and the Metaphysicians_ 74
VI. _On Scientific Method in Philosophy_ 97
VII. _The Ultimate Constituents of Matter_ 125
VIII. _The Relation of Sense-data to Physics_ 145
IX. _On the Notion of Cause_ 180
X. _Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by
Description_ 209
MYSTICISM AND LOGIC AND OTHER ESSAYS
I
MYSTICISM AND LOGIC
Metaphysics, or the attempt to conceive the world as a whole by means
of thought, has been developed, from the first, by the union and
conflict of two very different human impulses, the one urging men
towards mysticism, the other urging them towards science. Some men
have achieved greatness through one of these impulses alone, others
through the other alone: in Hume, for example, the scientific impulse
reigns quite unchecked, while in Blake a strong hostility to science
co-exists with profound mystic insight. But the greatest men who have
been philosophers have felt the need both of science and of mysticism:
the attempt to harmonise the two was what made their life, and what
always must, for all its arduous uncertainty, make philosophy, to some
minds, a greater thing than either science or religion.
Before attempting an explicit characterisation of the scientific and
the mystical impulses, I will illustrate them by examples from two
philosophers whose greatness lies in the very intimate blending which
they achieved. The two philosophers I mean are Heraclitus and Plato.
Heraclitus, as every one knows, was a believer in universal flux: time
builds and destroys all things. From the few fragments that remain, it
is not easy to discover how he arrived at his opinions, but there are
some sayings that strongly suggest scientific observation as the
source.
"The things that can be seen, heard, and learned," he says, "are what
I prize the most. " This is the language of the empiricist, to whom
observation is the sole guarantee of truth. "The sun is new every
day," is another fragment; and this opinion, in spite of its
paradoxical character, is obviously inspired by scientific reflection,
and no doubt seemed to him to obviate the difficulty of understanding
how the sun can work its way underground from west to east during the
night. Actual observation must also have suggested to him his central
doctrine, that Fire is the one permanent substance, of which all
visible things are passing phases. In combustion we see things change
utterly, while their flame and heat rise up into the air and vanish.
"This world, which is the same for all," he says, "no one of gods or
men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be, an
ever-living Fire, with measures kindling, and measures going out. "
"The transformations of Fire are, first of all, sea; and half of the
sea is earth, half whirlwind. "
This theory, though no longer one which science can accept, is
nevertheless scientific in spirit. Science, too, might have inspired
the famous saying to which Plato alludes: "You cannot step twice into
the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you. " But
we find also another statement among the extant fragments: "We step
and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not. "
The comparison of this statement, which is mystical, with the one
quoted by Plato, which is scientific, shows how intimately the two
tendencies are blended in the system of Heraclitus. Mysticism is, in
essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in
regard to what is believed about the universe; and this kind of
feeling leads Heraclitus, on the basis of his science, to strangely
poignant sayings concerning life and the world, such as:
"Time is a child playing draughts, the kingly power is a child's. "
It is poetic imagination, not science, which presents Time as despotic
lord of the world, with all the irresponsible frivolity of a child. It
is mysticism, too, which leads Heraclitus to assert the identity of
opposites: "Good and ill are one," he says; and again: "To God all
things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and
some right. "
Much of mysticism underlies the ethics of Heraclitus. It is true that
a scientific determinism alone might have inspired the statement:
"Man's character is his fate"; but only a mystic would have said:
"Every beast is driven to the pasture with blows"; and again:
"It is hard to fight with one's heart's desire. Whatever it wishes to
get, it purchases at the cost of soul"; and again:
"Wisdom is one thing. It is to know the thought by which all things
are steered through all things. "[1]
Examples might be multiplied, but those that have been given are
enough to show the character of the man: the facts of science, as they
appeared to him, fed the flame in his soul, and in its light he saw
into the depths of the world by the reflection of his own dancing
swiftly penetrating fire. In such a nature we see the true union of
the mystic and the man of science--the highest eminence, as I think,
that it is possible to achieve in the world of thought.
In Plato, the same twofold impulse exists, though the mystic impulse
is distinctly the stronger of the two, and secures ultimate victory
whenever the conflict is sharp. His description of the cave is the
classical statement of belief in a knowledge and reality truer and
more real than that of the senses:
"Imagine[2] a number of men living in an underground cavernous
chamber, with an entrance open to the light, extending along the
entire length of the cavern, in which they have been confined, from
their childhood, with their legs and necks so shackled that they
are obliged to sit still and look straight forwards, because their
chains render it impossible for them to turn their heads round: and
imagine a bright fire burning some way off, above and behind them,
and an elevated roadway passing between the fire and the prisoners,
with a low wall built along it, like the screens which conjurors
put up in front of their audience, and above which they exhibit
their wonders.
I have it, he replied.
Also figure to yourself a number of persons walking behind this
wall, and carrying with them statues of men, and images of other
animals, wrought in wood and stone and all kinds of materials,
together with various other articles, which overtop the wall; and,
as you might expect, let some of the passers-by be talking, and
others silent.
You are describing a strange scene, and strange prisoners.
They resemble us, I replied.
Now consider what would happen if the course of nature brought them
a release from their fetters, and a remedy for their foolishness,
in the following manner. Let us suppose that one of them has been
released, and compelled suddenly to stand up, and turn his neck
round and walk with open eyes towards the light; and let us suppose
that he goes through all these actions with pain, and that the
dazzling splendour renders him incapable of discerning those
objects of which he used formerly to see the shadows. What answer
should you expect him to make, if some one were to tell him that in
those days he was watching foolish phantoms, but that now he is
somewhat nearer to reality, and is turned towards things more real,
and sees more correctly; above all, if he were to point out to him
the several objects that are passing by, and question him, and
compel him to answer what they are? Should you not expect him to be
puzzled, and to regard his old visions as truer than the objects
now forced upon his notice?
Yes, much truer. . . .
Hence, I suppose, habit will be necessary to enable him to perceive
objects in that upper world. At first he will be most successful in
distinguishing shadows; then he will discern the reflections of men
and other things in water, and afterwards the realities; and after
this he will raise his eyes to encounter the light of the moon and
stars, finding it less difficult to study the heavenly bodies and
the heaven itself by night, than the sun and the sun's light by
day.
Doubtless.
Last of all, I imagine, he will be able to observe and contemplate
the nature of the sun, not as it _appears_ in water or on alien
ground, but as it is in itself in its own territory.
Of course.
His next step will be to draw the conclusion, that the sun is the
author of the seasons and the years, and the guardian of all things
in the visible world, and in a manner the cause of all those things
which he and his companions used to see.
Obviously, this will be his next step. . . .
Now this imaginary case, my dear Glancon, you must apply in all its
parts to our former statements, by comparing the region which the
eye reveals to the prison house, and the light of the fire therein
to the power of the sun: and if, by the upward ascent and the
contemplation of the upper world, you understand the mounting of
the soul into the intellectual region, you will hit the tendency of
my own surmises, since you desire to be told what they are; though,
indeed, God only knows whether they are correct. But, be that as it
may, the view which I take of the subject is to the following
effect. In the world of knowledge, the essential Form of Good is
the limit of our enquiries, and can barely be perceived; but, when
perceived, we cannot help concluding that it is in every case the
source of all that is bright and beautiful,--in the visible world
giving birth to light and its master, and in the intellectual world
dispensing, immediately and with full authority, truth and
reason;--and that whosoever would act wisely, either in private or
in public, must set this Form of Good before his eyes. "
But in this passage, as throughout most of Plato's teaching, there is
an identification of the good with the truly real, which became
embodied in the philosophical tradition, and is still largely
operative in our own day. In thus allowing a legislative function to
the good, Plato produced a divorce between philosophy and science,
from which, in my opinion, both have suffered ever since and are still
suffering. The man of science, whatever his hopes may be, must lay
them aside while he studies nature; and the philosopher, if he is to
achieve truth, must do the same. Ethical considerations can only
legitimately appear when the truth has been ascertained: they can and
should appear as determining our feeling towards the truth, and our
manner of ordering our lives in view of the truth, but not as
themselves dictating what the truth is to be.
There are passages in Plato--among those which illustrate the
scientific side of his mind--where he seems clearly aware of this. The
most noteworthy is the one in which Socrates, as a young man, is
explaining the theory of ideas to Parmenides.
After Socrates has explained that there is an idea of the good, but
not of such things as hair and mud and dirt, Parmenides advises him
"not to despise even the meanest things," and this advice shows the
genuine scientific temper. It is with this impartial temper that the
mystic's apparent insight into a higher reality and a hidden good has
to be combined if philosophy is to realise its greatest possibilities.
And it is failure in this respect that has made so much of idealistic
philosophy thin, lifeless, and insubstantial. It is only in marriage
with the world that our ideals can bear fruit: divorced from it, they
remain barren. But marriage with the world is not to be achieved by an
ideal which shrinks from fact, or demands in advance that the world
shall conform to its desires.
Parmenides himself is the source of a peculiarly interesting strain
of mysticism which pervades Plato's thought--the mysticism which may
be called "logical" because it is embodied in theories on logic. This
form of mysticism, which appears, so far as the West is concerned, to
have originated with Parmenides, dominates the reasonings of all the
great mystical metaphysicians from his day to that of Hegel and his
modern disciples. Reality, he says, is uncreated, indestructible,
unchanging, indivisible; it is "immovable in the bonds of mighty
chains, without beginning and without end; since coming into being and
passing away have been driven afar, and true belief has cast them
away. " The fundamental principle of his inquiry is stated in a
sentence which would not be out of place in Hegel: "Thou canst not
know what is not--that is impossible--nor utter it; for it is the same
thing that can be thought and that can be. " And again: "It needs must
be that what can be thought and spoken of is; for it is possible for
it to be, and it is not possible for what is nothing to be. " The
impossibility of change follows from this principle; for what is past
can be spoken of, and therefore, by the principle, still is.
Mystical philosophy, in all ages and in all parts of the world, is
characterised by certain beliefs which are illustrated by the
doctrines we have been considering.
There is, first, the belief in insight as against discursive analytic
knowledge: the belief in a way of wisdom, sudden, penetrating,
coercive, which is contrasted with the slow and fallible study of
outward appearance by a science relying wholly upon the senses. All
who are capable of absorption in an inward passion must have
experienced at times the strange feeling of unreality in common
objects, the loss of contact with daily things, in which the solidity
of the outer world is lost, and the soul seems, in utter loneliness,
to bring forth, out of its own depths, the mad dance of fantastic
phantoms which have hitherto appeared as independently real and
living. This is the negative side of the mystic's initiation: the
doubt concerning common knowledge, preparing the way for the reception
of what seems a higher wisdom. Many men to whom this negative
experience is familiar do not pass beyond it, but for the mystic it is
merely the gateway to an ampler world.
The mystic insight begins with the sense of a mystery unveiled, of a
hidden wisdom now suddenly become certain beyond the possibility of a
doubt. The sense of certainty and revelation comes earlier than any
definite belief. The definite beliefs at which mystics arrive are the
result of reflection upon the inarticulate experience gained in the
moment of insight. Often, beliefs which have no real connection with
this moment become subsequently attracted into the central nucleus;
thus in addition to the convictions which all mystics share, we find,
in many of them, other convictions of a more local and temporary
character, which no doubt become amalgamated with what was essentially
mystical in virtue of their subjective certainty. We may ignore such
inessential accretions, and confine ourselves to the beliefs which all
mystics share.
The first and most direct outcome of the moment of illumination is
belief in the possibility of a way of knowledge which may be called
revelation or insight or intuition, as contrasted with sense, reason,
and analysis, which are regarded as blind guides leading to the morass
of illusion. Closely connected with this belief is the conception of a
Reality behind the world of appearance and utterly different from it.
This Reality is regarded with an admiration often amounting to
worship; it is felt to be always and everywhere close at hand, thinly
veiled by the shows of sense, ready, for the receptive mind, to shine
in its glory even through the apparent folly and wickedness of Man.
The poet, the artist, and the lover are seekers after that glory: the
haunting beauty that they pursue is the faint reflection of its sun.
But the mystic lives in the full light of the vision: what others
dimly seek he knows, with a knowledge beside which all other knowledge
is ignorance.
The second characteristic of mysticism is its belief in unity, and its
refusal to admit opposition or division anywhere. We found Heraclitus
saying "good and ill are one"; and again he says, "the way up and the
way down is one and the same. " The same attitude appears in the
simultaneous assertion of contradictory propositions, such as: "We
step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not. " The
assertion of Parmenides, that reality is one and indivisible, comes
from the same impulse towards unity. In Plato, this impulse is less
prominent, being held in check by his theory of ideas; but it
reappears, so far as his logic permits, in the doctrine of the primacy
of the Good.
A third mark of almost all mystical metaphysics is the denial of the
reality of Time. This is an outcome of the denial of division; if all
is one, the distinction of past and future must be illusory. We have
seen this doctrine prominent in Parmenides; and among moderns it is
fundamental in the systems of Spinoza and Hegel.
The last of the doctrines of mysticism which we have to consider is
its belief that all evil is mere appearance, an illusion produced by
the divisions and oppositions of the analytic intellect. Mysticism
does not maintain that such things as cruelty, for example, are good,
but it denies that they are real: they belong to that lower world of
phantoms from which we are to be liberated by the insight of the
vision. Sometimes--for example in Hegel, and at least verbally in
Spinoza--not only evil, but good also, is regarded as illusory, though
nevertheless the emotional attitude towards what is held to be Reality
is such as would naturally be associated with the belief that Reality
is good. What is, in all cases, ethically characteristic of mysticism
is absence of indignation or protest, acceptance with joy, disbelief
in the ultimate truth of the division into two hostile camps, the good
and the bad. This attitude is a direct outcome of the nature of the
mystical experience: with its sense of unity is associated a feeling
of infinite peace. Indeed it may be suspected that the feeling of
peace produces, as feelings do in dreams, the whole system of
associated beliefs which make up the body of mystic doctrine. But this
is a difficult question, and one on which it cannot be hoped that
mankind will reach agreement.
Four questions thus arise in considering the truth or falsehood of
mysticism, namely:
I. Are there two ways of knowing, which may be called respectively
reason and intuition? And if so, is either to be preferred to the
other?
II. Is all plurality and division illusory?
III. Is time unreal?
IV. What kind of reality belongs to good and evil?
On all four of these questions, while fully developed mysticism seems
to me mistaken, I yet believe that, by sufficient restraint, there is
an element of wisdom to be learned from the mystical way of feeling,
which does not seem to be attainable in any other manner. If this is
the truth, mysticism is to be commended as an attitude towards life,
not as a creed about the world. The meta-physical creed, I shall
maintain, is a mistaken outcome of the emotion, although this emotion,
as colouring and informing all other thoughts and feelings, is the
inspirer of whatever is best in Man. Even the cautious and patient
investigation of truth by science, which seems the very antithesis of
the mystic's swift certainty, may be fostered and nourished by that
very spirit of reverence in which mysticism lives and moves.
I. REASON AND INTUITION[3]
Of the reality or unreality of the mystic's world I know nothing. I
have no wish to deny it, nor even to declare that the insight which
reveals it is not a genuine insight. What I do wish to maintain--and
it is here that the scientific attitude becomes imperative--is that
insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of
truth, in spite of the fact that much of the most important truth is
first suggested by its means. It is common to speak of an opposition
between instinct and reason; in the eighteenth century, the opposition
was drawn in favour of reason, but under the influence of Rousseau and
the romantic movement instinct was given the preference, first by
those who rebelled against artificial forms of government and thought,
and then, as the purely rationalistic defence of traditional theology
became increasingly difficult, by all who felt in science a menace to
creeds which they associated with a spiritual outlook on life and the
world. Bergson, under the name of "intuition," has raised instinct to
the position of sole arbiter of metaphysical truth. But in fact the
opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct,
intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which
subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it
is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other
beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonising, controlling
force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical
realm, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.
Where instinct and reason do sometimes conflict is in regard to single
beliefs, held instinctively, and held with such determination that no
degree of inconsistency with other beliefs leads to their abandonment.
Instinct, like all human faculties, is liable to error. Those in whom
reason is weak are often unwilling to admit this as regards
themselves, though all admit it in regard to others. Where instinct is
least liable to error is in practical matters as to which right
judgment is a help to survival: friendship and hostility in others,
for instance, are often felt with extraordinary discrimination through
very careful disguises. But even in such matters a wrong impression
may be given by reserve or flattery; and in matters less directly
practical, such as philosophy deals with, very strong instinctive
beliefs are sometimes wholly mistaken, as we may come to know through
their perceived inconsistency with other equally strong beliefs. It is
such considerations that necessitate the harmonising mediation of
reason, which tests our beliefs by their mutual compatibility, and
examines, in doubtful cases, the possible sources of error on the one
side and on the other. In this there is no opposition to instinct as a
whole, but only to blind reliance upon some one interesting aspect of
instinct to the exclusion of other more commonplace but not less
trustworthy aspects. It is such one-sidedness, not instinct itself,
that reason aims at correcting.
These more or less trite maxims may be illustrated by application to
Bergson's advocacy of "intuition" as against "intellect. " There are,
he says, "two profoundly different ways of knowing a thing. The first
implies that we move round the object: the second that we enter into
it. The first depends on the point of view at which we are placed and
on the symbols by which we express ourselves. The second neither
depends on a point of view nor relies on any symbol. The first kind of
knowledge may be said to stop at the _relative_; the second, in those
cases where it is possible, to attain the _absolute_. "[4] The second
of these, which is intuition, is, he says, "the kind of _intellectual
sympathy_ by which one places oneself within an object in order to
coincide with what is unique in it and therefore inexpressible" (p.
6). In illustration, he mentions self-knowledge: "there is one
reality, at least, which we all seize from within, by intuition and
not by simple analysis. It is our own personality in its flowing
through time--our self which endures" (p. 8). The rest of Bergson's
philosophy consists in reporting, through the imperfect medium of
words, the knowledge gained by intuition, and the consequent complete
condemnation of all the pretended knowledge derived from science and
common sense.
This procedure, since it takes sides in a conflict of instinctive
beliefs, stands in need of justification by proving the greater
trustworthiness of the beliefs on one side than of those on the other.
Bergson attempts this justification in two ways, first by explaining
that intellect is a purely practical faculty to secure biological
success, secondly by mentioning remarkable feats of instinct in
animals and by pointing out characteristics of the world which, though
intuition can apprehend them, are baffling to intellect as he
interprets it.
Of Bergson's theory that intellect is a purely practical faculty,
developed in the struggle for survival, and not a source of true
beliefs, we may say, first, that it is only through intellect that we
know of the struggle for survival and of the biological ancestry of
man: if the intellect is misleading, the whole of this merely inferred
history is presumably untrue. If, on the other hand, we agree with him
in thinking that evolution took place as Darwin believed, then it is
not only intellect, but all our faculties, that have been developed
under the stress of practical utility. Intuition is seen at its best
where it is directly useful, for example in regard to other people's
characters and dispositions. Bergson apparently holds that capacity
for this kind of knowledge is less explicable by the struggle for
existence than, for example, capacity for pure mathematics. Yet the
savage deceived by false friendship is likely to pay for his mistake
with his life; whereas even in the most civilised societies men are
not put to death for mathematical incompetence.
In such a nature we see the true union of
the mystic and the man of science--the highest eminence, as I think,
that it is possible to achieve in the world of thought.
In Plato, the same twofold impulse exists, though the mystic impulse
is distinctly the stronger of the two, and secures ultimate victory
whenever the conflict is sharp. His description of the cave is the
classical statement of belief in a knowledge and reality truer and
more real than that of the senses:
"Imagine[2] a number of men living in an underground cavernous
chamber, with an entrance open to the light, extending along the
entire length of the cavern, in which they have been confined, from
their childhood, with their legs and necks so shackled that they
are obliged to sit still and look straight forwards, because their
chains render it impossible for them to turn their heads round: and
imagine a bright fire burning some way off, above and behind them,
and an elevated roadway passing between the fire and the prisoners,
with a low wall built along it, like the screens which conjurors
put up in front of their audience, and above which they exhibit
their wonders.
I have it, he replied.
Also figure to yourself a number of persons walking behind this
wall, and carrying with them statues of men, and images of other
animals, wrought in wood and stone and all kinds of materials,
together with various other articles, which overtop the wall; and,
as you might expect, let some of the passers-by be talking, and
others silent.
You are describing a strange scene, and strange prisoners.
They resemble us, I replied.
Now consider what would happen if the course of nature brought them
a release from their fetters, and a remedy for their foolishness,
in the following manner. Let us suppose that one of them has been
released, and compelled suddenly to stand up, and turn his neck
round and walk with open eyes towards the light; and let us suppose
that he goes through all these actions with pain, and that the
dazzling splendour renders him incapable of discerning those
objects of which he used formerly to see the shadows. What answer
should you expect him to make, if some one were to tell him that in
those days he was watching foolish phantoms, but that now he is
somewhat nearer to reality, and is turned towards things more real,
and sees more correctly; above all, if he were to point out to him
the several objects that are passing by, and question him, and
compel him to answer what they are? Should you not expect him to be
puzzled, and to regard his old visions as truer than the objects
now forced upon his notice?
Yes, much truer. . . .
Hence, I suppose, habit will be necessary to enable him to perceive
objects in that upper world. At first he will be most successful in
distinguishing shadows; then he will discern the reflections of men
and other things in water, and afterwards the realities; and after
this he will raise his eyes to encounter the light of the moon and
stars, finding it less difficult to study the heavenly bodies and
the heaven itself by night, than the sun and the sun's light by
day.
Doubtless.
Last of all, I imagine, he will be able to observe and contemplate
the nature of the sun, not as it _appears_ in water or on alien
ground, but as it is in itself in its own territory.
Of course.
His next step will be to draw the conclusion, that the sun is the
author of the seasons and the years, and the guardian of all things
in the visible world, and in a manner the cause of all those things
which he and his companions used to see.
Obviously, this will be his next step. . . .
Now this imaginary case, my dear Glancon, you must apply in all its
parts to our former statements, by comparing the region which the
eye reveals to the prison house, and the light of the fire therein
to the power of the sun: and if, by the upward ascent and the
contemplation of the upper world, you understand the mounting of
the soul into the intellectual region, you will hit the tendency of
my own surmises, since you desire to be told what they are; though,
indeed, God only knows whether they are correct. But, be that as it
may, the view which I take of the subject is to the following
effect. In the world of knowledge, the essential Form of Good is
the limit of our enquiries, and can barely be perceived; but, when
perceived, we cannot help concluding that it is in every case the
source of all that is bright and beautiful,--in the visible world
giving birth to light and its master, and in the intellectual world
dispensing, immediately and with full authority, truth and
reason;--and that whosoever would act wisely, either in private or
in public, must set this Form of Good before his eyes. "
But in this passage, as throughout most of Plato's teaching, there is
an identification of the good with the truly real, which became
embodied in the philosophical tradition, and is still largely
operative in our own day. In thus allowing a legislative function to
the good, Plato produced a divorce between philosophy and science,
from which, in my opinion, both have suffered ever since and are still
suffering. The man of science, whatever his hopes may be, must lay
them aside while he studies nature; and the philosopher, if he is to
achieve truth, must do the same. Ethical considerations can only
legitimately appear when the truth has been ascertained: they can and
should appear as determining our feeling towards the truth, and our
manner of ordering our lives in view of the truth, but not as
themselves dictating what the truth is to be.
There are passages in Plato--among those which illustrate the
scientific side of his mind--where he seems clearly aware of this. The
most noteworthy is the one in which Socrates, as a young man, is
explaining the theory of ideas to Parmenides.
After Socrates has explained that there is an idea of the good, but
not of such things as hair and mud and dirt, Parmenides advises him
"not to despise even the meanest things," and this advice shows the
genuine scientific temper. It is with this impartial temper that the
mystic's apparent insight into a higher reality and a hidden good has
to be combined if philosophy is to realise its greatest possibilities.
And it is failure in this respect that has made so much of idealistic
philosophy thin, lifeless, and insubstantial. It is only in marriage
with the world that our ideals can bear fruit: divorced from it, they
remain barren. But marriage with the world is not to be achieved by an
ideal which shrinks from fact, or demands in advance that the world
shall conform to its desires.
Parmenides himself is the source of a peculiarly interesting strain
of mysticism which pervades Plato's thought--the mysticism which may
be called "logical" because it is embodied in theories on logic. This
form of mysticism, which appears, so far as the West is concerned, to
have originated with Parmenides, dominates the reasonings of all the
great mystical metaphysicians from his day to that of Hegel and his
modern disciples. Reality, he says, is uncreated, indestructible,
unchanging, indivisible; it is "immovable in the bonds of mighty
chains, without beginning and without end; since coming into being and
passing away have been driven afar, and true belief has cast them
away. " The fundamental principle of his inquiry is stated in a
sentence which would not be out of place in Hegel: "Thou canst not
know what is not--that is impossible--nor utter it; for it is the same
thing that can be thought and that can be. " And again: "It needs must
be that what can be thought and spoken of is; for it is possible for
it to be, and it is not possible for what is nothing to be. " The
impossibility of change follows from this principle; for what is past
can be spoken of, and therefore, by the principle, still is.
Mystical philosophy, in all ages and in all parts of the world, is
characterised by certain beliefs which are illustrated by the
doctrines we have been considering.
There is, first, the belief in insight as against discursive analytic
knowledge: the belief in a way of wisdom, sudden, penetrating,
coercive, which is contrasted with the slow and fallible study of
outward appearance by a science relying wholly upon the senses. All
who are capable of absorption in an inward passion must have
experienced at times the strange feeling of unreality in common
objects, the loss of contact with daily things, in which the solidity
of the outer world is lost, and the soul seems, in utter loneliness,
to bring forth, out of its own depths, the mad dance of fantastic
phantoms which have hitherto appeared as independently real and
living. This is the negative side of the mystic's initiation: the
doubt concerning common knowledge, preparing the way for the reception
of what seems a higher wisdom. Many men to whom this negative
experience is familiar do not pass beyond it, but for the mystic it is
merely the gateway to an ampler world.
The mystic insight begins with the sense of a mystery unveiled, of a
hidden wisdom now suddenly become certain beyond the possibility of a
doubt. The sense of certainty and revelation comes earlier than any
definite belief. The definite beliefs at which mystics arrive are the
result of reflection upon the inarticulate experience gained in the
moment of insight. Often, beliefs which have no real connection with
this moment become subsequently attracted into the central nucleus;
thus in addition to the convictions which all mystics share, we find,
in many of them, other convictions of a more local and temporary
character, which no doubt become amalgamated with what was essentially
mystical in virtue of their subjective certainty. We may ignore such
inessential accretions, and confine ourselves to the beliefs which all
mystics share.
The first and most direct outcome of the moment of illumination is
belief in the possibility of a way of knowledge which may be called
revelation or insight or intuition, as contrasted with sense, reason,
and analysis, which are regarded as blind guides leading to the morass
of illusion. Closely connected with this belief is the conception of a
Reality behind the world of appearance and utterly different from it.
This Reality is regarded with an admiration often amounting to
worship; it is felt to be always and everywhere close at hand, thinly
veiled by the shows of sense, ready, for the receptive mind, to shine
in its glory even through the apparent folly and wickedness of Man.
The poet, the artist, and the lover are seekers after that glory: the
haunting beauty that they pursue is the faint reflection of its sun.
But the mystic lives in the full light of the vision: what others
dimly seek he knows, with a knowledge beside which all other knowledge
is ignorance.
The second characteristic of mysticism is its belief in unity, and its
refusal to admit opposition or division anywhere. We found Heraclitus
saying "good and ill are one"; and again he says, "the way up and the
way down is one and the same. " The same attitude appears in the
simultaneous assertion of contradictory propositions, such as: "We
step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not. " The
assertion of Parmenides, that reality is one and indivisible, comes
from the same impulse towards unity. In Plato, this impulse is less
prominent, being held in check by his theory of ideas; but it
reappears, so far as his logic permits, in the doctrine of the primacy
of the Good.
A third mark of almost all mystical metaphysics is the denial of the
reality of Time. This is an outcome of the denial of division; if all
is one, the distinction of past and future must be illusory. We have
seen this doctrine prominent in Parmenides; and among moderns it is
fundamental in the systems of Spinoza and Hegel.
The last of the doctrines of mysticism which we have to consider is
its belief that all evil is mere appearance, an illusion produced by
the divisions and oppositions of the analytic intellect. Mysticism
does not maintain that such things as cruelty, for example, are good,
but it denies that they are real: they belong to that lower world of
phantoms from which we are to be liberated by the insight of the
vision. Sometimes--for example in Hegel, and at least verbally in
Spinoza--not only evil, but good also, is regarded as illusory, though
nevertheless the emotional attitude towards what is held to be Reality
is such as would naturally be associated with the belief that Reality
is good. What is, in all cases, ethically characteristic of mysticism
is absence of indignation or protest, acceptance with joy, disbelief
in the ultimate truth of the division into two hostile camps, the good
and the bad. This attitude is a direct outcome of the nature of the
mystical experience: with its sense of unity is associated a feeling
of infinite peace. Indeed it may be suspected that the feeling of
peace produces, as feelings do in dreams, the whole system of
associated beliefs which make up the body of mystic doctrine. But this
is a difficult question, and one on which it cannot be hoped that
mankind will reach agreement.
Four questions thus arise in considering the truth or falsehood of
mysticism, namely:
I. Are there two ways of knowing, which may be called respectively
reason and intuition? And if so, is either to be preferred to the
other?
II. Is all plurality and division illusory?
III. Is time unreal?
IV. What kind of reality belongs to good and evil?
On all four of these questions, while fully developed mysticism seems
to me mistaken, I yet believe that, by sufficient restraint, there is
an element of wisdom to be learned from the mystical way of feeling,
which does not seem to be attainable in any other manner. If this is
the truth, mysticism is to be commended as an attitude towards life,
not as a creed about the world. The meta-physical creed, I shall
maintain, is a mistaken outcome of the emotion, although this emotion,
as colouring and informing all other thoughts and feelings, is the
inspirer of whatever is best in Man. Even the cautious and patient
investigation of truth by science, which seems the very antithesis of
the mystic's swift certainty, may be fostered and nourished by that
very spirit of reverence in which mysticism lives and moves.
I. REASON AND INTUITION[3]
Of the reality or unreality of the mystic's world I know nothing. I
have no wish to deny it, nor even to declare that the insight which
reveals it is not a genuine insight. What I do wish to maintain--and
it is here that the scientific attitude becomes imperative--is that
insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of
truth, in spite of the fact that much of the most important truth is
first suggested by its means. It is common to speak of an opposition
between instinct and reason; in the eighteenth century, the opposition
was drawn in favour of reason, but under the influence of Rousseau and
the romantic movement instinct was given the preference, first by
those who rebelled against artificial forms of government and thought,
and then, as the purely rationalistic defence of traditional theology
became increasingly difficult, by all who felt in science a menace to
creeds which they associated with a spiritual outlook on life and the
world. Bergson, under the name of "intuition," has raised instinct to
the position of sole arbiter of metaphysical truth. But in fact the
opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct,
intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which
subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it
is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other
beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonising, controlling
force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical
realm, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.
Where instinct and reason do sometimes conflict is in regard to single
beliefs, held instinctively, and held with such determination that no
degree of inconsistency with other beliefs leads to their abandonment.
Instinct, like all human faculties, is liable to error. Those in whom
reason is weak are often unwilling to admit this as regards
themselves, though all admit it in regard to others. Where instinct is
least liable to error is in practical matters as to which right
judgment is a help to survival: friendship and hostility in others,
for instance, are often felt with extraordinary discrimination through
very careful disguises. But even in such matters a wrong impression
may be given by reserve or flattery; and in matters less directly
practical, such as philosophy deals with, very strong instinctive
beliefs are sometimes wholly mistaken, as we may come to know through
their perceived inconsistency with other equally strong beliefs. It is
such considerations that necessitate the harmonising mediation of
reason, which tests our beliefs by their mutual compatibility, and
examines, in doubtful cases, the possible sources of error on the one
side and on the other. In this there is no opposition to instinct as a
whole, but only to blind reliance upon some one interesting aspect of
instinct to the exclusion of other more commonplace but not less
trustworthy aspects. It is such one-sidedness, not instinct itself,
that reason aims at correcting.
These more or less trite maxims may be illustrated by application to
Bergson's advocacy of "intuition" as against "intellect. " There are,
he says, "two profoundly different ways of knowing a thing. The first
implies that we move round the object: the second that we enter into
it. The first depends on the point of view at which we are placed and
on the symbols by which we express ourselves. The second neither
depends on a point of view nor relies on any symbol. The first kind of
knowledge may be said to stop at the _relative_; the second, in those
cases where it is possible, to attain the _absolute_. "[4] The second
of these, which is intuition, is, he says, "the kind of _intellectual
sympathy_ by which one places oneself within an object in order to
coincide with what is unique in it and therefore inexpressible" (p.
6). In illustration, he mentions self-knowledge: "there is one
reality, at least, which we all seize from within, by intuition and
not by simple analysis. It is our own personality in its flowing
through time--our self which endures" (p. 8). The rest of Bergson's
philosophy consists in reporting, through the imperfect medium of
words, the knowledge gained by intuition, and the consequent complete
condemnation of all the pretended knowledge derived from science and
common sense.
This procedure, since it takes sides in a conflict of instinctive
beliefs, stands in need of justification by proving the greater
trustworthiness of the beliefs on one side than of those on the other.
Bergson attempts this justification in two ways, first by explaining
that intellect is a purely practical faculty to secure biological
success, secondly by mentioning remarkable feats of instinct in
animals and by pointing out characteristics of the world which, though
intuition can apprehend them, are baffling to intellect as he
interprets it.
Of Bergson's theory that intellect is a purely practical faculty,
developed in the struggle for survival, and not a source of true
beliefs, we may say, first, that it is only through intellect that we
know of the struggle for survival and of the biological ancestry of
man: if the intellect is misleading, the whole of this merely inferred
history is presumably untrue. If, on the other hand, we agree with him
in thinking that evolution took place as Darwin believed, then it is
not only intellect, but all our faculties, that have been developed
under the stress of practical utility. Intuition is seen at its best
where it is directly useful, for example in regard to other people's
characters and dispositions. Bergson apparently holds that capacity
for this kind of knowledge is less explicable by the struggle for
existence than, for example, capacity for pure mathematics. Yet the
savage deceived by false friendship is likely to pay for his mistake
with his life; whereas even in the most civilised societies men are
not put to death for mathematical incompetence. All the most striking
of his instances of intuition in animals have a very direct survival
value. The fact is, of course, that both intuition and intellect have
been developed because they are useful, and that, speaking broadly,
they are useful when they give truth and become harmful when they give
falsehood. Intellect, in civilised man, like artistic capacity, has
occasionally been developed beyond the point where it is useful to the
individual; intuition, on the other hand, seems on the whole to
diminish as civilisation increases. It is greater, as a rule, in
children than in adults, in the uneducated than in the educated.
Probably in dogs it exceeds anything to be found in human beings. But
those who see in these facts a recommendation of intuition ought to
return to running wild in the woods, dyeing themselves with woad and
living on hips and haws.
Let us next examine whether intuition possesses any such infallibility
as Bergson claims for it. The best instance of it, according to him,
is our acquaintance with ourselves; yet self-knowledge is proverbially
rare and difficult. Most men, for example, have in their nature
meannesses, vanities, and envies of which they are quite unconscious,
though even their best friends can perceive them without any
difficulty. It is true that intuition has a convincingness which is
lacking to intellect: while it is present, it is almost impossible to
doubt its truth. But if it should appear, on examination, to be at
least as fallible as intellect, its greater subjective certainty
becomes a demerit, making it only the more irresistibly deceptive.
Apart from self-knowledge, one of the most notable examples of
intuition is the knowledge people believe themselves to possess of
those with whom they are in love: the wall between different
personalities seems to become transparent, and people think they see
into another soul as into their own. Yet deception in such cases is
constantly practised with success; and even where there is no
intentional deception, experience gradually proves, as a rule, that
the supposed insight was illusory, and that the slower more groping
methods of the intellect are in the long run more reliable.
Bergson maintains that intellect can only deal with things in so far
as they resemble what has been experienced in the past, while
intuition has the power of apprehending the uniqueness and novelty
that always belong to each fresh moment. That there is something
unique and new at every moment, is certainly true; it is also true
that this cannot be fully expressed by means of intellectual concepts.
Only direct acquaintance can give knowledge of what is unique and new.
But direct acquaintance of this kind is given fully in sensation, and
does not require, so far as I can see, any special faculty of
intuition for its apprehension. It is neither intellect nor intuition,
but sensation, that supplies new data; but when the data are new in
any remarkable manner, intellect is much more capable of dealing with
them than intuition would be. The hen with a brood of ducklings no
doubt has intuition which seems to place her inside them, and not
merely to know them analytically; but when the ducklings take to the
water, the whole apparent intuition is seen to be illusory, and the
hen is left helpless on the shore. Intuition, in fact, is an aspect
and development of instinct, and, like all instinct, is admirable in
those customary surroundings which have moulded the habits of the
animal in question, but totally incompetent as soon as the
surroundings are changed in a way which demands some non-habitual mode
of action.
The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of
philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals,
or to savages, or even to most civilised men. It is hardly to be
supposed, therefore, that the rapid, rough and ready methods of
instinct or intuition will find in this field a favourable ground for
their application. It is the older kinds of activity, which bring out
our kinship with remote generations of animal and semi-human
ancestors, that show intuition at its best. In such matters as
self-preservation and love, intuition will act sometimes (though not
always) with a swiftness and precision which are astonishing to the
critical intellect. But philosophy is not one of the pursuits which
illustrate our affinity with the past: it is a highly refined, highly
civilised pursuit, demanding, for its success, a certain liberation
from the life of instinct, and even, at times, a certain aloofness
from all mundane hopes and fears. It is not in philosophy, therefore,
that we can hope to see intuition at its best. On the contrary, since
the true objects of philosophy, and the habit of thought demanded for
their apprehension, are strange, unusual, and remote, it is here, more
almost than anywhere else, that intellect proves superior to
intuition, and that quick unanalysed convictions are least deserving
of uncritical acceptance.
In advocating the scientific restraint and balance, as against the
self-assertion of a confident reliance upon intuition, we are only
urging, in the sphere of knowledge, that largeness of contemplation,
that impersonal disinterestedness, and that freedom from practical
preoccupations which have been inculcated by all the great religions
of the world. Thus our conclusion, however it may conflict with the
explicit beliefs of many mystics, is, in essence, not contrary to the
spirit which inspires those beliefs, but rather the outcome of this
very spirit as applied in the realm of thought.
II. UNITY AND PLURALITY
One of the most convincing aspects of the mystic illumination is the
apparent revelation of the oneness of all things, giving rise to
pantheism in religion and to monism in philosophy. An elaborate logic,
beginning with Parmenides, and culminating in Hegel and his followers,
has been gradually developed, to prove that the universe is one
indivisible Whole, and that what seem to be its parts, if considered
as substantial and self-existing, are mere illusion. The conception
of a Reality quite other than the world of appearance, a reality one,
indivisible, and unchanging, was introduced into Western philosophy by
Parmenides, not, nominally at least, for mystical or religious
reasons, but on the basis of a logical argument as to the
impossibility of not-being, and most subsequent metaphysical systems
are the outcome of this fundamental idea.
The logic used in defence of mysticism seems to be faulty as logic,
and open to technical criticisms, which I have explained elsewhere. I
shall not here repeat these criticisms, since they are lengthy and
difficult, but shall instead attempt an analysis of the state of mind
from which mystical logic has arisen.
Belief in a reality quite different from what appears to the senses
arises with irresistible force in certain moods, which are the source
of most mysticism, and of most metaphysics. While such a mood is
dominant, the need of logic is not felt, and accordingly the more
thoroughgoing mystics do not employ logic, but appeal directly to the
immediate deliverance of their insight. But such fully developed
mysticism is rare in the West. When the intensity of emotional
conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will
search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in
himself. But since the belief already exists, he will be very
hospitable to any ground that suggests itself. The paradoxes
apparently proved by his logic are really the paradoxes of mysticism,
and are the goal which he feels his logic must reach if it is to be in
accordance with insight. The resulting logic has rendered most
philosophers incapable of giving any account of the world of science
and daily life. If they had been anxious to give such an account, they
would probably have discovered the errors of their logic; but most of
them were less anxious to understand the world of science and daily
life than to convict it of unreality in the interests of a
super-sensible "real" world.
It is in this way that logic has been pursued by those of the great
philosophers who were mystics. But since they usually took for granted
the supposed insight of the mystic emotion, their logical doctrines
were presented with a certain dryness, and were believed by their
disciples to be quite independent of the sudden illumination from
which they sprang. Nevertheless their origin clung to them, and they
remained--to borrow a useful word from Mr. Santayana--"malicious" in
regard to the world of science and common sense. It is only so that we
can account for the complacency with which philosophers have accepted
the inconsistency of their doctrines with all the common and
scientific facts which seem best established and most worthy of
belief.
The logic of mysticism shows, as is natural, the defects which are
inherent in anything malicious. The impulse to logic, not felt while
the mystic mood is dominant, reasserts itself as the mood fades, but
with a desire to retain the vanishing insight, or at least to prove
that it _was_ insight, and that what seems to contradict it is
illusion. The logic which thus arises is not quite disinterested or
candid, and is inspired by a certain hatred of the daily world to
which it is to be applied. Such an attitude naturally does not tend to
the best results. Everyone knows that to read an author simply in
order to refute him is not the way to understand him; and to read the
book of Nature with a conviction that it is all illusion is just as
unlikely to lead to understanding. If our logic is to find the common
world intelligible, it must not be hostile, but must be inspired by a
genuine acceptance such as is not usually to be found among
metaphysicians.
III. TIME
The unreality of time is a cardinal doctrine of many metaphysical
systems, often nominally based, as already by Parmenides, upon logical
arguments, but originally derived, at any rate in the founders of new
systems, from the certainty which is born in the moment of mystic
insight. As a Persian Sufi poet says:
"Past and future are what veil God from our sight.
Burn up both of them with fire! How long
Wilt thou be partitioned by these segments as a reed? "[5]
The belief that what is ultimately real must be immutable is a very
common one: it gave rise to the metaphysical notion of substance, and
finds, even now, a wholly illegitimate satisfaction in such scientific
doctrines as the conservation of energy and mass.
It is difficult to disentangle the truth and the error in this view.
The arguments for the contention that time is unreal and that the
world of sense is illusory must, I think, be regarded as fallacious.
Nevertheless there is some sense--easier to feel than to state--in
which time is an unimportant and superficial characteristic of
reality. Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the
present, and a certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential
to philosophic thought. The importance of time is rather practical
than theoretical, rather in relation to our desires than in relation
to truth. A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by
picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal
world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring
tyrant of all that is. Both in thought and in feeling, even though
time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of
wisdom.
That this is the case may be seen at once by asking ourselves why our
feelings towards the past are so different from our feelings towards
the future. The reason for this difference is wholly practical: our
wishes can affect the future but not the past, the future is to some
extent subject to our power, while the past is unalterably fixed. But
every future will some day be past: if we see the past truly now, it
must, when it was still future, have been just what we now see it to
be, and what is now future must be just what we shall see it to be
when it has become past. The felt difference of quality between past
and future, therefore, is not an intrinsic difference, but only a
difference in relation to us: to impartial contemplation, it ceases to
exist. And impartiality of contemplation is, in the intellectual
sphere, that very same virtue of disinterestedness which, in the
sphere of action, appears as justice and unselfishness. Whoever wishes
to see the world truly, to rise in thought above the tyranny of
practical desires, must learn to overcome the difference of attitude
towards past and future, and to survey the whole stream of time in one
comprehensive vision.
The kind of way in which, as it seems to me, time ought not to enter
into our theoretic philosophical thought, may be illustrated by the
philosophy which has become associated with the idea of evolution, and
which is exemplified by Nietzsche, pragmatism, and Bergson. This
philosophy, on the basis of the development which has led from the
lowest forms of life up to man, sees in _progress_ the fundamental law
of the universe, and thus admits the difference between _earlier_ and
_later_ into the very citadel of its contemplative outlook. With its
past and future history of the world, conjectural as it is, I do not
wish to quarrel.
