CHAPTER III
WAYWARD SCEPTICISM
Criticism surprises the soul in the arms of convention. Children insensibly accept all the suggestions of sense and language, the only initiative they show being a certain wilfulness in the extension of these notions, a certain impulse towards private superstition. This is soon corrected by education or broken off rudely, like the nails of a tender hand, by hard contact with custom, fact, or derision. Belief then settles down in sullenness and apathy to a narrow circle of vague assumptions, to none of which the mind need have any deep affinity, none of which it need really understand, but which nevertheless it clings to for lack of other footing. The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
Of this homely philosophy the tender cuticle is religious belief; really the least vital and most arbitrary part of human opinion, the outer ring, as it were, of the fortifications of prejudice, but for that very reason the most jealously defended; since it is on being attacked there, at the least defensible point, that rage and alarm at being attacked at all are first aroused in the citadel. People are not naturally sceptics, wondering if a single one of their intellectual habits can be reasonably preserved; they are dogmatists angrily confident of maintaining them all. Integral minds, pupils of a single coherent tradition, regard their religion, whatever it may be, as certain, as sublime, and as the only rational basis of morality and policy. Yet in fact religious belief is terribly precarious, partly because it is arbitrary, so that in the next tribe or in the next century it will wear quite a different form; and partly because, when genuine, it is spontaneous and continually remodelled, like poetry, in the heart that gives it birth. A man of the world soon learns to discredit established religions on account of their variety and ae although he may good-naturedly continue to conform to his own; and a mystic before long begins fervently to condemn current dogmas, on account of his own different inspiration. Without philosophical criticism, therefore, mere experience and good sense suggest that all positive religions are false, or at least (which is enough for my present purpose) that they are all fantastic and insecure.
Closely allied with religious beliefs there are usually legends and histories, dramatic if not miraculous; and a man who knows anything of literature and has observed how histories are written, even in the most enlightened times, needs no satirist to remind him that all histories, in so far as they contain a system, a drama, or a moral, are so much literary fiction, and probably disingenuous. Common sense, however, will still admit that there are recorded facts not to be doubted, as it will admit that there are obvious physical facts; and it is here, when popular philosophy has been reduced to a kind of positivism, that the speculative critic may well step upon the scene.
Criticism, I have said, has no first principle, and its desultory character may be clearly exhibited at this point by asking whether the evidence of science or that of history should be questioned first. I might impugn the belief in physical facts reported by the senses and by natural science, such as the existence of a ring of Saturn, reducing them to appearances, which are facts reported by personal remembrance; and this is actually the choice made by British and German critics of knowledge, who, relying on memory and history, have denied the existence of anything but experience. Yet the opposite procedure would seem more judicious; knowledge of the facts reported by history is mediated by documents which are physical facts; and these documents must first be discovered and believed to have subsisted unknown and to have had a more or less remote origin in time and place, before they can be taken as evidence for any mental events; for if I did not believe that there had been any men in Athens I should not imagine they had had any thoughts. Even personal memory, when it professes to record any distant experience, can recognise and place this experience only by first reconstructing the material scene in which it. occurred. Memory records moral events in terms of their physical occasions; and if the latter are merely imaginary, the former must be doubly so, like the thoughts of a personage in a novel. My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.
Romantic solipsism, in which the self making up the universe is a moral person endowed with memory and vanity, is accordingly untenable. Not that it is unthinkable or self-contradictory; because all the complementary objects which might be requisite to give point and body to the idea of oneself might be only ideas and not facts; and a solitary deity imagining a world or remembering his own past constitutes a perfectly conceivable universe. But this imagination would have no truth and this remembrance no control; so that the fond belief of such a deity that he knew his own past would be the most groundless of dogmas; and while by chance the dogma might be true, that deity would have no reason to think it so. At the first touch of criticism he would be obliged to confess that his alleged past was merely a picture now before him, and that he had no reason to suppose that this picture had had any constancy in successive moments, or that he had lived through previous moments at all; nor could any new experience ever lend any colour or corroboration to such a pathological conviction. This is obvious; so that romantic solipsism, although perhaps an interesting state of mind, is not a position capable of defence; and any solipsism which is not a solipsism of the present moment is logically contemptible.
The postulates on which empirical knowledge and inductive science are based — namely, that there has been a past, that it was such as it is now thought to be, that there will be a future and that it must, for some inconceivable reason, resemble the past and obey the same laws — these are all gratuitous dogmas. The sceptic in his honest retreat knows nothing of a future, and has no need of such an unwarrantable idea. He may perhaps have images before him of scenes somehow not in the foreground, with a sense of before and after running through the texture of them; and he may call this background of his sentiency the past; but the relative obscurity and evanescence of these phantoms will not prompt him to suppose that they have retreated to obscurity from the light of day. They will be to him simply what he experiences them as being, denizens of the twilight. It would be a vain fancy to imagine that these ghosts had once been men; they are simply nether gods, native to the Erebus they inhabit. The world present to the sceptic may continue to fade into these opposite abysses, the past and the future; but having renounced all prejudice and checked all customary faith, he will regard both as painted abysses only, like the opposite exits to the country and to the city on the ancient stage. He will see the masked actors (and he will invent a reason) rushing frantically out on one side and in at the other; but he knows that the moment they are out of sight the play is over for them; those outlying regions and those reported events which the messengers narrate so impressively are pure fancy; and there is nothing for him but to sit in his seat and lend his mind to the tragic illusion.
The solipsist thus becomes an incredulous spectator of his own romance, thinks his own adventures fictions, and accepts a solipsism of the present moment. This is an honest position, and certain attempts to refute it as self-contradictory are based on a misunderstanding. For example, it is irrelevant to urge that the present moment cannot comprise the whole of existence because the phrase “a present moment” implies a chain of moments; or that the mind that calls any moment the present moment virtually transcends it and posits a past and a future beyond it. These arguments confuse the convictions of the solipsist with those of a spectator describing him from outside. The sceptic is not committed to the implications of other men’s language; nor can he be convicted out of his own mouth by the names he is obliged to bestow on the details of his momentary vision. There may be long vistas in it; there may be many figures of men and beasts, many legends and apocalypses depicted on his canvas; there may even be a shadowy frame about it, or the suggestion of a gigantic ghostly something on the hither side of it which he may call himself. All this wealth of objects is not inconsistent with solipsism, although the implication of the conventional terms in which those objects are described may render it difficult for the solipsist always to remember his solitude. Yet when he reflects, he perceives it; and all his heroic efforts are concentrated on not asserting and not implying anything, but simply noticing what he finds. Scepticism is not concerned to abolish ideas; it can relish the variety and order of a pictured world, or of any number of them in succession, without any of the qualms and exclusions proper to dogmatism. Its case is simply not to credit these ideas, not to posit any of these fancied worlds, nor this ghostly mind imagined as viewing them. The attitude of the sceptic is not inconsistent; it is merely difficult, because it is hard for the greedy intellect to keep its cake without eating it. Very voracious dogmatists like Spinoza even assert that it is impossible, but the impossibility is only psychological, and due to their voracity; they no doubt speak truly for themselves when they say that the idea of a horse, if not contradicted by some other idea, is a belief that the horse exists; but this would not be the case if they felt no impulse to ride that imagined horse, or to get out of its way. Ideas become beliefs only when by precipitating tendencies to action they persuade me that they are signs of things; and these things are not those ideas simply hypostatised, but are believed to be compacted of many parts, and full of ambushed powers, entirely absent from the ideas. The belief is imposed on me surreptitiously by a latent mechanical reaction of my body on the object producing the idea; it is by no means implied in any qualities obvious in that idea. Such a latent reaction, being mechanical, can hardly be avoided, but it may be discounted in reflection, if a man has experience and the poise of a philosopher; and scepticism is not the less honourable for being difficult, when it is inspired by a firm determination to probe this confused and terrible apparition of life to the bottom.
So far is solipsism of the present moment from being self-contradictory that it might, under other circumstances, be the normal and invincible attitude of the spirit; and I suspect it may be that of many animals. The difficulties I find in maintaining it consistently come from the social and laborious character of human life. A creature whose whole existence was passed under a hard shell, or was spent in a free flight, might find nothing paradoxical or acrobatic in solipsism; nor would he feel the anguish which men feel in doubt, because doubt leaves them defenceless and undecided in the presence of on-coming events. A creature whose actions were pre-determined might have a clearer mind. He might keenly enjoy the momentary scene, never conceiving himself as a separate body or as anything but the unity of that scene, nor his enjoyment as anything but its beauty: nor would he harbour the least suspicion that it would change or perish, nor any objection to its doing so if it chose. Solipsism would then be selflessness and scepticism simplicity. They would not be open to disruption from within. The ephemeral insect would accept the evidence of his ephemeral object, whatever quality this might chance to have; he would not suppose, as Descartes did, that in thinking anything his own existence was involved. Being new-born himself, with only this one innate (and also experimental) idea, he would bring to his single experience no extraneous habits of interpretation or inference ; and he would not be troubled by doubts, because he would believe nothing.
For men, however, who are long-lived and teachable animals, solipsism of the present moment is a violent pose, permitted only to the young philosopher, in his first intellectual despair; and even he often cheats himself when he thinks he assumes it, and professing to stand on his head really, like a clumsy acrobat, rests on his hands also. The very terms “solipsism” and “present moment” betray this impurity. An actual intuition, which by hypothesis is fresh, absolute, and not to be repeated, is called and is perhaps conceived as an ipse, a self-same man. But identity (as I shall have occasion to observe in discussing identity in essences) implies two moments, two instances, or two intuitions, between which it obtains. Similarly, a “present moment” suggests other moments, and an adventitious limitation either in duration or in scope; but the solipsist and his world (which are not distinguishable) have by hypothesis no environment whatsoever, and nothing limits them save the fact that there is nothing more. These irrelevances and side glances are imported into the mind of the sceptic because in fact he is retreating into solipsism from a far more ambitious philosophy. A thought naturally momentary would be immune from them.
A perfect solipsist, therefore, hardly is found amongst men; but some men are zealous in bringing their criticism down to solipsism of the present moment just because this attitude enables them to cast away everything that is not present in their prevalent mood, or in their deepest thought, and to set up this chosen object as the absolute. Such a compensatory dogma is itself not critical; but criticism may help to raise it to a specious eminence by lopping off everything else. What remains will be different in different persons: some say it is Brahma, some that it is Pure Being, some that it is the Idea or Law of the moral world. Each of these absolutes is the sacred residuum which the temperament of different philosophers or of different nations clings to, and will not criticise, and in each case it is contrasted with the world in which the vulgar believe, as something deeper, simpler, and more real. Perhaps when solipsism of the present moment is reached by a philosopher trained in abstraction and inclined to ecstasy, his experience, at this depth of concentration, will be that of an extreme tension which is also liberty, an emptiness which is intensest light; and his denial of all natural facts and events, which he will call illusions, will culminate in the fervent assertion that all is One, and that One is Brahma, or the breath of life. On the other hand, a scientific observer and reasoner, who has pried into substance, and has learned that all the aspects of nature are relative and variable, may still not deny the existence of matter in every object; and this element of mere intensity, drawn from the sense of mere actuality in himself, may lead him to assert that pure Being is, and everything else is not. Finally, a secondary mind fed on books may drop the natural emphasis which objects of sense have for the living animal, and may retain, as the sole filling of its present moment, nothing but the sciences. The philosopher will then balance his denial of material facts by asserting the absolute reality of his knowledge of them. This reality, however, will extend no farther than his information, as some intensest moment of recollection may gather it together; and his personal idea of the world, so composed and so limited, will seem to him the sole existence. His universe will be the after-image of his learning.
We may notice that in these three instances scepticism has not suspended affirmation but has rather intensified it, pouring it all on the devoted head of one chosen object. There is a tireless and deafening vehemence about these sceptical prophets; it betrays the poor old human Psyche labouring desperately within them in the shipwreck of her native hopes, and refusing to die. Her sacrifice, she believes, will be her salvation, and she passionately identifies what remains to her with all she has lost and by an audacious falsehood persuades herself she has lost nothing. Thus the temper of these sceptics is not at all sceptical. They take their revenge on the world, which eluded them when they tried to prove its existence, by asserting the existence of the remnant which they have still by them, insisting that this, and this only, is the true and perfect world, and a much better one than that false world in which the heathen trust. Such infatuation in the solipsist, however, is not inevitable; no such exorbitant credit need be given to the object, perhaps a miserable one, which still fills the sceptical mind, and a more dispassionate scepticism, while contemplating that object, may disallow it.