CHAPTER IV
DOUBTS ABOUT SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
Do I know, can I know, anything? Would not knowledge be an impossible inclusion of what lies outside? May I not rather renounce all beliefs? If only I could, what peace would descend into my perturbed conscience! The spectacle of other men’s folly continually reawakens in me the suspicion that I too am surely fooled; and the character of the beliefs which force themselves upon me — the fantasticality of space and time, the grotesque medley of nature, the cruel mockery called religion, the sorry history and absurd passions of mankind — all invite me to disown them and to say to what I call the world, “Come now; how do you expect me to believe in you?” At the same time this very incredulity and wonder in me are baseless and without credentials. What right have I to any presumptions as to what would be natural and proper? Is not the most extravagant fact as plausible as any other? Is not the most obvious axiom a wanton dogma? Yet turn whichever way I will, and refine as I may, the pressure of existence, of tyrannical absolute present being, seems to confront me. Something is evidently going on, at least in myself. I feel an instant complex strain of existence, forcing me to say that I think and that I am. Certainly the words I use in such reflection bring many images with them which may possess no truth. Thus when I say “I,” the term suggests a man, one of many living in a world contrasted with his thinking, yet partly surveyed by it. These suggestions of the word “I” might well be false. This thinking might not belong to a member of the human family, and no such race as this mankind that I am thinking of might ever have existed. The natural world in which I fancy that race living, among other races of animals, might also be imaginary. Yet, in that case, what is imagination? Banish myself and my world as much as I will, the present act of banishing them subsists and is manifest; and it was this act, now unrolling itself consciously through various phases, not any particular person in any environment, that I meant when I said, “I find that I think and am.”
In like manner the terms thinking and finding, which I use for want of anything better, imply contrasts and antecedents which I may disregard. It is not a particular process called thinking, nor a particular conjunction called finding, that I need assert to exist, but merely this passing unrest, whatever you choose to call it: these pulsations and phantoms which to deny is to produce and to strive to banish is to redouble.
It might seem for a moment as if this pressing actuality of experience implied a relation between subject and object, so that an indescribable being called the ego or self was given with and involved in any actual fact. This analysis, however, is merely grammatical, and if pressed issues in mythical notions. Analysis can never find in the object what, by hypothesis, is not there; and the object, by definition, is all that is found. But there is a biological truth, discovered much later, under this alleged analytic necessity: the truth that animal experience is a product of two factors, antecedent to the experience and not parts of it, namely, organ and stimulus, body and environment, person and situation. These two natural conditions must normally come together, like flint and steel, before the spark of experience will fly. But scepticism requires me to take the spark itself as my point of departure, since it alone lives morally and lights up with its vital flame the scene I seem to discover. This spark is single, though changeful. Experience has no conditions for a critic of knowledge who proceeds transcendentally, that is, from the vantage-ground of experience itself. To urge, therefore, that a self or ego is presupposed in experience, or even must have created experience by its absolute fiat, is curiously to fail in critical thinking, and to renounce the transcendental method. All transcendental system-makers are in fact false to the very principle by which they criticise dogmatism; a principle which admits of no system, tolerates no belief, but recalls the universe at every moment into the absolute experience which posits it here and now.
This backsliding of transcendentalism, when it forgets itself so far as to assign conditions to experience, might have no serious consequences, if transcendentalism were clearly recognised to be simply a romantic episode in reflection, a sort of poetic madness, and no necessary step in the life of reason. That its professed scepticism should so soon turn into mythology would then seem appropriate in such a disease of genius. But the delusion becomes troublesome to the serious critic of knowledge when it perhaps inclines him to imagine that, in asserting that experience is a product, and has two terms, he is describing the inner nature of experience, and not merely its external conditions, as natural history reports them. He may then be tempted to assign a metaphysical status and logical necessity to a merely material fact. Instead of the body, which is the true “subject” in experience, he may think he finds an absolute ego, and instead of the natural environment of the body, which is the true “object,” he may think he finds an illimitable reality; and, to make things simpler, he may proceed to declare that these two are one; but all this is myth.
The fact of experience, then, is single and, from its own point of view, absolutely unconditioned and groundless, impossible to explain and impossible to exorcise. Yet just as it comes unbidden, so it may fade and lapse of its own accord. It constantly seems to do so; and my hold on existence is not so firm that non-existence does not seem always at hand and, as it were, always something deeper, vaster, and more natural than existence. Yet this apprehension of an imminent non-existence — an apprehension which is itself an existing fact — cannot be trusted to penetrate to a real nothingness yawning about me unless I assert something not at all involved in the present being, and something most remarkable, namely, that I know and can survey the movement of my existence, and that it can actually have lapsed from one state into another, as I conceive it to have lapsed.
Thus the sense of a complex strain of existence, the conviction that I am and that I am thinking, involve a sense of at least possible change. I should not speak of complexity nor of strain, if various opposed developments into the not-given were not, to my feeling, striving to take place. Doors are about to open, cords to snap, blows to fall, pulsations to repeat themselves. The flux and perspectives of being seem to be open within me to my own intuition.
Caution is requisite here. All this may be simply a present obsession, destitute of all prophetic or retrospective truth, and carrying me no further, if I wish to be honest, than a bare confession of how I feel. Anything given in intuition is, by definition, an appearance and nothing but an appearance. Of course, if I am a thorough sceptic, I may discredit the existence of anything else, so that this appearance will stand in my philosophy as the only reality. But, then, I must not enlarge nor interpret nor hypostatise it: I must keep it as the mere picture it is, and revert to solipsism of the present moment. One thing is the feeling that something is happening, an intuition which finds what it finds and cannot be made to find anything else. Another thing is the belef that what is found is a report or description of events that have happened already, in such a manner that the earlier phases of the flux I am aware of existed first, before the later phases and without them; whereas in my intuition now the earlier phases are merely the first part of the given whole, exist only together with the later phases, and are earlier only in a perspective, not in a flux of successive events. Ifanything had an actual beginning, that first phase must have occurred out of relation to the subsequent phases which had not yet arisen, and only became manifest in the sequel: as the Old Testament, if really earlier than the New Testament, must have existed alone first, when it could not be called old. If it had existed only in the Christian Bible, under that perspective which renders and calls it old, it would be old only speciously and for Christian intuition, and all revelation would have been really simultaneous. In a word, specious change is not actual change. The unity of apperception which yields the sense of change renders change specious, by relating the terms and directions of change together in a single perspective, as respectively receding, passing, or arriving. In so uniting and viewing these terms, intuition of change excludes actual change in the given object. If change has been actual, it must have been prior to, and independent of, the intuition of that change.
Doubtless, as a matter of fact, this intuition of change is itself lapsing, and yielding its place in physical time to vacancy or to the intuition of changelessness; and this lapse of the intuition in physical time is an actual change. Evidently, however, it is not a given change, since neither vacancy nor the intuition of changelessness can reveal it. It is revealed, if revealed at all, by a further intuition of specious change taken as a report. Actual change, if it is to be known at all, must be known by belief and not by intuition. Doubt is accordingly always possible regarding the existence of actual change. Having renounced my faith in nature, I must not weakly retain faith in experience. This intuition of change might be false; it might be the only fact in the universe, and perfectly changeless. I should then be that intuition, but it would not bring me any true knowledge of anything actual. On the contrary, it would be an illusion, presenting a false object, since it would present nothing but change, when the only actual reality, namely its own, was unchanging. On the other hand, if this intuition of change was no illusion, but a change was actually occurring and the universe had passed into its present state out of a previous state which was different (if, for instance, this very intuition of change had grown more articulate or more complex), I should then be right in hazarding a very bold assertion, namely, that it is known to me that what now is was not always, that there are things not given, that there is genesis in nature, and that time is real.