The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
hypothesis. Only in such a world can moral judgments have a claim to
be. For the bad is that which takes the place of something else which
possibly might have been where it now is, and the better is that which
absolutely might be where it absolutely is not. In the universe of
Hegel--the absolute block whose parts have no loose play, the pure
plethora of necessary being with the oxygen of possibility all
suffocated out of its lungs--there can be neither good nor bad, but one
dead level of mere fate.
But I have tired the reader out. The worst of criticising Hegel is
that the very arguments we use against him give forth strange and
hollow sounds that make them seem almost as fantastic as the errors to
which they are addressed. The sense of a universal mirage, of a
ghostly unreality, steals over us, which is the very moonlit atmosphere
of Hegelism itself. What wonder then if, instead of {293} converting,
our words do but rejoice and delight, those already baptized in the
faith of confusion? To their charmed senses we all seem children of
Hegel together, only some of us have not the wit to know our own
father. Just as Romanists are sure to inform us that our reasons
against Papal Christianity unconsciously breathe the purest spirit of
Catholicism, so Hegelism benignantly smiles at our exertions, and
murmurs, "If the red slayer think he slays;" "When me they fly, I am
the wings," etc.
To forefend this unwelcome adoption, let me recapitulate in a few
propositions the reasons why I am not an hegelian.
1. We cannot eat our cake and have it; that is, the only real
contradiction there can be between thoughts is where one is true, the
other false. When this happens, one must go forever; nor is there any
'higher synthesis' in which both can wholly revive.
2. A chasm is not a bridge in any utilizable sense; that is, no mere
negation can be the instrument of a positive advance in thought.
3. The continua, time, space, and the ego, are bridges, because they
are without chasm.
4. But they bridge over the chasms between represented qualities only
partially.
5. This partial bridging, however, makes the qualities share in a
common world.
6. The other characteristics of the qualities are separate facts.
7. But the same quality appears in many times and spaces. Generic
sameness of the quality wherever found becomes thus a further means by
which the jolts are reduced.
8. What between different qualities jolts remain. {294} Each, as far
as the other is concerned, is an absolutely separate and contingent
being.
9. The moral judgment may lead us to postulate as irreducible the
contingencies of the world.
10. Elements mutually contingent are not in conflict so long as they
partake of the continua of time, space, etc.,--partaking being the
exact opposite of strife. They conflict only when, as mutually
exclusive possibilities, they strive to possess themselves of the same
parts of time, space, and ego.
11. That there are such real conflicts, irreducible to any
intelligence, and giving rise to an excess of possibility over
actuality, is an hypothesis, but a credible one. No philosophy should
pretend to be anything more.
NOTE.--Since the preceding article was written, some observations on
the effects of nitrous-oxide-gas-intoxication which I was prompted to
make by reading the pamphlet called The Anaesthetic Revelation and the
Gist of Philosophy, by Benjamin Paul Blood, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874,
have made me understand better than ever before both the strength and
the weakness of Hegel's philosophy. I strongly urge others to repeat
the experiment, which with pure gas is short and harmless enough. The
effects will of course vary with the individual. Just as they vary in
the same individual from time to time; but it is probable that in the
former case, as in the latter, a generic resemblance will obtain. With
me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the
experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense
metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth
beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the
logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity
to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety
returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly
at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at a
cadaverous-looking snow-peak from which the sunset glow has just fled,
or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand.
{295}
The immense emotional sense of _reconciliation_ which characterizes the
'maudlin' stage of alcoholic drunkenness,--a stage which seems silly to
lookers-on, but the subjective rapture of which probably constitutes a
chief part of the temptation to the vice,--is well known. The centre
and periphery of things seem to come together. The ego and its
objects, the _meum_ and the _tuum_, are one. Now this, only a
thousandfold enhanced, was the effect upon me of the gas: and its first
result was to make peal through me with unutterable power the
conviction that Hegelism was true after all, and that the deepest
convictions of my intellect hitherto were wrong. Whatever idea or
representation occurred to the mind was seized by the same logical
forceps, and served to illustrate the same truth; and that truth was
that every opposition, among whatsoever things, vanishes in a higher
unity in which it is based; that all contradictions, so-called, are but
differences; that all differences are of degree; that all degrees are
of a common kind; that unbroken continuity is of the essence of being;
and that we are literally in the midst of _an infinite_, to perceive
the existence of which is the utmost we can attain. Without the _same_
as a basis, how could strife occur? Strife presupposes something to be
striven about; and in this common topic, the same for both parties, the
differences merge. From the hardest contradiction to the tenderest
diversity of verbiage differences evaporate; _yes_ and _no_ agree at
least in being assertions; a denial of a statement is but another mode
of stating the same, contradiction can only occur of the same
thing,--all opinions are thus synonyms, are synonymous, are the same.
But the same phrase by difference of emphasis is two; and here again
difference and no-difference merge in one.
It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of the
identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this
experience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written
during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless
drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire
of infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death,
I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity
and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and
swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and
small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty
other {296} contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way.
The mind saw how each term _belonged_ to its contrast through a
knife-edge moment of transition which _it_ effected, and which,
perennial and eternal, was the _nunc stans_ of life. The thought of
mutual implication of the parts in the bare form of a judgment of
opposition, as 'nothing--but,' 'no more--than,' 'only--if,' etc.,
produced a perfect delirium of theoretic rapture. And at last, when
definite ideas to work on came slowly, the mind went through the mere
_form_ of recognizing sameness in identity by contrasting the same word
with itself, differently emphasized, or shorn of its initial letter.
Let me transcribe a few sentences:
What's mistake but a kind of take?
What's nausea but a kind of -ausea?
Sober, drunk, -_unk_, astonishment.
Everything can become the subject of criticism--how
criticise without something _to_ criticise?
Agreement--disagreement!!
Emotion--motion!!!
Die away from, _from_, die away (without the _from_).
Reconciliation of opposites; sober, drunk, all the same!
Good and evil reconciled in a laugh!
It escapes, it escapes!
But----
What escapes, WHAT escapes?
Emphasis, EMphasis; there must be some emphasis in order
for there to be a phasis.
No verbiage can give it, because the verbiage is _other_.
_In_coherent, coherent--same.
And it fades! And it's infinite! AND it's infinite!
If it was n't _going_, why should you hold on to it?
Don't you see the difference, don't you see the identity?
Constantly opposites united!
The same me telling you to write and not to write!
Extreme--extreme, extreme! Within the _ex_tensity that
'extreme' contains is contained the '_extreme_' of intensity.
Something, and _other_ than that thing!
Intoxication, and _otherness_ than intoxication.
Every attempt at betterment,--every attempt at otherment,--is a----.
It fades forever and forever as we move.
{297}
There _is_ a reconciliation!
Reconciliation--_e_conciliation!
By God, how that hurts! By God, how it _does n't_ hurt!
Reconciliation of two extremes.
By George, nothing but _o_thing!
That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure _on_sense!
Thought deeper than speech----!
Medical school; divinity school, _school_! SCHOOL! Oh my
God, oh God, oh God!
The most coherent and articulate sentence which came was this:--
There are no differences but differences of degree between different
degrees of difference and no difference.
This phrase has the true Hegelian ring, being in fact a regular _sich
als sich auf sich selbst beziehende Negativität_. And true Hegelians
will _überhaupt_ be able to read between the lines and feel, at any
rate, what _possible_ ecstasies of cognitive emotion might have bathed
these tattered fragments of thought when they were alive. But for the
assurance of a certain amount of respect from them, I should hardly
have ventured to print what must be such caviare to the general.
But now comes the reverse of the medal. What is the principle of unity
in all this monotonous rain of instances? Although I did not see it at
first, I soon found that it was in each case nothing but the abstract
_genus_ of which the conflicting terms were opposite species. In other
words, although the flood of ontologic _emotion_ was Hegelian through
and through, the _ground_ for it was nothing but the world-old
principle that things are the same only so far and no farther than they
_are_ the same, or partake of a common nature,--the principle that
Hegel most tramples under foot. At the same time the rapture of
beholding a process that was infinite, changed (as the nature of the
infinitude was realized by the mind) into the sense of a dreadful and
ineluctable fate, with whose magnitude every finite effort is
incommensurable and in the light of which whatever happens is
indifferent. This instantaneous revulsion of mood from rapture to
horror is, perhaps, the strongest emotion I have ever experienced. I
got it repeatedly when the inhalation was continued long enough to
produce incipient nausea; and I cannot but regard it as the normal and
inevitable outcome of the {298} intoxication, if sufficiently
prolonged. A pessimistic fatalism, depth within depth of impotence and
indifference, reason and silliness united, not in a higher synthesis,
but in the fact that whichever you choose it is all one,--this is the
upshot of a revelation that began so rosy bright.
Even when the process stops short of this ultimatum, the reader will
have noticed from the phrases quoted how often it ends by losing the