Theaetetus
inward is like saying that the arm of the workman is stronger than the
constructing or directing mind.
Returning to the senses we may briefly consider two questions--first
their relation to the mind, secondly, their relation to outward
objects:--
1. The senses are not merely 'holes set in a wooden horse' (Theaet.),
but instruments of the mind with which they are organically connected.
There is no use of them without some use of words--some natural or
latent logic--some previous experience or observation. Sensation, like
all other mental processes, is complex and relative, though apparently
simple. The senses mutually confirm and support one another; it is hard
to say how much our impressions of hearing may be affected by those
of sight, or how far our impressions of sight may be corrected by the
touch, especially in infancy. The confirmation of them by one another
cannot of course be given by any one of them. Many intuitions which are
inseparable from the act of sense are really the result of complicated
reasonings. The most cursory glance at objects enables the experienced
eye to judge approximately of their relations and distance, although
nothing is impressed upon the retina except colour, including gradations
of light and shade. From these delicate and almost imperceptible
differences we seem chiefly to derive our ideas of distance and
position. By comparison of what is near with what is distant we learn
that the tree, house, river, etc. which are a long way off are objects
of a like nature with those which are seen by us in our immediate
neighbourhood, although the actual impression made on the eye is very
different in one case and in the other. This is a language of 'large and
small letters' (Republic), slightly differing in form and exquisitely
graduated by distance, which we are learning all our life long, and
which we attain in various degrees according to our powers of sight or
observation. There is nor the consideration. The greater or less strain
upon the nerves of the eye or ear is communicated to the mind and
silently informs the judgment. We have also the use not of one eye only,
but of two, which give us a wider range, and help us to discern, by the
greater or less acuteness of the angle which the rays of sight form,
the distance of an object and its relation to other objects. But we are
already passing beyond the limits of our actual knowledge on a subject
which has given rise to many conjectures. More important than the
addition of another conjecture is the observation, whether in the case
of sight or of any other sense, of the great complexity of the causes
and the great simplicity of the effect.
The sympathy of the mind and the ear is no less striking than
the sympathy of the mind and the eye. Do we not seem to perceive
instinctively and as an act of sense the differences of articulate
speech and of musical notes? Yet how small a part of speech or of music
is produced by the impression of the ear compared with that which is
furnished by the mind!
Again: the more refined faculty of sense, as in animals so also in man,
seems often to be transmitted by inheritance. Neither must we forget
that in the use of the senses, as in his whole nature, man is a social
being, who is always being educated by language, habit, and the teaching
of other men as well as by his own observation. He knows distance
because he is taught it by a more experienced judgment than his own; he
distinguishes sounds because he is told to remark them by a person of
a more discerning ear. And as we inherit from our parents or other
ancestors peculiar powers of sense or feeling, so we improve and
strengthen them, not only by regular teaching, but also by sympathy and
communion with other persons.
2. The second question, namely, that concerning the relation of the mind
to external objects, is really a trifling one, though it has been made
the subject of a famous philosophy. We may if we like, with Berkeley,
resolve objects of sense into sensations; but the change is one of name
only, and nothing is gained and something is lost by such a resolution
or confusion of them. For we have not really made a single step towards
idealism, and any arbitrary inversion of our ordinary modes of speech is
disturbing to the mind. The youthful metaphysician is delighted at his
marvellous discovery that nothing is, and that what we see or feel is
our sensation only: for a day or two the world has a new interest to
him; he alone knows the secret which has been communicated to him by the
philosopher, that mind is all--when in fact he is going out of his mind
in the first intoxication of a great thought. But he soon finds that
all things remain as they were--the laws of motion, the properties of
matter, the qualities of substances. After having inflicted his theories
on any one who is willing to receive them 'first on his father and
mother, secondly on some other patient listener, thirdly on his dog,'
he finds that he only differs from the rest of mankind in the use of a
word. He had once hoped that by getting rid of the solidity of matter he
might open a passage to worlds beyond. He liked to think of the world as
the representation of the divine nature, and delighted to imagine angels
and spirits wandering through space, present in the room in which he is
sitting without coming through the door, nowhere and everywhere at the
same instant. At length he finds that he has been the victim of his own
fancies; he has neither more nor less evidence of the supernatural than
he had before. He himself has become unsettled, but the laws of the
world remain fixed as at the beginning. He has discovered that his
appeal to the fallibility of sense was really an illusion. For whatever
uncertainty there may be in the appearances of nature, arises only out
of the imperfection or variation of the human senses, or possibly from
the deficiency of certain branches of knowledge; when science is able to
apply her tests, the uncertainty is at an end. We are apt sometimes
to think that moral and metaphysical philosophy are lowered by the
influence which is exercised over them by physical science. But any
interpretation of nature by physical science is far in advance of such
idealism. The philosophy of Berkeley, while giving unbounded license to
the imagination, is still grovelling on the level of sense.
We may, if we please, carry this scepticism a step further, and
deny, not only objects of sense, but the continuity of our sensations
themselves. We may say with Protagoras and Hume that what is appears,
and that what appears appears only to individuals, and to the same
individual only at one instant. But then, as Plato asks,--and we must
repeat the question,--What becomes of the mind? Experience tells us by a
thousand proofs that our sensations of colour, taste, and the like,
are the same as they were an instant ago--that the act which we are
performing one minute is continued by us in the next--and also
supplies abundant proof that the perceptions of other men are, speaking
generally, the same or nearly the same with our own. After having slowly
and laboriously in the course of ages gained a conception of a whole and
parts, of the constitution of the mind, of the relation of man to God
and nature, imperfect indeed, but the best we can, we are asked to
return again to the 'beggarly elements' of ancient scepticism, and
acknowledge only atoms and sensations devoid of life or unity. Why
should we not go a step further still and doubt the existence of the
senses of all things? We are but 'such stuff as dreams are made of;'
for we have left ourselves no instruments of thought by which we can
distinguish man from the animals, or conceive of the existence even of a
mollusc. And observe, this extreme scepticism has been allowed to spring
up among us, not, like the ancient scepticism, in an age when nature and
language really seemed to be full of illusions, but in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, when men walk in the daylight of inductive
science.
The attractiveness of such speculations arises out of their true nature
not being perceived. They are veiled in graceful language; they are not
pushed to extremes; they stop where the human mind is disposed also to
stop--short of a manifest absurdity. Their inconsistency is not observed
by their authors or by mankind in general, who are equally inconsistent
themselves. They leave on the mind a pleasing sense of wonder and
novelty: in youth they seem to have a natural affinity to one class of
persons as poetry has to another; but in later life either we drift
back into common sense, or we make them the starting-points of a higher
philosophy.
We are often told that we should enquire into all things before we
accept them;--with what limitations is this true? For we cannot use
our senses without admitting that we have them, or think without
presupposing that there is in us a power of thought, or affirm that all
knowledge is derived from experience without implying that this first
principle of knowledge is prior to experience. The truth seems to be
that we begin with the natural use of the mind as of the body, and
we seek to describe this as well as we can. We eat before we know the
nature of digestion; we think before we know the nature of reflection.
As our knowledge increases, our perception of the mind enlarges also. We
cannot indeed get beyond facts, but neither can we draw any line which
separates facts from ideas. And the mind is not something separate
from them but included in them, and they in the mind, both having a
distinctness and individuality of their own. To reduce our conception of
mind to a succession of feelings and sensations is like the attempt to
view a wide prospect by inches through a microscope, or to calculate a
period of chronology by minutes. The mind ceases to exist when it loses
its continuity, which though far from being its highest determination,
is yet necessary to any conception of it. Even an inanimate nature
cannot be adequately represented as an endless succession of states or
conditions.
Paragraph II. Another division of the subject has yet to be considered:
Why should the doctrine that knowledge is sensation, in ancient times,
or of sensationalism or materialism in modern times, be allied to the
lower rather than to the higher view of ethical philosophy? At
first sight the nature and origin of knowledge appear to be wholly
disconnected from ethics and religion, nor can we deny that the ancient
Stoics were materialists, or that the materialist doctrines prevalent
in modern times have been associated with great virtues, or that both
religious and philosophical idealism have not unfrequently parted
company with practice. Still upon the whole it must be admitted that the
higher standard of duty has gone hand in hand with the higher conception
of knowledge. It is Protagoras who is seeking to adapt himself to
the opinions of the world; it is Plato who rises above them: the one
maintaining that all knowledge is sensation; the other basing the
virtues on the idea of good. The reason of this phenomenon has now to be
examined.
By those who rest knowledge immediately upon sense, that explanation of
human action is deemed to be the truest which is nearest to sense. As
knowledge is reduced to sensation, so virtue is reduced to feeling,
happiness or good to pleasure. The different virtues--the various
characters which exist in the world--are the disguises of self-interest.
Human nature is dried up; there is no place left for imagination, or in
any higher sense for religion. Ideals of a whole, or of a state, or of a
law of duty, or of a divine perfection, are out of place in an Epicurean
philosophy. The very terms in which they are expressed are suspected of