Essay I. On Truth and the Understanding.
In this wild maze their vain endeavours end:
How can the less the greater comprehend?
Or finite reason reach Infinity?
For what could fathom God, were more than He.
DRYDEN.
MUCH in linguistic thinking is inexact,
unsound, and destined simply to produce an effect rather than to resolve a
conundrum. As linguistics are but words, and words are but sounds, it is most
improbable that this grievous obstacle to the exactitude of human learning
should be ever quite overcome. Words often seem, like semaphore flags upon the
riggings of sailing ships, to appear and disperse as great spectral arrays of
colours and shapes, each invoking a particular set of associations relative to
the other, and all mutually convoking the plural assemblage of a pervasive
theme. A considerably intricate system thus serves an entirely nebulous
practice, and a grid of rules quarters the cacophony of chaos, yet the
linguistic method nonetheless remains, notwithstanding its inaccuracies, the
most effectual and indispensable means of man's intellectual concourse.
Indeed, that
restrictive element of inaccuracy is seemingly laden about each and every mode
of human expression. Numeracy is but representative of quantities seen[1],
geometry but imitative of irregular material shapes, and algebra but a
manipulation of inferences. Each system reveals its origin in the inadequate
observations of the defective senses. Consequently, it is perhaps unreasonable
to expect of mankind that certainty of deliberation which might be the more
rationally anticipated elsewhere. Truisms, however apparently exact, are ever
riddled by the associative variance of their means of expression, and lose by
complication the essences of notions. Therefore the sun does not rise in the
east or set in the west, though the earth's rotation makes it seem so;
therefore the earth's rotation does not
make it seem so, for it is not the earth's rotation but the sun's rotation of
the earth; but the sun's rotation of the earth does not simply make it seem so,
for nothing is seen without perception; yet perception and the sun's rotation
of the earth are also each dependent upon all the extraneous and contextual
qualifiers of existence. Hence nothing which does not perfectly describe
everything can perfectly describe anything.
It is possible that probable beliefs, and not certain truths, are the
most for which a man might reasonably hope. Whether that is due to an
insufficient expression of the belief, an insufficient means of the expression
of the belief, or simply the belief's intrinsic insufficiency, it will little
aid man to know. For the unfortunate but inevitable conclusion of all the sages
since Socrates has been that our conscious minds, however apparently unparalleled
upon earth, are themselves insufficient. When that is realised, when our own
personalities’ very capacity to see the light itself, and not simply to worship
it, is justly questioned, then ought the attempt to fashion perfect expressions
be interrupted and the search for spoken certainty abandoned. Send not for gold
from a tin mine.
Yet send for tin;
hopeless abandon is a hopeful indignity. A vainglorious polemicist hopes to
hunt by force what he cannot by ingenuity, namely, that elusive game truth. Earthly truth, however, is quite
as impossible to bag brazenly as it is difficult to bag cautiously. One cannot
simply hew down the coverts of the old doctrines and expect to find scampering
truth bounding about the open. He will have sheltered in the felled trees, or
retired to his old caverns, indignant at the ill-usage which only fools could
mete out upon the honoured old hunting grounds of wisdom.
For a philosophy, as
a structure, must be proportional to its foundations lest it should grow unwieldy,
unstable, and collapse upon itself in its imbalance. It is impossible to uphold
anything if the natures of reality and perspective, and therefore of truth and
falsehood, are not firstly postulated. One cannot recognise the unseen;
discernment must precede definition, and observation—both. Hence the views of
the empiricists who have made it their rage not only to discredit partial
belief but to discredit vital truth. The moment, however, a sceptic begins to
doubt as to truth is the moment he implies the truth of doubt and ‘the user so
destroys it’. At least a tincture of intellectual courage is necessary in all
contemplation, and truly all those who have ever expressed a thought express
this. The only difference between the experimentalist and the metaphysician is
that the experimentalist thinks truth is concealed in phenomena and the
metaphysician thinks phenomena is contained in truth. Whether either is true or
useful is a thing to consider only after enquiry. None can attain anything
without efforts and attempts; even the landed heir loses his fortune if he
loses his life.
Enough then of postulates
written in water and the scrutiny of design! Within each person is a natural
brain which, however modified or degraded by influence or disease, is always
capable while it lives of a certain primary construction. An infant possesses
this power, a dying man possesses it, a madman possesses it. Even those in the
grip of dementia and those who are comatose possess it. It is the inherited
power of the inherited knowledge which makes the brain. The lobotomised have it
even, and the alcoholic, and the drug-addled. Still in these worst conditions,
where the brain is severely affected or injured, the principal force of truth
survives. Only in death is it apparently thwarted, and yet what may a bystander
tell? The assorted parts of the human body are individually alive in themselves
as well as collectively in the mystery of the personality. The stomach is a
variety of brain and the brain a variety of stomach; does not the stomach react
to fear, does not the brain hunger and digest?
When the heart beats
it is in certain knowledge that it must and should; as when the lungs breathe,
the eyes perceive, the ears hear, the brain thinks. These actions are made to
the extent of their capacities with such conviction and persistence that if
they were wrong they must be called bigoted, but as they are right they must be
called certain. In this is that which all have longed to discover, the certain
knowledge which cannot be confuted. Not even David Hume could compel his body
by force of argument to act otherwise.
Thus to a furthered
extent there are thoughts which, however closely scrutinised or angrily
repudiated by the personality, are always maintained in the larger and wiser
parts of the brain which are inaccessible to the individual. Why is it then the
tired old analyst philosophies of Russell and Moore still survive, to throw wet
rags upon every lightsome new philosophy. They ridicule anyone whose opinions
extend beyond ‘I don’t know’, and although some circumstantial good might have
come of this levelling influence during days when much madness was mistaken for
reason, no good can continue to glow during a most sober age from so
intrinsically false a flame as the school of analyst empiricism. For though it
is but common sense to prefer evidence to fancy it is madness to prefer doubt
to belief, and vicious nonsense to speak of ‘truth’s untruth and untruth’s
truth’.
Such indeed have
been the irregular methods of late scholarship that some appear to have erred
so widely as even to confound the imaginable with the actual. Hence that
extraordinary interpretation of Schrodinger's cat which does not simply admit
that the cat could be alive or dead
but positively contends that it is both alive and dead. Thus, all things which might be to these scholars
evidently must be. There are not only multiple universes, but parallel
universes, each fulfilling the innumerable possibilities unfulfilled in
another.
If an apple is an
apple is it only an apple? To say an apple is an apple would not, to a
right-minded person, be a false description, yet to a fully rational being it
could not be a wholly true description. A wholly true description must be a
perfect description. This perfection must exist if imperfection exists. There
could be no northerly direction without the North Pole; no inferiority without
superiority; no base without a summit. To admit the slight is to admit the
absolute, for nothing could be slight except before the absolute. An apple
perfectly described would be the whole truth of existence perfectly described,
as the parts could not be comprehended without the whole. It would be
impossible to perfectly understand the shattered shards of a wine glass without
perfectly understanding the wine glass.
To consider,
therefore, the case against the supposition of there being 'nothing either good
or bad (or true or false) but thinking makes it so', in the barest of terms,
for complexity is simplicity in verbosity, it will be necessary to consider
existence itself. If existence itself has no reality to it, that is, if it is
solely a mist of perceptions and nowhere indisputable, as it would be where
nothing was actually true but only conceivably true, then a question arises to
which no very satisfactory answer may be made. What is it which perception
perceives? Furthermore, how may there be the perception of reality without the
reality of perception, that is to say, how might a merely perceived perception
perceive? An existence of perception without reality is in fact no existence.
By the implications of these words it is self-evident that there might
conceivably be a reality without perception, but that there could be perception
without reality is roundly impossible. The hallucinating drunkard perceives the
largely non-existent, presumably because of a dysfunction in his truly extant
brain. The brain makes a murky brown of its pure blues, yellows, greens, and
reds. In an existence of no reality, however, there would be no paints to irresponsibly
mix and no palette upon which to mix them.
What then might be
the nature of the truth? Only the utmost understanding could perfectly know,
yet as seas might be speculated at by raindrops, and deserts by sand grains, so
too might this perfection be imperfectly supposed. Plainly an ultimate of truth
must exist where slight truths exist; if that ultimate is a being it is God; if
that ultimate is not a being it is existence itself comprised. Human beings are
individual beings which harbour a massive array of smaller beings, or
microorganisms, upon their bodies. It is not impossible that the same is true
of God, and that existence is his body. It would be fruitless of science to
attempt the disproof of this theory, because the disparity in scope between us
and God's body would be so vast as to make Him impossible to perceive through
our perspectives. It would be as likely for a protein to perceive us as for us
to perceive God. This is the view of pantheism, and it answers many questions
concerning the conception of God. He is omnipotent if He is all of existence
and therefore all of the power of existence; He is omniscient if He is all of
existence and therefore all of the knowledge and wisdom of existence. These
facts account for the idea of providence; all that occurs naturally tends to
godliness, because all that occurs naturally is within the perfect system of
God.
It could, however,
be argued that the summit of truth is existence comprised but that that
comprisal is not of itself a being. One motive I have is to discredit, as far
as is feasible, this latter proposition for an ultimately improbable,
iniquitous, and vitiating, proposition. It is improbable because it denies an
ultimate of life though it admits an ultimate of existence, and it is
iniquitous because it frightens hope and nurtures fear.
The advantage of the
pantheist proposition is that it admits both. If the ultimate truth of
existence is that there is no ultimate of life then there ought not to be, by a
process of inverse reasoning, any single manifestation of life. Life feeds on
life: the vegetarian as the carnivore, the tree as the ape, the ape as the
cellular organism; by this observation it would hold true that all of this
earthly life lives itself upon the ultimate life form, as lice live upon
elephants. Yet if life lives, as this considered proposition implies, upon the
barren matter of an ultimately dead existence, not from an ultimately alive and
immortal spring, how, it must be
enquired, does it live? To properly consider this question it will be necessary
to consider the theory of abiogenesis.
Abiogenesis is the
theory that life was not created but arose spontaneously from matter. Aristotle
and Aristotelians once upheld it, until it was thought conclusively disproved
by the microscope—when the theory was spurned, until it was once more upheld by
Darwin and Darwinians. Notwithstanding these great advocates, is it truthfully
probable, or even possible, that life could have developed from death? Is it
logical to assert that from dead matter arose a living flesh? Such a thing has
never been observed nor even adequately argued. The truly dead is truly
infertile. No combination of dead particles and dead chemicals, forming dead
warm ponds, could avail in striking the sparks of life. The fire cannot burn
amid absolute frigidity. If the ultimate Life does not permeate the ultimate
existence then the ultimate existence must perforce be dead. Yet, cogito ergo sum, there is life, and
waters require a wellspring.
The great presence
of monotheism throughout the history of civilised man is a sure indication of
his necessity to comprehend the slight by the absolute. For the slight can only
be slight before the absolute. Many speak of slight truths with regular
certainty. It is true men breathe air and if a man should suggest they do not
he is mad, yet many atheists, incredulous that anybody should not admit slight
truths, will not admit the absolute truth by which all other truths, if they
are truths, are validated. If all slightness must have its absolute then God is
certainly confirmed. Slight existence must have its ultimate existence, slight
truth must have its ultimate truth, slight life must have its ultimate life. Implied
in the concept of God are these ultimate summits of reality; the deep to the
surface, the colour to the shades, the sea to the river.
None in Europe ever used to doubt this vitally
necessary truth, and the enormous advances of Western civilisation between the
implosion of the Roman Empire and the explosion of the Great War—both atheistic
events—were the consequences. Now, very few ever consider the question of
ultimate truth, and of those who do consider it very few are unprejudiced
enough to nod at a conclusion which might validate religion. We live in a
period unprecedented, certainly in recorded European history, for its hatred of
worship. The analytic philosophers tempered the daggers of this cynicism with
their bizarre metals, and formed an as yet unbroken alloy. True it is that much
fanaticism is now purged, but to purge all religion with it is to kill with the
cure. A pure interpretation of religion would require nothing of the sort.
For he pursued a lonely road,
His eyes on Nature’s plan;
Neither made man too much a God,
Nor God too much a man.
ARNOLD.
One
of the most vital yet confused of all questions in this great debate is that of
the dichotomy between mind and matter. A materialist cannot honestly answer for
consciousness, a thing so utterly apart from oblivious mineral that it will
always seem more mistaken than apt to call it matter, and an idealist can
hardly place a foot in the quicksand of his dubious world. The dualist will
claim a place for each, but what can he say of the in-between? How is one thing
divided from another except by something else? A thing is not separate to
itself, nor is something divided by nothing, for nothing is by definition
stateless. What then is a dualist? Where two things can only be separated by a
third, dualism is not the word, pluralism is the word. He who will
describe particular things as not only apparently individual but actually individual
can make no end of the process. If one thing may be two things for a reason
then two things may be four things, four things may be eight things, eight
things sixteen things, and so on and so forth to an impossible finite infinity.
However, there is a solution to this old and tired problem. It has
always been in the background, hidden in plain sight. Not materialism, not
idealism, but realism, answers the
problem. Mind is not matter nor is matter mind, for matter is not matter nor
mind mind. These things are reality;
they are existence, and each is
self-evidently the case. Existence alone is true as a descriptive concept, for
only existence refers to all of this universal frame; and yet, in science,
philosophy, much religion, and general opinion, materialism continues to reign
unquestioned as the first and foremost interpretation of reality. No
phenomenon, no experience, no reflection, nor happening, is presently thought
to rank outside the category of matter (as defined in the philosophical sense).
Thought is the brain, sensation is thought, the brain is a bank of neurons,
neurons are systems of atoms, atoms are systems of energy, energy is the
integral definition of physical phenomena; so the circle completes as it
begins, thought is only a system of a system of a system of a system, and so
on, comprised of the same stuff as rocks are made on. Perceptions are not to be
trusted, mystery is gullible ignorance, all may be explained, and must be
explained, by material references. Certainly all the evidence of common
experience would seem to lend itself bodily and utterly to this interpretation
of reality; but the logic of it is completely impossible.
Consider the thought
that if truly all apparently complex things are defined and determined by the
simplest and least remarkable things, by the lowest quantum, atom, or
scientific unit, with which all other things perceived are arranged, then it
becomes at once important and necessary to dismiss all perceived reality beyond
this unit as untrue and illusory. For if truth is a downward and not an upward
search then all upward search is a search after lies: dismiss it, it has no
place in the conception, truth is the simplest and lowest unit and the simplest
and lowest unit is truth. Therefore there is no such thing as life, if actually
all apparent life is truly reducible to this dead essential atom of matter.
Therefore there is no such thing as sense or perception, no reality to sight,
hearing, touch, taste, or smell, none whatever when all things are but so many
inert crumbs ungainly gambolling about in trillions on trillions of tangos.
This is not stretching the notion—this is the notion, if the truth is that
everything perceived is made up of a vast collection of the basest, the lowest,
and the least remarkable building brick in existence, then the truth is the
building brick itself and not the structures which it is thought to make.
Indeed if an eye existed that possessed the quality of seeing things as they
actually are, instead of as they are represented to us in our brains, there
would be no structures at all anyway but everywhere and only—this same crudity.
This is as bizarre a
notion as it is appalling, for if it be seriously considered it means that we
are no more distinguishable from death than a mulching skeleton or a mound of
compost; and having been myself informed of this as gospel truth from every
quarter, at school, on television, and in conversation, it was natural enough
that I felt somewhat alienated by the world around me. Yet I was also told of
my great-grandfather’s dying words, heard not without strong emotion by my
attendant grandmother, being, ‘Heaven is beautiful!’. Both these accounts have had
their effect on me over time. So too have a number of experiences in my boyhood.
My family used to go to a seaside fair in the past, where the walk along the
promenade was a stern trial as the wind threw sand into the eyes of those
passing, and there we saw the Crooked
House, the Hall of Mirrors, and the Helter-Skelter. These were great
novelties at the time, the painful falls down the leaning stairs of the Crooked House were then delightful, the
bizarre malformations of our limbs and faces in the Hall of Mirrors would make us
hilarious, and the whirling vertigo induced by the Helter-Skelter felt then a
pleasure as choice as a glass of dry sherry with olives. But the allure of all
novelty fades. How was I to know that every subsequent enquiry into the truth
of things around me would be but a vexing return to these three same bewildering
amusements?
Indeed there is that
old quotation in Francis Bacon’s very cursory essay on the subject to consider,
‘“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer’. Perhaps,
as in dictionaries, that word is most accurately defined by its antithesis:
truth is everything which falsehood is not. Should not enquiry therefore turn
more immediately, as it is more necessary and attainable, to discovering
falsehood? Not in its garb certainly, for falsehood may wear anything to its
liking, but in its flesh? What is false? Fiction? What is fiction? Fiction is a
product of the human mind which makes different combinations of the elements of
existence. It is a product of the meeting between perception and reality.
Fiction is never false therefore, how could it be if it is a perception of
reality? Nor could it ever be quite true however, for truth must be
representative of all things. Hence the most positive assertion is the most
truthful assertion and the most negative assertion the most untruthful. Thus
the most untrue statement possible is ‘nothing exists’, while the truest
statement possible is ‘God exists’, for the most positive assertion is that
existence is unified in an absolute and uncompromised power, which is God.
Everything which is
purely positive therefore is true; everything which is purely negative—false.
That is to say, the entirety of existence is only described absolutely when it
is described completely, therefore every magnification of reality’s powers is
true and every detraction of its powers is false. In human expression, a thing
mingled with error by its very nature, we tend to deal greatly in positives and
negatives. We do our best, for language is indeed a limited signalling system,
but we are at our truest when we say: God knows. The rest is tiring, tedious,
and debatable.
The partial truths
of human utterance are to be selected like the best gemstones from jewel mines,
for bearing the most mineral and the very least dross. To establish that is
largely intuitive. There are elements or signs in truths which distinguish them
from falsehoods. If I write, you are
going to die soon, the statement is arresting but unconvincing, but if a
doctor made the same communication its effect would be profound. Almost every
thought and feeling would be altered for the worse. Equally if I write, you have won a lottery of five million
pounds, one is hardly joyous for such a fiction, yet the joy for a set of a
numbers on a slip and in a newspaper would be enormous. The mind intuits when a
thing is likeliest. Indoctrination indeed will do much, but left alone in doubt
we are soon reinstated with our instinctive guesses.
For he who turns his
mind against God will shatter it as a sword against stone, but he who turns his
mind against atheism will cut it through, as an axe upon twine. Those that seek
irrefragable demonstrable proofs seek only those illusions which are less elusive
because least important. A wide interpretation is always advisable, but
particularly in matters of religion, for religion is the widest of all
subjects. It is apparent in experience, to give an example, that there are
sensations distinct from material. Memories and dreams are not of themselves
experiences connected to the materials from which they are created or
synthesised (the latter in particular are stimulated when the body is prone and
paralysed) and when the personality’s consciousness is crushed to a point
within an inch of death, and carries little of its own volition or judgement.
Nor could there ever exist a chemical formula for fondness or regret. These are
facts as well, though radical.
All things are specious, especially
fictions. What is commonly called truth to-day, or scientific truth, is itself
the least plausible kind of truth because the most difficult to understand. The
general assent of mankind is given to undeniable truths: I am me, you are you. These are of course language truths but they
naturally point to the acceptable things.
Few madmen even reach a point of confusion in such matters. But whereas these
truths are established by the general assent
of mankind, that is, up is up, down is down, circles are not angular, squares
are not rounded, etc., the complex truths of science asserted by litanies of
proofs, weighed objections, assessments of variables, debates of probability,
contentions of terminology, assumptive formulæ, and so forth, are only
established by the general consent of
mankind. There is a begrudging note in all who are largely unacquainted with
the methods of science that it is all very clever, but that surely so clever a
thing cannot possibly be true. Nor should such feelings be instantly dismissed.
The view of Bacon that a little thought inclines the mind to atheism, but a lot
of thought returns the mind to theism, embodies a degree of potent insight into
the nature of contemplation. Very exact thinking is constricted. The simplest
notions are the most abstruse because they are the least confined. A complex
notion is so fragmented and conditioned by words that it becomes narrow. A word
here or a number there will either make up an edifice or break it in rubble; so
that although a stunning atheistic assertion such as any that are common
to-day,[2]
may seem fatal and final, yet the broader weightier effects of a high mass,
decades of experience, the contemplation of a sunrise, the experiences of love,
witnessed death, witnessed birth, the elation of triumph, the dejection of
failure, the contemplation of ancient relics, a profound debate, an honest
meditation, or a prolonged acquaintance with literature, will inevitably
incline the mind to question the real validity of a miniscule logic.
‘What is the meaning of it, Watson?’ said
Holmes, solemnly, as he laid down the paper. ‘What object is served by this
circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our
universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the
great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer
as ever.’ ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE.
The brain, which
receives all the feelings of the limbs and organs, itself feels nothing: a
strange irony of reality. Indeed the whole world, as Chesterton observed, is
littered with these strange ironies, contradictions, and complementary
paradoxes. For example, if fiction is something which is imagined but not
experienced, something which can be witnessed but never felt, something which
only conveys impression but receives
no impressions itself, then death is a fiction, and life an eternal truth. Thus
the man who kills himself kills nothing but only changes the scene. We may not
know it but we are all one and the same people at the same time, being all but
bubbles in the same boiling pot. We fancy so much of our personal and private
fortunes, but the twig is in the end but the tree. We were poor old Shakespeare
a few centuries back, sweating with ale probably in a dingy candle-lit tavern, scratching
soliloquies in time for the next production. We were Wellington weeping at
Waterloo’s carnage; Nelson blessing Hardy; Hardy kissing Nelson; Chinese
emperors, Russian Czars, the farmers and peasants of every land; the men, as
the executioners, nauseous at the gallows; Caesar, Nero, Aurelius, Elagabalus,
and everyone else in history. It is not reincarnation but incarnation infinite
and eternal forever at once, and time proves but a sliding scale of thought
comprehending action
This is an important point in the doctrine of
truth. Without infinity there can be no truth; only the highest ideals provide
a firm foundation, it is therefore necessary to dwell upon the subject. Its
nature is best discerned by simplicity of statement. Infinity is simply the
absolute; it is never lessened nor increased, for it cannot be increased upon
as the absolute, and it is impervious to reduction, as to reduce infinity must
be to destroy it. The difficulty in imagining infinity is caused by the
tendency of the human imagination to conceive any one thing by division or
reduction. Thus a glass of water is conceived in the minds of men as finite;
that some water may fill the glass and some drinking may empty it, and that no
unlimited quantities are apparent, but the glass cannot be understood without
everything around it.
Rock too may make an
incongruity of air, and air an incongruity of rock, but rock and air are each
entirely congruous as existences. That each is an existence proves their true
mutual congruity; that each is different to the senses makes the impression of
incongruity, but variation is not separation. Air, atmosphere, and space, are
as potently extant as granite. That they seem otherwise to us is due to the
nature of the human body, it being able to move through the former more easily
than the latter, but indeed the human body provides a good analogy in this case
for it could survive if there were no granite and clay but not if there were
neither air nor atmosphere nor space. Breathing without the first and second,
and moving without the third, would be impossible for it, so that these
variations of existence which seem lesser than others are in fact more
important to human existence; they exist by the same ægis and quite as fully as
solids. The difference is simply characteristic.
Substance, attributes,
and modes, are Spinoza’s peculiar
words for the various perceptible strata of existence. He held substance to be the
primary form, attributes to be the secondary form, and modes to be the tertiary
form. Quite simply he represents that the secondary form of existence called an
attribute is merely a single instance of the infinite variety of the primary
existence of substance. The modes for their part are but the various aspects or
flourishes of the attributes, like sunlight waltzing on the water. In all this
he intended essentially to show that our perceptions, themselves but
reflections of reflections, are not adamantly to be trusted.
Straight lines and curves are good instances
of ideas which are delineated separately in dualism but which seem to me to be
two perceptions of the same thing, namely form. I used to wonder whether the
world is ultimately composed of lines or curves, because it appeared to me that
lines could be made of curves and curves could be made of lines, as thus:
I attached the utmost importance to the discovery of
whichever was true, for this profound discovery would be pregnant with the
highest consequences. Even balls like atoms or particles would be, following
this revelation, truly lines or curves in essence, and then science should
abandon the Atomic Theory and embrace the Line Postulate or Curve Hypothesis.
Eventually however I realised, alas, that neither existed separately but that
our perceptions made each of the other. From this I have very naturally applied
the same conclusion to most other differences of appearance. Yet it is still
generally considered that infinity and eternity, because difficult to conceive
in the human imagination, are impossible realities. Everything upon earth and
everything conceivable in mathematics appears finite. Vastness is finite, and
only as vast as littleness permits it; expansion is finite, for the expanding
is larger than it formerly was, and will be yet larger than it presently is;
and all else perceived by the finite minds of men appears limited not
limitless. True logic, however, runs contrary to all of these considerations.
For if existence is
itself finite then it must have borders where it both begins and ends. Within
these borders it is, and without them it is not. Without them, beyond them,
stretching endlessly without cessation, bar the single and singular exception
of the universe, there must be only non-existence.
Nothing else but nothing could mutilate existence out of its rightful infinity
as the one state. This is the only conceivable alternative to infinite
existence; any other supposed division would be a kind of existence, material
or no, yet this alternative is only as conceivable in the imagination as any
other stark impossibility. For how could non-existence, implying as it must the
complete absence of all existence, be even once disrupted in its infinity by a
patch of existence? If this postulated state of nothingness is indeed a state
of nothingness then no single thing could disrupt it in its essence, however
comparatively or intrinsically diminutive. Indeed this consideration, namely
that of the necessarily absolute state of non-existence, is the very reason why
existence itself, if it exists, must exist infinitely and eternally; for
limited existence, as well as limited non-existence, must disprove itself: a
limited non-existence because
non-existence must mean no existence whatever, and a limited existence because it could only be
limited by a limited non-existence. It would be more reasonable to say that
fire, though hot, is largely cold, and ice, though cold, is partly hot, for
indeed there are many gradations within existence though there can be none
between existence and its alternative. Moreover its alternative seems
impossible even by definition. To speak of non-existence as though it exists is
of course a contradiction. How can one even imagine non-existence except as some
variety of blank existence?
Yet still the world seems
to be everywhere finite; beer tankards are emptied, roast mutton is carved to
its carcass, shores end in seas, seas end in shores; the universe too, and all
matter, seen or unseen, supposed or unknown, is understood to be, in scientific
as in philosophic theory, of limited extent. The fundamentals of mathematics
are entirely founded upon everything in its proportion, such as is observable
in the matter of the world and the universe. However, if, as all know to be
true, things may be more than the sum of their parts then the constituent parts
of perfection may be imperfect, or at least imperfect seeming, without causing
any diminution of the total effect. There are many examples of this occurring
in life, in painting, in music, the characters of good people, in certain faces’
imperfections, which can lend more beauty by their uniqueness than a perfect
symmetry ever could, it is apparent.
For though salt is
finite, and man is finite, the universe is not finite because it is everything.
Salt is finite because not all salt is the universe but the universe is
infinite because not all the universe is salt. It is not a difficult point, and
yet it is a point so commonly neglected. For the man who always suspends his
appreciation of the universe, conceived as justly it ought to be, the true
totality of things, the infinite expanse, will always find himself in error and
confusion. It is to judge a lion on his dandruff or a sequoia on a bird’s nest.
|
Salt grains. |
The imagination, indeed all thought, is
continually bound in the scale of God, which is the essence of all judgement
and opinion. That is the strongest and clearest possible evidence for God; that
without even the thought of Him we could neither measure nor comprehend
anything else. Such is His necessity, such is His evidence. It is therefore
plain that the usual means of thinking about the world, the ordinary scales of
time, number, cause and effect, are ultimately untrue although not invalid. There
is no such thing as cause, if there were such a thing it would have to
originate in a cause of existence itself, which impossible condition being
unfulfilled must disprove all relative cause. Yet those probabilities which
govern whether one thing seems likelier in the imagination than another, those
couched assumptions about the ways reality tends to go about its business,
obviously have an accuracy in certain situations, as they have also many uses
in our own lives. So has time, so has number, but none of these scales can be
definitive while they are particular, and particular they must always be.
Therefore a wide sympathy is wiser than an acute knowledge and that is the
point which, in the general scheme of human life, is most important to make
upon the subject of truth and the understanding.
Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise:
He, who defers this work from day to day,
Does on a river’s bank expecting stay
Till the whole stream that stopp’d him shall be gone,
Which runs, and, as it runs, for ever shall run on. COWLEY.
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