Winds of Doctrine | Page 5

of romantic anarchy. It is in essence but a
franker confession of the principle upon which modern philosophy has
been building--or unbuilding--for these three hundred years, I mean the
principle of subjectivity. Berkeley and Hume, the first prophets of the
school, taught that experience is not a partial discovery of other things
but is itself the only possible object of experience. Therefore, said Kant
and the second generation of prophets, any world we may seem to live
in, even those worlds of theology or of history which Berkeley or
Hume had inadvertently left standing, must be an idea which our
present experience suggests to us and which we frame as the principles
of our mind allow and dictate that we should. But then, say the latest
prophets--Avenarius, William James, M. Bergson--these mental
principles are no antecedent necessities or duties imposed on our

imagination; they are simply parts of flying experience itself, and the
ideas--say of God or of matter--which they lead us to frame have
nothing compulsory or fixed about them. Their sole authority lies in the
fact that they may be more or less congenial or convenient, by
enriching the flying moment æsthetically, or helping it to slip
prosperously into the next moment. Immediate feeling, pure experience,
is the only reality, the only fact: if notions which do not reproduce it
fully as it flows are still called true (and they evidently ought not to be)
it is only in a pragmatic sense of the word, in that while they present a
false and heterogeneous image of reality they are not practically
misleading; as, for instance, the letters on this page are no true image of
the sounds they call up, nor the sounds of the thoughts, yet both may be
correct enough if they lead the reader in the end to the things they
symbolise. It is M. Bergson, the most circumspect and best equipped
thinker of this often scatter-brained school, who has put this view in a
frank and tenable form, avoiding the bungling it has sometimes led to
about the "meaning of truth." Truth, according to M. Bergson, is given
only in intuitions which prolong experience just as it occurs, in its full
immediacy; on the other hand, all representation, thought, theory,
calculation, or discourse is so much mutilation of the truth, excusable
only because imposed upon us by practical exigences. The world, being
a feeling, must be felt to be known, and then the world and the
knowledge of it are identical; but if it is talked about or thought about it
is denaturalised, although convention and utility may compel the poor
human being to talk and to think, exiled as he is from reality in his
Babylon of abstractions. Life, like the porcupine when not ruffled by
practical alarms, can let its fretful quills subside. The mystic can live
happy in the droning consciousness of his own heart-beats and those of
the universe.
With this we seem to have reached the extreme of self-concentration
and self-expansion, the perfect identity and involution of everything in
oneself. And such indeed is the inevitable goal of the malicious theory
of knowledge, to which this school is committed, remote as that goal
may be from the boyish naturalism and innocent intent of many of its
pupils. If all knowledge is of experience and experience cannot be
knowledge of anything else, knowledge proper is evidently impossible.

There can be only feeling; and the least self-transcendence, even in
memory, must be an illusion. You may have the most complex images
you will; but nothing pictured there can exist outside, not even past or
alien experience, if you picture it.[1] Solipsism has always been the
evident implication of idealism; but the idealists, when confronted with
this consequence, which is dialectically inconvenient, have never been
troubled at heart by it, for at heart they accept it. To the uninitiated they
have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave of the hand:
What! are you still troubled by that? Or if compelled to be so scholastic
as to labour the point they have explained, as usual, that oneself cannot
be the absolute because the idea of oneself, to arise, must be contrasted
with other ideas. Therefore, you cannot well have the idea of a world in
which nothing appears but the idea of yourself.
[Footnote 1: Perhaps some unsophisticated reader may wonder if I am
not trying to mislead him, or if any mortal ever really maintained
anything so absurd. Strictly the idealistic principle does not justify a
denial that independent things, by chance resembling my ideas, may
actually exist; but it justifies the denial that these things, if they existed,
could be those I know. My past would not be my past if I did not
appropriate it; my ideas would not