Chapter XIV BELIEFS
In the preceding chapters I have posed and attempted to answer three questions. First: what do we want to become? Second: what are we now? Third: how do we propose to pass from our present condition to the condition we desire to reach? Of these three questions, the third has been answered methodically, in a series of more or less elaborate discussions of ways and means. The second has been answered incidentally at different stages of these discussions. The first, it will be remembered, was asked in the opening chapter and received only the briefest and most categorical answers. In what follows I propose to examine those answers—to consider the social ideals of the prophets and the personal ideals of the founders of religions in the light of what we know about the world. ‘All that we are, is the result of what we have thought.’
Men live in accordance with their philosophy of life, their conception of the world. This is true even of the most thoughtless. It is impossible to live without a metaphysic. The choice that is given us is not between some kind of metaphysic and no metaphysic; it is always between a good metaphysic and a bad metaphysic, a metaphysic that corresponds reasonably closely with observed and inferred reality and one that doesn’t. Logically, this discussion of the nature of the world should have preceded the discussion of the practical ways and means for modifying ourselves and the society in which we live. But the arrangement that is logically most correct is not always the most convenient. For various reasons it has seemed to be expedient to reserve this discussion of first principles to the last chapters.
Let us begin by a summary, in the most general terms, of what we know about the world we live in. Science, in Meyerson’s phrase, is the reduction of diversity to identity.[22] The diverse, the brute irrational fact, is given by our senses. But we are not content to accept diversity as so given. We have a hunger and thirst for explanation and, for the human mind, explanation consists in the discovery of identity behind diversity. Any theory which postulates the existence of identities behind diversities strikes us as being intrinsically plausible.
Nature seems to satisfy the mind’s craving; for, upon investigation, it turns out that identities do in fact underlie apparent diversity. But explanation in these terms is never quite complete. The facts of sensation and of irreversible change in time are irrationals which cannot be completely rationalized by reduction to identity. Science recognizes the specificity of things as well as their underlying sameness. Hegel’s mistake was to imagine that nature was wholly rational and therefore deducible a priori. It would be convenient if this were the case; but unfortunately it isn’t.
The diversity of the material world has been reduced, so far as such reduction is possible, to an ultimate identity. All matter, according to the physicist, is built up, in a limited number of patterns, out of units of energy which, in isolation, seem to possess none of the qualities ordinarily associated with matter in the mass. Between a billion sub-atomic units and one sub-atomic unit there is a difference, not only of quantity, but also of quality. The natural sciences, such as physics, chemistry, biology, are concerned with matter as built up into varying degrees of patterned complexity. The specificity of things, immediately perceived by our senses, is found to be correlated with the number and the arrangement of ultimate units of energy.
The material universe is pictured by science as composed of a diversity of patterns of a single substance. Common sense arbitrarily selects certain packets of patterned energy-units and regards them as separate, individual existents. This proceeding would seem to be entirely unjustifiable. So-called separate, individual existents are dependent upon one another for their very being. They are interconnected by a network of relationships—electro-magnetic, gravitational, chemical and, in the case of sentient beings, mental. That network gives them their being and reality. An individual existent is nothing except in so far as it is a part of a larger whole. In other words, it is not an individual existent. The things we ordinarily call objects or individuals—a tree, a man, a table—are not ‘concrete realities,’ as the romantic anti-intellectuals would have us believe. They are abstractions from a reality that consists, as systematic investigation reveals, of a network of relations between the interdependent parts of an incalculably greater whole.
A man, for example, is what he is only in virtue of his relationship with the surrounding universe. His entire existence is conditioned by his neighbourhood to the earth, with its powerful gravitational field; radiations of many kinds make him dependent on distant heavenly bodies; he is the locus of a continuous process of chemical exchange; mentally, he is related to and conditioned by the minds of his contemporaries and predecessors. The common-sense claim that we live among, and ourselves are, independent existents is based upon ignorance. In present circumstances, however, those who insist on talking of men and women as though they were ‘concrete’ independent existents can excuse themselves on the ground that such a description, though incorrect, is less misleading than that of the political theorists who consider that human beings should be sacrificed to such entities as ‘the nation,’ ‘the state,’ ‘the party,’ ‘the destiny of the race’ and so on. The truth is that there are many different levels of abstraction from reality.
The entities with which political theory deals belong to a higher order of distraction than do the separate, individual existents of common sense—are more remote, that is to say, from concrete reality, which consists of the interdependent parts of a totality. The monstrous evils which arise when remote abstractions, like ‘nation’ and ‘state’ are regarded as realities more concrete and of greater significance than human beings may be remedied, in some measure, by the insistence on the relative concreteness of individual men and women. But this last doctrine is itself the source of very great evils, which cannot be remedied until we recognize, and choose to act upon, the truth that the ‘individual’ is also an abstraction from reality. Separate, individual existents are illusions of common sense. Scientific investigation reveals (and these findings, as we shall see later on, are confirmed by the direct intuition of the trained mystic and contemplative) that concrete reality consists of the interdependent parts of a totality and that independent existents are merely abstractions from that reality.
Recent scientific investigations have made it clear that the world of sense experience and of common sense is only a small part of the world as a whole. It is small for two reasons: first, because we are confined to a particular point in space and have scarcely any knowledge by direct acquaintance and little knowledge even by inference of the conditions prevailing in distant parts of the universe; second, because the organs by means of which we establish direct communication with the outside world are incapable of apprehending the whole of reality. This second limitation is of more significance than the first. Even if we were able to make voyages of exploration through interstellar space, we should still be incapable of seeing electro-magnetic vibrations shorter than those we now perceive as violet or longer than those of which we are conscious as red. We should still be unable actually to see or feel even so large an object as a molecule. The shortest instant of time perceptible to us would still be a large fraction of a second. We should still be stone deaf to all sounds above a certain pitch. We should still be without the faculties that enable migrating birds to find their way. And so on.
Every animal species inhabits a home-made universe, hollowed out of the real world by means of its organs of perception and its intellectual faculties. In man’s case the intellectual faculties are so highly developed that he is able, unlike the other animals, to infer the existence of the larger world enclosing his private universe. He cannot see beyond the violet; but he knows by inference that ultra-violet radiations exist and he is even able to make practical use of these radiations which sense and common sense assure him do not exist. The universe in which we do our daily living is the product of our limitations. We ourselves have made it, selecting it (because we wished to or were incapable of doing otherwise) from a total reality much larger than, and qualitatively different from, the universe of common sense. To this most important of fundamental scientific discoveries I shall have occasion to return, in another context, later on.
So much for the scientific picture of the material world. The scientific picture of mind is unfortunately much less clearly outlined. Indeed, there is no single scientific picture of mind; there are several irreconcilably different pictures. Some scientific investigators insist that mind is merely an epiphenomenon of matter; that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile; that the very notion of consciousness can be
