Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays

LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS

The Huxley Lecture delivered in the University of Birmingham, May 24, 1911.

When a lecture is dedicated to the memory of a distinguished man of science, one cannot but feel some constraint in the choice of subject. It must be a subject that would have specially interested the person honoured. I feel no embarrassment on this account in regard to the great name of Huxley; the difficulty would be to find any problem to which his mind would have been indifferent, one of the greatest minds the England of the Nineteenth Century produced. And yet it seems to me that if one subject more than another would have appealed with particular force to the mind of a naturalist who was also a philosopher, it is the threefold problem of consciousness, of life and of their relation. For my part, I know, no problem more fundamental in its importance, and it is this which I have chosen.

In dealing with this problem we cannot reckon much on the support of systems of philosophy. The problems men have most deeply at heart, those which distress the human mind with anxious and passionate insistence, are not always the problems which hold the place of importance in the speculations of the metaphysicians. Whence are we? What are we? Whither tend we? These are the vital questions, which immediately present themselves when we give ourselves up to philosophical reflexion without regard to philosophical systems. But, Between us and these problems, systematic philosophy interposes other problems. “Before seeking the solution of a problem,” it says, “ must we not first know how to seek it? Study the mechanism of thinking, then discuss the nature of knowledge and criticize the faculty of criticizing: when you have assured yourself of the value of the instrument, you will know how to use it.” That moment, alas! will never come. I see only one means of knowing how far I can go; that is by going. If the knowledge we are in search of be real instruction, a knovfrledge which expands thought, then to analyse the mechanism of thought before seeking knowledge could only show the impossibility of ever getting it, since we should be studying thought before the expansion of it which it is the business of knowledge to obtain. A premature reflexion of the mind on itself would discourage it from advancing, whilst by simply advancing it would have come nearer to its goal and perceived, moreover, that the so-called obstacles were for the most part the effects of a mirage.. But suppose even that the metaphysician dp®® not thus sacrifice the use of mind for the criticism of mind, the end for the means, the prey for the shadow: too often, when confronted with the problem of the origin, nature and destiny of man, he passes it by in order to deal with questions which he judges to be higher, and on which he thinks its solution depends. He speculates on existence in general, on the real and the possible, on time and space, on mind and matter, and from these generalities descends gradually to the consciousness and life whose essence he would understand. Now, is it not clear that his speculations have become purely abstract, with no bearing on the things themselves, but only on the altogether too simple idea of them which he has formed before he has studied them empirically? It would be impossible to explain a philosopher’s attachment to so strange a method had it not the threefold advantage that it flatters his self-esteem, facilitates his work and gives him the illusion of definitive knowledge. As it leads him to some very general theory, to an almost empty concept, he can always, later on, place retrospectively in the concept whatever experience has come to teach him of the thing. He will then claim to have anticipated experience by the force of reasoning alone, to have embraced beforehand in a wider conception those conceptions, narrower, I confess, but the only ones difficult to form and the only ones useful to keep, which we get by the study of facts. On the other hand, as nothing is easier than to reason geometrically with abstract ideas, he has no trouble in constructing an iron-bound system, which appears to be strong because it is unbending. But this apparent strength is simply due to the fact that the idea with which he works is diagrammatic and rigid and does not follow the sinuous and mobile contours of reality. How much better a more modest philosophy would be, one which would go straight to its object without worrying about the principles on which it depends! It would not aim at immediate certainty, which can only be ephemeral. It would take its time. It would be a gradual ascent to the light. Borne along in an experience growing ever wider and wider, rising to ever higher and higher probabilities, it would strive towards final certainty «8 to a limit.