WE MUST NOW consider the most crucial point in this elementary course on the hidden teaching. The concepts of modern science have got rid of the static things suspended in space and replaced them by fields of force. If it is difficult to credit that we are knowing thoughts of things when we believe we are experiencing independent external things, is it not equally difficult to credit the knowledge offered by science that a pen is made up of electrons which cannot even be imaginatively compared with the hard stuff out of which we experience the pen to be made? Nothing that we see or can possibly see even roughly resembles the electronic “stuff” to which science has reduced our familiar fountain pen. And if science may thus undermine our realistic experience, why not philosophy? And if the electronic pen is the real pen, then we are seeing only an image, only a representation of it, when we see the material pen. Yet such a representative image must be in our mind, for it can be nowhere else. If the idea is but a mental copy of a material object which is outside mind and therefore a separate and distinct entity, why is it that the two of them cannot be brought simultaneously before awareness and compared with each other? If the external pen which is given to us in sense-experience were the cause of the thought of it we would never be able to verify its existence, for every attempt to observe external pens would only end in the observation of thoughts.
We cannot get at things first hand, cannot inspect them directly, do what we will. We can never get beyond the thoughts of them.
Hence we cannot even verify their separate existence. We cannot exhibit the objects to our eyes because both eye and brain are themselves known mentally, i.e., they are ideas, and through them we can become conscious of mental things, of ideas alone.
When we try to test our mental constructs by turning to the things themselves, by comparing one with the other, all that we succeed in doing is to test one construct by another, i.e., compare one thought with another.
The perception of a thing and the thing itself are the two sides of a curve, the inside and the outside of it. Do what we will, we can never separate the one side from the other. The thing is on the outside and the perception is on the inside. But the curve is not two things, but one. The thing refuses to be taken apart from its perception. We cannot separate the perception from the thing, but we can distinguish them in speech and thought by making a mental abstraction of one or the other, although with wiser speech and profounder thought we shall find that even this feat is impossible.
Now we cannot see any object without thinking of it as being seen. If it is to exist for us at all it must exist as something that is perceived. Let us try to think of a pen, without thinking of personally seeing it, without permitting the operation of actually seeing it to mingle with the pen itself. We shall find that it is impossible to sever one from the other. We can think of the pen only through and by the thought of perceiving it. Do what we may, we shall be utterly unable to think of it otherwise. Nobody can separate in thought an external pen from his actual perception of it. What is the conclusion to be drawn from this? That the pen is not purely objective but both objective and subjective, both material and mental in one.
If it is objected that when the pen is in a dark room where nobody can see it its existence is not thereby cancelled, the reply is that we cannot talk or mention such an object without thinking about it and we can only think of it by constructing a mental image of it, and if we wish to do this then we are forced to imagine it as being seen, we are compelled to think sight along with the pen. It is only by thinking both together that we can come to the idea that it exists at all.
A further objection may be made that a thing may exist in some remote untrodden part of the globe where nobody has ever perceived it and where nobody is ever likely to perceive it. Here the reply is precisely the same as to the previous objection. Wherever the thing may be, it cannot be discussed as existent unless it is thought of, unless it is mentally pictured, and it cannot be so pictured unless we regard it as perceived either by ourselves or by some unconsciously assumed imaginary observer. Similarly, if it be objected that it is easy to imagine a scene like the North Pole, where no observer is likely to be present but where great masses of ice exist and are known to exist, despite the nonpresence of anyone to see the ice, to walk upon it, to feel its coldness and to admire its white purity, the answer is that in thinking of the polar region and of the ice that fills it we have not kept out an observer but have actually, although unconsciously, brought him to the scene to note its details. We have imagined an observer but we are quite unaware of having done so. And in bringing such an imaginary observer to the Pole we have brought his mind there and made him think of the scene. The solid ice is known to be solid only because our unseen spectator feels its resistance beneath his feet.
We can think of an object only by thinking of the seeing of the object: it is not humanly possible to consider its existence in any other way. Therefore sight becomes an indivisible concomitant of existence. Nothing can possibly possess any being for us independent of our awareness of it. Both thing and thought must be understood in the united idea of a thing seen by somebody or by ourselves.
A similar analysis holds good of the other forms of sensation. Objects cannot be separated from the thought of their being felt by us for instance or by someone else; they exist only because they can be thought of as being hard, solid, heavy, and so on to the touch. The same is precisely true of heard things. The sensation of hearing comes first and the sound itself is subsequent to that. Sounds exist only because we can think the hearing of them at the same time. We can think of them only as heard sounds.
Remove mind from our picture of the world and we remove space and time from it; we knock the bottom out of it. The world as idea exists for some mind or it cannot exist at all. For every object seen there must exist a seer. In other words, whatever is known is known by some mind. Nothing has ever been known and nothing can ever be known apart from a knower. This is incontrovertible. No object can exist alone and unknown. Those therefore—and they are in the vast majority—who believe and assert that a thing can possess a separate existence of its own are really talking nonsense. If they indignantly deny it, let them show a single object, let alone the whole world of objects, without also simultaneously showing it to be connected with a knower! They cannot do so, for they cannot separate anything from mind. The world is inextricably and inevitably bound up with mind. Thus the final conclusion is that, look where we will, in the universe everything is because it is thought of.
The reverse is equally true. We cannot think of perception without thinking also of perceiving some object, nor of the act of hearing without coupling some sound with it. There is no hearing without sound, no sense perception without its object. Therefore we find again that the two cannot be imagined save as one, that sight and the thing seen are two sides of a single coin, that touch and a thing touched are the subjective and objective halves of a unity.
When the scientific principle of relativity says that the observer is part of his observation, this means that the person who has experience of anything is part of his experience. We may carry this further and now say that it means that the thought is part of the thing thought of. If we ponder well upon this statement we shall see that the mental factor is inseparable from every object known. And if we ponder deeper we shall find that the two are really one.
We cannot hold existence and the perception of existence apart from each other and so we are forced to form the conclusion that the two are not two in reality but indissolubly one. The thing and the sensation of the thing live in fundamental and inseparable union. Thus there is nothing else but awareness. Ask yourself whether that statement will explain all your experience and you will find that it will do so quite adequately. Try, on the other hand, to discover whether the theory of the materialists will explain your experience of the world, the theory that there is nothing else but independently existent physical things, and you will find that it does not and cannot explain the existence of thoughts and feelings. For if you believe that you can put something material into a test tube you cannot do the same with thought.
It must therefore be emphatically repeated that a percept is not a mere copy of something external. It is primal and not secondary. This should not be overlooked, because it is a key to correct understanding of “mentalism,” which is the doctrine that all things are mental things.
We see that the notion of a pen existing independently of the mind to which it is present is a pure fiction. The percept of the pen is nothing less than the pen itself. That any other pen exists separately and materially is utterly beyond our range of possible knowledge and must therefore be ignored if we are to deal with scientifically ascertained facts rather than uncertain assumptions. The pen is a construct in consciousness. Its being is being known. There are not two pens, a material one and a mental copy of it. There is only one. The image which is immediately before consciousness is the pen itself. It is so vivid, so perfect, and so convincingly stamped with the characteristic of objectivity that we do not stop with merely seeing it; we go on to infer that it is nothing less than the independent pen itself and refuse to believe otherwise. Yet the pen which is known by the senses is none other than the percept which is known by the mind.
But we must now face an objection: “Here am I with direct experience of a pen which lies outside me in space, separate from me, which I can pick up and grasp in my hand, finding it to be solid, weighty, and hard. How then can you expect me to believe that it is merely an idea in my mind?”
To this the reply is that this doctrine must not be misunderstood to mean that it is asserted that the pen is not directly present to our vision. It most emphatically is present. Its very immediacy disarms us. We have got to grasp this truth that the perceived pen is not less rounded and weighty and coloured and useful than the supposedly existent material pen, despite the fact that the former is a mental construct. In the previous two chapters we have seen that the mind is involved in all our experience of the world and we have found that sensation, so far from being a purely passive and receptive process, is creative and even projective. But we are so enamoured of the sensations of solidity which we receive from the things around us, and so deceived by the sensations of distance and position which we receive from their relations to each other and to our eyes, that we habitually underrate the tremendously suggestive and creative force of mind. We are almost totally ignorant of the proven and provable fact that mental images can assume size, shape, length, height, breadth, solidity, relief, perspective, weight, colour, and other qualities that we usually associate with external objects. They can provide all these sensations with perfect vividness and with all the actuality of ordinary experience. And yet they remain nothing more than ideas!
Thus mental experiences are the visible things that we take to be outside us. The thing itself is admittedly existent, but the character of the thing is what we have now found out and we have found it to be quite other than it is commonly thought to be. Those who would declare there are two separate facts, the fact of perception and the fact of an external material object, have made a false analysis of sensation. The oneness of both idea and object is a discovery to which the subtle thinking of the ancients and the sharp observation of the moderns inescapably lead, but it emerges only after the hardest and most rigorous reflection.
Once this point is grasped, then one may say to himself: “I am aware of my awareness of this thing,” and he will then perceive that he cannot strip the second awareness from the thing in itself; they constitute an indivisible entity. Those who want to divide the fact, the thing known, into a percept of it on one hand and its material substantiality on the other, who make perception a mental act and substantiality a nonmental thing, who posit mind against matter, fall into a grievous fallacy. What we know is an idea, what we perceive is not a discovery but a mental construction. Those who deny this put themselves in the predicament of explaining away the inexplicable.
Comes a further objection: “Do you mean to tell me,” cavils the sceptic, “that the abstract objects of my imagination, the phantasmagoria of my dreams, the pictures of my reveries, and the phantom creations of my fancy are as real, are as existent, and are as substantial as the twenty-ton locomotive engine which draws yonder train of coaches? Do you mean to say that this engine is nothing more than a thought in my brain like these other fanciful thoughts? If that be so, why is it I cannot think such an engine into immediate existence, think as hard as I may, or think such a train into existence and step into the train and be driven away? The contrast between a supposed train and a real train is so strong as to make the suggestion that they are in any way similar quite absurd. There is the real train standing clearly and distinctly before me, I can confidently step into it, I can hear its powerful engine roar and puff, but I cannot see my imaginary train so solidly before me nor can I get anywhere in it except in self-delusion. Therefore I cannot accept your doctrine of mentalism. There is a trick in it somewhere, a snare or a pitfall. The perceived train is most useful to me, but the imaginary one is useless. It is utterly ridiculous for anyone to tell me that both stand on the same footing.”
Let it first be noted that what the critic cannot do has been done by others, i.e., find in waking fancies a reality and a vividness that make them completely present to the mind’s eye. Great poets have done this, artists of genius have done this, celebrated mystics have done this, and separated lovers have done this. They have found amid the scenes of their imagined surroundings and among their imagined faces a perfect sense of actuality. They did not at the time disbelieve in the real presence of the objects and persons thought of. There are indeed two conditions of the human mind which have been experienced by most persons and in which we find extraordinary illustrations of the possibility of doing part of what our critic cannot do. And they are when we are plunged in profound reverie and when we are plunged in profound dream. In these states the contrasts between the perceived world and the imagined world—a contrast which is admittedly felt at normal times by ordinary people—is spontaneously suspended. We may enter trains during these rapt states and be driven away in them and not for one moment shall we feel that they are not real trains and that our journey is not a real journey. On the contrary, we possess at the time a complete belief in the reality, solidity, and existence of our reverie-born and dream-born universe. Were we to live mostly in such conditions they would certainly be more real to us than would seem any temporary lapse into full waking life that might occur. Indeed, we would then attach reality to them and deny it to the waking world. It is therefore unjustifiable to assert that because material things are so vividly and distinctly seen, whereas mental images are comparatively dim and vague, therefore the former cannot belong to the same class as the latter, cannot also be mental themselves. For it is here not a question of the manner in which a perception originates but of whether it is or is not mental.
But our critic will object that this is a perverse and not a proper answer to his criticism. It is certainly not intended to be a full answer, for it is offered only as illustration and not as proof. If it vindicates nothing it hints at many of the mysterious possibilities whereby the mind can fabricate reality. It is intended to warn him not to dogmatize too quickly about what or what not the mind can do.
The full answer to our critic cannot be given here because it involves an explanation of the final secret of human personality, a revealment which falls into its natural place in the second and last volume of this work, which is yet to be written. And what the mystic apprehends with dreamlike vagueness about this secret the philosopher determines with amazing precision. Suffice it to say that our critic is right in making the latter part of his objection, for it is not contended by the hidden teaching that the individual mind, the ego, of any man can create his familiar world at its sweet will. Within this limit the criticism shall find some answer in the present and the following chapter.
The further question will be asked by the critic, “What then is the real nature of the independent objects which cause these thoughts to be presented? You tell us that what we see are only thoughts. Admitting this point, there is still a question which troubles us and which all this demonstration has completely if not cleverly avoided. Even if it be admitted that we know only the thoughts of things, there are still the things which seem to make the impressions on our sense-instruments and so bring these thoughts ultimately into existence. If what we perceive is only a thought felt to be external, what becomes of the object which gives rise to this thought? Surely you would not ask us to identify the real thing with the mere thought of it? Surely that which causes the mental image to arise is not the same as the image itself? We may discredit the testimony of the senses but we are unable to discard it. Nor is this all. You have passed over in complete silence the process whereby a sensation is born out of the vibrations in the brain. How is such a thought created? You have told us how the thing thought of is produced but not how a thought itself comes into being.”
What is the independent object? How does the brain communicate with the mind? Certainly these two questions may now properly be asked, for they have not been explained so far. But can the existence of anything rightly come under consideration until what it is that is known to exist has been made clear? Yet this in turn depends on how we come to know it. Therefore it will be easier to see clearly the answer to the first question when we have learnt the answer to the second one. We shall therefore begin with the latter.
Let us begin by noting that each sense-experience is a twofold fact, first the physiological impressions experienced by the body and second the consciousness of these impressions. This consciousness may be termed the perception of the object. The combination of these two factors, physical impression on eye, ear, et cetera, and conscious thought constitutes our perception of it. Hence when we smell a rose we coordinate a state of mind with a state of physical disturbance. But how can the latter resolve into the former? How can mind take in what is nonmental? A physical disturbance is the very antithesis of a mental one. Where is the medium, the connecting link, which can bridge the striking gap between both these opposites?
Here is a doubt which may legitimately be raised, a question which demands a direct answer. How does mind make the miraculous leap from a physical to a nonphysical immaterial entity like sensation? How can mind testify to the existence of anything outside itself? Nobody has ever been conscious of the mind taking this distinct step of attending to and interpreting the activity in the grey matter of the brain. To say that we are never aware of the process whereby a sensation is born and to say that the nerve vibration is converted into unconscious thought is to take a leap in the dark and to land on entirely different territory. To make the process a subconscious one does not solve the difficulty, for it still remains a mental process. We come to a sudden full stop when we come to the molecular change in the brain. There the continuity ends. Consciousness makes an abrupt appearance at the other side of the chasm and we do not know how to unite two such totally different orders of existence together. How can physiology bring the two ends together?
The answer is that it does not bring them together. It leaves them precisely where they are. It bridges the chasm by using the word “somehow,” by assuming that the ends are somehow united. It accepts the chasm and then assumes that it is not a chasm. When therefore the science of physiology says that the gap is somehow closed, although it is quite unable to say how it is closed, it is indulging in a play of speculative fancy, not in a discovery of ascertained and verified fact. The leap it makes is not natural but arbitrary. Thus we return to the troubling question: How is it possible to relate mind which is immaterial to the brain which is material?
Physiology confesses that the clearance of this gap between a wavelike movement in nerve stuff and a conscious movement of thought is incomprehensible to it although it has tried to advance various hypotheses and guesses. None of these have been able to secure wide agreement. Nobody has ever adequately explained the facts of psychology by the phenomena of physiology. All such efforts have failed because they failed to understand the connection between mind and matter. Those who complacently assert that the crowning function of the nervous system is to “produce” thought beneath the bony rind of the skull assert a miracle more marvellous than any. Let them take up a measuring rod and mark the distance between one idea and another, between one conscious thought and another. They cannot do it. For nobody knows where the mind begins or ends. Is it not foolish to imply that in nodding their visible heads men nod their invisible minds at the same time? For under no conceivable circumstances can the mind be seen to reside in the head. Yet materialists accept unthinkingly the vague belief which regards the mind in the same way as it regards material objects. Nobody can bring an immaterial presence like mind together with a material place like the head, for there is no point and no surface in mind to meet any point or surface in the head. Yet they still talk as though mind were definitely located at the brain terminals of the sensory nerves. For the sake of convenience in common talk we may—perhaps must—continue to speak of the mind as though it were in one’s head, but for philosophic purposes it is reprehensible to do so.
Perception is a mental process, i.e., thought, and reason demands that the thought be referred to some subject to which it occurs, to some consciousness whereto the process happens. We must not therefore mistake the movements of material molecules in the fleshly brain for conscious thoughts. Those who cannot grasp the difference between both can never grasp the meaning of sensation—which is the most elementary fact of psychology. And the first steps in psychology are inescapable steps in philosophy. No microscope has ever discovered consciousness, and no opening of the skull has ever done it either. It is not observable. It must be treated for what it is—a separate and distinct fact. To treat the physical brain as identical with full consciousness is to deal in pure fancy. The attempt to explain perception away as being merely a matter of nervous functioning is nothing less than to beg the question.
When the physiologist follows a sensation through its entire course from surface of the body to centre of the brain, what has he really done? He has followed it in his own mind, he has performed an act of consciousness. It does not lose its mental character because he chooses to affix the name of “nerve-change” to its corresponding physical vibration. His difficulty is that he cannot actively take a percept apart and yet keep it in full consciousness. It can be divided only theoretically. It is an entity, and now beyond any possibility of practical analysis. The dissecting knife can expose the nervous substance of the brain to sight but it cannot expose a thought, an idea, a fancy, or a memory-image. The chasm between both seems quite unbridgeable.
Here physiological science must frankly stop, bewildered and dumbfounded, for it is totally unable to explain satisfactorily this sudden and startling leap from unconsciousness to consciousness. Despite the best efforts of the best thinkers of modernity, physiology has failed to solve the following problem satisfactorily: What is the connection between the human mind within and the material universe without? What is the nature of the intercourse between thought and thing? Herbert Spencer, for example, who tried to interpret science to the nineteenth-century world, who wrote scornfully of the philosophical attempt to reduce knowledge of things to knowledge of thoughts, had to confess that “how the material affects the mental and how the mental effects the material are mysteries which it is impossible to fathom.”
For the fact of consciousness is a primary one. And it is the most mysterious fact in all human existence. No movement of material molecules can directly explain it, as nothing nonconscious can adequately account for it. We do not know that molecules possess the power to reflect upon their own nature. Mental experience is and has ever been the supreme enigma set in the midst of a seemingly nonmental world. To confine consciousness to its events or to its contents, as is so often done, does not help to explain its own existence, but merely evades the issue. Science has succeeded admirably in telling us what mind does and how it behaves, but it has so far failed to tell us what it is. Mind is the recalcitrant entity which refuses to be disintegrated into anything else. Therefore we must keep on asking: How is it that a physiological process is converted into a mental one? For mind is both mysterious and unique—nobody seems to know what it is although everybody guesses. This we do know, however, that there is nothing else like it in the universe.
Physiology has well considered and has long considered this problem but has given it up as insoluble and inscrutable. The hiatus is utterly insurmountable. And such it must remain forever unless and until we recognize two simple yet subtle points which help to solve this problem and with it the whole train of foolish questions that drag after it.
The physiologist has not noticed these two points for the simple reason that such recognition would take him beyond the limits of his special science. If he is to remain a physiologist and nothing more he must pay the heavy price of narrow specialism—expertness within those boundaries but ignorance outside them! If, however, he is willing to pursue his inquiry farther, then he must turn psychologist; there is no other direction to which he may turn for light. For the psychological standpoint is a beginning of the still higher philosophical standpoint.
These two points are: first, the ultimate order in which the details of our becoming aware of objects follow each other and fall into their proper places; second, what it is that the mind can really know. When the answers to these are both forthcoming, the answer to the great problem which stands at the end of the physiologist’s road will reveal itself of its own accord.
The first point bids us find out at which precise and crucial moment we actually become conscious of the objects around us. We then remember that according to physiology during the whole passage of the impression from nerve ending to brain centre there is no moment that leaps into awareness of it; there is no fraction of a second of consciousness of the independent thing supposed to be outside and supposed to be reported. Only after it has reached its terminus, only as a subsequent act, does the striking contrast of the percept arise.
We think of an object, and then mind, curious to know how the thought has arisen, tries to get behind it, with the consequence that the sensory side of the science of physiology gradually comes into being. The physiologist then slowly ascertains bit by bit the whole sensory process until he gets back to the thought again. He reveals nothing about the perception as a moment when thought flashes into the mind when he reveals the way in which the object makes an impression on the sense-instrument or the way in which this impression is carried to the brain. For all these things imply the primacy of consciousness, whose presence is not explained by noting the things of which we are conscious, but is only described. The physiologist is like a man who can construct a violin and explain the laws of sound but who cannot produce or explain the music itself.
He does not realize that all his descriptions, which purport to account for the existence of his consciousness of an object, are descriptions of what occurs after the consciousness of it has already arisen. He does not perceive that his explanations of the action of nerve and brain processes which are the result of interaction between the body and an object are catalogues of occurrences which appear subsequent to consciousness of the object. Therefore his attempts to explain awareness explain everything but the percept itself, a fact which he unconsciously accepts when confessing that there is an inexplicable gap in the entire series of events.
Now pose yourself the question, “How do I first know that anything exists at all?” And you will have to reply that you know or become aware of anything primarily through the mind and only secondarily through the senses. This is proved by the phenomenon of mind-wandering and distracted attention described in the early part of the previous chapter. The brick wall that confronts you may remain outside the threshold of your consciousness so long as you persist in profound and attentive reflection upon a bygone experience or an immediate problem. This does not mean that the eyes have not performed their duties. On the contrary, the image of the wall will be found perfectly registered on the retina. Nor does it mean that the optic nerve has not performed its task of vibrating a message to the brain nor that the cortical centre in the brain has not received the message. All this has been done, the sense-impressions have been made, and the excitations have arisen in the brain. Why then does the wall remain unseen? Because all these have been unattended to by the mind. Because they have not been taken up into consciousness. Because, to put it briefly, we can experience only what the mind experiences! When therefore you say that you have become aware of a wall before you, what you really mean is that you have become aware of the percept of a wall, i.e., of the idea of a wall as an object of consciousness.
Moreover, this same theorem was demonstrated in the examination of illusions and hallucinations likewise recorded in the previous chapter.
When we put on a pair of spectacles for the first time we become quite conscious of their presence on the face. But after a while the glazed circles before our eyes and the pressure on our nose fade off from our awareness and we finish by becoming completely oblivious of both presence and pressure of the spectacles. The nerve endings in the skin, i.e., touch, tell us that they are there. The nerve endings in the eyes, i.e., sight, likewise report their existence. Yet we habitually fail to notice these impressions. Perception of the spectacles disappears from the mind and their existence with it.
Why? Because the thought of the spectacles comes first and when we cease to think of them, being engrossed with other matters, the perception of the spectacles ceases also. Because the external aspect of the spectacles is only a projection of the internal idea. A thing cannot exist for us when there is no thought of it first—this is our experimental proof!
Every event and every object is an event which must first be perceived and an object which must first be recognized. But perception and recognition are states of consciousness, ideas. Their dependence is on mind. Can any man be competent to know what “solidity” is apart from first becoming aware of it? Can a thing come before the mind unperceived? Can it be known at all unless a knowing mind is apprehended along with it? Can there be any sort of cognition of something solid without the mental principle initially entering into it? We do not know and we cannot know any object apart from knowing the idea of it. The birth of awareness begins first.
We have to get firm hold of this fact: that we are not first aware of a pen or a pageant but only of our sensations of them. We must make this distinction as clear to our experience as it is self-evident to our reason after we have analytically inquired into the process of our knowledge of external things. We become aware of thoughts, images, representations of things, not the things themselves. We feel sensations, touch them, smell them, and taste them. Those who deem this impossible know neither psychology as science nor philosophy as interpretation of science. We know that things exist only because we originally know them mentally. Mind is the final ground of them. The thought of the thing comes first and must come first if we are to know it at all. Therefore consciousness must arise before anything else, even before the whole sensory process operates.
To sum up: The analysis of perception which physiology offers us is the result of direct observation. But nobody has ever seen the external object before it has passed into perception. This is irrefutable, for the seeing of it presupposes the perception of it. Therefore the object is brought into the field of notice for the first time with the perception of it and not before. Thus the analytic series which physiology originally offered us turns out to be incorrect from the higher standpoint of psychology, which makes the birth of the thought the first item in this series, although quite correct from its own. Were physiology to rise to philosophy it would be forced to revise its own analysis and offer a less fallible one. For physiology has fallen into this error because it insists on regarding the body as that which is alone real and enduring in comparison with thought, which it regards as ephemeral and illusory. The physiologist’s “gap” appears only while he begins the series in the wrong order. Let him reverse it and put his idea, which he has put last, at the beginning where it ought to be, and then the gap will vanish.
Consciousness is the inaugural fact of all our knowledge of the object without. Until it comes into operation we cannot even conceive that such an object exists. Yet after it comes into operation we do not even grant this simple primary condition! We perceive the object because we think it; we do not think the object because we perceive it. This truth is not one of those which man can make his own by merely glancing around—he can comprehend it only after hard thinking and relentless inquiry.
It was earlier mentioned that there were two points which would help to bridge the gap between brain and mind. The first has now been explained and the second will now be explained: What is it that the mind does really know?
There exist various theories of knowledge which are technically termed the double-aspect theory, interactionism, psychophysical parallelism, the emergent theory, et cetera, but they all fail to meet different objections adequately. Above all, they have yet to perceive that the place occupied by mind is paramount, for nothing can be known unless mind is present as an entity in its own right. If anyone makes the assertion that mind can take direct hold of a material object or of a collection of material objects, and if matter were something quite different from mind, then he is making an assertion which inextricably falls into self-contradiction. For if mind and matter do interact, then there must be a link between them, and this link can only be that they are ultimately of the same nature. If matter were not the same as mind, then the process of knowing external objects could not take place, for knowledge is a mental activity; ideas are its product, and all that we know as perception or as reflection are ideas.
Knowledge is an inner psychical process, and when we know a thing we are compelled by a law of relation to know it as a thought. The ultimate act of vision is a mental one. A multitude of images may fall on the retina of a dead man but he will see nothing. His mind is not active, and no relationship can be set up. Where do the sensations really fall? Do they fall within the mind or without it? Because they occur to the mind and because the mind cannot overstep itself we must admit that they fall within it. An object must fall within the unity of the same stuff as consciousness if it is to be recognized at all; which means it must first be converted into mental stuff. Therefore an object or an experience must first be transformed into an idea before the mind can become aware of it.
The five senses seem to tell us of material things, but without the mind they would be struck dumb and remain forever silent. Analysis of the process of knowing has already revealed that sight, hearing, et cetera, really and finally reside in the mind and nowhere else, and that what is actually brought into awareness is a mental thing. That is to say, the mind’s immediate and direct knowledge is of things of its own nature, of the same character and not different from it as material things are supposed to be different.
Thought and feeling are the prerogatives of mind. That which is thought or felt is therefore mental, i.e., idea, whether it be a wooden table, a distant star, or hot anger. Nothing is perceived without being thought, hence nothing that is seen is known as being other than idea.
What is the relation which exists between your perceptions and your mind? Do they exist outside of your mind? Reflection will show its impossibility. They are themselves of the very nature of mind; that is, they are conscious and immaterial. They are, therefore, composed of the same stuff as that of which the mind itself is composed. The activity of the experiencing mind generates whatever it knows. Hence consciousness, as we ordinarily know it, is a continuum of ideas and images. It is the mind that makes it possible for us to see, hear, and feel and it is seeing, hearing, and feeling that make it possible for us to experience the object. Therefore no internal idea—no external object!
The common belief is that what is experienced in sensation is identical with the physical object. Actually we do not know more of the nature of the object than what it is in terms of sensation, i.e., idea. The unreflecting attitude of a commonsense view of the world takes what is seen for a truism; it knows little of the process of perception whereby that world of what are said to be physical things becomes known. It does not know that the world is never directly apprehended and consequently never really gets within our experience. The mind actually takes hold of something related, some sensation, percept, image, or picture which is essentially mental. It becomes aware of what is akin to it, which means that it may know ideas, but nothing else. It sees finally that which represents itself in consciousness rather than that which represents itself to the senses. The known is not less mental than the knowing element itself.
The mind thus fulfils a double office. It is both awareness and the idea of which it is aware. Its nature is such that it becomes directly conscious of nothing that extends beyond itself but only of the changes within itself, i.e., of thoughts. To make the mind the passive recipient of impressions from an alien world is to ignore the fact that mind knows only mental things, i.e., ideas. Whether an outward thing gives birth to sensation or not, it can still only be an idea in itself if it is to be apprehended.
A whole train of false interpretations and futile questions disappears when this truth is seen. Mind does not depend on any external thing for its awareness of that thing, because there is nothing that is external or internal to mind. The thing must be present to mind as an idea and can be immediately present in no other way.
Thoughts, indeed, are all that it possesses, all that it experiences, whether they be thoughts of hearing something or seeing something.
It is not the five physical senses which finally feel the pleasure of a summer’s garden walk or the pain of a winter’s icy exposure, but the immaterial mind. It is not the visible fleshly eye which really reads the words imprinted upon this page, but the invisible mind. The truth of this fundamental fact of existence is as scientific as it is philosophic, and will become an accepted axiom of college textbooks before the troubled sands of this century have run out.
We must now gather up whatever insight into our external experience of things we have gained. When we first picked up our fountain pen we started with the physical notion that but for the light rays we could never have seen it. We went on to the anatomical notion that but for the eyes we could not have seen the light rays. We proceeded to the physiological notions that but for the nerves the eyes would have seen nothing, and but for the brain the nerves would have experienced their vibrations in vain. Then we rose to the psychological notion that here, at this point, the mind began its constructive work and that but for the latter we should still have failed to see the pen. For we become aware of it finally as a thought, the instant of conscious perception being the instant of actual experience of the pen’s existence. But we noted that there was no ascertainable connection at the point of transition from the physical brain to the nonphysical sensations, so that the continuity of the whole process was broken. In searching for an explanation of this break we made the startling discovery that because the mental image of the pen was the first intimation we had of its existence, and because the only things perceptible to mind were such images, such thoughts, then it must have constructed the idea of the pen before it could have known that the pen existed.
We began by making mind, light, eye, nerve, and brain partners in this game of getting experience of the pen. We have ended by finding not only that mind alone underwent the experience, but that it also produced the idea which constituted its experience! What does this mean? It means that we have begun by knowing there is a pen, but in making an analysis of how we came to this knowledge, this thought, we return to our starting point, the same thought. We have been travelling in a perfect circle. This implies that at no point of the circle have we touched the object other than as a thought. Stranger still, it further implies that we have been travelling within the realm of thoughts throughout. We have only succeeded in passing from one mental construct to another!
This last conclusion is strange, because it compels us to place within the mental circle not only the brain but the nerves, and not only the nerves but the eyes, and not only the eyes but the light. Then what of the actual pen itself? Let us put that question aside for a brief while and concentrate on this astonishing state of affairs in which we have somehow got involved. For the sum of all these statements is that in moving from light ray to physical brain we have merely moved from one thought, one percept, to another at every separate stage of the journey!
What takes place in the eyes, in the nerves, and in the brain we can learn only from what we can observe therein, i.e., from sensations formed into percepts and from what we can infer from such observations, i.e., from inferences. But both sensations and inferences are thoughts. Unless we have the intellectual courage to come to this conclusion we shall make the serious blunder of treating one group of sensations, i.e., the percept of the reflected light image of the pen, as mental, but treating another group of sensations, i.e., the percept of our bodily sensory system, as nonmental. The two realms of observations are identical insofar as they are both objectively experienced and both physically seen. Both light ray and fleshly body stand on precisely the same footing!
We must be consistent, therefore. What is valid for the lit and coloured image of the pen formed by the light rays is equally valid for the lit and coloured images of the eyes themselves, of the nerves and of the brain! We know all these things because they are thinkable things, because they are known in the last analysis as ideas. Therefore we have no alternative but to make the whole system of eyes, nerves, and brain a system of ideas.
Science has never been able to demonstrate how objective sense-impression and subjective idea can coalesce. This is because it has artificially divided that which forms an indivisible union. It has severed in theory what has never been severed in reality. The question involved in the problem of the physiologist’s “gap” is unanswerable because it is unaskable. The broken continuity of explanation can only be maintained if he has the boldness to throw the whole nervous system, the entire body, and the external object into unity with the sensation itself, i.e., to deprive them of their material character and convert them all into ideas. He must take up the view that their place in the sensory circuit is as mental as is the idea in which this circuit ends. Otherwise the process of knowing the varied things of this world becomes unaccountable and must ever remain an insoluble mystery.
Both the initial and the ultimate acts in sensation are thus seen to be acts of mind! All that occurs between them occurs within mind. Similarly the initial and ultimate substance dealt with is also mind: where then is room for a material structure of eyes, nerves, and brain? They must be mental constructs too, for neither nerve nor brain nor eye can sufficiently account for the formation of a perception if they are to be taken as nonmental things. Their very nature offers intrinsic obstacles to the building of a bridge between the conscious act of perception and the supposedly unconscious materials which are worked up into the act. Science has not succeeded in overcoming these obstacles and it is impossible to conceive that it can ever do so. Physiology can minutely describe these materials and the way they are arranged, but it cannot do more. For the final perception is a mental affair and hence beyond its boundary. The solution is to recognize that mind is present and active throughout.
The hidden teaching disturbs none of the scientific facts about sensation and perception already narrated; on the contrary, it allows for them. What it does is to complete them by casting a bridge across the enormous chasm left by them. It explains that the entire structure of eyes, nerves, and brain falls inside mind and has never existed outside it, which means that we are dealing with ideas all the time when we believe we are dealing with nonmental material substances fashioned in the forms of eye, nerve, and brain. The reason why we are not aware of this is that we circumscribe the mind within a small space inside the head and therefore have no option but to place the sensory and nervous structure outside mind. We forget that the entire body itself is but a complex of mental percepts. All the delicate physiological apparatus which manufactures impressions, all the marvellously responsive eyes, nose, ears, skin, and tongue, all the network of complicated nerves and winding convolutions of the brain which belong to the physical body and which are taken to be solid material things, are themselves enclosed within the charmed circle of consciousness, are only mentally known: they must be in short nothing more and nothing less than mental constructs.
What!—it will be objected—are we to regard our awareness of a person standing before us as being merely the awareness of a group of ideas? The reply is that both touch and sight and all the senses are mental, that beyond these sensations which tell us of head, trunk, legs, and arms and which ultimately resolve themselves into conscious states, we know for certain of nothing. Our consciousness and its states exist with a surety which is irrefutable but the materiality of the other person’s body exists only as an idea. The whole content of his being is identical for us with our conscious states. He is not and he cannot be extramental. He cannot be independent of our consciousness.
Once we abandon the futile attempt to regard sense-impressions of the human body, whether of our own or of another’s, as being material activities and take them for what they are—purely mental—the picture of our universe becomes clearer and the puzzles which beset the materialist view disappear altogether. Nothing else will perfectly answer our question and nothing less will profoundly satisfy our reason.
Thus our ultimate awareness of the existence of all these sensory nerves and sensory organs is itself an act of perception. If we have had to end with the mind, it may dawn on us that we unconsciously began with mind too. We have been travelling in a circle and never really got away from mind at any moment. The terms “brain,” “nerve,” and “sense-instrument” are indeed merely terms used by the mind to describe its own experiences. They are themselves perceived objects! The whole of man’s physical body is nothing less than a percept, for we become aware of it because we see parts of it and feel its surface, et cetera, all of which are simply internal sensations.
Finally it may be suggested to those who find difficulty in grasping these admittedly difficult points that a helpful illustration is to consider the dream experience of dream bodies.
So long as men come to premature unreflected conclusions about this familiar act of experiencing an external thing, which recurs continuously throughout their waking lives, so long will they be unable to comprehend its vital and immense importance as one key to the right understanding of life’s mystery.
Let it be emphasized that what is written in this chapter is not written from the practical standpoint of everyday living but from the subtler standpoint of what is ultimately true. Our criterion of truth is not to be what the lined palm of one’s hand feels, which is satisfactory enough to the plain man, but what the reasoning and judging power of the mind ascertains, which is alone satisfactory to the philosopher. Nobody will ever be able to dislodge reason from this central fact of mentalism, do what he will.
It is now time to face one of our final problems. What becomes of the independent externally experienced thing which has somehow been left out of this reckoning while we were so preoccupied with ascertaining how we formed our idea of it? We seem to ourselves to have entered into close intercourse with those external objects but we now know that we never attain to more than intercourse with ideas. We seem to have immediate experience of the material things, but it is wholly impossible to prove their immediate presence in our experience. We can testify only to the experience of pictures in the mind and to the fact that the independently existing object has never really been revealed to our senses; we have only thought of it, just as we have thought of the senses themselves. We can make no truthful statement about it for the simple reason that our experience is completely cut off from it. We cannot place ourselves beside it.
Must we then bow our head humbly and admit that this mysterious thing in itself remains outside the other end of the eye-nerve-brain series, apparently an unknown and ever unknowable object?
We accept the existence of things because we perceive them. Let us look into the point. It is necessary to examine this act of perception more closely. We take it habitually for granted when we attend to sensations and perceptions that we are attending to material things and that we are receiving information about objects which exist quite separately from ourselves. The philosopher cannot afford to take anything for granted, however. He endeavours through the profoundest possible reflection to enter into an understanding of what is actually occurring, rejecting all assumptions and inferences in the process.
First of all, we must make it clear beyond doubt that the very moment of sensing the existence of a fountain pen is an act of mind, consciousness, and no longer an act of nerve vibration or cerebral change; that it is not a physical process at all. The physiological account of sensation accounts for everything except for this first moment of awareness when the pen becomes known to us. It does not account for the birth of consciousness of the pen, for the mental act of knowing it as apart from the supposedly physical act of entering into relation with it. Moreover, the mere act of judging the impressions of objects is itself a mental activity which cannot be explained by any physical process. Thus instead of separating percept from object we ought to separate the awareness of perception from the percept itself, both being mental; and instead of separating the subjective from the objective we would do better to separate consciousness from the object of consciousness, i.e., idea.
When we examine this verbal symbol idea we find it to be an expression of an awareness which is immediate, innate, direct, and obvious, whereas that of things is indirect, added, and interpreted—in short, inferred.
It is because we see the mental image of a separate independent external material man that we automatically and unconsciously think that there is also a person to whom that image corresponds. Nevertheless, such is the relativity of thought that the very presence of an idea forces us to prejudge the issue and think that there is a material thing outside which has given birth to the idea. The percept of a man is alone directly known. Any other must be a mentally constructed one. The awareness of sensations is certain and indubitable. The knowledge of an external cause of those sensations to which they answer is entirely inferred and supposed.
We see, taste, and feel external things as being absolutely independent merely because we start with an inborn belief that they are absolutely independent. If A and B are in causal relation, then A always comes first. Cause precedes effect. Now what do we experience first of the external objects? Why, we become aware of the mental impression of them, and nothing else at any time! Hence, if the mental impression comes first, it must be the cause! To make the external object the cause of the internal sensation is equal to making sensation the cause of sensation, i.e., to beg the question and to attempt what is impossible and inconceivable.
We must emphasize what will appear only from acute analytic reflection—namely, that mental experience precedes physical experience and that the latter follows the former merely because it is a subsequent inference. The image is antecedent to the inference that the object exists. We unconsciously and almost instantaneously decide that the object is outside after we have perceived the image; it is a later act. But granting that the knowledge of the independently existent object comes second after the knowledge of the percept, how is it proved that it is only an inference? The answer is that everything that cannot be immediately known, everything that cannot be known as it is in itself, must necessarily be brought to our knowledge by the working of imagination. We must represent it to ourselves through the image-making faculty of mind. And to know what particular image to construct we have to pass through the corridor of subconscious reasoning until we come to a final conclusion, which could only be an inference even if it were a right inference, which it is not.
The thought is primary, whereas the thing is secondary. The idea is factual, whereas the object is inferential. Before the mind reveals the perception to itself there is no knowledge of any external object. Such an object appears subsequently on the scene; until then nothing can be said of it. It is this important distinction which forms the very foundation of mentalism. And this distinction is not the fanciful speculation of imaginative metaphysics; it is slowly beginning to be the factual finding of leaders like Eddington and Jeans, who are in the front ranks of modern science. The meaning of this distinction is that the object veritably depends for its existence on the idea of it, not the idea on the object. Nobody can prove that it possesses any independent existence. Mind is its basis and upholder. It is a mental derivative.
We may find enough courage to face the truth about these external objects. For we found in our study of illusions that the capacity of an illusion to deceive us disappeared after we took the trouble to inquire into it, even though the existence of the illusion remained. Similarly the external objects have now, after we have taken the trouble to inquire into them, turned out to be inferred, although they continue to remain in experience. Now an inference is an imagination, i.e., an idea. So our external object turns out to be an idea just as much as our actual experience of it is an idea. When analysed it also turns out to be a thought. What does this mean? As in illusion the mind creates an object of its own and then proceeds to assume its reality, so in the case of ordinary everyday experience the mind has created an external thing and then assumed its existence; and as in illusion the assumed thing was indubitably and repeatedly seen, so here too the inferred object is also plainly and persistently seen. That a percept is an item of consciousness is indubitable, that the object is outside it is merely an idea. The first is fact but the second is unproved and unprovable. An independent object is never seen separately but only inferred psychologically. We may pay it the utmost attention and give it our alertest awareness, but we will never detect it apart from the idea. For its very existence rests on inferences and involves assumptions. But truth does not deal in inferences. It must keep its feet on firm ground—fact verified and ascertained.
Whoever has been impatient at this venture into seeming abstractions has erred. For until he has formed a correct idea of how we come to know the external world of things which rest or move in space he cannot penetrate to its reality. Until he has analysed the content of world-consciousness he cannot understand how it has been built up. We habitually consider the wall that confronts us as standing quite aloof from our sensation of its existence. We hold unreflectingly to the view that we see the wall first and then make a representative image of its appearance in the mind. The wall falls into first place and the mental picture into second place in the order of our supposed awareness of it. We have already found how little this is correct. We shall now arrive at the right view and it will sap the foundations of our age-long human certitude about the nature of the world, the position of the body, and the dimension of the mind.
How can we continue to take it for granted that although we cannot directly know the object, our idea of it is an image which duplicates it more or less satisfactorily, a kind of photograph made on the mind by the object? How can this belief continue to stand in face of all that we have discovered by our prying analysis? How can it be that the object is really there outside us and the perception of it is only a copy of it, albeit a mental one? How can it be that our superficial apprehension of a material universe is correct, is just as it seems to be, and is in no need of analysis? For all our facts show that we have unconsciously begun with the idea of the object and consciously ended with it, and that perception is a psychological act, and that the perception of a fountain pen is not merely seeing the mental copy of a pen but literally seeing the pen itself, because it is identical with the mental percept and not merely related to it. The theory that although it is true that we know only our mental constructs, nevertheless these constructs are only copies, representations, of some unknown external material object, is utterly invalid. For the object is itself part of the construct and no justification exists for separating it from the totality of perception other than the justification of ancient and habitual prejudice. Those who believe in the “mental copy” theory, who put idea and object at different ends of the same pole, are joining together complete incompatibles.
Material things are not only just as much mental as their so-called “subjective” perceptions but are intrinsically the same. It would be a gross error to believe that a perception is a mere mental copy of a material object. The latter itself is as subjective as the former. Both the supposed material thing and the conscious registration of it are mental constructions and nothing else. The notion that the construct itself conforms to the material thing is pure supposition.
The idea of a wall is all that we know for certain because it is all that we really experience, the rest is but unconscious deduction and automatic erroneous judgment. For our entire attention is directed toward the externalized wall and not toward the awareness of what is actually taking place during its perception. Hence simple and superficial persons fall into easy error by taking this idea for an external thing. The idea, the mental copy which is supposed to have come into existence in consequence of the presence of the material wall is the first thing we really know, whereas the matter is the second thing. But it has not the advantage of being known, it is only inferred and remote and as an inference it is only a copy of the first idea, i.e., we have multiplied the construct itself. We can get along quite well without such multiplication. The lesson is that we must give preference and allow priority to the perception itself rather than to the object of perception, because we must mark out a strict boundary line between what is actually perceived and what is merely inferred.
But we are not yet done with our critic. He may very properly ask: “If there is nothing external, no independent thing at all, then the question will inevitably arise: ‘Why do we get the idea of an object when there is apparently nothing to cause it?’” This and other criticisms and objections which can be made and are likely to be made against mentalism must regrettably be left for further consideration when the doctrine is more adequately explained and finally proved in the succeeding volume of this work. They are linked together with more advanced problems. For unless the nature of Mind, the mystery of sleep, the meaning of dream, the secret of the I, and the significance of creation are thoroughly understood, the conviction of mentalism’s truth cannot be finally clinched nor can its own tremendous contribution be brought into relation with our common life. Philosophy in general has hitherto offered many questions but few final solutions, whereas the hidden teaching offers a complete key to the understanding of the ALL. Let it be noted that it touches on these tantalizing mysteries only to solve them, but that solution belongs to the more advanced tenets and can only be grasped after the difficult preparatory studies have been made, and may not be separated without causing bewilderment arising from the strange facts there to be revealed. Such is the regrettable position and there we must perforce leave it for the present.
Meanwhile, in reply to the questions, why does the independent object contribute to our sensation of sight, smell, and touch, and why does it induce those sensations by its mere presence?—we may now say that because the percept manufactured out of such sensations is the object itself, the questions collapse as unaskable. Thing and thought are identical. Those who would distinguish between the thing as apart from our mind and the thing in relation to us attempt what is impossible, for they are as inseparable as the sun ray and the sun. The thought is the thing, the percept is the object, rather than the reverse. Every object, together with the space and time relations that go with it, is an object perceived in consciousness and nowhere else, and therefore dependent on it. What we call a material object really is the percept of a material object built in our minds, and the outward projection of a percept really is the outward object itself. That which immediately and indisputably exists for us is the finished percept. We need not hesitate to apply this principle with the utmost boldness. Locomotive engines and reinforced concrete skyscrapers, broad lakes, and lofty mountains are as much mental constructs as any other things that we see amid teeming cities or in placid landscapes.
It is hard at first but easy in the end to grasp this primary fact, that the supposed deliverances of sense-activities, i.e., sensations, are themselves the objects with which we are dealing in our intercourse with the world. When we ponder reflectively we shall find that thing and thought meet, that objective and subjective merge, that any distinction between them is arbitrary, for it is made by man and not by Nature. Thus subjective and objective elements merge into unity, into radical identity. It is impossible to think thing and construct asunder when we deeply consider what they really are. Reflection relentlessly demands that we blend them into one. It is an iron necessity of the laws of thought against which no shuffling convention can prevail.
What is the distinction between a thing as we see it and as it is in itself? For us there is none. The purposes of the practical activities of mankind quite entitle us to inquire no farther than the common view, which does not take the thought for the thing. But this will not stand up to critical philosophical inquiry, which demands the whole truth and nothing less and which therefore finds that the thing is really the thought of the thing. Hence for philosophic purposes we are compelled to rub out the distinction between the thought and the thing. It might exist in Nature but it does not exist in knowledge. It is impossible to prove that it is a fact and it is equally impossible to prove that it is a fiction. For the thing-in-itself is beyond our reach as any thing other than as a thought.
The setting up of a material activity in opposition to a mental one rests on the false and perverted notion of a bifurcated world containing both outside things and internal thoughts. The superficial masses immediately make this discrimination, but were they to think deeply enough they could never maintain this absurd thesis. Uninstructed and unreflective persons believe that they have direct awareness of external objects, for they call the mental construct the material object. The best philosophical psychologists know better, for they know that the mental operations concerned are the first to enter the field of awareness, as they are also the last.
So long as we stubbornly persist in drawing a line between things and our perception of these things, so long shall we be unable to comprehend their real character. So long as we sever the one from the other, so long shall we find ourselves in this cul-de-sac which renders the problem wholly insoluble. Once we throw this primary error, this fundamental and fatal miscalculation, into the crucible of intent reflection, we may hope to find the true fact about our knowledge of the world but not before. The masses naturally think and feel that every external thing comes first and the mental image of it is merely a copy that arises subsequently. They are not to be blamed for this, for Nature hides her gold in the depths of earth and hides her truth in the depths of reflection. Habit forces us to establish this separation of thought from thing, but reflection equally forces us to repair this error. Those who will not take the trouble to pick their way through this tangled inquiry cannot hope to perceive the truth about the familiar things around them. That whether it be a pen or a pageant each of these things is mental, is a truth which stands in direct and primary opposition to their first and foremost impressions. Nothing but the severest scrutiny of himself and the subtlest thinking within himself could ever have given man the knowledge of this amazing truth.
When we carry this line of reasoning to its farthest end with thorough consistency we cannot fail to conclude that although it has converted objects into ideas it does not stop there, but converts ideas back again into objects!