Notes On Natural Science - Intellectual Conception And Animated Life. 1871

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_ THE RANGE OF INTELLECTUAL CONCEPTION PROPORTIONED TO THE RANK IN ANIMATED LIFE.[36]

A THEOREM.

298. I suppose this theorem to be a truism; but I venture to state it, because it is surely desirable that it should be recognized as an axiom by metaphysicians, and practically does not seem to me yet to have been so. I say "animated life" because the word "life" by itself might have been taken to include that of vegetables; and I say "animated" instead of "spiritual" life because the Latin "anima," and pretty Italian corruption of it, "alma," involving the new idea of nourishment of the body as by the Aliment or Alms of God, seems to me to convey a better idea of the existence of conscious creatures than any derivative of "spiritus," "pneuma," or "psyche."

I attach, however, a somewhat lower sense to the word "conception" than is, I believe, usual with metaphysicians, for, as a painter, I belong to a lower rank of animated being than theirs, and can only mean by conception what I know of it. A painter never conceives anything absolutely, and is indeed incapable of conceiving anything at all, except as a phenomenon or sensation, or as the mode or locus of a phenomenon or sensation. That which is not an appearance, or a feeling, or a mode of one or the other, is to him nothing.

299. For instance, he would deny the definition of the phenomenon which he is himself first concerned in producing--a line--as "length without breadth." He would say, "That which has no breadth is nothing, and nothing cannot be long." He would define a line as a narrow and long phenomenon, and a mathematician's idea of it as an idea of the direction of such a phenomenon.

The act of conception or imagination with him, therefore, is merely the memory, simple or combined, of things that he has seen or felt. He has no ray, no incipience of faculty beyond this. No quantity of the sternest training in the school of Hegel, would ever enable him to think the Absolute. He would persist in an obstinate refusal to use the word "think" at all in a transitive sense. He would never, for instance, say, "I think the table," but "I think the table is turning," or is not, as the case might be. And if he were to be taught in any school whatever to conceive a table, his first demand would be that he should be shown one, or referred to other things that had the qualities of one in illustrative degree.

300. And even respecting the constant methods or laws of phenomena, he cannot raise the statement of them into an act of conception. The statement that two right lines can never inclose a space merely appears to him another form of verbal definition, or, at the grandest, a definition in prophetic extent, saying in other words that a line which incloses, or ever may inclose, a space, is not, and never will be, a right one. He would admit that what he now conceives as two things, doubled, would always be what he now conceives as four things. But assuming the existence of a world in which, whenever two things were actually set in juxtaposition with other two things, they became actually three times, or actually five, he supposes that the practice of arithmetic, and laws of it, would change in relation to this new condition in matter; and he accepts, therefore, the statement that twice two are four only as an accident of the existing phenomena of matter.

301. A painter therefore may, I think, be looked upon as only representing a high order of sensational creatures, incapable of any but physical ideas and impressions; and I continue my paper, therefore, only in the name of the docile, and therefore improvable, part of the Brute Creation.

And in their name I would suggest that we should be much more docile than we are if we were never occupied in efforts to conceive things above our natures. To take an instance, in a creature somewhat lower than myself. I came by surprise the other day on a cuttle-fish in a pool at low tide. On being touched with the point of my umbrella, he first filled the pool with ink, and then finding himself still touched in the darkness, lost his temper, and attacked the umbrella with much psyche or anima, hugging it tightly with all his eight arms, and making efforts, like an impetuous baby with a coral, to get it into his mouth. On my offering him a finger instead, he sucked that with two or three of his arms with an apparently malignant satisfaction, and on being shaken off, retired with an air of frantic misanthropy into the cloud of his ink.

302. Now, it seems to me not a little instructive to reflect how entirely useless such a manifestation of a superior being was to his cuttle-fish mind, and how fortunate it was for his fellow-octopods that he had no command of pens as well as ink, nor any disposition to write on the nature of umbrellas or of men.

It may be observed, further, that whatever ideas he was able to form respecting either were positively false--so contrary to truth as to be worse than none, and simply dangerous to himself, so far as he might be induced to act upon them--that, namely, an umbrella was an eatable thing, or a man a conquerable one, that the individual man who looked at him was hostile to him or that his purposes could be interfered with by ejection of ink. Every effort made by the fish under these convictions was harmful to himself; his only wisdom would have been to lie quietly and unreflectively in his pool.

And with us painters also, the only result of any efforts we make to acquaint ourselves with the subjects of metaphysical inquiry has been an increased sense of the prudence of lying placidly and unreflectively in our pools, or at least limiting ourselves to such gentle efforts of imagination as may be consistent with the as yet imperfectly developed powers, I do not say even of cephalopodic, but of Ascidian nervous centers.

303. But it may be easily imagined how pleasantly, to persons thus subdued in self-estimation, the hope presents itself which is involved in the Darwinian theory, that their pools themselves may be capable of indefinite extension, and their natures of indefinite development--the hope that our descendants may one day be ashamed of us, and debate the question of their parentage with astonishment and disgust.

And it seems to me that the aim of elementary metaphysical study might henceforth become more practical than that of any other science. For in hitherto taking little cognizance of the limitation of thought by the structure of the body, we have surely also lost sight of the power of certain modes of thought over the processes of that structure. Taking, for instance, the emotion of anger, of which the cephalopoda are indeed as capable as we are, but inferior to us in being unable to decide whether they do well to be angry or not, I do not think the chemical effect of that emotion on the particles of the blood, in decomposing and otherwise paralyzing or debilitating them, has been sufficiently examined, nor the actual quantity of nervous energy which a fit of anger of given violence withdraws from the body and restores to space, neither the correlative power of volition in restraining the passion, or in directing the choice of salutary thought, as of salutary herbs on streams. And even we painters, who dare not call ourselves capable of thought, are capable of choice in more or less salutary vision. In the degree in which we lose such power of choice in vision, so that the spectral phenomena which are the materials of our industry present themselves under forms beyond our control, we become insane; and although for all our best work a certain degree of this insanity is necessary, and the first occurring conceptions are uncommanded, as in dreams, we have, when in health, always instantaneous power of accepting some, refusing others, perfecting the outlines and colors of those we wish to keep, and arranging them in such relations as we choose.

304. And unquestionably the forms of the body which painters instinctively recognize as best, and call "beautiful," are so far under the command of the plastic force of voluntary thought, that the original and future authority of such a plastic force over the whole of creation cannot but seem to painters a direct, though not a certain influence; and they would at once give their adherence to the statement made many years since in his opening lectures in Oxford by the present Regius Professor of Medicine (as far as I can recollect approximately, in these terms)--that "it is quite as logical, and far more easy, to conceive of original anima as adapting itself to forms of substance, than of original substance as adapting to itself modes of mind."

305. It is surely, therefore, not too much to expect of future schools of metaphysicians that they will direct mankind into methods of thought which will be at once happy, unerring, and medicinal, and therefore entirely wise; that they will mark the limits beyond which uniformity must be dangerous, and speculation vain; and that they will at no distant period terminate the acrimony of theologians, and the insolences, as well as the sorrows, of groundless faith, by showing that it is appointed for us, in common with the rest of the animal creation, to live in the midst of an universe the nature of which is as much better than we can believe, as it is greater than we can understand.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 36: Contemporary Review, June, 1871.--ED.] _

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