Now, it is necessary here to observe very carefully that it is from the unique individuality of the purpose expressed in an actual experience that the objects or facts of immediate experience derive the individuality in virtue of which we contrast them with the generalities or abstract possibilities of science. It is the more necessary to dwell explicitly on this point, because there is a common but erroneous doctrine that the individuality of actual existence is derived from its occupying a particular place in the space and time orders. Scientific truth is general, it is often said, because it refers alike to all places and times; actual “fact” is individual because it is what is here and now. But we should be able to see that such an account directly inverts the real order of logical dependence. Mere position in space and time can never be a true “principle of individuation,” for the simple reason that one point in space and one moment in time, considered apart from the things and events which fill them, are, at any rate for our perception,[[34]] indistinguishable from all other points and moments. It is, on the other hand, precisely by their correlation with unique stages in lives which are the embodiment of unique and individual purpose, that places and times and the things and events which occupy them become for us themselves unique and individual. Here, for me, means where I now am, and now, this unique and determinate stage in the execution of the purposes which, by their uniqueness, make me unique in the world. Thus we seem to have reached the significant conclusion that to say “Reality is experience” involves the further propositions, “Reality is through and through purposive” and “Reality is uniquely individual.”
§ 4. We have already seen that to identify reality with experience does not mean identifying it with my own experience just as it comes to me in actual life, still less with my own experience as I mentally reconstruct it in the light of some conscious or unconscious philosophical theory.[theory.] My own experience, in fact, is very far from satisfying the conditions of completeness and harmony which we found in our last book to be essential to a “pure” or perfect experience. Its defectiveness is principally manifested in three ways. (1) As we have already seen, its contents are always fragmentary. It never contains more than the poorest fragment of the whole wealth of existence. The purposes or interests which make up my conscious life are narrowly limited. The major portion of the facts of the universe, i.e. of the conditions of which note has to be taken by its inhabitants if their aims are to be fulfilled, lie outside the range of my individual interests—at least, of those which I ever become explicitly aware. Hence, being without significance for my individual purposes, they do not directly enter into my special experience. I either know nothing of them at all, or know of them only indirectly and through the testimony of others for whose lives they have real and direct significance. And these others again are, in virtue of the individual interests which differentiate them from me, only partially cognisant of the same factual reality as I am.
(2) Again, my insight even into my own aims and interests is of a very limited kind. For one thing, it is only a fragment of them which is ever given in the form of what is immediately felt in an actual moment of experience. I have largely to interpret the actually felt by theoretical intellectual constructions which reach, in the form of memory, into the past, and, in the form of anticipation, into the future. And both these types of intellectual construction, though indispensable, are notoriously vitiated by fallacies. For another, even with the fullest aid of such intellectual construction, I never succeed in completely grasping the whole meaning of my life as the embodiment of a single coherent purpose. Many of my purposes never rise sufficiently into clear consciousness to be distinctly realised, and those that do often wear the appearance of having no systematic connection with one another. Small wonder, then, that the realities or “facts” of which I learn to take note for the execution of my aims more often than not appear to belong to a chaos rather than to the orderly system which we cannot help believing the world to be, could we see it as it truly is.
(3) Finally, I have the gravest grounds for the conviction that even of the realities of which I do take note I never perceive more than just those aspects which attract my attention just because they happen to be significant for my special interests. What startling experiences teach us in the case of our fellow-men may be true everywhere, namely, that everything that is has an infinity of sides to it, over and above those of which we become aware because of their special importance for our own purposes; there may be an infinite wealth of character in the most familiar things, to which we are blind only because, so to speak, it has no “economic value” for the human market. For all these reasons we are absolutely forbidden to identify our own limited experience with the experience of which we have said, that to be real is to be bound up with it, and to be bound up with it is to be real. Neither, again, can we identify this experience with the “collective experience” of the aggregate of human or other finite sentient beings in the universe. This is obvious for more reasons than one. To begin with, “collective experience,” if it has any meaning at all, is a contradictory expression. For experience, as we have seen, is essentially characterised by unique individuality of aim and interest; in this sense at least, a true experience must be that of an individual subject, and no collection or aggregate can be an individual subject. The so-called “collective experience” is not one experience at all, but simply an indefinite multiplicity of experience, thrown together under a single designation. And even if we could get over this difficulty, there remains a still more formidable one. The various experiences of finite individuals are all, we have said, fragmentary and more or less incoherent. You cannot, therefore, get an experience which is all-comprehensive and all-harmonious by adding them together. If their defect were merely their fragmentariness, it would be conceivable that, given an outside observer who could see all the fragments at once, they might constitute a whole by merely supplementing one another’s deficiencies. But our finite experiences are not only fragmentary, but also largely contradictory and internally chaotic. We may indeed believe that the contradictions are only apparent, and that if we could become fully conscious of our own inmost aims and purposes we should at the same moment be aware of all Reality as a harmonious system; but we never do, and we shall see later that just because of our finitude we never can, attain this completed insight into the significance of our own lives. Hence the experience for which all reality is present as a harmonious whole cannot be any mere duplicate of the partial and imperfect experiences which we possess.
We thus seem driven to assert the necessary existence of a superhuman experience to which the whole universe of being is directly present as a complete and harmonious system. For “reality” has been seen to have no meaning apart from presence in a sentient experience or whole of feeling, while it has also been seen infinitely to transcend all that can be given as directly present to any limited experience. If this conclusion is sound, our “Absolute” can now be said to be a conscious life which embraces the totality of existence, all at once, and in a perfect systematic unity, as the contents of its experience. Such a conception clearly has its difficulties; how such an all-containing experience must be thought to be related to the realm of physical nature, and again to our own finite experiences, are problems which we shall have to take up in our two succeeding books. We shall find them far from simple, and it is as well for us from the first to face the possibility that our knowledge of the character of the absolute experience may prove to be very limited and very tentative. That it is we seem compelled to assert by the very effort to give a coherent meaning to our notion of reality, but of what it is we may have to confess ourselves largely ignorant.
But we may at least go so far as this, at the present stage of our argument. However different an all-containing coherent experience may be in its detailed structure from our own piecemeal and largely incoherent experience, if it is to be experience at all, it must apprehend its contents in the general way which is characteristic of direct experience as such. It must take note or be aware of them, and it must—if it is to be a direct experience at all—be aware of them as exhibiting a structural unity which is the embodiment of a consistent plan or purpose. We have to think of it as containing in a systematic unity not only all the “facts” of which our various experiences have to take note, but all the purposes which they express. Hence it is natural for us, when we attempt to form some approximate concept of such an ultimate experience in terms of our own conscious life, to conceive it as the union of perfected knowledge in an indivisible whole with supreme will. We must, however, remember that, for such an experience, precisely because of its all-comprising character, the what and the that are inseparable. Hence its knowledge must be of the nature of direct insight into the individual structure of the world of fact, not of generalisation about possibilities, and its will must have the form of a purpose which, unlike our own, is always consciously expressed with perfect harmony and completeness in the “facts” of which it is aware.[[35]] Hence knowledge and will, involving as they do for us discrepancy between the what and the that of experience, are not wholly satisfactory terms by which to characterise the life of the Absolute.[[36]] The most adequate analogue to such a life will probably be found in the combination of direct insight with satisfied feeling which we experience in the relation of intimate and intelligent love between persons. The insight of love may be called “knowledge,” but it is knowledge of a quite other type than the hypothetical universals of science. I know my friend, not as one case of this or that general class about which certain propositions in Physiology, Psychology, or Ethics can be made, but as—for me at least—a unique individual centre of personal interest. Again, in my relations with my friend, so far as they remain those of satisfied love, my individual interests find their fullest embodiment. But the will to love is not first there in an unsatisfied form, and the embodiment afterwards added as the result of a process through means to an end. The purpose and its embodiment are throughout present together in an unbroken unity, and where this is not so, true mutual friendship does not as yet exist.[[37]] After some such general fashion we shall best represent to ourselves the kind of consciousness which we must attribute to an all-embracing world-experience. Only, we must bear in mind that, owing to the fragmentariness of our own lives, the identity of purpose on which human friendship rests can never be close and intimate enough to be an adequate representative of the ultimate unity of all experience in the Absolute.[[38]]
§ 5. It may be well to add a word of caution against a plausible fallacy here. If there is such an Absolute Experience as we have demanded, all the realities that we know as the contents of our environment must be present to it, and present to it as they really are in their completeness. But we must be careful not to suppose that “our” environment, as it appears to an experience which apprehends it as it really is, is a mere replica or reduplication of the way in which it appears to us. For example, I must not assume that what I perceive as a physical thing, made up of separable parts external to one another and apparently combined in a mechanical way into a whole which is a mere collection or aggregate of parts, is necessarily apprehended by the Absolute Experience as an aggregate of similar or corresponding parts. The thing as it appears to my limited insight may be no less different from the thing as apprehended in its true nature by such an experience, than your body, as it exists for my perception from your body as you apprehend it in organic sensation. In particular, we must not assume that things exist for the Absolute Experience in the form into which we analyse them for the purpose of general scientific theory, for instance, that physical things are for it assemblages of atoms or individual minds successions of “mental states.” In fact, without anticipating the results of succeeding books, we may safely say at once that this would be in principle impossible. For all scientific analysis is in its very nature general and hypothetical. It deals solely with types and abstract possibilities, never with the actual constitution of individual things. But all real existence is individual.
To put the same thing in a different way, scientific theory deals always with those features of the what of things of which we take note because of their significance for our human purposes. And in dealing with these features of things, it seeks to establish general laws of linkage between them of which we may avail ourselves, for the practical purpose of realising our various human interests. This practical motive, though often not apparent, implicitly controls our whole scientific procedure from first to last. Hence the one test of a scientific hypothesis is its success in enabling us to infer one set of facts from another set, Whether the intermediate links by which we pass from the one set to the other have any counterpart in the world of real experience or are mere creations of theory, like the “uninterpretable” symbols in a mathematical calculus, is from this point of view a matter of indifference. All we require of our hypothesis is that when you start with facts capable of experimental verification, the application of it shall lead to other facts capable of experimental verification. For this reason we may justifiably conclude that to any experience which is aware of things in their concrete individuality they must present aspects which are not represented in our scientific hypotheses, and again cannot appear to it as the precise counterpart of the schemes according to which we quite legitimately reconstruct them for the purpose of scientific investigation. We shall need to bear this in mind in future when we come to discuss the real character of what appears to us as the world of physical nature.[[39]]
§ 6. The conclusion we have reached so far is largely identical with that of the anti-materialistic argument of Berkeley’s well-known Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. But there is one important difference between the two results which will lead to momentous consequences. Berkeley’s argument against the independent existence of unperceived matter proceeds throughout on the principle that to be means to be present in an experience, and his exhibition of the contradictions into which the denial of this principle leads the supporter of scientific materialism remains the classic demonstration of the truth of the opposing or “idealistic” view. But it is to be noted that he works throughout with an inadequate conception of “experience” and “presence in experience.” He treats experience as equivalent to mere passive “awareness” of a quality presented to perception. To experience with him means simply to be conscious of a presented quality; experience is treated as having, in psychological terminology, a merely presentational character. Hence he is led to infer that the things with which experience confronts us are nothing more than complexes of presented qualities, or, as he phrases it, that their whole being consists in being perceived.
The full extent of the paradox which this identification of the esse of material things with percipi involves, will be more apparent when we come to deal in our next book with the problem of matter. At present I merely wish to call attention to one of its many aspects. On the theory that experience is purely passive and presentational, consisting merely in the reception of certain sensations, the question at once arises, What determines what in particular the sensations we at any given moment receive shall be? On the Berkeleian view, their order must be determined altogether from without by a principle foreign to the experience which, he assumes, has nothing to do but to cognise the qualities put before it. Hence he is led to appeal to the agency of God, whom he supposes directly and immediately to cause perceptions to succeed one another in my experience in a certain definite order. Now, apart from further difficulties of detail, this doctrine at once leads to the result that the attitude of God to the world of things is totally different from that of us who experience it. Experience is to me a purely passive receptivity of presentations; God’s relation to the presented objects, on the other hand, is one of active production. There is no common element in these fundamentally contrasted relations; hence it is really a paralogism when Berkeley allows himself to bring God under the same categories which he applies to the interpretation of human experience, and to attribute to Him a consciousness of the things which have been declared to be only the presentations His agency raises in the human mind.[[40]]