We are obliged to use images to think by—e.g. the opening of a flower or the accretive growth of a coral reef—and possibly it would save a good deal of trouble if we did not disguise by long words the truth that all our theories in science and philosophy are simply metaphors of this kind—but the fact still lies behind and below them.
Perhaps, if we are to use the word Cause at all, we should do well to use it in the old sense in which the final cause and the efficient cause are one (the eidos of Aristotle)—to use it not so much to link phenomena or externals to each other as to link each phenomenon in a group to the thought or feeling which underlies that group. The notes in the Dead March in Saul, for instance. We cannot say that one note is the cause of another, but we might say that each note stands in a causal subordination to the feeling which inspired the piece—which is the origin of the piece and the result of its performance—the alpha and omega of it. Similarly, the ground floor in a house is not the cause of the first floor, nor the first floor of the second floor, nor that of the roof; but these actualities and the whole house itself stand in strict relationship to a mental something which is not in the same plane with them at all, nor an actuality in the same sense.
According to this view the notion that one configuration of atoms or bodies determines the next configuration turns out to be illusive. Both configurations are determined by a third something which does not belong to quite the same order of existence as the said atoms or bodies. Chance "laws" of succession may doubtless be found among physical events, and are valuable for practical purposes, but at any moment—owing to their superficiality—they may fail. Thus, an insect observing the expansion of the petals of a chrysanthemum might frame a law of their order of succession in size and colour, which would be valid for a time, but would fail entirely when the stamens appeared. Or, to take another illustration, physical science acts like a man trying to find direct causal relations between the various leaves of a tree, without first finding the relations of these to the branches and trunk—and so solving the problem indirectly. It deals only with the surface of the world of Man.
In thinking about such matters, Music, as Schopenhauer shows, is wonderfully illustrative, because in creating music man recognises that he is creating a world of his own—apart from and not to be confused with that other world of Nature (in which he does not recognise any of his handiwork). Supposing a non-musical person were to examine and analyse the score of a Beethoven symphony, he would be in the same position as a man examining and analysing Nature by purely scientific or intellectual methods. He would discover the recurrence of certain groups among the notes, he would establish laws of their sequences, would make all kinds of curious generalisations about them, and point out some remarkable exceptions, would even very likely be able to predict a bar or two over the page; his treatise would be very learned, and from a certain point of view interesting also, but how far would he be from any real understanding of his subject? Let him change his method: let him train his ear, let him hear the symphony performed, over and over, till he understands its meaning and knows it by heart; and then he will know at any rate something of why each note is there, he will see its fitness and feel in himself the "law" of its occurrence, and possibly in some new case will be able to predict several bars over the page! The symphony is not understood by examination and comparison of the notes alone, but by experience of their relation to deepest feelings; and Nature is not explained by laws, but by its becoming—or rather being felt to be—the body of Man; marvellous interpreter and symbol of his inward being.
There is a kind of knowledge or consciousness in us—as of our bodily parts, or affections, or deep-seated mental beliefs—which forms the base of our more obvious and self-conscious thought. This systemic knowledge grows even while the brain sleeps. It is not by any means absolute or infallible, but it affords, at any moment in man's history, the axiomatic ground on which his thought-structures, scientific and other, are built. Thus the axioms of Euclid are part of our present systemic knowledge, and afford the ground of all our geometry structures. But as the systemic consciousness grows, the ground shifts and the structures reared upon it fall. All our modern science, for instance, is founded on the acceptation of mechanical cause and effect as a basic fact of consciousness; but when that base gives way the entire structure will cave in, and a new edifice will have to be reared. Similarly, when the human form becomes distinctly visible to us in the animals—as an unavoidable part of our consciousness—this consciousness will form a new base or axiom for all our thought on the subject, and the theory of evolution, as hitherto conceived by science, will be entirely transformed.
Thus, although the experimental investigatory coral-reef accretion method of modern science is very valuable within its range, it must not be forgotten that the human mind does not progress more than temporarily by this method—that its progression is a matter of growth from within, and involves a continual breaking away of the bases of all thought-structures; so that, while this latter—i.e., the progression of the systemic consciousness of man—is necessary and continuous, the rise and fall of his thought-systems is accidental, so to speak, and discontinuous.
It is then finally in Man—in our own deepest and most vital experience—that we have to look for the key and explanation of the changes that we see going on around us in external Nature, as we call it; and our understanding of the latter, and of History, must ever depend from point to point on the exfoliation of new facts in the individual consciousness. Round the ultimate disclosure of the essential Man all creation (hitherto groaning and travailing towards that perfect birth) ranges itself, as it were, like some vast flower, in concentric cycles; rank beyond rank; first all social life and history, then the animal kingdom, then the vegetable and mineral worlds. And if the outer circles have been the first in fact to show themselves, it is by this last disclosure that light is ultimately thrown on the whole plan; and, as in the myth of the Eden-garden, with the appearance of the perfected human form that the work of creation definitely completes itself.
FOOTNOTE:
[39] This does not, of course, preclude the action of external conditions, or imply that organisation is determined by desire alone. In fact organisation may be regarded as the expression of desire acting under conditions—as in the cases of the monkey and giraffe above.