Evolution

by F. B. Jevons

We apprehend a thing as being both our sensations and something more. When the idealist says that the latter half of this apprehension is a misapprehension, he rejects an observed fact of experience, not because he does not find it in his experience, but because it seems to him impossible that it should be there. He argues that to say we can be conscious of what is not in our consciousness is to say that we can be conscious of something of which we are unconscious—a patent nonsense. He might admit, for the sake of argument, that possibly a thing could exist both in consciousness and out, and even that we might know that it so existed. But he cannot admit that a man is conscious of what he is not conscious of.

He is not required to admit it. He is required to admit that our perceptions are not the only things of which we are conscious; or, to put it in other words, that our states of consciousness are not the only things of which we are conscious. And he is required to admit it simply and solely on the ground that it is a fact of common observation and everyday experience. Thus, for instance, we perform actions, and (usually) we are conscious of performing them. But the action is something more and other than our consciousness of it. Or is someone going to maintain that doing and knowing are the same thing? Is anyone prepared to push the illusion-argument so far as to say that the idea that we do things is a mere delusion? If it is not a delusion, if it is, on the contrary, a fact, then our actions are not states of consciousness, but things of which we are conscious. We apprehend them, in the very act of apprehension, as realities distinct from the consciousness which we have of them. And we have the very same guarantee for their reality as we have for the reality of our perception or sensations of them, viz. the fact that we are conscious of them.

In the same way, when we push a solid object or feel the impact of a moving body, we are as conscious of that body as of our muscular sensations: our sensations make up our perception of the object, but are not the object. They constitute the state of consciousness, but that state is not the only thing we are conscious of. The object is apprehended as being in consciousness and not as merely being our consciousness of it.

Mr. Herbert Spencer, at least, is quite clear that our states of consciousness are not the only things of which we are conscious; he holds even that we are vaguely conscious of that which transcends our consciousness. Thus, our personality is not a state of consciousness, yet we are conscious of it, and "its existence is to each a fact above all others the most certain."[6] And, as for the real, "our firm belief in objective reality, a belief which metaphysical criticism cannot shake," is not merely "a positive though vague consciousness of that which transcends consciousness," but "has the highest validity of any"[7] of our beliefs.

But though Mr. Spencer admits, or rather insists, that we know that the Real is, he denies that we know what it is. In other words, he accepts the validity of one half of every act of experience and denies the validity of the other half. Our analysis of experience has shown us that we apprehend the real, in the very act of apprehension, as being both a state of our consciousness and something more than that state. To say that one half of the apprehension is a misapprehension is to say that both are invalid. If what is present in consciousness is merely appearance and not the real thing, then our states are the only things of which we are conscious, and the existence of anything more is not a fact of experience and observation—still less can it have the highest validity of any of our beliefs.

We may be asked, "Granted that the Real is more than a state of our consciousness, what more is it?" and, if no answer is forthcoming, we may be told that after all then, it seems, we know that the Real is, but not what it is. The reply is: So far as the Real is out of consciousness we may not know what it is; as far as it is in, we do. By "being conscious of a thing" we mean knowing what the thing is—not necessarily complete knowledge, but some.

If it be said that, on our own showing, a thing and the knowledge of it are different, and that consequently however great our knowledge may become there always remains, and must always remain, something which we cannot know, because it is ex hypothesi, not knowledge, we must reply that this objection is but a restatement of the inveterate fallacy of idealism—the fallacy that states of consciousness are the only things we can be conscious of; that if we know a thing the thing ceases to be anything but our knowledge of it; that to be conscious of performing an action is proof that no action is really performed, and that the only doing is knowing.

We act, and we know that we act. Reality must be accorded to both or denied to both; it cannot be accorded to one and denied to the other. Indeed, knowledge itself is action, a series of actions. But it is also something more, just as an action of which we are conscious is something more than our consciousness of it.

But we are conscious not only of our own actions, but of the reactions of things on us, and of the interactions of things on one another. We apprehend all three—action, reaction, and interaction—as real; we know not only that they are, as being realities, but also what they are as states of consciousness. As states of consciousness they are successive sensations or perceptions; as more than states of consciousness they are power or force.

The study which science makes of the interactions of things on one another reveals those interactions as conformable to law and happening in such a way that their occurrence can be logically deduced, and even foretold, from their laws. In a word, they happen in a way that can be reasoned out, and they constitute together a logical process. The reality, the power, the activity which is exhibited in this process is exhibited therefore as a rational activity, as reason active; and both the reason and the action are apprehended by us as real, and not as mere states of our consciousness.