We pity what is like ourselves, and the greater and clearer our sense of its likeness with ourselves, the greater our pity. And if we may say that this likeness provokes our pity, it may also be maintained that it is our reservoir of pity, eager to diffuse itself over everything, that makes us discover the likeness of things with ourselves, the common bond that unites us with them in suffering.
Our own struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase our own consciousness makes us discover in the endeavours and movements and revolutions of all things a struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase consciousness, to which everything tends. Beneath the actions of those most akin to myself, of my fellow-men, I feel—or, rather, I co-feel—a state of consciousness similar to that which lies beneath my own actions. On hearing my brother give a cry of pain, my own pain awakes and cries in the depth of my consciousness. And in the same way I feel the pain of animals, and the pain of a tree when one of its branches is being cut off, and I feel it most when my imagination is alive, for the imagination is the faculty of intuition, of inward vision.
Proceeding from ourselves, from our own human consciousness, the only consciousness which we feel from within and in which feeling is identical with being, we attribute some sort of consciousness, more or less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply a struggle to realize fullness of consciousness through suffering, a continual aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and yet to preserve their proper limits.
And this process of personalization or subjectivization of everything external, phenomenal, or objective, is none other than the vital process of philosophy in the contest of life against reason and of reason against life. We have already indicated it in the preceding chapter, and we must now confirm it by developing it further.
Giovanni Baptista Vico, with his profound esthetic penetration into the soul of antiquity, saw that the spontaneous philosophy of man was to make of himself the norm of the universe, guided by the instinto d'animazione. Language, necessarily anthropomorphic, mythopeic, engenders thought. "Poetic wisdom, which was the primitive wisdom of paganism," says Vico in his Scienza Nuova, "must have begun with a metaphysic, not reasoned and abstract, like that of modern educated men, but felt and imagined, such as must have been that of primitive men. This was their own poetry, which with them was inborn, an innate faculty, for nature had furnished them with such feelings and such imaginations, a faculty born of the ignorance of causes, and therefore begetting a universal sense of wonder, for knowing nothing they marvelled greatly at everything. This poetry had a divine origin, for, while they invented the causes of things out of their own imagination, at the same time they regarded these causes with feelings of wonder as gods. In this way the first men of the pagan peoples, as children of the growing human race, fashioned things out of their ideas.... This nature of human things has bequeathed that eternal property which Tacitus elucidated with a fine phrase when he said, not without reason, that men in their terror fingunt simul creduntque."
And then, passing from the age of imagination, Vico proceeds to show us the age of reason, this age of ours in which the mind, even the popular mind, is too remote from the senses, "with so many abstractions of which all languages are full," an age in which "the ability to conceive an immense image of such a personage as we call sympathetic Nature is denied to us, for though the phrase 'Dame Nature' may be on our lips, there is nothing in our minds that corresponds with it, our minds being occupied with the false, the non-existent." "To-day," Vico continues, "it is naturally impossible for us to enter into the vast imagination of these primitive men." But is this certain? Do not we continue to live by the creations of their imagination, embodied for ever in the language with which we think, or, rather, the language which thinks in us?
It was in vain that Comte declared that human thought had already emerged from the age of theology and was now emerging from the age of metaphysics into the age of positivism; the three ages coexist, and although antagonistic they lend one another mutual support. High-sounding positivism, whenever it ceases to deny and begins to affirm something, whenever it becomes really positive, is nothing but metaphysics; and metaphysics, in its essence, is always theology, and theology is born of imagination yoked to the service of life, of life with its craving for immortality.
Our feeling of the world, upon which is based our understanding of it, is necessarily anthropomorphic and mythopeic. When rationalism dawned with Thales of Miletus, this philosopher abandoned Oceanus and Thetis, gods and the progenitors of gods, and attributed the origin of things to water; but this water was a god in disguise. Beneath nature (φυσις) and the world (κοσμος), mythical and anthropomorphic creations throbbed with life. They were implicated in the structure of language itself. Xenophon tells us (Memorabilia, i., i., 6-9) that among phenomena Socrates distinguished between those which were within the scope of human study and those which the gods had reserved for themselves, and that he execrated the attempt of Anaxagoras to explain everything rationally. His contemporary, Hippocrates, regarded diseases as of divine origin, and Plato believed that the sun and stars were animated gods with their souls (Philebus, cap. xvi., Laws, x.), and only permitted astronomical investigation so long as it abstained from blasphemy against these gods. And Aristotle in his Physics tells us that Zeus rains not in order that the corn may grow, but by necessity (εξ αναρχης). They tried to mechanize and rationalize God, but God rebelled against them.
And what is the concept of God, a concept continually renewed because springing out of the eternal feeling of God in man, but the eternal protest of life against reason, the unconquerable instinct of personalization? And what is the notion of substance itself but the objectivization of that which is most subjective—that is, of the will or consciousness? For consciousness, even before it knows itself as reason, feels itself, is palpable to itself, is most in harmony with itself, as will, and as will not to die. Hence that rhythm, of which we spoke, in the history of thought. Positivism inducted us into an age of rationalism—that is to say, of materialism, mechanism, or mortalism; and behold now the return of vitalism, of spiritualism. What was the effort of pragmatism but an effort to restore faith in the human finality of the universe? What is the effort of a Bergson, for example, especially in his work on creative evolution, but an attempt to re-integrate the personal God and eternal consciousness? Life never surrenders.
And it avails us nothing to seek to repress this mythopeic or anthropomorphic process and to rationalize our thought, as if we thought only for the sake of thinking and knowing, and not for the sake of living. The very language with which we think prevents us from so doing. Language, the substance of thought, is a system of metaphors with a mythic and anthropomorphic base. And to construct a purely rational philosophy it would be necessary to construct it by means of algebraic formulas or to create a new language for it, an inhuman language—that is to say, one inapt for the needs of life—as indeed Dr. Richard Avenarius, professor of philosophy at Zürich, attempted to do in his Critique of Pure Experience (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung), in order to avoid preconceptions. And this rigorous attempt of Avenarius, the chief of the critics of experience, ends strictly in pure scepticism. He himself says at the end of the Prologue to the work above mentioned: "The childish confidence that it is granted to us to discover truth has long since disappeared; as we progress we become aware of the difficulties that lie in the way of its discovery and of the limitation of our powers. And what is the end?... If we could only succeed in seeing clearly into ourselves!"