The Inner Life

by Rufus M. Jones

Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;

Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my soul.”—Walt Whitman.

There are many forms of experience which in the primary, unanalyzed, unreflective stage appear to bring us into immediate contact with self-transcending reality. We seem to be nearer the heart of things, more imbedded in life and in reality itself when consciousness is fused and unified in an undifferentiated whole of experience than in the later stage of reflection and description. This later stage necessarily involves reduction because it involves abstraction. We cannot bring any object or any experience to exact description without stripping it of its life and its mystery and without reducing it to the abstract qualities which are unvarying and repeatable.

There can be no doubt that our experiences of beauty, for instance, have a physical and describable aspect. The sunset which thrills us is for descriptive purposes an aggregation of minute water-drops which set ether waves vibrating at different velocities, and, as a result, we receive certain nerve shocks that are pleasurable. These nerve shocks modify brain cells and affect arterial and visceral vibrations, all of which might conceivably be accurately described. But no complete account of these minute cloud particles, or of these ether vibrations; no catalogue of these nerve shocks, cell changes, or arterial throbs can catch or present to us what we get in the naïve and palpitating experience of beauty itself. Something there in the field of perception has suddenly fused our consciousness into an undifferentiated whole in which sensuous elements, intellectual and ideal elements, emotional and conative elements are indissolubly merged into a vital system which baffles all analysis. Something got through perception puts all the powers of the inner self into play and into harmony, overcomes all dualisms of self and other, annuls all contradictions that may later be discovered, lifts the mind to the apprehension of objects of a higher order than that of sense, and liberates and vitalizes the soul with a consciousness of possession and joy and freedom.

The flower of the botanist is an aggregation of ovary, calyx, petals, pistil, and pollen—a thing which can be exactly analyzed and described. The poet’s flower, on the other hand, is never a flower which could be pressed in a book or dried in an herbarium. It is a tiny finite object which suddenly opens a glimpse into a world which mere sense-eyes never see. It gives “thoughts that do lie too deep for tears.” It is something so bound in with the whole of things that if one understood it altogether, he would know “what God and man is.”

These experiences, even if they do not prove that there is a world of a higher order than that of mechanism and causal systems, at least bring the recipient moments of relief when he no longer cares for proof and they enable him to feel that he has authentic tidings of a world which is as it ought to be.

Our world of “inner experience” can in a similar way be dealt with by either one of these two characteristically different methods of approach. We can say, if we wish to do so, as Professor Leuba does in his Psychology of Religion, that “inner experience belongs entirely to psychology,” “the conscious life belongs entirely to science,”[16] “we must deal with inner experience according to the best scientific methods;”[17] or we can seize by an interior integral insight the rich concrete meaning and significance of the unanalyzed whole of consciousness, as it lives and moves in us.

Psychology, like all sciences, proceeds by analysis and limitation. It breaks up the integral whole of inner experience. It strips away all mystery, all that is private and unique, and it selects for exact description the permanent and repeatable aspects, and ends with a consciousness which consists of “mind-states,” or describable “contents.” Everything that will not reduce to this scientific “form” is ousted from the lists as negligible. All independent variables, all aspects of “meaning,” all will-attitudes, the unique feature of personal ideals, the integral consciousness of self-identity, the inherent tendency to transcend the “given”—all these features are either ignored or explained in terms of substitutes. Psychology confines itself, and must confine itself, to an empirical and describable order of facts. It could no more discover a transcendent world-order than could geology or astronomy. Its field is phenomena and the “man” it reports upon is “a naturalistic man,” as completely describable as the sunset cloud or the botanist’s flower.

What I insist upon, however, is that this “described, naturalistic man” is not a real existing, living, acting man possessed of interior experience. He is a constructed man. No addition of described “mind-states,” no summation of “mind-contents” would ever give consciousness in its inner living wholeness. The reality whose presence makes all the difference may be named “fringe,” or “connecting principle,” or “synthetic unity” or anything you please—“but oh! the difference to me!” The “psychic elements” of the psychologist are never really parts. Every psychical state is in reality what it is because it belongs to a person, is flooded with unique life, and is imbedded in a peculiar whole of personality. Forever psychology by its method of analysis misses, and must miss, the central core of the reality. It can analyze, reduce, and describe the abstract, universal, and repeatable aspects, but it cannot catch the thing itself any more than a cinematograph can.

Here in the inner life, if anywhere, we are justified in seizing and valuing the unified and undifferentiated whole of experience in its central meaning. If this primary experience of integral wholeness and unity of self be treated as an illusion, to what other pillar and ground of truth can we fasten? The object of beauty always reveals to us something which must be comprehended as a totality greater than the sum of its parts. The thing of beauty takes us beyond the range of the method of description. So, too, in the case of our richest, most intense, and unified moments of inner consciousness, we cannot get an adequate account by the method of analysis. We must supplement science by the best testimony we can get of the worth and meaning and implications of interior insight. We must get, where possible, appreciative accounts of the undifferentiated and unreduced experience and then we can raise the question as to what is rationally involved in such personal experiences.