Kitabı oku: «Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas», sayfa 13

IV

There remains the question of the co-ordination of the impressions received materially by the senses. This co-ordination, for elementary sensations, is evidently identical for all beings. The snail, his horn being threatened, and man, his eye, make the same shrinking movement. Identical acts can have as cause only identical realities, or ones perceived as such. With judgment, we enter upon the mystery. If light is constant, the judgment which admits its existence is variable according to the species, and, in the higher species, according to the individual. It is clear that all eyes are affected by light, but we do not know to what degree, or according to what mode of spectral decomposition. It is the same for all other senses. Even if the reality of the sensible world be admitted, we are obliged to pronounce cautiously upon the quality of this reality, as reality perceived and judged. We then return to idealism, though having had a quite different end in view. We must retrace our steps, contemplate anew the ironic portress, and resign ourselves never to know anything save appearance.

Another fact, however, remains – another fortress, perhaps, reared facing the other. This is, that matter existed before life. The gain seems slight, but it is equivalent to saying that the phenomena perceived by the senses are exterior to the senses which now perceive them; and this perhaps means that, if life becomes extinct, matter will survive life. The proposition of the idealists that the world would come to an end if there were no longer any sensibilities capable of feeling it, any intelligences capable of perceiving it, seems, therefore, untenable. And yet what would a world be, that was neither thought nor felt? We must recognize this, that when we think of a world void of thought, it still contains our thought, or it is our thought which contains it and animates it. Another phenomenon analogous to this has, perhaps, contributed much to belief in the immortality of the soul, namely, that we cannot conceive of ourselves as dead save by thinking of this death, by feeling and seeing it. The idea of our non-existence supposes, moreover, the life of our thought. That there is here an illusion due to the very functioning of the mechanism of thought is probable enough; but it is difficult not to take it into account. It would seem somewhat high-handed to make abstraction of it.

We can attempt it, however, and try a new road leading "beyond thought." The way would be to consider the general movement of the things in which our thought itself is closely implicated, and by which it is rigorously conditioned. Far, perhaps, from thought thinking life, it is life that animates thought. What is anterior is a vast rhythmic undulation, of which thought is but one of the moments, one of the bounds.

The position taken by man outside the world to judge the world, is a factitious attitude. It is, perhaps, only a game, and one that is too easy. The division of man into two parts, thought, physical being, one considering the other and pretending to contain it, is only a philosophic amusement which becomes impossible the moment we stop to consider. There is, in fact, a physic of thought. We know that it is a product, measurable, ponderable. Unformulated externally, it nevertheless manifests its physical existence by the weight which it imposes upon the nervous system. It needs speech, writing, or some sort of sign, in order to manifest itself externally. Telepathy, thought, penetration, presentiment – if there be any facts in this category which have really been verified – would in such a case be so many proofs of the materiality of thought. But it is useless to multiply arguments in favour of a fact which is no longer contested save by theology.

This fact of materiality gives thought a secondary place. It is produced. It might not be. It is not primordial. It is a result, a consequence – doubtless a property of the nervous system, or even of living matter. It is then through a singular abuse, that we have become accustomed to consider it isolated from the ensemble of its producing causes.

But, if thought be a product, it is, none the less, productive in its turn. It does not create the world, it judges it. It does not destroy it, it modifies and reduces it to its measure. To know is to frame a judgment; but every judgment is arbitrary, since it is an accommodation, an average, and since two different physiologies give different averages, just as they give different extremes. The path, once again, after many windings, brings us back to idealism.

Idealism is definitely founded on the very materiality of thought, considered as a physiological product. The conception of an external world exactly knowable is compatible only with belief in the reason, that is to say, in the soul, that is to say, furthermore, in the existence of an unchangeable, incorruptible, immortal principle, whose judgments are infallible. If, on the contrary, knowledge of the world be the work of a humble physiological product, thought – a product differing in quality, in modality, from man to man, species to species – the world may perhaps be considered as unknowable, since each brain or each nervous system derived from its vision and from its contact a different image, or one which, if it was at first the same for all, is profoundly modified in its final representation by the intervention of the individual judgment.

If the same object produces the same image on the retina of an ox or the retina of a man, it will not, doubtless, be concluded, therefore, that this image is known and judged identically by the ox and the man.

There are no two leaves, there are no two beings, alike in nature. Such is the basis of idealism and the cause of incompatibility with the agreeable doctrines with which men continue to be entertained.

The reasons of idealism plunge deep down into matter. Idealism means materialism, and conversely, materialism means idealism.

1904.