Problems of Life: From the Diary of an Old Physician

I. Translator’s Preface

Every cultured man in Europe and America is more or less familiar with Doctor Pirogoff’s name. And our readers perhaps may remember what was said of this eminent Russian surgeon and pathologist in Lucifer of April last—in the editorial “Kosmic Mind.” Some quotations from his posthumous Memoirs were brought forward, to show how closely the views of a great man of science approximated to the occult teachings of Theosophy: e.g., his ideas on the universal mind, “infinite and eternal, which rules and governs the Ocean of Life,” and also on that bugbear of the materialists—the existence in every organism, as also outside, in Kosmos, of a distinct Vital Force, independent of any chemical or physical process. It was likewise stated, that the posthumous publication of Doctor Pirogoff’s Diary had raised a stir of amazement among the Russian public, and—among the Darwinists and Materialists, his ex-colleagues—quite a storm of indignation, as our eminent surgeon had hitherto been regarded as an “Agnostic,” if not an out-and-out Atheist of Buchner’s School.

Since then we have heard it said that a few lines quoted from a man’s writings proved nothing, and that the Theosophists had no right to affirm that their views had received corroboration at the hands of such a well-known man of science. Therefore, it has been decided to make lengthy selections from the two volumes of Doctor Pirogoff’s Memoirs, and to publish their translations in Lucifer. Of course the complete Diary cannot be translated, in order to satisfy the sceptics. Nor is it needed: as it is amply sufficient, in order to prove our point, to translate only those pages which contain the writer’s intimate thoughts upon the great problems of men. These, consisting of detached fragments, it is intended to publish in a short series of articles. Moreover, an autobiography in the shape of a private diary, interspersed with anecdotes about events and people belonging to a foreign country, would interest an English reader but little. All this is attractive to those only who are familiar with the names mentioned, and of whose country the author was for over a period of thirty years the pride and glory. Hence only such pages of the “Diary” as bear upon what we call theosophical and metaphysical questions, or which are of a philosophical character will be translated. The value of such pages is enhanced tenfold for us, as having been penned by a man of science, whose great learning was recognised by all Europe, and whose famous achievements in surgery have been so appreciated, that some of them have become authoritative even in England,¹ always so backward in recognising foreign—and especially Russian—merit.

Before proceeding with our selections, it may not be out of place, perhaps, to say a few words about the author.

N. I. Pirogoff was born in November, 1810, and died in the same month of the year 1881. Having passed the best years of his youth in the University of Dorpat, the very hotbed of German freethought during the years 1830-60, he was filled, as he himself confesses, with that proud spirit of all-denial, embodied by Goethe in his Mephisto. “Wherefore,” he writes, in describing his state of mind in those early days, “wherefore, and to what ends need we suppose the existence of a Deity? What can it explain in cosmogenesis? Is not matter eternal, and should it not be so? Why then this useless hypothesis which explains nothing?”

Elsewhere, however, probably years after, treating on the same subject, he writes in a different strain:— “Though it was a great heathen—der grosse Heide—(as Goethe was called), who said that he talked of God only with God himself, yet I, a Christian, following his advice, also avoid talking of my intimate belief and convictions even with those nearest and dearest to me: the holy to the holy.”

This accounts for the amazement experienced by those who knew Doctor Pirogoff most intimately, when on reading his posthumous Diary, they found that he had been an opponent of religion only in its forms, in its church and dogmas; but that ever since his thirty-ninth year he had found what he had craved for: namely, faith in an abstract, almost unreachable ideal, absolutely outside every form and ritualism. His writings show him to be a most profound mystic and philosopher.

Four years after his death, Doctor Pirogoff’s widow and sons gave his papers to be published, and the two volumes from which the following pages are translated were printed at the end of 1887. The first volume contains in full the unfinished “Diary of an Old Physician,” and ends in the middle of a sentence, interrupted by death. An epigraph on its title page explains that the late author wrote it “exclusively” for himself, “yet not without a secret hope that, perchance, others might read it too, some day.” “The perusal of these posthumous papers leads one to think,” adds the Russian publisher in his Preface, “that this last work of the author was connected in his thoughts with his early public writings, as he added to his diary, etc., a sub-title already used by him some twenty years before, in heading his philosophical essays, namely, ‘The Questions (or Problems) of Life.’” But as the latter, collected in volume II, are almost all of a social and educational rather than of a metaphysical character, it is not proposed to treat of them for the present.

—[H.P.B.]

———

I. On Autobiographies²

5th November, 1879.

Why are there so few autobiographies? Why such a mistrust of them? Surely every one will agree with me that there is no subject worthier of attention than acquaintance with the inner nature of a thinking man, even though he has done nothing to distinguish himself in social life.

The is a profound interest for us in the comparison of our own concepts with those that guide our fellow-man in his life-journey. No one denies this; yet it is an old habit with us to learn all we can about others, through others. More is believed of what is said of a man by another man, than of what his own actions suggest. This is juridically true; and there are no other means of finding out a juridical, i.e., an outward fact. Even the modern physician is guided in his diagnosis by objective symptoms, that which he himself sees, hears, and senses, rather than by what his patient tells him.

Besides mistrust, there are, I think, other reasons for the scarcity of autobiographies. There are too few people ready to write them. Some have no time, while alive; others find little interest in, and would rather not look back and recollect, their past; others again—and these are among the most thoughtful—believe that having published other works, there is no need to write about themselves; there are also those who have really nothing, to say of themselves, as there are others who will do it for them. Finally, many are deterred from writing their lives through fear and all kinds of other reasons. Very naturally, in our day of scepticism, confidence in open confession has decreased still more than in the times of Jean Jacques Rousseau. It is with a smile of distrust that we read now his bold statement (which I so much admired, once upon a time):— “Que la trompette du jugement dernier sonne quand elle voudra, je viendrai, ce livre à la main, devant le Souverain Juge, et je dirai: voilà ce que je fais, ce que je fus, ce que je pensais.” [Let the trumpet of the Last Judgment sound whenever it will; I will come, this book in hand, before the Sovereign Judge, and I will say: here is what I do, what I was, what I thought.] But a modern autobiography need not be a confession before the Sovereign Judge; nor has the Omniscient any need of our confession; yet no more ought a modern autobiography to be a kind of juridical act, written in accusation or in defence of self, before the social tribunal. It is not external truth alone, but the unveiling of all the inner truth before one’s own self, and with no object of self-condemnation or self-justification, such must be the aim of the autobiography of every thinking man. It is not the reader he has to acquaint with his personage, but first of all to make his own consciousness familiar with himself. And this means that the autobiographer has to make plain, through the analysis of his own actions, their motives and objects, the latter being but too often profoundly hidden in the innermost recesses of his soul, and, therefore, incomprehensible even to himself, let alone to all others.

But now, a query: is the autobiographer able to speak the truth about his, and to him, past motives? Can he appreciate at its true value that which once guided his actions? Can he feel certain that his concepts were such as he describes them, and not of another kind, at that given moment of his existence?

I believe that these questions must be solved variously in accordance with the faculties, character, and individuality of each writer. For one sure of himself without any vanity, there must exist also a firm conviction that it was just such a view and no other, that guided him when he perpetrated this or that action. And if I feel sure that he speaks the truth, concealing nothing, what more, then, can I expect? Should, then, a man who would learn the motives of my actions, and my ideas at the time when I did them, believe others and himself more than he should myself? He, or anyone else, can judge of the inner mechanism which propelled my actions, only by those same actions, or the evidence of other persons; and any opinions formed, by our deeds and second-hand testimony concerning the hidden, inner mechanism of the former, demand a certain conformity and must admit of no contradictions; though indeed we all know by experience that very often our deeds contradict our own conceptions, beliefs and convictions. Very frequently too, our grandest deeds are called forth by the weakest motives, and inversely; therefore in our case even conformity of testimony cannot be always a guarantee for the real inner truth.

How can that critical analysis of our own acts and motives, so difficult even for ourselves, be said to be more accessible to others, who are entirely unfamiliar with our inner mental life?

Very true, it does happen sometimes, that a stranger, a heart-reader, may guess better and more correctly than we can ourselves why we have acted so and not otherwise at some given moment of our life. It is true again that none of us is a judge of himself; but to discover the motive of our actions, a motive unknown to ourselves, can be done only in two cases: firstly, when we dissemble and remain secretive before our own “I”; and secondly, when we have done something in a moment of forgetfulness or of irresistible impulse, and without having ascertained, beforehand, that which was taking place within us, at the time, and without one single introspective glance. And supposing the principle that no one can be his own judge be true, still it is so only so far as external truth is concerned—juridical truth; a magistrate or an attorney-general, can of course expose a hypocrite or a liar more easily than the latter would do so himself. But with regard to the inner truth, when we are neither hypocrites nor liars, there can be no better or more competent judges than we ourselves. Thus the whole question depends on that issue: who is the writer, who lays open before us his inner, soul-life; and an opinion on this, to say the least, is as difficult to form, as the opinion of a stranger, who undertakes the duty of laying open, before the world, the inner life of some public character. Even if the latter has been, at times, confessedly to all, a hypocrite and a liar, this does not at all prove that he has ever been such. There are cases in our lives so fertile in contradictions, that it is precisely a liar and a hypocrite who, at certain moments of his life becomes more capable of speaking the truth about himself than any other people who had known him only externally, as he appeared. There is no more contradiction in this, than there is in the fact, that a base man is sometimes capable of the noblest deed, and that the most honest of men commits at times the basest of actions.

For whom, and why do I write all this? Upon my conscience—at this moment only for myself alone, out of some unaccountable inner necessity, though without the least desire of keeping secret from others that which I write. Though I have the idea of writing about myself for myself, and have determined not to publish this during my life, yet I have nothing against other people reading these memoirs when I am no more. And this—with my hand on my heart—not because, while I am still living, I dread criticism, or being laughed at, or not read at all. No! though I have no small share of vanity, and do not remain insensible to the world’s praise, yet my amour propre [self-regard] is more of an inner than of an outer kind.

Moreover, I am an egotistical self-devourer;³ and therefore, dread myself, lest the description of my inner state, read in the hearing of all, should be mistaken by me for vanity, for a desire to pose for originality, and that all this should in its turn damage that inner truth I would fain preserve in its greatest purity in these memoirs. As a self-devourer, however, I know that it is impossible to be absolutely sincere with oneself, even when living within, and with, that Self, on absolutely open-hearted terms. Occasionally and without any apparent cause for it, one is beset by thoughts so base and foul, that, at their bare appearance, as they emerge from the secret chambers of one’s soul, one feels burning with shame, and almost persuaded at times that these thoughts are not one’s own, but are suggested by someone else—by that basest of beings that lives in each of us.⁴ It is, as the Apostle Paul said long ago, one does not want to do evil, but does it unwittingly. A grand truth, this! And it is our thoughts, our mental states that bring it out most prominently. One does not want to think foully, and yet one does it—and woe to him who does not guard himself from it in the very beginning, who fails to perceive and catch himself in so doing and thus stop in time.

Thus, as so many others, I cannot, however strongly I may desire it, either in the past or in the present, turn my inner life inside out before me. With regard to the Past, I am of course unable to guarantee before myself that my concept of things was at a certain moment of my life, just as it seems to me now. And, in connection with the present, I cannot swear that I have succeeded in catching the chief feature, the real essence of my present concepts. This is a difficult affair. One has to trace the red thread through all the entangled bundle of doubts and contradictions, which arise every time when one seeks to make the guiding thread more clear.

And here I am, wishing to examine for myself and through myself, my life; to make up the sum of my aspirations and world concepts (in the plural, as I had several such) and to analyze the motives of my past actions. But stop! Stop at the start! Do not I dissemble with myself? Do I really wish to write but for myself? Even if I have decided to leave that which I have written of myself, unpublished during my lifetime, do I not, nevertheless, desire that it should be read some day by certain persons, say, for instance, by my children and a few friends. My wife will be sure to read this. And if I have no such desire, I still create thereby a cause for posing, for concealing this and the other, and for colouring facts before those nearest to me. This is the first thought that enters a self-absorbed cannibal’s head.

It is but right it should be so. As long as this is kept in view, there is hope for an efficient counteraction. Self-devouring, alone, would never allow me to lose sight of myself during this work with myself; and if I watch, I shall notice and catch myself tripping, and so will stop and allow no opportunity for any dissembling or secretiveness. However, I know beforehand that I do not wish to be cynically sincere, even with myself. Cleanliness is not only for show. It is better to lay aside, without touching them and subjecting them to analysis, our cynical actions in life—better, for one’s own sake; otherwise, one might find oneself in the sewers of the soul, and by unclosing them, contaminate even that which it is most desirable to leave immaculate, and as pure as it is in reality. All of us have quite enough mud at the bottom of our souls; and if by descending to that bottom we once stir it up, it will become well-nigh impossible even for ourselves to distinguish the clean from the unclean. But, if it was such cynicism and soul-filth that was the motive of any action, that had influenced all our after-life, then we have no choice, and we are forced to descend even into these very sewers.

But, am I able to write about myself—for myself?

One query more—what are the conditions for this?

The chief condition is, a full sincerity with oneself.

One thing only can I say, and it is, that I have never been secretive with myself; for there are people who are less sincere with themselves than they are with others. I do not belong to the latter category, though it did happen, that I confessed certain things to myself, only after having been frank about them with others. It is when talking openly to others about things done, that one begins to better realize that which takes place within myself; and it is often possible to learn it well, only when discussing oneself with another person. And it so happens that one feels ashamed to confess to oneself that which weighs on the soul, and one avoids it, until, as if by chance (though not all by “chance,” either), as in some fit of cynical sincerity, one blurts out to another person that, which one had hitherto so carefully concealed even from oneself.

The Diary then, which I am now writing, is destined, in every case of insincerity with myself, to occupy the place of such a spontaneous confession, or a conversation with a second person; the paper replaces the latter: a writing, even one’s own, feels more objective than a mental dialogue with oneself. We become bolder before ourselves, when we write, and the process, moreover, keeps thoughts in order, preventing them from wandering and scattering on every side. While writing, the main thought becomes like unto a thread, and it spins out easier from the brain, than it does during our mental reflections alone.

Hence in this Diary, I hope to be as sincere, yea, and far sincerer even, with myself, than in my most hearty effusions, even with those nearest and dearest to me.

———

II. On Memory and Consciousness

Second condition for becoming a truthful autobiographer is good memory. For a person with a bad memory, however witty and mentally sane he may be, there can exist no past. Such an individual may be a profound thinker, even a genius, but he can hardly avoid being one sided, as, in any case, clear and fresh sensation of past impressions is unthinkable without a good memory. But, there are two kinds of memory, I believe: one, a general memory, more ideal, more universal, and the other a special and more technical one; such as the memory for music, for colours, numbers, figures, etc., etc. The former (the general memory) though it has been rejected by some, is precisely the one that retains the various kinds of impressions received throughout our life, and the events lived over by every one of us. A very profound thinker, and a man full of genius, may have a strongly developed special memory, and lack almost entirely the other.

My memory is of the former order and was in days of yore very acute. And now, in my old age, as in the case of other old people, it is the past that appears to me the clearest, not only in its events, but in the personal sensations experienced by me. I feel almost sure of making no mistake in the correct description of my thoughts and feelings at the various and most remote epochs of my life. Yet the recollection of my past sensations and the convictions and ideas resulting therefrom, may, after all, not be of that kind which I have termed “general memory”. It may be only special or, so to speak, technical memory; and it is not everyone who is endowed with it. Furthermore the memory or recollection of one’s personal sensations demands culture (training), as it is only culture which can generate in us and develop self-absorption. To the development of this quality, attention—centred on one’s sensations and their further evolution—must be added. In general, we remember well only that to which our attention has been called. Attention, thus, is the first attribute of memory, although neither attention nor memory is always conscious;—yet the former is rarely otherwise. On the other hand, memory—the special or technical memory—frequently acts quite unconsciously in us. We remember a good many things and often pay great attention to them (involuntarily and unawares to ourselves). When suddenly recalling certain things, how very often a genuine feeling of surprise arises in us that we have preserved them in our memory!

It is extremely difficult to realise how certain sensations and recollections, not only of past events in general, but even the minute feelings which we experienced during long by-gone events—how they can remain stored in our brain, as they do, almost for a life-time! The brain, like all our other organs, is subject to a constant change of substance, the particles of its tissues being steadily replaced by new ones. We must suppose that during the process of this change of one substance into another, the old atoms impart to the new ones the same vibrations that moved them, when experiencing various impressions connected with the past. Thus, the plastic, soft brain-stuff of the child, during the process of its solidification and changes of its physical properties, continues to retain the imprints of its earliest sensations and impressions, thence to pass them on to our consciousness; and this it does still more vividly and clearly in our old age than during our manhood. Does not this speak rather in favour of a theory of mine (rather a mystical one, I confess), that the atomic, or molecular oscillations (which it is absolutely necessary to postulate in sensations) take place, not in the visible and ever-changing cells of the brain tissues alone, but also in something else besides; in a more subtle, ethereal element, which, interpenetrating the atoms, passes through them, and is impervious to all the organic changes?⁵

Very remarkable, also, are the unconscious sensations, which may, or may not, remain latent in our memory. All our inner life consists of incessant sensations—whether conscious or unconscious; of feelings ever acting upon and agitating us, brought from without, and generated within. From the beginning of our being to the end of our life, our organs and tissues bring to, and retain in us, a large mass of such sensations, which, in their turn, receive their impressions, some from the external world, others from their own innermost being. We do not feel our organs. When looking at an object, we do not think of our eye. No one during his normal state knows anything of his liver, nor even of his ever-beating heart. But there is not an organ that fails to furnish with its special contingent of sensations the general organism it belongs to, and which is composed of these organs. Not one of these, as a part of the whole, can avoid incessantly notifying the latter of its presence. It is, then, this endless series of sensations from within and from without—regulated, no doubt, in a certain way, and therefore, rather a collectivity of sensations—which is our “I” during our earthly life-time. What is, or would be, that “I” separated from this collectivity of feelings, is something which no one could represent to himself. But there is no reason why he should refuse to admit the possibility of the existence of a sentient Principle, yet experiencing none of our sensations. Thus, while one “I” is based on experiment and observation, the other has to be accepted on logic, and the third may be postulated on faith.⁶ The Cartesian cogito, ergo sum [I think, therefore I am], might be replaced by the more correct words: sentio, ergo sum [I feel, therefore I am], as the sentence “I feel my ‘I’” may be uttered without any thinking. The feeling—“I am”, “I exist”, is not the product of the action of a thought, but that of a sensation, the result of a feeling, not of an idea. True, the infant when drawing its first breath, upon entering the world, does not formulate the words “I exist”, though unquestionably, when drawing breath for the first time, it experiences (unconsciously) something entirely new to it. Nor, again, is the conscious feeling of existence which develops gradually in a child the product of thought, any more than is the other. It is simply only a more regulated, and a firmer sensation brought to him by his organs from the outside world and from within himself.

The Cartesian “I”, due to reasoning, is quite another affair. Nevertheless, and long before we pronounce the suggestive words, “I,” and “I am”, we have the time of reaching and realising through our sensations and mental representations (not due to thought, anyhow) our self-sentiency, and of manifesting it. Thus, the conscience of our “I” comes to us unconsciously, and we do not reach it through a thinking process. For, the conscience of existence is not the prerogative of human nature alone, but we share it in common with the whole animated world. How could an animal defend itself, seek for its food, and struggle for life, had it not within itself the consciousness of its individuality? But the full comprehension of one’s own “I” or personality, the sum, in short, or the “I am”, can, of course, manifest only in a being like man, i.e., in one endowed with speech and the faculty of uttering mentally syllabic sounds, and of combining these same words, mentally, again. These two faculties and thought are the same thing. Without a “word,” there can be no thought; without a thought—no “word”. Sensation and representation are transformed in our brain into a thought or an idea, only through the syllabic sounds of words. There is no need that the faculty of arranging words out of sensations should absolutely go hand in hand with the faculty of speech, i.e., of pronouncing words. A deaf and dumb person thinks in his own way and can understand others, though deprived of the faculty of uttering words.⁷ He replaces them in his head by signs, akin to syllabic sounds; and the sensation necessary to stimulate this faculty into activity is furnished him, not of course by the organ of hearing, but by that of sight and other organs. For, besides the organs of sensation—in both animal and man—not only the consciousness of individual existence, but also the sensation of the agreeable and the disagreeable, the affections and passions, are stimulated by all the other organs.⁸ The collectivity (ensemble) of sensations, furnished to us by all our organs (both those which do not, and those that do communicate with the outward world, with the non-I⁹), is that which we call existence, the gist of which, as of everything else in this world, is unknown to us.

We find the above very graphically expressed in the books of old anatomists:

“Cor ardet, loquitur pulmo, fel promovet ira,
Splen rudere facit, cogit amare jecur.”

[The heart burns, the lung speaks, bile stirs up anger;
The spleen makes one roar, the liver compels one to love.]

In our day, when observations are proving that the actions of our organs of sense, especially those of the eye, can be explained in no other way than by accepting unconscious (instinctual) cerebration, it is no longer a matter of doubt that we attain to a fully conscious, grammatical “I am,” only through a long process of unconscious cerebration preceding the latter. But even this fully conscious action of thought has its unconscious logic, which demands absolutely and fatally, that we should think in such, and not in any other way, with moreover, and fortunately for us, a full inner conviction that our thought enjoys freedom. But in fact, it is absolutely free only in lunatics; and even in them this freedom—in other words the cerebral jumble—is most probably dependent on various abnormal sensations of personal existence, generated by the disease of organs.¹⁰

But an attempt to convince oneself and others that our thought and will are indeed never free, is also a kind of insanity, in its way.

There is nothing to be done against the reality of sensations. If we are all hallucinated, then hallucination can no longer exist for us: but who, in this case, can show us that we are self-deceiving ourselves? There might be a possibility of proving it, if there were only one organ of sense in us hallucinated, for then all the other organs could correct the mistake. But what can be done when all our sensations, in every one of us, lead us to the conviction that our thoughts and our will are free, and when all the foundations of life have already been shaped on this idea? To stubbornly persist in convincing oneself and others of the contrary, might, in this case, lead the persuading sage to allow his own thought and will so much freedom, as to make him quite fit and ready for a lunatic asylum himself. It is only with abnormal sensations that we are able—and even that with great difficulty—to struggle and hold our own; with regard to our normal sensations, however meaningless they may appear to us, the least struggle may become fatal.

Of late there have appeared among our young society men, those who will not hear of “enslaving their thought”, even so far as to make them admit that two and two make four. “My thought is free”, they declare. “If I choose to, I will accept such or another mathematical axiom; if I do not choose to do so—there it goes!” and so on. The idea that an unbridled licence of thought and will is a terrible disease, from the development of which every man, who would not end by suicide or folly, has to guard himself, seems to have never so much as entered the head of these gentlemen. Every one of us must be free enough to choose for himself such or another view of the Universe, but having once chosen a concept, he has to adhere to it; at any rate until he has found a better one to replace it with.

The establishment of a certain modus vivendi [way of living] is necessary, not only for the harmonious union of families, societies and nations, but likewise for peaceful union with oneself; and this can be achieved only through a certain and more or less well-defined world-concept.

I do not believe that any thinking man has ever succeeded in allowing himself to be guided throughout his whole life by one and the same conception; but I feel certain that all our intellectual life is finally summed up by the working out—if it were only for one’s daily use—of some final concept of life, of the Universe, and of self. It is true that a constant work of this kind is in the way of the establishment of a status quo. Nevertheless, it stretches without a break, like a red thread throughout the whole bundle of existence, and never ceases to guide, and more or less to rule, over all our actions. Of course doubts and wavering are unavoidable during such a “working out”; but they are by far less troublesome than those which weigh down the man who believes that stopping at something definite means the breaking of the freedom of thought and will.

In the present examination of my life I will describe the several theories on the Universe and Man that I had accepted at different periods of my existence, holding to them for a greater or a shorter time; and I hope also to elucidate to myself why I have accepted them. For the present, however, I must try to work out for myself the views on which I have, as I believe, finally settled. I have to analyse that portion of my present ideas, which relates to my actual concepts on the foundations of our being.

I can no longer settle my thought on the ever restless and eternally living atoms of space. My mind falls flat, and finds itself in a condition from which there is no issue whatever in either of these two cases: (a) whenever it attempts to conceive the world-atoms as infinitely divisible and formless: or (b) as indivisible and having a certain form. The particle of matter; the infinitely divisible, the moving and the formless, self-becoming, owing to chance alone; conditioned or limited, quiescent and now having form—all this appears so incongruous to my mind that I am unable to accept the hypothesis.¹¹ Nor can my thought linger long on atoms fractioned into granules, pellets, mathematical points¹² and what not else. If the Universe is literally filled with impermeable atoms—meaning by impermeable that they have preserved the chief property of substance—and that they have, meanwhile, to be in incessant motion, where then, in what (space) and how, does this motion take place? My weak intellect while performing its analysis of substance, dividing and decomposing its atoms (particles) is unable to rest on them. It passes on finally, insensibly and involuntarily, to something else, having all the negative properties of matter. My mental analysis brings me fatally to the necessity of accepting outside these atoms something permeable and interpenetrating everything and everywhere, indivisible, formless, ever in motion, and by these very properties imparting, moving, accumulating, and scattering the atoms; shaping thereby, the forms of substance and penetrating into them and through them, assuming (nestling, so to say, in them), if even only temporarily, this or another aspect, according to which form of matter it is penetrating.¹³

Carrying my analysis of the organic substances and of myself further, I involuntarily put myself the question: whence this faculty of the organic world to sense and to perceive its existence? Its fundamental atoms, however I may represent them to myself, will nevertheless, ever remain for me, infinitely divisible, impermeable, and so forth, i.e., having such properties as are unable to explain to me their faculty of sensing and being conscious of themselves. It is evidently necessary to allow, that from ages upon ages innumerable, there have existed atoms endowed with these faculties, which, through their accumulation into one whole, formed sentient and conscious organisms. My mind does not accept the idea that the mere grouping of atoms into certain forms (e.g., the cerebral cells) could make them eo ipso [by that fact] capable of sensing, desiring and conceiving, unless the faculty of sensing and consciousness were already innate in such units.¹⁴

It is this principle or “Beginning”, this element of feeling, of will and consciousness, the most fundamental element of being—a principle, without which the Universe would have no existence for us—it is this, which my mental analysis is looking for beyond the limits of atoms. And it searches for it in that, which it recognises through necessity as existing outside of the particles of matter, and having all the negative faculties—i.e., contrary to those of the molecules—and without which, even the positive faculties of matter would remain non-existing for us.

This abstract creation of mental analysis—as abstract as are the atoms themselves—based on the natural faculty of the mind to carry its functions outside itself, must likewise contain in itself the fundamental and negative property of the substantial particles (or atoms)—an independent principle of life with its chief attribute: the capacity for sensing and self-consciousness, only of course different from that capacity in us mortals.

I conceive—no, it is not a conception, but a vision—and this vision represents to me a limitless, incessantly rolling and waving ocean of life, formless, containing in itself the whole Universe, penetrating all its atoms, continually grouping them, then decomposing their combinations and aggregates, and adjusting them to the various objects of being.¹⁵

In whichsoever series of my limited mental representations I may class this Fountain Head of sensation and self-sentient life—to that of Forces, or of the infinitely attenuated substances—it will still represent to me something entirely independent and distinct from that matter, which is known to us through its sensuous properties, i.e., pertaining to sensuous investigations and observations. I have no other means of investigating this source of sensations and of my conscious “Being”, save that capacity of sensing received by me from that same source. And too we can only then investigate and know anything fully, when we find ourselves higher than, and superior to, the object to be known. But the property of our mind, to search for aim and design, cannot fail to perceive such a designment in the phenomena of life. There is nothing rational and continuous thought out, or discovered, by our intelligence that is not to be found, cut and dry, so to speak, in the Universe that surrounds us. It is useless to say that our organism is a machine;—quite the opposite, for every machine ever invented by man is nothing but an impression taken from objects and apparatus, and various engines already existing in nature and in our organisms.

Organic nature is all the more striking to us, in that the Beginning, or the source of life, has adjusted all its mechanical and chemical processes to the various aims and objects of existence. And if our mind cannot fail to find a design in the manifestations of life and a creative faculty in the various types according to definite forms, then that same mind can no more fail to perceive in this itself—i.e., reason and intelligence. Thus our intellect has to accept of necessity an infinite and eternal Mind, which rules the Ocean of Life.

———

III. On Atoms of the Universal Mind

November 21, 1879.

I began my diary on November the 5th, and to-day, November 21st, I resume it again after a few days’ interval.

I write for myself, and will not read over again what is already written. Therefore, there may be in the latter a number of repetitions, of half explained ideas, perchance of contradictions and inconsistencies. Were I to set myself to correct this, it would be a proof for me that I am writing it for others.

I have confessed that I had no wish to keep my memoirs secret for ever: those persons, however, who will feel interested in acquainting themselves with my innermost life will be little troubled by such repetitions. They will prefer to know me as I am, and study the real man with all his repetitions, and even inconsistencies.

Hence I will busy myself to-day once more with my World-contemplation, and by repeating over again my present views, I may, perhaps, elucidate them the better.

And now I put to myself again the question: what is it, in fact, that forces me not to accept the atoms of matter as my concept of the Universe? Why not regard them as something final, eternal, infinite, self-dependent, consequently absolute and allowing of no other existence?

The atoms of matter are, viewed as a beginning, something just as abstract as the universal Life-Principle which I imagine. Why then admit of two abstractions when one will do? Why not say, that these atomic particles have always existed, and, along with all other properties of matter, have always been capable of sensing, and of consciously perceiving themselves? For where, and by whom were ever found in the Universe sensation and consciousness without the presence of matter? Who of us has ever known himself, and could think without a brain? And why should not matter, endowed with other properties, be able to sense itself, to know and think? If we cannot admit this, is it not simply because, owing to our ignorance, inexperience and shortsighted reasoning, we have limited too much and too arbitrarily our views about the properties of Substance? and having done so, we have forced ourselves to admit the actual existence of an imaginary (psychic) principle, invented, moreover, by—ourselves.

Such were the questions that, at one time of my life, I had put to myself, and answered them all in the affirmative and to my own satisfaction. This is an undeniable fact: no consciousness and thought without a brain; and these syllogistic arguments—according to well-known and generally accepted lines of thought: cum hoc, ergo propter hoc [“with this, therefore because of this”; i.e. the fallacy of mistaking association for causation]—appeared to me so natural and so unanswerable, that they did not allow me a shadow of a doubt.

But this same mind of mine, which had accepted so unquestioningly, in those days of old, ideating and conscious brain-atoms, came gradually to perceive itself, not only in itself, but in the whole universal life. And then my reason could not fail to see, that its chief phenomena—ideation and creation—manifested in full accordance with the laws of design and causation, as clearly in the whole universal life, without any participation of brain matter. Is it not passing strange, that thought emanating from the brain, should find itself there, where no individual brain has ever been discovered by our senses.

It is this discovery by my brain ideation of the universal ideation, common to, and in concordance with, the laws of causation and of designment in the creative faculty of the Universe, which is the cause why my mind could not feel satisfied with the atomic theory: with those sentient, self-conscious, ideating atoms, which act only through their same selves and without the participation of any other higher principle of thought and consciousness. The creative faculty of our mind, and its natural aspiration to conform itself in its productions to aims and plans traced beforehand, cannot fail to discern in each of its actions the difference between thought and purpose, and the means and material which serve to carry out the two former.

Thought and purpose, caught, so to speak, in the nets of the material—whether on a canvas by means of the painter’s brush, or in the marble of the sculptor, or on the paper covered with the signs and words of the poet—live from that time forward; their own life, for long centuries, compelling the canvas, the marble and the paper to communicate from one generation to the other the creations contained in them. Thought, on penetrating into the brute material, makes of it its organ, capable of generating and developing new thoughts in the spectator and reader.

If this is an indisputable fact, then no less indisputable for me is the conviction that the Supreme Universal Thought, having selected the Kosmos for its organ, interpenetrating and grouping the atoms into a certain form, has likewise shaped my brain into an organ of my ideation. Indeed, it (the brain) can be compared to nothing better than a musical organ, the chords and keys of which are set in constant vibration from without, while someone touching, examining and listening to these vibrations, and thus setting chords and keys in motion, combines out of these oscillations a harmonious whole. This “some one” attuning my organ into unison with the universal harmony, becomes my “I”.¹⁶ And then, the laws of the design and causation of the actions of universal ideation, become also the laws of my “I”, and I find them within myself, passing their manifestations from without, within myself, and from myself back into infinite nature.¹⁷

Sensation, consciousness, thought (quite unthinkable processes without the vibrations of atoms which form our common sensorium), cannot consist of motion and vibrations only, unless these reach something that relates to them, as the eye relates to light, and the ear to sound-vibrations; that is to say, something which can receive these vibrations in order to transform them into something else, and then, acting independently, communicate them to the outside world. Are not these atomic vibrations of the organ the very essence of our “I”? To accept the above means to me to admit in Substance such an immaterial and abstract property, that would have no sense-relations to matter, endowed with this property. Heat, light, electricity, as effects produced by the motion of particles, have all direct and immediate relations to our senses, and the capacity of acting directly through these vibrations on the concatenation and affinity of the atoms;¹⁸ and sense and thought again searching out in nature, light and heat and electricity, and being by their nature purely subjective, become in their turn objective, not in a direct way, but through the mediation of other forces, in acting upon substances.

Life, force, motion, and thought are, in my conception, ideas so closely linked together, that I cannot imagine the one without thinking of the others. In Life, we have motion, force and thought; in Thought—motion and force; and in Force—motion and thought. From this collective or associated conception of life, that soil which we are accustomed to feel under our feet is entirely absent. It has nothing concrete or objective about it. Nor could a conception of cosmic life, in general, be concrete or purely objective; for it is a fiction, though to us, unavoidable and inevitable, as such a life exists, and we too exist, think and act within its vortex, inconceivable to us in its gigantic proportions. But then, even our objective investigations, which seem to us based upon such a firm foundation, are, in fact, only the investigations of our subjective thought; as otherwise they would be void of all sense and not worthy of the name. It is true that in all such investigations, our thought constantly finds for itself a material lining or a canvas on which it shapes for itself designs out of the substantial material at hand.

When exploring or analyzing an abstract conception about cosmic life, we are unable to master the voluminous substance used by it for its manifestations, while our investigation of its individual phenomena makes our conceptions of the world-life fragmentary, one-sided, and often false. One thing only is indisputable to an impartial and far-seeing observer; the continuity, the causation, the plan and thought in every phenomenon of the world-life. This means nothing else than the coincidence of our thought and aspirations in the research of aims and causes with what we discover in the world-life.

Thus, an unavoidable conviction seizes hold of me, that my brain (and also my whole self) is only the organ of the thought of the world-life, just as pictures, statues, and buildings are the organs and the stores of the artist’s thought.

For the substantial manifestation of the world-thought, an apparatus, composed according to a definite plan, of atoms grouped in a certain way, was needed. This became my organism; while the cosmic or world consciousness became my individual consciousness through a special mechanism contained in the nervous centres. How this came to pass, of course neither I, nor anyone else, can tell. But one thing is for me indubitable: my consciousness, my thought and that innate aspiration of my mind to be ever searching for aims and causes, cannot be something detached, a unit having no connection with the world-life, and a something complete, that gives the finishing touch to the Universe, and has nothing higher than itself.

Finally, the most desperate empiricism, which neither admits, nor wants to know anything save facts and sense-perceptions, has to be guided, in the end, by an abstraction, that is to say by thought, and we see, that not only not a single sense-perception, based upon unconscious logic, can do without it, but that also sense perceptions alone, without a conscious and guiding thought, may be fit, perhaps, for an Epicurean empiricist, but can certainly never do for an observing empiricist and investigator.

Everything in the thinking Universe leads to abstract ideas. All our mental representations and concepts, however much they may be based on facts and sense-experience, become pure abstractions, so soon as they are subjected to a mental analysis. And not to so subject them, does not rest with us. It is this corrosive analysis which transforms substance into force. All that which we regard as the characteristic of substance, is transformed by our mental analysis into something existing outside of that substance which is subject to our senses, i.e., again and once more into a force or a substance, opposed to Substance.

The atoms accepted by our mental analysis as the foundation of matter, are transformed by it either into mathematical (and thus, into immaterial) points, or into centres attracting to themselves other atoms; or again, into infinitely small, therefore infinitely divisible, magnitudes. In both cases substance ceases to be that which it appears to us. It loses its sensuous existence (sensuous as subjected to our senses) and becomes, in other words—force. Just so; a force, for having decomposed it into atoms, we can no longer regard it as quiescent and inactive; and by allowing it action, we endow it with the chief attribute of force (viz., action). In order not to deprive substance of its most characteristic properties, we have to trace a limit to the mental analysis which decomposes it; e.g., if, by carrying on our analysis infinitely, we thus allowed to matter infinite divisibility, then we would, as I just said, transform it into force or into something invisible and intangible, outside of the perception of our senses, and deprive it thereby of its other chief properties—impermeability and weight. On the other hand, to limit mental analysis, by refusing to carry it to the end, means to mistake for substance, not the last product of the analysis—atoms, but only their agglomeration or congeries; and in this case, we have to allow the possibility of the formation of matter out of an accumulation of force. Nor do I see a logical impossibility in accepting this final result of my mental analysis of matter. Very true, I do not know what may be a force manifested outside of matter; but then again, I do not see anything in substance, subjected to mental analysis, except a manifestation of that same force; and all the properties of substance are in my eyes, such manifestations. So, for instance, substance would become as permeable as force, did not its particles (i.e., its accumulation of atoms) hold together by cohesion, without which primeval force, there would not exist the smallest particle of substance, and the infinitely divided matter would disappear from our world of sense. But the force which manifests to my senses through the properties and motion of matter could still exist without being necessarily in the form of agglomerated atomic particles. How far, after the dispersion of matter, it would remain entitled to the name of substance—meaning by the latter, to what extent it would remain perceptible to our brain-thought—this, I am not prepared to say. Yet, convinced as I am that beyond my brain-thought there exists another, and a higher thought—World or Universal Ideation—I believe that this Thought Substance would still continue to exist, and act in that World Thought. And this Thought, and the Force which acts through it, are just that which constitute Cosmic Life.

Yes; life, for me, is a collective conception. I have already said it: life is an intelligent, illimitably acting force, ruling all the properties of substance (i.e., its forces), aspiring, moreover, and tending incessantly toward a certain object, namely the realization and support of being.¹⁹

The simple, empirical definition of life, by Bichat and others, is very correct: life, according to it, is summed up by the collectivity of functions counteracting death—l’ensemble des fonctions qui résistent à la mort.

Indeed, in a living organism, as in the whole living realm of being, all the vital functions are directed toward the conservation of life and the counteraction of decay. The mistake, or rather the incompleteness of this definition, lies in that it is not the vital functions of the organism per se that aspire to, and reach more or less that object, but something else in them, a ruling principle, intelligent—since it aspires toward an end, preserving continuity in all the functions of the organism, namely—Life Force.²⁰

All the mechanical actions of the organic arrangements and apparatuses, all the chemical processes, the whole process of the organic development, all is continuous, everywhere we find thought, plan, and the aspiration to realize, preserve and support life. The mechanism of the organisation of the organs, the chemism of various functions, &c., all this, the more we investigate and the more we subject it to the analysis of the senses, the clearer it shows in the ingeniousness of its formation, causation and design. But that which directs the mechanical and chemical processes of the organism toward its aims, that remains, and will remain for us the real and the primordial Force, though for ever hidden to our sensuous perceptions.

December 2, 1879.

A few days have passed since I conversed with myself. Whether I shall be able to catch the thread of my argument without reading over what I have written, or not, matters little. I do not pretend to the title of a philosopher, and write but for myself.

That which once seemed the greatest absurdity to my mind, which was somewhat given to empiricism and that which strengthened it in me—was the proposition that thought can exist without an organ to generate it. No; Brain-thought is inadmissible without a brain.²¹ But then, even World Thought is only the product of Brain-thought. Where can we find its manifestations without the latter? And that is just the trouble, as I say, viz., that the same feeling which convinces us of our existence, is inseparable from that other conviction—the existence in the Universe, through its manifestations, of a World Thought or Universal Ideation. And thus the same mind which persuaded me of a design and purpose in our vital functions and which antecedes them, sees the same design in the work of the universal functions. In other words, our own mind, in whatever way it may have been trained by empiricism or idealism, cannot fail to perceive the presence of thought and reason outside of itself, just in the same manner as it gets convinced of the presence of substance in its own organism and also outside of it. One of these two things: either it (our mind) has to regard all that which exists outside of itself as an illusion, or else the sentient existence of the Universe—the whole of that which is the “not I”—must be as undeniable to it, as is its own existence. To protect myself from insanity and the lunatic asylum, it becomes necessary for me to accept the latter proposition.²² And this leads us to a further and an as unavoidable admission; the actual existence of a cosmic as well as of a brain thought, of a higher and Universal Thought. Its constant manifestation in the Universe that surrounds us, is the more unquestionable to us, as all that manifests in our mind, all that it invents, all, in short, it can think out, exists already and is in the manifestations of the Universal Ideation.²³

Of course it is far easier to a mind, trained in empiricism, to conceive itself as a simple function of the brain. In practical life an empirical intellect may, without any difficulty, choose such a view, flawless in appearance, and based on unquestionable facts. The unavoidable result of such a view, of course, is that a universal design, conformity and creative faculty according to a definite plan, are but the products of our own minds, a function of our brain. And this once accepted, we shall have to admit also this other result—viz., that the brain itself, which finds through its function (mind) a plan and design in the organization of our universe, does so only because it happens to be so organized, that the atoms which constitute the brain, have, under the influence of external conditions, come to group themselves accidentally, and by mere chance, in such manner and no other. Furthermore, we shall have to allow, that it might have been also, otherwise. The outcome of all this is something very strange: if both design and plan are fathered upon the universe by my brain, and if this brain itself, as everything else in the world, is but the product of a fortuitous combination of atoms, a certain form of the grouping and composition of which has resulted in that the operation of the external world upon them produces sensation and ideation; if, I say, we have to admit all this as an ultimum refugium [final refuge, last resort] of the mind, then all that which I attribute to the creative faculty of universal thought and life, must also be the work of chance? It is fortuitous—since there is no first principle to act designedly, intelligently and rationally. It is fortuitous, I say, even in the presence of those numberless legions of various forms and compounds, into which by means of their own properties the atoms of matter have grouped themselves together, as also the atoms of the brain; at first, of course, in some other, more primitive type; and then, changing and becoming more complex under the influence of external conditions, the now acting organ of ideation and sensation was formed.

Thus, chance is the first principle of the creative faculty; it is from the combination of its actions with the co-operative forces—generated likewise, in the beginning, through blind chance—that the bastard, called by us the Universe, has come into being.

In such a conception of the Universe as this, it is, of course, of first necessity that we should recognize blind chance as the mightiest of forces. But I will give my views upon chance further on, if I may presume that this fair unknown is as much known to me as to those who ascribe to it such a first-rate importance.

There is, however, even in this concept, a grain of truth.

In investigating nature even on the most empirical methods, that is to say trusting only to those facts which we get through our external senses, we still do nothing more, in reality, than transfer our ideation and mental faculties, in general, to the external world; inversely, we cannot analyse our own “I”, otherwise than by making of it an external object, that is to say, by transferring it outside of ourselves. But while accepting this as an unquestionable fact, yet with the views I hold, I cannot agree, at the same time, with the idea, that the design in cosmic organization, discovered in it by my reasoning powers, is no better than something that I myself have fathered upon Kosmos, arbitrarily or otherwise; that it is something not quite as real or as unquestionable a fact as my own being.

But, the difference between my conception of the universe and the empirical view is shown nowhere better or clearer than in the fact, that the mind which regards itself as simply a function of the brain, views as the greatest nonsense and absurdity the opposite conviction, the existence of another, of a primordial and intelligent, vital Principle; one that is neither functional nor organic, which is independent of the grouping of atoms and the action of forces, and is itself that which organizes and brings into activity the atomic forces; and the instrument or organ of whose manifestations is the whole Universe. Thence, our brain-mind discovering itself—or that tendency peculiar to it, to design and creation, which is its natural property—outside of itself, does so for the very reason that it, itself, is only a manifestation of the Higher or Universal Mind.²⁴

———

IV. On Mind and its Relations to Space and Time

December 3rd, 1879.

Very naturally, an organic (brain) mind like ours must experience a great difficulty in conceiving another higher mind (in the Universe), with no organic basis; and to the modern mind such a concept must necessarily seem very absurd and nonsensical. In our times, it is not the diplomat alone who gets the most easily reconciled to an accomplished fact. In practical life, as well, the best thing is to accept that only which is visible and tangible, and in our investigations of causes and effects, to hold simply to the time-honoured and well-known cum et post hoc, ergo propter hoc [“with and after this, therefore because of this”; i.e. reasoning from association and sequence to causation]. However threadbare and persecuted by logic this watch-word may be, still it is inevitable in empiricism. For whenever we experience anything, and reject or confirm one experience by another, still, in sober truth, we do nothing with our empirical or inductive speculations but replace one cum et propter hoc [“with and because of this”; i.e. one inferred causal connection based on association] by another.

Indeed, we must not go too far either in empiricism or in practical life. But where shall we stop? This is a question left for each of us to solve individually and according to our respective frames of mind. But howsoever zealously we may try to limit ourselves to facts and purely inductive theories, we have yet, at every step we take, to reckon with abstract concepts and notions.²⁵ However inductive a speculation may be, it cannot see light or live without the help of abstraction. Space is a fact, time—a fact, motion—a fact, life—a fact, and nevertheless, space, and time, and motion, and life are—the chiefest and most important abstractions!

Every child measures space, and is able, as long as it is made subject to three dimensions, to judge easily and correctly enough of it; but, with regard to infinite and immeasurable space, the greatest and most practical minds do not feel quite sure as to the number of dimensions that may be applied to it. Mathematicians who now discuss the possibility of a fourth dimension, may find, perchance, the necessity, not only the possibility, of also a fifth dimension.²⁶

It is very probable that our brain-mind arrives at all such abstract conceptions as of space, time, etc., by empirical means, and through our external senses. But it ceases to be empiricism, when after seeing and sensing the limits of space everywhere, we begin to think also of the limitless. Whether it be due to Kant’s categories, or the drawers in the desk of our brain-mind, or any other hidden mechanism in it, the presence of abstractions in such evident realities as are space and time—is likewise a fact. Inevitably and fatally, without seeing or sensing the immeasurable and the limitless, we recognise its actual existence—and the “no-fact” exists as undeniably and as substantially as does any fact; and we feel convinced of the existence of the limitless and the immeasurable, far more than ever was Columbus in the existence of America before its discovery. The only difference lies in that we shall, perhaps, never be able to discover our America, as he has discovered his continent.²⁷

December 4th, 1879.

It must be kept in mind that our conceptions about space, time and life are totally distinct from common generalisations, as for example our views on man. By that generalisation “man”, we understand no further than the properties undeniably characterising the human species.

But in the conception of space all the properties of separate spaces, such as dimension, form, contents and so on, disappear. To us (to me, at any rate), whenever thinking of space, it seems that all the spaces and objects known to us through sensuous perception are contained in their turn in that something else—immeasurable, formless, and limitless.

We find the same in our conception of time; in reality we judge of it only by its motion or progress in space; but besides this actual definition of time, we cognize that without even such motion, that is to say without any means of calculating time in space, our “I” exists in the present, just as it has existed in the past, and that this same past and present do not exist for the “I” alone, but will likewise exist in its absence.

The conception of the measures of space of time, which involuntarily follows our thought about space itself, and time itself, serves us not to clear our understanding, but to convince us that that which yields to measurement in space and time is not yet necessarily space and time itself.

Nor is our conception of life a simple generalisation.

It is related, in my opinion, to the same category as space and time.

The first impulse towards a mental formation of any conception about these three x’s, gives us the sensation of our being. This sensation is a fact, of course. But what fact? Can it be classed in the category of those facts which we gather through our external senses, basing it precisely on that most important fact—the feeling of being, without which everything else is meaningless to us? This is a fact sui generis, and outside of all others.

How the feeling of being manifests in animals—is another mystery, as insoluble as the phenomena of our conceptions about space and time. The first impulse comes undeniably from the action of the external world on our senses, but only as an impulse; the real pith and marrow of the sensation of being, and of our conceptions of space and time, lie profoundly hidden in the very esse of the life principle itself.

Let us take for an example the moment of the birth of a warm-blooded animal, what is it that causes it to sense its being with the first breath it draws, and utter its first sound of life?

It is the reflex action from the contact of air on its peripheral nerves, or the sudden change in the blood circulation of the new-born child.

This shows that the machine is so adapted that the contact of the eternal world with its peripheral nerves must inevitably re-act on the spring which is in the oblongated brain, and which puts into motion the respiratory apparatus, forcing it to draw into itself the outward air; and this incipient inspiration must reflect itself, in its turn, on something that senses, and thus distinguishes itself from the external world. But it is just the relation of that “something” to the mechanism of the animal machine, which is the first x: it is insoluble, because to solve it substantially, would require our watching and observing the relation of this first breath to the sensation of being, not only in oneself, or some other animal creature, but also our being able to sense the whole progress through, from its beginning to end. But then, even such an impracticable observation would be found insufficient. For while sensing, it is impossible to closely observe one’s sensation, without thereby altering and destroying it. Daily and hourly, we see men and animals born, and chickens hatched out; and we get so accustomed to life, that we begin to imagine (as many do) that it is ourselves who give life to other beings. This is only natural, as life seems to us a matter-of-fact, a vulgar event, instead of the mystery it is.

It is hardly possible not to perceive that the difference between the living and non-living is unnoticeable on the extreme border of life. Before being taught by personal experience to distinguish life by its trenchant phenomena, we are involuntarily led to attribute (more or less) the same vital sensations as we ourselves experience to everything around us, chiefly to that to which we attribute strength or might. Thus, a child is taught only by experience to distinguish his “I” from the “not-I’s” around him; and he thinks every object before him as alive as he is himself.

It is then, by studying and observing, that we are led, at last, to distinguish, more or less rationally, life-phenomena from those of simple being. Even then we learn of no more than the mechanism of various organisms, governed by the same forces that rule being or existent things, viz., by gravity, cohesion, atomic affinity, by electricity, heat and so on. As to the Principle which, in conformity to law, guides the said forces and mechanism toward the preservation of organisms and individuality, and also their relations to the external world—this remains unknown to us. To use a lawyer’s phraseology, its essence “is irrelevant to the case” (or investigation), external form only being open to discussion.

As already said, it is our brain-mind alone that is led to the unavoidable conviction of the existence of this first principle of life, in which it finds and from which it traces itself, perceiving also a rational tendency towards an object, independence and formation according to a pre-existing plan. Our mind, discovering in the most varied manifestations of life its own most vital aspirations, only on an immeasurably higher scale, cannot fail to recognize the primordial and independent being of a higher Principle, acting by the same laws of conformity and creative work, as it does itself. Therefore, the being of that Principle must be, to our mind, independent of the matter it rules,²⁸ and as primordial and independent of its substantial manifestations (or manifestations in substance) as universal space and time are independent of spatial measurements within space and time. Like space and time, so the Life-Principle indwelling in them must be according to the demands of our reason, primordial, infinite, formless and unconditioned. This self-existent, formless principle of Life shapes, in the primordial and also limitless space and time, every form of substance, and then, guides all the other Forces to a struggle for life in that already formed and animated Substance.

But in however close an agreement with the demands of our mind may be the conviction of the absolute necessity for the existence within and without matter, or substance, of a primordial and independent life-principle, to rule the atoms, and guide the forces inherent in them, no clear or definite conception of it will ever be possible to us. Doubt will ever find its way into our mind, and the more and the better we get acquainted with the organization and functions of the organs necessary to life, the more probable it will appear to us that life, indeed, is but the collective functions of those organs, and nothing else. Hence, very naturally, our concepts about the independence and the co-ordination of the acts of the Life-Principle will appear to us not as facts, but only as the imaginative abstractions of that same mind of ours.

The fact is that our mental activity, once having received an impulse toward a certain direction, does not go astray as easily as we may think; and that, moreover, it experiences a difficulty in deviating from its path, proportionate to its satisfaction with the results of its investigation in that once accepted direction. And it is but natural, that the results attained with the full participation in them of our external senses should be precisely those that appear to us the clearest, and also the most satisfactory. But to our regret, it is precisely during inductive and exact methods of observation that we generally lose sight of the fact that if our sensuous perceptions acquire importance at all, it is not really due to themselves, but to the mental conclusions we draw—let them be conscious or unconscious—from what we see, hear, and sense. And still these conclusions, as all other logical deductions, are no other than pure abstractions, whether conscious or unconscious. Our intellect also perceiving necessarily everywhere and in every fact, only itself outside of itself—acts in the same way during induction as during deduction; both there, where it judges on the data furnished by its senses, and there, where it judges by the representations of its fancy.

We have no means of reasoning other than by transferring our consciousness outside of ourselves. Without carrying our “I” into the external world, we would be unable to arrive at a mental conviction in the reality of even the universe we see. The sensuous perceptions of that which is outside us, we share in common with all the animal world, and—who knows—perchance with every organic body too; and surely, it is not conscious or unconscious sensation either—sensation, so to speak, per contactum [by contact]—which we designate as “conviction”!

December 16th, 1879.

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

Yes; in analyzing its genesis deductively, our brain-mind becomes soon and easily persuaded—too soon and too easily, I fear—that after all, it is only a function of its own brain. Observing its chief attribute of ideation, our mind arrives at the conviction that it is simply a collective faculty, and that therefore, it must be the function of the various parts and the various histological elements of the brain.

That which takes part in the process of ideation is:—(1) the faculty—conscious or unconscious—of sensing and receiving impressions (perceptio); (2) the consciousness of such impressions—though not invariably, as even during unconscious sensations one can yet think unconsciously; (3) the faculty of retaining impressions (memory), which again, are not always conscious; (4) the faculty (which I would rather call understanding) of uniting, associating and grouping in a certain order the sensations recorded by the memory and of forming out of them ideas; and (5) to do all this, a conditio sine qua non [an indispensable condition] of ideation is necessary; namely, the faculty of pointing out by signs or of transferring into phonetic or mimetic signs (syllables and words) the impressions received and passed on, in this new form, to memory. Now the combination, grouping and association of impressions, without their being transformed into phonetic and mimetic signs may be possible, but in this case the relations of this faculty to consciousness become inconceivable to us; then we call such a grouping and association unconscious or instinctual. We have to confess, at the same time, that in this case such definitions do not help us in any way to explain the relations to, and part taken in it by, consciousness. (6) The highest point in the process of our ideation consists of its tendency and faculty to discern the cause and the results, the object and the means (the laws of causation and designment), and to discover the point of union between these, to postulate in every action a motion and an aspiration towards its realization, in short—a tendency and a faculty of creative work. And all this is closely allied in the process of our ideation with the feelings of liberty, determination, and free-will.

All of us believe that we are free to think this way or another, as we will. But on the other hand, each of us feels and knows that there is a limit to this supposed freedom, beyond which ideation becomes insanity. This is because our ideation is subject to the laws of Universal Ideation. Meanwhile, our brain-intellect, knowing of no other ideation than its own, and convinced by experience of its dependence upon its brain, can, in its examination of the external Universe, reach the illusion that there is no other thought in it (the Universe) save its own. This must necessarily happen, unless we feel as strongly convinced of the independent existence of the Universe as we feel sure of our own existence. Otherwise, all that our exploration finds therein organized, as if designedly and independently of ourselves, must seem to us no better than a product of our own mind and fancy.

Thus, we find ourselves confined within a magic circle. On the one hand, we do not know in reality any other mind but our own organic mind; on the other, this same mind points out to us the external works of creative intelligence, which testify undeniably to the existence of another mind, with attributes for creation not only similar to, but immeasurably higher than our own.²⁹ And here an involuntary question arises: Is it quite certain that we could not walk in any other way than with the help of our legs and feet, or, do we walk, only because we are endowed with legs and feet? Is it certain that we can think only with the help of, and through our brain, or do we so think, only because we have a brain? In seeing the endless numbers of means by, and through which given objects are reached in the surrounding Universe, are we justified in affirming that the mind is, and had to be, no more than a function of the brain? Do not we see the bee, the ant, and such like animate beings, performing various actions of thought without the help of the brain of the vertebrate animals? Indeed, they offer us instances of an extraordinary perspicacity, of a distinct resolve to reach a given end, and even of a creative capacity. And what is this strange function, which holds in durance the existence of its organ? A pistol-shot guided by that function—and the organ is destroyed! What is this unique function, capable of analyzing itself and its organ, like an object, like something external, outside itself? And if our mind finds itself, that is to say, its thought, and intelligent creativeness, outside of itself, is it not rather because, as stated, it is only a manifestation of that same higher, universal, vital Principle, present and manifesting in the whole creation? The Universal Thought inherent in that principle coincides, so to say, with our brain-thought which serves it as a manifestation; hence the same attributes and tendencies in both. This coincidence is an evidence that the two kinds of manifestation come from the same common source.

Our thought is only individual, precisely because it is organic and a brain-thought, while the other thought manifesting in the Life-Principle of the whole Universe, cannot be organic, just because it is Universal. The organic cannot fully comprehend the inorganic. And therefore this vital Principle, as one of the manifestations of this Higher Mind, must remain to us a mystery. Ignorabimus [we shall not know].

. . . . . . . . .

It seems to me that I am ever jabbering about the Universal Mind and Universal Thought. But where is the Universal Brain? A thought without a brain, and without words! How absurd in the mouth of a physician! But why not, if the bee and the ant and the whole animal kingdom think without words? If people will give the name of thought only to the human-spoken, brain-born, and the human conscious thought, it is their look-out. But for me, our thought is the product of the Universal Mind—and no fortuitous product, either.

December 17th, 1879.

The Universe, life, force, space and time, all these are—how shall I call them—well, abstract facts. To call them so, may seem absurd; but since it contains two contradictions, it seems to me to express my views the more correctly, and is just what I want to say. Our notions about the above conceptions, as enumerated, are based on our sensations, hence on a fact. While sensing this, at first, we do not analyse our sensations and thus mistake them d’emblée [straightaway] all for one and the same fact. Notwithstanding the absence of analysis, we are still conscious (whether consciously or otherwise, I cannot tell) and acquire the firm conviction, that, besides the limited space occupied by ourselves, even beside the limits of the horizons before us, there exists another space, and still another, and so on, ad infinitum [without end]. The same in the case of time, force, and life, for we do not find in our sensations any definite boundaries. As we do not remember the beginning of that sensation, so we are ignorant of its end. It is only our fancy, and the long series of experiences which familiarize us with the beginnings and the ends of various objects and actions, that cause us to think and speak of the end of the world, the end of life, and so on. But sensations, like the facts we live through, convince us of the contrary, that is, of the existence of the limitless and endless. In the sensation expressed by us by means of the sound or the words “I am”, the “I was” and the “I will be” are contained. We feel vividly that the present—is but an illusion, that we live only in the past, which is incessantly transformed into the future. And when we desire to guide ourselves, in a way, in our sensations about life, force, space, time and substance, in other words, to raise these sensations to the degree of a notion or a definite idea, we do not act as we do in our generalisations. The conception shaped in us concerning the sensations of life, force, time, space, and substance, is not the quintessence of the properties of distinct objects or things, as are our other abstract generalisations. No; this is an abstract fact, outflowing from a sensation of something limitless and infinite, and clashing with that which we usually call an actual fact, i.e., one, which owing to its limitations is made subservient to the verification of the external senses, or any other documentary (for instance, historical) verification.

Whatever we may say of the inevitability of death, even our own life appears to us to be endless. At any rate, until we approach that end, owing to old age or illness—we can hardly conceive of it.

However familiar we may be with matter, through experience, we finally get convinced that all our knowledge of its properties is insufficient to get at a definite conception of substance, with a view toward its limitations. However strong our ideas on the inseparability of force from substance, we are still unable to understand force as a property of matter, but have to admit its independent and limitless existence—as of substance itself—in boundless space and time. Had we ever the same chance, as the astronomers, of defining even approximately the boundaries and measurements of that which seems to be, and is sensed by us as something endless and limitless, even then, as in astronomy, we should get figures and numbers such as we could never be able to represent to ourselves in reality. What good would be to us the countless milliards and billions? Our conceptions of the figures and numbers would still remain as vague as our notions of the Infinite and the Eternal!

———

V. On the Inductive Methods and Fancy

December 25th, 1879.

Christmas Day. Have not touched this diary for a whole week, but tried instead, during my morning walks to put in order, and make my conceptions about the beginnings of life intelligible to myself.

I must make clear in my own mind how far I am a materialist. I like the name no more than did the Duke of Hesse, who could not bear to have his professor Liebig regarded as a materialist. “Sein Vater war Materialist, nicht er,” [His father was a materialist, not he] said the Duke to Liebig’s accusers.

But what’s in a name? The most important is to make one’s conceptions of the Universe clear to oneself. Provided I do not lie to my own conscience in analyzing and describing my thoughts, what does it matter whether I stand as a materialist or a fool in the sight of others?

I have not been true to my promise; I have read over what I had written a few days ago. And having done so, I find that I have included in my conceptions of the infinite, to which I relate space, time, force and life, the idea of substance also. I sincerely confess that substance seems to me as infinite as are space, time, force and life. It appears to me, that is to say, it does not seem impossible to my imagination to conceive that substance may get transformed into force, and force into substance.

Force must be formless, but matter also in its ultimate boundaries can hardly be imagined as having form. The life-principle, too, being something quite as limitless and formless as Force, in my conception, must have the properties of Force and be transformed into material atoms,³⁰ just as we admit the possibility of the nebulae in the universal Ether being transformed into heavenly bodies. The comparison, in truth, is rather too coarse. For here we have the passing of one substance into another substance—therefore only a transformation of form. But what is the transformation of Force into substance! What is it? A fallacy? But Force is not a nothing, Analyzed by our mind apart from substance, it is something different from matter—were it even by its negative properties alone. Our conception of God or—as with the atheists—of Cosmos (their god), can be the only conception devoid of negation; every thing else in the world, conceived of or represented to ourselves, must, to be comprehensible, carry into our mind its own negation.

A conception of limitless space finds its negation in measurable objects and formations; a conception of infinite time is negatived by the hours and the minutes; life finds its negation in death; and, in order to make even one of the properties of Divine Nature—Good, clearer to our conception, the creation of the Devil (Evil) has been found necessary. Therefore the conception of Substance calls forth in our mind its opposite principle—Force. Without force, without its attributes antagonistic to Substance, the latter itself with its inertia³¹ and other properties, would become inconceivable. But we can and—in order to obtain a clearer conception—we must transform the negative (i.e., non-material) property of force into a positive one, taking as our starting point its chief attribute—action and motion. In truth, to my conception of limitless space and time is united that of motion; time—is the abstract motion in space, that is to say, force acting in space and transforming itself, by this very action, into substance.³² Can I expect that my conceptions of such abstract subjects should be as clear and as definite as my sensuous perceptions, since we often have moreover only a hazy representation even of the most material things? Shall I, because my conceptions of something are hazy, conclude that this misty image is therefore false and nonsensical? And do we not know of hallucinations, on the other hand, of phantoms I mean, which are as real and as indisputable to the victims of such visions as life itself?

Now when a conception is not very clear, we can help it with comparisons, and it seems to me that I can find no better comparison for my intellectual conception of the origin of life than light. Though the source of light is known to us, yet in fact its distance from us is so great, and its effects upon us and everything with which we are surrounded, so varied and so numerous, that in daily life we refer almost without thinking to these properties of light as if they were the properties of bodies. Thus we think and say, that such or another colour belongs to this or another body instead of referring it to the solar rays; though, in fact, if a body or an object is coloured at all, it is because its atoms retain, reflect or refract the beams of light. These same beams can reach us and become visible, sometimes whole centuries and milleniums after the source of their light has been extinguished. The oscillations of the luminous ether—something ill-resembling substance, capable of penetrating through substances, impenetrable to every other matter, and imparting to them new properties—seem to me very illustrative of the action of the life-principle.

December 26th, 1879.

Self-confabulation is very attractive to me. However I may be convinced that I shall never be able to explain my cosmic concepts to myself completely and fully, yet the very attempt of trying to do so has a certain charm to my mind.

Yes; I represent to myself the brain as a glass prism, with the property of decomposing and breaking up rays of light. If I did not dread being laughed at for my fancies, I would call the brain a prism of the Universal Mind;³³ and if my comparison is just, then it is a function of the brain, to receive and pass through itself the vibrations or actions of this universal Force. But, once that I place myself on the standpoint of a materialist empiricist, I see an impassable chasm between my illustration and the view to which sceptical empiricism is unavoidably brought from the first start. Setting aside the truism that comparaison n’est pas raison [comparison is not proof], is there, I ask, as an empiricist, the smallest sense in the expressions I use, such as the oscillations of Force, a cosmic mind without any cosmic brain, energy without substance, a life-principle, outside of any organism? What is all this, from the standpoint of an empiricist, but an ideological series of empty words?

I grant it all. To reconcile pure empiricism with the existence of force outside matter, of thought without brain, of a life-principle apart from organized bodies—is unthinkable. It is a contradictio in adjecto [contradiction in terms]. And those empiricists, who, stopping at facts, do not venture beyond the direct speculations derived from these facts, are quite right in my opinion. I was as they are myself, and am even still so; but no sooner do we pass outside the magic circle, no sooner do we attempt to solve the mysterious x, than the deductions of empiricism prove not a whit more sensible than any ideological theory. Nor ought we to forget that what we call sense, is neither a firm nor an unconditionally correct standard of truth. Though the laws of thought have been, and will at all times be the same, and two and two will ever make four, yet the same subjects do not appear invariably to all, sensible or senseless. That which a hundred years ago was regarded as evident and undeniable to all, may appear as nonsensical to those who live at the end of the nineteenth century. It is not only owing to the accumulation of scientific knowledge in our minds that the meaning of things changes, but the change may be likewise often due to a psychic epidemic, and other external conditions—including fashion. As to fashion, it appears invariably as an epidemic. Speaking in general, our good sense, and along with it our world-conceptions, is subject to a law of periodicity, a law which plays a very important part in our own as well as in the universal life. The old and the forgotten appear again at certain periods, though of course under a new form; new and accumulated experiences call forth into the world things buried in oblivion, imparting to them freshness and new forces. That “that only is new which is well forgotten” is an aphorism of a sceptic which has a great deal of truth in it. The periodical and for long centuries time-honoured dominion of the various clashing doctrines in science and religion, among many nations, shows us forcibly how far we can trust our reason and sense. Modern empiricism is also a doctrine in its way, though its followers do not like to be viewed as doctrinaires. And no doctrine, though it should, like empiricism, claim only that which is strictly based on fact, can avoid being one-sided. Otherwise, it would not have dominion over all others, it would not follow strictly one and ever the same direction, regarding it as infallible; but would admit the merits of other doctrines and recognise the dignity of their convictions based on something higher and outside merely sensuous facts. We call that which contradicts our convictions—absurd. Decidedly so; our convictions, not our knowledge, for convictions influence people more strongly than any knowledge.³⁴

December 28th, 1879.

. . . . . . . . .

If our reason, then, depends on our modern convictions, and these, in their turn, are only temporary, and, owing to their strength and obstinacy, not always co-ordinate with our knowledge, then, no dominant doctrine (or religion), no school of thought, ought to look down upon any other doctrine or school, however the teachings of the latter may contradict those of the former. Nor does it befit an impartial mind, sure of itself, beyond credulity and the danger of being influenced or carried away, to fear ridicule, receiving nick-names, or of being charged with retrogression, irrationality or even with absurdity. He who has lived and learned some things during a long life, may remember with what contempt the Hegelians and “Nature-philosophers” used to treat, in the twenties and thirties of the present century, the modest and (in those days) humbled empiricists; and now, the latter pay the ex-sages with the same coin. Beyond doubt it would be far safer and more hopeful to stop at the positive, and leaving aside everything that is inexplicable, accept for one’s axiom, that there are things in the world, which are not subject to, nor concerned with our sciences. But such a view, no sooner is it subjected to a rigid policy and enforced upon its followers, than it becomes practically a doctrine like any other. And doctrinarianism, as I have just said, is ever one-sided and narrow-minded. Is it possible to demand of every mind, that it should pledge itself not to touch this or that subject for thought; that it should stop just where it is commanded to stop by another mind? It is quite true, as positivism, I believe, maintains, that a certain logical sequence in the direction of thought and world-contemplation, answering to the degree of knowledge acquired in human life, is observed in the progress of Humanity. But such a sequence does not destroy the possibility of periodical returns of that or another of the intellectual tendencies that have preceded; as it is not given to our mind to come to a final conviction concerning the immutable truth of any mental tendency or direction. Our temporary convictions, though always stronger than our knowledge, are still less firmly rooted than are our sciences acquired by experiment and observation alone. Therefore, however positive the tendency of modern thought, it becomes impossible to reject a leaning toward the returns of an anti-positive tendency contrary to positivism, were it even in only another form. And here am I, who without disputing the merits of positive knowledge, or its fitness and adaptability to many of our high intellects, nevertheless regard it as unfit for my own mind, since, to become a positivist in knowledge, I would have to break entirely my whole nature.

However strongly reflection and observation may be trying to convince me that I cannot step out beyond the magic circle traced around me, that I am incapable of solving a single one of the problems that interest me—I cannot conquer my aspirations and renounce occupying myself with problems that I consider the greatest questions of my life. With all that I am not a doctrinaire. To attempt to reduce to sense and order the creations of my fancy in the work of the solution of these problems, does not mean for me, to refuse to deal with empiricism (in its higher philosophical sense),³⁵ or to despise it, to regard its methods as already worked out by science and observation, as false, of little importance and to refuse it due credit. Not at all; I am one who so far back as in the twenties, when hardly from the University bench, having sensed the tendencies of the age, proceeded, in consequence, with great fervency to give myself up with my colleagues to the inductive methods of science, or empiricism as it was called, notwithstanding that we were still surrounded with the debris of natural and Hegelian philosophies. After faithfully serving this (in those days quite new) method of my (medical) science for over fifty years, I ended by perceiving, that for a man of my turn of mind, it was impossible to keep all the questions that interested me within the same method; in other words—to become a positivist in knowledge. Hence, I said to myself, “Stop! not a step farther”.

Thus it happens that I allow my fancy, helped by whatever scientific knowledge I may possess, to prove—to myself again, of course—that the raison d’être of everything subject to the senses, observation and experiment is hidden behind the scenery of the empirical stage, and is, therefore, subject to my “fancy” alone and its reasoning powers, and that too, within the most narrow limits. Not being born an out and out positivist, I cannot repress in myself the desire of looking behind the back scenery; this, not only out of mere curiosity, but with the (very utilitarian) object of limiting the too impudent pretensions of experiment and “observation” to self-authority and interference in the solution of questions relating to that hidden raison d’être [reason for being].

And now, I will begin with that at which I stopped, and which will at the first blush have appeared absurd.

December 29th, 1879.

“In’s Innere der Natur dringt kein geschaffener Geist.” [No created Mind can penetrate Nature’s innermost essence.] This is a grand, profoundly deep thought of the eminent naturalist.³⁶ Indeed, however deep experiment and observation may penetrate into the organism, into the depths of nature, entrance is forbidden to them. Scientific progress makes experiment and observation more refined, intensifies the senses of the experimenter, helps him to substitute one sense for another in the best way possible, as for instance the replacing of sight by touch; it reveals also the mechanism and chemism of the organic store. But that which governs the latter; that which directs the forces at work toward the conservation and support of being in a certain, already pre-ordained (typical) form, en gros et en détail [in broad outline and in detail], in all the organic mass, in every genus, organ, and tissue—that is not subject to research and remains inexplicable. Nevertheless, ignore that principle or force—call it what you like—we cannot, however much we would like to do so. Our thought and fancy cannot help aspiring to connect in one way or another the manifestations of that Universal Principle with our own “I”. We think only because we find thought in everything that surrounds us. Without the participation of thought and fancy no experiment could take place, and every observation and fact would prove senseless. Our thought and fancy, as the causes which lead to experiment and observation, are incapable, owing to the peculiarities of their nature, of limiting and contenting themselves with these two means of science. Our mind, having made use of experiment and observation, that is to say, having directed and forced our senses to act in a certain way, afterwards begins to examine its facts from every aspect, connects the impressions collected by our senses and gives them a new direction, and does this invariably with the participation of fancy.

December 30th, 1879.

I am seeking to prove to myself that the intellectual process in me, now that I am trying to put in order and explain my views of the Universe, acts, in truth, on the same lines as it did when I would hear of nothing save scientific demonstration, when I based my reasoning on nothing but facts. It seems to me that the extremely marked difference made between a priori and a posteriori judgments, or between the deductive and the inductive methods, is purely doctrinarian, and correct at best, only in extreme cases, approaching folly. In reality both the apriorist and the empiricist³⁷ take for the starting-point of their reasoning, fact—factum, something which for both also is incontestable because acquired from the first through senses and experiment. The only difference lies in this: the apriorist gives ultimately another meaning to his facts and experiments, and, in the acquisition of his knowledge (unthinkable without experiment) does not limit himself to the impressions he gets from his external senses. With him the conclusions his mind arrives at, and the fancies out-flowing therefrom, play a more important part than the direct sensuous perceptions. But no more does the so-called rational empiricism, among the followers of which I include also myself, content itself with the collection of impressions derived from the senses. While inventing various means of observation and experiment, checking one experiment by another, a rational empiricist inevitably opens the door to fancy, and his syllogisms and arguments can rarely, if ever, keep to the direct, independent connection with the sensuous perceptions he derives directly from his experiments and observations. There will be always a gap found between the syllogistic conclusion and the sensuous fact of perception; but, to fill up that gap as far as possible, we have no other means except an accumulation or repetition of kindred facts; and this process exposes us to errors, which are often more pernicious than the flights of our fancy, because they deceive us with their apparent accuracy.

On the whole, even that analysis of our cerebration which we have chosen to guide us, seems to me too childish. We regard sensations, attention (perceptio), memory, association of ideas, the faculty of expressing sensations by syllabled sounds, judgment and fancy as faculties acting separately and quite independently from each other. This, of course, is necessary for the comprehension of the mental process. But I regard the completely independent action of these functions as quite impossible in our normal state. True enough, one function may be more developed than the others, and therefore become to us more apparent than the rest, but it is still unthinkable without sensation. Ideation experienced without perception and memory, would be but an ephemeral and resultless excitation; and without fancy or imagination, the most exact mathematical mode of thought is impossible. It is quite true that in favour of the separatism and localisation of our psychical faculties we have the undeniable fact that, in the complete absence of one of such faculties, all the rest continue to act. The very faculty of sensation, located by some physiologists in the optic lobes of the brain, is subdivided and localised into several other categories; thus the optic must have a separate place from the auditory sensation in the brain, and it is probable that the various sensations, furnished to us by our exterior senses, are centred in various portions of the head. But that, which senses in us, the sensing principle, is something indivisible, integral and hardly ever changing during the course of life. It cannot be localised in this or that portion of the brain; nor is it quite correct to view the brain as its only seat.³⁸ Of course when centering our attention on some object, when examining it through a telescope or under a microscope, it may seem to us that we only look, that we are, so to say, wholly transformed into sight. But when we dive deeper into this process of concentrated vision, then, to begin with, we find that to fix our attention on something, means, in reality, to fix it on ourselves; i.e., to direct the sensing Principle called “I”, on the impressions, conveyed by one or the other organ of sense. That it means to look with that Ego of ours into our eye, to hear with it through our ear; and, while assimilating these impressions, to take cognisance and judge of them at the same time, to represent them to ourselves in that or in another shape, to compare them with previous sensations received before by the same senses; all this imperatively demands, that our I should be incessantly and simultaneously stimulating our various mental faculties to action.

Though during our sensuous perceptions, as, for instance, between hearing and seeing, it is possible to determine short intervals of time that divide these perceptions, if, like the astronomers, we listen and look at the same time; yet it is more than doubtful that we should ever find the means of seizing and determining the intervals that separate the sensation conveyed by the organ of sight, from that process which is simultaneously accomplished by our I, and which (process) is now termed by us unconscious cerebration—a term, in my opinion, considerably absurd, though it does refer to a special psychical process. It would be far better, I believe, to leave it nameless than to give it such a meaningless name.

It is precisely this would-be “unconscious” cerebration that follows all our sensuous feelings and emotions at the moment of their manifestation, which is the most characteristic property of the indivisibility and the homogeneity of our I. However much isolated and localised may be our senses of sight, hearing and touch, our memory, imagination, the faculties of speech, thought and will—our I is both something separate from them, and the container, at the same time, of all these faculties and feelings. Our I plays as on a piano, on the keys of those organs to the functions of which scientific empiricism attributes sight, hearing, memory, speech, etc., etc., and while expressing by its play these functions, it participates in them itself, as an indivisible, integral entity, connecting them and manifesting through them its own being.

On Life, the Meaning of Truth and the Ego

January 6th, 1880.

While taking my morning walk, I suddenly remembered that in my diary I had treated the famous cogito, ergo sum perhaps in a too one-sided way, by maintaining that it ought to be replaced by sentio, ergo sum. Turning to some object, identifying itself with it, and, so to say, transforming itself entirely into sight or hearing, our I, directed in this way to the external Universe—towards its non-I—thus continues, perhaps imperceptibly (owing to the intense attention it bestows upon the external object) to sense its being. And this feeling accompanies it from the cradle, from the moment when it learns to discern its non-I from itself, down to the grave; even during the loss of our consciousness during delirium or sleep, this sensation cannot discontinue, though it may change its form. Besides this at times to us imperceptible sensation of being, it can become so—as all our other sensations—through our habit of being. Our I becomes raised from a simple sensation to the plane of thought in cases when, upon the reception of impressions external (universal) and organic (conveyed by the organs), it connects them with its own feeling of sensing in itself the presence of its mental faculties, of attention, perception, memory, imagination and thought. Then our I becomes fully conscious, rational and sensible. Condillion said that a man without external senses was a statue. This is not so: breathing must impart to him the sensation of being, without any participation of external senses, simply by supporting his connection with the external world. The sensation of being would certainly exist in this case, only whether or not it would be conscious and rational without the participation of external senses is another question. Consciousness of one’s memory, thought and imagination, is without doubt stimulated and supported by the external and organic senses; but there is no cause, I think, to reject the possibility of such consciousness even in the absence of external and organic senses.

But I see that I have digressed and gone too far in my desire to demonstrate that, although I have reached my philosophical conceptions of the universe and man not in the least by the usual empirico-rational (inductive) method, I nevertheless view my conclusions as equal to fact.

January 10^th, 1880

Yes, equal to fact, and on the strength of my conviction I consider my views as proven. For what is fact? If we hold to the literal meaning, then fact is that which is accomplished—factum, which is done (therefore, un fait accompli [an accomplished fact]—a pleonasm). In this case, a fact must be something sensuous. Indeed, if our very being is a sensation, then, there can be nothing in it that would not be primarily dependent on impressions, conveyed to us by sensations.

Everything manifested in us by life, is manifested through sensations, i.e., through a connecting link with the external world. Nevertheless, the consequences and the products of our impressions are varied in the extreme. Some of them generate in us one feeling of life, others stimulate an unconscious cerebration and every kind of reflex action. But there is also a class of impressions—representations might do better, perhaps—which, notwithstanding their primal origin from sensuous perceptions, stimulate to action only our conscious mental faculties, memory, cerebration and fancy (or imagination, the faculty of combining and creating new representations). Though we remember, think and imagine at every act of the organs of our senses, yet this sensuous, and generally unconscious process of recollection, cerebration and representation (imagination) is ended, as soon as this or some other sense ceases to act; while another process—markedly distinct from the first—the process of recollection, cerebration and imagination, an always conscious process, takes place without any direct participation of our senses.

Thus, while every fact has to be the product of sensuous perceptions and of impressions acting on us externally, our internal sensations, present in us without any direct participation of external impressions, are capable of not only representing to us facts from various standpoints but also of discovering to us truths. Though a fact is generally regarded as if it were a truth, yet no one would refer to mathematical axioms as truths. Why? Is it not apparent that such a fact, for instance, as the presence of the sun in the sky is as undeniable and as true as any mathematical axiom? Yes, indeed; these are real facts and self-evident truths; still a fact is not always the truth, and truth is not a fact. The sun in the sky is an evident fact, because every one can have it demonstrated to him by his own senses; but such a mathematical (astronomical) truth, that the sun will rise and set in certain determined spots on the horizon, requires no verification by our senses; this is based not only on the theory of probabilities, but on knowledge and science, with the participation of all our other mental faculties (memory and fancy, &c.) True, the basis of this knowledge is resting on fact; had we never seen the sun and the stars, the construction of our planetary system would have never entered our heads; but mathematical calculations differ so widely from sense-observations, that they determine a priori the place of a planet not yet discovered by observation. The mathematical axiom that two magnitudes that are severally equal to the same magnitude are equal to one another, though evident, i.e., susceptible of being explained by a physical demonstration, is in reality, based on consideration, not on experiment; in order to comprehend it, there need not be before our eyes three magnitudes of equal size. Fact differs then from truth, in that its properties are different, whereas the essence of truth, even when unknown to us, is ever one and the same. Only that fact which was, is, and will be, would be truth. But we are acquainted with no such fact; and if we feel convinced of the necessity or possibility of the existence of something which ever was and ever will be—even when not real to the physical senses—then this conviction is Truth for us, although it cannot be called a fact. It is evident also, that to arrive at a conviction of such a truth, reason alone is insufficient:—the potent participation of fancy (ideation) is necessary.

Everything that is high and beautiful in our life, in science and art, was created by intellect with the help of fancy, and much by fancy helped by intellect. It can be boldly maintained, that neither Copernicus nor Newton would have ever acquired such importance in science as they now have, had they not been helped by fancy. Meanwhile we often hear in life, in science and even in art, recriminations against fancy, not only against its exaggerations, but against its normal function. There is no greater reproach for a modern realist and naturalist than to say that he uses his fancy. But in reality, only that realist and empiricist merits the reproach of inconsistency, who allows himself to abandon for one moment the guidance of sense-experience³⁹ directed and governed by intellect and fancy. Speaking in general, the doctrine which divides by artificial compartments the functions of our mental faculties one from the other, leads us finally to make as strong distinctions between their respective manifestations in all our productions, as though it were possible to cerebrate without imagining, or imagine without reflection! It is enough for us to remember, that we are unable to make the simplest summing up of figures, without calling into action the functions of our memory, our imagination and our reason, although it may seem to us that our I is all absorbed in figures during the process.

January 14th, 1880.

I am still seeking to prove to myself that I must not regard my world-theories and speculations as simply the product of idle fancy, only because they are not based upon direct and immediate experiment. It would never do for me, after having devoted my life—in fact the best part of my life—to rational induction, to deny the all importance of experiment; but it is not for me, equally, to question the wisdom of this first Hippocratian aphorism: experientia fallax, judicium difficile [experience is deceptive, judgment is difficult].

When age is no longer conducive to fascination (entraînement [impulse]), then one begins to realize how easy it is to be carried away, not merely by dreams but even by such exact and sober things as facts and experiments.

There are things in this world, to which even such safe means as experiment is inapplicable. Meanwhile these things are life-questions, without solving which to oneself, one would not like to die; otherwise we should be inclined to address life reproachfully, asking it in the deeply thought-out words of our poet:—

“Thou useless gift, thou gift of chance,
Life, why to me, hast thou been given?”⁴⁰

Verily, orgies of lust, the grossest means for obtaining self-oblivion and finally suicide, are in store for one who would seek to solve the riddle of life by scientific experiment, and will unavoidably lead to perdition. It is quite true that some strong, healthy and positive minds may live and act very well, having laid aside every attempt toward the solution of the excruciating question of life. But woe to him, who in his pride will dream that he is just that kind of esprit fort [strong-spirit, freethinker] who requires no such solutions. The ascetic Philaretus has well answered from his standpoint when objecting to Poushkin’s reproach to life; and his answer was to the point, precisely because he (Philaretus) had not unriddled to himself the problem of life by means of scientific experiment; and however one-sided such a solution, it is stronger, and what is more important—more humane than helpless complaints against life for its refusal to unveil its secret in the way we would like to see it divulged. No doubt one would like life to do this as palpably and as evidently as it does with regard to its sensuous manifestations.

It seems to me, that all of us, followers of the Verulam Bacon, attach too much importance to his inductive method of investigation.⁴¹ This method is not in the least any new discovery of some special activity of our minds. In daily life, and before the day of Bacon, people have ever investigated facts inductively; yet no one,—not even Bacon himself, I think—has ever regarded this method as the only possible means for the discovery of truth. The chief merit of Bacon is noli jurare in verba magistri [“bound to swear allegiance to the words of no master”; i.e. do not accept claims merely on authority]. And even this has ceased to be in our day a merit, as there could not be found now even a schoolboy, who would have an opportunity of repeating this rule. The mediaeval faith in authorities is now replaced by mistrust. We have all lost confidence even in ourselves; our children on the school benches, mistrust their masters every time they look at them. This can hardly escape being regarded as a consequence of the one-sided exercise of our minds according to the inductive method; yet, may heaven preserve us from that deductive process which taught us jurare in verba magistri! [to swear by the words of the master; i.e. to submit blindly to authority.]

Therefore, I say, that if we would make our philosophical views of the universe influence our moral life—to me, at any rate, this has become a necessity—then we must not base these views on the exact, purely demonstrable data of sensuous perceptions. We must not blind ourselves with an apparent and fundamental evidence there, where a mere representation is concerned, or—what is still more correct—where only a possibility of a representation which would make it clear to us, is in question. Here we can demand no more than that the representation or conception should contain no evident contradictions and that it should be in the least possible degree incongruous; in other words, that it should conform as far as it can be made to, with our exact sciences, and should not include in itself more fallacies and contradictions than there are in these sciences.

January 15th, 1880.

Yesterday afternoon I was driving home from inland. The weather was frosty and clear. I was sitting in the sleigh with my back toward the setting sun. The fields, covered with a thick layer of snow, as smooth as a tablecloth, were lighted as far as eye could see, with a soft rosy glow, deepening hither and thither into a light violet hue; the full moon was rising from behind the forest, its light silvery disc strongly outlined on the greenish, dark-blue horizon. This play of opalescent colours on the sky, passing from green to light yellow, and from rosy to light violet, and shining like diamond sparks on the immaculate snow—quite fascinated me. I breathed the pure cold air with such ease and delight, that I caught myself making unconsciously a paraphrase of Poushkin’s Reproach to Life, and whispering:—

“No useless gift, no gift of chance,
A gift mysterious, full of meaning,
Life, with an object thou wert given.”

And is it because no one could hitherto unriddle thee, O divine gift called Life, that we should reproach thee with being an absurd gift of chance, desecrate and vulgarise thee and play with, instead of appreciating thee! We feel mad at the thought of our inability to make bare the mystery of the gift, and out of pure spite, we are ready to maintain that it contains neither secret, nor object; that like the fabulist Kryloff’s box of life, there is no lock to it; and that life simply opens per vaginam [through the vagina], and closes as easily—with the grave.

From our very cradle we get into the habit of life, and therefore view life and the universe as we do ordinary every-day objects; this is fortunate for us, though such fortune in truth is superficial and vulgar enough. But what would become of all of us, were our mind to be constantly trying to penetrate and fathom ourselves and everything surrounding us? Every moment we should meet face to face with an impenetrable, crushing mystery; at every step perplexity and doubt would be weighing heavily on our thoughts. What is this strange motion and whirling in infinite space of mutually gravitating bodies, of globular masses? What is this incomprehensible existence of numberless worlds, formed of the same substantial atoms and separated for eternity from each other, by distances hardly conceivable owing to their magnitude? What is the meaning of this infinite variety of forms? And cohesion, gravitation, affinity, the incessant vibration of atoms—are not all these daily and hourly manifestations so many mysteries concealed under scientific terms? And the so-called simple bodies, again; these indecomposable elements accumulated in the gigantic planetary masses,—are they, indeed, primordial elements? Whence could they appear, whence planetary life, if other primordial and to us unknown, elements were not contained in the universal and to the mortal, unreachable source,—the chaos of ether? What is it, this source and container, the vehicle of unknown principles?

What wonder if there exists in each of us, surrounded as we are from cradle to grave by such universal mysteries, a leaning toward mysticism: if some of us owing to certain characteristics, become very easily mystics, and end by seeing and discovering hidden secrets there, where other men who circle without rest or break in the whirlpool of life—find everything very plain and simple? And how can it be expected of the inhabitants of this planet—of those who are endowed with the faculty of vividly representing to themselves the unseen and the impalpable, that they should always remain in a vegetative frame of mind and feel reconciled to the evils of the day? When fate after endowing them with an aspiration to foresight, and a certain force of imagination, prohibits them from leaving their terrestrial abode any further than the airy spaces, that directly surround it, transforming mockingly for him, who attempts to soar higher, the azure of the sky into the darkest night. But if every leaf, every seed, every bit of crystal reminds us of the existence outside of and within us, of a mysterious laboratory in which all works incessantly for itself and that which surrounds it, with an evident design and thought, then our own consciousness must be for us a still deeper and at the same time uncomfortable mystery. There is, however, a still more sacred mystery, this time originating from that very unconsciousness of ours—and that is—truth. There was a mocking satire in the indiscreet query of the Roman proconsul; and, perchance, this is why he received no answer. Verily and indeed curiosity alone will not lead us to learn—what is truth?

Of course I do not speak here of the so-called scientific truths. All these—historical and historico-natural, the mathematical and the judicial—are no more than facts, or more or less correct conclusions and hypotheses, obtained by logical analysis and synthesis: or formulas, dictated by life, customs and the exigencies of society. Of such “truths” we have many. But there is a truth—one, integral, and the highest—which serves as the foundation of all our moral and ethical life. It is wrong to assert, as such historians as Buckle do, and along with him the majority of our modern younger generations, that humanity is chiefly indebted to the progress of scientific truths in society, while moral truths have done nothing towards its success, i.e., its progress, happiness and welfare. I think, on the contrary, that the unity and the integrity of the truth I speak of, becomes more and more evident with the progress of humanity, though it may be very hard to determine how far it has become any better. Truth can only be one; it is without and at the same time within us, in our consciousness; of course not as bright as the physical sun for us, but like a far distant light-wave throwing radiance on our moral being. What would become of our ethical principle had not the eternal and one Truth served it as a foundation? Without it, without this foundation, no scientific truths could exist for us, for there would have been no moral aspiration toward the discovery of truth. Every man, even one who is most steeped in crime, seeks involuntarily to find truth in himself, attempting to find an excuse for these misdeeds before himself as before other men. It is true that, during such attempts at justification, in attempting to appear instead of being, we get entangled in lies; but this is no proof to the contrary, no evidence that this arbitrary aspiration toward truth, is absent from us. All this—to appear and not to lie, and the whole edifice of lies raised by us in justification of our deeds—is only a disfigured aspiration toward truth, following which we get further and further away from truth, only because we are on a false track. Finally then, comes a day when we find it impossible to discern truth from falsehood. It is then that is generated the mocking query of the Roman proconsul: What is truth, how can we learn it, how shall we discern it, and where is it? And how, indeed, shall we understand the most ideal of all the Ideals! Truth! Don’t you see that it is the Deity, the Absolute! We ought not even to dare to attempt a hope of ever reaching it.

But the impossibility of ever solving it, is no denial of an aspiration towards it. This aspiration that we have received from on high is our most precious possession. Deeply buried in us lies, if not the conviction, at any rate the feeling, reminding us that without an aspiration to the truth, there can be no real happiness. See how this aspiration, silenced by our passions and misfortunes, by that which is called destiny and chance, and false tendencies, see how it manifests itself under another form, having apparently, nothing in common with the aspiration that lurks in the very foundation of our moral being. An irrepressible longing toward the pursuit of objects, based on error, does not for all that annihilate in us the aspiration toward the discovery of true and real facts or scientific truths; and thus it happens that, while satisfying on one hand our longing for truth, we neglect occasionally to fully satisfy its other higher side. We see just in the same way, grand, but immoral geniuses, conquerors and sovereigns, while trampling truth under their feet, trying to convince themselves of the righteousness and justice of their deeds; because with them the aspiration toward the true finds its satisfaction in the grand results reached by them: and these results co-operate indeed toward the discovery and the propagation of various actual truths. All these are illusions inseparable from our existence. Truth is so radiant, that without such illusions, our aspiration toward it alone would blind us, and therefore, falsehood, in view of this insurmountable drawing of men toward truth—has become inevitable. Ignorant of what it really is, drawn nevertheless irrepressibly, according to a law inherent in us, to search after it, we have (fortunately and unfortunately) to live constantly under an illusion and amidst a series of hallucinations. This inevitable destiny serves us as a circonstance atténuante [attenuating circumstance] before the tribunal of our conscience: but it does not, any more than the other, destroy in us entirely the faculty of coming back to our senses and of discerning our illusions and hallucinations. We may hallucinate ourselves to a degree of seeing snakes in our boots, but this does not give us the right of saying that therefore, there is no such one and integral truth; or that only that which is acquired by observation and experiment and the facts resulting therefrom, are truths; while every other truth is only a relative conception, for the time being, binding pro domo sua [i.e. binding only from its own limited standpoint]. Thinking thus, we would change our illusions from a screen, preserving our sight from the unbearable radiance of Truth, into a dark and everlasting night.

———

VI. On the Utility of Illusions, on Will, Desire, and Pure Reason

January 28th, 1880.

A kind of dolce far niente [sweet idleness] . . . . a singing in the ears, not from quinine only, but intensified—as the echoes of the evening noises in the streets of a large city.⁴² A whole kaleidoscopic world in the head, in statu nascente [in the nascent state; in the act of arising], one thought rapidly replacing the other, the past changing into the present without cessation. Attention fails to catch and fix a single idea, meanwhile attention and cerebration and fancy and memory are all there, and all acting at the same time. This proves to me, that in me, as in all others, I believe, in healthy as in abnormal conditions, none of these faculties act separately; my I is now playing on their respective keys, now lightly touching memory, then passing on to imagination, then again to reason. Only my I does so now softly, in a very weak way, extracting from the keys dull though not altogether disconnected tones and sounds. But such a state of mind is not without its charm; for it is the dolce far niente [sweet idleness] of our I.

Looking over the pages written during these last days, I find that I have spoken of illusion. Yes, this screen, as I have called it, is indeed our talisman. For a man who watches himself carefully, it will be easy to understand the kind of service illusion renders him, and by becoming still more careful he will not permit it to darken too much the path before him—that path which is indicated to him by his inherent, hence irrepressible, drawing toward the truth.

January 30th

Everything will be explained, everything will become clear, to him who knows how to deal with fact—illusion whispers. Learn to carefully observe, sharpen your senses, know how to discriminate correctly; and then will disappear the wonders and mysteries of nature, and the arrangement of the Universe will become as simple a fact for you as all that you now know, and that you hitherto considered arcane and quite inaccessible. Such is the conviction which with every day takes more hold, not only of the high priests of science and the foremost intellects, but of the masses likewise. And this is one of the most important modern illusions, the most beneficent as it is the most useful. This illusion is more than useful, inasmuch it directs all our mental forces to objects subservient to the most exact sense-analysis and investigation, and prevents us at the same time busying ourselves with that which, to us, has to remain a most commanding mystery. The more the object of our investigation is special, the more it is limited; the stronger the illusion, the more hope there is for an exact and clear result; hence the more blissful and calm he feels who has devoted all his time and attention to the investigation. Having plunged into and devoted all our life to research on these lines, we arrive at last at the conviction, that there is nothing behind the scenes on the stage of our action, and that what appears hidden behind the scenery is so only to him who does not want or knows not how to throw a searching look into those nooks. And yet it is sufficient to think seriously, without being carried away either by the striking grandeur of sundry discoveries or by the colossal results obtained through the inductive methods of investigation, and calmly examine and analyse the sum and essence of the knowledge we have acquired by these methods, to obtain the certitude that we learn exclusively thereby only the exterior side of the universe that surrounds us, and also of ourselves.

Thus some of us are solely interested in the mechanism of phenomena, the construction, materials and action of certain sets and apparatuses of life, and its forms; others are occupied with the practical, hence also with the external side of life. By this method our knowledge and conceptions of the life of this world are undeniably increased; its external side is subjected to an examination from different sides; but it remains as much as ever undeniable now as before, and as it always was, that in’s Innere der Natur dringt kein geschaffener Geist [no created Mind can penetrate into Nature’s inner essence]. It is this consciousness—so keen for our spirit—that we blunt by means of the beneficent illusion, which makes us fix and concentrate all our attention on the external side of the world-life.

Who, among the men occupied with the investigation of evident truths and practical life, will ever think of reflecting upon the essence of things? Who of those busy with practical affairs would believe that this essence is not at all what our senses make us believe it is? All is plain and simple to him who has got into the habit of viewing everything as plain and simple. The really scientific investigator is far more concerned with the how than with the why. We see a leaf growing, we watch it growing, we learn the organization and the component parts of its cells, and follow step by step the division and the multiplying of the cells, and the whole mechanism of the growing process is discovered to us as plainly as it can be. But what is it that makes the leaf grow just as it is, and not in a different way? What is it that makes the plant and the animal assume this or another characteristic species? Why do the seed and the egg contain respectively a germ precisely of the same type and species as those from which they originated? What is it that attracts the alkalies to the acids? What is that cohesion which forces the particles to unite together, and what attracts one body to the other? Why does muscular motion get transformed into heat, and heat into motion; and why does the vibration of atoms produce in us the feeling of heat? All these and a thousand more questions, remaining unanswered to this day owing to our ignorance of the ultimate essence of things, show that we are surrounded with mysteries; and if none of these mysteries are regarded by us as miracles and wonders, it is only because we meet them at every step. Instead of wonders, we call them phenomena, based on natural laws, though we are ignorant of their origin. But when, on the other hand, we meet with something far less marvellous, but less common, we do not hesitate for a moment to deny its reality; we do not believe in it, or else we believe too much, and forthwith call it a miracle. Such are our illusions—and thank heaven for them! Without our dear illusions, it would be unbearable for us to live in this mysterious world, circumscribed by an enchanted circle out of which there is no exit.

February 8th, 1880.

But is it, indeed, so? May it not be also an illusion to say, or to believe, that there exists an essence of things of some kind, unknown and not subject to our analysis? May not that ultimate essence be again only that which becomes known to us by means of experiment and observation? Why should not our senses be fitted by nature herself expressly to recognise things as they essentially are? Sensus nos fallunt [the senses deceive us] may be only another term for asylum ignorantiæ [a refuge of ignorance; i.e. an excuse for not knowing]. It is only necessary to learn how to use our senses, to habitually train and sharpen them, to know how to correctly interpret and explain to ourselves the sensations conveyed to us by their organs, and our senses will never deceive us.

Such are the arguments brought forward and there is some truth in them, but only some truth.

To begin with, we judge of our senses and the results derived therefrom only subjectively and individually. Verification of these is based on the general solidarity of opinion. But the judges of our sensuous perceptions are those same senses. That which seems to all undeniable on the testimony of their senses to-day, may be controverted to-morrow on the same authority. There is a limit to the acuteness of the senses, and the more one sense is sharpened, the more easy becomes error, the more difficult the verification of that sense, or its checking by another sense. Finally, however acute and trained my senses may have become, still the question, what is the object observed by me outside myself, remains unsolved. I recognise any object only through the impression and sensation it produces on me. And a sensation without my I is unthinkable to me. Meanwhile, the certitude remains to my reason that every object that I investigate can, and will, exist without me. What is then this object?

But even besides this evidently unsolvable question, the essence of things—das Ding an (und) für sich selbst [the thing in and of itself]—must be for us something else, and not that which is conveyed to us by our senses, simply because our sensuous and mental perceptions and representations, however clear they may be, can never give us a complete and full comprehension even of the external side of the object investigated by us. Could we fully fathom and penetrate into the essence of things even from their external sense-side alone, we would then know what is force and what is matter. And if we could get a representation of things not as they seem but as they really are, without the help and participation of our senses, then would we comprehend the mystery of creation, and also the mysteries of the creative powers. But not only is this unreachable to us, but even the possibility of subjecting every object to the analysis of all our senses is denied us. Myriads of things remain unexplained; other myriads will remain for ever entirely unknown to us; while our mental representations about those things which are yet likely to be discovered and analyzed through an artificial cultivation of our senses, however clear they may seem to us, are still in reality no better than phantoms, misty pictures and faint echoes, often alluring the mind into the inextricable labyrinth of conjectures and illusions.

Another beneficent illusion is our unshaken conviction in the freedom of our will, thought and conscience. Without this conviction, so dear to us, moral life would become impossible, while the phenomena of physical life would meet at every step impediments in ourselves. It is not an easy matter for me to make myself lose the conviction that I cannot fail to wish for that which I desire, and that I cannot fail to desire that which it is natural for my psychic and mental faculties to long for. My thought cannot manifest itself outside of fixed and well-known laws of cerebration, without the risk of getting transformed into something inane. My conscience demands of me only that which I consider conscientious and moral; and if I act contrary to the laws of conscience, I profess that it is because the latter has lost the freedom of its action. However, we can only maintain that will, thought and conscience are not arbitrary, though they are certainly free within the limits determined by certain organic and psychic laws. Absence of causation and freedom are certainly not synonymous terms; nor are will and desire equivalents. I will and desire, are two different notions. But neither our willing nor desiring can be arbitrary, though they do seem to us so to be. I am wishing (or desiring) at this moment something, because my inner or organic sensations (i.e., those conveyed to me by the organs), and all the preceding circumstances and conditions force me to desire just this and not anything else; I can alter my desire or force it to be silent, but only so long as my will has not yet been weakened under the yoke of various desires and other abnormal conditions. Will, in its normal state, must always be stronger than desire. Will is ever active and is the ruler of our actions. Hence, I can will something good, and at the same time wish something bad. It is only physical obstacles that can impede the actions of a strong or normal will. In will, there is indeed, a tendency to arbitrary action; nevertheless, even will cannot be disproportional in its strength to the organic energy of our I. I may will to lift my arm, but my will and its subsequent action are limited by the faculty of transmitting my will to the arm; and if the latter is paralyzed, then, with all my will to lift it, there will be no active wish to do so. I shall have probably to return more than once in this diary to this important subject.

The third illusion of our psychic life, an illusion as beneficent as the former two, depends on the inconsistency of our mind and fancy.

Pure reason, i.e., reason viewed apart from the other psychic faculties, cannot, of course, be inconsequential. But we are unable to so argue that pure reason alone should act; while arguing, we at the same time pay attention, we remember, imagine, desire, and (in practical life) frequently excite ourselves, and get carried away by some passion or other. Therefore, our mind, consistent in principle, becomes almost invariably inconsistent in practice. And this is our fortune and also our misfortune.

Thus our mind, owing to its innate consecutiveness, is brought during each of its world-concepts, of its speculations upon the phenomena of the universe, to accept, whatever it may be trying to investigate in its world-contemplation, the infinite, the limitless and the eternal, whether it be in space, in time, motion, force, substance, or what not. It has finally to confront infinitude, the illimitable, and eternity, even though it can never form for itself any definite and clear conception of these. And no power of our argumentative fancy can represent to us any image of that infinitude, the recognition of which our mind with its inherent consecutiveness fatally reaches. This undeniable existence of the infinite, limitless and eternal principle, so fatally reached by our mind and its ideation, while analyzing the finite, the conditioned and the temporary, is not only a fact subservient to our sense, but it stands higher than any fact, because it is the unavoidable postulate of pure reason which it transfers to the domain of phantasy. At the same time both reason and argumentative phantasy are incessantly occupied in practical life with the contemplation of the various transformations of all that surrounds us, and it is these ceaseless changes in space, time, motion, force and substance, which constantly contradict in themselves the consequential conclusions of pure reason, forcing us to find in everything that surrounds us only that which is temporary, conditioned and determined. This is that very illusion which is our fortune and our misfortune, but on the whole more beneficent than otherwise, since it forces us to centre all our mental faculties on the research of changes taking place outside of us in infinite space and time. Without this forced inconsecutiveness of our mind and the outflowing illusion, the activity of our intellect and fancy would be lost for us, engrossed as it would be in a fruitless contemplation of (to us) an unreachable infinitude.

February 12th, 1880.

Only is it all indeed, just as I imagine it?

Is not precisely that which seems to us incomprehensible, namely infinitude, illimitation and eternity, an illusion? Beginning and end, birth and death, we meet and realize at every step. All our existence on earth is in constant dependence on things determined, finite and temporary. Our chief means for the knowledge of things—our senses—are constructed exclusively for the fixing and measurement of the limits of space, time and motion. Where then, is there any illusion in this? The best we can do is to see no illusion, and failing to perceive it to act as if there were none. This would be practical, for to reason oneself into the belief that we live in a world of illusions, leads to nothing, or rather it leads more to evil than to good. All this is so; but then it is enough for me to throw a glance heavenward for infinitude to become in my sight an incontrovertible fact; suffice it for me to think of the universe, the force and substance it contains, and the thought of the eternal, immutable principle involuntarily appears before me, striking my thought with its fathomless depths. And if the illimitable eternal is not only a postulate of our reason but a gigantic fact in itself, how then are we to reconcile the existence of the limited and temporary with this fact? The illusion lurks just in this: limited, conditioned and evanescent are only the manifestations of the illimitable and eternal principle, and even that which is limited and finite in them in truth is only their changes of form. These manifestations, owing to eternal motion, and the incessant passage of forces and substance and their transformation into one another, cannot be constantly the same. The universe is a colossal, ever-revolving kaleidoscope. The figures change incessantly, but its guiding thought and energy are eternal and immutable.

It is thus that my mind and fancy, which I take to be inseparable, convince me of the existence of an infinite and eternal Principle. Without fancy even the minds of a Copernicus and a Newton would have been inadequate to give us that inkling of the Universe which has now become the property of the whole civilized world. Nothing great in this world has ever been achieved without the participation of fancy. And it is to this argument-loving fancy that we have to turn for the solution of the unsolvable question concerning the relation of substance to this eternal universal Principle.

And I maintain, that in the mental analysis helped by fancy, substance is volatilized, so to speak, and, instead of its atoms, force remains in our imagination. What this force is, we know no more than we do what the fundamental atoms of substance are. One thing I feel certain of, and this is that neither this imaginary basic force, nor these imaginary fundamental atoms have, nor can they have, the same sense-faculties, which experiment, observation and science discover in the surrounding universe. This basic force and basic substance are just as much of an abstraction as are the universal mind and the principle of life—but an abstraction, which manifests in the mind involuntarily and unavoidably whenever we reflect and imagine, and then also involuntarily (I am ready to say “unconsciously”, though I regard the term as nonsensical) our mind finds itself, along with the aspirations toward an aim and plan peculiar to it—outside of itself. Such is the faculty of the mind. But it is endowed with it, just because this faculty exists outside of it (our mind) in the whole universe, or, in other words, because our human mind is only the manifestation of another, higher, universal mind.

February 16th, 1880.

. . . . . . . . .

I catch myself still talking, in my world-speculations, of Universal Mind and Universal Thought, but where is the Universal Brain? Thought without brain and speech! What a fallacy in the mouth of a physician! Nevertheless, the insect world thinks without a brain, and the animal kingdom cerebrates, in its way, without expressing its ideas in words. If you choose to limit the term thought only to the brain-produced, speechified, wordy, human and humanly-conscious thought, in my turn I refuse to do so. For me, human thought is but a radiation of the World-Thought, universally diffused, creating and ruling all. Brain itself and even speech, regarded by us as the organ and condition of thought, are the productions of this World-Thought—and most assuredly no chance creations. If, for a reason unknown to us, the construction of organisms was necessary, then it stands to reason that creative Thought had to find, for the expression of itself by word and consciousness, some substratum or other, the best fitted for its design, and such a substratum, as we now find—is the brain in man and animal. Why human cerebration necessitated just such convolutions, cells, glands and tissues as we have and no others, this we do not know; just as we are unaware why the evolution of the actual, and not of some other animal types was found necessary. We cannot know it, just because as the formation of our organ of thought, so the evolution of specified animal types is the production of a higher, Universal Thought, conceivable to us only through its manifestations. As said many a time before, in discovering at every step outside of ourselves an (in our sense) unconscious thought, we get gradually accustomed to regard it as our own humanly conscious ideas.

Meanwhile, we know now for a certainty, that in our actions, especially in the activity of the organ of sight, the so-called unconscious cerebration participates considerably; without it, we could not sense and conceive of the objects we see, such as they are, or as they seem to us to be. We reason, calculate, imagine, remember, desire, in many a case unconsciously; doubtless we can also feel unconsciously, as reflex action shows, or forget the moment of the sensation at its very beginning. It seems to me that the time has come when we ought to discern the consciousness of our I from other psychic acts, such as sensation, cerebration, will and imagination, without mentioning the fact that the degrees of consciousness itself may be very different. I believe that the brain is exclusively the organ of individual consciousness; and our cerebration depends on the brain, in so far as it is the organ of speech and sensations conveyed to it by other organs. But neither the brain nor the other organs sense themselves consciously. Whence then the consciousness of our I in the brain? What is this strange transformation of various outer and inner sensations conveyed to the (per se) unconscious brain-stuff, into a feeling of our personality! Perchance it, too, is brought to us from without. I mean, may not this personal consciousness be communicated to the organism from without, along with other element-bearers of the Life Principle?

The Life Principle, or Life Force, the Spirit of Being, call it as you will, can have of course no personal I; nor can it have an individually human consciousness. It is universal; but in guiding the forces and elements toward the formation of organisms, this organising Principle of life becomes self-sensing, self-conscious, universal or individual. Even in every animal species there exists, besides the consciousness (more or less clear) of its individuality, that of its own kind; and in man, besides the consciousness of the individual I, there exists that of human kind, or one common to all humanity. These different forms of consciousness, the organs of which are mostly the nervous centres, are, in my view, nothing less than the embodiment of the world-thought actioned by life force. This is no empty statement in my opinion. I have a right to believe it; firstly, because I know of no other explanation of the origin of our I; secondly,⁴³ it is impossible to doubt the existence of a life-principle (of a force) as the x that rules substance in the organism, and the physical forces, and directs them toward a given, determined aim, namely, toward the support and the preservation of the organism; thirdly and finally, the substance ruled and directed by the life principle, is organised according to a general and determined plan into various given types; and does not this mean that the organisation of types and forms represents in itself the expression and embodiment of a creative world-thought? But as this Thought is not, and owing to its essence, cannot be an individuality, therefore it has no need, very naturally, of a special organ such as our brain, the latter being exclusively appointed for individuals. Nor is there any more need for the expression of the World-Thought, of words, speech, or sensations, which are necessary for our personal cerebration.

Generally speaking, we have no right to maintain that such or another organ is formed for such purpose, or for such function as our experiments and scientific observations attribute to it. We cannot maintain that our legs are given us to walk, our brain to think; for we walk because we have legs, and think because we have a head. But to argue that we have a head, in order that we should think, is equivalent to saying that the creative force of life had no other means but the one chosen by it for its purpose. We have to remember that we are ignorant of the reason why that creative force has consciously embodied itself in the type and form of man and not in any other; and at the same time we have no right to maintain that man is the last expression of the divine creative thought, or that its embodiment is limited to man in whom it has developed and culminated as self-consciousness. We have no cause to reject the possibility of the existence of organisms endowed with such properties as would make of them the direct embodiment of the Universal Mind, a perfection inaccessible to our consciousness or human mind.

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VIII. On the Inductive and Deductive Methods

17th and 18th February, 1880.

I am well aware that my world-concept is not based on that inductive method which is demanded in our day from every seriously thought-out speculation. But that’s just where the trouble is, as on these lines we have either to renounce any conception of the universe at all, or use for its foundations generalizations so common that they become pure abstractions. I was never destined to be a positivist; it is beyond my power to command my thought to abstain from going there where it immediately loses its way. Thus, I feel bound in my world-concept to base myself on that which, to me, seems to be beyond any doubt or cavil, even if it be more of an abstraction than a fact. These kinds of abstractions seem to me as undeniable as my own existence; to them I attribute universal unity and design; a general plan of creation; universal thought; force independent of substance; substance which, when mentally analysed, gets transformed into something eluding our senses—in other words, into force also; a principle (or force) of life, penetrating substance, yet independent of it as well as of physical forces, which it guides designedly toward the self-conservation of substance, raised by that principle to the degree of organisms and species. Accepting all these as undeniable axioms, how could I have worked out a different world-conception? Whether it is ever proved by science or not that the higher animal types, forms, and we ourselves, have developed, under the influence of external conditions and forces, out of lower forms, and these, in their turn, out of primordial organic protoplasm, makes no difference and can alter in nowise my concepts; whether life on this earth has developed in this or another way, the principle of a unity of design in its creation loses nothing by it, and it is inadequate to make the presence of universal Thought and of a Life-Principle in the universe appear thereby doubtful.

I cannot acquire the conviction—though I am unable to demonstrate this by facts—that our brain can be the only organ of thought; that everything in the universe, save that organ, is thoughtless and senseless, and that human thought alone should impart to the universe a meaning and an integral harmony. With such a one-sided view the importance of the brain would seem to me very strange; for it comes to this: in the whole cosmos it is our brain alone which senses external impressions without sensing itself, and serves as a test of manifestation for some I, which recognises no solidarity with the source of its origin and acts as if the latter had nought to do with it. This is why I regard as far more probable this other theory, that this very hazy and very strange I of ours is carried into the brain, and develops in it, together with the sensations produced from external impressions brought to it; in other words the question may be asked: may not our I come from the outside, and may it not be universal Thought itself⁴⁴ which finds and uses the brain as an apparatus, cleverly constructed ad hoc [for this purpose] by life-force, and designed by the latter as an embodiment and individualization of the Universal Mind? In such case the brain would be but a cleverly constructed net for the containment and the manifestation in personal form of that cosmic mind.

In every case this apparently fantastic conjecture seems to me more probable than that other hypothesis, put forward by the school of materialists pur sang [pure-blooded materialists], which teaches that our thought depends on brain phosphorus. However much fish and peas I may eat (by Moleschott’s advice) never shall I consent to give away my I into the durance vile of a product accidentally extracted by alchemy from urine. If in our conceptions of the universe it be our fate to be ever falling into illusions, then my illusion has, at least, the advantage of being very comforting. For it shows to me a rational universe and the activity of the forces working in it, harmonious and intelligent; as also my I, not the product of chemical and histological elements but an embodiment of a general Universal Intelligence, which I represent to myself, as I did many times before, acting with free will, in accordance with the same laws which are traced by it for my own mind, but exempt from that restraint which trammels our humanly conscious individuality.

February 20th and 21st, 1880.

But what about my autobiography? Well, writing for myself, it is of more importance to me that I should make clear to my mind what I am, and only then follow it by tracing out how much and in what way practical life has helped to make of me what I am now; that is to say, by what means I have arrived at accepting my actual world-concepts, my religious and moral convictions. Therefore I had to ascertain and explain to myself, first of all, how I view the surrounding universe, in what light I look upon myself, and what kind of man I take myself to be, what I believe in, that which I have my doubts about, what I like and dislike. All my past, all that I have lived through is interesting to me, but only in so far as it can explain to me my development in the process of mental evolution, and of moral being. To arrive at such results in my life-history, I have not only to recall long bye-gone days, but to endeavour to be constantly sincere with myself; and both are far from being easy.

There was a time when as a boy of eighteen I kept my diary, portions of which are still preserved by my wife; but there is little in it I could use now. I find in it for instance, that I had no idea of living over thirty . . . . which shows that I was often in a gloomy disposition in those days . . . . Nor is it easy for me to determine how far I can, be sincere with myself; and this is more difficult than it really appears. There are events in one’s life, the chief and secret motives of which it is impossible to explain unless one is absolutely frank with oneself; and meanwhile it is just in such cases that one is at a loss to determine if one is frank or not. There are motives so deeply enshrined in the secret places of our I, that it becomes almost hopeless to drag them out to the surface of the Soul, however much we may desire to do so. Instead of these there appear others more comely; but when they come to be examined one feels that there lurks, in the very depths of one’s being, stubborn and unyielding, another motive, misty and hazy, and what is worse, resembling in nothing any of those that swim instead of it upon the surface. And this happens in cases quite different from those in which reason and caution prohibit sincerity with other persons? Not at all; and I maintain that it is far more difficult to be frank with oneself than with others—perchance, because such sincerity is necessary only in critical and serious cases. It happens also that, in very truth, one is unable to decide what had been really the cause of such or another action committed, and finds it still more difficult to see why in doing it one’s appreciation of it was quite different at that time. The very analysis of, and enquiry into the actions of our I, demand a great deal of experience and training. It is doubtful whether any one who has busied himself a good deal with the analysis of the thoughts and feeling of other people, acquires thereby the faculty of correctly analyzing himself.

The query—is it a normal function at all to analyze oneself—still remains for me an open question. A single-hearted man appears, lives, thinks, acts, without having any need of analyzing his I. He is so constituted, and has so constituted himself, that his thoughts and deeds have to be what and as they are, not otherwise. The psychic process in such a man may be compared to a clock wound up once for all for the term of his life. The pendulum moves equally, accurately and regularly. There is no need to open it to examine its mechanism. But “Cannibalism”⁴⁵ is quite another thing. “Cannibalism” is, I am inclined to think, a pathological product, although it is on this faculty that the profound injunction of the sages—“Know thyself”—is based.

Guided by this rule one has to bid goodbye to single-heartedness, as the rending in twain and the duality of soul become unavoidable. When our I becomes at the same time subject and object, the strife between the observed and the observing principles is close at hand. It is that duality that I disapprove and regret in myself, though it has played, perchance, a considerable part in my self-training and self-control. Without the duality, i.e., without self-observation and self-analysis, I would have been perhaps far worse than I now consider myself to be. Yet it has been a great hindrance to me in my professional practice, having been the means toward the development of combativeness and opposition. This spirit of opposition has always manifested in me as strongly in the analysis of the actions and opinions of other persons as of my own.

I could never take a one-sided view of anything. Whenever I come into contact with anything new for me I proceed forthwith to get a glimpse of its opposite side. It was perhaps a suggestive fact that I was born with a squint in my left eye. But this twofold view of things, while being occasionally useful, is pernicious in its action, inasmuch as it deprives me of the means of hitting the mark, of quickness and concentration. I have experienced it, to my regret, more than once during my life. On the other hand that faculty has preserved me from being injudiciously led away, by showing to me at once the bad side of things that fascinated me. Moreover, it has proved very useful to me in chronic cases, when there is sufficient time before acting to weigh and judge a thing or an action from its different standpoints.

Strange and incomprehensible⁴⁶ is this faculty of our I to rend itself in twain. I could not certify, meanwhile, whether it is our individual I or something else in us which has that strange faculty. What I know by experience, however, is, that neither of the two opposite frames of mind (the joyful and the gloomy) has ever taken completely hold of me; it has always seemed to me as if one of my I’s was rejoicing while the other felt miserable, and kept analyzing the cause of the other’s joyfulness. Thus with regard to actions in which passion or fascination was concerned, everything depended on the degree of their intensity: the I which was carried away brought hastily forward its motives; the other, the restraining I, gave as rapidly its reasons to the contrary; and the first generally prevailed, but acted only when its motives and reasons were laid before some third “I”, and by him found more potent and conclusive than those of the restraining Ego. To a psychologist, all this, of course, will appear arrant nonsense.⁴⁷ The I of every person is an indivisible unit; and the feeling as though two or several quite different Egos were acting in me, is again one of my illusions. From the very day we begin to be self-conscious and to our last hour we are clearly cognizant of our I; and this, however much we may alter during the course of our lives, in character, habits, modes of life, and so on. We feel the changes in us and acknowledge them; in the meantime we are quite conscious that these changes have not changed us into other persons.

February 23rd and 27th, 1880.

Just so; our I is an integral entity, indivisible and ever identical during the whole of our life. It is only lunatics, and even not all of these, who do not probably realize the identity of their present with their past I. Whence then, the illusion which makes us believe that we can think and feel in two or more different ways simultaneously, and not only differently but in complete contrast, one feeling counteracting the other and one thought chased by another thought?

Firstly, we may be erring as to time; between one sensation and another sensation, one thought and another, there must always be a certain interlude of time, however short it may be in reality and however imperceptible to our senses.

Secondly, the illusion is produced by and depends on the fact that our I is able to come into contact, so to say, simultaneously with several organs, each having its own set of functions, differing from each other: that same I, moreover, being, as it were, woven out of contrasting sensations.

What is it then, finally, this protean I? Is it only a personal pronoun? Or is it again, but an illusion? I believe we shall have to distinguish between the two aspects of our I. One of its aspects is no more than the feeling or the sensation of its individual being, a property which all the animal species have in common. In its other aspect and along with this sensation there exists in it, moreover, a more or less clear conception of itself, i.e., of its personality. It is this conscious cognizance of the inherent feeling in us, of our individual being, i.e., of our personality, which is precisely the human I, expressed by the personal pronoun, by adults in the first, by children in the third person. Even the animals express the sensation of their being in sounds; only with them it is always expressed in connection with a feeling of either pleasure or pain.

I would compare our I in its connection with sundry psychic faculties with a musician playing simultaneously on several instruments; sweeping over them by means of various movements of the body he is enabled to give harmonious concerts. The I, woven out of the most varied sensations, has the faculty of touching lightly and simultaneously the elements of the different portions of the brain and of stimulating psychic functions, bringing at times the activity of these organs into unison, and at others producing an intolerable cacophony for itself as for others. In whatever way we may localize the different psychic faculties in various portions of the brain, sensation and the conscience of being, i.e., our I, cannot be localized. In order to perform without breaking the law of harmony some mental piece, the I (or consciousness) has to touch simultaneously the organic elements which preserve in themselves the impresses of external impressions (i.e., of memory) and the convolutions of the brain which serve as organs of speech, as also the organs of imagination and reason, never yet discovered by the modern localisators—the psycho-physiologists. This the I must do, because we cannot cerebrate and reason without calling forth into action our memory, our reasoning faculty and imagination, or fancy. It is by this faculty of our I to bring into action, simultaneously or in succession, with the shortest intervals and without interfering with its own integral nature (without dividing itself)—different organs of sensation and various psychic faculties, that I explain to myself its apparent duality, so finely expressed by the Apostle Paul in one of his epistles. Not only between our wish or will and our action, but even between the early germs of our own thoughts, sensations and desires, it is but too easy to perceive in us contradictions and a two-fold nature.

Quite recently I was in a bad humour (after great pain produced by stomach catarrh), and though feeling very angry, yet never ceased to observe how, while displeasure against certain persons was filling my heart, the germ of a thought contained already excuses in their favour; I was ready to abuse and at the same time to excuse them, even to reproaching myself with injustice. Does it not mean that my I, while penetrating into the midst of the dirty sensations carried by my diseased organ (the intestinal canal) into my imagination, had not plunged deep enough into my angry feelings to get drowned therein, leaving memory (with its certain agreeable associations concerning those persons) and reason in full activity.

What is our I, woven as I have said out of our sensations, without or bereft of these sensations—ignoro et ignorabo [I do not know, and I shall not know]. We physicians and naturalists who have devoted ourselves from early years to sense-experiments on dead and living organisms and organs, get so accustomed to life bound up with organic elements, that we end by viewing it as an effect instead of as a cause. Through one trifling puncture in the medulla oblongata, we put an end instantaneously to a life full of health and vital powers. How can we physicians be accused then, even if we do conclude that life stops like unto a clock-work mechanism at an injury done to one of its springs? Is it not a natural deduction that our life is nothing else than a motion regulated by organic mechanism? The key to the mechanism lies in that point of the medulla oblongata, which has, therefore, to be referred to as the life knot—nœud vital.⁴⁸ At the moment when we are born into the world the machine is wound up, and the first manifestation of our mechanism is the motion of breath. If we do not regard as the outside world of the human foetus, the uterus which contains it for nine months, then its first communication with the external universe consists in the movements of its chest. After this what can be to us our I, minus sensations and disconnected with the organs which receive and convey them to it? To those who devote themselves to the study of organic nature these careful investigations prove abundantly that the same laws and forces that act in the inorganic world act in the organic. Are we not fully authorized thereby to conclude that all that which we observe in the animal organism, relates, as in inorganic bodies, to the properties and functions of the material elements which are the compound of that organism’s parts and organs?

February 29th and March 1st, 1880.

It is indeed difficult for the scientific empiricist who has adopted the inductive method of investigation, to avoid the illusion which represents to him as impossible the existence of a conscious, intelligent life outside of organism and without the sense-stimulating organs. Nevertheless, this illusion is founded on a view and judgment of the individual phenomena of life, which, however it may seem apparently indisputable and attractive, is still only superficial and one-sided.

The principle which lives in us, that which senses and realizes the sensations, cannot be itself the organ, that is to say an object; nor can it be, by its very nature, the subject, or a being apart from the organ (not in a grossly material sense, of course); and, as a matter of fact, it cannot have any of the properties that are subject to our perceptions such as belong to organized beings. Closely linked with the organic elements, without which its sensuous manifestations would be impossible for us, with the destruction of that link it ceases to be the object, or rather an object for our sensuous investigation. But who can represent to himself the possibility of sensation, that of clearly comprehending and realizing that which he senses (hence thinks of and reasons about) without being at the same time conscious of himself, being, so to speak, his own subject? By breaking or discontinuing the connexion of this subjective, sensing, self-conscious principle with the organic elements, we only destroy its objectively individual manifestation, hence that of life also, but not the life-principle. As to the question to what degree it can preserve its individuality, in other words its individual (personal) image after the destruction of the binding organic union, this is quite another thing, and in its very nature no less profound a problem; I may treat of it from my own standpoint elsewhere.

A theory in apparent contradiction with the idea that sensation and cerebration must be always conscious, has settled itself of late in modern science. It is true, that judging from many facts it becomes difficult to deny in certain cases unconscious feelings and cerebrations. It is not always easy to seize the substantial difference between these forms of sensation and cerebration and those we call conscious. Here are facts. It is probable that the organism of the fœtus senses unconsciously: most of the reflex actions are based on unconscious sensation conveyed to the motor-nerves. The interior organs no doubt, transfer from themselves various kinds of sensations; but these are unconscious and are generally manifested only by reflex actions. The impressions communicated to us by the senses, by sight especially, from the outside world, produce in us correct representations of objects only, as it were with the help of unconscious cerebration, acquired by experience. Many movements of the body, also, are accomplished unconsciously. But in all these phenomena, classed under one name of unconscious sensation and cerebration, we must understand, firstly, only our organic receptivity, or the faculty of the tissues being stimulated—a faculty which would, perhaps, be better described as sensibility, without which the tissue could not be excited by stimulus, nor transfer it to the centres for the stimulation of the reflex. Secondly, a whole series of organic sensations (starting from the interior organs), though presented to our consciousness less clearly and definitely than external impressions conveyed to it by our senses, acts still on consciousness indirectly, by exciting at one time fancy, at another desires, stimulating our passions and other reminders of themselves: therefore such sensation cannot be called altogether unconscious. Thirdly, and finally, there are many fully conscious perceptions, which are so evanescent as to disappear almost instantaneously from the circle of our conscious activity and are not retained by memory.⁴⁹

Sometimes, as during those moments when our attention is engrossed and centred on some one subject, such sensations are not remarked at all, or reach our consciousness only by glimpses; as for instance sundry physical wants during hard mental work.

With regard to unconscious cerebration, in the absence of which we could not explain many of the functions of our senses, e.g., the calculation of distances by the eye, the correct appreciation of objects seen from all sides, perspective, etc., even here it is only apparent; for this seeming unconsciousness is, in many cases, only the result of habit and experience. That which in the early days of our life we have learned to recognise owing to conscious, gradual and practical experience, having become familiar to us in after life, may often seem to be taken in by our senses unconsciously, and we make use of the fruits of that acquired knowledge without thinking that the latter is due only to long practice. It is but natural that a mental appreciation of things which has become for us a matter of everyday habit, should cease in time to be regarded as a mental appreciation at all, but appear on the contrary something quite evident, not necessitating the slightest exercise of thought. To know that two and two make four is not generally regarded by us as necessitating an expenditure of cerebration; it appears to us as evident as a chair or a table before our eyes, the correct appreciation of which objects has demanded of us at one time of our life as much mental study as that 2 + 2 = 4. Moreover, we have to remember that even fully conscious thoughts and perceptions remain such occasionally for a very short period; the glimpses of thought that pass through our consciousness are, at times, so rapid that they can be compared to flashes of lightning without any exaggeration. Nevertheless, notwithstanding their evanescent nature, many among these, unnoticed as they were, remain in our memory, inciting us to actions; in such cases, those thoughts themselves that have served them as motives may appear to us unconscious. It also happens that our attention, being all absorbed in some occupation, does not take note at all of either actions performed or the thoughts that guide the latter, though neither of them are unconscious. In order to solve conclusively the question of the consciousness or the unconsciousness of our perceptions, thoughts and opinions, it is necessary that we should first learn to transform our subjective I into the object of a constant and incessant observation of that subject, by itself.

But such an intense and one-sided activity of our attention to the conscious and the unconscious in us, is evidently abnormal, so that even the results of such observation can hardly be regarded as trustworthy or fit for control. It is stated that Johann Müller became almost insane during such a self-watching. He had determined to note the precise moment, in himself, of the transformation of the waking into the sleeping state; in other words, he had undertaken to catch himself in the passage from consciousness to unconsciousness. But we cannot step out from the magic circle, however great our efforts and desire to determine with better exactitude our subjective individual meaning. In its general features it is identical in all humankind, and has, moreover, many a feature in common with the subjectivism of other animals. But the resemblance is manifested objectively only in three ways: through the voice (sound), speech (articulated words), and motion—direct and reflected. All our experiments and observations of the phenomena of the subjective individual being of men and animals have no other criterion. But if all these, the important knowledge acquired through them, notwithstanding, are untrustworthy, doubtful, two-faced and contradictory, how much more so the sciences which may have been acquired by purely subjective observations!

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