03.01 - Part 3, Chapter 1

SOME CAUSES OF BELIEF

CHAPTER I CAUSES OF EXPERIENCE So far the results at which we have arrived may be not unfairly described as purely negative. In the first part of these Notes I endeavoured to show that Naturalism was practically insufficient. In the first chapter of Part II. I indicated the view that it was speculatively incoherent. The obvious conclusion was therefore drawn, that under these circumstances it was in the highest degree absurd to employ with an unthinking rigour the canon of consistency as if Rationalism, which is Naturalism in embryo, or Naturalism, which is Rationalism developed, placed us in the secure possession of some unerring standard of truth to which all our beliefs must be made to conform. A brief criticism of one theological scheme, by which it has been sought to avoid the narrownesses of Naturalism without breaking with Rationalising methods, confirmed the conclusion that any such procedure is predestined to be ineffectual, and that no mere inferences of the ordinary pattern, based upon ordinary experience, will enable us to break out of the Naturalistic prison-house. But if Naturalism by itself be practically insufficient, if no conclusion based on its affirmations will enable us to escape from the cold grasp of its negations, and if, as I think, the contrasted system of Idealism has not as yet got us out of the difficulty, what remedy remains? One such remedy consists in simply setting up side by side with the creed of natural science another and supplementary set of beliefs, which may minister to needs and aspirations which science cannot meet, and may speak amid silences which science is powerless to break. The natural world and the spiritual world, the world which is immediately subject to causation and the world which is immediately subject to God, are, on this view, each of them real, and each of them the objects of real knowledge. But the laws of the natural world are revealed to us by the discoveries of science; while the laws of the spiritual world are revealed to us through the authority of spiritual intuitions, inspired witnesses, or divinely guided institutions. And the two regions of knowledge lie side by side, contiguous but not connected, like empires of different race and language, which own no common jurisdiction nor hold any intercourse with each other, except along a disputed and wavering frontier where no superior power exists to settle their quarrels or determine their respective limits. To thousands of persons this patchwork scheme of belief, though it may be in a form less sharply defined, has, in substance, commended itself; and if and in so far as it really meets their needs I have nothing to say against it, and can hold out small hope of bettering it. It is much more satisfactory as regards its content than Naturalism; it is not much less philosophical as regards its method; and it has the practical merit of supplying a roughand-ready expedient for avoiding the consequences which follow from a premature endeavour to force the general body of belief into the rigid limits of one too narrow system.

It has, however, obvious inconveniences. There are many persons, and they are increasing in number, who find it difficult or impossible to acquiesce in this unconsidered division of the ’ Whole ’ of knowledge into two or more unconnected fragments. Naturalism may be practically unsatisfactory. But at least the positive teaching of Naturalism has secured general assent; and it shocks their philosophic instinct for unity to be asked to patch and plaster this accepted creed with a number of heterogeneous propositions drawn from an entirely different source, and on behalf of which no such common agreement can be claimed.

What such persons ask for, and rightly, is a philosophy, a scheme of knowledge, which shall give rational unity to an adequate creed. But, as the reader knows, I have it not to give; nor does it even seem to me that we have any right to flatter ourselves that we are on the verge of discovering some all-reconciling theory by which each inevitable claim of our complex nature may be harmonised under the supremacy of Reason. Unity, then, if it is to be attained at all, must be sought for, so to speak, at some lower speculative level. We must either pursue the Rationalising and Naturalistic method already criticised, and compel the desired unification of belief by the summary rejection of everything which does not fit into some convenient niche in the scheme of things developed by empirical methods out of sense-perception; or if, either for the reasons given in the earlier chapters of these Notes, or for others, we reject this method, we must turn for assistance towards a new quarter, and apply ourselves to the problem by the aid of some more comprehensive, or at least more manageable, principle.

II To this end let us temporarily divest ourselves of all philosophic preoccupation. Provisionally restricting ourselves to the scientific point of view, let us forbear to consider beliefs from the side of proof, and let us survey them for a season from the side of origin only, and in their relation to the causes which gave them birth. Thus considered they are, of course, mere products of natural conditions; psychological growths comparable to the flora and fauna of continents or oceans; objects of which we may say that they are useful or harmful, plentiful or rare, but not, except parenthetically and with a certain irrelevance, that they are true or untrue.

How, then, would these beliefs appear to an investigator from another planet who, applying the ordinary methods of science, and in a spirit of detached curiosity, should survey them from the outside, with no other object than to discover the place they occupied in the natural history of the earth and its inhabitants? He would note, I suppose, to begin with, that the vast majority of these beliefs were the short-lived offspring of sense-perception, instinctive judgments on observed matter-of-fact. ’ The su-n is shining,’ ’ there is somebody in the room,’ ’ I feel tired,’ would be examples of this class; whose members, from the nature of the case, refer immediately only to the passing moment, and die as soon as they are born. If now our investigator turned his attention to the causes of these beliefs of perception, he would, of course, discover, in the first place, that, when normal, they were invariably due to the action of external objects upon the organism, and more particularly upon the nervous system, of the percipient; and in the second place, that though these beliefs were thus all due to a certain kind of neural change, the converse of the proposition is by no means true, since, taking the organic world at large, it was by no means the case that neural changes of this kind invariably, or even usually, issued in beliefs of perception, or, indeed, in any psychical result whatever. For consider how the case must present itself to our supposed observer. He would see a series of organisms possessed of nervous systems ranging from the most rudimentary type to the most complex. He would observe that the action of the exterior world upon those systems varied, in like manner, from the simple irritation of the nerve-tissue to the multitudinous correspondences and adjustments involved in some act of vision by man or one of the higher mammals. And he would conclude, and rightly, that between the upper and the lower members of the scale there were differences of degree, but not of kind; and that existing gaps might be conceived as so filled in that each type might melt into the one immediately below it by insensible gradations.

If, however, he endeavoured to draw up a scale of psychical effects whose degrees should correspond with this scale of physiological causes, two results would make themselves apparent. The first is, that the lower part of the psychical scale would be a blank, because in the case of the simple organisms nervous changes carried with them no mental consequents. The second is, that even when mental consequents do appear, they form no continuous series like their physiological antecedents; but, on the contrary, those at the top of the scale are found to differ in something more than degree from those which appear lower down. We do not, for example, suppose that protozoa can properly be said to feel, nor that every animal which feels can properly be said to form judgments or to possess immediate beliefs of perception.

One conclusion our observer would, I suppose, draw from facts like these is, that while neural sensibility to external influences is a widespread benefit to organic Nature, the feelings, and still more the beliefs, to which in certain cases it gives rise are relatively insignificant phenomena, useful supplements to the purely physiological apparatus, necessary, perhaps, to its highest developments, but still, if operative at all, 1 rather in the nature of final improvements to the machinery than of parts essential to its working. A like result would attend his study of the next class of beliefs that might fall under his notice, those, namely, which, though they do not relate to things or events within the field of perception, like those we have just been considering, are yet not less immediate in their character. Memories of the past are examples of. this type; I should be inclined to add, though I do not propose here to justify my opinion, certain instinctive and, so to speak, automatic expectations about the future or that part of the present which does not come within the reach of direct experience. Like the beliefs of perception of which we have been speaking, they would seem to be the psychical side of neural changes which, at least in their simpler forms, need be accompanied by no psychical manifestation. 1 See Note on Chapter V., page 285.

Physiological co-ordination is sufficient by itself to perform services for the lower animals similar in kind to those which, in the case of man, are usefully, or even necessarily, supplemented by their beliefs of memory and of expectation.

These two classes of belief, relating respectively to the present and the absent, cover the whole ground of what is commonly called experience, and something more. They include, therefore, at least in rudimentary form, all particulars which, on any theory, are required for scientific induction; and, according to empiricism in its older forms, they supply not this only, but also the whole of the raw material, without any exception, out of which reason must subsequently fashion whatever stock of additional beliefs it is needful for mankind to entertain. Our Imaginary Observer, however, quite indifferent to mundane theories as to what ought to produce conviction, and intent only on discovering how convictions are actually produced, would soon find out that there were other influences besides reasoning required to supplement the relatively simple physiological and psychological causes which originate the immediate beliefs of perception, memory, and expectation. These immediate beliefs belong to man as an individual. They involve no commerce between mind and mind. They might equally exist, and would equally be necessary, if each man stood face to face with material Nature in friendless isolation. But they neither provide, nor by any merely logical extension can be made to provide, the apparatus of beliefs which we find actually connected with the higher scientific social and spiritual life of the race. These also are, without doubt, the product of antecedent causes causes many in number and most diverse in character. They presuppose, to begin with, the beliefs of perception, memory, and expectation in their elementary shape; and they also imply the existence of an organism fitted for their hospitable reception by ages of ancestral preparation. But these conditions, though necessary, are clearly not enough; the appropriate environment has also to be provided. And though I shall not attempt to analyse with the least approach to completeness the elements of which that environment consists, yet it contains one group of causes so important in their collective operation, and yet in popular discourse so often misrepresented, that a detailed notice of it seems desirable.