Perhaps it would sound materialistic only because, under the unconscious influence of the long dualistic tradition, we continue to think of the body in merely physical terms. Aristotle, it will be remembered, compared the distinction between body and soul to that between matter and form, and defined soul as the realization of the potentialities of the organized body-the completed idea, so to speak, of that which it has it in it to be. Hamilton's abandonment of the notion of a special seat of the soul-his conception of it as present at every part of the bodily organism—might, in itself, be taken as a step in the direction of a truer theory; but as actually stated, in terms of the old metaphysical dualism, it is a grotesque combination of the points of view of physiology and of common sense-a combination which fails in justice to the truth of either. To return to the question of the secondary qualities, it is obvious how a genuinely realistic theory such as I have sketched and illustrated, incorporates into itself all that is true in the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge. The range as well as the quality of our knowledge of the external world-its delicacy and precision-depend undoubtedly on the structure of the sense-organs and the nervous system generally. The universe must therefore appear differently to different creatures according to the difference of their equipment in these respects. The development of the special senses out of a general sensibility to contact is an evolutionary commonplace. One creature exhibits a vague organic sensitiveness to the difference between light and darkness. By another, with a rudimentary organ of vision, the difference between the two is clearly perceived; and, as the organ is perfected, there is added, with ever-increasing precision and delicacy, the perception of the different colours and the discrimination of their finest shades. Similarly the sense of hearing advances from a sensitiveness to concussions affecting the whole environment' to accurate VI EVOLUTION OF SENSE-ORGANS 127 localization and the refinements of musical appreciation. Each creature, therefore, has its own world, in the sense that it sees only what it has the power of seeing; but what it apprehends, up to the limit of its capacity, is a true account of the environment, so far as it goes. And the progressive development of more delicate organs of apprehension just means the discovery of fresh aspects of the world, qualities and distinctions of its real being, too subtle to be appreciated by the ruder instruments previously at our disposal. There is no explanation possible of the evolution of the sense-organs and of the sentient organism generally, unless we assume the reality of the new features of the world to which that evolution introduces us. The organism is developed and its powers perfected as an instrument of nature's purpose of self-revelation.1 And what is thus asserted of the secondary qualities will hold also of what Professor Bosanquet in one place calls the 'tertiary' qualities, the aspects of beauty and sublimity which we recognize in nature, and the finer spirit of sense revealed by the insight of the poet and the artist. These things also are not subjective imaginings; they give us a deeper truth than ordinary vision, just as the more developed eye or ear carries us farther into nature's refinements and beauties. The truth of the poetic imagination is perhaps the profoundest doctrine of a true philosophy. 'I am certain of nothing', said Keats, 'but of the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of Imagination.' It 1 Instead of speaking of primary and secondary qualities, Laurie suggests a distinction between the quantitative or common sensibles, as Aristotle called them, and the qualitative or proper sensibles, and he points out, suggestively, as it seems to me, that' through these qualitative affections we ascertain certain peculiar characters of the quantitative external which, but for the subjective qualitative feeling, would never have been the object of physical investigation at all'. Science, when thus set upon the track, can show us the quantitative equivalent of a colour or a sound; but it is as if the more subtle characters of the object cannot be conveyed quantitatively in sensation but only qualitatively'. Cf. Synthetica, vol. i, pp. 114-16. is with the second of these far-reaching certainties that we are here concerned. The poet, it has been often said, is a revealer; he teaches us to see, and what he shows us is really in the facts. It is not put into them, but elicited from them by his intenser sympathy. Did Wordsworth spread the fictitious glamour of an individual fancy over the hills and vales of his beloved Lakeland, or was he not rather the voice by which they uttered their inmost spirit to the world? Remember his own noble claim for poetry as 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge, the impassioned expression which is on the face of all science'. 'Of genius in the fine arts,' he says, 'the only infallible sign is the widening of the sphere of human sensibility, for the delight, honour and benefit of human nature. Genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe it is an advance or a conquest made by the soul of the poet.' But, again, the new element is not imported; the advance is an advance in the interpretation of the real world, a new insight which brings us nearer to the truth of things. Hence, when Coleridge says in a well-known passage, O Lady, we receive but what we give, the statement is exactly the reverse of the truth, if it be taken to mean that the beauty of nature is reflected upon it from the subjective spirit of the observer, and does not express what Wordsworth calls the spirit of the place'.1 1 Certainly when we give way to the pathetic fallacy', investing nature with our transient moods of joy or grief, we fall into this subjectivism and falsify the facts. To take a glaring example: Call it not vain: they do not err, t t VI THE AESTHETIC QUALITIES 129 Coleridge's lines are only true if they are understood, as they may be understood, to mean that unless we bring the seeing eye, we shall not see the vision. All idealism teaches the correlativity of subject and object; they develop pari passu, keeping step together, inasmuch as the objective world seems to grow in richness as we develop faculties to apprehend it. But all sane idealism teaches that, in such advance, the subject is not creating new worlds of knowledge and appreciation for himself, but learning to see more of the one world, which is the world of all of us'. Philosophy does not require us, then, to treat the beauty and sublimity of natural objects as subjective emotions in the bystander: we are entitled, on the principles I have been advocating, to treat them as qualities of the object just as much as the vaunted primary qualities. There was an awful rainbow once in heaven; Keats attributes this result to 'cold philosophy', at whose mere touch all charms fly. The poet's complaint is that a knowledge of physical optics-the laws of refraction and so forth-reduces the rainbow to an illusion, by showing us the mechanism on which the beautiful phenomenon depends. Keats, in fact, momentarily accepts the popular scientific view that this physical mechanism is the reality of the rainbow; and as a poet he mourns his lost illusion. But that is the abstraction against which our whole argument has been a protest. The reality of the rainbow inBut Scott knows that they do err, and that he is merely playing with fancies, for he acknowledges it himself in the next stanza : Not that, in sooth, o'er mortal urn How different from this the transfiguring touch of the Wordsworthian imagination, even when it seems to involve a similar transference of emotion: The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare. cludes that very shimmer of lovely colour and the wonderful aesthetic suggestion which made the primitive poet call it God's bow in the clouds, and which still makes our hearts 'leap up' when we behold it in the sky. Things are as they reveal themselves in their fullness to the knowing mind. As a French thinker expresses it, if we wish to form a true idea of the total fact, of the real, we must not eliminate from it precisely what completes reality, what makes it exist for itself '.1 1 A. Fouillée, Evolutionnisme des Idées-forces, p. 279. |