ABSTRACT
IN earlier chapters I have attempted to interpret instinctive experience in terms of natural history. But can there be a natural history of experience? Or is the attempt to give a genetic account of experience in terms of natural history, and science founded thereon, futile and foredoomed to failure? I regard instinctive experience as the earliest phase of a continuous development in the individual, which may lead up to the enriched thought-experience of man. But am I not, it will be asked, beginning at the wrong end? Can one explain the higher in terms of the lower? Must one not reverse the procedure and explain the lower in terms of the higher? Those who approach this question along such a path as ours regard human self-consciousness as a result of evolution; it is, for them, the terminus ad quem to which or towards which development leads up. But those who approach the question through a different avenue, urge that self-consciousness is the terminus a quo from which we must start forth on our quest for explanation. Thus T. H. Green says 1 that self-consciousness Is "at its begin ning formally or potentially or implicitly all that st becomes actually or explicitly in developed knowledge." There is of course a sense in which the naturalist can understand and accept this statement —the sense in which an acorn is potentially or implicitly all that it becomes actually or explicitly in the developed oak-tree. But here we have only an expectation founded on knowledge of routine, and one which implies the prior existence of such knowledge, as this in turn implies the prior existence of a knower. In any case this is certainly not the sense in which Green's statement is to be understood. "A natural history of self-consciousness is,"he says, "impossible since such a history must be of events and self-consciousness is not reducible to a series of events." This might perhaps be interpreted as indicating an insight into the distinction between the events experienced and the process of experiencing, or, as Green would have phrased it, between content and act. But for him the act implies an Agent, and the Agent is not of this world. Mind, though it may act into nature is not of, or belonging to, the order of nature. "A form of consciousness which we cannot explain as of natural origin" is, Green says, 1 "necessary for our conceiving an order of nature." Here we have Consciousness as Source. For Green, as we saw in the last chapter, Source is all-important; and his real point is that a natural explanation of Source is impossible. This may be freely granted both by those who believe in a Source of phenomena and by those who disbelieve. Now, in so far as epistemology discusses the origin of knowledge, as distinct from its genetic development, it belongs to the metaphysics of Source. Its method of interpretation is to explain the lower in terms of the higher; the end determines the course of events by which it is reached. Hence my reiterated contention that any commingling of the antithetical methods of metaphysics and of science is to be deprecated. Why should we not try to write a natural history of experience, as it somehow actually runs its course, leaving the problem of its Source to be discussed on a different platform?
