第98章

attributes perceived when awake, more real than attributes perceived in a dream.But, owing to the diverse relations contracted by the various objects with each other , the simple rule that the lively and permanent is the real is often enough disguised.A conceived thing may be deemed more real than a certain sensible thing, if it only be intimately related to other sensible things more vivid, permanent, or interesting than the first one.Conceived molecular vibrations, e.g., are by the physicist judged more real than felt warmth, because so intimately related to all those other facts of motion in the world which he has made his special study.Similarly, a rare thing may be deemed more real than a permanent thing if it be more widely related to other permanent things.All the occasional crucial observations of science are examples of this.A rare experience, too, is likely to be judged more real than a permanent one, if it be more interesting and exciting.Such is the sight of Saturn through a telescope;

such are the occasional insights and illuminations which upset our habitual ways of thought.

But no mere floating conception, no mere disconnected rarity, ever displaces vivid things or permanent things from our belief.A conception, to prevail, must terminate in the world of orderly sensible experience.A rare phenomenon, to displace frequent ones, must belong with others more frequent still.

The history of science is strewn with wrecks and ruins of theory -- essences and principles, fluids and forces -- once fondly clung to, But found to hang together with no facts of sense.And exceptional phenomena solicit our belief in vain until such time as we chance to conceive them as of kinds already admitted to exist.What science means by 'verification' is no more than this, that no object of conception shall be believed which sooner or later has not some permanent and vivid object of sensation for its term.Compare what was said on pages 3-7, above.

Sensible objects are thus either our realities or the tests of our realities.Conceived objects must show sensible effects or else be disbelieved.

And the effects, even though reduced to relative unreality when their causes come to view (as heat, which molecular vibrations make unreal), are yet the things on which our knowledge of the causes rests.Strange mutual dependence this, in which the appearance needs the reality in order to exist, but the reality needs the appearance in order to be known!

Sensible vividness or pungency is then tire vital factor in reality when once the conflict between objects, and the connecting of them together in the mind, has begun.No object which neither possesses this vividness in its own right nor is able to borrow it from anything else has a chance of making headway against vivid rivals, or of rousing in us that reaction in which belief consists.On the vivid objects we pin , as the saying is, our faith in all the rest; and our belief returns instinctively even to those of them from which reflection has led it away.Witness the obduracy with which the popular world of colors, sounds, and smells holds its own against that of molecules and vibrations.Let the physicist himself but nod, like Homer, and the world of sense becomes his absolute reality again.

That things originally devoid of this stimulating power should be enabled, by association with other things which have it, to compel our belief as if they had it themselves, is a remarkable psychological fact, which since Hume's time it has been impossible to overlook.

"The vividness of the first conception," he writes," diffuses itself along the relations and is conveyed, as by so many pipes or channels, to every idea that has any communication with the primary one....Superstitious people are fond of the relics of saints and holy men, for the same reason that they seek after types and images, in order to enliven their devotion and give them a more intimate and strong conception of those exemplary lives....Now, 'tis evident one of the best relics a devotee could procure would be the handiwork of a saint, and if his clothes and furniture are ever to be considered in this light, 'tis because they were once at his disposal, and were moved and affected by him; in which respect they are...connected with him by a shorter train of consequences than any of those from which we learn the reality of his existence.This phenomenon clearly proves that a present impression, with a relation of causation, may enliven any idea, and consequently produce belief or assent, according to the precedent definition of it....It has been remarked among the Mahometans as well as Christians that those pilgrims who have seen Mecca or the Holy Land are ever after more faithful and zealous believers than those who have not had that advantage.A man whose memory presents him with a lively image of the Red Sea and the Desert and Jerusalem and Galilee can never doubt of any miraculous events which are related either by Moses or the Evangelists.The lively idea of the places passes by an easy transition to the facts which are supposed to have been related to them by contiguity, and increases the belief by increasing the vivacity of the conception.

The remembrance of those fields and rivers has the same influence as a new argument....The ceremonies of the Catholic religion may be considered as instances of the same nature.The devotees of that strange superstition usually plead in excuse for the mummeries with which they are upbraided that they feel the good effect of external motions and postures and actions in enlivening their devotion and quickening their fervor, which otherwise would decay, if directed entirely to distant and immaterial objects.We shadow out the objects of our faith, say they, in sensible types and images, and render them more present to us by the immediate presence of these types than it is possible for us to do merely by an intellectual view and contemplation."