Читать книгу The Kernel and the Husk: Letters on Spiritual Christianity онлайн

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My dear ——,

You ask me to explain, in detail, what I mean by asserting that the Imagination is the basis of knowledge. “Apparently,” you say, “our knowledge of the world external to ourselves seems to you to spring, not from the sensations as interpreted by the Reason, but (at all events to a large extent) from the sensations as interpreted by the Imagination. If you mean this, I wish you would show how the Imagination thus builds up our knowledge of the world. But I think I must have misunderstood you.”

You have not misunderstood me. I would go even further than the limits of your statement: for I believe that we are largely indebted to the Imagination for our knowledge, not only of the external world, but also of ourselves. However, suppose we first take a simple instance of the knowledge of external things: “This inkstand is hard. How did I come to know that it was hard? How do I know that it is hard now?”

Let us begin from the beginning. I am an infant scrambling on the floor where the said inkstand is casually lying. Having a congenital impulse (commonly called “instinct”) to touch and suck anything that comes in my way, and especially anything bright, I greedily and rapidly approximate my lips to the corner of this polished object. I recoil with a sharp shock of pain. The pain abates. The instinctive recoil from the inkstand has left in me an instinctive aversion to the pain-causing object: but my touching and sucking instinct again revives, and as soon as it prevails over the recoiling instinct, I am impelled again towards the inkstand, not so rapidly as before, but still too rapidly. I recoil again, with pain lessened but still acute. I am acquiring “knowledge”: I “know,” though I cannot put it into words, that I have twice found the inkstand not-to-be-rapidly-approached-under-penalty-of-a-certain-kind-of-pain, in other words, “hard.” But I try again; I try four, five, six times: I find that when I approach with less velocity my pain is less, and when with sufficiently diminished velocity, there is no pain at all; I touch and suck in peace: but when I forget my experience and suppose that the inkstand—even though I dash wildly at it after my old fashion—will “behave differently this time,” I find that I am mistaken: the inkstand will not “behave differently”; it always behaves in the same way. By this time then I know something very important indeed.