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

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But neither this nor any other explanation of the manner in which the sensations prepare the way for the construction of the idea of the “I,” ought to prevent us from recognizing that the idea itself is the work of the Imagination, and not of the unaided sensations, nor of the unaided reason. Self-pinching and contact with the rough external world might convince the child that he was different from his environment at the time when he made his last experiments and underwent his last experiences; but they could not convince him that he is different now, or that he will be different in the next instant; and for this conviction he depends upon faith. Again, the imagination of the “I” seems closely bound up with two other nearly simultaneous imaginations, those of Force and Cause. First he feels a desire to touch the inkstand, then he feels himself moving towards the inkstand, then he feels the inkstand touched. These sequences of desire, action, result, he can repeat as often as he likes. By their frequency therefore, as well as by their vividness, they impress him more powerfully than sequences of phenomena not dependent on himself; and it is from these probably that he first imagines the idea of “must,” or “necessity,” or “cause and effect.” If he feels a desire to move a limb, the motion of the limb immediately follows; it always obeys him; it must obey him. He pushes a brick; what caused the brick to fall? He feels that it was his own force that caused it; he no longer looks upon the push and the fall as if the former merely preceded the latter; he imagines a connection of necessity between the push and the fall, the cause and the effect, and gradually comes to imagine himself as the causer of the cause. But all these imaginations are mere imaginations, not proofs. To gather together all the sensations of which he retains the memory, the sensations of which he is at present conscious, and the sensations to which he looks forward, and to put an “I” behind or below all these, as the foundation of them all, and partial causer of them all—what an audacious assumption is this! Not Plato and Aristotle combined could prove to a child, or to the most consummate of philosophers, that he has a right to call himself “I,” or that he is any other than a machine and a part of the universal machinery. How can I prove and vindicate my independence, my right to an “I”? By saying that I will do, or not do, and by then doing, or not doing, any conceivable thing at any conceivable time? Such an attempt is futile. The retort is unanswerable: “In the great machine which you call the universe, that small part which you call ‘I’ was so constructed and wound up that it could no more help saying and doing what it did and said, than a clock could help pointing and striking.”