CHAPTER VI

THE MOMENT OF EXPERIENCE

And then he drew a dial from his poke,
And looking on it with lack-lustre eye,
Says very wisely, "It is ten o'clock:

Thus may we see," quoth he, "how the world wags:
'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine;

And after one hour more 'twill be eleven ;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot,
And thereby hangs a tale."—Shakespeare.

CONSCIOUSNESS or pure knowing accompanies a very infinitesimal portion of our whole activity and seems attached to it by a very inconstant bond. It is certainly not the whole monadic activity. Only in the higher monads does it exist at all. If we agree with Leibniz in describing the whole monadic activity as perception then we must allow that perception is not only possible where consciousness is absent but for the most part perception is altogether devoid of consciousness, that is of consciousness in the pure sense of knowing. In us consciousness appears as a halo of illumination playing round the focal centre of our activity. It is intense at the point and at the instant of progressing action, but it fades away in a penumbra as we move from the focal centre. It seems to have no dividing line. It is very intense and concentrated when our action demands effort or has to deal with a new and unwonted situation. When the progressing action is ordinary and habitual or automatic, consciousness is relaxed and dispersed. Actual consciousness or knowing seems concerned with our activity at the focus where action is forming, to be gathered together and concentrated on the progressing action. It appears

indeed as though the action itself produced a kind of phosphorescence called forth by the nature and need of the action itself and as though the intensity of the illumination were relative to the need. We may then describe consciousness, in its specific meaning of knowing or awareness, as an intensity at the focus thinning off till it fades away at the periphery, and neither at the focus nor at the periphery having any clear outline or distinct division. Or, in other words, consciousness is distinguished internally only by its degree of tension or concentration.

When we consider the content of this consciousness, or the action which it illuminates, consciousness then itself seems to be distinguished by its clear and distinct outline. The chief aim of knowing seems to be to give precision to the form and matter of what is known. If knowing is the indefinite light dispersed or concentrated, the known is that which the light serves to delineate. Knowing and knowledge, consciousness and content of consciousness, are not two things brought into relation but one thing internally distinguished, and the distinctiveness of knowledge characterizes knowing, the clearness or obscurity of the content of consciousness characterizes consciousness. We represent in fact consciousness as itself divided crisply into moments of experience, which, when distinguished as now and then, are conceived with definite, precise and absolute outlines. Consciousness may seem incapable of delimitation into moments, just as flowing water seems incapable of resolution into distinct drops, but as flowing water is decomposable into drops so is consciousness resolvable into moments, on any principle and according to any order. We have therefore another and opposite character of consciousness. It is gathered into moments, each with its own cognitive content, its own emotional quality, its own feeling tone, its own perfect individuality. Each moment of experience corresponds with the actual centre of activity in the progressing action of the subject, but it marks a distinct and definite state of progress of the action, a state which when past is accomplished and unalterable. It seems therefore that consciousness or knowing

is itself articulated; the joints may not be easy to trace and the association of states may be in a measure indefinite, but they are clearly marked off from one another and exclusive. We have therefore a second characteristic of consciousness. Consciousness consists of states only one of which is present; every present state of consciousness is separated by a distinct and definite outline from every remembered or anticipated state; and the quality and content of its present state will in some form attach to it when it ceases to be present and is only remembered.

In this twofold characteristic of the individual consciousness, first, that it has only internal distinction and difference in degrees of intensity, and second, that it consists of states exclusive of one another and different in kind, we may see a close and significant analogy with individual existence itself. Every individual creature in his range of activity is distinct and separate and exclusive and therefore different in kind from every other individual, and yet every individual is only a focus of the activity of a reality which has no divisions or boundary lines and which differs only internally in the degree of its tension or extension. No one with our modern world-view and the knowledge which science has developed, whatever particular theory of our origin and destiny he may hold, can doubt that the living individual is one with all that lives and with all that has lived. Every living form, animal or vegetable, is the expression of an activity which is not theoretically or abstractly or collectively one activity but essentially and indivisibly one. Whether life be a property of certain forms or combinations of inert matter under certain special conditions as some suppose, or not, it is hardly disputed that the actual phenomenon of life is one in its origin and in its manifestation. Yet this activity manifests itself in myriad special forms each possessed of that absolute exclusiveness which belongs to the moment of experience in the individual himself. If this analogy hold, if it be really the case that in the moment of experience we have not merely a phenomenon repeated in myriad centres of activity but the very principle of life itself; if the moment of experience

be to the individual what the individual is to the universe; then it follows that the situation of consciousness at the centre of our system, at the point of focal intensity, and the consequent inconceivability of transcending the system and viewing it from without, so far from being a disadvantage and handicap in our effort to comprehend reality is a positive privilege of philosophy, enabling us at once and with certainty to know reality as it is in itself.

In the moment of experience, then, we have the actual focus of individual activity. The activity which is spread over the whole life of the individual is there seen at the point at which action is progressing. By studying it we are turning our attention on the very centre of the reality we are seeking in philosophy to understand and raising the metaphysical problem of its ultimate nature in its clearest and most definite form.

What, then, is the moment of experience? It is the present moment, the moment in which what we are actually experiencing is contained, as distinguished from an abstract mathematical moment of time which has no content at all. Whatever we experience is now, and only what is now is immediate experience. But the word "now," as used in ordinary discourse, is vague. Any one unexpectedly asked to say what length of clock-time he associates with his moment of experience would probably hesitate and be in doubt whether to assign to it three or four minutes or something less than a second. The moment of experience is not vague, however, when its content is considered; it is then sharply distinguished from all other moments. It is the moment during which experience is sense experience. It is the only moment the experience of which may be analysed by the psychologist as it occurs, and the experience which occurs in it is the only experience which exists as immediate experience.

It is in the moment of experience, therefore, that the mind and the world are immediately related. This moment has duration, and yet all that occurs within it is present, nothing that occurs within it is past or future. It is altogether now, no part of it is then or when. The moment is also distin

guished by the special character or quality of its content, sensation. This quality is unmistakable, but it is indefinable otherwise than by reference to the experience itself. The moments of our past which we remember, or the moments of our future which we anticipate, contain remembered or imagined or inferred sense experience, in the present moment only is the experience actually sensed.

These are familiar facts, and the problems they give rise to are familiar problems. There is the problem of the relation of psychological to mathematical time, or, as some prefer to state it, the problem of the distinction of mental time from physical time. Also, there is the problem of the ultimate nature of sensation and its relation to other forms or modes of knowledge. These are problems of psychology as well as problems of philosophy, but while psychology is concerned to make clear the distinctions they involve in order to free its subject-matter from confusion (the psychological interest being the definition of terms and classification of empirical facts), for philosophy the problems are vital, they go to the very root of the question of the ultimate nature of knowledge and its relation to reality. The philosophical importance of these problems, and not their mere dialectical interest, should appeal to us. The whole possibility of a consistent theory of life and knowledge depends on the power of philosophy to solve them, and the metaphysical solution seems to me clearly to depend on our power to interpret, or rather to make explicit what is implicit in the concept of a moment of experience.

I will begin with a particular problem on the commonsense plane, a psychological problem which involves no principle of philosophy at all. When we see a shooting star we have the visual sensation of a luminous line drawn across a more or less extensive region of sky. It endures a very short though appreciable time, and, although it seems to begin to disappear at the point at which it began to appear, there is a certain time during which the whole line is simultaneously present to our consciousness, otherwise it would not be experienced as a line. It appears to us, when we describe it, as though a star previously fixed in the firmament,