Avernus

“ There is in the dark woods which surround the Lake of Avernus a certain tree, dense of foliage, on which grows a single bough of gold, with leaves and twigs of the same precious metal, and no living mortal can enter Hades unless he has first found and plucked this bough, which is demanded by Proserpine, the consort of Pluto and queen of the infernal realms, as her peculiar tribute. When the bough is torn off, another always grows in its place. ”

“ Here Spenser imitates Homer's Odyssey, xvi, 163.
267. the ghastly Owle. The poet follows the Latin rather than the Greek poets, who regard the owl as the bird of wisdom.
273. of deep Avernus hole. Avernus in the poets is a cavern (in an ancient crater) , supposed to be the entrance to the infernal regions. Cf. Vergil's Æneid, vi, 237. In Strabo's Geography it is a lake in Campania.
298. Cerberus, the dog which guarded the lower regions. This stanza is an imitation of Vergil's Æneid, vi, 417 seq. In Dante's Inferno Vergil appeases him by casting handfuls of earth into his maw. ”

“ Alone she stood, facing the goddess—the lifeless marble into which the hand of an artist, long since pulseless, had wrought this unhallowed expression with such marvellous realism that it was difficult to remember that no knowledge, no power, no fearsome intelligence, lay behind those gleaming eyes, that low animal brow. Evarne stood motionless, gazing intently up at the brutal face, trying to forget her own individuality and all that was modern. ”

“ At no stage is the development describable as a transition from a consistent and true experience to an impossible or illegitimate dualism. If at certain stages duality, such as that of soul and body in the animistic theories, is unduly emphasised, it can be said with equal truth that in the preceding stages the duality was unduly ignored. A duality that leads through animism to the idealism of Plato can only be reckoned an illegitimate development of thought by those who, like Avenarius, advocate a purely naturalistic interpretation of spiritual experience. ”

“ The heritage of animism which we have on our hands is, Avenarius thinks, the soul-concept and its consequences in philosophy.
The soul is conceived to be something within the body,—it is the basis of a literal distinction between inner and outer. The concept of the soul is, indeed, not prominent to-day, but the distinction between inner experience and outer experience, internal sense and external sense, is common enough. If there had been no soul-concept, the course of philosophy would no doubt have been very different from what it actually has been ”

“ An account of the philosophy of Avenarius is a difficult matter, not because the thought is obscure or hard to follow, but because it is expressed in an elaborate and novel terminology which can hardly be omitted altogether, but which, if introduced to any great extent into an exposition, certainly gets between the reader and the thought. ”

“ Progress in science and philosophy is largely due to a capacity for discovering real problems. Oriental peoples have this genius in a far less degree than Europeans. The problems of the Oriental consciousness are solved. Only the Western consciousness is tormented with doubts about reality, duty, the past and the future. Avenarius loves to dwell on the satisfaction and relief which the solution of a real problem affords, and on the teasing, restless, unsatisfied state which accompanies an unsolved real problem. ”

“ He tried to express the admiration, the respect and the affection he felt for Evarne, in a manner totally devoid of any exaggeration or seeming blindness, but with unmistakable clearness and certainty.
"You are prejudiced against Evarne because of her profession, Winborough; but when you have known her for a little while you will be forced to acknowledge that, despite it, she is in every respect as near perfection as any human being can possibly be. In culture and refinement, in mind and manner, she is the equal of my own mother. ”

“ In view of the continuity of experience, such an evolution as that described by Avenarius seems, then, extremely plausible, when once attention is called to it.
We can not cast off all at once habits of mind cultivated by centuries of faith; they bind us in ways we can not name. But the theological tradition is giving way, and in proportion as it does, we come more and more to feel that the truth about the world is to be found in a complete description of its empirical content. ”

“ The contention of Avenarius is that when this process of rejecting animism is completed, the theory of idealism must disappear. This concept is the concept of a genuine history, in which theories of reality have been determined by the fund of animism not yet rejected.
Finally, in the fifth and last section, I take up some contemporary discussions of pure experience. Professor William James has recently published his conviction that consciousness as a kind of stuff or entity does not exist. ”

“ He shares Avenarius’ belief in a primitive state of pure and true experience. Though the starting-point of human experience is the ‘unaufgeschlossenes Ei des Glaubens,’ in which the whole truth of the Universe is contained in germ, “it was so unstable that it yielded to every idle suggestion, so uncertain of itself that it fell victim to every deceptive appearance, so little capable of grasping the parts simultaneously with the whole, that every attempt to enter more fully into the parts caused it to lose the meaning of the whole. ”

“ By thus explaining idealism as the final result of the soul-concept which was itself a bit of introjection left over from the original animistic reine Erfahrung, Avenarius includes it among the E-values which will be eliminated in the course of the history of ΣC, if that history is not interrupted.
As the subjective additions to nature are eliminated from our view of the world, we approach a purely descriptive concept. We no longer speak of the world of our experience as the phenomenal world, while the real world is something else, we know not quite what. ”

“ This was the ‘Kritik der reinen Erfahrung.’ Avenarius was impressed by the helplessness of the modern idealism, which ends with the affirmation that all we know about the world is only our sensations, i.e., subjective states of mind. On the other hand, he saw that in spite of those negative results of philosophical investigations the sciences increased their discoveries and human life went farther in its development, based on the belief in the reality of the objective world. ”

“ EVANDER (Gr. Εὔανδρος, “good man”) , in Roman legend, son of Mercury and Carmenta, or of Echemus, king of Arcadia. According to the story, Evander left the Arcadian town of Pallantion about sixty years before the Trojan War and founded Pallanteum or Palatium on the hill afterwards called the Palatine. This is only one of the many Greek legends adopted by the Romans for the purpose of connecting places in Italy with others of like-sounding name in Greece. To Evander was attributed the introduction of Greek rites and customs into his new country; of writing, music and other arts ”

“ The sole remaining question, properly stated, is not how the brain, viewed as an external and independent reality, is related to consciousness as something distinct from the brain and dependent upon it, but why our experience as a whole should vary together with one particular part of itself. And, as we have seen, Avenarius seems to hold that that problem is on a level with the question, why the three angles of a triangle should vary together with one another. ”

“ His critique of experience is a supreme effort to found such a science. As it is difficult to characterize his methods in a few words, it is proper to give here, as one example, his theory of the fundamental problem of philosophy, namely, the theory of reality. In place of throwing himself immediately into a discussion as to what is reality, Avenarius seeks for other states of the human mind, having much in common with this peculiar state, which induces us to ascribe to certain phenomena the character of reality. ”

“ Hearing this cry, the Lord of Avannes raised himself up on the bed where he was lying, and gazing piteously upon her, beheld her with a gentle sigh surrender her glorious soul to Him from whom it had come. When he perceived that she was dead, he ran to the body, which when alive he had ever approached with fear, and kissed and embraced it in such wise that he could hardly be separated from it, whereat the husband was greatly astonished, for he had never believed he bore her so much affection ”

“ Lastly, supposing that all human processes can in this way be reduced to vital series in an essential co-ordination of oneself and environment, Avenarius held that this empirio-critical supposition, which according to him is also the natural view of pure experiences, contains no opposition of physical and psychical, of an outer physical and an inner psychical world—an opposition which seemed to him to be a division of the inseparable. ”

“ I can't tell you how terrible it is to me to think of you as weak and suffering ... my bright-eyed, rosy-lipped Evarne. And I feel that really it is all my fault in one way and another.... I'm sure it is not surprising that yesterday should have upset you.... It's a delicate, sensitive soul, I know, for all the glorious vitality of the flesh. Only get well quickly, my best and dearest, and I'll guard you better in future. Get strong quickly, for my sake, who love you so, and you shall have permission to smash every vase in the studio to your heart's content ... you darling! ”

“ And, since the content of my assumption is the matter of another individual’s experience, though the hypothesis introduces a duality or plurality, it does not cause a dualism in the philosophical sense. Nothing is assumed which is not or cannot be experienced either by myself or by others.
The proof that the natural consciousness involves no dualism demands, however, a fuller analysis of its various elements. The first distinction which Avenarius notes is that between things and thoughts. ”

“ None the less Avenarius maintains as the fundamental principle of his Kritik that the only hope of a scientific treatment of mental experience lies in the development of physiology on the lines which he has sketched. Only through a scientific understanding of the brain in its relation to environment can we acquire knowledge of the ultimate nature of experience as a whole. This part of his philosophy appears to have been formed previous to the views developed in the Menschliche Weltbegriff, and to be uncritically based on the scientific teaching prevalent in his day. ”

“ We are seeking an experience with the fidential-character, the character of 'Heimhaftiakeit,' as Avenarius called it, and, in fact, the presence of ultimate problems is often testified to in language that breathes an acute tone of 'Heimweh.' The search for truth is indeed the search for a satisfied will, but the truth which we find may remain the truth for ten minutes or for a lifetime. ”

“ From this point of view Avenarius seeks to interpret the progress of philosophy as an inevitable development of animism through more and more subtilised forms of spiritualism back to naturalism. Philosophy, as it develops the conception of spirit, passes by completion of the dualism between it and all the objects of possible experience into agnosticism, and agnosticism, by elimination of the spiritualistic opposition of appearance and reality which it has unconsciously retained, returns to the naturalism of pure experience. ”

“ But consideration of this falsifying process of introjection I must defer until I have stated more completely Avenarius’ own view of reality. To illustrate the truth of his assertion that there is nothing which need lead to radical alteration of pure experience, and that all questions which are insoluble from its point of view are problems which involve illegitimate assumptions, Avenarius takes the following crucial instance. [14] Two individuals, one of whom is red-blind, apprehend an object as being numerically the same for both, and name it cinnabar. ”

“ His sire unworthy of so brave a son;
Himself well worthy of a happier throne.
Next Aventinus drives his chariot round
The Latian plains, with palms and laurels crown'd.
Proud of his steeds, he smokes along the field;
His father's hydra fills his ample shield:
A hundred serpents hiss about the brims;
The son of Hercules he justly seems
By his broad shoulders and gigantic limbs;
Of heav'nly part, and part of earthly blood,
A mortal woman mixing with a god. ”

“ The real is reassuring, we feel that we understand it as we understand an old friend. It is not strange and baffling. The unreal is ‘unheimlich,’ something to which we can’t get adjusted, and which, therefore, does not have a place in our world of truth. This ‘fidential’ character Avenarius explains by the term ‘Heimhaftigkeit,’ and he quaintly says that every real problem is a kind of Heimweh,—the desire to get back into the region where we feel at home, by reducing our uncomprehended data to terms of known data. ”

“ Upon this alone he constructs his theory as follows:—
He analyses the presupposition and finds that it contains three members: (1) the environment and its component parts; (2) fellow-creatures and the self; (3) human statements. Here it becomes necessary to make the reader acquainted with several symbols introduced by Avenarius. Every value which is accessible to description, in so far as it is assumed to be a component part of the environment, he denotes simply by R. In this sense Avenarius speaks of things in space, of physiological stimuli, as R-values. ”

“ It is all very well to talk about the facilis descensus Averni; but in all kinds of climbing, as Catalani said of singing, it is far more easy to get up than to come down. In the present instance I have no sympathy—at least no pity—for him who descends. He is that monstrum horrendum, an unprincipled man of genius. I confess, however, that I should like very well to know the precise character of his thoughts, when, being defied by her whom the Prefect terms 'a certain personage,' he is reduced to opening the letter which I left for him in the card-rack. ”