Inexperience

“ But even such relative reduction of the chaos as we get never lasts long and continuously in the life of any one person. Your moments of unfragmentary and more scientific experience fill of themselves only fragments of your life. A wandering attention, the interruption of intruding sensations, — such fragments may at any time be ready, by their intrusion, to destroy the orderliness of even the best-equipped scientific experience. The student of science, like other men, knows in fragments, and prophesies in fragments. ”

“ I mean to say that one must have the right out of one's own EXPERIENCE--experience, as it seems to me, always implies unfortunate experience?--to treat of such an important question of rank, so as not to speak of colour like the blind, or AGAINST science like women and artists ("Ah! this dreadful science!" sigh their instinct and their shame, "it always FINDS THINGS OUT!") ”

“ For, mark you, to the illiterate life means only those circumscribed experiences that come within the range of one's own sight and touch and hearing. "What I have seen, what I have heard, what I have felt"—there experience ends. ”

“ As far as the rest of life with its so-called "experiences" is concerned, which of us has even sufficient serious interest? or sufficient time? In our dealings with such points of life, we are, I fear, never properly to the point; to be precise, our heart is not there, and certainly not our ear. ”

“ However it may be with such strong feelings as doubt or anger, about weaker feelings, and about the relations to each other of all feelings, we find ourselves in continual error and uncertainty so soon as we are called on to name and class, and not merely to feel. Who can be sure of the exact order of his feelings when they are excessively rapid? Who can be sure, in his sensible perception of a chair, how much comes from the eye and how much is supplied out of the previous knowledge of the mind? ”

“ The immediate reaction of the human brain to this inconceivable catastrophe was that of sublime disbelief in its possibility. The finite mind, incapable, as it is, of grasping the infinities, resolutely declined to accept any proposition outside the history of man's experience. ”

“ But what after all is the character of these pleasures upon which there is such a high estimate placed? They are all vain and empty as a bubble on the wave. They are like a dream which assumes all the appearance of reality, till we awake from our slumber and discover the deception. ”

“ I cheered her with saying that the dark day, at the end, would be for the like of me; inasmuch as, going in our small way by experience and observation, we depended not on a revelation, but on a little tiresome process. Observation depended on opportunity, and where should we be when opportunity failed? ”

“ And so I entered this world: a being, sliding obscurely in among human beings. But whence, or whither? Those questions belong among the gigantic, terrible ones, insoluble, silent,—the unanswering primeval sphinxes of the mind. We can sit and stare at such questions, and wonder; but staring and wondering are not thought. ”

“ Experience is a fine word, but what does it mean? It seems to carry with it a mixed sense of mastery and disappointment, suggesting knowledge of a sort with despair of better knowledge. Is it such contact with events as nobody can avoid, shocks and pressure endured from circumstances and from the routine of the world? ”

“ It is a common saying—a common experience, if you will—that we may, on certain trying or tremendous occasions, live years in one moment. But that's a mental experience, not a physical one, and one that applies, at all events, only to human beings, not to senseless things of wood and metal. ”

“ Experience is sowing truth in actual personal occurrences. The cutting, upturning edge of the plow, the tearing teeth of the harrow, go on inside your very being, while perhaps the moments drag themselves by, slow as snails.
Experience is hammering truth into shape upon the anvil of your life, while the pounding of the lightning trip-hammer is upon your own quivering flesh. ”

“ We have learned to regard the region of emotional disturbance, of uncertainty and aspiration, as belonging peculiarly to ourselves; we have learned to set over against this the world of observation and of valid thought as something unaffected by our moods, hopes, fears, and opinions. (2) We have also come to distinguish between what is immediately present in our experience and the past and the future; we contrast the realms of memory and anticipation with that of sense perception ”

“ How trying are the moments when we wait in utter darkness, the explanation of some mystery which is inexplicable to us. What a thousand and one fancies rush through our brain, as we attempt to penetrate what is impenetrable! ”

“ Why then, lastly, it may be asked, do these experiences befall us so faintly, so secretly, so seldom; if it is the true life that beats so urgently into our souls, why are we often so careful and disquieted, why do we fare such long spaces without the heavenly vision, why do we see, or seem to see, so many of our fellows to whom such things come rarely or not at all? ”

“ But if we never experience anything but what is not an inseparable aspect of that experience, how can we infer that anything whatever, let alone everything, is an inseparable aspect of any experience? ”

“ You need not be told that human experience analysed resolves itself into a series of disappointments. I beg you to ask yourself, or any of your acquaintances, whether any person, thing, or event ever turned out to be exactly, or nearly, such as was expected he, she, or it would be. ”

“ The going forth into the world for the first time alone is, it seems to me, the most trying point in the existence of any one of any sensibility. But does not the very difficulty of the case indicate the value of the experience? ”

“ That is indeed the secret of the visitor's expectant feeling and disappointment—the vague vision of a vastness and grandeur and desolateness almost preternatural, conceived in childhood, which all the experience of a long life of disillusionment has been powerless to eradicate from the mind, or to replace with a mental picture more in accord with the reality. ”

“ Hence, — and here, indeed, is the conclusion of the whole matter, — the very effort hypothetically to assert that the whole world of experience is a world of fragmentary and finite experience is an effort involving a contradiction. ”

“ Such a certainty, under some circumstances, might have so mingled hope and expectation with all the anxieties and apprehensions which follow every strong passion, that the whole would still have remained a pleasant dream to cheer me on upon the path of exertion and enterprise; but, situated as I was, the tardy discovery alone exposed to my sight a prospect of disappointment and despair. ”

“ Experience is a question of instinct about life. ”

“ If we apply to experience, it is yielded, that from long and diligent observation, we may gather in some{118} measure in what manner those we are acquainted with express their passions externally. But with respect to strangers, of whom we have no experience, we are left in the dark. ”

“ We may, then, roughly define an illusion of introspection as an error involved in the apprehension of the contents of the mind at any moment. If we mistake the quality or degree of a feeling or the structure of a complex mass of feeling, or if we confuse what is actually present to the mind with some inference based on this, we may be said to fall into an illusion of introspection. ”

“ Indeed, our reactions to the environment, our moral and social conduct, the affective reactions of our sentiments, instincts, feelings, and other conative tendencies, our “habits,” judgments, points of view, and attitudes of mind—all that we term character and personality—are predetermined by the mental experiences of the past by which they are developed, organized, and conserved in the unconscious. Otherwise all would be chaos. We are thus the offspring of our past and the past is the present. ”

“ All in vain I strove to control the workings of my morbidly excited imagination—I could not shut out the fearful thoughts and anticipations which the occurrences of the day so naturally and obviously suggested. The lapse of twenty-four hours might find us all reduced to the same helpless state, deprived of consciousness and reason. ”

“ Restless, introspective, with a feeling of unreality gripping at his heart, the patient finds himself confronting a world that has lost meaning because it has lost enthusiasm in desire and satisfaction. ”

“ And so there flows into the gap the certainty that one can make more of misadventures, of unpromising people, of painful experiences, than one had ever hoped. It may not be, nay, it is not, so eager, so full-blooded a spirit ”

“ But it is quite possible to make a false judgment as to what experience we are actually having, or, still more commonly, simply to take for granted that our experience must be such and such, without ever looking to see whether it is or not. ”

“ At a still later period, as disappointment nevertheless not unfrequently happens notwithstanding a considerable amount of past experience on the side of the expectation, the mind is put upon making distinctions in the kind of past experiences, and finding out what qualities, besides mere frequency, experience must have, in order not to be followed by disappointment. ”

“ An "Experience" is a brutally produced conscious effect that contributes to a habit, self-controlled, yet so satisfying, on deliberation, as to be destructible by no positive exercise of internal vigour. ”

“ For our doubter, at once fully self-conscious and honest, no possible experience can ever be in itself real and final, nor, on the other hand, can any possible experience ever be altogether unreal and illusory. His reality, I say, must be at once free and all-inclusive. ”

“ Objects seen through obscurity, imperfectly discerned, allow to the fancy but too free a scope; the mind grows debilitated, by brooding over its apprehensions; and those apprehensions, whether real or imaginary, are carried with accumulated pain to the heart. ”

“ Gradually a vast area of speculative psychology opens out before me, and, like one walking in a world of dreams, I lose myself in its dim distances, seeking for some light, clear opening, wherein I can discover the secret of this extraordinary psychic or physiological mystery, that has hidden itself for a lifetime in my being. ”

“ I feel my sides pressed hard, and bored with points of knotty inferences piled up one upon another without being able ever to recollect myself, or catch a glimpse of the actual world without me. I am somehow wedged in between different rows of material objects, overpowering me by their throng, and from which I have no power to escape, but of which I neither know nor understand any thing. ”

“ We call the Unseen—the great gamble. I have shown how all else betrays—how all matter is a mockery at the last—that even love and friendship fail for those who are called to weep and worship wholly at the tomb of the body.... The truth is out: The beginnings of real teaching is in making the Unseen interesting and dramatic. ”

“ Distractions, tempests, and head-winds in the brain, by-ends, the sidelong eyes of vanity, the overleaping eyes of ambition, the bleared eyes of conceit,—these are they which thwart study and bring it to nought. ”

“ What are our experiences, then? Much more what we attribute to them than what they really are. Or should we perhaps say that nothing is contained in them? that experiences in themselves are merely works of fancy? ”

“ It is only some such train of thought, or rather of feeling, that can in a measure explain the aim of the attempt, made in the tale which follows, to present an unrestful episode in the obscure lives of a few individuals out of all the disregarded multitude of the bewildered, the simple and the voiceless. ”

“ They find themselves failing and falling, and are astonished and perplexed, and they conclude that they must have been mistaken in their experience, and so they make a new attempt at the same thing and again fall, until at last, worn out with the experiment, they conclude that the experience is a delusion, or, at least, that it was never intended for them, and so they fall back into the old way, and their last state is worse than their first. ”

“ For here, everything seemingly serious and needful, which appears to lead to a definite goal, resembles only detached fragments when compared with the path we ourselves have trodden, even in our dreams,— detached fragments of that complete and grand experience whereof we cannot even think without a thrill. ”

“ If, now, we take these facts in connection with what has been said above respecting the nature of the process of introspection, the probability of error will be made sufficiently clear. To transfix any particular feeling of the moment, to selectively attend to it, and to bring it under the proper representation, is an operation that requires time, a time which, though short, is longer than the fugitive character of so much of our internal mental life allows. ”

“ But the experiments I have seen are merely exciting and unsettling, without the least good result, with a haunting notion that you are being tricked or deluded. It is as much as I can do to try and know my own mind, without reading the minds of others. ”

“ Without disagreeable prolixities and repetitions, it is not in my power to represent what pains I took, in trying so to counteract those occupations which distracted my attention and disturbed my peace of mind, that my heart, in spite of them, might still be open to the influences of the Invisible Being. ”

“ That an unnatural and constant excitement of the mind is most injurious, there is no doubt; [233] that excitement involves a consequent weakness, is a law of our nature than which none is surer; that the weakness of mind thus produced is and must be adverse to quiet study and thought, to that reflection which alone is wisdom, is also clear in itself, and proved too largely by experience. ”