“N’attendez pas de cette métaphysique des conclusions simples ou des solutions radicales. Ce serait lui demander encore de s’en tenir à une manipulation de concepts. Ce serait aussi la laisser dans la région du pur possible. Sur le terrain de l’expérience, au contraire, avec des solutions incomplètes et des conclusions provisoires, elle atteindra une probabilité croissante qui pourra équivaloir finalement à la certitude. Prenons un problème que nous poserons dans les termes de la métaphysique traditionnelle: l’âme survit-elle au corps? Il est facile de le trancher en raisonnant sur de purs concepts. On définira donc l’âme. On dira, avec Platon, qu’elle est une et simple. On en conclura qu’elle ne peut se dissoudre. Donc elle est immortelle. Voilà qui est net. Seulement, la conclusion ne vaut que si l’on accepte la définition, c’est-à- dire la construction. Elle est subordonnée à cette hypothèse. Elle est hypothétique. Mais renonçons à construire l’idée d’âme comme on construit l’idée de triangle. Étudions les faits. Si l’expérience établit, comme nous le croyons, qu’une petite partie seulement de la vie consciente est conditionnée par le cerveau, il s’ensuivra que la suppression du cerveau laisse vraisemblablement subsister la vie consciente. Du moins la charge de la preuve incomberat-elle maintenant à celui qui nie la survivance, bien plus qu’à celui qui l’affirme. Il ne s’agira que de survie, je le reconnais; il faudrait d’autres raisons, tirées cette fois de la religion, pour arriver à une précision plus haute et pour attribuer à cette survie une durée sans fin. Mais, même du point de vue purement philosophique, il n’y aura plus de si: on affirmera catégoriquement – je veux dire sans subordination à une hypothèse métaphysique – ce qu’on affirme, dût- on ne l’affirmer que comme probable. La première thèse avait la beauté du définitif, mais elle était suspendue en l’air, dans la région du simple possible. L’autre est inachevée, mais elle pousse des racines solides dans le réel.”

Henri Bergson

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies – all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or “feeling into.” Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. But what if these others belong to a different species and inhabit a radically alien universe? For example, how can the sane get to know what it actually feels like to be mad? Or, short of being born again as a visionary, a medium, or a musical genius, how can we ever visit the worlds which, to Blake, to Swedenborg, to Johann Sebastian Bach, were home? And how can a man at the extreme limits of ectomorphy and cerebrotonia ever put himself in the place of one at the limits of endomorphy and viscerotonia, or, except within certain circumscribed areas, share the feelings of one who stands at the limits of mesomorphy and somatotonia? To the unmitigated behaviorist such questions, I suppose, are meaningless. But for those who theoretically believe what in practice they know to be true – namely, that there is an inside to experience as well as an outside – the problems posed are real problems, all the more grave for being, some completely insoluble, some soluble only in exceptional circumstances and by methods not available to everyone. Thus, it seems virtually certain that I shall never know what it feels like to be Sir John Falstaff or Joe Louis. On the other hand, it had always seemed to me possible that, through hypnosis, for example, or autohypnosis, by means of systematic meditation, or else by taking the appropriate drug, I might so change my ordinary mode of consciousness as to be able to know, from the inside, what the visionary, the medium, even the mystic were talking about.”

Aldous Huxley