1.3. THE WORLD OF FACT.
Necessarily when one begins an inquiry into the fundamental nature of
oneself and one's mind and its processes, one is forced into
autobiography. I begin by asking how the conscious mind with which I am
prone to identify myself, began.
It presents itself to me as a history of a perception of the world of
facts opening out from an accidental centre at which I happened to
begin.
I do not attempt to define this word fact. Fact expresses for me
something in its nature primary and unanalyzable. I start from that. I
take as a typical statement of fact that I sit here at my desk writing
with a fountain pen on a pad of ruled scribbling paper, that the
sunlight falls upon me and throws the shadow of my window mullion across
the page, that Peter, my cat, sleeps on the window-seat close at hand
and that this agate paper-weight with the silver top that once was
Henley's holds my loose memoranda together. Outside is a patch of lawn
and then a fringe of winter-bitten iris leaves and then the sea, greatly
wrinkled and astir under the south-west wind. There is a boat going out
which I think may be Jim Pain's, but of that I cannot be sure...
These are statements of a certain quality, a quality that extends
through a huge universe in which I find myself placed.
I try to recall how this world of fact arose in my mind. It began with a
succession of limited immediate scenes and of certain minutely perceived
persons; I recall an underground kitchen with a drawered table, a window
looking up at a grating, a back yard in which, growing out by a dustbin,
was a grape-vine; a red-papered room with a bookcase over my father's
shop, the dusty aisles and fixtures, the regiments of wine-glasses and
tumblers, the rows of hanging mugs and jugs, the towering edifices of
jam-pots, the tea and dinner and toilet sets in that emporium, its
brighter side of cricket goods, of pads and balls and stumps. Out of the
window one peeped at the more exterior world, the High Street in front,
the tailor's garden, the butcher's yard, the churchyard and Bromley
church tower behind; and one was taken upon expeditions to fields and
open places. This limited world was peopled with certain familiar
presences, mother and father, two brothers, the evasive but interesting
cat, and by intermittent people of a livelier but more transient
interest, customers and callers.
Such was my opening world of fact, and each day it enlarged and widened
and had more things added to it. I had soon won my way to speech and was
hearing of facts beyond my visible world of fact. Presently I was at a
Dame's school and learning to read.
From the centre of that little world as primary, as the initiatory
material, my perception of the world of fact widened and widened, by new
sights and sounds, by reading and hearing descriptions and histories, by
guesses and inferences; my curiosity and interest, my appetite for fact,
grew by what it fed upon, I carried on my expansion of the world of fact
until it took me through the mineral and fossil galleries of the Natural
History Museum, through the geological drawers of the College of
Science, through a year of dissection and some weeks at the astronomical
telescope. So I built up my conceptions of a real world out of facts
observed and out of inferences of a nature akin to fact, of a world
immense and enduring, receding interminably into space and time. In that
I found myself placed, a creature relatively infinitesimal, needing and
struggling. It was clear to me, by a hundred considerations, that I in
my body upon this planet Earth, was the outcome of countless generations
of conflict and begetting, the creature of natural selection, the heir
of good and bad engendered in that struggle.
So my world of fact shaped itself. I find it altogether impossible to
question or doubt that world of fact. Particular facts one may question
as facts. For instance, I think I see an unseasonable yellow wallflower
from my windows, but you may dispute that and show that it is only a
broken end of iris leaf accidentally lit to yellow. That is merely a
substitution of fact for fact. One may doubt whether one is perceiving
or remembering or telling facts clearly, but the persuasion that there
are facts, independent of one's interpretations and obdurate to one's
will, remains invincible.
