| Introduction |
 |
You must not think me a hard-headed rationalist for all this.
Half my time particularly when writing verse I "believe"
…in spectres, mysterious voices, intuitions, omens, dreams,
haunted places, etc, etc. |
| This is Hardy writing to a philosopher acquaintance,
rejecting Bergson's dualistic idea of "a line of demarcation
between the inert and the living" because it leads to "an
inconsistent rupture of Order." Again rejecting dualism,
he wrote in a notebook that "the conception of a First
Cause which the theist calls 'God', and the conception of the
same that the so-styled atheist calls 'no-God', are nowadays
almost exactly identical." |
| As a Victorian intellectual, and uneasily a self-made
man sensitive to slights against his "peasant" background
and needing all the means of defence available to him, Hardy
was a rationalist, subscribing to Darwinism, positivism, and
even (in spite of the pessimism which he described in a notebook
as "the sure game… the only view of life in which
you can never be disappointed") social meliorism. But in
the depths of his being, which is to say as a poet, he was an
animist who believed that nature is as alive as the people who
move within it. In his novels an overt conflict between animism
(essentially irrationalism, "peasant" superstition
of the sort he had grown up with) and rationalism plays itself
out. In his poems animism has full play. |
| Hardy agreed with the psychologist William James's
point that "We live forward, we understand backward":
he saw that since rationality was necessarily a retrospective
summary of evidence, it could not be applied in the act of living.
In another letter he attempted to resolve the rational versus
irrational dilemma by defining separately non-rationality: |
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non-rationality seems, so far as one can perceive, to be the
principle of the Universe. By which I do not mean foolishness,
but rather a principle for which there is no exact name, lying
at the indifference-point between rationality and irrationality. |
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