Knowledge

Miracles 3.4 Everything we know is either from our immediate sensations or inferred from those sensations. Lewis sketches the inference to conclude "...therefore there must exist something other than myself and it must be systematic." He gives as examples, Evolution and the existence of our own brains.

I have made no serious effort to hide the fact that the old Model delights me as I believe it delighted our ancestors. Few constructions of the imagination seem to me to have combined splendour, sobriety, and coherence in the same degree. It is possible that some readers have long been itching to remind me that it had a serious defect: it was not true.

I agree. It was not true. But I would like to end by saying that this charge can no longer have exactly the same sort of weight for us that it would have had in the nineteenth century. We then claimed, as we still claim, to know much more about the real universe than the medievals did; and hoped, as we still hope, to discover yet more truths about it in the future. But the meaning of the words 'know' and 'truth' in this context has begun to undergo a certain change.

The nineteenth century still held the belief that by inferences from our sense-experience (improved by instruments) we could 'know' the ultimate physical reality more or less as, by maps, pictures, and travel-books, a man can 'know' a country he has not visited; and that in both cases the 'truth' would be a sort of mental replica of the thing itself. Philosophers might have disquieting comments to make on this conception; but scientists and plain men did not much attend to them.

Already, to be sure, mathematics were the idiom in which many of the sciences spoke. But I do not think it was doubted that there was a concrete reality about which the mathematics held good: distinguishable from the mathematics as a heap of apples is from the process of counting them. We knew indeed that it was in some respects not adequately imaginable; quantities and distances if either very small or very great could not be visualised. But, apart from that, we hoped that ordinary imagination and conception could grasp it. We should then have through mathematics a knowledge not merely mathematical. We should be like the man coming to know about a foreign country without visiting it. He learns about the mountains from carefully studying the contour lines on a map. But his knowledge is not a knowledge of contour lines. The real knowledge is achieved when these enable him to say 'That would be an easy ascent', 'This is a dangerous precipice', 'A would not be visible from B', 'These woods and waters must make a pleasant valley'. In going beyond the contour lines to such conclusions he is (if he knows how to read a map) getting nearer to the reality.

It would be very different if someone said to him (and was believed) 'But it is the contour lines themselves that are the fullest reality you can get. In turning away from them to these other statements you are getting further from the reality, not nearer.' All those ideas about "real" rocks and slopes and views are merely a metaphor or a parable: a pis aller, permissible as a concession to the weakness of those who can't understand contour lines, but misleading if they are taken literally.

And this, if I understand the situation, is just what has now happened as regards the physical sciences. The mathematics are now the nearest to the reality we can get. Anything imaginable, even anything that can be manipulated by ordinary (that is, non-mathematical) conceptions, far from being a further truth to which mathematics were the avenue, is a mere analogy, a concession to our weakness. Without a parable modern physics speaks not to the multitudes. Even among themselves, when they attempt to verbalise their findings, the scientists begin to speak of this as making 'models'. It is from them that I have borrowed the word. But these 'models' are not, like model ships, small-scale replicas of the reality. Sometimes they illustrate this or that aspect of it by an analogy. Sometimes, they do not illustrate but merely suggest, like the sayings of the mystics. An expression such as 'the curvature of space' is strictly comparable to the old definition of God as 'a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere'. Both succeed in suggesting; each does so by offering what is, on the level of our ordinary thinking, nonsense. By accepting the 'curvature of space' we are not 'knowing' or enjoying 'truth' in the fashion that was once thought to be possible.

It would therefore be subtly misleading to say 'The medievals thought the universe to be like that, but we know it to be like this'. Part of what we now know is that we cannot, in the old sense, 'know what the universe is like' and that no model we can build will be, in that old sense, 'like' it. //The Discarded Image//, Epilogue, paragraphs 1-8

It is incredible how little this knowledge moved him [Wither]. It could not, because he had long ceased to believe in knowledge itself. What had been in his far-off youth a merely aesthetic repugnance to realities that were crude or vulgar, had deepened and darkened, year after year, into a fixed refusal of everything that was in any degree other than himself. He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and thence through Logical Positivism, and out at last into the complete void. The indicative mood now corresponded to no thought that his mind could entertain. He had willed with his whole heart that there should be no reality and no truth, and now even the imminence of his own ruin could not wake him. The last scene of Dr. Faustus where the man raves and implores on the edge of Hell is, perhaps, stage five. The last moments before damnation are not often so dramatic. Often the man knows with perfect clarity that some still possible action of his own will could yet save him. But he cannot make this knowledge real to himself. Some tiny habitual sensuality, some resentment too trivial to waste on a blue-bottle, the indulgence of some fatal lethargy, seems to him at that moment more important than the choice between total joy and total destruction. With eyes wide open, seeing that the endless terror is just about to begin and yet (for the moment) unable to feel terrified, he watches passively, not moving a finger for his own rescue, while the last links with joy and reason are severed, and drowsily sees the trap close upon his soul. So full of sleep are they at the time when they leave the right way. //That Hideous Strength//, chapter 4, paragraph 2

A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works; indeed, he certainly won't know how it works until he's accepted it. //Mere Christianity//, chapter 4, paragraph 4

Unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated. //De Futilitate//, paragraph 19

…wherever there is real progress in knowledge, there is some knowledge that is not superseded. //Dogma and the Universe//, 4th paragraph from the end

All men alike, on questions which interest them, escape from the region of belief

All men alike, on questions which interest them, escape from the region of belief into that of knowledge when they can, and if they succeed in knowing, they no longer say they believe. //On Obstinacy in Belief//, paragraph 10

We need no barbarous words nor solemn spell To raise the unknown. It lies before our feet; There have been men who sank down into Hell In some suburban street,

And some there are that in their daily walks Have met archangels fresh from sight of God, Or watched how in their beans and cabbage-stalks Long files of faerie trod.

Often me too the Living voices call In many a vulgar and habitual place, I catch a sight of lands beyond the wall, I see a strange god’s face.

And some day this work will work upon me so I shall arise and leave both friends and home And over many lands a pilgrim go Through alien woods and foam,

Seeking the last steep edges of the earth Whence I may leap into that gulf of light Wherein, before my narrowing Self had birth, Part of me lived aright.

//Poems//, 32 “Spirits in Bondage”