Part 13 (1/2)
Or still again: ”The pluralists have talked philosophy to a standstill--Nature is contingent, excessive and mystical essentially.”
Have we here contradiction simply, a man converted from one faith to its opposite? Or is it only dialectic circling, like the opposite points on the rim of a revolving disc, one moving up, one down, but replacing one another endlessly, while the whole disc never moves? If it be this latter--Mr. Blood himself uses the image--the dialectic is too pure for me to catch: a deeper man must mediate the monistic with the pluralistic Blood. Let my incapacity be castigated, if my ”Subject” ever reads this article, but let me treat him from now onwards as the simply pluralistic mystic which my reading of the rest of him suggests. I confess to some dread of my own fate at his hands.
In making so far an ordinary transcendental idealist of him, I have taken liberties, running separate sentences together, inverting their order, and even altering single words, for all which I beg pardon; but in treating my author from now onwards as a pluralist, interpretation is easier, and my hands can be less stained (if they _are_ stained) with exegetic blood.
I have spoken of his verbal felicity, and alluded to his poetry.
Before pa.s.sing to his mystic gospel, I will refresh the reader (doubtless now fatigued with so much dialectic) by a sample of his verse. ”The Lion of the Nile” is an allegory of the ”champion spirit of the world” in its various incarnations.
Thus it begins:--
”Whelped on the desert sands, and desert bred From dugs whose sustenance was blood alone-- A life translated out of other lives, I grew the king of beasts; the hurricane Leaned like a feather on my royal fell; I took the Hyrcan tiger by the scruff And tore him piecemeal; my hot bowels laughed And my fangs yearned for prey. Earth was my lair: I slept on the red desert without fear: I roamed the jungle depths with less design Than e'en to lord their solitude; on crags That cringe from lightning--black and blasted fronts That crouch beneath the wind-bleared stars, I told My heart's fruition to the universe, And all night long, roaring my fierce defy, I thrilled the wilderness with aspen terrors, And challenged death and life. . . .”
Again:
”Naked I stood upon the raked arena Beneath the pennants of Vespasian, While seried thousands gazed--strangers from Caucasus, Men of the Grecian Isles, and Barbary princes, To see me grapple with the counterpart Of that I had been--the raptorial jaws, The arms that wont to crush with strength alone, The eyes that glared vindictive.--Fallen there, Vast wings upheaved me; from the Alpine peaks Whose avalanches swirl the valley mists And whelm the helpless cottage, to the crown Of Chimborazo, on whose changeless jewels The torrid rays recoil, with ne'er a cloud To swathe their blistered steps, I rested not, But preyed on all that ventured from the earth, An outlaw of the heavens.--But evermore Must death release me to the jungle shades; And there like Samson's grew my locks again In the old walks and ways, till scapeless fate Won me as ever to the haunts of men, Luring my lives with battle and with love.” . . .
I quote less than a quarter of the poem, of which the rest is just as good, and I ask: Who of us all handles his English vocabulary better than Mr. Blood?[7]
His proclamations of the mystic insight have a similar verbal power:--
”There is an invariable and reliable condition (or uncondition) ensuing about the instant of recall from anaesthetic stupor to 'coming to,' in which the genius of being is revealed. . . . No words may express the imposing certainty of the patient that he is realizing the primordial Adamic surprise of Life.
”Repet.i.tion of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if it could not possibly be otherwise. The subject resumes his normal consciousness only to partially and fitfully remember its occurrence, and to try to formulate its baffling import,--with but this consolatory afterthought: that he has known the oldest truth, and that he has done with human theories as to the origin, meaning, or destiny of the race.
He is beyond instruction in 'spiritual things.' . . .
”It is the instant contrast of this 'tasteless water of souls' with formal thought as we 'come to,' that leaves in the patient an astonishment that the awful mystery of Life is at last but a homely and a common thing, and that aside from mere formality the majestic and the absurd are of equal dignity. The astonishment is aggravated as at a thing of course, missed by sanity in overstepping, as in too foreign a search, or with too eager an attention: as in finding one's spectacles on one's nose, or in making in the dark a step higher than the stair.
My first experiences of this revelation had many varieties of emotion; but as a man grows calm and determined by experience in general, so am I now not only firm and familiar in this once weird condition, but triumphant, divine. To minds of sanguine imagination there will be a sadness in the tenor of the mystery, as if the key-note of the universe were low; for no poetry, no emotion known to the normal sanity of man, can furnish a hint of its primeval prestige, and its all-but appalling solemnity; but for such as have felt sadly the instability of temporal things there is a comfort of serenity and ancient peace; while for the resolved and imperious spirit there are majesty and supremacy unspeakable. Nor can it be long until all who enter the anaesthetic condition (and there are hundreds every secular day) will be taught to expect this revelation, and will date from its experience their initiation into the Secret of Life. . . .
”This has been my moral sustenance since I have known of it. In my first printed mention of it I declared: 'The world is no more the alien terror that was taught me. Spurning the cloud-grimed and still sultry battlements whence so lately Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray gull lifts her wing against the night fall, and takes the dim leagues with a fearless eye.' And now, after twenty-seven years of this experience, the wing is grayer, but the eye is fearless still, while I renew and doubly emphasize that declaration. I know, as having known, the meaning of Existence; the sane centre of the universe--at once the wonder and the a.s.surance of the soul.”
After this rather literary interlude I return to Blood's philosophy again. I spoke a while ago of its being an ”irrationalistic”
philosophy in its latest phase. Behind every ”fact” rationalism postulates its ”reason.” Blood parodizes this demand in true nominalistic fas.h.i.+on. ”The goods are not enough, but they must have the invoice with them. There must be a _name_, something to _read_. I think of d.i.c.kens's horse that always fell down when they took him out of the shafts; or of the fellow who felt weak when naked, but strong in his overcoat.” No bad mockery, this, surely, of rationalism's habit of explaining things by putting verbal doubles of them beneath them as their ground!
”All that philosophy has sought as cause, or reason,” he says, ”pluralism subsumes in the status and the given fact, where it stands as plausible as it may ever hope to stand. There may be disease in the presence of a question as well as in the lack of an answer. We do not wonder so strangely at an ingenious and well-set-up effect, for we feel such in ourselves; but a cause, reaching out beyond the verge [of fact]
and dangling its legs in nonent.i.ty, with the hope of a rational foothold, should realize a strenuous life. Pluralism believes in truth and reason, but only as mystically realized, as lived in experience.
Up from the breast of a man, up to his tongue and brain, comes a free and strong determination, and he cries, originally, and in spite of his whole nature and environment, 'I will.' This is the Jovian _fiat_, the pure cause. This is reason; this or nothing shall explain the world for him. For how shall he entertain a reason bigger than himself? . . . Let a man stand fast, then, as an axis of the earth; the obsequious meridians will bow to him, and gracious lat.i.tudes will measure from his feet.”
This seems to be Blood's mystical answer to his own monistic statement which I quoted above, that ”freedom” has no fertility, and is no reason for any special thing.[8] ”Philosophy,” Mr. Blood writes to me in a letter, ”is past. It was the long endeavor to logicize what we can only realize practically or in immediate experience. I am more and more impressed that Herac.l.i.tus insists on the equation of reason and unreason, or chance, as well as of being and not-being, etc. This throws the secret beyond logic, and makes mysticism outcla.s.s philosophy. The insight that mystery,--the Mystery, as such is final, is the hymnic word. If you use reason pragmatically, and deny it absolutely, you can't be beaten; be a.s.sured of that. But the _Fact_ remains, and of course the Mystery.” [9]
The ”Fact,” as I understand the writer here to mean it, remains in its native disseminated shape. From every realized amount of fact some other fact is _absent_, as being uninvolved. ”There is nowhere more of it consecutively, perhaps, than appears upon this present page.” There is, indeed, to put it otherwise, no more one all-enveloping fact than there is one all-enveloping spire in an endlessly growing spiral, and no more one all-generating fact than there is one central point in which an endlessly converging spiral ends. Hegel's ”bad infinite”
belongs to the eddy as well as to the line. ”Progress?” writes our author. ”And to what? Time turns a weary and a wistful face; has he not traversed an eternity? and shall another give the secret up? We have dreamed of a climax and a consummation, a final triumph where a world shall burn _en barbecue_; but there is not, cannot be, a purpose of eternity; it shall pay mainly as it goes, or not at all. The show is on; and what a show, if we will but give our attention! Barbecues, bonfires, and banners? Not twenty worlds a minute would keep up our bonfire of the sun; and what banners of our fancy could eclipse the meteor pennants of the pole, or the opaline splendors of the everlasting ice? . . . Doubtless we _are_ ostensibly progressing, but there have been prosperity and highjinks before. Nineveh and Tyre, Rome, Spain, and Venice also had their day. We are going, but it is a question of our standing the pace. It would seem that the news must become less interesting or tremendously more so--'a breath can make us, as a breath has made.'”
Elsewhere we read: ”Variety, not uniformity, is more likely to be the key to progress. The genius of being is whimsical rather than consistent. Our strata show broken bones of histories all forgotten.
How can it be otherwise? There can be no purpose of eternity. It is process all. The most sublime result, if it appeared as the ultimatum, would go stale in an hour; it could not be endured.”
Of course from an intellectual point of view this way of thinking must be cla.s.sed as scepticism. ”Contingency forbids any inevitable history, and conclusions are absurd. Nothing in Hegel has kept the planet from being blown to pieces.” Obviously the mystical ”security,” the ”apodal sufficiency” yielded by the anaesthetic revelation, are very different moods of mind from aught that rationalism can claim to father--more active, prouder, more heroic. From his ether-intoxication Blood may feel towards ordinary rationalists ”as Clive felt towards those millions of Orientals in whom honor had no part.” On page 6, above, I quoted from his ”Nemesis”--”Is heaven so poor that justice,” etc. The writer goes on, addressing the G.o.ddess of ”compensation” or rational balance;--