Part 1 (1/2)
The Complex Vision.
by John Cowper Powys.
PROLOGUE
What I am anxious to attempt in this antic.i.p.atory summary of the contents of this book is a simple estimate of its final conclusions, in such a form as shall eliminate all technical terms and reduce the matter to a plain statement, intelligible as far as such a thing can be made intelligible, to the apprehension of such persons as have not had the luck, or the ill-luck, of a plunge into the ocean of metaphysic.
A large portion of the book deals with what might be called our _instrument of research_; in other words, with the problem of what particular powers of insight the human mind must use, if its vision of reality is to be of any deeper or more permanent value than the ”pa.s.sing on the wing,” so to speak, of individual fancies and speculations.
This instrument of research I find to be the use, by the human person, of all the various energies of personality concentrated into one point; and the resultant spectacle of things or reality of things, which this concentrated vision makes clear, I call the original revelation of the complex vision of man.
Having a.n.a.lyzed in the earlier portions of the book the peculiar nature of our organ of research and the peculiar difficulties-- amounting to a very elaborate work of art--which have to be overcome before this _concentration_ takes place, I proceed in the later portions of the book to make as clear as I can what kind of reality it is that we actually do succeed in grasping, when this concentrating process has been achieved. I indicate incidentally that this desirable concentration of the energies of personality is so difficult a thing that we are compelled to resort to our memory of what we experienced in rare and fortunate moments in order to establish its results. I suggest that it is not to our average moments of insight that we have to appeal, but to our exceptional moments of insight; since it is only at rare moments in our lives that we are able to enter into what I call the _eternal vision_.
To what, then, does this conclusion amount, and what is this resultant reality, in as far as we are able to gather it up and articulate its nature from the vague records of our memory?
I have endeavoured to show that it amounts to the following series of results. What we are, in the first place, a.s.sured of is the existence within our own individual body of a real actual living thing composed of a mysterious substance wherein what we call mind and what we call matter are fused and intermingled. This is our real and self-conscious soul, the thing in us which says, ”I am I,” of which the physical body is only one expression, and of which all the bodily senses are only one gateway of receptivity.
The soul within us becomes aware of its own body simultaneously with its becoming aware of all the other bodies which fill the visible universe. It is then by an act of faith or imagination that the soul within us takes for granted and a.s.sumes that there must be a soul resembling our own soul within each one of those alien bodies, of which, simultaneously with its own, it becomes aware.
And since the living basis of our personality is this real soul within us, it follows that all those energies of personality, whose concentration is the supreme work of art, are the energies of this real soul. If, therefore, we a.s.sume that all the diverse physical bodies which fill the universe possess, each of them, an inner soul resembling our own soul, we are led to the conclusion that just as our own soul half-creates and half-discovers the general spectacle of things which it names ”the universe,” so all the alien souls in the world half-create and half-discover what they feel as _their_ universe.
If our revelation stopped at this point we should have to admit that there was not one universe, but as many universes are there are living souls. It is at this point, however, that we become aware that all these souls are able, in some degree or other, to enter into communication. They are able to do this both by the bodily sounds and signs which const.i.tute language and by certain immaterial vibrations which seem to make no use of the body at all. In this communication between different souls, as far as humanity is concerned, a very curious experience has to be recorded.
When two human beings dispute together upon any important problem of life, there is always an implicit appeal made by both of them to an invisible arbiter, or invisible standard of arbitration, in the heart of which both seem aware that the reality, upon which their opinions differ, is to be found in its eternal truth. What then is this invisible standard of arbitration? Whatever it is, we are compelled to a.s.sume that it satisfies and transcends the deepest and furthest reach of personal vision in all the souls that approach it.
And what is the deepest and furthest reach of our individual soul?
This seems to be a projection upon the material plane of the very stuff and substance of the soul's inmost nature.
This very ”stuff” of the soul, this outflowing of the substance of the soul, I name ”emotion”; and I find it to consist of two eternally conflicting elements; what I call the element of ”love,” and what I call the element of ”malice.” This emotion of love, which is the furthest reach of the soul, I find to be differentiated when it comes into contact with the material universe into three ultimate ways of taking life; namely, the way which we name the pursuit of beauty, the way which we name the pursuit of goodness, and the way which we name the pursuit of truth. But these three ways of taking life find always their unity and ident.i.ty in that emotion of love which is the psychic substance of them all.
The invisible standard of arbitration, then, to which an appeal is always made, consciously or unconsciously, when two human beings dispute upon the mystery of life, is a standard of arbitration which concerns the real nature of love, and the real nature of what we call ”the good” and ”the true” and ”the beautiful.”
And since we have found in personality the one thing in existence of which we are absolutely a.s.sured, because we are aware of it, _on the inside_, so to speak, in the depths of our own souls, it becomes necessary that in place of thinking of this invisible standard as any spiritual or chemical ”law” in any stream of ”life-force” we should think of it as being as personal as we ourselves are personal. For since what we call the universe has been already described as something which is half-created and half-discovered by the vision of some one soul in it or of all the souls in it, it is clear that we have no longer any right to think of these ultimate ideas as ”suspended” in the universe, or as general ”laws” of the universe. They are suspended in the individual soul, which half-creates and half-discovers the universe according to their influence.
Personality is the only permanent thing in life; and if truth, beauty, goodness, and love, are to have permanence they must depend for their permanence not upon some imaginary law in a universe half-created by personality but upon the indestructible nature of personality itself.
The human soul is aware of an invisible standard of beauty. To this invisible standard it is compelled to make an unconscious appeal in all matters of argument and discussion. This standard must therefore be rooted in a personal super-human vision and we are driven to the conclusion that some being or beings exist, superior to man, and yet in communication with man. And since what we see around us is a world of many human and sub-human personalities, it is, by a.n.a.logy, a more natural supposition to suppose that these supernatural beings are many than that they are one.
What the human soul, therefore, together with all other souls, attains in its concentrated moments is ”an eternal vision” wherein what is mortal in us merges itself in what is immortal.
But if what we call the universe is a thing made up of all the various universes of all the various souls in s.p.a.ce and time, we are forbidden to find in this visible material universe, whose ”reality”
does not become ”really real” until it has received the ”hall-mark,”
so to speak, of the eternal vision, any sort of medium or link which makes it possible for these various souls to communicate with one another.
This material universe, thus produced by the concentrated visions of all the souls entering into the eternal vision, is made up of all the physical bodies of all such souls, linked together by the medium of universal ether. But although the bodies which thus occupy different points of s.p.a.ce are linked together by the universal ether, we are not permitted to find in this elemental ether, the medium which links the innumerable souls together. And we are not permitted this because in our original a.s.sumption such souls are themselves the half-creators, as well as the half-discoverers, of that universe whose empty s.p.a.ces are thus filled. The material ether which links all bodies together cannot, since it is a portion of such an universe, be itself the medium from the midst of which these souls create that universe.
But if, following our method of regarding every material substance in the world as the body of some sort of soul, we regard this universal ether as itself the body of an universal or elemental soul, then we are justified in finding in this elemental omnipresent soul diffused through s.p.a.ce, the very medium we need; out of the midst of which all the souls which exist project their various universes.
We are thus faced by a universe which is the half-creation and half-discovery of all living souls, a universe the truth and beauty of which depend upon the eternal vision, a universe whose material substance is entirely composed of the actual physical bodies of those very souls whose vision half-creates and half-discovers it.
We thus reach our conclusion that there is nothing in the world except personality. The material universe is entirely made up of personal bodies united by the personal body of the elemental ether.