Part 3 (1/2)
The reader is quite at liberty to make a different cla.s.sification from mine, if mine appears unconvincing to him. The general trend of my argument will not be in any serious way affected, as long as he admits that I have followed the tradition of ordinary human language, in the cla.s.sification which I have preferred.
It seems to me, then, that the aspects of the complex vision are eleven in number; and that they may be summarized as consisting of reason, self-consciousness, will, the aesthetic sense, or ”taste,”
imagination, memory, conscience, sensation, instinct, intuition and emotion.
These eleven aspects or attributes are not to be regarded as absolutely separate ”functions,” but rather as relatively separate ”energies” of the one concrete soul-monad. The complex vision is the vision of an irreducible living ent.i.ty which pours itself as a whole into every one of its various energizings. And though it pours itself as a whole into each one of these, and though each one of these contains the latent potentiality of all the rest, the nature of the complex vision is such that it necessarily takes colour and form from the particular aspect or attribute through which at the moment it is especially energizing.
It is precisely here that the danger of ”disproportion” was found. For the complex vision with the whole weight of all its aspects behind it receives the colour and the form of only one of them. We can see the result of this from the tenacity--implying the presence of emotion and will--with which some philosopher of pure reason pa.s.sionately and imaginatively defends his logical conclusion.
But we are ourselves proof of it in every moment of our lives.
Confronted with some definite external situation, of a happy or unhappy character, we fling ourselves upon this new intrusion with the momentum of our whole being; and it becomes largely a matter of accident whether our reaction of the moment is coloured by reason or by will or by imagination or by taste. Immersed in the tide of experience, receiving shock after shock from alien and hostile forces, we struggle with the weight of our whole soul against each particular obstacle, not stopping to regulate the complicated machinery of our vision but just seizing upon the thing, or trying to avoid it, with whatever energy serves our purpose best at the moment.
This is especially true of small and occasional pleasures or small and occasional annoyances. A supreme pleasure or a supreme pain forces us to gather our complex vision together, forces us to make use of its apex-thought, so that we can embrace the ecstasy or fling ourselves upon the misery with a co-ordinated power. It is the little casual annoyances and reliefs of our normal days which are so hard to deal with in the spirit of philosophic art, because these little pleasures and pains while making a superficial appeal to the reason or the emotion or the will or the conscience, are not drastic or formidable enough to drive us into any concentration of the apex-thought which shall harmonize our confused energies.
The fatal ease with which the whole complex vision gets itself coloured by and obsessed by one of its own attributes may be proved by the history of philosophy itself. Individual philosophers have, over and over again, plunged with furious tenacity into the mystery of life with a complex vision distorted, deformed and over-balanced.
I seem to see the complex vision of such thinkers taking some grotesque shape whereby the apex-point of effective thought is blunted and broken. The loss and misery, or the yet more ign.o.ble comfort, of such suppressions of the apex-thought, is however a personal matter. Those ”invisible companions,” or immortal children of the universe, who are implicitly present as the background of all human discussion, grow constantly more definite and articulate the apprehension of the general human mind by reason of these personal aberrations.
It is perhaps rather to the great artists of our race than to any philosopher at all that these invisible ones reveal themselves, but in their gradual disclosure to the consciousness of the human race, they are certainly a.s.sisted by the most insane and unbalanced plunges into mystery, of this and the other abnormal individual. The paradox may indeed be hazarded that the madder and more abnormal are the individual's attempts to dig himself into the very nerves and fibres of reality, the clearer and more definite as far as consciousness of the race is concerned, does the revelation of these invisible ones grow.
The abnormal individual whose complex vision is distorted almost out of human recognition by the predominance of some one attribute, is yet, in his madness and morbidity, a wonderful engine of research for the clairvoyance of humanity.
The vision of the immortals, as a background to all further discussion, is rendered richer and more rhythmical every day, or rather the hidden rhythm of their being is revealed more clearly every day, by the eccentricities and maladies, nay! by the insanities and desperations, of individual victims of life.
Thus it comes about that, while the supreme artists, whose approximation, to the vision of the invisible ones is closest, remain our unique masters, the lower crowd of moderately sane and moderately well-balanced persons are of less value to humanity than those abnormal and wayward ones whose psychic distortions are the world's perverted instruments of research.
A philosopher of this unbalanced kind is indeed a sort of living sacrifice or victim of self-vivisection, out of whose demonic discoveries--bizarre and fantastic though they may seem to the lower sanity of the mob--the true rhythmic vision of the immortals is made clearer and more articulate.
The kind of balance or sanity which such average persons, as are commonly called ”men of the world,” possess is in reality further removed from true vision than all the madness of these debauches of specialized research. For the consummation of the complex vision is a meeting place of desperate and violent extremes; extremes, not watered down nor modified nor even ”reconciled,” certainly not cancelled by one another, but held forcibly and deliberately together by an arbitrary act of the apex-thought of the human soul.
As I glance at these basic activities of the complex vision one by one, I would beg the reader to sink as far as he can into the recesses of his own ident.i.ty; so that he may discover whether what he finds there agrees in substance--call it by what name he pleases and explain it how he pleases--with each particular energy I name, as I indicate such energies in my own way.
Consider the att.i.tude of self-consciousness. That man is self-conscious is a basic and perhaps a tragic fact that surely requires no proof. The power of thinking ”I am I” is an ultimate endowment of personality, outside of which, except by an act of primordial faith, we cannot pa.s.s. The phenomenon of human growth from infancy to maturity proves that it is possible for this self-consciousness--this power of saying ”I am I”--to become clearer and more articulate from day to day. It seems as impossible to fix upon a definite moment in a child's life where we can draw a line and say ”_there_ he was unconscious of himself and _here_ he is conscious of himself” as it is impossible to observe as an actual visible movement the child's growth in stature.
Between consciousness and self-consciousness the dividing line seems to be as difficult to define as it is difficult to define the line between sub-consciousness and consciousness. My existence as a self-conscious ent.i.ty capable of thinking ”I am I” is the basic a.s.sumption of all thought. And though it is possible for my thought to turn round upon itself and deny my own existence, such thought in the process of such a denial cuts the very ground away which is the leaping point of any further advance.
Philosophy by such drastic scepticism is reduced to complete silence. You cannot build up anything except illusion from a basis that is itself illusion. If I were not self-conscious there would be no centre or substratum or coherence or unity in any thought I had. If I were not self-conscious I should be unable to think.
Consider, then, the attribute of reason. That we possess reason is also a fact that carries with it its own evidence. It is reason which at this very moment--reason of some sort, at any rate--I am bound to use, in estimating the important place or the unimportant place which reason itself should occupy. You cannot derogate from the value of reason without using reason. You cannot put reason into an inferior category, when compared with will or instinct or emotion, without using reason itself to prove such an inferiority.
We may come to the conclusion that the universe is rather irrational than rational. We may come to the conclusion that the secret of life transcends and over-brims all rationality. But this very conclusion as to the irrational nature of the mystery with which reason is attempting to deal is itself a conclusion of the reason.
There is only one power which is able to put reason aside in its search for truth and that power is reason.
Consider, then, the attribute of will. That we possess a definite and distinct energy whose activity may be contrasted with the rest and may be legitimately named ”the will” is certainly less self-evident than either of the two preceding propositions but is none the less implied in both of them. For in the act of articulating to ourself the definite thought ”I am I” we are using our will. The motive-force may be anything. We may for instance will an answer to the implied question ”_what_ am I,” and our self-consciousness may return the answer ”I am I,” leaving it to the reason to deal with this answer as best it can. The motive may be anything or nothing. Both consciousness and will are independent of motive.
For in all these primordial energizings of the complex vision everything that happens, happens simultaneously. With the consciousness ”I am I” there comes simultaneously into existence the consciousness of an external universe which is, at one and the same time, included in the circle of the ”I am I” and outside the circle. That is to say when we think the thought ”I am I,” we feel ourselves to be the whole universe thinking ”I am I,” and yet by a primordial contradiction, we feel ourselves to be an ”I am I”
opposed to the universe and contrasted with the universe.
But all this happens simultaneously; and the consciousness that we are ourselves implies, at one and the same time, the consciousness that we _are_ the universe and the consciousness that we are _inside_ the universe.