Part 22 (1/2)
Its chemical elements, as they resolve themselves slowly back into their planetary accomplices, are part and parcel of that general ”body of the earth” which is in a state of constant movement, and which has the ”soul of the earth” as its animating principle of personality. And just as the human corpse, when the soul has deserted it, becomes a portion of those chemical elements which are the body of the planet's ”personal soul,” so do the dead bodies of animals and plants and trees become portions of the same terrestrial bodies.
Thus strictly speaking there is no single moment when any material form or body can be called ”dead.” Instantaneously with the departure of its own individual soul it is at once ”possessed” by the soul of that planetary globe from whose chemistry it drew its elemental life and from whose chemistry, although the form of it has changed, it still draws its life. For it is no fantastic speculation to affirm that every living thing whether human or otherwise plays, while it lives, a triple part upon the world stage.
It is in the first place the vehicle of the individual soul. It is in the second place the medium of the ”spiritual vampirizing” of the invisible planetary spirits. And it is in the third place a living portion of that organic elemental chemistry which is the body of the terrestrial soul. Thus it becomes manifest that that ”illusion of dead matter” which fills the human soul with so profound a melancholy is no more than an everlasting trick of the malice of the abyss.
And the despair which sometimes results from it is a despair which issues from no ”dead matter” but from the terrible living depths of the soul itself. It is from a consideration of the especial kind of melancholy evoked in us by the illusion of ”objective deadness” that we are enabled to a.n.a.lyse those peculiar imaginative feelings which sometime or another affect us all. I refer to the extraordinary tenacity with which we cling to our bodily form, however grotesque it may be, and the difficulty we experience in disa.s.sociating our living soul from its particular envelope or habitation; and the tendency which we have, in spite of this, to imagine ourselves transferred to an alien body. For the soul in us has the power of ”thinking itself” into any other body it may please to select.
And there is no reason why we should be alarmed at such an imaginative power; or even a.s.sociate its fantastic realization with any terror of madness. The invisible ent.i.ty within us which says ”I am I” can easily be conceived as suddenly awakening out of sleep and discovering, to its astonishment, that its visible body has suffered a bewildering transformation.
Such a transformation can be conceived as almost unlimited in its humorous and disconcerting possibilities. But no such transformation of the external envelope of the soul, whether into the form of an animal or a plant or a G.o.d, need be conceived of as necessarily driving us into insanity. The ”I am I” would remain the same in regard to its imagination, instinct, intuition, emotion, self-consciousness and the rest. It would be only ”changed” in regard to sensation, which is a thing immediately dependent upon the particular and special senses of the human body.
This is a truth to the reality of which the wandering fancies of every human child bear ample witness; not to speak of the dreams of those childlike tribes of the race, who in our progressive insolence we are pleased to name ”uncivilized.” The deeper we dig into the tissue of convoluted impressions that make up our universe the more vividly do we become aware that our only redemption from sheer insanity lies in ”knowing ourselves”; in other words, in keeping a drastic and desperate hold upon what, in the midst of ambiguity and treachery, we are definitely a.s.sured of.
And the only thing we are definitely a.s.sured of, the only thing which we really know ”on the inner side,” and with the kind of knowledge which is una.s.sailable, is the reality of our soul. We know this with a vividness completely different from the vividness of any other knowledge because this is not what we feel or see or imagine or think but what we _are_. And all feeling, all seeing, all imagining and all thinking are only attributes of this mysterious ”something” which is our integral self.
To the superficial judgment there is always something weird and arbitrary about this belief in our own soul. And this apparent weirdness arises from the fact that our superficial judgments are the work of reason and sensation arrogating to themselves the whole field of consciousness.
But directly we bring to bear upon this ma.s.s of impressions which is our ”universe” the full rhythmic play of our complete ident.i.ty this weirdness and arbitrariness disappear and we realize that we _are_, not this thought or this sensation or even this stream of thoughts and sensations, but the definite living ”monad” which gives these things their only link of continuity and permanence.
And it is better to accept experience, even though it refuses to resolve itself into any rational unity, rather than to leave experience in the distance and permit our reason to evolve its desired unity out of its own rules and limitations.
We must readily admit that to take all the attributes of personality and to make them adhere in the mysterious substratum of the soul rather than in the little cells of the brain, seems to the superficial judgment a weird and arbitrary act. But the more closely we think of what we are doing when we make this a.s.sumption the more inevitable does such an a.s.sumption appear.
We are driven by the necessity of the case to find some ”point,” or at least some ”gap” in thought and the system of things, where mind and matter meet and are fused with one another. Absolute consciousness does not help us to explain the facts of experience; because ”facing” absolute consciousness, directly it isolates itself, we are compelled to recognize the presence of ”something else,”
which is the material or object of which absolute consciousness is conscious.
And what we do when we a.s.sume the little cells of the physical brain to be the point in s.p.a.ce or ”the gap in thought” where mind and matter meet and become one is simply to place these two worlds in close juxtaposition and then a.s.sert that they are one. But this placing them side by side and a.s.serting that they are one does not make them one. They are just as far apart as ever. The cells of the brain remain material and the phenomenon of consciousness remains immaterial and they are still as remote from one another and as ”unfused” as if consciousness were outside of time and s.p.a.ce altogether.
It is only when we come to regard the ”fusion-point” of these two things as being itself a living and personal thing; it is only when we come to regard the substratum of the soul as a mysterious ”something” which is, at one and the same time, both what we call ”mind” and what we call ”matter,” that the difficulty I have described disappears. For in this case we are dealing with something which, unlike the little cells of the brain, is totally invisible and totally beyond all scientific a.n.a.lysis; and yet with something which, because it is affected by bodily sensations and because it is under the sway of time and s.p.a.ce, cannot be regarded as utterly outside the realm of material substance. We are in fact, in this case, dealing with something which we feel to be the integral and ultimate reality of ourselves, as we certainly do not feel the little cells of the brain to be; and we are dealing with something that is no mere stream of impressions, but is the concrete permanent reality which gives to all impressions, whether material or immaterial, their unity and coherence.
When once we are put into possession of this, when once we come to recognize our invisible soul as the reality which is our true self, it is found to be no longer ridiculous and arbitrary to endow this soul with all those various attributes, which, after all, are only various aspects of that unique personality which is the personality of the soul. To say ”the soul has imagination,” or ”the soul has instinct,” or ”the soul has an aesthetic sense,” has only a ridiculous sound when under the pressure of the abysmal malice which opposes itself to life we fall into the habits of permitting those usurping accomplices, pure reason and pure sensation, to destroy the rhythmic harmony of the complex vision.
When once we are in full possession of our own soul it is no mere fanciful speculation but an inevitable act of faith which compels us to envisage the universe as a thing crowded with invisible souls, who in some degree or other resemble our own. If this is ”anthropomorphism,” though strictly speaking it ought to be called ”pan-psychism,” then it is impossible for us to be too anthropomorphic. For in this way we are doing the only philosophical thing we have a right to do--namely, interpreting the less known in the terms of the more known.
When we seek to interpret the soul, which we vividly know, in terms of chemical or spiritual abstractions of which we have no direct knowledge but which are merely rationalized symbols, we are proceeding in an illegitimate and unphilosophical manner to interpret the more known in terms of the less known, which is in the true sense ridiculous.
The only escape from that profound melancholy so easily engulfed in sheer insanity, which is the result of submission to ”the illusion of dead matter,” lies in this tenacious hold upon the concrete ident.i.ty of the soul. So closely are we linked, by reason of the chemistry of our mortal body, to every material-element; that it is only too easy for us to merge our personal life by a perverted use of the imagination in that phantom-world of supposedly ”dead matter” which is the illusive projection of the abysmal malice.
Thus just as the soul is driven by extreme physical pain to relinquish its ident.i.ty and to become ”an incarnate sensation,” so the soul is driven by the power of malice to relinquish its centrifugal force and to become the very mud and slime and excremental debris which it has endowed with an illusive soullessness.
The clue to the secret pathology of these moods, to whose brink reason and sensation have led us and into whose abyss perverted imagination has plunged us, is therefore to be found in the unfathomable duality of good and evil. If it seems to the kind of mind that demands ”rational unity” at all costs, even at the cost of truth to experience, that this duality cannot be left unreconciled, the answer which the philosophy of the complex vision must make, is that any reconciliation of such a sort, any reduction to monistic unity of the eternal adversaries out of whose struggle life itself springs, would bring life itself back to nothingness.
The argument that because, in the eternal process of destruction and creation, life or love or what we call ”the good” depends for its activity upon death or malice or what we call ”evil,” these opposites are one and the same, is shown to be utterly false when one thinks of the a.n.a.logy of the struggle between the s.e.xes.
Because the activity of the male depends upon the existence of the female, that is no reason for concluding that the male and the female are one and the same thing.
Because ”good” becomes more ”good” out of its conflict with ”evil,” that does not mean that ”good” is responsible for the existence of ”evil”; any more than because ”evil” becomes more ”evil” out of its conflict with ”good” does it mean that ”evil” is responsible for the existence of ”good.” Neither is responsible for the existence of the other. They are both positive and real and they are both eternal. They are both unfathomable elements in every personal individual soul, whether of man or plant or animal or G.o.d or demi-G.o.d that has ever existed or will ever come to exist.
The prevalent idea that because good ”in the long run” and over vast s.p.a.ces of time shows itself to be a little--just a little--more powerful than evil, evil must be regarded as only a form of good or a necessary negation of good is a fallacy derived from the illusion that life is the creation of a ”parent” of the universe whose nature is absolutely ”good.” Such a fallacy takes for granted that somewhere and somehow ”Good” will finally triumph over ”evil.”
The revelation of the complex vision destroys this fallacy. Such a complete triumph of ”good” over ”evil” would mean the end of everything that exists because everything that exists depends upon this abysmal struggle. But for personalities who are able to recognize that the mere fact of their being alive is already a considerable victory of ”good” over ”evil,” there is nothing overwhelming in the thought that ”good” can never completely overcome ”evil.” It is enough that life has given them life; and that in the perpetually renewed struggle between love and malice they find at the rare moments when love overcomes malice a flood of happiness which, brings with it ”the sensation of eternity.”