Part 29 (1/2)
Although the remaining energies of the soul, beyond those I have just named--such as instinct, intuition, imagination, and the like-- are less definitely divided up among those three ”primordial ideas”
which we discern as ”truth,” ”beauty,” and ”goodness,” they are subject, nevertheless, since their substance is the stuff of emotion, to the same duality of love and malice.
It is not difficult to see how this duality turns upon itself in human instinct, in human imagination, and in human intuition for the creative impulse in all these energies finds itself opposed by the impulse to resist creation. It is when the will is in question that we are compelled to notice a difference. For the will, although itself a primal energy or projection of the soul, is in its inherent nature set apart from the other activities of the soul.
The will is that particular aspect of the soul-monad by means of which it consciously intensifies or relaxes the outward pressure of emotion. From the point of view of the complex vision, the will, although easily differentiated from both consciousness and emotion, cannot be imagined as existing apart from these.
Every living organism possesses consciousness in some degree, emotion in some degree, and will in some degree; and the part played by the will in the complicated ”nexus” of the soul's life may be compared to that of a mechanical spring in some kind of a machine. In this case, however, the spring of the machine is fed by the oil of consciousness and releases its force upon the cogs and wheels of contradictory emotion.
No theory of psychology which attempts to eliminate the will by the subst.i.tution of pure ”motive” playing upon pure ”action” is acceptable to us. And such an elimination is unacceptable, because, in the ultimate insight of the complex vision turned round upon itself, the soul is aware of a definite recognizable phenomenon which although present to consciousness is different from consciousness, and although intensifying and lessoning emotion is different from emotion.
In regard to this ”problem of conduct,” which I refuse to interpret as anything short of the whole art of life, contemplative as well as active, the will, being, so to say, the main-spring of the soul, naturally plays the most important part. The prominence given, in moral tradition, to the struggle of the will with s.e.xual desire is one of the melancholy evidences as to how seldom the complex vision of the soul has been allowed full play.
What is called ”asceticism” or ”puritanism” is the result of an over-balanced concentration of the will upon the phenomena of sensation alone. Whereas in the rhythmic balance of the soul's complete faculties, what the ideal vision calls upon the will to do, is not to concentrate upon repressing sensation but to concentrate upon repressing malice and intensifying love.
Sensation is only, after all, one of the energies, or projected flames, of the soul, in its reaction to the objective mystery. But emotion is, as we have seen, the very soul itself, poured forth in its profoundest essence, and eternally divided against itself in the ultimate duality. Emotion is the psychic element which is the real substratum of sensation, just as it is the real substratum of reason and taste. So that when the will concentrates itself, as it has so often done and so often been commended for doing, upon sensation alone, it is neglecting and betraying its main function, which is the repressing of malice and the liberation of love.
The deliberate repression of sensation does, it is true, sometimes destroy our response to sensation; but it more often intensifies the soul's sensational life. It is only when the will is concentrated upon the intensifying of love and the suppression of malice that sensation falls into its right place in the resultant rhythm. There is then no question of either suppressing it or of indulging it. It comes and goes as naturally, as easily, as inevitably, as the rain or the snow.
When the will is concentrated upon the suppression of malice and the intensifying of love all those cults of sensation which we call vice naturally relinquish their hold upon us. The fact that women so rarely indulge in the worst excesses of these cults is due to the fact that in their closeness to nature they follow more easily the rhythmic flow of life and are less easily tempted to isolate and detach from the rest any particular feeling. But women pay the penalty for this advantage when it comes to the question of the illuminative moments of the apex-thought. For in these high, rare and abnormal moments, the ordinary ebb and flow of life is interrupted; and something emerges which resembles the final effluence of a work of art that has touched eternity. The rhythmic movement of the apex-thought, when under such exceptional conditions it evokes this effluence, rises for a moment out of the flux of nature and gathers itself into a monumental vision, calm and quiet and immortal. It is more difficult for women to attain this vision than for men; because, while under normal conditions the play of their energies is better balanced and more harmonious than man's, it is harder for them to detach themselves from the ebb and flow of nature's chemistry, harder for them to attain the personal isolation which lends itself to the supreme creative act. But while such exceptional moments seem to come more frequently to men than to women, and while a greater number of the supreme artists and prophets of the world are of the male s.e.x, it cannot be denied that the average woman, in every generation, leads a more human and a more dignified life than the average man. And she does this because the special labours which occupy her, such as the matter of food, of cleanliness, of the making and mending of clothes, of the care of children and animals and flowers, of the handling of animate and inanimate things with a view to the increase of life and beauty upon the earth, are labours which have gathered about them, during their long descent of the centuries, a certain symbolic and poetic distinction which nothing but immemorial a.s.sociation with mankind's primal necessities is able to give.
The same dignity of immemorial a.s.sociation hangs, it is true, about such masculine labours as are connected with the tilling of the earth and the sailing of the sea. Certain ancient and eternally necessary handicrafts, such as cannot be superseded by machinery, take their place with these. But since man's particular power of separating himself from Nature and dominating Nature by means of logical reason, physical science and mechanical devices, puts him in the position of continuity breaking up those usages of the ages upon which the ritualistic element in life depends, he has come, by inevitable evolution, to be much more the child of the new and the arbitrary than woman is; and in his divorce from immemorial necessity has lost much of that symbolic distinction which the life of woman retains.
It may thus be said that while the determining will in the soul of the average woman ought to be directed towards that exceptional creative energy which lifts the soul out of the flux of Nature and gives it a glimpse of the vision of the immortals, the determining will in the soul of the average man ought to be directed towards the heightening of his ordinary consciousness so as to bring this up to the level of the flux of nature and to penetrate it with the memory of the creative moments which he has had.
In both cases the material with which the will has to work is the emotions of love and of malice; but in the case of man this malice tends to destroy the poetry of common life, while in the case of woman it tends to obstruct and embarra.s.s her soul when the magic of the apex-thought stirs within her and an opportunity arises for that creative act which puts the complex vision in touch with the vision of the G.o.ds.
The philosophy of the complex vision does not discover in its examination of the psycho-material organism of the soul any differentiated ”faculties” which can be paralleled by the differentiated ”members” of the human body. The organic unity of the soul is retained, in undissipated concentration, throughout whatever movement or action or stress of energy it is led to make.
The totality of the soul becomes will, or the totality of the soul becomes reason, or the totality of the soul becomes intuition, in the same way as a falling body of water, or the projected stream of a fountain _becomes_ whatever dominant colour of sky or air or atmosphere penetrates it and transforms it. What we have called emotion, made up of the duality of love and malice, is something much more integral than this. For the totality of the soul, which _becomes_ reason, consciousness, intuition, conscience, and the like, is always composed of the very stuff and matter of emotion.
When we say ”the totality of the soul becomes imagination or intuition” it is the same thing as though we said ”the emotion of the soul becomes imagination or intuition.”
Emotion is our name, in fact, for the psycho-material ”stuff” out of which the organic substratum of the soul is made. And since this ”stuff” is eternally divided against itself into a positive and a negative ”pole” we are compelled to a.s.sert that our ultimate a.n.a.lysis of the system of things is dualistic, in spite of the fact that the whole drama takes place under the one comprehensive unity of s.p.a.ce.
When we say that the totality of the soul becomes will, reason, imagination, conscience, intuition and so forth, we do not mean that by becoming any one of these single things it is prevented from becoming others. We are confronted here by a phenomenon of organic life which, however inexplicable, is of frequent occurrence in human experience. The ecclesiastical dogma of the Trinity is no fantastic invention of this or the other theologian. It is an inevitable definition of a certain body of human experience to which it affords a plausible explanation.
What the philosophy of the complex vision attempts to do is to a.n.a.lyse into its component parts that confused ma.s.s of contradictory impressions to which the soul awakens as soon as it becomes conscious of itself at all. The older philosophers begin their adventurous journey by the discovery and proclamation of some particular clue, or catchword, or general principle, out of the rational necessity of whose content they seek to evoke that living and breathing universe which impinges upon us all. Modern philosophy tends to reject these Absolute ”clues,” these simplifying ”secrets” of the system of things; but in rejecting these it either subst.i.tutes its own hypothetical generalizations, such as ”spirit,” ”life-force,” or ”cosmic energy,” or it contents itself with noting, as William James does, the more objective grouping of states of consciousness, as they weave their pattern on the face of the swirling waters, without regard to any ”substantial soul” whose background of organic life gives these ”states” their concrete unity.
The philosophy of the complex vision differs from the older philosophies in that it frankly and confessedly starts with that general situation which is also its goal. Its movement is therefore a perpetual setting-forth and a perpetual return; a setting forth towards a newly created vision of the world, and a return to that ideal of such a vision which has been implicit from the beginning.
And this general situation from which it starts and to which it returns is nothing less than the huge spectacle of the visible universe confronting the individual soul and implying the kindred existence of innumerable other souls. The fact that what the complex vision reveals is the primary importance of personality does not detract in the least degree from the unfathomable mysteriousness of the objective universe And it does not detract from this because the unfathomableness of the universe is not a rational deduction drawn from the logical idea of what an objective universe would be like if it existed, but is a direct human experience verified at every movement of the soul. The universe revealed to us by the complex vision is a universe compounded of the concentrated visions of all the souls that compose it, a universe which in its eternal beauty and hideousness has received the ”imprimatur of the immortal G.o.ds.”
The fact that such a universe is in part a creation of the mind, and in part a discovery made by the mind when it flings itself upon the unknown, does not lessen or diminish the strangeness or unfathomableness of life. The fact that the ultimate reality of such a universe is to be found in the psycho-material substratum--where mind and matter become one--of the individual soul, does not lessen or diminish the magical beauty or cruel terribleness of life.
What we name by the name of ”matter” is not less a permanent human experience, because apart from the creative energy of some personal soul we are not able to conceive of its existence.
The philosophy of the complex vision reduces everything that exists to an eternal action and re-action between the individual soul and the objective mystery. This action and reaction is itself reproduced in the eternal duality, or ebb and flow, which const.i.tutes the living soul itself. And because the psycho-material substance of the soul must be considered as identical, on its psychic side, with the ”spiritual substance” of the universe ”medium” through which all souls come into contact with one another, and identical on its material side with the objective mystery which is expressed in all bodies, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the individual personality is surrounded by an elemental and universal ”something” similar to itself, dominated as itself is dominated by the omnipresent circle of s.p.a.ce.
This universal ”something” must be regarded, in spite of its double nature, as one and the same, since it is dominated by one and the same s.p.a.ce. The fact that the material aspect of this psycho-material element is constantly plastic to the creative energy of the soul does not reduce it to the level of an ”illusion.” The mind recreates everything it touches; but the mind cannot work in a vacuum. There must be something for the mind to ”touch.” What the soul touches, therefore, as soon as it becomes conscious of itself is, in the first place, the ”material element” of its own inmost nature; in the second place the ”material element” which makes it possible for all bodies to come in contact with one another; and in the third place the ”material element” which is the original potentiality of all universes and which has been named ”the objective mystery.”
To call this universal material element, thus manifested in a three-fold form, an illusion of the human mind is to destroy the integrity of language. Nothing can justly be called an illusion which is a permanent and universal human experience. The name we select for this experience is of no importance. We can name it _matter_, or we can name it _energy_, or _movement_, or _force_. The experience remains the same, by whatever name we indicate it to one another.
The philosophy of the complex vision opposes itself to all materialistic systems by its recognition of personality as the ultimate basis of life; and it opposes itself to all idealistic systems by its recognition of an irreducible ”material element” which is the object of all thought but which is also, in the substratum of the soul-monad, fused and blended with thought itself.
We now arrive at the conclusion of our philosophical journey; and we find it to be the identical point or situation from which we originally started. Once and for all we are compelled to ask ourselves the question, whether since personality is the ultimate secret of life and since all individual personalities, whether human, sub-human, or super-human, are confronted by one ”material element” dominated by one universal material s.p.a.ce, it is not probable that this ”material element” should itself be, as it were, the ”outward body” of one ”elemental soul”? Such an elemental soul would have no connexion with the ”Absolute Being” of the great metaphysical systems. For in those systems the Absolute Being is essentially impersonal, and can in no sense be regarded as having anything corresponding to a body.