Part 9 (1/2)
It was a great day for us when an ancestor crawled up out of the slowly-cooling sea;--or say rather when a previously unsuspected capacity for directly breathing air gradually revealed the fact that we had for long been breathing air in the water;--and that we were living in the midst of a vastly extended environment,--the atmosphere of the earth. It was a great day again when another ancestor felt on his pigment-spot the solar ray;--or say rather when a previously unsuspected capacity for perceiving light revealed the fact that we had for long been acted upon by light as well as by heat; and that we were living in the midst of a vastly extended environment,--namely, the illumined Universe that stretches to the Milky Way. It was a great day when the first skate (if skate he were) felt an unknown virtue go out from him towards some worm or mudfish;--or say rather when a previously unsuspected capacity for electrical excitation demonstrated the fact that we had long been acted upon by electricity as well as by heat and by light; and that we were living in an inconceivable and limitless environment,--namely, an ether charged with infinite energy, overpa.s.sing and interpenetrating alike the last gulf of darkness and the extremest star. All this,--phrased perhaps in some other fas.h.i.+on,--all men admit as true. May we not then suppose that there are yet other environments, other interpretations, which a further awakening of faculty still subliminal is yet fated by its own nascent response to discover? Will it be alien to the past history of evolution if I add: It was a great day when the first thought or feeling flashed into some mind of beast or man from a mind distant from his own?--when a previously unsuspected capacity of telepathic percipience revealed the fact that we had long been acted upon by telepathic as well as by sensory stimuli; and that we were living in an inconceivable and limitless environment,--a thought-world or spiritual universe charged with infinite life, and interpenetrating and overpa.s.sing all human spirits,--up to what some have called World-Soul, and some G.o.d?
And now it will be easily understood that one of the corollaries from the conception of a constantly widening and deepening perception of an environment infinite in infinite ways, will be that the faculties which befit the material environment have absolutely no primacy, unless it be of the merely chronological kind, over those faculties which science has often called _by-products_, because they have no manifest tendency to aid their possessor in the struggle for existence in a material world.
The higher gifts of genius--poetry, the plastic arts, music, philosophy, pure mathematics--all of these are precisely as much in the central stream of evolution--are perceptions of new truth and powers of new action just as decisively predestined for the race of man--as the aboriginal Australian's faculty for throwing a boomerang or for swarming up a tree for grubs. There is, then, about those loftier interests nothing exotic, nothing accidental; they are an intrinsic part of that ever-evolving response to our surroundings which forms not only the planetary but the cosmic history of all our race.
What inconsistencies, what absurdities, underlie that a.s.sumption that evolution means nothing more than the survival of animals fittest to conquer enemies and to overrun the earth. On that bare hypothesis the genus _h.o.m.o_ is impossible to explain. No one really attempts to explain him except on the tacit supposition that Nature somehow tended to evolve intelligence--somehow needed to evolve joy; was not satisfied with such an earth-over-runner as the rabbit, or such an invincible conqueror as the influenza microbe. But _how much_ intelligence, _what_ kind of joy Nature aimed at--is this to be left to be settled by the instinct of _l'homme sensuel moyen?_ or ought we not rather to ask of the best specimens of our race what it is that they live for?--whether they labour for the meat that perisheth, or for Love and Wisdom? To more and more among mankind the need of food is supplied with as little conscious effort as the need of air; yet these are often the very men through whom evolution is going on most unmistakably--who are becoming the typical figures of the swiftly-changing race.
Once more. If this point of view be steadily maintained, we shall gain further light on some of those strangenesses and irregularities of genius which have led to its paradoxical juxtaposition with insanity as a divergence from the accepted human type. The distinctive characteristic of genius is the large infusion of the subliminal in its mental output; and one characteristic of the subliminal in my view is that it is in closer relation than the supraliminal to the spiritual world, and is thus nearer to the primitive source and extra-terrene initiation of life. And earthly Life itself--embodied as it is in psycho-physically individualised forms--is, on the theory advanced in these pages, a product or characteristic of the etherial or metetherial and not of the gross material world. Thence in some unknown fas.h.i.+on it came; there in some unknown fas.h.i.+on it subsists even throughout its earthly manifestation; thither in some unknown fas.h.i.+on it must after earthly death return. If indeed the inspirations of genius spring from a source one step nearer to primitive reality than is that specialised consensus of faculties which natural selection has lifted above the threshold for the purposes of working-day existence, then surely we need not wonder if the mind and frame of man should not always suffice for smooth and complete amalgamation; if some prefiguration of faculties adapted to a later stage of being should mar the symmetry of the life of earth.
And thus there may really be something at times _incommensurable_ between the inspirations of genius and the results of conscious logical thought. Just as the calculating boy solves his problems by methods which differ from the methods of the trained mathematician, so in artistic matters also that ”something of strangeness” which is in ”all excellent beauty,” may be the expression of a real difference between subliminal and supraliminal modes of perception. I cannot help thinking that such a difference is perceptible in subliminal relations to speech; that the subliminal self will sometimes surpa.s.s conscious effort, if it is treating speech as a branch of Art, in Poetry;--or else in some sense will fall short of conscious effort, when it is merely using words as an unavoidable medium to express ideas which common speech was hardly designed to convey.
Thus, on the one hand, when in presence of one of the great verbal achievements of the race--say the _Agamemnon_ of aeschylus--it is hard to resist the obscure impression that some form of intelligence other than supraliminal reason or conscious selection has been at work. The result less resembles the perfection of rational choice among known data than the imperfect presentation of some scheme based on perceptions which we cannot entirely follow.
But, on the other hand, even though words may thus be used by genius with something of the mysterious remoteness of music itself, it seems to me that our subliminal mentation is less closely bound to the faculty of speech than is our supraliminal. There is a phrase in common use which involves perhaps more of psychological significance than has yet been brought out. Of all which we can call genius, or which we can ally with genius--of art, of love, of religious emotion--it is common to hear men say that they _transcend the scope of speech_. Nor have we any reason for regarding this as a mere vague sentimental expression.
There is no _a priori_ ground for supposing that language will have the power to express all the thoughts and emotions of man. It may indeed be maintained that the inevitable course of its development tends to exhibit more and more clearly its inherent limitations. ”Every language,” it has been said, ”begins as poetry and ends as algebra.” To use the terms employed in this work, every language begins as a subliminal uprush and ends as a supraliminal artifice. Organic instincts impel to primitive e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n; unconscious laws of mind shape early grammar. But even in our own day--and we are still in the earth's infancy--this navete of language is fast disappearing. The needs of science and of commerce have become dominant, and although our vocabulary, based as it is on concrete objects and direct sensations, is refined for the expression of philosophic thought, still we cannot wonder if our supraliminal manipulation leaves us with an instrument less and less capable of expressing the growing complexity of our whole psychical being.
What then, we may ask, is the att.i.tude and habit of the subliminal self likely to be with regard to language? Is it not probable that other forms of symbolism may retain a greater proportional importance among those submerged mental operations which have not been systematised for the convenience of communication with other men?
I think that an intelligent study of visual and motor automatism will afford us sufficient proof that symbolism, at any rate pictorial symbolism, becomes increasingly important as we get at the contents of those hidden strata. Telepathic messages, especially, which form, as we shall see, the special prerogative or characteristic of subliminal communication, seem to be conveyed by vague impression or by inward or externalised picture oftener than by articulate speech. And I may so far antic.i.p.ate later discussion of _automatic writings_ (whether self-inspired or telepathic) as to point out a curious linguistic quality which almost all such writings share. The ”messages” of a number of automatists, taken at random, will be sure to resemble each other much more closely than do the supraliminal writings of the same persons.
Quite apart from their general correspondence in _ideas_--which belongs to another branch of our subject--there is among the automatic writings of quite independent automatists a remarkable correspondence of literary style. There is a certain quality which reminds one of a _translation_, or of the compositions of a person writing in a language which he is not accustomed to talk. These characteristics appear at once in automatic script, even of the incoherent kind; they persist when there is no longer any dream-like incoherence; they are equally marked, even when, as often happens, the automatic script surpa.s.ses in intelligence, and even in its own kind of eloquence, the products of the waking or supraliminal mind.
And side by side and intercurrent with these written messages come those strange meaningless arabesques which have been baptized as ”spirit-drawings”--though they rarely show any clear trace of the operation of an external intelligence.[35] These complex and fanciful compositions--often absolutely automatic--appear to me like a stammering or rudimentary symbolism; as though the subliminal intelligence were striving to express itself through a vehicle perhaps more congenial to its habits than articulate language.
Returning, then, from these ill.u.s.trations drawn from actual _automatism_ to our proper subject of _genius_,--that happy mixture of subliminal with supraliminal faculty,--we may ask ourselves in what kind of subliminal uprush this hidden habit of wider symbolism, of self-communion beyond the limits of speech, will be likely to manifest itself above the conscious threshold.
The obvious answer to this question lies in the one word Art. The inspiration of Art of all kinds consists in the invention of precisely such a wider symbolism as has been above adumbrated. I am not speaking, of course, of symbolism of a forced and mechanical kind--symbolism designed and elaborated as such--but rather of that pre-existent but hidden concordance between visible and invisible things, between matter and thought, between thought and emotion, which the plastic arts, and music, and poetry, do each in their own special field discover and manifest for human wisdom and joy.
In using these words, I must repeat, I am far from adopting the formulae of any special school. The symbolism of which I speak implies nothing of mysticism. Nor indeed, in my view, can there be any real gulf or deep division between so-called realistic and idealistic schools. All that exists is continuous; nor can Art symbolise any one aspect of the universe without also implicitly symbolising aspects which lie beyond.
And thus in the Arts we have symbolism at every stage of transparency and obscurity; from symbolisms which merely summarise speech to symbolisms which transcend it. Sometimes, as with Music, it is worse than useless to press for too close an interpretation. Music marches, and will march for ever, through an ideal and unimaginable world. Her melody may be a mighty symbolism, but it is a symbolism to which man has lost the key. Poetry's material, on the other hand, is the very language which she would fain transcend. But her utterance must be subliminal and symbolic, if it is to be poetry indeed; it must rise (as has been already hinted) from a realm profounder than deliberate speech; it must come charged, as Tennyson has it, with that ”charm in words, a charm no words can give.”
Here, too, we must dwell for a moment upon another and higher kind of internal visualisation. I have spoken of the arithmetical prodigy as possessing a kind of internal blackboard, on which he inscribes with ease and permanence his imaginary memoranda. But blackboards are not the only surfaces on which inscriptions can be made. There are other men--prodigies of a different order--whose internal _tabula_ is not of blackened wood, but of canvas or of marble; whose inscriptions are not rows of Arabic numerals but living lines of colour, or curves of breathing stone. Even the most realistic art is something more than transcript and calculation; and for art's higher imaginative achievements there must needs be moments of inward idealisation when visible beauty seems but the token and symbol of beauty unrevealed; when Praxiteles must ”draw from his own heart the archetype of the Eros that he made;” when Tintoret must feel with Herac.l.i.tus that ”whatsoever we see waking is but deadness, and whatsoever sleeping, is but dream.”
But when we reach this point we have begun (as I say) to transcend the special province to which, in Chapter I, I a.s.signed the t.i.tle of _genius_. I there pointed out that the influence of the subliminal on the supraliminal might conveniently be divided under three main heads.
When the subliminal mentation co-operates with and supplements the supraliminal, without changing the apparent phase of personality, we have _genius_. When subliminal operations change the apparent phase of personality from the state of waking in the direction of trance, we have _hypnotism_. When the subliminal mentation forces itself up through the supraliminal, without amalgamation, as in crystal-vision, automatic writing, etc., we have _sensory or motor automatism_. In accordance with this definition, the _content_ of the inspirations of genius is supposed to be of the same general type as the content of ordinary thought. We have regarded genius as crystallising fluid ideas; or, if you will, as concentrating and throwing upwards in its clear fountain a maze of subterranean streams. But we have not regarded it as modifying, in such operation, the ordinary alert wakefulness of the thinker, nor as providing bun with any fresh knowledge, obtainable by supernormal methods alone.
It is plain, however, that such distinctions as those which I have drawn between genius, trance, automatism, cannot possibly be rigid or absolute. They are distinctions made for convenience between different phases of what must really be a continuous process--namely, the influence of the Self below the threshold upon the Self above it.
Between each of these definite phases all kinds of connections and intermediate stages must surely exist.
Connections between _trance_ and _automatism_, indeed, are obvious enough. The difficulty has rather lain in their clear separation.
Trance, when habitual, is pretty sure to lead to automatic speech or writing. Automatism, when prolonged, is similarly apt to induce a state of trance.
The links between _Genius_ and these cognate states are of a less conspicuous kind. They do, however, exist in such variety as to confirm in marked fas.h.i.+on the a.n.a.logies suggested above.
And first, as to the connection between genius and automatism, one may say that just as anger is a brief madness, so the flash of Genius is essentially a brief automatism.
Wordsworth's moments of inspiration, when, as he says,
”Some lovely image in the song rose up Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea,”
were in effect moments of automatic utterance; albeit of utterance held fast in immediate co-operation with the simultaneous workings of the supraliminal self. Such a sudden poetic creation, like the calculating boy's announcement of the product of two numbers, resembles the sudden rush of planchette or pencil, in haste to scrawl some long-wished-for word.