Part 22 (1/2)
Has every finite being (or only some) the temptation to become intensely and wholly conscious of its distinctness and, as a result, to be betrayed into the wretchedness of _division_? Grosser natures, wholly swallowed up in selfishness which does not rise to self-love, never even acquire that sense of distinctness, while, to others, love is the first step to re-union. It is a by-word that religious enthusiasm borders on and tends to sensuality--possibly because all our powers work together, and as a consequence of striding too vastly up the ladder of existence, a great _round_ of the ladder is omitted, namely, love to some, _Eine verschiedene_, of our own kind. Then let Religion love, else will it not only partake of, instead of being partaken by, and so co-adunated with, the summit of love, but will necessarily include the nadir of love, that is, appet.i.te. Hence will it tend to dissensualise its nature into fantastic pa.s.sions, the idolatry of Paphian priestesses.
[Sidenote: IN WONDER ALL PHILOSOPHY BEGAN]
Time, s.p.a.ce, duration, action, active pa.s.sion pa.s.sive, activeness, pa.s.siveness, reaction, causation, affinity--here a.s.semble all the mysteries known. All is known-unknown, say, rather, _merely_ known. All is unintelligible, and yet Locke and the stupid adorers of that _fetish_ earth-clod take all for granted. By the bye, in poetry as well as metaphysics, that which we first meet with in the dawn of our mind becomes ever after _fetish_, to the many at least. Blessed he who first sees the morning star, if not the sun, or purpling clouds his harbingers. Thence is _fame_ desirable to a great man, and thence subversion of vulgar fetishes becomes a duty.
Rest, motion! O ye strange locks of intricate simplicity, who shall find the key? He shall throw wide open the portals of the palace of sensuous or symbolical truth, and the Holy of Holies will be found in the adyta.
Rest = enjoyment and death. Motion = enjoyment and life. O the depth of the proverb, ”Extremes meet”!
[Sidenote: IN A TWINKLING OF THE EYE]
The ”break of the morning”--and from inaction a nation starts up into motion and wide fellow-consciousness! The trumpet of the Archangel--and a world with all its troops and companies of generations starts up into a hundredfold expansion, power multiplied into itself cubically by the number of all its possible acts--all the potential springing into power.
Conceive a bliss from self-conscience, combining with bliss from increase of action; the first dreaming, the latter dead-asleep in a grain of gunpowder--conceive a huge magazine of gunpowder and a flash of lightning awakes the whole at once. What an image of the resurrection, grand from its very inadequacy. Yet again, conceive the living, moving ocean--its bed sinks away from under and the whole world of waters falls in at once on a thousand times vaster ma.s.s of intensest fire, and the whole prior orbit of the planet's successive revolutions is possessed by it at once (_Potentia fit actus_) amid the thunder of rapture.
[Sidenote: SINE QUa NON]
Form is fact.i.tious being, and thinking is the process; imagination the laboratory in which the thought elaborates essence into existence. A philosopher, that is, a nominal philosopher without imagination, is a _coiner_. Vanity, the _froth_ of the molten ma.s.s, is his _stuff_, and verbiage the stamp and impression. This is but a deaf metaphor--better say that he is guilty of forgery. He presents the same sort of _paper_ as the honest barterer, but when you carry it to the bank it is found to be drawn to _Outis_, _Esq._ His words had deposited no forms there, payable at sight--or even at any imaginable _time_ from the date of the draft.
[Sidenote: SOLVITUR SUSPICIENDO]
The sky, or rather say, the aether at Malta, with the sun apparently suspended in it, the eye seeming to pierce beyond and, as it were, behind it--and, below, the aethereal sea, so blue, so _ein zerflossenes_, the substantial image, and fixed real reflection of the sky! O! I could annihilate in a deep moment all possibility of the needle-point, pin's-head system of the _atomists_ by one submissive gaze!
[Sidenote: A GEM OF MORNING]
A dewdrop, the pearl of Aurora, is indeed a true _unio_. I would that _unio_ were the word for the dewdrop, and the pearl be called _unio marinus_.
_VER_, _ZER_, AND _AL_
O for the power to persuade all the writers of Great Britain to adopt the _ver_, _zer_, and _al_ of the German! Why not verboil, zerboil; verrend, zerrend? I should like the very words _verflossen_, _zerflossen_, to be naturalised:
And as I looked now feels my soul creative throes, And now all joy, all sense _zerflows_.
I do not know, whether I am in earnest or in sport while I recommend this _ver_ and _zer_; that is, I cannot be sure whether I feel, myself, anything ridiculous in the idea, or whether the feeling that seems to imply this be not the effect of my antic.i.p.ation of and sympathy with the ridicule of, perhaps, all my readers.
[Sidenote: THE LOVER'S HUMILITY]
To you there are many like me, yet to me there is none like you, and you are always like yourself. There are groves of night-flowers, yet the night-flower sees only the moon.
CHAPTER VI
_1808-1809_
Yea, oft alone, Piercing the long-neglected holy cave The haunt obscure of old Philosophy, He bade with lifted torch its starry walls Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame Of odorous lamps tended by Saint and Sage.