Man or Matter Part 9

And later:

'Hence in a season of calm weather Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us. .h.i.ther, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the sh.o.r.e, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.''

The fact that Wordsworth in his later years gave no further indication of such experiences need not prevent us from taking quite literally what he says here. The truth is that an original faculty faded away with increasing age, somewhat as happened with Reid when he could no longer continue his philosophical work along its original lines.

Wordsworth's Ode is the testament of the childhood forces still persisting but already declining within him; it is significant that he set it down in about the same year of life (his thirty-sixth) as that in which Traherne died and in which Goethe, seeking renewal of his being, took flight to Italy.7

Of Traherne, too, we shall say here only as much as our present consideration and the further aims of this book require. We cannot concern ourselves with the remarkable events which led, half a century ago, to the discovery and identification of his long-lost writings by Bertram Dobell. Nor can we deal with the details of the eventful life and remarkable spiritual development of this contemporary of the Civil War. These matters are dealt with in Dobell's introduction to his edition of Traherne's poems, as also by Gladys I. Wade in her work, Thomas Traherne. Our grat.i.tude for the labours of these two writers by which they have provided mankind with the knowledge of the character and the work of this unique personality cannot hinder us, however, from stating that both were prevented by the premises of their own view of the world from rightly estimating that side of Traherne which is important for us in this book, and with which we shall specially concern ourselves in the following pages.

Later in this chapter we shall discuss Dobell's philosophical misinterpretation of Traherne, to which he fell victim because he maintained his accustomed spectator standpoint in regard to his object of study. Miss Wade has, indeed, been able to pay the right tribute to Traherne, the mystic, whose inner (and also outer) biography she was able to detect by taking seriously Traherne's indications concerning his mystical development. Her mind, however, was too rigidly focused on this side of Traherne's life - his self-training by an iron inner discipline and his toilsome ascent from the experience of Nothingness to a state of Beatific Vision. This fact, combined with her disinclination to overcome the Augustinian picture of man in herself, prevented her from taking Traherne equally seriously where he speaks as one who is endowed with a never interrupted memory of his primeval cosmic consciousness - notwithstanding the fact that Traherne himself has pointed to this side of his nature as the most significant for his fellow-men.

Of the two works of Traherne which Dobell rescued from oblivion, on both of which we shall draw for our exposition, one contains his poems, the other his prose writings. The t.i.tle of the latter is Centuries of Meditations. The t.i.tle page of one of the two ma.n.u.scripts containing the collection of the poetical writings introduces these as Poems of Felicity, Containing Divine Reflections on the Native Objects of an Infant-Eye. As regards the t.i.tle 'Centuries of Meditations' we are ignorant of the meaning Traherne may have attached to it, and what he meant by calling the four parts of the book, 'First', 'Second', etc., Century. The book itself represents a manual of devotion for meditative study by the reader.

Let our first quotation be one from the opening paragraph of the third 'Century' in which Traherne introduces himself as the bearer of certain uncommon powers of memory and, arising from these powers, a particular mission as a teacher:

'Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born are the best unto this day, wherein I can see the Universe. By the gift of G.o.d they attended me into the world, and by His special favour I remember them till now. Verily they seem the greatest gifts His wisdom could bestow, for without them all other gifts had been dead and vain. They are unattainable by books, and therefore I will teach them by experience.' (Ill, 1.)

The picture thus remaining with him of his nature of soul in his earliest years on earth he describes as follows:

'Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child. All appeared new, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger, which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys. My knowledge was Divine. I knew by intuition those things which since my Apostacy, I collected again by the highest reason. I was entertained like an Angel with the works of G.o.d in their splendour and glory, I saw all in the peace of Eden; Heaven and Earth did sing my Creator's praises, and could not make more melody to Adam, than to me. All Time was Eternity, and a perpetual Sabbath. Is it not strange, that an infant should be the heir of the whole world, and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?' (Ill, 1, 2.)

In a different form the same experience comes to expression in the opening lines of Traherne's poem, Wonder:

'How like an Angel came I down!

How bright are all things here I When first among his Works I did appear O how their GLORY did me crown!

The World resembled his ETERNITIE, In which my Soul did Walk; And evry Thing that I did see Did with me talk.'8

The picture of man thus sketched by Traherne is as close to Reid's as it is remote from Augustine's. This remoteness comes plainly to expression in the way Traherne and Augustine regard the summons of Christ to His disciples to become as little children, a summons to which Reid was led, as we have seen, on purely philosophical grounds.

Let us first of all recall the words of Christ as recorded by Matthew in his 18th and 19th chapters:

'And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, and said: Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of Heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven.' (xviii, 2-4.)

'Suffer the little children and forbid them not to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of Heaven.' (xix, 14.)

Augustine refers to these words when he concludes that examination of his childhood memories which he undertook in order to prove the depravity of the soul from its first day on earth. He says: 'In the littleness of children didst Thou, our king, give us a symbol of humility when Thou didst say: Of such is the kingdom of Heaven.'

If we glance back from what Augustine says here to the original pa.s.sages in the Gospel just quoted, we see what a remarkable alteration he makes. Of the first pa.s.sage only the last sentence is taken, and this in Augustine's mind is fused into one with the second pa.s.sage.

Thereby the admonition of Christ through one's own effort to become as one once was as a child disappears completely. The whole pa.s.sage thus takes on a meaning corresponding to that pa.s.sive att.i.tude to the divine will inculcated by Augustine and opposed by Pelagius, and it is in this sense that the words of Christ have sunk into the consciousness of Western Christianity and are usually taken to-day.

We may see how differently this injunction of Christ lived in Traherne's consciousness from the following pa.s.sage out of his Centuries:

'Our Saviour's meaning, when He said, ye must be born again and become a little child that will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, is deeper far than is generally believed. It is not only in a careless reliance upon Divine Providence, that we are to become little children, or in the feebleness and shortness of our anger and simplicity of our pa.s.sions, but in the peace and purity of all our soul. Which purity also is a deeper thing than is commonly apprehended.' (Ill, 5.)

With Traherne also the pa.s.sage in question has been fused together with another utterance of Christ, from John's account of Christ's conversation with Nicodemus:

'Verily, verily I say unto you, except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of G.o.d.' (John iii, 3.)

What conception of the infant condition of man must have existed in a soul for it to unite these two pa.s.sages from the Gospels in this way?

Whereas for Augustine it is because of its small stature and helplessness that the child becomes a symbol for the spiritual smallness and helplessness of man as such, compared with the overwhelming power of the divine King, for Traherne it is the child's nearness to G.o.d which is most present to him, and which must be regained by the man who strives for inner perfection.

Traherne could bear in himself such a picture of man's infancy because, as he himself emphasizes, he was in possession of an unbroken memory of the experiences which the soul enjoys before it awakens to earthly sense-perception. The following pa.s.sage from the poem, My Spirit, gives a detailed picture of the early state in which the soul has experiences and perceptions quite different from those of its later life. (We may recall Reid's indication of how the child receives the natural language of things.)

'An Object, if it were before Mine Ey, was by Dame Nature's Law Within my Soul: Her Store Was all at once within me; all her Treasures Were my immediat and internal Pleasures; Substantial Joys, which did inform my Mind.

'... I could not tell Whether the Things did there Themselvs appear, Which in my Spirit truly seem'd to dwell: Or whether my conforming Mind Were not ev'n all that therein s.h.i.+n'd.'

Further detail is added to this picture by the description, given in the poem The Praeparative, of the soul's non-experience of the body at that early stage. The description is unmistakably one of an experience during the time between conception and birth.

'My Body being dead, my Limbs unknown; Before I skill'd to prize Those living Stars, mine Eys; Before or Tongue or Cheeks I call'd mine own, Before I knew these Hands were mine, Or that my Sinews did my Members join; When neither Nostril, Foot, nor Ear, As yet could be discerned or did appear; I was within A House I knew not; newly cloath'd with Skin.

Then was my Soul my only All to me, A living endless Ey, Scarce bounded with the Sky, Whose Power, and Act, and Essence was to see; I was an inward Sphere of Light, Or an interminable Orb of Sight, Exceeding that which makes the Days, A vital Sun that shed abroad its Rays: All Life, all Sense, A naked, simple, pure Intelligence.''

In the stanza following upon this, Traherne makes a statement which is of particular importance in the context of our present discussion.

After some additional description of the absence of all bodily needs he says:

'Without disturbance then I did receiv The tru Ideas of all Things'

The ma.n.u.script of this poem shows a small alteration in Traherne's hand in the second of these two lines. Where we now read 'true Ideas', there originally stood 'fair Ideas'. 'Fair' described Traherne's experience as he immediately remembered it; the later alteration to 'true' shows how well aware he was that his contemporaries might miss what he meant by 'Idea', through taking it in the sense that had already become customary in his time, namely, as a mere product of man's own mental activity.

This precaution, however, has not saved Traherne from being misinterpreted in our own day in precisely the way he feared - indeed, by no less a person than his own discoverer, Dobell. It is the symptomatic character of this misinterpretation which prompts us to deal with it here.

In his attempt to cla.s.sify the philosophical mode of thought behind Traherne's writings, Dobell, to his own amazement, comes to the conclusion that Traherne had antic.i.p.ated Bishop Berkeley (1684-1753).

They seemed to him so alike that he does not hesitate to call Traherne a 'Berkeleyan before Berkeley was born'. In proof of this he refers to the poems, The Praeparative and My Spirit, citing from the latter the pa.s.sage given above (page 112), and drawing special attention to its two concluding lines. Regarding this he says: 'I am much mistaken if the theory of non-existence of independent matter, which is the essence of Berkeley's system, is not to be found in this poem. The thought that the whole exterior universe is not really a thing apart from and independent of man's consciousness of it, but something which exists only as it is perceived, is undeniably found in My Spirit:

The reader who has followed our exposition in the earlier parts of this chapter can be in no doubt that, to find a philosophy similar to Traherne's, he must look for it in Reid and not in Berkeley. Reid himself rightly placed Berkeley amongst the representatives of the 'ideal system' of thought. For Berkeley's philosophy represents an effort of the onlooker-consciousness, unable as it was to arrive at certainty regarding the objective existence of a material world outside itself, to secure recognition for an objective Self behind the flux of mental phenomena. Berkeley hoped to do this by supposing that the world, including G.o.d, consists of nothing but 'idea'-creating minds, operating like the human mind as man himself perceives it. His world picture, based (as is well known) entirely on optical experiences, is the perfect example of a philosophy contrived by the one-eyed, colourblind world-spectator.

We shall understand what in Traherne's descriptions reminded Dobell of Berkeley, if we take into account the connexion of the soul with the body at the time when, according to Traherne, it still enjoys the untroubled perception of the true, the light-filled, Ideas of things.

In this condition the soul has only a dim and undifferentiated awareness of its connexion with a spatially limited body ('I was within a house I knew not, newly clothed with skin') and it certainly knows nothing at all of the body as an instrument, through which the will can be exercised in an earthly-spatial way ('My body being dead, my limbs unknown'). Instead of this, the soul experiences itself simply as a supersensible sense-organ and as such united with the far s.p.a.ces of the universe ('Before I skilled to prize those living stars, mine eyes. ...

Then was my soul my only All to me, a living endless eye, scarce bounded with the sky').

At the time when the soul has experiences of the kind described by Traherne, it is in a condition in which, as yet, no active contact has been established between itself and the physical matter of the body and thereby with gravity. Hence there is truth in the picture which Traherne thus sketches from actual memory. The same cannot be said of Berkeley's world-picture. The fact that both resemble each other in certain features need not surprise us, seeing that Berkeley's picture is, in its own way, a pure 'eye-picture' of the world. As such, however, it is an illusion - for it is intended for a state of man for which it is not suited, namely for adult man going upright on the earth, directing his deeds within its material realm, and in this way fas.h.i.+oning his own destiny.

Indeed, compared with Berkeley's eye-picture of the world, that of Reid is in every respect a 'limb-picture'. For where he seeks for the origin of our nave a.s.surance that a real material world exists, there he reverts - guided by his common sense - to the experiences available to the soul through the fact that the limbs of the body meet with the resistant matter of the world. And whenever he turns to the various senses in his search, it is always the will-activity of the soul within the sense he is investigating - and so the limb-nature within it - to which he first turns his attention. Because, unlike Berkeley, he takes into account the experiences undergone by the soul when it leaves behind its primal condition, Reid does not fall into illusion, but discovers a fundamental truth concerning the nature of the world-picture experienced by man in his adult age. This, in turn, enables him to discover the nature of man's world picture in early childhood and to recognize the importance of recovering it in later life as a foundation for a true philosophy.

a.s.suredly, the philosopher who discovered that we must become as little children again if we would be philosophers, is the one to whom we may relate Traherne, but not Berkeley. And if we wish to speak of Traherne, as Dobell tried to do, we speak correctly only if we call him a 'Reidean before Reid was born'.

A little more than a hundred years after Thomas Traherne taught his fellow-men 'from experience' that there is an original condition of man's soul, before it is yet able to prize 'those living stars, mine eyes', in which it is endowed with the faculty to see 'the true (fair) Ideas of all things', Goethe was led to the realization that he had achieved the possibility of 'seeing Ideas with the very eyes'. Although he was himself not aware of it, the conception of the Idea was at this moment restored through him to its true and original Platonic significance.

The present chapter has shown us how this conception of the Idea is bound up with the view that is held of the relations.h.i.+p between human nature in early childhood and human nature in later life. We have seen that, when Plato introduced the term Idea as an expression for spiritual ent.i.ties having a real and independent existence, men were still in possession of some recollection of their own pre-earthly existence. We then found Traherne saying from his recollections that in the original form of man's consciousness his soul is endowed with the faculty of seeing 'true' Ideas, and we found Reid on similar grounds fighting the significance which the term 'idea' had a.s.sumed under his predecessors. By their side we see Goethe as one in whom the faculty of seeing Ideas appears for the first time in adult man as a result of a systematic training of observation and thought.

If our view of the interdependence of the Platonic conception of the Idea with the picture man has of himself is seen rightly, then Goethe must have been the bearer of such a picture. Our expectation is shown to be right by the following two pa.s.sages from Goethe's autobiography, Truth and Fiction.

In that part of his life story where Goethe concludes the report of the first period of his childhood (Book II), he writes: