The Complex Vision Part 28

The universal wisdom of the ages bears witness to the fact that a "moderate poverty" or a "moderate competence" is the ideal outward state for a man to find himself in. And this "moderate enjoyment" of food, shelter, clothing, comfort, leisure and emotional happiness, is a thing which, in a scientifically organized communistic society, would be within the reach of even the least efficient.

The gloomy and melancholy argument brought forward by the enemies of "communism" that under such a condition "the incentive of private initiative would disappear" and that no other motive could take its place, is an argument based upon the a.s.sumption that human nature derives more inspiration from the idea of dishonourable greed than it derives from the idea of honourable and useful labour; which is an a.s.sumption so wholly opposed to true psychology that it has only to be nakedly stated to be seen in its complete absurdity.

What the psychologist, interested in this abysmal struggle between the idea of communism and the idea of private property, has to note is the nature and character of the particular individual who brings forward this argument of the "incentive of greed" or the "initiative" produced by greed. Such an individual will never be found to be a great man of science, or a great artist or scholar or craftsman, or a first-rate engineer, or a highly trained artisan or farmer or builder.

The individual bringing forward this argument of the "initiative of greed" will invariably be found to be a member of what might be called the "parasitic cla.s.s." He will either be an intellectually second-rate minister or politician or lawyer or professor, or he will be a commercial and financial "middleman," whose activities are entirely absorbed in the art of exploitation and who has never experienced the sensation of creative work.

If he does not himself belong to the unproductive and parasitic cla.s.s it will be easy to detect in him the unmistakable presence of the emotion of malice. Nowhere is the emotion of malice more entirely in harmony with itself than when it is engaged in attributing base and sordid motives to the energy of human nature.

This monstrous doctrine that human beings _require_ "the incentive of greed" and that without that incentive or "initiative"

no one would engage in any kind of creative work, is a doctrine springing directly from the aboriginal malice of the soul; and a doctrine which is refuted every day by every honest, healthy and honourable man and woman.

But all these are, after all, only negative proofs of the inevitable rise, out of the very necessity of love's nature, of the idea of communism. Of all mortal instincts, the possessive instinct is the most insidious and most evil. Love is for ever being perverted and polluted by this thing, and turned from its true essence into something other than itself. This is equally true of love whether such love is directed towards persons or towards ideas or things.

The possessive instinct springing directly from the aboriginal malice is perpetually deceiving itself. Apparently and superficially what it aims at is the eternally "static." In other words what it aims at is the retention in everlasting immobility of the person or the idea or the thing into which it has dug its claws.

Thus the maternal instinct, in its evil mood, aims at petrifying and rendering immobile that helpless youthfulness in its offspring which the possessive pa.s.sion finds so provocative and exciting.

Thus the lover in his evil mood, desires that the object of his love should remain in everlasting immobility, an odalisque of eternal reciprocity. That this evil desire takes the form of a longing that the object of his love should eternally escape and eternally be recaptured makes no difference in the basic feeling.

Thus the collector of "works of art"--a being divided from the real lover of art by an impa.s.sable gulf--derives no pleasure from the beauty of anything until it has become _his_, until he has hidden it away from all the rest of the world. Thus the lover of "nature," in his evil mood, derives no pleasure from the fitful magic of gra.s.s and bowers and trees, until he feels happy in the mad illusion that the very body of the earth, even to the centre of the planet, where these things grow, is his "private" property and is something fixed, permanent, static, unchanging. But all this desire for the eternally "static" is superficial and self-deceiving.

a.n.a.lysed down to its very depth, what this evil possessive instinct desires is what all malice desires, namely the annihilation of life.

Pretending to itself that it desires to hug to itself, in eternal immobility, the thing it loves, what in its secret essence it really desires is that thing's absolute annihilation. It wants to hug that thing so tightly to itself that the independence of the thing completely vanishes. It wants to destroy all separation between itself and the thing, and all liberty and freedom for the thing. It wants "to eat the thing up" and draw the thing into its own being.

Its evil desire can never find complete satisfaction until it has "killed the thing it loves" and buried it within its own ident.i.ty. It is this evil possessive element in s.e.xual love, whether of a man for a woman or a woman for a man, which is the real evil in the s.e.xual pa.s.sion. It is this possessive instinct in maternal love which is the evil element in the love of a mother for a child. Both these evil emotions tend to make war upon life.

The mother, in her secret sub-conscious pa.s.sion, desires to draw back her infant into her womb, and restore it to its pre-natal physiological unity with herself. The lover in his secret evil sub-consciousness, desires to draw his beloved into ever-increasing unity with himself, until the separation between them is at an end and her ident.i.ty is lost in his ident.i.ty.

The final issue, therefore, of this evil instinct of possession, this evil instinct of private property, can never be anything else than death. Death is what the ultimate emotion of malice desires; and death is an actual result of the instinct of possession carried to an extreme limit.

The static immobility and complete "unchangeableness" which the possessive instinct pretends to itself is all it desires is really therefore nothing but a mask for its desire to destroy. The possessive instinct is, in its profoundest abyss, an amorist of death.

What it secretly loves is the dead; for the dead alone can never defraud it of its satisfaction. Wherever love exercises its creative energy the possessive instinct relaxes its hold. Love expands and diffuses itself. Love projects itself and merges itself The creative impulse is always centrifugal. The indrawing movement, the centripetal movement, is a sign of the presence of that inert malice which would reduce all life to nothingness.

The creative energy of love issues inevitably in the idea of communism. The idea of communism implies the complete abolition of private property; because private property, whether it be property in persons or in things, is essentially evil, is indeed the natural expression of the primordial inert malice, in its hostility to life. Under any realization, in actual existence, of the idea of communism the creative energy finds itself free to expand and dilate. All that heavy clogging burden of "the personally possessed" being shaken off, the natural fresh shoots of living beauty rise to the surface like the new green growths of spring when the winter's rubble has been washed away by the rain.

The accursed system of private property, rooted in the abysmal malice of the human heart, lies like a dead weight upon every creative impulse. Everything is weighed and judged, everything is valued and measured, in relation to this.

Modern Law is the system of restriction by which we protect private property.

Modern religion is the system of compensation by which we soften the difference between inequalities in private property.

Modern politics is the system of compromise by which public opinion registers its devotion to private property. Modern morality is the system of artificial inhibitions by which the human conscience is perverted into regarding private property as the supreme good.

Modern science is the system by which private property is increased and the uses of it made more complicated. Modern "truth" is the system of traditional opinion by which the illusion of private property is established as "responsible" thinking, and "serious" thinking, and "ethical" thinking.

Modern art is the system by which what is most gross and vulgar in the popular taste is pandered to in the interests of private property.

The creative energy in modern life is therefore restricted and opposed at almost every point by the evil instinct to possess. Of every new idea the question is asked, "does it conflict with private property?"

Of every new aesthetic judgment the question is asked, "does it conflict with private property?"

Of every new moral valuation the question is asked, "does it conflict with private property?" And the instinct which puts these questions to every new movement of the creative energy is the instinct of inert malice. The object of life can be regarded as nothing less than the realization of the vision of the Immortals; and it is only under a communistic state that the vision of the Immortals can be realized; because only in such a state is that petrified illusion of inert malice which we name "private property"

thoroughly got rid of and destroyed.

CONCLUSION

No attempted articulation of the mystery, life, can be worthy of being named a "philosophy" unless it has a definite bearing upon what, in the midst of that confused "manifold" through which we move, we call the problem of conduct.

The ma.s.s of complicated impression, which from our first dawn of consciousness presses upon us, falls into two main divisions--the portion of it which comes under the power of our will and the portion of it which is supplied by destiny or circ.u.mstance, and over which our will is impotent.

Superficially speaking what we call conduct only applies to action; but in a deeper sense it applies to that whole division of our sensations, emotions, ideas, and energies, whether it take the form of action or not, which comes in any measure under the power of the will. Such acts of the mind therefore, as are purely intellectual or emotional--as for instance what we call "acts of faith"--are as much to be considered forms of conduct as those outer visible material gestures which manifest themselves in action.

This is no fantastic or extravagant fancy. It is the old cla.s.sical and catholic doctrine, to which not only such thinkers as Plato and Spinoza have affixed their seal, but which is at the root of the deepest instincts of Buddhists, Christians, Epicureans, Stoics, and the mystics of all ages. It may be summed up by the statement that life is an art towards which the will must be directed; and that the larger portion of life manifests itself in interior contemplation and only the smaller part of it in overt action.

In both these spheres, in the sphere of contemplation as much as in the sphere of action, there exists that "given element" of destiny or circ.u.mstance, in the presence of which the will is powerless. But in regard to this given element it must be remembered that no individual soul can ever, to the end of time, be absolutely certain that in any particular case, whether his own or another's, he has finally arrived at this irreducible fatality.

The extraordinary phenomenon of what religious people call "conversion," a phenomenon which implies a change of heart so unexpected and startling as to seem miraculous, is a proof of how unwise it is to be in any particular case rigidly dogmatic as to where the sunken rock of destiny really begins. So many appearances have taken the shape of this finality, so many mirages of "false fate" have paralysed our will, that it is wisest to believe to the very end of our days that our att.i.tude to destiny can change and modify destiny.

a.s.suming then that the articulation of the mystery of life which has been outlined in this book, under the name of "the philosophy of the complex vision," must remain the barest of intellectual hypotheses until it has manifested itself in "conduct"; and a.s.suming further that this "conduct" includes the whole of that portion of life, whether contemplative or active, which can be reduced to a fine art by the effort of the will; the question emerges--what kind of effort must the will make, both interiorally and exteriorally, if it desire to respond, by a rhythmic reciprocity, to the vision which the intellect has accepted?

It must be remembered that the vision upon which this philosophy depends and from which it derives its primordial a.s.sumptions is not the normal vision of the human soul. The philosophy of the complex vision rejects the normal vision of the human soul on behalf of the abnormal vision of the human soul. Its point of view, in this matter, is that the human soul only arrives at the secret of the universe in those exalted, heightened, exceptional and rare moments, when all the multiform activities of the soul's life achieve a musical consummation. Its point of view is that since philosophy, at its deepest and highest, necessarily becomes art; and since art is a rare and difficult thing requiring infinite adjustments and reconciliations; what philosophy has really to use, in formulating any sort of adequate system, is the memory of such rare moments after they have pa.s.sed away. The point of view from which we have made all our basic a.s.sumptions is the point of view that the secret of the universe is only revealed to man in rare moments of ecstasy; and that what man's reason has to do is to gather together in memory the broken and scattered fragments of these moments and out of this residuum build up and round off, as best it may, some coherent interpretation of life.

From all this it follows that the first rhythmic reply of the human will to the vision to serve is a pa.s.sionate act of what might be called "contemplative tension," in the direction of the reviving of such memories, and in the direction of preparing the ground for the return of another "moment of vision" similar in nature to those that have gone before.

The secret of this act of inward contemplative tension we have already a.n.a.lysed. We have found it to consist in a "complex" of all the primordial energies of the soul, focussed and concentrated into what we have compared to a pyramidal apex-point by the power of a certain synthetic movement of the soul itself which we have named the apex-thought.

The reply of the will, therefore, to the vision it desires to serve consists of a gathering together of all the energies of the soul into a rhythmic harmony. It may well be that this premeditated and deliberately constructed harmony will have to wait for many days and years without experiencing the magic touch of the soul's apex-thought. For though we may pa.s.sionately desire the touch of this--aye, and pray for it with a most desperate prayer!--it is of the very nature of this mysterious thing to require for the moment of its activity something else than the contemplative tension which has prepared the ground for its appearance. For this synthetic apex-thought, which is the soul's highest power, is only in a very limited sense within the power of the will.

The whole matter is obscure and perhaps inexplicable; but it seems as if a place were required here for some philosophic equivalent of that free gift of the G.o.ds which, in theological language, goes by the name of "grace." Long and long may the soul wait--with the hardly won rhythm of its multiform "complex" poised in vibrant expectation--before the moment arrives in which the apex-thought can strike its note of ecstasy.

In the time and place of such a moment, in the acc.u.mulation of conditions which render such a moment eternal, chance and circ.u.mstance may play a prominent part. There is, however, an inveterate instinct in humanity--not perhaps to be altogether disregarded--according to the voice of which this unaccountable element of chance and circ.u.mstance, or, shall we say, of destiny, is itself the result of the interposed influence of the invisible companions. But whether this be so or not, the fact remains that some alien element of indeterminable chance or circ.u.mstance or destiny does frequently enter into that acc.u.mulation of obscure conditions which seem to be necessary before the magic of the apex-thought is roused.

This preparing of the ground, this deliberate concentration of the soul's energies, is the first movement of the will in answer to the attraction of the eternal vision discerned so far only as a remote ideal. The second movement of the will has been already implied in the first, and is only a lifting into clear consciousness of what led the soul to make its initial effort. I speak of the part played by the will in the abysmal struggle between love and malice. This struggle was really implicit, in the beginning, in the effort the will made to focus the multiform energies of the complex vision. But directly some measure of insight into the secret of life has followed upon this effort, or directly, if the soul's good fortune has been exceptional, its great illuminative moment has been reached, the will finds itself irresistibly plunged into this struggle, finds itself inevitably ranged, on one side or the other, of the ultimate duality.

That the first effort of the will was largely what might be called an intellectual one, though its purpose was to make use of all the soul's attributes together, is proved by the fact that it is possible for human souls to be possessed of formidable insight into the secret of life and yet to use that insight for evil rather than for good.

But the second movement of the will, of which I am now speaking, reveals without a shadow of ambiguity on which side of the eternal contest the personality in question has resolved to throw its weight. If, in this second movement, the will answers, with a reciprocal gathering of itself together, the now far clearer attraction of the vision attained by its original effort, it will be found to range itself on the side of love against the power of malice.

If, on the contrary, having made use of its original vision to understand the secret of this struggle, it allies itself with the power of malice against love, it will be found to produce the spectacle of a soul of illuminated intellectual insight deliberately concentrated on evil rather than good.

But once irrevocably committed to the power of that creative energy which we call love, the will, though it may have innumerable lapses and moments of troubled darkness, never ceases from its abysmal struggle. For this is the conclusion of the whole matter. When we speak of the eternal duality as consisting in a struggle between love and malice, what we really mean is that the human soul, concentrated into the magnet-point of a pa.s.sionately conscious will, is found varying and quivering between the pole of love and the pole of malice.

The whole drama is contained within the circle of personality; and it would be of a similar nature if the personality in question were confronted by no other thing in the universe except the objective mystery. I mean that the soul would be committed to a struggle between its creative energy and its inert malice even if there were no other living persons in the world towards whom this love and this malice could be directed.

I have compared the substance of the soul to an arrowhead of concentrated flames, the shaft of which is wrapped in impenetrable darkness while the point of it pierces the objective mystery. From within the impenetrable darkness of this invisible arrow-shaft the very substance of the soul is projected; and in its projection it a.s.sumes the form of these flames; and the name I have given to this mysterious outpouring of the soul is _emotion_, whereof the opposing poles of contending force are respectively love and malice. The psycho-material substance of the invisible soul-monad is itself divided into this eternally alternating duality, of which the projected "flames," or manifested "energies" are the constant expression. Each of these energies has as its concrete "material,"

so to speak, the one projected substance of the soul; and is thus composed of the very stuff of emotion.

The eternal duality of this emotion takes various forms in these various manifestations of its one substance. Thus the energy or flame of the aesthetic sense resolves itself into the opposed vibrations of the beautiful and the hideous. Thus the energy, or flame, of the pure reason resolves itself into the opposed vibrations of the true and the false. Thus the energy, or flame, of conscience resolves itself into the opposed vibrations of the good and the evil.