The Complex Vision Part 5

The particular message or command of conscience is bound to differ in a thousand ways in the cases of different personalities. Only in its ultimate essence it cannot differ. Because, in its ultimate essence, the conscience of every individual is confronted by that eternal duality of love and malice which is the universal contradiction at the basis of every living soul.

But short of this there is room for an infinite variety of "categorical imperatives." The conscience of one personality is able to accept as its "good" the very same thing that another personality is compelled to regard as its "evil." Indeed it is conceivable that a moment might arise in the history of the race when one single solitary individual called that thing "good" or that thing "evil" which all the rest of the world regarded in the opposite sense. Not only so; but it might even happen that the genius and persuasiveness of such a person might change into its direct opposite the moral valuation of the whole of humanity. In many quite ordinary cases there may arise a clash between the conventional morality of the community and the verdict of an individual conscience. In such cases it would be towards what the community termed "immoral" that the conscience of the individual would point, and from the thing that the community termed "moral" that it would turn instinctively away.

A conscience of this kind would suffer the pain of remorse when in its weakness it let itself be swayed by the "community-morality"

and it would experience the pleasure of relief when in absolute loneliness it defied the verdict of society.

Let us consider now an attribute of man's complex vision which must instantaneously be accepted as basic and fundamental by every living person. I refer to what we call "sensation." The impressions of the outward senses may be criticized. They may be corrected, modified, reduced to order, and supplemented by other considerations.

Conclusions based upon them may be questioned. But whatever be done with them, or made by them, they must always remain an integral and inveterate aspect of man's personality.

The sensations of pain and pleasure--who can deny the primordial and inescapable character of these? Not that the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of pain can be the unbroken motive-force even of the most hedonistic among us. Our complex vision frequently flings us pa.s.sionately upon pain. We often embrace pain in an ecstasy of welcome. Nor is this fierce embracing of pain "motivated" by a deliberate desire to get pleasure out of pain. It seems in some strange way due to an attraction towards pain for its own sake-- towards pain, as though pain were really beautiful and desirable in itself. One element in all this is undoubtedly due to the desire of the will to a.s.sert its freedom and the integrity of its being; in other words to the desire of the will towards the irrational, the capricious, the destructive, the chaotic.

It has been only the least imaginative of philosophers who have taken for granted that man invariably desires his own welfare. Man does not even invariably desire his own pleasure. He desires the reactive vibration of power; and very often this "power" is the power to rush blindly upon destruction. But, whether dominant or not as a motive affecting the will, it remains that our experience of pleasure and pain is a basic experience of the complex vision. And this experience of sensation is not only a pa.s.sive experience. The attribute of sensation has its active, its energetic, its creative side. No one who has suffered extreme pain or enjoyed exquisite and thrilling pleasures, can deny the curious fact that these things take to themselves a kind of independent life within us and become something very like "ent.i.ties" or living separate objects.

This phenomenon is due to the fact that our whole personality incarnates itself in the pain or in the pleasure of the moment. Such pain, such pleasure, is the quintessential attenuated "matter" with which our soul clothes itself. At such moments we _are_ the pain; we _are_ the pleasure. Our human ident.i.ty seems merged, lost, annihilated. Our soul seems no longer _our_ soul. It becomes the soul of the overpowering sensation. We ourselves at such moments become fiery molecules of pain, burning atoms of pleasure. Just as the logical reason can abstract itself from the other primal energies and perform strange and fantastic tricks, so the activity of sensation can so absorb, obsess and overpower the whole personality that the rhythm of existence is entirely broken.

Pain at the point of ecstasy, pleasure at the point of ecstasy, are both of them destructive of those rare moments when our complex vision resolves itself into music. Such music is indeed itself a kind of ecstasy; but it is an ecstasy intellectualized and consciously creative. Pain is present there and pleasure is present there; but they are there only as orchestral notes in a larger unity that has absorbed them and trans.m.u.ted them.

When a work of art by reason of its sensational appeal reduces us to an ecstasy of pleasure or pain it renders impossible that supreme act of the complex vision by means of which the immortal calm of the ideal vision descends upon the unfathomable universe.

Sensation carried to its extreme limit becomes impersonal; for in its unconscious mechanism personality is devoured. But it does not become impersonal in that magical liberating sense in which the impersonal is an escape, bringing with it a feeling of large, cool, quiet, and unruffled s.p.a.ce. It becomes impersonal in a thick, gross, opaque, mechanical manner.

There is brutality and outrage; there is b.e.s.t.i.a.lity and obscenity about both pain and pleasure when in their voracious maw they devour the magic of the unfathomable world. Thus it may be noted that most great and heroic souls hold their supreme pain at a distance from them, with a proud gesture of contempt, and go down at the last with their complex vision unruffled and unimpaired. There is indeed a still deeper "final moment" than this; but it is so rare as to be out of the reach of average humanity. I refer to an att.i.tude like that of Jesus upon the cross; in whose mood towards his own suffering there was no element of "pride of will" but only an immense pity for the terrible sensitiveness of all life, and a supreme heightening of the emotion of love towards all life.

It will be noted that in my a.n.a.lysis of "sensation" I have said nothing of what are usually called "the five senses." These senses are obviously the material "feelers" or the gates of material sentiency by which the soul's attribute of sensation feeds itself from the objective world; but they are so penetrated and percolated, through and through, by the other basic activities of the soul, that it is extremely difficult to disentangle from our impressions of sight, of sound, of touch, of taste, and of smell, those interwoven threads of reason, imagination and so forth which so profoundly modify and trans.m.u.te, even in the art of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling, the various manifestations of "the objective mystery"

which we apprehend in our sensuous grasp.

By emphasizing the feelings of pleasure and pain as the primary characteristics of the attribute of sensation we are indicating the fact that every sensation we experience carries with it in some perceptible degree or other, the feeling of "well-being" or the feeling of distress.

We now come to consider that dim, obscure, but nevertheless powerful energy, which the universal tradition of language dignifies by the name of "instinct." This "instinct" is the portion of the activity of the soul which works more blindly and less consciously than any other.

The French philosopher Bergson isolates and emphasizes this subterranean activity until it seems to him to hold in its grasp a deeper secret of life than any other energy which man possesses To secure for instinct this primary place in the panorama of life it is necessary to eliminate from the situation that silent witness which we call "the mind" or self-consciousness; that witness which from its invisible watch-tower looks forth upon the whole spectacle. It is necessary to take for granted the long historic stream of evolutionary development. It is necessary to regard this development in its organic totality as the sole reality with which we have to deal.

The invisible mental witness being eliminated, it becomes necessary, if instinct is to be thus made supreme, to regard the appearance of the soul as a mere stage in an evolutionary process, the driving-force of which is the power of instinct itself. Planets and plants, men and animals, are seen in this way to be all dominated by instinct; and instinct is found to be so much the most important element in evolution, that upon it, rather than upon anything else, the whole future of the universe may be said to depend.

Having made this initial plunge into shameless objectivity, having put completely out of court the invisible witness of it all, we find ourselves reduced to regarding this "blind" instinct as the galvanic battery which moves the world. Thus isolated from the other powers of the soul, this mysterious energy, this subterranean driving-force, has to bear the whole weight of everything that happens in s.p.a.ce and time. A strange sort of "blindness" must its blindness be, when its devices can supply the place of the most pa.s.sionate intellectual struggles of the mind!

If it is blind, it gropes its way, in its blindness, through the uttermost gulfs of s.p.a.ce and into the nethermost abysses of life. If it is dumb, its silence is the irresistible silence of Fate, the silence of the eternal "Mothers."

But the "instinct" which is one of the basic attributes of the complex vision is not quite such an awe-inspiring thing as this. To raise it into such a position as this there has to be a vigorous suppression, as I have hinted, of many other attributes of the soul. Instinct may be defined as the pressure of obscure creative desire, drawn from the inscrutable recesses of the soul, malleable up to a certain point by reason and will, but beyond that point remaining unconscious, irrational, incalculable, elusive. That it plays an enormous part in the process of life cannot be denied; but the part it plays is not so isolated from consciousness as sometimes has been imagined.

There is in truth a strange reciprocity between instinct and self-consciousness, according to which they both play into each other's hands. This is above all true of great artists' work, which in a superficial sense might be called unconscious, but which in a deeper sense is profoundly conscious. It seems as though, in great works of art, a certain superficial reasoning is sacrificed to instinct, but in that very sacrifice a deeper level of reason is reached between which and instinct there is no longer anything but complete understanding.

To intellectualize instinct is one of the profoundest secrets of the art of life; and it is only when instinct is thus intellectualized, or brought into focus with the other aspects of the soul, that it is able to play its proper rhythmic part in the musical synthesis of the complex vision. But although we cannot allow to instinct the all-absorbing part in the world-play which Bergson claims for it, it remains that we have to regard it as one of the most mysterious and incalculable of the energies of the soul. It is instinct which brings all living ent.i.ties into relation with something sub-conscious in their own nature.

Under the pressure of instinct man recognizes the animal in himself, the plant in himself, and even a strange affinity with the inorganic and the inanimate. It is instinct in us which attracts us so strangely to the earth under our feet. It is instinct which attracts certain individual souls to certain particular natural elements, such as air, fire, sand, mould, rain, wind, water, and the like; a kind of remote atavistic reciprocity in us stretching out towards that particular element. It is by means of instinct that we are able to sink into that mysterious sub-conscious world which underlies the conscious levels of every soul-monad. Under the groping and fumbling guidance of this strange power we seem to come into touch with the profoundest reservoirs of our personal ident.i.ty.

Considering what fantastic and cruel tricks the lonely thinking power, the abstract reason, has been allowed to play us it is no wonder that this French philosopher has been tempted to turn away from reason and find in instinct the ultimate solution. Instinct, as we give ourselves up to it, seems to carry us into the very nerves and tissues and veins and pulses of life. Its verdicts seem to reach us with an absolute and unquestionable authority. They seem to bear upon them an "imprimatur" more powerful than any moral sanction.

Potent and terrible, direct and final, instinct seems to rise up out of the depths and break every law.

It leaps forth from our inmost being like a second self more powerful than we are. It invades religion. It incarnates itself in l.u.s.t. It obsesses taste. It masquerades as intuition. It triumphs over reason. With an irrationality, that seems at the same time terrible and beautiful, instinct moves straight to its goal. It follows its purpose with demonic tenacity, heedless of logic, contemptuous of consequences. It cares nothing for contradictions. It forces contradictions to lose themselves in one another according to some secret law of its own, unknown to the law of reason.

Such, then, is instinct, the sub-conscious fatality of Nature so difficult to control; whose unrestrained activity is capable of completely destroying the rhythm of the complex vision. Nothing but the power of the apex-thought of man's whole concentrated being is able to dominate this thing. It may be detected lurking in the droop of the Sphinx's eyelids and in the cruel smile upon her mouth. But the answer given to the challenge of this subterranean force is not, after all, any logical judgment of the pure reason. It is the answer of the vision of the artist, holding its treacherous material under his creative hand.

Let us turn now to the attribute of "intuition." Intuition is a thing more clearly definable and more easily a.n.a.lysed than almost any other of the aspects of the soul. Intuition is the feminine counterpart of imagination; and, as compared with instinct, it is a power which acts in clearly denned, isolated, intermittent movements, each one of which has a definite beginning and a definite end. As compared with imagination, intuition is pa.s.sive and receptive; as compared with instinct it does not fumble and grope forward, steadily and tenaciously, among the roots of things; but it suspends itself, mirror-like, upon the surface of the unfathomable waters, and suspended there reflects in swift sudden glimpses the mysterious movements of the great deep. In this process of reflecting, or apprehending in sudden, intermittent glimpses, the mysterious depths of the life of the soul, intuition is less affected by the reason or by the will than any other aspect of the complex vision.

Instinct, in secret sub-conscious alliance with the will, is a permanent automatic energy, working in the hidden darkness of the roots of things like an ever-flowing subterranean stream. The revelations of intuition, on the other hand, are not flowing and constant, but separate, isolated, distinct and detached. In the subject-matter of their revelations, too, intuition and instinct are very different. If the recesses of the soul be compared to a fortified castle, instinct is the active messenger of the place, continually issuing forth on secret errands concerning the real nature of which he is himself often quite ignorant. Intuition, on the contrary, is the little postern gate at the back of the building, set open at rare moments to the wide fields and magical forests which extend to the far-off horizon.

Instinct is always found in close contact with sensation, groping its ways through the midst of the ma.s.s of material impressions, acting and reacting as it fumbles among such impressions. Intuition seems to deal directly and absolutely with a clear and definite landscape behind the superficial landscape, with a truth behind truth, with a reality within reality.

To take an instance from common experience: a stranger, an unknown person, enters our circle. Instinct, working automatically and sensationally, may attract us powerfully towards such a person, with a steady, irresistible attraction. Intuition, on the contrary, uttering its revelation abruptly and with, so to speak, one sudden mysterious cry, may warn us of some dangerous quicksand or perilous jungle in such a stranger's nature of which instinct was totally ignorant because the thing was what might be called a "spiritual quality" lying deeper than those sensational or magnetic levels through which instinct feels its way.

The instinct of animals or birds for instance warns them very quickly with regard to the presence of some natural enemy whose approach they apprehend through some mysterious sense-impression beyond the a.n.a.lysis of human reason. But when their enemy is the mental intention of a human being they are only too easily tricked.

To take quite a different instance. It may easily happen that while conscience has habitually driven us to a certain course of action against which instinct has never revolted because of its preoccupation with the senses, some sudden flash of intuition reaching us from the hidden substratum of our being changes our whole perspective and gives to conscience itself a completely opposite bias. What these intermittent revelations of intuition certainly do achieve is the preservation in the soul's memory of the clear and deep and free and unfathomable margins of the ultimate mystery, those wavering sea-edges and twilight-sh.o.r.es of our being, which the austere categories of rational logic tend to shut out as if by impenetrable walls.

It remains to consider the attribute of memory. Memory is the name which we give to that intrinsic susceptibility, implying an intrinsic permanence or endurance in the material which displays susceptibility, such as makes it possible for what the soul feels or what the soul creates to write down its own record, so that it can be read at will, or if not "at will," at least can be read, if the proper stimulus or shock be applied.

Memory is not the cause of the soul's concrete ident.i.ty. The soul's concrete ident.i.ty is the cause or natural ground of memory. Memory is the "pa.s.sive-active" power by means of which the concrete ident.i.ty of the soul grows richer, fuller, more articulate, more complex and more subtle.

In looking back over these eleven attributes of the "soul-monad,"

what we have to remark is, that two of the number differ radically in their nature from the rest. The attribute of emotion differs from the rest in the sense that it is the living substantial unity or ultimate synthesis in which they all move. It is indeed more than this. For it is the actual "stuff" or "material" out of which they are all, so to speak, "made" or upon which they all, so to speak, inscribe their diverse creations.

The permanent "surface," or identical susceptibility, of this ebbing and flowing stream of emotion is memory; but the emotion itself, divided into the positive and negative "pole," as we say of love and malice, is an actual projection upon the objective universe of the intrinsic "stuff" or psycho-material "substance" of which the substratum of the soul is actually composed. The other aspects of the soul are, so to speak, the various "tongues" of diversely coloured flame with which the soul pierces the "objective mystery"; but the substance of all these flames is one and the same. It is the soul itself, projected upon the plane of material impression; and thus projected, becoming the conflicting duality to which I give the name of "emotion."

The attribute of "will," also, differs radically from the rest; in the sense that "will" is the power which the soul possesses of encouraging or suppressing, re-vivifying or letting fade, all the other attributes of the soul, including that attribute which is the substance and synthesis of them all and which I name "emotion."

In regard to "emotion" the will can do three separate things. It can encourage the emotion of love and suppress that of malice. It can encourage the emotion of malice and suppress that of love. And finally it can use its energy in the effort, an effort which can never be totally successful, to suppress all emotion, of any kind at all.

Man's complex vision then consists, in simple terms, of self-consciousness, reason, taste, imagination, conscience, instinct, sensation, intuition, will, memory, and emotion. These various activities, differentiated clearly enough in their separate energizing, must never be regarded as absolutely separate "faculties," but rather as relatively separated "aspects." Behind all of them and under all of them is the complex vision itself, felt by all of us in rare moments in its creative totality, but constantly being distorted and obscured as one or other of its primal energies invades the appropriate territory of some other.

The complex vision must not be regarded as the mere sum or acc.u.mulated agglomeration of all these. It is much more than this. It is more than a mere formal focussing of its own attributes. It is more than a mere logical unity suspended in a vacuum.

The complex vision is the vision of a living self, of an organic personality, of an actual soul-monad. It may be the vision of a man.

It may be the vision of a plant or a planet or a G.o.d. It may be the vision of ent.i.ties undreamed of and of existences inconceivable. It may be the vision, for example, of some strange "soul of s.p.a.ce" or "soul of the ether" whose consciousness is extended throughout the visible universe and even throughout the "etherial medium" which binds all souls together.

But whether the vision of a plant, a man, or a G.o.d, the complex vision seems to bring with it its own immediate revelation that where there is any form of "matter," however attenuated, such "matter" is the outward expression of some inward living soul whose energies have some mysterious correspondence to the eleven aspects of the soul of man.

CHAPTER III.

THE SOUL'S APEX-THOUGHT

It now becomes necessary to discuss the connection between what I have named the soul's "apex-thought" and certain permanent aspects of life with which this "apex-thought" has to deal.

The "apex-thought" is the name I give to that synthetic and concentrating effort of the soul by means of which the various energies of the complex vision are brought into focus and fused with one another. In accordance with my favourite metaphorical image, the "apex-thought" is the extreme point of the arrow-head of the soul; the point with which it pierces its ways into eternity.

It is necessary that I should indicate the connection between the activity of this apex-point of the complex vision and the various perplexing human problems round which our controversies smoulder and burn. It is advisable that I should indicate the connection between the activity of this "apex-thought" and that thing which the world has agreed to call Religion.