There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
_Hamlet_, Act I, Scene V.
For some days he had been spiritually restless. His sterile mind
flitted hither and thither like a butterfly. Nothing succeeded in
interesting him. He picked up a book, read two or three pages and then
had to close it again, unable to control his wandering attention. He
tried to write, but half of the sheets that he wrote he tore up. And
yet he had never enjoyed better health, never felt the blood coursing
more vigorously through his veins, or the heart and lungs working in
better unison. At the same time he had a premonition of something
strong and mature within himself striving to come to birth; he felt
that he was on the verge of bringing forth thoughts brimful of vitality
and splendour. But something, a kind of solemn calm, against which he
contended in vain, encompassed and paralysed him. It was no doubt sheer
insensibility in him not to wait in peace for the grace of the Spirit
to visit him but to seek to force it with violence.
At last, one afternoon, when the light of the setting sun was pouring
upon the wide balcony of his cell-like room, he shut himself up in it,
with its dumb books, with all its familiar objects the sight of which
was always grateful to him. It was like shutting himself up within
himself, or even better than that, for this wonted ambience served him
as a means of communion with the world. That square glass inkstand,
those fat pen-holders, that carpet, that stout leather arm-chair in
which his body rested while his mind went galloping away, those rough
plain chairs, those rows of books against the white naked walls: all
these things were a kind of prolongation of his spirit and at the same
time they were like arms which the world stretched out to enfold him
in. They belonged to him and yet they belonged also to the world; they
were himself and at the same they were the not-himself. They would not
deceive him, no. He had touched them once and a thousand times and
every touch had linked itself with all the other touches, until at last
these things of humble use had become invested with a kind of soul made
up of the outpourings of spirit and memories.
He had books that were like lovers, grateful, remembering, for whenever
he opened them at random they opened themselves of their own accord at
the same place, always offering him the same passage, the choicest, the
most intense, the most life-giving that they had to offer. And when he
read the passage over again, the intimate ambience of the peaceful room
yielded up the memory of all the other fugitive moments when he had
read it before, and his soul vibrated across the gulf of time until its
vibrations were lost in that remoteness of the past where consciousness
loses itself too.
From the balcony of his room, across red roofs stained here and there
with the green of lichen, he could just glimpse the clouds glowing
in the sunset light. And nearer at hand, along the eaves of the roof
opposite, the white stone-crop blossomed, its tiny flowerets nourishing
their life upon the moist earthy sediment washed down by the rain from
the sun-baked clay tiles and deposited in the guttering. In summer,
pigeons flew down from the neighbouring belfry to bill and coo upon the
roof, picking the seeds of the stone-crop at its edge, while the dark
swifts skimmed through the air above. Sometimes cats crept stealthily
with sinuous movement across the tiles. Upon this roof too his eyes had
often rested; the little wild garden in the gutter, the pigeons, the
swifts, the cats, these too belonged to him and at the same time to the
world; and often while he had held them in his gaze his mind had been
intent upon his innermost thoughts.
He shut himself up there in his study, like an oyster in its shell. He
untethered his mind, letting it roam at will, without spur or bridle.
For a time it wandered up and down, plucking at passing ideas, ranging
over the backs of the books and divining famous names and titles of
renown. Then it collected itself and withdrew into the body that it
animated and made use of, and presently the arm of this body reached
out for a sheet of paper and the eyes glanced over it.
It was the strident manifesto that had been so much talked about; it
was the famous composition into which he, he himself, who was now
sitting at ease in his cow-hide arm-chair, had emptied his spirit. He
began to read it, and as he read it a strange disquiet invaded him. No,
that was not his, that was not what he had thought and believed, that
was not what he had written. And yet there could be no doubt about it.
That, that which now seemed so strange to him, he had written that, and
it had increased his fame. He read it over again.
No, we do not communicate what we want to communicate, he reflected.
No sooner does a thought incarnate itself in words and issue forth
into the world than it belongs to someone not ourself, or rather it
belongs to nobody because it belongs to everybody. The flesh with which
language clothes itself is communal and external; it wizens up thought,
it imprisons it and even reverses and falsifies it.
It was a singular and disturbing effect that was produced in him
by reading himself as if he were a stranger, as if his writing had
been written by someone else. This effect of the duplication of his
personality reminded him of a former experience of self-duplication
which he never recalled without a shudder. Once when gazing at the
reflection of his own gaze in a mirror he had the sensation of seeing
himself as someone else; he regarded himself as an unsubstantial
shadow, as an impalpable phantom, and this alarmed him to such a degree
that he called to himself softly by his own name. And his voice sounded
to him as if it were the voice of another, a voice which came forth out
of space, out of the invisible, out of impenetrable mystery. He cleared
his throat, touched himself, felt the quickened beating of his heart.
He had never forgotten that unforgettable experience.
His present feeling was not the same, but it had something that
resembled it. Had he written that? Was he the same person as the man
who had written that? Did he contain within himself more than one
person? Might it not be that he carried within him a whole legion of
souls sleeping one below another? Were not all his ancestors sleeping
somewhere in the limbo of his brain? Did others see him as he saw
himself, or did they see him quite differently, and was he always
actually doing and saying that which he thought he was?
This last idea, an absurd and extravagant idea, had obsessed him for
some time past and it caused him anguish, for he said to himself: This
is madness, this is sheer madness.
Only too often, in fact, as he walked quietly along the street, it
had occurred to him to think something like this: “What if, instead
of walking quietly and soberly, I were really pirouetting or making
ridiculous contortions or behaving improperly? This hostility which I
have remarked in certain of my acquaintance, may it not have arisen
because I have said things to them which I am unaware of having said,
or because when I thought I was offering them my hand I was in fact
making some impudent or contemptuous gesture? When I imagine myself to
be saying one thing, may it not be they hear something very different
or perhaps contrary?”
This absurd obsession disquieted him, irritated him, made him doubt the
sanity and vigour of his reason, and he had to exercise all the power
of autosuggestion at his command to overcome it.
With a vigorous effort he threw off this obstinate vagary of his mind,
but only to return to the question of the strangeness of what he had
written.
Formerly, a long time ago, he had been a convinced determinist, unable
to tolerate even the mention of free will, so irrational did the
supposition of it seem to him. But later on, after further examination
of the question, his inflexible determinist faith had broken down; and
now, at the time at which we discover him, seated in his arm-chair
in his study, he has put this question of determinism and free will
away into the lumber-room of metaphysics from which he rarely takes
it out. He believes now that science has not succeeded in putting
this question in its true light, but that it always involves it in a
_petitio principii_. But what he really does feel--he feels rather
than thinks it--is that however free a man may be within himself, in
so far as he has to exteriorize and manifest himself, to speak or to
act, to communicate with his fellows, in so far as he has to avail
himself of his body and of the bodies of others, he remains bound by
the rigid laws of these bodies, he is a slave. My acts--he thinks--are
never exclusively mine: if I speak I have to make use of air that is
not mine in order to produce my voice; neither are my vocal cords,
strictly speaking, mine; nor is the language mine which I must use if
I wish to make myself understood; and the case is the same if I write,
if I strike a blow, if I kiss, if I fight. And he asks himself in
conclusion: “Am I myself really mine?” And so the tormenting obsession
buzzes round him again.
There is something which we have incorporated and made our own and
there is much that is completely alien to us; and between these two
extreme terms everything is partly ours and partly not ours. Our life
is a continual combat between our spirit which seeks to make itself
master of the world, to make the world its own, to make the world it,
and the world which in its turn seeks to possess itself of our spirit,
to make our spirit its own. I wish to make the world mine--our man
thinks--to make it myself, and the world tries to make me its, to make
me it; I strive to personalize it and it strives to depersonalize me.
And in this tragic combat--for yes, the combat is a tragic one--I have
to make use of my enemy in order to dominate him, and my enemy has to
make use of me in order to dominate me. Whatever I say, write or do, it
is only with the world’s help that I can say, write or do it; and thus
the world at once depersonalizes my saying, writing and doing and makes
them its own, and I appear to be different from what I am.
What an unhappy necessity is that of writing! What woeful constraint
is that of having to talk! Between any two who talk together, language
mediates, the world mediates, that which is neither one nor the other
of the interlocutors mediates; they are involved in this intrusive
element which, while enabling them to communicate, separates them. If
it were only possible to create language in the very act of speaking
our thought!...
Undoubtedly speech is a more perfect medium than writing, because
it is less material: the vibrations of the air are dissipated,
while the trace of the ink remains. Undoubtedly the _flatus vocis_,
like everything fugitive, is richer in association, more complete
in orchestration, while writing, like everything concrete, remains
detached. But better still if pure thought could communicate itself
by means only of those vague and fluid words upon which it floats
within the soul! To make oneself understood in words or writing is to
communicate the accidents, not the substance, of thought.
Our man looks at the clouds in the western sky, combed out by the
unseen comb of the wind, and watches them turn to flame in the light of
the setting sun. And he thinks of the substantial communion of spirits,
communication by the act of spiritual presence alone. He remembered
how once, on hearing some old ballad sung by a shepherd boy, the sound
of which had come to him faintly through a leafy screen of grey oaks,
he had trembled and felt as if he heard voices from another world,
not from another world beyond this world, but from a world that lives
within the world we know--voices which seemed to issue from the very
heart of things, as if they were the song of the soul of the oaks, of
the clouds, of the pebbles of the stream, of the earth and of the sky.
Where had he heard that song before?
Who knows? Perhaps one night, when he lay asleep, the shepherd boy
had passed by singing his song, and the song had lapped his dream and
steeped it in the fountains of life.
Another time--he remembered--when on a journey, he had met a woman, a
foreigner, who did not know his language nor did he know hers. Neither
of them knew any human tongue in which they could make themselves
understood, and they sat there in the railway carriage alone, opposite
one another, looking and sometimes smiling at one another. Theirs was a
protracted and mute conversation. When he thought kindly and tenderly
of her the stranger smiled, and when a less innocent desire stirred
within him the shadow of a frown crossed her brow. Perhaps they heard,
without themselves knowing that they heard, the measured beating of
their hearts, beating in unison while their eyes gazed at one another;
but without a doubt the breath of their souls mingled together. For the
soul breathes.
The soul breathes.--Why not speak in metaphors?
Our man began to think about breathing and how the air, penetrating
into the cells of the lungs, aerates the blood, this inner atmosphere
of our bodies. It is the material substance of the world--he
thought--which circulates within us; it is the world diluted and made
our own. And from this he went on to imagine a kind of spiritual
aeration of our mind, and how the world of colours, forms, sounds and
impressions of every kind is diluted in it.
But these are metaphors, nothing but metaphors, he said, then at once
reflecting: Metaphors? and what is not metaphor? Science is built up
of metaphors and language is essentially metaphorical. Matter, force,
light, memory--all metaphors. When positivists, or those who consider
themselves positivists, try to sweep science clean of metaphors, they
sweep them away with a metaphorical broom, and so sweep the metaphors
back again.
And then his mind began to play around one of his specially favourite
ideas, namely the idea of the superiority of what we call imagination
over the other so-called faculties of the spirit, and how the
excellency of poets was greater than that of men of science and men of
action.
A thousand times he had deplored the barbarous intransigence of most of
those with whom he had to communicate--in accidental, not substantial,
communion; that dismal lack of comprehension of every opinion which
they do not themselves share; that ridiculous belief that there are
ideas which one must necessarily consider absurd and which can only be
professed by confused and unhinged minds. All that--he was wont to say
to himself--is simply lack of imagination, incapacity to see things
oneself, even momentarily, as others see them, sheer aridity of mind.
How far from all that was the large spirit of the great Goethe, who was
able to feel himself deist, pantheist, atheist all at the same time,
whose mind embraced a profound understanding of paganism together with
an equally profound understanding of Christianity! But Goethe was a
poet, the poet, a true and essential poet, not a miserable didacticist
or dogmatist like those who think they travel more safely the more
ballast of formal logic they carry, at the expense of intelligence, and
the more closely they hug the level shores of thought, moored fast to
tradition and the senses.
Our man cast his eyes once more over the manifesto and said to himself:
“And I have been called an intellectual! I! I who abhor intellectualism
more than anybody! If they had labelled me ‘an imaginative’--well and
good. But an intellectual?” And he thought of Paul of Tarsus and the
pregnant sentences of his epistles.
He thought of Paul of Tarsus and his classification of men into carnal,
intellectual and spiritual, for so he was pleased to translate it, or
rather to interpret it. For there was a time when he had delighted
in exegesis. Not scientific exegesis; not investigating and searching
for the actual meaning of the writers of the sacred books; not
co-ordinating them logically and trying to discover, by reference to
the ideas and sentiment of the age and country in which they lived,
what they really felt and thought; but taking as his starting-point the
text that had been consecrated and enriched by centuries of tradition
and thence launching out into free speculation. The moment that Paul
of Tarsus gave his epistles to the world they ceased to be his, they
belonged to the world, they were part of the common stock, of the
patrimony, of humanity, and it was possible for him to understand them
and feel them altogether differently from the way in which the Apostle
himself had felt and understood them. That which others did to his
writings when they read them and commented upon them, it was possible
for him to do to the Apostle’s, provided he undertook the task with
knowledge and conscientiousness. The actual text furnished his mind
with the necessary foothold, it was the jumping-off place from which
his imagination could take flight.
And in Paul of Tarsus, in his epistle to the Romans and his first
epistle to the Corinthians, he found those three classes of men: the
carnal or _sarcinal_, σάρϰινοι, the natural or psychical, Ψυϰικοί,
and the spiritual or pneumatical, πνευματικοί. He had often read that
14th verse of the 7th chapter of the epistle to the Romans: “For
we know that the law is spiritual [_pneumatical_]; but I am carnal
[_sarcinal_], sold under sin”; and that 44th verse of the 11th chapter
of the first epistle to the Corinthians which says that there is a
natural or _psychical_ body and a spiritual or _pneumatical_ body; and
he was aware that for the Apostle the _psyche_, Ψυϰή, was something
inferior, something that was more or less equivalent to what was later
to be called the vital force, the sensitive soul, common to men and
animals; the _pneuma_, on the other hand, being the higher part of
the soul, the spirit, the ήγεμονικόν of the Stoics, something that
survives the body. But he preferred to give it another interpretation,
and he always regarded the _psyche_ as the intellectual power that is
bound to the necessities of our actual earthly life, the slave of a
logic that is educated and trained by the struggle for life, ordinary,
common, current knowledge, necessary in order to enable us to live, the
knowledge from which science is evolved. He could not help thinking
of psychical men as intellectuals, men of common sense and logic, men
whose ideas are dominated by the associations which the external and
visible world suggests to them, reasonable men who are trained to some
profession and practice it, who, if they are doctors, learn how to cure
diseases, if engineers to construct roads, if chemists to prepare drugs
and analyse compounds, if architects to build houses. These psychical
men are the average men, those who take the middle course, those of
whom it is said that they have a sound and clear judgment and standard,
those who do not believe in any fallacy that is not consecrated by
tradition and habit, those who never swallow any new absurdity, because
their minds are already so stuffed with timeworn absurdities.
Between these and the carnal or _sarcinal_ men he always established
a difference. For him the carnal men were the brutish, the absolutely
uncultured, those who scarcely think of anything but eating, drinking
and sleeping, those who are wholly and completely immerged in animal
life. The psychical man, no; the psychical man is interested in
questions of science and culture; the psychical Spaniard preaches
national regeneration, is enthusiastic about the telephone, the
gramophone and the cinematograph, reads Flammarion, Haeckel, Ribot,
buys popular works on philosophy, and if he is in the neighbourhood of
a railway stands in ecstatic contemplation of the majestic progress
of the locomotive. If the psychical man is an orthodox Catholic, he
admires the genius of St. Thomas Aquinas, although he has never read
him, he knows that modern geology squares with the Mosaic account of
the Creation, and that it is legitimate to admit a part of Darwinism,
and that the Church possesses a remedy for all the social ills that
afflict our age. The psychical man is an intellectual, his intellect
may be small or great, but fundamentally he is an intellectual.
And lastly come the spiritual men, the dreamers, those whom the
intellectuals contemptuously call mystics, those who tolerate the
tyranny neither of science nor of logic, those who believe that there
is another world within our world and mysterious dormant forces in the
depths of our spirit, those who speak the language of the heart and
many who prefer not to speak at all. Most of the great poets have been
spiritual men, not intellectuals. Of one of them, of the sweet singer
Wordsworth, it has been said that he was a genius without talent, that
is to say a great spirit without sufficient intelligence.
How many times had he not read and re-read the end of the second
and the beginning of the third chapter of the first epistle to the
Corinthians! “For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit
of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but
the spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world,
but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that
are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the
words which man’s wisdom teacheth [not with didactical arguments,
which is the term employed in the text], but which the Holy Spirit
teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural
man [_psychical_, or as our man translated it, intellectual] receiveth
not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him:
neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But
he that is spiritual [_pneumatical_] judgeth all things, yet he himself
is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord that he
may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. And I, brethren,
could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal
[_sarcinal_], even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk,
and not with meat; for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither
yet now are ye able. For ye are yet carnal....”
He turned again to the epistles of Paul of Tarsus and re-read the
verses that he had so often read before. “The things of God knoweth no
man, but the Spirit of God.” And he said to himself: Useless to seek
to know the things of God by the method of didactical argument, of
theology, of logic; a theology is a contradiction in terms, for the
_theos_ is at war with the _logia_; arguments do not help us to reach
God. And he remembered Kant and his shattering of the supposed logical
proofs of the existence of God, and how in his own spirit all that
scaffolding of a metalogical belief, spiritual and not intellectual,
psychical and not pneumatical, had collapsed. The ontological proof,
the cosmological proof, the metaphysical proof, the ethical proof, all
had come tumbling down in his mind at the same time, and with them the
so-called God of reason. All that theological rationalism had come to
earth in his spirit with a crash, though the noise of it was heard
only by himself, destroying not a few delicate flowers in its fall and
covering the ground with rubbish. Upheavals of the heart, earthquakes
of the spirit, had cleared the ground of the debris, and in a new way,
a way the intellectuals do not know, there sprung up within him a faith
which came from the Spirit of God. For the things of God knoweth no
man, but the Spirit of God.
“Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom
teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth, comparing spiritual things
with spiritual.”--Mystic! This word, spat out with contempt, like an
insult or a reproach, seemed to be spoken into his ear, and so near, so
clear, so distinct it was, that he involuntarily turned his head. And
there at his side, not in the body, visible and tangible, but present
in the spirit, was the prototype of the intellectual, with all his most
exclusively intellectual attributes--there was the psychical man, the
natural man _par excellence_. There he was repeating his physiological
creed parrot-wise, while in his heart he rebelled against his poetic
and creative impotence, against his unconfessed unspirituality.--He
shrugged his shoulders, smiled and turned again to look at the slowly
darkening sky. The sunset clouds now appeared like mountains of ashes,
the remains of the solar conflagration. He turned on the electric
switch and the wire thread glowed in the bulb--there was light, light
of man’s making, light of applied science.
“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for
they are foolishness into him: neither can he know them, because they
are spiritually discerned.” Foolishness ... madness ... he repeated
to himself, while his eyes wandered over those familiar objects which
the electric light had called forth out of the dark shadows. Madness
... and what is madness? There are alienists, phreno-pathologists,
psychiatrists, and who knows by how many other names they are
called?... But what is sanity? For perhaps one ought to begin with that.
Health is that condition in which a man is free from every kind of
disease; but what is disease? Health, others say, is “that condition in
which the organism exercises all its faculties normally.”[5] Normally
... normally ... and what is the normal? He stretched out his hand
for a book which he was just then reading, a book stored with a mass
of data relating to the mysterious life of the spirit, the work of
that noble mind that had been the soul of the Society for Psychical
Research, and he read:
“The word _normal_ in common speech is used almost indifferently to
imply either of two things, which may be very different from each
other--conformity to a standard and position as an average between
extremes. Often, indeed, the average constitutes the standard--as
when a gas is of average density; or is practically equivalent to the
standard--as when a sovereign is of normal weight. But when we come
to living organisms a new factor is introduced. Life is change; each
living organism changes; each generation differs from its predecessor.
To assign a fixed norm to a changing species is to shoot point-blank
at a flying bird. The actual average at any given moment is no ideal
standard; rather, the furthest evolutionary stage now reached is
tending, given stability in the environment, to become the average of
the future.”[6]
He shut the book and said to himself again: Normal ... madness ...
sanity ... disease ... health.... The madness of to-day will be the
sanity of to-morrow, just as the sanity of to-day will appear madness
to-morrow. Intellectuals call that madness which they are unable
to understand, for it can only be discerned spiritually. And an
intellectual, what is he, in the last instance, but a normal man, a
man of the _via media_, equally far removed from the carnal and from
the spiritual man? The intellectual is the man of the _via media_, at
an equal distance from the enormous mass of carnality and from the
very limited quantity of conscious spirituality--for the other kind of
spirituality, the unconscious and potential, is dormant in all men
and is perhaps more alive in the carnal men themselves than in the
intellectuals. For it is easier for the flesh than for the intellect
to receive the spirit; between intellect and spirit the logic of the
schools interposes. The intellectual is the man of average sense, which
he calls common sense, and which is as far from the universal, cosmic
or instinctive sense in which carnal men live, as it is from that
private sense which fortifies the spirit of spiritual men.
“But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged
of no man.” By what right do those whose own spirit is buried beneath
their intellect judge the things of the spirit?
“For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But
we have the mind of Christ.” At this word Christ our man’s thinking
was arrested. He had arrived at what is called the religious problem
and it presented itself to him in the form under which he had been
contemplating it now for some time. In this problem--_the_ problem, the
religious problem--he saw the principal touchstone that distinguishes
the intellectuals from the spiritual men.
In so far as the religious question is concerned, the intellectuals
presented themselves to him, in effect, as divided into two large
groups, usually called believers and unbelievers. Taking these terms
in the concrete and in relation to his own country, they resolved
themselves into intellectual Catholics and intellectual non-Catholics,
who in practice were always anti-Catholics. These two factions
contended one against another; but as a contest is only possible on
a common basis, they contended on the same ground. No contest is
possible between a fish which never emerges from the depths of the sea
and a bird which never descends from the altitudes of the air. These
two factions contended facing one another--that is to say, one looking
in one direction and the other in another--but both standing on the
same ground, both on the same plane of intellectuality. And woe to him
who should address them either from above or from below, from another
plane than theirs, from the plane of spirituality or from the plane of
carnality. They will both unite in calling him either a madman or a
brute.
These two factions contend together. For the one, religion is needful
as the necessary basis of morality, social order being impossible
without the fear of hell, of death and of the devil; religion is
assured by external proofs, prophecies, miracles--or, rather, accounts
of miracles--and before all and above all, by a tradition of centuries
resting upon an authority. For the other, proofs of the truth of
religion are wanting; social order can be established without hell
or the fear of death and of the devil, and the tradition has neither
been constant nor does it possess any convincing logical value. Both
approach the question from the same side: the one sees in religion
a social institution devoted to the interests of order, the other a
social institution devoted to the interests of despotism; the one
seeks for external logical proofs and the other rejects these proofs.
Advocates, and merely advocates, both of them! For both of them it
is a question of a social institution, something based upon external
authorities and evidences or inevidences, upon something logical or
illogical. It is what they call the conflict between reason and faith,
although this faith is not faith but only belief. It was not possible
for him, for our man, to feel it in that way, and the arguments of the
one side interested him as little as those of the other. Disputes of
intellectuals!...
He was now called to supper and he went away to attend to the wants of
the body, giving it first food and then sleep.