CAIN: Let me, or happy or unhappy, learn
To anticipate my immortality.
LUCIFER: Thou didst before I came upon thee.
CAIN: How?
LUCIFER: By suffering.
BYRON: _Cain_, Act II., Scene I.
The most tragic thing in the world and in life, readers and brothers of
mine, is love. Love is the child of illusion and the parent of
disillusion; love is consolation in desolation; it is the sole medicine
against death, for it is death's brother.
_Fratelli, a un tempo stesso, Amore e Morte
Ingeneró la sorte_,
as Leopardi sang.
Love seeks with fury, through the medium of the beloved, something
beyond, and since it finds it not, it despairs.
Whenever we speak of love there is always present in our memory the idea
of sexual love, the love between man and woman, whose end is the
perpetuation of the human race upon the earth. Hence it is that we never
succeed in reducing love either to a purely intellectual or to a purely
volitional element, putting aside that part in it which belongs to the
feeling, or, if you like, to the senses. For, in its essence, love is
neither idea nor volition; rather it is desire, feeling; it is something
carnal in spirit itself. Thanks to love, we feel all that spirit has of
flesh in it.
Sexual love is the generative type of every other love. In love and by
love we seek to perpetuate ourselves, and we perpetuate ourselves on the
earth only on condition that we die, that we yield up our life to
others. The humblest forms of animal life, the lowest of living beings,
multiply by dividing themselves, by splitting into two, by ceasing to be
the unit which they previously formed.
But when at last the vitality of the being that multiplies itself by
division is exhausted, the species must renew the source of life from
time to time by means of the union of two wasting individuals, by means
of what is called, among protozoaria, conjugation. They unite in order
to begin dividing again with more vigour. And every act of generation
consists in a being's ceasing to be what it was, either wholly or in
part, in a splitting up, in a partial death. To live is to give oneself,
to perpetuate oneself, and to perpetuate oneself and to give oneself is
to die. The supreme delight of begetting is perhaps nothing but a
foretaste of death, the eradication of our own vital essence. We unite
with another, but it is to divide ourselves; this most intimate embrace
is only a most intimate sundering. In its essence, the delight of sexual
love, the genetic spasm, is a sensation of resurrection, of renewing our
life in another, for only in others can we renew our life and so
perpetuate ourselves.
Without doubt there is something tragically destructive in the essence
of love, as it presents itself to us in its primitive animal form, in
the unconquerable instinct which impels the male and the female to mix
their being in a fury of conjunction. The same impulse that joins their
bodies, separates, in a certain sense, their souls; they hate one
another, while they embrace, no less than they love, and above all they
contend with one another, they contend for a third life, which as yet is
without life. Love is a contention, and there are animal species in
which the male maltreats the female in his union with her, and other in
which the female devours the male after being fertilized by him.
It has been said that love is a mutual selfishness; and, in fact, each
one of the lovers seeks to possess the other, and in seeking his own
perpetuation through the instrumentality of the other, though without
being at the time conscious of it or purposing it, he thereby seeks his
own enjoyment. Each one of the lovers is an immediate instrument of
enjoyment and a mediate instrument of perpetuation, for the other. And
thus they are tyrants and slaves, each one at once the tyrant and slave
of the other.
Is there really anything strange in the fact that the deepest religious
feeling has condemned carnal love and exalted virginity? Avarice, said
the Apostle, is the root of all evil, and the reason is because avarice
takes riches, which are only a means, for an end; and therein lies the
essence of sin, in taking means for ends, in not recognizing or in
disesteeming the end. And since it takes enjoyment for the end, whereas
it is only the means, and not perpetuation, which is the true end, what
is carnal love but avarice? And it is possible that there are some who
preserve their virginity in order the better to perpetuate themselves,
and in order to perpetuate something more human than the flesh.
For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers
perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father
of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that
in the depth of love there is a depth of eternal despair, out of which
spring hope and consolation. For out of this carnal and primitive love
of which I have been speaking, out of this love of the whole body with
all its senses, which is the animal origin of human society, out of this
loving-fondness, rises spiritual and sorrowful love.
This other form of love, this spiritual love, is born of sorrow, is
born of the death of carnal love, is born also of the feeling of
compassion and protection which parents feel in the presence of a
stricken child. Lovers never attain to a love of self abandonment, of
true fusion of soul and not merely of body, until the heavy pestle of
sorrow has bruised their hearts and crushed them in the same mortar of
suffering. Sensual love joined their bodies but disjoined their souls;
it kept their souls strangers to one another; but of this love is
begotten a fruit of their flesh--a child. And perchance this child,
begotten in death, falls sick and dies. Then it comes to pass that over
the fruit of their carnal fusion and spiritual separation and
estrangement, their bodies now separated and cold with sorrow but united
by sorrow their souls, the lovers, the parents, join in an embrace of
despair, and then is born, of the death of the child of their flesh, the
true spiritual love. Or rather, when the bond of flesh which united them
is broken, they breathe with a sigh of relief. For men love one another
with a spiritual love only when they have suffered the same sorrow
together, when through long days they have ploughed the stony ground
bowed beneath the common yoke of a common grief. It is then that they
know one another and feel one another, and feel with one another in
their common anguish, they pity one another and love one another. For to
love is to pity; and if bodies are united by pleasure, souls are united
by pain.
And this is felt with still more clearness and force in the seeding, the
taking root, and the blossoming of one of those tragic loves which are
doomed to contend with the diamond-hard laws of Destiny--one of those
loves which are born out of due time and season, before or after the
moment, or out of the normal mode in which the world, which is custom,
would have been willing to welcome them. The more barriers Destiny and
the world and its law interpose between the lovers, the stronger is the
impulse that urges them towards one another, and their happiness in
loving one another turns to bitterness, and their unhappiness in not
being able to love freely and openly grows heavier, and they pity one
another from the bottom of their hearts; and this common pity, which is
their common misery and their common happiness, gives fire and fuel to
their love. And they suffer their joy, enjoying their suffering. And
they establish their love beyond the confines of the world, and the
strength of this poor love suffering beneath the yoke of Destiny gives
them intuition of another world where there is no other law than the
liberty of love--another world where there are no barriers because there
is no flesh. For nothing inspires us more with hope and faith in another
world than the impossibility of our love truly fructifying in this world
of flesh and of appearances.
And what is maternal love but compassion for the weak, helpless,
defenceless infant that craves the mother's milk and the comfort of her
breast? And woman's love is all maternal.
To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most.
Men aflame with a burning charity towards their neighbours are thus
enkindled because they have touched the depth of their own misery, their
own apparentiality, their own nothingness, and then, turning their newly
opened eyes upon their fellows, they have seen that they also are
miserable, apparential, condemned to nothingness, and they have pitied
them and loved them.
Man yearns to be loved, or, what is the same thing, to be pitied. Man
wishes others to feel and share his hardships and his sorrows. The
roadside beggar's exhibition of his sores and gangrened mutilations is
something more than a device to extort alms from the passer-by. True
alms is pity rather than the pittance that alleviates the material
hardships of life. The beggar shows little gratitude for alms thrown to
him by one who hurries past with averted face; he is more grateful to
him who pities him but does not help than to him who helps but does not
pity, although from another point of view he may prefer the latter.
Observe with what satisfaction he relates his woes to one who is moved
by the story of them. He desires to be pitied, to be loved.
Woman's love, above all, as I have remarked, is always compassionate in
its essence--maternal. Woman yields herself to the lover because she
feels that his desire makes him suffer. Isabel had compassion upon
Lorenzo, Juliet upon Romeo, Francesca upon Paolo. Woman seems to say:
"Come, poor one, thou shalt not suffer so for my sake!" And therefore is
her love more loving and purer than that of man, braver and more
enduring.
Pity, then, is the essence of human spiritual love, of the love that is
conscious of being love, of the love that is not purely animal, of the
love, in a word, of a rational person. Love pities, and pities most when
it loves most.
Reversing the terms of the adage _nihil volitum quin præcognitum_, I
have told you that _nihil cognitum quin prævolitum_, that we know
nothing save what we have first, in one way or another, desired; and it
may even be added that we can know nothing well save what we love, save
what we pity.
As love grows, this restless yearning to pierce to the uttermost and to
the innermost, so it continually embraces all that it sees, and pities
all that it embraces. According as you turn inwards and penetrate more
deeply into yourself, you will discover more and more your own
emptiness, that you are not all that you are not, that you are not what
you would wish to be, that you are, in a word, only a nonentity. And in
touching your own nothingness, in not feeling your permanent base, in
not reaching your own infinity, still less your own eternity, you will
have a whole-hearted pity for yourself, and you will burn with a
sorrowful love for yourself--a love that will consume your so-called
self-love, which is merely a species of sensual self-delectation, the
self-enjoyment, as it were, of the flesh of your soul.
Spiritual self-love, the pity that one feels for oneself, may perhaps be
called egotism; but nothing could be more opposed to ordinary egoism.
For this love or pity for yourself, this intense despair, bred of the
consciousness that just as before you were born you were not, so after
your death you will cease to be, will lead you to pity--that is, to
love--all your fellows and brothers in this world of appearance, these
unhappy shadows who pass from nothingness to nothingness, these sparks
of consciousness which shine for a moment in the infinite and eternal
darkness. And this compassionate feeling for other men, for your
fellows, beginning with those most akin to you, those with whom you
live, will expand into a universal pity for all living things, and
perhaps even for things that have not life but merely existence. That
distant star which shines up there in the night will some day be
quenched and will turn to dust and will cease to shine and cease to
exist. And so, too, it will be with the whole of the star-strewn
heavens. Unhappy heavens!
And if it is grievous to be doomed one day to cease to be, perhaps it
would be more grievous still to go on being always oneself, and no more
than oneself, without being able to be at the same time other, without
being able to be at the same time everything else, without being able to
be all.
If you look at the universe as closely and as inwardly as you are able
to look--that is to say, if you look within yourself; if you not only
contemplate but feel all things in your own consciousness, upon which
all things have traced their painful impression--you will arrive at the
abyss of the tedium, not merely of life, but of something more: at the
tedium of existence, at the bottomless pit of the vanity of vanities.
And thus you will come to pity all things; you will arrive at universal
love.
In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, human and
extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within
yourself, you must personalize everything. For everything that it loves,
everything that it pities, love personalizes. We only pity--that is to
say, we only love--that which is like ourselves and in so far as it is
like ourselves, and the more like it is the more we love; and thus our
pity for things, and with it our love, grows in proportion as we
discover in them the likenesses which they have with ourselves. Or,
rather, it is love itself, which of itself tends to grow, that reveals
these resemblances to us. If I am moved to pity and love the luckless
star that one day will vanish from the face of heaven, it is because
love, pity, makes me feel that it has a consciousness, more or less dim,
which makes it suffer because it is no more than a star, and a star that
is doomed one day to cease to be. For all consciousness is consciousness
of death and of suffering.
Consciousness (_conscientia_) is participated knowledge, is co-feeling,
and co-feeling is com-passion. Love personalizes all that it loves. Only
by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea. And when love is
so great and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves
everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers that the total
All, that the Universe, is also a Person possessing a Consciousness, a
Consciousness which in its turn suffers, pities, and loves, and
therefore is consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe,
which love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call
God. And thus the soul pities God and feels itself pitied by Him; loves
Him and feels itself loved by Him, sheltering its misery in the bosom of
the eternal and infinite misery, which, in eternalizing itself and
infinitizing itself, is the supreme happiness itself.
God is, then, the personalization of the All; He is the eternal and
infinite Consciousness of the Universe--Consciousness taken captive by
matter and struggling to free himself from it. We personalize the All
in order to save ourselves from Nothingness; and the only mystery really
mysterious is the mystery of suffering.
Suffering is the path of consciousness, and by it living beings arrive
at the possession of self-consciousness. For to possess consciousness of
oneself, to possess personality, is to know oneself and to feel oneself
distinct from other beings, and this feeling of distinction is only
reached through an act of collision, through suffering more or less
severe, through the sense of one's own limits. Consciousness of oneself
is simply consciousness of one's own limitation. I feel myself when I
feel that I am not others; to know and to feel the extent of my being is
to know at what point I cease to be, the point beyond which I no longer
am.
And how do we know that we exist if we do not suffer, little or much?
How can we turn upon ourselves, acquire reflective consciousness, save
by suffering? When we enjoy ourselves we forget ourselves, forget that
we exist; we pass over into another, an alien being, we alienate
ourselves. And we become centred in ourselves again, we return to
ourselves, only by suffering.
_Nessun maggior dolore
che ricordarsi del tempo felice
nella miseria_
are the words that Dante puts into the mouth of Francesca da Rimini
(_Inferno_, v., 121-123); but if there is no greater sorrow than the
recollection in adversity of happy bygone days, there is, on the other
hand, no pleasure in remembering adversity in days of prosperity.
"The bitterest sorrow that man can know is to aspire to do much and to
achieve nothing" (_polla phroneoita mêdenos chrateein_)--so
Herodotus relates that a Persian said to a Theban at a banquet (book
ix., chap. xvi.). And it is true. With knowledge and desire we can
embrace everything, or almost everything; with the will nothing, or
almost nothing. And contemplation is not happiness--no! not if this
contemplation implies impotence. And out of this collision between our
knowledge and our power pity arises.
We pity what is like ourselves, and the greater and clearer our sense of
its likeness with ourselves, the greater our pity. And if we may say
that this likeness provokes our pity, it may also be maintained that it
is our reservoir of pity, eager to diffuse itself over everything, that
makes us discover the likeness of things with ourselves, the common bond
that unites us with them in suffering.
Our own struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase our own
consciousness makes us discover in the endeavours and movements and
revolutions of all things a struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase
consciousness, to which everything tends. Beneath the actions of those
most akin to myself, of my fellow-men, I feel--or, rather, I co-feel--a
state of consciousness similar to that which lies beneath my own
actions. On hearing my brother give a cry of pain, my own pain awakes
and cries in the depth of my consciousness. And in the same way I feel
the pain of animals, and the pain of a tree when one of its branches is
being cut off, and I feel it most when my imagination is alive, for the
imagination is the faculty of intuition, of inward vision.
Proceeding from ourselves, from our own human consciousness, the only
consciousness which we feel from within and in which feeling is
identical with being, we attribute some sort of consciousness, more or
less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for
they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply a struggle
to realize fullness of consciousness through suffering, a continual
aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and
yet to preserve their proper limits.
And this process of personalization or subjectivization of everything
external, phenomenal, or objective, is none other than the vital
process of philosophy in the contest of life against reason and of
reason against life. We have already indicated it in the preceding
chapter, and we must now confirm it by developing it further.
Giovanni Baptista Vico, with his profound esthetic penetration into the
soul of antiquity, saw that the spontaneous philosophy of man was to
make of himself the norm of the universe, guided by the _instinto
d'animazione_. Language, necessarily anthropomorphic, mythopeic,
engenders thought. "Poetic wisdom, which was the primitive wisdom of
paganism," says Vico in his _Scienza Nuova_, "must have begun with a
metaphysic, not reasoned and abstract, like that of modern educated men,
but felt and imagined, such as must have been that of primitive men.
This was their own poetry, which with them was inborn, an innate
faculty, for nature had furnished them with such feelings and such
imaginations, a faculty born of the ignorance of causes, and therefore
begetting a universal sense of wonder, for knowing nothing they
marvelled greatly at everything. This poetry had a divine origin, for,
while they invented the causes of things out of their own imagination,
at the same time they regarded these causes with feelings of wonder as
gods. In this way the first men of the pagan peoples, as children of the
growing human race, fashioned things out of their ideas.... This nature
of human things has bequeathed that eternal property which Tacitus
elucidated with a fine phrase when he said, not without reason, that men
in their terror _fingunt simul creduntque_."
And then, passing from the age of imagination, Vico proceeds to show us
the age of reason, this age of ours in which the mind, even the popular
mind, is too remote from the senses, "with so many abstractions of which
all languages are full," an age in which "the ability to conceive an
immense image of such a personage as we call sympathetic Nature is
denied to us, for though the phrase 'Dame Nature' may be on our lips,
there is nothing in our minds that corresponds with it, our minds being
occupied with the false, the non-existent." "To-day," Vico continues,
"it is naturally impossible for us to enter into the vast imagination of
these primitive men." But is this certain? Do not we continue to live by
the creations of their imagination, embodied for ever in the language
with which we think, or, rather, the language which thinks in us?
It was in vain that Comte declared that human thought had already
emerged from the age of theology and was now emerging from the age of
metaphysics into the age of positivism; the three ages coexist, and
although antagonistic they lend one another mutual support.
High-sounding positivism, whenever it ceases to deny and begins to
affirm something, whenever it becomes really positive, is nothing but
metaphysics; and metaphysics, in its essence, is always theology, and
theology is born of imagination yoked to the service of life, of life
with its craving for immortality.
Our feeling of the world, upon which is based our understanding of it,
is necessarily anthropomorphic and mythopeic. When rationalism dawned
with Thales of Miletus, this philosopher abandoned Oceanus and Thetis,
gods and the progenitors of gods, and attributed the origin of things to
water; but this water was a god in disguise. Beneath nature (_phhysist_)
and the world (_khosmos_), mythical and anthropomorphic creations
throbbed with life. They were implicated in the structure of language
itself. Xenophon tells us (_Memorabilia_, i., i., 6-9) that among
phenomena Socrates distinguished between those which were within the
scope of human study and those which the gods had reserved for
themselves, and that he execrated the attempt of Anaxagoras to explain
everything rationally. His contemporary, Hippocrates, regarded diseases
as of divine origin, and Plato believed that the sun and stars were
animated gods with their souls (_Philebus_, cap. xvi., _Laws_, x.), and
only permitted astronomical investigation so long as it abstained from
blasphemy against these gods. And Aristotle in his _Physics_ tells us
that Zeus rains not in order that the corn may grow, but by necessity
(_ex anharchêst_). They tried to mechanize and rationalize God, but God
rebelled against them.
And what is the concept of God, a concept continually renewed because
springing out of the eternal feeling of God in man, but the eternal
protest of life against reason, the unconquerable instinct of
personalization? And what is the notion of substance itself but the
objectivization of that which is most subjective--that is, of the will
or consciousness? For consciousness, even before it knows itself as
reason, feels itself, is palpable to itself, is most in harmony with
itself, as will, and as will not to die. Hence that rhythm, of which we
spoke, in the history of thought. Positivism inducted us into an age of
rationalism--that is to say, of materialism, mechanism, or mortalism;
and behold now the return of vitalism, of spiritualism. What was the
effort of pragmatism but an effort to restore faith in the human
finality of the universe? What is the effort of a Bergson, for example,
especially in his work on creative evolution, but an attempt to
re-integrate the personal God and eternal consciousness? Life never
surrenders.
And it avails us nothing to seek to repress this mythopeic or
anthropomorphic process and to rationalize our thought, as if we thought
only for the sake of thinking and knowing, and not for the sake of
living. The very language with which we think prevents us from so doing.
Language, the substance of thought, is a system of metaphors with a
mythic and anthropomorphic base. And to construct a purely rational
philosophy it would be necessary to construct it by means of algebraic
formulas or to create a new language for it, an inhuman language--that
is to say, one inapt for the needs of life--as indeed Dr. Richard
Avenarius, professor of philosophy at Zürich, attempted to do in his
_Critique of Pure Experience (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung_), in order to
avoid preconceptions. And this rigorous attempt of Avenarius, the chief
of the critics of experience, ends strictly in pure scepticism. He
himself says at the end of the Prologue to the work above mentioned:
"The childish confidence that it is granted to us to discover truth has
long since disappeared; as we progress we become aware of the
difficulties that lie in the way of its discovery and of the limitation
of our powers. And what is the end?... If we could only succeed in
seeing clearly into ourselves!"
Seeing clearly! seeing clearly! Clear vision would be only attainable by
a pure thinker who used algebra instead of language and was able to
divest himself of his own humanity--that is to say, by an unsubstantial,
merely objective being: a no-being, in short. In spite of reason we are
compelled to think with life, and in spite of life we are compelled to
rationalize thought.
This animation, this personification, interpenetrates our very
knowledge. "Who is it that sends the rain? Who is it that thunders?" old
Strepsiades asks of Socrates in _The Clouds_ of Aristophanes, and the
philosopher replies: "Not Zeus, but the clouds." "But," questions
Strepsiades, "who but Zeus makes the clouds sweep along?" to which
Socrates answers: "Not a bit of it; it is atmospheric whirligig."
"Whirligig?" muses Strepsiades; "I never thought of that--that Zeus is
gone and that Son Whirligig rules now in his stead." And so the old man
goes on personifying and animating the whirlwind, as if the whirlwind
were now a king, not without consciousness of his kingship. And in
exchanging a Zeus for a whirlwind--God for matter, for example--we all
do the same thing. And the reason is because philosophy does not work
upon the objective reality which we perceive with the senses, but upon
the complex of ideas, images, notions, perceptions, etc., embodied in
language and transmitted to us with our language by our ancestors. That
which we call the world, the objective world, is a social tradition. It
is given to us ready made.
Man does not submit to being, as consciousness, alone in the Universe,
nor to being merely one objective phenomenon the more. He wishes to save
his vital or passional subjectivity by attributing life, personality,
spirit, to the whole Universe. In order to realize his wish he has
discovered God and substance; God and substance continually reappear in
his thought cloaked in different disguises. Because we are conscious, we
feel that we exist, which is quite another thing from knowing that we
exist, and we wish to feel the existence of everything else; we wish
that of all the other individual things each one should also be an "I."
The most consistent, although the most incongruous and vacillating,
idealism, that of Berkeley, who denied the existence of matter, of
something inert and extended and passive, as the cause of our sensations
and the substratum of external phenomena, is in its essence nothing but
an absolute spiritualism or dynamism, the supposition that every
sensation comes to us, causatively, from another spirit--that is, from
another consciousness. And his doctrine has a certain affinity with
those of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. The former's doctrine of the Will
and the latter's doctrine of the Unconscious are already implied in the
Berkeleyan theory that to be is to be perceived. To which must be added:
and to cause others to perceive what is. Thus the old adage _operari
sequitur esse_ (action follows being) must be modified by saying that to
be is to act, and only that which acts--the active--exists, and in so
far as it acts.
As regards Schopenhauer, there is no need to endeavour to show that the
will, which he posits as the essence of things, proceeds from
consciousness. And it is only necessary to read his book on the Will in
Nature to see how he attributed a certain spirit and even a certain
personality to the plants themselves. And this doctrine of his carried
him logically to pessimism, for the true property and most inward
function of the will is to suffer. The will is a force which feels
itself--that is, which suffers. And, someone will add, which enjoys. But
the capacity to enjoy is impossible without the capacity to suffer; and
the faculty of enjoyment is one with that of pain. Whosoever does not
suffer does not enjoy, just as whosoever is insensible to cold is
insensible to heat.
And it is also quite logical that Schopenhauer, who deduced pessimism
from the voluntarist doctrine or doctrine of universal personalization,
should have deduced from both of these that the foundation of morals is
compassion. Only his lack of the social and historical sense, his
inability to feel that humanity also is a person, although a collective
one, his egoism, in short, prevented him from feeling God, prevented him
from individualizing and personalizing the total and collective
Will--the Will of the Universe.
On the other hand, it is easy to understand his aversion from purely
empirical, evolutionist, or transformist doctrines, such as those set
forth in the works of Lamarck and Darwin which came to his notice.
Judging Darwin's theory solely by an extensive extract in _The Times_,
he described it, in a letter to Adam Louis von Doss (March 1, 1860), as
"downright empiricism" _(platter Empirismus)_. In fact, for a
voluntarist like Schopenhauer, a theory so sanely and cautiously
empirical and rational as that of Darwin left out of account the inward
force, the essential motive, of evolution. For what is, in effect, the
hidden force, the ultimate agent, which impels organisms to perpetuate
themselves and to fight for their persistence and propagation?
Selection, adaptation, heredity, these are only external conditions.
This inner, essential force has been called will on the supposition that
there exists also in other beings that which we feel in ourselves as a
feeling of will, the impulse to be everything, to be others as well as
ourselves yet without ceasing to be what we are. And it may be said
that this force is the divine in us, that it is God Himself who works in
us because He suffers in us.
And sympathy teaches us to discover this force, this aspiration towards
consciousness, in all things. It moves and activates the most minute
living creatures; it moves and activates, perhaps, the very cells of our
own bodily organism, which is a confederation, more or less solidary, of
living beings; it moves the very globules of our blood. Our life is
composed of lives, our vital aspiration of aspirations existing perhaps
in the limbo of subconsciousness. Not more absurd than so many other
dreams which pass as valid theories is the belief that our cells, our
globules, may possess something akin to a rudimentary cellular, globular
consciousness or basis of consciousness. Or that they may arrive at
possessing such consciousness. And since we have given a loose rein to
the fancy, we may fancy that these cells may communicate with one
another, and that some of them may express their belief that they form
part of a superior organism endowed with a collective personal
consciousness. And more than once in the history of human feeling this
fancy has been expressed in the surmisal of some philosopher or poet
that we men are a kind of globules in the blood of a Supreme Being, who
possesses his own personal collective consciousness, the consciousness
of the Universe.
Perhaps the immense Milky Way which on clear nights we behold stretching
across the heavens, this vast encircling ring in which our planetary
system is itself but a molecule, is in its turn but a cell in the
Universe, in the Body of God. All the cells of our body combine and
co-operate in maintaining and kindling by their activity our
consciousness, our soul; and if the consciousness or the souls of all
these cells entered completely into our consciousness, into the
composite whole, if I possessed consciousness of all that happens in my
bodily organism, I should feel the universe happening within myself,
and perhaps the painful sense of my limitedness would disappear. And if
all the consciousness of all beings unite in their entirety in the
universal consciousness, this consciousness--that is to say, God--is
all.
In every instant obscure consciousnesses, elementary souls, are born and
die within us, and their birth and death constitute our life. And their
sudden and violent death constitutes our pain. And in like manner, in
the heart of God consciousnesses are born and die--but do they die?--and
their births and deaths constitute His life.
If there is a Universal and Supreme Consciousness, I am an idea in it;
and is it possible for any idea in this Supreme Consciousness to be
completely blotted out? After I have died, God will go on remembering
me, and to be remembered by God, to have my consciousness sustained by
the Supreme Consciousness, is not that, perhaps, to be?
And if anyone should say that God has made the universe, it may be
rejoined that so also our soul has made our body as much as, if not more
than, it has been made by it--if, indeed, there be a soul.
When pity, love, reveals to us the whole universe striving to gain, to
preserve, and to enlarge its consciousness, striving more and more to
saturate itself with consciousness, feeling the pain of the discords
which are produced within it, pity reveals to us the likeness of the
whole universe with ourselves; it reveals to us that it is human, and it
leads us to discover our Father in it, of whose flesh we are flesh; love
leads us to personalize the whole of which we form a part.
To say that God is eternally producing things is fundamentally the same
as saying that things are eternally producing God. And the belief in a
personal and spiritual God is based on the belief in our own personality
and spirituality. Because we feel ourselves to be consciousness, we
feel God to be consciousness--that is to say, a person; and because we
desire ardently that our consciousness shall live and be independently
of the body, we believe that the divine person lives and exists
independently of the universe, that his state of consciousness is _ad
extra_.
No doubt logicians will come forward and confront us with the evident
rational difficulties which this involves; but we have already stated
that, although presented under logical forms, the content of all this is
not strictly rational. Every rational conception of God is in itself
contradictory. Faith in God is born of love for God--we believe that God
exists by force of wishing that He may exist, and it is born also,
perhaps, of God's love for us. Reason does not prove to us that God
exists, but neither does it prove that He cannot exist.
But of this conception of faith in God as the personalization of the
universe we shall have more to say presently.
And recalling what has been said in another part of this work, we may
say that material things, in so far as they are known to us, issue into
knowledge through the agency of hunger, and out of hunger issues the
sensible or material universe in which we conglomerate these things; and
that ideal things issue out of love, and out of love issues God, in whom
we conglomerate these ideal things as in the Consciousness of the
Universe. It is social consciousness, the child of love, of the instinct
of perpetuation, that leads us to socialize everything, to see society
in everything, and that shows us at last that all Nature is really an
infinite Society. For my part, the feeling that Nature is a society has
taken hold of me hundreds of times in walking through the woods
possessed with a sense of solidarity with the oaks, a sense of their dim
awareness of my presence.
Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and
anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes
everything identical with man.[36] And the work of man is to
supernaturalize Nature--that is to say, to make it divine by making it
human, to help it to become conscious of itself, in short. The action of
reason, on the other hand, is to mechanize or materialize.
And just as a fruitful union is consummated between the individual--who
is, in a certain sense, a society--and society, which is also an
individual--the two being so inseparable from one another that it is
impossible to say where the one begins and the other ends, for they are
rather two aspects of a single essence--so also the spirit, the social
element, which by relating us to others makes us conscious, unites with
matter, the individual and individualizing element; similarly, reason or
intelligence and imagination embrace in a mutually fruitful union, and
the Universe merges into one with God.
* * * * *
Is all this true? And what is truth? I in my turn will ask, as Pilate
asked--not, however, only to turn away and wash my hands, without
waiting for an answer.
Is truth in reason, or above reason, or beneath reason, or outside of
reason, in some way or another? Is only the rational true? May there not
be a reality, by its very nature, unattainable by reason, and perhaps,
by its very nature, opposed to reason? And how can we know this reality
if reason alone holds the key to knowledge?
Our desire of living, our need of life, asks that that may be true which
urges us to self-preservation and self-perpetuation, which sustains man
and society; it asks that the true water may be that which assuages our
thirst, and because it assuages it, that the true bread may be that
which satisfies our hunger, because it satisfies it.
The senses are devoted to the service of the instinct of preservation,
and everything that satisfies this need of preserving ourselves, even
though it does not pass through the senses, is nevertheless a kind of
intimate penetration of reality in us. Is the process of assimilating
nutriment perhaps less real than the process of knowing the nutritive
substance? It may be said that to eat a loaf of bread is not the same
thing as seeing, touching, or tasting it; that in the one case it enters
into our body, but not therefore into our consciousness. Is this true?
Does not the loaf of bread that I have converted into my flesh and blood
enter more into my consciousness than the other loaf which I see and
touch, and of which I say: "This is mine"? And must I refuse objective
reality to the bread that I have thus converted into my flesh and blood
and made mine when I only touch it?
There are some who live by air without knowing it. In the same way, it
may be, we live by God and in God--in God the spirit and consciousness
of society and of the whole Universe, in so far as the Universe is also
a society.
God is felt only in so far as He is lived; and man does not live by
bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God
(Matt. iv. 4; Deut. viii. 3).
And this personalization of the all, of the Universe, to which we are
led by love, by pity, is the personalization of a person who embraces
and comprehends within himself the other persons of which he is
composed.
The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.
For where there is no consciousness there is no finality, finality
presupposing a purpose. And, as we shall see, faith in God is based
simply upon the vital need of giving finality to existence, of making it
answer to a purpose. We need God, not in order to understand the _why_,
but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate _wherefore_, to give a
meaning to the Universe.
And neither ought we to be surprised by the affirmation that this
consciousness of the Universe is composed and integrated by the
consciousnesses of the beings which form the Universe, by the
consciousnesses of all the beings that exist, and that nevertheless it
remains a personal consciousness distinct from those which compose it.
Only thus is it possible to understand how in God we live, move, and
have our being. That great visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg, saw or caught
a glimpse of this in his book on Heaven and Hell _(De Coelo et Inferno_,
lii.), when he tells us: "An entire angelic society appears sometimes in
the form of a single angel, which also it hath been granted me by the
Lord to see. When the Lord Himself appears in the midst of the angels,
He doth not appear as encompassed by a multitude, but as a single being
in angelic form. Hence it is that the Lord in the Word is called an
angel, and likewise that on entire society is so called. Michael,
Gabriel, and Raphael are nothing but angelical societies, which are so
named from their functions."
May we not perhaps live and love--that is, suffer and pity--in this
all-enveloping Supreme Person--we, all the persons who suffer and pity
and all the beings that strive to achieve personality, to acquire
consciousness of their suffering and their limitation? And are we not,
perhaps, ideas of this total Grand Consciousness, which by thinking of
us as existing confers existence upon us? Does not our existence consist
in being perceived and felt by God? And, further on, this same visionary
tells us, under the form of images, that each angel, each society of
angels, and the whole of heaven comprehensively surveyed, appear in
human form, and in virtue of this human form the Lord rules them as one
man.
"God does not think, He creates; He does not exist, He is eternal,"
wrote Kierkegaard (_Afslutende uvidens-kabelige Efterskrift_); but
perhaps it is more exact to say with Mazzini, the mystic of the Italian
city, that "God is great because His thought is action" (_Ai giovani
d'ltalia_), because with Him to think is to create, and He gives
existence to that which exists in His thought by the mere fact of
thinking it, and the impossible is the unthinkable by God. Is it not
written in the Scriptures that God creates with His word--that is to
say, with His thought--and that by this, by His Word, He made everything
that exists? And what God has once made does He ever forget? May it not
be that all the thoughts that have ever passed through the Supreme
Consciousness still subsist therein? In Him, who is eternal, is not all
existence eternalized?
Our longing to save consciousness, to give personal and human finality
to the Universe and to existence, is such that even in the midst of a
supreme, an agonizing and lacerating sacrifice, we should still hear the
voice that assured us that if our consciousness disappears, it is that
the infinite and eternal Consciousness may be enriched thereby, that our
souls may serve as nutriment to the Universal Soul. Yes, I enrich God,
because before I existed He did not think of me as existing, because I
am one more--one more even though among an infinity of others--who,
having really lived, really suffered, and really loved, abide in His
bosom. It is the furious longing to give finality to the Universe, to
make it conscious and personal, that has brought us to believe in God,
to wish that God may exist, to create God, in a word. To create Him,
yes! This saying ought not to scandalize even the most devout theist.
For to believe in God is, in a certain sense, to create Him, although He
first creates us.[37] It is He who in us is continually creating
Himself.
We have created God in order to save the Universe from nothingness, for
all that is not consciousness and eternal consciousness, conscious of
its eternity and eternally conscious, is nothing more than appearance.
There is nothing truly real save that which feels, suffers, pities,
loves, and desires, save consciousness; there is nothing substantial but
consciousness. And we need God in order to save consciousness; not in
order to think existence, but in order to live it; not in order to know
the why and how of it, but in order to feel the wherefore of it. Love is
a contradiction if there is no God.
Let us now consider this idea of God, of the logical God or the Supreme
Reason, and of the vital God or the God of the heart--that is, Supreme
Love.