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.
It is advisable that I should indicate the relation of the
"apex-thought" to those recurrent moods of profound human scepticism
wherein we deny the attainability of any "truth" at all.
It is advisable that I should indicate the relation of the
apex-thought to any possible "new organ of vision" with which some
unforeseen experiment of the soul may suddenly endow us. And it
is above all advisable that I should show the relation between this
focussed synthesis of the soul's complexity and the actual physical
body whose material senses are part of this complexity.
The whole problem of the art of life may be said to lie in the
question of co-ordination. The actual process of coordination is the
supreme and eternal difficulty. Only at rare moments do we
individually approximate to its achievement. Only once or twice, it
may be, in a whole life-time, do we actually achieve it. But it is by
the power and insight of such fortunate moments that we attain
whatever measure of permanent illumination adds dignity and
courage to our days.
We live by the memory of such moments. We live by the hope of
their return. In the meanwhile our luck or our ill luck, as living
human beings, depends on no outward events or circumstances but
on our success in the conscious effort of approximation to what,
when it does arrive, seems to take the grace and ease and
inevitable beauty of a free gift of the gods.
This fortunate rhythm of the primordial energies of the complex
vision may be felt and realized without being expressed in words.
The curse of what we call "cleverness" is that it hastens to find
facile and fluent expression for what cannot be easily and fluently
expressed. Education is too frequently a mere affair of words, a
superficial encouragement of superficial expression. It is for this
reason that many totally uneducated persons achieve, unknown to
all except their most intimate friends, a far closer approach to this
difficult co-ordination than others who are not only well-educated
but are regarded by the world as famous leaders of modern
thought.
It will be remarked that in my list of the primordial energies of the
complex vision I do not mention religion. This is not because I do
not recognize the passionate and formidable role played by
religion in the history of the human race, nor because I regard the
"religious instinct" as a thing outgrown and done with. I have not
included it because I cannot regard it as a distinct and separate
attribute, in the sense in which reason, conscience, intuition and so
forth, are distinct and separate attributes, of the complex vision.
I regard it as a name given in common usage to certain premature
and disproportioned efforts at co-ordination among these
attributes, and I am well content to apply the word "religion" to
that sacred ecstasy, at once passionate and calm, at once personal
and impersonal, which suffuses our being with an unutterable
happiness when the energies of the complex vision are brought
into focus. I regard the word religion as a word that has drawn and
attracted to itself, in its descent down the stream of time, so rich
and so intricate a cargo of human feelings that it has come to mean
too many things to be any longer of specific value in a
philosophical analysis.
Any sort of reaction against the primeval fear with which man
contemplates the unknown, is religion. The passionate craving of
human beings for a love which changes not nor passes away, is
religion.
The desperate longing to find an idea, a principle, a truth, a
"cause," for the sake of which we can sacrifice our personal
pleasure and our personal selfishness, is religion.
The craving for some unity, some synthesis, some universal
meaning in the system of things, is religion. The desire for an
"over-life" or an "over-world," in which the distress, disorder,
misunderstandings and cruelties of our present existence are
redeemed, is religion.
The desire to find something real and eternal behind the transient
flow of appearance, is religion. The desire to force upon others by
violence, by trickery, by fire, by sword, by persecution, by magic,
by persuasion, by eloquence, by martyrdom, an idea which is more
important to us than life itself, is religion.
It will be seen from this brief survey of the immense field which
the word "religion" has come to cover, that I am justified in
regarding it rather as a name given to the emotional thrill
and ecstatic abandonment which accompanies any sort of co-ordination
of the attributes of the complex vision, proportioned or
disproportioned, than as a distinct and separate attribute in itself.
Only when the co-ordination of our human activities rises to the
height of a supreme music, can we regard "religion" as the most
beautiful and most important of all human experiences. And at the
moment when it takes this form it resolves itself into nothing more
than an unutterable feeling of ecstasy produced by the sense that
we are in harmony with the rest of the universe. Religion, as I am
compelled to think of it, resolves itself into that reaction of
unspeakable happiness produced in us, when by any kind of
synthetic movement, however crude, we are either saved from
unreality or reconciled to reality.
Religion is, in fact, the name we give to the ecstasy in the heart of
the complex vision, when, in any sort of coordination between our
contradictory energies, we at once escape from ourselves and
realize ourselves. We are forbidden to speak of the "religious
sense" or the "religious instinct" because, truly interpreted,
religion is not a single activity among other activities, but the
emotional reaction upon our whole nature when that nature is
functioning in its creative fulness.
Religion must therefore be regarded as the culminating ecstasy of
the art of life, or as a premature snatching at such an ecstasy while
the art of life is still discordant and inchoate. In the first instance
it is the supreme reward of the creative act. In the second instance it
is a tragic temptation to rest by the way in a unity which is an
illusive unity and in a heaven from which "the sun of the morning"
is excluded. It thus comes about that what we call religion is
frequently a hindrance to the rhythm of the apex-thought. It may
be a sentimental consolation. It may be an excuse for cruelty and
obscurantism. There is always a danger when it is thus
prematurely manifested, that it should darken, distort, deprave and
obstruct the movement of creation.
At this point, an objection arises to our whole method of research
which it is necessary to meet at once. This objection, a peculiarly
modern one, is based upon the theory, handed about in modern
literature as a kind of diploma of cleverness and repeated
superficially by many who are not really sceptical at all, that it is
impossible in this world to arrive, under any circumstances, at any
kind of truth.
Persons who repeat this sceptical dogma are simply refusing to
acknowledge the evidence of their own experience. However rare
our high rhythmic moments may be, some sort of approximation
to them, quite sufficient to destroy the validity of this absolute
scepticism, must, if a person honestly confesses the truth, and does
not dissimulate out of intellectual pride, have entered into the
experience of every human being.
Let us, however, consider the kind of dogmatic language which
these sceptics use. They speak of "life" as a thing which so
perpetually changes, expands, diminishes, undulates, advances,
recedes, evolves, revolves, explodes, precipitates, lightens,
darkens, thins, thickens, hardens, softens, over-brims, concentrates,
grows shallow, grows deep, that it were ridiculous even to attempt
to create an equilibrium, or rhythmic "parting-of-the-ways,"
out of such evasive and treacherous material.
My answer to this sceptical protest is a simple one. It is an appeal
to human experience. I maintain that this modern tendency to talk
dogmatically and vaguely about "the evasive fluidity of life" is
nothing more than a crafty pathological retreat from the
formidable challenge of life. It is indeed a kind of mental drug or
spiritual opiate by the use of which many unheroic souls hide
themselves from the sardonic stare of the eternal Sphinx. It is a
weakness comparable to the weakness of many premature religious
syntheses; and it has the same soothing and disintegrating effect
upon the creative energy of the mind.
What, as a matter of fact, hurts us all, much more than any
tendency of life to be over-fluid and over-evasive, is the atrocious
tendency of life to be inflexible, rigorous, implacable, harshly
immobile. This vague dogmatic sentiment about "the fluidity of
life," is one of the instinctive ways by which we try to pretend that
our prison-walls are not walls at all, but only friendly and flowing
vapour. None of the great works of art and poetry, the austere
beauty of which reflects the real nature of the universe, could
continue to exercise their magical power upon us, could continue
to sustain us and comfort us, if those tragic ultimate realities were
not ultimate realities.
The sublime ritual of art, which at its noblest has the character of
religion, could not exist for a moment in a world as softly
fluctuating and as dimly wavering as this modern scepticism
would make it. Life is at once more beautiful and far more tragic.
Though surrounded by mystery the grand outlines of the world
remain austerely and sternly the same. The sun rises and sets. The
moon draws the tides. Man goes forth to his work and his labour
until the evening. Man is born; man loves and hates; man dies.
And over him the same unfathomable spaces yawn. And under
him the same unfathomable spaces yawn. Time, with its seasons,
passes him in unalterable procession. From birth to death his soul
wrestles with the universe; and the drama of which he is the
protagonist lifts the sublime monotony of its scenery from the
zenith to the nadir.
Let any man ask himself what it is that hurts him most in life and
yet seems most real to him. He will be compelled to answer . . .
"the atrocious regularity of things and their obscene necessity."
The very persons who talk so glibly about the "fluidity" and
"evasiveness" of life are persons in whose own flesh the
wedge-like granite of fate has lodged itself with crushing finality.
Life has indeed been too rigid and too stark for them; and in
place of seizing it in an embrace as formidable as its own, they go
aside muttering, "life is evasive; life is fluid; life brims over."
This sceptical dogma of "evasiveness" is generally found in
alliance with some vague modern "religion" whose chief object is
to strip the world of the dignity of its real tragedy and endow it
with the indignity of some pretended assurance. This is the role of
that superficial optimism so inherently repugnant to the aesthetic
sense.
Such apologists for a shallow and ignoble idealism are in the habit
of declaring that "the tendency of modern thought" is to render
"materialism" unthinkable; but when these people speak of
materialism they are thinking of the austere limits of that vast
objective spectacle into which we are all born. This spectacle is
indeed mysterious. It is indeed staggering and awful. But it is
irrevocably _there_. And no vague talk about the "evasiveness"
and "over-brimmingness" of life can alter one jot or tittle of its
eternal outlines.
From the sublime terror of this extraordinary drama such persons
are anxious to escape, because the iron of it has entered into their
souls. They do not see that the only "escape" offered by the reality
of things is a change of attitude towards this spectacle, not an
assertion that the form of this spectacle is unfixed and wavering.
No psychological or mathematical speculation has the power to
alter the essential outlines of this spectacle.
If such speculations could alter it, then the aesthetic sense of
humanity would be driven to transform itself; and a new aesthetic
sense, adapted to this new "evasiveness of life," would have to
take its place. Attempts are indeed being made at this very hour to
"start fresh" with a new aesthetic sense and only the winnowing
process of time and the pressure of personal experience can refute
such attempts. Meanwhile all we can do is to note the rejection of
such attempts by the verdict of the complex vision; a rejection
which indicates that if such attempts are to be successful they must
imply the substitution of a new complex vision for the one which
humanity has used since the beginning.
In other words they must imply a radical change in the basic
attributes of human nature. Humanity, to justify them, must
become some sort of super-humanity; and a new world inhabited
by a new race must take the place of the world we know. Such an
attempt to substitute a new humanity for the old is already
conscious of itself in those curious experiments of psychical
research which are based upon the hypothesis that some completely
new organs of sense are on the point of being discovered. Philosophers
who believe in the inherent unchangeableness of our present instrument
of research--the complex vision as it now exists--can only look on at
these experiments with an attitude of critical detachment; and wait
until time and experience have justified or refuted them.
Philosophers who believe in the unchangeableness of the complex
vision are bound to recognize that the human will, which is a basic
attribute of this vision, must in any case play a considerable part in
the creation of the future. But from their point of view the will is,
after all, only one of these basic attributes. There is also the
aesthetic sense. And the aesthetic sense is totally averse to this
new kind of humanity and this new kind of world. The eternal
vision of those invisible "sons of the universe," the proof of whose
existence is a deduction from the encounters of all actual souls
with one another, would seem to be entirely irreconcilable with
any new complex vision whose nature had been completely
changed.
The visible spectacle of the world with its implied "eternal
arbiters" would be transmuted and transfigured by such an
upheaval. For as long as the human will, as we know it now,
remains in association with the aesthetic sense as we know it now,
the creation of the future--however yielding and indetermined--
must depend upon the form, the shape, the principle, the prophecy,
the premonition, existing from the beginning in the nature of
things. And it is precisely this shape, this form, this principle, this
hope, this dream, this essential motive of those sons of the
universe whose existence is implied "when two and three are
gathered together," which would be destroyed and annihilated, if
the complex vision were transformed into something else and a
new world took the place of the old.
It is the existence of these real "immortals" confronting this real
universe which makes possible the feeling we have that in spite of
all our differences, some accumulated stream of beauty, truth and
goodness, does actually carry the past forward into the future, does
actually create the future according to a premonition and a hope
which have been there from the beginning.
This is the supreme act of faith of the complex vision. This is the
supreme act of faith which saves us at once from our subjective
isolation and from the will towards the acceptance of a premature
"religion." This is what saves us from any psychological or
mathematical or logical speculation, which would contradict this
hope or destroy the reality of the universe from which this hope
emerges.
When we come to a general consideration of the various attributes
of the complex vision we are struck at once by the appalling power
they each have, when not held in check, of cancelling one
another's contribution. It is for this reason that my newly-coined
word was unavoidable if we are to emphasize the synthetic energy
of the complex vision when it exercises its control over these
diverse attributes and resists their constant tendency to cancel one
another. It was precisely to emphasize this synthetic energy of
the soul that I have made use of the arbitrary expression
"apex-thought." For if we think of these various attributes as
shooting forth like flames from the arrowhead of the individual soul,
we must think of this coordinating energy as the power which
continually draws these flames together when they deviate from
their focussed intensity, and continually restores, from its
inharmonious dispersion, the concentration of their arrows' point.
If we are permitted to use this image of a horizontal pyramid of
flames it will be seen how important a part is played by this
apex-thought in concentrating the energies of the complex vision so
that it can "drive" or "burn" or "pierce" its way into the surrounding
mystery.
For this image of an arrow-head of focussed flame which is in
constant danger of being dispersed as the flames recede from one
another and are blown backwards is only a symbolic way of
indicating how difficult it is to pierce with our complicated
instrument of research the vast mystery which surrounds us.
All this is mere pictorial metaphor; but in visualizing the human
soul as a moving arrow-head, composed of flickering flames that
only now and then combine into a sharp point, while at other times
the wind drives them apart and bends them back, I am suggesting
that the ultimate reality of things is a state of confused movement
continually becoming a state of concentrated movement. I am
suggesting that the secrets of life only yield themselves up to a
movement of desperation. I am suggesting that the spirit of
creation is also the spirit of destruction, and that the real object
of the energy of creation is to pierce with its burning light the
darkness of the objective mystery.
As proof of the necessity of keeping this apex-thought in constant
poise, let me reiterate one or two of the philosophical disasters
which result from a cessation of its rhythmic function. When the
reason, for instance, usurps the whole field and acts in isolation
from the imagination and the intuition, it tends to persuade us to
deny the very existence of that deepest and most vivid reality of
all, the handle of our spear-head, the base of our pyramid, the
mysterious entity within us, which we have come, following the
traditions of the centuries, to name the "soul." And not only does
the soul disappear when the reason thus isolates itself, but another
primary revelation of the complex vision, I mean that half-created,
half-discovered object of the senses popularly called "matter,"
disappears with it.
Man's self-consciousness is thus left suspended "in vacuo" with no
concrete reality within it and no concrete reality outside it; and
"thought-in-the-abstract" becomes the only truth.
But not only can reason thus set itself up in isolated usurpation
against such other activities as imagination, intuition, will or taste;
it can also divide itself against itself and emerge in completely
contradictory functions. In the form of mathematical logic, for
instance, it can dispose most drastically of that living organic
world which in the form of experimental science it assumes to be
the only truth. Again it may happen that reason will arbitrarily ally
itself with one or the other of the other attributes and on the
strength of such an alliance seek to obliterate all the rest. Thus
while it is impossible to avoid the admission that of all these basic
attributes reason is the most important, because without it all the
rest would be inarticulate and dumb, it remains true that to hold
reason in balanced relation to all the rest and to hold its own
contradictory tendencies in balanced relation to one another is an
undertaking of such extraordinary difficulty that if it were not for
the complex vision's possession of that co-ordinating power which
I have named its apex-thought, one might well pardon the mood of
those persons who use reason to drug reason and who steer their
boat into some unruffled backwater of dogma or mysticism.
The necessity of such an infinitely delicate poise or balance or
rhythm in these high matters, the necessity of keeping all these
conflicting attributes at this exquisite point of suspense between
abysses of contradiction, is a necessity which compels us to
recognize that philosophy is nothing more or less than the supreme
art, and the most difficult of all arts.
Certainly, it seems as though thought has to become in a profound
sense rhythmical, has to take to itself the nature of music, before it
can become the truth. For the truth does not seem to be a mere
picture of the system of things, reflected in the mirror of the mind.
The truth seems to be the very system of things itself, become
conscious and volitional, changing, growing, living, destroying,
creating. Thus it comes about that the thought which plunges into
the universe must of necessity, even in that very act, remould and
re-fashion the universe. Thus Nature perpetually recreates herself
by the passion of her children and is forever re-born as the child of
her own offspring.
But if the supreme difficulty of the art of life lies in the
maintenance of this rhythm between these primary attributes, it
must never be forgotten that these "attributes" are, after all, only
_aspects_ of the soul. The soul _is_ each of them, not _in_ each of
them. They are not "faculties" through which the soul acts. They
are never absolutely distinct from one another. There is something
of each of them in every one of them, and every attempt which
they make to establish themselves in an independent existence is
only an attempt of the soul itself to live a perverted and a
discordant, instead of a natural and a harmonious life.
The rarity and difficulty of that high art which brings all these
orchestral players into harmony is sufficient cause to account for
the scarcity of genuine philosophical thought in this confused
world. The human soul, looking desperately round for some calm
yet passionate light to save its hours from ruinous waste, turns
away in bitter disillusion from the thin dust and the swollen
vapour that are offered it.
Out of the logical laboratories of the abstract reason this thin dust
is offered; and out of the ideal factories of the wish for superficial
comfort this iridescent vapour is poured forth. That burning secret
of life, that lovely and terrible reality for which the soul pines is
not to be found in any mere outward fact or in any mere subjective
intuition.
Such a fact may crumble to pieces and give place to another. Such
an intuition may melt into air under the shock of experience. The
craving of the soul is not satisfied by the discovery that "matter"
resolves itself into "energy," nor is the misery of the heart
assuaged by the theory that time is an attribute of fourth-dimensional
space. The lamentable beating of blood-stained hands upon the
ultimate walls does not cease when we learn that two straight lines
can or cannot meet in infinity; nor does the knowledge that history
is an "ideal evolution" heal the aching of the world-sorrow.
Could we know for certain that the dead were raised up, even that
knowledge would not reduce to silence the bitter cry of the
outraged generations. So poisonous and so deep is the pain of life
that no kind of knowledge, not even the knowledge that annihilation
must at last, sooner or later, end it all, can really heal it.
But truth is not knowledge. Truth is not the recognition of an
external fact. Truth is a creative gesture. It is a ritual, a rhythmic
poise, a balance deliberately sustained between eternal
contradictions. It is the magical touch which reduces to harmony
the quivering vibrations of many opposites. It is the dramatic
movement of a supreme actor at the climax of an unfathomable
drama. It is music resting upon itself; music so exquisite as to
seem like silence, music so passionate as to have become calm.
The apex-thought of that pyramid of conflicting flames which we
call the complex vision holds itself together at one concentrated
point. And this point is the arrow point of our human soul; that
soul which is shot across immensity in the eternal war between life
and the opposite of life.
Although for the purpose of emphasizing and elucidating the
essential nature of this apex-thought it has been found advisable to
use such metaphorical and pictorial images as the one just
indicated, it must be remembered that what we are actually and in
direct experience confronted with is the mystery of a real human
personality inhabiting a real human body.
This real personal soul inhabiting a real objective body and
surrounded on all sides by a real unfathomable universe, is the
original revelation of the complex vision from which there is no
escape except by death.
The philosophy of the complex vision finds its starting point in an
acceptance of this situation which is nothing more than an
acceptance of the complex vision's own harmonious activity. An
acceptance of the reality of the human body is an essential part of
this harmonious activity because among the aspects of the
complex vision are to be found certain attributes, such as
sensation, instinct and imagination, which would be negated and
rendered abortive if the human body were an illusion.
If the "starting point" of our philosophy demands recognition of
the reality of the body, the "ideal" of our philosophy must have a
place for the body also. Flesh and blood must therefore play their
part in the resultant harmony at which we are all the while aiming;
and no contempt for the body, no hatred of the body, no refusal to
recognize the supreme beauty and sacredness of the body, can be
allowed to distort or pervert our vision.
The activity of the apex-thought, though we have a right to use
any metaphorical image we please about it in order to elucidate its
nature, must always be considered as using the bodily senses in its
resultant rhythm. It must always be considered as using that
portion of the objective universe which we name the body as an
inevitable "note" in its musical flight from darkness to darkness. It
must always be conceived as following the attraction of an eternal
vision, in which "the idea of the body" is an imperishable element.
This "eternal vision," which it is the rhythmic motive of the
apex-thought to seek, carries with it the witness and "imprimatur" of
the gods; and although no man has ever "beheld" the gods, and
although the gods by reason of their omnipresent activity, cannot
be thought of as being "incarnated," yet since they are living souls,
even as we are, and since every living soul has, as the substratum
of its identity, what might be called a "spiritual body," there is
nothing in the revelation made to us through the activity of our
complex vision to forbid our free and even fanciful speculation as
to its use, by the very highest of superhuman personalities, even,
let us say, by the Christ himself, of this mysterious energy of the
soul which I have named the "apex-thought."