THE ILLUSION OF DEAD MATTER
The philosophy of the complex vision is based, as I have shown,
upon nothing less than the whole personality of man become
conscious of itself in the totality of its rhythmic functioning. This
personality, although capable of being analysed in its constituent
elements, is an integral and unfathomable reality. And just because
it is such a reality it descends and expands on every side into
immeasurable depths and immeasurable horizons.
We know nothing as intimately and vividly as we know personality
and every knowledge that we have is either a spiritual or
a material abstraction from this supreme knowledge. This
knowledge of personality which is our ultimate truth, implies a
belief in the integral and real existence of what we call the soul.
And because personality implies the soul and because we have no
ultimate conception of any other reality in the world except the
reality of personality, therefore we are compelled to assume that
every separate external object in Nature is possessed of a soul.
The peculiar psychological melancholy which sometimes seizes us
in the presence of inanimate natural objects, such as earth and
water and sand and dust and rain and vapour, objects whose
existence may superficially appear to be entirely chemical or
material, is accounted for by the fact that the soul in us is baffled
and discouraged and repulsed by these things because by reason of
their superficial appearance they convey the impression of
complete soullessness. In the presence of plants and animals and
all animate things we are also vaguely conscious of a strange
psychological melancholy. But this latter melancholy is of a
less poignant character than the former because what we seem
superficially conscious of is not "soullessness" but a psychic life
which is alien from our life, and therefore baffling and obscure.
In both of these cases, however, as soon as we are bold enough to
apply the conclusions we have arrived at from the analysis of the
knowledge which is most vivid and real to us, namely, the
knowledge of our own soul, this peculiar psychological melancholy
is driven away. It is a melancholy which descends upon us
when in any disintegrated moment the creative energy in
us, the energy of love in us, is overcome by the evil and inertness
of the aboriginal malice. Under the influence of this inert malice,
which takes advantage of some lapse or ebb of the creative energy
in us, the rhythmic activity of our complex vision breaks down;
and we visualize the world through the attributes of reason and
sensation alone. And the world, visualized through reason and
sensation alone, becomes a world of uniform, and homogeneous
monotony, made up either of one all-embracing material substance,
or of one all-embracing spiritual substance. In either case
that living plurality of real separate "souls" which correspond
to our own soul vanishes away, and a dreary and devastating
oneness, whether spiritual or chemical, fills the whole field. The
world which is the emanation of this atrophied and distorted vision
is a world of crushing dreariness; but it is an unreal world because
the only vivid and unfathomable reality we know is the reality of
innumerable souls. The curious thing about this world of
superficial chemical or spiritual uniformity is that it seems the
same _identical_ world in the case of all separate souls whose
complex vision is thus distorted by the prevalence of that which
opposes itself to creation and by the consequent ebb and
weakening of the energy of love. It is impossible to be assured that
this is the case; but all evidence of language points towards such
an _identity of desolation_ between the innumerable separate
"universes" of the souls which fill the world, when such souls
visualize existence through reason and sensation alone.
This also is a portion of the same "illusion of impersonality" into
which the inert malice of the ultimate "resistance" betrays us with
demonic cunning. What man is there among us who does not
recall some moment of visionary disintegration, when, in the
presence of both these mysteries, an unspeakable depression of
this kind has overtaken him? He has stood, perhaps, on some wet
autumn evening, watching the soulless reflection of a dead moon
in a pond of dead water; while above him the motionless distorted
trunk of some goblinish tree mocks him with its desolate
remoteness from his own life.
At that moment, with his abortive and atrophied complex vision,
all he sees is the eternal soullessness and deadness of matter; dead
moonlight, dead water, dead mud and slime and refuse, dead mist
and vapour, dead earth-mould and dead leaves. And while the
desolate chemistry of nothingness grips him with its dead fingers
and he turns hopelessly to the silent tree-trunk at his side, that also
repels him with the chill breath of psychic remoteness; and it
seems to him that that also is strange and impersonal and
unconscious; that that also is only a blind pre-determined portion
of some huge planetary life-process that has no place for a living
soul, but only a place for automatic impersonal chemistry.
Brooding in this way, with the eternal malice of the system of
things conquering the creative impulse in the depths of his soul, he
becomes obsessed with the idea that not only these isolated
portions of Nature, but the whole of Nature, is thus alien and
remote and thus given up to a desolate and soulless uniformity.
Unutterable loneliness takes possession of him and he feels
himself to be an exile in a dark and hostile assemblage
of elemental forces. If at such a moment by means of some
passionate invocation of the immortal gods, or by means of some
desperate sinking into his own soul and gathering together of the
creative energy in him, he is able to resist this desolation, how
strange and sudden a shifting of mood occurs! He then, by a bold
movement of imagination, restores the balance of his complex
vision; and in a moment the spectacle is transfigured.
The apparently dead pond takes to itself the lineaments of some
indescribable living soul, of which that particular portion of
elemental being is the outward expression. The apparently dead
moonlight becomes the magical influence of some mysterious
"lunar soul" of which the earth's silent companions is the external
form. The apparently dead mud of the pond's edge becomes a
living portion of that earth-body which is the visible manifestation
of the soul of the earth. The motionless tree-trunk at his side seems
no longer the desolate embodiment of some vague "psychic life"
utterly alien from his own life but reveals to him the immediate
magical presence of a real soul there, whose personality, though
not conscious in the precise manner in which he is conscious, has
yet its own measure of complex vision and is mutely struggling
with the cruel inertness and resistance which blocks the path of the
energy of life. When once, by the bold synthesis of reason and
sensation with those other attributes of the complex vision which
we name instinct, imagination, intuition, and the like, the soul
itself comes to be regarded as the substratum of personal
existence, that desolating separation between humanity and Nature
ceases to baffle us. As long as the substratum of personal life is
regarded as the physical body there must always be this desolating
difference and this remoteness.
For in such a case the stress is inevitably laid upon the
physiological and biological difference between the body of a man
and the body of the earth or the moon or the sun or any plant or
animal. But as soon as the substratum of personal life is regarded
not as the body but as the sour it ceases to be necessary to lay so
merciless a stress upon the difference between man's elaborate
physiological constitution and the simpler chemical constitution of
organic or inorganic objects.
If the complex vision is the vision of the soul, if the soul uses its
bodily sensation as only one among its other instruments of
contact with life, then it is obvious that between the soul of a man
and the soul of a planet or a plant there need be no such appalling
and desolating gulf as that which fills us with such profound
melancholy when we refuse to let the complex vision have its
complete rhythmic play and insist on sacrificing the revelations
made by instinct and intuition to the falsifying conclusions of
reason and sensation, energizing in arbitrary solitude.
The "mort-main" or "dead-hand" of that aboriginal malice which
resists life is directly responsible for this illusion of "unconscious
matter" through the midst of which we grope like outlawed
exiles. Reason and the bodily senses, conspiring together, are
perpetually tempting us to believe in the reality of this desolate
phantom-world of blind material elements; but the unreality of this
corpse-life becomes evident directly we consider the revelation of the
complex vision.
For the complex vision reveals to us that what we call "the
universe" is a thing which is for ever coming newly and freshly
into life, for ever being re-born and re-constituted by the interplay
between the individual soul and the "objective mystery." Of the
objective mystery itself, apart from the individual soul, we are able
to say nothing. But since the "universe" is the discovery and
creation of the individual soul, there must be as many different
"universes" as there are living souls.
Our belief in "one universe," whose characteristics are relatively
identical in the case of all the souls which contemplate it, is a
belief which in part results from an original act of faith and in part
results from an implicit appeal to those "invisible companions"
whose concentrated will towards "reality" and "beauty" and
"nobility" offers us our only objective standard of these ideas.
From the ground, therefore, of this trinity of incomprehensible
substances, namely the substance which is the substratum of the
individual soul, the substance which is "the objective mystery" out
of which the individual soul creates its universe, and the substance
which is the "medium" or "link" which enables these individual
souls to communicate with one another, emerge the only realities
which we can know. And since this trinity of incomprehensible
substances, thus divided one from another, must be thought of as
dominated by the same unity of time and space, it is inconceivable
that they should be anything else than three aspects of one and the
same incomprehensible substance. From this it follows that from
the ground of one incomprehensible substance which in its first
aspect is the substratum of the soul, in its second aspect is the
objective mystery confronting the soul, in its third aspect is the
medium which holds all souls together, there must be evoked all
the reality which we can conceive.
And this reality must, from the conclusions we have already
reached, take two forms. It must take the form of a plurality of
subjective "universes" answering to the plurality of living souls.
And it must take the form of one objective "universe," answering
to the objective standard of truth, beauty, and nobility, together
with the opposites of these, which is implied in the tacit appeal of
all individual souls to their "invisible companions."
In this double reality; the reality of one objective universe
identical in its appearance to all souls but dependent for its identity
upon an implicit reference to the "invisible companions," and the
reality of as many subjective universes as there are living souls; in
this double reality there is obviously no place at all for that
phantom-world of unconscious "matter," which in the form of
soulless elements, or soulless organic automata, fills the human
mind with such devastating melancholy.
The dead pond with its dead moonlight, with its dead mud and its
dead snow, is therefore no better than a ghastly illusion when
considered in isolation from the soul or the souls which look forth
from it. To the soul of which those elements are the "body" neither
mud nor water nor rain nor earth-mould can appear desolate or
dead. To the soul which contemplates these things there can be no
other way of regarding them, as long as the rhythm of its vision is
unimpeded, than as the outward manifestation of a personal life, or
of many personal lives, similar in creative energy to its own.
Between the soul, or the souls, of the elements of the earth, and the
soul of the human spectator there must be, if our conclusions are
to be held good at all, a natural and profound reciprocity. The
apparent "deadness," the apparent automatism of "matter," which
projects itself between these two and resists with corpse-like
opacity their reciprocal understanding, must be one of the ghastly
illusions with which the sinister side of the eternal duality
undermines the magic of life.
But although in its objective isolation, as an absolute entity, this
"material deadness" of earth and water and rain and snow and of
all disintegrated organic chemistry must be regarded as an
"illusion," it would be a falsifying of the reality of things to deny
that it is an "illusion" to which the visions of all souls are
miserably subject. They are for ever subject to it because it is
precisely this "illusion" which the unfathomable power hostile to
life for ever evokes.
Nor must we for a moment suppose that this material objectivity,
this pond, these leaves, this mud, this snow, are altogether unreal.
Their reality is demanded by the complex vision and to deny their
reality would be the gesture of madness. They are only unreal,
they are only an "illusion," when they are considered as existing
independently of the "souls" of which they are the "body." As the
expression and manifestation of such "souls" they are entirely real.
They are indeed, in this sense, as real as our own human body.
The human soul, when it suffers from that malignant power which has
its positive and external existence in the soul itself, feels itself
to be absolutely alone in the midst of a dark chaotic welter of
monstrous elemental forces. In a mood of this kind the thought of
the huge volumes of soulless water which we call "oceans" and
"seas" crushes us with a devastating melancholy. The thought of
the interminable deserts of "dead" sand and the vast polar ice
fields and the monstrous excrescences that we call "mountains"
have the same effect. But the supreme example of the kind of
material ghastliness which I am trying to indicate, is, as may easily
be surmised, nothing less than the appalling thought of the
unfathomable spatial gulfs through which our whole stellar system
moves. Here also, in this supreme insistence of objective
"deadness," the situation is relieved when we realize that this
unthinkable space is nothing more than the material expression of
that indefinable "medium" which holds all souls together.
Moreover we must remember that these stellar gulfs cannot be
thought of except as the habitation of innumerable living souls,
each one of which is using this very "space" as the ground of its
creation of the many-coloured impassioned "universe" which is its
own dwelling. In all these instances of "objective deadness,"
whether great or small, we must not forget that the thing which
desolates us and fills us with so intolerable a nostalgia is a thing
only half real, a thing whose full reality depends upon the soul
which contemplates it and upon the soul's implicit assumption that
its truth is the truth of those "invisible companions" who supply us
with our perpetually renewed and reconstituted standard of what is
"good" and what is "evil."
There is an abominably vivid example of the kind of melancholy
I have in my mind, which, although obviously less common to
normal human experience than the forms of it I have so far
attempted to suggest, is as a rule even more crushing in its cruelty.
I refer to the sight of a dead human body; and in a less degree to
the sight of a dead animal or a dead plant.
A human corpse laid out in its coffin, or nailed down in its coffin,
how exactly does the particular attitude towards life, which for
convenience sake I name the philosophy of the complex vision,
find itself regarding _that_? Such a body, deserted by its living
soul, is obviously no longer the immediate and integral expression
of a personal life. Is it therefore no more than a shred or shard or
husk or remnant of inconceivably soulless matter? The gods
forbid! Certainly and most assuredly it is more than that.
An isolated heterogeneous mass of dead chemistry is a monstrous
illusion which only exists for us when the weakness of our
creative energy and the power of the original malice in the soul
destroys our vision. This dead body lying in its wooden coffin is
certainly possessed of no more life than the inanimate boards of
the coffin in which it lies. But the inanimate boards of the coffin,
together with the inanimate furniture of the house or room that
contains it, and the bricks and stones and mortar of such a house,
are themselves nothing less than inevitable portions of the vast
earth-body of our planetary globe.
And this planetary globe, this earth upon which we live, cannot
under any conceivable kind of reasoning to which imagination has
contributed its share, be regarded as a dead or a soulless thing. In
its isolated integrity, as a separate integral personality, the soul
has deserted the body and left it "dead." But it is only "dead" when
considered in isolation from the surrounding chemistry of
planetary life. And to consider it in this way is to consider it
falsely. For from the moment it ceases to be the expression of the
life of an individual human soul, it becomes the expression--
through every single phase of its chemical dissolution--of the life
of the planet.
In so far as the human soul, which has deserted it, is concerned it
is assuredly no better than a dead husk; but in so far as the soul of
the planet is concerned it is an essential portion of that planet's
living body and in this sense is not dead at all.
Its chemical elements, as they resolve themselves slowly back into
their planetary accomplices, are part and parcel of that general
"body of the earth" which is in a state of constant movement, and
which has the "soul of the earth" as its animating principle of
personality. And just as the human corpse, when the soul has
deserted it, becomes a portion of those chemical elements which
are the body of the planet's "personal soul," so do the dead bodies
of animals and plants and trees become portions of the same
terrestrial bodies.
Thus strictly speaking there is no single moment when any
material form or body can be called "dead." Instantaneously with
the departure of its own individual soul it is at once "possessed" by
the soul of that planetary globe from whose chemistry it drew its
elemental life and from whose chemistry, although the form of it
has changed, it still draws its life. For it is no fantastic
speculation to affirm that every living thing whether human or
otherwise plays, while it lives, a triple part upon the world stage.
It is in the first place the vehicle of the individual soul. It is in
the second place the medium of the "spiritual vampirizing" of the
invisible planetary spirits. And it is in the third place a living
portion of that organic elemental chemistry which is the body of
the terrestrial soul. Thus it becomes manifest that that "illusion of
dead matter" which fills the human soul with so profound a
melancholy is no more than an everlasting trick of the malice of
the abyss.
And the despair which sometimes results from it is a despair
which issues from no "dead matter" but from the terrible living
depths of the soul itself. It is from a consideration of the especial
kind of melancholy evoked in us by the illusion of "objective
deadness" that we are enabled to analyse those peculiar
imaginative feelings which sometime or another affect us all. I
refer to the extraordinary tenacity with which we cling to our
bodily form, however grotesque it may be, and the difficulty we
experience in disassociating our living soul from its particular
envelope or habitation; and the tendency which we have, in spite
of this, to imagine ourselves transferred to an alien body. For the
soul in us has the power of "thinking itself" into any other body it
may please to select.
And there is no reason why we should be alarmed at such an
imaginative power; or even associate its fantastic realization with
any terror of madness. The invisible entity within us which says "I
am I" can easily be conceived as suddenly awakening out of sleep
and discovering, to its astonishment, that its visible body has
suffered a bewildering transformation.
Such a transformation can be conceived as almost unlimited in
its humorous and disconcerting possibilities. But no such
transformation of the external envelope of the soul, whether into
the form of an animal or a plant or a god, need be conceived of as
necessarily driving us into insanity. The "I am I" would remain the
same in regard to its imagination, instinct, intuition, emotion,
self-consciousness and the rest. It would be only "changed" in regard
to sensation, which is a thing immediately dependent upon the
particular and special senses of the human body.
This is a truth to the reality of which the wandering fancies of
every human child bear ample witness; not to speak of the dreams
of those childlike tribes of the race, who in our progressive
insolence we are pleased to name "uncivilized." The deeper we dig
into the tissue of convoluted impressions that make up our
universe the more vividly do we become aware that our only
redemption from sheer insanity lies in "knowing ourselves"; in
other words, in keeping a drastic and desperate hold upon what, in
the midst of ambiguity and treachery, we are definitely assured of.
And the only thing we are definitely assured of, the only thing
which we really know "on the inner side," and with the kind of
knowledge which is unassailable, is the reality of our soul. We
know this with a vividness completely different from the vividness
of any other knowledge because this is not what we feel or see or
imagine or think but what we _are_. And all feeling, all seeing, all
imagining and all thinking are only attributes of this mysterious
"something" which is our integral self.
To the superficial judgment there is always something weird and
arbitrary about this belief in our own soul. And this apparent
weirdness arises from the fact that our superficial judgments are
the work of reason and sensation arrogating to themselves the
whole field of consciousness.
But directly we bring to bear upon this mass of impressions which
is our "universe" the full rhythmic play of our complete identity
this weirdness and arbitrariness disappear and we realize that we
_are_, not this thought or this sensation or even this stream of
thoughts and sensations, but the definite living "monad" which
gives these things their only link of continuity and permanence.
And it is better to accept experience, even though it refuses to
resolve itself into any rational unity, rather than to leave
experience in the distance and permit our reason to evolve its
desired unity out of its own rules and limitations.
We must readily admit that to take all the attributes of personality
and to make them adhere in the mysterious substratum of the soul
rather than in the little cells of the brain, seems to the superficial
judgment a weird and arbitrary act. But the more closely we think
of what we are doing when we make this assumption the more
inevitable does such an assumption appear.
We are driven by the necessity of the case to find some "point," or
at least some "gap" in thought and the system of things, where
mind and matter meet and are fused with one another. Absolute
consciousness does not help us to explain the facts of experience;
because "facing" absolute consciousness, directly it isolates itself,
we are compelled to recognize the presence of "something else,"
which is the material or object of which absolute consciousness is
conscious.
And what we do when we assume the little cells of the physical
brain to be the point in space or "the gap in thought" where mind
and matter meet and become one is simply to place these two
worlds in close juxtaposition and then assert that they are one. But
this placing them side by side and asserting that they are one does
not make them one. They are just as far apart as ever. The cells of
the brain remain material and the phenomenon of consciousness
remains immaterial and they are still as remote from one another
and as "unfused" as if consciousness were outside of time and
space altogether.
It is only when we come to regard the "fusion-point" of these two
things as being itself a living and personal thing; it is only when
we come to regard the substratum of the soul as a mysterious
"something" which is, at one and the same time, both what we call
"mind" and what we call "matter," that the difficulty I have
described disappears. For in this case we are dealing with
something which, unlike the little cells of the brain, is totally
invisible and totally beyond all scientific analysis; and yet with
something which, because it is affected by bodily sensations and
because it is under the sway of time and space, cannot be regarded
as utterly outside the realm of material substance. We are in fact,
in this case, dealing with something which we feel to be the
integral and ultimate reality of ourselves, as we certainly do not
feel the little cells of the brain to be; and we are dealing with
something that is no mere stream of impressions, but is the
concrete permanent reality which gives to all impressions, whether
material or immaterial, their unity and coherence.
When once we are put into possession of this, when once we come
to recognize our invisible soul as the reality which is our true self,
it is found to be no longer ridiculous and arbitrary to endow this
soul with all those various attributes, which, after all, are only
various aspects of that unique personality which is the personality
of the soul. To say "the soul has imagination," or "the soul has
instinct," or "the soul has an aesthetic sense," has only a ridiculous
sound when under the pressure of the abysmal malice which
opposes itself to life we fall into the habits of permitting those
usurping accomplices, pure reason and pure sensation, to destroy
the rhythmic harmony of the complex vision.
When once we are in full possession of our own soul it is no mere
fanciful speculation but an inevitable act of faith which compels us
to envisage the universe as a thing crowded with invisible souls,
who in some degree or other resemble our own. If this is
"anthropomorphism," though strictly speaking it ought to be
called "pan-psychism," then it is impossible for us to be
too anthropomorphic. For in this way we are doing the only
philosophical thing we have a right to do--namely, interpreting the
less known in the terms of the more known.
When we seek to interpret the soul, which we vividly know, in
terms of chemical or spiritual abstractions of which we have no
direct knowledge but which are merely rationalized symbols, we
are proceeding in an illegitimate and unphilosophical manner to
interpret the more known in terms of the less known, which is in
the true sense ridiculous.
The only escape from that profound melancholy so easily engulfed
in sheer insanity, which is the result of submission to "the illusion
of dead matter," lies in this tenacious hold upon the concrete
identity of the soul. So closely are we linked, by reason of the
chemistry of our mortal body, to every material-element; that it is
only too easy for us to merge our personal life by a perverted use
of the imagination in that phantom-world of supposedly "dead
matter" which is the illusive projection of the abysmal malice.
Thus just as the soul is driven by extreme physical pain to
relinquish its identity and to become "an incarnate sensation," so
the soul is driven by the power of malice to relinquish its
centrifugal force and to become the very mud and slime and
excremental debris which it has endowed with an illusive
soullessness.
The clue to the secret pathology of these moods, to whose brink
reason and sensation have led us and into whose abyss perverted
imagination has plunged us, is therefore to be found in the
unfathomable duality of good and evil. If it seems to the kind of
mind that demands "rational unity" at all costs, even at the cost of
truth to experience, that this duality cannot be left unreconciled,
the answer which the philosophy of the complex vision must
make, is that any reconciliation of such a sort, any reduction to
monistic unity of the eternal adversaries out of whose struggle life
itself springs, would bring life itself back to nothingness.
The argument that because, in the eternal process of destruction
and creation, life or love or what we call "the good" depends for
its activity upon death or malice or what we call "evil," these
opposites are one and the same, is shown to be utterly false when
one thinks of the analogy of the struggle between the sexes.
Because the activity of the male depends upon the existence of the
female, that is no reason for concluding that the male and the
female are one and the same thing.
Because "good" becomes more "good" out of its conflict with
"evil," that does not mean that "good" is responsible for the
existence of "evil"; any more than because "evil" becomes more
"evil" out of its conflict with "good" does it mean that "evil" is
responsible for the existence of "good." Neither is responsible for
the existence of the other. They are both positive and real and they
are both eternal. They are both unfathomable elements in every
personal individual soul, whether of man or plant or animal or god
or demi-god that has ever existed or will ever come to exist.
The prevalent idea that because good "in the long run" and over
vast spaces of time shows itself to be a little--just a little--more
powerful than evil, evil must be regarded as only a form of good
or a necessary negation of good is a fallacy derived from the
illusion that life is the creation of a "parent" of the universe whose
nature is absolutely "good." Such a fallacy takes for granted that
somewhere and somehow "Good" will finally triumph over "evil."
The revelation of the complex vision destroys this fallacy. Such a
complete triumph of "good" over "evil" would mean the end of
everything that exists because everything that exists depends upon
this abysmal struggle. But for personalities who are able to
recognize that the mere fact of their being alive is already a
considerable victory of "good" over "evil," there is nothing
overwhelming in the thought that "good" can never completely
overcome "evil." It is enough that life has given them life; and that
in the perpetually renewed struggle between love and malice they
find at the rare moments when love overcomes malice a flood of
happiness which, brings with it "the sensation of eternity."
For such souls eternity is here and now; and no anticipated
absolute triumph of the "good" in the world over the "evil" can
compare for a moment with the indescribable happiness which this
"sensation of eternity" brings. It is this happiness, evoked by the
rhythmic play of the soul's apex-thought in its supreme hours,
which alone, even in memory, can destroy "the illusion of dead
matter."
The psychological situation brought about by the fact that this
illusion is a perpetually recurrent one and a thing that is always
liable to return whenever reason and sensation are driven to isolate
themselves is a situation a good deal more complicated than I have
so far indicated. It is complicated by the fact that although in
certain moods the contemplation of "the illusion of dead matter"
produces profound melancholy, in other moods it produces a kind
of demonic joy. It seems as though the melancholy mood, which
carried to an extreme limit borders on absolute despair, comes
about when the creative energy in our soul, although under the
momentary dominance of what resists creation, is still, so to speak,
the master of our will.
Under such circumstances the will, still resolutely turned towards
life, is confronted by what appears to be the very embodiment of
death. Under these conditions the will is baffled, perplexed,
defeated and outraged. It beats in vain against the "inert mass"
which malice has projected; and feels itself powerless to overcome
it. It then turns furiously round upon the very substratum of the
soul and rends and tears at that, in a mad effort to reach the secret
of a phantom-world which seems to hold no secret. If some sort of
relief does not come, such relief for instance as physical sleep, the
inert misery of the submission of the will, following upon such a
desperate struggle, may easily drift into a deadly apathy, may
easily approach the borders of insanity.
But there is another condition under which the soul may confront
"the illusion of dead matter." This condition comes about when the
will, instead of being turned towards creation, is definitely turned
towards the opposite of creation. It is impossible for the will to
remain in this condition for more than a limited time. Some
outward or inward shock, some drastic swing of the psychic
pendulum, must sooner or later restore the balance and bring the
will back to that wavering and indecisive state--poised like the
point of a compass between the two extremes--which seems to be
its normal attitude.
Any human will unchangeably directed towards "the good" would
be the will of a soul that in its inherent depths were already
"absolutely good"; and this, as we have seen, is an impossible
phenomenon. The utmost reach of "wickedness" that any soul,
whether it be the soul of a man or of a god, can attain to, is a
recurrent concentration of the will upon evil and a recurrent
overcoming, for relatively increasing spaces of time, of the power
of love. This incomplete and constantly interrupted concentration
upon evil is the nearest approach to "the worship of Satan" which
any will is able to reach. The exquisite pleasure, therefore,
culminating in a kind of insane ecstasy, which the soul can enjoy
when, in the passion of its evil will, it leaps to welcome "the
illusion of dead matter," is a pleasure that in the nature of things
cannot last. And the condition of inert malignant apathy which
follows such an "ecstasy of evil" is perhaps the nearest approach to
a consciousness of "eternal death" which the soul can know.
And it is in this malignant apathy, rather than in the demonic
exultation of the mood that preceded it, that the extreme opposite
of love finds its culmination. For in its hour of demonic exultation,
when the will to evil buries itself with insane joy in "the illusion of
dead matter," it is drawing savagely upon the energy of life. It
corrupts such energy as it draws upon it and distorts it from its
natural functions; but the energy itself, although "possessed" by
the abysmal malice, is living and intense; and therefore cannot be
regarded as so entirely the opposite of love as that inert condition
of malignant lifelessness which inevitably succeeds it.
The demonic ecstasy, full of invincible magnetism, which looks
forth from the countenance of a soul obsessed with, evil, has much
more in common with the magnetic exultation of a soul possessed
with love than has that ghastly inertness, with its insane malignant
attraction to death. For out of the countenance of this latter looks
forth everything that is hostile to life; and its expression has in it
the obscene cunning, mixed with frozen despair, of a corpse which
has become utterly dehumanized.
It is frequently a matter of surprise to minds whose view of what is
"good" has excluded the concept of energy that persons obviously
under the obsession of "evil" are able to display such immense
reserves of inexhaustible power. But this surprise disappears when
it is realized that such "worshippers of Satan" are drawing upon
the creative energy and corrupting it, in the process of drawing
upon it, by the malignant power which resists creation.
The "illusion of dead matter" conceived as we have conceived it,
as a thing made up of unconscious chemical elements, is after all
only one aspect of the phantom-world of illusive soullessness
which the abysmal malice delights to project. It is only to
particular sensitive natures that this peculiar "despair of the
inanimate" takes the form of mud or sand or refuse or water or
dead planetary bodies or empty space.
To other natures it may take the form of those innumerable
off-shoots of economic necessity, which are not themselves necessary
either to human life or human welfare but which are the arbitrary
creations of economic avarice divorced from necessity and
indulged in out of an inert hatred of what is beautiful and real. Any
labour, whether mental or physical, which directly satisfies the
economic needs of humanity carries with it the unfathomable thrill
of creative happiness. But when we come to consider those
innumerable forms of financial and commercial enterprise which
in no way satisfy human needs but exist only for the sake of
exploitation we find ourselves confronted by a weight of unreal
soulless hideousness which by reason of the fact that it is
deliberately protected by organized society is a more devastating
example of "the thing which is in the way" than any amount of
mud and litter and refuse and excremental debris. For this
unproductive commercialism, this "unreal reality" projected by the
malignant power which resists creation, is not only an obscene
outrage to the aesthetic sense; it is actually an assassination of
life. When, therefore, a philosopher who uses the complex vision of
the soul as his organ of research is asked the question, "where are we
to look for the type of human being most entirely evil?" the
answer which he is compelled to give is not a little surprising to
many minds.
For there are many minds whose physiological timidity corrupts
their judgment, and who lack the clairvoyance to unmask with
infallible certainty that look of sneering apathy which is the pure
expression of malice. And to such minds some wretched devil of a
criminal, driven to crime by an insane perversion of the creative
instinct--for creation and destruction are not the true opposites--
might easily seem the ultimate embodiment of evil.
Whereas the particular type of human being from whom the
philosopher of the complex vision would draw his standard of evil
would be a type very different from any perverted type even from
those whose mania might take the form of erotic cruelty. It would
be a type whose recurrent "evil" would take the form of a sneering
and malignant inertness, the form of a cold and sarcastic
disparagement of all intense feeling. It would be a type entirely
obsessed by "the illusion of dead matter"; not so much the
"illusion of dead matter" where Nature is concerned, but where the
economic struggle has resulted in some unnecessary and purely
commercial activity, altogether divorced from the basic necessities
of human life. A person of this type would, in his evil moods, be
more completely dominated by a malignant resistance to every
movement of the creative spirit than any other type, unless it were
perhaps one whom the heavy brutality of "officialdom" had
blunted into inhuman callousness.
Compared with persons such as these, by whom no actual positive
"wickedness" may have ever been perpetrated, the confessed
criminal or the acknowledged pervert remains far less committed
to the depths of evil. For in persons who have habitually lent
themselves to "the illusion of dead matter," whether in regard to
Nature or in regard to commercial or financial exploitation, there
occurs a kind of "death-in-life" which gives the sneering malignity
of the abyss its supreme opportunity, whereas in the souls of those
who have committed "crimes," or have been guilty of passionate
cruelty, there may easily remain a vivid and sensitive response to
some form of reality or beauty, or self-annihilating love.
For "the illusion of dead matter" is the most formidable expression
of evil which we know; and it can only be destroyed by the magic
of that creative spirit whose true "opposite" is not hatred or cruelty
or violence or destruction, but the motiveless power of a deadly
obscurantism.