THE REALITY OF THE SOUL IN RELATION TO MODERN THOUGHT
It ought not to be forgotten, as at least an important historical fact,
in regard to what we have asserted as the revelation of the
complex vision concerning the reality of the soul, that the two
most influential modern philosophers deny this reality altogether. I
refer to Bergson and William James.
In the systems of thought of both these writers there is no place
left for that concrete, real, actual "monad," with its semi-mental,
semi-material substratum of unknown hyper-physical, hyper-psychic
substance, which is what we mean, in philosophical as well as
in popular language when we talk of the "soul."
According to the revelation of man's complex vision this
hyper-physical, hyper-psychic "something," which is the concrete centre
of will and consciousness and energy, is also the invisible core or
base of what we term personality, and, without its real existence,
personality can have no permanence. Without the assumption of
its real existence personality cannot hold its own or remain
integral and identical in the midst of the process of life.
This then being the nature and character of the soul, what weight
is there in the arguments used against the soul's concrete existence
by such thinkers as James and Bergson? The position of the
American philosopher in regard to this matter seems less plausible
and less consistent than that of his French master.
James is prepared to give his adherence to a belief in a soul of the
earth and in planetary souls and stellar souls. He quotes with
approval on this point the writings of Gustav Theodor Fechner, the
Leipzig chemist. He is also prepared to find a place in his
pluralistic world for at least one quite personal and quite finite
god.
If he is not merely exercising his philosophical fancy in all this,
but is actually prepared to assume the real concrete existence of an
earth-soul and of planetary souls and of at least one beneficent and
quite personal god, why should he find himself unable to accept
the same sort of real concrete soul in living human beings? Why
should he find himself compelled to say--"the notion of the
substantial soul, so freely used by common men and the more
popular philosophers has fallen upon evil days and has no prestige
in the eyes of critical thinkers . . . like the word 'cause' the word
'soul' is but a theoretic stop-gap . . . it marks a place and claims it
for a future explanation to occupy . . . let us leave out the soul,
then, and confront the original dilemma"?
This scepticism of the pragmatic philosophy in regard to the
"substantial soul" is surely an unpardonable inconsistency. For in
all other problems the fact of an idea being "freely used by
common men" is, according to pragmatic principles, an enormous
piece of evidence in its favour. The further fact that all the great "a
priori" metaphysical systems have been driven by their pure logic
to discredit the "substantiality" of the soul, just as they have been
driven to discredit the personality of God, ought, one would think,
where "radical empiricism" is concerned, to be a still stronger
piece of evidence on the soul's side.
James has told us that he has found it necessary to throw away
"pure reason" and to assume an inherent "irrationality" in the
system of things. Why then, when it comes to this particular axiom
of irrational common-sense, does he balk and sheer off?
One cannot resist the temptation of thinking that just here the great
Pragmatist has been led astray by that very philosophical pride he
condemns in the metaphysicians. One cannot help suspecting that
it is nothing less than the fact of the soul's appeal to ordinary
common-sense that has prejudiced this philosopher of common-sense
so profoundly against it.
What James does not seem to see is that his pseudo-scientific
reduction of the integral soul-monad into a wavering and fitful
series of compounded vortex-consciousness is really a falling back
from the empirical data of human reality into the thin abstracted
air of conceptual truth. The concrete substantial soul, just because
it is the permanent basis of personality and the only basis of
personality which common sense can apprehend, is precisely one
of those obstinate original particular "data" of consciousness
which it is the proud role of conceptual and intellectual logic to
explain away, and to explain away in favour of attenuated
rationalistic theories which are themselves "abstracted" or, shall
we say, pruned and shaved off from the very thing they are
supposed to explain.
All these "flowing streams," and "pulses of consciousness" and
multiple "compoundings of consciousness" and overlappings of
sub-consciousness are in reality, for all their pseudo-scientific air,
nothing more or less than the old-fashioned metaphysical
conceptions, such as "being" and "becoming," under a new name.
Nor is the new "irrational reason" by which the pragmatist arrives
at these plausible theories really in the least different from the
imaginative personal vision which, as James himself clearly
shows, was at the back of all that old-fashioned dialectic.
The human mind has not changed its inherent texture; nor can it
change it. We may talk of substituting intuition for reason. But the
"new intuition," with its arrogant claims of getting upon the "inner
side" of reality, is after all only "the old reason" functioning with a
franker admission of its reliance upon that immediate personal
vision and with less regard for the logical rules.
It is not, in fact, because of any rule of "logical identity with
itself" that the human mind clings so tenaciously to the notion of an
integral soul-monad. It is because of its own inmost consciousness
that such a monad, that such a substantial integral soul, is in the
deepest sense its very self, and a denial of it a denial of its very
self.
The attitude of Bergson in this matter is much more consistent
than that of James. Bergson is frankly and confessedly not a
pluralist at all, but a spiritual monist. As a spiritual monist he is
compelled to regard what we call "matter," including in this term
the mechanical or chemical resistance of body and brain, as
something which is produced or evolved or "thrown off" by spirit
and as something which, when once it has been evolved, spirit has
to penetrate, permeate, and render porous and submissive.
The complexity of Bergson's speculations with regard to memory
and the "élan vital," with regard above all to the "true time," has
done much to distract popular attention away from his real attitude
towards the soul. But Bergson's attitude towards the existence of a
substantial soul-monad is consistently and inevitably hostile.
It could not be anything else as long as the original personal
"fling" into life which gives each one of us his peculiar angle of
vision remained with him a question of one unified _spirit_--"a
continuum of eternal shooting-forth"--which functioned through
the brain and through all personal life and perpetually created a
new unforeseen universe.
In the flux of this one universal "spirit," whereof "duration," in the
mysterious Bergsonian sense, is the functional activity, there can
obviously be no place for an actual substantial soul. "The
consciousness we have of our own self in its continual flux
introduces us to the interior of a reality on the model of which we
must represent other realities. All reality, therefore, is a tendency,
if we agree to mean by tendency an incipient change in any
direction." And when we enquire as to the nature of this "continual
flux" of which the positive and integral thing we have come to call
the soul is but a ripple, or swirling whirlpool of centripetal ripples,
the answer which Bergson gives is definite enough. "We approach
a duration which _strains_, contracts, and intensifies itself more
and more; at the limit would be eternity. No longer conceptual
eternity, which is an eternity of death, but an eternity of life. A
living, and therefore still moving eternity in which our own
particular duration would be included, as the vibrations are in
light; an eternity which would be the concentration of all duration,
as materiality is its dispersion. Between these two extreme limits
intuition moves, and this movement is the very essence of
metaphysics."
Thus according to Bergson the essential secret of life is to be
found in some peculiar movement of what he calls spirit; a
movement which takes place in some unutterable medium, or upon
some indescribable plane, the name of which is "pure time" or
"duration."
And listening to all this we cannot resist a sigh of dismay. For
here, in these vague de-humanized terms--"tendency," "flux,"
"eternity," "vibration," "duration," "dispersion"--we are once
more, only with a different set of concepts, following the old
metaphysical method, that very method which Bergson himself
sets out to confine to its inferior place. "Tendency" or "flux" or
"duration" is just as much a metaphysical concept as "being" or
"not being" or "becoming."
The only way in which we can really escape from the rigid
conceptualism of rational logic is to accept the judgment of the
totality of man's nature. And the judgment of the totality of man's
nature points unmistakably to the existence of a real substantial
soul. Such a soul is the indispensable implication of personality.
And the most interior and intimate knowledge that we are in
possession of, or shall ever be in possession of, is the knowledge
of personality.
Bergson is perfectly right when he asserts that "the consciousness
which we have of our own self" introduces us "to the interior of a
reality, on the model of which we must represent other realities."
But Bergson is surely departing both from the normal facts of
ordinary introspection and from the exceptional facts of abnormal
illumination when he appends to the words "the consciousness
which we have of our own self" the further words in its continual
"flux." For in our normal moods of human introspection, as well
as in our abnormal moods of superhuman illumination, what we
are conscious of most of all is a sense of integral continuity in the
midst of change, and of identical permanence in the midst of ebb
and flow.
The flux of things does most assuredly rush swiftly by us; and we,
in our inmost selves, are conscious of life's incessant flow. But
how could we be conscious of any of this turbulent movement
across the prow of our voyaging ship, if the ship itself--the
substantial base of our living consciousness--were not an
organized and integral reality, of psycho-chemical material, able to
exert will and to make use of memory and reason in its difficult
struggle with the waves and winds?
The revelation of man's complex vision with regard to the
personality of the soul is a thing of far-reaching issues and
implications. One of these implications is that while we have the
right to the term "the eternal flux" in regard to the changing waves
of sensations and ideas that pass across the horizon of the soul's
vision we have no right to think of this "eternal flux" as anything
else than the pressure upon us of the universe of our own vision
and the pressure upon us of the universe of other visions, as they
seem, for this or that passing moment, to be different from our
own.
The kind of world to which we are thus committed is a world
crowded with living personalities. Each of these personalities
brings with it its own separate universe. But the fact that all these
separate universes find their ideal synthesis or teleological
orientation in "the vision of the immortals," justifies us in
assuming that in a certain eternal sense all these apparently
conflicting universes are in reality one. This unity of ideas, with its
predominant aesthetic idea--the idea of beauty--and its
predominant emotional idea--the idea of love--helps us towards a
synthesis which is after all only a dynamic one, a thing of
movement, growth and creation.
Such a teleological unity, forever advancing to a consummation
never entirely to be attained, demands however some sort of static
"milieu" as well as some sort of static "material" in the midst of
which and out of which it moulds its premeditated future. It is
precisely this static "milieu" or "medium," and this static
"material" or formless "objective mystery," which Bergson's
philosophy, of the _"élan vital" of pure spirit_, spreading out into
a totally indetermined future, denies and eliminates.
In order to justify this double elimination--the elimination
of an universal "medium" and the elimination of a formless
"thing-in-itself"--Bergson is compelled to reduce _space_ to a quite
secondary and merely logical conception and to substitute for our
ordinary stream of time, measurable in terms of space, an
altogether new conception of time, measurable in terms of feeling.
When however we come to analyse this new Bergsonian time, or
as he prefers to call it "intuitively-felt duration," we cannot avoid
observing that it is merely a new "mysterious something"
introduced into the midst of the system of things, in order to
enable us to escape from those older traditional "mysterious
somethings" which we have to recognize as the "immediate data"
of human consciousness.
It might be argued that Bergson's monistic "spirit," functioning in
a mysterious indefinable "time," demands neither more nor less of
an irrational act of faith than our mysterious psycho-material
"soul" surrounded by a mysterious hyper-chemical "medium" and
creating its future out of an inexplicable "objective mystery."
Where however the philosophy of the complex vision has the
advantage over the philosophy of the "élan vital" is in the fact that
even on Bergson's own admission what the human consciousness
most intensely _knows_ is not "pure spirit," whether shaped like a
fan or shaped like a sheaf, but simply its own integral identity.
And this integral identity of consciousness can only be visualized
or felt in the mind itself under the form of a living concrete
monad.
It will be seen, however, when it comes to a "showing up" of what
might be called the "trump cards" of axiomatic mystery, that the
complex vision has in reality fewer of these ultimate irrational
"data" than has the philosophy of the élan vital.
Space itself, whether we regard it as objective or subjective, is
certainly not an irrational axiom but an entirely rational and indeed
an entirely inevitable assumption. And what the complex vision
reveals is that the trinity of "mysterious somethings" with which
we are compelled to start our enquiry, namely the "something"
which is the substratum of the soul, the "something" which is the
"medium" binding all souls together, and the "something" which is
the "objective mystery" out of which all souls create their
universe, is, in fact, a genuine trinity in the pure theological sense;
in other words is a real "three-in-one." And it is a "three-in-one"
not only because it is unthinkable that three "incomprehensible
substances" should exist in touch with one another without being
in organic relation, but also because all three of them are
dominated, in so far as we can say anything about them at all, by
the same universal space.
It is true that the unappropriated mass of "objective mystery" upon
which no shadow of the creative energy of any soul has yet been
thrown must be considered as utterly "formless and void" and thus
in a sense beyond space and time, yet since immediately we try to
_imagine_ or _visualize_ this mystery, as well as just logically
"consider" it, we are compelled to extend over it our conception of
time and space, it is in a practical sense, although not in a logical
sense, under the real dominion of these.
When therefore the philosophy of the complex vision places its
trump-cards of axiomatic mystery over against the similar cards of
the philosophy of the "élan vital" it will be found that in actual
number Bergson has one more "card" than we have. For Bergson
has not only his "pure spirit" and his "intuitively-felt time," but has
also--for he cannot really escape from that by just asserting that
his "spirit" produces it--the opposing obstinate principle of
"matter" or "solid bodies" or "mechanical brains" upon which his
pure spirit has to work.
It is indeed out of its difficulties with "matter," that is to say with
bodies and brains, that Bergson's "spirit" is forced to forego its
natural element of "intuitive duration" and project itself into the
rigid rationalistic conceptualism of ordinary science and
metaphysic.
The point of our argument in this place is that since the whole
purpose of philosophy is articulation or clarification and
since in this process of clarification the fewer "axiomatic
incomprehensibles" we start with the better; it is decidedly to the
advantage of any philosophy that it should require at the start
nothing more than the mystery of the individual soul confronting
the mystery of the world around it. And it is to the disadvantage of
Bergson's philosophy that it should require at the start, in addition
to "pure spirit" with its assumption of memory and will, and "pure
matter" with its assumption of ordinary space and ordinary time, a
still further axiomatic trump-card, in the theory of intuitive
"durational" time, in which the real process of the life-flow
transcends all reason and logic.
Putting aside however the cosmological aspect of our controversy
with the "radical empirical" school of thought, we still have left
unconsidered our most serious divergence from their position.
This consists in the fact that both Bergson and James have entirely
omitted from their original instrument of research that inalienable
aspect of the human soul which we call the aesthetic sense.
With only a few exceptions--notably that of Spinoza--all the great
European philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche have begun their
philosophizing from a starting-point which implied, as an essential
part of their "organum" of enquiry, the possession by the human
soul of some sort of aesthetic vision.
To these thinkers, whether rationalistic or mystic, no interpretation
of the world seemed possible that did not start with the aesthetic
sense, both as an instrument of research and as a test of what
research discovered.
The complete absence of any discussion of the aesthetic sense in
Bergson and James is probably an historic confession of the
tyranny of commercialism and physical science over the present
generation. It may also be a spiritual reflection, in the sphere of
philosophy, of the rise to political and social power of that
bourgeois class which, of all classes, is the least interested in
aesthetic speculation.
The philosophy of the complex vision may have to wait for its
hour of influence until the proletariat comes into its own. And it
does indeed seem as if between the triumph of the proletariat and
the triumph of the aesthetic sense there were an intimate
association. It is precisely because these two philosophers have so
completely neglected the aesthetic sense that their speculations
seem to have so little hold upon the imagination. When once it is
allowed that the true instrument of research into the secret of the
universe is the rhythmic activity of man's complete nature, and not
merely the activity of his reason or the activity of his intuition
working in isolation, it then becomes obvious that the universal
revelations of the aesthetic sense, if they can be genuinely
disentangled from mere subjective caprices, are an essential part of
what we have to work with if we are to approach the truth.
The philosophy of the complex vision bases its entire system upon
its faith in the validity of these revelations; and, as we have
already shown, it secures an objective weight and force for this
ideal vision by its faith in certain unseen companions of humanity,
whom it claims the right to name "the immortals."
This is really the place where we part company with Bergson and
James. We agree with the former in his distrust of the old
metaphysic. We agree with the latter in many of his pluralistic
speculations. But we feel that any philosophy which refuses to
take account, at the very beginning, of those regions of human
consciousness which are summed up by the words "beauty" and
"art," is a philosophy that in undertaking to explain life has begun
by eliminating from life one of its most characteristic products.
In Bergson's interpretation of life the stress is laid upon "spirit"
and "intuition." In James' interpretation of life the stress is laid
upon those practical changes in the world and in human nature
which any new idea must produce if it is to prove itself true.
In the view of life we are now trying to make clear, philosophy is
so closely dependent upon the activity of the aesthetic sense that it
might itself be called an art, the most difficult and the most
comprehensive of all the arts, the art of retaining the rhythmic
balance of all man's contradictory energies. What this rhythmic
balance of man's concentrated energies seems to make clear is the
primary importance of the process of discrimination and valuation.
From the profoundest depths of the soul rises the consciousness of
the power of choice; and this power of choice to which we give,
by common consent, the name of "will," finds itself confronted at
the start by the eternal duality of the impulse to create and the
impulse to resist creation. The impulse to create we find, by
experience, to be identical with the emotion of love. And the
impulse to resist creation we find, by experience, to be identical
with the emotion of malice.
But experience carries us further than this. The impulse to create,
or the emotion of love, is found, as soon as it begins a function, to
be itself a living synthesis of three primordial reactions to life,
which, in philosophic language, we name "ideas." These three
primordial ideas may be summed up as follows: The idea of
beauty, which is the revelation of the aesthetic sense. The idea of
goodness or nobility, which is the revelation of conscience. The
idea of truth, or the mind's apprehension of reality, which is the
revelation of reason, intuition, instinct, and imagination,
functioning in sympathic harmony. Now it is true that by laying so
much stress upon the "élan vital" or flowing tide of creative
energy, Bergson has indicated his acceptance of one side of the
ultimate duality. But for Bergson this creative impulse is not
confronted by evil or by malice as its opposite, but simply by the
natural inertness of mechanical "matter."
And once having assumed his "continuum" of pure spirit, he deals
no further with the problem of good and evil or with the problem
of the aesthetic sense.
From our point of view he is axiomatically unable to deal with
these problems for the simple reason that his élan vital or flux of
pure spirit, being itself a mere metaphysical abstraction from
living personality, can never, however hard you squeeze it,
produce either the human conscience or the human aesthetic sense.
These things can only be produced from the concrete activity of a
real living individual soul. In the same way it is true that William
James, by his emphasis upon conduct and action and practical
efficiency as the tests of truth, is bound to lay enormous stress at
the very start upon the ethical problem.
What a person believes about the universe becomes itself an
ethical problem by the introduction on the one hand of the
efficiency of the will to believe and on the other of the assumption
that a person "ought" to believe that which it is "useful" to him to
believe, as long as it does not conflict with other desirable truths.
But this ethical element in the pragmatic doctrine, though it is so
dominant as almost to reduce philosophy itself to a sub-division of
ethics, is not, when one examines it, at all the same thing as what
the philosophy of the complex vision means by the revelation of
conscience.
Ethics with William James swallows up philosophy and in
swallowing up philosophy the nature of Ethics is changed and
becomes something different from the clear unqualified mandate
of the human conscience. With the philosophy of the complex
vision the revelations of conscience are intimately associated with
the revelations of the aesthetic sense; and these again, in the
rhythmic totality of man's nature, with the revelations of emotion,
instinct, intuition, imagination.
Thus when it comes to conduct and the question of choice the kind
of "imperative" issued by conscience has been already profoundly
changed. It is still the mandate of conscience. But it is the mandate
of a conscience whose search-light has been taken possession of
by the aesthetic sense and has been fed by imagination, instinct
and intuition.
It must be understood when we speak of these various "aspects" or
"attributes" of the human soul we do not imply that they exist as
separable faculties independently of the unity of the soul which
possesses them.
The soul is an integral and indivisible monad and throws its whole
strength along each of these lines of contact with the world. As
will, the soul flings itself upon the world in the form of choice
between opposite valuations. As conscience, it flings itself upon
the world in the form of motive force of opposite valuations. As
the aesthetic sense, it flings itself upon the world in the form of yet
another motive-force of opposite valuations. As imagination, it
half-creates and half-discovers the atmospheric climate, so to
speak, of this valuation. As intuition, it feels itself to be in
possession of a super-terrestrial, super-human authority which
gives objective definiteness and security to this valuation. As
instinct, it feels its way by an innate clairvoyance into the organic
or biological vibrations of this valuation.
Thus we return to the point from which we started, namely that the
whole problem of philosophy is the problem of valuation. And this
is the same thing as saying that philosophy, considered in its
essential nature, is nothing less than art--the art of flinging itself
upon the world with all the potentialities of the soul functioning in
rhythmic harmony.
When Bergson talks of the "élan vital" and suggests that the acts
of choice of the human personality are made as naturally and
inevitably, under the pressure of the "shooting out" of the spirit, as
leaves grow upon the tree, he is falling into the old traditional
blunder of all pantheistic and monistic thinkers, the blunder
namely of attributing to a universal "God" or "life-force" or
"stream of tendency" the actual personal achievements of
individual souls.
Bergson's "apologia" for free-will is therefore rendered ineffective
by reason of the fact that it does not really leave the individual
free. The only "free" thing is the aboriginal "spirit," pouring forth
in its "durational" stream, and moulding bodies and brains as it
goes along.
The philosophy of the complex vision does not believe in "spirit"
or "life-force" or "durational streams of tendency." Starting with
personality it is not incumbent upon it to show how personality
has been evolved. It is no more incumbent upon it to show how
personality has been evolved than it is incumbent upon pantheistic
idealism to show how God or how the Absolute has been evolved.
Personality with its implication of separate concrete psycho-material
soul-monads is indeed our Absolute or at any rate is as much
of an Absolute as we can ever get while we continue to recognize
the independent existence of one universal space, of one universal
ethereal medium, and of on universal objective mystery.
Perhaps the correct metaphysical statement of our philosophic
position would be that our Absolute is a duality from the very
start--a duality made up on one side of innumerable soul-monads
and on the other side of an incomprehensible formless mass of
plastic material, itself subdivided into the two aspects of a medium
binding the soul-monads together, and an objective mystery into
which they pierce their way.
When the evolutionists tell us that personality is a thing of late
appearance in the system of things and a thing of which we are
able to note the historic or prehistoric development, out of the
"lower" forms of life, our answer is that we have no right to
assume that the life of the earth and of the other planetary and
stellar bodies is a "lower" form of life.
If to this the astronomer answer that he is able to carry the history
of evolution further back than any planet or star, as far back as a
vast floating mass of homogeneous fiery vapour, even then we
should still maintain that this original nebular mass of fire was the
material "body" of an integral soul-monad; and that in surrounding
immensities of space there were other similar masses of nebular
fire--possibly innumerable others--who in their turn were the
bodily manifestations of integral soul-monads.
When evolutionists argue that personality is a late and accidental
appearance on the world scene, they are only thinking of human
personalities; and our contention is that while man has a right to
interpret the universe in terms of his soul, he has no right to
interpret the universe in terms of his body; and that it is therefore
quite possible to maintain that the "body" of the earth has been
from the beginning animated by a soul-monad whose life can in no
sense be called "lower" than the life of the soul-monad which
at present animates the human body. And in support of our
contention just here we are able to quote not only the authority of
Fechner but the authority of Professor James himself approving of
Fechner.
What the philosophy of the complex vision really does is to take
life just as it is--the ordinary multifarious spectacle presented to
our senses and interpreted by our imagination--and regard this, and
nothing more recondite than this, as the ultimate Absolute, or as
near an Absolute as we are ever likely to get.
From our point of view it seems quite uncalled for to summon up
vague and remote entities, like streams of consciousness and
shootings forth of spirit, in order to interpret this immediate
spectacle. Such streams of consciousness and shootings forth of
spirit seem to us just as much abstractions and just as much
conceptual substitutions for reality as do the old-fashioned
metaphysical entities of "being" and "becoming."
No one has ever _seen_ a life-stream or a life-force. No one has
ever _seen_ a compounded congeries of conscious states. But
every one of us has seen a living human soul looking out of a
living human body; and most of us have seen a living soul looking
out of the mysterious countenance of earth, water, air and fire.
The philosophy of the soul-monad has at any rate this advantage
over every other: namely, that it definitely represents human
experience and can always be verified by human experience. Any
human being can try the experiment of sinking into the depths of
his own identity. Let the reader of this passage try such an
experiment here and now; and let him, in the light of what he
finds, decide this question. Does he find himself flowing
mysteriously forth, along some indescribable "durational" stream,
and, as he flows, feeling himself to be that stream? Or does he feel
himself to be a definite concrete actual "I am I," "the guest and
companion of his body" and, as far as the mortal weakness of flesh
allows, the motive-principle of that body?
If the philosophy of the complex vision is able to make an appeal
of this kind with a certain degree of assurance as to the answer, it
is able to make a yet more convincing appeal, when--the soul's
existence once admitted--it becomes a question as to that soul's
inherent quality. No human being, unless in the grasp of some
megalomania of virtue, can deny the existence, in the depths of his
nature, of a struggle between the emotion of love and the emotion
of malice.
Out of this ultimate duality under the pressure of the forms and
shapes of life and the reaction against these of the imagination and
the aesthetic sense, spring into existence those primordial ideas of
truth and beauty and goodness which, are the very stuff and
texture of our fate. But these ideas, primordial though they are, are
so confused and distorted by their contact with circumstances and
accident, that it may well be that no clear image of them is found
in the recesses of the soul when the soul turns its glance inward.
No soul, however, can turn its glance inward without recognizing
in its deepest being this ultimate struggle between love and malice.
How then can any philosophy be regarded as a transcript and
reflection of reality when at the very start it refuses to take
cognizance of this fact? If the only knowledge, which is in any
sense certain, is our knowledge of ourselves, and if our knowledge
of ourselves implies our knowledge of a definite "soul-monad" for
ever divided against itself in this abysmal struggle, how then may
a philosophy be regarded as covering the facts of experience,
when in place of this personal contradiction it predicates, as its
explanation of the system of things, some remote, thin, abstract
tendency, such as the "shooting forth of spirit" or the
compounding of states of consciousness?
The whole matter may be thus summed up. The modern tendencies
of thought which we have been considering, get rid of the
old metaphysical notion of the logical Absolute only to
substitute vague psychological "states of consciousness" in its
place. But what philosophy requires if the facts of introspective
experience are to be trusted is neither an Absolute in whose
identity all difference is lost nor a stream of "states of
consciousness" which is suspended, as it were, in a vacuum.
What philosophy requires is the recognition of real actual persons
whose original revelation of the secret of life implies that abysmal
duality of good and evil beyond the margin of which no living soul
has ever passed. Whether or not this concrete "monad" or living
substratum of personality survives the death of the body is quite a
different question; is in fact a question to which the philosophy of
the complex vision can make no definite response. In this matter
all we can say is that those supreme moments of rhythmic ecstasy,
whose musical equilibrium I have indicated in the expression
"apex-thought," establish for us a conclusive certainty as to the
eternal continuance, beyond the scope of all deaths, of that
indestructible aspect of personality we have come to name the
struggle between love and malice.
With the conclusive consciousness of this there necessarily arises
a certain attitude of mind which is singularly difficult to describe
but which I can hint at in the following manner. In the very act of
recognition, in the act by which we apprehend the secret of the
universe to consist in this abysmal struggle of the emotion of love
with the emotion of malice, there is an implication of a complete
acceptance of whatever the emotion of love or the principle of
love is found to demand, as the terms of its relative victory over its
antagonist. Whether this demand of love, or to put it more exactly
this demand of "all souls" in whom love is dominant, actually
issues in a personal survival after death we are not permitted to
feel with any certainty. But what we feel with certainty, when the
apex-thought of the complex vision reaches its consummation, is
that we find our full personal self-realization and happiness in a
complete acceptance of whatever the demand of love may be. And
this is the case because the ultimate happiness and fulfilment of
personality does not depend upon what may have happened to
personality in the past or upon what may happen to personality in
the future but solely and exclusively upon what personality
demands here and now in the apprehension of the unassailable
moment.
This suspension of judgment therefore in regard to the question of
the immortality of the soul is a suspension of judgment implicit in
the very nature of love itself. For if there were anything in the
world nearer the secret of the world than is this duality of love and
malice, then that alien thing, however we thought of it, would be
the true object of the soul's desire and the victory of love over
malice would fall into the second place.
If instead of the soul's desire being simply the victory of love over
malice it were, so to speak, the "material fruit" of such a victory--
namely, the survival of personality after death--then, in place of
the struggle between love and malice, we should be compelled to
regard _personality in itself_, apart from the nature of that
personality, as the secret of the universe. But as we have
repeatedly shown, it is impossible to think of any living
personality apart from this abysmal dualism, the ebb and flow of
which, with the relative victory of love over malice, is our ultimate
definition of what living personality _is_. The emotion of love
abstracted from personality is not the secret of the universe,
because personality in its concrete living activity is the secret of
the universe. It is this very abstraction of love, isolated from any
person who loves, and projected as an abstract into the void, that
has done so much to undermine religious thought, just as that other
absolute of "pure being" has done so much to undermine
philosophic thought.
Love and malice are unthinkable apart from personality; but
personality divorced from the struggle between love and malice is
something worse than unthinkable. It is something most tragically
thinkable. It is in fact the plain reality of death. A dead body
is a body in which the struggle between love and malice has
completely ceased. A dead planet would be a planet in which the
struggle between love and malice had ceased. We cannot speak of
a "dead soul" because the soul is, according to our original
definition, the very fusion-point and vortex-point where not only
consciousness and energy meet but where love and malice meet
and wage their eternal struggle.
Strictly speaking it is not true to say that the ultimate secret of the
universe is the emotion of love. The emotion of love, just because
it is an _emotion_, is the emotion of a personality. It is personality,
not the emotion of love, which is the secret of the universe, which
is, in fact, the very universe itself. But it is personality considered
in its true concrete life, not as a mere abstraction devoid of all
characteristics, which is this basic thing. And personality thus
considered is, as we have seen, a living battleground of two
ultimate emotions. The complete triumph of love over malice
would mean the extinction of personality and following from this
the extinction of the universe.
Thus what the soul's desire really amounts to, in those rhythmic
moments when its diverse aspects are reduced to harmonious
energy, is not the complete victory of love over malice but only a
relative victory. What it really desires is that malice should still
exist, but that it should exist in subordination to love.
The ideal of the soul therefore in its creative moments is _the
process of the overcoming of malice_, not the completion of this
process. In order to be perpetually overcome by love, malice must
remain existent, must remain "still there." If it ceased to be there,
there would be nothing left for love to overcome; and the ebb and
flow of the universe, its eternal contradictions, would be at an end.
The soul's desire, according to this view, is not a life after death
where malice, shall we say, is completely overcome and "good"
completely triumphant. The soul's desire is that malice, or evil,
should continue to exist; but should continue to exist under the
triumphant hand of love. The desire of the soul, in such ultimate
moments, has nothing to do with the survival of the soul after
death. It has to do with an acceptance of the demand of love. And
what love demands is not that malice should disappear; but that it
should for ever exist, in order that love should for ever
be overcoming it. And the ecstasy of this process, of this
"overcoming," is a thing of single moments, moments which, as
they pass, not only reduce both past and future to an eternal "now"
but annihilate everything else but this eternal "now." This
annihilation of the past does not mean the extinction of memory or
the extinction of hope. It only means that the profoundest of our
memories are "brought over" as it were from the past into the
present. It only means that a formless horizon of immense hope,
indefinite and vague, hovers above the present, to give it
spaciousness and freedom.
The revelation of the complex vision does not therefore answer the
question of the immortality of the soul. What it does is to indicate
the degree of importance of any answer to this question. And this
degree of importance is much smaller than in our less harmonious
moments we are inclined to suppose. At certain complacent
moments the soul finds itself praying for some final assurance of
personal survival. At certain other moments the soul is tempted to
pray for complete annihilation. But at the moments when it is most
entirely itself it neither prays for annihilation nor for immortality.
It does not pray for itself at all. It prays that the will of the gods
may be done. It prays that the power of love in every soul in the
universe may hold the power of malice in subjection.
The soul therefore, revealed as a real substantial living thing by
the complex vision, is not revealed as a thing necessarily exempt
from death, but as a thing whose deepest activity renders it free
from the fear of death.
In considering the nature of the contrast between the philosophy of
the complex vision and the most dominant philosophic tendencies
of the present time it is important to make clear what our attitude
is towards that hypothetical assumption usually known as the
Theory of Evolution.
If what is called Evolution means simply _change_, then we have
not the least objection to the word. The universe obviously
changes. It is undergoing a perpetual series of violent and
revolutionary changes. But it does not necessarily improve or
progress. On the contrary during enormous periods of time it
deteriorates. Both progress and deterioration are of course purely
human valuations. But according to our valuation of good and evil
it may be said that during those epochs when the malicious, the
predatory, the centripetal tendency in life predominates over the
creative and centrifugal tendency, there is deterioration and
degeneracy; and during the epochs when the latter overcomes the
former there is growth and improvement.
It is quite obvious that from our point of view, there is no such
thing as inanimate chemical substance, no such isolated
evolutionary _phases_ of "matter," such as the movements from
"solids" to "liquids," from "liquids" to "gases," from "gases" to
"ether," from "ether" to "electro-magnetism." All these apparent
changes must be regarded as nothing less than the living organic
changes taking place in the living bodies of actual personal souls.
According to our view the real and important variations in the
multiform spectacle of the universe are the variations brought
about by the perpetual struggle between life and death, in other
words between the personal energy of creation and the personal
resistance of malice.
For us the universe of bodies and souls is perpetually re-creating
itself by the mysterious process of birth, perpetually destroying
itself by the mysterious process of death.
It is this eternal struggle between the impulse to create new life
and the impulse to resist the creation of life, and to destroy or to
petrify life, which actually causes all movement in things and all
change; movement sometimes forward and sometimes backward
as the great pendulum and rhythm of existence swings one way or
the other.
And even this generalization does not really cover what we regard
as the facts of the case, because this backward or forward
movement, though capable of being weighed and estimated "en
masse" in the erratic and violent changes of history, is in reality a
thing of particular and individual instances, a thing that ultimately
affects nothing but individuals and personalities, in as much as it is
the weighing and balancing of a struggle which takes place
nowhere else except in the arena of concrete separate and personal
souls.
What is usually called Evolution then, and what may just as
reasonably be called Deterioration, is as far as we are concerned
just a matter of perpetual movement and change.
The living personalities that fill the circle of space are perpetually
reproducing themselves in a series of organic births, and
perpetually passing away in the process of death.
We have also to remember that every living organism whether
such an organism resemble that of a planet or a human being, is
itself the dwelling-place of innumerable other living organisms
dependent on it and drawing their life from it, precisely as their
parent organism depends on, and draws its life from, the
omnipresent universal ether.
What the philosophy of the complex vision denies and refutes is
the modern tendency to escape from the real mystery of existence
by the use of such vague hypothetical metaphors, all of them really
profoundly anthropomorphic, such as "life-force" or "hyper-space"
or "magnetic energy" or "streams of sub-consciousness."
The philosophy of the complex vision drives these pseudo-philosophers
to the wall and compels them to confess that ultimately all
they are aware of is the inner personal activity of their
own individual souls; compels them to confess that when it
comes to the final analysis their "life-force" and "pure
thought" and "hyper-space" and "radio-magnetic activity" are all
nothing but one-sided hypothetical abstractions taken from the
concrete movements of concrete individual bodies and souls which
by an inevitable act of the imagination we assume to reproduce in
their interior reactions what we ourselves experience in ours.
To introduce such a conception as that of those mysterious super
human beings, whom I have named "the gods," into a serious
philosophic system, may well appear to many modern scientific
minds the very height of absurdity.
But the whole method of the philosophy of the complex vision is
based upon direct human experience; and from my point of view
the obscure and problematic existence of some such beings has
behind it the whole formidable weight of universal human feeling--
a weight which is not made less valid by the arrogant use of mere
phrases of rationalistic contempt such as that which is implied in
the word "superstition."
From our point of view a philosophy which does not include and
subsume and embody that universal human experience covered by
the term "superstition" is a philosophy that has eliminated from its
consideration one great slice of actual living fact. And it is in this
aspect of the problem more than in any other that the philosophy
of the complex vision represents a return to certain revelations of
human truth--call them mythological if you please--which modern
philosophy seems to have deliberately suppressed. In the final
result it may well be that we have to choose, as our clue to the
mystery of life, either "mathematica" or "mythology."
The philosophy of the complex vision is compelled by the very
nature of its organ of research to choose, in this dilemma, the latter
rather than the former. And the universe which it thus dares to
predicate is at least a universe that lends itself, as so many
"scientific" universes do not, to that synthetic activity of the
_imaginative reason_ which in the long run alone satisfies the
soul. And such a universe satisfies the soul, as these others cannot,
because it reflects, in its objective spectacle of things, the
profoundest interior consciousness of the actual living self which
the soul in its deepest moments of introspection is able to grasp.
Modern science, under the rhetorical spell of this talismanic word
"evolution," seems to imply that it can explain the multiform
shapes and appearances of organic life by deducing them, in all
their vivid heterogeneity, from some hypothetical monistic
substance which it boldly endows with the mysterious energy
called the "life-force" and which it then permits to project out of
itself, by some sort of automatic volition, the whole long historic
procession of living organisms.
This purely imaginative assumption gives it, in the popular mind, a
sort of vague right to make the astounding claim that it has
"explained" the origin of things. Little further arrogance is needed
to give it, in the popular mind, the still more astounding right to
claim that it has indicated not only the nature of the "beginning" of
things but the nature of their "end" also; this "end" being nothing
less than some purely hypothetical "equilibrium" when the
movement of "advance," coming full circle, rounds itself off into
the movement of "reversion."
The philosophy of the complex vision makes no claim to deal
either with the beginning of things or with the end of things. It
recognizes that "beginnings" and "ends" are not things with which
we can intelligibly deal; are, on the contrary, things which are
completely unthinkable.
What we actually see, feel, divine, imagine, love, hate, detest,
desire, dream, create and destroy--these living, dying, struggling,
relaxing, advancing and retreating things--this space, this ether,
these stars and suns, these animals, fishes, birds, plants, this earth
and moon, these men and these trees and flowers, these high and
unchanging eternal ideas of the beautiful and the good, these
transitory perishing mortal lives and these dimly discerned
immortal figures that we name "gods," all these, as far as we are
concerned, have for ever existed, all these, as far as we are
concerned, must for ever exist.
In the immense procession of deaths and births, it is indeed certain
that the soul and body of the Earth have given birth to all the souls
and bodies which struggle for existence upon her living flesh
and draw so much of their love and their malice from the
unfathomable depths of her spirit. But when once we accept as our
basic axiom that where the "soul-monad" exists, whether such a
"monad" be human, sub-human, or super-human, it exists in actual
concrete organic personal integrity, we are saved from the
necessity of explaining how, and by what particular series of births
and deaths and change and variation, the living spectacle of things,
as we visualize it today, has "evolved" or has "deteriorated" out of
the remote past.
It is in fact by their constant preoccupation with the immediate and
material causes of such organic changes, that men of science have
been distracted from the real mystery. This real mystery does not
limit itself to the comparatively unimportant "How," but is
constantly calling upon us to deal with the terrible and essential
questions, the two grim interrogations of the old Sphinx, the
"_What_" and the "_Wherefore_."
It is by its power to deal with these more essential riddles that any
philosophy must be weighed and judged; and it is just because
what we name Science stops helplessly at this unimportant "How,"
that it can never be said to have answered Life's uttermost
challenge.
Materialistic and Evolutionary Hypotheses must always, however
far they may go in reducing so-called "matter" to so-called "spirit,"
remain outside the real problem. No attenuation of "matter" into
movement or energy or magnetic radio-activity can reach the
impregnable citadel of life. For the citadel of life is to be found in
nothing less than the complex of personality--whether such
personality be that of a planet or a plant or an animal or a man or a
god--must always be recognized as inherent in an actual living
soul-monad, divided against itself in the everlasting duality.
Although the most formidable support to our theory of an "eternal
vision," wherein all the living entities that fill space under the
vibration of an unspeakable cosmic rhythm and brought into focus
by one supreme act of contemplative "love," is drawn from the
rare creative moments of what I have called the "apex-thought," it
still remains that for the normal man in his most normal hours the
purely scientific view is completely unsatisfying.
I do not mean that it is unsatisfying because, with its mechanical
determinism, it does not satisfy his desires. I mean that it does not
satisfy his imagination, his instinct, his intuition, his emotion, his
aesthetic sense; and in being unable to satisfy these, it proves
itself, "ipso-facto," false and equivocal.
It is equally true that, except for certain rare and privileged
natures, the orthodox systems of religion are equally unsatisfying.
What is required is some philosophic system which is bold enough
to include the element of so-called "superstition" and at the same
time contradicts neither reason nor the aesthetic sense.
Such a system, we contend, is supplied by the philosophy of the
complex vision; a philosophy which, while remaining frankly
anthropomorphic and mythological, does not, in any narrow or
impudent or complacent manner, slur over the bitter ironies of this
cruel world, or love the clear outlines of all drastic issues in a
vague, unintelligible, unaesthetic idealism.
What our philosophy insists upon is that the modern tendency to
reduce everything to some single monistic "substance," which, by
the blind process of "evolution," becomes all this passionate drama
that we see, is a tendency utterly false and misleading. For us the
universe is a much larger, freer, stranger, deeper, more
complicated affair than that.
For us the universe contains possibilities of real ghastly, incredible
_evil_, descending into spiritual depths, before which the normal
mind may well shudder and turn dismayed away.
For us the universe contains possibilities of divine, magical,
miraculous _good_, ascending into spiritual heights and
associating itself with immortal super-human beings, before which
the mind of the merely logical intelligence may well pause,
baffled, puzzled, and obscurely indignant.
The "fulcrum" upon which the whole issue depends, the "pivot"
upon which it turns, is the existence of actual living souls filling
the immense spaces of nature.
If there is no "soul" in any living thing, then our whole system
crumbles to pieces. If there are living "souls" in every living thing,
then the universe, as revealed by the complex vision, is more real
than the universe as revealed by the chief exponents of modern
thought.