Possibly the power for such wishing must depend upon our comprehension
of the ghostliness of substance. Once men endowed with spirit all forms
and motions and utterances of Nature: stone and metal, herb and tree,
cloud and wind,--the lights of heaven, the murmuring of leaves and
waters, the echoes of the hills, the tumultuous speech of the sea. Then
becoming wiser in their own conceit, they likewise became of little
faith; and they talked about “the Inanimate” and “the Inert,”--which
are nonexistent,--and discoursed of Force as distinct from Matter, and
of Mind as distinct from both. Yet we now discover that the primitive
fancies were, after all, closer to probable truth. We cannot indeed
think of Nature to-day precisely as did our forefathers; but we find
ourselves obliged to think of her in very much weirder ways; and the
later revelations of our science have revitalized not a little of the
primitive thought, and infused it with a new and awful beauty. And
meantime those old savage sympathies with savage Nature that spring
from the deepest sources of our being,--always growing with our growth,
strengthening with our strength, more and more unfolding with the
evolution of our higher sensibilities,--would seem destined to sublime
at last into forms of cosmical emotion expanding and responding to
infinitude.
* * * * *
Have you never thought about those immemorial feelings?... Have you
never, when looking at some great burning, found yourself exulting
without remorse in the triumph and glory of fire?--never unconsciously
coveted the crumbling, splitting, iron-wrenching, granite-cracking
force of its imponderable touch?--never delighted in the furious and
terrible splendor of its phantasmagories,--the ravening and bickering
of its dragons,--the monstrosity of its archings,--the ghostly soaring
and flapping of its spires? Have you never, with a hill-wind pealing
in your ears, longed to ride that wind like a ghost,--to scream round
the peaks with it,--to sweep the face of the world with it? Or, watching
the lifting, the gathering, the muttering rush and thunder-burst of
breakers, have you felt no impulse kindred to that giant motion,--no
longing to leap with that wild white tossing, and to join in that mighty
shout?... And all such ancient emotional sympathies with Nature’s
familiar forces--do they not prelude, with their modern æsthetic
developments, the future growth of rarer sympathies with incomparably
subtler forces, and of longings to be limited only by our power to know?
Know ether--shivering from star to star;--comprehend its sensitivities,
its penetrancies, its transmutations;--and sympathies ethereal will
evolve. Know the forces that spin the suns;--and already the way has
been reached of becoming one with them.
And furthermore, is there no suggestion of such evolvement in the
steady widening through all the centuries of the thoughts of their
world-priests and poets?--in the later sense of Life-as-Unity absorbing
or transforming the ancient childish sense of life-personal?--in the
tone of the new rapture in world-beauty, dominating the elder worship
of beauty-human?--in the larger modern joy evoked by the blossoming
of dawns, the blossoming of stars,--by all quiverings of color, all
shudderings of light? And is not the thing-in-itself, the detail, the
appearance, being ever less and less studied for its mere power to
charm, and ever more and more studied as a single character in that
Infinite Riddle of which all phenomena are but ideographs?
* * * * *
Nay!--surely the time must come when we shall desire to be all that
is, all that ever has been known,--the past and the present and the
future in one,--all feeling, striving, thinking, joying, sorrowing,--and
everywhere the Part,--and everywhere the Whole. And before us, with the
waxing of the wish, perpetually the Infinities shall widen.
And I--even I!--by virtue of that wish, shall become all forms, all
forces, all conditions: Ether, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth,--all motion
visible or viewless,--all vibration named of light, of color, of
sonority, of torrefaction,--all thrillings piercing substance,--all
oscillations picturing in blackness, like the goblin-vision of the
X-rays. By virtue of that wish I shall become the Source of all
becoming and of all ceasing,--the Power that shapes, the Power that
dissolves,--creating, with the shadows of my sleep, the life that shall
vanish with my wakening. And even as phosphor-lampings in currents
of midnight sea, so shall shimmer and pulse and pass, in mine Ocean
of Death and Birth, the burning of billions of suns, the whirling of
trillions of worlds....