Let not the merely seeming irreverence of this idea frighten our souls
from that cool exercise of consciousness—from that deep tranquillity of
self-inspection—through which alone we can hope to attain the presence
of this, the most sublime of truths, and look it leisurely in the face.
The _phænomena_ on which our conclusions must at this point depend, are
merely spiritual shadows, but not the less thoroughly substantial.
We walk about, amid the destinies of our world-existence, encompassed by
dim but ever present _Memories_ of a Destiny more vast—very distant in
the by-gone time, and infinitely awful.
We live out a Youth peculiarly haunted by such dreams; yet never
mistaking them for dreams. As Memories we _know_ them. _During our
Youth_ the distinction is too clear to deceive us even for a moment.
So long as this Youth endures, the feeling _that we exist_, is the most
natural of all feelings. We understand it _thoroughly_. That there was a
period at which we did _not_ exist—or, that it might so have happened
that we never had existed at all—are the considerations, indeed, which
_during this youth_, we find difficulty in understanding. Why we should
_not_ exist, is, _up to the epoch of our Manhood_, of all queries the most
unanswerable. Existence—self-existence—existence from all Time and to
all Eternity—seems, up to the epoch of Manhood, a normal and
unquestionable condition:—_seems, because it is_.
But now comes the period at which a conventional World-Reason awakens us
from the truth of our dream. Doubt, Surprise and Incomprehensibility
arrive at the same moment. They say:—“You live and the time was when you
lived not. You have been created. An Intelligence exists greater than
your own; and it is only through this Intelligence you live at all.”
These things we struggle to comprehend and cannot:—_cannot_, because
these things, being untrue, are thus, of necessity, incomprehensible.
No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of
thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at
understanding, or believing, that anything exists _greater than his own
soul_. The utter impossibility of any one’s soul feeling itself inferior
to another; the intense, overwhelming dissatisfaction and rebellion at
the thought;—these, with the omniprevalent aspirations at perfection,
are but the spiritual, coincident with the material, struggles towards
the original Unity—are, to my mind at least, a species of proof far
surpassing what Man terms demonstration, that no one soul _is_ inferior
to another—that nothing is, or can be, superior to any one soul—that
each soul is, in part, its own God—its own Creator:—in a word, that
God—the material _and_ spiritual God—_now_ exists solely in the diffused
Matter and Spirit of the Universe; and that the regathering of this
diffused Matter and Spirit will be but the re-constitution of the
_purely_ Spiritual and Individual God.
In this view, and in this view alone, we comprehend the riddles of
Divine Injustice—of Inexorable Fate. In this view alone the existence of
Evil becomes intelligible; but in this view it becomes more—it becomes
endurable. Our souls no longer rebel at a _Sorrow_ which we ourselves
have imposed upon ourselves, in furtherance of our own purposes—with a
view—if even with a futile view—to the extension of our own _Joy_.
I have spoken of _Memories_ that haunt us during our youth. They
sometimes pursue us even in our Manhood:—assume gradually less and less
indefinite shapes:—now and then speak to us with low voices, saying:
“There was an epoch in the Night of Time, when a still-existent Being
existed—one of an absolutely infinite number of similar Beings that
people the absolutely infinite domains of the absolutely infinite
space.[16] It was not and is not in the power of this Being—any more
than it is in your own—to extend, by actual increase, the joy of his
Existence; but just as it _is_ in your power to expand or to concentrate
your pleasures (the absolute amount of happiness remaining always the
same) so did and does a similar capability appertain to this Divine
Being, who thus passes his Eternity in perpetual variation of
Concentrated Self and almost Infinite Self-Diffusion. What you call The
Universe is but his present expansive existence. He now feels his life
through an infinity of imperfect pleasures—the partial and
pain-intertangled pleasures of those inconceivably numerous things which
you designate as his creatures, but which are really but infinite
individualizations of Himself. All these creatures—_all_—those which you
term animate, as well as those to whom you deny life for no better
reason than that you do not behold it in operation—_all_ these creatures
have, in a greater or less degree, a capacity for pleasure and for
pain:—_but the general sum of their sensations is precisely that amount
of Happiness which appertains by right to the Divine Being when
concentrated within Himself_. These creatures are all, too, more or less
conscious Intelligences; conscious, first, of a proper identity;
conscious, secondly and by faint indeterminate glimpses, of an identity
with the Divine Being of whom we speak—of an identity with God. Of the
two classes of consciousness, fancy that the former will grow weaker,
the latter stronger, during the long succession of ages which must
elapse before these myriads of individual Intelligences become
blended—when the bright stars become blended—into One. Think that the
sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general
consciousness—that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel
himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he
shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah. In the meantime bear
in mind that all is Life—Life—Life within Life—the less within the
greater, and all within the _Spirit Divine_.”
[16] See pages 102-103—Paragraph commencing “I reply that the
right,” and ending “proper and particular God.”