CONCLUSION*

*This brief "Conclusion" was omitted in the second edition of this book,

as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into

whose hands it might fall. On the whole, I have thought it best to

reprint it here, with some slight changes which bring it closer to my

original meaning. I have dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean with

the thoughts suggested by it.

Legei pou Herakleitos hoti panta khorei kai ouden menei.

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or

fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us

begin with that which is without--our physical life. Fix upon it in one

of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious

recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical

life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which

science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and

delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them

in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of

them--the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses

of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of

light and sound--processes which science reduces to simpler and more

elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action

of these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out

on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven by many forces;

and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the

grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That

clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under

which we group them--a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass

out beyond it. This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but

the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner

or later on their ways.

Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the

whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. There

it is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye and fading of colour

from the wall,--the movement of the shore-side, where the water flows

down indeed, though in apparent rest,--but the race of the mid-stream, a

drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought. At first sight

experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing

upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves

in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to act upon

those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force

seems suspended like a trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group

of impressions--colour, odour, texture--in the mind of the observer. And

if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the

solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions unstable,

flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our

consciousness of them, it contracts still further; the whole scope of

observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual mind.

Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round

for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no

real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we

can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the

impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a

solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step farther

still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to

which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual

flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is

infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that

is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it,

of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than

that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the

stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or

less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines

itself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution

of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off--that

continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving

of ourselves.

Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren vivificiren. The

service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit

is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every moment

some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the

sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or

intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us,--for

that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is

the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated,

dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by

the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point,

and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital

forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy,

is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is

to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world,

and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two

persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet,

we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to

knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a

moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and

curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's

friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in

those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing

of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep

before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of

its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see

and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we

see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new

opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile

orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or

ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather

up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the

microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us

the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some

interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not

identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real

claim upon us.

One of the most beautiful passages in the writings of Rousseau is that in

the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in

him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had always clung

about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal

disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the

interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his

previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement,

which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well!

we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of

death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve--les hommes sont tous

condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then

our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness,

some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this

world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that

interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.

Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and

sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested

or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is

passion--that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied

consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty,

the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professing

frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they

pass, and simply for those moments' sake.