It was only when I began to study psychical research and mystical
philosophy that I broke away from my father's influence. He had been a
follower of John Stuart Mill and had grown to manhood with the scientific
movement. In this he had never been of Rossetti's party who said that it
mattered to nobody whether the sun went round the earth or the earth round
the sun. But through this new research, this reaction from popular
science, I had begun to feel that I had allies for my secret thought. Once
when I was in Dowden's drawing-room a servant announced my late
head-master. I must have got pale or red, for Dowden, with some ironical,
friendly remark, brought me into another room and there I stayed until the
visitor was gone. A few months later, when I met the head-master again I
had more courage. We chanced upon one another in the street and he said,
"I want you to use your influence with so-and-so, for he is giving all his
time to some sort of mysticism and he will fail in his examination." I
was in great alarm, but I managed to say something about the children of
this world being wiser than the children of light. He went off with a
brusque "good morning." I do not think that even at that age I would have
been so grandiloquent but for my alarm. He had, however, aroused all my
indignation.
My new allies and my old had alike sustained me. "Intermediate
examinations," which I had always refused, meant money for pupil and for
teacher, and that alone. My father had brought me up never when at school
to think of the future or of any practical result. I have even known him
to say, "when I was young, the definition of a gentleman was a man not
wholly occupied in getting on." And yet this master wanted to withdraw my
friend from the pursuit of the most important of all the truths. My
friend, now in his last year at school, was a show boy, and had beaten all
Ireland again and again, but now he and I were reading Baron Reichenbach
on Odic Force and manuals published by the Theosophical Society. We spent
a good deal of time in the Kildare Street Museum passing our hands over
the glass cases, feeling or believing we felt the Odic Force flowing from
the big crystals. We also found pins blindfolded and read papers on our
discoveries to the Hermetic Society that met near the roof in York
Street. I had, when we first made our society, proposed for our
consideration that whatever the great poets had affirmed in their finest
moments was the nearest we could come to an authoritative religion, and
that their mythology, their spirits of water and wind were but literal
truth. I had read "Prometheus Unbound" with this thought in mind and
wanted help to carry my study through all literature. I was soon to vex my
father by defining truth as "the dramatically appropriate utterance of the
highest man." And if I had been asked to define the "highest" man, I would
have said perhaps, "we can but find him as Homer found Odysseus when he
was looking for a theme."
My friend had written to some missionary society to send him to the South
Seas, when I offered him Renan's "Life of Christ" and a copy of "Esoteric
Buddhism." He refused both, but a few days later while reading for an
examination in Kildare Street Library, he asked in an idle moment for
"Esoteric Buddhism" and came out an esoteric Buddhist. He wrote to the
missionaries withdrawing his letter and offered himself to the
Theosophical Society as a _chela_. He was vexed now at my lack of zeal,
for I had stayed somewhere between the books, held there perhaps by my
father's scepticism. I said, and he thought it was a great joke though I
was serious, that even if I were certain in my own mind, I did not know "a
single person with a talent for conviction." For a time he made me ashamed
of my world and its lack of zeal, and I wondered if his world (his father
was a notorious Orange leader) where everything was a matter of belief was
not better than mine. He himself proposed the immediate conversion of the
other show boy, a clever little fellow, now a Dublin mathematician and
still under five feet. I found him a day later in much depression. I said,
"did he refuse to listen to you?" "Not at all," was the answer, "for I had
only been talking for a quarter of an hour when he said he believed."
Certainly those minds, parched by many examinations, were thirsty.
Sometimes a professor of Oriental Languages at Trinity College, a Persian,
came to our Society and talked of the magicians of the East. When he was a
little boy, he had seen a vision in a pool of ink, a multitude of spirits
singing in Arabic, "woe unto those that do not believe in us." And we
persuaded a Brahmin philosopher to come from London and stay for a few
days with the only one among us who had rooms of his own. It was my first
meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed
at once logical and boundless. Consciousness, he taught, does not merely
spread out its surface but has, in vision and in contemplation, another
motion and can change in height and in depth. A handsome young man with
the typical face of Christ, he chaffed me good-humouredly because he said
I came at breakfast and began some question that was interrupted by the
first caller, waited in silence till ten or eleven at night when the last
caller had gone, and finished my question.