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 those 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 waste
and repairing of the lenses of the eye, [234] the modification of
the tissues of the brain under 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
in many currents; 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, the gradual
fading of colour from the wall--movements 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 [235] reflexion begins to play upon
these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive
force seems suspended like some 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 into the narrow chamber of the
individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a group 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. [236] 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 to a life of constant 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 to 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 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
[237] 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 grasp 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 very 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, [238] or of what is only conventional, has no real
claim upon us.
One of the most beautiful passages 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
clung always 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
condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of
death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve--les hommes sont tous
condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis: 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. [239] Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the
desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For
art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the
highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for
those moments' sake.
1868.
NOTES
233. *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.
233. +Pater's translation: "[Herakleitos says somewhere that] All things
give way; nothing remains." Plato, Cratylus 402 A, as noted in
The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, eds. Lionel Trilling
and Harold Bloom. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973.
236. +Following William Buckler's emendation in Walter Pater:
Three Major Texts (New York: New York UP, 1986), I have
corrected dephlegmatisiren vivificiren to dephlegmatisiren,
vivificiren.
THE END