Answer a fool according to his folly, philosophy ditto.
Solemnity is a sign of fraud.
Religion and philosophy both have the same dual purpose: to get at the
beginning of things, and at the goal of things. They have both decided
that the serpent has got his tail in his mouth, and that the end is one
with the beginning.
It seems to me time someone gave that serpent of eternity another dummy
to suck.
They’ve all decided that the beginning of all things is the life-stream
itself, energy, ether, libido, not to mention the Sanskrit joys of
Purusha, Pradhana, Kala.
Having postulated the serpent of the beginning, now see all the heroes
from Moses and Plato to Bergson, wrestling with him might and main, to
push his tail into his mouth.
Jehovah creates man in his Own Image, according to His Own Will. If man
behaves according to the ready-made Will of God, formulated in a bunch
of somewhat unsavoury commandments, then lucky man will be received
into the bosom of Jehovah.
Man isn’t very keen. And that is Sin, original and perpetual.
Then Plato discovers how lovely the intellectual idea is: in fact, the
only perfection is ideal.
But the old dragon of creation, who fathered us all, didn’t have an idea
in his head.
Plato was prepared. He popped the Logos into the mouth of the dragon,
and the serpent of eternity was rounded off. The old dragon, ugly and
venomous, wore yet the precious jewel of the Platonic idea in his head.
Unable to find the dragon wholesale, modern philosophy sets up a retail
shop. You can’t lay salt on the old scoundrel’s tail, because, of
course, he’s got it in his mouth, according to postulate. He doesn’t
seem to be sprawling in his old lair, across the heavens. In fact, he
appears to have vamoosed. Perhaps, instead of being one big old boy, he
is really an infinite number of little tiny boys: atoms, electrons,
units of force or energy, tiny little birds all spinning with their
tails in their beaks. Just the same in detail as in the gross. Nothing
will come out of the egg that isn’t in it. Evolution sings away at the
same old song. Out of the amœba, or some such old-fashioned entity, the
dragon of evolved life stretches himself enormous and more enormous,
only, at last, to return each time, and put his tail into his own
mouth, and be an amœba once more. The amœba, or the electron, or
whatever it may lately be--the rose would be just as scentless--is the
constant, from which all manifest living creation starts out, and to
which it all returns.
There was a time when man was not, nor monkey, nor cow, not catfish. But
the amœba (or the electron, or the atom, or whatever it is) always was
and always will be.
Boom! tiddy-ra-ta! Boom!
Boom! tiddy-ra-ta! Boom!
How do you know? How does anyone know, what always was or wasn’t? Bunk
of geology, and strata, and all that, biology or evolution.
“One, two, three four five,
Catch a little fish alive.
Six, seven, eight nine ten,
I have let him go again....”
Bunk of beginnings and of ends, and heads and tails. Why does man always
want to know so damned much? Or rather, so damned little? If he can’t
draw a ring round creation, and fasten the serpent’s tail into its mouth
with the padlock of one final clinching idea, then creation can go to
hell, as far as man is concerned.
There is such a thing as life, or life energy. We know, because we’ve
got it, or had it. It isn’t a constant. It comes and it goes. But we
_want_ it.
This I think is incontestable.
More than anything else in the world, we want to have life, and
life-energy abundant in us. We think if we eat yeast, vitamines and
proteids, we’re sure of it. We’re had. We diddle ourselves for the
million millionth time.
What we want is life, and life-energy inside us. Where it comes from, or
what it is, we don’t know, and never shall. It is the capital X of all
our knowledge.
But we want it, we must have it. It is the all in all.
This we know, now, for good and all: that which is good, and moral, is
that which brings into us a stronger, deeper flow of life and
life-energy: evil is that which impairs the life-flow.
But man’s difficulty is, that he can’t have life for the asking. “He
asked life of Thee, and Thou gavest it him: even length of days for ever
and ever.” There’s a pretty motto for the tomb!
It isn’t length of days for ever and ever that a man wants. It is strong
life within himself, while he lives.
But how to get it? You may be as healthy as a cow, and yet have fear
inside you, because your life is not enough.
We know, really, that we can’t have life for the asking, nor find it by
seeking, nor get it by striving. The river flows into us from behind and
below. We must turn our backs to it, and go ahead. The faster we go
ahead, the stronger the river rushes into us. The moment we turn round
to embrace the river of life, it ebbs away, and we see nothing but a
stony fiumara.
We must go ahead.
But which way is ahead?
We don’t know.
We only know that, continuing in the way we are going, the river of life
flows feebler and feebler in us, and we lose all sense of vital
direction. We begin to talk about vitamines. We become idiotic. We
cunningly prepare our own suicide.
This is the philosophic problem: to find the way ahead.
_Allons!_--there is no road before us.
Plato said that ahead, ahead was the perfect Idea, gleaming in the brow
of the dragon.
We have pretty well caught up with the perfect Idea, and we find it a
sort of vast, white, polished tomb-stone.
If the mouth of the serpent is the open grave, into which the tail
disappears, then three cheers for the Logos, and down she goes.
We children of a later Pa, know that Life is real, Life is earnest, and
the Grave is not its Goal.
Let us side-step.
All goals become graves.
Every goal is a grave, when you get there.
Well, I came out of an egg-cell, like an amœba, and I go into the grave.
I can’t help it. It’s not my fault, and it’s not my business.
I don’t want eternal life, nor length of days for ever and ever. Nothing
so long drawn out.