I wonder if I can make clearer, by turning a few different facets in
this chapter, what we mean by friends, comrades, the spirit of things,
and love not as an emotion but as a cosmic force. Many days I have
faced a Chapel, as I face this day's work, longing to bring in closer
the dream of the new social order, yet dismayed by the limitations
of words and my own mind, trained so long in the life of the old....
I would begin to talk, drawing the young minds to mine through an
intimate revelation of the heart, then presently lose the sense of
effort, even the sense of thought--and an hour would pass in the joy of
communal blessedness, because we were one.
Man is not getting larger, though he is continually holding more.
The human brain, after it reaches a certain age and size, may gain
thereafter a conception of the universe without altering the size of
the hat-band. There is a continual condensation at work within us
mentally and physically. We take the cream of the thing, and throw the
rest away. The wiser and the more inclusive we become, the more we take
just the spirit of a thing, and leave the bulk and weight behind.
This is true in our every refinement, in the clothes we wear, the food
we eat, the books we read and the friends we gather together. We become
harder and harder to suit, because bulk and weight are common, but the
spiritual extract of anything is slow to appear for us. The wiser the
man, the more fastidious he is, and this does not mean that he is a
crank. The excellence of fastidiousness is not in eccentricity but in
inclusiveness. In the spirit of the thing, he sees all. From the spirit
of the thing, he expresses in his own way any part. He can array whole
hierarchies of facts from the spirit of the whole, but mainly he leaves
the facts in reference-libraries, where they belong and are quickly
available, and stores away in his working faculties just a drop of the
_oil_ of a subject or a breath from its essence.
There are those who believe that the soul of man is made up of essences
of experiences of thousands of lives--yet the refinement of the soul
is so spiritualised that the best surgeon cannot find the little
organ. He knows the brain, which is made up of the stored experiences
of but one life, but because the soul is so small or so diffused,
the surgeon is very apt to say that there is no such organ. And yet,
we all know there is knowledge and power behind us, which drives us,
in our greater moments, to utterances and action entirely without the
scope of the brain. We may call this the soul, or the nth power, or the
fourth dimension--the name doesn't matter.... Listen, if I write well
to-day--I mean well for me--if I rise to the opportunity at all, it
will be because I am writing things which my brain doesn't know.
I yearn to make this still clearer.... The rose, which is the highest
evolved of flowers, includes all the evolution of plant-life of its
line beneath; the same with gold among the minerals. The fact that each
is the highest necessitates that. In the same way, man includes Nature
and the lower creatures, in that he is the highest. This is easily
proven to you when you recall that a child in the womb passes through
all states of creature evolution. That period is, in a wonderful way, a
review of the evolution of the world.
The mere fact that the higher one climbs, the farther one can see,
proves it again. This is a law. The scent of a rose is the sublimate
of all plant odours; and the spirit of man is the refinement of all
knowledge and experience beneath.
The higher man ascends, the more inclusive. To heal another, the
physician must be able to include the other. Evolution is continual
refinement--the drawing unto ourselves of the spirit of bulks of
matter. I stood upon a bluff overlooking the ocean recently, and a
breath of the south wind awakened in my mind the story of one whole
summer; others have listened to forest trees or the humming roar of
a distant city, or the rush of a great river, and found in them the
aggregate of all Nature's sounds in one tone. This is the magic of the
spirit of things.
In all philosophy, there is no difference of opinion as to one fact,
that man is unfolding a microcosm within himself, including in his
consciousness more and more the Idea of the Universe. The cosmic
consciousness, which a few have attained, is the actual perception of
the externals of the Plan.
The cream of anything includes all the parts. The cosmic mind must
include the essence of all arts and experiences and facts. Just as the
rose and the man and the grain of dust are potential with all beneath,
the highest man, the cosmic intelligence, is potentially the cosmos in
containing the Idea of it.
This idea may be contained in and expressed outwardly by some great
single, all-including, all-mastering emotion--such as love. And now we
are in a region where there can be no difference of opinion; at least
I have never heard disputed what is the greatest thing in the world.
There are all kinds of love. The simple man loves simply--himself,
his woman, his children and his animals. The love of the cosmic
consciousness breaks forth in a deluge upon the race, because it
comprehends and includes all beneath. This great outpouring is formed
of earth, air, water, fire, sunlight and all winds, all facts, all
experiences, all arts, light of the moon and stars and all glowing
things under the sun, all sounds and scents and pictures, all ardours,
and sympathies and tolerances. Its outpouring is action, and is of
itself creative. This is the _OM_. Such a love leavens and impregnates
all things, because it understands and includes all things. It unifies
all separateness; it enfolds all intelligence with intuition; it unites
all parts.
This brings us to that ancient and unassailable premise of all
religions--that God includes every part of the universe in being the
spirit of it; that His idea of creativeness is expressed in one great
single, all-mastering and including emotion,--which is love. We hear
the little children saying it, "God is love."
* * * * *
... We awaken the Ideal in ourselves first by imitating the virtues of
others. In the earlier days when to me courage meant physical action,
men passed in different fields, leaving an imperishable remembrance.
I have often seen the expressions of those I loved and idealised as a
boy, live again in the faces of my own children. John T. McCutcheon in
Luzon, filling a reel of films, under a volley of fire at Binan, on his
knees, working the camera with a whole brigade sprawled behind--gave
me one of the finest early building blocks for the courage among men.
He also gave me an ideal of cleanliness: One evening, after a vicious
day's march, and we were all ravenous, John T. left camp to find a
river. There he bathed with government bouquet,--made himself right
with himself, even to shaving, before meat and drink. His constraint
looked like mastery to me then. Grant Wallace was a big star of that
service--ideal in performance of friendship.... Young men at hand now
are different. Not one of them lack in grip and grit. They reveal the
new thing in courage, the courage that begins where the courage of
the soldier ends. These have gone far into the mystery of their own
kingdoms--rapidly becoming kings of themselves.
The world doesn't understand them. The Abbot[3] is a sensation in
literary matters at Columbia, but unplaced. The Dakotan[3] was said
to be unfit for a soldier because he was twenty pounds under weight
for his height. He can leap five feet six, run or hike indefinitely,
exhaust a cement-mixer, say "stick" in all tongues and "quit" in none.
He has the will and wisdom to make himself a new man over night--and
yet his Government wants him served up just so, in pounds. There isn't
any one loves America more than the Dakotan, whom we now call Steve.
Even the young military surgeons will know before long that endurance
is a matter of spiritual culture, that courage is spirit--that a man
is well because of cleanliness of body and thought and organised
will; that he doesn't fail in a pinch because he is evolved; that all
the higher forms of life call for speed rather than strength, the
levitating force of spirit rather than the gravitating force of flesh,
for brain rather than brute.... Comrade stuff is the stuff of souls....
I've studied them long and devotedly. I build my days upon the things
these boys show me. Less and less are we different from those who call
to our hearts.
[3] These appear in _Child and Country_.
These young men do not think themselves out; they are not troubled by
misses or personal discrepancies. They simply are themselves. I have
perceived that men of dreams and genius and action are in the larger
sense free from themselves. The main part of their day's performance
is a lifting out of the tangle of emotion and desire, into a large,
unrestricted area full of calm daylight, where events and movements
are seen in their relation to one another, not in separateness and
one at a time, an area also where inspiration is momentarily expected
to strike. They do not analyse themselves. They do not hear their own
voices. They are not dismayed if they falter or drop from the key. The
things that most men do with care, and that occupy so much of the days
these young men perform automatically.
My own path was upward through an intense self-consciousness--the
American, not the oriental way. I lived with myself all the route. I
observed outward conditions and events, domestic, civic and cosmic; but
at the same time observed their effects upon myself. I did not know
until I was adult that there is a big receptivity of consciousness
above this--where intuitions play and weave causes and effects
together--where the mind is more like a child's than a man's, or more
like a giant's, perhaps--where the big faith comes, and the warm laugh
comes, and man surpasses himself, but does not know until afterward, if
at all.
Warmth flooded into me as I touched this larger consciousness. It
became clear as daylight--that a man is at his best only when out of
himself. I saw much of my misery and depression was the result of
self-analysis. I was a better man when I let myself go utterly. And
this was exactly the thing that happened in moments of danger, moments
of romance and friendship, moments of the self hurling itself outward.
Capacity for these moments makes the Comrade, and indicates that love
which is not a sentiment, but a cosmic force.
Again, you cannot describe a spiritual thing with these little tools
and materials in black and white--just intimations.... If we are
sweet enough inside, something of the song will come to us.... Two
words suggest it best. The first is _Comrade_, which has become a
silliness in a military sense, yet has a high and holy meaning to
all reconstructionists.... I remember when the word first came to me
with a thrill, as a young lad going off to Cuban wars. It was burned
out of me a few days afterward in a Sibley tent full of regular army
soldiers.... I remember the scorn with which I used the word all the
years--or avoided using it--until slowly, smilingly, its new dimension
opened, hard as a diamond, and as clear--its meaning in work and world
and women, its new meaning to Russia and India and China and America.
It seems to say _Equality_. It's a kind of deep drink of spirit
together, a word spoken at the last moment between men--an
inner-shrine word, spoken with a smile, and a glimpse into the eternal
indestructibility of the human heart. It expresses the love of the
world, not as it is felt in the brain, but in the breast of the soul.
The New Race has already washed it clean. It goes with a Cause fit to
die for. It belongs to men and women who can look at each other with a
kind of prayer in their eyes and face death alone and laugh at it.
There's a fury, too, in the word--fury against the world, against
things as they are. It stands against the world-darkness now, and for
the day that is to be. It means love for the poor, a love for the
peasants, a passion to serve and be tender to them, not to drive them
into the pits of death--a readiness to die for them without _cant_, a
readiness also to dare to live for them.
_Comrade_--there's vision in it to strip off the masks of decadent
nations, to open wide the sepulchres where the priests are still
plotting to crucify the King; its strong magic will uncover the
monotonous crimes of commerce.... It signifies the spirit of the young
men and women who have already begun with gladness and fire to clear
the débris for the building of the New Age.
They will begin with the soil; they will know and love their own hard
part. They will begin with the grass, with the rice, with the millet
and the wheat, the clean things, the simple and holy things that the
peasants love, with the songs that the peasants sing, the songs of the
soil and the rivers and snows--to build upon them the new heaven and
the new earth.... Above all, there's a laugh in the word--the laugh of
youth and power.
The other word is _Democracy_.
* * * * *
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