Not for the ignoble vulgar do I write this article, but only for those
dialectic-mystic souls who have an irresistible taste, acquired or
native, for higher flights of metaphysics. I have always held the
opinion that one of the first duties of a good reader is to summon
other readers to the enjoyment of any unknown author of rare quality
whom he may discover in his explorations. Now for years my own taste,
literary as well as philosophic, has been exquisitely titillated by a
writer the name of whom I think must be unknown to the readers of this
article; so I no longer continue silent about the merits of Benjamin
Paul Blood.
Mr. Blood inhabits a city otherwise, I imagine, quite unvisited by the
Muses, the town called Amsterdam, situated on the New York Central
Railroad. What his regular or bread-winning occupation may be I know
not, but it can't have made him super-wealthy. He is an author only
when the fit strikes him, and for short spurts at a time; shy,
moreover, to the point of publishing his compositions only as private
tracts, or in letters to such far-from-reverberant organs of publicity
as the _Gazette_ or the _Recorder_ of his native Amsterdam, or the
_Utica Herald_ or the _Albany Times_. Odd places for such subtile
efforts to appear in, but creditable to American editors in these
degenerate days! Once, indeed, the lamented W. T. Harris of the old
"Journal of Speculative Philosophy" got wind of these epistles, and the
result was a revision of some of them for that review (_Philosophic
Reveries_, 1889). Also a couple of poems were reprinted from their
leaflets by the editor of _Scribner's Magazine_ ("The Lion of the
Nile," 1888, and| "Nemesis," 1899). But apart from these three dashes
before the footlights, Mr. Blood has kept behind the curtain all his
days.[2]
The author's maiden adventure was the _Anoesthetic Revelation_, a
pamphlet printed privately at Amsterdam in 1874. I forget how it fell
into my hands, but it fascinated me so "weirdly" that I am conscious of
its having been one of the stepping-stones of my thinking ever since.
It gives the essence of Blood's philosophy, and shows most of the
features of his talent--albeit one finds in it little humor and no
verse. It is full of verbal felicity, felicity sometimes of precision,
sometimes of metaphoric reach; it begins with dialectic reasoning, of
an extremely Fichtean and Hegelian type, but it ends in a trumpet-blast
of oracular mysticism, straight from the insight wrought by
anaesthetics--of all things in the world--and unlike anything one ever
heard before. The practically unanimous tradition of "regular"
mysticism has been unquestionably _monistic_; and inasmuch as it is the
characteristic of mystics to speak, not as the scribes, but as men who
have "been there" and seen with their own eyes, I think that this
sovereign manner must have made some other pluralistic-minded students
hesitate, as I confess that it has often given pause to me. One cannot
criticise the vision of a mystic--one can but pass it by, or else
accept it as having some amount of evidential weight. I felt unable to
do either with a good conscience until I met with Mr. Blood. His
mysticism, which may, if one likes, be understood as monistic in this
earlier utterance, develops in the later ones a sort of "left-wing"
voice of defiance, and breaks into what to my ear has a radically
pluralistic sound. I confess that the existence of this novel brand of
mysticism has made my cowering mood depart. I feel now as if my own
pluralism were not without the kind of support which mystical
corroboration may confer. Morrison can no longer claim to be the only
beneficiary of whatever right mysticism may possess to lend _prestige_.
This is my philosophic, as distinguished from my literary, interest, in
introducing Mr. Blood to this more fashionable audience: his
philosophy, however mystical, is in the last resort not dissimilar from
my own. I must treat him by "extracting" him, and simplify--certainly
all too violently--as I extract. He is not consecutive as a writer,
aphoristic and oracular rather; and being moreover sometimes dialectic,
sometimes poetic, and sometimes mystic in his manner; sometimes
monistic and sometimes pluralistic in his matter, I have to run my own
risk in making him orate _pro domo mea_, and I am not quite unprepared
to hear him say, in case he ever reads these pages, that I have
entirely missed his point. No matter; I will proceed.
I
I will separate his diverse phases and take him first as a pure
dialectician. Dialectic thought of the Hegelian type is a whirlpool
into which some persons are sucked out of the stream which the
straightforward understanding follows. Once in the eddy, nothing but
rotary motion can go on. All who have been in it know the feel of its
swirl--they know thenceforward that thinking unreturning on itself is
but one part of reason, and that rectilinear mentality, in philosophy
at any rate, will never do. Though each one may report in different
words of his rotational experience, the experience itself is almost
childishly simple, and whosoever has been there instantly recognizes
other authentic reports. To have been in that eddy is a freemasonry of
which the common password is a "fie" on all the operations of the
simple popular understanding.
In Hegel's mind the vortex was at its liveliest, and any one who has
dipped into Hegel will recognize Mr. Blood to be of the same tribe.
"That Hegel was pervaded by the great truth," Blood writes, "cannot be
doubted. The eyes of philosophy, if not set directly on him, are set
towards the region which he occupied. Though he may not be the final
philosopher, yet pull him out, and all the rest will be drawn into his
vacancy."
Drawn into the same whirlpool, Mr. Blood means. Non-dialectic thought
takes facts as singly given, and accounts for one fact by another. But
when we think of "_all_ fact," we see that nothing of the nature of
fact can explain it, "for that were but one more added to the list of
things to be accounted for. . . . The beginning of curiosity, in the
philosophic sense," Mr. Blood again writes, "is the stare
[Transcriber's note: state?] of being at itself, in the wonder why
anything is at all, and what this being signifies. Naturally we first
assume the void, and then wonder how, with no ground and no fertility,
anything should come into it." We treat it as a positive nihility, "a
barrier from which all our batted balls of being rebound."
Upon this idea Mr. Blood passes the usual transcendentalist criticism.
There _is_ no such separate opposite to being; yet we never think of
being as such--of pure being as distinguished from specific forms of
being--save as what stands relieved against this imaginary background.
Being has no _outline_ but that which non-being makes, and the two
ideas form an inseparable pair. "Each limits and defines the other.
Either would be the other in the same position, for here (where there
is as yet no question of content, but only of being itself) the
position is all and the content is nothing. Hence arose that paradox:
'Being is by nothing more real than not-being.'"
"Popularly," Mr. Blood goes on, "we think of all that is as having got
the better of non-being. If all were not--_that_, we think, were easy:
there were no wonder then, no tax on ingenuity, nothing to be accounted
for. This conclusion is from the thinking which assumes all reality as
immediately given assumes knowledge as a simple physical light, rather
than as a distinction involving light and darkness equally. We assume
that if the light were to go out, the show would be ended (and so it
would); but we forget that if the darkness were to go out, that would
be equally calamitous. It were bad enough if the master had lost his
crayon, but the loss of the blackboard would be just as fatal to the
demonstration. Without darkness light would be useless--universal
light as blind as universal darkness. Universal thing and universal
no-thing were indistinguishable. Why, then, assume the positive, the
immediately affirmative, as alone the ingenious? Is not the mould as
shapely as the model? The original ingenuity does not show in bringing
light out of darkness, nor in bringing things out of nothing, but in
evolving, through the just opposition of light and darkness, this
wondrous picture, in which the black and white lines have equal
significance--in evolving from life and death at once, the conscious
spirit. . . .
"It is our habit to think of life as dear, and of death as cheap
(though Tithonus found them otherwise), or, continuing the simile of
the picture, that paper is cheap while drawing is expensive; but the
engraver had a different estimation in one sense, for all his labor was
spent on the white ground, while he left untouched those parts of the
block which make the lines in the picture. If being and non-being are
both necessary to the presence of either, neither shall claim priority
or preference. Indeed, we may fancy an intelligence which, instead of
regarding things as simply owning entity, should regard chiefly their
background as affected by the holes which things are making in it.
Even so, the paper-maker might see your picture as intrusive!"
Thus "does the negation of being appear as indispensable in the making
of it." But to anyone who should appeal to particular forms of being
to refute this paradox, Mr. Blood admits that "to say that a picture,
or any other sensuous thing, is the same as the want of it, were to
utter nonsense indeed: there is a difference equivalent to the whole
stuff and merit of the picture; but in so far as the picture can be
there for thought, as something either asserted or negated, its
presence or its absence are the same and indifferent. By _its_ absence
we do not mean the absence of anything else, nor absence in general;
and how, forsooth, does its absence differ from these other absences,
save by containing a complete description of the picture? The hole is
as round as the plug; and from our thought the 'picture' cannot get
away. The negation is specific and descriptive, and what it destroys
it preserves tor our conception."
The result is that, whether it be taken generally or taken
specifically, all that which _either is or is not_ is or is not _by
distinction or opposition_. "And observe the life, the process,
through which this slippery doubleness endures. Let us suppose the
present tense, that gods and men and angels and devils march all
abreast in this present instant, and the only real time and date in the
universe is now. And what _is_ this instant now? Whatever else, it is
_process_--becoming and departing; with what between? Simply division,
difference; the present has no breadth for if it had, that which we
seek would be the middle of that breadth. There is no precipitate, as
on a stationary platform, of the process of becoming, no residuum of
the process of departing, but between the two is a curtain, _the
apparition of difference_, which is all the world."
I am using my scissors somewhat at random on my author's paragraphs,
since one place is as good as another for entering a ring by, and the
expert reader will discern at once the authentic dialectic circling.
Other paragraphs show Mr. Blood as more Hegelian still, and thoroughly
idealistic:--
"Assume that knowing is distinguishing, and that distinction is of
difference; if one knows a difference, one knows it as of entities
which afford it, and which also he knows; and he must know the entities
and the difference apart,--one from the other. Knowing all this, he
should be able to answer the twin question, 'What is the difference
_between sameness and difference_?' It is a 'twin' question, because
the two terms are equal in the proposition, and each is full of the
other. . . .
"Sameness has 'all the difference in the world'--from difference; and
difference is an entity as difference--it being identically that. They
are alike and different at once, since either is the other when the
observer would contrast it with the other; so that the sameness and the
difference are 'subjective,' are the property of the observer: his is
the 'limit' in their unlimited field. . . .
"We are thus apprized that distinction involves and carries its own
identity; and that ultimate distinction--distinction in the last
analysis--is self-distinction, 'self-knowledge,' as we realize it
consciously every day. Knowledge is self-referred: to know is to know
that you know, and to be known as well.
"'Ah! but _both in the same time_?' inquires the logician. A
subject-object knowing itself as a seamless unit, while yet its two
items show a real distinction: this passes all understanding."
But the whole of idealism goes to the proof that the two sides _cannot_
succeed one another in a time-process. "To say you know, and you know
that you know, is to add nothing in the last clause; it is as idle as
to say that you lie, and you know that you lie," for if you know it not
you lie not.
Philosophy seeks to grasp totality, "but the power of grasping or
consenting to totality involves the power of thought to make itself its
own object. Totality itself may indeed be taken by the _naïve_
intellect as an immediate topic, in the sense of being just an
_object_, but it cannot be just that; for the knower, as other or
opposite, would still be within that totality. The 'universe' by
definition must contain all opposition. If distinction should vanish,
what would remain? To what other could it change as a whole? How can
the loss of distinction make a _difference_? Any loss, at its utmost,
offers a new status with the old, but obviously it is too late now to
efface distinction by a _change_. There is no possible conjecture, but
such as carries with it the subjective that holds it; and when the
conjecture is of distinction in general, the subjective fills the void
with distinction of itself. The ultimate, ineffaceable distinction is
self-distinction, self-consciousness. . . . 'Thou art the unanswered
question, couldst see thy proper eye.' . . . The thought that must be
is the very thought of our experience; the ultimate opposition, the to
be _and_ not to be, is personality, spirit--somewhat that is in knowing
that it is, and is nothing else but this knowing in its vast
relations.[3]
"Here lies the bed-rock; here the brain-sweat of twenty-five centuries
crystallizes to a jewel five words long: 'The Universe has No
Opposite.' For there the wonder of that which is, rests safe in the
perception that all things _are_ only through the opposition which is
their only fear."
"The inevitable generally," in short, is exactly and identically that
which in point of fact is actually here.
This is the familiar nineteenth-century development of Kant's
idealistic vision. To me it sounds monistic enough to charm the monist
in me unreservedly. I listen to the felicitously-worded concept-music
circling round itself, as on some drowsy summer noon one listens under
the pines to the murmuring of leaves and insects, and with as little
thought of criticism.
But Mr. Blood strikes a still more vibrant note: "No more can be than
rationally is; and this was always true. There is no reason for what
is not; but for what there is reason, that is and ever was. Especially
is there no becoming of reason, and hence no reason for becoming, to a
sufficient intelligence. In the sufficient intelligence all things
always are, and are rational. To say there is something yet to be
which never was, not even in the sufficient intelligence wherein the
world is rational and not a blind and orphan waif, is to ignore all
reason. Aught that might be assumed as contingently coming to be could
only have 'freedom' for its origin; and 'freedom' has not fertility or
invention, and is not a reason for any special thing, but the very
vacuity of a ground for anything in preference to its room. Neither is
there in bare time any principle or originality where anything should
come or go. . . .
"Such idealism enures greatly to the dignity and repose of man. No
blind fate, prior to what is, shall necessitate that all first be and
afterward be known, but knowledge is first, with fate in her own hands.
When we are depressed by the weight and immensity of the immediate, we
find in idealism a wondrous consolation. The alien positive, so vast
and overwhelming by itself, reduces its pretensions when the whole
negative confronts it on our side.[4] It matters little for its
greatness when an equal greatness is opposed. When one remembers that
the balance and motion of the planets are so delicate that the
momentary scowl of an eclipse may fill the heavens with tempest, and
even affect the very bowels of the earth--when we see a balloon, that
carries perhaps a thousand pounds, leap up a hundred feet at the
discharge of a sheet of note paper--or feel it stand deathly still in a
hurricane, because it goes with the hurricane, sides with it, and
ignores the rushing world below--we should realize that one tittle of
pure originality would outweigh this crass objective, and turn these
vast masses into mere breath and tissue-paper show." [5]
But whose is the originality? There is nothing in what I am treating
as this phase of our author's thought to separate it from the
old-fashioned rationalism. There must be a reason for every fact; and
so much reason, so fact. The reason is always the whole foil and
background and negation of the fact, the whole remainder of reality.
"A man may feel good only by feeling better. . . . Pleasure is ever in
the company and contrast of pain; for instance, in thirsting and
drinking, the pleasure of the one is the exact measure of the pain of
the other, and they cease precisely together--otherwise the patient
would drink more. The black and yellow gonfalon of Lucifer is
indispensable in any spiritual picture." Thus do truth's two
components seem to balance, vibrating across the centre of
indifference; "being and non-being have equal value and cost," and
"mainly are convertible in their terms." [6]
This sounds radically monistic; and monistic also is the first account
of the Ether-revelation, in which we read that "thenceforth each is
all, in God. . . . The One remains, the many change and pass; and
every one of us is the One that remains."