It seems to me that any transcendental idealist who reads this article
ought to discern in the fragmentary utterances which I have quoted thus
far, the note of what he considers the truer dialectic profundity. He
ought to extend the glad hand of fellowship to Mr. Blood; and if he
finds him afterwards palavering with the enemy, he ought to count him,
not as a simple ignoramus or Philistine, but as a renegade and relapse.
He cannot possibly be treated as one who sins because he never has
known better, or as one who walks in darkness because he is
congenitally blind.
Well, Mr. Blood, explain it as one may, does turn towards the darkness
as if he had never seen the light. Just listen for a moment to such
irrationalist deliverances on his part as these:--
"Reason is neither the first nor the last word in this world. Reason
is an equation; it gives but a pound for a pound. Nature is excess;
she is evermore, without cost or explanation.
'Is heaven so poor that _justice_
Metes the bounty of the skies?
So poor that every blessing
Fills the debit of a cost?
That all process is returning?
And all gain is of the lost?'
Go back into reason, and you come at last to fact, nothing more--a
given-ness, a something to wonder at and yet admit, like your own will.
And all these tricks for logicizing originality, self-relation,
absolute process, subjective contradiction, will wither in the breath
of the mystical tact; they will swirl down the corridors before the
besom of the everlasting Yea."
Or again: "The monistic notion of a oneness, a centred wholeness,
ultimate purpose, or climacteric result of the world, has wholly given
way. Thought evolves no longer a centred whole, a One, but rather a
numberless many, adjust it how we will."
Or still again: "The pluralists have talked philosophy to a
standstill--Nature is contingent, excessive and mystical essentially."
Have we here contradiction simply, a man converted from one faith to
its opposite? Or is it only dialectic circling, like the opposite
points on the rim of a revolving disc, one moving up, one down, but
replacing one another endlessly, while the whole disc never moves? If
it be this latter--Mr. Blood himself uses the image--the dialectic is
too pure for me to catch: a deeper man must mediate the monistic with
the pluralistic Blood. Let my incapacity be castigated, if my
"Subject" ever reads this article, but let me treat him from now
onwards as the simply pluralistic mystic which my reading of the rest
of him suggests. I confess to some dread of my own fate at his hands.
In making so far an ordinary transcendental idealist of him, I have
taken liberties, running separate sentences together, inverting their
order, and even altering single words, for all which I beg pardon; but
in treating my author from now onwards as a pluralist, interpretation
is easier, and my hands can be less stained (if they _are_ stained)
with exegetic blood.
I have spoken of his verbal felicity, and alluded to his poetry.
Before passing to his mystic gospel, I will refresh the reader
(doubtless now fatigued with so much dialectic) by a sample of his
verse. "The Lion of the Nile" is an allegory of the "champion spirit
of the world" in its various incarnations.