"There is an invariable and reliable condition (or uncondition) ensuing
about the instant of recall from anaesthetic stupor to 'coming to,' in
which the genius of being is revealed. . . . No words may express the
imposing certainty of the patient that he is realizing the primordial
Adamic surprise of Life.
"Repetition of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if it
could not possibly be otherwise. The subject resumes his normal
consciousness only to partially and fitfully remember its occurrence,
and to try to formulate its baffling import,--with but this consolatory
afterthought: that he has known the oldest truth, and that he has done
with human theories as to the origin, meaning, or destiny of the race.
He is beyond instruction in 'spiritual things.' . . .
"It is the instant contrast of this 'tasteless water of souls' with
formal thought as we 'come to,' that leaves in the patient an
astonishment that the awful mystery of Life is at last but a homely and
a common thing, and that aside from mere formality the majestic and the
absurd are of equal dignity. The astonishment is aggravated as at a
thing of course, missed by sanity in overstepping, as in too foreign a
search, or with too eager an attention: as in finding one's spectacles
on one's nose, or in making in the dark a step higher than the stair.
My first experiences of this revelation had many varieties of emotion;
but as a man grows calm and determined by experience in general, so am
I now not only firm and familiar in this once weird condition, but
triumphant, divine. To minds of sanguine imagination there will be a
sadness in the tenor of the mystery, as if the key-note of the universe
were low; for no poetry, no emotion known to the normal sanity of man,
can furnish a hint of its primeval prestige, and its all-but appalling
solemnity; but for such as have felt sadly the instability of temporal
things there is a comfort of serenity and ancient peace; while for the
resolved and imperious spirit there are majesty and supremacy
unspeakable. Nor can it be long until all who enter the anaesthetic
condition (and there are hundreds every secular day) will be taught to
expect this revelation, and will date from its experience their
initiation into the Secret of Life. . . .
"This has been my moral sustenance since I have known of it. In my
first printed mention of it I declared: 'The world is no more the alien
terror that was taught me. Spurning the cloud-grimed and still sultry
battlements whence so lately Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray gull
lifts her wing against the night fall, and takes the dim leagues with a
fearless eye.' And now, after twenty-seven years of this experience,
the wing is grayer, but the eye is fearless still, while I renew and
doubly emphasize that declaration. I know, as having known, the
meaning of Existence; the sane centre of the universe--at once the
wonder and the assurance of the soul."
After this rather literary interlude I return to Blood's philosophy
again. I spoke a while ago of its being an "irrationalistic"
philosophy in its latest phase. Behind every "fact" rationalism
postulates its "reason." Blood parodizes this demand in true
nominalistic fashion. "The goods are not enough, but they must have
the invoice with them. There must be a _name_, something to _read_. I
think of Dickens's horse that always fell down when they took him out
of the shafts; or of the fellow who felt weak when naked, but strong in
his overcoat." No bad mockery, this, surely, of rationalism's habit of
explaining things by putting verbal doubles of them beneath them as
their ground!
"All that philosophy has sought as cause, or reason," he says,
"pluralism subsumes in the status and the given fact, where it stands
as plausible as it may ever hope to stand. There may be disease in the
presence of a question as well as in the lack of an answer. We do not
wonder so strangely at an ingenious and well-set-up effect, for we feel
such in ourselves; but a cause, reaching out beyond the verge [of fact]
and dangling its legs in nonentity, with the hope of a rational
foothold, should realize a strenuous life. Pluralism believes in truth
and reason, but only as mystically realized, as lived in experience.
Up from the breast of a man, up to his tongue and brain, comes a free
and strong determination, and he cries, originally, and in spite of his
whole nature and environment, 'I will.' This is the Jovian _fiat_, the
pure cause. This is reason; this or nothing shall explain the world
for him. For how shall he entertain a reason bigger than
himself? . . . Let a man stand fast, then, as an axis of the earth;
the obsequious meridians will bow to him, and gracious latitudes will
measure from his feet."
This seems to be Blood's mystical answer to his own monistic statement
which I quoted above, that "freedom" has no fertility, and is no reason
for any special thing.[8] "Philosophy," Mr. Blood writes to me in a
letter, "is past. It was the long endeavor to logicize what we can
only realize practically or in immediate experience. I am more and
more impressed that Heraclitus insists on the equation of reason and
unreason, or chance, as well as of being and not-being, etc. This
throws the secret beyond logic, and makes mysticism outclass
philosophy. The insight that mystery,--the Mystery, as such is final,
is the hymnic word. If you use reason pragmatically, and deny it
absolutely, you can't be beaten; be assured of that. But the _Fact_
remains, and of course the Mystery." [9]
The "Fact," as I understand the writer here to mean it, remains in its
native disseminated shape. From every realized amount of fact some
other fact is _absent_, as being uninvolved. "There is nowhere more of
it consecutively, perhaps, than appears upon this present page." There
is, indeed, to put it otherwise, no more one all-enveloping fact than
there is one all-enveloping spire in an endlessly growing spiral, and
no more one all-generating fact than there is one central point in
which an endlessly converging spiral ends. Hegel's "bad infinite"
belongs to the eddy as well as to the line. "Progress?" writes our
author. "And to what? Time turns a weary and a wistful face; has he
not traversed an eternity? and shall another give the secret up? We
have dreamed of a climax and a consummation, a final triumph where a
world shall burn _en barbecue_; but there is not, cannot be, a purpose
of eternity; it shall pay mainly as it goes, or not at all. The show
is on; and what a show, if we will but give our attention! Barbecues,
bonfires, and banners? Not twenty worlds a minute would keep up our
bonfire of the sun; and what banners of our fancy could eclipse the
meteor pennants of the pole, or the opaline splendors of the
everlasting ice? . . . Doubtless we _are_ ostensibly progressing, but
there have been prosperity and highjinks before. Nineveh and Tyre,
Rome, Spain, and Venice also had their day. We are going, but it is a
question of our standing the pace. It would seem that the news must
become less interesting or tremendously more so--'a breath can make us,
as a breath has made.'"
Elsewhere we read: "Variety, not uniformity, is more likely to be the
key to progress. The genius of being is whimsical rather than
consistent. Our strata show broken bones of histories all forgotten.
How can it be otherwise? There can be no purpose of eternity. It is
process all. The most sublime result, if it appeared as the ultimatum,
would go stale in an hour; it could not be endured."
Of course from an intellectual point of view this way of thinking must
be classed as scepticism. "Contingency forbids any inevitable history,
and conclusions are absurd. Nothing in Hegel has kept the planet from
being blown to pieces." Obviously the mystical "security," the "apodal
sufficiency" yielded by the anaesthetic revelation, are very different
moods of mind from aught that rationalism can claim to father--more
active, prouder, more heroic. From his ether-intoxication Blood may
feel towards ordinary rationalists "as Clive felt towards those
millions of Orientals in whom honor had no part." On page 6, above, I
quoted from his "Nemesis"--"Is heaven so poor that justice," etc. The
writer goes on, addressing the goddess of "compensation" or rational
balance;--
"How shalt thou poise the courage
That covets all things hard?
How pay the love unmeasured
That could not brook reward?
How prompt self-loyal honor
Supreme above desire,
That bids the strong die for the weak,
The martyrs sing in fire?
Why do I droop in bower
And sigh in sacred hall?
Why stifle under shelter?
Yet where, through forest tall,
The breath of hungry winter
In stinging spray resolves,
I sing to the north wind's fury
And shout with the coarse-haired wolves?
* * * * * *
What of thy priests' confuting,
Of fate and form and law,
Of being and essence and counterpoise,
Of poles that drive and draw?
Ever some compensation,
Some pandering purchase still!
But the vehm of achieving reason
Is the all-patrician Will!"
Mr. Blood must manage to re-write the last two lines; but the contrast
of the two securities, his and the rationalist's, is plain enough. The
rationalist sees safe conditions. But Mr. Blood's revelation, whatever
the conditions be, helps him to stand ready for a life among them. In
this, his attitude seems to resemble that of Nietzsche's _amor fati_!
"Simply," he writes to me, "_we do not know_. But when we say we do
not know, we are not to say it weakly and meekly, but with confidence
and content. . . . Knowledge is and must ever be _secondary_, a
witness rather than a principal, or a 'principle'!--in the case.
Therefore mysticism for me!"
"Reason," he prints elsewhere, "is but an item in the duplex potency of
the mystery, and behind the proudest consciousness that ever reigned,
Reason and Wonder blushed face to face. The legend sinks to burlesque
if in that great argument which antedates man and his mutterings,
Lucifer had not a fighting chance. . . .
"It is given to the writer and to others for whom he is permitted to
speak--and we are grateful that it is the custom of gentlemen to
believe one another--that the highest thought is not a milk-and-water
equation of so much reason and so much result--'no school sum to be
cast up.' We have realized the highest divine thought of itself, and
there is in it as much of wonder as of certainty; inevitable, and
solitary and safe in one sense, but queer and cactus-like no less in
another sense, it appeals unutterably to experience alone.
"There are sadness and disenchantment for the novice in these
inferences, as if the keynote of the universe were low, but experience
will approve them. Certainty is the root of despair. The inevitable
stales, while doubt and hope are sisters. Not unfortunately the
universe is wild--game flavored as a hawk's wing. Nature is miracle
all. She knows no laws; the same returns not, save to bring the
different. The slow round of the engraver's lathe gains but the
breadth of a hair, but the difference is distributed back over the
whole curve, never an instant true--ever not quite."
"Ever not quite!"--this seems to wring the very last panting word out
of rationalistic philosophy's mouth. It is fit to be pluralism's
heraldic device. There is no complete generalization, no total point
of view, no all-pervasive unity, but everywhere some residual
resistance to verbalization, formulation, and discursification, some
genius of reality that escapes from the pressure of the logical finger,
that says "hands off," and claims its privacy, and means to be left to
its own life. In every moment of immediate experience is somewhat
absolutely original and novel. "We are the first that ever burst into
this silent sea." Philosophy must pass from words, that reproduce but
ancient elements, to life itself, that gives the integrally new. The
"inexplicable," the "mystery," as what the intellect, with its claim to
reason out reality, thinks that it is in duty bound to resolve, and the
resolution of which Blood's revelation would eliminate from the sphere
of our duties, remains; but it remains as something to be met and dealt
with by faculties more akin to our activities and heroisms and
willingnesses, than to our logical powers. This is the anesthetic
insight, according to our author. Let _my_ last word, then, speaking
in the name of intellectual philosophy, be _his_ word.--"There is no
conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to
it? There are no fortunes to be told, and there is no advice to be
given.--Farewell!"
[1] Written during the early summer of 1910 and published in the
_Hibbert Journal_ for July of that year.
[2] "Yes! Paul is quite a correspondent!" said a good citizen of
Amsterdam, from whom I inquired the way to Mr. Blood's dwelling many
years ago, after alighting from the train. I had sought to identify
him by calling him an "author," but his neighbor thought of him only as
a writer of letters to the journals I have named.
[3] "How shall a man know he is alive--since in thought the knowing
constitutes the being alive, without knowing that thought (life) from
its opposite, and so knowing both, and so far as being is knowing,
being both? Each defines and relieves the other, each is impossible in
thought without the other; therefore each has no distinction save as
presently contrasting with the other, and each by itself is the same,
and nothing. Clearly, then, consciousness is neither of one nor of the
other nor of both, but a knowing subject perceiving them and itself
together and as one. . . . So, in coming out of the anaesthetic
exhilaration . . . we want to tell something; but the effort instantly
proves that something will stay back and do the telling--one must utter
one's own throat, one must eat one's own teeth, to express the being
that possesses one. The result is ludicrous and astounding at
once--astounding in the clear perception that this is the ultimate
mystery of life, and is given you as the old Adamic secret, which you
then feel that all intelligence must sometime know or have known; yet
ludicrous in its familiar simplicity, as somewhat that any man should
always perceive at his best, if his head were only level, but which in
our ordinary thinking has grown into a thousand creeds and theories
dignified as religion and philosophy."
[4] Elsewhere Mr. Blood writes of the "force of the negative"
thus:--"As when a faded lock of woman's hair shall cause a man to cut
his throat in a bedroom at five o'clock in the morning; or when Albany
resounds with legislation, but a little henpecked judge in a dusty
office at Herkimer or Johnstown sadly writes across the page the word
'unconstitutional'--the glory of the Capitol has faded."
[5] Elsewhere Blood writes:--"But what then, in the name of common
sense, _is_ the external world? If a dead man could answer he would
say Nothing, or as Macbeth said of the air-drawn dagger, 'there is no
such thing.' But a live man's answer might be in this way: What is the
multiplication table when it is not written down? It is a necessity of
thought; it was not created, it cannot but be; every intelligence which
goes to it, and thinks, must think in that form or think falsely. So
the universe is the static necessity of reason; it is not an object for
any intelligence to find, but it is half object and half subject; it
never cost anything as a whole; it never _was_ made, but always _is_
made, in the Logos, or expression of reason--the Word; and slowly but
surely it will be understood and uttered in every intelligence, until
he is one with God or reason itself. As a man, for all he knows, or
has known, stands at any given instant the realization of only one
thought, while all the rest of him is invisibly linked to that in the
necessary form and concatenation of reason, so the man as a whole of
exploited thoughts is a moment in the front of the concatenated reason
of the universal whole; and this whole is personal only as it is
personally achieved. This is the Kingdom that is 'within you, and the
God which 'no man hath seen at any time.'"
[6] There are passages in Blood that sound like a well-known essay by
Emerson. For instance:--"Experience burns into us the fact and the
necessity of universal compensation. The philosopher takes it from
Heraclitus, in the insight that everything exists through its opposite;
and the bummer comforts himself for his morning headache as only the
rough side of a square deal. We accept readily the doctrine that pain
and pleasure, evil and good, death and life, chance and reason, are
necessary equations--that there must be just as much of each as of its
other.
"It grieves us little that this great compensation cannot at every
instant balance its beam on every individual centre, and dispense with
an under dog in every fight; we know that the parts must subserve the
whole; we have faith that our time will come; and if it comes not at
all in this world, our lack is a bid for immortality, and the most
promising argument for a world hereafter. 'Though He slay me, yet will
I trust in Him.'
"This is the faith that baffles all calamity, and ensures genius and
patience in the world. Let not the creditor hasten the settlement: let
not the injured man hurry toward revenge; there is nothing that draws
bigger interest than a wrong, and to 'get the best of it' is ever in
some sense to get the worst."
[7] Or what thinks the reader of the verbiage of these
verses?--addressed in a mood of human defiance to the cosmic Gods--
"Whose lightnings tawny leap from furtive lairs,
To helpless murder, while the ships go down
Swirled in the crazy stound, and mariners' prayers
Go up in noisome bubbles--such to them;--
Or when they tramp about the central fires,
Bending the strata with aeonian tread
Till steeples totter, and all ways are lost,--
Deem they of wife or child, or home or friend,
Doing these things as the long years lead on
Only to other years that mean no more,
That cure no ill, nor make for use or proof--
Destroying ever, though to rear again."
[8] I subjoin a poetic apostrophe of Mr. Blood's to freedom:
"Let it ne'er be known.
If in some book of the Inevitable,
Dog-eared and stale, the future stands engrossed
E'en as the past. There shall be news in heaven,
And question in the courts thereof; and chance
Shall have its fling, e'en at the [ermined] bench.
* * * * * *
Ah, long ago, above the Indian ocean,
Where wan stars brood over the dreaming East,
I saw, white, liquid, palpitant, the Cross;
And faint and far came bells of Calvary
As planets passed, singing that they were saved,
Saved from themselves: but ever low Orion--
For hunter too was I, born of the wild,
And the game flavor of the infinite
Tainted me to the bone--he waved me on,
On to the tangent field beyond all orbs,
Where form nor order nor continuance
Hath thought nor name; there unity exhales
In want of confine, and the protoplasm
May beat and beat, in aimless vehemence,
Through vagrant spaces, homeless and unknown.
* * * * * *
There ends One's empire!--but so ends not all;
One knows not all; my griefs at least are mine--
By me their measure, and to me their lesson;
E'en I am one--(poor deuce to call the Ace!)
And to the open bears my gonfalon,
Mine aegis, Freedom!--Let me ne'er look back
Accusing, for the withered leaves and lives
The sated past hath strewn, the shears of fate,
But forth to braver days.
O, Liberty,
Burthen of every sigh!--thou gold of gold,
Beauty of the beautiful, strength of the strong!
My soul for ever turns agaze for thee.
There is no purpose of eternity
For faith or patience; but thy buoyant torch
Still lighted from the Islands of the Blest,
O'erbears all present for potential heavens
Which are not--ah, so more than all that are!
Whose chance postpones the ennui of the skies!
Be thou my genius--be my hope in thee!
For this were heaven: to be, and to be free."
[9] In another letter Mr. Blood writes:--"I think we are through with
'the Whole,' and with '_causa sui_,' and with the 'negative unity'
which assumes to identify each thing as being what it lacks of
everything else. You can, of course, build out a chip by modelling the
sphere it was chipped from;--but if it was n't a sphere? What a
weariness it is to look back over the twenty odd volumes of the
'Journal of Speculative Philosophy' and see Harris's mind wholly filled
by that one conception of self-determination--everything to be thought
as 'part of a system'--a 'whole' and '_causa sui_.'--I should like to
see such an idea get into the head of Edison or George Westinghouse."