It would seem that when a heavenly body ceases to shine by its own
light, it becomes capable of breeding eyes with which to profit by the
light other bodies are shedding; whereas, so long as it was itself
on fire, no part of it could see. Is life a gift which cooling stars
receive from those still incandescent, when some ray falls upon a moist
spot, making it a focus of warmth and luminous energy, and reversing
at that point the general refrigeration? It is certain, at any rate,
that if light did not pour down from the sun no earthly animal would
have developed an eye. Yet there was another partner in this business
of seeing, who would have flatly refused to undertake it, had the sole
profit been the possibility of star-gazing.
Star-gazing is an ulterior platonic homage which we pay to our
celestial sources, as a sort of pious acknowledgment of their
munificence in unconsciously begetting us. But this is an
acknowledgment which they are far from demanding or noticing, not
being vain or anxious to be admired, like popular gods; and if we
omitted it, they would continue to perform their offices towards us
with the same contemptuous regularity. Star-gazing is, therefore, a
pure waste of time in the estimation of the other partner in vision,
besides celestial light--I mean, that clod of moist earth which the
light quickens, that plastic home-keeping parent of the mind, whom we
might call old mother Psyche, and whose primary care is to keep the
body in order and guide it prudently over the earth's surface. For
such a purpose the direct rays of the sun are blinding, and those of
the moon and stars fit only to breed lunatics. To mother Psyche it
seems a blessing that the view of the infinite from the earth is so
often intercepted; else it might have sunk into her heart (for she has
watched through many a night in her long vegetative career), and might
have stretched her comfortable industrious sanity into a sort of divine
madness or reason, very disconcerting in her business. Indeed, she
would never have consented to look or to see at all, except for this
circumstance, that the rays coming from heavenly bodies are reflected
by earthly bodies upon one another; so that by becoming sensitive to
light the Psyche could receive a most useful warning of what to seek or
to avoid. Instead of merely stretching or poking or sniffing through
the world, she could now map it at a glance, and turn instinct into
foresight.
This was a great turn in her career, wonderful in its tragic
possibilities, and something like falling in love; for her new art
brought her a new pleasure and a new unrest, purer and more continual
than those drowsy and terrible ones which she knew before. Reflected
light is beautiful. The direct downpour of light through space leaves
space wonderfully dark, and it falls on the earth indiscriminately
upon the wise and the foolish, to warm or to scorch them; but the
few rays caught by solid matter or drifting vapour become prismatic,
soft, and infinitely varied; not only reporting truly the position and
material diversity of things, but adding to them an orchestration in
design and colour bewitching to the senses. It was not the stars but
the terrestrial atmosphere that the eyes of the flesh were made to
see; even mother Psyche can love the light, when it clothes or betrays
something else that matters; and the fleshly-spiritual Goethe said most
truly: _Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben_.
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