They say the sun is a very small star, and the thing is plausible
enough in itself, without the proofs which presumably the astronomers
can give of it. That which nature produces she is apt to produce in
crowds; what she does once, if she has her way, she will do often, with
a persistency and monotony which would be intolerable to her if she
were endowed with memory; but hers is a life of habit and automatic
repetition, varied only when there is some hitch in the clockwork, and
she begins hurriedly beating a new tune. Accordingly, what any creature
calls the present time, the living interest, the ruling power, or the
true religion is almost always but as one leaf in a tree. The same
plastic stress which created it creates a million comparable things
around it. Yet it is easy for each to ignore its neighbours, and to be
shocked at the notion of loving them as itself; for they all have their
separate places or seasons, and bloom on their several stems, so that
an accident that overwhelms one of them may easily leave the others
unscathed. But for all that, they are as multitudinous and similar as
the waves of the sea. Take any star at random, like our sun, or any
poet, or any idea, and whilst certainly it will be the nearest and
warmest to somebody, it is not at all likely to be the greatest of its
kind, or even very remarkable.
Nevertheless, in a moral perspective, nearness makes all the
difference; and for us the sun is a veritable ruling deity and parent
of light; he is the centre and monarch of our home system. Similarly
each living being is a sort of sun to itself; this spark within me,
by whose light I see at all, is a great sun to me; and considering
how wide a berth other spiritual luminaries seem to give me, I must
warm myself chiefly by my own combustion, and remain singularly
important to myself. This importance belongs to the humour of material
existence, visible when I look at my seamy side; it vanishes in so
far as my little light actually bums clear, and my intent flies with
it to whatever objects its rays can reach, no matter how distant or
alien. Yet this very intelligence and scope in me are functions of my
inward fire: seeing, too, is burning. An atomic and spark-like form of
existence, prevalent in nature, is absolutely essential to spirit; and
I find it very acceptable. It is a free, happy, and humble condition.
I welcome the minute bulk, the negligible power, the chance quality
and oddity of my being, combined as it is with vital independence
and adequate fuel in my small bunkers for my brief voyage. On a
vaster scale, I think the sun, for all his littleness, has a splendid
prerogative, and I honour Phoebus as a happy god. The happiest part
of his condition and his best claim to deity lie in this: that he can
irradiate and kindle the frozen or vaporous bodies that swim about him;
he can create the moonlight and the earthlight, much more powerful than
the moonlight. This earthlight, if we could only get far enough from
the earth to see it, would seem strangely brilliant and beautiful; it
would show sea-tints and snow-tints and sand-tints; there would be
greens and purples in it reflected from summer and winter zones, dotted
with cinder scars and smoke-wreaths of cities. Yet all these lights are
only sunlight, received and returned with thanks.
Nor is this surface shimmer, visible to telescopic observers, the
only benefit gained: something is kept back and absorbed; some warmth
sinks into the substance of the earth and permeates its watery soil,
initiating currents in the sea and air, and quickening many a nest of
particles into magnetic and explosive and contagious motions. This
life which arises in the earth is an obeisance to the sun. The flowers
turn to the light and the eye follows it, animal bodies imbibe it, and
send it forth again in glad looks and keen attention; and when dreams
and thoughts, even with the eyes shut, play within us like flamelets
amongst the coals, it is still the light of the sun, strangely stored
and transmuted, that shines in those visions. Certainly intelligence
in its cognitive intent is radically immaterial, and nothing could be
more heterogeneous from vibrations, attractions, or ethereal currents
than the power to make assertions that shall be true or false, relevant
or irrelevant to outlying things; but this so spiritual power is
profoundly natural; it plainly exhibits an animal awaking to the
presence of other bodies that actually surround him, resenting their
cruelty or warming to their conquest and absorption. Apart from its
roots in animal predicaments, spirit would be wholly inexplicable in
its moods and arbitrary in its deliverance. The more ecstatic or the
more tragic experience is, the more unmistakably it is the voice of
matter. It then obviously retraces and makes incandescent the silent
relations of things with things, by which its weal or woe is decided.
Sometimes it simply burns in their midst and moves in their company
like the sun amongst the stars he ignores; sometimes it gilds in its
highly coloured lights the surface of things turned in its direction.
Were not the distances between bodies spanned by some universal
gravitation (which we are now told may be a sort of light), we may be
sure that sense and fancy, which are profoundly vegetative things,
would never leap from their source and discount their images in the
heroic effort to understand the world. But the fire of life casts
its passionate illumination on the dead things that control it, and
raises to aesthetic actuality various poetic symbols of their power.
Dead things possess, of course, in their own right, their material and
logical being, but they borrow from the adventitious interest which a
living creature must needs take in them their various moral dignities
and all their part in the conscious world. It is intelligible that
moralists and psychologists should be absorbed in those reflections
of their attention which reach them from things distant or near, and
that they should pronounce the whole universe to be nothing but their
experience of it, a sort of rainbow or crescent kindly decorating their
personal sky. On the same principle the sun (who, being a material
creature, would also be subject to egotism) might say that the only
substance in the universe was light, and that the earth and moon were
nothing but ethereal mirrors palely reflecting his own fire. It would
seem absurd to him that the earth or its inhabitants should profess to
have any bowels. Inextinguishable laughter and self-assurance would
seize him at the report that any dark places existed, or any invisible
thoughts. He would never admit that, in all this, he was himself
thinking; what we should call his thoughts he would maintain (without
thinking!) were evident meteors moving and shining on their own account.
Such are the cross-lights of animal persuasion. Things, when seen,
seem to come and go with our visions; and visions, when we do not know
why they visit us, seem to be things. But this is not the end of the
story. Opacity is a great discoverer. It teaches the souls of animals
the existence of what is not themselves. Their souls in fact live and
spread their roots in the darkness, which embosoms and creates the
light, though the light does not comprehend it. If sensuous evidence
flooded the whole sphere with which souls are conversant, they would
have no reason for suspecting that there was anything they did not
see, and they would live in a fool's paradise of lucidity. Fortunately
for their wisdom, if not for their comfort, they come upon mysteries
and surprises, earthquakes and rumblings in their hidden selves and
in their undeciphered environment; they live in time, which is a
double abyss of darkness; and the primary and urgent object of their
curiosity is that unfathomable engine of nature which from its ambush
governs their fortunes. The proud, who shine by their own light, do
not perceive matter, the fuel that feeds and will some day fail them;
but the knowledge of it comes to extinct stars in their borrowed light
and almost mortal coldness, because they need to warm themselves at
a distant fire and to adapt their seasons to its favourable shining.
When we are on the shady side of the earth we can, as a compensation,
range in knowledge far beyond our painted atmosphere, and far beyond
that little sun who, so long as he shone upon us, seemed to ride at
the top of heaven; we can perceive a galaxy of other lights, no less
original than he, to which his glory blinded us; we can even discover
how he himself, if his hot head of burning hair would only suffer him
to notice it, lives subject to their perpetual influence. Beautiful and
happy god as Phoebus may be, he is not a just god nor an everlasting
one. He is a lyric singer; he is not responsible save to his own
heart, and not obliged to know other things. He lives in the eternal,
and does not need to be perpetual. And he is often beneficent in his
spontaneity, and many of us have cause to thank and to love him. There
is an uncovenanted society of spirits, like that of the morning stars
singing together, or of all the larks at once in the sky; it is a happy
accident of freedom and a conspiracy of solitudes. When people _talk
together_, they are at once entangled in a mesh of instrumentalities,
irrelevance, misunderstanding, vanity, and propaganda; and all to no
purpose, for why should creatures become alike who are different? But
when minds, being naturally akin and each alone in its own heaven,
_soliloquize in harmony_, saying compatible things only because their
hearts are similar, then society is friendship in the spirit; and the
unison of many thoughts twinkles happily in the night across the void
of separation.
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