I hear that Oxford is reading Plotinus--a blessed change from Hegel.
The pious mind is still in the age of mythology; science has confused
its own lessons, for want of a philosopher who should understand them;
and what matters, so long as the age of mythology lasts, is that the
myths that occupy the fancy should be wise and beautiful, and should
teach men to lay up their treasures in heaven. The philosophy of
Plotinus does this, and does it magnificently. Like that of Plato
and of Aristotle it is little more than a rhetorical inversion or
perpetual metaphor, expressing the aim of life under the figure of a
cosmos which is animate and which has already attained its perfection.
Considering the hurried life which we are condemned to lead, and the
shifting, symbolic ideas to which we are confined, it seems hardly
worth while to quarrel with such inspired fabulists, or to carp at the
cosmic dress in which they present their moralities. Gentle, secluded,
scholastic England does well to platonize. It had never ceased to do
so. In spite of the restiveness, sometimes, of barbarian blood, in
spite of Hebraic religion and Germanic philosophy, the great classical
tradition has always been seated here; and England has shared, even if
with a little reserve and mistrust, in the ecclesiastical, courtly,
military, and artistic heritage of Europe. A genuine child of the past,
who is bred to knowledge of the world, and does not plunge into it
greedily like a stranger, cannot worship the world; he cannot really be
a snob. Those who have profited by a long life cannot possibly identify
the divine life with the human. They will not be satisfied with a
philosophy that is fundamentally worldly, that cannot lift up its heart
except pragmatically, because the good things are hanging from above,
or because the long way round by righteousness and the ten commandments
may be the shortest cut to the promised land. Their love of wisdom will
not be merely provisional, nor their piety a sort of idyllic interlude,
penitent but hopeful, comforting itself with the thought that the sour
grapes will soon be ripe, and oh, so delicious! They will not remember
the flesh-pots of Egypt with an eternal regret, and the flesh-pots of
Berlin and New York will not revive their appetite.
Spirit is not an instrument but a realization, a fruition. At every
stage, and wherever it peeps out through the interstices of existence,
it is a contemplation of eternal things. Eternal things are not other
material things by miracle existing for ever in another world; eternal
tilings are the essences of all things here, when we consider what
they are in themselves and not what, in the world of fortune, they may
bring or take away from us personally. That is why piety and prayer
are spiritual, when they cease to be magic operations or efforts of a
celestial diplomacy: they chief works of this school confess that this
is their only theme. Not moral life, much less the natural world, but
simply the articulation of knowledge occupies them; and yet, by the
hocus-pocus of metaphysics, they substitute this human experience for
the whole universe in which it arises. The universe is to be nothing
but a flux of perceptions, or a will positing an object, or a tendency
to feign that there is a world. It would ill become me, a pupil of this
philosophy, to deny its profundity. These are the heart-searchings of
"a creature moving about in worlds not realized." It is a wonderful
thing to spin out in soliloquy, out of some unfathomed creative
instinct, the various phases of one's faith and sensibility, making
an inventory of one's intellectual possessions, with some notes on
their presumable or reported history. I love the lore of the moral
antiquary; I love rummaging in the psychological curiosity shop. The
charm of modern life is ambiguous; it lies in self-consciousness.
Egotism has its tender developments; there is a sort of engaging purity
in its perplexities and faithful labours. The German soul has a great
volume, and Hamlet is heroic even in his impotence. When in this little
glow-worm which we call man there is so much going on, what must not
all nature contain in its immensity? Yet all these advances in analysis
and in psychological self-knowledge, far from enriching the modern
philosopher and giving him fresh hints for the interpretation of the
great world, have been neutralized, under the guise of scepticism, by
a total intellectual cramp or by a colossal folly. This thoughtful
dog has dropped the substance he held in his mouth, to snatch at the
reflection of it which his own mind gave him. It is wonderful with
what a light heart, with what self-satisfaction and even boasts, the
youngest children of the philosophical family jettison all their
heirlooms. Fichte and Nietzsche, in their fervid arrogance, could
hardly outdo the mental impoverishment of Berkeley and Hume in their
levity: it had really been a sight for the gods to see one of these
undergraduates driving matter out of the universe, whilst the other
drove out spirit.
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