There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.Hamlet, Act I, Scene V.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.Hamlet, Act I, Scene V.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.Hamlet, Act I, Scene V.
For some days he had been spiritually restless. His sterile mind flitted hither and thither like a butterfly. Nothing succeeded in interesting him. He picked up a book, read two or three pages and then had to close it again, unable to control his wandering attention. He tried to write, but half of the sheets that he wrote he tore up. And yet he had never enjoyed better health, never felt the blood coursing more vigorously through his veins, or the heart and lungs working in better unison. At the same time he had a premonition of something strong and mature within himself striving to come to birth; he felt that he was on the verge of bringing forth thoughts brimful of vitality and splendour. But something, a kind of solemn calm, against which he contended in vain, encompassed and paralysed him. It was no doubt sheer insensibility in him not to wait in peace for the grace of the Spirit to visit him but to seek to force it with violence.
At last, one afternoon, when the light of the setting sun was pouring upon the wide balcony of his cell-like room, he shut himself up in it, with its dumb books, with all its familiar objects the sight of which was always grateful to him. It was like shutting himself up within himself, or even better than that, for this wonted ambience served him as a means of communion with the world. That square glass inkstand, those fat pen-holders, that carpet, that stout leather arm-chair in which his body rested while his mind went galloping away, those rough plain chairs, those rows of books against the white naked walls: all these things were a kind of prolongation of his spirit and at the same time they were like arms which the world stretched out to enfold him in. They belonged to him and yet they belonged also to the world; they were himself and at the same they were the not-himself. They would not deceive him, no. He had touched them once and a thousand times and every touch had linked itself with all the other touches, until at last these things of humble use had become invested with a kind of soul made up of the outpourings of spirit and memories.
He had books that were like lovers, grateful, remembering, for whenever he opened them at random they opened themselves of their own accord at the same place, always offering him the same passage, the choicest, the most intense, the most life-giving that they had to offer. And when he read the passage over again, the intimate ambience of the peaceful room yielded up the memory of all the other fugitive moments when he had read it before, and his soul vibrated across the gulf of time until its vibrations were lost in that remoteness of the past where consciousness loses itself too.
From the balcony of his room, across red roofs stained here and there with the green of lichen, hecould just glimpse the clouds glowing in the sunset light. And nearer at hand, along the eaves of the roof opposite, the white stone-crop blossomed, its tiny flowerets nourishing their life upon the moist earthy sediment washed down by the rain from the sun-baked clay tiles and deposited in the guttering. In summer, pigeons flew down from the neighbouring belfry to bill and coo upon the roof, picking the seeds of the stone-crop at its edge, while the dark swifts skimmed through the air above. Sometimes cats crept stealthily with sinuous movement across the tiles. Upon this roof too his eyes had often rested; the little wild garden in the gutter, the pigeons, the swifts, the cats, these too belonged to him and at the same time to the world; and often while he had held them in his gaze his mind had been intent upon his innermost thoughts.
He shut himself up there in his study, like an oyster in its shell. He untethered his mind, letting it roam at will, without spur or bridle. For a time it wandered up and down, plucking at passing ideas, ranging over the backs of the books and divining famous names and titles of renown. Then it collected itself and withdrew into the body that it animated and made use of, and presently the arm of this body reached out for a sheet of paper and the eyes glanced over it.
It was the strident manifesto that had been so much talked about; it was the famous composition into which he, he himself, who was now sitting at ease in his cow-hide arm-chair, had emptied his spirit. He began to read it, and as he read it a strange disquiet invaded him. No, that was not his, that was not what he had thought and believed, that was not what he had written. And yet there could be no doubt about it. That, that which now seemed so strange to him, he had written that, and it had increased his fame. He read it over again.
No, we do not communicate what we want to communicate, he reflected. No sooner does a thought incarnate itself in words and issue forth into the world than it belongs to someone not ourself, or rather it belongs to nobody because it belongs to everybody. The flesh with which language clothes itself is communal and external; it wizens up thought, it imprisons it and even reverses and falsifies it.
It was a singular and disturbing effect that was produced in him by reading himself as if he were a stranger, as if his writing had been written by someone else. This effect of the duplication of his personality reminded him of a former experience of self-duplication which he never recalled without a shudder. Once when gazing at the reflection of his own gaze in a mirror he had the sensation of seeing himself as someone else; he regarded himself as an unsubstantial shadow, as an impalpable phantom, and this alarmed him to such a degree that he called to himself softly by his own name. And his voice sounded to him as if it were the voice of another, a voice which came forth out of space, out of the invisible, out of impenetrable mystery. He cleared his throat, touched himself, felt the quickened beating of his heart. He had never forgotten that unforgettable experience.
His present feeling was not the same, but it had something that resembled it. Had he written that? Was he the same person as the man who had writtenthat? Did he contain within himself more than one person? Might it not be that he carried within him a whole legion of souls sleeping one below another? Were not all his ancestors sleeping somewhere in the limbo of his brain? Did others see him as he saw himself, or did they see him quite differently, and was he always actually doing and saying that which he thought he was?
This last idea, an absurd and extravagant idea, had obsessed him for some time past and it caused him anguish, for he said to himself: This is madness, this is sheer madness.
Only too often, in fact, as he walked quietly along the street, it had occurred to him to think something like this: “What if, instead of walking quietly and soberly, I were really pirouetting or making ridiculous contortions or behaving improperly? This hostility which I have remarked in certain of my acquaintance, may it not have arisen because I have said things to them which I am unaware of having said, or because when I thought I was offering them my hand I was in fact making some impudent or contemptuous gesture? When I imagine myself to be saying one thing, may it not be they hear something very different or perhaps contrary?”
This absurd obsession disquieted him, irritated him, made him doubt the sanity and vigour of his reason, and he had to exercise all the power of autosuggestion at his command to overcome it.
With a vigorous effort he threw off this obstinate vagary of his mind, but only to return to the question of the strangeness of what he had written.
Formerly, a long time ago, he had been a convinced determinist, unable to tolerate even the mention of free will, so irrational did the supposition of it seem to him. But later on, after further examination of the question, his inflexible determinist faith had broken down; and now, at the time at which we discover him, seated in his arm-chair in his study, he has put this question of determinism and free will away into the lumber-room of metaphysics from which he rarely takes it out. He believes now that science has not succeeded in putting this question in its true light, but that it always involves it in apetitio principii. But what he really does feel—he feels rather than thinks it—is that however free a man may be within himself, in so far as he has to exteriorize and manifest himself, to speak or to act, to communicate with his fellows, in so far as he has to avail himself of his body and of the bodies of others, he remains bound by the rigid laws of these bodies, he is a slave. My acts—he thinks—are never exclusively mine: if I speak I have to make use of air that is not mine in order to produce my voice; neither are my vocal cords, strictly speaking, mine; nor is the language mine which I must use if I wish to make myself understood; and the case is the same if I write, if I strike a blow, if I kiss, if I fight. And he asks himself in conclusion: “Am I myself really mine?” And so the tormenting obsession buzzes round him again.
There is something which we have incorporated and made our own and there is much that is completely alien to us; and between these two extreme terms everything is partly ours and partly not ours. Our life is a continual combat between our spirit which seeks tomake itself master of the world, to make the world its own, to make the world it, and the world which in its turn seeks to possess itself of our spirit, to make our spirit its own. I wish to make the world mine—our man thinks—to make it myself, and the world tries to make me its, to make me it; I strive to personalize it and it strives to depersonalize me. And in this tragic combat—for yes, the combat is a tragic one—I have to make use of my enemy in order to dominate him, and my enemy has to make use of me in order to dominate me. Whatever I say, write or do, it is only with the world’s help that I can say, write or do it; and thus the world at once depersonalizes my saying, writing and doing and makes them its own, and I appear to be different from what I am.
What an unhappy necessity is that of writing! What woeful constraint is that of having to talk! Between any two who talk together, language mediates, the world mediates, that which is neither one nor the other of the interlocutors mediates; they are involved in this intrusive element which, while enabling them to communicate, separates them. If it were only possible to create language in the very act of speaking our thought!...
Undoubtedly speech is a more perfect medium than writing, because it is less material: the vibrations of the air are dissipated, while the trace of the ink remains. Undoubtedly theflatus vocis, like everything fugitive, is richer in association, more complete in orchestration, while writing, like everything concrete, remains detached. But better still if pure thought could communicate itself by means only of those vague andfluid words upon which it floats within the soul! To make oneself understood in words or writing is to communicate the accidents, not the substance, of thought.
Our man looks at the clouds in the western sky, combed out by the unseen comb of the wind, and watches them turn to flame in the light of the setting sun. And he thinks of the substantial communion of spirits, communication by the act of spiritual presence alone. He remembered how once, on hearing some old ballad sung by a shepherd boy, the sound of which had come to him faintly through a leafy screen of grey oaks, he had trembled and felt as if he heard voices from another world, not from another world beyond this world, but from a world that lives within the world we know—voices which seemed to issue from the very heart of things, as if they were the song of the soul of the oaks, of the clouds, of the pebbles of the stream, of the earth and of the sky. Where had he heard that song before?
Who knows? Perhaps one night, when he lay asleep, the shepherd boy had passed by singing his song, and the song had lapped his dream and steeped it in the fountains of life.
Another time—he remembered—when on a journey, he had met a woman, a foreigner, who did not know his language nor did he know hers. Neither of them knew any human tongue in which they could make themselves understood, and they sat there in the railway carriage alone, opposite one another, looking and sometimes smiling at one another. Theirs was a protracted and mute conversation. When he thought kindly and tenderly of her the stranger smiled, andwhen a less innocent desire stirred within him the shadow of a frown crossed her brow. Perhaps they heard, without themselves knowing that they heard, the measured beating of their hearts, beating in unison while their eyes gazed at one another; but without a doubt the breath of their souls mingled together. For the soul breathes.
The soul breathes.—Why not speak in metaphors?
Our man began to think about breathing and how the air, penetrating into the cells of the lungs, aerates the blood, this inner atmosphere of our bodies. It is the material substance of the world—he thought—which circulates within us; it is the world diluted and made our own. And from this he went on to imagine a kind of spiritual aeration of our mind, and how the world of colours, forms, sounds and impressions of every kind is diluted in it.
But these are metaphors, nothing but metaphors, he said, then at once reflecting: Metaphors? and what is not metaphor? Science is built up of metaphors and language is essentially metaphorical. Matter, force, light, memory—all metaphors. When positivists, or those who consider themselves positivists, try to sweep science clean of metaphors, they sweep them away with a metaphorical broom, and so sweep the metaphors back again.
And then his mind began to play around one of his specially favourite ideas, namely the idea of the superiority of what we call imagination over the other so-called faculties of the spirit, and how the excellency of poets was greater than that of men of science and men of action.
A thousand times he had deplored the barbarous intransigence of most of those with whom he had to communicate—in accidental, not substantial, communion; that dismal lack of comprehension of every opinion which they do not themselves share; that ridiculous belief that there are ideas which one must necessarily consider absurd and which can only be professed by confused and unhinged minds. All that—he was wont to say to himself—is simply lack of imagination, incapacity to see things oneself, even momentarily, as others see them, sheer aridity of mind. How far from all that was the large spirit of the great Goethe, who was able to feel himself deist, pantheist, atheist all at the same time, whose mind embraced a profound understanding of paganism together with an equally profound understanding of Christianity! But Goethe was a poet, the poet, a true and essential poet, not a miserable didacticist or dogmatist like those who think they travel more safely the more ballast of formal logic they carry, at the expense of intelligence, and the more closely they hug the level shores of thought, moored fast to tradition and the senses.
Our man cast his eyes once more over the manifesto and said to himself: “And I have been called an intellectual! I! I who abhor intellectualism more than anybody! If they had labelled me ‘an imaginative’—well and good. But an intellectual?” And he thought of Paul of Tarsus and the pregnant sentences of his epistles.
He thought of Paul of Tarsus and his classification of men into carnal, intellectual and spiritual, for so he was pleased to translate it, or rather to interpret it.For there was a time when he had delighted in exegesis. Not scientific exegesis; not investigating and searching for the actual meaning of the writers of the sacred books; not co-ordinating them logically and trying to discover, by reference to the ideas and sentiment of the age and country in which they lived, what they really felt and thought; but taking as his starting-point the text that had been consecrated and enriched by centuries of tradition and thence launching out into free speculation. The moment that Paul of Tarsus gave his epistles to the world they ceased to be his, they belonged to the world, they were part of the common stock, of the patrimony, of humanity, and it was possible for him to understand them and feel them altogether differently from the way in which the Apostle himself had felt and understood them. That which others did to his writings when they read them and commented upon them, it was possible for him to do to the Apostle’s, provided he undertook the task with knowledge and conscientiousness. The actual text furnished his mind with the necessary foothold, it was the jumping-off place from which his imagination could take flight.
And in Paul of Tarsus, in his epistle to the Romans and his first epistle to the Corinthians, he found those three classes of men: the carnal orsarcinal, σάρϰινοι, the natural or psychical, Ψυϰικοί, and the spiritual or pneumatical, πνευματικοί. He had often read that 14th verse of the 7th chapter of the epistle to the Romans: “For we know that the law is spiritual [pneumatical]; but I am carnal [sarcinal], sold under sin”; and that 44th verse of the 11th chapter of the first epistle tothe Corinthians which says that there is a natural orpsychicalbody and a spiritual orpneumaticalbody; and he was aware that for the Apostle thepsyche, Ψυϰή, was something inferior, something that was more or less equivalent to what was later to be called the vital force, the sensitive soul, common to men and animals; thepneuma, on the other hand, being the higher part of the soul, the spirit, the ήγεμονικόν of the Stoics, something that survives the body. But he preferred to give it another interpretation, and he always regarded thepsycheas the intellectual power that is bound to the necessities of our actual earthly life, the slave of a logic that is educated and trained by the struggle for life, ordinary, common, current knowledge, necessary in order to enable us to live, the knowledge from which science is evolved. He could not help thinking of psychical men as intellectuals, men of common sense and logic, men whose ideas are dominated by the associations which the external and visible world suggests to them, reasonable men who are trained to some profession and practice it, who, if they are doctors, learn how to cure diseases, if engineers to construct roads, if chemists to prepare drugs and analyse compounds, if architects to build houses. These psychical men are the average men, those who take the middle course, those of whom it is said that they have a sound and clear judgment and standard, those who do not believe in any fallacy that is not consecrated by tradition and habit, those who never swallow any new absurdity, because their minds are already so stuffed with timeworn absurdities.
Between these and the carnal orsarcinalmen healways established a difference. For him the carnal men were the brutish, the absolutely uncultured, those who scarcely think of anything but eating, drinking and sleeping, those who are wholly and completely immerged in animal life. The psychical man, no; the psychical man is interested in questions of science and culture; the psychical Spaniard preaches national regeneration, is enthusiastic about the telephone, the gramophone and the cinematograph, reads Flammarion, Haeckel, Ribot, buys popular works on philosophy, and if he is in the neighbourhood of a railway stands in ecstatic contemplation of the majestic progress of the locomotive. If the psychical man is an orthodox Catholic, he admires the genius of St. Thomas Aquinas, although he has never read him, he knows that modern geology squares with the Mosaic account of the Creation, and that it is legitimate to admit a part of Darwinism, and that the Church possesses a remedy for all the social ills that afflict our age. The psychical man is an intellectual, his intellect may be small or great, but fundamentally he is an intellectual.
And lastly come the spiritual men, the dreamers, those whom the intellectuals contemptuously call mystics, those who tolerate the tyranny neither of science nor of logic, those who believe that there is another world within our world and mysterious dormant forces in the depths of our spirit, those who speak the language of the heart and many who prefer not to speak at all. Most of the great poets have been spiritual men, not intellectuals. Of one of them, of the sweet singer Wordsworth, it has been said that he was a genius without talent, that is to say a great spirit without sufficient intelligence.
How many times had he not read and re-read the end of the second and the beginning of the third chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians! “For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth [not with didactical arguments, which is the term employed in the text], but which the Holy Spirit teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man [psychical, or as our man translated it, intellectual] receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual [pneumatical] judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal [sarcinal], even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat; for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able. For ye are yet carnal....”
He turned again to the epistles of Paul of Tarsus and re-read the verses that he had so often read before. “The things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.” And he said to himself: Useless to seek toknow the things of God by the method of didactical argument, of theology, of logic; a theology is a contradiction in terms, for thetheosis at war with thelogia; arguments do not help us to reach God. And he remembered Kant and his shattering of the supposed logical proofs of the existence of God, and how in his own spirit all that scaffolding of a metalogical belief, spiritual and not intellectual, psychical and not pneumatical, had collapsed. The ontological proof, the cosmological proof, the metaphysical proof, the ethical proof, all had come tumbling down in his mind at the same time, and with them the so-called God of reason. All that theological rationalism had come to earth in his spirit with a crash, though the noise of it was heard only by himself, destroying not a few delicate flowers in its fall and covering the ground with rubbish. Upheavals of the heart, earthquakes of the spirit, had cleared the ground of the debris, and in a new way, a way the intellectuals do not know, there sprung up within him a faith which came from the Spirit of God. For the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.
“Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.”—Mystic! This word, spat out with contempt, like an insult or a reproach, seemed to be spoken into his ear, and so near, so clear, so distinct it was, that he involuntarily turned his head. And there at his side, not in the body, visible and tangible, but present in the spirit, was the prototype of the intellectual, with all his most exclusively intellectual attributes—there was the psychical man, the natural manpar excellence. There he was repeating his physiological creed parrot-wise, while in his heart he rebelled against his poetic and creative impotence, against his unconfessed unspirituality.—He shrugged his shoulders, smiled and turned again to look at the slowly darkening sky. The sunset clouds now appeared like mountains of ashes, the remains of the solar conflagration. He turned on the electric switch and the wire thread glowed in the bulb—there was light, light of man’s making, light of applied science.
“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness into him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” Foolishness ... madness ... he repeated to himself, while his eyes wandered over those familiar objects which the electric light had called forth out of the dark shadows. Madness ... and what is madness? There are alienists, phreno-pathologists, psychiatrists, and who knows by how many other names they are called?... But what is sanity? For perhaps one ought to begin with that.
Health is that condition in which a man is free from every kind of disease; but what is disease? Health, others say, is “that condition in which the organism exercises all its faculties normally.”[5]Normally ... normally ... and what is the normal? He stretched out his hand for a book which he was just then reading, a book stored with a mass of data relating to the mysterious life of the spirit, the work of that noble mind that had been the soul of the Society for Psychical Research, and he read:
“The wordnormalin common speech is used almost indifferently to imply either of two things, which may be very different from each other—conformity to a standard and position as an average between extremes. Often, indeed, the average constitutes the standard—as when a gas is of average density; or is practically equivalent to the standard—as when a sovereign is of normal weight. But when we come to living organisms a new factor is introduced. Life is change; each living organism changes; each generation differs from its predecessor. To assign a fixed norm to a changing species is to shoot point-blank at a flying bird. The actual average at any given moment is no ideal standard; rather, the furthest evolutionary stage now reached is tending, given stability in the environment, to become the average of the future.”[6]
He shut the book and said to himself again: Normal ... madness ... sanity ... disease ... health.... The madness of to-day will be the sanity of to-morrow, just as the sanity of to-day will appear madness to-morrow. Intellectuals call that madness which they are unable to understand, for it can only be discerned spiritually. And an intellectual, what is he, in the last instance, but a normal man, a man of thevia media, equally far removed from the carnal and from the spiritual man? The intellectual is the man of thevia media, at an equal distance from the enormous mass of carnality and from the very limited quantity of conscious spirituality—for the other kind of spirituality, the unconscious and potential, is dormant in all menand is perhaps more alive in the carnal men themselves than in the intellectuals. For it is easier for the flesh than for the intellect to receive the spirit; between intellect and spirit the logic of the schools interposes. The intellectual is the man of average sense, which he calls common sense, and which is as far from the universal, cosmic or instinctive sense in which carnal men live, as it is from that private sense which fortifies the spirit of spiritual men.
“But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.” By what right do those whose own spirit is buried beneath their intellect judge the things of the spirit?
“For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.” At this word Christ our man’s thinking was arrested. He had arrived at what is called the religious problem and it presented itself to him in the form under which he had been contemplating it now for some time. In this problem—theproblem, the religious problem—he saw the principal touchstone that distinguishes the intellectuals from the spiritual men.
In so far as the religious question is concerned, the intellectuals presented themselves to him, in effect, as divided into two large groups, usually called believers and unbelievers. Taking these terms in the concrete and in relation to his own country, they resolved themselves into intellectual Catholics and intellectual non-Catholics, who in practice were always anti-Catholics. These two factions contended one against another; but as a contest is only possible on a common basis, they contended on the same ground. No contest is possiblebetween a fish which never emerges from the depths of the sea and a bird which never descends from the altitudes of the air. These two factions contended facing one another—that is to say, one looking in one direction and the other in another—but both standing on the same ground, both on the same plane of intellectuality. And woe to him who should address them either from above or from below, from another plane than theirs, from the plane of spirituality or from the plane of carnality. They will both unite in calling him either a madman or a brute.
These two factions contend together. For the one, religion is needful as the necessary basis of morality, social order being impossible without the fear of hell, of death and of the devil; religion is assured by external proofs, prophecies, miracles—or, rather, accounts of miracles—and before all and above all, by a tradition of centuries resting upon an authority. For the other, proofs of the truth of religion are wanting; social order can be established without hell or the fear of death and of the devil, and the tradition has neither been constant nor does it possess any convincing logical value. Both approach the question from the same side: the one sees in religion a social institution devoted to the interests of order, the other a social institution devoted to the interests of despotism; the one seeks for external logical proofs and the other rejects these proofs. Advocates, and merely advocates, both of them! For both of them it is a question of a social institution, something based upon external authorities and evidences or inevidences, upon something logical or illogical. It is what they call the conflict betweenreason and faith, although this faith is not faith but only belief. It was not possible for him, for our man, to feel it in that way, and the arguments of the one side interested him as little as those of the other. Disputes of intellectuals!...
He was now called to supper and he went away to attend to the wants of the body, giving it first food and then sleep.
In the course of my frequent peregrinations, when I go up and down the country preaching my lay sermons in the towns and cities of Spain, I have a way of taking my audiences as raw material for experiment. I carry out tests upon them, observing how they respond and react to my words. And I have observed that whenever they hear me say something which they think, however erroneously, implies a kind of negation of the immortality of the soul and of the existence of another life transcending this world, they break out into applause. And this applause saddens me and sometimes prompts me to attack.
If these outbursts of applause meant simply: “Hear, hear! Bravo! This man’s honest. He puts love of truth, however painful the truth may be, before love of consolation”—if the applause meant that, I would accept it, though with a certain sadness. But no, this applause means something different. It means: “Hear, hear! Excellent! We don’t want another life! This life is enough for us!” And this wounds me, for it is an explosion of the most debasing materialism.
Not believing that God exists or that the soul is immortal, or believing that God does not exist and that the soul is not immortal—and believing that the soulis not immortal is not the same as not believing that it is immortal—this is a belief that I can respect; but not wishing that God should exist or that the soul should be immortal is a thing profoundly repellent to me.
And it is precisely because I have this thorn in my heart of hearts, because I cannot resign myself to one day returning to unconsciousness, because I have a thirst for eternity, that this applause bruises my heart. That a man should not believe in another life, that I understand, for I myself find no proof of it; but that he should resign himself to this, and above all that he should not desire anything more than this life, that is a thing I do indeed not understand.
And then these gross calumniations of Christ and of Christianity, these stupidities that go contrary to nature and that have stunted the human spirit, and all this alluvion of vulgarity that so many unfortunate people swallow whole....
In one of those series of popular publications which flatter and seduce the coarsest instincts of the unlettered multitudes, there is a book—translated from the Italian, I believe—entitled “Jesus Christ Has Never Existed.” It is one of the most deplorable, shallow, and worthless books imaginable, inspired not by a love of truth but by the most blatant sectarianism. I was talking about it one day to a man who had read it and who had been delighted with it, and I said: “It is not the thesis that shocks me. The thesis that Jesus had no historical existence, that He is a myth, has many times been put forward, and with apparently very plausible arguments, at any rate with erudition—recently by Karthoff—but it is a thesis that has been demolished by the most judicious investigators, no matter what their personal creed may have been.” He replied: “Then I’m sorry, for He ought not to have existed.” And naturally I did not know what to say to that.
This lack of ideality, this aridity and poverty of inward life, which is implied by not longing for another and transcendental life, all this practical materialism, is dismaying to the mind of whosoever meditates a little upon the worth of human life. For my own part, I have very little hope of peoples who fall into this materialistic attitude.
Understand me clearly: I am not assuring you, nor can I assure you, that there is another life; I myself am not convinced that there is; but I cannot conceive that a man, a true man, should not merely resign himself to the enjoyment of this life only, but that he should renounce and even spurn another life. And as for this idea that we shall continue to live in our works, in our children, in the memory of other generations, and that everything renews and transforms itself, and that we shall help to build up a more perfect society—all this appears to me to be the most miserable subterfuge for escaping the depths of despair.
This is the reason why the radicalism of certain sections of the masses dismays me and why I cannot hope that anything fruitful will come of it. The radicalism of the masses in Spain, and perhaps in other so-called Latin, or, more strictly speaking, Catholic, countries, is lacking in the spirit and substance of religion. Theweak point in our socialism is its confused notion of the supreme end of the individual life.
Let us better the economic condition of man—good! Let us put an end to the division between rich and poor—exactly! Let us realize a state in which a moderate amount of work will be sufficient to satisfy all our wants—very good! And then? We have now created a society such as Bebel or Kropotkin dreamed of, and what is to happen to each one of us in this society? What is to be the end of this society? What shall we live for?
“Get rich!” said Guizon, the Calvinist, to the Catholic bourgeoisie of France; “get rich!” Very good. And then, when we have got rich?...
A country in which the people think only of getting rich is a country ... well, I would rather not inquire what kind of a country it is. Suffice it to say that I at any rate should die in it of cold, of shame, of disgust.
And if a country which is solely preoccupied with getting rich is abhorrent to me, still more abhorrent is the country in which the dominant preoccupation is that of enjoyment, of diversion. In other words, of self-stupefaction.
A collective patriotic enthusiasm, an imperialistic instinct, a passionate desire to influence other peoples and to impress your own stamp upon them—this, after all, is something. But this enthusiasm, this instinct, this desire, lives and burns in those peoples which preserve the inward spring of religion, an underlying inextinguishable thirst for eternity.
The people that is satisfied with this life lives,strictly speaking, on the defensive, and the people that lives on the defensive ends by being absorbed and dominated by those in whom the aggressive and dominating instinct is uppermost. The so-called struggle for life is efficacious only when the struggle is for predominance, not for preservation. The essence of being, as Spinoza showed, consists not so much in the effort to persist in mere being as in the effort to become more, to become everything. It is the appetite for infinity and eternity.
I do not know what is to be hoped from peoples that have been materialized by a long indoctrination of implicit Catholic faith, whose beliefs are a matter of routine, in whom the inner spring appears to be exhausted—that inward disquietude which distinguishes the essentially Protestant spirit. I do not know what is to be hoped from peoples in whom centuries of a religion more social than individual, characterized rather by ritual and ceremony and externality and authority than by inward struggle, have resulted in generating a kind of free-thinking that issues in indifference and in resignation to the life of this world.
From the superstition of a ridiculous and childish heaven and hell they have fallen into the superstition of a gross and unspiritual earth.
Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto, said the Latin playwright. And I would rather say:Nullum hominem a me alienum puto: I am a man; no other man do I deem a stranger. For to me the adjectivehumanusis no less suspect than its abstract substantivehumanitas, humanity. Neither the “human” nor “humanity,” neither the simple adjective nor the substantivized adjective, but the concrete substantive—man. The man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies—above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.
For there is something else that is also called man, and he is the subject of many more or less scientific speculations. He is the legendary featherless biped, the ξῷον πολιτικόυ of Aristotle, the social contractor of Rousseau, thehomo economicusof the Manchester school, thehomo sapiensof Linnæus, or, if you like, the vertical mammal. A man neither of here nor there, neither of this age nor of another, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in brief, merely an idea. That is to say, a no-man.
Our man is the other man, the man of flesh and bone—I and you, my reader, and the other man over there, all of us who weigh upon the earth.
And this concrete man, this man of flesh and bone, isat once the subject and the supreme object of all philosophy, whether certain self-styled philosophers like it or not.
In most of the histories of philosophy that I know, philosophic systems are presented to us as if they grew out of one another and their authors, the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts. The inward biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a secondary place. And it is this, nevertheless, this inward biography, that explains most things to us.
It behoves us to say, before all, that philosophy lies closer to poetry than to science. All philosophic systems that have been constructed as a supreme concord of the final results of the individual sciences have in every age possessed much less consistency and less life than those which have expressed the integral desire of the spirit of their authors.
For the fact is that the sciences, important to us as they are and indeed indispensable for our life and thought, are in a certain sense more extraneous to us than philosophy. They fulfil a more objective end, that is to say, an end more external to ourselves. They are, at bottom, a matter of economics. A new scientific discovery, of the kind called theoretical, is like a mechanical discovery—that of the steam-engine, the telephone, the phonograph, or the aeroplane—a thing that is useful for something. Thus the telephone may be useful to us in enabling us to communicate at a distance with the woman we love. But she, what is she useful to us for? A man takes an electric tram to go to hearan opera and asks himself: Which is in this case more useful, the tram or the opera?
Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete and unitary conception of the world and of life, and as a result of this conception, a feeling which gives birth to an inward attitude and even to an activity. But in fact this feeling, instead of being a consequence of this conception, is the cause of it. Our philosophy—that is, our mode of understanding or of not understanding the world and life—springs from our feeling towards life itself. And this, like everything affective, has subconscious, perhaps unconscious, roots.
It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or our pessimism, of physiological or perhaps pathological origin, as much the one as the other, that makes our ideas.
Man, they say, is a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly—but then perhaps the crab also resolves equations of the second degree inwardly.
And thus in a philosopher what must most concern us is the man.
Man is an end, not a means. All civilization addresses itself to man, to each man, to each “I.” What is this idol—call it Humanity or call it what you will—to which all men and each individual man must besacrificed? For I sacrifice myself for my neighbours, for my fellow-countrymen, for my children, and these sacrifice themselves in their turn for theirs, and theirs again for those who come after them, and so on in a never-ending series of generations. And who receives the fruit of this sacrifice?
Those who talk to us about this fantastic sacrifice, this dedication without an object, are wont to talk to us also about the right to live. And what is this right to live? They tell me that I have come into the world to realize I know not what social end; but I feel that I, like each one of my fellows, am here to realize myself, to live.
Yes, yes, I see it all—an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, an accumulation of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwards, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, with museums, with libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will endure—for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?
“Why!”—the reader will exclaim—“we are getting back to what the Catechism says: ‘Q. For whom did God create the world? A. For man’?” Precisely—so ought the man who is a man to reply. The ant, if it took account of these matters and were a person, conscious of itself, would reply: “For the ant,” and it would reply rightly. The world is made for consciousness, for each consciousness.
A human soul is worth all the universe, someone has said—I know not who, but it was excellently well said. A human soul, mind you! Not a human life.Not this life. And it is a fact that the less a man believes in the soul, that is to say, in his conscious immortality, personal and concrete, the more he will exaggerate the worth of this poor transitory life. Hence arises the effeminate sentimental feeling against war. True, a man ought not to wish to die, but it is the other, the eternal death, that he ought not to wish. “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it,” says the Gospel; but it does not say “whosoever will save his soul,” the immortal soul—the soul that we believe and wish to be immortal.
And all those definers of objectism do not realize, or rather do not wish to realize, that a man, in affirming his “I,” his personal consciousness, affirms man, man concrete and real, affirms the true humanism—the humanism of man, not of the things of man—and in affirming man he affirms consciousness. For the only consciousness of which we have consciousness is that of man.
The world is for consciousness. Or rather thisfor, this notion of finality, and feeling rather than notion, this teleological feeling is born only where there is consciousness. Consciousness and finality are the same thing fundamentally.
If the sun possessed consciousness it would think, no doubt, that it lived in order to give light to the worlds; but it would also and above all think that the worlds existed in order that it might give them light and joy in giving them light and so live. And it would think well.
And all this tragic fight of man to save himself, this immortal craving for immortality which causedthe man Kant to make that immortal leap[7]of which I have spoken, all this is simply a fight for consciousness. If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence.
It is possible that someone will discover that everything that I am saying rests upon a contradiction, since sometimes I express a longing for immortality and at other times I say that this life does not possess the value that is attributed to it. Contradiction? To be sure! The contradiction of my heart that says Yes and of my head that says No. Of course there is contradiction. Who does not recollect those words of the Gospel: “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief”? Contradiction? Of course! For we only live upon contradictions and by them; life is tragedy, and the tragedy is perpetual struggle, without victory or the hope of victory; life is contradiction.
It is a question, as you see, of an affective value, and against affective values reasons do not avail. For reasons are nothing more than reasons, that is to say, they are not even truths. There are definition-mongers—pedants by nature and by grace—who produce an effect upon me like that of a man who consoles a father for the loss of a son, dead in the prime of his life, by saying: “Patience, friend, we all must die.” Would you think it strange if this father were irritated by suchan ineptitude? For it is an ineptitude. How often may it not be said—