Santayana: Platonism and the Spiritual Life

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[cf2]BY THE SAME AUTHOR[cf1][ep

[ep

LITTLE ESSAYS

THE LIFE OF REASON

INTERPRETATIONS OF POETRY

AND RELIGION

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY

CHARACTER AND OPINION IN

THE UNITED STATES

SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND AND

LATER SOLILOQUIES

SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH

DIALOGUES IN LIMBO

POEMS

 

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PLATONISM AND THE

SPIRITUAL LIFE

 

BY

GEORGE SANTAYANA

 

 

 

 

 

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1927

 

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PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN.

CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND GRIGGS (PRINTERS), LTD.

TOOKS COURT, CHANCERV LANE, LONDON.

 

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PLATONISM

AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE

 

I

 

INTELLECTUAL anarchy is full of lights; its

blindness is made up of dazzling survivals,

revivals, and fresh beginnings. Were it not

for these remnants or seeds of order, chaos

itself could not exist; it would be nothing.

Without demanding from the men of to‑day

anything final or solid we may be grateful to

them for those glimpses of great things past

and of great things possible, which flash

through their labouring minds. One of these

great things past is Platonism, and one of the

great things always possible is spiritual life.

There is, or there seems to be, a certain affinity

between these two, as if deep called unto deep.

Yet I am not sure that everything in Platonism,

or even its first principles, can be called

spiritual; nor is it easy to discern what the

essence of spirituality may be, entangled as its

manifestations have always been with all sorts

of accidental traditions and prejudices.[ep

[bj22]In this perplexity I find a list of points

[bj22][bj22][bj22]B

 

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common to Platonism and to “Spiritual re‑

ligion” drawn up by the competent hand of

the Dean of St. Paul’s.¹ These points are a

firm belief in absolute and eternal values as the

most real things in the universe‑‑a confidence

that these values are knowable by man‑‑a

belief that they can nevertheless be known

only by whole‑hearted consecration of the

intellect, will, and affections to the great quest

‑‑an entirely open mind towards the discoveries

of science‑‑a reverent and receptive attitude

to the beauty, sublimity, and wisdom of the

creation, as a revelation of the mind and

character of the Creator‑‑a complete indiffer‑

ence to the current valuations of the world‑

ling.” This faith “is distinguished, among

other things, by its deep love of this good and

beautiful world, combined with a steady

rejection of that same world whenever it

threatens to conceal, instead of revealing, the

unseen and eternal world behind. The Pla‑

tonist loves . . . Nature, because in Nature

he perceives Spirit creating after its own like‑

ness. As soon as the seen and the unseen

worlds fall apart and lose connection with

each other, both are dead.” “Values are

 

[bj22]¹ Cf. [cf2]The Platonic Tradition in English Religious Thought[cf1],

the Hulsean Lectures at Cambridge, 1925‑6, by William

Ralph Inge, Dean of St. Paul’s, etc., Longmans, Green and

Co., London, 1926. All the phrases quoted are drawn from

this book.[ep

 

[[[003]]]

 

for the Platonist not only ideals but creative

powers.”[ep

[bj22]This, of course, is the language of a modern.

Dean Inge is not quoting Plato or Plotinus, but

expressing what he believes to be substantially

their view in words natural to a man of his

own country and religion. We must, therefore,

puzzle a little and hazard a guess before we

can recall the Platonic tenets to which some of

these phrases may refer. The term “value”

in particular is subjective, imageless, and in a

manner evasive. It may be taken as a neutral

term fairly representing the common quality

of what Plato called the good and the beautiful,

before these were hypostatized; but then to

hypostatize not only such values, but all

natural types and logical concepts, was the very

soul of Platonism; and when the good and the

beautiful have been hypostatized and have

become God or the One, the Ideas, the Demi‑

urgus, or the Soul of the World, they are no

longer values, but independent beings, existing

long before the need or the admiration of

mortals could attribute any value to them.

Value is something relative, a dignity which

anything may acquire in view of the benefit

or satisfaction which it brings to some living

being. If God or the Ideas were mere values,

as are pleasure or health, they would be un‑

substantial, and only a desired or achieved

perfection in something else. They might,

 

[[[004]]]

 

indeed, have value in their own eyes, but only

if they were alive. A man, or a god, cannot

prize his existence before he exists. An auto‑

matic harmony must be established in his life

before he can distinguish its direction, suffer

at its diminution, or conceive and desire its

greater perfection. This harmony itself is a

good only because the spirit which it creates

so regards it.[ep

 

[[[005]]]

 

II

 

IF I were a theologian, or even a bishop, I

might be innocently led to ask Dean Inge what

he means by a value. Is it anything that any‑

body values, or only that which some other

person thinks we ought to value? Is it the

fact that some satisfying aspect is found in

things, or rather a magic necessity providing

that such an aspect shall be found there? Or,

as we gather from other Cambridge philoso‑

phers,¹ is this necessity not magical but natural

and omnipresent in things, so that whenever

a wave rises and bursts into foam, or a snow‑

flake takes shape in the air, or any other form

trembles for a moment in the flux of existence,

the realization of this visiting essence is intrin‑

sically a value, whether it be watched and

prized by any spirit or not? Or on the con‑

trary are values existing supernatural beings,

by their influence compelling or inclining

nature often to reproduce these satisfactory

aspects? And I might even like to ask, going

a little deeper, whether such supernatural

beings, granting that they exist, work in

nature towards the production of values of any

 

[bj22]¹ For instance, in Whitehead’s [cf2]Science in the Modern

World[cf1].

 

[[[006]]]

 

and every sort‑‑as the law of the survival of

the fittest might work to produce harmony

between each sort of animal and its habitat,

but to make their forms and their pleasures

more and more diverse‑‑or whether these

supernatural beings are biassed in favour of

certain natural forms and certain values to the

exclusion of others; and finally, whether it is

this congenital bias in supernatural powers

that we should understand by the eternal

reality of values.[ep

[bj22]In the modern notion‑‑a very hazy one‑‑

that values themselves might be forces there is

a contradiction, or at least an ellipsis. In any

single instance, indeed, a mind disinclined to

look for the causes or origins of things may find

in an actual value a final and satisfying fact.

Felt values reconcile the animal and moral

side of our nature to their own contingency: if

anything is well, we neglect to ask why it

happens. The inner connivance and peace of

our will explain it sufficiently. But when

values are supposed to sustain themselves in

being through a long tangle of circumstances,

and to reassert themselves intermittently by

their own strength, we are not merely content

not to inquire why they arise, but we profess

to explain their occasions and causes by their

future presence: a position not only impossible

to defend, but impossible to conceive clearly,

and one that can be held only under cover of

 

[[[007]]]

 

half‑thoughts and cant phrases. Perception

carves out its conventional units, and final

causes insinuate themselves into the survey of

facts, when their patient genesis is ignored or

untraceable. Life on the whole is a proof of the

possibility of life; each sort of life is a proof

that circumstances made that sort of life

inevitable. A vigorous and courageous animal

assumes that fortune will not fail him. Did he

not assume it, how should he be able to live?

This sense of safety may be expressed and

justified intellectually by finding the facts or

habits of nature which support our own

habits, and so bring the customary values

about in the round of our experience. If these

favouring circumstances are dominant in our

world we shall be as safe in fact as we feel our‑

selves to be by instinct. This situation might

then be expressed elliptically, by saying that

the good is certain to prevail, or that values are

powers: the justification for such an expression

being that our assurance of safety and good

fortune rests on a substantial harmony between

our interests and our circumstances. But

when this harmony becomes audible, when for a

moment some value is realized, all potentiallty

and material efficacy are left far behind: we

are in the realm of actuality, of music, of

spirit; and the value actualized lives and ends

in itself. The promise which often lies in it,

as well as the disillusion or disaster that may

 

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ensue, will not be due to that value in its

moral nature, to that living and immaterial

good; it will be due to the organization of

nature beneath. All moral functions have their

material organs and their material effects; in

that context they are powers, or rather

vehicles of power‑‑for as the Moslems say,

there is no power but Allah. Goods are, in

their material ground, an integral part of the

flux of events; and the healthy habit in nature

which creates them once may repeat them and

perfect them, if the season is favourable and

the fates allow.[ep

 

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III

 

FOR my purpose, however, it is fortunately

unimportant to dispel these ambiguities, dear

to half‑hearted philosophies, because the

Platonic doctrine at least is clear. If for the

Platonist goods and evils are everlastingly

fixed and distinct, this moral dogmatism in

him is no accident of temperament, no mere

lack of moral elasticity, as in the bigot. If he

is sure that some goods often passionately

loved are nevertheless false goods, it is only

because he attributes a definite and unchange‑

able constitution to the material world and to

human nature. Life, he thinks, has been

kindled and is alone sustained by the influence

of pre‑existing celestial models. It is by

imitating these models in some measure that

we exist at all, and only in imitating, loving,

and contemplating them that we can ever be

happy. They are our good. In themselves,

however, they are inviolate beings, serenely

shedding, like the stars, an everlasting radiance,

and no doubt happy beings, if they are living

and self‑contemplative: but they are by no

means mere goals which this nether world sets

freely for itself, or perfections which it might

enjoy intrinsically. God and the Ideas could

be ruling powers, because they were existing

 

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beings, definite in their character and influence.

They exercised a miraculous, magnetic control

over formless matter, inducing in it here and

there an inward striving to imitate their forms.

They therefore had the greatest value for the

creature whose life was directed upon them

and who invincibly loved them; but this

value in them remained relative to the aspira‑

tion of their lover, and variable in so far as

his nature might change; so that St. Thomas

Aquinas goes so far as to say that to the sinner

God becomes an evil‑‑the Christian God, he

means, for I suppose the reprobate might still

find a divine friend in Bacchus or Venus. It

was never the actual values found in the world

that were separated from it, either in Platonism

or in Christianity, and conceived to compose an

eternal world behind it. The powers that were

creative, substantial, and permanent were not

values at all, but the [cf2]underpinning[cf1] which

values required if they were to arise; and

although this substructure had to be in itself

physical or metaphysical, the discovery of it

had momentous consequences for morals, in

that it enabled the enlightened believer to

distinguish possible attainable goods from the

impossible happiness after which the heathen

seek. Those goods which the nature of things

or the will of God assures and sanctions are

the “eternal values”; the others are “the

current valuations of the worldling.” Thus

 

[[[011]]]

 

religion or philosophy was the great arbiter of

true values, the guide of life; it justified the

sense of sin and the hope of salvation. The

distinction between true goods and false goods

can never be established by ignorant feeling or

by conscience not backed by a dogmatic view

of the facts: for felt values, taken absolutely

and regarded as unconditioned, are all equally

genuine in their excellence, and equally mo‑

mentary in their existence. The distinction

hangs on the system of forces, natural or super‑

natural, believed to produce and sustain these

various goods, some for a moment, others for

ever. [cf2]Some[cf1] constitution the cosmos must

have, and must disclose to our faith or science,

if ever we are to decide which of our pleasures

or affections reveal “the unseen and eternal

world behind,” and which of them threaten to

conceal it.[ep

 

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IV

 

THIS separation of the Platonic Ideas from the

things which manifested them has been much

blamed, yet it goes with another doctrine

which is much prized, often by the same critics.

The precious consequence of this abhorred

dualism was that the Ideas, if separate, might

be powers, creative forces that generated their

expressions. Separation is a pre‑requisite to

causal connection: a thing cannot be derived

from a part of itself. If Ideas were only

values, if they were immanent in things, as the

form of a poem or its peculiar beauty is

immanent in that poem, there would be no

sense in saying that the beauty or the form

was a power that had produced the poem:

Not only would each be dead without the

other, as Dean Inge says, but each would be

nothing; the poem arises by taking that form,

and the form is merely that precise arrange‑

ment of words and images. The beauty of a

thing is an essence which it manifests spon‑

taneously, a pure quality of being revealed

there, and perhaps never to be revealed

again. The natural causes that produce the

thing and bring it to notice produce also this

manifestation of beauty in it; both spring into

existence together out of a complex of circum‑

 

[[[013]]]

 

stances and impulses among which it is

impossible to place that homeless essence, the

form of beauty thereby revealed; yet this form

is their only value for the spirit, a value which

that precise conjunction of causes was needed

to realize.[ep

[bj22]There is a sense‑‑a somewhat esoteric sense

‑‑in which such essences as beauty may be

called “the most real things in the universe.”

They are the ultimate characters by which one

thing can be distinguished from another in the

flux of nature, or one thought from another in

the mind; and if the word “real” be used

sentimentally, to mean whatever is most clear

or important or nearest to the heart, such

values will be not only “most real” but even

the only “reality,” because their presence or

absence, their purity or contradiction, make

up the spiritual sum of life, all that matters

in it, without which no one would care to raise

his head from the pillow of non‑being. If,

however, by “most real” we understand most

primitive or fundamental physically, the roots

of existence, it is clearly impossible that the

most real things should be values. Values pre‑

suppose living beings having a direction of

development, and exerting themselves in it,

so that good and evil may exist in reference to

them. That the good should be relative to

actual natures and simply their innate ideal,

latent or realized, is essential to its being truly

 

[[[014]]]

 

a good. Otherwise the term “good” would

be an empty title applied to some existing

object or force for no assignable reason.[ep

[bj22]The good may nevertheless be called absolute

in several senses proper to current speech.

The good is by no means relative to opinion,

but is rooted in the unconscious and fatal

nature of living beings, a nature which pre‑

determines for them the difference between

foods and poisons, happiness and misery. The

moralist may speak for others with authority

when he knows them better than they know

themselves, but not otherwise. Moreover, their

natural good may be absolute in the sense of

being fixed and unalterable, so long as the

living beings concerned and the circumstances

in which they flourish remain constant in type.

That human nature and the world are un‑

changeable was an assumption of classic times

which survives often in modern moralists,

without its dogmatic justification. Finally,

the good may be called absolute in the sense

of being single and all‑sufficient, filling the

whole heart, and leaving nothing in the rest

of the universe in the least tempting, inter‑

esting, or worth distinguishing. It is in this

sense that lovers and mystics proclaim the

absoluteness of the good with which they are

united, and when the thing is true as a con‑

fession it would be frivolous and ungracious to

quarrel with it as a dogma.[ep

 

[[[015]]]

 

V

 

IF then the Ideas were immanent in things, as

the beauty of a poem is immanent in it, they

could not conceivably be powers producing

their occasional manifestation. The beauties

intrinsic to the tragedy of Hamlet could not

have caused Shakespeare to compose that play

since those values could not possibly come to

existence until the play had already composed

itself in his fancy, and burst into just those

beauties. In order to maintain seriously the

efficacy of Ideas and to conceive matters in the

orthodox Platonic way, we must make a differ‑

ent supposition. Suppose Hamlet had been a

living prince, like the present Prince of Wales

and that Shakespeare, with his company of

players, had happened to appear at this

prince’s court, and had conceived for him a

passionate Platonic attachment, such as he

seems to have conceived for the W.H. of the

Sonnets: and suppose further that, by the

prodigious inspiration of this passion, Shake‑

speare had been led to imagine episodes and

phrases that might in part express so tender,

intellectual, and profound a character as that

living Prince seemed to him to possess; then

indeed a most real Hamlet, with a pre‑existing

power and charm, might have been the “only

 

[[[016]]]

 

begetter” of the play. In exactly this way the

Platonic Ideas, the Christian God, or the

Christ of devout Christians, may be conceived

to be the causes of their temporal manifesta‑

tions in matter or in the souls of men. Evi‑

dently a play written in such circumstances

might have the same intrinsic value as one

purely imaginary; but it would not be this

literary value that would constitute the model

or the creative influence which had produced

the play; this literary value would have been

begotten, like the play itself and inseparably

from it, by the influence radiating from the

living Hamlet, a prince having his existence

apart, who by chance had come for a moment

within the poet’s orbit.[ep

[bj22]This separation between the creator and the

created is not only the condition of derivation,

contact, and causal influence, but it is also

the condition of a genuine worship; because

then that which is expression in the poet is at

the same time homage in the lover, as it could

not be except fatuously and by a poetic

affectation if the being loved did not exist

separately. And “only begetter” is the right

phrase to indicate the relation between such a

creative influence and its work. A Platonic

Idea could never be the whole cause of its

temporal expressions; a material or feminine

element is involved that may receive that

influence and make it fruitful; a fact which

 

[[[017]]]

 

would also explain the many variants and the

many imperfections which things might exhibit

in response to the same unchanging virtue of

their divine model.[ep

[bj22]When the matter is so conceived all force

departs from the contention that if we separate

God or the Ideas from the temporal world,

“both are dead.” God and the Ideas, like the

living Prince Hamlet, would remain exactly as

they were, with all their intrinsic warmth and

virtue; and the temporal world, like the

Shakespearean tragedy, would also remain just

as it is, with all its literary values. The only

difference would be that the living prince would

have inspired no poet, and that the self‑

inspired poet would have celebrated no living

prince. Shakespeare’s Hamlet would be

reduced to what, in fact, he is, an object of

occasional imagination, a pure essence, and not

a power. Meantime the inexhaustible powers

which, if a divine life existed, would certainly

lie in it, would have continued to radiate un‑

manifested, like those many rays of the sun

which are dissipated in space, not being by

chance reflected or absorbed and made tempor‑

ally fruitful by any speck of an earth.[ep

[bj22]Platonism accordingly would be entirely

stultified and eviscerated if it were not suffered

to be all that modern criticism, inspired as it is

by a subjective and psychological philosophy,

most thoroughly dislikes; I mean, super‑

[bj22][bj22][bj22]C

 

[[[018]]]

 

naturalistic, realistic, and dualistic. This is

only another way of saying that, according to

the Platonic doctrine, God and the unseen

world really exist in themselves, so that they

can precede, create, attract, and survive their

earthly emanations.[ep

 

[[[019]]]

 

VI

 

Is this to say that Aristotle and all the other

critics of Platonism have had no reason on their

side? Far from it: their criticism was amply

justified by the facts of nature, and their only

defect was perhaps not to have felt its full

force, and to have still attributed power to

those very Ideas to which they denied separate

existence.¹ The Platonic system is mytho‑

logical: if taken literally and dogmatically, it

can seem to cold reason nothing but a gratuit‑

ous fiction, as all systems of religion or meta‑

physics necessarily seem to the outsider. Of

course they are not inwardly gratuitous; they

are the fervent expression and product of the

deepest minds; and anyone capable of sharing

the inspiration which prompted them will

know them to be inevitable, persuasive, and

morally coherent. Thus Dean Inge says that

those who think Platonism dualistic have

simply not understood; that is (if I myself

understand him), they have not understood it

from within, genetically, historically, emotion‑

ally; they have not recovered the experience.[ep

[bj22]I have elsewhere ventured to suggest that perhaps Aris‑

totle himself was not guilty of this inconsistency. Cf. [cf2]Dia‑

logues in Limbo the Secret of Aristotle[cf1], pp. 181-193.[ep

 

[[[020]]]

 

and the immanent logic which, as a matter of

fact, held the Platonic dualism in solution.

This dualism appears only in the dogma pre‑

cipitated and left, as it were, as a sediment;

and the most sympathetic modern critic can

hardly take such dogma seriously. He cannot

receive it as a revelation, like a humble cate‑

chumen, drinking‑in the marvellous super‑

natural facts from the lips of the masters.

Platonism, like Christianity, cannot now pro‑

duce in him the illusion which it was its early

mission to produce. When he turns back to

the origin of such a faith, he cannot, for all his

sympathy, share the prophetic impulse which

carried the Fathers from their first intuitions to

the full expression of the same in consistent

and final dogmas. Truth for him means

historical, psychological truth; and the whole

force of his learning and imagination is spent in

dissolving those dogmas dramatically into their

subjective components, and showing them to be

but verbal expressions for certain radical

ambient values. This is what, in fact, they

were, or something of that kind: and he may

be assured of this not merely by the naturalistic

philosophy (perhaps unconsciously inspiring

him) which proclaims such dogmas to be

nothing else, but by the study of the surviving

documents. Plato’s writings in particular

show clearly that the eventual Platonic system

was but a moral and poetic fable.[ep

 

[[[021]]]

 

[bj22]The Ideas originally were really nothing but

values. Socrates had conceived them as forms

of the good, and this good itself was identical

with the useful, beneficent, or advantageous.

In the [cf2]Republic[cf1] we learn that anything‑‑a

shepherd or a ruler, a bridle or a bed‑‑is good

when it fulfils its natural function. Fitness to

control a horse for the purposes of war, com‑

merce, or sport would be the Idea (or value) of

a bridle, and fitness to induce sound and com‑

fortable sleep would be, I suppose, the Idea of

a bed; and as to the eternal Idea of a ruler or

shepherd, what should it be but to protect and

conduct his sheep or his people, and in due

season to shear them? This homely Socratic

wisdom may seem not far removed from “the

current valuations of the worldling”; it rested

on no revelation, private or public, and had no

principle save the reasonableness of the simplest

mortal when forced by shrewd questions to

disentangle his prejudices and to discover what

he really wants. But great is the power of

logic, when the mind is single and the heart

open. In a trice it will bring the humblest

judgements into the clarifying presence of the

highest good. Socrates was a plain man, but

fearless; he was omnivorous, playful, ironical,

but absolutely determined. His one purpose

was to be rational, to find and do what was

best. If Anaxagoras would tell him what

profit men might draw from the sun and moon,

 

[[[022]]]

 

he would listen gladly; but if it was only a

question of the substance or motions of those

bodies, he would turn his back on Anaxagoras

and laugh. This cobbler’s wisdom was the

same that almost made saints of the Cynics; it

reappeared in the monks; it may reappear any

day in some popular prophet. A fervid

utilitarianism has a strangely revolutionary

force: in squeezing the world to get every drop

of pure good out of it, it leaves the world

worthless, and has to throw it away: nothing

remains but the immediate good of the spirit,

the naked soul longing to be saved.[ep

 

[[[023]]]

 

VII

 

IN Plato and in his followers this revolution

took more time and a larger sweep. Plato’s

mind was more accomplished and less conse‑

crated than that of his master: that of his

followers was more dogmatic and single than

his own. Idealism, as it moves away from its

origins, may easily become idolatrous: while

leaving earthly things dry and empty, it may

worship the pure forms which these things

would have had if they had been perfect. In

criticizing and condemning this world the

prophet will find himself in the presence of

another world, its sublimated image. The gift

of thinking in myths, once native to the Greeks,

was not altogether lost; it could still fuse the

forms seen with a life unseen; it could trans‑

form definition of terms into intuition of

Ideas; it could personify the functions of

things and turn their virtues into patron

deities animating those things and causing

them to shine with a strength and beauty alien

to their earthly substance. In the unclouded,

synthetic, believing mind of Plotinus this

chastened mythology crystallized into the

most beautiful of systems.[ep

[bj22]An inexhaustible divine energy‑‑so the

system ran‑‑poured perpetually down into the

 

[[[024]]]

 

chaos of matter, animating and shaping it as

well as that torpid substance would permit.

At the bottom or centre there was little life,

but it stirred more actively and nobly at each

successive level, somewhat as the light of the

sun floods the ether absolutely, the air variously,

the sea dubiously, and the earth only darkly,

with a shallow warmth. Hence the hierarchy

of created goods, which is itself a good; and

as to the defeats and confusions involved in

being other than the highest, and other than

one’s own Idea, they were due to the inoppor‑

tune inertia of matter, or to blind accident, or

to a diabolical soul intervening and poisoning

the fountains of divine grace. All levels of

being were good in some measure, each after

its kind. Consistently, and yet perhaps only

with an effort and against the spirit of his

times, Plotinus defended the excellence of the

material world against the Gnostics, and the

worthiness of the state and of the traditions of

Hellenism, so that an emperor and even an

empress might be his auditors without offence;

and his philosophy remained Socratic in prin‑

ciple, a mythical underpinning to morals, and

not a view of nature founded on observation,

like those of the Stoics and the Epicureans.

Yet in the five or six hundred years since

Socrates, moral life itself had changed its

centre. The good of the soul and her salvation

had taken the place of domestic, military, and

 

[[[025]]]

 

political goods; so that while the various

spheres of being, like the terraces of Dante’s

Purgatorio, were all permanent and divinely

appointed, the spirit now moved through them

without rest. Its abiding‑place was beyond.

They were but the rounds of a Jacob’s ladder

by which the soul might climb again to her

native heaven, and it was only [cf2]”there,”[cf1] above,

that she truly lived and had been blessed from

all eternity.[ep

[bj22]Platonism, as Dean Inge observes, has no

tendency to become pantheistic. Its first

principle is the difference between good and

evil. Its final dogmas describe a half‑astro‑

nomical, half‑dramatic setting for the phases of

spiritual life. The divine spirit burned with

such an intense and concentrated fire, it was so

rich in its inner being, it overflowed into a

celestial hierarchy of so many choirs, all

superior to man, even on earth it found so

many marvellous and amiable non‑human

manifestations, that man, with his two‑footed

featherlessness and his political artifices, lost

his ancient Hellenic dignity: it was almost a

disgrace for the soul to be expressed in a body

or a body in a statue. Thus the imagined

universe which was to shelter morality threat‑

ened to outgrow its original office. Man and

his earthly fortunes began to seem to the con‑

templative mind but incidents in the barn‑

yard. The Only ambition worthy of a philo‑

 

[[[026]]]

 

sopher was to transcend and transfigure his

human nature, and to pass unsullied through

this nether world in adoration of the world

above.[ep

 

[[[027]]]

 

VIII

 

PLOTINUS professed to be, and actually was,

an orthodox Platonist and yet this dominant

sense in him of the spiritual life was perfectly

foreign to Socrates and Plato. I say this with‑

out forgetting the dialogues on love or the

almost Roman religiosity of the [cf2]Laws[cf1]. After

having been very poetical Plato became very

austere; but his philosophy remained political

to the end. To this descendant of Solon the

universe could never be anything but a crystal

case to hold the jewel of a Greek city. Divine

as the heavens were, they were but a mothering

and brooding power: in their refined materiality

and mathematical divinity they circled about

the earth, at once vivifying it and rebuking it

by the visible presence of an exemplary good.

The notion of the heavenly spheres was no

mere optical image, the dream of a philosopher

who, on a clear night, could measure the

radius of the universe with the naked eye: this

image was a moral parable. The realm of

ethics will always be a set of concentric circles.

Life necessarily radiates from centres; it stirs

here, in the self; from here it looks abroad

for supports and extensions, in the family, the

nation, the intellectual world, the parent and

subject universe. Wide as it may seem, this

 

[[[028]]]

 

prospect is homely, and taken from the hearth

of Vesta.[ep

[bj22]If the theology of Socrates and Plato was in

this way domestic, the remnant of traditional

religion in them was doubly so. Their attach‑

ment to ancient piety was childlike and super‑

stitious when it remained personal, but more

often it was expressly political and politic:

they saw in religion a ready means of silencing

dangerous questions and rebuking wickedness.

It was a matter of moral education and police,

and in no sense spiritual.[ep

[bj22]As to the Socratic philosophy of love, there

is an obvious spiritual tendency in it, inasmuch

as it bids the heart turn from the temporal to

the eternal; and it does so not by way of an

arid logic but by a true discipline of the affec‑

tions, sublimating erotic passion into a just

enthusiasm for all things beautiful and perfect.

This is the secret of Platonism, which makes it

perennial, so that if it were ever lost as a

tradition it would presently be revived as an

inspiration. It lives by a poignant sense of

eternal values‑‑the beautiful and the good‑‑

revealed for a moment in living creatures or in

earthly harmonies. Yet who has not felt that

this Platonic enthusiasm is somewhat equi‑

vocal and vain? Why? Because its renuncia‑

tion is not radical. In surrendering some

particular hope or some personal object of

passion, it preserves and feeds the passion

 

[[[029]]]

 

itself; there is no true catharsis, no liberation,

but a sort of substitution and subterfuge, often

hypocritical. Pure spiritual life cannot be

something compensatory, a consolation for

having missed more solid satisfactions: it

should be rather the flower of all satisfactions,

in which satisfaction becomes free from care,

selfless, wholly actual and, in that inward

sense, eternal. Spiritual life is simple and

direct, but it is intellectual. Love, on the

contrary, as Plotinus says, is something

material, based on craving and a sense of want.

For this reason the beautiful and the good, for

the Platonic enthusiast, remain urgent values;

he would cease to be a true Platonist or a rapt

lover if he [cf2]understood[cf1], if he discounted his

illusions, rose above the animal need or the

mental prejudice which made those values

urgent, and relegated them to their relative

station, where by their nature they belong.

Yet this is what a pure spirit would do, one

truly emancipated and enlightened.[ep

 

[[[030]]]

 

IX

 

HERE, at the risk of parting company with

Dean Inge and even with Plato, I come to a

radical conclusion. Spiritual life is not a

worship of “values,” whether found in things

or hypostatized into supernatural powers. It

is the exact opposite; it is [cf2]disintoxication[cf1] from

their influence. Not that spiritual insight can

ever remove values from nature or cease to feel

them in their moral black and white and in all

their aesthetic iridescence. Spirit knows these

vital necessities: it has been quickened in their

bosom. All animals have within them a

principle by which to distinguish good from

evil, since their existence and welfare are

furthered by some circumstances and acts and

are hindered by others. Self‑knowledge, with

a little experience of the world, will then easily

set up the Socratic standard of values natural

and inevitable to any man or to any society.

These values each society will disentangle in

proportion to its intelligence and will defend in

proportion to its vitality. But who would

dream that [cf2]spiritual life[cf1] was at all concerned

in asserting these human and local values to be

alone valid, or in supposing that they were

especially divine, or bound to dominate the

universe for ever?[ep

 

[[[031]]]

 

[bj22]In fact, the great masters of the spiritual

life are evidently not the Greeks, not even the

Alexandrian Greeks, but the Indians, their

disciples elsewhere in the East, and those

Moslems, Christians, and Jews who have

surrendered precisely that early, unregenerate

claim to be enveloped in a protecting world

designed for their benefit or vindication, a

claim of which Platonism after all was but a

refined version. To cling to familiar treasures

and affections is human, but it is not particu‑

larly spiritual to hypostatize these home

values into a cosmic system especially planned

to guarantee them, certainly expresses an

intelligible passionate need for comfort and

coddling in the universe, but with spirituality

it has nothing to do. If such confidence may

be called faith, it may also be called fatuity

and insolence; an insolence innocent in a

spirited child, but out of place in a philosopher.

Spirituality comes precisely of surrendering

this animal arrogance and this moral fanaticism

and substituting for them pure intelligence:

not a discoursing cleverness or scepticism, but

perfect candour and impartial vision. Spirit is

merciful and tender because it has no private

motive to make it spiteful; yet it is unflinch‑

ingly austere because it cannot make any

private motive its own. It need have no

scientific or artistic pretensions; it appears

quite adequately in straight seeing of simple

 

[[[032]]]

 

things; these, to pure spirit, are speculative

enough and good to whet its edge upon; the

proudest dreams of science or theology are no

better for the purpose. The spirit is content

with the widow’s mite and a cup of cold water;

it considers the lilies of the field; it can say

with literal truth: Inasmuch as ye did it unto

the least of these, ye did it unto me.[ep

[bj22]As the spirit is no respecter of persons, so it

is no respecter of worlds : it is willing to put up

with any of them, to be feasted in one or to be

martyred in another. And while it is allowed

to live‑‑a point that concerns the world it

lives in rather than the spirit itself‑‑it looks

with a clear and untroubled sympathy on such

manifestations of being as happen to be

unrolled before it. As it loves the non‑human

parts of nature, so it loves the human parts,

and is in no way hostile to the natural passions

and to the political and religious institutions

that happen to prevail. If spirit was to be

incarnate and to appear in existence at all, it

had to be born in one odd world or another:

why should it quarrel with its earthly cradle?

This is not to say that all circumstances are

equally favourable to the spiritual life. On

the contrary, most circumstances exclude it

altogether; the vast abysses of nature seem

to be uninhabited; and even where spirit

feebly appears, it is in order to be, very often,

stifled at once, or long tormented. Almost

 

[[[033]]]

 

always its world is too much with it; the spirit

is so deeply engaged and distracted by current

events that it cannot realize its proper function,

which is to see such things as come in its way

under the form of eternity, in their intrinsic

character and relative value, in their transitive‑

ness and necessity, in a word, in their truth.

This contemplative habit evidently finds a

freer course in solitude than in society, in art

than in business, in prayer than in argument.

It is stimulated by beautiful and constant

things more than by things ugly, tedious,

crowded, or uncertain. For this reason it is

more prevalent and freer in the East than in

the West, among Catholics than among Pro‑

testants, among Moslems than among Jews.

For the same reason the Platonic system, up to

a certain point, is sympathetic to the spirit.

Its universe was compact and immortal; the

oscillations of fortune on earth could not

disturb its unchangeable order. If nature were

conceived to be, as in fact she is, barbarous and

in indefinite flux, giving rein to anything and

everything, there would seem hardly to be time

to reach perfection on any level of being before

the soil was undermined and the budding Idea

was lost and dissipated. The great merit of an

unchanging world is that all its inhabitants

can be adapted to it. If they ever fall out of

tune the cause will be but a passing disease

and an accidental slackness in the strings; it

[bj22][bj22][bj22]D

 

[[[034]]]

 

will be easy to screw up the pegs, to renew a

snapped cord, and to restore the harmony.

Such a world offers an immovable basis and

sanction for the good: it establishes an

orthodox morality. Imperfection enters it

only below the circle of the moon like bad

manners below stairs; and even here, on

earth, evil is but an oscillation and dizziness in

matter which nature perpetually calls back to

the norm, as the motion of a top rights it in its

gyrations.[ep

 

[[[035]]]

 

X

 

I AM not confident, however, that a pure spirit

would feel safe in such a seven‑walled celestial

castle, or would prize the sort of safety which,

f it were real, it would afford. Existence is

contingent essentially. As things might just

as well have been different, so they might just

as well prove to be inconstant; and since they

cannot manifest their groundlessness by now

being other than they happen to be, they may

manifest it by being other at other times and

places. No existing being can have the means

of knowing that it will always exist or prosper

in the universe: the neatest cosmos and the

most solitary god might collide with something

unsuspected; or the unsuspected thing might

exist in its own preserves without being dis‑

covered or coming into collision. Yet that

undiscovered world, for the spirit, would be as

real and as interesting as this world. Ignorance

cannot justify any negative prophecy: but

existence, while it is the home of particular

certitudes, is also a cage in which an inevitable

and infinite ignorance sings and dies imprisoned.

Existence is self‑centred, limited in character

by the character which it chances to have,

and in duration by the crawling fact that it

exists while it is found existing. There is no

 

[[[036]]]

 

necessary and all‑comprehensive being except

the realm of essence, to which existence is

irrelevant: for whether the whole exist or only

a part, or even if no part existed, the alterna‑

tive fact would always be knocking at the

door; and nothing in the actual facts could

ever prove that the door would not suddenly

open and let the contrary in. Like people

living on the slopes of volcanoes, we ignore

these possibilities, although a catastrophe is

rapidly approaching each of us in the form of

death, and who knows how soon it may over‑

take the whole confused life of our planet?

Nevertheless, except in the interests of detach‑

ment and freedom, spirit has no reason for

dwelling on other possible worlds. Would

any of them be less contingent than this one,

or nearer to the heart of infinite Being? And

would not any of them, whatever its character,

lead the spirit inexorably [cf2]there[cf1]? To master the

actual is the best way of transcending it.

Those who know but one language, like the

Greeks, seem to find language a purer and more

transparent vehicle than those of us who notice

its idiosyncrasies and become entangled in its

meshes. So it is the saints most steeped each

in his traditional religion who are nearest

together in spirit; and if nature caused them

to change places, it is they that, after a

moment’s pause to get their bearings, would be

most at ease in one another’s skins. No one is

 

[[[037]]]

 

more unspiritual than a heretic, or more grace‑

less and wretched than an unfrocked priest;

yet the frock of the faithful is but an earthly

garment; it melts into the clouds which, in

their ascension, they leave behind them.[ep

 

[[[038]]]

 

XI

 

IN what places the spirit shall awake, and how

long and how freely it shall be suffered to

flourish are evidently questions of mundane

physics and politics: it is the world’s business

to call down spirit to dwell in it; not the spirit’s

business to make a world in which to dwell.

The friends of spirit, in their political capacity,

will of course defend those forms of society in

which, given their particular race and tradi‑

tions, spirit may best exist: they will protect

it in whatever organs and instruments it may

already have appeared, and will take care that

it pursues its contemplative life undisturbed

in its ancient sanctuaries. Spirituality has

material conditions; not only the general

conditions of life and intuition (for a man must

exist before he can become a spiritual man),

but subtler and more special conditions such

as concentration of thought, indifference to

fortune and reputation, warmth of tempera‑

ment (because spirit cannot burn clear except

at a high temperature) disciplined into chastity

and renunciation. These and other such con‑

ditions the master of novices does well to

consider; but spirit itself, when once aroused,

does not look back in that direction. Many

Christian saints have qualifed their spirituality

with too much self‑consciousness; it was no

 

[[[039]]]

 

doubt their religious duty to examine their

consciences and study to advance in holiness;

but the holiness really did not begin until they

forgot themselves in the thought of God. So

with those who were consumed with zeal for

the Church, the conversion of sinners, and other

works of charity. These are moral interests or

duties accruing to men as members of some

particular society; they are political cares.

They may be accompanied by spiritual insight,

if it be really salvation or spiritualization of

souls that preoccupies the missionary, and not

some outward change of habit or allegiance,

that may make other people more like himself

and ensure the dominance of his home tradi‑

tions. Political zeal even in the true friends of

spirit is not spiritual; a successful apostle

must have rather a worldly mind, because he

needs to have his hand on the pulse of the

world; his appeal would not be intelligible if

it were not threatening or spectacular or full of

lewd promises. It will be only afterwards,

perhaps, when people have been domesticated

in the new faith, that the spirit will descend

upon them. The spirit itself is not afraid of

being stamped out here, or anxious to be

kindled there; its concern is not about its

instances or manifestations; it is not essentially

learned or social; its kingdom is not of this

world. It leaves propaganda to those who call

themselves its friends but probably know

 

[[[040]]]

 

nothing of it, or are even its enemies, and only

the agents of some worldly transformation

ultimately quite nugatory.[ep

[bj22]Nor has the world, on its side, any obligation

to cultivate the spiritual life. Obligations are

moral; they presuppose a physical and social

organism with immanent spontaneous interests

which may impose those obligations. The

value and opportuneness of spiritual life, in

any of its possible forms, must be adjudged by

reason in view of the moral economy for

which, in any instance, reason may speak.

All values fall within the purview of ethics,

which is a part of politics. Spirituality is the

supreme good for those who are called to it,

the few whose intellectual thirst can be

quenched only by impartial truth and the

self‑annihilating contemplation of all Being.

The statesman and the father of a family may

not always welcome this disposition; it may

seem to them wasteful and idle. Just as the

value of an artist must be judged by the world,

in view of all the interests which his art affects

or subserves, while the artist himself lives only

in his own labour, irresponsible, technical, and

visionary; so the value of spiritual life in

general, or in any of its incidental forms, must

be judged morally by the world, in view of its

own ambitions, while the spirit, standing

invisibly at its elbow, judges the world and its

ambitions spiritually.[ep

 

[[[041]]]

 

XII

 

IT is impossible that spirit in a living creature

should ever be wholly freed from the body and

from the world; for in its inwardness it would

have ceased to follow and enact the fortunes

of that creature; it would either have been

absorbed in the contemplation of pure Being

and become virtually omniscient, or at least

it would contemplate its special objects equably

under the form of eternity, and not in the

perspectives determined by the station of its

body in time and place. Pure Being, or these

special essences and truths, would evidently

gain nothing by the fact that this new mind

had been lost in them; and this mind, in

gaining them, would have lost itself; it would,

in fact, have ceased to exist separately. Mean‑

time the body of that creature might go on

living automatically; the mind which it had

previously fed, as a lamp feeds its flame, would

have evaporated, gone up into the sun, and

ceased to light the precincts and penumbra of

that particular vessel, or to be a measure of its

little oil. But a living automaton is by nature

conscious: the lamp has not been materially

extinguished: the creature is accordingly still

breeding a faithful if flickering mind, which

feels and notes its further vicissitudes. Evi‑

 

[[[042]]]

 

dently this fresh mind is the true continuation

of that creature’s experience; it is again con‑

tinuously cognizant of that body in that world.

The effort to liberate souls from their bodies

or to transport them beyond their world has

therefore a rather ironical result: the redeemed

soul ceases to be anybody’s soul, and the body

continues to have a soul that is quite personal

and unregenerate.[ep

[bj22]The difference between the life of the spirit

and that of the flesh is itself a spiritual differ‑

ence: the two are not to be divided materially

or in their occasions and themes so much as in

the quality of their attention: the one is

anxiety, inquiry, desire and fear; the other is

intuitive possession. The spirit is not a tale‑

bearer having a mock world of its own to

substitute for the humble circumstances of this

life; it is only the faculty‑‑the disenchanting

and re‑enchanting faculty‑‑of seeing this world

in its simple truth. Therefore all the worldly

hatred of spirit‑‑and it is very fierce‑‑can

never remove the danger that, after a thousand

persecutions and a long conspiracy of derision,

a child of the spirit should be born in the

bosom of the worldly family. The more

organic and perfect the life of the world be‑

comes, the more intelligent it will be: and what

shall prevent intelligence from asking what all

this pother is about and driving the money‑

changers from the house of prayer? Spirit

 

[[[043]]]

 

must have some organ; but when once aroused

it does not look in the direction of its organ or

care at all about preserving it. It looks rather,

as we see in Indian philosophy, to a realm

anterior to all worlds, and finds there a compre‑

hensive object which in one sense includes all

worlds, since it is infinite Being, but for that

very reason excludes the enacted existence of

any one of them, since they can be enacted, as

the moments of time are enacted, only by

excluding and ousting one another. [cf2]This[cf1]

world, for a speculative mind, is exactly

analogous to [cf2]this[cf1] moment. It seems alone

real to those who inhabit it, but its pre‑

eminence is relative and egotistical: if main‑

tained dogmatically it becomes at once illusory

and absurd.[ep

 

[[[044]]]

 

XIII

 

NOT that the existence of a particular world‑‑

perhaps its exclusive existence‑‑is an evil. If

the lovers of pure Being are ever tempted to

say so, it is only in their human capacity,

because some rude fact may have wounded

their feelings. These feelings are a part of the

world which they condemn, inevitable as this

world is inevitable, and unnecessary in the

sense in which this world is unnecessary. The

contradiction or self‑dislike which they betray

in that world is, no doubt, a defect from the

point of view of the parts in it which are

quarrelling, each of which would wish to have

it all its own way. But this fact does not

render that world, or the conflicts in it, evil

absolutely. Evil can arise only within each

world when it becomes faithless to some Idea

which it has begun to pursue, or is crossed in

the pursuit of it either by some external enemy

(if any) or by the inward contradiction and

complexity of its impulses, which allow it only

to drift towards uncertain, tragic, and romantic

issues. But, as we see in some desperately

romantic philosophers, this very disorder may

please an imagination which is stirred by that

stimulus more deeply than by any impulse

towards harmony and fixity of form. Some

 

[[[045]]]

 

impulse towards form, some initial essence or

essences, a world must preserve so long as it

exists, else it would dissolve into chaos or into

that metaphysical non‑entity, matter without

form: but this modicum of form may be

composed by the perpetual defeat of every

particular endeavour, and the greatest evil of

the greatest number of souls may fulfil the

romantic ideal. The theologians who have

maintained that the damnation of the great

majority is no evil in the sight of God, and

leaves his intrinsic holiness and glory unsullied,

have understood the matter speculatively

and although the ferocity of the Calvinists was

not spiritual, and their notion of “an angry

God” was grotesque, there was spirituality in

their elevation above the weak judgements of

the flesh and even of the heart; only that the

speculative sword really cuts both ways, and

their sense for the superhuman should also

have dissolved their moral fanaticism. Pure

Being is infnite, its essence includes all

essences; how then should it issue particular

commands, or be an acrimonious moralist?[ep

[bj22]The two‑edged sword falls again here. If it

be true that the world can be evil only in its

own eyes and therefore only partially and pro‑

visionally, until the eyes are closed or are

hardened like the eagle’s to that wounding

light,so it is true also that it can be good in its

own eyes only: and more, that the spiritual

 

[[[046]]]

 

life and the pure Being to which its contempla‑

tion is addressed, can be good only in relation

to the living souls that may find their good

there. Plotinus and many other mystics have

admitted that the One, though habitually

called good, is not properly so called. It is the

good of religion, because religion is a conversion

from one object of pursuit to another, under

the form of the good : but in the One itself, or

in attainment, the pursuit is absent, and the

category of the good no longer has any applica‑

tion. The title may be retained, in human

parlance, to indicate that the attainment

really satisfies the aspiration which preceded,

and does not disappoint it; for to end there,

to end absolutely, was the very aim of that

aspiration. The case is like that of a man

building his tomb, or bequeathing his property

to his son; the result is a good for him in that

he desired it, but not in that he survives to

enjoy it. So is the peace that passeth under‑

standing, that annuls desire, and that excludes

the gasping consciousness of peace.[ep

 

[[[047]]]

 

XIV

 

SPIRIT, which is ultimately addressed to pure

Being, is not itself this pure Being. It is the

gift of intuition, feeling, or apprehension: an

overtone of animal life, a realization, on a

hypostatic plane, of certain moving unities in

matter. So, at least, I understand the word;

but its original meaning was a breath or wind,

and hence, often, an influence. In this last

sense it is used in Christian theology; the Holy

Ghost is not the Father nor the Son, but pro‑

ceeds from them and animates the world, or at

least the souls of the elect. It is the fountain

of grace. We also read in the gospel that God

is a spirit, to be worshipped in spirit and in

truth. Here the word evidently bears more

than one sense; the spirit in which God is

worshipped is a disposition of the mind, where‑

as God himself, we may presume, is a spirit in

the mighty sense in which Jehovah swept the

void, a breath or a word, bringing order out of

chaos; the same voice that spoke to Job out

of the whirlwind, with the sheer authority of

power. Spirit thus seems to be sometimes a

 

[[[048]]]

 

creative energy, sometimes a sanctifying influ‑

ence. So in the Latin hymn:[ep

[bj22][cf2]Veni creator Spiritus

[bj22]corda tuorum visitans

[bj22]imple supernâ gratiâ

[bj22]quae tu creasti pectora.[cf1][ep

[bj22]This double function of spirit, if we investi‑

gated its origin, would bring back the double

source of Christian doctrine, here Hebraic and

there Platonic: a profound dualism which

custom scarcely avails to disguise or theology

to heal. Creative power and redeeming grace

point in opposite directions; but a complete

religion needs to look both ways, feeding

piously at the breast of nature, yet weaning

itself spiritually from that necessary comfort

to the contemplation of superhuman and

eternal things. The object of piety is necessity,

power, the laws of life and prosperity, and to

call these things spirit is pure mythology; they

are indeed a great wind, sometimes balmy,

sometimes terrible; and it is the part of wis‑

dom to take shelter from it, or spread wings or

sails in it, according as it lists to blow. But to

what end? To live, to have spirit, to under‑

stand all these things.[ep

[bj22]There is also a conventional modern sese in

which we speak of the spirit of an age, a place,

or a book, meaning some vague tendency or

inspiration either actually dominating that

thing or suggested by it to the mind of a third

 

[[[049]]]

 

person. This is a verbal survival of myth,

poetry become cant: spirit here means those

characters of a thing which a myth‑making

mind would have attributed to a spirit.[ep

[bj22]In contrast to all these uses I am employing

the word spirit to mean something actual;

indeed, the very fact of actuality, the gleam

of intuition or feeling. But this gleam ordin‑

arily serves only to light up material life and

the perspectives in which it moves in time and

in space: an incessant sketchy sense of the

affairs of the body and of its world. The

digestion and preparation of action (as the

behaviourists have shown) is a physical matter.

In that business the spirit is entirely superfluous.

The behaviourists even affect to deny its

existence, on the ground that it is invisible and

would be a useless luxury in nature: excellent

economy, as if a man, the better to provide for

his future, should starve himself to death.

The spirit in us is that which, morally, we

actually are: If anything is to be expunged

from the complex face of reality it might

rather be our material and social setting and

all the strange and incoherent stories told us in

history and science. Certainly all these appar‑

ent or reported facts would be perfectly vain,

if they did not create the spirit, and teach it

to observe and enjoy them. So we are brought

back to the immediate revelation of things,

which is also their ultimate value: we are

[bj22][bj22][bj22]E

 

[[[050]]]

 

brought back to the spirit. Its life is composed

of feelings and intuitions, in many stages and

degrees; and when spirit is free and collected

it has no life but this spiritual life, in which the

ultimate is immediate. All the experiences of

the spirit, until they are so exorcized and

appropriated‑‑so enshrined in pure Being‑‑are

sheer distraction.[ep

 

[[[051]]]

 

XV

 

WERE any world perfect, as the Platonists

thought that this world was in its upper parts,

its spirit would view it with the same contem‑

plative satisfaction with which it views any

pure essence that spontaneously engages its

attention. It would not, in respect to that

perfect world, be harassed by remorse, as it

must be in an imperfect world when it counts

the cost of existence and considers the dreadful

sufferings which plagued it like a nightmare,

before something beautiful and good could

appear even for a moment. I say [cf2]remorse[cf1],

because such is the feeling that comes over me

when I remember the travail which, at least in

man, the spirit has had to endure in bringing

its better life to birth: but the spirit itself has

no guilt in the matter; it was caught in a vice;

and it may accept and overlook that terrible

gestation when at last it reaches the open and

rewards itself with an hour of freedom and

gladness. These are its natural notes: it is

born out of an achieved harmony, only in

creatures already formed and in some measure

fit to live: contradiction and torment are

inexplicable to it, and danger a cause of laugh‑

ter. How should spirit, the very essence of

radiance, ever become morose? It runs and

 

[[[052]]]

 

sparkles wherever it may, the free child of

nature. It has no grudge against its fostering

world; on the contrary, nothing but delighted

wonder. It has no native enmity towards the

flesh‑‑that comes to it afterwards from the

sad flesh itself; it has no disinclination to folly.

The difference between folly and wisdom,

between crime and piety, is not naturally

known to spirit; it is a lesson learned by

experience, in view of the conditions of material

life; spirit would of itself gladly take a turn

with the devil, who is also a spirit. Yet all this

innocent joy and courage native to spirit bind

it to the world with no tie. That which is tied,

that which cannot live save in its home climate

and family nest, is only the mortal psyche, the

poor, absurd, accidental human person. The

psyche in each of us is like Vesta, the goddess

of the Hearth, mother of the Promethean

flame, mother of spirit; and she needs to learn

the difficult unselfishness of the parent‑‑or of

the foster‑parent: for her child is of another

race. She must be content to be abandoned,

revisited only in haste on some idle holiday,

with a retrospective piety; and even as she

embraces her full‑grown over‑topping son he

will seem a stranger to her, and she will catch

sight of his eyes, gazing over her head into a

far country.[ep

[bj22]At the same time this homelessness of spirit

is not romantic; it is not impatience of this

 

[[[053]]]

 

and longing for that; it is not the snobbery of

learning and culture so characteristic of intel‑

lectual people who are not spiritual. No: the

homelessness of spirit comes from detachment,

detachment no less from the grander thing

which the snob respects and pretends to know

as from this humbler thing which he despises.

Anything is enough if it be pure; but purity

itself comes to things from the simplicity of the

spirit which regards them, not indeed with

indifference, rather with joy, but without any

[cf2]ulterior[cf1] interest; in other words, purity comes

of detaching the thing seen and loved from the

world that besets and threatens it and attach‑

ing it to the spirit to which it is an eternal

possession. But this thing eternally possessed

by the spirit is not the thing as the world

knows and prizes it; it is not the person, or

nation, or religion as it asserts and flaunts

itself, in a mortal anxiety to be dominant; it is

only that thing in its eternal essence, out of

which the stress and the doubt of existence

have wholly passed. It is that thing dead,

immortal, its soul restored, as Plotinus would

have said, to the soul of the universe where,

together with all other souls, it has always been

contained in its purity and perfection. But

the truth of it [cf2]there[cf1] is not the fact of it [cf2]here[cf1];

and therefore the world, though the spirit loves

it far more truly and tenderly than it loves

itself, is chilled and rebuked by that look of

 

[[[054]]]

 

divine love, which, if it were heeded, would

transmute its whole life and change it from

what it so passionately and cruelly is, in time,

into that which the spirit sees it to be in

eternity.[ep

 

[[[055]]]

 

XVI

 

THE human heart is full of political, religious,

metaphysical ambition; it hugs all sorts of

pleasant projects in art and in fortune. These

are moral interests and, if not misguided, may

bring hidden or future facts before the mind,

and broaden the basis for rational action. So

the Platonic philosophy sets the scene in one

way for the play, the Christian system in a way

somewhat different, and modern science, if we

make a naturalistic system out of it, in still

another. I will not say that the question

which of these is true, or truer, is indifferent to

the spirit; its fortunes and temper will evi‑

dently vary if it is bred in one or another of

these climates. But if the facts were dis‑

covered, whatever they might turn out to be,

the spirit would be equally ready and able to

face them. It is not in the least bound up with

the supposition, whatever it may mean exactly,

that any “values are the most real things in the

universe.” What should the spirit care if

moralistic metaphysics ceased to invade the

field of natural philosophy, venturing there

upon some guesses flattering to human vanity?

What if the most real‑‑that is, I suppose, the

most fundamental and dynamic‑‑things in the

universe were utterly inhuman? Would spiritu‑

 

[[[056]]]

 

ality be thereby prevented from being spiritual,

from seeing and judging whatever world

happened to exist in the light of spirit?[ep

[bj22]When I say the [cf2]light of spirit[cf1] I might as well

say [cf2]light[cf1] simply; for what is spirit but the act

of making light actual, of greeting, observing,

questioning, and judging anything and every‑

thing? Spirit is awareness, intelligence, recol‑

lection. It requires no dogmas, as does animal

faith or the art of living. Human morality,

for the spirit, is but the inevitable and hygienic

bias of one race of animals. Spirit itself is not

human; it may spring up in any life; it may

detach itself from any provincialism; as it

exists in all nations and religions, so it may

exist in all animals, and who knows in how

many undreamt‑of beings, and in the midst of

what worlds? It might flourish, as the Stoics

felt, even in the face of chaos, except that chaos

could not sustain the animal life, the psyche,

which spirit requires for its organ. From the

existence of spirit a psychologist may there‑

fore argue back to the existence‑‑at least local

and temporary‑‑of some cosmos of organized

matter: but this dependence of mind on body

is a lesson taught by natural philosophy, when

natural philosophy is sound; it is not a free

or evident requirement of spirit in its first

deliverance. On the contrary, the body which

is the matrix and cradle of spirit in time, seems

a stumbling‑block to it in its spontaneous

 

[[[057]]]

 

career; and a rather long discipline and much

chastening hardly persuade this supernatural

nursling that it is really so domestic, and that

it borrows its existence from a poor, busy,

precarious animal life; or that the natural

rhythms, pauses, and synthetic reactions of

that life are the ground of its native affinity

with the eternal. Yet such is the fact: spirit,

as I have said, is a hypostatic unity which

makes actual and emotional the merely formal

unities or harmonies of bodily life; and since

the living psyche is in flux, any actual exist‑

ence which bridged its processes and relations

would have to transcend time in its survey,

and not be attached or confined to any of the

moments which it overlooked and spanned.

Therefore spirit is essentially dateless, and its

immediate terms are essences in themselves

eternal; which is not to say that one form

of spirit does not continually replace another

in the world. There is a continual variation

in themes, and there may be intermittences in

intuition itself; but each of these themes is an

essence overarching a part of the existential

flux, and each moment or node in intuition

looks out of its narrow window upon a vista

which, whether broad or confined, is not

anchored in the place of any of its sundry

objects.[ep

[bj22]To this organ and to this temporal basis

spirit can accommodate itself perfectly when

 

[[[058]]]

 

once it has discovered them. Naturalism has

its modest way of doing the spirit honour. In

whatever manner natural forces may operate,

if ever they issue in life, it can be only because

they already have established rhythms, such

as day and night, favourable to that life, to its

renewal and inheritance. Any world, any

society, any language has a natural inertia or

tendency to continue; it satisfies and encour‑

ages the spirit which it creates. It fits the

imagination because it has kindled and moulded

it, and it satisfies its resident passions because

these are such, and such only, as could take

root and become habitual in precisely that

world. This natural harmony between the

spirit and its conditions is the only actual one:

it is the source of every ideal and the sole

justification of any hope. Imperfect and shift‑

ing as this harmony must be, it is sufficient to

support the spirit of man, and if this spirit be

clear and open, it is sufficient to unroll before

it all the proper objects of its contemplation in

their invincible beauty and eternity. That the

vision, considered as an event in history, must

change and pass is indifferent. It is not because

other people love what I love that, if I am a

free spirit, I love it, nor because I have always

loved it or must always love it in future, but

because it is lovely as I see it now. Such is the

assurance that is proper to life, to actuality, to

intuition: the rest is weariness of spirit, and a

 

[[[059]]]

 

burden to the flesh. But the animal in man is

wretched unless he can imagine that his

language, nation, arts, and sentiments are

destined to be supreme in the world for ever;

he is hardly content to suppose that he may

not rise again to take part in celebrating some

final, yet unending, victory; and he demands

eternity not for the lovely essences which he

may have beheld, which have eternity in

themselves already, but for the manifestation

of those essences, which cannot have it.[ep

 

[[[060]]]

 

XVII[ep

 

SINCE spirit is an emanation of natural life

there would be impiety on its part in flouting

or denying its own source: yet this has always

been a temptation for spirit when self‑conscious

and self‑contained: hence the pride of Lucifer,

the mock independence of the Stoic sage, the

acosmism and absoluteness of the Indian

mystic, and the egotism of German philosophy,

thinking to create and recreate its world in

its flight through nothingness. The trouble

with such forced attitudes is that they attempt

to divorce spirituality from piety, which is the

other half, and the fundamental half, of a

sound religion. In Platonism and Christianity

this divorce has been avoided, but without

establishing a happy and stable marriage

because the object of piety is the power, what‑

ever it may be, on which life depends; and it

is not true piety to invent or posit other sources

for life or welfare than those which experience

shows to exist: piety is wisdom. Nor does the

spiritual life profit in the end by trespassing in

this way on the preserves of a sober piety and a

sober science; because the spirit is thereby

entangled in the fanatical defence of fantastic

dogmas, as if these were indispensable to its

life; so that its peace is poisoned, and its

 

[[[061]]]

 

wings are clipped. What folly to suppose that

ecstasy could be abolished by recognizing the

true sources of ecstasy! Yet ecstatic, and not

addressed to matters of fact, the spirit is in its

essence, whenever it arises at all. It actualizes,

in an intuition which is through and through

poetical and visionary, various movements,

rhythms, potentialities, and transcendent rela‑

tions which physical life involves but which are

not parts or moments of its moving substance,

and remain merely formal facts for the external

observer.[ep

[bj22]The attachment of spiritual minds to some

particular system of cosmology, Platonic,

Christian, Indian, or other, is, therefore, a

historical accident‑‑a more or less happy

means of expression, but a treacherous article

of faith. The truth of any of these systems is a

question for science, not at all a postulate of

the spiritual life. Accordingly, as Dean Inge

says, “an entirely open mind towards the dis‑

coveries of science” would be characteristic of

a purely spiritual religion. But it is not possibly

characteristic of a convinced Platonist or a

convinced Christian. In Platonism, as in

Christianity, the spiritual life is not pure, but

incarnate in a particular body of dogma,

historical and cosmological: both systems are

pledged to the magic ascendancy of certain

supernatural powers, posited in order to guar‑

antee certain particular human values. No

 

[[[062]]]

 

such system, giving an unnatural fixity, in a

special cosmos, to a special morality or civiliza‑

tion or to a private personality, can look upon

the hypotheses of a free science with anything

but terror, perhaps mitigated by contempt:

terror, because it has laid up its treasure in an

eventual material heaven, which it feels in its

bones to be mythical; and perhaps contempt,

because free science is but human discourse,

in which one shaky hypothesis is always

replacing another; whereas the dogmas of an

allegorical religion, for the very reason that

they express elementary human feelings and

fancies, can appeal to the heart so long as the

heart is human. To cultivate this contempt

for free science, and to endure that terror with

fortitude, aided by hypnotic ritual influences

and the contagion of many voices crying in

unison, must be the policy of any such system;

it must stand by its guns. It can cultivate

its own learning and arts and philosophy, but

with free science it can have nothing to do.

It is not to‑day or yesterday, as Dean Inge

seems to think, that science has discredited

these mythical dogmas. Science is but a name

for consecutive observation and understanding,

and science had amply disproved those dogmas

before they arose: a fact which did not prevent

them from arising and from prevailing exceed‑

ingly.[ep

[bj22]The interests which these dogmas expressed

 

[[[063]]]

 

and sanctioned were respectable interests,

political, moral, and emotional. The civilized

mind is still very much more at home in such

a cosy world than in the universal flux of

nature, which not only opens material im‑

measurable abysses on every side of our human

nest, but threatens us with an indefinite flux in

our own being, in our habits, institutions,

affections, and in the very grammar and cate‑

gories of our thought. Yet neither science nor

spirituality share this classic dislike or fear of

the infinite. Science, although its occasion is

the description and manipulation of the field

of action, is heartily willng to describe it and

manipulate it in any convenient way. It is

perhaps the best sign of a scientific, as dis‑

tinguished from a doctrinaire, temper not to

lay great store on science itself, that is, on its

forms, language, and theories, but to keep it

plastic in the presence of its existing subject‑

matter, and of the spontaneity of human

fancy, which, at any moment, may suggest new

methods of notation, new abbreviations, new

syntheses. As to spirit, it has a far deeper

reason than science for eluding every conven‑

tion and not regarding institutions, whether

political, ecclesiastical, or intellectual, with

more than a resigned courtesy. Such things

must needs be: it would be foolish to reject

them instead of profiting by them. The body,

which is an institution of nature, is the indis‑

 

[[[064]]]

 

pensable organ of spirit in man; political and

religious institutions are organs necessary also

for certain kinds of spiritual life; and if the

cosmos, too, is a permanent institution, the

spirit can very well acknowledge that acci‑

dental fact and submit, [cf2]here[cf1], to the limitations

thereby imposed upon it. But it would be,

for spirit, a limitation; its proper field is [cf2]there[cf1],

in the world which is eternal by inward neces‑

sity and essence, not by a longevity presumed

to be perpetual; a world which for the same

reason is infinite, as a world of change, even if

endless, cannot be, since it expressly excludes

any order of events other than the one which

it happens to realize.[ep

 

[[[065]]]

 

XVIII[ep

 

THE Platonists, like all typical Greeks, shud‑

dered at the infinite and hardly thought of

it, even in the optical form of infinite space.

This is of itself a sufficient proof that they

were fundamentally political philosophers,

moralists, humanists, and not men living

primarily in the spirit. They thought the

infinite formless‑‑a conception which is possible

only in the absence of concentration upon that

idea; for, when considered intently, the

infinite is seen to contain all forms: it is the

realm of essence. This observation, if they

had stopped to make it (and it requires no

special intelligence, only pause) would have

dispelled any aesthetic dislike which they may

have had of the infinite; yet it would not have

changed their radical indifference to it. The

Greeks were not aesthetes; their love of form

and their approach to perfection in it were not

aesthetic but moral, political, hygienic: like

noble animals they were proud and content in

their own bodies, faculties, and loves; words

could not express their indifference to what

was not human; and when some divine shaft

rent those bodies and blackened that mind, the

cry of their mourning was brief but absolute.

Their love of finitude was vital; it was the

[bj22][bj22][bj22]F[ep

 

[[[066]]]

 

love of existence, and of perfection in existence;

and for that reason, not for any idle aestheti‑

cism, they were clear discerners of beauty.

Aestheticism is incapable of producing the

beautiful or, in the end, even of loving or

discerning it; it has cut off the vital and moral

roots of form which render one form more

beautiful than another, and which, deeper

still, give unity of form to objects at all. These

vital roots of form were alive in the Greeks:

they flowered into sundry finite perfections;

and evidently they could not flower into forms

contrary to these particular perfections, rooted

in a particular living seed, limited to the play

of a particular animal body and its appropriate

mind. The infnite was valueless: and from

the moral point of view, from the point of view

of some natural organism striving to be free

and perfect, valueless the infinite certainly is.[ep

[bj22]But spirit is a terribly treacherous inmate of

the animal soul; it has slipped in, as Aristotle

says, from beyond the gates: and its home is

the desert. This foreignness is moral, not

genealogical: spirit is bred in the psyche

because the psyche, in living, is obliged to

adjust herself to alien things: she does so in

her own interest: but in taking cognizance of

other things, in moulding a part of her dream

to follow their alien fortunes, she becomes

intelligent, she creates spirit; and this spirit

overleaps the pragmatic function of physical

 

[[[067]]]

 

sensibility‑‑it is the very act of overleaping it

‑‑and so proves itself a rank outsider, a child

rebellious to the household, an Ishmael ranging

alone, a dweller in the infinite.[ep

[bj22]This infinite is the infinite of forms, the

indestructible and inevitable infinite that con‑

tains everything, but contains it only in its

essence, in that eternal quality of being in

which everything is a companion and supple‑

ment to everything else, never a rival or a con‑

tradiction. These essences, when thought con‑

siders any of them without knowing whether

they describe any earthly object or not, may

be called ideal; but they are not ideal intrinsic‑

ally, either in the sense of being figments of

thought or of being objects of aspiration. They

become ideal, or enter into an external moral

relation to the animal soul, when this soul

happens to conceive them, or to make them

types for the objects of its desires. A perfectly

free spirit (if it could exist) would not consider

eternal beings in their ideal capacity, because

it would no longer refer them to the fancies or

hopes of some living creature, but would con‑

sider them in themselves, ranging from one to

another quite speculatively, that is, guided by

the intrinsic formal relations of similarity or

inclusion which obtain between them. It

would therefore virtually traverse the infnite,

its path not being hedged in by pre‑existing

irrelevant interests in one form of being rather

 

[[[068]]]

 

than in another. But evidently this perfect

impartiality is not human; it is contrary to the

initial status of spirit, as the hypostatic syn‑

thetic expression and realization of some dis‑

cursive phase of animal life‑‑some adventure,

some predicament, some propensity, some pre‑

occupation. It is therefore natural that the

intrinsic infinity of Being should remain in the

background, even in the spiritual life, and that

essences should be contemplated and dis‑

tinguished rather as ideals for the human

imagination than as beings necessary in them‑

selves.[ep

 

[[[069]]]

 

XIX[ep

 

FOR this reason the Platonic philosophy

opens a more urbane and alluring avenue

towards spiritual enlightenment than does the

Indian, although the latter runs faster towards

the goal and attains it more perfectly. The

limitation of the divine intellect, or the Ideas,

to the types of earthly or celestial bodies, and

to the values proper to their lives, leaves the

afterglow of passion upon them; the eternal

profits by the interest which its worshippers

have in the temporal. This accommodation is

also conspicuous in the Catholic tradition: it

seems doubtful sometimes whether that other

world is a liberation from this one, or a re‑

duplicion of it, with all its temporal, moral,

social, and diplomatic business extended inde‑

finitely. This is the price which the spiritual

life has to pay for being made amiable. A

universe is composed on purpose to facilitate

it; life there becomes so easy and natural, it

retains so many human values, that it threat‑

ens to be choked in a system of anxious hopes

and adjustments, worse than those involved in

mundane life, because inescapable. In this

world, at least, the spirit can flee to solitude,

to nature, to play, to the delicious irony of

despising the passions which one is forced to

 

[[[070]]]

 

share; but from heaven, ennobled and sancti‑

fied as it would be by so many immortal per‑

sonages, so many high maxims, marvellous

dogmas, and moral exclusions, whither should

the spirit flee? Of course the spiritual sense

for those celestial facts might be recovered;

even in heaven one might be a philosopher.

The other world would be but a second touch‑

stone for the spirit if, like this world and its

moral order, it were a fact existing in itself.

In the Catholic, as in the Platonic, kingdom,

the spirit must still blaze its own trail; the

carpets spread accommodatingly before its

feet, leading to the celestial courts, will never

lead it, of themselves, to spiritual liberation.[ep

[bj22]Consider the universe of Plotinus: a process

of emanation from the One through the Ideas

to the Soul of the World, whence, like rays

from different stars, human and animal souls

descend on occasion to animate material

bodies. This system was designed to encourage

the spirit to rise from its animal prison‑‑

prison was the word‑‑reversing that emanation

until it recovered the primal bliss of contem‑

plative union with pure Being. But what is

there in the system, if we accept it as describing

the facts, to compel or even to invite the spirit

to rise at all? The cosmology of Plotinus

might almost be adopted by a Hegelian inter‑

ested only in evolution and not in the least in

redemption; he might behold with rapture the

 

[[[071]]]

 

successive embodiment of linked Ideas in the

thoughts and institutions of men; far from

wishing to reverse the process in his heart, and

renounce all these endless transformations,

conflicts, and cumulative cares, his only joy

might be to share them, to be the first to

announce them, and at every turn in the battle

to drop the cry of yesterday in order to pick

up that of to‑morrow. Since it was the nature

of things to emanate from the One, he would

hasten to emanate with them. All his angels

would be seen descending Jacob’s ladder, and

none ascending. Yet only the ascent concerns

the spiritual life. The descent is the creation

of the world and the work of the world, by

which the spirit, when it awakes at last, finds

itself entangled in animal passions and foolish

ambitions. Starting from whatever facts and

predicaments may seem to envelop it, its

function is then to detach itself from them one

by one, escaping the flux and urgency which

they have in the realm of existence, unravelling

and synthesizing their temporal perspectives,

in order to transpose them all into the realm

of truth, where they form an eternal picture;

and then to let this picture itself recede into its

setting in the realm of essence, where it is but

one form of being, which this world by chance

has manifested, amid the countless forms of

being which perhaps have not been manifested

anywhere. The angels, even in their descent,

 

[[[072]]]

 

will then be messengers to the philosopher

from an eternal world, to which, in ascending

again, they carry up his heart; whereas if the

angels were born in transit and lived only in

their apparition in time, he might have perhaps

a pleasanter casual environment, but no

heavenly treasure; and his attitude would be

that of a lover and gloating denizen of this

world, not that of the spirit. Even from the

best world the spirit must depart. Beauty calls

it away no less than confusion; and happiness

is only a more amiable sacrament than suffering

to carry it to the impassible Being which

infinitely outruns all these accidents of exist‑

ence.[ep

 

[[[073]]]

 

XX[ep

 

SPIRIT, since its essence is to aspire, comes to

life at the foot of the ladder; it lives by con‑

templation, by knowing the thing above it.

It is not its own object, as the Platonic Ideas

seemed to become in Aristotle’s theology, when

they were identified with a cosmic intellect

eternally contemplating its own structure.

Spirit might indeed attain to such a condition

if its natural organ were, as Aristotle supposed,

some perfectly harmonious and immortal revo‑

lution of the heavens. Even then spirit would

properly be the rapt aspiration towards those

Ideas, the immortal love of them, which kept

the moving spheres constant in their round:

for the soul of each sphere was intently fixed

upon the Idea (or, as we might say, the

formula) which it was to realize by its motion

and to turn into a sustained note in the

celestial symphony. Even in this astronomical

theology spirit would be the third person of the

Trinity rather than the second; it would be the

Soul of the World looking towards the Ideas,

rather than the Ideas looking towards the One.

This One, if we may identify it with the Brahma

of the Indians, would be infinite Being; it

would not be any longer conformable or proper

to any particular cosmos or to any particular

 

[[[074]]]

 

moral life. Relevance to nature would begin

with the divine intellect or the sphere of the

Platonic Ideas: they would be finite in number

and exclusive in type; they would compose the

morphology of this world. The third person or

hypostasis in the eternal, would be the divine

spirit, the love or attention by which those

particular forms were made the theme of an

actual life. This divine spirit looks towards

the Ideas; it is hardly different from the God

of Aristotle; and it may be said to descend

(although inwardly still wholly attentive to the

beings above it) and to animate the world, in

the sense in which heavenly souls may be said

to descend to animate our bodies; namely, in

that an echo or imitation of them or obedience

to them keeps the world or the body alive.

The immortal soul of the world could never

itself look downwards or be troubled by the

vicissitudes of the matter which imitates its

form: no more could the immortal soul of any

man be compromised by the imperfections of

its earthly shadow.[ep

[bj22]We are here in the region of speculative

fiction; souls have become so perfect in their

eternal abode that other souls have to take

their places in living bodies. Indeed, an

organic inherited soul, a principle of material

growth and action, is no spirit; spirit is first

generated in it when it awakes to some actual

feeling or thought. Such a spirit evidently can

 

[[[075]]]

 

never envisage pure Being, or the realm of

essence, in its infinite fullness and detail; the

essences which will appear to it will be such,

and such only, as its material organ evokes by

its quite special processes and contacts. But

quantity is not a category important to spirit;

as it is indifferent to duration, because it lives

in the eternal, so it is indifferent to the endless

multiplicity of things, existing or not existing,

which may lie beyond its ken. It is not

anxious, like an animal soul hounded by

curiosity and fear, to dominate and possess

everything, lest by overlooking some secret

enemy it should live in a fool’s paradise, and

to‑morrow be ruined. The limitations of

experience, when experience is spiritual, are

not invidious; what it possesses it cannot lose;

what it leaves out is not denied or condemned

or demanded. As Dante says, there is no envy

in these spheres. The sense that the rest is

there (since all essences are implied in infinite

Being) suffices to give the spirit room, to

detach it from all partiality, from all unjust

affection; while the essential eternity of that

which is manifested suffices to wed the spirit

to it with an absolute confidence, without the

least ignoble hankering to look beyond. Spirit

differs from animal intelligence less in material

scope than in inward quality; its distinctive

object is not pure Being in its infinity, but

finite being in its purity.[ep

 

[[[076]]]

 

XXI[ep

 

EVEN in rare moments of attainment, when the

human spirit has seemed to be united or even

identified with the supreme Being, the reports

which reach us of that ecstasy indicate that the

chasm has never really been bridged. These

reports are avowedly inadequate; words can‑

not render what has been seen, nor would it be

lawful, perhaps, to reveal it. Ultimate insights

have a tendency to undermine the orthodox

approaches by which they have been reached.

The saint pulls his ladder up with him into his

private heaven; and the community of the

faithful, on whose sturdy dogmatic shoulders

he has climbed, must not be deprived of the

means of following his example. Hence any

dissolving culmination of the religious life must

be kept a secret, a mystery to be divulged only

to the few whom the knowledge of it can no

longer scandalize or discourage. Besides this

prudence and this consideration for the weaker

brethren, there is a decisive reason for silence:

the revelation has been essentially a revelation

of the illusion inherent in all language, in all

experience, in all existence. It cannot be com‑

municated save by being repeated.[ep

[bj22]Doubtless the state of being achieved in

ecstasy is intrinsically immensely positive, but

 

[[[077]]]

 

it is the negation of every human wish and idea;

there are, and can be, no human words to

express its nature. So true is this, that if the

mystic uses this very suspension of thought, this

ecstasy itself, as a true rendering of his ultimate

object of contemplation, he falls into a worse

error than the animal and worldly mind. For

at least, in current experience, scattered and

accidental manifestations of being appear;

they are illusions if taken for more than appear‑

ances, relative to particular animal organs and

interests; they are trivial and competitive;

yet they are distinct, and each of them, by its

positive character, enriches that revelation of

essence to spirit which animal life necessarily

affords, in spite of its distraction. It would

suffice to suspend the urgency of the animal

will (as sometimes happens to children and

poets in their simplicity) in order to disinfect

this sensuous revelation of its distraction and

illusion; it would not reveal much, but it

would reveal something of pure Being. In

poets and children this is but play; they revert

from it at once to what the world thinks serious

interests and sound knowledge of facts. When

on the contrary the same disillusion is attained

laboriously, by a long spiritual discipline, the

adept attempts to maintain and propagate his

insight; and then there is trouble, for in the

very act of defending this insight, he is likely

to lose it. In so far as the objects of his con‑

 

[[[078]]]

 

templation are familiar to everyone and have

accepted names, these names will carry animal

faith with them, and when he uses them they

will conceal or even contradict the new quality

of pure being which things have acquired in his

eyes; to him they have become eternal

essences, to his hearers they will still be

temporal facts. Meantime, in that realm of

essence which he now envisages, vistas may

have opened to him into all sorts of regions

which are not of this world, which have no

names at all in human discourse how should

he be able to express or even to remember their

intricate and unearthly nature  Even in

ordinary dreams, composed as they are,

presumably, out of bits of earthly imagery and

puffs of animal anxiety, there are many

marvels and vicissitudes, momentous to them‑

selves, which we cannot recover in the light

of day: how much harder the vision must be

to recompose if its elements were original or its

mood sublime! If spiritual attainment could

ever be complete and infinite Being could

reveal itself (which I do not believe) in its

entirety, evidently the disproportion would be

overwhelming between the number and variety

of things to report and the human means of

reporting them.[ep

[bj22]Silence is therefore imperative, if the mystic

has any conscience; he cannot have perceived,

and he cannot retain, the fullness of his ultimate

 

[[[079]]]

 

object. This fullness came to him, and remains

in him, merely as a [cf2]sense[cf1] of fullness, the brilli‑

ancy of a blinding light, without any specifica‑

tion of the infinity of essences which were there

to be lighted up. He therefore can only assure

us that it was a great revelation, freeing him

from the oppression of ordinary existence and

thought; it was peace, it was bliss, it was

virtual knowledge; but beyond that his powers

of perception and retention could not go.[ep

 

[[[080]]]

 

XXII[ep

 

HERE the mystic‑‑he who feels he has passed

beyond the veil and seen things not to be

uttered‑‑if he lacks humility and discipline,

may fall, and may lead us, into a sad illusion.

He may take his dazzled feeling itself, the

blinding glory of mere light, for the supreme

reality, or for the true description of its nature.

He may say that infinite Being is itself simply

feeling, or intensity without quality or dis-

tinctions, or the pure light of spirit falling, not

on everything, but only on itself. He would

then be confusing his own incapacity with the

object which infinitely exceeds it. The glass

dome, far from creating the many colours of

infinite Being, fuses and neutralizes them into

a white light–the blurred effect of a rude and

summary vision. This unitary feeling, rather

than a revelation of pure Being, is the custom-

ary sense of one’s own bodily existence. The

words existence and being are often used inter-

changeably, and this verbal ambiguity serves

to obscure the infinite difference between the

realm of essence–pure Being in all its eternal

modes–and the pressure of external things

and of internal change in a living organism.

This sense of existence, essentially transitive

and restless, may sometimes be lulled into a

 

[[[081]]]

 

simmering warmth and voluminous comfort, a

pleasant animal trance in which spirit dives as

deep as it can into the life of the matter. This

feeling has a true depth of its own, a kinship

with universal substance. Brahma is some‑

times likened to deep sleep, and Nirvana to

nothingness; and in modern philosophy we are

sometimes told that the true reality is pure

duration or pure sentience. These expressions

ignore pure Being, and even the presumable

substance of the natural world, which must

somehow be diversified and unevenly distri‑

buted; but they describe fairly enough the

sentiment which the presence of overwhelming

things aspires, or the trail which their passage

leaves in the animal mind. Persons far

advanced in the spiritual life often use language

of this kind, as they use pious or erotic lan-

guage; but their language must not be taken

amiss; they use, like all of us, the words they

find. To the true mystic even things are

symbols; how should he worship words? The

Spanish mystic, for instance, San Juan de la

Cruz, represents all virtues and graces as by-

paths diverging from the straight but diffi-

cult way, the name of which is Nothing,

Nothing, Nothing. In the end the spirit

indeed claims nothing, posits nothing, and is

nothing in its own eyes, but empties itself

completely into the Being which it contem-

plates; but if this Being itself were said to be

[bj22][bj22][bj22]G[ep

 

[[[082]]]

 

nothing, our mysticism would evidently have

slipped into a bad heresy, not to speak of the

flat contradiction. So Nirvana may be called

annihilation in that it annihilates personal‑

ity, desire, and temporal existence; yet the

“Buddha teaches that all beings are from

eternity abiding in Nirvana “¹ so that far

from being nothing Nirvana embraces the

whole realm of essence‑‑pure Being in its

infinite implications‑‑from which, of course,

existence is excluded; because since existence

is necessarily in flux and is centred in some

arbitrary moment, it itself exists only by

exclusion and with one foot in the grave.

Existence is that realm of Becoming which

combines Being and Non‑Being so much to

Hegel’s satisfaction, and which generates those

unstable but “current valuations of the world‑

ling” to which the spirit, according to Dean

Inge, is so completely indifferent.[ep

[ep

[bj22] ¹Dasgupta, [cf2]History of Indian Philosophy[cf1].[ep

 

[[[083]]]

 

XXIII[ep

 

THE spiritual life, then, is distinguished from

worldly morality and intelligence not so much

by knowledge as by disillusion: however

humble may be its career, it lifts those few and

common adventures into the light of eternity.

This eternal aspect of things summons spirit

out of its initial immersion in sensation and in

animal faith and clarifies it into pure spirit.

This eternal aspect of things is also their imme‑

diate aspect, the dimension in which they are

not things but pure essences; for if belief and

anxiety be banished from the experience of

any object, only its pure essence remains

present to the mind. And this aspect of

things, which is immediate psychologically,

ontologically is ultimate, since evidently the

existence of anything is a temporary accident,

while its essence is an indelible variation of

necessary Being, an eternal form. The spirit

lives in this continual sense of the ultimate in

the immediate. Mortal spirits, the spirit in

animals, cannot possibly survey pure Being in

its infinity; but in so far as they free them‑

selves from false respect for the objects of

animal faith and animal passion, they may

behold some finite being in its purity. For this

reason, established morality and religion, by

 

[[[084]]]

 

protecting the eye from too much distraction

and fixing it on noble objects, may make a

better soil for spirit than does wayward living.

Not that spirit may not crop out marvellously

in the sinner, as it may in the child or the poet.

It notoriously does so; and even in the saint

it remains profoundly indifferent to the occa-

sion that may have kindled its flame, be this

occasion religious faith or sensuous vision, be it

passion, study, or practical dominion over the

world. All is grist for the mill, if only there

be force of intellect actually to grind that

experimental substance and reduce it to some

pure essence on which contemplation can feed.

But moralities and religions, if they merely

extend or exaggerate the pressure of circum‑

stance on the soul, are as dreadful an incubus

on the spirit as ever was the animal search for

food, love, or safety; indeed, they are but a

monstrous and terrifying shadow of these

radical compulsions cast needlessly on the

screen of heaven.[ep

[bj22]I ask myself sometimes, is not morality a

worse enemy of spirit than immorality? Is it

not more hopelessly deceptive and entangling?

Those romantic poets, for instance, whose lives

were often so irregular‑‑were they not evidently

far more spiritual than the good people whom

they shocked? Shelley, Leopardi, Alfred de

Musset were essentially children of the spirit:

they were condemned to flutter on broken

 

[[[085]]]

 

wings only for lack of measure and discipline;

they were spiritual waifs, untaught to see the

relativity and absurdity of their proud passions.

The perfect spirit must be a patient hearer, a

sober pupil, not an occasional automatic sky‑

lark. Yet when spirituality, as in Words‑

worth, has to struggle instead against a black

coat and a white choker, it seems to be more

sadly and decisively stifled, buried alive under

a mountain of human alarms and a heavy

tombstone of sanctimony. The world, he

sighed, is too much with us ; but the hillsand

even the mock Tritons blowing their wreathed

horns were not able to banish the world from

his conscientious concern. Nothing is able to

banish the world except contempt for the

world, and this was not in him. It would even

have been contrary to his Protestant religion

‑‑that so unspiritual determination to wash

the world white and clean, adopt it, and set it

up for a respectable person. The world is not

respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused,

deluded for ever; but it is shot through with

beauty, with love, with glints of courage and

laughter; and in these the spirit blooms

timidly, and struggles to the light among the

thorns.[ep

[bj22]Such is the flitting life of this winged thing,

spirit, in this old, sordid, maternal earth. On

the one hand, in its innocence, spirit is happy

to live in the moment, taking no thought for

 

[[[086]]]

 

the morrow; it can enjoy the least gift as

gladly as the greatest; it is the fresh, the pure

voice of nature, incapable of learned or moral

snobbery. It ignores its origin, so buoyant is

it; its miraculous light seems to it a matter of

course. Its career is everywhere conditioned

and oppressed from without, yet it passes

through the fire with a serene incredulity, an

indomitable independence. On the other hand,

the eye of spirit, in its virtual omniscience, sees

the visible in its true setting of the invis‑

ible; it is fixed instinctively on the countless

moments that are not this moment, on the

joys that are not this sorrow and the sorrows

that are not this joy, on the thousand opinions

that are not this opinion and beauties that are

not this beauty; understanding too much to

be ever imprisoned, loving too much ever to be

in love. Spirit chills the flesh and is itself on

fire; thought, as Dean Inge says, “becomes

passionate, the passions become cold”; or

rather they are confronted and controlled by a

profound recollection, in which laughter and

tears pulse together like the stars in a polar

sky, each indelibly bright, and all infinitely

distant.[ep

 

[[[087]]]

 

XXIV[ep

 

IF with these considerations in mind I turn

back to the characteristics of Dean Inge’s

“Platonic tradition in religious thought ” I find

that some of these characteristics belong to the

spiritual life everywhere, but not to the

Platonic system. Such is openness to science,

or (what this openness implies) tolerance of any

dogmatic conception, and readiness to accept

any kind of world. Other characteristics are

indeed proper to Platonism, but irrelevant to

the spiritual life; such is the mythical cos‑

mology meant to secure the perpetual preval‑

ence of particular human or divine goods, in a

particular Hellenic universe. Still other char‑

acteristics seem to belong both to the spiritual

life and to Platonism; but I find on closer

inspection that these qualities are ambiguous,

and are not assignable to both in the same

sense! Of these apparently common properties

the most important is the gift of seeing the

eternal in the temporal. But what is the

eternal? For pure spirit the eternal means the

timeless; all images of sense and all events in

time offer eternal themes for contemplation

and are themselves eternal in the realm of truth.

This spiritual insight has been frequent among

Platonists, and may indeed have been at the

 

[[[088]]]

 

root of that trance‑like vision of essences

which enabled Plato to turn the general terms

of Socratic logic into individual and immortal

beings. But, if his sense for the eternal had

been absolutely direct and pure, he would have

seen the eternal in the figments of sense, no less

than in those of logic or ethics: for all forms

equally are essences, and all essences equally

are eternal.[ep

[bj22]It is true that “things seen are temporal,”

if by “seeing” we understand that animal

reaction by which we turn towards material

objects which affect our eyes, so that we are

prompted to grasp them or to get out of their

way. This animal sensibility is what has

usually been understood by sense, so that sense

has been conventionally regarded as revealing

matter, and a man immersed in sense as a

materialist. But this kind of “seeing,” if it

be more than a bodily reaction, is also more

than a pure intuition: it is a belief. Sense

thereby engages the spirit in the observation

and pursuit of material things; and these

obviously are temporal. But in this belief and

pursuit pure intuition must have intervened

to supply the terms of the experience; and

this pure intuition is no vision of material

things, but of the essences which we call and

think to be the qualities of material things, or

of whatever else we think about; and these

essences in themselves are eternal forms of

 

[[[089]]]

 

Being. One whose attention was wholly

absorbed in them would be an extreme idealist,

a poet or dreamer not suspecting that he was

living in a material world, falling into every

pit, and hugging every ghost to his bosom, as

the most solid of possible realities. And

though the world would laugh at him, the

angels would not; for after life is done, and the

world is gone up in smoke, what realities may

the spirit of a man boast to have embraced

without illusion, save the very forms of those

illusions by which he has been deceived?

These, and not the things which he thought he

saw, were his eternal discoveries.[ep

[bj22]In the Platonic system, however, the eternal

also has another signification; it may mean

the everlasting. This system was cosmological

and quasi‑scientific; it sought for the sub‑

stances and the permanent shapes of existing

things. God, the Ideas, and the Soul of the

World, though invisible, were in a wide sense

physical, since they were powers at work in

nature. Like the laws of modern physics

they were presumed to be unchangeable; but

this persistence of their expression in matter

was evidently an entirely different sort of

eternity-‑a presumptive eternity-‑from that

intrinsic to them as essences. Yet the same

word [cf2]eternal[cf1] designates now the pure objects of

the contemplative faculty and now certain

special objects of scientific presumption, belief

 

[[[090]]]

 

in which is unnecessary, audacious, and, to be

frank, superstitious. That anything existent

should be eternal in the spiritual sense is

logically impossible, because existence has to

verify itself from moment to moment and must

always remain temporal, no matter how long

it lasts. That any recognizable existing thing

should last for ever seems improbable and

contrary to all the analogies of nature. It is

contrary, too, to that profound natural philo‑

sophy of Heraclitus which Plato had adopted

and which, by a happy counterblast, had

quickened his sense for the truly eternal‑‑for

the inviolate and super‑existential being of

forms.[ep

[bj22]If this hazardous belief in permanent natural

powers were abandoned the comfortable moral

assurances of Platonism would also lapse. It

would cease to be popular with tender minds,

and a nest of sentimental fancies. The beauty

and goodness actually found in the world would

no longer be alleged to reveal the forces at

work in it more truly than do its ugliness and

confusion. It would become impossible to

maintain that goodness and beauty are some‑

how intentional in the world, and their oppo‑

sites interlopers. Values would be seen not to

be powers, but harmonies‑‑the very thing

which Plato, in his purely moral wisdom, had

made the first and highest principle of the

good. Indeed, that superstitious belief, with

 

[[[091]]]

 

which he thought to buttress the crumbling

virtues of antiquity, is useless to human morals.

Human morals draw their vigour from earthly

economy, and find their sanction there. Nor

is that superstitious belief helpful to the

spiritual life or even compatible with it at

bottom. For while to accept and love the

constituted order of nature and society is easy

for a pure spirit, which is without prejudices

or claims, for this same reason it is impossible

for spirit to deny or detest the other forms of

being which nature or society for the moment

does not happen to manifest.[ep

 

[[[092]]]

 

XXV[ep

 

THE manner of combining unworldliness with

the love of nature and of man is another point

not understood in the same sense in Platonism

and in the spiritual life. Platonism is moralistic:

it will love in man and in nature so much as

conforms to the patterns which its mathe‑

matical physics, its zoology, and its political

idealism prescribe for things: all that deviates

from these norms will seem to it sad, unaccount‑

able, terrible, and dangerous. In fact, the

love of nature and of man, though the beauty

of order and harmony in both was still felt in

the Greek manner, does not seem to me con‑

spicuous in Platonism. It was a censorious,

puritan, prescriptive love; it was not spon‑

taneous, it was not sympathetic, it was not

love of nature at all, but of a political, human

good, and of so much in nature as might illus‑

trate or sanction it. Free spirit would be more

generous. When the renunciation of the world,

and of existence itself, has been hearty and

radical, the love of nature can be universal;

I will not say unqualified by sadness, because

the spirit, having itself suffered, recognizes

in many an alien form of existence a maimed

effort and a lost glory analogous to its own;

but a love unqualified by prejudice, by envy,

 

[[[093]]]

 

by fear of being outshone or discountenanced

by the marvels which nature or society may

elsewhere bring to light. It is of the essence of

spirit to see and love things for their own sake,

in their own nature, not for the sake of one

another, nor for its own sake.[ep

[bj22]Meantime it is a question for scientific

speculation, on which pure spirit remains

ignorant and impartial, whether there are in

existence organisms so vast (measured by the

human scale) as the Platonic cosmos, with its

deity or deities animating its concentric

spheres. If so, spirit would have for its habita‑

tion and organ other bodies larger and more

long‑lived than the bodies of men or of kindred

animals: and the concert of so many happier

spirits would certainly be sublime, singing in

their Pythagorean symphony so calmly together.

Yet even then, we should remember that the

human scale is relative, and that this Platonic

cosmos (or the Christian cosmos which, though

historical rather than astronomical, is not very

different in principle) is vast only in that

perspective. Seen from without, and beyond,

it might be infinitesimal, and an insignificant

ingredient in some greater world. Its longevity,

too, would be relative; and the traditional

attribution of eternity to it must be regarded

as a rhetorical hyperbole, expressing the sense

that its duration is incalculable in terms of

human chronology; but true eternity, as I

 

[[[094]]]

 

have said, is not of that kind. In the end such

a universe, floating like a bubble in the flux

of things, would almost certainly dissolve. It

is not there that an enlightened heart would

lay up its treasure. The flood itself is a nobler

companion, and the spirit moves at ease upon

the waters.[ep

 

OPINION OF THE WORK OF[ep

G E O R G E  S A N T A Y A N A[ep

[ep

[ep

[bj22]BERTRAND RUSSELL in the NEW STATESMAN: “The book

(‘Scepticism and Animal Faith’) has all Mr. Santayana’s

well‑known merits; beauty of style, a truly philosophic

temper, a wide survey of history and thought. it is full of

sayings that are profound, delightful.or amusing. And it

has the great merit of not pretending, by bad arguments, to

establish doctrines which we accept on instinct but cannot

hope to prove.”[ep

[ep

[bj22]NATION AND ATHENÆUM: “There is another respect in

which Mr. Santayana’s system differs from those of most

professional philosophers, namely. that it is wholly sincere.

. . . This merit of sincerity, in a man of Mr. Santayana’s

breadth of intellectual sympathy, would suffice to make

the book important, even if it stood alone. There are many

other merits, notably perspicuity and beauty of style.”[ep

[ep

[bj22]DAILY TELEGRAPH: “In the person of Professor Santa‑

yana the philosophic temperament survives with a simple

dignity which is almost Hellenic in quality. To escape out

of the roaring traffic of modern publicity into the green and

shady academy of his dreams, is to be reminded once more,

with refreshing emphasis, of the sublime stability of

philosophic truth. . . .[ep

[bj22]”Here, in the cool cloister of thought, we return to

problems which are eternal, and to solutions which repeat

themselves from generation to generation. We moderns

boast of our progress in material conveniences and re‑

sources, but in the quiet kingdom of the mind we have

advanced nothing since the days when the youth of Athens

sat at the feet of Socrates.”[ep

[ep

[ep

[ep

A LIST OF SANTAYANA’S[ep

BOOKS MAY BE HAD FROM[ep

ANY BOOKSELLER[ep