LIBRARY 
 
 CALIFORNIA 
 AN MM* 
 
 A
 
 The Art of 
 Creation 
 
 Essays on the Self 
 and Its Powers ^ 
 "By Edward Carpenter 
 
 Author of " Towards Democracy," " Civilisation," 
 etc. etc. 
 
 London : George Allen, Ruskin House 
 156, Charing Cross Road Mdcccciv 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 * 
 
 Printed by BALLANTVNE, HANSON &> Co. 
 At the Ballantyne Press
 
 " These two things, the spiritual and the 
 material, though we call them by different names, 
 in their Origin are one and the same." 
 
 LAO-TZU. 
 
 " When a new desire has declared itself in 
 the human heart, when a new plexus is forming 
 among the nerves, then the revolutions of nations 
 are already decided, and histories unwritten are 
 
 written" 
 
 TOWARDS DEMOCRACY.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 WE seem to be arriving at a time when, with 
 the circling of our knowledge of the globe, a 
 great synthesis of all human thought on the 
 ancient and ever-engrossing problem of Creation 
 is quite naturally and inevitably taking shape. 
 The world-old wisdom of the Upanishads, with 
 their profound and impregnable doctrine of the 
 universal Self, the teachings of Buddha or of 
 Lao-tzu, the poetic insight of Plato, the inspired 
 sayings of Jesus and Paul, the speculations of 
 Plotinus, or of the Gnostics, and the wonderful 
 contributions of later European thought, from 
 the fourteenth century mystics down through 
 Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, 
 Ferrier and others ; all these, combining with the 
 immense mass of material furnished by modern 
 physical and biological Science, and Psychology, 
 are preparing a great birth, as it were ; and out of
 
 Preface 
 
 this meeting of elements is already arising the 
 dim outline of a philosophy which must surely 
 dominate human thought for a long period. 
 
 A new philosophy we can hardly expect, or 
 wish for ; since indeed the same germinal thoughts 
 of the Vedic authors come all the way down 
 history even to Schopenhauer and Whitman, 
 inspiring philosophy after philosophy and religion 
 after religion. But it is only to-day that our 
 knowledge of the world enables us to recognise 
 this immense consensus ; and it is only to-day that 
 Science, with its huge conquests in the material 
 plane, is able to provide for these world-old 
 principles somewhat of a new form, and so 
 wonderful a garment 'of illustration and expres- 
 sion as it does. 
 
 The philosophy of the Upanishads was nothing 
 if not practical ; and the same has been said by 
 every great religion of its own teaching. (" Do 
 the will and ye shall know of the doctrine.") It 
 is not sufficient to study and investigate the art 
 of Creation as an external problem ; we have to 
 learn and to practise the art in ourselves. So alone 
 will it become vital and really intelligible to us. 
 The object of the present volume is to show
 
 Preface 
 
 something of both these sides, the speculative 
 and the practical. 
 
 Chapter II., from which the book takes its 
 name, was originally given as an address. The 
 remainder of the body of the book appears now 
 for the first time with the exception of Chapters 
 VIII. and IX., on "The Gods." These in an 
 altered form were published as an article in the 
 Hibbert Journal for Jan. 1904, and for leave to 
 reprint them I am much indebted to the Editor 
 of that Journal. In the Appendix I have in- 
 cluded three articles of a considerably earlier 
 date, as possibly in their way contributing some 
 light to the main questio- s of the book. 
 
 E. C. 
 
 IX
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE ....... vii 
 
 I. PRELIMINARY ....... i 
 
 II. THE ART OF CREATION . . . . .10 
 
 III. MATTER AND CONSCIOUSNESS . . . . 35 
 
 IV. THE THREE STAGES OF CONSCIOUSNESS . . 46 
 V. THE SELF AND ITS AFFILIATIONS ... 63 
 
 VI. THE SELF AND ITS AFFILIATIONS (continued) . 84 
 VII. PLATONIC IDEAS AND HEREDITY . . .106 
 VIII. THE GODS AS APPARITIONS OF THE RACE-LIFE 123 
 IX. THE GODS AS DWELLING IN THE PHYSIOLOGICAL 
 
 CENTRES . . . . . . .142 
 
 X. THE DEVILS AND THE IDOLS . . . .162 
 
 XL BEAUTY AND DUTY . . . . .180 
 
 XII. CREATION ....... 196 
 
 XIII. TRANSFORMATION . . . . . .211 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 1. THE MAY-FLY : A STUDY IN TRANSFORMATION 225 
 
 2. HEALTH A CONQUEST . . . . .243 
 
 3. EVENING IN SPRING : A MEDITATION . .251
 
 THE ART OF CREATION 
 
 PRELIMINARY 
 
 RELATED Motion seems to be, as suggested by 
 the words Attraction and Repulsion, Gravitation, 
 Chemical Affinity, and so forth, the ground-fact 
 of inorganic Nature. And it seems also to be 
 the ground and foundation of Life. The proto- 
 plasmic jelly moves towards or away from sub- 
 stances in its neighborhood, and this appears to 
 be its fundamental property. The most primitive 
 cellular organisms act in the same way. Some 
 seek light, others flee from it. Paramecium is 
 drawn towards slightly acid substances, and flies 
 from alkalies. Actynophrys is attracted by starch ; 
 and so on. 1 There appears to be a kind of 
 ' choice ' or elective affinity ; and the learned are 
 divided on the subject into two schools those 
 who, like Binet, see in these movements of pro- 
 tozoa the germinal characteristics of human intel- 
 ligence, and those who class them as " merely 
 chemical " and automatic reactions. 
 
 1 See Th. Ribot, " Psychology of the Emotions," Contem- 
 porary Science Series, p. 4. Also H. S. Jennings, " Psychology 
 of a Protozoan,'' American Journal of Psychology, vol. x. 
 
 I A
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 It is not our business here to draw the line of 
 division. It is sufficient to see thataon the very 
 lowest rung of the ladder of life, and at a point 
 where it is difficult to distinguish its laws from 
 those of chemistry, such words as we are forced 
 to use words like Attraction, Repulsion, Affinity 
 have a double meaning, covering both material 
 and mental, external and internal, affections. 
 Even the word Motion itself passes easily into 
 E-motion. And modern psychology and physi- 
 ology have made it abundantly clear that every 
 feeling or emotion in the mind means motion of 
 some kind in the tissues or fluids of the body. 
 Some of our highest and most complex emotions 
 take the form of attraction or repulsion, and in 
 our dimmest sensations, almost below the level of 
 consciousness, we still can detect the same. 
 
 All Nature is motion. In the most primitive 
 Life there is a tendency to motion provoked by a 
 neighboring object. This capacity to be pro- 
 voked into motion is called irritability, and in a 
 higher degree sensibility. All these words 
 ' tendency,' * irritability,' ' sensibility ' have a 
 mental as well as physical import, which it is 
 difficult to escape from. If a protozoic cell does 
 not feel ' desire ' for food such as we feel, it 
 exhibits a ' tendency ' towards it, which we can 
 hardly refuse to regard as the germ of ' desire.' 
 
 Over the question of the priority of the mental 
 or the material aspects of cells and other things 
 there has been much discussion some maintain- 
 ing that chemical and automatic reactions come 
 
 2
 
 Preliminary 
 
 first, and that later, out of these, mental pheno- 
 mena are evolved ; while others insist that con- 
 sciousness in some form is prior, and the material 
 world only its expression. I think it best and 
 simplest to suppose the two simultaneous and 
 coextensive and I shall (provisionally) assume 
 this position, leaving the question to clear itself 
 up later in the book. 1 I may, however, here 
 quote two passages from Lloyd-Morgan's " Intro- 
 duction to Comparative Psychology." Speaking 
 of consciousness in some form as accompanying 
 all vital organisation, he says: "Does it not 
 seem reasonable to suppose that no matter what 
 stage we select, analysis would still disclose the 
 two aspects ? That with the simpler modes of 
 nerve-energy there would go simpler modes of 
 consciousness, and that with infra-neural modes 
 of energy there would be infra-consciousness, or 
 that from which Consciousness as we know it 
 has arisen in process- of Evolution ? " And again, 
 speaking of a dog as having grown from a single 
 fertilised egg-cell : " From what then have its 
 states of consciousness been evolved ? Do we not 
 seem forced by parity of reasoning to answer : 
 From something more simple than consciousness, 
 but of the same order of existence, which answers 
 subjectively to the simpler organic energy of the 
 fertilised ovum" that is, he supposes that asso- 
 ciated with the egg- cell is a subconsciousness 
 of some kind, which expands into the fuller 
 
 1 See chapters iii. and iv. 
 
 2 Contemporary Science Series, pp. 8 and 328. 
 
 3
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 consciousness part passu with the evolution of the 
 egg-cell into the dog. 
 
 Let us assume for the present that Mind and 
 Matter are simultaneous and coextensive. Then 
 on the latter side we have in ascending scale, first, 
 purely inorganic substances (if there are such), 
 then crystals, protoplasmic cells, vegetation, the 
 animal world, man, and whatever beings are 
 superior to man ; while on the mental side cor- 
 responding we have simple attraction and re- 
 pulsion, selective affinity, irritability, sensibility, 
 simple consciousness, self-consciousness, and such 
 higher stages of consciousness as are beyond. 
 Taking this view, we are enabled to abandon the 
 somewhat futile attempts which have been made 
 in all ages to separate Mind and Matter, and to 
 glorify one over the other (sometimes mind 
 over matter, and sometimes matter over mind). 
 These attempts have led mankind into all sorts 
 of bogs, which we may hope now simply to pass 
 by and leave behind. There is a distinction be- 
 tween Mind and Matter (as of two aspects of the 
 same thing), but no real separation. 
 
 This subject is dealt with at more length in 
 the chapter on Matter and Consciousness (chap, 
 iii.). We may say here, however, that the 
 distinction between Mind and Matter forces us 
 to conceive, or try to conceive, of a ' stuff' 
 prior to both a something of which they are 
 the two aspects ; and thus we come to the world- 
 old idea of primitive Being (before all differentia- 
 tion, emanation, or expression), or the ' Will ' of 
 
 4
 
 Preliminary 
 
 the later philosophers (Schopenhauer, Hartmann, 
 Royce, and others). This Will or Being is abso- 
 lutely not thinkable by the ordinary consciousness 
 (except as a necessary ground for other thoughts), 
 for obviously it lies beyond the region of thought. 
 I shall, however, endeavour to show that it is 
 known in the stage of (cosmic) consciousness 
 transcending our ordinary consciousness. The 
 perception of matter and mind as distinct things 
 belongs only to our ordinary (self) consciousness. 
 This distinction is not known in the earlier stage 
 of simple consciousness, and it passes away again 
 in the higher and more perfect stage of the cosmic 
 consciousness. (See chap. iv. on " The Three 
 Stages of Consciousness.") 
 
 Nevertheless, though Matter and Mind are 
 not separable, and may be regarded as two 
 aspects of one reality, there are advantages in 
 cases in treating one as prior to the other. As a 
 rule, since our mental states are the things that 
 are nearest to us and that we know best, it seems 
 wisest to begin from the mental side. Then if 
 we explain material things in terms of mind, we 
 explain things little known in terms of things 
 better known ; whereas if we explain mental 
 things in terms of matter, we are elucidating 
 things inadequately known by means of things 
 less known. Nevertheless the superior definite - 
 ness of the material world over the mental is a 
 great advantage in favour of the former. There 
 are many things which can be clearly seen from 
 the objective side, which would escape us from 
 
 5
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 the subjective ; and a healthy Materialism (side 
 by side with the other view) has its proper 
 and important use, and is by no means to be 
 neglected. 
 
 In addition to the debate as to which is prior, 
 Mind or Matter, there is the further controversy 
 as to which, in the constitution of the Mind 
 itself, comes first and is most fundamental - 
 Feeling or Intellect. This question, however, is 
 not quite on all fours with the other. For the 
 question of Mind and Matter is mainly a meta- 
 physical one, as of two possible aspects of 
 Being ; whereas the other is rather a question\of 
 observation, and of the order of evolution^. I 
 think it will become clear to any one who thinks 
 carefully about the question, that notwithstand- 
 ing a vast amount of interaction between the 
 two, Feeling is more fundamental than Intellect, 
 and prior to it in the order of expression and 
 evolution. Vague desire arises in the mind 
 before ever it takes any form sufficiently definite 
 to be characterised as Thought. This subject, 
 however, I deal with in chap. ii. (" The Art of 
 Creation") more in detail, and I will not dwell 
 upon it here. 
 
 What we have just said about the necessity of 
 positing a state of ' Being ' prior to Mind (as 
 we use that term) and Matter, indicates to us 
 and it is necessary to dwell upon this for a 
 moment that the problem of the Universe is 
 essentially insoluble to our ordinary thought. It 
 is necessary to face Lhis fact fairly and squarely, 
 
 6
 
 Preliminary 
 
 because by blinking it and deceiving ourselves we 
 get landed in hopeless morasses and vain quests. 
 The problem of the Universe is essentially in- 
 soluble without the introduction of some trans- 
 cendent factor Will, Being, the Ego, a Fourth 
 dimension, or whatever we may term it. The 
 ordinary consciousness, forced to see everything 
 under the double form of subject and object, 
 mind and matter, cannot escape this dual com- 
 pulsion ; and yet at the same time its own con- 
 stitution compels it to realise and to assume that 
 there is another order of being (unrepresentable 
 in thought) in which the duality is merged in 
 unity. It is thus, as it were by its own action, 
 driven against a wall which it cannot overpass, 
 and forced to set a barrier to its own further 
 progress ! 
 
 Immensely valuable as is the work which 
 physical Science has done, it suffers from this 
 disability which must be fairly faced, namely, 
 that it never can by any possibility explain the 
 situation, since it moves always on one side of a 
 fixed wall or fence. To pass the fence trans- 
 cendental things have to be assumed, and that 
 means that at a certain point the ordinary mind 
 must throw up the sponge ! The situation would 
 be desperate, were it not that perfectly naturally 
 and inevitably in its due time another order of 
 consciousness opens out, which reconciles subject 
 and object, mind and matter, and having one leg 
 firmly planted on the other side, lifts us gently 
 over the stile ! 
 
 7
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 In the two chapters on " The Self and its Affili- 
 ations," I have assumed that the Ego, a trans- 
 cendental being, descends into and manifests itself 
 in our ordinary world of Time and Space ; and 
 that even as the ego of the tiniest cell it has a 
 potential existence far transcending the minute 
 speck of protoplasm which we can actually see 
 or analyse. This may be thought to be an 
 enormous and unwarrantable assumption, but I 
 have given the reason why assumptions of some 
 such kind are unavoidable. And it may be 
 pointed out that if, endeavoring to keep to the 
 lines of pure physical science, we barred out such 
 assumptions, we should only be landed in an 
 infinity and an unthinkability of another kind. 
 For to understand and define a single tiniest cell, 
 it is a mere truism of science to say, we should 
 have to understand and define all its environ- 
 ment in space and time, or in other words the 
 whole universe. If therefore we find the subject 
 becomes more thinkable by assuming say a fourth 
 dimensional being than by following the ramifica- 
 tions of " matter and force " into infinite space 
 and time, we are quite justified in adopting the 
 former method. 
 
 For while we have to admit on the one hand 
 that these problems cannot be fully worked out 
 by ordinary thought, we are bound on the other 
 hand (and we necessarily desire) to make their 
 solutions as thinkable as possible. Thinkable in 
 some degree our views of the world must be (even 
 if not absolutely true), or else we cannot use them
 
 Preliminary 
 
 in our ordinary lives ; and however, in course 
 of time, our ordinary modes of thought may be 
 illuminated by a superior order of consciousness, 
 they will still retain their importance and their 
 value in their own sphere. 
 
 To show the limits of ordinary thought and 
 the points where the various problems hand them- 
 selves over to other stages of consciousness, is 
 part of the object of this series of papers. It is 
 in these stages of consciousness and their succes- 
 sion (which is a practical matter) that the solu- 
 tion of the great world-problems will, I think, 
 be found. And many of the present riddles of 
 existence, which vex us so, will when we compass 
 the ' cosmic ' stage simply be left lying as 
 matters of no importance not to say left 
 ' lying,' as seen to be the delusive things they 
 are.
 
 II 
 
 THE ART OF CREATION 1 
 
 IN speaking of "The Art of Creation" as there 
 may be some ambiguity about the expression I 
 wish to say that my object is to consider by what 
 process or method things are made to appear and 
 exist in the world. This may seem a bold matter 
 to discuss ; but it has, of course, been the subject 
 of philosophy time out of mind. 
 
 Forty or fifty years ago the materialistic view 
 of the world was much in evidence. We all at 
 that time were automatons ; and it was the 
 fashion to regard human beings as composed of 
 enormous crowds of material atoms, by whose 
 mechanical impacts all human actions were pro- 
 duced, and even certain mental phenomena in the 
 shape of consciousness were evolved as a sort of 
 by-product. Since then, however, partly through 
 a natural reaction and partly through the influx 
 of Eastern ideas, there has been a great swing of 
 the pendulum, and a disposition to posit the 
 Mental world as nearer the basis of existence 
 and to look upon material phenomena rather as 
 the outcome and expression of the mental. In 
 the later part of last century we looked upon 
 
 1 Given originally as an address. 
 10
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 Creation as a process of Machinery ; to-day we 
 look upon it as an Art. 
 
 But as no theory or view of things in general is 
 of much value unless founded on actual observa- 
 tion in detail, I should like the reader to consider 
 how things we know about actually do come into 
 existence. And since it is best in such cases to 
 observe things that are near us and that we know 
 most about, I propose that we should first con- 
 sider how our own Thoughts and Actions and 
 Bodily Forms come into existence. 
 
 Let us take our Thoughts first. We have only 
 to indulge in a few moments' rest, and immedi- 
 ately we become aware that our mind is peopled 
 by a motley crowd of phantoms. We seem to see 
 them springing up of themselves, and almost at 
 random, from the background of consciousness 
 images of scenes, the countenances of friends, 
 concatenations of arguments and of events an 
 innumerable procession. Where does it all come 
 from ? Yet a moment more and we see that the 
 crowd is not a random one, but that it is inspired 
 and given its form by the emotions, the feelings, 
 the desires, lying deep and half-hidden within. 
 We are depressed, and the forms and images that 
 pass before us are those of disaster and fear ; or 
 we are in high spirits and the scenes are scenes 
 of joy and gladness. This is familiar ground, of 
 course, but it may be worth while considering it 
 more in detail. 
 
 Feeling (or desire) lies beneath. Thought is 
 the form which it takes as it comes into the outer 
 
 ii
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 world. 1 Let us take a definite instance. We 
 desire to travel. The desire begins first as a 
 mere vague sense of discomfort or restlessness ; 
 presently it takes shape as a wish to leave home 
 or to visit other regions. It may remain at that 
 for some time ; then it takes somewhat more 
 definite shape as to go to the seaside. Then we 
 consult our wife, we consider ways and means, 
 we fumble through Bradshaw, the thought of 
 Margate comes as a kind of inspiration, and a 
 quite distinct and clearly formed plan emerges. 
 
 Or we wish to build ourselves a house of our 
 own. For a long time this may only be a kind 
 of cloudy pious aspiration. But at last and 
 almost inevitably, the dream of the house takes 
 shape within our minds. We get so far as to 
 make a pencil sketch of what we want. We go 
 
 1 Though there are some who dispute the priority of Feeling, 
 and though undoubtedly there is a great interaction between 
 Feeling and Intellect, so that intellectual states sometimes pro- 
 duce emotional states, and the two are often or even generally 
 intertangled- yet on the whole it is clear, I think, that Feeling 
 is the more fundamental of the two, and prior to I ntellect. Ribot 
 (" Psychology of the Emotions ") mentions various cases in which 
 emotion appears unaccompanied by any intellection as in 
 earliest infancy before perceptions are awakened, or in some 
 cases of disease where vague sadness or dread makes its first 
 appearance without taking any form or having any apparent 
 reason. He thinks there is an "autonomous life of feeling, 
 independent of the intellectual life, and having its cause below" 
 (p. 9). Paul Deussen points out ("Elements of Metaphysics," 
 p. 113) that desire precedes intellect in infancy and survives it 
 in old age ; and Herbert Spencer, in his " Facts and Frag- 
 ments," p. 27, says " the emotions are the masters, the intellect 
 is the servant." We may also notice that in the order of 
 evolution sensation precedes perception, and that a vegetative 
 nervous system appears in the lower animals long before any- 
 thing resembling a brain is developed.
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 and prospect a site. We consult an architect, 
 and presently there emerges a much more definite 
 and detailed plan than before. Then steps are 
 actually taken towards building. Heaps of bricks 
 and stone and other materials begin to appear on 
 the scene ; and at last there is the house standing, 
 which once only existed in the dream-world of 
 our minds. Always the movement is outwards, 
 from the indefinite vague Feeling or desire to the 
 definite clearly formed Thought, and thence to 
 Action and the External world. 
 
 Whatever feeling it is, the result is the same. 
 We harbour within us the desire to injure any 
 one, or the desire to benefit any one. The desire 
 cannot remain at that stage. It must either 
 perish away, or else if it is harboured it will 
 grow. It will grow into definite thoughts and 
 plans of benefit or of injury. And these thoughts 
 and plans will grow into Actions. True, the 
 actions may not be seen immediately ; the 
 thoughts and plans may work unseen for a long 
 time. Still, there they are, working ; there they 
 are making ready the channels for action. And 
 this it is, I suppose, which explains the fact that 
 we all of us at times act so much more heroically 
 than either our neighbours, or even ourselves, 
 expect ; and also, I am afraid, that at times we 
 act so much more meanly. All the time, in 
 silence, thought has been busy within, making 
 ready the channels ; and so one day when a great 
 rush of feeling comes it flows down, and in an 
 instant, as it were, before we have time to say 
 
 13
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 Yea or Nay, has flung itself forth into our 
 actions, and taken form and standing in the 
 visible world. 
 
 And not only is this true of violent feeling, 
 that it finds expression in the visible world ; but 
 even of very quiet feeling the same, if it is also 
 Persistent. If so small a creature as man presses 
 with his hand against the side of a great ship 
 floating in dock, it seems that no result is pro- 
 duced ; yet we know that if he should continue 
 persistently so to press, in time a measurable 
 effect would ensue. And so it is with those 
 smaller calmer currents of desire and feeling 
 within us. If they are always there, always 
 flowing, they will inevitably show themselves 
 in time. Gradually, insensibly, they modify our 
 thoughts, our actions, our habits of action, the 
 movements of our muscles and limbs, the ex- 
 pressions of our faces, the forms of our bodies. 
 Yes, even the forms of our bodies, the forms and 
 outlines of our faces, our expressions and man- 
 ners, and the tones of our voices all the things 
 that go to make up our appearance in the world 
 are, I will not say entirely the result (since 
 Heredity and other things have to be considered), 
 but plainly to a very great extent the result and 
 expression of those dim feelings and emotions, 
 which, welling up in the hidden caverns of the 
 mind, gradually press forward and outward into 
 the light of day. 
 
 So far, then, we seem to come upon something 
 which we may call a Law of Nature, just as much 
 
 14
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 as gravitation or any other law the law, namely, 
 that within ourselves there is a continual move- 
 ment outwards from Feeling towards Thought, 
 and then to Action ; from the inner to the 
 outer ; from the vague to the definite ; from 
 the emotional to the practical ; from the world 
 of dreams to the world of actual things and what 
 we call reality. 
 
 It will be said, however, that though this 
 general movement of feeling and thought towards 
 the outer and 'real' world may truly be noticed, 
 yet there is an immense and everlasting difference 
 between thoughts and actual things between the 
 sketch of the house in my mind, and the actual 
 house of stone and mortar. The one is a mere 
 dream, an insubstantial phantom inside my brain, 
 which no one but myself can see or feel ; the 
 other is a solid and undeniable fact which would 
 crack my skull and my brain both, if they came 
 into too sudden contact with it. Nevertheless, 
 as I have shown that between a man's thoughts 
 and his actions there is no positive line of sepa- 
 ration that can be drawn ; so I want it to be 
 realised, as we go on, that the house as it exists 
 in the man's brain, and the house as it stands on 
 the hillside, are not two entirely separate things ; 
 that an essential unity enfolds them ; and that 
 the same Art of Creation which is concerned in 
 the production of one is also concerned in the 
 production of the other. 
 
 But first I would say a word about dreams. 
 I have pointed out that in our waking hours 
 
 15
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 continual processions of Thoughts are passing 
 through the mind, stimulated by underlying 
 feeling. In the dreams of sleep we notice the 
 same ebullition of images, only we say, and 
 rightly, that they are more scrappy, more in- 
 coherent, more grotesque. The truth is, doubt- 
 less, that in sleep the higher reasoning centres of 
 the brain are quiescent, and consequently the 
 growth of images takes place more at random 
 and less harmoniously. But what I want you to 
 notice is that the same rule as before governs, 
 and that the dream-images are, for the most part, 
 inspired or evoked by dim underlying feelings. 
 We go to sleep with insufficient covering on, and 
 immediately dream of plunging through snow- 
 drifts, or falling into a crevasse ; or we have 
 eaten a heavy supper, and are haunted by most 
 discomfortable apparitions, which image and 
 represent to us in outward form the discomfort 
 we feel within. That hunger or any other need 
 or desire of the body evokes illustrative dreams 
 is a commonplace remark. A friend of mine in 
 the interior of Africa years ago, with an exploring 
 party, was for eight days without food nothing 
 but a parrot and a mud-fish having been obtained 
 during that time ! He said that one of the worst 
 trials of the starvation was the impossibility of 
 sleep which it brought with it. And when, worn 
 out with fatigue, he did relapse into slumber for 
 a minute or two, it was only to be visited by a 
 most tantalising dream. For at once he beheld 
 what he described as "a most delicious dish of 
 
 16
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 mutton-cutlets " floating towards him. Of 
 course, no sooner did he stretch his hand to 
 seize the prize, than he woke, and the vision 
 departed ; but he said that if during those 
 fateful days he dreamed of that blessed dish 
 once, he dreamed of it a hundred times ! 
 
 Here we see an almost poetic and artistic effort 
 of the slumbering mind to express the underlying 
 desire for food in the most lovely and attrac- 
 tive form which it could devise. And some folk, 
 who are of a literary turn, are not unaccustomed 
 to find themselves composing dream-verses, which 
 are expressive in their way even if not perfect 
 models of composition. An acquaintance of mine, 
 who was accustomed to keep a pencil and paper 
 by his bedside for such occasions, told me that 
 he once woke in the night feeling himself drenched 
 with a sense of seraphic joy and satisfaction, while 
 at the same time a lovely stanza which he had 
 just dreamed lingered in his mind. Quickly he 
 wrote it down, and immediately fell asleep again. 
 In the morning waking, after a while he bethought 
 himself of the precious experience, and turning to 
 look at the words, which he doubted not would 
 make his name immortal, he read : 
 
 Walker with one eye, 
 
 Walker with two, 
 Something to live for, 
 
 And nothing to do. 
 
 Here again we find that the deep feeling in 
 which the sleeper's mind was drenched had got 
 so far as to instinctively clothe itself in rhyme 
 
 17 B
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 and rhythm. This at any rate was an important 
 move in the direction of expression, even though 
 the poetry produced was not of a very high order ! 
 Still, one must feel that the ideal of " something 
 to live for, and nothing to do " was a very blessed 
 and beautiful one in its way ! 
 
 There is a class of dreams which occur not un- 
 frequently under anaesthetics, which are interesting 
 because they illustrate this expressive symbolic 
 quality. There is good reason to believe that 
 under anaesthetics there is a separation effected 
 between the grosser material body and the more 
 subtle and highly conscious part a separation 
 from the connection of pain, and a liberation, so 
 to speak, of the inner being. And it is curious 
 that under anaesthetics dreams so frequently occur 
 in which one seems to be flying or soaring through 
 space with a great sense of joy and liberation. I 
 have heard of many instances. The following 
 rather poetic dream was told me by a friend as 
 consequent on the somewhat prosaic operation of 
 having a tooth removed under gas. He dreamed 
 immediately that he was soaring through space 
 with an intense feeling of freedom and ecstasy. 
 Up and up through the ethereal regions he went 
 till suddenly he popped out on the floor of 
 heaven ! And there (I suppose he had been read- 
 ing Plato) he beheld the twelve gods seated in a 
 semicircle, and filled (as the gods should be) 
 with inextinguishable joy and laughter. And 
 well might they laugh ; for now he became con- 
 scious of himself, there on the floor of heaven, 
 
 18
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 as a small transparent ball of jelly, in the centre 
 of which was a speck, which he knew to be his 
 very self or ego. He also was greatly amused, 
 and was just about to join in the laughter, when 
 he heard behind him a horrible sound, as of the 
 belling of a gigantic bloodhound ; and a sense of 
 awful despair seized him as he realised that his 
 body, with its mouth wide open, was in pur- 
 suit of him. Escape was hopeless ; there was a 
 moment of agony as he was swallowed down ; 
 and then he woke up to find his tooth out ! In 
 a dream like this, though one cannot suppose it 
 to be an accurate description or vision of what 
 actually took place, yet one may well suppose it 
 to be an artistic representation of real facts and 
 feelings, and an endeavour to portray them in the 
 symbols and images of the world we know. 
 
 Thus what I want the reader to notice is that 
 the operation of the mind in dreams is along 
 similar lines to that of our waking hours 
 though naturally not quite so perfect that is, 
 it proceeds from underlying feeling to images and 
 thoughts which represent the feeling, and which 
 continually become more distinct and ' real/ [I 
 need hardly say that I am not here giving a 
 complete theory of dreams, for there may be 
 some dreams that fall under other heads ; but I 
 am simply citing them in illustration of my 
 principle.] 
 
 The tendency is, I say, for all these images 
 evoked in our minds by feeling to grow on us 
 and become more and more distinct and real ; 
 
 19
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 and indeed in dreams we wonder sometimes at 
 the intense reality of the images we see. But 
 it is really quite the same in waking life. We 
 are walking down the street on some errand ; 
 but presently forgetting about our proper business, 
 the mind wanders away just as in dreamland, 
 and we imagine ourselves talking to some friend 
 in Australia, or at the club arguing violently some 
 question with an opponent. The scene grows 
 more and more distinct, more real to us, we 
 become quite lost in it till suddenly we run 
 against the lamp-post ! then of course the dream 
 is dissipated. Something more real than it has 
 arrived. But in the dreams of sleep there is no 
 lamp-post ; and so they go on gathering reality, 
 till they seem as actual to us as the events of 
 the outer world. The chief difference between 
 the thoughts of our waking hours and those of 
 sleep is that the former are constantly corrected 
 and set in order by the presence of the actual 
 world around us, whereas the visions of sleep 
 grow undisturbed like plants in a hothouse de- 
 fended from the winds, or like weeds in a 
 sheltered and neglected corner of the garden. 
 
 That this is so, is shown by the fact that our 
 waking thoughts too can gain the same reality 
 as our dreams if they are only encouraged and 
 defended from outer disturbance. When you sit 
 by the fire in the twilight there is little to dis- 
 tract your attention, and your thoughts in such 
 reveries seem strangely real. I have heard of 
 people who indulged in such day-dreams, carrying 
 
 20
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 them on from day to day, retiring to their rooms 
 always at a certain hour, and taking them up 
 where left the day before, till their life spent 
 in this way seemed as real as their ordinary life. 
 And there are other people, Authors of novels, 
 or Dramatists, who deliberately do this who de- 
 liberately isolate themselves and concentrate their 
 minds till the figures and characters so created 
 become like living men and women. And not 
 only to themselves ; but to the world at large. 
 So that to-day, to every one of us, there are 
 scores of characters created by the great drama- 
 tists and authors, of which it is hard for us at 
 the moment to say whether they are men and 
 women whom we actually remember, or whether 
 they are such creations from books. The truth 
 being that the author with immense labour has 
 projected his own feeling, his own vitality, into 
 figures and forms with such force, that they begin 
 to compete in reality with the figures and forms 
 of the actual world. 
 
 We may then, I think, fairly conclude from 
 what has been said that the same process may be 
 witnessed both in our waking thoughts and in 
 our dreams namely, a continual ebullition and 
 birth going on within us, and an evolution out of 
 the Mind-stuff of forms which are the expression 
 and images of underlying feeling ; that these 
 forms, at first vague and undetermined in out- 
 line, rapidly gather definition and clearness and 
 materiality, and press forward towards expression 
 in the outer world. And we may fairly ask 
 
 21
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 whether we are not here within our own minds 
 witnessing what is really the essential process of 
 Creation, taking place everywhere and at all 
 times in other persons as well as ourselves, and 
 in the great Life which underlies and is the visible 
 universe. 
 
 But it will be said, We can see that the feel- 
 ings in Man clothe themselves in mental images, 
 which he, by throwing his vitality more and 
 more into them, can make practically real to 
 himself; and which by roundabout processes like 
 writing books or setting workmen to build houses 
 he can in time body forth and make real to 
 other folk. But ought he not, if your theory be 
 correct, to be able to throw those mental images 
 direct into the outer world so as to become visible 
 and tangible to others, at once, and without inter- 
 mediate operations ? To which I answer, Dont be 
 in too great a hurry, I believe man has the germ 
 of such power, and will have it in greater degree. 
 But because he can travel so far along the route 
 at present it does not follow that with his yet 
 undeveloped powers he can at once reach the 
 point of being able to project his thoughts in- 
 stantly into the world around him. 
 
 Yet I would like you in this connection to 
 consider a few facts. In the first place, is it not 
 true that in moments of great feeling there 
 flashes something out of people's faces and figures 
 which Is visible at once to those around, and 
 which is intensely real, quite as real as a light- 
 ning flash, or immovable as a mass of rock ? In 
 
 22
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 the second place, has not the modern study of 
 telepathy, by careful and scientific methods, 
 shown pretty conclusively that images can be 
 projected by one mind and be seen or felt by 
 others at a distance ? Thirdly, do not the well- 
 established phenomena of Wraiths, or the Ghosts 
 of those in the act of dying, point in the same 
 direction namely, that in such moments the 
 whole vitality of a person may pour itself out 
 towards a loved one and impress itself power- 
 fully as a real presence on the latter's mind. 
 
 There are other considerations connected with 
 what is called Spiritualism, which are very in- 
 teresting, but which I have not time to dwell 
 on at any length. There seems a mass of evi- 
 dence to show that in connection with so-called 
 mediums in a state of Trance images are evolved 
 which become visible and even tangible to a 
 small circle of people. Now as we have seen 
 that in Reverie, when one's body is at rest and 
 the world around one is still, one's vitality may 
 go into one's thoughts to such a degree as to 
 render them strangely real ; and as in Dreams, 
 when one's body is asleep^ the images become 
 more real still ; so in Trance, which is a still 
 deeper sleep, does it seem quite possible that the 
 inner vitality of the Medium may shape itself 
 into images so far material as to be visible even 
 to other folk. At any rate evidence points in 
 this direction ; and the well-known fact that the 
 Medium is often greatly exhausted after these 
 manifestations, corroborates the idea. For since 
 
 23
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 an author who spends three or four hours in writing 
 a novel or a play thus doing some of the hardest 
 work to which a mortal can devote himself is 
 all the time throwing out his mental vitality to 
 inspire, embody, and create those images which 
 he gives to the world, and in the process 
 naturally is intensely exhausted ; so by a parity 
 of reasoning we should expect that the medium 
 out of whose mind-stuff such images were 
 directly created would be exhausted in even worse 
 fashion. 1 [I may also remind the reader how 
 tiring it is to any one in ordinary sleep to dream 
 excessively.] 
 
 However, leaving these passing illustrations, I 
 will now proceed along the main line of argu- 
 ment. Whatever we may think about the last 
 few remarks, we do see within ourselves a very 
 distinct process in operation. There is the first 
 birth of dim vague Feeling or Desire ; then the 
 growth in clearness and intensity of that Feel- 
 ing ; then its shaping into distinct Thoughts or 
 Images ; till these latter become intensely real to 
 ourselves ; then the descent of Thought and Feel- 
 ing into our Nerves and Muscles, our Habits and 
 Manners, the expression of our Faces, the very 
 forms of our Bodies ; and their ultimate trans- 
 lation into Action, and the results of our actions 
 in the Outer World. Of this process there is no 
 doubt. And thus we see that there is in Man a 
 
 1 Here again I am not attempting to give a complete theory 
 of Spiritualism, but only to show how some of its phenomena 
 illustrate the main contention of my lecture. 
 
 24
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 Creative Thought-source continually in opera- 
 tion, which is shaping and giving form not only 
 to his body, but largely to the world in which 
 he lives. In fact, the houses, the gardens, the 
 streets among which we live, the clothes we 
 wear, the books we read, have been produced 
 from this source. And there is not one of these 
 
 things the building in which we are at this 
 
 
 moment, the conveyance in which we may ride 
 
 home which has not in its first birth been a 
 mere phantom Thought in some man's mind, 
 and owes its existence to that fact. Some of us 
 who live in the midst of what we call Civilisation 
 simply live embedded among the thoughts of 
 other people. We see, hear, and touch those 
 thoughts, and they are, for us, our World. 
 
 But no sooner do we arrive at this point, and 
 see the position clearly, than another question 
 inevitably rises upon us. If, namely, this world 
 of civilised life, with its great buildings and 
 bridges and wonderful works of art, is the em- 
 bodiment and materialisation of the Thoughts 
 of Man, how about that other world of the 
 mountains and the trees and the mighty ocean 
 and the sunset sky the world of Nature is 
 that also the embodiment and materialisation of 
 the Thoughts of other Beings, or of one other 
 Being ? And when we touch these things are 
 we also coming into touch with the thoughts of 
 these beings ? 
 
 It may seem rather absurd to some folk to 
 suppose that rocks and stones and trees and 
 
 25
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 waterspouts can be the expression of any one's 
 thoughts. But that does not prove the thing to 
 be impossible. We know that to primitive 
 savages writing (so familiar to us) appears just 
 such an impossible thing. Some time ago I 
 heard a well-authenticated story of a trader 
 up-country in a distant land, and among a 
 people utterly unused to civilisation, who had 
 each week to send a basket of provisions to 
 another European who lived some miles away. 
 The native who carried the basket was naturally 
 much tempted by the fowls, bread, eggs, or what 
 other things it contained ; and on one occasion, 
 
 O 7 ' 
 
 being overcome, took some of the food, then 
 covered up the basket and delivered it as usual. 
 But the man who received it took up a little 
 piece of paper (which of course contained a list 
 of the articles) from the basket, looked at it, and 
 then said, You have taken a loaf and so many 
 eggs. The native, horror-struck, confessed his 
 sin, and was punished. After which he refrained 
 for some time ; but at last gave way again and 
 of course with the same result. He had a great 
 fear of that little bit of paper. He thought it 
 was fetish, tabu. Not for one instant did it occur 
 to him that those little scratches and dots on it 
 could mean anything, could have any sense. No, 
 he thought the paper was alive, and that it saw 
 what he did, and told the man. So he deter- 
 mined what to do. The next time he felt 
 hungry, he waited till he came to a lonely spot. 
 Then he put the basket down, took out the bit 
 
 26
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 of paper, not without fear and trembling, carried 
 it off a little distance, and hid it behind a rock, 
 where it could not see him or the basket. Then 
 he helped himself freely, and having done so, 
 smoothed the napkin nicely over the top, put the 
 paper back, and delivered the basket as usual. 
 Alas ! it was no use. The paper told all. He 
 was punished again, and from that time he aban- 
 doned the affair as hopeless. 
 
 But if the savage takes a long time to learn 
 that these lines and marks on paper have mean- 
 ing, may it not also take us a long time to learn 
 that these lines of the sea and sunset sky, these 
 forms and colours of the trees and the flowers, 
 are the expression of ideas waiting perhaps 
 through the ages for their interpreters. 
 
 It is curious that we admit intelligence in Man, 
 though we cannot prove it. I am hopeful that 
 you perceive some intelligence in me. But you 
 cannot absolutely -prove that I feel and think : for 
 all you know I may be merely a cleverly-made 
 automaton. You only infer that I feel and think 
 from a comparison of my actions and movements 
 with your own. And so, on the same grounds, 
 we infer intelligence in dogs and monkeys, be- 
 cause their movements still resemble ours in some 
 degree. [But we must remember that Descartes 
 and other philosophers have contended that 
 animals were merely machines or automata 
 without feeling ; and certainly one is almost 
 obliged to think that some of our vivisecting Pro- 
 fessors adopt the same view.] When, however, 
 
 27
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 we come to creatures whose movements do 
 not much resemble ours, like worms and oysters 
 and trees, it is noticeable that we become very 
 doubtful as to whether they feel or are conscious, 
 and even disinclined to admit that they are. Yet 
 it is obviously only a question of degree ; and if 
 we allow intelligence in our fellow men and 
 women, and then in dogs, horses, and so forth, 
 where and at what particular point are we to draw 
 the line ? In fact, it is obvious that the main 
 reason why we do not allow intelligence in an 
 oyster is because we do not understand and 
 interpret its movements as well as we do those 
 of a dog. But it is quite conceivable that to one 
 of its own kind another oyster may appear the 
 most lovely and intelligent being in creation. 
 
 Certainly it is quite probable that the feeling 
 and consciousness in an oyster or a tree is different 
 and less extended than in a man or a dog ; but 
 that in its order and degree it is quite as intense 
 and definite I hardly doubt. 
 
 What is it that before all convinces us that 
 there is an intelligent Self in our fellow-man ? It 
 is that he has a Will and Purpose, a Character, 
 which, do what you will, tends to push outwards 
 towards Expression. You put George Fox in 
 prison, you flog and persecute him, but the 
 moment he has a chance he goes and preaches 
 just as before. And so with all of us. Our lives, 
 despite all the blows of fortune and misfortune, 
 spring again and again from a mental root which 
 we recognise as our real selves : which we want
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 to express, which we must express, and to express 
 which is our very life. But take a Tree, and you 
 notice exactly the same thing. A dominant Idea 
 informs the life of the Tree ; persisting, it forms 
 the tree. You may snip the leaves as much as 
 you like to a certain pattern, but they will only 
 grow in their own shape. You may cut off a 
 branch, and another will take its place. You 
 may remove a small twig, and even that twig 
 will have within it the pervading character or 
 purpose, for if you plant it in the ground, an- 
 other tree of the same shape will spring from it. 
 Finally, you may cut the tree down root and 
 branch, and burn it, but if there is left a single 
 seed, within that seed in an almost invisible 
 point lurks the formative ideal, which under 
 proper conditions will again spring into life 
 and expression. 
 
 I need hardly remind you here how exactly 
 similar to that seed, is the little compressed 
 Desire or Need which at the very beginning of 
 this argument we saw, as it were, lurking in the 
 human breast, and which afterwards, under the 
 proper conditions, grew out into a House or 
 some other great objective result in the external 
 world. Look at the huge network of Railways, 
 now like an immense Tree, with endless branches 
 encircling the globe. Once that Tree slept in 
 the form of a little compressed Thought or 
 feeling in the breast of George Stephenson, the 
 collier-lad, and unbeknown and invisible to any 
 but himself. 
 
 29
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 And now, at this time of year, there are lying 
 and being buried in the great Earth thousands 
 and thousands of millions of seeds of all kinds of 
 plants and trees, which during the long winter 
 will slumber there like little dream-images in the 
 brain of the great globe, waiting for their awaken- 
 ing. 1 And when the Spring comes with the 
 needful conditions, they will push forward to- 
 wards their expression and materialisation in 
 the outer world, even as every thought presses 
 towards its manifestation in us. 
 
 Thus, as we think about it, it becomes more 
 and more possible to see that this solid earth, 
 and the great liquid sea, and even the midnight 
 sky with its wonderful starry systems which from 
 dream-like nebulae have gradually through the 
 ages cohered into definite and one may say living 
 organisms that this great world of Nature, just 
 as much as the world of Man, is the panorama of 
 a conscious life ever pressing forward towards 
 Expression and Manifestation ; and that these 
 dots and scratches in the writing, these stones and 
 stars and storms, are words appealing to us con- 
 tinually for our loving understanding and inter- 
 pretation. We conclude the intelligence of our 
 friends because we should find it absurd and im- 
 possible to place ourselves on a lonely pinnacle 
 and look upon those we love as automatons. 
 
 1 Who knows but what our brains in the same way are full 
 of tiny atoms seed-atoms of desire and purpose which lie 
 there silent and compressed, till conditions liberate them to 
 long trains of action in the drama of humanity ? 
 
 3
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 And in the same way, in proportion as we come 
 to love and understand the animals and the trees 
 and the face of Nature shall we find it impossible 
 to deny intelligence to these. Certainly there are 
 times, as for instance in looking at some beautiful 
 landscape or sunset sky, when not only we seem 
 to perceive, as the Greeks did, separate presences 
 or spirits in the trees and the plants and the 
 streams, but we seem to feel the overshadowing 
 of a universal Mind " A sense sublime," as 
 Wordsworth has it, 
 
 "Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean, and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man 
 A motion and a spirit that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls thro' all things." 
 
 Creation, then, is not an almighty/*?/, by which 
 things are suddenly out of nothing given form 
 and solidity or if it is, it is a process of which 
 we have no experience, and which is unintelligible 
 to us. On the other hand we cannot regard it as 
 a fortuitous concourse of material atoms, because 
 we have no experience of such atoms or of their 
 existence ; and if Creation were such a concourse 
 of senseless things, it would be itself senseless and 
 mere nonsense (which it certainly is not). But it 
 is a process, I take it, which we can see at any 
 time going on within our own minds and bodies, 
 by which forms are continually being generated 
 from feeling and desire ; and, gradually acquiring 
 
 31
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 more and more definition, pass outward from the 
 subtle and invisible into the concrete and tangible. 
 This process, I say, we can observe within ourselves 
 in the passage from Emotion to Thought, and 
 from these again to Action and the External 
 world. It is the foundation of all human Art. 
 The painter, the sculptor, the musician are for 
 ever bringing their dreams of Beauty and Perfec- 
 tion forward from the most intimate recesses and 
 treasure-houses of their hearts and giving them a 
 place in the world. And not only the Artist 
 and Musician, but every workman who makes 
 things does the same. The world of Man is 
 created by this process ; and I have given reasons 
 for supposing that the world of Nature is con- 
 tinuous with that of man, and that there too 
 innumerable Beings are for ever labouring to 
 express themselves, and so to enter into touch 
 and communication with each other. 
 
 [The reader may say there is no evidence that 
 man ever produces a particle of matter directly 
 out of himself; and I will admit that is so. But 
 there is plenty of evidence that he produces 
 shapes and forms, and if he produces shapes and 
 forms that is all we need ; for what matter is in 
 the abstract no one has the least experience or 
 knowledge. All we know is that the things we 
 see are shapes and forms of what we call matter. 
 And if (as is possible and indeed probable) Matter 
 is of the same stuff as Mind only seen and 
 envisaged from the opposite side then the shapes 
 and forms of the actual world are the shapes and 
 
 32
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 forms of innumerable Minds, our own and others, 
 thus projected for us mutually to witness and to 
 understand. However, there I leave the argu- 
 ment.] 
 
 I will only, in conclusion, say that in this view 
 Creation is a stupendous and perpetually renewed 
 work of Art, an everlasting evolution and ex- 
 pression of inner meanings into outer form, 1 not 
 only in the great whole, but in every tiniest part ; 
 
 Nature is a great vehicle, an innumerable network 
 
 P 
 and channel of intelligence and emotion ; and 
 
 this whole domain of the universe the theatre 
 of an immense interchange of conscious life. 
 Countless hosts of living beings, of every grade 
 of organisation and consciousness, are giving 
 utterance to themselves, expressing and unfolding 
 that which is within them even as every child of 
 man from birth to death is constantly endeavour- 
 ing to express and unfold and give utterance to 
 what lies within him. With incredible speed the 
 messages of these intelligences flash through space ; 
 " the Morning Stars sing together " ; the messages 
 of light and sound and electricity and attraction 
 penetrate everywhere ; and as modern science 
 shows us that the air, the sea, and the solid frame 
 of the earth itself may be the vehicle of waves 
 which without wire or definite channel may yet 
 convey our thoughts safely to one another 
 
 1 I have in this paper dwelt only on this one aspect of the 
 World and Existence that of its movement outwards its 
 generation and birth. There is of course and necessarily, an 
 opposite aspect of equal importance that of its absorption and 
 involution from the outer to the inner. 
 
 33 C
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 through intervening leagues of distance, so surely 
 we must believe that the countless vibrations ever 
 going on around, and ever radiating from and 
 impinging on every known object, are messengers 
 too of endless meaning and feeling. 
 
 The intelligences which constitute the universe 
 are doubtless of infinite variety and of infinite 
 gradation in development. Some may find 
 expression in a mere point of space, others may 
 enclose a planet or a solar system. Some are 
 harmonious and accordant together ; others may 
 be as we well know in violent mutual hostility 
 or warfare. Yet in the end they are included. 
 To regard the world as simply an arena of 
 separate warring beings and personalities is im- 
 possible, because (as all Science, Philosophy, and 
 Experience convince us) there is inevitably a vast 
 unity underlying all ; and all these beings and 
 personalities must root down in one ultimate 
 Life and Intelligence ; all of them in the end 
 and deep down must have a common purpose 
 and object of existence and in that thought 
 there is liberation, in that thought there is rest. 
 
 34
 
 Ill 
 
 MATTER AND CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 THE world consists of what is (or can be) 
 known or perceived. There is no other world 
 obviously that we know or can know anything 
 about. 
 
 But what is this act of knowing, which is so 
 important ? 
 
 Every act of knowing involves three aspects, 
 which we cannot avoid, and under which (by the 
 present nature of our minds) we are forced to re- 
 gard it. There is (i) the knower or perceiver, 
 (2) the knowledge or perception, (3) the thing 
 to be known or perceived. I say we cannot 
 imagine the act of knowledge or perception ex- 
 cept in this triple form. 
 
 For the first analysis of the conception of 
 knowledge implies and compels the thought of 
 a knower either oneself or some one else. If 
 it is our own knowledge, then we cannot avoid 
 the thought of self as the knower ; if it is 
 knowledge in some far planet, totally beyond 
 our sphere, still we are forced to think of it 
 as entertained by some being, be it beetle or 
 angel, who is thus the knower. And without 
 
 35
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 some knower the conception of knowledge is (to 
 us) meaningless. 1 
 
 Similarly the act of knowledge at first analysis 
 yields a " thing to be known" ; we cannot avoid 
 thinking there is something of which we have 
 the knowledge or perception. If an impression 
 is made on our mind the very word connotes, 
 as Herbert Spencer says, " something that im- 
 presses as well as something that is impressed," 
 or, in other words, the " modification of our 
 mind " which we call knowledge compels us to 
 look for something which causes the modification. 
 We are startled by a thunder-clap ; instantly we 
 ask, What is the thunder, what is behind it ? 
 We are told that it is Zeus, or God, or Elec- 
 tricity. The answers do not bring us much 
 further, but they indicate the conviction that 
 there is "something." This habit of the mind 
 of positing a something behind and different from 
 the knowledge itself may be foolish, but it 
 is apparently quite inveterate and unavoidable. 
 Though we do not seem able to say what the 
 " thing known " is, we seem to see quite clearly 
 that is not the knowledge. Here is a violet. 
 
 1 Thus J. F. Ferrier in his " Institutes of Metaphysics" gives 
 it as his first and foundation proposition that "Along with what- 
 ever any intelligence knows it must, as the ground or condition 
 of its knowledge, have some cognisance of itself" j and later, 
 " The objective and the subjective part do together constitute 
 the unit or minimum of knowledge." Sir William Hamilton also 
 says, " In the act of perception Consciousness gives us a con- 
 joint fact, an Ego or mind, and a Non-Ego or matter, known 
 together and contradistinguished from each other." Some 
 modern psychologists have endeavoured to impugn this view, 
 but not very successfully. (See note, p. 70, chap, v.) 
 
 36
 
 Matter and Consciousness 
 
 The least thought shows us that the colour of 
 the flower is largely in our own sensations. The 
 same of its odour. We know that such colours 
 and smells appeal differently to different eyes and 
 noses. What then is the violet " in itself" ? We 
 do not know ; we are tempted to say that it cer- 
 tainly is not the violet that we see and smell. Yet 
 we are compelled to believe that there is an entity 
 there. And in all our knowledge and perception, 
 whatever it may be, we cannot get over this ascrip- 
 tion of an Objective side to it, as well as of a Sub- 
 jective. Even in our dreams, those most tenuous 
 phantoms, we are oppressed with a sense of their 
 " reality." 
 
 The distinction of Subject and Object is funda- 
 mental in our minds (as at present constituted). 
 Practically all the philosophers agree in this 
 and there are not many things that they do 
 agree about. All our knowledge implies and 
 involves these two aspects. There is always an 
 Ego side to it, and always a Non-Ego side. 
 Consciousness to use the simile of Ferrier is 
 like a stick. It has two ends, and without the 
 two ends we cannot imagine it. All knowledge, 
 be it great or small, simple or complex, has two 
 poles, the subject and the object. The least atom 
 of the knowledge (as in a magnet) has the same con- 
 stitution. All our knowledge is saturated and inter- 
 penetrated by the union and distinction of subject 
 and object. And we are compelled to think it so. 1 
 
 1 Kant's doctrine of Causality as a necessary form of the 
 understanding comes to the same thing. The experience, 
 
 37
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 Nevertheless, it need hardly be said, this an- 
 alysis, in young children, animals, and very primi- 
 tive folk, scarcely takes place. The knower, the 
 knowledge, and the thing known are in experi- 
 ence undistinguished, darkly confused together, 
 as it were one ; the Ego quite dim, only now 
 and then, so to speak, suspected ; the thing to be 
 known and the knowledge frankly unseparated. 
 This may be called the state of simple conscious- 
 ness. Yet again we, considering it, are com- 
 pelled, if we believe there is knowledge, to believe 
 also there is a Knower and a Known, an ego 
 side and an object side even though these 
 sides, in the simple consciousness, have not yet 
 become separated. 
 
 Once then the Nature of knowledge, as above 
 indicated, is seized, many things easily follow. 
 
 In the first place, it is obvious that Matter, per 
 se, as an independent entity supposed apart from 
 some act of knowledge, is absolutely unknown to 
 us. Matter, of course, is a general and in its 
 way useful term for the supposed objective entity 
 underlying phenomena and our sensations. I say 
 that to figure this entity as independent and apart 
 from mind is impossible. For knowledge is the 
 subject plus the object, the object plus the subject. 
 It is, and always must be, relative in some degree 
 to the Subject or Ego. Something therefore 
 not relative to any ego or subject, but having an 
 
 whatever it is, is at once conceived as having a cause ; and 
 this cause is projected into space, as the object. Thus subject 
 plus object is the necessary form of Thought. 
 
 38
 
 Matter and Consciousness 
 
 independent non-mental existence of its own, can- 
 not be known. It cannot even be imagined. The 
 instrument or act of knowledge being itself partly 
 subjective can only at best give us information 
 of some joint relation between self and the sup- 
 posed external entity ; and if the " thing outside " 
 can exist without relation to any self or ego, all 
 knowledge is absolutely silent about it. If there 
 is an objective and material " violet " existing inde- 
 pendent of any conscious mind (either its own or 
 any other), we know and can know nothing what- 
 ever about it. 1 
 
 It follows, therefore, that all the talk about a 
 mechanical structure of the universe as of dead 
 ' matter,' which, apart from any kind of con- 
 sciousness, moves in obedience to laws of its own; 
 and all the talk about senseless atoms which fly 
 and spin and collide and rebound, and so by 
 unwitting mechanical or chemical processes build 
 up the world we see, is itself senseless, and may 
 be at once dismissed, not only as having no mean- 
 ing, but as being incapable of meaning to us. We 
 cannot think such matter or such atoms, and the 
 
 1 " Some truths there are/' says Berkeley, " so near and 
 obvious to the mind, that a man need only open his eyes 
 to see them. Such I take this important one to be, to wit, 
 that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in 
 a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of 
 the world, have not any subsistence without mind ; that their 
 being is, to be perceived or known ; that consequently so long 
 as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my 
 mind, or that of any other created spirit, they must either have 
 no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal 
 spirit." 
 
 39
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 more we try the more we see our inability. 
 Atoms there may be ; but if we are to think 
 them, we must think them as related to Mind 
 either as being centres of consciousness them- 
 selves, or as being outlying elements (thoughts) 
 in wider systems of consciousness. We may, of 
 course, think them as being our own thoughts 
 about an unknown objective world (which no 
 doubt they to a large extent are) ; or again, we 
 may think them as thoughts conveyed to us by 
 another mind or minds (in which case the objec- 
 tive world is conceived of as mental in character). 
 But as ' matter ' which might conceivably remain 
 and pursue its course even in a world from which 
 intelligence had departed, we cannot think them. 
 Again, as " dead Matter " is nonsense, so is 
 another term, lately much used, namely, " un- 
 conscious Thought." The very expression is of 
 course self-contradictory. If there is thought, 
 there is consciousness of some kind ; we cannot 
 imagine it otherwise. In strict language the 
 expression is nonsense. But loosely we know 
 that it is used to indicate that in sleep and at 
 other times processes resembling thought seem 
 to go on (either in portions of our minds or 
 bodies or elsewhere), of which we have no con- 
 sciousness or memory, but of which we use 
 the results. Now, of this there may be two 
 interpretations : either we may suppose conscious 
 thought (in a strict sense i.e. conscious to our 
 own or to some other self) to be really going on 
 in the region indicated ; or we may suppose (and 
 
 40
 
 Matter and Consciousness 
 
 this is the view I think most generally enter- 
 tained) that non-conscious cerebral, mechanical, 
 and chemical changes are taking place which 
 simply turn out at last a result translatable, and 
 so made use of, as conscious thought. 
 
 Now the latter supposition we must dismiss ; 
 for we have already seen that non-conscious 
 mechanical and chemical actions convey no 
 meaning to our minds and are really inconceiv- 
 able. We are therefore compelled to adopt the 
 former supposition, namely, that " unconscious 
 Thought " is really conscious thought of some 
 kind, but inherent in or related to another self 
 than our own. And anyhow it is far simpler, 
 and more natural and intelligent, to suppose 
 this than to call in by way of explanation a 
 mechanical non-conscious process which, when 
 we come to look into it, proves meaningless 
 and unimaginable to us, and therefore to be no 
 explanation at all. 
 
 In the third place, from the Nature of know- 
 ledge it follows that, like Matter, the Ego, per 
 se, as an independent entity supposed apart from 
 some act or possible act of knowledge, cannot 
 be even' conceived to exist. For the knower, 
 the knowledge, and the known are one from 
 the beginning ; and though the one differentiates 
 into three aspects, we cannot separate these 
 aspects. The stick has two ends, but we 
 cannot separate the end from the stick. And 
 if we could, what satisfaction were it to have an 
 end without a stick ?
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 Of the Ego we have a consciousness, but only 
 in the act of perception or knowledge (which at 
 the same moment involves the consciousness of 
 the Non-Ego). When there is no act of know- 
 ledge, there is no consciousness of the Ego. 
 [But, as we shall presently see, when the know- 
 ledge becomes perfect knowledge, then the con- 
 sciousness of the Self also becomes complete.] 
 We cannot be conscious of our ego as unrelated 
 and independent ; for consciousness (in the ordi- 
 nary sense) of course means relation. 
 
 This consciousness of the ego, present in the 
 act of knowledge, gradually evolves, as we have 
 seen, and becomes distinct ; indeed, it becomes to 
 us the most real thing in the world. It pursues 
 us everywhere ; we refer everything to it. Yet it 
 remains curiously simple and unanalysable. We 
 cannot avoid it ; but we cannot analyse it, for the 
 simple reason that as soon as it is envisaged // 
 becomes the Object, and the real Ego is found 
 to be again at the hither end of the stick. This 
 action is very curious. However intimate the 
 Thought one may entertain, the Ego is instantly 
 beneath it, and more intimate suggesting the 
 idea that it (the ego) is a kind of widely-dif- 
 fused substance of Mind, of which thoughts are 
 modifications. Indeed, the idea is suggested that 
 possibly all egos are in essence the same that 
 they are portions or branches of one universal 
 mind-stuff, of which all thoughts and existences 
 are modifications. 
 
 However, leaving these last considerations aside 
 42
 
 Matter and Consciousness 
 
 for the moment, we see this curious fact, that 
 while we feel the ego as a simple unity, we are 
 compelled to think it (if we think of it at all) as 
 enormously complex, or, at least, as having the 
 potentiality of enormous complexity. For obvi- 
 ously the self which entertains or is related to 
 all our knowledge and experience cannot be less 
 complex, or have less potentiality of complexity, 
 than the knowledge and experience to which it 
 is related. Consequently, the self appears at once 
 as a simple monad, and an infinite complexity of 
 possible relations. 
 
 In the fourth place, having cleared the ground 
 somewhat, the question arises, Are we now in a 
 position to get a clearer idea of the Non-Ego or 
 of * Matter ' ? If we have some conception of 
 the nature of the ego (as we are compelled to 
 conceive it), does that throw any light on the 
 nature of the non-ego? 
 
 If the ego is impressed, what is that unknown 
 thing which impresses it ? or, If the ego enters 
 into relation, what is that correlative unknown 
 thing which enters into relation with it ? or, to 
 put it in the plural, In a world of egos capable 
 of entering into relation, what are the correlative 
 Objects ? But since there is no such thing as 
 dead Matter, the only answer we can think is : 
 the objects are other egos. The egos enter into 
 relation with each other. 
 
 I say we cannot think otherwise, for we have 
 nothing to place at the other end of the stick, 
 except something similar to what we have at the 
 
 43
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 hither end. We know of nothing else. In all 
 our experience the self and its knowledge are the 
 only things we know of. We may not be right 
 in our surmise, but if we think at all, we are 
 compelled to think thus. There is a certain 
 probability, besides, that one end of the stick is 
 similar to the other. If Subject and Object are 
 correlative, as we are forced to think them, then 
 it is hard not to suppose the object similar in 
 nature to the subject. We conceive the subject 
 as a self or intelligence which is one and yet in- 
 finitely complex and it is difficult not to con- 
 ceive of the correlated object or objects as one 
 or many similar selves one and yet infinitely 
 complex the kind of thing which physical 
 science, along its own ways, is constantly search- 
 ing for and assuming to exist. 
 
 Thus, as in the last chapter, we arrive at the 
 conclusion that Knowledge, Perception, Con- 
 sciousness 1 are messages or modes of communi- 
 cation between various selves words as it were 
 by which intelligences come to expression, and 
 become known to each other and themselves. 
 All Nature all the actual world, as known to 
 us or any being we have to conceive as the 
 countless interchange of communication between 
 countless selves ; or, if these selves are really 
 identical, and the one Ego underlies all thought 
 and knowledge, then the Subject and Object are 
 the same, and the World, the whole Creation, 
 is Self-revealment. 
 
 1 In its ordinary form. 
 44
 
 Matter and Consciousness 
 
 In these few remarks on Matter and Con- 
 sciousness generally I have endeavoured to set 
 out not so much what is, as what we are com- 
 pelled to think, as this indeed seems the safer 
 thing to do. How far what we are compelled 
 to think may be taken as evidence of what is, is 
 another question, which I will not tackle, but 
 which the philosophers deal with. I will only 
 quote the following remark of J. F. Ferrier's, 
 from the Ontology section of his " Institutes of 
 Metaphysics " : " No Existence at all can be con- 
 ceived by any intelligence anterior to, and aloof 
 from, knowledge. Knowledge of existence the 
 apprehension of oneself and other things is 
 alone true existence. This is itself the First, 
 the Bottom, the Origin and this is what all 
 intelligence is prevented by the laws of reason 
 from ever getting beyond or below." 
 
 45
 
 IV 
 
 THE THREE STAGES OF CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 OBSERVATION of the actual facts of life seems 
 to show us pretty distinctly that there are three 
 stages or degrees of Consciousness ; and a con- 
 sideration of the nature of knowledge, as set out 
 in the foregoing paper, would tend to make us 
 expect such three stages. 
 
 There is first the stage of Simple Conscious- 
 ness, in which the knower, the knowledge, and 
 the thing known are still undifferentiated. 
 
 Though we cannot observe this directly, nor 
 draw the exact line at which it begins or ceases, 
 we seem to be able to discern its existence clearly 
 enough in the animals. The thought of self as 
 the knower has not arisen upon them, except in 
 low degree and in a few cases ; and certainly the 
 thought of the object as distinguishable from the 
 knowledge or perception of it has not arisen. It 
 is the same with very young children and some 
 primitive men. And this non-differentiation of 
 the self in consciousness explains in these cases 
 various facts which are puzzling to us. The 
 horse in the field stands out, patient and placid, 
 through hours or days of cold and rain, simply 
 because not having a distinct consciousness of 
 
 46
 
 The Three Stages of Consciousness 
 
 self, it cannot pity itself. It feels discomfort no 
 doubt ; it may feel pain ; but it does not project 
 itself and think with dismay that itself will be 
 feeling this discomfort, this pain, to-morrow. 
 Small babies have little fear, for the same reason. 
 [Nevertheless, Fear in the higher animals and 
 young children apart from a mere instinct of 
 escape is there, and often very strongly ; and 
 this shows us that the consciousness of self is 
 dimly beginning. Fear, in fact, is an inevitable 
 accompaniment and means of the evolution of 
 that consciousness ; it is the midwife of a birth 
 which in the far past of the human race has ac- 
 complished itself with much suffering.] 
 
 The knowledge and perception of animals, 
 therefore, owing to this non-differentiation, and 
 owing to the absence of certain causes of disloca- 
 tion and trouble, is extraordinarily perfect and 
 untampered. It is from the first a part of 
 Nature, and has a cosmic universal quality about 
 it. Their knowledge is, as it were, embedded in 
 the great living intelligent whole (of the world), 
 and therefore each special act of knowledge or 
 perception carries with it a kind of aura or 
 diffused consciousness extending far, far around 
 it. We are aware of this aura or " fringe " of 
 consciousness in ourselves, and the modern 
 psychologists have dwelt much on it. Seton 
 Thompson, in his " Wild Animals I have Known," 
 speaks of them as being "guided by a knowledge 
 that is beyond us " ; and in his description of the 
 wild horse which " in spite of all reasons to take 
 
 47
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 its usual path " came along another and so 
 avoided the pitfall set for it, he says, "What 
 sleepless angel is it watches over and cares for the 
 wild animals ? " and again, " But the Angel of 
 the wild things was with him, and that incom- 
 prehensible warning came." This daemonic or 
 quasi-divine knowledge is as we shall see 
 largely lost in the second stage of consciousness, 
 but restored again in the third. 
 
 The second stage is that in which the great 
 mass of humanity at present is ; it is that in 
 which the differentiation of knower, knowledge, 
 and thing known has fairly set in. 
 
 The consciousness of Self becomes more and 
 more distinct, and with it the consciousness of an 
 object antagonising the Self. Some folk say they 
 remember the moment when, as quite young 
 children, to them with a sense of alarm self- 
 consciousness suddenly came. They were sud- 
 denly terrified at the thought of self, as of a 
 separate item or atom in this vast world. 
 Whether suddenly or gradually, this feeling of 
 course has come to every one. Its arrival can 
 generally be noticed without difficulty in any 
 young child. It is the beginning of a new era 
 in its development, and from that moment life 
 begins to shape round the self. 
 
 But at the same moment, or very shortly after, 
 the child begins to recognise the self in others 
 in its mother and those around. And what 
 is curious and interesting the child ascribes 
 ' selves ' also to toys, stones, and what we call 
 
 48
 
 The Three Stages of Consciousness 
 
 inanimate things. In fact, simultaneously with the 
 appearance of the subject in consciousness comes 
 the appearance of the object in consciousness. It 
 is curious that at these early stages the object of 
 knowledge and the knowledge should be differen- 
 tiated from each other, or begin to be differen- 
 tiated ; but it is so. The child feels not only (as 
 we do) that there is a personality behind the 
 appearance of its mother, but that there is some- 
 thing behind these stocks and stones, and personi- 
 fies them also. So does the savage. It is the 
 period of fetishism, which correlates with and 
 accompanies the first evolution of the idea of 
 self. 1 And in very truth, feeble and inadequate as 
 this ' anthropomorphism ' may be, it will be seen 
 (from what has already been said) that the child, 
 in this respect, is wiser than the man, that its 
 view is really more logical and rational than that 
 of the ' practical ' person who contends that the 
 stocks and stones are the real objects, or who 
 posits, in order to explain them, an ultimate 
 ' matter ' devoid of intelligence. Anthropo- 
 morphism is inevitable to us (in this second stage), 
 and much the best we can do is frankly to 
 accept it. 
 
 Such then is the first birth of self-conscious- 
 ness. But as the evolution of the idea of self 
 goes on, there comes at last a kind of fatal 
 
 1 Later, as the consciousness of the ego evolves, and deepens 
 and lifts, so does the form in consciousness of the object ; and 
 the fetish-beings become gods ; and the gods rise to greater 
 nobility and majesty. 
 
 49
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 split between it and the objective side of things. 
 The kindly beliefs of early peoples in beings 
 similar to themselves moving behind and inspir- 
 ing natural phenomena, and the consequent sense 
 of community of life with Nature, fade away. 
 The subject and object of knowledge drift 
 farther and farther apart. The self is left face 
 to face with a dead and senseless world. Its own 
 importance seems to increase out of all reason ; 
 and with the growth of this illusion (for it is an 
 illusion) the knowledge itself becomes dislocated 
 from its proper bearings, becomes cracked and 
 impotent, and loses its former unity with Nature. 
 Objects are soon looked upon as important only 
 in so far as they minister to the (illusive) self; 
 and there sets in the stage of Civilisation, when 
 self-consciousness becomes almost a disease ; when 
 the desire of acquiring and grasping objects, or of 
 enslaving men and animals, in order to minister 
 to the self, becomes one of the main motives of 
 life ; and when, owing to this deep fundamental 
 division in human nature and consciousness, 
 men's minds are tormented with the sense of sin, 
 and their bodies with a myriad forms of disease. 
 
 Physiologically, this period is marked by the 
 growth of the Brain. In animals the cerebrum is 
 small ; the great sympathetic system of nerves 
 and the cerebro-spinal system are relatively large. 
 The cerebrum is only, as it were, a small organ 
 attached to these systems to subserve their needs. 
 But the growth of the intellect is at first stimu- 
 lated by the growth of the 'self and its needs. 
 
 5
 
 The Three Stages of Consciousness 
 
 And in man the cerebral portion of the brain, as 
 specially the seat of self-regarding relations, rises 
 into immense importance ; and over a long period 
 lapses into a kind of conflict with the great 
 sympathetic system which, without doubt, is 
 the great organ of the emotions. The emotions 
 and the intellect of man for a long period are at 
 variance, and distress and grief ensue in the mind, 
 as (owing to the organic disharmony) pain and 
 disease prevail in the body. 
 
 Finally, with the complete antagonism of sub- 
 ject and object, of 'self and 'matter,' and all 
 the antagonisms which follow in its wake of 
 intellect and emotion, the individual and society, 
 and so forth and the terrible disruptions of life 
 and society which ensue comes the third stage. 
 
 When the illusion of separation is complete 
 and the man has sounded the depths of grief and 
 pain which accompany this illusion, then, one day, 
 often suddenly, the third form of Consciousness 
 dawns, or flashes, upon him that which has been 
 called the Cosmic, or universal, Consciousness. 
 The object suddenly is seen, is///, to be one with 
 the self. The reconciliation is effected. The long 
 process of differentiation comes to an end, and 
 reintegration takes its place. The knower, the 
 knowledge, and the thing known are once more 
 one " Objects turn round upon themselves with 
 an exceedingly innocent air, but are visibly not 
 the same.*' 
 
 This form of Consciousness is the only true 
 knowledge it is the only true existence. And
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 it is a matter of experience ; it has been testified 
 to in all parts of the world and in all ages of 
 history. There is a consciousness in which the 
 subject and the object are felt, are known, to be 
 united and one in which the Self is felt to be the 
 object perceived ("I am the hounded slave"), or 
 at least in which the subject and the object are 
 felt to be parts of the same being, of the same 
 including Self of all. And it is the only true 
 knowledge ; for we saw at the beginning that the 
 knower and the thing known are aspects of the 
 act of knowledge, implicit in it, and not to be 
 separated from it (the knower without the know- 
 ledge, or the thing known without the knowledge, 
 being both unthinkable). Therefore they are 
 really one in the knowledge ; and though a dif- 
 ferentiation takes place in consciousness (thus 
 immensely enriching the knowledge), yet as soon 
 as ever it becomes a separation, and the subject 
 and object are thought of as isolated things, 
 (separate ' selves ' and ' atoms,' for example), it 
 has already passed over into a sphere of illusion 
 and folly, and has become nonsense. The true 
 knowledge, therefore, is that in which the subject 
 and object are known as one ; and is of course a 
 much higher and more perfect form of know- 
 ledge than that first as in the animals when 
 subject and object are one, but never having been 
 distinguished are not known as one. 
 
 When this consciousness comes it brings with 
 it a strange illumination. For the object and the 
 ego are felt to be one, not only through the 
 
 52
 
 The Three Stages of Consciousness 
 
 special act of knowledge which unites them, but 
 deep down in their very essence. A circle is, as 
 it were, completed ; and the external act of know- 
 ledge is no longer merely external, but is trans- 
 formed into a symbol of a vast underlying life. 
 The aura, in fact, of the animals returns with 
 greatly increased intensity : to such a degree, we 
 may perhaps say, that it becomes the main thing, 
 and the object or external experience is only of 
 importance as waking it. It is not merely that 
 the object is seen by the eye or touched by the 
 hand, but it is felt at the same instant from within 
 as a part of the ego ; and this seeing and touching 
 wake an infinite response a reverberation through 
 all the chambers of being such as was impossible 
 before. The knowledge, in fact, loses its tenta- 
 tive illusive form of thought, and acquires a cosmic 
 universal character. It becomes luminous with 
 far-reaching interpretations. 
 
 How shall we denote or explain these things ? 
 It is obvious that mere thought (belonging to the 
 second stage of consciousness) does not and can- 
 not possibly cover them any more than a man 
 can walk a square mile. Thought can and does 
 bring us to the edge of the third stage, and 
 within sight, as it were, of the essential facts 
 of the universe ; and its value, in that respect 
 alone, is immense ; but, like the mule at the 
 edge of the glacier, there is a point where, from 
 the nature of the case, it has to be left behind. 
 We cannot obviously prove the ultimate constitu- 
 tion of things. But that which the third order 
 
 S3
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 of consciousness conveys, we can illustrate and 
 symbolise in thought. 
 
 To illustrate the two orders of consciousness 
 we may, for instance, figure a tree in which two 
 leaves observe each other externally for a long 
 enough time, mutually exclusive, and without 
 any suspicion that they have a life in common. 
 Then the 'self consciousness of one of the 
 leaves deepening inwardly (down the twig or 
 branch), at last reaches the point whence the 
 'self of the other leaf also branches off and 
 becomes aware of its unity with the other. In- 
 stantly its external observation of its fellow-leaf 
 is transformed ; it sees a thousand meanings in 
 it which it never saw before. Its fellow-leaf is 
 almost as much an expression of self as itself 
 is ; for both now belong to a larger self that 
 of the spray or branch from which they depend. 
 
 Or when two strangers, of different race and 
 tongue perhaps, meet, they eye each other with 
 suspicion and misunderstanding, and seem to 
 catch only at the most external knowledge of 
 each other to notice the slant of the brow or 
 the cut of the clothes. But when two folk know 
 each other in the sense of love (love being a 
 consciousness of the third kind), instantly a word 
 or a glance of the eyes, in the external world, 
 reveal abysmal depths in the two selves, and a 
 sense of age-long union. Without the external 
 knowledge the two could not know either them- 
 selves or the other person (since, as we have seen, 
 the self without the knowledge is unthinkable) ; 
 
 54
 
 The Three Stages of Consciousness 
 
 but in the second case the knowledge is trans- 
 formed, and reveals meanings and depths of the 
 self unimagined before. 
 
 In the case of two persons the transformation 
 of knowledge in the third stage of consciousness 
 is easy to understand, since here the so-called 
 subject and object are commonly recognised to 
 be of the same nature, and to have some degree 
 of identity. But in the case of a man observing, 
 say, a tree, we find it more difficult. Yet in truth 
 the process appears to be quite similar. Some 
 people, like Jacob Boehme, the mystic, have been 
 conscious of the hidden qualities of plants and 
 trees they looked on ; l and innumerable instances 
 of ' second-sight,' well authenticated, must con- 
 vince us that, in cases, the direct external act of 
 perception brings with it far outlying and under- 
 lying tracts of knowledge and illumination. The 
 external knowledge is transformed by being 
 brought into relation with the original source 
 of knowledge, i.e. the unity of all beings. It is, 
 in fact, that hidden knowledge realised and made 
 external. To borrow a simile from electricity, 
 the luminous arc springs into being when the 
 circuit is complete, and is the evidence and mani- 
 festation of that completeness. 
 
 This third mode of consciousness is, I say, 
 the only perfect knowledge ; for the first mode 
 (though nearer to the third than the second is) is 
 merely inchoate ; while the second mode is sheer 
 
 1 And it is probable that many primitive folk, as well as 
 animals, have, on an inferior plane, intuitions of the same kind. 
 
 55
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 illusion. It, the second mode, is all built upon 
 the separation of the self from the knowledge 
 and from the object (i.e. from other selves). It 
 is therefore built upon an illusion, and is itself 
 illusion. Its form is not true knowledge, but 
 Thought. Thought is an aspect ; it is the last 
 disintegration of knowledge. It is the fact seen 
 from just one most particular and separate point 
 of view. The (hidden) fact being the unity of 
 my 'self with that of the tree, all my thought 
 about the tree is an attempt to get at that fact 
 from ever -shifting, ever - countless sides; but 
 remains profitless, barren, productive of little 
 but unrest and disappointment till the moment 
 when the reintegration takes place, subject and 
 object close in one, and the innumerable thoughts 
 fusing in the intense heat of union lose their 
 separateness, and merge in perfect light. 
 
 Herbert Spencer touches this point with a kind 
 of unwilling illumination when, speaking of the 
 impossibility of knowing the "substance of Mind," 
 he says, 1 " A thing cannot at the same instant be 
 both subject and object of Thought ; and yet the 
 substance of Mind must be this before it can be 
 known." Certainly, a thing cannot at once be 
 subject and object of thought, i.e. of the second 
 stage of consciousness ; because this stage is built 
 on the separation and antagonism of subject and 
 object. But that a thing may be subject and 
 object of the third stage experience shows ; and 
 the ' thing ' that thus becomes both subject and 
 
 1 "Psychology," i. p. 148. 
 56
 
 The Three Stages of Consciousness 
 
 object is the ' self ' (which corresponds to Spen- 
 cer's " substance of Mind "). Thus we conclude 
 that the self or substance of Mind (though it 
 cannot be known in the second stage) may or 
 must be known in the third stage of conscious- 
 ness ; and indeed that this is the only way in 
 which it can be known. 
 
 Of the existence of this third form of con- 
 sciousness there is evidence all down History ; 
 and witnesses, far removed from each other in 
 time and space and race and language, and per- 
 fectly unaware of each other's utterances, agree so 
 remarkably in their testimony, that there is left 
 no doubt that the experience is as much a matter 
 of fact as any other human experience though 
 the capacity for it is of course not universal. 
 The authors of that extraordinary series of writ- 
 ings, the Upanishads, founded evidently the whole 
 of their teaching on this experience. Their object 
 in the teaching was to introduce others to the 
 same knowledge : 
 
 " He who beholds all beings in the Self, and the 
 Self in all beings, he never turns away from it." 
 
 " When to a man who understands, the Self 
 has become all things, what sorrow, what trouble, 
 can there be to him who once beheld that 
 unity ? " 
 
 " Tat tvam asi, Thou art that, Thou art that," 
 says his father to Svetaketu, pointing to object 
 after object, and trying to make him feel that 
 the subtle essence of all these things is his true 
 Self. 
 
 57
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 "Knowledge has three degrees," says Plotinus 
 " opinion, science, illumination. ... It [the 
 last] is absolute knowledge founded on the iden- 
 tity of the mind knowing with the object known" 
 
 " God is the soul of all things," says Eckhardt, 
 " He is the light that shines in us when the veil 
 [of division] is rent." 
 
 Whitman speaks of the light that came to 
 him : 
 
 " Light rare, untellable, lighting the very light, 
 Beyond all signs, descriptions, languages," 
 
 and says 
 
 " Strange and true, that paradox hard I give, 
 Objects gross and the unseen soul are one." 
 
 And Tennyson, in a well-known passage, dis- 
 tinguishing the ordinary knowledge from the 
 other, says : 
 
 " For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake 
 That sees and stirs the surface- shadow there 
 But never yet hath dipt into the abysm, 
 The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within 
 The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth, 
 And in the million-millionth of a grain 
 Which cleft and cleft again for evermore, 
 And ever vanishing, never vanishes. . . . 
 
 And more, my son ! for more than once when I 
 Sat all alone, revolving in myself 
 That word which is the symbol of myself, 
 The mortal limit of the Self was loosed, 
 And past into the Nameless, as a cloud 
 Melts into Heaven. I touched my limbs, the limbs 
 Were strange not mine andjf/ no shadow of doubt, 
 58
 
 The Three Stages of Consciousness 
 
 But utter clearness, and through loss of Self 
 The gain of such large life as matched with ours 
 Were Sun to spark, unshadowable in words, 
 Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world." 
 
 And so on. 1 But it is not only the great pro- 
 phets and seers who prove to us the existence of 
 another stage of consciousness. For to almost 
 all mankind flashes (or glimmers) of the same 
 thing come in those moments of exaltation or 
 intuition which form the basis of religion, art, 
 literature, and much even of practical life. 
 Schopenhauer, who has written well on Art and 
 Music, says that Art and the sense of Beauty 
 give us the most real knowledge of things, 
 because then we see the object as the " realisa- 
 tion of an Idea " (i.e. as a form, according to 
 him, of the world-soul) ; and the beholder 
 (who has the same world-soul within himself) 
 " becomes the clear mirror of the object," and 
 " the distinction of the subject and object 
 vanishes." And every one, whether he agrees 
 with Schopenhauer or not, must have felt in 
 poetry, music, and art generally, and in all cases 
 where the sense of Beauty is deeply roused, that 
 strange impression of passing into another world 
 of consciousness, where meanings pour in and 
 illuminate the soul, and the " distinction between 
 subject and object " vanishes. 
 
 1 Dr. R. M. Bucke in his great work on " Cosmic Conscious- 
 ness" (Philadelphia, 1901) has gathered together the utterances 
 of a vast number of witnesses, and shown very convincingly 
 their remarkable agreement as to the nature of this conscious- 
 ness. His prefatory essay on its evolution is also instructive. 
 
 59
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 The evidence, I say, for the existence of this 
 third stage of consciousness is ample and con- 
 vincing ; and though to do the subject justice 
 would require a volume, yet we can see even 
 from what has already been said that this cosmic 
 sense is perfectly normal and in the line of human 
 progress, and that it surpasses the ordinary con- 
 sciousness of the second stage as far indeed as that 
 surpasses the first. 
 
 It is indeed, from its very nature, as already 
 explained (i.e. union of subject and object), the 
 only true and absolute knowledge, and this view 
 of it is corroborated by the testimony of those 
 who have experienced it. It is also the only true 
 existence (at least that we can imagine), for, as we 
 have seen, the world consists of what is known, 
 i.e. of what enters into consciousness. Con- 
 sciousness is existence ; and the perfect conscious- 
 ness is the perfect and true existence. That 
 universal consciousness by and in which the 
 subject knows itself absolutely united to the 
 object is absolute Being. 
 
 All things, and the whole universe of space 
 and time, really exist and are in this third state ; 
 a state where every object (or portion of the 
 whole) is united to every other object (or 
 portion) by infinite threads of relation l such 
 infinitude of relations constituting the universal 
 consciousness as embodied in that object. This 
 
 1 Such a state is, of course, assumed by all physical science 
 as the ground of its operations ; and it is the (illusive) dream 
 of science to be able to completely analyse it. 
 
 60
 
 The Three Stages of Consciousness 
 
 is the state of absolute Being in which all things 
 are, and from which the things which we ordi- 
 narily see and know proceed by disintegration or 
 ignorance. It is the state from which they lapse 
 or fall by disintegration into ordinary conscious- 
 ness or thought. That is to say, the real tree 
 exists and can be seen in the resplendent light of 
 the universal consciousness ; but the tree which 
 we ordinarily look upon is only the merest aspect 
 of its infinitude, a few isolated thoughts or rela- 
 tions which the botanist or the woodman may 
 happen to separate off and call the tree (the 
 method of Ignorance). 
 
 All the universe exists, and is in this third state 
 of consciousness ; but we in the strange condition 
 of illusion which belongs to the second stage 
 exiles from the Eden-garden, persuaded of the 
 separateness of our individual selves, and unable 
 to enter into true knowledge are content to 
 gnaw off tiny particles, which we call thoughts, 
 from the great Reality. Assimilating and digest- 
 ing these as best we can, we are persuaded that 
 some day, putting all the results together, we 
 shall arrive at the Reality. But the quest by this 
 method is obviously hopeless. Infinities of in- 
 finity stretch before us, and vistas of brain- 
 gnawing misery. Arrive doubtless we shall, but 
 it will be by another route. One day when man 
 has passed the ' rodent ' stage he will enter quite 
 naturally and normally into another world of being, 
 surpassing that in which he now lives, as much 
 as the present surpasses the world of simple 
 
 61
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 consciousness belonging to the snail or the fish. 
 Then, though he will perceive that his illusions 
 of 'thought' and 'self have not directly 
 opened the door for him, he will find that they 
 have fitted him for a realisation of the Truth, 
 such as perhaps he could have obtained in no 
 other way. 
 
 62
 
 V 
 
 THE SELF AND ITS AFFILIATIONS 
 
 WE have seen three things in the two preceding 
 papers ( I ) that we first become conscious of the 
 ego as part of the act of knowledge, and appar- 
 ently inseparable from it ; (2) that there is a 
 stage of meagre false knowledge connected with 
 the illusion of a separate self; and (3) a stage of 
 full, vastly-extended knowledge connected with 
 the (restored) sense of union between the ego and 
 the object. 
 
 We have now to see how far we can get a 
 clearer idea of what we mean by the ego or self. 
 
 But as a preliminary we may lay down two pro- 
 positions, which will be useful later on. Firstly, 
 though we are not conscious of the self except in 
 some act of knowledge or consciousness of an 
 object, and though consequently we cannot think 
 of the self as existing altogether apart from 
 knowledge, we can think of it as going to know, 
 or having known (i.e. as potential of knowledge). 
 Thus I think of myself as existing in sleep, as an 
 ego that did know yesterday, or will know to- 
 morrow, or I think of myself as perduring from 
 one act of knowledge to the next, and so as it 
 
 63
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 were forming a link between the two acts. This 
 does not of course prove that I do so exist ; and 
 many psychologists argue that this idea is an 
 illusion, and that the ego simply perishes in sleep, 
 or with each act of knowledge the reappearing 
 ego in each case being an entirely new one. But 
 practically we think as I have indicated ; and in 
 fact life being founded on this assumption (of the 
 possibility of the duration of the ego in an un- 
 manifested condition) we accept it until such 
 time as we find some explanation more adequate 
 and satisfying. 1 
 
 Secondly, this thought of the self as ante- 
 cedently capable or potential of knowledge com- 
 pels us to think of the knowledge as in some 
 degree dependent on the self. In other words, 
 since knowledge is always relative to the subject, 
 the subject in every case contributes something 
 without which the knowledge (at any rate in that 
 form) would not exist. This flows obviously 
 from things that have already been said, and it 
 might seem unnecessary to dwell upon it ; but it 
 has important bearings. 
 
 Practically the matter is very evident. Not 
 only awaking from sleep do we immediately 
 recognise what the objects around us are, because, 
 in fact, we have the memories or images of them 
 already in our minds ; but the simplest observa- 
 tion of things involves a similar antecedent 
 condition the knowing what to look for. How 
 
 1 We shall see later that there is reason to believe that the ego 
 in sleep passes into the third stage of consciousness. 
 
 64
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 hard to "find the cat" in the picture, or the 
 wood-cock in the autumn leaves, till the precise 
 image of what one wants to see is already in the 
 mind, and then, how easy ! The townsman 
 walking along the high-road perceives not the 
 hare that is quietly watching him from the 
 farther field. Even when the countryman points 
 it out with all circumstance, he fails ; because the 
 kind of thing he is to see is not already in his 
 mind. Why is it so difficult to point the con- 
 stellations to one who has never considered them 
 before ? The sky is simply a mass of stars, it is 
 the mind that breaks it into forms. Or why, look- 
 ing down from a cliff upon the sea, do we isolate 
 a wave and call it one ? It is not isolated ; no 
 mortal could tell where it begins or leaves ofF; it 
 is just a part of the sea. It is not one ; it is millions 
 and millions of drops ; and even these millions 
 are from moment to moment changing, moving. 
 Why do we isolate it and call it one ? There is 
 some way of looking at things, some preconception, 
 already at work, in all cases, which determines or 
 helps to determine, what we see, and how we see 
 it. All nature thus is broken and sorted by the 
 mind ; and as far as we can see this is true of the 
 simplest act of discrimination or sensation the 
 knower selects, supplies, ignores, compares, con- 
 tributes something without which the discrimina- 
 tion or sensation would not be. 
 
 Every one has experienced the magic of the 
 musician, " that out of three sounds he frame, 
 not a fourth sound, but a star." The three first 
 
 65 E
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 notes are mere* sounds, noises; but with the 
 fourth, the phrase, the melody, the meaning, 
 suddenly descends upon us from within ; an 
 answer comes from the background of our minds 
 which transforms mere noise into music. Brown- 
 ing suggests that this magic is exceptional ; but it 
 is universal. All life is made of it. When the 
 phrase or the melody have come to vibrate with 
 meaning, then concatenations of phrases and 
 melodies roll up into the huge symphony, which 
 now we call an inspiration though once it too was 
 only noise. So too the incidents, the events, the 
 meanings of life roll up. The trees, the moun- 
 tains, people's forms and features, become lumin- 
 ous. Why do you see expressions, motives, 
 emotions, in folk's faces, broad as day, which 
 others never even suspect or imagine ? The lines, 
 the movements, are the same for everybody ; but 
 it is your mind that interprets. Always these 
 knockings going on at the outer door of ourselves, 
 and always something from within descending to 
 answer and ever new and newer answers as the 
 years go on. 
 
 Nor does it seem by any means sufficient to 
 explain these answers in each case as merely the 
 result of summations or associations of previous 
 experiences partly because of the very newness 
 of the answer (as of the ' star ' in the music, or 
 the expression on a loved one's face things which 
 though they may be called forth by experience 
 are like no other experience) ; and partly because, 
 as I have hinted, when we go back to the most 
 
 66
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 primitive sensations we seem to find the same 
 thing. Buried in the Self from the beginning are 
 these affections. Browning indeed does not men- 
 tion that exactly as the melody though made of 
 or provoked by four sounds was utterly different 
 from the four sounds or their summation, so 
 each musical sound itself was a ' star ' in com- 
 parison to the air-pulses that provoked //. Why 
 should 270 taps in a second on the drum of the 
 ear call forth the fairy C* from the hidden 
 chambers within ? or so many billions on the 
 retina the magical and beautiful colour of blue ? 
 We cannot resist the conclusion that the qualities 
 of things, the bitter, the sweet, the rough, the 
 smooth, the lovable, the hateful, the musical, the 
 brilliant are given already in the mind, though 
 elicited by the outward phenomena, whatever 
 they are ; and that, allowing all we may for the 
 gradual building up of knowledge from outside 
 and its gradual transformation, there remain 
 nevertheless the forms under which we receive 
 this knowledge from the mere sensations of 
 touch or taste or colour or sound, up through the 
 moral and mental qualities, to such things as the 
 sense of self or of duty, and far beyond which 
 in a vast and ascending scale the ego, or 
 hidden knower, contributes as its share to the solu- 
 tion of the marvellous problem ! 
 
 Having then cleared the ground somewhat by 
 means of these two preliminary propositions (i) 
 that the self or ego may (provisionally) be thought 
 of as existent in sleep or in an unmanifested 
 
 67
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 condition ; and (2) that it must be thought of as 
 contributing the (or a) formative element in the 
 knowledge which comes to it we may proceed 
 farther on the way. 
 
 And first let us take, with respect to the nature 
 of the self, the evidence of the third stage of 
 Consciousness, such as we have it. We saw that 
 in this third stage the subject and object are seen, 
 are known, to be united, to be essentially one. 
 This is the unanimous declaration of the witnesses, 
 and we know also that the witnesses are by no 
 means few or insignificant in the history of the 
 world. If then we accept their evidence we must 
 believe the final and real Self to be one and 
 universal. For if A knows his essential identity 
 with all the objects a, b, <:, &c.; and B also knows 
 the same ; then A and B know their essential 
 identity with each other, even though they may 
 never have seen each other. And so on. All 
 our ' selves ' consequently must be one, or at least 
 united so as to be branches of the One even 
 though for a time deluded by the idea of separa- 
 tion. The ground of the universe must be one 
 universal Self or one Eternal City of selves, ever 
 unitea and ever arriving at the knowledge of 
 their union with each other. 
 
 But since the evidence of the so-called Cosmic 
 Consciousness is yet scattered and unauthoritative, 
 and by no means universally accepted, we may, in 
 the second place, consider what proof we may be 
 able to get from the ordinary processes of thought 
 and consciousness. And even by these we seem 
 
 68
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 to be led towards the same conclusion, and to 
 have the way up the higher slopes indicated 
 though of course the mule stops short at the 
 edge ! 
 
 In fact, analysing one's own mind, one of the 
 first things that appears is that the ego underlies 
 or accompanies every thought. It is always I 
 know, I think, I feel, I remember, I desire, I act. 
 Though some thoughts are moderately simple, 
 and some exceedingly complex, though some 
 take their colour from others or derive a halo 
 from the ' fringe ' of unobserved thoughts 
 round them, 1 still inevitably whether in the 
 wholes or whether in the components the ego 
 is there ; and we become convinced at last that 
 if we could reach even the simplest and most 
 elementary sensation of which we are capable, 
 the ego would underlie would be a part of the 
 knowledge, even though not distinctly differ- 
 entiated in consciousness. 
 
 The ego, therefore, underlying my every 
 possible thought and even if I lived a thousand 
 years and shared the thoughts of all folk on the 
 globe, it would still underlie them and under- 
 lying too the most elementary sensation I can 
 
 1 By some it is supposed that it is by the action of this 
 ' fringe ' that the fourth note becomes a ' star ' by, in fact, 
 waking myriads of unobserved associations. But again 
 though there is some truth in this view we must note that 
 the mere summation of associations, however numerous, will 
 not create a new feeling. And we may also point out that the 
 ' fringe ' taken in an extended sense brings us back again to 
 the unconscious, unmanifested ego. 
 
 69
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 possibly conceive myself having cannot be a 
 thought itself. 1 And so we are forced to 
 think of the ego either as a kind of unitary 
 being separate from all thought (which of 
 course won't do) ; or else as an infinitely 
 complex unity capable of every conceivable 
 thought in fact a universal Being. But here, 
 alas ! we come to a fatal crevasse beyond 
 which the four-footed creature cannot go. For 
 as soon as we think of the ego, the ego has 
 already become a thought and ceases to be the 
 ego we are in search of. Obviously, therefore, 
 thought can be no more made use of in the 
 matter, and the only course that remains seems 
 to be to fee! (as we instinctively do) that the ego 
 is a unitary Being ; and to see that directly we 
 try to think it, its first form is that of an infinite 
 complex capable of every conceivable thought 
 
 1 Professor W. James suggests in speaking of the "stream of 
 consciousness " that " the thoughts themselves are the thinkers ! " 
 (" Textbook of Psychology," p. 216.) But we really cannot accept 
 this conundrum. I am not the knife which I handle or the 
 ideal which I imagine. Practically the mind is compelled to 
 believe in a self distinguishable from its own thoughts, some- 
 thing underlying and unitary which gives the sense and 
 measure of sameness and continuity; and whatever subtleties 
 may lead it away, the human mind will inevitably return to this 
 view the old antithesis of Being and Existence, of ' substance ' 
 and ' accident,' which cannot be avoided if we are to think at 
 all. See also W. Wundt's " Human and Animal Psychology" 
 (Sonnenschein, 1894), p. 250, where we read, "Self is not an 
 idea it is simply the perception of intercommunication of 
 internal experience, which accompanies that experience itself." 
 That is, the Self is the perception ; the thoughts are the 
 thinkers. But it is evident that this view creates more confusion 
 than it dispels. 
 
 70
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 at the same moment acknowledging that in the 
 act of thinking it we have already departed from 
 its essence. 
 
 I shall now therefore assume, both on account 
 of the direct evidence of the Cosmic Conscious- 
 ness, and because the indirect evidence of the 
 ordinary thought and consciousness points in the 
 same direction, that there is a real universal self 
 a one absolute Ego and knower, underlying all 
 existences the Tat tvam asi of the Upanishads, 
 the essence and life of the whole universe, and 
 true self of every creature. And I think we 
 are justified in assuming this, because clearly the 
 evidence of the ordinary consciousness, however 
 long we work at the problem, can never carry us 
 a step farther than it does now ; while on the 
 other hand the direct evidence of the Cosmic 
 Consciousness is added to by fresh witnesses 
 every day, and daily becomes more conclusive. 
 
 There is therefore, I say, a real universal Self, 
 but there is also an elusive self. There are 
 millions of selves which are or think themselves 
 separate. And over these we must delay. For 
 to see the connection between them and the one 
 Self is greatly important ; and we may be sure 
 that the illusive self is not for nothing ; indeed 
 the term ' illusive ' may not after all be quite 
 the right one to apply to it. 
 
 Let us ask two questions : 
 
 1. How can the great Self also be millions of 
 selves ? 
 
 2. If the great Self is within each of us, and 
 
 7i
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 the ego of every thought, why do we not know 
 it so ? 
 
 (i) How can the great Self also be millions 
 of selves? Well, we may ask, How can the self 
 of the human body also be millions of selves in 
 the component cells of the body ? For modern 
 science more and more attributes selfness and 
 intelligence to cells, 1 and more and more tends to 
 establish the intimate relation between the self of 
 the body and the selves of the cells. How can a 
 man be one self in his office, and another at his 
 club, and another in his domestic circle ? How 
 is it that plants and low animals multiply by 
 fission ? Do the selves multiply ? Or, since a 
 self is not necessarily to be thought of in space 
 and time, can one self have many expressions in 
 space and time, i.e. many bodies ? or is it possible 
 even that one self may require many bodies ? 
 Such are a few out of many questions that arise 
 on the subject. 
 
 The fact remains apparently (though we are 
 not in a position yet to see all round it) that a 
 self may become many selves, or that it may have 
 
 1 See Binet on the " Psychic Life of Micro-Organisms," 
 where he maintains that infusoria exhibit memory, volition, 
 surprise, fear, and the germinal properties of human intelli- 
 gence. (Though such words as memory, volition, surprise, and 
 fear must certainly be used with the greatest caution in this 
 connection, yet the facts seem to show that there is a "sensi- 
 bility " in these little creatures corresponding to the germ of 
 these human faculties ; and none the less real because it 
 relates itself to chemical affinities. See H. S. Jennings on 
 "The Psychology of a Protozoan," American Journal of Psy- 
 chology, vol. x.) 
 
 72
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 many selves affiliated to it. In the human body 
 the cells are differentiated in a vast number of 
 ways, according to their service and function in 
 the body. The intelligence of each cell is an 
 aspect or a differentiation of the intelligence of 
 the body. The great Self of the universe may dif- 
 ferentiate itself into countless selves or ' aspects ' 
 and this may be a condition of more perfect self- 
 knowledge yet each self or aspect may still be 
 the whole and commensurate with the whole. 
 " One eyesight does not countervail another," 
 says Whitman. Ten thousand people gathered 
 round an arena may see one another and the 
 whole show, each from his own -point of 'view. 
 Each onlooker sums up the Whole, represents 
 the Whole ; but each from a different side. Each 
 eyesight is individual and complete ; yet it does 
 not interfere with any other. 
 
 The fact is conceivable that the Self may be- 
 come countless selves. The great Self is omni- 
 present in Space and Time ; but if it appear 
 or express itself at any one point of space and 
 time (say as the ego of a single cell), then at 
 once and in that moment it has determined an 
 aspect of itself; and the ego in that cell is 
 already an individual having within itself the 
 potentiality of the whole, yet different 1 from 
 every other possible individual of the universe. 
 The fact of such multiplex appearance in Space 
 
 1 Theoretically this would appear so though the extreme 
 conclusion (that every cell represents a separate and eternal 
 Individuality) need hardly be pressed. (See next chapter.) 
 
 73
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 and Time is conceivable ; the reason for it may 
 be that of self-knowledge ; but the " how " of 
 the operation must necessarily remain inscrutable 
 to our ordinary thought. 
 
 Leaving the matter thus, we may now then 
 pass to the further question, (2) If the great 
 Self is in each of us, and is the ego of every 
 thought, why do we not know it so ? And the 
 answer is not difficult to frame. It is a ques- 
 tion of degree of expression. We only know that 
 of which we perceive the reflection. 
 
 Suppose the great Self, now incarnate as the 
 ego of a single cell, to receive some simple sensa- 
 tion, to exercise some most primitive and elemen- 
 tary act of knowledge. Then, from what has been 
 said a few pages back, it cannot do that except 
 because the knowledge is in some sense implicit 
 in itself, and called forth by the outer phenome- 
 non (whatever that may be). There is a meet- 
 ing of subject and object, a reflection of one in 
 the other, a consciousness but of very low degree. 
 In the ego all knowledge (so we are at liberty to 
 suppose) is implicit yes, in the ego of that single 
 cell universal knowledge, as fr6"m that particular 
 individual point of view. But that knowledge 
 though implicit is not expressed ; only the lowest 
 degree of it has come into consciousness. The 
 ego, therefore, has only to that degree become 
 conscious of itself. Perhaps the sense of touch 
 has wakened within it, but no more. Certainly 
 the consciousness of its own universal being, of 
 its true self, has not been excited or called forth. 
 
 74
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 As much of itself as has been reflected in the 
 phenomenal world, it is conscious of with the 
 order of consciousness that belongs to the phe- 
 nomenal world, but no more. 1 
 
 But presently another sensation comes along, 
 or rather another happening which calls forth a 
 sensation, say again of touch. Many such touches 
 may come,, and still there is no particular growth 
 of consciousness. But one day the sense of like- 
 ness between them arrives. And it arrives from 
 within. Doubtless there may be a real outer 
 relation of likeness between the touches, or the 
 objects that cause them ; but until the ego sees 
 and seizes that relation, contributes it from within 
 itself, there is no sense or perception of likeness 
 for it. Thus now the ego of that cell has arrived 
 at the degree of consciousness represented by the 
 sensation or perception ('recept') of likeness 
 
 1 Though our thought of course cannot compass this whole 
 matter, we may help it out by the analogy of a fourth dimen- 
 sion. If this being which descends and manifests itself in 
 tridimensional space is in fact a being of four-dimensional 
 order, then that conception helps us to understand both its 
 ' thereness ' prior to manifestation, and the possibility of its 
 manifestation being multiplex, though itself one. For if we 
 suppose a three-dimensional object say the hand with fingers 
 downward coming down into two-dimensional space say the 
 surface of still water, then we have a similar case. The hand 
 is one, and it is ' there ' prior to touching the water. Its first 
 (multiplex) appearance on the surface is in four separate points, 
 the finger-tips. Let us suppose now the under surface of the 
 water to be a mirror, and suppose too the finger-tips to be pro- 
 vided with eyes ; then as the fingers descend below the sur- 
 face they will see themselves by reflection first as mere nails, 
 then as first joints, and so on ; but always as entirely separate 
 objects, till the moment when the body of the hand passing 
 below the surface, reveals their union. 
 
 75
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 and it has arrived there by the way of reflection 
 in the objective world. 
 
 It is clear that that ego being already a more 
 or less individualised aspect of the universal Self, 
 will see and seize and group the happenings of 
 the external world in some degree differently from 
 any other individual 1 that is, its sensations and 
 perceptions and inner qualities will develop and 
 become manifest in consciousness according to its 
 own law and order of exfoliation. The happen- 
 ings of the external world will have their say 
 certainly, and must not be minimised. They 
 may retard or hasten the process ; they may 
 modify the outer embodiment ; but it hardly 
 appears that they can alter the general order of 
 inner evolution. 
 
 As experiences multiply for our imagined ego 
 at last a cluster of sensations, perceptions, latent 
 associations, instincts, memories, thoughts, and 
 feelings fears, desires, wonderments is formed 
 about it, and float around. These are all qualities 
 of the ego active as well as passive called 
 forth doubtless by the outer world, and used to 
 give form and outline to its dealings with the 
 outer world, but coming down from within. 
 They are exfoliations or expressions of the ego ; 2 
 
 1 Though the differences, at any rate in the early stages, may 
 be very slight. 
 
 2 Thus the instinct of self-preservation and that of race- 
 propagation appear in the very earliest creatures, long before 
 actual self-consciousness has arisen because, in fact, these 
 instincts embody the primary need of the ego, i.e. that of 
 expression race-propagation being a device for securing 
 expression in another organism when the first has perished. 
 
 76
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 they are the ego coming to consciousness of itself 
 but within every one of them lurks still the 
 fathomless Being, and that which is unexpressed. 
 This is the stage of Animal Consciousness, full of 
 keen perceptions, sensations, instincts, and dis- 
 closing even higher powers of the mind ; but 
 still the thought of Self is not there ; it has not yet 
 come to reflection, to consciousness ; the cluster 
 of thoughts around the ego has not yet been 
 distinctly conceived as a separate cluster separate 
 from the rest of the world ; there is no know- 
 ledge of the real self, none of the illusive self 
 
 O 
 
 even. Yet the thought of self must arrive some 
 time, to give a further unity to all experience. 
 It must arrive, and from within, because the self 
 is a reality in a sense the only reality 1 and 
 selfness must necessarily be one of the forms of 
 its expression. But the mark of the individual 
 Self is its differentiation, its distinctness, even in 
 some degree its separation from the others. And 
 so we find the first form in which the self fairly 
 comes to consciousness is that of separation. 
 
 One day (and this happens probably in the 
 higher animals, certainly in the human child) the 
 thought of ' Me ' arises ; and from that moment 
 
 O 
 
 a great new stage of evolution, of exfoliation, has 
 begun the stage especially of Humanity. 
 
 Now what is this thought of Me ? It is evi- 
 dently another generalisation, another form, 
 which the ego at a certain stage projects, and 
 
 1 Even as an individual the self is a reality through its 
 affiliation to the great whole. It is a "son of God." 
 
 77
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 classifies and colours the world therewith. Just 
 as at one stage in human evolution the sense 
 of melody came with the power of giving new 
 meaning to an otherwise disconnected series of 
 sounds, so at another stage the sense of me-ness 
 comes and throws a colour and an associative 
 bond over all the experiences of the ego. "It is 
 me," " It is mine." All this manifold cluster of 
 thoughts and feelings is now grouped and con- 
 ceived of as Myself, as Me. 
 
 And this is all right in a sense ; for they are 
 the expression (so far) of the great individual 
 Ego. But it is clear that here two mistakes are 
 inevitable to occur. In the first place, the little 
 cluster is almost certain to be mistaken for a kind 
 of fixed and final Me. It is looked upon as the 
 real self, whereas at best it only represents the 
 tiniest portion of the real self: it is, by the very 
 act of being conceived, only an objectivation of 
 the reality ; while the ego itself sinks fathomless 
 behind. And in the second place it (the Me) 
 does not only appear as a complex of thoughts 
 and feelings (representative of the ego), but is 
 inevitably confused with the objects which excite 
 those thoughts and feelings, which are the occa- 
 sion of them, and in which they are reflected. 
 Thus the body, the clothes, the goods, the pos- 
 sessions, are at first conceived as the Me. " They 
 are me," " they are mine." It is as a child who, 
 first seeing his reflection in a glass, thinks the 
 reflection is the real thing, and something inherent 
 in the glass, and in that special bit of glass. So 
 
 78
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 the vast immortal Ego finds itself reflected, and 
 first becomes conscious of itself (on this plane) as 
 the local and limited Me, tangled apparently and 
 bound in what are called material things. 
 
 From all this arise two illusions, inevitable 
 to this stage of self-consciousness, and full of 
 sorrow and suffering to mankind. The ' I ' 
 is thought of as perishable ; and it is thought of 
 as separate. It is thought of as separate, because 
 the Me and the Mine (that is, the conditions and 
 surroundings which reflect the I) are in these 
 early stages quite local and limited, and therefore 
 as long as the I is confused with the Me the self 
 must be thought of not only as different, but as 
 isolated, separate, enclosed, and apart from others. 1 
 And it is thought of as perishable, because it is 
 confused with the things of the outer world and 
 the perishing flux of phenomena. 
 
 But because, sitting on the bank of a stream, 
 my reflection in the water wavers and shifts, that 
 does not show that I am moving. Through a 
 glass darkly we come at first to the knowledge of 
 ourselves. For ages and ages the primitive Man 
 peered in ponds and streams, in bits of shining 
 flint or metal or shell, and saw strange obscure 
 visions, which he credited to these objects, nor 
 knew or perceived that they were dim images of 
 his own person. Or if he did guess that they 
 were images, he thought that he himself by some 
 
 1 Hence, too, of course, the mind in this stage only functions 
 in the second degree of consciousness, already described, in 
 which subject and object are conceived of as separate. 
 
 79
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 magic was tangled in them. 1 Only at last, and 
 with greater experience, did it one day flash upon 
 him that He was different, and by no means to 
 be confused with streams and shells. Only at last 
 did his true identity come to him. 
 
 And only after long experience does the sense 
 of our true Identity come to us. And as the 
 civilised man who has learned what reflection is 
 can now see his own face almost where he will 
 in pools and rivers and polished surfaces nor 
 thinks it only confined to some mystic shell or 
 other object, so our true Identity once having 
 been learned, our relation to our body having 
 been completed, we shall find that the magic of 
 one particular body is no longer necessary, since 
 out of the great ocean of Nature we can now pick 
 up our own reflection (or make to ourselves a 
 body of some kind) practically anywhere. 
 
 So for a long time the ' Me ' goes on growing. 
 Every new thought or experience that is added 
 sinks into the Me ; and as long as the ruling idea 
 of the Me as a separate -perishable entity 
 governs the cluster or organism, so long do greed 
 and fear, hatred and jealousy, sorrow and grief, 
 increase and multiply and hover round, till their 
 presence grows wellnigh insupportable. Yet all 
 the time the ego, the real self, is behind, waiting 
 for its next development, its next expression 
 which must inevitably come. 
 
 1 Hence the universal dread among primitive folk of having 
 likenesses or images of themselves made, and their fear of the 
 enchantment of mirrors. 
 
 80
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 We have dealt much in similes. Let us return 
 once more to the child regarding its own reflection 
 say in the tiniest of tiny pools. So small is the 
 little mirror that it only reflects the smallest part 
 of the child a lock of hair, a portion of its dress. 
 The child does not in the least recognise what the 
 reflection is. But it has a water-can and pours 
 water into the pool, and the pool grows. Now 
 the child can see its own entire hand in the water. 
 It is fascinated, and tires not to pose its fingers in 
 every way for reflection. But again the pool goes 
 on growing, and more of its body becomes visible, 
 till at last, lo ! the child can see itself complete. 
 
 So to us. Each new thought, each new expe- 
 rience that is added to the Me, is like a drop of 
 water that is added to the pool, 1 till it becomes 
 large enough the Me becomes sufficiently uni- 
 versal to reflect the universality of the I. The 
 vision of the true Self at last arises, with wonder 
 and revelation and joy indescribable : the vision 
 of a self that is united to others, that is eternal. 
 The thoughts connected with separation and 
 mortality the greeds, the fears, the hatreds, the 
 griefs fall ofF and a new world, or conception of 
 the world, opens life is animated with a new 
 spirit. The Me-conception (as far as that means 
 isolation, mortality, ' self-seeking ') disappears, is 
 broken up, is transformed ; and the life is trans- 
 formed accordingly. 2 
 
 1 Added really in the last resort by ourselves. 
 
 2 Always the life, the vitality, of an organism is a reflection 
 of its overmastering thought or conception, and in the main is 
 determined thereby. 
 
 81 F
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 When I say the idea of the true Self arises, I 
 do not say that at once the complete and final 
 Individual is realised. Nature does not proceed 
 per saltum. On the side of the past, there may 
 yet be much "clinging to the old self"; and 
 again, on the side of the future, there may be 
 many new disclosures and revelations still to be 
 made. But this stage in which the human 
 being begins at least to realise his universal life 
 and identity ; in which he, as it were, comes 
 within sight of the end forms such an epoch, 
 that it may be taken as one of the great land- 
 marks on his immense journey a landmark more 
 important even than that which signalled the 
 birth of Self-consciousness. 
 
 It marks the entrance to an emancipated, glori- 
 fied, transformed Humanity, of whose further 
 course and transformation we need not too curi- 
 ously inquire, though we seem to discern dimly its 
 grander lines. 1 It marks the arrival of the third 
 stage of Consciousness, at first only occasionally 
 and spasmodically realised, but even so guiding 
 and pointing the way ; and finally becoming per- 
 manent not necessarily to obliterate and negate 
 the earlier faculties, but rather to interpret and 
 render them for the first time really rational and 
 meaningful. It marks the realisation at last of 
 the whole meaning of the Universe, even though 
 the detail thereof may be for ever inexhaustible. 
 
 With a kind of inexorable logic, from infinitely 
 various beginnings, from infinitely various sides, 
 
 1 See chap, xiii., " Transformation." 
 82
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 the Great Self sums itself up to form a vast 
 affiliation of selves a Celestial City of equals 
 and lovers. 1 " It is by love only that we can 
 fully enter into that harmony with others which 
 alone constitutes our own reality and the reality 
 of the universe. We conceive the universe as a 
 spiritual whole, made up of individuals, who have 
 no existence except as manifestations of the whole ; 
 as the whole, on the other hand, has no existence 
 except as manifested in them." 
 
 1 Love, as we have already indicated, whether taken in its 
 most ideal or its most sensuous signification, is a form of the 
 Cosmic Consciousness. 
 
 2 M'Taggart, "The Further Determination of the Absolute," 
 p. 56.
 
 VI 
 
 THE SELF AND ITS AFFILIATIONS 
 ( Continued} 
 
 HAVING in the last paper considered the Self and 
 its affiliations from the within point of view, we 
 may now with advantage study the same subject 
 on its more external side. 
 
 A certain school of psychologists, in trying to 
 explain the total consciousness of an organism as 
 the sum (in some sense) of the consciousnesses of 
 its separate cells, are met with serious criticism, 
 and themselves find a difficulty, in the question 
 of how the separate cell-consciousnesses can pos- 
 sibly be fused in one consciousness, or how even 
 we can conceive such a thing. How can one cell 
 know, it is said, what its neighbour feels, or fuse 
 its neighbour's experience with its own ? What 
 kind of total ego is it that can possibly gather up 
 the experiences of millions of lesser egos, and 
 render them one ? And the difficulty is perfectly 
 natural, and indeed insuperable, as long as the 
 egos of the cells are held to be distinct and 
 
 O 
 
 separate. But as soon as we see that (as sug- 
 gested in the last chapter) they may be the same, 
 that they may be already one, the difficulty 
 
 84
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 disappears. We have, indeed, arrived at the 
 conclusion that all egos are finally the same, 
 though differing little or much in aspect, in 
 affiliation, in ramification even as every twig on 
 a tree dates back to the trunk, and has a common 
 life with the others, however different from them 
 in aspect to the outer world, or in affiliation to 
 its main stem, it may be. And so it is not diffi- 
 cult to conceive of them as fusing their know- 
 ledge. Indeed it is inevitable that they should 
 do so. 
 
 Let us consider for a moment the genesis of 
 the body, human or other. The body grows 
 from one cell, sperm and germ united. The cell 
 obtains nourishment (from the organism of the 
 mother, in the higher creatures), and grows, and 
 splits into two, four, many, and then multitudes 
 of cells, which dispose themselves into certain 
 forms the outlines of the growing creature. At 
 the same time, the dividing and multiplying cells 
 become differentiated from each other, and finally 
 (in the human being) break up into some thirty 
 well-marked varieties, according to their uses and 
 functions in the complete organism. 
 
 [To make the -meaning of this process clear, 
 we must remember that we were compelled to 
 think of the ego of that primitive cell as itself a 
 unitary but enormously complex being, manifested 
 at first in the lowest degree. Then we see the 
 multiplication and differentiation of that cell 
 simply as the process by which the various com- 
 plexities of its inner Being are further manifested 
 
 85
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 their manifestations, no doubt, being sundered 
 in the world of space, but their inner nature 
 losing nothing of its original unity.] 
 
 To proceed. The growing, multiplying, differ- 
 entiating cells are all in touch and in relation 
 with each other ; but in time by special nerve- 
 channels (themselves composed of cells) more 
 special and closer relations are established, groups 
 are formed, which tend to act and to feel together; 
 and again in time some of these groups unite and 
 form larger groups, and so on up to the whole 
 organism. As to the nerve-channels, which re- 
 prese.nt at any rate the subtler and swifter and 
 more specialised relations (though not by any 
 means all the relations), they are of various kinds 
 and structure, and are minutely distributed over 
 the whole body ; and the nerve-centres and 
 plexuses, which bring these relations to definite 
 focus in a vast variety of ways, are also widely 
 distributed, not only in the brain and encephalon, 
 but all down the spinal cord, and in the trunk of 
 the body, where they lie embedded among the 
 organs. 
 
 Such is the process of the growth of the body ; 
 and such as we have seen -"or very similar, is 
 the growth of the mind. In fact in the case of 
 the latter (using the word * thought ' to cover 
 all affections of the mind) we have seen that a 
 very primitive or elementary thought must first 
 appear, that this being fed and added to by the 
 happenings of the outer world, repeats itself and 
 multiplies, and becomes differentiated into other 
 
 86
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 nearly-resembling thoughts, and that by degrees 
 the ego groups these elementary thoughts into 
 more inclusive thoughts (as when it groups a 
 number of separate pulses into a musical sound), 
 and then these group-thoughts again into higher 
 group-thoughts (as when it groups musical sounds 
 into melodies or harmonies). And as in this 
 mental process we are compelled to think of the 
 same ego which underlies the total mind, or one 
 of the higher group-thoughts, as underlying also 
 the more elementary thoughts (the same ' I ' 
 that perceives the melody perceiving also the 
 separate notes) ; so we may seem justified in sup- 
 posing in the case of the bodily cells that their 
 myriad egos form what may be called a group- 
 soul that they are in fact one and the same with 
 the soul of the whole body. 
 
 The difference is, of course, that in the simple 
 cell, though the total ego is ' there,' it is neces- 
 sarily expressed only to a very simple and primitive 
 degree, whereas in the groups of cells, especially 
 when the latter have reached some degree of 
 differentiation, it may be much more fully ex- 
 pressed. We can hardly refuse too to think that 
 not only complexity but volume of feeling depends 
 to some extent on the largeness of the group of 
 cells concerned. Thus in the great emotions 
 fear, anger, &c. it is obvious that vast multitudes 
 of cells are agitated, whole organs affected, secre- 
 tions changed, and so forth. But in pure thought 
 or representation where no emotion is concerned 
 (as, for instance, in simply using the word ' fear ') 
 
 87
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 there is no sense of volume, and probably quite a 
 few little cells in the brain, specially differentiated 
 to express that simple concept, are all that is 
 required. There is no feeling probably which 
 carries with it more permanent volume, as 
 well as a great degree of complexity, than that 
 of selfness ; and we may associate that with 
 the supposition that roughly speaking all the 
 cells of the body (through their instinct of self- 
 preservation, if through nothing more complex) 
 are concerned in it. 
 
 I think myself (subject of course to correction) 
 that it is a mistake to suppose that consciousness 
 is limited to the cells in a certain portion of the 
 brain. The hypothesis does at its best sound 
 very improbable. Certainly it is likely that the 
 cells of the cortex are specialised in that direction 
 (and particularly as representatives of the second 
 stage of consciousness) ; but this would not imply 
 that other cells from which the cerebral cells 
 have been differentiated have not the same 
 faculty in less degree. To even the simplest 
 tissue-cell one must credit sensibility, to the nerve- 
 cells higher sensibility ; to others perhaps, as 
 those of the Sympathetic system, simple conscious- 
 ness ; to the brain-cells or groups self-conscious- 
 ness ; and there must be many cells or groups 
 which represent those higher orders of conscious- 
 ness of which we are occasionally aware. 
 
 That there is a diffused consciousness all 
 through the body, I think any one who attends 
 to the subject will feel persuaded and that, in
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 some sense, independent of the brain. 1 It is, in 
 fact, the primitive consciousness out of which 
 the more complex brain-consciousness has been 
 evolved ; and it links on to that ' subliminal ' 
 region of the mind of which we have heard so 
 much lately the vast 'fringe' of thought and 
 feeling which surrounds our ordinary conscious- 
 ness, which never comes quite into the full light 
 of observation, and yet is always obscurely 
 present. 
 
 In these lights it does not seem difficult to 
 think of the egos of the body-cells as one with 
 the total Ego which represents the fusion of their 
 separate consciousnesses one with it, though each 
 less adequately manifested than the whole. And 
 indeed I believe they love to feel this affiliation ; 
 dimly they are conscious of it, and it vitalises 
 them, presiding over and directing their activities. 
 
 Now here we have to pause ; for indeed if my 
 conscious Ego and the egos of all my body-cells 
 
 1 Stanley in his " Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling " 
 (p. 32) says : " In man, physiologically speaking, it is the 
 brain-consciousness that is general. But we need not suppose 
 this to extinguish all the lower ganglionic consciousness from 
 which it arose." And Ribot in his " Psychology of the Emo- 
 tions " (p. 200), speaking of the nutritive functions, says : 
 " Though in the adult they play only a latent and intermittent 
 part [in consciousness] by reason of the preponderance of 
 external sensations, images, and ideas, yet it is probable that 
 in animals, particularly in voracious ones, the functions are 
 inverted, and that coenaesthesia passes to the front rank." In 
 fact since the brain-cells are only differentiations of the primitive 
 body-cells, we are compelled to think of the general cells as 
 having a germinal consciousness ; and though they may convey 
 their coenaesthesia or common sentiment to the brain, it no less 
 originates, and has its first birth in them. 
 
 89
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 were in the condition of harmony suggested, all 
 would be "pancakes and cream": the state of 
 affairs indicated in the former chapter, "The Art 
 of Creation," would be realised ; these bodies of 
 ours, and the bodies of other creatures, trees, 
 plants, &c., would be the adequate manifestations 
 (so far) of their respective egos, and would be 
 the forms under which we should apprehend the 
 expression of our own and other minds. 
 
 Yet clearly this is not so. I and my cells fall 
 out to some extent. They do not always do or 
 say what I want. There are confusions as well as 
 fusions, alterations and alternations of personality. 
 My body is not altogether an embodiment of my 
 mind at any rate of that mind of which I am 
 preponderantly conscious. 
 
 What is the cause of this discrepancy or of 
 these discrepancies? 
 
 This leads us on to further considerations. 
 
 Exactly as a (human) body is a complex of 
 cells descended and differentiated from a single 
 pair, so is a (human) Race a complex of bodies, 
 which for our present purpose we may suppose as 
 descended and differentiated from a single pair. 
 I am not alluding to Adam and Eve especially 
 as progenitors of the whole human race, but 
 rather (in order to gain clearness) to smaller 
 tribes and peoples such as the Maoris, or the 
 Apache Indians, or the old Israelites much in- 
 terrelated, and in many cases descended from a 
 very few progenitors, if not actually (as their 
 traditions often relate) a single pair. Such a race 
 
 90
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 has all the characteristics of an organic being : it 
 has its well-marked customs, instincts, religion, 
 ideals, external habits of life, grade of mental 
 development, and so forth. It has its individual 
 members, its groups, and larger groups, culmi- 
 nating in the whole tribe or race as an entity, just 
 the same as the cells with regard to the human 
 body. And it has its phases of emotion and belief 
 and action its patriotisms, religions, and warlike 
 and other enthusiasms belonging to it only as a 
 whole, and called forth somehow by the sentiment 
 of the whole. " Crowds are sometimes accessible 
 to a very lofty morality," says a French writer 1 
 " a much loftier one, indeed, than that of which 
 the isolated individual is capable." And anyhow 
 we see that societies, not only of bees (as Maeter- 
 linck has shown), but of all creatures, up to man, 
 have, qua societies, a life of their own inclusive 
 of and superadded to that of their individual 
 members. 
 
 It is difficult therefore, in view of all this, to 
 refuse to credit an Ego and a consciousness to a 
 well-marked race or people or tribe ; and of course 
 this has often been done ; while the cognate idea 
 of the " social organism " has become a thing of 
 common acceptance. Now if this ascription of 
 an organic and conscious life to huge collections 
 of human beings were merely an abstract affair, 
 like Auguste Comte's " Humanity " or the Spen- 
 cerian " social organism," it would be, to say the 
 least, a trifle dull and uninteresting. But the 
 
 1 G. Le Bon, " Psychologic des foules," p. 46.
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 moment we realise that it means just the opposite 
 something very much alive indeed, and en- 
 tangled in the very heart of our own natures then 
 it becomes absorbingly important. Not only do 
 we recognise, when these huge crowd - emotions 
 come along, that immense unsuspected forces are 
 working within us ; but we see that at all times, 
 in some mysterious way, the capacity of entering 
 into the Race-consciousness is in us, and that daily 
 and hourly this fact is moulding and modifying 
 our lives : just the same as in every limb of my 
 body there lurks the capacity of being thrilled 
 by the great emotions of my total ego, and this 
 fact in its turn guides and moulds the destinies 
 and activities of my tiniest cells. 
 
 To the more detailed consideration of this 
 subject, and of the way in which the gods, the 
 devils, and the great emotions represent our past 
 in the Race-consciousness, I have given the next 
 four chapters, so I will not dwell upon it here. 
 We may here consider more in detail the mode 
 of arrival of the individual ego on the scene, and 
 his relation to the race-life. 
 
 How did I arrive as regards the race to which 
 I belong ? Why, the same protozoic cells (same in 
 fundamental nature, or ego, and same by sheer 
 continuity of life) which were in Adam and Eve 
 have also produced me. 1 Or, to bring the matter 
 
 1 The immortality of the protozoic cells is now widely ac- 
 cepted. That is to say, since these cells multiply by fission or 
 gemmation, they do not die. If a parent cell divides into two 
 (or four) descendant cells, the descendant cells are simply a pro- 
 longation and multiplication of the parent life, and continuous 
 
 92
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 within more definite compass, the same cells from 
 which Abraham and his wife Sarah sprung, pro- 
 duced also Solomon and St. Paul. [I select the 
 Jews as an illustration, because they afford an in- 
 stance of a very well-defined race which, not- 
 withstanding occasional lapses, kept itself very 
 pure and unmixed, and, as a consequence, had 
 the strictest customs and religious ideals, and the 
 strongest national consciousness.] That is to 
 say, to put the matter more definitely still, the 
 sex-cells of Abraham and Sarah united to form 
 a single cell, from which Isaac sprang. Every cell 
 in Isaac's body was therefore a prolongation and 
 fission-growth from that single cell. Isaac in his 
 turn uniting with Rebekah (his cousin) similarly 
 produced Jacob, who again uniting with Leah (his 
 cousin), produced Reuben, Simeon, and Judah ; 
 and so on. After endless ramifications in this tree 
 
 with it, and so on to any number or degree of descendants. 
 Any one of these descendant cells of course may perish by 
 accident, but the point is that the descendant or descendants in 
 the hundredth generation still will be the same, in being and life, 
 with the parent cell. That it or they will have learned much 
 on the way can hardly be doubted. Whether they will have 
 been modified by the outer world is a point which, with regard 
 to the sex-cells, Weismann has challenged. That the sex-cells 
 learn, by long practice, skill in the art of self-expression is 
 obvious from the facts of embryology and "recapitulation"; 
 and this in itself is a kind of use-inheritance. Herbert Spencer 
 in his " Facts and Fragments " has given reasons for supposing 
 that even with the acceptance of Weismann's general views, 
 use-inheritance is quite possible ; and the most reasonable 
 theory of the whole subject seems to be that a great inner law 
 of growth presides in the evolution of races and species, but 
 always subject to a slow modification by the outer world in the 
 forms of U se-inheritance and Natural Selection. 
 
 93
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 of life, Solomon appeared, and again after more, 
 St. Paul or Jesus. The conclusion is clear. Re- 
 membering the immortality of the cells and their 
 continuity of life, with of course great differenti- 
 ations and ramifications all down the centuries, 
 we see that a tiny group of cells in Abraham's 
 time, themselves related to each other, and pro- 
 bably differentiations of some one cell further 
 back, lay beneath the whole development of the 
 Jewish race through the centuries ; and that this 
 latter indeed might reasonably be looked upon as 
 the exfoliation of a single Ego which through 
 this long chain, in hundreds of thousands of lives 
 affiliated to it, sought expression, and so far suc- 
 ceeded in finding it. 
 
 Well might Jesus of Nazareth exclaim, " Before 
 Abraham was, I am." His consciousness, the 
 consciousness of his own being, had reached that 
 depth at which it had become united with the 
 consciousness of the race ; and in using those 
 words he merely stated a fact which he felt 
 within himself, and knew to be true. 
 
 In this view we see and understand the enor- 
 mous import and sacredness of sex, and its deep 
 association with the religious and communal life 
 of the race a thing which the earlier and less 
 mixed races understood instinctively and appre- 
 ciated much better than we do, but which (for 
 reasons which may later appear) has been to a 
 great degree lost in the modern societies and 
 nations. The sex-cells, conserved and perpetuated 
 by each organism, and passed on with fervent care 
 
 94
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 from generation to generation, are the most 
 central and potent, and least differentiated of all 
 the cells of the body the other cells losing their 
 reproductiveness in proportion as they are more 
 and more differentiated. They are the most re- 
 presentative of the body and all its faculties, and 
 within them lies the secret and heart of the race. 1 
 The same ever-descendant cells, I say, which 
 produce the first man of a race, produce the last 
 man. But the last man is not therefore the same 
 as the first man. The first man may be merely a 
 living soul (or psyche), the last may be a quicken- 
 ing Spirit. The little primitive cell may grow and 
 differentiate and grow, till that which was in it 
 attains at last to Manhood and Deliverance. The 
 descendant cells by ever-renewed practice, gene- 
 ration after generation, in the expression of the 
 Ego within them, may attain more and more 
 facility ; the art of building up the body, tenta- 
 tive at first, by repetition becomes easy ; and if 
 the potency of the cells continues (which without 
 a crossing of the strain with another race, or 
 branch of the great Ego, does not always take 
 
 1 Ray Lankester (quoted by Geddes and Thomson, " Evolu- 
 tion of Sex," p. 277) says, " The bodies of the higher animals 
 which die, may from this point of view be regarded as some- 
 thing temporary and non-essential, destined merely to carry for 
 a time, to nurse, and to nourish the more important and death- 
 less fission-products of the unicellular egg." And Metch- 
 nikoff (" The Nature of Man," p. 268) remarks : " Scientific 
 proof exists therefore that our bodies contain immortal elements, 
 eggs, or spermatozoa. . . . These cells not only are truly alive, 
 but exhibit properties that are within the category of psychical 
 phenomena." He also says, " It is possible to speak of the 
 soul of protozoa." 
 
 95
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 place) the race in question may reach a high level 
 of development. 
 
 Thus when a man to-day, born of such and 
 such parents, appears, his body in its early stages 
 is rapidly and instinctively built up ; these stages 
 summing up and embodying the evolution of the 
 race behind it. His ego is already affiliated to 
 that of the race ; and his unfoldment (so far) 
 already prepared. His body, so far, represents a 
 summation of an endless series of mental actions 
 preceding his actual nativity, a ramifying thread 
 of race-life, here condensed. All the instincts, all 
 the devices, all the mental and physical adjust- 
 ments by which during the centuries the Ego 
 obtained expression for its own nature and quali- 
 ties amid the outer conditions in which the race 
 existed, are (together with that nature and those 
 qualities) summed up and represented in his cor- 
 poral organism ; and within it the immense 
 heritage of race-memory is stored. The ' I,' 
 the Ego, of his race is not only present, mani- 
 festing itself in Time and History but an aspect, 
 an affiliation, of it is now, to-day, present and 
 existent in that man, in his Body. 
 
 And this brings us back to that discord or 
 discrepancy between the body and the conscious 
 self, which started the subject of the last few 
 pages. Is there reason for supposing a real 
 discord between the Ego of the race, and the 
 self-conscious individual who is affiliated to it? 
 and is there in the body of the individual man 
 
 really in some sense a seat of race-consciousness, 
 
 96
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 separate from his brain, or that part of it, which 
 is the seat of his ordinary mind ? 
 
 To take the last question first. We have 
 already suggested that there is a consciousness 
 belonging peculiarly to the body and its * auto- 
 matic ' nerve-centres and ganglia, with all their 
 instincts, habits, and organic functioning. Though 
 these (partly from our inattention to them) ap- 
 pear as a rule dark and silent, and beyond the 
 region of our voluntary observation or control, 
 yet it is becoming more and more admitted that 
 there is a sort of ' awareness ' of them. Science 
 is less and less able to proceed without the con- 
 ception of the ' subliminal ' mind, or the ' sub- 
 jective,' or the ' subconscious,' or the ' fringe ' 
 which surrounds the ordinary consciousness ; it 
 is more and more seen that the emotions are 
 forms of consciousness accompanying the organic 
 functions and secretions, and that all the processes 
 of the body contribute their flow great or small 
 to the life of the feelings, which again expresses 
 itself in the life of the intellect ; there are facts 
 such as second-sight, telepathy, and luminous 
 sleep, which indicate states of consciousness exist- 
 ing when the ordinary brain is at rest ; there are 
 the facts of cosmic consciousness already alluded 
 to ; and lastly, there is a whole series of facts 
 with which I shall deal in the next chapters, 
 which seem to show that there is such a thing as 
 a race-consciousness associated with our bodily 
 organisation and accessible on occasions to our 
 conscious minds. 
 
 97 G
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 I do not doubt that the body and its organisa- 
 tion are the scene and the seat of an extensive 
 consciousness of other orders of consciousness 
 which, though usually hidden from, or unrecog- 
 nised by, us are still really operating within and 
 around our minds, and are directly accessible to 
 them. 1 
 
 But whatever consciousness may have its seat 
 in the body, or the cerebellum, or the automatic 
 portions of the brain, and however vast the sum- 
 mation and expression of experience and instinct 
 these may represent, they still do not represent 
 the total possible expression of the Ego within. 
 The body (at any rate in childhood) represents 
 only the expression to which the race has attained 
 so far. There are vast deeps of the unexpressed 
 yet behind it. And a progressive power is needed 
 to seek and search and devise and effect ever new 
 advances of expression however slight. This 
 power is the conscious Brain. It is the function 
 of the Brain to be continually making new com- 
 binations in which the whole Feeling-nature, can 
 find satisfactions in other words, to be con- 
 tinually extending the area of expression of that 
 nature. Ever new thoughts, ever new adjust- 
 ments, ever new combinations, it consciously 
 
 1 There is much to show that animals have some kind of 
 direct consciousness of their internal functions ; and the Hindu 
 yogis, who have given much attention to this subject, not only 
 obtain a marked consciousness of their own internal organs, 
 but an extraordinary power of voluntarily controlling them 
 suspending at will the action of the heart, for instance, or 
 reversing the peristaltic movements of the alimentary canal. 
 
 98
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 forms which, as they are finally accepted and 
 grow habitual, fall back into the so-called un- 
 conscious mind of the organism, and are replaced 
 by new purposive endeavours. 
 
 The Conscious Mind (of the second stage) is 
 the pioneer of progress. If we take it as repre- 
 sented by the Brain, and if we take the sub- 
 conscious hereditary Mind to be in the main 
 represented by the Great Sympathetic Nerve- 
 system, then the discord or discrepancy to which 
 we have alluded is that between the conscious 
 and the subconscious Minds, between the Brain 
 and the Great Sympathetic. 1 The discord is to a 
 certain extent the progress ; and therefore we 
 need not look upon it as bad. It is easy to 
 imagine, and common to observe, that a consider- 
 able and rapid mental advance may bring us into 
 conflict with our hereditary thought and habits. 2 
 Nevertheless such conflict is uncomfortable and 
 must not be allowed to continue long, at risk of 
 mental or bodily disease. It may indicate either 
 that the hereditary attitude has to be modified, 
 or possibly on the other hand that a mental posi- 
 tion has been rashly taken up which may have 
 to be abandoned or altered. The Brain may be 
 at fault, or, on the other hand, the Great Sympa- 
 thetic may be. Diseases are not unfrequently 
 
 1 More strictly speaking, between the fore-brain or Cerebrum 
 on the one hand, and the Great Sympathetic plus the hind- 
 brain and the spinal system on the other. 
 
 2 Metchnikoff suggests that some "disharmonies" in Man 
 are caused by his highly developed Brain bringing him into "a 
 new path of evolution." 
 
 99
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 the clearing and expiation of this conflict, and 
 in that sense they too are not always to be 
 regretted, nor necessarily to be looked on as 
 retrogressions. But this subject, which is a large 
 one, cannot be fully considered here. 
 
 The Conscious Mind we may then regard as 
 the latest outgrowth and expression of the un- 
 folding Ego ; and in that sense it is very im- 
 portant. But to expect our bodies at every 
 moment to transform themselves into expressions 
 of its passing moods would be an absurd thing to 
 do. It is only the advance guard, as it were, of a 
 moving column ; the bud on the branch ; the 
 crest on the wave. And it is easy to see that 
 without the other without the subconscious 
 Mind and the life of the Body, without the great 
 race-Mind behind it (and those other orders of 
 consciousness) to which it is affiliated, it is but a 
 very poor thing, and of comparatively little scope 
 and value. 
 
 It is perhaps the fault of the modern Brain or 
 conscious Mind that it has not perceived this. 
 From the moment when the sense of Self (as a 
 separate being) evolved within primitive man, and 
 entered into distinct consciousness, from that 
 moment an immense stimulus was given to the 
 Brain or the conscious Mind (to devise satis- 
 factions and expressions for the individual self as 
 apart from the race) ; and the enormous develop- 
 ment of brain-power and thought (all in the 
 second stage of consciousness) during the period 
 of Civilisation goes with this fact. On which 
 
 100
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 indeed we may congratulate ourselves ; but it has 
 led to a fearful, and for the time being most 
 sinister, divorce between the two parts of man's 
 nature. Amid the clatter of self-interests and 
 self-conscious brain activities, the presence and 
 the functioning of other orders of mind within 
 us have been discounted and disregarded ; and, 
 cut off from the mass and communal life around 
 him, from the race-life behind, and the heaven- 
 life within, the little self-conscious man has be- 
 come a puny creature indeed. 
 
 We must in the future look to a restoration of 
 the harmony between (roughly speaking) the Mind 
 and the Body, the Brain and the great Sympathetic, 
 the conscious and the subconscious Man. "Why," 
 asks Mr. W. H. Hudson in his last nature-story, 1 
 " why does the brightness of the mind [so often] 
 dim that beautiful physical brightness which the 
 wild animals have ? " The recovery of the organic 
 consciousness, the realisation of the transparency 
 of the body and the splendour of its intuitions, is 
 not an impossible feat. The Hindus and other 
 Orientals have in these directions, partly by 
 deliberate practice, come into touch with and 
 command of regions whose existence the Western 
 peoples hardly suspect. In the West, the modern 
 upgrowth of Woman and her influence will ere 
 long make possible a Humanity which shall 
 harmonise even in each individual the mascu- 
 line and the feminine elements, and bring back at 
 last the Brain and the self-conscious mind into 
 
 1 "Green Mansions." 
 101
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 relation with that immense storehouse of agelong 
 knowledge and power which is represented by the 
 physical body in the individual, as it is repre- 
 sented by the communal life and instinct in the 
 mass-people. 
 
 Thus finally, looking back on what has been 
 said, we see that the whole of Creation falls 
 together into expressions of the One endless, 
 boundless, fathomless Self and its myriad affilia- 
 tions expressions reached by infinite divisions 
 into, and differentiations, fusions, and concatena- 
 tions of the primitive elements of consciousness. 
 Cells, plants, lichens, molluscs, fish, quadrupeds, 
 bee and insect swarms, birds, planets, solar 
 systems, races of men and animals, societies 
 organisms far-stretching in time as well as in 
 space all illustrate this conception. The whole 
 of Creation is alive. But we now understand, 
 when we look at a man or a bee, that we are not 
 looking at a little separate being that has sprung 
 as it were full-armed out of the ground in the 
 course of a few days or years, and whose actions 
 and perceptions are rounded by that scope ; but 
 that we are looking at a being who stretches 
 (through affiliation after affiliation) into the far 
 "backward and abysm of Time," who through 
 endless centuries has been seeking to express 
 itself; nevertheless whose consciousness is here 
 and now in its visible body, as well as in that 
 agelong world-life. The ego of the Bee, we 
 understand, is not a perishable thing of six or 
 
 102
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 seven weeks' duration, but is in its essence one 
 with the "Spirit of the Hive" (whence comes 
 the utter readiness of the Bee to give its little 
 body for the safety of the Hive) ; the particular 
 hive or colony of bees again is affiliated to the 
 whole race of domestic bees, and this again to the 
 further back race of wild bees ; and when our 
 little friend comes humming along the southern 
 wall among the early blooms in the February 
 morning she brings (as we feel) a message not 
 of the moment, but of things aeonian slumbering 
 deep in our hearts as well as in hers. 
 
 This aliveness of all Nature, and its derivation 
 from one absolute and eternal Self, must be 
 realised. And if at times the multiplexity of 
 egos, as of gnats in the summer sunshine, in 
 myriad procession and endless turmoil, seems 
 appalling and fatiguing ; then at other times 
 their fusion and affiliation with each other into 
 larger and grander beings of comparative fewness 
 seems consoling ; and even the conclusion of their 
 ultimate Oneness may bring a sense of immense 
 majesty and calm which, if it should be touched 
 with melancholy, would lead us back quite natur- 
 ally to the multiplexity again ! 
 
 We may envisage the matter as we like, and 
 according to our mood. Sufficient that it is a 
 fact, which we have to realise : we may say, the 
 fact of the universe. 
 
 Let us return for a moment to the elementary 
 act of knowledge or perception, from which we 
 
 started four chapters back. I come to the gate 
 
 103
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 of a wood and see, before me, the massed foliage 
 and congregated stems. It seems a little matter, 
 but within that simple act sleep the immensities. 
 I am an artist, and the light and shade and colour 
 attract me, rousing emotions which I do not 
 analyse ; the whisper of the leaves and the songs 
 of the birds wake far-back feelings dating from 
 ancestral ages. I am a woodman, and I see the 
 size and quality of the timber ; all the adjuncts 
 of wood-craft the brushing, the peeling, the 
 felling, and the hauling with horses rustle around 
 me ; and dim visions rise of the log-cabins or 
 wattled huts in which my forefathers lived. The 
 mystery, in either case, and the wild life of the 
 woods are there, though unseen ; and the instincts 
 which led the Britons to seek them for a cover 
 and a refuge, or the Druids to hold their worship 
 among them. All these things are present some- 
 how in that act of perception. And so are the 
 far remembrance of fear and primitive terror, the 
 vision of nymphs and wood-gods, and things 
 deep down in the life of the animals, and of the 
 trees themselves, or even in the life of the planet. 
 A wonderful aura and halo surrounds that little 
 scene from the gate, and is latent in its every 
 detail. The young moon sails above in the pure 
 sky of evening, and an immense peace, as of some 
 eternal being, descends, folding in silence the soul 
 of the onlooker. 
 
 The knowledge of our unfathomable life is 
 implicit in every least act of perception. Nor 
 does it bar the expression of our most determined 
 
 104
 
 The Self and its Affiliations 
 
 individuality. Nay, it needs this for its expression. 
 It stands revealed and manifest in the words and 
 actions of humanity's best-loved children. 
 
 " Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even 
 there, 
 
 I waited unseen and always, and slept thro' the lethargic mist, 
 
 And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon. 
 
 Long I was hugg'd close long and long. 
 
 Immense have been the preparations for me, 
 
 Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me. 
 
 Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boat- 
 men, 
 
 For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings." 
 
 So says Whitman of the past and we need not 
 doubt his word. And again of the future : 
 
 " It avails not, time nor place distance avails not, 
 I am with you men and women of a generation, or ever so many 
 generations hence." 
 
 And again Jesus of Nazareth says : 
 " Lo ! I am with you alway, even unto the end 
 of the world." 
 
 105
 
 VII 
 
 PLATONIC IDEAS AND HEREDITY 
 
 THOUGH experience coming from the outer world 
 affects the Mind (through the senses), yet the way 
 this experience is seized and combined is largely 
 given by the Mind itself. There is, as we have 
 already said, a subjective element in all knowledge 
 and without it there can be no knowledge. 
 
 This subjective element may arise from previous 
 experience, as when we recognise the hare sitting 
 in its ' form ' in a distant field because we have 
 already seen other hares so sitting, perhaps much 
 nearer. The mind is ready, as it were, to take 
 the required shape and attitude, and may do so 
 even under doubtful or misleading circumstances, 
 because it has taken the same shape and attitude 
 so often before. And we can hardly doubt that 
 through heredity also, in some way, as well as 
 through our own individual experience, the mind 
 acquires the habit of making certain combinations 
 and interpretations of the outer world. 
 
 But it is also obvious that there is a great deal 
 on the subjective side of knowledge which is given 
 antecedently to all experience, hereditary or in- 
 dividual as when the sense of likeness or difference 
 arises, or of size, or of number ; or when so many 
 
 106
 
 Platonic Ideas and Heredity 
 
 taps on the ear combine to a musical sound, or so 
 many vibrations in the optic nerve to the im- 
 pression of blue or red ; or when sounds combine 
 to a sense of harmony or of melody ; or when cer- 
 tain vibrations and agitations of the body coalesce 
 to the emotion of fear, or other vibrations and 
 agitations to love; or when certain perceptions 
 grouped together give rise to the sense of justice, 
 or of truth, or of beauty. 
 
 In all these cases, though the mental state thus 
 produced may grow from small beginnings and by 
 means of experience, yet it is in a sense prior to 
 experience that is to say, it is inconceivable that 
 a succession of taps on the drum of the ear should 
 be combined into one and heard as a single 
 musical sound, unless the power of so combining 
 taps was in the mind prior to experience. Or it is 
 clear that two sounds might go on side by side in 
 the ear for ever, and not be heard as harmony, unless 
 the mind added to the two that third and separate 
 thing which is the sense of their harmony. Cer- 
 tainly the sense of harmony might at first be felt 
 in some very simple relation of two notes, and 
 afterwards might grow and be extended to much 
 more remote and multiplex relations ; but all the 
 same it would from the first be an original 
 synthesis contributed from within. So of the 
 sense of likeness or difference. In whatever un- 
 developed mind of infant or animal it first occurs 
 to feel that two experiences, not only are each 
 what they are, but that they are like or unlike 
 each other, the new experience (of likeness or 
 
 107
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 unlikeness) is something added by the mind. It 
 represents a new power or faculty developed, and 
 totally unlike all its former powers and faculties. 
 
 So again when a great number of inchoate 
 movements in the tissues and nerves of the body, 
 and agitations of the muscles, organs and secre- 
 tions, with the internal sensations they convey, 
 are all combined in one emotion of fear, or 
 another set of movements and sensations in one 
 emotion of love, these emotions are totally different 
 from the sensations and movements so combined. 
 They are something added by the mind to the 
 group of sensations ; they are its way of seizing 
 and combining the group. Lastly, certain groups 
 of experiences excite in our minds the sense of 
 Justice or of Truth or of Beauty ; but we are 
 utterly unable to conceive that these great ideas 
 are in the separate experiences or events them- 
 selves, but they are our way of looking at them, 
 our feeling with regard to them. 
 
 I have insisted on the aspect of all these things 
 as feelings. They are sensations, emotions, states 
 or affections of the Mind. They are the qualities 
 given by the mind to its various combinations 
 of experience. Time, Space, and Causality, said 
 Kant, are universal forms or qualities of the 
 understanding conditions of our perception of 
 outer experience. But (we may say) redness, 
 blueness, sound, heat, similarity, order, harmony, 
 love, justice, beauty, &c., are qualities given by the 
 mind still deeper down, and projected by it into 
 the world of space, time, and causality. They 
 
 1 08
 
 Platonic Ideas and Heredity 
 
 are the names for feelings, states, or ideas, if we 
 like to call them so, aboriginal and primitive in 
 the mind itself. 
 
 And here comes in a most important point 
 the distinction, namely, between the two aspects 
 of each of these things the inner or the outer, 
 the emotional or the intellectual, the synthetic or 
 the analytic : the neglect of which distinction has 
 been the cause of endless confusion. 
 
 In fact, we see that each of these affections (the 
 experience of a musical sound, for example, or of 
 similarity, or of justice) is on one side a perfectly 
 simple and undecomposable feeling ; while on the 
 other side it resolves itself into a relation, possibly 
 quite complex, between objects. Thus the sound 
 of a violin string is on its inner and deeper side a 
 simple and unique sensation, but in its more 
 external and analytic aspect it appears as a series 
 of vibrations of very complex form falling in a 
 particular way on the ear. Similarity is from one 
 point of view a simple state or affection of the 
 mind, from the other it figures out in the form 
 of multiplex relations between objects. So of 
 Justice ; on the one side all the labyrinthine detail 
 of statutes and courts of law ; on the other a 
 severe unique sentiment. Herbert Spencer has 
 a long and eloquent passage in which he shows 
 analytically and from the intellectual side the 
 vast complexity of love. Dr. Bucke says that 
 love is a perfectly simple moral state defying 
 analysis ! 
 
 It is obvious that unless we recognise the 
 109
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 two-sidedness of these mental states, we are liable 
 to be landed in the utmost confusion. Let us call 
 such a mental state (following the nomenclature 
 of Plato, but perhaps somewhat extending it), 
 which on its inner side appears as a simple quality 
 or feeling, but on its outer side is a structure more 
 or less complex, an " idea." Then the units of 
 the mind's operations are such ideas, which on 
 one side are relations, and on the other side are 
 simple structureless feelings. 1 But it is to be 
 noted that the latter side seems to be the more 
 intimate and essential, because the same feeling 
 may be associated with more than one set of rela- 
 tions as when the sense of harmony in music is 
 provoked by more than one chord, or the sense 
 of injustice by various possible relations between 
 folk: 
 
 There is another point which must be noted, i.e. 
 the structure of ideas with regard to one another. 
 Thus, to take the case of music, to which we have 
 so often referred : taps on the ear combine to the 
 sensation or idea of sound ; but the sensations 
 of sound combine to the idea of harmony or of 
 melody. Harmonies and melodies again combine 
 to a much more complex structure a musical 
 phrase. This structure in its turn wakes an 
 emotion, which is, as it were, the other side of it. 
 Whenever we hear the phrase the same emotion 
 
 1 The distinction between "ideas" and concepts must be 
 clearly held in mind. The concept of a dog is a purely intel- 
 lectual abstraction a symbol, so to speak, of dogs in general 
 with no feeling necessarily attached to it. An idea is not an 
 idea unless it carries with it feeling and power. 
 
 no
 
 Platonic Ideas and Heredity 
 
 recurs. Finally, a whole series of phrases, with 
 their accompanying emotions, make up a musical 
 piece, which excites in us some still grander syn- 
 thesis and sense of Beauty or Truth or Freedom. 
 
 Let us suppose the composer's mind filled with 
 the sense of Beauty taking some definite form. 
 Then that single idea in his mind generates the 
 whole musical piece. For it first of all regulates 
 the balance and structure of the component emo- 
 tions of the piece. Each of these emotions in its 
 turn determines the musical phrase which expresses 
 it. The harmonies and melodies again needful 
 for the musical phrase determine the various rela- 
 tions to each other of the single notes ; and lastly, 
 the single notes determine the number of air-vibra- 
 tions necessary for their production. Thus the 
 whole complex of mechanical air- vibration is gener- 
 ated and determined by the single idea or feeling 
 of Beauty in the composer's mind, acting through 
 lesser and subordinate ideas. And, vice versa, the 
 public listening to the complex of air-vibrations 
 is led up again step by step to the realisation of 
 and participation in that same root-idea which from 
 the beginning was responsible for its generation. 
 
 Whoever clearly follows this concatenation and sub- 
 ordination of Ideas and their creative power, has 
 already come a long way towards understanding, 
 not only the generation of a musical piece, but 
 the generation and creation of all nature and 
 human life. 
 
 For the instant a new Idea or synthesis is mani- 
 fested, say in the mind of a child (and the instant 
 
 in
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 can often be observed), or in an adult mind 
 whether it be the simple idea of number, or of 
 harmony, or of truth, or what not it determines 
 both observation and action : it guides as to what 
 we shall perceive and as to how we shall act. 
 Take the sense of Order coming to a child. The 
 moment of this happening may often be noticed 
 the new perception of what order means, and 
 the new feeling of pleasure in it. The two to- 
 gether constitute the idea of order. And at once 
 the child sees new facts in the world around it, 
 and arranges its life and belongings anew. 
 
 Thus again if the idea of Justice is present 
 among a people though it may be but a senti- 
 ment at first and on its inner side, yet quickly on 
 its outer side it gives itself structure, and regulates 
 the conflicting desires and emotions and needs of 
 the people ; and these emotions and desires so 
 regulated from above do each of them in their 
 turn generate and regulate groups of habits and 
 customs ; and these again each in their turn 
 innumerable individual acts. And so the idea of 
 Justice becomes creative and alive throughout the 
 whole State. 
 
 Plato, as is well known, gave to Ideas in some 
 such sense as this the greatest import. They 
 existed before the world, and the world was 
 created after their pattern (see the "Timaeus"). 
 And we can see, from what has already been said, 
 that they are somehow implicit in the Ego before 
 all experience. As they descend into operation 
 and consciousness within the Man, they shape his 
 
 112
 
 Platonic Ideas and Heredity 
 
 life and form, and through him again the outer 
 world. Thus there is a point in evolution un- 
 doubtedly when the thought and feeling of self- 
 ness emerges in the child or the monkey, or 
 another point when the idea of courage dawns on 
 the early man or the growing boy ; and instantly 
 in each case we see what immense vistas of life, 
 and forms of life and action, what different 
 ramifications and institutions of society, proceed 
 from one such inner birth. 
 
 With Plato the great ruling Ideas were Justice, 
 Temperance, Beauty, and the like. But he also 
 considered that there were ideas or patterns, eter- 
 nal in the heavens, of all tribes and creatures in 
 the world, as of trees, animals, men, and the lesser 
 gods ; and he even went so far as to suppose ideas 
 of things made by man's artifice, such as beds and 
 tables (see " Republic," Book X.). Certainly it 
 sounds a little comic at first to hear the " absolute 
 essential Bed " spoken of, and Plato has been 
 considerably berated by many folk for his daring 
 in this matter. He has been accused of con- 
 founding the idea of a bed with the concept of a 
 bed ; it has been said too that if there are ideas 
 of beds and tables, trees and animals, there must 
 also be archetypes in heaven of pots and pans 
 absolutely essential worms, beetles and toadstools, 
 and so forth. Plato, however, had no doubt con- 
 sidered these difficulties, and it may be worth 
 while for our purpose to pause a moment over 
 them. 
 
 If it were the mere concept of a bed, it would 
 113 ' H
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 of course be absurd to give it any essential reality. 
 For the concept is a mere intellectual abstraction 
 derived from the perception of a great number of 
 actual beds, and is certainly less real than the 
 things of which it is, so to speak, a rough sketch. 
 But the Idea, as we have said, though it may have 
 intellectual structure on its outer side, is on its 
 inner side essentially a feeling. It is the feeling 
 of Bed which constitutes the Idea, and is creative. 
 Now in Man there is essentially such a feeling 
 a need and desire of sleep and the horizontal 
 position. How deep this feeling may root in 
 the nature of Man it might be hard to say, but 
 we can see that it is very, very profound. And 
 from it spring all imaginable actual beds, of 
 most various shape and construction, yet all in 
 their ways adapted and giving form to that 
 feeling. 
 
 I say the idea of Bed in this sense is rooted 
 most deep and far back in the nature of Man. 
 But Man himself and his nature is rooted deep in 
 the nature of God, from whom he springs and 
 so may we not say that in some sense the idea of 
 Bed is rooted in the ultimate reality and nature 
 of things ? 
 
 When we see how things like beds and tables 
 and houses may thus spring from needs or ideas, 
 like Rest and Shelter, lying deep in the very con- 
 stitution of man, it is not difficult to see further 
 how the forms of man's body, and of the animals 
 and trees and worms and beetles and toadstools, 
 may have been (to a large extent) determined and 
 
 114
 
 Platonic Ideas and Heredity 
 
 created by the feelings or ideas slumbering within 
 these beings. At some point the feeling of 
 pleasure and safety in arboreal life lent form and 
 outline to the whole race of prehensile monkeys ; 
 at some other point the sweet sensation of con- 
 trast between the moist darkness of the earth and 
 the sunlit air of heaven gave birth to the vast 
 tribe of vegetable beings, for ever seeking by 
 upward and downward ramifications to extend 
 the glad interchange between the two worlds. 
 That these creative feelings did not appear to the 
 individual animals and vegetables concerned as 
 vast and luminous " Ideas," but only as dim 
 semi-conscious desires, does not affect the argu- 
 ment that in this way creation has been effected. 
 Nor do I wish to say that this is quite the way in 
 which Plato conceives the subject. It is more 
 like the conception of Schopenhauer. But any- 
 how it is an attempt to show how the Platonic 
 ideas may be brought into some sort of line and 
 harmony with modern science and philosophy. 
 And it enables us dimly to see how the great 
 panorama of creation has come forth, ever deter- 
 mining and manifesting itself from within through 
 the disclosure from point to point and from time 
 to time of ever-new creative feelings or ideas 
 the whole forming an immense hierarchy, cul- 
 minating in the grandest, most universal, Being 
 and Life. 
 
 Here, in the contemplation of this universal 
 Being, this primal Self of all, we are at the source 
 of Creation. In this primal Self, and its first 
 
 "5
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 differentiation, we may suppose to exist great 
 primitive Ideas, attitudes, aspects things below 
 or more fundamental than Feeling, which yet 
 work out into Feeling, Thought, and Action. 
 These ideas are working everywhere in the 
 great Self, and in every lesser self that springs 
 therefrom ; and our lives are their expression 
 (differently mingled though they be in each 
 person, and always, owing to the conflict of exist- 
 ence, inadequately expressed). In quite inorganic 
 Nature, we still perceive ideas of a certain class 
 pervading matter, like Attraction or Repulsion, 
 Rigidity or Fluidity, Rest or Motion, which (as 
 we have noticed before) answer to feelings which 
 we have within ourselves. In more organic 
 Nature we recognise Life, Sensitiveness, Selfness, 
 Affection ; and in our fellow-man ideas of Cour- 
 age, Justice, Beauty, and so forth. Everywhere 
 in Creation we see ideas working which answer 
 more or less to those within ourselves ; and it is 
 this answering of one to the other, of the outer 
 to the inner, which forms the very ground of all 
 Science and Art, and the joy that we feel in 
 Truth and Beauty. 
 
 But in the Race too, as well as in the indi- 
 vidual, these ideas are working ; and, in fact, it 
 is through the Race largely that they gradually 
 gain their form and expression. This considera- 
 tion must detain us a moment, as it is important. 
 
 The feelings which are an essential part of Ideas 
 may be innate in the human mind, and the capa- 
 city for them may be universal, but the forms 
 
 116
 
 Platonic Ideas and Heredity 
 
 corresponding may vary greatly from race to 
 race. The feeling of number, or of melody, or 
 of justice, may be universal in mankind ; but the 
 arithmetical systems, or the diatonic scales, or 
 the social institutions of the various races may 
 be very various. The abstract feeling of number 
 then, or of melody, or of justice, may correspond 
 to the Idea of Plato, formless in the heavens, or 
 in the bosom of God ; but when it comes to take 
 form in the various races of mankind it does so 
 with variety, according to the necessity of out- 
 ward circumstances, and the genius and tradition 
 of each race. Thus Plato feigns in the "Timaeus" 
 that the universal spirit of God handed over the 
 seeds of the immortal, imperishable Ideas to the 
 lesser gods, who, each according to the race of 
 men or animals over which he presided, was to 
 embody these seeds in external forms. Thus the 
 various races of living creatures arose all vivified 
 from within by the eternal Ideas, yet all having 
 their various structures according to their races, 
 and the genius of the particular god presiding 
 over the race. 
 
 In the language of modern Science, using the 
 term " Heredity " to cover much the same ground 
 as " the genius of the race-god," we should say 
 that while the ideas (say of melody and of flight 
 in the case of birds) are the vivifying impulses 
 of any class of creatures, the particular forms 
 (as of songs and of wings) are a matter of slowly 
 growing heredity and the tradition of the race. 
 
 Let us take the example of Courage in man. 
 117
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 At a certain stage in evolution, doubtless, the 
 idea of Courage dawned on primitive Man. He 
 may have fought in a scrambling, spasmodic way 
 before that, but without any nucleus to his ardour. 
 Now round this new idea, this new sense, a dis- 
 tinct life grew. He admired courage in others, 
 he strove for it in himself. And it took form. 
 The idea (which in the abstract, or in heaven, 
 may be formless enough) took form and became 
 embodied in a certain type of man, according to 
 the race, according to its tradition, according to 
 its needs and environment. The physical and 
 moral type of courage in the mind of a Greek 
 (the dress, the figure, the temperament, the 
 character) would be very different from that in 
 the mind of a North American Indian ; and 
 that again from the type in the mind of a 
 modern soldier : the form depending on more 
 or less traceable external conditions, but the feel- 
 ing being one which comes to all races and men 
 at a certain stage of growth. 
 
 Thus Heredity comes in. The ancestors having 
 all been accustomed to associate Courage with a 
 certain type of man and action, we can hardly 
 doubt that in some way (pace Weismann) the 
 repeated impressions cohere in the descendant, or 
 at least leave the descendant mind the more 
 ready to respond to that particular type ; till 
 in the course of centuries and thousands of years, 
 a particular form rouses a particular feeling with 
 the greatest intensity, or, on the other hand, a 
 
 feeling calls up a particular form. The modern 
 
 us
 
 Platonic Ideas and Heredity 
 
 boy sees in a red-coat soldier an emblem of super- 
 human valour, when a befeathered Apache brave 
 would only fill him with contempt and ridicule. 
 Thus the creative Idea, through heredity and 
 individual experience combined, works in this 
 or that form in this or that race though in 
 the course of centuries, with changing circum- 
 stances or development, the form too may slowly 
 change. 
 
 Or we may take the example of Love how of 
 this inner feeling a certain external type of Woman 
 (owing to the genius and heredity and circum- 
 stances of the race) may become the emblem and 
 ideal, how this type may figure as the goddess of 
 Love for the race, and become a great power in 
 the midst of it. Or again Justice how certain 
 institutions getting ingrained by heredity in race- 
 habit, as associated with this sentiment, acquire 
 a great sacredness and authority, and are most 
 difficult to alter though to other races or folk 
 they may seem quite horrible. Or even of beds 
 and tables how the idea of a bed in one race 
 may work itself out in a ponderous four-poster, 
 and in another in a simple mat on the ground, 
 and in a third in the form of a hammock. 
 Though the feeling and the need of Sleep may 
 be practically the same in all races, yet the forms 
 and structures in which it finds expression may 
 be so different as to be almost meaningless and 
 useless to those unaccustomed to them. 
 
 Thus we get a glimpse of great formative 
 ideas lying even behind the evolution of races, 
 
 119
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 and largely guiding these evolutions (subject of 
 course to external influences, and such things as 
 the clashing of the ideas of one race with those 
 of another) ; and we see how the expression of 
 ideas, through the long race-life and the repe- 
 tition of them in the same form, may gain an 
 extraordinary intensity a subject to which we 
 shall return in the next chapter. We see too 
 in what way Plato was justified in saying that 
 the Ideas were the real things and the mundane 
 objects only illusive forms. For clearly the ham- 
 mock and the mat and the four-poster, and all 
 the countless variations of these are, none of them, 
 the absolute essential Bed or Bedness but rather 
 this term must be applied to that profound 
 quality of man's nature from which all mortal 
 beds proceed. And clearly all the horribly dis- 
 cordant law-books and laws and law-courts and 
 prisons are none of them Justice ; but this term 
 must be applied to that deep sentiment of which 
 all these are the lame expression. " For nothing 
 can have any sense except by reason of that of 
 which it is the shadow." And finally, we may 
 ask whether for a true understanding of the 
 trees and the plants and the animals we must 
 not refer them in a similar way to the root- 
 ideas and feelings from which they spring, and 
 of which they strive to be the expression. 
 
 To recapitulate. The creative source is in the 
 transcendent Self of all things. This Self at its 
 first differentiation into multiplex ' aspects ' (or 
 
 120
 
 Platonic Ideas and Heredity 
 
 individualities) manifests at the same time the 
 Ideas which are inherent in its being ; l and these 
 again descend into Feeling, Thought, and Action, 
 and finally into external structure and life which 
 latter may be looked upon as largely due to the 
 conditioning or limitation of the ideas manifested 
 in one individuality by those manifested in an- 
 other. Anyhow, we can see that the manifesta- 
 tion takes place under certain external conditions, 
 and that by the time it descends into actual struc- 
 ture it has been largely swayed by those condi- 
 tions. These external forms built up in any race 
 for the manifestation or expression of Ideas are 
 riveted and emphasised by Heredity (or by the 
 hammering of the race-god through the cen- 
 turies), and acquire an extraordinary sanctity and 
 transcendent glamour through this process, so 
 that the mere appearance of the form instantly 
 wakes the Idea or deep transcendent feeling which 
 belongs to it. Thus we come near to Plato's 
 aj/a/xj/^o-if, and see how a kind of memory of 
 celestial visions and powers may be roused by 
 the sight of mortal things. 
 
 We see too that the self of one race, having 
 branched off somewhere from the primal Self, 
 
 1 It is not difficult to see how the very first differentiation ol 
 the One into the Multiple must necessarily mean the manifes- 
 tation of certain great primal Ideas such as Union (or love), 
 Individuality (or pride), Equality, Justice, Power (the life of the 
 Many in the One), Beauty (the beholding of the One in the 
 Many), Truth, and so forth. The Ideas have no force or 
 validity of their own except as inherent in the primal Being or 
 in those beings affiliated to it ; and Being has no differentiation 
 except through the Ideas which it manifests. 
 
 121
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 may embody or manifest the Ideas in somewhat 
 different degree or different order, say from the 
 self of another race ; and again that the indi- 
 vidual Ego branching from the race-Ego 
 though it carries on the general forms and ideas 
 of the race may manifest them in different 
 degree or combination from another individual. 
 Yet it has to be remembered that the absolute 
 self of the individual is still ultimately the 
 transcendent World-self (coming down in time 
 through the Race-self, but by no means neces- 
 sarily tied to the race-forms), and that the indi- 
 vidual, notwithstanding his heredity, has still an 
 access and appeal to a region and powers beyond 
 and prior to all heredity. 
 
 122
 
 VIII 
 
 THE GODS AS APPARITIONS OF THE 
 RACE-LIFE 
 
 WE are now in a position to understand in some 
 degree the mysterious figures of the gods those 
 figures which, clothed with dominion and terror, 
 or with grace and beauty, have hovered like 
 phantoms for thousands and scores of thousands 
 of years over the earlier races of the Earth. 
 
 When we look back at the wonderful pano- 
 rama of them at the timeless gods of Egypt, 
 the strange mesmeric gods of India, the just yet 
 merciful Judges of Assyria, the gracious deities 
 of Greece, the warlike, restless powers of Scandi- 
 navia, the fateful, terrible gods of Mexico, and 
 all the grotesque, half-brute, half-human idols of 
 countless savage races ; or even at the deities and 
 saints of the Christian Church, the Virgin Mary, 
 the Holy Ghost, the infant or the crucified 
 Christ, and the lesser figures grouped round 
 them in the Catholic Heaven the question can- 
 not but force itself on us : What is the meaning 
 of it all ? What gave to these figures their 
 intense reality and significance for the people 
 over whom they presided ? 
 
 For although modern Science has tackled this 
 123
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 question, and although we feel that the current 
 explanations which it gives are suggestive as of 
 generalisations of Nature-phenomena, anthropo- 
 morphic superstitions, idealisations of heroic men 
 and women, and so forth, modified by traditions 
 and memories and dreams, and complicated by 
 mistakes in the meanings of words and names 
 we feel also that these explanations fail almost 
 entirely to account for the astounding power and 
 influence of the figures concerned, or to reveal 
 why to the savage and untutored mind mere 
 traditions and generalisations and abstractions 
 should have acquired such intense reality. 
 
 For no one can consider the subject for a 
 moment without seeing that for each race its 
 gods were (at any rate in the earlier period of 
 their apparition) actually existent beings. When 
 we read that Pheidippides, having been sent by 
 the Athenians to Sparta to ask for aid against 
 the Persians, was exhausted by the way (for he 
 covered, it was said, the one hundred and fifty 
 miles in less than two days), and that as he rested 
 for a moment in some quiet valley beside a 
 spring, lo ! the great god Pan appeared to him, 
 and his voice was heard promising victory to the 
 Athenians ; and further, that the latter in con- 
 sequence dedicated a temple to Pan after the 
 battle of Marathon, and honoured him thence- 
 forth with annual sacrifices and a torch-race we 
 cannot but feel that whatever was the actual 
 occurrence, the popular belief in the reality of 
 the apparition and the voice was irresistible. Or 
 
 124
 
 The Gods as Apparitions of the Race-Life 
 
 when in the Homeric epos Athen comes from 
 the sky and takes Achilles by his yellow hair, 
 and the wrathful hero, at the behest of her 
 terribly brilliant eyes, sheathes his sword ; or 
 when in the Ramayana the supreme god Krishna, 
 in the form of the charioteer, holds long dis- 
 course with Arjuna on the field of battle, speak- 
 ing words of eternal and divine wisdom, we see 
 that though these incidents may be literary in- 
 ventions, they derive all their force from the 
 fact that they would appeal to an immense and 
 wide-spread conviction that such incidents could 
 and did occur. Or when we come to compara- 
 tively modern witnesses, like Saint Francis, who 
 beheld the Madonna descend from the sky and 
 place in his arms her Divine Son, or Catherine of 
 Siena, for whom Heaven opened and showed her 
 the Christ sitting upon the Throne ; or consider 
 hundreds and hundreds of similar stories, and 
 how the presence and activity and profound 
 influence of such figures and beings have been 
 admitted and accepted and insisted on by millions 
 and millions of human kind in all races and in all 
 ages ; and the belief in them has compelled men 
 to every conceivable heroism and devotion, and 
 terror of death and sacrifice it is impossible, I 
 say, not to see how intense was the reality with 
 which they were credited, and difficult not to 
 suppose that (whatever these apparitions actually 
 were) they represented some real force or forces 
 influencing mankind. 
 
 After what has been said in preceding chapters 
 125
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 it may be guessed what my answer would be to 
 these questions. It is that these figures derive 
 their profound influence from the fact that they 
 represent the life of the race itself; that they are 
 the manifestation and expression of that life, of 
 which (as far as our bodies are concerned) we are 
 offshoots and affiliations so that through them 
 we reach to another and more extended order 
 of consciousness ', we partake of a vaster life, and 
 are correspondingly deeply moved. If we look 
 upon the vast race-life as the manifestation of 
 one great aspect of the World-Self or Ego, and 
 on the great formative Ideas of the race as its 
 gods, whose essence is eternal but whose form 
 (as we saw in the last chapter) is apparitional and 
 dependent in some degree on outer circumstances ; 
 then we can understand how through these forms 
 we may enter into the race-life and the great 
 Ideas that inspire it, and come one step nearer to 
 the world-self. We may be lifted for a moment 
 out of our work-a-day existence and touch upon 
 that which is eternal. 
 
 For the moment I only wish to suggest this 
 general answer and even so I do not wish to 
 limit the answer too much, or say that it is only 
 through the race-life that we reach a higher order 
 of consciousness. But certainly through the race- 
 consciousness much may come ; and it may be 
 worth while to consider it more in detail. 
 
 In studying any phenomenon of the past it is 
 always advisable to try and detect it in the life of 
 to-day. And the moment we do so in this case 
 
 126
 
 The Gods as Apparitions of the Race-Life 
 
 we see that the gods are still living and real all 
 around us. Allowing all one may for mere cant 
 or custom, yet there are thousands and thousands 
 round us to whom the figure of Christ, say, is an 
 intense, a living, and an actually present reality. 
 It is difficult to suppose that all these people are 
 merely deceiving themselves. One must see that 
 whatever this figure is, or proceeds from, it is 
 much more than the imagination of a fairy tale, 
 and represents a real power there present and 
 acting within the man. It is a thing of the same 
 character as the deities of olden time. 
 
 Or again, who is there so unfortunate as not 
 to have had the experience, in ordinary daily life, 
 of seeing some features, perhaps those of a well- 
 known person, suddenly transformed into the 
 lineaments of a god with the strangest possible 
 sense of a transcendent Presence, only to be 
 described by some such word ? Or why, on 
 occasions, walking along the crowded streets 
 amid all the rubbish and riff-raff of humanity, 
 does a face suddenly appear, all glorified and 
 shining, removed by a measureless gulf from 
 those around and disappear again in the stream? 
 What is the meaning of these sudden halos and 
 glamours ? 
 
 Dr. Bucke, in his " Memories of Walt Whit- 
 man," describes the profound impression pro- 
 duced upon him by his first interview with the 
 poet. " I remember well how, like so many 
 others, I was struck, almost amazed, by the 
 beauty and majesty of his person and the gracious 
 
 127
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 air of purity that surrounded and permeated him. 
 We did not talk much, nor do I remember any- 
 thing that was said, but it would be impossible 
 for me to fully convey by words or in any way 
 to describe the influence upon me of that short 
 and simple interview. A sort of spiritual intoxi- 
 cation set in, which did not reach its culmination 
 for several weeks, and which, after continuing for 
 some months, very gradually, in the course of the 
 next few years, faded out. While this state of 
 exaltation remained at its height the mental 
 image of the man Walt Whitman underwent 
 within me a sort of glorification (or else a veil 
 was withdrawn and I saw him as he was and is), 
 insomuch that it became impossible for me (I 
 am describing the event just as it occurred, and 
 as accurately as possible) to believe that Whitman 
 was a mere man. It seemed to me at that time 
 certain that he was either actually a god or in some 
 sense dearly and entirely preterhuman. Be all this as 
 it may, it is certain that the hour spent that day 
 with the poet was the turning-point of my life." 
 These words of Dr. Bucke are specially interest- 
 ing as coming from no sentimental youth, but 
 from a man of scientific and practical attainment 
 who at the time of the recorded experience was 
 fully forty years old, and superintendent of a 
 large insane asylum ; and they show clearly 
 enough his deliberate conviction that he beheld in 
 
 O 
 
 Whitman the presence of a being divine and 
 beyond the range of mortality. 
 
 Or again, we ask, why do the mountain-peaks 
 128
 
 The Gods as Apparitions of the Race-Life 
 
 and the thunder-clouds sometimes take on a 
 mystic light, and stir us with a sense of some- 
 thing unearthly ? Why in the sylvan glades do 
 we become aware, perhaps quite unexpectedly, of 
 a breathless stillness and magic, and the trees 
 stand as though the Wood-god himself were 
 there, and the air exhales a mystery ? What is 
 this light which never was on sea or land ? We 
 see that these things are realities in the sense that 
 they so deeply influence us. We surmise that 
 they are something more than phantoms or 
 fictions of our own individual brains. 
 
 I have already touched upon the effort of 
 Plato to explain these mysteries. Plato believed 
 in a world of Absolute Forms and Essences 
 remaining beyond the reach of Time. There, in 
 company with the gods, dwelt and for ever 
 dwell Justice and Temperance and Beauty and 
 many other Ideas. The soul of every man in 
 some earlier state of being, carried round in the 
 retinue of that special god to whom he may 
 belong, has beheld in that heavenly world these 
 divine Essences. But fallen now to Earth it has 
 wellnigh forgotten them. Only now and then, 
 when the man sees some fair face or figure, wit- 
 nesses some heroic deed or well-balanced action, 
 or even perceives some well-formed object, is he 
 reminded of that which is Eternal. For Plato the 
 explanation of the Divine was easy enough. It 
 was an cW/xi^crt? a recollection, faint or power- 
 ful, of things once known and seen. When you 
 set eyes might Plato say upon that face in the 
 
 129 i
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 crowd it was not so much the face itself that was 
 divine (though it was certainly privileged so far 
 to resemble divinity), but that it instantly recalled 
 to your memory the form of some god seen long 
 ago, or far down in the mirror of the mind to 
 which god indeed your adoration and worship 
 were due, and not to the mortal ; or if to the 
 mortal, only so far as in him (or her) the image 
 of the god were faintly visible. Of these celestial 
 forms (and these are Plato's actual words in the 
 "Phaedrus") " few only retain an adequate remem- 
 brance ; and they, when they behold any image 
 of that other world, are rapt in amazement ; but 
 they are ignorant of what this rapture means, 
 because they do not clearly perceive. For there is 
 no light in the earthly copies of justice or temper- 
 ance or any of the higher qualities which are 
 precious to souls : they are seen through a glass 
 dimly ; and there are few who, going to the 
 images, behold in them the realities, and they only 
 with difficulty.'* Thus for Plato the explanation 
 of " the light which never was on sea or land " 
 was easy enough. It was a memory of that 
 celestial light in which the divine Ideas and 
 heavenly beings themselves were once seen by the 
 soul ; and indeed are (according to him) ever 
 seen, whenso it may succeed in penetrating into 
 that region where they dwell eternal. 
 
 We have seen (in the last chapter) how it may 
 be possible to look upon this theory of Plato's in 
 the light of modern science and philosophy. The 
 Ideas, we saw, on their inner and essential side 
 
 130
 
 The Gods as Apparitions of the Race-Life 
 
 are states of being, states of feeling. It is on 
 their outer side that they take form and structure. 
 So that ultimately the mundane forms in which 
 they express themselves may not only be very 
 various (several or many forms being capable of 
 expressing one idea), but the mundane forms are 
 also necessarily imperfect expressions, and largely 
 determined by external accident and circumstance. 
 We saw also how Heredity in the race comes in 
 to stamp and accentuate the connection between a 
 comparatively imperfect and accidental form, and 
 the Idea which it represents and to such a degree 
 that at last the mere momentary sight of the said 
 imperfect form may wake the Idea, or state of 
 being and feeling, with the greatest intensity. 
 Thus a real ara/xi/ijo-t? takes place that is, a re- 
 membrance or revivifying of divine things in the 
 mind through a mere external phenomenon. The 
 countless memories of the race, all associated for 
 generations with the particular object or the 
 sum and result of these memories wake the Idea 
 in the mind of the present individual with a 
 seemingly supernatural force. Let us go into 
 this subject yet more closely. 
 
 We all know that the young of animals act in 
 a way which suggests that their psychical selves, 
 their memory and experience, are in some way 
 continuous with those of their ancestors. Young 
 partridges, or the chicks of the barndoor fowl, 
 only a day old, at sight of any large bird in the 
 air, will instantly and instinctively crouch and 
 flatten themselves on the ground. Their alarm,
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 increased by the warning call of the mother, causes 
 them to seek refuge under her wings. What 
 definite form the sense of danger takes in the 
 young chick's mind it is of course hard to say. 
 But there it seems to be the memory of a thou- 
 sand and a hundred thousand occasions in the 
 history of the chick's ancestors, when the dreaded 
 claws and beak came from the sky and snatched 
 or nearly snatched the cowering prey. So clear 
 and oft-repeated has the association become, that 
 now the Vision of a bird above governs, so to 
 speak, a whole plexus of nerves, not only in the 
 chick, but even in the adult partridge or fowl, 
 and sets in movement, almost automatically, a 
 whole apparatus of muscles of defence or flight. 
 The certainty and instantaneousness with which 
 this happens is something astonishing. Personally 
 I am never tired of watching my barndoor fowls 
 on the occasions when the sweep comes to clean 
 the chimney. On the moment when the brush 
 emerges from the top of the chimney whatever 
 the fowls are doing, whether they are feeding or 
 basking, or foraging in far grounds in that 
 instant with shrieks and screams they rush in 
 every direction seeking for cover : convinced that 
 an awful enemy has appeared on the roof. A 
 cap thrown high in the air has the same effect. 
 It is not that a cap in form or movement is so 
 very like a bird (in fact, some of my fowls 
 must know well enough in their hearts exactly 
 what my cap really is), but that it wakes the 
 latent remembrance of the bird of prey. The 
 
 132
 
 The Gods as Apparitions of the Race-Life 
 
 fowls do not really see the cap or the chimney 
 sweep's brush, but they see what may be called 
 the Vision of the Ideal Hawk which is far 
 stronger and more deeply embedded in their 'very 
 physiology than any momentary image can be, 
 and has a far more powerful influence on 
 them. 
 
 All this is quite like the Platonic reminiscence. 
 We do not really see the rather commonplace 
 features which pass in the street, but some celestial 
 vision (in the race-consciousness) of which they 
 remind us ; and it is this latter which agitates 
 and transports us. At the back of our eyes, so 
 to speak, and in the profound depths of the race- 
 life (of which each individual is but a momentary 
 point) is stored the remote past of the world ; 
 and through our eyes look the eyes of dead 
 ancestors. Thus we see not merely the bare 
 object, but rather it is surrounded by a strange 
 halo and glamour, which is the presence of all 
 this past. 
 
 Let us take an important and definite instance 
 from human life. In the last chapter we spoke 
 of Courage. In the history of nations War is of 
 supreme importance ; and we can see how the 
 Idea of the hero, or courageous warrior, has helped 
 to build up every race. Working in the race 
 through the centuries, and under certain external 
 conditions, it has produced a certain type of 
 warriors. Of these warriors some naturally would 
 be more representative and efficient than others, 
 and these would be the mighty men of valour to
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 whom every one would look up. Among early 
 and warlike races, probably far the greater part 
 of the activity of the male portion of the race, 
 and of the love-longing of the female portion, 
 has thus clustered round the figure of the mighty 
 warrior. The man who towers head and shoulders 
 above his fellows, who is a terror to his enemies 
 and a fortress of strength to his friends, necessarily 
 occupies a commanding position in the minds 
 of those around him, be they friends or foes 
 especially in the minds of the youth. His image 
 is the object of their admiration and emulation, 
 it is associated with the most thrilling exploits, it 
 is the symbol of all they would desire to be, in 
 themselves or their children. Every young man 
 has had two or three such figures stamped on his 
 brain ; between which figures there will doubtless 
 be some degree of similarity, and some degree of 
 blending into a joint ideal. 
 
 But (and this is the important point) the same 
 process has been taking place through the genera- 
 tions ; and going back through the long succes- 
 sion of any one line of ancestry we seem to see 
 that countless images have been imprinted (each 
 with great intensity in its time) and superimposed 
 on one another the result being the formation 
 of a great composite form or symbol, which, 
 slowly altering, will be inherited by each descend- 
 ant, and will lie there, perhaps for a long time 
 slumbering and unbeknown to the individual, at 
 the centre of all the emotions and activities con- 
 cerned in warfare and patriotism, and associated 
 
 '34
 
 The Gods as Apparitions of the Race-Life 
 
 with some nerve-plexus which governs these 
 activities and affections in the human body. 1 
 
 This composite then, like a composite photo- 
 graph of many faces upon the same plate, will 
 not show individual details and variations except 
 by implication, but rather the large outlines of 
 the group which it represents in this case the 
 warrior-hero. In the hundreds and thousands of 
 images which go to form it, defects, dispropor- 
 tions, inharmonious details, will cancel each other 
 out, and there will emerge a Form, harmonious, 
 grand, and not far from perfect the- warrior-god, 
 in fact, of the race the result, so to speak, of 
 the selection and chiselling of thousands of minds 
 through the centuries. 
 
 But if in one sense this God-form is the result 
 of the chiselling of thousands of minds, in 
 another it is the Form which the Heroic Idea 
 working through the centuries has fashioned for 
 itself and has inspired the multitudinous minds 
 to adore. It is the god himself, as one aspect of 
 the race-life, whom we here see in his double 
 activity both as producing certain types of man- 
 hood, and as inspiring others to reverence and 
 store in memory these types, so that at last 
 
 1 If it sounds too crude and materialistic to speak of an 
 inherited composite image as dwelling in or associated with a 
 nerve-plexus, yet we must allow that by heredity the nerves 
 become adjusted so as to respond to images of a certain class 
 or composite type. And if again our knowledge of nerve- 
 plexuses is too uncertain yet to show exactly how ideas and 
 emotions are associated with them, yet that there is some such 
 general association is for the most part admitted by the modern 
 psychologists and physiologists. 
 
 135
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 through the mortal types the god himself may be 
 beheld, and the race-life and race-consciousness 
 entered into. There in its appropriate centre or 
 nerve-structure of the human body the heroic 
 Idea dwells, inspiring the blended memory of 
 countless heroic actions, feats of bravery, struggles, 
 defeats, triumphs, and so forth, and governing in 
 the individual man the vast congregation of powers 
 and activities with which it is concerned. No 
 wonder that when the sight of a living warrior 
 wakes this slumbering centre within the youth, 
 devotion and emulation, excitement and the ardour 
 of heroic deeds, for him can know no bounds. 
 
 Let us take another instance. There is no 
 class of mental impressions much more powerful 
 and persistent through all time than those con- 
 nected with the relation of the sexes. For ages, 
 thousands of centuries, the Male has sought the 
 
 ' D 
 
 Female, the Female has sought the Male. Here 
 we are at the very centre and focus of race-life. 
 Love, in this sense, means union of differentiated 
 and opposing elements, by which the balance of 
 race-life is restored, and the self or Being who is 
 at the root of this life comes one step farther to 
 manifestation. This Titanic being, who through 
 the ages (and always working subject to some 
 external conditions) has thrown out multitudinous 
 types, always more or less imperfect, of itself, 
 dwells also hidden within each individual. Not 
 only metaphysically speaking does it dwell in 
 each individual, but through the long process of 
 Heredity, its Form or Forms (the race-ideals or 
 
 136
 
 The Gods as Apparitions of the Race-Life 
 
 race-gods) lie slumbering there 1 and in closest 
 touch with all the nerve-structures and potencies 
 which have to do with the generation of the 
 race. Then come together two individuals whose 
 opposite polarities and differentiations will to- 
 gether build an adequate expression, and instantly 
 in each other they wake this Titanic life, and the 
 god-figures belonging to it. The youth sees the 
 girl ; it may be a chance face, a chance outline, 
 amid the most banal surroundings. But it gives 
 the cue. There is a memory, a confused reminis- 
 cence. The mortal figure without penetrates to 
 the immortal figure within ; and there rises into 
 consciousness a shining Form, glorious, not belong- 
 ing to this world, but vibrating with the agelong 
 life of humanity, and the memory of a thousand 
 love-dramas. The waking of this vision intoxicates 
 the man ; it glows and burns within him ; a 
 goddess (it may be Venus herself) stands in the 
 sacred place of his Temple ; a sense of awe-struck 
 splendour fills him ; and the world is changed. 2 
 " He whose initiation is recent," says Plato, 
 
 1 As in the case of the Warrior-god, we may imagine that 
 every man inherits from his countless male ancestors a sus- 
 ceptibility to a certain type of feminine beauty ; and every 
 woman from her female ancestors a susceptibility to a certain 
 ideal of manhood. 
 
 2 The degree in which this Form comes into clear Vision may 
 vary much with different races or individuals. In many cases 
 a distinct vision is never realised, though it may be indicated 
 by the agitation and excitement felt, and by the halo thrown 
 round the mortal creature. Anyhow, it must be remembered 
 (what we have already said) that the Idea on its inner side is a 
 state of being or feeling, and only on its outer and less essential 
 side a form. Aristotle calls the Platonic Ideas dta-drjTa dtdia. 
 
 137
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 " and who has been spectator of many glories in 
 the other world, is amazed when he sees any one 
 having a god-like face or form, which is the 
 expression of Divine Beauty ; and at first a 
 shudder runs through him, and again the old 
 awe steals over him ; then looking upon the face 
 of his beloved as of a god he reverences him, and 
 if he were not afraid of being thought a down- 
 right madman, he would sacrifice to his beloved 
 as to the image of a god." And Lafcadio Hearn, 
 who in his " Out of the East " and in his "Exotics 
 and Retrospectives " has written much that is 
 suggestive on this point, says this visionary figure 
 is " a composite of numberless race-memories . . . 
 a beautiful luminous ghost made of centillions of 
 memories " ; but he adds, somewhat in the spirit 
 of Thomas Hardy, " you will now remember 
 the beloved seemed lovelier than mortal woman 
 could be." 
 
 In truth, as we have said before, the mortal 
 object which wakes the ideal in our minds, and 
 the Ideal itself, though occasionally confused, are 
 on the whole clearly distinct and separable in 
 thought from each other. They are -perceived by 
 separate faculties. The object, so far as it is a 
 mortal object, is perceived by the senses, by surface 
 sight and touch and hearing ; but not so the inner 
 Vision. Plato says that this state of mind, in 
 which Divine Beauty is seen (and which is asso- 
 ciated with all real love), is a " Mania," and that 
 only in this condition of " Mania " can the 
 heavenly facts be perceived or remembered. 
 
 138
 
 The Gods as Apparitions of the Race-Life 
 
 What he seems to indicate by this and what 
 we, in modern speech, should probably say is 
 that it is another state of consciousness which is 
 concerned : that is, that while the objects of the 
 outer world are perceived by us through the 
 senses, co-ordinated under the conditions of 
 the ordinary consciousness, these ancient (race) 
 memories, and the feelings and visions which 
 come with them, belong to another order of 
 consciousness. Indeed, it almost seems obvious 
 that it must be so. If the existence of race- 
 memories, and of feelings and visions accompany- 
 ing them, is allowed at all, it would seem that 
 these things must belong in some degree to the 
 consciousness of the race, to a less individual and 
 local consciousness than the ordinary one. The 
 terms ' mania,' then, or ' ecstasy,' which would 
 indicate the passing out from the ordinary con- 
 sciousness (into the racial or celestial, according 
 as we adopt the modern or Platonic view), would 
 seem quite appropriate. 
 
 There is one other point just here. I say the 
 outer object and the Ideal Memory which it 
 wakes in the mind, though separable in thought, 
 are for a time confused with one another. The 
 splendours of the Ideal are showered upon and 
 invest the object. Yet dimly the mind feels that 
 it is remembering something, and wonders to 
 what previous experience the object is akin. Is 
 this the explanation of that curious sense of 
 Familiarity, at first sight, which is so often 
 excited by the idealisation of another person ?
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 A memory is indeed awakened, and of a figure 
 most intimate to oneself, but slumbering deep in 
 the recesses of one's own mind. 
 
 Going back to the subject of the Warrior, we 
 see that Hero-worship is not confined to that 
 form. Worship of the Athlete, the Saint, the 
 King, come under the same head. In modern 
 Europe as in ancient Greece, the Athlete excites 
 the mad enthusiasm of crowds. In India, as in 
 mediaeval Europe, romance and idealism gather 
 at least as strongly round the Saint. These are 
 matters of race and temperament. Everywhere, 
 with the exception of a few peoples who have 
 advanced beyond this stage, the King is granted 
 divine honours. No one can witness the excite- 
 ment produced by Royalty without perceiving 
 that it is an instinct, like that of bees for their 
 Queen that is, a r^^-consciousness or sentiment. 
 The glamour is that of an Idea, an Ideal King, a 
 figure composite in the memory of the race, and 
 the centre of its agelong hopes and fears and 
 growth and struggle and conquest, and the 
 glamour is readily and easily transferred to the 
 living and actual representative, however un- 
 worthy he may be. Almost every one recognises 
 that it is so. The word "King" spoken to an 
 Englishman wakens in his conscious mind a con- 
 joint image of a succession of sovereigns from 
 Alfred say to Edward VII. ; but to his sub- 
 conscious self it means far far more than that. 
 It means an epitome of the devotion, the fear, 
 the awe, the confidence which every one of his 
 
 140
 
 The Gods as Apparitions of the Race-Life 
 
 ancestors felt towards the ruler of his day, and 
 that not only as far back as Alfred, but into the 
 almost unending past, when the relation of every 
 man to his chieftain was far closer than now all 
 this mighty mass of feeling concentrated in one 
 great Vision of Kinghood, one instinct of devoted 
 Service. It is obvious that this mass of feeling 
 being still there, and still centred and co- 
 ordinated in that particular way, it must pour 
 itself out at some time, and the particular 
 Royalty of the day is only the excuse, as it 
 were, for such outpouring. 
 
 But from this perception of a glow or halo 
 round the figure of a king to his transformation 
 into a god is but a short step. The actual 
 mortal sovereign is identified with the immortal, 
 ever-abiding race-memory and the idealised figure 
 of Kinghood which dwells there. Everywhere 
 we see this taking place. The Egyptian Pharaohs 
 were exalted into gods. To the Roman Caesars 
 temples were built and divine honours paid. The 
 Aztec and Peruvian emperors the same. Even 
 to-day, for the Russian peasant or the tribesman 
 of Morocco, the glamour of absolute deity 
 surrounds the Tsar or the Sultan. 
 
 141
 
 IX 
 
 THE GODS AS DWELLING IN THE 
 PHYSIOLOGICAL CENTRES 
 
 I INDICATED in the last chapter how the form 
 and figure of the actual king may rise into that 
 of a god through its blending with the immense 
 subconscious emotion of the race. So of other 
 gods and divinities. The idealisation of the 
 Warrior growing through successive generations 
 obscurely but powerfully in the primitive Latin 
 folk, suddenly perhaps through the appearance 
 of an actual man who fulfilled the ideal to an 
 extraordinary degree may have taken definite 
 shape and name in the figure of Mars ; who 
 thenceforth, identified with the ideal, stood as 
 the God of War for succeeding time. Or the 
 enthusiasm for the Athlete or strong man, so 
 deeply rooted in primitive peoples, may have 
 been brought to a focus by the appearance of 
 a real Heracles or Hercules. The names and 
 figures, then, of these men, became for after 
 generations the centre of this enthusiasm and 
 deep racial instinct of admiration, and to these 
 names were ascribed many exploits, not only of 
 these, but of other heroes before and after. And 
 since in any such cases of mighty men appearing 
 
 142
 
 The Gods in the Physiological Centres 
 
 among a people, the exploits which would pro- 
 duce the most profound impression would be 
 those which were most beneficial to the folk 
 the slaying of monsters and wild beasts, the 
 cleansing of pestilent swamps, the taming of 
 oxen, the wrestling with death, and so forth so 
 it would be these which would be enshrined in 
 the public memory, and which (from various 
 sources) would cluster round the ideal figure 
 of the Hero or Saviour. 
 
 This myth-making tendency of races, and the 
 unconscious clustering of incidents and anecdotes 
 from various sources round one or more definite 
 figures, is of course well recognised, and explains 
 how it is these legends often seem to contain so 
 deep a sentiment and meaning. It is that they 
 are the selection and affectionate preservation 
 from the memorial life of the race of events 
 and stories which illustrate and symbolise some 
 deep instinct and enthusiasm of the race ; such 
 stories being gradually and unconsciously modified 
 into more and more of expressiveness as time goes 
 on. In this way many great epic poems, legends, 
 myths, and traditions of the gods have been built 
 up. And such things have inevitably a profound 
 sentiment in them. They are wiser than any one 
 man could make them for they represent the 
 feelings, the enthusiasms, the wonderments, the 
 humour, the wit, the activities to which the race 
 has responded for generations. If such legends 
 and stories were merely mental ideals, if they were 
 such handy little allegories and generalisations as
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 any philosopher or literary person might make in 
 his study, they would be very cheap and paltry 
 affairs. The whole point of the argument will 
 be missed unless it is seen that the Ideas and 
 enthusiasms which produce myths and legends lie 
 deep down in the very structure and physical 
 organisation of humanity, and in its very physi- 
 ology that they are things of agelong life and 
 importance, principalities and powers (if we may 
 so call them) which in the form of these legends 
 and figures are slowly rising into recognition, but 
 which belong to another order of existence, so 
 to speak, than that with which we are usually 
 concerned. 
 
 Here is another god, Mercury to whom 
 among the Greeks Hermes corresponds, and 
 who is represented also among other nations 
 the Swift runner, the Messenger-god. It seems 
 a little curious at first that a mere messenger- 
 ideal should be deified. Where did the glow 
 or glamour which transformed him come from ? 
 But when you consider what the swift runner 
 really represented in those days when you think 
 for a moment what the postal service, the tele- 
 graph, the locomotive, and all the other means of 
 intercommunication are to us when you think 
 of the story of Pheidippides mentioned above, a 
 people in its agony sending their fleetest foot- 
 racer to the neighboring state for help, and of 
 the profound sensation, the tears of joy, the 
 enthusiasm, the worship, with which he would 
 be greeted on his return ; then it is easy to see 
 
 144
 
 The Gods in the Physiological Centres 
 
 that round the figure of the Messenger generally 
 in the national consciousness a glamour would 
 grow which would easily transform such figure 
 into a god. And as swift communication means 
 many things beside the delivery of messages as 
 it means the growth of commerce, the coming 
 into contact with strange peoples and languages 
 and so forth so the Messenger god, Hermes, or 
 Mercury, or Thoth, or whoever he might be, 
 would not only be the deliverer of divine mes- 
 sages, but would stand for the patron of all 
 interpretations, mysteries, travel, and commerce 
 (and so even of thieving) ! 
 
 The goddess of Love and of feminine grace and 
 beauty, Aphrodite, Venus, Freia, Astarte, is one 
 to whom we have already referred. Her temples 
 and worship have been honoured among almost 
 all races. We need not go again over ground 
 which we have already partly covered. That 
 there is among the nerves of the human body, 
 of the brain and of the great sympathetic sys- 
 tem, some kind of centre or plexus, or group 
 of plexuses, which co-ordinates and dominates 
 the love-instinct, and that this is one of the 
 most powerful and important centres in the 
 body; that connected and associated with this 
 centre and its ramifications is a whole world of 
 emotions, desires, mental images, thoughts, acti- 
 vities ; and that this centre, in both its physi- 
 cal and mental aspects, is the result and growth 
 and embodiment of centuries and ages of race- 
 experience these are things that few will deny. 
 
 145 K
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 And that the successive images of feminine form 
 and feature acting on this centre in long heredi- 
 tary line may have combined to one powerful joint 
 Impression which, even though latent in con- 
 sciousness, dominates and moves all the race- 
 memories of love is something which seems at 
 least very probable. 1 
 
 The raising of this Composite, this luminous 
 ghost, into consciousness, in the history of a 
 race, is in this view the creation or birth of the 
 Goddess of Love, for that race. Love itself existed 
 from immemorial time ; but when into it a deeper 
 consciousness began to come, it was filled with 
 strange force and fire, an extraordinary glow and 
 glamour, and a vague sense of divinity and of a 
 life beyond the moment ; and when, beyond that, 
 the race-consciousness itself in some moment of 
 inspiration awoke, bringing the astounding reve- 
 lation of its own memory, like a fairy mountain 
 peak rising over the world, then the individual 
 beheld the veritable Goddess, and divined that 
 Love was immortal. 
 
 It will, perhaps, be said that though this way 
 of looking at the matter may account for those 
 
 1 It is important to remember, in this connection, that in 
 all the great plexuses of the Sympathetic Nerve-system there 
 ramify not only the nerve-fibres of the Sympathetic itself, but 
 also nerve-fibres from the cerebro-spinal system and nerve-fibres 
 from the cerebrum. We thus have in the case of each plexus, 
 and brought together into one focus, capacities of immense 
 emotional agitation (the Sympathetic), capacities of swift reflex 
 action and response (the cerebro-spinal), and the formation of 
 powerful mental images (the cerebrum). These three elements 
 cannot well be separated from each other, and working together 
 in any centre they represent a kind of daemonic presence. 
 
 146
 
 The Gods in the Physiological Centres 
 
 gods which are idealisations of human types, it 
 does not explain why the mere things of Nature, 
 like the Moon and the Sun, or the Darkness and 
 the Dawn, should be personified. But the least 
 thought shows that the anthropomorphic ten- 
 dency is in some degree inevitable in us. The 
 Moon and the Sun are to us what they are, only 
 because they have appeared in human conscious- 
 ness. Consider for a moment the latter. How 
 many millions of times has the great Sun risen on 
 our primitive ancestors after the dark and peril- 
 ous night, with unspeakable sense of joy, relief, 
 comfort ? How continually has this sense grown, 
 with reverberant intensity in the successive gene- 
 rations ? till at last in some more than usually 
 subtle or sensitive soul it has broken into a 
 strange consciousness of a Presence the -presence, 
 in fact, within that soul, of the myriad life and 
 emotion of those that have gone before. The rising 
 orb, the growing glory of the sky, have wakened 
 a multitudinous memory the memory and con- 
 sciousness of mankind itself in its most adventur- 
 ous and buoyant mood ; and to this child of 
 Man, this primitive poet, the Sun has indeed 
 appeared as not only a circle of light in the 
 sky, but as the symbol and reminiscent vision of 
 a majestic and celestial being, going forth to his 
 daily conquest of the world, hero of a thousand 
 battles, and with the magic upon him of a life 
 immortal. 
 
 Or, similarly, how often has Night descended, 
 with a mystic sense of human terror, doubt, and 
 
 147
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 awe, a million times distilled and concentrated ? 
 Or seriously, can even we moderns, in tall hat 
 and patent leather boots, regard the young Moon 
 in the clear sky of evening without a most foolish 
 yet poignant tenderness and romance, and a sense 
 as if within us and through our eyes sheer myriads 
 of other eyes were watching her ? 
 
 In all these cases there is a personification truly ; 
 but it is because what we are really coming into 
 touch with is not the so-called Moon or Sun, or 
 Darkness or Dawn, so much as the great sub- 
 conscious mind of the race under its different 
 aspects. It is in this immense world which 
 comes down to us from the far past' that city 
 of a thousand gates of which we in our indi- 
 vidual bodies are but the portals, and yet into 
 which through our bodies we have entrance 
 that we must look for the Gods, and for all the 
 evidences of a life which, though greater than 
 that we commonly call our own, belongs to us 
 and is indeed ours. 
 
 And here we come again to the point which is 
 the main subject of this chapter, the connection 
 of it all with Physiology. All those deities I 
 have mentioned the gods and goddesses of Day 
 and Night, the Gods of War and of Love, the 
 Hero-god or Saviour, the King-god or Lord of 
 heaven, and many more, represent very distinct 
 centres and co-ordinations of feelings and activi- 
 ties in the race ; but they also, as we have hinted, 
 represent very distinct centres of organic life in 
 
 each human body, which is indeed an epitome of 
 
 148
 
 The Gods in the Physiological Centres 
 
 the race : they represent such physiological centres 
 as Love, Pugnacity, Sympathy, Sleep, and so forth. 
 The gods, in fact, may be said not only to be 
 aspects of the life of the race, but to dwell in 
 some sense in the organic nuclei and plexuses 
 of the body, and to be the centres of command 
 and service there. 
 
 Strange as this may sound, it is yet most im- 
 portant ; and the appreciation of this point gives 
 perhaps more than anything else the key to the 
 understanding of the religions of paganism and 
 the past, and to the progress of humanity in the 
 future. The body is not vile. It is not only 
 a Temple of God, but it is a collection of temples ; 
 and just as the images of the gods dwell in the 
 temples of a land, and are the objects of service 
 and the centres of command there, so, we may 
 say, the gods themselves dwell in the centres and 
 sacred places of the body. The one thing is an 
 allegory or symbol of the other, and it has been 
 the instinct of primitive humanity to express itself 
 in this way. Every organ and centre of the body 
 is the seat of some great emotion, which in its 
 proper activity and due proportion is truly divine. 
 It is through this bodily and physiological centre 
 that the emotion, the enthusiasm, that portion of 
 the divine Being, expresses itself; and in the pure 
 and perfect body that expression, that activity, is 
 itself a revelation. The total physiology of Man 
 is, or should be, the nearest expression of divinity 
 complete, and the replica or image of the physi- 
 ology of the Cosmos itself. 
 
 149
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 Once this conception of the relation of the 
 human body, not only to the life of the race, but 
 to the whole world of the emotions and inner 
 life of Man, and to the panorama of his gods, is 
 fairly seized and appropriated, many things become 
 clear. And as we go on doubtless the whole 
 subject will become clearer. At present, how- 
 ever, we must pass to two other points which 
 need consideration. 
 
 In the first place, these great formative forces, 
 Ideas, Enthusiasms, which manifest themselves in 
 the race-life, and, clothed with emotion, dwell in 
 the hidden centres of the actual body, are, from 
 the nature of the case, things which we only 
 become directly conscious of in those moments 
 of excitement or exaltation which take us into 
 the deeper regions of our being. Though they 
 may be vaguely felt by the ordinary conscious- 
 ness, they cannot very well be described in its 
 terms. They are therefore only seen and seized 
 in their fulness by the few by the few whose 
 more harmonious natures fit them for the vision ; 
 or if by the many, only in rare moments. And 
 so it becomes the function of the inspired pro- 
 phets, poets, artists, to give these a definite form 
 and name as Moses did, who bodied forth Jehovah 
 for the Jews, or as Pheidias the sculptor is said 
 to have finally fixed and shapen the ideal of Athene 
 for the Athenians. The many, when they see these 
 forms bodied forth by the great Seers, leap to them 
 and accept them, feeling distinctly enough that 
 they answer to something which is slumbering 
 
 150
 
 The Gods in the Physiological Centres 
 
 within them, though they cannot quite seize the 
 latter directly. The actual figures of the Gods, 
 in fact, accepted and adopted by the various races, 
 cannot be said to be realities, but are rather sym- 
 bols or representations, adapted to the ordinary 
 consciousness, of real powers working in the race 
 and profoundly moving and inspiring it. 
 
 In the second place, these real Powers (ruling 
 in our nerve-centres as the image-gods rule in the 
 Temples) are themselves, of course, always grow- 
 ing that is to say, that as the race grows and 
 branches, their forms also modify and change 
 slowly, indeed, through centuries, but steadily. 
 But as the images the once-inspired forms which 
 were embodied in stone or paintings, or in holy 
 books and ceremonials as these do not change, 
 so in time they cease to correspond to the realities, 
 they cease to be inspired or to awaken inspiration, 
 and become dry and dead conventions. On this 
 subject, however, of Conventions as affecting the 
 Gods I will say no more here. It leads to the con- 
 sideration of the change in religious forms and di- 
 vinities which takes place as time and history go on, 
 and the eternal conflict between letter and spirit. 1 
 
 Returning now to the general line of thought, 
 I would say a few words on the subject of Christi- 
 anity. In speaking of the genesis of the deities 
 hitherto, I have dwelt more especially on the 
 pagan gods of Greece and Rome. The appear- 
 ance of Christianity on the scene marked a new 
 
 1 See "Angels' Wings," by E. Carpenter, chap. v. (Sonnen- 
 schein).
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 growth not exactly a new growth in the history 
 of the world, because something much (though 
 not quite) the same had appeared long before in 
 India and Egypt but new in the West. There 
 was growing, in the races which gathered round 
 Imperial Rome, a sense partly due, perhaps, to 
 reaction from the life of the day a sense of the 
 presence of death, a longing for some other life, 
 a belief in the power of gentleness, meekness, 
 chastity things which had been comparatively 
 little considered by the preceding Nature-religions. 
 It surely might almost be said that a new centre 
 of organic life was forming a new plexus among 
 the nerves of Humanity. No one can visit 
 India without being struck by what seems quite 
 a physiological difference between the average 
 Hindu and the average Westerner the pas- 
 sivity of the former, the mildness, the meekness, 
 the meditative transcendental temper, the sense 
 of another world, the little fear of death. His 
 organism seems to be differently keyed from 
 ours ; so that while the Anglo-Saxon masses are 
 shouting themselves hoarse over a football hero 
 or other Athlete, the Hindu peasant is paying his 
 profoundest adoration to an emaciate Saint. That 
 is to say, there seems to be some organic centre 
 in each race so much more developed than in the 
 other that it may be woken to delirium or frenzy 
 or ecstasy by a spectacle which leaves the other 
 unmoved. 
 
 I say some such changes in the organic consti- 
 tution of humanity were taking place in the 
 
 152
 
 The Gods in the Physiological Centres 
 
 Roman Empire, and that quite independently of 
 the little band of propagandists who called them- 
 selves Christians (see Walter Pater's "Marius"). 
 Under Marcus Aurelius a wider sense of humanity 
 was growing up. Hospitals, orphan schools, hos- 
 pitals for animals even, began to be founded. 
 Oriental ideas and religions and (perhaps more 
 important still) Oriental blood and heredity began 
 to circulate. A new type of human being de- 
 manded new gods ; and men and women whose 
 hearts began to respond to the power of gentle- 
 ness, the pity of Life, the presence of Death, who, 
 as slaves or the descendants of slaves, knew well 
 what it was to be despised and rejected, began to 
 see a glamour in figures of a different complexion 
 from those which had dominated their prede- 
 cessors. Thus at length the personality and life 
 of Jesus of Nazareth, or at least the picture of it 
 drawn by Paul and the Evangelists, gave form 
 and outline to this new creative Idea, and it took 
 the shape of the gentle, loving, and crucified 
 Christ, the God that above all has dominated the 
 Christian centuries. Not that this ideal was (as I 
 have said) absolutely new ; for the glamour of it, 
 or of something very similar (allowing for differ- 
 ence of race and longitude), had been embodied 
 six centuries before in the figure of the divine 
 Buddha, and doubtless for centuries in the human 
 race these feelings had been registered in race- 
 memory and had struggled for expression ; but 
 new as a recognised ideal this undoubtedly was in 
 the history of the Western world.
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 And (what I wish to enforce) this figure of 
 Christ written about, pictured in canvas or in 
 stone, or in words of living eloquence, through 
 all these later centuries has served to waken in 
 the human mind the consciousness of a very real 
 Presence : a Presence at least as real as that indi- 
 cated by Apollo or Athene to a Homeric Greek : 
 a definite individualised Power which has estab- 
 lished itself living and moving in the Western races, 
 and therefore also in each man or woman of these 
 races. In this particular case we have the advan- 
 tage of being able to analyse an actual and still 
 operative conception of a god ; and I take it that 
 the intense reality which this figure carries with it 
 to many people means a great deal. It means 
 that the figure not merely represents a mental 
 ideal of desirable qualities, or the remembrance 
 of a certain beneficent man who once lived, but 
 that it represents a living focus of life in the 
 European peoples of the last two thousand 
 years, which has slowly emerged to conscious- 
 ness through the accumulated race-memories of 
 a far longer period than that. And I take it 
 that the inward Vision of this living power and 
 presence has in some degree come to most people 
 who have been Christians in anything more than 
 name ; while to some people it has come with 
 such force and intensity that they have been per- 
 suaded that they beheld the veritable Christ 
 himself surrounded with glory (i.e. seen in the 
 luminous field of a superior consciousness). At 
 any rate to deny or utterly discredit all the
 
 The Gods in the Physiological Centres 
 
 stories of the Saints, from St. Paul who saw a 
 great light and heard a voice, onward through 
 endless cases to modern times, would be, as I 
 have already suggested, a parochial and purblind 
 view to take. 
 
 In the same way I think it seems very un- 
 scientific to regard the common stories of ' con- 
 version ' as mere fancies or fabrications. It is 
 pretty clear that they represent a reality, a very 
 real experience, to those concerned ; and though 
 the * conversions ' may not be as luminous or 
 profound as that of St. Paul, it seems to me 
 that they are things of the same kind cases, 
 namely, in which after long and silent prepara- 
 tion, new centres of life are suddenly disclosed 
 within folk, accompanied by more or less of 
 excitement, vision, and a complete change of 
 outlook on the world. And the stories, often 
 fantastical enough, which accompany such con- 
 versions, must be looked on simply as the lame 
 effort of uncultured minds to picture and inter- 
 pret the cosmic facts experienced. (See two 
 interesting chapters on " Conversion " in Pro- 
 fessor William James' book on " The Varieties 
 of Religious Experience," in which he views 
 conversion as a possible shifting of centres of 
 consciousness, or as possibly comparable to the 
 changes of equilibrium in a polyhedron, resting 
 on one facet after another.) 
 
 On the other hand, if we regard the Vision of 
 Christ as it comes to many people even nowa- 
 days as indicating a real power and presence
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 living and working within them, so we must of 
 course regard the Vision of Athene, or Apollo, 
 or of any other god that came to men and women 
 of old, as indicating a very real and living power 
 within them. These are names which Humanity 
 through the ages has given to its own powers 
 and faculties ; and every individual, as far as he 
 has truly revered and identified himself with the 
 God that moved within him, has so far identified 
 himself with the life of Humanity. 
 
 If we were to go to India, we should find this 
 appearance and presence of the gods everywhere 
 acknowledged and believed in. The vision of 
 Siva, or Vishnu, or Brahma, or of Kali, or 
 Krishna, or any one of the many popular saints 
 who, having once been men, are now become 
 divinities, is common enough. I may give one 
 instance, which will help to remove the matter 
 from the region of mere vulgar fantasy and 
 superstition. Among the Gnanis and Teachers 
 (gurus) who carry on the tradition of the ancient 
 Wisdom-religion from very remote times, and 
 some of whom are among the most emancipated, 
 keen-minded, and inspired of human beings, it is 
 said that a pupil (chela), after all instruction by 
 the Guru, may spend a long time before his 
 initiation is quite complete ; then, in the ripe- 
 ness of time and of his growth, one day (or 
 night) the God (Siva), awful and glorious in 
 light, will appear to him clothed in the form of his 
 Guru ; and the chela, overcome with amazement 
 and emotion, will leap up, and seeking out his 
 
 156
 
 The Gods in the Physiological Centres 
 
 Teacher will throw himself, in a flood of tears 
 and of gratitude, at his feet. After which his 
 initiation is fulfilled, and he is received into the 
 long line of those who are followers of the god. 
 
 Cases of this kind I have personally heard 
 of. (The reader also will remember the quo- 
 tation from Dr. Bucke in chapter viii.) And 
 there is no reason, I think, to doubt that the 
 above is at least a fair account of what usually 
 happens in the Indian initiations. If so, it 
 illustrates remarkably what has been said all 
 through namely, that when the Vision in the 
 supernal consciousness, with its accompanying 
 blaze of splendour, takes place, it clothes itself 
 generally in the shape of some figure which 
 is known to the ordinary consciousness, and 
 which is, as it were, the best representation 
 it can get for the purposes of the latter con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 There are other figures connected with Chris- 
 tianity on which I can only dwell briefly. The 
 rise of the Virgin Mary or Madonna into a 
 goddess (with her special services and Temples), 
 is a mark of change similar to the rise of Christ 
 himself though perhaps not so pronounced. 
 The Madonna links on very closely to Isis, Deme- 
 ter, Ceres the ever-virgin, yet ever-fertile god- 
 desses of the elder world ; yet her motherhood 
 has more of human feeling in it and less of 
 Nature-symbolism than theirs ; and her worship 
 marks perhaps a growth in Humanity of filial 
 worship and respect for Woman. When one
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 thinks for a moment of what the Mother is to 
 every human being, of the profound impression 
 her figure makes upon the child, and then con- 
 siders how long, what numberless times, in the 
 history of mankind and in the heredity of every 
 individual, that impression has been repeated on 
 the sensitive film of consciousness ; then one sees 
 it as inevitable that there must come a time when 
 the Mother-figure should be deified, and become 
 surrounded with this halo of race-memory that 
 a Mother-god should arise, corresponding to the 
 Father-god of patriarchal times. (Indeed there 
 is much evidence to show that the Mother-god 
 is the more primitive of the two.) As to the 
 Virgin-Mother of Christianity, it is said that 
 St. Bernard of Clairvaux (noo) was much 
 devoted to her. " His health' was extremely 
 feeble : and once when he was employed in 
 writing his homilies, and was so ill that he could 
 scarcely hold the pen, she graciously appeared to 
 him, and comforted and restored him by her 
 divine presence" (Mrs. Jameson, "Legends of 
 the Monastic Orders," p. 144). And the num- 
 ber of similar records of Visions of the Madonna 
 must run into hundreds, if not thousands. 
 Whatever we think about these records, their 
 mere existence convinces us how deep, how 
 much deeper than just one individual life, the 
 figure of the pure, long-suffering, tender, divine 
 Mother has etched itself into the heart of the 
 race. 
 
 But the rise of Woman, and her influence, 
 158
 
 The Gods in the Physiological Centres 
 
 brought another result with it the deification of 
 the Babe. It is not likely that Man the human 
 male left to himself would have done this 
 (though it appears that the Fanti on the West 
 Coast of Africa have a curious worship of an 
 Immortal Child). But to woman it was natural. 
 What woman to-day bending over her sleeping 
 infant has not at some time been aware of a Divine 
 Child which seemed to come and blend its features 
 with those she gazed on ? The long heredity of 
 Mother-love and memory is there, and it is not 
 only the little thing before her, which she sees, 
 but the long and wondrous dream of the past 
 which its image awakens. This glamour of the 
 Child arising primarily in the woman, transmitted 
 itself, of course, to the man, transmitted itself to 
 the race generally, and becomes symbolised in 
 such figures as the infant Jesus, the child 
 Horus, the holy Bambino at Rome, and so 
 forth giving perhaps a tenderness and humanity 
 to Christianity which we miss in the earlier 
 religions. 
 
 Thus the Holy Family Father, Mother, and 
 Child - - consolidated itself. For indeed the 
 Family (in this close and limited form) was a 
 peculiar characteristic of the Egyptian and of the 
 Christian centuries ; and human life, the human 
 organism, was establishing itself round this as 
 one of its important centres. In the earlier and 
 more primitive and communistic phases of society, 
 the tribe, the gens, the clan, the demos, were the 
 important groups the family (in the modern
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 sense) was weak. But with the rise of the Pro- 
 perty-civilisation and the breakdown of the older 
 Societies, the individual ceased to find his life and 
 well-being in the tribe or community, and took 
 refuge as it were in the lesser Family, which be- 
 came sacred and all-important to him as the Ark 
 of his better self and affections amid the troubled 
 waters of external strife and competition. Thus 
 the Family gathered sacredness through the cen- 
 turies till it became deified in the mediaeval eye. 
 
 Looking back then at what has been said, we 
 seem to see the gods arising as Humanity's con- 
 sciousness through the ages of its own life and 
 faculties (called into play, no doubt, through 
 contact with Nature). Each race, representing 
 some aspect of the great World-self, and inspired 
 and moulded from within by the formative Ideas 
 belonging to it, becomes conscious of these creative 
 powers as the Gods. The gods are in that sense 
 real emanations and expressions of the World- 
 self. And again each individual of the race, 
 affiliated to the race and the gods from whence he 
 springs or at least to whom he owes his body 
 and his heredity does through that body and 
 that heredity at times enter into the race-con- 
 sciousness, and become aware of these powers 
 working within him and the race. Each unit- 
 mind is an offshoot of the racial mind ; each 
 unit-body an offshoot of the racial body ; and 
 as far as, for each individual, his mind and body 
 register the Life and Memory of the Race do 
 
 1 60
 
 The Gods in the Physiological Centres 
 
 they form a gate of access to its particular 
 Olympus and group of divinities. 1 
 
 In this view, Plato's heaven of eternal change- 
 less Forms and Essences might be compared to 
 the great uplifted Consciousness of the Human 
 Race. In the latter, Forms are seen in the inner 
 Light, which certainly to the momentary indi- 
 vidual apprehension seem eternal, unchangeable 
 centres of immense life and activity, mountainous 
 in grandeur, though possibly, like the mountains, 
 really in slow flux and change : great gods, who 
 on their inner side are Wisdom and Justice and 
 Beauty and Courage and Mother-Love, and so forth 
 in essence the same in all races and peoples ; but 
 on their outer side, and with respect to the circum- 
 stances and conditions of their activity, are very 
 various from race to race. And the mortal figures 
 that we see, and the images and idols of the 
 Temples, acquire much of their sanctity from the 
 fact that they are expressions or manifestations or 
 reminiscences of these. But of idols I shall speak 
 in the next chapter. 
 
 1 But we must not forget here, what I have hinted more than 
 once before, that race-life is not by any means the only higher 
 order of life to which we have access ; and that in every indi- 
 vidual slumbers even the absolute World-self. But the race- 
 life and consciousness is interesting to us here as forming the 
 key to what we call the Gods and Religion. 
 
 161
 
 THE DEVILS AND THE IDOLS 
 
 BUT some one will say If the Gods are thus 
 real powers and centres of vitality in the human 
 body and in humanity at large, what about the 
 Devils ? What are they ? The reply of course 
 is, They are the same. The devils are very real 
 powers and centres of human energy and vitality. 
 But yet there is a difference ; and the difference 
 may perhaps be broadly defined thus that the 
 Gods are powers making for Life and Harmony, 
 and the Devils are powers making for Discord 
 and Death. 
 
 There are centres in the human body and mind 
 which make for Corruption : we know that. 
 There are centres of Disease in the body, alien 
 growths which consume and waste its substance ; 
 centres of Disease in the mind, alien and con- 
 suming passions, ungoverned greeds and desires, 
 hatreds, vanities. There are such things as Lust 
 without love, Desire of food and drink without 
 reverence for Health, love of Power without 
 Pity, love of Gain without Charity. Every one 
 sees that here are centres of activity in the human 
 being which in the long-run must lead to Cor- 
 ruption and Disintegration. There are similar 
 
 162
 
 The Devils and the Idols 
 
 centres in society at large and the life of the race. 
 If the higher centres and those which lead to 
 beneficial and harmonious and permanent activi- 
 ties are the foci where the Gods dwell, then these 
 others are the seats of what we call diabolic and 
 demonic agencies. 
 
 The personification, the glamour, the domina- 
 tion of the latter are as easy to explain as of the 
 former. Take any one of the instances above 
 say the Love of Power. Far back in the history 
 of the race, did the domination of one individual 
 by another (little known among the animals) 
 begin. How many thousands and thousands of 
 times to the ancestors of each of us has the face 
 of some petty tyrant made itself hateful ? how 
 deeply have his cruelties, his meannesses, seared 
 the memory of his features in the heart of his 
 victim ? how intensely may this long line of 
 memories have come down surrounded by a 
 glamour of fear and hatred ? how easy to see 
 that a certain similarity of features and expression 
 in this long line may have given rise to the joint 
 picture of a diabolic figure delighting in cruelty 
 and tyranny a veritable Satan, composite indeed 
 of race-memories, yet lurking terrible in the 
 subconsciousness of every child, and even of the 
 adult man or woman ! Or, to take another 
 example, how many thousands of times to our 
 feminine ancestors may the features of Lust 
 without Love have made themselves fearful and 
 terrible? and how easily out of the combined 
 memory of these may the likeness arise of a devil 
 
 163
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 of Lust and Sensuality, haunting certain centres 
 of imagination and association in the brain ! And 
 so on. 
 
 But there is another side too to the question. 
 Not only do we all bear in our heredity the 
 remembrance of countless tyranny suffered, and 
 the vague image of a devil corresponding, whom 
 we hate ; but we also and similarly bear the 
 remembrance of tyranny inflicted on others, and the 
 pleasure accompanying (from immemorial time) 
 such exercise of power. Over and over again the 
 lower human and animal nature within our 
 countless ancestors has rejoiced in its sense of 
 power accompanying some cruel and tyrannous 
 action, till at last such actions have been invested 
 with a sort of glamour, and the temptation to 
 tyrannise (actually to inflict pain) may come down 
 to us with an attraction otherwise hard to explain. 
 Or change the wording of the above, and for 
 Tyranny read Selfishness, Greed, Lust, and so 
 forth, and we see that the argument is the same. 
 The Greed that we hate in others with a com- 
 posite hatred has a fatal and complex hold on 
 ourselves ; and the devil-figure whom at one 
 moment we detest, at another moment exercises 
 over us a strange and lurid fascination, pushing 
 us on to the very deeds we abhor. 
 
 The strange psychology of passion is difficult 
 to understand in any other way the inordinate 
 enchantment which surrounds the pleasures of 
 the Senses, so disproportionate to the actual en- 
 joyment experienced ; the mania to which it may 
 
 164
 
 The Devils and the Idols 
 
 rise of Drink, or Greed, or whatever it may 
 be ; the sense (so frequent) of a diabolic power 
 impelling one ; the abhorrence, even while they 
 are being perpetrated, of the actions which we 
 call our own. All this seems only explicable by 
 the fact that we bear in our bodies the experience 
 and memory of countless beings, who, having 
 witnessed or embodied the same action from opposite 
 sides^ transmit to us on one side an intense and 
 reduplicated magnetism in its favour, and on the 
 other side a multiplied hatred of it ; and from 
 both sides the sense of a sinister Agency at work 
 within. The strife between human beings in the 
 past, and arising out of the life of the senses, is 
 re-enacted, in miniature and in memory, within 
 our own breasts ; there the reconciliation waits 
 to be worked out, and the strange Justice of 
 Nature to be fulfilled ! But it is obvious that 
 where such conditions exist, and the sense of the 
 diabolic is present, we are dealing with centres 
 which contain the elements of strife and dis- 
 integration within themselves, and which are 
 therefore leading towards Corruption, Insanity, 
 and Death. 
 
 But it will be asked, If the devils represent 
 centres of corruption, how can they be related or 
 assimilated to the gods, who are the expression 
 and embodiment of great formative Ideas ? The 
 answer is, Simply enough, because the devils also 
 represent formative ideas, but ideas of a lower 
 grade, which necessarily in time have to be super- 
 seded. These particular centres of activity, in fact, 
 
 165
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 in the human race, and human body, have not 
 always been centres of corruption or degeneration 
 quite the reverse though there are various 
 ways in which they may have become so. Origi- 
 nally perfectly natural and healthy (like all the 
 animal instincts, say), and therefore carrying the 
 sense of pleasure and goodness with them, yet 
 any one of them may in course of time become 
 disproportionately developed, and lapse into con- 
 flict therefore with the rest of the nature ; or it 
 may, as it grows, develop seeds of strife within 
 itself ; or, as Humanity grows and changes and 
 adjusts itself round other centres, the centre in 
 question may have to be readjusted or broken up. 
 In any of these cases the sense of evil will be 
 developed in connection with it ; and the con- 
 tinuance of the centre in its particular course will 
 involve the threat of corruption and death to the 
 race or the individual. Thus the Agencies or 
 Personalities which are associated with these 
 centres take on a maleficent aspect. They may 
 not have worn this always. They may have been 
 Angels and Gods (and the power and fascination 
 that they exercise is mainly due to the long far- 
 back and beneficent root-activity of the ideas 
 which they represent in the human race) ; but 
 now they are become falling Angels, dethroned 
 Gods, Lucifers with a lurid light upon them ; 
 and the pleasures and activities associated with 
 them have become delusive pleasures, insane and 
 fruitless activities, stricken and made barren by 
 the pain and suffering of others who are involved; 
 
 1 66
 
 The Devils and the Idols 
 
 they stand for Motives which are being ejected 
 from the bosom of Humanity. 
 
 To this class belong a vast number of material 
 and animal pleasures and satisfactions. What joy 
 remains in the mere acquisition or spending of 
 Wealth when the inevitable suffering of those 
 from whom it is wrung begins to be realised ? or 
 what in ambition or domination or selfish grati- 
 fication when the others who represent the reverse 
 of the shield are considered and cared for ? Not 
 that the ideas of Wealth, or Praise, or Power, or 
 Passion, may not in essence be perfectly good 
 and useful, but the special forms which they have 
 hitherto worn have proved unworthy, and are 
 being superseded or modified. The root-ideas 
 are changing their aspect. 
 
 It is needless to recall in detail the fact that 
 the gods of one age or race become the devils of 
 another. It falls naturally into place here. 
 
 With Christianity, as we have seen, the human 
 mind grouped itself round other centres of inte- 
 rest and activity than in the old paganism. A 
 tremendous revolution, in fact, in humanity was 
 taking place, and the physiological equipoise was 
 tending towards a denial of the more animal and 
 natural centres in favour of the more spiritual 
 and ascetic. The pagan centres of life became 
 decadent, the pagan gods were changed into 
 devils. Apollo became Apollyon ; Aphrodite 
 (or Venus), the stately goddess of Love, Queen 
 of the world and rewarder of heroes and warriors, 
 became a mere demon and enchantress ; and Pan, 
 
 167
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 that wonderful impersonation of animal Nature, 
 wore his horns and goat's-hooves now in the 
 character of Satan ! But similar revolutions had 
 taken place before ; and as the gods of Chris- 
 tianity were now driving out the gods of 
 Olympus, so had these in their time driven 
 out Cronos and Rhea and their crew ; and these 
 again had disenthroned the primitive deities 
 Uranus and Gaea strange far-back records of 
 the growing life of the races within whose 
 bosoms these gods dwelt ! 
 
 The hatred felt by one race for the gods of 
 another and neighboring race is a thing of the 
 same kind. It is almost a physiological hatred ; 
 and it indicates the great constitutional gulfs and 
 differences of habit and life which separate the 
 races. Baal and Ashtoreth were very respectable 
 deities among the Phoenicians, and no doubt were 
 at one period the emblems and expressions of 
 their best life ; but for the Israelites they were 
 simply devils. I am not sure that the Saints of 
 the Catholic Church are not by some Noncon- 
 formist sects looked at in the same light ; and 
 it is obvious that the great division of Europe 
 into Catholic and Protestant and Greek Church 
 is not so much a matter of intellectual Tightness 
 or wrongness of view, as of a difference of in- 
 stinctive heredity, and a distinction of race-feeling 
 between Latin and Teuton and Slav. From the 
 same point of view, the way in which the race- 
 gods figure in all race-conflicts, and the im- 
 mense importance ascribed to them and their 
 
 1 68
 
 The Devils and the Idols 
 
 prevailment over the enemy, is a matter very 
 easily intelligible. 
 
 But to return to our devils. As I have said, 
 the devils are gods which have gone astray 
 Powers or Forms which, once helpful and con- 
 structive in the human organism, have now be- 
 come maleficent and destructive. Perhaps in the 
 most primitive races it is not always easy to dis- 
 tinguish gods from devils. The instinct of self- 
 preservation, for instance, is one of the earliest 
 and most powerful instincts in animal and human 
 life. It is largely represented in the lowest savages 
 by Fear. Fear rules in this centre of self-preserva- 
 tion. Everything that can possibly harm the man 
 is dreaded and avoided ; mental ingenuity is taxed 
 to discover what may be possibly harmful. Fear 
 is thus good, and a necessary condition of animal 
 life and primitive human preservation. But it is 
 also bad and destructive, and the more advanced 
 the creature becomes, the more so. For as soon 
 as the human brain becomes sufficiently developed 
 to be capable of consciously entertaining within 
 itself the images of Fear /.<?., the images of harm- 
 ful and horrible things it is already harming and 
 injuring itself. Fear has already become destruc- 
 tive within it. The images of fearful things within 
 the brain are already beginning the work of de- 
 struction which the real things in the outer world 
 are accused of. 
 
 Thus Fear is one of the most primitive, power- 
 ful, and widespread of the emotions ; for a long 
 time it rules in the centre of animal and human 
 
 169
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 life ; and it has a beneficent as well as a malefi- 
 cent aspect. From all this it can easily be under- 
 stood how prolific a source it has been of deities, 
 good and bad ; and how among primitive races 
 certain images (invested) with an agelong glamour 
 of ancestral terror become transformed at last 
 into veritable gods or devils. It does not matter 
 whether they are wooden idols of a certain form 
 and feature, or whether they are snakes' skins, or 
 leopards' claws, or whether they are images of 
 lions or crocodiles, or whether they are real lions 
 or crocodiles, or whether they are black stones or 
 hideous personifications of the powers of the air 
 with a hundred eyes and a hundred arms it does 
 not matter whether it is the most innocent and 
 harmless object, or the most really dangerous, as 
 long as it is thought terrible, as long as the 'trans- 
 formation of the race-memory invests it. It is 
 sufficient to remember the fowls. When the 
 sweep's brush leaps out of the chimney-top, when 
 the cap flies up in the air, or even when the 
 harmless solitary rook wings across the sky, 
 Dame Partlet does not stop to scrutinise the 
 object in the dry light of her own reason, but 
 in the glamour of her race-memory instantly 
 sees the Hawk-devil impending overhead, and 
 flies for her life. 
 
 Even among ourselves civilised though we be 
 why do certain faces, certain expressions, cer- 
 tain grimaces, especially in childhood (and even if 
 only portrayed on paper) afflict with such a painful 
 and unreasoning sense of horror ? Why is the 
 
 170
 
 The Devils and the Idols 
 
 dark so much more alarming to children (not 
 to mention adults) than circumstances seem to 
 justify? Why does such a simple thing as 
 having some one walk continuously behind one 
 in the street cause fidgets and creeps intoler- 
 able ? except that these things wake memories 
 in us memories innumerable of being pursued 
 by man or animal, memories of time when the 
 dark was full of danger, far more than now; 
 and so forth. Lafcadio Hearn indeed, in his 
 "Exotics and Retrospectives," suggests that the 
 common nightmare in which one seems to lie 
 powerless in the grasp of some terrible creature 
 of uncertain outline arises in this kind of way. 
 How often, he asks, going back through one's 
 countless primitive-human and animal ancestry, 
 has it 'not really happened that a fore-father or 
 fore-mother has so lain, and been overpowered, 
 by the foe ; and this terrible moment and others 
 in like succession, burning themselves in the 
 brain, and transmitted to descendants, have fused 
 into the awful imagery of the dream, in which 
 the very confusedness of the obsessing Figure is 
 suggestive of its multiplex origin ? 
 
 Thus Fear in the human race has been the 
 source of countless deities, idols, fetishes, which 
 have been invested in their various degrees with 
 supernatural awe, or fascinating dread, or the 
 most unreasoning terror, and which in propor- 
 tion as Fear itself, with the growth of humanity, 
 has tended to be cast out, have tended also to 
 lapse into devils, charms, and playthings, and to 
 
 171
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 lose their ancient authority. While again in the 
 form of Awe, and especially associated with the 
 marvellous and impressive moments and aspects 
 of the planets and heavenly bodies, the same feel- 
 ing has been the origin and inspiration of many of 
 the grander and more enduring gods. 
 
 But Fear of course is by no means the only 
 primitive emotion which has cast its glamour over 
 objects and builded up deities. Sex, Hunger, the 
 Mother-instinct, and many other passions, have 
 thus projected themselves. The pagan gods of 
 the Senses and Passions the fact that these deities 
 were honoured as gods and not feared as devils 
 shows that these instincts were on the whole 
 healthy and in place. In fact one sees with the 
 passions generally that they are healthy as long 
 as ' in place ' ; and that their unhealthiness and 
 devilry comes in when they usurp power and 
 cease to be properly subordinate. With the in- 
 coming of Christianity, as I have already said, 
 many of these deities became distinctly devils 
 partly perhaps because the passions corresponding 
 were losing their natural place and balance at that 
 time, and partly because by the strong Christian 
 reaction towards asceticism a kind of artificial 
 overturn was being given to human nature. 
 One feels that as long as Aphrodite occupied 
 an honoured and gracious position in the Greek 
 Olympus, the passion which she represented must 
 have been mainly honourable and gracious among 
 those who worshipped her. When she fell, it 
 became possible for the monkish writers to 
 
 172
 
 The Devils and the Idols 
 
 regard woman as the incarnation of all filth and 
 wickedness. No Goddess of Love exists in 
 modern times, alas ! for indeed Love seems to 
 have fled from public life into the utmost privacy 
 and concealment, leaving only Prostitution and 
 the Divorce Court as its visible reminder in the 
 world. 
 
 The distinction between gods, devils, idols, 
 fetishes, magical forms, &c., seems to be only 
 one of degree. They are all cases in which an 
 image, by virtue of association or memory, 
 excites in the mind of the individual beholder 
 a state of consciousness belonging to another 
 order than that of his ordinary life ; and it is 
 this extended consciousness which fills him with 
 amazement and impresses him so profoundly. 
 
 Fetish-worship is common enough, not only 
 among savage peoples, but among modern nations. 
 One of the most striking instances is that of a 
 child with its doll. Think of the passionate love 
 and admiration, the veritable ecstasy, which the 
 little girl feels at the sight of its friz-haired, blue- 
 eyed babe. The latter's waxen nose has long ago 
 been melted away by the fire, and the sawdust 
 has run out of its legs ; but that makes no differ- 
 ence. It is still the doll. The child knows 
 perfectly well that the thing is not a baby, and 
 has no sense or feeling, but it makes no difference 
 (any more than it makes a difference to the fowls 
 that they know quite well my cap is not an 
 eagle). It is still the doll the symbol, the 
 hieroglyph, which wakes in the child's mind the 
 
 173
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 immense ancestral emotion of countless mother- 
 love and passion flowing down like a stream into 
 its young life, and filling it with amazement. 
 
 A great deal of ignorant contempt has been 
 showered upon the worship of idols. But this 
 is because the civilised man does not for a 
 moment see or imagine what the idol means to 
 the savage any more than as a rule he under- 
 stands what the doll means to his own little 
 daughter. The savage knows as well as the 
 civilised child (if either of them go so far as to 
 analyse their consciousness) that the object of his 
 devotion is a mere stock or stone. Yet what is 
 that to him ? To him the real and important 
 fact is, that this painted monster (this effigy 
 which for a hundred generations has played its 
 part in the history of his ancestors) overwhelms 
 him with emotion with Wonder and Fear and 
 the rude smitings of Conscience and compels 
 him to bow to a Life, a Presence, which he cannot 
 fathom. 1 
 
 Or (to take an instance which appeals to the 
 civilised man), consider for a moment the inor- 
 dinate magic of Gold. For a vast period gold 
 has been the symbol of power and well-being, 
 and an object of pursuit. The inherited emotion 
 
 1 " There is a great, secret, deep, vast and unspeakable joy 
 in Idol-worship. Other highest experiences also cannot be 
 comparable to this. As the letters, which stand only in sounds, 
 have been formed and are the cause to learn the intellectual 
 powers ; so is the idol formed for the formless god that we 
 may know by experience the vast intellectual being of his 
 existence." Extract from a letter received from India. 
 
 174
 
 The Devils and the Idols 
 
 of all those generations is in each of us, and flows 
 swiftly, almost whether we will or no, towards 
 the symbol when it appears. This little old 
 woman, half-starved, and in clothes rusty-green 
 and ragged with wear, walking the streets of 
 London, with her thousands in the Bank, and 
 her beady eyes glittering as she fingers the coins 
 in her purse, is only an extreme case. There is 
 something pathetic surely about her figure ; for 
 all these privations she suffers, all these sacrifices 
 that she makes, are not really for the little gold 
 pieces. They are only because the gold pieces 
 wake in her such wonderful memories, and the 
 dim consciousness of the great life behind her, 
 filling her with a strange joy she cannot explain. 
 This, indeed, is her religion. 
 
 Or the Fetishes of Royalty and Titles. How 
 explain the glamour which is upon these things, 
 and the anxiety of American pork-dealers to take 
 part in them a glamour which persists even 
 when reason exposes the very prosaic and com- 
 monplace characters of those concerned unless 
 here again a transcendent sentiment is involved, 
 and an instinct built up and confirmed during 
 thousands of years ? 
 
 A curious case of fetish and magic is that of 
 spells and incantations. A spell is a spell. That 
 is, it is the use of a form of spoken or written 
 words. To-day the use of words has for the 
 most part become commonplace ; but there has 
 been a time far back in history when to con- 
 vey meanings in this way was little short of
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 miraculous. Especially has this been true of the 
 written word. There existed a few years ago, 
 and probably yet exist, tribes in Central and 
 South Africa to whom a piece of written paper 
 a letter in fact was taboo. They would not 
 touch it or come near it, for the fear and awe 
 the mystery of writing inspired. 1 In all early 
 peoples writing is confined to the few ; and to 
 the many, for generation after generation, it is 
 surrounded with such an atmosphere of wonder, 
 that at last it comes to partake of the super- 
 natural. The Bibles and other writings of such 
 peoples largely owe their sacredness to this fact 
 often more to this than to the value of the 
 matter which they contain. And more than this, 
 it is probable that actual forms of words used in 
 such writings in Bibles, poems, prayers, reci- 
 tations, incantations used over and over again 
 for scores of generations come at last to carry 
 with them a volume of race-memory and race- 
 consciousness so great as to give them a quite 
 different value and force from ordinary language. 
 How much of the magic which surrounds certain 
 collocations of words in poetry is due to this fact 
 that they recall threads of ancient experience 
 woven, as it were, in our very blood ? As to 
 spells and incantations, is it not really possible 
 that certain forms of words, which have been 
 used for immemorial time, have the power of 
 waking in us forms of the race-consciousness with 
 
 D 
 
 which they have been associated and so under 
 
 1 See chap. ii. p. 26. 
 176
 
 The Devils and the Idols 
 
 their influence Satan or other powers of light and 
 darkness may indeed appear ! 
 
 The same sort of thing is true of the magic of 
 numbers. If written words excited wonder among 
 the uninitiated, much more would numbers and 
 their properties and signification. After a time 
 they became positively sacred, and even to-day 
 for many people (theosophists and others) a 3 or 
 a 4 or a 5 or a 7 bear some kind of religious 
 glamour about them, and mystic meanings 
 ineffable. The same too of simple geometrical 
 figures, squares, and pentagons and hexagons ; 
 and it is not difficult to understand how these 
 and the numbers entered into and became part of 
 charms and incantations. 
 
 My object throughout is to make it clear that 
 all these things these deities, devils, and fetishes, 
 and the excitement produced by what appear 
 commonplace and unimportant symbols indicate 
 real stirrings within us of another order of life 
 and consciousness than that with which we are 
 usually concerned, and that it is this fact which 
 gives the symbols or images their value and 
 potency. What further meanings this stirring 
 of another order of consciousness within us may 
 have, and how it relates to our individual lives 
 and personalities, we may consider later on. 
 Here it is sufficient to note that it seems to 
 be the explanation of a vast number of pheno- 
 mena that otherwise are obscure. Everywhere 
 this glamour is to be found. How easy to see 
 or feel, as suggested in an earlier chapter when 
 
 177 M
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 we look, for instance, at the young moon in the 
 evening sky (in itself, of course, an impressive 
 spectacle) that it is not merely our individual 
 eyes that are following that luminous crescent 
 over the mountains, but that within us millions 
 of eyes are gazing, with a thrill of multitudinous 
 emotion far beyond the experience of one twilight 
 scene or one life ! How easy to see that the 
 sceptre or rod which the King bears in his hand 
 (or Whip on the Egyptian monuments) carries a 
 glamour of awe with it, because the actual rod 
 in times past descended on the backs of our 
 successive ancestors and left an accumulated 
 impression there, still vibrating in heredity ! 
 
 The various animals which (naturally) played 
 so important a part in the life of the early races, 
 and entered so deeply into their consciousness, 
 became invested with a corresponding glamour ; 
 and there is hardly a creature bird or fish or bull 
 or cat or beaver or kangaroo which by some 
 race, Egyptian or African or Australian or Ameri- 
 can Indian, has not been made fetishistic, totem- 
 istic, or divine. The same of many trees and 
 plants. As to parts of the body, it seems natural 
 enough that the phallus and the yoni in almost 
 every race of the world have been treated as 
 objects of worship and emblems of devilry or 
 divinity ; for these symbols appeal to every 
 human being, and for good or bad the accumu- 
 lated ancestral magic surrounding them must 
 be enormously powerful. But even other parts 
 
 of the body partake of the same enchantment, 
 
 178
 
 The Devils and the Idols 
 
 and it is well known that the mistress's eyebrow, 
 or the hair, or the hand, or even some article of 
 clothing, have in cases a kind of supernatural 
 attraction, which we may fairly ascribe to a more 
 specialised subconscious association of the same 
 character. 
 
 A curious instance of the rousing of the com- 
 munal or race consciousness is given by the word 
 testis, which signifies both a witness and a testicle^ 
 the double signification being illustrated by the 
 fact that among many peoples the taking of an 
 oath is confirmed by the placing of the hand on 
 the part indicated. More than any other fact 
 this helps us to understand the sacredness of sex 
 in some early times, and how the sense of the 
 communal life and divinity in connection with 
 sex was so strong, that an oath taken thus was as 
 
 D' 
 
 good as taken in the presence of the god. 
 
 179
 
 XI 
 
 BEAUTY AND DUTY 
 
 IN the above lights it may be worth while to say 
 a few words on the subjects of Art and Morality. 
 Beauty and Duty are two of the great formative 
 Ideas of which we have spoken. They operate 
 especially in the more advanced sections of the 
 human race; and wherever they make their 
 appearance they modify Life profoundly. Like 
 all the ideas, they are on one side an incommuni- 
 cable, unanalysable, innate feeling or sense ; on 
 the other side they are structural, and built up 
 of many and various elements. The ' sense of 
 Beauty,' the 'sense of Duty,' are each peculiar, 
 unique feelings. They may be little or much 
 developed, little or much manifested ; but they 
 come from within, and are as indescribable as the 
 peculiar smell of a flower. On the other hand, 
 they express and manifest themselves externally 
 in endlessly various forms and structures. 
 
 If we remember what has been already said 
 about the Race-life, we shall see that the Idea of 
 Beauty, or the Idea of Duty, will take form in 
 the long succession of the generations of the race 
 largely in accordance with the conditions of that 
 life. That is, the one Life, or Being, or Self of 
 
 1 80
 
 Beauty and Duty 
 
 the race, impelling its individual members to 
 honour and cherish the race (in each other), or 
 to sacrifice themselves for it, will stamp upon 
 each individual mind a particular form or type 
 of Beauty or Duty which through the repe- 
 titions of Heredity will be emphasized and fixed 
 though such forms or types will differ much 
 from each other in different races, and will 
 depend along what particular external lines the 
 great formative Ideas are able to work in the 
 given cases. Thus the ideals of the various races 
 are formed. 
 
 Thomas Hardy, in his very characteristic poem 
 " The Well-beloved," figures a man walking far 
 one morning over hill and dale to visit his bride, 
 and dreaming, as he goes, of her faultless form, 
 "the God-created norm of perfect womankind." 
 And lo ! a shape like that he dreams glides softly 
 by his side so like, that he asks it, "Art thou 
 she ? " And the Shape with equivocal voice 
 replies : 
 
 "... Thy bride remains within 
 Her father's grange and grove.' 
 
 And he : 
 
 " Thou speakest rightly," I broke in, 
 " Thou art not she I love." 
 
 But again the Shape replies : 
 
 " Nay ; tho' thy bride remains inside 
 Her father's walls," said she, 
 
 " The one most dear is with thee here, 
 For thou dost love but me." 
 181
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 The man is puzzled ; but when he reaches the 
 end of his journey, things become clearer; for 
 he finds his mortal bride indeed, but 
 
 " Her look was pinched and thin, 
 As if her soul had shrunk and died, 
 And left a waste within." 
 
 And the mystery is made manifest namely, 
 that the ideal and the real woman are two very 
 different apparitions : 
 
 " O fatuous man, this truth infer, 
 
 Brides are not what they seem ; 
 Thou West what thou dreamest her ; 
 I am thy very dream ! " 
 
 Here the distinction between the mortal woman 
 and the ideal * norm of womankind ' is made 
 very apparent ; and the suggestion is of course 
 made that the former derives her attractiveness 
 merely from the fact of her arousing a remi- 
 niscence of the latter. 
 
 On the subject of Beauty an immense amount 
 has been written, and Tolstoy in his " What is 
 Art ? " though he only deals with writers of the 
 last two centuries, manages to quote some fifty 
 or sixty answers given to the question " What is 
 Beauty ? " Whether we agree with his somewhat 
 contemptuous treatment of the philosophers and 
 their divergencies or not, we cannot but be im- 
 pressed by the fact that such an amazing amount 
 of intellectual activity has been expended on this 
 subject during that period, as indicating indeed 
 
 its importance. 
 
 182
 
 Beauty and Duty 
 
 And here it is interesting to find that Tolstoy 
 groups the fifty or sixty answers of the philo- 
 sophers under two fundamental conceptions. 
 " The first is, that beauty is something having 
 an independent existence (existing in itself), that 
 it is one of the manifestations of the absolutely 
 Perfect, of the Idea, of the Spirit, of Will, or of 
 God ; the other is, that beauty is a kind of 
 pleasure received by us, not having personal 
 advantage for its object." Both classes of 
 definition Tolstoy considers unsatisfactory ; the 
 first, because it dwells in a vague and unknown 
 region of mysticism, and is "a fantastic definition, 
 founded on nothing"; the second, because it 
 descends to mere physiology and the senses. But 
 to us surely both are highly interesting. In fact, 
 we see that philosophy only gives two answers to 
 the question ; the one is practically that of Plato, 
 the other is that of modern science. The one 
 places the sentiment of Beauty in the perception 
 of an absolute existence in the Heavens; the 
 other, in the reception of a pleasure not having 
 personal advantage for its object that is, in a 
 pleasure inspired or generated by something 
 beyond the personal life. Both therefore agree 
 in considering the sentiment of Beauty to be 
 derived from our continuity with an order of 
 existence beyond what we usually call our own. 
 In the view of Plato, the dream-figure which 
 walked by the man's side was a reminiscence of 
 
 1 Tolstoy's "What is Art?" trans, by Aylmer Maude, 
 chap. iv. 
 
 183
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 some celestial Form seen long ago, but still 
 dwelling there, far in the heavens ; in the view 
 of Heredity, it was the re-viviscence within the 
 mind, of a luminous form, the complex product 
 or manifested presence of ages of race-conscious- 
 ness and memory. In either case it was the 
 waking of another order of consciousness within 
 the man. 
 
 I shall now (even though the evidence may 
 not seem absolutely conclusive) assume that this 
 general aspect of the question is the right one, and 
 proceed to inquire what we may infer from it. 
 
 In the first place, it would seem that if the 
 dream-figure walking beside the man is merely 
 the rehabilitation of some memory within him, 
 its connection with the living mortal woman to 
 whose feet he is making his pilgrimage is of the 
 slightest ; and that in that view Love is indeed a 
 sad illusion, as Thomas Hardy, in his pessimistic 
 way, seems to suggest. The dream-figure, which 
 is the real inspiration of the man's love and 
 devotion, is a merely subjective fancy ; and the 
 mortal woman only the painful actuality which 
 by some accident chanced to recall a dream. 
 
 But it will easily be seen that the whole point 
 of my endeavour hitherto on this subject will 
 have been missed if the kind of vision with which 
 we are dealing be thus characterised as merely 
 subjective. Taking the Heredity view, we can- 
 not refuse to see that the race-life which builds 
 up and projects these Visions, dreams, and gla- 
 mours is intensely real, and that the visions, &c., 
 
 184
 
 Beauty and Duty 
 
 are quite real and necessary manifestations of 
 it. This race-life is, as a matter of fact, within 
 each of us, and forms the chief, though a sub- 
 conscious, part of our individual selves ; we, as 
 conscious individuals, are simply the limbs and 
 prolongations of it. When, therefore, Thomas 
 Hardy's pilgrim sees the "god-created norm of 
 womankind " walking beside him he sees some- 
 thing which, in a sense, is more real than the 
 figures in the street, for he sees something that 
 has lived and moved for hundreds of years in the 
 heart of the race ; something which has been one 
 of the great formative influences of his own life, 
 and which has done as much to create those very 
 figures in the street as qualities in the circulation 
 of the blood may do to form a finger or other 
 limb. He comes into touch with a very real 
 Presence or Power one of those organic centres 
 of growth in the life of humanity, of which we 
 have spoken and feels this larger life within 
 himself, subjective, if you like, and yet intensely 
 objective. 
 
 And more. For is it not also evident that the 
 woman, the mortal woman who excites the Vision, 
 has some closest relation to it, and is indeed far 
 more than a mere mask or empty formula which 
 reminds him of it ? For she indeed has within 
 her, just as much as the man has, deep sub- 
 conscious Powers working ; and the ideal which 
 has dawned so entrancingly on the man is in all 
 probability closely related to that which has been 
 working most powerfully in the heredity of the 
 
 185
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 woman, and which has most contributed to mould 
 her form and outline. No wonder, then, that her 
 form should remind him of it. Indeed, when he 
 looks into her eyes (for all that she be " pinched 
 and thin"), he sees through to a far deeper life 
 even than she herself may be aware of, and yet 
 which is truly hers a life perennial and won- 
 derful. The more than mortal in him beholds 
 the more than mortal in her ; and the gods 
 descend to meet. 
 
 That there are many ' norms * and ideals 
 moving and working within the man, within 
 the woman, and within the race, goes without 
 saying; and these, as we have said farther back, 
 are continually growing from age to age, accreting, 
 advancing, and branching in the various sections, 
 branches, families, individuals even, of the race. 
 The gods are no changeless, inviolate beings, but 
 (at any rate as far as their manifestation is con- 
 cerned) may be thought of as continually growing, 
 evolving ; as Robert Buchanan says : 
 
 " Fed with the blood and tears of living things, 
 
 Nourish'd and strengthen'd by Creation's woes, 
 The god unborn, that shall be King of Kings, 
 
 Sown in the darkness, thro' the darkness grows." l 
 
 Furthermore, it is pretty evident that, as each 
 individual naturally stands more under the influ- 
 ence of one ideal or organic centre than another, 
 and will differ from other individuals in the 
 proportion and arrangement of his centres, so all 
 
 1 " God Evolving." Robert Buchanan. 
 1 86
 
 Beauty and Duty 
 
 will fall into groups, so to speak, under their 
 various gods. Thus Plato, in the " Phaedrus," 
 explains that Zeus and the various gods move 
 through heaven, each followed by a company of 
 souls, who thus gain a glimpse of the things of 
 the celestial world. And afterwards, when they 
 are fallen to earth, each soul still implicitly 
 belongs "to that particular god of whose choir 
 he was a member," and seeks for his love and 
 mate among such souls. " They then that 
 belong to Zeus seek to have for their beloved 
 one who resembles Zeus in his soul." Similarly 
 the followers of Hera or Apollo, or any other 
 god, " walking in the ways of the god, seek a 
 love who is to be like their god, and when they 
 have found him they themselves imitate their 
 god, and persuade their love to do the same, and 
 bring him into harmony with the form and ways 
 of the god as far as they can." 
 
 Thus the man and woman drawn together by 
 great forces deep-lying in the race, reveal to each 
 other their own deep-rooted divinity. And truly 
 when love comes between them there comes for 
 the first time (pace Thomas Hardy) something 
 like real knowledge. There comes also a trans- 
 formation which may be seen a change and 
 glory which is as real and obvious to the senses 
 as it is far-reaching and miraculous in spiritual 
 significance. 
 
 And may we not say (as Schopenhauer says *) 
 that it is in this ' Meeting of the Ideas ' that 
 
 1 See above, chap. iv. p. 59. 
 187
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 the sense of Beauty, that the Art sense every- 
 where consists ? When an Idea that is struggling 
 for expression within us meets with and recog- 
 nises the same Idea (itself indeed) expressed again 
 in some outer form be it man or woman, or 
 flower, or slumbering ocean there is an infinite 
 sense of relief, of recognition, of rest, of unity ; 
 we are delivered from our little selves, our little 
 desires and unrest ; and with the eyes of the gods 
 we see the gods. 
 
 And I take it that it is much the same with 
 the sense of Duty. Much has been written about 
 the Categoric imperative and the Stern Daughter 
 of the voice of God. It is sufficient to see that 
 such expressions point towards a transcendent 
 consciousness, without feeling it necessary to 
 accept all they imply. The sense of Duty derives 
 primarily and essentially from the sense (and the 
 fact) of oneness between ourselves and our fellows. 
 Structurally and through the centuries it may 
 grow and be built up in forms of laws and 
 customs and out of lower motives of Fear and 
 Conformity ; but ultimately and in all these 
 forms it is the Common Life asserting itself, and 
 the sense of the Common Life and unity. George 
 Santayana in his very suggestive book on " The 
 Sense of Beauty" l points out that Fear, involving 
 subconsciousness of terrors, death, disease, &c., 
 lies behind Duty ; while Love, involving sub- 
 consciousness of health, vitality and all pleasur- 
 able things, lies behind Beauty. And so we may 
 
 1 "The Sense of Beauty." Scribner, 1901, pp. 24, 25. 
 1 88
 
 Beauty and Duty 
 
 see that the earlier consciousness of the race, 
 wherein Fear and the unfriendly gods play so 
 important a part, gives birth to the sentiment of 
 Duty ; while the later consciousness endues the 
 Beauty form. In Wordsworth we may discern 
 the transition taking place : " Flowers laugh 
 before thee on their beds, and fragrance in 
 thy footing treads " ; and among the Greeks 
 already moral actions had become beautiful, 
 and were accounted desirable because they were 
 beautiful. 
 
 In the end it is the sense of Oneness, and of 
 the One Life, which underlies these two, and 
 perhaps many other enthusiasms ; and may we 
 not think that both Duty and Beauty, the sense 
 of Morality and the sense of Art, when they at 
 last realise their own meaning, are taken up and 
 surrender themselves in an Idea of an even higher 
 order, namely that of Love ? 
 
 That this sense of the One Life of the race, 
 or of humanity is not a mere figment, but a 
 very living reality, many folk's experience will 
 testify. Sometimes, under deep emotion rousing 
 the whole being, there comes a glimmering yet 
 distinct consciousness of this agelong existence. 
 Of such a mood Walt Whitman's poems show 
 many examples, but none perhaps more striking 
 than those first lines of " Children of Adam " : 
 
 " To the garden, the world anew ascending . . . 
 Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber, 
 The revolving cycles in their wide sweep having brought me 
 again, 
 
 189
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 Amorous, mature, all beautiful to me, all wondrous, 
 
 My limbs, and the quivering fire which ever plays through 
 
 them, for reasons, most wondrous, 
 Existing I peer and penetrate still, 
 Content with the present, content with the past, 
 By my side or back of me Eve following, 
 Or in front, and I following her just the same." 
 
 The existence of various orders of conscious- 
 ness is a conception which is becoming familiar 
 to-day. What with the subliminal consciousness 
 of F. W. Myers and the psychical researchers, the 
 subconscious mind of the hypnotists, the race- 
 memory and heredity of the biologists, the cosmic 
 consciousness of some late writers, the ecstasy of 
 the Christian Mystics, and the samadhi of the 
 Indian gnanis, we have abundant evidence of a yet 
 unexplored world within us. And some have 
 sought to show that there is a complete gradation 
 onwards from the mere consciousness of the 
 animals through the self-consciousness of the 
 human being, to family, tribal, and race conscious- 
 ness, and so upward to the cosmic life and 
 Nirvana. 
 
 The important thing, I think, at present 
 without attempting to go into any detail on the 
 subject or to classify what is yet unknown is to 
 see that undoubtedly various orders of conscious- 
 ness do exist, actually embedded within us ; and 
 that the words I and Thou do not merely cover 
 our bodily forms and the outlines of our minds 
 as we habitually represent them to ourselves, but 
 cover also immense tracts of intelligence and 
 
 190
 
 Beauty and Duty 
 
 activity lying behind these and only on occasions 
 coming into consciousness. Yet these tracts 
 belong to us, and are ourselves quite as much as, 
 and perhaps more intimately than, those com- 
 monly recognised. It is the waking of these tracts, 
 and their inrush upon the field of ordinary con- 
 sciousness, which is held to explain so many 
 phenomena of our psychic and religious experi- 
 ence. To command these tracts in such a way 
 as to be able to enter in and make use of them at 
 will, and to bring them into permanent relation 
 with the conscious ego, will I think be the method 
 of advance, and the means by which all these 
 questions of the perduration and reincarnation of 
 the ego, and of its real relation with other egos, 
 will at length be solved. If we could by any 
 means explore and realise what is meant by that 
 letter ' I ' ; if we could travel inward with firm 
 tread to its remotest depth, and find the regions 
 where it touches close, so close, on the other 
 forms of the same letter ; if we could stand 
 assured, and look around us, in that central land 
 where it ceases to convey the sense of difference 
 and only indicates unity ; and if then with light- 
 ning swiftness we could pass to the extreme peri- 
 phery where in its particular and invincible shape 
 it almost rejoices to stand alone antagonising the 
 rest of the universe; why, then, surely all would be 
 clear to us, and Gladness and Beauty would be 
 our perpetual attendants. It is through the deep- 
 ening of consciousness that these results will 
 gradually be obtained ; and the forms of the 
 
 191
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 race-consciousness are perhaps intermediary stages 
 on the way. 
 
 For, as we have seen, it is in the constitution 
 of things that the large and harmonious should 
 prevail over the petty and discordant, and there 
 is a kind of necessity driving us in the happier 
 direction. In memory and experience the over- 
 laying of images tends to the mutual obliteration 
 of defects and excrescences, and the production 
 of a composite and ideal finer than any single 
 specimen. And just as in the case of musical 
 sounds transmitted a long distance through the 
 air, the discords cancel each other, leaving harmony 
 in the end so in hereditary transmission the 
 elements which are mutually harmonious prevail. 
 The organic centres in the race (or in the indi- 
 vidual) which tend to Strength, Peace, Harmony, 
 Life, persist ; those which tend to unbalance, 
 pettiness, decay, and mutual conflict, dissolve and 
 disappear. The Angels overcome and eject the 
 Devils. The root-truths, qualities, powers of 
 the Universe move ever forwards to their expres- 
 sion. Beauty, amid the tangle of the superficial 
 and unfinished, shows itself more and more. 
 Man rises from the life of his petty self, to that 
 of his family, his tribe, his race, mankind, find- 
 ing his greater Self each time in these ; and as 
 he does so his gods lose more and more their 
 deformity and terror, and become clothed with 
 harmony and grace. 
 
 The primitive gods, the early idealisations, are 
 more local, partial ; they represent the mental 
 
 192
 
 Beauty and Duty 
 
 states of unformed people living in tribes, families, 
 localities. They are grotesque, fearsome, foolish, 
 these Typhons, Mexitlis, Bulls, Grizzlies, Dagons, 
 Satans, and other monsters ; yet they linger in 
 all of us still incarnations of foolish heart- 
 quakings and prejudices, which though dismissed 
 by our better reason still haunt the twilight 
 grounds of our subconsciousness. Farther on 
 and higher in development, we come to such 
 beautiful impersonations as Apollo, Aphrodite, 
 Demeter, Isis, Mary representing far profounder 
 movements and intuitions of the human mind ; 
 or to those general tendencies to deify the King 
 or the Warrior or the Saint, which may be found 
 in most races ; and all of these too linger in us, 
 inspiring the great mass of our religion, poetry, 
 ideals, and those enthusiasms which lift us out 
 of daily life into other spheres of emotion and 
 experience. But all these refer to particular 
 aspects of humanity. It is only with the in- 
 coming of Democracy in its largest sense that the 
 idealisation of the common Man and Woman, of 
 the human being, irrespective of all adornments, 
 occurs. The Egyptian could see plainly that the 
 mighty Pharaoh, as he drove by in his chariot, 
 was a god, but he could not see that the negro 
 slave, who flicked the flies from his royal master, 
 was equally divine ; but Whitman boldly says of 
 the men and women of the street, " What gods 
 can exceed these that clasp me by the hand ? " 
 For him the sight of a simple human being was 
 sufficient to wake the glow and the halo of 
 
 193 N
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 divinity. This latest and greatest idealisation 
 proceeds clearly from the fact that the image or 
 object in such case rouses the glorified conscious- 
 ness not of any one line of experience and 
 memory, not of any particular aspect or section 
 of the race, but of humanity itself. When the 
 consciousness in a man has deepened so far that 
 it is in touch with that of humanity, then clearly 
 any human being may wake that deeper con- 
 sciousness. And its awakening is accompanied 
 by a sense of glory, wonderment, and peren- 
 nial splendour as great or perhaps greater than 
 that which accompanied the visions of the elder 
 gods. 
 
 Here in this perennial, immeasurable conscious- 
 ness sleeping within us we come again to our 
 Celestial City, our Home from which as indivi- 
 duals we proceed, but from which we are never 
 really separated. It is surely some intimation 
 and sense of this, some need of its revelation, 
 which gives for us the charm of Utopias and 
 dreams of Paradise and Cities of the Sun. What 
 exactly our relation as individuals to that whole 
 and to each other, and what our relation to the 
 past and future, may be, are questions which for 
 the present we need not trouble ourselves with. 
 When it is realised that the central life zV, and 
 lives and moves, within us, that it is in some 
 sense ourselves, these questions will largely fall 
 away. Every man feels doubtless that his little 
 mortal life is very inadequate, and that to express 
 and give utterance to all that is in him he would 
 
 194
 
 Beauty and Duty 
 
 need many lives, many bodies. Even what we 
 have been able to say here shows that the deeper 
 self of him that which is the source of all his 
 joy and inspiration has had the experience of 
 many lives, many bodies, and will have.
 
 XII 
 
 CREATION 
 
 WE have suggested (Chapters I. and II.) evolu- 
 tion out of the Mind-stuff, through Feeling and 
 Thought, as the essential process of Creation. 
 The primal undifferentiated Being takes form. 
 The movement out of itself is e-motion, feeling ; 
 the form into which it moves is thought. The 
 material world, the world of Creation, is (as 
 physical science suggests) movement under various 
 forms. 
 
 Let us consider it more closely. The pro- 
 tozoic cell moves towards food. There is motion, 
 which we may, if we like, associate with chemical 
 action (chemotaxis) ; but we cannot refuse also 
 to see that there is a simultaneous e-motion, or 
 desire for food, in the cell-consciousness. The 
 repetition of this movement towards food evolves 
 at last a dim perception of relationship, a thought 
 of the object as food ; and with this thought of 
 relation, and the repeated action which the object 
 thus excites, comes structure as of the evolution 
 of tentacles, or swimming apparatus, by which 
 the food may be pursued or seized. 
 
 Later on in evolution, objects are conceived not 
 
 only as food, but as Fear or Anger or Jealousy, 
 
 196
 
 Creation 
 
 or what not. Objects, of course, are not fear 
 or anger, but they wake these qualities and feel- 
 ings, and so build the body and the life of the 
 being concerned. They call forth the new births 
 within the soul which determine its manifestation 
 in the world. Fear oft repeated calls forth the 
 long ears of the rabbit or the donkey, or gives 
 to the monkey its structure for climbing trees. 
 
 Later again the Me-sense is called forth and 
 descends into operation within man. It too 
 desires food (the applause of others), and so 
 leads to modifications of structure, to adaptations 
 of morals and manners, such as will secure the 
 approval of fellow-beings. 
 
 Looking at things in this way we seem to 
 see how, through ages on the Earth, not only 
 the great needs and emotions have given rise to 
 whole races and tribes of plants and animals, 
 but the detailed forms of these have been thought 
 out through processes most closely resembling 
 our own human thinking. If for a moment 
 one considers the working of the latter how 
 if one wishes to solve any question the image- 
 making faculty within supplies a host of chance- 
 suggestions, one of which at last is found to 
 be the form required ; or if we consider how 
 the human race at large has worked out any 
 great problem say that of ship-building how 
 through centuries and thousands of years tiny 
 suggestions and modifications have been thrown 
 out by innumerable thinkers most of which 
 have failed and been discarded in the struggle, 
 
 197
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 but some of which have succeeded and been 
 adopted and how at last the form of a ftiodern 
 ship has emerged : we see at once that the 
 process by which through the centuries the 
 forms of a stag or a walnut tree have been pro- 
 duced are quite similar. They have been thought 
 out. The image-making faculty in each genera- 
 tion of deer or tree has thrown out (chiefly in 
 the seed 1 ) casual variations, suggestions, most of 
 which have failed, but some have been adopted. 
 Each individual tree or animal has contributed 
 its tiny share of thought and ingenuity to the 
 success or failure of its own life, and so of the 
 form which it represents. In the vast succession 
 of individuals, of generations, the total mass of 
 accumulated thought and ingenuity has built 
 itself and embodied itself in the marvellous beauty, 
 expressiveness, and meaning, of the stag or the 
 tree. These forms, and the forms of man him- 
 self, and of the different races of man, are " the 
 result of the selection and chiselling of thousands 
 of minds through the centuries." And, at once, 
 when we realise this view of Nature and Creation, 
 we realise our part in it, our continuity with it 
 all, and the power, hitherto undreamed of, which 
 we may wield, if we only seize the whole process 
 in ourselves, and at its very source. 
 
 Here then, at this point, comes a change of 
 conception. All down the race-life before us 
 this process of Creation, through intermediary 
 Feeling and Thought, has been going on on 
 
 1 See p. 30, supra. 
 198
 
 Creation 
 
 a vast scale, and over our heads as it were. We 
 have been like puppets in the game; and all 
 these wonderful race-things, these swift powers, 
 these weaknesses and disabilities, which we inherit 
 in our bodies, we have looked upon as fatal 
 in their domination over us not to be escaped 
 from, not to be resisted. 
 
 But now comes a new conception. This Ego 
 which all down the ages has come building up 
 and slowly perfecting the expression of itself, 
 is ' there ' still. We are that Ego. It is not 
 an alien tyrant dominating us, it is our very self. 
 It is not somewhere back in the dark infinite. 
 It is here. And with this recognition all life is 
 changed. 
 
 The whole life of the Race from which we have 
 come, the whole route, the whole series of thought- 
 processes by which we have descended, is (it cannot 
 be too often repeated) within us, in our bodies, in 
 our subconscious selves. It is not that we have to 
 go rambling afar through great aeons of uncertain 
 history and biology to find this Race-life. It 
 or that branch of it to which we belong is 
 here and now in our bodies. The memories, 
 the accumulated experiences, habits, the whole 
 thought-concatenation which has built them up, 
 is there only waiting to be brought again into 
 consciousness. Every one of these organs, the 
 eye, the liver, the thyroid gland, or what not, 
 has been built up for a special use by intensely 
 conscious selective thought. It is, in fact, at this 
 moment a habit of thought having of course, 
 
 199
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 like every thought-structure, a definite form 
 and capable of being taken up into consciousness 
 again. 
 
 The whole life which has been thought out 
 and expressed in the Race before us is in our 
 bodies ; and something more, i.e. that which has 
 not as yet got itself expressed. The primal 
 being, in which all thoughts of necessity in- 
 here, which underlies all thoughts, and contains 
 myriads yet unexpressed, is in us. It is there, 
 and accessible to our consciousness. When we 
 reach to it we reach the source of all Power. 
 
 We are in the habit of regarding our bodies 
 as material legacies from the past that is, as 
 things unintelligent and therefore essentially 
 unintelligible and accept them, as I have said, 
 as a kind of lumbering fate or destiny, which 
 we may struggle against indeed, but to which 
 we must eventually succumb. But let us look at 
 them as mental legacies as congeries of customs, 
 habits, views, prejudices, thought-forms, handed 
 down, and immediately the whole aspect of the 
 life-problem is changed. The thought-habits 
 thus crystallised in us may not be the best we 
 can imagine ; they may be inchoate forms of the 
 race-life, destined to be replaced by superior 
 forms ; new needs, emotions, surging within us 
 may find our present outlines inadequate. But 
 the point is that our bodies now will no longer 
 appear as alien and separate things from our 
 minds, but as our own race-mind made visible, 
 and as essentially continuous with and undivided 
 
 200
 
 Creation 
 
 from that which we more specially call our- 
 selves. 
 
 And instantly it becomes clear that our bodies, 
 instead of oppressing like a nightmare, may be- 
 come our most willing servants, and may even 
 be capable of the most extraordinary and un- 
 expected transformations. 
 
 For consider for a moment the thought- 
 nature of the mind that which we call specially 
 mental in ourselves. A man's conscious mind 
 (we know it only too well) is a mass of habitual 
 thoughts, prejudices, ways of looking at things. 
 It has often a most rigid outline. He is a hard- 
 and-fast Tory, or a Plymouth brother, or a 
 screaming Radical, or an obdurate Secularist. 
 The form of the mind is distinct and set; one 
 can almost feel its shape, as if it were a body ; 
 indeed one can detect its shape in the curves and 
 lines of the body itself. And this mental form 
 in such cases is so set, that it offers the greatest 
 resistance to the entry of a new thought. You 
 talk in vain to a person of such type ; you adduce 
 arguments, instances ; you press new facts upon 
 him ; but these things roll off again and effect no 
 lodgment. Yet at last, when as it were by a 
 surgical operation, a new idea is really introduced 
 into his mind, how astonishing the change! How 
 often a single suggestion or hint from nature 
 or history, finding its way at last into the brain 
 of some Biblical Calvinist, has brought the 
 whole structure of his religion or superstition to 
 the ground, and turned him into an implacable 
 
 201
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 * freethinker.' In such cases the power of a single 
 idea (germinal as every idea is with a certain life 
 of its own) is something almost terrible. The 
 old thought-structure gives way before it ; de- 
 vastation spreads through the unseen chambers ; 
 the man thinks he is going mad, or really loses 
 his reason for a time. Then he emerges his 
 faculties and activities keyed upon a new con- 
 ception of life, his mental outlook and habit 
 altered, his body even notably changed. Or the 
 ' freethinker ' in his turn, and by exactly similar 
 process, is transformed into a Spiritualist and 
 the change is written on his face ! 
 
 This power, this vitality, of a single thought 
 or conception, and its capacity of growth or 
 multiplication from itself like a living organism, 
 are things which I think have not been sufficiently 
 appreciated. It is not only that one hitherto 
 unconsidered thought (or fact) may destroy a 
 whole system of philosophy or of science may 
 act like a poison on such system unless it can be 
 properly assimilated and digested but that a 
 similar thought may multiply in the brain of a 
 man and transform his whole existence. 
 
 Here is a plain man who has led a workaday 
 life for some years, honest and decent and re- 
 spected by his neighbours. One day a chance 
 speculation (perhaps in the markets, perhaps 
 on the turf) unexpectedly successful sets him 
 thinking. The idea that he can make Money, 
 can get Rich, effects a lodgment in his mind. 
 A kind of fever ensues. The one idea spawns, 
 
 202
 
 Creation 
 
 generates, and multiplies itself. In a few weeks 
 or months the man is deep in all manner of 
 plans, schemes, and speculations, in a few years 
 he is a millionaire, and a pest to himself and 
 society. He is altered in mind and deeply 
 altered in physique and bodily habit. This one 
 idea of Money-making, very old in the Race- 
 experience, and generating and propagating itself 
 down the centuries, has still enormous vitality ; 
 and fastening itself to-day upon thousands of 
 brains, and there spawning, completely mono- 
 polises and subverts them, reducing them to a 
 kind of slavery even as it might be some fell 
 disease. 
 
 And seriously the question may be asked, 
 Whether the microbial organisms which our 
 scientific instruments reveal to us are not indeed 
 the external forms of beings which seen from 
 within would appear to us as simple or rudi- 
 mentary states of mind : whether each microbe 
 which constitutes or is associated with a disease 
 is not representative of some attitude of mind 
 (like Fear or Worry) inimical and baneful to the 
 human organism, while those microbes which are 
 associated with health are representative of con- 
 structive and harmonious mental attitudes. The 
 planet on which we live swarms with highly 
 complex organisms, which we call human bodies ; 
 and we are so constituted that we cannot help 
 crediting each such body with an internal aspect, 
 or mentality, which we call its mind, also highly 
 complex. As we range down through the 
 
 203
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 animal kingdom we can hardly help doing the 
 same thing, and crediting each simpler organism 
 with a correspondingly less complex state of mind. 
 When, therefore, we reach the simplest forms, like 
 bacilli, whose whole life-action consists in one or 
 two very simple operations, including perpetual 
 self-propagation, is it not natural to suppose 
 that each such organism indicates a state of 
 mind of a very simple or rudimentary type a 
 single organic thought or desire, as we might 
 call it, incessantly concerned in a certain form 
 of action, and in the repetition and reproduction 
 of itself ? 
 
 Shall we actually discover, ere long, the bacillus 
 of Fear, or of Money-greed, or of Vanity, or of 
 Ambition. It does not seem so very improbable. 
 Why are certain bodily diseases associated with 
 certain mental temperaments? What are those 
 thoughts that are in the air, like microbes 
 some beneficial, some baneful ? What are those 
 microbes which swarm from one brain to another, 
 like thoughts ? Professor Elie Metchnikoff in 
 his last book, " The Nature of Man," says that 
 there is a class of tiny organism, he calls macro- 
 phags y which in old age gnaw and eat away the 
 brain and other organs. What does Worry do ? 
 Is it a macrophag ? 
 
 But leaving this question of the special inter- 
 pretation we are to give to microbes, let us 
 return to the general fact that our bodies are 
 the legacies of the immemorial thought of our 
 ancestors, that they are those thought-forms, 
 
 204
 
 Creation 
 
 habits, prejudices, consolidated into definite shape 
 and function ; then does it not seem clear what a 
 power a new feeling or thought may have and 
 may exercise in disturbing or readjusting the 
 organisation of the body ? That ' conversions ' and 
 other such experiences change folk in the most 
 amazing way is a fact we have already alluded 
 to. Such things not only shatter and rebuild 
 people's minds, but also their bodies simply, it 
 would appear, because the body is also a system 
 of habits and thought-forms, like the mind and 
 a system lying in close relationship (in fact, really 
 continuous) with what we call the mind. And 
 does it not seem clear that in cases new thoughts 
 may enter and disturb or modify the body 
 directly, without passing through or delaying in 
 the mind or at any rate without disturbing it 
 perhaps because the mind has already assimilated 
 or is familiar with them ? I know of cases in which 
 the receipt of so-called bad news, while leaving 
 the mind quite untroubled and serene, has caused 
 a complete prostration of the body for some 
 days ; and every one knows of the wonderfully 
 heartening effect on the body of a piece of good 
 news, even at times when the conscious man 
 has forgotten the intelligence, or is not paying 
 special heed to it. No doctor is unaware of the 
 importance of instilling courage and faith into 
 his patient. This attitude of mind apparently 
 spreads through the body, confirming and strength- 
 ening its organic processes. Doubt and despair are 
 equally disorganising. A cruel word, wounding 
 
 205
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 the heart, may paralyse all strength in the limbs. 
 One little thought or feeling, and the whole 
 body-structure deranged ! 
 
 But, naturally, those parts of the body, or 
 consolidated racial mind, which are most recent 
 and nearest to the conscious mind, are most easily 
 affected by new thought. The more complex 
 nerve-centres, the more recently formed plexuses, 
 representing and embodying more highly wrought 
 thought and emotion, are more easily modified, 
 more easily perhaps upset, than the more primi- 
 tive and simple. In insanity, it is the higher 
 thought-forms and later developed bodily faculties 
 the moral nature, the extended co-ordination 
 of the limbs which first give way. In drunken- 
 ness the same. The man plumps down on all 
 fours, because the ' leg-centre ' (at the top of 
 the brain) was in his long history one of the 
 latest formed and here the thought-habit of 
 uprightness dwells. In hypnotic suggestion a 
 single notion introduced may strangely transmute 
 a man's actions, physiognomy, or even senses of 
 taste or smell. It may act poisonously or cura- 
 tively on his body. 
 
 Still, in all these cases we do not expect to 
 find the fundamental outlines of the body changed 
 the bones, the muscles, the forms and func- 
 tions of the organs or if so, we only expect the 
 alteration to be very slow and gradual. And this 
 even though we admit the body's close affinity in 
 itself to thought and to the mind is perfectly 
 
 natural and rational. For the physical structure 
 
 206
 
 Creation 
 
 of the body, muscles and organs, is immensely 
 old, and represents thought-habits which have 
 been allowed and confirmed and verified by 
 countless generations ; and it is not likely they 
 are going to give way at once to some upstart 
 new idea, any more than a blooming old Tory is 
 likely to have his political faith upset by the 
 first young Radical shaver who comes along. 
 Nevertheless the bones and muscles and solider 
 parts of the body are altered by thought. Sandow 
 has shown us that. He has particularly insisted 
 on the great influence which concentration of the 
 mind exercises on the growth of the muscles. 
 
 Every one must have noticed how certain 
 attitudes of mind are associated with certain 
 attitudes of body courage and faith with an 
 erect carriage, depression and doubt with bent 
 back and uncertain gait, and so forth. It is clear 
 that when certain attitudes of mind become per- 
 manent and habitual, they must permanently 
 alter the carriage and structure of the body. 
 Again, that the chemical nature of the secretions 
 from the various glands and organs is altered in 
 connection with the various emotions joy, fear, 
 grief, pain, love, and so forth is a well-known 
 fact ; and it is obvious that when these states of 
 mind persist, permanent alterations of the func- 
 tions of the organs must follow. 
 
 Thus we arrive and the human race is arriv- 
 ing at the conscious use of the formative power. 
 We are arriving at one of the most fruitful and 
 important turning-points in the history of the 
 
 207
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 race. The Self is entering into relation with the 
 Body. For, that the individual should conceive 
 and know himself, not as a toy and chance- 
 product of his own bodily heredity, but as identi- 
 fied and continuous with the Eternal Self of 
 which his body is a manifestation, is indeed to 
 begin a new life and to enter a hitherto un- 
 dreamed world of possibilities. 
 
 Tt begins to dawn on us that, identifying our- 
 selves with this immortal self, we also can take 
 part consciously in the everlasting act of Creation. 
 To still the brain, and feel, feel, feel our identity 
 with that deepest being within us is the first 
 thing. There in that union, in that identity, all 
 the sins and errors of the actual world are done 
 away. We are most truly ourselves ; we go back 
 to the root from which all that may really express 
 us must inevitably spring. 
 
 Remaining there in silence as long as may be, 
 then out of that state will inevitably spring a 
 wave of conscious Feeling of joy, courage, love, 
 expansion, or whatever it may be a feeling not 
 foreign or fabricated or ephemeral, but deeply 
 rooted and expressive of our real life. Then 
 holding on to that root-idea, that feeling, that 
 emotion, that desire, whatever it may be, con- 
 fident in its organic Tightness and constructive 
 power holding steadily to it for a time per- 
 fectly naturally and inevitably out of it will 
 flow certain forms of Thought. The feeling 
 will take shape, it will clothe itself in images 
 of things actual ; and already the process will 
 
 208
 
 Creation 
 
 have begun by which those things will be created 
 or realised in the world. "All consciousness is 
 motor," says William James ; and no sooner does 
 the new emotion or desire come within the 
 border of consciousness than it sets the springs 
 of action in motion which inevitably flow down 
 to Creation and the outer world. 
 
 It is not that any violent act of Will is re- 
 quired for the realisation of things in this outer 
 world. It is rather that by non-acting we should 
 identify ourselves with the great process of 
 Creation for ever going on. 1 There is Will 
 certainly, there is control and power in holding 
 and concentrating on any given feeling or 
 thought ; but it is not the violent will which 
 
 o 
 
 would seek to wrest materials from their places. 
 The driver of a locomotive does not jump 
 down and seek forcibly to turn the wheels of his 
 engine ; but moving one or two levers, he con- 
 trols the great driving forces at their source. 
 So handling the levers of Feeling and Thought 
 we can already send the forces of Nature in 
 our bodies and elsewhere along the lines which 
 we desire. 
 
 Long and persevering must the practice and 
 exercise be, by which power to direct thought 
 and feeling may be attained, and by which the 
 sense of identity with the universal self may 
 
 1 "By non-action," says Lao-Tzu, "there is nothing that 
 may not be done. One might undertake the government of 
 the world without ever taking any trouble and as for all those 
 who take trouble, they are not competent to the government 
 of the world." 
 
 209 O
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 be established for without this Jatter all our 
 work must inevitably turn out vain and ephem- 
 eral but when the conditions are fulfilled, then 
 strangely obvious is the result and simple the 
 act of Creation. 
 
 2JO
 
 XIII 
 TRANSFORMATION 
 
 TRANSFORMATIONS are perpetually going on 
 throughout the animal kingdom, and through- 
 out our individual lives. 
 
 New ideals, new qualities, new feelings and 
 envisagements of the outer world, are perpetually 
 descending from within, both in man and the 
 animals ; new centres and plexuses are forming 
 among the nerves ; new gods are presiding in 
 the region of our dreams. Every one of these 
 things means a new centre of life and activity, 
 and a transformation (slow or swift) in the type 
 of the individual or the race. 
 
 The transformations induced even by momen- 
 tary excitement of particular feelings or centres 
 are most extraordinary. See a man under the 
 influence of violent Anger or of Jealousy his 
 whole mien, face, attitude, exhalation of char- 
 acter changed it is hardly credible that he is 
 the same person that we knew before. Or see 
 him under the influence of some strong enthu- 
 siasm or generous emotion, doing things he 
 would have been physically incapable of at 
 another time ! 
 
 Or again, when the poison of drink reaches 
 
 211
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 and inflames some particular centre in the brain, 
 Philip drunk becomes so utterly different from 
 Philip sober that we can only say he is not ' him- 
 self ' ; or when disease or old age or madness act 
 in a similar way, these alterations and alternations 
 of Personality can only be described as transforma- 
 tions ; taking place, indeed, according as one 
 centre or another in the brain, one synthesis or 
 another in the mind, may happen to be in the 
 ascendant. 
 
 Throughout the whole animal kingdom, but 
 especially among insects, transformations of one 
 kind or another are most abundant and remark- 
 able. There are ' recapitulations ' by the em- 
 bryos and young of mammals of the life-history 
 of their race, with strongly marked breaks and 
 mutations corresponding to the stages of evolu- 
 tion represented ; there are the metamorphoses 
 of caterpillars and flies, some including twenty 
 or thirty changes in a single life-time ; there 
 are the transformations and alternate generations 
 of annelids and Crustacea ; and there are strange 
 jumps and quick disguises in the lives of some 
 plants. Even the human being passes through 
 a great number of very distinct stages and phases 
 from the embryo onwards to old age. 1 
 
 But probably the greatest and most important 
 of all transformations in the human and animal 
 kingdoms, is that which takes place when the 
 centre of life in Man is transferred, as indicated 
 in the last chapter, from unconscious activity in 
 
 1 See infra, " The Mayfly," p. 230 et seq. 
 212
 
 Transformation 
 
 the body to the conscious self that is, when 
 the individual self, reaching union with the 
 universal, becomes consciously and willingly the 
 creator and inspirer of the body. That is indeed 
 a Transfiguration. The individual is no longer 
 under the domination of the body and its heredity, 
 but rising out of this tomb becomes lord and 
 master of the body's powers, and identified with 
 the immortal Self of the world. 
 
 This transformation, whilst the greatest and 
 most wonderful, is also of course the most diffi- 
 cult in Man's evolution, for him to effect. It 
 may roughly be said that the whole of the civilisa- 
 tion-period in Man's history is the preparation 
 for it. For though the transformation itself (of 
 the consciousness, from the second order to the 
 third order) may be practically instantaneous, yet 
 the pupal condition, during which the elements 
 of the change are being prepared and set in order, 
 must necessarily be immensely protracted ; and it 
 must be remembered too, that when for any 
 individual the transformation of consciousness 
 does occur and the new forces begin to operate, 
 it does not follow at once that the change is 
 permanent, and that there will not be backslidings 
 again to the old centres ; or that the change in 
 the inward consciousness can be immediately 
 followed by corresponding change in the whole 
 bodily system. Indeed it seems probable that 
 for the individual the permanent change is hardly 
 possible until such time as large portions of the 
 race round him are sharing in it. 
 
 213
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 Thus, though this great Transformation may in- 
 dividually have an instantaneous character, yet the 
 period of its preparation and establishment may 
 occupy ages of human history. We may divide 
 the latter into three periods : The first, or animal 
 period, in which the human being follows his 
 body and its instincts unhesitatingly ; the second, 
 or intellectual period, in which a half-formed, 
 separate and illusive, self appears ; and the third, 
 or period of the Super- man (if we like to call it 
 so) in which the self, being identified with the 
 universal being, becomes the centre of absolute 
 recognition and reliance and repose. The great 
 Transformation is that which takes place at the 
 entrance of the third period ; and the second 
 period is the period of its preparation. 
 
 This transition from the first to the third stage 
 is obviously a very difficult and precarious one. 
 It covers practically the whole of what we call 
 civilisation. During this period the sense of 
 Me-ness has to descend into consciousness, and 
 to be evolved the sense of self, but of course 
 at first in a very imperfect and illusive form. 
 The (false) notion of a separate and atomic self, 
 apart and having interests distinct from the rest 
 of the universe, for a long time dominates ; and 
 for a long time leads to the most terrible struggles 
 and miseries. There is no real reliance anywhere. 
 The old animal instincts and sanctions having 
 been abandoned, there remains nothing but this 
 illusive phantom ego which gives way direfully 
 
 the moment any pressure is placed upon it. The 
 
 214
 
 Transformation 
 
 fight for this self as against other selves, and the 
 everlasting doubt as to where, in the midst of the 
 general chaos, reliance may be found, lead to huge 
 and despairing efforts of the Brain as it were to 
 solve a double and impossible problem. And the 
 growth and ascendancy of the self-conscious, 
 analytic, individualising Brain becomes one of the 
 great marks of this period. The Brain and Self- 
 consciousness are the midwives, as it were, of this 
 great birth and transformation the greatest of 
 all births and transformations of the soul. They 
 are both of incalculable value and importance 
 to humanity ; but in their present form, and 
 as long as the true individuality and the true 
 self is unrealised, they both can only be re- 
 garded as distorted, unbeautiful shapes, to be 
 redeemed in the future when the present work 
 is done. 
 
 There comes a time however, and at last, when 
 the real self emerging into consciousness, abys- 
 mal, adamantine, founded deep below and beyond 
 all worlds the Brain ceases from its terrified and 
 insatiate quest. Even the far-inherited and age- 
 long animal instincts, rooted in the great immen- 
 sity of material Nature, yield in respect of 
 authority or promise of security to this far deeper 
 knowledge of the Nature-self. They either fail 
 and shrivel before it, or becoming identified with 
 it lose their separate and external outline ; and 
 the first period joining on and becoming amalga- 
 mated to the third, leaves only the tiniest crack 
 or seam between to indicate what was once a huge 
 
 215
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 gulf including thousands of years of human 
 history. 1 
 
 The brain is stilled. It does not cease from its 
 natural and joyful activities. But it ceases from 
 that terrified and joyless quest which was inevit- 
 able to it as long as its own existence, its own 
 foundation, its own affiliation to the everlasting 
 Being was in question and in doubt. The Man 
 at last lets Thought go ; he glides below it into 
 the quiet feeling, the quiet sense of his own 
 identity with the self of other things of the 
 universe. He glides past the feeling into the 
 very identity itself, where a glorious all-conscious- 
 ness leaves no room for separate self-thoughts or 
 emotions. He leans back in silence on that inner 
 being, and bars off for a time every thought, every 
 movement of the mind, every impulse to action, 
 or whatever in the faintest degree may stand 
 between him and That ; and so there comes to 
 him a sense of absolute repose, a consciousness of 
 immense and universal power, such as completely 
 
 1 When the consciousness deepens to that of the universal 
 life, and to the point whence as it were the different races have 
 radiated, then the figures of the gods grow dim and lose their 
 outline, the rivalries and mutual recriminations of the various 
 human ideals cease to have the old poignancy and interest ; and 
 their place is taken by a profound sense and intense realisation 
 of the unity and common life of all races and creatures ; by a 
 strange and novel capacity of understanding and entering into 
 the habits of distant beings or peoples ; and by a mysterious 
 sense of power to ' flow down ' into these forms and embody 
 therein a portion of the life universal. And with all this come 
 naturally great changes in the institutions and political forms 
 of peoples, and the spreading of the genuine Democracy and 
 Socialism over the earth. 
 
 216
 
 Transformation 
 
 transforms the world for him. All life is changed; 
 he becomes master of his fate ; he perceives that 
 all things are hurrying to perform his will ; and 
 whatever in that region of inner Life he may 
 condescend to desire, that already is shaping itself 
 to utterance and expression in the outer world 
 around him. "The winds are his messengers 
 over all the world, and flames of fire his servants; 
 . . . and the clouds float over the half-concealed, 
 dappled, and shaded Earth to fulfil his will, to 
 fulfil his eternal joy." 
 
 For the ceaseless endeavour to realise this 
 identity with the great Self, there is no substitute. 
 No teaching, no theorising, no philosophising, no 
 rules of conduct or life will take the place of 
 actual experience. This is the Divine yoga or 
 union, from which really all life, all Creation, 
 proceeds. And for its realisation it is necessary 
 that at times, as already said, all thought, all 
 plans and purposes, should be obliterated from 
 the mind, leaving it free to fall back and touch 
 absolutely to its own source. What is learnt by 
 this actual experience is so much more, and so 
 much more important, than anything that can be 
 learnt by teaching or philosophy, that at any rate 
 without it the latter can hardly be accounted of 
 much value. 
 
 It may, however, be of some use, as a supple- 
 ment to the reader's personal experience, to say a 
 few words more. This true Ego this Self above 
 and beyond the separate Me to know it one 
 
 217
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 must, as I say, become identified with it ; and 
 that is ultimately the only way of knowing it. 
 Yet it may help us, to be able to see, as a matter 
 of speculation, what its nature may and must be. 
 
 The true Self is universal : that is, it is the 
 Self of all beings. But that does not mean that 
 it is not individual. On the contrary, as far as it 
 is the self of any one being it must be individual. 
 If it is remembered what was said in the chapter 
 on Affiliation it will be seen that every local or 
 individual self exists only by reason of its being 
 an outgrowth or prolongation or aspect of the 
 universal Self, and that conversely the universal 
 self has no definite expression or existence except 
 in so far as it is individual and local in some 
 degree or other. The true and ultimate Self 
 therefore in each of us is universal and common 
 to all beings, and yet it is also individual and 
 specialised in a certain direction. When the 
 more universal nature of the Self descends and 
 becomes revealed, the consciousness of the 
 individual necessarily takes certain forms corre- 
 sponding. 1 
 
 One of these is Love and Sympathy. The self, 
 hitherto deeming itself a separate atom, suddenly 
 becomes aware of its inner unity with these other 
 human beings, animals, plants even. It is as if a 
 veil had been drawn aside. A deep understand- 
 ing, knowledge, flows in. Love takes the place 
 of ignorance and blindness ; and to wound another 
 is to wound oneself. It is the great deliverance 
 
 1 See note on the great primal Ideas, chap. vii. p. 121. 
 218
 
 Transformation 
 
 from the prison-life of the separate self, and 
 comes to the latter sometimes with the force and 
 swiftness of a revelation. 
 
 Another form is Faith, Courage, Confidence. 
 If I have my home in these other bodies as well 
 as my own, if my life is indeed so wide-reaching, 
 so universal, if I feel that it is so what is there 
 to fear, how can I fear? All things are given 
 into my hands. My life checked here may flow 
 on there ; innumerable are my weapons, my 
 resources ; and rooted down, deep, below all 
 accidents, is my real being. 
 
 Or again a strange sense of Extension comes on 
 me and of presence in distant space and time. 
 Mine is an endless Life, unconquerable, limitless 
 in subtlety and expanse ; and strange intimations 
 that it is so come to me even in my tiny earth- 
 cell intimations of power inexhaustible, of 
 knowledge mysterious and unbounded, and of far 
 presence through all forms and ranges of being. 
 
 These are some of the things some of the new 
 modes of consciousness that come Love, Faith, 
 endless Life and Presence in space and time, end- 
 less Power, Knowledge, ' Humanity.' Let them 
 be felt first. Do not think too much about them. 
 When you have merged your being, if it be but 
 for a moment, in its source, then inevitably on 
 emerging (if union has really been effected) will 
 one or other of these feelings that I have men- 
 tioned be found occupying your mind. Do not 
 think or at any rate delay the process of think- 
 ing as much as you can but retain the mind in 
 
 219
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 its state of feeling. Feel, feel, feel, in silence, 
 your touch upon the great inner Life, in these its 
 first Creative forms. Rivet and hold fast these 
 feelings ; join them ever on to your central and 
 abiding Self; make them into the great main 
 branches of your Life-tree ; and so gradually let 
 them pass outward into the twigs and ramifica- 
 tions of thought, to deal with the actual and the 
 outer. Thus they will pass into structure. These 
 feelings, this Supreme Life which they represent, 
 will pass into expression, and become realised 
 in the structure of the body. They will pass 
 into the life around, and become realised in the 
 structure of Society. 
 
 The body so built when it is built must 
 clearly be aeonian, not mortal in the ordinary 
 sense. The mortal, local, and ' separate ' self, 
 with its illusive limitations, can only build a 
 mortal and temporary body. The Race-self 
 truly, being aeonian, may build, in the institutions 
 and life of the race, an agelong-enduring body. 
 And as far as this race-self enters into the con- 
 sciousness of the individual as it does at times 
 through the great enthusiasms of the race so 
 far does the individual put on the race-body, and 
 share in its degree of physical immortality. But 
 when, further, into the individual there descends 
 a consciousness profounder, more basic, more 
 enduring, even than that of the Race-self, then 
 inevitably does there begin to be built even for 
 the individual, a body corresponding. This body, 
 in fact, is the expression and grows out of those 
 
 220
 
 Transformation 
 
 great creative feelings of which I have just 
 spoken. Through Love it becomes a body 
 built into the lives of others, and positively 
 sharing their organic life and vitality. Since 
 Faith and Courage inspire it, it is well based, 
 firm to stand the shocks of Time and Accident ; 
 extending its domain over the elements ; incor- 
 porating in itself the sea and the wild creatures, 
 and so unafraid of them ; surrounding Chance 
 and taking it captive. Its consciousness of 
 immense Extension in time and space indicates 
 its ethereal character ; its consciousness of Power 
 indicates its strongly material composition ; its 
 consciousness of Knowledge, the penetrating 
 subtle quality of it. And so we forebode, beside 
 and within the very local body which we know 
 best (and which is expressive of our more local 
 selves), another body expressive of our more 
 universal nature a body built of swift, far- 
 extending ethereal elements, subtle and penetrat- 
 ing, yet powerfully massive and material ; closely 
 knit in itself, not easily disturbed or dislocated, 
 enduring for asons ; yet sensitive in the highest 
 degree, and twining its nerves and fibres through 
 all Creation sharing the life of all creatures. 
 
 Of that body, woven like Cinderella's robe of 
 the sun and moon, who shall speak ? " Lo ! the 
 rippling stream, and the stars, and the naked 
 tree-branches deliver themselves up to him. 
 They come close ; they are his body ; and his 
 spirit is wrapt among them ; without thought 
 he hears what they and all things would say." 
 
 221
 
 The Art of Creation 
 
 When on the striving, bewildered consciousness, 
 in the maze of the second stage, suddenly the 
 apparition of that body dawns, no wonder 
 there is a transformation and a transfiguration. 
 
 O 
 
 " Behold I show you a mystery ! " says Paul, 
 *' in the twinkling of an eye we shall be changed." 
 And Fra Angelico in his little cell at San Marco 
 saw even the same mystery, and in simple vision 
 pictured it out of his own soul upon the wall 
 the transfigured Christ, luminous, serene, with 
 arms extending over the world. 
 
 This sublime Consciousness of simple Being 
 (with which we began these chapters) is there is 
 in the world and within all creatures as the 
 supreme cosmic Consciousness always. It can 
 be seen quite plainly in the look in the eyes of 
 the animals and in primitive healthy folk and 
 children deep down, unsuspected by the creature 
 itself; and yet there, unmistakable. It is seen 
 by lovers in each other's eyes the One, absolute 
 and changeless, yet infinitely individuate and 
 intelligent the Supreme life and being ; of which 
 all actual existence and Creation is the descent 
 and partial utterance in the realms of emotion 
 and thought. 
 
 222
 
 APPENDICES
 
 I 
 
 THE MAY-FLY 
 
 A STUDY IN TRANSFORMATION 1 
 
 EVERY one knows the May-fly or at least some member 
 of the tribe, of which there are said to be fifty species in 
 Great Britain alone. The most well-known perhaps is 
 that one which anglers call the Green Drake or the Grey 
 Drake, and the scientific folk call Ephemera vulgata a 
 little fairy with four pearly lace-like wings, and whitey- 
 green body about an inch long, and tail of three long 
 hairs. They appear in numbers on any hot day towards 
 the end of May, or in this neighborhood (Derbyshire) in 
 June, and continue to be seen for two or three weeks ; 
 and they love to dance scores and hundreds together 
 in the sunshine, whizzing vertically upwards for a few 
 feet, and then letting themselves float luxuriously down- 
 ward on poised V-shaped wings ; then up again ; and so 
 on for the few short hours of their life during which 
 they do nothing but dance, make love, and lay their eggs. 
 They cannot eat, for their mouths do not admit of their 
 taking food ! Their numbers are sometimes so great 
 that they look like snowflakes in the air, and the ground 
 and even the water are strewn with their dead or dying 
 bodies. 
 
 For they come from the water, from running water ; 
 
 1 Reprinted from the Humane Review, April 1903. 
 225 p
 
 Appendix I 
 
 there is no doubt about that. They are found generally 
 near a stream ; and if you go down to the stream you 
 will see them rising as if by magic, from the weeds by 
 the brook side, or even from the clear surface of the 
 water. Look closer, and you will see what appear to be 
 empty husks of them floating in the water, or tangled 
 amid the marginal grasses. But though you feel sure 
 these are their husks, yet it is most tantalising, for to put 
 the two together and to see the fly actually emerging 
 from its case is most difficult. You may watch for an 
 hour without success for the trick is done, the light- 
 ning change is made, literally " in the twinkling of an 
 eye." 
 
 The larva of the common may-fly is a semi-transparent, 
 brownish, scaly creature, clumsy and sluggish, that crawls 
 about the bottom of running streams or hides itself in 
 small semicircular burrows in the banks. " Bank bait " 
 it is called by the anglers, for it too, as well as the perfect 
 fly, is much beloved by the Trout. It remains in this 
 condition apparently for two years or so, during this 
 period casting its skin several times, and undergoing on 
 each occasion slight transformations in structure. At 
 last the wings develop and " become prominent under 
 the larval skin, and the intestine (so says Swammerdam) 
 is emptied, and the colour of the animal changes in 
 consequence." Then it is ready for its transformation. 
 
 One day, when the weather is warm, and in its 
 retreat the insect knows that the right moment has 
 arrived, it creeps from its burrow, swims rapidly up to 
 the surface of the water, and there performs the feat 
 which is so difficult to witness. Swammerdam, in 1675, 
 speaking not of Ephemera vulgata^ but of an allied form, 
 the Palingenia longicauda, says : 
 
 "When the larvae have left their burrows they make 
 their way with all speed to the surface, and the trans- 
 formation is effected with such rapidity that even the 
 most attentive observer can make out little, except that 
 
 226
 
 The May-fly 
 
 the winged fly suddenly darts out from the midst of 
 the water." l 
 
 And Reaumur, observing in 1738 another allied form, 
 the Polymitarcys, says : 
 
 " The rapidity with which they cast the larval skin is 
 truly wonderful. We cannot take our arm from the sleeve 
 of a coat more readily than the Ephemera extricates its 
 abdomen, wings, legs, and its long tail-filaments from 
 their sheaths. During the operation they rest upon 
 objects standing out of the water or upon the water 
 itself. The thorax splits lengthwise, and the rest of the 
 business of extrication is over in a moment." 
 
 And of their enormous numbers he says : 
 
 " The exclamations of my gardener, who had gone to 
 the foot of the stairs [by the river Marne, near Paris], 
 attracted my attention. I then saw a sight beyond all 
 expectation. The Ephemeras filled the air like the 
 snow-flakes in a dense snow-storm. The steps were 
 covered to a depth of two, three, or even four inches. 
 A tract of water five or six feet across was completely 
 hidden, and as the floating insects slowly drifted away, 
 others took their place. Several times I was obliged to 
 retreat to the top of the stairs from the annoyance caused 
 by the Ephemerae, which dashed in my face, and got into 
 my eyes, mouth, and nose." 
 
 Any observer who cares to take the trouble will be 
 able to verify the remarks of Swammerdam and Reaumur 
 as to the rapidity of the May-fly metamorphosis, and the 
 difficulty of observing the actual details. For some 
 seasons in succession I watched, on favorable days, in 
 a certain brook, for the transformation of Ephemera 
 vulgata, but always without success. At last, however, 
 I was rewarded. I saw what at first I thought was a 
 mere husk floating down the stream; but there was 
 a silvery glaze at the thorax end. Immediately that end 
 
 1 See Miall's " Natural History of Aquatic Insects," chap, 
 viii. 
 
 227
 
 Appendix I 
 
 opened, a perfect May-fly glided out, head first, stood for 
 a moment on the wave beside its own corpse, stretched 
 its wings, and flew away. The whole operation was so 
 rapid that it was completed even while the stream moved 
 forward about three feet, say, in two seconds. Since 
 that time I have witnessed the change frequently. Some- 
 times the grub seems to creep and wriggle up the bank 
 side till it gets onto a stone or twig just on the water 
 surface ; the glistening air-space appears quite at the 
 front end of the thorax. This or the back of the head 
 itself opens, the skin on the two sides turns over, leaving, 
 as Sir John Lubbock describes, 1 only a small aperture, 
 through which, as from a glove, the insect delivers itself 
 the legs from the legs, the antennas from the antennae, 
 the jaws from the jaws, the eyes from the eyes, and the 
 three tail-filaments (in the case of E. vulgatd] from the 
 three tail-sheaths. But the jaws now, in the perfect 
 insect, are rudimentary, and useless for eating purposes ; 
 and the eyes are compound and many-faceted, instead of 
 flat and smooth as they were in the larva. Only the 
 gills, which were large and branched in the larva, are 
 completely gone ; and four wings, completely absent in 
 the original grub, now adorn the perfect insect. 
 
 Curiously, it appears that even now at any rate in 
 the case of the common May-fly the transformations 
 are not finished. For though it has its mature form and 
 power of flight, yet presently its skin splits once more, a 
 final veil falls from its wings and its whole body, and it 
 emerges lighter both in colour and in weight than 
 at first (the Grey Drake now, whereas in its all-but-perfect 
 state it was the Green Drake) and joins its companions 
 in the mazy dance, in which the remaining hours of its 
 existence will be mostly passed. 
 
 Mostly, but not altogether. The one serious duty of 
 the Ephemera is egg-laying and fertilisation. As we 
 have seen, it does not eat. It is freed from the necessity 
 
 1 " Origin and Metamorphoses of Insects," p. 21. 
 228
 
 The May-fly 
 
 of collecting and consuming food. It has come to the 
 end of its life as an individual, and its only call is to 
 provide for the race. And this seems to be a reason why 
 so many insects put on wings in their final and repro- 
 ductive stage or why their egg-laying is delayed to the 
 winged stage in order, namely, that they may be able 
 to spread their progeny to a distance from the original 
 location. Especially is this true of water insects, which, 
 with the drying up of streams and ponds at certain seasons, 
 might be in danger of perishing entirely, if the perfect 
 creature were not able, being winged, to fly to distant 
 places where the conditions were more favourable. 
 
 Accordingly, our Ephemera takes care to lay its eggs 
 in the water of some stream either that from which it 
 emerged or some other where its grub will find itself at 
 home. Reaumur, speaking of Polymitarcys, says that 
 " they skim the surface of the water, and support their 
 bodies upon it by means of the tail-filaments while 
 engaged in egg-laying. The eggs fall at once to the 
 bottom, and soon become scattered, for the jelly in which 
 they are embedded is soluble in water." De Geer, 
 speaking of E. vu/gata y gives much the same account, 
 and adds, with regard to fertilisation, that the aerial 
 dances of the Ephemerae are usually composed of males 
 only, but that when, as often happens, a female mixes in 
 the swarm, two or three males pursue her, until one of 
 them succeeds in flying away with her generally to the 
 top of a wall or summit of a tree. 
 
 With fertilisation and egg-laying the duties of the 
 individual terminate. The parent insects perish ; and 
 the life-round begins again. 
 
 The metamorphoses of insects of which that of the 
 May-fly, with its very sudden transition from a lethargic 
 subaqueous existence to a giddy dance in the sunshine, 
 is such a striking example are mostly rather dramatic 
 and impressive. But it is well, in considering the 
 
 229
 
 Appendix I 
 
 subject, to remember that they are only pronounced 
 instances of an event which is very universal in Nature. 
 Slighter transformations are common, and continually 
 taking place. The larva of the May-fly undergoes 
 several minor changes, as I have already mentioned, 
 before its final liberation into the air. One of the 
 species, Chloeon dimidiatum, goes through twenty-one 
 moults, according to Sir John Lubbock, while it is 
 preparing for its imaginal form. Caterpillars and other 
 grubs, as is well known, frequently cast their skins and 
 take on slight changes of structure or colour. In the 
 case of worms and insects, as there is no interior 
 skeleton, the skin, horny or otherwise, forms the attach- 
 ment and support of the muscles and internal organs, 
 and with any change of these latter a new skin has to 
 be formed, and the interval of forming the new skin 
 and casting the old one often necessitates a dormant or 
 pupal stage, which may be brief or prolonged according 
 to circumstances. Crabs and other Crustacea similarly 
 cast their shells and go through periods of seclusion, 
 accompanied by changes of structure. 
 
 In the case, however, of the vertebrate animals and 
 man there is not the same necessity to change the skin, 
 and the transformations are not so obvious. Yet they 
 are taking place all the time. The human being passes 
 through several very distinct phases as an embryo in the 
 womb ; besides these there is a marked change at birth ; 
 then another at the coming of the milk teeth, and again 
 at the casting of the same ; another at puberty ; and 
 again another in age, with the lapse of the sexual 
 functions. Possibly yet others of a slighter character 
 might be distinguished. These that I have mentioned 
 as taking place during the actual life of an individual, 
 and corresponding to the growth and change of teeth, 
 to puberty and to the meno-pause, all imply considerable 
 changes of structure and organisation, and (what is worth 
 noticing) are generally accompanied by periods of 
 
 230
 
 The May-fly 
 
 lethargy, subversion of the system, and even symptoms 
 of disease, which are suggestive, to say the least, of the 
 pupal stages in insects. So far, then, we seem to see 
 that transformations, more or less pronounced, are a 
 common, and one may perhaps say normal, phenomenon 
 of animate nature. 
 
 With regard to Man and the Mammalia, it has been, 
 since the time of Von Baer, an accepted doctrine that 
 the successive changes in the embryo and the young 
 form a kind of epitome of the history of the race to 
 which the individual belongs. It is pointed out that the 
 embryo of man, for instance, at an early stage shows 
 characteristics which assimilate it to the fishes, and, 
 later, characteristics which assimilate it in succession to 
 reptiles, lower Mammals, and higher Mammals ; that, 
 again, the lately born infant has some characteristics 
 of the monkey or other arboreal animals, and that the 
 boy has the habits and conformation of the savage ; and 
 so on. Some of these stages in the development of the 
 individual may be fairly distinct and well marked; others 
 may glide quite imperceptibly into each other. But, 
 anyhow, the point is that the growth of the individual 
 thus resumes and rehearses in brief the agelong previous 
 life and growth of the race. Now the theory with regard 
 to insects seems to be that here, too, the life of the indi- 
 vidual, from the egg onward, through all the changes and 
 transformations of the grub, the larva, the pupa, and the 
 perfect insect, is, in a similar way, a recapitulation of the 
 life-history of its race. In a similar, yet not exactly the 
 same way, as will presently be explained. 
 
 But first a word about what race-history means. 
 
 For long periods in the life of a race, slow growth and 
 modification of the organs and faculties may take place, 
 and yet the general balance of the organic centres in the 
 normal individual may be little changed ; the general 
 type of the race may remain much the same. But then 
 again there will come a period or periods when changes 
 
 231
 
 Appendix I 
 
 of conditions or the natural course of evolution will 
 occasion rather rapid and complete changes in the 
 balance of the functions, possibly even the growth of 
 quite new organic centres. Then the type of the race 
 will alter very decidedly. When, for instance, the 
 monkey-like animal first took to climbing trees, however 
 slow and continuous its development had been before, 
 now a rapid transformation began to take place. A new 
 centre organising and controlling the prehensile activity 
 quickly developed, and soon assumed a commanding 
 position among the other organic centres ; the balance 
 of functions in the race suffered a kind of revolution. 
 So when the precursor of the dog first came under the 
 influence of man, a new formative plexus arose which 
 modified the whole mentality and activity of the animal ; 
 or when certain kinds of worms or insects by accident 
 or by necessity took to marshy and watery grounds, and 
 ultimately became aquatic, the same kind of thing 
 happened. Thus race-history, from this point of view, 
 means the gradual growth and redistribution of organic 
 centres in the animal ; gradual, that is, as a general 
 rule, but varied by occasional rather rapid changes in 
 . the balance of these centres and their functions ; 
 and may be looked upon as a combination of slow 
 evolution with, now and then, what may be termed 
 revolution. 
 
 If we apply this to the history of any single individual 
 say, of an individual man from his commencement as 
 a germ, through his life and growth as an embryo, a 
 babe, a child, a boy, and so on to maturity, we seem to 
 see the same thing slow, continuous evolution, inter- 
 rupted now and then by rather rapid and considerable 
 transformations, and the grouping of the life round new 
 organic centres. Thus, early in the life of the human 
 embryo (between the fourth and eighth week 1 ) the 
 
 1 W. B. Carpenter, "Human Physiology," 8th edition, 
 p. ion. 
 
 232
 
 The May-fly 
 
 arrangement of its blood-vessels, which hitherto has 
 been slowly developing on the type of the fishes and 
 cold-blooded animals, begins to transform itself to the 
 type of the Mammals, and at the moment of birth the 
 first use of the lungs completely changes the actual 
 character of the circulation. In fishes the kidneys do 
 not exist, their function being partly fulfilled by certain 
 other bodies ; and this is also the case in the human 
 embryo between the fourth and seventh week ; but at 
 the latter date the true kidneys first begin to present 
 themselves, and a readjustment soon takes place with 
 respect to these bodies and their importance in the 
 system. Again, with regard to the Brain, Dr. W. B. 
 Carpenter says that in the sixth week of the human 
 embryo there is a " certain correspondence " between its 
 brain and that of a Fish ; in the twelfth week there is a 
 " strong analogy " with that of a Bird. 
 
 "Up to the end of the third month, the Cerebral 
 Hemispheres present only the rudiments of anterior 
 lobes, and do not pass beyond that grade of development 
 which is permanently characteristic of the Marsupial 
 Mammalia. . . . During the fourth and part of the fifth 
 months, however, the middle lobes are developed . . . 
 and the posterior lobes, of which there was no previous 
 rudiment, subsequently begin to sprout. ... In these 
 and other particulars there is a very close correspondence 
 between the progressive stages of development of the 
 Human Cerebrum, and those which we encounter in 
 the ascending series of Mammalia." l 
 
 Here, all along, then, we may see changes of struc- 
 ture and function, and the alteration of balance in 
 the organic centres, taking place gradually or rapidly 
 in the brief life of the individual, just as on an in- 
 finitely more extended time-scale they have taken place 
 in the far-back life of the race from which the individual 
 is descended. 
 
 1 Ibid., p. 1034. 
 233
 
 Appendix I 
 
 And, digressing for a moment, it is difficult in all this 
 however unwilling we may be to use terms which we 
 cannot fully justify not to see something very like 
 memory. Memory it may not be in exactly the ordinary 
 sense ; but when we consider how like the process is to 
 that which we use when recapitulating mentally the 
 events, say, of our past years the rapid summarising in 
 thought of what has gone before, the actual reassuming 
 in some degree of the old attitudes and expressions as 
 of children when thinking of our own childhood, or of 
 boyhood when thinking of our school days the faint 
 and more general delineation of the distant and the 
 slower and more detailed reconstruction of the nearer 
 past ; when we think how near habit and custom are to 
 memory, and how physiological habit is often held to 
 explain our resemblance to our ancestors : I say it is 
 difficult not to see in this recapitulation by the individual 
 of the general outlines of the history of his race, some- 
 thing very like the working of a racial memory trans- 
 mitted to the individual. The expression may not be 
 really our final word on the subject, but it may be 
 practically the best that we at present have at command. 
 And we seem to see the individual creature, when faced 
 with the problem of its own unfoldment, leaning back 
 on its racial memory, and so repeating the things which 
 it finds there, and which have been done before just as 
 we all, when faced with the daily problems of life, first 
 of all in any case repeat what our own memory tells 
 us we have done before and only when that process is 
 finished, or fails to serve us, cast about to try something 
 else. 
 
 Now, in the case of insects the theory is, as I have 
 said, that each individual insect " recapitulates " the life 
 of the race from which it is descended, in just the same 
 way as does the young of man or the higher animals, 
 but with this difference, namely, that while the young 
 
 234
 
 The May-fly 
 
 of man and the higher animals recapitulates all the 
 earlier portion of its life-history in the womb of its 
 mother (as an embryo), the young of the insect re- 
 capitulates in the open arena of the world. And this at 
 once brings in important considerations. 
 
 The foetus in the womb recapitulating the immense 
 past (dreaming over again, if you like, the ancestral 
 memories) can do so undisturbed (or comparatively so) 
 by outer events, and can thus keep pretty closely along 
 the line of its proper evolution. But the insect, com- 
 mencing first as a primitive cell-like egg, then developing 
 to a mere grub, then becoming a caterpillar or aquatic 
 larva, with spiracles in the one case or gills in the other, 
 then turning to a butterfly or winged image, has to pass 
 through all these stages in the face of the outer world, 
 and exposed to its severe competition and criticism ; and 
 it is obvious that under these circumstances the line of 
 its growth may be deflected, and may no longer quite 
 coincide with the line of ancestral evolution. 
 
 Among the winged or partially winged insects, the 
 Orthoptera (Grasshoppers, Cockroaches, Earwigs, &c.) 
 and the Hemiptera (Bugs, Pond-skaters, Aphides, &c.) 
 are considered, I believe, to be those whose line of 
 growth has been least deflected in this way, and whose 
 changes consequently best represent the sequence of 
 ancestral evolution. These two orders are looked upon 
 as very primitive, and probably nearer than any others 
 to the wingless ancestors of the insect tribe. 1 Their 
 wings, or such rudiments as they may possess, grow 
 quite slowly, and are acquired in successive moults, 
 without any distinct pupa stage. We may, therefore, 
 suppose that there was a time when their ancestors had 
 no wings, and not passing beyond the creeping and 
 
 1 See F. M. Balfour's " Embryology." Lubbock agrees with 
 Darwin in regarding Campodea, a certain insect of the wingless 
 kind which passes through no metamorphoses, as representing 
 the original stock whence all insects sprang. 
 
 235
 
 Appendix I 
 
 crawling stage of existence, bred and propagated in that 
 stage. Subsequently, however, some of the species 
 developed membranous appendages which, with the aid 
 of the wind, enabled them to skip and traverse the 
 ground quickly ; and, later still, these became perfect 
 wings. The period of fertility was naturally delayed 
 to the winged stage, on account of the advantages of 
 widespread propagation, &c., and each individual insect 
 now recapitulating the life-history of the race begins 
 to acquire wings as it approaches maturity. 
 
 The Orthoptera and Hemiptera^ however, being insects 
 which do not use their wings to any great degree, have 
 not been very much modified by such use, and conse- 
 quently, as said, they have kept very much along the 
 ancestral line of growth. But when we come to insects 
 like Butterflies, Bees, Gnats, Dragon-flies, &c., which in 
 their final stage almost live on the wing, it is obvious 
 that, owing to this fact, their structure in the final stage 
 has been greatly altered from the previous stages, and a 
 kind of gap created between. The Butterfly must have 
 a light body ; it must have a suctorial proboscis instead 
 of mandibular jaws ; a complex eye adapted to long 
 range, instead of the simple eye of the caterpillar, and 
 so forth. Furthermore, the gap between it and the 
 caterpillar may be widened by a thousand changes of 
 condition and environment acting on the latter which 
 were unknown to its predecessors. Among these may 
 be reckoned the fact that the necessity of fertilisation 
 being removed from the caterpillar stage to a later one, 
 the caterpillar would no longer need to go actively about 
 in search of a mate, thus exposing itself to dangers, but 
 would rather adopt a policy of quiet ease and conceal- 
 ment. Thus it might easily grow to a much greater 
 size than its ancestral type, and take on changes of form 
 and habit which would lead it away from the old line 
 of evolution. In this way, for example, the great gap 
 and difference, in size and colour and every respect, 
 
 236
 
 The May-fly 
 
 between the caterpillar of the privet-hawk-moth and the 
 perfect insect itself might be accounted for. 
 
 But the gap between the two stages having once 
 appeared or begun to appear, an intermediate or pupal 
 stage would be the necessary result. For, to take the 
 last-mentioned instance, the caterpillar endeavouring to 
 develop along the line of its racial memory, and yet 
 having strayed somewhat from the ancestral tradition, 
 would find, when the time came for its wings to appear, 
 that it was off the track somehow, that its body had grown 
 too big and lumbering for flight, that its skin was too 
 thick perhaps for wing-formation, that its jaws, with 
 continual exercise, had become too horny and monstrous 
 to be possibly adapted for sipping honey, and so forth. 
 What would it do ? What could it do ? It could not 
 go on indefinitely in its new line as a gigantic caterpillar, 
 for experience and memory would give it no clue how 
 to do this. On the other hand, its whole racial instinct 
 would be surging up within it in the direction of flight. 
 What would it do ? What could it do ? Clearly, it 
 could only give up its errant and strayed larval life as 
 a bad job, coil up, and try to dream itself back again 
 into its racial memory, and the proper line of its evolu- 
 tion. It could but refuse to eat, bring its existing career 
 to a close, seek some retired spot, and withdrawing deep 
 within itself, allow its wings to grow as quickly as may 
 be, its overgrown jaws and digestive apparatus to shrivel 
 and disappear, its old skin to harden and fall off, and the 
 interrupted order of its evolution to be resumed. This 
 then is what it does ; and this is its pupal or chrysalis stage. 
 
 The pupal stage is an exaggeration of the ordinary 
 moult, and is caused by a certain discontinuity which 
 has arisen in the course of time between the larval and 
 imaginal stages. It is a stage of internal changes, by 
 which the continuity of development is recovered, and 
 it resembles in some respects an effort of memory. 
 
 The necessity of quiescence during this stage is 
 237
 
 Appendix I 
 
 involved (at least in most cases) by the nature of the 
 changes taking place. It is evident, for instance, that 
 the transformation of mouth-parts must mean a con- 
 siderable period without food. Similarly, the casting of 
 the old skin, and the formation of a new one, with fresh 
 attachments for new muscles and organs, must mean 
 temporary retirement and unfitness for the world. The 
 pupal stage is like Memory ; it is an abandonment of 
 present complications, in order to knit on again to the 
 long chain of the past. It is like Sleep ; changes are 
 going on in it, often rapidly enough, but they are of an 
 internal character, and must not be interfered with by 
 the outer world. It is like Death ; for indeed large 
 tracts of the old creature die, and other tracts take on a 
 new life. And it is like Disease ; for revolutions are in 
 process within, the balance of centres is displaced and 
 re-created, and for the time discomfort and uneasiness 
 prevail. 
 
 The transformations of the animate world are, as I 
 have said, endless. They are not confined to insects. 
 It is sufficient to mention in this connection the extra- 
 ordinary facts of asexual reproduction, alternate genera- 
 tion, and pelorism, to show how widely the principle 
 ramifies. Of the higher vertebrates and Man, every 
 individual goes through transformations, not only in the 
 womb before birth, but afterwards in its proper and 
 external life. In the case of Man, the transformations 
 connected with teething, with puberty, and with the 
 lapse of the sexual functions in age, are so considerable, 
 and the disorganisation and readjustment of centres so 
 great, that the change has often the appearance, and is 
 accompanied by collateral symptoms, of Disease. And 
 the query is suggested to us whether some illnesses 
 which occur, and which leave patients greatly changed in 
 temperament, and even improved in health, should not 
 be looked on as natural and necessary accompaniments 
 
 238
 
 The May-fly 
 
 of some quite normal transformation which is going 
 on deep below the surface, and as steps forward in 
 the line of evolution, rather than as mere backslidings 
 and signals of failure. As to Sleep, we may almost 
 regard each night's rest as a brief pupal stage, for certain 
 it is that every human being, man and woman, and 
 especially boy and girl, comes again into the world each 
 morning subtly transformed ; something has passed into 
 or out of their faces; a veil of thinnest texture has fallen 
 from their souls. And when one thinks of it, one sees 
 that Sleep is a state which allies itself easily to the con- 
 dition of the chrysalis. For, however far we have 
 travelled from our normal line of growth during the 
 day, whatever wild excursions we have made into the 
 regions of care and folly, the night's rest restores us, as 
 we say, to our true selves, and we take up again the 
 thread of our proper activity. In fact, in sleep we lapse 
 more into the domain of racial memory ; primitive 
 instincts and thoughts come to the front in our dreams, 
 and we are refreshed by bathing, as it were, in the 
 morning dew of our own natures. 
 
 But this flooding of the soul with its own primitive 
 life and instinct is most marked of all in the period 
 of puberty. Strange that accompanying the physical 
 changes which then take place in the body should 
 occur this drenching of the mind in a sea of emotions 
 and thoughts and fancies unknown to the child. It 
 is as if a world of race-memories and experiences 
 hitherto forgotten were suddenly recalled. The old 
 infantile objects of pursuit and interest fade away ; the 
 whole perspective of the world is changed. Plato, of 
 course, insists that Love is a reminiscence ; the mania 
 of Love is caused by the vision opening back in the soul 
 once more of that celestial world, and of those divine 
 forms and beings, which in ages past it had once beheld. 
 We may or may not agree with Plato ; but in any case 
 it is interesting to find that he relates this powerful 
 
 239
 
 Appendix I 
 
 force, transforming the lives and fates of human beings 
 to Memory, and looks upon the changes so induced as a 
 renewal (may we say a recapitulation ?) of a long-past 
 existence. 
 
 Apart from puberty, apart from illnesses, apart from 
 sleep, there are other periods, more obviously mental in 
 their origin, of strange transformation in our lives 
 periods not unlike those of the "conversions" of reli- 
 gious folk when after weeks or months of mental 
 depression and lethargy, or of inward conflict and strain, 
 or even of accompanying physical illness and incapacity, 
 the whole nature seems to veer round and organise itself 
 about new centres of interest and activity, and a sudden 
 joy and outbreak of fresh life occurs. In these cases, 
 taking the thing from the psychological side, we shall 
 generally find that the impression produced on the mind 
 is that it has found a long-lost key, that it has come back 
 to something deep within itself. We speak of the return 
 to Nature, return to Self, to Truth, to God, as if we 
 were remembering something forgotten and neglected 
 taking up a broken thread ; and the idea is suggested to 
 us (though we cannot call it more than a suggestion) 
 that the great well-springs of growth and transformation 
 are indeed within ; and that the successive stages of our 
 human life are but the falling away of larval husks, 
 which in time must disclose an universal Form. The 
 allegory of the beautiful winged psyche the very ideali- 
 sation of life and love, delivered from the crawling worm 
 and the cold, unpleasant chrysalis has haunted the 
 imagination of mankind from earliest times, kindling 
 within it an immortal hope ; and even the cold light of 
 Science leaves it clear that in every creature sleeps this 
 impetus of transformation towards an ever-wider range 
 and capacity of life. 
 
 To come back to our particular May-fly. It is quite 
 probable that this, and the other winged insects which 
 
 240
 
 The May-fly 
 
 emerge from the waters, were not originally aquatic, for 
 in an aquatic life such insects could never have learned 
 to acquire wings. 1 It was probably after the great body 
 of Insects had acquired wings that the larvae of some of 
 these found themselves in marshy surroundings, and 
 ultimately became adapted to an aquatic life. Then, 
 though deeply changed and modified by their sub- 
 aqueous existence, the memory and habit of wing- 
 growth still came back upon them at its appointed time, 
 and urged them once more to a terrestrial and aerial 
 habitat. Thus the May-fly was able, and is able to-day, 
 to effect that marvellous transfiguration from a watery 
 grub to an aerial fairy which so astonishes us, as with an 
 exhibition of strange determination and evolutionary 
 force in so slight a creature. It is not only, as we have 
 seen, the extent of the transfiguration, but the rapidity of 
 it, which is surprising, and the cause of this final rapidity 
 is the fact that the change has to be made in the pre- 
 sence and before the eyes, as it were, of the insect's 
 most implacable foe and pursuer the Trout ! Whether 
 as a larva in its bank-side burrow, or as the perfect image 
 in the air, the Trout loves the May-fly ; and if the latter 
 delayed for a moment, even over the unbuttoning of its 
 last garment, it would inevitably be snapped up. We 
 may wonder that, under such circumstances, it did not 
 give up the game long ago ; but, in truth, though so 
 innocent looking, the May-fly is an old hand, and this 
 illusive little thing, that we call the creature of an hour, 
 has really for thousands of centuries been practising her 
 magic trick ; and now so perfect is she in it that even 
 
 1 Other reasons for believing that the aquatic Insects were 
 originally terrestrial are (i) the common persistence of air- 
 tubes and spiracles in aquatic insects ; (2) that the most primi- 
 tive forms of insects are terrestrial rather than aquatic ; (3) 
 that the aquatic species are more closely related to terrestrial 
 species than to each other. (See MialFs " Nat. Hist. Aquatic 
 Insects," pp. 4 and 5.) 
 
 241 Q
 
 Appendix I 
 
 while he, her enemy, is swimming towards her, darting 
 from the dusky depths of his pool, she has already 
 slipped her shroud, and is soaring in the eye of the 
 sun. 
 
 After seeing that, one can but conclude that there is 
 nothing that Man or other creature may not do, 
 provided he only chooses. 
 
 242
 
 II 
 
 HEALTH A CONQUEST 1 
 
 IT is an important thought that health cannot be won 
 without some amount of effort ; that conquest and the 
 putting forth of power are intimate conditions of its 
 acquirement and preservation. Health like freedom 
 has to be won afresh every morning. 
 
 And this in its way is true on all planes. In physical 
 matters the effort of the muscles exercise is necessary 
 to keep the body in good condition. In the mind, 
 effort, or the mental faculties deteriorate. In morals 
 again, effort conscience, duty, sacrifice all necessary. 
 
 This is a truth, or a side of the truth, which is worth 
 dwelling on, especially in consideration of the fact that 
 the easy tendency the downhill grade is all the other 
 way : in the direction, namely, of a reliance on external 
 props and supports drugs, regulated stimulants, careful 
 avoidance of draughts, plentiful flannels, and all the 
 other paraphernalia of valetudinarianism. 
 
 " Now Roderick dear, remember, do, 
 Those breezes from the Channel, 
 And at the Volunteer Review 
 Please don't forget your flannel." 
 
 Not that the wise man despises flannels and the para- 
 phernalia generally, but he remembers that they, poor 
 things, can only give a kind of passive assistance he 
 1 Reprinted from Seedtime^ April, 1892. 
 243
 
 Appendix II 
 
 must do the real fighting himself and salvation in the 
 long run does not come by trusting to them. 
 
 Paradoxical as it may sound, Health demands for its 
 continuance a certain willingness to run risks even to 
 forget itself and so differs toto coelo from valetudinarian- 
 ism, which is always occupied with its own safety. 
 Strong exposure to face the elements, the rain, the 
 wind, the sun, extreme heat, extreme cold to battle 
 and overcome them, and take their strength into ours, 
 like the Indian warrior who hangs the scalps of his slain 
 to his girdle that is good. Not to be done all at once, 
 certainly ; but to be done in time. I would not say 
 " Be foolish or rash " ; but surely it is itself the height 
 of rashness not to run a risk now and then, hiding our- 
 selves as we do all day behind innumerable mufflers and 
 the torn-off skins of animals, and in our stuffy dens, till 
 we turn sickly pale all over like unwholesome crickets, 
 and verily fear to venture out, lest she, Nature, the 
 argus-eyed, see us and slay us in her wrath. 
 
 Why indeed do we dread a cold, a chill, so much, but 
 because we are guilty within, and we know it and the 
 prowling influenza will find us out and expose our 
 wickedness. It is good to be in such a state of health 
 that you can sit or lie out, and turn cold, very cold 
 feel like a stone all over and then thaw again and be 
 none the worse. Not much of a miracle either, since 
 even the poor beasts perform it, lying out in damp places 
 or in frost every night ! But their consciences no doubt 
 burn clear and undimmed, affording a perpetual spring of 
 inner warmth. 
 
 I knew a miner from Manitoba and a good whole- 
 some man he was who told me that one night a 
 stranger knocked at the door of his log-cabin on the 
 edge of Lake Superior and begged help, saying that he 
 and a companion had been crossing the lake on the ice, 
 and that the companion had given out. He who 
 knocked at the door had come on alone for assistance. 
 
 244
 
 Health a Conquest 
 
 My friend picked up a lantern, and the two hurried 
 down across the ice. The night was very cold and 
 dark, but after some searching they found the man. He 
 was lying stretched frozen and insensible and " stiff as a 
 log." They picked him up and carried him back to the 
 cabin, and sat up all night and into the next day con- 
 tinually rubbing and chafing his body. At last he came 
 to and made a complete recovery, and in a few days 
 except for some marks of frost-bite on his skin showed 
 no sign of damage. Surely that was a holy man, in 
 whom the frost, though it went right through his body, 
 could find no sin. 
 
 It seems as if effort, or vigorous action, has the effect 
 of unifying the body making it whole under the stress 
 of a single impulse as if, through effort, the real being 
 from within descended and made himself manifest. How 
 often it happens, when one feels sick and out of sorts, 
 that a call upon his energies rouses the man he throws 
 himself into the work, concentrates all his forces into 
 one, and lo ! when the rush of action is over he is quite 
 well. It is a common remark that when people in old 
 age give up their ' business ' they soon die the concen- 
 tration of will ceasing, the body begins to break up. 
 Sometimes when one sees people going about shivering 
 on a cold day, enveloped in furs, weighed down with 
 wrappings so that they can indeed only move slowly, 
 one thinks how good it would be for most of them just 
 to strip then and there, and r, run till they were red 
 hot mastering the cold that way. [Not an altogether 
 gracious sight perhaps, as the mass of people are nowa- 
 days, with their pasty white skins and ineffectual move- 
 ments but all that would soon improve as they turned 
 a more wholesome colour !] How strong it would make 
 them feel, how secure ! What new waves of Health 
 never known before, rushing through the body ! Then 
 they might get clothed and return to their right minds 
 again at leisure. 
 
 245
 
 Appendix II 
 
 This evil (of putting all one's trust in external 
 defences) is an evil which, like lying, reduplicates and 
 complicates itself. The more clothes and wrappings 
 you wear the slower and more feebly you move, also 
 the more sensitive and * nesh ' does the skin become. 
 Hence greater liability to chill, and necessity for more 
 clothes, and so ad infinitum. Some of our good ' ladies,' 
 under the enormous weight of sealskins, &c., which 
 they feebly animate, seem to have reached the infinitum 
 already. 
 
 The principle of conquest as to Health holds somehow 
 also in regard to Food. There seem to be two views of 
 food, more or less unconsciously entertained of course 
 and corresponding to them I think perhaps you may note 
 two quite different manners or methods in eating. 
 
 The one view is that food is a mere material of health 
 and strength a material which has to be utilised, selected, 
 controlled, and by some judicious power built up into the 
 structure of the body ; the other, that food itself contains 
 the forces which build up the body, and that it is the 
 prime agent in the body's construction and renovation. 
 The first gives the eater an active relation to his food, the 
 second a passive ; the first tends towards, or somewhat in 
 the direction of abstemiousness, the second in the direction 
 of stimulants. I do not say that one is absolutely right 
 and the other absolutely wrong, or that one is reasonable 
 and the other quite unreasonable ; but I think that now 
 that we have attained a state of civilisation in which 
 speed in the chase is not for most of us an indispensable 
 condition of getting our dinner, the first view is the one 
 which we are most liable to overlook. 
 
 The digestive apparatus is like a sort of General Post 
 Office and a great deal of work to be done ; the food to 
 be dissected and distributed every atom of it sorted and 
 sent to its different destination. What an innumerable 
 activity is here ! all the myriad different organic or 
 chemic particles to be dealt with, each after its kind ; all 
 
 246
 
 Health a Conquest 
 
 the countless needs of the body to be provided for ! Yet 
 a healthy body has somehow, it would seem, the power of 
 carrying on this complex process with extraordinary tact, 
 authority and discrimination determining quite deci- 
 sively the amount and kind of food it requires, and send- 
 ing every particle to its right place. This is indeed a 
 conquest. The creature advances on the world, wrests 
 from the general currents of the globe just those elements 
 which it requires, and commands, nay compels them, to 
 array themselves around it in obedience to some law or 
 order, of which we we I say who take such intimate 
 part in the process are still only dimly conscious. 
 Nevertheless the order and the law is in our consciousness 
 or in regions which in time if not now will be acces- 
 sible to our consciousness. 
 
 This apparatus of digestion, as we well know, can quite 
 possibly be broken down by overloading it with work. 
 And there is no doubt that all food beyond what is really 
 needed is not only waste in itself but actually wastes 
 energy in the disposal of it destroys force instead of 
 creating it. That the assimilation of food is work and 
 involves the exertion of power is I think obvious to 
 every one. (Hence, for instance, the need of warmth and 
 quiet after meals.) Indeed there seems to be something 
 necessary and radical in this idea : because the ' I,' the 
 real person, can only, one would suppose, appear and 
 become manifest through some authentic action, some 
 action of its own ; and if the body were constructed and 
 built up by another force, not the ego as, for instance, 
 by the forces residing in the food then would the body 
 cease to be an expression or manifestation of such ego, 
 and become rather a concealment and cloud over it. 
 
 That the bodies of many people, and of us all in degree, 
 are built up in this external way ; and are more or less 
 clouded and spotty, I do not for a moment doubt. And 
 here is the justification of the view that eating is a passive 
 process. Shovel the curry and rice in, and let it sort 
 
 247
 
 Appendix II 
 
 itself ! Let us have plenty of * support ' ; give us active 
 stimulating viands which will do the work themselves 
 and save us the trouble of co-ordination, pick-me-ups 
 which will restore animation at any hour, and always 
 everything so well cooked that digestion may be rendered 
 next to useless ! In these moods we eat hastily, greedily, 
 with little discrimination as if in fear lest we should 
 faint before the precious sustenance were well down our 
 throats ; and like all that is done in haste the work done 
 at such times is not good work. 
 
 For what if by rendering digestion passive the power 
 of making a true body has been lost ? What if by 
 trusting the nourishment to help us, instead of in ourselves 
 to raise the nourishment to a higher plane of activity, we 
 have put ourselves second and the lower forces first ? 
 Doubtless there are constructive forces resident in food, 
 but what if these, instead of being dominated and con- 
 trolled by the consuming organism, have been left to their 
 own sweet will ? Then a body truly has been built up, 
 but not a human body only the body of the sheep or the 
 hog or of some other creature according to the nature of 
 the food in question. 
 
 Here we have an interesting point. There is warfare, 
 a struggle for supremacy, between me and that which I 
 endeavour to assimilate. I am a man and I try to assimi- 
 late a sheep. What will the result be, man or sheep ? 
 Will my food assimilate me, by any chance ? Yet this in 
 plain terms is the warfare that is always going on, in 
 every department of human life the veritable struggle 
 for existence ; " the price of freedom (from sheephood) is 
 eternal Vigilance." 
 
 In these lights the questions of animal and vegetable 
 food, of cooked and raw, acquire a certain significance. 
 Animal food, containing as it does highly wrought organic 
 forces, may liberate within our system powers which we 
 may find it difficult or even impossible to dominate 
 lethargic monsters, foul harpies, and sad-visaged lemures 
 
 248
 
 Health a Conquest 
 
 which may insist on having their own way, building 
 up an animal body not truly human. The common- 
 sense experience of all advanced races is against the use of 
 raw animal food. We know its dangers too well. We 
 do not want to make our bodies nests for trichinae or any 
 other insubordinate forms. Cooked flesh is safer a 
 certain grade of vitality being destroyed by cookery but 
 then Oh, dear ! if the lemures and harpies are dead, what 
 kind of cheer is to be got out of their wretched carcases ? 
 The passivity of the vegetable kingdom lends itself 
 perhaps more readily to a true assimilation. But here on 
 the other hand appears an opposite danger. The man 
 who feeds on mere meek pulses and porridges may domi- 
 nate them almost too easily. The reins of his chariot 
 may grow slack and he himself quiescent, like a carter 
 asleep behind an aged mare. Fresh fruits have more 
 vitality in them ; there are charming fragrant sylphs and 
 oreads in these, which we seem to absorb into ourselves 
 and which it is a sin to drive out by fire. In a clean 
 human body they love to dwell, making their homes there 
 and finding plenty of occupation under the eye of the 
 master. The slight indigestibility which some people 
 complain of in raw fruit, nuts, and so forth, is a bit of a 
 sign which these dainty little spirits make to us a kind 
 of challenge that we should effect that conquest of them 
 which is their beatitude and our good Health. 
 
 In England and Germany of late years the movement 
 towards sun-baths and open-air cures, and simplifications 
 of dress generally, has taken great proportions. Sandow's 
 Magazine not long ago (Jan. 1900) contained an article 
 on the importance of open-air swimming-baths, with 
 running track and gymnastic appliances combined. Such 
 places (made as ornamental as may be, with shrubs and 
 trees) would afford the immense advantage of work in the 
 
 249
 
 Appendix II 
 
 open, and of deep and free breathing while the boon to 
 the gymnast of being able to take a bath before dressing, 
 or a run after swimming, would be obvious. " In truth 
 there are few days in the year when such a place could 
 not be used with advantage. Any runner knows that he 
 can run through wintry weather or rain and feel 'as 
 warm as a toast' a good deal warmer than when 
 shivering over the fire in a great-coat ; and to conquer 
 cold in this way, and get warm in spite of it, is splendid 
 practice ; and the mere fact of having done it once keeps 
 one warm for the rest of the day. Like Thoreau, who 
 said that one sack of coals served him all the winter 
 because when cold he simply carried the sack up from the 
 cellar and took it down again ; and this kept him warm 
 without a fire ! " 
 
 Certainly the exposure of the skin to sun and air is one 
 of the most important conditions of health ; and I believe 
 that what we call * catching cold ' is greatly due to our 
 everlastingly covering it, and so checking the action of its 
 innumerable glands. 
 
 250
 
 Ill 
 
 EVENING IN SPRING 
 A MEDITATION i 
 
 MOST lovely is the evening. The swallows darting to 
 and fro in a clear sky, the level shafts of the setting sun 
 throwing into relief all the dimples and contours of the 
 valley and its woods, the trail of blue smoke from a 
 cottage floating slowly eastward, the massed blue-bells 
 (like pools of water) in all the shady spots, under trees or 
 along the wall sides, the faint fragrance, the outline of 
 leaves overhead against the light, above all the wonderful 
 sense of space, filled as it seems with the faintest mist 
 all so harmonious, calm, perfect. For a moment one 
 envies the swallows their happiness, or the gnats dancing 
 in the last sun-rays. 
 
 But the swallows are not happy. Little things they are 
 rushing to and fro, consumed at every moment by the 
 desire to catch a gnat from one gnat to another they 
 rush. If the swallow is happy it does not know that it is 
 happy, it only knows that it has caught the gnat or that 
 it has failed to catch it. One cannot call this happiness. 
 
 Or the gnat whether it is caught or whether it 
 escapes one cannot call this happiness. 
 
 Or the blue-bell whether among the thousands of 
 other blue-bells down in that hollow it has succeeded in 
 lifting its head to the coveted sun and air, or whether it 
 
 1 Reprinted from Seedtime, April 1897. 
 251
 
 Appendix III 
 
 has been choked, trampled out, by the huge crowd of its 
 competitors, and lies there done to death beneath the 
 dead leaves, a starveling bulb with an abortive shoot one 
 cannot call that happiness. 
 
 Or I whether I have caught my gnat or whether I 
 have failed to catch it ; whether I have escaped my 
 pursuer or whether I have failed to escape ; whether 
 I have trampled on others or whether I have myself been 
 trampled on I cannot call any of these things happiness. 
 
 And the scene is made up of swallows and gnats and 
 blue-bells and human and other beings thousands and 
 thousands of them therefore where among them all is 
 happiness ? 
 
 Yet happiness is there. When I look upon the scene 
 I feel it is there j I know it. Indeed I feel it, unanswer- 
 able, incontestable, deep down, far below failure and 
 success, in myself. It is something that cannot fail. It 
 is in the life of the scene itself of which life the little 
 motives of the swallows and the gnats are the merest 
 fractions. 
 
 Sometimes it seems horrible that Nature should be " a 
 world of plunder and prey" but then again it is not 
 horrible. It is in no way horrible to me to think that one 
 corpuscle in my circulation may swallow another ; indeed 
 it may be absolutely necessary for my body's existence 
 that they should act so. If the corpuscle that is swallowed 
 thinks he is ill-treated, and the corpuscle that swallows 
 thinks that his merit has at last been rewarded, they are 
 both under an illusion the illusion that they exist in my 
 circulation as separate individuals, and that my body is 
 their happy hunting ground ; and the sooner they get 
 over that illusion the better : 
 
 " If the red slayer thinks he slays, 
 
 And if the slain thinks he is slain, 
 They know not well the subtle ways 
 I keep, and pass, and turn again." 
 252
 
 Evening in Spring : a Meditation 
 
 In this scene to-night there is a life which equalises 
 individual fortune and misfortune. One blue-bell bulb 
 must fail in order that another may succeed, but to that 
 life there is neither failure nor success. The individual 
 life has its pains and pleasures, which in the long run just 
 about balance each other. The universal life is an eternal 
 and surpassing joy, of which the other is but the nutriment 
 and body. 
 
 The curious thing is, however, that one should 
 be able to feel this universal life in one. The curious 
 thing is that one should be prompted to say : " This, this 
 surpassing existence is after all Myself, my true self." I 
 wonder if the swallows and the gnats and the corpuscles 
 of the blood have any inkling that they are really not 
 mutually exclusive individuals ; it seems as if there were 
 two consciousnesses, more or less distinct and separable, in 
 each person one which occupies itself with the relation 
 of things primarily to oneself as distinct from other 
 persons ; the other, more latent and less defined, which 
 occupies itself with things as considered rather in relation 
 to the common life of all. This latter consciousness has 
 an abode of course in the individual, and perceives and 
 acts through the individual, yet it cannot quite be called 
 individual in its aims or judgments. 
 
 The curious thing is, I say, that this deeper, more 
 universal consciousness should be a part of our actual 
 selves. Yet that it is so there is no doubt. Hidden 
 or clouded though it may be, yet it is recognisable to some 
 degree in all men nay, I believe that it is the very 
 foundation of our individual life. 
 
 In the animals the universal life is strong (as witness 
 their instincts often leading to sacrifice of their own 
 existence), but it is unconscious, at least as far as they are 
 concerned or only quite subconscious. Their indi- 
 vidual consciousness on the other hand, though keen and 
 intense enough, is limited in area. In man the individual 
 consciousness has grown so vast that it threatens at a 
 
 253
 
 Appendix III 
 
 certain period of his development to wrest him from 
 universal ends in Titanic revolt against the Gods (a thing 
 inconceivable in the case of the animals) ; but his salva- 
 tion comes inevitably, in the growth also within him of a 
 universal consciousness the double consciousness bring- 
 ing terrible discord and doubt for a time, till at last the 
 fusion of the two, and the recognition of the primacy of 
 the latter, restores harmony and makes his entrance into 
 real life and happiness possible. 
 
 To attain this fusion of the individual and universal 
 consciousness so that, still remaining individual, one 
 should partake and be aware of the universal life this is 
 the long effort and upward climb of humanity, worth all 
 the struggles and disasters and failures by the way that 
 may attend it. That in the process the thwarting, dis- 
 appointment, and even partial destruction of the individual 
 life should occasionally be necessary in order that the 
 germs of the higher consciousness may develop seems a 
 matter easy to understand. But when the process is 
 complete the two sides of Man do but feed each other 
 mutually the universal nourishing and directing the 
 individual, and the individual giving selfness and defini- 
 tion to the universal. 
 
 THE END 
 
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