Chss "R H5 Book. K& W 5 OopigM°_ CQFffilGKT DEPOSIT. THE WILL TO BEAUTY Being a continuation of the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche BY ABRAHAM KANOVITCH "Say on sayers! Delve ! mould ! pile the words of the earth ! Work on — (it is materials you bring, not breadths) Work on, age after age ! nothing is to be lost ; It may have to wait long, but it will certainly come in use. When the materials are all prepared, the architects shall appear." Walt Whitman NEW YORK GOLD ROSE PRINTING CO. PUBLISHERS 1922 ft** Copyright, 1923 By ABRAHAM KANOVITCH All rights reserved ©CI.A66198 8 PREFACE From ancient times an undercurrent of tragedy surged. The beautiful fables of Greece that glorified the human relations to the height of gods that dwelt in Olympus yielded in helplessness in Greek tragedy. The QEdipus of Sophocles shows to us how the attempt to solve the riddle of life "ends in a sea of dire woe"; and in "Anathema," the modern tragic drama of Leonid Andreyev, the speechless one veiled in gray is as unyielding to entreaty as the silent sphinx of old. Hellenic beauty, because it was incomplete, had to descend and disintegrate itself. Down and down it went until it reached the religion of sorrow. The unconscious Will of the universe was not satisfied with a fable, it needed further amplification in fact and clear reason. It had to descend to the prose of modern science and mechanist invention, to Darwin, to the doctrine of "utility" of Spencer, to the mathematical phi- losophy of Kant. From the Greek oracle to the dark seance rooms of modern spiritualism, until it could rebound and the scattered fragments be integrated in the present "Will to Beauty." The Greek mythos of beauty is now reborn into a philosophy based on clear reason instead of fable. This is the New Hellenism to which the re- ligions of human suffering must yield. * * * * iii The reader is asked not to be satisfied with a hasty reading, but rather to study (at intervals), to read and reread two or three times; it cannot be understood at once. New York, April i, 192 1. IV EXPLANATORY INTRODUCTION If God is a mind, especially an all-knowing mind, as the religious claim, why does he not stop a fire when innocent human beings are burning? If he is all-merciful, why does he permit his chil- dren to be buried under the debris of an earth- quake or the lava of a volcano? Religious people worship a God that does not have the mercy that they have. If these things are the work of the "devil," then why does not the omnipotent God overpower the devil? These have been, and will remain forever, the most honest questions that a human being can ask. There is no theologian living that can answer these questions without resorting to a sophistry that is an insult to the human mind. The true answer to these questions came when Schopenhauer discovered the "Will." The uni- verse is an unconscious force, or motive, seeking a conscious ego. "God" does not know, but by a ponderous evolution it attains to the human mind. "God" is the great unconscious. The question before us now is, What is the aim and object of this unconscious Will of the universe? Schopenhauer was pessimistic because it appeared to him that the Will has no object but to create and destroy, to create and destroy. Nietzsche, who followed Schopenhauer, tried to work up a little enthusiasm. This unconscious Will, accord- ing to Nietzsche, is the Will to Power — power trying to exceed itself. It glories in power and in the esthetics of power. But as the Will to Power must finally destroy the ego that it has evolved, the enthusiasm cannot be very great, almost any sensible person will admit. v Since the time of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche weak and decadent philosophers have sprung up. They are the weeds that spring up among the vegetation. Whenever the human race makes progress the religious reactionaries utilize that progress for proving their point over again. We live and have lived in a condition of eco- nomic injustice, a condition of rich and poor, masters and servants. In order to sustain this economic chaos, religion and morality are neces- sary. I call this the "religio-economic arrange- ment," because they are inseparable. These weak and decadent philosophers are the Bergsons and the pragmatists like William James. They would have a human being go through all sorts of moral gymnastics until he becomes "spiritual," very much as theosophists would have a human being go through lives and deaths that he may lose that thing most beautiful about his, his naive and human qualities, and become a saintly abstraction. This work is not for them to accomplish. They talk about art without being artists, they talk about "spiritism" without being mediums themselves; and the un- conscious "Will" of Schopenhauer offers no ob- stacle to them. They can evolve a world of gods and Jesuses just the same; all that is necessary is a little more sophistry and you have the religio- economic interpretation over again. The Will to Beauty is opposed to theism in any form and to the religio-moral. It holds, however, that the unconscious Will of the uni- verse strikes a balance. It teaches an after-life without a God. vi "God" is a sincere passion, therefore it attains to beauty. Force is Invisible (Insensible) until it Produces a Contrast The unconscious motive of the universe can attain reality only through contrasted action. Sharp contrast, and then lesser contrast, that is all there is to reality. There is no other reality. * * * * Contrast is the simplest conception of the mind. Nature cannot be reduced to anything less simple. * * * * There is only one inevitable law in nature, and that is contrast; upon this inevitable law all other so-called law is built. Concentration into a Center and Radiation from a Center All the power in the universe seeks to con- centrate itself and to hide itself under a garb of impotence into a sincere human ego. After it has attained this center of sincerity, it seeks a condition of security whence it may radiate again. Vlll CONTENTS PAGE Preface iii Explanatory Introduction v "Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future" . . n The Contrasted Viewpoints of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche 17 The Unconscious Motive Seeks Itself in Human Emotion 18 The Contrast of Emotions 19 Explanatory 23 Decadence 24 Interpretation Is All There Is ... 26 The Superstate as a Condition of Undomi- nated Force Yielding to the Will of the Ego 26 The Unconscious Devil-god 30 Infinity and Chaos 31 Nietzsche the Immoralist 36 "Beyond Good and Evil" 38 The Nature of Art and Realism as Opposed to the Subliminal and the Infinite . . 48 Central Doctrine 51 The Will in Botany 61 The Will in Astronomy 67 The Will in Eugenics 81 Religion 93 To the Student of the Future ..... 93 Decadence 93 Equality 94 ix PACK From the Sublime to the Ridiculous ... 95 Preface to the Will in Chemistry 96 The Will in Chemistry 98 Miscellaneous 114 Schopenhauer's " World as Will and Idea" 116 Bergson and Wm. James 117 Herbert Spencer 121 Relativity (Einstein) 121 Nature Changes from Contrast to Motive, from Motive to Contrast . . . . . 127 Immanuel Kant 129 The Mistakes of Nietzsche 131 The Mind, the Amplifier 133 The Self Creative 135 Free Will 137 Reincarnation 138 The Relation of Subject to Object . . .139 Interpretation as a Means of Discovering the Truth as Opposed to the Scientific Method 140 Oscar Wilde and Whistler 141 Walt Whitman 143 Contrasted Styles in Art 144 Nietzsche contra Wagner 145 Business 147 Romanticism 150 The Great Principle in Construction . . . 151 The Human All Too Human 152 The Social Order of the Future 164 The Perfect City 167 Obsession 170 Vision and Realism versus Fantastic Imagi- nation 191 The Will to Beauty DY the Will to Beauty I mean that the uncon- -■-* scious motive of the universe strives and remains dissatisfied until it is able to attain the realization of its energy in the climax of emotion in the human ego, not through sorrow and re- ligion, which is its negative mode of attainment, but by a rationally constructed social order, where the human ego can grow in beauty, and his or her emotion rise gradually through happiness and sex passion to the ecstasy of love and the profound adoration of nature. This is nature's flower. The Superman and the Superstate I employ the words superman and superstate to designate the human being in the after-death condition; instead of the word "spirit." See the section entitled "Obsession" (end of book) for details regarding the after-death state. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future The creative Will speaks : "I am only a mystery to those who would not listen. The child who raises its hands to the moon and stars knows my secret. The lovers who walk in silence and beauty know it. The poet who meets me by brooding ii rivers and weeps tears of joy, he knows it best. From molten chaos I have fashioned this sphere. I have waited for ages until the overhanging vapors might condense into great waters. Coarse vege- tation and ponderous animals, hateful to look at, rose up. They devoured each other with great ferocity. For ages they had to continue for I, the helpless one, great in passion but bound by necessity, had no other way to bring my primitive, my dazed, man child. Deep was his woe, deeper his ignorance, for he made for himself strange gods that needed constant prayer and sacrifice. To them he sacrificed his brothers and sisters and his one redeeming procreative passion. But I am not this God. Sacrifice and prayer are hateful to me. Listen to my secret. I am the procreative passion. In the spring come odorous blossoms and birds that sing in the trees. The grass is soft and green at your feet. In the vault of heaven shining spheres float in rhythmic motion. The moon breaks forth from beneath a sweeping cloud and hides again. The hum and lull of the deep-breathing orchestra of night completes my harmony. This is my meaning. This is as much as I could do without your aid. I ask a greater harmony, the conscious man whose religion is beauty. I want the child that will raise its hands to the moon and stars as the poplars and cedars whose branches yearn skyward. I want the beau- tiful and sincere lovers to grace my landscape, and the poet whose tears mingle with the flowing current." I see a new civilization arise by the banks of this very river. For ages its restless waves have rushed in despair to unknown seas, for the life 12 by its shores was of the dumb brute and savage man who lived by mutual slaughter. Its border- ing shores he denuded of its trees and built an iron city with a heart of stone. But its waters shall not always rush in despair. I see a new civilization to whom death will no longer be a thing of fear that steals upon one as a thief in the night, and throws its dark shadow over a meaningless life. I see a new humanity reclaimed from mechanism, its iron monsters hidden. I see young men, the best-hearted with comely bearded faces, intellectual artists and socialists. I see the lovers with clasped hands exchanging the vow of sincere passion. I see the silent one; he walks brooding by the shore. I see tears flowing from his eyes and he whispers to the tide and the rising trees: "Where are you flowing, my waters? Why are you yearning, my tall trees." "Toward the great harmony," they answer, "toward the great harmony." * * * * I saw the vision of the superman; he came to me in the night and whispered his name. He was of my kin, but of his presence, how can I tell, for there is nothing on earth I can compare his presence to. He seemed like a fragrant tree who stood for ages rising to the sun. He came to me from the virgin forest of God, and I knew that man is but the seed whose heart must be torn in pain, whose tears must flow like rivers of sorrow, and like the black seed, his body must rot in the earth before he can send forth the first shoot and receive the dews of heaven, and as the welcome dews of heaven were the tears I shed when I saw him of my kin who left the earth an unknown man come in the holy night to share with 13 me its celestial harmonies. Dark-robed night, to me of all men have you yielded up your secret, folded in veils of azure, and sealed with the silence of the ages. Why do you brood on your deep-toned strings ? O night ! why do you mourn with stately requiem the dying sunset? Why sighs the wind in the swaying tree? What has hushed the song in its branches? * * * * Every discovery commences with a vision, a faith, a passion. Its elucidation is but its unfold- ment. There is no such thing as reason in itself, for that would mean that one did not desire to prove anything. Vision brings with it faith, for what good can abstract truth be to him who has seen something beautiful? Analysis would be a descent into a negation. Analysis is necessary, but it is of value only with the faith of vision. Sf» 3JC 2|C S|S The mistake of philosophers before Schopen- hauer (even of Herbert Spencer, who came after) has been that they did not realize that when you arrive to force you arrive to the infinite. It is the searching of a cause for force that is respon- sible for the idea of a god, the "unknowable," and u the thing in itself." It is like trying to ex- plain what is beauty. Beauty is a force in har- mony with itself. Cause, reason, only applies to the components of the harmony. When you at- tain to the harmony (the motive) you cease to reason, you feel. If you analyze the notes in a melody you lose the melody, you come to mathe- matics. Throughout nature force is one with the form in which it lives, but man who seeks to reason cannot find the harmonic motive, but runs 14 from cause to effect, like an imprisoned animal, until his strength breaks against the stone wall of the "unknowable." *|* ^P *P *fr All philosophers before Schopenhauer started with an infinite that was perfect as the center of the universe. "To become like God" is the religious ideal, and in trying to realize that ideal it was necessary to shut one's eyes to what is going on in God's world. The biologists watched the beasts' "struggle for existence" in the jungle and decided that it was necessary to take pattern after that. Nietzsche seeing "power" decided to place power, both in construction and destruction, on a par, which is another way of imitating God. At last we shall know that man must not copy either God or animals; both are blind and in- stinctive. The wonder of a human being is his frailty. (See "Human, All Too Human.") His weaknesses, his faults even, are better than all the virtues that moralists ever invented. The highest order of energy hides itself under a garb of impotence. * * * * And so I did not take pattern, as Nietzsche did, after a regiment of cavalry, but in a deep forest valley, where the murmur of trees turned to sad music as if by the skill of a composer. I heard the climax of pathos in the song of a bird during the mating season, flutelike and of the profoundest melody, the beautiful lone singer of the valley. * * * * From Whistler I learned to see in ensemble by continuous practice for many years. I learned that vision is flexible. The artist reads beauty *5 into the things he sees. The contour of the face and form of the man or woman he is painting ceases to be physiological, it becomes beauty to his eyes, its shape has actually changed; and so I conceived the Will to Beauty. I further saw that a work of art, a motive, is expressed by sharp contrast and lesser variations. This I applied to the nature of time and space, and cause and effect. * * * * How I avoided the snare of the religio-moral, that is the miracle. By means of claroaudience I made friends with the good devil and his wife (the superman and woman) ; I learned that there is no sin. I was advised that the law of contrasts applies to human conduct. * * * * A profound emotion overawes and incapaci- tates the intellect. The person who has felt pro- foundly is more likely to adopt a religion or philosophy of sorrow, and to look upon the con- clusions of the Will to Beauty as wrong and shallow. This is especially so because we live in fear, and our profound emotions are born in sorrow. A person who has never felt at all will weep under pressure of adversity. It is in that dangerous moment (dangerous for the in- tellect) that a religious philosophy is born: it becomes useless to reason with such a person. He knows that he has felt, and he assumes that another has not felt. Let this stand as a warning, then, that the point of view of the Will to Beauty was not adopted hastily. 16 The Contrasted Viewpoints of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche According to Nietzsche's own admission, there was nothing for him to do but to reverse Schopen- hauer. The negation of the "Will to Live" be- came the ".Will to Power." Schopenhauer still remains the serious philosopher, for he recog- nized the helplessness of man in his present en- vironment, where his every effort to seek his pleasure meets with a reaction. His extreme of pessimism is the similitude of the Christian re- ligion, in spite of the atheistic basis, for, aside from its encumbrance of fanaticism, Christianity is the idealization of sorrow and self-denial. The work of Nietzsche consisted in utilizing the great discovery of Schopenhauer, i.e., the "Will" ; to this he added the jungle law, the "survival of the fittest" of Darwin; upon this base he built up a grandiloquent, over-strained philosophy of "Power." Nietzsche's point of view is somewhat foolish, but it corresponds perfectly to the opposite ex- treme of Christianity, i.e., war. Unconsciously these two continent bachelors repeated the ex- treme Christian motive without believing in God. The Will to Power, which implies the domina- tion of life by sheer force, is the counter-blast to pessimism. The depression of life at one end only means that it will burst forth in a conflagra- tion at its very opposite. We are led from the rack of self-denial to the anguish of warfare. Here we have two thousand years of that morbid distemper called Christianity culminating in the most cruel world war. Turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, and other such doctrines pale 17 and pallid, actually reversing themselves into the survival of the fittest. This is the true inner ex- planation of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, al- though they were sincere men, and the only two philosophers who were intrenched on the solid base of sound metaphysics. 1 The Will to Beauty is the harmonic outlet. (See, for example, in astronomy, the opposite ex- tremes and the balanced harmonic outlet.) The Unconscious Motive Seeks Itself in Human Emotion I now put before you the theory of the Will to Beauty. The universe is a passion that cannot be con- trolled. All human activity only means that this passion is striving. All this clash of elements, all human conflict and sorrow, only means that the Will has not yet realized itself, and so it re- mains dissatisfied. This unconscious passion destroys the form in which it has manifested itself and finds a mode of expression diametrically opposed; it goes from one condition to its very opposite, until it has evolved a conscious ego of profound emotion and clear intellect who is able to employ nature's greatest secret, i.e., contrasted action, for the purpose of expressing his emotions in an environ- ment where there is no sorrow. Man must break with the beliefs that hold him in repression, for there is no God that seeks to dominate over him, to impose upon him his law. The religion that teaches him sorrow, alike with the prosaic mo- 1 Von Hartman's philosophy is a demasculated version of Schopenhauer. 18 notony of utilitarianism that binds him to drudg- ery, is false. There is only an unconscious motive that wishes man to find out its secret, i.e., the pleasure of contrasted emotions. What is called good, forms only one set of emotions, the sincere ecstasies of religion, expres- sion in art, love and the adoration of nature. What is called sin, forms a contrary set of emo- tions, i.e., sex, passion, drinking, laughter, ridi- cule. These are beautiful human qualities. For the rest, socialism will stop all the competition, war, crime, and economic worry. For how can the sincere motive of the universe hold within itself that which is contrary to itself? All that we need in order to obtain perfection is a sincere human being in an environment that will not em- barrass him. (See "The Will in Eugenics") The Contrast of Emotions So strong is the hold of the religio-moral sys- tem with its doctrine of self-denial upon the human mind, that during the expression of re- ligious pathos the mind untrained in the philoso- phy of contrasts will look upon sex expression as being lesser, imperfect, or even wrong; whereas sex beauty with all its intimacy is primal and posi- tive in nature (man and woman are the supreme contrasts) ; while sorrow is negative, it implies that beauty has not been able to come forth ex- ultant, in luxurious pleasure, with all the challenge of a secure environment such as profuse nature guarantees, and for that reason it has taken on a note of sorrow. Not that pathos is out of place in a world such as we live in, where we must wait in patience for every good, but pathos is not 19 nature's fruition. Religious pathos is at best a contrast to sex love. The luxury of sex beauty and love of the woman should alternate with the love for creation in art, and that, with the knowledge and experience that it necessitates. Under religious influence the sex impulse soon exhausts itself and leaves the woman without a lover, so that the art of life (adoration of woman's beauty in wonderful en- vironment) is not encouraged to flourish as an art that defies by its charm and strength our feeble morality and poor economics. The emotion of sorrow unbalances the flow of nature's circle of harmonic contrasts and varia- tions; it inevitably reacts into undue humility, anger, ugliness, and inefficiency; it divides the human family into the tyrant and slave. A religion of sorrow reacts into utilitarian drudgery; its accumulation of anger precipitates war. Beautiful nature transmutes anger into sex passion, but sorrow feeds the emotion of pity with the imperfection it creates. Art may take the imperfection of real life and weave it into sad melodies and dramas that reveal the soul's travail and its yearning after an Eden of beauty. Artists and poets know well that the plaintive note of lament and the theme of pathos augment beauty, as her sorrowful expression enhances the beauty of Niobe; but in the highest life, it is different. Evolution is not satisfied with a state of imper- fection; it is for this reason that the Will to Beauty raises man to an environment yielding to his innermost will, where every condition of hu- man life may be touched by art, and realism be robbed of its sordidness. 20 As soon as man begins to live according to nature's motive, which is beauty-worship, an en- vironment corresponding to his volition is sure to form itself, with mechanism, the invisible serv- ant to aid him. With a knowledge of the true philosophy he can employ the law of contrasted emotions to his advantage and permit his nature to ebb and flow and variate from one order of beauty to another, instead of being divided into good and evil, by a violent religion, driven to mediocrity by smug prosperity, or stupefied into the beast of burden by relentless poverty. When life reaches its flower, the man worships the woman and is ennobled by it; and the woman, who is the incarnation of beauty, flourishes and is made more wonderful by responding to the phallic ecstasy; from this they react to love (as distinguished from the sexual relationship which we will call life), or else, according to their na- tures, man reacts to wit and wisdom, and woman to the detail of arrangement, foresight, laughter, or the art of dissimulation. If in the superstate the man may coordinate the corollary of force into a landscape that will show the skill of the artist- creator, or the detail of a beautiful edifice (which is the same as being the owner without its en- cumbrance, for it can readily be dispersed into dematerialization) and the woman may robe her- self in beautiful dress. The perfect man and woman have no God to pray to, for life is only force that evolves until it reaches its climax; but the soul nevertheless is filled with adoration when beholding the universe as the evident expression of a beautiful will. 21 How comely is the earth to him that went forth in love ! Dear to him are the stones at his feet and dear to him the grass, and as souls in prayer are the swaying trees with their manifold chorus of little leaves. For God is a sincere passion that attains to beauty; it dwells in the brooding tree, it breathes in the overhanging peace. * * * * I see now that the suffering ones who in the hour of anguish prayed with tearful eyes had their prayers answered by the extent of the emotion they rose to; and he that went forth on a lonely path, robed in beauty as a god, and with over- flowing heart and outstretched hand, whispered, "I need nothing," has achieved the object of crea- tion. He who has not yet felt the climax of emo- tion is like a plant not yet blown into efflorescence. Whatever their age, they are but children who have not yet attained to their prime. The climax of wonderful ecstasy once passed, life arranges itself into esthetic balance, for its rapture is too enthralling to sustain. The man and woman be- come capable of the poetry and music of delicate feeling, and sincere love sustains their sincere passion. This is the goal of the superman. Schopenhauer was right, life is vanity; vanity of vanities until life discovers itself in the heart of him that has attained to an intense love; he becomes the crest on the wave of creation; he is like a stately tree in a sacred valley whose rising boughs are swayed by mighty winds, filling the air with the resonance of solemn music, as of many deep-stringed harps. 22 Explanatory The Will is a passion — a passion that can neither be realized nor controlled until it realizes itself in an harmonic environment. Such a pas- sion makes trouble because it is dissatisfied with the imperfect condition in which it struggles. It is because the Will seeks its climax of emotion that the life of man is what it is. We cannot stultify ourselves with apathy or fortify ourselves with wealth and power; our se- curity would not last long. Sorrow would over- take us in one form or another; in other words, something would happen that would awaken our emotion. Many diseases can be traced to the in- activity of the emotions, as inactivity is the basis of all sickness. The dominant motive in the hierarchy of mo- tives is not the search for bread — that becomes a nether motive after it is attained. (The Will to Beauty employs utility as the nether motive upon which it rises.) The dominant motive force of life is the need of expressing the emotions. Under the most perfect economic conditions a philosophy of sorrow would soon be evolved, akin to Christianity, if not Christianity itself; or else atheistic, similar to the pessimism of Schopen- hauer, unless people discovered the secret of con- trasting their emotions; namely, after expressing themselves in religious-poetic emotion, they can turn to sex passion and wine, as a contrast. Hypocrisy is the secret. Furthermore, without a knowledge of the law of contrasted action decadence would soon show itself. In a condition of ease and wealth the pleasures are carried to that point where they 23 reverse themselves into sorrow; the optimistic and pleasure-loving people soon arrive at the same place as the pessimistic and religious people. They soon begin to write doleful poetry of im- perfect love affairs and of the emptiness of pleas- ure. In fact, a condition of sorrow and difficulty acts as a mainstay against decadence. The un- conscious Will has no other way of teaching man the law of the contrast of emotions but by con- tinuous reversion into sorrow; either sorrow, or else it must have varied emotion of beauty, in happiness. Decadence Throughout the following pages I shall be obliged to repeat again and again the law of con- trasts as it applies to human conduct. (See "Beyond Good and Evil.") At present, one class of people believe in one set of emotions — the re- ligious people, for example — and they oppose the class of people who seek expression through an entirely opposite order of emotion, such as wine, woman, and gayety; the result being that society clashes. The rational solution is that each indi- vidual should contrast his or her emotions. The Will to Beauty is a terrific force that does not exhaust itself through one set of emotions. When it cannot contrast itself, it goes to deca- dence. The decadence of the religious emotion is its doctrine of self-denial, its fabrication of cruelty in one form or another, devils, evil spirits, a hell, the need of repentance, prayer, etc. Pleasure, sex, and wine go to decadence also when not contrasted, for the same reason that 24 the Will to Beauty cannot exhaust itself in that one emotion (reality implies contrast), therefore its surplus energy turns into quarrel, jealousy, and even murder; its contrast becomes religious repentance. Life holds a secret: it is the rational construc- tion of the passion force in man by discovering the contrasts. At present man reforms in sorrow from what he calls immorality into religion; or else he is tempted in fear, from a false religious morality into u sin," but nature has intended man to go from one to the other without sorrow and fear. That life and everything in nature proceeds by contrasts has been guessed by many before; Socrates in the Phaedo speaks of this most clearly, but it was always a false dualism. Contrasts and variations (lesser contrasts) have never been ap- plied to the nature of time and space and cause and effect (see "Central Doctrine"), much less have moralists had the courage to permit it to apply to human conduct. The contrasts chosen were contrasts that clashed; a false dualism, of god and devil, of good and evil. It was never conceived that the universe may be a harmonic motive whose contrasts go to complete its har- mony the same as day and night and the contrast of the seasons. It is because of a false dualism, such as rich and poor, spirit and matter, life and death, that the world suffers. Life must be rein- terpreted. The appropriate contrasts must be discovered instead of the contrasts of error. The whole universe, i.e., every part of material reality, is no different than the contrasted tones of a pic- ture. They await interpretation; only then are they right. 25 Interpretation Is All There Is The universe is fluid and flexible; he that has discovered its hidden motive has discovered its reality. The motive of the universe cannot be perverse and contrary to itself. It is force that seeks to extricate itself from the clash of power into the ensemble of power. The Superstate as a Condition of Pure, Undom- inated Force Yielding to the Will of the Ego Pure force is capable of endless transformation. Electricity is the best example we have of how force accommodates itself to light, heat, and power, the fashioning of form, the transmission of sound — always, of course, in accordance with the casuality of the planet which dominates over the ego, instead of superplanetary contrasted ac- tion which readily yields to the wish of the ego. The transmutation of force in the superstate follows the need of the individual. This is the improvement upon the ponderous social mode of production, which is the only practical economy in our planetary condition. The superstate as a condition of pure, undomi- nated force is as potent to the ego as the primal nebulae out of which the unconscious Will of the universe fashioned the beauty of the landscape, pleasant odor, sound, harmonic color, the good taste of food and the nourishment it gives, human dress and habitation. The planet itself is nothing hut force which materialized and will dematerialize. 26 When the conscious dual ego, man and woman, enter the condition of pure force, they are able to create for themselves, in that space which forms the circle of their horizon, all the forms of their volition. In the superstate, the Will of the universe emancipates itself from a condition where its every effort to realize itself in beauty is marred by the forces of opposition and destruction, such as the planetary condition is, and establishes itself in a sphere of perfection where growth and de- cline is transmuted to materialization and dema- terialization for the purpose of better serving the will of the ego. To hold force in control in a sphere of exist- ence that is not dominated by a superior force, such as the planet which dominates over the will of man, where the process of formation can pro- ceed for the pleasure of the individual, and the process of dissolution is utilized to avoid encum- brance, that is the final economy. And what is the pleasure of the individual but an environment of great beauty in a system so perfect as to leave his individuality unhampered, freed from labor, but rather moved by the love for creation, and when that is attained, what is more wonderful than profound love between man and woman, who are in the prime of manhood and woman- hood, a sincere sexual passion, a thorough intel- lectual knowledge of the philosophy of beauty, and a keen and flowing wit that rises superior to all religion and the possibility of misfortune, and greatest of all, deep and sincere emotions which reveal to us the meaning of life; for only after profound feeling can it be understood; while an interval of laughter shows us life's ensemble, ban- 27 ishes all apparent difficulty and fits us for a change of attitude. From this point of view, it can be truly said that most mortals and their environ- ments are but half formed, just emerging from the nebulae state. The coordination of force in forms of reality by the ego in the superstate is a reproduction of planetary reality, for there is only one kind of reality, i.e., the earth; there is no fantastic heaven (with the only difference that the process of selection is ever in favor of beauty, the human, instead of the mechanical, nature augmented by art). When a condition of reality is attained, it is held in realization until the mood of the ego changes or the integrating force of the objective environment seeks a reaction, for they are both related to one another, as the subject is to the ob- ject; force maintains itself in actuality or realizes itself in matter through contrasts, and the pleasure of the ego seeks variation. This condition of matter does not make it less real, for the reality of matter does not consist in being a clod that en- cumbers, but rather the reality and the value of matter are measured by the extent to which it yields to the needs and the mood of the individual. The artist who has attained to the power of vision, that is to say, is enabled to see things in ensemble, knows the flexibility of so-called real matter, even on this plane of our existence, for he is able by the mere process of vision to translate what is static into flowing light, what is evidently prosaic into beauty. In undominated space, force must materialize itself wonderfully good, with sharp angles and 28 contrasts; an example may be taken from astron- omy, for magnitude means nothing; it is merely a question of means to an end. The unconscious motive operates in empty space, the same as the superman. The unconscious Will to Beauty sends forth the base from which life may rise, while the conscious ego coordinates life's climax. All astronomy can be reduced to sharp and lesser contrasts, seeking to bring force into rhythm, which is a law that applies to all motives. The sun, the planets, and their moons suspended in space have ample play in proportion as they are not dominated over by a superior force; they lay themselves out with certainty, they float with ease, they are like a huge flower whose petals radiate from a fiery center. Throughout nature, there is this central reality with its secondary corollary. The ego in the superstate is not dominated over; he is independent of the planetary arrange- ment. The man and the woman are the central reality; their changing environment is their corollary. The ego on the planet does not notice that he is on a planet; all that is evident to him is the circle of the horizon; wherever he goes he is the center of it. Tangible matter is permitted him only as far as he can stretch out his arm (see "Preface to the Will in Chemistry") ; the rest is color. If by art the same delusion can be pro- duced, we have a condition of security from plane- tary accident. This is the superplane of art. The unconscious Will has made a picture in the planetary landscape, which the conscious Will to Beauty (the ego) imitates. 29 The Unconscious Devil-G-od Because of the sincerity of the unconscious mo- tive, it cannot arrange itself until its outlet is complete, i.e., in the superstate, or until the con- scious ego is able to arrange and dominate the planetary condition; until that time comes, the power that dominates our earth may be looked upon more as a perverse force than one of good- ness. So merciless is the law of contrasts that no human being escapes the reaction of sor- row or imperfection under the present conditions ; whether we suffer from some other human being, from nature, or from ourselves, it is the same. Should the ego continue to act in the right direc- tion for too long a period, the perverse motive would stop his mind; he would soon be forced to hurt himself, delude himself, make himself fool- ish, or do the like to another. That reaction sat- isfies the Will. A fever would take hold of the mind if the ego became too smart. It is only gradually, by letting each one bear a little of the burden, that the conscious arrangement of man will become possible. Now that the truth is out, it should be easy. Humanity has had enough of the terrors of war and famine to permit the true philosophy to assert itself. The self-chastisement of religion, the prepara- tion for death that each person undergoes in old age, economic difficulty, sickness, the clash of creeds and social clans, all that is the toll paid for the permission to live on the planet, and if one should be fortunate enough to die young and painless, there is a lifetime of imprisonment in- communicado in the superstate with the permis- sion to see how the husband or wife, parent or 30 child is getting along without being able to help them if they are in trouble, this is sometimes worse than being in trouble oneself. Just because the unconscious force arranges itself perfectly in the superstate, is the very rea- son why it is bad now, but only until man becomes conscious. Infinity and Chaos "The Greeks," says Wilde, "were a nation of artists, because they were spared the sense of the infinite," but now that the Greek mythos of beauty has been superseded by the 'holy spirit,' the 'holy ghost,' the 'thing in itself,' and the 'unknowable,' we have all sorts of obnoxious speculations about the infinite. The following is from Maeterlinck's "The Light Beyond" : We are plunged in a universe that has no limits in time and space. It can neither go forward nor go back. It has no origin, it never began nor will it ever end. The myriad of years behind it are even as the myriads of years which it has yet to unroll. From all time it has been at the boundless center of the days. It could have no aim, for if it had one, it would have attained it in the infinity of years that lie behind us. . . . If it have not become conscious, it will never become conscious; if it know not what it wishes, it will continue in ignorance, hopelessly, knowing all or knowing nothing and remaining as near its end as its beginning. If it have no mind, it will never have one. If it have one, that mind has been at its climax from all time and will remain there. The truth of the matter is that the universe is an organism that had a beginning; when the first piece of matter appeared, time and space came with it; it could have no meaning without matter. Matter, whose nature is essentially finite, gives 31 meaning to time and space, the infinite. When an artist like Maeterlinck began to dabble in spir- itism, I expected a rival, but the above quotation shows plain ignorance; the latter part would seem to indicate that he does not even know that the universe is an unconscious motive gaining con- sciousness through the mind of man. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche made the same mistake about time having no beginning. See for example, Schopenhauer's "Essay on Death" ("The World as Will and Idea," Vol. Ill, p. 283). "If time of its own resources could bring us to a happy state, then we would already have been there long ago; for an infinite time lies be- hind us." And further (pp. 284, 285) : "Who- ever thus links his existence to the identity of con- sciousness and therefore desires an endless exist- ence after death for this, ought to reflect that he can certainly only attain this at the price of just as endless a past before birth." That is exactly how the stupid Buddhist-Theosophic idea of rein- carnation bases its reasoning. Then Nietzsche continues the error with his doctrine of the "Eternal Recurrence" ("Will to Power," Vol. II, p. 425) : "If the universe had a goal, that goal would have been reached by now," and : "The universe exists ; it is nothing that grows into existence and that passes out of existence, or better still, it develops, it passes away, but it never began to develop, and has never ceased from pass- ing away" (Ibid., p. 428). This only shows that he does not know that time is the servant of the motive. Time and space are the primal contrasts which the motive employs for its expression. 32 Extending time to an infinite past by "eternal re- currence" does not help. The motive is prior to its contrasts. Time has no meaning in itself; it has meaning only as the contrast of space. If life had started millions of years before, we could still ask, Why has it not started sooner? When the motive expressed itself with the first piece of matter or nebulas, measure in time and space began also and not otherwise. Sempiter- nity (infinite in the future not in the past) is correct, in spite of the fact that it was used for theological purposes. It is the same with cause and effect, according to the old style of reason- ing: the chain of cause and effect kept on until it led one on to the contradiction, the absolute first cause. In reality, the contrast known as cause and effect can be traced a short distance only, and then stops when the motive appears. The same with time and space ; it is traced to the motive whose contrast it is. This chaotic way of speaking about time having an infinite past is only confusing the world in the head — the empty mathematics of the mind, with the reality of a universe which is a material organism. In abstract number time seems infinite back- ward as well as forward. The error began with Kant, with u the ideality of time and space," i.e., that time and space have no absolute existence apart from the subject and that the great reality is the "thing in itself." The great reality is the Will to Beauty, but it has no significance in "itself" "outside of time and space." Its meaning lies in the forms it evolves. Before the conscious subject appeared, time, space, and matter were absolute realities. The great secret is contrasts and variations 33 (lesser contrasts) within a sphere. The uncon- scious motive employs contrasts for its unfold- ment, the same as an artist employs light and shade and half-tones. The mind is so constructed that unless it is in close contact with the senses and reality it begins to speculate upon the empty mathematics of time and space and causality, and is confused if not frightened by them. Time accrues to the ego as a future immortality. We can see from the na- ture of space whose infinity presents itself imme- diately, that time possesses a future infinity, for time and space are only contrasts of each other; the three dimensions of length, breadth, and thickness in space become past, present, and future in time. * * * * If after reaching the superstate life came to an end, when profound love between man and woman, parents and children, has been attained, it would be a tragedy far worse than the so-called planetary death. The Will of the universe would not be a harmonic Will, but a self-destructive one. Clear reason must ever base itself on the belief that the motive of the universe cannot be con- trary to itself. This is another proof of man's immortality in future time. Man and woman, the conscious climax of the unconscious Will, do not have desires that the Will does not satisfy when the superstate is at- tained, for human mind and volition are only an evolved instrument of the unconscious Will to Beauty. The ego has no will of its own. The great difference is this, that the unconscious Will in creating its contrasts resorts to destruction and imperfection as an offset to its constructive har- 34 monic motive (it cannot do otherwise, for it is unconscious and contrasted action is its only pos- sible mode of procedure), but the conscious ego, once he knows the law of contrasts, is able to create a condition where imperfection does not enter. This latter is the great secret of human happiness which must be elaborated upon in order to be appreciated. (See "Beyond Good and Evil," and "The Contrast of Emotions.") The unknowing mortal is not only not responsible for any act of imperfection, but rather he is forced to it by the unconscious God of the uni- verse; his mind is stopped or obsessed for the time being, and if he did not resort to some mode ot imperfection as an outlet, the unconscious mo- tive, which moves him, would destroy him, or make him sick, or in some other way realize itself in contrasted action, to the sorrow of the ego. Under the religio-economic arrangement, the objective environment of the ego is not sufficiently flexible to permit the law of contrasts to realize itself without resorting to imperfection. This requires a social order where the philosophy of the Will to Beauty is dexterously employed as a means of cheating the unconscious Will. Our preachers of "good," whether religionists or atheistic moralists, do not know that every motive automatically seeks its contrasts and variations; they would have one do "good" forever. That is why they are kept so busy saving humanity from sin, and incidentally combating each other. Neither is the so-called "immoralist" Will-to- power attitude of Nietzsche a solution of the problem ; one must be either insane or a pure fool blinded by a militarist monarchy around him to advocate such ideas; a pure fool, a second Par- 3S sifal, who controls his sex impulse and permits it to go to his head and become sublimated into a religion of cruelty and hate. The Nietzsche idea is the antithesis of Schopenhauer's self-abne- gating pessimism. Nietzsche the ImmoraJist Conscientious people prefer a philosophy of life which demands of them to control themselves, to be self-sacrificing, to do their duty to some one, to help some one. They have learned by sad experience that these virtues are necessary in our present falsely ar- ranged religio-economic social order. They would even continue these virtues in an after- death state, where angels are eternally busy sym- pathizing with each other. The self-sufficiency of the artist creator and that of the passionate lovers who need no favor from anybody, that does not occur to them. (That is all that nature seeks to attain.) Their conscious God is supposed to enjoy see- ing people strain and squirm doing charity to each other and other such impossible gymnastics. Peo- ple exhaust their fountain of goodness in patch- ing up a false social order; they are obliged to cover up crude economics with politeness ; but the social organism is a unit the same as the ego is a unit, and every unit, or ensemble, seeks expression in sharp and lesser contrasts. When the arrange- ment is false, the contrasts do not complement each other but clash with each other instead; so that while one class of people insist on morality and politeness (while remaining blind all the time to the false social arrangement), another class of 36 people, equally important in the universe, must find an outlet in thievery, anger, and impoliteness. All our morality and virtue can only serve the exigencies of our present incomplete social order. All preaching and every system of ethics is tem- porary. It is from this point of view that Nietzsche, the first immoralist philosopher, re- ceives value and meaning. He himself has gone to ridiculous extremes, but he has initiated a tendency. When nature reaches its flower, whether it be a perfect social-economic arrangement on the planet or in the superstate of individualism, mor- ality can have no meaning. It is to this order of inmorality that the superman attains, not to the condition of clash of power where the stronger dominates over the weaker. The superman at- tains to a condition where all the interesting "color quality" of the human has full play. Na- ture lays itself out so that there is no strain or pull necessary, and the ego finally laughs at God and morality. 37 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL At the beginning of the Russian Revolution, the story of a mad monk went around, who made his home with the royal family, causing much mischief. When asked how one ought to live,, his advice was: "Sin and repent," "Sin and re- pent." This monk was not so very mad, or else we must let a madman teach us the truth. This is precisely how the Will of the universe moves people. The unconscious motive cannot teach people the law of contrasted action, and so a poor innocent person, fearing God and believing in religion, goes through life burdened with sorrow and self-chastisement, believing himself impelled by a lower nature, a devil, or surrounded by evil spirits. We have it from the servant-maid in the family of Count Leo Tolstoy that the Count was wont to get up in the middle of the night and bolster up his ascetic idealism by regaling him- self with meat and vodka. This, if true, is no defamation of Tolstoy's character; it merely helps to make him human. A sincere human being is a wonderful being that calls forth love. He should never be placed in embarrassing circumstances; neither need any- body presume sufficient authority to preach to him. Tolstoy was a sincere man, but no more than the millions of Russian peasants or any sin- cere man who could find no elaborate expression for his secret emotions. His philosophy of Chris- tian idealism was false. 38 To go from the pleasures of wine, women, and song to the religious ecstasies of a humble peasant in a lone forest, as he did, that precisely is the true contrasted action, and it will be a glorious day for mankind when that law is understood throughout the world. This is the point I wish to emphasize. Remember this, my sincere friends who have been perplexed until now; it means the end of trouble, of self-chastisement. Instead of being pushed by unconscious nature to reform from one condition into the other, take the reins in your own hand and recognize the law of contrasted action as the great truth. You must acquire the habit not to denounce in the period of one emotion that which is opposed and con- trasted to it, but give each its time. Wait, and let an interval of humor intervene, and your life will flow on like a singing brook. To be sincere and yet to manipulate life as if you were an actor on a stage, that is the highest wisdom. This at last is beyond good and evil, not Nietzsche's "noble" man, the empty-headed aristocrat. To read the section "What is Noble" in his volume "Beyond Good and Evil" is to fill one with contempt. Such sentences are exemplary: "The noble type of man separates from himself the beings in whom the opposite of this exalted, proud disposition displays itself; he despises them." Or: "The noble man also helps the un- fortunate, but not — or scarcely — out of pity, but rather from an impulse generated by the super- abundance of power." To think of the whimper- ing little children, the bashful youths and maidens, loving men and women, waiting for a favor from one man, or one group of men, who hold power or wear a theatrical military costume, when society 39 might arrange itself so that there would be no economic problem in evidence. Nietzsche is their lackey, not the helpless one who must sell himself for bread. If it were not for the fact that Nietzsche made some advance in metaphysics, it would be idle even to consider such a fool. The case of Nietzsche is very simple after all; once he adopted the idea of the Will to Power, he was obliged to carry that to the limit or retract the central prin- ciple, but his followers are poor simpletons indeed. Nature guarantees riches and a perfect physical form to all in the superstate; that is the first thing; the poverty, the embarrassment only means that the unconscious Will to Beauty could not as yet rise exultant, and so it spends itself in sorrow ; it is left for us to create a state of art. Religious emotion only means that the Will to Beauty pe- riodically seeks its flower, but there is no greater perversion of the truth than the doctrines of theism. He that has not felt profound emotion does not know the wonder-meaning of life; he has something in store for him to be realized, if not here, then in the superstate ; one should not hurry, however. The important thing is to understand the law of contrasted action as it applies to the conduct of life, for it is the same with grand emotions as with lesser variations. I claim that every motive tends automatically to reverse itself, so that in advancing any given thought you must take into consideration that its opposite will necessarily seek expression (unless your idea is already the contrast of another) and that all possible restric- tions and precautions cannot prevent the expres- 40 sion of the contrasted energy in some torm or an- other. If not by direct opposition, then by subter- fuge, this process goes on throughout nature; e.g., when microbes attack a powerful organism (re- verse energy is always able to transmute itself into some other form of reversion), unless you arrive to that social order where the law of con- trasts and variations can operate without causing injury to another. Humanity has not yet realized that sphere of noble activity, not because it has not the power to do so, but because it does not know how. The false teachings of Christianity, its degradation of human energy into repentance and into humility in the sight of a monstrous God, that is responsi- ble for the puffed-up tyrant, for the whole Nietzsche idea, its antithesis. The poor, the humble, the repentant, the sincere people become the easy prey of God and his agents. The moralists exhort people to goodness, but people are more than good; what should one say when people repent for acts that the will of nature impels them to do, or when they are contented with servitude and humility to idlers, when the universe has guaranteed man to become the con- scious creator? Here we are, according to the best calculations of astronomy, probably on the only habitable planet in the sidereal system, the one fertile seed that serves as an outlet for the Will; all that waste of matter, of incalculable binary suns until a condition is attained where the clash of forces attains a harmony; yet religion will tell you "that the poor we must have with us." Are not people better than the God of religion and his agents? These moral preachers and mas- ters of the capitalist state (they go hand in hand) 4i are often the insincere people, the unripe fruit, the products of an imperfect eugenic order; they are not as good as the person who is impelled to rebel against this unnatural order, the so-called criminal; at best they are no different, only that they have the faculty for taking advantage, which they employ against the sincere who stand im- potent before them. The person who sees the injustice of repentance and humility is better than they and their God, unto whose nostrils the prayers of the broken- hearted are a fine savor and incense. These mas- ters of the religio-economic order, instead of being kept by society in a condition of inconspicuous activity until their souls are born within them — these insincere, these external people, manage to take advantage of an imperfect state of society to which they are adaptable. A profoundly sincere person could not do the things that they will do, and so they rise to the top where they serve as examples of success and respectability to the unsuspecting, and even over- awe the sincere people. The humble religious man and woman are victims of these people. This state of things is an injustice all around, for when these masters wake up in the superstate, what can they do but curse society that deluded them, just as their oppressed victims curse the social order that enslaved them. Under the present arrangement everybody pays his toll of sorrow; for the unconscious Will, to which we permit ourselves to be subjected, so rules the world that one has to become disgusted and hopeless, i.e., suffer to the extreme in some form or other, until after having had its fill, the 42 Will is able to react and establish itself on a secure basis, for as contrasted action is the very nature of reality, no other course is open to an unconscious force. The Will seeks its climax, it knows nothing else, and is careless whether it attains it through the negative method of sorrow or through the positive ecstasy of beauty. The law of contrasted action — which is its mode of procedure — is ful- filled whether the Will imposes its unconscious process upon humanity or whether humanity adopts the law of contrasts, outwits the Will, and rises beyond good and evil. The religio-economic interpretation has a false dualism of spirit and matter, good and evil, rich and poor, heaven and hell. Let us proceed to further detail. The truth has been a puzzle, it has eluded everybody. The atheistic immoralist and the religious man have been opposed to each other. Each carried his idea to the point of decadence. Religious emo- tion is absolutely unreliable in making a philoso- phy of life; the emotion itself may be very pro- found, but immediately afterward the person who experienced it creates a God, a philosophy of un- natural goodness and asceticism, which in reality means cruelty to oneself and others, a philosophy of nonsense and stupidity in general. The immoralist finds expression in what the religious man calls "sin." If he is an intellectual artist or any man of sincerity, for that matter, he becomes sorrowful at intervals and asks him- self repeatedly, What will become of me? It is in this way that the unconscious Will, which seeks a toll for every breath of happiness, becomes sat- isfied, as it becomes satisfied with the self-imposed 43 philosophy of sorrow of the religious. People generally imagine that "spiritual emotion" is con- fined to the religious. That is not so. The "sinner" has his periods of emotion just as well; life brings them out. But the trouble with the immoralist is that he cannot be made to believe in a future life of immorality. The reverse energy, the unconscious devil-god so dominates the mind of both the religious man and the "sin- ner." Each pays his toll of despondency. Could the immoralist believe in a future life, could he be made to understand that the universe is so ar- ranged that there are no secrets, that while God does not know, his parents, grandparents, and friends who have died can know if they wish, it would be enough to make him insane with shame and regret. Human nature is so sensitive, so good, that we are ever ready to lash ourselves. The atheistic immoralist can only reconcile his liberalism on the ground that there is no after- life. Our family, our friends who have died, live and know everything, but they do not judge us from the viewpoint of religion. They are not religious any more, they are the enemies of re- ligion, they are atheists and immoralists. They have regained their youth if they died when aged, and they have thrown repentance to the winds. If they are not sufficiently decided in marriage, the chances are that they practice polygamy, for there is no law in the sky, and ac- cording to the natural law of sexual selection, polygamy necessarily precedes monogamy. 2 2 My observations lead me to the absolutely certain conclu- sion that polygamous relationship is continuously practiced in the superstate before monogamy is attained; my power of claroaudience, which is very strong now (1920) and has been 44 They are materialists, they believe in the pas- sions and appetites, but they are capable of pro- found emotion and are very keen intellectually. Their chief perfection lies in the fact that they have a perfect economic system, a condition of individualism par excellence, such as we cannot have, and that they practice the law of contrasted action, which enables them to lead a double life. They are the highest order of hypocrites. They sin without repenting and pray without believing in God. Let no one who acquires mediumship or comes in contact with the superstate (which, by the way, is a thing to be avoided — see "Obses- sion") ever assume the religious attitude or be- lieve himself censured for his acts. We live in a universe in which there is no free will but plenty of ignorance as to the meaning of life. If we speak against the cruel tyrant, the advan- tage-taker, the person who lacks sincerity of char- acter and brings sorrow upon others, we must on second thought retract our censure; the universe is an unconscious force seeking consciousness. A person is not responsible if he has inherited cer- tain qualities, because his progenitors were mated without regard to eugenics, any more than if the eugenic arrangement is a fortunate one; it is rather an injustice to him. What people do in a condition of mediocrity does not matter. One ought to be glad that they were born at all. All attain to profound emotion and intellectual clarity as soon as they enter the superstate. The vision good ever since I discovered the philosophy of the Will to Beauty, leads me to that conclusion. People who wait in the superstate for husbands or wives to die, live with others for the time being. The lonesomeness is intense. I can hear people conversing in the superstate clear and loud above the buzzing conversation of mortals around me. 45 of immortality brings out the most musical ecsta- sies. Forbid the thought of that monstrous re- ligious doctrine about devils and angels. The moral code, as it is insisted upon by the church and capitalist state, cannot be practiced. A little reason will make that clear. People might as well say that they want the day always and not the night. They insist on one motive, one point of view only, and that which conforms to that. It is always "morality" always "goodness"; but in a world built on con- trasts, how is "evil" to exhaust itself? Every philosophy so far has insisted on the point of view of the "good" and that which conforms to it (except Nietzsche, who made himself ridicu- lous), without ever realizing that the "good" which they insist on, and the more they insist on it, the more will it have a tendency to reverse into an opposite. The Will is a passion that vibrates in contrasted action; what is known as religious ecstasy must construct itself upon the desires and appetites, upon "sin," its opposite. The Will to Beauty as it dwells in the human ego does not know the difference between sin and virtue. They are opposite poles of one's human nature. The solution, then, is this: the individual must become a sort of hypocrite, he must alternate between the emotions that are called "religious" and those that are "sinful." When he has had his fill of one he must turn to the other. There must be no conscience pangs. This means the fullness of health and expres- sion. This is nature ! This is the secret of secrets ! 4 6 This is how the superman lives. How can the Will to Beauty, which is the ex- pression of power rising to a harmony, arrange itself in a cramped condition of poverty and re- pression, instead of expression? The Will can- not be quiescent, it is a passion; but as it is not able to express itself in its fullness in our present arrangement, it produces sorrow, on the one hand, and breaks out in conflict and cruelty, on the other. The conflict must go on by subter- fuge, as in deception, or by direct power, as in war and competition. It will give the lie to any and all religious or ethical pretensions, until the Will to Beauty realizes itself in an environment permitting the ego to discharge his energy in a harmonic wheel of sharp and lesser contrasts. At present "power" is operative, i.e., the worst elements of human nature, hate and subterfuge, competition and war, are employed in the combat for existence, when it might all be reduced to laughter and placed on the stage only for the sake of the interest that realism provides, and the trashy romanticism which now soothes the nerves of the overworked populace be relegated to churches and asylums. Under socialism "power" is raised to humor and to art. Art makes reality more real without hurting any one. But the thing I wish to impress is this: that under the most perfect economic condition human nature would still make sorrow for itself without a knowledge of the law of contrasted action. People would still be obsessed with the idea of "sin." An emotion remains good if it is not analyzed too much but is rather in due time contrasted with an emotion of an opposite nature. People 47 think about their emotions in time of leisure, when their mood is probably different; it is in this way that the idea of sin originated. When people have once grasped this philosophy, the religious and ethical preachers who now live on the sorrow and fear of humanity will be obliged to look for other recreation; for, the truth once known, what need is there of moralizing? Besides, it is their doctrine of repression which causes an outbreak in unlooked-for directions. In this way they make more work for themselves. To rise beyond good and evil, complete sex expression in romance and beauty should be con- trasted with poetic-religious emotion; then for the lesser contrasts, art, craftsmanship or labor, and the love of nature, which should not be de- stroyed by mechanism, should be contrasted with clear intellect and abundant humor, social gath- erings, the theater, the burlesque, communal dwellings, free relationship among young people, speaking without an introduction, communal din- ing rooms, eating, drinking, vulgar laughter, ma- terialism, socialism, atheism. The Nature of Art and Realism as Opposed to the Subliminal and the Infinite That life is not evolutionary continuously but rather seeks the climax of beauty and then stops, not being able to go any farther, as it has no need of going any farther, is evident by the nature of art. The idea of infinity, infinite growth, is chaotic. Art seeks a boundary in form; to im- prove beyond a certain limit is to destroy or spoil. The artist will conceive a thing of beauty 4 8 in poetry, music, or painting that all his future experience will not surpass. A great genius, or a woman of wonderful beauty, with a nature profoundly ecstatic or a soul shrouded in deep pathos appears, or a race physically perfect like the Greek; they come and go everywhere without regard to the world's evolutionary period. Of course, life is evolution- ary in the short distance it traverses until it reaches its objective, but in reality nature is only a reversion from the unconscious to the conscious Will to Beauty, as the negative produces the posi- tive in photography. When once attained, beauty variates from one mode of expression to another, or else it properly seeks a contrast in luxurious pleasure, intellectual clarity, wit, and humor. Sorrow is the negative mode of expression of nature's will, and therefore reacts into a mode of discord. The super ego lives rooted to the real- ism of the earth and is not averse to the human, all too human; he eats, evacuates, and cohabits. It is on the planet under the influence of religion and economic stress that the genus homo passes through the angelic period. Were the individual to continue evolving to what the religious call perfection, he would become godly, spiritual, ghostly, unreal; he would frighten people. Art has a boundary; reality has a top and bottom. It is only the spiritualist that sublimates reality into fantastic idealism. Nature is a passion for beauty that appears wherever it is permitted, even in a condition of error, through every period of history; if it is insufficient, it destroys itself for a greater order 49 of beauty; if it attains a climax on the planet, it seeks a condition of security in the super-state. Above all, it seeks integration in forms of reality. All the arts are subservient to the art of life, which is sincere love and passion between a man and a woman who have attained to the maturity of emotion and physical beauty, whether on earth or in the superstate, by gradual growth, when the conditions are favorable, or through the contrast of sorrow, when unfavorable. Love of sex may variate in polygamy until a condition of monogamy is reached; it is then that the highest love is made possible. In a sphere yield- ing to the will the perfectly mated couple attain to happiness. As all the arts are but the transmutation of the energy of an emotion, so the wonderful woman holds within herself every mode of wo- manly expression possible; every fashion with its correlated environment from aristocratic luxury to peasant simplicity is within her power of dis- simulation; this precludes the possibility of the infatuation which art lends to polygamy. Her profound ecstatic nature makes of her the god- dess that man worships and yet controls by his predominating intellect. The superman and his wife become a genus that does not wish to be different, the part of a constellation; they have no need of further evolution, or they would cease to be human. 50 CENTRAL DOCTRINE Si The Nature of Time and Space— and Cause and Effect The sharp contrast and its variations (lesser contrasts) Time and space are contrasts. Space permits matter to have form, time permits the continuity of a form. Were time alone to exist, the mind would perceive one impression, one thing only, one formless idea of matter (for it takes space to give it form). Space permits more than one object to exist. Were space alone to exist, the mind would be able to perceive many objects, but they would all disappear in a flash. Time gives it duration. Matter combines within itself the rigid unchangeable nature of space and the fleet- ing course of time. Time is always narrowed down to the merest point — the present moment — but the very nature of space is infinite extension. Space shows its infinity immediately, but the in- finity of time is for the future. It is from imme- diate infinity of space that we can reason a future infinity of time, for they are only contrasts of each other, the primal contrasts of the uncon- scious motive of the universe, whence they receive their birth and origin. When the Will expressed itself in matter, time and space appeared simul- taneously. A time and space or matter with an infinite past is a chaos. Matter, the finite, gives meaning to time and space, the future infinite. 53 Cause and Effect (Matter) The variations (or lesser contrasts) This innocent-looking proposition regarding the nature of time and space and cause and effect is the triumph of modern philosophy; many have stumbled on that and none have solved it until now. The transcendentalism of Kant which Schopenhauer improved upon is a very imperfect presentation of the nature of reality. The rela- tion of subject and object is only one contrast among many. If such a thing as a secret order existed that guarded a truth sphinxlike through- out the ages, it could reveal no secret more pro- found, affecting our minds, affecting our actions, affecting the whole of unconscious and conscious nature, than the following sentences: — 1. The motive of the universe can find expres- sion only through contrasted action, for there is nothing else. 2. The inner meaning of cause and effect in nature is contrasted action. 3. The sense of cause and effect in the mind, the "principle of sufficient reason," as Schopen- hauer calls it, is the sense of contrasts. 4. All contrasts flow into their motive, where they are lost. The great success of Kant was that he hit upon a very important contrast, the relation between subject and object. But the relation between sub- ject and object is not all; it is one contrast among many. The idealism of Kant only served to raise matter from the static nature with which it was regarded; otherwise it is false. Nietzsche began to understand that the relation between subject 54 and object is not all there is of reality; he saw that the whole universe is an interpreting force which employs the various forms as a means of self-enhancement. (See the "Will to Power in Science," in the "Will to Power," Vol. II.) But what means the Will employs is the secret of secrets he did not know. Schopenhauer could find no escape from the Kantian transcendentalism, and Nietzsche's doctrine of "eternal recurrence" is evidence that he confused actual time and space with the empty mathematical form of it in the mind. (See "Infinity and Chaos.") Now to return to the nature of cause and ef- fect, the variations of time and space. I have but to quote Schopenhauer ("The World as Will and Idea," Vol. I, pp. 10, n). Although Schopenhauer does not know that cause and effect is equivalent to contrasted action, he gives a good explanation of it. Whoever has recognized the law of causation has com- pletely mastered the nature of matter, for matter is noth- ing more than causation, as any one will see at once if he reflects. Its true being is its action, nor can we possibly conceive of it as having any other meaning. Only as action does it fill time and space. The action of matter upon itself is the condition of its existence. Cause and effect thus constitutes the whole nature of matter. The nature of all material things is therefore very appropri- ately called in German, Wirklichkeit ; in English, "actu- ality," a word which is more expressive than Realitat, or "reality." Thus, the whole being and essence of matter consist in the orderly change which one part of it brings about in another part. What is determined by the law of causality is not merely a succession of things in time, but this succession with reference to a definite space, and not merely existence of things in a particular place, but in this place at a different point of time. Change implies 55 always a determined part of space, and a determined part of time together and in action. Thus causality unites space with time; that is to say, matter must take to itself at once the distinguishing qualities both of space and of time, however much these may be opposed to each other. We see from the above that matter is the lesser contrast of time and space. Time and space are contrasted infinities, but cause and effect can only take place within the circle of the stellar system. Beginning with such contrast as the centrifugal and centripetal action of sun and planet, thence to other variations, such as the contrasted nature of heat and light, the contrasts of the elements, and then ad infin- itum, or else it is an ordinary contrast; i.e., the changes that take place in matter, with reference to a particular space, in a different period of time, as Schopenhauer describes. Only it must be re- membered that the contrast is not always in evi- dence. When the motive or Will receives promi- nence, the contrast remains subdued. This is a rule throughout nature, and is in itself a contrasted mode of procedure, for Motive and contrasts are also opposites. Then the motives contrast each other. The motive appeals to the emotions; it is not analyzed by the mind; the mind sees in it mystery. * * * * Unconscious nature is an interpreting force that tires of monotony the same as the ego would tire of seeing only contrasted action. There is the mind and there is the heart. Reality is composed of both the motive and its contrasts, just as the ego is composed of the senses and emotions, on the one hand, and the mind whose nature is contrast, on the other. 56 These two do not mix but are of a nature entirely different one from the other: You cannot reason about the motive. The motive must he felt. This is of the utmost importance to understand, as it explains the nature of reality. The ego in his reasoning and feeling does exactly what uncon- scious nature does in motive and contrast. The conscious ego is a concentration of unconscious nature. Cause and effect, as we know it in our present planetary state, is only one mode of reality; its inner meaning is contrast. Cause and effect is either a mode of contrasted action or it is noth- ing. A motive only needs contrasted action to attain reality. Contrasted action is reality; there is no other reality. The Will to Beauty need not always be in evi- dence as the vivifying motive; nature employs nether motives, upon which it rises, such as the Will to Power, or mechanist utility. The same as in the construction of an edifice, the interpreters who see only mechanism and power do not see the climax. The thing to be remembered is that time and space is not a "flux," as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche would have it, but an actual reality. Flux is nebulous. The mediocre philosophy of Bergson is based on that, is, in fact, the elonga- tion of that error. By sublimating the intangible flux he gets "duration," then "spirit," whatever that may be. Cause and effect are useful words only, em- ployed for designating a mode of procedure in our planetary state. The same is true of all "laws" of nature; the ponderous planetary mo- tive brought these laws into evidence. The ego 57 in the superstate is able to create matter without regard to planetary cause and effect; another kind of cause and effect (contrasted action) makes its appearance. The growth of a tree, for example, is slow and cumbersome; it depends on so many other ele- ments to sustain it — on climate, soil, an endless chain of cause and effect; it is different again when an artist paints that tree, or when a Hindu fakir-medium produces a materialization of a tree. Reality assumes different forms in each of these examples, but contrasted action is the un- derlying base in all of them. Planetary law and cause and effect will disappear, but contrast will remain. The mind that proceeds from reason to conse- quent, the "principle of sufficient reason," as Schopenhauer calls it, is not a metaphysical fac- ulty at all, but is rather a means of making the ego habituated to his environment. The artist is the true metaphysician. That is to say, the mind cannot be depended upon to discover any phi- losophical truth, for its nature is to go from cause to effect, from effect to cause. It is for this reason that all philosophers stopped with cause and effect. Beyond cause and effect (or contrast) the mind sees only mystery. The mind ever inquires for a cause, but the mind does not know that its search for a cause is necessitated by the need for contrasted action. The artist, however, is able to see that the contrasts flow into the motive and stop there. I find that there is nothing a priori about the mind. I find that there is only vision and deduc- tion from vision. The a priori idea only misled Kant and his 58 followers into believing that time, space, and causality had an infinite past, just because the empty numeral one could be divided as well as multiplied to infinity. The mind is the amplifier of the senses, otherwise it is nothing. With the senses and emotions rests sincerity. The mind should not be trusted away from the senses. The intellectual artist is more capable of perceiving the truth than professional philosophers. Scho- penhauer's discovery of the Will was an artistic vision. Any painter or musician might have noticed that a motive is expressed by light and shade and half-tones, or contrasts and variations. * * * * In mechanics, the double-acting lever goes from the wheel and to the wheel. This serves to illustrate how all cause and effect, whose real meaning is contrasted action, can be traced only to the motive, and from the motive, and stops there. The wheel is the mechanist, or mathematical symbol, of the motive. Concentration into a Center and Radiation from a Center This is a process evident throughout nature; it is the means which nature employs for inte- grating its central motive. Concentration into a center and radiation from the center can be re- duced to contrasted action of course, only that it is a special process in nature. It explains many things that could not be understood otherwise; it explains why the animal does not survive in the superstate. The conscious ego, man, is the center. It explains the centrifugal and centripetal force, force of sun and planet. 59 Nature, likewise, indicates that sex is its cen- tral motive by the construction of the adult form. The sex passion alternates with the adoration of external nature. The entire planetary arrange- ment is raised to the superplane of art. The dual ego, man and woman, instead of being subservient to the gravitational center of the planet, are re- moved from the planet to a condition where the external environment is magically yielding to their will; this insures their safety. This process is the process of concentration. The whole stellar system might then clash and disintegrate, for it must have an ending as it had a beginning. (See also "Preface to the Will in Chemistry.") 60 THE WILL IN BOTANY The plant is a perfect symbol. The Will to Beauty proceeds in the same way from root to flower as the plant does. The leaves on the op- posite sides of the stem are a symbol of the process of dual contrast rising towards the flower. The flower itself represents the climax of human ecstasy. The plant rooted to the ground repre- sents the basis in materialism. Nature has not intended that emotion, the flower of the human heart, should be wrung out of man and woman as the result of hard condi- tions; only false religion sanctions that. The plant refuses to grow unless it has sunshine and every condition of its being is fulfilled. So life should proceed in laughter, health, and abun- dance. If man is unable to realize that condition on the planet on a basis of socialism, the super- state will bring that realization through indi- vidualism. The plant does not show the process whereby it gathers its food, how its leaves take carbon from the atmosphere for the purpose of building up its structure, how its roots gather the ammonia salts. So in man's life mechanism should be hidden. Root, stem, and leaves are the organs of nutri- tion; the flower is an organ of reproduction, it is a perfect symbol of sex beauty. The pistillate 61 flowers receive the pollen from the staminate flowers; by their color and perfume they exhibit an inner passion. Only in man's life the harmony is broken! Based on discord, the chords that construct life's melody cannot rise and unite ex- ultant in beauty, and so their numbers break in sorrow. With the evolution of the animal the Will starts a more complex harmony. The at- tainment of that harmony is therefore deferred until the ego becomes fully conscious of nature's motive on the planet or in the superstate. In the childhood of the race man lived close to simple nature, and his religion of fantasy and myth was lyric and flutelike as the shepherd's song in the spring, but now the Cross and the Thorn Crown hide a stain of blood. Our civilization is so complex, science is so profuse in detail, beautiful myth does not suffice. Our foolish religio-eco- nomic system makes war, competition, sickness, and sorrow; it quells the thirst for life. The same phenomenon is observed in chemistry when an element that otherwise takes its place in a harmonic motive, by being reversed, becomes virulent, corrosive, or explodes. The reason for this becomes evident when we realize that every organism lives by the expression of its energy, not by being quiescent. The fact that there is catastrophe is in itself evidence that the philosophy on which the social unit is built produces the clash. Clear reason must ever base itself on the principle that the Will of the universe holds within itself a harmonic pos- sibility, for how can a force remain at variance with itself? * * * * 62 Nature has well provided that man should love the woman's emotional nature, and by his intel- lect should guard her and the rest of the human family against sorrow of any kind. Instead of seeking out the rational basis of life, they send prayers to a God that does not hear, and cheat and rob each other by subterfuge. They live each in his own prison house, a life of mock individual- ism, a life in which clear reason has no part. In- stead of business and the drudgery of labor, nature intended the man to be an artist and a philosopher with the utilitarian part of life sub- servient, reduced to a minimum, relegated to the machine, hidden — a race that lives in the sun and pure air, surrounded by oxygen producing trees, with bodies beautiful to look at. Marvelous is the human form, wonderful the color of pure health; its possibilities are greater than we can at present imagine, the face re- splendent with idealism, the sincere heart that does not know the fraud of business. How won- derful is the added dignity of appropriate dress modified according to climate, and the stateliness of white-columned architecture in a beautiful landscape ! * * * * An example of unconscious harmonic action: Pollination by means of water as illustrated by the tape grass (Vallisneria). The individual at the left bears a spike of staminate buds (k). These spherical buds (a) become detached and rise to the surface, where, as they float, they open and expose the stamens. The pistillate flowers are borne on long stems which come just to the surface of the water. Pollination is accomplished 63 by those staminate flowers which float against the pistillate ones. After pollination the stem of the pistillate flowers coils into a spiral, withdrawing the ovary below the surface. The fruit develops under the water. (After Coulter.) An example of contrasted action: The adaptation between flower and insect by which the former secure pollination and the latter food are endless, but the contrasts are not always as evident as in the pollination of the smyrna fig by a wasp, which thrives in wild caprifigs. The fig tree is diclinous; i.e. } some trees bear staminate 6 4 (male) flowers, others the pistillate (female) flowers, or, if both are present, the staminate flowers are sterile on some trees while the pistil- late are sterile on others. The caprifig is not edible, but its wasp is able to fructify the flowers of the smyrna fig, which otherwise will not perfect fruit. The male of the fig wasp is without wings and never reaches the symrna fig tree ; the male wasps die within the caprifigs in which they are born, but the female has wings and sawlike mandibles. The female escapes and carries with her the pollen with which she becomes dusted as she crawls about within the floral cavity. The escap- ing female then cuts her way through the scales which interlock over the apex of the half-grown fig; she loses her wings in entering; after laying her eggs, she dies in the fig and is absorbed by the vegetable cells. Those which enter the pistillate inflorescences of the edible smyrna fig have no progeny, but are of service in pollination; the styles of the fertile pistillate flowers are so long that the wasp cannot deposit her eggs in a favorable place, and if she does lay eggs, they also perish, but those which enter the staminate caprifigs produce progeny, but are of no service in pollination. In the staminate caprifigs, there are numerous sterile pistillate flowers with short styles, which permit the female wasp to lay her eggs. Sometimes the clash of contrasts is most evi- dent in nature ; at other times the motive assumes importance, and the contrasts are uninteresting or not evident, but the contrasts are always there, 65 for it is nature's only means of attainment. This we may recognize throughout nature; sometimes the contrasts, at other times the motive. It is this which Schopenhauer intimated by the "World as Will and Idea." He should have called it "The Will and its Contrasts." This is itself a contrasted mode of procedure, for contrast and motive are opposed to each other. * * * * The flower and root are sharp contrasts, the leaves are the lesser contrasts. 66 THE WILL IN ASTRONOMY The most wonderful conclusion of modern astronomy is that the vast stellar system is a unit, that the Milky Way is practically circular like the hub of a wheel, with our solar cluster near the center. The Will has actually formed itself into a gi- gantic flower; the Milky Way, or Galaxy, is its corolla, thirty-six hundred light years across in diameter with a central calyx that holds the seed; i.e., the planet that produces man. The staminate sun acts upon the pistillate .; \:' ' "' "*>* « MILKY WA Y \ I f m v r •«- -£; — \7" — «-»—• pOS ITION OF "•** J: '. .;'-: "'-*. OUR 5 OLAR -SYSTEM COROLLA - PJSTIL \ STAMPS OVARY(coa/taia//a/& THE SEED) The process of concentration into a center. 67 earth. The sun is placed in about the same posi- tion as the stamens of a flower, but in the stellar flower the pistillate earth cannot occupy the very center, as is the case in the ordinary bisexual flower, owing to the great distance. In infinite space the ego is always the center. To the primitive Will setting out upon the task of creation, the circle with its central nucleus is the simplest expression of its nature. It is defi- nitely shown in the center of gravity of star and planet, and its greater significance becomes evi- dent in the conscious ego surrounded by the circle of the horizon. It is the symbol of the center of emotion within its sphere of contrasts and variations. The ecstatic woman is the central emotional motive and man with the predominating intellect, the nature of which is dual contrast, is her con- cordant corollary. The sex center, in the exact center of the adult body, is the means of issue. In order to realize itself in a fitting organism, the Will proceeds from stellar harmony to the wonderment of landscape, its color and sound, its moonlight, its sunrise and sunset, until it finds itself in the human form that will express its emotion. Without a knowledge of metaphysics, and in spite of his religious inclinations, or perhaps be- cause of his religious inclinations, Alfred R. Wal- lace, in his book "Man's Place in the Universe," gives a thorough exposition of the conclusions of modern astronomers, and as if guided by a clear vision, he develops the conception of the unity of the stellar system, culminating in a central seed (the man-producing planet) to a logical finish. I quote Mr. Wallace freely throughout this section in order to save time; the facts remain 68 the same, the discoveries of astronomy do not belong to any one man. 3 It seems that the entire region of the Milky Way, or galaxy, is unsuited for the formation of a life-producing planet, on account of the excessive forces there in action, as shown by the immense size of many of the stars, their enormous heat-giving power, the crowding of stars and nebulous matter, the great number of star-clusters, and especially because it is the region of "new stars" which imply col- lisions of masses of matter sufficiently large to become vis- ible from the immense distance we are from them. Hence the Milky Way is the theater of extreme activity and motion; it is comparatively crowded with matter under- going continual change, and is therefore not sufficiently stable for any periods to be at all likely to possess habit- able worlds. It is to the center of the Galactic circle then, the solar cluster, that we must look for planetary systems suitable for life-development, but here we are confronted by new difficulties, the discov- ery that most stars which to the eye appear as one star are really double or multiple star-systems, known as binary and variable stars. A binary system is composed of two stars re- volving around each other. Many thousands of binary stars were discovered by the telescope, and when the power of the telescope failed, the spec- troscope opened up a new field of discovery, so that now the telescopic binaries are only a small portion of the spectroscopic binaries. Professor Campbell of the Lick Observatory has stated his opinion that as accuracy of measurement increases "the star that is not a spectroscopic binary will prove to be a rare exception." Variable stars form a small proportion of the binary system, 3 The reader is requested to read the book, "Man's Place in the Universe." 69 and are to be found among the spectroscopic binaries; they are composed of two or more stars revolving around each other, with a dark com- panion very close to it, which obscures it either wholly or partially during every revolution. Of course these can only be discovered when the plane of their orbit is directly within our line of sight, otherwise the eclipse would not be noticed. Binary and variable stars sometimes revolve so close to each other that the two stars are often in absolute contact, forming systems of the shape of a dumb-bell. Their periods of revolu- tion vary from less than nine hours to more than a thousand years, as in the twin stars of Castor. It appears then that the suns subdivide on the same principle as the well-known explanation of the origin of the moon, by disruption from the earth; but owing perhaps to their intensely heated gaseous state, they seem usually to form nearly equal parts. Another drawback against the prob- ability of suns possessing attendant habitable orbs is that when their density can be determined, they are found, on the average, to be only one-eighth of our sun, so that even though many of them are considerably larger than our luminary, it is evi- dent that they must be wholly gaseous, but the stars in general, according to Professor New- comb, are of much smaller mass than our sun, so these cannot be depended upon to retain sufficient heat and light for the great number of years it takes to develop life; but that which settles for- ever the question of life on other systems, accord- ing to Wallace, is the fact that all stars in the solar cluster are either resolved to binary sys- tems or else they are in the process of aggrega- tion, and if there should be two or three suns such as ours is, they have not yet been discovered. 70 We would then be obliged to take into considera- tion the nicety of arrangement between a planet and its sun without which life could not proceed. Importance of Our Central Position The matter comprising our present stellar sys- tem must be an evolution from a simpler and more chaotic form. The harmonic motive in forming the Galactic ring has thereby protected the cen- tral solar constellation from too forcible an on- rush of meteoric matter, for the Galactic ring is attracting the great mass of matter to itself. It is now generally agreed among astronomers that the solar system has not come about by the con- densation of nebulae alone, but by the aggregative meteoric matter; for the cold of stellar space, which is sufficient to solidify hydrogen, would turn a diffused nebula into meteoric dust almost instantaneously. The powerful magnetic attrac- tion of the Milky Way retained the great mass of matter and permitted only a comparatively small portion to enter the central solar cluster; were it not for that, all the matter would rush to the cen- ter. Our sun was built up from this meteoric mat- ter until it attained its maximum of heat and size, every added collision adding to it; a portion of this matter went to the planets, but mostly to the greater body the sun, or its neighboring suns. A negligible amount of this meteoric matter is still found in our system. The position which astronomers allot to our sun, a position towards the outside of the central aggregation of suns (see illustration) is the most favorable for grad- ual growth by accretion, and thus provides a mode of keeping up the sun's heat during the long geologic periods necessary to the gradual formation of life. 71 A rapid aggregation of heat-producing matter and an equally rapid cooling would naturally be inimical to life. Then again, the very center of the solar cluster would be a place where me- teoric matter would not reach continuously from the outside, as it would be received by those suns preceding it. A place where gravitative force is small, motions produced there would be slow, collisions rare, a place for dark bodies, the very contrary of the region in or near the Milky Way which is a region of intense and uncontrolled ac- tion. Thus the position allotted to our sun would be the most favorable. Essential Life Conditions No amount of explanation by mechanism alone can explain the harmonic relation of our planet's distance from the sun, its mass, and the obliquity of its ecliptic, which as we shall see later, are the first conditions for life-development. Chance does not explain it, for that would imply a uni- verse without a motive. Such a universe could not evolve one human mind and the inspiring pas- sion of beauty. Mechanism, cause and effect, sees only the immediate detail, but there is always the inspiring motive which employs mechanism and cause and effect. Our mind, as well as our environment, proceeds by contrasted action (which is equivalent to cause and effect and mech- anism) ; it is the only way in which the motive can ever attain to realization. The artist, in seek- ing to express a motive of beauty or an ensemble of nature, finds its contrasted parts wonderful and marvelous the more subservient they are to the inspiring motive and the less they are re- garded in themselves, but the philosopher or scientist who proceeds with cause and effect and 72 mechanism only, is soon confronted with the "unknowable," or else he drifts headlong into theism. Theism is the last resort of the incompe- tent; there is no excuse for it after Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have written. Almost every scien- tific book ends with a feeble speculation about mind and matter, the life-germ, God, the soul, spirit, etc. Let this slight digression be a warn- ing to priest astronomers and religious writers, people like Wallace, even, lest they assume that our planet is a place especially designed by their God, the supreme mind, for their Jesus with his religion of sorrow and fear. Such people had better not commit themselves to print, but live with their sincere religious emo- tions if they have any. Then, again, there is the uninteresting stuff of such philosophers as Henry Bergson and William James. They call themselves "voluntists" be- cause they feed on the sincere thoughts of Scho- penhauer and Nietzsche, but they have no inspir- ing emotion. Our motiveless voluntists, after they have cov- ered volumes of waste paper with their obnoxious speculations leading one anywhere and nowhere, are just as likely as not to turn to the conventional God of religion or to the "unknowable" after the fashion of Herbert Spencer, who turned to the "unknowable" after once deciding that force is the basis of matter. The harmonic motive is unconscious; it seeks to realize itself in a conscious ego with all the sincerity and innocence of a force vibrating in contrasted action through all the forms of time, space, and causality. To a harmonic force, pain is negative and contrary to its nature. In other words, just as the human ego, who is the indi- 73 vidualization of the Will to Beauty, seeks ex- pression of his nature in an environment free from pain, just so does the unconscious Will seek outlet in the line of least resistance, and that, it stands to reason, can best be done by having one planet only, when pain, owing to inevitable hu- man ignorance, would be reduced to a minimum. This is a moot question that only actual observa- tion can settle; deduction cannot go far without vision. If astronomers could discover within the same circle as the solar cluster other suns the same as ours, it might serve as sufficient ground for conjecture that a life-producing planet of the same mass as our earth revolves around it. A flower has a number of stamens; the stellar flower likewise may have a number of suns, the same as ours, placed at the same distance from its center and circumference. According to Wallace, such suns have not yet been found, and even if found there is the nicety of arrangement to be consid- ered. A flower produces a number of seeds in its center, it is true, but these do not all take root, because some slight condition is lacking. From the standpoint of human reason, it cer- tainly seems better to have one planet only that will serve as an outlet for the Will, for then pain would be reduced to a minimum. As the Will is a harmonic motive, it has a strange way of at- taining a wonderful concordance in all its parts, so that its works appear like human intelligence. Human reason is only an amplification of the un- conscious Will; it accomplishes what the uncon- scious motive holds latent. As long as the fires of the sun endure, the flow of egos on the planet will go on. Whether this number of egos is a sufficient measure of its mo- tive we cannot say. Certain it is that if the Will 74 had within itself the urge to continue the species beyond the number the planet can yield, it would create for itself the means for doing so in the superstate, for while children cannot be born in the superstate at present, the Will might link itself in the future to the superstate, when the element of pain would be eliminated; for to the harmonic Will every evolutionary step is the out- growth of the step before. It is merely a question of the measure of the Will's volition, for time and space, cause and effect are its servant, but not a barrier that can prevent its expression. However that may be, the essential life condi- tions for a successful man-producing planet which we are about to consider all seem to point toward only one, the globe we live on. 4 Distance from the Sun The first essential condition we must consider is the distance of our planet from the sun. Proto- plasm, which is the basis of all organic life, is sensitive to either extreme of temperature. Nitro- gen is the element which gives protoplasm its ex- treme mobility, and its proneness to enter into combination and change its state of energy with carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, is confined between the temperature of freezing water and 104 F. Albumen loses its fluidity and coagulates at 160 F. Were the earth's temperature to rise or fall 72 F., life would soon become extinct. Now if we consider that the heat derived from the sun is inversely as the square of the distance, and that at half the distance we would have four times as much heat, we can then appreciate the importance of our position. The planet Mars receives less than half the 4 After all, the ancient idea that the earth is the center of the universe is not so bad. 75 amount of the sun's heat that we do, much below the freezing point of water. While in the planet Venus, the very opposite conditions prevail; it receives almost double the amount of heat that we do, far too hot for the existence of proto- plasm. The other planets are out of considera- tion. The Obliquity of the Ecliptic Were the earth's axis perpendicular to the plane of its orbit there would be no change of climate anywhere; although it would vary with latitude, it would remain forever the same. This would be unfavorable to life for the contrasts of summer and invigorating winter conduce to the best order of civilization; the terrific and contin- uous equatorial heat, on one hand, and the un- changing cold of the north would endanger the temperate zone. Were the earth's axis in the plane of its orbit, the contrasts of the changing seasons would be too strong. The obliquity of the axis permits moderate contrasts of spring, summer, autumn, and winter in that section of the globe whence the best human effort comes, and relegates the sharp contrasts to two separate places, the intense cold to the arctic zone and the heat to the equatorial belt; and even there the obliquity permits varia- tion. Another strange example of contrasted ac- tion conspiring toward a harmony on the planet is the fact that the earth is nearer to the sun in winter; in this way moderating the cold, and further from the sun in summer, which serves to moderate the heat (for the actual winter and summer are produced by the slanting ray in the winter and the direct sun's ray in the summer). The perpendicular and horizontal axes are the 76 opposing contrasts, the oblique orbit is the har- monic outlet. In the distribution of the planets around the sun I see again the law of contrasts seeking a har- monic outlet; i.e., those that are too near and those that are too far from the sun, Mars on one side a little too cold, and Venus a little too warm, with the earth in about the same position as the staminate sun in the stellar flower. During the period of aggregation the greater amount of meteorites went either to the very large planets on the very outside of the solar system or to the central sun, thus gradually giv- ing the earth its proper mass. (According to the law of contrasts, note that the planets were sepa- rated from their primary and then built up by the aggregation of meteorites.) 5 The Mass of the Planet Upon the mass of the planet, as well as its density, depends the amount of atmosphere its gravity can retain. The mass of the moon is not sufficient to hold a gas as heavy as carbon disul- phide, while hydrogen and helium will escape from our planet. Evidently the combined mass of moon and earth before their separation, was suffi- cient to hold the amount of hydrogen that entered into the formation of our present quantity of water, or else during the period of its aggrega- tion by meteorites, the frozen hydrogen that fell upon the earth immediately combined with the oxygen to form water; for, according to the har- monic arrangement, the least flame or lightning- stroke is sufficient to ignite and combine the hy- drogen and oxygen and form water, but once All astronomy can be no more than the harmonic motive seeking outlet through contrasted action. 77 formed, it is not easily separated. Had our planet been larger, the quantity of all gases in- cluding hydrogen would have been greater; with one tenth more water than we have at present, the land would all be submerged; with a greater atmosphere, greater winds inimical to life would be the result. The atmosphere and the water both unite in further enhancing the harmonic motive which seeks expression on the planet. The contrast of heat and cold produces wind in the atmosphere. The wind raises microscopic dust particles to a great height throughout the planet, which serve as a nucleus for water vapor. Without these dust particles held in space by a powerful and dense atmosphere, the great cloud canopies which serve the double purpose of protection from the continuous action of the sun, as well as producing rain, would be impossible, but condensation would follow evaporation. All this depends upon the mass of the planet compared with its primary, the sun; also, with a larger or hotter sun, the planet's relation towards it would no longer be the same. The atmosphere further serves as a warm blanket that retains the sun's heat during the night. We see here the action of the contrasted ele- ments. Their effort to bring forth the seed, man and woman, in the stellar flower, is the same as contrasted action necessary to bring forth the seed of a plant. See, for example, the complex action in the pollination of the fig. (See "The Will in Botany.") The Distribution of the Oceans and Continents The quantity of water on the surface of the earth is so great that, were it not for the great 78 ocean basins, it would cover the surface of the earth nearly two miles. Our satellite, the moon, received its origin from the earth during its molten condition, forming these great ocean basins that are placed opposite each other, and it now con- trols the contrasted action of its tides. The moon separated from the earth owing to centrifugal force generated by its rapid motion, and the tidal action of the sun upon its molten interior, causing it to break forth at the equator. In the distant past the earth's rotation around its axis was much faster than it is now, i.e., about four hours. It has attained its present harmonic period of rotation during the life of man, through the tidal pull of the sun and moon on its molten interior and its waters, which lengthens the day, though only several seconds in a thousand years. The Atlantic and Pacific basins both extend to an equal distance north and south of the equator; the greater mass of matter from the Pacific at- tracted to itself the mass of the Atlantic and formed the moon. The land area of the globe is 28% and the water area is 72%. Without this greater surface area of the oceans, there would not be sufficient evaporation to supply the land with rain. The land, after receiving its water, forms brooks and rivers which return to the ocean; were it not for the oceans, all bodies of water that beautify the landscape and the entire harmonic water-system would soon disappear. The oceans further tend to equalize conditions by distributing their stored-up heat from the equa- torial zone to regions that would otherwise be cold. This it is able to do, owing to the posi- tion of the continents. If the continents were so arranged as to occupy the position of the equato- rial oceans, the equalizing ocean currents running 79 north and south could not have done their work. Another factor that aids the harmonic motive on this planet is the alternation of day and night. The planet Venus presents one face to the sun continually, causing, of course, terrible contrasts. The same with the planet Mercury. Nature is not able to produce a harmony imme- diately. It produces the contrasts and then the lesser contrasts which serve as more delicate vari- ations, in about the same manner as an artist proceeds with a picture, only that the motive can- not complete itself on the planet. The planet is like the blossom which serves for forming the seed, but when the blossom falls away, the fruit continues to grow around the seed. Every terres- trial condition, however harmonic, holds within itself an opening for death, a loophole for de- struction. The very elements that go to com- plete the terrestrial harmony have destructive contrasts^so that it still leaves the planet imperfect, and when we come to the life of man, supersti- tion, war, and an imperfect economic order pre- vent a completion of nature's harmonic passion; for the unconscious Will to Beauty is not qui- escent; it is a terrible force seeking outlet, and it is for this reason that to a philosopher like Nietzsche it seemed like power trying to exceed itself, with all its terribleness and destruction as an essential part of it; but it stands to reason that a force cannot forever be at war with itself ; it must find itself sometime. The unconscious motive tries to meet the con- scious ego halfway and by complete consciousness in an ego it realizes itself. Human emotion is the climax of its energy. All its fury is hidden under a garb of impotence. 80 THE WILL IN EUGENICS The true nature of woman is sincerity, or emo- tion, to which intellect is subservient. It is evi- dently for this reason that the unconscious Will to Beauty has chosen her as the fitting outlet for the child. The perfect man is intellect coordi- nated by emotion or art. The child belongs to the mother; according to nature, there is no fa- ther; the father is a question of eugenics, unless it be the man whom the woman chooses as her husband forever. For that matter, the child is neither of the father nor of the mother but of nature, which employs the contrast of sex and the womb of maternity as an outlet for the conscious ego. The religio-economic arrangement does not re- spect nature, but forces a haphazard heredity upon the unborn. Sex impulse has nothing to do with childbirth and should never be confounded. Sex passion is nature's central motive by which means it rises to love and to its highest ecstatic beauty (otherwise it turns to sorrow as a means). The fact that the sex organs in the adult are in the exact center of the body is an indication of that, according to the law of concentration into a center and radiation from a center, which is evident throughout nature. Sexual selection proceeds from polygamy to monogamy and not vice versa. The immortal 81 ego cannot decide hastily who shall be his or her mate forever. Monogamy is a grand climax that only people of profound emotions know the meaning of. The man must be profound through having lived, through sorrow, or through sincere expression in art. The accumulated emotion gained in another direction is able to transmute itself to a very profound love, but where there is no accumulation, there is no concentrated center of security. The emotions of the superman are very deep. A young woman whose very nature is emotion is more likely to have attained to the height of ecstasy (see, for example, the sorrowful Niobe, Murillo's "Madonna," the "Mater Dolorosa" of Guido Reni), but a young man, hardly, unless through great sorrow, among very sincere people. The emotions of most men are only awakened at about the age of forty, when they become re- ligious; the mind being unable to interpret the meaning of emotion, rushes in fear to the religious interpretation. Besides, idealistic young people have such strange ideas as to what constitutes a true marriage. There are religious marriages, respectable marriages, and intellectual marriages. The more educated and idealistic young people are, the more are they likely to be mistaken in their marriage, while so-called vulgar and un- educated people are more likely to be correct. The true basic principle in marriage is the irre- sistible attraction of the masculine and the femi- nine, vulgar and material sex passion. With peo- ple who have nature's emotions, instead of those imposed upon them by religion, the more sincere their sex relationship, the greater will be their love and adoration; this is beautiful monogamy, 82 but timid young people frightened by "spiritual love," religious idealism, or respectability, cannot be expected to know that at once. As for those spoiled by the religio-economic system, what can their claim to monogamy amount to? They can only be considered as undeveloped seeds. Meanwhile the period of childbirth for the woman is limited to the period of life on the planet. There are no children born in the super- sphere of art, for the warp and woof of planetary causality which knits the ego to the Will does not operate there. Besides, even if the man and woman are per- fectly suited to each other in a marriage that time will not reverse, it does not mean that they will produce the best progeny. According to Galton's law of "filial regression," parents who are of a very high order will produce children less perfect than themselves. But above all, na- ture dislikes monotony of the male parent. If one of the children in a family is perfect, that is, of sincere character, good intellect, and physical form, the rest will be less perfect or they will die at birth. Hardly a family but nature shows re- bellion due to the repetition of the male parent. Nature seeks variation, the same as the mind seeks variation. By variation it is strengthened, by repetition it is weakened. This reaction which nature produces in the children can be intercepted by variating the male parent. This would satisfy the unconscious Will. The religio-economic social order, in its blind- ness, is opposed to this, but when a man dies, and his wife marries again, and has children with the second husband, it is the same thing; for the first husband lives in the superstate, and knows every- 83 thing, and if he is her true mate he waits for her; the children are always her children. The whole planetary arrangement is intended to be social, with individualism and monogamy reserved for the superstate (with exceptions, of course). The religio-economic order has a contemptible mock individualism in which clear reason has no part. Consider an apple or a grape : Each one has a number of seeds; if planted, it would cover the face of earth. It can only be used by selection with discretion. So with the seed of sex; it should be used according to eugenics, so that the unborn will not be the victims of injustice. God does not know justice. Justice is first born in the human heart. The same method that careful breeders of horses and cattle employ, that is the true method ; only that sincerity of character should be counted as by far the foremost quality to be sought for, with perfect mind and form added. The profuse sex seed should exhaust itself in beauty, romance, and passion and not be transmuted to commercial or military conquest. For childbirth the man must be sincere, with- out a physical or mental taint in his ancestry which might revert to the child; but now there are too many empty people, people whose nature is external commotion. Our civilization is prac- tically controlled by these people. They have the power to come to the front by taking advantage of an imperfect state of society. If they take to intellectual pursuit, their insincerity still remains. Who more shallow than the college professor, the political economist that will condone capitalism, the grandiloquent religio-moralist that will up- hold every decadent institution? 8 4 Meanwhile, the factories born of the monstei mechanism destroy the face and form, and na- ture's primal goodness, sex emotion, is religion- ized and commercialized. All this brain fever of colleges and theological seminaries, all this precaution of the state, and tremendous effort of labor that a successful business man might thrive here and there, when the whole arrangement is foolish ! Riches is foolish and poverty is foolish. Beauty is a vision. There is no morality ! Every moral code and system of ethics ever concocted is worthless. There is only a social order which permits eu- genics, by which means the birth of a sincere human being is insured. Such a one cannot do any wrong. The religio-economic arrangement must bring about a reaction of trouble, according to the law of motives seeking a contrast; the preach- ers and law-makers make more work for them- selves, the more they insist upon their short- sighted viewpoint. When a false social order is insisted upon for any length of time, it be- comes a determinant in the parental gametes, ac- cording as it affects the different sections of the community. The false arrangement produces its own contrasts and variations. The need for sub- terfuge develops into the skill for theft and advan- tage-taking. The masters attain to aristocratic pride, an undue humility is evolved among the poor, and intellect is valuable only as it can be sold, i.e., intellect is employed for clever fraud. Then good and evil makes its appearance. The intellectual classes are clever enough as far as their own profession goes, but they are like dead when a liberal thought is presented to them. Every character that human nature exhibits is 85 only a specification of what the unconscious mo- tive holds within itself, hate, anger, malice, jeal- ousy, lying, cheating, sneering, scoffing, violence, and murder. Intellect only specifies in the ego that which is indistinct in the unconscious pas- sion, but if we proceed on the assumption that the motive of the universe cannot be contrary to itself, then the above-mentioned qualities of hu- man nature must find their place ; nay, they should be assets to human nature. The answer is that these are the very qualities that under a perfect condition turn into wit and humor, while all anger and violence exhausts itself in sex passion. The very qualities that produce imperfection now would, under the proper arrangement, produce an interesting human being, while the saint would be a vacant abstraction. (See "Human, All Too Human.") The Will to Beauty that attains to the flower of human ecstasy and profound love must reverse itself into its opposite, as the roots and branches of a plant are opposite to each other, but that does not mean a reversion into "evil," rather a reversion into its contrast, the same as the light and shade of a picture or the contrasted elements in a drama. The Will that arrived to a harmony in the stellar circle and attains to the climax of individualism in the superstate, that same Will provides for a rational social arrangement in our planetary state. The unconscious motive is flex- ible enough, but a reaction of sorrow is the con- sequence of a false interpretation. Socialism and the eugenic interpretation will make a world where there will be no greedy graspers. The seed of sincere men must be taken advantage of, for just as perfect fruit cannot grow out of the seed taken 86 from an imperfect tree, just so cannot the gametes of insincere parents produce a perfect child un- less there is a chance reversion to an ancestral type. The woman, of course, must be what she is; no child would blame its mother for any imperfect heredity due to her, but the male that will com- plement her nature can be chosen. Besides, if the process of selection is continued, all women would be perfect in a few generations. If the woman is negative, the male should be very profound and positive and variate with each child. If the woman is just right, the man should correspond to her nature, always sincere, and variate with each child, but if the woman is very ecstatic and profound, the man should be negative to her; for when the motive is too strong, it re- verses, or else artificial parthenogenesis; some- thing which science is surely coming to. There will be plenty of Jesuses then. The unconscious motive has a ponderous cau- sality, which is different from the swift will of the ego on the plane of art; so that in order to obtain a good result {in this case the birth of a perfect child), the "laws" generated by that ponderous causality must be discovered. Man cannot im- pose his will in this instance, any more than he can will how chemical action should proceed. Professor Abbott, of Washington University, writing on the subject of artificial parthenogenesis and the experiments made in that direction, says : Such experiments show that probably all eggs contain within themselves all potentialities for normal develop- ment and that fertilization, or zygosis, is only an accom- paniment to, not a necessity for, individual development. Like a wound clock, the egg is a mass of matter of which 87 the parts, although in unstable equilibrium, are at rest because of a sort of inertia. When an appropriate "stim- ulus" comes, whether that of the sperm or that of some chemical or physical agent, cell division begins to follow cell division in rapid succession. It seems, then, that zygosis, or the combination of two gametes of diverse origin, serves only to bring about a biparental inheritance. The unconscious motive waits for man's selec- tion. The universe is itself an organism liable to organic response and depression; it seeks progress when it can through intermittent growth, through heredity, but, being unconscious, it is unable to proceed, and so it reverses, owing to the law of contrasts, until man's conscious selection can sus- tain it. Evolution proceeds by sudden bounds (muta- tions) and by gradual steps (diversities). This is an equivalent of the law of sharp contrasts and lesser variations which forms the basis of reality throughout nature. The mating of decided oppo- sites produces a progeny of a more perfect order than either of the parents; then inbreeding is necessary — inbreeding with continuous variation of parent of the very same type, otherwise that type goes to decadence. When a climax of sin- cerity has been attained, it cannot be improved upon; there is no such thing as endless evolution of the human ego. We must rather devise a means of sustaining it. In ancient times sincere individuals existed that could not be improved upon by any future evolu- tion, the perfect physical form and love of art of the Greeks and the profundity of the best indi- viduals among the Semitic races. By man's con- scious selection their blood might have flowed in 88 the veins of all succeeding generations, but the religio-economic arrangement brought about a premature monogamy. The sex relationship be- came sinful without marriage, and the male as- sumed power and conceit. The strangest thing about a system of power is that the sincere people become the victims of the dominant element whose nature is external action. Nature's motive, which is the Will to Beauty, soon establishes itself in the supersphere, where it laughs at power. It is idle to talk of the Will to Power; we live in the midst of a seething caldron of forces, terrestrial and solar forces, and the sun itself is held secure by the manner in which the sidereal system is constructed. (See "The Will in Astronomy.") Man need not boast of his power, or an invisible microbe will sicken him; it is by a nicety of arrangements that we live at all. When business success enters a family as a determinant, it produces shallowness in the male, a mind filled with petty intellectualism ; nothing is sacred to such people except that falsehood which permits them to thrive. Their touch is withering; art, philosophy, love, turn to ashes be- fore them. They cannot be taught; of all things they take only the external; they cheapen, they make fun of the sincere person. Who are they? Some speculator, manipulator, salesman, poli- tician. A woman's romanticist nature may struggle to realize itself in a false environment, which is an injustice to her, but the adaptable male is inter- esting only in a condition of sorrow. The crimi- nal is an impulsive child compared with the war general and captain of industry whose devasta- 8 9 tion spreads far and wide. May they go to mourn in infinite space, where their nature is straight- ened out ! Their only consolation can be that the unconscious motive of the universe has no other way of realizing itself in consciousness and human emotion but by making one the victim of the other. The sincere person does not need that mode of self-realization; the sincere need only a fitting environment that they may express themselves. I must say that among the Jews in the Ghetto there are the greatest and sincerest souls. The sincere man is poor. One can see many, many. Here stands a carpenter with a few simple tools waiting for some one to give him work, his face made beautiful by sorrow; there, a glazier with a few panes of glass; a poor woman, a beautiful profound soul, waiting to scrub a floor, evidently a widow, her husband probably waiting near her helpless in the superstate, her father and mother, too, invisible and inaudible to the passing crowd. There is a socialist waiting for the day of redemp- tion; an artist, his work sincere and good; he does not get out of his work what he spends for color and canvas, for he is earning his bread in some other way. Each expresses his sincerity in another direction. The poor depatriated man is nearer to the figure of Christ than the warring, political, capitalist-minded Christian; he is also nearest to the superman, only that Christ and the poor depatriated man are figures of sorrow. The superman has transmuted his emotions of sorrow into emotion in beauty, i.e., the adoration of sex, the beauty of profound melody, and the adora- tion of nature. 90 The climax of emotion once attained, nature does not go any higher or it would destroy what is human. All that is best in art is but a reflec- tion, and all intellect is the servant of profound sincerity. The intellect that runs away with itself is worthless, all ostentatious officialism and all elaboration of force but emptiness. Throughout nature the highest order of energy hides itself under a garb of impotence. It is my belief that all genius is usually a regression from parents more profound who did not attain to intellectual expression. A little intellect makes a great deal of noise. All books are worthless. The super- man has no books. As soon as we stop teaching children, so soon will an uneducated race of sin- cere people form itself. The true philosophy of life once known, what need will there be even to talk about it? It will crystallize itself into cus- toms, the same as error has become a custom. Books will reduce themselves into pamphlets, truths of science or facts valuable in industry. A people that see the ensemble of life will not per- mit detail to leave its bound and place, or be en- grossed all day long in externalism, and in the evening repose in feeble pleasure. That is your Christian commercial civilization. What is the result? Despicable faces of young men, no pro- found ideal, no comely beard; just luxury and business success as an ideal. The popular drama never wearies of setting forth the romance of the rich young man who lives in luxurious environ- ment, and some slip of a girl that cannot live without servants. Sincere people do not fit in this atmosphere of externalism, they resist it; but foolish young people are overawed by "civili- 91 zation," their native sincerity is destroyed, they wither, and become as despicable as those whom they seek to imitate. In olden times man was nearer to nature; there was the pathos of human labor without the ma- chine, and even among the feudal masters and powerful church, the Will to Beauty found ex- pression. The state and the church has cast aside its the- atrical garb, and is avowedly promoting business and the morality of business. When man does not know when to use mechanism and when not to, but valueless and ugly production covers the earth, he produces vacancy, nothing upon which the human spirit may linger in love and honesty. No more a simple peasantry or good workman who works at home, but machines and people who look like machines. Monogamy once attained, care should be taken not to return to polygamous variation, or it might destroy a perfect relationship. Polygamous va- riation is well enough for those who have not attained. On the plane of art, the woman who has at- tained to perfect beauty becomes the clever ac- tress; she can imitate many types by change of costume, coiffure, and by speech. By the art of dissimulation to which the superstate especially lends itself, polygamy becomes unnecessary. The true meaning of monogamy is a very profound love. Sex charm is easily imitated or substituted. Monogamy is the concentrated center. 92 Religion From the prayers of our forefathers a great deal of emotion can be drawn. There is more in some of these old prayers (of the New Year, the Atonement Day, and the Lamentations of the Jews, to a Jew, and the emotional services of the Catholics, to a Catholic) as regards sincerity of emotion than in most of our poetry. They be- come dear to us on account of those whom we loved (the same in all religions). We should be smart, however; i.e., we must pray like hypo- crites, for there is no basic truth in them, and our forefathers in the superstate no longer be- lieve in them. They should be employed to con- trast sex emotion. Sex romance is liable to go to decadence if continued for too long a time with- out contrasting. We should live like sinners who repent periodically. It is ignorance of this truth that has caused great sorrow in the world. * * * * To the Student of the Future Avoid intellectual detail, it destroys sincerity; it is for empty people. A detail should be kept in its place, otherwise it is a nuisance. Decadence There are people who live empty, trivial lives; sex is the only outlet for their emotions. The ex- pression of poetic pathos and the adoration of nature gives strength to a man; it makes him worthy to become the comrade of other sincere men, and to be respected by the profound woman. 5JC 3JC «f» 3fC 93 The meaning of decadence is that the motive seeks to contrast itself. ^F* *T* *f* *#* Regarding Freud — sex may be the central mo- tive, but no motive can stay by itself without seeking its opposite mode of expression. Equality The most difficult thing to learn and the most important is, that we are all alike in the very near future, if not in the immediate present. After knowing this, we can criticize each other to our heart's content. There will be no venom in it. We can also select without denouncing. People only begin differently. The unconscious Will employs the various en- vironments of people as a means of squeezing emotion out of them. Its object is emotion. One may be very poor and hungry, a cripple, a negro, a street-cleaner, but to the unconscious Will the sorrow of that humility is a means just as art is a means, just as the disappointment that comes from wealth, power, and pride is a means. The beautiful and emotional actress does not realize that the poor woman in a shawl is probably more profound than she is. Under a rationally con- structed social order human emotion could pro- ceed in happiness, but at present the unconscious Will can only realize itself by the clash of social clans and creeds and by all the accidentals of our life. There is nothing great and nothing small to the Will that ever pushes forward. Whatever brings forth emotion, that serves its purpose. In reality, we are all rich and perfect physi- 94 cally, with clear minds and profound emotions, but we have not yet come to our inheritance. Our seed has sprung from chaos. We are as helpless as water that flows into the form of a vessel, and the Will that moves us cannot readily communicate its secret to us. Therefore, we must wait until we can arrange ourselves, until sorrow will loose its sting and transmute itself to the flower of ecstatic music; then we shall become the equal masters of time and space. If there is any difference among us it is the contrast and variation of type, which is a law that rules all nature. We become like efflores- cences whose beauty is augmented by variation. From the Sublime to the Ridiculous To permit the contrary motives of deep emo- tion and humor to follow each other is the height of wisdom. People are frightened by emotion into religion. The sincere person must not let the unconscious Will lead him by the nose; he must employ shrewdness, art, hypocrisy even, he must play the emotional actor. (Sincerity of emotion once attained, a person cannot go back to apathy.) The Will to Beauty is satisfied with intervals of emotion only; these moments are the flower. Why may not the ego react to laughter, sin, and vulgarity? By all means. 95 PREFACE TO THE WILL IN CHEMISTRY Concentration into a Center and Radiation from a Center What is the meaning of the three dimensions of time and the three dimensions of space? Ac- cording to the law of contrasts, two should be sufficient. The answer, it seems to me, is this : The ego seeks concentration in the center, thus leaving the two opposites. Of time, the ego takes always the present, and in infinite space the ego is the center, as he actu- ally is the center in the circle of the horizon. Tangible three-dimensioned matter is a thing pos- sible only in the immediate vicinity of the ego. It partakes of the nature of the ego or the dual ego, man and woman, who are the concentrated center. Perspective flattens matter into two di- mensions, the same as a picture ; the three dimen- sions are a delusion in the distance. The fact that the ego knows that when he reaches that distance matter will become as tangi- ble to him as the matter of his present environ- ment, means nothing. It only goes to prove that the planet is a preparation for the superplane of art, where the same phenomenon is repeated, with the ego as the central creator. The same as a stage with distant sceneries and tangible accessories. 9 6 Of the five senses, touch is the center. Light and sound, the equivalent of seeing and hearing, are capable of distance, which touch cannot reach. Light, or color, partakes principally of the nature of space (with time as a negative factor). Sound partakes principally of the nature of time with space as a negative factor. Smell and taste are a further integration of tangible matter. It is something that the ego takes into himself. JfS 3|C Jj% >Ji Sound, the nature of which is time, vanishes with the present; it flows like time; when it ceases, it becomes a thing of the past and a possibility of the future; but the nature of color is continu- ous, for it partakes chiefly of the rigid unchange- able nature of space. Nature employs this con- trasted process for keeping the eye and the ear interested. Light, or color, has its intermittence in time on a larger scale; i.e., it employs longer periods of time; time is its negative factor; its existence depends on materialization and demate- rialization in the superstate, upon the change of night and day on the planet and upon other pon- derous planetary processes which the superego raises to the plane of art. The dual ego, man and woman, the central reality, have their inter- mission of existence in sleeping and waking. The mind is only the reflector of the senses; it must refer to the senses continually in order to main- tain its vigor, otherwise it reverses upon itself and goes off into unfounded fantasy; but the mind can construct what is not immediately pres- ent. In this way it has a greater reach than all the senses. 97 THE WILL IN CHEMISTRY As the quality of matter is not inert substance, but rather the message of a motive, it must of necessity arrange itself according to the law of motives, which is sharp contrasts and concor- dances (subtler variations), within an ensemble or sphere. Let us see in what way the elements known to modern science conform to the law of motives. The spectroscope has shown us that all matter in the incandescent state conforms to the solar spectrum. Let us remember this, and we shall soon see that all the modifications of matter and form are no different than the modifications of light. The harmonic motive in its effort to express itself seeks to coordinate a picture. White and black, or light and shadow, form the sharp con- trast, with the rest of the colors as the subtler variations, or lesser contrasts. We shall be bet- ter able to understand the Will to Beauty, if we follow the idea of a picture coordinated into beauty by the eye of an impressionist painter. Alfred R. Wallace, in his book "World of Life," says: "The various sensations by which we come into contact with the external world — sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch — are really all specializations of the last, that of material contact." There is a profound idea in this, which 9 8 will enable us to understand how the Will em- ploys matter to coordinate a harmony. Let us wait and examine another characteristic law of motives which is : the central motive of sincerity in a correlated environment, as the center within a circle, the seed in the center of a flower, the ego in the center of his coordinated environment — the circle of the horizon, the process of radiation from a center throughout nature. Let us remember now that all external nature is the object for the central ego, the subject, that the five senses of the ego are drawn from corre- spondences in external nature. It is wonderful how the senses arrange themselves in dual con- trast around the sense of touch of which they are the modification; sight and hearing bring to the ego knowledge of distance; taste and smell bring verification of nearness, they are of a contrasted nature to sight and hearing. The sense of touch is the center. (See Preface.) Nature seems to have intended that man and woman, the con- trasted dual ego, should live in a paradise of love and poetry, in a beautiful landscape with tall decorative trees, intoned in harmonic light and color, with the songs of birds, the murmur of trees and water, and other beautiful sights and sounds of nature, augmented by his own sense of music, with flowers, fruits, and all delicious food to gratify his sense of smell and taste. The harmony once attained by the unconscious Will, by means of planetary causality 6 reproduces itself in the superstate, as the volition of the con- scious man and woman. The sense of touch finds a The inner meaning of causality is contrast; the uncon- scious motive interprets astronomical and chemical causality, the same as an artist employs contrasts. 99 its correspondence in the formation of material contact, and the distance is beautiful light shining on form coordinated by the sense of sight instead of the light of the sun. Of course, the other senses find their correspondence in the external ensemble, for the principle is ever the same; i.e., the central motive coordinating its corollary through con- trasted action. The whole planetary arrange- ment must therefore be an arrangement between subject and object, for that is the most important contrast. The only difference between the planet and the superstate is, that the planet presents a social arrangement, while the superstate is indi- vidualistic; otherwise it is all magnetic; i.e., it can be reduced to force. All matter is a phenomenon of energy, in the contrast, time and space, only that the unconscious Will proceeds through the ponderous planetary causality, while the conscious Will to Beauty, the ego, in the superstate, takes the essence, is able to select, without the unpleasant contrast which is inevitable in the planetary state. It is from this larger conception of the nature of matter, i.e., its inherent will to coordinate itself into a harmony (by the process of dual contrast) for the purpose of serving the subject, the conscious ego, that we can form a correct idea of the force that dwells in the elements. The specialist to whom chemistry is a trade is lost in an abyss of mystery, for he has no metaphysical basis. We can only consider here the broad view of the Will in Chemistry — that suffices our purpose — and leave it to the chemist to verify the law of motives in greater detail. The English physicist Sir J. J. Thomson showed that an isolated electrical charge moving ioo with high velocity could have both mass and inertia, i.e., could have those very properties that we are accustomed to ascribe to matter. The atom is made up of a large number of negative charges of electricity, or electrons, as they are termed, moving with high velocities in a field of positive electrification; this corresponds to the metaphysical view that all matter is reducible to force or Will in contrasted action. The ancients, in reducing all matter to their primal appearances of earth, air, water, fire, per- ceived the law of contrast. Let us here, for con- venience' sake, consider matter from this ancient viewpoint instead of the modern analytical method, which reduces matter to eighty-odd ele- ments. There is a suspicion among chemists that the elements are not as stable as they were at first supposed to be, being that they are all a mode of energy. We know that the emanation of ra- dium produces among other things the element helium, and lead, which may be regarded as the ashes of radium. It is claimed that when X-rays are sent through hydrogen gas helium and neon are produced; be that as it may, the stability of the element is unimportant to us. They serve the chemist only as figures serve the mathematician. * * * * Fire The primal energy unfolds itself into two opposites — heat and light. Observe contrasted action in the following: — A chemical reaction implies a transmutation of energy and the reason two substances react is that they are charged to different electrical potentials IOI and are induced to react by an electric current, by heat or by light. Electricity itself is force that can be reduced to heat and to light through its negative and positive poles. Heat and light are the dual expression of primal energy, fire, accord- ing to the ancient conception. Heat corresponds to the inner quality of matter, while light gives things their external appearance of light and shade and color. Heat and light are easily transmuted one into the other. An instance is that of chlorophyl, the substance which gives leaves their green color. Chlorophyl separates the carbon from carbon dioxide with the aid of sunlight; in the laboratory the same process requires intense heat. The tre- mendous power attributed to the ultra-red ray of being able to destroy fortifications may be very true. So throughout nature, form and color are interchangeable. Like all inseparable contrasts, they can be traced to one motive. The central motive dilates itself until it reaches the circle of the horizon. Tangible form is merely the con- centrated center in the sphere of the conscious ego. Form and color become light in the dis- tance. Likewise, all matter partakes of the nature of fire combustion and extinction, growth and decay — in the superstate, materialization and demate- rialization. Water Water, which is the opposite of fire, is com- posed of oxygen and hydrogen; hydrogen the most combustible gas and oxygen without which com- 102 bustion cannot take place, i.e., the contrast of fire is composed of fire. Air Air is composed of oxygen which induces com- bustion and nitrogen which extinguishes, i.e., an- other contrast. Earth is the contrast of air. When solids transmute themselves into sound, they identify themselves with air; without vibrating air, sound is inaudible. The solid in the distance becomes color or sound. In the superstate the central ego can produce the sounds of nature by the con- trasted action of energy, without having the causality of the planet, such as the sounds of trees, the songs of birds and musical instruments, the same as telharmonic music (electric music) reproduces the timbre of violins and other instru- ments. (I heard the sound that the wind makes among the trees imitated by a person in the super- state, with an interpreting melody interwoven.) We must admit that art makes reality more real, that the whole planet is only so much material for the emotions, its tangible encumbrance is worth- less. The solids can also be reduced to lesser contrasts, e.g., the contrasts among the metals. Time and space is the grand contrast of all matter. As the Will is never prosaic repetition, but rather its contrasts are vivified by the Will to Beauty, a tremendous force, immense and yet subtle, the matter of its robe, which is the visible universe, assumes variation of quality and form. It should therefore not always be interpreted from the point of view of causality or dual con- 103 trast, as if we were forever busy examining its texture, its warp and woof. Its causality is sec- ondary, it is only its mode of attainment; in its ensemble it is the harmonic motive. It is this relationship to the harmonic motive which gives matter its mysterious qualities, its beauty. Some- times matter makes itself evident as the Will to Power, as in the case of explosives and poisons, or in the generation of pure energy; or else the motive may be utility. The Will to Beauty em- ploys nether motives upon which it rises; these form its necessary base. The Will to Beauty cannot arrange itself com- pletely on the planet without leaving a loophole for death; it cannot rest here, but it is to be noticed that wherever man is impotent, the un- conscious Will produces the harmonic relation- ship. The planetary condition strives to arrange itself as much as possible to be of service to man, the conscious subject. It seeks to meet the ego halfway. It must do so, because the ego is its means of attainment. An example of this con- cordance in unconscious nature is evident in the nature of water. When water freezes into ice, its density is only .091, which enables it to float; all other substances become denser when freezing. Were ice to become denser, it would clog up all rivers and oceans, as the water on the surface would continue to freeze and sink. It is this con- cordant quality of the unconscious harmonic mo- tive that deludes so many otherwise scientific people into the belief of a conscious creator, such as Wallace, Edison, and others. It is really a pity to see such widespread ignorance of Schopen- hauer's philosophy; incomplete though he was, he still explains the above difficulty most thoroughly 104 in the "Will in Nature" and in "The World as Will and Idea." If we turn now to organic chemistry, we find a marvelous correspondence of contrasts. In the organism, the Will makes an effort to evolve the conscious subject. Protoplasm is a substance essentially composed of hydrogen, oxygen, nitro- gen, and carbon. The first two are the vivifiers, the last two are the elements acted upon. They correspond perfectly to fire, air, water, earth: hydrogen to fire, oxygen to air, nitrogen to water, and the nonmetallic solid carbon to earth, as we shall see. Nitrogen is the extinguisher; it also resembles water in that it flows, it changes, con- tinually, it gives protoplasm its flow, its mobility, its proneness to change its state of combination and energy. Nitrogen, though itself inactive, readily enters into combinations when energy is supplied to it; this it receives through the hy- drogen and oxygen. The nitrogen and hydrogen combine through electric discharges in the atmos- phere and it is in this way, as also by means of oxides of nitrogen, that plants get their nitrogen and through the plants, the animals. Oxygen gives protoplasm its vitality, hydrogen its fire, while the solid carbon seems to be the basis. Protoplasm has the power of modifying its structure by absorbing and molding other ele- ments to serve special purposes in the various parts of an organism; these, of course, serve the purpose of lesser contrasts, but the first four ele- ments serve as a starting-point for further modi- fications. When the contrast is not evident or is uninteresting, a new motive appears. The motive is not analyzed by the mind, it is for the senses and emotions. 105 All elements taken together, whether as ele- ments (the periodic table) or as compounds, must fall under the law of motives, i.e. y sharp and lesser contrasts within an ensemble or sphere, whether the sphere of observation is large or small. 7 It is always a correspondence of the an- cient division of matter, even though it may not resemble earth, air, water, fire. Whenever two contrasts only are in evidence, time and space forms its greater contrast; but too many lesser contrasts cannot become evident without a lesser motive intervening. This is the complex of real- ity; only that in the planetary arrangement a con- trast of imperfection enters, a nuisance, such as the weed among vegetation, but this very same complex of reality can arrange itself until it attains perfection. Let us not forget that the relation between subject and object is the most important contrast. We now have the metaphysical base which can be elaborated by the scientist. * * * * The breaking up of the atom in radium reveals to us what tremendous energy the Will to Beauty transmutes. * * * * It must be remembered that the intrinsic energy that every element holds can be utilized by the Will to serve a subtler purpose : its latent potency can be sublimated, translated, trans- muted into a higher ratio, before and after enter- ing into combination. For the Will is not con- tented with the exhibition of pure force; it is a 7 For further detail of this, see "The New Knowledge" by R. K. Duncan, and "Researches on the Affinities of the Ele- ments" by Geoffrey Martin. 106 motive that seeks to transmute power into beauty. The highest order of energy hides itself under a garb of impotence. The transmutation of the intrinsic energy of elements into a higher ratio is evident alike in the protoplasm that goes to form the subject and in the sphere of the object, the environment, for the subject and object are contrasts of each other. It is simply that the harmonic motive everywhere arranges itself into a corolla with a concentrated center, like a flower. Each element is a motive, itself the center of a sphere of energy, guided by the law of motives. The new quality it assumes is no more strange than the new quality that mixed colors have — their relationship in the ensemble of a landscape, or any part of the landscape. The value of a note of music is noticed only when it has found its place in a melody of beauty : it becomes strange and wonderful then, something that you cannot do without; in the octave it is so commonplace. The elements never lose their hidden motive; they await interpretation, i.e., they flow, they trans- mute themselves according to the requirements of the Will. This explains the coordination of force in the superstate. Why does the black carbon become a diamond? Why is the sapphire only oxide of aluminium? When the element or combination of elements express themselves as power only, they express the most elementary aspect of their nature; when acted upon by primal energy (solar heat and light or electricity, which is a transmutation of heat and light) they clash, that they may finally harmonize; for the primal Will is terrific and savage. An instance of how an innocent-looking substance manifests its primal force is evident in 107 water. Water retains the terrific energy of its hydrogen and oxygen. When heated into steam or frozen into ice, it can break iron vessels and gigantic rocks. When highly heated and compressed, water becomes one of the most corrosive substances; such water will dissolve metals like iron and zinc with effervescence, just as a strong acid will, evolving hydrogen gas; while the strongest min- eral acids such as sulphuric, hydrochloric and nitric acids become quite neutral substances at the low temperature of 105 ° F. It all depends how the element is arranged; for example, iron is strong but oxygen can reduce it to rust. 8 The mighty energies locked up in nitrogen manifest themselves in the terrible power of ex- plosives. Nitrogen combines with oxygen at high temperature and under the influence of electricity so furiously that it produces a flame hot enough to boil platinum. Under ordinary temperature it is seemingly inert and dead. The lightning is burning nitrogen. We can see from chemistry that a coordinated harmony is composed of in- tense energy, only differently arranged; in other words, the Will to Beauty is a more subtle, more profound, mode of energy than the Will to Power. The harmonic action of the elements depends, of course, on the earth's distance from the sun, the related mass of sun and planet; but that only shows how profound the harmonic Will is. The conscious creator, the artist, finds the same won- 8 When the iron becomes color (burnt umber, burnt sienna, ochre, raw sienna, light red) its potency is transmuted. When the color takes its place in a harmony of beauty, it may become more potent. It is strange, too, that as color the iron is very permanent but the element must be continually pro- tected. IO8 der in his own work, after completing an impres- sion of beauty. The mind marvels at the won- derful way in which the various parts are linked. We need here not consider the interpretation of utility in chemistry — that has already been done and overdone by modern science. Utility is the nether structure in the relations of subject and object. If we further consider the elements as air, earth, water, fire, their esthetic synthesis, in- stead of their analytical aspect, at the beautiful hour of dusk, sunset, deepening night, and the romantic light of the moon, they conspire to form nature's most wonderful harmony. Every motive in nature, be it a chemical ele- ment or a human ego, is capable of radiating from its center of sincerity and of transforming itself into dominating power; it may transmute its energy into a force of destruction; more com- monly it will seek its place as a link in the chain of utility, but as a climax in the sphere of its activity, the motive will seek its flower, namely, beauty. The elements will seek beauty, in the ensemble of a landscape, into harmonious sound among the trees, and the marvel of color harmony among the vegetation, cloud, sky, and reflecting water — and the human ego seeks emotion. Notice the same in astronomy. The highest manifestation of power, terrific in clash and destruction, but all of it shaping itself that it may serve our sun and planet. On a clear night when undisturbed by the lights of city, as in midocean, the stars appear in their grandeur and beauty, as a chandelier of lights 109 suspended in the sky. Then there is moonlight, sunrise, and sunset. Color harmony, which de- pends upon the light of the sun, is a peace-bring- ing factor that is continuously active. Notice the beauty of the ground that is not destroyed by mechanism, the yellowish gray path strewn with the various accessories that are very precious in- deed, twigs, pebbles and a few golden brown leaves — here is peace. Man's power is a jest. The best manifestation of man's power is the interpretation of realism into art. Then ponderous nature yields to his volition, unless by being immortal he can claim to express more power in time than the whole stellar system holds in space. The rest is luck. Man is lucky that there is an unconscious Will to Beauty seeking specialization in an ego. The Transmutation of Power into Beauty Light, which throughout nature expresses itself as color, intones all things into a sphere of clear foreground and hazy distance, leaving the ego in the center. The Will seeks color through chemi- cal action in our ponderous planetary state; it transmutes light into pigment, waiting for man's selection to complete her motive, to continue the remarkable color harmonies found in nature and at intervals to augment them. All art is nature flowing into beauty. It is not necessary to dissect color, to trace it to its original power. Color harmony is strong enough, is the most powerful in its effect upon the emo- tions; the very color of the ground undisturbed by mechanism is enough to bring one happiness. no A mechanist civilization that destroys the acci- dentals of nature for the sake of its construction deludes itself. The tar-paved streets prevent na- ture from healing the human heart. To Ruskin it was a religion, because he knew its value. It is a theme sufficient for a religion. One form of mechanism leads to another: the automobiles — the ground is divided into squares by the real- estate owner. Our large cities, our large edifices have upon them the curse of utility and the hypocrisy of ornament. Then the clothing of men has upon it the stamp of commerce ; they are not shabby enough, not free enough; they require continuous attention, continuous polishing. Is it a wonder that the people are obnoxious to look at? Fools stand agape at the marvels of mechanism. How ennobling is the stateliness of white-col- umned architecture in a landscape ! How good it is to meet sincere men and women walking quietly in the midst of a nature made more beau- tiful by their presence — socialists, poets, lovers, creators, the clear in intellect, and the true- hearted! Sound, like color, is the misty chaos of power which is brought to the most melodious luxury by the pathos and lyric ecstasy of the Will to Beauty. Sound bears that relation to time which color bears to space ; that is why they are of con- trasted nature. Color has a continuous stable effect, while sound is flowing and intermittent. The same power that produces harmonic color contrasts itself in the production of harmonic sound. The sound that the wind makes among the trees is not accidental, a long chain of planetary cau- iii sality evolved it. It bows the heart with its reso- nance. An inventor by the name of Chaill de- vised a means of transmitting music to a great distance (telharmonic music) by means of a small invisible instrument among the trees. It could augment nature's sound into a fitting melody. The water's edge is the point of highest in- terest. It reflects the landscape like a mirror causing meditation; with the reed that grows by the river's edge the primitive man made music. The mind, too, is like a mirror. When the senses feed upon beauty, the mind reflects and by the process of imagination it gives birth to that flower of beauty, deep emotion. In building an artistic city, the canal is left to man's selection. When the ground will no longer be bound by the real- estate owner, architecture will flourish, its lines of construction will variate with the dignity of the ancient Greek and the freedom of the modern, and will serve communal necessity. The nether structure of iron should not be used for raising a fifty-story monstrosity, but rather for the purpose of securing greater safety. In case of earthquake, iron structure has proved its value. The form of natural construction without iron should be observed and maintained. The impor- tant thing is to safeguard human life, especially the woman, who should have a child before dying. Architecture can be greater than the Greek be- cause of the invisible improvements that can enter into its construction ; romantic gardens for prome- nading lovers can fill the intervening spaces, where the virtues of loving-kindness and compassion may be practiced; with telharmonic music hidden among the foliage continuous melody can be made to issue forth. Woman's beauty will begin to 112 reign; wit and coquetry will supersede the need for political betterment among a race of religious cripples. Pottery tiles are the most beautiful thing for external architectural decoration and stained glass for internal color. The blue-red-and-yellow tile ornament looks beautiful between the foliage of trees. In the autumn the landscape runs from dark green and russet to orange and yellow; nature seeks an exaggeration into black and gold. The metal gold is malleable and can be hammered into golden laurels into bright notes among the tiles that will resist oxidation, it can be woven into black draperies that will fall with telling contrast across the porticos and balconies of the cream- colored buildings. The elements pass on their will to a rising har- mony in the myriad murmuring sounds at sunset. The frog and the cricket's sound, the songs of birds, in tall decorative trees, the swan's death song — "chant only one hymn and expire." The beautiful "willows by the water courses," the strutting peacock on the meadow of sharp green with its burden of blue and copper color, or the white peacocks with a center of delicate lemon color, which by man's selection can be had in abundance, the marvelous color harmony of the plumage of pheasants. /Jut first the economic system must be perfected, human drudgery must be relieved; after that, the law of contrasts must be understood, so as to prevent any one condition from going to deca- dence by being sustained too long and so reversing itself into sorrow. * * * * 113 The improvement of the superstate over the planetary condition is this : The external environ- ment in the superstate depends for its existence upon the will of the ego. The external environ- ment can never hurt the ego; every object would dematerialize before his will; nothing can fall on him for there is no gravitation; no fire could exist against his will; the ego is the center. In our planetary condition the ego is subservient to the planet. It requires great arrangement on the planet to insure the ego against sorrow, until in- evitable old age comes. Then, in order to further outwit the unconscious Will, the ego should seek painless death. The forms of reality in the superstate are the same as the forms of reality on the planet. The realism of the planet seeks per- fection by flowing into the superplane of art. The artist can do nothing else but employ the realism of nature. Miscellaneous All art is nature's realism flowing into beauty, but now nature flows into mechanism. * * * * The interest that primitivism in art has for us is that the unskilled crudeness of the human hand, the pathos of human labor, is dearer to us than the correctness of the machine. The correctness of the machine kills and destroys; we are like dead in its presence. *I* 5JC 5fC 2J» Nature has taken force, and has transmuted it into what is called human weakness. 114 When human ignorance attains to erudition it is complete. * * * * Vulgarity — people are polite because they need favors from one another; vulgar people tell the truth. When it comes to emotion, it is the un- educated people who feel sincerely. * * * * I believe that vision in ensemble of the human figure or landscape is the prerequisite for phil- osophic vision. Our colleges turn out distorted, one might say insane, people, with whom one cannot reason — minds overburdened with detail. * * * * Study with a clear mind is possible only at in- tervals, the same as clear vision in art. Our life on the planet is not arranged in proper contrasts. It is for this reason that the mind reverses after it has been occupied in clear reason. The reverse energy does not permit. * * # * When a woman has no children of her own, she and her husband can arrange a relationship with the children of relatives or friends in the superstate. The superstate is finally an arrange- ment between adults of the same age though of different generations. The superman is one. 115 SCHOPENHAUER'S " WORLD AS WILL AND IDEA" It must be said to the credit of Schopenhauer that he understood that time and space are con- trasts, and that cause and effect partake of the contrasted nature of time and space; but as he was misled by the Kantian idealism, he did not know enough to make "sharp and lesser con- trasts" the principle upon which the Will con- structs itself. His book should have been "The World as Will and Its Contrasts." He also labored a great deal in trying to ex- plain how the relation between the Will and its manifestations is not causal.* The thing is much simpler : Cause and effect in nature, and the mind (the principle of sufficient reason) correspond to contrasted action. The Will corresponds to the senses and emotions in the ego. All contrasted action in nature flows into the motive where it stops. All the mind's reason flows into the senses and stops there. Then you feel. In mechanics, the wheel and the double-acting lever that goes to the wheel and from the wheel is a good example of how contrasted action goes to the motive and from the motive, and is lost there. The wheel is a symbol of the motive. *r *r t * *Note. — Schopenhauer made the greatest discovery in phi- losophy when he conceived that causality does not apply to the Will. 116 This is a thing of the utmost importance to un- derstand. You cannot ask for a cause for the motive. The mind that asks for a cause is im- pelled by the need for contrasts, but in the motive contrasts disappear. Schopenhauer made a great effort to explain this point in his own incomplete way, but after all it is very simple. The process of going from reason to consequence in the mind, and from cause to effect in external nature, is impelled by contrasted action, but the motive (the Will) is a self-sufficient ensemble. Emotion and reason are opposed modes of knowing. If philosophers had understood that, they would not have labored so much seeking for God, the absolute, the in- finite, and the unknowable. Bergson and William James After the sincere minds have spoken, come the mediocrities. When a person is sincere he always expresses that. He may be a shoemaker singing sadly at his work, but mediocrity cannot be trans- muted by becoming a philosopher into anything better, but into another form of mediocrity. Of such nature are the philosophies of Bergson and of James. In our present social condition of civilized externalism, the shallow and stupid is in demand, if it can only take on a tone of erudition. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were very pow- erful thinkers. Their minds penetrated nature through and through. Lacking the evidence of an after-life, their interpretations of the uncon- scious Will, as pessimism, and as power, its oppo- site, were the only possible interpretations. They are like chess-players, defeated because they had 117 no other move; but these college professors who have to teach something, write about something, what are their thoughts but worthless? Pragmatism means that Professor James gives you the permission to believe in any ideal. A person having emotion does not wait for a prag- matist to sanction it. Belief in an ideal depends on its rational construction. Furthermore, it dif- fers from another opposite construction, it op- poses it. Contrasts cannot be avoided. There is only one alternative; suppress expression and be mediocre. Then it does not matter what ideas you have. A religious person prays to God in the hour of need, "Out of the depths I cry unto you, O Lord," because reason tells him that there his help lies, but an atheist-socialist with equal sincerity would consider that irrational. A better economic order would be more efficient than prayer to the socialist. How can pragmatism reconcile the clash of these opposites? About as much as it can reconcile the opposition of the exploiting rich and their victims. He who understands the philosophy of Beyond Good and Evil can afford to be a hypocrite, he can feel the emotion of prayer and be an atheist at the same time. From this point of view, prag- matism may be looked upon as a burlesque on the law of contrasts. Pragmatism is undoubtedly an adaptation of Nietzsche's "process of falsification" and a reac- tion of his intense philosophy of power. Bergson got the idea that nether nature is guided by law, but free will reigns in the "spirit." The truth of the matter is that "law" and "cause and effect" can always be reduced to contrasts and 118 variations; wherever there is reality it is the same; this is different from free will. He, too, tried to adopt Nietzsche's "process of falsifica- tion." "Free will" is a means of satisfying the search of the theologian for a philosophical basis. It is Nietzsche combined with Kantian transcenden- talism that gave Bergson the false start. You cannot cover weak reasoning by being "artistic." Art is not nebulous. The artist is impelled by a motive which is opposed to a motive of an oppo- site nature. Furthermore, the lines of construc- tion become contrasted and related until that par- ticular motive is expressed — he has no free will at all. The method of the artist is precisely the method of nature. To say that there is free will is to say that a motive is capable of constructing itself without contrasts. Nature permits interpretation to the conscious ego, but that is a false liberty, for every motive is composed not only of itself but of its contrasts and subtler variations. If the interpre- tations are unsound, a contrast of discord and suffering is sure to follow. Where, then, is free will? The ego is a motive that seeks arrange- ment, the same as a chemical element. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have expressed the tragedy of the unconscious Will. Bergson is a mediocrity; he is not an artist, he has only emasculated and distorted them into the stale spirit-and-matter interpretation which the relig- ious frauds have always employed as a base for their profession. This he accomplishes by the hocus-pocus of sublimating time, space, and mat- ter. Time and space are contrasts. That which is contrast must remain contrast. Bergson made 119 a daub of it; he confused the lights and shadows and destroyed nature's motive like a weak painter. He sublimates the concentrated center into "spirit." What do you gain by giving the individual free will? Who has free will? Is it the person who finds it difficult to live, or is moved by hidden emotions? Only smug respectability has free will. It is nothing but shallowness covered by talk, "V art de bien dire," which the French like. William James does the same thing; he has an obnoxious conversational style, college erudition, much ado about nothing. He takes pains to ex- plain a petty thought that a sincere person would discard from his mind. We are helpless against the human emotions as against the coming of a tornado or volcanic eruptions. It is childish to speak about it. It is the teaching of people who are well situ- ated, souls untouched by pain. They do not know what it is not to be able to live. We are helpless unless by wisdom man finds the way that the un- conscious Will strives for, then we are parallel. Bergson discovered nothing new; his refutation of the mechanist view of life is not his own. Nietzsche had already tried that. "Truth is that kind of error which enables a species to augment itself." (See "The Mistakes of Nietzsche.") There was nothing for the two professors to do but to follow the bent of their mediocre natures, to popularize and to cheapen, to supply the de- mands of audiences made mediocre by colleges, respectable religion, and business. Bergson be- gan to spin fine thoughts and James discovered "pragmatism," "what is truth." After Schopen- hauer has shown that the Will of the universe is 1 20 unconscious, it becomes possible once more to have a conscious God, a Jesus, anything else, for that matter, as long as you are respectable. Furthermore, what is the meaning of "spirit"? There is emotion, there is beauty, but there is no such thing as spirit. Herbert Spencer The explanation by mechanism is not bad if we bear in mind that the inner meaning of mechanism is contrasted action and that there is a motive, an intention, behind the contrasted ac- tion, which employs it as a means of realizing itself. [This article needs further amplification.] Relativity— Einstein Relativity leads one nowhere ; it might lead one to insanity; it has no sides, no top or bottom. Contrast and variations within a sphere — that puts a sharp edge to the universe. Mathematical elaboration avails nothing when the point of view is weak. I believe that Nietzsche became insane because the "process of falsification" led him nowhere, but to "eternal recurrence," "the most oppressive thought." He then began to speak of "spherical space." Relativity properly applies to the greater and the lesser only. Furthermore, relativity is the weakest of all weak ideas if it has no interpreting motive to give it content. You take a real world and reduce it to the cloudy chaos of mathematics. That the universe is not a static reality, but in 121 a state of continuous becoming, that has been discussed over and over again by Nietzsche. (See "Will to Power in Science," in "The Will to Power," Vol. II.) The world is an "appear- ance of an appearance." Truth is that "process of falsification" which brings you something defi- nite; the universe is a flux; the question is, How do you condition the flux? It is like living in the fogs of London where, as Wilde says, "the cul- tured get an artistic effect, but the uncultured only catch cold." The universe is a nebula waiting for an interpreter ; a false interpretation is better than none, for it enables you to live, but a mathe- matical doctrine of relativity is without any in- terpretation. When the artist looks at a landscape or a figure he finds it flexible ; he stamps his mood upon them; the contrasted masses reshape themselves and change their tone according as his point of view is prosaic or poetic. I have no doubt that this same flexibility that exists in the sphere of art exists in every part of matter. That is as it should be. Art is the metaphysical abstract of the material universe. The universe strives until it realizes itself in human emotion. That is why I interpret the universe as the Will to Beauty. A scientist should forget all about that and apply himself to the discovery of those facts that will serve as an amplifying detail to life, that will serve utility if you wish. When a scientist talks of relativity, it means he cannot discover anything; he should leave that kind of speculation to phi- losophers. The detail must be in its place; it must not run away with itself. One wonders when reading the books of those speculative scientists what learning is for, such hair-splitting 122 detail, such motiveless ideas. My theory is that stegnosis is the meaning of that kind of learning — too much time spent sitting in professorial chairs. From this point of view, their books may be regarded as a concomitant (to use the lan- guage of Spencer) to the aforementioned condi- tion. There are authors of the Einstein class (too numerous to mention) who will cover a whole volume on the nature of time and space and not know in the end what constitutes reality. They usually finish their mathematics with quoting a sentimental poem on how difficult it is to know the mystery of life, or with a yawn about "being" outside of time and space. A person should be happy if he has not been spoiled by detail. One should run away from it as from a contagious fever. When this brain fever of science is over, humanity will be able to go back to a kind of beautiful primitivism. A detail of science in its relation to life is like a detail in a painting. It is good in its place, otherwise it is a nuisance. The one good thing that can be said in favor of the idea of relativity is, that it is a departure from the Kantian transcendentalism which also confused Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and is a step in the direction of contrasts, but a scientist that proceeds by analysis cannot go far, for na- ture does not proceed from detail to ensemble any more than an artist proceeds that way. Science can only supply the detail after the grand conception is known. Relativity applies only to the greater and the lesser; it applies to parts only, degrees of an identical quality. To reduce con- 123 trasts and variations to relativity is to reduce the ensemble to its parts. Then, again, contrasted action is not always in evidence. Contrasted action alternates with the inspiring motive. * * * * Unconscious nature begins with matter in the contrast of time and space and completes itself in the contrast, man and woman. Matter, the finite, gives contrasted meaning to time and space, the infinite. That is different than "relativity" and "spherical space." Relativity is a weak interpretation. The in- terpretation by contrast brings entirely different results. Contrasts should remain contrasts. The weakness of relativity becomes evident when the relativitists find it necessary to reduce time to a fourth dimension of space (they have no use for time), instead of letting the three di- mensions of time contrast with the three dimen- sions of space. It becomes especially evident when space is reduced to a sphere, which is a quality of matter, instead of letting matter, the finite, contrast with time and space, the infinite. Relativity is a daub of the universe, not a pic- ture — the lights and shadows and the half-tones all in a mash. There is no doubt, however, that all contrasts can be traced to the same motive from which they have their origin. This kind of relativity (if one wishes to use a misleading term) is equivalent to contrasts. * * * * Einstein's motiveless relativity, which reduces time and space to finites, is the opposite extreme of error of the Kantian idealism, which gave 124 time and space an infinite past. I notice that the relativitists (Reuterdahl) are returning to an Ab- solute, a God, u upon whom the relative reality of the cosmos depends." This is the most logical conclusion for a speculative scientist. Between the parts of space by itself there is relativity, between the parts of time by itself there is relativity; but between space and time there is no relativity, there is contrast, unless you rob time and space of their reality by reducing them to empty mathematics. In empty mathematics relativity reigns su- preme; but reality changes the relativity of mathematics into contrast. The whole idea of relativity could receive origin only in the brain of a mathematician, not an artist. The Kantian mathematics, which is based on the relation of subject to object, is the more plausible of the two. The relation of subject and object is a contrast of utmost importance — really, the greatest contrast. Spherical space is what the ego makes for himself (the circle of the horizon, the dome of the sky). The sphere is the material symbol of infinity. The manner in which Einstein proceeds is fit for a child, as follows : He begins to show, as the strongest argument for relativity, that all motion is relative, that there can be no absolute motion, and then concludes with spherical space. In spherical space motion becomes absolute; for nothing can go beyond the periphery of the sphere. It is in this way that relativity defeats itself when carried to the bitter end. Also, a child might ask, What is beyond the sphere? In infinite space all motion, however swift, is nulli- fied; is evident only as it produces a contrast. 125 The ego, and the matter of his object, is always the center in infinite space, but relativity is afraid of the concentration into a center, as not being in line with its empty mathematics. Concentration into a center and radiation from a center is a most important process in nature. Relativity demands a space that is equivalent to matter, "that is nowhere empty of matter" ; but the interpretation by contrasts does not re- quire that, according to the proposition that mat- ter, the finite, gives contrasted meaning to space, the infinite. In infinite space the ego and his matter is the concentrated center. The following is the key to the situation: In mathematics there is no sharp edge: the numeral one can be multiplied or divided to infinity; every- thing is really relative, but the sharp edge of ma- terial reality produces sharp and lesser contrasts. The mathematician who gets his idea of rela- tivity from empty mathematics and who seeks to apply that principle to the real universe must come to ridiculous conclusions; for example, he must have finite space. Matter cannot be relative to infinite space; it can only be a concentrated point in infinite space. In order to be relative, space must have a form the same as matter, it must become of an identical nature with matter; it then becomes relative, as the greater is to the lesser. But space that has a form would require another space to give it form. Spherical space requires a most unthinking person to consent to. After making space finite, the relativist does not know what to do with time, which, according to his mathematics, should be infinite; he cannot place it. He is therefore obliged to destroy its reality as a contrast to space, and make mathe- 126 matics out of it. He can then add it on to space as a fourth dimension, or do anything he likes with it. The interpretation by contrasts solves the whole problem; i.e., time and space are con- trasts of each other. Matter is the lesser contrast of time and space. Matter, the finite, is the con- trast of time and space, the infinite. Contrast and relativity may appear to be the same thing, but they are not. Nature Changes from Contrast to Motive, from Motive to Contrast As a final explanation of the nature of reality, it should be remembered that while it is true that contrast is the principle that brings definiteness out of chaos, yet every sphere, ever} 7 part of nature from the highest ensemble to the merest detail, alternates from contrast to motive, and from motive to contrast. The motive appears as an interesting mystery; it affects the emotions and not the mind. There is the mind and there is the heart. All scientists have difficulty on this point, for the nature of their work is intellectual analysis, and so they become mathematical and motiveless. The motive of mystery need not always affect us as beauty; there are the nether motives (the motives contrast each other). The motive may be utility, i.e., we may be struck with the remark- able way in which different parts of nature, or of an organism are linked together. We may find interest in the clash of power. Then again power may hide itself under a garb of humor. Humor is an ensemble. When the ego is able 127 to laugh, it means that he has power in control. Contrasted action and the inspiring motive of mystery are opposites to each other, as the in- tellect and the emotions in a human being are opposites. (Whenever two contrasts only are in evidence, time and space forms its greater con- trast; but too many lesser contrasts can not be- come evident in reality, without a lesser motive intervening.) * * * * Is it not strange how ignorant scientists are of metaphysics? They rush headlong into theism as if Schopenhauer never existed. They do not seem to understand that the "Will" is the un- conscious motive which evolves mind and form. All they know about Schopenhauer is that he was a pessimist. As a result, we have such examples as Wallace and Sir Oliver Lodge talking about the "directive mind" of a God and scores of others like them. Almost every scientific book is disgraced with a discussion about the difference between mind and matter. As soon as they get away from old-fashioned materialism they are at sea. If they receive evidence of another life they kneel to pray. The English scientists have all been misled by Spencer and his "unknowable," but even the Ger- man scientists are still ignorant of Schopenhauer. Spencer either did not understand Schopenhauer, or he could not get an English translation. * * * * The mind ever inquires for a cause, but the mind does not know that its search for a cause is necessitated by the need of a contrast. 128 The motive is the infinite, the Absolute, God, the unknowable, and all other such absurdities that philosophers invented. The motive is un- knowable to the mind; it is for the senses. The mind knows only contrasts and relativity. Immanuel Kant, the Snare of Modern Philosophy The relation of the subject to the object is a very important contrast, a relationship very much like that of the center of a circle to its periphery, which is a permanent form throughout nature, but it is only one contrast among many. The important relationship of subject to object becomes more evident in esthetic interpretation; when the ego is able to reshape reality, the im- portance becomes greater still; when in the super- state the ego is master of the circle of the horizon, but of all things, time and space are furnished to ego ready-made. Time and space have en- closed matter before the ego became conscious. He has no power over that, though his will may shape matter and the variations of matter to his heart's content. His finite being and the finiteness of matter gives meaning to time and space, the infinite. Time and space give meaning to each other. There is no need of anything a priori. There is only vision and deduction from vision. The ego is only a means which the Will to Beauty employs. It begins with time and space, the first contrast, and completes itself with man and woman. If it were not for Kant's elaborate transcen- 129 dentalism, some poor crayon artist might have told Schopenhauer what it all amounts to. Sir Oliver Lodge The "dead" live in the ether, if by the word "ether" is meant a condition of force. In that case we live in the ether also, only that the con- dition of force we live in is not yielding to our will. Why bring in ether when everything is force? Force is meaningless until it produces a contrast, that is the idea. The "dead" occupy space, the same space that we live in, only that force (or the ether) yields to their volition, while in our planetary state force yields mainly to the unconscious Will. Cause and Effect The meaning of cause and effect must be under- stood, so that the mind can be cleared from false notions. Cause and effect is equivalent to con- trast. The "principle of sufficient reason" is the sense of contrast; all contrasts flow into a motive where they are lost and become invisible. * * * * Empty mathematics can also be reduced to con- trasts and variations: it can be added because it can be subtracted; it can be multiplied because it can be divided. Infinity is the motive of mystery in mathematics. The relativity of mathematics becomes contrasts as soon as it touches reality. 130 Time and Space And now to recapitulate the nature of time and space. Time and space are contrasts that flow into the motive and stop there, the same as cause and effect and all other contrasts are traced to the motive only. It is for this reason that time and space cannot be said to have an infinite past, although in the empty mathematics of the mind infinity works both ways, past and future. When- ever the motive expressed itself in matter, time and space appeared. We may reason, however, that time has a future infinity, according to the principle of vision and deduction from vision, as follows : Space shows infinity immediately ; we can reason from this that time has a future infinity, for they are only contrasts of each other. (The immediate infinity of space is made evident by matter, the finite. Matter, the finite, gives con- trasted meaning to space, the infinite.) The ego is the concentrated center of all mat- ter. The Mistakes of Nietzsche It is strange that upon a knowledge of the nature of time and space all philosophy depends. If time has an infinite past, argued Nietzsche, then the universe should have attained balance. The fact that there is still clash and struggle shows that the universe has no aim but struggle — power seeking to exceed itself — and when the Will to Power reached its climax in the ego, or exhausted itself with the decline of the solar sys- tem, it had to begin all over again, for time is infinite. This is a most pessimistic outlook, but 131 Schopenhauer had already done that. There was nothing else for Nietzsche to do but to glorify power, to write about the esthetics of power. Had Nietzsche known that time and space are contrasts, and that all contrasts flow into and end with the motive or Will, it would have been all different. If time has no infinite past, then we may be living in a young universe. We have hope of reaching to something better than aristocracy and the "order of rank." Nietzsche's next difficulty was that he had no definite idea as to the nature of matter (reality). This he covered continually with art and clever aphorisms, "the process of falsification," as if a work of art could construct itself without em- ploying sharp and lesser contrasts. Had Nietzsche known that matter is the lesser contrast of time and space, he could have no ob- jection to an invisible world where the Will strikes a balance and is at the same time just as "ma- terialistic" as the planetary state. Schopenhauer at least held on to the relation of subject and object, but Nietzsche became nebulous. He de- nied that the universe is an organism ; the relation of subject and object was unimportant; cause and effect had no meaning; and all known truth is only the process of falsification which the Will to Power employs. He disorganized all the known forms of reality without being able to put forward the basic principle which lies underneath the present forms, i.e., contrasts. The motive of the universe must employ sharp and lesser contrasts the same as a motive of art. Not to know this is only to fall into weakness, and you cannot cover this weakness by being ar- tistic. (See "The Will to Power," Vol. II.) It 132 is true that art is interpretation and that the Will is an interpreting force; but in every interpreta- tion there is a rational construction. This vacant, though clever, writing of Nietzsche only paved the way for the more vacant philosophies of Bergson and William James. Nietzsche's most unpardonable error was that of ''finite space," "spherical space," a limited space that is nowhere empty of matter. This idea found its culmination in the empty mathe- matics of relativity. How can space have a form? It would require another space to give it form. Here, too, contrasts would have helped Nietzsche; i.e., matter, the finite, gives contrasted meaning to space, the infinite. No matter how great the quantity of matter, it could only be a contracted point in infinite space. We see from this how important contrasts are as a key to time and space and matter. We can also see how a philosophy is built up. The Mind, the Amplifier The human organism is a unit. Every part of the organism, whether it be the body, the senses, the mind, or the grand emotions, presents the phenomenon of continuous change from contrast to motive and from motive to contrast. Con- trasted action in the mind is no different from con- trasted action in the physics and the chemistry of our environment. The objective environment of the ego changes from contrast to motive and from motive to contrast the same as the ego, the subject. The relation of subject to object is the most important contrast. Because nature seeks the climax of its passion, therefore it requires a 133 mind. That is all that being conscious means : a higher mode of vibration. The mind may construct an emotion or remain invisible behind the emotion. (See corroborative detail in "Psychoanalysis.") What psycho- analysts call the "unconscious" is nothing but the retreat of the mind (contrasted action) into the motive. The great unconscious motive of the universe is the Will, which was first conceived by Schopen- hauer. The Will seeks itself in forms of reality by continuous contrasted action until it reaches the mind in an ego. The body of the ego is the concentrated center. It is the body which makes him an ego, otherwise the unconscious Will of the universe can be said to "think" in the sense that it constructs its motives through contrasted action. When secretions enter the blood, due to the ab- normal action of certain glands, they stimulate thought and action. It is because the ego has an amplifying mind that he is able to attain finally to high emotion without sorrow. The Will to Beauty seeks itself in the ego, then places the ego in the superstate. This enables the ego to select from nature's forms of reality those appropriate to his nature, to imi- tate the reality of matter; for the reality of our planetary matter is nothing more than a complex of motives and contrasts. It is because the ego has an amplifying "mind" seeking a higher order of arrangement that he suffers from obsessions, false beliefs, and insanity. Reverse energy com- mon throughout our present planetary arrange- ment is all it is. Nature hides a contrast of imperfection even where it is evidently perfect and beautiful, until it attains to the ego on the 134 plane of art. This imperfection in nature is its imperfect "thought." * * The mind, then, is nothing in itself, but an amplification, a structure of contrasts, by which means the motive reaches its goal. 3fC 2|C ?|C 3JC There is no such thing as independent mind. The ego is a unit. There is no such thing as "pure reason." The mind is always prejudiced; i.e., it is always impelled by a motive, otherwise it becomes empty mathematics. The active mind in the ego, in that it is a complex of motives and contrasts, is no different from matter, which is also a complex of contrasts and motives, only that "matter" is the concentrated center, the point of contact. The universe may be compared to a machine composed of many wheels (motives) and double-acting levers (contrasts) emerging from the wheels. Force enters the machine at one end, and by the complex action of motives and con- trasts an interesting article is turned out at the other end. The ego is the interesting product. The force of electricity begins with its positive and negative poles, steam begins with its con- trasted levers, the Will of the universe begins with time and space and ends in the emotion of beauty (emotion without sorrow) in an ego. Towards that end a constructive mind is needed. The Self-Creative Reality is self-creative. All the self-creative reality of our environment is an evident relation- ship of subject to object. (Explanatory — exter- nal nature so arranges itself as to suit the wants *3S and characteristics of the ego.) It also modifies the ego, so that he will accommodate himself to the environment. It is this arrangement between subject and object, evident throughout nature in the relationship of the animal to its environment, as well as that of man, which probably caused Immanuel Kant to suppose that external time and space finds its counterpart in the mind of the ego. Time, space, and matter are sharp and lesser con- trasts that existed before the ego was evolved. Time and space serve to give the ego immor- tality, while matter permits him to have an appro- priate environment. The ego is the center of his self-creative environment, i.e., the center of his horizon. As the mysterious color quality on the surface of pottery is self-creative and yet it permits itself to be directed, so the self-creative reality of the superplane of art permits itself to be directed by the ego. The artist merely ar- ranges the matter that is given to him. The self- creative reality of our planetary state permits itself to be directed socially (with a loophole for death, for the Will cannot remain immortal on the planet). The self-creative is magic. The animal is not immortal because it is not a sufficiently appropriate center in the sphere of art in which the Will to Beauty seeks itself. The human egos, man and woman, are the concen- trated center. (The mind that asks for a cause for the self-creative, does not know that the inner meaning of cause and effect is only contrasted action — it is a means of accommodating the ego to his environment; it stops with the motive.) The universe is an organism, a plant that rises from root to flower, by means of sharp contrasts 136 and many lesser variations until its motive of beauty is attained. Free Will When an organism discharges its energy it feels free, but in reality its action is bound by the law of contrasts. The conscious ego has power to interpret and to select, but that liberty is only apparent. The mind means nothing. The ego is, after all, a motive that seeks arrangement, like all other motives. The present action may be a contrast or variation of a previous action or else the present action is an indication of what the future act will be, for every motive is not only itself (that which appears at present), but also contrasts and variations as yet not evident. Then, again, the character of a species may be contrasted to another; e.g., the beauty of the song bird in the tree is different from the beauty of the bird who does not sing but whose plumage brings a note of color to the foreground of a landscape — each is bound by its character. A more strik- ing example is the contrast of male and female; they are not free, they only feel free when their desires coincide with the Will to Beauty, and when an appropriate environment permits the expression of their desires. As soon as man acts according to a false interpretation or when an imperfect environment interferes, we are not free, we suffer. The unconscious Will to Beauty em- ploys the ego and his mind as a means of realizing itself. It also employs all nether motives, such as power and utility, as a means of constructing itself. The whole universe is force seeking ar- rangement. 137 Reincarnation The subject of reincarnation is almost too foolish to discuss, when the central doctrine of the Will to Beauty is understood; but to one who does not know that cause and effect in nature and the mind's action in judging from reason to consequence are both due to contrasted action, and that all contrasts are traced to the motive and no further, reincarnation will appear to the mind as logical, inevitable, even, especially when people believe in an after-life. It is the child's mind, the naive mind that does not know its own action. "I am here now; I must have been somewhere before." This deluded Socrates in the Phaedo; and even Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were not free from its taint. (See "Infinity and Chaos.") Furthermore, it implies an ignorance of the na- ture of matter. People ask, When we die, if we do not return to this planet, do we go to another planet? A motive acting through sharp and lesser con- trasts is all that there is to planetary matter, with the ego as the concentrated center in the circle of his horizon. If the human ego needs "development," could not the harmonic motive of the universe best accomplish that in the superstate, where the en- vironment is just as real and yet yielding to the ego, instead of separating people who have loved each other, and returning the mature mind to infancy? The ego does not need much develop- ment, he needs arrangement. The ego in the superstate is incarnated in a body the same as ours, he does not need to be reincarnated. There is no such thing as a soul or a spirit. 138 The Relation of Subject to Object This is the most important relationship. How else can it be? The ego could not exist if he did not correspond to his environment. Schopenhauer brings this out very clearly in the chapter on "Comparative Anatomy" in "The Will in Na- ture." Speaking of how the Will modifies its anatomical form in the animal, "according to the aims prescribed to it by external circumstances," he says as follows : If it (the Will) desires to climb about in trees, it catches at the boughs at once with four hands, while it stretches the ulna and radius to an excessive length and immediately prolongs the os coccygis to a curly tail, a yard long, in order to hang by it to the boughs and swing itself from one branch to another. If, on the other hand, it desires to crawl in the mud as a crocodile, to swim as a seal, or to burrow as a mole, these same arm-bones are shortened till they are no longer recognizable; in the last case the metacarpus and phalanges are enlarged to dis- proportionately large shovel-paws, to the prejudice of the other bones. But if it wishes to fly through the air as a bat, not only are the os humeri, radius and ulna prolonged in an incredible manner, but the usually small and sub- ordinate carpus, metacarpus and phalanges digitorum ex- pand to an immense length, as in St. Anthony's vision, outmeasuring the length of the animal's body, in order to spread out the wing-membrane. If, in order to browse upon the tops of very tall African trees, it has, as a giraffe, placed itself upon extraordinarily high fore-legs, the same seven vertebrae of the neck, which never vary as to num- ber and which, in the mole, were contracted so as to be no longer recognizable, are now prolonged to such a de- gree, that here, as everywhere else, the neck acquires the same length as the fore-legs, in order to enable the head to reach down to drinking-water. But where, as is the case when it appears as the elephant, a long neck could 139 not have borne the weight of the enormous, unwieldy head — a weight increased, moreover, by tusks a yard long — the neck remains short, as an exception, and a trunk is let down as an expedient, to lift up food and draw water from below and also to reach up to the tops of trees. . . . The ant-bear, for instance, is not only armed with long claws on its fore-feet, in order to break into the nests of the white ant, but also with a prolonged cylin- drical muzzle, in order to penetrate into them, with a small mouth and a long, threadlike tongue, covered with a glutinous slime, which it inserts into the white ant's nests and then withdraws covered with the insects that adhere to it: on the other hand it has no teeth, because it does not want them. Who can fail to see that the ant- bear's form stands in the same relation to the white ants as an act of the will to its motive? The ego in the superstate of magic and art represents the same relationship to its environ- ment as the animal that has a coat of fur, horns, and claws. Interpretation as a Means of Discovering the Truth, as Opposed to the Scientific Method In a universe where contrasted action is all that there is to reality, scientific analysis can only dis- cover parts. In every scientific discovery there is the empirical element of interpretation. Exact science is empty mathematics. Interpretation is the motive. No inventor can proceed without an interpreting motive, however little he may speak about it or confess it to others. Interpretation and analysis are contrasted methods of procedure, both are necessary. Interpretation is a faith, a vision, with the cor- roborative evidence deferred for a later time. 140 He that refuses to wait but must have the evi- dence at once can be as "scientific" as he likes, but he cannot go very far. This is especially true when we come to investi- gate the invisible sphere — psychic phenomena. To stop short at the immediate fact, is the same as for an artist to become engrossed with a photographic detail instead of seeking the en- semble. We must wait and the detail will take its place. I was led to the Will to Beauty by observing that an ensemble of vision changes prosaic and confusing detail into beauty. When I examined psychic phenomena I assumed that we live. When I felt profound emotion I assumed that it is the outlet which the Will to Beauty seeks in life. I then had courage to proceed with the corrobora- tive detail. Oscar Wilde and Whistler There are some very remarkable passages in "The Critic as an Artist," in "The Decay of Lying," and in "The Soul of Man under Social- ism," proving that Wilde had the vision of an artist. He needed the rational basis of Schopen- hauer and Nietzsche. The idea repeated throughout "The Critic as an Artist," i.e., that real life becomes more inter- esting when interpreted by art, that is the one great idea ; it is this which the Will of the universe is striving for by raising the ego to the superstate. To quote : E. Must we go, then, to Art for everything? G. For everything. Because Art does not hurt us. The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile I 4 I emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken. We weep, but we are not wounded. ... It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realize our perfection ; through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence. This very same sphere of art is possible in a rationally constructed social order. It is toward this that Wilde's artistic nature was striving in "The Soul of Man under Socialism," but he lacked a rational basis. Where there is no rational construction the emotions go out in superstition and decadence. Wilde speaks against the academic philosopher, the abstractions of Kant, "the formless, intangible Being which Plato rates so high," "the illumina- tion of Philo, the Abyss of Eckhart, the Vision of Boehme, the monstrous Heaven that was re- vealed to Swedenborg's blinded eyes," but he does not mention the Will of Schopenhauer. Wilde was destined to attain profounder emotion through sorrow in real life (as is usually the case) than can be attained through art. Sorrow swept away his reason, or rather it found him without any intellectual base, and so he turned to religion in the "Ballad of Reading Gaol." He could not have done that if he had been convinced that the Will is an unconscious motive seeking conscious- ness in an ego. It may also be said that if Nietzsche had the artistic nature of Wilde, and his sense of humor, he could not have taken the Will to Power so seriously. Wilde's hermaphroditic nature is an error with regard to the law of contrasts. Na- ture's object is the contrast of man and woman. Whistler might have helped Wilde, or else Whistler might have continued Schopenhauer 142 much better than Nietzsche did. Whistler was interested in spiritism, and his power of interpret- ing prosaic reality into beauty by vision in en- semble might have led him to the conclusion that the universe is the Will to Beauty. 5JC 3|C 5JC 5JS The secret sorrows of life, my friends, the sor- rows that the unintellectual old man and woman bear, are greater than the emotions of art. If the Will to Beauty reached its climax in a con- dition of insufficient emotion, future life would not be profound enough. It is for the social order of the future to arrange life on a rational base, so that the emotions will go forth gradually in happiness and beauty, instead of reaching a hasty climax through pain and sorrow; it is then that the superplane of art will be realized amongst us. Walt Whitman Whitman suffered from the American prov- incialism of his time. His intellectual relation- ship with a retired clergyman like Emerson could do him no good. He needed Schopenhauer, but according to his own admission, "In libraries, I lie as one dead." That was his trouble, he did not read. His philosophy needed intellectual specifications. As it is, it is a hazy ensemble full of error; for example, his constant assurance of immortality is meaningless unless he told the reader that he based his belief on his experiences in seance rooms and psychic phenomena; this might be prosaic in the midst of poetry, but his poetry has intervals of prose just the same. Had he lived in Europe with the intellectual association 143 of Wilde, Whistler, Nietzsche, Wagner, and Karl Marx, he might have been the man to gather the scattered motives and write u The Will to Beauty." His "Leaves of Grass" shows that he had attained to profound emotion; such passages as these : Thus by blue Ontario's shore, I thrilled with the Pow- er's pulsations, and the charm of my theme was upon me. Till the tissues that held me, parted their ties upon me, and I saw the free Souls of poets. The loftiest bards of past ages strode before me. They are like the psalms of David : I will incline mine ear to a parable: I will open my dark saying to the lyre. The people of the future will need poetry like Whitman's, as they needed the Psalms, only it must be free from error. It only goes to show that emotion is not suffi- cient for the purpose of constructing a philosophy of life. Contrasted Styles in Art Here is a difficulty which troubles every artist, and which only the law of contrasts can make clear: Every style grows out of its opposite, as the day grows out of the night. There is only one theme in art, and that is the expression of in- terest and beauty on a basis of realism, but the artist who chooses one style will denounce that which is opposite to it, or else he himself, after exhausting one style, will drift into its opposite and regard his own former work as valueless, or if he admire two opposites, he will have difficulty in deciding which to follow. The law of con- trasts settles that. 144 Mediocrity and insincerity in art always remain mediocrity and insincerity, no matter what style. Such people go from impressionism to post- impressionism, thinking that by changing the ex- ternal form they will gain something. Either they lack emotion, or they lack the power of ex- pression. If they lack emotion, it is all off; but if they lack the power of expression, they should not worry, they need do nothing; sincerity soon expresses itself. Every style of art has its possibilities for the expression of realism, power and beauty, but in pure impressionism, i.e., the vision in ensemble, I see the greatest feat of painting, although there is a great deal of beauty and interest in the con- scious imitation of primitive effort, or postim- pressionism, as it is called; just as the photographic artists, the old masters, the English painters, have expressed a great deal of beauty by the mere pose of the figure and by lighting. There is a correspondence in the other arts. In music, elaborate orchestration that expresses subtle beauty is the highest feat, although the primitive folk-song style is an opposite mode of expression. Nietzsche contra Wagner Until now there was no philosophy that would permit the human emotions to flow in an ecstasy that dilates and glorifies the individual, instead of prayer and sorrow that humbles. The lyri- cism of Greek myth alone permitted that. Nietzsche tried to turn Greek philosophy to serve the need of the modern, but he lacked the Olympian inspiration. What could Dionysian ecstasy mean to us? 145 It is like presenting an ancient play to a modern audience. It invariably leaves us cold, it bears the mold of history about it. To Wagner, Christ and Schopenhauer's pessimism was more real. Christ and Schopenhauer had plenty of proof in the world-sorrow. The primitive intoxication of Dionysus had no basis in modern belief; it served the primitive mind of that epoch only. Early Greek belief was really the philosophy of the present "Will to Beauty" in the form of myth, not sufficiently amplified in clear reason. (The Socratic philosophy was an approach towards Christianity. ) Nietzsche could not supply the right philoso- phy. The idea of "The Will to Power" might inspire the warrior; Wagner the poet needed a vision of profounder emotion. Nietzsche's phi- losophy is after all only the esthetology of Ger- man militarism. JJC 5j« # * In Wagner's music, melody has attained suf- ficiently subtle expression, except that its beauty was wound about a Christian and medieval theme. Elaborate orchestration must not become intellectual; it must be subservient to deep feel- ing, to melody; it must not run away with itself. The person who occupies himself with that has more ambition than sincerity; he lacks a vision of sufficient beauty. With Wagner, the art of orchestration meant the construction of sincere emotion into melody of sufficient subtleness (in parts). A mode of expression contrasted to Wagnerian orchestration is the single melody of primitive simplicity. Every mode of expression is good if it is sincere. All sincere people have their mode of expression, they create their own 146 music in moments of deep feeling. Art is only its amplification by the intellect. * * * * After all, what is art that it should be made so much of? Art cannot reach to the height and depth of emotion; that is only possible in life. The artist has a vision of beauty, and then he takes a week to express it in appropriate tech- nique. Sincerity is art or, rather, all that is pro- found in art is a reflection of sincerity of feeling. The artist may forget that they who publish them- selves remain vacant. * * * * Nietzsche preferred Bizet's "Carmen" to the love-sorrow of Wagner's "Parsifal," with the usual ignorance of mankind who do not know that nature seeks contrasted modes of expression. (Religious ecstasy seeks a contrast in sex passion.) There is no reason why Parsifal should not be produced with virile Spanish music and dances, as an interlude (since the theme of Parsifal is false). * * * * The unconscious Will to Beauty holds in store for the ego the most wonderful emotion. They who have not felt it cannot believe it, but once felt, it is marvelous to know that the universe holds such depths of feeling within itself — it is more than words can tell. It satisfies the longing of the heart; all external commotion pales before it. It justifies the existence of the universe. Business Engaging in business reacts by destroying the esthetic nature of the individual. If the business 147 is on a large scale, it turns the human qualities into mechanist energy. It occupies one's time with foolish thought and leaves no leisure, for such people are never through with their work. These people become the patrons of religion; this is only adding insult to injury; they forget that they break the one great social law upon which all the others depend, i.e., by taking for themselves that which should be socialized, such as land, machinery, the means of social produc- tion and distribution. All crime can be laid to the false economic system, and to sex, which is indirectly aggravated by the economic system and religion. Our religio-economic arrangement does not permit eugenics, by which means the business- tainted mind, the advantage-taker, and the crimi- nal could be eradicated. Its wasteful method brings on forced labor that disfigures the form of man and humiliates his nature, and poverty which robs the woman of her pride and beauty; while a surplus output congests the world markets and brings on war. The pleasures of the business man are me- diocre; the stage, music, painting, soon descend to the level of their minds, for they are the ones that hold the reins of power; while the bashful sincerity of the sex impulse is by them desecrated. It is nothing for them to converse about that element of sex which the artist and passionate lover feels to be private. Such people make fun of the idealist, the phi- losopher, and sincere person; for the nature of business is insincerity, gain acquired by insincere means; the honesty of labor and production is not for them, they rather school themselves to 148 become adaptable to such obnoxious detail as their business requires; it is this which gives their faces the prosaic appearance; they would just as soon sell manure as anything else. There is nothing to learn from such people except how to be practical in an imperfect society; for they are not given to reason clearly, and yet clear reason based on an esthetic motive is the very thing that a woman admires in a man, as it sustains her emotional nature. The architecture of the business man is ugly, for it depends on the lot of ground. (See "The Perfect City.") Such things react on the eye of the beholder who is unconsciously affected by it, for the eye, as well as the ear, is negative to external sounds and sights; and nature did not create beautiful landscapes and song birds for nothing. As it is, each business man is in his own nook probably selling the same article that a competitor is selling a few houses away. Surrounded by ugly advertising signs, the stench of automobiles, the noise of drivers en- gaged in the art of competitive distribution, they spend their lives waiting for death. We can only repeat with the author of "The Right to be Lazy," "We materialists are sorry there is no hell where we can send such people to." * * In the superstate every man becomes an artist and a philosopher, so we need not be too serious — business is only a momentary delusion. Humor is force coordinated. The wielding of power is force in the process of clash. 149 Romanticism Romanticism is a condition of beauty or emo- tion that is not built on a construction of rational- ism. A reaction of imperfection is bound to take place. Of such nature is the sentiment in the popular drama and novel; such ideas as fame, the good fortune of becoming rich, social precedence, aristocracy, royalty, etc. In all the above forms of sentiment disappointment is due. We do not need good fortune at the expense of another's ill fortune; the highest is awaiting each of us. We need a rationally arranged social order upon which the emotions can construct themselves without sorrow or disappointment. The harmonic motive of the universe cannot stay satisfied in a condition of rich and poor, master and servant, good and evil. It seeks a condition where contrasts will go to form one harmonic unit, the same as the light and shade of a picture. It is idle to imagine that the motive of the universe is anything but harmonic; that being the case, what sense is there to preach and to condone, to seek to prolong a social arrange- ment where the above-mentioned contrasts are produced? A clash is inevitable, by direct opposi- tion or by subterfuge. There is no possible way of avoiding it (for nature is terribly powerful) ; it cannot be stopped from reaching its objective until the arrangement is right. Then what seemed the terrific clash of power becomes human laugh- ter. Human beings will arrange themselves in contrasted types, the same as two beautiful trees, which are different one from another. 150 THE GREAT PRINCIPLE IN CONSTRUC- TION First invisible mechanism, or rational construc- tion underneath; then nature, the human, beauty, emotion. EMOTION SATISFIES When a human being attains to profound emotion, he is satisfied; he does not need the ex- ternal commotion, e.g., the glory of conquest of Nietzsche's superman. The wielding of wealth and power is a means of stimulating the emotions to a human being who cannot otherwise feel deeply. It only means that the Will does not let people rest; they must have some form of commotion, but in profound emotion the Will rests compensated and satisfied. 151 THE HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN My friends, this is the doctrine that will deal the death blow to the religio-economic arrange- ment. The perfection of man depends on his weaknesses. All human qualities are a transmutation of the tremendous power that the unconscious Will holds within itself, viz., jealousy, envy, lying, stealing, conceit, eating, drinking, and sex love. All human weaknesses are good, except power, e.g., the skill of monopoly in business, conquest in war, and the powerful criminal. The human frailties appear as faults. They are faults now because the social order is false, but under a condition of perfection a human being that would be without these qualities would be inhuman. Among peasants, among uneducated people, among children and among animals, that naive quality remains, and it is for this reason that they are interesting. A human being is loved not for his pretensions to power and virtue, but because of his human frailties, because of his errors, in fact. The human is the climax of evo- lution, but respectability, civilization, is forced and uninteresting; it is a return to mechanist force. An example may be taken from astronomy. What good are the distant suns, their awful size, the terrible force hidden in them? The soft 152 moonlight on the road is an esthetic transmuta- tion of that terrible force. The clash of ponderous bodies in stellar space, the roar of the wild beast in the jungle, are but symbols of power, they are but fractions of power; but when man laughs, he exhibits power in ensemble. Power clashes and struggles until it can transmute itself into human laughter; just as the graceful movement of a woman's hand or the music among the trees is an ensemble. The powerful Will to Beauty has concentrated itself in a form and movement of grace; it has trans- muted its clash and thunder into a sound of har- mony. Why should unconscious nature first evolve man and woman and then tell them to struggle, first implant certain emotions and then forbid their expression? The unconscious Will only seeks consciousness (completion) in man and woman. Why should the Will struggle against itself? The sincere human ego is the most help- less, and in his helplessness, he is most perfect. The human ego shows his perfection in a condi- tion of imperfection even; his so-called imperfect acts, in a condition of imperfection, are a theme for a comedy or a tragi-comedy, rather than for a moralist; one might as well moralize to a goat in an environment where there is no vegetation. Nature is built on expression rather than re- pression. When a kitten is well fed it plays with its tail, otherwise it turns to prayer and supplica- tion; so be it with man, his God, and the don'ts of his ten commandments. A human being finds himself in an unnatural environment, where others have much and he has little; a cunning idea strikes him: he steals. A 153 religio-moralist-economist appears on the scene; he raises a hue and cry. How could you do such a thing! Instead a dramatist should be called, in order to get the "local color." Here is a human being, the height of nature's evolution, the Will of the universe individualized, in a world of great abundance, accused of stealing, when he has only given us an example of human dexterity. In the superstate, his every desire will materialize before him ; he will then laugh at himself ; laugh ! not repent. Unconscious nature evidently wished to evolve that cunning quality which enables him to steal, or else it would never come into existence (a certain amount of shrewdness is necessary for the health of the mind) ; under a perfect social order it would not be theft but humor, the same with every other human quality that might appear as a fault now. They are a part of our cunning make-up without which we would be a saintly abstraction or a marble statue. It is remarkable that a human being capable of doing these things was evolved, i.e., that the contrasts and varia- tions of force could ever attain to that degree of subtlety. A human being should not be preached to any more than a plant should be preached to; all you have to do is feed the root and the flower will appear. The human flower is emotion; but when people assume power, they frustrate na- ture's process of transmuting power into human interest and into beauty, and the flower of emo- tion finds an outlet in sorrow. In a false social order, false ideas of power and conquest are placed before the ambitious. Meanwhile the preachers are kept busy exhorting the populace to become "perfect." 154 A human being does not have to be successful at all; he is more interesting when he is not suc- cessful, because then the human quality has a chance to come forward. In time people will understand this; they will then laugh at them- selves. Foolish audiences listen with awe to lec- turers v T ho tell them about this great man and that greac man. The shepherd boy who became a statesman, the wood-cutter who became a presi- dent, the vagrant who became a millionaire, and the sinner who became a saint. Why, it is ridicu- lous ! There is nothing more beautiful than the helpless human quality. Man does not have to evolve or improve to a greater perfection; rather he must be saved from the "civilization" which causes his energy to express itself in the wielding of power. Power is evident — appears as a valuable factor, in imperfect nature only. In the beginning, power appears in clash, but in a condition of perfection power hides itself, it transmutes itself into an in- teresting human quality, into an expression of the face that arouses our sympathy, into helplessness, into human temptation and "sin," as well as into profound emotion. Whether the dominance of power expresses itself as business success, the domination of Nietzsche's monarchial superman, the power of the austere ascetic to dominate his own nature, or the domination of the machine over the human hand, the result is the same. The tremendous effort brings one nothing but disappointment. Nature does not want an exhi- bition of power. Nature has too much power; it is tired of it, it wants to transmute it, and to hide it. An example may be taken from chem- istry; the nitrogen which forms the chief element in explosives, the powerful oxygen and hydrogen transmute themselves into a green leaf, the petal of a flower, and into a drop of dew. Another example may be taken from astronomy. The distant suns serve a mechanist purpose, they keep the stellar system in place, they gather the meteoric matter that might otherwise destroy our solar system, but that is not visible to us; all we see are stars in a dome of azure. All that tre- mendous energy has subjugated itself for the sake of our little planet. Nietzsche's stern superman can remain stern until an insidious microbe finds its way into his entrails and gives him the cholera ; he then is forced to bend in two ; he yields. Then all nature either mocks at him or pities him. The celibate ascetic gains nothing for all his effort but an "impure mind." Nature does not need his self-torture, his "immaculate conception," and his philosophy of hate and anger, for sex is nature's central motive. He might as well be a sinner and be human. The successful business man acquires pelf and a despicable appearance, and as regards the domination of the machine — I cannot speak of it, it would require a volume of Lamentations. Let no mortal imagine, then, that he can bring forward an arrangement of power that will sup- plant the human and the naive. There is no God that answers the prayers of clashing armies on the field of battle ; there is only a God that seeks to extricate himself from the clash of power and to hide himself under a garb of impotence. Nature's imperfection is greater than man's idea of perfection. The idea of "perfection" is the reflex action of the machine. It is due to man's fear of God. When he sees the thunder i 5 6 and lightning, he decides to take the vow of celi- bacy and abstinence. Nature is profounder, more interesting, than human conventions. Observe the "color quality" in nature; a leaf, the varia- tion of a shell or a pebble, the fur of animals, the subtle color of birds' feathers. Human char- acter, likewise, holds within itself a profundity if unhampered by the conventional power of the religio-economic order or the need for outward etiquette and politeness. The people that can accommodate themselves to a false social order are the empty, the spoiled; they take their hat off, they speak politely, but they are only machines. Observe simple people when the stern force of the monarchial or capitalist state confronts them. How beautiful is their helplessness, compared with an exhibition of power ! That wonderful quality in a human being which arouses our sym- pathy, our sense of humor, which permits us to be intimate, that is the true profundity; but "greatness" and "power" are externals not yet transmuted into the human. They frighten us, as the elements frighten us. The self-denial of religion is only the opposite extreme of the power of the monarchial or capi- talist state, — another form of power, the human, is the harmonic outlet. Emotion must not be forced out of a human being by religion. We must have the faith that emotion will construct itself upon its nether mo- tives, upon the appetites, the desires, and pas- sions, upon humor, upon sex, upon the expression of every human quality. They do not have to be suppressed in favor of religion; all these are like the roots and leaves of a plant that gradually lead to the flower. When these nether motives 157 are suppressed, they reverse themselves, then "evil" makes its appearance; the human being has not had his fill of them, the same as if the roots of a plant are not fed sufficiently (a new order of contrasts and variations makes its ap- pearance in the character of man). Human emotion satisfies the secret longing of the heart; then the human being shows his great- ness. He does not need fame or power as a stimulus; everything else is childish, empty, theatrical. The wielding of power by any individual in the social organism does harm to society. How else can it be? — the master must have his servant, the domineering conqueror, his victim. Then re- ligion enters; these two, power and self-control, destroy the innocent, the naive, the beautiful hu- man qualities. The human qualities are stultified by mechanism, they go to asceticism, on the one hand, or to the opposite extreme of drunkenness and decadence. Then a false heredity enters, and imperfect people are born; (unconscious na- ture depends on the ego for arrangement). There is really nothing else but socialism and a eugenic arrangement. Then the knowledge of the true philosophy will bring out the emotions in happiness. *** *f* *t* *?* It must be remembered that socialism is only a mechanist arrangement; it must not come to the front and destroy the human. By its means, human drudgery will be relieved; the emotions will not have to exhaust themselves in pity, and nature's lavish wealth will not be doled out in charity. 2f£ 3ft 3|C 3JC 158 The human being is perfect; all that is neces- sary is an environment where his energy will not imitate the clash of power among the elements, but will transmute itself to wit and humor, and to the love of realism in art, until it reaches at intervals the flower, emotion. Every human emotion is wonderful. Every human movement is perfect, a shrug of the shoul- der, a motion of the hand, the expression of the face; sex desire is goodness; timidity and bash- fulness are signs of sincerity; laughter and tears are ensembles of the universe. But an exhibition of power frightens away what is human. People who are easily frightened appear weak, but there is more power integrated into their make-up than in those who dominate. Perhaps in the embarrassment of our imperfect social order they become confused and commit some- thing contrary to its laws. The harsh moralist may censure such a person, but one who is more profound will see in their very frailty a sign of greater sincerity. They are like a frail vessel that must be handled carefully. It is for this reason that the Will to Beauty has prepared for them the superstate where they can laugh at power. * * * * Self-control always finds its antithesis in the wielding of power over another — if not in the same individual, then in the social organism. Self-control brings sorrow to oneself, the wielding of power brings sorrow to others. 159 Nature shows its utter contempt for power when it opposes the insidious microbe against the most powerful organism. Man's power is in the realism of humor and the realism of art. The contrasted viewpoint of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is only the religio-economic arrange- ment over again. jjt *p *p *t* Nature does not care anything about morality. The morality that is preached in an imperfect social order only serves the exigencies of the moment. There is nothing that can stop an im- perfect social arrangement from kicking back under strain. When the arrangement is such that one class of people are preached into the practice of virtue and charity, another class of people will find it interesting to practice craftiness. Observe that it is this perverse quality of a human being which makes of him a being of great interest to the artist, playwright — much more than the peo- ple that conform — just because he betrays the human. Where the near-sighted dramatist sees villains and heroes, the artist sees humor, the cunning, the naive, or else an occasion for pathos or the emotion of beauty. The artist-playwright draws more humor, more of the human touch, out of the lives of vagrants and pickpockets than out of the lives of respectable people ; in fact, he is more likely to blame the respectable people. If his vision is very wide he will not even do that; he will see them, too, as poor puppets, helpless, moved by invisible strings; the cholera makes 1 60 them bend in two, and a toothache swells their faces the same as anybody else. Upon the great stage of life, the superplane of art, it is the same; imperfections disappear, morality and immorality disappear, the human frailties become a source of interest instead of a problem. The interpretation of the artist be- comes a reality on the plane of art. The human ego is like a rough stone or jewel with an interesting color quality. When he is polished down he may fit into an imperfect social order of repression, but he will not fit into Na- ture's scheme of expression. Nature has evolved these human ''imperfections"; it has put together an interesting human quality out of uninteresting power. Power transmutes itself into a mood, an ex- pression of interest, into an appealing feature. The very qualities of error are wonderful. The mathematics of force has become a human "error," a "sin." Even the "pettiness" of the human being has a meaning. In an appropriate environment the ego would not be interesting enough without this "pettiness." That human frailty which Nietzsche would call the negative expression of the Will to Power has more power hidden into it than evident power. The noble lord is theatrical; there is more "color quality" in a beggar. There is no evolution for the "imperfect" human ego unless we wish to call the awakening of profound emotion evolution. There is only arrangement on the superplane of art, where the human qualities become interesting. And the 161 superplane of art, my unsophisticated friends, can be made just as much a reality under a condition of economic independence such as socialism, as it is in the superstate of individualism. People do not understand this now; they are intimidated by the religio-moral preachers. Some people think that they have to be reincarnated a number of times before they can become "per- fect." I would invite such people to visit a cage of well-fed, hence sociable, monkeys; they might then see how much more interesting is the naive than the saintly. Observe vulgar people away from the rigor of polite civilization (where power is not resorted to). Listen to the conver- sation of market people in small European towns, and learn. * * * * Emotion should not be preached out of people, the human is interesting enough. Nature takes care of our emotions. Life brings them out. Nature is a plant that grows from root to flower. The ego is a plant that grows into flower in good time. We need a social order that will permit the human being to live without struggle. We do not need religion. The best religion is to permit the ego to laugh at God and morality. * * * * And now should the question be asked, Is there nothing virile? Is there no stamina in human character? My ready answer (and I consider this the strongest point in the book) is: That which gives strength to a work of art gives strength to human character; i.e., contrasts and variations. The virile painter puts his sharp and lesser contrasts just where they belong. It is that 162 which gives a thing distinction and "power." The mediocre artist, who has no decided vision, has the lights, shadows, and half-tones all over the picture. By contrasting his moods the superman attains to the highest order of power; not the actual picictice of power of the domineering aris- tocrat or the self-conquering ascetic. (See "Be- yond Good and Evil.") Schopenhauer was discouraged because he could not dominate his passions, and Nietzsche, who was sick most of the time, strained in an opposite direction. It is the religio-economic over again in spite of their atheistic basis. The superman may go from the interesting color quality of the human to a clear intellect, where from nebulous mystery the scheme of things becomes evident, but he will be no more than a chess-player who makes clever moves with kings and queens, bishops, knights, and castles ; he cannot dominate over another ego, for the other would have the three dimensions of space to escape to, and live in self-sufficiency. He can no longer lead combats and own industries. He may go with his beloved, from nature ecstasies, to the satiation of sex, and from that they may go together to vulgar and daring humor, and to feasting, but in all this, power be- comes lost. Contrasting the mood is what gives strength. The human "imperfections" need no more be eliminated than the ego need be castrated. He never becomes so angelic that he does not need to evacuate. 163 THE SOCIAL ORDER OF THE FUTURE A Corollary of Styles and Forms Around the Central Figure of Sincerity The anarchist is hasty; he anticipates the con- dition of individualism in the superstate. The planetary arrangement is intended to be social; it cannot be otherwise or we would return to prim- itivism. But (this is important) all government is mechanistic; i.e., its nature is power; it must therefore he kept in the background, so that it does not encroach upon the central figure, i.e., the sincere ego. The nature of government being utilitarian, it must not be elaborated upon, it must not over- awe. Even socialists might make the error of elaborating officialism. This is the true view- point. We must never forget that the universe arranges itself so that the individual can laugh at every manifestation of power. A perfect so- ciety is one which insures the individual against economic want. That is what nature does in the superstate ; everything else is theatrical, it resolves itself to styles of dress and styles of speech. The sincere ego remains the center; he can assume any part, the same as an actor. Nietzsche and his deluded exponents have cov- ered so much waste paper on the subject of aris- tocracy that I feel it incumbent upon me to analyze its significance. I find that it resolves itself into a 164 style of speech and dress and that actors on the stage can imitate it well. The only difference be- tween the stage and real life is that people in "real life" become fine actors as soon as they convince themselves that a given condition in the social order is their part. Aristocratic beauty might adorn the amorous relations of young men and women while they are waiting for monogamy, and it is best prac- ticed under a condition of socialism. When peo- ple do not have to worry about a living, true equality will enter. They can then play aristo- crats when they wish, and when they tire of that, they can take a ride in a hay wagon drawn by oxen and be peasants for a while, according to the law of contrasts. The future society need do nothing else but imitate the best styles and forms they choose, be- cause of the human quality that it possesses, be- cause of its realism, its humor, its goodness, or its beauty, but the forms evolved in a condition of utility and machinery are ugly and worthless. The proper place of mechanist-utility is the hidden base for the human and the beautiful. Let us take, for example, a monarchial form of government in the Middle Ages, or some town in Russia, during the time of the czars, or a town in Italy, Venice say, during its romantic period. We have here presented to us many beautiful forms for imitation, the simple dress of the peasantry — a mechanist civilization destroys the peasant — the style of dress of the craftsman, the various military styles, and the styles of the aris- tocracy. We have for imitation the vulgar speech of the market people, their bargaining and their cursing and then, if we wish to imitate a central 165 figure of sincerity, we have the poor depatriated, noncombatant Jew in the Ghetto. When I speak of the poor Jew as the central figure of sincerity I do not mean the Jew alone. There are many sincere people everywhere, among the poor all over the world ; poor Italians and poor Slavs are fine types of sincerity. Be- sides, the sincere person does not have to imitate any type, he is himself. The idea of the central figure of sincerity is a person who has not been deluded by the ostentation of power in the mon- archal or capitalist state; unspoiled by business success, in whom the human quality is not covered up by conventional politeness; who lives with a profound ideal. Such a one is nature's central figure who can assume any part in order to satisfy the law of contrasts and variations, just as the beautiful and profound woman can assume many styles of beauty. The society of the future will not permit ma- chinery to overrun their civilization, it will be utilized for sewerage. The true society will appear more primitive, the beautiful human forms that were evolved dur- ing the time when man was without the machine will be revived, the imperfections will be dis- carded; in other words, real life will be raised to the plane of art. Real life has a reaction in difficulty, but the make-believe of art leads one from one stage of interest to another, according to the law of con- trasts. Art makes reality more real without hurting us. 166 THE PERFECT CITY According to the process of concentration into a center and radiation from a center, the follow- ing arrangement in building social centers seems to me the most rational: The town should be a circle as nearly as the ground permits, with all forms of social recreation in its center (see illustration), for the central mo- tive of the planet is social. 5 CEMETEfiYLWD - ) CENTRE OF TOIV/I A continuation of these towns might form a large circle as follows: <7/VV7J.93iiOrf GO C£NTR£ I ' J *" Q 1 Q o FORESTLANO 167 But the circle should not be noticeable, accord- ing to the principle that the mechanist nether structure should be hidden. The buildings can be arranged with freedom so as to form interesting roads and gardens. The face of nature should not be destroyed by blasting and bringing every- thing to a level, but interest should be maintained. The natural appearance of the ground is impor- tant. The buildings should be made to serve com- munal purposes, with large central courts or out- lying arcades. Great spaces should be left be- tween buildings. By concentrating into a rotunda with a central court more people can be accommo- dated than in long lines of streets. People who want individual cottages can go to the forest section. The large cemetery section will offer an oppor- tunity for people who want to be alone. The center of the city can have the theater, halls of music, etc. When there is no natural body of water, an artificial lake or canals would be appropriate in the center. This arrangement will be found good. Automobiles should be done away with; people will be able to walk the short distance or use covered wagons in time of rain, with slow-moving horses, or oxen, to imitate rus- ticity, or the age without the machine. If the circle of the town is too large it loses its value; if too small, its mechanist arrangement comes to the front. The houses should be placed at irregular points so as to avoid forming parallel roads, and to avoid bringing the circular arrange- ment into evidence. One mechanist road can be 168 placed where it will best serve utility, on the out- skirts of a large circle of towns, as follows: -ROA& This mechanist road, — automobile or railroad, — will touch every town in the large circle and the industrial and farming section between towns. The towns can be so arranged so that mines will be in the forest section, i.e., the locations can be manipulated. With the absence of automobiles within the town human life will be saved and the face of nature will not be marred. The location of buildings can be so manipulated so that a beauti- ful landscape will appear at every point and no mechanist arrangement evident. 169 OBSESSION Thus did Zarathustra hear a soothsayer speak; and the foreboding touched his heart and transformed him. Sorrowfully did he go about and wearily ; and he became like unto those of whom the soothsayer had spoken. — Thus did Zarathustra go about grieved in his heart, and for three days he did not take any meat or drink: he had no rest, and lost his speech. — -"Then did a roaring wind tear the folds apart : whistling, whizzing, and pierc- ing, it threw unto me a black coffin. — And a thousand caricatures of children, angels, owls, fools, and child- sized butterflies laughed and mocked, and roared at me." Thus did Zarathustra relate his dream, and then was silent: but the disciple whom he loved most arose quickly, seized Zarathustra's hand and said: "Art thou not thyself the wind with shrill whistling, which bursteth open the gates of the fortress of death? Art thou not thyself the coffin full of many-hued malices and angel-caricatures of life?" Thus spake the disciple; and all the others then thronged around Zarathustra, grasped him by the hands, and tried to persuade him to leave his bed and his sad- ness, and return unto them. Zarathustra, however, sat upright on his couch, with an absent look. Like one re- turning from long foreign sojourn did he look on his disciples, and examined their features; but still he knew them not. When, however, they raised him and set him upon his feet, behold, all on a sudden, his eye changed; he understood everything that had happened, stroked his beard, and said with a strong voice: "Well! this hath just its time; but see to it, my dis- ciples, that we have a good repast, and without delay! Thus do I mean to make amends for bad dreams! 170 The soothsayer, however, shall eat and drink at my side: and verily, I will yet show him a sea in which he can drown himself." — Thus Spake Zarathustra. All mediumship is a contagion of the super- state sphere of magic. 9 The superman is able by volition, i.e., by the manipulation of energy, to create for himself his environment. The superman is positive, the cen- ter; he is therefore able to control his environ- ment, but the human being on the planet is nega- tive and subservient to his environment. Were the ego on the planet the master of his condition, the center, he would be able to manip- ulate his environment according to the law of contrasts, but as he is subservient to unconscious nature's process of contrasted action, he suffers continually a reaction of imperfection. When the ego on the planet becomes affected with the magical causality of the after-death state, it is only natural that the contrast of imperfection should make itself evident, as it is evident throughout the planetary arrangement. The Will cannot rest in our planetary arrange- ment. The Will is an unconscious force that seeks harmony with itself. These reactions of imperfection are called by religious spiritualists "evil spirits," but, there is no such a thing as evil spirits; this is absolute and final. Reactions of imperfection is all they are, reverse forms of energy. The whole planet must be looked upon as a thing magnetic. Whether these reverse forms of energy appear in the form of life like pictures of people, in solid materializations, or in sound, i.e., imperfect or * It is usually acquired by sitting in seances with other me- diums. 171 abusive language, it is all the same; they are all variations of reverse energy. When the time comes for a reaction, the reverse energy can trans- mute itself into any form of reversion. Mate- rialization in solid form is no more difficult to nature than the formation of sound. More often this reverse energy manifests itself by affecting the mind of the medium with obnoxious thought or erroneous belief, sometimes with insanity. The best transmutation of reverse energy is physical inner pressure on the nose and forehead and snapping of the jaws. By waiting quietly and patiently, instead of yielding to the obsession or erroneous belief, the movement of the jaws and then pressure appear. The reverse energy must receive outlet at intervals. When the obsession is very strong it is not easily transmuted to physical pressure. It is often well to initiate the jaw movement. The reverse energy is a force that seeks augmentation into commotion of some kind, but the jaw movement and the nose pressure that follow confine it and give it outlet. With people who are not mediums the reverse energy finds out- let in the worry and fear of death. Even relig- ious people who believe in immortality have an uncertain faith, but the medium has sure evidence. This consolation of the medium is sufficient cause for the unconscious devil-god to make trouble. The imperfect acts and crimes that people com- mit, the decadent insipid conversation, the stupor in which people live, their newspapers, their poli- tics, their quarrels, their divorces, their swindle, robbery, and murder, all that is so much obses- sion carried to the plane of action. They are forced into it as a mode of reversed energy. The obsessing force is rather strong in the beginning 172 of mediumship. Other movements of the face, head, and body, if they are involuntary, will serve to relieve the pressure on the teeth.* These in- voluntary movements will also serve to bring out the pressure on the nose and forehead. The reverse energy is satisfied, of course, if it can make the person religious. It is therefore dangerous for any person to become medium- istic; there is nothing better than the material reality. Speaking to the invisible especially con- fuses the mind. The mind is accustomed to being sustained by the senses, by seeing and hearing; otherwise it reverses upon itself and becomes con- fused, it loses control of its thoughts. A person who suffers obsession should not suffer alone; he should confide in friends who know the philosophy of the Will to Beauty. If he stops believing in evil spirits, his ailment will soon get better. Many poor innocent people, when discovering through spiritualism that there is an after-life, imme- diately assume the religious interpretation; the result being that they chastise themselves and suffer great embarrassment in silence on account of their "sins," usually sex relationships. The consciousness that their parents and friends in the superstate who were religious know every- thing is enough to make some people insane with worry. Let no one then assume the religious interpretation. Every human quality that we have in us from nature is good. All we need is socialism and a eugenic arrangement, so that the ♦Note. — I find that a strong movement of the jaws without gritting the teeth is a sufficiently effective outlet to the reverse energy, although the snapping of the jaws is more effective. When the jaw movement does not produce itself it should be started. This is a thing of great importance ; otherwise the pent up reverse energy makes one nervous and irritable, or else it may seek an outlet in an unlooked for direction. 173 human qualities can express themselves without one human being injuring another. Lacking this environment, the individual cannot be blamed. There is no God, there is no sin, but there is an after-life, where we laugh at everything. In my years of experience, conversing with the "dead," there is one phrase that I hear repeated continually, and that is, "laugh at everything." Our dear parents, our children, our friends who have left us, are all enemies of religion; they are atheists, they are good-looking young people. They live lives of sexual pleasure. They laugh at their praying relatives; they are not sexually castrated, as the writers on spiritualism would have it. In order to encourage one, they em- ploy the most vulgar language. This is out of the goodness of their hearts. They have very profound emotions when the time comes for emotion. About the only things that they would blame one for is the domination of one man over another. I have heard mothers weeping and cursing when their children are made to do hard work, due to our present economic arrangement, where the business man lives by speculation and swindle and all social production haphazard is relegated to the worker. Some people who have been held down by society to menial labor, to servitude, curse and denounce when they come to the superstate, but that does not mean u evil spirits." In this they do only what is right; they are nobody's servant now. If the object of life is expression in beauty, how can a human being reconcile this with a life spent in street-cleaning, years spent in prison, or a lackey to somebody, or the humility of the con- fession of sins that religion imposes. Anger 174 and cursing are the only thing that would relieve one's feelings. A medium with a religious phi- losophy of life hearing this naturally comes to the conclusion that there are evil spirits; but this is false, human nature is more than good. There is no goodness like the goodness of the superman and woman; their beautiful tears are like the tears of a child. The superstate permits the expression of every human quality, which our present planetary ar- rangement does not permit; human nature is straightened out, there is no need for the wield- ing of power and advantage-taking, sex passion is freely expressed. The self-control of religion, which cripples one's nature, becomes unnecessary. People who wait for husband and wife on the planet live with others until a condition of abso- lute monogamy is attained, but the religio-eco- nomic arrangement produces a contrast of imper- fection. Some live in luxury and others clean their dirt. It is this same contrast of imperfec- tion which confronts the medium. It is for a similar reason that Hindu fakirs improve their magic by torturing themselves ; the reverse energy has an outlet. Obsession is a terrible sickness, but it is no more than the terrible plagues and diseases that are the lot of humanity. The un- conscious Will struggles to free itself from the planetary arrangement to the superstate, where force is in harmony with itself, where the clash of opposites becomes the rhythm of contrasted and variated motives. (See "Beyond Good and Evil.") People generally imagine that the human de- sires and passions should be suppressed in favor of religious emotions; it is this interpretation 175 which makes angels and devils. As soon as hu- manity understands that that which it calls "sin," eating, drinking, sex and laughter, are the neces- sary complements to religious emotion, a new world will bloom forth in beauty, and crucifixes and epitaphs of lamentation will be removed from tombstones. The reverse energy in nature produces the devils; they have no basis in reality. If the me- dium is religious, and avoids thoughts of sex, the imp of the reverse will produce for him pictures of sex, but if his mind has been occupied with sex thoughts in sufficience, religious ideas, and forms of sorrow, will force themselves upon his atten- tion; in other words, an opposition always forms itself. All forms of obsession are only a repeti- tion of the imperfect forms on the planet (the imperfect contrasts and variations of our arrange- ment), the dirt, the injustice, the cruelty of our world. Of course, when the period of reversion has passed, the medium can have beautiful emo- tions for a while. There is no medium living who does not suffer some form of reaction; neither is there a mortal living who does not suf- fer some form of reaction. In the future, when the law of contrasts is better understood, and society arranged accordingly, there is every rea- son to believe that obsession will become milder, and in time disappear entirely, in proportion as the imperfect reverse forms on the planet will disappear. The generations of the future will benefit by our sorrow. With a knowledge of the true philosophy it will be possible to converse with the good devil, the superman; (several people should be able to con- verse with the invisible much better than one, as 176 in this way the mind will be strengthened by see- ing and hearing each other), but under present circumstances it is a dangerous undertaking. I find that people in the superstate are very anxious to speak, but they cannot as long as the mortal entertains the religious interpretation, even if he were the best medium. I maintain that most of the phenomena of the seance rooms is self-cre- ative energy; the subconscious mind (motives) of the medium, his religious interpretation, produces itself magically. The slate-writing, the materiali- zations of the human forms, the voices, are pro- duced by motives, The ego in the superstate does not materialize (he is materialized, although a duplicate may form itself), he or she need not be present when the writing produces itself, or the voice speaks; it is the same as when a phono- graph speaks, or as when a camera produces a picture, or some electric automatic writing-ma- chine produces writing. The solid materializa- tions are no different than the casting of a statue ; they are wonderful as magical phenomena, but no different than the wonders that Hindu fakirs pro- duce ; they are produced by motives. If the person in the superstate has affected the medium once, a motive has been produced that will repeat itself continually without the superego being present. These motives are more powerful than the superego, who really cannot say what he wishes, owing to reverse energy and the religious point of view of the audiences. Audiences in seance rooms usually imagine themselves favored by visits from great personages. These person- ages are nothing more than motives, self-creative or induced by anybody in the superstate. There are no great personages in the superstate, all are 177 alike. The superman is one, although there is variation of type. This is of the utmost impor- tance and should be understood. All greatness is an external thing. Our relatives who have died and who have gone through profound emo- tions are as great as any. All genius in art and letters is only the intellectual amplification of an emotion. All intellect is only the amplification that the unconscious Will of the universe seeks. Some people are more intellectual than others and for that reason they come to the front. Intellect is too often misdirected. If we go to the poor sections of a city, we find many people who have gone through great emotion, great sorrow, but they do not publish themselves. All attain to the highest; people only begin differently. A motive is an affection that has not yet re- ceived formation or intellectual amplifications. The seed of a tree holds within itself the motive of the tree, which can take form under proper conditions. A motive in the mind of an architect will amplify itself until it takes the form of a stone edifice. The forms of obsession that appear to the medium are so clever and cunning that it is no wonder they are mistaken for real entities, for good and evil spirits; but if we consider that the human ego and his mind are amplifications of the unconscious motive of the universe, it will serve to explain the cunning of "evil spirits." The self- creative pictures and forms are clearer than those that the superman would like to show. * * * * No person should ever become too mediumistic by continuous intercourse with the superstate; he might as well die as do that. Even under the i 7 8 best planetary conditions of the future, too much mediumship will cause trouble. The superman and woman are able to show themselves at inter- vals, and to make realistic pictures which serve the purpose of conversation. It is this picture conversation which makes the mortal too medium- is tic. When indulged in to a great extent, the me- dium becomes so sensitive, so negative, to his environment, that every motive, whether on the planet or in the superstate (principally motives from the superstate), enters his being and oblit- erates his own individuality. These innocent mo- tives speak through him, act through him, move his hands and feet, they "possess" him. The best cure for that is the realism of our own environ- ment, social and sex relationship. Even a child in the superstate can affect an oversensitive me- dium, for the mortal is negative. These motives stay in the medium and repeat themselves for a long time. There is this advantage, however; during this condition of oversensitiveness one absorbs, so to say, all motives. As they unfold themselves later on, the medium is able to know what has trans- pired in the superstate during his period of over- sensitiveness. Every detail repeats itself and un- folds itself. The medium becomes like the reel of a cinematograph. It is a thing to be avoided, however, owing to the great difficulty it causes; it does not permit the mortal to be himself, the motives stay in him and take up his whole indi- viduality. It is not the fault of the superman that he is positive and the sensitive mortal nega- tive. Even a person sleeping in the superstate affects the oversensitive medium. As the motives 179 unfold themselves everything becomes evident, the exact voice of parents, grandparents, and great- grandparents appears, whatever remarks they happened to make at that time, the exact nature of friends and strangers who happened to be in the vicinity. The great ecstasy of people who have just died and who are thrilled with the vision of immor- tality; the exact melody of grandparents musing and singing; their sex relationship ; in short, every- thing repeats itself. It gives the medium knowl- edge, at the same time it controls him and hinders him. Instead of mediumship one should study the philosophy of the Will to Beauty and live in one world at a time, the life of an artist and socialist. With regard to verbal conversation, there is the same danger. In a period of reversion the sounds become self-creative. They may alarm one, they may say things that the ego himself or herself in the superstate whose voice it resembles would never say. During these periods of rever- sion, the self-creative sounds are usually louder than when the superego actually spoke. The superego has many ways of communicating. The sounds of nature, the sounds of people conversing can be turned by the superego into other words; but every means of communication is liable to re- act and become self-creative reversion. The only thing to do is never to be frightened, to laugh at everything, to forget everything, and to live in the realism of one's material environment. The obsessed should avoid profound emotion. He must learn to distinguish between the real and the self-creative. * * * * 180 I use the word "superman" instead of "spirit," because the ego in the after-state is just as solid and real as we are, even though we are not able to see them. The superego is more robust than the ghostly and angelic mortal, and the women are more voluptuous. The word "spirit" gives one a nebulous idea. The superman comes nearer to the healthy animal. * * We need never worry lest our friends in the superstate are spying on us (for they are able to read our mind). Our mind, with all its human thought, is right; the way nature made it; besides, the superman and his wife are busy with self- indulgence. If we have troubles, they cannot help us. Nature fixed it so they can do nothing for others, but live for themselves. Let us remem- ber, above all, that all people are alike, that they become just as great, one the same as another, in a short time. People only begin differently. The ego in the superstate has the same mate- rial desires and functions that we have; eating, sleeping, procreation, evacuation. Mediums of the future will verify my observations as well as my philosophy. * * * * The superego does not travel from one place to another "with the swiftness of thought," as spiritualists would have it. His means of loco- motion is no swifter than that of the mortal. He can, however, convert his energy to gain great speed, the same as an automobile or train. He can also manage to see and hear at a distance of 181 a few hundred yards, and to project sound and pictures to that distance. It might be asked, "Why cannot the superego explain to the medium the philosophy of the Will to Beauty and avoid all this difficulty that the religious interpretation involves? Reverse energy is the answer. Unconscious nature cannot proceed anywhere without a reaction, e.g., the Will brings a beautiful forest into existence, but immediately after, the law of the jungle makes that forest a frightful place to enter, the poisonous plant, the pestiferous insect, and the powerful beast. Until the ego attains the climax of consciousness, he is a part of the unconscious motive; for every point gained there is a reaction of superstition, of obsession, of every kind of perverse reaction. 2|C JJC JjC 3J; The medium of the future, who will proceed with the philosophy of the Will to Beauty will find the superstate a real world — none of the "God-bless-you's," the insipid and obnoxious con- versation of "spirits" in seances. The superman is very brilliant; instead of politeness, the con- versation is human, intimately vulgar even; as soon as it becomes religious preaching, moraliz- ing of any kind, the medium should assume the voice to be the reversion of self-creative energy. The superman and woman always encourage one to "laugh at everything." * * * * The superstate is no far off locality, the super- man and woman make their home in the space surrounding the planet; they are usually in the vicinity of their relatives. The invisible space 182 surrounding the planet holds all the generations ever since man appeared. (The "spheres" that spiritualists talk about is nonsense.) * * * * The human being, immediately after dying, re- mains suspended in space, the same as an aviator, the same as the planet is suspended in space; he becomes independent of the planet and its sun; although he follows the planet unconsciously. He is able to create his own heat, light, and power. I notice that the superman generates power by means of a rotary mechanist motion; this power he then proceeds to convert into all the forms of his volition, into food, into a tangible environ- ment (furniture) or into his horizon (a land- scape). Every planetary condition is imitated, with selection of course. The essence of interest is gotten out of it, while the danger of being hurt by the environment, as in our planetary condition, is absent. The superego disintegrates his environment, also, by the generation of mech- anist energy, which is utilized for the purpose of destruction. Planetary matter has only exten- sion for the superego; it has no point of contact; he can go right through it. There is no such thing as a "fourth dimension," there is only space, the same space that we live in. * * * * The superman and woman arrange themselves in constellations or efflorescences, i.e., an associa- tion of congenial friends who become very inti- mate and who encourage each other to live (sex- ually) and to laugh (that is the part of the woman). The men are comrades and engage in intellect and in humor. That relationship is dif- 183 ferent from the relationship of parents and chil- dren; different again when the superman and woman wish to be alone that they may express their profoundest emotion, according to the law of contrasts. SfC 2fE 5j£ *j» All this and more can be discovered through mediumship, once you have the right point of view. There is nothing that the medium cannot know. It is possible for a medium to marry some one in the superstate, whom he has never met be- fore; that is, promise to wait for each other; meanwhile they can exchange love and intimacy. The conditions for communication are so remark- able (through clairvoyance and cJaroaadience) in spite of the reaction of difficulty. * * * * The superego is not omniscient, although he has a broad view of things; the mortal can know more of detail because he has books. The super- ego is able to read the mind of the medium, to slant the mind, that is, move the mind of the medium with thoughts that the superego wishes the medium to think (that has its limitation) and also to bring forward past thought and action. But it must be remembered that the superego does not preach to the mortal, so one need not be afraid. This conversation is very difficult for the mind, and can only be done at intervals. The mind is liable to slip back to irresponsible thought, or obsession, when this is attempted. It also requires a thorough knowledge of the philosophy of the Will to Beauty, as well as experience; otherwise the medium is liable to credit to the superego re- 184 ligious thoughts, obsessions to "evil spirits," with a result of confusion and error. Whenever the superego slants the mind of the medium, it is usually accompanied with audible or visual evi- dence, otherwise it is meaningless; judgment should be used. The universe is so arranged that there is no secret. Everything is interpreta- tion. Sincere people respect each other's privacy; the rest is humor. * * * * I had endless visible and audible evidence of the existence of the superstate without the need of any other medium; continuously, daily, many times during the day. As soon as I conceived the Will to Beauty, the conversation became brilliant instead of religious consolation. I felt at times as if I myself were in the superstate. Such won- derful people ! Such goodness ! Such emotion expressed openly ! All are alike, all seek to for- get the imperfection of the planet. The conver- sation of the young men is so human, so good, such fine voices, holding within them 1 the richness of many emotions; but they are devils with the women; they are sincere I should say. That is all the deviltry there is in the superstate. New mediums will soon corroborate my point of view. I was able to recognize my mother's voice after a departure of thirty years, and my father's voice, who died later, most perfectly. I cannot begin to relate all the evidence. Every- thing depends on the point of view you assume. Fortified with the rational philosophy, the super- state becomes real, wonderful, but the medium who is a fanatic can come to all sorts of foolish conclusions. For example : — My grandfather (in the superstate), in order 185 to show me his skill as an artist-creator, made for my amusement most perfect pictures of dogs, with all the color, anatomy, and movements of real life. There are no animals in the superstate; they are raised to the plane of art (magic) the same as all natural forms. The superego is the center. The medium must not mistake pictures for realities (whether they are intentionally pro- duced by the superego or self-creative). Neither is the superego always able to produce pictures for the medium as he would wish to; the reverse energy does not always permit, but in his own sphere the superman and woman are absolute masters of their environment. Experience soon teaches one to know the difference between real- ity and the self-creative. * ^ *)* T I ask the new medium not to come to a hasty conclusion, but rather to reserve judgment until this point of view has been tried for a number of years. * * * * And now with regard to the opponents of "spirit" phenomena, there is only one class that requires consideration and these are the psycho- analysts. But these near-sighted people are just what their name implies; they are nothing but analysts, they have no synthetic vision. A Chris- tian Scientist has a bigger vision than they have. To ascribe all phenomena to the projection of the unconscious 10 in the ego, is no different than 10 The motive is what the psychoanalyst terms the subcon- scious mind. The motive seeks outlet through whatever form it can (forms of the mind or forms of matter are alike modes of contrasted action). A reverse motive seeks outlet through reverse forms . The good motive selects whatever is invigor- ating and beautiful. 186 to ascribe the whole universe, and the ego, to the unconscious Will. That is all there is to reality, to matter and to mind — an unconscious motive in contrasted action. What is necessary is an in- terpretation. The medium enters a magic world, a world where materialization and dematerialization fol- low the wish of the ego instead of the cause and effect (contrasted action) of the planet. The medium is neither here nor there; it is natural that he should be confused. But if it is a question of reality, I should say that we are dead, com- pared with the reality of the superstate. It is true that the medium mistakes pictures for people, sounds for voices; it is true that the pictures and voices of people that have not yet died will appear to the medium, but all this "smoke" only shows that there is "fire." Soon greater phenomena appear, greater evidence ap- pears, evidence upon evidence, until it becomes overwhelming. Why, it is ridiculous! Vision brings faith with it. Emotion gives the mind a basis for interpretation, but with analysis you cannot go far, you remain with your nose to the ground. The detail of science must find its place in the ensemble, then it is valuable. Nature does not proceed from detail to en- semble any more than an artist proceeds that way. To an artist all reality is a thing that flows and accommodates itself. You must have faith in your vision, then watch for corroborative evidence in detail. Could a scientist invent a sensitive ma- chine that would register motives (in the pres- ence of a medium) , what reason is there to believe that it would not reverse, owing to self-creative opposing motives? It could bring no greater evi- 187 dence of reality than the marvelous slate-writing or materializations. * H= * * We need a rationally arranged social order. We will then be able to do away with nervous- ness, Christian Science, and psychoanalysis. * * * * I believe that the people of the future will em- ploy suicide whenever a very serious ailment overtakes them (science can discover a painless form). Neither will they seek to prolong a sor- rowful old age. * * * * The superego can affect the dream state of the mortal to the extent that conditions (the presence of reverse energy) will permit; but everything that the superego can do, can make itself by self- creative motives. There is no way of knowing the truth, except by interpretation, by using one's judgment. * * * * Reverse energy that has not exhausted itself may attack the dream state as an outlet. 5fC 2|S 5jC Sgg One should pay no attention to the obsessing force. The reverse energy should be allowed to go through without putting any meaning to it. It is nothing but innocent force that cannot arrange itself in our present planetary condition. One should be sensible about it. All the unpleasant thoughts and words that are self-creative should be allowed to go through until the reverse energy exhausts itself. 3J» S|E Jji 5}C 188 As an illustration of how the reverse energy acts : My grandfather made himself visible to me, but I felt strained, I could make no appropriate remark except the word "monkey" ; immediately after, his face, which was very fine, real, and life- like, made itself into a monkey in the picture. The reverse energy will take the nearest form of reversion as an outlet. A favorite outlet is self- chastisement, repentance, embarrassment over some trifle; should the medium disregard that, the reverse energy will probably form unpleasant pictures for the eye or for the mind's imagination; should the medium disregard that, a force of anger might go through him; should he control that, the jaws will begin to snap. When the re- verse energy goes out physically it is the best. Its worst form is when a poor human being wor- ries and blames himself, when as a matter of fact we are helpless. Reverse energy is continually accumulating and must have outlet at intervals. Why the reverse energy takes one form instead of another is not important; it undoubtedly takes the course of least resistance. Every form of reversion known on the planet is open to it and satisfies it. The medium opens up for himself new channels that reverse energy may take; but there can be no happier mortal than the medium who has learned how to find an outlet for reverse energy. When one outlet is blocked, the reverse energy will find another outlet, until it has exhausted itself. Why is the superego invisible? It seems to me that if he were visible it would interfere with our environment, it would becloud our sky with 189 forms foreign to the harmony of the landscape. Furthermore, if the superego were identified with the planetary condition he would become affected by its elements. Enough can be known through mediumship to serve our purpose. Force is invisible ; all there is to reality is produced by its contrasted action. * * * * The superman and woman become perfect adults whether they die in old age or in infancy. The child grows gradually, the cripple or insane person becomes perfect gradually. The negro becomes white gradually. * * * * Through mediumship I was able to feel the loftiest ecstasy, the deepest love, the sincerest ro- mantic passion. The emotions of a lifetime were crowded into weeks and every day held the full- ness of a year — emotions that I never felt before, although I lived for art and idealism two score years. I saw that profound emotion is the great reality, for everything else on earth seemed empty in comparison. I was inspired with the thought that the universe held such emotions. Never be- fore have I even dreamed of their existence. The tears of my father and mother and others whom I loved streamed through my eyes; and as I was too rational to rush to the religious interpretation, I conceived the Will to Beauty. I was rewarded for running the gauntlet of psychic obsession, the inevitable reaction in unconscious nature; I dis- covered a real world. * * * * I realize that it is possible to construct a phi- losophy of sorrow upon the same metaphysical 190 base that the Will to Beauty is based. There may be some who will attempt it. The religio- moral interpretation is a stubborn thing. It may hide itself under a garb of atheism. I myself was frightened in the beginning when I saw "evil spirits," but later experience dispelled the religio- moral idea. * # * * To all objectors, I can only answer: Every- thing is interpretation. Vision and Realism, Versus Fantastic Imagina- tion The impressionist painter finds that plain, un- prejudiced vision is the most difficult, that in fact a vacant stare brings an ensemble of its own ac- cord, without the need of idealizing; the result is beauty and realism. That is all there is to phi- losophy. Immanuel Kant made a discovery that the mind contains knowledge a priori. He had no better way of raising the universe from meaning- less static matter but by idealizing time and space; by making it something in the mind of the sub- ject as well as the object; and then instead of beauty, "the thing in itself." The fact is that there is nothing a priori in the mind but mean- ingless mathematics. The proper place of the mind is as the ampli- fier of the senses, and must not be trusted away from the senses. 3(» 3JC Jj» J^C Man has paid a high price for his intellect. He has overburdened himself; the mind has run riot with false education which destroys native sin- 191 cerity. By means of that intellect, he has reared a structure of cold-hearted commercialism, and the empty detail of erudition. How good it will be when people establish themselves in noncombatant communities, where mechanism will forever be kept as a thing lower than nature, the same as the organs in the body are concealed. The Will to Beauty is the true motive that en- dures forever when it has realized itself in human sincerity. By observing how volcanoes, earth- quakes, and other elements destroy without rea- son or mercy, man might readily conclude, one would imagine, that "God" is without reason, and that man is more merciful than God. Instead of that, theologians began to spin wild theories. They made man sinful and God full of mercy. As for belief in the super-terrestrial state, was there a time when man did not see "apparitions" or hear "voices?" The vision of an after-life without a God — that required an impressionist painter accustomed to strange combinations. I cannot apologize for insufficient amplification of detail, or possible error in detail; I bring an ensemble. Perhaps in a later edition, if condi- tions permit, more of the appropriate detail can be added. The point of view once given, any person who takes the time to study and select from the volumi- nous literature of science already published, can accomplish this. END 192