SUM ERGO COGITO

NOT to encumber the text with too much abstruse metaphysics, I place here what seem to me some important corollaries of the position stated at the close of Chapter I.

If the Universe is not a mere aggregate but a coherent Whole, then it follows of necessity that the units which compose it will have relations not only with each other but also with the Whole. When any of these units reaches the stage of consciousness it may be expected that it will become conscious of these relations, and that this consciousness will, like other things, develop in time to greater and greater fulness.

But here, from the analytic side of the Kantian philosophy, comes the warning which tells us that all we can really know is the stream of sensation which passes through our mind and which derives the order and coherence it seems to possess from the laws of that mind. How can we transcend this apprehension of fleeting appearances, and attain knowledge of the One, the Real, and of our relations with It?

To answer this question we must look a little deeper into the basis of this doctrine of the subjectivity of human knowledge.

This subjectivity, when we examine it closely, does not (as it is often, I think, supposed) appear to be a special and inexplicable condition imposed in some external way on human consciousness. It is a condition absolutely bound up with the state of existence implied in being a Person, an ‘I.’ The moment the mind is able to turn inward upon itself and to separate the thing known or felt from that which knows and feels, in that moment the Thing stands a whole infinity away from the ‘I’; they are separated by the analytic faculty of the Ego and they can never by that faculty be reunited. The state of being an ‘I’ is essentially a state of analytic consciousness. The intuitions of space and time are simply the instruments by which the analytic faculty works, for it is only by their relations in space and time that things in the world can be divided and distinguished by the intellect. This analytic faculty has, it must be noted, an unbounded power of disintegration. It does not spare even the Ego itself, which it reduces to a mere flux of sensations. There is no answer to its destructive logic except the sufficient one, that this boundless power of analysis in both directions, inward and outward, is simply a function inevitably bound up with being an ‘I’ at all—it is because of that function that I am an ‘I.’ Every being possessing ‘I’-hood must, eo ipso, be capable of reducing all external things to its own sensations, and of externalizing its own self. One cannot be an ‘I’ on any other terms.

Now let us suppose that this analytic faculty did not exist, and that consciousness went on, as perhaps it does in beasts, by acts of pure intuition, without ever turning inward to regard itself, without ever making distinctions between external objects, save as a matter of unreasoned sense-responsiveness; what would the consequences be then?

Clearly in that case object and subject would be one, and knowledge, so far as it went, would be absolute knowledge. But it would neither be true nor false, since without analysis and comparison there could be no criterion of truth and falsity. Nor, similarly, could the actions springing from this state of what may be called Impersonal Consciousness be either ethically good or bad in relation to the creature which performed them. In this state, things in space and time would be seen simply as they really are—as moments in the life of the Spirit.

Our relations with the Whole, then, must be sought in this region of pure impersonal consciousness, which implies entire forgetfulness of Self, entire surrender to the life-movement of the universe. We can understand now why man has always had yearnings for this state, and has so often sought to attain it by false means, by the trance or ecstasy produced through self-hypnotism, drugs, etc.; means ultimately and necessarily destructive of their object since a self-regarding motive lies at the root of them.

If there are illegitimate ways of attaining this state what, it may be asked, are the legitimate ones? The difficulty of this question lies in the fact that the state of impersonal consciousness disappears the moment we begin to think about it. We live in it, in fact, a great deal more than, in our states of analytic self-consciousness, we have any idea of. But as a rule we only live in it with a part of our nature—the instinctive, animal part. To enter it with our whole nature, to live in it as Man, two ways have been found and these we call the way of Religion and the way of Art; or, if we describe them by the faculties respectively dominant in each, as the way of Love and the way of Beauty. Through these essentially harmonizing and synthesizing powers Man can for a while merge himself in the vast ocean of Being, and return from it, renewed and purified, to the narrow confines of his selfhood.

But return he must; for selfhood is not an accident or a deformity, not a thing to be despised and shuffled off the moment we can get rid of it. It, also, is a power of life, and through it we are enabled to harvest an immense store of experiences. Through the Ego, no doubt, with its rapacious egotisms, come sin and wrong into the world; but, as Heracleitus finely says, “Men would not have known the name of Justice if these things had not been.” Moreover, man has to act as well as to be and to feel. For all complex action, regarding distant ends and involving choice and discrimination, the faculty of analysis, with which selfhood is bound up, is absolutely essential. Man is not to be raised in the scale of being by cutting away any part of his nature, but by developing the whole harmoniously; and the analytic self-consciousness is harmonized with the impersonal consciousness when the one is used to translate into its own sphere the experiences of the other—to fashion in the visible and material life some counterpart of the realities known in the spirit.