Platonism and the spiritual life, by George Santayana.Santayana, George, 1863-1952.New York, C. Scribner's sons, 1934, c1927.

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PLATONISM ANDTHE SPIRITUALLIFE

in ' SAN ~

1

517

S233

PLATONISM AND THE

SPIRITUAL LIFE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

LITTLE ESSAYSTHE LIFE OF REASON

INTERPRETATIONS OF POETRYAND RELIGION

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY

CHARACTER AND OPINION INTHE UNITED STATES

SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND ANDLATER SOLILOQUIES

SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITHDIALOGUES IN LIMBO

POEMS

THE REALM OF ESSENCETHE REALM OF MATTER

PLATONISM AND THE

SPIRITUAL LIFE

BY

GEORGE SANTAYANA

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

First Published 1927Reprinted . 1927

Reprinted . 1934

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN AT THE CHISWICK PRESS LTD.NEW SOUTHGATE, LONDON, N.II

PLATONISMAND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE

INTELLECTUAL anarchy is full of lights; itsblindness is made up of dazzling survivals,revivals, and fresh beginnings. Were it notfor these remnants or seeds of order, chaositself could not exist; it would be nothing.Without demanding from the men of to-dayanything final or solid we may be grateful tothem for those glimpses of great things pastand of great things possible, which flashthrough their labouring minds. One of thesegreat things past is Platonism, and one of thegreat things always possible is spiritual life.There is, or there seems to be, a certain affinitybetween these two, as if deep called unto deep.Yet I am not sure that everything in Platonism,or even its first principles, can be calledspiritual; nor is it easy to discern what theessence of spirituality may be, entangled as itsmanifestations have always been with all sortsof accidental traditions and prejudices.In this perplexity I find a list of points

B

common to Platonism and to " spiritual religion" drawn up by the competent hand of

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

firm belief in absolute and eternal values as themost real things in the universe—a confidencethat these values are knowable by man—abelief that they can nevertheless be knownonly by whole-hearted consecration of theintellect, will, and affections to the great quest—an entirely open mind towards the discoveriesof science—a reverent and receptive attitudeto the beauty, sublimity, and wisdom of thecreation, as a revelation of the mind andcharacter of the Creator—a complete indifference to the current valuations of the worldling." This faith " is distinguished, amongother things, by its deep love of this good andbeautiful world, combined with a steadyrejection of that same world whenever itthreatens to conceal, instead of revealing, theunseen and eternal world behind. The Pla-tonist loves . . . Nature, because in Naturehe perceives Spirit creating after its own likeness. As soon as the seen and the unseenworlds fall apart and lose connection with

/. each other, both are dead."" Values are

1 Cf. The Platonic Tradition in English Religious Thought,the Hulsean Lectures at Cambridge, 1925-6, by WilliamRalph Inge, Dean of St. Paul's, etc., Longmans, Green andCo., London, 1926. All the phrases quoted are drawn fromthis book.

for the Platonist not only ideals but creativepowers."This, of course, is the language of a modern.Dean Inge is not quoting Plato or Plotinus, butexpressing what he believes to be substantiallytheir view in words natural to a man of hisown country and religion. We must, therefore,puzzle a little and hazard a guess before wecan recall the Platonic tenets to which some ofthese phrases may refer. The term

" value "

in particular is subjective, imageless, and in amanner evasive. It may be taken as a neutralterm fairly representing the common qualityof what Plato called the good and the beautiful,before these were hypostatized ; but then tohypostatize not only such values, but allnatural types and logical concepts, was the verysoul of Platonism ; and when the good and thebeautiful have been hypostatized and havebecome God or the One, the Ideas, the Demi-urgus, or the Soul of the World, they are nolonger values, but independent beings, existinglong before the need or the admiration ofmortals could attribute any value to them.Value is something relative, a dignity whichanything may acquire in view of the benefitor satisfaction which it brings to some livingbeing. If God or the Ideas were mere values,as are pleasure or health, they would be unsubstantial, and only a desired or achievedperfection in something else. They might,

indeed, have value in their own eyes, but onlyif they were alive. A man, or a god, cannotprize his existence before he exists. An automatic harmony must be established in his lifebefore he can distinguish its direction, sufferat its diminution, or conceive and desire itsgreater perfection. This harmony itself is agood only because the spirit which it createsso regards it.

IIIF I were a theologian, or even a bishop, Imight be innocently led to ask Dean Inge whathe means by a value. Is it anything that anybody values, or only that which some otherperson thinks we ought to value? Is it thefact that some satisfying aspect is found inthings, or rather a magic necessity providingthat such an aspect shall be found there ? Or,as we gather from other Cambridge philosophers,1 is this necessity not magical but naturaland omnipresent in things, so that whenevera wave rises and bursts into foam, or a snow-flake takes shape in the air, or any other formtrembles for a moment in the flux of existence,the realization of this visiting essence is intrinsically a value, whether it be watched andprized by any spirit or not? Or on the contrary are values existing supernatural beings,by their influence compelling or incliningnature often to reproduce these satisfactoryaspects ? And I might even like to ask, goinga little deeper, whether such supernaturalbeings, granting that they exist, work innature towards the production of values of any

1 For instance, in Whitehead's Science in the ModernWorld.

and every sort—as the law of the survival ofthe fittest might work to produce harmonybetween each sort of animal and its habitat,but to make their forms and their pleasuresmore and more diverse—or whether thesesupernatural beings are biassed in favour ofcertain natural forms and certain values to theexclusion of others ; and finally, whether it isthis congenital bias in supernatural powersthat we should understand by the eternalreality of values.In the modern notion—a very hazy one—that values themselves might be forces there isa contradiction, or at least an ellipsis. In anysingle instance, indeed, a mind disinclined tolook for the causes or origins of things may findin an actual value a final and satisfying fact.Felt values reconcile the animal and moralside of our nature to their own contingency : ifanything is well, we neglect to ask why ithappens. The inner connivance and peace ofour will explain it sufficiently. But whenvalues are supposed to sustain themselves inbeing through a long tangle of circumstances,and to reassert themselves intermittently bytheir own strength, we are not merely contentnot to inquire why they arise, but we professto explain their occasions and causes by theirfuture presence : a position not only impossibleto defend, but impossible to conceive clearly,and one that can be held only under cover of

half-thoughts and cant phrases. Perceptioncarves out its conventional units, and finalcauses, insinuate themselves into the survey offacts, when their patient genesis is ignored oruntraceable. Life on the whole is a proof of thepossibility of life; each sort of life is a proofthat circumstances made that sort of lifeinevitable. A vigorous and courageous animalassumes that fortune will not fail him. Did henot assume it, how should he be able to live ?This sense of safety may be expressed andjustified intellectually by finding the facts orhabits of nature which support our ownhabits, and so bring the customary valuesabout in the round of our experience. If thesefavouring circumstances are dominant in ourworld we shall be as safe in fact as we feel ourselves to be by instinct. This situation mightthen be expressed elliptically, by saying thatthe good is certain to prevail, or that values arepowers : the justification for such an expressionbeing that our assurance of safety and goodfortune rests on a substantial harmony betweenour interests and our circumstances. Butwhen this harmony becomes audible, when for amoment some value is realized, all potentialityand material efficacy are left far behind: weare in the realm of actuality, of music, ofspirit ; and the value actualized lives and endsin itself. The promise which often lies in it,as well as the disillusion or disaster that may

8

ensue, will not be due to that value in itsmoral nature, to that living and immaterialgood; it will be due to the organization ofnature beneath. All moral functions have theirmaterial organs and their material effects ; inthat context they are powers, or rathervehicles of power—for as the Moslems say,there is no power but Allah. Goods are, intheir material ground, an integral part of theflux of events ; and the healthy habit in naturewhich creates them once may repeat them andperfect them, if the season is favourable andthe fates allow.

IllFOR my purpose, however, it is fortunatelyunimportant to dispel these ambiguities, dearto half-hearted philosophies, because thePlatonic doctrine at least is clear. If for thePlatonist goods and evils are everlastinglyfixed and distinct, this moral dogmatism inhim is no accident of temperament, no merelack of moral elasticity, as in the bigot. If heis sure that some goods often passionatelyloved are nevertheless false goods, it is onlybecause he attributes a definite and unchangeable constitution to the material world and tohuman nature. Life, he thinks, has beenkindled and is alone sustained by the influenceof pre-existing celestial models. It is byimitating these models in some measure thatwe exist at all, and only in imitating, loving,and contemplating them that we can ever behappy. They are our good. In themselves,however, they are inviolate beings, serenelyshedding, like the stars, an everlasting radiance,and no doubt happy beings, if they are livingand self-contemplative : but they are by nomeans mere goals which this nether world setsfreely for itself, or perfections which it mightenjoy intrinsically. God and the Ideas couldbe ruling powers, because they were existing

9

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beings, definite in their character and influence.They exercised a miraculous, magnetic controlover formless matter, inducing in it here andthere an inward striving to imitate their forms.They therefore had the greatest value for thecreature whose life was directed upon themand who invincibly loved them; but thisvalue in them remained relative to the aspiration of their lover, and variable in so far ashis nature might change ; so that St. ThomasAquinas goes so far as to say that to the sinnerGod becomes an evil—the Christian God, hemeans, for I suppose the reprobate might stillfind a divine friend in Bacchus or Venus. Itwas never the actual values found in the worldthat were separated from it, either in Platonismor in Christianity, and conceived to compose aneternal world behind it. The powers that werecreative, substantial, and permanent were notvalues at all, but the underpinning whichvalues required if they were to arise; andalthough this substructure had to be in itselfphysical or metaphysical, the discovery of ithad momentous consequences for morals, inthat it enabled the enlightened believer todistinguish possible attainable goods from theimpossible happiness after which the heathenseek. Those goods which the nature of thingsor the will of God assures and sanctions arethe"eternal values

"; the others are

"the

current valuations of the worldling." Thus

IIreligion or philosophy was the great arbiter oftrue values, the guide of life; it justified thesense of sin and the hope of salvation. Thedistinction between true goods and false goodscan never be established by ignorant feeling orby conscience not backed by a dogmatic viewof the facts : for felt values, taken absolutelyand regarded as unconditioned, are all equallygenuine in their excellence, and equally momentary in their existence. The distinctionhangs on the system of forces, natural or supernatural, believed to produce and sustain thesevarious goods, some for a moment, others forever. Some constitution the cosmos musthave, and must disclose to our faith or science, \if ever we are to decide which of our pleasuresor affections reveal

" the unseen and eternalworld behind," and which of them threaten to jconceal it.

IV

THIS separation of the Platonic Ideas from thethings which manifested them has been muchblamed, yet it goes with another doctrinewhich is much prized, often by the same critics.The precious consequence of this abhorreddualism was that the Ideas, if separate, mightbe powers, creative forces that generated theirexpressions. Separation is a pre-requisite tocausal connection : a thing cannot be derivedfrom a part of itself. If Ideas were onlyvalues, if they were immanent in things, as theform of a poem or its peculiar beauty isimmanent in that poem, there would be nosense in saying that the beauty or the formwas a power that had produced the poem.Not only would each be dead without theother, as Dean Inge says, but each would be, nothing ; the poem arises by taking that form,and the form is merely that precise arrangement of words and images. The beauty of athing is an essence which it manifests spontaneously, a pure quality of being revealedthere, and perhaps never to be revealedagain. The natural causes that produce thething and bring it to notice produce also thismanifestation of beauty in it ; both spring intoexistence together out of a complex of circum

12

13

stances and impulses among which it isimpossible to place that homeless essence, theform of beauty thereby revealed ; yet this formis their only value for the spirit, a value whichthat precise conjunction of causes was neededto realize.There is a sense—a somewhat esoteric sense—in which such essences as beauty may becalled"the most real things in the universe."

They are the ultimate characters by which onething can be distinguished from another in theflux of nature, or one thought from another inthe mind ; and if the word " real " be usedsentimentally, to mean whatever is most clearor important or nearest to the heart, suchvalues will be not only " most real " but eventhe only

"reality," because their presence or

absence, their purity or contradiction, makeup the spiritual sum of life, all that mattersin it, without which no one would care to raisehis head from the pillow of non-being. If,however, by " most real

"we understand most

primitive or fundamental physically, the rootsof existence, it is clearly impossible that themost real things should be values. Values pre-*'suppose living beings having a direction ofdevelopment, and exerting themselves in it,so that good and evil may exist in reference tothem. That the good should be relative toactual natures and simply their innate ideal,latent or realized, is essential to its being truly

14

a good. Otherwise the term"good" would

be an empty title applied to some existingobject or force for no assignable reason.The good may nevertheless be called absolutein several senses proper to current speech.The good is by no means relative to opinion,but is rooted in the unconscious and fatalnature of living beings, a nature which predetermines for them the difference betweenfoods and poisons, happiness and misery. Themoralist may speak for others with authoritywhen he knows them better than they knowthemselves, but not otherwise. Moreover, theirnatural good may be absolute in the sense ofbeing fixed and unalterable, so long as theliving beings concerned and the circumstancesin which they nourish remain constant in type.That human nature and the world are unchangeable was an assumption of classic timeswhich survives often in modern moralists,

. without its dogmatic justification. Finally,

Ithe good may be called absolute in the sense

', of being single and all-sufficient, filling thewhole heart, and leaving nothing in the restof the universe in the least tempting, interesting, or worth distinguishing.

'

It is in thisTsense that lovers and mystics proclaim theabsoluteness of the good with which they areunited, and when the thing is true as a confession it would be frivolous and ungracious toquarrel with it as a dogma.

IF then the Ideas were immanent in things, asthe beauty of a poem is immanent in it, theycould not conceivably be powers producingtheir occasional manifestation. The beautiesintrinsic to the tragedy of Hamlet could nothave caused Shakespeare to compose that playsince those values could not possibly come toexistence until the play had already composeditself in his fancy, and burst into just thosebeauties. In order to maintain seriously theefficacy of Ideas and to conceive matters in theorthodox Platonic way, we must make a different supposition. Suppose Hamlet had been aliving prince, like the present Prince of Wales,and that Shakespeare, with his company ofplayers, had happened to appear at thisprince's court, and had conceived for him apassionate Platonic attachment, such as heseems to have conceived for the W.H. of theSonnets: and suppose further that, by theprodigious inspiration of this passion, Shakespeare had been led to imagine episodes andphrases that might in part express so tender,intellectual, and profound a character as thatliving Prince seemed to him to possess; thenindeed a most real Hamlet, with a pre-existingpower and charm, might have been the

"only

i6

begetter"of the play. In exactly this way the

Platonic Ideas, the Christian God, or theChrist of devout Christians, may be conceivedto be the causes of their temporal manifestations in matter or in the souls of men. Evidently a play written in such circumstancesmight have the same intrinsic value as onepurely imaginary; but it would not be thisliterary value that would constitute the modelor the creative influence which had producedthe play ; this literary value would have beenbegotten, like the play itself and inseparablyfrom it, by the influence radiating from theliving Hamlet, a prince having his existenceapart, who by chance had come for a momentwithin the poet's orbit.This separation between the creator and thecreated is not only the condition of derivation,contact, and causal influence, but it is alsothe condition of a genuine worship; becausethen that which is expression in the poet is atthe same time homage in the lover, as it couldnot be except fatuously and by a poeticaffectation if the being loved did not existseparately. And

"only begetter

"is the right

phrase to indicate the relation between such acreative influence and its work. A PlatonicIdea could never be the whole cause of itstemporal expressions; a material or feminineelement is involved that may receive thatinfluence and make it fruitful; a fact which

17

would also explain the many variants and themany imperfections which things might exhibitin response to the same unchanging virtue oftheir divine model.When the matter is so conceived all forcedeparts from the contention that if we separateGod or the Ideas from the temporal world," both are dead." God and the Ideas, like theliving Prince Hamlet, would remain exactly asthey were, with all their intrinsic warmth andvirtue; and the temporal world, like theShakespearean tragedy, would also remain justas it is, with all its literary values. The onlydifference would be that the living prince wouldhave inspired no poet, and that the self-inspired poet would have celebrated no livingprince. Shakespeare's Hamlet would bereduced to what, in fact, he is, an object ofoccasional imagination, a pure essence, and nota power. Meantime the inexhaustible powerswhich, if a divine life existed, would certainlylie in it, would have continued to radiate un-manifested, like those many rays of the sunwhich are dissipated in space, not being bychance reflected or absorbed and made temporally fruitful by any speck of an earth.Platonism accordingly would be entirelystultified and eviscerated if it were not sufferedto be all that modern criticism, inspired as it isby a subjective and psychological philosophy,most thoroughly dislikes; I mean, super-

C

i8

naturalistic, realistic, and dualistic. This isonly another way of saying that, according tothe Platonic doctrine, God and the unseenworld really exist in themselves, so that theycan precede, create, attract, and survive theirearthly emanations.K_

VI

Is this to say that Aristotle and all the othercritics of Platonism have had no reason on theirside ? Far from it : their criticism was amplyjustified by the facts of nature, and their onlydefect was perhaps not to have felt its fullforce, and to have still attributed power tothose very Ideas to which they denied separateexistence.1 The Platonic system is mythological : if taken literally and dogmatically, itcan seem to cold reason nothing but a gratuitous fiction, as all systems of religion or metaphysics necessarily seem to the outsider. Ofcourse they are not inwardly gratuitous ; theyare the fervent expression and product of thedeepest minds ; and anyone capable of sharingthe inspiration which prompted them willknow them to be inevitable, persuasive, andmorally coherent. Thus Dean Inge says thatthose who think Platonism dualistic havesimply not understood; that is (i

f I myselfunderstand him), they have not understood it

from within, genetically, historically, emotionally; they have not recovered the experience

1 I have elsewhere ventured to suggest that perhaps Aristotle himself was not guilty of this inconsistency. Cf. Dialogues in Limbo : the Secret of Aristotle, pp 181-193.

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and the immanent logic which, as a matter offact, held the Platonic dualism in solution.This dualism appears only in the dogma precipitated and left, as it were, as a sediment ;and the most sympathetic modern critic canhardly take such dogma seriously. He cannotreceive it as a revelation, like a humble catechumen, drinking-in the marvellous supernatural facts from the lips of the masters.Platonism, like Christianity, cannot now produce in him the illusion which it was its earlymission to produce. When he turns back tothe origin of such a faith, he cannot, for all hissympathy, share the prophetic impulse whichcarried the Fathers from their first intuitions tothe full expression of the same in consistentand final dogmas. Truth for him meanshistorical, psychological truth ; and the wholeforce of his learning and imagination is spent indissolving those dogmas dramatically into theirsubjective components, and showing them to bebut verbal expressions for certain radicalambient values. This is what, in fact, theywere, or something of that kind : and he maybe assured of this not merely by the naturalisticphilosophy (perhaps unconsciously inspiringhim) which proclaims such dogmas to benothing else, but by the study of the survivingdocuments. Plato's writings in particularshow clearly that the eventual Platonic systemwas but a moral and poetic fable.

21

The Ideas originally were really nothing butvalues. Socrates had conceived them as formsof the good, and this good itself was identicalwith the useful, beneficent, or advantageous.In the Republic we learn that anything—ashepherd or a ruler, a bridle or a bed—is goodwhen it fulfils its natural function. Fitness tocontrol a horse for the purposes of war, commerce, or sport would be the Idea (or value) ofa bridle, and fitness to induce sound and comfortable sleep would be, I suppose, the Idea ofa bed ; and as to the eternal Idea of a ruler orshepherd, what should it be but to protect andconduct his sheep or his people, and in dueseason to shear them? This homely Socraticwisdom may seem not far removed from

"the

current valuations of the worldling"; it rested

on no revelation, private or public, and had noprinciple save the reasonableness of the simplestmortal when forced by shrewd questions todisentangle his prejudices and to discover whathe really wants. But great is the power oflogic, when the mind is single and the heartopen. In a trice it will bring the humblestjudgements into the clarifying presence of thehighest good. Socrates was a plain man, butfearless ; he was omnivorous, playful, ironical,but absolutely determined. His one purposewas to be rational, to find and do what wasbest. If Anaxagoras would tell him whatprofit men might draw from the sun and moon,

22

he would listen gladly; but if it was only aquestion of the substance or motions of thosebodies, he would turn his back on Anaxagorasand laugh. This cobbler's wisdom was thesame that almost made saints of the Cynics ; itreappeared in the monks ; it may reappear anyday in some popular prophet. A fervidutilitarianism has a strangely revolutionaryforce : in squeezing the world to get every dropof pure good out of it, it leaves the worldworthless, and has to throw it away : nothingremains but the immediate good of the spirit,the naked soul longing to be saved.

VII

IN Plato and in his followers this revolutiontook more time and a larger sweep. Plato'smind was more accomplished and less consecrated than that of his master: that of hisfollowers was more dogmatic and single thanhis own. Idealism, as it moves away from itsorigins, may easily become idolatrous: whileleaving earthly things dry and empty, it mayworship the pure forms which these thingswould have had if they had been perfect. Incriticizing and condemning this world theprophet will find himself in the presence ofanother world, its sublimated image. The giftof thinking in myths, once native to the Greeks,was not altogether lost ; it could still fuse theforms seen with a life unseen ; it could transform definition of terms into intuition ofIdeas; it could personify the functions ofthings and turn their virtues into patrondeities animating those things and causingthem to shine with a strength and beauty aliento their earthly substance. In the unclouded,synthetic, believing mind of Plotinus thischastened mythology crystallized into themost beautiful of systems.An inexhaustible divine energy—so thesystem ran—poured perpetually down into the

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chaos of matter, animating and shaping it aswell as that torpid substance would permit.At the bottom or centre there was little life,but it stirred more actively and nobly at eachsuccessive level, somewhat as the light of thesun floods the ether absolutely, the air variously,the sea dubiously, and the earth only darkly,with a shallow warmth. Hence the hierarchyv/of created goods, which is itself a good; andas to the defeats and confusions involved inbeing other than the highest, and other thanone's own Idea, they were due to the inopportune inertia of matter, or to blind accident, orto a diabolical soul intervening and poisoningthe fountains of divine grace. All levels of•<being were good in some measure, each afterits kind. Consistently, and yet perhaps onlywith an effort and against the spirit of histimes, Plotinus defended the excellence of thematerial world against the Gnostics, and theworthiness of the state and of the traditions ofHellenism, so that an emperor and even anempress might be his auditors without offence ;I and his philosophy remained Socratic in prin-^ciple, a mythical underpinning to morals, andnot a vTew oTnature founded on observation,like those of the Stoics and the Epicureans.Yet in the five or six hundred years sinceSocrates, moral life itself had changed itscentre. The good of the soul and her salvationhad taken the place of domestic, military, and

25

political goods; so that while the variousspheres of being, like the terraces of Dante'sPurgatorio, were all permanent and divinely x (.<•

*

appointed, the spirit now moved through themwithout rest. Its abiding-place was beyond.They were but the rounds of a Jacob's ladder ^ . ^

by which the soul might climb again to hernative heaven, and it was only " there," above,that she truly lived and had been blessed fromall eternity.Platonism, as Dean Inge observes, has notendency to become pantheistic. Its first ^principle is the difference between good andevil. Its final dogmas describe a half-astronomical, half-dramatic setting for the phases ofspiritual life. The divine spirit burned withsuch an intense and concentrated fire, it was sorich in its inner being, it overflowed into acelestial hierarchy of so many choirs, allsuperior to man, even on earth it found somany marvellous and amiable non-humanmanifestations, that man, with his two-footedfeatherlessness and his political artifices, losthis ancient Hellenic dignity: it was almost a,disgrace for the soul to be expressed in a bodyor a body in a statue. Thus the imagineduniverse which was to shelter morality threatened to outgrow its original office. Man andhis earthly fortunes began to seem to the contemplative mind but incidents in the barnyard. The only ambition worthy of a philo-

26

sopher was to transcend and transfigure hishuman nature, and to pass unsullied throughthis nether world in adoration of the worldabove.

VIII

PLOTINUS professed to be, and actually was,an orthodox Platonist ; and yet this dominantsense in him of the spiritual life was perfectlyforeign to Socrates and Plato. I say this without forgetting the dialogues on love or thealmost Roman religiosity of the Laws. Afterhaving been very poetical Plato became veryaustere ; but his philosophy remained politicalto the end. To this descendant of Solon theuniverse could never be anything but a crystalcase to hold the jewel of a Greek city. Divineas the heavens were, they were but a motheringand brooding power : in their refined materialityand mathematical divinity they circled aboutthe earth, at once vivifying it and rebuking itby the visible presence of an exemplary good.The notion of the heavenly spheres was nomere optical image, the dream of a philosopherwho, on a clear night, could measure theradius of the universe with the naked eye : thisimage was a moral parable. The realm ofethics will always be a set of concentric circles.Life necessarily radiates from centres ; it stirshere, in the self; from here it looks abroadfor supports and extensions, in the family, thenation, the intellectual world, the parent andsubject universe. Wide as it may seem, this

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prospect is homely, and taken from the hearthof Vesta.If the theology of Socrates and Plato was inthis way domestic, the remnant of traditionalreligion in them was doubly so. Their attachment to ancient piety was childlike and superstitious when it remained personal, but moreoften it was expressly political and politic:they saw in religion a ready means of silencingdangerous questions and rebuking wickedness.It was a matter of moral education and police,and in no sense spiritual.As to the Socratic philosophy of love, thereis an obvious spiritual tendency in it, inasmuchas it bids the heart turn from the temporal tothe eternal; and it does so not by way of an/ r-arid logic but by a true discipline of the affec-

jtions, sublimating erotic passion into a justI enthusiasm for all things beautiful and perfect.

] This is the secret of Platonism, which makes itperennial, so that if it were ever lost as atradition it would presently be revived as an.inspiration. It lives by a poignant sense ofJ eternal values—the beautiful and the good—revealed for a moment in living creatures or inearthly harmonies. Yet who has not felt thatthis Platonic enthusiasm is somewhat equivocal and vain ? Why ? Because its renunciation is not radical. In surrendering someparticular hope or some personal object ofpassion, it preserves and feeds the passion

29

itself ; there is no true catharsis, no liberation,but a sort of substitution and subterfuge, oftenhypocritical. Pure spiritual life cannot besomething compensatory, a consolation forhaving missed more solid satisfactions: itshould be rather the flower of all satisfactions,in which satisfaction becomes free from care,selfless, wholly actual and, in that inwardsense, eternal. Spiritual life is simple anddirect, but it is intellectual. Love, on thecontrary, as Plotinus says, is somethingmaterial, based on craving and a sense of want.For this reason the beautiful and the good, forthe Platonic enthusiast, remain urgent values ;he would cease to be a true Platonist or a raptlover if he understood, if he discounted hisillusions, rose above the animal need or themental prejudice which made those valuesurgent, and relegated them to their relativestation, where by their nature they belong.Yet this is what a pure spirit would do, onetruly emancipated and enlightened.

IXHERE, at the risk of parting company withDean Inge and even with Plato, I come to aradical conclusion. Spiritual life is not aworship of

" values," whether found in thingsor hypostatized into supernatural powers. Itis the exact opposite ; it is disintoxication fromtheir influence. Not that spiritual insight canever remove values from nature or cease to feelthem in their moral black and white and in allv their aesthetic iridescence. Spirit knows thesevital necessities : it has been quickened in theirbosom. All animals have within them aprinciple by which to distinguish good fromevil, since their existence and welfare arefurthered by some circumstances and acts andare hindered by others. Self-knowledge, witha little experience of the world, will then easilyset up the Socratic standard of values naturaland inevitable to any man or to any society.These values each society will disentangle inproportion to its intelligence and will defend inproportion to its vitality. But who woulddream that spiritual life was at all concernedin asserting these human and local values to bealone valid, or in supposing that they wereespecially divine, or bound to dominate theuniverse for ever ?

30

In fact, the great masters of the spirituallife are evidently not the Greeks, not even theAlexandrian Greeks, but the Indians, theirdisciples elsewhere in the East, and thoseMoslems, Christians, and Jews who havesurrendered precisely that early, unregenerateclaim to be enveloped in a protecting worlddesigned for their benefit or vindication, aclaim of which Platonism after all was but a

^

refined version. To cling to familiar treasuresand affections is human, but it is not particularly spiritual; to hypostatize these homevalues into a cosmic system especially plannedto guarantee them, certainly expresses anintelligible passionate need for comfort andcoddling in the universe, but with spiritualityit has nothing to do. If such confidence maybe called faith, it may also be called fatuityand insolence; an insolence innocent in aspirited child, but out of place in a philosopher.Spirituality comes precisely of surrendering Vthis animal arrogance and this moral fanaticismand substituting for them pure intelligence:not a discoursing cleverness or scepticism, but ,perfect candour and impartial vision. Spirit is vmerciful and tender because it has no privatemotive to make it spiteful ; yet it is unflinchingly austere because it cannot make anyprivate motive its own. It need have noscientific or artistic pretensions; it appearsquite adequately in straight seeing of simple

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things; these, to pure spirit, are speculativeenough and good to whet its edge upon; theproudest dreams of science or theology are nobetter for the purpose. The spirit is contentwith the widow's mite and a cup of cold water ;it considers the lilies of the field ; it can saywith literal truth : Inasmuch as ye did it untothe least of these, ye did it unto me.As the spirit is no respecter of persons, so itis no respecter of worlds : it is willing to put upwith any of them, to be feasted in one or to bemartyred in another. And while it is allowedto live—a point that concerns the world itlives in rather than the spirit itself—it lookswith a clear and untroubled sympathy on suchmanifestations of being as happen to beunrolled before it. As it loves the non-humanparts of nature, so it loves the human parts,and is in no way hostile to the natural passionsand to the political and religious institutionsthat happen to prevail. If spirit was to beincarnate and to appear in existence at all, ithad to be born in one odd world or another:why should it quarrel with its earthly cradle ?This is not to say that all circumstances areequally favourable to the spiritual life. Onthe contrary, most circumstances exclude italtogether; the vast abysses of nature seemto be uninhabited; and even where spiritfeebly appears, it is in order to be, very often,stifled at once, or long tormented. Almost

33

always its world is too much with it ; the spiritis so deeply engaged and distracted by currentevents that it cannot realize its proper function,which is to see such things as come in its wayunder the form of eternity, in their intrinsiccharacter and relative value, in their transitive-ness and necessity, in a word, in their truth.This contemplative habit evidently finds afreer course in solitude than in society, in artthan in business, in prayer than in argument.It is stimulated by beautiful and constantthings more than by things ugly, tedious,crowded, or uncertain. For this reason it ismore prevalent and freer in the East than inthe West, among Catholics than among Protestants, among Moslems than among Jews.For the same reason the Platonic system, up toa certain point, is sympathetic to the spirit.Its universe was compact and immortal; theoscillations of fortune on earth could notdisturb its unchangeable order. If nature wereconceived to be, as in fact she is, barbarous andin indefinite flux, giving rein to anything andeverything, there would seem hardly to be timeto reach perfection on any level of being beforethe soil was undermined and the budding Ideawas lost and dissipated. The great merit of anunchanging world is that all its inhabitantscan be adapted to it. If they ever fall out oftune the cause will be but a passing diseaseand an accidental slackness in the strings; it

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will be easy to screw up the pegs, to renew asnapped cord, and to restore the harmony.Such a world offers an immovable basis andsanction for the good: it establishes anorthodox morality. Imperfection enters itonly below the circle of the moon, like badmanners below stairs; and even here, onearth, evil is but an oscillation and dizziness inmatter which nature perpetually calls back tothe norm, as the motion of a top rights it in itsgyrations.

X

I AM not confident, however, that a pure spiritwould feel safe in such a seven-walled celestialcastle, or would prize the sort of safety which,if it were real, it would afford. Existence iscontingent essentially. As things might justas well have been different, so they might justas well prove to be inconstant ; and since theycannot manifest their groundlessness by nowbeing other than they happen to be, they maymanifest it by being other at other times andplaces. No existing being can have the meansof knowing that it will always exist or prosperin the universe : the neatest cosmos and themost solitary god might collide with somethingunsuspected; or the unsuspected thing mightexist in its own preserves without being discovered or coming into collision. Yet thatundiscovered world, for the spirit, would be asreal and as interesting as this world. Ignorancecannot justify any negative prophecy: butexistence, while it is the home of particularcertitudes, is also a cage in which an inevitableand infinite ignorance sings and dies imprisoned.Existence is self-centred, limited in characterby the character which it chances to have,and in duration by the crawling fact that itexists while it is found existing. There is no

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necessary and all-comprehensive being exceptthe realm of essence, to which existence isirrelevant : for whether the whole exist or onlya part, or even if no part existed, the alternative fact would always be knocking at thedoor; and nothing in the actual facts couldever prove that the door would not suddenlyopen and let the contrary in. Like peopleliving on the slopes of volcanoes, we ignorethese possibilities, although a catastrophe israpidly approaching each of us in the form ofdeath, and who knows how soon it may overtake the whole confused life of our planet ?Nevertheless, except in the interests of detachment and freedom, spirit has no reason fordwelling on other possible worlds. Wouldany of them be less contingent than this one,or nearer to the heart of infinite Being ? Andwould not any of them, whatever its character,lead the spirit inexorably there ? To master theactual is the best way of transcending it.Those who know but one language, like theGreeks, seem to find language a purer and moretransparent vehicle than those of us who noticeits idiosyncrasies and become entangled in itsmeshes. So it is the saints most steeped eachin his traditional religion who are nearesttogether in spirit ; and if nature caused themto change places, it is they that after amoment's pause to get their bearings, would bemost at ease in one another's skins. No one is

37

more unspiritual than a heretic, or more graceless and wretched than an unfrocked priest;yet the frock of the faithful is but an earthlygarment ; it melts into the clouds which, intheir ascension, they leave behind them.

XIIN what places the spirit shall awake, and howlong and how freely it shall be suffered toflourish are evidently questions of mundanephysics and politics : it is the world's business^ to call down spirit to dwell in it, not the spirit'sbusiness to make a world in which to dwell.The friends of spirit, in their political capacity,will of course defend those forms of society inwhich, given their particular race and traditions, spirit may best exist : they will protectit in whatever organs and instruments it mayalready have appeared, and will take care thatit pursues its contemplative life undisturbedin its ancient sanctuaries. Spirituality hasmaterial conditions; not only the generalconditions of life and intuition (for a man mustexist before he can become a spiritual man),

Ibut subtler and more special conditions suchas concentration of thought, indifference toI fortune and reputation, warmth of tempera-Vment (because spirit cannot burn clear except/ at a high temperature) disciplined into chastityvand renunciation. These and other such conditions the master of novices does well toi consider ; but spirit itself, when once aroused,Moes not look back in that direction. ManyChristian saints have qualified their spiritualitywith too much self-consciousness ; it was no

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doubt their religious duty to examine theirconsciences and study to advance in holiness;but the holiness really did not begin until theyforgot themselves in the thought of God. Sowith those who were consumed with zeal forthe Church, the conversion of sinners, and otherworks of charity. These are moral interests orduties accruing to men as members of someparticular society; they are political cares.They may be accompanied by spiritual insight,if it be really salvation or spiritualization ofsouls that preoccupies the missionary, and notsome outward change of habit or allegiance,that may make other people more like himselfand ensure the dominance of his home traditions. Political zeal even in the true friends ofspirit is not spiritual; a successful apostlemust have rather a worldly mind, because heneeds to have his hand on the pulse of theworld; his appeal would not be intelligible ifit were not threatening or spectacular or full oflewd promises. It will be only afterwards,perhaps, when people have been domesticatedin the new faith, that the spirit will descendupon them. The spirit itself is not afraid ofbeing stamped out here, or anxious to bekindled there; its concern is not about itsinstances or manifestations ; it is not essentiallylearned or social; its kingdom is not of thisworld. It leaves propaganda to those who callthemselves its friends but probably know

40

nothing of it, or are even its enemies, and onlythe agents of some worldly transformationultimately quite nugatory.Nor has the world, on its side, any obligationAo cultivate the spiritual life. Obligations aremoral ; they presuppose a physical and socialorganism with immanent spontaneous interestswhich may impose those obligations. Thevalue and opportuneness of spiritual life, inany of its possible forms, must be adjudged byreason in view of the moral economy forwhich, in any instance, reason may speak.All values fall within the purview of ethics,* which is a part of politics. Spirituality is thesupreme good for those who are called to it,the few whose intellectual thirst can bequenched only by impartial truth and theself-annihilating contemplation of all Being.The statesman and the father of a family maynot always welcome this disposition; it mayseem to them wasteful and idle. Just as thevalue of an artist must be judged by the world,in view of all the interests which his art affectsor subserves, while the artist himself lives onlyj in his own labour, irresponsible, technical, andvisionary; so the value of spiritual life ingeneral, or in any of its incidental forms, mustbe judged morally by the world, in view of its

•I own ambitions, while the spirit, standinginvisibly at its elbow, judges the world and itsambitions spiritually.

XIIIT is impossible that spirit in a living creatureshould ever be wholly freed from the body andfrom the world ; for in its inwardness it wouldhave ceased to follow and enact the fortunesof that creature; it would either have beenabsorbed in the contemplation of pure Beingand become virtually omniscient, or at leastit would contemplate its special objects equablyunder the form of eternity, and not in theperspectives determined by the station of itsbody in time and place. Pure Being, or thesespecial essences and truths, would evidentlygain nothing by the fact that this new mindhad been lost in them; and this mind, ingaining them, would have lost itself ; it would,in fact, have ceased to exist separately. Meantime the body of that creature might go onliving automatically; the mind which it hadpreviously fed, as a lamp feeds its flame, wouldhave evaporated, gone up into the sun, andceased to light the precincts and penumbra ofthat particular vessel, or to be a measure of itslittle oil. But a living automaton is by natureconscious: the lamp has not been materiallyextinguished : the creature is accordingly stillbreeding a faithful if flickering mind, whichfeels and notes its further vicissitudes. Evi

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dently this fresh mind is the true continuationof that creature's experience ; it is again continuously cognizant of that body in that world.The effort to liberate souls from their bodiesor to transport them beyond their world hastherefore a rather ironical result : the redeemedsoul ceases to be anybody's soul, and the bodycontinues to have a soul that is quite personaland unregenerate.The difference between the life of the spiritand that of the flesh is itself a spiritual difference : the two are not to be divided materiallyor in their occasions and themes so much as inthe quality of their attention: the one isanxiety, inquiry, desire, and fear ; the other isintuitive possession. The spirit is not a talebearer having a mock world of its own tosubstitute for the humble circumstances of thislife ; it is only the faculty—the disenchantingand re-enchanting faculty—of seeing this worldin its simple truth. Therefore all the worldlyhatred of spirit—and it is very fierce—cannever remove the danger that, after a thousandpersecutions and a long conspiracy of derision,a child of the spirit should be born in thebosom of the worldly family. The moreorganic and perfect the life of the world becomes, the more intelligent it will be : and whatshall prevent intelligence from asking what allthis pother is about and driving the moneychangers from the house of prayer? Spirit

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must have some organ ; but when once arousedit does not look in the direction of its organ orcare at all about preserving it. It looks rather,as we see in Indian philosophy, to a realmanterior to all worlds, and finds there a comprehensive object which in one sense includes allworlds, since it is infinite Being, but for thatvery reason excludes the enacted existence ofany one of them, since they can be enacted, asthe moments of time are enacted, only byexcluding and ousting one another. Thisworld, for a speculative mind, is exactlyanalogous to this moment. It seems alonereal to those who inhabit it, but its preeminence is relative and egotistical: it maintained dogmatically it becomes at once illusoryand absurd.

XIIINOT that the existence of a particular world—perhaps its exclusive existence—is an evil. Ifthe lovers of pure Being are ever tempted tosay so, it is only in their human capacity,because some rude fact may have woundedtheir feelings. These feelings are a part of theworld which they condemn, inevitable as thisworld is inevitable, and unnecessary in thesense in which this world is unnecessary. Thecontradiction or self-dislike which they betrayin that world is, no doubt, a defect from thepoint of view of the parts in it which arequarrelling, each of which would wish to haveit all its own way. But this fact does notrender that world, or the conflicts in it, evilabsolutely. Evil can arise only within eachworld when it becomes faithless to some Ideawhich it has begun to pursue, or is crossed inthe pursuit of it either by some external enemy

(if any) or by the inward contradiction and

complexity of its impulses, which allow it onlyto drift towards uncertain, tragic, and romanticissues. But, as we see in some desperatelyromantic philosophers, this very disorder mayplease an imagination which is stirred by thatstimulus more deeply than by any impulsetowards harmony and fixity of form. Some

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impulse towards form, some initial essence oressences, a world must preserve so long as itexists, else it would dissolve into chaos or intothat metaphysical non-entity, matter withoutform : but this modicum of form may becomposed by the perpetual defeat of everyparticular endeavour, and the greatest evil ofthe greatest number of souls may fulfil theromantic ideal. The theologians who havemaintained that the damnation of the greatmajority is no evil in the sight of God, andleaves his intrinsic holiness and glory unsullied,have understood the matter speculatively ;and although the ferocity of the Calvinists wasnot spiritual, and their notion of "an angryGod " was grotesque, there was spirituality intheir elevation above the weak judgements ofthe flesh and even of the heart ; only that thespeculative sword really cuts both ways, andtheir sense for the superhuman should alsohave dissolved their moral fanaticism. PureBeing is infinite, its essence includes allessences; how then should it issue particularcommands, or be an acrimonious moralist ?The two-edged sword falls again here. If it ,be true that the world can be evil only in itsown eyes and therefore only partially and provisionally, until the eyes are closed or arehardened like the eagle's to that woundinglight, so it is true also that it can be good in its »own eyes only : and more, that the spiritual

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life and the pure Being to which its contemplation is addressed, can be good only in relation•/to the living souls that may find their goodthere. Plotinus and many other mystics haveadmitted that the One, though habituallycalled good, is not properly so called. It is thegood of religion, because religion is a conversionfrom one object of pursuit to another, underthe form of the good : but in the One itself, orin attainment, the pursuit is absent, and thecategory of the good no longer has any application. The title may be retained, in humanparlance, to indicate that the attainmentreally satisfies the aspiration which preceded,and does not disappoint it; for to end there,to end absolutely, was the very aim of thataspiration. The case is like that of a manbuilding his tomb, or bequeathing his propertyto his son ; the result is a good for him in thathe desired it, but not in that he survives toenjoy it. So is the peace that passeth understanding, that annuls desire, and that excludesthe gasping consciousness of peace.

XIV

SPIRIT, which is ultimately addressed to pureBeing, is not itself this pure Being. It is thegift of intuition, feeling, or apprehension : anovertone of animal life, a realization, on ahypostatic plane, of certain moving unities inmatter. So, at least, I understand the word;but its original meaning was a breath or wind,and hence, often, an influence. In this lastsense it is used in Christian theology ; the HolyGhost is not the Father nor the Son, but proceeds from them and animates the world, or at ,least the souls of the elect7 It is the fountain

(

of grace. We also read in the gospel that God 1is a spirit, to be worshipped in spirit and intruth. Here the word evidently bears morethan one sense; the spirit in which God isworshipped is a disposition of the mind, whereas God himself, we may presume, is a spirit inthe mighty sense in which Jehovah swept thevoid, a breath or a word, bringing order out of/chaos; the same voice that spoke to Job outof the whirlwind, with the sheer authority ofpower. Spirit thus seems to be sometimes a

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f 48

i creative energy, sometimes a sanctifying influence. So in the Latin hymn :

Veni creator Spirituscorda tuorum visitansimple supernA. gratid, Ll^L " 1 * ',

, "*""X'' 7'

qua* tu creasti pectora. &.<.*u f..J* i-.-'i'*^ '**'

This double function of spirit, if we investi-"gated its origin, would bring back the double

ffi-.* i source of Christian doctrine, here Hebraic andthere Platonic: a profound dualism whichcustom scarcely avails to disguise or theology

„' to heal. Creative power and redeeming gracepoint in opposite directions; but a completereligion needs to look both ways, feedingpiously at the breast of nature, yet weaningitself spiritually from that necessary comfortto the contemplation of superhuman andeternal things. The object of piety is necessity,power, the laws of life and prosperity, and tocall these things spirit is pure mythology ; theyare indeed a great wind, sometimes balmy,sometimes terrible; and it is the part of wisdom to take shelter from it, or spread wings orsails in it, according as it lists to blow. But to

^ what end ? To live, to have spirit, to understand all these things.There is also a conventional modern sense inwhich we speak of the spirit of an age, a place,or a book, meaning some vague tendency orinspiration either actually dominating thatthing or suggested by it to the mind of a third

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person. This is a verbal survival of myth,poetry become cant : spirit here means thosecharacters of a thing which a myth-makingmind would have attributed to a spirit.In contrast to all these uses I am employingthe word spirit to mean something actual;indeed, the very fact of actuality, the gleamof intuition or feeling. But this gleam ordinarily serves only to light up material life andthe perspectives in which it moves in time andin space: an incessant sketchy sense of theaffairs of the body and of its world. Thedigestion and preparation of action (as thebehaviourists have shown) is a physical matter.In that business the spirit is entirely superfluous.The behaviourists even affect to deny itsexistence, on the ground that it is invisible andwould be a useless luxury in nature : excellenteconomy, as if a man, the better to provide forhis future, should starve himself to death.The spirit in us is that which, morally, weVactually are : if anything is to be expungedfrom the complex face of reality it mightrather be our material and social setting andall the strange and incoherent stories told us inhistory and science. Certainly all these apparent or reported facts would be perfectly vain,if they did not create the spirit, and teach itto observe and enjoy them. So we are broughtback to the immediate revelation of things,which is also their ultimate value : we are

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i brought back to the spirit. Its life is composedof feelings and intuitions, in many stages anddegrees ; and when spirit is free and collectedit has no life but this spiritual life, in which theultimate is immediate. All the experiences ofthe spirit, until they are so exorcized andappropriated—so enshrined in pure Being—aresheer distraction.

XV

WERE any world perfect, as the Platoniststhought that this world was in its upper parts,its spirit would view it with the same contemplative satisfaction with which it views anypure essence that spontaneously engages itsattention. It would not, in respect to thatperfect world, be harassed by remorse, as itmust be in an imperfect world when it countsthe cost of existence and considers the dreadfulsufferings which plagued it like a nightmare,before something beautiful and good couldappear even for a moment. I say remorse,because such is the feeling that comes over mewhen I remember the travail which, at least inman, the spirit has had to endure in bringingits better life to birth : but the spirit itself hasno guilt in the matter ; it was caught in a vice ;and it may accept and overlook that terriblegestation when at last it reaches the open andrewards itself with an hour of freedom andgladness. These are its natural notes: it isborn out of an achieved harmony, only increatures already formed and in some measurefit to live : contradiction and torment areinexplicable to it, and danger a cause of laughter. How should spirit, the very essence ofradiance, ever become morose? It runs and

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sparkles wherever it may, the free child ofnature. It has no grudge against its fosteringworld ; on the contrary, nothing but delightedwonder. It has no native enmity towards theflesh—that comes to it afterwards from thesad flesh itself ; it has no disinclination to folly.The difference between folly and wisdom,between crime and piety, is not naturallyknown to spirit ; it is a lesson learned byexperience, in view of the conditions of materiallife ; spirit would of itself gladly take a turnwith the devil, who is also a spirit. Yet all thisinnocent joy and courage native to spirit bindit to the world with no tie. That which is tied,that which cannot live save in its home climateand family nest, is only the mortal psyche, thepoor, absurd, accidental human person. Thepsyche in each of us is like Vesta, the goddessof the Hearth, mother of the Prometheanflame, mother of spirit ; and she needs to learnthe difficult unselfishness of the parent—or ofthe foster-parent: for her child is of anotherrace. She must be content to be abandoned,revisited only in haste on some idle holiday,with a retrospective piety; and even as sheembraces her full-grown over-topping son hewill seem a stranger to her, and she will catchsight of his eyes, gazing over her head into afar country.At the same time this homelessness of spiritis not romantic; it is not impatience of this

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and longing for that ; it is not the snobbery oflearning and culture so characteristic of intellectual people who are not spiritual. No : thehomelessness of spirit comes from detachment,detachment no less from the grander thingwhich the snob respects and pretends to knowas from this humbler thing which he despises.Anything is enough if it be pure ; but purityitself comes to things from the simplicity of thespirit which regards them, not indeed withindifference, rather with joy, but without anyulterior interest ; in other words, purity comesof detaching the thing seen and loved from theworld that besets and threatens it and attaching it to the spirit to which it is an eternalpossession. But this thing eternally possessedby the spirit is not the thing as the worldknows and prizes it; it is not the person, ornation, or religion as it asserts and flauntsitself, in a mortal anxiety to be dominant ; it isonly that thing in its eternal essence, out ofwhich the stress and the doubt of existencehave wholly passed. It is that thing dead,immortal, its soul restored, as Plotinus wouldhave said, to the soul of the universe where,together with all other souls, it has always beencontained in its purity and perfection. Butthe truth of it there is not the fact of it here ;and therefore the world, though the spirit lovesit far more truly and tenderly than it lovesitself, is chilled and rebuked by that look of

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divine love, which, if it were heeded, wouldtransmute its whole life and change it fromwhat it so passionately and cruelly is, in time,into that which the spirit sees it to be ineternity.

XVI

THE human heart is full of political, religious,metaphysical ambition; it hugs all sorts ofpleasant projects in art and in fortune. Theseare moral interests and, if not misguided, maybring hidden or future facts before the mind,and broaden the basis for rational action. Sothe Platonic philosophy sets the scene in oneway for the play, the Christian system in a waysomewhat different, and modern science, if wemake a naturalistic system out of it, in stillanother. I will not say that the questionwhich of these is true, or truer, is indifferent tothe spirit; its fortunes and temper will evidently vary if it is bred in one or another ofthese climates. But if the facts were discovered, whatever they might turn out to be,the spirit would be equally ready and able toface them. It is not in the least bound up withthe supposition, whatever it may mean exactly,that any

"values are the most real things in the

universe." What should the spirit care ifmoralistic metaphysics ceased to invade thefield of natural philosophy, venturing thereupon some guesses flattering to human vanity ?What if the most real—that is

, I suppose, themost fundamental and dynamic—things in theuniverse were utterly inhuman ? Would spiritu

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ality be thereby prevented from being spiritual,from seeing and judging whatever worldhappened to exist in the light of spirit ?When I say the light of spirit I might as wellsay light simply ; for what is spirit but the actof making light actual, of greeting, observing,questioning, and judging anything and every-i thing ? Spirit is awareness, intelligence, recollection. It requires no dogmas, as does animalfaith or the art of living. Human morality,for the spirit, is but the inevitable and hygienic\bias of one race of animals. Spirit itself is nothuman ; it may spring up in any life ; it maydetach itself from any provincialism; as itexists in all nations and religions, so it mayexist in all animals, and who knows in howmany undreamt-of beings, and in the midst ofwhat worlds ? It might flourish, as the Stoicsfelt, even in the face of chaos, except that chaoscould not sustain the animal life, the psyche,which spirit requires for its organ. From theexistence of spirit a psychologist may therefore argue back to the existence—at least localand temporary—of some cosmos of organizedmatter : but this dependence of mind on bodyis a lesson taught by natural philosophy, whennatural philosophy is sound; it is not a freeor evident requirement of spirit in its firstdeliverance. On the contrary, the body whichis the matrix and cradle of spirit in time, seemsa stumbling-block to it in its spontaneous

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career ; and a rather long discipline and muchchastening hardly persuade this supernaturalnursling that it is really so domestic, and thatit borrows its existence from a poor, busy,precarious animal life; or that the naturalrhythms, pauses, and synthetic reactions ofthat life are the ground of its native affinitywith the eternal. Yet such is the fact : spirit,as I have said, is a hypostatic unity whichmakes actual and emotional the merely formalunities or harmonies of bodily life ; and sincethe living psyche is in flux, any actual existence which bridged its processes and relationswould have to transcend time in its survey,and not be attached or confined to any of themoments which it overlooked and spanned.Therefore spirit is essentially dateless, and itsimmediate terms are essences in themselveseternal; which is not to say that one formof spirit does not continually replace anotherin the world. There is a continual variationin themes, and there may be intermittences inintuition itself ; but each of these themes is anessence overarching a part of the existentialflux, and each moment or node in intuitionlooks out of its narrow window upon a vistawhich, whether broad or confined, is notanchored in the place of any of its sundryobjects.To this organ and to this temporal basisspirit can accommodate itself perfectly when

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once it has discovered them. Naturalism hasits modest way of doing the spirit honour. Inwhatever manner natural forces may operate,if ever they issue in life, it can be only becausethey already have established rhythms, suchas day and night, favourable to that life, to itsrenewal and inheritance. Any world, anysociety, any language has a natural inertia ortendency to continue ; it satisfies and encourages the spirit which it creates. It fits theimagination because it has kindled and mouldedit, and it satisfies its resident passions becausethese are such, and such only, as could take.root and become habitual in precisely that*world. This natural harmony between thespirit and its conditions is the only actual one :it is the source of every ideal and the solejustification of any hope. Imperfect and shifting as this harmony must be, it is sufficient tosupport the spirit of man ; and if this spirit beclear and open, it is sufficient to unroll beforeit all the proper objects of its contemplation intheir invincible beauty and eternity. That thevision, considered as an event in history, mustchange and pass is indifferent. It is not becauseother people love what I love that, if I am afree spirit, I love it, nor because I have alwaysIloved it or must always love it in future, bijLi because it is lovely as I see it now. Such is theassurance that is proper to life, to actuality, tointuition : the rest is weariness of spirit, and a

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burden to the flesh. But the animal in man iswretched unless he can imagine that hislanguage, nation, arts, and sentiments aredestined to be supreme in the world for ever ;he is hardly content to suppose that he maynot rise again to take part in celebrating somefinal, yet unending, victory ; and he demandseternity not for the lovely essences which hemay have beheld, which have eternity inthemselves already, but for the manifestationof those essences, which cannot -have it.

XVII

SINCE spirit is an emanation of natural lifethere would be impiety on its part in floutingor denying its own source : yet this has alwaysbeen a temptation for spirit when self-consciousand self-contained : hence the pride of Lucifer,the mock independence of the Stoic sage, theacosmism and absoluteness of the Indianmystic, and the egotism of German philosophy,thinking to create and recreate its world inits flight through nothingness. The troublewith such forced attitudes is that they attemptto divorce spirituality from piety, which is theother half, and the fundamental half, of asound religion. In Platonism and Christianitythis divorce has been avoided, but withoutestablishing a happy and stable marriage;because the object of piety is the power, whatever it may be, on which life depends ; and itis not true piety to inventor posit other sourcesfor life or welfare than those which experienceshows to exist : piety is wisdom. Nor does thespiritual life profit in the end by trespassing inthis way on the preserves of a sober piety and asober science; because the spirit is therebyentangled in the fanatical defence of fantasticdogmas, as if these were indispensable to itslife; so that its peace is poisoned, and its

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6i

wings are clipped. What folly to suppose thatecstasy could be abolished by recognizing thetrue sources of ecstasy ! Yet ecstatic, and notaddressed to matters of fact, the spirit is in itsessence, whenever it arises at all. It actualizes,in an intuition which is through and throughpoetical and visionary, various movements,rhythms, potentialities, and transcendent relations which physical life involves but which arenot parts or moments of its moving substance,and remain merely formal facts for the externalobserver.The attachment of spiritual minds to someparticular system of cosmology, Platonic,Christian, Indian, or other, is, therefore, ahistorical accident—a more or less happymeans of expression, but a treacherous articleof faith. The truth of any of these systems is aquestion for science, not at all a postulate ofthe spiritual life. Accordingly, as Dean Ingesays,"an entirely open mind towards the dis

coveries of science" would be characteristic of

a purely spiritual religion . But it is not possiblycharacteristic of a convinced Platonist or a__convinced Christian. In Platonism, as in>jChristianity, the spiritual life is not pure, butincarnate in a particular body of dogma,historical and cosmological : both systems arepledged to the magic ascendancy of certainsupernatural powers, posited in order to guarantee certain particular human values. No

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such system, giving an unnatural fixity, in aspecial cosmos, to a special morality or civilization or to a private personality, can look uponthe hypotheses of a free science with anythingbut terror, perhaps mitigated by contempt :terror, because it has laid up its treasure in aneventual material heaven, which it feels in itsbones to be mythical ; and perhaps contempt,because free science is but human discourse,in which one shaky hypothesis is alwaysreplacing another; whereas the dogmas of anallegorical religion, for the very reason thatthey express elementary human feelings andfancies, can appeal to the heart so long as theheart is human. To cultivate this contemptfor free science, and to endure that terror withfortitude, aided by hypnotic ritual influencesand the contagion of many voices crying inunison, must be the policy of any such system ;it must stand by its guns. It can cultivateits own learning and arts and philosophy, butwith free science it can have nothing to do.It is not to-day or yesterday, as Dean Ingeseems to think, that science has discreditedthese mythical dogmas. Science is but a namefor consecutive observation and understanding,and science had amply disproved those dogmasbefore they arose : a fact which did not preventthem from arising and from prevailing exceedingly.The interests which these dogmas expressed

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and sanctioned were respectable interests,political, moral, and emotional. The civilizedmind is still very much more at home in sucha cosy world than in the universal flux ofnature, which not only opens material immeasurable abysses on every side of our humannest, but threatens us with an indefinite flux inour own being, in our habits, institutions,affections, and in the very grammar and categories of our thought. Yet neither science norspirituality share this classic dislike or fear ofthe infinite. Science, although its occasion isthe description and manipulation of the fieldof action, is heartily willing to describe it andmanipulate it in any convenient way. It isperhaps the best sign of a scientific, as distinguished from a doctrinaire, temper not tolay great store on science itself, that is, on itsforms, language, and theories, but to keep itplastic in the presence of its existing subject-matter, and of the spontaneity of humanfancy, which, at any moment, may suggest newmethods of notation, new abbreviations, newsyntheses. As to spirit, it has a far deeperreason than science for eluding every convention and not regarding institutions, whetherpolitical, ecclesiastical, or intellectual, withmore than a resigned courtesy. Such thingsmust needs be : it would be foolish to rejectthem instead of profiting by them. The body,which is an institution of nature, is the indis-

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pensable organ of spirit in man ; political andreligious institutions are organs necessary alsofor certain kinds of spiritual life; and if thecosmos, too, is a permanent institution, thespirit can very well acknowledge that accidental fact and submit, here, to the limitationsthereby imposed upon it. But it would be,for spirit, a limitation ; its proper field is there,in the world which is eternal by inward necessity and essence, not by a longevity presumedto be perpetual ; a world which for the samereason is infinite, as a world of change, even ifendless, cannot be, since it expressly excludesany order of events other than the one whichit happens to realize.

XVIII

THE Platonists, like all typical Greeks, shuddered at the infinite and hardly thought ofit, even in the optical form of infinite space.This is of itself a sufficient proof that theywere fundamentally political philosophers,moralists, humanists, and not men livingprimarily in the spirit. They thought theinfinite formless—a conception which is possibleonly in the absence of concentration upon thatidea; for, when considered intently, theinfinite is seen to contain all forms : it is therealm of essence. This observation, if theyhad stopped to make it (and it requires nospecial intelligence, only pause) would havedispelled any aesthetic dislike which they mayhave had of the infinite ; yet it would not havechanged their radical indifference to it. TheGreeks were not aesthetes ; their love of formand their approach to perfection in it were notaesthetic but moral, political, hygienic: like /noble animals they were proud and content intheir own bodies, faculties, and loves; wordscould not express their indifference to whatwas not human ; and when some divine shaftrent those bodies and blackened that mind, thecry of their mourning was brief but absolute.Their love of finitude was vital; it was the

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love of existence, and of perfection in existence ;and for that reason, not for any idle aestheti-cism, they were clear discerners of beauty.Aestheticism is incapable of producing thebeautiful or, in the end, even of loving ordiscerning it ; it has cut off the vital and moralroots of form which render one form morebeautiful than another, and which, deeperstill, give unity of form to objects at all. Thesevital roots of form were alive in the Greeks:they flowered into sundry finite perfections;and evidently they could not flower into formscontrary to these particular perfections, rootedin a particular living seed, limited to the playof a particular animal body and its appropriatemind. The infinite was valueless: and fromthe moral point of view, from the point of viewof some natural organism striving to be freeand perfect, valueless the infinite certainly is.But spirit is a terribly treacherous inmate ofthe animal soul ; it has slipped in, as Aristotlesays, from beyond the gates : and its home isthe desert. This foreignness is moral, notgenealogical: spirit is bred in the psychebecause the psyche, in living, is obliged toadjust herself to alien things: she does so inher own interest : but in taking cognizance ofother things, in moulding a part of her dreamto follow their alien fortunes, she becomesintelligent, she creates spirit; and this spiritoverleaps the pragmatic function of physical

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sensibility—it is the very act of overleaping it—and so proves itself a rank outsider, a childrebellious to the household, an Ishmael rangingalone, a dweller in the infinite.This infinite is the infinite of forms, theindestructible and inevitable infinite that contains everything, but contains it only in itsessence, in that eternal quality of being inwhich everything is a companion and supplement to everything else, never a rival or a contradiction. These essences, when thought considers any of them without knowing whetherthey describe any earthly object or not, maybe called ideal ; but they are not ideal intrinsically, either in the sense of being figments ofthought or of being objects of aspiration. Theybecome ideal, or enter into an external moralrelation to the animal soul, when this soulhappens to conceive them, or to make themtypes for the objects of its desires. A perfectlyfree spirit (i

f it could exist) would not considereternal beings in their ideal capacity, because

it would no longer refer them to the fancies orhopes of some living creature, but would consider them in themselves, ranging from one toanother quite speculatively, that is, guided bythe intrinsic formal relations of similarity orinclusion which obtain between them. Itwould therefore virtually traverse the infinite,its path not being hedged in by pre-existingirrelevant interests in one form of being rather

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than in another. But evidently this perfectimpartiality is not human ; it is contrary to theinitial status of spirit, as the hypostatic synthetic expression and realization of some discursive phase of animal life—some adventure,some predicament, some propensity, some preoccupation. It is therefore natural that theintrinsic infinity of Being should remain in thebackground, even in the spiritual life, and thatessences should be contemplated and distinguished rather as ideals for the humanimagination than as beings necessary in .themselves.

XIX

FOR this reason the Platonic philosophyopens a more urbane and alluring avenuetowards spiritual enlightenment than does theIndian, although the latter runs faster towardsthe goal and attains it more perfectly. Thelimitation of the divine intellect, or the Ideas,to the types of earthly or celestial bodies, andto the values proper to their lives, leaves theafterglow of passion upon them; the eternal^profits by the interest which its worshippers

j

have in the temporal. This accommodation is Jalso conspicuous in the Catholic tradition : itseems doubtful sometimes whether that otherworld is a liberation from this one, or a reduplication of it, with all its temporal, moral,social, and diplomatic business extended indefinitely. This is the price which the spirituallife has to pay for being made amiable. Auniverse is composed on purpose to facilitateit; life there becomes so easy and natural, itretains so many human values, that it threatens to be choked in a system of anxious hopesand adjustments, worse than those involved inmundane life, because inescapable. In thisworld, at least, the spirit can flee to solitude,to nature, to play, to the delicious irony ofdespising the passions which one is forced to

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share ; but from heaven, ennobled and sanctified as it would be by so many immortal personages, so many high maxims, marvellousdogmas, and moral exclusions, whither shouldthe spirit flee? Of course the spiritual sensefor those celestial facts might be recovered;even in heaven one might be a philosopher.The other world would be but a second touchstone for the spirit if

,

like this world and itsmoral order, it were a fact existing in itself.In the Catholic, as in the Platonic, kingdom,the spirit must still blaze its own trail; thecarpets spread accommodatingly before itsfeet, leading to the celestial courts, will neverlead it, of themselves, to spiritual liberation.Consider the universe of Plotinus : a processof emanation from the One through the Ideasto the Soul of the World, whence, like raysfrom different stars, human and animal soulsdescend on occasion to animate materialbodies. This system was designed to encouragethe spirit to rise from its animal prison—prison was the word—reversing that emanationuntil it recovered the primal bliss of contemplative union with pure Being. But what is

there in the system, if we accept it as describingthe facts, to compel or even to invite the spiritto rise at all ? The cosmology of Plotinusmight almost be adopted by a Hegelian interested only in evolution and not in the least inredemption ; he might behold with rapture the

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successive embodiment of linked Ideas in thethoughts and institutions of men; far fromwishing to reverse the process in his heart, andrenounce all these endless transformations,conflicts, and cumulative cares, his only joymight be to share them, to be the first toannounce them, and at every turn in the battleto drop the cry of yesterday in order to pickup that of to-morrow. Since it was the natureof things to emanate from the One, he wouldhasten to emanate with them. Ah1 his angelswould be seen descending Jacob's ladder, andnone ascending. Yet only the ascent concernsthe spiritual life. The descent is the creationof the world and the work of the world, bywhich the spirit, when it awakes at last, findsitself entangled in animal passions and foolishambitions. Starting from whatever facts andpredicaments may seem to envelop it, itsfunction is then to detach itself from them oneby one, escaping the flux and urgency whichthey have in the realm of existence, unravellingand synthesizing their temporal perspectives,in order to transpose them all into the realmof truth, where they form an eternal picture;and then to let this picture itself recede into itssetting in the realm of essence, where it is butone form of being, which this world by chancehas manifested, amid the countless forms ofbeing which perhaps have not been manifestedanywhere. The angels, even in their descent,

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will then be messengers to the philosopherfrom an eternal world, to which, in ascendingagain, they carry up his heart ; whereas if theangels were born in transit and lived only intheir apparition in time, he might have perhapsa pleasanter casual environment, but noheavenly treasure ; and his attitude would bethat of a lover and gloating denizen of thisworld, not that of the spirit. Even from thebest world the spirit must depart. Beauty callsit away no less than confusion ; and happinessis only a more amiable sacrament than sufferingto carry it to the impassible Being whichinfinitely outruns all these accidents of existence.

XX

SPIRIT, since its essence is to aspire, comes tolife at the foot of the ladder ; " it lives by contemplation, by knowing the thing above it.It is not its own object, as the Platonic Ideasseemed to become in Aristotle's theology, whenthey were identified with a cosmic intellecteternally contemplating its own structure.Spirit might indeed attain to such a conditionif its natural organ were, as Aristotle supposed,some perfectly harmonious and immortal revolution of the heavens. Even then spirit wouldproperly be the rapt aspiration towards thoseIdeas, the immortal love of them, which keptthe moving spheres constant in their round:for the soul of each sphere was intently fixedupon the Idea (or, as we might say, theformula) which it was to realize by its motionand to ' turn into a sustained note in thecelestial symphony. Even in this astronomicaltheology spirit would be the third person of theTrinity rather than the second ; it would be theSoul of the World looking towards the Ideas,rather than the Ideas looking towards the One.This One, if we may identify it with the Brahma"of the Indians, would be infinite Being; itwould not be any longer conformable or properto any particular cosmos or to any particular

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moral life. Relevance to nature would beginwith the divine intellect or the sphere of thePlatonic Ideas : they would be finite in numberand exclusive in type ; they would compose themorphology of this world. The third person orhypostasis in the eternal, would be the divinespirit, the love or attention by which thoseparticular forms were made the theme of anactual life. This divine spirit looks towardsthe Ideas ; it is hardly different from the Godof Aristotle; and it may be said to descend(although inwardly still wholly attentive to thebeings above it

) and to animate the world, inthe sense in which heavenly souls may be saidto descend to animate our bodies ; namely, inthat an echo or imitation of them or obedienceto them keeps the world or the body alive.The immortal soul of the world could neveritself look downwards or be troubled by thevicissitudes of the matter which imitates itsform : no more could the immortal soul of anyman be compromised by the imperfections ofits earthly shadow.We are here in the region of speculativefiction ; souls have become so perfect in theireternal abode that other souls have to taketheir places in living bodies. Indeed, anorganic inherited soul, a principle of materialgrowth and action, is no spirit; spirit is firstgenerated in it when it awakes to some actualfeeling or thought. Such a spirit evidently can

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never envisage pure Being, or the realm ofessence, in its infinite fullness and detail ; theessences which will appear to it will be such,and such only, as its material organ evokes byits quite special processes and contacts. Butquantity is not a category important to spirit ;as it is indifferent to duration, because it livesin the eternal, so it is indifferent to the endlessmultiplicity of things, existing or not existing,which may lie beyond its ken. It is notanxious, like an animal soul hounded bycuriosity and fear, to dominate and possesseverything, lest by overlooking some secretenemy it should live in a fool's paradise, andto-morrow be ruined. The limitations ofexperience, when experience is spiritual, arenot invidious ; what it possesses it cannot lose ;what it leaves out is not denied or condemnedor demanded. As Dante says, there is no envyin these spheres. The sense that the rest isthere (since all essences are implied in infiniteBeing) suffices to give the spirit room, todetach it from all partiality, from all unjustaffection; while the essential eternity of thatwhich is manifested suffices to wed the spiritto it with an absolute confidence, without theleast ignoble hankering to look beyond. Spiritdiffers from animal intelligence less in materialscope than in inward quality; its distinctiveobject is not pure Being in its infinity, butfinite being in its purity.

XXI

EVEN in rare moments of attainment, when thehuman spirit has seemed to be united or evenidentified with the supreme Being, the reportswhich reach us of that ecstasy indicate that thechasm has never really been bridged. Thesereports are avowedly inadequate; words cannot render what has been seen, nor would it belawful, perhaps, to reveal it. Ultimate insightshave a tendency to undermine the orthodoxapproaches by which they have been reached.The saint pulls his ladder up with him into hisprivate heaven; and the community of thefaithful, on whose sturdy dogmatic shouldershe has climbed, must not be deprived of themeans of following his example. Hence anydissolving culmination of the religious life mustbe kept a secret, a mystery to be divulged onlyto the few whom the knowledge of it can nolonger scandalize or discourage. Besides thisprudence and this consideration for the weakerbrethren, there is a decisive reason for silence :the revelation has been essentially a revelationof the illusion inherent in all language, in allexperience, in all existence. It cannot be communicated save by being repeated.Doubtless the state of being achieved inecstasy is intrinsicallv immensely positive, but"

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it is the negation of every human wish and idea ;there are, and can be, no human words toexpress its nature. So true is this, that if themystic uses this very suspension of thought, thisecstasy itself, as a true rendering of his ultimateobject of contemplation, he falls into a worseerror than the animal and worldly mind. Forat least, in current experience, scattered andaccidental manifestations of being appear;they are illusions if taken for more than appearances, relative to particular animal organs andinterests; they are trivial and competitive;yet they are distinct, and each of them, by itspositive character, enriches that revelation ofessence to spirit which animal life necessarilyaffords, in spite of its distraction. It wouldsuffice to suspend the urgency of the animalwill (as sometimes happens to children andpoets in their simplicity) in order to disinfectthis sensuous revelation of its distraction andillusion; it would not reveal much, but itwould reveal something of pure Being. Inpoets and children this is but play ; they revertfrom it at once to what the world thinks seriousinterests and sound knowledge of facts. Whenon the contrary the same disillusion is attainedlaboriously, by a long spiritual discipline, theadept attempts to maintain and propagate hisinsight; and then there is trouble, for in thevery act of defending this insight, he is likelyto lose it. In so far as the objects of his con-

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templation are familiar to everyone and haveaccepted names, these names will carry animalfaith with them, and when he uses them theywill conceal or even contradict the new qualityof pure being which things have acquired in hiseyes ; to him they have become eternalessences, to his hearers they will still betemporal facts. Meantime, in that realm ofessence which he now envisages, vistas mayhave opened to him into all sorts of regionswhich are not of this world, which have nonames at all in human discourse ; how shouldhe be able to express or even to remember theirintricate and unearthly nature? Even inordinary dreams, composed as they are,presumably, out of bits of earthly imagery andpuffs of animal anxiety, there are manymarvels and vicissitudes, momentous to themselves, which we cannot recover in the lightof day : how much harder the vision must beto recompose if its elements were original or itsmood sublime! If spiritual attainment couldever be complete and infinite Being couldreveal itself (which I do not believe) in itsentirety, evidently the disproportion would beoverwhelming between the number and varietyof things to report and the human means ofreporting them.Silence is therefore imperative, if the mystichas any conscience ; he cannot have perceived,and he cannot retain, the fullness of his ultimate

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object. This fullness came to him, and remainsin him, merely as a sense of fullness, the brilliancy of a blinding light, without any specification of the infinity of essences which were thereto be lighted up. He therefore can only assureus that it was a great revelation, freeing himfrom the oppression of ordinary existence andthought; it was peace, it was bliss, it wasvirtual knowledge ; but beyond that his powersof perception and retention could not go.

XXII

the mystic—he who feels he has passedbeyond the veil and seen things not to beuttered—if he lacks humility and discipline,may fall, and may lead us, into a sad illusion.He may take his dazzled feeling itself, theblinding glory of mere light, for the supremereality, or for the true description of its nature.He may say that infinite Being is itself simplyfeeling, or intensity without quality or distinctions, or the pure light of spirit falling, noton everything, but only on itself. He wouldthen be confusing his own incapacity with theobject which infinitely exceeds it. The glassdome, far from creating the many colours ofinfinite Being, fuses and neutralizes them intoa white light—the blurred effect of a rude andsummary vision. This unitary feeling, ratherthan a revelation of pure Being, is the customary sense of one's own bodily existence. Thewords existence and being are often used interchangeably, and this verbal ambiguity servesto obscure the infinite difference between therealm of essence—pure Being in all its eternalmodes—and the pressure of external thingsand of internal change in a living organism.This sense of existence, essentially transitiveand restless, may sometimes be lulled into a

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simmering warmth and voluminous comfort, apleasant animal trance in which spirit dives asdeep as it can into the life of the matter. Thisfeeling has a true depth of its own, a kinshipwith universal substance. Brahma is sometimes likened to deep sleep, and Nirvana tonothingness ; and in modern philosophy we aresometimes told that the true reality is pureduration or pure sentience. These expressionsignore pure Being, and even the presumablesubstance of the natural world, which mustsomehow be diversified and unevenly distributed; but they describe fairly enough thesentiment which the presence of overwhelmingthings inspires, or the trail which their passageleaves in the animal mind. Persons faradvanced in the spiritual life often use languageof this kind, as they use pious or erotic language ; but their language must not be takenamiss ; they use, like all of us, the words theyfind. To the true mystic even things aresymbols ; how should he worship words ? TheSpanish mystic, for instance, San Juan de laCruz, represents all virtues and graces as bypaths diverging from the straight but difficult way, the name of which is Nothing,Nothing, Nothing. In the end the spiritindeed claims nothing, posits nothing, and isnothing in its own eyes, but empties itselfcompletely into the Being which it contemplates ; but if this Being itself were said to be

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nothing, our mysticism would evidently haveslipped into a bad heresy, not to speak of theflat contradiction. So Nirvana may be calledannihilation in that it annihilates personality, desire, and temporal existence; yet the" Buddha teaches that all beings are frometernity abiding in Nirvana "l so that farfrom being nothing Nirvana embraces thewhole realm of essence—pure Being in itsinfinite implications—from which, of course,existence is excluded ; because since existenceis necessarily in flux and is centred in somearbitrary moment, it itself exists only byexclusion and with one foot in the grave.Existence is that realm of Becoming whichcombines Being and Non-Being so much toHegel's satisfaction, and which generates thoseunstable but " current valuations of the worldling" to which the spirit, according to Dean

Inge, is so completely indifferent.1Dasgupta, History of Indian Philosophy.

XXIIITHE spiritual life, then, is distinguished fromworldly morality and intelligence not so muchby knowledge as by disillusion: howeverhumble may be its career, it lifts those few andcommon adventures into the light of eternity.This eternal aspect of things summons spiritout of its initial immersion in sensation and inanimal faith and clarifies it into pure spirit.This eternal aspect of things is also their immediate aspect, the dimension in which they arenot things but pure essences ; for if belief andanxiety be banished from the experience ofany object, only its pure essence remainspresent to the mind. And this aspect ofthings, which is immediate psychologically,ontologically is ultimate, since evidently theexistence of anything is a temporary accident,while its essence is an indelible variation ofnecessary Being, an eternal form. The spiritlives in this continual sense of the ultimate inthe immediate. Mortal spirits, the spirit inanimals, cannot possibly survey pure Being inits infinity; but in so far as they free themselves from false respect for the objects ofanimal faith and animal passion, they maybehold some finite being in its purity. For thisreason, established morality and religion, by

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protecting the eye from too much distractionand fixing it on noble objects, may make abetter soil for spirit than does wayward living.Not that spirit may not crop out marvellouslyin the sinner, as it may in the child or the poet.It notoriously does so ; and even in the saintit remains profoundly indifferent to the occasion that may have kindled its flame, be thisoccasion religious faith or sensuous vision, be itpassion, study, or practical dominion over theworld. All is grist for the mill, if only therebe force of intellect actually to grind thatexperimental substance and reduce it to somepure essence on which contemplation can feed.But moralities and religions, if they merelyI extend or exaggerate the pressure of circumstance on the soul, are as dreadful an incubuson the spirit as ever was the animal search forfood, love, or safety; indeed, they are but amonstrous and terrifying shadow of theseradical compulsions cast needlessly on thescreen of heaven.I ask myself sometimes, is not morality aworse enemy of spirit than immorality ? Is itnot more hopelessly deceptive and entangling ?Those romantic poets, for instance, whose liveswere often so irregular—were they not evidentlyfar more spiritual than the good people whomthey shocked? Shelley, Leopardi, Alfred deMusset were essentially children of the spirit :they were condemned to flutter on broken

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wings only for lack of measure and discipline ;they were spiritual waifs, untaught to see therelativity and absurdity of their proud passions.The perfect spirit must be a patient hearer, asober pupil, not an occasional automatic skylark. Yet when spirituality, as in Wordsworth, has to struggle instead against a blackcoat and a white choker, it seems to be moresadly and decisively stifled, buried alive undera mountain of human alarms and a heavytombstone of sanctimony. The world, hesighed, is too much with us ; but the hills andeven the mock Tritons blowing their wreathedhorns were not able to banish the world fromhis conscientious concern. Nothing is able tobanish the world except contempt for theworld, and this was not in him. It would evenhave been contrary to his Protestant religion—that so unspiritual determination to washthe world white and clean, adopt it, and set itup for a respectable person. The world is notrespectable ; it is mortal, tormented, confused,deluded for ever; but it is shot through withbeauty, with love, with glints of courage andlaughter ; and in these the spirit bloomstimidly, and struggles to the light among the !thorns.Such is the flitting life of this winged thing,spirit, in this old, sordid, maternal earth. Onthe one hand, in its innocence, spirit is happyto live in the moment, taking no thought for

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the morrow; it can enjoy the least gift asgladly as the greatest ; it is the fresh, the purevoice of nature, incapable of learned or moralsnobbery. It ignores its origin, so buoyant isit ; its miraculous light seems to it a matter ofcourse. Its career is everywhere conditionedand oppressed from without, yet it passesthrough the fire with a serene incredulity, anindomitable independence. On the other hand,the eye of spirit, in its virtual omniscience, seesthe visible in its true setting of the invisible; it is fixed instinctively on the countlessmoments that are not this moment, on thejoys that are not this sorrow and the sorrowsthat are not this joy, on the thousand opinionsthat are not this opinion and beauties that arenot this beauty; understanding too much tobe ever imprisoned, loving too much ever to bein love. Spirit chills the flesh and is itself on

jfire ; thought, as Dean Inge says,

"becomes

passionate, the passions become cold"; or

rather they are confronted and controlled by aprofound recollection, in which laughter andtears pulse together like the stars in a polarsky, each indelibly bright, and all infinitelydistant.

XXIV

IF with these considerations in mind I turnback to the characteristics of Dean Inge's" Platonic tradition in religious thought

" I findthat some of these characteristics belong to thespiritual life everywhere, but not to thePlatonic system. Such is openness to science,or (what this openness implies) tolerance of anydogmatic conception, and readiness to acceptany kind of world. Other characteristics arevindeed proper to Platonism, but irrelevant tothe spiritual life; such is the mythical comology meant to secure the perpetual preval-ence of particular human or divine goods, in aparticular Hellenic universe. Still other char-acteristics seem to belong both to the spirituallife and to Platonism; but I find on closerinspection that these qualities are ambiguous,and are not assignable to both in the samesense. Of these apparently common properties ,

the most important is the gift of seeing the ieternal in the temporal. But what is theeternal ? For pure spirit the eternal means the Vtimeless ; all images of sense and all events intime offer eternal themes for contemplationand are themselves eternal in the realm of truth.This spiritual insight has been frequent amongPlatonists, and may indeed have been at the

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root of that trance-like vision of essences-I which enabled Plato to turn the general termsof Socratic logic into individual and immortalbeings. But, if his sense for the eternal hadbeen absolutely direct and pure, he would haveseen the eternal in the figments of sense, no lessthan in those of logic or ethics : for all formsequally are essences, and all essences equallyare eternal.It is true that " things seen are temporal,"if by " seeing " we understand that animalreaction by which we turn towards materialobjects which affect our eyes, so that we areprompted to grasp them or to get out of theirway. This animal sensibility is what hasusually been understood by sense, so that sensehas been conventionally regarded as revealingmatter, and a man immersed in sense as amaterialist. But this kind of " seeing," if itbe more than a bodily reaction, is also morethan a pure intuition: it is a belief. Sensethereby engages the spirit in the observationand pursuit of material things; and theseobviously are temporal. But in this belief andpursuit pure intuition must have intervenedto supply the terms of the experience; andthis pure intuition is no vision of materialthings, but of the essences which we call andthink to be the qualities of material things, orof whatever else we think about; and theseessences in themselves are eternal forms of

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Being. One whose attention was whollyabsorbed in them would be an extreme idealist,a poet or dreamer not suspecting that he wasliving in a material world, faUing into everypit, and hugging every ghost to his bosom, asthe most solid of possible realities. Andthough the world would laugh at him, theangels would not ; for after life is done, and theworld is gone up in smoke, what realities maythe spirit of a man boast to have embracedwithout illusion, save the very forms of thoseillusions by which he has been deceived?These, and not the things which he thought hesaw, were his eternal discoveries.In the Platonic system, however, the eternalalso has another signification; it may meanthe everlasting. This system was cosmologicaland quasi-scientific; it sought for the substances and the permanent shapes of existingthings. God, the Ideas, and the Soul of theWorld, though invisible, were in a wide sensephysical, since they were powers at work innature. Like the laws of modern physicsthey were presumed to be unchangeable ; butthis persistence of their expression in matterwas evidently an entirely different sort ofeternity—a presumptive eternity—from thatintrinsic to them as essences. Yet the sameword eternal designates now the pure objects ofthe contemplative faculty and now certainspecial objects of scientific presumption, belief

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in which is unnecessary, audacious, and, to befrank, superstitious. That anything existentshould be eternal in the spiritual sense islogically impossible, because existence has toverify itself from moment to moment and mustalways remain temporal, no matter how longit lasts. That any recognizable existing thingshould last for ever seems improbable andcontrary to all the analogies of nature. It iscontrary, too, to that profound natural philosophy of Heraclitus which Plato had adoptedand which, by a happy counterblast, hadquickened his sense for the truly eternal—forthe inviolate and super-existential being offorms.If this hazardous belief in permanent naturalpowers were abandoned the comfortable moralassurances of Platonism would also lapse. Itwould cease to be popular with tender minds,and a nest of sentimental fancies. The beauty

' and goodness actually found in the world would .no longer be alleged to reveal the forces atwork in it more truly than do its ugliness andconfusion. It would become impossible tomaintain that goodness and beauty are somehow intentional in the world, and their oppo-sites interlopers. Values would be seen not to, be powers, but harmonies—the very thing1which Plato, in his purely moral wisdom, hadP nmade the first and highest principle of the[good. Indeed, that superstitious belief, with

which he thought to buttress the crumblingvirtues of antiquity, is useless to human morals.Human morals draw their vigour from earthlyeconomy, and find their sanction there. Noris that superstitious belief helpful to thespiritual life or even compatible with it atbottom. For while to accept and love theconstituted order of nature and society is easyfor a pure spirit, which is without prejudicesor claims, for this same reason it is impossiblefor spirit to deny or detest the other forms ofbeing which nature or society for the momentdoes not happen to manifest.

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THE manner of combining unworldliness withthe love of nature and of man is another pointnot understood in the same sense in Platonismand in the spiritual life. Platonism ismoralistic :it will love in man and in nature so much asconforms to the patterns which its mathematical physics, its zoology, and its politicalidealism prescribe for things : all that deviates

. j from these norms will seem to it sad, unaccount-'iable, terrible, and dangerous. In fact, thelove of nature and of man, though the beautyof order and harmony in both was still felt inthe Greek manner, does not seem to me con-, spicuous in Platonism. It was a censorious,jpuritan, prescriptive love ; it was not spontaneous, it was not sympathetic, it was notMove of nature at all, but of a political, humangood, and of so much in nature as might illustrate or sanction it. Free spirit would be moregenerous. When the renunciation of the world,and of existence itself, has been hearty andradical, the love of nature can be universal;I will not say unqualified by sadness, becausethe spirit, having itself suffered, recognizesin many an alien form of existence a maimedeffort and a lost glory analogous to its own;but a love unqualified by prejudice, by envy,

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by fear of being outshone or discountenancedby the marvels which nature or society mayelsewhere bring to light. It is of the essence ofspirit to see and love things for their own sake,in their own nature, not for the sake of oneanother, nor for its own sake.Meantime it is a question for scientificspeculation, on which pure spirit remainsignorant and impartial, whether there are inexistence organisms so vast (measured by thehuman scale) as the Platonic cosmos, with itsdeity or deities animating its concentric

spheres. If so, spirit would have for its habitation and organ other bodies larger and morelong-lived than the bodies of men or of kindredanimals : and the concert of so many happierspirits would certainly be sublime, singing intheir Pythagorean symphony so calmly together. ,Yet even then, we should remember that thehuman scale is relative, and that this Platoniccosmos (or the Christian cosmos which, thoughhistorical rather than astronomical, is not verydifferent in principle) is vast only in thatperspective. Seen from without, and beyond,it might be infinitesimal, and an insignificantingredient in some greater world. Its longevity,too, would be relative; and the traditionalattribution of eternity to it must be regardedas a rhetorical hyperbole, expressing the sensethat its duration is incalculable in terms ofhuman chronology; but true eternity, as I

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have said, is not of that kind. In the end sucha universe, floating like a bubble in the fluxof things, would almost certainly dissolve. Itis not there that an enlightened heart wouldlay up its treasure. The flood itself is a nobler

^\ companion, and the spirit moves at ease uponthe waters.

OPINION OF THE WORK OFGEORGE SANTAYANAKftxxxmxxsiz^^

BERTH AND RUSSELL in the NEW STATESMAN : ' ' The bonk

(' Scepticism and Animal Faith') has all Mr. Santayana'swell-known merits : beauty of style, a truly philosophictemper, a wide survey of history and thought. It is full ofsayings that are profound, delightful, or amusing. And ithas the great merit of not pretending, by bad arguments, toestablish doctrines which we accept on instinct but cannot

hope to prove."

NATION AND ATHENAEUM : *' There is another respect inwhich Mr. Santayana's system differs from those of mostprofessional philosophers, namely, that it is wholly sincere.. . . This merit of sincerity, in a man of Mr. Santayana'sbreadth of intellectual sympathy, would suffice to makethe book important, even if it stood alone. There are manyother merits, notably perspicuity and beauty of style.'

DAILY TELEGRAPH '. " In the person of Professor Santa-yana the philosophic temperament survives with a simpledignity which is almost Hellenic in quality. To escape outof the roaring traffic of modern publicity into the green andshady academy of his dreams, is to be reminded once more,with refreshing emphasis, of the sublime stability ofphilosophic truth. . . ." Here, in the cool cloister of thought, we return toproblems which are eternal, and to solutions which repeatthemselves from generation to generation. We modernsboast of our progress in material conveniences and resources, but in the quiet kingdom of the mind we haveadvanced nothing since the days when the youth of Athenssat at the feet of Socrates,"

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