What stupendous constructive mental

2.3. FREE WILL AND PREDESTINATION.

And now let me return to a point raised in the first Book in Chapter
1.9. Is the whole of this scheme of things settled and done? The whole
trend of Science is to that belief. On the scientific plane one is a
fatalist, the universe a system of inevitable consequences. But as I
show in that section referred to, it is quite possible to accept as true
in their several planes both predestination and free will. (I use free
will in the sense of self-determinisn and not as it is defined by
Professor William James, and predestination as equivalent to the
conception of a universe rigid in time and space.) If you ask me, I
think I should say I incline to believe in predestination and do quite
completely believe in free will. The important belief is free will.

But does the whole universe of fact, the external world about me, the
mysterious internal world from which my motives rise, form one rigid and
fated system as determinists teach? Do I believe that, had one a mind
ideally clear and powerful, the whole universe would seem orderly and
absolutely predestined? I incline to that belief. I do not harshly
believe it, but I admit its large plausibility--that is all. I see no
value whatever in jumping to a decision. One or two Pragmatists, so far
as I can understand them, do not hold this view of predestination at
all; but as a provisional assumption it underlies most scientific work.

I glance at this question rather to express a detachment than a view.

For me as a person this theory of predestination has no practical value.
At the utmost it is an interesting theory like the theory that there is
a fourth dimension. There may be a fourth dimension of space, but one
gets along quite well by assuming there are just three. It may be
knowable the next time I come to cross roads which I shall take.
Possibly that knowledge actually exists somewhere. There are those who
will tell you that they can get intimations in the matter from packs of
cards or the palms of my hands, or see by peering into crystals. Of such
beliefs I am entirely free. The fact is I believe that neither I know
nor anybody else who is practically concerned knows which I shall take.
I hesitate, I choose just as though the thing was unknowable. For me and
my conduct there is that much wide practical margin of freedom.

I am free and freely and responsibly making the future--so far as I am
concerned. You others are equally free. On that theory I find my life
will work, and on a theory of mechanical predestination nothing works.

I take the former theory therefore for my everyday purposes, and as a
matter of fact so does everybody else. I regard myself as a free
responsible person among free responsible persons.

2.4. A PICTURE OF THE WORLD OF MEN.

Now I have already given a first picture of the world of fact as it
shaped itself upon my mind. Let me now give a second picture of this
world in which I find myself, a picture in a rather different key and at
a different level, in which I turn to a new set of aspects and bring
into the foreground the other minds which are with me in the midst of
this great spectacle.

What am I?

Here is a question to which in all ages men have sought to give a clear
unambiguous answer, and to which a clear unambiguous answer is
manifestly unfitted. Am I my body? Yes or no? It seems to me that I can
externalize and think of as "not myself" nearly everything that pertains
to my body, hands and feet, and even the most secret and central of
those living and hidden parts, the pulsing arteries, the throbbing
nerves, the ganglionic centres, that no eye, save for the surgeon's
knife has ever seen or ever will see until they coagulate in decay. So
far I am not my body; and then as clearly, since I suffer through it,
see the whole world through it and am always to be called upon where it
is, I am it. Am I a mind mysteriously linked to this thing of matter and
endeavour?

So I can present myself. I seem to be a consciousness, vague and
insecure, placed between two worlds. One of these worlds seems clearly
"not me," the other is more closely identified with me and yet is still
imperfectly me. The first I call the exterior world, and it presents
itself to me as existing in Time and Space. In a certain way I seem able
to interfere with it and control it. The second is the interior world,
having no forms in space and only a vague evasive reference to time,
from which motives arise and storms of emotion, which acts and reacts
constantly and in untraceable way with my conscious mind. And that
consciousness itself hangs and drifts about the region where the inner
world and the outer world meet, much as a patch of limelight drifts
about the stage, illuminating, affecting, following no manifest law
except that usually it centres upon the hero, my Ego.

It seems to me that to put the thing much more precisely than this is to
depart from the reality of the matter.

But so departing a little, let me borrow a phrase from Herbart and
identify myself more particularly with my mental self. It seems to me
that I may speak of myself as a circle of thought and experience hung
between these two imperfectly understood worlds of the internal and the
external and passing imperceptibly into the former. The external world
impresses me as being, as a practical fact, common to me and many other
creatures similar to myself; the internal, I find similar but not
identical with theirs. It is MINE. It seems to me at times no more than
something cut off from that external world and put into a sort of pit or
cave, much as all the inner mystery of my body, those living, writhing,
warm and thrilling organs are isolated, hidden from all eyes and
interference so long as I remain alive. And I myself, the essential me,
am the light and watcher in the mouth of the cave.

So I think of myself, and so I think of all other human beings, as
circles of thought and experience, each a little different from the
others. Each human being I see as essentially a circle of thought
between an internal and an external world.

I figure these circles of thought as more or less imperfectly focussed
pictures, all a little askew and vague as to margins and distances. In
the internal world arise motives, and they pass outward through the
circle of thought and are modified and directed by it into external
acts. And through speech, example, and a hundred various acts, one such
circle, one human mind, lights and enlarges and plays upon another. That
is the image under which the interrelation of minds presents itself to
me.

2.5. THE PROBLEM OF MOTIVES THE REAL PROBLEM OF LIFE.

Now each self among us, for all its fluctuations and vagueness of
boundary, is, as I have already pointed out, invincibly persuaded of
Free Will. That is to say, it has a persuasion of responsible control
over the impulses that teem from the internal world and tend to express
themselves in act. The problem of that control and its solution is the
reality of life. "What am I to do?" is the perpetual question of our
existence. Our metaphysics, our beliefs are all sought as subsidiary to
that and have no significance without it.

I confess I find myself a confusion of motives beside which my confusion
of perceptions pales into insignificance.

There are many various motives and motives very variously
estimated--some are called gross, some sublime, some--such as
pride--wicked. I do not readily accept these classifications.

Many people seem to make a selection among their motives without much
enquiry, taking those classifications as just; they seek to lead what
they call pure lives or useful lives and to set aside whole sets of
motives which do not accord with this determination. Some exclude the
seeking of pleasure as a permissible motive, some the love of beauty;
some insist upon one's "being oneself" and prohibit or limit responses
to exterior opinions. Most of such selections strike me as wanton and
hasty. I decline to dismiss any of my motives at all in that wholesale
way. Just as I believe I am important in the scheme of things, so I
believe are all my motives. Turning one's back on any set of them seems
to me to savour of the headlong actions of stupidity. To suppress a
passion or a curiosity for the sake of suppressing a passion is to my
mind just the burial of a talent that has been entrusted to one's care.
One has, I feel, to take all these things as weapons and instruments,
material in the service of the scheme; one has to take them in the end
gravely and do right among them unbiassed in favour of any set. To take
some poor appetite and fling it out is to my mind a cheap and
unsatisfactory way of simplifying one's moral problems. One has to
accept these things in oneself, I feel--even if one knows them to be
dangerous things, even if one is sure they have an evil side.

Let me, however, in order to express my attitude better, make a rough
grouping of the motives I find in myself and the people about me.

2.6. A REVIEW OF MOTIVES.

I cannot divide them into clearly defined classes, but I may perhaps
begin with those that bring one into the widest sympathy with living
things and go on to those one shares only with highly intelligent and
complex human beings.

There come first the desires one shares with those more limited souls
the beasts, just as much as one does with one's fellow man. These are
the bodily appetites and the crude emotions of fear and resentment.
These first clamour for attention and must be assuaged or controlled
before the other sets come into play.

Now in this matter of physical appetites I do not know whether to
describe myself as a sensualist or an ascetic. If an ascetic is one who
suppresses to a minimum all deference to these impulses, then certainly
I am not an ascetic; if a sensualist is one who gives himself to
heedless gratification, then certainly I am not a sensualist. But I find
myself balanced in an intermediate position by something that I will
speak of as the sense of Beauty. This sense of Beauty is something in me
which demands not simply gratification but the best and keenest of a
sense or continuance of sense impressions, and which refuses coarse
quantitative assuagements. It ranges all over the senses, and just as I
refuse to wholly cut off any of my motives, so do I refuse to limit its
use to the plane of the eye or the ear.

It seems to me entirely just to speak of beauty in matters of scent and
taste, to talk not only of beautiful skies and beautiful sounds but of
beautiful beer and beautiful cheese! The balance as between asceticism
and sensuality comes in, it seems to me, if we remember that to drink
well one must not have drunken for some time, that to see well one's eye
must be clear, that to make love well one must be fit and gracious and
sweet and disciplined from top to toe, that the finest sense of all--the
joyous sense of bodily well-being--comes only with exercises and
restraints and fine living. There I think lies the way of my
disposition. I do not want to live in the sensual sty, but I also do not
want to scratch in the tub of Diogenes.

But I diverge a little in these comments from my present business of
classifying motives.

Next I perceive hypertrophied in myself and many sympathetic human
beings a passion that many animals certainly possess, the beautiful and
fearless cousin of fear, Curiosity, that seeks keenly for knowing and
feeling. Apart from appetites and bodily desires and blind impulses, I
want most urgently to know and feel, for the sake of knowing and
feeling. I want to go round corners and see what is there, to cross
mountain ranges, to open boxes and parcels. Young animals at least have
that disposition too. For me it is something that mingles with all my
desires. Much more to me than the desire to live is the desire to taste
life. I am not happy until I have done and felt things. I want to get as
near as I can to the thrill of a dog going into a fight or the delight
of a bird in the air. And not simply in the heroic field of war and the
air do I want to understand. I want to know something of the jolly
wholesome satisfaction that a hungry pig must find in its wash. I want
to get the quintessence of that.

I do not think that in this I confess to any unusual temperament. I
think that the more closely mentally animated people scrutinize their
motives the less is the importance they will attach to mere physical and
brute urgencies and the more to curiosity.

Next after curiosity come those desires and motives that one shares
perhaps with some social beasts, but far more so as a conscious thing
with men alone. These desires and motives all centre on a clearly
apprehended "self" in relation to "others"; they are the essentially
egotistical group. They are self-assertion in all its forms. I have
dealt with motives toward gratification and motives towards experience;
this set of motives is for the sake of oneself. Since they are the most
acutely conscious motives in unthinking men, there is a tendency on the
part of unthinking philosophers to speak of them as though vanity,
self-seeking, self-interest were the only motives. But one has but to
reflect on what has gone before to realize that this is not so. One
finds these "self" motives vary with the mental power and training of
the individual; here they are fragmentary and discursive, there drawn
tight together into a coherent scheme. Where they are weak they mingle
with the animal motives and curiosity like travellers in a busy
market-place, but where the sense of self is strong they become rulers
and regulators, self-seeking becomes deliberate and sustained in the
case of the human being, vanity passes into pride.

Here again that something in the mind so difficult to define, so easy
for all who understand to understand, that something which insists upon
a best and keenest, the desire for beauty, comes into the play of
motives. Pride demands a beautiful self and would discipline all other
passions to its service. It also demands recognition for that beautiful
self. Now pride, I know, is denounced by many as the essential quality
of sin. We are taught that "self-abnegation" is the substance of virtue
and self-forgetfulness the inseparable quality of right conduct. But
indeed I cannot so dismiss egotism and that pride which was the first
form in which the desire to rule oneself as a whole came to me. Through
pride one shapes oneself towards a best, though at first it may be an
ill-conceived best. Pride is not always arrogance and aggression. There
is that pride that does not ape but learn humility.

And with the human imagination all these elementary instincts, of the
flesh, of curiosity, of self-assertion, become only the basal substance
of a huge elaborate edifice of secondary motive and intention. We live
in a great flood of example and suggestion, our curiosity and our social
quality impel us to a thousand imitations, to dramatic attitudes and
subtly obscure ends. Our pride turns this way and that as we respond to
new notes in the world about us. We are arenas for a conflict between
suggestions flung in from all sources, from the most diverse and
essentially incompatible sources. We live long hours and days in a kind
of dream, negligent of self-interest, our elementary passions in
abeyance, among these derivative things.

2.7. THE SYNTHETIC MOTIVE.

Such it seems to me are the chief masses of the complex of motives in
us, the group of sense, the group of pride, curiosity and the imitative
and suggested motives, making up the system of impulses which is our
will. Such has been the common outfit of motives in every age, and in
every age its melee has been found insufficient in itself. It is a
heterogeneous system, it does not form in any sense a completed or
balanced system, its constituents are variable and compete amongst
themselves. They are not so much arranged about one another as
superposed and higgledy-piggledy. The senses and curiosity war with
pride and one another, the motives suggested to us fall into conflict
with this element or that of our intimate and habitual selves. We find
all our instincts are snares to excess. Excesses of indulgence lead to
excesses of abstinence, and even the sense of beauty may be clouded and
betray. So to us all, even for the most balanced of us, come
disappointments, regrets, gaps; and for most of us who are ill-balanced,
miseries and despairs. Nearly all of us want something to hold us
together--something to dominate this swarming confusion and save us from
the black misery of wounded and exploded pride, of thwarted desire, of
futile conclusions. We want more oneness, some steadying thing that will
afford an escape from fluctuations.

Different people, of differing temperament and tradition, have sought
oneness, this steadying and universalizing thing, in various manners.
Some have attained it in this manner, and some in that. Scarcely a
religious system has existed that has not worked effectively and proved
true for someone. To me it seems that the need is synthetic, that some
synthetic idea and belief is needed to harmonize one's life, to give a
law by which motive may be tried against motive and an effectual peace
of mind achieved. I want an active peace and not a quiescence, and I do
not want to suppress and expel any motive at all. But to many people the
effort takes the form of attempts to cut off some part of oneself as it
were, to repudiate altogether some straining or distressing or
disappointing factor in the scheme of motives, and find a tranquillizing
refuge in the residuum. So we have men and women abandoning their share
in economic development, crushing the impulses and evading the
complications that arise out of sex and flying to devotions and simple
duties in nunneries and monasteries; we have people cutting their lives
down to a vegetarian dietary and scientific research, resorting to
excesses of self-discipline, giving themselves up wholly to some "art"
and making everything else subordinate to that, or, going in another
direction, abandoning pride and love in favour of an acquired appetite
for drugs or drink.

Now it seems to me that this desire to get the confused complex of life
simplified is essentially what has been called the religious motive, and
that the manner in which a man achieves that simplification, if he does
achieve it, and imposes an order upon his life, is his religion. I find
in the scheme of conversion and salvation as it is presented by many
Christian sects, a very exact statement of the mental processes I am
trying to express. In these systems this discontent with the complexity
of life upon which religion is based, is called the conviction of sin,
and it is the first phase in the process of conversion--of finding
salvation. It leads through distress and confusion to illumination, to
the act of faith and peace.

And after peace comes the beginning of right conduct. If you believe and
you are saved, you will want to behave well, you will do your utmost to
behave well and to understand what is behaving well, and you will feel
neither shame nor disappointment when after all you fail. You will say
then: "so it is failure I had to achieve." And you will not feel
bitterly because you seem unsuccessful beside others or because you are
misunderstood or unjustly treated, you will not bear malice nor cherish
anger nor seek revenge, you will never turn towards suicide as a relief
from intolerable things; indeed there will be no intolerable things. You
will have peace within you.

But if you do not truly believe and are not saved, you will know it
because you will still suffer the conflict of motives; and in regrets,
confusions, remorses and discontents, you will suffer the penalties of
the unbeliever and the lost. You will know certainly your own salvation.

2.8. THE BEING OF MANKIND.

I will boldly adopt the technicalities of the sects. I will speak as a
person with experience and declare that I have been through the
distresses of despair and the conviction of sin and that I have found
salvation.

I BELIEVE.

I believe in the scheme, in the Project of all things, in the
significance of myself and all life, and that my defects and uglinesses
and failures, just as much as my powers and successes, are things that
are necessary and important and contributory in that scheme, that scheme
which passes my understanding--and that no thwarting of my conception,
not even the cruelty of nature, now defeats or can defeat my faith,
however much it perplexes my mind.

And though I say that scheme passes my understanding, nevertheless I
hope you will see no inconsistency when I say that necessarily it has an
aspect towards me that I find imperative.

It has an aspect that I can perceive, however dimly and fluctuatingly.

I take it that to perceive this aspect to the utmost of my mental power
and to shape my acts according to that perception is my function in the
scheme; that if I hold steadfastly to that conception, I am SAVED. I
find in that idea of perceiving the scheme as a whole towards me and in
this attempt to perceive, that something to which all my other emotions
and passions may contribute by gathering and contributing experience,
and through which the synthesis of my life becomes possible.

Let me try to convey to you what it is I perceive, what aspect this
scheme seems to bear on the whole towards me.

The essential fact in man's history to my sense is the slow unfolding of
a sense of community with his kind, of the possibilities of
co-operations leading to scarce dreamt-of collective powers, of a
synthesis of the species, of the development of a common general idea, a
common general purpose out of a present confusion. In that awakening of
the species, one's OWN PERSONAL BEING LIVES AND MOVES--A PART OF IT AND
CONTRIBUTING TO IT. ONE'S INDIVIDUAL EXISTENCE IS NOT SO ENTIRELY CUT
OFF AS IT SEEMS AT FIRST; ONE'S ENTIRELY SEPARATE INDIVIDUALITY IS
ANOTHER, A PROFOUNDER, AMONG THE SUBTLE INHERENT DELUSIONS OF THE HUMAN
MIND. Between you and me as we set our minds together, and between us
and the rest of mankind, there is SOMETHING, something real, something
that rises through us and is neither you nor me, that comprehends us,
that is thinking here and using me and you to play against each other in
that thinking just as my finger and thumb play against each other as I
hold this pen with which I write.

Let me point out that this is no sentimental or mystical statement. It
is hard fact as any hard fact we know. We, you and I, are not only parts
in a thought process, but parts of one flow of blood and life. Let me
put that in a way that may be new to some readers. Let me remind you of
what is sometimes told as a jest, the fact that the number of one's
ancestors increases as we look back in time. Disregarding the chances of
intermarriage, each one of us had two parents, four grandparents, eight
great-grandparents, and so on backward, until very soon, in less than
fifty generations, we should find that, but for the qualification
introduced, we should have all the earth's inhabitants of that time as
our progenitors. For a hundred generations it must hold absolutely true,
that everyone of that time who has issue living now is ancestral to all
of us. That brings the thing quite within the historical period. There
is not a western European palaeolithic or neolithic relic that is not a
family relic for every soul alive. The blood in our veins has handled
it.

And there is something more. We are all going to mingle our blood again.
We cannot keep ourselves apart; the worst enemies will some day come to
the Peace of Verona. All the Montagues and Capulets are doomed to
intermarry. A time will come in less than fifty generations when all the
population of the world will have my blood, and I and my worst enemy
will not be able to say which child is his or mine.

But you may retort--perhaps you may die childless. Then all the sooner
the whole species will get the little legacy of my personal achievement,
whatever it may be.

You see that from this point of view--which is for me the vividly true
and dominating point of view--our individualities, our nations and
states and races are but bubbles and clusters of foam upon the great
stream of the blood of the species, incidental experiments in the
growing knowledge and consciousness of the race.

I think this real solidarity of humanity is a fact that is only slowly
being apprehended, that it is an idea that we who have come to realize
it have to assist in thinking into the collective mind. I believe the
species is still as a whole unawakened, still sunken in the delusion of
the permanent separateness of the individual and of races and nations,
that so it turns upon itself and frets against itself and fails to see
the stupendous possibilities of deliberate self-development that lie
open to it now.

I see myself in life as part of a great physical being that strains and
I believe grows towards beauty, and of a great mental being that strains
and I believe grows towards knowledge and power. In this persuasion that
I am a gatherer of experience, a mere tentacle that arranges thought
beside thought for this being of the species, this being that grows
beautiful and powerful, in this persuasion I find the ruling idea of
which I stand in need, the ruling idea that reconciles and adjudicates
among my warring motives. In it I find both concentration of myself and
escape from myself; in a word, I find Salvation.

2.9. INDIVIDUALITY AN INTERLUDE.

I would like in a parenthetical section to expand and render rather more
concrete this idea of the species as one divaricating flow of blood, by
an appeal to its arithmetical aspect. I do not know if it has ever
occurred to the reader to compute the number of his living ancestors at
some definite date, at, let us say, the year one of the Christian era.
Everyone has two parents and four grandparents, most people have eight
great-grandparents, and if we ignore the possibility of intermarriage we
shall go on to a fresh power of two with every generation, thus:--

Column 1: Number of generations.

Column 2: Number of ancestors.

3 : 8
4 : 16
5 : 32
7 : 128
10 : 1,024
20 : 126,976
30 : 15,745,024
40 : 1,956,282,976

I do not know whether the average age of the parent at the birth of a
child under modern conditions can be determined from existing figures.
There is, I should think, a strong presumption that it has been a rising
age. There may have been a time in the past when most women were mothers
in their early teens and bore most or all of their children before
thirty, and when men had done the greater part of their procreation
before thirty-five; this is still the case in many tropical climates,
and I do not think I favour my case unduly by assuming that the average
parent must be about, or even less than, five and twenty. This gives
four generations to a century. At that rate and DISREGARDING
INTERMARRIAGE OF RELATIONS the ancestors living a thousand years ago
needed to account for a living person would be double the estimated
population of the world. But it is obvious that if a person sprang from
a marriage of first cousins, the eight ancestors of the third generation
are cut down to six; if of cousins at the next stage, to fourteen in the
fourth. And every time that a common pair of ancestors appears in any
generation, the number of ancestors in that generation must be reduced
by two from our original figures, or if it is only one common ancestor,
by one, and as we go back that reduction will have to be doubled,
quadrupled and so on. I daresay that by the time anyone gets to the 8916
names of his Elizabethan ancestors he will find quite a large number
repeated over and over again in the list and that he is cut down to
perhaps two or three thousand separate persons. But this does not
effectually invalidate my assumption that if we go back only to the
closing years of the Roman Republic, we go back to an age in which
nearly every person living within the confines of what was then the
Roman Empire who left living offspring must have been ancestral to every
person living within that area to-day. No doubt they were so in very
variable measure. There must be for everyone some few individuals in
that period who have so to speak intermarried with themselves again and
again and again down the genealogical series, and others who are
represented by just one touch of their blood. The blood of the Jews, for
example, has turned in upon itself again and again; but for all we know
one Italian proselyte in the first year of the Christian era may have
made by this time every Jew alive a descendant of some unrecorded
bastard of Julius Caesar. The exclusive breeding of the Jews is in fact
the most effectual guarantee that whatever does get into the charmed
circle through either proselytism, the violence of enemies, or feminine
unchastity, must ultimately pervade it universally.

It may be argued that as a matter of fact humanity has until recently
been segregated in pools; that in the great civilization of China, for
example, humanity has pursued its own interlacing system of inheritances
without admixture from other streams of blood. But such considerations
only defer the conclusion; they do not stave it off indefinitely. It
needs only that one philoprogenitive Chinaman should have wandered into
those regions that are now Russia, about the time of Pericles, to link
east and west in that matter; one Tartar chieftain in the Steppes may
have given a daughter to a Roman soldier and sent his grandsons east and
west to interlace the branches of every family tree in the world. If any
race stands apart it is such an isolated group as that of the now
extinct Tasmanian primitives or the Australian black. But even here, in
the remote dawn of navigation, may have come some shipwrecked Malays, or
some half-breed woman kidnapped by wandering Phoenicians have carried
this link of blood back to the western world. The more one lets one's
imagination play upon the incalculable drift and soak of population, the
more one realizes the true value of that spreading relation with the
past.

But now let us turn in the other direction, the direction of the future,
because there it is that this series of considerations becomes most
edifying. It is the commonest trick to think of a man's descendants as
though they were his own. We are told that one of the dearest human
motives is the desire to found a family, but think how much of a family
one founds at the best. One's son is after all only half one's blood,
one grandson only a quarter, and so one goes on until it may be that in
ten brief generations one's heir and namesake has but 1/1024th of one's
inherited self. Those other thousand odd unpredictable people thrust in
and mingle with one's pride. The trend of all things nowadays--the
ever-increasing ease of communication, the great and increasing drift of
population, the establishment of a common standard of civilization--is
to render such admixture far more probable and facile in the future than
in the past.

It is a pleasant fancy to imagine some ambitious hoarder of wealth, some
egotistical founder of name and family, returning to find his
descendants--HIS descendants--after the lapse of a few brief
generations. His heir and namesake may have not a thousandth part of his
heredity, while under some other name, lost to all the tradition and
glory of him, enfeebled and degenerate through much intermarriage, may
be a multitude of people who have as much as a fiftieth or even more of
his quality. They may even be in servitude and dependence to the really
alien person who is head of the family. Our founder will go through the
spreading record of offspring and find it mixed with that of people he
most hated and despised. The antagonists he wronged and overcame will
have crept into his line and recaptured all they lost; have played the
cuckoo in his blood and acquisitions, and turned out his diluted strain
to perish.

And while I am being thus biological let me point out another queer
aspect in which our egotism is overridden by physical facts. Men and
women are apt to think of their children as being their very own, blood
of their blood and bone of their bone. But indeed one of the most
striking facts in this matter is the frequent want of resemblance
between parents and children. It is one of the commonest things in the
world for a child to resemble an aunt or an uncle, or to revive a trait
of some grandparent that has seemed entirely lost in the intervening
generation. The Mendelians have given much attention to facts of this
nature; and though their general method of exposition seems to me quite
unjustifiably exact and precise, it cannot be denied that it is often
vividly illuminating. It is so in this connexion. They distinguish
between "dominant" and "recessive" qualities, and they establish cases
in which parents with all the dominant characteristics produce offspring
of recessive type. Recessive qualities are constantly being masked by
dominant ones and emerging again in the next generation. It is not the
individual that reproduces himself, it is the species that reproduces
through the individual and often in spite of his characteristics.

The race flows through us, the race is the drama and we are the
incidents. This is not any sort of poetical statement; it is a statement
of fact. In so far as we are individuals, in so far as we seek to follow
merely individual ends, we are accidental, disconnected, without
significance, the sport of chance. In so far as we realize ourselves as
experiments of the species for the species, just in so far do we escape
from the accidental and the chaotic. We are episodes in an experience
greater than ourselves.

Now none of this, if you read me aright, makes for the suppression of
one's individual difference, but it does make for its correlation. We
have to get everything we can out of ourselves for this very reason that
we do not stand alone; we signify as parts of a universal and immortal
development. Our separate selves are our charges, the talents of which
much has to be made. It is because we are episodical in the great
synthesis of life that we have to make the utmost of our individual
lives and traits and possibilities.

2.10. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT.

What stupendous constructive mental and physical possibilities are there
to which I feel I am contributing, you may ask, when I feel that I
contribute to this greater Being; and at once I confess I become vague
and mystical. I do not wish to pass glibly over this point. I call your
attention to the fact that here I am mystical and arbitrary. I am what I
am, an individual in this present phase. I can see nothing of these
possibilities except that they will be in the nature of those
indefinable and overpowering gleams of promise in our world that we call
Beauty. Elsewhere (in my "Food of the Gods") I have tried to render my
sense of our human possibility by monstrous images; I have written of
those who will "stand on this earth as on a footstool and reach out
their hands among the stars." But that is mere rhetoric at best, a
straining image of unimaginable things. Things move to Power and Beauty;
I say that much and I have said all that I can say.

But what is Beauty, you ask, and what will Power do? And here I reach my
utmost point in the direction of what you are free to call the
rhapsodical and the incomprehensible. I will not even attempt to define
Beauty. I will not because I cannot. To me it is a final, quite
indefinable thing. Either you understand it or you do not. Every true
artist and many who are not artists know--they know there is something
that shows suddenly--it may be in music, it may be in painting, it may
be in the sunlight on a glacier or a shadow cast by a furnace or the
scent of a flower, it may be in the person or act of some fellow
creature, but it is right, it is commanding, it is, to use theological
language, the revelation of God.

To the mystery of Power and Beauty, out of the earth that mothered us,
we move.

I do not attempt to define Beauty nor even to distinguish it from Power.
I do not think indeed that one can effectually distinguish these aspects
of life. I do not know how far Beauty may not be simply fulness and
clearness of sensation, a momentary unveiling of things hitherto seen
but dully and darkly. As I have already said, there may be beauty in the
feeling of beer in the throat, in the taste of cheese in the mouth;
there may be beauty in the scent of the earth, in the warmth of a body,
in the sensation of waking from sleep. I use the word Beauty therefore
in its widest possible sense, ranging far beyond the special beauties
that art discovers and develops. Perhaps as we pass from death to life
all things become beautiful. The utmost I can do in conveying what I
mean by Beauty is to tell of things that I have perceived to be
beautiful as beautifully as I can tell of them. It may be, as I suggest
elsewhere, that Beauty is a thing synthetic and not simple; it is a
common effect produced by a great medley of causes, a larger aspect of
harmony.

But the question of what Beauty is does not very greatly concern me
since I have known it when I met it and since almost every day in life I
seem to apprehend it more and to find it more sufficient and satisfying.
Objectively it may be altogether complex and various and synthetic,
subjectively it is altogether simple. All analysis, all definition, must
in the end rest upon and arrive at unanalyzable and indefinable things.
Beauty is light--I fall back upon that image--it is all things that
light can be, beacon, elucidation, pleasure, comfort and consolation,
promise, warning, the vision of reality.

2.11. THE SYNTHESIS.

It seems to me that the whole living creation may be regarded as walking
in its sleep, as walking in the sleep of instinct and individualized
illusion, and that now out of it all rises man, beginning to perceive
his larger self, his universal brotherhood and a collective synthetic
purpose to increase Power and realize Beauty...

I write this down. It is the form of my belief, and that unanalyzable
something called Beauty is the light that falls upon that form.

It is only by such images, it is only by the use of what are practically
parables, that I can in any way express these things in my mind. These
two things, I say, are the two aspects of my belief; one is the form and
the other the light. The former places me as it were in a scheme, the
latter illuminates and inspires me. I am a member in that great being,
and my function is, I take it, to develop my capacity for beauty and
convey the perception of it to my fellows, to gather and store
experience and increase the racial consciousness. I hazard no whys nor
wherefores. That is how I see things; that is how the universe, in
response to my demand for a synthesizing aspect, presents itself to me.