Subtle as the mind is, it can effect little without knowledge. It cannot construct a bridge, or a building, or make a canal, or work a problem in algebra, unless it is provided with information. This is obvious, and yet some say, What can you effect by the soul? I reply because it has had no employment. Mediaeval conditions kept it in slumber: science refuses to accept it. We are taught to employ our minds, and furnished with materials. The mind has its logic and exercise of geometry, and thus assisted brings a great force to the solution of problems. The soul remains untaught, and can effect little.
I consider that the highest purpose of study is the education of the soul or psyche. It is said that there is no proof of the existence of the soul, but, arguing on the same grounds, there is no proof of the existence of the mind, which is not a tangible thing. For myself, I feel convinced that there is a soul, a mind of the mind—and that it really exists. Now, glancing at the state of wild and uneducated men, it is evident that they work with their hands and make various things almost instinctively. But when they arrive at the idea of mind, and say to themselves, I possess a mind, then they think and proceed farther, forming designs and constructions both tangible and mental.
Next then, when we say, I have a soul, we can proceed to shape things yet further, and to see deeper, and penetrate the mystery. By denying the existence and the power of the soul—refusing to employ it—we should go back more than twelve thousand written years of human history. But instead of this, I contend, we should endeavour to go forward, and to discover a fourth Idea, and after that a fifth, and onwards continually.
I will not permit myself to be taken captive by observing physical phenomena, as many evidently are. Some gases are mingled and produce a liquid; certainly it is worth careful investigation, but it is no more than the revolution of a wheel, which is so often seen that it excites no surprise, though, in truth, as wonderful. So is all motion, and so is a grain of sand; there is nothing that is not wonderful; as, for instance, the fact of the existence of things at all. But the intense concentration of the mind on mechanical effects appears often to render it incapable of perceiving anything that is not mechanical. Some compounds are observed to precipitate crystals, all of which contain known angles. Thence it is argued that all is mechanical, and that action occurs in set ways only. There is a tendency to lay it down as an infallible law that because we see these things therefore everything else that exists in space must be or move exactly in the same manner. But I do not think that because crystals are precipitated with fixed angles therefore the whole universe is necessarily mechanical. I think there are things exempt from mechanical rules. The restriction of thought to purely mechanical grooves blocks progress in the same way as the restrictions of mediæval superstition. Let the mind think, dream, imagine: let it have perfect freedom. To shut out the soul is to put us back more than twelve thousand years.
Just as outside light, and the knowledge gained from light, there are, I think, other mediums from which, in times to come, intelligence will be obtained, so outside the mental and the spiritual ideas we now possess I believe there exists a whole circle of ideas. In the conception of the idea that there are others, I lay claim to another idea.
The mind is infinite and able to understand everything that is brought before it; there is no limit to its understanding. The limit is in the littleness of the things and the narrowness of the ideas which have been put for it to consider. For the philosophies of old time past and the discoveries of modern research are as nothing to it. They do not fill it. When they have been read, the mind passes on, and asks for more. The utmost of them, the whole together, make a mere nothing. These things have been gathered together by immense labour, labour so great that it is a weariness to think of it; but yet, when all is summed up and written, the mind receives it all as easily as the hand picks flowers. It is like one sentence—read and gone.
The mind requires more, and more, and more. It is so strong that all that can be put before it is devoured in a moment. Left to itself it will not be satisfied with an invisible idol any more than with a wooden one. An idol whose attributes are omnipresence, omnipotence, and so on, is no greater than light or electricity, which are present everywhere and all-powerful, and from which perhaps the thought arose. Prayer which receives no reply must be pronounced in vain. The mind goes on and requires more than these, something higher than prayer, something higher than a god.
I have been obliged to write these things by an irresistible impulse which has worked in me since early youth. They have not been written for the sake of argument, still less for any thought of profit, rather indeed the reverse. They have been forced from me by earnestness of heart, and they express my most serious convictions. For seventeen years they have been lying in my mind, continually thought of and pondered over. I was not more than eighteen when an inner and esoteric meaning began to come to me from all the visible universe, and indefinable aspirations filled me. I found them in the grass fields, under the trees, on the hill-tops, at sunrise, and in the night. There was a deeper meaning everywhere. The sun burned with it, the broad front of morning beamed with it; a deep feeling entered me while gazing at the sky in the azure noon, and in the star-lit evening.
I was sensitive to all things, to the earth under, and the star-hollow round about; to the least blade of grass, to the largest oak. They seemed like exterior nerves and veins for the conveyance of feeling to me. Sometimes a very ecstasy of exquisite enjoyment of the entire visible universe filled me. I was aware that in reality the feeling and the thought were in me, and not in the earth or sun; yet I was more conscious of it when in company with these. A visit to the sea increased the strength of the original impulse. I began to make efforts to express these thoughts in writing, but could not succeed to my own liking. Time went on, and harder experiences, and the pressure of labour came, but in no degree abated the fire of first thought. Again and again I made resolutions that I would write it, in some way or other, and as often failed. I could express any other idea with ease, but not this. Once especially I remember, in a short interval of distasteful labour, walking away to a spot by a brook which skirts an ancient Roman wall, and there trying to determine and really commence to work. Again I failed. More time, more changes, and still the same thought running beneath everything. At last, in 1880, in the old castle of Pevensey, under happy circumstances, once more I resolved, and actually did write down a few notes. Even then I could not go on, but I kept the notes (I had destroyed all former beginnings), and in the end, two years afterwards, commenced this book.
After all this time and thought it is only a fragment, and a fragment scarcely hewn. Had I not made it personal I could scarcely have put it into any shape at all. But I felt that I could no longer delay, and that it must be done, however imperfectly. I am only too conscious of its imperfections, for I have as it were seventeen years of consciousness of my own inability to express this the idea of my life. I can only say that many of these short sentences are the result of long-continued thought. One of the greatest difficulties I have encountered is the lack of words to express ideas. By the word soul, or psyche, I mean that inner consciousness which aspires. By prayer I do not mean a request for anything preferred to a deity; I mean intense soul-emotion, intense aspiration. The word immortal is very inconvenient, and yet there is no other to convey the idea of soul-life. Even these definitions are deficient, and I must leave my book as a whole to give its own meaning to its words.
Time has gone on, and still, after so much pondering, I feel that I know nothing, that I have not yet begun; I have only just commenced to realise the immensity of thought which lies outside the knowledge of the senses. Still, on the hills and by the seashore, I seek and pray deeper than ever. The sun burns southwards over the sea and before the wave runs its shadow, constantly slipping on the advancing slope till it curls and covers its dark image at the shore. Over the rim of the horizon waves are flowing as high and wide as those that break upon the beach. These that come to me and beat the trembling shore are like the thoughts that have been known so long; like the ancient, iterated, and reiterated thoughts that have broken on the strand of mind for thousands of years. Beyond and over the horizon I feel that there are other waves of ideas unknown to me, flowing as the stream of ocean flows. Knowledge of facts is limitless: they lie at my feet innumerable like the countless pebbles; knowledge of thought so circumscribed! Ever the same thoughts come that have been written down centuries and centuries.
Let me launch forth and sail over the rim of the sea yonder, and when another rim arises over that, and again and onwards into an ever-widening ocean of idea and life. For with all the strength of the wave, and its succeeding wave, the depth and race of the tide, the clear definition of the sky; with all the subtle power of the great sea, there rises an equal desire. Give me life strong and full as the brimming ocean; give me thoughts wide as its plain; give me a soul beyond these. Sweet is the bitter sea by the shore where the faint blue pebbles are lapped by the green-grey wave, where the wind-quivering foam is loth to leave the lashed stone. Sweet is the bitter sea, and the clear green in which the gaze seeks the soul, looking through the glass into itself. The sea thinks for me as I listen and ponder; the sea thinks, and every boom of the wave repeats my prayer.
Sometimes I stay on the wet sands as the tide rises, listening to the rush of the lines of foam in layer upon layer; the wash swells and circles about my feet, I have my hands in it, I lift a little in my hollowed palm, I take the life of the sea to me. My soul rising to the immensity utters its desire-prayer with all the strength of the sea. Or, again, the full stream of ocean beats upon the shore, and the rich wind feeds the heart, the sun burns brightly; the sense of soul-life burns in me like a torch.
Leaving the shore I walk among the trees; a cloud passes, and the sweet short rain comes mingled with sunbeams and flower-scented air. The finches sing among the fresh green leaves of the beeches. Beautiful it is, in summer days, to see the wheat wave, and the long grass foam—flecked of flower yield and return to the wind. My soul of itself always desires; these are to it as fresh food. I have found in the hills another valley grooved in prehistoric times, where, climbing to the top of the hollow, I can see the sea. Down in the hollow I look up; the sky stretches over, the sun burns as it seems but just above the hill, and the wind sweeps onward. As the sky extends beyond the valley, so I know that there are ideas beyond the valley of my thought; I know that there is something infinitely higher than deity. The great sun burning in the sky, the sea, the firm earth, all the stars of night are feeble—all, all the cosmos is feeble; it is not strong enough to utter my prayer-desire. My soul cannot reach to its full desire of prayer. I need no earth, or sea, or sun to think my thought. If my thought-part—the psyche—were entirely separated from the body, and from the earth, I should of myself desire the same. In itself my soul desires; my existence, my soul-existence is in itself my prayer, and so long as it exists so long will it pray that I may have the fullest soul-life.
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