Negative and Positive
Wisdom, Madness and Folly. By John Custance. (Gullancz. 16s.) MR. JOHN CUSTANCE suffers from manic-depressive insanity. In this book, much of which was written while he was a patient at& mental hospital, he describes with lucidity and insight his thoughts and feelings during the phases of excitement and depression which characterise that disorder. In the manic phase sensory impressions were heightened, association of ideas occurred with extreme rapidity, and the barriers of individuality seemed to be broken down so that " everything felt akin. 1 was joined to Creation, no longer shut away in my little shell. And my vision of the Power of Love was the key to it all "—an " ineffable revelation " accompanied by " delusions of grandeur and power." In the alternating state of depression on the other hand the outer world loses its vividness, and the sufferer is shut in with his own thoughts, overpowered by so strong a sense of misery and sin that existence becomes a private hell, in which he contemplates an eternity of suffering, Mr. Custance believes that his experience of mania and depres- sion has given him an insight into the nature of the universe which has outlasted his stay in the mental hospital. He equates mania with "attraction," " a movement towards unity, synthesis, merg- ing," and depression with repulsion and isolation ; and finds a parallel in the mystical states of the beatific vision and the dark night of the soul. He extends this "'fantasia of opposites" to the universe as a whole, where he perceives a struggle between Negative and Positive Forces, the Yin and Yang of Chinese philosophy, and traces the expression of this conflict in mythology, religion, psychology and politics. Finally he endeavours to integrate these views into a " theory of actuality." which treats the psychological and the physical as two modes of describing the same reality • and in this way seeks to give the same validity to the visions of the priest, the saint and the artist as to the concepts of the scientist.
This is necessarily an incomplete summary of a thesis which draws upon a wide range of knowledge to support an intuition derived from abnormal mental experiences. There is nothing very new in the ideas which Mr. Custance puts forward, as he admits ; but his presentation of them brings the reader, as well as the author, face to face with questions of actuality. Assuming that the con- scious content of certain states of insanity is the same as certain mystical experiences, does this tell us anything further about either
insanity or mysticism There is no problem here for the materialist who interprets both as purely subjective events with, presumably, some common basis in a disturbance of the brain. But if the mystic enters into relationship with a reality other than himself, what status is to be accorded to similar experiences when they occur in the mental hospital or under nitrous oxide anaes-
thesia or, as in Dostoevsky's case, in the course of an attack of epilepsy ? Mr. Custance's theory of actuality does not provide a satisfactory answer to this question.
A visual hallucination is a real experience, but it is not an experience of a reality existing independently of the person who sees it. So it is not enough to say that gods, angels and devils must be real because they form part of the psychic life of those who believe in them ; the important question about them is whether they have any existence apart from this private actuality. A mystical experience may seem to possess an intense validity for the ecstatic, but how can he convince others that it involves a form of know- ledge of God or of the universe as a whole ? Mr. Custance may not have solved a problem which has baffled many other thinkers, but his book, nevertheless, suggests that current philosophy may be stating it wrongly. Perhaps we tend to exaggerate the part played by logic in our knowledge of reality. In his terminology Logos needs to be balanced by Eros, the Positive analytical technique by a " synthetic intuition of the Negative." W. RUSSELL BRAIN.
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