The Marriage of One Mind
WHAT is more difficult than to put down in black and white the solid realities of one's life ? Just as it is easier to talk volubly with a stranger or a mere acquaintance than with the loved person, so it is in relation to one's ideas. The casual, external ideas, born in the events of the day like the ephemeral winged beauties of summer, can be seen calmly, enjoyed, admired, and described. But those deeper thoughts, those minerals c-f one's nature, the rock of one's foundation, are so bare and sparse and yet so vast that the effort to describe them exhausts the mind. There is nothing to be said where we believe and love. It is as though we should live in the neighbourhood of a superb cathedral, year after year, watching it in all the changes of light and view, becoming familiar with every facet of its coherent grace and dignity, imbibing from it a constant influence of spiritual comfort and assurance of the stability of the Over-mind out of which it sprang to such abiding demon- stration. Yet if one approach, creeping up and gazing with eyes fixed scientifically six inches from the stone, what can he seen but a bare expanse that seems so crude as hardly to have known the touch of a shaping hand ? What could be said at such a moment ? The glory, and all the prospect of faith and enthusiasm, would for the moment vanish like some childhood memory against the opposition of this rough square-foot of stone. It seems to me that this fanciful little picture might be used to explain to one's bewildered self the causes of the struggle which has been raging between the Churchmen and the Evolutionists since Darwin flung his stone so innocently into the pool of modern speculation. What has happened since has been, on the surface at least, a sort of inversion of that process which Samuel Butler described in Erewhon Revisited, whereby " however cataclysmic a change of natural opinions may appear to be, people will find means of bringing the new into more or less conformity with the old." For the past two decades, in particular, the theologians have been attempting to temper the wind to the shorn lamb ; the wind being public enlightenment, and the shorn lamb being the dogma of accepted religions. It has been pathetic to hear the apologetic sophistries fall from the lips of suave interpreters of the Scriptures, to the effect that all is not literal ; that the wonderful myths of the Old Testament are pieces of symbolism invented by a pre-scientific people out of a consciousness which never doubted of the anthropogenetie nature of its en- vironment. But even while this special pleading is in process, experiment and discovery pour in new evidence to destroy the argument. We find that slowly but surely science itself is carrying us away from the materialistic position. Matter, that persistent bugbear which so conveniently stubbed Dr. Johnson's toe, is crumbling in our hands, and the atoms between our fingers are dis- sociating with a. flash and a glory, so that we stand, as it were, with some holy fire about us, haVing touched sub- stance and found it transfigured into dream. I remember, as a boy, reading a book called The Evolu- tion of Matter, by Lebon ; and for the first time I was confronted by the fact of this miracle of the eternal ebb and flow of forni, the disintegration' and recreation of matter, the Dantesque passage from the darkness of sub- stance through the portals of radio-activity into the light and grace of disembodied idea, that lovely shapelessness which by the paradox of origins appears to be the matrix of all shape. I marvelled then that there should have to be apologists for what had been called the myths of religion, seeing that on all sides modern scientific speculation was sub- mitting more and more to the percolation of the psycho- logical quantity. Philosophers, like Bergson and Santayana, deliberately put aside the Swedenborgian weapons which they might have used, and took up the untested and roughly shaped swords now offered them. For these were swords made from living thought and emotion. Why could not the theologians do the same ? Why did not one arise to proclaim, " I believe in the Platonic Idea ; the Perfect Type which is the beginning and end of every evolutionary channel." It would be courageous ; it would be firm and teleologically definite ; it would set dogma up again in the high places ; and, above all, it would be prophetically scientific. And this brings us back to the prospect of the cathedral, and our analysis of positions in relation to a fixed object. The cathedral is life, the universe in and around the indi- vidual. What certainty can we find out about it except the certainty, established by a sort of pragmatic and sublime common sense, that we have a dual relationship to it, and that between the two phases of that relationship is strung the whole gamut of Reality so far as our con- sciousness is capable of measuring it ? After all, we must be old-fashioned, and acknowledge our limitations. The scientist in us, which peers into the texture of the universe, teaches us truths by its own way. The artist in us, which stands off and surveys the whole, teaches us truth by another way. The first is the Sancho Panza, the second is the Don Quixote, and in the union of the two we find our complete self, a zealous adventurer and " pilgrim of eternity." If we tilt at wind- mills, is that action any more fantastic than the activities of the stockbroker who runs about so feverishly beneath the shadow of Gresham's grasshopper ? We live by symbols, and the clash of contradictions, male and female, the passionate embrace between the two, the Janus-head looking both ways round the sphere of life ; these are all images of the two-in-one which makes the individual. That is the sacred thing ; that is the divine mystery ; the individual, against whom none should blaspheme. For in the integrity of that unit lies the foundation of religious, social, and political man. In this being that looks both ways is comprised the negative and positive magnetism which holds the universe in equilibrium. Thinking of one's faith in the power and sacredness of that dual self, in its subtle genius for reciprocity in reconciling opposing experiences, one can only comprehend thz, beauty and rightness of that conception by a sort or grim facetiousness. So let us misquote Kipling, and say :— -
"For East is West, and West is East, And ever the twain shall meet."
RICHARD CIIIIRCHq
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