CHAPTER II.
La raison, dit saint Augustin, ne se soumettroit jamais, si elle ne jugeoit qu’il y a des occasions où elle doit se soumettre. Il est donc juste qu’elle se soumette quand elle juge qu’elle doit se soumettre; et qu’elle ne se soumette pas, quand elle juge avec fondement qu’elle ne doit pas le faire: mais il faut prendre garde à ne pas se tromper.—Pascal.
Gower ceased reading. A few irregular remarks and questions followed the short silence. Willoughby expressed his wish that Atherton were with them, and was echoed by the lady of Ashfield. Kate received Atherton’s bulky letter from Gower’s hands, and began to look it over for herself, as we always do with newspapers, however fully read aloud. Mrs. Lowestoffe was cutting out some ingenious paper figures, destined to throw little Kate into rapturous glee, and her husband had just petitioned for music, when the deep bark of Lion was heard in the court-yard; then the muffled sound of hoofs and wheels over the snow, and a tearing peal of the bell.
It was Atherton, who, released sooner than he had hoped, had followed his epistle at speed, sweeping with the wind, through the whitening hills, for two-thirds of the December day.
In half an hour he was among his guests—had refreshed him after his journey—been upstairs to kiss his sleeping child—and now appeared, blithesome and ruddy, diffusing smiles. Enthroned in his favourite arm-chair, he amused them with the story of what he had seen, and heard, and done; nothing uncommon, certainly, but full of life and humour in his style of telling. On his way home that, day he had met with an entertaining companion in the railway carriage, a little spherical old gentleman, exhibiting between upper and nether masses of fur a narrow segment of face,—gruff and abrupt in speech—ferocious about stoppages and windows,—who had been in India, and knew everybody who was ‘anybody’ there.
‘We talked,’ said Atherton, ‘about Brahmins and Buddhists, about the Bhilsa Topes and Major Cunningham, about the civil service, and what not. On every topic he was surprisingly well informed, and gave me, in his brief way, just the facts I wanted to know. A propos of Ceylon and the famous cinnamon breezes, he said that when he was on board the Bungagunga Indiaman, they stood one day out at sea, some miles off the island, when the wind was blowing, mark you, right on the land. A group among the passengers began to dispute about these said breezes—were they a poetic fiction, or an olfactory fact? With that, my old gentleman slips away slyly, rubs a little oil of cinnamon on the weather hammock nettings, and has the satisfaction of presently seeing the pro-cinnamon party in full triumph, crying, with distended nostrils and exultant sniffs, ‘There! don’t you smell them now?’ One of them, he told me (his multitudinous envelopes shaking the while), actually published an account when he got home, relating his own experience of those spicy gales, said to perfume the ocean air so far away.’
Gower. Amusing enough. Just the blunder, by the way, of our mystics,—mistaking what exists only on board their own personality for something real that operates from without. Their pleasurable emotions can be nothing less than precious odours—miraculous benisons, breathed from some island of the blest.
Lowestoffe. They seem to me a most monotonous set of gentry—those same mystics. Accept my congratulations on your having nearly done with them. As far as I understand them, they go round one old circuit for ever, in varying forms,—just like your gold fish there, Mrs. Atherton, now looking so big about it, and the next moment tapered off to a mere tail. See that fellow now, magnified almost to the size of his glass world, with his huge eyes, like a cabbage rose in spectacles; and now, gone again on his way round and round,—always the same, after all.
Atherton. And yet religious extravagances, with all their inordinate Quixotism, or worse, are full of instruction. Your favourite botanical books should hint that much to you; for the vegetable physiologists all say that no little light has been thrown on the regularly developed organism by the study of monstrous and aberrant forms of growth.
Lowestoffe. There is something in that. But these irregularities you speak of have repeatedly broken out in the conduct, have they not, as well as in imagination or opinion?
Atherton. They have. The dazzling splendour of a superhuman knowledge or a superhuman fervour, has often distorted the common rule of right and wrong,——
Gower. As they say the Northern Lights disturb the direction of the needle.
Kate. Yet those glimmers and flashes are of service in the arctic night,—better than total darkness.
Lowestoffe. Right, Miss Merivale. I fully admit the plea.
Willoughby. I think we must allow the substantial justice of Mr. Lowestoffe’s complaint. There is a sameness in these mystics. Each one starts, to so large an extent, on his own account, with the same bias and the same materials. He reiterates, after his manner, the same protest, and the same exaggeration. The same negations, the same incoherence, the same metaphors, have attempted in every age the utterance of the unutterable.
Atherton. So science began to make steady progress as soon as it confined itself within the limits of the knowable, and ceased to publish fancy maps of the terra incognita. Theosophy was perpetually transgressing those limits, and hence its waste of ingenuity in vain gyrations.
Gower. There is one point, Atherton, on which I could wish you had dwelt more at large in your letter. Do we not find, the most prolific source of mysticism in the idea that there is a special faculty for the discernment of spiritual truth,—that there is a kind of soul within the soul which may unite with God, leaving behind it all the ordinary powers of the mind,—a potency, in fact, altogether independent of knowledge, understanding, judgment, imagination, &c., and never amenable to any of them? We have encountered this doctrine over and over again, sometimes in a qualified, sometimes in an uncontrollable form. Hugo’s ‘Eye of Contemplation’ is such a faculty. Tauler adopts the principle when he separates the Ground of the Soul from all its acts and powers. It lies at the root of the inexpressible experiences so precious to the Spanish mystics, when every function of the soul underwent divine suspension. It appears again in the divorce declared (by Coleridge, for example) between the Understanding—the reasoning faculty, which deliberates and judges, and the Intuitive Reason, which discerns religious and philosophic truth directly.
Atherton. You make out a strong case, certainly. Declare intuition absolute, with an undivided irresponsible prerogative of this kind, and what check is provided against any possible vagary of mysticism?
Mrs. Atherton. I do not clearly understand the question at issue. Pray explain before you go farther.
Gower. Allow me to make the attempt. I am afraid we are growing prosy—speaking for myself, at least. Old travellers used to report that the Danube, near its conjunction with the Drave, flowed in a stream quite separate from its tributary, though the same banks confined them both. The two currents were said to be perfectly distinct in colour, and their waters of quality so opposite, that the fish caught in the one were never to be found in the other. Now the question is, whether Reason and Understanding in the mind of man, do, in a similar way, reciprocally exclude each other.
Atherton. Gower says no; and the failures of mysticism powerfully support his position. I agree with him. I think we have all within us what I may call Intuition, the poetical, and Understanding, the practical man; but that each of the two is the better for close fellowship with his brother. Let not Intuition disdain common-sense, and think irrationality a sign of genius. And you, Gower, would be the last to give the reins to logic only, and live by expediency, arithmetic, and mensuration.
Mrs. Atherton. Thank you.
Willoughby. But there was occasion, surely, for Coleridge’s exhortation to rise above the dividual particular notions we have gathered about us, to the higher region of the Universal Reason.
Atherton. By all means, let us clear our minds of prejudice, and seek the True for its own sake.
Lowestoffe. But I do not find that those who profess to have ascended to the common ground of Universal Reason, are one whit more agreed among themselves, than those who are disputing in the lists of logic about evidence.
Willoughby. They are not, I grant. They would attribute their want of unanimity, however, to the fact that some of them have not sufficiently purged their intuitional eyesight from everything personal and particular.
Lowestoffe. Who is to be judge in the matter? Who will say how much purging will suffice to assure a man that he has nowhere mistaken a ‘wholesome Prejudice’ for a divine intuition?
Willoughby. He must exercise his judgment——
Gower. Exactly so; his critical, sifting faculty—his understanding. But that is contrary to the theory in question, which represents Understanding as utterly incapable in the Intuitional sphere. According to Jacobi, it is the instinct of the logical faculty to contradict the intuitional—as the bat repudiates the sunshine.
Atherton. If the Christianity of mere logic hardens into a formula, the Christianity of mere intuition evaporates in a phantom.
Willoughby. But do not let us forget how limited is the logical faculty.
Gower. So, for that matter, is the intuitional. Undeveloped by culture from without, its voice is incoherent, various, scarce audible oftentimes.
Willoughby. What logic can prove to me the Eternity of the Divine Nature? Is not that a transcendental truth?
Atherton. I grant it. But my understanding, observing and reasoning, has shown me convincingly that I must receive that truth on pain of believing an absurdity. In this way, the Understanding is satisfied (as Pascal observes it always should be), and acquiesces in a truth beyond itself. But if I have not thus used my Understanding as far as it will go, I am traversing the transcendental region without the passport it should give me,—I cannot render a reason—I only oracularly affirm—I am fast turning mystic.
Lowestoffe. But how this Intuition sees to work, or finds means to work, without contact with the other faculties of the mind, I cannot conceive. Has it a set of finer senses of its own? Has no one ever defined it?
Gower. Several definitions have been attempted. I think Mark Antony’s the best. He delivered it when he gave drunken Lepidus that hoaxing description of the crocodile. A mind with any depth of insight will understand at once the fine symbolism of Shakspeare, and see that he is depicting Intuition. ‘It is shaped, sir, like itself; and it is as broad as it hath breadth; it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs; it lives by that which nourishes it; and, the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.’
Atherton. In fact, Intuition is not to be termed one among or above the faculties of the mind. It is rather, like consciousness, related to them as species to individuals. As the man is, so are his intuitions. Previous observation, training, judgment, all combine to bring the mind to that point from which Intuition takes its survey, more or less extended.
Lowestoffe. Good. Our inner and our outer world contradict that separatist theory every day, by their action and reaction on each other. The man who dreads the internal light as an illusive Will-o’-the-Wisp, has often consulted his own inward bent, far more than he supposes, in choosing what authority he shall receive. The man who professes to transcend the external altogether is still moulded by it in a thousand unimagined modes.
Willoughby. The imperfect character of our recollection should make us very cautious, I admit. So much that has been imported into the mind looks native and spontaneous after a lapse of time. Many an idea, promulged as the dictum of Intuition—as having its source in the immemorial depths of our being, has been subsequently traced, even by its own author, to the external world.
Gower. That gaberlunzie, Memory (whose wallet has so many holes), would step in oftener, if he did his duty, and say, like Edie Ochiltree, ‘I mind the biggin o’ it.’
Atherton. It seems to me so unfair and ungrateful that after having been so largely indebted, from the first, to the outer world, any man should pretend, at a certain point, to deny utterly that indispensable coadjutor in his inward development.
Gower. You remind me of the affectation of the author in Humphrey Clinker, who professed such an antipathy to green fields as made him careful to sit with his back to the window all dinner-time,—though he had, in fact, passed his childhood with the asses on the village common.
Lowestoffe. Let us, then, celebrate the reconciliation of the pair—Reason and Understanding, if the terms are to be retained. So only can our nature realize its full productiveness,—as the richest mines lie always near the junction of two dissimilar rocks.
Atherton. I think spiritualism, which complains that religion is separated too widely from common life, will scarcely mend the matter by teaching men that they use one faculty, or set of faculties, about their week-day business, and a quite distinct one in their worship.
Gower. As though we were to leave our understandings—like the sandals of old—at the door of our holy places.
Atherton. Enough on this question, I have only one remark to add. We have seen mysticism endeavouring to exclude all distinct form or expression, all vivid figure, from its apprehensions of spiritual truth; as if such clearness and warmth belonged to our meaner nature—were low and sensuous.
Gower. Confounding spirituality with abstraction.
Atherton. Spiritualism now repeats the same error—is the revival of an old mistake in a new form. It shrinks from distinctness, mistaking it, I suppose, for so much gross materialism, or artificial formalism. It shuns, as far as possible, actual outward persons and events—as though reality were carnality—as though the fewer facts we acknowledged, the less formal we were sure to be—as though we were spiritual in proportion as we resolved sacred narrative into symbols of inward states or emotions, forsook history for reverie, and evidence for hazy sentiment. The Spanish Quietists were well nigh enjoining the exclusion of the conception of Christ’s humanity from their higher contemplation, as an image too substantial and earthy. Spiritualism, in its tendency to escape from objective facts to subjective experience, displays a similarly unnatural timidity—a morbid aversion to that manly exercise of our whole nature on religious questions which we put forth on others.
Gower. Thinking, I conclude, that the opposite to spirituality is, not sensuality or earthliness—but external reality.
Willoughby. Why look at me? You don’t suppose I have a word to say in defence of such a curious confusion of thought?
Lowestoffe (who has been turning over the leaves of a Shakspeare while listening.) If any one of you should ever take it into his head to write a book about mysticism——
Atherton. Forbid it, my good genius!
Lowestoffe. I have a motto for him—a motto by ‘sweet Bully Bottom,’ quite in the past-all-utterance mystical strain.
‘I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was, there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had. But man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen; man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom.