MISUSED POWERS: by R. W. Machell
"USE with care those living messengers we call words." So said William Q. Judge, a very wise man.
The misuse of words seems a trifling matter to those who habitually misuse every function of mind and body; but the results of perversion are disastrous to body, mind, and soul. The misuse of terms, when not due to ignorance of their legitimate meaning, is in itself an indication of a perverted mind diseased by habitual misuse of the functions of both body and mind, which two are so intimately related as to share inevitably the consequences of right or wrong living.
The words we use and the way we use them are not mere accidents but are sure indications of our mental condition, and the mind and body are so mutually responsive that it is hard to say which affects the other and which is the affected one, for habits of body are induced by habits of mind and the mind in turn is influenced by the bodily condition resulting from those habits. With self-indulgence as the unfortunate rule of life, and with the ignorance of our own nature and of our relation to others, which is almost universal, it is not surprising that wrong living should be the general rule, and that misuse of the powers of mind and body should be so common; nor is it at all strange that there should be so much unhappiness in the world, nor need we marvel if people in these conditions should think that their sufferings, mental and physical, are due to everything except their own misconduct. And if men can not see that they are indeed the makers of their own sufferings, how shall they be able to realize their responsibility to others? With selfishness as the rule of life, and with ignorance of our interdependence, and of our intimate union one with another throughout the whole world, it is quite natural that we should feel little responsibility to others for the effects we produce in the world by the use or misuse of words: a responsibility that is increased by the spread of education and by the increase in the number of persons who read without thinking, and who take thoughts from books as they take water from a tap, unquestioning as to its quality. Pure water is now recognized as essential to health and is supplied in all civilized communities, but pure language and pure thought are left to chance; and while the supply of literature is as plentiful as the supply of water, the quality of our literature is not subject to the same scrutiny as is our water-supply, and the stream of thought that flows through the channels of our publications is frequently contaminated by unhealthy and unwholesome matters. Purity of thought and purity of words are essential values, for words are embodied thoughts, and from thoughts spring deeds, and the deeds of man are his life.
The responsibility of writers and speakers has hardly yet been recognized; though illustrations of the dangers of trifling with essential values, or of misusing talents, or indeed of perverting from its right use any function, are actually supplied by some of our brilliant writers, who have recklessly and often ignorantly become apostles of mere degeneracy and powerful instruments for the demoralization of the people. Even those who see the evils scarcely seem to appreciate either the causes or the consequences of the corruption of literature and the confusion of language.
Some recent reviewers, however, have begun to question more closely the character of the influence exercised upon the world by some writers, whose works have excited general or special admiration, even calling some of them defaulters, for that, holding great talents, they have used the light they held to dazzle the eyes and to confuse the minds of others, so as to make them blind to the path of right living, which is virtue or morality.
One of these critics, Paul Elmer More, literary editor of the New York Evening Post, in a study of the influence of Walter Pater, distinctly suggests that the author confused the truth and in fact misrepresented history, reading his own desires and inclinations into the teachings of Plato in one case, and in another of doing the same for Christianity, making them appear to exalt sensuous beauty above spiritual beauty which is the soul of virtue; whereas Plato himself exclaims: "When anyone prefers beauty to virtue, what is this but the real and utter dishonor of the soul?" Mr. More suggests that Christianity is equally misrepresented by this brilliant writer, but in his perversion of the real meaning and purpose of true Christianity he is simply drifting with the tide of so-called Christian civilization, which has been, almost from its first appearance as a politically established religion, a clear departure from those teachings concerning the Christos in man, attributed to Jesus, the supposed founder of the system, and which in their original purity are identical with Universal Theosophy of which they are a part and upon which they are drawn.
Further, Mr. More suggests that the demoralizing effect of Pater may have largely affected that brilliant apostle of decadence, Oscar Wilde, whose tragic collapse in the hour of his literary success drew attention to an evil whose ravages have ruined multitudes of lives and wrecked every civilization that has become tainted with the poison of perversion. For this man exalted perversion into a cult, his wit was entirely based upon it, his ethics steeped in it, and his own life wrecked by it. He himself shows that he was not unaware of the truth, at times, for he wrote:
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God;
Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance—
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?
And later, in that awful page of the tragedy of a fallen soul, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, there is a sort of blind recognition of the justice of Karma, which tolerates no perversion of Nature's order on any plane, coupled with a noble and generous plea for the removal of the unnecessary horrors of the prisons, in which we grind out the last vestige of man's inherent love of virtue, and crush the last buds of growth that the fallen soul may yet be able to put forth.
Here again was one, who exalted the beauty of the senses above the beauty of the soul, and so soiled the whole nature and so perverted the mind, which is the mirror of the man, that he produced a vortex of vice, in which all who entered were bewildered and lost their guiding star; in which many were utterly wrecked, and all defiled.
Professor Henderson in his critical interpretation of five authors, points out so much of the evil that one can only regret that his grasp of true psychology was not deep enough to enable him to make more clear the distinction between the spiritual soul and the animal soul (not to go further into the complex nature of the Soul), the great duality in man that is the clue to all these mysteries. With this key one feels that his study of Maeterlinck's philosophy would have become more luminous, for surely this is a case, in which an author continually confuses his audience, and perhaps also himself, by exalting the sensuous joys of the animal soul, and the emotions of the imagination, above the pure joy of true beauty, which is, as all poets, not only Keats, have seen, the same as truth. Keats himself may have known the difference, but his readers certainly must in most instances have been misled and may have found in his lines a justification of their own indulgence of morbid tastes, for however morbid may be a man's condition he will still see beauty in pleasure of any kind, no matter how vile may be its source. We may endorse the axiom in the first line
Beauty is truth, truth beauty
but must protest against the fallacy in the next line
... that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
No! we need to know what we mean by beauty, and we need to know that the word conceals pitfalls innumerable for him who has no knowledge of the true nature of man, for one who thinks he is his body, and who believes his passions are the voices of his soul and who mistakes the intoxication of sensuality for spiritual illumination, lust for love, and perversion for genius. We need the teaching so clearly given in "The Two Paths" translated by H. P. Blavatsky from The Book of the Golden Precepts. We need to know that there is a chasm deep as hell between these two souls in man, and that when the higher nature is the slave of the lower then the man is in hell indeed; for as said by H. P. Blavatsky, there is no other hell than that of a man-bearing planet. Those who have stood on the brink of this hell with even partially opened eyes, know that the terrors of hell invented by churchmen are but as a comic interlude to the reality of horrors that life on earth holds for masses of humanity, and from which there is no escape except by the path of right living, based upon right perception of our own true nature, and discrimination between the higher and the lower nature in man, which is so often veiled by the false teachings of perverted minds. We need the truth to discriminate the spiritual beauty that is pure joy from the sensual beauty that intoxicates, blinds, and destroys the life—and we need the guiding power of pure altruism to make our writings useful to others and a full recognition of the responsibility of those who now so lightly use "those living messengers we call words."