Readers and Writers (1917-1921)

by A. R. Orage

Psycho-Analysis and the Mysteries.—It would be unwise to make a dogma of any of the present conclusions of psycho-analysis. As a means of examining the contents of the subconscious, psycho-analysis is an instrument of the highest value, but in the interpretation of what it finds there, and in the conclusions it draws as to their origin—how the apple got into the dumpling, in fact—psycho-analysis requires to be checked by all the knowledge we have at our command. Mr. Mead has raised the question of origins, but it is just as easy to raise the question of interpretation. I am not satisfied that the interpretation placed by Jung on myths is any more than correct as far as it goes, and I am disposed to think that it does not go far enough. His reduction, for example, of a whole group of myths to the “incest” motive, appears to me, even in the light of his definition of incest as the “backward urge into childhood,” to give us only a partial truth, an aspect of truth. For there is a sense in which an “urge into childhood” is not backward but forward, not a regression into an old, but a progression into a new childhood. “Unless ye become as little children, ye can in no wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” “Incest” is a strictly improper term to apply to such a transformation; the new birth might suit the case better. Mr. Mead takes the same view. The interpretations of psycho-analysis carry us back, he suggests, to the lesser mysteries; but they need to be “elevated” in the Thomist sense in order to carry us back to the greater. So long as it confines itself to the “body” psycho-analysis must plainly be confined to the lesser mysteries, for the lesser mysteries are all concerned with generation. The greater mysteries are concerned with regeneration, and, hence, with the “soul”; and even if we assume the “soul” to require a body, we are outside the region of ordinary generation if that body is not the physical body. The psycho-analytic interpretation suffers from this confinement of its text to the physical body, since “the genuine myth has first and foremost to do with the life of the soul.”

Another caution to remember is that reality cannot be grasped with one faculty or with several; it requires them all. Only the whole can grasp the whole. For this reason it is impossible to “think” reality; for though the object of thought may be reality, all reality is not to be thought. Similarly, it is impossible to “feel” or to “will” or to “sense” reality completely. Each of these modes of experiencing reality reports us only a mode of reality, and not the whole of it. Before we can say certainly that a thing is true—before, that is, we can affirm a reality—it must not only think true, but feel true, sense true, and do true. The pragmatic criterion that reports a thing to be true because it works may be contradicted by the intellectual criterion that reports a thing to be true because it “thinks” true; and when these both agree in their report, their common conclusion may fail to be confirmed by the criterion of feeling that reports a thing to be true when it “feels” true. It is from an appreciation of the many-sided nature of truth, and, consequently, from an appreciation of the many faculties required to grasp it, that the value set by the world on common sense is derived. For common sense is the community of the senses or faculties; in its outcome it is the agreement of their reports. A thing is said to be common sense when it satisfies the heart, the mind, the emotion, and the senses; when, in fact, it satisfies all our various criteria of reality. Otherwise a statement may be logical, it may be pleasing, it may be practical, it may be obvious; but only when it is all is it really common sense.

But can we, with only our present faculties, however developed and harmonised, ever arrive at reality? It may be that in the natural order of things, humanity implies by definition a certain state of ignorance, and that this state is only to be transcended by the overpassing of the “human” condition. Psycho-analysis is still only at the beginning of its discoveries, but on the very threshold we are met by the problem of the nascent or germinal faculties of the mind. Are there in the subconscious, “yearning to mix themselves with life,” faculties for which “humanity” has not yet developed end-organs? If this be so, as our fathers have told us, the next step in evolution is to develop them.

Gently with Psycho-Analysis.—I am doubtful whether we have sufficiently developed the ideas of psycho-analysis to make a fruitful parallel possible between them and the ideas contained in Patanjali. Psycho-analysis, as the name indicates, is more concerned with analysis than with synthesis, and “Yoga,” whose dominant idea is re-union or synthesis, appears to be rather a complement than an analogue of psycho-analysis in the broad sense. Take, for example, the idea of Yoga as a means to the re-union of the individual with the world-soul: “Thou art That; Thou shalt become That.” According to Jung, this attempt at re-union may be nothing more than a megalomaniac regressive introversion, representing on a grand scale a return to the mother and infantilism. Since it is separation from the mother (actual and metaphorical), that, in Jung’s view, creates the basis of consciousness, any attempt to become re-united with the “mother” is an act of regression. It is obvious from this dissonance of doctrine that Yoga and psycho-analysis have not as yet discovered any profound common ground; in fact, in some respects they appear to be opposed.

I count myself among the increasing number of enthusiastic students of psycho-analysis. It is the hopeful science of the dawning era. No new era appears to me to be possible without it, and such a work as Dr. Ernest Jones’s Psycho-Analysis is one of the books most worth buying at the present time. But it is elsewhere that I find the best justification for my enthusiasm, in these words from an old Hermetic text: “The beginning of perfection is gnosis of man; but gnosis of God is perfected perfection.” Psycho-analysis thus appears to be the beginning of the gnosis of man, and, in this sense, the beginning of perfection. But it is only the beginning. Mere morality, however psychological, is no substitute for religion; and the most profoundly and sincerely moral of men—Ibsen, for example—end in a state of despair unless at the point at which their morality gives out, religion of some kind comes to their aid. Psycho-analysis, I think it will be found, is doomed, while it remains analysis, to end in the same state of despair. It will teach us all there is to be known about the nature of man; but the gnosis of man is not satisfying. For it is only thereafter and when man is transcended as an object of gnosis that perfected perfection is possible. I would not, however, hasten by a single impatient step this second and completing phase of the process of our learning. The gnosis of man is necessary to the gnosis of God, and God can well look after Himself and bide our time. Furthermore, a premature attempt to know God before we are initiated into the mysteries of the gnosis of man must be heavily paid for. Religion without humanity is more dangerous than humanity without religion. Let us then settle down with concentrated attention to the problem before us, the material and method of which are to be found in psycho-analysis. We shall be able to afford to whistle when we are through that wood.

A Cambridge “Cocoon.”—The new Cambridge magazine, The Cocoon, cannot be regarded as superfluous, the editors suggest, since its point of view is unique. It is not written by “theological” minds that “estimate affairs in relation to unchangeable dogmas and fixed beliefs,” but by minds that hold that things “are capable of more than one truthful interpretation.” The second of these contentions is true enough, but, unfortunately, the new interpretations of The Cocoon, however truthful, are trivial. Age, we are told, sees the Moon as just a “heavenly body”; whereas the youth who spin The Cocoon see the Moon as “a wonderful cheese” or a prehistoric coin. Age, again, looks at the Great Pyramid and interprets it as a pyramidal structure; but our spinning youth interpret it as a “colossal and awe-inspiring cube,” with emphasis on the awe. The difference between the interpretations is, to my mind, all in favour of age. It may be true that the Moon is translatable in terms of cheese, and the Great Pyramid may really be a cube, but the interpretations are without interest or value. If The Cocoon had said that the Moon might conceivably be the Devil, or the Great Pyramids the psychic meeting-place of the Rosicrucians, the new “interpretation” might have had some interest. As it is, we are back in the nursery, and not by any means in the nursery of the race. The earlier editorial affirmation is not even sense, but a contradiction of sense. “To estimate affairs in relation to unchangeable dogmas and fixed beliefs,” is not theological only, it is only means of estimating at all. Things are so and so, and the unchangeability of dogma and fixity of belief are determined, or should be, by the corresponding unchangeability and fixity of things as they are. When we find that the nature of things changes arbitrarily from day to day, we may consider the advisability of changing our belief that it is fixed as rapidly as nature itself is transformed. Otherwise, if anything we say is to be “true,” it must be because there is a fixed and unchangeable nature to which our dogmas and beliefs refer. The alternative is not youth and imagination and “other truthful interpretations of things,” it is nursery chatter about cheese and pyramidal cubes.

Pass the articles on Balzac and D’Annunzio, both of which might have been written by Old Age or even by Middle Age, and let us see how the state of mind calling itself Youth deals with history. Remember that Cambridge, where the Cocoons come from, regards itself as “the nursery of the nation”; and then listen to Mr. L. J. Cheney, no doubt one of our future representatives on the World-League, preparing his programme. “It is stupid,” he says, “to write history or to study history, on the assumption that we Western Europeans are the salt of the earth.” And Mr. H. Y. Oulsham, on the same subject, remarks that “we must keep the sociological aim of history in sight”; ... “the be-all and end-all of history is sociology.” No wonder the Manchester Guardian—the guardian, that is to say, of Manchester—found The Cocoon so promising, for the opinions expressed by Mr. Cheney and Mr. Oulsham are embryos of Manchester Guardian “leaders,” they are so cosmopolitan and so humanitarian. Apart, however, from their extreme Age, bordering on decrepitude, I find in them not even an unimportant “truthful interpretation.” It is not true that sociology is the be-all and end-all of history as it ought to be written; and to deny, in the name of history, that Western Europe is the salt of the earth (however it may have lost its savour) is just to deny and repudiate European world-responsibility. Things, again, are so and so, and not otherwise, let Youth interpret them as it will. Europe is the responsible mind of the world, and the be-all and end-all of history is the fulfilment of a world-purpose whose objective is more than merely human sociology. If the “nursery of the nation” has a different interpretation, the nursery of the nation is wrong.

The Cocoon is under the impression that there is something valuable in Youth in years; that Youth in years is the only kind of Youth; that Youth in years is Youth indeed. Our first birth, however, is only a sleep and a forgetting, and real Youth comes only after the second-birth. The once-born are creatures of pure circumstance, owing their youth to the accident of time alone; but the twice-born are self-creations defying time; they never grow old, though they are always growing up. The Cocoon fairly describes Youth as “a condition of energy and receptiveness”; but is Youth in years necessarily of that kind? As for receptiveness, we have already seen that the “historians” of the “nursery of the nation” either hark back or hark forward to ideas long since dead. And as for “energy,” barring its animal manifestation in sport, the highest culture demands the highest concentration of energy, and where shall we find it but in the twice-born? Whoever can make a turn upon himself and his habits of thought is young, whatever his years. On the other hand, whoever cannot be “bothered” to think afresh, but contents himself with what he used to think is old and lacking in energy, whatever his years or his blues.

It is the fate of the once-born to become pessimistic as they grow old, as it is privilege of the twice-born to increase in hope as they wax in youth. One of our Cocoonists, therefore, must be prematurely old in the former sense, since he lifts up his lamentation that “the beauty of English prose is already mainly a thing of the past.” It is not a sentiment for “the nursery of the nation,” and it is altogether untrue. Beautiful English prose has certainly been written, but the best is yet to be. Beautiful qualities of English prose we have certainly had revealed to us in abundance, and some of our greatest writers have succeeded in making an anthology in their style of two or three or even four of them; but an English prose with all its known qualities harmonised and synthesised in a single style is a thing of the future and not of the past. There are qualities in English still unrevealed. A great deal of “energy,” however, will be necessary to such a synthesis. Its creator must be not only twice-born, but, as the Mahabharata says of Indian sages, “blazing with spiritual energy,” for the fire of imagination to fuse all the qualities of English prose into a style is too intense for ordinary mortals.

An Oxford Miscellany.—A Queen’s College Miscellany is filially dedicated to Walter Pater and Ernest Dowson, both of whom, it seems, were Queen’s men in their day. Still another association with these writers is sought in the comparison of the college coterie from which each arose with the group responsible for the present miscellany. Something of the nature of a cult is indicated; and I take it that the various items of the miscellany are “corporate” as well as individual. The foreword says as much. In a vocabulary that seems most ominous for literature, we are referred to a “literary team” whose “output” is here presented, and to an attempt to “prove that team-work is possible in prose and poetry.” And the miscellany is the first “harvest” of “the refined product.” My opinion of “team-work” is certainly that it is possible both in prose and poetry. No individual has ever by himself written either great prose or great poetry, and the greatest literary works of the world, not excepting Shakespeare, are of anonymous—that is to say, of collective—authorship. The elevation of the group-consciousness, however, is everything, and I need not remark that a group whose highest aim is to emulate Pater and Dowson, and whose considered “foreword” contains such terminological ineptitudes as “team-work,” “output,” and the “harvest” of a “refined product,” is not yet upon a very high plane of discourse.