“How can it ever end?” I asked. “Each time starts it all going again.”
“By starting the opposite. Love dissolves the link. Understand why you hate—and at once it lessens. Sympathy follows, feeling-with—that’s love; and love sets you both free. It’s not thinking, but feeling that makes the strongest chains.”
And it was speaking of “feeling” that led to his saying things I have never forgotten. For thinking, in those older days, seemed of small account. It was an age of feeling, chiefly. Feeling was the way to knowledge: here was the main difference between To-day and those far-off Yesterdays. The way to know an object was to feel it—feel-with it. The simplicity of the method was as significant as its—impossibility! Yet a fundamental truth was in it.
To know a thing was not to enumerate merely its qualities. To state the weight, colour, texture of a stone, for instance, was merely to mention its external characteristics; whereas to think of it till it became part of the mind, seen from its own point of view, was to know it as it actually is. The mind felt-with it. It became a part of yourself. Knowledge, as Julius understood the word, was identifying himself with the object: it became part of the substance of the mind: it was known from within.
Communion with inanimate objects, with Nature itself, was in this way actually possible.
“Dwell upon anything you like,” he said, “to the point where you feel it, and you get it all exactly as it is, not merely as you see it. Its quality, its power, becomes a part of yourself. Take trees, rivers, mountains, take wind and fire in this way—and you feel their power in you. You can use them. That was the way of worship—then.”
“The sun itself, the planets, anything?” I asked eagerly, recognising something that seemed once familiar to me.
“Anything,” he replied quietly. “Copy their own movements too, and you’ll get nearer still. Imitate the attitude and gestures of a stranger and you begin to understand what he’s up to, his point of view—what he’s feeling. You begin to know him. All ceremonies began that way. On that big plain where the worship of the sun was held, the smaller temples represented the planets, the distances all calculated in proper ratio from the heavens. We copied their movements exactly, as we moved, thousands and thousands of us, in circular form about the centre. We felt-with them, got all joined up to the whole system; by imitating their gestures, we understood them and absorbed a portion of their qualities and powers. Our energy became as theirs. Acting the ceremony brought the knowledge, don’t you see? Oh, it’s scientific, right enough,” he added. “It’s not going backwards—instinctive knowledge. It’s a pity it’s forgotten now.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.