Now, in knowledge, pure altruism means so to bury the mind in the thing known that all particular relations of one’s self pass away. The altruistic knowledge of the heavens would be, to feel that the stars were vast bodies, and that I am moving rapidly. It would be, to know this, not as a matter of theory, but as a matter of habitual feeling.
Whether this is possible, I do not know; but a somewhat similar attempt can be made with much simpler means.
In a different place I have described the process of acquiring an altruistic knowledge of a block of cubes; and the results of the laborious processes involved are well worth the trouble. For as a clearly demonstrable fact this comes before one. To acquire an absolute knowledge of a block of cubes, so that all self relations are cast out, means that one has to take the view of a higher being.
It suddenly comes before one, that the particular relations which are so fixed and important, and seem so absolutely sure when one begins the process of learning, are by no means absolute facts, but marks of a singular limitation, almost a degradation, on one’s own part. In the determined attempt to know the most insignificant object perfectly and thoroughly, there flashes before one’s eyes an existence infinitely higher than one’s own. And with that vision there comes,—I do not speak from my own experience only,—a conviction that our existence also is not what we suppose—that this bodily self of ours is but a limit too. And the question of altruism, as against self-regard, seems almost to vanish, for by altruism we come to know what we truly are.
“What we truly are,” I do not mean apart from space and matter, but what we really are as beings having a space existence; for our way of thinking about existence is to conceive it as the relations of bodies in space. To think is to conceive realities in space.
Just as, to explore the distant stars of the heavens, a particular material arrangement is necessary which we call a telescope, so to explore the nature of the beings who are higher than us, a mental arrangement is necessary. We must prepare our power of thinking as we prepare a more extended power of looking. We want a structure developed inside the skull for the one purpose, while an exterior telescope will do for the other.
And thus it seems that the difficulties which we first apprehended fall away.
To us, looking with half-blinded eyes at merely our own little slice of existence, our filmy all, it seemed that altruism meant disorder, vagary, danger.
But when we put it into practice in knowledge, we find that it means the direct revelation of a higher being and a call to us to participate ourselves too in a higher life—nay, a consciousness comes that we are higher than we know.
And so with our moral life as with our intellectual life. Is it not the case that those, who truly accept the rule of altruism, learn life in new dangerous ways?