This passage, like a proffered dish full of rare fruit, tempts the metaphysical appetite by the wealth and variety of its appeal; but not to weary the reader, the author will content himself by the abstraction of a single plum. The plum in question is simply this (and the reader is asked to read the quotation carefully again): may not every act, incident, circumstance in a human life be the "uncoiling" of a karmic aggregate? This coil of life may be thought of most conveniently in this connection as the character of the person, a character built up, or "successively introduced" in antecedent lives. The sequence of events resultant on its "unwinding" would be the destiny of the person—a destiny determined, necessarily, by past action. This concept gives a new and more eloquent meaning to the phrase "Character is destiny." If we carry our thought no further, we are plunged into the slough of determinism—sheer fatality. But in each reincarnation, however predetermined every act and event, their reaction upon consciousness remains a matter of determination—is therefore self-determined. We may not control the event, but our acceptance of it we may control. Moreover, each "unwinding" of the karmic coil takes place in a new environment, in a world more highly organized by reason of the play upon it of the collective consciousness of mankind. Though the same individual again and again intersects the stream of mundane experience, it is an evolving ego and an augmenting stream. Therefore each life of a given series forms a different, a more intricate, and a more amazing pattern: in each the thread is drawn from nearer the central energy, which is divine, and so shows forth more of the coiled power within the soul.
X GENIUS
IMMANENCE
The greatest largess to the mind which higher thought brings is the conviction of a transcendent existence. Though we do not know the nature of this existence, except obscurely, we are assured of its reality and of its immanence, through a growing sense that all that happens to us is simply our relation to it.
In our ant-like efforts to attain to some idea of the nature of this transcendent reality, let us next avail ourselves of the help afforded by the artist and the man of genius, too troubled by the flesh for perfect clarity of vision, too troubled by the spirit not to attempt to render or record the Pisgah-glimpses of the world-order now and then vouchsafed. For the genius stands midway between man and Beyond-man: in Nietzsche's phrase, "Man is a bridge and not a goal."
Of all the writers on the subject of genius, Schopenhauer is the most illuminating, perhaps because he suffered from it so. According to him, the essence of genius lies in the perfection and energy of its perceptions. Schopenhauer says, "He who is endowed with talent thinks more quickly and more correctly than others; but the genius beholds another world from them all, although only because he has a more profound perception of the world which lies before them also, in that it presents itself in his mind more objectively, and consequently in greater purity and distinctness." This profounder perception arises from his detachment: his intellect has to a certain extent freed itself from the service of his will, and leads an independent life. So long as the intellect is in the service of the will, that which has no relation to the will does not exist for the intellect; but along with this partial severance of the two there comes a new power of perception, synthetic in its nature, a complex of relationships not reproducible in linear thought, for the mind is oriented simultaneously in many different directions. Of this order of perception the well-known case of Mozart is a classic example. He is reported to have said of his manner of composing, "I can see the whole of it in my mind at a single glance … in which way I do not hear it in my imagination at all as succession—the way it comes later—but all at once, as it were. It is a rare feast! all the inventing and making goes on in me as in a beautiful strong dream."
TIMELESSNESS
The inspirations of genius come from a failure of attention to life, which, all paradoxically, brings vision—the power to see life clearly and "see it whole." Consciousness, unconditioned by time, "in a beautiful strong dream," awakens to the perception of a world that is timeless. It brings thence some immortelle whose power of survival establishes the authenticity of the inspiration. However local and personal any masterpiece may be, it escapes by some potent magic all geographical and temporal categories, and appears always new-born from a sphere in which such categories do not exist.
No writer was more of his period than Shakespeare, yet how contemporary he seems to each succeeding generation. Leonardo, in a perfect portrait, showed forth the face of a subtle, sensuous, and mocking spirit, against a background of wild rocks. It represents not alone the soul-phase of the later Renaissance, but of every individual and of every civilization which on life's dangerous and orgiastic substratum has reared a mere garden of delight. Living hearts throb to the music penned by the dead hand of Mozart and of Beethoven; the clownings of Aristophanes arouse laughter in our music halls; Euripides is as subtle and world-weary as any modern; the philosophies of Parminides and Heraclitus are recrudescent in that of Bergson; and Plato discusses higher space under a different name.