I may perhaps claim one advantage in trying to describe what happened to myself in my passage through life. From the earliest days that I can recollect, I felt myself as a twofold being—as a subject and an object, as a spectator and as an actor. I suppose we all talk to ourselves, and say to our better and worse selves, O thou fool! or, Well done, my boy! Well this inward conversation began with me at a very early time, and left the impression that I was the coachman, but at the same time the horse too which he drove and sometimes whipped very cruelly. And this phase of thought, or rather this state of feeling, seems soon to have led me on to another view which likewise dates from a very early time, though it afterwards vanished. As a little boy, when I could not have the same toys which other boys possessed, I could fully enjoy what they enjoyed, as if they had been my own. There is a German phrase, “Ich freue mich in deiner Seele,” which exactly expressed what I often felt. It was not the result of teaching, still less of reasoning—it was a sentiment given me and which certainty did not leave me till much later in life, when competition, rivalry, jealousy, and envy seemed to accentuate my own I as against all other I’s or Thou’s. I suppose we all remember how the sight of a wound of a fellow creature, nay even of a dog, gives us a sharp twitch in the same part of our own body. That bodily sympathy has never left me, I suffer from it even now as I did seventy years ago. And is there anybody who has not felt his eyes moisten at the sudden happiness of his friends? All this seems to me to account, to a certain extent at least, for that feeling of identity with so-called strangers, which came to me from my earliest days, and has returned again with renewed strength in my old age. The “know thyself,” ascribed to Chilon and other sages of ancient Greece, gains a deeper meaning with every year, till at last the I which we looked upon as the most certain and undoubted fact, vanishes from our grasp to become the Self, free from the various accidents and limitations which make up the I, and therefore one with the Self that underlies all individual and therefore vanishing I’s. What that common Self may be is a question to be reserved for later times, though I may say at once that the only true answer given to it seems to me that of the Upanishads and the Vedanta philosophy. Only we must take care not to mistake the moral Self, that finds fault with the active Self, for the Highest Self that knows no longer of good or evil deeds.
Long before I had worked and thought out this problem as the fundamental truth of all philosophy, it presented itself to me as if by intuition, long before I could have fathomed it in its metaphysical meaning. I had just heard of the death of a dear little child, and was standing in our garden, looking at a rose-bush, covered in summer with hundreds of rose-buds and rose-flowers. While I was looking I broke off one small withered bud from the midst of a large cluster of roses, and after I had done so a question came to me, and I said to myself, What has happened? Is it only that one small bud is dead and gone, or have not all the other roses been touched by the breath of death that fell on it? Have they not all suffered from the death of their sister, for they all spring from the same stem, they all have their life from the same source? And if one rose suffers, must not all the others suffer with it? Then all the buds and flowers of the cluster seemed to me to become one, as it were a family of roses, and each single bud seemed but the repetition of the same thing, the manifestation of the same thought, namely the thought of the rose. But my eyes were carried still further, and the stem from which the bunch of roses sprang was lost with other stems in a branch, and it was that branch on which all the roses of the branchlets and stems depended, and without which they could not flower or exist. The single roses thus became identified with the branch from which they had sprung, and by which they lived. I wondered more and more, and after another look all the branches with all their branchlets became absorbed in the stem, and the stem was the tree, and the tree sprang from a seed, or as it is now called, the protoplasm; but beyond that seed there was nothing else that the eye could see or the mind could grasp. And while this vision floated before my eyes I thought of my little friend, and the home from which she had been broken off, and the same vision which had changed the rose-bush with all its flowers, and buds, and branchlets, and branches, into a stem and a tree, and at last into one invisible germ and seed, seemed now to change my little friend and her brothers and sisters, her parents too and all her family, into one being which, like an old oak tree, started from an invisible stem, or an invisible seed, or from an invisible thought, and that divine thought was man, as the other divine thought had been rose.
Perhaps I did not see it so fully then as I see it now, and I certainly did not reason about it. I simply felt that in the death of my little friend, something of myself had gone, though she was no relation, but only a stray human friend. We see many things as children which we cannot see as grown-up men and women, for, as Longfellow said, “the thoughts of youth are long long thoughts.” Nay, I feel convinced that He who spoke the parable of the vine had seen the same vision when He said: “I am the vine, ye are the branches. Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine, no more can ye, except ye abide in Me.” And it is on this vision, or this parable of the vine, that immediately afterwards follows the lesson, “Love one another, as I have loved you.” In loving one another we are in truth loving the others as ourselves, as one with ourselves; and while we are loving Him who is the vine, we are loving the branches, ourselves—aye, even our own little selves.
Such vague visions or intuitions often remain with us for life, but while they seem to be the same, they vary as we vary ourselves. We imagine we saw their deepest meaning from the first, but, like a parable, they gain in meaning every time they come back to us.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Deutsche Rundschau, Feb., 1900, p. 249.
[2] Driesch, Biologisches Centralblatt, 1896, p. 335.
[3] As giving a clear and complete abstract of my writings I may now recommend M. Montcalm’s L’origine de la Pensée et de la Parole, Paris, 1900.
[4] Oxford Dictionary, s. v.; J. Rennie, Science of Gardening, p. 113.
[5] Science of Language, vol. i. p. 24 (1861).