§ 2. THE DESTINY OF MAN
At this point we may fitly close our survey, and these "Reflections," by endeavouring to determine, not the remote future of Imperial Britain, but its immediate task, Fate's mandate to the present, and as we have considered Imperial Britain in its relations to the destiny of past empires, pause for a moment in conclusion upon its relations to the destiny of man.
To the ancient world, man in his march across the deserts of Time had left felicity and the golden age far beyond him, and Rousseau's vision of Humanity as starting upon a wrong track, and drifting ever farther from the path of its peace, had charmed the melancholy or the despair of Virgil and his great master in verse and speculation, Titus Lucretius.
This conception of man's destiny as an infinite retrogression, Eden receding behind Eden, lost Paradise behind lost Paradise, in the dateless past, encounters us, now as a myth, now as a religious or philosophic tenet, throughout the earlier history of humanity from the Baltic to the Indian Sea, from the furthest Orient to the Western Isles. Besides this radiant past even the vision of the abode which awaits the soul at death seems dusky and repellent, a land of twilight, as in the Etruscan legend, or that dominion over the shades which Achilles loathed beyond any mortal misery.
But the memory or the imagination of this land far behind, upon which Heaven's light for ever falls, the Asgard of the Goths, the Akkadian dream of Sin-land ruled by the Yellow Emperor, the reign of Saturn and of Ops, diminishes in power and living energy as the ages advance, and, perishing at last, is embalmed in the cold and crystal loveliness of poetry. In its place bright mansions, elysian groves, await the soul at death. Heaven closes around earth like a protecting smile, and from this hope of a recovered Paradise and new Edens amongst the stars, which to Dante and his time are but the earth's appanage, man advances swiftly to the desire, the hope, the certainty of a terrestrial Paradise waiting his race in the near or remote future. Thus, as the immanence of the Divine within the soul of man has deepened, and the desire of his heart has grown nearer the desire of the world-soul, so has the power of memory decreased and been transformed into hope. Man, tossed from illusion to illusion, has grown sensitive to the least intimations of Reality.
But these visions of Eden, whether located in a remote past, or in the interstellar spaces, or in the near future, have certain characteristics in common. From far behind to far in front the dream has shifted, as if the Northern Lights had moved from horizon to horizon, but it remains one dream. The earthly Paradise of the social reformer, a Saint-Simon or a Fourier, of a world free from war and devoted to agriculture and commerce, or of the philosophic evolutionist, of a world peopled by myriads of happy altruists bounding from bath to breakfast-room, illumined and illumining by their healthy and mutual smiles, differs from the earlier fancies of Asgard and the Isles of the Blest, not in heightened nobility and reasonableness, but in diminished beauty and poetry. The dream of unending progress is vain as the dream of unending regress.[[4]]
Critics of literature and philosophy have often remarked how sterile are the efforts to delineate a state of perfect and long-continued bliss, even when a Dante or a Milton undertakes the task, compared with delineations of torment and endless woe. And Aeschylus has remarked, and La Rochefoucauld and Helvétius bear him out, how much easier a man finds the effort to sympathize with another's misery than to rejoice in his joy.
Such contrasts are due, not to a faltering imagination, nor to the depravity of the human heart. They are the recognition by the dark Unconscious, which in sincerity of vision ever transcends the Conscious, that in man's life truth dwells not with felicity, that to the soul imprisoned in Time and Space, whether amongst the stars or on this earth, perfect peace is a mockery. But in Time, misery is the soul's familiar, anguish is the gate of truth, and the highest moments of bliss are, as the Socrates of Plato affirms, negative. They are the moments of oblivion, when the manacles of Time fall off, whether from stress of agony or delight or mere weariness. Therefore with stammering lips man congratulates joy, but the response of grief to grief is quick and from the heart, sanctioned by the Unconscious; therefore in the portraiture of Heaven art fails, but in that of Hell succeeds.
It is not in Time that the eternal can find rest, nor in Space that the infinite can find repose, and as illusion follows lost illusion, the soul of man does but the more completely realize the wonder ineffable of the only reality, the Eternal Now.