Trial of Nirvâna.
It would be interesting to perform a practical experiment in Nirvâna. One of my acquaintances pushed the experiment as far as a European of scientific tendencies could. He practised asceticism to the point of rejecting all variety in his diet, he gave up meat (as Mr. Spencer also did for some time), wine, every kind of ragout, every form of condiment, and reduced to its lowest possible terms the desire that is most fundamental in every living being—the desire of food, the excitation of the famished animal in the presence of appetizing dishes, the moment of heightened expectation before dinner which constitutes for so many people the event of the day. For the protracted meals that are customary, he substituted a certain number of cups of pure milk. Having thus blunted his sense of taste and the grosser of his appetites, having abandoned all physical activity, he sought to find a recompense in the pleasures of abstract meditation, and of æsthetic contemplation. He entered into a state which was not that of dreamland, but neither was it that of real life, with its definite details. What gives relief and outline to the life of each day, what makes each day an epoch for us in our existence, is the succession of our desires and our pleasures. One has no idea what a blank would be produced in one’s existence by the simple omission of some hundreds of meals. By a similar process of elimination, employed in regard to pleasures and desires generally, he secured for his life a certain savourless, colourless, ethereal charm. The whole universe recoiled by degrees into the distance, for the universe was composed of things that he no longer came into forcible contact with, that he no longer handled vigorously, and that, therefore, came less violently into contact with him, and left him, therefore, more indifferent to them. He entered the cloud in which the gods sometimes envelop themselves, and no longer felt the firm earth beneath his feet, but he soon found that, if he no longer stood upon firm earth, he was not on that account the nearer heaven; what struck him most was the enfeeblement of his thoughts precisely at the time when, owing to his complete detachment from all material cares, he was inclined to believe himself most intellectually competent. The instant that thought ceased to rest upon a foundation of solid reality it became incapable of abstraction; the life of thought as of our whole being is contrast, and it gathers power by dealing from time to time with objects which seem least readily to lend themselves to its purposes. An endeavour to purify and to sublimate thought robs it of its precision; meditation gives place to dream, and dream gives place to the ecstasy in which mystics lose all sense of the distinction between ἕν καὶ πᾶν, but in which a mind accustomed to self-possession cannot long remain without a sense of vapidity. Then a feeling of revolt supervenes, and one begins to understand that abstract thought needs, if it is to achieve its highest point of lucidity and concentration, to be spurred on by desire. Such at least was the experience of the friend mentioned above, and I suggest his experiment for imitation to those who speak of Nirvâna from hearsay only, and have never practised absolute renunciation. The only danger to fear is lest renunciation produce a certain brutalization, lest one lose one’s self-control and be overcome by a sort of vertigo before having measured the depth of the abyss, and having perceived that it is bottomless. The safest paths in the mountains are those that have been trodden out by asses and mules. “Follow the asses,” is the advice of the guides. The advice is often good in real life; the good sense of the multitude opens the way which must be followed, whether one will or not, and philosophers may well at times “follow the asses.”
Sanctity and egoism.
Absorption in infinite substance, renunciation of the desire to live, and inert sanctity will always constitute the ultimate form and expression of human illusion. If all is vanity, nothing, after all, is more vain than to be completely conscious that all is vanity; if action is vain, repose is still more vain; life is vain, death is vainer. Even sanctity is not the equal of charity, the equal, that is to say, of what binds the individual to other individuals, and by that fact renders him once more the slave of desire and of pleasure—if not of his own desires and pleasures, at least of those of other people. One must always serve someone, must always be in bonds to something, even if only to the flesh. One must drag a chain, if one is to draw others after one. Nobody forms a sufficient end and aim for his own activity; nobody can emancipate himself by living ‘in and in,’ by forming an ideal circle like the coiled serpent, by reflecting eternally, according to the Hindu precept, on his navel; nothing is more like servitude than liberty that is confined within the bounds of self. The perfect sanctity of the mystics, Buddhists, and pessimists is a subtler egoism simply; and the sole genuine virtue in the world is generosity, which does not fear to set its foot in the dust, in the service of another.
Pessimism not destined to prevail.
We do not therefore believe, with Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, that pessimism will be the religion of the future. Life will not be persuaded to seek death, nor movement to prefer immobility. We have said elsewhere that what renders existence possible renders it also desirable; if the sum of the pains of human life were greater than the sum of the pleasures, the species would become extinct by a gradual decrease in the vitality of each succeeding generation. Occidental nations, or rather the active people in the world, to whom the future belongs, will never become converts to pessimism. Whoever acts, feels, has power, and to be strong is to be happy. Even in the Orient, when their pessimism, the great religions, is addressed to the multitude, it is very superficial; commonplace maxims on the ills of existence, and on the necessity for resignation, result as a matter of fact in a far niente which is appropriate to the manners of the Orient. And, when it is addressed to thinkers, pessimism is only provisional—it points to its own remedy in Nirvâna; but Nirvâna as a panacea and salvation by negation, or by violent self-destruction, will not long captivate modern common sense. It is ridiculous to attribute to man the power to destroy the sacred germ from which life, with all its illusions, has sprung, and will always spring, in spite of ascetics and partisans of individual suicide, and even, if Von Hartmann will, of “cosmic suicide.” It is perhaps less difficult to create than to annihilate, to make God than to destroy Him.
CHAPTER V.
REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE DOGMA—Concluded.
Idealism, Materialism, Monism.
I. Idealism—Different forms of idealism: subjective idealism, objective idealism: The whole of existence resolved into a mode of mental existence—Value of idealism considered from point of view of the religious sentiment—Most specious of contemporary idealisms: Possibility of universal progress on the hypothesis of radical spontaneity and of “freedom”—Reconciliation between determinism and the conception of freedom—Moral idealism as a possible substitute for religious sentiment: Dependence of the universe on the principle of goodness.
II. Materialism—Difficulty in defining absolute materialism: Matter—The atom—Nebular hypothesis—Hydrogen—Necessity of supplementing materialism by some theory of the origin of life—The latest conception of materialism: Conception of infinite divisibility and infinite extensibility.