What the theologian calls God, the metaphysician calls by various names. One will tell you that the world is a Will to Live rushing into being. Another will say, "That does not account for man: if a Will to Live is the thing in itself, man is de trop, for man is the greatest foe life has. Other animals kill only to satisfy hunger; but man, although for food and for sport he preserves life, yet for sport, for food, for adornment, and to make room for himself, man has destroyed, and continues to destroy, life by whole species, including those of his own kind. No, there is something behind the Will to Live, and that is the Will to Power. A Will to Power accounts for man; man, the tamer of the tide, of the lion and the lightning; and man, the tamer of man." But anyone can make a metaphysic; it is a splendid image, that of splitting logs. Thus we can prove easily that the world is a Will to Death; for that indeed is the end of a pessimistic philosophy, the suicide of the race. I have, myself, made and applied a perfect metaphysic in the few hundred lines of the "Testament of a Vivisector," where the thing in itself is represented as a Will to Know:
"It may be Matter in itself is pain
Sweetened in sexual love, that so mankind,
The medium of Matter's consciousness,
May never cease to know—the stolid bent
Of Matter, the infinite vanity
Of the Universe being evermore self-knowledge."
There was a passing gibe at theologians a moment ago, but one has only to remember how great a thing it is they study, one has only to descry for a moment the ancient and glorious realm in which the minds and imaginations of theologians have their being, to know and understand their integrity and passion. But theology is now, like so many names, a misnomer. By the application of scientific methods the more rigorous minds, although still speaking—I think, equivocally—of theology, have really brought about a theonomy. Scientific method destroyed astrology, and gave us in exchange for a superstitious obsession, astronomy and the Universe. Scientific method has destroyed theology. But the theologians, powerless to admit it because most humanly reluctant to drop so sublime a thing, have allowed themselves to gloze the Material God who made the world, who sent His son to die for sinners, who reared high Heaven and dug deep Hell—I say the theologians have thought away all this that was so great, and have spun out, not the heart of it but the husk of it, into a metaphysical idea of God; have, the more advanced and veracious minds among them, set aside the incarnation and the atonement, offering instead the engaging person and beautiful immorality of Christ:—still an immorality, Christ's teaching; let anyone attempt to turn the other cheek in any playground, parliament, court of justice, college, exchange, club, or Convocation, and he will know with a vengeance what it means to be immoral:—and in the matter of Heaven and Hell, have, most honestly, nothing to say; whereas the true theonomist finds the study of God to be a branch of mythology. In my ballads I have employed this of God and Sin and Heaven and Hell as the warp of myth in the loom of my poetry, giving the myth also a new orientation as the weaver changes the pattern of his web—an orientation which I have carried to its utmost limit in the Judgment-day of the "Prime Minister"; but no individual mind and imagination, and no general mind and imagination of any class, mass, or mob of men can enter a fateful battle in the name of a metaphysic, can live highly and die serenely to the tune of a mere folklore. I cry aloud with the Bishop of St. James's:—
"Who shall persuade the Kings that God is not,
The politicians, usurers, financiers,
Priests, warriors that depend on God to bear
The burden of their inhumanities?
All inhumanity that flings itself
On God's unsearchable device will fight
To the last drop of blood, last labouring sigh
For God and Heaven and Hell. And who shall teach
The orphans that their mothers are not; who
Unpeople heaven of lovers, children, saints?
Women will fight with babies at their breasts,
Old palsied hags, peace-makers, cripples, cowards,
When this is put to war! Their sons that died
In battle, where are they? Their enemies,
That should lament in Hell? The little child,
That lived a year and holds its parents' hearts
In dimpled hands for ever? Christ Himself
That pardoned wanton women, where is He?"
It was a great conception of the Universe; it made life intensely interesting; and still dominates imagination. Even those who understand that the material Other World in which the imagination of our more immediate forefathers lived and moved and had so great a being is as phantasmal as Olympus or Asgard, know well that when the blood and the brain and the bones and the marrow are fused together into an act of imagination by love, or war, by some profound sorrow, some high ambition, some great self-sacrifice, or some great crime, men immediately, and without effort, become immortal soul, and clothe themselves as of old in God and Sin and Heaven and Hell. As becomes one who proposes to furnish imagination with a new abode, I now state what Heaven and Hell and God and Sin are, and undertake to show that what I offer is truly immoral, and of the evolving and devolving Universe.
II HEAVEN AND HELL
How is it that imagination lives with ease in a material Heaven and Hell, although these are known to be impossible? What is the meaning of that? It means that there is no Other World; that the whole Universe consists of the same Matter as man; and therefore it is that even the most upright minds, the most enfranchised souls, the strongest and sanest temperaments in passionate moods and times of stress, when imagination, expanding, must fill some splendid place, fly, as to a city of refuge, having no other conception of the Universe, to this concrete Heaven and Hell. Man is Matter; mind and soul are material forces; there is no spiritual world as distinct from the material world; all psychical phenomena are material phenomena, the result of the operation of material forces; hence, I say again, the imagination of man, being a complex of material forces, cannot live in a metaphysical idea or an acknowledged myth, but makes its Heaven and Hell concrete, and itself immortal soul. What is the source of this immortal soul with its flaming Hell and glowing Heaven?
Man being Matter, and thought and fancy being material forces, we shall find in the history of Matter the origin of much that seems obscure. Man consists of the following properties of Matter; oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, kalium, natrium, sulphur, phosphorus, iron, magnesium, silicon, chlorine, fluorine, lithium, manganese, copper, lead. I invite the reader to consider this with all the material forces of his being. These forms of Matter with their energies, of which the body, mind, and soul of man consist, have always been; they burn in the farthest stars, they are knit up in the texture—thinner than gossamer, than vapour, as imponderable as fancy—of the primitive substance, the Ether, which fills the interstellar spaces from moon to sun, from orbit to orbit, from galaxy to galaxy, the exquisite material out of which the nebulae are constringed in beads and drops and clots of Matter upon threads of lightning, meteors, meteorites, that collide into flame, or by what process soever, to become upon condensation, concentration, contraction, systems and constellations, suns and planets. The whole Matter of man, however mutable, is therefore everlasting, has no beginning and will have no end; for Matter is indestructible. The earths, metals, vapours, mysterious properties of the one mystery Matter, which make up man, are in themselves supposed to be unconscious: sensitive in every electron, but in all likelihood without sensibility and therefore unconscious. Sensitive all forms of Matter are; the elements have individuality, character, genius; have passions—fierce passions, some of them; have memory, more or less positive, far-reaching, and reliable. Oxygen seems to be the chief male element, the sultan of Matter, with his seraglio of dazzling metals, earths, vapours, not one of which he ever fails to remember; it is he who knits up the rocks and ridges of the globe, the bones of men and beasts; he supports all fires of suns and hearts; he is the food of flame and the fibre of the shower which extinguishes flame; and, by a miracle of male parthenogenesis, with lightning for accoucheur in place of Vulcan and his hammer, it is he who brings forth the crystalline virgin ozone to clear the air of the world. Hydrogen, the ethereal and versatile vapour, whose passionate flame is the light and heat of the most brilliant and the hottest stars, whose delicate and fluent being is also the feminine principle in water—the exquisite hermaphrodite that flows so wooingly about the world—forgets not her way in the sea, nor ever foregoes her purpose in plants and animals. Carbon, the workman among the elements, the artist, the artificer, the labouring class, and the proletariate of Matter, is the form one likes the best; he is coal and the diamond, wine and blood, the seed of plants and animals, love and poetry, lust and slaughter, wood and flesh, and bones and rocks; the texture of all life; the human element, the diabolic element, the divine element. These three highly individualized, genial, passionate and many-sided forms, along with nitrogen, a loose-living, dissolute gas whose will is to decay; phosphorus, white and red, the Jekyll and Hyde of the elements; sulphur, a gold-hued wonder of twice three transformations; calcium, silicon, iron, and the rest, constitute the body of man; his energies, vital, reproductive, mental, and spiritual, are the sums of the energies of these various forms of Matter. Consider it! In this alone there is a new world of poetry, a new world of humour. Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, sulphur, natrium, kalium, magnesium, iron, silicon, the principal constituents of the whole of the Universe have become in man subconscious, conscious, and self-conscious; it is infinitely satisfying to know it, write it, say it, think it. These dozen mysterious forms of Matter the Mysterious have become man; and all their prodigious powers of expansion, cohesion, magnetic and electric energies, intense and hungry chemical affinities, miraculous transformations, radiations, isomerisms, allotropisms, and the continuous, passionate, omnipresent pulses of molecular attraction and interatomic motion are converted into vitality, generative power, muscular energy, nervous energy, into cerebration, emotion, passion, imagination, material forces all. This is a high and great thing, and when the general mind and imagination live in it, the mood of the world will undergo an unparagoned change.
I am now to answer the question, What is the source of this immortal soul with its flaming Hell and glowing Heaven? These dozen mysterious, mutable forms of Matter the indestructible, being the principal constituents of the whole Universe, have become in man conscious; and man, before he understands, calls this indestructibility of the Matter of which he consists immortal soul. Wordsworth has it wonderfully, building better than he knew, for it was Matter that spoke when Wordsworth said—
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home;"