Confessions and Criticisms

by Julian Hawthorne

Let us review the position we have reached:—We have an entranced or magnetized person,—a person whose mind, or spirit, has, by a certain process, been so far withdrawn from conscious communion with his own bodily senses as to disable him from receiving through them any tidings from the external world. He is not, however, wholly withdrawn from his body, for, in that case, the body would be dead; whereas, in fact, its organic or animal life continues almost unimpaired. He is therefore neither out of the body nor in it, but in an anomalous region midway between the two,—a state in which he can receive no sensuous impressions from the physical world, nor be put in conscious communication with the spiritual world through any channel—save one.

This one exception is, as we have seen, the person who magnetized him. The magnetizer is, then, the one and only medium through which the person magnetized can obtain impressions: and these impressions are conveyed directly from the mind, or spirit, of the magnetizer to that of the magnetized. Let us note, further, that the former is not, like the latter, in a semi-disembodied state, but is in the normal exercise of his bodily functions and faculties. He possesses, consequently, his normal ability to originate ideas and to impart them: and whatever ideas he chooses to impart to the magnetized person, the latter is fain passively and implicitly to accept. And having so received them, they descend naturally into the automatic mechanism of the body, and are by it mechanically interpreted or enacted.

So far, the theory is good: but something seems amiss in the working. We find that a certain process frequently issues in a certain effect: but we do not yet know why this should be the case. Some fundamental link is wanting; and this link is manifestly a knowledge of the true relations between mind and matter: of the laws to which the mental or spiritual world is subject: of what nature itself is: and of what Creation means. Let us cast a glance at these fundamental subjects; for they are the key without which the secrets of magic must remain locked and hidden.

In common speech we call the realm of the material universe, Creation; but philosophy denies its claim to that title. Man alone is Creation: everything else is appearance. The universe appears, because man exists: he implies the universe, but is not implied by it. We may assist our metaphysics, here, by a physical illustration. Take a glass prism and hold in the sunlight before a white surface. Let the prism represent man: the sun, man's Creator: and the seven-hued ray cast by the prism, nature, or the material universe. Now, if we remove the light, the ray vanishes: it vanishes, also, if we take away the prism: but so long as the sun and the prism—God and man—remain in their mutual relation, so long must the rainbow nature appear. Nature, in short, is not God; neither is it man; but it is the inevitable concomitant or expression of the creative attitude of God towards man. It is the shadow of the elements of which humanity or human nature is composed: or, shall we say, it is the apparition in sense of the spiritual being of mankind,—not, be it observed, of the being of any individual or of any aggregation of individuals; but of humanity as a whole. For this reason, also, is nature orderly, complete, and permanent,—that it is conditioned not upon our frail and faulty personalities, but upon our impersonal, universal human nature, in which is transacted the miracle of God's incarnation, and through which He forever shines.

Besides Creator and creature, nothing else can be; and whatever else seems to be, must be only a seeming. Nature, therefore, is the shadow of a shade, but it serves an indispensable use. For since there can be no direct communication between finite and Infinite—God and man—a medium or common ground is needed, where they may meet; and nature, the shadow which the Infinite causes the finite to project, is just that medium. Man, looking upon this shadow, mistakes it for real substance, serving him for foothold and background, and assisting him to attain self-consciousness. God, on the other hand, finds in nature the means of revealing Himself to His creature without compromising the creature's freedom. Man supposes the universe to be a physical structure made by God in space and time, and in some region of which He resides, at a safe distance from us His creatures: whereas, in truth, God is distant from us only so far as we remove ourselves from our own inmost intuitions of truth and good.

But what is that substance or quality which underlies and gives homogeneity to the varying forms of nature, so that they seem to us to own a common origin?—what is that logical abstraction upon which we have bestowed the name of matter? scientific analysis finds matter only as forms, never as itself: until, in despair, it invents an atomic theory, and lets it go at that. But if, discarding the scientific method, we question matter from the philosophical standpoint, we shall find it less obdurate.

Man, considered as a mind or spirit, consists of volition and intelligence; or, what is the same, of emotion or affection, and of the thoughts which are created by this affection. Nothing can be affirmed of man as a spirit which does not fall under one or other of these two parts. Now, a creature consisting solely of affections and thoughts must, of course, have something to love and to think about. Man's final destiny is no doubt to love and consider his Creator; but that can only be after a reactionary or regenerative process has begun in him. Meanwhile, he must love and consider the only other available object—that is, himself. Manifestly, however, in order to bestow this attention upon himself, he must first be made aware of his own existence. In order to effect this, something must be added to man as spirit, enabling him to discriminate between the subject thinking and loving, and the object loved and thought of. This additional something, again, in order to fulfill its purpose, must be so devised as not to appear an addition: it must seem even more truly the man than the man himself. It must, therefore, perfectly represent or correspond to the spiritual form and constitution; so that the thoughts and affections of the spirit may enter into it as into their natural home and continent.

This continent or vehicle of the mind is the human body. The body has two aspects,—substance and form, answering to the two aspects of the mind,—affection and thought: and affection finds its incarnation or correspondence in substance; and thought, in form. The mind, in short, realizes itself in terms of its reflection in the body, much as the body realizes itself in terms of its reflection in the looking-glass: but it does more than this, for it identifies itself with this its image. And how is this identification made possible?

It is brought about by the deception of sense, which is the medium of communication between the spiritual and the material man. Until this miraculous medium is put in action, there can be no conscious relation between these two planes, admirably as they are adapted to each other. Sense is spiritual on one side and material on the other: but it is only on the material side that it gathers its reports: on the spiritual side it only delivers them. Every one of the five messengers whereby we are apprised of external existence brings us an earthly message only. And since these messengers act spontaneously, and since the mind's only other source of knowledge is intuition, which cannot be sensuously confirmed,—it is little wonder if man has inclined to the persuasion that what is highest in him is but an attribute of what is lowest, and that when the body dies, the soul must follow it into nothingness.

Creative energy, being infinite, passes through the world of causes to the world of effects—through the spiritual to the physical plane. Matter is therefore the symbol of the ultimate of creative activity; it is the negative of God. As God is infinite, matter is finite; as He is life, it is death; as He is real, it is unreal; as He reveals, matter veils. And as the relation of God to man's spirit is constant and eternal, so is the physical quality of matter fixed and permanent. Now, in order to arrive at a comprehension of what matter is in itself, let us descend from the general to the specific, and investigate the philosophical elements of a pebble, for instance. A pebble is two things: it is a mineral: and it is a particular concrete example of mineral. In its mineral aspect, it is out of space and time, and is—not a fact, but—a truth; a perception of the mind. In so far as it is mineral, therefore, it has no relation to sense, but only to thought: and on the other hand, in so far as it is a particular concrete pebble, it is cognizable by sense but not by thought; for what is in sense is out of thought: the one supersedes the other. But if sense thus absorbs matter, so as to be philosophically indistinguishable from it, we are constrained to identify matter with our sensuous perception of it: and if our exemplary pebble had nothing but its material quality to depend upon, it would cease to exist not only to thought, but to sense likewise. Its metaphysical aspect, in short, is the only reality appertaining to it. Matter, then, may be defined as the impact upon sense of that prismatic ray which we have called nature.