Who knows? Perhaps one night, when he lay asleep, the shepherd boy had passed by singing his song, and the song had lapped his dream and steeped it in the fountains of life.
Another time—he remembered—when on a journey, he had met a woman, a foreigner, who did not know his language nor did he know hers. Neither of them knew any human tongue in which they could make themselves understood, and they sat there in the railway carriage alone, opposite one another, looking and sometimes smiling at one another. Theirs was a protracted and mute conversation. When he thought kindly and tenderly of her the stranger smiled, and when a less innocent desire stirred within him the shadow of a frown crossed her brow. Perhaps they heard, without themselves knowing that they heard, the measured beating of their hearts, beating in unison while their eyes gazed at one another; but without a doubt the breath of their souls mingled together. For the soul breathes.
The soul breathes.—Why not speak in metaphors?
Our man began to think about breathing and how the air, penetrating into the cells of the lungs, aerates the blood, this inner atmosphere of our bodies. It is the material substance of the world—he thought—which circulates within us; it is the world diluted and made our own. And from this he went on to imagine a kind of spiritual aeration of our mind, and how the world of colours, forms, sounds and impressions of every kind is diluted in it.
But these are metaphors, nothing but metaphors, he said, then at once reflecting: Metaphors? and what is not metaphor? Science is built up of metaphors and language is essentially metaphorical. Matter, force, light, memory—all metaphors. When positivists, or those who consider themselves positivists, try to sweep science clean of metaphors, they sweep them away with a metaphorical broom, and so sweep the metaphors back again.
And then his mind began to play around one of his specially favourite ideas, namely the idea of the superiority of what we call imagination over the other so-called faculties of the spirit, and how the excellency of poets was greater than that of men of science and men of action.
A thousand times he had deplored the barbarous intransigence of most of those with whom he had to communicate—in accidental, not substantial, communion; that dismal lack of comprehension of every opinion which they do not themselves share; that ridiculous belief that there are ideas which one must necessarily consider absurd and which can only be professed by confused and unhinged minds. All that—he was wont to say to himself—is simply lack of imagination, incapacity to see things oneself, even momentarily, as others see them, sheer aridity of mind. How far from all that was the large spirit of the great Goethe, who was able to feel himself deist, pantheist, atheist all at the same time, whose mind embraced a profound understanding of paganism together with an equally profound understanding of Christianity! But Goethe was a poet, the poet, a true and essential poet, not a miserable didacticist or dogmatist like those who think they travel more safely the more ballast of formal logic they carry, at the expense of intelligence, and the more closely they hug the level shores of thought, moored fast to tradition and the senses.
Our man cast his eyes once more over the manifesto and said to himself: “And I have been called an intellectual! I! I who abhor intellectualism more than anybody! If they had labelled me ‘an imaginative’—well and good. But an intellectual?” And he thought of Paul of Tarsus and the pregnant sentences of his epistles.
He thought of Paul of Tarsus and his classification of men into carnal, intellectual and spiritual, for so he was pleased to translate it, or rather to interpret it. For there was a time when he had delighted in exegesis. Not scientific exegesis; not investigating and searching for the actual meaning of the writers of the sacred books; not co-ordinating them logically and trying to discover, by reference to the ideas and sentiment of the age and country in which they lived, what they really felt and thought; but taking as his starting-point the text that had been consecrated and enriched by centuries of tradition and thence launching out into free speculation. The moment that Paul of Tarsus gave his epistles to the world they ceased to be his, they belonged to the world, they were part of the common stock, of the patrimony, of humanity, and it was possible for him to understand them and feel them altogether differently from the way in which the Apostle himself had felt and understood them. That which others did to his writings when they read them and commented upon them, it was possible for him to do to the Apostle’s, provided he undertook the task with knowledge and conscientiousness. The actual text furnished his mind with the necessary foothold, it was the jumping-off place from which his imagination could take flight.
And in Paul of Tarsus, in his epistle to the Romans and his first epistle to the Corinthians, he found those three classes of men: the carnal or sarcinal, σάρϰινοι, the natural or psychical, Ψυϰικοί, and the spiritual or pneumatical, πνευματικοί. He had often read that 14th verse of the 7th chapter of the epistle to the Romans: “For we know that the law is spiritual [pneumatical]; but I am carnal [sarcinal], sold under sin”; and that 44th verse of the 11th chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians which says that there is a natural or psychical body and a spiritual or pneumatical body; and he was aware that for the Apostle the psyche, Ψυϰή, was something inferior, something that was more or less equivalent to what was later to be called the vital force, the sensitive soul, common to men and animals; the pneuma, on the other hand, being the higher part of the soul, the spirit, the ήγεμονικόν of the Stoics, something that survives the body. But he preferred to give it another interpretation, and he always regarded the psyche as the intellectual power that is bound to the necessities of our actual earthly life, the slave of a logic that is educated and trained by the struggle for life, ordinary, common, current knowledge, necessary in order to enable us to live, the knowledge from which science is evolved. He could not help thinking of psychical men as intellectuals, men of common sense and logic, men whose ideas are dominated by the associations which the external and visible world suggests to them, reasonable men who are trained to some profession and practice it, who, if they are doctors, learn how to cure diseases, if engineers to construct roads, if chemists to prepare drugs and analyse compounds, if architects to build houses. These psychical men are the average men, those who take the middle course, those of whom it is said that they have a sound and clear judgment and standard, those who do not believe in any fallacy that is not consecrated by tradition and habit, those who never swallow any new absurdity, because their minds are already so stuffed with timeworn absurdities.