“Behold, the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.”
The primacy of Self is indisputable, if by reason of one fact only—that this, self-same, Self is the initial postulate of all sane philosophy. And, when Philosophy soars to Metaphysic, Scientific Analysis “takes up the wondrous tale,” and its burden is Self-hood also. All roads lead to Rome. All analysis runs into the Egoistic Synthesis. “The One [Ego] remains, the Many change and pass.” Yet the passing is only the flux and ebb of the One. In Hegel’s words, “that which passes away passes away into its own self: only the passing away passes away.” Which things are an allegory, and yet “solvitur ambulando.” A recent traveller in the United States tells us, that, in the Emerson country, he chanced upon cross-roads, and found there an apparently contradictory direction-post. One arm of it bore the inscription, “This is the way to Concord,” the other, pointing in the opposite direction, was similarly worded, “This is the way to Concord.” The Hylo-Ideal Thesis is this Ideal Concord, to be reached whether you travel by way of Eastern Idealism, or by the route of plainer Western Materialism. For, and here all contradictions are reconciled, in the one Subject-object which is Self, there is no diversity, neither Jew nor Greek, neither Idealism only, nor Materialism only, or exclusively, but all is one.[[142]] And in Unity there is no class distinction, no nomenclature, no “otherness,” no Ebal and Gerizim, but only the Mount of God. What the Ego is, all is.[[143]] It is the x of every problem and answers to any value save the spurious and indifferent one of the Dualist.
I find Hylo-Idealism (Auto-centricism)—this “pearl of great price”—canvassed and examined by many modern thinkers, only to be contemptuously cast away, though it would have made each one of them in turn “richer than all his tribe.” But it was ever thus. In this rejection there is no despair in the view of the illuminati. All is ours, and paltering with the central truth of SOLIPSISM, as men have ever paltered, does not change or diminish the truth itself, or lessen the assurance of its ultimate victory, since to go from, or flee from, the Egoistic presence is an impossibility. We wander here and there, but to seek to transcend ourselves is vain. There must, sooner or later, be the resipiscentia, the coming home at last to Self, and Self only, as to the better home at last.
In this view there is no Logos—save that indisputable one, which maketh all things to every one of us—no “true Light” save that effulgent one which “lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” namely, his own creative and illuminating Egoity—sans which there is but nothingness. Such a Gospel as this should be termed the Evangel of common-sense were it not that that phrase shows only one side of the question—“Virginibus, puerisque est” but it is also the very acme of the exalted intelligence, “the last and sharpest height” of human thought where the atmosphere is all too rare for mortal breath.
The highest and the lowliest[[144]] are ever thus akin—“Aryan worship secreted in the Holy of Holies the utensils of the dairy.” Grasp but the centre truth of truths—that the Ego and its products are one, that every one of us spins, from his own consciousness, the web of thing and circumstance, which envelopes him—and you see at once and as it were instinctively, that in this Universe-circle of Egoity there is no “otherness” even thinkable, no lower and no higher, no difference, nothing essentially common or unclean, everything being, not so much cleansed of God, as very THEOBROMA,[[145]] God’s food and nutrient element, seeing that in it, and by it, and through it, we and all things CONSUBSTANTIALLY EXIST.
Thus veræ causæ and other figments are not so much unsearchable, or past finding out, as out of court or indifferent. Whether all be of God, or all be from a “clam-shell,” does not matter—does not, by one jot, affect our Thesis. Indifferently we are by origin, patricians or “gutter-snipes.” The Ego is free of the Cosmos—equal to either fortune, high or low, makes its own universe, calls it by its own name, and it “lives and moves and has its being.”
G. M. McC.
GERALD MASSEY ON SHAKSPEARE.
Mr. Massey has sent us a circular, the contents of which should be of interest to the lovers of Shakspeare and the buyers of rare books. The writer says: