4
THE STUFF OF COMRADES
I wonder if I can make clearer, by turning a few different facets in this chapter, what we mean by friends, comrades, the spirit of things, and love not as an emotion but as a cosmic force. Many days I have faced a Chapel, as I face this day's work, longing to bring in closer the dream of the new social order, yet dismayed by the limitations of words and my own mind, trained so long in the life of the old.... I would begin to talk, drawing the young minds to mine through an intimate revelation of the heart, then presently lose the sense of effort, even the sense of thought—and an hour would pass in the joy of communal blessedness, because we were one.
Man is not getting larger, though he is continually holding more. The human brain, after it reaches a certain age and size, may gain thereafter a conception of the universe without altering the size of the hat-band. There is a continual condensation at work within us mentally and physically. We take the cream of the thing, and throw the rest away. The wiser and the more inclusive we become, the more we take just the spirit of a thing, and leave the bulk and weight behind.
This is true in our every refinement, in the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the books we read and the friends we gather together. We become harder and harder to suit, because bulk and weight are common, but the spiritual extract of anything is slow to appear for us. The wiser the man, the more fastidious he is, and this does not mean that he is a crank. The excellence of fastidiousness is not in eccentricity but in inclusiveness. In the spirit of the thing, he sees all. From the spirit of the thing, he expresses in his own way any part. He can array whole hierarchies of facts from the spirit of the whole, but mainly he leaves the facts in reference-libraries, where they belong and are quickly available, and stores away in his working faculties just a drop of the oil of a subject or a breath from its essence.
There are those who believe that the soul of man is made up of essences of experiences of thousands of lives—yet the refinement of the soul is so spiritualised that the best surgeon cannot find the little organ. He knows the brain, which is made up of the stored experiences of but one life, but because the soul is so small or so diffused, the surgeon is very apt to say that there is no such organ. And yet, we all know there is knowledge and power behind us, which drives us, in our greater moments, to utterances and action entirely without the scope of the brain. We may call this the soul, or the nth power, or the fourth dimension—the name doesn't matter.... Listen, if I write well to-day—I mean well for me—if I rise to the opportunity at all, it will be because I am writing things which my brain doesn't know.
I yearn to make this still clearer.... The rose, which is the highest evolved of flowers, includes all the evolution of plant-life of its line beneath; the same with gold among the minerals. The fact that each is the highest necessitates that. In the same way, man includes Nature and the lower creatures, in that he is the highest. This is easily proven to you when you recall that a child in the womb passes through all states of creature evolution. That period is, in a wonderful way, a review of the evolution of the world.
The mere fact that the higher one climbs, the farther one can see, proves it again. This is a law. The scent of a rose is the sublimate of all plant odours; and the spirit of man is the refinement of all knowledge and experience beneath.
The higher man ascends, the more inclusive. To heal another, the physician must be able to include the other. Evolution is continual refinement—the drawing unto ourselves of the spirit of bulks of matter. I stood upon a bluff overlooking the ocean recently, and a breath of the south wind awakened in my mind the story of one whole summer; others have listened to forest trees or the humming roar of a distant city, or the rush of a great river, and found in them the aggregate of all Nature's sounds in one tone. This is the magic of the spirit of things.
In all philosophy, there is no difference of opinion as to one fact, that man is unfolding a microcosm within himself, including in his consciousness more and more the Idea of the Universe. The cosmic consciousness, which a few have attained, is the actual perception of the externals of the Plan.