The Law is for All

66 The Law is for All like Narcissus, offer oneself loveless to every love like Catherine, or find the body so vain as to enclose one’s lust in the soul and make one lifelong spinthria1 unassuaged in the imagination like Aubrey Beardsley, the means matter no whit. Bach takes one way, Keats one, Goya one. The end is everything: that by the act, what­ ever it is, one worships, loves, possesses, and becomes Nuit. 1 [“Seeing stars,” or spintherism, from omi^rip, “sparks.”] 2 [Shakespeare, Macbeth i, 7.] The act of love can no more “trammel up the consequence”1 2 than any other act. As long as you possess the talisman, it must be used from time to time, whether you will or no. If you injure the quality, or diminish the quantity, of that quintessence, you blas­ pheme yourself, and betray the trust reposed in you when you accepted the obligation of that austerely chivalrous Order called Manhood. The powers of the talisman are irresistible like every other natural force. Every time they are used, a child must be begotten. This child must be in your own image, a symbol of your nature, an expression of your true subconscious Will. It is, of course, only once in many times that the conditions allow of the production of a human child. What happens when (either by chance or by design) that obvious effect is prevented? The materialist may imagine that with the destruction of the com­ plex, it becomes harmless, its potentialities aborted, just as the violence of sulphuric acid comes to naught if it be neutralized by caustic soda. But he is a very poor materialist if he says so. The full possibilities of the acid must be accounted for in one way or another. If it does not dissolve a metal, it may carbonize a sugar, generate a gas, give off heat, or in one way or another fulfil abso­ lutely every possibility which it inherited from the forces that went to make it. It is manifestly a contradiction of the laws of the Conservation of matter and energy, that a substance should lose by being transformed. It is contrary to Nature that a man, with potentialities which can transform the face of the earth, should become nothing but inert carrion when he happens to die. Every­ thing that he was must inevitably persist; and if the manifestation be not to one set of senses, why then, to another! The idea of