The Sword of Song

THE SWORD OF SONG 66 thing called consciousness exists.” He denies the assertion of duality: he has no datum to assert the denial of duality. I have. Consciousness, as we know it, has one essential quality: the opposition of subject and object. Reason has attacked this and secured that complete and barren victory of convincing without producing conviction.* It has one quality apparently not essential, that of ex- ceeding impermanence. If we examine what we call steady thought, we shall find that its rate of change is in reality inconceivably sw ift. To consider it, to watch it, is beweildering, and to some people becomes intensely terrifying. It is as if the solid earth were suddenly swept away from under one, and there were some dread awakening in outer space amid the rush of incessant meteors—lost in the void. All this is old knowledge; but who has taken steps to alter it ? The answer is forbidding: truth compels me to say, the mystics of all lands. Their endeavour has been to slow the rate of change ; their methods perfect quietude of body and mind, produce in varied and too often vicious ways. Regularis ation of the breathing is the best known formula. Their results are contemptible, w e must admit ; but only so because empirical. An unwarranted reverence has overlaid the watchfulness which science would have enjoined, and the result is muck and misery, the wreck of a noble study. But what is the one fact on which all agree? The one fact whose knowledge has been since reliigon began the all-sufficient passport to their doubtfully-desirable company? This: that “I see a cat” is not only an unwarrantable assumption but a lie ; that the duality of consciousness ceases suddenly, once the rate of change has been sufficiently slowed down, so that, even for a few seconds, the rela- tion of subject and object remains impregnable. It is a circumstance of little interest to the present essayist that this annihilation of duality is associated with intense and passionless peace and delight; the fact has been a bribe to the unwary, a bait for the charlatan, a hindrance to the philosopher; let us discard it.† * Hume, and Kant in the “Pr olegomena,” discuss this phenomenon unsatisfactorily.—A. C. † It is this rapture which has ever been the bond between mystics of all shades; and the obstacle to any accurate observation of the phenomenon, its true causes, and so on. This must always be a stumbling- block to more impressionable minds; but there is no doubt as to the fact—it is a f act—and its present isolation is to be utter ly deplored. M ay I entreat men of Science to conquer the prejudices natural to them when the justly despised ideas of mysticism are mentioned, and to attack the problem ab initio on the severely critical and auster ely ar duous lines which have distinguished their labours in other fields? — A. C. More, though the establishment of this new estate of consciousness seems to open the door to a new world, a world where the axioms of Euclid may be absurd, and the propositions of Keynes* untenable, let us not fall into the error of the mystics, by supposin that in this world is necessarily a final truth, or even a certain and definite gain of knowledge. But that a field for research is opened up no sane man may doubt. Nor may one question that the very first fact is of a nature disruptive of difficulty philosophical and reasonable ; since the phenomenon does not invoke the assent of the reasoning faculty. The argu- ments which reason may bring to bear against it are self-destructive; reason has given con- sciousness the lie, but consciousness survives and smiles. R eason is a part of consciousness and can never be greater than the whole ; this Spencer sees; but reason is not even any part of this new consciousness (which I, and many others, have too rarely achieved) and therefore can never touch it: this I see, and this w ill I hope be patent to those ardent and spiritually- minded agnostics of whom Huxley and Tyndall are for all history-time the prototypes. Know or doubt! is the alternative of the highwayman Huxley ; “Believe” is not to be admitted ; this is fundamental; in this agnosticism can never change ; this must ever command our moral as well as our intellectual assent. But I assert my strong conviction that ere long we shall have done enough of what is after all the schoolmaster w ork of correcting the inky and ill-spelt exercises of the theologi- cal dunces in that great class-room, the world; and found a little peace—while they play—in the intimate solitude of the laboratory and the passionless rapture of research—research into those very mysteries of nature which our dunces have solved by a rule of thumb; determining the nature of a bee by stamping on it, and shouting “bee”; while we patiently set to work with microscopes, and say nothing till be know, nor more than need be when we do. But I am myself found guilty of this rôle of schoolmaster : I w ill now therefore shut the doors and retire again into the laboratory where my true life lies. 403, 405. Reason and concentration.45—The results of reasoning are always assailable : those of concentration are vivid and certain, since they are directly presented to conscious- ness. And they are more certain than con- sciousness itself, since one who has experienced them may, with consciousness, doubt con- sciousness, but can in no state doubt them. 412. Ganesh.46—The elephant-headed God, son of Shiva and Bhavani. He presides over obstacles. * Author of a text-book on “Formal Logic.”