We have accustomed ourselves to ascribe animism and rationality in this or that form only to things which we designate as "beings", i.e. those whom we find analogous to ourselves in the functions which appear to us to define animism.
Inanimate objects and mechanical phenomena are, to us, lifeless and irrational.
But this cannot be so.
It is only for our limited mind, for our limited power of communion with other minds, for our limited skill in analogy, that rationality and psychic life in general manifest only in certain classes of living creatures, alongside of which exists a long series of dead things and mechanical phenomena.
But if we could not converse among ourselves, if none of us could infer the existence of rationality and of psychic life in another by analogy with himself, then everyone would consider only himself to be alive and animated, and would relegate all the rest of humankind to mechanical "dead" nature.
In other words, we recognise as animated only those beings which have psychic life accessible to our observation in three-dimensional sections of the world, i.e., beings whose psyche is analogous to ours. About other forms of consciousness we do not and cannot know. All "beings" whose psyche does not manifest itself in the three-dimensional section of the world are inaccessible to us. If they contact our life at all, then we necessarily regard their manifestations as those of dead and unconscious nature. Our power of analogy is limited to this section. We cannot think logically outside the conditions of the three-dimensional section. Therefore everything that lives, thinks, and feels in a manner not analogous to ours must appear dead and mechanical. [See The Source of Illusion. Ed.]
In electrical discharges, in thunder and lightning, in the rush and howling of the wind, can be discerned the sensuous-nervous shudderings of some gigantic organism.
A strange individuality all their own can be sensed in certain days. There are days brimming with the marvellous and the mystic; days having each its own individual and unique consciousness, its own emotions, its own thoughts. One may almost commune with such days, and they will tell you that they live a long, long time, perhaps eternally, and that they have known and seen many, many things.
In the processional of the year; in the iridescent leaves of autumn, with their memory-laden smell; in the first snow, frosting the fields and communicating a strange freshness and sensitivity to the air; in the spring freshets, the warming Sun, the awakening but still naked branches through which gleams the turquoise sky; in the white nights of the north, and in dark, humid, warm tropical nights spangled with stars: all these are expressions of the thoughts, emotions and forms of consciousness of some great mysterious being Nature.
If we consider Nature from our side, from the side of phenomena, then it is necessary to say that each thing, each phenomenon, possesses a psyche of its own.
A mountain, a tree, a river, the fish in the river, dew and rain, planet, fire each separately must possess a psyche of its own.
If we consider Nature from the other side, from the side of noumena, then it is necessary to say that each thing and each phenomenon of our world is a manifestation in our section of a rationality incomprehensible to us, belonging to another section, having in that section functions incomprehensible to us. In that section of space, one rationality is such and its function is such that it manifests itself here, in our section, as a mountain, as a tree, as a fish, and so forth.
The phenomena of our world are very different from one another. If they are nothing else but manifestations in our section of different rational beings, then these beings must be very different too.
Between the psyche of a mountain and the psyche of a man, there must be the same difference as between a mountain and a man.
We have already admitted the possibility of different existences. We said that a house exists, that a man exists, and that an idea exists also but they all exist differently. If we pursue this thought, then we shall discover many kinds of different existences.
The fantasy of fairy tales, making all the world animate, ascribes to mountains, rivers, forests a psychic life similar to that of men. But this is just as untrue as the complete denial of consciousness to an inanimate nature. Noumena are as distinct and various as the phenomena which are their manifestation in our three-dimensional sphere.
Each stone, each grain of sand, each planet has its noumenon, consisting of life and of psyche, binding them into certain wholes incomprehensible to us.
The activity of life of separate units may vary greatly. The degree of the activity of life can be determined from the standpoint of its power of reproducing itself. In inorganic, mineral nature, this activity is so insignificant that units of this nature accessible to our observation do not reproduce themselves although it may only seem so to us because of the narrowness of our view in time and space. Perhaps if that view embraced hundreds of thousands of years and our entire planet simultaneously, we might then see the growth of minerals and metals.
Were we to observe, from the inside, one cubic centimetre of the human body, knowing nothing of the existence of the entire body and of the man himself, then the phenomena going on in this little cube of flesh would seem like elemental phenomena in inanimate nature.
The body of a snail possesses the power to move, to nourish itself, to feel pleasure and pain, to seek the former and avoid the latter; and most important of all, it possesses the faculty to multiply, to create new forms similar to itself, to involve inorganic substance within these forms, subduing physical laws to its service. The snail is a complex centre of transmutation of some physical energies into others. This centre possesses a consciousness of its own. It is for this reason that the snail is indivisible. Its psyche is infinitely higher than that of a stone. The snail has the consciousness of form, i.e., the form of a snail is, as it were, conscious of itself. The form of a stone is not conscious of itself.
In organic nature where we see life, it is easier to assume the existence of a psyche. In the snail, a living creature, we already admit without difficulty a certain kind of psyche. But life belongs not only to separate, individual organisms: anything indivisible is a living being. Each cell in an organism is a living being and it must have a certain psychic life.
Indivisibility in our sphere is the sign of a definite function. If a given phenomenon in our plane is a manifestation of that which exists on another plane, then it is evident that indivisibility on our side corresponds to individuality on that other side. The rationality of the divisible can express itself only in a collective, non-individual, reason.
But even a complete organism is merely a section of a certain magnitude of what we may call the life of this organism from birth to death. We may imagine this life as a body of four dimensions extended in time. The three-dimensional physical body is merely a section of the four-dimensional body, the Linga-Sarira [see Linga Sarira Ed]. The image of the man which we recognise as his "personality" is also merely a section of his true personality, which undoubtedly has its separate psychic life. Therefore we may assume in man three psychic lives: first, the psychic life of the body, which manifests in instincts and in the constant work of the body; second, his personality, a complex and constantly changing "I" which we know and are conscious of in ourselves; third, the consciousness of all life a greater and higher "I". In our state of development these three psychic lives know one another only very imperfectly; they communicate with one another only under narcosis, in trance, in ecstasy, in sleep, in hypnotic and mediumistic states that is, in other states of consciousness.
In addition to our own psychic lives with which we are indissolubly bound but which we do not know, we are surrounded by various other psychic lives which we do not know either. We often feel these lives, which are composed of our own. We enter into these lives as their component parts, just as into our life enter different other lives. These lives are good or evil spirits, helping us or precipitating evil. Family, clan, nation, race, or any aggregate to which we belong and which possesses a life of its own; any group of men having its separate functions and feeling its inner connection and unity such as a philosophical school, a "church", a sect, a Masonic order, a society, a political party, a trade association, a business entity, etc. etc., is undoubtedly a living being possessing a certain rationality.
A nation, a people, is a living being. Humanity is a living being also. This is the Grand Man, Adam Kadmon of the Kabbalists. Adam Kadmon is a being living in men, uniting in himself the lives of all men. Upon this subject, H P Blavatsky in her great work, The Secret Doctrine, says:
It is not the Adam of dust (of Genesis, Chapter 2) who is thus made in the divine image, but the Divine Androgyne (of Chapter 1), or Adam Kadmon.
Adam Kadmon is humanity, or humankind Homo Sapiens the Sphinx, i.e., "the being with the body of an animal and the face of a superman".
Entering as a component part into different great and little lives, man himself consists of an innumerable number of great and little "I"s. Many of the "I"s living in him do not even know one another, just as men who live in the same house may not know one another.
Expressed in terms of this analogy, it may be said that "man" has much in common with a house filled with the most diverse inhabitants. Or, better, he is like a great ocean liner on which are many transient passengers, each going to his own place for his own purpose, each uniting the most diverse elements in himself. Each separate unit of the population of this liner orientates himself, involuntarily and unconsciously regards himself, as the very centre of the steamer. This is a fairly true presentment of a human being.
Perhaps it would be more correct to compare a man with some little separate place on Earth, living a life of its own; with a forest lake, full of the most diverse life, reflecting the Sun and stars, and hiding in its depths some incomprehensible phantasm, perhaps an undine or a water-sprite.
The very terms body, soul, and spirit need explanation. The "body" is the physical body with its (to us) little understood mind. The "soul" the psyche studied by scientific psychology is the reflected activity which is guided by impressions received from the external world and from the body. The "spirit" comprises those higher principles which guide, or under certain conditions may guide, the life of the soul.
Thus a human being contains in itself the following three categories:
In saying "I", a man means, of course, not the total complex of all these regions, but that which in a given moment is in the focus of his consciousness. "I wish" (or more correctly, simply "wish", because man very seldom says "I wish"): these words (or this word), playing the most important rτle in the life of a man, usually refer not at all to every side of his being simultaneously, but merely to some small and insignificant facet which, at a given moment, holds the focus of consciousness and subjects all the rest to itself, until it is in turn forced out by another equally insignificant facet.
In the psyche of man there occurs a continual shifting of view from one subject to another. Through the focus of receptivity runs a continuous cinematographical film of feelings and impressions, and each separate impression defines the "I" of a given moment.
From this point of view the psyche of man has often been compared to a dark, sleeping town in the midst of which night-guards with lanterns slowly move about, each lighting up a little circle around himself. This is a perfectly true analogy. In each given moment there are several such unsteadily lighted circles in or near the focus, and all the rest is enveloped in darkness.
Each such little lighted circle represents an "I", living its own life, sometimes very short. And there is continuous movement, either fast or slow, as new and still newer objects, or old ones from the region of memory, or thoughts tormentingly revolving in a circle of the same fixed ideas, move out into the light.
This continuous motion in our psyche, this uninterrupted transfer of the light from one "I" to another, may perhaps explain the phenomenon of motion in the outer visible world.
Our intellect already tells us that there is no such motion. We know that everything exists in infinite spaces of time: nothing is made, nothing becomes, all is. But we do not see everything at once, and therefore it seems to us that everything moves, grows, is becoming. We do not see everything at once either in the outer world or in the inner world; thence rises the idea of motion. For example, as we ride past a house, the house turns behind us; but if we could see it not with our eyes, not in perspective, but by some sort of vision simultaneously from all sides, from below and from above and from the inside, we should no longer see that illusory motion but would see the house entirely immobile just as it is in reality. Mentally, we know that the house did not move.
It is just the same with everything else. The motion, growth, "becoming" which is going on all around us in the world is no more real than the motion of a house which we are riding by, or the motion of trees and fields relative to the windows of a rapidly moving railway car.
Motion goes on inside of us, and it creates the illusion of motion round about one idea, one perception or image, to another. Within the focus of consciousness, rapidly changing "I"s succeed one another. This is the true motion which alone exists in the world. Should this motion stop, should all "I"s simultaneously enter the focus of receptivity, should the light so expand as to illumine all at once that which is usually lighted bit by bit and gradually, and could a man by his reason simultaneously grasp all that ever entered or will enter his receptivity and all that which is never clearly illumined by thought (nevertheless producing its action on the psyche), then would a man behold himself in the midst of an immobile Universe in which there would exist simultaneously everything that usually lies in the remote depths of memory, in the past; all that lies at a remote distance from him; all that lies in the future.
C H Hinton very well says, in regard to beings of other sections of the world:
By the same process by which we get to know about the existence of other men around us, we may know of the high intelligences by whom we are surrounded. We feel them but we do not realise them.
To realise them it will be necessary to develop our power of perception.
The power of seeing with our bodily eye is limited to the three-dimensional section. But the inner eye is not thus limited; we can organise our power of seeing in higher space, and we can form conceptions of realities in this higher space.
This affords the groundwork for the perception and study of these beings other than man.
With reference to the higher things of life, we are like blind and puzzled children. We know that we are members of one body, limbs of one vine; but we cannot discern, except by instinct and feeling, what that body is, what the vine is.
Our problem consists in the diminution of the limitations of our perception.
Nature consists of many entities towards the apprehension of which we strive.
For this purpose new conceptions have to be formed first, and vast fields of observation shall be unified under one common law. The real history of progress lies in the growth of new conceptions.
When the new conception is formed, it is found to be quite simple and natural. We ask ourselves what we have gained; and we answer: Nothing; we have simply removed an obvious limitation.
The question may be put: In what way do we now come into contact with these higher beings? And evidently the answer is: In those ways in which we tend to form organic unions unions in which the activities of individuals coalesce in a living way.
The coherence of a military empire or of a subjugated population, presenting no natural nucleus of growth, is not one through which we should hope to grow into direct contact with our higher destinies. But in friendship, in voluntary associations, and above all in the family, we tend towards greater life.
Just as, to explore the distant stars of the heavens, a particular arrangement which we call a telescope is necessary, so to explore the nature of beings who are higher than we, a mental arrangement is necessary. We must prepare a more extended power of looking. We want a structure developed inside the skull for the one purpose which an exterior telescope will do for the other.
This idea is very interestingly expressed in the essay of P Florensky [Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky, 1882-1943, Russian Orthodox theologian, philosopher, and mathematician. Ed.] The Humanitarian Roots of Idealism (The Theosophical Messenger, 1909, in Russian.):
Are there many people who regard a forest not merely as a collective proper noun and rhetorical embodiment, i.e., as a pure fiction, but as something unique, living? ... The real unity is a unity of self-consciousness.... Are there many who recognise unity in a forest, i.e., the living soul of a forest taken as a whole voodoo, wood-demon, Old Nick? Do you consent to recognise undines and water-sprites those souls of the aquatic element?
The activity of the life of such a composite being as a forest is not the same as the activity of different species of plants and animals, and the activity of the life of a species is again different from the life of separate individuals.
Moreover, the diversity of the functions expressed in different life-activities reveals the differences existing between the psychic lives of different "organisms". The life-activity of a single leaf of a birch tree is, of course, an infinitely lower form of activity than the life of the tree. The activity of the life of the tree is not such as the activity of the life of the species, and the life of the species is not such as the life of the forest.
The functions of these four "lives" are entirely different, and their functionality must be correspondingly different also.
The rationality of a single cell of the human body must be as much lower in comparison with the rationality of the body i.e., with the "physical consciousness of man" as its life-activity is lower in comparison with the life-activity of the entire organism.
The idea of an animistic Universe leads inevitably to the idea of a "World-Soul" a "Being" whose manifestation is this visible universe.
The idea of the "World-Soul" was very picturesquely understood in the ancient religions of India. The mystical poem, The Bhagavad Gita, gives a remarkable presentment of Mahadeva, i.e., the great Deva whose life is this world:
Thus Krishna propounded his teaching to his disciples ... preparing them for an apprehension of those high spiritual truths which unfold before his inner sight in a moment of illumination.
When he spoke of Mahadeva his voice became very deep, and his face was illuminated by an inner light.
Once Arjuna, in an impulse of boldness, said to him: Let us see Mahadeva in his divine form. May we behold him?
And then Krishna ... began to speak of a being who breathes in every creature, has an hundred-fold and a thousand-fold forms, many-faced, many-eyed, facing everywhere, and who surpasses everything created by infinity, who envelops in his body the whole world, things still and animate. If the radiance of a thousand Suns should burst forth suddenly in the sky, it would not compare with the radiance of that Mighty Spirit.
When Krishna spoke thus of Mahadeva, a beam of light of such tremendous force shone in his eyes that his disciples could not endure the radiance of that light, and fell at Krishna's feet. From very fear the hair rose on Arjuna's head, and bowing low he said: Thy words are terrible; we cannot look upon such a being as Thou evokest before our eyes. His form makes us tremble.
Ordinary monistic idealism leaves everything intermediary out. It recognises only extremes as if, after the first rude face of the phenomenal world in all its particularity, nothing but the supreme in all its perfection could be found. First, you and I, just as we are in this room; and the moment we get below that surface, the unutterable itself! Doesn't this show a singularly indigent imagination? Isn't this brave Universe made on a richer pattern, with room in it for a long hierarchy of beings? Materialistic science makes it infinitely richer in terms, with its molecules, and ether, and electrons, and what not. Absolute idealism, thinking of reality only under intellectual forms, knows not what to do with bodies of any grade, and can make no use of any psycho-physical analogy or correspondence.
Fechner, from whose writings Prof. James makes copious quotations, upheld quite a different view-point. Fechner's ideas are so near to those which have been presented in the previous chapters that we shall dwell on them more extensively. I use the words of Prof. James:
The original sin, according to Fechner, of both our popular and scientific thinking, is our inveterate habit of regarding the spiritual not as the rule but as an exception in the midst of nature. Instead of believing our life to be fed at the breasts of the greater life, our individuality to be sustained by the greater individuality, which must necessarily have more consciousness and more independence than all that it brings forth, we habitually treat whatever lies outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life only.
Or if we believe in Divine Spirit, we fancy it on the one side as bodiless, and nature as soulless on the other.
What comfort, or peace, Fechner asks, can come from such a doctrine? The flowers wither at its breath, the stars turn into stone; our own body grows unworthy of our spirit and sinks to a tenement for carnal senses only. The book of nature turns into a volume on mechanics, in which whatever has life is treated as a sort of anomaly; a great chasm of separation yawns between us and all that is higher than ourselves; and God becomes the thinnest of abstractions.
Fechner's great instrument for verifying the daylight view is analogy....
Bain [Alexander Bain, 1818-1903, Scottish philosopher. Ed.] defines genius as the power of seeing analogies.
The number that Fechner could perceive was prodigious; but he insisted on the differences as well. Neglect to make allowance for these, he said, is the common fallacy in analogical reasoning.
Most of us, for example, reasoning justly that, since all the minds we know are connected with bodies, therefore God's mind should be connected with a body, proceed to suppose that the body must be just an animal body over again, and paint an altogether human picture of God. But all that the analogy comports is a body the particular features of our body are adaptations to a habitat so different from God's that if God have a physical body at all, its structure must be utterly different from ours.
The vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders of body. The entire Earth on which we live must have, according to Fechner, its own collective consciousness. So must each sun, moon, planet; so must the whole Solar System have its own wider consciousness, in which the consciousness of our Earth plays one part. So has the entire starry system its consciousness; and if that starry system be not the sum of all that IS, materially considered, then that whole system, along with whatever else may be, is the body of that absolutely totalised consciousness of the Universe to which men give the name of God. Speculatively Fechner is thus a monist in his theology: but there is room in his Universe for every grade of spiritual being between man and the final all-inclusive God.
The Earth-soul he passionately believes in; he treats the Earth as our special human guardian angel; we can pray to the Earth as men pray to their saints.
His most important conclusion is that the constitution of the world is identical throughout. In ourselves, visual consciousness goes with our eyes, tactile consciousness with our skin. But although neither skin nor eye knows aught of the sensations of the other, they come together and figure in some sort of relation and combination in the more inclusive consciousness which each of us names as his self. Quite similarly, then, says Fechner, we must suppose that my consciousness of myself and yours of yourself, although in their immediacy they keep separate and know nothing of each other, are yet known and used together in a higher consciousness, that of the human race, say, into which they enter as constituent parts.
Similarly, the whole human and animal kingdoms come together as conditions of a consciousness of still wider scope. This combines in the soul of the Earth with the consciousness of the vegetable kingdom, which in turn contributes its share of experience to that of the whole solar system, etc.
The supposition of an Earth-consciousness meets a strong instinctive prejudice. All the consciousness we directly know seems told to brains. But our brain, which primarily serves to correlate our muscular reactions with the external objects on which we depend, performs a function which the Earth performs in an entirely different way. She has no proper muscles or limbs of her own, and the only objects external to her are the other stars. To these her whole mass reacts by most exquisite alterations in its total gait, and by still more exquisite vibratory responses in its substance. Her ocean reflects the lights of heaven as on a mighty mirror, her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous lens, the clouds and snow-fields combine them into white, the woods and flowers disperse them into colours. Polarisation, interference, absorption awaken sensibilities in matter of which our senses are too coarse to take any note.
For these cosmic relations of hers, then, she no more needs a special brain than she needs eyes or ears. Our brains do indeed unify and correlate innumerable functions. Our eyes know nothing of sound, our ears nothing of light, but having brains, we can feel sound and light together, and compare them.... Must every higher means of unification between things be a literal brain fibre? Cannot the Earth-mind know otherwise the contents of our minds together?
In a striking page Fechner relates one of his moments of direct vision of truth.
"On a certain morning I went out to walk. The fields were green, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising, here and there a man appeared, a light as of transfiguration lay on all things. It was only a little bit of Earth; it was only one moment of her existence; and yet as my look embraced her more and more it seemed to me not only so beautiful an idea, but so true and clear a fact, that she is an angel an angel carrying me along with her into Heaven.... I asked myself how the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life so far as to deem the Earth only a dry clod.... But such an experience as this passes for fantasy. The Earth is a globular body, and what more she may be, one can find in mineralogical cabinets."
The special thought of Fechner's is his belief that the more inclusive forms of consciousness are in part constituted by the more limited forms. Not that they are the mere sum of our sights plus our sounds, plus our pains, but in adding these terms together it also finds relations among them and weaves them into schemes and forms and objects of which no one sense in its separate estate knows anything, so the Earth-soul traces relations between the contents of my mind and the contents of yours of which neither of our separate minds is conscious. It has schemes, forms, and objects proportionate to its wider field, which our mental fields are far too narrow to cognise. By ourselves we are simply out of relation with each other, for we are both of us there, and different from each other, which is a positive relation. What we are without knowing, it knows that we are. It is as if the total universe of inner life had a sort of grain or direction, a sort of valvular structure, permitting knowledge to flow in one way only, so that the wider might always have the narrower under observation, but never the narrower the wider.
Fechner likens our individual persons on the earth unto so many sense-organs of the Earth-soul. We add to its perceptive life.... It absorbs our perceptions into its larger sphere of knowledge, and combines them with the other data there. The memories and conceptual relations that have spun themselves round the perceptions of a certain person remain in the larger earth-life as distinct as ever, and form new relations...."
Fechner's ideas are expounded in his book, Zend-Avesta: On the Things of Heaven and the Hereafter
I have made such a lengthy quotation from Prof. James' book in order to show that the ideas of the animism and the rationality of the world are neither new nor paradoxical. It is a natural and logical necessity, resulting from a broader view of the world than that which we usually permit ourselves to hold.
Logically we must either recognise life and rationality in everything, in all "dead nature", or deny them completely, even in ourselves.