CONCLUSION[1]
To regard all things and principles of things
as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern
thought – our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite
intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of
water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a
combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But those
elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human
body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is
a perpetual motion of them – the passage of the blood, the waste and repairing
of the lenses of the eye, the mortification of the tissues of the brain under
every ray of light and sound – processes which science reduces to simpler and
more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action
of these forces extends beyond us: it rusts iron, and ripens corn. Far out on
every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven in many currents; and
birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but
a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline
of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them – a design
in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of
flame-like our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to
moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their passion and thought. At
first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects,
pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of
ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to play upon
those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems
suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of
impressions – colour, odour, texture – in the mind of the observer. And if we continue
to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which
language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent,
which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts
still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow
chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of
impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of
personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or
from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those
impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind
keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step
further still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to
which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight;
that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible,
each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a
single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more
truly said that it has ceased to be
than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the
stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less
fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down.
It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions,
images, sensations, that analysis leaves off – that continual vanishing away,
that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves.
Philosophiren,
says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren, vivificiren. The service of
philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to
startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form
grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea in choicer
than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is
irresistibly real and attractive to us, – for that moment only. Not the fruit
of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses
only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all
that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to pint, and be present
always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their
purest energy?
To burn always with this hard, gem-like
flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even
be said that our failure it to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative
to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that
makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under
our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to
knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment,
or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours,
or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of ones friend. Not to discriminate
every moment some passionate attitude in
those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic
dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to
sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of
its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and
touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and
touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and
courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy, of Comte, or
Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view,
instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass
unregarded by us. “Philosophy is the microscope of thought.” The theory or idea
or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in
consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract
theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional,
has no real claim upon us.
One of the most beautiful passages of
Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he
describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him,
and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He
asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that
remained; and he was not biased by anything in his previous life when he
decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in
the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! We are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under
sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve – les hommes sont tous
condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no
more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passion, the
wisest, at least among “the children of the world”, in art and song. For our
chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as
possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love,
the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which
come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is a passion – that it does yield
you this fruit of a quickened,
multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of
beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you
proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as
they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
1868
[1] This brief “Conclusion” was omitted in the second
edition of this book, as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those
young men into whose hands it might fall. On the whole, I have thought it best
to reprint it here, with some slight changes which bring it closer to my
original meaning. I have dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean with
the thoughts suggested by it.