Disjecta Membra.

1. A creature born to live among the stars and nebulæ could not conceive of a place like our earth in his universe, which he would feel he knew so well and uniformly across vast distances. So we creatures born to dwell on the earth can only begin to conceive of a place like heaven, and this only by stratifying words and thoughts (so 'heaven' comes from 'sky' and the faithful are belaboured for their God 'delusion', though the faithless are not reprimanded for their poverty of imagination). I try to express what I feel from my faith, but what may I express that the following image does not?

I. When I am feeling particularly bad I begin to think about my thoughts and the things around me, people, objects, and the world generally, as being after all one and the same, this continuous field or constant.

II. When it comes to being and existence I think it is like the difference between a dog and a rock, although at heart both the dog and the rock are these fields of energy. But it seems to me that it is altogether too simple to say a dog is alive and a rock is dead, I do not think it can be correct to say something is either alive or dead, as existence is continuous. I think human life, or animal being, is more like a long dream of sensations, an illusory world of experience which these fields generate. Suffering is always present, hunger is a kind of suffering, tiredness also. Because human life is very conditional, we need so many things to keep going, light, water, food, and shelter, as well as many other things in order to be happy, e.g. companionship,love, hobbies, activities, whenever we lack one or more of these conditions suffering is the result. These are all the demands of animal instinct, so far as we are greedy animals we always want more, crave more, and become impatient. Yet if all these varieties of experience, of existence and the universe, are really the same thing, we can rest easy. If I look too much through my own eyes and think only about what is good for me I become selfish, why should I do anything for anyone else? Why should I work and not be at rest? But that is to think that I am different from everything else, a king, an emperor, and everyone and everything else a slave. But if I think to myself, 'no, I am one with everyone else, with everything else around me' I feel a little more relaxed.It's not a complete cure, we can't help our instincts, and everyone gets lazy or frustrated, but in my brighter moments I remember these things and they help a little. Theology is a good study, it focuses these philosophies into characters and concepts. 

III. It interests me that the many polytheist systems of history all tend to spiritualise or deify the same things; the sun, the moon, thunder and lightning, fire and water, time, infinity, passions and phenomena, like anger and war. My belief is that the nature of infinity is finite. By this I mean that infinity is everything, but since we cannot see everything we see only small regions of it, and these small regions considered in themselves are finite. So if I eat a plate of dinner I am full though you may be hungry, because we are thinking of two regions of infinity, me and you. If however we start from the perspective of everything, we lose the notion of my fullness or your hunger, as my fullness and your hunger are statements about two finite regions, myself and you. In likewise suffering, which is to do with animal needs, the need for this, the need for that, which lacking causes pain, disappears when we consider that the universe exists always and only requires itself in order to do so. Therefore I cannot think of the universe as hungry or suffering, so hunger and suffering disappear with the perspective. No thought, however, can change our biological instincts, but I think this philosophy can help calm agitation, it certainly helps to calm me at times, though not all the time.

    I also have a keen interest in the eastern religions, particularly Buddhism but also Confucianism and Taoism (which are perhaps more philosophies than religions). As you said before, the Hindus have Brahma, their equivalent of Heh, to whose dreams we belong, and the world will end when he wakes up. These are stories of course, most of religion is story telling, but the stories have meanings. I often think, if there is a God, though God would not be human of course, that this God at least would be more like a human than a stone, because a human has more qualities than a stone. So I think the anthropomorphic tendency of religions, to turn ideas or concepts into animals or people, has some justification, although nowadays people think it is simply ridiculous to imagine the Olympians on a cloud having affairs with one another.

IV. I am at a loss to decide whether this infinity has something like a central mind or character. To one extent we are parts of infinity, so if I have a mind the infinity has a mind, my mind at least, but what I wonder most is if all this relative chaos on earth and the vastness of the universe is following the will of a being who is everywhere at once, or if in fact I have to accept that this is a dumb and random universe wherein all animals and all experience is an accident, an unimportant accident. Buddhism is quite correct to say it is the longing for other things which brings about most suffering, but it is mistaken if it thinks that this can ever be totally overcome. Everyone, no matter how strong or impressive, has his limits I firmly believe. We can only tolerate so much for so long. The body demands things, food and water, sleep and shelter, and all of the material society around us is in fact based on these needs.

V. There is a deep longing within me to believe in God. Partly because I see so much of the best culture is based on belief in God; the Book of Job for example, the Psalms, cathedrals and temples, hymns and paintings. Yet I cannot bring myself to accept that God is a being limited in space who somehow lives outside the universe. I think much of the question depends on one's definition of life and being, as well as consciousness. Scientists say, I think, that life is an emergent quality that occurs from the interaction and configuration of substances like protoplasm and nucleic acids. In the same way that water is wet but the molecule H2O is not wet so a cell is living but its ingredients, such as carbon, nitrogen, water, and so on, are not themselves alive. I find it difficult to accept so complete a rejection. I cannot see how life can emerge from death. It is like saying something can emerge from nothing. The statement 'water is wet' is a statement about an interaction between a liquid and a subject of experience. Therefore of course a molecule is not wet, but many molecules interact in a way that causes wetness to be perceived. By this reasoning life is also an interaction, an interaction between a perception of life and the object which causes the perception. I cannot help thinking however that life reveals a fundamental aspect of nature, that life itself means 'sustainment' or 'persistence', the maintenance of a state or a system, and by this token the universe is alive

VI. I do feel divinity from the night sky, from the sheer scale of it and the tremendous forces at work in it. I suppose between a rational choice between saying that all life is really the dream of death or that all death is really the dream of life, I prefer the second choice both emotionally and logically. I cannot see how death, the absence of life, can dream up something like a lion or a lamb, but I can see how consciousness quietens down in sleep to something like death. In that great book Don Quixote there is a passage that goes: 'There is only one thing in which I dislike sleep, it is that it resembles death. There is very little difference between a man in his first sleep and a man in his last.' This is a profound observation in my view, and accords with Shakespeare's famous saying that 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on'.

VII. Regarding impermanence, there can surely be a difference between being impermanent and feeling impermanent, just as there can be a difference between being in danger and being afraid. If we grant that the universe is eternal for example, which I cannot help thinking it must be as something cannot come out of nothing, and time is only relative, then the whole thing itself is permanent, but I understand that what you feel is your impermanence. 

VIII. I suppose I question the perception of the transformations we see in this eternal life force or energy. What appears very different to one thing is, by the definition of science, really the same thing: the atom, the molecule, etc. What we have to escape in our lives is the delusional thinking which makes us always feel at odds with other people and with the world around us; the greed which causes an immoderate love for pleasing one's senses and ignoring the deeper feelings of others. All of this seems to me to be confusion arising from the notion that we are in a disparity with the world, that it is not all the same thing but really a heap of different things, interacting chaotically and blindly, whereas it is really all the same substance. Therefore I think the problem of suffering and disparities is not a problem of substance but a problem of perception. In a certain sense one has to shut one's eyes off to all the animal instincts, the brute assumptions of a selfish creature, and remind oneself through the intellect that the universe is really a harmony and an ever living completeness. It seems to me that  when I listen to my favourite hymns or read my favourite literature, in other words, when any person is brought into the symmetry of a particular interest, that is when this idea or vision of the unified world is before the eyes. So by this train thought we are made to realise that it is not the sense of permanence which is illusory but the sense of impermanence, not the feeling of joy which is false but the feeling of suffering. This is very much the same manner of thinking as Buddhism and Taoism, that reality is in fact the idea and the world of sense perception is, in truth, the world of dreams.

IX. How do we connect rationality with overall existence? I personally think that it is simple and easy, too simple and easy, to
say that empiricism is testable and therefore truest. The fact that something can be evidenced makes it better practically but not, in my opinion, truer. Thus the statement 'Water evaporates' is a better statement practically than 'Existence exists' as an experiment can be performed, that is, a kettle can be boiled, to prove that water evaporates whereas no particular test can be performed to show that existence exists. Yet of these two statements I think 'existence exists' is the truer statement, because existence is a fundamental term. Water after all is just one kind of a compound of two kinds of an element, each of which are only rearrangements of atoms. Existence, on the other hand, though a worse term practically, refers to the heart of what we mean by the reality in which we live, the universe of which we are a part.

X. It seems true to say that the pleasure of an interest is a sense pleasure to do with space and time and the flesh, but my view is that this is a perspective formed from human emotion. If we are parts of the universe then it is true that there is an aspect to our existence which, if viewed in the correct way, is eternal and everlasting. Easy it is to see the other aspects; all the fleeting parts to our existence which, being temporal, cause an unstable flux of emotions. Perhaps love is the best example of this. For most people the greatest joy that they can think to attain is the love of another person, and yet in this very bliss of love there is too often a myriad of other less pleasant feelings: jealousy, suspicion, possessiveness, lust, and so on. All of these unpleasant by-products spring from the fact that the object of these feelings is changeable. We can imagine that a lover might cheat, might grow tired of our personalities, might leave and never return, but we cannot, on the contrary, imagine existence not existing, we cannot conceive of nothing, for we do not know what nothing is. So the most stable emotions are developed by thinking on the most stable of objects: existence itself. The reason I think that a particular interest which anchors a person emotionally has reference to this permanence is because of this very stability; an inordinate passion like jealous love is unstable, but an interest like a true historical interest, or a philosophical curiosity, does not tend to cause big shifts in emotion. This is, in my view, because the object of the interest is a stable object. Everything we learn of faith, as in the Christian religion, turns us towards this general permanence. They are describing the same thing: that sense of eternity and infinity which we have within us, which we deduce from our own mortality. This causes faith, for faith is what is meant by trust in the continuation of existence.

XI. I have had a revival in the last few days of my religious feelings, and I have been reading the Bible again. I can't say that I am exactly an orthodox Christian, but I love the ancient literature. When I see the creatures of the earth it always sets me wondering: what this creature is showing me of the nature of reality, or the nature of existence.Every point in the world is like a description, and if we could put all the descriptions together we would get the most complete picture.

   I take particular refuge in the psalms, of which the most famous is probably also my favourite: 'The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. -- He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. -- He restoreth my soul, He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. -- Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. -- Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. -- Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever'. Another example: 'I will love thee, O Lord, my strength; the Lord is my stony rock, and my defence: my Saviour, my God, and my might, in whom I will trust, my buckler, the horn also of my salvation, and my refuge. -- I will call upon the Lord, which is worthy to be praised: so shall I be safe from mine enemies. -- The sorrows of death compassed me: and the overflowings of ungodliness made me afraid. -- The pains of hell came about me: the snares of death overtook me. -- In my trouble I will call upon the Lord: and complain unto my God. -- So shall he hear my voice out of his holy temple: and my complaint shall come before him, it shall enter even into his ears.' I very much like the rhythm and music of these verses.

   My view, in which I do not feel a shred of doubt, is that it is impossible for something to come of nothing. To my mind that is the most false statement that can possible be uttered, and indeed many famous physicists like Sir Roger Penrose agree that the Big Bang did not produce the universe out of nothing but, instead, began a new aeon or cycle, that the universe expands and expands to infinity, and then, apparently, becomes a singularity from which the next Big Bang or aeon begins. Moreover, even if one imagines taking everything out of the universe, one by one, the imagination cannot help still picturing a space with dimensions, which implies energy and existence anyway. They say the majority of energy and matter is undetectable but deducible, this is called dark energy and dark matter.

 

XII. What I would call everlasting in ourselves is the fact that we are ourselves parts of the eternal infinity of existence or the universe. Like a wave in the sea. No two waves are ever the same, so no two people are ever the same, yet these waves and these people are the same in that they are parts of the sea. So we are all at heart the same thing, the same essence and substance of reality, but we have a different appearance according to time and place and perception. I often think about it this way: if the universe were not eternal then it must have already ended, for all of time must have already occurred in the past. So what we mean by human death is the same as you described: an alteration of energy in the system. This is part of the beautiful process of continuous existence.

XIII. Somehow I do not at the moment feel any trouble in pursuing a study or faith in Christianity without actually accepting the literal interpretation of its creeds. I think the correct position to take in regard to anything is 'what does this make me feel, what effect does this produce on my understanding?' Churches and hymns and sacred literature very often have a calming and enlightening effect on me, whereas, although I enjoy science, I very often feel a sense of perplexity and mistrust in reading scientific papers.

 

XIV. I cannot myself imagine what the absence of space would look like, in fact it would have to mean not imagining at all, hence why I say it is impossible to conceive of nothing. This does provide me some comfort because it reminds me of all that has come before my lifetime, which suggests that there is a fundamental purpose at work in existence which is, namely, existence itself. Suffering exists but so also does happiness and great beauty, no one can deny that there is a tremendous beauty to the universe and the earth. The sense of dreamy illusion also comforts me, for it makes me think that most of my feelings of unworthiness, as well as my pettiest emotions, are untrue whereas the truth is this eternity always near at hand.

XV.  I ask you about consciousness because I think really the crux of the difference between religion and science is that, while science treats the universe as dumb stuff acting according to certain principles of certain forces, religion treats the universe as a living thing. So in science it is more important to understand a mechanism, whereas in religion it is important to understand meaning. A good example of this might be Stonehenge; the science of those days obviously led to their moving those rocks and constructing them in a certain way, that was the mechanism but it has no real meaning, whereas it was the religious impulse which motivated them to build it in the first place, because it had a certain meaning. Now to my mind meaning can be what science calls falsehood and yet be far more important than that which science calls truth. In churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, there is something very different going on in the minds of men to those in laboratories. Behind all the symbolism, all the prayers and rites, all the fashion and status, of such religions there is a deep and common yearning. And I as a matter of fact think that religion does touch upon certain meanings to existence which science does not, and I must think it worthwhile for that sake. Nothing so extraordinary as religion could be completely false.

XVI. I very much appreciate Van Gogh's paintings of the night time, so I agree with you about the night, although I think it is good to have both day and night in our lives. It occurs to me that the fear of death along with the urge to procreation are the two main forces at work in the human psyche, and nowadays especially there is a fear of death and everything concerning it, as it turns away from all which we value in materialism. Without fleshly life as we understand it, life involving bodies and matter, we do not think there can be any value in anything at all. So in a broadly atheistic environment death becomes the absolute evil which all dread, the thing which robs us of all our joy, all our thoughts, all that we aspire to, even all our vices. As someone who sympathises with the religious spirit and who believes broadly speaking in pantheism, I do not think human death so tragic a thing as an atheist must. I do think and trust that there is a more fundamental kind of life underlying the universe, and human life is rather like an explosion of a firework, a beautiful thing certainly, but transitory and comparatively unimportant. I see however that to an atheist and materialist, who conceives all which is valuable as to do with organic bodily life, death becomes the focus of all which is detested in society. Thus we do cover up corpses. Partly out of respect it is true, but also partly in horror, partly in dread, of that brutal fact from which we all wish to hide as from a monster. It is tragic what has happened due to these earthquakes, very upsetting, but I think we would not feel quite so shocked nowadays by such things if we had a broader view of reality, and felt a purpose beyond simply the human. Of course this requires something religious in spirit.

XVII. My own feelings upon the matter of consciousness are unclear, but it is thought even by biologists that consciousness as we know it, subjectively in human experience, is a kind of delirium or hallucination caused by the brain in the summation of its electrical activity. One interesting fact however is that the cerebellum has more neurons than the cerebrum and yet is, apparently, quite unconscious in its operations. It is a part of the brain apart from what we consider consciousness. But what is consciousness even? We do not consciously will our hearts to beat, and yet they still beat every second of every day, for seventy years in a single life. Is that not a kind of will, a kind of life? Surely consciousness is something more fundamental than the dreams of perception which we simply attribute to it. If human life is a result of the movements of nature, of the complex systems of physics, then surely there is something ultimate about the system itself, something mysterious and yet certain, which validates all of our human experiences. By this I mean to say that a droplet implies a sea. There would not be rainfall if there were not an ocean from which it must have evaporated. This is why my mind inclines to the thought or the belief that consciousness is fundamental in nature, that to some extent the stone is conscious, the sand, the earth, and the sun. To what extent it is difficult to say. One interesting point to note is that it is not necessary to be conscious in order to be alive, as comatose patients can live for decades without having apparent consciousness. I think it all goes much deeper, and from the subjective experience of human perception, human consciousness, we are plumbing into the depths of the universe's secrets. Something extraordinary is at the root of the universe, of that I am convinced, for it produces extraordinary results. The universe is conscious so far as we know that we are conscious and also parts of the universe. Quantum mechanics suggests many things in its strange doctrine, especially in the supposed phenomena of entanglement and the collapse of the wave function, but I think it goes further even than that. I suppose I must admit that I think all this phenomena culminates in a divinity which is the total. I cannot accept mere materialism. For a universe without perception and thought I could accept materialism, but not for a universe which includes the human mind.

XVII. I can only think of reincarnation as a plausible view if the view you consider implausible is also taken. That the single thing called Reality or the universe, all existence comprised, reincarnates itself into different things at different points at different times, is plausible. If however the view is that a unique and individual spirit such as mine, conceived I suppose by my personality, is in the future to inhabit a rabbit or a tree, I think it implausible. For in what respect is my spirit maintained? Will I be remembering this correspondence while blossoming in the spring? Is that what makes the tree also me? I think that point of view is isolationist, it is isolating every part of the universe apart from every other part. If however we take the view that we are everywhere looking at the same thing manifesting in different ways to perception, then we can sustain a theory of reincarnation which rather puts the emphasis on the reincarnation of appearances instead of the reincarnation of substance. Personally I think science validates this view by boiling everything down to fundamental particles, and fundamental particles down to fundamental fields.

   Everything seems to blur at the quantum level. The question is what is this blurring? Is it the blurring of our vision or the merging of the stuff considered? The evidence seems to suggest it is not our vision blurring but the actual fabric of matter looking everywhere present and uniform on this scale. Thus when I consider the collapse of the wave function I think of it rather as the establishment of the perspective of the particle. It seems to me that the truer state of affairs is the wave, but that it is the nature of perspective, which requires a conscious mind, to isolate things into given positions. No one can deny, as you quite rightly say, that different things seem utterly different to us. My view in philosophy, which I think mirrors some of the views of science, is that this is due to our finite nature as human beings. A good example of this is diamond and carbon. Diamond is carbon, chemically it is the same, but a man with a ton of diamonds is, by the judgement of society, far richer than a man with a ton of carbon. Such are value judgements, such is all judgement of perspective. I do not disagree with you at all that, to human nature, and to all intents and purposes, different parts of the world around us seem and might as well be utterly divided from one another. I eat pieces of cake and not pieces of wood. All of this must, in my view at least, be attributed to perception rather than reality. The difficult thing to accept is the truth of reality; that in theory a piece of wood really is the same as a piece of cake, even though we as human beings can only eat one. This is perhaps the greatest mystery of all, and I think it ties in with the mystery of consciousness. Why do we see the world as so varied and different? Well why, for that matter, can I live a whole world in my dreams? Clearly it is the mind which is responsible for all of this.

   By this perspective then faith, or trust in abiding nature which I equate with God, is truer and more accurate than empiricism. Empiricism is always dealing with the compromised perception of the mind, whereas religious philosophy is dealing with the most fundamental layer of existence, where all things are the same, one and uniform. This is a beautiful point of view in my opinion, it gets rid of so many of the worst things of human existence. We burn away like chaff things like suffering, ugliness, violence, and disease, and what we are left with, once we forget the selfishness of human perspective, is the eternal beauty of the universe which is also God. It seems so improbable, but it is so improbable that it is true; and I think modern science is slowly showing it also.

 

XVIII. Of course suffering and ugliness are emotional terms, it is difficult to give any objective reality to them. Most beauty seems to be that which lends a sense of health to a subject, symmetry for example is considered the great indicator of beauty; the golden ratio applies to so many things, beauty in nature, beauty in art, beauty in faces. You say the ultimate reality is not beautiful because ugliness exists; I deny that ugliness and beauty exist at all except in terms of human emotion. What the ultimate reality evokes is transcendent of course, so far as it transcends all comparisons, for after all there is nothing but itself to make comparison with. Certainly, for human beings ugliness and suffering have a personal reality, because we have two standards: 1. the standards of health and symmetry which suggest reproductive success; 2. the standards of health and prosperity which cause the biological processes we call happiness. If these two standards are removed then the emotions we associate with ugliness and suffering are eliminated. I call the full reality beautiful, because I think that the fullness probably does have an ultimate symmetry, but I accept that this term is really finite. It seems to me you make much the same error as you say I make in defining the universe in terms of suffering and ugliness; these terms are merely an animal perspective, the truth is something more essential than such a perspective.

XIX. A divine being need not be all benevolent to humanity in order to exist. I do not myself believe that God directly answers prayer, although I think prayer is in itself a useful and pleasant thing. It has been shown to increase good chemicals in the brain, as has meditation. Again I do not think one can judge God or the universe by what we consider to be our own interests. Yes I may die horribly of an accident or a disease, and God will not stop it happening no matter how much I cry out to him to do so, but it would be a shallow belief which depends solely on what is good for me in order to persist. Ultimately speaking, is there anything on earth or in the universe which can bring about any actual hurt? I do not think so. True, animals kill and eat one another, causing great anguish and horrible deaths; true, we all must suffer the continual frustrations of mortal existence, needing one moment food, the next moment water; lusting always for more and jealously guarding our interests. We are animals. We cannot expect too much of our nature. Nevertheless it is the course of time which proves, incontestably in my view, that eternity exists. I cannot fathom existence at all if I cannot see that something cannot come of nothing, therefore something, in fact everything, has always been here, and will always be here. Once a human being realises this ultimate and necessary truth he can find release from much of his own suffering. Do you not see my point of view, that if we think more about the universe than about ourselves then we feel the less suffering and the more joy, that the less I hate myself and the more I love the universe, the more beautiful everything seems, the less terrible suffering appears? Surely you must accept that this is true, that without the emotions of human perspective, of our own selfish ambition for our own lives and appetites, death loses its sting, and suffering becomes but a birth cry, a pang of transformation, which we can overcome with this wisdom or insight into the overall persistence and glory of Nature.

XX. Death, the great horror for most people, means that new generations are born, that the young are born into new aeras, and that the old cannot dominate the world with their immortality. Pain, the culprit of all suffering, is necessary to survive. People have been born who felt no pain, due to some mutation in their genes, and they very often suffer terrible injuries and die young because their minds cannot apprise them of dangers. The body does not learn through words, it learns through sensations. When pain and fear are generated the body is made averse to certain things. This is what I mean by the necessity for suffering, as night is necessary to day. As we grow older we grow sadder, but we also grow wiser. 'He went like one that hath been stunned, And is of sense forlorn: A sadder and a wiser man He rose the morrow morn.' - Coleridge. I too was happier at times in my childhood, I have a few certain memories of utter bliss in childhood, but I also have some bad memories, and children are very foolish. Twice I broke my arms because of my clumsiness, and often I would lose my temper at the slightest things. This brings us to the old conundrum of whether ignorant happiness is preferable to a wise sadness, 'Where ignorance is bliss, 't is folly to be wise'.

XXI. I do not think the human condition can so easily be defined. Is happiness really a mere gratification of the senses? Suppose every day you had the best food, that you lived in a castle surrounded by servants, that you had musicians playing the most beautiful music, paintings to contemplate, and a harem of the most beautiful women, do you think that a lifetime of such experiences would conduce to the highest happiness? I think the lack of purpose in such an existence, the absence of a higher reason to be existing, would make such a life hollow. I can in fact imagine depression forming from such circumstances as easily as from the worst circumstances. A world without affliction, it seems to me, is no world at all. Not that I think suffering is good in itself, but if I look at the fuller scheme of life and consider the structure of the universe I notice, what I do not notice when I am only selfishly regarding my own desires, that the interconnections and relations of things are such that I cannot conceive of a world which works without something like suffering. Between two choices, a world with suffering and no world at all, it is better to have a world with suffering. 'I hold it true, whate'er befall, I feel it when I sorrow most, 'T is better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.' - Tennyson. This universal acceptance of the universe, or God's will it could be called, is in my view the highest wisdom, and it is a great blessing that we can find, in the midst of this scheme, what we call mortal happiness.

 

XXII. What you say about things having an existence which have causal powers is most interesting. I accept that illusions exist and have causal powers, but that both their existence and their causal powers are due to subjective experience, not to objective reality. By the same token it is a relief to think that, although illusions, among which we must in fact account all of human emotion, are very vivid, they do not have a true reality, for the true reality is that which alone describes all of existence at the same time. Something is only partially true if it only explains a part of the universe. This is why scientists are so busy attempting to formulate a theory of everything, something which unifies all known and deduced phenomena in terms of mathematical functions. I do not think they will succeed, but we have come close enough already to know that there is a unity in all of existence. To see the divisions is easy, to see the unity is difficult, but as Spinoza said, 'All good things are as difficult as they are rare'.

 XXIII. A Spinozist's Creed. 

 

1. The universe is
Rationable only if rational,
Intelligible only if intelligent.

2. I believe there is no such thing as mortal will,
Only the sense of being satisfied or disatisfied
With one's actions;
All is but a form of happening,
And the distinctions of life and death,
Animal or mineral,
By this standard lose their identities,
Or rather, return to their true and fullest identity
As parts of a whole, divine and sublime.
Change happens like ink fallen into water
That shapes and permeates its colours
Through the substance already there,
Not summoning out of nowhere
An alien element,
But modifying only
Through all eternity
Infinite possibility.

3. I take a human being to be a system of life,
I take life to be a system of chemistry,
I take chemistry to be a system of particles,
I take particles to be a system of fields,
I take fields to be a system of energy,
I take energy to be a system,
I take a system to be energy,
I take all equivalences to mean unity,
I take unity to mean harmony, accord,
I take harmony, accord, to mean perfection,
I take perfection to mean an utmost,
I take an utmost to be synonymic with unity,
I take the systems of all the systems to culminate in the utmost,
I take all the properties of all the systems
And apply them to the unity,
And find God.
For when I contemplate a firework,
The host of the most extraordinary chemical reactions,
Snow, frogs, fire, lightning, rain, and cathedrals,
And then again recall the particles,
And the systems
In the systems,
The Wheels within Wheels,
I am struck by the Variety of Unity
(It being commonly affirmed
That all biology is chemistry
And all chemistry is physics),
The complex array of singular Substance,
The Arrangements or configurations or systematised ways
Of the singular,
So extraordinary that the illusion of Plurality begins
From one small point noticing others,
I am dumbstruck,
Not to say inspired,
And culminating all in all is All,
The Almighty,
Not a petty king or a squalid miser
But a Universe,
A God indeed,
A God in fact,
Not a man but more like a man than a rock,
For a rock is but a subordinate man
And a man is a higher chieftain rock,
So God is a higher chieftain man,
Not a man but a man better likened,
Not two arms, two legs, one head,
But infinite arms, legs, heads,
Presence, throughout infinity,
Across eternity,
Forming a Being most profound,
Most purposeful,
Extolling the Divine Self in all works.

4. Life indeed is an operative word
And an operative thing,
So that by this designation
It is shown that all is alive,
The very fibre of existence operates,
All things operate,
Some with more and some with less
Variety;
But of all that operates,
Of all that lives,
It is the total which is most various,
As infinite,
So it is the total which is most alive.
Energy, a term of manufacture,
Is designative of the motions,
But not of the meaning,
Of existence.

XXIV.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

XXV. THE soul is such a thing as is meant when a person known and named is lit, as a firework, in all his or her respective associations. Such things collectively generate a theme or an essence. Say the name of any acquaintance and immediately one will be conscious of a number of attributes as, for example, whether more commonly jolly or melancholy, whether more intellectual or athletic, whether more gregarious or introverted, and so on. The mind is so fast, and Thales contended 't was faster than light in traversing imaginatively and instantly the entire universe, that the theme or the essence of the person considered will generate and influence the subject's mind as completely as a body is influenced by diving into a lake. Of this elusive influence there is typically a conscious knowledge, and it is detected by the subject in the many intellectual and emotional effects it causes, like a strong scent filling and pervading a room. Quite as a scent it can be bottled in things like names, and released at their utterance. Such a thing is the soul, such a thing is an identity.

   Therefore, by changing the characteristics and so the associations of the theme or the essence, extreme alterations can occur. For example, there might be an acquaintance named Rose who is full of the joys of spring and an acquaintance named Harry who is not. Suppose however that Rose endures a terribly misfortunate year while Harry enjoys a happily fortunate one. Seeing each the next year it may so happen that they seem to have swapped souls with one other, that now Harry is full of the joys of spring while Rose is trapped in a continual winter. At such a point do we question whether we really are seeing the same person. This is something alike the paradox of the Ship of Theseus, or the real example of the Cutty Sark. Here we have the same names, the same appearances, but surely not the same things. Further, it is well known that every single part of the human body at many times in a typical lifecycle sheds, dies, and regenerates, every cell and fibre, which is a thing equivalent to all the planks of the Ship of Theseus being replaced by others. What is left of the original? What is preserved? Nothing at all! Nothing, that is, except the soul.

   I define the soul as a thing which is never seen, nor touched, nor known, except in its effects. Its existence is realised deductively. It can be preserved outside the vessels it inhabits and reproduced in the minds of other people. Therefore, the soul of Leonardo is looking at you through the eyes of Mona Lisa, and to read the plays of Shakespeare is also to read the soul of Shakespeare. Thereafter, in the mind of the observer of Leonardo and the reader of Shakespeare, a reproduction of their souls or essences is made in the memory. That is also what collectively comes to be termed the 'spirit of the age', when the most successful souls are reproduced in the largest quantity of minds, and make the deepest imprints on a place in a time. This is a very relevant subject in all matters but especially in religion, in nationhood, and in psychology, but I shall begin in reverse.

   It is a common saying that a nation is its people, and like many common things it is patently untrue. A nation is partly its people to be sure, but if all the people in England disappeared tomorrow would the nation disappear? Even when all the buildings remain, all the famous natural landmarks, all the books written of it in all the world's languages? Of course not, the nation physically would remain even without its people, and perhaps even without its geography it would spiritually remain in those things wherein it is preserved. There is for example a small piece of the United States of America on the moon in the form of its flag. Now this too may be applied to people. Their memory and their essence continue to live in that they continue to drive actions and to influence events. In what respect is this any less a life than the bodily one it succeeded? In the bodily life the spirit or the soul drove some limbs, a head, a brain, a stomach, and so forth. In the bodiless life it no longer drives such a vessel directly, but indirectly it is influencing the course of events forever. Never have I been less convinced than when I heard Christopher Hitchens say 'we are our bodies', in a blunt attempt at brute fact. The corpse is the body, it is not the soul. After death there is more representation of the soul in the memories of acquaintances, and in the works the body left behind, than in the corpse itself. Such is the multiplying nature of the spirit, it leaves its mark in all it meets.

   This is also why it can be said that a man has 'disappointed himself' or that he is not acting 'like the person he is'. Of course, without the concept of a soul these sayings are purest nonsense. A man must always be himself, no matter what he says or does. If he is in an angry mood, that is how he is, if he is in a friendly mood, that also is how he is. Again, the standard of beauty is a prolific spirit in the minds of the majority. Quasimodo, no matter how much he might tell himself he is handsome, would probably not find much confirmation from others of the supposition. Yet this too is all ethereal, as some utilitarians might suggest that beauty is but a tactic of persuasion in the cause of reproduction and that, to this extent, were Quasimodo to be extremely wealthy, or extremely intelligent, or socially powerful, it would be a thing identical with a supreme beauty of person; the effects proving the same. But much study is a weariness of the flesh; ultimately it is the soul of God that is the only true soul, which to limited perspective has the appearance of a divided nature. By this means I can fathom all the collisions of variable thinking, but without it I am left with the Heraclitus' world of continual flux, wherein nothing can be grasped whatsoever, and all the talk of the wisest men in all the ages and of all studies is but mistaken hearing; what truly is heard is one evil eternal and reverberant laugh. Ens realissimum.

 

XXVI. Things escape their categories, par exemple, a joke may be stupid and pleasant or a joke may be wise and pleasant. Therefore pleasantness and unpleasantness are not always to do with wisdom or stupidity. Consequently, it is not correct to say that something is either stupid or wise, or that it is either pleasant or unpleasant. It is a trivial point but it describes about nine tenths of human thought in debates. This is the same point which Bernard Williams so ably made against utilitarianism, that as a means of gauging reality it is absurdly simple. It is rather like attempting to describe The Flying Scotsman purely by whether it is going above or below fifty miles per hour. Modern scientific disregard, bolstered by the laziest of attempts at a philosophy, atheism, acts in much the same way. It says to its audience, 'God is such a complex idea it is unbelievable, and cannot describe the universe. I'll tell you what can though, the simplest of ideas imaginable: singularity: there. You can go to bed now'. Thank you professor, thank you.

XXVII.

FORLORN EFFORT AT A PLAY.

 

CAST.

I. Constance.

II. Edward.

III. George.

IV. The Baronet.

V. The Bishop of Bath and Wells.

VI. Elizabeth.

VII. Katherine.

VIII. Lord BLahblahblah.

IX. The vicar of St. Mary's Bathwick.

 

 

SETTING.

The height of the nineteenth century in Bath.

 

Two figures, a young lady of about twenty and a gentleman of a near age, walk in from the pouring rain into a spacious and opulent parlour, the lady escorted by the gentleman. The lady, of a remarkable beauty, carefully holds up her skirts on entering, and the gentleman, of a comparatively plain appearance, folds up the umbrella he had chivalrously held over his companion's head. There are heavy rain sounds reverberating in the scene.

Constance. This torrent is not what I imagined when I was invited to take the waters at Bath.

Edward. I hope the effect of these waters will not counteract the effect of the others.

Constance. I sometimes wonder if it is even possible that any liquid should have so many qualities credited to it as water? Why, I have but lately come from Buxton with little to show for it save a rattling cough and an outbreak of hives.

Edward. Oh my sweet! But Bath, you know, has been famed since Roman times for its curative powers. What is more, there is such a wealth of company here at this season that, if the waters do you no good, I am sure a game of backgammon, with perhaps the smallest glass of ruby port, will perform the remainder of the work.

Constance. It does my digestion no good whatsoever.

Edward. Little and often, as my grandmother would say.

(A servant walks in. Constance coughs.)

XXVII. Forgiveness is a good thing for humanity but depending on circumstances it might, at a particular time, be a bad thing for an individual. Particularly terrible people have no right to demand the forgiveness of a philosophical ideal they have themselves forsaken. Perhaps with much time and reflection it can occur, but a pretend forgiveness is no forgiveness.