The Complex Vision

assifications. As long as, in the brief summary which follows, I include the more obvious and more

to him. The general trend of my argument will not be in any serious way affected, as long as he admits t

they may be summarized as consisting of reason, self-consciousness, will, the aesthetic se

irreducible living entity which pours itself as a whole into every one of its various energizings. And though it pours itself as a whole into each one of these, and though each one of these contains the laten

behind it receives the colour and the form of only one of them. We can see the result of this from the tenacity-implying the pres

largely a matter of accident whether our reaction of the moment is coloured by reason or by will or by imagination or by taste. Immersed in the tide of experience, receiving shock after shock from alien and hostile forces, we struggle with

brace the ecstasy or fling ourselves upon the misery with a co-ordinated power. It is the little casual annoyances and reliefs of our normal days which are so hard to deal with in the spirit of philosophic art, because these little pleasure

butes may be proved by the history of philosophy itself. Individual philosophers have, over and over again, plu

re ignoble comfort, of such suppressions of the apex-thought, is however a personal matter. Those "invisible companions," or immortal children of the universe, who are implicitly

y are certainly assisted by the most insane and unbalanced plunges into mystery, of this and the other abnormal individual. The paradox may indeed be hazarded that the madder and more abnormal are the indi

recognition by the predominance of some one attribute, is yet, in his madness

ythmical every day, or rather the hidden rhythm of their being is revealed more clearly every day, by

remain our unique masters, the lower crowd of moderately sane and moderately well-balanced persons are of less value to

section, out of whose demonic discoveries-bizarre and fantastic though they may seem to the lower

ss of these debauches of specialized research. For the consummation of the complex vision is a meeting place of desperate and violent extremes; extremes, not watered down nor

o the recesses of his own identity; so that he may discover whether what he finds there agrees in substance-call it by what

primordial faith, we cannot pass. The phenomenon of human growth from infancy to maturity proves that it is possible for this self-consciousness-this power of saying "I am I"-to become clearer and more articulate from day to day. It seems as imposs

nsciousness. My existence as a self-conscious entity capable of thinking "I am I" is the basic assumption of all thought. And though it is possible for my thought to tu

llusion from a basis that is itself illusion. If I were not self-conscious there would be no centre or subs

rt, at any rate-I am bound to use, in estimating the important place or the unimportant place which reason itself should occupy. You cannot derogate from the value of reason

usion that the secret of life transcends and over-brims all rationality. But this very conclusion as to the

le to put reason aside in its searc

propositions but is none the less implied in both of them. For in the act of articulating to ourself the definite thought "I am I" we are using our will. The motive-force may be anything. We may for instance will an answer to the implied

onsciousness of an external universe which is, at one and the same time, included in the circle of the "I am I" and outside the circle. That is to say when we think the thought "I am I," we

ourselves implies, at one and the same time, the consciousness that we

contradiction of being at once the whole universe and something inside the univer

vague motive of alleviating the distress of disorder with the comfort of order. But, on the other hand, self-consciousness may play its part, reason may play its part and the will may play its part in the complete absence of any definite motive. There is such a thing-and this is the point I am anxious to make-as motiveless will. Certain thinkers have sought to eliminate the will altogether by substituting for it the direct impact or pressure of some motive o

the notable or troublesome thought "I am I." I may be sometimes so lost and absorbed in sensation that I quite forget this interesting fact. But it may easily happen at such times that I definitely experience the sensation of choice; of choice b

and to watch the struggle going on between two opposite motive-forces, quite

n. The opposite motives may be engaged in a struggle. But the field of the struggle is what we call the will. And it may even sometimes happen that the will inter

the will alone, just as it can energize through sensation alone. The will can, so to speak, stretch its muscles

t it is not "will in the abstract" which makes such a movement but the totality of the complex vision, though in this case

eathing, he uses his lungs or his throat. Around him, from the beginning, all manner of motives may flutter like birds on the wing. They may be completely different motives in the c

e will is a question which necess

nything it pleases. That at least is certain. For without some limitation, without something resistant to exert itself upon, the will

s freedom. The problem resolves itself, therefore, if once we grant the existence of the will, into the question of how much freedom the will has or

ominate the situation. The logical reason arrives step by step at the inevit

assume that the limitation of the will is not absolute but that within certain

as free. If the reason is justified in regarding the freedom of the will as an illusion, we are justified in denying the existence of the will altogether. For a will with only an illusion of freedom is n

edom to the sceptical reason by helping that same reason to retire into its

d "taste" at this moment in preference to "aesthetic sense," because I feel that this particular original activity of the complex vision has a wider field than is commonly supposed. I regard it, in fact, as including much more than the mere sense of beauty. I regard it as a direct

nteresting and the uninteresting, the significant and the insignificant, the suggestive and the meaningless, the arresting and the common

these into new forms of beauty, is a fact that considerably complicates the situation. And what art, the culminating c

is thing. A name is required for it that conveys a more creative implication than the word "taste," a word which has an irresponsible, arbitrary, and even flippant sound, and a more passionate, religious, and ecstatic implication than the word "aesthetic," a word which suggests something calc

ife. It springs from the original reservoirs of life. It has depths which no mental logic can sound; and it has horizons in the presence of which the mind stops baffled. When we use the term "the beautiful" to indicate the nature of what it reveals, we are easily misled; because in current superficial speech-and unless the word is used by a great artist-

s and distinction; it also reveals the grotesque, the bizarre, the outrageous, the indecent and the diabolic. If we prefer to use the term "beauty" in a sense so comprehensive and vast as to include both sides of

l its contradictions, considered as an aesthetic spectacle, will become "beautiful" to us. This is undoubtedly one form which the ae

r attention upon what in the narrow sense we call the beautiful or the distinguished or the lovely. But there is yet a third form the aesthetic sense may assume. Not only can it visualize the whole chaot

nd dreariness and devilishness in the universe is so unspeakable that any "beauty" which includes such things must be a tragic beauty. Not

etic energy. For there exists a primordial aspect of the aesthetic vision which is not concerned with the beautiful at a

ndest abyss. This humorous aspect of the system of things is just as primordial and intrinsic as what we call the "beautiful." The human soul is able to pour the whole stream of its complex vision through this fantastic casement. It knows h

ense. There is a "good" irony as well as a "wicked" irony. Humour can be found in alliance with the emotion of love as well as with the emotion of hate. Humour can be kind

not be denied or explained away. Directly we grow conscious of ourselves, directly we use reason or instinct or the aesthetic sense, we are aware of

us to indicate, in regard to emotion, how difficult it is to

all "being in love." Nor do I mean the calmer emotion which we call "affection." The passion of friendship, when friendship really becomes a passion, is nearer my meaning than any of these. And yet the emotion of love, conceived as one side of this eternal duality, is much more than the "passion of friendship"; because it is an emotion that can be felt

drama, it is still harder to define its opposite, its antagonist. I could name this by the name of "ha

d of dull and insensitive hostility, a kind of brutal malignity and callous aversion. Pe

tion of deliberate insensitiveness about it. The most concentrated and energetic opposite of love is not either hate or malic

work of art, an idea, a principle, a landscape, a theory, an inanimate group of things, could not be cont

as a living intensity which makes it less dull, less thick, less deliberately insensitive, less coldly hostile, t

eation and destruction. The dull, thick, insensitive callousness which we are conscious of in the opposite of love is

force. Such an active destructive force must necessarily, by reason of the passionat

what is in the way of further creation. Thus the true opposite of creation is not destruction, but the inert, heavy, th

shape and determine its total activity. The soul within us, that mysterious "something" which is the living and concrete "person" whose v

iving force, the creator of beauty, the discoverer of

love and hatred; or, as I prefer to say, without love and malice. Self-consciousness implies from the start what we call the universe; and the universe cannot appear upon the scene without exciting in us the em

is unthinkable. Such indifference could not last a moment without becoming either that faint hatred, which we call "boredom," or that faint love, which we call "interest." The contemplation of the universe with

philosophic effort. Behind every philosophy, if we have the love or the malice to seek for it, may be found the love or malice, or both of them, side by side, of the individual philosopher. That pure and unemotional desire for truth for its own sa

f-creative, half-interpretative act by which the complex personality seizes upon, plunges into, and moulds to its pur

t works upon. Intuition is entirely receptive and it receives the illumination offered to it at one single indrawing, at one breath. Imaginati

ing in its absence. One becomes aware at once that such a limited activity does not cover the field of man's complex vision. Som

We are not concerned here with the world-old discussion as to the "origin" of conscience. Conscience, from the

ulted in the particular differentiation of species which we now behold. What we are now assuming is that, in whatever way the differentiation of actual living organisms has come a

uch a vision, including the attribute which the human race has come to call "conscience" and which is, in reality, "the power of response" to the vision which we have named "immortal." When evolutionists retort to us that what we call personality is only a late and accidental phenomenon in the long process of evolution, our ans

xisted but masses of gaseous nebulae, our reply is that they have forgotten that invisible and shadowy projection

ic life succeeded one another in their historic creation. Evolutionists have to make their start somewhere, just as "personalists" have; and it is much more difficult for them to show how masses of utterly unconscious "neb

he remote planetary past, assume as their axiomatic "data" that soulless unconscious chemical elements possess "within them" the miraculous

consciousness of life." And we would further reply to the evolutionists that their initial assumption as to the objective existence, suspended in a vacuum, of masses of material chemistry is an assumption which

to evolve" to the primordial "nebula" and even prepared to allow it such obscure consciousness as is implied in the phrase "life-force" or "élan vital," it is startled and shocked to a suprem

is actual personality, with all the implications of that, that it cries out in protest. The average mind can swallow our contention that reason and will existed from the beginning because the average mind has been penetrated for centuries by

o be the "body" of some definite living soul seems almost humorous; and for such a living soul to possess the attribut

ear "absurd" to the average intelligence. The philosophy of the complex vision accepts the element of the "absurd" or of the "outrageous" or of the "fantastic" in

parently miraculous creation of "something" out of "nothing"; for the unfathomable creative power of personali

ot touch the essential problem at all. The essential problem from the point of view of the philosophy of the complex vision is not how "conscience," or why other attribute of the soul, got itself lodged in the human skull, or expressed, shall we say, through the human skull, but how it is th

o any sort of intelligibility or system. The average human mind which feels a shock of distrust and suspicion directly we suggest that the thing we name "conscience," defined as the power of response to the ideal vision, is an inalienable aspect of what we call "the soul" wher

But when, in one hold act of faith or of imagination, we project the content of our own individual soul into the circle of every other possible "soul," including the "souls" of such phenomenal vortices of matter as those from which historic evolution takes its start, this impossible g

nscience, to tease ourselves with the fabulous image of some prehistoric "cave-man" supposedly devoid of suc

leave our actual human experience completely behind. But the philosophy of the complex vision is an attempt to interpret the mystery of the universe in terms of nothing else than actual human experience. So we are not only permitted but compelled to put out of court this con

him a touch of insanity and a vein of anti-social aberration. But no human being, however abnorma

practise "reason-killing" or "intuition-killing" or "taste-killing." One may set out to hunt and try to kill any basic attribute of our complex vision; but the proof of the truth of our whole argument lies in the fact t

e what the precise and particular "command" of conscience may be in any

es. Only in its ultimate essence it cannot differ. Because, in its ultimate essence, the conscience of every individual is

litary individual called that thing "good" or that thing "evil" which all the rest of the world regarded in the opposite sense. Not only so; but it might even happen that the genius and persuasiveness of such a person might change into its direct opposite the moral valuation of the whole of humanity. In many quite ordinary cases

it let itself be swayed by the "community-morality" and it would experience the

"sensation." The impressions of the outward senses may be criticized. They may be corrected, modified, reduced to order, and supplemented by other considerations. Conclu

tely upon pain. We often embrace pain in an ecstasy of welcome. Nor is this fierce embracing of pain "motivated" by a deliberate desire to get pleasure out of pain. It seems in some strange way due to an attraction towards pain for its own sake-towards pain, as though pain wer

on destruction. But, whether dominant or not as a motive affecting the will, it remains that our experience of pleasure and pain is a basic experience of the complex vision. And this experience of sensation is not only a passive experience. The attribute of sensation has its active,

e pain; we are the pleasure. Our human identity seems merged, lost, annihilated. Our soul seems no longer our soul. It becomes the soul of the overpowering sensation. We ourselves at such moments become fiery molecules of pain, burning atoms of pleasure.

es itself into music. Such music is indeed itself a kind of ecstasy; but it is an ecstasy intellectualized and consciously creative. Pain is pres

easure or pain it renders impossible that supreme act of the complex vision by means

it does not become impersonal in that magical liberating sense in which the impersonal is an escape, bringing with it a

nce from them, with a proud gesture of contempt, and go down at the last with their complex vision unruffled and unimpaired. There is indeed a still deeper "final moment" than this; but it is so rare as to be out of the reach of average humanity. I refer to an

rom the objective world; but they are so penetrated and percolated, through and through, by the other basic activities of the soul, that it is extremely difficult to disentangle from our impressions of sight, of sound, of touch, of taste, and of smell, those i

ute of sensation we are indicating the fact that every sensation we experience carries with i

rsal tradition of language dignifies by the name of "instinct." This "instinct" is the porti

imary place in the panorama of life it is necessary to eliminate from the situation that silent witness which we call "the mind" or self-consciousness; that witness which from its invisible watch-tower looks forth upon th

tionary process, the driving-force of which is the power of instinct itself. Planets and plants, men and animals, are seen in this way to be all dominated by instinct; and i

as the galvanic battery which moves the world. Thus isolated from the other powers of the soul, this mysterious energy, this subterranean driving-force, has to bear the whole weight of ev

lfs of space and into the nethermost abysses of life. If it is dumb, its sile

, of many other attributes of the soul. Instinct may be defined as the pressure of obscure creative desire, drawn from the inscrutable recesses of the soul, malleable up to a certain point by reason and will, but beyond that

work, which in a superficial sense might be called unconscious, but which in a deeper sense is profoundly conscious. It seems as though, in great works of art, a certain superficial

e to play its proper rhythmic part in the musical synthesis of the complex vision. But although we cannot allow to instinct the all-absorbing part in the world-play which Bergson claims for it, it remains that

racts certain individual souls to certain particular natural elements, such as air, fire, sand, mould, rain, wind, water, and the like; a kind of remote atavistic reciprocity in us stretching out towards that particular element. It is by means of instinct that w

ind in instinct the ultimate solution. Instinct, as we give ourselves up to it, seems to carry us into the very nerves and tissues and veins and pulses of life. Its verdicts seem to reach us with an absolute and

over reason. With an irrationality, that seems at the same time terrible and beautiful, instinct moves straight to its goal. It follows its purpose with demonic tenacity, heedless of logic, co

f the apex-thought of man's whole concentrated being is able to dominate this thing. It may be detected lurking in the droop of the Sphinx's eyelids and in the cruel smile upon her mouth. But the answer given

ts, each one of which has a definite beginning and a definite end. As compared with imagination, intuition is passive and receptive; as compared with instinct it does not fumble and grope forward, steadily and tenaciously, among the roots of things; but it suspends itself, mirror-like, upon the surface of the unfathomable wate

eparate, isolated, distinct and detached. In the subject-matter of their revelations, too, intuition and instinct are very different. If the recesses of the soul be compared to a fortified castle, instinct is the active messenger of the place, continually issuing forth o

essions, acting and reacting as it fumbles among such impressions. Intuition seems to deal directly and absolutely with a

irresistible attraction. Intuition, on the contrary, uttering its revelation abruptly and with, so to speak, one sudden mysterious cry, may warn us of some dangerous quicksand or perilous jungle in such a stra

atural enemy whose approach they apprehend through some mysterious sense-impression beyond the analysis of

tuition reaching us from the hidden substratum of our being changes our whole perspective and gives to conscience itself a completely opposite bias. What these intermittent revelations of intuition certainly do achieve is the preservation in the

ence or endurance in the material which displays susceptibility, such as makes it possible for what the soul feels or what the soul creates to

use or natural ground of memory. Memory is the "passive-active" power by means of which the con

e attribute of emotion differs from the rest in the sense that it is the living substantial unity or ultimate synthesis in which they all move. It is indeed more than

ive universe of the intrinsic "stuff" or psycho-material "substance" of which the substratum of the soul is actually composed. The other aspects of the soul are, so to speak, the various "tongues" of diversely coloured flame with which the soul pierc

he soul possesses of encouraging or suppressing, re-vivifying or letting fade, all the other attributes of th

that of malice. It can encourage the emotion of malice and suppress that of love. And finally it can use its ene

tiated clearly enough in their separate energizing, must never be regarded as absolutely separate "faculties," but rather as relatively separated "aspects." Behind all of them and under all of them is the comp

on of all these. It is much more than this. It is more than a mere formal focussin

t or a planet or a god. It may be the vision of entities undreamed of and of existences inconceivable. It may be the vision, for example, of some strange "soul of s

velation that where there is any form of "matter," however attenuated, such "matter" is the outward expression of