Part 7
“There are quagmires and skeletons in the forest. I have discovered and admired the ruined gods under the still living and wonderful vegetation: their spirit has evaporated. The odour of Christ has little charm for me; I prefer that of Buddha. What I adore in him is the fundamental contradiction that seeks to assure us of our immortality by proving our inevitable annihilation. He taught, in the same breath, the illusion of the Ego and its periodical reincarnation, an obvious absurdity which implies a knowledge of the profoundest truth, of the very nature of being, at the same time and alternately collective and individual. This discovery, which he did not formulate, should have led him elsewhere than to Nirvana, that paradise of unripe fruits....
“Man is so fashioned as to perceive only one half of the universe; and the mind of ordinary texture sees barely a hemisphere of truth. Afflicted with a congenital ‘nervous headache,’ humanity thinks with only one half of its brain, with the eastern lobe or the western, the ancient or the modern; its mind nibbles its own tail; the antinomies pursue one another in an endless circle, which Kant believed that he had discovered, but which Buddha had striven to open. He possessed the complementary virtues; he was religious and rational; while he summed up within himself the mysticism of the east, his was the most scientific of the minds of antiquity, at a time when science did not exist but was merged in philosophy. The moderns who have sought to condense into a system the collective and hardly initiated effort of science have pitiably failed, for they have thought only as westerners, entangled in the contradiction of idealistic aspirations and materialistic arguments, whereas Buddha’s formula might still and almost without breaking down contain this gigantic effort and yet not hamper it. From the death of the prince-philosopher, down to the flights of contemporary science, true thought has not advanced one step; Arab or Christian spiritualism and its reagent, positivist or scientific materialism, are recoils in contrary directions, false monisms which, taking the extreme for the supreme, seek to fix the centre of gravity on the circumference of the wheel. The explorers of the Beyond must set out from the cross-roads of religious synthesis and scientific analysis and drag these rival sisters by the hand.
“Truth shines at the centre of a circle of onlookers and we must pass through its flame to recognize a brother in the adversary opposite. We must reach the centre of space to discern the identity of its cardinal points: ‘_Totum et Nihil, Alter et Ego_.’ The longing to convert others must yield to the need of completing and balancing our own point of view. In the sacred forest, which pioneers have penetrated on all sides and in all ages, the more greatly daring must necessarily draw nearer one to the other. Even if they cannot meet, they can hear one another and give one another mutual encouragement. The most modest cry of discovery may be welcome in the solitude and silence in which the truth of the future is ripening....”
2
I thought it well to preserve this page. It sets forth, in a remarkable, though perhaps too rapid summary, two or three of the great problems which in reality are only one and to which, unless we give up everything, we are bound to attempt the answer: the problems of immortality or annihilation, of flux and reflux, of existence alternatively collective and individual, of exteriorization and interiorization, which make up the mighty cosmic rhythm whereof our life and death are but infinitesimal pulsations.
3
But let us begin by observing that the fundamental contradiction which seeks to assure us of our immortality by proving our inevitable annihilation is not to be found in Buddha and that it is not true to say that he teaches in the same breath the illusion of the Ego and its periodical reincarnation. The doctrine of reincarnation is not Buddha’s. He found it ready-made; it existed before him and was so deeply rooted in his people that he does not even dream of disputing it. From the exoteric point of view, he tries only to disarm it, to deprive it of its sting, to render it harmless. He tries to reduce life to the point where it can find nothing wherewith to reincarnate itself. According to the exoteric doctrine, which is but a preparation for esoteric truth, life is naught but suffering; and its only aim is the redemption or the extinction of suffering. This extinction is to be found in Nirvana, which is not annihilation but the absorption of the individual into the universe. Ordinary death, by reason of the perpetual reincarnation of the same individual, cannot suppress suffering. We must therefore find a sort of superdeath, which makes any reincarnation impossible; and this superdeath can be obtained only by the man who has been striving to die all his life long and who has deliberately cut off all the ties that bind him to existence: all love, all hope, all desire, all possession. When, at the end of this systematic and voluntary superdeath, the actual death arrives, it will no longer find a living germ capable of achieving reincarnation. This superdeath, thus obtained, will precede by many centuries or millenaries purification, final redemption and the absorption into the absolute One.
It has been said that this is exactly the reverse of the doctrine of Christ. With Buddha, life is only the gate of death; with Christ, death is the gate of life. In reality, it is the same thing and everything ends by the absorption into the divine, for the doctrine of Christ is nothing more than a mutilated branch of the great trunk of the mother religion.
Here we have the solution offered to us by the most wonderful mind, the greatest sage that humanity has ever known; by one who knew things which we no longer know and which, it may be, we shall never recover. It is the foundation of the religion of five hundred millions of men. There is nothing nearer to the ultimate truth.
4
Let us observe, however, that the problem of immortality or annihilation ought not to be set in these terms, since the word annihilation cannot be employed, save in a metaphorical sense, to denote a life which we no longer comprehend, seeing that Nihil or nothingness is the one thing whose existence is utterly impossible and whose non-existence is absolutely certain.
As for immortality, here again there is ambiguity, for, as annihilation cannot exist, immortality is inevitable; and the only question that remains to be solved is whether this immortality will or will not be accompanied by some sort of continuance of our present consciousness.
But, while it is probable that the problem of immortality, more or less accompanied by consciousness, will long remain in suspense, the answer to the problem of the “nervous headache,” or rather of congenital hemiphlegia, is doubtless easier to find. In any case, it occupies a domain which our direct investigations are able to explore. It is, after all, an historical and geographical question. It seems that there are in fact in the human brain an eastern lobe and a western lobe, which have never acted at the same time. The one produces, here, reason, science and consciousness; the other secretes, yonder, intuition, religion and subconsciousness. One reflects only the infinite and the unknowable; the other is interested only in what it is able to delimit, in what it may hope to understand. They represent, employing a perhaps imaginary image, the conflict between the material and the moral ideal of humanity. They have more than once endeavoured to penetrate each other, to mingle and to work in concert; but the western lobe, at least over the most active part of the world, has hitherto paralysed and almost annihilated the efforts of the other. We are indebted to it for extraordinary progress in all the material sciences, but also for such catastrophes as those which we are undergoing to-day, catastrophes which, if we are not careful, will not be the last nor the worst. The time would seem to have come to awaken the paralysed lobe; but we have neglected it so greatly that we no longer quite know what it is capable of doing.
HOPE AND DESPAIR
XIII
HOPE AND DESPAIR
1
The same soldier, who has become my war-time “god-child,” writes to me again:
“I experience an ineffable delight in remaining the average man and in professing emptiness. I felt a great peace descend within me on the day when I resigned myself to the common lot, in other words, to ignorance and death. I have found life by renouncing it and, now that I am no longer anything, I feel rich indeed. Do not tempt me in the direction of that subtle spiritual vanity which constitutes one of the most formidable obstacles to the final liberation from self. Proud I certainly was and I am still only too much so; but we cannot extract virtues otherwise than from our vices. More ardently than when I embraced the phantom of individual superiority, I stretch my arms towards homogeneous equality, towards the fullness of vacancy....”
2
He is right; but he is thinking, here, with the eastern lobe of his brain, the Asiatic lobe; and the philosophy of this lobe counsels only inaction and renunciation, the “enchantment of the disenchanted,” as Renan used to say, or rather the satisfaction of despair. Certainly all we that see, all that we feel and all that we know pledges us to this despair, which our meditations--above all, those of this same Asiatic lobe--may, for that matter, render very spacious and as beautiful, almost as habitable, as hope. But what do we know, as compared with what we do not know? We are ignorant of all that goes before and of all that comes after us, in a word, of the whole universe. Our despair, which appears at first the last word and the last effort of wisdom, is therefore based upon what we know, which is nothing, whereas the hope of those whom we believe to be less wise can be based upon what we do not know, which is everything.
Moreover, if we would be quite just, there is more than one reason for hoping which we will not recall here; let us confess therefore that in this nothing which we know there exists naught but despair and that hope can lie only in that everything which we do not know. But, instead of listening only to our eastern lobe, which counsels us to accept this inactive ignorance and to bury our lives therein, is it not more reasonable at the same time to set our western lobe to work, the lobe which seeks to discover that everything? It is possible that here too, when all is said, it will find despair; but it is unlikely, for we cannot imagine a world which would be merely an act of despair. Now, if the world is not an act of despair, nothing that exists in it has reason to despair. In any case and in the meanwhile, this search will doubtless permit us to hope as long as the world exists.
3
One of the most dangerous temptations that assail him who scrutinizes nature and who sees, as he advances in his enquiries, that her mysteries become more and more numerous, reaching forth unendingly in every direction, is the temptation to grow discouraged by the impossible task and to abandon it. He drops his weapons. On the last slope of life particularly, he is too much inclined to resign himself, to go no farther forward, to make no further effort, to fall into a humour of saying, “What is the good?” and to drop asleep and learn nothing more, since he has learnt that he will never know anything.
He is already sensible of this wish to surrender at discretion when he considers the humblest, the lowliest of the sciences. What will it be when he attempts to embrace them all? The mind goes astray, becomes dizzy, asks to close its eyes. It must not close them. That would be the basest treachery that man could commit. We have no other thing to do in this life of ours than to seek to know where we are. We find no other reason for our existence; we have no other duty. Not to know is merely vexatious; no longer to seek to know is the supreme, the irremediable misfortune, the unpardonable desertion.
4
Yet, without renouncing, it is not well that we should feed ourselves upon too petty illusions. We should always keep before our eyes certain verities which put us in our place. There is no doubt that we shall never know everything; and so long as we do not know everything we shall be just as though we knew nothing. It is extremely possible, as the Rig-Veda suggests, that God Himself, or the first cause, does not know everything. It is equally possible that the universe has not yet, in any of its parts, become conscious of itself; that it knows not whence it came nor whither it is going, what it was nor what it will be, what it has accomplished nor what it is seeking to accomplish; and, on the other hand, it is probable that, if it has not yet learnt these things, it will never learn them, seeing that, as I have already said, there is no reason why it should be able, in the infinity of time which will come after us, to do what it has not been able to do in the infinity of time which went before.
5
If there be a consciousness of the universe, a God, He knows all that He should know, or He will never know it. And, if He knows it, why has He done what He has done, which cannot lead to anything, seeing that He might already have led us where we ought to go? Why did He not prefer nothingness, or at least that which we call nothingness, the only form of lasting happiness, immovable, incontestable and comprehensible?
We could understand, if need were, an immobile, immutable, eternal universe, a finished universe; but we cannot understand a universe in movement, or one, at least, of which all the parts that we see are incessantly in movement, evolving through space and time, a universe hurling itself at a dizzy rate of speed towards an end which it will never attain, since it has not yet attained it.
We may say, to console ourselves, that all despair comes only from the limited nature of our purview; but it is fair to add that our purview limits all hope in the same way.
MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM
XIV
MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM
1
The biologists tell us that the human embryo repeats, very rapidly during the early months of its development and more slowly during the later months, all the forms of life which preceded man upon this earth.
The round speck which is the germ becomes a hollow sphere, a sort of sac with a double wall, which is known as the gastrula and whose orifice of invagination, when it closes, receives the name of the blastopore. This is protozoic life, the as yet gelatinous beginning of animal life, and is followed, after transformations that would take too long to enumerate, by polypoid life.
Next, on either side of the head, appear the branchial arches, corresponding with the gills of the fish. At the end of the first month, the limbs are still no more than mere buds; on the other hand, the embryo is provided with a tail, which, folded against the body, nearly touches the forehead. It now has the appearance of a tadpole and lives a life which is wholly aquatic, bathed in the amniotic fluid which represents for it the water in which the embryos of fish and frogs move about freely.
It now becomes a matter of forming a resolution and knowing what to do with it. The embryo is almost in the situation occupied by life at the origin of the species; and nature, as though to humiliate man or to humiliate herself by remembering her mistakes and hesitations, returns to her gropings, her asymmetrics, her repentances, her unsuccessful experiments. Tentative forms, such as the dorsal cord, are reabsorbed; the primitive kidneys disappear, to make room for the final kidneys, which are enormous, filling the greater portion of the peritoneal cavity. Enormous too is the liver, which invades almost the whole of the visceral cavity; enormous the head, almost as large as the rest of the body; and in this enormous head the primitive ocular vesicles are formed, themselves enormous, as is the umbilical vesicle. This is the incoherent and monstrous period corresponding with the period of madness and gigantism when nature, as yet inexperienced, was blindly sketching uncertain creatures, formidable, unbalanced and anomalous, birds, crocodiles, elephants and fish in one, as though she had not as yet decided what to do, not yet completed her classifications, disentangled her laws, or acquired the sense of proportion, of balance, or of conditions essential to the maintenance of the life which she was creating.
2
This, roughly speaking, is the recapitulation which occurs before our eyes, but of which, no doubt, many incidents escape us or do not sufficiently attract our attention, for it is possible that they reproduce types with which we are not acquainted and which have not even left geological traces, seeing that the number of species which have disappeared is infinitely greater than that of the species which we know.
Dr. Hélan Jaworski may therefore very justly assert that the embryonic period corresponds with the geological period. And, even as, in the great terrestrial evolution, we observe the gradual disappearance of the armour-plated fishes, the monstrous reptiles and the gigantic mammals, so, in the minor embryonic evolution, we see the primitive kidney, the dorsal cord and the umbilical vesicle dissolve, while the liver diminishes and the disproportion between the head and the rest of the body is lessened. In a word, nature is learning wisdom, recognizing her errors, profiting by her experience, doing her best to repair her blunders and acquiring a sense of equilibrium, economy and form.
Dr. Jaworski finds other analogies between the geological period corresponding with man’s appearance upon earth and the birth of the child, analogies which are ingenious, but rather more hazardous. Birth is in fact preceded by a miniature deluge, caused by the tearing of the foetal envelopes, which allow the amniotic fluid to escape. Then the child, at the moment of entering into life, suddenly experiences a sort of glacial period; it passes, in fact, from an environment with a temperature of over 98° to the outer air, which is barely 60° or 65°. The sense of cold is so terrible that it wrests a first cry of suffering from the new-born child.
3
What is the meaning of this strange recapitulation?
Dr. Jaworski thinks that, if the brief process of embryonic evolution which prepares the way for the birth of man repeats the great process of terrestrial evolution, this latter, on its side, might well be but a vast embryonic period that is preparing for a birth which we cannot as yet imagine. I do not know whether he will succeed in maintaining this stupendous theory. If he does, he will really have made us, as he promises to do, “take a step towards the essence of things.” Meanwhile, thanks to his preparatory studies, he will always have made us take another and a very useful step towards a truth which this time is incontestable, which, though less unexpected, has never been elucidated with so much patience and which is no less big with consequences.
4
Dr. Jaworski, then, undertakes to demonstrate that the human body unites in itself, in a plainly recognizable form, all the living creatures which now exist upon earth and which have existed since the origin of life. In other words, each creature sums up in itself all those which have preceded it; and man, the last-comer, contains within himself the whole biological tree, so much so that, if we could distribute his body, if we could segregate each of his organs and keep it alive in isolation, we should be able to reconstitute all existing forms, to repeople the earth with all the species which it has borne, from the primitive protoplasm to the synthesis, the final achievement, which is man.
We might perhaps go farther than Dr. Jaworski and declare, with the occultists of the east, that we likewise contain within us, in the germ or in a rough-hewn state, all the creatures and all the forms that will come after us. But here we should be leaving the domain of science proper to lose ourselves in a speculation which by its very nature is incapable of verification.
5
So it is not merely in a figurative sense, such as that foreshadowed by the current idiom, where it speaks of the vascular tree, the branches of nerves, or the ovarian cluster; it is not merely by analogy, but in a literal and strictly scientific sense that our heart, fundamentally, is nothing but a medusa and our kidneys sponges, that our intestines represent the polyps and our skeleton the polypites, that our reproductive organs are worms or molluscs, that the vertebral column and the spinal marrow take the place of the Echinodermata, while the Brachiopoda and the Ctenophora would be derived from our eye and the reptiles found in our digestive apparatus, the birds in our respiratory organs and so on.
I repeat, there is no question here of metaphors or of more or less approximate, elastic and plausible correspondences but of rigorously and meticulously established proofs.
I cannot, of course, set before you the details of Dr. Jaworski’s exegesis. It would not permit of the slightest solution of continuity and, in the three volumes published so far, it leads us to conclusions which are very difficult to contest. People used to assert, without attaching too much faith to what they said or scrutinizing it too closely, that man is a microcosm. It seems to be clearly proved to-day that this is not merely literally defensible, but scientifically accurate. We are a prehistoric colony, immense and innumerous, a living agglomeration of all that lives, has lived and probably will live upon earth. We are not only the sons or brothers of the worms, the reptiles, the fish, the frogs, the birds, the mammals and no matter what monsters have defiled or affrighted the surface of the globe: we bear them within us; our organs are no other than themselves; we nourish all their types; they are only awaiting an opportunity to escape from us, to reappear, to reconstitute themselves, to develop and to plunge us once again into terror. In this respect, quite as much as in respect of the secret thoughts, the vices and the phantoms with which we are filled, we might repeat the words which Emerson’s old man used to speak to his children, when they were frightened by a strange face in the dark passage:
“Children, you will never see anything worse than yourselves!”
If all the species were to disappear and only man remained, none would be lost and all might be reborn of his body, as though they were coming out of Noah’s ark, from the almost invisible protozoa down to the formidable antediluvian colossi which could lick the roofs of our houses.
It is therefore fairly probable that all these species take part in our existence, in, our instincts, in all our feelings, in all our thoughts; and here once more we are led back to the great religions of India, which foresaw all the truths that we are gradually discovering and which already, thousands of years ago, were telling us that man is everything and that he must recognize his essence in every living creature.
HEREDITY AND PREEXISTENCE
XV
HEREDITY AND PREEXISTENCE
1