CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE REAL AND THE ACTUAL

We have ancient wisdom speaking to us volubly and in beautiful figure in Plutarch's dissertation (Morals III, 573):

"All of which Plato endeavors to illustrate by a similitude of the chariot horses of the soul, the one whereof being more unruly, not only kicks and flings at him that is more gentle and tractable, but also thereby so troubles and disorders the driver himself, that he is forced sometimes to hold him hard in and sometimes again to give him his head,

'Lest from his hands the purple reins should slip,' as Simonides speaks."

And a sanity all too wanting in philosophies bent to crush the "lower" passions in the fell rush to take the kingdom of heaven by storm, is found in Plutarch's Morals (Vol. III, 490), the sober good sense of which is recommended to all cults preaching the spiritual aim of religion, in disparagement of the physical life.

"Of all which things man does in some measure participate . . . . For he is contained by habit and nourished by Nature; he makes use of reason and understanding; he wants not his share of the irrational soul; he has also in him a native source and inbred principle of the passions, not as adventitious but necessary to him [italics ours], which ought not therefore to be utterly rooted out, but only pruned and cultivated. For it is not the method and custom of reason . . . . to destroy and tear up all the passions and affections indifferently, good and bad, useful and hurtful together; but rather--like some kind and careful Deity who has a tender regard to the growth and improvement of fruit trees and plants--to cut away and clip off that which grows wild and rank, and to dress and manage the rest that it may serve for use and profit. For neither do they who fear any violent commotion of their passions go about utterly to destroy and eradicate, but rather wisely to temper and moderate them. And as they who use to break horses and oxen do not go about to take away their goings, or to render them unfit for labor and service, but only strive to cure them of their unluckiness and flinging by their heels, and to bring them to be patient of the bit and yoke, so as to become useful; after the same manner reason makes very good use of the passions after they are well subdued and made gentle, without either tearing in pieces or over-much weakening that part of the soul which was made to be obedient to her. But much more useful than these in their several kinds are the whole brood of passions, when they become attendants to reason,

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and when, being assistant and obedient to virtue, they give life and vigor to it."

Here is wisdom which, all things seem to warrant the saying, Greece possessed and India lacked. Greece saw the beneficent use of the lower nature in its relation to the higher; India could only think of crushing down and extinguishing the life of the senses and even of the mind. As far as the outward expression of the two philosophies goes, Plutarch's lucid illustration of the function of the passional nature stands as direct contradiction of the major body of Hindu yoga doctrine.

In another passage (Morals III, 91) Plutarch elucidates how God uses the body of man to make himself known both to others and to himself. Each higher principle of the cosmic consciousness, he says, employs a lower essence as its instrument, and through the lower power, though it limits and compresses the diviner potential, brings its hidden capacities to view. His statement is notable and of such majestic dignity as to be worthy of citation:

"It is true, whilst man, in that little part of him, his soul, lies struggling and scattered in the vast womb of the universe, he is an obscure and unknown being; but, when once he gets hither into this world and puts a body on, he grows illustrious and from an obscure becomes a conspicuous being; from a hidden an apparent one . . . . For the birth or generation of individuals gives not any being to them which they had not before, but brings that individual into view."

In our humble view it seems time that wisdom such as this should, like the obscure being of man which it descants upon, be brought from dark recesses of ancient sapiency out into the view of modern man. For here is wisdom that would resolve a thousand points of confusion in modern thought and rebuke a thousand cult teachings of warped truth which in the folly of ignorance turn the mind to enmity against the world of life.

Here can be caught a deeper meaning to the commonplace sense of the doctrine of manifestation in theology. The physical worlds are in reality God himself in manifestation, bringing his hidden nature forth to view both to himself and those of his creatures on the scene. Plutarch says that the sun, taken to be Apollo, was called Delius (conspicuous) and Pythius (known) because it was in open view of all. But the ruler of the lower invisible kingdom was

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called Hades (invisible). The basic fact underlying all philosophy is the knowledge that the great life of the universe alternately brings itself from the state of non-existence or unmanifestation out to existence and becoming. All negation attaches to the first state, and all positive being to the second. It is to be assumed that each condition is most delightful to the conscious mind operating the cycles of its life as the one succeeds the other. But it would certainly stand approved by reason that a philosophy which puts all rich positive value in the cycle of non-existence, decrying and denying all value to existence, is unbalanced and illogical, or worse. If it be submitted to the naive common judgment of all thinking people, the decision must be that something is better than nothing, that existence is better than non-existence. Life must enhance itself by its own positive attitudes; it can not advance on negation. India comes perilously close to affirming in her philosophy that Hamlet's question, to be or not to be, is best answered in the negative. Existence has no rewards sufficiently compensatory for its strains and ills. Life is best crushed before it begins.

It is true the Greeks associated the idea and the very term of "death" with the life in the body. They even defined matter as "privation." Spirit was accorded the highest rank in the order of value; matter was the essence of non-being. Yet the utterly real being arose, they held, from the alternate rotation and the commingling of the two, never inhered in the one alone, in detachment from the other.

There is a subtle, yet very definite difference between the words real and actual. They are in general usage taken pretty much as synonyms. In philosophical parlance, however, there subsists a distinction that should be clearly apprehended for the better understanding of basic problems. It can be assumed that all being is real, whether it is inactive in the non-manifest arc of its cycles, or active and conscious in the manifest arc; just as man is real whether he be asleep or awake. So the cycles introduce no distinction in the status of being as to its reality or non-reality. But they do introduce a distinction between the reality of being and its actuality. As sharply as man can analyze this distinction, the cycles of manifestation precipitate the conscious essence of being from a condition of sheer potentiality out into a condition of self-conscious actualization of its unborn potential. Manifestation, as Plutarch

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says, does not add to being anything that it lacked before; it only made its unknown reality actual to itself. Actuality, it was noted, is the key word in the luminous passage earlier quoted from Plotinus. Souls, he said, could not know what their prospective possessions of faculty were until they were actualized in the objective, the self-conscious, form of reality, inferring that they would have remained unknown if retained forever in the purely subjective state of reality. Only the objectified reality is the actually real, it might be put. There are infinite grades of reality in the cosmos; only the tiny segment of that infinite gamut of which the creature can be self-conscious can be said to be his reality, only the part that he has actualized. Infinite reaches of higher reality stretch beyond him, which he has not yet actualized. To him only that is real which he has actualized, made himself conscious of and acquainted with.

Hindus gave supreme reality only to the subjective potential, and denied it to the objective actual. The resolution of endless debate in philosophy could have been achieved if this distinction had been clearly accentuated in the past. The worlds and the divine life manifesting in them oscillate forever between the two ends of the gamut lying between the positive state and privation. Also, what seems indicated and has not been brought out in the exposition, is that each swing of the pendulum from positive to negative state, from active to inert, likewise changes the polarity in the sense that to whatever consciousness life possesses in each arc, that grade would seem to be the positive and its opposite the negative. This would make it possible to say that to heavenly inhabitants their sort of consciousness would seem to be real and earth consciousness a want of reality. But to us on earth this experience seems real and we think that death will abolish its reality.

What the great Aristotle contributed to this clarification is too charged with clear understanding to be passed over. His analysis starts from the consideration of change in the living order of the universe. Nothing remains what it now is; all things are in process of change or transition from what they are to something else. On this observation has been based largely the accusation of the idealist and monistic schools in philosophy that all things here are unreal, and that reality is to be found only in the states of consciousness assumed to have play in the unmanifest cycles, where change is frozen to immobility in static inertia.

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But Aristotle resolves this too simple analysis with more recondite particularity. Says he, change passes always from one state to another under definite ordained procedures, and it is the entire structure pattern drawn out by the total sweep of the movement of change that constitutes the reality, which is not to be found in any one static moment of the process. The oak sapling is not what the giant tree will be; the boy is not what he will be as a man. The full revelation of what each created thing will be only comes to view in the final stages of growth in the cycle or cycles. Life reveals itself in the cycle's end, or only then in complete fulness. The Greek word for end being telos, he named his theory entelechy, the idea that the end stage actualizes the potential implicit in the beginning. Change, he says, passes always to or from a climax, it is either anabolic or katabolic, growth or decay. A potential thing is realized at its climax, becomes fully entitled to the designation of real, when it becomes actualized in its consummation of growth. It may be, in one sense, real when it is yet only potential; but it is not actually real until it has brought out all its inner life to fruitage. At stages of advance toward its entelechy it is actual as far as it has gone, but still only potential in the ground it has yet to traverse. Its actuality is always a mixture of hule (hyle), substance, and an intellectually preconceived form in the ideal or noumenal world. The two ingredients in the mixture are matter, which holds the potentiality, and form, which, when manifested in the concrete, is the actuality which comes to view in the entelechy. The two are purely relative to each other, and can have no existence apart from each other. When their polarized relation is dissolved (and Indian philosophy insistently urges its dissolution), the being that was coming to its entelechy ceases its becoming and relapses back into sheer be-ness, retaining only its potentiality for later becoming. Aristotle in his De Generatione et Corruptione (Concerning Generation and Decay) says: "Although there is a matter of the perceptible bodies, a matter of which the so-called 'elements' come to be, it has no separate existence, but is always bound up with a contrariety." Those who deny the existence or reality of matter are denying to God's creative ideas and purposes the opportunity and the reality of their actualization in the worlds.

The mystics who presume to eliminate time and evolution from their interpretative scheme, are undermining the conditions

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necessary for the realization of the entelechy, and would by obviating these "limitations" on the free spirit lift consciousness in one ecstatic leap into the realm of unconditioned being. This is folly, for they do not realize that, as has been said, "time is the moving image of eternity." If philosophy is so avid to postulate the experience of climactic exaltations and apotheosizations without giving the process time to unfold the pattern of the forms, it puts itself arbitrarily and artificially out of harmony with the ordained processes of universal life. Such philosophy answers no questions about the meaning of life; it declares life evil and counsels escape from it.

Nature, so lavishly reviled by idealistic theory, could be looked upon with something more than mere poetic appreciations of its beauty, if Aristotle's enlightened view of it was generally reflected upon. The world of nature, he says, is that realm of existence in which we have for the first time form and matter mixed. It is the first scene on which the idea-forms of the creation appear to a sensible creature.

As nature is a composite of matter-potential and ideal reality in life's first and hence rudimentary conjunction of the two, nature, as manifesting matter more conspicuously than the mind-forms hidden in it, came through dearth of profounder understanding, under the condemnation of religious ideology. Matter became the devil, the evil genius of the world, and has had to bear the brunt of religion's eternal obloquy and vilification for centuries. Canon Farrar, in his Lives of the Fathers (Vol. II, 217) gives so lucid and graphic a picture of this attitude that it is well to hear it:

"The causes that led to asceticism were manifold; but the deepest cause which, heretical as it is, exercised a strong, though half-unconscious, influence over many Christians in the early centuries was the Zoroastrian, Dualistic, Manichean and Gnostic conception of the inherent corruption and malignancy of matter. The body, which the gift of the Indwelling Spirit had elevated into a temple of the Holy Ghost, was regarded as a polluting tomb. It was treated as the source of all evils; and because it is a duty to subdue the appetites of the flesh, it was most erroneously regarded as meritorious to crush the body in which they originate."

Here is the declaration of one of the great modern lights of the Church that it is a great error to crush the body, which he also declares to be the temple of the soul, following the Christian founder, St. Paul. If he is right in his statement, then Christianity for a long

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ten centuries acted out an erroneous policy, since the crushing of the body was a dominant motive of its activity from about the fifth to the fifteenth century. The long and tragic story of this impulse to crucify the flesh, a hallucination which under false austerities ground down both the souls and bodies of millions of Christians, has never been written in all its glaring luridness. It is quite closely allied with the mysticism here discussed, as regimes of self-denial were instituted with the idea of profiting by Porphyry's expressive phrase, "to cause the body to sit as lightly as possible about the soul." Fasting in particular was practiced to render the nervous system and the psychic faculties more sensitive to the conditions which would bring spiritual visions and phenomena of occult character. The Essenes in their monastic colonies in the Jordan Valley and Syria were perhaps the most amazingly successful practitioners of these ascetic measures in the religious field.

Stanley Romaine Hopper (The Crisis of Faith, 107) speaks of a mysticism which turned the spirit inward upon its own impotence. What else could the spirit find within itself, if it had once torn out of its inner citadel all the contents of the feelings and the mind from which it might have drawn support and strength? A doctrine that urges it to invite or entice downward into its cognizance the divine apocalypse by first denuding itself of all its incentives to growth through knowledge of the creation which it can acquire only from the world, must be adjudged an illogical teaching. Hopper goes on to arraign this age-old self-deification, which he says results from the withdrawal of the self from the objective world, in the fatuous attempt of the meditator to elevate himself to super-human estate, in which the self is lost in the pursuit of beatific goals predicated upon the insatiable longing of the self for the infinite.

Commenting upon Amiel's reference to mystical afflations as "this bedazzlement with the infinite," Hopper agrees with him that it is a snare and a delusion. And Friedrich Schlegel (The Philosophy of Life, 40) says that "the Henosis of Plotinus intoxicates me like a philtre," until, as Hopper adds, "extinction overtakes him and the colored air-bubble has burst in the infinite space and the misery of thought has sunk to rest in the changeless repose of an all-embracing nothing." Hopper speaks of the mystical practices as tending to induce narcissism. The spirit of man, he says, may relate itself either to existences outside itself and depersonalize itself as it identi-

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fies itself with its object; or it may also be possible to relate itself to objects no less real for being reified in the imagination, created by subjective fantasy, which have neither tangibility nor substance, and are pure figments of the mind. An incalculable quantity of the objects of religious devotion are undoubtedly of this sort. It should in every sphere of man's life be his object to hitch his mind to reality. Religion has gone so far in the contrary direction as to tie the mind to an infinite variety of bogies and chimeras.

The French Pascal speaks in most uncompromising terms upon the false premises of mysticism (in Pensees, 464): "All philosophers have said in vain, 'Retire within yourselves, you will find your god there.' We do not believe them, and those who believe them are the most empty and the most foolish." And again (Pensees 430): "It is in vain, O men, that you seek within yourselves the remedy for your ills. All your light can only reach the knowledge that not in yourselves will you find truth or good." This, however, needs the qualification that man will find truth, light, knowledge and overshadowing peace within himself (how could he get these outside himself?) when through continuing experience he brings out the potential within himself, not by casting out the fruits of his mundane living, but by relating his innate divine genius properly with the forms of truth impinging upon his life from the external world.

Canon Farrar's work, Lives of the Fathers, goes into elaborate detail to narrate the fantastic extravagances of subjective visionings, entrancings, alleged visitations of the spirits of ancient dead, and volumes of the same abound in the mystical literature of Christianity, from Augustine and Martin down to the present. The scientific secular psychopathic approach to the investigation of such phenomena today divests this chapter of religious abnormality of most of its unctuous spiritual glamor and reduces its authority as a credential of divine influence drastically. The hallowed saints as well narrate assaults upon them by demons and devils as visitations by angels. Much of early mystical afflatus was generated by gazing in rigid concentration on the bones of earlier Christian saints, in the fashion of Hindus staring at their navel. So that the Emperor Julian was constrained to dub the Roman Christians "Bone Worshippers."

There is little profit in pursuing this line further, but as a true

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historical demonstration of the lengths of unbalance to which the religious abhorrence of matter and the flesh can carry humans, the following passage from Farrar's "Fathers" is worthy of notice:

"A strong glimpse of the irregularities of the fourth century may be derived from the enchantments of the Council of Gangra. The date of this Council is uncertain, but it was probably held about 379 A. D., and was intended to check the errors and extravagances of the followers of Eustathius of Sebaste. We learn from its canons that there were some who not only blamed marriage, but said that a woman living with her husband cannot be saved; that others separated themselves from the communion of married priests and refused to partake of elements which they consecrated; that they embraced a life of virginity from horror of the married state; and that they insulted married persons. We also find anathemas against women who, under the pretence of religion, wore men's clothing, cut off their hair and forsook their children. These canons are undoubtedly genuine and are contained in the codes of the Greek and Latin Churches."

The length to which the story of such reactions under the influence of combined mysticism and asceticism has gone is close to incredible.

Beatrice M. Hinkle, in her fine work, The Integration of the Individual (449), speaking of psychoanalysis and its advantages over religion, in that religion gives the promise of felicity in a future life, while psychoanalysis offers not faith in a future, but self-knowledge by which the individual can steer his course most directly toward felicity here and now, by finding the transforming power within himself, does not fail to remind us that in using those very powers of the psyche which make possible our elevation to higher states of being, we can be most easily tricked and deceived "in this tragic play of hide and seek with ourselves." Mystic philosophy has reversed the true and fixed order of beneficent economy as between man and his world: it adjures man to turn away from the forms of the physical creation outside him as having no meaning or message, or a lying one, and to go within the unconditioned depths of his own consciousness to find truth and light. This reverses the true direction. He finds, as many of the psychologists are now saying, his inner world, in so far as he has not filled it with the truths reflected from their prototypal images in the external world, to be either an empty hall or peopled with some truths, some half-truths

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and numberless phantoms and fancies born of his unintelligence and spontaneous run of free imagination, not organized on any rational basis and unrelated to reality. This is no less than devastating to the psyche.

While Christian and Hindu asceticism, bred from the concept of this diabolical "malignancy of matter," went on for centuries stifling, mutilating the body, Greece brought that body to its highest point of strength and beauty. Greek philosophy well understood the limitations which the flesh imposed upon soul; indeed it referred to the body under the cryptic symbolism of the soul's prison-house, grave, tomb, as the Egyptians had called it the mummy-case and the bird-cage of the soul. The soul resided in the body in analogically the same conditions as a bird in its cage. In the body the soul lay, till awakened and resurrected, in "death."

Nevertheless the Greeks never understood the soul's imprisonment in body in the bald literal and realistic sense in which the Christians took it. Greek philosophical perspicacity saw through the recondite esotericism to the positive meaning behind it. The body might be poetized as a prison, a tomb; but competent sagacity discerned that it was at the same time the window which life had opened out upon the sunlight of reality. Prison it might be thought, but still it was known to be a whole miniature world in itself, a microcosm of the total world, a universe over which the infant deity implanted at its heart could have real practice in the exercise of sovereignty for the evolution of his kingship over all the elements. Death-house it might be called; but it was a mortuary whose doors would in the anastasis, or resurrection, open wide to let the imperishable "mummy," like Lazarus, arise and come forth in Easter radiance to life eternal. The body, lowly animal as it is, was still the faithful beast on whose back the divinity in man would ride up to and through the gates of the holy Jerusalem of celestial glory, with hosannas resounding through the skies. The erudite Greeks knew the mighty temptation soul had to undergo from the side of body; but they knew that without such wrestling with the seductions of the flesh, soul would waste away in inanition. No disastrous negativism or condemnation, therefore, motivated their attitude toward the body. With a balanced understanding dictating their posture toward it, they sought to impose upon it the exact measure and proportion of due restraint of its fierce lusts and passions, while

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developing to the full its magnificent mechanism of power and its natural charm.

Dean Milman, author of perhaps the finest History of Christianity (p. 26), pays the Greeks a high tribute, lauding their religion, which, he says, had so elevated the popular mind with salutary philosophy that it brought the human bodily development to its highest peak of perfection.

S. R. Hopper, already quoted, says that the lofty humanism of the Greeks

"attained a view of man that was sane, balanced and 'human.' This wholeness and health of the Greek perspective was grounded in wonder and in wisdom. The wonder of the modern world, said Chesterton, is that the wonder of the world has gone out of it."

Quoting Heraclitus' terse statement that "man is kindled and put out like a light in the nighttime," Hopper says that "with sure intuition the Greek mind turned to this element of permanence which forever transcends the flux, or founds it, and established there its wisdom." "For all human laws are fed by one thing, the divine," he had been assured by this same Heraclitus.

What John Addington Symonds says about the influence of the revival of study of the Greek classics upon the great Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth century in Europe will be enlightening to all modern readers.

"The study of Greek implied the birth of criticism, comparison, research. Systems based on ignorance and superstition were destined to give way before it. The study of Greek opened philosophical horizons far beyond the dream-world of the Churchmen and the monks; it stimulated the germs of science . . . . and indirectly led to the discovery of America. The study of Greek resuscitated a sense of the beautiful in art and literature. It subjected the creeds of Christianity, the language of the Gospels, the doctrines of St. Paul to analysis, and commenced a new era for Biblical inquiry . . . . Since the reawakening faith in human reason, reawakening belief in the dignity of man, the desire for beauty, the audacity and passion of the Renaissance received from Greek studies their strongest and most vital impulse."

These are words loaded with fateful challenge to a decadent world blindly now seeking a secure path through its darkness. It would seem that when a tribute of such splendid character and such benignant influence in world history can be accorded a nation of

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people, the philosophy which both expressed their greatness and made them great above other nations, should be closely studied by the world for its present behoof. Writers assure us that early Christianity would have died out in a generation if its fervors and fanatical zealotry had not been tempered and rationalized by the introduction of elements of the sage Greek philosophy, largely through that master of the Greek Mystery religions, St. Paul.

Some idea of that balance of philosophical acumen which saved the Greeks from sinking down, with India and with Christianity, to abject self-mortification under false conceptions of the body's "enmity" to soul may be gleaned from Fuller's analysis of Greek thought in the Introduction to his History of Philosophy. The Greeks aspired and longed to win the state of freedom and deathlessness enjoyed by the gods; but they entertained no overweening fatuous notions that they could magically overcome human mortality and rise to godhood by some simple contemplative broodings, and the mental denial of the reality of the life here. Referring to man, Fuller writes:

"For him to aspire to the blessed and deathless life of the gods was to seek to usurp the divine prerogative and was insolence of the worst sort. 'Seek not to become Zeus; mortal things befit a mortal.'"

Again the Greeks balance and sanity are shown in what follows this sentence. Fuller says he will in a moment have to refer to another voice in Greek religion that defies this admonition, by telling man that he is really divine and bidding him regain his Edenic status.

"But underlying the concept of Pindar's--the idea that nature has called each form of being to a particular station in which it must be contained, and has set upon it bounds which it must respect if it would not go wrong and meet with retribution--is dominant in Greek religious thought and fundamental in Greek ethics."

Here the Greek mind recognized that if there was to be order and harmony in the universe, each creature had to be held, though with freedom in its own allotted measure of self-initiated action, to its own assigned sphere, which formed one unit in a greater cosmic structure, the smooth working of the whole depending upon the steady action of each component element in its proper place and

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function. If, so to say, any unit along the line, in eager haste to reach the goal "toward which the whole creation moves," stepped out of its place and rushed in reckless impetuosity toward the head of the column, it was clear that chaos would be precipitated in the world order. The over-avid unit would not only disorder the whole progression, but would wreck itself in the mad endeavor. In the eternal balance of things a wise restraint even on the most laudable motives was as virtuous as the divine urge for the good life. What the Greeks sought always was that golden mean between the excess and the deficiency of any good quality. This is the stanchest principle of practical wisdom in the ethical code of mankind. So again it is to the intellect that resort must be had when it is a matter of deciding where lies that median point between too much and too little of any element in a problem.

Rated high among earth's coterie of greatest minds is the German poet-philosopher Goethe. He, too, and probably from Greek sources, had caught the sane view of man's allotment among the orders of created beings, and the necessity under which he labored to fulfil his evolutionary task assigned by Fate. And in a beautiful poetic expression he, too, warns against our striving and straining to "become Zeus" or assail the kingdom of heaven by violence.

There is enough to know about the earthly sphere;

The Beyond from sight forever is debarred!

A man's a fool to grope with blinking eyes,

Dreaming in clouds above his fellow men.

Let him stand firmly here and look around,

To the capable the world is never dumb!

Why must he ramble through eternity?

First let him gain and utilize the known!

Roam down the pathway of his earthly days;

When spirits haunt him, let him go his way,

Though at the moment still unsatisfied,

Find joy or torment striding to his goal!

And we have already heard Mr. Brunton speak in derogatory terms of those socially useless contemplatives, bent on reaching the bliss of Devanchan and the surcease of Nirvana "with blinking eyes, dreaming in clouds above their fellow men."

An odd but logical way of stating the ethical principle of the golden mean is given by the Jewish Medieval scholar Maimonides:

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"If there is any one who is, in regard to principle, in equal distance from two extremes in all his doings, he is called a wise man, a physician of the soul, because he restores her to health and keeps her in the right course."

The great "weighing in the balance," that equilibration of spirit and matter which ancient wisdom declared to be the necessary basis of all progression, is well substantiated by Fuller's exposition of the philosophy of Plotinus:

"The way of redemption is long and gradual. It may take aeons of incarnation to traverse it, and there are no short cuts in the long windings of its ascent. Sudden conversions, shortcuttings such as seemed to be promised by the Mystery Religions, irrelevant and premature ecstasies, reunions with the One in outbursts of irrational emotion, have no place in the system. In the end, to be sure, the soul will be wrapped away and united with the divine in an indescribable ecstasy; but she must first pledge herself for that last flight by a long and rigorous discipline, not only moral but intellectual. Without this long and careful training she would not be strong enough to attain the heights upon which redemption dwells, or to bear the splendors of the beatific vision these revealed to her."

When one reads the literature of nearly all the modern cults announcing and promising the rhapsodies of mystical communion and the consummate genius of seership as the reward of a proffered course of study covering a few months, one realizes how the venerable philosophy of the ancient initiates and semi-divine teachers has been traduced to banality. It has been travestied and caricatured into something matching the modern run of magical mechanical gadgets that substitute inventive ingenuity for real exertion. The rewards of steady devotion and achievement in the field of spiritual progress are hardly to be overlauded. But the cults present an unbalanced and an untrue picture of the possibilities in the case, deceiving their followers with the prospects of quick results, which can hardly come save in the course of many journeys of the soul through the incarnate valley.

Some of the more rabid schools of cult indoctrination simply ignore the time element altogether, promising climactic fulfilment and evolutionary consummation on the condition of sufficient intensity of resolute determination, alleged to be achievable at any instant the heroic will to its attainment can be mustered. This boldness springs from the presumption that a quantitative experience

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requiring longer time can be equated by a heightened qualitative one, almost eliminating the time element as a factor necessary for growth. It is a commonplace expression among devotees of yoga philosophy that one can hasten one's evolution. If this means that intensive effort, spurred by a fervent zeal for truth and light, and directed by sound intelligence, can lead one most directly, without undue wasting of time and opportunity, on to the steps ahead, it can be accepted as a rational proposition. But if, as it so generally does, it expresses the belief that a short period of practice of some prescribed run of meditations and yoga exercises will obviate the necessity of the full development of every occult potentiality and quickly elevate one to arhatship and Nirvanic consciousness, it is of all follies the most treacherous and baseless.

The wise admonition of Plotinus should be nailed on the walls of those cult temples to give their votaries a sobering sense of their vaunting presumptions in this mighty science of the spirit, which is infinitely more recondite and searching than they are ready to believe. Most of them essay to reach the loftiest heavens without offering the most elementary requirements on the intellectual side, which Plotinus, seconded by Aristotle and Spinoza in particular, affirms are indispensable. The legend has gained wide vogue that forces of consciousness asserted to transcend the intellect will achieve in a trice what the imperfect intellect could not arrive at in ages. Perhaps it could be agreed that of course the imperfect intellect could not achieve consummative spiritual states, certainly not as long as it is kept--imperfect. But the intellect can be perfected to high efficiency. And so the semi-hysterical prodding of the spirit goes on in these groups, with results that are really the proper subject of study in a psychiatric clinic.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

INTELLECTUAL LOVE OF GOD

Integrally related to the last excerpt quoted from Fuller's work is a further exposition of Plotinus' thought, which again dialectically relates the evolution of the soul to its mundane environment and experience. It is profoundly true and basic for understanding:

"Furthermore, man has a body and senses, and a sensible experience crowded with individual data, and it is through perception that he gets his first contacts with the external world and his first incentive to think. His intellectual processes are not self-initiating and self-supporting. Sensible experience pushes the button that sets the active parts of the intellect to work realizing the truth it potentially contains. This operation consists in abstracting their common and universal characteristics--in other words their forms."

This stands as one of the most concise and compact statements of how soul grows from its contact with the earthly realities in the midst of which it lives.

And an answer and rebuttal which Fuller supplies to the arrant claims that the intellect is not of prime utility in the redemptive process is quite noteworthy:

"If the will, then, were enlightened by an accurate knowledge of the true good, it would spontaneously, necessarily and freely prefer, choose and pursue it."

It has forever been contended that knowledge is not in any case a guarantee of virtuous conduct, that we continually do evil, knowing better. The alcoholic, for instance, knows full well he ought not to drink, yet continues to do so. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, we say. But it is to be noted what Fuller precisely says here: "if the will were enlightened by an accurate knowledge of the true good." One may have knowledge, but still lack the rich possession of an enlightened will. It is perhaps not so much true that the spirit is willing and the flesh weak, as that the spirit, that is, resolute will made dynamic by enlightened intelligence, is weak and the flesh willing. Nothing will stop the human soul that is truly enlightened and its spirit fired with resolution!

For this reason and under such condition, it may be conceded,

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perhaps, that mere intellectual knowledge may not galvanize the will into robust rulership of the desires, impulses and passions, and it is unreasonable to expect that mental acquaintance with a fact should work miracles of moral regeneration at one stroke. The experience which time brings is always the final educator of the will. It takes the play of all the four elements of consciousness in mutual interaction over sufficiently long periods to settle a moral gain securely in character.

But one thing is sure, and Fuller's comment is right: the will will not spontaneously or automatically choose and pursue the good until it has been enlightened by accurate knowledge. Or, more surely still, it will not pursue the good, either freely or under evolutionary pressures, unless it is enlightened. The most excellent aspect of fine character is the dependable stabilized motive and sincere desire to do good. But, as touched on before, the determination of what the good thing is brings the problem ever back to the door of the intellect. A survey of the exalted Greek philosophy would readjust the lost relation of values generally held to prevail between good motive and the intellect in the field of ethical philosophy today. All emphasis is placed on the disposition to do good, the will to the good, the common assumption being that if one avows such excellent disposition, it will insure a constant right choice of action. The intellect, the knowledge which alone will determine what is the good thing, is only incidentally taken into account. In the Greek analysis of the factors involved in the life of goodness and virtue the intellect is virtually the sole, at any rate the determining influence from first to last. Good intent and virtuous disposition are a feeble and wobbly foundation for goodness, standing alone. Good will is better than evil mind, it goes without saying. Nevertheless goodness unshepherded by keen intelligence possesses no guarantee against blind and erroneous action, unwitting blunder. Much of history's foulest inhumanity has been perpetrated by people and parties ignorantly inspired by unintelligent motives that were by them interpreted as good. Unintelligent "good" purposes have splattered all the pages of history with lurid stains of blood. Goodness is never safe from inflicting injury until it is also intelligent. The unctuous proclivity of spiritual sects to slander the intellect has undoubtedly been productive of immense evil in all ages of the world.

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This matter is one of such general and practical interest and concern and the subject of so much discussion and Sabbath-school homiletics that it seems good to present what Fuller has further to say in its elucidation. The world-soul, he says, is naturally predisposed, or by evolutionary stress turned, toward the achievement of the good. He says:

"Descending now to man, we find that he, too, is self-determined to the good. How contrary this is to religion, which asseverates that man is by nature incurably evil! He can not choose or will any course of action that he does not think, at the moment, will attain a desired end and satisfy a want. But, unfortunately, the human will, unlike the divine, is not enlightened and determined by an accurate knowledge of what the truly desirable end and the deepest wants really are. Because of his material nature and his attachments to the physical and temporal world, man has no clear vision and no undivided love of the sovereign good. His eye is caught on every side by the relative and contingent goods, satisfactions of the moment, gratification of the senses, worldly success and the like, which divide the life of which God is the proper object, and scatter it in a thousand conflicting drives upon as many different satisfactions."

Commenting on the doctrinism of the great Aquinas, Fuller says in the same vein:

"Since we have only an indirect knowledge of its nature, gained by reason and revelation, our choices must often miss the mark and lead us away from God rather than toward him."

And he gives the ultimate conclusion of the ethical problem as Greek Platonism worked it out: "An evil choice is simply a mistaken choice." Perhaps this must ever seem to us to be too thin and abstract an analysis to be the truth. But this is because we see wrong decisions acted out under the drive of such massive emotional impulsions that we regard the motive as the gross evil rather than the principle involved in the act. But after all, the wrong thing done was a decision or a choice made by the intellect, or in default of it. The passion, the greed or the subtle desire was only the force driving the intellect on to make its good or evil choice. What was done ill was perpetrated by a miscalculation of the intellect. Sin is therefore an error of the intellect. If intellect, better intellect, is needed to correct those errors, how imbecile the philosophy which urges its extinction that truth may flow in!

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In the end, then, the mistake in wrong action is much the same at base as the mistake in solving a mathematical problem. And the attainment of proficiency in bringing off true good comes ultimately through the cultivation of skill in the mental determinations of right action. The modern mind needs badly to recover this insight of the Greek wisdom.

An exceedingly sound view of the need of philosophy in the counsels of the present, but by no means inapt to all epochs of the historical period, is found in Romaine Hopper's The Crisis of Faith, previously quoted:

"Scheler holds that the problem of a philosophical anthropology stands today at the midpoint of all the philosophical problems. Berdyaev goes farther and asserts simply that philosophy is primarily the doctrine of man. It is easy to see that ethics depends upon our understanding of the nature of man, and that the civilization of any particular period is largely determined by it . . . . We are searching today for a new humanism--for the recovery of an understanding of man in his wholeness and completeness. In this larger and more intimate sense we need desperately to be humanized."

He then laments the prevalence today of an academic philosophy that in effect does not philosophize in the true sense of the term, or in a way to affect our society beneficently.

"Philosophy as it has been practiced has been one of the best ways of avoiding the issue. Philosophy also has aimed at 'objective' truth. Philosophers have ceased to be lovers of wisdom in the ancient sense, and in so far have stinted their true work in the world through diminishing wisdom to science, their work has become esoteric and detached. It touches the surfaces of life as little as possible, rebounding into the speculative the moment it does so, like a toy balloon. Life is severed from thought, and philosophers become specialists, men of science, men of one knowledge. Philosophy has become what Nietzsche said it was--thought husbandry (Denkwirklichschaft), a trade in thought."

Perhaps this is a little indefinite, and provided thought be sound and good, one must hesitate to condemn "trade in thought." Speculation need not be decried either, if it be discerning and sifts out the chaff. Neither is esotericism to be outlawed. But it is true that "life has been severed from thought;" perhaps rather that thought has been severed from life. That, indeed, is largely what

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this work is aiming to show in the case of Indian philosophy: it virtually abstracts thought so far away from the life in the world that it professedly seeks to destroy that life altogether.

At what tremendous risk the intellect would be left out of the conscious life of individuals and society can be graphically seen in the light of the two following statements, the first from Susanne K. Langer's Philosophy in a New Key, the second quoted by Alfred Korzybski from a work of Charles S. Pierce.

"For a single higher conception can be a marvelous leaven in the heavy amorphous mass of human thought."

"It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man's head, will sometimes act like an obstruction of inert matter in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fulness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty."

Imagination might be brought in to aid us to realize that in fact, from the knowledge side, we enter life practically blind, and live only vegetatively, by impulsive instinctual reaction to experience, until the intellect begins to give us knowledge of things, then of relationships to each other and to ourselves. These insights that together go on to increase understanding may be thought of indeed as the first windows which we are able to open out into the light of things, and at the same time let light enter our house of consciousness, enabling us to walk both within and without the house more safely and happily, without stumbling and injury. Truly, as the Greeks and the Egyptians stated, we walk in a dark cave until the light of rational understanding is generated by the glow of the innate germinal divine mind within us. To decry the full development of the intellect is to proclaim, hail and perpetuate the reign of darkness.

In his The Philosophy of Spinoza Richard McKeon expounds the Dutch philosopher to the effect that "the real evils of the world are not poverty, neglect, pain or any of the unavoidable accidents of life, but the perturbations of the mind." As the whole science of psychiatry, an enormous area of medical practice today, is grounded on "perturbations of the mind," the significance of Spinoza's thesis can be readily assented to.

That knowledge is essential to order and happiness in life is

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again testified to by another eminent thinker, the philosopher-educator John Dewey.

"The construction of ideals in general and their sentimental glorification are easy; the responsibilities both of studious thought and of action are shirked. The affections, desires, purposes, choices are going to endure as long as man is man; therefore, as long as man is man there are going to be ideas, judgments, beliefs about values . . . . But these expressions of our nature need direction, and direction is possible only through knowledge. When they are informed by knowledge they themselves constitute in their directed activity intelligence in operation.

A notable excerpt from McKeon's "Spinoza" is quite apropos of the discussion.

"To act according to one's nature and essence is virtue, but that is to act only in terms of adequate ideas; therefore to act absolutely according to virtue is to act under the guidance of reason. Virtue then is understanding, [This completely accords with the Greek philosophy] and the endeavor to understand is in turn referred to as the first and only basis of virtue, since it is identical with the endeavor to preserve oneself."

This dialectic, already a most telling refutation of mystical claims that ignore the intellectual function in achieving blessedness, is grandly climaxed by a further development of its implications:

"Virtue is to act according to the laws of one's own nature; such action will further one's own power to act, and the sign of that increased power is pleasure. Clearly virtue and pleasure will be achieved most certainly if the mind acts always according to adequate ideas. If one is to act best, all the difficulties of knowing the truth must be faced . . . . To understand, then, is the absolute virtue of the mind."

All emotion, all passion, therefore, comes from inadequate knowledge. Do we need any stronger peg on which to hang our educational pleas? The Wisdom of Solomon (8:17) says that "to be allied with wisdom is immortality. By means of her I shall obtain immortality, and leave behind me an everlasting memorial to them that come after me." Would any partisans of the mystic way argue that wisdom can come otherwise than by mind? Could wisdom come if the mind was abolished,--as India urges us to do?

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A point-blank denial of the mystics' claim that supreme ecstasies and cognitions are open to man through a faculty transcending the mind and functioning when mind is entirely put away, is found in a statement by Dalton L. Scudder, in a work reviewing Tenent's theological philosophy:

"Lastly, both intuitional and mystical theology appeal to a specific cognitive faculty by means of which the religious object is perceived. Analytic and genetic psychology does not find any such unique faculty in the case of the milder type of religious experience; and in the case of mysticism it is unable to distinguish this higher faculty of cognition from the subliminal functions of the mind. Anaesthetics and happiness both produce the cosmic consciousness and metaphysical revelations. No antecedent reason is available to distinguish the latter revelations as illusory and the former as veridical. Certainly no weight can be given to the assertions of special faculty."

This stands as a forthright rebuttal of the unfounded postulation that the intuitive faculty is a specifically distinct power of consciousness above the intellect. As our argument has expounded it earlier, what has been hypostatized by mystical enthusiasts as such a super-faculty is only the more mercurial operation of the mind's own power. In exalting supermind, they are exalting mind itself.

In dealing with the relation of science and religion in his fine work, Religion in an Age of Science, Edwin A. Burtt consummates his exposition with the following sententious declaration:

"Both have their being in the human mind. Like quarrelsome brothers they must be brought to sit at the same table; they can not be permanently insulated in separate rooms. Mysticism takes one away from social life, takes thought away from earthly things and attaches it to things beyond the temporary world. The ideal of flight into another world of values than this of ordinary sense experience cannot really maintain itself unpoisoned."

Here again the presuppositions of mystical theory are met with a straightforward contradiction. And this rebuke to such theory receives remarkable corroboration from Spinoza himself (Theo. Pol. VI, iii, 85):

"But on the contrary, when we know all things to be ordained and ratified by God, and the operations of nature to follow from God's essence, and the laws of nature to be eternal decrees and voli-

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tions of God, we must perforce conclude that we know God better and the will of God, in the degree that we know natural things better and understand more clearly in what manner they operate according to the eternal laws of nature."

Here once more the direction in which our understanding must go to find the indices of God's nature and being is exactly reversed from that in which the mystics would have us go. For the philosopher says we will become the better acquainted with God's thought the more we observe and reflect on natural objects.

Fuller dissertates on Plato's ideal archetypal forms which are the projections of God's creative thought, giving the great Academician's views that those forms existed in their pure and perfect essence in the celestial or noumenal realms, and that earthly objects distort and disfigure their pristine form and beauty. Aristotle veered somewhat away from his master's view, asserting that the mundane objects were the concrete embodiments of the primordial forms. Fuller says that the latter view has gained against the Platonic. He says that some eminent scholars "regard the forms not as metaphysical principles existing in and for themselves apart from the sensible world, but as logical essences which are enacted nowhere save in the particular objects exemplifying them."

He instances gravitation as such a principle, saying that apart from the gravitating objects it has no enacted existence.

"Nevertheless in spite of its independence, in one sense, of its material embodiments, the Idea gets all its punch and substantial being from the bodies that incorporate and enact it."

This surely brings the concept of reality back to earth in a form that can not be challenged. Apart from the physical order ideal reality is an unrealized value. It can mean something to creature consciousness only in its particular manifestations.

If we apply these considerations to the relation of the Platonic Ideas to the sensible world, we find ourselves not in a three-story but in a one-story universe. The only really liveable floor is the ground floor. What we took to be an elevation of the house above the first floor is only the extended plan of the first and only story. Fuller reports Aristotle insisting that nowhere save in the material, sensible house has the form and true being of the house positive existence. "The plan of the whole house can be realized only in the material of which the house is built . . . . The forms are no less true,

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no less valuable, no less the goals of scientific and moral activity for being realizable only in material stuff of the sensible universe." "The Forms are only the script of the play; the presentations of them are only given on the plane of the flux of sense."

Fulfilment of the highest longing for love, then, is not to be attained by abstracting oneself from the world, but in bringing the relations of love down into this enacted consciousness.

The direct statement that the ground floor of the universe, the plane of physical embodiment of the noumenal types, is the first and only story uncompromisingly blasts the inflated protestations of the mystics that all true values and reality itself are to be caught only when we have destroyed the ground floor and still somehow can manage to maintain ourselves, sans sense, feeling and mind, in the ethereal tower above all lower floors. It is permitted to ask them how they expect to uphold the upper stories of their house after they have destroyed the lower ones. An upper becomes such only by virtue of its resting upon a lower.

If the Forms of divine thought are only the script of the play, the divine Architect's ideal conception of his universe-to-be, and the physical objects are themselves those Forms now hardened to concretion in our world, then what Susanne K. Langer says about the function of our senses, so anathematized by spiritual cultism, has ringing import for us:

"The senses, long despised and attributed to the interesting but improper domain of the devil, were recognized as man's most valuable servants, and were rescued from their classical disgrace to wait on him in his new venture. They were so efficient that they not only supplied the human mind with an incredible amount of food for thought, but seemed presently to have transacted most of its cognitive business in handling the knowledge that sensory experience was deemed the only knowledge that carried any affidavit of truth; for truth became identified, for all vigorous minds, with empirical fact."

What does this tell us but that in following the illusive mystifications of supramental doctrines we turn away from the only authentic roots of true ideas to seek them in the realm in which their certification rests upon no sounder foundation than human fantasy and unreliable sense of hedonism? The truth found shadowed in nature carries the authentication of divine mind, since its objects are divine thoughts in material form. But on what standard of

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certification are the multifarious and random visions and seizures of mystic introversion to be judged for truth? Precisely because these sporadic emotions can not be subjected to empirical judgment of the senses, they forever lack authority to command man's mental allegiance. Not only do they thus lack the credentials as data for knowledge, but they have been found to border closely on the phenomena of self-deception, illusion and downright hallucination. Their chief credentials seem to be hedonistic, they "prove" themselves in the feelings of pleasure they yield. But from the Epicureans down to the present it has been debated whether pleasure can claim the function of a true umpire in the moral battle. For there are pleasures high and pleasures low, and in between; and when and whether the reaction of pleasure can be safely relied upon is itself a moot question. Pleasures of lofty tone and quality may be in the bright stars calling us upward; others less noble may be the siren lure leading us down the primrose path to wreckage.

As between the created objects of the cosmic intelligence confronting us outwardly and the unaccountable, eccentric and precarious configurations that form themselves in the realm of the human subjective area of consciousness, to affirm that the latter constitute man's most authentic revelation of God and reality rather than the former, would seem to be of all things most erroneous. And a belief that categorizes the senses as our constant deceivers instead of recognizing them as our faithful and most amazing servants, would likewise appear to be the product of unconscionable folly.

Fuller, discussing Plato's solution of this problem of a hedonistic criterion of our psychic experience, says that to determine what pleasures are preferable and in harmony with the purpose of evolution, we must appeal to something beyond their immediate pleasurableness; and, he tells us, this something Plato finds in wisdom and reason, not in feeling.

In corroboration of our assertion that the precipitations of hysteria and strained asceticism are as likely as not to be apparitions of fancy, Fuller gives the following:

"The untutored mind is naive and soft-headed. In its operations it scarcely distinguishes fact from fancy, dreaming from waking. It swallows everything it is told. Hence it is forever shying at shadows, growling at reflections, pursuing will-o'-the-wisps and

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clinging to phantoms. Now and then it may happen to lay hold of a truth, but it does so at random, on irrational grounds and with no sense of the difference between the real and the illusory."

If the area of consciousness in which the enraptured mystical experiences are to be generated is to such degree subject to hallucinations, it would again appear conclusive that it is the last ground on which either religion or philosophy should venture in their quest for real experience.

Plato attributed ultimate reality to the Forms of divine thought; Aristotle held that they were real only in their earthly subsistence. This difference, which is most germane to the present discussion, is well stated by Edwin A. Burtt, in his Types of Religious Philosophy (p. 51):

"The first major difference between Plato and Aristotle . . . . is that for the latter the world of sense experience may not be impugned as deceitful and shadowy; it is real and substantial as such. The changes which obviously go on in it are to be seriously accepted and adequately explained, rather than, as in a large measure with Plato, branded as evil and unreal. The changeless Forms, in his view, are not to be contemplated instead of the changing entities of perception, as the true reality behind the flux; they are to be conceived as immanent principles guiding the changes that transpire and as providing an explanation of their occurrence. And this causal efficacy of form in accounting for change is the second major difference.

"Plato, at least in some of his assertions about the forms, portrays them as patterns existing in a transcendent realm separate from the objects of sense experience. These objects more or less vainly imitate the forms, but that participation is not a temporal process--still less is it identical with the observable changes which take place in all objects--and hence the forms do not account for those changes. Aristotle allows no such dualism of two separate realms in the universe, one real but impotent, the other unreal, but undergoing interesting alterations. He thinks of the forms as embedded in the experienced objects and actively controlling the changes which can be observed in them.

"Corresponding to these differences in Aristotle's general conception of the world is an equally important difference in his theory of knowledge. His ideal of science, to be sure, is determined mainly by the Greek mathematicians who had been a profound influence in his master's [Plato's] thinking; it is the systematic demonstration of detailed truths about the world as flowing from the first principles whose truth has already been apprehended. But Aristotle held, in

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opposition to Plato, that the first steps toward knowledge are not to be taken by turning away from sense perception, in disquiet at the instability of its disclosures. Knowledge is won, rather by building upon perception itself. This humble activity, aided by memory and by what Aristotle calls the 'common sense,' produces experience which already partly reveals the embedded forms, at least as habitual rules of action which we follow in dealing with objects that have become familiar as a result of these processes. Experience, thus won, provides a necessary foundation for the activity of reason. This faculty grasps the universal principle exhibited in any case of repeated change, and thus carries the quest for knowledge to perfection. Aristotle gives the name 'induction' to such operations as those when they cooperate in eliciting clear apprehensions of truth which may later be used as principles of scientific demonstration. Induction is not itself a part of science, but since it starts from the material of sense perception and keeps in intimate touch with the changes which the latter undergoes, the principles established permit the explanation of change rather than, as with Plato, requiring denial of it as unreal."

This long excerpt has been included because it states the crucial and highly momentous difference between these two great and influential thinkers, difference which the failure of European philosophy to resolve in balanced understanding cost Western history incalculable consequences in the determination of the idealistic or ideological systems of thought which dominated the Christian civilization over some twenty centuries. As, according to Plato, ideas rule the world, the rulership of Christian Europe could have brought happier eventualities than its history records, in religious bigotry, superstition, misuse of power, wars and persecution, had Aristotle's more competent exegesis of the "Forms", as expressing their reality here on earth, rather than in the heavens of divine noumena, been generally accepted. A few items of Burtt's exposition deserve some elaboration for added clarification of important principles.

It is of great moment that Aristotle takes his stand, confirming the position of this essay, that the world objects are not to be impugned as deceitful and shadowy. In his famous "cave allegory" Plato represents the forms as being perceived here only as shadows. The real forms are, he analogizes, outside the cave opening, and man, bound in the cave with his back to the entrance of the light and unable to turn around to see them directly outside the cave mouth, can see only the shadows cast by the forms on the wall in

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front of him. Thus, infers Plato, man can not ever see the forms themselves, but only their shadows on the wall. Hence they are blurred, indistinct, their outlines confused, their expression untrue to reality.

As poetic figure, perhaps, the analogy is legitimate, but, as Aristotle saw, analogy here as elsewhere, can not be taken in too absolute literalness. Aristotle, we think, translates the allegory in truer form. He rebels against the imputation of imperfection, and certainly of evil character, to the shadows. With him they are not shadows in any true sense, but the solid precipitations of something that in human estimation must be held the less substantial of the two, the divine ideas. Indeed, from the human point of view, Aristotle's approach to the interpretation would completely reverse Plato's dramatization. It would consider the original noumenal Forms outside the cave mouth as invisible to man (for he can not see a thought, even if he could turn around to behold them out there in the light). After all it is the darkness of the cave that helps to make the shadow visible! Plato's imposition on man of the inability to turn around to behold them directly is no doubt to typify our limitation of cognitive dimension in our cave. From Aristotle's point of view, since man can not see the invisible Forms in their noumenal state, it has been necessary for the creative thought to arrange their presentation to his limited faculties in a form of materialized substantiality, if they are to become objects of perception at all. A paramount question which philosophy should long ago have asked and answered is as to what warrant the human mind has ever had for presuming to deny to the Forms in this condition the authentic title to reality. From every naive point of view, the objects here are not the shadows but the real things themselves, so that we can look at them and exclaim "See what God hath wrought!" And Plato's "Ideas" are not the realities but the shadows. How can it ever be supposed that man can bring himself to think that what is forever invisible and intangible to him is to be considered the utterly real, while the perceptible things of his world are only wraiths? And again on the naive view he might be justified in asking how it was that Plato expected us to believe that a mere thought-structure can cast a shadow. To frame a real answer to that query would definitely demand a knowledge of something in the science of atomic physics as to which we can only surmise as yet,

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though we do have now the bases for a pertinent answer that only a few years ago would have been laughed out of court. Verily the question how God's ideas became the forms of this world is standing at the door of the human mind, knocking.

What Aristotle stands on, of course, is that the reality ascribed to Plato's divine noumena is not lost, but fully retained, when by creative operation the cosmic thought-forms take on matter and body, and stand revealed to us in our world. He means that while they may be allowed to be poetized as shadows in the sense that no merely physical object can adequately speak the language of thought, still their outline and the patterns of their changing processes bespeak to a thinking mind, with its capability of reason from analogy, their full cognitive message. This is the nub of the great Stagirite's philosophy and its point of departure from his master's system. It launched the division between the two main schools of philosophical exegesis ever since. For presumably the issue eternally arraying two leading systems of thought against each other in religion and philosophy is whether the real essence of being, for which man searches with unremitting persistence, is the objective reality of things perceptible to his senses, or the subjective reality of consciousness. Plato posited this reality as inherent in the subjective world; Aristotle located it here on earth.

Idealists have in the main held with Plato; positivists have veered to Aristotle's position. But at bottom it is only a contention over whether a thing, a world, is more real in its original mental conception than it is when the conception has hardened in material form. Is it real in its noumenal beginning or in its phenomenal end! It all amounts to asking whether truth hidden in a thought is more real than when disclosed in concrete manifestation. It becomes in the finale a choice of the relative value of the answers to the two questions: What hath God thought? And what hath God wrought? Since what he hath wrought is what he first thought, the eternal debate would seem to be ended by the merging of the two in a common identity. He who at the flip of a coin chooses heads, gets the tails also, for the two sides equally appertain to the coin. Hermes Trismegistus, reputed author of old Egypt's amazing wisdom, really announced the grounds for reconciliation of the great debate on his famous Emerald Tablet:

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"True without falsehood, certain and most true, that which is above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is above, for the perfection of the miracle of the One Thing."

It is the aeonial task of evolving man to consummate the discernment of this identity. For in the final stages of the process of enlightenment, man discerns also that he himself is identical with the God mind that thought and the object that God wrought. India herself stood originally on this recognition, for it is affirmed in the epigrammatic phrase believed to summarize the gist of Hindu philosophy, tat tvam asi, "Thou art That." But Hindu philosophy itself proved faithless to the high commitment entrusted to it in the beginning, and tragically and with direful consequences to itself and the world, severed the link of connection between the soul and the world and has ever since endeavored to detach the spirit entirely from the beneficent influences of its world, precluding thus the possibility of its finding itself in harmony with its cognate counterpart That.

The next point of difference between the two Greek philosophers is in Aristotle's rebuttal of Plato's argument that world objects are not to be taken as real because they are in a constant flux of change. A thing can not be real, if it can not remain the same, or maintain its identity with itself. It can not be real if it is constantly turning into something other than itself. It looks like a formidable argument. How did Heraclitus, and after him Aristotle meet it? So far was the phenomenon of change from failure to reveal the reality of things that it was precisely this change process, these philosophers showed, that transcribed the reality for man to read. A changeless thing, they affirmed, was as dead. It could tell no story about itself. But in changing from state to state it disclosed the "plot;" it gave out the meaning behind its existence. The Ideas existent in the noumenal creation may be stabilized in their spiritual home "above;" but down here their raison d'etre is unfolded in a temporal and progressive order and sequence. The ideal Forms may be held in their composite unity in the mind of God, but to man's limited purview they must be presented as in a cinerama, one stage after another. Not the thing as seen at any one moment--a mere cross section of it--but the thing that takes a whole moving drama of changing scenes to reveal its continuity and true form, is the thing in its wholeness. As Browning put it: "In heaven the

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rounded circle; on earth the broken arc." But give the earthly arcs the time--which mystics never like to allow--to connect their fragments in full circle, and finally the whole reality of the thing runs its course to completion.

Hence all the stigma and dialectical besmirching that the shallow philosophies have cast upon the element of change, is along with the calumniation of matter and the senses, repudiated by Aristotle, in divergence from Plato. Change is not to be impugned as the mark and evidence of either unreality or evil. How can it be held to be evil when it is the very revelator of the reality of the world that would without it remain undisclosed? Aristotle's view, then, grounds in wisdom the recommendation that we should seek the forms of truth as they are imaged right here in our concrete world, and rendered legible in the changing phenomena of nature, rather than attempt to visualize those forms in the noumenal state, obviously a blind and foredoomed futility.

It is obvious also that Aristotle has a quarrel with the phrase which the idealists use by ingrained habit "the reality behind the flux." This seems to rest on the idea that the patent visible physical manifestation is only a false front, a blank dead opaque unreality, and that the true reality is an idea or set of ideas hiding behind the outer objective facade, and for the matter of that, not only not revealed by the material front, but concealed, obscured, marred and even destroyed by it. Aristotle would locate the true reality not behind, but in the flux; not distorted and muddied by it, but clearly revealed by it to a competent intelligence and a keen analogical genius. It would admittedly not be revealed to a bumpkin or a dunderhead; nor would it be readily perceptible even to a philosopher who gazed at nature's cinematograph with an eye made opaque by a mind darkened with the fixed curtain of belief that nature and the world misrepresented and maligned the truth. Only a mind quickened to intensive clarity of apprehension by the assurance that every object and procedure of the outer creation is mutely but faithfully oracular of truth is qualified and primed to read the open book of the world and glean its enchanting story. The noumenal forms are not to be found behind, but in the phenomena. The latter are the noumena transfixed for our scrutiny. As Aristotle inferred, the Forms are no less real for being found down here instead of in heaven.

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As Fuller brings out, these forms coming to view in earthly phenomena, though open to our sensual perception, are nevertheless not "seen" by the senses. Mere sensual agency is not adequate to bring the Forms to view. The senses fully perform their function in simply presenting to our view the objects dramatizing the forms. It is not the eye but the mind that must "see" the Forms haloing the objects. The mind must interpret what the eye observes. This process is rationalization, and is itself sufficiently mystical. To bring this faculty, this skill, this technique to its highest proficiency is the prime and central function of the great power of mind, the function and power of the intellect,--the faculty and power mystical cultism cries against and marks for destruction.

So Fuller sums up by saying "these forms and formulae are not perceived by the senses; they are apprehended by the intellect." Though we can not discern the forms by the senses, he yet affirms that there is no other source than the senses through which we can contact them,--that there is no other source for any experience whatever. Instead, then, of deriding and condemning the senses, we have to depend on them as the ground-spring of any conscious realization at all.

Fuller enlarges upon the specific mental science needed to enable us to discover the forms embodied in objective phenomena. We must, he says, develop the "knack" or the genius of thinking through the sense images to the eternal truths they adumbrate. From the modes of activity and the patterns of change the mind can prefigure the shape of truth constructs. And finally an alert mind can so clearly discern the links and threads of relationship subsisting between the various elements of the structure that it can bring all knowledge to a synthesis and unity.

"Before we can be really said to know, we must bind into a single organized whole the different forms and laws discovered by thinking through and understanding the phenomena. Only on such a unified vision of Reality can the aspiration toward knowledge and truth come to rest."

This task calls for the resuscitation of a great lost arcane science, that of the true semantics of analogy and symbolism. It is simply the science of reading the ideas embodied in phenomena by the power of a constructive imagination, which can be cultivated to amazing proficiency by proper knowledge and the possession of

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certain archaic keys to the science. Every worldly fact mirrors, because it embodies, a noumenal causal idea; by intensive looking and profound reflection the heavenly idea may be reconstructed from its mundane embodiment.

The final crown of the mind's work upon the data which the world furnishes it is that of organic interrelation and integration of all the data in a comprehensive view, or synthesis. This is the synthetic unity of apperception of Kant's system. By this effort, as Fuller says, the mind passes from the forms to the first principle of the whole. The mind's enterprise in this task is what the Greeks meant by "philosophy." And this is the kingly function of the intellect, despised by mystical propensity.

The world of ideas, Fuller explains, is itself a many-in-one, the forms including or implying each other. This would have to be so if it is true that every object represents a divine ideaform. When we correlate objects we are really correlating ideal forms. As the multifarious objects together constitute the world whole, so the individual ideas together round out the unit pattern. But the Aristotle concept asserted that the ideaform had no real being "unless it is concretely enacted in particular objects." If this be true, then God's thoughts are not real until they have found embodiment in the concrete world. This would elevate positive philosophy to the seat of universal authority in the human thought domain. But it would not abolish the relative reality of the ideas as ideas. It would reserve the final award of reality to the completion of the process of manifestation, when, as Hermes said, both aspects of the reality united to achieve the miracle of the One. Herein is the rationalization of the world, the possibility of all understanding. St. Paul illustrates the truth in his analogy of the body and its many parts: the meaning only comes to view in the action of all the parts as a unit. A principle of truth is thus a formula which includes and summarizes the diverse parts and functions of an organism in one final end purpose. Real being is a synthesis of interrelated forms which fulfils the mind's demand for clear understanding. Things can have no real meaning in isolation; only in relation to other things in the complex and finally to the integrated whole can the real nature of anything be envisaged. Real being, Aristotle asserted, was not to be sought in abstract universals and monistic predications. It is localized and can be discovered only in the particular objects,--the

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very place where idealist theory proclaims it can never be found. Real being is here, in our world (among others), in the particular, the individual and the concrete. Otherwise how could the creature life, immersed in these worlds, participate in real being? Negative philosophy persists in asseverating that we will open the door to reality only by annihilating the world of particulars.

A summarization of the truth of the discussion Aristotle embodied in his dictum: "No Form without matter; no matter without Form,"--so far at least as the sensible world is concerned. Perhaps he drew too rigid a line between the two states of the existence of a divine idea. It perhaps goes too far to say that an idea has no existence unless it turns to rock, so to say. What he obviously means to convey, however, is true, that the idea-products of God's mind do not come to their form of real being, finished being, until they stand hardened in matter, objectified to consciousness.

In all this discussion is involved the great question posed and examined by Kant as to the innate ideas, whether the forms of truth and the archai of reason were inherent in the nature of the mind itself or were imprinted on the mind by the impact of external forms and processes upon it; whether true ideas were universal and necessary, or fortuitous and contingent; or, as Kant put it, a priori or a posteriori; prior to experience or consequent upon it. A large segment of philosophical thought, reasoning from the assumed basic predication that universal ideas could not be derived from the flux of changing sense objects, which reported truth not truthfully, but all in distortion,--the shadow not the reality--held that the divine ideaforms were, like the spider's filament, spun out of the essence of the mind itself, as a function of the rational soul, independent of sense and outer experience. It was this position that Aristotle disputed, asserting that the soul, though it might possess an aptitude for the eternal forms of truth, being the child of a Parent whose thoughts were those truths, nevertheless came to experience with an open, clean and unconditioned mind, and was destined to form its mental pictures over the patterns it discerned in the world in which it found itself.

Out of this debate came the formulation of the thesis that would have closely matched Aristotle's conclusions: that the logical order and connection of ideas is a counterpart of the actual order and connection of things. The inner subjective logicality of reason

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was exactly correspondent to the preconceived logicality of the relations of existing things. Obviously if the external creation is the noumenal precipitated to earth, this correspondence must be perfect. Certainly the two aspects of the same thing must match.

The German poet Schiller refers to the correspondence between mind and the world order in saying that he was long in coming to comprehend nature at first hand; he "had but learned to admire her image reflected in the understanding and put in order by rules."

So Aristotle turns the mind back upon the panorama of the world, as the objectified body of living truth itself, which truth must necessarily be discerned and meditated upon through the initial efforts of the reprobated sense perceptions. It is directly from the norms, the habitual roles and rules and laws of the operating creation that the ideal archai, or primordial principles of the cosmic order are to be grasped. When man develops sufficient genius to rationalize the phenomena of the changing world, he will not have to resort to the intellectually disingenuous ruse of excusing his ignorance by denying reality to the phenomena. The world is the ground-base of our experience and to negate its real existence is to cut the very ground from under our mental capability of ever attaining understanding. And idealists will have to learn that the mere action of the human mind will not dissolve the real being of things.

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