CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE EPIPHANY OF NATURE

Aristotle's view that reality emerges only when the mind has achieved a synthetic vision is authenticated by a sententious statement of Dr. William E. Hocking, former head of the philosophy department of Harvard University, in his Science and the Idea of God (p. 42): "There is no cure for mental disease without consulting the total meaning of the world." And again he states:

"But whether we use the word or not, the emotional basis of Humanism takes us beyond the human scene altogether, and requires us to concern ourselves with the nature of the cosmos . . . . Man is made for the infinite, with all that is surveyable and enclosed, his fervors are finite and burn down to an ash. The infinite restores him to himself."

"Society dare forget nothing of that total in which its destiny is entangled."

And Fuller sums up the gist of Greek philosophy in saying that "we can not decide what the end of life should be."

To any thinking person it becomes immediately and glaringly obvious that in all human endeavor the effort to engage in activity without knowing what it will eventuate in spells in the first place gross irrationality, and then inevitable confusion, waste exertion, failure and loss. So the spectacle of the whole race rather lackadaisically expending its energies daily in occupations and engrossments that virtually only serve to keep it going, but with no sense of specific direction, with no goal in sight that would seem to justify the living ordeal,--all this impresses the reflective mind as anomalous and irrational indeed. It pretty much makes humans squirrels in a revolving cage. The unphilosophical mind sees life as a treadmill with no escape save in death, and no purpose that carries beyond that event.

All that the general unreflective mind consoles itself with are the common traditional maxims and shibboleths of orthodox religion. It is massively believed that life is lived here with tolerable rectitude, a future of psychic happiness will requite the soul for hardships endured. There is a vague confidence that our egos somehow, somewhere survive and will not be burdened with the

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strains suffered on earth. But assured knowledge that the life here is an integral arc of a universal and continuous experience whose successive stages will elevate the soul to a condition of blissful super-existence has pretty nearly vanished from general intelligence. The divine genius in man has not been cultivated to enable him to read the script of truth written by nature in symbolic language. He has not been adept enough to extract from life and its world their message to his intelligence. The gigantic polymorph of world existence remains an insoluble riddle, and history can not articulate its oracular message.

In this benighted condition the peoples have grasped at what has been termed revelation, the same being a quantum of venerable and venerated literature of ostensibly superhuman provenance allegedly vouchsafed to very early mankind by beings of our own perfected evolution, or graduates of a former cycle on other planets, known as gods or demigods. Indubitably the sacred Scriptures of ancient civilizations emanated from some indisputably high source of transcendent wisdom, for they have won an approval and solid homage from the best intelligence of all races from remote antiquity to the present, and high minds recognize in them a grasp of truth transcending the best purely human capability. They still have power to elevate the intellect and cheer the spirit of man by their piercing insight and their promised guerdon of blessedness for virtue.

But tragically either the generality of mankind has drifted far away from an original receptivity to their message, or it has not yet emerged from a state of childhood nescience and become mature enough to apprehend the dynamic force of those vital Scriptures, for it has to be sadly recorded that the great wisdom of that body of "holy writ" has never been clearly and lucidly perceived by the race as a whole or indeed by any interpreters however learned. The Bibles of old, though conned with incredible assiduity and virtually worshipped as tomes of infallible truth, remain still sealed treasure chests of unknown purport. They still await the discovery of the lost keys to their intricate symbolic lock mechanisms. In the meantime the blundering efforts to render their cryptic significations at the level of ignorant amateurism and gross stupidity have fixated the mass consciousness of millions over the centuries with arrant misconceptions so crassly alien to truth that the common mentality

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of the world, both East and West, has suffered a veritable derationalization that has immeasurably darkened earth life.

It is not even known to the present day how those hoary volumes of sapient literature aimed to present their oracles of lofty truth and recondite wisdom so that man in his evolutionary development might apply his intelligence to discern and translate their meaning. Their mode of portraying truths, the outcome of a certain knowledge in the possession of their authors, in reality was the mechanism of a science which comprehended the grasp of truth in all its aspects. This science rested on the basic principle that the outer world was cosmic truth in visible representation. To portray truth then it was only necessary to employ natural forms to illustrate the ideas and the principles. Abstract concepts were presented in the form of their physical analogues. From observing the physical outlines of ideas in objects and processes in the living world, the sluggish intellect of early man would come to apprehend the essential nature of the ideas themselves. By constant association with the natural world the human mind would come to familiarity with the spiritual reality that world adumbrated. Certainly the mind, the purpose, the form of God's intent must show out in that which he has created.

The Christian theology has held that God revealed his nature only in his Son, the man Jesus. It is necessary to understand this in the full range of its truth. By failure to enlarge the scope of its import Christianity has imposed upon its quantum of power a fatal limitation, the confinement of the divine Sonship to one man of flesh in history. It did well in identifying the Son with the Logos; but the Logos is just this cosmic mind projecting itself out into the creation, and giving form to the universe. This reads a new meaning into the term and the concept of "Son," making it cosmic and universal in its range instead of local and humanly personal. God has revealed himself in his Son, the logical structure of creation. It is not too crass a way of stating it to say that the universe created by God's mind is the Son. It imposed a fatal blight on human thought to restrict the conception to one personality in human form and at the human level.

If, then, God has revealed himself in the Logos, his Son, and that Logos-Son is the created universe, it is to that world that we must look to study the creative mind of God. And this is definitely

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the motive that dictated the methodology employed in the composition of the Scriptures. The clear purpose and the method it prescribed were to match spiritual, moral and intellectual forms of truth with their natural analogues. If the forms of truth expressed in literature, in drama, myth and allegory, rune and ritual, were sensed by man, the learner, to reflect a constant harmony, nay an identity, with the reality of the external world life, they would commend themselves to his intelligence and take root in his psychic constitution, thus aligning his life with the pattern and order of the cosmic ideation. To instill in his mind or stamp on his consciousness the principia of eternal veritude by daily contact with their daily tangible manifestation was one of the reasons why God's sons were sent into the world. It follows, then, that the whole process of the unfoldment of the human power to apprehend truth would be implemented through the gradual development of a propensity into the stature of a faculty for sensing analogies. By the perfecting of this faculty the human mind would come in the end to the exercise of its divine genius in the habit of discerning the primal creative archetypes in every natural fact. Wherever he looked he would descry the laws and the forms of truth mutely instructing him. In the continuation of the practice mortal mind would find itself aglow with an inner illumination, a veritable aurora of understanding, which is that apotheosization of the human intellect which Plotinus, Aristotle and Spinoza have extolled as the climactic product of all human mental activity.

Not by shutting out the visible world to find the divine forms of truth in the inner void, but by taking into its heart the forms that it finds already under its eye does the mind of the creature rise to its deification. With this realization centuries of that mind's obscuration will pass into the history of tragedy, and a new sunrise of human intelligence will break on the world. Mystic presumptions allied with ignorance have for long millennia severed the cord of the benignant relation of man's mind with the universe in which he is immersed, depriving it of the natural food for its healthy activity. His mind, like any flower in the garden, must imbibe the substance for its growth from the soil in which it is rooted. Mystical hallucinations take no reckoning of the fact that divine soul is rooted in a natural garden, and this obstinacy holds in the face of the Scriptural statement that God placed his human family in the Garden of

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Eden. As the road of the soul to its beatitude swings down through the valley of earth, so the road of understanding in philosophy must run down through the physical foundation of the soul's life, the world of nature. We can understand spirit only as we understand matter and its operations in nature. Philosophy of the mystical propensity has, on the contrary, strained to lift up its towers of higher consciousness while undermining the very foundations on which they must rest.

The modern discovery of the structure and potency of the atom bears the happy augury of forcibly divulsing the dogged human mind at last from the postures of traditional errancy in which religion has fixed it over too many dolorous centuries. It will achieve this felicitous outcome by focusing that errant mind all afresh on the domain of matter and nature, as the source-springs of the truth it has been seeking in misinterpreted Scriptural revelation and in destructive religious mysticism that despised and flouted nature. The enforced return of the mind of humanity to nature will mark the return of world intelligence to the primal foundations of all possible enlightenment. If religion and its potentially true and beneficent exaltations in mystical experience are to wield their ennobling influence in world life, they will have to link themselves anew with the dynamic currents of inspiration that can flow only from the realm of nature.

Nature must henceforth be the great theme of human study. No mightier subject can be found, for nature is the physical body of God. In our fixated beliefs we have hugged to our souls the persuasion that it was our religious duty and our most exalted virtue to try to fathom the mind of God, while holding it almost too indecorous, if not too sinful, to look at his body. His spirit was worshipped, his body demeaned. This can now be seen to be a folly and a missing of the mark. But we have hardly known that it was God's body we were looking at when we gazed upon the world. Surely we would treat it with deeper reverence if we knew this as a fact.

Christianity has boasted in a gloating manner that its influence has brought an epochal blessing to the world by putting an end to Pagan naturalism and supplanting it with ecclesiastical theologies accentuating the spirit of God. The Pagans, forsooth, could not rise above animistic and materialistic conceptions because they could not conceive of divinity as spiritual, but clung to it as the

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natural order. Christianity broadcast the cry, Great Pan is dead! The advent of the knowledge that Christ had come to supplant Pan was and is yet the claim of Christianity. And this knowledge, it was asserted, would lift humanity out of heathen blindness and enlighten it with the gift of the Christ spirit. Disastrously mistaken as this belief was, it achieved only the complete severance of the mind from its ground of supernal intelligence in which the Pagan philosophy had striven to keep it firmly rooted. With its roots torn out of the earth, the mental genius of man perforce languished and wilted, having nothing but the food of emotionalism and sickly fantasy to draw on for its logical sustenance. Nature was scorned and its illuminating power lay unused. If the human mind is not supposed to glean the meaning of the world from observing and studying it, of what use can his divinely ordained experience in the world be to him, or what purpose can his mission to earth subserve in the cosmic economy? To answer this central question in all human inquiry the Oriental mystic philosophy has never uttered a single word for elucidation. If we want an answer we must turn to Greece and Egypt. The evidence of the close association of the Greek people with nature has been presented. As to the Egyptians the only excerpt available bearing directly on the point has been found in a brief statement from the great modern Egyptologist, William H. Breasted, in his History of Egypt (p. 89), but it should be sufficiently authoritative to establish the item: "The Egyptian was passionately fond of nature and of outdoor life." John Dewey, in his The Quest for Certainty (p. 51), adds his testimony to that already noticed as to the Greek fellowship with nature:

"Greek thought never made a sharp separation between the rational and perfect realm and the natural world. The latter was indeed inferior and infected with non-being and privation. But it did not stand in any sharp dualism to the higher and perfect reality. Greek thinking accepted the senses, the body and nature with natural piety and found in nature a hierarchy of forms, leading degree by degree to the divine. The soul was the realized actuality of the body, as reason was the transcendent realization of the intimation of ideal forms contained in the soul. The senses included within themselves forms which needed only to be stripped of their material accretions to be true stepping-stones to higher knowledge."

Dewey's last sentence here confirms the view expressed throughout this essay that the world objects are the archetypal

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forms embodied in matter. The mind needs but to exercise and train its divine faculty of imagination to render the material vesture translucent and so to find itself gazing at the truth-forms in themselves.

The discussion should by no means leave unnoticed the extremely pertinent point that a life of close daily association with nature, in the case of the Greeks and the Egyptians, did not in the least degree cripple the wings of the soul so as to prevent it soaring aloft in the higher spiritual flights. It assuredly did not bind it down to earth, as Orientalism and ascetic Christianity asserted it would. On this issue we hear the voice of our eminent modern psychologist, C. G. Jung in a notable utterance. He is speaking of the cults of early Christianity and Mithraism, and says that they aimed to impose a moral restraint on the animal impulses, to effectuate which they labored to make a transformation of the natural sexual forces into a sublimated religious engrossment,--which the psychologist pauses to say is a "sentimental and ethically worthless pose." He says that this transformation of libidinous interest was in great measure due to the Mithraic worship, "which was a nature religion in the best sense of the word." He subjoins in a note that the passing out of Mithraism was due largely to its emphasis on nature worship, "because the eyes of that time were blinded to the beauty of nature." Jung cites Augustine as writing: "These men were themselves undone through love of her [creation]; while the primitive Christians exhibited throughout an antagonistic attitude to the beauties of this world." Augustine has expressed himself strongly to the effect that the only true Christliness was a love of the divine nature within the heart, and he scores the love of natural beauty as sinful.

It was a perception of the analogically mutual relation between nature and the idea-world that inspired the writing of Henry Drummond's work that had its fairly brilliant day of general popularity some sixty years ago, The Natural Law in the Spiritual World. It is a discerning survey of prominent aspects of this parallelism and it had the potentiality of an epochal upheaval in religious thought. That it flashed for a period and then passed into oblivion is voluble testimony to the still lingering dusk of the Medieval Dark Ages. In spite of the transcendent marvels of our physical science we are still theologically, intellectually, philosophically in the murks of

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those Dark Ages. Nothing will lift us out of the shadows onto the peaks of light but our eventual recognition of the allegorical composition of the still dominating Scriptures and the reconstitution of the basic science of analogy, the true semantics.

It could hardly be argued rationally that it will detract from the sanctifying power of spiritual conceptions if one can see also their perfectly mirrored reflection in the objects and phenomena on the earth. The Greeks, Fuller intimates, instead of losing the vividness and effective power of mystical truths by looking downward toward the earth, had their grasp of spiritual realities doubly strengthened by finding them equally authenticated in the two worlds. As Wordsworth sings:

The pansy at my feet

Doth the same tale repeat.

When Thales declared that the world is full of Gods he testified to the Greeks' possession of a piercing insight into the logical structure of the natural world. It was the Greeks, not we, who could look upon nature with the x-ray vision and see into her interior heart, to discern there the forms of the Logoic mind in the phenomena she presented. To them nature was the handiwork of the gods, whom they rated as the subordinate powers of the infinite God himself. And the close physical association with her and, even more, their mental affinity with her procedures, enabled the Greeks to draw into themselves, body and soul, the salutary influences which she imparts.

It is pertinent to recall for a moment Fuller's observation that we will be able to recapture the Greek intimacy with nature only by harking back to our childhood. For it has been a truly epochal achievement of Jung, the psychologist of our day, to have arrived at the characterization of the divine seed potential in humanity as "the child." At Christmas what is commemorated is the birth of the divine child. Likewise the glamor of Wordsworth's masterpiece of philosophical allegorism, his Ode on the Intimations of Immortality. From Recollections of Early Childhood, lingers appealingly in the cultural consciousness of our time, yet fails to awaken us to the effective realizations of its flashing purport. The child-mind, he poetizes, still retaining some glow of the heavenly light out of which it came to earth, sees all nature irradiated by this light as it shim-

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mers over the face of nature. So he apostrophizes the child at play as the open-eyed Seer among his elders:

Thou whose exterior semblance doth belie

Thy soul's immensity;

Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep

Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,

That deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,

Haunted forever by the eternal mind,--

Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!

On whom those truths do rest,

Which we are toiling all our lives to find,

In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;

Thou, over whom thy Immortality

Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a slave;

A Presence which is not to be put by;

Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might

Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,

Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke

The years to bring the inevitable yoke,

Thus blindly with thyself at strife?

Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,

And custom hang upon thee with a weight

Heavy as frost and deep almost as life!

It is of course to be noted that the child has this glow and halo about all natural things when he can not yet recognize it or theorize about it. From the intellectually conscious point of view, he is not the philosopher at all, but the natural mystic, being afflated with light and buoyancy without realizing that he is thus blessed. He is bathed in a lingering felicity, but hardly thinks to tell himself so.

The picture of childhood was introduced by Fuller and it has pertinence to the theme from the fact that the Greek attitude toward nature was akin to that of childhood. Rather strangely the Scriptures themselves accentuate the high rating of child-mindedness. To enter the kingdom of heaven it is declared necessary to be childlike. It would seem to predicate by logic that the Periclean Greeks were racially in the childhood period, since their association with nature was close, spontaneous and fresh. It is hardly likely that it was consciously philosophical, or that the analogical significance of natural forms was grasped by more than a few of the philosophers. Nevertheless there must have been an underrunning consciousness of the kinship of the mind with what nature gave to

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thought. To a race as given to reflection at a high level of mental acuity as the Greeks, the discernment of the ever manifest parallelism between natural phenomena and their noumenal analogues could not but have been constantly evident to thought. Their literature is replete with figures, tropes and poetic naturegraphs.

Fuller's positive assertion that Christianity, in contrast to the Greek religion, was essentially an introvert movement may come with some surprise to many. Christianity has become the religion predominantly of the West, and the West is rated as extrovert in its attitude toward life. For Fuller to categorize the objectively oriented materialistic West as introvert in its religion seems incongruous. Yet it is basically a true observation. It must be remembered that Christianity arose in an Eastern land, one that for several centuries before the upsurge of the faith that became Christianity had been inundated by a great wave of mystical influence sweeping westward from Asia, from India. Dualism and subjectivism came in with Zoroastrianism. The dualist philosophy sharply set the earthly physical elements and interests of man over against his spirit as its enemies. Hence the introvert direction of all theological systematism and spiritual motivation was inevitable.

On the other side the Christian embodiment of the Christos divinity in the man Jesus of Nazareth made it in a sense the most extravert religion of all, since this move located divinity outside all other men. So that indeed the extravert and the introvert elements of the faith cross and clash incongruously. Its history shows the curve of trends now in the one direction, again in the other. The point essentially germane to our analysis is that it did historically turn the interests of Western humanity away from the world of nature, and thus for two millennia it has insulated both the body and the spirit of Occidental man from magnetic contact with the most immediate source of his inner nutriment. To have caused a third of the human family to miss for so long the salutary influences of truth must be accounted no minor calamity to be charged to Western religion.

Next there is a sagacious discernment of Spinoza, referring to the Old Testament literature:

"As the prophets perceived the revelations of God by the aid of the imagination, they could indisputably perceive much that is

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beyond the boundary of the intellect . . . . It is clear, then, why the prophets perceived and taught nearly everything parabolically and enigmatically and expressed all spiritual truths in bodily terms; indeed these characteristics agree best with the nature of the imagination."

In saying that the analogical methodology agreed best with the nature of the imagination, all that can be implied is that the imagination can construct no images of abstract spiritual truth save as it can find some natural basis in the phenomenal world to suggest to it form and substance for its fabrications. The mind's metaphysical formulations are ever the shadows or specters of its objective knowledge, though idealistic philosophy has it precisely the contrary.

Spinoza shows no contempt for the physical world when he says that to make use of things and take delight in them as much as possible is the part of the wise man. He carries this further in stating that even the knowledge of individual things leads to a knowledge of God. The most ephemeral thing or circumstance is more than "mere appearance," since the most trivial thing, to be at all, must be pertinent to the reality of all. "To understand the nature of anything is to participate in the nature of God." To such clear envisioning of the factual reality of our experience the introversionist presumptions are totally blind. And there is his famous passage which can bear endless republication:

"Since nothing could be or be conceived without God, it is evident that all things in nature involve and express the conception of God as the reason for their essence and perfection, so that we acquire greater and more perfect knowledge of God in proportion as we understand natural things more; the greater our knowledge of natural phenomena, the more perfectly we understand the essence of God, the cause of all things. It follows from this farther that man is perfect or the reverse in proportion to the nature and perfection of the object which he loves before all things; he is necessarily most perfect and participates most in the highest blessedness who loves above all else the intellectual knowledge of God, the most perfect being, and delights particularly in it."

The intelligibility of the world is not separate from the world itself, is one of Spinoza's observations; so that even the changes which things undergo contain elements of eternal truth. The mind itself becomes eternal to the extent that it seizes upon the eternal principles illustrated by material objects.

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In his Morals and Dogma (p. 25) Albert Pike, the Masonic writer, has a strong statement on the teaching power of nature:

"The first Scriptures of the human race were written by God on the earth and heavens. The reading of these Scriptures is Science. Familiarity with the grass and trees, the insects and the infusoria, teaches us deeper lessons of love, of faith, than we can glean from the writings of Fenelon and Augustine. The great Bible of God is ever open before mankind."

He quotes Galen:

"Listen to me as to the voice of the Eleusinian hierophant, and believe that the study of Nature is a mystery no less important than theirs, no less adapted to display the wisdom and power of the great Creator. Their lessons and demonstrations were obscured, but ours are clear and unmistakable."

Galen was wrong, however, in thinking that the arcana of the Eleusinian Mysteries were so divorced from analogical foundations in nature as to deserve his strictures. Pike himself testifies to this on the same page:

"The Mysteries were a sacred Drama, exhibiting some legend significant to nature's changes, of the visible Universe in which the Divinity is revealed, and whose import was in many respects as open to the Pagan as to the Christian. Nature is the great Teacher of man; for it is the revelation of God. It neither dogmatizes nor attempts to tyrannize by compelling to a particular creed or special interpretation. It presents its symbols to us and adds nothing by way of explanation. It is the text without the commentary; . . . . the earliest instructors of mankind not only adopted the lessons of Nature, but as far as possible adhered to her method of imparting them . . . . To employ Nature's universal symbolism, instead of technicalities of language, rewards the humblest inquirer, and discloses its secret to every one in proportion to his preparatory training and his power to comprehend them."

This is well said, and it is followed by the statement that the symbolic natural representations implied no hostility to philosophy, "because philosophy is the great expounder of symbols." He adds the extremely pertinent and necessary qualification that "ancient interpretations were often ill-founded and incorrect." It indeed has been true that the faulty and bizarre misinterpretations of ancient symbolism and allegory have given partisan scholars the excuse to decry the whole of the ancient semantic and analogical science as

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fantastic fol-de-rol. The unfortunate business of basing dogma on unsound rendering of symbolic structures, he says, has been fatal to beauty of expression and has also led to assumed infallibility and the intolerance it breeds. A further statement adds that the harmonies of heaven correspond to those of earth and the eternal Life accomplishes its evolutions in accordance with the same laws as those ruling the life of a dog. "God has arranged all things by weight, number and measure," he quotes from the Scriptures.

It is hardly a diversion from the main line of the discussion to dilate a moment on Pike's assertion that the interpretation of ancient symbols has too often been ill-founded and incorrect. For the genius of antiquity expressed itself and its supreme message through the mechanism of symbols, and the miscarriage of the age-long effort to bring their true significations through to proper understanding has permitted a canker-worm of ignorance and superstition to gnaw at the vitals of world intelligence and sanity. Pike is not alone in referring to the failure of symbolic science. Plutarch (Morals), dissertating at length and in particularity on the cryptic sense of the symbols and the nature of the gods, says that while symbols guide the understanding to the knowledge of things divine,

"Some, not being able to reach their true meaning, have slid into downright superstition; and others again, while they would fly the quagmire of superstition, have fallen unwittingly upon the principle of atheism."

The tragic consequences of the philosophical derogation of matter and the ascription of evil character to nature and the world, and the separation of the two worlds, the material and the spiritual, into two compartments of the human mind, are expressed tersely by John Dewey, (The Quest For Certainty, 308) as follows: "The antagonism between the actual and the ideal, the spiritual and the natural, is the source of the deepest and most injurious of all enmities." As making for a return to sanity in religion, these words deserve to be framed in gold and hung on every church wall. They reach even beyond the field of religion and are supremely challenging to the whole world of culture. They state in effect that the almost universal addiction of religion to exalt spirit, while degrading and vilifying material things, has wrought untold injury to mankind in the psychological domain. It has divided man's house against itself, splitting his psyche, so to say, into two mutually

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antagonistic segments, causing him to frown on his natural life of worldly interests as detrimental to his spiritual uplift and making his spiritual life a thing apart, abstracted wholly away from his predominant total of worldly interest and activity. The popular clerical admonition to be in the world but not of it, attests this feature of bad psychology. As truth is basic and paramount in all final reckoning, humans have the first obligation to understand that they, their imperishable souls, are definitely sent into the world to be of it. And the more judiciously and harmoniously the soul settles itself into its proper place in the physical world, the better it will be for its welfare both now and all down the future. All in all, it would be hard to discover a religious influence more deleterious to mankind than this warping of the religious mind under the persuasion that the world, matter and nature are at enmity with the soul.

The religiously inspired differentiation between the sacred and the secular in popular thought has borne disastrous consequences. The dualism of holy and profane has made of much of life a jarring jangle. All such divisions have thrown our life into a mid-point where it is jostled back and forth between two loyalties. To engage in the daily secular activities of our lives, under the mental pall that these activities are iniquitous to our spiritual welfare, is to introduce a warfare in the psychic core of our being. It is understandable that the two areas of interest are to be entered into in a somewhat different posture of mind, as lighter moods are more fitting to certain of our actions and graver ones to others. But that all life interests are not to be regarded as essentially sacred in the total sum of our experience, is a miscarriage of general sane human ideation. It causes humans to live by far the larger portion of their lives under a psychic cloud. It spreads the miasma of the sin consciousness out to the farthest limit of our existence.

Dewey found himself wrestling with this express problem and rendered his reaction to it as follows:

"The philosophy which holds that the realm of essence subsists as an independent realm of Being also emphasizes that this is a realm of possibilities; it offers this realm as a true object of religious devotion. But by definition such possibilities are abstract and remote. They have no concern nor traffic with natural and social objects that are concretely expressed. It is not possible to avoid the impression that the idea of such a realm is simply the

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hypostatizing in a wholesale way of the fact that actual existence has its own possibilities. But in any case devotion to such remote and unattached possibilities simply perpetuates the otherworldliness of religious tradition, although its other world is not one supposed to exist. Thought of it is a refuge, not a resource. It becomes effective in relation to the conduct of life only when separation of essence from existence is cancelled; when essences are taken to be possibilities to be embodied through action in concrete objects of secure experience."

The philosopher's terms of expression, somewhat abstruse and recondite, may not be clear or readily comprehended. His "essence" is the substance of that unconditioned world in which the mystics proclaim that their experience of bliss is enjoyed. It stands for "real being" in contrast to the "unreality" of our sensual and mental experience here. He is asserting that those who proclaim it as a possibility of experience are logically inconsistent, since their own definition, as he calls it, describes it as an experience not possible to us with our available equipment or faculty, but that it is to be attained by the cancelling out or actual destruction of all our present equipment. He holds it to be irrational to strive and strain after the attainment of an experience from under which you first cut the possibility of its attainment by destroying the very faculty by which it might be brought to experience.

Dewey's entire philosophy is the philosophy of the practical, in the sense that our gains must be won at the level where we stand and with the equipment that we have, not by means of a mentally hypostatized instrumentation of some remote perfection which we at present have no powers or faculties to implement. The expectation of a future metamorphosis of being is not irrationally held as an ideal, it must be granted. But the point Dewey makes--and it is crucial and decisive in the issue--is that any conceivable realization of the infinitely remote possibility entertained in the postulation of the consummative state can not be made in any connection with our natural existence at our station. It is abstract and remote; the gap between existential actualities and abstract conceptualities is practically infinite; and, as he says, the dream of the actualization now of infinite and unconditioned experience that can only be abstractly conceived, could be realized only by the cancellation of the infinite gulf of separation that yawns between the two states. Indeed, though Dewey does not stop to think of it, it

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is a real question whether the gap between the conditioned actual and the hypothecated unconditioned real, that is, between the relative and the absolute, can be thought of as being ever bridged! It is the commonest axiom of philosophical theory that the finite can never comprehend--much less experience--the infinite; the relative grasp the absolute. The mystical persuasion virtually stands on the presumption that it is possible for man at his present stage to achieve this impossibility; so to say, leap out of the conditioned relative mode of existence and dimension of consciousness into the absolute and unconditioned being, assumedly by some extraordinary miracle of inhibiting his present modes of conscious life--sense and intellect--and thus freeing his ego from the limitations which are now his agents for the actualization of his present life.

The direct upshot of Dewey's analysis is that it makes the mystical position a vain and calamitous reaching for the moon, in fact for infinite galaxies, when the soul's true business is to mingle with the earth on the friendliest of terms and draw from it the sustenance needed for an experience of growth in finite values positively more glorious than any Nirvanic insensibility. It may be said with full truth that the dream of religion, that merely by a mystical "conversion" the conditioned consciousness of our earthly existence is to be by God's miraculous grace transmuted into an eternal unconditioned swirl of unalloyed and uninterrupted bliss, is a frightfully delusive mirage, a perilous will-o'-the-wisp. It ignores life's eternal law of rhythm and periodicity. It takes no account of life's other law of manifestation through polarity and its retirement into non-manifestation--and non-consciousness--when the polarity is neutralized at the cycle's end. The mystico-ideal philosophies simply take their stand on the proposition that of the two opposite nodes of the polarity, the one giving birth to consciousness and enriching it with ever-expanding power, the other extinguishing it, the extinction is the one final real blessedness, the former a false, cruel and evil unreality. India has stood on this platform. Greece, all the while, has given the world the true resolution of the matter: life brings to realization its supreme values through an alternation of the two in a systole and diastole rhythm, and a balancing and equilibration of the two in successive impulses, as the human body is borne along by the alternate movement of the two legs in walking.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE ETERNAL IN THE FLUX

The study requires that basic ground be laid for the understanding of the great ruling principle which makes the oneness of the duality of all life the prime datum for philosophy. Indian thought, for whatever reason, revolts against the duality, sees no good in it, and urges our dissolution of it by some mode of mental hypnotization,--since one of the most direct steps prescribed for the achievement of escape from this dually-conditioned existence is to master "the four states of trance." Instead of rationalizing the stress of the duality as the modality of evolutionary good, it advises negation and escape. But to a philosophy which "accepts the universe" and seeks to understand it as the rationale for effecting the good purposes of life, the opposition of positive and negative forces is seen to be the basis and support of the whole creation, and is therefore accredited as good, to be experienced for benefit, not escaped. With the eye of rationality the philosopher can discern the presence and the working efficacy of Infinite Being--God--in the duality, and therefore does not have to denounce it as evil. As poets say that God is in the whirlwind, in the thunder, in the fire, the hail, the sun and the rain, so philosophy can say that the infinite life is in the tension of opposites everywhere. Both ends, both pull and resistance, are equally God, or of God. We find this stated epigrammatically by Heraclitus: God, he says, is "day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger." The opposites are identical, at least in purpose. Rather perhaps it is meant to be stated that what is effected by the interrelation of the two is the real essence of the forces at work. Heraclitus elaborates the conception: "Mortals are immortals, and immortals are mortals, one living the other's death and dying the other's life." The meaning of this odd form of statement is that in the eternal swing of the cycles, as potential life units plunge downward into matter and again return with enrichment, there is always a balance, an equilibration. It is a see-saw operation; as one end goes down, the other goes up. As immortals incarnate, they become mortals, and the immortal part "dies" to give life to mortals; as the mortal part dies, it gives life again to the immortal part. As a star sets in the west, another rises in the east. With St. Paul we see that as man dies

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daily unto the old Adam, the fleshly nature with its lusts, he is born anew in the spirit of the Christhood. Everything, says Heraclitus, runs an up-and-down course. Every cycle registers the movement of two streams going in opposite directions, so that life is engendered at the point where they cross, and is thus crucified or put on the cross. The Greeks called the two streams the upward and the downward ways. We call the one force positive, the other negative. Their forces must be neutralized, or balanced, else there could be no stability. The stars and planets hold to their fixed orbits because they are stabilized at the precise station at which the centripetal and the centrifugal forces are exactly balanced; similarly the protons and the electrons in the atom. The established peace and serenity of the physical universe, giving eternal silence and apparent immobility in the midst of cosmic energies of inconceivable might, are the results of the exactly balanced tensions of spirit and matter. Fuller, commenting, says that individual objects are subject to the same law. All things follow the two ways, being pulled in opposite directions at the same moment. The opposite pulls create a state of counterbalance and equilibrium, which enable the objects to persist in spite of ceaseless changes taking place within them. Heraclitus says: "Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is in an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre." Things change, giving ground to the philosophy that denies reality to the phenomena and locates it only in changeless being,--the contention of Parmenides in his debate with Heraclitus. But Heraclitus announced, and Aristotle endorsed, that the divine law of order and purpose in the run of the changes was ever the fixed and changeless reality "behind" the changes. This law of the cosmic order Heraclitus calls the Logos of the universe.

The German philosopher Fichte, elaborating the formulation of Heraclitus, finds that as regards man, consciousness would itself disappear if the tension between soul and body was relaxed, as all power would be gone from the bow if the tautness of the cord was relaxed. No music could be produced from an untensed harp string. So an untensed life could generate no morality and no spirit, hence no good. The very possibility of good is thus seen to depend on relating it tensionally with opposition. Good must then be defined as the product of the life energy constantly working to effect a stable

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precipitate out of the opposition of its two-polar aspects. Morality Fuller expounds, rests upon the ego's contrasting itself with something not itself. If there was no force of vice and evil to contend with, there would be no merit, no virtue, no spiritual victory. How could the dramatic hero be glorified if he had no desperate villain to overcome? "To him that overcometh" are the seven great rewards promised in Revelation. They--be it noted--are not promised to him that fatuously thinks to escape all trials by dissolving the duality.

The extravagances of mystical presumption tend to make of what is called spiritual development or realization something that runs very close to philosophical subjectivism, if not to solipsism itself. This is the name for the belief that the individual I-consciousness is the sum and essence of all existence and being, making it identical with the whole. When the Hindu system affirms to the individual Tat tvam asi, "thou art that," it makes the individual consciousness equate the totality of being. It empowers the separate ego to stand forth and say, "I am the universe." Fuller points out the psychological perils of accepting such a thesis, if it were a real possibility of demonstration in any practical way. He says in this connection: "A duty toward a mere figment of my imagination would rest on insanity pure and simple." And in discussing Hegel's philosophy, he writes: "Not to rebel against life but to love it as it is, with all its limitations and vicissitudes, is to overcome fate and to transmute it into freedom." It is doubtful if any more direct and succinct precept of human wisdom than this brief formulation could be made. The practical moral of all philosophy is implicit in it. And it refutes the bizarre presuppositions of the mystical theorists. Again he states that the multiplicity, the variety, the opposition are all subservient to some higher principle, in which they are all ultimately reconciled, and to the beneficent action of which they are all necessary.

In this light Hegel says that objective nature becomes the manifestation of a companionable spirit akin to our own and in whose image we are created. This, it will be seen, matches the Greek view.

The monistic idealists prate of the blessedness of our attainment of the ultimate unity through the abolition of the duality. So it is good to hear Hegel expound that eternal sameness would be

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meaningless except in contrast to the change and diversity of sensual experience in conditional existence. The rational genius must have diversion and engaging interest in rationalizing the many episodes that actual life strings together. Unity is a linking together the meaning of many things. Without a multiplicity of separate events to weld together, unity, says Hegel, would be a blank. It would mean nothing. Hence the existence of the One and the many is interdependent.

And in his chapter on Schopenhauer Fuller makes the categorical statement which, if true, should forever silence the mouthings of the mystics:

"It is in our immediate experiences that we reach the rock bottom of reality. There is nothing behind or beyond, or deeper than sensation. All our so-called getting behind or beneath sensible experience is really constructing upon experience."

The true wisdom expressed in the first sentence here and elaborated in the others is the prime item of knowledge that could redeem the extreme mystics to sanity. The whole system of philosophy could well build upon it. The reflective mind should long ago have asked itself how it will ever be possible for man to derive the utmost of benefit from his living experience on the globe if he does not release the whole ardor of his spirit for full participation in its actualities. What must be the psychic damage constantly inflicted on his ego if he approaches or partakes of every experience in perpetual attitude of negation of its value? If he is afflicting his very soul with the unrelieved conviction of his sinful attitude in all he does, he poisons the well-springs of his life in their depths. Certainly life will not shed its infinite blessedness upon soul and body when they are contorted into diseased conditions by self-accusation in abject morbidity of spirit. Surely life will not scatter its largesse abroad upon those who hold its blessings in disdain and contempt. And life will endeavor in vain to reach with its good gifts those who squint their vision to focus their gaze not upon the outer sphere of actual events, but somewhere "behind" or "beyond" or "beneath" what the senses and the mind present. They presume to be looking through the unreal to find the real behind it; in so doing they risk missing any reality at all. It may become obvious some happy day that nature, if it is to yield us its meaning, must be looked at, not looked away from.

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Fuller comments again:

"Life is forever present. It is never over, it is never about to be. It is always there. Past and future, in so far as the one is dead and gone and the other yet unborn, have no reality of their own. Their only reality is in pleasant memories or anticipations given in the present content of consciousness . . . . All existence, then, is concentrated in a present moment, and is now."

A moment's sober thinking should long ago have made it a matter of the simplest recognition that there is only one "time" in which consciousness can have experience, obviously the time that, at any moment, then is. If we say that we live in the past or the future, we mean only that at the moment which is always a present we indulge in retrospection or in imagination. Memory and anticipation are activities of a present consciousness and, contrary to common thought, do not nullify the present. They merely determine the subjects of present conscious activity. This may seem a simple matter of commonplace knowledge, yet it has not been sufficiently taken into account to correct errant programs of cult religions. In its effort to extinguish the senses and the intellect to make way for the incursion of rhapsodies of superconsciousness, what mystical presumption actually does is to deaden the normal contact of the individual consciousness with the present. All that such a "philosophy" does is to fill the present consciousness with idealistic dream pictures of a hypothecated future which have no more reality than what the imagination gives them. Common sense would assert that such "dreaming" is a waste of precious present time. It does not enable a person to escape his world, it simply fills his present life with fantasy. One merely spoils his present by attempted to escape it through visualizing the future. Philosophy will never bring its devotees to the solid ground of correct envisagement of life's drama and a wholesome orientation of the psychic nature toward it, until it drives home the blunt simple truth that life can be lived in only one time, the present, and lived then under the terms imposed by the interrelation of external environment and inner intelligence. Any thought system that would wrench the ego out of this setting in the cosmic order and try to adjust it to altered conditions self-generated by the individual mentality is indulging in a sort of sorcery. It is trying to manipulate states of mind by processes matching those of witchcraft.

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In a notable passage in his The Quest For Certainty. (p. 138), John Dewey makes the challenging statement that, apart from the real but limited service which they perform in giving us aesthetic pleasure,

"Ideas are worthless except as they pass into actions which rearrange or reconstruct in some way, be it little or large, the world in which we live. To magnify thought and ideas for their own sake apart from what they do, is to refuse to learn the lesson of the most authentic kind of knowledge . . . . to praise thinking above action because there is so much ill-conditioned action in the world, is to help maintain the kind of world in which action occurs for narrow and transient purposes. To seek after ideas and to cling to them as means of conducting operations . . . . is to participate in creating a world in which the springs of thinking will be clear and everflowing."

On the basic analogy of our creation in God's image, if the creation would not be established except God bring his ideas to physical manifestation, likewise our creative effort would come to nought unless we carried out our ideas to concrete results. Action at the physical level is ultimately the only escape from stagnation of the life stream and the foul corruption that stagnation breeds. To dream on when action alone will keep the life forces in healthy movement is to live in futility and privation.

Plato speaks of the intelligible principle of the cosmos as trying to establish all that was invisible in the foundations of the visible. If the astral galaxies and all life riding on them are God's creation, it can not well be otherwise. The creation is his effort to bring his will to pass. It could hardly merit the name of creation if it proceeded no farther than the thought-form stage, held invisibly in his mind. Its actualization had to be achieved by precipitating it into matter. In the purely noumenal form it could be and mean nothing to his children. We could not read his mind unless we saw his handiwork.

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If, then, the physical objects are the very ideas of God standing before us in all their divine intelligibility, the question invoked by reflection is: why has mankind so completely failed to catch their message of divine truth? Why has the human intelligence failed even to know that nature was all the while delivering this mighty discourse to it? Why has the language of nature so signally failed of translation?

The answer is involved and abstruse. But it brings to the fore in the discussion the next great item for consideration--symbolism. This item is an integral element in the whole science of the ancient arcana of wisdom. The use of symbols was the prime method employed in the construction of ancient books, so that real skill in the interpretation of symbols is therefore the necessary equipment for their successful rendition. If all nature is the mute, but mutely eloquent dialect of God's ideas, then every object in nature is a divine thought still whispering its meaning. To be able to look at an object or to witness the unrolling of a phenomenon and to see the idea it voices, not behind or beyond it, but directly in it, is ultimately the supreme employment of the genius of mankind. Subjectivism preaches the attainment of the intuition of life's meaning by looking away from life objectified, to find it in life still wholly subjectified. On the open view this would appear to be the extreme of irrational folly. Man has not ordinarily any faculty by which he can objectify, and thus have cognition of, subjective forms either cosmic or human. We can not see thought-forms. Hence the open road to understanding of life's meanings is to look at what life has objectified in visible forms and catch the ideal intention from them.

It is precisely at this point that idealism has most flagrantly erred. As even Plato declared--and so set the philosophical fashion--it has been persistently asserted that the world objects deceive the observing mind, that they distort the veridical forms of truth. This posture is artificial, the result of a specious doctrine endlessly reiterated. It needs to be met with direct and positive refutation. It is widely admitted even by its exponents and practitioners that the claimed powers of man to discern ethereal, mental and spiritual forms in subatomic matter are most erratic, unreliable and precarious. They completely lack certitude and exactness. Exploitation of phenomena in that realm tends to be as fantastic as our experience in dreams. The very realm in which it is asserted that we

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will find truth and knowledge in their purest forms of veritude, is just the place where they will be found least veracious. On the other side the objective world, in which the ideas are alleged to be least clearly and reliably envisaged, presents them in infallible clarity. For this is the realm in which God's voice has spoken the true message of his mind. The world of nature can not tell the story untruly. A fictitious idealism has turned the philosophical world upside down. It urges souls to dodge the experience which they were sent here to be instructed by.

In descanting on the heavenly natures which descend from the celestial spheres and run the risk of "contamination" of their virgin purity from "mixing" their divine nature with human passions, Plutarch says that Plato first or in the greatest degree among the philosophers:

"joined both of these principles together, attributing to God the causality of all things that are according to reason, and yet not depriving matter of a necessary and passive concurrence; but acknowledging that the adorning and disposing of all this sensible world does not depend on one single and simple cause, but took its being from the conjunction and fellowship of matter with reason."

The deep discernment of ancient philosophers recognized and without exception proclaimed the emergence of truth and real being from out of the union of the superior subjective order with the inferior material base of existence. As the law of polarity demonstrated, full being is to be predicated of neither end of the tension alone, but comes out of the equilibration of the two forces. The manifested universe is the Logos, the Son of God; and a son is always the product of sexual polarization or union of the two creative energies. To put it more explicitly, the universe is the product of the fatherhood of God in copulation with the motherhood of matter. The child expresses the mean product of the elements contributed by both parents. Hence our mundane consciousness is the mean generated by the interblending of the spiritual energies of reason with the atomic energies of matter. Idealism always tends to leave matter out of the combination. But if this were possible, there would be no present existence or consciousness either to philosophize or be philosophized about. Says G. R. G. Mure in a work on Aristotle's philosophy: "The essence of Aristotle's teaching is the unity of subject and object." Aristotle called the divine ideas

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logoi enuloi, "logical principles embodied in matter." "Thought turned wooden" might be a permissible literal translation of the phrase. "The mean is what possesses the contrasting quantities in equipoise," it is stated in The Analytics. The philosopher even goes so far as to affirm that a sense is a logos. Again it is declared that a form (mental divine idea) achieves its destiny and receives its proper embodiment only when perceived. Here one has to recall Berkeley's dictum as to the reality of any object: esse est percipi; to be is to be perceived.

The principle of union of opposites brings into prominence the element of ratio and proportion. The Greek thought made of measure and proportion, which with us are sheer quantitative values, essentially moral qualities. That is, the proportion in which the ingredients entering into the constitution of anything were mingled, was the factor determining its nature and its mode of being. "The reason (Latin ratio) for anything is this ratio of its compounds." In the living processes, all things being compounded of the four elements, fire, air, water, earth, the nature of things changed as the ceaseless flux of the elements alternated in prescribed rhythms. All four elements pass into one another in cycles, and always the coming-to-be of one is the passing away of another. This can be seen in the origin and life history of the heavenly bodies. Fire passes into air, air into water and water into earth, and in the dissolution process the order is reversed. Similar transmutations of elementary essence account for the coming to be of all things, and explain growth and decay.

Fire is the only one of the four that is not corruptible, and all things emanate out of one primordial fire, of which they are modifications, and return to it. Ur is the original word for fire, and so it was out of Ur of the Chasadim, or the seven archangelic Fires, that the first father principle, Abram, came, to go "west," the direction pointing from spirit to matter. In the process each successive stage or step was for the sake of and found its meaning in the next. Any development is a mid-stage between two levels partakes of the nature of the one above it and of the one below. In this situation man, the human, partakes, through body, of the nature of the animal order, and through intellect, of that of the gods above him. That is the reason why the typical divinized human, the Christ, is portrayed in drama and allegory as both Son of God and Son of

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Man. The highest virtue is the perfectly balanced and proportioned mixture and harmonization of the two natures. How in accord with the Greek principles St. Paul expresses this datum, speaking of the Christos: "For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; having abolished in his flesh the enmity, for to make in himself of the twain one new man, so making peace"! A whole new charter of the reconditioning of Hindu religionism is to be found in Paul's phrase: "having abolished in his flesh the enmity." For it would instruct the Hindu mind that right here in the flesh the "enmity" between spirit and matter is to be reconciled in a harmonious union of the two. No longer would there be need or justification for the abolition of the flesh, to be rid of it as an enemy of the spirit, when it is understood that only by the spirit's union with it will new growth be won. The dissolving of the dividing wall and the merging of the two natures in a new creation is what is meant by the atonement and reconciliation of (the) man with (the) god in humanity.

From the standpoint of psychoanalysis it is interesting to note how Jung, the psychologist, rationalizes the relation between the spirit and the physical body in our life. The soul, being the positive node of the polarity, with body the negative, is dramatized as thus being bound in and under the cyclical rhythms of its vehicle. The physical world, and hence the human body, is the kingdom of the mother, or matter, principle. The body, independent of the mind, is ruled by the so-called "unconscious" element of the psyche. If the mind-soul permits itself too long to be carried on by the swirling cycles of instinctive automatic motions and passions of the body, it may be considered to be thus bound in its prison of the unconscious and the sensuous life of the "mother." To win its freedom it must assert the divine prerogative of the rulership of reason, its own dormant powers of thought, and break out of the "vicious" cycle of physical automatism on the "mother" side.

"Only he can break through this magic circle who has the courage of the will to live, and the heroism to carry it through. Only the overcoming of the obstacles of reality brings deliverance from the mother, who is the continuous and inexhaustible source of life for the creator, but death for the cowardly, timid and sluggish."

In its deepest import poetry is the exercise of the genius which flowers to its highest artistry in the discernment of the divine nou-

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menal forms in the earthly phenomena. It is the insight which sees the divine in the natural. It interprets nature in the terms of the cosmic logoi. It sees in nature the reflection, and not the vague confused shadow of the universal reason. It is by the sharpening of its analogical faculty that it comes to discern the spiritual in the natural, or discerns that the natural is the spiritual, hardened in matter. We find Plutarch saying: "For generation is the production of an image of the real substance upon matter, and what is generated is an imitation of what is in truth."

Mure, in his Aristotle says that

"The eye for an effective metaphor is in fact a mark of genius and unteachable. And in devoting most space to illustrating that form of metaphor which depends upon analogy,--as when old age is described as Life's sunset--Aristotle means, perhaps, to mark the manifestation within the poet's imaginative world of that hierarchic order of analogous stages which pervades the whole Aristotelian universe."

Miss Langer quotes M. W. Urban (Language and Reality):

"It is not true that whatever can be expressed symbolically can be better expressed literally."

This is the rebuke administered to unimaginative factual prose-minded attitude toward existence by sensitive genius which appreciates the hidden values of beauty and meaning in nature. The conceptions of the human mind would be a drab, bleak and barren poverty of consciousness if they could not be haloed with a true mystical aura and experience the discovery of expansive intimations.

All this takes us into the next phase of the elucidation,--that poetry is in itself philosophy under a veil. Naturally this must be so, for if poetry is the sensing of the basic correspondence between the outward manifestation of the forms and the forms themselves, it is a delineation of the fundamental archai of the creation, which is philosophy. So Aristotle says (De Poetica): "Hence poetry is something more philosophical and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals; whereas those of history are singulars."

Urban, just quoted, writes again:

"But when all is said and done, it remains true that poetry is covert metaphysics, and it is only when its implications, critically

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interpreted and adequately expressed, become part of philosophy that an adequate view of the world can be achieved."

Miss Langer says that the symbols embody basic ideas of life and death, of man and the world, and are naturally sacred. But, catastrophically, naive thinking does not distinguish between the symbol and its abstract counterpart, or divine its inner import. Then this writer, in her Philosophy in a New Key, articulates one of the most significant principles in all this field of understanding: "Our metaphysical symbols must spring from reality." They must come into the mind from their connection with the real life of the world, else they may spring from fantasy and darken the mental view. They must be part and parcel of that infinite essence with which we are to attune our lives.

Like poetry, art also wins its edifying power over the human spirit by being cognate with the natural order and designed to depict the inner elan and meaning of that order. Fuller tells that Aristotle, as would be evident, did not agree with Plato's idea that art is base because it is only an imitation of nature. It is inspiring because it is such an imitation, contended the Stagirite. Perhaps art, however, only attains its high power of uplift when it is a divination of what is universal and eternal in the particulars it portrays, adumbrative of what in nature is true, expressing in sensible terms the ideal which nature silently proclaims.

Dewey makes the profound observation that "symbols afford the only way of escape from submergence in existence." This might suggest to the Hindu mind a better way of escape than self-destruction! Unquestionably symbols help the mind to gain that degree of understanding of the run of events which enables it to maintain its poise and equanimity amid the constant succession of things which in their isolation can furnish the thought with no principle of rationalization. A symbol, expertly envisaged, points to meaning, and it is meaning alone that can fortify mind with the power to participate in the manifold of experience without becoming an idle drifter or totally lost. To be carried along on the transmission belt of events without having a view of order, plan or purpose, or at least an eventuality that will have meaning, is only to wander aimlessly in a thicket. A symbol affords the thought a link by which events can be tied together to engage the interest and so feed the hunger of the rational nature with satisfying food. It is

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no mere poetism to say that the reasoning faculty must be fed with proper rational diet, as the body with physical food. Man's life is cast among things. His intercourse with things is only redeemed from banality and deadness by virtue of his knowing something of the relation things bear to the ultimate and total meaning and purpose of the creation, as Dr. Hocking has said. The nature of a thing, said Socrates, involves the presupposition of its purpose or end in the total of things. The teleological significance of any object or event must therefore wait on time to unfold it. The meaning of some one bolt, bar, rod, lever, wheel, valve, pin or ratchet in a printing press can be known only when its essential contribution to the running of the machine as a whole is known; and even that comes to meaning only when the purposes of a newspaper or book are known. And confronting mankind is the still further step toward knowing the true purposes and ends of newspapers and books. The regress goes on until it brings man face to face with the end question of all: what is the total meaning of human life, what the essence and purport of the universe. All actions, moments and events in life are contributory to some evident design, something that the supreme entelechy comprehends. What this is is the task of philosophy to discover.

As man is a miniature copy of the universe, his experience may point by analogy to the corresponding, if infinitely surpassing, experience of higher Logoi and creative god powers. When a man makes something designed to serve a specific purpose, he can be thought of as a small god, throwing a number of cosmic elements into a compound to effect the desired result. It yields him the feeling of a creator, and psychologically it is the most satisfying perhaps of all self-generated feelings. It represents at its inferior level and degree the creative Lila or joy of God. That there is a very god within every man, eager to gain his majority and enjoy the sense of his creative potential to regulate and rule a portion of the complex of events in his corner of the universe is well stated by the Roman philosopher Seneca:

"There is no need to lift up your hands to heaven or to pray the servant of the temple to admit you to the ear of the idol that your prayers may be heard the better. God is near thee; he is with thee. Yes, Lucilius, a holy spirit resides within us, the observer of good and evil, and our constant guardian. And as we treat him, he

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treats us; no good man is without a god--that a god dwells in the breast of every good man is certain."

This is echoed in the Upanishads of India: "The one supreme power through which all things have been brought into being is one with the inmost self in each man's heart." "God's dwelling place is the heart of man." "Thou are the sheath of Brahman." The inner immortal self and the great cosmic power are one and the same. Man comes to have the rudiments of a sagacious understanding of what his residence on this planet may mean only when he has gained the firm realization that he, dually segmented in consciousness and body, compounded of spirit and matter, is himself a seed portion of the totality of life. As seed of a larger growth, he faces a process of evolution, for, as a seed, his existence is forever meaningless apart from cycles of growth. Any philosophy that deals with life on terms that take no account of growth and development in a time process is a fatal mirage.

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