CHAPTER II THE NATURE OF THE SELF

" It is by love only that we can folly enter into that harmoay with others which akme constitates <mr own realtty and the reality of the onivene. We conceive tbe nnivene as a spiritual whole, made up of individoals, who hâve no existence except as manifestations of the whole ; as tha whole. on the other hand, has no existence except as manifested in them." — ^McTaggart. ^

ARGUMENT

The witness of introspection is that that which begins as Feding tends to pass outwards thraugh Thought to Action, Désire précèdes structure, and the complex organization of aur présent human bodies represénts mental and conative processes in the age-long race-tife. The créative race-Ego is in each individual, working on through hitn. The fundamental fact of individual selfhood is a Universai Self, The same conclusion is reached from an examination of the development of consciousness ; in animais knower, thing known, and knowledge are undifferentiated, but in man there arises self-consciousness with its oppositions and delusions, This differentiation into separated selves ministers to the growth and realization of individuality, and looks towards the re-fusion of individuals into a higher unity. Of this higher

18 AFFINITIES WITH BERGSON

unity, as heing présent amid the différences and arUagonisms of self-consciousness, the expérience of " cosmic consciousness " is a witness. In this expérience, the individual self recognizes the Great Self as its own truth and reality.^ At the surface, the individual appears an isoïated fragment ; but inwardly and more truly he is an all-embracing kingdom, The true self is a Democracy.

^Y^HE Art of Création is Edward Carpenter's M most ambitious prose work, and a real contribution to the solution of the central problem of finite existence. The book takes its title from a lecture which is printed as the first chapter, and its main thème is a fresh, profound, and very suggestive analytical examination of the nature of the Self. The reader will not fail to be impresse<J with the remarkable anticipations which the book contains of views which are associated with the name of Henri Bergson.

Reflectlng independently upon the problem of life, Carpenter bases his metaphysics, in strict accordance with the Bergsonian injunction, upon an act of the sympathetic imagination whereby the thinker, no longer content with observing the extemal forms in which the life-process mamfests, places himself as it were within the life-stream which is the core of ail objects.

1 " If a man worship the Self only as his own true state, his work cannot perish; for whatever he desires, that he obtains from the Self" {Brihad-aranyaka-Up. I. iv. 15).

THEORT OF CREATION Ift

Carpenter did not hit upon Bergson's beautifol and illuminating symbol of the foontain whose central, perpetually-urgent jet represents the élan vital of the créative life, the vital foice, the super-consciotisnes&— or whatever it may be called — which is the " life of ail that hath been made " ; and from which intellect and matter each anse in their tum by a kind of latéral or peripheral relaxation, retardation, curving-backwards, in the fashion of the fountain-spray, fine as mist (intellect) above, and becoming heavier drops (matter) as the fall proceeds; probably this view of the création of matter is original in human thought with the brilliant French philosopher > ; yet, short of this last link Connecting the non-material with the material, Carpenter's theory is very similar. We shall now give an outline of it.

It is inévitable that the first experiments in this more intimate way of knowing, this know* ledge from within, should be directed towards the thinker's own personality; for although the process of introspection, especially as it becomes more and more profound penetrating to the very roots of being, is not easy, the Self is nearer and more penetrable than any other object of knowledge. Scrutinizing so, and taking

1 The fondamental identity of spirit and matter bas, of course, often been affirmed : cf. Lao-tra. " The two things. the spiritual and the material, though we caU them by difierent names, in their Origin are one and the same."