CREATION AS SELF-UTTERANCE

the hint of dreams, Carpenter affirms that the ultimate investigation reveals

a continuai ebullition and birth going on within us, and an évolution out of the Mind-stufi of forms which are the expression and images of underlying feeling ; thèse forms, at ûrst vague and undetermined in outline, rapidly gather définition and deamess and materiality, and press fbrward towards expression in the outer world.^

This suggests the norm of the créative process.

We seem to corne upon something which we may caU a Law of Nature — namely, that within ourselves tiiere is a continuai movement outwards from Feeling towards Thought and then to Action; from the inner to the outer ; from the vague to the deûnite ; from the emotional to the practical; from the world of dreams to the world of actual things and what we call reality.*

Création, therefore— individual and cosmic (though in the end the two are one and the same) — is in the nature of a real self-utterance,' a seU-revealment ; the process is taking place everywhere and at ail times; the moment ol Création is an etemal Now, its locus an onrnlprésent Hère ; we are part of it, and partakers in it ; it is possible for us to " leam and to praçtise the art in ourselves." *

Consider, for purposes of illustration, the living body. How does it arise ? Even the protozoon must be regarded as in some rudimentary sensé

^ The Art of Cfêoiion (Edition 1907), p. ai.

» i4. C, p. 14. » Ibid,, p. 53. • Cf. Ilnd., p. 320.

DESIRE PRECEDES STRUCTURE 21

desiring food, and the recnrrent désire, exdting to action, gives rise ultimatdy to the structure necessary for the pursuit and capture of food. Similarly,

fear oft repeated calls forth the long ears of tha rabbît or the donkey, or gives to the xnonkey its structure for climbing trees.^

The human hand, a material structure, is the crystallization of haintual, persistent désire — a mental process. Just as the complicated mechan* ism of a modem railway engine did not come suddenly into being, but was thought out in détail, and by numerous minds in successive générations, from very lowly, crude, imperfect beginnings, each addition or new adjustment or arrangement of parts being the expression of a thoi^ht and the satisfaction of a need, so the human body has been Uterally thought out, and is the resuit of " the sélection and chiselling of thousands of minds through the centuries." With this créative process we are continuons; our bodies in ail their détails of structure and function are mental legacies, the materiaUzation of a mental inheritance ; and the same Ufe-principle which has through the âges created the body is hère within each of us, and still at work.

The whole life of the Race from which we hâve come, the whole route, the whole séries of thought-processes by which we hâve descended, is within us, in our bodies, in our subconscious selves.*

^ A. C, p. 209. s Ibid.^ p. 311.