CHAPTER XIX
EPILOGUE
THE USES OF MYSTERY
Something Challis has told me; something I have learned for myself; andthere is something which has come to me from an unknown source.
But here again we are confronted with the original difficulty--thedifficulty that for some conceptions there is no verbal figure.
It is comprehensible, it is, indeed, obvious that the deeper abstractspeculation of the Wonder's thought cannot be set out by any metaphorthat would be understood by a lesser intelligence.
We see that many philosophers, whose utterances have been recorded inhuman history--that record which floats like a drop of oil on thelimitless ocean of eternity--have been confronted with this samedifficulty, and have woven an intricate and tedious design of words intheir attempt to convey some single conception--some conception whichthemselves could see but dimly when disguised in the masquerade oflanguage; some figure that as it was limned grew ever more confusedbeneath the wrappings of metaphor, so that we who read can glimpsescarce a hint of its original shape and likeness. We see, also, that thevery philosophers who caricatured their own eidolon, became intriguedwith the logical abstraction of words and were led away into awilderness of barren deduction--their one inspired vision of a stablepremiss distorted and at last forgotten.
How then shall we hope to find words to adumbrate a philosophy whichstarts by the assumption that we can have no impression of reality untilwe have rid ourselves of the interposing and utterly false concepts ofspace and time, which delimit the whole world of human thought.
I admit that one cannot even begin to do this thing; within our presentlimitations our whole machinery of thought is built of these twooriginal concepts. They are the only gauges wherewith we may measureevery reality, every abstraction; wherewith we may give outline to anyimage or process of the mind. Only when we endeavour to grapple withthat indeterminable mystery of consciousness can we conceive, howeverdimly, some idea of a pure abstraction uninfluenced by and independentof, those twin bases of our means of thought.
Here it is that Challis has paused. Here he says that we must wait, thatno revelation can reveal what we are incapable of understanding, thatonly by the slow process of evolution can we attain to any understandingof the mystery we have sought to solve by our futile and primitivehypotheses.
"But then," I have pressed him, "why do you hesitate to speak of whatyou heard on that afternoon?"
And once he answered me:
"I glimpsed a finality," he said, "and that appalled me. Don't you seethat ignorance is the means of our intellectual pleasure? It is thesolving of the problem that brings enjoyment--the solved problem has nofurther interest. So when all is known, the stimulus for action ceases;when all is known there is quiescence, nothingness. Perfect knowledgeimplies the peace of death, implies the state of being one--ourpleasures are derived from action, from differences, from heterogeneity.
"Oh! pity the child," said Challis, "for whom there could be no mystery.Is not mystery the first and greatest joy of life? Beyond the gate thereis unexplored mystery for us in our childhood. When that is explored,there are new and wonderful possibilities beyond the hills, then beyondthe seas, beyond the known world, in the everyday chances and movementsof the unknown life in which we are circumstanced.
"Surely we should all perish through sheer inanity, or die desperatelyby suicide if no mystery remained in the world. Mystery takes a thousandbeautiful shapes; it lurks even in the handiwork of man, in a stone god,or in some mighty, intricate machine, incomprehensibly deliberate anddetermined. The imagination endows the man-made thing with consciousnessand powers, whether of reservation or aloofness; the similitude ofmeditation and profundity is wrought into stone. Is there not source formystery to the uninstructed in the great machine registering theprogress of its own achievement with each solemn, recurrent beat of itsmetal pulse?
"Behind all these things is the wonder of the imagination that neverapproaches more nearly to the creation of a hitherto unknown image thanwhen it thus hesitates on the verge of mystery.
"There is yet so much, so very much cause for wondering speculation.Science gains ground so slowly. Slowly it has outlined, however vaguely,the uncertainties of our origin so far as this world is concerned, whilethe mystic has fought for his entrancing fairy tales one by one.
"The mystic still holds his enthralling belief in the succession ofpeoples who have risen and died--the succeeding world-races, red, black,yellow, and white, which have in turn dominated this planet. Sciencewith its hammer and chisel may lay bare evidence, may collate material,date man's appearance, call him the most recent of placental mammals,trace his superstitions and his first conceptions of a god from theelemental fears of the savage. But the mystic turns aside with anassumption of superior knowledge; he waves away objective evidence; hehas a certainty impressed upon his mind.
"And the mystic is a power. He compels a multitude of followers, becausehe offers an attraction greater than the facts of science. He tells of amystery profounder than any problem solved by patient investigation,because his mystery is incomprehensible even by himself; and in fearlest any should comprehend it, he disguises the approach with an arrayof lesser mysteries, man-made; with terminologies, symbologies and hightalk of esotericism too fearful for any save the initiate.
"But we must preserve our mystic in some form against the awful timewhen science shall have determined a limit; when the long history ofevolution shall be written in full, and every stage of world-buildingshall be made plain. When the cycle of atomic dust to atomic dust isdemonstrated, and the detail of the life-process is taught andunderstood, we shall have a fierce need for the mystic to save us fromthe futility of a world we understand, to lie to us if need be, toinspirit our material and regular minds with some breath of deliciousmadness. We shall need the mystic then, or the completeness of ourknowledge will drive us at last to complete the dusty circle in oureagerness to escape from a world we understand....
"See how man clings to his old and useless traditions; see how heopposes at every step the awful force of progress. At each stage heprotests that the thing that is, is good, or that the thing that was andhas gone, was better. He despises new knowledge and fondly clings to thebelief that once men were greater than they now are. He looks back tothe more primitive, and endows it with that mystery he cannot find inhis own times. So have men ever looked lingeringly behind them. It is aninstinct, a great and wonderful inheritance that postpones the moment ofdisillusionment.
"We are still mercifully surrounded with the countless mysteries ofeveryday experience, all the evidences of the unimaginable stimulus wecall life. Would you take them away? Would you resolve life into adisease of the ether--a disease of which you and I, all life and allmatter, are symptoms? Would you teach that to the child, and explain tohim that the wonder of life and growth is no wonder, but a demonstrableresult of impeded force, to be evaluated by the application of anadequate formula?
"You and I," said Challis, "are children in the infancy of the world.Let us to our play in the nursery of our own times. The day will come,perhaps, when humanity shall have grown and will have to take uponitself the heavy burden of knowledge. But you need not fear that thatwill be in our day, nor in a thousand years.
"Meanwhile leave us our childish fancies, our little imaginings, ourhope--children that we are--of those impossible mysteries beyond thehills...."
THE END
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