Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West. Ameen Rihani
law. Neither good nor evil, in this sense, is a hard fact, but a liquid phenomenon. And every individual manifestation, every given fact is related to thousands, millions of its kind that precede and follow. Repentance, for in, never remedies a wrong act. It only complicates it. For though the wrong may cease, temporarily or permanently, the act continues—becomes a part of the unwritten social law. Likewise, a definite consciousness, blossoming in one individual, may have its roots in a generation that is already extinct, and may waft its seeds to generations unborn. It is because we live mostly in the present, however, that we only see the link in the chain of circumstances, and we often mistake effects for causes. Nevertheless, we pretend to be able to define the confusion within us.
Psychology, we call to our aid. But civilized man has but recently began to study the underlying strata of his intellectual and spiritual make-up. We are still lisping in the hornbook of psychology. Why then put on dionysian airs and bamboozle ourselves and the world with introspective profundities? Or with candor, measured and designed? Or with loud, unreserved avowals of seeking and understanding the re-actions of life upon the Ego?
For this is one of the dominating intellectual passions of the age. We seek experience only to see how it reacts upon us. In other words, we do not give for the sake of giving and the joy in the giving, but only for the sake of studying its effect upon ourselves. We do not seek in experience the hidden and oft times remote agencies of spiritual growth and betterment, but the palpable, material, and immediate returns.
I do not say, however, that this is prompted wholly by selfish motives. On the contrary, the selfishness, if any, springs from an illusory extension of Self—a fictitiousness of our own making. It is the result of an individualism abnormally and artificially developed—an individualism of the hot-house. It is the Ego taking an especial delight in its grotesqueries, revelling in its own madness, boasting even of its morbid, cancerous growth. The soul is turned into a clinic, as it were; the mind, into an asylum. This is the kind of experience that leads into the chamber of horrors; and it is responsible, even in real art, for the spiritual bankruptcy of the Western world.
We are told that people who disarm us with their candor, who discount our suspicion with a startling confession, are not capable of deceiving. But the eye very often belies the tongue. A delicious candor, a surface sincerity goes little into the soul of things—the hidden springs of reality. When a woman mundane, for instance, tells you that her hair is a wig, her complexion, paste and cream and rouge and art, might not this show of bankrupt pulchritude be designed to avert your eye from the more pathetic bankruptcy within? Might it not be what the military critics call a diversion?
To be sure, we would not allow the world, if we can help it, to peep into our soul, much less to enter it. Our No-Man's-Land is hedged about with a wire entanglement of insincerities. And often we take refuge in a temperament, a pose, or a mystic mood. Like certain animals, we take on the color of our surroundings in self defense. And often aggressively we color our own passions, oblivious of the native pigment hidden in our own consciousness. We want to be what we are not, and we are petulent, moody, when we fail.
Albeit, moods, howsoever evanescent, have a spiritual significance—a physical import as well. They are the living cells, as it were, of the psychology of our being. Even the most elusive, the most sudden and unaccountable, has in it the potency of perpetuity. It vanishes into our subconsciousness like a waft of perfume or a whiff of smoke, and there, in the alembic of mystery, is invisibly, insensibly transformed or crystalized. It evades in either instances our mortal ken. Its process of growth can not be detected, however keen our perceptive faculty. And a microscope of moods has not yet been invented. Let us then respect the aura of mystery—the etherial—spiritual and moral—emanations of every reality. And the trick of candor and sincerity as well. Our psychological analysis leads us but to the door of knowledge; and there, we must either enter blindly or go our way bravely with our curiosity still unsatisfied.
III.
III
THE HIGHEST IDEAL
THE living spirit of the ages is made up of ideals more or less visionary in their inception, more or less unattainable in their plenitude. And in nations, as in individuals, they are subject to the law of growth and decay—the law that governs the seed in the soil, the star-dust in the planetary system—as well as to the law of conservation.
Like matter itself, an ideal is mutable, but indestructible. It does not die; it only undergoes a change. It expresses itself in art and literature and religion only after it has attained a certain degree of common conception. An idealist is ahead of his time only in the sense that he is articulate. The same is true of a nation. For even primitive people, even effete races have a message for those above or below them. The heritage of the Ideal, however small can not be exhausted.
That is why in periods of awakening, or of cataclysmic change, the light often comes from unremembered and unexpected sources—sources that were thought to be exhausted or barren. The ideals of Greece, of Rome, of the Orient, the ideals even of primitive man, come back to us, in the eternal cycle of the spirit, to leaven our own. They often surprise us in moments of depression or exaltation, in our silences, in our subliminal spells, even in our daily grind.
Out of the vague, even vagrant conceptions of the mind an ideal slowly evolves, assumes definite shape and form. Error-bound but truth-directed, we are constantly moving to a certain goal in its unfolding infinitudes. Its fiat is universal, despite its apparent failures. The grocer as well as the poet, at one time or another, must recognize and accept its circulating medium. Whether they squander it or save it or invest it—whether they profit by it or not—is another question. But they are idealists in that they are both dissatisfied with its purchasing power. We are all idealists in that we are ever discontented with the present state of the Ego and the World.
It is among the poor and obscure, however, that the ideal often finds its sincerest expression; for those who make it their business often speculate in certain tangible concrete forms of it—reform formulas—that are neither useful in a general way nor attractive. The poor man, on the other hand, concerns not himself with reforms; nor does he entertain such visions of a regenerated world as might obstruct the way to his immediate needs. His ideal, it is true, may consist in having a home instead of a slum-hole; in sending his children to school instead of the factory; in being free to work whenever and wherever he please, instead of being a slave to capital or to labor. It is nevertheless an ideal, which, although obviously material, has in it a spirituality that can revolutionnize the world. He sincerely desires to improve his own condition and to give the world better and healthier children. And this desire, though it be only partly realized in a lifetime, is the heritage of the ideal, which he bequeaths to them.
But the world seldom recognizes the spirituality in the material ideals of the poor. They are ridiculed by those who preach, but do not practice, the higher ethics. They are flouted, called base, worldly, sordid, by those professional idealists of religion and literature and art. And yet, a loaf of bread can regenerate a soul; a loaf of bread can precipitate a revolution. And by the law of reaction, materialism does become sordid, and the vaunted spirituality of its critics loses its vitality and attraction. Hence the epochal outbreaks of doubt, skepticism, heresy, revolt. For the man who is struggling for wealth and power or fame and glory, is no better and no worse, without a lofty ideal, than the man who is struggling for bread. The latter, in fact, is more deserving of respect, is more entitled to the consideration of the world. And the sooner he gets it, the better for the world. For the spirituality of his material ideals, now that he too has become a self-conscious Ego, is fast resolving itself into a monstrosity of selfishness. He is no longer a poor working man; he is a man of the working poor, who refuses to be poor for ever and refuses morever to work. He is a menace to-day. He will become a scourge to-morrow. No Labor Union can guide him; no Government can deter him. He is a fatality. Spiritually deformed himself, he comes, paradoxical as it may seem, to restore