Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily DeathMyers, F. W. H. (Frederic William Henry)
Religion
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
Myers, F. W. H. (Frederic William Henry)
Immortality; Parapsychology; Personality
The obvious answer to this question lies in the one word Art. The
inspiration of Art of all kinds consists in the invention of precisely
such a wider symbolism as has been above adumbrated. I am not speaking,
of course, of symbolism of a forced and mechanical kind--symbolism
designed and elaborated as such--but rather of that pre-existent but
hidden concordance between visible and invisible things, between matter
and thought, between thought and emotion, which the plastic arts, and
music, and poetry, do each in their own special field discover and
manifest for human wisdom and joy.
In using these words, I must repeat, I am far from adopting the formulæ
of any special school. The symbolism of which I speak implies nothing of
mysticism. Nor indeed, in my view, can there be any real gulf or deep
division between so-called realistic and idealistic schools. All that
exists is continuous; nor can Art symbolise any one aspect of the
universe without also implicitly symbolising aspects which lie beyond.
And thus in the Arts we have symbolism at every stage of transparency
and obscurity; from symbolisms which merely summarise speech to
symbolisms which transcend it. Sometimes, as with Music, it is worse
than useless to press for too close an interpretation. Music marches,
and will march for ever, through an ideal and unimaginable world. Her
melody may be a mighty symbolism, but it is a symbolism to which man has
lost the key. Poetry's material, on the other hand, is the very language
which she would fain transcend. But her utterance must be subliminal and
symbolic, if it is to be poetry indeed; it must rise (as has been
already hinted) from a realm profounder than deliberate speech; it must
come charged, as Tennyson has it, with that "charm in words, a charm no
words can give."
Here, too, we must dwell for a moment upon another and higher kind of
internal visualisation. I have spoken of the arithmetical prodigy as
possessing a kind of internal blackboard, on which he inscribes with
ease and permanence his imaginary memoranda. But blackboards are not the
only surfaces on which inscriptions can be made. There are other
men--prodigies of a different order--whose internal _tabula_ is not of
blackened wood, but of canvas or of marble; whose inscriptions are not
rows of Arabic numerals but living lines of colour, or curves of
breathing stone. Even the most realistic art is something more than
transcript and calculation; and for art's higher imaginative
achievements there must needs be moments of inward idealisation when
visible beauty seems but the token and symbol of beauty unrevealed; when
Praxiteles must "draw from his own heart the archetype of the Eros that
he made;" when Tintoret must feel with Heraclitus that "whatsoever we
see waking is but deadness, and whatsoever sleeping, is but dream."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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