Ideas of Good and EvilYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Philosophy
Ideas of Good and Evil
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Essays
symbols, for it long seemed to me that one could account for everything by
the power of one imagination over another, telepathy as it is called with
that separation of knowledge and life, of word and emotion, which is the
sterility of scientific speech. The symbol seemed powerful, I thought,
merely because we thought it powerful, and we would do just as well
without it. In those days I used symbols made with some ingenuity instead
of merely imagining them. I used to give them to the person I was
experimenting with, and tell him to hold them to his forehead without
looking at them; and sometimes I made a mistake. I learned from these
mistakes that if I did not myself imagine the symbol, in which case he
would have a mixed vision, it was the symbol I gave by mistake that
produced the vision. Then I met with a seer who could say to me, 'I have a
vision of a square pond, but I can see your thought, and you expect me to
see an oblong pond,' or, 'The symbol you are imagining has made me see a
woman holding a crystal, but it was a moonlight sea I should have seen.' I
discovered that the symbol hardly ever failed to call up its typical
scene, its typical event, its typical person, but that I could practically
never call up, no matter how vividly I imagined it, the particular scene,
the particular event, the particular person I had in my own mind, and that
when I could, the two visions rose side by side.
I cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers whether
they are used consciously by the masters of magic, or half unconsciously
by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist. At first I
tried to distinguish between symbols and symbols, between what I called
inherent symbols and arbitrary symbols, but the distinction has come to
mean little or nothing. Whether their power has arisen out of themselves,
or whether it has an arbitrary origin, matters little, for they act, as I
believe, because the great memory associates them with certain events and
moods and persons. Whatever the passions of man have gathered about,
becomes a symbol in the great memory, and in the hands of him who has the
secret, it is a worker of wonders, a caller-up of angels or of devils. The
symbols are of all kinds, for everything in heaven or earth has its
association, momentous or trivial, in the great memory, and one never
knows what forgotten events may have plunged it, like the toadstool and
the ragweed, into the great passions. Knowledgeable men and women in
Ireland sometimes distinguish between the simples that work cures by some
medical property in the herb, and those that do their work by magic. Such
magical simples as the husk of the flax, water out of the fork of an
elm-tree, do their work, as I think, by awaking in the depths of the mind
where it mingles with the great mind, and is enlarged by the great memory,
some curative energy, some hypnotic command. They are not what we call
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