Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook: Ten Lectures on Social SubjectsHousman, Laurence
Philosophy
Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook: Ten Lectures on Social Subjects
Housman, Laurence
Social ethics; Social sciences
The eye of the sun itself is blind; and for ever, while it dazzles
us with its light, blind it must remain. Nay, what need has it for
sight at all, if in blindness it be able to fulfil its mission? And
yet implicit within its vast energies, there lies the gift of sight.
For that blind Eye of Heaven taught us to see; our substance came from
it, our eyes were made by it, and without it was not anything made on
earth that was made. And if, by this gift of sight, it has opened to us
so vast a space for our understanding to dwell in--bestowing so huge
a conception of life on this frail vessel of clay--if by so giving
of itself through long aeons of time it has opened to us so much more
than it knows itself, cannot we render back without grudging these
shorter, frailer lives of ours, whose brevity, perhaps, is the very
price required of us for their enjoyment, since without such limits our
far-reaching comprehension of space and its possessions could never
have been gained. Should there be any despair, or any depression in
the thought that from the blind eye of day and from the powers of its
heat was developed the human brain? For if from that apparent Blindness
of our Universe came really the eyes of life by which we perceive all
things, can we not commit our spirits back to its keeping with an
equal trust that what lies ahead will be at least as good as what lies
behind, though we be not there to see it?
But the law of the conservation of energy does not in the least satisfy
the aspirations of those who are out for personal immortality in the
individual sense. To these it seems a grievance that they should have
been called into being for any end not wholly satisfying to that
Ego which is now laying upon their consciousness the weight of its
possessive limitations. This separative quality of the Ego is to them
the whole principle of existence; without it they cannot see life.
To them, life in any less focused or more diffused form would be no
better than annihilation, an obvious setting-back of the evolutionary
process by which creation has led step by step to that degree of
self-consciousness realised in the human race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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