And the same assertion must be made both with regard to
goodness and with regard to truth. If any one of them absolutely
overcame the other, so as completely to destroy it, the ebb and
flow of life would at that moment cease.
A world where all minds could apprehend all truth without any
illusion or admixture of unreality, would not be a world at all, as
we know the world. It would be the colourless dream of an
immobile plurality of absolutes. As far as we are concerned it
would be synonymous with death. Thus the ultimate nature of the
world is found to be unfathomably dualistic. A sharp dividing line
of irreconcilable duality intersects every living soul; and the secret
of life turns out to be the relatively victorious struggle of
personality with the thing that in itself resists its fuller life.
This verdict of the complex vision is in unison with the natural
feeling of ordinary humanity and it is also in unison with the
supreme illuminated moments when we seem to apprehend the
vision of the gods. When once we have apprehended the inherent
nature of beauty, we are in a position to understand what the spirit
of art must be, whose business it is to re-create this beauty in terms
of personality. The idea of beauty itself is profoundly personal
even before art touches it, since it is one of the three primordial
ideas with which every conscious soul sets forth.
But it is not only personal. It is also objective and impersonal. For
it is not only the reaction of a particular soul to its own universe;
it is also felt, in the rare moments when the apex-thought of the
complex vision is creating its world rhythm, to be nothing less
than the vision of the immortals.
Art, therefore, which is the representation in terms of some
particular personal temperament, of that sense of beauty which is
the inheritance of all souls born into the world, must be profoundly
penetrated by the victorious struggle of the emotion of love with
the emotion of malice. For although the human sense of the beauty
of the world, which may be called the objective sense of the
beauty of the world, since the vision of the immortals lies behind
it, is the thing which art expresses, it must be remembered that this
sense is not an actual substance or concrete entity, but is only a
principle of selection or a process of mental reaction, in regard to
life.
The thing which may be called an actual substance is that outflowing
of the soul itself in centrifugal waves of positive and
negative vibration which we have chosen to name by the name
"emotion." This may indeed be called an actual concrete extension
of the psychic-stuff of the substantial soul. None of the three
primordial ideas resemble it in this. They are all attitudes of the
soul; not conscious enlargements or lessenings of the very stuff; of
the soul.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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