It is needless to indicate how the Ideas of Plato, the "sub specie
aeternitatis" of Spinoza, the "Liberation" from "the Will" of
Schopenhauer, the "Beatific Vision" of the Catholic saints are all
analogues and parallels, expressed under different symbols, of the
same universal feeling. The difference between these philosophic
statements of the situation and mine, is that, whereas these are
content, with the doubtful exception of Plato, to eliminate from
this subconscious "more" of what is "best" in our own soul, every
trace and element of personality, I am unable to escape from the
conviction that compared with personality no power in the
universe, whether it be called "Idea" or "Substance" or a "Will to
annihilate Will" or "Life Force" or "Stream of consciousness" or
any other name, is worthy to be regarded as the cause and origin of
that intimation of "something more" by which our soul comes into
contact with the secret of the system of things.
To assume that the vision of unutterable truth which is reached in
the supreme works of art is anything less than the vision of
super-human Personality is to assume that something other than
Peripety is the secret of life. And how can man, who feels so
profoundly conscious that his own personal "I am I" is the inmost
essence of his being, when it comes to the question of the cause of
his sensation of "riding on the waves" of this something "more," be
content to find the cause in mere abstractions from personality,
such as "streams of consciousness" or "life-force" or "Absolute
Substance"?
What we _know for certain_, in this strange imbroglio, is that
what we call Beauty is a complex of two mysteries, the mystery of
our own "I am I" and the mystery of the "objective something"
which this "I am I" confronts. And if, as is the case, our most
intense and passionate experience, when the rhythm of our nature
is at the fullest, is the intuition of some world-deep authority or
sanction giving an eternal validity to our ideas, this authority or
sanction cannot be interpreted in mere metaphors or similes
abstracted from personality, or in any material substance without a
mind, or in any "stream of thought" without a thinker: but can only
be interpreted in terms of what alone we have an inside
consciousness of, namely in terms of personality itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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