We should not have this, because though the basic activities were
there in equal proportion, each living concrete person whose
activities these were would necessarily colour the resultant vision
with the stain or dye of his original difference from all the rest. For
no two living entities in this extraordinary world are exactly the
same.
What is left for us, then, it might be asked, but to "whisper our
conclusions" and accept the fact that all "philosophies" must be
different, as they are all the projection of different personalities?
Nothing, as far as pure logic is concerned, is left for us but this.
Yet it remains as an essential aspect of the process of philosophizing
that we should endeavour to bring over to our vision as many other
visions as we can succeed in influencing. For since we have the
power of communicating our thought to one another and since it is
of the very nature of the complex vision to be exquisitely sensitive
to influences from outside, it is a matter of primordial necessity to
us all that we should exercise this will to influence and this will to
be influenced.
And just as in the case of persons sympathetic to ourselves the
activity of philosophizing is attended by the emotion of love and the
instinct of creation, so in the case of persons antagonistic to
ourselves the activity of philosophizing is attended by the emotion
of hate and the instinct of destruction. For philosophy being the
final articulation of a personal reaction to life, is penetrated
through and through with the basic energies of life.
On the one hand there is a "Come unto me, all ye . . ." and on the
other there is a "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"
Just because the process of philosophizing is necessarily personal, it
is evident that the primordial aspect of it which implies "the will to
influence" must tally with some equally primordial reciprocity,
implying "the will to be influenced."
That it does so tally with this is proved by the existence of language.
This medium of expression between living things does not seem to
be confined to the human race. Some reciprocal harmony of energy,
corresponding to our complex vision, seems to have created
many mysterious modes of communication by which myriads of
sub-human beings, and probably also myriads of super-human beings,
act and react on one another.
But the existence of language, though it excludes the possibility of
absolute difference, does not, except by an act of faith, necessitate
that any sensation we name by the same name is really identical
with the sensation which another person feels. And this difficulty is
much further complicated by the fact that words themselves tend in
the process to harden and petrify, and in their hardening to form, as
it were, solid blocks of accretion which resist and materially distort
the subtle and evasive play of the human psychology behind them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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