The struggle between the emotion of love and the emotion of
malice goes on perpetually, in the depths of life, below a thousand
shifting masks and disguises. What we call the "universe" is
nothing but a congeries of innumerable "souls," manifested in
innumerable "bodies," each one confronted by the objective
mystery, each one surrounded by an indescribable ethereal
"medium."
What we call the emotion of love is the outflowing of any one of
these souls towards the body and soul of any other, or again, in a
still wider sense, towards all bodies and souls covered by the
unfathomable circle of space.
I will give a concrete example of what I mean. Suppose a man to
be seated in the yard of a house with a few patches of grass in
front of him and the trunk of a solitary tree. The slanting sunshine,
we will suppose, throws the shadows of the leaves of the tree and
the shadows of the grass-blades upon a forlorn piece of trodden
earth-mould or dusty sand which lies at his feet. Something about
the light movement of these shadows and their delicate play upon
the ground thrills him with a sudden thrill; and he finds he "loves"
this barren piece of earth, these grass-blades, and this tree. He does
not only love their outward shape and colour. He loves the "soul"
behind them, the "soul" that makes them what they are. He loves
the "soul" of the grass, the "soul" of the tree, and that dim,
mysterious, far-off "soul" of the planet, of whose "body" this
barren patch of earth is a living portion.
What does this "love" of his actually imply? It implies an
outflowing of the very stuff and substance of his own towards the
thing he loves. It implies, by a mysterious vibration of reciprocity,
an indescribable response to his love from the "soul" of the tree,
the plant, and the earth. Let an animal enter upon the scene, or a
bird, or a windblown butterfly, or a flickering flight of midges or
gnats, their small bodies illumined by the sun. These new comers
he also loves; and is obscurely conscious that between their
"souls" and his own there vibrates a strange reciprocity. Let a
human being enter, familiar or unfamiliar, and if his will be set
upon "love," the same phenomenon will repeat itself, only with a
more conscious interchange.
But what of "malice" all this time? Well! It is not difficult to
indicate what "malice" will seek to do. Malice will seek to find its
account in some physical or mental annoyance produced in us by
each of these living things. This annoyance, this jerk or jolt to our
physical or mental well-being, will be what to ourselves we name
the "fault" of the offending object.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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