But the problem of conduct is not the problem of getting into
harmony with any particular individual soul. It is the problem of
getting into harmony with the creative vision in our own soul,
which when attained turns out to be identical with the creative
vision of every other soul in the universe. The conception of the
elemental personality does not depend, as does the existence of the
immortals, upon our consciousness of something objective and
eternal in our primordial ideas. It depends upon our suspicion that
no extended mass of what we call matter, however attenuated and
ethereal, can exist suspended in soulless space.
Some attenuated form of matter our universe demands, as the
universal medium by means of which all separate bodies come
into touch with each other; but it is hard to imagine an universal
medium hung, as it were, in an enormous vacuum. Such a medium
would seem to demand, as a reason for its existence, some living
centre of energy such as that which a personal soul can alone
supply. It is in this way we arrive at the hypothetical conception of
the elemental soul.
And our hypothesis is borne out by one very curious human
experience. I mean the experience which certain natures have of a
demonic or magnetic force in life which can be drawn upon either
for good or for evil, and which seems in some strange sense to be
diffused round us in the universal air. Goethe frequently refers to
this demonic element; and others, besides Goethe, have had
experience of it. If our hypothetical, elemental personality is to be
regarded as a sort of demi-god, lower than the immortals and
perhaps lower than man, we may associate it with those vague
intimations of a sub-human life around us which seems in some
weird sense distinct from the life of any particular thing we know.
The elemental personality, in this case, would be the cause of
those various "psychic manifestations" which have sometimes
been fantastically accounted for as the work of so-called
"elementals."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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