Life, according to this philosophy, is only one aspect of personality.
Another aspect of personality is the apparently miraculous creation
of "something" out of "nothing"; for the unfathomable creative
power of personality extends beyond and below all the organic
phenomena which we group vaguely together under the name of
"life."
Thus when in our analysis of the attributes of the complex vision we
are confronted by the evolutionary question as to how such a thing,
as the thing we call "conscience," got itself lodged in the little
cells of the human cranium, our answer is that the question stated in
this manner does not touch the essential problem at all. The essential
problem from the point of view of the philosophy of the complex
vision is not how "conscience," or why other attribute of the soul,
got itself lodged in the human skull, or expressed, shall we say,
through the human skull, but how it is that the whole stream of
sense-impressions, of which the hardness and thickness of the
human skull is only one impression among many, and the original
"star-dust" or "star-nebulae" only another impression among many,
ever got itself unified and synthesized into the form of "impression"
at all.
In other words the problem is not how the attributes of the soul
arose from the chemistry of the brain and the nerves; but how the
brain and the nerves together with the whole stream of material
phenomena from the star-dust upwards, ever got themselves unified
and focussed into any sort of intelligibility or system. The average
human mind which feels a shock of distrust and suspicion directly
we suggest that the thing we name "conscience," defined as the
power of response to the ideal vision, is an inalienable aspect of
what we call "the soul" wherever the soul exists, feels no sort of
shock or surprise when we appeal to its own "conscience," or when
it appeals to the "conscience" of its child or its dog or even of its
cat, or when it displays anger with its trees or its flowers for
their apparent wilfulness and errancy.
Kant found in the moral sense of humanity his door of escape from
the fatal relativity of pure reason with its confounding antinomies.
Huxley found in the moral sense of humanity a mysterious,
unrelated phenomenon that refused to fall into line with the rest of
the evolutionary-stream. But when, in one hold act of faith or of
imagination, we project the content of our own individual soul into
the circle of every other possible "soul," including the "souls" of
such phenomenal vortices of matter as those from which historic
evolution takes its start, this impossible gulf or "lacuna" dividing
the human scene from all previous "scenes" is immediately bridged;
and the whole stream of material sense-impression flows forward, in
parallel and consonant congruity, with the underlying creative
energy of all the complex visions of which it is the expression.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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