To take an instance from common experience: a stranger, an
unknown person, enters our circle. Instinct, working automatically
and sensationally, may attract us powerfully towards such a person,
with a steady, irresistible attraction. Intuition, on the contrary,
uttering its revelation abruptly and with, so to speak, one sudden
mysterious cry, may warn us of some dangerous quicksand or
perilous jungle in such a stranger's nature of which instinct was
totally ignorant because the thing was what might be called a
"spiritual quality" lying deeper than those sensational or magnetic
levels through which instinct feels its way.
The instinct of animals or birds for instance warns them very
quickly with regard to the presence of some natural enemy whose
approach they apprehend through some mysterious sense-impression
beyond the analysis of human reason. But when their enemy
is the mental intention of a human being they are only too easily
tricked.
To take quite a different instance. It may easily happen that while
conscience has habitually driven us to a certain course of action
against which instinct has never revolted because of its
preoccupation with the senses, some sudden flash of intuition
reaching us from the hidden substratum of our being changes our
whole perspective and gives to conscience itself a completely
opposite bias. What these intermittent revelations of intuition
certainly do achieve is the preservation in the soul's memory of the
clear and deep and free and unfathomable margins of the ultimate
mystery, those wavering sea-edges and twilight-shores of our being,
which the austere categories of rational logic tend to shut out as if
by impenetrable walls.
It remains to consider the attribute of memory. Memory is the name
which we give to that intrinsic susceptibility, implying an intrinsic
permanence or endurance in the material which displays
susceptibility, such as makes it possible for what the soul feels or
what the soul creates to write down its own record, so that it can be
read at will, or if not "at will," at least can be read, if the proper
stimulus or shock be applied.
Memory is not the cause of the soul's concrete identity. The soul's
concrete identity is the cause or natural ground of memory. Memory
is the "passive-active" power by means of which the concrete
identity of the soul grows richer, fuller, more articulate, more
complex and more subtle.
In looking back over these eleven attributes of the "soul-monad,"
what we have to remark is, that two of the number differ radically in
their nature from the rest. The attribute of emotion differs from the
rest in the sense that it is the living substantial unity or ultimate
synthesis in which they all move. It is indeed more than this. For it
is the actual "stuff" or "material" out of which they are all, so to
speak, "made" or upon which they all, so to speak, inscribe their
diverse creations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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