Chapter II: Introduction: Wordsworth's Immorality and Mine (2)

There was truth in astromancy. Man, consisting of the same Matter as the stars, felt his kinship, and, being uninstructed, built up assiduously his judicial astrology to explain, what every atom of his body knew subconsciously, his identity with Sirius and Aldebaran. There was truth in alchemy, more truth than in astrology. The prime idea of alchemy, the transmutation of Matter, is absolutely true. Uranium, thorium, radium, have been detected in the act of secreting and producing other elements, which new elements, it is almost certain, change, possibly by way of hydrogen, into electricity--rapidly in the cases of uranium and thorium, very slowly in the case of radium--and from electricity devolve back into the primitive form of Matter, the Ether. And such is the history of all Matter: from the Ether through cycles of change back to the Ether. Man, being this transmutable, indestructible matter become conscious, had from the beginning the knowledge of these properties of Matter within him, and, while still uninstructed, conceived the ideas of the transmutation of metals by the philosopher's stone, and of the prolonging of life indefinitely by that same philosopher's stone dissolved into the elixir of life: the one idea, practically true; the other, a fantastic intimation of the indestructibility of the Matter of which man consists. There was truth in witchcraft and sorcery. Modern hypnotism can exhibit phenomena as wonderful as anything recorded of black magic or white; and I am certain when I remember the properties and qualities of the elements of which he is compounded, that there are other material powers in man awaiting discovery. I understand the list of human elements is correct as far as it goes: about some eighteen are given, including those that are barely traceable. I cannot conceive what further powers may be discovered in man; but I allow myself an interlude to suggest that there are other elements besides the current list in the Matter of which he consists.

The rare gases recently discovered in the atmosphere, helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and the unknown members of that group, certain to be found--have these zero gases, as they are called, been sought for in man? Hitherto their story is a blank, as it is impossible to unite them chemically with any element; but they constitute one per cent. of the mechanical mixture of gases which we breathe. What are they doing, then, in the air? Nitrogen alone is a sufficient diluent of the necessary oxygen. Are these rare gases purposeless? I am intensely curious about them. Are there outcasts also among the elements? Are these gases dead elements? One of them, helium, is a transmuted emanation of radium. Is it the ghost of radium? Nitrogen, with which they are found mechanically mingled, is the element of fermentation and decay. One feels upon the brink of a notable discovery. These dead gases, these ghosts of elements herding with the vapour of dissolution, nitrogen, cannot be entirely ineffective. I hazard this poetical suggestion:--It is the presence of these incommunicable elements that maintains the mechanical mixture of the oxygen and the nitrogen of the air: were their ghostly frontier eliminated, the two main members of the atmosphere would unite chemically, forming protoxide of nitrogen, which is laughing gas. Great Pan! How close we are to that rare old fantasy, that the crack of doom will be a universal shout of laughter!

The names, affinities and energies of the elements of which man consists should be more secure in every memory than the alphabet and the multiplication table. This is a great part of my immorality, that, instead of a myth, children should be told, as soon as they begin to express their wonder, that they consist of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, kalium, natrium, sulphur, phosphorus, iron, magnesium, silicon; that the principal human elements are also the principal constituents of the whole Universe, and that all the elements are forms of one substance. They should also be shown experimentally the qualities and properties of these elements; and gradually, instead of catechisms and the grammars of dead languages, obtain a knowledge of the poetry of evolution: a poetry that does not require to be taught or learnt; that requires only to be told and shown to be known, welcomed, and remembered, because it is already subconscious in the Matter of which we consist. Thus a child would know at once that there has been no philosophy, no religion, no literature hitherto; that there is nothing for him to learn; that every one must make for himself his own philosophy, religion, literature. All that chemists, astronomers, physicists, biologists, have discovered and suggested; all science and all its speculations--these things that do not require to be learnt, but only require to be shown to be known and delighted in, the child would soon furnish himself with; just as he would light-heartedly reject everything in the shape of system from Aristotle to Herbert Spencer, and all doctrine from Buddha to Christ, and from Christ to Nietzsche. The insane past of mankind is the incubus: the world is really a virgin world awaking from a bad dream. ("The Testament of a Man Forbid.")

These are some of the seeds of the new thing I bring, of the new poetry which the world will make, Matter brooding on Matter for centuries to come. Poetry is the flower of what all men are maturing in thought and fancy; I reap a harvest as yet unsown; I come a hundred years before the time--that time foreseen by Wordsworth, "when what is now called science, familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on a form of flesh and blood."

It is a profoundly satisfying thought that no serious pursuit of man, no cherished conception, however erroneous in itself, is ever based in error. Man is Matter, embodied sincerity, and cannot for any length of time concern himself with what is not. I have shown a new thing--that Heaven and Hell were memories of processes of evolution struggling into consciousness; I have reminded the reader that astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, and sorcery had, all of them, roots in Material facts, and I have pointed out that these pseudo-sciences and black and white magics were attempts of unenlightened but conscious Matter to reveal itself and its powers. I will now state the Material sources of the stupendous ideas of God and Sin.

IV GOD AND SIN

Man is inhuman. Humanity is as fanciful an ideal as divinity. From eternity the Matter of which man consists had an unconscious being dissolved in the Ether; thereafter as lightning, and as various Material forms which we call elements: and as these various Material forms which we call elements, as lightning, and once again in the Ether, the Matter of which man consists will have an unconscious being to all eternity. I say an unconscious being: the likelihood that the Matter of man after its devolution into the Ether will again become conscious is inconsiderable. Further, in the event of so remote a chance, it is even more unlikely that the Matter of man, becoming conscious again, should have any recollection of its former consciousness. The present interlude of his conscious being--in the old image like the flight of a night-bird through an illumined hall from darkness to darkness--is so brief, that on that account alone man has had no time to become human. This is true of the individual; and were mankind to end now, or a million years hence, it would also, and still, be true of the race. A million years of consciousness as man would not be an experience long and broad and deep enough to humanize the Matter of which man consists, because except in rare cases the same Matter is never more than once incarnate. From crops grown, and cattle fed, on battlefields, molecules of Matter that were once part of man may become part of man again. Doubtless also cannibals have eaten cannibals, thus giving the same Matter repeated avatars: an instance, however, that does not make for humanity. Even if our earth were to heap geological period upon geological period from our recent era of tertiary and quaternary times to a futurity of centenary and millenary ages, until in the course of a million million of years every electron of the globe transmuted through all forms of Matter, had been reincarnated as Man again and again, that would not be experience enough to fix a permanent memory of humanity in the devolved Matter of man: because this Matter that becomes man, like all Matter, existed from all eternity--during the immeasurable and inconceivable lapse of eternity, existed in the Ether, thereafter as lightning, and as elements on fire, for periods compared with which a million million years are as the time of a single heart-beat compared with a million million years. Like thoughts of childhood in old age, the memory of the diaphanous light of the nebula and of the tumult and fire of its contraction, and the memory of the peace and darkness of its primeval, ethereal being, would overcome all impressions of consciousness in that unconscious memory which Matter is: and even if living experience remained occult in the oxygen and carbon, the hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium which had been man, the tumult and fire of the new nebula into which the Matter of man must devolve, will bray and burn out all sense of life in the most passionate Matter that ever lived and fought, the peace and darkness of the re-entered Ether, of the infinite Lethean Ether, will restore an entire and pure unconsciousness to the Matter which was Christ, to the Matter which was Nero, to the Matter which you are and which I am. It is a new poetry I bring, a new poetry for the first time in a thousand years: an abiding-place for the imagination of man as matter-of-fact, as hard and fast, as ineluctable as Olympus and Hades, Asgard and Hela, Heaven and Hell were for our ancestors, and simpler and greater and more perdurable than these, because it is no longer a dream of the Universe, but the Universe itself, in which the imagination of man must now find its abode.

The Matter of man can never become human. A metaphysic or metaphor of man is of two terms:--Man is a Will to an impossible Divinity by way of an impossible Humanity. For four score years or five score, a heart-beat between the two eternities, some dozen elements are elected or doomed to consciousness as man: and to this consciousness is imparted by the manner of his generation an insignificant heritage of accumulated tendency, impulse and impression: so insignificant, within recorded time, that it may be ignored. It has been suggested that out of man, the descendant of a lower animal, something higher than man may be evolved. The suggestion does not commend itself to me. I know of no data that can make the Evolution of Species from three or four originals by Natural Selection a credible assumption. The age of miracles is past. When we ask for a sign we are referred to the evolution of a new species of louse. If any mortal thing, elephant or microscopic insect, is still unprovided, by all means let it have its complement of lice: all-bounteous nature is not likely to be wanting in that department. That Matter should produce a new form of degenerate life in which it is especially prolific is no proof of the Evolution of Species by Natural Selection. The appearance of a new pedicular degraded-hemipterous insect in a hitherto inverminate habitat ensures certainly a due degree of phthiriasis where no phthiriasis was before--a consummation to rejoice the moral order of pediculina, and doubtless confirming the metaphysician of the parasitic world in his doctrine of the Universe as a Will to be Suctorial; but such an isolated phenomenon is not necessarily an illustration of the method of evolution, and might be called with greater probability an act of special creation. To me it is an instance of the material, poetic or imaginative style of Matter in its mood of depravity--a mood analogous to that in which literature produces Sinon, Tartuffe, Parolles, Chivy Slyme. A poetical metaphysic or metaphor is that of the Universe as Imagination becoming Phenomena. As in the Matter of a poet--nourished by the past, productive in the present, and sending forth aerial roots into the future--thoughts, imaginings, shapes, and legends of infinite variety, uncalled arise, and unlaboured become; so in the Matter of the earth--which is Matter of the Universe, from all eternity to all eternity, which is all memory, all imagination, all energy--life in infinite variety arises and becomes: not by the breaking up of species, although that may be a side-show at the world's fair, but by the appearance of species the staple of evolution proceeds. If one speck or clot of protoplasm can arise and become, and after becoming, can evolve an organism, millions of specks of protoplasm can arise and become, each evolving a different organism, and the whole constituting an unbroken chain of being: not evolution in a straight line, but cubic evolution, a pullulation of species. Consider it: there must be similarities without any necessity for either lineal or collateral evolution, although these are both thrown in by exuberant nature: if the organisms are vertebrate, then they must all have backbones; if they are invertebrate they will be, all of them, without backbones; if the generation is viviparous the mother--plant or animal--will suckle her young; if the generation is oviparous the mother--plum-tree, grain, poultry, or spider--will produce eggs: but to suppose that a fish changes into a bird, and a bird into a beast by Natural Selection, as it is at present understood, is to demand from man a credulity that could die a martyr's death to prove that the earth is flat. It is not a wanton mark of interrogation which I place against the Darwinian theory of the Origin of Species. What seems to me the subtle beginning of the one thing to be dreaded, a new anthropomorphism, demands resistance. On the threshold of Darwin's theory of the Evolution of Species by Natural Selection a danger-signal warns the jealous observer. The probability that allied species were descended from a common parent had sunk deeply into Darwin's mind; "but for some years," he writes, "I could not conceive how each form became so excellently adapted to its habits of life. I then began systematically to study domestic productions, and after a time saw clearly that _man's selective power was the most important agent_." (Darwin's Letter to Professor Haeckel of 8 October, 1864.) The italics are mine. Man's selective power is the most important agent in the breeding of domestic animals, therefore an analogous selective power is exercised by nature! Darwin set himself to find out that this was true, with unexampled patience certainly, but with a rooted and evergrowing prepossession that what he sought was there, that he would discover his own anthropical notion in an ananthropic world. Is this not the inception of a new anthropomorphism? So men sought for God; so men hunted after witchcraft. Whatever we search for, we find; nothing is surer than that. We must, therefore, search without seeking for; we must desire to find, not an echo or reflection of our own thoughts, obtainable anywhere and at any time, but only that which is. With Darwin Natural Selection amounted to a metaphysic; it obsessed him with all the force of Other World; it explained the phenomena considered and so must be the cause of these phenomena! In human affairs circumstantial evidence is the most reliable, in the affairs of the Universe the most misleading, as all science, philosophy, and religion, directly attest. Natural Selection, sexual and vital, accounts for much variation, but it is not sufficient to bridge the gulf between the negro and the Teuton; to my mind it is not even sufficient to bridge the gulf between the Jew and the Gentile; and to trace man lineally through apes, marsupials, mudfish, skull-less vertebrates, worms, and one-celled protozoa at twenty-five removes from the monera is to propound a thing my intellect and imagination reject. Environment, sexual inclination, and the struggle for life, will not evolve a man from a rhizopod. Natural Selection, as it is understood, cannot be the full mechanism of the evolution of man. I want to know about the Chemical Selection; the difference between the elemental constitution of man and the other animals; the actual chemistry of animated Matter. Is there as much of the Universe in the tiger as in man? Is there an element of self-consciousness to be found only in man? A profound, a more Material Selection, a fate, a doom, is yet to be discovered. Although evolutionists insist that their Natural Selection is a mechanical process, like Darwin himself they feel that it is insufficient; they may not confess it to themselves, but they are sceptical. Scepticism being the parent of superstition, Natural Selection assumes the desired attributes, dynamic, theurgic. Natural Selection has usurped the thoughts of evolutionists as a thing behind phenomena, as a kind of god. The world is in danger of a new fanaticism, of a scientific instead of a religious tyranny. This is my protest. In the course of many ages the mind of man may be able to grasp the world scientifically: in the meantime we can know it only poetically; science is still a valley of dead bones till imagination breathes upon them.

It is certain that Matter has not evolved a finer race of men than the Caucasian; and it is certain that the Caucasian has not evolved a finer breed than the Greeks, the Romans or the English. Maugre the new louse--doubtless a most belated and strangely involved occurrence, comparable to our war of the Heptarchy in South Africa more than a thousand years behind the time--upon our earth the evolution of species has ceased, except tentatively by unnatural selection under the control of man. Unnatural is here a most relative term: I do not forget that man is himself as much a force of nature as a climate, or a season of the year, or any other environment. Since in the Caucasian races of men Matter has become capable of full self-consciousness, although it has not attained it yet, no further evolution of life in an ascending scale is possible; therefore man cannot become more human than he is. A fuller self-consciousness will not achieve a greater humanity: on the contrary, as I intend to show, a fuller self-consciousness entails a deeper integration, a closer involution of man's inhumanity.

Man is inhuman, and cannot be other than inhuman, the metaphysic or metaphor illustrative being--The Universe as a Will to an impossible Divinity by way of an impossible Humanity. The skeleton of man is a most inhuman thing; a skull is most inhuman; bones are as inhuman as rocks. The flesh of man is inhuman; it is not distinguishable from the flesh of swine. His sight, hearing, taste, appetites, functions, are inhuman, being appropriaments of all mammalia. Four important things he has which, by their quality, differentiate him from the other animals--his thumb, his posture, his brain, and his larynx; and these, the insignia of man, are the special vehicles of a most profound inhumanity for which the catfish and the wolverine, were they in power, would wipe the present lord of creation from the face of the earth as utterly unfit to live. His commanding posture, his opposable thumb, his spacious convoluted brain, and his voice of terror and command, have enabled man to invent, elaborate, and apply to man all the tortures of his imagined Hell. The cat plays with the mouse, but that is the feline culinary art; and the mouse is shortly killed. Nor is the mouse fastened; it has to the last a chance of escape; and often the mouse gets away after a rousing game in which the stake was its life. The spider weaves a web, and the insect is caught; here the prey is fastened, but it is for food, and often a stout fly will break the net, and at the worst he is soon despatched. It was man who conceived the exquisite idea of fastening people in order to hurt them at his will and pleasure. Not a mammoth cat, insane and hunger-clung, ties up men and flogs them underground to cook them quickly instead of employing the longer, less brutal, and customary method with the mouse: it is man who does this to man, and not for food, but upon principle. Not a Titanic spider, but man, rove the strappado and stretched the rack in order to hurt men in body, mind, and soul, in every organ, nerve and sinew, joint and muscle, repeatedly and for long periods without killing them: it was man who did this, and not because he was starving and this the only way to secure and prepare food, but in many cases only because there was between him and his victims a difference of opinion upon an entirely immaterial point. It was not a pack of wolves, having captured more game than they could dispose of, and being quite sated with flesh and wanton with blood, who chained up men and women and burned them alive: it was men who did this to men as a religious duty. As soon as their queen has been pleased, and the future of the hive is assured, the working-bees destroy the drones. If merciful economy be a human attribute, the bees are more human than men. Those who cannot work, and those for whom there is nothing to do, the natural and artificial drones among men, are interned in lunatic asylums, homes for incurables, prisons, poorhouses. The cost of these would, I suppose, provide old-age pensions for all the workers. The lethal chamber of the bee is the porch of his straw-built citadel. Recently a humane man of science, with courage and public spirit--so rare in England now!--inquired for the lethal chambers of men. These are they: our asylums, prisons, poorhouses; but the death we supply is slow--so slow: why, one pleasant meal of five courses, with wine, coffee, benedictine, and a cigar, would in one night dispose of all the old men in a certain _Home_ I know: indeed, they are living tombs rather than lethal chambers, these institutions of ours. Among the bees it is the queens and drones, among the ants the queens and kings, non-workers in both cases, who produce the drudges and the soldiers. The proletariate of the hive and of the cities of the emmet are more human than men; they do not propagate their order: proletariate is really a discourtesy title applied to working-bees and ants. In the hive and the ant-hill the proletaneous order is the upper class: no slave begets a slave among these swarming miracles. From ancient times the working-bees and the working-ants, seeing that the endless all-absorbing drudgery has to be done, gradually evolved, by heroic human abstinence, their own sexlessness, leaving to the idle classes the rapture, the sin, and the awful responsibility of producing slaves: the humanity of the bees and ants, class and mass, approaches divinity. Among men the idle and well-to-do classes, instead of producing the workers and the soldiers, limited themselves of old to the reproduction of their own order, the males merely as an entertainment making sporadic incursions into the colonies of the workers. Now, even reproduction of their own order, in France, America, and more recently in England, begins to be irksome to the idle and well-to-do classes; but instead of an honest, honourable, and human abstinence, they adopt a dishonest, dishonourable, and brutal artifice: nor have they any real idea of regulating the future of the human race: it is only to keep their own circumstances easy and the tide of pleasure flowing: this custom is also extending, not so inhumanly, to the proletariate. With the majority of animals, so far as they themselves are concerned, all the seeds of life have fair play: and in the order of mammalia a beautiful, a human chastity has been evolved which restricts to a brief annual occurrence the nisus towards the future of their kind, such inhuman animals as men, monkeys, and cats excepted: with the exception of women also the females of all mammalia are human; they suckle their young. The asceticism of the asexual worker and soldier ants, the divinest thing in nature, had at one time an analogue of a kind in our monasteries, nunneries, and orders of military monks: that was the deadlift effort mankind made to attain an impossible Divinity by way of an impossible Humanity; and it was only a further dehumanization of the individual without any evolutionary result: man is much too Material a being ever to compass so human, so divine an event as the generation of sexless beings to do the necessary drudgery of the world as devoutly as lovers kiss: his ideal eunuch of the monastery, and his actual eunuch of the seraglio are overwhelming proof of man's profound inhumanity and of the abysmal indivinity of his nature.

Man's consciousness of his inhumanity and indivinity are transmuted in his uninstructed imagination into the monstrous phantom--Sin; something so heinous and detestable interpenetrating all his being, works and ways, that many of the subtlest intelligences and most upright minds have found no relief from its remorseful obsession except in the atonement of Christ and faith in an immaterial future; or, more courageously, in a remorseless despair and the resolute acceptance of the postulate that life is a thing that should never have been. It has been left to me to show that this inhumanity, this indivinity, this Sin, has, like all man's ideas, conceptions, and fantasies, a Material source in the properties of the forms of Matter of which man consists. In expounding my new poetry I am at an immense disadvantage in one regard--that the latent forces of expansion and chemical affinity, the active electrical, magnetic, radiant and cohesive energies, and the perpetuity of molecular and interatomical motions in the oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, etc., of the Matter of man are as yet only vaguely conceived, so far at least as they relate to himself, in the mind of the reader. I must therefore reiterate that these forces, converted into anabolic and katabolic activities, into vitality, nervous energy, reproductive power, into love, hate, thought, imagination, into consciousness and self-consciousness, are the fount of man's notion that there is within him, and without, something other than Matter and its properties of form and energy: it is these material forces that man has ignorantly christened soul or spirit, with the immaterial significance of these words. Now no one in love feels sinful; no one in a passion of any kind feels sinful; no man gloriously drunk feels sinful; no deep-set ambition ever accuses itself of sin; an entirely healthy nature living a healthy life knows nothing of sin. Conviction of Sin has always been a limited experience. There have been, are, and will be, powerful and most Material natures, unaffected except temporarily and superficially by bouts of debauchery, prolonged mental strain, and the commission of every crime. Conviction of Sin, alike in the offspring of worn-out stock--epileptics, consumptives, neuropaths, mattoids, weak-bodied and weak-minded people generally--as in ordinary healthy natures, is the effect of the exhaustion of the Material forces of the Matter of man. The exhaustion may proceed from dissipation, from prolonged domestic or financial worry, or--not to multiply instances--it may be the result of the enormous discharge of nervous energy and the upheaval of the whole nature in the commission of a murder or the betrayal of a friend. But no ordinary, healthy man is ever convicted of Sin before the act, or in the act; the degenerate whose normal state is one of conscious sinfulness, feels for the moment deified upon the sudden access of energy that leads him into crime; and the outcast, when he learns to say, "Evil, be thou my good," stumbles, although unconsciously, upon the tremendous knowledge that the categoric imperative is the discharge of the material forces of Matter, whether the discharge be by the lightnings of the clouds, in the seismal throes of earth, or through the passion and imagination of men and women. Sin, then, is the exhaustion of the material forces of man. Discharges of force in ways of pleasure, in moods of delight, in trances of ecstasy, as well as discharges of force in feelings of rancour, jealousy, and malice, in deeds of lust, slaughter, and treachery, have alike to bear the unhallowed name of the succeeding reaction. It is a species of vengeance, this transference of the title Sin from the impotence of the spent Matter to the energy that was expended. The degenerate suffers because his forefathers used up the energies of the stock in enjoyment; the debauchee suffers by the over-discharge of his own force; and both feel a vengeful pleasure in transferring the moral nickname of their enfeebled condition to the innocent, whole-hearted liberty and power of the days of exuberant health. It is the meanest, most cowardly thing man has done to call his courage Sin: by this vengeance the enfeebled Matter of man obtains such pitiful satisfaction as an infant does when it calls the floor upon which it has broken its brow "bad," and invites its nurse to whip the offender. An apologue:--A bee, seized with an access of Quixotic daring, exhausted its sting in the neck of a quite harmless tourist, and shortly lay buzzing its last and lamenting its guilt. "What a sinner I have been!" the bee buzzed. A hornet flounced up and asked the bee what ailed it. "I have sinned," the bee replied, "and deserve only death and hell." "Let's see," cried the hornet, examining the bee; "why, you've no sting! You've used up your sting!" "Ay!" sighed the bee; "I've used it up, sinner that I am!" "Pooh!" replied the hornet, who was by way of being a casuist: "that's not how to look at it! Your sting, look you--your sting itself was the sin. Now, you are purged of that. _Courage, mon camarade, le diable est mort!_" "Whatever do you mean?" rejoined the bee. "When I was active and happy, confident and proud, with the power of life and death in my tail, going about the delightful business of the universe among the amorous flowers----" "Then you were sinful," interrupted the hornet, determined that his cousin should not die unconsoled: "now, since by the loss of your sting, which was your sin _par excellence_, you being sexless, you are convicted of sin, and have become penitent, your sin ceases, and you will go to heaven." But the bee in the sudden illumination of death whispered faintly but resolutely, "No, by heaven, and earth, and hell! None of your tricks on travellers bound for the undiscovered country. It was not until I lost my power to sin that I felt sinful; therefore I was never a sinner, and I'm not a sinner now." Whereupon the bee with a last effort flew into the bosom of a rose and died happy.

I now come to the Material source of the idea of God.

The Ether from which everything was evolved fills all space: it interpenetrates all Matter so intimately that the electrons of an atom swim in it with the liberty of fish in the sea. The Ether has never been analysed, quantitatively, qualitatively, or volumetrically; it has never been seen, heard, smelt, felt, tasted, or weighed.

A mathematician has suggested that the Ether is the unimaginable world of four dimensions, including, interpenetrating and transcending our cognizable Universe as a cube which is a world of three dimensions includes and transcends a possible world of two dimensions contained in a superficial square. Certain, if a world of two dimensions can exist, a world of four dimensions is not impossible; but we require to complete the series with a linear world of one dimension and a punctual world of none, which is absurd.

Nevertheless, it is possible to form some idea of the nature of the Ether. Its invisibility is not beyond our conception: this negative quality is characteristic of many fluids, notably of the atmosphere; but the atmosphere becomes apparent in the object-glass of the telescope when the moon is seen like a white pebble in a rushing stream. The imponderability of the Ether can also be conceived by analogy with the atmosphere. Every man, knowing nothing of it, carries upon his shoulders a column of air sixty miles high and weighing many tons. In calm weather the very presence of this voluminous vapour is unfelt: it is only when the wind rises that we know how heavy its hand can be. Thus a poetical or concrete conception of the Ether is not negatived by that which it is not. But this omnipresent substance can be conceived positively, and the most suitable analogue is the sea. The sea consists of two gases--hydrogen and oxygen, united chemically to form water, and containing in solution two or three hundred grains to the pint of compounds of the following forms of Matter: Kalium, natrium, magnesium, calcium, sulphur, carbon, chlorine, bromine, iodine, and traces of everything soluble and partially soluble in water: it contains also, dissolved in various salts and bases, the very elements, hydrogen and oxygen, of which it is itself compounded. If a fluid so simple as water, braided of only three molecules of Matter, two of hydrogen and one of oxygen, can be so powerful a solvent, it follows that a fluid so complex as the Ether, woven and interwoven of molecules of all the elements, that is, of molecules of every form of Matter, must be dynamic in the highest degree, must be an omnipotent solvent: if water, consisting of only two elements, can hold in solution, besides its own constituents, ten or a dozen other elements, the Ether, consisting of all the elements, _a fortiori_ can hold in solution all these elements. Nor is the actual omnipresence of the Ether altogether beyond our grasp. To say that every electron, every atom, every molecule, every element or form of Matter, every planet, sun, and system, floats in the Ether and is interpenetrated by it, is to say that which seems improbable; but the analogy of water again helps to a natural concrete image. To say that three-quarters by weight of human flesh, three-eighths by weight of human bones, consist of water, is to say that which seems improbable, but which is nevertheless true. Thus we can guess the Ether in terms of our Universe of three dimensions.

The esoteric nature of the Ether is more easily understood. I use the word "esoteric" with my own meaning, implying nothing mystical. By esoteric I mean here a thing known only to me. Upon the publication of this book, the thing I am about to tell becomes exoteric. I _make_ no mystery. The Universe is all mystery: the existence of a drop of water is as mysterious as the existence of music.

Man is the Universe alive and conscious, and with the capacity of entire self-consciousness. This capacity, undeveloped and misunderstood, is the source of all man's misery, the hotbed of the idea of Sin and the idea of God. Unable to comprehend it, the Greek and the Norseman projected their trouble into Olympus and Hades, Asgard and Nifelheim, gods and goddesses, titans, giants, furies, valkyrs. Every people cast out and projected its self-consciousness as Other World in some form. A unique race, the Jews, threw its shadow on the Universe as Jehovah, the One God, jealous, vengeful, inhuman. The European Aryans laid hold of this, but in a decadent, Christianized form; and as they lacked in general the intense individuality of the Hebrew, they soon brought it into a deliquescence of the Trinity, the Mother of Heaven, Saints, transubstantiation, the God of love, etc. The hardier northern races, however, reverted to a more Hebraic form, preferring the God of battles to the Madonna; and withal the idea of the One God remained dominant in Christian countries, being recruited by the sudden rise and rivalry of Islam, with its strident profession of monotheism. The material source of this uneasy self-consciousness which projects itself into Other World is twofold. One of these is the Nature of Man, formerly called Original Sin, God and Sin being in this regard convertible terms. I have stated this source clearly enough in the "Prime Minister," in that passage where the protagonist overcomes the desire to pray, conjuring himself to--

"think Instead what God is, sanely think; and what The sanguine source of our immortal hope; Think how some common drudging neighbour-wight (Not Hercules nor a titan of the war Venerean; no, but any honest Jack) Could happily beget for fifty years A hundred wholesome children annually: How every rosy Jill encloisters germs Of many thousand brats; think this and laugh Aloud, delighted with the naive, the rich Conceit of immortality and vast Exuberance of the race that swells and throbs In every man and woman, strings the nerves, Ignites the brain and thunders in the heart With God and life eternal."

The other source of the idea of God is in the Ether. I have not yet dealt with this by name in any of my writings, and had intended to reserve it for my "Testament of a Deliverer"; but having elected to prepare a brief and general account of my message, I must at least mention it here. My statement of the Ethereal source of the idea of God is not nearly mature yet. Nevertheless, the idea is simple and clear; it is indeed self-evident. Every molecule of which man consists is not only saturated in the all-pervading Ether, but is kneaded of it, visible, ponderable Matter being a condensation of the invisible, imponderable Ether. In a last analysis, which takes us back to the first synthesis, man is therefore the Ether become conscious. It is not a question of bulk. Man is an inhabitant of the earth, which is one of the smallest planets of one of the smallest systems in the Universe; but man consists of the Universe, of the whole Universe in its condensed form, and also of the whole Universe in its invisible, imponderable form, being permeated and pervaded by the omnipotent, omnipresent Ether, being soaked in it, being drunk with it, being it. There _is_ nothing anywhere higher than man; there can be nothing higher than the Universe become self-conscious. In his uninstructed time man called the Ether which permeates him, which is his ecstasy, God and gods: "Out of God he came," he thought; "and back to God he should return;" or he called it Nirvana and an infinite peace. Imagination is the radiation of the omnipotent Ether. Only the whole Universe become conscious could have imagined God the Creator. Now man knows that there is no God; that nothing was made; that all is a becoming; that he is the Ether, condensed, evolved; and that he will devolve again into that invisible, imponderable form of Matter: and this knowledge inherent in himself is infinitely satisfying. All the imaginings about the source of his being which man has maddened over, which he has clung to in good report and ill, which he has died for in battle and at the stake, have their roots in Material truth. The idea of the Trinity, for example, is clearly the effort of the Universe become conscious in man to express that visible and invisible being and that power, namely, Ether, Matter, Energy, which we now know to be the triple form of the Universe; and the sublime idea of the Immaculate Conception has the same profound significance as the union of the gods with the daughters of men in all mythologies; it means that man procreates something more than man; it means that he procreates a conscious Universe. I think it unlikely that Matter has become conscious anywhere else than on our earth. In man the Ether and the principal forms of Matter are conscious and self-conscious. It is not conceivable that some other dozen elements might become conscious; Matter cannot imagine life and consciousness without carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus. It is not necessary that other elements should become conscious, because every element is a form of the one substance: therefore in man the whole Universe is conscious. I should say that there is not now, that there has not been at any time, a mate or a peer of man; and--I repeat it once more--there cannot be anything higher than man, because man is the whole Universe become conscious and self-conscious. This is a great thing: it is the greatest thing that has been told to the world. It will destroy all existing religions, governments, institutions, morality and all moralities, all philosophy, all literature, all art. It puts an end to man's mistaken effort towards an impossible Divinity by way of an impossible Humanity: he will leave that henceforth to the bees and the ants; he is higher than the bees and the ants; he is more Material than they. But that prolonged, deadlift agony towards an impossible Divinity by way of an impossible Humanity sprang, like all man's travail, from a Material truth. Man's aim at something higher than man meant that there is nothing anywhere higher than man. There is nothing anywhere higher than man. The terror and splendour of this will give the world pause; nor will the world yield to it easily, for here is an actual new-birth at last: to know that there can be no first cause, no metaphysic; that there can be no Other World; that man is the Material Universe become conscious. A thousand years' war would not be too terrible a travail for the birth of the world's self-consciousness: thereafter man could be and do something; heretofore he has been and done nothing.

The generative power of man and the all-pervading Ether, conscious in him, are the Material sources of the idea of God. From the first source there comes also the idea of Sin cognate and isomeric with the idea of God. (The Devil, the personification of God as Sin, has been so long a joke that he is out of court.) These twin ideas God and Sin died together on Calvary two thousand years ago. The history of Christendom is the history of the obsequies of these ideas, of the devolution of these ideas. ("The Testament of a Prime Minister," pp. 76-81.) Out of Matter the Myth of God and Sin and Heaven and Hell arose. Return that myth in which the imagination of Christendom still dwells in all serious moods and times of passion, return it to its Material source, and let the world's imagination go with it and be born again, to live no longer in a myth but in the Universe itself. I say, with the Prime Minister, let

"the passionate heart of man, The proud imagination and the dream That hovers homeless as the myths decay, Exempt from fabulous wonder, rooted deep In Substance one and multiform, and breathed In all the mystery of the things that are, Create indomitable will to truth, An open mind at home in space and time, A stainless memory splendidly endowed With actual knowledge, a Material soul At one with the Material Universe."

With the Bishop of St. James's I watch the future, an actual world wherein an actual man shall be and do greatly

"In majesty Material, the Nessus-shirt Of spirit, warp and woof of legend, dyed In many-coloured Sin, the mordant shame That cankered life, and clung, a grafted hide About his innocent flesh, fallen off, or flayed With hideous woe, and in its proper filth Corrupted into naught. Forthwith the world Begins again, not even a pallid dream Of legendary pasts to cloud the dawn. I say it simply:--With the Universe Man clothes himself; arrayed in time and space, In darkness and in light, no lamp, no gleam He follows, for the sun illumines him And every sun his kinsmen in the skies, The systems, constellations, galaxies. At home in the empyrean, issuing thence, His free imagination momently Remembers flame pellucid, which it was And will be in the nebula again When all the orbs that stock the loins of night Return into the sun, and fill with seed Of chastest fire the impassioned womb of space."

To conclude for the present: Whence is the Universe and Why? The Universe itself is the only answer to these questions. Whence is the Universe? There is no whence; it fills space. Why is the Universe? It cannot tell: it is neither necessary nor unnecessary: it is. There are, properly, no answers to these questions; therefore these questions are not. The Universe says always and only, "Here and Now."

THE THEATROCRAT A TRAGIC PLAY OF CHURCH AND STAGE

"This is the freedom of the Universe" Wordsworth

PERSONS

Sir Tristram Sumner ... Proprietor and Manager of the Grosvenor Theatre. Gervase Sackville ... Bishop of St. James's. Warwick Groom ...} Silas Orchard ... } Actors. Mark Belfry ... An American Manager. Hildreth ... Sir Tristram's Secretary. Abbot ... Business Manager. Salerne ... Stage Manager. Blyth ... } Boulder ... } Commissionaires. Temple ... Sir Tristram's Dresser. Rouse ... Call-boy. Two Doctors Lady Sumner ... Sir Tristram's Wife. Europa Troop ... An Actress. Actors, Scene-shifters, Property-men.

Scene: London. Time: The Present A month elapses between the third and fourth Acts.

THE THEATROCRAT