FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

by

D. H. LAWRENCE

New YorkThomas Seltzer1922Copyright, 1922, byThomas Seltzer, Inc. 

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

 FOREWORD

 I. INTRODUCTION

 II. THE HOLY FAMILY

 III. PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON

 IV. TREES AND BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS

 V. THE FIVE SENSES

 VI. FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND

 VII. FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION

 VIII. EDUCATION AND SEX IN MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD

 IX. THE BIRTH OF SEX

 X. PARENT LOVE

 XI. THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

 XII. LITANY OF EXHORTATIONS

 XIII. COSMOLOGICAL

 XIV. SLEEP AND DREAMS

 XV. THE LOWER SELF

 EPILOGUE

FOREWORD

The present book is a continuation from "Psychoanalysis and theUnconscious. " The generality of readers had better just leave italone. The generality of critics likewise. I really don't want toconvince anybody. It is quite in opposition to my whole nature. Idon't intend my books for the generality of readers. I count it amistake of our mistaken democracy, that every man who can read printis allowed to believe that he can read all that is printed. I count ita misfortune that serious books are exposed in the public market, likeslaves exposed naked for sale. But there we are, since we live in anage of mistaken democracy, we must go through with it. 

I warn the generality of readers, that this present book will seem tothem only a rather more revolting mass of wordy nonsense than thelast. I would warn the generality of critics to throw it in the wastepaper basket without more ado. 

As for the limited few, in whom one must perforce find an answerer, Imay as well say straight off that I stick to the solar plexus. Thatstatement alone, I hope, will thin their numbers considerably. 

Finally, to the remnants of a remainder, in order to apologize for thesudden lurch into cosmology, or cosmogony, in this book, I wish to saythat the whole thing hangs inevitably together. I am not a scientist. I am an amateur of amateurs. As one of my critics said, you eitherbelieve or you don't. 

I am not a proper archæologist nor an anthropologist nor anethnologist. I am no "scholar" of any sort. But I am very grateful toscholars for their sound work. I have found hints, suggestions forwhat I say here in all kinds of scholarly books, from the Yoga andPlato and St. John the Evangel and the early Greek philosophers likeHerakleitos down to Fraser and his "Golden Bough, " and even Freud andFrobenius. Even then I only remember hints--and I proceed byintuition. This leaves you quite free to dismiss the whole wordy massof revolting nonsense, without a qualm. 

Only let me say, that to my mind there is a great field of sciencewhich is as yet quite closed to us. I refer to the science whichproceeds in terms of life and is established on data of livingexperience and of sure intuition. Call it subjective science if youlike. Our objective science of modern knowledge concerns itself onlywith phenomena, and with phenomena as regarded in theircause-and-effect relationship. I have nothing to say against ourscience. It is perfect as far as it goes. But to regard it asexhausting the whole scope of human possibility in knowledge seems tome just puerile. Our science is a science of the dead world. Evenbiology never considers life, but only mechanistic functioning andapparatus of life. 

I honestly think that the great pagan world of which Egypt and Greecewere the last living terms, the great pagan world which preceded ourown era once, had a vast and perhaps perfect science of its own, ascience in terms of life. In our era this science crumbled into magicand charlatanry. But even wisdom crumbles. 

I believe that this great science previous to ours and quite differentin constitution and nature from our science once was universal, established all over the then-existing globe. I believe it wasesoteric, invested in a large priesthood. Just as mathematics andmechanics and physics are defined and expounded in the same way inthe universities of China or Bolivia or London or Moscow to-day, so, it seems to me, in the great world previous to ours a great scienceand cosmology were taught esoterically in all countries of the globe, Asia, Polynesia, America, Atlantis and Europe. Belt's suggestion ofthe geographical nature of this previous world seems to me mostinteresting. In the period which geologists call the Glacial Period, the waters of the earth must have been gathered up in a vast body onthe higher places of our globe, vast worlds of ice. And the sea-bedsof to-day must have been comparatively dry. So that the Azores rose upmountainous from the plain of Atlantis, where the Atlantic now washes, and the Easter Isles and the Marquesas and the rest rose lofty fromthe marvelous great continent of the Pacific. 

In that world men lived and taught and knew, and were in one completecorrespondence over all the earth. Men wandered back and forth fromAtlantis to the Polynesian Continent as men now sail from Europe toAmerica. The interchange was complete, and knowledge, science wasuniversal over the earth, cosmopolitan as it is to-day. 

Then came the melting of the glaciers, and the world flood. Therefugees from the drowned continents fled to the high places ofAmerica, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Isles. And some degeneratednaturally into cave men, neolithic and paleolithic creatures, and someretained their marvelous innate beauty and life-perfection, as theSouth Sea Islanders, and some wandered savage in Africa, and some, like Druids or Etruscans or Chaldeans or Amerindians or Chinese, refused to forget, but taught the old wisdom, only in itshalf-forgotten, symbolic forms. More or less forgotten, as knowledge:remembered as ritual, gesture, and myth-story. 

And so, the intense potency of symbols is part at least memory. And soit is that all the great symbols and myths which dominate the worldwhen our history first begins, are very much the same in every countryand every people, the great myths all relate to one another. And so itis that these myths now begin to hypnotize us again, our own impulsetowards our own scientific way of understanding being almost spent. And so, besides myths, we find the same mathematic figures, cosmicgraphs which remain among the aboriginal peoples in all continents, mystic figures and signs whose true cosmic or scientific significanceis lost, yet which continue in use for purposes of conjuring ordivining. 

If my reader finds this bosh and abracadabra, all right for him. OnlyI have no more regard for his little crowings on his own littledunghill. Myself, I am not so sure that I am one of theone-and-onlies. I like the wide world of centuries and vastages--mammoth worlds beyond our day, and mankind so wonderful in hisdistances, his history that has no beginning yet always the pomp andthe magnificence of human splendor unfolding through the earth'schanging periods. Floods and fire and convulsions and ice-arrestintervene between the great glamorous civilizations of mankind. Butnothing will ever quench humanity and the human potentiality to evolvesomething magnificent out of a renewed chaos. 

I do not believe in evolution, but in the strangeness andrainbow-change of ever-renewed creative civilizations. 

So much, then, for my claim to remarkable discoveries. I believe I amonly trying to stammer out the first terms of a forgotten knowledge. But I have no desire to revive dead kings, or dead sages. It is notfor me to arrange fossils, and decipher hieroglyphic phrases. Icouldn't do it if I wanted to. But then I can do something else. Thesoul must take the hint from the relics our scientists have somarvelously gathered out of the forgotten past, and from the hintdevelop a new living utterance. The spark is from dead wisdom, but thefire is life. 

And as an example--a very simple one--of how a scientist of the mostinnocent modern sort may hint at truths which, when stated, he wouldlaugh at as fantastic nonsense, let us quote a word from the alreadyold-fashioned "Golden Bough. " "It must have appeared to the ancientAryan that the sun was periodically recruited from the fire whichresided in the sacred oak. "

Exactly. The fire which resided in the Tree of Life. That is, lifeitself. So we must read: "It must have appeared to the ancient Aryanthat the sun was periodically recruited from life. "--Which is what theearly Greek philosophers were always saying. And which still seems tome the real truth, the clue to the cosmos. Instead of life being drawnfrom the sun, it is the emanation from life itself, that is, from allthe living plants and creatures which nourish the sun. 

Of course, my dear critic, the ancient Aryans were just doddering--theold duffers: or babbling, the babes. But as for me, I have somerespect for my ancestors, and believe they had more up their sleevethan just the marvel of the unborn me. 

One last weary little word. This pseudo-philosophy ofmine--"pollyanalytics, " as one of my respected critics might say--isdeduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse. The novels and poemscome unwatched out of one's pen. And then the absolute need which one hasfor some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things ingeneral makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one'sexperiences as a writer and as a man. The novels and poems are purepassionate experience. These "pollyanalytics" are inferences madeafterwards, from the experience. 

And finally, it seems to me that even art is utterly dependent onphilosophy: or if you prefer it, on a metaphysic. The metaphysic orphilosophy may not be anywhere very accurately stated and may be quiteunconscious, in the artist, yet it is a metaphysic that governs men atthe time, and is by all men more or less comprehended, and lived. Menlive and see according to some gradually developing and graduallywithering vision. This vision exists also as a dynamic idea ormetaphysic--exists first as such. Then it is unfolded into life andart. Our vision, our belief, our metaphysic is wearing woefully thin, and the art is wearing absolutely threadbare. We have no future;neither for our hopes nor our aims nor our art. It has all gone grayand opaque. 

We've got to rip the old veil of a vision across, and find what theheart really believes in, after all: and what the heart really wants, for the next future. And we've got to put it down in terms of beliefand of knowledge. And then go forward again, to the fulfillment inlife and art. 

Rip the veil of the old vision across, and walk through the rent. Andif I try to do this--well, why not? If I try to write down what Isee--why not? If a publisher likes to print the book--all right. Andif anybody wants to read it, let him. But why anybody should read onesingle word if he doesn't want to, I don't see. Unless of course he isa critic who needs to scribble a dollar's worth of words, no matterhow. 

TAORMINA

October 8, 1921

FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Let us start by making a little apology to Psychoanalysis. It wasn'tfair to jeer at the psychoanalytic unconscious; or perhaps it _was_fair to jeer at the psychoanalytic unconscious, which is truly anegative quantity and an unpleasant menagerie. What was really notfair was to jeer at Psychoanalysis as if Freud had invented anddescribed nothing but an unconscious, in all his theory. 

The unconscious is not, of course, the clue to the Freudian theory. The real clue is sex. A sexual motive is to be attributed to all humanactivity. 

Now this is going too far. We are bound to admit than an element ofsex enters into all human activity. But so does an element of greed, and of many other things. We are bound to admit that into all humanrelationships, particularly adult human relationships, a largeelement of sex enters. We are thankful that Freud has insisted onthis. We are thankful that Freud pulled us somewhat to earth, out ofall our clouds of superfineness. What Freud says is always _partly_true. And half a loaf is better than no bread. 

But really, there is the other half of the loaf. All is _not_ sex. Anda sexual motive is _not_ to be attributed to all human activities. Weknow it, without need to argue. 

Sex surely has a specific meaning. Sex means the being divided intomale and female; and the magnetic desire or impulse which puts maleapart from female, in a negative or sundering magnetism, but whichalso draws male and female together in a long and infinitely variedapproach towards the critical act of coition. Sex without theconsummating act of coition is never quite sex, in humanrelationships: just as a eunuch is never quite a man. That is to say, the act of coition is the essential clue to sex. 

Now does all life work up to the one consummating act of coition? Inone direction, it does, and it would be better if psychoanalysisplainly said so. In one direction, all life works up to the onesupreme moment of coition. Let us all admit it, sincerely. 

But we are not confined to one direction only, or to one exclusiveconsummation. Was the building of the cathedrals a working up towardsthe act of coition? Was the dynamic impulse sexual? No. The sexualelement was present, and important. But not predominant. The same inthe building of the Panama Canal. The sexual impulse, in its widestform, was a very great impulse towards the building of the PanamaCanal. But there was something else, of even higher importance, andgreater dynamic power. 

And what is this other, greater impulse? It is the desire of the humanmale to build a world: not "to build a world for you, dear"; but tobuild up out of his own self and his own belief and his own effortsomething wonderful. Not merely something useful. Something wonderful. Even the Panama Canal would never have been built _simply_ to letships through. It is the pure disinterested craving of the human maleto make something wonderful, out of his own head and his own self, andhis own soul's faith and delight, which starts everything going. Thisis the prime motivity. And the motivity of sex is subsidiary to this:often directly antagonistic. 

That is, the essentially religious or creative motive is the firstmotive for all human activity. The sexual motive comes second. Andthere is a great conflict between the interests of the two, at alltimes. 

What we want to do, is to trace the creative or religious motive toits source in the human being, keeping in mind always the nearrelationship between the religious motive and the sexual. The twogreat impulses are like man and wife, or father and son. It is no useputting one under the feet of the other. 

The great desire to-day is to deny the religious impulse altogether, or else to assert its absolute alienity from the sexual impulse. Theorthodox religious world says faugh! to sex. Whereupon we thank Freudfor giving them tit for tat. But the orthodox scientific world saysfie! to the religious impulse. The scientist wants to discover a causefor everything. And there is no cause for the religious impulse. Freudis with the scientists. Jung dodges from his university gown into apriest's surplice till we don't know where we are. We prefer Freud's_Sex_ to Jung's _Libido_ or Bergson's _Elan Vital_. Sex has at least_some_ definite reference, though when Freud makes sex accountable foreverything he as good as makes it accountable for nothing. 

We refuse any _Cause_, whether it be Sex or Libido or Elan Vital orether or unit of force or _perpetuum mobile_ or anything else. Butalso we feel that we cannot, like Moses, perish on the top of ourpresent ideal Pisgah, or take the next step into thin air. There weare, at the top of our Pisgah of ideals, crying _Excelsior_ and tryingto clamber up into the clouds: that is, if we are idealists with thereligious impulse rampant in our breasts. If we are scientists wepractice aeroplane flying or eugenics or disarmament or somethingequally absurd. 

The promised land, if it be anywhere, lies away beneath our feet. Nomore prancing upwards. No more uplift. No more little Excelsiorscrying world-brotherhood and international love and Leagues ofNations. Idealism and materialism amount to the same thing on top ofPisgah, and the space is _very_ crowded. We're all cornered on ourmountain top, climbing up one another and standing on one another'sfaces in our scream of Excelsior. 

To your tents, O Israel! Brethren, let us go down. We will descend. The way to our precious Canaan lies obviously downhill. An end ofuplift. Downhill to the land of milk and honey. The blood will soon beflowing faster than either, but we can't help that. We can't help itif Canaan has blood in its veins, instead of pure milk and honey. 

If it is a question of origins, the origin is always the same, whatever we say about it. So is the cause. Let that be a comfort tous. If we want to talk about God, well, we can please ourselves. Godhas been talked about quite a lot, and He doesn't seem to mind. Why weshould take it so personally is a problem. Likewise if we wish to havea tea party with the atom, let us: or with the wriggling little unitof energy, or the ether, or the Libido, or the Elan Vital, or anyother Cause. Only don't let us have sex for tea. We've all got toomuch of it under the table; and really, for my part, I prefer to keepmine there, no matter what the Freudians say about me. 

But it is tiring to go to any more tea parties with the Origin, or theCause, or even the Lord. Let us pronounce the mystic Om, from the pitof the stomach, and proceed. 

There's not a shadow of doubt about it, the First Cause is justunknowable to us, and we'd be sorry if it wasn't. Whether it's God orthe Atom. All I say is Om!

The first business of every faith is to declare its ignorance. I don'tknow where I come from--nor where I exit to. I don't know the originsof life nor the goal of death. I don't know how the two parent cellswhich are my biological origin became the me which I am. I don't inthe least know what those two parent cells were. The chemical analysisis just a farce, and my father and mother were just vehicles. And yet, I must say, since I've got to know about the two cells, I'm glad I doknow. 

The Moses of Science and the Aaron of Idealism have got the wholebunch of us here on top of Pisgah. It's a tight squeeze, and we'll befalling very, very foul of one another in five minutes, unless some ofus climb down. But before leaving our eminence let us have a lookround, and get our bearings. 

They say that way lies the New Jerusalem of universal love: and overthere the happy valley of indulgent Pragmatism: and there, quite near, isthe chirpy land of the Vitalists: and in those dark groves the home ofsuccessful Analysis, surnamed Psycho: and over those blue hills theSupermen are prancing about, though you can't see them. And there isBesantheim, and there is Eddyhowe, and there, on that queer littletableland, is Wilsonia, and just round the corner is Rabindranathopolis. .. . 

But Lord, I can't see anything. Help me, heaven, to a telescope, for Isee blank nothing. 

I'm not going to try any more. I'm going to sit down on my posteriorand sluther full speed down this Pisgah, even if it cost me my trouserseat. So ho!--away we go. 

In the beginning--there never was any beginning, but let it pass. We've got to make a start somehow. In the very beginning of allthings, time and space and cosmos and being, in the beginning of allthese was a little living creature. But I don't know even if it waslittle. In the beginning was a living creature, its plasm quiveringand its life-pulse throbbing. This little creature died, as littlecreatures always do. But not before it had had young ones. When thedaddy creature died, it fell to pieces. And that was the beginning ofthe cosmos. Its little body fell down to a speck of dust, which theyoung ones clung to because they must cling to something. Its littlebreath flew asunder, the hotness and brightness of the little beast--Ibeg your pardon, I mean the radiant energy from the corpse flew awayto the right hand, and seemed to shine warm in the air, while theclammy energy from the body flew away to the left hand, and seemeddark and cold. And so, the first little master was dead and done for, and instead of his little living body there was a speck of dust in themiddle, which became the earth, and on the right hand was a brightnesswhich became the sun, rampaging with all the energy that had come outof the dead little master, and on the left hand a darkness which feltlike an unrisen moon. And that was how the Lord created the world. Except that I know nothing about the Lord, so I shouldn't mention it. 

But I forgot the soul of the little master. It probably did a bit offlying as well--and then came back to the young ones. It seems mostnatural that way. 

Which is my account of the Creation. And I mean by it, that Life isnot and never was anything but living creatures. That's what life isand will be just living creatures, no matter how large you make thecapital L. Out of living creatures the material cosmos was made: outof the death of living creatures, when their little living bodies felldead and fell asunder into all sorts of matter and forces andenergies, sun, moons, stars and worlds. So you got the universe. Whereyou got the living creature from, that first one, don't ask me. He wasjust there. But he was a little person with a soul of his own. Hewasn't Life with a capital L. 

If you don't believe me, then don't. I'll even give you a little songto sing. 

 "If it be not true to me What care I how true it be . . "

That's the kind of man I really like, chirping his insouciance. And Ichirp back:

 "Though it be not true to thee It's gay and gospel truth to me. . . "

The living live, and then die. They pass away, as we know, to dust andto oxygen and nitrogen and so on. But what we don't know, and what wemight perhaps know a little more, is how they pass away direct intolife itself--that is, direct into the living. That is, how many deadsouls fly over our untidiness like swallows and build under the eavesof the living. How many dead souls, like swallows, twitter and breedthoughts and instincts under the thatch of my hair and the eaves of myforehead, I don't know. But I believe a good many. And I hope theyhave a good time. And I hope not too many are bats. 

I am sorry to say I believe in the souls of the dead. I am almostashamed to say, that I believe the souls of the dead in some wayreënter and pervade the souls of the living: so that life is alwaysthe life of living creatures, and death is always our affair. Thisbit, I admit, is bordering on mysticism. I'm sorry, because I don'tlike mysticism. It has no trousers and no trousers seat: _n'a pas dequoi_. And I should feel so uncomfortable if I put my hand behind meand felt an absolute blank. 

Meanwhile a long, thin, brown caterpillar keeps on pretending to be adead thin beech-twig, on a little bough at my feet. He had got hishind feet and his fore feet on the twig, and his body looped up likean arch in the air between, when a fly walked up the twig and began tomount the arch of the imitator, not having the least idea that it wason a gentleman's coat-tails. The caterpillar shook his stern, and thefly made off as if it had seen a ghost. The dead twig and the livetwig now remain equally motionless, enjoying their different ways. Andwhen, with this very pencil, I push the head of the caterpillar offfrom the twig, he remains on his tail, arched forward in air, andoscillating unhappily, like some tiny pendulum ticking. Ticking, ticking in mid-air, arched away from his planted tail. Till at last, after a long minute and a half, he touches the twig again, andsubsides into twigginess. The only thing is, the dead beech-twig can'tpretend to be a wagging caterpillar. Yet how the two commune!However--we have our exits and our entrances, and one man in his timeplays many parts. More than he dreams of, poor darling. And I amentirely at a loss for a moral!

Well, then, we are born. I suppose that's a safe statement. And webecome at once conscious, if we weren't so before. _Nem con. _ And ourlittle baby body is a little functioning organism, a little developingmachine or instrument or organ, and our little baby mind begins tostir with all our wonderful psychical beginnings. And so we are inbud. 

But it won't do. It is too much of a Pisgah sight. We overlook toomuch. _Descendez, cher Moïse. Vous voyez trop loin. _ You see too farall at once, dear Moses. Too much of a bird's-eye view across thePromised Land to the shore. Come down, and walk across, old fellow. And you won't see all that milk and honey and grapes the size ofduck's eggs. All the dear little budding infant with its tendervirginal mind and various clouds of glory instead of a napkin. Not atall, my dear chap. No such luck of a promised land. 

Climb down, Pisgah, and go to Jericho. _Allons_, there is no road yet, but we are all Aarons with rods of our own. 

CHAPTER II

THE HOLY FAMILY

We are all very pleased with Mr. Einstein for knocking that eternalaxis out of the universe. The universe isn't a spinning wheel. It is acloud of bees flying and veering round. Thank goodness for that, forwe were getting drunk on the spinning wheel. 

So that now the universe has escaped from the pin which was pushedthrough it, like an impaled fly vainly buzzing: now that the multipleuniverse flies its own complicated course quite free, and hasn't gotany hub, we can hope also to escape. 

We won't be pinned down, either. We have no one law that governs us. For me there is only one law: _I am I. _ And that isn't a law, it'sjust a remark. One is one, but one is not all alone. There are otherstars buzzing in the center of their own isolation. And there is nostraight path between them. There is no straight path between you andme, dear reader, so don't blame me if my words fly like dust intoyour eyes and grit between your teeth, instead of like music into yourears. I am I, but also you are you, and we are in sad need of a theoryof human relativity. We need it much more than the universe does. Thestars know how to prowl round one another without much damage done. But you and I, dear reader, in the first conviction that you are meand that I am you, owing to the oneness of mankind, why, we are alwaysfalling foul of one another, and chewing each other's fur. 

You are _not_ me, dear reader, so make no pretentions to it. Don't getalarmed if _I_ say things. It isn't your sacred mouth which is openingand shutting. As for the profanation of your sacred ears, just apply alittle theory of relativity, and realize that what I say is not whatyou hear, but something uttered in the midst of my isolation, andarriving strangely changed and travel-worn down the long curve of yourown individual circumambient atmosphere. I may say Bob, but heavenalone knows what the goose hears. And you may be sure that a red ragis, to a bull, something far more mysterious and complicated than asocialist's necktie. 

So I hope now I have put you in your place, dear reader. Sit you likeWatts' Hope on your own little blue globe, and I'll sit on mine, andwe won't bump into one another if we can help it. You can twang yourold hopeful lyre. It may be music to you, so I don't blame you. It isa terrible wowing in my ears. But that may be something in myindividual atmosphere; some strange deflection as your music crossesthe space between us. Certainly I never hear the concert of WorldRegeneration and Hope Revived Again without getting a sort oflock-jaw, my teeth go so keen on edge from the twanging harmony. Still, the world-regenerators may _really_ be quite excellentperformers on their own jews'-harps. Blame the edginess of my teeth. 

Now I am going to launch words into space so mind your cosmic eye. 

As I said in my small but naturally immortal book, "Psychoanalysis andthe Unconscious, " there's more in it than meets the eye. There's morein you, dear reader, than meets the eye. What, don't you believe it?Do you think you're as obvious as a poached egg on a piece of toast, like the poor lunatic? Not a bit of it, dear reader. You've got asolar plexus, and a lumbar ganglion not far from your liver, and I'mgoing to tell everybody. Nothing brings a man home to himself liketelling everybody. And I _will_ drive you home to yourself, do youhear? You've been poaching in my private atmospheric grounds longenough, identifying yourself with me and me with everybody. A nice rowthere'd be in heaven if Aldebaran caught Sirius by the tail and said, "Look here, you're not to look so green, you damm dog-star! It's anoffense against star-regulations. "

Which reminds me that the Arabs say the shooting stars, meteorites, are starry stones which the angels fling at the poaching demons whomthey catch sight of prowling too near the palisades of heaven. I mustsay I like Arab angels. My heaven would coruscate like a catherinewheel, with white-hot star-stones. Away, you dog, you prowlingcur. --Got him under the left ear-hole, Gabriel--! See him, see him, Michael? That hopeful blue devil! Land him one! Biff on your bottom, you hoper. 

But I wish the Arabs wouldn't entice me, or you, dear reader, provokeme to this. I feel with you, dear reader, as I do with a deaf-man whenhe pushes his vulcanite ear, his listening machine, towards my mouth. I want to shout down the telephone ear-hole all kinds of improperthings, to see what effect they will have on the stupid dear face atthe end of the coil of wire. After all, words must be very differentafter they've trickled round and round a long wire coil. Whateverbecomes of them! And I, who am a bit deaf myself, and may in the endhave a deaf-machine to poke at my friends, it ill becomes me to be sounkind, yet that's how I feel. So there we are. 

Help me to be serious, dear reader. 

In that little book, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, " I triedrather wistfully to convince you, dear reader, that you had a solarplexus and a lumbar ganglion and a few other things. I don't know whyI took the trouble. If a fellow doesn't believe he's got a nose, thebest way to convince him is gently to waft a little pepper into hisnostrils. And there was I painting my own nose purple, and wistfullyinviting you to look and believe. No more, though. 

You've got first and foremost a solar plexus, dear reader; and thesolar plexus is a great nerve center which lies behind your stomach. Ican't be accused of impropriety or untruth, because any book ofscience or medicine which deals with the nerve-system of the humanbody will show it to you quite plainly. So don't wriggle or try tolook spiritual. Because, willy-nilly, you've got a solar plexus, dearreader, among other things. I'm writing a good sound science book, which there's no gainsaying. 

Now, your solar plexus, most gentle of readers, is where you are you. It is your first and greatest and deepest center of consciousness. Ifyou want to know _how_ conscious and _when_ conscious, I must referyou to that little book, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. "

At your solar plexus you are primarily conscious: there, behind youstomach. There you have the profound and pristine conscious awarenessthat you are you. Don't say you haven't. I know you have. You might aswell try to deny the nose on your face. There is your first anddeepest seat of awareness. There you are triumphantly aware of yourown individual existence in the universe. Absolutely there is the keepand central stronghold of your triumphantly-conscious self. There you_are_, and you know it. So stick out your tummy gaily, my dear, with a_Me voilà_. With a _Here I am!_ With an _Ecco mi!_ With a _Da binich!_ There you are, dearie. 

But not only a triumphant awareness that _There you are_. An exultantawareness also that outside this quiet gate, this navel, lies a wholeuniverse on which you can lay tribute. Aha--at birth you closed thecentral gate for ever. Too dangerous to leave it open. Too near thequick. But there are other gates. There are eyes and mouths and earsand nostrils, besides the two lower gates of the passionate body, andthe closed but not locked gates of the breasts. Many gates. Andbesides the actual gates, the marvelous wireless communication betweenthe great center and the surrounding or contiguous world. 

Authorized science tells you that this first great plexus, thisall-potent nerve-center of consciousness and dynamic life-activity isa sympathetic center. From the solar plexus as from your castle-keepyou look around and see the fair lands smiling, the corn and fruit andcattle of your increase, the cottages of your dependents and the hallsof your beloveds. From the solar plexus you know that all the world isyours, and all is goodly. 

This is the great center, where in the womb, your life first sparkledin individuality. This is the center that drew the gestating maternalblood-stream upon you, in the nine-months lurking, drew it on you foryour increase. This is the center whence the navel-string broke, butwhere the invisible string of dynamic consciousness, like a darkelectric current connecting you with the rest of life, will neverbreak until you die and depart from corporate individuality. 

They say, by the way, that doctors now perform a little operation onthe born baby, so that no more navel shows. No more belly-buttons, dear reader! Lucky I caught you this generation, before the doctorshad saved your appearances. Yet, _caro mio_, whether it shows or not, there you once had immediate connection with the maternalblood-stream. And, because the male nucleus which derived from thefather still lies sparkling and potent within the solar plexus, therefore that great nerve-center of you, still has immediateknowledge of your father, a subtler but still vital connection. Wecall it the tie of blood. So be it. It is a tie of blood. But muchmore definite than we imagine. For true it is that the one bright malegerm which went to your begetting was drawn from the blood of thefather. And true it is that that same bright male germ lies unquenchedand unquenchable at the center of you, within the famous solar plexus. And furthermore true is it that this unquenched father-spark withinyou sends forth vibrations and dark currents of vital activity all thetime; connecting direct with your father. You will never be able toget away from it while you live. 

The connection with the mother may be more obvious. Is there not yourostensible navel, where the rupture between you and her took place?But because the mother-child relation is more plausible and flagrant, is that any reason for supposing it deeper, more vital, moreintrinsic? Not a bit. Because if the large parent mother-germ stilllives and acts vividly and mysteriously in the great fused nucleus ofyour solar plexus, does the smaller, brilliant male-spark that derivedfrom your father act any less vividly? By no means. It isdifferent--it is less ostensible. It may be even in magnitude smaller. But it may be even more vivid, even more intrinsic. So beware how youdeny the father-quick of yourself. You may be denying the mostintrinsic quick of all. 

In the same way it follows that, since brothers and sisters have thesame father and mother, therefore in every brother and sister there isa direct communication such as can never happen between strangers. Theparent nuclei do not die within the new nucleus. They remain there, marvelous naked sparkling dynamic life-centers, nodes, well-heads ofvivid life itself. Therefore in every individual the parent nucleilive, and give direction connection, blood connection we call it, withthe rest of the family. It _is_ blood connection. For the fecundatingnuclei are the very spark-essence of the blood. And while life livesthe parent nuclei maintain their own centrality and dynamiceffectiveness within the solar plexus of the child. So that everyindividual has mother and father both sparkling within himself. 

But this is rather a preliminary truth than an intrinsic truth. Theintrinsic truth of every individual is the new unit of uniqueindividuality which emanates from the fusion of the parent nuclei. This is the incalculable and intangible Holy Ghost each time--eachindividual his own Holy Ghost. When, at the moment of conception, thetwo parent nuclei fuse to form a new unit of life, then takes placethe great mystery of creation. A new individual appears--not theresult of the fusion merely. Something more. The quality ofindividuality cannot be derived. The new individual, in his singlenessof self, is a perfectly new whole. He is not a permutation andcombination of old elements, transferred through the parents. No, heis something underived and utterly unprecedented, unique, a new soul. 

This quality of pure individuality is, however, only the one supremequality. It consummates all other qualities, but does not consumethem. All the others are there, all the time. And only at his maximumdoes an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and becomepurely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pureindividuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterlyunknown to them. "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" But this doesnot alter the fact that within him lives the mother-quick and thefather-quick, and that though in his wholeness he is rapt away beyondthe old mother-father connections, they are still there within him, consummated but not consumed. Nor does it alter the fact that very fewpeople surpass their parents nowadays, and attain any individualitybeyond them. Most men are half-born slaves: the little soul they areborn with just atrophies, and merely the organism emanates, the newself, the new soul, the new swells into manhood, like big potatoes. 

So there we are. But considering man at his best, he is at the startfaced with the great problem. At the very start he has to undertakehis tripartite being, the mother within him, the father within him, and the Holy Ghost, the self which he is supposed to consummate, andwhich mostly he doesn't. 

And there it is, a hard physiological fact. At the moment of ourconception, the father nucleus fuses with the mother nucleus, and thewonder emanates, the new self, the new soul, the new individual cell. But in the new individual cell the father-germ and the mother-germ donot relinquish their identity. There they remain still, incorporatedand never extinguished. And so, the blood-stream of race is onestream, for ever. But the moment the mystery of pure individualnewness ceased to be enacted and fulfilled, the blood-stream would dryup and be finished. Mankind would die out. 

Let us go back then to the solar plexus. There sparkle the includedmother-germ and father-germ, giving us direct, immediate blood-bonds, family connection. The connection is as direct and as subtle asbetween the Marconi stations, two great wireless stations. A family, if you like, is a group of wireless stations, all adjusted to thesame, or very much the same vibration. All the time they quiver withthe interchange, there is one long endless flow of vitalisticcommunication between members of one family, a long, strange_rapport_, a sort of life-unison. It is a ripple of life through manybodies as through one body. But all the time there is the jolt, therupture of individualism, the individual asserting himself beyond allties or claims. The highest goal for every man is the goal of pureindividual being. But it is a goal you cannot reach by the mererupture of all ties. A child isn't born by being torn from the womb. When it is born by natural process that is rupture enough. But eventhen the ties are not broken. They are only subtilized. 

From the solar plexus first of all pass the great vitalisticcommunications between child and parents, the first interplay ofprimal, pre-mental knowledge and sympathy. It is a great subtleinterplay, and from this interplay the child is built up, body andpsyche. Impelled from the primal conscious center in the abdomen, thechild seeks the mother, seeks the breast, opens a blind mouth andgropes for the nipple. Not mentally directed and yet certainlydirected. Directed from the dark pre-mind center of the solar plexus. From this center the child seeks, the mother knows. Hence the truemindlessness of the pristine, healthy mother. She does not need tothink, mentally to know. She knows so profoundly and actively at thegreat abdominal life-center. 

But if the child thus seeks the mother, does it then know the motheralone? To an infant the mother is the whole universe. Yet the childneeds more than the mother. It needs as well the presence of men, thevibration from the present body of the man. There may not be anyactual, palpable connection. But from the great voluntary center inthe man pass unknowable communications and unreliable nourishment ofthe stream of manly blood, rays which we cannot see, and which so farwe have refused to know, but none the less essential, quickening darkrays which pass from the great dark abdominal life-center in thefather to the corresponding center in the child. And these rays, thesevibrations, are not like the mother-vibrations. Far, far from it. Theydo not need the actual contact, the handling and the caressing. On thecontrary, the true male instinct is to avoid physical contact with ababy. It may not need even actual presence. But present or absent, there should be between the baby and the father that strange, intangible communication, that strange pull and circuit such as themagnetic pole exercises upon a needle, a vitalistic pull and flowwhich lays all the life-plasm of the baby into the line of vitalquickening, strength, knowing. And any lack of this vital circuit, this vital interchange between father and child, man and child, meansan inevitable impoverishment to the infant. 

The child exists in the interplay of two great life-waves, the womanlyand the male. In appearance, the mother is everything. In truth, thefather has actively very little part. It does not matter much if hehardly sees his child. Yet see it he should, sometimes, and touch itsometimes, and renew with it the connection, the life-circuit, notallow it to lapse, and so vitally starve his child. 

But remember, dear reader, please, that there is not the slightestneed for you to believe me, or even read me. Remember, it's just yourown affair. Don't implicate me. 

CHAPTER III

PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON

The primal consciousness in man is pre-mental, and has nothing to dowith cognition. It is the same as in the animals. And this pre-mentalconsciousness remains as long as we live the powerful root and body ofour consciousness. The mind is but the last flower, the _cul de sac_. 

The first seat of our primal consciousnesses the solar plexus, thegreat nerve-center situated behind the stomach. From this center weare first dynamically conscious. For the primal consciousness isalways dynamic, and never, like mental consciousness, static. Thought, let us say what we will about its magic powers, is instrumental only, the soul's finest instrument for the business of living. Thought isjust a means to action and living. But life and action take riseactually at the great centers of dynamic consciousness. 

The solar plexus, the greatest and most important center of ourdynamic consciousness, is a sympathetic center. At this main center ofyour first-mind we know as we can never mentally know. Primarily weknow, each man, each living creature knows, profoundly andsatisfactorily and without question, that _I am I. _ This root of allknowledge and being is established in the solar plexus; it is dynamic, pre-mental knowledge, such as cannot be transferred into thought. Donot ask me to transfer the pre-mental dynamic knowledge into thought. It cannot be done. The knowledge that _I am I_ can never be thought:only known. 

This being the very first term of our life-knowledge, a knowledgeestablished physically and psychically the moment the two parentnuclei fused, at the moment of the conception, it remains integral asa piece of knowledge in every subsequent nucleus derived from this oneoriginal. But yet the original nucleus, formed from the two parentnuclei at our conception, remains always primal and central, and isalways the original fount and home of the first and supreme knowledgethat _I am I. _ This original nucleus is embodied in the solar plexus. 

But the original nucleus divides. The first division, as scienceknows, is a division of recoil. From the perfect oneing of the twoparent nuclei in the egg-cell results a recoil or new assertion. Thatwhich was perfect _one_ now divides again, and in the recoil becomesagain two. 

This second nucleus, the nucleus born of recoil, is the nuclear originof all the great nuclei of the voluntary system, which are the nucleiof assertive individualism. And it remains central in the adult humanbody as it was in the egg-cell. In the adult human body the firstnucleus of independence, first-born from the great original nucleus ofour conception, lies always established in the lumbar ganglion. Herewe have our positive center of independence, in a multifariousuniverse. 

At the solar plexus, the dynamic knowledge is this, that _I am I. _ Thesolar plexus is the center of all the sympathetic system. The greatprime knowledge is sympathetic in nature. I am I, in vital centrality. I am I, the vital center of all things. I am I, the clew to the whole. All is one with me. It is the one identity. 

But at the lumbar ganglion, which is the center of separate identity, the knowledge is of a different mode, though the term is the same. Atthe lumbar ganglion I know that I am I, in distinction from a wholeuniverse, which is not as I am. This is the first tremendous flash ofknowledge of singleness and separate identity. I am I, not because Iam at one with all the universe, but because I am other than all theuniverse. It is my distinction from all the rest of things which makesme myself. Because I am set utterly apart and distinguished from allthat is the rest of the universe, therefore _I am I. _ And this root ofour knowledge in separateness lies rooted all the time in the lumbarganglion. It is the second term of our dynamic psychic existence. 

It is from the great sympathetic center of the solar plexus that thechild rejoices in the mother and in its own blissful centrality, itsunison with the as yet unknown universe. Look at the pictures ofMadonna and Child, and you will even _see_ it. It is from this centerthat it draws all things unto itself, winningly, drawing love for thesoul, and actively drawing in milk. The same center controls the greatintake of love and of milk, of psychic and of physical nourishment. 

And it is from the great voluntary center of the lumbar ganglion thatthe child asserts its distinction from the mother, the single identityof its own existence, and its power over its surroundings. From thiscenter issues the violent little pride and lustiness which kicks withglee, or crows with tiny exultance in its own being, or which clawsthe breast with a savage little rapacity, and an incipientmasterfulness of which every mother is aware. This incipient mastery, this sheer joy of a young thing in its own single existence, themarvelous playfulness of early youth, and the roguish mockery of themother's love, as well as the bursts of temper and rage, all belong toinfancy. And all this flashes spontaneously, _must_ flashspontaneously from the first great center of independence, thepowerful lumbar ganglion, great dynamic center of all the voluntarysystem, of all the spirit of pride and joy in independent existence. And it is from this center too that the milk is urged away down theinfant bowels, urged away towards excretion. The motion is the same, but here it applies to the material, not to the vital relation. It isfrom the lumbar ganglion that the dynamic vibrations are emitted whichthrill from the stomach and bowels, and promote the excrementalfunction of digestion. It is the solar plexus which controls theassimilatory function in digestion. 

So, in the first division of the egg-cell is set up the first plane ofpsychic and physical life, remaining radically the same throughout thewhole existence of the individual. The two original nuclei of theegg-cell remain the same two original nuclei within the corpus of theadult individual. Their psychic and their physical dynamic is the samein the solar plexus and lumbar ganglion as in the two nuclei of theegg-cell. The first great division in the egg remains always the same, the unchanging great division in the psychic and the physicalstructure; the unchanging great division in knowledge and function. Itis a division into polarized duality, psychical and physical, of thehuman being. It is the great vertical division of the egg-cell, and ofthe nature of man. 

Then, this division having taken place, there is a new thrill ofconjunction or collision between the divided nuclei, and at once thesecond birth takes place. The two nuclei now split horizontally. Thereis a horizontal division across the whole egg-cell, and the nuclei arenow four, two above, and two below. But those below retain theiroriginal nature, those above are new in nature. And those abovecorrespond again to those below. 

In the developed child, the great horizontal division of the egg-cell, resulting in four nuclei, this remains the same. The horizontaldivision-wall is the diaphragm. The two upper nuclei are the twogreat nerve-centers, the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion. Wehave again a sympathetic center primal in activity and knowledge, anda corresponding voluntary center. In the center of the breast, thecardiac plexus acts as the great sympathetic mode of new dynamicactivity, new dynamic consciousness. And near the spine, by the wallof the shoulders, the thoracic ganglion acts as the powerful voluntarycenter of separateness and power, in the same vertical line as thelumbar ganglion, but horizontally so different. 

Now we must change our whole feeling. We must put off the deep way ofunderstanding which belongs to the lower body of our nature, andtransfer ourselves into the upper plane, where being and functioningare different. 

At the cardiac plexus, there in the center of the breast, we have nowa new great sun of knowledge and being. Here there is no more of self. Here there is no longer the dark, exultant knowledge that _I am I. _ Achange has come. Here I know no more of myself. Here I am not. Here Ionly know the delightful revelation that you are you. The wonder is nolonger within me, my own dark, centrifugal, exultant self. The wonderis without me. The wonder is outside me. And I can no longer exultand know myself the dark, central sun of the universe. Now I look withwonder, with tenderness, with joyful yearning towards that which isoutside me, beyond me, not me. Behold, that which was once negativehas now become the only positive. The other being is now the greatpositive reality, I myself am as nothing. Positivity has changedplaces. 

If we want to see the portrayed look, then we must turn to the North, to the fair, wondering, blue-eyed infants of the Northern masters. They seem so frail, so innocent and wondering, touching outwards tothe mystery. They are not the same as the Southern child, nor theopposite. Their whole life mystery is different. Instead ofconsummating all things within themselves, as the dark little Southerninfants do, the Northern Jesus-children reach out delicate littlehands of wondering innocence towards delicate, flower-reverentialmothers. Compare a Botticelli Madonna, with all her wounded andabnegating sensuality, with a Hans Memling Madonna, whose soul is pureand only reverential. Beyond me is the mystery and the glory, says theNorthern mother: let me have no self, let me only seek that which isall-pure, all-wonderful. But the Southern mother says: This is mine, this is mine, this is my child, my wonder, my master, my lord, myscourge, my own. 

From the cardiac plexus the child goes forth in bliss. It seeks therevelation of the unknown. It wonderingly seeks the mother. It opensits small hands and spreads its small fingers to touch her. And bliss, bliss, bliss, it meets the wonder in mid-air and in mid-space it findsthe loveliness of the mother's face. It opens and shuts its littlefingers with bliss, it laughs the wonderful, selfless laugh of purebaby-bliss, in the first ecstasy of finding all its treasure, gropingupon it and finding it in the dark. It opens wide, child-wide eyes tosee, to see. But it cannot see. It is puzzled, it wrinkles its face. But when the mother puts her face quite near, and laughs and coos, then the baby trembles with an ecstasy of love. The glamour, thewonder, the treasure beyond. The great uplift of rapture. All thissurges from that first center of the breast, the sun of the breast, the cardiac plexus. 

And from the same center acts the great function of the heart andbreath. Ah, the aspiration, the aspiration, like a hope, like ayearning constant and unfailing with which we take in breath. When webreathe, when we take in breath, it is not as when we take in food. When we breathe in we aspire, we yearn towards the heaven of air andlight. And when the heart dilates to draw in the stream of dark blood, it opens its arms as to a beloved. It dilates with reverent joy, as ahost opening his doors to an honored guest, whom he delights to serve:opening his doors to the wonder which comes to him from beyond, andwithout which he were nothing. 

So it is that our heart dilates, our lungs expand. They are bidden bythat great and mysterious impulse from the cardiac plexus, which bidsthem seek the mystery and the fulfillment of the beyond. They seek thebeyond, the air of the sky, the hot blood from the dark under-world. And so we live. 

And then, they relax, they contract. They are driven by the oppositemotion from the powerful voluntary center of the thoracic ganglion. . That which was drawn in, was invited, is now relinquished, allowed togo forth, negatively. Not positively dismissed, but relinquished. 

There is a wonderful complementary duality between the voluntary andthe sympathetic activity on the same plane. But between the twoplanes, upper and lower, there is a further dualism, still morestartling, perhaps. Between the dark, glowing first term of knowledgeat the solar plexus: _I am I, all is one in me_; and the first term ofvolitional knowledge: _I am myself, and these others are not as Iam_;--there is a world of difference. But when the world changesagain, and on the upper plane we realize the wonder of other things, the difference is almost shattering. The thoracic ganglion is aganglion of power. When the child in its delicate bliss seeks themother and finds her and is added on to her, then it fulfills itselfin the great upper sympathetic mode. But then it relinquishes her. Itceases to be aware of her. And if she tries to force its love to playupon her again, like light revealing her to herself, then the childturns away. Or it will lie, and look at her with the strange, odd, curious look of knowledge, like a little imp who is spying her out. This is the curious look that many mothers cannot bear. Involuntarilyit arouses a sort of hate in them--the look of scrutinizing curiosity, apart, and as it were studying, balancing them up. Yet it is a lookwhich comes into every child's eyes. It is the reaction of the greatvoluntary plexus between the shoulders. The mother is suddenly setapart, as an object of curiosity, coldly, sometimes dreamily, sometimes puzzled, sometimes mockingly observed. 

Again, if a mother neglect her child, it cries, it weeps for her loveand attention. Its pitiful lament is one of the forms of compulsionfrom the upper center. This insistence on pity, on love, is quitedifferent from the rageous weeping, which is compulsion from the lowercenter, below the diaphragm. Again, some children just drop everythingthey can lay hands on over the edge of their crib, or their table. They drop everything out of sight. And then they look up with acurious look of negative triumph. This is again a form of recoil fromthe upper center, the obliteration of the thing which is outside. Andhere a child is acting quite differently from the child who joyously_smashes_. The desire to smash comes from the lower centers. 

We can quite well recognize the will exerted from the lower center. Wecall it headstrong temper and masterfulness. But the peculiar will ofthe upper center--the sort of nervous, critical objectivity, thedeliberate forcing of sympathy, the play upon pity and tenderness, theplaintive bullying of love, or the benevolent bullying of love--thesewe don't care to recognize. They are the extravagance of spiritual_will_. But in its true harmony the thoracic ganglion is a center ofhappier activity: of real, eager curiosity, of the delightful desireto pick things to pieces, and the desire to put them together again, the desire to "find out, " and the desire to invent: all this arises onthe upper plane, at the volitional center of the thoracic ganglion. 

CHAPTER IV

TREES AND BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS

Oh, damn the miserable baby with its complicated ping-pong table of anunconscious. I'm sure, dear reader, you'd rather have to listen to thebrat howling in its crib than to me expounding its plexuses. As for"mixing those babies up, " I'd mix him up like a shot if I'd anythingto mix him with. Unfortunately he's my own anatomical specimen of apickled rabbit, so there's nothing to be done with the bits. 

But he gets on my nerves. I come out solemnly with a pencil and anexercise book, and take my seat in all gravity at the foot of a largefir-tree, and wait for thoughts to come, gnawing like a squirrel on anut. But the nut's hollow. 

I think there are too many trees. They seem to crowd round and stareat me, and I feel as if they nudged one another when I'm not looking. I can _feel_ them standing there. And they won't let me get on aboutthe baby this morning. Just their cussedness. I felt they encouragedme like a harem of wonderful silent wives, yesterday. 

It is half rainy too--the wood so damp and still and so secret, in theremote morning air. Morning, with rain in the sky, and the forestsubtly brooding, and me feeling no bigger than a pea-bug between theroots of my fir. The trees seem so much bigger than me, so muchstronger in life, prowling silent around. I seem to feel them movingand thinking and prowling, and they overwhelm me. Ah, well, the onlything is to give way to them. 

It is the edge of the Black Forest--sometimes the Rhine far off, onits Rhine plain, like a bit of magnesium ribbon. But not to-day. To-day only trees, and leaves, and vegetable presences. Huge straightfir-trees, and big beech-trees sending rivers of roots into theground. And cuckoos, like noise falling in drops off the leaves. Andme, a fool, sitting by a grassy wood-road with a pencil and a book, hoping to write more about that baby. 

Never mind. I listen again for noises, and I smell the damp moss. Thelooming trees, so straight. And I listen for their silence. Big, tall-bodied trees, with a certain magnificent cruelty about them. Orbarbarity. I don't know why I should say cruelty. Their magnificent, strong, round bodies! It almost seems I can hear the slow, powerfulsap drumming in their trunks. Great full-blooded trees, with strangetree-blood in them, soundlessly drumming. 

Trees that have no hands and faces, no eyes. Yet the powerfulsap-scented blood roaring up the great columns. A vast individuallife, and an overshadowing will. The will of a tree. Something thatfrightens you. 

Suppose you want to look a tree in the face? You can't. It hasn't gota face. You look at the strong body of a trunk: you look above youinto the matted body-hair of twigs and boughs: you see the soft greentips. But there are no eyes to look into, you can't meet its gaze. Youkeep on looking at it in part and parcel. 

It's no good looking at a tree, to know it. The only thing is to sitamong the roots and nestle against its strong trunk, and not bother. That's how I write all about these planes and plexuses, between thetoes of a tree, forgetting myself against the great ankle of thetrunk. And then, as a rule, as a squirrel is stroked into itswickedness by the faceless magic of a tree, so am I usually strokedinto forgetfulness, and into scribbling this book. My tree-book, really. 

I come so well to understand tree-worship. All the old Aryansworshiped the tree. My ancestors. The tree of life. The tree ofknowledge. Well, one is bound to sprout out some time or other, chipof the old Aryan block. I can so well understand tree-worship. Andfear the deepest motive. 

Naturally. This marvelous vast individual without a face, without lipsor eyes or heart. This towering creature that never had a face. Heream I between his toes like a pea-bug, and him noiselesslyover-reaching me. And I feel his great blood-jet surging. And he hasno eyes. But he turns two ways. He thrusts himself tremendously downto the middle earth, where dead men sink in darkness, in the damp, dense under-soil, and he turns himself about in high air. Whereas wehave eyes on one side of our head only, and only grow upwards. 

Plunging himself down into the black humus, with a root's gushingzest, where we can only rot dead; and his tips in high air, where wecan only look up to. So vast and powerful and exultant in his twodirections. And all the time, he has no face, no thought: only a huge, savage, thoughtless soul. Where does he even keep his soul?--Wheredoes anybody?

A huge, plunging, tremendous soul. I would like to be a tree for awhile. The great lust of roots. Root-lust. And no mind at all. Hetowers, and I sit and feel safe. I like to feel him towering round me. I used to be afraid. I used to fear their lust, their rushing blacklust. But now I like it, I worship it. I always felt them hugeprimeval enemies. But now they are my only shelter and strength. Ilose myself among the trees. I am so glad to be with them in theirsilent, intent passion, and their great lust. They feed my soul. But Ican understand that Jesus was crucified on a tree. 

And I can so well understand the Romans, their terror of the bristlingHercynian wood. Yet when you look from a height down upon the rollingof the forest--this Black Forest--it is as suave as a rolling, oilysea. Inside only, it bristles horrific. And it terrified the Romans. 

The Romans! They too seem very near. Nearer than Hindenburg or Foch oreven Napoleon. When I look across the Rhine plain, it is Rome, and thelegionaries of the Rhine that my soul notices. It must have beenwonderful to come from South Italy to the shores of this sea-likeforest: this dark, moist forest, with its enormously powerfulintensity of tree life. Now I know, coming myself from rock-drySicily, open to the day. 

The Romans and the Greeks found everything human. Everything had aface, and a human voice. Men spoke, and their fountains piped ananswer. 

But when the legions crossed the Rhine they found a vast impenetrablelife which had no voice. They met the faceless silence of the BlackForest. This huge, huge wood did not answer when they called. Itssilence was too crude and massive. And the soldiers shrank: shrankbefore the trees that had no faces, and no answer. A vast array ofnon-human life, darkly self-sufficient, and bristling with indomitableenergy. The Hercynian wood, not to be fathomed. The enormous power ofthese collective trees, stronger in their somber life even than Rome. 

No wonder the soldiers were terrified. No wonder they thrilled withhorror when, deep in the woods, they found the skulls and trophies oftheir dead comrades upon the trees. The trees had devoured them:silently, in mouthfuls, and left the white bones. Bones of the mindfulRomans--and savage, preconscious trees, indomitable. The true Germanhas something of the sap of trees in his veins even now: and a sort ofpristine savageness, like trees, helpless, but most powerful, underall his mentality. He is a tree-soul, and his gods are not human. Hisinstinct still is to nail skulls and trophies to the sacred tree, deepin the forest. The tree of life and death, tree of good and evil, treeof abstraction and of immense, mindless life; tree of everythingexcept the spirit, spirituality. 

But after bone-dry Sicily, and after the gibbering of myriad peopleall rattling their personalities, I am glad to be with the profoundindifference of faceless trees. Their rudimentariness cannot know whywe care for the things we care for. They have no faces, no minds andbowels: only deep, lustful roots stretching in earth, and vast, lissome life in air, and primeval individuality. You can sacrifice thewhole of your spirituality on their altar still. You can nail yourskull on their limbs. They have no skulls, no minds nor faces, theycan't make eyes of love at you. Their vast life dispenses with allthis. But they will live you down. 

The normal life of one of these big trees is about a hundred years. Sothe Herr Baron told me. 

One of the few places that my soul will haunt, when I am dead, will bethis. Among the trees here near Ebersteinburg, where I have beenalone and written this book. I can't leave these trees. They havetaken some of my soul. 

 * * * * *

Excuse my digression, gentle reader. At first I left it out, thinkingwe might not see wood for trees. But it doesn't much matter what wesee. It's nice just to look round, anywhere. 

So there are two planes of being and consciousness and two modes ofrelation and of function. We will call the lower plane the sensual, the upper the spiritual. The terms may be unwise, but we can think ofno other. 

Please read that again, dear reader; you'll be a bit dazzled, comingout of the wood. 

It is obvious that from the time a child is born, or conceived, it hasa permanent relation with the outer universe, relation in the twomodes, not one mode only. There are two ways of love, two ways ofactivity and independence. And there needs some sort of equilibriumbetween the two modes. In the same way, in physical function there iseating and drinking, and excrementation, on the lower plane andrespiration and heartbeat on the upper plane. 

Now the equilibrium to be established is fourfold. There must be atrue equilibrium between what we eat and what we reject again byexcretion: likewise between the systole and diastole of the heart, the inspiration and expiration of our breathing. Suffice to say theequilibrium is never quite perfect. Most people are either too fat ortoo thin, too hot or too cold, too slow or too quick. There is no suchthing as an _actual_ norm, a living norm. A norm is merely anabstraction, not a reality. 

The same on the psychical plane. We either love too much, or imposeour will too much, are too spiritual or too sensual. There is not andcannot be any actual norm of human conduct. All depends, first, on theunknown inward need within the very nuclear centers of the individualhimself, and secondly on his circumstance. Some men _must_ be toospiritual, some _must_ be too sensual. Some _must_ be too sympathetic, and some _must_ be too proud. We have no desire to say what men_ought_ to be. We only wish to say there are all kinds of ways ofbeing, and there is no such thing as human perfection. No man can beanything more than just himself, in genuine living relation to all hissurroundings. But that which _I_ am, when I am myself, will certainlybe anathema to those who hate individual integrity, and want to swarm. And that which I, being myself, am in myself, may make the hairbristle with rage on a man who is also himself, but very differentfrom me. Then let it bristle. And if mine bristle back again, then letus, if we must, fly at one another like two enraged men. It is how itshould be. We've got to learn to live from the center of our ownresponsibility only, and let other people do the same. 

To return to the child, however, and his development on his two planesof consciousness. There is all the time a direct dynamic connectionbetween child and mother, child and father also, from the start. It isa connection on two planes, the upper and lower. From the lowersympathetic center the profound intake of love or vibration from theliving co-respondent outside. From the upper sympathetic center theoutgoing of devotion and the passionate vibration of _given_ love, given attention. The two sympathetic centers are always, or shouldalways be, counterbalanced by their corresponding voluntary centers. From the great voluntary ganglion of the lower plane, the child isself-willed, independent, and masterful. 

In the activity of this center a boy refuses to be kissed and pawedabout, maintaining his proud independence like a little wild animal. From this center he likes to command and to receive obedience. Fromthis center likewise he may be destructive and defiant and reckless, determined to have his own way at any cost. 

From this center, too, he learns to use his legs. The motion ofwalking, like the motion of breathing, is twofold. First, asympathetic cleaving to the earth with the foot: then the voluntaryrejection, the spurning, the kicking away, the exultance in power andfreedom. 

From the upper voluntary center the child watches persistently, wilfully, for the attention of the mother: to be taken notice of, tobe caressed, in short to exist in and through the mother's attention. From this center, too, he coldly refuses to notice the mother, whenshe insists on too much attention. This cold refusal is different fromthe active rejection of the lower center. It is passive, but cold andnegative. It is the great force of our day. From the ganglion of theshoulders, also, the child breathes and his heart beats. From the samecenter he learns the first use of his arms. In the gesture ofsympathy, from the upper plane, he embraces his mother with his arms. In the motion of curiosity, or interest, which derives from thethoracic ganglion, he spreads his fingers, touches, feels, explores. In the motion of rejection he drops an undesired object deliberatelyout of sight. 

And then, when the four centers of what we call the first _field_ ofconsciousness are fully active, then it is that the eyes begin togather their sight, the mouth to speak, the ears to awake to theirintelligent hearings; all as a result of the great fourfold activityof the first dynamic field of consciousness. And then also, as aresult, the mind wakens to its impressions and to its incipientcontrol. For at first the control is non-mental, even non-cerebral. The brain acts only as a sort of switchboard. 

The business of the father, in all this incipient child-development, is to stand outside as a final authority and make the necessaryadjustments. Where there is too much sympathy, then the greatvoluntary centers of the spine are weak, the child tends to bedelicate. Then the father by instinct supplies the roughness, thesternness which stiffens in the child the centers of resistance andindependence, right from the very earliest days. Often, for a mereinfant, it is the father's fierce or stern presence, the vibration ofhis voice, which starts the frictional and independent activity of thegreat voluntary ganglion and gives the first impulse to theindependence which later on is life itself. 

But on the other hand, the father, from his distance, supports, protects, nourishes his child, and it is ultimately on the remote butpowerful father-love that the infant rests, in a rest which is beyondmother-love. For in the male the dominant centers are naturally thevolitional centers, centers of responsibility, authority, and care. 

It is the father's business, again, to maintain some sort ofequilibrium between the two modes of love in his infant. A mother maywish to bring up her child from the lovely upper centers only, fromthe centers of the breast, in the mode of what we call pure orspiritual love. Then the child will be all gentle, all tender andtender-radiant, always enfolded with gentleness and forbearance, always shielded from grossness or pain or roughness. Now the father'sinstinct is to be rough and crude, good-naturedly brutal with thechild, calling the deeper centers, the sensual centers, into play. "What do you want? My watch? Well, you can't have it, do you see, because it's mine. " Not a lot of explanations of the "You see, darling. " No such nonsense. --Or if a child wails unnecessarily for itsmother, the father must be the check. "Stop your noise, you littlebrat! What ails you, you whiner?" And if children be too sensitive, too sympathetic, then it will do the child no harm if the fatheroccasionally throws the cat out of the window, or kicks the dog, orraises a storm in the house. Storms there must be. And if the child isold enough and robust enough, it can occasionally have its bottomsoundly spanked--by the father, if the mother refuses to perform thatmost necessary duty. For a child's bottom is made occasionally to bespanked. The vibration of the spanking acts direct upon the spinalnerve-system, there is a direct reciprocity and reaction, the spankertransfers his wrath to the great will-centers in the child, and thesewill-centers react intensely, are vivified and educated. 

On the other hand, given a mother who is too generally hard orindifferent, then it rests with the father to provide the delicatesympathy and the refined discipline. Then the father must show thetender sensitiveness of the upper mode. The sad thing to-day is thatso few mothers have any deep bowels of love--or even the breast oflove. What they have is the benevolent spiritual will, the will of theupper self. But the will is not love. And benevolence in a parent isa poison. It is bullying. In these circumstances the father must givedelicate adjustment, and, above all, some warm, native love from thericher sensual self. 

The question of corporal punishment is important. It is no use roughlysmacking a shrinking, sensitive child. And yet, if a child is tooshrinking, too sensitive, it may do it a world of good cheerfully tospank its posterior. Not brutally, not cruelly, but with real sound, good-natured exasperation. And let the adult take the fullresponsibility, half humorously, without apology or explanation. Letus avoid self-justification at all costs. Real corporal punishmentsapply to the sensual plane. The refined punishments of the spiritualmode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack. The pained but resigned disapprobation of a mother is usually a verybad thing, much worse than the father's shouts of rage. And sendingsto bed, and no dessert for a week, and so on, are crueller and meanerthan a bang on the head. When a parent gives his boy a beating, thereis a living passionate interchange. But in these refined punishments, the parent suffers nothing and the child is deadened. The bullying ofthe refined, benevolent spiritual will is simply vitriol to the soul. Yet parents administer it with all the righteousness of virtue andgood intention, sparing themselves perfectly. 

The point is here. If a child makes you so that you really want tospank it soundly, then soundly spank the brat. But know all the time_what_ you are doing, and always be responsible for your anger. Neverbe ashamed of it, and never surpass it. The flashing interchange ofanger between parent and child is part of the responsiblerelationship, necessary to growth. Again, if a child offends youdeeply, so that you really can't communicate with it any more, then, while the hurt is deep, switch off your connection from the child, cutoff your correspondence, your vital communion, and be alone. But neverpersist in such a state beyond the time when your deep hurt dies down. The only rule is, do what you _really_, impulsively, wish to do. Butalways act on your own responsibility sincerely. And have the courageof your own strong emotion. They enrichen the child's soul. 

For a child's primary education depends almost entirely on itsrelation to its parents, brothers, and sisters. Between mother andchild, father and child, the law is this: I, the mother, am myselfalone: the child is itself alone. But there exists between us a vitaldynamic relation, for which I, being the conscious one, am basicallyresponsible. So, as far as possible, there must be in me no departurefrom myself, lest I injure the preconscious dynamic relation. I mustabsolutely act according to my own true spontaneous feeling. But, moreover, I must also have wisdom for myself and for my child. Always, always the deep wisdom of responsibility. And always a braveresponsibility for the soul's own spontaneity. Love--what is love?We'd better get a new idea. Love is, in all, generous impulse--even agood spanking. But wisdom is something else, a deep collectedness inthe soul, a deep abiding by my own integral being, which makes meresponsible, not for the child, but for my certain duties towards thechild, and for maintaining the dynamic flow between the child andmyself as genuine as possible: that is to say, not perverted by idealsor by my _will_. 

Most fatal, most hateful of all things is bullying. But what isbullying? It is a desire to superimpose my own will upon anotherperson. Sensual bullying of course is fairly easily detected. What ismore dangerous is ideal bullying. Bullying people into what is ideallygood for them. I embrace for example an ideal, and I seek to enactthis ideal in the person of another. This is ideal bullying. A mothersays that life should be all love, all delicacy and forbearance andgentleness. And she proceeds to spin a hateful sticky web of permanentforbearance, gentleness, hushedness around her naturally passionateand hasty child. This so foils the child as to make him half imbecileor criminal. I may have ideals if I like--even of love and forbearanceand meekness. But I have no right to ask another to have these ideals. And to impose _any ideals_ upon a child as it grows is almostcriminal. It results in impoverishment and distortion and subsequentdeficiency. In our day, most dangerous is the love and benevolenceideal. It results in neurasthenia, which is largely a dislocation orcollapse of the great voluntary centers, a derangement of the will. Itis in us an insistence upon the one life-mode only, the spiritualmode. It is a suppression of the great lower centers, and a living asort of half-life, almost entirely from the upper centers. Thence, since we live terribly and exhaustively from the upper centers, thereis a tendency now towards pthisis and neurasthenia of the heart. Thegreat sympathetic center of the breast becomes exhausted, the lungs, burnt by the over-insistence of one way of life, become diseased, theheart, strained in one mode of dilation, retaliates. The powerfullower centers are no longer fully active, particularly the greatlumbar ganglion, which is the clue to our sensual passionate pride andindependence, this ganglion is atrophied by suppression. And it isthis ganglion which holds the spine erect. So, weak-chested, round-shouldered, we stoop hollowly forward on ourselves. It is theresult of the all-famous love and charity ideal, an ideal now quitedead in its sympathetic activity, but still fixed and determined inits voluntary action. 

Let us beware and beware, and beware of having a high ideal forourselves. But particularly let us beware of having an ideal for ourchildren. So doing, we damn them. All we can have is wisdom. Andwisdom is not a theory, it is a state of soul. It is the state whereinwe know our wholeness and the complicate, manifold nature of ourbeing. It is the state wherein we know the great relations which existbetween us and our near ones. And it is the state which accepts fullresponsibility, first for our own souls, and then for the livingdynamic relations wherein we have our being. It is no use expectingthe other person to know. Each must know for himself. But nowadaysmen have even a stunt of pretending that children and idiots aloneknow best. This is a pretty piece of sophistry, and criminalcowardice, trying to dodge the life-responsibility which no man orwoman can dodge without disaster. 

The only thing is to be direct. If a child has to swallow castor-oil, then say: "Child, you've got to swallow this castor-oil. It isnecessary for your inside. I say so because it is true. So open yourmouth. " Why try coaxing and logic and tricks with children? Childrenare more sagacious than we are. They twig soon enough if there is aflaw in our own intention and our own true spontaneity. And they playup to our bit of falsity till there is hell to pay. 

"You love mother, don't you, dear?"--Just a piece of indecent trickeryof the spiritual will. The great emotions like love are unspoken. Speaking them is a sign of an indecent bullying will. 

"Poor pussy! You must love poor pussy!"

What cant! What sickening cant! An appeal to love based on false pity. That's the way to inculcate a filthy pharisaic conceit into achild. --If the child ill-treats the cat, say:

"Stop mauling that cat. It's got its own life to live, so let it liveit. " Then if the brat persists, give tit for tat. 

"What, you pull the cat's tail! Then I'll pull your nose, to see howyou like it. " And give his nose a proper hard pinch. 

Children _must_ pull the cat's tail a little. Children _must_ stealthe sugar sometimes. They _must_ occasionally spoil just the thingsone doesn't want them to spoil. And they _must_ occasionally tellstories--tell a lie. Circumstances and life are such that we must allsometimes tell a lie: just as we wear trousers, because we don'tchoose that everybody shall see our nakedness. Morality is a delicateact of adjustment on the soul's part, not a rule or a prescription. Beyond a certain point the child _shall_ not pull the cat's tail, _or_steal the sugar, _or_ spoil the furniture, _or_ tell lies. But I'mafraid you can't fix this certain soul's humor. And so it must. If ata sudden point you fly into a temper and thoroughly beat the boy forhardly touching the cat--well, that's life. All you've got to say tohim is: "There, that'll serve you for all the times you _have_ pulledher tail and hurt her. " And he will feel outraged, and so will you. But what does it matter? Children have an infinite understanding ofthe soul's passionate variabilities, and forgive even a realinjustice, if it was _spontaneous_ and not intentional. They know wearen't perfect. What they don't forgive us is if we pretend we are: orif we _bully_. 

CHAPTER V

THE FIVE SENSES

Science is wretched in its treatment of the human body as a sort ofcomplex mechanism made up of numerous little machines workingautomatically in a rather unsatisfactory relation to one another. Thebody is the total machine; the various organs are the includedmachines; and the whole thing, given a start at birth, or atconception, trundles on by itself. The only god in the machine, thehuman will or intelligence, is absolutely at the mercy of the machine. 

Such is the orthodox view. Soul, when it is allowed an existence atall, sits somewhat vaguely within the machine, never defined. Ifanything goes wrong with the machine, why, the soul is forgotteninstantly. We summon the arch-mechanic of our day, the medicine-man. And a marvelous earnest fraud he is, doing his best. He is reallywonderful as a mechanic of the human system. But the life within usfails more and more, while we marvelously tinker at the engines. Doctors are not to blame. 

It is obvious that, even considering the human body as a very delicateand complex machine, you cannot keep such a machine running for oneday without most exact central control. Still more is it impossible toconsider the automatic evolution of such a machine. When did anymachine, even a single spinning-wheel, automatically evolve itself?There was a god in the machine before the machine existed. 

So there we are with the human body. There must have been, and must bea central god in the machine of each animate corpus. The little soulof the beetle makes the beetle toddle. The little soul of the _homosapiens_ sets him on his two feet. Don't ask me to define the soul. You might as well ask a bicycle to define the young damsel who sowhimsically and so god-like pedals her way along the highroad. A younglady skeltering off on her bicycle to meet her young man--why, whatcould the bicycle make of such a mystery, if you explained it tilldoomsday. Yet the bicycle wouldn't be spinning from Streatham toCroydon by itself. 

So we may as well settle down to the little god in the machine. We mayas well call it the individual soul, and leave it there. It's as faras the bicycle would ever get, if it had to define Mademoiselle. Butbe sure the bicycle would not deny the existence of the young miss whoseats herself in the saddle. Not like us, who try to pretend there isno one in the saddle. Why even the sun would no more spin without arider than would a cycle-pedal. But, since we have innumerable planetsto reckon with, in the spinning we must not begin to define the riderin terms of our own exclusive planet. Nevertheless, rider there is:even a rider of the many-wheeled universe. 

But let us leave the universe alone. It is too big a bauble forme. --_Revenons. _--At the start of me there is me. There is amysterious little entity which is my individual self, the god whobuilds the machine and then makes his gay excursion of seventy yearswithin it. Now we are talking at the moment about the machine. For themoment we are the bicycle, and not the feather-brained cyclist. Sothat all we can do is to define the cyclist in terms of ourself. Abicycle could say: Here, upon my leather saddle, rests a strange andanimated force, which I call the force of gravity, as being the onegreat force which controls my universe. And yet, on second thoughts, Imust modify myself. This great force of gravity is not _always_ inthe saddle. Sometimes it just is not there--and I lean strangelyagainst a wall. I have been even known to turn upside down, with mywheels in the air; spun by the same mysterious Miss. So that I mustintroduce a theory of Relativity. However, mostly, when I am awake andalive, she is in the saddle; or _it_ is in the saddle, the mysteriousforce. And when it is in the saddle, then two subsidiary forces plungeand claw upon my two pedals, plunge and claw with inestimable power. And at the same time, a kind and mysterious force sways my head-stock, sways most incalculably, and governs my whole motion. This force isnot a driving force, but a subtle directing force, beneath whose gripmy bright steel body is flexible as a dipping highroad. Then let menot forget the sudden clutch of arrest upon my hurrying wheels. Oh, this is pain to me! While I am rushing forward, surpassing myself inan _élan vital_, suddenly the awful check grips my back wheel, or myfront wheel, or both. Suddenly there is a fearful arrest. My soulrushes on before my body, I feel myself strained, torn back. My fibersgroan. Then perhaps the tension relaxes. 

So the bicycle will continue to babble about itself. And it willinevitably wind up with a philosophy. "Oh, if only the great anddivine force rested for ever upon my saddle, and if only themysterious will which sways my steering gear remained in place forever: then my pedals would revolve of themselves, and never cease, andno hideous brake should tear the perpetuity of my motions. Then, ohthen I should be immortal. I should leap through the world for ever, and spin to infinity, till I was identified with the dizzy andtimeless cycle-race of the stars and the great sun. .. . "

Poor old bicycle. The very thought is enough to start a philanthropicsociety for the prevention of cruelty to bicycles. 

Well, then, our human body is the bicycle. And our individual andincomprehensible self is the rider thereof. And seeing that theuniverse is another bicycle riding full tilt, we are bound to supposea rider for that also. But we needn't say what sort of rider. When Isee a cockroach scuttling across the floor and turning up its tail Istand affronted, and think: A rum sort of rider _you_ must have. You've no business to have such a rider, do you hear?--And when I hearthe monotonous and plaintive cuckoo in the June woods, I think: Whothe devil made _that_ clock?--And when I see a politician making afiery speech on a platform, and the crowd gawping, I think: Lord, saveme--they've all got riders. But Holy Moses! you could never guess whatwas coming. --And so I shouldn't like, myself, to start guessing aboutthe rider of the universe. I am all too flummoxed by the masquerade inthe tourney round about me. 

We ourselves then: wisdom, like charity, begins at home. We've each ofus got a rider in the saddle: an individual soul. Mostly it can'tride, and can't steer, so mankind is like squadrons of bicyclesrunning amok. We should every one fall off if we didn't ride so thickthat we hold each other up. Horrid nightmare!

As for myself, I have a horror of riding _en bloc_. So I grind awayuphill, and sweat my guts out, as they say. 

Well, well--my body is my bicycle: the whole middle of me is thesaddle where sits the rider of my soul. And my front wheel is thecardiac plane, and my back wheel is the solar plexus. And the brakesare the voluntary ganglia. And the steering gear is my head. And theright and left pedals are the right and left dynamics of the body, insome way corresponding to the sympathetic and voluntary division. 

So that now I know more or less how my rider rides me, and from whatcenters controls me. That is, I know the points of vital contactbetween my rider and my machine: between my invisible and my visibleself. I don't attempt to say what is my rider. A bicycle might as welltry to define its young Miss by wriggling its handle-bars and ringingits bell. 

However, having more or less determined the four primary motions, wecan see the further unfolding. In a child, the solar plexus and thecardiac plexus, with corresponding voluntary ganglia, are awake andactive. From these centers develop the great functions of the body. 

As we have seen, it is the solar plexus, with the lumbar ganglion, which controls the great dynamic system, the functioning of the liverand the kidneys. Any excess in the sympathetic dynamism tends toaccelerate the action of the liver, to cause fever and constipation. Any collapse of the sympathetic dynamism causes anæmia. The suddenstimulating of the voluntary center may cause diarrhoea, and so on. But all this depends so completely on the polarized flow between theindividual and the correspondent, between the child and mother, childand father, child and sisters or brothers or teacher, orcircumambient universe, that it is impossible to lay down laws, unless we state particulars. Nevertheless, the whole of the greatorgans of the lower body are controlled from the two lower centers, and these organs work well or ill according as there is a true dynamic_psychic_ activity at the two primary centers of consciousness. By a_true_ dynamic psychic activity we mean an activity which is true tothe individual himself, to his own peculiar soul-nature. And a dynamicpsychic activity means a dynamic polarity between the individualhimself and other individuals concerned in his living; or between himand his immediate surroundings, human, physical, geographical. 

On the upper plane, the lungs and heart are controlled from thecardiac plane and the thoracic ganglion. Any excess in the sympatheticmode from the upper centers tends to burn the lungs with oxygen, weaken them with stress, and cause consumption. So it is just criminalto make a child too loving. No child should be induced to love toomuch. It means derangement and death at last. 

But beyond the primary physiological function--and it is the businessof doctors to discover the relation between the functioning of theprimary organs and the dynamic psychic activity at the four primaryconsciousness-centers, --beyond these physical functions, there are theactivities which are half-psychic, half-functional. Such as the fivesenses. 

Of the five senses, four have their functioning in the face-region. The fifth, the sense of touch, is distributed all over the body. Butall have their roots in the four great primary centers ofconsciousness. From the constellation of your nerve-nodes, from thegreat field of your poles, the nerves run out in every direction, ending on the surface of the body. Inwardly this is an inextricableramification and communication. 

And yet the body is planned out in areas, there is a definitearea-control from the four centers. On the back the sense of touch isnot acute. There the voluntary centers act in resistance. But in thefront of the body, the breast is one great field of sympathetic touch, the belly is another. On these two fields the stimulus of touch isquite different, has a quite different psychic quality and psychicresult. The breast-touch is the fine alertness of quivering curiosity, the belly-touch is a deep thrill of delight and avidity. Correspondingly, the hands and arms are instruments of superbdelicate curiosity, and deliberate execution. Through the elbows andthe wrists flows the dynamic psychic current, and a dislocation in thecurrent between two individuals will cause a feeling of dislocation atthe wrists and elbows. On the lower plane, the legs and feet areinstruments of unfathomable gratifications and repudiations. Thethighs, the knees, the feet are intensely alive with love-desire, darkly and superbly drinking in the love-contact, blindly. Or they arethe great centers of resistance, kicking, repudiating. Sudden flushingof great general sympathetic desire will make a man feel weak at theknees. Hatred will harden the tension of the knees like steel, andgrip the feet like talons. Thus the fields of touch are four, twosympathetic fields in front of the body from the throat to the feet, two resistant fields behind from the neck to the heels. 

There are two fields of touch, however, where the distribution is notso simple: the face and the buttocks. Neither in the face nor in thebuttocks is there one single mode of sense communication. 

The face is of course the great window of the self, the great openingof the self upon the world, the great gateway. The lower body has itsown gates of exit. But the bulk of our communication with all theouter universe goes on through the face. 

And every one of the windows or gates of the face has its directcommunication with each of the four great centers of the first fieldof consciousness. Take the mouth, with the sense of taste. The mouthis primarily the gate of the two chief sensual centers. It is thegateway to the belly and the loins. Through the mouth we eat and wedrink. In the mouth we have the sense of taste. At the lips, too, wekiss. And the kiss of the mouth is the first sensual connection. 

In the mouth also are the teeth. And the teeth are the instruments ofour sensual will. The growth of the teeth is controlled entirely fromthe two great sensual centers below the diaphragm. But almost entirelyfrom the one center, the voluntary center. The growth and the life ofthe teeth depend almost entirely on the lumbar ganglion. During thegrowth of the teeth the sympathetic mode is held in abeyance. There isa sort of arrest. There is pain, there is diarrhoea, there is miseryfor the baby. 

And we, in our age, have no rest with our teeth. Our mouths are toosmall. For many ages we have been suppressing the avid, negroid, sensual will. We have been converting ourselves into ideal creatures, all spiritually conscious, and active dynamically only on one plane, the upper, spiritual plane. Our mouth has contracted, our teeth havebecome soft and un-quickened. Where in us are the sharp and vividteeth of the wolf, keen to defend and devour? If we had them more, weshould be happier. Where are the white negroid teeth? Where? In ourlittle pinched mouths they have no room. We are sympathy-rotten, andspirit-rotten, and idea-rotten. We have forfeited our flashing sensualpower. And we have false teeth in our mouths. In the same way the lipsof our sensual desire go thinner and more meaningless, in thecompression of our upper will and our idea-driven impulse. Let usbreak the conscious, self-conscious love-ideal, and we shall growstrong, resistant teeth once more, and the teething of our young willnot be the hell it is. 

Teething is strictly the period when the voluntary center of the lowerplane first comes into full activity, and takes for a time theprecedence. 

So, the mouth is the great sensual gate to the lower body. But let usnot forget it is also a gate by which we breathe, the gate throughwhich we speak and go impalpably forth to our object, the gate atwhich we can kiss the pinched, delicate, spiritual kiss. Therefore, although the main sensual gate of entrance to the lower body, it hasits reference also to the upper body. 

Taste, the sense of taste, is an intake of a pure communicationbetween us and a body from the outside world. It contains the elementof touch, and in this it refers to the cardiac plexus. But taste, _quâ_ taste, refers purely to the solar plexus. 

And then smell. The nostrils are the great gate from the wideatmosphere of heaven to the lungs. The extreme sigh of yearning wecatch through the mouth. But the delicate nose advances always intothe air, our palpable communicator with the infinite air. Thus it hasits first delicate root in the cardiac plexus, the root of its intake. And the root of the delicate-proud exhalation, rejection, is in thethoracic ganglion. But the nostrils have their other function ofsmell. Here the delicate nerve-ends run direct from the lower centers, from the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion, or even deeper. Thereis the refined sensual intake when a scent is sweet. There is thesensual repudiation when a scent is unsavoury. And just as thefullness of the lips and the shape of the mouth depend on thedevelopment from the lower or the upper centers, the sensual or thespiritual, so does the shape of the nose depend on the direct controlof the deepest centers of consciousness. A perfect nose is perhaps theresult of a balance in the four modes. But what is a perfect nose!--Weonly know that a short snub nose goes with an over-sympathetic nature, not proud enough; while a long nose derives from the center of theupper will, the thoracic ganglion, our great center of curiosity, andbenevolent or objective control. A thick, squat nose is thesensual-sympathetic nose, and the high, arched nose the sensualvoluntary nose, having the curve of repudiation, as when we turn upour nose from a bad smell, but also the proud curve of haughtiness andsubjective authority. The nose is one of the greatest indicators ofcharacter. That is to say, it almost inevitably indicates the mode ofpredominant dynamic consciousness in the individual, the predominantprimary center from which he lives. --When savages rub noses instead ofkissing, they are exchanging a more sensitive and a deeper sensualsalute than our lip-touch. 

The eyes are the third great gateway of the psyche. Here the soul goesin and out of the body, as a bird flying forth and coming home. Butthe root of conscious vision is almost entirely in the breast. When Igo forth from my own eyes, in delight to dwell upon the world which isbeyond me, outside me, then I go forth from wide open windows, throughwhich shows the full and living lambent darkness of my present inwardself. I go forth, and I leave the lovely open darkness of my sensientself revealed; when I go forth in the wonder of vision to dwell uponthe beloved, or upon the wonder of the world, I go from the center ofthe glad breast, through the eyes, and who will may look into the fullsoft darkness of me, rich with my undiscovered presence. But if I amdispleased, then hard and cold my self stands in my eyes, and refusesany communication, any sympathy, but merely stares outwards. It is themotion of cold objectivity from the thoracic ganglion. Or, from thesame center of will, cold but intense my eyes may watch withcuriosity, as a cat watches a fly. It may be into my curiosity willcreep an element of warm gladness in the wonder which I am beholdingoutside myself. Or it may be that my curiosity will be purely andsimply the cold, almost cruel curiosity of the upper will, directedfrom the ganglion of the shoulders: such as is the acute attention ofan experimental scientist. 

The eyes have, however, their sensual root as well. But this is hardto transfer into language, as all _our_ vision, our modern Northernvision is in the upper mode of actual seeing. 

There is a sensual way of beholding. There is the dark, desirous lookof a savage who apprehends only that which has direct reference tohimself, that which stirs a certain dark yearning within his lowerself. Then his eye is fathomless blackness. But there is the dark eyewhich glances with a certain fire, and has no depth. There is a keenquick vision which watches, which beholds, but which never yields tothe object outside: as a cat watching its prey. The dark glancing lookwhich knows the _strangeness_, the danger of its object, the need toovercome the object. The eye which is not wide open to study, to_learn_, but which powerfully, proudly or cautiously glances, andknows the terror or the pure desirability of _strangeness_ in theobject it beholds. The savage is all in all in himself. That which hesees outside he hardly notices, or, he sees as something odd, something automatically desirable, something lustfully desirable, orsomething dangerous. What we call vision, that he has not. 

We must compare the look in a horse's eye with the look in a cow's. The eye of the cow is soft, velvety, receptive. She stands and gazeswith the strangest intent curiosity. She goes forth from herself inwonder. The root of her vision is in her yearning breast. The same onehears when she moos. The same massive weight of passion is in a bull'sbreast; the passion to go forth from himself. His strength is in hisbreast, his weapons are on his head. The wonder is always outside him. 

But the horse's eye is bright and glancing. His curiosity is cautious, full of terror, or else aggressive and frightening for the object. Theroot of his vision is in his belly, in the solar plexus. And he fightswith his teeth, and his heels, the sensual weapons. 

Both these animals, however, are established in the sympathetic mode. The life mode in both is sensitively sympathetic, or preponderantlysympathetic. Those animals which like cats, wolves, tigers, hawks, chiefly live from the great voluntary centers, these animals are, inour sense of the word, almost visionless. Sight in them is sharpenedor narrowed down to a point: the object of prey. It is exclusive. They see no more than this. And thus they see unthinkably far, unthinkably keenly. 

Most animals, however, smell what they see: vision is not very highlydeveloped. They know better by the more direct contact of scent. 

And vision in us becomes faulty because we proceed too much in onemode. We see too much, we attend too much. The dark, glancingsightlessness of the intent savage, the narrowed vision of the cat, the single point of vision of the hawk--these we do not know any more. We live far too much from the sympathetic centers, without the balancefrom the voluntary mode. And we live far, far too much from the_upper_ sympathetic center and voluntary center, in an endlessobjective curiosity. Sight is the least sensual of all the senses. Andwe strain ourselves to see, see, see--everything, everything throughthe eye, in one mode of objective curiosity. There is nothing insideus, we stare endlessly at the outside. So our eyes begin to fail; toretaliate on us. We go short-sighted, almost in self-protection. 

Hearing the last, and perhaps the deepest of the senses. And herethere is no choice. In every other faculty we have the power ofrejection. We have a choice of vision. We can, if we choose, see inthe terms of the wonderful beyond, the world of light into which we goforth in joy to lose ourselves in it. Or we can see, as the Egyptianssaw, in the terms of their own dark souls: seeing the strangeness ofthe creature outside, the gulf between it and them, but finally, itsexistence in terms of themselves. They saw according to their ownunchangeable idea, subjectively, they did not go forth from themselvesto seek the wonder outside. 

Those are the two chief ways of sympathetic vision. We call our waythe objective, the Egyptian the subjective. But objective andsubjective are words that depend absolutely on your starting point. Spiritual and sensual are much more descriptive terms. 

But there are, of course, also the two ways of volitional vision. Wecan see with the endless modern critical sight, analytic, and at lastdeliberately ugly. Or we can see as the hawk sees the one concentratedspot where beats the life-heart of our prey. 

In the four modes of sight we have some choice. We have some choice torefuse tastes or smells or touch. In hearing we have the minimum ofchoice. Sound acts direct upon the great affective centers. We mayvoluntarily quicken our hearing, or make it dull. But we have reallyno choice of what we hear. Our will is eliminated. Sound acts direct, almost automatically, upon the affective centers. And we have no powerof going forth from the ear. We are always and only recipient. 

Nevertheless, sound acts upon us in various ways, according to thefour primary poles of consciousness. The singing of birds acts almostentirely upon the centers of the breast. Birds, which live by flight, impelled from the strong conscious-activity of the breast andshoulders, have become for us symbols of the spirit, the upper mode ofconsciousness. Their legs have become idle, almost insentient twigs. Only the tail flirts from the center of the sensual will. 

But their singing acts direct upon the upper, or spiritual centers inus. So does almost all our music, which is all Christian in tendency. But modern music is analytical, critical, and it has discovered thepower of ugliness. Like our martial music, it is of the upper plane, like our martial songs, our fifes and our brass-bands. These actdirect upon the thoracic ganglion. Time was, however, when music actedupon the sensual centers direct. We hear it still in savage music, and in the roll of drums, and in the roaring of lions, and in thehowling of cats. And in some voices still we hear the deeper resonanceof the sensual mode of consciousness. But the tendency is foreverything to be brought on to the upper plane, whilst the lower planeis just worked automatically from the upper. 

CHAPTER VI

FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND

We can now see what is the true goal of education for a child. It isthe full and harmonious development of the four primary modes ofconsciousness, always with regard to the individual nature of thechild. 

The goal is _not_ ideal. The aim is _not_ mental consciousness. Wewant _effectual_ human beings, not conscious ones. The final aim isnot _to know_, but _to be_. There never was a more risky motto thanthat: _Know thyself_. You've got to know yourself as far as possible. But not just for the sake of knowing. You've got to know yourself sothat you can at last _be_ yourself. "Be yourself" is the last motto. 

The whole field of dynamic and effectual consciousness is _always_pre-mental, non-mental. Not even the most knowing man that ever livedwould know how he would be feeling next week; whether some new andutterly shattering impulse would have arisen in him and laid hisnicely-conceived self in ruins. It is the impulse we have to live by, not the ideals or the idea. But we have to know ourselves prettythoroughly before we can break the automatism of ideals andconventions. The savage in a state of nature is one of the mostconventional of creatures. So is a child. Only through fine delicateknowledge can we recognize and release our impulses. Now our whole aimhas been to force each individual to a maximum of mental control, andmental consciousness. Our poor little plans of children are put intohorrible forcing-beds, called schools, and the young idea is thereforced to shoot. It shoots, poor thing, like a potato in a warmcellar. One mass of pallid sickly ideas and ideals. And no root, nolife. The ideas shoot, hard enough, in our sad offspring, but theyshoot at the expense of life itself. Never was such a mistake. Mentalconsciousness is a purely individual affair. Some men are born to behighly and delicately conscious. But for the vast majority, muchmental consciousness is simply a catastrophe, a blight. It just stopstheir living. 

Our business, at the present, is to prevent at all cost the young ideafrom shooting. The ideal mind, the brain, has become the vampire ofmodern life, sucking up the blood and the life. There is hardly anoriginal thought or original utterance possible to us. All is sicklyrepetition of stale, stale ideas. 

Let all schools be closed at once. Keep only a few technical trainingestablishments, nothing more. Let humanity lie fallow, for twogenerations at least. Let no child learn to read, unless it learns byitself, out of its own individual persistent desire. 

That is my serious admonition, gentle reader. But I am not so flightyas to imagine you will pay any heed. But if I thought you would, Ishould feel my hope surge up. And if you _don't_ pay any heed, calamity will at length shut your schools for you, sure enough. 

The process of transfer from the primary consciousness to recognizedmental consciousness is a mystery like every other transfer. Yet itfollows its own laws. And here we begin to approach the confines oforthodox psychology, upon which we have no desire to trespass. Butthis we _can_ say. The degree of transfer from primary to mentalconsciousness varies with every individual. But in most individualsthe natural degree is very low. 

The process of transfer from primary consciousness is calledsublimation, the sublimating of the potential body of knowledge withthe definite reality of the idea. And with this process we haveidentified all education. The very derivation of the Latin word_education_ shows us. Of course it should mean the leading forth ofeach nature to its fullness. But with us, fools that we are, it is theleading forth of the primary consciousness, the potential or dynamicconsciousness, into mental consciousness, which is finite and static. Now before we set out so gayly to lead our children _en bloc_ out ofthe dynamic into the static way of consciousness, let us consider amoment what we are doing. 

A child in the womb can have no _idea_ of the mother. I think orthodoxpsychology will allow us so much. And yet the child in the womb mustbe dynamically conscious of the mother. Otherwise how could itmaintain a definite and progressively developing relation to her?

This consciousness, however, is utterly non-ideal, non-mental, purelydynamic, a matter of dynamic polarized intercourse of vitalvibrations, as an exchange of wireless messages which are nevertranslated from the pulse-rhythm into speech, because they have noneed to be. It is a dynamic polarized intercourse between the greatprimary nuclei in the foetus and the corresponding nuclei in thedynamic maternal psyche. 

This form of consciousness is established at conception, and continueslong after birth. Nay, it continues all life long. But the particularinterchange of dynamic consciousness between mother and child suffersno interruption at birth. It continues almost the same. The child hasno conception whatsoever of the mother. It cannot see her, for its eyehas no focus. It can hear her, because hearing needs no transmissioninto concept, but it has no oral notion of sounds. It knows her. Butonly by a form of vital dynamic correspondence, a sort of magneticinterchange. The idea does not intervene at all. 

Gradually, however, the dark shadow of our object begins to loom inthe formless mind of the infant. The idea of the mother is, as itwere, gradually photographed on the cerebral plasm. It begins with thefaintest shadow--but the figure is gradually developed through yearsof experience. It is never quite completed. 

How does the figure of the mother gradually develop as a _conception_in the child mind? It develops as the result of the positive andnegative reaction from the primary centers of consciousness. From thefirst great center of sympathy the child is drawn to a lovely oneingwith the mother. From the first great center of will comes theindependent self-assertion which locates the mother as somethingoutside, something objective. And as a result of this twofold notion, a twofold increase in the child. First, the dynamic establishment ofthe individual consciousness in the infant: and then the first shadowof a mental conception of the mother, in the infant brain. Thedevelopment of the _original_ mind in every child and every man alwaysand only follows from the dual fulfillment in the dynamicconsciousness. 

But mark further. Each time, after the fourfold interchange betweentwo dynamic polarized lives, there results a development in theindividuality and a sublimation into consciousness, bothsimultaneously in each party: _and this dual development causes atonce a diminution in the dynamic polarity between the two parties_. That is, as its individuality and its mental concept of the motherdevelop in the child, there is a corresponding _waning_ of the dynamicrelation between the child and the mother. And this is the naturalprogression of all love. As we have said before, the accomplishment ofindividuality never finally exhausts the dynamic flow between parentsand child. In the same way, a child can never have a finite conceptionof either of its parents. It can have a very much more finite, finished conception of its aunts or its friends. The portrait of theparent can never be quite completed in the mind of the son ordaughter. As long as time lasts it must be left unfinished. 

Nevertheless, the inevitable photography of time upon the mental plasmdoes print at last a very substantial portrait of the parent, a verywell-filled concept in the child mind. And the nearer a conceptioncomes towards finality, the nearer does the dynamic relation, out ofwhich this concept has arisen, draw to a close. To know, is to lose. When I have a finished mental concept of a beloved, or a friend, thenthe love and the friendship is dead. It falls to the level of anacquaintance. As soon as I have a finished mental conception, a fullidea even of myself, then dynamically I am dead. To know is to die. 

But knowledge and death are part of our natural development. Only, ofcourse, most things can never be known by us in full. Which means wedo never absolutely die, even to our parents. So that Jesus' questionto His mother, "Woman, what have I to do with thee!"--whileexpressing a major truth, still has an exaggerated sound, which comesfrom its denial of the minor truth. 

This progression from dynamic relationship towards a finishedindividuality and a finished mental concept is carried on from thefour great primary centers through the correspondence medium of allthe senses and sensibilities. First of all, the child knows the motheronly through touch--perfect and immediate contact. And yet, from themoment of conception, the egg-cell repudiated complete adhesion andeven communication, and asserted its individual integrity. The childin the womb, perfect a contact though it may have with the mother, isall the time also dynamically polarized against this contact. From thefirst moment, this relation in touch has a dual polarity, and, nodoubt, a dual mode. It is a fourfold interchange of consciousness, themoment the egg-cell has made its two spontaneous divisions. 

As soon as the child is born, there is a real severance. The contactof touch is interrupted, it now becomes occasional only. True, thedynamic flow between mother and child is not severed when simplephysical contact is missing. Though mother and child may not touch, still the dynamic flow continues between them. The mother knows herchild, feels her bowels and her breast drawn to it, even if it be ahundred miles away. But if the severance continue long, the dynamicflow begins to die, both in mother and child. It wanes fairlyquickly--and perhaps can never be fully revived. The dynamic relationbetween parent and child may fairly easily fall into quiescence, astatic condition. 

For a full dynamic relationship it is necessary that there be actualcontact. The nerves run from the four primary dynamos, and end withlive ends all over the body. And it is necessary to bring the liveends of the nerves of the child into contact with the live ends ofcorresponding nerves in the mother, so that a pure circuit isestablished. Wherever a pure circuit is established, there occurs apure development in the individual creation, and this is inevitablyaccompanied by sensation; and sensation is the first term of mentalknowledge. 

So, from the field of the breast and arms, the upper circuit, and fromthe field of the knees and feet and belly, the lower circuit. 

And then, the moment a child is born, the face is alive. And the facecommunicates direct with both planes of primary consciousness. Themoment a child is born, it begins to grope for the breast. Andsuddenly a new great circuit is established, the four poles allworking at once, as the child sucks. There is the profounddesirousness of the lower center of sympathy, and the superior avidityof the center of will, and at the same time, the cleaving yearning tothe nipple, and the tiny curiosity of lips and gums. The nipple of themother's breast is one of the great gates of the body, hence of theliving psyche. In the nipple terminate vivid nerves which flash theirvery powerful vibrations through the mouth of the child and deep intoits four great poles of being and knowing. Even the nipples of the manare gateways to the great dynamic flow: still gateways. 

Touch, taste, and smell are now active in the baby. And these senses, so-called, are strictly sensations. They are the first term of thechild's mental knowledge. And on these three _cerebral_ reactions thefoundation of the future mind is laid. 

The moment there is a perfect polarized circuit between the first fourpoles of dynamic consciousness, at that moment does the mind, theterminal station, flash into cognition. The first cognition is merelysensation: sensation and the remembrance of sensation being the firstelement in all knowing and in all conception. 

The circuit of touch, taste, and smell must be well established, before the eyes begin actually to see. All mental knowledge is builtup of sensation and of memory. It is the continually recurringsensation of the touch of the mother which forms the basis of thefirst conception of the mother. After that, the graduallydiscriminated taste of the mother, and scent of the mother. Tillgradually sight and hearing develop and largely usurp the first threesenses, as medium of correspondence and of knowledge. 

And while, of course, the sensational _knowledge_ is being secreted inthe brain, in some much more mysterious way the living individualityof the child is being developed in the four first nuclei, the fourgreat nerve-centers of the primary field of consciousness and being. 

As time goes on, the child learns to see the mother. At first he seesher face as a blur, and though he knows her, knows her by a directglow of communication, as if her face were a warm glowing life-lampwhich rejoiced him. But gradually, as the circuit of touch, taste, andsmell become powerfully established; gradually, as the individualdevelops in the child, and so retreats towards isolation; gradually, as the child stands more immune from the mother, the circuit ofcorrespondence extends, and the eyes now communicate across space, theears begin to discriminate sounds. Last of all develops discriminatehearing. 

Now gradually the picture of the mother is transferred to the child'smind, and the sound of the first baby-words is imprinted. And as thechild learns to discriminate visually, objectively, between the motherand the nurse, he learns to choose, and becomes individually free. Andstill, the dynamic correspondence is not finished. It only changes itscircuit. 

While the brain is registering sensations, the four dynamic centersare coming into perfect relation. Or rather, as we see, the reverse isthe case. As the dynamic centers come into perfect relation, the mindregisters and remembers sensations, and begins consciously to know. But the great field of activity is still and always the dynamic field. When a child learns to walk, it learns almost entirely from the solarplexus and the lumbar ganglion, the cardiac plexus and the thoracicganglion balancing the upper body. 

There is a perfected circuit of polarity. The two lower centers arethe positive, the two upper the negative poles. And so the childstrikes out with his feet for the earth, presses, and strikes awayagain from the earth, the two upper centers meanwhile correspondingimplicitly in the balance of the upper body. It is a chain ofspontaneous activity in the four primary centers, establishing acircuit through the whole body. But the positive poles are the lowercenters. And the brain has probably nothing at all to do with it. Eventhe _desire_ to walk is not born in the brain, but in the primarynuclei. 

The same with the use of the hands and arms. It means theestablishment of a pure circuit between the four centers, the twoupper poles now being the positive, the lower the negative poles, andthe hands the live end of the wire. Again the brain is not concerned. Probably, even in the first deliberate grasping of an object, thebrain is not concerned. Not until there is an element of recognitionand sensation-memory. 

All our primal activity originates and circulates purely in the fourgreat nerve centers. All our active desire, our genuine impulse, ourlove, our hope, our yearning, everything originates mysteriously atthese four great centers or well-heads of our existence: everythingvital and dynamic. The mind can only register that which results fromthe emanation of the dynamic impulse and the collision or communion ofthis impulse with its object. 

So now we see that we can never know ourselves. Knowledge is toconsciousness what the signpost is to the traveler: just an indicationof the way which has been traveled before. Knowledge is not even indirect proportion to being. There may be great knowledge of chemistryin a man who is a rather poor _being_: and those who _know_, even inwisdom like Solomon, are often at the end of the matter of living, notat the beginning. As a matter of fact, David did the living, thedynamic achievement. To Solomon was left the consummation and thefinish, and the dying down. 

Yet we _must_ know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supremelesson of human consciousness is to learn how _not to know_. That is, how not to _interfere_. That is, how to live dynamically, from thegreat Source, and not statically, like machines driven by ideas andprinciples from the head, or automatically, from one fixed desire. Atlast, knowledge must be put into its true place in the livingactivity of man. And we must know deeply, in order even to do that. 

So a new conception of the meaning of education. 

Education means leading out the individual nature in each man andwoman to its true fullness. You can't do that by stimulating the mind. To pump education into the mind is fatal. That which sublimates fromthe dynamic consciousness into the mental consciousness has alone anyvalue. This, in most individuals, is very little indeed. So that mostindividuals, under a wise government, would be most carefullyprotected from all vicious attempts to inject extraneous ideas intothem. Every extraneous idea, which has no inherent root in the dynamicconsciousness, is as dangerous as a nail driven into a young tree. Forthe mass of people, knowledge _must_ be symbolical, mythical, dynamic. This means, you must have a higher, responsible, conscious class: andthen in varying degrees the lower classes, varying in their degree ofconsciousness. Symbols must be true from top to bottom. But theinterpretation of the symbols must rest, degree after degree, in thehigher, responsible, conscious classes. To _those who cannot divest_themselves again of mental consciousness and definite ideas, mentalityand ideas are death, nails through their hands and feet. 

CHAPTER VII

FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION

The first process of education is obviously not a mental process. Whena mother talks to a baby, she is not encouraging its little mind tothink. When she is coaxing her child to walk, she is not making atheoretic exposition of the science of equilibration. She crouchesbefore the child, at a little distance, and spreads her hands. "Come, baby--come to mother. Come! Baby, walk! Yes, walk! Walk to mother!Come along. A little walk to its mother. Come! Come then! Why yes, apretty baby! Oh, he can toddle! Yes--yes--No, don't be frightened, adear. No--Come to mother--" and she catches his little pinafore by thetip--and the infant lurches forward. "There! There! A beautiful walk!A beautiful walker, yes! Walked all the way to mother, baby did. Yes, he did--"

Now who will tell me that this talk has any rhyme or reason? Not aspark of reason. Yet a real rhyme: or rhythm, much more important. The song and the urge of the mother's voice plays direct on theaffective centers of the child, a wonderful stimulus and tuition. Thewords hardly matter. True, this constant repetition in the end forms amental association. At the moment they have no mental significance atall for the baby. But they ring with a strange palpitating music inhis fluttering soul, and lift him into motion. 

And this is the way to educate children: the instinctive way ofmothers. There should be no effort made to teach children to think, tohave ideas. Only to lift them and urge them into dynamic activity. Thevoice of dynamic sound, not the words of understanding. Damnunderstanding. Gestures, and touch, and expression of the face, nottheory. Never have ideas about children--and never have ideas _for_them. 

If we are going to teach children we must teach them first to move. And not by rule or mental dictation. Horror! But by playing andteasing and anger, and amusement. A child must learn to move blitheand free and proud. It must learn the fullness of spontaneous motion. And this it can only learn by continuous reaction from all thecenters, through all the emotions. A child must learn to containitself. It must learn to sit still if need be. Part of the first phaseof education is the learning to stay still and be physicallyself-contained. Then a child must learn to be alone, and to adventurealone, and to play alone. Any peevish clinging should be quite roughlyrebuffed. From the very first day, throw a child back on its ownresources--even a little cruelly sometimes. But don't neglect it, don't have a negative attitude to it. Play with it, tease it and rollit over as a dog her puppy, mock it when it is too timorous, laugh atit, scold it when it really bothers you--for a child must learn not tobother another person--and when it makes you genuinely angry, spank itsoundly. But always remember that it is a single little soul byitself; and that the responsibility for the wise, warm relationship isyours, the adult's. 

Then always watch its deportment. Above all things encourage astraight backbone and proud shoulders. Above all things despise aslovenly movement, an ugly bearing and unpleasing manner. And make amock of petulance and of too much timidity. 

We are imbeciles to start bothering about love and so forth in achild. Forget utterly that there is such a thing as emotionalreciprocity. But never forget your own honor as an adult individualtowards a small individual. It is a question of honor, not of love. 

A tree grows straight when it has deep roots and is not too stifled. Love is a spontaneous thing, coming out of the spontaneous effectualsoul. As a deliberate principle it is an unmitigated evil. Alsomorality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigatedevil. A child which is proud and free in its movements, in all itsdeportment, will be quite as moral as need be. Honor is an instinct, asuperb instinct which should be kept keenly alive. Immorality, vice, crime, these come from a suppression or a collapse at one or other ofthe great primary centers. If one of these centers fails to maintainits true polarity, then there is a physical or psychic derangement, orboth. And viciousness or crime are the result of a derangement in theprimary system. Pure morality is only an instinctive adjustment whichthe soul makes in every circumstance, adjusting one thing to anotherlivingly, delicately, sensitively. There can be no law. Therefore, atevery cost and charge keep the first four centers alive and alert, active, and vivid in reaction. And then you need fear no perversion. What we have done, in our era, is, first, we have tried as far aspossible to suppress or subordinate the two sensual centers. We haveso unduly insisted on and exaggerated the upper spiritual or selflessmode--the living in the other person and through the otherperson--that we have caused already a dangerous over-balance in thenatural psyche. 

To correct this we go one worse, and try to rule ourselves more andmore by the old ideas of sympathy and benevolence. We think that loveand benevolence will cure anything. Whereas love and benevolence areour poison, poison to the giver, and still more poison to thereceiver. Poison only because there is practically _no_ spontaneouslove left in the world. It is all _will_, the fatal love-will andinsatiable morbid curiosity. The pure sympathetic mode of love longago broke down. There is now only deadly, exaggerated volition. 

This is also why general education should be suppressed as soon aspossible. We have fallen into a state of fixed, deadly will. Everything we do and say to our children in school tends simply to fixin them the same deadly will, under the pretence of pure love. Ouridealism is the clue to our fixed will. Love, beauty, benevolence, progress, these are the words we use. But the principle we evoke is aprinciple of barren, sanctified compulsion of all life. We want to putall life under compulsion. "How to outwit the nerves, " forexample. --And therefore, to save the children as far as possible, elementary education should be stopped at once. 

No child should be sent to any sort of public institution before theage of ten years. If I could but advise, I would advise that thisnotice should be sent through the length and breadth of the land. 

 "Parents, the State can no longer be responsible for the mind and character of your children. From the first day of the coming year, all schools will be closed for an indefinite period. Fathers, see that your boys are trained to be men. Mothers, see that your daughters are trained to be women. 

 "All schools will shortly be converted either into public workshops or into gymnasia. No child will be admitted into the workshops under ten years of age. Active training in primitive modes of fighting and gymnastics will be compulsory for all boys over ten years of age. 

 "All girls over ten years of age must attend at one domestic workshop. All girls over ten years of age may, in addition, attend at one workshop of skilled labor, or of technical industry, or of art. Admission for three months' probation. 

 "All boys over ten years of age must attend at one workshop of domestic crafts, and at one workshop of skilled labor, or of technical industry, or of art. A boy may choose, with his parents' consent, his school of labor, or technical industry or art, but the directors reserve the right to transfer him to a more suitable department, if necessary, after a three months' probation. 

 "It is the intention of this State to form a body of active, energetic citizens. The danger of a helpless, presumptuous, news-paper-reading population is universally recognized. 

 "All elementary education is left in the hands of the parents, save such as is necessary to the different branches of industry. 

 "Schools of mental culture are free to all individuals over fourteen years of age. 

 "Universities are free to all who obtain the first culture degree. "

The fact is, our process of universal education is to-day so uncouth, so psychologically barbaric, that it is the most terrible menace tothe existence of our race. We seize hold of our children, and byparrot-compulsion we force into them a set of mental tricks. Byunnatural and unhealthy compulsion we force them into a certain amountof cerebral activity. And then, after a few years, with a certainnumber of windmills in their heads, we turn them loose, like so manyinferior Don Quixotes, to make a mess of life. All that they havelearnt in their heads has no reference at all to their dynamic souls. The windmills spin and spin in a wind of words, Dulcinea del Tobosobeckons round every corner, and our nation of inferior Quixotes jumpson and off tram-cars, trains, bicycles, motor-cars, buses, in one madchase of the divine Dulcinea, who is all the time chewing chocolatesand feeling very, very bored. It is no use telling the poor devils tostop. They read in the newspapers about more Dulcineas and morechivalry due to them and more horrid persons who injure the fair fameof these bored females. And round they skelter, after their own tails. That is, when they are not forced to grind out their lives for a wage. Though work is the only thing that prevents our masses from goingquite mad. 

To tell the truth, ideas are the most dangerous germs mankind has everbeen injected with. They are introduced into the brain by injection, in schools and by means of newspapers, and then we are done for. 

An idea which is merely introduced into the brain, and startedspinning there like some outrageous insect, is the cause of all ourmisery to-day. Instead of living from the spontaneous centers, we livefrom the head. We chew, chew, chew at some theory, some idea. Wegrind, grind, grind in our mental consciousness, till we are besideourselves. Our primary affective centers, our centers of spontaneousbeing, are so utterly ground round and automatized that they squeak inall stages of disharmony and incipient collapse. We are a people--andnot we alone--of idiots, imbeciles and epileptics, and we don't evenknow we are raving. 

And all is due, directly and solely, to that hateful germ we call theIdeal. The Ideal is _always_ evil, no matter what ideal it be. Noidea should ever be raised to a governing throne. 

This does not mean that man should immediately cut off his head andtry to develop a pair of eyes in his breasts. But it does mean this:that an idea is just the final concrete or registered result of livingdynamic interchange and reactions: that no idea is ever perfectlyexpressed until its dynamic cause is finished; and that to continue toput into dynamic effect an already perfected idea means thenullification of all living activity, the substitution of mechanism, and all the resultant horrors of _ennui_, ecstasy, neurasthenia, and acollapsing psyche. 

The whole tree of our idea of life and living is dead. Then let usleave off hanging ourselves and our children from its branches likemedlars. 

The idea, the actual idea, must rise ever fresh, ever displaced, likethe leaves of a tree, from out of the quickness of the sap, andaccording to the forever incalculable effluence of the great dynamiccenters of life. The tree of life is a gay kind of tree that isforever dropping its leaves and budding out afresh, quite differentones. If the last lot were thistle leaves, the next lot may be vine. You never can tell with the Tree of Life. 

So we come back to that precious child who costs us such a lot ofink. By what right, I ask you, are we going to inject into him our owndisease-germs of ideas and infallible motives? By the right of thediseased, who want to infect everybody. 

There are _few, few people_ in whom the living impulse and reactiondevelops and sublimates into mental consciousness. There are all kindsof trees in the forest. But few of them indeed bear the apples ofknowledge. The modern world insists, however, that every individualshall bear the apples of knowledge. So we go through the forest ofmankind, cut back every tree, and try to graft it into an apple-tree. A nice wood of monsters we make by so doing. 

It is not the _nature_ of most men to know and to understand and toreason very far. Therefore, why should they make a pretense of it? Itis the nature of some few men to reason, then let them reason. Thosewhose nature it is to be rational will instinctively ask why andwherefore, and wrestle with themselves for an answer. But why everyTom, Dick and Harry should have the why and wherefore of the universerammed into him, and should be allowed to draw the conclusion hencethat he is the ideal person and responsible for the universe, I don'tknow. It is a lie anyway--for neither the whys nor the wherefores arehis own, and he is but a parrot with his nut of a universe. 

Why should we cram the mind of a child with facts that have nothing todo with his own experiences, and have no relation to his own dynamicactivity? Let us realize that every extraneous idea effectuallyintroduced into a man's mind is a direct obstruction of his dynamicactivity. Every idea which is introduced from outside into a man'smind, and which does not correspond to his own dynamic nature, is afatal stumbling-block for that man: is a cause of arrest for his trueindividual activity, and a derangement to his psychic being. 

For instance, if I teach a man the idea that all men are equal. Nowthis idea has no foundation in experience, but is logically deducedfrom certain ethical or philosophic principles. But there is a diseaseof idealism in the world, and we all are born with it. Particularlyteachers are born with it. So they seize on the idea of equality, andproceed to instil it. With what result? Your man is no longer a man, living his own life from his own spontaneous centers. He is atheoretic imbecile trying to frustrate and dislocate all life. 

It is the death of all life to force a pure _idea_ into practice. Lifemust be lived from the deep, self-responsible spontaneous centers ofevery individual, in a vital, _non-ideal_ circuit of dynamic relationbetween individuals. The passions or desires which are thought-bornare deadly. Any particular mode of passion or desire which receives anexclusive ideal sanction at once becomes poisonous. 

If this is true for men, it is much more true for women. Teach a womanto act from an idea, and you destroy her womanhood for ever. Make awoman self-conscious, and her soul is barren as a sandbag. Why were wedriven out of Paradise? Why did we fall into this gnawing disease ofunappeasable dissatisfaction? Not because we sinned. Ah, no. All theanimals in Paradise enjoyed the sensual passion of coition. Notbecause we sinned. But because we got our sex into our head. 

When Eve ate that particular apple, she became aware of her ownwomanhood, mentally. And mentally she began to experiment with it. Shehas been experimenting ever since. So has man. To the rage and horrorof both of them. 

These sexual experiments are really anathema. But once a woman issexually self-conscious, what is she to do? There it is, she is bornwith the disease of her own self-consciousness, as was her motherbefore her. She is bound to experiment and try one idea after another, in the long run always to her own misery. She is bound to have fixedone, and then another idea of herself, herself as woman. First she isthe noble spouse of a not-quite-so-noble male: then a _MaterDolorosa_: then a ministering Angel: then a competent social unit, aMember of Parliament or a Lady Doctor or a platform speaker: and allthe while, as a side show, she is the Isolde of some Tristan, or theGuinevere of some Lancelot, or the Fata Morgana of all men--in her ownidea. She can't stop having an idea of herself. She can't get herselfout of her own head. And there she is, functioning away from her ownhead and her own consciousness of herself and her own automaticself-will, till the whole man and woman game has become just a hell, and men with any backbone would rather kill themselves than go on withit--or kill somebody else. 

Yet we are going to inculcate more and more self-consciousness, teachevery little Mary to be more and more a nice little Mary out of herown head, and every little Joseph to theorize himself up to thescratch. 

And the point lies here. There will _have_ to come an end. Every racewhich has become self-conscious and idea-bound in the past hasperished. And then it has all started afresh, in a different way, withanother race. And man has never learnt any better. We are really far, far more life-stupid than the dead Greeks or the lost Etruscans. Ourday is pretty short, and closing fast. We can pass, and another racecan follow later. 

But there is another alternative. We still have in us the power todiscriminate between our own idealism, our own self-conscious will, and that other reality, our own true spontaneous self. Certainly weare so overloaded and diseased with ideas that we can't get well in aminute. But we can set our faces stubbornly against the disease, oncewe recognize it. The disease of love, the disease of "spirit, " thedisease of niceness and benevolence and feeling good on our own behalfand good on somebody else's behalf. Pah, it is all a gangrene. We canretreat upon the proud, isolate self, and remain there alone, likelepers, till we are cured of this ghastly white disease ofself-conscious idealism. 

And we really can make a move on our children's behalf. We really canrefrain from thrusting our children any more into those hot-beds ofthe self-conscious disease, schools. We really can prevent theireating much more of the tissues of leprosy, newspapers and books. Fora time, there should be no compulsory teaching to read and write atall. _The great mass of humanity should never learn to read andwrite_--_never_. 

And instead of this gnawing, gnawing disease of mental consciousnessand awful, unhealthy craving for stimulus and for action, we mustsubstitute genuine action. The war was really not a bad beginning. Butwe went out under the banners of idealism, and now the men are homeagain, the virus is more active than ever, rotting their very souls. 

The mass of the people will never _mentally understand_. But they willsoon instinctively fall into line. 

Let us substitute action, all kinds of action, for the mass of people, in place of mental activity. Even twelve hours' work a day is betterthan a newspaper at four in the afternoon and a grievance for the restof the evening. But particularly let us take care of the children. Atall cost, try to prevent a girl's mind from dwelling on herself, Makeher act, work, play: assume a rule over her girlhood. Let her learnthe domestic arts in their perfection. Let us even artificially sether to spin and weave. Anything to keep her busy, to prevent herreading and becoming self-conscious. Let us awake as soon as possibleto the repulsive machine quality of machine-made things. They smell ofdeath. And let us insist that the home is sacred, the hearth, and thevery things of the home. Then keep the girls apart from anyfamiliarity or being "pals" with the boys. The nice clean intimacywhich we now so admire between the sexes is sterilizing. It makesneuters. Later on, no deep, magical sex-life is possible. 

The same with the boys. First and foremost establish a rule over them, a proud, harsh, manly rule. Make them _know_ that at every moment theyare in the shadow of a proud, strong, adult authority. Let them besoldiers, but as individuals not machine units. There are wars in thefuture, great wars, which not machines will finally decide, but thefree, indomitable life spirit. No more wars under the banners of theideal, and in the spirit of sacrifice. But wars in the strength ofindividual men. And then, pure individualistic training to fight, andpreparation for a whole new way of life, a new society. Put moneyinto its place, and science and industry. The leaders must stand forlife, and they must not ask the simple followers to point out thedirection. When the leaders assume responsibility they relieve thefollowers forever of the burden of finding a way. Relieved of thishateful incubus of responsibility for general affairs, the populacecan again become free and happy and spontaneous, leaving matters totheir superiors. No newspapers--the mass of the people never learningto read. The evolving once more of the great spontaneous gestures oflife. 

We can't go on as we are. Poor, nerve-worn creatures, fretting ourlives away and hating to die because we have never lived. The secretis, to commit into the hands of the sacred few the responsibilitywhich now lies like torture on the mass. Let the few, the leaders, beincreasingly responsible for the whole. And let the mass be free:free, save for the choice of leaders. 

Leaders--this is what mankind is craving for. 

But men must be prepared to obey, body and soul, once they have chosenthe leader. And let them choose the leader for life's sake only. 

Begin then--there is a beginning. 

CHAPTER VIII

EDUCATION AND SEX IN MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD

The one thing we have to avoid, then, even while we carry on our own oldprocess of education, is this development of the powers of so-calledself-expression in a child. Let us beware of artificially stimulatinghis self-consciousness and his so-called imagination. All that we do isto pervert the child into a ghastly state of self-consciousness, makinghim affectedly try to show off as we wish him to show off. The momentthe least little trace of self-consciousness enters in a child, good-byto everything except falsity. 

Much better just pound away at the ABC and simple arithmetic and soon. The modern methods do make children sharp, give them a sort ofslick finesse, but it is the beginning of the mischief. It ends in thegreat "unrest" of a nervous, hysterical proletariat. Begin to teach achild of five to "understand. " To understand the sun and moon anddaisy and the secrets of procreation, bless your soul. Understandingall the way. --And when the child is twenty he'll have a hystericalunderstanding of his own invented grievance, and there's an end ofhim. Understanding is the devil. 

A child mustn't understand things. He must have them his own way. Hisvision isn't ours. When a boy of eight sees a horse, he doesn't seethe correct biological object we intend him to see. He sees a bigliving presence of no particular shape with hair dangling from itsneck and four legs. If he puts two eyes in the profile, he is quiteright. Because he does _not_ see with optical, photographic vision. The image on his retina is _not_ the image of his consciousness. Theimage on his retina just does not go into him. His unconsciousness isfilled with a strong, dark, vague prescience of a powerful presence, atwo-eyed, four-legged, long-maned presence looming imminent. 

And to _force_ the boy to see a correct one-eyed horse-profile is justlike pasting a placard in front of his vision. It simply kills hisinward seeing. We don't _want_ him to see a proper horse. The child is_not_ a little camera. He is a small vital organism which has directdynamic _rapport_ with the objects of the outer universe. Heperceives from his breast and his abdomen, with deep-sunken realism, the elemental nature of the creature. So that to this day a Noah's Arktree is more real than a Corot tree or a Constable tree: and a flatNoah's Ark cow has a deeper vital reality than even a Cuyp cow. 

The mode of vision is not one and final. The mode of vision ismanifold. And the optical image is a mere vibrating blur to achild--and, indeed, to a passionate adult. In this vibrating blur thesoul sees its own true correspondent. It sees, in a cow, horns andsquareness, and a long tail. It sees, for a horse, a mane, and a longface, round nose, and four legs. And in each case a darkly vitalpresence. Now horns and squareness and a long thin ox-tail, these arethe fearful and wonderful elements of the cow-form, which the dynamicsoul perfectly perceives. The ideal-image is just outside nature, fora child--something false. In a picture, a child wants elementalrecognition, and not correctness or expression, or least of all, whatwe call understanding. The child distorts inevitably and dynamically. But the dynamic abstraction is more than mental. If a huge eye sits inthe middle of the cheek, in a child's drawing, this shows that thedeep dynamic consciousness of the eye, its relative exaggeration, isthe life-truth, even if it is a scientific falsehood. 

On the other hand, what on earth is the good of saying to a child, "The world is a flattened sphere, like an orange. " It is simplypernicious. You had much better say the world is a poached egg in afrying pan. _That_ might have some dynamic meaning. The only thingabout the flattened orange is that the child just sees this orangedisporting itself in blue air, and never bothers to associate it withthe earth he treads on. And yet it would be so much better for themass of mankind if they never heard of the flattened sphere. Theyshould never be told that the earth is round. It only makes everythingunreal to them. They are balked in their impression of the flat goodearth, they can't get over this sphere business, they live in a fog ofabstraction, and nothing is anything. Save for purposes ofabstraction, the earth is a great plain, with hills and valleys. Whyforce abstractions and kill the reality, when there's no need?

As for children, will we never realize that their abstractions arenever based on observations, but on subjective exaggerations? If thereis an eye in the face, the face is all eye. It is the child soulwhich cannot get over the mystery of the eye. If there is a tree in alandscape, the landscape is all tree. Always this partial focus. Theattempt to make a child focus for a whole view--which is really ageneralization and an adult abstraction--is simply wicked. Yet thefirst thing we do is to set a child making relief-maps in clay, forexample: of his own district. Imbecility! He has not even the faintestimpression of the total hill on which his home stands. A steepnessgoing up to a door--and front garden railings--and perhaps windows. That's the lot. 

The top and bottom of it is, that it is a crime to teach a childanything at all, school-wise. It is just evil to collect childrentogether and teach them through the head. It causes absolutestarvation in the dynamic centers, and sterile substitute of brainknowledge is all the gain. The children of the middle classes are sovitally impoverished, that the miracle is they continue to exist atall. The children of the lower classes do better, because they escapeinto the streets. But even the children of the proletariat are nowinfected. 

And, of course, as my critics point out, under all the school-smarmand newspaper-cant, man is to-day as savage as a cannibal, and moredangerous. The living dynamic self is denaturalized instead of beingeducated. 

We talk about education--leading forth the natural intelligence of achild. But ours is just the opposite of leading forth. It is a rammingin of brain facts through the head, and a consequent distortion, suffocation, and starvation of the primary centers of consciousness. Anice day of reckoning we've got in front of us. 

Let us lead forth, by all means. But let us not have mental knowledgebefore us as the goal of the leading. Much less let us make of it avicious circle in which we lead the unhappy child-mind, like a cow ina ring at a fair. We don't want to educate children so that they mayunderstand. Understanding is a fallacy and a vice in most people. Idon't even want my child to know, much less to understand. _I_ don'twant my child to know that five fives are twenty-five, any more than Iwant my child to wear my hat or my boots. I _don't_ want my child to_know_. If he wants five fives let him count them on his fingers. Asfor his little mind, give it a rest, and let his dynamic self bealert. He will ask "why" often enough. But he more often asks why thesun shines, or why men have mustaches, or why grass is green, thananything sensible. Most of a child's questions are, and should be, unanswerable. They are not questions at all. They are exclamations ofwonder, they are _remarks_ half-sceptically addressed. When a childsays, "Why is grass green?" he half implies. "Is it really green, oris it just taking me in?" And we solemnly begin to prate aboutchlorophyll. Oh, imbeciles, idiots, inexcusable owls!

The whole of a child's development goes on from the great dynamiccenters, and is basically non-mental. To introduce mental activity isto arrest the dynamic activity, and stultify true dynamic development. By the age of twenty-one our young people are helpless, hopeless, selfless, floundering mental entities, with nothing in front of them, because they have been starved from the roots, systematically, fortwenty-one years, and fed through the head. They have had all theirmental excitements, sex and everything, all through the head, and whenit comes to the actual thing, why, there's nothing in it. _Blasé. _ Theaffective centers have been exhausted from the head. 

Before the age of fourteen, children should be taught only to move, toact, to _do_. And they should be taught as little as possible even ofthis. Adults simply cannot and do not know any more what the mode ofchildish intelligence is. Adults _always_ interfere. They _always_force the adult mental mode. Therefore children must be preserved fromadult instructions. 

Make a child work--yes. Make it do little jobs. Keep a fine anddelicate and fierce discipline, so that the little jobs are performedas perfectly as is consistent with the child's nature. Make the childalert, proud, and becoming in its movements. Make it know verydefinitely that it shall not and must not trespass on other people'sprivacy or patience. Teach it songs, tell it tales. But _never_instruct it school-wise. And mostly, leave it alone, send it away tobe with other children and to get in and out of mischief, and in andout of danger. Forget your child altogether as much as possible. 

All this is the active and strenuous business of parents, and must notbe shelved off on to strangers. It is the business of parents_mentally_ to forget but dynamically never to forsake their children. 

It is no use expecting parents to know _why_ schools are closed, and_why_ they, the parents, must be quite responsible for their ownchildren during the first ten years. If it is quite useless to expectparents to understand a theory of relativity, much less will theyunderstand the development of the dynamic consciousness. But why shouldthey understand? It is the business of very few to understand and forthe mass, it is their business to believe and not to bother, but to behonorable and humanly to fulfill their human responsibilities. To giveactive obedience to their leaders, and to possess their own souls innatural pride. 

Some must understand why a child is not to be mentally educated. Somemust have a faint inkling of the processes of consciousness during thefirst fourteen years. Some must know what a child beholds, when itlooks at a horse, and what it means when it says, "Why is grassgreen?" The answer to this question, by the way, is "Because it is. "

The interplay of the four dynamic centers follows no one conceivablelaw. Mental activity continues according to a law of co-relation. Butthere is no logical or rational co-relation in the dynamicconsciousness. It pulses on inconsequential, and it would beimpossible to determine any sequence. Out of the very lack of sequencein dynamic consciousness does the individual himself develop. Thedynamic abstraction of a child's precepts follows no mental law, andeven no law which can ever be mentally propounded. And this is why itis utterly pernicious to set a child making a clay relief-map of itsown district, or to ask a child to draw conclusions from givenobservations. Dynamically, a child draws no conclusions. All thingsstill remain dynamically possible. A conclusion drawn is a nail in thecoffin of a child's developing being. Let a child make a claylandscape, if it likes. But entirely according to its own fancy, andwithout conclusions drawn. Only, let the landscape be vividlymade--always the discipline of the soul's full attention. "Oh, butwhere are the factory chimneys?"--or else--"Why have you left out thegas-works?" or "Do you call that sloppy thing a church?" Theparticular focus should be vivid, and the record in some way true. Thesoul must give earnest attention, that is all. 

And so actively disciplined, the child develops for the first tenyears. We need not be afraid of letting children see the passions andreactions of adult life. Only we must not strain the _sympathies_ of achild, in _any_ direction, particularly the direction of love andpity. Nor must we introduce the fallacy of right and wrong. Spontaneous distaste should take the place of right and wrong. Andleast of all must there be a cry: "You see, dear, you don'tunderstand. When you are older--" A child's sagacity is better than anadult understanding, anyhow. 

Of course it is ten times criminal to tell young children facts aboutsex, or to implicate them in adult relationships. A child has a strongevanescent sex consciousness. It instinctively writes impossible wordson back walls. But this is not a fully conscious mental act. It is akind of dream act--quite natural. The child's curious, shadowy, indecent sex-knowledge is quite in the course of nature. And doesnobody any harm at all. Adults had far better not notice it. But if achild sees a cockerel tread a hen, or two dogs coupling, well andgood. It _should_ see these things. Only, without comment. Let nothingbe exaggeratedly hidden. By instinct, let us preserve the decentprivacies. But if a child occasionally sees its parent nude, taking abath, all the better. Or even sitting in the W. C. Exaggerated secrecyis bad. But indecent exposure is also very bad. But worst of all isdragging in the _mental_ consciousness of these shadowy dynamicrealities. 

In the same way, to talk to a child about an adult is vile. Letadults keep their adult feelings and communications for people oftheir own age. But if a child sees its parents violently quarrel, allthe better. There must be storms. And a child's dynamic understandingis far deeper and more penetrating than our sophisticatedinterpretation. But _never_ make a child a party to adult affairs. Never drag the child in. Refuse its sympathy on such occasions. Alwaystreat it as if it had _no_ business to hear, even if it is present and_must_ hear. Truly, it has no business mentally to hear. And thedynamic soul will always weigh things up and dispose of them properly, if there be no interference of adult comment or adult desire forsympathy. It is despicable for any one parent to accept a child'ssympathy against the other parent. And the one who _received_ thesympathy is always more contemptible than the one who is hated. 

Of course so many children are born to-day unnaturally mentally awakeand alive to adult affairs, that there is nothing left but to tellthem everything, crudely: or else, much better, to say: "Ah, get out, you know too much, you make me sick. "

To return to the question of sex. A child is born sexed. A child iseither male or female, in the whole of its psyche and physique iseither male or female. Every single living cell is either male orfemale, and will remain either male or female as long as life lasts. And every single cell in every male child is male, and every cell inevery female child is female. The talk about a third sex, or about theindeterminate sex, is just to pervert the issue. 

Biologically, it is true, the rudimentary formation of both sexes isfound in every individual. That doesn't mean that every individual isa bit of both, or either, _ad lib. _ After a sufficient period ofidealism, men become hopelessly self-conscious. That is, the greataffective centers no longer act spontaneously, but always wait forcontrol from the head. This always breeds a great fluster in thepsyche, and the poor self-conscious individual cannot help posing andposturing. Our ideal has taught us to be gentle and wistful: rathergirlish and yielding, and _very_ yielding in our sympathies. In fact, many young men feel so very like what they imagine a girl must feel, that hence they draw the conclusion that they must have a large shareof female sex inside them. False conclusion. 

These girlish men have often, to-day, the finest maleness, once it isput to the test. How is it then that they feel, and look, so girlish?It is largely a question of the direction of the polarized flow. Ourideal has taught us to be _so_ loving and _so_ submissive and _so_yielding in our sympathy, that the mode has become automatic in manymen. Now in what we will call the "natural" mode, man has hispositivity in the volitional centers, and women in the sympathetic. Infulfilling the Christian love ideal, however, men have reversed this. Man has assumed the gentle, all-sympathetic rôle, and woman has becomethe energetic party, with the authority in her hands. The male is thesensitive, sympathetic nature, the woman the active, effective, authoritative. So that the male acts as the passive, or recipient poleof attraction, the female as the active, positive, exertive pole, inhuman relations. Which is a reversal of the old flow. The woman is nowthe initiator, man the responder. They seem to play each other'sparts. But man is purely male, playing woman's part, and woman ispurely female, however manly. The gulf between Heliogabalus, or themost womanly man on earth, and the most manly woman, is just the sameas ever: just the same old gulf between the sexes. The man is male, the woman is female. Only they are playing one another's parts, asthey must at certain periods. The dynamic polarity has swung around. 

If we look a little closer, we can define this positive and negativebusiness better. As a matter of fact, positive and negative, passiveand active cuts both ways. If the man, as thinker and doer, is active, or positive, and the woman negative, then, on the other hand, as theinitiator of emotion, of feeling, and of sympathetic understanding thewoman is positive, the man negative. The man may be the initiator inaction, but the woman is initiator in emotion. The man has theinitiative as far as voluntary activity goes, and the woman theinitiative as far as sympathetic activity goes. In love, it is thewoman naturally who loves, the man who is loved. In love, woman is thepositive, man the negative. It is woman who asks, in love, and man whoanswers. In life, the reverse is the case. In knowing and in doing, man is positive and woman negative: man initiates, and woman lives upto it. 

Naturally this nicely arranged order of things may be reversed. Actionand utterance, which are male, are polarized against feeling, emotion, which are female. And which is positive, which negative? Was man, theeternal protagonist, born of woman, from her womb of fathomlessemotion? Or was woman, with her deep womb of emotion, born from therib of active man, the first created? Man, the doer, the knower, theoriginal in _being_, is he lord of life? Or is woman, the greatMother, who bore us from the womb of love, is she the supreme Goddess?

This is the question of all time. And as long as man and woman endure, so will the answer be given, first one way, then the other. Man, asthe utterer, usually claims that Eve was created out of his spare rib:from the field of the creative, upper dynamic consciousness, that is. But woman, as soon as she gets a word in, points to the fact that maninevitably, poor darling, is the issue of his mother's womb. So thebattle rages. 

But some men always agree with the woman. Some men always yield towoman the creative positivity. And in certain periods, such as thepresent, the majority of men concur in regarding woman as the sourceof life, the first term in creation: woman, the mother, the primebeing. 

And then, the whole polarity shifts over. Man still remains the doerand thinker. But he is so only in the service of emotional andprocreative woman. His highest moment is now the emotional moment whenhe gives himself up to the woman, when he forms the perfect answerfor her great emotional and procreative asking. All his thinking, allhis activity in the world only contributes to this great moment, whenhe is fulfilled in the emotional passion of the woman, the birth ofrebirth, as Whitman calls it. In his consummation in the emotionalpassion of a woman, man is reborn, which is quite true. 

And there is the point at which we all now stick. Life, thought, andactivity, all are devoted truly to the great end of Woman, wife andmother. 

Man has now entered on to his negative mode. Now, his consummation isin feeling, not in action. Now, his activity is all of the domesticorder and all his thought goes to proving that nothing matters exceptthat birth shall continue and woman shall rock in the nest of thisglobe like a bird who covers her eggs in some tall tree. Man is thefetcher, the carrier, the sacrifice, the crucified, and the reborn ofwoman. 

This being so, the whole tendency of his nature changes. Instead ofbeing assertive and rather insentient, he becomes wavering andsensitive. He begins to have as many feelings--nay, more than a woman. His heroism is all in altruistic endurance. He worships pity andtenderness and weakness, even in himself. In short, he takes on verylargely the original rôle of woman. Woman meanwhile becomes thefearless, inwardly relentless, determined positive party. She gripsthe responsibility. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Nay, she makes man discover that cradles should not be rocked, inorder that her hands may be left free. She is now a queen of theearth, and inwardly a fearsome tyrant. She keeps pity and tendernessemblazoned on her banners. But God help the man whom she pities. Ultimately she tears him to bits. 

Therefore we see the reversal of the old poles. Man becomes theemotional party, woman the positive and active. Man begins to showstrong signs of the peculiarly strong passive sex desire, the desireto be taken, which is considered characteristic of woman. Man beginsto have all the feelings of woman--or all the feelings which heattributed to woman. He becomes more feminine than woman ever was, andworships his own femininity, calling it the highest. In short, hebegins to exhibit all signs of sexual complexity. He begins to imaginehe really is half female. And certainly woman seems very male. So thehermaphrodite fallacy revives again. 

But it is all a fallacy. Man, in the midst of all his effeminacy, isstill male and nothing but male. And woman, though she harangue inParliament or patrol the streets with a helmet on her head, is stillcompletely female. They are only playing each other's rôles, becausethe poles have swung into reversion. The compass is reversed. But thatdoesn't mean that the north pole has become the south pole, or thateach is a bit of both. 

Of course a woman should stick to her own natural emotionalpositivity. But then man must stick to his own positivity of _being_, of action, _disinterested, non-domestic, male_ action, which is notdevoted to the increase of the female. Once man vacates his camp ofsincere, passionate positivity in disinterested being, his supremeresponsibility to fulfill his own profoundest impulses, with referenceto none but God or his own soul, not taking woman into count at all, in this primary responsibility to his own deepest soul; once manvacates this strong citadel of his own genuine, not spurious, divinity; then in comes woman, picks up the scepter and begins toconduct a rag-time band. 

Man remains man, however he may put on wistfulness and tenderness likepetticoats, and sensibilities like pearl ornaments. Your sensitivelittle big-eyed boy, so much more gentle and loving than his hardersister, is male for all that, believe me. Perhaps evilly male, somothers may learn to their cost: and wives still more. 

Of course there should be a great balance between the sexes. Man, inthe daytime, must follow his own soul's greatest impulse, and givehimself to life-work and risk himself to death. It is not woman whoclaims the highest in man. It is a man's own religious soul thatdrives him on beyond woman, to his supreme activity. For his highest, man is responsible to God alone. He may not pause to remember that hehas a life to lose, or a wife and children to leave. He must carryforward the banner of life, though seven worlds perish, with all thewives and mothers and children in them. Hence Jesus, "Woman, what haveI to do with thee?" Every man that lives has to say it again to hiswife or mother, once he has any work or mission in hand, that comesfrom his soul. 

But again, no man is a blooming marvel for twenty-four hours a day. Jesus or Napoleon or any other of them ought to have been man enoughto be able to come home at tea-time and put his slippers on and situnder the spell of his wife. For there you are, the woman has herworld, her positivity: the world of love, of emotion, of sympathy. Andit behooves every man in his hour to take off his shoes and relax andgive himself up to his woman and her world. Not to give up hispurpose. But to give up himself for a time to her who is hismate. --And so it is one detests the clock-work Kant, and thepetit-bourgeois Napoleon divorcing his Josephine for a Hapsburg--oreven Jesus, with his "Woman, what have I to do with thee?"--He mighthave added "just now. "--They were all failures. 

CHAPTER IX

THE BIRTH OF SEX

The last chapter was a chapter of semi-digression. We now return tothe straight course. Is the straightness none too evident? Ah well, it's a matter of relativity. A child is born with one sex only, andremains always single in his sex. There is no intermingling, only agreat change of rôles is possible. But man in the female rôle is stillmale. 

Sex--that is to say, maleness and femaleness--is present from themoment of birth, and in every act or deed of every child. But sex inthe real sense of dynamic sexual relationship, this does not exist ina child, and cannot exist until puberty and after. True, children havea sort of sex consciousness. Little boys and little girls may evencommit indecencies together. And still it is nothing vital. It is asort of shadow activity, a sort of dream-activity. It has no veryprofound effect. 

But still, boys and girls should be kept apart as much as possible, that they may have some sort of respect and fear for the gulf thatlies between them in nature, and for the great strangeness which eachhas to offer the other, finally. We are all wrong when we say there isno vital difference between the sexes. There is every difference. Every bit, every cell in a boy is male, every cell is female in awoman, and must remain so. Women can never feel or know as men do. Andin the reverse men can never feel and know, dynamically, as women do. Man, acting in the passive or feminine polarity, is still man, and hedoesn't have one single unmanly feeling. And women, when they speakand write, utter not one single word that men have not taught them. Men learn their feelings from women, women learn their mentalconsciousness from men. And so it will ever be. Meanwhile, women liveforever by feeling, and men live forever from an inherent sense of_purpose_. Feeling is an end in itself. This is unspeakable truth to awoman, and never true for one minute to a man. When man, in theEpicurean spirit, embraces feeling, he makes himself a martyr toit--like Maupassant or Oscar Wilde. Woman will _never_ understand thedepth of the spirit of purpose in man, his deeper spirit. And manwill never understand the sacredness of feeling to woman. Each willplay at the other's game, but they will remain apart. 

The whole mode, the whole everything is really different in man andwoman. Therefore we should keep boys and girls apart, that they arepure and virgin in themselves. On mixing with one another, in becomingfamiliar, in being "pals, " they lose their own male and femaleintegrity. And they lose the treasure of the future, the vital sexpolarity, the dynamic magic of life. For the magic and the dynamismrests on _otherness_. 

For actual sex is a vital polarity. And a polarity which rouses intoaction, as we know, at puberty. 

And how? As we know, a child lives from the great field of dynamicconsciousness established between the four poles of the dynamicpsyche, two great poles of sympathy, two great poles of will. Thesolar plexus and the lumbar ganglion, great nerve-centers below thediaphragm, act as the dynamic origin of all consciousness in man, andare immediately polarized by the other two nerve-centers, the cardiacplexus and the thoracic ganglion above the diaphragm. At these fourpoles the whole flow, both within the individual and from withouthim, of dynamic consciousness and dynamic creative relationship iscentered. These four first poles constitute the first field of dynamicconsciousness for the first twelve or fourteen years of the life ofevery child. 

And then a change takes place. It takes place slowly, gradually andinevitably, utterly beyond our provision or control. The living soulis unfolding itself in another great metamorphosis. 

What happens, in the biological psyche, is that deeper centers ofconsciousness and function come awake. Deep in the lower body thegreat sympathetic center, the hypogastric plexus has been acting allthe time in a kind of dream-automatism, balanced by its correspondingvoluntary center, the sacral ganglion. At the age of twelve these twocenters begin slowly to rumble awake, with a deep reverberant forcethat changes the whole constitution of the life of the individual. 

And as these two centers, the sympathetic center of the deeperabdomen, and the voluntary center of the loins, gradually sparkle intowakeful, _conscious_ activity, their corresponding poles are roused inthe upper body. In the region of the throat and neck, the so-calledcervical plexuses and the cervical ganglia dawn into activity. 

We have now another field of dawning dynamic consciousness, that willextend far beyond the first. And now various things happen to us. First of all actual sex establishes its strange and troublesomepresence within us. This is the massive wakening of the lower body. And then, in the upper body, the breasts of a woman begin to develop, her throat changes its form. And in the man, the voice breaks, thebeard begins to grow round the lips and on to the throat. There arethe obvious physiological changes resulting from the gradual burstinginto free activity of the hypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion, in the lower body, and of the cervical plexuses and ganglia of theneck, in the upper body. 

Why the growth of hair should start at the lower and upper sympatheticregions we cannot say. Perhaps for protection. Perhaps to preservethese powerful yet supersensitive nodes from the inclemency of changesin temperature, which might cause a derangement. Perhaps for the sakeof protective warning, as hair warns when it is touched. Perhaps for ascreen against various dynamic vibrations, and as a receiver of othersuited dynamic vibrations. It may be that even the hair of the headacts as a sensitive vibration-medium for conveying currents ofphysical and vitalistic activity to and from the brain. And perhapsfrom the centers of intense vital surcharge hair springs as a sort ofannunciation or declaration, like a crest of life-assertion. Perhapsall these things, and perhaps others. 

But with the bursting awake of the four new poles of dynamicconsciousness and being, change takes place in everything, thefeatures now begin to take individual form, the limbs develop out ofthe soft round matrix of child-form, the body resolves itself intodistinctions. A strange creative change in being has taken place. Thechild before puberty is quite another thing from the child afterpuberty. Strange indeed is this new birth, this rising from the sea ofchildhood into a new being. It is a resurrection which we fear. 

And now, a new world, a new heaven and a new earth. Now newrelationships are formed, the old ones retire from their prominence. Now mother and father inevitably give way before masters andmistresses, brothers and sisters yield to friends. This is the periodof _Schwärmerei_, of young adoration and of real initial friendships. A child before puberty has playmates. After puberty he has friends andenemies. 

A whole new field of passional relationship. And the old bondsrelaxing, the old love retreating. The father and mother bonds nowrelax, though they never break. The family love wanes, though it neverdies. 

It is the hour of the stranger. Let the stranger now enter the soul. 

And it is the first hour of true individuality, the first hour ofgenuine, responsible solitariness. A child knows the abyss offorlornness. But an adolescent alone knows the strange pain of growinginto his own isolation of individuality. 

All this change is an agony and a bliss. It is a cataclysm and a newworld. It is our most serious hour, perhaps. And yet we cannot beresponsible for it. 

Now sex comes into active being. Until puberty, sex is submerged, nascent, incipient only. After puberty, it is a tremendous factor. 

What is sex, really? We can never say, satisfactorily. But we know somuch: we know that it is a dynamic polarity between human beings, anda circuit of force _always_ flowing. The psychoanalyst is right sofar. There can be no vivid relation between two adult individualswhich does not consist in a dynamic polarized flow of vitalistic forceor magnetism or electricity, call it what you will, between these twopeople. Yet is this dynamic flow inevitably sexual in nature?

This is the moot point for psychoanalysis. But let us look at sex, inits obvious manifestation. The _sexual_ relation between man and womanconsummates in the act of coition. Now what is the act of coition? Weknow its functional purpose of procreation. But, after all ourexperience and all our poetry and novels we know that the procreativepurpose of sex is, to the individual man and woman, just a side-show. To the individual, the act of coition is a great psychic experience, avital experience of tremendous importance. On this vital individualexperience the life and very being of the individual largely depends. 

But what is the experience? Untellable. Only, we know something. Weknow that in the act of coition the _blood_ of the individual man, acutely surcharged with intense vital electricity--we know no word, sosay "electricity, " by analogy--rises to a culmination, in a tremendousmagnetic urge towards the magnetic blood of the female. The whole ofthe living blood in the two individuals forms a field of intense, polarized magnetic attraction. So, the two poles must be brought intocontact. In the act of coition, the two seas of blood in the twoindividuals, rocking and surging towards contact, as near as possible, clash into a oneness. A great flash of interchange occurs, like anelectric spark when two currents meet or like lightning out of thedensely surcharged clouds. There is a lightning flash which passesthrough the blood of both individuals, there is a thunder of sensationwhich rolls in diminishing crashes down the nerves of each--and thenthe tension passes. 

The two individuals are separate again. But are they as they werebefore? Is the air the same after a thunder-storm as before? No. Theair is as it were new, fresh, tingling with newness. So is the bloodof man and woman after successful coition. After a false coition, likeprostitution, there is not newness but a certain disintegration. 

But after coition, the actual chemical constitution of the blood is sochanged, that usually sleep intervenes, to allow the time forchemical, biological readjustment through the whole system. 

So, the blood is changed and renewed, refreshed, almost recreated, like the atmosphere after thunder. Out of the newness of the livingblood pass the new strange waves which beat upon the great dynamiccenters of the nerves: primarily upon the hypogastric plexus and thesacral ganglion. From these centers rise new impulses, new vision, newbeing, rising like Aphrodite from the foam of the new tide of blood. And so individual life goes on. 

Perhaps, then, we will allow ourselves to say what, in psychicindividual reality, is the act of coition. It is the bringing togetherof the surcharged electric blood of the male with the polarizedelectric blood of the female, with the result of a tremendous flashinginterchange, which alters the constitution of the blood, and the veryquality of _being_, in both. 

And this, surely, is sex. But is this the whole of sex? That is thequestion. 

After coition, we say the blood is renewed. We say that from the new, finely sparkling blood new thrills pass into the great affectivecenters of the lower body, new thrills of feeling, of impulse, ofenergy. --And what about these new thrills?

Now, a new story. The new thrills are passed on to the great uppercenters of the dynamic body. The individual polarity now changes, within the individual system. The upper centers, cardiac plexus andcervical plexuses, thoracic ganglion and cervical ganglia now assumepositivity. These, the upper polarized centers, have now the positiverôle to play, the solar and the hypogastric plexuses, the lumbar andthe sacral ganglia, these have the submissive, negative rôle for thetime being. 

And what then? What now, that the upper centers are finely active inpositivity? Now it is a different story. Now there is new vision inthe eyes, new hearing in the ears, new voice in the throat and speechon the lips. Now the new song rises, the brain tingles to new thought, the heart craves for new activity. 

The heart craves for new activity. For new _collective_ activity. Thatis, for a new polarized connection with other beings, other men. 

Is this new craving for polarized communion with others, this cravingfor a new unison, is it sexual, like the original craving for thewoman? Not at all. The whole polarity is different. Now, the positivepoles are the poles of the breast and shoulders and throat, the polesof activity and full consciousness. Men, being themselves made newafter the act of coition, wish to make the world new. A new, passionate polarity springs up between men who are bent on the sameactivity, the polarity between man and woman sinks to passivity. It isnow daytime, and time to forget sex, time to be busy making a newworld. 

Is this new polarity, this new circuit of passion between comrades andco-workers, is this also sexual? It is a vivid circuit of polarizedpassion. Is it hence sex?

It is not. Because what are the poles of positive connection?--theupper, busy poles. What is the dynamic contact?--a unison in spirit, in understanding, and a pure commingling in one great _work_. Amingling of the individual passion into one great _purpose_. Now thisis also a grand consummation for men, this mingling of many with onegreat impassioned purpose. But is this sex? Knowing what sex is, canwe call this other also sex? We cannot. 

This meeting of many in one great passionate purpose is not sex, andshould never be confused with sex. It is a great motion in theopposite direction. And I am sure that the ultimate, greatest desirein men is this desire for great _purposive_ activity. When man loseshis deep sense of purposive, creative activity, he feels lost, and islost. When he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his _secret_ soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair. When he makes woman, or the woman and child the great center of lifeand of life-significance, he falls into the beginnings of despair. 

Man must bravely stand by his own soul, his own responsibility as thecreative vanguard of life. And he must also have the courage to gohome to his woman and become a perfect answer to her deep sexual call. But he must never confuse his two issues. Primarily and supremely manis _always_ the pioneer of life, adventuring onward into the unknown, alone with his own temerarious, dauntless soul. Woman for him existsonly in the twilight, by the camp fire, when day has departed. Eveningand the night are hers. 

The psychoanalysts, driving us back to the sexual consummation always, do us infinite damage. 

We have to break away, back to the great unison of manhood in somepassionate _purpose_. Now this is not like sex. Sex is alwaysindividual. A man has his own sex: nobody else's. And sexually he goesas a single individual; he can mingle only singly. So that to make sexa general affair is just a perversion and a lie. You can't get peopleand talk to them about their sex, as if it were a common interest. 

We have got to get back to the great purpose of manhood, a passionateunison in actively making a world. This is a real commingling of many. And in such a commingling we forfeit the individual. In thecommingling of sex we are alone with _one_ partner. It is anindividual affair, there is no superior or inferior. But in thecommingling of a passionate purpose, each individual sacredly abandonshis individual. In the living faith of his soul, he surrenders hisindividuality to the great urge which is upon him. He may have tosurrender his name, his fame, his fortune, his life, everything. Butonce a man, in the integrity of his own individual soul, _believes_, he surrenders his own individuality to his belief, and becomes one ofa united body. He knows what he does. He makes the surrenderhonorably, in agreement with his own soul's deepest desire. But hesurrenders, and remains responsible for the purity of his surrender. 

But what if he believes that his sexual consummation is his supremeconsummation? Then he serves the great purpose to which he pledgeshimself only as long as it pleases him. After which he turns it down, and goes back to sex. With sex as the one accepted prime motive, theworld drifts into despair and anarchy. 

Of all countries, America has most to fear from anarchy, even from onesingle moment's lapse into anarchy. The old nations are _organically_fixed into classes, but America not. You can shake Europe to atoms. And yet peasants fall back to peasantry, artisans to industrial labor, upper classes to their control--inevitably. But can you say the sameof America?

America must not lapse for one single moment into anarchy. It would bethe end of her. She must drift no nearer to anarchy. She is nearenough. 

Well, then, Americans must make a choice. It is a choice betweenbelief in man's creative, spontaneous soul, and man's automatic powerof production and reproduction. It is a choice between serving _man_, or woman. It is a choice between yielding the soul to a leader, leaders, or yielding only to the woman, wife, mistress, or mother. 

The great collective passion of belief which brings men together, comrades and co-workers, passionately obeying their soul-chosen leaderor leaders, this is not a sex passion. Not in any sense. Sex holdsany _two_ people together, but it tends to disintegrate society, unless it is subordinated to the great dominating male passion ofcollective _purpose_. 

But when the sex passion submits to the great purposive passion, thenyou have fulness. And no great purposive passion can endure longunless it is established upon the fulfillment in the vast majority ofindividuals of the true sexual passion. No great motive or ideal orsocial principle can endure for any length of time unless based uponthe sexual fulfillment of the vast majority of individuals concerned. 

It cuts both ways. Assert sex as the predominant fulfillment, and youget the collapse of living purpose in man. You get anarchy. Assert_purposiveness_ as the one supreme and pure activity of life, and youdrift into barren sterility, like our business life of to-day, and ourpolitical life. You become sterile, you make anarchy inevitable. Andso there you are. You have got to base your great purposive activityupon the intense sexual fulfillment of all your individuals. That washow Egypt endured. But you have got to keep your sexual fulfillmenteven then subordinate, just subordinate to the great passion ofpurpose: subordinate by a hair's breadth only: but still, by thathair's breadth, subordinate. 

Perhaps we can see now a little better--to go back to the child--whereFreud is wrong in attributing a sexual motive to all human activity. It is obvious there is no real sexual motive in a child, for example. The great sexual centers are not even awake. True, even in a child ofthree, rudimentary sex throws strange shadows on the wall, in itsapproach from the distance. But these are only an uneasy intrusionfrom the as-yet-uncreated, unready biological centers. The greatsexual centers of the hypogastric plexus, and the immensely powerfulsacral ganglion are slowly prepared, developed in a kind of prenatalgestation during childhood before puberty. But even an unborn childkicks in the womb. So do the great sex-centers give occasional blindkicks in a child. It is part of the phenomenon of childhood. But wemust be most careful not to charge these rather unpleasant apparitionsor phenomena against the individual boy or girl. We must be _very_careful not to drag the matter into mental consciousness. Shoo itaway. Reprimand it with a pah! and a faugh! and a bit of contempt. Butdo not get into any heat or any fear. Do not startle a passionalattention. Drive the whole thing away like the shadow it is, and be_very_ careful not to drive it into the consciousness. Be very carefulto plant no seed of burning shame or horror. Throw over it merely thecold water of contemptuous indifference, dismissal. 

After puberty, a child may as well be told the simple and necessaryfacts of sex. As things stand, the parent may as well do it. Butbriefly, coldly, and with as cold a dismissal as possible. --"Lookhere, you're not a child any more; you know it, don't you? You'regoing to be a man. And you know what that means. It means you're goingto marry a woman later on, and get children. You know it, and I knowit. But in the meantime, leave yourself alone. I know you'll have alot of bother with yourself, and your feelings. I know what ishappening to you. And I know you get excited about it. But youneedn't. Other men have all gone through it. So don't you go creepingoff by yourself and doing things on the sly. It won't do you anygood. --I know what you'll do, because we've all been through it. Iknow the thing will keep coming on you at night. But remember that Iknow. Remember. And remember that I want you to leave yourself alone. I know what it is, I tell you. I've been through it all myself. You'vegot to go through these years, before you find a woman you want tomarry, and whom you can marry. I went through them myself, and gotmyself worked up a good deal more than was good for me. --Try tocontain yourself. Always try to contain yourself, and be a man. That'sthe only thing. Always try and be manly, and quiet in yourself. Remember I know what it is. I've been the same, in the same state thatyou are in. And probably I've behaved more foolishly and perniciouslythan ever you will. So come to me if anything _really_ bothers you. And don't feel sly and secret. I do know just what you've got and whatyou haven't. I've been as bad and perhaps worse than you. And the onlything I want of you is to be manly. Try and be manly, and quiet inyourself. "

That is about as much as a father can say to a boy, at puberty. Youhave to be _very_ careful what you do: especially if you are a parent. To translate sex into mental ideas is vile, to make a scientific factof it is death. 

As a matter of fact there should be some sort of initiation into trueadult consciousness. Boys should be taken away from their mothers andsisters as much as possible at adolescence. They should be given intosome real manly charge. And there should be some actual initiationinto sex life. Perhaps like the savages, who make the boy die again, symbolically, and pull him forth through some narrow aperture, to beborn again, and make him suffer and endure terrible hardships, to makea great dynamic effect on the consciousness, a terrible dynamic senseof change in the very being. In short, a long, violent initiation, from which the lad emerges emaciated, but cut off forever fromchildhood, entered into the serious, responsible pale of manhood. Andwith his whole consciousness convulsed by a great change, as hisdynamic psyche actually is convulsed. --And something in the same way, to initiate girls into womanhood. 

There should be the intense dynamic reaction: the physical sufferingand the physical realization sinking deep into the soul, changing thesoul for ever. Sex should come upon us as a terrible thing ofsuffering and privilege and mystery: a mysterious metamorphosis comeupon us, and a new terrible power given us, and a new responsibility. Telling?--What's the good of telling?--The mystery, the terror, andthe tremendous power of sex should never be explained away. The massof mankind should _never_ be acquainted with the scientific biologicalfacts of sex: _never_. The mystery must remain in its dark secrecy, and its dark, powerful dynamism. The reality of sex lies in the greatdynamic convulsions in the soul. And as such it should be realized, agreat creative-convulsive seizure upon the soul. --To make it a matterof test-tube mixtures, chemical demonstrations and trashy lock-and-keysymbols is just blasting. Even more sickening is the line: "You see, dear, one day you'll love a man as I love Daddy, more than anythingelse in the _whole_ world. And then, dear, I hope you'll marry him. Because if you do you'll be happy, and I want you to be happy, mylove. And so I hope you'll marry the man you really love (kisses thechild). --And then, darling, there will come a lot of things you knownothing about now. You'll want to have a dear little baby, won't you, darling? Your own dear little baby. And your husband's as well. Because it'll be his, too. You know that, don't you, dear? It will beborn from both of you. And you don't know how, do you? Well, it willcome from right inside you, dear, out of your own inside. You cameout of mother's inside, etc. , etc. "

But I suppose there's really nothing else to be done, given the worldand society as we've got them now. The mother is doing her best. 

But it is all wrong. It is wrong to make sex appear as if it were partof the dear-darling-love smarm: the spiritual love. It is even worseto take the scientific test-tube line. It all kills the greateffective dynamism of life, and substitutes the mere ash of mentalideas and tricks. 

The scientific fact of sex is no more sex than a skeleton is a man. Yet you'd think twice before you stock a skeleton in front of a ladand said, "You see, my boy, this is what you are when you come to knowyourself. "--And the ideal, lovey-dovey "explanation" of sex assomething wonderful and extra lovey-dovey, a bill-and-coo process ofobtaining a sweet little baby--or else "God made us so that we must dothis, to bring another dear little baby to life"--well, it just makesone sick. It is disastrous to the deep sexual life. But perhaps thatis what we want. 

When humanity comes to its senses it will realize what a fearful Sodomapple our understanding is. What terrible mouths and stomachs full ofbitter ash we've all got. And then we shall take away "knowledge" and"understanding, " and lock them up along with the rest of poisons, tobe administered in small doses only by competent people. 

We have almost poisoned the mass of humanity to death with_understanding_. The period of actual death and race-extermination isnot far off. We could have produced the same barrenness and frenzy ofnothingness in people, perhaps, by dinning it into them that every manis just a charnel-house skeleton of unclean bones. Our "understanding, "our science and idealism have produced in people the same strange frenzyof self-repulsion as if they saw their own skulls each time they lookedin the mirror. A man is a thing of scientific cause-and-effect andbiological process, draped in an ideal, is he? No wonder he sees theskeleton grinning through the flesh. 

Our leaders have not loved men: they have loved ideas, and have beenwilling to sacrifice passionate men on the altars of theblood-drinking, ever-ash-thirsty ideal. Has President Wilson, or KarlMarx, or Bernard Shaw ever felt one hot blood-pulse of love for theworking man, the half-conscious, deluded working man? Never. Each ofthese leaders has wanted to abstract him away from his own blood andbeing, into some foul Methuselah or abstraction of a man. 

And me? There is no danger of the working man ever reading my books, so I shan't hurt him that way. But oh, I would like to save him alive, in his living, spontaneous, original being. I can't help it. It is mypassionate instinct. 

I would like him to give me back the responsibility for generalaffairs, a responsibility which he can't acquit, and which saps hislife. I would like him to give me back the responsibility for thefuture. I would like him to give me back the responsibility forthought, for direction. I wish we could take hope and belief together. I would undertake my share of the responsibility, if he gave me hisbelief. 

I would like him to give me back books and newspapers and theories. And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, andrich, original spontaneity and fullness of life. 

CHAPTER X

PARENT LOVE

In the serious hour of puberty, the individual passes into his secondphase of accomplishment. But there cannot be a perfect transitionunless all the activity is in full play in all the first four poles ofthe psyche. Childhood is a chrysalis from which each must extricatehimself. And the struggling youth or maid cannot emerge unless by theenergy of all powers; he can never emerge if the whole mass of theworld and the tradition of love hold him back. 

Now we come to the greater peril of our particular form of idealism. It is the idealism of love and of the spirit: the idealism ofyearning, outgoing love, of pure sympathetic communion and"understanding. " And this idealism recognizes as the highest earthlylove, the love of mother and child. 

And what does this mean? It means, for every delicately brought upchild, indeed for all the children who matter, a steady andpersistent pressure upon the upper sympathetic centers, and a steadyand persistent starving of the lower centers, particularly the greatvoluntary center of the lower body. The center of sensual, manlyindependence, of exultation in the sturdy, defiant self, willfulnessand masterfulness and pride, this center is steadily suppressed. Thewarm, swift, sensual self is steadily and persistently denied, damped, weakened, throughout all the period of childhood. And by sensual we donot mean greedy or ugly, we mean the deeper, more impulsive recklessnature. Life must be always refined and superior. Love and happinessmust be the watchword. The willful, critical element of the spiritualmode is never absent, the silent, if forbearing disapproval anddistaste is always ready. Vile bullying forbearance. 

With what result? The center of upper sympathy is abnormally, inflamedlyexcited; and the centers of will are so deranged that they operate injerks and spasms. The true polarity of the sympathetic-voluntary systemwithin the child is so disturbed as to be almost deranged. Then we havean exaggerated sensitiveness alternating with a sort of helpless fury:and we have delicate frail children with nerves or with strange whims. And we have the strange cold obstinacy of the spiritual will, cold ashell, fixed in a child. 

Then one parent, usually the mother, is the object of blind devotion, whilst the other parent, usually the father, is an object ofresistance. The child is taught, however, that both parents should beloved, and only loved: and that love, gentleness, pity, charity, andall "higher" emotions, these alone are genuine feelings, all the restare false, to be rejected. 

With what result? The upper centers are developed to a degree ofunnatural acuteness and reaction--or again they fall numbed andbarren. And then between parents and children a painfully falserelation grows up: a relation as of two adults, either of two purelovers, or of two love-appearing people who are really trying to bullyone another. Instead of leaving the child with its own limited butdeep and incomprehensible feelings, the parent, hopelessly involved inthe sympathetic mode of selfless love, and spiritual love-will, stimulates the child into a consciousness which does not belong to it, on the one plane, and robs it of its own spontaneous consciousness andfreedom on the other plane. 

And this is the fatality. Long before puberty, by an exaggeration andan intensity of spiritual love from the parents, the second centersof sympathy are artificially aroused into response. And there is anirreparable disaster. Instead of seeing as a child should see, througha glass, darkly, the child now opens premature eyes of sympatheticcognition. Instead of knowing in part, as it should know, it begins, at a fearfully small age, to know in full. The cervical plexuses andthe cervical ganglia, which should only begin to awake afteradolescence, these centers of the higher dynamic sympathy andcognition, are both artificially stimulated, by the adult personallove-emotion and love-will into response, in a quite young child, sometimes even in an infant. This is a holy obscenity. 

Our particular mode of idealism causes us to suppress as far aspossible the sensual centers, to make them negative. The whole of theactivity is concentrated, as far as possible, in the upper orspiritual centers, the centers of the breast and throat, which we willcall the centers of dynamic cognition, in contrast to the centers ofsensual comprehension below the diaphragm. 

And then a child arrives at puberty, with its upper nature alreadyroused into precocious action. The child nowadays is almost invariablyprecocious in "understanding. " In the north, spiritually precocious, so that by the time it arrives at adolescence it already hasexperienced the extended sympathetic reactions which should have lainutterly dark. And it has experienced these extended reactions withwhom? With the parent or parents. 

Which is man devouring his own offspring. For to the parents belongs, once and for all, the dynamic reaction on the first plane ofconsciousness only, the reaction and relationship at the first fourpoles of dynamic consciousness. When the second, the farther plane ofconsciousness rouses into action, the relationship is with strangers. All human instinct and all ethnology will prove this to us. Whatsex-instinct there is in a child is always _adverse_ to the parents. 

But also, the parents are all too quick. They all proceed to swallowtheir children before the children can get out of their clutches. Andeven if parents do send away their children at the age of puberty--toschool or elsewhere--it is not much good. The mischief has been donebefore. For the first twelve years the parents and the whole communityforcibly insist on the child's living from the upper centers only, andparticularly the upper sympathetic centers, without the balance of thewarm, deep sensual self. Parents and community alike insist onrousing an adult sympathetic response, and a mental answer in thechild-schools, Sunday-schools, books, home-influence--all works inthis one pernicious way. But it is the home, the parents, that workmost effectively and intensely. There is the most intimate mesh oflove, love-bullying, and "understanding" in which a child isentangled. 

So that a child arrives at the age of puberty already stripped of itschildhood's darkness, bound, and delivered over. Instead of waking nowto a whole new field of consciousness, a whole vast and wonderful newdynamic impulse towards new connections, it finds itself fatallybound. Puberty accomplishes itself. The hour of sex strikes. But thereis your child, bound, helpless. You have already aroused in it thedynamic response to your own insatiable love-will. You have alreadyestablished between your child and yourself the dynamic relation inthe further plane of consciousness. You have got your child as sure asif you had woven its flesh again with your own. You have done what itis vicious for any parent to do: you have established between yourchild and yourself the bond of adult love: the love of man for man, woman for woman, or man for woman. All your tenderness, yourcherishing will not excuse you. It only deepens your guilt. You haveestablished between your child and yourself the bond of furthersympathy. I do not speak of sex. I speak of pure sympathy, sacredlove. The parents establish between themselves and their child thebond of the higher love, the further spiritual love, the sympathy ofthe adult soul. 

And this is fatal. It is a sort of incest. It is a dynamic _spiritual_incest, more dangerous than sensual incest, because it is moreintangible and less instinctively repugnant. But let psychoanalysisfall into what discredit it may, it has done us this great service ofproving to us that the intense upper sympathy, indeed the dynamicrelation either of love-will or love-sympathy, between parent andchild, upon the upper plane, inevitably involves us in a conclusion ofincest. 

For although it is our aim to establish a purely spiritual dynamicrelation on the upper plane only, yet, because of the inevitablepolarity of the human psychic system, we shall arouse at the same timea dynamic sensual activity on the lower plane, the deeper sensualplane. We may be as pure as angels, and yet, being human, this willand must inevitably happen. When Mrs. Ruskin said that John Ruskinshould have married his mother she spoke the truth. He _was_ marriedto his mother. For in spite of all our intention, all our creed, allour purity, all our desire and all our will, once we arouse thedynamic relation in the upper, higher plane of love, we inevitablyevoke a dynamic consciousness on the lower, deeper plane of sensuallove. And then what?

Of course, parents can reply that their love, however intense, ispure, and has absolutely no sensual element. Maybe--and maybe not. Butadmit that it is so. It does not help. The intense excitement of theupper centers of sympathy willy-nilly arouses the lower centers. Itarouses them to activity, even if it denies them any expression or anypolarized connection. Our psyche is so framed that activity aroused onone plane provokes activity on the corresponding plane, automatically. So the intense _pure_ love-relation between parent and childinevitably arouses the lower centers in the child, the centers of sex. Now the deeper sensual centers, once aroused, should find responsefrom the sensual body of some other, some friend or lover. Theresponse is impossible between parent and child. Myself, I believethat biologically there is radical sex-aversion between parent andchild, at the deeper sensual centers. The sensual circuit _cannot_adjust itself spontaneously between the two. 

So what have you? Child and parent intensely linked in adultlove-sympathy and love-will, on the upper plane, and in the child, thedeeper sensual centers aroused, but finding no correspondent, noobjective, no polarized connection with another person. There theyare, the powerful centers of sex, acting spasmodically, withoutbalance. They must be polarized somehow. So they are polarized to theactive upper centers within the child, and you get an introvert. 

This is how introversion begins. The lower sexual centers are aroused. They find no sympathy, no connection, no response from outside, noexpression. They are dynamically polarized by the upper centers withinthe individual. That is, the whole of the sexual or deeper sensualflow goes on upwards in the individual, to his own upper, from his ownlower centers. The upper centers hold the lower in positive polarity. The flow goes on upwards. There _must_ be some reaction. And so youget, first and foremost, self-consciousness, an intense consciousnessin the upper self of the lower self. This is the first disaster. Thenyou get the upper body exploiting the lower body. You get the handsexploiting the sensual body, in feeling, fingering, and inmasturbation. You get a pornographic longing with regard to the self. You get the obscene post cards which most youths possess. You get theabsolute lust for dirty stories, which so many men have. And you getvarious mild sex perversions, such as masturbation, and so on. 

What does all this mean? It means that the activity of the lowerpsyche and lower body is polarized by the upper body. Eyes and earswant to gather sexual activity and knowledge. The mind becomes full ofsex: and always, in an introvert, of his _own_ sex. If we examine theapparent extroverts, like the flaunting Italian, we shall see the samething. It is his own sex which obsesses him. 

And to-day what have we but this? Almost inevitably we find in a childnow an intense, precocious, secret sexual preoccupation. The upperself is rabidly engaged in exploiting the lower self. A child and itsown roused, inflamed sex, its own shame and masturbation, its owncruel, secret sexual excitement and sex _curiosity_, this is thegreatest tragedy of our day. The child does not so much want to _act_as to _know_. The thought of actual sex connection is usuallyrepulsive. There is an aversion from the normal coition act. But thecraving to feel, to see, to taste, to _know_, mentally in the head, this is insatiable. Anything, so that the sensation and experienceshall come through the _upper_ channels. This is the secret of ourintroversion and our perversion to-day. Anything rather thanspontaneous direct action from the sensual self. Anything rather thanthe merely normal passion. Introduce any trick, any idea, any mentalelement you can into sex, but make it an affair of the upperconsciousness, the mind and eyes and mouth and fingers. This is ourvice, our dirt, our disease. 

And the adult, and the ideal are to blame. But the tragedy of ourchildren, in their inflamed, solitary sexual excitement, distresses usbeyond any blame. 

It is time to drop the word love, and more than time to drop the idealof love. Every frenzied individual is told to find fulfillment inlove. So he tries. Whereas, there is no fulfillment in love. Half ofour fulfillment comes _through_ love, through strong, sensual love. But the central fulfillment, for a man, is that he possess his ownsoul in strength within him, deep and alone. The deep, rich aloneness, reached and perfected through love. And the passing beyond any further_quest_ of love. 

This central fullness of self-possession is our goal, if goal there beany. But there are two great _ways_ of fulfillment. The first, the wayof fulfillment through complete love, complete, passionate, deep love. And the second, the greater, the fulfillment through theaccomplishment of religious purpose, the soul's earnest purpose. Wework the love way falsely, from the upper self, and work it to death. The second way, of active unison in strong purpose, and in faith, thiswe only sneer at. 

But to return to the child and the parent. The coming to thefulfillment of single aloneness, through love, is made impossible forus by the ideal, the monomania of more love. At the very _âgedangereuse_, when a woman should be accomplishing her own fulfillmentinto maturity and rich quiescence, she turns rabidly to seek a newlover. At the very crucial time when she should be coming to a stateof pure equilibrium and rest with her husband, she turns rabidlyagainst rest or peace or equilibrium or husband in any shape or form, and demands more love, more love, a new sort of lover, one who will"understand" her. And as often as not she turns to her son. 

It is true, a woman reaches her goal of fulfillment through feeling. But through being "understood" she reaches nowhere, unless the loverunderstands what a vice it is for a woman to get herself and her sexinto her head. A woman reaches her fulfillment through love, deepsensual love, and exquisite sensitive communion. But once she reachesthe point of fulfillment, she should not break off to ask for moreexcitements. She should take the beauty of maturity and peace andquiet faithfulness upon her. 

This she won't do, however, unless the man, her husband, goes onbeyond her. When a man approaches the beginning of maturity and thefulfillment of his individual self, about the age of thirty-five, thenis not his time to come to rest. On the contrary. Deeply fulfilledthrough marriage, and at one with his own soul, he must now undertakethe responsibility for the next step into the future. He must now givehimself perfectly to some further purpose, some passionate purposiveactivity. Till a man makes the great resolution of aloneness andsingleness of being, till he takes upon himself the silence andcentral appeasedness of maturity; and _then, after this_, assumes asacred responsibility for the next purposive step into the future, there is no rest. The great resolution of aloneness and appeasedness, and the further deep assumption of responsibility in purpose--this isnecessary to every parent, every father, every husband, at a certainpoint. If the resolution is never made, the responsibility neverembraced, then the love-craving will run on into frenzy, and lay wasteto the family. In the woman particularly the love-craving will run onto frenzy and disaster. 

Seeking, seeking the fulfillment in the deep passional self; diseasedwith self-consciousness and sex in the head, foiled by the very lovingweakness of the husband who has not the courage to withdraw into hisown stillness and singleness, and put the wife under the spell of hisfulfilled decision; the unhappy woman beats about for her insatiablesatisfaction, seeking whom she may devour. And usually, she turns toher child. Here she provokes what she wants. Here, in her own son whobelongs to her, she seems to find the last perfect response for whichshe is craving. He is a medium to her, she provokes from him her ownanswer. So she throws herself into a last great love for her son, afinal and fatal devotion, that which would have been the richness andstrength of her husband and is poison to her boy. The husband, irresolute, never accepting his own higher responsibility, bows andaccepts. And the fatal round of introversion and "complex" starts oncemore. If man will never accept his own ultimate being, his finalaloneness, and his last responsibility for life, then he must expectwoman to dash from disaster to disaster, rootless and uncontrolled. 

"_On revient toujours à son premier amour. _" It sounds like a cynicismto-day. As if we really meant: "_On ne revient jamais à son premieramour. _" But as a matter of fact, a man never leaves his first love, once the love is established. He may leave his first attempt at love. Once a man establishes a full dynamic communication at the deeper andthe higher centers, with a woman, this can never be broken. But sex inthe head breaks down, and half circuits break down. Once the fullcircuit is established, however, this can never break down. 

Nowadays, alas, we start off self-conscious, with sex in the head. Wefind a woman who is the same. We marry because we are "pals. " The sexis a rather nasty fiasco. We keep up a pretense of "pals"--and nicelove. Sex spins wilder in the head than ever. There is either afamily of children whom the dissatisfied parents can devote themselvesto, thereby perverting the miserable little creatures: or else thereis a divorce. And at the great dynamic centers nothing has happened atall. Blank nothing. There has been no vital interchange at all in thewhole of this beautiful marriage affair. 

Establish between yourself and another individual a dynamic connectionat only _two_ of the four further poles, and you will have the devilof a job to break the connection. Especially if it be the firstconnection you have made. Especially if the other individual be thefirst in the field. 

This is the case of the parents. Parents are first in the field of thechild's further consciousness. They are criminal trespassers in thatfield. But that makes no matter. They are first in the field. Theyestablish a dynamic connection between the two upper centers, thecenters of the throat, the centers of the higher dynamic sympathy andcognition. They establish this circuit. And break it if you can. Veryoften not even death can break it. 

And as we see, the establishment of the upper love-and-cognitioncircuit inevitably provokes the lower sex-sensual centers into action, even though there be no correspondence on the sensual plane betweenthe two individuals concerned. Then see what happens. If you want tosee the real desirable wife-spirit, look at a mother with her boy ofeighteen. How she serves him, how she stimulates him, how her truefemale self is his, is wife-submissive to him as never, never it couldbe to a husband. This is the quiescent, flowering love of a maturewoman. It is the very flower of a woman's love: sexually askingnothing, asking nothing of the beloved, save that he shall be himself, and that for his living he shall accept the gift of her love. This isthe perfect flower of married love, which a husband should put in hiscap as he goes forward into the future in his supreme activity. Forthe husband, it is a great pledge, and a blossom. For the son also itseems wonderful. The woman now feels for the first time as a true wifemight feel. And her feeling is towards her son. 

Or, instead of mother and son, read father and daughter. 

And then what? The son gets on swimmingly for a time, till he is facedwith the actual fact of sex necessity. He gleefully inherits hisadolescence and the world at large, without an obstacle in his way, mother-supported, mother-loved. Everything comes to him in glamour, he feels he sees wondrous much, understands a whole heaven, mother-stimulated. Think of the power which a mature woman thusinfuses into her boy. He flares up like a flame in oxygen. No wonderthey say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sadfates. 

And then?--and then, with this glamorous youth? What is he actually todo with his sensual, sexual self? Bury it? Or make an effort with astranger? For he is taught, even by his mother, that his manhood mustnot forego sex. Yet he is linked up in ideal love already, the best hewill ever know. 

No woman will give to a stranger that which she gives to her son, herfather or her brother: that beautiful and glamorous submission whichis truly the wife-submission. To a stranger, a husband, a womaninsists on being queen, goddess, mistress, the positive, the adored, the first and foremost and the one and only. This she will not askfrom her near blood-kin. Of her blood-kin, there is always one shewill love devotedly. 

And so, the charming young girl who adores her father, or one of herbrothers, is sought in marriage by the attractive young man who loveshis mother devotedly. And a pretty business the marriage is. We can'tthink of it. Of course they may be good pals. It's the only thingleft. 

And there we are. The game is spoilt before it is begun. Within thecircle of the family, owing to our creed of insatiable love, intenseadult sympathies are provoked in quite young children. In Italy, theItalian stimulates adult sex-consciousness and sex-sympathy in hischild, almost deliberately. But with us, it is usually spiritualsympathy and spiritual criticism. The adult experiences are provoked, the adult devotional sympathies are linked up, prematurely, as far asthe child is concerned. We have the heart-wringing spectacle ofintense parent-child love, a love intense as the love of man andwoman, but not sexual; or else the great brother-sister devotion. Andthus, the great love-experience which should lie in the future isforestalled. Within the family, the love-bond forms quickly, withoutthe shocks and ruptures inevitable between strangers. And so, it iseasiest, intensest--and seems the best. It seems the highest. You willnot easily get a man to believe that his carnal love for the woman hehas made his wife is as high a love as that he felt for his mother orsister. 

The cream is licked off from life before the boy or the girl istwenty. Afterwards--repetition, disillusion, and barrenness. 

And the cause?--always the same. That parents will not make the greatresolution to come to rest within themselves, to possess their ownsouls in quiet and fullness. The man has not the courage to withdrawat last into his own soul's stillness and aloneness, and _then_, passionately and faithfully, to strive for the living future. Thewoman has not the courage to give up her hopeless insistence on loveand her endless demand for love, demand of being loved. She has notthe greatness of soul to relinquish her own self-assertion, andbelieve in the man who believes in himself and in his own soul'sefforts:--if there _are_ any such men nowadays, which is verydoubtful. 

Alas, alas, the future! Your son, who has tasted the real beauty ofwife-response in his mother or sister. Your daughter, who adores herbrother, and who marries some woman's son. They are so charming tolook at, such a lovely couple. And at first it is all such a goodgame, such good sport. Then each one begins to fret for the beauty ofthe lost, non-sexual, partial relationship. The sexual part ofmarriage has proved so--so empty. While that other loveliestthing--the poignant touch of devotion felt for mother or father orbrother--why, this is missing altogether. The best is missing. Therest isn't worth much. Ah well, such is life. Settle down to it, andbring up the children carefully to more of the same. --Thefuture!--You've had all your good days by the time you're twenty. 

And, I ask you, what good will psychoanalysis do you in this state ofaffairs? Introduce an extra sex-motive to excite you for a bit andmake you feel how thrillingly immoral things really are. And then--itall goes flat again. Father complex, mother complex, incest dreams:pah, when we've had the little excitement out of them we shall forgetthem as we have forgotten so many other catch-words. And we shall bejust where we were before: unless we are worse, with _more_ sex in thehead, and more introversion, only more brazen. 

CHAPTER XI

THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

Here is a very vicious circle. And how to get out of it? In the firstplace, we have to break the love-ideal, once and for all. Love, as wesee, is not the only dynamic. Taking love in its greatest sense, andmaking it embrace every form of sympathy, every flow from the greatsympathetic centers of the human body, still it is not the whole ofthe dynamic flow, it is only the one-half. There is always the othervoluntary flow to reckon with, the intense motion of independence andsingleness of self, the pride of isolation, and the profoundfulfillment through power. 

The very first thing of all to be recognized is the danger ofidealism. It is the one besetting sin of the human race. It means thefall into automatism, mechanism, and nullity. 

We know that life issues spontaneously at the great nodes of thepsyche, the great nerve-centers. At first these are four only: then, after puberty, they become eight: later there may still be anextension of the dynamic consciousness, a further polarization. Buteight is enough at the moment. 

First at four, and then at eight dynamic centers of the human body, the human nervous system, life starts spontaneously into being. Thesoul bursts day by day into fresh impulses, fresh desire, freshpurpose, at these our polar centers. And from these dynamic generativecenters issue the vital currents which put us into connection with ourobject. We have really no will and no choice, in the first place. Itis our soul which acts within us, day by day unfolding us according toour own nature. 

From the objective circuits and from the subjective circuits whichestablish and fulfill themselves at the first four centers ofconsciousness we derive our first being, our child-being, and also ourfirst mind, our child-mind. By the objective circuits we mean thosecircuits which are established between the self and some externalobject: mother, father, sister, cat, dog, bird, or even tree or plant, or even further still, some particular place, some particularinanimate object, a knife or a chair or a cap or a doll or a woodenhorse. For we must insist that every object which really enterseffectively into our lives does so by direct connection. If I love mymother, it is because there is established between me and her adirect, powerful circuit of vital magnetism, call it what you will, but a direct flow of dynamic _vital_ interchange and intercourse. Iwill not call this vital flow a _force_, because it depends on theincomprehensible initiative and control of the individual soul orself. Force is that which is directed only from some universal will orlaw. Life is _always_ individual, and therefore never controlled byone law, one God. And therefore, since the living really sway theuniverse, even if unknowingly; therefore there is no one universallaw, even for the physical forces. Because we insist that even the sundepends, for its heartbeat, its respiration, its pivotal motion, onthe beating hearts of men and beast, on the dynamic of thesoul-impulse in individual creatures. It is from the aggregateheartbeat of living individuals, of we know not how many or what sortof worlds, that the sun rests stable. 

Which may be dismissed as metaphysics, although it is quite as validor even as demonstrable as Newton's Law of Gravitation, which lawstill remains a law, even if not quite so absolute as heretofore. 

But this is a digression. The argument is, that between an individualand any external object with which he has an affective connection, there exists a definite vital flow, as definite and concrete as theelectric current whose polarized circuit sets our tram-cars runningand our lamps shining, or our Marconi wires vibrating. Whether thisobject be human, or animal, or plant, or quite inanimate, there isstill a circuit. My dog, my canary has a polarized connection with me. Nay, the very cells in the ash-tree I loved as a child had a dynamicvibratory connection with the nuclei in my own centers of primaryconsciousness. And further still, the boots I have worn are sosaturated with my own magnetism, my own vital activity, that if anyoneelse wear them I feel it is a trespass, almost as if another man usedmy hand to knock away a fly. I doubt very much if a blood-hound, whenit takes a scent, _smells_, in our sense of the word. It receives atthe infinitely sensitive telegraphic center of the dog's nostrils thevital vibration which remains in the inanimate object from theindividual with whom the object was associated. I should like to knowif a dog would trace a pair of quite new shoes which had merely beendragged at the end of a string. That is, does he follow the smell ofthe leather itself, or the vibration track of the individual whosevitality is communicated to the leather?

So, there is a definite vibratory rapport between a man and hissurroundings, once he definitely gets into contact with thesesurroundings. Any particular locality, any house which has been livedin has a vibration, a transferred vitality of its own. This is eithersympathetic or antipathetic to the succeeding individual in varyingdegree. But certain it is that the inhabitants who live at the foot ofEtna will always have a certain pitch of life-vibration, antagonisticto the pitch of vibration even of a Palermitan, in some measure. Andold houses are saturated with human presence, at last to a degree ofindecency, unbearable. And tradition, in its most elemental sense, means the continuing of the same peculiar pitch of vital vibration. 

Such is the objective dynamic flow between the psychic poles of theindividual and the substance of the external object, animate orinanimate. The subjective dynamic flow is established between the fourprimary poles within the individual. Every dynamic connection beginsfrom one or the other of the sympathetic centers: is, or should be, almost immediately polarized from the corresponding voluntary center. Then a complete flow is set up, in one plane. But this always rousesthe activity on the other, corresponding plane, more or less intense. There is a whole field of consciousness established, with positivepolarity of the first plane, negative polarity of the second. Whichbeing so, a whole fourfold field of dynamic consciousness now workingwithin the individual, direct cognition takes place. The mind beginsto know, and to strive to know. 

The business of the mind is first and foremost the pure joy of knowingand comprehending the pure joy of consciousness. The second businessis to act as medium, as interpreter, as agent between the individualand his object. The mind should _not_ act as a director or controllerof the spontaneous centers. These the soul alone must control: thesoul being that forever unknowable reality which causes us to riseinto being. There is continual conflict between the soul, which is forever sending forth incalculable impulses, and the psyche, which isconservative, and wishes to persist in its old motions, and the mind, which wishes to have "freedom, " that is spasmodic, idea-drivencontrol. Mind, and conservative psyche, and the incalculable soul, these three are a trinity of powers in every human being. But there issomething even beyond these. It is the individual in his puresingleness, in his totality of consciousness, in his oneness of being:the Holy Ghost which is with us after our Pentecost, and which we maynot deny. When I say to myself: "I am wrong, " knowing with suddeninsight that I _am_ wrong, then this is the whole self speaking, theHoly Ghost. It is no piece of mental inference. It is not just thesoul sending forth a flash. It is my whole being speaking in onevoice, soul and mind and psyche transfigured into oneness. This voiceof my being I may _never_ deny. When at last, in all my storms, mywhole self speaks, then there is a pause. The soul collects itselfinto pure silence and isolation--perhaps after much pain. The mindsuspends its knowledge, and waits. The psyche becomes strangely still. And then, after the pause, there is fresh beginning, a new lifeadjustment. Conscience is the being's consciousness, when theindividual is conscious _in toto_, when he knows in full. It issomething which includes and which far surpasses mental consciousness. Every man must live as far as he can by his own soul's conscience. But not according to any ideal. To submit the conscience to a creed, or an idea, or a tradition, or even an impulse, is our ruin. 

To make the mind the absolute ruler is as good as making a Cook'stourist-interpreter a king and a god, because he can speak severallanguages, and make an Arab understand that an Englishman wants fishfor supper. And to make an ideal a ruling principle is about as stupidas if a bunch of travelers should never cease giving each other andtheir dragoman sixpence, because the dragoman's main idea of virtue isthe virtue of sixpence-giving. In the same way, we _know_ we cannotlive purely by impulse. Neither can we live solely by tradition. Wemust live by all three, ideal, impulse, and tradition, each in itshour. But the real guide is the pure conscience, the voice of the selfin its wholeness, the Holy Ghost. 

We have fallen now into the mistake of idealism. Man always falls intoone of the three mistakes. In China, it is tradition. And in the SouthSeas, it seems to have been impulse. Ours is idealism. Each of thethree modes is a true life-mode. But any one, alone or dominant, brings us to destruction. We must depend on the wholeness of ourbeing, ultimately only on that, which is our Holy Ghost within us. Whereas, in an ideal of love and benevolence, we have tried toautomatize ourselves into little love-engines always stoked with thesorrows or beauties of other people, so that we can get up steam ofcharity or righteous wrath. A great trick is to pour on the fire theoil of our indignation at somebody else's wickedness, and then, whenwe've got up steam like hell, back the engine and run bish! smash!against the belly of the offender. Because he said he didn't want tolove any more, we hate him for evermore, and try to run over him, every bit of him, with our love-tanks. And all the time we yell athim: "Will you deny love, you villain? Will you?" And by the time hefaintly squeaks, "I want to be loved! I want to be loved!" we have gotso used to running over him with our love-tanks that we don't feel ina hurry to leave off. 

 "_Sois mon frère, ou je te tue. _" "_Sois mon frère, ou je me tue. _"

There are the two parrot-threats of love, on which our lovingcenturies have run as on a pair of railway-lines. Excuse me if I wantto get out of the train. Excuse me if I can't get up any love-steamany more. My boilers are burst. 

We have made a mistake, laying down love like the permanent way of agreat emotional transport system. There we are, however, running onwheels on the lines of our love. And of course we have only twodirections, forwards and backwards. "Onward, Christian soldiers, towards the great terminus where bottles of sterilized milk for thebabies are delivered at the bedroom windows by noiseless aeroplaneseach morn, where the science of dentistry is so perfect that teeth areplanted in a man's mouth without his knowing it, where twilight sleepis so delicious that every woman longs for her next confinement, andwhere nobody ever has to do anything except turn a handle now and thenin a spirit of universal love--" That is the forward direction of theEnglish-speaking race. The Germans unwisely backed their engine. "Wehave a city of light. But instead of lying ahead it lies direct behindus. So reverse engines. Reverse engines, and away, away to our city, where the sterilized milk is delivered by noiseless aeroplanes, _atthe very precise minute when our great doctors of the Fatherland havediagnosed that it is good for you_: where the teeth are not only sopainlessly planted that they grow like living rock, but where theircomposition is such that the friction of eating stimulates the cellsof the jaw-bone and develops the _superman strength of will whichmakes us gods_: and where not only is twilight sleep serene, but intothe sleeper are inculcated the most useful and instructive dreams, calculated to perfect the character of the young citizen at thiscrucial period, and to enlighten permanently the mind of the happymother, with regard to her new duties towards her child and towardsour great Fatherland--"

Here you see we are, on the railway, with New Jerusalem ahead, and NewJerusalem away behind us. But of course it was very wrong of theGermans to reverse their engines, and cause one long collision allalong the line. Why should we go _their_ way to the New Jerusalem, when of course they might so easily have kept on going our way. Andnow there's wreckage all along the line! But clear the way is ourmotto--or make the Germans clear it. Because get on we will. 

Meanwhile we sit rather in the cold, waiting for the train to get astart. People keep on signaling with green lights and red lights. Andit's all very bewildering. 

As for me, I'm off. I'm damned if I'll be shunted along any more. AndI'm thrice damned if I'll go another yard towards that sterilized NewJerusalem, either forwards or backwards. New Jerusalem may rot, if itwaits for me. I'm not going. 

So good-by! There we leave humanity, encamped in an appalling messbeside the railway-smash of love, sitting down, however, and havingnot a bad time, some of 'em, feeding themselves fat on the plunder:others, further down the line, with mouths green from eating grass. But all grossly, stupidly, automatically gabbling about getting thelove-service running again, the trains booked for the New Jerusalemwell on the way once more. And occasionally a good engine gives ascreech of love, and something seems to be about to happen. Andsometimes there is enough steam to set the indignation-whistleswhistling. But never any more will there be enough love-steam to getthe system properly running. It is done. 

Good-by, then! You may have laid your line from one end to the otherof the infinite. But still there's plenty of hinterland. I'll go. Good-by. Ach, it will be so nice to be alone: not to hear you, not tosee you, not to smell you, humanity. I wish you no ill, but wisdom. Good-by!

To be alone with one's own soul. Not to be alone without my own soul, mind you. But to be alone with one's own soul! This, and the joy ofit, is the real goal of love. My own soul, and myself. Not my ego, myconceit of myself. But my very soul. To be at one in my own self. Notto be questing any more. Not to be yearning, seeking, hoping, desiring, aspiring. But to pause, and be alone. 

And to have one's own "gentle spouse" by one's side, of course, to digone in the ribs occasionally. Because really, being alone in peacemeans being two people together. Two people who can be silenttogether, and not conscious of one another outwardly. Me in mysilence, she in hers, and the balance, the equilibrium, the purecircuit between us. With occasional lapses of course: digs in the ribsif one gets too vague or self-sufficient. 

They say it is better to travel than to arrive. It's not been myexperience, at least. The journey of love has been rather alacerating, if well-worth-it, journey. But to come at last to a niceplace under the trees, with your "amiable spouse" who has at lastlearned to hold her tongue and not to bother about rights and wrongs:her own particularly. And then to pitch a camp, and cook your rabbit, and eat him: and to possess your own soul in silence, and to feel allthe clamor lapse. That is the best I know. 

I think it is terrible to be young. The ecstasies and agonies of love, the agonies and ecstasies of fear and doubt and drop-by-dropfulfillment, realization. The awful process of human relationships, love and marital relationships especially. Because we all make a very, very bad start to-day, with our idea of love in our head, and our sexin our head as well. All the fight till one is bled of one'sself-consciousness and sex-in-the-head. All the bitterness of theconflict with this devil of an amiable spouse, who has got herself sostuck in her own head. It is terrible to be young. --But one fightsone's way through it, till one is cleaned: the self-consciousness andsex-idea burned out of one, cauterized out bit by bit, and the selfwhole again, and at last free. 

The best thing I have known is the stillness of accomplished marriage, when one possesses one's own soul in silence, side by side with theamiable spouse, and has left off craving and raving and being onlyhalf one's self. But I must say, I know a great deal more about thecraving and raving and sore ribs, than about the accomplishment. And Imust confess that I feel this self-same "accomplishment" of thefulfilled being is only a preparation for new responsibilities ahead, new unison in effort and conflict, the effort to make, with other men, a little new way into the future, and to break through the hedge ofthe many. 

But--to your tents, my Israel. And to that precious baby you've leftslumbering there. What I meant to say was, in each phase of life youhave a great circuit of human relationship to establish and fulfill. In childhood, it is the circuit of family love, established at thefirst four consciousness centers, and gradually fulfilling itself, completing itself. At adolescence, the first circuit of family loveshould be completed, dynamically finished. And then, it falls intoquiescence. After puberty, family love should fall quiescent in achild. The love never breaks. It continues static and basic, the basisof the emotional psyche, the foundation of the self. It is like themoon when the moon at last subsides into her eternal orbit, round theearth. She travels in her orbit so inevitably that she forgets, andbecomes unaware. She only knits her brows over the earth's greateraberrations in space. 

The circuit of parental love, once fulfilled, is not done away with, but only established into silence. The child is then free to establishthe new connections, in which he surpasses his parents. And let usrepeat, parents should never try to establish adult relations, ofsympathy or interest or anything else, between themselves and theirchildren. The attempt to do so only deranges the deep primary circuitwhich is the dynamic basis of our living. It is a clambering upwardsonly by means of a broken foundation. Parents should remain parents, children children, for ever, and the great gulf preserved between thetwo. Honor thy father and thy mother should always be a leadingcommandment. But this can only take place when father and mother keeptheir true parental distances, dignity, reserve, and limitation. Assoon as father and mother try to become the _friends_ and _companions_of their children, they break the root of life, they rupture thedeepest dynamic circuit of living, they derange the whole flow of lifefor themselves and their children. 

For let us reiterate and reiterate: you cannot mingle and confuse thevarious modes of dynamic love. If you try, you produce horrors. Youcannot plant the heart below the diaphragm or put an ocular eye in thenavel. No more can you transfer parent love into friend love or adultlove. Parent love is established at the great primary centers, whereman is father and child, playmate and brother, but where he _cannot_be comrade or lover. Comrade and lover, this is the dynamic activityof the further centers, the second four centers. And these second fourcenters must be active in the parent, their intense circuitestablished even if not fulfilled, long before the child is born. Thecircuit of friendship, of personal companionship, of sexual love mustneeds be established before the child is begotten, or at least beforeit attains to adolescence. These circuits of the extended field arealready fully established in the parent before the centers ofcorrespondence in the child are even formed. When therefore the fourgreat centers of the extended consciousness arouses in a child, atadolescence, they must needs seek a strange complement, a foreignconjunction. 

Not only is this the case, but the actual dynamic impulse of the newlife which rouses at puberty is _alien_ to the original dynamic flow. The new wave-length by no means corresponds. The new vibration by nomeans harmonizes. Force the two together, and you cause a terriblefrictional excitement and jarring. It is this instinctive recognitionof the different dynamic vibrations from different centers, indifferent modes, and in different directions of positive and negative, which lies at the base of savage taboo. After puberty, members of onefamily should be taboo to one another. There should be the mostdefinite limits to the degree of contact. And mothers-in-law should betaboo to their daughters' husbands, and fathers-in-law to their sons'wives. We must again begin to learn the great laws of the firstdynamic life-circuits. These laws we now make havoc of, andconsequently we make havoc of our own soul, psyche, mind and health. 

This book is written primarily concerning the child's consciousness. It is not intended to enter the field of the post-pubertyconsciousness. But yet, the dynamic relation of the child isestablished so directly with the physical and psychical soul of theparent, that to get any inkling of dynamic child-consciousness we mustunderstand something of parent-consciousness. 

We assert that the parent-child love-mode excludes the possibility ofthe man-and-woman, or friend-and-friend love mode. We assert that thepolarity of the first four poles is inconsistent with the polarity ofthe second four poles. Nay, between the two great fields is a certaindynamic opposition, resistance, even antipathy. So that in the naturalcourse of life there is no possibility of confusing parent love andadult love. 

But we are mental creatures, and with the explosive and mechanisticaid of ideas we can pervert the whole psyche. Only, however, in adestructive degree, not in a positive or constructive. 

Let us return then. In the ordinary course of development, by the timethat the child is born and grown to puberty the whole dynamic soul ofthe mother is engaged: first, with the children, and second, on thefurther, higher plane, with the husband, and with her own friends. Sothat when the child reaches adolescence it must inevitably cast abroadfor connection. 

But now let us remember the actual state of affairs to-day, when thepoles are reversed between the sexes. The woman is now the responsibleparty, the law-giver, the culture-bearer. She is the conscious guideand director of the man. She bears his soul between her two hands. Andher sex is just a function or an instrument of power. This being so, the man is really the servant and the fount of emotion, love andotherwise. 

Which is all very well, while the fun lasts. But like all pervertedprocesses, it is exhaustive, and like the fun wears out. Leaving anexhaustion, and an irritation. Each looks on the other as a perverterof life. Almost invariably a married woman, as she passes the age ofthirty, conceives a dislike, or a contempt of her husband, or a pitywhich is too near contempt. Particularly if he be a good husband, atrue modern. And he, for his part, though just as jarred insidehimself, resents only the fact that he is not loved as he ought to be. 

Then starts a new game. The woman, even the most virtuous, looksabroad for new sympathy. She will have a new man-friend, if nothingmore. But as a rule she has got something more. She has got herchildren. 

A relation between mother and child to-day is practically _never_parental. It is personal--which means, it is critical and deliberate, and adult in provocation. The mother, in her new rôle of idealist andlife-manager never, practically for one single moment, gives her childthe unthinking response from the deep dynamic centers. No, she givesit what is good for it. She shoves milk in its mouth as the clockstrikes, she shoves it to sleep when the milk is swallowed, and sheshoves it ideally through baths and massage, promenades and practice, till the little organism develops like a mushroom to stand on its ownfeet. Then she continues her ideal shoving of it through all thestages of an ideal up-bringing, she loves it as a chemist loves histest-tubes in which he analyzes his salts. The poor little object ishis mother's ideal. But of her head she dictates his providentialdays, and by the force of her deliberate mentally-directed love-willshe pushes him up into boyhood. The poor little devil never knows onemoment when he is not encompassed by the beautiful, benevolent, idealistic, Botticelli-pure, and finally obscene love-will of themother. Never, never one mouthful does he drink of the milk of humankindness: always the sterilized milk of human benevolence. There is nomother's milk to-day, save in tigers' udders, and in the udders ofsea-whales. Our children drink a decoction of ideal love, at thebreast. 

Never for one moment, poor baby, the deep warm stream of love from themother's bowels to his bowels. Never for one moment the dark proudrecoil into rest, the soul's separation into deep, rich independence. Never this lovely rich forgetfulness, as a cat trots off and utterlyforgets her kittens, utterly, richly forgets them, till suddenly, click, the dynamic circuit reverses itself in her, and she remembers, and rages round in a frenzy, shouting for her young. 

Our miserable infants never know this joy and richness and pang of realmaternal warmth. Our wonderful mothers never let us out of their mindsfor one single moment. Not for a second do they allow us to escape fromtheir ideal benevolence. Not one single breath does a baby draw, freefrom the imposition of the pure, unselfish, Botticelli-holy, detestable_love-will_ of the mother. Always the _will_, the will, the love-will, the ideal will, directed from the ideal mind. Always this stone, thisscorpion of maternal nourishment. Always this infernal self-consciousMadonna starving our living guts and bullying us to death with her love. 

We have made the idea supplant both impulse and tradition. We have nospark of wholeness. And we live by an evil love-will. Alas, the greatspontaneous mode is abrogated. There is no lovely great flux of vitalsympathy, no rich rejoicing of pride into isolation and independence. There is no reverence for great traditions of parenthood. No, there issubstitute for everything--life-substitute--just as we havebutter-substitute, and meat-substitute, and sugar-substitute, andleather-substitute, and silk-substitute, so we have life-substitute. We have beastly benevolence, and foul good-will, and stinking charity, and poisonous ideals. 

The poor modern brat, shoved horribly into life by an effort of will, and shoved up towards manhood by every appliance that can be appliedto it, especially the appliance of the maternal will, it is really toopathetic to contemplate. The only thing that prevents us wringing ourhands is the remembrance that the little devil will grow up and begetother similar little devils of his own, to invent more aeroplanes andhospitals and germ-killers and food-substitutes and poison gases. Theproblem of the future is a question of the strongest poison-gas. Whichis certainly a very sure way out of our vicious circle. 

There is no way out of a vicious circle, of course, except breakingthe circle. And since the mother-child relationship is to-day theviciousest of circles, what are we to do? Just wait for the results ofthe poison-gas competition presumably. 

Oh, ideal humanity, how detestable and despicable you are! And how youdeserve your own poison-gases! How you deserve to perish in your ownstink. 

It is no use contemplating the development of the modern child, bornout of the mental-conscious love-will, born to be another unit ofself-conscious love-will: an ideal-born beastly little entity with adevil's own will of its own, benevolent, of course, and a Satan's ownseraphic self-consciousness, like a beastly Botticelli brat. 

Once we really consider this modern process of life and the love-will, we could throw the pen away, and spit, and say three cheers for theinventors of poison-gas. Is there not an American who is supposed tohave invented a breath of heaven whereby, drop one pop-cornful inHampstead, one in Brixton, one in East Ham, and one in Islington, andLondon is a Pompeii in five minutes! Or was the American onlybragging? Because anyhow, whom has he experimented on? I read it inthe newspaper, though. London a Pompeii in five minutes. Makes thegods look silly!

CHAPTER XII

LITANY OF EXHORTATIONS

I thought I'd better turn over a new leaf, and start a new chapter. The intention of the last chapter was to find a way out of the viciouscircle. And it ended in poison-gas. 

Yes, dear reader, so it did. But you've not silenced me yet, for allthat. 

We're in a nasty mess. We're in a vicious circle. And we're making acareful study of poison-gases. The secret of Greek fire was lost longago, when the world left off being wonderful and ideal. Now it iswonderful and ideal again, much wonderfuller and _much_ more ideal. Sowe ought to do something rare in the way of poison-gas. London aPompeii in five minutes! How to outdo Vesuvius!--title of a new bookby American authors. 

There is only one single other thing to do. And it's more difficultthan poison-gas. It is to leave off loving. It is to leave offbenevolenting and having a good will. It is to cease utterly. Justleave off. Oh, parents, see that your children get their dinners andclean sheets, but don't love them. Don't love them one single grain, and don't let anybody else love them. Give them their dinners andleave them alone. You've already loved them to perdition. Now leavethem alone, to find their own way out. 

Wives, don't love your husbands any more: even if they cry for it, thegreat babies! Sing: "I've had enough of that old sauce. " And leave offloving them or caring for them one single bit. Don't even hate them ordislike them. Don't have any stew with them at all. Just boil the eggsand fill the salt-cellars and be quite nice, and in your own soul, bealone and be still. Be alone, and be still, preserving all the humandecencies, and abandoning the indecency of desires and benevolenciesand devotions, those beastly poison-gas apples of the Sodom vine ofthe love-will. 

Wives, don't love your husbands nor your children nor anybody. Sitstill, and say Hush! And while you shake the duster out of thedrawing-room window, say to yourself--"In the sweetness of solitude. "And when your husband comes in and says he's afraid he's got a coldand is going to have double pneumonia, say quietly "surely not. " Andif he wants the ammoniated quinine, give it him if he can't get it forhimself. But don't let him drive you out of your solitude, yoursingleness within yourself. And if your little boy falls down thesteps and makes his mouth bleed, nurse and comfort him, but say toyourself, even while you tremble with the shock: "Alone. Alone. Bealone, my soul. " And if the servant smashes three electric-light bulbsin three minutes, say to her: "How very inconsiderate and careless ofyou!" But say to yourself: "Don't hear it, my soul. Don't take frightat the pop of a light-bulb. "

Husbands, don't love your wives any more. If they flirt with menyounger or older than yourselves, let your blood not stir. If you cango away, go away. But if you must stay and see her, then say to her, "I would rather you didn't flirt in my presence, Eleanora. " Then, whenshe goes red and loosens torrents of indignation, don't answer anymore. And when she floods into tears, say quietly in your own self, "My soul is my own"; and go away, be alone as much as possible. Andwhen she works herself up, and says she must have love or she willdie, then say: "Not my love, however. " And to all her threats, hertears, her entreaties, her reproaches, her cajolements, herwinsomenesses, answer nothing, but say to yourself: "Shall I beimplicated in this display of the love-will? Shall I be blasted bythis false lightning?" And though you tremble in every fiber, and feelsick, vomit-sick with the scene, still contain yourself, and say, "Mysoul is my own. It shall not be violated. " And learn, learn, learn theone and only lesson worth learning at last. Learn to walk in thesweetness of the possession of your own soul. And whether your wifeweeps as she takes off her amber beads at night, or whether yourneighbor in the train sits in your coat bottoms, or whether yoursuperior in the office makes supercilious remarks, or your inferior isfamiliar and impudent; or whether you read in the newspaper that LloydGeorge is performing another iniquity, or the Germans plotting anotherplot, say to yourself: "My soul is my own. My soul is with myself, andbeyond implication. " And wait, quietly, in possession of your ownsoul, till you meet another man who has made the choice, and kept it. Then you will know him by the look on his face: half a dangerous look, a look of Cain, and half a look of gathered beauty. Then you two willmake the nucleus of a new society--Ooray! Bis! Bis!!

But if you should never meet such a man: and if your wife shouldtorture you every day with her love-will: and even if she should forceherself into a consumption, like Catherine Linton in "WutheringHeights, " owing to her obstinate and determined love-will (which isquite another matter than love): and if you see the world inventingpoison-gas and falling into its poisoned grave: never give in, but bealone, and utterly alone with your own soul, in the stillness andsweet possession of your own soul. And don't even be angry. And_never_ be sad. Why should you? It's not your affair. 

But if your wife should accomplish for herself the sweetness of herown soul's possession, then gently, delicately let the new mode assertitself, the new mode of relation between you, with something ofspontaneous paradise in it, the apple of knowledge at last digested. But, my word, what belly-aches meanwhile. That apple is harder todigest than a lead gun-cartridge. 

CHAPTER XIII

COSMOLOGICAL

Well, dear reader, Chapter XII was short, and I hope you found itsweet. 

But remember, this is an essay on Child Consciousness, not a tract onSalvation. It isn't my fault that I am led at moments intoexhortation. 

Well, then, what about it? One fact now seems very clear--at any rateto me. We've got to pause. We haven't got to gird our loins with a newfrenzy and our larynxes with a new Glory Song. Not a bit of it. Beforeyou dash off to put salt on the tail of a new religion or of a newLeader of Men, dear reader, sit down quietly and pull yourselftogether. Say to yourself: "Come now, what is it all about?" Andyou'll realize, dear reader, that you're all in a fluster, inwardly. Then say to yourself: "Why am I in such a fluster?" And you'll seeyou've no reason at all to be so: except that it's rather exciting tobe in a fluster, and it may seem rather stale eggs to be in no flusterat all about anything. And yet, dear little reader, once you considerit quietly, it's _so_ much nicer _not_ to be in a fluster. It's somuch nicer not to feel one's deeper innards storming like the Bay ofBiscay. It is so much better to get up and say to the waters of one'sown troubled spirit: Peace, be still . .. ! And they will be still . .. Perhaps. 

And then one realizes that all the wild storms of anxiety and frenzywere only so much breaking of eggs. It isn't our business to liveanybody's life, or to die anybody's death, except our own. Nor to saveanybody's soul, nor to put anybody in the right; nor yet in the wrong, which is more the point to-day. But to be still, and to ignore thefalse fine frenzy of the seething world. To turn away, now, each oneinto the stillness and solitude of his own soul. And there to remainin the quiet with the Holy Ghost which is to each man his own truesoul. 

This is the way out of the vicious circle. Not to rush round on theperiphery, like a rabbit in a ring, trying to break through. But toretreat to the very center, and there to be filled with a new strangestability, polarized in unfathomable richness with the center ofcenters. We are so silly, trying to invent devices and machines forflying off from the surface of the earth. Instead of realizing thatfor us the deep satisfaction lies not in escaping, but in getting intothe perfect circuit of the earth's terrestrial magnetism. Not inbreaking away. What is the good of trying to break away from one'sown? What is the good of a tree desiring to fly like a bird in thesky, when a bird is rooted in the earth as surely as a tree is? Nay, the bird is only the topmost leaf of the tree, fluttering in the highair, but attached as close to the tree as any other leaf. Mr. Einstein's Theory of Relativity does not supersede the Newtonian Lawof Gravitation or of Inertia. It only says, "Beware! The Law ofInertia is not the simple ideal proposition you would like to make ofit. It is a vast complexity. Gravitation is not one elemental uncouthforce. It is a strange, infinitely complex, subtle aggregate offorces. " And yet, however much it may waggle, a stone does fall toearth if you drop it. 

We should like, vulgarly, to rejoice and say that the new Theory ofRelativity releases us from the old obligation of centrality. It doesno such thing. It only makes the old centrality much more strange, subtle, complex, and vital. It only robs us of the nice old idealsimplicity. Which ideal simplicity and logicalness has become such afish-bone stuck in our throats. 

The universe is once more in the mental melting-pot. And you can meltit down as long as you like, and mutter all the jargon andabracadabra, _aldeboronti fosco fornio_ of science that mentalmonkey-tricks can teach you, you won't get anything in the end but aformula and a lie. The atom? Why, the moment you discover the atom itwill explode under your nose. The moment you discover the ether itwill evaporate. The moment you get down to the real basis of anything, it will dissolve into a thousand problematic constituents. And themore problems you solve, the more will spring up with their fingers attheir nose, making a fool of you. 

There is only one clue to the universe. And that is the individualsoul within the individual being. That outer universe of suns andmoons and atoms is a secondary affair. It is the death-result ofliving individuals. There is a great polarity in life itself. Lifeitself is dual. And the duality is life and death. And death is notjust shadow or mystery. It is the negative reality of life. It is whatwe call Matter and Force, among other things. 

Life is individual, always was individual and always will be. Lifeconsists of living individuals, and always did so consist, in thebeginning of everything. There never was any universe, any cosmos, ofwhich the first reality was anything but living, incorporateindividuals. I don't say the individuals were exactly like you and me. And they were never wildly different. 

And therefore it is time for the idealist and the scientist--they areone and the same, really--to stop his monkey-jargon about the atom andthe origin of life and the mechanical clue to the universe. Thereisn't any such thing. I might as well say: "Then they took the cart, and rubbed it all over with grease. Then they sprayed it with whitewine, and spun round the right wheel five hundred revolutions to theminute and the left wheel, in the opposite direction, seven hundredand seventy-seven revolutions to the minute. Then a burning torch wasapplied to each axle. And lo, the footboard of the cart began toswell, and suddenly as the cart groaned and writhed, the horse wasborn, and lay panting between the shafts. " The whole scientific theoryof the universe is not worth such a tale: that the cart conceived andgave birth to the horse. 

I do not believe one-fifth of what science can tell me about the sun. I do not believe for one second that the moon is a dead worldspelched off from our globe. I do not believe that the stars cameflying off from the sun like drops of water when you spin your wethanky. I have believed it for twenty years, because it seemed soideally plausible. Now I don't accept any ideal plausibilities at all. I look at the moon and the stars, and I know I don't believe anythingthat I am told about them. Except that I like their names, Aldebaranand Cassiopeia, and so on. 

I have tried, and even brought myself to believe in a clue to theouter universe. And in the process I have swallowed such a lot ofjargon that I would rather listen now to a negro witch-doctor than toScience. There is nothing in the world that is true except empiricdiscoveries which work in actual appliances. I know that the sun ishot. But I won't be told that the sun is a ball of blazing gas whichspins round and fizzes. No, thank you. 

At length, for _my_ part, I know that life, and life only is the clueto the universe. And that the living individual is the clue to life. And that it always was so, and always will be so. 

When the living individual dies, then is the realm of deathestablished. Then you get Matter and Elements and atoms and forces andsun and moon and earth and stars and so forth. In short, the outeruniverse, the Cosmos. The Cosmos is nothing but the aggregate of thedead bodies and dead energies of bygone individuals. The dead bodiesdecompose as we know into earth, air, and water, heat and radiantenergy and free electricity and innumerable other scientific facts. The dead souls likewise decompose--or else they don't decompose. Butif they _do_ decompose, then it is not into any elements of Matter andphysical energy. They decompose into some psychic reality, and intosome potential will. They reënter into the living psyche of livingindividuals. The living soul partakes of the dead souls, as the livingbreast partakes of the outer air, and the blood partakes of the sun. The soul, the individuality, never resolves itself through death intophysical constituents. The dead soul remains always soul, and alwaysretains its individual quality. And it does not disappear, butreënters into the soul of the living, of some living individual orindividuals. And there it continues its part in life, as adeath-witness and a life-agent. But it does not, ordinarily, have anyseparate existence there, but is incorporate in the living individualsoul. But in some extraordinary cases, the dead soul may really actseparately in a living individual. 

How this all is, and what are the laws of the relation between lifeand death, the living and the dead, I don't know. But that thisrelation exists, and exists in a manner as I describe it, for my ownpart I know. And I am fully aware that once we direct our livingattention this way, instead of to the absurdity of the atom, then wehave a whole _living_ universe of knowledge before us. The universe oflife and death, of which we, whose business it is to live and to die, know nothing. Whilst concerning the universe of Force and Matter wepile up theories and make staggering and disastrous discoveries ofmachinery and poison-gas, all of which we were much better without. 

It is life we have to live by, not machines and ideals. And life meansnothing else, even, but the spontaneous living soul which is ourcentral reality. The spontaneous, living, individual soul, this is theclue, and the only clue. All the rest is derived. 

How it is contrived that the individual soul in the living sways thevery sun in its centrality, I do not know. But it is so. It is thepeculiar dynamic polarity of the living soul in every weed or bug orbeast, each one separately and individually polarized with the greatreturning pole of the sun, that maintains the sun alive. For I take itthat the sun is the great sympathetic center of our inanimateuniverse. I take it that the sun breathes in the effluence of all thatfades and dies. Across space fly the innumerable vibrations which arethe basis of all matter. They fly, breathed out from the dying and thedead, from all that which is passing away, even in the living. Thesevibrations, these elements pass away across space, and are breathedback again. The sun itself is invisible as the soul. The sun itself isthe soul of the inanimate universe, the aggregate clue to thesubstantial death, if we may call it so. The sun is the great activepole of the sympathetic death-activity. To the sun fly the vibrationsor the molecules in the great sympathy-mode of death, and in the sunthey are renewed, they turn again as the great gift back again fromthe sympathetic death-center towards life, towards the living. But itis not even the dead which _really_ sustain the sun. It is the dynamicrelation between the solar plexus of individuals and the sun's core, aperfect circuit. The sun is materially composed of all the effluenceof the dead. But the _quick_ of the sun is polarized with the living, the sun's quick is polarized in dynamic relation with the quick oflife in all living things, that is, with the solar plexus in mankind. A direct dynamic connection between my solar plexus and the sun. 

Likewise, as the sun is the great fiery, vivifying pole of theinanimate universe, the moon is the other pole, cold and keen andvivifying, corresponding in some way to a _voluntary_ pole. We livebetween the polarized circuit of sun and moon. And the moon ispolarized with the lumbar ganglion, primarily, in man. Sun and moonare dynamically polarized to our actual tissue, they affect thistissue all the time. 

The moon is, as it were, the pole of our particular terrestrial_volition_, in the universe. What holds the earth swinging in space isfirst, the great dynamic attraction to the sun, and then counterposingassertion of independence, singleness, which is polarized in the moon. The moon is the clue to our earth's individual identity, in the wideuniverse. 

The moon is an immense magnetic center. It is quite wrong to say sheis a dead snowy world with craters and so on. I should say she iscomposed of some very intense element, like phosphorus or radium, someelement or elements which have very powerful chemical and kineticactivity, and magnetic activity, affecting us through space. 

It is not the sun which we see in heaven. It is the rushing thitherand the rushing thence of the vibrations expelled by death from thebody of life, and returned back again to the body of life. Possiblyeven a dead soul makes its journey to the sun and back, before wereceive it again in our breast. Just as the breath we breathe outflies to the sun and back, before we breathe it in again. And as thewater that evaporates rises right to the sun, and returns here. Whatwe see is the great golden rushing thither, from the death exhalation, towards the sun, as a great cloud of bees flying to swarm upon theinvisible queen, circling round, and loosing again. This is what wesee of the sun. The center is invisible for ever. 

And of the moon the same. The moon has her back to us for ever. Nother face, as we like to think. The moon also pulls the water, as thesun does. But not in evaporation. The moon pulls by the magnetic forcewe call gravitation. Gravitation not being quite such a Newtoniansimple apple as we are accustomed to find it, we are perhaps fartheroff from understanding the tides of the ocean than we were before thefruit of the tree fell to Sir Isaac's head. It is certainly not simplelittle-things tumble-towards-big-things gravitation. In the moon'spull there is peculiar, quite special force exerted over thosewater-born substances, phosphorus, salt, and lime. The dynamic energyof salt water is something quite different from that of fresh water. And it is this dynamic energy which the sea gives off, and whichconnects it with the moon. And the moon is some strange coagulation ofsubstance such as salt, phosphorus, soda. It certainly isn't a snowycold world, like a world of our own gone cold. Nonsense. It is a globeof dynamic substance like radium or phosphorus, coagulated upon acertain vivid pole of energy, which pole of energy is directlypolarized with our earth, in opposition with the sun. 

The moon is born from the death of individuals. All things, in theironeing, their unification into the pure, universal oneness, evaporateand fly like an imitation breath towards the sun. Even the crumblingrocks breathe themselves off in this rocky death, to the sun ofheaven, during the day. 

But at the same time, during the night they breathe themselves off tothe moon. If we come to think of it, light and dark are a questionboth of the third body, the intervening body, what we will call, bystretching a point, the individual. As we all know, apart from theexistence of molecules of individual matter, there is neither lightnor dark. A universe utterly without matter, we don't know whether itis light or dark. Even the pure space between the sun and moon, theblue space, we don't know whether, in itself, it is light or dark. Wecan say it is light, we can say it is dark. But light and dark areterms which apply only to ourselves, the third, the intermediate, thesubstantial, the individual. 

If we come to think of it, light and dark only mean whether we haveour face or our back towards the sun. If we have our face to the sun, then we establish the circuit of cosmic or universal or material orinfinite sympathy. These four adjectives, cosmic, universal, material, and infinite are almost interchangeable, and apply, as we see, to thatrealm of the non-individual existence which we call the realm of thesubstantial death. It is the universe which has resulted from thedeath of individuals. And to this universe alone belongs the qualityof infinity: to the universe of death. Living individuals have noinfinity save in this relation to the total death-substance anddeath-being, the summed-up cosmos. 

Light and dark, these great wonders, are relative to us alone. Theseare two vast poles of the cosmic energy and of material existence. These are the vast poles of cosmic sympathy, which we call the sun, and the other white pole of cosmic volition, which we call the moon. To the sun belong the great forces of heat and radiant energy, to themoon belong the great forces of magnetism and electricity, radium-energy, and so on. The sun is not, in any sense, a materialbody. It is an invariable intense pole of cosmic energy, and what wesee are the particles of our terrestrial decomposition flying thitherand returning, as fine grains of iron would fly to an intense magnet, or better, as the draught in a room veers towards the fire, attractedinfallibly, as a moth towards a candle. The moth is drawn to thecandle as the draught is drawn to the fire, in the absolute spell ofthe material polarity of fire. And air escapes again, hot anddifferent, from the fire. So is the sun. 

Fire, we say, is combustion. It is marvelous how science proceeds likewitchcraft and alchemy, by means of an abracadabra which has noearthly sense. Pray, what is combustion? You can try and answerscientifically, till you are black in the face. All you can say isthat it is _that which happens_ when matter is raised to a certaintemperature--and so forth and so forth. You might as well say, a wordis that which happens when I open my mouth and squeeze my larynx andmake various tricks with my throat muscles. All these explanations areso senseless. They describe the apparatus, and think they havedescribed the event. 

Fire may be accompanied by combustion, but combustion is notnecessarily accompanied by fire. All A is B, but all B is not A. Andtherefore fire, no matter how you jiggle, is not identical withcombustion. Fire. FIRE. I insist on the absolute word. You may saythat fire is a sum of various phenomena. I say it isn't. You might aswell tell me a fly is a sum of wings and six legs and two bulgingeyes. It is the fly which has the wings and legs, and not the legs andwings which somehow nab the fly into the middle of themselves. A flyis not a sum of various things. A fly is a fly, and the items of thesum are still fly. 

So with fire. Fire is an absolute unity in itself. It is a dynamicpolar principle. Establish a certain polarity between themoon-principle and the sun-principle, between the positive andnegative, or sympathetic and volitional dynamism in any piece ofmatter, and you have fire, you have the sun-phenomenon. It is thesudden flare into the one mode, the sun mode, the material sympatheticmode. Correspondingly, establish an opposite polarity between thesun-principle and the water-principle, and you have decomposition intowater, or towards watery dissolution. 

There are two sheer dynamic principles in our universe, thesun-principle and the moon-principle. And these principles are knownto us in immediate contact as fire and water. The sun is not fire. Butthe principle of fire is the sun-principle. That is, fire is thesudden swoop towards the sun, of matter which is suddenlysun-polarized. Fire is the sudden sun-assertion, the release towardsthe one pole only. It is the sudden revelation of the cosmic OnePolarity, One Identity. 

But there is another pole. There is the moon. And there is anotherabsolute and visible principle, the principle of water. The moon isnot water. But it is the soul of water, the invisible clue to all thewaters. 

So that we begin to realize our visible universe as a vast dualpolarity between sun and moon. Two vast poles in space, invisible inthemselves, but visible owing to the circuit which swoops betweenthem, round them, the circuit of the universe, established at thecosmic poles of the sun and moon. This then is the infinite, thepositive infinite of the positive pole, the sun-pole, negativeinfinite of the negative pole, the moon-pole. And between the twoinfinites all existence takes place. 

But wait. Existence is truly a matter of propagation between the twoinfinites. But it needs a third presence. Sun-principle andmoon-principle, embracing through the æons, could never by themselvespropagate one molecule of matter. The hailstone needs a grain of dustfor its core. So does the universe. Midway between the two cosmicinfinites lies the third, which is more than infinite. This is theHoly Ghost Life, individual life. 

It is so easy to imagine that between them, the two infinites of thecosmos propagated life. But one single moment of pause and silence, one single moment of gathering the whole soul into knowledge, willtell us that it is a falsity. It was the living individual soul which, dying, flung into space the two wings of the infinite, the two polesof the sun and the moon. The sun and the moon are the two eternaldeath-results of the death of individuals. Matter, all matter, is theLife-born. And what we know as inert matter, this is only the resultof death in individuals, it is the dead bodies of individualsdecomposed and resmelted between the hammer and anvil, fire and sandof the sun and the moon. When time began, the first individual died, the poles of the sun and moon were flung into space, and between thetwo, in a strange chaos and battle, the dead body was torn and meltedand smelted, and rolled beneath the feet of the living. So the worldwas formed, always under the feet of the living. 

And so we have a clue to gravitation. We, mankind, are all one family. In our individual bodies burns the positive quick of all things. Butbeneath our feet, in our own earth, lies the intense center of ourhuman, individual death, our grave. The earth has one center, to whichwe are all polarized. The circuit of our life is balanced on theliving soul within us, as the positive center, and on the earth's darkcenter, the center of our abiding and eternal and substantial death, our great negative center, away below. This is the circuit of ourimmediate individual existence. We stand upon our own grave, with ourdeath fire, the sun, on our right hand, and our death-damp, the moon, on our left. 

The earth's center is no accident. It is the great individual pole ofus who die. It is the center of the first dead body. It is the firstgerm-cell of death, which germ-cell threw out the great nuclei of thesun and the moon. To this center of our earth we, as humans, areeternally polarized, as are our trees. Inevitably, we fall to earth. And the clue of us sinks to the earth's center, the clue of our death, of our _weight_. And the earth flings us out as wings to the sun andmoon: or as the death-germ dividing into two nuclei. So from the earthour radiance is flung to the sun, our marsh-fire to the moon, when wedie. 

We fall into the earth. But our rising was not from the earth. We rosefrom the earthless quick, the unfading life. And earth, sun, and moonare born only of our death. But it is only their polarized dynamicconnection with us who live which sustains them all in their placeand maintains them all in their own activities. The inanimateuniverse rests absolutely on the life-circuit of living creatures, isbuilt upon the arch which spans the duality of living beings. 

CHAPTER XIV

SLEEP AND DREAMS

This is going rather far, for a book--nay, a booklet--on the childconsciousness. But it can't be helped. Child-consciousness it is. Andwe have to roll away the stone of a scientific cosmos from thetomb-mouth of that imprisoned consciousness. 

Now, dear reader, let us see where we are. First of all, we areourselves--which is the refrain of all my chants. We are ourselves. Weare living individuals. And as living individuals we are the one, pureclue to our own cosmos. To which cosmos living individuals _havealways_ been the clue, since time began, and _will always_ be theclue, while time lasts. 

I know it is not so fireworky as the sudden evolving of life, somewhere, somewhen and somehow, out of force and matter with a pop. But that pop never popped, dear reader. The boot was on the other leg. And I wish I could mix a few more metaphors, like pops and legs andboots, just to annoy you. 

Life never evolved, or evoluted, out of force and matter, dear reader. There is no such thing as evolution, anyhow. There is onlydevelopment. Man was man in the very first plasm-speck which was hisown individual origin, and is still his own individual origin. As forthe origin, I don't know much about it. I only know there is but oneorigin, and that is the individual soul. The individual souloriginated everything, and has itself no origin. So that time is amatter of living experience, nothing else, and eternity is just amental trick. Of course every living speck, amoeba or newt, has itsown individual soul. 

And we sit on our own globe, dear reader, here individually located. Our own individual being is our own single reality. But the singlereality of the individual being is dynamically and directly polarizedto the earth's center, which is the aggregate negative center of allterrestrial existence. In short, the center which in life we thrustaway from, and towards which we fall, in death. For, our individualexistence being positive, we must have a negative pole to thrust awayfrom. And when our positive individual existence breaks, and we fallinto death, our wonderful individual gravitation-center succumbs tothe earth's gravitation-center. 

So there we are, individuals, single, life-born, life-living, yet allthe while poised and polarized to the aggregate center of oursubstantial death, our earth's quick, powerful center-clue. 

There may be other individuals, alive, and having other worlds undertheir feet, polarized to their own globe's center. But the verysacredness of my own individuality prevents my pronouncing about them, lest I, in attributing qualities to them, transgress against the pureindividuality which is theirs, beyond me. 

If, however, there be truly other people, with their own world undertheir feet, then I think it is fair to say that we all have ourinfinite identity in the sun. That in the rush and swirl of death wepass through fiery ways to the same sun. And from the sun, can thespores of souls pass to the various worlds? And to the worlds of thecosmos seed across space, through the wild beams of the sun? Is thereseed of Mars in my veins? And is astrology not altogether nonsense?

But if the sun is the center of our infinite oneing in death with allthe other after-death souls of the cosmos: and in that great centralstation of travel, the sun, we meet and mingle and change trains forthe stars: then ought we to assume that the moon is likewise ameeting-place of dead souls? The moon surely is a meeting-place ofcold, dead, angry souls. But from our own globe only. 

The moon is the center of our terrestrial individuality in the cosmos. She is the declaration of our existence in separateness. Save for theintense white recoil of the moon, the earth would stagger towards thesun. The moon holds us to our own cosmic individuality, as a worldindividual in space. She is the fierce center of retraction, offrictional withdrawal into separateness. She it is who sullenly standswith her back to us, and refuses to meet and mingle. She it is whoburns white with the intense friction of her withdrawal intoseparation, that cold, proud white fire of furious, almost malignantapartness, the struggle into fierce, frictional separation. Her whitefire is the frictional fire of the last strange, intense waterymatter, as this matter fights its way out of combination and out ofcombustion with the sun-stuff. To the pure polarity of the moon flythe essential waters of our universe. Which essential waters, at themoon's clue, are only an intense invisible energy, a polarity of themoon. 

There are only three great energies in the universal life, which isalways individual and which yet sways all the physical forces as wellas the vital energy; and then the two great dynamisms of the sun andthe moon. To the dynamism of the sun belong heat, expansion-force, andall that range. To the dynamism of the moon the _essential_ wateryforces: not just gravitation, but electricity, magnetism, radium-energy, and so on. 

The moon likewise is the pole of our night activities, as the sun isthe pole of our day activities. Remember that the sun and moon are butgreat self-abandons which individual life has thrown out, to the righthand and to the left. When individual life dies, it flings itself onthe right hand to the sun, on the left hand to the moon, in the dualpolarity, and sinks to earth. When any man dies, his soul divides indeath; as in life, in the first germ, it was united from two germs. Itdivides into two dark germs, flung asunder: the sun-germ and themoon-germ. Then the material body sinks to earth. And so we have thecosmic universe such as we know it. 

What is the exact relationship between us and the death-realm of theafterwards we shall never know. But this relation is none the lessactive every moment of our lives. There is a pure polarity betweenlife and death, between the living and the dead, between each livingindividual and the outer cosmos. Between each living individual andthe earth's center passes a never-ceasing circuit of magnetism. It isa circuit which in man travels up the right side, and down the leftside of the body, to the earth's center. It never ceases. But while weare awake it is entirely under the control and spell of the totalconsciousness, the individual consciousness, the soul, or self. Whenwe sleep, however, then this individual consciousness of the soul issuspended for the time, and we lie completely within the circuit ofthe earth's magnetism, or gravitation, or both: the circuit of theearth's centrality. It is this circuit which is busy in all our tissueremoving or arranging the dead body of our past day. For each time welie down to sleep we have within us a body of death which dies withthe day that is spent. And this body of death is removed or laid inline by the activities of the earth-circuit, the great activedeath-circuit, while we sleep. 

As we sleep the current sweeps its own way through us, as the streetsof a city are swept and flushed at night. It sweeps through our nervesand our blood, sweeping away the ash of our day's spent consciousnesstowards one form or other of excretion. This earth-current activelysweeping through us is really the death-activity busy in the serviceof life. It behooves us to know nothing of it. And as it sweeps itstimulates in the primary centers of consciousness vibrations whichflash images upon the mind. Usually, in deep sleep, these images passunrecorded; but as we pass towards the twilight of dawn andwakefulness, we begin to retain some impression, some record of thedream-images. Usually also the images that are accidentally swept intothe mind in sleep are as disconnected and as unmeaning as the piecesof paper which the street cleaners sweep into a bin from the citygutters at night. We should not think of taking all these papers, piecing them together, and making a marvelous book of them, propheticof the future and pregnant with the past. We should not do so, although every rag of printed paper swept from the gutter would havesome connection with the past day's event. But its significance, thesignificance of the words printed upon it is so small, that werelegate it into the limbo of the accidental and meaningless. Thereis no vital connection between the many torn bits of paper--only anaccidental connection. Each bit of paper has reference to some actualevent: a bus-ticket, an envelope, a tract, a pastry-shop bag, anewspaper, a hand-bill. But take them all together, bus-ticket, tornenvelope, tract, paper-bag, piece of newspaper and hand-bill, and theyhave no individual sequence, they belong more to the mechanicalarrangements than to the vital consequence of our existence. And thesame with most dreams. They are the heterogeneous odds and ends ofimages swept together accidentally by the besom of the night-current, and it is beneath our dignity to attach any real importance to them. It is always beneath our dignity to go degrading the integrity of theindividual soul by cringing and scraping among the rag-tag of accidentand of the inferior, mechanic coincidence and automatic event. Onlythose events are significant which derive from or apply to the soul inits full integrity. To go kow-towing before the facts of change, asgamblers and fortune-readers and fatalists do, is merely a pervertingof the soul's proud integral priority, a rearing up of idiotic idolsand fetishes. 

Most dreams are purely insignificant, and it is the sign of a weakand paltry nature to pay any attention to them whatever. Onlyoccasionally they matter. And this is only when something _threatens_us from the outer mechanical, or accidental _death_-world. Whenanything threatens us from the world of death, then a dream may becomeso vivid that it arouses the actual soul. And when a dream is sointense that it arouses the soul--then we must attend to it. 

But we may have the most appalling nightmare because we eat pancakesfor supper. Here again, we are threatened with an arrest of themechanical flow of the system. This arrest becomes so serious that itaffects the great organs of the heart and lungs, and these organsaffect the primary conscious-centers. 

Now we shall see that this is the direct reverse of real livingconsciousness. In living consciousness the primary affective centerscontrol the great organs. But when sleep is on us, the reverse takes place. The great organs, being obstructed in their spontaneous-automatism, at lastwith violence arouse the active conscious-centers. And these flash imagesto the brain. 

These nightmare images are very frequently purely mechanical: as offalling terribly downwards, or being enclosed in vaults. And suchimages are pure physical transcripts. The image of falling, of flying, of trying to run and not being able to lift the feet, of having tocreep through terribly small passages, these are direct transcriptsfrom the physical phenomena of circulation and digestion. It is thedirectly transcribed image of the heart which, impeded in its actionby the gases of indigestion, is switched out of its establishedcircuit of earth-polarity, and is as if suspended over a void, orplunging into a void: step by step, falling downstairs, maybe, according to the strangulation of the heart beats. The same paralyticinability to lift the feet when one needs to run, in a dream, comesdirectly from the same impeded action of the heart, which is thrownoff its balance by some material obstruction. Now the heart swingsleft and right in the pure circuit of the earth's polarity. Hinderthis swing, force the heart over to the left, by inflation of gas fromthe stomach or by dead pressure upon the blood and nerves from anyobstruction, and you get the sensation of being unable to lift thefeet from earth: a gasping sensation. Or force the heart toover-balance towards the right, and you get the sensation of flying orof falling. The heart telegraphs its distress to the mind, and wakesus. The wakeful soul at once begins to deal with the obstruction, which was too much for the mechanical night-circuits. The same holdsgood of dreams of imprisonment, or of creeping through narrowpassages. They are direct transfers from the squeezing of the bloodthrough constricted arteries or heart chambers. 

Most dreams are stimulated from the blood into the nerves and thenerve-centers. And the heart is the transmission station. For theblood has a unity and a consciousness of its own. It has a deeper, elemental consciousness of the mechanical or material world. In theblood we have the body of our most elemental consciousness, our almostmaterial consciousness. And during sleep this material consciousnesstransfers itself into the nerves and to the brain. The transfer inwakefulness results in a feeling of pain or discomfort--as when wehave indigestion, which is pure blood-discomfort. But in sleep thetransfer is made through the dream-images which are mechanicalphenomena like mirages. 

Nightmares which have purely mechanical images may terrify us, give usa great shock, but the shock does not enter our souls. We aresurprised, in the morning, to find that the bristling horror of thenight seems now just nothing--dwindled to nothing. And this is becausewhat was a purely material obstruction in the physical flow, temporaryonly, is indeed a nothingness to the living, integral soul. We aresubject to such accidents--if we will eat pancakes for supper. Andthat is the end of it. 

But there are other dreams which linger and haunt the soul. These aretrue soul-dreams. As we know, life consists of reactions andinterrelations from the great centers of primary consciousness. I maystart a chain of connection from one center, which inevitablystimulates into activity the corresponding center. For example, I maydevelop a profound and passional love for my mother, in my days ofadolescence. This starts, willy-nilly, the whole activity of adultlove at the lower centers. But admission is made only of the upper, spiritual love, the love dynamically polarized at the upper centers. Nevertheless, whether the admission is made or not, once establish thecircuit in the upper or spiritual centers of adult love, and you willget a corresponding activity in the lower, passional centers of adultlove. 

The activity at the lower center, however, is denied in the daytime. There is a repression. Then the friction of the night-flow liberatesthe repressed psychic activity explosively. And then the image of themother figures in passionate, disturbing, soul-rending dreams. 

The Freudians point to this as evidence of a repressed incest desire. The Freudians are too simple. It is _always_ wrong to accept adream-meaning at its face value. Sleep is the time when we are givenover to the automatic processes of the inanimate universe. Let us notforget this. Dreams are automatic in their nature. The psychepossesses remarkably few dynamic images. In the case of the boy whodreams of his mother, we have the aroused but unattached sex plungingin sleep, causing a sort of obstruction. We have the image of themother, the dynamic emotional image. And the automatism of thedream-process immediately unites the sex-sensation to the great stockimage, and produces an incest dream. But does this prove a repressedincest desire? On the contrary. 

The truth is, every man has, the moment he awakes, a hatred of hisdream, and a great desire to be free of the dream, free of thepersistent mother-image or sister-image of the dream. It is a ghoul, it haunts his dreams, this image, with its hateful conclusions. Andyet he cannot get free. As long as a man lives he may, in his dreamsof passion or conflict, be haunted by the mother-image orsister-image, even when he knows that the cause of the disturbingdream is the wife. But even though the actual subject of the dream isthe wife, still, over and over again, for years, the dream-processwill persist in substituting the mother-image. It haunts and terrifiesa man. 

Why does the dream-process act so? For two reasons. First, the reasonof simple automatic continuance. The mother-image was the first greatemotional image to be introduced in the psyche. The dream-processmechanically reproduces its stock image the moment the intensesympathy-emotion is aroused. Again, the mother-image refers only tothe upper plane. But the dream-process is mechanical in its logic. Because the mother-image refers to the great dynamic stress of theupper plane, therefore it refers to the great dynamic stress of thelower. This is a piece of sheer automatic logic. The living soul is_not_ automatic, and automatic logic does not apply to it. 

But for our second reason for the image. In becoming the object ofgreat emotional stress for her son, the mother also becomes an objectof poignancy, of anguish, of arrest, to her son. She arrests him fromfinding his proper fulfillment on the sensual plane. Now it is almostalways the object of arrest which becomes impressed, as it were, uponthe psyche. A man very rarely has an image of a person with whom he islivingly, vitally connected. He only has dream-images of the personswho, in some way, _oppose_ his life-flow and his soul's freedom, andso become impressed upon his plasm as objects of resistance. Once aman is dynamically caught on the upper plane by mother or sister, thenthe dream-image of mother or sister will persist until the dynamic_rapport_ between himself and his mother or sister is finally broken. And the dream-image from the upper plane will be automatically appliedto the disturbance of the lower plane. 

Because--and this is very important--the dream-process _loves_ its ownautomatism. It would force everything to an automatic-logicalconclusion in the psyche. But the living, wakeful psyche is soflexible and sensitive, it has a horror of automatism. While the soulreally lives, its deepest dread is perhaps the dread of automatism. For automatism in life is a forestalling of the death process. 

The living soul has its great fear. The living soul _fears_ theautomatically logical conclusion of incest. Hence the sleep-processinvariably draws this conclusion. The dream-process, fiendishly, playsa triumph of automatism over us. But the dream-conclusion is almostinvariably just the _reverse_ of the soul's desire, in anydistress-dream. Popular dream-telling understood this, and pronouncedthat you must read dreams backwards. Dream of a wedding, and it meansa funeral. Wish your friend well, and fear his death, and you willdream of his funeral. Every desire has its corresponding fear that thedesire shall not be fulfilled. It is _fear_ which forms anarrest-point in the psyche, hence an image. So the dream automaticallyproduces the fear-image as the desire-image. If you secretly wishedyour enemy dead, and feared he might flourish, the dream would presentyou with his wedding. 

Of course this rule of inversion is too simple to hold good in allcases. Yet it is one of the most general rules for dreams, and appliesmost often to desire-and-fear dreams of a psychic nature. 

So that an incest-dream would not prove an incest-desire in the livingpsyche. Rather the contrary, a living fear of the automaticconclusion: the soul's just dread of automatism. And though this maysound like casuistry, I believe it does explain a good deal of thedream-trick. --That which is lovely to the automatic process is hatefulto the spontaneous soul. The wakeful living soul fears automatism asit fears death: death being automatic. 

It seems to me these are the first two dream-principles, and the twomost important: the principle of automatism and the principle ofinversion. They will not resolve everything for us, but they will helpa great deal. We have to be _very_ wary of giving way to dreams. It isreally a sin against ourselves to prostitute the living spontaneoussoul to the tyranny of dreams, or of chance, or fortune or luck, orany of the processes of the automatic sphere. 

Then consider other dynamic dreams. First, the dream-image generally. Any _significant_ dream-image is usually an image or a symbol of somearrest or scotch in the living spontaneous psyche. There is anotherprinciple. But if the image is a symbol, then the only safe way toexplain the symbol is to proceed from the quality of emotionconnected with the symbol. 

For example, a man has a persistent passionate fear-dream abouthorses. He suddenly finds himself among great, physical horses, whichmay suddenly go wild. Their great bodies surge madly round him, theyrear above him, threatening to destroy him. At any minute he may betrampled down. 

Now a psychoanalyst will probably tell you off-hand that this is afather-complex dream. Certain symbols seem to be put into complexcatalogues. But it is all too arbitrary. 

Examining the emotional reference we find that the feeling is sensual, there is a great impression of the powerful, almost beautiful physicalbodies of the horses, the nearness, the rounded haunches, the rearing. Is the dynamic passion in a horse the danger-passion? It is a greatsensual reaction at the sacral ganglion, a reaction of intense, sensual, dominant volition. The horse which rears and kicks and neighsmadly acts from the intensely powerful sacral ganglion. But thisintense activity from the sacral ganglion is male: the sacral ganglionis at its highest intensity in the male. So that the horse-dreamrefers to some arrest in the deepest sensual activity in the male. The horse is presented as an object of terror, which means that to theman's automatic dream-soul, which loves automatism, the great sensualmale activity is the greatest menace. The automatic pseudo-soul, whichhas got the sensual nature repressed, would like to keep it repressed. Whereas the greatest desire of the living spontaneous soul is thatthis very male sensual nature, represented as a menace, shall beactually accomplished in life. The spontaneous self is secretlyyearning for the liberation and fulfillment of the deepest and mostpowerful sensual nature. There may be an element of father-complex. The horse may also refer to the powerful sensual being in the father. The dream may mean a love of the dreamer for the sensual male who ishis father. But it has nothing to do with _incest_. The love isprobably a just love. 

The bull-dream is a curious reversal. In the bull the centers of powerare in the breast and shoulders. The horns of the head are symbols ofthis vast power in the upper self. The woman's fear of the bull is agreat terror of the dynamic _upper_ centers in man. The bull's horns, instead of being phallic, represent the enormous potency of the uppercenters. A woman whose most positive dynamism is in the breast andshoulders is fascinated by the bull. Her dream-fear of the bull andhis horns which may run into her may be reversed to a significance ofdesire for connection, not from the centers of the lower, sensualself, but from the intense physical centers of the upper body: thephallus polarized from the upper centers, and directed towards thegreat breast center of the woman. Her wakeful fear is terror of thegreat breast-and-shoulder, _upper_ rage and power of man, which maypierce her defenseless lower self. The terror and the desire are neartogether--and go with an admiration of the slender, abstracted bullloins. 

Other dream-fears, or strong dream-impressions, may be almostimageless. They may be a great terror, for example, of a purelygeometric figure--a figure from pure geometry, or an example of puremathematics. Or they may have no image, but only a sensation of smell, or of color, or of sound. 

These are the dream-fears of the soul which is falling out of humanintegrity into the purely mechanical mode. If we idealize ourselvessufficiently, the spontaneous centers do at last work only, or almostonly, in the mechanical mode. They have no dynamic relation withanother being. They cannot have. Their whole power of dynamicrelationship is quenched. They act now in reference purely to themechanical world, of force and matter, sensation and law. So that indream-activity sensation or abstraction, abstract law or calculationoccurs as the predominant or exclusive image. In the dream there maybe a sensation of admiration or delight. The waking sensation is fear. Because the soul fears above all things its fall from individualintegrity into the mechanic activity of the outer world, which is theautomatic death-world. 

And this is our danger to-day. We tend, through deliberate idealism ordeliberate material purpose, to destroy the soul in its first natureof spontaneous, integral being, and to substitute the second nature, the automatic nature of the mechanical universe. For this purpose westay up late at night, and we rise late in the morning. 

To stay up late into the night is always bad. Let us be as ideal as wemay, when the sun goes down the natural mode of life changes in us. The mind changes its activity. As the soul gradually goes passive, before yielding up its sway, the mind falls into its second phase ofactivity. It collects the results of the spent day into consciousness, lays down the honey of quiet thought, or the bitter-sweet honey of thegathered flower. It is the consciousness of that which is past. Evening is our time to read history and tragedy and romance--all ofwhich are the utterance of that which is past, that which is over, that which is finished, is concluded: either sweetly concluded, orbitterly. Evening is the time for this. 

But evening is the time also for revelry, for drink, for passion. Alcohol enters the blood and acts as the sun's rays act. It inflamesinto life, it liberates into energy and consciousness. But by aprocess of combustion. That life of the day which we have not lived, by means of sun-born alcohol we can now flare into sensation, consciousness, energy and passion, and live it out. It is a liberationfrom the laws of idealism, a release from the restriction of controland fear. It is the blood bursting into consciousness. But naturallythe course of the liberated consciousness may be in either direction:sharper mental action, greater fervor of spiritual emotion, or deepersensuality. Nowadays the last is becoming much more unusual. 

The active mind-consciousness of the night is a form ofretrospection, or else it is a form of impulsive exclamation, directfrom the blood, and unbalanced. Because the active physicalconsciousness of the night is the blood-consciousness, the mostelemental form of consciousness. Vision is perhaps our highest form of_dynamic_ upper consciousness. But our deepest lower consciousness isblood-consciousness. 

And the dynamic lower centers are swayed from the blood. When theblood rouses into its night intensity, it naturally kindles first thelowest dynamic centers. It transfers its voice and its fire to thegreat hypogastric plexus, which governs, with the help of the sacralganglion, the flow of urine through us, but which also voices the deepswaying of the blood in sex passion. Sex is our deepest form ofconsciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pureblood-consciousness. It is the basic consciousness of the blood, thenearest thing in us to pure material consciousness. It is theconsciousness of the night, when the soul is _almost_ asleep. 

The blood-consciousness is the first and last knowledge of the livingsoul: the depths. It is the soul acting in part only, speaking withits first hoarse half-voice. And blood-consciousness cannot operatepurely until the soul has put off all its manifold degrees and formsof upper consciousness. As the self falls back into quiescence, itdraws itself from the brain, from the great nerve-centers, into theblood, where at last it will sleep. But as it draws and folds itselflivingly in the blood, at the dark and powerful hour, it sends out itsgreat call. For even the blood is alone and in part, and needs ananswer. Like the waters of the Red Sea, the blood is divided in a dualpolarity between the sexes. As the night falls and the consciousnesssinks deeper, suddenly the blood is heard hoarsely calling. Suddenlythe deep centers of the sexual consciousness rouse to theirspontaneous activity. Suddenly there is a deep circuit establishedbetween me and the woman. Suddenly the sea of blood which is me heavesand rushes towards the sea of blood which is her. There is a moment ofpure frictional crisis and contact of blood. And then all the blood inme ebbs back into its ways, transmuted, changed. And this is theprofound basis of my renewal, my deep blood renewal. 

And this has nothing to do with pretty faces or white skin or rosybreasts or any of the rest of the trappings of sexual love. Thesetrappings belong to the day. Neither eyes nor hands nor mouth haveanything to do with the final massive and dark collision of the bloodin the sex crisis, when the strange flash of electric transmutationpasses through the blood of the man and the blood of the woman. Theyfall apart and sleep in their transmutation. 

But even in its profoundest, and most elemental movements, the soul isstill individual. Even in its most material consciousness, it is stillintegral and individual. You would think the great blood-stream ofmankind was one and homogeneous. And it is indeed more nearly one, more near to homogeneity than anything else within us. Theblood-stream of mankind is almost homogeneous. 

But it isn't homogeneous. In the first place, it is dual in a perfectdark dynamic polarity, the sexual polarity. No getting away from thefact that the blood of woman is dynamically polarized in opposition, or in difference to the blood of man. The crisis of their contact insex connection is the moment of establishment of a new flashingcircuit throughout the whole sea: the dark, burning red waters of ourunder-world rocking in a new dynamic rhythm in each of us. And then inthe second place, the blood of an individual is his _own_ blood. Thatis, it is individual. And though we have a potential dynamic sexualconnection, we men, with almost every woman, yet the great outstandingfact of the individuality even of the blood makes us need acorresponding individuality in the woman we are to embrace. The moreindividual the man or woman, the more unsatisfactory is anon-individual connection: promiscuity. The more individual, the moredoes our blood cry out for its own specific answer, an individualwoman, blood-polarized with us. 

We have made the mistake of idealism again. We have thought that thewoman who thinks and talks as we do will be the blood-answer. And weforce it to be so. To our disaster. The woman who thinks and talks aswe do is almost sure to have no dynamic blood-polarity with us. Thedynamic blood-polarity would make her different from me, and not likeme in her thought mode. Blood-sympathy is so much deeper thanthought-mode, that it may result in very different expression, verbally. 

We have made the mistake of turning life inside out: of dragging theday-self into the night, and spreading the night-self over into theday. We have made love and sex a matter of seeing and hearing and ofday-conscious manipulation. We have made men and women come togetheron the grounds of this superficial likeness and commonalty--theirmental, and upper sympathetic consciousness. And so we have forced theblood to submission. Which means we force it into disintegration. 

We have too much light in the night, and too much sleep in the day. Itis an evil thing for us to prolong as we do the mental, visual, idealconsciousness far into the night when the hour has come for this upperconsciousness to fade, for the blood alone to know and to act. Byprovoking the reaction of the great blood-stress, the sex-reaction, from the upper, outer mental consciousness and mental lasciviousnessof conscious purpose, we thereby destroy the very blood in our bodies. We prevent it from having its own dynamic sway. We prevent it fromcoming to its own dynamic crisis and connection, from finding its ownfundamental being. No matter how we work our sex, from the upper orouter consciousness, we don't achieve anything but the falsificationand impoverishment of our own blood-life. We have no choice. Either wemust withdraw from interference, or slowly deteriorate. 

We have made a corresponding mistake in sleeping on into the day. Once the sun rises our constitution changes. Once the sun is well upour sleep--supposing our life fairly normal--is no longer truly sleep. When the sun comes up the centers of active dynamic upperconsciousness begin to wake. The blood changes its vibration and evenits chemical constitution. And then we too ought to wake. We doourselves great damage by sleeping too long into the day. Thehalf-hour's sleep after midday meal is a readjustment. But the longhours of morning sleep are just a damage. We submit our now activecenters of upper consciousness to the dominion of the blood-automaticflow. We chain ourselves down in our morning sleep. We transmute themorning's blood-strength into false dreams and into an ever-increasingforce of inertia. And naturally, in the same line of inertia wepersist from bad to worse. 

With the result that our chained-down, active nerve-centers arehalf-shattered before we arise. We never become newly day-conscious, because we have subjected our powerful centers of day-consciousness tobe trampled and wasted into dreams and inertia by the heavy flow ofthe blood-automatism in the morning sleeps. Then we arise with afeeling of the monotony and automatism of life. There is no good, glad refreshing. We feel tired to start with. And so we protract ourday-consciousness on into the night, when we _do_ at last begin tocome awake, and we tell ourselves we must sleep, sleep, sleep in themorning and the daytime. It is better to sleep only six hours than toprolong sleep on and on when the sun has risen. Every man and womanshould be forced out of bed soon after the sun has risen: particularlythe nervous ones. And forced into physical activity. Soon after dawnthe vast majority of people should be hard at work. If not, they willsoon be nervously diseased. 

CHAPTER XV

THE LOWER SELF

So it comes about that the moon is the planet of our nights, as thesun of our days. And this is not just accidental, or even mechanical. The influence of the moon upon the tides and upon us is not just anaccident in phenomena. It is the result of the creation of theuniverse by life itself. It was life itself which threw the moon aparton the one hand, the sun on the other. And it is life itself whichkeeps the dynamic-vital relation constant between the moon and theliving individuals of the globe. The moon is as dependent upon thelife of individuals, for her continued existence, as each singleindividual is dependent upon the moon. 

The same with the sun. The sun sets and has his perfect polarity inthe life-circuit established between him and all living individuals. Break that circuit, and the sun breaks. Without man, beasts, butterflies, trees, toads, the sun would gutter out like a spent lamp. It is the life-emission from individuals which feeds his burning andestablishes his sun-heart in its powerful equilibrium. 

The same with the moon. She lives from us, primarily, and we from her. Everything is a question of relativity. Not only is every forcerelative to other force or forces, but every existence is relative toother existences. Not only does the life of man depend on man, beast, and herb, but on the sun and moon, and the stars. And in anothermanner, the existence of the moon depends absolutely on the life ofherb, beast, and man. The existence of the moon depends upon the lifeof individuals, that which alone is original. Without the life ofindividuals the moon would fall asunder. And the moon particularly, because she is polarized dynamically to this, our own earth. We do notknow what far-off life breathes between the stars and the sun. But ourlife alone supports the moon. Just as the moon is the pole of oursingle terrestrial individuality. 

Therefore we must know that between the moon and each individual beingexists a vital dynamic flow. The life of individuals depends directlyupon the moon, just as the moon depends directly upon the life ofindividuals. 

But in what way does the life of individuals depend directly upon themoon?

The moon is the mother of darkness. She is the clue to the activedarkness. And we, below the waist, we have our being in darkness. Below the waist we are sightless. When, in the daytime, our life ispolarized upwards, towards the open, sun-wakened eyes and the mindwhich sees in vision, then the powerful dynamic centers of the lowerbody act in subservience, in their negative polarity. And then we flowupwards, we go forth seeking the universe, in vision, speech, andthought--we go forth to see all things, to hear all things, to knowall things by acquaintance and by knowledge. One flood of dynamic floware we, upwards polarized, in our tallness and our wide-eyed spiritseeking to bring all the universe into the range of our consciousindividuality, and eager always to make new worlds, out of this oldworld, to bud new green tips on the tree of life. Just as a tree woulddie if it were not making new green tips upon all its vast old worldof a body, so the whole universe would perish if man and beast andherb were not always putting forth a newness: the toad taking avivider color, spreading his hands a little more gently, developing amore rusé intelligence, the birds adding a new note to their speechand song, a new sharp swerve to their flight, a new nicety to theirnests; and man, making new worlds, new civilizations. If it were notfor this striving into new creation on the part of living individuals, the universe would go dead, gradually, gradually and fall asunder. Like a tree that ceases to put forth new green tips, and to advanceout a little further. 

But each new tip arises out of the apparent death of the old, thepreceding one. Old leaves have got to fall, old forms must die. And ifmen must at certain periods fall into death in millions, why, so mustthe leaves fall every single autumn. And dead leaves make good mold. And so dead men. Even dead men's souls. 

So if death has to be the goal for a great number, then let it be so. If America must invent this poison-gas, let her. When death is ourgoal of goals we shall invent the means of death, let our professionsof benevolence be what they will. 

But this time, it seems to me, we have consciously and responsibly tocarry ourselves through the winter-period, the period of death anddenudation: that is, some of us have, some _nation_ even must. Forthere are not now, as in the Roman times, any great reservoirs ofenergetic barbaric life. Goths, Gauls, Germans, Slavs, Tartars. Theworld is very full of people, but all fixed in civilizations of theirown, and they all have all our vices, all our mechanisms, and all ourmeans of destruction. This time, the leading civilization cannot dieout as Greece, Rome, Persia died. It must suffer a great collapse, maybe. But it must carry through all the collapse the living clue tothe next civilization. It's no good thinking we can leave it to Chinaor Japan or India or Africa--any of the great swarms. 

And here we are, we don't look much like carrying through to a newera. What have we got that will carry through? The latest craze is Mr. Einstein's Relativity Theory. Curious that everybody catches fire atthe word Relativity. There must be something in the mere suggestion, which we have been waiting for. But what? As far as I can see, Relativity means, for the common amateur mind, that there is no oneabsolute force in the physical universe, to which all other forces maybe referred. There is no one single absolute central principlegoverning the world. The great cosmic forces or mechanical principlescan only be known in their relation to one another, and can only existin their relation to one another. But, says Einstein, this relationbetween the mechanical forces is constant, and may be expressed by amathematical formula: which mathematical formula may be used to equateall mechanical forces of the universe. 

I hope that is not scientifically all wrong. It is what I understandof the Einstein theory. What I doubt is the equation formula. It seemsto me, also, that the velocity of light through space is the _deus exmachina_ in Einstein's physics. Somebody will some day put salt on thetail of light as it travels through space, and then its simplevelocity will split up into something complex, and the Relativityformula will fall to bits. --But I am a confirmed outsider, so I'llhold my tongue. 

All I know is that people have got the word Relativity into theirheads, and catch-words always refer to some latent idea or conceptionin the popular mind. It has taken a Jew to knock the last center-pinout of our ideally spinning universe. The Jewish intelligence forcenturies has been picking holes in our ideal system--scientific andsociological. Very good thing for us. Now Mr. Einstein, we are glad tosay, has pulled out the very axle pin. At least that is how the vulgarmind understands it. The equation formula doesn't count. --So now, theuniverse, according to the popular mind, can wobble about withoutbeing pinned down. --Really, an anarchical conclusion. But the Jewishmind insidiously drives us to anarchical conclusions. We are glad tobe driven from false, automatic fixities, anyhow. And once we aredriven right on to nihilism we may find a way through. 

So, there is nothing absolute left in the universe. Nothing. LordHaldane says pure knowledge is absolute. As far as it goes, no doubt. But pure knowledge is only such a tiny bit of the universe, and alwaysrelative to the thing known and to the knower. 

I feel inclined to Relativity myself. I think there is no one absoluteprinciple in the universe. I think everything is relative. But I alsofeel, most strongly, that in itself each individual living creature isabsolute: in its own being. And that all things in the universe arejust relative to the individual living creature. And that individualliving creatures are relative to each other. 

And what about a goal? There is no final goal. But every step takenhas its own little relative goal. So what about the next step?

Well, first and foremost, that every individual creature shall come toits own particular and individual fullness of being. --Very nice, verypretty--but _how_? Well, through a living dynamic relation to othercreatures. --Very nice again, pretty little adjectives. But what _sort_of a living dynamic relation?--Well, _not_ the relation of love, that's one thing, nor of brotherhood, nor equality. The next relationhas got to be a relationship of men towards men in a spirit ofunfathomable trust and responsibility, service and leadership, obedience and pure authority. Men have got to choose their leaders, and obey them to the death. And it must be a system of culminatingaristocracy, society tapering like a pyramid to the supreme leader. 

All of which sounds very distasteful at the moment. But upon all thevital lessons we have learned during our era of love and spirit anddemocracy we can found our new order. 

We wanted to be all of a piece. And we couldn't bring it off. Becausewe just _aren't_ all of a piece. We wanted first to have nothing butnice daytime selves, awfully nice and kind and refined. But it didn'twork. Because whether we want it or not, we've got night-time selves. And the most spiritual woman ever born or made has to perform hernatural functions just like anybody else. We must _always_ keep inline with this fact. 

Well, then, we have night-time selves. And the night-self is the verybasis of the dynamic self. The blood-consciousness and theblood-passion is the very source and origin of us. Not that we can_stay_ at the source. Nor even make a _goal_ of the source, as Freuddoes. The business of living is to travel away from the source. Butyou must start every single day fresh from the source. You must riseevery day afresh out of the dark sea of the blood. 

When you go to sleep at night, you have to say: "Here dies the man Iam and know myself to be. " And when you rise in the morning you haveto say: "Here rises an unknown quantity which is still myself. "

The self which rises naked every morning out of the dark sleep of thepassionate, hoarsely-calling blood: this is the unit for the nextsociety. And the polarizing of the passionate blood in the individualtowards life, and towards leader, this must be the dynamic of the nextcivilization. The intense, passionate yearning of the soul towards thesoul of a stronger, greater individual, and the passionateblood-belief in the fulfillment of this yearning will give men thenext motive for life. 

We have to sink back into the darkness and the elemental consciousnessof the blood. And from this rise again. But there is no rising untilthe bath of darkness and extinction is accomplished. 

As social units, as civilized men we have to do what we do as physicalorganisms. Every day, the sun sets from the sky, and darkness falls, and every day, when this happens, the tide of life turns in us. Instead of flowing upwards and outwards towards mental consciousnessand activity, it turns back, to flow downwards. Downwards towards thedigestion processes, downwards further to the great sexualconjunctions, downwards to sleep. 

This is the soul now retreating, back from the outer life of day, backto the origins. And so, it stays its hour at the first great sensualstations, the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion. But the tide ebbson, down to the immense, almost inhuman passionate darkness of sex, the strange and moon-like intensity of the hypogastric plexus and thesacral ganglion, then deep, deeper, past the last great station of thedarkest psyche, down to the earth's center. Then we sleep. 

And the moon is the tide-turner. The moon is the great cosmic polewhich calls us back, back out of our day-self, back through themoonlit darknesses of the sensual planes, to sleep. It is the moonthat sways the blood, and sways us back into the extinction of theblood. --And as the soul retreats back into the sea of its owndarkness, the mind, stage by stage, enjoys the mental consciousnessthat belongs to this retreat back into the sensual deeps; and then itgoes extinguished. There is sleep. 

And so we resolve back towards our elementals. We dissolve back, outof the upper consciousness, out of mind and sight and speech, back, down into the deep and massive, swaying consciousness of the dark, living blood. At the last hour of sex I am no more than a powerfulwave of mounting blood. Which seeks to surge and join with theanswering sea in the other individual. When the sea of individualblood which I am at that hour heaves and finds its pure contact withthe sea of individual blood which is the woman at that hour, then eachof us enters into the wholeness of our deeper infinitude, our profoundfullness of being, in the ocean of our oneness and our consciousness. 

This is under the spell of the moon, of sea-born Aphrodite, mother andbitter goddess. For I am carried away from my sunny day-self intothis other tremendous self, where knowledge will not save me, butwhere I must obey as the sea obeys the tides. Yet however much I go, Iknow that I am all the while myself, in my going. 

This then is the duality of my day and my night being: a duality sobitter to an adolescent. For the adolescent thinks with shame andterror of his night. He would wish to have no night-self. But it isMoloch, and he cannot escape it. 

The tree is born of its roots and its leaves. And we of our days andour nights. Without the night-consummation we are trees without roots. 

And the night-consummation takes place under the spell of the moon. Itis one pure motion of meeting and oneing. But even so, it is acircuit, not a straight line. One pure motion of meeting and oneing, until the flash breaks forth, when the two are one. And this, thisflashing moment of the ignition of two seas of blood, this is themoment of begetting. But the begetting of a child is less than thebegetting of the man and the woman. Woman is begotten of man at thatmoment, into her greater self: and man is begotten of woman. This isthe main. And that which cannot be fulfilled, perfected in the twoindividuals, that which cannot take fire into individual life, thistrickles down and is the seed of a new life, destined ultimately tofulfill that which the parents could not fulfill. So it is for ever. 

Sex then is a polarization of the individual blood in man towards theindividual blood in woman. It is more, also. But in its primefunctional reality it is this. And sex union means bringing intoconnection the dynamic poles of sex in man and woman. 

In sex we have our basic, most elemental being. Here we have our mostelemental contact. It is from the hypogastric plexus and the sacralganglion that the dark forces of manhood and womanhood sparkle. Fromthe dark plexus of sympathy run out the acute, intense sympatheticvibrations direct to the corresponding pole. Or so it should be, ingenuine passionate love. There is no mental interference. There iseven no interference of the upper centers. Love is supposed to beblind. Though modern love wears strong spectacles. 

But love is really blind. Without sight or scent or hearing thepowerful magnetic current vibrates from the hypogastric plexus in thefemale, vibrating on to the air like some intense wireless message. And there is immediate response from the sacral ganglion in somemale. And then sight and day-consciousness begin to fade. In the loweranimals apparently any male can receive the vibration of any female:and if need be, even across long distances of space. But the higherthe development the more individual the attunement. Every wirelessstation can only receive those messages which are in its own vibrationkey. So with sex in specialized individuals. From the powerful dynamiccenter the female sends out her dark summons, the intense darkvibration of sex. And according to her nature, she receives herresponses from the males. The male enters the magnetic field of thefemale. He vibrates helplessly in response. There is established atonce a dynamic circuit, more or less powerful. It would seem as if, while ever life remains free and wild and independent, thesex-circuit, while it lasts, is omnipotent. There is one electric flowwhich encompasses one male and one female, or one male and oneparticular group of females all polarized in the same key ofvibration. 

This circuit of vital sex magnetism, at first loose and wide, gradually closes and becomes more powerful, contracts and grows moreintense, until the two individuals arrive into contact. And even thenthe pulse and flow of attraction and recoil varies. In free wild life, each touch brings about an intense recoil, and each recoil causes anintense sympathetic attraction. So goes on the strange battle ofdesire, until the consummation is reached. 

It is the precise parallel of what happens in a thunder-storm, whenthe dynamic forces of the moon and the sun come into collision. Theresult is threefold: first, the electric flash, then the birth of purewater, new water. 

So it is in sex relation. There is a threefold result. First, theflash of pure sensation and of real electricity. Then there is thebirth of an entirely new state of blood in each partner. And thenthere is the liberation. 

But the main thing, as in the thunder-storm, is the absolute renewalof the atmosphere: in this case, the blood. It would no doubt be foundthat the electro-dynamic condition of the white and red corpuscles ofthe blood was quite different after sex union, and that the chemicalcomposition of the fluid of the blood was quite changed. 

And in this renewal lies the great magic of sex. The life of anindividual goes on apparently the same from day to day. But as amatter of fact there is an inevitable electric accumulation in thenerves and the blood, an accumulation which weighs there and broodsthere with intolerable pressure. And the only possible means of reliefand renewal is in pure passional interchange. There is and must be apure passional interchange from the upper self, as when men unite insome great creative or religious or constructive activity, or as whenthey fight each other to the death. The great goal of creative orconstructive activity, or of heroic victory in fight, _must_ always bethe goal of the daytime self. But the very possibility of such a goalarises out of the vivid dynamism of the conscious blood. And the bloodin an individual finds its great renewal in a perfected sex circuit. 

A perfected sex circuit and a successful sex union. And there can beno successful sex union unless the greater hope of purposive, constructive activity fires the soul of the man all the time: or thehope of passionate, purposive _destructive_ activity: the two amountreligiously to the same thing, within the individual. Sex as an end initself is a disaster: a vice. But an ideal purpose which has no rootsin the deep sea of passionate sex is a greater disaster still. And nowwe have only these two things: sex as a fatal goal, which is theessential theme of modern tragedy: or ideal purpose as a deadlyparasite. Sex passion as a goal in itself always leads to tragedy. There must be the great purposive inspiration always present. But theautomatic ideal-purpose is not even a tragedy, it is a slowhumiliation and sterility. 

The great thing is to keep the sexes pure. And by pure we don't meanan ideal sterile innocence and similarity between boy and girl. Wemean pure maleness in a man, pure femaleness in a woman. Woman isreally polarized downwards, towards the center of the earth. Her deeppositivity is in the downward flow, the moon-pull. And man ispolarized upwards, towards the sun and the day's activity. Women andmen are dynamically different, in everything. Even in the mind, wherewe seem to meet, we are really utter strangers. We may speak the sameverbal language, men and women: as Turk and German might both speakLatin. But _whatever_ a man says, his meaning is something quitedifferent and changed when it passes through a woman's ears. Andthough you reverse the sexual polarity, the flow between the sexes, still the difference is the same. The _apparent_ mutual understanding, in companionship between a man and a woman, is always an illusion, and always breaks down in the end. 

Woman can polarize her consciousness upwards. She can obtain a handeven over her sex receptivity. She can divert even the electric spasmof coition into her upper consciousness: it was the trick which thesnake and the apple between them taught her. The snake, whoseconsciousness is _only_ dynamic, and non-cerebral. The snake, who hasno mental life, but only an intensely vivid dynamic mind, he enviedthe human race its mental consciousness. And he knew, this intenselywise snake, that the one way to make humanity pay more than the priceof mental consciousness was to pervert woman into mentality: tostimulate her into the upper flow of consciousness. 

For the true polarity of consciousness in woman is downwards. Herdeepest consciousness is in the loins and belly. Even when perverted, it is so. The great flow of female consciousness is downwards, down tothe weight of the loins and round the circuit of the feet. Pervertthis, and make a false flow upwards, to the breast and head, and youget a race of "intelligent" women, delightful companions, trickycourtesans, clever prostitutes, noble idealists, devoted friends, interesting mistresses, efficient workers, brilliant managers, womenas good as men at all the manly tricks: and better, because they areso very headlong once they go in for men's tricks. But then, after awhile, pop it all goes. The moment woman has got man's ideals andtricks drilled into her, the moment she is competent in the manlyworld--there's an end of it. She's had enough. She's had more thanenough. She hates the thing she has embraced. She becomes absolutelyperverse, and her one end is to prostitute herself and her ideals tosex. Which is her business at the present moment. 

We bruise the serpent's head: his flat and brainless head. But hisrevenge of bruising our heel is a good one. The heels, through whichthe powerful downward circuit flows: these are bruised in us, numbedwith a horrible neurotic numbness. The dark strong flow that polarizesus to the earth's center is hampered, broken. We become flimsy fungoidbeings, with no roots and no hold in the earth, like mushrooms. Theserpent has bruised our heel till we limp. The lame gods, the enslavedgods, the toiling limpers moaning for the woman. You don't find thesun and moon playing at pals in the sky. Their beams cross the greatgulf which is between them. 

So with man and woman. They must stand clear again. They must fighttheir way out of their self-consciousness: there is nothing else. Or, rather, each must fight the other out of self-consciousness. Insteadof this leprous forbearance which we are taught to practice in ourintimate relationships, there should be the most intense openantagonism. If your wife flirts with other men, and you don't like it, say so before them all, before wife and man and all, say you won'thave it. If she seems to you false, in any circumstance, tell her so, angrily, furiously, and stop her. Never mind about being justified. Ifyou hate anything she does, turn on her in a fury. Harry her, and makeher life a hell, so long as the real hot rage is in you. Don'tsilently hate her, or silently forbear. It is such a dirty trick, somean and ungenerous. If you feel a burning rage, turn on her and giveit to her, and _never_ repent. It'll probably hurt you much more thanit hurts her. But never repent for your real hot rages, whetherthey're "justifiable" or not. If you care one sweet straw for thewoman, and if she makes you that you can't bear any more, give it toher, and if your heart weeps tears of blood afterwards, tell heryou're thankful she's got it for once, and you wish she had it worse. 

The same with wives and their husbands. If a woman's husband gets onher nerves, she should fly at him. If she thinks him too sweet andsmarmy with other people, she should let him have it to his nose, straight out. She should lead him a dog's life, and never swallow herbile. 

With wife or husband, you should never swallow your bile. It makes yougo all wrong inside. Always let fly, tooth and nail, and never repent, no matter what sort of a figure you make. 

We have a vice of love, of softness and sweetness and smarminess andintimacy and promiscuous kindness and all that sort of thing. We thinkit's so awfully nice of us to be like that, in ourselves. But in ourwives or our husbands it gets on our nerves horribly. Yet we think itoughtn't to, so we swallow our spleen. 

We shouldn't. When Jesus said "if thine eye offend thee, pluck itout, " he was beside the point. The eye doesn't really offend us. Weare rather fond of our own squint eye. It only offends the person whocares for us. And it's up to this person to pluck it out. 

This holds particularly good of the love and intimacy vice. It'llnever offend us in ourselves. While it will be gall and wormwood toour wife or husband. And it is on this promiscuous love and intimacyand kindness and sweetness, all a vice, that our self-consciousnessreally rests. If we are battered out of this, we shall be battered outof self-consciousness. 

And so, men, drive your wives, beat them out of theirself-consciousness and their soft smarminess and good, lovely idea ofthemselves. Absolutely tear their lovely opinion of themselves totatters, and make them look a holy ridiculous sight in their own eyes. Wives, do the same to your husbands. 

But fight for your life, men. Fight your wife out of her ownself-conscious preoccupation with herself. Batter her out of it tillshe's stunned. Drive her back into her own true mode. Rip all her nicesuperimposed modern-woman and wonderful-creature garb off her. Reduceher once more to a naked Eve, and send the apple flying. 

Make her yield to her own real unconscious self, and absolutely stampon the self that she's got in her head. Drive her forcibly back, backinto her own true unconscious. 

And then you've got a harder thing still to do. Stop her from lookingon you as her "lover. " Cure her of that, if you haven't cured herbefore. Put the fear of the Lord into her that way. And make her knowshe's got to believe in you again, and in the deep purpose you standfor. But before you can do that, you've got to _stand_ for some deeppurpose. It's no good faking one up. You won't take a woman in, notreally. Even when she _chooses_ to be taken in, for prettiness' sake, it won't do you any good. 

But combat her. Combat her in her sexual pertinacity, and in hersecret glory or arrogance in the sexual goal. Combat her in hercock-sure belief that she "knows" and that she is "right. " Take it allout of her. Make her yield once more to the male leadership: if you'vegot anywhere to lead to. If you haven't, best leave the woman alone;she has _one_ goal of her own, anyhow, and it's better than yournullity and emptiness. 

You've got to take a new resolution into your soul, and break off fromthe old way. You've got to know that you're a man, and being a manmeans you must go on alone, ahead of the woman, to break a way throughthe old world into the new. And you've got to be alone. And you've gotto start off ahead. And if you don't know which direction to take, look round for the man your heart will point out to you. Andfollow--and never look back. Because if Lot's wife, looking back, wasturned to a pillar of salt, these miserable men, for ever looking backto their women for guidance, they are miserable pillars of half-rottentears. 

You'll have to fight to make a woman believe in you as a real man, areal pioneer. No man is a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer. You'll have to fight still harder to make her yield her goal to yours:her night goal to your day goal. The moon, the planet of women, swaysus back from our day-self, sways us back from our real social unison, sways us back, like a retreating tide, in a friction of criticism andseparation and social disintegration. That is woman's inevitable mode, let her words be what they will. Her goal is the deep, sensualindividualism of secrecy and night-exclusiveness, hostile, withguarded doors. And you'll have to fight very hard to make a womanyield her goal to yours, to make her, in her own soul, _believe_ inyour goal as the goal beyond, in her goal as the way by which you go. She'll never believe until you have your soul filled with a profoundand absolutely inalterable purpose, that will yield to nothing, leastof all to her. She'll never believe until, in your soul, you are cutoff and gone ahead, into the dark. 

She may of course already love you, and love you for yourself. But thelove will be a nest of scorpions unless it is overshadowed by a littlefear or awe of your further purpose, a living _belief_ in your goingbeyond her, into futurity. 

But when once a woman _does_ believe in her man, in the pioneer whichhe is, the pioneer who goes on ahead beyond her, into the darkness infront, and who may be lost to her for ever in this darkness; when onceshe knows the pain and beauty of this belief, knows that theloneliness of waiting and following is inevitable, that it must be so;ah, then, how wonderful it is! How wonderful it is to come back toher, at evening, as she sits half in fear and waits! How good it is tocome home to her! How good it is then when the night falls! How richlythe evening passes! And then, for her, at last, all that she has lostduring the day to have it again between her arms, all that she hasmissed, to have it poured out for her, and a richness and a wonder shehad never expected. It is her hour, her goal. That's what it is tohave a wife. 

Ah, how good it is to come home to your wife when she _believes_ inyou and submits to your purpose that is beyond her. Then, howwonderful this nightfall is! How rich you feel, tired, with all theburden of the day in your veins, turning home! Then you too turn toyour other goal: to the splendor of darkness between her arms. And youknow the goal is there for you: how rich that feeling is. And you feelan unfathomable gratitude to the woman who loves you and believes inyour purpose and receives you into the magnificent dark gratificationof her embrace. That's what it is to have a wife. 

But no man ever had a wife unless he served a great predominantpurpose. Otherwise, he has a lover, a mistress. No matter how much shemay be married to him, unless his days have a living purpose, constructive or destructive, but a purpose beyond her and all shestands for; unless his days have this purpose, and his soul is reallycommitted to his purpose, she will not be a wife, she will be only amistress and he will be her lover. 

If the man has no purpose for his days, then to the woman aloneremains the goal of her nights: the great sex goal. And this goal isno goal, but always cries for the something beyond: for the rising inthe morning and the going forth beyond, the man disappearing aheadinto the distance of futurity, that which his purpose stands for, thefuture. The sex goal needs, absolutely needs, this further departure. And if there _be_ no further departure, no great way of belief onahead: and if sex is the starting point and the goal as well: then sexbecomes like the bottomless pit, insatiable. It demands at last thedeparture into death, the only available beyond. Like Carmen, or likeAnna Karenina. When sex is the starting point and the returning pointboth, then the only issue is death. Which is plain as a pike-staff in"Carmen" or "Anna Karenina, " and is the theme of almost _all_ moderntragedy. Our one hackneyed, hackneyed theme. Ecstasies and agonies oflove, and final passion of death. Death is the only pure, beautifulconclusion of a great passion. Lovers, pure lovers should say "Let itbe so. "

And one is always tempted to say "Let it be so. " But no, let it be notso. Only I say this, let it be a great passion and then death, ratherthan a false or faked purpose. Tolstoi said "No" to the passion andthe death conclusion. And then drew into the dreary issue of a falseconclusion. His books were better than his life. Better the woman'sgoal, sex and death, than some _false_ goal of man's. 

Better Anna Karenina and Vronsky a thousand times than Natasha andthat porpoise of a Pierre. This pretty, slightly sordid couple triedso hard to kid themselves that the porpoise Pierre was puffing withgreat purpose. Better Vronsky than Tolstoi himself, in my mind. BetterVronsky's final statement: "As a soldier I am still some good. As aman I am a ruin"--better that than Tolstoi and Tolstoi-ism and thatbeastly peasant blouse the old man wore. 

Better passion and death than any more of these "isms. " No more of theold purpose done up in aspic. Better passion and death. 

But still--we _might_ live, mightn't we?

For heaven's sake answer plainly "No, " if you feel like it. No goodtemporizing. 

EPILOGUE

"_Tutti i salmi finiscono in gloria. _"

All the psalms wind up with the Gloria. --"As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, World without end. Amen. "

Well, then, Amen. 

I hope you say Amen! along with me, dear little reader: if there beany dear little reader who has got so far. If not, I say Amen! all bymyself. --But don't you think the show is all over. I've got anothervolume up my sleeve, and after a year or two years, when I have shakenit down my sleeve, I shall bring it and lay it at the foot of yourLiberty statue, oh Columbia, as I do this one. 

I suppose Columbia means the States. --"Hail Columbia!"--I suppose, etymologically, it is a nest of turtle-doves, Lat. _columba_, a dove. Coo me softly, then, Columbia; don't roar me like the sucking doves ofthe critics of my "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. "

And when I lay this little book at the foot of the Liberty statue, that brawny lady is not to look down her nose and bawl: "Do you seeany green in my eye?" Of course I don't, dear lady. I only see thereflection of that torch--or is it a carrot?--which you are holding upto light the way into New York harbor. Well, many an ass has strayedacross the uneasy paddock of the Atlantic, to nibble your carrot, dearlady. And I must say, you can keep on slicing off nice littlecarrot-slices of guineas and doubloons for an extraordinarilyinexhaustible long time. And innumerable asses can collect themselvesnice little heaps of golden carrot-slices, and then lift up theirheads and brag over them with fairly pan-demoniac yells ofgratification. Of course I don't see any green in your eye, dearLibertas, unless it is the smallest glint from the carrot-tips. Thegleam in your eye is golden, oh Columbia!

Nevertheless, and in spite of all this, up trots this here little assand makes you a nice present of this pretty book. You needn't sniff, and glance at your carrot-sceptre, lady Liberty. You needn't throwdown the thinnest carrot-paring you can pare off, and then say: "Whyshould I pay for this tripe, this wordy mass of rather revoltingnonsense!" You can't pay for it, darling. If I didn't make you apresent of it you could never buy it. So don't shake yourcarrot-sceptre and feel supercilious. Here's a gift for you, Missis. You can look in its mouth, too. Mind it doesn't bite you. --No, youneedn't bother to put your carrot behind your back, nobody wants tosnatch it. 

How do you do, Columbia! Look, I brought you a posy: this nice littleposy of words and wisdom which I made for you in the woods ofEbersteinburg, on the borders of the Black Forest, near Baden Baden, in Germany, in this summer of scanty grace but nice weather. I made itspecially for you--Whitman, for whom I have an immense regard, says"These States. " I suppose I ought to say: "Those States. " If thepublisher would let me, I'd dedicate this book to you, to "ThoseStates. " Because I wrote this book entirely for you, Columbia. You maynot take it as a compliment. You may even smell a tiny bit ofSchwarzwald sap in it, and be finally disgusted. I admit that treesought to think twice before they flourish in such a disgraced place asthe Fatherland. "_Chi va coi zoppi, all' anno zoppica. _" But you'venot only to gather ye rosebuds while ye may, but _where_ ye may. Andso, as I said before, the Black Forest, etc. 

I know, Columbia, dear Libertas, you'll take my posy and put yourcarrot aside for a minute, and smile, and say: "I'm sure, Mr. Lawrence, it is a _long_ time since I had such a perfectly beautifulbunch of ideas brought me. " And I shall blush and look sheepish andsay: "So glad you think so. I believe you'll find they'll keep freshquite a long time, if you put them in water. " Whereupon you, Columbia, with real American gallantry: "Oh, they'll keep for _ever_, Mr. Lawrence. They _couldn't_ be so cruel as to go and die, such perfectlylovely-colored ideas. Lovely! Thank you ever, ever so much. "

Just think of it, Columbia, how pleased we shall be with one another:and how much nicer it will be than if you snorted "High-falutin'Nonsense"--or "Wordy mass of repulsive rubbish. "

When they were busy making Italy, and were just going to put it inthe oven to bake: that is, when Garibaldi and Vittorio Emmanuele hadwon their victories at Caserta, Naples prepared to give them atriumphant entry. So there sat the little king in his carriage: he hadshort legs and huge swagger mustaches and a very big bump ofphiloprogeniture. The town was all done up, in spite of the rain. Anddown either side of the wide street were hasty statues of large, well-fleshed ladies, each one holding up a fore-finger. We don't knowwhat the king thought. But the staff held their breath. The king'sappetite for strapping ladies was more than notorious, and naturallyit looked as if Naples had done it on purpose. 

As a matter of fact, the fore-finger meant _Italia Una_! "Italy shallbe one. " Ask Don Sturzo. 

Now you see how risky statues are. How many nice little asses andpoets trot over the Atlantic and catch sight of Liberty holding upthis carrot of desire at arm's length, and fairly hear her say, as onedoes to one's pug dog, with a lump of sugar: "Beg! Beg!"--and "Jump!Jump, then!" And each little ass and poodle begins to beg and to jump, and there's a rare game round about Liberty, zap, zap, zapperty-zap!

Do lower the carrot, gentle Liberty, and let us talk nicely andsensibly. I don't like you as a _carotaia_, precious. 

Talking about the moon, it is thrilling to read the announcements ofProfessor Pickering of Harvard, that it's almost a dead cert thatthere's life on our satellite. It is almost as certain that there'slife on the moon as it is certain there is life on Mars. The professorbases his assertions on photographs--hundreds of photographs--of acrater with a circumference of thirty-seven miles. I'm not satisfied. I demand to know the yards, feet and inches. You don't come it over mewith the triteness of these round numbers. 

"Hundreds of photographic reproductions have proved irrefutably thespringing up at dawn, with an unbelievable rapidity, of vast fields offoliage which come into blossom just as rapidly (sic!) and whichdisappear in a maximum period of eleven days. "--Again I'm notsatisfied. I want to know if they're cabbages, cress, mustard, ormarigolds or dandelions or daisies. Fields of foliage, mark you. And_blossom_! Come now, if you can get so far, Professor Pickering, youmight have a shrewd guess as to whether the blossoms are good to eat, or if they're purely for ornament. 

I am only waiting at last for an aeroplane to land on one of thesefields of foliage and find a donkey grazing peacefully. Hee-haw!

"The plates moreover show that great blizzards, snow-storms, andvolcanic eruptions are also frequent. " So no doubt the blossoms areedelweiss. 

"We find, " says the professor, "a living world at our very doors wherelife in some respects resembles that of Mars. " All I can say is:"Pray come in, Mr. Moony. And how is your cousin Signor Martian?"

Now I'm sure Professor Pickering's photographs and observations arereally wonderful. But his _explanations_! Come now, Columbia, where isyour High-falutin' Nonsense trumpet? Vast fields of foliage whichspring up at dawn (!!!) and come into blossom just as quickly (!!!!)are rather too flowery even for my flowery soul. But there, truth isstranger than fiction. 

I'll bet my moon against the Professor's, anyhow. 

So long, Columbia. _A riverderci. _