Section 10

SOME MOKE PHILOSOPHY
has acquired the power of shedding tears. His dry-eyed smiles stupify those who look on the majesty of nature, through the fog-mist of their souls.
The Optimist is hut half natural; there is a queer aflfectation ahout him ; he is a story without a sequel, a brook without a source, sunshine without a sun, light with- out heat- His teeth are white, but he has no lines nor dimples, and the muscular play about his mouth, at times has a ghastly look, a dead smile, as though it were forced on the lips of a corpse by gal- vanic persuasion. And his laugh has a peculiar ring, a metallic clatter, hollow and strange. His happiness is so persistent that one detects a false note in it, or a rep- etition of the theme that smacks of untruth. Of this he is all unconscious ; nor does he realize that there is a strain of cowardness in him, that impels him to an eternal ig- noring of two sided facts, or inspires him to bury his head, child-fashion at night, be- neath the blankets, when the wind howls. He flatters himself that he distills bliss, as
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the perfumer distills rose attar, and steeped in self-satisfaction, he certainly does exude something, which has an unendurable com- fort in it that is difficult to define.
We must put up with him as the world goes to balance the Pessimist. Though he has no touch of grandeur in him, he is tol- erated and essential. If he soothes you into weariness, sleep may follow and nerve- calming dreams. Scowl on him then, he will never mind, and if he serves no other purpose than that of allowing you the op- portunity to give free vent to yourself, he has not lived in vain as far as you are con- cerned.
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THE PESSIMIST.
The gloomy grandeur of a great Pessi- mist is like the twilight of the Canyon of the Colorado; there the fishes float around without eyes; and you, at the feet of a Schopenhauer, lose entirely the power to see. The glance of the Pessimist withers the lilies, and causes the lips of children to quiver, when he walks their way. A woman of the timid sort, trembles in his presence, but adores him; he is fatal to her, yet she loves him to the death. He reads earth from its crust to igneous rock, and discovers the fire at her breast that must inevitably go out or rend her to pieces. He beholds the Universe return- ing by slow stages to the goal of ^^ nothing/' or back to that Unit Will, that plays with
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the stars, as though they were gilded balls. He reads the meaningless meaning of the Sphinx, and discovers the sure decay at- tendant upon organized life, and its ulti- mate return, in a cycle's whirl, back to the All from whence it came. He sees the specie vanish in the genus, and the particu- lar in the whole. A sublime monist, he merges the individual into the race, and the race into the One. To him, the eternal struggle to become, results in naught of be- ing; and Life, purposeless, hungry, and starved, swallows and digests itself.
There is a gloomy splendor in the Pessi- mist; he is vast and far-reaching; he digs down to the root of things, and discovers the filth and the worm; he burrows about the foundations of palaces like an eyeless mole, and learns their rottenness by the sense of touch; he views all air castle-dungeons, where phantom skeletons of murdered ghosts lie, with sarcastic smiles on his lips. He marches dowu the aisle of time with swift strides, never pausing till he reaches the end of the dim perspective, where the
-=^— - -
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ruins of a Babylon or a Thebes lie spread, shouting back from behind a temple of some defunct Memnon, his voice an echo among the tombs, the story of the rise and fall of Nations; while faintly in the wake of his hollow tones, come the cry of the bittern and the hoot of the owl. He would prove pro- gress a dream, and aspiration a chimera; he would steep you in the bitterness of your- self, and force you to drink the decoction. Never stale, he is pungent, terrible. On the stage, he plays tragedy. He writes his novels with red ink, and veils the moral in the habiliments of death. His tread is mar- tial; he fights sublimely — hand to hand. As Esculapius, he uncovers foetid sores, and lays bare ulcers. As Realist, he opens the shutters of brothels, and floods the den of prostitution with the glare of day. He paints nude pictures, and decorates the halls of art with copies of *' Things as they are." He chemically analyzes the under- ground sewers of the world's Paris, and shrinks not a whit from the foul breath of the cesspool. He is afraid of nothing; he
OF THE HERMETICS
dares the heights, the depths. In his very blasphemy of courage, he chases Sirius over the sky with his spectrum, and invades the sacred secrets of man's interior with his x-ray. His speech is clear-cut sarcasm, or mournful monologue, more depressing than the hymns of our ancestors. He is grim, grim.
But if our Pessimist happens to be a man of small caliber, note the difference. In- deed we should have placed him first in our essay, as the little ought, in point of picture, to precede the great. Even he awes his wife, because of her love of peace. He com- plains, complains, complains; no matter what she or the household do, he is fiuical, severe. He sees ruin in the air; it takes the form of a bat or an owl, and slips in through the cracks of the half-open door. His pro- phecy is a croak, and he reads in invisible letters of fire, doom^-doom— doom. Sick- ness is at one elbow, death at the other; financial ruin is running ahead, total anni- hilation chasing behind; and all this, while he sits in his easy chair, smokes his pipe.
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pats a fat pocket, and cultivates a bank book; all this, with his wife's kiss soft on his lips, and his children climbing up his knees.
The Pessimist is by nature {though per- haps unconsciously) iconoclastic, chaotic; in reality lie loves to upset and upheave; he is a storm fiend, delighting in the tornado and hurricane. He glories in fire, in war; if it fail him literally, he invents it, and revels in an imaginary cyclone, with its attendant destruction. He interprets all things to his liking, and reads his book of Revelation in a cave.
His mission is evident; he saves the world from the Optimist, and redeems the commonest thing from its ignominy. Instead of soothing, he excites; and all who come within his atmosphere are more or less stirred. He carries a chip on his shoulder, and is ever in readiness for a knock-down fight. He loves argument more than aught else, and hates whoever fails to resist; nothing outrages him as
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does the acquiescence of others in his eternal complaints. His one chance of de- fending his position lies in an opposing obstacle, and that failing him, he is undone. To please him, you must fight him tooth and nail; would you oflFend him, shut your lips; the more silent you become, the more enraged he grows — he beats the air, he fumes — only an Optimist can control him. In fiict they are true mates, for the Optimist eflfectually closes the Pessimist's mouth, and allows him no vent for the sulphuric lava of his seething soul.
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HOW MEN ARGUE.
The world seems to be divided into two parties on this subject of Optimism and Pes- simism, and one half wrangles with the other, as though it were aiming to cut the habitable globe in two. But the philoso- pher? Does he deny the right of either or of both? Does he preach a mezzo condition, where vice is merged into virtue, and black into white? Does he live in a dim gray fog, neither warm nor cold ? Does he count on the dawn and the gloaming, and sleep through day and night? Are his food and drink luke warm, and his words bitter sweet?
Here let us state, that though the Sage understands and often rests on the balance of the golden mean, he in no way avoids the experience which implies the limit of ex-
OF THE HERMETICS
I6S
tremes. The philosopher is neither Opti- mist nor Pessimist, he is both; or rather a third quantity in Nature, which takes into account the two sides of a thing or question at the same time. He sees the shadow under the tree and the sun overhead with one sweep of his eye; he accepts darkness and light as necessary constituents of the same thing, and transcending their marriage, he revels in both in consciousness at once. He is Janus-faced, and while he looks East he gazes West; when his eyes weep, his lips smile. He reads the record of Earth in her rocks and ribs; he was on hand at her birth, and will be in at her death. He too, like the Pessimist, runs down the jeons, but laughs like the Optimist at the cry of the bittern; he sees the end from the beginning, and the beginning from the end. He believes in the Resurrection, and knows that a new Ninevah will spring from the rotting arms of the old. He, too, watches the going out of the stars, and the coming in; but sees the shadow of the moon in the lap of the crescent.
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Death stalks at his left side. Life at his right, and he holds them both by the hand; he relates them, and in relating, transcends and comprehends them. He bends the straight line to a circle, and shifts the poles at will.
The philosopher knows full well that the Optimist is right, that the Pessimist is right — the chameleon may be red to-day and green to-morrow. The philosopher believes in the rythm, which mystifies the Optimist, and deludes the Pessimist; he realizes that the points of view are many, and that each position is true to its landscape. He under- stands that the Optimist is near-sighted, and that to him, distant things are blurred, while the Pessimist is too far-sighted to catch the meaning of the near. In fact the world's Optimists and Pessimists are noth- ing to one who sweeps the whole landscape with unerring eyes, while he pulls the past from the depths, and the future from the heights, merging cause and eflfect together, and reading them as two pages of the same book.
OF THE HEPMETTCS
THE POET.
When the Singer sings, Nature holds her hreath, Venus trembling, flees in tumult with her Doves and Graces, and Space is echoless of all save the poet's voice. Over the ocean it floats, clariou, ringing, high above the music of the deep, whose sub-tones chime with it, and mingle, like the mufHed bass of a mighty organ. Rushing with the tempest, ever liquid, ever strong, it rises and falls with the passion of the storm; yet thrills through, around, above it, like the cry eternal of a raptured soul. It re-echoes mid the mountains, baclc and forth among the peaks, complaining, sighing, dying — lost in the caverns to come forth upon the heights, humming, wailing, whistling where the piues, shivering, listen, dumb and awed by the splendor of the strain.
The poet drowns the melody of the sky- lark in a rain of pure notes, and silences the
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nightingale by the matchless music of his trill. He pipes where brooks wander, and Pan entranced, forgets to play, merging himself in the strange rapture, which holds more of beauty than his weird fancy ever conjured.
The poet comes to earth rarely; his rythmic return is heralded by the minstrel and the seer; Lesbos pants with joy when Sappho opens her eyes, and the harp is hung on the dead-tree limb when the "Tenth Muse'' passes.
To wake to the poet is to rise to the god, for his song is immortal, and escaping the singer, it vies with time in its eternal race, Like that of the comet, the poet's orbit is unaccountable. Coming from an unreck. oned distance, he illuminates heaven, and vanishes to startle and enamour the unseen watchers of another sky. The poet bright- ens the sun, gilds the star, crowns the mountain, crests the wave. He flashes on a country, to renew its vestal fires, then wings his way far off" and out of sight into the dim and endless blue.
OF THE HER ME TICS
To Study man without his religion, is to do superficial work. Even in the dawn, farther back than written history, we find evidence that relates him to a Cuvier and an Agassiz, and separates him from the ape or hyena. When his head was different from ours, even then (possibly before the great glacier had appeared from the North) he had become conscious of something or some one, superior to himself, to which or whom he must necessarily do honor.
If animals have a religion, they g^ve no evidence, unless those conquered by man look up to him as a god. But the wild beast, untamed, the king lion, the royal tiger, un- doubtedly admit no superior, and feel in themselves an almigitiness which death
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alone can humble. But the cave man, the drift man, walked in a way, with God. Right here let us say, that the word God is elastic, and means something different to each human being, to say nothing of its in- terpretation by those who terrorized or frater- nized with the mammoth and the mastodon. These prehistoric individuals, as their relics indicate, came up against something which astounded them; they discovered the wall of adamant, which was as non-understandable as is Spencer's Unknowable. To picture it another way, they found themselves afloat on a shoreless sea, and asked, but half con- sciously, " whence and whither."
It makes no difference whether your skull is twenty inches around, or twenty-four, whether you dress in skins, use stone im- plements and dwell in a cave, or stride about in broadcloth, carry a revolver and live in a castle; you are bound to be bound by the non-understandable, which masters you by its mystery, and consequently forces you to religion. And by religion we mean that worship of a something or some one
OF THE HERMETICS
which is greater than yourself, and beyond your comprehension; that which compels you to acquiesce whether you will or not; that which vetoes absolute individual lib- erty, and binds and confines you in spite of all protestation. Though you blaspheme and curse, struggle and defy, within, you do homage to the Inevitable, and kneel at its shrine; though you set fire to the church and slaughter the devotee, though you foul the air with jeers, and shake your fist at the Almighty, within you have a little god, contracted, despicable, but never- theless there, to whom you offer sacrifice. Or putting it more mildly, as an Atheist you may call your religion Agnosticism, Pantheism, Nature Worship, Animism, it is still a finality, a Sphinx, to which you yield obeisance, and by which you admit yourself mastered. Or putting it still more mildly, as a Theist yon may call your re- ligion Polytheism, Monotheism, Moham- medanism, Judaism, Christianity, you sit under the wings of a great non-nnderstand- able bird which broods over and shelters
SOME hfORE PHILOSOPHY
you, whose hovering pinions are never lifted, but as ultimate verities, dominate and o'ershadow you. There is no escape, from the drift-man to the Pope, we find like con- ditions. The human creature comes plump up against something from which he bounds back like an india rubber ball; the heavier he is, the more he feels the blow; a feather, he scarcely flutters; a cannon ball, he is all but shattered.
But here comes the peculiarity; the Athe- ist, whose religion is Agnosticism, scoffs loudly at the Theist, whose religion is Mon- otheism, whereupon the Theist catches the Atheist and burns him alive. The battle of religious began with the dawn, when Eozoic man emerged from his brute father, and is still furious, though fought by the kid- glove gentry at high noon. There is no fight about the ultimate Unknown, but what that ultimate is, is the question; whether anthropomorphic or inherent, exterior or in- terior, a being, a force, or principle. All men are religious, and, though they deny it strenuously, you can find no one on this
OP THE HERMBTICS
broad eartli who has come to the realization that he is man, who does not concede that force and motion (if nothing else) are em- phatic, to that degree that plants grow, and worlds spin, and are altogether too much for him, as he discovers within no power by which to put a stop to the same. This un- knowable faces the acutest logician, or the most blasphemous heretic, and under its mask of a million faces, defies them both.
So then, w'e all have religion; that is to say, we are all bound by something beyond us, which, whether it be a reptile or a prin- ciple, compels us to kneel. That there is a difference in the beauty and dignity of re- ligions, there is no denying; that they are a sure index to man's intellectual develop- ment, is absolutely certain. Like human- ity's God, religion takes innumerable forms, yet in one particular manifests to all the same characteristic, which is that of being mysterious, unknowable — a conquerer by its very invincibility. The shade of a dead an- cestor may be amplj' sufficient to excite the admiration and awe of an ignorant Mongol-