Section 5

SOME MORS PHILOSOPHY
The fruits of a virgin soil are beyond compare. Have you ever dreamed of Kden, where flowers were rank, and earth teemed with life; where to wish was to be, and to will was to do ? Have you heard of a para- dise where the air swarmed with houris, and the sea with nymphs; of Eldorado whose voluptuous luxury knew no profanation of plow or harrow, but whose spontaneous yerdure was but the natural outcome of a conserved and transformed energy ? Have you read of men who revivified others with their touch; men whom time passed- over, and who gave up life with the glow of youth still on their cheeks after centuries of living? Or have you reversely, in the shadow of a shaft which rose in cold scorn at the head of a tomb, shivered and dreamed of the sterile soil where Adam and Eve wandered after the gates were guarded by the angel with the flaming sword? Have you thought of an Inferno pictured by a Dante, who dipped his pen iu blood? Have you conjured a death valley which spread its skeletons at the very foot of a Sierra, whose
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fern covered niches were watered by per- petual springs?
Ah! the shaft which marks a mortal's grave cuts the sun in twain, and draws a band of black across earth's bosom, that out- lasts the mourner's crepe.
Remember in self, are seeds of life and death; the crop will prove the planting.
Would you have perfumed flowers on the tree of life, rather than a fruit that another eats, cut oflF the opening buds; they will grow again, again, again, in their ceaseless effort to fruit; and the air will be redolent with perfume, while the eye of man gloats on beauty, and Psyche eats the pollen and drinks the dew.
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WORDS.
When the mind is surcharged, it breaks out in words to that extent that people often talk to themselves. From a low form of life upward, entities speak; conveying to one another a veiled meaning which is but half guessed. Words are exceedingly mis- leading and yet are the best means known to man, with one exception, for conveying thought. If they are winged messengers, they fly to their destination in a roundabout way, but nevertheless arrive, and are more eflfective than pantomime.
Beast, bird, and man have always talked; for silence eternal is not possible with a full brain; even the dumb-born make hideous attempts at speech and sound. The dumb undoubtedly have an internal language of symbols by which they
battle with ideas in tlieir minds — some invention of their own by which they give form to things and call up objects through a silent picture-language within. A deaf and dumb man's brain must be a veritable gallery of art; where form, color, action are a thousand times more vivid than to those whose symbols are external sounds. On the stage of the dumb mind, the actors convey ideas in pautomine and gesture; all shades of meaning by color; and tragedy and comedy by emphatic action. Even the deaf and dumb is not altogether so; some faint conception of sound is possible to him through the vibration caused by touch. Foi', strictly analyzed, the shock upon the tympanum is but another form of touch.
But man speaks, the dumb are few; man makes a brush of his words and paints pictures on the air. Again these messen- gers sent from himself are bullets which strike another dead. Again drops of honey which fall on responsive tongues call forth sweet speech. Man lifts the people on the
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wings of his words till earth slips from under them, and heaven is all; or prostrates the rabble faces downward to the sod, with stinging syllables shot from his tongue.
Words are monotonous, sweet, holy, terri- ble, sublime. They break and heal tender hearts, undo and erect homes, unmake and make nations, unite and separate contL nents. But the mischief of words — wherein does it lie? Simply in the fact that they are inadequate. As man grows more com- plex he becomes painfully conscious of this. He perceives finer shades of meaning and thought in himself, and hunts the diction- ary through for a medium of expression. Alas I he is shocked when he sees how ugly he is in print; and he looks upon his work as a bastard child. Then he invents and coins; but to no purpose; his readers devour the words dictionary-wise, and the author alone reads between the lines.
Words do not, can not keep pace with the evolution and complexity in mind. To go back to the root of a word, is but to dig up the plant and toss it dirt and
i 4
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all in the face of the scandalized reader. To fall back on pure Saxon, or pure any- thing, is but to convey ideas by the much- mooted method of suggestion; leaving the reader full liberty to guess at the meaning. There is perhaps a cliarm in this fashion as each reader gets an individual conception, so unlike any other that he practically devours himself, tinctured by the author. If the user of words falls back on simile, and the still more powerful metaphor, he relies in greater degree upon the conjuring potency of his listener than upon that of himself; and more likely than not, the picture he strives to convey, will be painted by the pigment of the receiver's mind, which is likely to translate red into brown and blue into gray.
The user of words is even more ham- pered than is he who strikes the harp strings, or dabbles in the paint box. He has risen a step on the ladder of method, above the artist and the musician, and in striving to convey abstract ideas attempts a deal more, and must needs fail accordingly.
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What then is the hope of the word painter, the preacher and the teacher? How shall the orator set fire to an audience, and the poet to a country? Are his words to fly back 2X him like boomerangs having accomplished but little. — Are they bad pennies sure to return? The user of words is wise when he fully comprehends their limitations. He weighs and measures them and knows what they are, and are not. He deducts a certain per cent, of valuation from them, and expects a result from their output in accordance with the reduction. He takes account of the understandings that receive, as well as of the words that give. He makes allowances for his own language and that of others ; he expects rather less than more from words than the impulse that sent them forth would imply. He gets at the standard, generally accepted, everyday meaning of the word, and then he uses it with salt. He never digs in the soil of philosophy for root discoveries when he writes and talks to the people; his time is too precious; he acquires as nearly as
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possible the people's language in its correct form and comes down to them instead of undermining them. They stand on words as a foundation of common communica- tion, and the sage surely will not throw up their roots, and topple humanity over. Among savants of course, the case is dif- ferent; but the writer and the orator sell their wares (or give them) to the crowd.
Words are certainly Hermetic enough at best, they expose and hide, being every- where exponents of the universal parallel- ism in all nature. The wise realize this and toss words back and forth accordingly^ accepting the impossible as a necessary corollary of the possible ; squeezing words for the juices, which can never in spite of it, be sucked dry. The philosopher is well aware that whatever he may choose to write or say will be interpreted by each individual diflferently ; and though he state as accurately as possible, his perceptions and conceptions, though he clothe the chil- dren of his imagination in colored fabric of his own dye, he is absolutely certain that
SOAfE MORE PHILOSOPHY
each individual reader or listener will translate with a shade of difference, and that to them, in spite of himself, he speaks in a foreign tongue.
It is indeed hard to be understood by another through the medium of wordless speech, and utterly impossible to be fully comprehended through the medium of expressed symbol or sound.
"What then shall we do with words?" We answer, the best you can, remembering that you may count on conveying a certain understanding of your idea, and though it be faint, it at least will have a flash in it, and perhaps some modicum of heat.
Above all avoid anger and sensitiveness at criticism and misunderstanding. Expect this and it will not trouble you. Look for misinterpretation as you do for enemies ; a man is of small account if he finds none. But here we wish to say, and must admit, that in all probability a good deal of your discomfiture arises from your own fault. In the first place if you really wish to convey an idea conscientiously and for a
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purpose, it is your duty to choose tlie lan- guage that the people argue and paint in; second, to find those words which will be the clearest-cut and swiftest messengers to the opaque public mind. Words should be swords, knives, needles and pins; they should pierce and draw blood. If your object in writing and speaking is not to bandy words about like a fakir on a street comer, but to drive home into some stupid or responsive brain an idea; if you choose words as a medium only to carry melody or thought, be selective, conscientious, careful, and aim them as you would bullets — at least aim; if you are a marksman with language yon will hit here and there at the vitals of a human target and capture a prisoner — or a corpse.
But, if you juggle with words like a show- man, and they are not loaded, you are but a harmless fool dedicated to the amusement of the public, and have in all the world but one rival which is none other than the parrot.
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A dictionary on legs might be of great service if it had the attribute of omnipres- ence, but things being as they are, it is more useful in the rack.
Words ! words ! words ! wind-blown feathers! words! sunbeams — hot shot — messengers of life or death!
OF THE HER ME TICS
SILENCE.
Some day, to some few, there will come a language more potent thaii thunderbolts — the language of silence — the language of the eyes. Message bearers ^vill be as sound- less and swift as Mercury when he ran down Olympus with news from Zeus. In fact it is the chief speech of some few even now; the speech of silence which has no suggestion of sound in it other than a faint symbol, that carries the hint of a breath like a statue In marble. The magnetism of man speaks louder than his tongue, but is so seldom translated on earth that the reading is left to the gods. Man is his own revelation, and some day, in a possible Golden Age, word- less, we shall read and re-read each other.
The master mind which dominates the base and uses them for their weal or woe, reads
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to himself, and in the presence of his uncon- scious subjects, interprets the language of each. We call him a student of human nature; he is not, he is a reader, an inter- preter. All men speak to him, though their tongues lie idle in their mouths. They speak as a statue speaks, but with a myriad times more power, for they move and act; and he watches and reads, never out loud, always to himself. Men wonder that they are understood when they have said no word — when with utmost endeavor they have striven to make Sphinxes of themselves. Men truly never lie; they utter false sounds, but their persons, their faces, their heads, \ their magnetism, their touch, cry out; and a Napoleon harks, hears, and manipulates. Nature uses parable, metaphor, simile, poetry, disguise, veils, cosmetics, dyes, but Truth is naked in the final manifestation; and Nature's interpreter sees through and beneath all her feminine coquetry deep down to the fact.
We envy these Shakespeares of Humanity — their power and mastership — and well we
OF THE HERMETICS
may; for surface-skimmers who stake their souls on words, clothes, and apparent envi- ronment wield scarcely more power over their kind than do so many fools; they have missed in the reading, and mistake Latin for Sanskrit, Greek for English. To get this mastership over auras and magnetisms, features and bumps, to interpret signs and expressions, to comprehend a man at a glance, to feel sure of him — bone, marrow, fibre, muscle and vitals — to weigh him physically, mentally and diTmely, to balance him with others right and left and ascertain his position and place on earth, is easy or not, according to the language you rely on, and the vocabulary you use. If yon have grown fat on words, and thrive on sounds; if noisy sounds are a necessity to your clear comprehension, you can make nothing of the silence. If, on the contrary, yon have learned to read for yourself, with the diction- ary of objective nature at hand, you are the master of stillness, whose everlasting mate is a thunder-clap. The silent work done by the maker of European maps, spoke from
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the mouth of a cannon, and the voice of calmness ultimately upheaved Europe with the roar of artillery.
When one reads you with his eye and speaks no word, watch 1 beware! you may hear later from au unexpected source, a noise that will burst the drums of your ears. He who reads to himself one day, speaks from the rostrum the next. The thunder and lightning of Pericles were preceded by a long calm. Ominous stillness is pregnant with noise. The master of weighty words can hold his tongue for days.
Silence is a Vesuvius, that lazily breathes its black breath into heaven's purity, appar- ently asleep; but mistake not this unnatural stillness for the coma that precedes death. At the heart of Vesuvius is fire, fire. It rages upwards and outwards till it pours its lava-speech on helpless cities, and buries them temple-deep in exudations of itself.
He who enters the silent chambers of thought and dreams, comes forth loaded and dangerous; he is a devil or a god, destroyer or builder. On his appearance something is
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sure to follow; iconoclastic, he overturns and crushes; synthetic, he organizes and builds; he is chaos or cosmos, incarnate.
" And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep." What followed ? A thing startling, magnificent — the birth of the world, heralded by the twin of darkness — light. A night of silence with the day of action in its wake. Man conceives under the cover of shadow, but manifests in the light to the roar of sound. Be assured, if you are not silent for long hours, days, years, that you cannoi speak. If you do not face about and enter the Avenues of Self, where Winged Speech hangs over you like a flock of dumb birds, and revel there with the still angels of your own paradise, you can never come forth in voice. The singer who sings, utters few words till the stage flashes with her own splendor and the proscenium- vault echoes her transcendent notes. Birds save their music for the love season, and warble loudest after long continence.
The first stage of creation is stillness; the
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second, commotion. And the echoes, what of the echoes — the never-dying — heard only by ears celestial, tuned to the music of eternity ? Upon the still air falls the echo, softly as the dew on the lily. Only in the silence can you catch the echo, floating by from the otherwise unrecovered past— a faint reverberation of far away scenes and ages. Imperishable echoes! beating about mid ultimate ethers, striking on listening ears in the lonely places, flooding to-day with the story of the long-gone past.
The Mystic hears that which he calls music — a strange blending of battle charge and lullaby. He harks not only backward but across seas, and listens at the door of the Orient, and the gates of the Occident. " All roads lead to Rome." All countries focns in him. Clairvoyant, clairaudiant, he sees and hears; and then equipped and armed with words, steps forth to utter speech that rings around the world and lives in echoes till the Judgment Day.
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INSPIRATION.
Can man inspire himself? Hardly, unless he considers that he has a sort of dual consciousness, or a Pure and an Empirical Ego, as some psychologists put it; but leaving this out of the question, can he be inspired by another or by others ? From one sense there is no debating the subject, for every one knows that the birds, the flowers, the mountains and stars, in fact all objective nature, including other beings of his own kind, act more or less as inspirations to him, but there is a deeper, subtler aspect. If there are objective inspirations recognized and known, are there possibilities of inspira- tions the source of which is unknown? Are there influences which steal on man from out the dark, and persuade him with an