Feminism and Sex-Extinction Part 17

Mind is of an order of mentality wholly different from that of Intelligence or Intellect. Mind is of the nature of Emotion. It is personal, is sympathy, is divination. It is the cerebration of the Soul.

The Soul, or essential Individuality, must abide amid infinitely delicate and delicately infinite brain-cells attuned to those spiritual vibrations whereof Mind is the reflex. And if Mind is Emotion, the Woman brain-half, which is the department of human emotion, must be the mainspring of the human mind.

Great intellect, pure and simple, may exist in man or woman without or with only a fractional leaven of Mind. This is seen in the abstractions of scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, astronomers, financiers, and others. Such brains are special organs of a high order of Intellection, clear, calculating and precise of observation and reflection; rational, deductive; admirable in their unswerving rect.i.tude, pitiless in their impregnable emotionlessness; rejecting all but incontestable evidences, scrupulously aggregating and faithfully interpreting their dry bones of numbers and data and vestiges--skeletons of Life long since extinct, or scaffoldings of Life that lives and moves and laughs and weeps, and bears no more semblance to their bloodless tabulations of its modes and processes than warm, creative Mother-Earth resembles the geological strata they describe in her; or than a beautiful flower-garden blooms in botanical treatises; or than living men and women are pourtrayed in text-books of Anatomy and Physiology.

Many men of Science--and all the great ones--have been men of Mind as well as of Intellect. But the intellectual processes of Abstract Science are no more operations of Mind than the paths by which we climb to sun-illumined peaks are the Light upon those peaks. Mind is Spiritual Illumination--a glimmering of The Infinite, reflected in the highest and most subtle order of the brain-cells. Rays from it are deflected toward the concrete, to function as Intellection. But these rays enter the brain at a different angle from that of Mind-rays.

Like woman its medium, Mind is inspirational, wayward and elusive. It comes we know not whence. It goes we know not whither. Receptive, intuitive, creative, colourful, it may be unwitting of Astronomy, yet it roams amid the stars. Ignorant of Geology, in it Immortal, the dry-bones of The Past become immortal--arise eternally in everlasting re-creation.

Its Biology is in the lives and loves, the hopes and fears, the throes and tears of human souls and stories. It inspires the poet, priest, historian, romancist, artist; the seer and statesman; the philosopher and wondering child. It exalts the humble and meek. It may be lacking in the cleverest and most learned of men. It is found in the most ignorant and simple women; in whom it is dumb, however, failing the intellectual talent of expression.

VI

The Woman brain-half being medium, in its higher region, of that _Supra_-conscious emotionalism which engenders Mind, and in its lower region, of that _Sub_conscious emotionalism which engenders vital impulse in the body, woman's range of mentality is wider than is that of man; extending both higher and lower in its opposite reaches.

But because her Intelligent Consciousness is not inherent in her own brain-half, but is supplied by her borrowed masculine brain-half, her intelligence is more superficial, is weaker and less deep and strong of grip than is his. And when the gap between her upper and her lower registers is not duly bridged and stabilised by an efficient middle-register of male-intelligence, she tends toward two extremes of mentality, both of which are emotional. Thus she lives on the plane of her highest emotional impulses. Or she lives on the plane of her senses.

Some women act and re-act perpetually between these two extremes.

In her highest _Supra_-reaches, she is athrill with Supra-faculties. In her lowest _Sub_-register, she is instinct and palpitant with the colour, the magnetic vibrations and the blind forces of Matter, which her vital processes are evolving into Life.

Extremes which are shown, at the one end, in the reasonless animal emotionalism of hysteria, with its abandon of control, its inco-ordinated muscular movements, its senseless weepings, cries and laughter; at the other end, in catalepsy, in which she exists detached from earth and its material needs and consciousness, subsisting, it may be for weeks together, without food or drink, withdrawn into the Inner, and potential, zones of Life and Mind. So that, no longer subject to limitations of Matter, she perceives without aid of the senses, apprehends without aid of intelligence, discerns without help of the eyes, hears without instrumentality of ears. And Time and s.p.a.ce no longer circ.u.mscribing her essential faculties, she visions happenings at the Antipodes, overhears whispers across a Continent, recalls The Past, foretells The Future.

It is because of the potence of the Subconscious medium in her, instinct with the magnetic forces of Evolving Matter, that, in her intelligence, she shows as more materialistic than man is, although warmer and more quickened in her feelings.

Living personalities and issues mean to her more than intellectual abstractions do. She is more materialistic because she cares more for the things that matter! The puddings which in her children's young bodies will be trans.m.u.ted into living flesh and function, are to her of more significance than the Isosceles Triangle is.

(All that is true of the Woman brain-half must be true of the Woman brain-half in man. In him, however, his own hemisphere dominates the bent and faculty of its female counterpart.)

It is in the emotional impressionability of the Subconsciousness that habit, good and bad, is formed. Hence woman's native susceptibility to her environment--a susceptibility which renders indispensable due protection of her mind and nature during years when habits of thought and of conduct are shaping in her. Normal man, whose emotionalism is (like woman's intelligence) a borrowed faculty, differs essentially from her in this. His intelligence is inherent and more stably rooted. He is far less mimetic, far less a creature of circ.u.mstance. His firmer will and stronger intellect enable him to rise superior to environmental conditions, to shake himself free alike of habit and of circ.u.mstance; his pioneering spirit disposing him to new departures.

VII

Dual Personality, Catalepsy, Epilepsy, Shock, Insanity, Ch.o.r.ea are explicable as effects of abnormal dissociations or inherent discrepant relations between the two brain-hemispheres, which represent, respectively, Conscious (or objective) Intelligence, and Subconsciousness (which is subjective).

Such discrepancy occasioning confusion between the two planes of mentality, perception becomes so blurred that, as in insanity, _subjective_ impressions are perceived as _objective fact_. And some idea or spectre of his own mind becoming thus objective, and being seen out of all perspective with the facts and conditions of everyday life, the patient may be so haunted and dominated thereby that not only his mentality, but his actions too may take distorted shape.

While the Conscious Brain-half is a lens that focuses the Concrete, the _Sub_conscious Brain-half is a highly-sensitised mirror (or retina) that reflects and retains, in terms of potential Memory, all impressions and experiences. It becomes charged thus with a medley of strange and incongruous imprints, which, so long as the lens keeps these submerged and subconscious--because unfocused on the plane of consciousness--do not obtrude upon mentality. Flaws or failures in the lens of reason allowing certain imprints to emerge, these become fixed ideas and obsessions.

It is by way of the Subconsciousness, that the hypnotist impresses "suggestion."

Clairvoyants and other "mediums" employ crystal-gazing and other devices in order to fatigue, and thus to paralyse or inhibit the visual function on the outer plane of Sight. By such means, the Subconscious visual faculty comes into operation, and sets them _en rapport_ with their client's subconscious mentality. This becoming _objective_ to them, those endowed with the gift of "Second-Sight" (a faculty not to be denied) are able to visualise in it misty impressions of the subjects'

character, thoughts and circ.u.mstances. Those rare clairvoyants who are able to establish rapport with their client's Supra-consciousness may catch glimmerings of future events, even. Because Supra-conscious Mind, being Supra-Natural, is not bounded by the limitations of The Natural, in respect of Time and s.p.a.ce. In it, that which Was still Is, and that which Is-to-be already Has Been.

"Spiritists" who see or hear phenomena they attribute to "spirits" are (when such are genuine) for the most part visualising or overhearing phenomena of their own (or of some other's) Subconsciousness, which, owing to errors of refraction in the lens of Consciousness, have become _objective_ to them.

It may well be by way of magnetic vibrations communicated to Ether by the _Supra_ or the _Sub_consciousness, that apparitions and telepathic impressions are transmitted from the brain of one person to that of another. So too, apparitions seen of persons lately dead, and so-called spiritist "communications" with these, may be (when genuine) phenomena of such etheric vibrations communicated to the Supra or the Subconsciousness of a living person, and apprehended by him in the objective forms of "ghosts" or "voices."

Kindred vital and powerful electric vibrations emanating, at the moment of death, from the Subconsciousness of victims murdered, may so charge the etheric element of houses and localities as to be communicable, for long periods afterwards, to the Subconscious mentality of "sensitives,"

which serves thus as "wireless receiver." Such sensitives derive the impression that the scene of the tragedy is haunted by the actual "spirit" of the murdered.

It is as incredible, of course, that an immortal soul should be chained to the scene of the violent death of a mortal body as it is incredible that a "spirit" should be at the call of a "medium," who--perhaps, for a fee--should be able, at will, to summon it back to the plane of concrete conditions, in order that it might talk (for the most part) irrelevant nonsense.

On the other hand it is to be believed that, for a brief period after death, a spiritual ent.i.ty may remain sufficiently in touch with the material plane as to be able, by way of those Etheric undulations continuous through all the planes of Being, to manifest its existence to one in close sympathy with it.

VIII

In an article by me, "_Is Man an Electrical Organism?_" which appeared in _The Nineteenth Century_, July, 1914, I showed--on the evidence of careful and delicate experiments by an electrical expert--that the two sides of the body (and presumably of the brain) are of different electrical potential. The active, right side is _positively_ electrified, while the pa.s.sive, left side is _negatively_ electrified.

Mental Telepathy and Telaesthesia prove, surely, that brain and nerve-currents are electrical--one brain-hemisphere operating as transmitter, the other as receiver. Since Nature employs _one_ Law only to suspend the mighty solar systems of the Universe and to bring an apple to the ground, is it credible that she should employ _two_ laws for "Wireless" and for Human telegraphy, respectively?

The Hibernation both of animal and vegetative organisms shows two poles of vital function; Life and Consciousness pa.s.sing into the Recessive, or potential, mode during such winter-sleep. Plants sleep by night.

Is Sleep a recession merely from the state of Consciousness to the potential states of Sub- and Supra-consciousness? And do these two states alternate normally in the opposite halves of the brain, concurrently with the alternation of Day and Night? Night-blindness suggests such an alternation in the dual factors of Vision--which comprises the intrinsic _faculty_ of Vision and the concrete _function_ of visualising the external. Every concrete function normally wanes with the waning of Day.

Hence increasing drowsiness, pa.s.sing into Sleep.

Morning and evening mentality differ greatly. Intellect, reason and physical activity are paramount during the day. Emotion and imagination intensify with the approach of night.

Is this an alternation in function of the Male and Female brain-hemispheres, coincident with the alternation of the dual luminaries of our earth--the positive, unchanging Dominant Sun; the changeful Moon, with her Recessive phases and her mystical influences upon Life and Mind? The ante-natal life of the embryo is set in terms of lunar months. The word "lunatic" expresses the effects of lunar phases on persons of unstable mentality.

Whence do we derive our daily influx of Life? Though we have sunk to rest with dissolution in our bones, we awake re-charged with powers of living--a phenomenon for which Science has no explanation.

Life does not originate in vital processes; vital processes originate in Life. Do we, in sleep, when processes have exhausted our daily influx of Life-power, recruit this again from a psychical source? Are living processes the wick of a lamp which is filled with the Spirit of Life at each recurring dawn, spent by the day's endeavour, and re-filled again with the following dawn?

Failure of sleep kills more swiftly than starvation. And drug-insensibility will not preserve life unless natural sleep supervene.

If nervous energy is a complex form of electrical energy, then the brain in which this is stored is an electrical dynamo. Is this dynamo re-charged during sleep from some Occult Power-station?

Since, in every equation of Science, an unknown factor reveals itself, why not candidly confess this to be a Spiritual factor?

Spirit is no more a hypothetical medium than Ether is. And Science has been forced to a.s.sume the existence of Ether, as a basis for its calculations. Ether and Spirit are conceivably the same medium manifesting on different planes--the one of Physics, the other of Mind.

IX

According to Professor Clarapede:

"The intellect appears only as a makeshift, an instrument which betrays that the organism is not adapted to its environment, a mode of expression which reveals a state of impotence."

A saying which supports three clauses of my hypothesis: First, that the brain, with its tributary spinal-nervous system, is an instrument of Consciousness wholly differentiated from, and supplementary to the organism of Life. Secondly, that it is an instrument designed for the adaptation of the organism to environment (the role I have a.s.signed, throughout, to the male). Thirdly, that the organism of Life is not itself adapted to its environment, and that, accordingly, Adaptation to Environment cannot be regarded as the impulse of Evolutionary development, since the living organism has so far failed to adapt itself to environment that it requires a highly specialised instrument to serve as medium between itself and its surroundings.