Towards the Great Peace Part 9

[Ill.u.s.tration: DIAGRAM NO. 1. The interpenetration of Matter by Spirit.

_x,_ The primary Unknowable; _x',_ the ultimate Unknowable; _[Greek: alpha],_ the plane of Matter; _[Greek: beta],_ the plane of Life.]

Now there is eternally in process a penetration of the stratum of matter by jets of the _elan vital_ from the realm of pure spirit, each as it were striving to detach from the plane of matter some small portion, which is transformed in its pa.s.sage through life and achieves entrance into the ultimate unknowable, when the process of redemption is, for this small particle, completed. Always, however, is exerted the gravitational pull of matter, and the energy that drove through, instead of pursuing a right line, tends to bend in a parabolic curve, like the trajectory of a cannon ball. In the completion of the process some portion of redeemed matter "gets by," so to speak, but other portions do not; they return to their source of origin and are reabsorbed in matter, becoming subject to the operation of future interpenetrating jets of spiritual energy. The upward drive of the _elan vital_ const.i.tutes what may properly be known as evolution, the declining fall the process of devolution or degeneration. Evolution then is only one part of the cosmic process, it is inseparable from degeneration.

This process holds in the case of individuals, of families, of races, of states and of eras, or definite and completed periods of time. As man is begotten, born, developed to maturity and then is brought downward to the grave, so in the case of races and nations and the clearly defined epochs into which the history of man divides itself. There is no mechanical system of "progress," no c.u.mulative wisdom and power that in the end will inevitably lead to earthly perfection and triumph. For every individual there is the possibility of spiritual evolution within the time allotted that will open for him the gates that bar the frontiers of the world of reality and of redemption that lies beyond that world of earthly life which is the field of contest between unredeemed matter and redeeming spirit, of contest and of victory--or of failure. In the case of races and nations and epochs there is the same conflict between material factors and spiritual energy; the same crescent youth with all its primal vitality, maturity with its a.s.surance and competence, and the dying fall of dissipating energies. In each case death is the concomitant of life but there is always something that lasts over, and that is the spiritual achievement, the precious residuum that remains, defying death and dissolution, that infuses the plane of life with its redemptive ardour, and is the heritage of lives that come after, acting with the sacramental agencies of religion in cooperation with G.o.d Who ordained and compa.s.sed them both, in that great process of redemption and salvation that is continually taking place and will continue until matter, and time which is but the ratio of the resistance of matter to the redeeming power of spirit, shall be no more.

I confess the hopelessly mechanical quality in this vain attempt to put into words something that by its very nature must transcend all modes of expression that are intellectually apprehendable. Taken literally it would be entirely false and probably heretical from a theological point of view, as it certainly is more than inadequate as a philosophical proposition. It is intended only as a symbol, and a gross symbol at that, but as such I will let it stand.

Now if there is indeed a possible truth hidden somewhere within somewhat clumsy approximations, it must modify some of our generally accepted ideas. The life-process will appear, not a slow, interrupted, but substantially forward development from lower and simpler organisms to higher and more complex, with the end (if there be an end), beyond the very limits of eternity, but rather a swift creation of some of the highest forms through the first energy of the creative force, with the throwing off of ever lower and lower forms as the curve of the trajectory descends. So through a ma.s.s of low and static vitality comes the sudden and enormous power that produces at the very beginnings of our own recorded history of man, the almost superhuman intelligence and capacity of the Greeks and the Egyptians. So each of the definite eras of civilization opens with the releasing of great energies, the revealing of great figures of paramount character and force. So, conversely, as the energy declines, men appear less and less potent and in a descending scale. This is the case with the Greek states, with the Roman Republic and the Empire, with Byzantium, with

Mediaevalism, and with our modern era. I do not know of any other theory that claims to explain the perpetual and rhythmical fluctuations of history, as violent in their degree as they are approximately regular in their rhythm.

Following the idea a little further, it may even appear that many of the lower, and particularly the more distorted, forms of animal life, instead of being abortive or undeveloped stages in a continuous evolutionary progress, are actually the product of a diminishing energy, stages in a process of degeneration, and therefore leading not upward to ever higher stages of development having issue at last in a completed perfection, but rather downward to ultimate extinction. Geology records this process in sufficient quant.i.ty, so far as many members of the animal kingdom are concerned, and we, in our own day, have seen the extinction of the dodo as well as the threatened disappearance of other species. Creeping and crawling creatures too, that we could crush with the heel, are but the last and puny descendants of mighty and terrible monsters that once rolled and crashed through the fetid forests of the carboniferous era. So there are races of men today, amongst others the pygmies of Africa and the Australian bushmen, as well as some nearer in a certain degree to the dominant races of the world, whom large-hearted optimists regard as stages of r.e.t.a.r.ded development, capable, under tutelage, of advance to a level with the Caucasian, but who, in this view of the case, would be but the weakening product of the "dying fall"

of the energy that produced the Greek, the Semite and the Nordic stocks.

So in the last instance, the ape and the lemur and all their derivatives may be, not records of some of the many stages through which man has pa.s.sed in his process of evolution, sidetracked by the upward rush of one highly favoured or fortunate line, nor yet an abortive branch from the common trunk from which sprang both man and ape, but rather the last degradation of a primaeval energy, producing in its declension these strange caricatures of the Man in whose production it found its achievement. In other words, the old evolutionary idea is exactly reversed, and those phenomena once looked on as pa.s.sed stages of growth, become the memorials of a creative process that has already achieved, and is now returning, with its fantastic manifestations in terms of declining life, even to that primordial mystery whence it had emerged.

Granting this theory, the search for the "missing link," whether in the geological strata below those that revealed the Piltdown skull, or in the fastnesses of Central Asia, is as vain a quest as it has always been. Primaeval man, as he is grudgingly revealed to us, may have been the degenerate remainder of an earlier and fully developed race whose records are buried in the sunken fastnesses of some vanished Atlantis or Lemuria, as the races of the South Sea Islands may be less metamorphosed remnants of the same stock. Into this infinitely degraded residuum of a vanished race entered the new energizing force when the divine creative energy came once more into operation, in the fullness of time, and the Minoan, the Egyptian and the Greek came almost in an hour to their highest perfection. So through the unnumbered ages of the world's history, G.o.d has from time to time created man in His own image, out of the dust of the earth, and man so made "a little lower than the angels"

has, also in time, fallen and forfeited his inheritance. Yet the process goes on without ceasing, and in conformity with some law of divine periodicity; but it is _Man_ that is created in the beginning, of his full stature, even as is symbolically recorded in the Book of Genesis; not a hairy quadrumana that by the operation of the laws of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, ultimately and through endless ages, and by the most infinitesimal changes, becomes at last Plato and Caesar, Leonardo and Dante, St. Louis and Shakespeare and St.

Francis.

Now in this process of the interpenetration of matter by spirit there must be a certain periodicity, if it is a constant process and not one accomplished once and for all time in the very beginnings of the world.

This rhythmical action, which is exemplified by every phenomenon of nature, the vibratory process of light, sound, heat, electricity, the pulsation of the heart, the motion of the tides, has never escaped the observation even of primitive peoples, and always attempts have been made to determine its periodicity. May it not be infinitely complex, as the ripple rises on the wave that lifts on the swell of the underlying tide? Certainly we are now being forced back to a new consideration of this periodical beat, in history at least, for now that our own era, which came in by the power of the Renaissance and the Reformation and received its final energizing force through the revolutions of the eighteenth century and the industrial revolution of the nineteenth, is so manifestly coming to its end, we look backward for precedents for this unexpected debacle and lo, they appear every five hundred years back as far as history records. 500 B.C., Anno Domini; 500 A.D., 1000 A.D., and 1500 A.D. are all, to the point of very clear approximation, nodal points, where the curve of the preceding five centuries, having achieved its crest, curves downward, and in its fall meets the curve of rising energy that is to condition the ensuing era. The next nodal point, calculated on this basis, comes about the year 2000. Are we not justified, in plotting our trajectory of modernism, in placing the crest in the year 1914, and in tracing the line of fall from that moment?

I have plotted this curve, or series of curves, after a rough and ready fashion (Diagram No. 2) and though the personal equation must, in any subjective proposition such as this, enter largely into account, I think the diagram will be accepted in principle if not in details, and not wholly in its relationships. I have made no effort to estimate or indicate comparative heights and depths, giving to each five-hundred year epoch a similar level of rise and depth of fall. Perhaps the actual difference here would, rightly estimated, be less than we have been led to believe, though certainly few would lift the Carolingian crest to the level of that of h.e.l.lenism or of the Middle Ages, nor a.s.sign to the end of this latter period as low a fall as that accomplished during the tenth century in continental Europe.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DIAGRAM No. 2. The rise and fall of the line of civilization; showing also the nodal points at the Christian Era and at the years 500, 1000, 1500 and 2000 (?)]

In a third cut (Diagram No. 3) I have roughly indicated in conventional form a phenomenon which seems to me to show itself around the nodal point when a descending curve of energy meets and crosses the descending line. As the _elan vital_ that has made and characterized any period declines, it throws off reactions, the object of which is if possible to arrest, or at least delay, the fatal _glissade._ These are, in intent and in fact, reforms; conscious efforts at saving a desperate situation by regenerative methods. Trace back their lines of procedure, and in every case they will be found to issue out of the very force which is even then in process of degeneration, therefore they are poisoned at the source and no true or vital reforms, for the sudden energy that urges them is, after all, in no respect different from that which is already a failing force.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DIAGRAM No. 3. The reactions thrown off by (a) the descending line of vital force, (b) by the ascending line.]

This, I conceive, is why today the mult.i.tudinous and specious "reforms,"

which beat upon us from all sides, and find such ready acceptance in the enactments of law, are really no reforms at all, since each one of them is but an exaggeration or distortion of the very principles and methods that already are bending downward the curve of our progression until it disappears in the nether-world of failure, as did those of every preceding epoch of equal duration. An example of what I mean is the astute saying, frequently heard nowadays: "The cure for democracy is more democracy."

Now while one curve descends and throws off its reformative reactions in the process, the other is ascending, preparatory to determining the coming era for its allotted s.p.a.ce of five centuries. In this process it also throws off its own reactions, but these are for the purpose of lifting the line more rapidly, bringing its force into play before its determined time. These also are exaggerations, over-emphasized qualities that are inherent in the ascending force, and they are no more to be accepted as authoritative than are the others. They have their value however, for they are prophetic, and even in their exaggeration there is the clear forecast of things to be. Trace them in turn to the source.

What is their source? The new power issues out of obscurity and its character is veiled, but we can estimate it from the very nature of the exaggerated reactions we _can_ see. If something shows itself, in sociology, economics, politics, religion, art, what you will, that is especially a denial of what has been a controlling agency during the past four or five hundred years: if it is by common consent impractical and "outside the current of manifest evolutionary development," then, shorn of its exaggerations, reduced to its essential quality, it is very probably a clear showing forth of what is about to come to birth and condition human life for the next five hundred years. This, I suppose, explains the comprehensive return to Medievalism that, to the scorn of biologists, sociologists and professors of political economy, is flaunting itself before us today, at the hands of a very small minority, in all the categories I have named, as well as in many others besides.

A glance at the diagram will show a curious pattern round about the nodal point. One may say that the reactions are somewhat mixed. Quite so. At this moment we are beaten upon by numberless reforms, both "radical" and "reactionary." Materialism, democracy, rationalism, anarchy contending against Medievalism of twenty sorts, and strange mysticisms out of the East. Which shall we choose, _if_ we choose, and do not content ourselves with an easier inertia that allows nature to take its course? It is simply the question; On which wave will you ride; that which is descending to oblivion or that which has within itself the power and potency to control man's destiny for the next five hundred years?

APPENDIX B

CERTAIN BOOKS SUGGESTED FOR COLLATERAL READING

ADAMS, HENRY Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres.

ADAMS, HENRY Degradation of the Democratic Dogma.

BAUDRILLART, A. Catholic Church, Renaissance and Protestantism.

BELL, BERNARD IDDINGS Right and Wrong after the War.

BELLOC, HILAIRE The Servile State.

BRYCE, VISCOUNT Modern Democracies.

BULL, PAUL B. The Sacramental Principle.

CHESTERTON, G.K. Orthodoxy.

CHESTERTON, G.K. What's Wrong with the World.

CHESTERTON, G.K. The Napoleon of Notting Hill.

CONKLIN, E.G. The Direction of Human Evolution.

CRAM, R.A. The Nemesis of Mediocrity.

CRAM, R.A. Walled Towns.

CRAM, R.A. The Ministry of Art.

CRAM, R.A. The Great Thousand Years.

f.a.gUET, E. The Cult of Incompetence.

FERRERO, G. Europe's Fateful Hour.

FIGGIS, J.N. Civilization at the Cross Roads.

FIGGIS, J.N. The Will to Freedom.

FIGGIS, J.N. Political Aspects of St. Augustine's "City of G.o.d."

GENUNG, J.F. The Life Indeed.

GRAHAM, STEPHEN Priest of the Ideal.

HARRISON, McVEIGH Daily Meditations.

HUBBARD, A.J. The Fate of Empires.

IRELAND, ALLEYNE Democracy and the Human Equation.