ferred because it has become consubstantial with our own life and feeling. It is in this sense that each individual of us, however paltry, is the centre of the whole universe for which he sacrifices himself and others. And in the widening of this circle, whereof his feeling self is for each the centre, lies all that mankind has achieved, all the virtue and wisdom of which mankind is capable. VII I have shrunk from naming Love among the Players in Satan's Orchestra, although I have given a hint, speaking of the comrade seeking to avenge his comrade and the mother sending forth her last son that the other ones may not have died for naught, that this greatest and most protean of all passions has, as the current saying goes, done its bit to keep up the war. That much, however we may wish to blink it, is evident; indeed, not being to be blinked, is put as a merit to Love's account. There remains a subtler manner in which Love, so oddly transforming back and forwards into Revenge, has served the purposes of Satan. And that is as a begetter of Delusion. I have pointed out the unavowed, constant, irresistible action on our ideas and judgments of those vague groups of feelings, ever on the alert, ever exposed to hurt, which concern the individual self. It is the nature of all Love-love of persons, country, stocks and stones, aims and creeds-to enclose its objects into the outer, but equally sensitive, self which every living soul spins round its private core; connecting them with our innermost feeling by spiritual nerves so sensitive that a rough touch on them, merely an irreverent gesture aimed against their bare thought or name, sends the blood to our cheeks or brings a knot into our throat. This being the case, the objects of our love, nay rather the idea of those objects, call forth the defensive automatism of Delusion. More intolerable than our own sense of diminution, is the feeling that what we love is weighed and found wanting. We can, some of us, at rare intervals, admit our own nothingness, recognize the meanness of our spirit, the hopeless self-contradiction, even hypocrisy, of our thoughts and lives. To recognize any such blemishes and alloys in those we love is far more difficult, if only because our deepest pride refuses to admit that what we adore is rubbish. Hence much tampering with our standards, habits, instincts; casuistry often silently formulated to ourselves in order to save the object of our love from such desecrating doubt, from such discrimination between nobler and baser elements as breaks what love insists on most: the unity of the loved object. In time of war, particularly, a man may readily admit that, personally, he is not noble nor even honest; but he will fly out at your smallest suggestion that his country, that the aggregate of individuals whom he usually ignores and mainly despises, headed by individuals, Lloyd George or Carson, whom he may positively hate, can possibly be at fault. His country is in him; he is part of it; and that emotional participation makes him far more sensitive in its honour than in his own. Hence my country right or wrong always turns into my country which never is or can be other than right; since who has ever consciously defended a bad cause or admittedly clung to a worthless thing? And this produces manifold war delusions, both of commission of falsehood and omission of truth. Hence also inability to recognize the intricate reciprocity of all causes of war and all conduct of war; amazing blindness to the symmetrical irony of war's realities; the grim farce of girding against autocracy in Germany when we had allied ourselves with, indeed were indirectly drawn into war by the deeds of, the incomparably worse autocracy of Russia. Similarly the talk of exacting justice to small nationalities from our enemies when we never stirred a finger to save Jews or Finns from our Allies; indeed when, despite the supplications of liberal Russia, we had lent our money to help the Tzar to flout his Dumas. All such keenness to the mote in the neighbour's eye and blindness to the beam in our own is part of the unceasing play of those self-regarding feelings I have tried to deal with. Love, love of country, class, ideas, aims, love of son, brother, husband, brings the doings and characters of others within that warm outer sphere of our feelings. It makes them partake of our innermost self, links them up with our centres of magnification and diminution, and obliges us to be as deluded about others as we naturally are about ourselves. Indeed it has often seemed to me that if, in this country at least, so many of those who most distrusted and despised the notion of settling anything by violence, have yet come to endure, acquiesce, and at last exult in, war; if especially so many of our women, to whom slaughter of other women's children is almost physiologically odious, have come to look without a shudder, rather with pride in their eyes, at the armless, legless creatures sent back from France; and have learned to read with complacency accounts of such doings as should have turned a butcher sick, this has been due originally to the love which each of those women has borne to a husband, nay even more to a son or a brother; due to the delusion that what he did could not be otherwise than innocent, nay holy; the delusion wherewith their love has protected itself against desecration. Thus love, the love of self-effacing noble mothers, of tender and reserved sisters, that wonderful passion where sex is sublimated into sexlessness, has, like indignation and pity, kept Satan's ballet going with its steady, subdued voice, so exquisitely in tune, of such unearthly purity of timbre. Oh, more than by nursing the wounded, manufacturing surgical appliances and turning out and filling shells which scatter entrails and whole villages, have the women of all belligerent countries participated by their love, their love delusion, in the slaughter and ruin and hatred of these war-years! October, 1918. VIII We are all of us (and that is part of Delusion's evil work) so apt to misinterpret the words of our intellectual opponents, that I am a little afraid of being supposed to treat with contempt or censoriousness the hidden life of the feelings. Let me therefore say that I hold it to be the most venerable among all the mysteries of human nature, and that without it we should neither perceive nor act. Moreover, these innermost feelings are essentially ourself. My only quarrel with them is when, begetting Delusion, they prevent our seeing, recognizing, respecting, other things and other selves, and thereby frustrate the co-operation required with and from the great multifold otherness which is what I mean by Reality. IX One reason why they do so, why our inner life of feeling does so easily interfere with our knowledge of reality, is that reality is intricate, while our feelings are comparatively simple. Reality has many sides, faces and facettes, many dimensions of time as well as space, many competing as well as collaborating appeals; whereas our feelings, taken at any single moment, are unified in a single imperative. Hence they can come in contact with, grasp and hold, only the smallest number of the aspects which reality offers, and naturally only those for which they have a use. This inevitable omission, and the consequent concentration of certain selected qualities and aspects, accounts sufficiently for much delusion; delusion for which Reality imposes a penalty, since what our feelings have omitted does not exist any the less, acts none the less, and will, sooner or later, force itself, sometimes cruelly, on our unwariness. Moreover-and this point is not sufficiently insisted upon by our philosophers-Reality is not merely actual; it is potential. Esse est percipi posse. When we speak of a thing having real existence, we do not mean merely that at this present fraction of time it is acting, or acted on, in a given manner; we mean that it has acted or been acted upon, come into existence, undergone certain changes in the past, without which it would not be there such as it is by definition; and, more important still, we mean that, present circumstances being altered in a specified manner, there will be manifested certain other qualities or actions implied in our idea of that thing, and without which it would be not that one but another: the rose is not developing from its original seed or cutting, putting out leaves, opening out petals, under our eyes; but it must have done all these things unless it was no real rose, but a painted or paper one; similarly we are not necessarily at present either inhaling its fragrance or being pricked by its thorns, but the possibility of both these happenings, cæteris paribus, are included in its being a rose. Reality is composed of what one might call an incorporated past and an unfoldable future; and, since the present is but a point, that past and that future constitute far the larger proportion of all real things and persons; and in order to know these, we must correctly recognize at least a part of their past and correctly foretell at least a part of their future. Now this is what feeling, by which I mean all the unclassified emotional tendencies no less than the well-defined emotions and passions-this is what feeling often prevents. Feeling is present, often very fleetingly present; but while present, predominant; and it is concerned only with present aspects. The past and future ones, the aspects which we have to remember, or to foretell, it either neglects, or else recalls and foretells as a mere homogeneous prolongation, backwards or forwards, of that present: to the eyes of love, the unamiable past qualities, the disquieting future ones, of the beloved object, do-not exist; no decent person can think of a friend or lover as an embryo or a corpse; and yet those two are aspects inevitably implied in the very existence of every man or woman. Similarly hatred is unable to realize that the nation we are at present endeavouring to crush is the friend and ally of the past, and must become the economic partner, buyer or seller, the scientific and philosophical collaborator, perhaps once more the dear artistic benefactor in the future. All this means that our feelings are whittling away our notion of Reality; it means delusion by a simple omission. But the mind abhors a vacuum; and where feeling omits, it also replaces; and naturally replaces with what is congruous, hence seems natural, to itself: the beloved has always been radiantly lovable and ever will be; the enemy has always been (even if secretly) odious, or else being odious now will remain odious until, well!... until he shall have been purged and transformed in the fire of our wrath. Hence, in private concerns the avidity, often humiliating to ourselves |
