though irresistible, with which we listen to, even ferret out, the unsuspected past shadinesses or follies of those who were once our friends. Hence in this war, the instantaneous belief, on the part equally of both contending parties, in plots against the peace of the world, long existing military preparation to pounce upon unsuspecting neighbours, or, as the Germans believed about the Entente, to strangle and starve by diplomatic and commercial encirclements. Some of which suspicions by coincidence, become historically correct, but they may, are believed not because of the real evidence or real logical probability; they are believed because our feelings insist on such belief. The facts may be real, the belief is delusion. * Nor is this all. When it happens that in the incalculable intricacy of the past, our feelings allow us to perceive, or put us on the scent of certain real qualities or events, these are but torn-off shreds of the vast real web, threads loosened from the others; or rather-for life cannot be dealt with in metaphors of inorganic things-they are minute living fibres which have taken their very existence from other delusions, which themselves escape our notice, either because we are too intent upon the virtuous or poisonous quality we are looking for, or because the recognition of those real origins would make us pause, would bring up short our hatred or our self-righteousness. For in our search for further proof of guilt, we may, we should, in proportion to the honesty of our search, light upon responsibilities, common crimes and follies, of our own; at least upon the disconcerting fact, turning us to stone unless looked at (like the Gorgon's head) in our own private glass: the fact of common beginnings and common human nature. And so, lest our feelings be checked, our acts arrested, frozen in mid-course by that intolerable aspect, we safeguard our passion which is our present life, by looking at Reality only in the mirror of Delusion. X There is another reason also why feeling is perpetually at loggerheads with Reality. It ignores the fact that Reality * The vindictiveness of the armistice-blockade and of the Peace conditions constitutes such a coincidence. implies change; and it does so because one of its own essential accompaniments is the delusory sense of its own eternal and unchangeable nature. Passionate feeling is conscious of nothing but itself and its object, that is to say of its own present; and it blots out all realization of other and less vehement states. Moreover, by the law of psychic co-ordination and unification, which Karl Groos has aptly called the monarchical constitution of the mind, the feeling which is dominant refuses to recognize anything which does not submit and minister to its aggrandisement. He is but a half-hearted lover who can believe that his love can ever be less; and the angry man who knows that his anger will not last beyond sunset is not a formidable enemy. Similarly when Faust called upon the Consummate Moment, bidding it stay, he evidently did not remember that his own desire might move on. Indeed one is tempted to think that it is from its brief bouts of passion that mankind has evolved its belief in eternity and unchangeableness. Volume and intensity of feeling, although in truth the heralds of change and re-action (since they wear out the very powers they elicit), become, to those who experience them, the warrant of permanence. Can any man think green while the stared-at patch of scarlet burns his nerves? Yet it is that very burning which, a minute later, obliges his eye to see upon the white wall not a red after-image, but a green one. Similarly do passion's optics blind us to Reality's essential characteristic: Reality's continual, inevitable change. And in the matter especially of this Ballet of the Nations, the angry combatants cannot believe that their anger will ever lessen or seek another object—as has happened with those French allies of ours, who, twenty years ago, in Fashoda days, were enemies with whom we nearly were at war. The knowledge of the unceasing flow of change in all things, molecules and atoms dancing vertiginously in and out of their places in space; and coupled with it the knowledge of the inevitable illusion whereby our passion feels itself and its objects undying and unchangeable-it is this knowledge of the reality of change and unreality of stability which makes one shrug one's shoulder at all talk of guaranteeing future security by crushing, wiping out an enemy; for even while that talk is going on, the whirling complexities of things may be transforming that enemy into the ally, or rather into the friend (for let us have no more allies, for God's sake!), of the future. Make the future secure ! padlock and double-lock it; glue and nail it to its place, the place we think it safe in! Meanwhile we ourselves and our wishes and interests are being swept along, leaving nothing behind save our burnt-out desires and animosities; and facing perpetually new contingencies and unguessed dangers. ΧΙ June, 1917. I have tried to show how our feelings stealthily influence our views for the sake of self-consistence, self-respect, and, more precious still, devotion to whatever we love best. There are more obvious and grosser cases where feeling prompts action and where that action itself requires a fresh output of feeling for its continuance or its efficiency. The recent advertisement of a picture-palace openly proclaims this psychological truth: "You can't put up a good fight," it warns the passing patriot, "unless your blood boils;" and to this end bids him come to see 66 The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin," at the Scala Theatre. It is indeed difficult to fight one's battle while admitting that oneself, to whatever small an extent, may have been to blame for the occurrence. It is even more difficult to induce others to fight by saying: "We have got into such a mess that, willy-nilly, we must fight tooth and nail or get the worst of it." Still more impossible to admit that the adversary also is in a mess, and that it is our fighting him which obliges him to fight us and vice versa. Fighting implies fighting for one's own just cause. Certain states of the nerves, nay of the muscles, are incompatible with certain thoughts; a clenched fist, for instance, with the notion that there is something to be said for the other side. L CONFUSION I As he himself has pointed out, Satan's choicest ministers, Delusion and Confusion, most often hunt in couples; whence a difficulty in dealing with each separately. That Delusion is the master (or rather mistress) of the two, Confusion invariably obeying and almost always requiring to take a lead from her, is a hopeful sign that the Primæval Chaos and Old Night are, after all, shrinking and receding from the human soul. It means that mankind has already stocked up a common store of wisdom, such that, whenever their interests are immediately concerned, even the dullest people can be trusted to show a minimum thereof, always provided they are not forbidden its use by preference and aversion, in the acute form of passion or the chronic one of prejudice. Where either or both of these deluding forces come into play, as when the subject is Religion, or War, what happens is that people purposely forget to pay their tribute to common-sense, just as, according to Dr. Freud, subconscious avarice make his patients occasionally forget to pay their fees. At any rate, what people really want, on similar occasions, is to go on talking, feeling and acting in the way that they're inclined to, without making too sure what it is all about. And thus Delusion calls in Confusion. II Having thus explained why and in what manner Delusion and Confusion hunt in couples, I hasten to add that Confusion does not really hunt at all, takes no exercise worth speaking of, is, in fact, torpid like the Primæval Chaos and Old Night whose sway in our minds is handed down to her. There is an attractive, splendid, majestic side to Delusion, reconciling one, for all its mischievous folly, to the recognition that, in one form or other, in the case for instance of mothers, lovers, and many kinds of genius, Delusion will never cease attendance on the human race. But there is nothing the least attractive about Confusion, except to professional mythologists. And even the complicated and often sanguinary muddles of ritual and myth are due to hasty logic, quite as much as to the dull takings-for-granted to which that logic is applied. Be this as it may, Confusion, being nine-tenths of it dullness, is a dull subject, and I wish I could pass it by with the disdainful "non ragioniam di lor" of Virgil about those sinners who sinned from never having been quite alive. But when dull things are also mischievous, one must not yield to that temptation. And having mentioned those denizens of Hell "che non fur mai vivi," I can begin by saying that theirs is precisely the essential sin of Confusion, and what differentiates it principally from Delusion, which, arising in feeling and resulting in action, may be said to be too alive by far, though alive with the transient narrowed life of the Ego, or rather of the Ego's Here and Now. Left to itself (though that rarely happens), Confusion is inert. Incuriously and torpidly it acquiesces in all the heapings-up of casual experience, dully expects that to-morrow must be like to-day; takes a single case as sufficient to make a rule; identifies the post hoc with the propter; and having partaken of beans and bacon on the same plate, imagines no other possible classification of those products of the vegetable and animal worlds. It does not understand, because it does not divide the thing to be understood into its constituent elements; still less, of course, does it ever weigh, shuffle and recombine such elements in its imagination, for it has no more imagination than it has analysis. It learns to look alive only by hitting itself in divers unexpected directions; and ten to one goes on attributing the responsibility for such bruises to the chairs and tables; or making an effort, it thinks (as primitive religions taught) that the chairs and tables must have had some spite against it.* * Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion, page 25, gives a good example of this primæval, primordial kind of Confusion, showing its lazy or at least helpless character: "The process of making winds and rivers into anthropomorphic Gods is, for the most part, not the result of using the imagination with special vigour. not doing so. The wind is obviously alive. Why naturally just as you and I blow. going to make a great effort of the imagination to It is the result of it blows; how? And unless we are try to realize, like a |
