Logic Taught by Love. Mary Everest Boole

they ever rightly understand us); but every now and then we are made to feel that some magnetism is coming forth from the incomprehensible Race, which acts as a solvent to our metaphysical perplexities; which is the witness to and preparation for a Life higher than anything we can conceive.

      The complex and variable relation between Jews and Gentiles, so unutterably sweet in some aspects, so bitter often, so unsettled and incomprehensible always, seems to be one chief means by which Humanity is being made fit for the rapture of intelligent comprehension, and able to look into the Face of Love.

      The Race of Israel is the hereditary priesthood of that Unity whose action is Pulsation. There is another such priesthood: occasional, unrecognized, consecrated by no hand but that of suffering, marked out by no special observance except that of being always peculiar everywhere; High Priests for ever after that order to which all official priesthoods are forced, sooner or later, to do homage. Out of the deeps they have called; and Truth has heard. Where steady health sees solid things ​and enduring systems, the sick often perceive, instead, a shimmering palpitation.

      The man of whom it is said that he made the greatest advance in Logic since Aristotle, said of himself, that no one could do certain kinds of work unless he would consent to be ill. The majority decide, of course, that the perceptions of illness are "abnormal"; in old days these abnormal perceptions were called "miraculous." The name matters little; the important thing for us is to see that we do not waste the gifts that God sends through suffering.

      Jesus, the High Priest of Pulsation, offered himself to death rather than support any one-sided rights or any fixed doctrine. And having been slain by one set of idolaters, He was made into the object of sensational worship by another set. And now, as ever, the teachers of the Eternal Logos are alone on the earth; and yet we are not alone, because the Father is with us, and all the Seers who went before us.

      If we sorrow overmuch about the idolatry of our brethren, do not we thus prove ourselves to be also idolaters who would arrest the natural Pulsations? For the conflict between Seers of New Truth and the lovers of fixed ideas is the very palpitation of human life, the great witness to the doctrine that progress takes place by pulsation.

      In some of the following Chapters an attempt is made to picture past episodes in the conflict between the Logos-Seers and their antagonists; in others, suggestions are offered of means whereby that very conflict might be converted into an orderly and peaceable mental gymnastic.

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      The Natural Symbols of Pulsation

       Table of Contents

      CHAPTER II

      THE NATURAL SYMBOLS OF PULSATION

      Heaven and Earth declare the wonder of His Work.

      The History of early religions is very much a history of the successive introductions into public worship of various symbols, by means of which the Seers hoped to make the masses realize the perpetual Flux or Pulsation which underlies the phenomena of Nature. The Seer perceives the Law of Pulsation by observing a certain phenomenon; that phenomenon becomes for him interesting; he tries to make the masses share his interest in it, as a revelation of Nature's fundamental Law; the masses lose sight of the idea of pulsation, and get up an idolatrous (i.e. fixed) tension on the symbol itself. To the pure in heart who see the Logos, all things are pure, because all things suggest the ineffable "process of becoming"; and those things are naturally sacred to any man, and an object of religious reverence, which most vividly suggest it to him. But to the masses things are not thus pure; because they see, in each thing, not the Creative Logos, but some special quality which is, or which they suppose to be, the especial characteristic of that object. Each Seer tries to break up the association of special Sanctity which clings round the symbol employed by his predecessor; in all good faith and innocence he tries to teach Flux-doctrine by some new symbol; and so the process begins again. It has in various forms gone on throughout the History not only of religion, but of all the intellectual and moral ​life of the world; it is made intelligible by studying those natural objects which at various times have been associated with religious ceremonies.

The movements of the Heavenly Bodies revealed to the Seers some mighty Principle of rhythmic motion; those whom they tried to indoctrinate with this idea worshipped Sun and Moon and Stars. The Seers erected stones to facilitate consecutive observation of the heavenly motions; the people supposed those stones to be possessed of magic virtues. It would seem that at some time in the world's history the process of becoming was taught chiefly by reference to vegetable growth. The people attached fantastic ideas to the grotesque forms of certain vegetable objects. Then the Seers selected for use in teaching certain trees distinguished by the absence of tendency to grow into suggestive shapes, and which exhibit in a severely simple form the main laws of growth.^[1] The idolaters constituted these particular trees or plants sacred. Then the Seers ordered the sacred plants to be burned in homage to the Unseen Cause of growth; the masses made an idolatrous ceremonial out of the very act of destroying a sacred Symbol. The Seers would seem then to have turned from the vegetable, which only grows, and whose growth can only be inferred, not seen, to the animal, in which the life-process reveals itself by visible motion. To the medical priest, who, by dissecting a ram's heart, has caught the secret of the throbbing of his own heart, the ram is henceforward a sacred object. The mass of mankind are, however, not easily interested ​in abstruse and as yet imperfectly developed physiological theories; to them, a ram is—a beast of certain shape. They see his form, but not the pulsating force which constitutes his life; and, of all that the enthusiast has told them, they remember nothing, except that when they say their prayers they are to look at a ram. From that to the worship of a ram-god is an easy step for the unthinking multitude.

      When the sacred beast dies, Superstition makes of him a mummy, so as to preserve as much of him as can be preserved. The Seer orders him to be burned in honour of The Unseen Giver of Life. The masses attach superstitious ideas to the very fire that consumes the offering. The Seer orders that part of the flesh shall be consumed, not by the fire, but by the very worshippers; the masses make the meal a superstitious observance. Some Seer tries to show that the important thing in the beast is not his death, but the lessons drawn from the palpitating entrails which reveal the secret of life; the next generation declares that the Prophet drew auguries from the entrails.

Another Seer tells how mere tension on the lessons of the past is idolatrous and barren, and mere following of one's personal inspirations is dangerous and misleading; that he alone is a true Prophet by whose head converge the two streams of instruction, inspiration and tradition, as two birds may fly from distant points of the horizon.^[2] Posterity says that the great man of old taught how to gather knowledge from the flight of birds. And so on, ever round and round the same weary circle, the Seers rolling up the Sisyphus-stone towards ​true enlightenment; the masses ever plunging back into idolatry and carnalism.

      There was in old times one practical difficulty connected with the conflict, which may well account for the eagerness of ancient Prophets to put an end to idolatrous conceptions. To every genuine philosopher the symbols of certain physical functions are among the most sacred of all objects, as being the perennial witness that the Logos is with man; and not with man only, but with all Creation. But the masses can see nothing in these objects except the symbols of certain pleasurable sensations; and if they are taught to think intently of them, they make their religion consist in the stimulation of mere sensation. This has been the cause of numberless disorders, and excuses much Prophetic injustice and bigotry on the subject of Idolatry.

      The Founders of Judaism desired that the People should be taught, as far as possible, by symbols possessing in a very marked manner the property of evanescence. The Sun and Moon, the symbols of pure Light, had been degraded to idolatrous purposes; Moses seems to have tried to make his people feel that some phosphorescent material, which shone only rarely, was more truly sacred than the Sun and moon. In fact, the Mosaic religion may be described as one which abjures, as far as possible, the consecration of colour-and-form manifestations which