Idealist Science.—1. Oneself.—2. The Changeling.—3. The Gospel of Imagination—4. The Parable of Life. WE have now made the passage from thoughts to things, or from words to reality. The whirl-swirl is no longer a mathematical figure. We have found it embodied within a greater Whirl-Swirl, without which it could not be. So far I have spoken of these two realities as the Strength Within and the Strength Without. The names in vulgar use are Soul and God. We see already that it is not the task of the Idealist to prove that there are such things as a Soul and a God. Even if there could be such a thing as proof, it could not prove the beginnings of proof. There are the two points from which we begin to reckon. They are the elements of the mind. To try to prove them is like trying to lift the fulcrum by means of the lever. In establishing these two forethoughts I have worked, not as an idealist, but as an ontologist—as a learner of what words mean. I have been cutting open words and looking inside them, no more than that. Uttered by the devout Thomas Paine as a rebuke to the idolators of Mediterranean manuscripts, that saying is true. But it is not the whole truth. It is just one-fourth of the truth. As we have seen, the Outer Strength flows in and out of the Inner Strength, whirling as sense, and swirling as emotion. The swirl is as much a revelation as the whirl, and Ideal science is the science of emotion. It is because the manuscripts are a precious record of emotion, I seem to be in the same case with the wild man who said there was a man inside the steam-engine, and with the learned men who thought there was a man inside their stones and crumbs, although they would not say so. I have been talking of the Inner Strength, when I meant the Man Inside. It is a very common case to be in, though few of us are so frank about it as the wild man. We have seen how hard the chemists and the physicists tried to hide their men, and how cunningly Euclid hid the man who moved his flying triangle. Man, as Protagoras put it, is the measure of Everything. That is the human equation which no Copernicus can do away with. Man measures all things from himself
Let us not think of word-lore as fixed, nor of words as dead flowers stuck into a book. Let us not think of even their shells as artificial carpentry, like the false coins daily issuing from the Babu mint, or the unheard-of exercises of language-makers. Even the Roman words that have struck true roots into our northern speech did so because they found congenial soil; the water ran where there were channels for it; the marriages were between far-off kinsmen. And so the new clothes partly followed the old fashions, and the old clothes partly followed the new. Let us thank philology, and beware of it. Some one has guessed that Self is shortened from soul-elf. Now the good men who have said such hard things about Self, are very fond of Soul. What then is Soul? The learned Latham gives me the old spelling sawel, and leaves me there, with "explanations" which require to be explained by soul. I find the Dutch write it ziel, which makes me think of zeal. But this philology will not allow. English philology has a particular spite against the Dutch, almost as much as against provincial "English. It chooses rather to track zeal through French and Latin back to the Greek zeo, to seethe and boil. And after it has taken all this trouble, it next proceeds to track If that be so, the poor, despised, imprisoned Baltic mind was, after all, more subtle than the Mediterranean mind. Perhaps, during that long time that the Mediterranean mind has been swaggering up and down the world, ferule in hand, dictating to us of points and atoms, universe and unit, the Baltic mind has been secretly whispering to itself—Half. Such are those old, prophetic words. Such are the jewels, glowing with all the colours of the rainbow, which we have flung away to clutch the ultramontane beads. To me these words seem flowers, which have been snatched from children's hands, and trodden underfoot, but which have seeded in the dust, and are ready to spring up again, and gladden our jaded senses with somewhat of the freshness of the foreworld. The question of the beginning of One's-Life is the question whether life comes from death, or death from life; and I find this question cannot be answered either way so as to please good men. Down to about three hundred years ago, every one, good and bad alike, seems to have thought that dead meat could turn into live maggots by itself. Then the Florentine doctor, Redi, showed that dead meat did not turn into live maggots by itself; and he did so very easily, by putting a piece of gauze over the dead meat, and thus keeping off the flies that had laid the eggs that had turned into the live maggots in the meat. This was not Logic, nor Absolute Proof, but it persuaded most people that dead meat did not turn into live maggots by itself. Now by doing this Redi gave great pain to the good men. They charged him with having limited the power of the Omnipotent. The words seem to unsay themselves;—how can you put bounds to the strength of the All-Strong?—but that is what the good men said Redi had done by putting a piece of gauze between the flies and the dead meat. That is what rightly ought to be called Idealism; and if we are forbidden to call it Science, let us call it Imagination; not talking positively when it talks about deep things; not tapping on the walls of the All-Thing with a hammer, and pronouncing them hollow; but listening at the chinks, with finger on lip, for the murmur of the Beyond. Imagination is the ragamuffin called in by Science to sweep up its breakages. Imagination is the boy upon the steps, who thought that he had found the seed-pearl dropped by the archbishop. The boy is always there, in every age, outside the temple. He does not go into temples, whether in Rome or in Jerusalem. He stays out on the steps, in the sunshine, looking for pearls amongst the dust. Perhaps he does not really find them. Perhaps it is the sunshine that he sees. He is reverent towards the archbishops while they are listening to God. When they talk back, he does not always join in the responses. He thinks his own thoughts, and he utters them in his own words. That is why, when the archbishops of to-day, muttering their Mediterranean incantations, come to the heart of their mystery, and recite,—Energy of Motion, the boy whispers back,—The Elf Inside. And now if we should widen this definition of life so as to take in, not only oneself, but other selves, and write it as the story of a Thousand Elves and One Elf; if we should speak of these little lives as saying nay to the Yea of that Great Life, within which they move and have their being; in that case our language about the All-Thing will echo the language of Materialism about the Atom, and the Least that we have knowledge of will be a likeness of the Most. Yet it will not be the whole truth about Everything, any more than Thomson's pretty Chinese toy is the whole truth about Nothing. The good men whom I am fighting have sometime busied themselves with what they call the problem of the origin of Evil. For me there is no such problem, because there is no such Evil as theirs. Evil for me means what I dislike, and it means nothing more. My only problem is how to overcome evil without greater evil, and I find that to be problem enough. In the meantime I am sure that unless I disliked some things I could not like other things, and I could not be alive. If you take away resistance, you take away existence. I agree with the Buddha in his reasoning, albeit not in his hope. Yet if I were to answer these good men in their own language—which in me would be blasphemous language, if I were tempted into speaking of theTHE ELF