The Centaur | Page 4

his top-floor back, spinning by rushlight his web
of beauty, was greater than the finest critical intelligence that ever lived.
The one, for all his poor technique, was stammering over something
God had whispered to him, the other merely destroying thoughts
invented by the brain of man.
And this attitude of mind, because of its interpretative effect upon what
follows, justifies mention. For to O'Malley, in some way difficult to
explain, Reason and Intellect, as such, had come to be worshipped by
men today out of all proportion to their real value. Consciousness,
focused too exclusively upon them, had exalted them out of due
proportion in the spiritual economy. To make a god of them was to
make an empty and inadequate god. Reason should be the guardian of

the soul's advance, but not the object. Its function was that of a great
sandpaper which should clear the way of excrescences, but its worship
was to allow a detail to assume a disproportionate importance.
Not that he was fool enough to despise Reason in what he called its
proper place, but that he was "wise" enough--not that he was
"intellectual" enough!--to recognize its futility in measuring the things
of the soul. For him there existed a more fundamental understanding
than Reason, and it was, apparently, an inner and natural
understanding.
"The greatest Teacher we ever had," I once heard him say, "ignored the
intellect, and who, will ye tell me, can by searching find out God? And
yet what else is worth finding out...? Isn't it only by becoming as a little
child--a child that feels and never reasons things--that any one shall
enter the kingdom...? Where will the giant intellects be before the Great
White Throne when a simple man with the heart of a child will top the
lot of 'em?"
"Nature, I'm convinced," he said another time, though he said it with
puzzled eyes and a mind obviously groping, "is our next step. Reason
has done its best for centuries, and gets no further. It can get no further,
for it can do nothing for the inner life which is the sole reality. We must
return to Nature and a purified intuition, to a greater reliance upon what
is now subconscious, back to that sweet, grave guidance of the
Universe which we've discarded with the primitive state--a spiritual
intelligence, really, divorced from mere intellectuality."
And by Nature he did not mean a return to savagery. There was no idea
of going backwards in his wild words. Rather he looked forwards, in
some way hard to understand, to a state when Man, with the best results
of Reason in his pocket, might return to the instinctive life--to feeling
with--to the sinking down of the modern, exaggerated intellectual
personality into its rightful place as guide instead of leader. He called it
a Return to Nature, but what he meant, I always felt, was back to a
sense of kinship with the Universe which men, through worshipping
the intellect alone, had lost. Men today prided themselves upon their
superiority to Nature as beings separate and apart. O'Malley sought, on

the contrary, a development, if not a revival, of some faultless instinct,
due to kinship with her, which--to take extremes--shall direct alike the
animal and the inspired man, guiding the wild bee and the homing
pigeon, and--the soul toward its God.
This clue, as he called it, crystallized so neatly and so conclusively his
own mental struggles, that he had called a halt, as it were, to his own
intellectual development.... The name and family of the snake, hence,
meant to him the least important things about it. He caught, wildly yet
consistently, at the psychic links that bound the snake and Nature and
himself together with all creation. Troops of adventurous thoughts had
all his life "gone west" to colonize this land of speculative dream. True
to his idea, he "thought" with his emotions as much as with his brain,
and in the broken record of the adventure that this book relates, this
strange passion of his temperament remains the vital clue. For it
happened in, as well as to, himself. His Being could include the Earth
by feeling with her, whereas his intellect could merely criticize, and so
belittle, the details of such inclusion.
Many a time, while he stretched credulity to a point, I have heard him
apologize in some such way for his method. It was the splendor of his
belief that made the thing so convincing in the telling, for later when I
found the same tale written down it seemed somehow to have failed of
an equal achievement. The truth was that no one language would
convey the extraordinary freight that was carried so easily by his
instinctive choice of gestures, tone, and glance. With him these