The Complex Vision | Page 8

we philosophize?" is as follows.
We philosophize for the same reason that we move and speak and
laugh and eat and love. In other words, we philosophize because man is
a philosophical animal. We breathe because we cannot help breathing
and we philosophize because we cannot help philosophizing. We may
be as sceptical as we please. Our very scepticism is the confession of an
implicit philosophy. To suppress the activity of philosophizing is as
impossible as to suppress the activity of breathing.
Assuming then that we have to philosophize, the question naturally
arises . . . how have we to philosophize if our philosophy is to be an
adequate expression of our complete reaction to life?
By the phrase "man's complex vision" I am trying to indicate the
elaborate and intricate character of the organ of research which we have
to use. All subsequent discoveries are rendered misleading if the total
activity, at least in its general movement, of our instrument of research
is not brought into focus. This instrument of research which I have
named "man's complex vision" implies his possession, at the moment

when he begins to philosophize, of certain basic attributes or energies.
The advance from infancy to maturity naturally means, when the
difference between person and person is considered an unequal and
diverse development of these basic energies. Nor even when the person
is full grown will it be found that these energies exist in him in the
same proportion as they exist in other persons. But if they existed in
every person in precisely equal proportions we should not all, even then,
have the same philosophy.
We should not have this, because though the basic activities were there
in equal proportion, each living concrete person whose activities these
were would necessarily colour the resultant vision with the stain or dye
of his original difference from all the rest. For no two living entities in
this extraordinary world are exactly the same.
What is left for us, then, it might be asked, but to "whisper our
conclusions" and accept the fact that all "philosophies" must be
different, as they are all the projection of different personalities?
Nothing, as far as pure logic is concerned, is left for us but this. Yet it
remains as an essential aspect of the process of philosophizing that we
should endeavour to bring over to our vision as many other visions as
we can succeed in influencing. For since we have the power of
communicating our thought to one another and since it is of the very
nature of the complex vision to be exquisitely sensitive to influences
from outside, it is a matter of primordial necessity to us all that we
should exercise this will to influence and this will to be influenced.
And just as in the case of persons sympathetic to ourselves the activity
of philosophizing is attended by the emotion of love and the instinct of
creation, so in the case of persons antagonistic to ourselves the activity
of philosophizing is attended by the emotion of hate and the instinct of
destruction. For philosophy being the final articulation of a personal
reaction to life, is penetrated through and through with the basic
energies of life.
On the one hand there is a "Come unto me, all ye . . ." and on the other
there is a "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" Just

because the process of philosophizing is necessarily personal, it is
evident that the primordial aspect of it which implies "the will to
influence" must tally with some equally primordial reciprocity,
implying "the will to be influenced."
That it does so tally with this is proved by the existence of language.
This medium of expression between living things does not seem to be
confined to the human race. Some reciprocal harmony of energy,
corresponding to our complex vision, seems to have created many
mysterious modes of communication by which myriads of sub-human
beings, and probably also myriads of super-human beings, act and react
on one another.
But the existence of language, though it excludes the possibility of
absolute difference, does not, except by an act of faith, necessitate that
any sensation we name by the same name is really identical with the
sensation which another person feels. And this difficulty is much
further complicated by the fact that words themselves tend in the
process to harden and petrify, and in their hardening to form, as it were,
solid blocks of accretion which resist and materially distort the subtle
and evasive play of the human psychology behind them.
So that not only are we aware that the word which we use does not
necessarily represent to another what it represents to ourself, but we are
also aware that it does not, except in a hard and