The Complex Vision | Page 9

inflexible manner,
represent what we ourselves feel. Words tend all too quickly to become
symbolic; and it is often the chief importance of what we call "genius"
that it takes these inflexible symbols into its hands and breaks them up
into pieces and dips them in the wavering waters of experience and
sensation.
Every philosopher should be at pains to avoid as far as possible the use
of technical terms, whether ancient or modern, and should endeavour to
evade and slip behind these terms. He should endeavour to indicate his
vision of the world by means of words which have acquired no thick
accretion of traditional crust but are fresh and supple and organic. He
should use such words, in fact, as might be said to have the flexibility

of life, and like living plants to possess leaves and sap. He should avoid
as far as he can such metaphors and images as already carry with them
the accumulated associations of traditional usage, and he should select
his expressions so that they shall give the reader the definite impact and
vivid shock of thoughts that leap up from immediate contact with
sensation, like fish from the surface of a river.
Just because words, in their passage from generation to generation, tend
to become so hard and opaque, it is advisable for any one attempting to
philosophize to use indirect as well as direct means of expressing his
thoughts. The object of philosophizing being to "carry over" into
another person's consciousness one's personal reaction to things, it may
well happen that a hint, a gesture, a signal, a sign, made indirectly and
rather by the grouping of words and the tone of words than by their
formal content, will reach the desired result more effectually than any
direct argument.
It must be admitted, however, that this purely subjective view of
philosophy, with its implied demand for a precise subjective colouring
of the words, leaves some part of our philosophical motive-force
unsatisfied and troubled by an obscure distress. No two minds can
interchange ideas without some kind of appeal, often so faint and
unconscious as to be quite unrecognized, to an invisible audience of
hidden attendants upon the argument, who are tacitly assumed in some
mysterious way to be the arbiters. These invisible companions seem to
gather to themselves, as we are vaguely aware of them, the attributes of
a company of overshadowing listeners. They present themselves to the
half-conscious background of our mind as some pre-existent vision of
"truth" towards which my subjective vision is one contribution and my
interlocutor's subjective vision another contribution.
This vague consciousness which we both have, as we exchange our
ideas, of some comprehensive vision of pre-existent reality, to which
we are both appealing, does not destroy my passionate conviction that I
am "nearer the truth" than my friend; nor does it destroy my latent
feeling that in my friend's vision there is "something of the truth" which
I am unable to grasp. I think the more constantly we encounter other

minds in these philosophical disputes the more does there grow and
take shape in our own mind the idea of some mysterious and invisible
watchers whose purer vision, exquisitely harmonious and clairvoyant,
remains a sort of test both of our own and of others' subjectivity;
becomes, in fact, an objective standard or measure or pattern of those
ideas which we discover within us all, and name truth, beauty, nobility.
This objective standard of the things which are most important and
precious to us, this ideal pattern of all human values, attests and
manifests its existence by the primordial necessity of the interchange of
thoughts among us. I call this pattern or standard of ideas "the vision of
the immortal companions." By the term "the immortal companions" I
do not mean to indicate any "immanent" power or transcendental
"over-soul." Nor do I mean to indicate that they are created by our
desire that they should exist. Although I call them "companions" I wish
to suggest that they exist quite independently of man and are not the
origin of these ideas in man's soul but only the model, the pattern, the
supreme realization of these ideas.
It is, however, to these tacit listeners, whose vision of the world is there
in the background as the arbiter of our subjective encounters, that in our
immense loneliness we find ourselves constantly turning. All our
philosophy, all our struggle with life, falls into two aspects as we grow
more and more aware of what we are doing. The whole strange drama
takes the form, as we feel our way, of a creation which at present is
non-existent and of a realization of something which at present is
hidden.
Thus philosophy, as I have said, is at once a setting-forth and a return;