The Complex Vision | Page 7

cause and effect--of certain mysterious Powers in the background of our experience, such as hitherto have only found symbolic and representative expression in the ritual of Art and Religion.
What we have come to demand is some flexible, malleable, rhythmic system which shall give an imaginative and yet a rational form to the sum total of those manifold and intricate impressions which make up the life of a real person upon a real earth.
What we have come to demand is that the centre of gravity in our interpretation of life should be restored to its natural point of vantage, namely, to the actual living consciousness of an actual living human being.
And it is precisely these demands that the philosophy of the complex vision attempts to satisfy. It seeks to satisfy them by using as its organ of research the balanced "ensemble" of man's whole nature. It seeks to satisfy them by using as its "material" the whole variegated and contradictory mass of feelings and reactions to feelings, which the natural human being with his superstitions, his sympathies, his antipathies, his loves and his hates, his surmises, his irrational intuitions, his hopes and fears, is of necessity bound to experience as he moves through the world.
It seeks, in fact, to envisage from within and without the confused hurly-burly of life's drama; and to give to this contradictory and complicated spectacle the aesthetic rationality or imaginative inevitableness of a rhythmic work of art.
In this attempt the philosophy of the complex vision is bound to recognize, and include in its rational form, much that remains mysterious, arbitrary, indetermined, organic, obstinately illogical. For the illogical is not necessarily the unintelligible, so long as the reason which we use is that same imaginative and clairvoyant reason, which, in its higher measure, sustains the vision of the poets and the artists.
By the use of this fuller, richer, more living, more concrete instrument of research, the conclusions we arrive at will have in them more of the magic of Nature, and will be closer to the actual palpable organic mystery of Life, than either the abstract conclusions of metaphysic or the cautious, impersonal hypotheses of experimental physical science.
CHAPTER I.
THE COMPLEX VISION
A philosophy is known by its genuine starting-point. This is also its final conclusion, often very cunningly concealed. Such a conclusion may be presented to us as the logical result of a long train of reasoning, when really it was there all the while as one single vivid revelation of the complex vision.
Like travellers who have already found, by happy accident, the city of their desire, many crafty thinkers hasten hurriedly back to the particular point from which they intend to be regarded as having started; nor in making this secret journey are they forgetful to erase their footsteps from the sand, so that when they publicly set forth it shall appear to those who follow them that they are guided not by previous knowledge of the way but by the inevitable necessity of pure reason.
I also, like the rest, must begin with what will turn out to be the end; but unlike many I shall openly indicate this fact and not attempt to conceal it.
My starting-point is nothing less than what I call the original revelation of man's complex vision; and I regard this original revelation as something which is arrived at by the use of a certain synthetic activity of all the attributes of this vision. And this synthetic activity of the complex vision I call its apex-thought.
This revelation is of a peculiar nature, which must be grasped, at least in its general outlines, before we can advance a step further upon that journey which is also a return.
It might be maintained that before attempting to philosophize upon life, the question should be asked . . . "why philosophize at all?" And again . . . "what are the motive-forces which drive us into this process which we call philosophizing?"
To philosophize is to articulate and express our personal reaction to the mystery which we call life, both with regard to the nature of that mystery and with regard to its meaning and purpose.
My answer to the question "Why do 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