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- Lucifer, vol. 2, no. 7, March 1888, pp. 80-82
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Title for references: Lewins R. - Science and Sciolism
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Science and Sciolism
“We receive but what we give, |
| Coleridge. |
Let me again strive, with reference to the elaborate minutes on this synthesis and the ingenious speculations of the “Adversary,” contained in the February No. of Lucifer, to show, as imperfectly as words can interpret Abstract Ideals, what the real meaning and drift of this contention practically is. I shall endeavour to be as luminous, without being voluminous, as possible. My heresy purports to predicate that truth is neither an Orthodoxy or Heterodoxy, but a Paradoxy with two sides – not to mention subordinate facets. Anything short of this, whether on the Physical Science, or Transcendental aspect, can only be a half truth, i.e., a whole falsehood. It is a case not only of Facing-both-ways, as Bunyan has it, but of Janus Quadrifrons. It holds with the hare and hunts with the hounds. It covers all phenomena whatsoever. It turns upside down all current concepts and percepts of good and evil, as the eye from inversion of light rays on the retina reverses all objects visible. And thus it brands civilization, and especially British Pseudo-civilization, the most stereotyped and conventional form in Europe – as a pyramid on its apex – always, as indeed the history of all modern nations proves, unstable, but never more tottering and ready to topple over than when its blinded votaries – as in the Bœotian Britain of to-day – most jubilantly cackle about its progress, prosperity and stability. My object in promulgating this Cosmology and Biology, a superstructure founded upon all extant concrete Science, from the formal Physics of Newton to Anatomy, which only in this century, on the lines of French Materialism, has developed into a true Science – is to ventilate scientific formula as the basis of somatic Monism or Unitarianism, as Occultists label it. So as to bring completely within the limits of Reason, occult data hitherto falsely held to be outside its pale, such as “Divine” mysteries, like the Descent of the Holy Ghost and similar ones, which the Brain Theory reduces to symptoms of exalted innervation and cerebration.[1] The Rev. Edward Irving’s epidemic orgasm of unknown tongues, inter alia multa, is clearly such a nerve-erethism – the 9th pair of cerebral nerves or Linguals, which innervates the motor muscles of the tongue participating in the hyperæsthesia of the adjacent ganglia – I identify thus completely the Stoic Palingenesia with the Pentecostal outpouring of the Paraclete and other prophetic visions, thus denuding the latter, as I more fully explain in my tract of “Life and Mind on the basis of Modern Medicine (Materialism),” of all pretensions to be an exceptional, novel or miraculous Influx. Hippocrates, indeed, the father of Medicine, who first broke away – so far as our own records extend – from the hereditary caste of Æsculapian priesthood, really implied all I do when – no doubt to the horror of the orthodox hierarchy – he hazarded the aphorism that Epilepsy, which, according to ancient Church tradition, was St. Paul’s “thorn or stake[2] in the flesh,” was no more a Divine disease than any other, all diseases being alike the result of impaired bodily tissue; the healthy function of which being thus à fortiori, necessarily, implied to be a natural hylic one, and in no degree dependent on indwelling “spirit” or “divinity” in any shape or hue. It is indeed significant that no terminology has ever been coined to express what Transcendentalism vainly seeks to express by words when, in its Utopia, it aims at formulating a dual substance – a substance super-added to and “animating” the sole cognizable entity Matter. We may hence alone assume that no second substance is intelligible or logically thinkable, but that what savage medicine men, in whose steps Ontologists are still straying, have mistaken for this Animistic Fetich is nothing else than the function, exhibit, or symptom – to use a medical term – of this one material or somatic to Pan. “Where three physicians are, two are Atheists,” says the immemorial proverb, coined before Physic had conquered a scientific status. Now the proverb, if up to date, must be amplified so as to include all three. When we eliminate “anima,” which really means vitality,[3] or Soul, which is Anglo-Saxon for life, from the universe inorganic and organic, which indeed since Wöhler’s artificial preparation of an organic compound, 60 years
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ago, are proved to be solidaire, and only formally, not really distinct, we get rid of Deity, as the active agent in function either of “brute,” or living matter, which seeming duality the above chemical experiment shows to be but one compact, indivisible Monad. God, as a Maker of Spirit, Soul, and caco-demonic Anima, is clean out of court and eliminated from what is falsely labelled “Creation.” Indeed, the definition of this Eidolon in the 39 Articles of the English Church – now 300 years old – tells the same atheistic tale. A god “without parts and passions,” is exactly what I term the still wider conception of “Spirit,” a non-entity, and no actual Ens at all. Sir I. Newton was quite mystified when he inserted, in his Principia, the scholium about the Supreme Being. Just as much as the mystagogical theo-philanthropist Robespierre was, when he instituted the fete of that nonentity during the French terror.
Coleridge, indeed – though himself a fervid “Spiritualist,” especially when under Narcosis from opium – distinctly states in his “Table-Talk,” that Newton’s divinity doctrines were “pure raving.” Luther himself is virtually all Materialism indicates as Atheist, when he says: “God is a blank sheet, on which nothing is written but by ourselves.” And again, “We learn by experience that God takes no interest in the present world.” He died despairing of Humanity, comforting himself in the prospect of its speedy annihilation as hopelessly and miserably derelict. Mr. Carlyle was one of my most inveterate libellers – yet he too was practically an Atheist when he exclaimed, with a howl Mr. Froude avers he can never forget, that “God never acts or shows himself.” – Indeed, his biographer infers that Carlyle seemed to rage so ante-diluvianly against Materialism from a secret dread and anticipation that it would turn out to be true. I think the case of Cudworth’s “Intellectual System of the Universe,” very significant. No doubt he was a sincere Christian, his work being written shortly before Newton turned the world upside down. Yet, as a candid and sincere soul, and a far-reaching and profound thinker in estimating the conflicting claims of Deism and Atheism his arguments for the latter Faith or Unfaith so preponderated over the theistic ones, that, to his great distress, he was reviled as an Atheist in disguise, which so discouraged and depressed him that much of his opus magnum still remains – in the British Museum, I believe – in manuscript. Sir A. Grant, late principal of the Edinburgh University, in his monograph of Aristotle, credits the Stagyrite withholding the same virtually Atheistic creed as Buddha. To me it is, or ought to be, strange how Atheism looms before the strabismic eyes of our gross, semi-bestial generation – as a coarse and vulgar creed, if for no other reason than for its enthusiastic advocacy by Lucretius – the most sublime and most truly original poet and thinker of antiquity, and by Shelley in modern times, who, though no solid thinker, had probably the most ethereal soul of whom we have any literary record.
The Brain theory I launch on the world chaos – like Noah’s dove on the diluvial waste of waters – as an Eirenicon between mystics and scientists, is simply this, that all the knowledge we are capable of reaching must be an asselfment, prior to which there can be no Gnosis at all – not even its chaotic adumbration – that the mind, an organic function and nothing separate from the bodily Ego – as seal and conditioner of percepts and concepts – is both Agonist and Agony, Spectacle and Spectator – out of which egress is impossible. So that the Universe – abstract and concrete – of thought and thing, subject and object, is, in the last resort, a subjective, egoistic, cerebral or intercranial one, an organic function in short, generating all space and immensity, time and eternity, so that capping Louis XIV. in his vaunt of being the state, each unit of sentient creation must say, “l’Univers c’est moi.”[4] Remembering that, as concept and percept, everything can only be a “think” and that thought is a process of cerebration, it is clear Solipsism is established – no sane mind ever dreaming of vicarious performance of any natural function, which each monad must perform for itself alone.
Let me illustrate my axiom by an example I have often elsewhere used. But crambe repetita I find, like John Wesley, the most convincing form of Rhetoric. Napoleon, on his Egyptian expedition, fuming at the Atheism of his accompanying savans, Monge, Berthollet, &c., raised his conquering arm to the hosts of Heaven and reproved their Hylism thus: “You are fine talkers, Messieurs, but who made all these?” The ordinary sensationalist response was then and now is, and no doubt it was theirs: “No one – they were never made at all, Matter is eternal, without beginning as without end.” But our Brain theory, as so luminously expounded in C. N.’s (who is Miss Constance Naden, author of the volume of poems lately sent by me to Lucifer, “The Modern Apostle, Elixir of Life, &c.,” now travelling in the land of Brahma and Buddh) Prologue to my recent tract “Humanism
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v. Theism,” carries the solution of the crux one momentous and fateful step further. Our answer would have been, “Yourself. Colour and Light, and all they reveal, are only imagery manufactured in the posterior chambers of your own optics, and in the cells (vesiculo-neurine) of your own Cortex cerebri.”
Again I compare our relation to the external world to Sir Christopher Wren’s in St. Paul’s Cathedral, which is practically that of Para Brahm, who, looking round, can see nothing but Self and the operations of Self, which fully justifies Miss Naden when she characterizes our Schema as Apotheosis not Iconoclasm. We level up and destroy nothing. We only transfigure all things by immersion in the Self. We thus verify Schiller’s couplet in his “Ideale.”
“Take the Godhead into your own Being, |
So that, as G. M. McC. finely puts it in the Appendix to Mr. Courtney’s “Auto-Centricism,” our brain, and no central Sun, is the cynosure, as creator of all the constellations – Nature’s giant frame itself being but an abstract figment of Egoity. Shakspeare’s dictum: “There is nothing good or ill but thinking makes it so,” should hylo-ideally run: “There is nothing good, ill, indifferent, or at all, other than thinking.” I trust the above synopsis has served materially to clear up the outs and ins of this heresy, which is at once common sense, synthetic science, and Christology rationalized and adapted to the present standpoint of the human – at least European – understanding.
It will be found on verification – Fact being grander than all Fiction – to be sublimer than all Religious or Poetic or mystic Oriental inspiration or clairvoyance. Byron sings in “Don Juan” of Berkeley’s “sublime discovery of making the Universe universal Egotism,” and Hylo-Phenomenalism – as a later birth of time – necessarily overtops absolute Idealism. It quite sets Mankind up for Himself and for the first time in Civil History – makes, in vulgar parlance, a Man of a beast. So long as our race is the thrall of its own “lawless and uncertain thoughts,” the human animal – individually and collectively – remains the semi-bestial hybrid Goethe, and other sages, ticket the “little World God” as being.
Before closing, let me shortly allude to the criticism of The Adversary, arraigning, on verbal grounds, the consistency of this heresy. The antinomy is apparent only – not vital. It inevitably arises from the amphibology of language – no single word in which is capable of covering the doubles ententes in a Paradoxy which stands four square to all the points of the compass. I need not here dwell on this objection. It has been effectually anticipated and dealt with by Mr. Courtney, in his most lucid and luminiferous Appendix to “The New Gospel of Hylo-Idealism,” as also most fully in his Preface to “Auto-Centricism.”
As to the argumentum ad hominem the Lucifer censor adduces of the improbability of this simple theorem being reserved for Dr. Lewins to solve, let it stand for the little it is worth. Some one must be the Innovator in every Reformation. Why not Dr. Lewins, as well as another? No one can know like himself how anxiously and conscientiously he has laid the substructure and constructed the superstructure of his “Palace of Truth.” But let the thing, or nothing (for it is both), stand on its own merits, independent of extraneous non-essentials. I have always insisted on its only being an adaptation, up to date, of former Cosmogonies – pre-historic, classic and modern. Among the latest and most noteworthy of these is Kant’s negation of “Thing in itself.” Only my formula is better suited to our age, and inevitably so. For Kant formulated his “all shattering” one at an epoch, when not one of the modern sciences I have utilized as the concrete substrata of mine – with the doubtful exception of Astronomy – had been evolved from the dædal Brain of Aryan Man – and he never really was at home in his own palace, which was too spacious for his use.
I may here appropriately add that all the Physical Sciences – not even excepting Astronomy, both in its present day eschatological bearings and analytic technic – are French. Chemistry, Geology Paleontology and Anatomy (Histology.) The hide-bound, unspeculative British intellect has contributed essential data (facts) to the fabric. But its defective generalizing and abstract capacity – as notably in Priestley’s Oxygen discovery – has quite failed in constructing out of “disjecta membra” a symmetric syntaxis. When not narrow and contracted the English mind, at least since the Puritan Revolt and Revolution – with which the hard and fast Philosophy of Locke well dovetails – has been quite eccentric. Its real province has been in the vulgar realistic details of Physical Science, and in the still lower planes of Industrialism. Scotland preserved, for more than a century longer, the ideal “spiritual” and philosophic afflatus.
Footnotes
- ↑ I might include the Bacchic phrensy, with which the “coming of the Holy Ghost” was confounded by outsiders, as in Acts, 2nd Chap., 13th verse.
- ↑ This neurosis, it may be profitably added, breaks down the mind more than the body.
- ↑ Of which “vitality” biologists know no more than of the man in the moon. – [Adversary.]
- ↑ Just what every Brahmin and every Vedantin says when repeating: Aham ava parabrahma, “I am myself Brahma or the Universe.” – [Adversary.]