HPB-SB-10-94: Difference between revisions

To estimate the value of individuality, we cannot do better than regard man in his several mundane relations, supposing that either of these might become the central, actuating focus of his being— his “ruling love,” as Swedenborg would call it— displacing his mere egoism, or self-love, thrusting that more to the circumference, and identifying him, so to speak, with that circle of interests to which all his energies and affections relate. Outside this substituted ego we arc to suppose that he has no conscience, no desire, no will. Just as the entirely selfish man views the whole of life, so far as it can really interest him, solely in relation to his individual wellbeing, so our supposed man of a family, of a society, of a church, or a State, has no eye for any truth or any interest more abstract or more individual than that of which he may be rightly termed the incarnation. History shows approximations to this ideal man. Such an one, for instance, I conceive to have been Loyola: such another, possibly, is Bismarck. Now those men have ceased to be individuals in their own eyes, so far as concerns any value attaching to their own special individualities. They are devotees. A certain “conversion” has been effected, by which from mere individuals they have become “representative” men. And we—the individuals.—esteem them precisely in proportion to the remoteness from individualism of the spirit that actuates them. As the circle of interests to which they are “devoted” enlarges—that is to say, as the dross of individualism is purged away—we accord them indulgence, respect, admiration, and love. From self to the family, from the family to the sect or society, from sect or society to Church (in no denominational sense) and State, there is the ascending- scale and widening circle, the successive transitions which make the worth of an individual depend on the more or less complete subversion of his individuality by a more comprehensive soul or spirit. The very modesty which suppresses, as far as possible, the personal pronoun in our addresses to others, testifies to our sense that we are hiding away some utterly insignificant and unworthy thing; a thing that has no business even to be, except in that utter privacy which is rather a sleep and a rest than living. Well, but in the above instances, even those most remote from sordid individuality, we have fallen far short of that ideal in which the very conception of the partial, the atomic, is lost in the abstraction of universal being, transfigured in the glory of a Divine personality. You are familiar with Swedenborg’s distinction between discrete and continuous degrees. Hitherto we have seen how man — the individual — may rise continuously by throwing himself heart and soul into the living interests of the world, and lose his own limitations by adoption of a larger mundane spirit. But still he has but ascended nearer to his own mundane, source, that soul of the world, or Prakriti, to which, if I must not too literally insist on it, I may still resort as a convenient figure. To transcend it, he must advance by the discrete degree. No simple “bettering” of the ordinary self, which leaves it alive, as the focus—the French word “foyer” is the more expressive.—of his thoughts and actions; not even that identification with higher interests in the world’s plane just spoken of, is, or can progressively become, in the least adequate to the realisation of his Divine ideal. This “bettering” of our present nature, it alone being recognised as essential, albeit capable of “improvement,” is a commonplace, and to use a now familiar term a “Philistine” conception. It is the substitution of the continuous for the discrete degree. It is a compromise with our dear old familiar selves. “And Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly {{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on |10-95}}