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{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |True and False Personality|10-93}} | {{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |True and False Personality|10-93}} | ||
... | {{Style P-No indent|individual temporal immortality has had to encounter, there is none that we can less afford to neglect than that which represents it as an ideal essentially egotistical and ''borne. ''True it is that our critics do us injustice through ignorance of the enlarged views as to the progress of the soul in which the speculations of individual Spiritualists coincide with many remarkable spirit teachings. These are, undoubtedly, a great advance upon popular theological opinions, while some of them go far to satisfy the claim of Spiritualism to be regarded as a religion. Nevertheless, that slight estimate of individuality, as we know it, which in one view too easily allies itself to materialism, is also the attitude of spiritual idealism, and is seemingly at variance with the excessive value placed by Spiritualists on the discovery of our mere psychic survival. The idealist may recognise this survival; but, whether he does so or not, he occupies a post of vantage when he tells us that it is of no ultimate importance. For he, like the Spiritualist who proclaims his “proof palpable of immortality,” is thinking of the mere temporal, self-regarding consciousness—its sensibilities, desires, gratifications, and affections.—which ''are ''unimportant absolutely, that is to say, their importance is relative solely to the individual. There is, indeed, no more characteristic out birth of materialism than that which makes a teleological centre of the individual. Ideas have become mere abstractions; the only reality is the infinitely little. Thus utilitarianism can see in the State only a collection of individuals whose “greatest happiness,” mutually limited by nice adjustment to the requirements of “the greatest number,” becomes the supreme end of government and law. And it cannot, I think, be pretended that Spiritualists in general have advanced beyond this substitution of a relative for an absolute standard. Their “glad tidings of great joy” are not truly religious. They have regard to the perpetuation in time of that lower consciousness whose manifestations, delights, and activity are in time, and of time alone. Their glorious message is not essentially different from that which we can conceive as brought to us by some great alchemist, who had discovered the secret of conferring upon us and upon our friends a mundane perpetuity of youth and health. Its highest religious claim is that it enlarges the horizon of our opportunities. As such, then, let us hail it with gratitude' and relief; but, on peril of our salvation, if I may not say of our immortality, let us not repose upon a prospect which is, at best, one of renewed labours and trials, and efforts to be free even of that very life whose only value is opportunity.}} | ||
{{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on |10-95}} | 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}} | ||
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