The Uses Of Mystery

: MY ASSOCIATION WITH THE WONDER

Something Challis has told me; something I have learned for myself; and

there is something which has come to me from an unknown source.



But here again we are confronted with the original difficulty--the

difficulty that for some conceptions there is no verbal figure.



It is comprehensible, it is, indeed, obvious that the deeper abstract

speculation of the Wonder's thought cannot be set out by any metaphor< r />
that would be understood by a lesser intelligence.



We see that many philosophers, whose utterances have been recorded in

human history--that record which floats like a drop of oil on the

limitless ocean of eternity--have been confronted with this same

difficulty, and have woven an intricate and tedious design of words in

their attempt to convey some single conception--some conception which

themselves could see but dimly when disguised in the masquerade of

language; some figure that as it was limned grew ever more confused

beneath the wrappings of metaphor, so that we who read can glimpse

scarce a hint of its original shape and likeness. We see, also, that the

very philosophers who caricatured their own eidolon, became intrigued

with the logical abstraction of words and were led away into a

wilderness of barren deduction--their one inspired vision of a stable

premiss distorted and at last forgotten.



How then shall we hope to find words to adumbrate a philosophy which

starts by the assumption that we can have no impression of reality until

we have rid ourselves of the interposing and utterly false concepts of

space and time, which delimit the whole world of human thought.



I admit that one cannot even begin to do this thing; within our present

limitations our whole machinery of thought is built of these two

original concepts. They are the only gauges wherewith we may measure

every reality, every abstraction; wherewith we may give outline to any

image or process of the mind. Only when we endeavour to grapple with

that indeterminable mystery of consciousness can we conceive, however

dimly, some idea of a pure abstraction uninfluenced by and independent

of, those twin bases of our means of thought.



Here it is that Challis has paused. Here he says that we must wait, that

no revelation can reveal what we are incapable of understanding, that

only by the slow process of evolution can we attain to any understanding

of the mystery we have sought to solve by our futile and primitive

hypotheses.



"But then," I have pressed him, "why do you hesitate to speak of what

you heard on that afternoon?"



And once he answered me:



"I glimpsed a finality," he said, "and that appalled me. Don't you see

that ignorance is the means of our intellectual pleasure? It is the

solving of the problem that brings enjoyment--the solved problem has no

further interest. So when all is known, the stimulus for action ceases;

when all is known there is quiescence, nothingness. Perfect knowledge

implies the peace of death, implies the state of being one--our

pleasures are derived from action, from differences, from heterogeneity.



"Oh! pity the child," said Challis, "for whom there could be no mystery.

Is not mystery the first and greatest joy of life? Beyond the gate there

is unexplored mystery for us in our childhood. When that is explored,

there are new and wonderful possibilities beyond the hills, then beyond

the seas, beyond the known world, in the everyday chances and movements

of the unknown life in which we are circumstanced.



"Surely we should all perish through sheer inanity, or die desperately

by suicide if no mystery remained in the world. Mystery takes a thousand

beautiful shapes; it lurks even in the handiwork of man, in a stone god,

or in some mighty, intricate machine, incomprehensibly deliberate and

determined. The imagination endows the man-made thing with consciousness

and powers, whether of reservation or aloofness; the similitude of

meditation and profundity is wrought into stone. Is there not source for

mystery to the uninstructed in the great machine registering the

progress of its own achievement with each solemn, recurrent beat of its

metal pulse?



"Behind all these things is the wonder of the imagination that never

approaches more nearly to the creation of a hitherto unknown image than

when it thus hesitates on the verge of mystery.



"There is yet so much, so very much cause for wondering speculation.

Science gains ground so slowly. Slowly it has outlined, however vaguely,

the uncertainties of our origin so far as this world is concerned, while

the mystic has fought for his entrancing fairy tales one by one.



"The mystic still holds his enthralling belief in the succession of

peoples who have risen and died--the succeeding world-races, red, black,

yellow, and white, which have in turn dominated this planet. Science

with its hammer and chisel may lay bare evidence, may collate material,

date man's appearance, call him the most recent of placental mammals,

trace his superstitions and his first conceptions of a god from the

elemental fears of the savage. But the mystic turns aside with an

assumption of superior knowledge; he waves away objective evidence; he

has a certainty impressed upon his mind.



"And the mystic is a power. He compels a multitude of followers, because

he offers an attraction greater than the facts of science. He tells of a

mystery profounder than any problem solved by patient investigation,

because his mystery is incomprehensible even by himself; and in fear

lest any should comprehend it, he disguises the approach with an array

of lesser mysteries, man-made; with terminologies, symbologies and high

talk of esotericism too fearful for any save the initiate.



"But we must preserve our mystic in some form against the awful time

when science shall have determined a limit; when the long history of

evolution shall be written in full, and every stage of world-building

shall be made plain. When the cycle of atomic dust to atomic dust is

demonstrated, and the detail of the life-process is taught and

understood, we shall have a fierce need for the mystic to save us from

the futility of a world we understand, to lie to us if need be, to

inspirit our material and regular minds with some breath of delicious

madness. We shall need the mystic then, or the completeness of our

knowledge will drive us at last to complete the dusty circle in our

eagerness to escape from a world we understand....



"See how man clings to his old and useless traditions; see how he

opposes at every step the awful force of progress. At each stage he

protests that the thing that is, is good, or that the thing that was and

has gone, was better. He despises new knowledge and fondly clings to the

belief that once men were greater than they now are. He looks back to

the more primitive, and endows it with that mystery he cannot find in

his own times. So have men ever looked lingeringly behind them. It is an

instinct, a great and wonderful inheritance that postpones the moment of

disillusionment.



"We are still mercifully surrounded with the countless mysteries of

everyday experience, all the evidences of the unimaginable stimulus we

call life. Would you take them away? Would you resolve life into a

disease of the ether--a disease of which you and I, all life and all

matter, are symptoms? Would you teach that to the child, and explain to

him that the wonder of life and growth is no wonder, but a demonstrable

result of impeded force, to be evaluated by the application of an

adequate formula?



"You and I," said Challis, "are children in the infancy of the world.

Let us to our play in the nursery of our own times. The day will come,

perhaps, when humanity shall have grown and will have to take upon

itself the heavy burden of knowledge. But you need not fear that that

will be in our day, nor in a thousand years.



"Meanwhile leave us our childish fancies, our little imaginings, our

hope--children that we are--of those impossible mysteries beyond the

hills...."