Author's Foreword

TO MY FRIEND

SPENCER KELLOGG

It was in the year 1860 that there came to me, through the necessary use of anæsthetics, a Revelation or insight of the immemorial Mystery which among enlightened peoples still persists as the philosophical secret or problem of the world. It is an illumination of the cosmic centre, in which that field of thought where haunt the topics of fate, origin, reason and divinity glows for the moment in an inevitable but hardly communicable appreciation of the genius of being; it is an initiation, historically realized as such, into the oldest and most intimate and ultimate truth. Whoever attains and remembers it, or remembers of it, is graduated beyond instruction in “spiritual things”; but to those who are philosophically given it will recur as a condition which, if we are to retain a faith in reason, should seem amenable to articulate expression, for it is obviously what philosophers fail of.

After fourteen years of this experience at varying intervals, I published in 1874 “The Anæsthetic Revelation and The Gist of Philosophy,” not assuming to define therein the purport of the illumination, but rather to signalize the experience, and in a résumé of philosophy to show wherein that had come short of it. My brochure was indifferently reviewed, except that William James treated it seriously in the Atlantic Monthly. But afterward submitting it to the poet Tennyson, I immediately received from the laureate a cordial and explicit confirmation out of his own occasional abstractions, while not in a fully normal state, yet impressing me as likely to be of identical illumination. Many other responses came to me in the course of time, announcing similar strangely inexpressible memories, until I learned that nearly every hospital and dental office has its reminiscences of patients who, after a brief anæsthesia, uttered confused fragments of some inarticulate import which always had to do with the mystery of life, of fate, continuance, necessity and cognate abstractions, and all demanding “What is it?” “What does it all mean, or amount to?” Such is what is known esoterically, or among its comparatively few illuminati, as the anæsthetic revelation.

I let it drift along for years, for there seemed nothing to be made of it, or out of it, except that it drove me more and more to the realization of philosophy as “of all our vanities the motliest,” while yet the confirmations of the homogeneity of the experience came faster and more various.

For there comes a wondrous and congratulatory sense of reminiscence with the experience itself, which exalts this immediate mental phenomenon to the solemnity of fate and prehistoric necessity; a sense of life and the world falling of its own weight into the vacuity of the future, rather than as an ejected superfluity or surfeit of the past; a sense that it was always so, and has to be so. It is this reminiscence of the immemorial, the “time out of mind,” which only later could have become the Adamic and aboriginal, that makes it supernally the Revelation. It is this, too, that secularizes the ancient mystery, and leaves it congenital and familiar with the humor and pathos of life; that gives the weirdness and thrill to occasions of birth and death and marriage; that makes the rustic halt and keep his countenance at the most absurd occurrence; that puts a sting of danger into the homeliest of proverbs; that makes us cheer when the awkward horse wins the race, and when Portia’s picture is found in the leaden casket; when fair Titania yields the flower of her cheek to the hairy and grotesque Bottom; when we call the heaven-inspired weak-minded person a “natural.”

This singular insight obviously belongs to, or implicates or calls for, what is known as philosophy. But turning thereto, one finds philosophy itself in such a vagarious and unsettled condition, as having no tribunal nor generally acknowledged authority, that its promiscuous precepts have no judicial standing. In fact, philosophy, at least of the unprofessional sort, has largely deserted the field whereon alone this topic can be exploited. What it most needs is language; but almost disqualifying logic, philosophy seems to have turned for light and guidance to biology and the inarticulate instincts of mere life.

The plain truth is that the modern student of philosophy has been baffled, daunted and discomfited by a fake esotericism, arbitrarily technical in terms and presumptions, wholly problematical in its own coteries—delighting, as Kant protested, in the confusion of the plain man. The thoughtful spirit finds the interest of the problem unabated, although so many novelties invite the popular attention that there is left even for him but little of that fine old leisure in which philosophy was once the pride and the prestige of the race.

It is this problem, and the Revelation of it, which is the import and background of my book.

In the popular sense the book begins with a proposition of positive science, one that the astronomers rarely consider, although it involves the determining element in all their wonderful calculations, the proposition that a numerical or limited set of movable stars, pervaded by a uniform attraction, would all come together in one conglomerate mass; and that those which we do observe must be either held apart by others still beyond them, and these others still by others indefinitely without end, or else by some arbitrary and superstitious and unscientific agency.

And the fact is clearly apparent, to common sense, that if the stars in their multitude do thus go on and on interminably, there can be no comprehension nor comprehender of them as a whole, or as a one, or as all; and that no pressure or formation or management can come to them from without. But this inference, seemingly so sure, is conditioned upon the natural understanding that the space which contains the stars would go on, whether with or without them; and this understanding has been rudely shaken by “idealism,” a doctrine that outer things are at least partly determined by the knowing of them, and that space is not physical extensity, but mental or spiritual freedom to extend.

This doctrine (which Mr. Herbert Spencer rankly characterized as insanity) badly shatters the integrity of all objective things; and it is abetted scientifically by the microscope—for instance in the important matter of size—showing that all sizes are determined by the lenses of vision, which they surely are. Color and form and tangibility also are found to be referable to organic structure; the difference of things is not a property of things themselves, etc., so that for an explanation of vision and distinction and space we have to go behind both the eye and the mind, to “metaphysics.”

And although reality as a whole (a one, an all, or totality) may not be known by a comprehension from without—since full comprehension must include the spirit which comprehends—yet the psychologists insist that it can be comprehended from within by self-relation; that it is at once in-itself and for-itself, a subject-object, and they appeal to the common “self-consciousness” as its empirical proof.

All these topics have long since been treated with a desperate persistence and an astonishing ingenuity, which have necessitated and must condone the possibly tiresome chapters which follow. But however these chapters may disqualify the philosophy of the past, they do not assume to replace it by a better on the same lines. The leading expectation of this book is to signalize the anæsthetic revelation.

The most overt and beaten path into philosophical curiosity is at its division of reality into static and dynamic, as these notions are exemplified in eternity and time, and in the duplexity of the one and the many. To this duplexity we now devote our first working chapter.

Benjamin Paul Blood.