Vision: The Revised 1937 Edition

THE GREAT WHEEL

BOOK I: THE GREAT WHEEL

“When Discord”, writes Empedocles, “has fallen into the lowest depths of the vortex”—the extreme bound, not the centre, Burnet points out—“Concord has reached the centre, into it do all things come together so as to be only one, not all at once but gradually from different quarters, and as they come Discord retires to the extreme boundary . . . in proportion as it runs out Concord in a soft immortal boundless stream runs in.”2 And again: “Never will boundless time be emptied of that pair; and they prevail in turn as that circle comes round, and pass away before one another and increase in their appointed turn”. It was this Discord or War that Heraclitus called “God of all and Father of all, some it has made gods and some men, some bond and some free”, and I recall that Love and War came from the eggs of Leda.³

According to Simplicius,^I a late commentator upon Aristotle, the Concord of Empedocles fabricates all things into “an homogeneous sphere”,⁴ and then Discord separates the elements and so makes the world we inhabit, but even the sphere formed by Concord is not the changeless eternity, for Concord or Love but offers us the image of that which is changeless.5

If we think of the vortex attributed to Discord as formed by circles diminishing until they are nothing, and of the opposing sphere attributed to Concord as forming from itself an opposing vortex, the apex of each vortex in the middle of the other’s base, we have the fundamental symbol of my instructors.

If I call the unshaded cone “Discord” and the other “Concord” and think of each as the bound of a gyre, I see that the gyre of “Concord” diminishes as that of “Discord” increases, and can imagine after that the gyre of “Concord” increasing while that of “Discord” diminishes, and so on, one gyre within the other always. Here the thought of Heraclitus dominates all: “Dying each other’s life, living each other’s death”.6

The first gyres clearly described by philosophy are those described in the Timaeus which are made by the circuits of “the Other” (creators of all particular things), of the planets as they ascend or descend above or below the equator. They are opposite in nature to that circle of the fixed stars which constitutes “the Same” and confers upon us the knowledge of Universals.⁷ Alcmaeon, a pupil of Pythagoras, thought that men die because they cannot join their beginning and their end.⁸ Their serpent has not its tail in its mouth.⁹ But my friend the poet and scholar Dr. Sturm sends me an account of gyres in St. Thomas Aquinas:¹⁰ the circular movement of the angels which, though it imitates the circle of “the Same”,¹¹ seems as little connected with the visible heavens as figures drawn by my instructors, his straight line of the human intellect and his gyre, the combination of both movements, made by the ascent and descent^II of angels between God and man. He has also found me passages in Dr. Dee,13 in Macrobius,¹⁴ in an unknown mediaeval writer, which describe souls changing from gyre to sphere and from sphere to gyre.¹⁵ Presently I shall have much to say of the sphere as the final place of rest.

Gyres are occasionally alluded to, but left unexplored, in Swedenborg’s mystical writings. In the Principia, a vast scientific work written before his mystical life, he describes the double cone. All physical reality, the universe as a whole, every solar system, every atom, is a double cone; where there are “two poles one opposite to the other, these two poles have the form of cones”.^{III, 16} I am not concerned with his explanation of how these cones have evolved from the point and the sphere, nor with his arguments to prove that they govern all the movements of the planets, for I think, as did Swedenborg in his mystical writings, that the forms of geometry can have but a symbolic relation to spaceless reality, Mundus Intelligibilis.¹⁷ Flaubert is the only writer known to me who has so used the double cone. He talked much of writing a story called “La Spirale”. He died before he began it, but something of his talk about it has been collected and published.¹⁸ It would have described a man whose dreams during sleep grew in magnificence as his life grew more and more unlucky, the wreck of some love affair coinciding with his marriage to a dream princess.

III

The double cone or vortex,¹⁹ as used by my instructors, is more complicated than that of Flaubert. A line is a movement without extension, and so symbolical of time—subjectivity—Berkeley’s stream of ideas—in Plotinus^IV it is apparently “sensation”—and a plane cutting it at right angles is symbolical of space or objectivity.²⁰ Line and plane are combined in a gyre which must expand or contract according to whether mind grows in objectivity or subjectivity.

The identification of time V with subjectivity is probably as old as philosophy; all that we can touch or handle, and for the moment I mean no other objectivity, has shape or magnitude, whereas our thoughts and emotions have duration and quality, a thought recurs or is habitual, a lecture or a musical composition is measured upon the clock. At the same time pure time and pure space, pure subjectivity and pure objectivity—the plane at the bottom of the cone and the point at its apex—are abstractions or figments of the mind.

My instructors used this single cone or vortex once or twice but soon changed it for a double cone or vortex, preferring to consider subjectivity and objectivity as intersecting states struggling one against the other. If the musical composition seek to suggest the howling of dogs or of the sea waves it is not altogether in time, it suggests bulk and weight. In what I call the cone of the Four Faculties which are what man has made in a past or present life—I shall speak later of what makes man—the subjective cone is called that of the antithetical tincture because it is achieved and defended by continual conflict with its opposite; the objective cone is called that of the primary tincture because whereas subjectivity—in Empedocles “Discord” as I think—tends to separate man from man, objectivity brings us back to the mass where we begin. I had suggested the word tincture, a common word in Boehme,22 and my instructors took the word antithetical from Per Amica Silentia Lunae.²³

I had never read Hegel, but my mind had been full of Blake from boyhood up and I saw the world as a conflict—Spectre and Emanation—and could distinguish between a contrary and a negation. “Contraries are positive”, wrote Blake, “a negation is not a contrary”, “How great the gulph between simplicity and insipidity”, and again, “There is a place at the bottom of the graves where contraries are equally true”.²⁴

I had never put the conflict in logical form,VI never thought with Hegel that the two ends of the see-saw are one another’s negation, nor that the spring vegetables were refuted when over.

The cones of the tinctures mirror reality but are in themselves pursuit and illusion. As will be presently seen, the sphere is reality. By the antithetical cone, which is left unshaded in my diagram, we express more and more, as it broadens, our inner world of desire and imagination, whereas by the primary, the shaded cone, we express more and more, as it broadens, that objectivity of mind which, in the words of Murray’s Dictionary, lays “stress upon that which is external to the mind” or treats “of outward things and events rather than of inward thought” or seeks “to exhibit the actual facts, not coloured by the opinions or feelings”.26 The antithetical tincture is emotional and aesthetic whereas the primary tincture is reasonable and moral. Within these cones move what are called the Four Faculties: Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate.

It will be enough until I have explained the geometrical diagrams in detail to describe Will and Mask as the will and its object, or the Is and the Ought (or that which should be), Creative Mind and Body of Fate as thought and its object, or the Knower and the Known, and to say that the first two are lunar or antithetical or natural, the second two solar or primary or reasonable. A particular man is classified according to the place of Will, or choice, in the diagram. At first sight there are only two Faculties, because only two of the four, Will and Creative Mind, are active, but it will be presently seen that the Faculties can be represented by two opposing cones so drawn that the Will of the one is the Mask of the other, the Creative Mind of the one the Body of Fate of the other. Everything that wills can be desired, resisted or accepted, every creative act can be seen as fact, every Faculty is alternately shield and sword.

These pairs of opposites whirl in contrary directions, Will and Mask from right to left, Creative Mind and Body of Fate like the hands of a clock, from left to right. I will confine myself for the moment to Will and Creative Mind, will and thought.²⁷ As Will approaches the utmost expansion of its antithetical cone it drags Creative Mind with it—thought is more and more dominated by will—but Creative Mind remains at the same distance from its cone’s narrow end that Will is from the broad end of the antithetical cone. Then, as though satiated by the extreme expansion of its cone, Will lets Creative Mind dominate, and is dragged by it until Creative Mind weakens once more. As Creative Mind, let us say, is dragged by Will towards the utmost expansion of its antithetical cone it is more and more contaminated by Will, while Will frees itself from contamination. We can, however, represent the two Faculties as they approach the full expansion of the antithetical cone by the same cross-sections of the cone.

The shaded, or primary part, is a contamination of Will; the unshaded, or antithetical part, a contamination of Creative Mind. We can substitute positions in the cones for either symbol: we can represent Creative Mind as approaching the extreme expansion of the antithetical cone and then as changing into the narrow end of the primary cone and expanding once more; the Will as approaching the narrow end of the primary cone and then, at the same instant when the Creative Mind changes cones, passing into the broad end of the antithetical cone, and contracting once more. The diagram is sometimes so used by my instructors and gives them a phrase which constantly occurs, “the interchange of the tinctures”, but it is inconvenient.28 For this reason they generally represent the Faculties as moving always along the outside of the diagram. Just before complete antithetical expression they are placed thus:

Just after it, thus:

I think of the gyre of Will as approaching complete antithetical expansion—unshaded cone—along the lower side of the diagram or moving from right to left,29 and the gyre of Creative Mind as approaching it along the upper side, left to right, and then of their passing one another at complete expansion, then of their receding from it, Will upon the upper side, Creative Mind upon the lower, and always on the outside of the diagram until they pass one another at complete primary expansion. These movements are but a convenient pictorial summary of what is more properly a double movement of two gyres. These gyres move not only forward to the primary and antithetical expansion, but have their own circular movement, the gyre of Will from right to left, that of Creative Mind from left to right. I shall consider presently the significance of these circlings.

The Mask and Body of Fate occupy those positions which are most opposite in character to the positions of Will and Creative Mind. If Will and Creative Mind are approaching complete antithetical expansion, Mask and Body of Fate are approaching complete primary expansion, and so on. In the following figure the man is almost completely antithetical in nature.

In the following almost completely primary.

In the following he is completely primary, a state which is like the completely antithetical state, as I must show presently, only a supernatural or ideal existence.

In the following he is midway between primary and antithetical and moving towards antithetical expansion. All four gyres are superimposed.

I have now only to set a row of numbers upon the sides to possess a classification, as I will show presently, of every possible movement of thought and of life, and I have been told to make these numbers correspond to the phases of the moon, including among them full moon and the moonless night when the moon is nearest to the sun. The moonless night is called Phase 1, and the full moon is Phase 15.30 Phase 8 begins the antithetical phases, those where the bright part of the moon is greater than the dark, and Phase 22 begins the primary phases, where the dark part is greater than the bright. At Phases 15 and 1 respectively, the antithetical and primary tinctures come to a climax. A man of, say, Phase 13 is a man whose Will is at that phase, and the diagram which shows the position of the Faculties for a Will so placed, describes his character and destiny. The last phase is Phase 28, and the twenty-eight phases constitute a month of which each day and night constitute an incarnation and the discarnate period which follows. I am for the moment only concerned with the incarnation, symbolised by the moon at night.

Phase 1 and Phase 15 31 are not human incarnations because human life is impossible without strife between the tinctures. They belong to an order of existence which we shall consider presently. The figure which I have used to represent Will at almost complete subjectivity represents the moon just before its round is complete, and instead of using a black disc with a white dot for Will at almost complete objectivity I think of the last crescent.

But it is more convenient to set these figures round a circle thus:³²

PART II: EXAMINATION OF THE WHEEL

During the first months of instruction I had the Great Wheel of the lunar phases as printed at the end of this paragraph, but knew nothing of the cones that explain it, and though I had abundant definitions and descriptions of the Faculties at their different stations, did not know why they passed one another at certain points, nor why two moved from left to right like the sun’s daily course, two from right to left like the moon in the zodiac.33 Even when I wrote the first edition of this book I thought the geometrical symbolism so difficult, I understood it so little, that I put it off to a later section; and as I had at that time, for a reason I have explained, to use a romantic setting, I described the Great Wheel as danced on the desert sands by mysterious dancers who left the traces of their feet to puzzle the Caliph of Bagdad and his learned men.³⁴ I tried to interest my readers in an unexplained rule of thumb that somehow explained the world.

This wheel is every completed movement of thought or life, twenty-eight incarnations, a single incarnation, a single judgment or act of thought. Man seeks his opposite or the opposite of his condition, attains his object so far as it is attainable, at Phase 15 and returns VII to Phase 1 again.

Phase 15 is called Sun in Moon because the solar or primary tincture is consumed by the lunar, but from another point of view it is Mask consumed in Will; all is beauty. The Mask as it were wills itself as beauty, but because, as Plotinus says, things that are of one kind are unconscious, it is an ideal or supernatural incarnation.³⁶ Phase 1 is called Moon in Sun because the lunar or antithetical tincture is consumed in the primary or solar, but from another point of view it is the Body of Fate consumed in Creative Mind; man is submissive and plastic: unless where supersensual power intervenes, the steel-like plasticity of water where the last ripple has been smoothed away. We shall presently have to consider the Principles where pure thought is possible, but in the Faculties the sole activity and the sole unity is natural or lunar, and in the primary phases that unity is moral. At Phase 1 morality is complete submission. All unity is from the Mask, and the antithetical Mask is described in the automatic script as a “form created by passion to unite us to ourselves”, the self so sought is that Unity of Being compared by Dante in the Convito to that of “a perfectly proportioned human body”.37 The Body of Fate is the sum, not the unity, of fact, fact as it affects a particular man. Only in the Four Principles shall we discover the concord of Empedocles. The Will is very much the Will described by Croce.^VIII,38 When not affected by the other Faculties it has neither emotion, morality nor intellectual interest, but knows how things are done, how windows open and shut, how roads are crossed, everything that we call utility. It seeks its own continuance. Only by the pursuit or acceptance of its direct opposite, that object of desire or moral ideal which is of all possible things the most difficult, and by forcing that form upon the Body of Fate, can it attain self-knowledge and expression. Phase 8 and Phase 22 are phases of struggle and tragedy, the first a struggle to find personality, the second to lose it. After Phase 22 and before Phase 1 there is a struggle to accept the fate-imposed unity, from Phase 1 to Phase 8 to escape it.

All such abstract statements are, however, misleading, for we are dealing always with a particular man, the man of Phase 13 or Phase 17 let us say. The Four Faculties are not the abstract categories of philosophy, being the result of the four memories of the Daimon or ultimate self of that man. His Body of Fate, the series of events forced upon him from without, is shaped out of the Daimon’s memory of the events of his past incarnations; his Mask or object of desire or idea of the good, out of its memory of the moments of exaltation in his past lives; his Will or normal ego out of its memory of all the events of his present life, whether consciously remembered or not; his Creative Mind from its memory of ideas—or universals—displayed by actual men in past lives, or their spirits between lives.

III

When I wish for some general idea which will describe the Great Wheel as an individual life I go to the Commedia dell’ Arte or improvised drama of Italy.39 The stage-manager, or Daimon, offers his actor an inherited scenario, the Body of Fate, and a Mask or rôle as unlike as possible to his natural ego or Will, and leaves him to improvise through his Creative Mind the dialogue and details of the plot. He must discover or reveal a being which only exists with extreme effort, when his muscles are as it were all taut and all his energies active. But this is antithetical man. For primary man I go to the Commedia dell’ Arte in its decline.⁴⁰ The Will is weak and cannot create a rôle, and so, if it transform itself, does so after an accepted pattern, some traditional clown or pantaloon. It has perhaps no object but to move the crowd, and if it “gags” it is that there may be plenty of topical allusions. In the primary phases man must cease to desire Mask and Image by ceasing from self-expression, and substitute a motive of service for that of self-expression. Instead of the created Mask he has an imitative Mask; and when he recognises this, his Mask may become the historical norm, or an image of mankind. The author of the Imitation of Christ was certainly a man of a late primary phase.⁴¹ The antithetical Mask and Will are free, and the primary Mask and Will enforced; and the free Mask and Will are personality, while the enforced Mask and Will are code, those limitations which give strength precisely because they are enforced. Personality, no matter how habitual, is a constantly renewed choice, varying from an individual charm, in the more antithetical phases, to a hard objective dramatisation; but when the primary phases begin man is moulded more and more from without.

Antithetical men are, like Landor, violent in themselves because they hate all that impedes their personality,⁴² but are in their intellect (Creative Mind) gentle, whereas primary men whose hatreds are impersonal are violent in their intellect but gentle in themselves, as doubtless Robespierre was gentle.⁴³

The Mask before Phase 15 is described as a “revelation” because through it the being obtains knowledge of itself, sees itself in personality; while after Phase 15 it is a “concealment”, for the being grows incoherent, vague and broken, as its intellect (Creative Mind) is more and more concerned with objects that have no relation to its unity but a relation to the unity of society or of material things known through the Body of Fate. It adopts a personality which it more and more casts outward, more and more dramatises. It is now a dissolving violent phantom which would grip itself and hold itself together. The being of antithetical man is described as full of rage before Phase 12, against all in the world that hinders its expression, after Phase 12, but before Phase 15, the rage is a knife turned against itself. After Phase 15, but before Phase 19, the being is full of phantasy, a continual escape from and yet acknowledgment of all that allures in the world, a continual playing with all that must engulf it. The primary is that which serves, the antithetical is that which creates.

At Phase 8 is the “Discovery of Strength”, its embodiment in sensuality.44 The imitation that held it to the enforced Mask, the norm of the race now a hated convention, has ceased and its own norm has not begun. Primary and antithetical are equal and fight for mastery; and when this fight is ended through the conviction of weakness and the preparation for rage, the Mask becomes once more voluntary. At Phase 22 is the “Breaking of Strength”, for here the being makes its last attempt to impose its personality upon the world before the Mask becomes enforced once more, character substituted for personality. To these two phases, perhaps to all phases, the being may return up to four times, my instructors say, before it can pass on. It is claimed, however, that four times is the utmost possible. By being is understood that which divides into Four Faculties, by individuality the Will analysed in relation to itself, by personality the Will analysed in relation to the free Mask, by character Will analysed in relation to the enforced Mask. Personality is strongest near Phase 15, individuality near Phase 22 and Phase 8.

In the last phases, Phases 26, 27 and 28, the Faculties wear away, grow transparent, and man may see himself as it were arrayed against the supersensual; but of this I shall speak when I consider the Principles.

The Will looks into a painted picture, the Creative Mind looks into a photograph, but both look into something that is the opposite of themselves. The Creative Mind contains all the universals in so far as its memory permits their employment, whereas the photograph is heterogeneous. The picture is chosen, the photograph is fated, because by Fate and Necessity—for I need both words—is understood that which comes from without, whereas the Mask is predestined, Destiny being that which comes to us from within. We can best explain the heterogeneity of the photograph when we call it the photograph of a crowded street, which the Creative Mind when not under the influence of the Mask contemplates coldly; while the picture contains but few objects and the contemplating Will is impassioned and solitary. When the Will predominates the Mask or Image is “sensuous”; when Creative Mind predominates it is “abstract”, when Mask predominates it is “idealised”, when Body of Fate predominates it is “concrete”. The automatic script defines “sensuous” in an unexpected way. An object is sensuous if I relate it to myself, “my fire, my chair, my sensation”, whereas “a fire, a chair, a sensation”, are all concrete or appertain to the Body of Fate; while “the fire, the chair, the sensation”, because they are looked upon as representative of their kind, are “abstract”. To a miser his own money would be “sensuous”, another’s money “concrete”, the money he lacked “idealised”, the money economists speak of “abstract”.

In the Table in section XII the characters of the Faculties at all the different phases are described, and the phasal characteristics of a man at any particular phase can be discovered by their means. The descriptions should not be considered as exhaustive but as suggestions to call into imagination the Four Faculties at any particular phase.

They were written in the automatic script sometimes two or three, sometimes eight or nine at a time. Even now after years of use I could not re-create them if the Table were lost. I should say they proved a use more prolonged than my own did I not remember that the creators of the script claim a rapidity of thought impossible to our minds. I think of the elaborate pictures one sees between sleeping and waking and often showing powers of design and invention that would have taken hours of an artist’s time.

At Phases 11 and 12 occurs what is called the opening of the tinctures, at Phase 11 the antithetical opens, at Phase 12 the primary. A cone is for the moment substituted for the wheel, a gyre encircles the cone, ascending or descending, which completes its journey round the cone, while the larger movement completes a phase.45 The opening means the reflection inward of the Four Faculties: all are as it were mirrored in personality, Unity of Being becomes possible. Hitherto we have been part of something else, but now discover everything within our own nature. Sexual love becomes the most important event in life, for the opposite sex is nature chosen and fated. Personality seeks personality. Every emotion begins to be related to every other as musical notes are related. It is as though we touched a musical string that set other strings vibrating. The antithetical tincture (Will and Mask) opens first because the phases signified by odd numbers are antithetical, the primary tincture at Phase 12 because those signified by even numbers are primary. Though all phases from Phase 8 to Phase 22 are antithetical, taken as a whole, and all phases from Phase 22 to Phase 8 primary; seen by different analysis the individual phases are alternately antithetical and primary.⁴⁶ At Phase 18 the primary tincture closes once more, and at Phase 19 the antithetical. At Phases 25 and 26 there is a new opening, and at Phases 4 and 5 a new closing, but this time the tinctures open not into personality but into its negation, the whole objectively perceived. One may regard the subjective phases as forming a separate wheel, its Phase 8 between Phases 11 and 12 of the larger wheel, its Phase 22 between Phases 19 and 20; the objective phases as another separate wheel, its Phase 8 between Phases 25 and 26, its Phase 22 between Phases 4 and 5. This wheel between its Phases 8 and 22 is not subjective, from the point of man, but a sharing of or submission to divine personality experienced as spiritual objectivity, whereas its three first and three last phases are physical objectivity. During this spiritual objectivity, or spiritual primary, the Faculties “wear thin”, the Principles, which are, when evoked from the point of view of the Faculties, a sphere, shine through.47 At Phase 15 and Phase 1 occurs what is called the interchange of the tinctures, those thoughts, emotions, energies, which were primary before Phase 15 or Phase 1 are antithetical after, those that were antithetical are primary. I was told, for instance, that before the historical Phase 15 the antithetical tincture of the average European was dominated by reason and desire, the primary by race and emotion, and that after Phase 15 this was reversed, his subjective nature had been passionate and logical but was now enthusiastic and sentimental. I have made little use of this interchange in my account of the twenty-eight incarnations because when I wrote it I did not understand the relation between the change and Unity of Being. Every phase is in itself a wheel; the individual soul is awakened by a violent oscillation (one thinks of Verlaine oscillating between the church and the brothel) until it sinks in on that Whole where the contraries are united, the antinomies resolved.⁴⁸

RULES FOR DISCOVERING TRUE AND FALSE MASKS

When the Will is in antithetical phases the True Mask is the effect of Creative Mind of opposite phase upon that phase; and the False Mask is the effect of Body of Fate of opposite phase upon that phase.

The True Mask of Phase 17, for instance, is “Simplification through intensity”, derived from Phase 3, modified by the Creative Mind of that phase, which is described as “Simplicity” and comes from Phase 27, which is that of the Saint.

The False Mask of Phase 17 is “Dispersal”, derived from Phase 3, modified by the Body of Fate of the phase which comes from Phase 13 and is described as “Interest”. It will be found that this word describes with great accuracy the kind of “Dispersal” which weakens men of Phase 17 when they try to live in the primary tincture.

When the Will is in primary phases the True Mask is the effect of Body of Fate of opposite phase upon that phase; and the False Mask is the effect of Creative Mind of opposite phase upon that phase.

The True Mask of Phase 3 is “Innocence”, derived from Phase 17, modified by the Body of Fate of the phase which is described as “Loss” and comes from Phase 27, which is that of the Saint.

The False Mask of Phase 3 is “Folly” derived from Phase 17, modified by the Creative Mind of that phase which is described as “Creative imagination through antithetical emotion” and comes from Phase 13. The primary Phase 3, when it attempts to live antithetically, gives itself up to inconsequence because it cannot be creative in the Mask. On the other hand, when it lives according to the primary, and is true to phase, it takes from its opposite phase delight in passing things, sees “a world in a grain of sand, a Heaven in a wild flower” and becomes a child playing, knows nothing of consequence and purpose.49 “Loss” affects Phase 17 itself as an enforced withdrawal of primary desire, for the Body of Fate is inimical to antithetical natures.

Only long familiarity with the system can make the whole Table of Masks, Creative Minds, etc.—see Section XII—intelligible; it should be studied by the help of these two following rules:

In an antithetical phase the being seeks by the help of the Creative Mind to deliver the Mask from Body of Fate.

In a primary phase the being seeks by the help of the Body of Fate to deliver the Creative Mind from the Mask.

VII

RULES FOR FINDING THE TRUE AND FALSE CREATIVE MIND

When the Will is in antithetical phases the True Creative Mind is derived from the Creative Mind phase, modified by the Creative Mind of that phase; while the False Creative Mind is derived from the Creative Mind phase, modified by the Body of Fate of that phase.

For instance, the True Creative Mind of Phase 17, “Creative Imagination through antithetical Emotion”, is derived from Phase 13 as that phase is modified by its Creative Mind, which is described as “Subjective truth” and comes from Phase 17.

The False Creative Mind of Phase 17, “Enforced self-realization”, is derived from Phase 13 as that phase is modified by its Body of Fate, “Enforced love”, “enforced love of another” derived from Phase 3.

When the Will is in primary phases the True Creative Mind is derived from Creative Mind phase, modified by the Body of Fate of that phase; while the False Creative Mind is derived from the Creative Mind phase modified by the False Creative Mind of that phase.

For instance, the True Creative Mind of Phase 27 is described as “Supersensual receptivity” and is derived from Phase 3 as that phase is modified by its Body of Fate derived from Phase 13, and described as “Interest”; while its False Creative Mind is described as “Pride” and is derived from Phase 3, modified by the False Creative Mind of that phase which is derived from Phase 27 and described as “Abstraction”.

VIII

RULE FOR FINDING BODY OF FATE

The Body of Fate of any particular phase is the effect of the whole nature of its Body of Fate phase upon that particular phase. As, however, the Body of Fate is always primary it is in sympathy with the primary phase while it opposes the antithetical phase; in this it is the reverse of the Mask, which is sympathetic to an antithetical phase but opposes a primary.

SUBDIVISIONS OF THE WHEEL

Excluding the four phases of crisis (Phases 8, 22, 15, 1), each quarter consists of six phases, or of two sets of three. In every case the first phase of each set can be described as a manifestation of power, the second of a code or arrangement of powers, and the third of a belief, the belief being an appreciation of, or submission to some quality which becomes power in the next phase. The reason of this is that each set of three is itself a wheel, and has the same character as the Great Wheel. The Phases 1 to 8 are associated with elemental earth, being phases of germination and sprouting; those between Phase 8 and Phase 15 with elemental water, because there the image-making power is at its height; those between Phase 15 and Phase 22 with elemental air, because through air, or space, things are divided from one another, and here intellect is at its height; those between Phase 22 and Phase 1 with elemental fire, because here all things are made simple. The Will is strongest in the first quarter, Mask in second, Creative Mind in third, and the Body of Fate in fourth.

There are other divisions and attributions to be considered later.

DISCORDS, OPPOSITIONS AND CONTRASTS

The being becomes conscious of itself as a separate being, because of certain facts of Opposition and Discord, the emotional Opposition of Will and Mask, the intellectual Opposition of Creative Mind and Body of Fate, Discords between Will and Creative Mind, Creative Mind and Mask, Mask and Body of Fate, Body of Fate and Will. A Discord is always the enforced understanding of the unlikeness of Will and Mask or of Creative Mind and Body of Fate. There is an enforced attraction between Opposites, for the Will has a natural desire for the Mask and the Creative Mind a natural perception of the Body of Fate; in one the dog bays the Moon,50 in the other the eagle stares on the Sun by natural right.⁵¹ When, however, the Creative Mind deceives the Will in an antithetical phase, by offering it some primary image of the Mask, or when the Will offers to the Creative Mind an emotion that should be turned towards the Mask alone, the Discord emerges again in its simplicity because of the jarring of the emotion, the grinding out of the Image. On the other hand, it may be the Mask that slips on to the Body of Fate till we confuse what we would be with what we must be. As the Discords through the circling of the Four Faculties become Oppositions, when as at Phase 15 (say) the Creative Mind comes to be opposite the Mask, they share the qualities of Opposition. As the Faculties approach to one another, on the other hand, Discord gradually becomes identity, and one or other, according to whether it takes place at Phase 1 or Phase 15, is weakened and finally absorbed, Creative Mind in Will at Phase 15, Will in Creative Mind at Phase 1 and so on; while if it be at Phase 8 or Phase 22, first one predominates and then the other and there is instability.

Without this continual Discord through Deception there would be no conscience, no activity; Deception is a technical term of my teachers and may be substituted for “desire”. Life is an endeavour, made vain by the four sails of its mill, to come to a double contemplation, that of the chosen Image, that of the fated Image.

There are also Harmonies, but these which are connected with the whole figure can be best considered in relation to another part of the System.

THE FOUR PERFECTIONS AND THE FOUR AUTOMATONISMS

The Four Perfections can only be understood when their phases are studied in detail; it will be obvious for instance that self-sacrifice must be the typical virtue of phases where instinct or race is predominant, and especially in those three phases that come before reflection. Automatonism in antithetical phases arises from the Mask and Creative Mind, when separated from the Body of Fate and Will, through refusal of, or rest from conflict; and in primary phases from the Body of Fate and Will, when weary of the struggle for complete primary existence or when they refuse that struggle. It does not necessarily mean that the man is not true to phase or, as it is said, out of phase; the most powerful natures are precisely those who most often need Automatonism as a rest. It is perhaps an element in our enjoyment of art and literature, being awakened in our minds by rhythm and by pattern. He is, however, out of phase, if he refuse for anything but need of rest the conflict with the Body of Fate which is the source of antithetical energy and so falls under imitative or creative Automatonism, or if in primary phases he refuse conflict with the Mask and so falls under obedient or instinctive Automatonism.

XII

TABLE OF THE FOUR FACULTIES

Each Faculty is placed after the number of the phase where it is formed, not after the phase which it affects.

TABLE OF THE FOUR FACULTIES

WILL	MASK	CREATIVE MIND	BODY OF FATE
1. No	description except	Complete plasticity.
2. Beginning of energy.	True. Illusion. False. Delusion.	True. Physical activity. False. Cunning.	Enforced love of the world.
3. Beginning of ambition.	True. Simplification through intensity. False. Dispersal.	True. Supersensual receptivity. False. Pride.	Enforced love of another.
4. Desire for primary objects.	True. Intensity through emotions. False. Curiosity.	True. Beginning of the abstract supersensual. False. Fascination of sin.	Enforced intellectual action.
5. Separation from innocence.	True. Conviction. False. Domination.	True. Rhetoric. False. Spiritual arrogance.	Enforced belief.
6. Artificial individuality.	True. Fatalism. False. Superstition.	True. Constructive emotion. False. Authority.	Enforced emotion.
7. Assertion of individuality.	True. Self-analysis. False. Self-adaptation.	True. Creation through pity. False. Self-driven desire.	Enforced sensuality.
8. War between individuality and race.	True. Self-immolation. False. Self-assurance.	True. Amalgamation. False. Despair.	The beginning of strength.
9. Belief takes place of individuality.	True. Wisdom. False. Self-pity.	True. Domination of the intellect. False. Distortion.	Adventure that excites the individuality.
10. The image-breaker.	True. Self-reliance. False. Isolation.	True. Dramatisation of Mask. False. Self-desecration.	Humanity.
11. The consumer. The pyre-builder.	True. Consciousness of self. False. Self-consciousness.	True. Emotional intellect. False. The Unfaithful.	Natural law.
12. The Forerunner.	True. Self-realization. False. Self-abandonment.	True. Emotional philosophy. False. Enforced lure.	Search.
13. The sensuous man.	True. Renunciation. False. Emulation.	True. Creative imagination through antithetical emotion. False. Enforced self-realization.	Interest.
14. The obsessed man.	True. Oblivion. False. Malignity.	True. Vehemence. False. Opinionated will.	None except monotony.
15. No	description except	Complete beauty.
16. The positive man.	True. Player on Pan’s Pipes. False. Fury.	True. Emotional will. False. Terror.	The Fool is his own Body of Fate.
17. The Daimonic man.	True. Innocence. False. Folly.	True. Subjective truth. False. Morbidity.	None except impersonal action.
18. The emotional man.	True. Passion. False. Will.	True. Subjective philosophy. False. War between two forms of expression.	The Hunchback is his own Body of Fate.
19. The assertive man.	True. Excess. False. Limitation.	True. Moral iconoclasm. False. Self-assertion.	Persecution.
20. The concrete man.	True. Justice. False. Tyranny.	True. Domination through emotional construction. False. Reformation.	Objective action.
21. The acquisitive man.	True. Altruism. False. Efficiency.	True. Self-dramatisation. False. Anarchy.	Success.
22. Balance between ambition and contemplation.	True. Courage. False. Fear.	True. Versatility. False. Impotence.	Temptation through strength.⁵²
23. The receptive man.	True. Facility. False. Obscurity.	True. Heroic sentiment. False. Dogmatic sentimentality.	Enforced triumph of achievement.
24. The end of ambition.	True. Organisation. False. Inertia.	True. Ideality. False. Derision.	Enforced success of action.
25. The conditional man.	True. Rejection. False. Moral indifference.	True. Social intellect. False. Limitation.	Enforced failure of action.
26. The multiple man also called The Hunchback.	True. Self-exaggeration. False. Self-abandonment.	True. First perception of character. False. Mutilation.	Enforced disillusionment.
27. The Saint.	True. Self-expression. False. Self-absorption.	True. Simplicity. False. Abstraction.	Enforced loss.
28. The Fool.	True. Serenity. False. Self-distrust.	True. Hope. False. Moroseness.	Enforced illusion.

XIII

CHARACTERS OF CERTAIN PHASES

FOUR PERFECTIONS

At P. 2, P. 3, P. 4		.	Self-sacrifice
At P. 13	.	.	Self-knowledge
At P. 16, P. 17, P. 18		.	Unity of Being
At P. 27	.	.	Sanctity

FOUR TYPES OF WISDOM IX

At P. 4	.	.	Wisdom of Desire
At P. 18	.	.	Wisdom of Heart
At P. 12	.	.	Wisdom of Intellect
At P. 26	.	.	Wisdom of Knowledge

FOUR CONTESTS

At P. 1	.	.	Moral
At P. 8	.	.	Emotional
At P. 15	.	.	Physical
At P. 22	.	.	Spiritual or supersensual

RAGE, FANTASY, ETC.

From P. 8 to P. 12	.	Rage
From P. 12 to P. 15	.	Spiritual or supersensual Rage
From P. 15 to P. 19	.	Fantasy
From P. 19 to P. 22	.	Power

XIV

GENERAL CHARACTER OF CREATIVE MIND X

(1)	Affecting	28, 1, 2 from 2, 1, 28. Controlled.
(2)	"	3, 4, 5, 6 from 27, 26, 25, 24. Transformatory.
(3)	"	7, 8, 9 from 23, 22, 21. Mathematical.
(4)	"	10, 11, 12 from 20, 19, 18. Intellectually passionate.
(5)	"	13 from 17. Stillness.
(6)	"	14, 15, 16 from 16, 15, 14. Emotional.
(7)	"	17, 18, 19, 20 from 13, 12, 11, 10. Emotionally passionate.
(8)	"	21, 22, 23 from 9, 8, 7. Rational.
(9)	"	24 from 6. Obedient.
(10)	"	25, 26, 27 from 3, 4, 5. Serenity.

GENERAL CHARACTER OF BODY OF FATE AFFECTING CERTAIN PHASES

(1)	Affecting	28, 1, 2 from 16, 15, 14. Joy.
(2)	"	3, 4, 5, 6 from 13, 12, 11, 10. Breathing.
(3)	"	7, 8, 9 from 9, 8, 7. Tumult.
(4)	"	10, 11, 12 from 6, 5, 4. Tension.
(5)	"	13 from 3. Disease.
(6)	"	14, 15, 16 from 2, 1, 28. The world.
(7)	"	17, 18, 19, 20 from 27, 26, 25, 24. Sorrow.
(8)	"	21, 22, 23 from 23, 22, 21. Ambition.
(9)	"	24 from 20. Success.
(10)	"	25, 26, 27 from 19, 18, 17. Absorption.

XVI

TABLE OF THE QUARTERS

THE FOUR CONTESTS OF THE ANTITHETICAL WITHIN ITSELF

First quarter.		With body.	In the first quarter body should win, in second heart, etc.
Second	"	With heart.
Third	"	With mind.
Fourth	"	With soul.

FOUR AUTOMATONISMS

First quarter.		Instinctive.
Second	"	Imitative.
Third	"	Creative.
Fourth	"	Obedient.

FOUR CONDITIONS OF THE WILL

First quarter.		Instinctive.
Second	"	Emotional.
Third	"	Intellectual.
Fourth	"	Moral.

FOUR CONDITIONS OF THE MASK

First quarter.		Intensity (affecting third quarter).
Second	"	Tolerance (affecting fourth quarter).
Third	"	Convention or systematization (affecting first quarter).
Fourth	"	Self-analysis (affecting second quarter).

DEFECTS OF FALSE CREATIVE MIND WHICH BRING THE FALSE MASK

First quarter.		Sentimentality.
Second	"	Brutality (desire for root facts of life).
Third	"	Hatred.
Fourth	"	Insensitiveness.

Note.—In primary phases these defects separate Mask from Body of Fate, in antithetical, Creative Mind from Body of Fate.

ELEMENTAL ATTRIBUTIONS

Earth	.	.	.	First quarter
Water	.	.	.	Second quarter
Air	.	.	.	Third quarter
Fire	.	.	.	Fourth quarter

XVII

UNCLASSIFIED ATTRIBUTES

Mask worn—moral and emotional.

Mask carried—emotional.

ABSTRACTION

Strong at 6, 7, 8.

Strongest at 22, 23, 24, 25.

Begins at 19, less at 20, increases again at 21.

THREE ENERGIES

Images from self give emotion.

Images from world give passion.

Images from the supersensual give will.

ENFORCED AND FREE FACULTIES

In primary phases the Mask and Will are enforced, the Creative Mind and Body of Fate free.

In antithetical phases the Creative Mind and Body of Fate are enforced and the Mask and Will free.

THE TWO CONDITIONS

Primary means democratic.

Antithetical means aristocratic.

THE TWO DIRECTIONS

Phase 1 to Phase 15 is towards Nature.

Phase 15 to Phase 1 is towards God.

RELATIONS

Those between Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate are oppositions, or contrasts.

Those between Will and Creative Mind, Mask and Body of Fate discords.

OBJECTIVITIES

From Phase 23 to Phase 25 is Physical Objectivity.

From Phase 26 to Phase 28 is Spiritual Objectivity.

CONSCIOUSNESS

From Phase 8 to Phase 22 is Will.

From Phase 28 to Phase 8 is Creative Mind.54

PART III: THE TWENTY-EIGHT INCARNATIONS 55

PHASE ONE AND THE INTERCHANGE OF THE TINCTURES

As will be seen, when late phases are described, every achievement of a being, after Phase 22, is an elimination of the individual intellect and a discovery of the moral life. When the individual intellect lingers on, it is arrogance, self-assertion, a sterile abstraction, for the being is forced by the growing primary tincture to accept first the service of, and later on absorption in, the primary Whole, a sensual or supersensual objectivity.

When the old antithetical becomes the new primary, moral feeling is changed into an organisation of experience which must in its turn seek a unity, the whole of experience. When the old primary becomes the new antithetical, the old realisation of an objective moral law is changed into a subconscious turbulent instinct. The world of rigid custom and law is broken up by “the uncontrollable mystery upon the bestial floor”.⁵⁶

Phase 1 not being human can better be described after Phase 28. None of those phases where the tinctures open into the Whole, except Phase 27, produce character of sufficient distinctiveness to become historical.

PHASE TWO

Will—Beginning of Energy.

Mask (from Phase 16). True—Player on Pan’s Pipes.⁵⁷ False—Fury.

Creative Mind (from Phase 28). True—Hope. False—Moroseness.

Body of Fate (from Phase 14)—“None except monotony”.

When the man lives out of phase and desires the Mask, and so permits it to dominate the Creative Mind, he copies the emotional explosion of Phase 16 in so far as difference of phase permits. He gives himself to a violent animal assertion and can only destroy; strike right and left. Incapable of sharing the spiritual absorption of Phase 28, his Creative Mind fills him with ignorance and gloom.

But when they find the frowning Babe,

Terror strikes through the region wide:

They cry “The babe! the babe is born!”

And flee away on every side.58

But if he live according to phase, he uses the Body of Fate to clear the intellect of the influence of the Mask. He frees himself from emotion; and the Body of Fate, derived from Phase 14, pushes back the mind into its own supersensual impulse, until it grows obedient to all that recurs, and the Mask, now entirely enforced, is a rhythmical impulse. He gives himself up to Nature as the Fool (Phase 28) gave himself to God. He is neither immoral nor violent but innocent; is as it were the breath stirring on the face of the deep;⁵⁹ the smile on the face of a but half-awakened child. Nobody of our age has, it may be, met him, certainly no record of such meeting exists, but, were such meeting possible, he would be remembered as a form of joy, for he would seem more entirely living than all other men, a personification or summing up of all natural life. He would decide on this or that by no balance of the reason but by an infallible joy, and if born amid a rigid mechanical order, he would make for himself a place, as a dog will scratch a hole for itself in loose earth.

Here, as at Phase 16, the ordinary condition is sometimes reversed, and instead of ugliness, otherwise characteristic of this as of all primary phases, there is beauty. The new antithetical tincture (the old primary reborn) is violent. A new birth, when the product of an extreme contrast in the past life of the individual, is sometimes so violent that lacking foreign admixture it forestalls its ultimate physical destiny. It forces upon the primary and upon itself a beautiful form. It has the muscular balance and force of an animal good-humour with all appropriate comeliness as in the Dancing Faun.⁶⁰ If this rare accident does not occur, the body is coarse, not deformed, but coarse from lack of sensitiveness, and is most fitted for rough physical labour.

Seen by those lyrical poets who draw their Masks from early phases, the man of Phase 2 is transfigured. Weary of an energy that defines and judges, weary of intellectual self-expression, they desire some “concealment”, some transcendent intoxication. The bodily instincts, subjectively perceived, become the cup wreathed with ivy.61 Perhaps even a Body of Fate from any early phase may suffice to create this Image, but when it affects Phase 13 and Phase 14 the Image will be more sensuous, more like immediate experience. The Image is a myth, a woman, a landscape, or anything whatsoever that is an external expression of the Mask.

The Kings of Inde their jewelled sceptres vail,

And from their treasures scatter pearlèd hail;

Great Brama from his mystic heaven groans

And all his priesthood moans;

Before young Bacchus’ eye-wink turning pale.⁶²

PHASE THREE

Will—Beginning of Ambition.

Mask (from Phase 17). True—Innocence. False—Folly.

Creative Mind (from Phase 27). True—Simplicity. False—Abstraction.

Body of Fate (from Phase 13)—Interest.

Out of phase and copying the opposite phase he gives himself up to a kind of clodhopper folly, that keeps his intellect moving among conventional ideas with a sort of make-believe. Incapable of consecutive thought and of moral purpose, he lives miserably seeking to hold together some consistent plan of life, patching rags upon rags because that is expected of him, or out of egotism. If on the other hand he uses his Body of Fate to purify his Creative Mind of the Mask, if he is content to permit his senses and his subconscious nature to dominate his intellect, he takes delight in all that passes; but because he claims nothing of his own, chooses nothing, thinks that no one thing is better than another, he will not endure a pang because all passes. Almost without intellect, it is a phase of perfect bodily sanity, for, though the body is still in close contact with supersensual rhythm, it is no longer absorbed in that rhythm; eyes and ears are open; one instinct balances another; every season brings its delight.

He who bends to himself a joy

Does the wingèd life destroy,

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise.⁶³

Seen by lyrical poets, of whom so many have belonged to the fantastic Phase 17, the man of this phase becomes an Image where simplicity and intensity are united, he seems to move among yellowing corn or under overhanging grapes. He gave to Landor his shepherds and hamadryads,64 to Morris his Water of the Wondrous Isles,⁶⁵ to Shelley his wandering lovers and sages,⁶⁶ and to Theocritus all his flocks and pastures;⁶⁷ and of what else did Bembo think when he cried, “Would that I were a shepherd that I might look daily down upon Urbino”?⁶⁸ Imagined in some antithetical mind, seasonal change and bodily sanity seem images of lasting passion and the body’s beauty.

PHASE FOUR

Will—Desire for Exterior World.

Mask (from Phase 18). True—Passion. False—Will.

Creative Mind (from Phase 26). True—First Perception of Character. False—Mutilation.

Body of Fate (from Phase 12)—Search.

When out of phase he attempts antithetical wisdom (for reflection has begun), separates himself from instinct (hence “mutilation”), and tries to enforce upon himself and others all kinds of abstract or conventional ideas which are for him, being outside his experience, mere make-believe. Lacking antithetical capacity, and primary observation, he is aimless and blundering, possesses nothing except the knowledge that there is something known to others that is not mere instinct. True to phase, his interest in everything that happens, in all that excites his instinct (“search”), is so keen that he has no desire to claim anything for his own will; nature still dominates his thought as passion; yet instinct grows reflective. He is full of practical wisdom, a wisdom of saws and proverbs, or founded upon concrete examples.⁶⁹ He can see nothing beyond sense, but sense expands and contracts to meet his needs, and the needs of those who trust him. It is as though he woke suddenly out of sleep and thereupon saw more and remembered more than others. He has “the wisdom of instinct”, a wisdom perpetually excited by all those hopes and needs which concern his well-being or that of the race (Creative Mind from Phase 12 and so acting from whatever in race corresponds to personality unified in thought). The men of the opposite phase, or of the phases nearly opposite, worn out by a wisdom held with labour and uncertainty, see persons of this phase as images of peace. Two passages of Browning come to mind:

An old hunter, talking with gods

Or sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos.70

A King lived long ago,

In the morning of the world,

When Earth was nigher Heaven than now:

And the King’s locks curled,

Disparting o’er a forehead full

As the milk-white space ’twixt horn and horn

Of some sacrificial bull—

Only calm as a babe new-born:

For he was got to a sleepy mood,

So safe from all decrepitude,

From age with its bane, so sure gone by,

(The Gods so loved him while he dreamed)

That, having lived thus long, there seemed

No need the King should ever die.⁷¹

THE OPENING AND CLOSING OF THE TINCTURES

Since Phase 26 the primary tincture has so predominated, man is so sunk in Fate, in life, that there is no reflection, no experience, because that which reflects, that which acquires experience, has been drowned. Man cannot think of himself as separate from that which he sees with the bodily eye or in the mind’s eye. He neither loves nor hates though he may be in hatred or in love. Birdalone in The Water of the Wondrous Isles (a woman of Phase 3 reflected in an antithetical mind) falls in love with her friend’s lover and he with her. There is great sorrow but no struggle, her decision to disappear is sudden as if compelled by some power over which she has no control. Has she not perhaps but decided as her unknown fathers and mothers compelled, but conformed to the lineaments of her race? Is she not a child of “Weird”, are not all in the most primary phases children of “Weird” exercising an unconscious discrimination towards all that before Phase 1 defines their Fate, and after Phase 1 their race?72 Every achievement of their souls, Phase 1 being passed, springs up out of the body, and their work is to substitute for a life where all is Fate frozen into rule and custom, a life where all is fused by instinct; with them to hunger, to taste, to desire, is to grow wise.

Between Phase 4 and Phase 5 the tinctures ceased to be drowned in the One, and reflection begins. Between Phases 25, 26 and Phases 4, 5, there is an approach to absolute surrender of the Will, first to God, then, as Phase 1 passes away, to Nature, and the surrender is the most complete form of the freedom of the Body of Fate which has been increasing since Phase 22. When Man identifies himself with his Fate, when he is able to say “Thy Will is our freedom” or when he is perfectly natural, that is to say, perfectly a portion of his surroundings, he is free even though all his actions can be foreseen, even though every action is a logical deduction from all that went before it.⁷³ He is all Fate but has no Destiny.

PHASE FIVE

Will—Separation from Innocence.

Mask (from Phase 19). True—Excess. False—Limitation.

Creative Mind (from Phase 25). True—Social Intellect. False—Limitation.

Body of Fate (from Phase 11)—Natural Law.

Out of phase, and seeking antithetical emotion, he is sterile, passing from one insincere attitude to another, moving through a round of moral images torn from their context and so without meaning. He is so proud of each separation from experience that he becomes a sort of angry or smiling Punch with a lath between his wooden arms striking here and there.⁷⁴ His Body of Fate is enforced, for he has reversed the condition of his phase and finds himself at conflict with a world which offers him nothing but temptation and affront. True to phase, he is the direct opposite of all this. Abstraction has indeed begun, but it comes to him as a portion of experience cut off from everything but itself and therefore fitted to be the object of reflection. He no longer touches, eats, drinks, thinks and feels Nature, but sees her as something from which he is separating himself, something that he may dominate, though only for a moment and by some fragmentary violence of sensation or of thought. Nature may seem half gone, but the laws of Nature have appeared and he can change her rhythms and her seasons by his knowledge. He lives in the moment but with an intensity Phases 2, 3 and 4 have never known, the Will approaches its climax, he is no longer like a man but half-awakened. He is a corrupter, disturber, wanderer, a founder of sects and peoples, and works with extravagant energy, and his reward is but to live in its glare.

Seen by a poet of the opposite phase, by a man hiding fading emotion under broken emphasis, he is Byron’s Don Juan or his Giaour.75

PHASE SIX

Will—Artificial Individuality.

Mask (from Phase 20). True—Justice. False—Tyranny.

Creative Mind (from Phase 24). True—Ideality. False—Derision.

Body of Fate (from Phase 10)—Humanity.

Example: Walt Whitman.⁷⁶

Had Walt Whitman lived out of phase, desire to prove that all his emotions were healthy and intelligible, to set his practical sanity above all not made in his fashion, to cry “Thirty years old and in perfect health!” would have turned him into some kind of jibing demagogue;⁷⁷ and to think of him would be to remember that Thoreau, picking up the jaw-bone of a pig with no tooth missing, recorded that there also was perfect health.⁷⁸ He would, that he might believe in himself, have compelled others to believe. Not being out of phase, he used his Body of Fate (his interest in crowds, in casual loves and affections, in all summary human experience) to clear intellect of antithetical emotion (always insincere from Phase 1 to Phase 8), and haunted and hunted by the now involuntary Mask, created an Image of vague, half-civilised man, all his thought and impulse a product of democratic bonhomie, of schools, of colleges, of public discussion. Abstraction had been born, but it remained the abstraction of a community, of a tradition, a synthesis starting, not as with Phases 19, 20 and 21 with logical deduction from an observed fact, but from the whole experience or from some experience of the individual or of the community: “I have such and such a feeling. I have such and such a belief. What follows from feeling, what from belief?” While Thomas Aquinas, whose historical epoch was nearly of this phase, summed up in abstract categories all possible experience, not that he might know but that he might feel, Walt Whitman makes catalogues of all that has moved him, or amused his eye, that he may grow more poetical. Experience is all-absorbing, subordinating observed fact, drowning even truth itself, if truth is conceived of as something apart from impulse and instinct and from the Will. Impulse or instinct begins to be all in all. In a little while, though not yet, it must, sweeping away catalogue and category, fill the mind with terror.

PHASE SEVEN

Will—Assertion of Individuality.79

Mask (from Phase 21). True—Altruism. False—Efficiency.

Creative Mind (from Phase 23). True—Heroic sentiment. False—Dogmatic sentimentality.

Body of Fate (from Phase 9)—Adventure that excites the individuality.

Examples: George Borrow, Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Carlyle, James Macpherson.⁸⁰

At Phases 2, 3 and 4 the man moved within tradition or seasonable limits, but since Phase 5 limits have grown indefinite; public codes, all that depend upon habit, are all but dissolved, even the catalogues and categories of Phase 6 are no longer sufficient. If out of phase the man desires to be the man of Phase 21; an impossible desire, for that man is all but the climax of intellectual complexity, and all men, from Phase 2 to Phase 7 inclusive, are intellectually simple. His instincts are all but at their apex of complexity, and he is bewildered and must soon be helpless. The dissolving character, out of phase, desires the breaking personality, and though it cannot possess or even conceive of personality, seeing that its thoughts and emotions are common to all, it can create a grandiloquent phantom and by deceiving others deceive itself; and presently we shall discover Phase 21, out of phase, bragging of an imaginary naïveté.

Phase 7 when true to phase surrenders to the Body of Fate which, being derived from the phase where personality first shows itself, is excited into forms of character so dissolved in Will, in instinct, that they are hardly distinguishable from personality. These forms of character, not being self-dependent like personality, are, however, inseparable from circumstance: a gesture or a pose born of a situation and forgotten when the situation has passed; a last act of courage, a defiance of the dogs that must soon tear the man into pieces. Such men have a passion for history, for the scene, for the adventure. They delight in actions, which they cannot consider apart from setting sun or a storm at sea or some great battle, and that are inspired by emotions that move all hearers because such that all understand.

Alexandre Dumas was the phase in its perfection, George Borrow when it halts a little, for Borrow was at moments sufficiently out of phase to know that he was naïve and to brag of imaginary intellectual subjectivity, as when he paraded an unbelievable fit of the horrors, or his mastery of many tongues. Carlyle like Macpherson showed the phase at its worst. He neither could nor should have cared for anything but the personalities of history, but he used them as so many metaphors in a vast popular rhetoric, for the expression of thoughts that seeming his own were the work of preachers and angry ignorant congregations. So noisy, so threatening that rhetoric, so great his own energy, that two generations passed before men noticed that he had written no sentence not of coarse humour that clings to the memory. Sexual impotence had doubtless weakened the Body of Fate and so strengthened the False Mask, yet one doubts if any mere plaster of ant’s eggs could have helped where there was so great insincerity.81

PHASE EIGHT

Will—War between Individuality and Race.

Mask (from Phase 22). True—Courage. False—Fear.

Creative Mind (from Phase 22). True—Versatility. False—Impotence.

Body of Fate (from Phase 8)—The beginning of strength.

Example: The Idiot of Dostoyevsky perhaps.82

Out of phase, a condition of terror; when true to phase, of courage unbroken through defeat.

From Phase 1 to Phase 7, there has been a gradual weakening of all that is primary. Character (the Will analysed in relation to the enforced Mask) has become individuality (the Will analysed in relation to itself), but now, though individuality persists through another phase, personality (the Will analysed in relation to the free Mask) must predominate. So long as the primary tincture predominated, the antithetical tincture accepted its manner of perception; character and individuality were enlarged by those vegetative and sensitive faculties excited by the Body of Fate, the nearest a primary nature can come to antithetical emotion. But now the bottle must be burst. The struggle of idealised or habitual theologised thought with instinct, mind with body, of the waning primary with the growing antithetical, must be decided, and the vegetative and sensitive faculties must for a while take the sway.⁸³ Only then can the Will be forced to recognise the weakness of the Creative Mind when unaided by the Mask, and so to permit the enforced Mask to change into the free. Every new modification or codification of morality has been its attempt, acting through the Creative Mind, to set order upon the instinctive and vegetative faculties, and it must now feel that it can create order no longer. It is the very nature of a struggle, where the soul must lose all form received from the objectively accepted conscience of the world, that it denies us an historical example. One thinks of possible examples only to decide that Hartley Coleridge is not amongst them,⁸⁴ that the brother of the Brontës may only seem to be because we know so little about him,⁸⁵ but that Dostoyevsky’s Idiot is almost certainly an example. But Dostoyevsky’s Idiot was too matured a type, he had passed too many times through the twenty-eight phases to help our understanding. Here for the most part are those obscure wastrels who seem powerless to free themselves from some sensual temptation—drink, women, drugs—and who cannot in a life of continual crisis create any lasting thing. The being is often born up to four times at this one phase, it is said, before the antithetical tincture attains its mastery. The being clings like a drowning man to every straw, and it is precisely this clinging, this seemingly vain reaching forth for strength, amidst the collapse of all those public thoughts and habits that are the support of primary man, that enables it to enter at last upon Phase 9. It has to find its strength by a transformation of that very instinct which has hitherto been its weakness and so to gather up the strewn and broken members. The union of Creative Mind and Mask in opposition to Body of Fate and Will, intensifies this struggle by dividing the nature into halves which have no interchange of qualities. The man is inseparable from his fate, he cannot see himself apart, nor can he distinguish between emotion and intellect. He is will-less, dragged hither and thither, and his unemotionalised intellect, gathered up into the mathematical Phase 22, shows him perpetually for object of desire, an emotion that is like a mechanical energy, a thought that is like wheel and piston. He is suspended; he is without bias, and until bias comes, till he has begun groping for strength within his own being, his thought and his emotion bring him to judgment but they cannot help. As those at Phase 22 must dissolve the dramatising Mask in abstract mind that they may discover the concrete world, he must dissolve thought into mere impersonal instinct, into mere race, that he may discover the dramatising Mask: he chooses himself and not his Fate. Courage is his True Mask, and diversity, that has no habitual purpose, his True Creative Mind, because these are all that the phase of the greatest possible weakness can take into itself from the phase of the greatest possible strength. When his fingers close upon a straw, that is courage, and his versatility is that any wave may float a straw. At Phase 7, he had tried out of ambition to change his nature, as though a man should make love who had no heart, but now shock can give him back his heart. Only a shock resulting from the greatest possible conflict can make the greatest possible change, that from primary to antithetical or from antithetical to primary again. Nor can anything intervene. He must be aware of nothing but the conflict, his despair is necessary, he is of all men the most tempted—“Eloi, Eloi, why hast thou forsaken me?”86

PHASE NINE

Will—Belief instead of Individuality.

Mask (from Phase 23). True—Facility. False—Obscurity.

Creative Mind (from Phase 21). True—Self-dramatisation. False—Anarchy.

Body of Fate (from Phase 7)—Enforced Sensuality.

Example: An unnamed artist.⁸⁷

Out of phase, blundering and ignorant, the man becomes when in phase powerful and accomplished; all that strength as of metallic rod and wheel discovered within himself. He should seek to liberate the Mask by the help of the Creative Mind from the Body of Fate—that is to say, to carve out and wear the now free Mask and so to protect and to deliver the Image. In so far as he does so, there is immense confidence in self-expression, a vehement self, working through mathematical calculation, a delight in straight line and right angle; but if he seek to live according to the primary tincture, to use the Body of Fate to rid the Creative Mind of its Mask, to live with objective ambition and curiosity, all is confused, the Will asserts itself with a savage, terrified violence. All these phases of incipient personality when out of phase are brutal, but after Phase 12, when true personality begins, brutality gives place to an evasive capricious coldness—“false, fleeting, perjured Clarence”—a lack of good faith in their primary relation, often accompanied in their antithetical relation by the most self-torturing scruples.⁸⁸ When an antithetical man is out of phase, he reproduces the primary condition, but with an emotional inversion, love for Image or Mask becomes dread, or after Phase 15, hatred, and the Mask clings to the man or pursues him in the Image. It may even be that he is haunted by a delusive hope, cherished in secret, or bragged of aloud, that he may inherit the Body of Fate and Mask of a phase opposed to his own. He seeks to avoid antithetical conflict by accepting what opposes him, and his antithetical life is invaded. At Phase 9, the Body of Fate that could purify from an unreal unity the mind of a Carlyle, or of a Whitman, breaks with sensuality (the rising flood of instinct from Phase 7), a new real unity, and the man instead of mastering this sensuality, through his dramatisation of himself as a form of passionate self-mastery, instead of seeking some like form as Image, becomes stupid and blundering. Hence one finds at this phase, more often than at any other, men who dread, despise and persecute the women whom they love. Yet behind all that muddy, flooded, brutal self, there is perhaps a vague timid soul knowing itself caught in an antithesis, an alternation it cannot control. It is said of it, “The soul having found its weakness at Phase 8 begins the inward discipline of the soul in the fury of Phase 9”. And again, “Phase 9 has the most sincere belief any man has ever had in his own desire”.

There is a certain artist who said to a student of these symbols, speaking of a notable man, and his mistress and their children, “She no longer cares for his work, no longer gives him the sympathy he needs, why does he not leave her, what does he owe to her or to her children?”89 The student discovered this artist to be a Cubist of powerful imagination and noticed that his head suggested a sullen obstinacy, but that his manner and his speech were generally sympathetic and gentle.

PHASE TEN

Will—The Image-Breaker.

Mask (from Phase 24). True—Organisation. False—Inertia.

Creative Mind (from Phase 20). True—Domination through emotional construction. False—Reformation.

Body of Fate (from Phase 6)—Enforced emotion.

Example: Parnell.⁹⁰

If he live like the opposite phase, conceived as primary condition—the phase where ambition dies—he lacks all emotional power (False Mask: “Inertia”), and gives himself up to rudderless change, reform without a vision of form. He accepts what form (Mask and Image) those about him admire and, on discovering that it is alien, casts it away with brutal violence, to choose some other form as alien. He disturbs his own life, and he disturbs all who come near him more than does Phase 9, for Phase 9 has no interest in others except in relation to itself. If, on the other hand, he be true to phase, and use his intellect to liberate from mere race (Body of Fate at Phase 6 where race is codified), and so create some code of personal conduct, which implies always “divine right”, he becomes proud, masterful and practical. He cannot wholly escape the influence of his Body of Fate, but he will be subject to its most personal form; instead of gregarious sympathies, to some woman’s tragic love almost certainly.91 Though the Body of Fate must seek to destroy his Mask, it may now impose upon him a struggle which leaves victory still possible. As Body of Fate phase and Mask phase approach one another they share somewhat of each other’s nature; the effect of mutual hate grows more diffused, less harsh and obvious. The effect of the Body of Fate of Phase 10, for instance, is slightly less harsh and obvious than that of the “enforced sensuality” of Phase 9. It is now “enforced emotion”. Phase 9 was without restraint, but now restraint has come and with it pride; there is less need to insist on the brutality of facts of life that he may escape from their charm; the subjective fury is less uncalculating, and the opposition of Will and Mask no longer produces a delight in an impersonal precision and power like that of machinery (machinery that is emotion and thought) but rather a kind of burning restraint, a something that suggests a savage statue to which one offers sacrifice. This sacrifice is code, personality no longer perceived as power only. He seeks by its help to free the creative power from mass emotion, but never wholly succeeds, and so the life remains troubled, a conflict between pride and race, and passes from crisis to crisis. At Phase 9 there was little sexual discrimination, and now there is emotion created by circumstance rather than by any unique beauty of body or of character. One remembers Faust, who will find every wench a Helen, now that he has drunk the witches’ dram, and yet loves his Gretchen with all his being.⁹² Perhaps one thinks of that man who gave a lifetime of love because a young woman in capricious idleness had written his name with her umbrella upon the snow.⁹³ Here is rage, desire to escape but not now by mere destruction of the opposing fate; for a vague abstract sense of some world, some image, some circumstance, harmonious to emotion, has begun, or of something harmonious to emotion that may be set upon the empty pedestal, once visible world, image, or circumstance has been destroyed. With less desire of expression than at Phase 9, and with more desire of action and of command, the man (Creative Mind from Phase 20, phase of greatest dramatic power) sees all his life as a stage play where there is only one good acting part; yet no one will accuse him of being a stage player, for he will wear always that stony Mask (Phase 24, “The end of ambition”, antithetically perceived). He, too, if he triumph, may end ambition through the command of multitudes, for he is like that god of Norse mythology who hung from the cliff’s side for three days, a sacrifice to himself.94 Perhaps Moses when he descended the mountain-side had a like stony Mask, and had cut Tables and Mask out of the one rock.⁹⁵

John Morley says of Parnell, whose life proves him of the phase, that he had the least discursive mind he had ever known, and that is always characteristic of a phase where all practical curiosity has been lost wherever some personal aim is not involved, while philosophical and artistic curiosity are still undiscovered.⁹⁶ He made upon his contemporaries an impression of impassivity, and yet a follower has recorded that, after a speech that seemed brutal and callous, his hands were full of blood because he had torn them with his nails.⁹⁷ One of his followers was shocked during the impassioned discussion in Committee Room No. 15 that led to his abandonment,⁹⁸ by this most reticent man’s lack of reticence in allusion to the operations of sex, an indifference as of a mathematician dealing with some arithmetical quantity, and yet Mrs. Parnell tells how upon a night of storm on Brighton pier, and at the height of his power, he held her out over the waters and she lay still, stretched upon his two hands, knowing that if she moved, he would drown himself and her.⁹⁹

PHASE ELEVEN

Will—The Consumer, Pyre-builder.

Mask (from Phase 25). True—Rejection. False—Moral indifference.

Creative Mind (from Phase 19). True—Moral iconoclasm. False—Self-assertion.

Body of Fate (from Phase 5)—Enforced belief.

Examples: Spinoza, Savonarola.¹⁰⁰

While Phase 9 was kept from its subjectivity by personal relations, by sensuality, by various kinds of grossness; and Phase 10 by associations of men for practical purposes, and by the emotions that arise out of such associations, or by some tragic love where there is an element of common interest; Phase 11 is impeded by the excitement of conviction, by the contagion of organised belief, or by its interest in organisation for its own sake. The man of the phase is a half-solitary, one who defends a solitude he cannot or will not inhabit, his Mask being from a phase of abstract belief, which offers him always some bundle of mathematical formulae, or its like, opposed to his nature. It will presently be seen that the man of Phase 25, where the Mask is, creates a system of belief, just as Phase 24 creates a code, to exclude all that is too difficult for dolt or knave; but the man of Phase 11 systematises, runs to some frenzy of conviction, to make intellect, intellect for its own sake, possible, and perhaps, in his rage against rough-and-ready customary thought, to make all but intellect impossible. He will be the antithesis of all this, should he be conquered by his Body of Fate (from Phase 5, where the common instinct first unites itself to reflection), being carried off by some contagion of belief, some general interest, and compelled to substitute for intellectual rage some form of personal pride and so to become the proud prelate of tradition.

In Spinoza one finds the phase in its most pure and powerful shape. He saw the divine energy in whatever was the most individual expression of the soul, and spent his life in showing that such expression was for the world’s welfare and not, as might seem, a form of anarchy. His Mask, under the influence of his Body of Fate, would force him to seek happiness in submission to something hard and exterior; but the Mask, set free by a Creative Mind that would destroy exterior popular sanction, makes possible for the first time the solitary conception of God. One imagines him among the theologians of his time, who sought always some formula perhaps, some sheep-dog for common minds, turning himself into pure wolf, and making for the wilderness. Certainly his pantheism, however pleasing to his own bare bench of scholars, was little likely to help the oratory of any bench of judges or of bishops. Through all his cold definitions, on whose mathematical form he prided himself, one divines a quarrel with the thought of his fathers and his kin, forced upon him perhaps almost to the breaking of his heart: no nature without the stroke of fate divides itself in two.

PHASE TWELVE

Will—The Forerunner.

Mask (from Phase 26). True—Self-exaggeration. False—Self-abandonment.

Creative Mind (from Phase 18). True—Subjective philosophy. False—War between two forms of expression.

Body of Fate (from Phase 4)—Enforced intellectual action.

Example: Nietzsche.101

The man of this phase, out of phase, is always in reaction, is driven from one self-conscious pose to another, is full of hesitation; true to phase, he is a cup that remembers but its own fullness. His phase is called the “Forerunner” because fragmentary and violent. The phases of action where the man mainly defines himself by his practical relations are finished, or finishing, and the phases where he defines himself mainly through an image of the mind begun or beginning; phases of hatred for some external fate are giving way to phases of self-hatred. It is a phase of immense energy because the Four Faculties are equidistant. The oppositions (Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate) are balanced by the discords, and these, being equidistant between identity and opposition, are at their utmost intensity. The nature is conscious of the most extreme degree of deception, and is wrought to a frenzy of desire for truth of self. If Phase 9 had the greatest possible “belief in its own desire”, there is now the greatest possible belief in all values created by personality. It is therefore before all else the phase of the hero, of the man who overcomes himself, and so no longer needs, like Phase 10, the submission of others, or, like Phase 11, conviction of others to prove his victory. Solitude has been born at last, though solitude invaded, and hard to defend. Nor is there need any longer of the bare anatomy of Phase 11; every thought comes with sound and metaphor, and the sanity of the being is no longer from its relation to facts, but from its approximation to its own unity, and from this on we shall meet with men and women to whom facts are a dangerous narcotic or intoxicant. Facts are from the Body of Fate, and the Body of Fate is from the phase where instinct, before the complications of reflection, reached its most persuasive strength. The man is pursued by a series of accidents, which, unless he meet them antithetically, drive him into all sorts of temporary ambitions, opposed to his nature, unite him perhaps to some small protesting sect (the family or neighbourhood of Phase 4 intellectualised); and these ambitions he defends by some kind of superficial intellectual action, the pamphlet, the violent speech, the sword of the swashbuckler. He spends his life in oscillation between the violent assertion of some commonplace pose, and a dogmatism which means nothing apart from the circumstance that created it.

If, however, he meets these accidents by the awakening of his antithetical being, there is a noble extravagance, an overflowing fountain of personal life. He turns towards the True Mask and having by philosophic intellect (Creative Mind) delivered it from all that is topical and temporary, announces a philosophy which is the logical expression of a mind alone with the object of its desire. The True Mask, derived from the terrible Phase 26, called the phase of the Hunchback, is the reverse of all that is emotional, being emotionally cold; not mathematical, for intellectual abstraction ceased at Phase 11, but marble pure. In the presence of the Mask, the Creative Mind has the isolation of a fountain under moonlight; yet one must always distinguish between the emotional Will—now approaching the greatest subtlety of sensitiveness, and more and more conscious of its frailty—and that which it would be, the lonely, imperturbable, proud Mask, as between the Will and its discord in the Creative Mind where is no shrinking from life. The man follows an Image, created or chosen by the Creative Mind from what Fate offers; would persecute and dominate it; and this Image wavers between the concrete and sensuous Image. It has become personal; there is now, though not so decisively as later, but one form of chosen beauty, and the sexual Image is drawn as with a diamond, and tinted those pale colours sculptors sometimes put upon a statue. Like all before Phase 15 the man is overwhelmed with the thought of his own weakness and knows of no strength but that of Image and Mask.

PHASE THIRTEEN

Will—The Sensuous Man.

Mask (from Phase 27). True—Self-expression. False—Self-absorption.

Creative Mind (from Phase 17). True—Subjective truth. False—Morbidity.

Body of Fate (from Phase 3)—Enforced love of another.

Examples: Baudelaire, Beardsley, Ernest Dowson.102

This is said to be the only phase where entire sensuality is possible, that is to say, sensuality without the intermixture of any other element. There is now a possible complete intellectual unity, Unity of Being apprehended through the images of the mind; and this is opposed by the Fate (Phase 3 where body becomes deliberate and whole) which offers an equal roundness and wholeness of sensation. The Will is now a mirror of emotional experience, or sensation, according to whether it is swayed by Mask or Fate. Though wax to every impression of emotion, or of sense, it would yet through its passion for truth (Creative Mind) become its opposite and receive from the Mask (Phase 27), which is at the phase of the Saint, a virginal purity of emotion. If it live objectively, that is to say, surrender itself to sensation, it becomes morbid, it sees every sensation separate from every other under the light of its perpetual analysis (Creative Mind at a phase of dispersal). Phase 13 is a phase of great importance, because the most intellectually subjective phase, and because only here can be achieved in perfection that in the antithetical life which corresponds to sanctity in the primary: not self-denial but expression for expression’s sake. Its influence indeed upon certain writers has caused them in their literary criticism to exalt intellectual sincerity to the place in literature which is held by sanctity in theology. At this phase the self discovers, within itself, while struggling with the Body of Fate, forms of emotional morbidity which others recognise as their own; as the Saint may take upon himself the physical diseases of others. There is almost always a preoccupation with those metaphors and symbols and mythological images through which we define whatever seems most strange or most morbid. Self-hatred now reaches its height, and through this hatred comes the slow liberation of intellectual love. There are moments of triumph and moments of defeat, each in its extreme form, for the subjective intellect knows nothing of moderation. As the primary tincture has weakened, the sense of quantity has weakened, for the antithetical tincture is preoccupied with quality.

From now, if not from Phase 12, and until Phase 17 or Phase 18 has passed, happy love is rare, for seeing that the man must find a woman whose Mask falls within or but just outside his Body of Fate and Mask, if he is to find strong sexual attraction, the range of choice grows smaller, and all life grows more tragic. As the woman grows harder to find, so does every beloved object. Lacking suitable objects of desire, the relation between man and Daimon becomes more clearly a struggle or even a relation of enmity.

PHASE FOURTEEN

Will—The Obsessed Man.

Mask (from Phase 28). True—Serenity. False—Self-distrust.

Creative Mind (from Phase 16). True—Emotional will. False—Terror.

Body of Fate (from Phase 2)—Enforced love of the world.

Examples: Keats, Giorgione, many beautiful women.103

As we approach Phase 15 personal beauty increases and at Phase 14 and Phase 16 the greatest human beauty becomes possible. The aim of the being should be to disengage those objects which are images of desire from the excitement and disorder of the Body of Fate, and under certain circumstances to impress upon these the full character of the Mask which, being from Phase 28, is a folding up, or fading into themselves. It is this act of the intellect, begun at conception, which has given the body its beauty. The Body of Fate, derived from the phase of the utmost possible physical energy, but of an energy without aim, like that of a child, works against this folding up, yet offers little more of objects than their excitement, their essential honey. The images of desire, disengaged and subject to the Mask, are separate and still (Creative Mind from a phase of violent scattering). The images of Phase 13 and even of Phase 12 have in a lesser degree this character. When we compare these images with those of any subsequent phase, each seems studied for its own sake; they float as in serene air, or lie hidden in some valley, and if they move it is to music that returns always to the same note, or in a dance that so returns into itself that they seem immortal.

When the being is out of phase, when it is allured by primary curiosity, it is aware of its primary feebleness and its intellect becomes but a passion of apprehension, or a shrinking from solitude; it may even become mad; or it may use its conscious feebleness and its consequent terror as a magnet for the sympathy of others, as a means of domination. At Phase 16 will be discovered a desire to accept every possible responsibility; but now responsibility is renounced and this renunciation becomes an instrument of power, dropped burdens being taken up by others. Here are born those women who are most touching in their beauty. Helen was of the phase; and she comes before the mind’s eye elaborating a delicate personal discipline, as though she would make her whole life an image of a unified antithetical energy. While seeming an image of softness and of quiet, she draws perpetually upon glass with a diamond.104 Yet she will not number among her sins anything that does not break that personal discipline, no matter what it may seem according to others’ discipline; but if she fail in her own discipline she will not deceive herself, and for all the languor of her movements, and her indifference to the acts of others, her mind is never at peace. She will wander much alone as though she consciously meditated her masterpiece that shall be at the full moon, yet unseen by human eyes, and when she returns to her house she will look upon her household with timid eyes, as though she knew that all powers of self-protection had been taken away, that of her once violent primary tincture nothing remained but a strange irresponsible innocence. Her early life has perhaps been perilous because of that nobility, that excess of antithetical energies, which may have so constrained the fading primary that, instead of its becoming the expression of those energies, it is but a vague beating of the wings, or their folding up into a melancholy stillness. The greater the peril the nearer has she approached to the final union of primary and antithetical, where she will desire nothing; already perhaps, through weakness of desire, she understands nothing yet seems to understand everything; already serves nothing, while alone seeming of service. Is it not because she desires so little, gives so little that men will die and murder in her service? One thinks of the Eternal Idol of Rodin: that kneeling man with hands clasped behind his back in humble adoration, kissing a young girl a little below the breast, while she gazes down, without comprehending, under her half-closed eyelids.105 Perhaps, could we see her a little later, with flushed cheeks casting her money upon some gaming-table, we would wonder that action and form could so belie each other, not understanding that the Fool’s Mask is her chosen motley, nor her terror before death and stillness. One thinks too of the women of Burne-Jones, but not of Botticelli’s women, who have too much curiosity, nor Rossetti’s women, who have too much passion;¹⁰⁶ and as we see before the mind’s eye those pure faces gathered about the “Sleep of Arthur,” or crowded upon the “Golden Stair,” we wonder if they too would not have filled us with surprise, or dismay, because of some craze, some passion for mere excitement, or slavery to a drug.¹⁰⁷

In the poets too, who are of the phase, one finds the impression of the Body of Fate as intoxication or narcotic. Wordsworth, shuddering at his solitude, has filled his art in all but a few pages with common opinion, common sentiment;¹⁰⁸ while in the poetry of Keats there is, though little sexual passion, an exaggerated sensuousness that compels us to remember the pepper on the tongue as though that were his symbol. Thought is disappearing into image; and in Keats, in some ways a perfect type, intellectual curiosity is at its weakest; there is scarcely an image, where his poetry is at its best, whose subjectivity has not been heightened by its use in many great poets, painters, sculptors, artificers.¹⁰⁹ The being has almost reached the end of that elaboration of itself which has for its climax an absorption in time, where space can be but symbols or images in the mind. There is little observation even in detail of expression, all is reverie, while in Wordsworth the soul’s deepening solitude has reduced mankind, when seen objectively, to a few slight figures outlined for a moment amid mountain and lake. The corresponding genius in painting is that of Monticelli, after 1870, and perhaps that of Conder, though in Conder there are elements suggesting the preceding phase.¹¹⁰

All born at antithetical phases before Phase 15 are subject to violence, because of the indeterminate energy of the Body of Fate; this violence seems accidental, unforeseen and cruel—and here are women carried off by robbers and ravished by clowns.¹¹¹

PHASE FIFTEEN

Will.		No description except that this is a phase of complete beauty.¹¹²
Mask (from Phase 1).
Creative Mind (from Phase 15).
Body of Fate (from Phase 1).

Body of Fate and Mask are now identical; and Will and Creative Mind identical; or rather the Creative Mind is dissolved in the Will and the Body of Fate in the Mask. Thought and will are indistinguishable, effort and attainment are indistinguishable; and this is the consummation of a slow process; nothing is apparent but dreaming Will and the Image that it dreams. Since Phase 12 all images, and cadences of the mind, have been satisfying to that mind just in so far as they have expressed this converging of will and thought, effort and attainment. The words “musical”, “sensuous”, are but descriptions of that converging process. Thought has been pursued, not as a means but as an end—the poem, the painting, the reverie has been sufficient of itself. It is not possible, however, to separate in the understanding this running into one of Will and Creative Mind from the running into one of Mask and Body of Fate. Without Mask and Body of Fate the Will would have nothing to desire, the Creative Mind nothing to apprehend. Since Phase 12 the Creative Mind has been so interfused by the antithetical tincture that it has more and more confined its contemplation of actual things to those that resemble images of the mind desired by the Will. The being has selected, moulded and remoulded, narrowed its circle of living, been more and more the artist, grown more and more “distinguished” in all preference. Now contemplation and desire, united into one, inhabit a world where every beloved image has bodily form, and every bodily form is loved. This love knows nothing of desire, for desire implies effort, and though there is still separation from the loved object, love accepts the separation as necessary to its own existence. Fate is known for the boundary that gives our Destiny its form, and—as we can desire nothing outside that form—as an expression of our freedom. Chance and Choice have become interchangeable without losing their identity.113 As all effort has ceased, all thought has become image, because no thought could exist if it were not carried towards its own extinction, amid fear or in contemplation; and every image is separate from every other, for if image were linked to image, the soul would awake from its immovable trance. All that the being has experienced as thought is visible to its eyes as a whole, and in this way it perceives, not as they are to others, but according to its own perception, all orders of existence. Its own body possesses the greatest possible beauty, being indeed that body which the soul will permanently inhabit, when all its phases have been repeated according to the number allotted: that which we call the clarified or Celestial Body. Where the being has lived out of phase, seeking to live through antithetical phases as though they had been primary, there is now terror of solitude, its forced, painful and slow acceptance, and a life haunted by terrible dreams. Even for the most perfect, there is a time of pain, a passage through a vision, where evil reveals itself in its final meaning. In this passage Christ, it is said, mourned over the length of time and the unworthiness of man’s lot to man, whereas his forerunner mourned and his successor will mourn over the shortness of time and the unworthiness of man to his lot; but this cannot yet be understood.¹¹⁴

PHASE SIXTEEN

Will—The Positive Man.

Mask (from Phase 2). True—Illusion. False—Delusion.

Creative Mind (from Phase 14). True—Vehemence. False—Opinionated will.

Body of Fate (from Phase 28)—Enforced Illusion.

Examples: William Blake, Rabelais, Aretino, Paracelsus, some beautiful women.¹¹⁵

Phase 16 is in contrast to Phase 14, in spite of their resemblance of extreme subjectivity, in that it has a Body of Fate from the phase of the Fool, a phase of absorption, and its Mask from what might have been called the phase of the Child, a phase of aimless energy, of physical life for its own sake; whereas Phase 14 had its Body of Fate from the phase of the Child and its Mask from that of the Fool. Fate thrusts an aimless excitement upon Phase 14. Phase 14 finds within itself an antithetical self-absorbing dream. Phase 16 has a like dream thrust upon it and finds within itself an aimless excitement. This excitement, and this dream, are both illusions, so that the Will, which is itself a violent scattering energy, has to use its intellect (Creative Mind) to discriminate between illusions. They are both illusions, because, so small is the primary nature, sense of fact is an impossibility. If it use its intellect, which is the most narrow, the most unflinching, even the most cruel possible to man, to disengage the aimless child (i.e. to find Mask and Image in the child’s toy), it finds the soul’s most radiant expression and surrounds itself with some fairyland, some mythology of wisdom or laughter. Its own mere scattering, its mere rushing out into the disordered and unbounded, after the still trance of Phase 15, has found its antithesis, and therefore self-knowledge and self-mastery.

If, however, it subordinate its intellect to the Body of Fate, all the cruelty and narrowness of that intellect are displayed in service of preposterous purpose after purpose till there is nothing left but the fixed idea and some hysterical hatred. By these purposes, derived from a phase of absorption, the Body of Fate drives the Will back upon its subjectivity, deforming the Mask until the Will can only see the object of its desire in these purposes. It does not hate opposing desire, as do the phases of increasing antithetical emotion, but hates that which opposes desire. Capable of nothing but an incapable idealism (for it has no thought but in myth, or in defence of myth), it must, because it sees one side as all white, see the other side all black; what but a dragon could dream of thwarting a St. George?116 In men of the phase there will commonly be both natures, for to be true to phase is a ceaseless struggle. At one moment they are full of hate—Blake writes of “Flemish and Venetian demons”¹¹⁷ and of some picture of his own destroyed “by some vile spell of Stoddart’s”¹¹⁸—and their hate is always close to madness; and at the next they produce the comedy of Aretino and of Rabelais or the mythology of Blake, and discover symbolism to express the overflowing and bursting of the mind. There is always an element of frenzy, and almost always a delight in certain glowing or shining images of concentrated force: in the smith’s forge; in the heart; in the human form in its most vigorous development; in the solar disc; in some symbolical representation of the sexual organs; for the being must brag of its triumph over its own incoherence.

Since Phase 8 the man has more and more judged what is right in relation to time: a right action, or a right motive, has been one that he thought possible or desirable to think or do eternally; his soul would “come into possession of itself for ever in one single moment”; but now he begins once more to judge an action or motive in relation to space.119 A right action or motive must soon be right for any other man in similar circumstance. Hitherto an action, or motive, has been right precisely because it is exactly right for one person only, though for that person always. After the change, the belief in the soul’s immortality declines, though the decline is slow, and it may only be recovered when Phase 1 is passed.

Among those who are of this phase may be great satirists, great caricaturists, but they pity the beautiful, for that is their Mask, and hate the ugly, for that is their Body of Fate, and so are unlike those of the primary phases, Rembrandt for instance, who pity the ugly, and sentimentalise the beautiful, or call it insipid, and turn away or secretly despise and hate it.¹²⁰ Here too are beautiful women, whose bodies have taken upon themselves the image of the True Mask, and in these there is a radiant intensity, something of “The Burning Babe” of the Elizabethan lyric.¹²¹ They walk like queens, and seem to carry upon their backs a quiver of arrows, but they are gentle only to those whom they have chosen or subdued, or to the dogs that follow at their heels.¹²² Boundless in generosity, and in illusion, they will give themselves to a beggar because he resembles a religious picture and be faithful all their lives, or if they take another turn and choose a dozen lovers, die convinced that none but the first or last has ever touched their lips, for they are of those whose “virginity renews itself like the moon”.¹²³ Out of phase they turn termagant, if their lover take a wrong step in a quadrille where all the figures are of their own composition and changed without notice when the fancy takes them. Indeed, perhaps if the body have great perfection, there is always something imperfect in the mind, some rejection of or inadequacy of Mask: Venus out of phase chose lame Vulcan.¹²⁴ Here also are several very ugly persons, their bodies torn and twisted by the violence of the new primary, but where the body has this ugliness great beauty of mind is possible. This is indeed the only antithetical phase where ugliness is possible, it being complementary to Phase 2, the only primary phase where beauty is possible.

From this phase on we meet with those who do violence, instead of those who suffer it; and prepare for those who love some living person, and not an image of the mind, but as yet this love is hardly more than the “fixed idea” of faithfulness. As the new love grows the sense of beauty will fade.

PHASE SEVENTEEN

Will—The Daimonic Man.

Mask (from Phase 3). True—Simplification through intensity. False—Dispersal.

Creative Mind (from Phase 13). True—Creative imagination through antithetical emotion. False—Enforced self-realization.

Body of Fate (from Phase 27)—Loss.125

Examples: Dante, Shelley, Landor.¹²⁶

He is called the Daimonic man because Unity of Being, and consequent expression of Daimonic thought, is now more easy than at any other phase. As contrasted with Phase 13 and Phase 14, where mental images were separated from one another that they might be subject to knowledge, all now flow, change, flutter, cry out, or mix into something else; but without, as at Phase 16, breaking and bruising one another, for Phase 17, the central phase of its triad, is without frenzy. The Will is falling asunder, but without explosion and noise. The separated fragments seek images rather than ideas, and these the intellect, seated in Phase 13, must synthesise in vain, drawing with its compass-point a line that shall but represent the outline of a bursting pod. The being has for its supreme aim, as it had at Phase 16 (and as all subsequent antithetical phases shall have), to hide from itself and others this separation and disorder, and it conceals them under the emotional Image of Phase 3; as Phase 16 concealed its greater violence under that of Phase 2. When true to phase the intellect must turn all its synthetic power to this task. It finds, not the impassioned myth that Phase 16 found, but a Mask of simplicity that is also intensity. This Mask may represent intellectual or sexual passion; seem some Ahasuerus or Athanase;127 be the gaunt Dante of the Divine Comedy;¹²⁸ its corresponding Image may be Shelley’s Venus Urania,¹²⁹ Dante’s Beatrice, or even the Great Yellow Rose of the Paradiso.¹³⁰ The Will, when true to phase, assumes, in assuming the Mask, an intensity which is never dramatic but always lyrical and personal, and this intensity, though always a deliberate assumption, is to others but the charm of the being; and yet the Will is always aware of the Body of Fate, which perpetually destroys this intensity, thereby leaving the Will to its own “dispersal”.

At Phase 3, not as Mask but as phase, there should be perfect physical well-being or balance, though not beauty or emotional intensity, but at Phase 27 are those who turn away from all that Phase 3 represents and seek all those things it is blind to. The Body of Fate, therefore, derived from a phase of renunciation, is “loss”, and works to make impossible “simplification by intensity”. The being, through the intellect, selects some object of desire for a representation of the Mask as Image, some woman perhaps, and the Body of Fate snatches away the object. Then the intellect (Creative Mind), which in the most antithetical phases were better described as imagination, must substitute some new image of desire; and in the degree of its power and of its attainment of unity, relate that which is lost, that which has snatched it away, to the new image of desire, that which threatens the new image to the being’s unity. If its unity be already past, or if unity be still to come, it may for all that be true to phase. It will then use its intellect merely to isolate Mask and Image, as chosen forms or as conceptions of the mind.

If it be out of phase it will avoid the subjective conflict, acquiesce, hope that the Body of Fate may die away; and then the Mask will cling to it and the Image lure it. It will feel itself betrayed, and persecuted till, entangled in primary conflict, it rages against all that destroys Mask and Image. It will be subject to nightmare, for its Creative Mind (deflected from the Image and Mask to the Body of Fate) gives an isolated mythological or abstract form to all that excites its hatred. It may even dream of escaping from ill-luck by possessing the impersonal Body of Fate of its opposite phase and of exchanging passion for desk and ledger. Because of the habit of synthesis, and of the growing complexity of the energy, which gives many interests, and the still faint perception of things in their weight and mass, men of this phase are almost always partisans, propagandists and gregarious; yet because of the Mask of simplification, which holds up before them the solitary life of hunters and of fishers and “the groves pale passion loves”, they hate parties, crowds, propaganda.131 Shelley out of phase writes pamphlets, and dreams of converting the world, or of turning man of affairs and upsetting governments,¹³² and yet returns again and again to these two images of solitude, a young man whose hair has grown white from the burden of his thoughts,¹³³ an old man in some shell-strewn cave whom it is possible to call, when speaking to the Sultan, “as inaccessible as God or thou”.¹³⁴ On the other hand, how subject he is to nightmare! He sees the devil leaning against a tree, is attacked by imaginary assassins,¹³⁵ and, in obedience to what he considers a supernatural voice, creates The Cenci that he may give to Beatrice Cenci her incredible father.¹³⁶ His political enemies are monstrous, meaningless images. And unlike Byron, who is two phases later, he can never see anything that opposes him as it really is. Dante, who lamented his exile as of all possible things the worst for such as he, and sighed for his lost solitude, and yet could never keep from politics, was, according to a contemporary, such a partisan, that if a child, or a woman, spoke against his party he would pelt this child or woman with stones.¹³⁷ Yet Dante, having attained, as poet, to Unity of Being, as poet saw all things set in order, had an intellect that served the Mask alone, that compelled even those things that opposed it to serve, and was content to see both good and evil. Shelley, upon the other hand, in whom even as poet unity was but in part attained, found compensation for his “loss”, for the taking away of his children, for his quarrel with his first wife, for later sexual disappointment, for his exile, for his obloquy—there were but some three or four persons, he said, who did not consider him a monster of iniquity—in his hopes for the future of mankind.¹³⁸ He lacked the Vision of Evil, could not conceive of the world as a continual conflict, so, though great poet he certainly was, he was not of the greatest kind.¹³⁹ Dante suffering injustice and the loss of Beatrice, found divine justice and the heavenly Beatrice, but the justice of Prometheus Unbound is a vague propagandist emotion and the women that await its coming are but clouds.¹⁴⁰ This is in part because the age in which Shelley lived was in itself so broken that true Unity of Being was almost impossible, but partly because, being out of phase so far as his practical reason was concerned, he was subject to an automatonism which he mistook for poetical invention, especially in his longer poems. Antithetical men (Phase 15 once passed) use this automatonism to evade hatred, or rather to hide it from their own eyes; perhaps all at some time or other, in moments of fatigue, give themselves up to fantastic, constructed images, or to an almost mechanical laughter.

Landor has been examined in Per Amica Silentia Lunae.141 The most violent of men, he uses his intellect to disengage a visionary image of perfect sanity (Mask at Phase 3) seen always in the most serene and classic art imaginable. He had perhaps as much Unity of Being as his age permitted, and possessed, though not in any full measure, the Vision of Evil.

PHASE EIGHTEEN

Will—The Emotional Man.

Mask (from Phase 4). True—Intensity through emotion. False—Curiosity.

Creative Mind (from Phase 12). True—Emotional philosophy. False—Enforced lure.

Body of Fate (from Phase 26)—Enforced disillusionment.

Examples: Goethe, Matthew Arnold.¹⁴²

The antithetical tincture closes during this phase, the being is losing direct knowledge of its old antithetical life. The conflict between that portion of the life of feeling which appertains to his unity, and that portion he has in common with others, coming to an end, has begun to destroy that knowledge. “A Lover’s Nocturne” or “Ode to the West Wind” are probably no more possible, certainly no more characteristic.¹⁴³ He can hardly, if action and the intellect that concerns action are taken from him, recreate his dream life; and when he says “Who am I?”, he finds it difficult to examine his thoughts in relation to one another, his emotions in relation to one another, but begins to find it easy to examine them in relation to action. He can examine those actions themselves with a new clearness. Now for the first time since Phase 12, Goethe’s saying is almost true: “Man knows himself by action only, by thought never”.144 Meanwhile the antithetical tincture begins to attain, without previous struggle or self-analysis, its active form which is love—love being the union of emotion and instinct—or when out of phase, sentimentality. The Will seeks by some form of emotional philosophy to free a form of emotional beauty (Mask) from a “disillusionment” differing from the “illusions” of Phase 16, which are continuous, in that it permits intermittent awakening. The Will, with its closing antithetical, is turning away from the life of images to that of ideas, it is vacillating and curious, and it seeks in this Mask (from a phase where all the functions can be perfect), what becomes, when considered antithetically, a wisdom of the emotions.

At its next phase it will have fallen asunder; already it can only preserve its unity by a deliberate balancing of experiences (Creative Mind at Phase 12, Body of Fate at Phase 26), and so it must desire that phase (though that transformed into the emotional life), where wisdom seems a physical accident. Its object of desire is no longer a single image of passion, for it must relate all to social life; the man seeks to become not a sage, not Ahasuerus, but a wise king, and seeks a woman who looks the wise mother of children.¹⁴⁵ Perhaps now, and for the first time, the love of a living woman (“disillusionment” once accepted) as apart from beauty or function, is an admitted aim, though not yet wholly achieved. The Body of Fate is from the phase where the “wisdom of knowledge” has compelled Mask and Image to become not objects of desire but objects of knowledge. Goethe did not, as Beddoes said, marry his cook, but he certainly did not marry the woman he had desired, and his grief at her death showed that, unlike Phase 16 or Phase 17, which forget their broken toys, he could love what disillusionment gave.¹⁴⁶ When he seeks to live objectively, he will substitute curiosity for emotional wisdom, he will invent objects of desire artificially, he will say perhaps, though this was said by a man who was probably still later in phase, “I was never in love with a serpent-charmer before”;¹⁴⁷ the False Mask will press upon him, pursue him, and, refusing conflict, he will fly from the True Mask at each artificial choice. The nightingale will refuse the thorn and so remain among images instead of passing to ideas.¹⁴⁸ He is still disillusioned, but he can no longer through philosophy substitute for the desire that life has taken away, love for what life has brought. The Will is near the place marked Head upon the great chart, which enables it to choose its Mask even when true to phase almost coldly and always deliberately, whereas the Creative Mind is derived from the place marked Heart, and is therefore more impassioned and less subtle and delicate than if Phase 16 or Phase 17 were the place of the Will, though not yet argumentative or heated. The Will at Head uses the heart with perfect mastery and, because of the growing primary, begins to be aware of an audience, though as yet it will not dramatise the Mask deliberately for the sake of effect as will Phase 19.

PHASE NINETEEN

Will—The Assertive Man.

Mask (from Phase 5). True—Conviction. False—Domination.

Creative Mind (from Phase 11). True—Emotional intellect. False—The Unfaithful.

Body of Fate (from Phase 25)—Enforced failure of action.

Examples: Gabriele d’Annunzio (perhaps), Oscar Wilde, Byron, a certain actress.149

This phase is the beginning of the artificial, the abstract, the fragmentary, and the dramatic. Unity of Being is no longer possible, for the being is compelled to live in a fragment of itself and to dramatise that fragment. The primary tincture is closing, direct knowledge of self in relation to action is ceasing to be possible. The being only completely knows that portion of itself which judges fact for the sake of action. When the man lives according to phase, he is now governed by conviction, instead of by a ruling mood, and is effective only in so far as he can find this conviction. His aim is so to use an intellect which turns easily to declamation, emotional emphasis, that it serves conviction in a life where effort, just in so far as its object is passionately desired, comes to nothing. He desires to be strong and stable, but as Unity of Being and self-knowledge are both gone, and it is too soon to grasp at another unity through primary mind, he passes from emphasis to emphasis. The strength from conviction, derived from a Mask of the first quarter antithetically transformed, is not founded upon social duty, though that may seem so to others, but is temperamentally formed to fit some crisis of personal life. His thought is immensely effective and dramatic, arising always from some immediate situation, a situation found or created by himself, and may have great permanent value as the expression of an exciting personality. This thought is always an open attack; or a sudden emphasis, an extravagance, or an impassioned declamation of some general idea, which is a more veiled attack. The Creative Mind being derived from Phase 11, he is doomed to attempt the destruction of all that breaks or encumbers personality, but this personality is conceived of as a fragmentary, momentary intensity. The mastery of images, threatened or lost at Phase 18, may, however, be completely recovered, but there is less symbol, more fact. Vitality from dreams has died out, and a vitality from fact has begun which has for its ultimate aim the mastery of the real world. The watercourse after an abrupt fall continues upon a lower level; ice turns to water, or water to vapour: there is a new chemical phase.

When lived out of phase there is a hatred or contempt of others, and instead of seeking conviction for its own sake, the man takes up opinions that he may impose himself upon others. He is tyrannical and capricious, and his intellect is called “The Unfaithful”, because, being used for victory alone, it will change its ground in a moment and delight in some new emphasis, not caring whether old or new have consistency. The Mask is derived from that phase where perversity begins, where artifice begins, and has its discord from Phase 25, the last phase where the artificial is possible; the Body of Fate is therefore enforced failure of action, and many at this phase desire action above all things as a means of expression. Whether the man be in or out of phase, there is the desire to escape from Unity of Being or any approximation towards it, for Unity can be but a simulacrum now. And in so far as the soul keeps its memory of that potential Unity there is conscious antithetical weakness. He must now dramatise the Mask through the Will and dreads the Image, deep within, of the old antithetical tincture at its strongest, and yet this Image may seem infinitely desirable if he could but find the desire. When so torn into two, escape when it comes may be so violent that it brings him under the False Mask and the False Creative Mind. A certain actress is typical, for she surrounds herself with drawings by Burne-Jones in his latest period, and reveres them as they were holy pictures, while her manners are boisterous, dominating and egotistical.150 They are faces of silent women, and she is not silent for a moment; yet these faces are not, as I once thought, the True Mask but a part of that incoherence the True Mask must conceal. Were she to surrender to their influence she would become insincere in her art and exploit an emotion that is no longer hers. I find in Wilde, too, something pretty, feminine, and insincere, derived from his admiration for writers of the 17th and earlier phases, and much that is violent, arbitrary and insolent, derived from his desire to escape.

The antithetical Mask comes to men of Phase 17 and Phase 18 as a form of strength, and when they are tempted to dramatise it, the dramatisation is fitful, and brings no conviction of strength, for they dislike emphasis; but now the weakness of the antithetical has begun, for though still the stronger it cannot ignore the growing primary. It is no longer an absolute monarch, and it permits power to pass to statesman or demagogue, whom, however, it will constantly change.

Here one finds men and women who love those who rob them or beat them, as though the soul were intoxicated by its discovery of human nature, or found even a secret delight in the shattering of the image of its desire. It is as though it cried, “I would be possessed by” or “I would possess that which is Human. What do I care if it is good or bad?” There is no “disillusionment”, for they have found that which they have sought, but that which they have sought and found in a fragment.

PHASE TWENTY

Will—The Concrete Man.

Mask (from Phase 6). True—Fatalism. False—Superstition.

Creative Mind (from Phase 10). True—Dramatisation of Mask. False—Self-desecration.

Body of Fate (from Phase 24)—Enforced success of action.

Examples: Shakespeare, Balzac, Napoleon.¹⁵¹

Like the phase before it, and those that follow it immediately, a phase of the breaking up and subdivision of the being. The energy is always seeking those facts which being separable can be seen more clearly, or expressed more clearly, but when there is truth to the phase there is a similitude of the old unity, or rather a new unity, which is not a Unity of Being but a unity of the creative act. He no longer seeks to unify what is broken through conviction, by imposing those very convictions upon himself and others, but by projecting a dramatisation or many dramatisations. He can create, just in that degree in which he can see these dramatisations as separate from himself, and yet as an epitome of his whole nature. His Mask is derived from Phase 6, where man first becomes a generalised form, according to the primary tincture, as in the poetry of Walt Whitman, but this Mask he must by dramatisation rescue from a Body of Fate derived from Phase 24, where moral domination dies out before that of the exterior world conceived as a whole. The Body of Fate is called “enforced success”, a success that rolls out and smooths away, that dissolves through creation, that seems to delight in all outward flowing, that drenches all with grease and oil; that turns dramatisation into desecration: “I have made myself a motley to the view”.152 Owing to the need of seeing the dramatic image, or images, as individuals, that is to say as set amongst concrete or fixed surroundings, he seeks some field of action, some mirror not of his own creation. Unlike Phase 19 he fails in situations wholly created by himself, or in works of art where character or story has gained nothing from history. His phase is called “The Concrete Man”, because the isolation of parts that began at Phase 19 is overcome at the second phase of the triad; subordination of parts is achieved by the discovery of concrete relations. His abstraction too, affected by these relations, may be no more than an emotional interest in such generalisations as “God”, “Man”, a Napoleon may but point to the starry heavens and say that they prove the existence of God.¹⁵³ There is a delight in concrete images that, unlike the impassioned images of Phase 17 and Phase 18, or the declamatory images of Phase 19, reveal through complex suffering the general destiny of man. He must, however, to express this suffering, personify rather than characterise, create not observe that multitude, which is but his Mask as in a multiplying mirror, for the primary is not yet strong enough to substitute for the lost Unity of Being that of the external world perceived as fact. In a man of action this multiplicity gives the greatest possible richness of resource where he is not thwarted by his horoscope, great ductability, a gift for adopting any rôle that stirs imagination, a philosophy of impulse and audacity; but in the man of action a part of the nature must be crushed, one main dramatisation or group of images preferred to all others.

Napoleon sees himself as Alexander moving to the conquest of the East, Mask and Image must take an historical and not a mythological or dream form, a form found but not created; he is crowned in the dress of a Roman Emperor.154 Shakespeare, the other supreme figure of the phase, was—if we may judge by the few biographical facts, and by such adjectives as “sweet” and “gentle” applied to him by his contemporaries—a man whose actual personality seemed faint and passionless.¹⁵⁵ Unlike Ben Jonson he fought no duels;¹⁵⁶ he kept out of quarrels in a quarrelsome age; not even complaining when somebody pirated his sonnets;¹⁵⁷ he dominated no Mermaid Tavern,¹⁵⁸ but—through Mask and Image, reflected in a multiplying mirror—he created the most passionate art that exists. He was the greatest of modern poets, partly because entirely true to phase, creating always from Mask and Creative Mind, never from situation alone, never from Body of Fate alone; and if we knew all we would find that success came to him, as to others of this phase, as something hostile and unforeseen; something that sought to impose an intuition of Fate (the condition of Phase 6) as from without and therefore as a form of superstition. Both Shakespeare and Balzac used the False Mask imaginatively, explored it to impose the True, and what Thomas Lake Harris,^XI the half-charlatan American visionary, said of Shakespeare might be said of both: “Often the hair of his head stood up and all life became the echoing chambers of the tomb”.¹⁵⁹

At Phase 19 we create through the externalised Mask an imaginary world, in whose real existence we believe, while remaining separate from it; at Phase 20 we enter that world and become a portion of it; we study it, we amass historical evidence, and, that we may dominate it the more, drive out myth and symbol, and compel it to seem the real world where our lives are lived.

A phase of ambition; in Napoleon the dramatist’s own ambition; in Shakespeare that of the persons of his art; and this ambition is not that of the solitary lawgiver, that of Phase 10 (where the Creative Mind is placed) which rejects, resists and narrows, but a creative energy.

PHASE TWENTY-ONE

Will—The Acquisitive Man.

Mask (from Phase 7). True—Self-analysis. False—Self-adaptation.

Creative Mind (from Phase 9). True—Domination of the intellect. False—Distortion.

Body of Fate (from Phase 23)—Enforced triumph of achievement.

Examples: Lamarck, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. Wells, George Moore.160

The antithetical tincture has a predominance so slight that the Creative Mind and Body of Fate almost equal it in control of desire. The Will can scarcely conceive of a Mask separate from or predominant over Creative Mind and Body of Fate, yet because it can do so there is personality not character. It is better, however, to use a different word, and therefore Phases 21, 22 and 23 are described as, like the phases opposite, phases of individuality where the Will is studied less in relation to the Mask than in relation to itself. At Phase 23 the new relation to the Mask, as something to escape from, will have grown clear.

The antithetical tincture is noble, and, judged by the standards of the primary, evil, whereas the primary is good and banal; and this phase, the last before the antithetical surrenders its control, would be almost wholly good did it not hate its own banality. Personality has almost the rigidity, almost the permanence of character, but it is not character, for it is still always assumed. When we contemplate Napoleon we can see ourselves, perhaps even think of ourselves as Napoleons, but a man of Phase 21 has a personality that seems a creation of his circumstance and his faults, a manner peculiar to himself and impossible to others. We say at once, “How individual he is”. In theory whatever one has chosen must be within the choice of others, at some moment or for some purpose, but we find in practice that nobody of this phase has personal imitators, or has given his name to a form of manners. The Will has driven intellectual complexity into its final entanglement, an entanglement created by the continual adaptation to new circumstances of a logical sequence; and the aim of the individual, when true to phase, is to realise, by his own complete domination over all circumstance, a self-analysing, self-conscious simplicity. Phase 7 shuddered at its intellectual simplicity, whereas he must shudder at his complexity.

Out of phase, instead of seeking this simplicity through his own dominating constructive will, he will parade an imaginary naïveté, even blunder in his work, encourage in himself stupidities of spite or sentiment, or commit calculated indiscretions simulating impulse. He is under the False Mask (emotional self-adaptation) and the False Creative Mind (distortion: the furious Phase 9 acted upon by “enforced sensuality”). He sees the antithetical as evil, and desires the evil, for he is subject to a sort of possession by the devil, which is in reality but a theatrical scene. Precisely because his adaptability can be turned in any direction, when lived according to the primary, he is driven into all that is freakish or grotesque, mind-created passions, simulated emotions; he adopts all that can suggest the burning heart he longs for in vain; he turns braggart or buffoon. Like somebody in Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, he will invite others to tell their worst deeds that he may himself confess that he stole a half-crown and left a servant-girl to bear the blame.161 When all turn upon him he will be full of wonder, for he knows that the confession is not true, or if true, that the deed itself was but a trick, or a pose, and that all the time he is full of a goodness that fills him with shame. Whether he live according to phase and regard life without emotion, or live out of phase and simulate emotion, his Body of Fate drags him away from intellectual unity; but in so far as he lives out of phase he weakens conflict, refuses to resist, floats upon the stream. In phase he strengthens conflict to the utmost by refusing all activity that is not antithetical: he becomes intellectually dominating, intellectually unique. He apprehends the simplicity of his opposite phase as some vast systematisation, in which the will imposes itself upon the multiplicity of living images, or events, upon all in Shakespeare, in Napoleon even, that delighted in its independent life; for he is a tyrant and must kill his adversary. If he is a novelist, his characters must go his road, and not theirs, and perpetually demonstrate his thesis; he will love construction better than the flow of life, and as a dramatist he will create character and situation without passion, and without liking, and yet he is a master of surprise, for one can never be sure where even a charge of shot will fall. Style exists now but as a sign of work well done, a certain energy and precision of movement; in the artistic sense it is no longer possible, for the tension of the will is too great to allow of suggestion. Writers of the phase are great public men and they exist after death as historical monuments, for they are without meaning apart from time and circumstance.

PHASE TWENTY-TWO

Will—Balance between ambition and contemplation.

Mask (from Phase 8). True—Self-immolation. False—Self-assurance.

Creative Mind (from Phase 8). True—Amalgamation. False—Despair.

Body of Fate (from Phase 22)—Temptation through Strength.

Examples: Flaubert, Herbert Spencer, Swedenborg, Dostoyevsky, Darwin.162

The aim of the being, until the point of balance has been reached, will be that of Phase 21 except that synthesis will be more complete, and the sense of identity between the individual and his thought, between his desire and his synthesis will be closer; but the character of the phase is precisely that here balance is reached and passed, though it is stated that the individual may have to return to this phase more than once, though not more than four times, before it is passed. Once balance has been reached, the aim must be to use the Body of Fate to deliver the Creative Mind from the Mask, and not to use the Creative Mind to deliver the Mask from the Body of Fate. The being does this by so using the intellect upon the facts of the world that the last vestige of personality disappears. The Will, engaged in its last struggle with external fact (Body of Fate), must submit, until it sees itself as inseparable from nature perceived as fact, and it must see itself as merged into that nature through the Mask, either as a conqueror lost in what he conquers, or dying at the moment of conquest, or as renouncing conquest, whether it come by might of logic, or might of drama, or might of hand. The Will since Phase 8 has more and more seen itself as a Mask, as a form of personal power, but now it must see that power broken. From Phase 12 to Phase 18 it was or should have been a power wielded by the whole nature; but since Phase 19 it has been wielded by a fragment only, as something more and more professional, temperamental or technical.

It has become abstract, and the more it has sought the whole of natural fact, the more abstract it has become. One thinks of some spilt liquid which grows thinner the wider it spreads till at last it is but a film. That which at Phase 21 was a longing for self-conscious simplicity, as an escape from logical complication and subdivision, is now (through the Mask from Phase 8) a desire for the death of the intellect. At Phase 21 it still sought to change the world, could still be a Shaw, a Wells, but now it will seek to change nothing, it needs nothing but what it may call “reality”, “truth”, “God’s Will”: confused and weary, through trying to grasp too much, the hand must loosen.

Here takes place an interchange between portions of the mind which resembles the interchange between the old and new primary, the old and new antithetical at Phase 1 and Phase 15. It is reflected, however, from the Wheel of the Principles I shall describe in Book II. The mind that has shown a predominantly emotional character, called that of the Victim, through the antithetical phases, now shows a predominantly intellectual character, called that of the Sage (though until Phase 1 has been passed it can but use intellect when true to phase to eliminate intellect); whereas the mind that has been predominantly that of the Sage puts on Victimage.163 An element in the nature is exhausted at the point of balance, and the opposite element controls the mind. One thinks of the gusts of sentimentality that overtake violent men, the gusts of cruelty that overtake the sentimental. At Phase 8, a blinded and throttled phase, there is not a similar interchange. I will return to this omission in Book II.¹⁶⁴ A man of Phase 22 will commonly not only systematise, to the exhaustion of his will, but discover this exhaustion of will in all that he studies. If Lamarck, as is probable, was of Phase 21, Darwin was probably a man of Phase 22, for his theory of development by the survival of fortunate accidental varieties seems to express this exhaustion. The man himself is never weak, never vague or fluctuating in his thought, for if he brings all to silence, it is a silence that results from tension, and till the moment of balance, nothing interests him that is not wrought up to the greatest effort of which it is capable. Flaubert is the supreme literary genius of the phase, and his Temptation of St. Anthony and his Bouvard and Pécuchet are the sacred books of the phase, one describing its effect upon a mind where all is concrete and sensuous, the other upon the more logical, matter-of-fact, curious, modern mind.165 In both the mind exhausts all knowledge within its reach and sinks exhausted to a conscious futility. But the matter is not more of the phase than is the method. One never doubts for a moment that Flaubert was of the phase; all must be impersonal;¹⁶⁶ he must neither like nor dislike character or event; he is “the mirror dawdling down a road” of Stendhal, with a clear brightness that is not Stendhal’s; and when we make his mind our own, we seem to have renounced our own ambition under the influence of some strange, far-reaching, impartial gaze.¹⁶⁷

We feel too that this man who systematised by but linking one emotional association to another has become strangely hard, cold and invulnerable, that this mirror is not brittle but of unbreakable steel. “Systematised” is the only word that comes to mind, but it implies too much deliberation, for association has ranged itself by association as little bits of paper and little chips of wood cling to one another upon the water in a bowl. In Dostoyevsky the “amalgamation” is less intellectual, less orderly, he, one feels, has reached the point of balance through life, not through the deliberate process of his art; his Whole will, not merely his intellectual will, has been shaken. His characters, in whom is reflected this broken will, are aware, unlike those of Bouvard and Pécuchet, those of the Temptation even, of some ungraspable Whole to which they have given the name of God. For a moment that fragment, that relation, which is our very being, is broken; they are at Udan Adan “wailing upon the edge of nonentity, wailing for Jerusalem, with weak voices almost inarticulate”; yet full submission has not come.¹⁶⁸

Swedenborg passes through his balance after fifty, a mind incredibly dry and arid, hard, tangible and cold, like the minerals he assayed for the Swedish government, studies a new branch of science: the economics, the natural history of Heaven; notes that there nothing but emotion, nothing but the ruling love exists.169 The desire to dominate has so completely vanished, “amalgamation” has pushed its way so far into the subconscious, into that which is dark, that we call it a vision. Had he been out of phase, had he attempted to arrange his life according to the personal Mask, he would have been pedantic and arrogant, a Bouvard, or a Pécuchet, passing from absurdity to absurdity, hopeless and insatiable.

In the world of action such absurdity may become terrible, for men will die and murder for an abstract synthesis, and the more abstract it is the further it carries them from compunction and compromise; and as obstacles to that synthesis increase, the violence of their will increases. It is a phase as tragic as its opposite, and more terrible, for the man of this phase may, before the point of balance has been reached, become a destroyer and persecutor, a figure of tumult and of violence; or as is more probable—for the violence of such a man must be checked by moments of resignation or despair, premonitions of balance—his system will become an instrument of destruction and of persecution in the hands of others.

The seeking of Unity of Fact by a single faculty, instead of Unity of Being by the use of all, has separated a man from his genius. This is symbolised in the Wheel by the gradual separation (as we recede from Phase 15) of Will and Creative Mind, Mask and Body of Fate. During the supernatural incarnation of Phase 15, we were compelled to assume an absolute identity of the Will, or self, with its creative power, of beauty with body; but for some time self and creative power, though separating, have been neighbours and kin. A Landor, or a Morris, however violent, however much of a child he seem, is always a remarkable man; in Phases 19, 20 and 21 genius grows professional, something taken up when work is taken up, it begins to be possible to record the stupidities of men of genius in a scrapbook; Bouvard and Pécuchet have that refuge for their old age. Someone has said that Balzac at noonday was a very ignorant man, but at midnight over a cup of coffee knew everything in the world.¹⁷⁰ In the man of action, in a Napoleon, let us say, the stupidities lie hidden, for action is a form of abstraction that crushes everything it cannot express. At Phase 22 stupidity is obvious, one finds it in the correspondence of Karl Marx,171 in his banal abusiveness, while to Goncourt, Flaubert, as man, seemed full of unconsidered thought.¹⁷² Flaubert, says Anatole France, was not intelligent.¹⁷³ Dostoyevsky, to those who first acclaimed his genius, seemed when he laid down his pen an hysterical fool. One remembers Herbert Spencer dabbing the grapes upon a lodging-house carpet with an inky cork that he might tint them to his favourite colour, “impure purple”.¹⁷⁴ On the other hand, as the Will moves further from the Creative Mind, it approaches the Body of Fate, and with this comes an increasing delight in impersonal energy and in inanimate objects, and as the Mask separates from the Body of Fate and approaches the Creative Mind we delight more and more in all that is artificial, all that is deliberately invented. Symbols may become hateful to us, the ugly and the arbitrary delightful, that we may the more quickly kill all memory of Unity of Being. We identify ourselves in our surroundings—in our surroundings perceived as fact—while at the same time the intellect so slips from our grasp, as it were, that we contemplate its energies as something we can no longer control, and give to each of those energies an appropriate name as though it were an animate being. Now that Will and Body of Fate are one, Creative Mind and Mask one also, we are no longer four but two; and life, the balance reached, becomes an act of contemplation. There is no longer a desired object, as distinct from thought itself, no longer a Will, as distinct from the process of nature seen as fact; and so thought itself, seeing that it can neither begin nor end, is stationary. Intellect knows itself as its own object of desire; and the Will knows itself to be the world; there is neither change nor desire of change. For the moment the desire for reform has ceased and an absolute realism becomes possible.

PHASE TWENTY-THREE

Will—The Receptive Man.

Mask (from Phase 9). True—Wisdom. False—Self-pity.

Creative Mind (from Phase 7). True—Creation through pity. False—Self-driven desire.

Body of Fate (from Phase 21)—Success.

Examples: Rembrandt, Synge.175

When out of phase, for reasons that will appear later, he is tyrannical, gloomy and self-absorbed. In phase his energy has a character analogous to the longing of Phase 16 to escape from complete subjectivity: it escapes in a condition of explosive joy from systematisation and abstraction. The clock has run down and must be wound up again. The primary tincture is now greater than the antithetical, and the man must free the intellect from all motives founded upon personal desire, by the help of the external world, now for the first time studied and mastered for its own sake. He must kill all thought that would systematise the world, by doing a thing, not because he wants to, or because he should, but because he can; that is to say, he sees all things from the point of view of his own technique, touches and tastes and investigates technically. He is, however, because of the nature of his energy, violent, anarchic, like all who are of the first phase of a quarter. Because he is without systematisation he is without a master, and only by his technical mastery can he escape from the sense of being thwarted and opposed by other men; and his technical mastery must exist, not for its own sake, though for its own sake it has been done, but for that which it reveals, for its laying bare—to hand and eye, as distinguished from thought and emotion—general humanity. Yet this laying bare is a perpetual surprise, is an unforeseen reward of skill. And unlike antithetical man he must use his Body of Fate (now always his “success”) to liberate his intellect from personality, and only when he has done this, only when he escapes the voluntary Mask, does he find his true intellect, is he found by his True Mask.

The True Mask is from the frenzied Phase 9 where personal life is made visible for the first time, but from that phase mastered by its Body of Fate, “enforced sensuality”, derived from Phase 7 where the instinctive flood is almost above the lips. It is called “wisdom” and this wisdom (personality reflected in a primary mirror) is general humanity experienced as a form of involuntary emotion and involuntary delight in the “minute particulars” of life.¹⁷⁶ The man wipes his breath from the window-pane, and laughs in his delight at all the varied scene. Because his Creative Mind is at Phase 7, where instinctive life, all but reaching utmost complexity, suffers an external abstract synthesis, his Body of Fate which drives him to intellectual life, at Phase 21; his Will at a phase of revolt from every intellectual summary, from all intellectual abstraction, this delight is not mere delight, he would construct a whole, but that whole must seem all event, all picture. That whole must not be instinctive, bodily, natural, however, though it may seem so, for in reality he cares only for what is human, individual and moral. To others he may seem to care for the immoral and inhuman only, for he will be hostile, or indifferent to moral as to intellectual summaries; if he is Rembrandt he discovers his Christ through anatomical curiosity, or through curiosity as to light and shade,177 and if he is Synge he takes a malicious pleasure in the contrast between his hero, whom he discovers through his instinct for comedy, and any hero in men’s minds.¹⁷⁸ Indeed, whether he be Synge or Rembrandt, he is ready to sacrifice every convention, perhaps all that men have agreed to reverence, for a startling theme, or a model one delights in painting; and yet all the while, because of the nature of his Mask, there is another summary working through bone and nerve. He is never the mere technician that he seems, though when you ask his meaning he will have nothing to say, or will say something irrelevant or childish.

Artists and writers of Phase 21 and Phase 22 have eliminated all that is personal from their style, seeking cold metal and pure water, but he will delight in colour and idiosyncrasy, though these he must find rather than create. Synge must find rhythm and syntax in the Aran Islands,¹⁷⁹ Rembrandt delight in all accidents of the visible world; yet neither, no matter what his delight in reality, shows it without exaggeration, for both delight in all that is wilful, in all that flouts intellectual coherence, and conceive of the world as if it were an overflowing cauldron. Both will work in toil and in pain, finding what they do not seek, for, after Phase 22, desire creates no longer, will has taken its place; but that which they reveal is joyous. Whereas Shakespeare showed, through a style full of joy, a melancholy vision sought from afar; a style at play, a mind that served; Synge must fill many notebooks, clap his ear to that hole in the ceiling;¹⁸⁰ and what patience Rembrandt must have spent in the painting of a lace collar though to find his subject he had but to open his eyes.¹⁸¹ When out of phase, when the man seeks to choose his Mask, he is gloomy with the gloom of others, and tyrannical with the tyranny of others, because he cannot create. Phase 9 was dominated by desire, was described as having the greatest belief in its own desire possible to man, yet from it Phase 23 receives not desire but pity, and not belief but wisdom. Pity needs wisdom as desire needs belief, for pity is primary, whereas desire is antithetical. When pity is separated from wisdom we have the False Mask, a pity like that of a drunken man, self-pity, whether offered in seeming to another or only to oneself: pity corrupted by desire. Who does not feel the pity in Rembrandt, in Synge, and know that it is inseparable from wisdom? In the works of Synge there is much self-pity, ennobled to a pity for all that lived; and once an actress, playing his Deirdre, put all into a gesture. Concubar, who had murdered Deirdre’s husband and her friends, was in altercation with Fergus, who had demanded vengeance; “Move a little further off”, she cried, “with the babbling of fools”; and a moment later, moving like a somnambulist, she touched Concubar upon the arm, a gesture full of gentleness and compassion, as though she had said, “You also live”.182 In Synge’s early unpublished work, written before he found the dialects of Aran and of Wicklow, there is brooding melancholy and morbid self-pity.¹⁸³ He had to undergo an aesthetic transformation, analogous to religious conversion, before he became the audacious, joyous, ironical man we know. The emotional life in so far as it was deliberate had to be transferred from Phase 9 to Phase 23, from a condition of self-regarding melancholy to its direct opposite. This transformation must have seemed to him a discovery of his true self, of his true moral being; whereas Shelley’s came at the moment when he first created a passionate image which made him forgetful of himself. It came perhaps when he had passed from the litigious rhetoric of Queen Mab to the lonely reveries of Alastor.¹⁸⁴ Primary art values above all things sincerity to the self or Will but to the self active, transforming, perceiving.

The quarter of Intellect was a quarter of dispersal and generalisation, a play of shuttlecock with the first quarter of animal burgeoning, but the fourth quarter is a quarter of withdrawal and concentration, in which active moral man should receive into himself, and transform into primary sympathy the emotional self-realisation of the second quarter. If he does not so receive and transform he sinks into stupidity and stagnation, perceives nothing but his own interests, or becomes a tool in the hands of others; and at Phase 23, because there must be delight in the unforeseen, he may be brutal and outrageous. He does not, however, hate, like a man of the third quarter, being but ignorant of or indifferent to the feelings of others. Rembrandt pitied ugliness, for what we call ugliness was to him an escape from all that is summarised and known, but had he painted a beautiful face, as antithetical man understands beauty, it would have remained a convention, he would have seen it through a mirage of boredom.

When one compares the work of Rembrandt with that of David,185 whose phase was Phase 21; the work of Synge with that of Mr. Wells;¹⁸⁶ one compares men whose antithetical tincture is breaking up and dissolving, with men in whom it is, as for a last resistance, tightening, concentrating, levelling, transforming, tabulating. Rembrandt and Synge but look on and clap their hands. There is indeed as much selection among the events in one case as in the other, but at Phase 23 events seem startling because they elude intellect.

All phases after Phase 15 and before Phase 22 unweave that which is woven by the equivalent phases before Phase 15 and after Phase 8.

The man of Phase 23 has in the Mask, at Phase 9, a contrary that seems his very self until he use the discord of that contrary, his Body of Fate at Phase 21, to drive away the Mask and free the intellect and rid pity of desire and turn belief into wisdom. The Creative Mind, a discord to the Will, is from a phase of instinctive dispersal, and must turn the violent objectivity of the self or Will into a delight in all that breathes and moves: “The gay fishes on the wave when the moon sucks up the dew”.¹⁸⁷

PHASE TWENTY-FOUR

Will—The end of ambition.

Mask (from Phase 10). True—Self-reliance. False—Isolation.

Creative Mind (from Phase 6). True—Humanitarianism. through constructive emotion.¹⁸⁸ False—Authority.

Body of Fate (from Phase 20)—Objective action.

Examples: Queen Victoria, Galsworthy, Lady Gregory.¹⁸⁹

As the Mask now seems the natural self, which he must escape, the man labours to turn all within him that is from Phase 10 into some quality of Phase 24. At Phase 23, when in what seemed the natural self, the man was full of gloomy self-absorption and its appropriate abstractions, but now the abstractions are those that feed self-righteousness and scorn of others, the nearest the natural self can come to the self-expressing mastery of Phase 10. Morality, grown passive and pompous, dwindles to unmeaning forms and formulae. Under the influence of the Body of Fate, the unweaver and discord of Phase 10, the man frees the intellect from the Mask by unflagging impersonal activity. Instead of burning, as did Phase 23, intellectual abstraction in a technical fire, it grinds moral abstraction in a mill. This mill, created by the freed intellect, is a code of personal conduct, which, being formed from social and historical tradition, remains always concrete in the mind. All is sacrificed to this code; moral strength reaches its climax; the rage of Phase 10 to destroy all that trammels the being from without is now all self-surrender. There is great humility—“she died every day she lived”190—and pride as great, pride in the code’s acceptance, an impersonal pride, as though one were to sign “servant of servants”.¹⁹¹ There is no philosophic capacity, no intellectual curiosity, but there is no dislike for either philosophy or science; they are a part of the world and that world is accepted. There may be great intolerance for all who break or resist the code, and great tolerance for all the evil of the world that is clearly beyond it whether above it or below. The code must rule, and because that code cannot be an intellectual choice, it is always a tradition bound up with family, or office, or trade, always a part of history. It is always seemingly fated, for its subconscious purpose is to compel surrender of every personal ambition; and though it is obeyed in pain—can there be mercy in a rigid code?—the man is flooded with the joy of self-surrender; and flooded with mercy—what else can there be in self-surrender?—for those over whom the code can have no rights, children and the nameless multitude. Unmerciful to those who serve and to himself, merciful in contemplating those who are served, he never wearies of forgiveness.

Men and women of the phase create an art where individuals only exist to express some historical code, or some historical tradition of action and of feeling, things written in what Raftery called the Book of the People, or settled by social or official station, even as set forth in Directory or Peerage.192 The judge upon the bench is but a judge, the prisoner in the dock is but the eternal offender, whom we may study in legend or in Blue Book.¹⁹³ They despise the Bohemian above all men till he turns gypsy, tinker, convict, or the like, and so finds historical sanction, attains as it were to some inherited code or recognised relation to such code.¹⁹⁴ They submit all their actions to the most unflinching examination, and yet are without psychology, or self-knowledge, or self-created standard of any kind, for they but ask without ceasing, “Have I done my duty as well as So-and-so?”¹⁹⁵ “Am I as unflinching as my fathers before me?” and though they can stand utterly alone, indifferent though all the world condemn, it is not that they have found themselves, but that they have been found faithful. The very Bohemians are not wholly individual men in their eyes, and but fulfil the curse, laid upon them before they were born, by God or social necessity.

Out of phase, seeking emotion instead of impersonal action, there is—desire being impossible—self-pity, and therefore discontent with people and with circumstance, and an overwhelming sense of loneliness, of being abandoned. All criticism is resented, and small personal rights and predilections, especially if supported by habit or position, are asserted with violence; there is great indifference to others’ rights and predilections; we have the bureaucrat or the ecclesiastic of satire, a tyrant who is incapable of insight or of hesitation.

Their intellect being from Phase 6, but their energy, or will, or bias, from Phase 24, they must, if in phase, see their code expressed in multiform human life, the mind of Victoria at its best, as distinguished from that of Walt Whitman. Their emotional life is a reversal of Phase 10, as what was autocratic in Victoria reversed the personal autocracy of Parnell.¹⁹⁶ They fly the Mask, that it may become, when enforced, that form of pride and of humility that holds together a professional or social order.

When out of phase they take from Phase 10 isolation, which is good for that phase but destructive to a phase that should live for others and from others; and they take from Phase 6 a bundle of race instincts, and turn them to abstract moral or social convention, and so contrast with Phase 6, as the mind of Victoria at its worst contrasts with that of Walt Whitman. When in phase they turn these instincts to a concrete code, founded upon dead or living example.

That which characterises all phases of the last quarter, with an increasing intensity, begins now to be plain: persecution of instinct—race is transformed into a moral conception—whereas the intellectual phases, with increasing intensity as they approached Phase 22, persecuted emotion. Morality and intellect persecute instinct and emotion respectively, which seek their protection.

PHASE TWENTY-FIVE

Will—The Conditional Man.

Mask (from Phase 11). True—Consciousness of self. False—Self-consciousness.

Creative Mind (from Phase 5). True—Rhetoric. False—Spiritual arrogance.

Body of Fate (from Phase 19)—Persecution.

Examples: Cardinal Newman, Luther, Calvin, George Herbert, George Russell (A. E.).197

Born as it seems to the arrogance of belief, as Phase 24 was born to moral arrogance, the man of the phase must reverse himself, must change from Phase 11 to Phase 25; use the Body of Fate to purify the intellect from the Mask, till this intellect accepts some social order, some condition of life, some organised belief: the convictions of Christendom perhaps. He must eliminate all that is personal from belief; eliminate the necessity for intellect by the contagion of some common agreement, as did Phase 23 by its technique, Phase 24 by its code. With a Will of subsidence, an intellect of loosening and separating, he must, like Phase 23 or Phase 24, find himself in such a situation that he is compelled to concrete synthesis (Body of Fate at Phase 19 the discord of Phase 11), but this situation compels the Will, if it pursue the False Mask, to the persecution of others, if found by the True Mask, to suffer persecution. Phase 19, phase of the Body of Fate, is a phase of breaking, and when the Will is at Phase 25, of breaking by belief or by condition. In this it finds impulse and joy. It is called the Conditional Man, perhaps because all the man’s thought arises out of some particular condition of actual life, or is an attempt to change that condition through social conscience. He is strong, full of initiative, full of social intellect; absorption has scarce begun; but his object is to limit and bind, to make men better, by making it impossible that they should be otherwise, to so arrange prohibitions and habits that men may be naturally good, as they are naturally black, or white, or yellow. There may be great eloquence, a mastery of all concrete imagery that is not personal expression, because though as yet there is no sinking into the world but much distinctness, clear identity, there is an overflowing social conscience. No man of any other phase can produce the same instant effect upon great crowds; for codes have passed, the universal conscience takes their place. He should not appeal to a personal interest, should make little use of argument which requires a long train of reasons, or many technical terms, for his power rests in certain simplifying convictions which have grown with his character; he needs intellect for their expression, not for proof, and taken away from these convictions is without emotion and momentum. He has but one overwhelming passion, to make all men good, and this good is something at once concrete and impersonal; and though he has hitherto given it the name of some church, or state, he is ready at any moment to give it a new name, for, unlike Phase 24, he has no pride to nourish upon the past. Moved by all that is impersonal, he becomes powerful as, in a community tired of elaborate meals, that man might become powerful who had the strongest appetite for bread and water.

When out of phase he may, because Phase 11 is a phase of diffused personality and pantheistic dreaming, grow sentimental and vague, drift into some emotional abstract, his head full of images long separated from life, and ideas long separated from experience, turn tactless and tasteless, affirm his position with the greatest arrogance possible to man. Even when nearly wholly good he can scarce escape from arrogance; what old friend did Cardinal Newman cut because of some shade of theological difference?198

Living in the False Creative Mind produces, in all primary phases, insensitiveness, as living in the False Mask produces emotional conventionality and banality, because that False Creative Mind, having received no influence from the Body of Fate, no mould from individuals and interests, is as it were self-suspended. At Phase 25 this insensitiveness may be that of a judge who orders a man to the torture, that of a statesman who accepts massacre as an historical necessity. One thinks of Luther’s apparent indifference to atrocities committed, now by the peasants, now against them, according to the way his incitements veered.199

The genius of Synge and Rembrandt has been described as typical of Phase 23. The first phase of a triad is an expression of unrelated power. They surprised the multitude, they did not seek to master it; while those chosen for examples of Phase 24 turn the multitude into a moral norm. At Phase 25 men seek to master the multitude, not through expressing it, nor through surprising it, but by imposing upon it a spiritual norm. Synge, reborn at Phase 25, might interest himself, not in the primary vigour and tragedy or his Aran Island countrymen, but in their conditions, their beliefs, and through some eccentricity (not of phase but horoscope), not in those shared with fellow Catholics, as Newman would, but in those shared with Japanese peasants, or in their belief as a part of all folk belief considered as religion and philosophy. He would use this religion and philosophy to kill within himself the last trace of individual abstract speculation, yet this religion and this philosophy, as present before his mind, would be artificial and selected, though always concrete. Subsidence upon, or absorption in, the spiritual primary is not yet possible or even conceivable.

Poets of this phase are always stirred to an imaginative intensity by some form of propaganda. George Herbert was doubtless of this phase; and George Russell (A. E.), though the signs are obscured by the influence upon his early years of poets and painters of middle antithetical phases. Neither Russell’s visionary painting nor his visions of “nature spirits” are, upon this supposition, true to phase. Every poem, where he is moved to write by some form of philosophical propaganda, is precise, delicate and original, while in his visionary painting one discovers the influence of other men, Gustave Moreau, for instance.²⁰⁰ This painting is like many of his “visions”, an attempt to live in the Mask, caused by critical ideas founded upon antithetical art. What dialect was to Synge, his practical work as a cooperative organiser was to him, and he found precise ideas and sincere emotion in the expression of conviction. He learned practically, but not theoretically, that he must fly the Mask. His work should neither be consciously aesthetic nor consciously speculative but imitative of a central Being—the Mask as his pursuer—consciously apprehended as something distinct, as something never imminent though eternally united to the soul.

His False Mask showed him what purport to be “nature spirits” because all phases before Phase 15 are in nature, as distinguished from God, and at Phase 11 that nature becomes intellectually conscious of its relations to all created things. When he desires the Mask, instead of flying that it may follow, it gives, instead of the intuition of God, a simulated intuition of nature. That simulated intuition is arrayed in ideal conventional images of sense, instead of in some form of abstract opinion, because of the character of his horoscope.

PHASE TWENTY-SIX

Will—The Multiple Man, also called “The Hunchback”.201

Mask (from Phase 12). True—Self-realisation. False—Self-abandonment.

Creative Mind (from Phase 4). True—Beginning of abstract supersensual thought. False—Fascination of sin.

Body of Fate (from Phase 18)—The Hunchback is his own Body of Fate.

The most difficult of the phases, and the first of those phases for which one can find few or no examples from personal experience. I think that in Asia it might not be difficult to discover examples at least of Phases 26, 27 and 28, final phases of a cycle. If such embodiments occur in our present European civilisation they remain obscure, through lacking the instruments for self-expression. One must create the type from its symbols without the help of experience.

All the old abstraction, whether of morality or of belief, has now been exhausted; but in the seemingly natural man, in Phase 26 out of phase, there is an attempt to substitute a new abstraction, a simulacrum of self-expression. Desiring emotion the man becomes the most completely solitary of all possible men, for all normal communion with his kind, that of a common study, that of an interest in work done, that of a condition of life, a code, a belief shared, has passed; and without personality he is forced to create its artificial semblance. It is perhaps a slander of history that makes us see Nero so, for he lacked the physical deformity which is, we are told, first among this phase’s inhibitions of personality.202 The deformity may be of any kind, great or little, for it is but symbolised in the hump that thwarts what seems the ambition of a Caesar or of an Achilles.²⁰³ He commits crimes, not because he wants to, or like Phase 23 out of phase because he can, but because he wants to feel certain that he can; and he is full of malice because, finding no impulse but in his own ambition, he is made jealous by the impulse of others. He is all emphasis, and the greater that emphasis the more does he show himself incapable of emotion, the more does he display his sterility. If he live amid a theologically minded people, his greatest temptation may be to defy God, to become a Judas, who betrays, not for thirty pieces of silver, but that he may call himself creator.²⁰⁴

In examining how he becomes true to phase, one is perplexed by the obscure description of the Body of Fate, “The Hunchback is his own Body of Fate”. This Body of Fate is derived from Phase 18, and (being reflected in the physical being of Phase 26) can only be such a separation of function—deformity—as breaks the self-regarding False Mask (Phase 18 being the breaking of Phase 12). All phases from Phase 26 to Phase 11 inclusive should be gregarious; and from Phase 26 to Phase 28 there is, when the phase is truly lived, contact with supersensual life, or a sinking-in of the body upon its supersensual source, or desire for that contact and sinking. At Phase 26 has come a subconscious exhaustion of the moral life, whether in belief or in conduct, and of the life of imitation, the life of judgment and approval. The Will must find a substitute, and as always in the first phase of a triad energy is violent and fragmentary. The moral abstract being no longer possible, the Will may seek this substitute through the knowledge of the lives of men and beasts, plucked up, as it were, by the roots, lacking in all mutual relations; there may be hatred of solitude, perpetual forced bonhomie; yet that which it seeks is without social morality, something radical and incredible. When Ezekiel lay upon his “right and left side” and ate dung, to raise “other men to a perception of the infinite”,²⁰⁵ he may so have sought, and so did perhaps the Indian sage or saint who coupled with the roe.²⁰⁶

If the man of this phase seeks, not life, but knowledge of each separated life in relation to supersensual unity; and above all of each separated physical life, or action,—that alone is entirely concrete—he will, because he can see lives and actions in relation to their source and not in their relations to one another, see their deformities and incapacities with extraordinary acuteness.207 His own past actions also he must judge as isolated and each in relation to its source; and this source, experienced not as love but as knowledge, will be present in his mind as a terrible unflinching judgment. Hitherto he could say to primary man, “Am I as good as So-and-so?” and when still antithetical he could say, “After all I have not failed in my good intentions taken as a whole”; he could pardon himself; but how pardon where every action is judged alone and no good action can turn judgment from the evil action by its side? He stands in the presence of a terrible blinding light, and would, were that possible, be born as worm or mole.²⁰⁸

From Phase 22 to Phase 25, man is in contact with what is called the physical primary, or physical objective; from Phase 26 and Phase 4, the primary is spiritual; then for three phases, the physical primary returns. Spiritual, in this connection, may be understood as a reality known by analogy alone. How can we know what depends only on the self? In the first and in the last crescents lunar nature is but a thin veil; the eye is fixed upon the sun and dazzles.

PHASE TWENTY-SEVEN

Will—The Saint.

Mask (from Phase 13). True—Renunciation. False—Emulation.

Creative Mind (from Phase 3). True—Supersensual receptivity. False—Pride.

Body of Fate (from Phase 17)—None except impersonal action.

Examples: Socrates, Pascal.²⁰⁹

In his seemingly natural man, derived from Mask, there is an extreme desire for spiritual authority; and thought and action have for their object display of zeal or some claim of authority. Emulation is all the greater because not based on argument but on psychological or physiological difference. At Phase 27, the central phase of the soul, of a triad that is occupied with the relations of the soul, the man asserts when out of phase his claim to faculty or to supersensitive privilege beyond that of other men; he has a secret that makes him better than other men.

True to phase, he substitutes for emulation an emotion of renunciation, and for the old toil of judgment and discovery of sin, a beating upon his breast and an ecstatical crying out that he must do penance, that he is even the worst of men. He does not, like Phase 26, perceive separated lives and actions more clearly than the total life, for the total life has suddenly displayed its source. If he possess intellect he will use it but to serve perception and renunciation. His joy is to be nothing, to do nothing, to think nothing; but to permit the total life, expressed in its humanity, to flow in upon him and to express itself through his acts and thoughts. He is not identical with it, he is not absorbed in it, for if he were he would not know that he is nothing, that he no longer even possesses his own body, that he must renounce even his desire for his own salvation, and that this total life is in love with his nothingness.

Before the self passes from Phase 22 it is said to attain what is called the “Emotion of Sanctity”, and this emotion is described as a contact with life beyond death. It comes at the instant when synthesis is abandoned, when fate is accepted. At Phases 23, 24 and 25 we are said to use this emotion, but not to pass from Phase 25 till we have intellectually realised the nature of sanctity itself, and sanctity is described as the renunciation of personal salvation. The “Emotion of Sanctity” is the reverse of that realisation of incipient personality at Phase 8, which the Will related to collective action till Phase 11 had passed.210 After Phase 22 the man becomes aware of something which the intellect cannot grasp, and this something is a supersensual environment of the soul. At Phases 23, 24 and 25 he subdues all attempts at its intellectual comprehension, while relating it to his bodily senses and faculties, through technical achievement, through morality, through belief. At Phases 26, 27 and 28 he permits those senses and those faculties to sink in upon their environment. He will, if it be possible, not even touch or taste or see: “Man does not perceive the truth; God perceives the truth in man”.²¹¹

PHASE TWENTY-EIGHT

Will—The Fool.212

Mask (from Phase 14). True—Oblivion. False—Malignity.

Creative Mind (from Phase 2). True—Physical activity. False—Cunning.

Body of Fate (from Phase 16)—The Fool is his own Body of Fate.

The natural man, the Fool desiring his Mask, grows malignant, not as the Hunchback, who is jealous of those that can still feel, but through terror and out of jealousy of all that can act with intelligence and effect. It is his true business to become his own opposite, to pass from a semblance of Phase 14 to the reality of Phase 28, and this he does under the influence of his own mind and body—he is his own Body of Fate—for having no active intelligence he owns nothing of the exterior world but his mind and body. He is but a straw blown by the wind, with no mind but the wind and no act but a nameless drifting and turning, and is sometimes called “The Child of God”.²¹³ At his worst his hands and feet and eyes, his will and his feelings, obey obscure subconscious fantasies, while at his best he would know all wisdom if he could know anything. The physical world suggests to his mind pictures and events that have no relation to his needs or even to his desires; his thoughts are an aimless reverie; his acts are aimless like his thoughts; and it is in this aimlessness that he finds his joy. His importance will become clear as the system elaborates itself, yet for the moment no more need be said but that one finds his many shapes on passing from the village fool to the Fool of Shakespeare.

Out of the pool,

Where love the slain with love the slayer lies,

Bubbles the wan mirth of the mirthless fool.²¹⁴

PHASE ONE

Will.		No description except complete plasticity.
Mask (from Phase 15).
Creative Mind (from Phase 1).
Body of Fate (from Phase 15).

This is a supernatural incarnation, like Phase 15, because there is complete objectivity, and human life cannot be completely objective. At Phase 15 mind was completely absorbed by being, but now body is completely absorbed in its supernatural environment. The images of mind are no longer irrelevant even, for there is no longer anything to which they can be relevant, and acts can no longer be immoral or stupid, for there is no one there that can be judged. Thought and inclination, fact and object of desire, are indistinguishable (Mask is submerged in Body of Fate, Will in Creative Mind), that is to say, there is complete passivity, complete plasticity. Mind has become indifferent to good and evil, to truth and falsehood; body has become undifferentiated, dough-like; the more perfect be the soul, the more indifferent the mind, the more dough-like the body; and mind and body take whatever shape, accept whatever image is imprinted upon them, transact whatever purpose is imposed upon them, are indeed the instruments of supernatural manifestation, the final link between the living and more powerful beings.215 There may be great joy; but it is the joy of a conscious plasticity; and it is this plasticity, this liquefaction, or pounding up, whereby all that has been knowledge becomes instinct and faculty. All plasticities do not obey all masters, and when we have considered cycle and horoscope it will be seen how those that are the instruments of subtle supernatural will differ from the instruments of cruder energy; but all, highest and lowest, are alike in being automatic.

Finished at Thoor Ballylee, 1922, in a time of Civil War.²¹⁶

I. Quoted by Pierre Duhem in Le Système du monde, vol. I, page 75.

II. In an essay called “The Friends of the People of Faery” in my Celtic Twilight I describe such an ascent and descent. I found the same movement in some story I picked up at Kiltartan, and suspected a mediaeval symbolism unknown to me at the time.¹²

III. Vol. ii, p. 555 of the Swedenborg Society’s translation.

IV. Ennead, vi. i. 8 (MacKenna’s translation).

V. Giovanni Gentile summarises Kant on time and space as follows: “Kant said that space is a form of external sense, time a form of internal sense. He meant that we represent nature, that is what we call the external world and think of as having been in existence before our knowledge and spiritual life began, in space, then we represent the multiplicity of the objects of our internal experience, or what we distinguish as diverse and manifold in the development of our spiritual life, not in space but in time” (Theory of Mind as Pure Act, chap. ix, H. Wildon Carr’s translation). He thinks these definitions which seem to separate time and space from one another require re-statement. It will be seen, however, when I come to what I have called the Four Principles, that my symbols imply his description of time as a spatialising act.²¹

VI. Though reality is not logical it becomes so in our minds if we discover logical refutations of the writer or movement that is going out of fashion. There is always error, which has nothing to do with “the conflict” which creates all life. Croce in his study of Hegel identifies error with negation.²⁵

VII. A similar circular movement fundamental in the works of Giovanni Gentile is, I read somewhere, the half-conscious foundation of the political thought of modern Italy. Individuals and classes complete their personality and then sink back to enrich the mass. Government must, it is held, because all good things have been created by class war, recognise that class war though it may be regulated must never end. It is the old saying of Heraclitus, “War is God of all, and Father of all, some it has made Gods and some men, some bond and some free”, and the converse of Marxian Socialism.³⁵

VIII. The Four Faculties somewhat resemble the four moments to which Croce has dedicated four books; that the resemblance is not closer is because Croce makes little use of antithesis and antinomy.

IX. I give the Four Types of Wisdom as they were given. I have more than once transposed Heart and Intellect, suspecting a mistake; but have come to the conclusion that my instructors placed them correctly, the nature of the wisdom depending upon the position of the Creative Mind.

X. This and the following Table are divided into ten divisions because they were given me in this form, and I have not sufficient confidence in my knowledge to turn them into the more convenient twelvefold divisions. At first my instructors divided the Great Year also into ten divisions.⁵³

XI. I quote from a book circulated privately among his followers. I saw it years ago but seem to remember it as now vague, now vulgar, and now magnificent in style.