And this is how Time is omnipresent : that Soul is absent from no fragment of the Kosmos just as our Soul is absent from no particle of ourselves. As for those who pronounce Time a thing of no substantial existence, of no reality, they clearly belie God Himself whenever they say “ He was ” or “ He will be ” ; for the existence indicated by the “ was and will be ” can have only such reality as belongs to that in which it is said to be situated : — but this school demands another style of argument.
Meanwhile we have a supplementary observation to make.
Take a man walking and observe the advance he has made ; that advance gives you the quantity of movement he is employing : and
Iii. 8. 1] Nature Contemplation and the One
when you know that quantity— represented by the ground traversed by his feet, for, of course, we are supposing the bodily movement to corre- spond with the pace he has set within himself — you know also the move- ment that exists in the man himself before the feet move.
You must relate the body, carried forward during a given period of Time, to a certain quantity of Movement causing the progress and to the Time it takes, and that again to the Movement, equal in extension, within the man’s soul.
But the Movement within the Soul — to what are you to (relate) refer that ?
Let your choice fall where it may, from this point there is nothing but the unextended : and this is the primarily existent, the container to all else, having itself no container, brooking none.
And, as with Man’s Soul, so with the Soul of the All.
“ Is Time, then, within ourselves as well ? ”
Time is in every Soul of the order of the All-Soul, present in like form in all ; for all the Souls are the one Soul.
And this is why Time can never be broken apart, any more than Eternity which, similarly, under diverse manifestations, has its Being as an integral constituent of all the eternal Existences.
Nature Contemplation and the One
Supposing we played a little before entering upon our serious concern and maintained that all things are striving after Contemplation, looking to Vision as their one end — and this, not merely beings endowed with reason but even the unreasoning animals, the Principle that rules in growing things, and the Earth that produces these — and that all achieve their purpose in the measure possible to their kind, each attaining Vision and possessing itself of the End in its own way and degree, some things in entire reality, others in mimicry and in image — we would scarcely find
anyone to endure so strange a thesis. But in a discussion entirely among ourselves there is no risk in a light handling of our own ideas.
Well — in the play of this very moment am I engaged in the act of Contemplation ?
Yes ; I and all that enter this play are in Contemplation : our play aims at Vision ; and there is every reason to believe that child or man, in sport or earnest, is playing or working only towards Vision, that every act is an effort towards Vision ; the compulsory act, which tends rather to bring the Vision down to outward things, and the act thought of as voluntary, less concerned with the outer, originate alike in the effort towards Vision.
The case of Man will be treated later on : let us speak, first, of the earth and of the trees and vegetation in general, asking ourselves what is the nature of Contemplation in them, how we relate to any Contemplative activity the labour and productiveness of the earth, how Nature, held to be devoid of reason and even of conscious representation, can either harbour Contemplation or produce by means of the Contemplation which it does not possess.
There is, obviously, no question here of hands or feet, of any imple- ment borrowed or inherent : Nature needs simply the Matter which it is to work upon and bring under Form ; its productivity cannot depend upon mechanical operation. What driving or hoisting goes to produce all that variety of colour and pattern ?
The wax-workers, whose methods have been cited as parallel to the creative act of Nature, are unable to make colours ; all they can do is to impose upon their handicraft colours taken from elsewhere. None the less there is a parallel which demands attention : in the case of workers in such arts there must be something locked up within themselves, an efficacy not going out from them and yet guiding their hands in all their creation ; and this observation should have indicated a similar phenome- non in Nature ; it should be clear that this indwelling efiicacy, which makes without hands, must exist in Nature, no less than in the craftsman —
in. 8. 3] NATURE CONTEMPLATION AND THE ONE
I2i
but, there, as a thing completely inbound. Nature need possess no outgomg force as against that remaining within ; the only moved thing is Matter ; there can be no moved phase in this Nature-Principle ; any such moved phase could not be the primal mover ; this Nature-Principle is no such moved entity ; it is the unmoved Principle operating in the Kosmos.
We may be answered that the Reason-Principle is, no doubt, un- moved, but that the Nature-Principle, another being, operates by motion.
But, if Nature entire is m question here, it is identical with the Reason- Principle ; and any part of it that is unmoved is the Reason- Principle. The Nature- Principle must be an Ideal-Form, not a compound of Form and Matter ; there is no need for it to possess (such a changeable element as) Matter, hot and cold : the Matter that underlies it, on which it exercises its creative act, brings all that with it, or, natively without quality, becomes hot and cold, and all the rest, when brought under Reason : Matter, to become fire, demands the approach not of fire but of a Reason-Principle.
This is no slight evidence that in the animal and vegetable realms the Reason-Principles are the makers and that Nature is a Reason- Principle producing a second Reason-Principle, its offspring, which, in turn, while itself, still, remaining intact, communicates something to the underlie. Matter.
The Reason-Principle presiding over visible Shape is the very ultimate of its order, a dead thing unable to produce further : that which produces in the created realm is the living Reason-Principle — brother, no doubt, to that which gives mere shape, but having life-giving power.
But if this Reason-Principle (Nature) is in act — and produces by the process indicated — how can it have any part in Contempla- tion ?
To begin with, since in aU its production it is stationary and intact, a Reason-Principle self-indwelling, it is in its own nature a Contemplative
act. All doing must be guided by an Idea, and will therefore be distinct from that Idea : the Reason-Principle then, as accompanying and
guiding the work, wiU be distinct from the work ; not being action but Reason-Principle it is, necessarily. Contemplation. Taking the Reason- Principle, the Logos, in all its phases, the lowest and last springs from a mental act (in the higher Logos) and is itself a contemplation, though only in the sense of being contemplated (i.e. of being the conscious pro- duct of a Contemplation ?), but above it stands the total Logos with its two distinguishable phases, first, that identified not as Nature but as All-Soul and, next, that operating in Nature and being itself the Nature- Principle.
And does this Reason-Principle, Nature, spring from a contempla- tion ?
Wholly and solely ?
From self-contemplation, then ? Or what are we to think ? It derives from a Contemplation and some contemplating Being ; how are we to suppose it to have Contemplation itself ?
The Contemplation springing from the reasoning faculty — that, I mean, of planning its own content, it does not possess.
But why not, since it is a phase of Life, a Reason- Principle and a creative Power ?
Because to plan for a thing is to lack it : Nature does not lack ; it creates because it possesses. Its creative act is simply its possession of its own characteristic Essence ; now its Essence, since it is a Reason- Principle, is to be at once an act of contemplation and an object of contemplation. In other words, the Nature-Principle produces by virtue of being an act of contemplation, an object of contemplation and a Reason-Principle ; on this triple character depends its creative efficacy.
Thus the act of production is seen to be in Nature an act of contem- plation, for creation is the outcome of a contemplation which never becomes anything else, which never does anything else, but creates by simply being a contemplation.
111.8.41 Nature Contemplation and the One
And Nature, asked why it brings forth its works, might answer if it cared to listen and to speak ; —
“ It would have been more becoming to put no question but to learn in silence just as I myself am silent and make no habit of talking. And what is your lesson ? This ; that whatsoever comes into being is my vision, seen in my silence, the vision that belongs to my character who, sprung from vision, am vision-loving and create vision by the vision-seeing faculty within me. The mathe- maticians from their vision draw their figures : but I draw nothing ; I gaze and the figures of the material world take being as if they fell from my contemplation. As with my Mother (the All-Soul) and the Beings that begot me so it is with me : they are bom of a Con- templation and my birth is from them, not by their Act but by their Being ; they are the loftier Reason-Principles, they contem- plate themselves and I am born.”
Now what does this tell us ?
It tells : that what we know as Nature is a Soul, offspring of a yet earlier Soul of more powerful life ; that it possesses, therefore, in its repose, a vision within itself ; that it has no tendency upward nor even downward but is at peace, steadfast, in its own Essence ; that, in this immutability accompanied by what may be called Self-Consciousness, it possesses— within the measure of its possibility — a knowledge of the realm of subsequent things perceived in virtue of that understanding and consciousness ; and, achieving thus a resplendent and delicious spectacle, has no further aim.
Of course, while it may be convenient to speak of ” understanding ” or “ perception ” in the Nature-Principle, this is not in the full sense applicable to other beings ; we are applying to sleep a word borrowed from the wake.
For the Vision on which Nature broods, inactive, is a self-intuition, a spectacle laid before it by virtue of its unaccompanied self-concentra- tion and by the fact that in itself it belongs to the order of intuition. It
is a Vision silent but somewhat blurred, for there exists another a clearer of which Nature is the image : hence all that Nature produces is weak , the weaker act of intuition produces the weaker object.
In the same way, human beings, when weak on the side of contem- plation, find in action their trace of vision and of reason : their spiritual feebleness unfits them for contemplation ; they are left with a void, because they cannot adequately seize the vision ; yet they long for it ; they are hurried into action as their way to the vision which they cannot attain by intellection. They act from the desire of seeing their action, and of making it visible and sensible to others when the result shall prove fairly well equal to the plan. Everi^where, doing and making will be found to be either an attenuation or a complement of vision — attenua- tion if the doer was aiming only at the thing done ; complement if he is to possess something nobler to gaze upon than the mere work produced.
Given the power to contemplate the Authentic, who would run, of choice, after its image ?
The relation of action to contemplation is indicated in the way duller children, inapt to study and speculation, take to crafts and manual labour.