THE OCCULT NOVEL.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXII, Issue LXII, 20 January 1912, Page 9

THE OCCULT NOVEL.

Mr Algernon Blackwood has made a phase of the occult novel particularly his own as will be known to those who read "The Education of Uncle Paul," and "The Human Chord." In "The Centaur" (Macmillan, London)' he deals in masterly fashion' with the meaning of the iove of Nature ; deeply imbedded in the civilised mind, working out a weird plot which is only impossible when viewed from the "com-mon-sense" point of view. Through the book walk men who can commune with 1 'Nature' '—can become ' 'centaurs' '-— and to whom the tilings we value in civilisation are less than worthless. One of them explains Fechner and his "great idea" thus: " 'Not alone the earth but the whole Universe in its different spans and wave-lengths is everywhere alive and conscious.' He regards the spiritual as the rule in Nature, not the exception. The professorial philosophers have no vision. Fechner towers above them is a man of vision. He dared to imagine. He made discoveries —whew!'

"He whistled, 'and such discoveries!' " 'To which the scholars and professors of to-day,' I suggested, 'would think reply not even called for?"

'' 'Ah,' he laughed, 'the solemnfaced Intellectuals with their narrow outlook, their atrophied vision, and their long words! Perhaps! But in Fechner's universe there is room for every grade of spiritual being between man and God. The" vaster orders of mind go, with the vaster orders of hotly. He believes passionately in the Earth Soul, he treats her as our special guardian angel; we can pray to the earth as men pray to their saints. The earth has a Collective Consciousness. We rise upon the Earth as wavelets rise upon the ocean. We grow out of her soil as leaves grow from .a, tree. Sometimes we find our bigger life and realise that we are part of her bigger collective consciousness, but as a rule we are aware only of our separateness, as individuals. These moments of cosmic consciousness are rare. They come with love, sometimes with pain, music may bring them too, but above a ll_landscape and the beauty of Nature! Men are too petty, conceited, egotistic to welcome them, clinging for dear life to their precious individualities.' _

THE LIVING EARTH

"He drew breath and then went on

---" 'Fechner likens our individual persons on earth to so many sense-organs | of her soul, adding to her perceptive life so long as our own life lasts. She absorbs our perceptions, just as they occur, into her larger sphere of knowledge. When one of us dies,, it is as it an eve of the world were closed, for all perceptive contributions from the particular quarter cease.' " " 'Go on,' I exclaimed, realising that he was obviously quoting verbatim fragments from James "that he had since pondered over till they had become his own. 'Tell me more. It is delightful and very splendid.' "° 'Yes, 5 he said, Til .go on quick enough, provided you promise me one thing;, and that is to understand that Fechner does not regard the Earth as a s«rt of big human thing. If a being at all, she is a being utterly different from

us in kind, as of course we know she is in structure. Planetary beings, as a class, would be totally different from ] any other beings that we know. Pie ! merely protests at the presumption of j our insignificant human knowledge in denying some kind of life and consciousness to a form so beautifully and [ marvellously organised as that of the earth! The heavenly bodies, he holds, are beings superior to men in the scale of life —a vaster order of intelligence altogether. A little two-legged man with his cocksure reason strutting on its tiny brain he ridicules. D'ye see now ?' "I gasped. I lit a big pipe and listened. This time it was clearly a pag^ from the Hibbert Lecture Stahl had mentioned —the one in which Professor James tries'to give some idea of Fechner's aim and scope, while admitting that he 'inevitably does him miserable injustice by summarising and abridging liim.'-

" 'Ages ago the earth was called an animal,' I ventured. 'We all know that.'

" 'But Fechner,' he replied, 'insists that a .planet is a bigger class of being than either man or animal-—a being whose enormous size requires an altogether different plan of life.'

" cAn inhabitant of the ether—?'

" 'You've hit it,' he replied eagerly. 'Every element has its own living .denizens. Ether, then, also has hers —the globes. The ocean of ether, whose waves are light, has also her denizens —higher by as much as their element is high, swimming without fins, flying without wings, moving, immense and tranquil, as by a half-spiritual force through the half-spiritual sea, which they inhabit, sensitive to the slightest •pull of one another's attractions; beings -in every way superior to us. Any Imagination, you know,' he added, 'can play with the idea. It is old as the hills." \