FRINGES OF TRUTH

Southland Times, Issue 20014, 30 October 1926, Page 13

FRINGES OF TRUTH

A SUPER-SOUL

(Written after reading the latest by

H. G. Wells.)

When my wife interrupted me a minute ago to talk about the rent anil the bailiff or some such nonsense I was engaged in a bout of introspection. I was just thinking it a terrible, yet what a wonderful thing it is to possess a soul. Sometimes when I examine my own soul I am amazed at its cosmic immensity, its unplumbed profundities. Often it angers me to think that something so deep and so beautiful should be doomed to merge into the ultimate nothingness. For I am not one of those who believe in the survival of the personal attributes, much less of the rehabilitation of the body after death, as the apostles of orthodox religion profess they believe. Indeed, I find it rather hard to find what Ido believe; I have a shadowy idea that my own Ego will ultimately become merged into a sort of great cognate consciousness—the Jungwehrsterbundesrathvolk of the Neo-Mendelians, perhaps even the more vague Chandra-Vyakarana of the Sanskritic Sabdakalpadruma—but I am never certain; life is difficult for those who have souls. “Tune quasieris, scire nefas,” says Horace in the Dictionary of Quotations. “Sapias, vina liques.” Yes, but the rent is overdue and I have no vina to liques. Do not think that I have never sampled the soothing syrup of religion •it was no fault of my upbringing that I found no solace in that direction. My dear mother was an Adjutant in the Salvation Army, and as fine a tambourine player as you ever saw, while my father, originally a Plymouth Rock, was driven through his liberal tendencies into the fold of the Seventh Day Adventists. Through a truly British compromise I received my earlier smatterings of religion at a Theosophist Sunday School and was later drawn towards Presbyterianism. Up to this time I had been a subconscious fundamentalist with the dogmas of my childhood unscathed by any attacks of analytical probings. But as my university studies advanced I began to feel a vague uneasiness. My researches into geology, dermatology, geomorphology, numismatology, philosophy, gymnosophy, mathematics and mechano-therapeutics gradually planted the seeds of scepticism in a naturally acute mind. One by one the props of my early convictions collapsed, eateh away by the acid test of science. For months I tried to hide from myself the fact that I was a mental derelict, but when I found courage to face the position I knew that I had reached a spiritual crisis. For three days I remained closeted in my room wrestling with my soul, with hardly a bite to eat except at meal times, and snatching a bare ten hours of fevered sleep each night. At the end'-of that time I emerged holloweyed and wan, but my mind was made up. For me there could be no turning back; I had embarked upon the troubled waters of agnosticism; I was doomed ever to follow the urge of my mighty intellect. That night I wrote to my father, knowing he would rather I told him all. I told him quite brutally that for me the postulates of Neo-Darwinism were incommensurable with the dogmas of the theological fundamentalists. He wrote back and told me to consult a specialist. Sometimes the problem of whether I exist or not gives < me a great' deal of trouble. Last week I spent an evening with Dr Szchrxy, the brilliant young Jugo-Slavian psycho-analyst, and we drank beer and gin and discussed the matter. It was good conversation, cold, logical and penetrating, without any attitudinising. In the end he admitted that he did not see any reason why I should elist. All the way home I thought about what he had said and fought with my doubts. Was I after all but a shadow cast on a screen, a relative sensation in the general effluxion of the cosmos, nothing more nor less than an anthropomorphic nullity? It was a clear, exhilarating evening, and the sense of my own unreality seemed to grow on me; the substantial lines of the everyday world that we generally take as a guarantee of our own concrete reality seemed to sway and waver. I remember that as I parted with Szchrxy on the steps below his flat I made the assertion that after all the relative coexistence of separate Egos in a ratiocinative universe could hardly be established by the ordinary data of thermo-dynamics. “Th ash sho,” he replied thoughtfully with, a not unpleasing touch of his Slavonic accent. Next morning I had a splitting headache, and the prosaic garb of reality seemed to have closed around me once more. These bouts of introspection have always produced a severe physical reaction. I remember, too, that I woke up with my boots on, a proof of the depth of the previous night’s mental detachment.

Sir Henry Bluebottle was in to see me this afternoon, mainly to tell me that he had succeeded in inoculating tadpoles with scarlet fever bacteria. This is a knock for Kummel’s hypothesis that the batrachians are non-ruminant. Bluebottle talks well, but in a narrow sphere; his own investigations are as specialised as mine are diversified. Perhaps it is for this reason that he holds that the primal urge of life is centripetal and that the faculties should be made to converge towards a given end. I have always had leanings towards The centrifugal concept that the mind, originally a protoplasmic synthesis, can be built up by embracing fresh spheres of activity. This afternoon I expounded my view of the question for his benefit. I must say in fairness to myself that I am a good talker on such subjects, and after I had been going for an hour or more his interest was intense. “Don’t say any more,” he interrupted. “This Is too valuable to be lost. You must write a book.” I offered to give him a brief sketch of my theory of the universal cosmography, but he insisted that I must start my book immediately and took his departure. I will not deny that Bluebottle’s words have made a deep impression on me. “Talk Hess and write more,” had been his final advice. I begin to see for the first time that my thoughts and deductions, which might have materially aided in the advancement of humanity towards its common goal are being wasted in speech. Yes, I shall write a book. I won’t be able to write my book after all. The bailiff has just removed my writing desk.