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-
* .
THE *.
o, s
*
*
WISDOM OF PASSION
OR
THE MOTIVES OF HUMAN NATURE
Being an entirely new view of the
Human Passions
* BOSTON MEDICAL LIBRAR’
|N THE
SALWARONA FRANCIS A. COUNTWAY
LIBRARY OF MEDICINF
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, U. S. A.
- EVERETT STATION
Mystic RIVER BOOK COMPANY, PUBLISHERS
1901


;
*
:
CONTENTS,
OUR PASSIONS AND SOCIETY
THE PRICE OF PASSION
PASSIONs AS BONDS OF UNITY
OUR PASSIONS AND OUR THOUGHTS
PASSIONS As CREATORS OF FORMS
THE SOUL AND ITS PASSIONS
THE PASSIONS OF ROBERT BURNS
PASSIONS OF GREAT ARTISTS
THE PASSION OF SUBLIMITY
THE SOVEREIGNTY OF PASSION
THE PASSIONS OF THE PROPHETS
THE PASSION FOR LIBERTY
THE PASSIONS AND SPIRITUALISM
OUR PASSIONS AND NOVELS
PASSIONS OF HUNGER AND SEX .
THE PASSIONS AND THE STAGE
THE PASSION OF LOVE
THE PASSIONS AND THE WILL
our Passions AND SENsations .
PASSIONs of HoPE AND FEAR
THE PAssIONS AND TIME
2.
Page
11.
15
19
23
38
57
62
77
86
111
118
142
148
168
174
198
210
221
234





6 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
simply to be considered as relative to a given epoch or
epochs. About these relatively ideal Souls as of Wesley,
Buddha, Mohammed, Luther, Swedenborg, Williams,
Campbell and others men have clustered and formed
spiritual oligarchies and hierarchies. A spiritual oligarchy
is a scriptural form of church government in the hands of a
few men with a determination to rule and govern humanity
by its special interpretations and ideas. By these oligarchies
the individual soul is not considered as a worthy end in
itself to work for; but is reduced to a pawn to be played
for the higher stake of the glory of the special oligarchy,
rather than for its own personal worth. And when we
consider that the leading life ambition of the majority of
the young ministers and priests (educated in the colleges of
these oligarchies) is to become the first men and rulers of
their own special churches themselves, we can readily see
how the individual soul of the average man is never con-
sidered as an end in itself worth laboring for; but only as
it can be “reduced to a pawn to be played for ” the higher
stake of the special glory of the ministers own church
oligarchy. Even underlying the seemingly disinterested
ideals of the Salvation Army the military ideal prevails
with its crushing denial of cultured individualism. Both
General William Booth and his right hand man Railton
discouraged any attempt of a broader self culture on the
part of their early exhorters; as it had a tendency in their
opinion to unfit them for their work in the social status of
lower communities. In this general sense it may be seen
that all spiritual oligarchic systems which imply the nega-
tion of a loftier individualism thereby crush out the
sympathies of those loftier universal passions which imply
in their activities the progress of man. Any plea for
religious unity by a people who deny the possibility of
progress in interpretation crushes the intellectual and


OUR PASSIONS AND SOCIETY. 7
spiritual development of the individuals who become
attached to it, and makes of the individual a means for the
conservation of the ignorance and darkness of society.
Their special religious and social unities are maintained by
sacrificing the more universal love of the grander passions
of the individual. Lyman Abbott has said:
“As we approach the higher ranks of civilization we find
that individualization and personalization become more pro-
nounced. The whole tendency of civilization is to intensify
the person, magnify the person. Personality goes on year
after year. Does it stop at death? No, it does not stop
at death.”
How the divine inspirations of spiritual genius have
always to war against this esprit de corps of mental and
spiritual darkness whose aim is the destruction of a loftier
and wiser individualism. The value of Emerson to Amer-
ica and the world has been in the clear notes struck for the
individualistic doctrine. Hence he says: “Let a Stoic
arise who shall reveal the resources of man and tell men
they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach
themselves. That with the exercise of self trust new
powers shall appear. That a man is the word made flesh
born to shed healing to the nations. That he should be
ashamed of our compassion. That the moment he acts
from himself, tossing the laws, the books, and idolatries
out of the window . . . that teacher shall restore the
life of man to splendor and make his name dear to all his-
tory.” Thus the loftier, grander passions of genius when
in activity often imply an insurrectionary unsocial self
capable of self isolation and a rebellion against the imper-
fect ideals of society. In the possibility of an attainment
to a greater perfection of knowledge and sympathy than his
companions lies the uniqueness and the indefeasible rights
of the individual. The rights of the more perfectly devel-
oped man are never realized in society until others have


8 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
subsequently self-cultured themselves up to his level and
thereby sanctioned them. The interdependence of men
imply the dependence of the lowest on the highest. In the
meantime the passions of the genius must suffer. Until he
receive a social confirmation of his opinions he must live soli-
tary in the world. Whether we choose to accept Plato's idea
of an ideal government as ruled by philosophers or not, the
verdict of history has long since been that ultimate Sov-
ereignty is located in the genius as distinguished from com-
munism on the one hand or the lower types of individualism
on the other. “To the intellectual whirlwinds of intellectual
fire all things are subservient through the persuasive counsels
of the Father.” Akin to this ancient oracle of the Neo-
Platonists is the saying of Emerson: “Beware when the
great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all
things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has
broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe,
or where it will end. . . . There is not any literary
reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame that
may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of
man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the
manners and morals of mankind are all at the mercy of a
new generalization. Generalization is always a new influx
of the divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill that attends
it.” To put the language of the philosopher into strictly
scientific verbiage the genius is the creator of the new gen-
eralization which in its turn becomes the means of the
evolution of society. But the evolution of society means
the evolution of its ideas. Against this evolution of ideas
every oligarchic institution with fixed interpretations and
assumed infallible books arranges itself. Progress thus
implies war. Unchastened spiritual interest becomes the
foe of man; because it dreads and fights against all change
in its old spiritual and ethical view of things. The mass


OUR PASSIONS AND SOCIETY. 9
of all the religious bodies do not believe in evolution as the
divine law of the universe but take their old interpretations
of their sacred books and Testaments as the only rule of
their faith and practice. Hence their war with all forms
of human progress and its greater ideas is inevitable; and
the advent of a genius with new light is dreaded by them
with a great and terrible fear. All change of ideas with
them implies acute mental pain and suffering. In the
social process of the world it is always the self evolution
of some greater soul that eventually makes possible the
evolution of institutions; or, to amplify, the greater rationa-
lized sublimity of the evolved soul of the individual makes
possible the greater social process of humanity. This
implies pain and change by the leaders of the old special
spiritual oligarchies. The sociologist in glancing down the
following column may see the law governing the incessant
reaction of these factors.
Moses Pain change Egyptian dogma
Jeremiah Pain change Hebrew dogma
Hosea Pain change Hebrew dogma
Amos Pain change Hebrew dogma
Ezekiel Pain change Hebrew dogma
Habakuk Pain change Hebrew dogma
Buddha Pain change Hindu dogma
Mohamet Pain change Arabic dogma
Jesus Pain change Hebrew dogma
Socrates Pain change Greek dogma
Patanjali Pain change Hindu dogma
Confucius Pain change Chinese dogma
Pythagoras Pain change Greek dogma
Zoroaster Pain change Persian dogma
Zeno Pain change Greek dogma
Copernicus Pain change Catholic dogma "
Galileo Pain change Catholic dogma


10 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
Bruno Pain change Catholic dogma
Savonarola Pain change Catholic dogma
Luther Pain change Catholic dogma
Wesley Pain change Protestant dogma
Calvin • Pain change Protestant dogma
Williams Pain change Protestant dogma
Knox Pain change Protestant dogma
Spinoza Pain change Philosophical dogma
Kant Pain change Philosophical dogma
Campbell Pain change Philosophical dogma
Hume Pain change Philosophical dogma
Bâcon Pain change Philosophical dogma
Newton Pain change Philosophical dogma
Darwin Pain change Philosophical dogma
Swedenborg Pain change Protestant dogma
A study of the foregoing facts may clearly show that
the desire to conserve a pleasurable spiritual unity of old
or new Testament ideas is no proof of the infallible
rationality of the ideas. All desires to fiercely conserve
any given pleasurable spiritual unity of old ideas produces
a rationally static condition of the people conserving them.
All joyful or pleasurable conditions of spiritual or intel-
lectual passionate feeling imply a non-intellectual
progress along lines not strengthened by the special attach-
ment of the passion. Our spiritual joy may be only proof
of the relative value of the truth temporally accepted by us.
Our belief is the basis of our spiritual feeling; and all
belief must prove a development according to the mass,
nature, and motives governing the evidences of the testimony
submitted. As I have elsewhere pointed out, our feeling
of spiritual pleasure is a subjective proof of a law of the
Soul; not of the infallibility of the objective truth accepted.
This rests on its own grounds. The Soul though divine
is not infallible. If it was its evolution would be accom-
plished, and its education be a superfluity in the universe.


THE PRICE OF PASSION. 11
When a great spiritually sublime soul like St. Francis
appears, he immediately becomes the centre of a new
spiritual oligarchic system. The Popes, to strengthen
their own power, often become members of such orders.
Thus it is that recently may have been seen going the
rounds of the press the information that it was a pope of
the Franciscan order who composed that beautiful hymn,
“Stabat Mater,” and who wrote that sublime and pathétic
“Dies Irae,” in the requiem for the dead. The present
Pope is a member of the third order of St. Francis, which
also includes the majority of the cardinals, and has
throughout its history such names as Dante, Petrarch, Tasso,
Columbus, Gounod, Cimabu Giotta, Michael Angelo,
Raphael, Murillo, Da Vinci, Sir Thomas More, Vasco de
Gama, Elizabeth of Hungary, Catherine of Arragon, St.
Louis of France, Joan of Arc and others. In this we can
clearly see, in the language of the evolutionist, the selection
and survival of the grander ethical ideas of the individual.
They become the basis of esteem if not of practice. Had
the splendid spiritual passion of St. Francis taken, however,
a distinctly philosophical turn like that of Bruno, or Galileo,
or Copernicus, it is not improbable that he would have
shared the fate of a martyr. Somebody has said that
Galileo and Servetus were" not persecuted for what they
said but for the deductions that their persecutors made from
what they said.
CHAPTER II.
THE PRICE OF PASSION.
“Before the curing of a strong disease,
Even in the instant of repair and health
The fit is strongest: evils that take leave
On their departure most of all show evil.”—SHAKESPEARE.
Ignorance of the laws of the passions of Sex, Avarice,
Hate, Pride, Fear, Envy and Jealousy—the causes of


12 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
crime — costs the United States, at the lowest estimate,
some $800,000,000, annually. The actual statistics may be
gathered from a study of the paper of Eugene Smith of
New York on “The Cost of Crime” read before the
National Prison Association at its annual meeting last year
(1900). $800,000,000 ! What a sin offering ! Add
$200,000,000 more for what is secretly spent for vice and
crime and the figures mount up to $1,000,000,000 !
Enough money to start a scheme to make beggary impos-
sible on the face of the earth. Looked at from its highest
sociological aspect every vice of the individual is both a
social offense as well as a personal one. Because the vice
keeps back the individual from becoming an ideal helper
of society. In the religious or theological sense both
vices and crimes are classed as sins. Albeit we classify a
crime as 'a social offense; and a vice as a personal one.
But the lesson for the sociologist, with his welfare of
society at heart, to remember, is, that all crime, vice, and
sin — other things equal — has its origin in the public
ignorance of the laws of the darker and more malignant
passions. To understand the philosophy of vice, crime
and sin, in its relation to the development of society we
need first of all a new ethical philosophy of the passions in
their relation to self, society, and God. Our cowardice
about these deeper questions of psychology has kept the
world in darkness. Society cannot be made better by
ignorance. The scope of our sociology must accept as its
corner stone the psychological laws of the human passions.
These laws it is the duty of the sociological psychologist
to discover. Albion W. Small of the University of Chi-
cago has bravely said:
“Furthermore, we are not debarred from immediate
social ambition, nor from , practical endeavor to make
society better, by the fact that sociological theories are only
:


THE PRICE OF PASSIONS. 13
in the making. Physicians practised fumigation of infected
places, and with a certain degree of success, long before
they had an approximate explanation of the propagation of
disease. We need not be less efficient for being intelligent
about our limitations. There is no knowledge of social
relations that can furnish adequate major premises for
wholesale dogmas about social programs. There is insight
into the facts of human association sufficient to show the
way toward more insight, and toward more intelligent
action. It is honest, and therefore socially the best policy,
to represent sociology as it is, not as its more selfish
exponents would like to have their public imagine
that it is.”
If the theologian and the creed has failed then is the
time for the loftier sociological philosopher to do his part
for humanity. It is the law of nature that the higher man
—be he priest, philosopher, prophet, or poet—must in some
way atone for and redeem the lower man. Every truly
great man is crucified by somebody. The blood of
Wisdom must atone for the Ignorance of the ages.
Obviously there can be no great civilization without great
cities; and the temptations and dangers which the growth
of a city involves to its people are dangers purely relative
to the activity of classes of the lower passions; and mainly
those of Sex, Vanity, and Avarice. What is true of Rome,
Paris, London, Boston, New York, was true of Athens.
An enlarged teaching of the consequences of actions is the
only safe national corrective, urged Socrates. When a
city succumbs to its lower passions its glory has fled. The
national character has not been able to stand the strain
upon its lower passions. The realm of the social to the
individual must always be regarded as relative. The price
paid for the activity of the grander passions of the genius
equally with those of the malignant passions of the criminal
implies temporary social ostracism. The two special classes
of social outcasts through all time have been the genius,


14 THE wisdom of PASSION.
and the criminal. Both classes imply anti-social forces.
For the time being society cannot arrange pleasurable
moral and spiritual contact between itself and the criminal
or the genius. It therefore repulses them. Poisons
Socrates, crucifies Jesus, and burns Bruno. The thief and
the genius are nailed side by side. The initial task of
society has been to get rid of both of these factors. There
is a Calvary in every village and town and city in the world
and nailed to its crosses of social ostracism may be seen the
local malefactors with the local genius in the centre. All
grandeurs of social growth must have their inevitable
origins however, in constantly recurring phases of new
unsocial atomistic individualistic philosophies of the Darwin
like types of genius. This higher struggle usually has its
stirrings and beginnings in the secret antagonisms of single
families, as was instanced in the early struggles of George
Eliot. An all embracing psychology comprehending the
systems of passions by which the criminal, the genius, and
the common-place philistine are actuated is a necessary
initiative knowledge to a higher social growth. A
psychology of the passions which embraces all possible
classes in its general laws is the first desideratum.
Professor Dewey, somewhat recently remarked in the
Psychological Review, that:
“The effort to apply psychology to social affairs means
that the determination of ethical value lies, not in any set
or class, however superior, but in the workings of the
social whole; that the explanation is found in the complex
interactions and interrelations which constitute this whole.
To save personality in all we must serve all alike — state
the achievements of all in terms of mechanism, that is, of
the exercise of reciprocal influence. To affirm personality
independent of mechanism is to restrict- its full meaning to
a few, and to make its expression in the few irregular and
arbitrary.”


PASSIONS AS BONDS OF UNITY. 15
CHAPTER III.
PASSIONS As Bonds of UNITY.
“Come hither Spirit
Set Caliban and his companions free
Untie the spell.”—SHAKESPEARE.
“He can disclose and bring forward, therefore, things which . .
would forever have escaped man's thoughts.”—Bacon.
By accurately defining the psychological nature of the
Special Class of Passions causing special interdependencies
in art, morals, and trade among the individuals of a nation,
the sociological psychologist is thereby able to point out
the ultimate bond of unity existing between a particular
nation and the rest of the nations of history. This is
because definite psychological laws run through all the
human associations that are founded on definite laws of
passion. Thus, for instance, after we have analyzed the
“Trust” of 1901 from the standpoints of diplomacy, law,
economics, and politics, we have obviously left out its
foundation principle if we have failed to accurately define
the psychological and moral nature of that complex Passion
of Acquisitiveness in business, which, by its fierce natural
desire for profits and emoluments, always causes the
business man to prefer a larger gain to a smaller one.
This psychological principle is unquestionably the basis of
all commerce. Because of its existence we have commercial
politics, law, and diplomacy. Any panorama of human con-
ditions presented to us respecting the “Trust” and which
would fail to thoroughly account for this psychological Passion
of Acquisitiveness, Covetousness, and Cupidity which created
the Trust would be inexact, untruthful, and unscientific.
All the rest of the information about the “Trust’ as to its
laws, politics, and diplomacy would be simply a throwing
of dust in our eyes if the sociologist failed to explain this
very commonplace principle of the Passions. If Sociology


18 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institu-
tion he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is
pledged to himself not to look but on one side, the per-
mitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is
a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the
emptiest affectation.” Thus it is, that in all these
“union” meetings the American idea of the individual as
an end, rather than as a means (to be used to advance the
special ideas of “our people”) is covertly suppressed.
“Our people's" glory; not the welfare of the individual
independent of “our people” is the ruling motive.
CHAPTER IV.
OUR PASSIONS AND OUR THOUGHTS.
“Every common bush is afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes.”—ANON.
“Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material
force; that thoughts rule the world.”—EMERson.
“What are we in this world for 2 ”—LEO XIII.
There are thousands and thousands of people who have
the time, and who make the time to study the laws,
principles, and motives of their own minds or Souls, and
also those of other people. Some form of Psychology or
Moral Philosophy is their hobby and they enjoy raving
over its topics with zeal, enthusiasm, and delight. The
world is full of such people. I have written this book for
them. To others the book may seem very much of a bore.
Except as a pastime, no book is worth reading once that is
not worth reading twice. Indirectly these chapters will
show that the natural spiritual passions are naturally so
strong in most people that these people need not be what
their unfortunate moral associations are. The mind or
Soul at birth is not like a piece of white paper on which
our surroundings shall scribble our fate. The natural


OUR PASSIONS AND OUR THOUGHTS. 19
unfolding laws of even a child's grander moral passion,
“by laying its weighty index finger on particular items of
experience so accent them as to give to the least frequent
associations far more power to shape its thought than the
most frequent one’s possess.” The passions naturally
possess their own laws of selective attention. These laws
imply laws of choice. The moral strength of a person is
in his spiritual passions. “An ill habit has the force of
an ill fate.” Passions are the creators of character; and
every Passion creates the moral form of its own special
character. Without Passion, character could not exist.
Emerson says: “All form is an effect of character; all
condition of the quality of life. . . . Being passes
into Appearance, and Unity into Variety. The universe is
an externalization of the soul. Since everything in nature
answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains
brute and dark, it is because the corresponding faculty in
the observer is not yet active.” By the word emotion
I mean passion. Professor Gates says, “For every
bad (passion) emotion there is a corresponding chemical
change in the tissues of the body which is life-depressing
and poisonous. Contrawise every good (passion) emotion
makes a life-promoting change.” Our Passions for our
personal objects and ideas are all forms of Expectation ;
and all our Passions as forms of Expectation are our
Special forms of Active Belief as qualified by their Special
ideas and objects. Our power to Believe therefore is
limited by any special Idea accepted as true by any special
Passion as of Love, Fear, or Hope. A person wholly
without the capacity for some form of spiritual Passion
or the other is only an animal. A study of the Passions
from Hunger to Sex, and from Sex to Fear and Sublimity
will show how and in what ways the Passions control the
selective attention of our thoughts. That which governs


OUR PASSIONS AND OUR THOUGHTS. 21
express themselves in an emergency and thereby to reveal
the controlling passion of the person's life. To illustrate
my meaning I will readapt and rearrange an anecdote used
by Steinthal. In the compartment of a railway carriage six
persons unknown to each other sit in lively conversation.
It becomes a matter of regret that one of the company must
alight at the next station. One of the others says that he
of all things prefers such a meeting with entirely unknown
persons. On such occasions he is accustomed neither to
ask what particular passion may dominate the life of his
companions or to tell what passion dominates himself.
Another says he will undertake to decide this question if
they each and all will answer him an entirely disconnected
question. They began. He drew five leaves from his
note book, wrote a question on each, and gave one to each
of his companions with the request that he write the answer
below. When the leaves were returned to him, he turned
after reading them without hesitation to the others and said
to the first: “The Passion of Sex is your ruling passion;’
to the second, “To please the Passion of Hunger is yours;’
to the third, ‘The Passion of Fame directs your life;’ to
the fourth, “Inordinate Passion leading to Avarice is
yours;’ to the fifth, “The Passion of Pride in personal
appearance is yours.” Notwithstanding their shortcomings
each man was brave enough to admit that he was right
whereupon he got out and left the five behind. Each
wished to know what question the others had received, and
behold he had given the same question to each. It ran
thus: “What is the greatest pleasure of life?' The first
answered, “to be with a woman;’ the second, ‘a square
meal;’ the third, ‘to be praised in the newspapers;’ the
fourth, to get money; the fifth, ‘to be able to dress
well.” As every one's ideas are related to their leading
passion, of course each one expresses the idea of that
2.


22 THE wisDOM OF PASSION.
passion because the ideas of our leading passion are always
the first to enter our heads:
“Press the grape the sweet wine flows;
Break the ground the harvest grows;
Crush the shell the kernel shows.”
Passions make experience. They precede in expectation
the stimuli-affinities they are in search of. Because
such passions as Hunger, Sex, and Ambition are modes
of active selective attention they react contemporaneously
and instantly on their objects and ideas in the world. We
simply become what our Passions select for us to become.
Our Passion of Sublimity may select one of the wonders of
creation as an affinity, and the passion of Sublimity become
our ruling destiny; or we may allow our passion of Sex to
whirl us for a life among the demi monde of Paris. Our
passions are the motives of our life attention. They make
us perceive, conceive, distinguish, and remember. The
attention of a Passion to its class of objects or ideas may
be either passive, or voluntary. In the passive attention
of a passion its special objects present themselves to it as
stimuli. In the voluntary attention of a passion, the
passion purposely seeks out its stimulus or affinity of form
and tries to find its location. Thus, such affinity-seeking
passions as Love, Ambition, Hunger, and Sex cause us to
pay selective attention to distinct classes of objects in their
special sub-divisions in Nature. Or, putting it in another
way, we may say that such passions voluntarily and actively
select for us those subdivided classes of objects and forms
out of which the Universe is composed.


PASSIONS AS CREATORS OF FORMS. 23
CHAPTER V.
PASSIONS As CREATORs of ForMs.
“I walked on musing with myself
On life and art and whether after all
A larger metaphysics might not help
Our physics—a completer poetry
Adjust our daily life and vulgar wants
More fully than the special outside plans
Phalansteries, material institutes
The civil conscriptions and lay monasteries
Preferred by modern thinkers.”
—ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
The somewhat recent experimental results of Professor
Elmer Gates at the Smithsonian Institute may illustrate
what I mean when I say that the Passions are Creators of
Forms. I substitute the word Passion for Emotion, be-
cause an Emotion (emoveo to move out) means simply the
moving out into space (through the brain and special
organs) of the special psychic force of the Passion when it
is in creative operation in the body. Professor Gates says:
“I have discovered that bad and unpleasant feelings
create harmful chemical products in the body, which are
physically injurious. Good, pleasant, benevolent, and
cheerful feelings create beneficial chemical products which
are physically healthful. These products may be detected
by chemical analysis in the perspiration and secretions of
the individual. I have detected more than forty of the
bad, and as many of the good.
“Suppose half a dozen men in a room. One feels de-
pressed, another remorseful, another ill-tempered, another
jealous, another cheerful, and another benevolent. It is a
warm day; they perspire. Samples of their perspiration
are placed in the hands of the psycho-physicist. Under his
examination they reveal all those emotional conditions dis-
tinctly and unmistakably.
“To sum it up, it is found that for each bad emotion
there is a corresponding chemical change in the tissues of
the body which is life-depressing and poisonous. Contrari-
wise, every good emotion makes a life-promoting change.


24 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
A noble and generous action blesses the doer as well as the
beneficiary. Every thought which enters the mind is regis-
tered in the brain by a change in the structure of its cells.
The change is a physical change, more or less permanent.
“Anybody may go into the business of building his own
mind. The thinking organ undergoes perpetual changes in
cell-structure, and is never finished.
“Even in old age it is not too late. Let the esoteric
mind-builder systematically devote an hour each day to
calling up pleasant ideas and memories. Let him summon
those finer feelings of benevolence and unselfishness which
are called up in ordinary life only now and then. Let him
make this a regular exercise, like swinging dumbbells. Let
him gradually increase the time devoted to these psychical.
gymnastics, giving them sixty or ninety minutes per diem.
“At the end of a month he will find the change in him.
self surprising. The alteration will be apparent in his
actions and thoughts. It will have been registered in the
cell-structure of his brain. Cells useful for good thinking
will have been well developed, while others productive of
evil will have shrunk. Morally speaking, the man will be
a great improvement on his former self. Such training is
most profitably conducted under the instruction of a skilled
psycho-physicist. One result will be to increase and
quicken the power of original thinking. In other words,
inventors can be made to order, and discovery can be pro-
moted. Genius has been an accident hitherto; in the
future it will be created systematically.”
Gates’ study of psycho-physics is of far greater practical
importance than Fechner's. Professor Gates' experiments
prove that Passions create chemical forms. This book
asserts that the passions create, not only chemical forms, but
mental and moral ones. Thus when a passion changes the
chemical nature and figures of physical atoms I assert that
it is a creator of physical forms. When it changes the
natures and figures of Sensations the Passion is a creator
of mental forms. When it changes the nature and figures
of mental forms into spiritual affinities the Passion creates


26 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
our religious Belief is possible because the unity of our
spiritual passions desire spiritual forms as their spiritual
affinities? Suppose the clergyman should urge that our
Belief as connected with our passions of Fear, Love, Sex,
or Hunger is the association of those ideas latent in our
Passions and which in the past has become irresistibly asso-
ciated with the passion as its spiritual affinity. Would we
thank the clergyman for giving us this insight into the laws
of our Souls? But this causal connection of the Passion
with its old ideas in the memory is a spiritual causal con-
nection of a permanent type. Knowing some reality,
imagining it, fancying it, or in any way conceiving it, may
all exist without Belief; because in knowing, imagining,
and fancying, our spiritual and moral passions may be
wholly inactive. Only when ideas “bite us” spiritually
and morally do we believe. There can be no spiritual
rational feeling in religion or philosophy without a unity of
spiritual rational passions as their permanent basis. The
ideas presented by the clergyman in his sermon are simply
the relative sign-affinities of this unity of our spiritual
passions. To believe in anything, therefore, always implies
the activity in us of some form and degree of Passion in its
relation to an idea ; which is a mental form. “ Belief,”
says Professor William James, “ consists in an emotional
reaction of the entire man on an object.” Human Life
from birth to death means the involution, dissolution and
evolution of physical, mental, and spiritual forms by laws
of Passion. Air, liquids, and solids as foods are physical
forms. The passions of Hunger and Sex assisted by their
special subsidiary Instincts and Senses imply laws which
involve, dissolve, and evolve Physical Forms. Generic
concepts of these physical forms are Mental Forms. Gen-
eric concepts of the passions of Moral Love, Sublimity, or
Moral Wrath are Spiritual Forms. Thus every generic


PASSIONS AS CREATORS OF FORMS. 27
concept as a spiritual form implies a mental form; but
every mental form does not imply a spiritual form. The
passions must therefore be studied according to their three-
fold laws of involution, dissolution, and evolution of forms.
Psychological involution is the psychical attraction of physi-
cal, mental and spiritual forms from within by laws of
Passion operating through special Senses and Instincts.
Psychological dissolution is the psychical separation of
physical, mental or spiritual forms for purposes of future
growth or self-protection. Psychological evolution is the
psychical construction of physical, mental and spiritual
forms by sub-conscious laws of Passion. The human pas-
sions are therefore assumed to be involving, dissolving and
evolving psychical forces; meaning by psychical force that
which is capable of changing the form rest or motion of
matter, mental images, or feelings. As psychical forces
the passions are therefore considered capable of doing work
on mental images and matter; and therefore can overcome
within certain limits the resistances of matter. The work
done by a Passion is to be measured as the product of the
Passion into the special class of form—physical, mental or
spiritual—in which it reveals its power in its own special
direction. If I try to eat but am nauseated, try to knock
a man down in anger but fail, try to beget offspring but
am senile, try to shout for Joy but cannot utter a word,
then my Passions of Hunger, Anger, Sex, and Joy have
done no work. For the Passions to do work they must
overcome. The Senses and Instincts of Man were intended
by the Creator to operate subserviently to their Special
Passions. The development of Life must therefore be
sought for in the laws of the Passions.
Kant, in speaking of Newton's discovery of Gravity,
said it “would have] remained forever undiscovered if
Copernicus had not ventured on the experiment—contrary
*,


28 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
to his senses but still just—of looking for the observed
movements not in the heavenly bodies but in the spectator.”
Heretofore man has scorned the creative passions of his
own Soul. He has looked for the laws of his religion,
morals and life in the heavenly books of inspiration. But
the unity of the nobler passions constitute the spiritual
unity of the Soul. It is assumed by the writer that the
Creator is more jealous for the success of Man's Soul than
He is for the success of any special church or book whatso-
ever. On the other hand it is obvious that the average
zealous religious man is more jealous for the success of his
own interpretation or that of his people than he is for the
success of the divinely created Soul of his brother. He
has no faith in the divinity of the Soul of man; mainly
because he does not know what the Soul is or what its laws
are. By Soul I mean a unity of form-involving, form-dis-
solving, and form-evolving Passions, which as psychical
forces are capable of expressing through their special Senses
and Instincts a common unity of consciousness. In so far
as this unity comprehends Spiritual and Moral Passions
capable of evolving spiritual concepts of spiritual and moral
forms, in so far is the Soul the proximate creative source
of all its divine inspirations. By a proximate creative
source or cause I mean that constructive unity of Moral and
Spiritual Passion which immediately precedes and produces
the inspired effect as distinguished from the Creator as the
predisposing cause. God as the creator of the Human Soul
is the author of its inspiring creative unity of spiritual and
moral passion. This unity of Moral and Spiritual Passion
in man is therefore the proximate attribute of God and as
such the source of divine inspirations. “Hence evidently
the tripod, the priest, the priestess inspired by the divine
afflatus,” the witness of the Holy Ghost. The true ends of
philosophy are therefore to be reached only by interpretation


PASSIONS AS CREATORS OF FORMS. 29
of the characteristics of Life as expressed in the involu-
tion, dissolution, and evolution of forms by Passion. And
this in their three-fold evolution of physical, mental and
spiritual forms which is the law both of reason and exist-
ence. By denying the moral and spiritual creative power
of the human Soul the power and right to evolve higher
moral and religious forms than those already known, and
by also denying to the Soul all innate force of creative
spiritual law independent of “our people's views” we have
reduced to a state of Nihilism every phase of psychology of
a helpful scientific universal character. Speaking of psy-
chological Nihilism as induced by such influences, Fichte,
the illustrious philosopher, says: “There is absolutely
nothing permanent either without me or within me. Only
an unceasing change. I know nothing of any existence, not
even of my own. I myself know nothing and am nothing.
Images there are. They constitute all that apparently
exists. What they know of themselves is after the manner
of images. Images that pass and vanish without their
being ought to witness their transition. That consist in
fact of images of images. Without significance and with-
out an aim. I myself am one of these images. Nay, I am
not even this much. But only a confused image of images.
All reality is converted into a marvellous dream. Into a
dream made up of a dream itself. Perception is a dream.
Thought, the source of all the existence and all the reality
which I imagine to myself by my existence of my power of
my destination—is the dream of that dream.”
To save myself from this sort of psychological and spiri-
tual Nihilism of the Soul, I have accepted unconditionally
the fact of a conscious and a subconscious unity of form."
involving, form-dissolving, and form-evolving Passions'
These as psychical forces are capable of expressing them-
selves through their special Senses and Instincts as a


30 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
common unity of constructive consciousness. In a word
there are Passions whose laws are to involve physical and
mental forms. Passions whose laws dissolve such forms;
and Passions whose laws evolve forms. This is the mean-
ing of the Soul when explained to be a conscious and sub-
conscious unity of form-involving, form-dissolving, and
form-evolving Passions operating through special Senses
and Instincts as a common unity of constructive conscious-
ness. This unity of Passions, Senses, and Instincts, thus
automatically personifying themselves within my body I
call a Soul and the forms chosen by them to evolve
I call my physical, mental, and spiritual affinities. A
passion as of Hunger possesses some special Sense and
Instinet by which it involves physical forms. Thus Taste
is a special Sense of Hunger. Sucking and Swallowing on
the other hand are special Instincts of Hunger. These
distinctions between Passion, Sense, and Instincts are vital.
Senses, Instincts, and Thoughts are therefore the servants
of Creative Passions. To lure or attract in any physical or
mental form by a Sense or Instinct to the Stomach, Womb,
or Soul is to involve the form. To afterwards reproduce
the involved form in another shape, figure, or form after it
has been attracted into the Stomach or Womb is to evolve
the form. Thus when my Passion of Hunger uses its Sense
of Taste and its Instinct of Swallowing to draw into the
Stomach a piece of venison or bread I have involved forms
of physical atoms for purposes of physiological evolution.
So when the Passion of Sex uses its Sense and Instinct to
ultimately attract animal seed to the Womb the Passion
implies for its object the involution of physical form (seed)
for the purposes of animal evolution. On the plane of
spirituality (above the evolution of animal forms) the same
law applies to mental and spiritual forms. Thus when my
Passions of Love and Sublimity use the Sense of Sight to


PASSION AS CREATORS OF FORMS. 31
attract (from books, nature, or pictures) images of mental
and spiritual forms to the Soul, I have thereby involved or
attracted to the Self mental and moral forms for purposes
of mental and spiritual evolution. The attractive and
selective force is the Passion to which the Sense and the
Instinct is subsidiary. All truth and reason are therefore
relative to evolutions of love or hate; and all love is pas-
sion. Reason is relative to the Senses and Instincts posited
by the Passion ; and by the means of which the Passion
attracts or involves affinities of moral and mental forms to
the Soul. Of course Fear, Hate, and Anger as passions of
Dissolution evolve their own various physical forms, organs,
and substances, as seen in the venom of vipers, the ink of
the cuttle fish, and the horns of the bull. In man the
development of Fear, Hate, and Anger causes him to invent
machines of war to take the place of venom, ink, and horns.
But there would be no armies or navies without Anger and
Fear to start them. “ The popular touchstone for all
philosophies,” says Professor James of Harvard “is the
question, ‘What is their bearing on a future life?” Now if
it can be shown by psychological experiments that the Soul
considered as the unity of the creative passions is capable
of evolving its own physical forms we have certainly gained
something. If passions possess no form-evolving power ,
then is the above nonsense. If, on the other hand, psy- \,
chology fearlessly demonstrates the form-creative power of
the passions on physical, mental, and moral planes, then we
have an Immortal Soul or passion-unity of spiritual forces,
giving “rise to a stream of consciousness continuous with
the present stream.” Every Passion for form implies the
exercise of special involutive dissolutive and evolutive
Instincts and Senses relating to such form. Or of involu-
tive-impulses, dissolutive-impulses, and evolutive-impulses.
In Hunger to see, smell, and draw in by the hand food-
forms to the mouth is to exercise an involutive-impulse for


32 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
form. To bite and separate the food-forms, after they
have been attracted to the Self by the involutive-impulse is
to exert a form-dissolutive-impulse. To unconsciously or
sub-consciously evolve the involved and dissolved food-
forms into chyle and blood is to exert a form-evolutive
impulse. Our Senses and Instincts are therefore connected
with the involutive and dissolutive form-impulses of this
Passion. The form-evolutive impulse being unconnected
with our Senses, Instincts, or Reason; but exerting itself
automatically. Now these same three laws of the involu-
tive, dissolutive, and evolutive form-impulses of the Pas-
sions are to be as strictly applied to the mental-image-forms
of the moral Passions as they are to the food-forms of
Hunger and the animal seed-forms of Sex. It is the
special nature of the forms hungered for, desired, or loved
which ultimately develop the special Senses, Instincts, and
Reasons by which we are enabled to attract the forms.
Special forms of Sense and Instincts appear because special
forms of Passion need them as means to attract or repulse
classes of form. Love and Hate simply mean our form-
affinities and their repulsions. The missing link in the
unity of the hunger-passions of all carnivorous and vegeta-
ble Life is obviously the Carnivorous Plant. Because the
special nature of the forms hungered for by the Carnivorous
Plant were carnivorous forms, special Senses of touch and
Instincts of carnivorous involution were specially developed.
There can be no Love without its forms of affinity. When
the Carnivorous Plant changes back to its Vegetable Hun-
ger it loses the Senses and Instincts it formerly exercised.
Love is an affinity for moral and mental forms. God is
Love. All Passion is some form of Love or Hate and
which implies affinities and non-affinities for classes of
physical, mental, and spiritual form. In order to evolve
higher spiritual forms the Spiritual Passions must first


PASSIONS AS CREATOR'S OF FORMS. 33
involve lower forms as a condition. “Nothing can be
evolved which was not involved.” So that the task of
Psychology and Biology resolves itself into this, viz: to refer
all mental and vital phenomena whatsoever to a unity of
involutive, dissolutive and evolutive Passions of physical,
mental and spiritual forms. These as attractive, develop-
ing, and repulsive forces to manifest their power as
psychical forces by doing work in changing physical mental
and spiritual forms for the purposes of Self evolution.
This unity of form-forces remain unchanged by time and
are the changeless ultimate causes of our changes of forms.
So that whilst for me to have any spiritual and rational
consciousness at all I must have a succession of different
spiritual and rational feelings; yet this unending sequence
of wholly different feelings may always be traced psycho-
logically as being the properties of some genus or distinct
class of Spiritual Passions the unity of which we call the
Soul. Hence there are two ways of arriving at a knowl-
edge of the Soul considered as a unity of Physical and
Rational Passions. (1) By its classes of feeling. (2) By
its classes of self-created physical and mental forms.
Nevertheless the origin of this Soul or unity of the laws of
Passion as creative of form is neither explicable by the
experience of the individual or that of his ancestors. The
consciousness of ourselves implies a three-fold division of
the work of the Passions. Thus the physical passions of
Hunger and Sex construct the Material or Sensual Self.
The passions of Anger, Rivalry, Shame, and Sympathy
create the Social Self; whilst the passions of Sublimity,
Weneration, Love, and Moral Fear create the Spiritual Self.
Our self-love is therefore always a love of some passion for
a form by the means of which it expresses its identity.
Thus change of passion implies change or evolution of
identity. To use Kant's style of verbiage, our special


PASSIONS AS OREATORS OF FORMS. 35
World-order the speaker is enabled to produce a series
of signs which are totally unlike the thought. But which
by virtue of the same mysterious order act as a series of
incitements upon the hearer. So that he constructs within
himself the corresponding mental state. The act of the
Speaker consists in availing himself of the proper incite-
ments. The act of the hearer is immediately only the
reaction of the Soul against the incitement. . . . All
communion between finite minds is of this sort.
Probably no reflecting person will deny this conclusion.
But when we say that what is true of perception of
another's thought is equally true of the perception of the
outer world in general many minds will be disposed to
question and not a few will deny it outright. Yet there is
no alternative but to affirm that to perceive the universe we
must construct it in thought. And that our knowledge of
the universe is but the unfolding of the mind's inner
nature. . . . By describing the mind as a waxen tablet
and things as impressing themselves upon it we seem to get
a great insight until we ask where this extended tablet is,
and how things stamp themselves upon it. And how the
perceptive act would be explained even if they did. . . .
The immediate antecedents of sensation and perception are
a series of nervous changes in the brain. Whatever we
know of the outer world is revealed only in and through
these nervous changes. But these are totally unlike the
objects assumed to exist as their causes. If we might con-
ceive the mind as in the light and in direct contact with its
objects the imagination at least would be comforted. But
when we conceive the mind as coming in contact with the
outer world only in the dark chamber of the skull, and then
not in contact with the objects perceived but only with a
series of nerve changes of which moreover it knows noth-
ing it is plain that the object is a long way off. All talk of


36 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
pictures, impressions, etc., ceases because of the lack of all
the conditions to give such figures any meaning. It is not
even clear that we shall ever find our way out of the dark-
ness into the world of light and reality again. We begin
with complete trust in physics and the Senses. And are
forthwith led away from the object into a nervous labyrinth
where the object is entirely displaced by a set of nervous
changes which are totally unlike anything but themselves.
Finally we land in the dark chamber of the skull. The
object has gone completely and knowledge has not yet
appeared. Nervous signs are the raw material of all know-
ledge of the outer world according to the most decided
realism. But in order to pass beyond these signs into a
knowledge of the outer world we must post an interpreter
who shall read back these signs into their objective mean-
ing. But that interpreter again must implicitly contain the
meaning of the universe within itself. And these signs are
really but excitations which cause the Soul to unfold what
is within itself. Inasmuch as by common consent the Soul
communicates with the outer world only through these
signs; and never comes nearer to the object than such signs
can bring it; it follows that the principles of interpretation
must be in the mind itself. And that the resulting con-
struction is primarily only an expression of the mind's own
nature. All reaction is of this sort. It expresses the
nature of the reacting agent. And knowledge comes
under the same head. This fact makes it necessary for us
either to admit a pre-established harmony between the laws
and nature of thought and the laws and nature of things.
Or else to allow that the objects of perception; the universe
as it appears are purely phenomenal. Being but the way in
which the mind reacts against the ground of its sensations.”
From the foregoing may be seen the reasons why I said in
a previous chapter that the Human Soul versus all Sacred


PASSIONS AS CREATORS OF FORMS. 37
Books and their Interpreters is the first and the greatest of
all the inspired revelations of God. It constructs its own .
spiritual, ethical, aud moral forms of thought, conception,
and judgment. All acts of Passion as connected with old
experiences of Fear, Anger, or Love, become psychic
forces of memory which can afterwards automatically
control the muscles. This explains what the French writers
call the phase des attitudes passionelles. The persons
automatically go through the outward movements of special
passions aroused in special past experiences. The possession
may be holy or unholy. On the other hand our past knowl-
edge grows, evolves, and changes by the inward processes
of the purposes of the Passions which are the causes of our
mental growth and self-development. That is, the varied
purposes of the latent passions develop the varied signifi-
cance of single classes of objects and thereby add to our
knowledge. Take such an object as a ruddy apple for
example. The Passion of Hunger has developed from it a
Knowledge of Taste. The fruit artist's passion of Beauty
has evolved from it a Knowledge of Form and Color. In
Newton, the philosopher's Passion of Wonder develops
from the falling motion of the apple the law of solar sys-
tems. Each passion is a special mode of choice of a special
relation of the Soul to the object. As each Passion relates
itself to the apple a broader universality is developed ; and
the loftier and more spiritual the Passions the loftier and
more spiritual will be the Knowledge. The higher Knowl-
edge only grows as the higher Passions come into play.
Each passion (in its regard to the apple) is a creator of its
own special form of Knowledge. As with apples so with
all things. The various Passions are the causes which
make explicit what was implicit. The higher conception is
born of the higher passion. Thus the philosopher's loftier
passion of Wonder may cause him to think of the word


38 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
Passion as meaning a law of the Soul; whilst the Libertine’s
or Prude's lower passions of Fear and Sex may cause them
only to think of the word in its relation to Evil. Mental
objects of sight which displace sensations are our former
created forms of sight.
CHAPTER VI.
THE SOUL AND ITS PASSIONs.
“Slowly the Bible of the race is writ,
Each age, each kindred adds a verse to it.”
“There is no religion higher than truth.”
“Narrow minds think nothing right that is above their own capacity.”
—ROCHEFOUCAULD.
It depends entirely on how we define the Soul whether
we can sensibly understand its nature. The laws of our
common psychological experience can alone be the ultimate
test as to whether man has a Soul; and whether his Soul
possesses intelligible psychological laws. If I have a Soul
it must have some sort of universal ground in the nature of
the things of my common experience. I can therefore only
know of its existence through the laws of experience
which govern my own growth in knowledge. Hearsay,
or the statements of sacred books (old or new) will not
suffice. When I am asked to define my Soul I very
promptly answer that it is a developing unity of form-
creating forces. To prove the assertion would take the
usual time necessary to prove any assertion. I can only
for the moment say that I am able to prove that my Passions
are such form-creating forces. The word Passion when
used in the sense of the Passion Plays or the Passion of
Jesus is clean. But because the lower and more vicious
masses of society have minds that are foul “with the corrup-
tion that is in the world through lust,” the word is limited to
mean Sex by them. The Passions as form-creating forces
create physical, mental, and spiritual forms. This is because


40 - THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
interpretations, and this is known to be dreaded with a
great and violent horror by all the old religious schools.
It has therefore been ungenerously assumed by many that
the professors of Psychology in all the European and
American theological institutions, bible colleges (for the
turning out of young ministers) and religious seminaries
make it a point to suppress all psychological teaching
which interferes with the views of their own particular
churches. What is assumed to be true of the Professors of
Psychology is also asserted concerning the Professors of
Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics. But all of this cruel
and unjust criticism must be taken with many many grains
of allowance. Among these professors are to be found
the stuff that the martyrs of philosophy were made of.
Then again it must be understood that in countries where
there are State religions (as well as in America) the Pro-
fessors of Psychology, Metaphysics, and Moral Philosophy
are usually religious preachers — not always — who are
supposed, however, to make all Science and Truth bend to
the special church interpretation of the special sacred book
which they take as a standard in preference to the divine
laws of the human Soul. It is assumed that the trustees of
special denominational colleges (inasmuch as they belong
to the old religious school) will not for one moment toler-
ate any views looking to Advanced Spiritual Thought.
Nevertheless the sublimely heroic spirit of Copernicus and
Galileo still burns in the reforming hearts of the college
professors of the Old World and the New. Stanford Uni-
versity is a case in point. “A faculty of wise interrogat—
ing is half a knowledge,” says Bacon. The greatest reforms
always cost the most. War is always rude. Scientists,
for the sake of Truth, must often ask humanity some very
rude questions. Philosophers, Journalists, Scientists, and
Prophets are alike in one particular, that to honor Truth


THE SOUL AND ITS PASSIONS. 41
they have sometimes to grossly offend the etiquettes which
shield ignorance and vice. About two decades ago I inter-
viewed for a leading daily journal a Monsignor Capel; at
that time a favorite of the Vatican and a man who had
figured in a novel of Lord Beaconsfield’s. “An interviewer
is like a mosquito ever ready to sting the passing stranger,”
smiled the Monsignor with a gracious, subtle, worldly tact,
and a seeming purity of kindness suggestive of Cardinal
Bonpré in one of Marie Corelli's stories. The questions
of the Philosophers are the stings which awaken the prog-
ress of humanity. The interviewing Prophet or Scientist
is always mosquito like in this particular. Frederick W.
H. Myers of Cambridge, England, once said: “There has
been a natural tendency to insist with a certain disillusion-
izing tenacity on the low beginnings of our race. When
eminent but ill-instructed personages have declared them-
selves with many flourishes, “on the side of the Angel,”
there has been a grim satisfaction in proving that Science
at any rate is “on the side of the Ape.” But the victory of
Science is won. She has dealt hard measure to man's tra-
dition and his self-conceit. As students of these things
are aware, Darwin has indirectly shown—other things equal
—in his “Descent of Man” that the evolution of the race
has been accomplished through the evolution of laws of
Passion. The philosopher Schopenhauer, though a terror
to the optimist, was clearly correct in emphasizing the fact
that Passion was the law of life. Jesus agrees with Dar-
win and Schopenhauer that Passion is the one law of exist-
ence. Not that Jesus laid emphasis on the same kind of
passion. But the principle is the same. To the eye of
Newton the gravitating apple and the gravitating moon were
moved by the same law. “If I lose myself I find myself.”
The higher passion saves us from the lower one.
“All living things, it is said, strive towards their maxi-
mum of pleasure. In what hours, then, and under what


42 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
conditions, do we find that human beings have attained to
their intensest joy? Do not our thoughts in answer turn
instinctively.to scenes and moments when all personal pre-
occupation, all care for individual interest, is lost in the
sense of spiritual union, whether with one beloved soul, or
with a mighty nation, or with ‘the whole world and crea-
tures of God’? We think of Dante with Beatrice, of Nel-
son at Trafalgar, of S. Francis on the Umbrian hill. And
surely here, as in Galahad's cry of ‘If I lose myself I find
myself,’ we have a hint that much, very much, of what we
are wont to regard as an integral part of us may drop
away, and yet leave us with a consciousness of our own
being which is more vivid and purer than before. This
web of habits and appetencies, of lusts and fears, is not,
perhaps, the ultimate manifestation of what in truth we are.
It is the cloak which our rude forefathers have woven
themselves against the cosmic storm; but we are already
learning to shift and refashion it as our gentler weather
needs, and if perchance it slip from us in the sunshine then
something more ancient and more glorious is for a moment
guessed within.”
What profundity of moral thought is in the lines of
Shakespeare in his Measure for Measure. -
“Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for ourselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike
As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touched
But to fine issues, nor Nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence
But like a thrifty goddess, she determines
Herself the glory of a creditor
Both thanks and use.”
With Bacon we are often reminded of the fact that the
Soul “sometimes takes soil in an impotent body, and so is
slackened from showing her wonders. Like an excellent
musician which cannot utter itself upon a defective instru-
ment.” The thought is both philosophical as well as prac-
tical. Perhaps the saddest aspect of the strife for spiritual
liberty today is the secret, mediaeval intolerance and ghastly


44 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
passions whose laws translate mental images from percepts
to concepts. The philosopher's ruling passions imply
the involution, dissolution and evolution of prevailing
forms of distinct classes of mental images. He wishes us
to become attached to his way. The following brief digest of
a lecture on the Passions of Great Men to my students at
The-I-don't-Understand-It-University at Milan may give
the reader some satirical idea of how I think the passions of
Genius may be analyzed from the University standpoint of
the man who does not believe in passion. Gentlemen :—
Robert Burns the Scotch poet writes of his lasses with the
flaming color of Titian. Take as an example the following
VerSe :
“Her voice is like the evening thrush
That sings in Cessnock banks unseen,
Her teeth are like a flock of sheep
With fleeces newly washen clean.
Her hair is like the curling mist
That shades the mountain-side at e'en.”
The controversy is still raging as to whether the feeling
giving rise to such expressions originate in the brain, the
spine, or the viscera. I have carefully examined the brains
of several poets but have found nothing in the brain cortex
to explain it. The Scotch poet's adoration of the pure
physical beauty of woman is an enigma. Perhaps Kant
may have thrown some light on it in his exposition of the
Cosmological Idea of Freedom in Harmony with the
universal Law of Natural Necessity. But I repeat, I have
never found it in the brain cortex. This is very singular.
In the poet's mind woman is one with Nature, one with the
song of the morning winds, one with the torrent, one with
the flowers, one with the voices of the woodlands. This
was evidently a dialectical illusion of the poet. I have
applied electric stimuli to the left hemispheres of the
brains of many of the higher types of lower animals but have


THE PASSIONS OF ROBERT BURNS. 45
found nothing tending to such verbal voluntary movements.
And yet there is the splendour and witchery of a divine
color and form in the poet's verse. Professor Conservi of
Rome is of the opinion that in such men a slight alcoholiza-
tion may reproduce such verbal disturbances. So that
where the verse of Burns has this bare noble nudity as of a
sunrise in Eden it was due to a localized spasm or palsy of
certain muscles or hemiplegia. I have had occasion to
repeatedly show to you that such results may be more or
less homologous in the ape, cat, or dog. With this
exception that with the contracture of the muscles the vocal
expressions are not the same. The Scotch maiden
undoubtedly felt complimented by the high estimate placed
on her by the passion of the genius of Burns. In a word
gentlemen, we find an explanation of the passions of Robert
Burns in the Empirical Use of the Regulative Principle of
Reason with regard to the Cosmological Ideas when applied
to the Rolando suture of the brain. The translucency of
this observation is obvious to all of you. There is, however,
a strange problem which the specialized movements of the
poet's brain does not wholly unravel. When Robert Burns
sings to the world of “Mary in Heaven” the poor of the
nations bow to the sound of the holy Angelus of his muse.
This may be due to the musculo-cutaneous sensibility of the
frontal lobes. There is evidently no anaesthesia. Dante
the incomparable of Italy sculptured Beatrice in his immor-
tal work the “ Divina Commedia” as the representative of
revelation. It is hardly necessary for me to emphasize the
fact that this work was not due to any feeling on the part
of Dante. The world has erroneously supposed that the
passion of genius implies feeling. But genius never gets
so low as to stoop to feeling in any sense. Passion, gen-
tlemen, in its relation to genius must always be considered
from the standpoint of the Discipline of Pure Reason in


THE PASSIONS OF ROBERT BURNS. 47
figurative intent of my words when I say that Burn's ethical
feeling for Scotland was less severely defined than that of
Dante for the wrongs of Italy. Each nation, understands
its own poet best. No bird is wild to its own mate.
Dante exploits his landscape instinct and subordinates his
view of Nature to purposes of religious grandeur. Burns
views nature as a composition of phenomena and in its
relation to the phenomenal existences of his lasses.
Whether this was accompanied with any motor aphasia of
the poet's brain has not been determined. As before
observed, gentlemen, when we speak of a poet's passion or
feeling for Nature we simply have reference to his ideas in
their relation to the Discipline of Pure Reason in Hypothe-
sis. The true aim of all philosophy and science is to
annihilate feeling. This is the supreme splendor and
purpose of its object in the world. The thing must be
known without any feeling that it is known. This is why
language which implies that a poet possesses feeling is so
misleading. It always leaves the inference that the poet
meant what he wrote. Rousseau had this strange gift.
When reading him you really think the man must have felt
deeply. But this would have been impossible. An
unphilosophical mind would have supposed Robert Burns
felt the cruel sense of injustice with which the Scotch
aristocrat,
“Eyes the simple rustic hind,
Whose toil upholds the glittering show,
A creature of another kind.
Some coarser substance unrefined
Placed for his lordly use thus far thus vile below.”
But it is only the ignorant, the illiterate, the unlearned,
and the masses who have to exercise what is known as Self
Control because they actually have feelings and passions to
govern. But the crudest mind knows that when you apply
the term Self Control to an ethical philosopher, poet, man


48 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
of science, clergyman, or literary man that the term is
wholly without meaning. Having reduced feeling to
extinction such persons have nothing to control, therefore
the words Self Control have no meaning when applied to
such beings. With the above men I should also name the
European nobility who consider all forms of feeling,
untitled birth and honest work the social shames of
humanity. Against this, in his calm, icy cold, unimpas-
sioned way Burns wrote,
“The rank is but the guinea's stamp
The man's the gold for a’ that.
The pith o' sense, and pride o' worth
Are higher ranks than a’ that.” -
Another strange public error is that Burns allowed his
feelings for the masses to cause him to sympathize with the
object of the French Revolution because he asserted that,
“for several years butcher's meat was a stranger in the
house,” and because for sixteen years he “endured the
cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil of a
galley slave.” Of such strange conceptions of reflection
arising from the confusion of the transcendental with the
empirical use of the understanding Kant has given
numerous examples. This delicate play of Burns' happy
descriptive fancy makes Burns' experience very interesting.
The idea that the poet makes his butcher's meat a postulate
of empirical thought is very fine. On the same principle I
have found in my laboratory experiments that when I sus-
pended a man by the nose from the ceiling and irritated
various organs with fire, the man performed the most
astonishing defensive movements. The sensorial stimulus
always caused some dominant muscular reaction. These
reflex performances are of course always more or less
remarkable in poets and such studies in psychological
reaction time are worthy of the loftiest ambition. To


THE PASSIONS OF ROBERT BURNS. 49
achieve this lofty aim of science is, in the language of
Byron, an effort,-
“Prolonging without end.”
So that you may see, gentlemen, how and why it is that
in studying what is ludicrously called the suffering feelings
of Burns, we secure for ourselves scientific and literary
pasturage at unexpected elevations. In the same way when
cutting out a live dog's brain, a pigeon's, or an ape's, to
study their reaction time, I never fail to realize the splen-
dor of the mission of the man of modern psychological
science. Those who believe the stupid incongruous theory
that men of genius possess feeling point out the fact that
Burns must have possessed a feeling, of his own worth.
This they say is evident in his self-confidence sustaining
him in the face of the pride of the Scotch lords who traced
their families back to the Saurians of the Tertiary period.
I have, however, repeatedly pointed out in my former
lectures that it is wholly due to a dialectical illusion as
based upon speculative principles of reason. That there
existed some general conditions of brain activity in the
poet I am willing to admit. But the sooner, gentlemen,
you rid your minds of the vulgar prejudice that knowledge
or a poet's or philosopher's work has anything to do with
feeling the better it will be for the race. There are many
hits at the religious superstitions of the people by Burns
in his poetry. He seems to think that they were to blame
because they did not accept the greater ideas of philosophy.
But every mental harbor cannot accommodate great ships.
Any religious principle, however, that has in it elements of
devotional feeling makes a poor theology. It is difficult
from a scientific standpoint to trace such adaptations of
spiritual conductin either the thalami, the brain hemispheres,
or the spinal cord; and for that reason they should be


THE PASSIONS OF ROBERT BURNS. 51
“Ilkhopping bird, wee helpless thing
What comes o' thee ?
That in the merry month o’ spring
Delighted me to hear thee sing
What comes o' thee?
Whare wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing
An' close thy e'e?”
But it is evident that the poet was wholly ignorant of just
where in the brain cortex or nerve centres the power of
the bird's vocalization was located and possibly would have
been averse to immediately shooting the bird for the
purpose of studying its sensory nerves. In figurative
language I suppose it might be said that the following
lines from his “Cotter's Saturday Night” express the
sincerity of his spiritual love for the nobler ideals of
the nobler poor of Scotland.
“The parent pair their secret homage pay,
And proffer up to heaven the warm request,
That He who feeds the ravens' clam’rous brood
And decks the lily fair in flowery pride,
Would in the way His wisdom sees the best
For them and for their little ones provide
But chiefly in their hearts with grace divine preside.”
Let us turn momentarily, gentlemen, from a considera-
tion of Burns to that of Emerson the American philosopher.
Here is a man who considers the garden of the mind
capable of blooming its own flowers of thought independent
of the fertilizers of passion. The word passion in its
relation to Emerson should be used solely from the stand-
point of Pure Reason in Hypothesis, gentlemen. If Emer-
son possessed what may be in a simile called the feeling
of Sublimity its cause was unquestionably physiological.
But as Sublimity is a universal juxtaposition of concepts
belonging to a transcendental ideal it may be at once seen
that whilst Emerson possessed the concepts he never
degraded himself to the level of feeling. As the word
emotion implies feeling I do not care to speak of the


1803-1882.
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THE PERRY PICTURES.
E M E R S O N .
R A L.P. H. W. A. L DO





THE PASSIONS OF EMERSON. 53
quickly realized how unbecoming it was for an ethical
philosopher to admit that he took an interest in the laws of
the feelings or passions. I have no doubt but that
Thoreau, Alcott, and the Marchioness Ossoli felt the same
way. The great work of this school consisted in liberating
New England from the passion and the feeling of Puritan-
ism. Everything goes wrong that feels. There is a sort
of recognition of the existence of the Deity in man to be
found in his sayings. So that there is a tendency to
suppose that he implied the existence of what Ruskin
calls moral feeling in such a sentence as the following:
“It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance, a new respect
for the divinity in man must work a revolution in all the
offices and relations of men; in their education, in their
pursuits, their modes of living, their association, in their
property, in their speculative views.” But all of this may
exist without descending to moral feeling or ethical passion.
In a similar vein he says,
“I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year.
Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain
Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's strain.”
But this does not prove that Emerson felt anything. It
is what Kant may have called a conceptual motion of
thought. A solution of the Cosmological Idea of the
Totality of the Deduction of cosmical events from their
Causes. It gave a new meaning to Gallows Hill and
Witches Mountain. Sublimity or the perception of the
universal and its outlook is the first condition of genius,
whether in Emerson, Titian, Copernicus, Veronese, Newton,
Tintoret, Darwin, Perugino, Kant, Raffaele, Hegel or
Turner. It is only when we say that Sublimity implies as
the correlative of its perception, magnificence of forms of
moral feeling and of illimitable grandeur of passion that we


THE PASSIONS OF BUDDHA. 55
passion of the assumed disinterestedness of Buddha by
which he ceased to care for himself and claimed to
care for others was due to some degeneration of his
nervous structure as to render the exercise of reason
impossible. A study of his character will show that
he possessed positive unhealthiness of mind. Melan-
cholia or the exaltation of grief is at one time in his
career strongly marked. Any incontrollable desire to do
good to others is insanity and is accompanied with delusion,
excitement, and irregular action of the intellectual powers.
Buddha's passion clearly shows a monomania of Benevo-
lence coupled with a monomania of Superstition. His
impulsive desires, so contradictory to the suggestions of
Prudence, prove the diseased state of his brain. The disin-
terested passion of Buddha and its sad effects on the world
is sufficient evidence to you that all exaltation of disinter-
ested feeling or of passion for the welfare of others is a
proof of complete unhealthiness of mind, of nervous
degeneracy, and is remarkable evidence of the non-devel-
opment of Buddha's self-regarding faculties and is therefore
unmistakable proof of a deviation from the average prudent
feeling of the human race. Buddha simply failed to
exercise what is known by prudent persons as self control.
The Nautch girl of his Moral Passion danced before the
Grand Rajah of his Moral Reason and bewitched him. So
he steps out of his Palanquin of Prudence bedecked with
its jewels of Self-Foresight and for her sake becomes a
beggar priest. His daring moral extravagance, his many
forms of moral eccentricity, the defect of his Prudence to
care first and last for himself, his failure to make everything
else in ife subsidiary to this one sense of Animal Self-
Regard and Comfort is what, as a psychologist and professor
of ethical philosophy, causes me to class Buddha's impulses
and passions with those of mania, melancholia, and insanity.


56 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
Had Buddha been a prudent man and devoted his attention
to cerebral science he might have discovered—by processes
of unwearying vivisection—a cerebral fact or two helpful to
the race. As it was he left,-
“His house, his home, his heritage, his lands,
The laughing dames in whom he did delight,
Whose large blue eyes, fair locks, and snowy hands,
Might shake the saintship of an anchorite
And long had fed his youthful appetite;
His goblets brimmed with every costly wine,
And all that might to luxury invite
Without a sigh he left.”
This disregard of the comfort of one's own animal future
for an assumed grander purpose or for the sake of another
person still happily remains the one supreme proof by
which we test a person's insanity, melancholia, and
mania. Where any form of passion exists as of
Sympathy, Love, Compassion, Kindness, or Benevolence,
there is proof of nervous degeneracy, abnormality, strange-
ness of conduct, singularity of manners, cerebral disorder;
and an absence of that economical, saving, thrifty disposi-
tion which is alone the proof of perfect sanity and New
England balance of mind. Of course I shall not refer to
the founder of Christianity at present.
Note. The mental philosophy of Christianity as of Buddhism is based
on psychology. That is, on those spiritual passions which belong to the
nature and relations of the facts of our common psychological consciousness.
Christianity being founded on the belief that Passion is the Law of Life, in
other words that “God is Love,” and that man's deliverance only comes
through the ascent of his own Passion of Love. The mental philosophy of
Buddhism is founded on the psychological consciousness that Passion is the
cause of Pain; and that man's deliverance from the Pain of Rebirth or Rein-
carnation can only come through the destruction of his own Passions and
their former objects of attachment. The four sublime Truths of Buddha
were : I. Pain exists. 2. The cause of Pain is Passion and its attachment.
3. Pain can be ended by Nirvana. 4. The way to Nirvana. Mohammedan-
ism is of course chiefly concerned with the metaphysical problems of the
Unity of God, and the speculative questions which have arisen from it.


THE PASSIONS OF BUDDHA. 57
Questions not essentially psychological. This note will further explain what
I meant, when I said in a former chapter, that a Spiritual Psychology versus
all sacred books and their interpreters, could alone afford a basis for
the union of religions. With the writer the words Spirituality and Psychology
are synonymous. There can be nothing spiritual that is not psychological;
and as “God is a Spirit,” or a Psychological Unity, there can be no world
reform or scientific refinement of religious faith without a Spiritual Psychology
as based on the laws of the divinely created Soul or Spirit of Man as its
foundation. If on the other hand, the Spirit or Soul of man is not a divine
creation, a child or Son of the Deity, and the Soul possesses no innate moral
or spiritual desires, no divinely creative spiritual laws within its own nature
capable of being psychologically studied and understood, then is such a foun-
dation of faith impossible. This is a question for the next Parliament of
Religions to discuss.
CHAPTER VII.
PASSION WoRKS OF GREAT ARTISTs.
“What master of the pencil, or the style -
Had traced the shades and lines that might have made
The subtlest workman wonder? Dead, the dead
The living seemed alive. With clearer view
His eye beheld not, who beheld the truth
Than mine what I did tread on, while I went,
Low bending.”—DANTE.
“Thou art reverend
Touching thy spiritual function, not thy life.”—SHAKESPEARE.
The great mass of persons who have not had the time to
devote to pictures and who therefore are incapable of judg-
ing of their merits are constantly hearing the pictures of
Tintoret and Turner praised by the artists of Ruskin's
school as being “spiritual.” Not having had the time to
ascertain the exact meaning of the terms spiritual and
spirituality as applied to pictures, such persons are there-
fore at a loss how to apply the words. So that at the risk
of appearing didactic it may be wise to remember that the
words spiritual and spirituality, whether applied to the art
or religion of a person, always mean two external and


58 THE wisdom of PASSION.
internal classes of fact. 1st, External. In their external
sense our spiritual ideas, whether of art or religion, always
imply a special class of external facts which we have per-
sonally allowed to influence us from among the millions of
other facts and ideas as presented by the Senses and
memory to the Soul. This first class of facts—including
the ideas of memory—we call our external or objective
spiritual ideas whether in art or religion. These ideas may
be traditions, a Bible, parents, pictures, a crucifix, or land-
scapes. In this sense the words spiritual and spirituality
therefore imply those external things which we have chosen
and prefer as types of perfection. 2nd, Internal. In
their internal sense our spiritual ideas, whether of art or
religion, always imply a special class of internal psychologi-
cal facts which, as spiritual passions of choice, have
personally selected such external ideas as their highest and
most perfect expressions. Our spiritual ideas, considered
as spiritual passions, are therefore strictly psychological
facts. In this sense the words spiritual and spirituality,
therefore, imply internal things and the unity of the nobler
passions as modes of spiritual choice. What I have no
power to sense I have no power to know. Spirituality
implies refined and ennobled passion. This internal class
of facts as implying choice in classes of feeling, mean the
classes of those passions comprising the moral unity of the
Soul. Therefore the words spiritual or spirituality, whether
applied to art or religion, always imply these two classes of
external and internal fact. The internal fact meaning the
choice of the Soul. In its narrow, conventional sense, the
word spirituality is applied by me to a person who holds
similar interpretations of the Testament or church to myself.
If he sees as I do he is spiritual. If he does not he is an
object of horror. In this sense the bond of unity is not in
the Soul or internal or psychological, but objective or


PASSION WORKS OF GREAT ARTISTS. 59
external. Now Ruskin has clearly shown that the differ-
ence between Beauty in art and in its relation to the human
form and Ugliness is—other things equal—the difference
between the Spirituality of the expression of the Grander
Passions as compared with the Evil Passions of Pride, Sen-
suality, Fear, and Ferocity. He says, “the beauty of the
animal form is in exact proportion to the amount of moral
or intellectual virtue expressed by it.” Thus of the eye of
the Poet, Shakspeare says:
“The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
*
Because certain pictures are types of the fate of certain.
passions they are therefore called spiritual in their meaning.
Let us glance with Ruskin at one or two of the pictures of
Turner in this sense. Thus, among Turner's pictures
which exist as types of the desolating fate of the Passion
of Pride the great Ruskin would refer us to “Marpeth
tower roofless and black. Gate of old Winchelsea wall,
the flock of sheep driven round it, not through it. Lindis-
farne with failing height of wasted shaft and wall. Raglan
in utter solitude midst the wild wood of its own pleasaunce.
The towers rounded with ivy and the forest roots choked
with undergrowth.” Of course to the person so mentally
and morally dead that they could not see any resemblance
of relations between a roofless and black castle tower and
a fallen passion of pride the picture would have no mean-
ing. That is, the picture would not be spiritual to them.
Note also how the power of the Spirituality in a picture
rises in the degree that it involves the fate of the noblest
and grandest passions of hosts of people as in the fate of


60 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
religion. Having spent so much time at both Stonehenge
and Salisbury the two next pictures of Turner which Rus-
kin shall interpret for us may have unduly influenced me to
see in them such vast spirituality. Ruskin says of Turner:
“On that plain of Salisbury he had been struck first by its
widely spacious pastoral life, and secondly by its monu-
ments of the great religions of England—Druidical and
Christian. . . . He treats the shepherd life as a type
of the ecclesiastical, and composes his two drawings so as
to illustrate both.” Here again the spirituality of the
picture depends wholly on the power of the spectator to
see the resemblance of relations between the shepherds, the
light of the heavens, the rain, the cathedral, and the
founder of the religion, its supernaturalism, its helpfulness
to the world, and other points. “In the drawing of Salis-
bury the plain is swept by rapid but not distressful rain.
The cathedral occupies the centre of the picture, towering
high over the city of which the houses (made on purpose
smaller than they really are) are scattered about it like a
flock of sheep. The cathedral is surrounded by a great
light. The storm gives way at first in a subdued gleam
over a distant parish church. Then bursts down again,
breaks away into full light about the cathedral, and passes
over the city in various sun and shade. In the foreground
stands a shepherd leaning on his staff, watching his flock—
bareheaded. He has given his cloak to a group of children
who have covered themselves up with it and are shrinking
from the rain. His dog crouches under a bank. His
sheep for the most part are resting quietly, some coming
up the slope of the bank towards him. . . . Turn now
to the Stonehenge. That also stands in great light. But it
is the Gorgon light—the sword of Chrysaor is bared against
it. The cloud of judgment hangs above. The rock pillars
seem to reel before its slope pale beneath the lightning.


PASSION WORKS OF GREAT ARTISTS. 61
And nearer in the darkness the shepherd lies dead, his
flock scattered. . . . He rarely introduces lightning if
the ruined building has not been devoted to religion. The
wrath of man may destroy the fortress, but only the wrath
of heaven can destroy the temple.” As we read Ruskin
how strongly we are impressed with the idea that skill in
giving embodiment or representation to the ideal depends
on the perception of all the higher moral passions in their
relation to life. That is, the end of Life is an Art, not a
Science. With Science, truth is the only end of Life. Art
implies that scientific truth is a means to a greater end.
Thus, a Grander Art succeeds a Surer Science. “Science
teaches us to know, and Art to do.” Bacon defines Art as
“a proper disposal of the things of Nature by human
thought and experience so as to make them answer the
designs and uses of mankind.”. Whewell draws the distinc-
tion between Art and Science by saying “that the object of
Science is knowledge. The objects of Art are works.”
Moral life is thus an involution of knowledge and an evolu-
tion of loftier powers and thoughts and deeds. Referring
to the above pictures of Turner as commented on by Ruskin
we readily see that a Grand Breadth of the Spiritual Pas-
sion of Moral Sympathy with other people's moral and
spiritual ideals are unavoidably essential to the works of
Great artists in their treatment of landscape or the pictur-
esque. Says Ruskin; “The only true test of good or bad
is ultimately strength of affection. . . . The dignity
of the picturesque increases from lower to higher in exact
proportion to the sympathy of the artist with his subject.”
Referring to Sir Joshua Reynolds he says, “he considers
the Italian painters as excelling in a style which corres-
ponds to that of imaginative poetry in literature, and which
has an exclusive right to be called the Grand Style.” Rus-
kin then answers the question, “What is poetry?” He


THE PASSION OF SUBLIMITY. 63
Sublimity. This transport of Soul as if out of the body,
this inner exaltation by which for the moment we transcend
the limits and conditions of ordinary experience and in
some mystical way identify the Soul with vastness is a
momentary ecstasy and implies a natural non-analytical
capacity of the Soul for the love, admiration and worship
of greatness as an ideal of power. It is the one passion
by which the Self is forced to liberate itself from the old
narrower Self. Hence the ecstasy aroused in us as we
watch the motion and liberty of great forces as of the roll
of the heavens or the unimaginable freedom of the mighty
energies of tempests or the sweep of vast expanse, or lofty
elevations. Only as the Self can appreciate that which is
vaster than the Self can the Self itself become morally
greater. The passion of Sublimity is therefore the passion
of apotheosis, of deification; and to such objects of vast-
ness we address our apostrophes as Byron does to the seas
when he magnificently says,
“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean—roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin—his control
Stops with the shore:-upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When for a moment like a drop of rain
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan.
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown."
Albeit we find that the passion of Sublimity as the pas-
sion of the apotheosis or deification of greatness in its earlier
non-analytical forms leads us as often to the worship of the
falsely great as it does to the greatly true. Unlearning
the evil of life simply means that we have analyzed our
false deities. Our early non-analytical astonishment and
admiration have given way to disgust and unconquerable
aversion. All those vast visions of a more universal liberty


64 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
from the lower conditions of fate which those deities of
Greatness promised have proven to be false. Perchance
many of them were the deities of our lower, narrower, more
selfish animal Self.
“Thrones and Imperial Powers, Offspring of Heaven
Ethereal Virtues; or these titles now
Must we renounce, and changing style be called
Princes of Hell? For so the popular vote
Inclines here to continue?”
The passion of the Sublime is the Soul's longing for more
vast ideals of moral freedom of which it dimly sees types
in the gigantic forces of nature, and to these vast ideals as
types it gladly pays its homage. Byron's unwearying deifi-
cation of the ocean has its secret here,
“Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee—
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters wasted them while they were free,
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts:–not so thou,
Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play—
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.”
So of the types of freedom it seems to see in the grander
liberty of the Passions of rage and anger in the lion or
the war charger. When these passions render the horse
irresponsible so that the animal exults in the great new-
found power of its freedom, as in war how sublime is the
picture. “The glory of his nostrils is terrible” says the
author of the book of Job. “He paweth in the valley, and
rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed
men. He mocketh at fear and is not affrighted : . . .
He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage.” The
pleasure of the passion of the Sublime in this picture is that
the Soul enjoys by secret sympathy the greatness of the


1788-1824.
88.
The PERRY Pictures.
LO R D BY R O N.





THE PASSION OF SUBLIMITY. 65
freedom of the power exerted by the animal. There is no
degree of horror or terror necessary to the completion of
the Sublimity of the feeling! It is the sudden bursting
forth of superphysical forces into a wider and more univer-
sal liberty which excites us. It presents us with a relative
image of greatness as an ideal of a form of the freedom of
a superphysical power. All forms of lower fear as of
prudence are foes to the passion of Sublimity. The prude
is never sublime. Relative good health is a condition for
its exercise for mal de mer and a passion of Sublimity for
ocean scenes and storms, are in inverse ratios. Expecta-
tion of the immediate advent of vast motions of forces on
which great results will ensue is also a cause of the passion
of the Sublime as the following from Byron clearly shows,
“The steeds are all bridled and snort to the rein;
Curved is each neck, and flowing each mane;
White is the foam of their champ on the bit :
The spears are uplifted : the matches are lit:
The cannon are pointed and ready to roar—”
and the passion heightens by degrees as the grandeur of the
freedom of the action increases.
“Hark to the trump and the drum,
And the mournful sound of the barbarous horn,
And the flap of the banners, that flit as they're borne,
And the neigh of the steed and the multitude's hum
And the clash and the shout “they come! they come!’”
As an illustration of how unanalytical the passion of Sub-
limity really is, and how we are borne unthinkingly along
by the expectation of the motion of forces in such scenes
the last five lines quoted above occur in a preceding part of
the poem; in fact ten lines above the first five lines quoted.
Nor is the passion of Sublimity as aroused by these images
due to their obscurity, confusion, or uncertainty. The
feeling is that of the huge expectation of Sublime wonder
roused as the effect of the perception of the details of vast


66 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
forces preparing for action. The images are clear, open,
and distinct. The Soul in the contemplation of the great-
ness of its object unconsciously identifies itself with it
and thereby loses for the time being the carking sense of
its moral infirmities and littleness of life. This is the rea-
son why images of vastness have such power over us. It
is this passion of the Soul's Universal Self to identify itself
with a new and truer greatness and thereby find a self-
forgetfulness for the old narrower self with its poisoned
images of moral fear and pain that add such force to the
creative power of the passion of Sublimity in poets. Both
Dante and Byron give unwearying evidence of this. So
far from the self-preservation of the old Self having any-
thing to do with the grandeur of the passion, it is obvious
that the passion of Sublimity is always inverse to the self-
preservation of the old Self and its limitations in some
sense or the other. Other things equal the power of the
passion of Sublimity will be greater in proportion to the
greatness of the former sufferings and moral pain suffered
by the poet. With Dante and Byron their fellow men in a
figure, made them flay their own flesh and drink their own
blood. Shame, scorn, scurrility, scandal, spite, slurs and
sorrow hunted them for years. The capacity for their
moral suffering was the measure of their capacity for Sub-
limity of Passion. Dante damns his tormentors in his
Inferno and Byron in his Childe Harold and English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers. The passion of Sublimity in both
poets was the outgrowth of their moral pain, which made
them search for some means to annihilate their mental
images of the past. If there be no new great object with
which the passion of their Sublimity can identify itself in
an objective sense their genius goes to work and creates
some new great ideal. “I must write or go mad,” says
Byron. Then his Soul suddenly bursts open the doors of


68 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
" .
scious higher changes. The delight, therefore, which we
feel when we witness Sublime scenes in which there is an
element of physical terror is in part due to the fact that the
Soul is conscious of an evolved freedom and a greater
superphysical chance of liberty from those circumstances
which under lower conditions would have involved danger
to the body. The sublime passages of poets and orators
cause us to feel triumphant and full of ecstacy because they
give to us a larger sense of our universal mental freedom
and superphysical power. Therefore we identify ourselves
with the grandeur and magnificence of their liberalising con-
cepts for we feel the chains of our old limitations slowly
falling from off the Soul. There is a species of Sublimity
which has its mental foundations wholly in old interpretive
forms of distinct religious belief. The finest passages of
Job or Milton produce little effect on a man whom Kant
has thoroughly convinced of the inability of his erring
reason to demonstrate the existence of God and who being
determined to found his belief wholly on his reason or
nothing naturally ends by having no type of religious belief
at all. Milton's grandiose description of Satan as a sort of
great Megalosaurus does not by its hugeness awaken any
Sublimity in a man who has no faith whatever in a personal
Devil or Devils. It simply excites a smile. To a man of
the old School, however, with his ancient devil, beliefs the
very name of Satan causes a shudder of moral awe. Mil-
ton's descriptions of a Devil to such a man appear as the
highest reaches of Sublimity. The passion of Sublimity in
this sense is therefore relative to a preexisting form of
religious belief. But what a man does not believe has an
existence can never become an ideal of greatness to him
even though like a sea serpent it has its
“—head uplift above the waves, and eyes
That sparkling blazed, his other parts besides


THE PASSION OF SUBLIMITY. 69
Prone on the flood, extended long and large
Lay floating many a rod, in bulk as huge
As whom the fables name of monstrous size—”
For a thing to strike us as Sublime it must possess either
a superphysical or a physical existence as believed or known
to us. Otherwise it is but a huge chimera in which we take
but a languid interest. Independent of our religious beliefs
the clouds give a natural feeling of Sublimity. Because in
their incessant travels through the majesty of the heavens
above us they suggest vast freedom of mysterious move-
ment, an immense liberty of aerial motion, or seemingly
innate power to break away from their old insufficient
relations and to at times reshape themselves into more
gloriously gigantic masses of new form. In the deep soli-
tary lonesomeness of the gloomy avenues of great forests,
and where the vast trees thickly overarch us, the same
feeling of Sublimity arises when we suddenly see through
some great opening in the overarching distance, floods of
golden sunlight and a vast army of chariots of silver cloud
sailing free and loftily along in their stately unimprisoned
grandeur. The natural desire of the passion of Sublimity
for the vaster liberty of the Self and its natural passion to
unite itself with the grander forms and liberty of greatness,
causes it to irresistibly identify itself with such scenes of
nature. Conformity to irrational and unanalyzed narrower
beliefs and forms are the methods of the Soul's slavery.
The marching clouds are non-conformists. And are not
the lightnings? Those godlike voices of vast thunders
rolling out their anger and wrath are they not all orators of
mental liberty and non-conformity chanting in their roaring
curses of the Soul's born right to its greater freedom of
thought utterance? The passion of Sublimity implies a
non-conformity to the old narrow, ignorant Self of mental
fear or it means nothing. Therefore it is that the Soul


70 THE wisdoM OF PASSION. N.
gladly identifies itself with those elements in nature which
seem to typify the breaking up of those conditions of our
old, cruel, mental slaveries. Hence the delight in watching
as symbol,—
º “The uprooting wind which tears
The oak from his foundation, and which spills
The ocean o'er its boundary, and bears
It's foam against the skies”—
Herein, too, consists the Sublimity of war when a
greater equity for the greater Self is its purpose.
“O Liberty, can man resign thee
Once having felt thy generous flame 2
Can dungeons, bolts, or bars confine thee?”
The only possible excuse for the presence of the human
Soul on earth is that it shall—in some sense or the other—
be great, feel great, realize the laws of its own native
superphysical greatness, and possess ideals of unconquera-
ble magnitude. Only by becoming greater than another can
I serve another. If I am weaker than another the other
must serve me. A great deed never sprang from a small
soul. The sublime in moral actions as in deeds of
daring and self-denial differ from the morally beautiful
though closely allied to it. The first is heroism, the second
is a lower form of disinterestedness. The passion of
Sublimity is the creator of great aspirations and acts.
A sense of moral grandeur is the first condition of the
Sublime in painting and statuary. The law of life of the
majority who aim to make the greatest amount of the per-
sonal physical pleasure of the home and the body the sole
ideal of existence can never be the ideal of the Sublime.
Hence a blacksmith working at his forge in tattered shirt
sleeves, and with a contempt for luxury written all over his
brow, has about him an element of ethical Sublimity never
found in ladies' drawing-rooms or clubs. The sublime in


THE PASSION OF SUBLIMITY. 71
nature depends on freedom in the motion of great forces
and their suggestions of infinity. Speaking of the storms
of the Rhone, Bryon says.—
—“Here not one but many make their play
And fling their thunderbolts from hand to hand,
Flashing and cast around: of all the band,
The brightest through these parted hills hath forked
His lightnings.-”
The sublimity of these natural images of the thunderbolts
and the lightnings, is heightened by ascribing to them not
only their majestic freedom of motion, but freedom of
choice of sportive action. So of the motion of the vast
elements of nature as they reply to the sceptred command
of Arimanes.
—“The elements which tear
Themselves to chaos at his high commandſ
He breatheth—and a tempest shakes the sea;
He speaketh—and the clouds reply in thunder;
He gazeth—from his glance the sunbeams flee;
He moveth—earthquakes rend the world asunder.
Beneath his footsteps the volcanoes rise;
His shadow is the Pestilence; his path
The comets herald through the crackling skies.”
So where the solemn silent effects of the previous opera-
tions of great forces are visible, as in the ruins of great
forests crushed by mountain winds, the wrecks of great
temples, broken arches, the desolation of vast cities, and
where the earth is imaged to us as a place where the great
forces of humanity are all spent, and the world has become
“ the great tomb of man,” as where Bryant says,
“All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom. Take the wings
Of morning and the Barcan desert pierce
Or, lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound
Save its own dashings—yet the dead are there;


THE PASSION OF SUBLIMITY. 73
-
conviction that the words are true; second, that their
interpretations are keys to the vast issues of the future.
In any event they have the power of raising the Self
to a temporary loftier and greater ideal. Apocalyptic
images, setting forth a vast transfigured world, always
manage to keep some form of glorious millenarianism aglow
in the Soul—even if it be but the actualizing of Plato's
Republic for a thousand years. Whilst darkness may in a
measure assist in producing Sublime ideas I cannot believe
that it has the power light has. In fact neither are of
value without sounds or objects. Where light is broken
into a field of innumerable objects all interspersed with.
darkness, as of that of the starry heavens magnificence is
the explanation of their sublimity. Magnificence joined
with mystery.
“Ye stars 1 which are the poetry of heaven
If in your bright leaves, we would read the fate
Of men and empires—'tis to be forgiven
That in our aspirations to be great
Our destinies o'erleap their mortal state
And claim a kindred with you; for ye are
A beauty and a mystery, and create
In us such love and reverence from afar
That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star.”
Whilst it is natural to associate darkness and gloom
with Sublimity, nevertheless the mystery of light has a
more overwhelming grandeur. I cannot but feel that
Burke in asserting that our ignorance is the chief cause of
our admiration was wholly wrong. Darkness, uncertainty,
confusion, and terror, which he considers the essential
conditions of Sublimity are the conditions of mental
savagery, of superstition, of an unenlightened mental
state. We are left to infer that the Passion of Sub-
limity is inconsistent with great knowledge. But where
do we find a man of more culture in his way than Milton,


74 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
an admitted master of the Sublime? The fiery heat of
the passion of his Sublimity melted down all of his knowl-
edge of Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish. And
yet the whole of Milton's poem does not convey as much
sublimity as the few words of the Psalmist when he said:
“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament
showeth his handiwork.” In the great Soul of that grand
old Hebrew king existed a Sublimity of feeling never since
reached by the mind of man. The genius that can reach
the awful height of believing that a creative deity accom-
panies the Soul from its body at death, has elevated itself
to a sublimity of expression unsurpassed by humanity.
“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of
death I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me.” The
words are few but, - *
“Nature triumphs more in this
Reverse of her decrees, than in the abyss
Where sparkle distant worlds”—
We use the word Human Soul flippantly enough ; but
what do we mean by it? By a man's soul I mean a super-
physical union of several conscious and sub-conscious forces
and senses which realize their temporary experiences
through a nervous system or brain. I call these super-
physical forces—passions. Ideas, images, thoughts, are
the figures and shapes assumed by these forces within the
brain. Electricity may play in the sky as well as confine
itself to wires. So these sub-conscious forces may exert
themselves independent of nervous systems and the nerve
wires of the brain. The only supernatural or superphysical
is the mental. Psychic phenomena of the sublime order of
the prophets, is a genuine product of the Human Soul and
of its latent sub-conscious conditions. Every man's soul
begins its career by a simple desire for physiological union
with forms of matter through hunger. It ends with multi-


THE PASSION OF SUBLIMITY. 75
form desires for union with moral ideals, or for broader
forms of knowledge and love. The attitude we assume to
our Ideals governs the shadows of our lives. If we walk
toward the sun we precede our shadows; if we walk from
it, the shadows precede us.
Beauty has its basis in Moral Passion. The affinity of a
Passion always implies the selective power of the Passion
to select its class of outward qualities. My sense of taste
prefers sugar to wormwood because the sugar is an affinity
to my Passion of Hunger. The ultimate principles of my
nature being the necessities of my Passions to which my
five senses are subordinated. Beauty can have no ultimate
basis in sex. The word taste in its relation to objects of
beauty is of course an analogue. It is the word used to
denote the natural preferences of my Moral Passions for
certain sounds, colors and forms as my Moral Passions
select them through my senses of hearing and sight. The
taste of hunger is a mode of selecting outward qualities by
physical passion; the taste of beauty is a mode of selecting
outward qualities by moral passion. Sex is a physical
passion. In the degree that my moral passions are evolved
my moral taste is developed. Through the affinities of my
Moral Passion of beauty I am able to appreciate the higher
works of art if no historic technical (intellectual) knowl-
edge is necessary to comprehend the picture or statue.
Says Ruskin, “Any material object which can give us
pleasure in the single contemplation of its outward qualities
without any direct and definite exertion of the intellect I
call in some way, or in some degree, beautiful. . . Ideas
of beauty, then, be it remembered, are the subjects of
moral, but not of intellectual perception.” Moral Percep-
tion arises from the unity of Moral Passion. In so far as
a work of art successfully portrays the loftier passions in
any form of life does it rise above mediocrity and stamp


76 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
the artist a man of genius. “The utmost glory of the
human body is a mean subject of contemplation compared
to the emotion (passion) which animates it.”
“Beauty is not as fond men misdeem
An outward show of things that only seem :
But that fair lamp from whose celestial ray
That light proceeds which kindleth lover's fire,
Shall never be extinguished nor decay.
But when the vital spirits do expire
Unto her native planet shall retire.”
Ruskin calls attention to the picture of the “Old Shep-
herds' Chief-Mourner” as an illustration of one of the most
perfect pictures of modern times. If we analyze the lan-
guage of Ruskin in his description of the picture we shall
readily see that the power of the picture lies in the lofty
moral passions described by Landseer through the passion-
ate attitudes of the noble heart-broken animal pressing him-
self against the coffin of his dead master. “The close pres-
sure of the dog's breast against the wood. The convulsive
clinging of the paws which has dragged the blanket off the
trestle. The total powerlessness of the head laid close and
motionless upon the folds. The fixed and tearful fall of
the eye in its utter hopelessness. The rigidity of repose
which marks that there has been no motion nor change in
the trance of agony since the last blow was struck on the
coffin lid.” Paws, breast, head, eyes, all in attitudes ex-
pressive of the mighty passion of heart-rending sympathy
and love and forgetfulness of Self on the part of the noble
animal. Landseer gave the splendor of the Soul of a Saint
to another magnificent dog in the picture “Saved.” All
saints are saints by reason of the splendor of their passions.
Any inventor artist or author who has to toil for his daily
bread and at the same time earn money enough to invent a
machine, publish a noble book, or give to the world a great
picture that shall make money for others, stands among the
º,


THE SOVEREIGNTY OF PASSION. 77
philanthropists and heroes of our modern daily life. Our
mere psychological knowledge of the passions "often imply
a knowledge of ignoble ends and motives. The study of
the Passions from the standpoints of Ethical Philosophy can
alone raise them to their native moral dignity. The Psy-
chologist simply knows them to catalogue them. The ends
of the two kinds of knowledge are as wide apart as life and
death. “This is the difference between the mere botanist's
knowledge of plants and the great poet's or painter's knowl-
edge of them. . . . The one counts the stamens and
affixes a name and is content.”
CHAPTER IX.
THE SOVEREIGNTY OF PASSION.
“Affairs that
Walk—as they say spirits do—at midnight-have
In them a wilder nature than the business
That seeks despatch by day.”—SHAKESPEARE.
The democracy of labor is the hope of the ages. The
awakening of the sovereign passions of modern industry
has taught the passions of the absolutisms of monarchs
and ecclesiastics that the essence of human liberty and
freedom is founded upon the relative equities of the expec-
tations of lower passions. The sovereignty of the
industrial passion has abolished serfdom and slavery. It’
has given to modern liberty the strength of its existing
constitutionalism. It has plainly said to the old European
monarchs’, ecclesiastics,’ and aristocrats' darker passions of
pride, ambition, and avarice, thus far thou shalt go and
no farther. Liberty, defined by me as the equity of the
expectation of passion of course implies a development from
conditions which formerly implied the natural innate in-
equity and injustice of the expectations of classes of unjust


78 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
passion. The transition from absolutism to constitutional-
ism as affected by the democracy of labor has therefore
evolved a clearer ethical idea of the relations of the darker
passions to liberty. But this has its dark side. Enter
some of the business offices in Rome, London, or Boston
to-day and the most terribly cruel of the hidden expectant
passions lurking in the background, may by an easy exper-
iment (by asking of half a dozen questions) be scientifically
proven to be those of Avarice, Fear, Ambition, Jealousy,
and Sex. The same old dark passions that actuated
absolutism in its relation to labor, whether in the ancient
family, the monarchy, or the ecclesiasticism. But above
the cruel expectations of the passion of Avarice in the
employer is the law giving to labor its right. This has
been the one valuable element in the selection and survival
of the modern industrial institution. It forbids the
employer doing to his employees what he would not have
the employees do to him. Moderate our abnormal expecta-
tions as employers and we make everyone happy about us.
Weaken ever so little our fierce, severe passions of
Ambition, Fear, and Avarice, and let a passion of broad,
big-hearted, cheerful, good humor and benevolence oil
every wheel of the establishment, and how different life
would be. Not that this would destroy the jealous, dark,
perfidious passions of rivalry for the employer's favor on
the part of the leading employees; but it would have a
tendency to lessen it. The unjust and unrighteous and
cruel rivalry of labor often brings upon itself a weight of
degradation and contempt. Freedom of labor must not
only be a political privilege, but an imperative pleasure.
What comfort is there in doing business with either an
employer or employee whose face and aets show how abnor-
mally fierce and agitated the expectations of his passions
are, concerning his business Nevertheless, with all these


THE SOVEREIGNTY ON PASSION. 79
shadows on its path, the democracy of labor, in all its
forms, is the hope of the ages of man. Of course, in the
main, industrial controversies of labor are disputes as to
wages and time. The freedom of labor is always striving
towards the equities of the expectation and limitation of
lower passions as the ideal of its liberty. The development
of the Massachusetts system of state arbitration in labor
disputes, shows, according to Supple, that:
“Out of three hundred and ninety cases reported in the
first thirteen years of its existence, one hundred and seven
were formal arbitrations where future prices were awarded.
In one instance the employer, in four instances the em-
ployees, hesitated a few days in accepting the result; in all
other cases the decision was promptly accepted. There
have been three instances of the sixty days' notice, all
served by employees on their employers. These notices
having expired and all parties released from their promises
to abide by the decision, the workmen continued at their
occupations. In one such instance, however, the employer
removed his business to another place. One hundred and
twenty-four agreements were effected through the media-
tion of the Board; and one hundred others through other
causes while proceedings were pending. There were fifty-
nine cases in which the Board interposed where the parties
preferred hostilities to a peaceful settlement.”
The sovereignty of an ideal passion of Equity and Justice
is thus slowly being evolved by the democracy of labor.
Not that the labor conditions of the city of Boston are ideal
by any means, but they show an improvement over those
of many of the American cities. The highest ideal of
Democracy implies a transference of Sovereignty from the
imperfect and relative equities of centralized municipalities
and institutions, to the sovereignty of the more perfect and
absolute justice due to the individual. All the centralizing
tendencies of institutions, which transfer the justice due
individuals, to corporations, must eventually perish. This


80 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
is because such movements imply a return to the methods
of the lower passions which formerly gave rise to absolut-
ism. John R. Commons has said:
“The democratization of institutions consisted in
breaking up the centralized form which had resulted from
survival, and creating small copies of it, each with similar
unrestricted powers of private dominion. The socialization
of institutions consists in introducing the subordinate
classes into partnership with the hitherto absolute proprie-
tor. The family was democratized when polygamy was
outlawed, and slaves and serfs were guaranteed possession
and control of their wives and children. The family was
socialized when the wife and children were granted the
right to veto the arbitrary commands of the head of the
family and so were made partners with him. Political
parties were democratized through the guaranteed right of
free assemblage, free speech, and free nomination and
election of candidates, whereby any group of persons could
organize a party if they could persuade enough others to
join. Parties are being socialized through the legalized
ballot and primaries, by which the organization proper is
transferred to sovereignty, and the subordinate members
are guaranteed approved rights of veto and persuasion
within the organization. Democratization divides and mul-
tiplies an institution, restricting its centralizing tendencies,
but retains its basis in private property. Socialization
transfers it from private property to sovereignty, incorpo-
rates its organization into the constitution of the state, fixes
the relations of its members to each other against capricious
change, and amends it in such ways as to guarantee certain
rights within it to the constituted members. The guilds
were a consequence of the democratization of property.
Their socialization was effected after the triumph of the
exclusive jurisdiction and political power which they
attained under private control. This power and jurisdic-
tion, being legally recognized and transferred to sov-
ereignty, was amended in the interest of order and right,
and thereby became the structure of city government.”
The structure of a city government, as of Boston, Rome,


THE soverEIGNTY of PAssion. 81
or Paris, is therefore an ultimate expression of that modern
Liberty which has been founded upon the acquired equities
of the abnormal expectations of the lower and irrational
spiritual passions; types and expressions of which linger
in the Blue Laws of the old Puritans of the founders of
New England. Nevertheless to New England is the mod-
ern world indebted for the loftiest sublimation of the indus-
trial idea. A study of the city of Boston in history will
clearly show that its attitude towards modern industrialism
and labor has strongly influenced the labor ideas of the
rest of the American cities. Having become very very
recently convinced of the political tenability of the Ameri-
can Gold Democrats’ idea as opposed to the silver illusion,
I was, nevertheless, surprised to find in Boston how exceed-
ingly strong the positive attitude of its local labor unions
were towards any political platform looking to a seemingly
greater equity in the financial attitude of the individual to
the community. This constant subordination of parties to
the ideals of the more perfect justice and equity due to the
sovereignty of the passion of labor is one of the most hope-
ful signs of the times. The people may of course occasion-
ally err in their judgments during such elections; but the
ideals of human equity towards which the democracy of
labor is forever striving, must eventually accomplish as its
result, the perfect industrial liberty of the American. A
residence of nearly two decades in Europe, and a quarter of
a century in America, has convinced me that the two great-
est foes to the advancing genius and progress of the world's
democracy of labor are the false ideals of excellence main-
tained by the British and European aristocracies on the one
hand, and the title-seeking leisure class of pretty and vain
American women and their mothers on the other. Both
classes are animated by a contempt for genius and honest
work. The same types of sociological passion are seen in


THE SOVEREIGNTY OF PASSION. 83
peers have appeared men of the type of Byron and Macau-
lay. But so intellectually superior on the average is the
Peerage considered when compared with all the rest of the
intelligences of the world, the worlds, and the universe,
that Newton, the greatest natural philosopher of any age,
was never raised to it. That, on the other hand the luxury
and extravagance of the peerage is an eternal menace to the
equities due to the democracy of labor on the one hand,
and to the natural equities due to the royalty of genius on
the other, goes without saying. To watch the adoring eyes
of the vulgar British bourgeoisie rolling upward in spas-
modic ecstacies of worship as the costly equipage of a peer
rolls past on its way to the Derby is a sight not to be missed
by the American sociologist. English men of letters have
not been free from this servility. Thackeray once asked
his readers to confess whether it would not give each of
them an exquisite pleasure to be met walking down Pall
Mall with a duke on either arm” A decent American man
or woman after being caught in such company would be all
the time secretly aching to hurry home to either take a
bath, or to fumigate oneself. To refer again to the philos-
opher Newton. Not only would the incomparable intellect-
ual genius of Newton be considered of itself of insufficient
value to elevate him to the peerage, but the same principle
applies to moral, ethical, and spiritual genius, per se. Is
any one foolish enough to suppose that the lord-worship-
ping middle class of England would ever be likely to see in
such spiritual characters as St. Francis, Plato, or Socrates,
persons of sufficient importance to be elevated to the peer-
age on account of their magnificent spirituality? So that it
is not genius, not the persistence of manly toil, not spiritu-
ality, not heroism, not the native manliness of honest worth,
but a titled birth, that, in the British Philistine's opinion, is
the one indispensable condition of all greatness in life, the


84 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
sine qua non of all superiority, the only thing that is
worthy of passing into an example of history. Not, what
has he done? But, who were his parents, is the first and
last question of the Englishman. It is utterly impossible
for the American to conceive the profound contempt which
the average British shopkeeper has for American ideals.
Let him present to the shopkeeper or to a vicar of the State
church, a general letter of introduction from an American
President, or an introduction from one of the Governors of
the States, and sealed with the State seal. The London
shopkeeper would simply laugh at such introductions. The
Englishman's stupendous and colossal conviction of the
utter moral, intellectual, social, and financial worthlessness
of everything that is not English can never be adequately
understood by the American. This may be seen in the
small space devoted in the London daily papers to Ameri-
can affairs. The kindly leniency of the American City
Editor to the cabled news of the doings of European aristo-
crats does a world of harm. Such matter occupies by far
too much space. In a sense this is a national misfortune,
fatal to the development of the grandeurs of our own indi-
vidualisms, and the encouragement of the more interesting
local news. The strictly American idea of the value of the
commonplace, average, individual as an end in him-or-her-
self, rather than being a thing of value as a means for the
perpetual support of a political and state spiritual aristoc-
racy, is an idea, that has not, as yet, fully taken possession
of the masses of the English. A few old related families
still run all the state politics and religion. A fact, which,
as in old Athens “accounts for the growth of an aristocracy
of birth monopolizing public office. Coincident with the
privileged class we find the first clear differentiation of gov-
ernmental functions. The king was first induced to dele-
gate certain of his powers to his immediate advisers, which


THE SOVEREIGNTY OF PASSION. 85
marked the first step in the transition from the early king-
priest' form of government, in which all power, civil and
ecclesiastical, was vested in one person, to the aristocratic
and oligarchic system. Those whom the king called in as
advisers soon came to regard their office as a proprietary
right.” The above words of Professor L. A. Rowe of the
University of Pennsylvania are elucidative of the general
principle of ambitious class passion which throughout all
history has always schemed to destroy or render negative
the inherent and imprescriptible right of the development
and evolution of the average Soul of the average individual.
For “the glory of our people” we will ostracize him and
eventually make him feel in some way the torture of our
power. But the final economic independence of the de-
mocracy of labor has at last made possible the greater relig-
ious and political emancipation of the average individual.
Emerson has said:
“Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases
in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transi-
tion of a past to a new state; in the shooting of the gulf;
in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates,
that the soul becomes; for, that forever degrades the past;
turns all riches to poverty; all reputation to a shame; con-
founds the saint with the rogue; shoves Jesus and Judas
equally aside. Why then do we prate of self-reliance?
Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not
confident but agent. To talk of reliance, is a poor external
way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, be-
cause it works and is. Who has more soul than I, masters
me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I
must revolve by the gravitation of spirits; who has less, I
rule with like facility. We fancy it rhetoric when we speak
of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height,
and that a man or a company of men plastic and permeable
to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride
all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not.”


86 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
So that in its last analysis the Sovereignty of Passion is
the Sovereignty of the equities of Moral Worth. The proof
of the utter worthlessness of Emerson, or any other indi-
vidual, consisting in the fact that he no longer holds “the
infallible views of our people, whereas he used to.” Of course
the exaggeration of individuality independent of the equities
due to the common rights of the democracy of labor are the
causes of the origin of all such societies as the Mafia.
CHAPTER X.
THE PASSIONS OF THE PROPHETs.
“There is some soul of goodness in things evil would men observingly
distil it out.” —SHAKESPEARE.
“The inclination to goodness is deeply implanted in the nature of man.”
—BACON.
The day is short and the work is great. It is not incumbent upon thee to
complete the work, but thou must not therefore cease from it.— TALMUD.
Only great natural moral passions can create vast moral
acts and thoughts. Oaks do not spring from thistle seeds.
Nevertheless all men inherit the natural germs of nobler
moral passion. For the purpose of exalting our creeds and
to bring men under their dominion we try to disprove the
innate moral worth of man as naturally latent in his nobler
passions. Psychological Science assists this idea, by deny-
ing the moral unity of the Soul and the Mystic attributes
the result of its occult forces to Spirits. All of these ideas
are unconscious attempts to belittle or deny the psycho-
logical unity of the Nobler Passions as ethical forces in life.
But by whatsoever means you seek to destroy in me my
faith in the unity of your nobler passions (in common with
the passions of Moses, Joel, or Deacon Smith) you are
simply seeking to destroy the only foundation possible to
the existence of Human Virtue. For I can understand


88 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
founded ethical monotheism. The folk were not in sym-
pathy with the leaders who sought to impose this higher
deity, and only amid continual struggles with the recalci-
trant backsliding Hebrews was the moral reform carried
through.”
Inspiration is the loftiest enthusiasm of the divinely
ethical spiritual passions of the Soul. This alone is divine
genius. Our common and lower ethical ideas grow up by
our common ethical associations. Not so our loftier and
grander ethical ideas. Edward Alsworth Ross of Leland
Stanford, Jr., University fame once remarked :
“In insisting that ethical elements may and do grow up
in a natural way out of peaceable intercourse, we do not
mean to say that by this means men can get very far or rise
very high. No advanced race has come by its moral heri-
tage in just this way. Such noble ethical achievements as
the character of Jehovah, the Persian dualism, the Stoic
ideal, or the Beatitudes cannot be ascribed to slow evolu-
tion. They are as much the creation of genius as the higher
gains in the arts and sciences. The reason why standards
cannot become very exacting or ideals very high by way of
selection and survival is that they can never rise quite clear
of the vulgar private fact. The conventional valuations of
things cannot shake themselves quite loose from the sensual
views of the individual. The ideal that triumphs in the
social mind is anchored close to earth by the base admira–
tions of the common mortal.”
Locke has sensibly said, “God, when he makes the
prophet does not unmake the man.” Religions are based
on the unity of the loftier passions. Of a grand religion it
may be said,
“She walks in Beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes.”
Religion is founded also on the capacity of our nobler
passions of Moral Love and ethical Fear to like or dislike
particular classes of religious ideas. Our incapacity to


1856-
SARGENT.
1031.
THE PERR Y Pictures.
copyRIGHT, 1897, BY curtis & cAMEron.
H O S E A .


THE PASSIONS OF THE PROPHETS. 89
subject all the causes of our moral choice to logical ground
throws the burden of our attitude to religion on the capacity
of our passion of Moral Love to accept the ideas which it
presents. So that without this pre-existing unity in us of
the Moral Passions of Moral Love and Fear to found itself
upon no religion could have possibly existed. The present-
ing of an idea or concept of Spiritual Love to me implies in
me a moral passion capable of knowing its moral worth and
of accepting it. My spiritual passion if left unprejudiced
is impartial and unlimited. The religious thought or idea
of a people or church is always partial and limited. This is
why creeds belie the heart and throw contempt on the Soul.
With their
- . “unwholesome reign;
No step between submission and a grave?’
What is to be the standard of your Spiritual and Moral
Worth? Is your moral worth to be spiritually measured by
the exercise of the universal spiritual capacity of your
natural spiritual nobler passions of Spiritual Love and
Weneration in respect to all great ideas in all religions? Or,
by the rigid chaining of your hitherto unlimited and impar-
tial Moral Love to the ideas of my religious people? And
after I had thus imprisoned your Moral Sympathies to our
views, would you tell me
“—it was liberty to stride
Along my cell from side to side,
And up and down, and then athwart
And tread it over every part;
And round the pillars one by one,
Returning where my walk begun.”
I have made that which was a nobler universal capacity
within you for moral and spiritual love and sympathy a
local prisoner by the repulsive logic of my local belief.
For spiritual good in a universal sense must first of all pre-
exist potentially in your natural passions of Spiritual Love
~


THE PASSIONS OF THE PROPHETS. 91
passions influenced their thoughts. So that I am venturing
to look at the most of their utterances as the automatic
expressions of their own Subliminal Selves. Assuming
their utterances, therefore, to have been either inspired or
arising from their Subliminal Selves, in what way can we
test the Subliminal utterance of the prophet from the In-
spired utterance. That the reader who is wholly inexperi-
enced in matters of psychical research may realize the
difficulty of making this distinction I will enumerate
points common to sentences seen and heard as proceeding
from the Subliminal Self of a Man and from some outside
occult agency. The chapter on Spiritualism also assists in
the explanation.
(1) It would be the easiest matter for the Prophet himself
to mistake the utterances of his own Subliminal Self for
the utterances of Inspiration. This would grow out of the
Prophet's intense realization that his own Will had nothing
whatever to do with producing the words seen and heard
by him. It is this one fact more than any other that would
make the Prophet, expectant of divine messages, believe the
words uttered by his own Subliminal Self to be words
inspired by the Lord; because he did not consciously
produce them himself.
(2) A man's Subliminal Self often calls itself “the
Lord” in presenting its messages.
(3) The messages of the Subliminal Self unwearyingly
denounce vice and sin and exalt virtue and righteousness.
(4) All of the messages of the Subliminal Self appear to
the Prophet to come from a Spiritual Personality wholly
and totally distinct from himself.
(5) The Prophet's ignorance of the power of his own
Subliminal Self to present messages and sentences, as
“Devotion and her daughter Love
Still bid the bursting spirit soar
To sounds that seem as from above.”


92 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
How far inspiration is necessary to foretell that a nation
plunging itself in effeminate views and luxuries will ulti-
mately go to ruin is an open question. Moral common
sense would seem sufficient. It is safe to assume that no
ancient prophet had any scientifically profound knowledge
of the psychic powers of his own nature. Evidently in the
ancient days the horses of moral truth went psychologically
unshod. Telepathy was unknown. But the fact that these
sublime old prophets were profoundly ignorant of the mag-
nificent psychological laws of their own Souls does not
lessen the moral glory of their ethical sayings or the incon-
ceivable moral worth of their own spiritual natures. In a
pure, high, sublime sense, their lofty spiritual passions
made grand moral enthusiasts of them all. Spiritual love,
wrath, sublimity, veneration are the divine passions. The
man whose life is controlled by them is divinely inspired.
These are the passions which form the inspirations of the
Subliminal Self. It implies the extraordinary excitement
and exaltation of the loftiest spiritual passions of the Soul.
A Subliminal Self is impossible without Subliminal Passions
urging to rapture, meditation, ardor, devotion, and,-
“Which beheld instils
Part of its immortality; the veil
Of heaven is half withdrawn; within the pale
We stand, and in that form and face behold
What Soul can make when Nature's self would fail.”
According to the strength and vehemence of the loftier
passion of the Prophet was the prophetic fire, freedom and
dramatic force of his words and style. His grander pas-
sions as his mental forces shaped his entire life and mind.
As to the mistakes made by Spiritualists in mistaking the
utterances of their own Subliminal Selves for Spirits the
mistake is unavoidable. Socrates, Mahomet, Swedenborg


THE PASSIONS OF THE PROPHETS. 93
made the same mistake. Without a natural spiritual psy-
chological affinity of the loftier passions for religious ideas
the psychic experiences of these men would have been
impossible. The fact that it could be unmistakably and
demonstrably proven that “the Lord” was not the author
of a single word of the prophecies of Isaiah, Jeremiah,
Habakuk, Joel, or any of the Prophets would only serve to
prove to me how unconquerably morally sublime and divine
were the Souls of the men themselves. A grander light
would be thrown on the mental and moral nature of man as
man. Psychology would unexpectedly receive inspiration
from a new source. We should not love God less but the
Soul of our brother more; as we watched this new psycho-
logical
“Vastness which grows—but grows to harmonize—
All musical in its immensities.”
The psychology of the passions of the Prophets is a fruit-
ful theme. An analysis and interpretation of the facts of
their consciousness by the modern observational, inductive,
introspective, and psychical research methods is the essential
duty of the psychologist. If the old religious ideals of
man are threatened by the march of Modern Science, then is
it the duty of Moral Philosopher and Psychologist out of its
seeming wreck to build from the practical actual knowledge
of the loftier passions of the Soul another—
—“bark of Hope once more
To battle with the ocean and the shocks
Of the loud breakers, and the ceaseless roar
Which rushes on the solitary shore
Where all lies foundered that was ever dear.”
What we know is ever in an inverse ratio to what we
don’t know. The unity of the loftier passions of man out
of which was constructed his first temporary religions still
exists. The smile of the Soul is ever vernal. The grander


94 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
passions of man may create a religion or destroy it as the
sea may elevate the earth or erose it. All oceans cause
indentations, even the ocean of human passion. The spirit-
ual passions of the prophets gave to their lives the force of
ecstasy of believed identification with the divine, a trans-
port of soul as if out of the world and a magnificence of
moral exaltation.
“The beings of the Soul are not of clay;
Essentially immortal, they create
And multiply in us a brighter ray
And more beloved existence.”
Such passions lie latent in every soul, and the spiritual
passions of the Prophets are the golden every day passions
of man, and which, whether he knows it or not, constitute
his Subliminal Self. The play of these loftier prophetic
passions induced the Neo-Platonic Ecstacies. All spiritual
development or spiritual evolution. is always relative to
some ideal standard assumed as perfect. The relative ideal
is accepted unquestioningly for the time being as the
absolutely perfectly evolved one. This was the case with
the prophets. They had reached their own summits of the
spiritual and moral ideal. The question of their spiritual
development evolution and future spiritual progress to a
more perfect ideal did not bother them. They believed
with a fiery enthusiasm that they had reached it. Thus the
sustained lofty imperial moral passion of the prophets
John or Isaiah is the only thing that animates them. They
spake as they were moved — muscle, nerves, brain—all
shaken by the grandeur of the affirmation of their intense
passionate credulity in an already perfectly evolved spiritual
ideal. Think of the faith of Hosea in its relation to Israel.
This faith of the prophets, however, would have been im-
possible if a latent unity of their loftier passions had not
pre-existed in their Souls on which to have grafted their


THE PASSIONS OF THE PROPHETS. 95
magnificent credulity As all of the religions of the
ages have been founded on this ideal unity of the grander
passions of man and which is the sole origin of all the moral
and spiritual ideals of history. The fact that Psychologists
ignore this fact out of a fear of offending the churches of
popular religions does not alter its truth. Such splendour
of passion as exhibited in the natures of Isaiah or John is
only possible as the affirmation of an intense natural
credulity in spiritual laws. And in this lay the secret of
their superb genius. The loftier passions of man are divine
spiritual laws and spiritual forces. In vain we seek for the
laws of the divinity in books, temples, shrines, stars, and
suns. The grander spiritual passions are the only divine
spiritual laws and forces. Face the man of the book boldly
and tell him thou wilt not slaughter the spiritual glory of
the Soul of thy common brother to support his book and
the pride of the belief of his people. Books of religion are
only images and signs and the man who worships them is
an impious idolator. Better by far deify the Subliminal
Self in thy brother than a book, for the divinity of the
loftier passions of the Subliminal Self has been the mouth-
piece of the highest love ever known to man. The true
attitude of man towards moral law is an active passion of
reverence for any and all of its sources as exhibited in the
loftier mental or psychological states of the Soul not in
books, bibles and creeds which make,
“Opinion an omnipotence, whose veil
Mantles the earth with darkness, until right
And wrong are accidents, and men grow pale
Lest their own judgments should become too bright,
And their free thoughts be crimes, and earth have
Too much light.”
The higher passions of the Prophets is the ultimate
ground on which to base moral distinctions; not their local


THE PASSIONS OF THE PROPHETs. 97
is one thing; its lava another. Shall I smite, ostracise or
burn my brother because he will not bow his knee and wor-
ship my lava? Because he persists in admiring the volcano
of my Soul out of which the lava flows? Because he for
the nonce disregards the pumice of Sirach, Pantanjali,
Moses, Jesus or Habakuk? For what are traditions but
moral substances ejected from the volcanoes of Lofty Hu-
man Souls? So far in all history the aim of man has been
to make his brother a convert to his pet religious ideas.
His brother's Soul was only of value in his eyes to the
extent that it became a moral prisoner to his theory of
interpretation. Pumice worship ! Blind pumice worship all
of it ! Occasionally a modern prophet like Emerson, Car-
lyle or Ruskin rises superior to the cruel arrogance of this
pumice worship. Somehow they make their escape from
their pumice dens, their hearts untamed,
“From long infection in a den like this
Where the mind rots congenial with the abyss.”
The power by which the prophet had knowledge of moral
law was his grander inborn moral passion of Moral Love
and Moral Fear. This gave to him his internal sanction of
duty. His pain on the violation of duty. The relations of
his actions to moral law. So far as passions of Moral
Sublimity, Love and Moral Anger could be stretched to
mean Moral Faculty, they are as natural to the average
developed, civilized man as his passions of Hunger and Sex.
There can be no conscience without moral passion and feel-
ing as its foundation. A conscience in man is possible
because moral passion is possible, otherwise conscience
would have no existence. The unity of the nobler Passions
of the prophets found their affinities in the ideas about .
them. This was particularly true of their passion of Moral
Sublimity. “The doctrine of Divine Unity by collecting
all the scattered rays of beauty and excellence from every


98 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
quarter of the universe and condensing them into one over-
powering conception—by tracing the innumerable rills of
thought and feeling, to the fountain of an infinite mind—sur-
passes the most elegant and ethereal polytheism immeasur-
ably more than the sun does the cinders of the element.”
This idea of the divine unity Moses had learned in Egypt;
and when Reason bows its thought in worship to the holy
sound of the Angelus of this Faith in the Divine Unity, all
our moral problems seem solved forever. Our passion of
Moral Sublimity is at once surfeited with its Spiritual
Grandeur. No wonder the Nobler Passions of the prophets
uttered,
“Oracles which set the world in flame,
Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more.”
As all study is logically inverse to the universal;
only the loftiest universal moral genius, and subliminal
impulse of the Soul could ever have raised the mind to such
an overpowering conception as that of the Divine Unity.
All nobler passion animated by such a universal idea neces-
sarily implies the unconscious subserviency of all intellect.
Analysis of such a concept is out of the question. Reason
is helpless. Kant has long ago proved this. So far as the
unity of the nobler passions of the Human Soul is con-
cerned if we agree to simply believe in the existence of
those nobler passions which have been analytically sub-
jected to the logical ground of modern psychological science,
then I cannot believe there is any principle of moral or
spiritual good in a solitary noble passion of human nature.
For the business of psychological science is with the reac-
tion time of my thought; of my olfactory organs: not with
the unity of the grander moral passions. John Locke denies
the innate existence of the passions as moral forces. Accord-
ing to him there are no innate moral principles either as pas-
sions or anything else. The sad and unavoidable nature of


THE PASSIONS OF THE PROPHETS. 99.
all forms of analysis is to pull apart instead of uniting the
moral mature of facts. Obviously there are some forms of
ethical unity having a distinct psychological, common
origin, and which we must postulate as non-intellectual first
truths or our moral actions would be impossible. And if
we could only attempt to demonstrate the similarities of
the loftier ethical passions in the race in all peoples and
civilizations, it would not be so repulsive. But our scien-
tific demonstrations do not attempt this. Persons in any
way conversant with the ideas of Emerson, Carlyle,
Cousin, or Jacobi will see why it was that they insisted so
sincerely in believing in the developed moral unity of the
Soul. They saw clearly enough that analysis—unless
terminating in a grander synthesis—meant the negation of
the ethical and moral unity of human nature. And of
course until such forms of scientific analysis have termin-
ated their labors in a loftier synthesis or unity, their process
is always one of unavoidable moral injustice to man as man.
A psychological science of moral passion seeking to find out
the good in man in all ages and religions is the first need of
moral philosophy. The Unitarians of Boston practically
turned Emerson out of the synagogue for teaching this. In
our beliefs we have fine theories of God and heaven and hell
but none of the Soul. The Passions of the Prophets reveal
the spiritual forces of man as man. The worshipper buries
his face in his prayer book. Suddenly that which is greater
than books and beads is aroused within him. A strange
earthquake shakes the Cross in the Calvary of his Soul.
The sun of his theological knowledge is turned into dark-
ness and the moon of his old virtues into blood. His brain
reels. He has up to that moment worshipped an Extinct
Moral Past. This lightning consciousness of a Living
Moral Present smites him to the earth. His Soul has made
of him a Mystic. Henceforth he has no doubt as to how


100 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
religions originated. Only as the Soul has (as a latent
psychological principle) within it a moral force urging it to
obey and love beings and forces greater than itself and the
past can the Soul itself become greater than its own past
and its own age. And this moral force is the passion of
our Moral Sublimity. Of this passion the prophets are
types. It argues nothing against the purity and value of
the gold in a mine that quartz is there in larger quantities.
I am not after the quartz. If the gold of Sublimity, Love,
Sympathy, is only to be found in the same natures where
the natural quartz of Sex and Hunger is found, am I to
quarrel with the creator of the mine or with my brother
because of this fact, and ignore the existence of the gold 2
The temporary ignorance of the Prophet has nothing to do
with his passion of Moral Sublimity. The fact that he
obeyed the law of Sex and took to himself wives has
nothing to do with the laws of his loftier passions and the
grandeurs of his prophecies, the sublimity of his passion
of apotheosis and deification. As to the relation of
education to conscience; because a prophet's conscience
possibly took years to perfectly develop itself as the ex-
pression of his nobler passions was his Conscience any the
less natural to his Soul at birth than his Sex, which would
also take long years to develop as the expression of his
physical lower passions? Is there any law forbidding time
to regulate the growth of oaks from acorns or eagles from
their eggs? Moral philosophy considered as the science of
human duty in its application to life must therefore find its
psychological roots in the developing natural nobler passions
of the Soul. How very difficult it seems for us to realize
that such words as devil and hell—aside from any objective
meaning—often imply the natural anguish of the passions;
and that moral evil originates in their moral inharmony and
the absence of loftier affinities. This is the meaning of
Shelley when he says,
-


THE PASSIONS OF THE PROPHETS. 101
“Hell is a city much like London—
A populous and smoky city;
There all sorts of people are undone,”
and in the lines,
“Sometimes
The devil is a gentleman;
At others a bard bartering rhymes
For sack: a statesman spinning crimes.”
By the term “heart’ the old Hebrews seem to have meant
the unity of the passions. And whatever may be our views
as to what the ultimate grounds may be on which we base
the moral distinctions of life the ancients positively
asserted that as a man thinketh or determineth in his pas-
sions or heart so is he. This was the view of the Man of
Nazareth. As compared with this view we have Kant's fol-
lowing classification of Ethical Theories according to their
particular grounds on which they base their moral
distinctions.
Subjective.
External. Internal.
Education (Montaigne) Physical feeling (Epicurus)
Civil Constitution (Mande- || Moral feeling (Hutcheson)
ville)
Objective.
Perfection (Wolf and the Will of God (Crusius and
Stoics) other theological moralists)
In so far as any one of these theories take us away from
our natural moral passions, it takes us away from the
moral unity of the developed Soul. Thus it is that Malachi,
Emerson, Hosea, and Carlyle seem to revolve in double
orbits around each other. The moral unity of their grander
passions make them all one. Through this moral unity of
passion all become intelligible. Earnestness, ecstasy, in-
tensity, is always a proof of the existence of that moral
passion which reveals its own intensity and ecstasy. The


102 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
fact that I mistake a white beryl for diamond when search-
ing for diamonds only proves my desire for nothing but the
diamond. My error has not altered the nature, singleness
and purity of my moral wish. The fierceness of the pas-
sion of conviction is only a proof of the affinity of the Soul
for Truth. If error is mistaken by me for truth it only
proves the fallibility of my reason, not that the nature of
my moral passion (in itself) was wrong. The persistency
of my moral passion in its search for truth is the guarantee
that truth is in the world. A poor drunken man hath more
of God in him than a drunken creed. The man shall sober
but the creed never will. In the earlier biological evolution
of the Soul an established number of organs appear upon
the advent of definite classes of passion and each passion
obviously takes its start in a class of passions below it.
There is a metamorphosis of form. Thus the egg of Hunger
is changed to the worm of Sex and the worm of Sex to the
butterfly of Intellectual Passion. Through the evolution of
the Under-Soul do we learn the purposes of the Over-Soul.
The organs of our passions in our bodies reveal the varied
power of the Soul to create the expressions of its varied
passions in flesh. The passion of Hunger develops as its
organ the stomach. The passions of Rage and Fear evolve
as their organs, stings, fangs, tusks, horns, teeth, and
noxious odors. The passions of Sex develop their special
organs. The passion of Sympathy develops as its organ
mammary glands. The passion of Pleasure as the general
passion for the harmony of the passions with their objects
evolves the brain as its organ. Our passions, therefore, as
forms of lower and higher spiritual laws of creative force
first learn to express themselves through their forms of
living matter. These organs and forms they create for
their own expressions and uses. From the fish to the
prophet each class of passions takes its starting point in a


THE PASSIONS OF THE PROPHETS. 103
class of passions below it. The Soul has traveled no royal
road. The organs of the body have finally appeared as the
total effect of the creative activities of the varied passions
of the Soul. The lower and nobler passions are the
Platonic ideas revealing themselves in flesh. They are the
archetypal forms of life. They are the operative spiritual
laws of man. Have I not shown that what is true of the
organs of passion is true also of the special senses and in-
stincts of passions as of Taste in Hunger and Touch in Sex?
The five senses will be seen to be the evolved products of
the needs of the soul in its relation to the evolved unity of
its passions. Darwin’s “Descent of Man” has indirectly
shown that the soul has traveled upward through all the
evolutions of nature. The soul of Amos and the soul of
the reader, if this be true, may have wandered through
similar centuries. Notwithstanding Darwin so bravely
demonstrated that the changes of form in the organs of
bodies has been due, in part, to the creative activity of
passions of natural selection, nevertheless the psychologist
has not taken the hint. The prophet Buddha saw clearly
enough that passion was the creative force of life. Sweden-
borg taught the same fact. A Passion of Love is the
creator of the universe, says Jesus. Or reversing the same
amplification of ‘God is Love’ we say the Creator of the
Universe is a Passion of Love exclaiming to the Soul in
its evolution that,-
“The coming of man from the roar of the ages
Has been like the seas in the breath of the storm ;
His heart has been torn and his soul has been riven
His joy has been short and his curse has been long.
But the bow of My promise still spreads in the heavens;
I have not destroyed the great sign of My love.
I stand at the door of the ark of creation,
And take in thy world like a storm-beaten dove,
And press to My bosom the world that I love.”


104 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
All of the loftier moral passions of the Prophets are in
harmony with their belief that the Deity is capable of exer-
cising the grander ethical passions of Moral Sympathy,
Pity, Love, and Moral Wrath. Thus instead of the prin-
ciple of Justice or Equity having no foundation in Passion
it is distinctly assumed that it is based on the fellow-feel-
ing of Passion in this moral sense. The founder of politi-
cal economy as a separate branch of human knowledge
makes the passion of Sympathy the ultimate appeal as
regards the moral value of actions. Nothing according to
him is estimated aright only as we judge it from the stand-
point of sympathy with moral law. In this way we become,
or are made impartial spectators. Our natural fellow-
feeling with the sorrows and joys of others coerces us
through our own passion into a universal impartiality of
moral opinion. Our moral passion as a form of Reason,
therefore, analyzes the facts and pronounces the verdict.
The only moral element in Reason is thus derived from the
loftier passions and whose expressions of civil equities are
found in books of civil law. All forms of fellow-feeling
imply unity of passion. Feeling in harmony with the
feeling of another whether pleasurable or painful means
that the passions are a life unity shared in universally by
all men. They are the first principles or conditions which
must exist in order to make any moral order possible.
Without them ethical reasons could not exist. They con-
stitute the moral life of the Soul and give to Reason the
universality of the moral judgments. A virtue, therefore,
is not the mere name for a passing mode of consciousness
which is only of value to the individual in so far as it
enables him to be temporarily just to society. Virtue as
revealed in the unity of the nobler passions is the harmony
of the Soul with the loftier consciousness of all the Souls
in the Universe. Our grander passions are virtues. Once


106 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
which contain what is not in the Koran are dangerous. All
which contain what is in it are useless.” Of course the
same idea is constantly being expressed in similar ways
concerning the Bible. Says Ruskin, “A man may receive
impression after impression, and that vividly and with
delight. And yet, if he take no care to reason upon those
impressions and trace them to their sources he may remain
totally ignorant of the facts that produced them. Nay,
may attribute them to facts with which they have no con-
nection, or may coin causes for them that have no existence
at all. And the more sensibility and imagination a man
possesses the more likely will he be to fall into error; for
then he will see whatever he expects.” Nevertheless for
me to have any spiritual consciousness at all I must have
a succession of different spiritual feelings. Bagehot con-
tinuing his observations on the burning of the Alexandrian
Library, and of the fiery sublime spiritual faith of the
Caliph Omar, says, “Probably no one ever had an intenser
belief in any thing than Omar had in this. Yet it is
impossible to imagine it preceded by an argument. His
belief in Mahomet, in the Koran, and in the sufficiency of
the Koran probably came to him in spontaneous gushes of
emotion (passion). There may have been little vestiges of
argument floating here and there but they did not justify
the strength of the emotion, (passion). Still less did they
create it, and they hardly even excused it. . . . Prob-
ably, when the subject is thoroughly examined conviction
will be found to be one of the intensest of human emotions
(passions); and one most closely connected with the bodily
state . . . accompanied or preceded by the sensation
which Scott makes his seer describe as the prelude of a
prophecy:
“At length the fatal answer came,
In characters of living flame—


THE PASSIONS OF THE PROPHETS. 107
Not spoke in words nor blazed in scroll
But borne and branded on my soul.”
A hot flash seems to burn across the brain. Men in these
intense states of mind have altered all history, changed for
better or worse the creed of myriads, or desolated or
redeemed provinces or ages. Nor is this intensity a sign
of truth, for it is precisely strongest in those points in
which men differ most from each other. John Knox felt
it in his anti-Catholicism; Ignatius Loyola in his anti-Prot-
estantism ; and both, I suppose, felt it as much as it is
possible to feel it.” If a man eat poison instead of nutri-
tious food it does not imply that his passion of Hunger was
in any way wrong, or that proper affinities did not exist
somewhere in Nature to properly gratify the Passion. So
of a man's Passions of Moral Love and Moral Sublimity.
The intensity of belief in an error is only a proof of the
Moral Grandeur of the Passion, and of the fallibility of
Reason. Somewhere in the universe is the proper affinity
for the harmony of the Passion of Moral Sublimity. The
existence of Hunger is the infallible proof of the existence
in Nature of affinities of healthy food. So of healthy ideas
for Moral Passions. My own observation of special cases,
personal experience and a study of the experiments of
Ribot, Krishaber, M. Pierre Janet, M. M. Binet and Féré
and others, has led me to the conclusion that when any
Passion as of sex, fear, wonder or ambition, or shame, is
sustained in connection with some simple idea for a long
time that the effect is the ultimate creation of a mental
form of individuality which becomes a latent condition of
double personality capable of expressing itself as a person
through the organs of speech. Of course this latent per-
sonality upon expressing itself at any unexpected moment
would be called by a Spiritualist a “control,” or “spirit”
from another world. Its subsequent capacity of being


108 - THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
evoked by the planchette, or in any other way, and thereby
expressing the dominating passion of its character, would,
of course, corroborate the Spiritualist in his theory. An
ancient prophet would have called it an “inspiration,” the
working of “the Lord,” or an “evil spirit,” according to
the moral character of the ideas expressed. Human life, I
never weary of repeating, implies the involution, dissolu-
tion, and evolution of forms by laws of Passion. The
Passions of fear, wonder, ambition, and shame are active
creators of mental forms on the mental plane; as the
Passion of sex is an active creator of a child-form on the
physical plane. All the Passions of the Soul are in some
sense or the other creators of some species of form or the
other. To limit the creation or evolution of form to the
Passions of sex and hunger is to leave wholly unexplained
the origin of all our spiritual, moral, and mental forms and
to assert that the Passions of the Soul simply create through
sex the germ-forms of physiological matter. There is a
Passion Play going on in every nobler soul. Our grander
Passions take on form, are crucified, and burst their graves.
Our darker Passions may also take on enduring mental
personality and form within us. To illustrate my meaning
I quote the following passage from F. W. H. Myers. He
says:
“An interesting connecting link, again, is afforded by
the accounts of possession which have come down to us
from the “Ages of Faith.” I take as an example the
recently-published autobiography of Soeur Jeanne des
Anges. Soeur Jeanne was the Superior of the Ursulines of
Loudon, about 1630–1665, and was one of the most ardent
admirers, afterwards one of the fiercest enemies, of the
unfortunate Urbain Grandier, who was burnt alive in 1634,
on the charge of having bewitched the Ursuline nuns.
Her manuscript autobiography has fallen into the hands of
editors of a type which she can hardly have foreseen, Drs.


110 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
and the Biologist and Physiologist consider it equally out
of their sphere to study the passions in the light of Moral
Philosophy or Psychology. To experts in insanity the
moral passions are of course only studied from the stand-
points of insanity. To understand the seeming miracles of
the stigmata or appearance on the body of the marks of the
crucifixion the following law must be remembered. All the
Laws of Latent Passion in the Soul (being psychic or
spiritual form-forces) as related to our previously experi-
enced sensations of form, act (of themselves from within
us) on our retina, tympanum, olfactory and other special
nerve centres, according to the special law of their eccentric
projections. Professor Ladd in his Physiological Psy-
chology 385,387, speaking of our sensations in their relation
to eccentric projections says: “Sensations . . . are
psychical states whose place—so far as they can be said to
have one—is the mind. The transference of these sensa-
tions from mere mental states to physical processes located
in the periphery of the body, or to qualities of things pro-
jected in space external to the body is . . . a mental
[conquering] achievement.” Of course Professor Ladd is
dealing here purely with Sensations; not with Laws of
Passion. When we realize our sensations as taking place
in any part of our bodies, he calls such eccentric projec-
tions by the name of ‘localizations.’ When they are dis-
tant from the body he then gives to our sensations the
fuller amplitude of meaning implied in the term eccentric
projection. All our laws of Passion in their relations to
Sensations imply spontaneously acting laws of self-relating
consciousness; the stimuli of which are furnished from
within and are therefore mental. Assuming the laws of the
Passions to act according to the law of ‘figured conscious-
ness’ of Professor James of Harvard; and in connection
with the law of eccentric projection’ of Professor Ladd of


THE PASSION FOR LIBERTY. 113
by the people. In the latter case, it must be influenced by
the changes which the people may undergo in their opinions.
But the people must remember that whenever, for any
reason, the administration of their institution, or the
instruction in any one of its departments, is changed by an
influence from without—whenever effort is made to dislodge
an officer or a professor, because the political sentiment of
the majority has undergone a change, at that moment the
institution has ceased to be a university; and it cannot
again take its place in the rank of universities so long as
there continues to exist to any appreciable extent the factor
of coercion. The state has no more right than the church
to interfere with the search for truth, or with its promulga-
tion when found. The state and the church alike may have
their own schools and colleges for the training of youthful
minds, and for the spreading of a certain kind of general
intelligence, and in these it may choose what special color-
ing shall be given to the instruction. This is proper, for
example, in the military schools of the state and in the
theological schools of the church, but such schools are not
universities. They do not represent the people; they do
not come out of the people.”
The schools of the churches of course exist in the main in
order to support the old ideas and interpretation of classes
of men who are at the head of the numberless scriptural
hierarchies and oligarchies of the country. These schools
are not the expressions of the universal liberty of thought of
the masses. Thomas Jefferson, referring to the functions
of the university, as distinct from the schools of oligarchies,
said they were :
“To form the statesmen, legislators, and judges, on
whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so
much to depend.
“To expound the principles and structures of government,
the laws which regulate the intercourse of nations, those
formed principally for our own government, and a sound
spirit of legislation, which, banishing all unnecessary


THE PASSION FOR LIBERTY. 117
Mountain. Is any man foolish enough to suppose that the
divine worth of a man, independent of his Puritan or
Catholic views, would be considered sufficient to procure
him a municipal appointment in Boston? What is true of
Boston, is, in a measure, true of every other American city.
The only hope for Liberty is in a profounder education of
the tendencies of the passions of human nature in their
relations to society. The thoughtful charity of those psy-
chological educators who begin their labors in the very
foundations of the passions is immeasurably praiseworthy.
If the liberty of Democracy means “in general, the supremacy
of the people; government for and by those governed,’ the
class systems of religious absolutisms must learn the new
value of the individual to humanity; apart from their fierce
and violent desires to consider the individual a thing of
value only as he can be used to advance the interest of
“our people.” This can only be done through a system of
education recognizing in the individual, divinity. The Soul
must take its place above the book; and the laws of the
Soul must be considered first. Sociology must be reached
through a Broader Psychology. The Soul of a modern man
must be held and regarded more sacred than the books of
Jews, Christians, Roman Catholic, or Protestants. The
hope of the race lies in the deeper study of the divine laws
of the individual soul and in its intrinsic moral worth rather
than in the propagation of the interpretations and beliefs of
old books. Nevertheless the only solution to the age long
fight for the ascendancy of religious creeds in their compet-
itive attempts to control the ethical and religious teaching
of the public schools of Massachusetts or any other state is
to allow a perfect equity of liberty for the Israelite, Catholic,
and Protestant alike. As in Germany; each church should
be allowed so much liberty and equitable time and freedom
each week to teach their own children ethics in their own


118 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
way. It may, in after generations, remain to be seen, how
long it will be before America (as well as Europe) will
grow tired of the ancient, bloody, fierce, and terrible com-
petitive systems of the old church interpretations. Never-
theless, it is a public crime to tax the Israelite, Catholic, or
Protestant for schools in which he is not allowed the slight-
est ethical representation.
If a part of the munificence of Carnegie, Morgan, Rocke-
feller and other American millionaires, was expended
towards the encouragement of that grander, higher scientific
scholarship which produces specific and greater contribu-
tions to the world's knowledge, America would quickly lead
the world in the Liberty of Truth. But American youth
go to German Universities. The American professor of
the American University, is not encouraged, has no rewards,
no approbation for distinct scientific discovery. He is a
mere drudge and has to spend the most of his time in class
drudgery. America at her present gait and by her present
methods of encouraging genius is not likely to develop
many Newtons or Galileos.
CHAPTER XII.
THE PASSIONS AND SPIRITUALISM.
“Ye spirits—
Whom I have sought in darkness and in light—
Ye, who do compass earth about and dwell
In subtler essence—ye to whom the tops
Of mountains inaccessible are haunts
And earth's and ocean's caves familiar things
I call upon ye by the written charm
Which gives me power upon you—Rise! appear!” Byron.
“The only magic I know is the magic of the heart—of the passions; a
natural witchcraft that conquers the world.—Corelli.
A few years ago among the persons interested in trying
to solve the problem of Spiritualism, and who were identi-


THE PASSIONS AND SPIRITUALISM. 119
fied as officers of the British Society for Psychical Research,
were the following:
- President, Professor Balfour Stewart, F. R. S., The
Owens College, Manchester.
Vice-Presidents, Arthur J. Balfour, Esq., M.P., 4 Carl-
ton-gardens, S.W.
Professor W. F. Barrett, Royal College of Science,
Dublin.
The Right Rev. the Bishop of Carlisle, Rose Castle,
Carlisle.
John R. Holland, Esq., 57 Lancaster-gate, London, W.
Richard H. Hutton, Esq., Englefield Green, Staines.
Rev. W. Stainton Moses, 21 Birchington-road, London,
N. W.
Hon. Roden Noel, 57 Anerles Park, London, S. E.
Lord Rayleigh, D.C.L., F.R.S., Terling Place, Witham,
Essex.
The Right Rev. the Bishop of Ripon, The Palace, Ripon.
Professor Henry Sidgwick, Trinity College, Cambridge.
W. H. Stone, Esq., M.B., 14 Dean's-yard, Westminster,
S. W.
Hensleigh Wedgwood, Esq., 31 Queen Anne Street,
London, W.
Honorary members, Professor J. C. Adams, LL.D.,
F.R.S., The Observatory, Cambridge.
William Crookes, F.R.S., 7 Kensington Park Gardens,
London, W.
The Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., Hawarden,
North Wales.
John Ruskin, LL.D., D.C.L., Brantwood, Coniston,
Lancashire.
Lord Tennyson, Farringford, Freshwater, Isle of Wight.
Alfred Russel Wallace, F.R.G.S., Mutwood Cottage,
Frith Hill, Goldalming.


120 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
G. F. Watts, R.A., Little Holland House, London, W.
Now, surely within the past quarter of a century some
sort of wider psychological view of human nature must
have been developed from such a vast number of experi-
ments. The question now resolves itself into Broader Psy-
chology versus Spiritualism. If there is any general broad
principle taught me from the evidence submitted by a mass
of the testimony, it is to the effect that the power of
mental construction referred to on pages 35 and 36 may also
embrace the construction of species of moral being. That
is ; the synthesis of our memorized experiences of certain
ideas, thoughts and conceptions, considered as affinities for
our passions of Love, Veneration, and Sublimity, may
automatically form within us the nucleus of a newly devel-
oped personality, Self, or Soul. This new Soul or Self
may sub-consciously live on in the body in unconscious or
conscious companionship with the Self which forms the
Soul of our daily experiences. This Self may give evidence
that it possesses knowledge, capacity of sensation, and
mechanical power to move the muscles of the body.
My own experiences alluded to in this chapter,
obviously have their origin here. In the April number
of Harper's Magazine of 1900, Dr. James Hervey Hyslop,
Professor of Psychology Columbian University, in
stating the results of research into Spiritualism states, that
a recent record in England and Wales was taken of the
appearances of the forms of persons after death. He says:
“The committee consisted of Professor Sidgwick of
Cambridge University; Mrs. Sidgwick, his wife, and sister
of Lord Salisbury; Mr. Frank Podmore, the keenest critic
that psychical research ever had ; Mr. F. W. H. Myers, the
secretary of the society; aud Miss Alice Johnson, of Newn-
ham College, Cambridge. The object of the census was to
test the hypothesis of chance as an explanation of such
phenomena. The committee rejected 270 of the instances


122 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
would be non-existent. Therefore the Soul in creating
forms creates the condition of her own intuition; for it is
only through intuitions that she is capable of rising to con-
ceptions. The permanence of the Soul therefore, beyond
life depends on its form-creative nature. As Kant says:
“Its permanence in life is evident per se, inasmuch as the
thinking being (as man) is to itself, at the same time an
object of the external senses.” My relation to space and
time may be shown in the following table;
1. I create Forms,
2. As Chemical Substances,
3. As Imponderable Substances,
4. As Mental and Moral Images,
during all the years of my life. I create forms; therefore I
am. Now, the essence of a form-creative power on any
plane, chemical, mental or moral, implies that of the com-
bination and connection of some pre-existing class of things
which are brought by the form-creative power into wholly
new relations. In its strictest sense, the most that Death
implies, is, that there is a cessation of the creation and use
of the old solid chemical forms of which the body is com-
posed. Of the Soul's creative relation after death to the
imponderable matter of the universe, Science has not yet
spoken. What new relations it then sustains to matter is
not known. Inductive Science, not dogmatism, is the only
torch for this sort of darkness. I may be unable to explain
a thinking nature existing after death; but I am not at
quite such a loss when I attempt to explain a form-creating
nature as surviving the experiences of life. Particularly
when by Life is meant the involution, dissolution, and
evolution of forms by laws of passion. That some of the
forms created by the Soul are capable of being dissolved
and decomposed is beyond question. These forms are
extensive or objective quantities. But the Soul's unity of


124 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
when the Soul exerts its unity of form-attractive forces, by
the means of which it first attracts to itself those inorganic
ponderable and imponderable forms, by the means of which
it evolves for itself organic form. But for this law of invo-
lution of forms, the 'spermatozoon and ovum could never
become a 9-pound baby, or the 9-pound baby a man of 150
pounds. As the limits of knowledge are the limits of
experience, it is obvious that if, after death, no single at-
tractive force of the Soul exists by the means of which the
Soul can attract to itself forms on any plane, then is a
conscious hereafter an impossibility. Admit that all the
attractive forces for forms on mental and imponderable
planes do not cease at death, then we have a basis to prove
the simple or multiplex personality of the Soul after death.
The uses to which the attracted forms are put during life
are those of creating a community of phenomena; of mental
forms; of duplicates of Nature. By referring to pages 35
and 36, this principle is explained. Professor William
James and B. P. Bowne have there shown that our mental
forms are our self-created forms. The unity of the physi-
cal, mental, and moral passions as attractive psychic forces
of form, imply conditions, whereby, through a community
of Senses, a community of substances is made possible to
self-comprehension. This community of Senses are adap-
tive duplicates of conditions of Nature. By a duplicate
construction of what the Soul knows to exist as the forms
of the physical universe, the Soul is enabled to discover
its chemical, inponderable, mental, and moral affinities.
But this law of the duplicative construction of forms does
not end with copies of physical things. Thoughts, concep-
tions, and ideas, are forms. This power of mental con-
struction referred to on pages 35 and 36 may also embrace
species of moral being. Or, in the language of Kant, “a
dynamical division of parent souls as intensive quantities


THE PASSIONS AND SPIRITUALISM. 125
produce other souls, while the former repaired the loss thus
sustained with new matter.” Strange it is, that the chimera
of to-day so often becomes the science of to-morrow. Mul-
tiplex personality implies multiplex creation of moral
forms. Now, I prefer to interpret the phenomena of Spir-
itualism and the like, assisted by this assumed chimera of
Kant, rather than to accept the popular interpretations of it.
The personal investigation of psychic phenomena or spirit-
ualism has cost me money, many hundred miles of travel,
and many long months of valuable time. Through these
experiences I have learned the necessity of studying the
Passions in their relations to Psychic Phenomena from the
two distinct standpoints of Moral Philosophy and Psychol-
ogy. Of course in studying the Passions in their relation
to Psychic Phenomena from the stand-point of insanity
experts, Psychology, or Psychic Research we are looking at
or recognizing the Passions in or by one of their least
important attributes. It confers no moral dignity on
human nature to be catalogued in this style. I have as-
sumed the grander passions of man to be his divine motives.
It is therefore only the moral philosopher (who can deeply
feel the spiritual, moral, and ethical dignity of the nobler
Passions in their relations to Psychic phenomena) who can
really be just in his verdict. The truth of the passions in
their bearing on Psychic Phenomena when studied from the
standpoint of Psychology alone often represent the Passions
in their inferior moral manifestations. Moral Philosophy
assumes the Passions to be the Ethical Forces of
Life. The student of Psychical research often regards
them only of value in so far as they afford a basis for
Psychic Phenomena capable of being catalogued as abnor-
anal. The mystical experiences leading me to this view
of the Passions were published in London in 1896 as “The
case of Albert Le Baron with an introduction by William


126 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
James of Harvard University,” and may to-day be found
among the printed matter and proceedings of the London
Society for Psychical Research. The ethical and psycho-
logical nature of these experiences may be gathered from the
following paragraph of the New York Herald of Feb. 14,
1897. The reviewer says: “The strange experiences of
Mr. Le Baron submitted to the Society for Psychical
Research by Professor James of Harvard College afford one
of the most interesting and truly marvellous cases of super-
natural endowments which have ever been investigated by
that learned society. The remarkable personal powers pos-
sessed by Mr. Le Baron, as the gentleman is called by
Professor James, might easily be regarded as a miracle.”
As I look back on those experiences and the Religious
Ecstacy involved, I can now (upon deeper reflection), see
how impossible such experiences would have been if my
Moral Passions had not been brought suddenly into play.
Among the prior conditions of Passion, which I now
think were sub-consciously involved were the following:
1. Intense previous desire to escape from all my old
narrower religious associations previously connected with
intense mental horror and suffering. 2. Previous fear of
old religious enemies. 3. Latent modification of religious
ideas in me as latent forms of psychic force whose subcon-
scious power I was not aware of. 4. Telepathy. 5. Prayer.
6. An expectation and profound faith in the miraculous as
posited by my awakened passion of Moral Sublimity. 7.
An unconsciously, self-created second soul. 8. A great
awakening of my Passions of Moral Grief and Self-abase-
ment. 9. Hope for a new Religious Ideal. Profound
awakening of the Passion of Spiritual Awe. Hence Moral
Fear, Love, Grief, Sublimity, and Adoration.
In other parts of this work I have shown that certain
Passions are capable of awakening certain Senses; that is,


THE PASSIONS AND SPIRITUALISM. 127
our Senses are operated upon by our Passions from within ;
and we feel and see things in a psychic instead of a physical
way. Our Passions in this sense create sensations of Space
through feeling of the Sense of Touch. In the chapter on
the Passions of Hunger and Sex I have explained this prin-
ciple. I add this to what I have said there, namely, that
as the Physical Passions are capable of creating and exercis-
ing the Senses, so are the Moral Passions. The unity of the
Moral Passions have not inaptly been called the Subliminal
Self. They are the latent modifications of all our past
moral experiences. These modifications tend to assume
new moral personalities in us like the personalities in our
dreams. They may therefore, under certain conditions,
act on our Senses. In this way Socrates called his Sub-
liminal Self a God or Demon; for it acted on his Sense of
Hearing. Mahomet and Swedenborg went through similar
experiences. Mahomet hears the voices of bells and men.
“Getting religion” by the Shakers, Quakers, and Metho-
dists often imply similar phenomena; and insanity—that is
certain forms of it—has its foundations in the same sub-
jective cause. Our ignorance of the mental powers of the
Soul leads us to attribute the cause to something outside of
us. Circumstances conspire to aid us in our self-delusion.
First ; the voice of our own Subliminal Self makes its claim
to our senses as being something apart from ourselves.
Second; popular spiritual education teaches that no noble
inspiration originates in the Soul itself but comes from the
Lord. Third ; the existence of the law of Telepathy adds to
the idea that all such phenomena originate in causes outside
of us. I am reminded of a few lines in one of the dramas
of Coleridge.
“Court. What! dost thou not believe that oft in dreams
A voice of warning speaks prophetic to us?
Wal. There is no doubt that there exists such voices.


THE PASSIONS AND SPIRITUALISM. 129
that of an extraneous divine spirit operating on them.
Enthusiasm was inspiration from without. Not the expres-
sion of the loftiér unfolding of the Nobler Passions from
within. Enthusiasm as the composition of the word im-
plies, is “divine inspiration.”
“These rays that slant in through these gorgeous
Windows from yon bright orb—though colored
As they pass are they not light?”
Man has never been able to rid himself of the identifica-
tion of his own Grander Passions with that of a Divinity
operating on him. Hence we personify and objectify the
Subliminal Self as the Holy Spirit. The fact that man has
for ages identified the natural divinity of his own Grander
Passions in a mistaken way as being that of an extraneous
divine spirit operating in him is no proof that an extraneous
divine spirit does not exist.
“Ord. Believe you then no preternatural influence 2
Believe you not that spirits throng around us
Ter. Say rather that I have imagined it
A possible thing; and it has soothed my soul
As other fancies have ; but ne'er seduced me
To traffic wtth the black and frenzied hope
That the dead hear the voice of witch or wizard.”
Albeit such is our reverence for the unseen that man
would sooner worship the foulest devil out of his skin than
the cleanest saint in it. The possibility of Experience
implies the Conservation of our past Mental Energy. And
the possibility of our Present Experience depends on a law
which can insulate this Conserved Past from the Present,
so that it does not unnecessarily appear in our conscious-
ness. Our Passions have to do most with the Present and
the Future. That is in their operations as Selective Mental
Force operating through the Senses to accomplish their
objects in Nature. To completely insulate the Passions
from their Conserved Past (as embodied in their Memories)


THE PASSIONS AND SPIRITUALISM. 131
That we looked round perplexed upon each other
Not knowing whether it were craziness
Or whether it were a God that spake in him.”
It would seem unwise to seek for outside causes (as holy
or unholy spirits) for our thoughts until we had thoroughly
applied the principle of the Conservation of Energy to our
own Moral Passions and their old past evolved mental pro-
ducts of Conception. With Swedenborg the Passions con-
stitute the basis of Life. “All things in the universe
arrange themselves to each person anew according to his
Ruling Love.” And with Swedenborg agrees Alexander
Pope,
“Seek then the ruling passion; there alone,
The wild are constant and the cunning known;
The fool consistent and the false sincere,
Priests, princes, women, no dissembling here.”
In Swedenborg's opinion Passion is the one power by
which two Souls may be instantly brought together after
death. Whatever of truth there may be in mental healing
is based on the two following principles. 1. That the
Passions (as mental forces) are capable of modifying the
feelings of Pain and Pleasure as realized through the
Thoughts and Senses. 2. That the Loftier Passions are
capable of being acted upon through ideas presented by
Telepathy. Of course mental electricity may play free
through the sky as well as obey the laws of its nervous
wires and batteries. The moral sentiment or the Unity of
the Grander Moral and Spiritual Passions, Emerson assures
us carries the possibilities of innumerable new Christianities
in its bosom. The soul in its diviner aspects is the origin
of its own spiritual and moral revelations.
Life has unceasingly been defined by me as the involu-
tion, evolution, and dissolution of forms by the Passions.
This is another way of saying that the law of the Passions
implies the evolution and dissolution of form. If we choose


132 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
to regard the archetypal creative ideas of Plato as creative
passions of form, our special passions would possess special
powers to create special material and mental forms. Thus,
chyle is a specially developed material form specially self-
evolved by the special Passion of Hunger. Animal seed is
a specially developed material form specially self-evolved
by the special Passion of Sex. The milk of a mother is a
specially developed material form specially self-evolved by
the special Passion of Love. The deadly poisonous red
sediment from the breath is a specially developed material
form specially self-evolved by the Passion of Anger.
Showing that the Passions of Dissolution or Destruction as
of Hate and Anger also develop their special material forms.
Obviously the poison of serpents is a specially developed
material form of substance specially self-evolved by their
passions of Fear and Anger. As the law of the Passions,
therefore, imply the self evolution of Forms both material
and mental and spiritual, I cannot exempt from this self-
creative law our religious and spiritual ideas; which, as the
created forms of the Spiritual and Moral Passions are
revealed in the prophecies of Prophets, the splendid dreams
of Mystics and Saviours, and the trances and ecstacies of
Spiritualists. So that by the word Form in its relation
to the Biology, Psychology, and Moral Philosophy of the
Passions, I of course, mean all those newly developed
material substances, concepts, figures, and shapes self-
evolved by the Soul. By a Soul I mean a Unity of creative
Passions and Senses capable of self-evolving forms of
matter and concepts. In some way or the other, by inner
senses and light, we are able to see our own self-created
figures, shapes, and mental forms in our dreams. These, if
We could project them from ourselves so that others could
see them, would be called spirits. Milton has this to say,


THE PASSIONS AND SPIRITUALISM. 133
“Spirits when they please
Can either sex assume or both ; so soft
And uncompounded is their essence pure.
- - - In what shape they chose
Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure
Can execute their aery purposes.”
Whatever may be Milton's meaning it is obvious that we
must allow to the Soul a greater creative scope.
“There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Passion implies the automatic creation by the Soul of
Self-similar forms both molecular and mental. According
to the moral and physical nature of the Creative
Passion will be the nature of the evolved molecular and
moral form. Our spiritual ideas are self-created by our
special classes of Spiritual Passions. A spiritual idea
is a subjective product of Sublimated Passion and not a
mental image of an external object. Of course a mental
image of an external object is also called an idea. My
spiritual ideas, however, are conceptualisms created by my
Spiritual Passions and to which I may give such names as
Liberty, Happiness, Love, State, Creation, God, Con-
science, Salvation. These words then are names for the
spiritual relations of the Soul to its spiritual existence.
Not for the mental images of such external objects as
Clouds, Seas, Trees, Mountains, or Human Bodies. The
one set of words explain physical things, the others spiritual.
Our Spiritual Words are material forms, figures, and
physical shapes, created by us to describe to each other
our personal spiritual relations to the special spiritua
things we agree to think and talk about.
“I have known one word hang starlike
O'er a weary waste of years;
And it only shone the brighter
Looked at through a mist of tears.”


134 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
All spiritual and religious vocabularies are therefore
self-created forms, evolved as the temporary sign needs of
our Grander Spiritual Passions. A spiritual word is always
a spiritually created form. When it is in the memory
it is a mental image of both an internal and external form.
The idea uses the word as its sign of the internal spiritual
state of the Soul. The law of the Spiritual and Physical
Passions always imply the evolution of some form; and all
religious words are developed forms. Each Passion creat-
ing its own class of forms. The power by which the Soul
can create an image of visible forms, is its space creative
and divine form-creative and form-producing law. In
Kant's words; “The image is a product of the empirical
faculty.” It evolves its “image to a conception.” The
physical or mental form, figure, or shape evolved by a
Special Passion will be always self-similar to the special
moral or physical nature of the Passion which develops it.
“Nature iterates her means perpetually on successive
planes. In the old aphorism, nature is always self-similar.
In the plant, the eye or germinative point opens to a leaf,
then to another leaf, with a power of transforming the leaf
into radicle, stamen, pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed.
The whole art of the plant is still leaf on leaf without end,
the more or less of heat, light, moisture and food determin-
ing the form it shall assume. . . . Creative force, like
a musical composer, goes on universally repeating a simple
air or theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten
thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven
with the chant.” -
A serious study of facts giving rise to a sound theory
of special physiological and chemico-human substances
as discovered to be the evolved special products of
Special Passions would help us to unlock the meaning of
the Soul's creative relation to the physical universe. The


THE PASSIONS AND SPIRITUALISM. 135
foundations of Ethics and Religions are in Psychology and
in its relation to Moral Philosophy. Says Young,-
“A worm a god | I tremble at myself
And in myself am lost At home a stranger
Thought wanders up and down, surprised aghast,
And wondering at her own.”
The question of spiritual materialization resolves itself
into the question whether the psychic forces of the Soul can
be so developed that they can automatically project from
the brain into space the psychic forms of its secondary per-
sonalities. This can be proven only by scientific experi-
ments. In this work I have made the Senses subsidiary to
the Passions. Not the Passions subsidiary to the Senses.
Speaking of the discovery of Gravity I have elsewhere
said that Kant said it “would have remained forever
undiscovered if Copernicus had not ventured on the
experiment — contrary to his Senses but still just—
of looking for the observed movements not in the
heavenly bodies but in the spectator.” Adopting the
revolutionary method of Copernicus, I venture on the
experiment of looking for the observed religious and ethical
movements of ages not in outside books and forces and
spirits impressing the Senses; but in the unfolding by
evolution of the Grander Spiritual Passions to a more
supreme spiritual Liberty. Thus whilst a Conservative
Tyranny has always attempted to forge the chains of
Spiritual Freedom; nevertheless this evolving unity of the
Grander Passions proved a victor.
“While he deems thee bound
The links are shivered and the prison walls
Fall outward: terribly thou springest forth,
As springs the flame above a burning pile :
And shouted to the nations, who return
Thy shoutings while the pale oppressor flies.”


136 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
The old philosophies always made the Senses in Psy-
chology of more importance than the Passions. But by
wresting from the Grander Passions all power of affinitive
moral choice and throwing the importance of the origin of
Knowledge on the Senses as awakened by books as external
objects we have succeeded in destroying every vestige of
moral free-will. In the sphere of religion this has its ad-
vantage. That external object we call The Book is ob-
viously in public religious opinion of vastly more impor—
tance than the Soul.
To admit the Soul possesses a Sublime Unity of Grand
Spiritual Passions capable of the self-origination of forms
of new Sublime religious ideas would be to detract from the
pride of our old book beliefs. Hence we justly prefer it a
wiser thing to damn the Creative Moral Soul and save our
Flying Rolls, Korans, Vedas, Apocraphas, Encyclicals,
Traditions, Testaments and Secret Doctrines. The Spirit-
ualists gladly assist the Orthodox World in this belittling
of the creative power of the Soul to create spiritual and
moral forms, figures and concepts. Because the Spiritual-
ist prefers to attribute his own Moral Soul Powers to in-
coming Spirits of Indian Chiefs and other visitors from his
so-called Summer Land. Whilst the following paragraph
will be of interest simply to the students of Kant, it will
nevertheless explain a principle relating to Sensations and
Passions as conditioning phases of psychic phenomena.
Dry and abstruse as Kant's sentence is, it is nevertheless
intelligible to those who have had the time to study his
philosophy. “In all phenomena, the Real; that which is
an object of Sensation, has Intensive Quantity. That is,
has a degree.” Any exercise of one of the Senses is a Sen-
sation. Any exercise of one of the Passions is an Emo-
tion. I have elsewhere pointed out the difference between
our feelings of Sensation and our feelings of Passion. Our


THE PASSIONS AND SPIRITUALISM. 137
Passions, as of Sex and Hunger, imply the anticipations
of the perceptions of the chemical forms which are their
special form affinities. There are only three classes of
forms capable of being perceived by the human mind as
affinities of Life. The first class are physical forms. The
Second class are mental forms. The third class are moral
forms. Life; as the involution, dissolution and evolution
of forms by laws of Passion implies the development of
form on all these three planes. Our Knowledge of physical
forms comes through our Sensations. As I have elsewhere
insisted, our Sensations are both inductional and deductional.
The distinction is one of the most vital in Psychology. The
inductional activity of any one of our Senses and of their
Sensations as an anticipation of Perception is caused by the
Passions and the Will. The deductional activity of our
Sensations is caused by the mathematical relation of physical
stimuli. The inductional activity of the Senses is due to
the fact that they are operated upon by classes of inductional
Passion. Our more Spiritual Senses have appeared in the
degree that the inductional activity of our Spiritual Passions
have posited them. We perceive all forms, figures and
shapes in but two ways. Mental and physical. The in-
ductional activity of our Passions and Will enable us to see
mental forms, figures and shapes, in our own minds, or in
those of others, through the internal relation of our Senses
to mental forms. The external relation of the Senses to
physical forms puts us into relation with the physical uni-
verse. This internal relation of the Senses to mental forms
may be proven by experiments of Trance, Ecstasy, Clair-
voyance, Dreams, or by closing the eyes and watching after
images, and the figures that appear when we fall asleep.
To these mental forms Kant would give the name of ‘Schema'.
Of course such mental forms can be projected from the
body. This internal power of the Senses in trance is


138 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
usually greater than their external power. I do not by
any means deny the possibility of communication with the
dead; but I do insist that the Soul possesses the power of
using its Senses in this internal way to perceive the mental
forms in its own mind and in those of others. It is not im–
possible but that Prof. James H. Hyslop of Columbia Uni-
versity, and Professor Richard Hodgson, professor of psy-
chology at Cambridge, England, may therefore have been
mistaken as to the “Piper” experiments. As the Soul after
death could not see physical things in its old external way
of the Senses; therefore unless the Senses possess this in-
ternal power of perception, consciousness of forms after
death would be impossible. The error has arisen in two
ways. By limiting the power of the Senses to the percep-
tion of physical objects; and by failing to note the dif-
ference between our inductional and deductional Sensations.
So far as the peculiar phenonema of mental healing (as an
American idea) may be connected with phases of psychic
phenomena, it is worthy of patient, severe, and bold scien-
tific analysis. The trouble with the religious aspect of men-
tal healing, (as with ‘Christian Science') is that it ignores
the rights of Caesar; and denying the future evolution of
knowledge concerning the Soul, contents itself with the
infallibility of the Science and Health of Mary Baker Eddy.
All psychological knowledge has been therein revealed.
Future growth in knowledge is impossible. This is the sad
side to it all. Not that a splendid optimism does not run
through the faith. And its joyous contentment of course
renders the knowledge of psychological laws all unnecessary.
As soon as ideas take on this strictly religious form, the
reason seems to become instantly paralyzed, the evidences of
reason are scouted, the painfully acquired knowledge of the
ages is scorned, and a fierce, joyful credulity in unanalyzed
fact is considered the only divine road for the soul. That


140 THE wisdom of PASSION.
group of money-loving, genial Christian Scientists in the
Tremont Building in Boston gravely insisting on the mental
treatment of a precarious copper mining scheme. The mine
was to be treated according to “Science’; ‘Christian Science’
of course. Any other kind of “Science' would have been
inmeasurably pitied. Now, though the good people of this
“Christian Science’ group had the good wishes of ‘Mother’
in their project, and valuable time has flown since then, it
is well known to the group that the stock of the Company
at the January opening of 1901 was neither dividend pay-
ing or even listed. Now, mental healing, either has, or it
has not, divinely defined limitations. Fanaticism is the
belief that there are no divinely defined limitations. For
that matter every one of us when seized with any spiritual
or other idea which we pursue with zeal and delight, are
likely to “run it into the ground,” and to unconsciously seek
to avoid everything that would painfully teach us its laws
of sensible limitation. Every church idea has the same
tendency to exaggerations in its own ‘essentials.’
As the words Passion and Sensation are often used
loosely as meaning the same thing it is necessary to state
what constitutes a feeling of Passion as distinct from a
feeling of Sensation.
A Passion is a feeling of
attraction or repulsion and
implies the activity of some
superphysical force of the
Soul to attract or repulse
forms.
A Sensation is a feeling of
any one of the five senses.
A feeling of Sense at
birth — as of Touch to the
breast by an hungry infant
—is due to the stimulus of
A feeling of Passion at
birth—as of Hunger—is an
attractive feeling demand-
ing union with matter for the


THE PASSIONS AND SPIRITUALISM.
141
the attraction of Hunger.
A feeling of Sensation is a
primary perception of a
physical or mental object by
one of the senses.
A Sensation is due to some
cause either without or with-
in us stimulating one or
more of the Five Senses to
action. Continuous Sensa-
tions may be aroused by our
other powers from within us;
as sensations of sounding
voices or sights. Examples
of this class of sensation is
seen in the mystical experi-
ences of Socrates, Sweden-
borg, Mahomet, and of in-
sane people.
purpose of evolving the
forms.
A feeling of attractive
Passion is a longing to at-
tract an object or idea pre-
sented by a Sensation so as
to develop a mental form
like unto it.
A Passion is a conscious
spontaneous force which we
class under such names as
Anger, Sex, Sublimity,
Love, or Hunger and which
is capable of attracting, re-
pulsing and reconstructing
the atoms and ideas which
we take into us as food or
thoughts. A Passion is
capable of exciting the
Senses to action and of creat-
ing sensations. Hunger re-
constructs atoms, Love re-
constructs ideas.
I herewith append nine explanations of the leading terms
used in my psychology.
LIFE.-The involution, dissolution, and evolution of
chemical, mental and moral forms by laws of Passion.
SOUL. —A unity of form-creating Passions, using Senses
and Conceptions to attract, evolve, and repulse forms.
PASSION.—A classified form of psychic force possess-
ing the power through Sense of attracting chemical, mental,
and moral forms to the Self; of re-creating the same ; and
of re-projecting the same into the human body and out of
the human body.


144 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
motive. The idea, that because the purpose of the novel is to
delight, it must lack the essentially meliorative, is a notion
born of that ancient indifferentism to human suffering for
art's sake; and of which Nero remains the classic type.
Assuming the truthfulness of the statement that the Czar
told Turgenieff that the freeing of the serfs was the result of
thoughts aroused by the reading of the novelist's story, what
an argument this is for the novel with a meliorative motive.
It is useless to rave against the pleasurable excitement to be
derived from the romanticist novel of the popular Charles
Garvice type. But all this sort of aristocratic story telling
is full of very sad peril to foolish young women. Where
the more selfish passions are in ascendancy, novel reading
of this type simply aids to conserve selfish absurd expecta-
tion. A false idea of excellence is maintained, and a false
reward of life. The half-truths embodied in these ideals
only render the illusion the more dangerous. Taste is the
development of affinities for the more spiritual passions;
and all mental development implies a classification of
passion-development. The finer or lower passions of a
person qualifies their taste; and taste selects the kind of
novel preferred by the passion. Hobbes used to say that
our passions or desires simply use our thoughts to spy out
the things or ideas they want. So that to the psychologi-
cal sociologist the study of a person's or a nation's preferred
fiction, is simply an unfolding to him of the panorama of
those form-affinities, which as ideas, are the preferred
relations of the person's or the nation's moral passion.
For example, assume the passion of Courage to imply the
passionate psychic force of moral repulsion. In the novel
the play of this passion will unfold itself as the necessary
activity of a psychic force essential to the removal of those
obstacles which may hinder such passions as Sex or Ambi-
tion from securing their wished for affinities. The unity of


146 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
cannot do better than to stubbornly deny the unity of the
senses of sight, taste, smell, hearing, and touch. Make
them take their own medicine. Deny the unity of the
organs of the body, too. Agree with them if necessary that
there is nothing synthetic in nature. Obviously the novel,
taking for its field what is usual and likely, depends on the
penetration of the writer as to how far it shall approach the
romance in the expression of noble unusual passion. Try
to divorce the technic of a novel from its matter as much as
we may, ‘the manner of telling to the matter of the tale,”
we shall nevertheless find that its ultimate technic and theme
always centres around the development and experience of a
few of the simple passions. This is true whether it be the
work of Dickens, Bret Harte, Scott, Rudyard Kipling, M.
Paul Bourget, or Gabriele d’ Annunzio. The future of the
novel is an inviting conjecture. What we know is always in
an inverse ratio to what we don't know. Knowledge and
experience yet to come will soften many of our old smart,
cruel dogmatisms. The epic has gone. The drama is
partly remodeled on the lines of “Ben Hur,’ ‘Trilby,’
• Uncle Tom's Cabin,’ ‘The Only Way,’ ‘Sapho,” “When
Knighthood was in Flower,’ ‘To Have and to Hold,”
“Jekyll and Hyde,’ and “The Christian.” w
Perhaps the only sad side to American fiction is its
lack of appreciation of the distinctly philosophical principle
as a basis for sincerity. Emerson says: “In England and
America, one may be an adept in the writing of a Greek or
Latin poet, without any poetic taste or fire. That a man
has spent years on Plato and Proclus, does not afford a
presumption that he holds heroic opinions, or undervalues
the fashions of his town. But the German nation have the
most ridiculous good faith on these subjects; the student,
out of the lecture-room, still broods on the lessons; and the
professor cannot divest himself of the fancy that the truths


OUR PASSIONS AND NOVELS. 147
of philosophy have some application to Berlin and Munich.
This earnestness enables them to outsee men of much more
talent. Hence, almost all the valuable distinctions which
are current in higher conversation, have been derived to us
from Germany. Men distinguished for wit and learning, in
England and France, adopt their study and their side with a
certain levity, and are not understood to be very deeply en-
gaged, from grounds of character, to the topic or the part
they espouse.” Personally, in the writing of this book, in
order, in America, to protect myself, I had to humorously
assume to all of my acquaintances that my soul was not en-
gaged in the work at all; but that the writing of it was a mere
matter of philosophical amusement, or business speculation.
Any revelation of moral earnestness on my part would have
instantly brought upon me the pitying scorn of them all.
Among the more active men of distinction recently writing
in England were the following: They include, in the
order of their signatures, J. M. Barrie, Walter Besant,
Augustine Birrell, James Bryce, Austin Dobson, Conan
Doyle, Edmund Gosse, R. B. Haldane, Thomas Hardy,
Frederic Harrison, “John Oliver Hobbs,’ Henry James, R.
C. Jebb, Andrew Lang, W. E. H. Lecky, M. London, F.
W. Maitland, Alice Meynell, John Morley, F. W. Myers,
J. Payn, Frederick Pollock, Anne Thackeray Ritchie,
Henry Sidgewick, Leslie Stephen, Algernon Charles Swin-
burne, Mary A. Ward, G. F. Watts, Theodore Watts,
Dunton Wolseley.
Whilst in glancing over the Nations, the greatest novelists
of the hour are possibly Tolstoi and Turgenieff, neverthe-
less the people of America now give the precedence to
American authors. America no longer looks to England
for its fiction. The demand for popular novels is remarka-
ble in the extreme. The sale of very recent novels is
phenomenal. When we consider the gradual sales of


148 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
standard works, these sales of books lately issued is most
astonishing. Here is a list of some books and number of
copies sold : Eben Holden, 250,000; Alice of Old Vin-
cennes, 175,000; The Reign of Law, 130,000; The Master
Christian, 90,000; The Cardinal's Snuff - Box, 70,000;
Eleanor, (about) 60,000; Tommy and Grizel, 60,000;
Stringtown on the Pike, 50,000; The Redemption of David
Corson, 50,000; Monsieur Beaucaire, 42,000. And then
the news stands at the railway stations usually have on hand
two or three magazines dealing with some phase of special
psychological study bearing on psychical matters in some
vague groping way or the other.
CHAPTER XIV.
PASSIONS OF HUNGER AND SEx.
“There was a time when all the body's members
Rebelled against the belly; thus accused it;
That only like a gulf it did remain
I” the midst of the body, idle and unactive
Still cupboarding the viands, never bearing
Like labor with the rest; where the other instruments
Did see and hear, devise, instruct, walk, feel,
And mutually participate; did minister
Unto the appetite and affection common
Of the whole body. The belly answered,
“True it is, my incorporate friends,” quoth he,
“That I receive the general food at first,
Which you do live upon; and fit it is;
Because I am the storehouse and the shop
Of the whole body. But, if you do remember,
I send it through the rivers of your blood
Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain,
And through the cranks and offices of man;
The strongest nerves, and small inferior veins,
From me receive that natural competency
Whereby they live.” - —SHAKESPEARE.


15() THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
III.
Passion Instinct
(Attractive)
Involutive
Self Sucking, Licking,
Hunger Evolution Swallowing.
Of (Repulsive)
Matter Dissolutive
Spitting out. Nausea.
Excretory Functions.
These eight Instincts have their origin in the Passion of
Hunger. They have no meaning when they are divorced
from it. The Psychologist may attempt to separate them.
Nature does not. If we wantonly destroy the Unity of the
Soul to gratify our fierce spirit for analysis,
“What profit if this scientific age
Burst through our gates with all its retinue
Of modern miracles 2 ”
We are like children glad enough to pull the clock of the
Soul to pieces but have not sense enough to restore its
natural unity after the mischief of the hour is passed. We
are restoring things to their proper places, however, when
we explain an Instinct to be a movement of a Sense or an
organ by a Passion, in order to attract or repulse affinitive
or non-affinitive objects to, or from the Self. An instinct
may imply sometimes more or less than this, but it certainly
implies this or nothing. From the Carnivorous Plant to
the Hamster the particular form and nature of the Passion
of Hunger posits Instincts of special character. Note
Schneider's analysis of the Hamster whose Instinct (of
storing corn in its hole) to gratify its Passion of Hunger
is so pronounced.
“If we analyze the propensity of storing we find that it
consists of three impulses. First, an impulse to pick up


PASSION OF HUNGER AND SEX. 151
the nutritious object due to perception. Second, an im-
pulse to carry it off into the dwelling-place due to the idea
of this latter. Third, an impulse to lay it down due to the
sight of the place. It lies in the nature of the hamster that
it should never see a full ear of corn without feeling a
desire to strip it. It lies in its nature to feel as soon as its
cheek-pouches are filled an irresistible desire to hurry to its
home. And finally it lies in its nature that the sight of the
storehouse should awaken the impulse to empty the cheek.”
As the hamster's Passion of Hunger developed perception-
impulses of Sight, so the Passion of Hunger in the Carniv-
orous Plant has developed perception-impulses of Touch.
As to storing for Hunger; the cook puts his beef in the
pantry, the hamster puts his corn in a hole, the butcher
bird spikes his mouse on a thorn, the Carnivorous Plant
attracts its small animals into a trap. How universal the
mental tendency.
“Mark with serene impartiality
The strife of things, and yet be comforted,
Knowing that by the chain causality
All separate existences are wed
Into one supreme whole.”
Bless me! How we hate hints of Unity revolting to our
theological pride as the only Specially Created Somebodies
and First Lords of the Universe ! One of the principal
reasons why I revere the Holy Man of Nazareth is because
he said His Father cared for Sparrows. In the relation of
our Passions to Ethics and Morals we are unavoidably led
to personify the Grander Passions as the God that is within
us. “As gold is incorruptible in the fire so man is subject
to the One God dwelling in him,” says Bohme. When we
say that the companionship of a person or a book does us
good we simply mean that they had the power of evoking
our grander, nobler passions, and which we personify and


152 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
deify as the Holy Spirit; the Chrishna; or the God of the
Soul. That which increases my faith in the Good in Man
as seen in the self-denying splendor of his Nobler Passions,
increases my faith in God as the Good Deity of the
Universe. The laws of the Passions of Hunger and Sex
when clearly understood lead us onward and upward by
their principles to the Nobler Moral Passions. And it will
be noticed that the fierce pleasure connected with Sexual
acts is intended purely to exist as an incentive to a Law of
Involution. The same is true of the pleasures of Taste as
connected with the Passion of Hunger. So that whether
in air, food, or mental and moral images; Life is the involu-
tion, evolution and dissolution of Forms through laws of
Passion. Note how the seeming three-fold type of Human
Hunger embraces the forms of Earth, Sea, and Air; or
Solids, Liquids, and Gases:
Passion of
Hunger (Earth)
for The eating of food is an involution of
Material solid forms.
Forms (Sea)
to The drinking of substances is an invo-
evolve lution of liquid forms.
into -
conditions of (Sky)
8, The breathing of air is an involution
Human of gaseous forms.
Body.
Is there no adaptation to the three-fold inorganic form of
the World in our Passion of Hunger? Is all of this chance?
Is the word Hunger a term by which we express a Passion
to involve or attract into ourselves solids, liquids and gases
for reconstruction into forms of Life? Is this a mere


PASSIONS OF HUNGER AND SEX. 153
fanciful unity? A universal Hunger for these universal
physical forms a philosopher's dream?
“Accuse me not
Of arrogance,
If having walked with nature
And offered far as frailty would allow
My heart a daily sacrifice to Truth
I now affirm of Nature and of Truth
Whom I have served that their Divinity
Revolts offended at the ways of men.
Philosophers, who through the human soul
Be of a thousand faculties composed
And twice ten thousand interests, do yet prize
This soul, and the transcendent universe
No more than as a mirror that reflects
To proud Self-love her own intelligence.”
Our blood circulation is a sub-conscious continuation of
the same involutionary law of Passion as expressed by the
special Senses and Instincts of the Passion of Hunger in its
relation to the evolution of physical forms. This view of
Human Life; as being the conscious and sub-conscious
involving, evolving, and dissolving of material and moral
forms by laws of Passion clearly introduces a revolu-
tionary idea into our views of Biology, Psychology,
and Moral Philosophy. Man involves the three forms of
this solid, liquid and gaseous matter of the world through
his Physical Passions and their three forms of involution;
viz, eating, drinking and breathing. The view is so simple
that it almost seems to rebuke the years of our learned
pride and pedagogic arrogance. According to Lotze,
Science, as distinguished from Philosophy, tends to shun the
great questions of human destiny. To attract in any form
to the Stomach, Womb or Mind is to Involve it; and implies
Laws of Involution. To reconstruct and reproduce the
form in another figure after that it has been involved is to
Evolve it; and implies the constructive work of Laws of


154 . . THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
Evolution. To exclude the unneeded parts of a thing is to
repulse it; and implies the destructive work of Laws of
Dissolution. All Physical and Mental Life is therefore an
involving Hunger for affinities of form for the purposes of
reconstructing them after their own Laws of Evolution.
One of the most striking illustrations of Living Beings
possessing Specialized Forms of Hunger which posit Special
Senses of Touch to assist them in attracting their Special-
ized Forms of Organized Matter is afforded us in the
example of Carnivorous Plants. When a Plant becomes
Carnivorous in its passion of Hunger and desires to live on
very small animals it puts forth new Senses of Touch as its
principles of Involution. In fact whatever Passion has a
natural innate quality of desiring gratification for the pur-
pose of its Evolution, also has some power by which it can
attract to itself its affinities of form through some special
form of Sense. Whether it be the added Sensation of
Taste to the Passion of Hunger as seen first in the appear-
ance of its connection with the tongue in fishes. Or of the
Sensation of Smell with the Passion of Sex as seen in the
first appearance of the nose in reptiles the principle is the
same. The Passions posit their own organs of Sense and
thereby create the conditions for the appearance of the ideas
and conceptions of the intellect. Only the insanity of
eroticism would attempt to divorce knowledge from the
feelings of passion as in the following lines,—
“To feel is better than to know;
And Wisdom is a childless heritage;
One pulse of passion—youth's first fiery glow—
Are worth the hoarded proverbs of the sage;
Vex not thyself with dead philosophy
Have we not lips to kiss with ?”
The entire difference between the animal and vegetative
kingdoms and of which the Carnivorous Plant is a sort of


156 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
so far as it is capable of rejecting the lower and harmful
with Passions of Anger and Rage it is to itself a Law of
Repulsion. The passion of Hunger must be examined
according to these three principles of the Involution, Evo-
lution and Repulsion of matter to become intelligible. Food
when eaten, therefore, becomes living matter because it has
been Hungerized or evolved to a higher physiological stage.
The difference in the size of our noses, ears, eyes and
other organs is due to the difference of the number of
living molecules of which they are formed by Hunger. A
molecule is an ultimate atom of chemical matter. Of the
nature of the molecules of such forces as electricity we
have no knowledge, therefore I refer to a molecule as an
ultimate atom of chemical matter; not of electrical matter,
or of the matter of magnetism, or of the matter of animal
electricity, or of the matter of the luminiferous ether. A
chemical molecule or atom can be measured and it takes
just so many of these to make a cell of a human body.
“The smallest living thing under the microscope does not
contain more than a million organized molecules . . . . . this
number is insufficient to form a being with a whole system
of specialized organs; ” and by specialized organs Maxwell
means our noses, ears, eyes and other organs. So far as we
know the only two creative passions of the Soul that have
to do with the construction of our primary molecules are the
passions of Sex and Hunger, as they have for their object
the involution and evolution of live matter in its first physi-
ological form. Various Senses are connected with these
two Creative Passions to assist them in their involutions, or
in the drawing or attraction of forms of chemical matter to
themselves. Thus the Sense of Taste is specially connected
with the Passion of Hunger for this purpose; and a
Special Sense of Touch is connected with the Passion of
Sex. That the Exciting Pleasure connected with these Sen-


PASSIONS OF HUNGER AND SEX. 157
sations of Special Taste and Touch is intended to be merely
subsidiary to the Law of Involution or the attracting in of
Specialized Matter by these Two Passions of Sex and Hun-
ger is seen in the fact that the Pleasure ceases the moment
the matter has been successfully attracted into their respec-
tive receptacles for the purposes of Physiological Evolution.
All animals and plants possess Specialized Forms of
Hunger which posit Special Senses of Taste and Touch for
Specialized Forms of Organized Matter. These specialized
forms of Hunger as instincts of Taste, therefore force an
animal to spend its life hunting up or attracting to itself
those special classes of physical sustenances or molecular
matter which are strictly allied to the animal's Sense of
Taste, whether for grapes, nuts or carrion. The subse-
quent classes of the ideas of the animal (considered as the
self-knowledge of its Experience) would be copies of the
objects of its food according to the particular classification
of its Form of Hunger. So that there would be no ideas
as copies of its food, as selected by its Special Sensation of
Taste in its Intellect that was not first in its Passion. The
Special Form of Hunger predestines the animal to Special
Objects of Nature as its Affinities, and out of the copies of
these objects as ideas and conceptions, arises a special form
of its knowledge. Its knowledge comes from a priori affin-
ities and repulsions of Passion and not from ‘impressions.”
When I speak of the Involutions of the Passions of Sex
and Hunger I mean therefore the exercise by the soul of
conscious, a priori attractions of superphysical force for
the purpose of drawing to the Soul special objects of matter
as a condition for its own physical existence and the physi-
cal existence of others. Passion is the A priori conscious-
ness of the existence of forms of affinitive knowledge.
The following abandoned Erotic Verse is illustrative of the
Law of Involution in its attractive acts of Sexual affinity:


158 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
“And longing arms around her neck he cast;
And felt her throbbing bosom and his breath came hot and fast;
And all his hoarded sweets were hers to kiss;
And all her maidenhood was his to slay.
And limb to limb in long and rapturous bliss
Their passion waxed and waned.”
The laws of all passion may be classed under the three
heads of Involution, Evolution, Repulsion or Dissolution.
To insist that Involution means the psychological attraction
of the Passions from within, through muscular efforts and
efforts of Sense, to attract to the Self matter and mental
images, for the purposes of Evolution, both physical, mental
and spiritual, is to proclaim an unnoticed law. An exceed-
ingly rough conjectural classification of some of the busi-
nesses of men considered in the light of ministering to the
Passions, may show that the majority are engaged in minis-
tering to the Passion of Hunger.
Provision Men, Hunger. Breeders, Sex. Undertakers, Grief.
Grocers, Hunger. Midwives, Sex. Crepe Manufacturers, Grief.
Bakers, Hunger. Marriage Justice, Sex. Coffin Dealers, Grief.
Butchers, Hunger. Marriage Journalists, Sex. Hearse Dealers, Grief.
Fish Men, Hunger.
Hotel Men, Hunger.
Fruit Men, Hunger.
Farmers, Hunger.
Coffee Men, Hunger.
Sugar Men, Hunger.
Tea Men, Hunger.
Hay Men, Hunger.
Milkmen, Hunger.
Flour Men, Hunger.
Cattlemen, Hunger.
Butter Men. Hunger.
Pork Men, Hunger.
Beef Men, Hunger.
Divorce Lawyers, Sex.
Wedding Trunk Men,Sex.
Brothel Keepers, Sex.
Low Doctors, Sex.
License Clerks, Sex.
Physicians, Pain.
Surgeons, Pain,
Druggists, Pain.
Dentists, Pain.
Educators, Hope.
Clergymen, Hope.
Speculators, Hope.
Insurance Men, Hope.
Politicians, Hope.
Cemetery Keepers, Grief.
Sextons, Grief.
Funeral Florists,Grief.[pathy.
Humane Society Clerks,Sym-
Social Reformers, Sympathy.
Theatrical Men, Pleasure.
Actresses, Pleasure.
Musicians, Pleasure.
Authors, Pleasure.
Novelists, Pleasure.
Phrenologists, Pleasure.
Philosophers, Wonder.
Scientists, Wonder.
Spiritualists, Wonder.
I have developed the idea sufficient to show the principle
involved. As showing the close relations existing between
the creative power of the Passion of Hunger and that of the


160 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
him; and this he discovers to be capable of present-
ing extraordinary conceptions. These personalities are the
unnoticed latent modifications of our passions in their rela-
tions to past mental images. The evolution of images and
new forms is the law of the Soul's life. Life, as I have
unceasingly explained, implies the involution, evolution and
dissolution of Forms. This is true whether it imply the
involution of forms of air, or of food, or of moral and men-
tal images. All are forms of Form. The forms of Aris-
totle have no existence apart from sensible things, like the
Ideas of Plato. Says Bacon, “When we speak of forms we
understand nothing more than the laws and modes of action
which regulate and constitute any simple nature, such as
heat, light, weight, in all kinds of matter susceptible of
them. So that the form of heat, or the form of light, and
the law of heat or the law of light are the same thing.”
Again, “since the form of a thing is the very thing itself,
(and the thing no otherwise differs from the form than as
the apparent differs from the existent, the outward from the
inward, or that which is considered in relation to man from
that which is considered in relation to the universe,) it fol-
lows clearly that no nature can be taken for the true form
unless it ever decreases when the nature itself decreases,
and in like manner is always increased when the nature is
increased.” Passions of involution and evolution create and
reconstruct the nature of physical, mental and moral Form.
To recapitulate; in order to make definite the foregoing law
of the Passions as the means by which the soul involves,
evolves and repulses forms. Our involving passions attract
forms. Our evolving passions evolve forms. Our repuls-
ing passions dissolve or repulse forms. To lure or attract
in any form to the stomach, womb, or mind, is to involve it.
To create or reproduce the form in a higher form after it
has been attracted into the mind, is to evolve it. To re-


PASSIONS OF HUNGER AND SEX. 161
pulse any of the inharmonious parts of the form is to dis-
solve or disintegrate it. And these are the three primary
laws of the Passions. In their evolving action on living
matter, the passion of Hunger so raises the atoms of
digested food to evolved quantities of new form, that our
Senses can operate through them as organs. As the law of
the Evolving Passions is to construct new forms out of old
material, the Soul (in so far as it possesses such powers of
self-constructive Evolving Passion) is a creator of New
Forms for itself. That is, the Soul has power over certain
forms of matter to create for itself Form. What is the
nature of the matter on which it shall operate after Death 2
And out of what form of forms shall it rebuild for itself a
New Form? All our Sex affinities are relative to our Higher
Evolution. Emerson says, “Of progressive Souls, all
friendships and loves are temporary. Do you love me?
means Do you see the same truth? If you do, we are happy
with the same happiness. But presently one of us passes
into the perception of new truth. We are divorced, and no
tension in nature can hold us to each other. I know how
delicious is this cup of love. I existing for you, you exist-
ing for me. But it is a child clinging to his toy. An at-
tempt to eternize the fireside and nuptial chamber. To
keep the picture-alphabet through which our first lessons are
prettily conveyed. . . . God is the bride or bridegroom
of the Soul. Heaven is not the pairing of two, but the com-
munion of all Souls.” How explanatory the foregoing seems
to be of Goethe's idea that man exists for what he can accom-
plish in himself. And the first foundation stones of this
possibility of culture are those of the lowly passions of Hun-
ger and Sex. And in relation to the aspect of the State to
this self-culture of the Individual, the regeneration of Mod-
ern Christianity would mean that its sublimely disinterested
primitive passion of Love should become the practical or-.


162 THE wisdom of PASSION.
ganizing power in the State, in the place of the old thread-
bare, selfish passions of love-of-power and gain. An icono-
clasm which has for its object the breaking down and destruc-
tion of all images and beliefs which stand between Man and
the natural spiritual honor and reverence due to the Divine
Creative Unity of the Spiritual Passions of His own. Soul is
not to be despised. In the place of Exploded Beliefs we
should have the certain Spiritual Science of a Moral and
Spiritual Psychology as based on the Ethical Unity of the
Grandest Spiritual Passions of the Soul. Progress is pos-
sible only as we wisely plan to form anew, according to
wiser ideals. Otherwise our efforts simply end in lapsing
back into worn-out superstitions. The Unity of the Soul is
seen in the fact that by reason of its Unity of Constructive
Passions and Senses, their created forms of experience are
combined and conserved within a common Unity of Con-
sciousness. Accepting as truths the Stigmata of St. Fran-
cis and all facts of this class, they would afford scientific
evidence of the power of the Grander Moral Passions to
mould the physiological matter of the human body into the
images and forms of their own ethical concepts.
In the chapter on “Passions as Creators of Forms,” I
referred at length to Professor Elmer Gates’ experiments.
It is not by any means impossible that protoplasm may some
day be made in the laboratory of the chemists. Dr. Ira
Remsen, professor of chemistry in the Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity, asserts that the same fats that occur in living beings
can be made in the chemist's laboratory out of the elemen-
tary substances of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. A chem-
ist can make a simple form of sugar from its first elements.
On the psychic side, on the other hand, the evolutive power
connected with the Passion of Hunger implies the power to
automatically construct from proteids, fats, and carbo-
hydrates, the protoplasm of living tissue. To understand


THE PASSIONS AND THE STAGE. 163
the psychic laws, by the means of which the evolutive power
of the passion constructs the elementary carbon, hydrogen
and oxygen into forms of protoplasm, is to unlock the first
of the mysteries of the life of animals. So that looking at
the Passion of Hunger as a Creator of Physiological Atoms
of Form, from the standpoint of Psychology we should be
forced to analyze the action of the Passion in its three-fold
aspect. First; we must understand the psychological laws
regulating its strictly wrvolutive acts. With these, of course,
are primarily connected the Sense of Taste and the Instinct
of Swallowing, Second : a clear analysis of its dissolutive
acts, as these bear on such Instincts as biting and tearing
on the one hand, and the Senses on the other. Third : a
knowledge of the laws bearing on the automatic acts of the
evolution of the food into chyle, and the chyle into blood
and tissues. In this way we arrive at a primary rough idea
of the nature of the force, whose purpose is the automatic
evolution of the chemical forms of the elementary sub-
stances of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen into protoplasmic
nervous systems, through which mental signs are received.
CHAPTER XV.
THE PASSIONS AND THE STAGE.
“The wise and fool, the artist and unread
The hard and soft, seem all affin’d and kin :
But in the wind and tempest of her frown,
Distinction with a broad and powerful fan, \
Puffing at all, winnows the light away;
And what hath mass or matter, by itself
Lies, rich in virtue and unmingled.”
—SHAKESPEARE.
From Coquelin, the genius of modern comedy in 1901,
A. D., back to Susarion who, 580 B. C., ridiculed the vi-
ces and follies of Greece from his small movable stage,


164 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
comedy has played its part in tripping up the ludicrous
pretensions of the lower passions. As we look back to an-
cient Greece for the invention of the drama, so we glance
up to our modern Shakespeare for its euthanasy and apoth-
esis. Whether we view the drama as an impersonal repre-
sentation by the dramatist of the talk of groups of people,
from whose speech the movement of the story is to be gath-
ered or not, the Value of all serious drama consists in its
antagonisms of passions. Self-contradictory as the terms
may sound, nevertheless it must be admitted that in all se-
rious or high purposeful comedy, its gaiety, riotous mirth,
and joviality always implies the destruction of the insuffi-
cient ideal of some form of passion or the other. AEschy-
lus, Sophocles, and Euripides gave to Greek tragedy its
loftiest ideals. The play of the grander passions which
led to heroism, to the acts of model men, to the sublimity
of moral character, was, by them idealized. It was, in the
language of Aristotle, always the “imitation of some ac-
tion, serious, entire, and of a proper magnitude. Effect-
ing, through Pity and Terror the refinement of these and
similar passions of the Soul.” Shakespeare, though uni-
versally admitted to be the greatest dramatic genius that
has ever appeared in the world, nevertheless lacked the
grandeur of moral intensity characteristic of the Greeks.
Even Schiller surpasses Shakespeare in this respect. It
was this lack of moral intensity in the work of Shakespeare
that led Emerson to remark: “He was master of the revels
to mankind. Is it not as if one should have, through ma—
jestic powers of science, the comets given into his hand, or
the planets and their moons, and should draw them from
their orbits to glare with the municipal fireworks on a holi-
day night, and advertise in all towns, “a very superior
pyrotechny this evening !” Are the agents of nature, and
the power to understand them, worth no more than a street


THE PASSIONS AND THE STAGE. 165
serenade, or the breath of a cigar? One remembers again
the trumpet-text in the Koran,—“The heavens and the
earth, and all that is between them, think ye we have crea-
ted them in jest?” As long as the question is of talent
and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to
show. But when the question is to life, and its materials,
and its auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it
signify? It is but a Twelfth Night or Mid-summer-Night's
Dream, or a Winter Evening's Tale: what signifies another
picture more or less? The Egyptian verdict of the Shakes-
peare Societies comes to mind, that he was a jovial actor
and manager.”
But this refinement and moral intensity of the masters of
Greek Tragedy, and which is claimed to be lacking in the
magnificent trifling of Shakespeare, seems in 1901, to be
returning and reappearing in unwonted ways, Clearly the
development of the ethically purposeful modern novel has
had much to do with this. The drama could have no exist-
ence but for the unity of the passions. The theater is in-
teresting simply because we see on its stage the unity of
those human passions which prevail within ourselves. The
trouble with the theatre going public is that it does not see
that it is to its own advantage to awe back those lower pas-
sions of the brute left over in the evolutionary ascent of
humanity. For there are often long periods in the lives of
men, where the fierce, unchastened, brute passion of Sex
becomes such a violent monomania of eroticism, that they
are satisfied with no theatrical reproduction whatever that
does not degrade humanity and say the foulest things in
human language. During times of war, especially the
Spanish Ameriean war, the dark passions of Revenge, An-
ger, and Hate, found their affinities in the war plays of the
melodrama; which, since its introduction by Rinuccini in
the 17th c., by the union of music with the romantic


THE PASSIONS AND THE STAGE. 167
constructed forms of sight and sound are the affinities of
the passions, or, their non-affinities as the case may be.
So that the perception of men and objects on the stage by
our sight is our own perception of our own inner construc-
ted mental forms, and which are constructed by the Soul in
the brain according to the mathematical degrees of stimulus
produced by the vibrations of light and sound in the thea-
tre. Thus, it is, that the sounds of the music of the or-
chestra, according to their liveliness affects through my pas-
sions my circulation. With Mosso I realize in a general
way the gathering unrest of the blood vessels in my hand,
which with every changing passion, change their volume.
So the red colors on the stage obviously increase the circu-
lation of my blood, and also my breathing, more rapidly
than those of green or yellow. The perception of these
things of sight on the stage is always the perception, there-
fore, of our own inner mentally constructed forms within
the brain; and not the perception of the real physical forms
of thickness, length, and breadth, which we think we see
on the stage in front of us. Our Passions are the psychic
forces which agitate us, not our Senses; and our Passions
are aroused through the construction of mental forms by
stimuli of sound and light on the nerves of our Senses.
This principle is of course true in our construction of
men and their sayings in pulpits; as on stages. We think
our senses are constructed to perceive a world of untrans-
lated physical forms; whilst it is only the passing world of
mental forms in our own brains which we see, and which
are only photographs of the passing physical forms outside
of us. This is why we can see the mental forms of men
and things in our dreams; for these dream objects and peo-
ple are purely mental, not physical. Theatre going may be
a great advantage to health; for it may, by arousing the
passions, assist in renewing circulation, and dislodge trains


168 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
of morbid ideas. A good play is a splendid mental healer.
It is the relation of the stimuli of the theatrical vibrations
of light and air (causing unusual lights and sounds) through
the Senses in on the psychical forces of the Passions, which
explains the result. The Stimulus acts on the Senses, and
the Senses on the Passions, and the Passions on the nerves,
causing us to feel Emotions. -
The automatic action of the psychic forces of the passions
on the pneumogastric nerve, which controls the heart is the
explanation of the changes in the volume of our circulation
when we are watching a play in a theatre. If the $15,000,
which is spent for car fares for visitors to see the insane
poor, who are distributed in the state hospitals of Massachu-
setts, was spent for theatre tickets for the mildly iusane ones,
compelling them to attend a theatre steadily for two weeks
during the season, there would unquestionably be a larger
percentage cured. Would not this be cheaper than paying
$4,000 to support the chronic insane person for his average
life in the Boston Insane Hospital? Within some past
years, Boston has paid for four new state insane hospitals,
by taxation, $1,780,244.52. Insanity is the morbid exalta-
tion and concentration of one or more of the passions. In
its earlier stages, nothing is so potent to break up the mor-
bidity of this concentration as a week's attendance at a pow-
erful play. The Senses are bombarded by the unusual
sights and sounds, appealing to a latent class of Passions,
which, when brought into activity, would render the ab-
normal Passion less active. The ordinary entertainment
given at asylums are usually too tame to produce the effect.
In this sense, then, I consider the great play one of the most
potent influences in the world for the mental healing of the
mildly insane. In order for no misapprehension to arise as
to what I mean by “mental healing,” I desire to emphasize
once for all that I do not mean the mental healing of chronic


THE PASSIONS AND THE STAGE. 169
organic diseases, broken bones, or starvation. To throw
aside the grand results of the patient surgical and medical
genius of generations is a horrible and ghastly fanaticism.
By “psychic phenomena” I also exclude as evidence the
statements of paid mediums; or, of data presented for pur-
poses of personal notoriety, or to gain power and influence
for the publicly expressed views of aggressive communities
of spiritual opinion. In my judgment the one sad need of
the present age is a more sublime and vastly enlarged teach-
ing of the neglected laws governing the evolution and in-
verse self-induction of the passions, and also from the more
severe, scientific and philosophical standpoint. If we are
not by conservative cowardice and without well-planned re-
form, to stand by and permit the advent of lawless and rad-
ical religious revolution to prematurely precipitate the relig-
ious future, or to throw the race back to ideas which are
effete and barbaric, it seems to me much more philosophical
and manly to promptly and boldly face the problems of spir-
itualism and mental healing, first of all from the neglected
laws of our passions. So far as the relation of the passions
to the theatre are concerned, the fact that the passions con-
dition themselves by nervous processes, and are therefore
both the causes and the result of physiological changes, does
not imply that the passions are mere reflew acts. My study
of the insane has convinced me that the passions are causal
psychic forces. As opposed to the old reflex theory of the
passions, the idea urged by me is, that because the chronic-
ally expectant passion is the cause of a special mode of per-
ception, it is therefore capable of producing such formid-
able bodily effects of “all-overishness,” and shivering, and
lachrymal effusion, and heart-swelling, and fainting. It is
unquestionably true that because a given passion can create
such sad morbid bodily states, that the body itself will, after
a time, automatically assist the passion as a cause in sustain-


THE PASSIONS AND THE STAGE. 171
in any way remarkable. When he had a mind to penetrate
into the inclinations of those he had to deal with, he com-
posed his face, his gesture and his whole body as nearly as
he could into the exact similitude of the person he intended
to examine; and then carefully observed what turn of mind
he seemed to acquire by the change.” So that, says my
author, he was able to enter into the dispositions and
thoughts of people as effectually as if he had been changed
into the very men. I have often observed (Burke now goes
on in his own person) that, on mimicking the looks and
gestures of angry, or placid, or frightened, or daring men
I have involuntarily found my mind turned to that passion
whose appearance I strove to imitate. Nay, I am con-
vinced it is hard to avoid it, though one strove to separate
the passion from its corresponding gestures.” It is a re-
markable, medical fact, worthy of the consideration of the
psychological sociologist, that the limited natural indulgence
of the passion of sex has at times caused renewed health.
Ethically considered, this view is perhaps worthy of the
severest condemnation. The therapeutic reason assigned is,
that the paroxysm of the passion, by increasing the tempo-
rary circulation assists in destroying the diseased patholog-
ical condition. But the fire that gives warmth on bitter
days, is the same element that burns down our uninsured
habitations. The idea of Emerson and the ancients that Evil
is—in some sense or the other—Good in the making, has
the theory of Evolution for its support. -
“Lilies 1 that from snch noisome pools
Distil such sweets, expound your rules;
That we the gracious hint may share
And grow as fair:-
We formed for noblest ends who yet
Our high prerogative forget,
Letting our earthliness prevent
The purpose meant.”


THE PASSIONS AND THE STAGE. 173
adjuncts. Every town had a fraternity for its perform-
ance. The Passion Plays were not finally suppressed,
because of the hostility of Luther or the Reformation, but
because of the rise of the secular immoral drama in Eng-
land, and the irreverence and buffoonery introduced by
ignorant players. Of the Passion Play as acted by the vil-
lagers of Oberammergau in the Bavarian Highlands every
ten years, the modern reader is aware.
“How do we know what evil is, or good P
What loss or gain? Ah, if we understood,
Should we thus scan God's deep, but perfect way,
Singing, perchance, His goodness all astray ?”
Although for long, long years the Passion Play has been
annually sustained up to 1900 in the City of Mexico, the
ecclesiastical authorities have now decided on its suppression.
The word holy-days, as applied to the days for the observ-
ance of the Passion Play in Mexico, simply came to mean
license-days for the indiscriminate indulgence of the lower
forms of brutalized sexual lust. Of the dramatic unities of
Action, Time, and Place, unquestionably the French are the
best critics. According to general opinion, these unities
imply the following points. “1. That the action of the
drama must be one. That is, that the interest or attention
must not be distracted by several plots. But that every-
thing must be subservient to the main action. 2. That all
actions must take place on the same spot, or very nearly so,
in order that the illusion may not be disturbed. 3. Every-
thing should happen on the same day for the same reason.
These are the landmarks on which the classic dramatist fixes
his eye.” By unity of action is therefore implied the for-
tunes and conflicts of the same leading passions; by the
same spot is meant the same space, and by the same day
is meant the same time. The truly great dramatist is
therefore the man who can set in motion the greatest


THE PASSION OF LOVE. 175
I.
THE ANXIETY OF LOVE. THE ANXIETY OF PRUDENCE.
In Love it is the regard for In Prudence it is the regard
the welfare of the object apart for the welfare of Self apart
from one's Self that awakens from others that awakens
anxiety. concern or anxiety.
II.
In Love the Self is put In Prudence the Self is
Last and the other person put First and the other per-
is put First. son is put Last.
* III.
In Love the Self wholly In Prudence the Self never
loses itself in the object and loses itself in the object; but
yields itself for the good of makes the object in some
the object. sense subservient to the Self.
IV.
In Love the belief that . In Prudence the belief that
Good is in the object is the Evil may be in the object is
dominant belief, feeling and the dominant belief, feeling
reality. and reality.
Says Corelli, “there are the laws of Life and the laws of
Death, but there are also the laws of Love. Without the
laws of Love the universe would cease to be.” The Sorrow
of Love ever waves in the wind of Eternal Hope, the
most exquisitely beautiful passion flower in the garden of
the Soul. Love is solicitous for all things. The hopes and
fears of a truly great soul pendulate as readily for the sor-
rowing welfare of a favorite horse or dog or bird as for one
of his own kind. The soul that has never known a pang of
anxiety for things that are lowly and beautiful has never
known Love. In all of our attachments the floating beacon


176 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
of the intellect turns with the tide of our Sorrowing Love.
All toil is sweet if the balsam of Love be in the cottage
window of Honest Labor. Byron, referring to Rousseau,
says,
“His love was passion's essence—as a tree
On fire by lightning; with ethereal flame
Kindled he was, and blasted; for to be
Thus and enamoured, were in him the same.
But his was not the love of living dame,
Nor of the dead who rise upon our dreams;
But of ideal beauty which became • *
In him existence, and o'er-flowing teems
Along his burning page, distemper'd though it seems."
- º
The adequacy of knowledge is no adequacy for a broken
heart. All love is false that reaches a height where the
heart ceases to throb with a linnet in the anguish of its
broken wing, or is indifferent to the overburdened man
or horse, that cares nothing for the half-frozen sparrow
begging for its crumb, or the starving dog piteously whining
for a bone. The extent or correctness of our ideas cannot
take away the Sorrow of our Love if the outlook be dark.
Love is subject to Sorrow in proportion to its intensity; for
the anxiety of its sympathy is then increased. The great-
ness of Love makes all men fools. The sympathy of Love
is Love with the accompanying Anxiety for the other's
wishes. So far as Love is affected with Sorrow so far is it
sincere, and the Love is greater in the degree that the
Sorrow is greater. Love is its own limitation; for the oil
of Grief feeds the lamps of Love. The anxiety of Love
creates the care for the existence of that which is loved,
and the profounder the anxiety the greater is the care man-
ifested. When the kindled fires of Love burn down to the
hot embers of Pleasure, there is the loss of Sympathy, for
Sympathy implies anxiety and anxiety implies Sorrow. "
There is no great Love without Sadness.


THE PASSION OF LOVE. 177
The Anxiety of Love is the one passion that implies the
utter negation of Self, and from which necessarily flow the
acts that promote the preservation of all other things; for
the attempt to preserve the welfare of all things is the
essence of the Anxiety of Love. It becomes individualized
in one single object at a time for us. Each morning of Love
furnishes its own new dawn of Care and Hope. The mental
pains of the anxiety of Love are the birth throes of the
Soul. A great Love—wholly independent of Sex—is that
which embraces many objects and becomes universal in its
solicitude. The knowledge of Good and Evil is the effect
of Pleasure and the anxiety of Pleasure; and of Love and
the Anxiety of Love. Each of these mountain systems
has its own rocks of virtue. Peradventure the moun-
tain passes of Love usually form a part of the water-shed of
Sorrow. The passion of the Anxiety of Love is only related
to the Soul in so far as the Soul becomes capable of caring
for the universal ; and he who becomes so related becomes a
Deity in miniature caring for a World. He, in Byron's
words—
“Ascends a throne
To which the steps are mountains; where the god
- Is a pervading life and light, so shown
Not on those summits solely, nor alone
In the still cave and forest ; o'er the flower
His eye is sparkling and his breath hath blown.
His soft and summer breath whose tender power
Passes the strength of storms in their most desolate hour.”
The rain of Anxious Love is the only thing that can re-
clothe the plains of the Soul with moral verdure. The ,
strength of the Anxiety of Love has its partial origin in the
uncertainty of our knowledge and the fear of evil. The
Knowledge of Evil is the Fear of Love. And the Fear of
Love is the road to an Anxiety for the welfare of all univer-
sal life. The development of an anxiety for the welfare of


178 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
all things could not have existed save as it originated in
the knowledge of evil and pain. So long as Pain is a law
of the Soul, Love must know Sorrow. For Pain is the
cause of the passion of Fear, as Pleasure is the cause of the
passion of Hope; as Anxious Love is the fear of the pain
of the object of Love. For another to dislike and repulse
an object of our Love is to create in us a similar repulsion
of Anger and Fear and Hate; for these furies are the
guardians of the Edens of our Love and stand at their
gates with flaming swords of Sorrow. Love is its own
Bible. The exaggerations of the Anxiety of Love are due
to its intensity; and the greater its intensity the vaster will
be the Denial of Self. There is no Love without exagger-
ation and exaltation : and the degree of each is measured by
the intensity of the passion. Great Souls are Souls born
keyed to a lofty susceptibility of magnanimous feeling.
They may become geniuses or madmen; for each new object
loved by them is loved with the same immeasurable pitch of
high-keyed broad magnanimous intensity. All Love is
relative to the development of universality; and the leaps to
universal experience by souls in a lifetime are tremendous.
The Anxiety of Love makes one's, own happiness depend
on protecting the happiness of another. But it is not
the welfare of others that furnishes the key to the fash-
ionable modern marriage barter. It is a false reciprocity
by which public opinion may force me to force a woman
to take that part of my life which I do not want myself and
which she does not want, in exchange for that part of her
life which she does not want herself, and which I do not
want. To the existence of the Anxiety of Love, Evil is a
necessity. Without Evil, Prudence and Anxiety would have
no reason for existence; for they would have nothing to
provide or be careful for. No one is Prudent in Heaven.
For Prudence presupposes the existence of Evil to be


THE PASSION OF LOVE. 179
guarded against. An analysis of the complex passion
of the Anxiety of Love gives us two ideas as to its
origin. (a) The law of the passion of Love as the passion
of perceptive perfection always idealizes its images and
objects. And this idealization of certain objects by the
passion always gives to the objects their supreme value in
the estimation of the person. This is why all lovers are
idealists and all idealizations are exaggerations. That is,
the idealizations of the objects of our Love are the enlarge-
ments of our own moral values and which we ourselves
create. But for this exaggeration or enlargement of the
moral value of things their real value would never be
afterward known. (b) The law of the passion of Fear as
the passion of perceptive pain is the origin of Anxiety and
universalizes images of Evil, Misfortune, Suffering and
Wrong as the antagonists of the objects of Love. The
blending of these two passions of Fear and Love with their
images and objects is what creates the Anxiety of Love.
The images of Love representing Joy and Perfection; the
images of Anxiety representing Sorrow and Imperfection.
This supreme law of idealizing values which Love places
universally on all animate and inanimate objects is that
which not only causes parents to love their offspring, but
also causes the poet to love the mountain and the wild bird
and the lion and the cascade. It forces the philosopher to
love inanimate systems of philosophy. It coerces the
preacher to feel an affection for the views of “our own
people.” It enables the housewife to place her value and
hopes of the future on her furniture, cooking and cats; and
the inventor on his machine. Thus Love, by exaggerating
and enlarging the value of all things thereby preserves,
protects, and brings them to relative perfection and har-
mony. By working on the law of probabilities the Passion
of Love by idealizing objects that are comparatively worth-


THE PASSION OF LOVE. 181
why childless women are such fastidious housekeepers.
Inanimate objects receive the protection and passion other-
wise extended to living things or offspring. Should an
animate thing even harmlessly cross the path of an inanimate
object thus protected, be it dust-pan, sofa or door-mat, the
passion of Fear is instantly aroused; and if any continued
unconscious opposition is shown, the passion of Anger
instantly accompanies the passion of Fear. As the passions
of Fear and Love in the childless housewife or unmarried
woman, are all strongly entwined about the inanimate life-
less objects and forms of her own house or room, to in any
way disarrange these lifeless objects is to disarrange the
poise and equilibrium of her own Life and Soul. So with
the tools of a mechanic, the Mss. of an author, the money of
people, the parts of an invention, the business man's ledger,
or the broker's certificate of mining stock. In proportion
to the narrowness of the life will be the fierceness of the
attachments of Prudence. The failure to realize this law
as governing the life of the housewife is what has caused
the breaking up of thousand of homes. It is not passion
that causes the Sorrow and Pain of Life; but the ignorance
of the laws of Passion. The best corrective of mental
Pain is a scientific drilling of the passions, teaching the
moral consequences of arousing the repulsive passions of
pain by purposely or inadvertently interfering with the
proper attachment of others. For where the nature of the
passions in their relations to attachments is taught as a
system the possibility of mental Pain, mental suffering and
of broken hearts would be lessened. The reason for this is.
that the equities of the limitations of attachment constitute.
the principles of Justice, and the elements entering into
and making up the virtue of Justice should be the first.
things taught. Every human thing is quicker to form
attachments and to repulse the attachments of others than it.


182 - THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
has any knowledge of. A knowledge of these principles
has been too much taken for granted. They are not scien-
tifically known, and until they are known, mental suffering,
moral pain, and wrecked nervous systems will darken the
lives of humanity. Happily the social fear of Higher
Nobler Customs makes a lower meaner Soul temporally
hypocritical and a slave to better appearances of culture as
well as to silly appearances. These parlor and street
adaptations become the temporary attachments of Prudence
whether it be to the Browning Society, or to the apeing of
the style of Mrs. Jones' missionary bonnet. But the
power to continue to ape the lofty appearances of Higher
Nobler Customs long enough, to persevere in apeing them
week in and month out, to keep on suffering and appearing,
and appearing and suffering, is eventually to gain the power
to be an actual real Higher Nobler Custom one's self, instead
of an imitator of it.
The suffering, mental and moral, which arise from impru-
dent attachments arises from the fact that our passion for
love, union, and harmony temporarily deceives us. The
natural state of the Soul is a desire for this concord; mental
union; moral harmony. It implies the desire of two or more
minds to perfectly agree in all their relations to ideas and
objects. Therefore we blindly and unquestioningly credit
the other with being as fervently attached to our own
ideas and objects as we are ourselves. We believe they are,
we feel they are, and if asked would say that we would be
willing to swear and die that they are.
Let us revert again to the New England Passion of
Prudence and ascertain whether this old Pagan Virtue of
Epicurus, Schopenhauer, and of New England is not after
all a Vice masquerading under the name of Christian
Virtue. -


THE PASSION OF LOVE. 183
I.
The Anxiety of Love im- The Anxiety of Prudence
plies the wish to set up con- implies the setting up of
ditions for the wants of An- conditions to satisfy our own
other without hope of return. Personal wants.
II.
Love welcomes the ideas Prudence repulses the new
of Others for the sake of ap- ideas of Others because they
proximating nearer to a unity interfere with its old ones;
of Truth. and its own Self-comfort.
III.
Love is the motive of all Prudence is the motive of
Disinterested Heroism. Calculating Self-seeking.
IV.
Love implies free dom Prudence implies slavery
from the old narrower spirit- to the unimproved Past.
ual Self.
V.
Love has its origin in Joy. Prudence has its origin in
Fear.
VI.
Love has its trust in Hu- Prudence has its origin in
manity. our distrust of Humanity.
VIII.
Love is the born Virtue of Prudence is the self de-
the Optimist. veloped fear of the Pes-
simist.
IX.
Love is self-denial. Prudence is spiritual and
physical Self-protection.


184 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
X.
Love gives and expects no Pru de n c e takes and
return. secretly wishes for more.
If gentlemen occupying pulpits can happily show that
I have erred in pointing out these distinctions it would
certainly prove an opportunity for valuable knowledge.
XI. -
The desire of Love is the The desire of Prudence is
surrender of the Self to An- to make Another's ideas and
other's ideas and interests. interests surrender to the
Self. -
XII. -
Love is morally correct Prudence is morally cor-
and respectable through rect and respectable through
Affection for Society. Fear of Society.
XIII.
Love implies the exalta- Prudence implies the exal-
tion of Good as the only tation of Evil as a life object
thing worth seeking. to guard against. The seller
fleeces the ignorant buyer;
hence the necessity for Pru-
dence.
XIV.
Love is the motive of Phil- Prudence is the motive of
anthropy. Business or a Church which
always prefer a greater gain
to a smaller, in money and
numbers.
XV.
Love implies thoughtful Prudence implies thought-
providence for the future ful providence for the future
physical and spiritual wel- physical and spiritual wel-
fare of Others, fare of the Self.


THE PASSION OF LOVE. 185
Now, if an Enlightened Conscience is to be our guide in
life, by which of these two Passions are we to be led ?
Obviously no such thing as a spiritual, ethical, or moral per-
ception is possible without the existence of such passions as
Moral Love and Fear on which to found it. All Conscience
arises from the passions of Moral Love and Fear; which,
then, of these two Passions is to furnish us with the
Universal Criterion Conscience? If we are, to believe the
founder of Christianity, the Universal Criterion Conscience
by which the Individual Conscience is to be squared and
corrected is to be formed from the knowledge of the law of
the Passion of Love. Ethics, morality, and spirituality,
according to Him, having their origin in the Passions.
The greatest happiness of the greatest number is a good
enough Standard of Conscience until the happiness is made
to consist in degrading (through Prudence) the smallest
number. Every man steals to provide conditions for his
own temporary welfare; that is, from a sense of Prudence.
The Passions of the Higher Self imply a preference of
Others before one's own welfare. The Passions of the
Lower Self imply a preference of Self before Others; and
this is the distinction, the only distinction existing between
Vice and Virtue. To satisfy one's self on this question of
Love as opposed to Prudence, let the reader present the
question to any of his clergymen friends, who may assist
him in pointing out the weakness of my views on the
matter. Is Prudence only another name for Covetousness?
Is Self-Denial from a motive of Love, a wholly different
thing from Self-denial arising from a motive of Prudence?
Does the fact that I deny myself things to-day in order to
enjoy them to-morrow alter the personal purpose of the
motive? If I deny myself things so that I may not be a
burden to another, the motive then becomes one of Love.
Are these acts of animal foresight by which (squirrel like)


186 THE wisDOM OF PASSION.
we spend our time hoarding Prudently for Self founded in
any higher motive than the low cunning of animal self-
protection? Is this a Virtue? Is this what we mean
by New England Prudence? If Prudence is not what I
have defined it to be, then what is it? The only moral duty
insisted on by the founder of Christianity—and of Buddha
was the self-development or culture of Love considered as
the Passion of Universal Disinterestedness or Sympathy.
The nobler passions according to this view are capable of
being self-evolved into permanent dispositions. If we will
not, and do not express in thought and acts our nobler
passions we never become noble. Says Professor William
James of Harvard, “Refuse to express a passion and it
dies.” Do we wish to change the character of the motive-
passions dominating our lives? The same author advises
us to begin and “go through the outward movements of
those contrary dispositions which we prefer to cultivate.”
Bain explains the value of so acting in order to induce
noble passions in ourselves. “By acting out the external
manifestations we gradually infect the nerves leading to
them and finally waken up the diffusive current by a sort
of action ab extra. . . . Thus it is that we are some-
times able to assume a cheerful tone of mind by forcing a
hilarious expression.”
However, at the present stage of our moral and spiritual
evolution it would not be difficult for the Philosopher of
Prudence to show that the Sorrow of Life arises from the
self-contradictory nature of the Passion of Love. Let us
therefore be fair and permit both sides to be represented.
I.
For Love. For Prudence. -
There is such a Life as an There is no such Life as
Existence entirely controlled an Existence entirely con-
by the Passion of Love trolled by the Passion of
which seeks as its sole object Love in which the welfare


THE PASSION OF LOVE.
187
the welfare of Another with-
out any possible Hope of
Return. -
Proof for Love.
The passion of Love is of
such a nature that it is con-
ditioned to be attracted to
Beauty and Helplessness.
But Helplessness cannot of
fer anything in return, and
through Beauty Love loses
itself; so that in neither case
has it any compensation.
Experience proves the abso-
lute disinterestedness of Love
in the passion of a Mother
for her child who loves it
better than her own life.
Also in the passion of the
martyr who loves his holy
belief better than his own
life; and in the passion of
the Hero who loves his coun-
try better than his life. The
Lover will die for his be-
trothed. Admit that there
is no Disinterested Love and
it follows that such a Life
must exist devoid of any
Self-needs. For the exist-
ence of Love implies the
possibility of supplying the
affinities of Need. But to
supply Needs implies the
of Others is its sole object
apart from compensation or
hope of Return.
Proof for P. udence.
Emerson has proved that
Compensation and not Love
is the law of Life. Admit-
ting there is such a Life that
has for its object the Wel-
fare of Another, yet it only
does the Other good with the
hope that the Other will do
it some good in return. So
that Love is the hope of
Compensation. Absolute
Disinterestedness is a chim-
era. Experience proves that
mothers do not love their
children if they bring them
shame. Martyrs deceived
themselves as to the infalli-
bility of their interpreta-
tions. Heroes becomes so
in order to get a name. In
the case of Lovers who die
for their affinities such cases
are clearly pathological.
There can be no Civilized
Life without Civilized Needs;
and these can only be sup-
plied on the Confucian basis
of reciprocity which implies
the principle of Compensa-
tion or Hope of Return. In


192 THE WISDOM
OF PASSION.
Proof for Marriage Love.
their Grander
the ideal of marriage. All
the Grander Passions are
forms of Disinterestedness.
Compensation belongs to a
lower brute law. Marriage
Lust is the covetousness of
m er e Libidinous Pleasure
and implies no Love. Spirit-
ual Beauty is an inverse
growth to the merely physi-
cal. The object of Mar-
riage is to open the eyes of
the Soul to the evidences of
Spiritual Beauty. The Pas-
sion of Love in Marriage
becomes a means of develop-
ing the Christian virtues.
Marriage produces Humility
in that it prefers the other's
higher spiritual attainments
to its own. Marriage creates
Temperance in that it teaches
the mortification of one's
own wants for the sake of
the other. Marriage de-
velops Liberality in that it
strips itself of everything
for offspring. Marriage
creates Courage whereby to
defend the home. Marriage
evolves Mental Power and
Knowledge as a means to
Passions is
Proof for Marriage Prudence.
tion at the time of having to
protect or care for anybody,
as she simply wishes “a
good time.” Marriage be-
comes a means of showing
to us forms of Selfishness
we never thought existed
within the limits of Human
nature. The subtler vices
are always more numerous
than the virtues. If mar-
ried life teaches any virtues
whatever it is by necessity,
not choice. The proof that
there is no such thing as
Married Life without hope
of return is seen in the di-
vorce courts. This is the
Mecca to which the thous-
ands turn when the partner
is no longer profitable in a
financial way. The prefer-
ence of one's own wishes to
those of the partner's is the
dominating idea of the life
marriage. The value of
marriage lies wholly in its
moral discipline. Its pain-
ful obstructions to our Sel-
fishness, through the antag-
onisms of the partner
develop a deeper Wisdom.
“Marriage makes a man


194 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
mothers and guardian angels of families, for these classes of
women and girls I have an unbounded admiration. On
the other hand, I am so hopelessly far below all average
civilized tastes for society, that I would honestly and
sincerely prefer a standing lunch of a glass of milk and a
doughnut in a bakery, than to sit down to the best dinner
ever concocted by a society woman. All Marriage Love
implies degrees of Sensation of Induction. In Sensations
of Induction the Passions originate and sustain the
Thoughts. I have elsewhere explained an Inductive Sensa-
tion to be that conscious state in which a Passion may
induce, or excite a Sense, Instinct, or a continued series of
Thoughts or Conceptions into permanent activity. In this
special and particular class of experiences the Passion is
not the mere reflex effect of some previous act of the Senses.
It becomes the mode of understanding; or, rather, the
form of the understanding; giving also spontaneous rise to
classificatory modes of Perception. It is in this sense that
I defined Love as the passion of perceptive perfection; and
Fear as the passion of perceptive pain. For, naturally,
the philosopher would inquire; how can a Passion be at
the same time a Perception? I trust my explanation may
be sufficiently clear. When the Grander or the Lower
Passions rule, they automatically classify (to their own
forms) our modes of Perception. When sane, the more
universal passions have the power of limiting the control of
the narrower ones. In deep experiences of Sexual Love,
or Fear, the one single passion becomes the solitary
cause, controlling and sustaining the permanent classifica-
tion of Thought and Perception.
Our philosopher of Prudence would take the foregoing
self-contradictions of the Passion of Love as shown in
Married Life as proof that the disinterested motives of the
Passion are unfit for Practical Life even if they sometimes


THE PASSION OF LOVE. 195
exist. He would claim that for us to shut our eyes to
either of these classes of facts would be unjust ; inasmuch
as Experience presents us with both. The self-contradic-
tion of the Passion of Love in Marriage he would assure us
grows out of the fact that if the one partner has a Loftier
Ideal she must throw it away to meet her husband on a
lower plane. But this is to throw the Self out of harmony
with its Loftier Ideal of Perfection and to abandon the self-
evolution of the Nobler Passion. So that we are asked to
examine the self-contradictions of the Passion of Love from
the standpoint of religion in order to see it in its perfec-
tion.
III.
For Love.
There is such a life as a
Religious Life entirely con-
trolled by the Passion of
Love, and which seeks the
welfare of others indepen-
dent of all moral distinctions
or hopes of return.
Proof for Religious Love.
Man considers as his chief
good that which will satisfy
his Needs for a Higher
Moral Existence indepen-
dent of compens a ti on.
Hence anything that will
satisfy his higher needs is
welcomed by him as a tem-
porary ideal. For this ideal
man is willing to sacrifice
his lower wants without hope
of return. St. Francis and
For Prudence.
There is no such life as a
Religious Life entirely con-
trolled by the Passion of
Love, and which seeks the
welfare of others indepen-
dent of hopes of return or
distinction.
Prooffor Religious Prudence.
Man does not consider as
his chief good that which will
sat is fy his Needs for a
Higher Existence indepen-
dent of compensation. The
chief good must be universal
and satisfy all his lower as
well as higher needs inde-
pendent of all moral and
e thic al distinctions. The
aim of all religious people is
to use you to make their


196
THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
Proof for Religious Love.
Buddha are types of those
who have followed the
passion of their Disinter-
ested Love for Humanity
apart from ideas of compen-
sation. The spirit of relig-
ious heroism always implies
a contempt for personal ends.
Mahomet was willing to die
for his belief and Jesus paid
the penalty of his convictions
by a cruel death. Without
hope of return the passion
of religious love has liber-
ated slavery, built the orphan
asylums of the world, edu-
cated the poor, and brought
about the higher education
of women. Religion is the
highest expression of the
Soul. Prudence belongs to
a low stage of Evolution.
Proof for Religious Prudence.
churches more numerous.
They work for compensation
and a constant hope for
return. Exceptions simply
prove the rule. No religion-
ist is a spiritual hero. He
works at his religion for
forms of compensation.
The hope of return in
praise is the force which
keeps the religious institu-
tions alive. All religions
are in the world to take
from you something; not to
give you something. A
human soul in the eye of a
religionist is only of value in
so far as it supports his views.
Religion is organized spirit-
ual selfishness. Its true ideal
is not actuated by one per-
son in ten million. Pru-
dence for “our church's wel-
fare is the governing law.
If I, in any clear sense, understand the teaching of the
Holy Man of Nazareth, it was to the effect that a uni-
versal Spiritual and Ethical Passion of Love—not a transi–
tory Sexual one—but a Spiritual Passion for the higher
phases of mental life, and the loftier psychological aspect
of things, should be induced to become the passion of per-
ceptive perfection; and the reigning king of the rest of
the passions of the Soul.
But a passion for a knowledge


THE PASSION OF LOVE. 197
of the higher psychological laws of Souls and their innate
moral worth, is different from a passion for sacred books,
or churches. -
Perhaps one of the saddest facts of history is the
unscrupulous and conscienceless ambition of our old inter-
pretations to destroy the natural developed Moral Unity of
the Soul by assuming that the unfolding of our natural
Grander Passions of Disinterestedness in experience is not
a natural unfolding of the Soul at all; but a working in
upon us of extraneous divine agencies by “grace.” Indi-
rectly this view confirms Pessimism and supports the con-
ception of the irredeemable total depravity or perennial moral
rottenness of the Soul. The possibilities of the Moral
Grandeur of Human Nature are all sacrificed; and I am com-
pelled to abandon my belief in the possible nobility of man
and the evolution of his Grander Passions. The Science
of Psychology cannot come to the aid of Optimism and the
Soul in this matter; because the unfolding of the Moral
Passions are not made a feature of College or University
psychological teaching. So that we continue to explain
the natural unfolding of our Grander Passions of Disinter-
ested Love in experience and in their relation to certain
concepts and ideas as “Buddhistic Love,” “Mahometan
Love,” “Divine Love,” “Platonic Love,” “ Christian
Love.” Our Souls must be made relative to the Books;
and not the Books relative to the Soul, according to the
adherents of these various symbols. So, assuming that all
the nobler passions of the Soul are not its natural divine
unfoldings and attributes; but the importation to it of out-
side spiritual forces, or ‘grace’ the Philosopher of Prudence
would have us put the word Religious in the place of Disin-
terested, and call it Religious Love.


THE PASSIONS AND THE WILL. 199
sented a divine meaning. The Egyptians evidently be-
lieved in the immortality of animals, for we find mummies
of crocodiles and cats.
“The proposition that the soul of an animal has a spirit-
ual significance in the general scheme of immortality is not
so startling as it at first appears.
“There is a logic in the process of spiritual affairs, as
there is in the science of material facts. The spiritual
nature is as rational in animal life as any other phase of
material nature is rational to scientific research.
Eternal spirit moving on
From state to state the spirit walks.
“Animals have souls.
“If they had not, there would be no reason to assume
that man had, since the highest existence is an evolution of
animal instinct.
“To my mind evolution is the strongest argument for
immortality, and in evolution everything begins with the
material; all higher existence springs from the lower forms.
Every rational argument for spiritual advancement is quite
as cogent for the animal soul as it is for the human soul.”
Because of the furious and violent hatred of theologians
for scientific laws which upset their interpretations on the
one hand, and of the seeming countenance which any ex-
planations of the power of psychic forces seem to give to
phases of “mental healing” on the other, the study of the
action of the passions of men and therefore their wills on
forms of imponderable matter is necessarily limited. Not
that such a study would not ultimately clear up the mysteries
of telepathy and three-fourths of the occult phenomena of
spiritualism. If as much attention had been given by psycho-
physicists to the experimental study of the laws of vital invo-
lution or attraction, as Hegel and Spencer have devoted to
the theories of mental evolution, the simple task of scien-
tifically proving that certain passions as forms of will
possess definite laws of attraction for imponderable and
ponderable forms of matter would by no means be diffi-
cult. Now, when the question of the life and death of


THE PASSIONS AND THE WILL. 201
ative of the appearances of the physical world. What are
the creative laws going on inside of the body, creative of
the psychical world?
When estimating the relation of the Passions to the Will
in a strictly dynamic sense, the work done on matter by the
destructive or constructive force of Passion, is always to be
measured as the product of the Passion or psychic force into
the particular forms of physical space through which it
moves its point of application in its own direction. By
space I therefore here mean any ponderable or imponderable
substance that can be measured as conditions for the stimuli
of sensibility. Human life, repeatedly defined by me as the
involution, dissolution and evolution of forms by laws of
passion, therefore implies a work done on forms of matter
by laws of psychic force. These forms of matter operated
on by the Passions are both ponderable and imponderable.
The “imponderable form of matter, or ether, which we
assume to occupy the interspaces existing between the solid
particles of ponderable matter, is not limited to these locali-
ties. But independent of occupying what would otherwise
be vacua between the gaseous atoms of our atmosphere,
even in it smost attenuated state, extends beyond its con-
fines, as well as those of all the ponderable elements of our
globe, into space;—here forming an invisible and impon-
derable fluid ocean, in which the vast orbs of our universe
roll on unimpeded in their majestic courses.”
“The subtle and invisible forms of ethereal matter, when
caused to assume a vibratory or undulatory movement with
sufficient rapidity, produce a peculiar set of phenomena,
whose effects are known by the terms of light and heat;
effects of vast importance, for without them nature would
be dead to us, its beauties no longer apparent, and this
world a cheerless waste.”
One of the first questions raised as to the power of
psychic forces to influence matter in certain conditions;


202 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
that is, whether a psychic force can produce vibrations in
the ether; is, whether it be true, in any sense, that an im-
ponderable force as a psychic force can alter the nature of
solid bodies. I will allow our English A. M., M. D., F.
R. S., F. L. S., to answer: —
“One of the most mysterious and wonderful properties
of imponderable matter is the power it possesses, under
certain circumstances, of effecting an alteration in the parti-
cles of ponderable and even solid bodies. It is now certain
that a sunbeam cannot fall upon a body without its exerting
some important physical or chemical change, and that every
alteration of light and shade which occurs produces a more
or less permanent effect on the surface which receives them.
What can be more evanescent even to a proverb, than a
shadow, whether we regard it in its commonest sense, or as
applied to, the beautiful colored images of the camera
obscura.” |
As the subtle nature of all the psychic forces of Life of
course more nearly approaches the subtle nature of the
forces of imponderable matter I have illustrated my mean-
ing by it. As, however, the nature of the psychic forces
of Life in their relations to imponderable matter may still
be vague in the mind of the reader, I quote another para-
graph illustrative of the point.
“Having assumed that all matter is made up of material,
minute, indestructible, spherical atoms, we see at a glance
that, let the attracting force emanating from their centres be
ever so intense, interspaces must exist. Now, as to the state
of these interspaces, more discrepancy of opinion has ex-
isted than on any other point of philosophic inquiry. Some
supposing them to be empty, others filled with ethereal mat-
ter. Here Descartes found his vortices; and here the more
ancient philosophers located their ether, animating the mass,
and enduing it with its peculiar properties. The latter
opinion, although exploded for ages, is probably, with some
modification, very near the truth; all reasoning and all ex-
periment tending to the belief that these interspaces are
filled with an imponderable form of matter playing a most
important part in the phenomena of the material world.”


THE PASSIONS AND THE WILL. 203
The Oracles of the ancient philosophers referred to,
are possibly the following, which I found among some
ancient Greek fragments in the British Museum. “ The
ethers of the elements therefore are there, the
impressions of characters, and of other divine visions
appear in the ether. In this, the figures without
figure, are figure. The ethereal vestment of the Soul per-
petually revolves in us.” Whatever may be the modern
psychological terms by which these ancient phrases may in
any way be rendered intelligible to modern thought, it is
nevertheless not difficult to see that a connection is hinted
at as existing between the ether and the operation of the
psychical forces exerted on it by the human mind. If then
the work done on imponderable matter by the constructive
work of a passion is — other things equal—to be measured
as the product of its psychic force into vibrations of ether,
would it be possible to understand thought transference
or telepathy by this law? And, are we not unwise to
attribute to ‘spirits’ phenomena that have their origin in
this natural source? Complex and obscure as the laws of
Telepathy, Spiritualism, Thought Transference, Mind
Reading and Mental Healing may appear to us, and tempted
as we are to refer every effect to its own peculiar cause,
is not this the result of our failure to be guided by the in-
ductive method of Bacon? Is it not possible that the Bacon-
ian method, by making us trace psychic effects to their proxi-
mate psychic causes, on further generalization would lead us
to the discovery of a few simple laws of psychic attraction,
obeying which we should learn how thought unites to thought
to make a mind, and how cell unites to cell to make a brain 2
Is it not possible that we may discover that the very law
that presides over the association of our ideas causes the
table to tip at a seance? That the law regulating the attrac-
tion of food by Hunger is identical with that which sustains


204 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
the enthusiasm of the philosopher, and the automatic mes-
sages of ‘spirits’? Obviously our best guides in reasoning
from mental experiments are the following four rules from
Newton, the discoverer of gravity: —
RULE I.
We are to admit no more causes of natural things than
such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appear-
ance.
RULE II.
Therefore to the same natural effects we must as far as
possible assign the same cause.
RULE III.
The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intension nor
remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all
bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be es-
teemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.
RULE IV.
In experimental philosophy we are to look upon proposi-
tions collected by general induction from phenomena, as
accurately, or very nearly true, notwithstanding any con-
trary hypothesis that may be imagined, till such times as
other phenomena occur by which they may either be made
more accurate, or liable to exception.
In the relations of the Passions to the Will, however, in
Moral Life, it is unquestionably certain that the Passions
have a uniform efficacy as causes and motives. The certainty
that men in the same circumstances and under the same mo–
tives will act the same way; and that upon this principle all
of the complicated operations of society depend, is sufficient
evidence of the unity of the human Passions, or of uniform
acts governed by classes of uniform feeling. The freedom
of the Will in Moral Life, therefore, means the choice of


206 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
ful at the time. Brown was of the opinion that those brief
feelings which the body immediately obeys are commonly
called volitions, while the more lasting wishes are simply
denominated desires. Of the same opinion was Priestley
who says: “Every volition is nothing more than a desire,
viz., a desire to accomplish some end, which end may be
considered as the object of the passion.”
Evidently the whole tendency of this book has been to
strengthen the position of the large crowd of illustrious
philosophers who have identified passion and will. The
relation between the nobler or lower Passions and the Will
is, of course, implied in the idea of Hegel, that the ethical
end is self-realization, i. e., the realization of the true self
—not the mere private self. Bradley thus states the posi-
tion: “I am morally realized, not until my personal self
has utterly ceased to be my exclusive self; is no more a will
which is outside others' wills, but find in the world of
others nothing but self. . . . Realize yourself as an
infinite whole,” means “realize yourself as the self-conscious
member of an infinite whole, by realizing that whole in
yourself. . . . Hence that all willing is seen not to be
in collision with morality.” Thus, the complex operations
of the Passions in life is an Art creative of Forms; an
orderly disposal of the physical and mental forms of Nature,
so as to make such forms answer to the design of evolution.
Clearly, the greater development of the Collective Will of
a city, state, or nation, depends upon those loftier prin-
ciples which liberate the individual from the professional
politicians. So far from the bosses aiming to place men
of educated culture in American politics it is asserted that
there are only Vice President Roosevelt and Secretary Hay
who have ever written books. It is laughable to conjecture
as to what sort of support Emerson would have received
had he run for the Presidency? High literary intellectual


208
THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
knowledge of the physical of all moral, ethical, and
universe.
Sensations of deduction
by furnishing physical facts
for classification, thereby
create the possibility for the
connection of the order of
all physical things, and
forms, and forces in physical
time.
spiritual principles; of all
knowledge of the psychic
universe.
Sensations of induction by
furnishing psychical facts for
classification, thereby create
the possibility for the con-
nection of the order of all
psychical forms, and things,
and forces in psychical time.
VI.
Sensations of deduction
imply that their principle of
cause and effect (as the prin-
ciple of possible experience)
are the forces essential for
the co-existence of the forms
of the physical universe.
Sensations of induction
imply that their principle of
cause and effect (as the prin-
ciple of possible experience)
are the forces essential to the
co-existence of the forms of
the psychical universe.
VII.
Sensations of deduction
mean, that all changes and
successions in Time take
place according to the laws
of physical causes and
effects.
Sensations of induction
mean, that all changes and
successions in Time take
place according to the laws
of psychical causes and
effects.
VIII.
Sensations of deduction
mean, that all changes and
successions in Time in the
Sensations of induction
mean, that all change in the
successions of Time by


THE PASSIONS AND THE WILL. 209
forces and forms of matter forms of Life is only possi-
is only possible on the condi- ble on the condition of the
tion of the permanence of permanence of Life as a con-
Matter as a condition for dition for psychical time.
physical time.
IX.
Sensations of deduction Sensations of induction
are caused by forces con- are caused by forces con-
nected with forms of Matter nected with forms of Mind
and Death. and Life.
All phenomena therefore relate to a Duality of Time in
which, side by side, existence passes. The Unity of Time
is untenable. It is based on the fallacy of the Unity of
Sensation; or, that Sensation is not Dual in its origin and
nature.
In this principle of the Duality of Time giving rise to
its two laws of Sensation will be seen the difference between
Kant, the whole school of German and modern Idealists,
and myself. Up to the present, the law of Inductional
Sensation has been ignored. By it, however, I claim that
man realizes the “objective" reality of psychical stimuli;
and the psychic forces of his own moral intuition. By means
of his Moral Sensations of Induction the ethical higher truths
are as firmly grasped by man as by faith in the deductions of
the Senses, “we, so to speak, lay hold on the phenomena of
the material world.” In other words, Sensations of Induc-
tion gives us moral “Knowledge” in the strict sense of the
term. So far, this form of knowledge has been supposed
to possess merely a “subjective” reality. I claim for it an
“objective” reality. The two foregoing laws of Induc-
tional and Deductional Sensation, meaning, that through
these two classes of Sensation we have knowledge—on the
one hand, of an Intelligible Psychic Universe to which our
Souls belong; and of a Blind Physical Universe to which


210 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
the Matter of our Bodies belong. The union of the two we
call Space. Their natures, however, in themselves being
separated and distinct; though existing together after a two-
fold co-ordination.
CHAPTER XVIII.
OUR PASSIONS AND SENSATIONs.
“Being ourselves the sowers and the seeds,
The night that covers and the lights that fade,
The spear that pierces and the side that bleeds,
The lips betraying and the life betrayed;
The deep hath calm; the moon hath rest: but we
Lords of the natural world are yet our own dread enemy.”
—ANON.
In Kant's opinion, unless the Mind or Soul had within it
principles of Time and Space at birth, by the means of
which it could shape its own experiences into forms of
knowledge, its experiences would be impossible. The Soul
must, therefore, possess the innate power of knowing that
things exist alongside of each other; which is co-existence or
Space. It must also have the innate power of knowing
that things succeed each other; which is succession or Time.
And this knowledge of Time and Space is therefore created
for us by our feelings of Sensation and Passion; because our
Senses and Passions are prearranged to co-exist with physi-
cal objects; and to succeed each other in consciousness as
physical objects do. Sometimes the Passion of Sublimity
realizes the poetic force of this co-existence of the Soul
with Nature as it exclaims,
“Sky, mountains, river, winds, lake, lightnings! Yel
Wiih night and clouds, and thunder, and a soul
To make these felt and feeling, well may be
Things that have made me watchful; the far roll
Of your departing voices, is the knoll
Of what in me is sleepless.”


OUR PASSIONS AND SENSATIONS. 211
For our knowledge of all the objects of Nature which co-
exist and succeed each other therefore, we are, according to
Kant, indebted to our feelings of Sensation. Or; in the
line of the Poet, to “a Soul to make these” objects felt
and feeling; our feelings of Sensation being laws of the
Soul. So that if the reader's Sensations of Sight and
Hearing enable the reader to see and hear five thousand
things whilst I am only feeling one, the reader's Sensations
would be five thousand times greater than the author's.
Our feeling of Sensation so far as Physical Time is con-
cerned, simply resolves itself into our power to note the
swiftness or slowness of things which succeed each other.
What the ultimate nature of the objects of Matter may be
apart from what our feelings of Sensation tell us, we can
never know, hence we speak of the world as phenomènal.
“We gaze and turn away and know not where,
Dazzled and drunk with beauty, till the heart
Reels with its fulness.”
The Soul develops Senses; as a means of harmon-
izing the Passions with the laws of the Universe. So
far as Time consisting of successions of feelings
in their temporary co-existences with ideas, objects
and forces, it is plain that things may succeed each
other both outside of the brain and in it. The objects
seen in our dreams succeed each other inside of
the brain, by the law of Psychical Time, and also produce
feelings of Sensation and awaken forces of Passion. So of
objects seen in psychic phenomena, in experiences of mysti-
cism, in the visions of prophecy, in insanity, in the inspira-
tions of genius. The objects productive of either the feelings
of Sensation or the feelings of Passion in these cases succeed
each other by the Psychical law of Time within the brain.
The Soul relates itself to objects according to the succes-
sions of its own Psychical law of Time in all these instances.


212 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
It is briefly insulated from the world of matter. The suc-
cessions of the Physical Time of things in their accustomed
order then has no power. The grave has no influence over
this Psychical law of Time; for its succession of objects are
wholly subjective.
“The mind that is immortal makes itself
Requital for its good or evil thoughts—
Is its own origin of ill and end—
And its own place and time—its innate sense
When stripped of this mortality, derives
No color from the fleeting things without.”
The Soul or Mind, therefore, is capable of creating new
Spiritual objects of affinity out of its old images of expe-
rience; and to which its feelings of Passion and feelings of
Sensation can respond as readily as they do to the physical
objects of the World and the Universe. All of our deeper
inner experiences substantiate this fact; unless we attribute
all the association of the people in our dreams and psychic
experiences to — spirits. Our Senses have in themselves no
meaning save as they are capable of selecting forms as
affinities for the feelings of the Passions. The Universe of
Souls and Forms of Matter in which the Individual Soul and
her varied Passions of Love finds herself in the Twentieth
Century A.D., is a Universe of Souls and Forms of Matter
possessing Higher Possibilities of a more Grand and Harmo-
nious Affinity. With these Higher Possibilities of Harmony,
the Soul and her Higher Evolving Passions of Love
may become related. In so far as the Senses may be
used as the evolved agents of the Higher Passions to
discover these Higher affinities are the Higher Passions
capable of conditioning their own Law of Time through
their Senses. All the Series of Biological Facts in Evolu-
tion (which clearly show that the Senses one after another
have been evolved to serve as agents for the Evolving
Passions) also show that the Soul and her varied Passions
of Attractive Love are capable of conditioning their own


214 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings strong or weak
All that I would have sought and all I seek
Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe—into one word
And that word were Lightning I would speak;
But as it is I live and die unheard
With a most voiceless thought sheathing it as a sword.”
The whole question whether when a man die shall he live
again is one depending on the deeper question does the Soul
possess constructive innate powers by which it can self-
endow itself with form? The present physical form of the
Soul has been developed by its powers of Sex and Hunger;
for the Body is the physical form of the Soul. In what
sense are other powers of the Soul constructive of forms?
The strictly scientific answer to this question would afford
more comfort on a death bed than the whispering of a
thousand creeds. That some of the superphysical forces of
the Soul which we call Passions are capable of constructing
matter into new forms, as instanced in Hunger and Sex, is
obvious. But what influence on certain material forces
have other Passions; and can they reconstruct forms of
matter on other planes? There is no physical analogy or
resemblance that has done more to destroy belief in the
spontaneous power of the Passions to act on, and recon-
struct ideals or forms in the living matter of the body than
the analogy of a physical impression upon a wax tablet or
a piece of white paper as proof of the emptiness of a child's
mind at birth. In this analogy every idea of the innate,
spontaneous, constructive power of the Soul or Mind
is destroyed. Ancient and modern philosophers begin
by using the analogy of a physical impression in its relation
to the Soul as a figure of speech but end up by insisting
that it is a faithful resemblance of the leading law of the
Mind or Soul; which is that of being wholly passive, recipi-
ent and uncreative. The Soul on this theory is capable of
being altered by physical forces; but is incapable in any


OUR PASSIONS AND SENSATIONS. 215
sense of altering their relations. Thoughts and Ideas may
influence It ; but It has no influence on Thoughts and
Ideas. The impression theory was created in a sad hour.
Uncritical minds never cease believing that it is the one
ruling law of the Mind or Soul; and I fully believe that
Hume believed in it as the corner stone of all his thinking.
He says, “an impression first strikes upon the Senses and
makes us perceive heat or cold, thirst or hunger.” Here
Hume confounds the Sensations of heat and cold, due to ex-
ternal conditions with Hunger; which is a born Passion and
a conscious spontaneous cause demanding union with matter
as a condition of Life. Hume says: “Of this impression
there is a copy taken by the mind.” According to this
the Mind is a copybook for the Senses. The Mind
is one thing; the Senses another. Furthermore he
calls the Passion of Hunger a Sense. “The copy remains
after the impression ceases and we call the copy an idea.”
Still haunted by the analogy of a physical impression on a
piece of paper, Hume continues: “This copy which has been
called an idea produces the new impressions of desire or
aversion.” Now Desire, or Aversion, or Love and Hate
are modes of Passion; and the Desire of Hunger is assumed
to be an effect of reflection. “ These are impressions of
reflection because derived from it.” Here the word impres-
sion is twisted in the sense of an effect. Aversion and Desire
being the effect of the copied idea. At first an impression
was stated by him to be a cause of Sensation. And in
order to carry out the idea that impression is a cause,
though in the last sentence he says it is an effect, Hume
continues, “These impressions of reflection are again copied
by the imagination or memory and become ideas.” That is,
the feelings of Desire and Aversion which are impressions
as he says, are copied by the Imagination; the Imagination
being a copybook too. “These may give rise to others.


OUR PASSIONS AND SENSATIONS. 217
our ability to be conscious of the successions of objects and
ideas. One is by the successions of physical stimuli on our
Senses. The other law of Time is constituted by the suc-
cessions of the psychical stimuli of our Passions in their
effects on our nerves, muscles and Senses. The one law of
Time originates from the successions of outside physical
objects as they produce successions of Sensations from
without. This is the law of the Time of the Earth. The
other law of Time originates from the successions of inside
psychical forces from within us as they produce feelings of
Inductive Sensation and Passion and their serial successions
within. This is the Law of the Time of the Soul. At death
the first law of Time ceases so far as the body is concerned.
But as our Passions may be proved capable of positing
Senses and also of stimulating them to activity, the Soul
after death will still possess its own Law of Time. The old
impression theory of Locke indirectly implies that Sensation
is uniformly deductive. Sensation is the exercise of a Sense
and is both Inductive and Deductive. Unpurposed hearing
is Deductive Sensation. Conscious listening is Inductive
Sensation. So of the difference between Seeing unpur-
posedly and Looking. The stimulus of the one originates
from physical causes, the latter from psychical. Inductive
Sensation is created by Passions from Within. Deductive
Sensation is created by material or physical stimuli from
Without. The one is a matter of laws of psycho-physics
and of physical stimuli. The other of psychical self originat-
ing stimuli. A Sensation is a feeling of any one of the Five
Senses. A Passion is a feeling of mental attraction or repul-
sion and is the activity of an inside mental force. Inductive
Sensations are created by the Passion of Joy when a bird
sings, or when by the Passion of Anger I knock a man
down. Deductive Sensations are realized by those who
hear the song and feel the blow. The philosophy of Hume,


218 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
Locke and Huxley is built solely on the impressionism of
Deductive Sensation. The philosophy is false because it is
only an half-truth. Without a law of Inductive Sensation
to precede its Deductionism experience would be impossible.
The phenomena of mental healing, insanity and psychic
phenomena are based on the laws of Inductive Sensation in
their relation to the Passions. The relation of our Passions
to our Inductive Sensations and their feelings of Pleasure
and Pain is a key to these mysteries. It may be sad that
the rude tempest of these pages should so roughly awaken
the sweet slumbers of Locke and Hume ; but the experience
of millions proves their theory an exaggerated half-truth.
Having explained the distinction between Deductive and
Inductive Sensation it may be broadly stated that in all forms
of Inductional Passion we posit our own Inductional Sensa-
tions. The Sensations we feel when swayed by the Passion of
Devotion are induced by the Passion in its Inductive action.
So of Sex. The Passion induces a knowledge of Self
utterly independent of other outside impressions. Though,
of course, objects of affinity exist. This principle may
be carried so far that one can self-induce Sensations of
Touch on the arms, face, neck, feet or other parts of the
body. The relation of a Holy Passion to Inductive Sensa-
tions was shown in the stigmata of St. Francis. No holier
soul has flamed torch-like in the heavens of the centuries
than he. Insanity is possible because the Passions of the
insane induce erroneous Sensations. No swift daylight of
Truth can destroy their darkness. The law of the Psychical
Time of the Soul has temporally destroyed the law of the
Physical Time of the Earth in its suggestive rationality.
The successions of outside objects can make no better im-
pression. All insanity, psychic phenomena, and forms of
mental healing are based on the common psychological prin-
ciple that as all our Aggressive Passions are Inductive they


OUR PASSIONS AND SENSATIONS. 219
are therefore capable of positing Inductive Sensations. In
a word the knowledge derived from our Inductive Sensations
as caused by Passion, is a knowledge which the Soul or
Mind supplies from itself; whereas the knowledge common
to our Deductive Sensations has its source in experiences
aroused by physical stimuli as ;
“When in some fresh-blossoming wood
We draw the spring into our breath and feel that life is good.”
Inductive Sensations present à priori knowledge of the
laws of our internal states. Deductive Sensations present
à posteriori knowledge of physical objects and forces.
These are two wholly distinct spheres of knowledge. The
one is altogether independent of physical experience; though
longing to find its affinities in it.
“For we, close caught in the wide nets of Fate,
Wearied with waiting for the World's Desire,
Aimlessly wandered in the house of gloom,
Aimlessly sought some slumberous anodyne
For wasted lives, for lingering wretchedness
Till we beheld thy re-arisen shrine
And the white glory of thy loveliness.”
The Mystic, Prophet, Spiritual Philosopher, and Platonist
builds his philosophy on the evidence of his Inductive
Sensations in their relations to his Nobler Passions. The
Sensationalist, Materialist, Lockite and Hume's disciples
found their philosophy on the evidence of their Deductive
Sensations in their relation to laws of physical stimuli. A
philosophy broad enough to embrace both of these prin-
ciples of Sensation is possible. Of course the Theological
philosophies would fight Inductive Sensation, as their object
is to exalt their Beliefs at the expense of the Soul.
This indirectly, leads across the field, to another matter.
Nothing reveals another's nature to us, or a man's leading
Passions, so much as the mode and manner of the man's
criticism of great subjects. For, in deciding a man's lofty


PASSIONS OF HOPE AND FEAR. 221
passes away, the world and all it contains, are grasped in
their true nature by an act of intuition, and appear in a
form which forces itself upon consciousness as an object of
meditation. Here reflection attains its highest point.
Between it and the merely animal perception there are
countless stages, which differ according to the approach
made to a universal view of things.”
CHAPTER XIX.
PASSIONS OF HOPE AND FEAR.
“In nature there's no blemish but the mind.”—SHAKESPEARE.
“Pale Fear hunted by ghastlier shapes
Than surround Moon-blasted Madness
When he yells at midnight.”—Coler IDGE.
“The mind is its own place and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven
What matter where if I be still the same.”—MILTON.
For me to know what things I may certainly Hope for
and what things I should philosophically Fear is for me to
know how to Live and Die. Things that prove to be
illusions are more fiercely hoped for than realities. Our
temperaments are lakes discharging themselves by prevail-
ing passions. At our birth the balance of the Passions of
Hope and Fear in our temperaments influences us as pros-
pective Heroes or Cowards. So that in after life, –
“There is nothing either good or bad
But thinking makes it so.” -
And we look at things according to our prevailing tem-
perament. “As character comprises the entire sphere of
the educated will, so temperament is nothing else than the
sum of our natural inclinations and tendencies. Inclination
is the material of the will resolving itself when controlled
into character; and when controlling into passions. Tem-


222 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
perament is, therefore, the class of our passions. And the
former like the latter may be distinguished into two prin-
cipal classes. Intelligent psychologists and physicians have
always recognized this fact. The former dividing tempera-
ments into active and passive. The latter classifying the
passions as exciting and depressing.” Thus it is that from
the teeming soil of Moral Hope have sprung the World's
golden crops of Higher Faiths. The Oak of Joy in which
Love Sings was once potential in an Acorn of Hope. For
Hope teacheth Love to build her nest and instructs the
Honeysuckle of Peace how to climb the porch of the
Cottage of Toil. The character of our Passions of Hope
and Fear give moral character to those things in Life which
we regard as Good and Evil. And we call those things
Evil which give us physical and moral and religious pain.
The Passion of Hope implies the Uncertainty of the Form
of Good which we expect; and the fallibility and uncer-
tainty of our knowledge. Though we realize that all our
gales cannot waſt from groves of orange and citron trees,
Hope throws the preponderance of feeling in favor of the
Good.
“But thou, O Hope 1 with eyes so fair,
What was thy delighted measure ?
Still it whispered promised pleasure,
And bade the lovely scenes at distance hail!
Still would her touch the strain prolong;
And from the rocks, the woods, the vale
She called on Echo still through all her song;
And where her sweetest theme she chose
A soft responsive voice was heard at every close;
And Hope enchanted, smiled, and waved her golden hair.”
There are certain General Passions of Involution whose
expectations at Birth and Puberty imply a natural affinity
of the Soul with Nature. Thus we have the Hope of
Hunger, the Hope of Sex, the Hope of Love. In this
sense the Passion of Hope is the expression of all the


PASSIONS OF HOPE AND FEAR. 223
various involving passions whose innate expectations imply
their universal affinities of Nature and Mind. Spinoza
and Hume seem to have studied these passions only from
the standpoint of Reason. That is, Hume enlarged on
Spinoza's idea of the law of intellectual probability as
intellectually swaying the Soul from Hope to Fear.
Evidently our Temperaments influence this law of
Probability in looking at all things. Collins finely brings
out this idea. Let us suppose his Harp of Music in his
ode to be the Harp of Life. His Passions of Fear, Anger,
and Despair to be prevailing Temperaments in a Home.
“First Fear his hand, its skill to try
Amid the chords bewildered laid;
And back recoiled he knew not why
Even at the sound himself had made.
Next Anger rushed—his eyes on fire,
In lightnings owned his secret stings;
In one rude clash he struck the lyre,
And swept with hurried hands the strings.
With woful measures wan Despair—
Low sullen sounds!—his grief beguiled;
A solemn, strange, and mingled air;
'Twas sad by fits—by starts 'twas wild.”
In its practical relations to home, business, or pro-
fessional life, no temperament is more discouraging to have
with you than one biased to Melancholy, Fear, and Despair.
The Mental Healers try to subdue the Passion of Fear in
their patients by giving them more hopeful thoughts.
Mental healing in this form was taught in Athens 306 B.C.
by Epicurus, and was made one of the prominent doctrines
taught by him. He tried to make every one of his
disciples his own Mental Healer in this sense; for he
considered the Passion of Fear to be the great foe of Moral
Happiness. In so far as a mental or moral object becomes
an object of Fear to us, does it become an object of Evil.
An Evil Imagination is one in which thoughts exist which


224 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
are detested by other standards of Moral Love. If we
Fear a Noble Ideal in a person, we also Hate the Good in
the person, and hence become Unjust and Cruel.
“From her obscure haunt shrieked Fear,
Of Cruelty the ghastly dam.”
In all the relations of Life we use the words Good and
Evil to designate those things which our Passions desire to
either attract to, or repulse forever from the Self. Thus
with Hume if I can with skill repulse the dangerous sick-
ness of a friend I call it a Good. If my friend dies I call
it an Evil. If my enemy lives I call it an Evil because his
life is a menace to my own. Often enough we find at
certain turns of Life forms of disagreeable fate presenting
themselves. If we have no proper spiritual meekness we
are sometimes urged to ludicrously adopt the mock heroic
attitude of Satan. Being once thrown in an unpleasant
business position I found myself wickedly yet ludicrously
saying of the place,—
“Hail, horrors, hail l
Infernal world and thou profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor; one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.”
The courage of Milton's Satan is a nobler strength in
fighting the battles of Life than the Dutch courage of Cole-
ridge's Opium, or Alcohol. In our most unpleasant situa-
tions we can say,+
“All is not lost; the unconquerable will . . .
And courage never to submit or yield;
And what is also not to be overcome.”
Of course sweeter by far than this spirit is the resigna-
tion of Quietism. All spirits, however, cannot rise to the
uniform submission of a Nobler Piety. The one redeeming
trait of Milton's Satan is that he is not a Despairing
Coward. To believe in our inability to overcome is to


PASSIONS OF HOPE AND FEAR. 225
create our inability. It is to incapacitate the thoughts,
brain, and nervous and muscular systems. The greater the
degree of Fear the greater the incapacity. Mosso says,
“We have seen that the graver the peril becomes the more
do the reactions which are positively harmful to the animal
prevail in number and inefficiency. We already saw that
the trembling and the palsy make it incapable of flight or
defence. We have also convinced ourselves that in the
most decisive moments of danger we are less able to see
(or to think) than when we are tranquil. In face of such
facts we must admit that the phenomena of fear cannot all
be accounted for by “selection.” Their extreme degrees
are morbid phenomena which show an imperfection in the
organism. We might almost say that Nature had not been
able to frame a substance which should be excitable enough
to compose the brain and spinal marrow. And yet which
should not be so excited by exceptional stimulation as to
overstep in its reactions those physiological bounds which
are useful to the conservation of the creature.” The Soul
and her Hopeful Passions are (as mental forces to the
body) what the force of steam is to an engine. Fear shuts
off the Induction of the Mental Steam and the Body ceases
its motion. The disciples of Epicurus and Mrs. Eddy
seemingly assume a similar doctrine. Only in so far as the
Passion of Fear is exercised for the welfare of another can
it in any sense assume the importance of Moral Dignity.
There are various ways of studying the Passions of Hope
and Fear. “A man is known to his dog by the smell—to
his tailor by the coat-–to his friend by the smile. Each
of these know him, but how little, or how much, depends
on the dignity of the intelligence.” Thus we may study
the Passions of Hope and Fear merely through their
nervous expressions after the methods of Mosso, Mante-
gazza, or Darwin. Or, with Hume in their relations to


226 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
intellectual activity and in a psychological sense. Or,
we may study them in the grandeur of the light of
the Moral Philosopher who will see in them the causes of
the rise of empires. In perhaps a scientifically loose yet
sublime way, Ruskin, Carlyle, Emerson, and the Prophets,
so regarded the Passions of Moral Hope and Fear in their
nobler spiritual aspects. Evidently in all sublime art, grand-
eur of imagination is the result of the loftiest play of the
passion of intellectual expectation in its relation to an ideal.
A Hope to express the Perfect. The Almighty raises man
through the ideals of man. The Soul of a great genius, is,
in a figure, a-
“Glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time
Calm or convulsed—in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark heaving; boundless, endless and sublime—
The image of Eternity—the throne
Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee; thou goeth forth, dread, fathomless, alone.”
The Passions of our Hopes and Fears are of course
always relative to our various ideals in life. Our Hope is
the uncertainty of our Good. So that whilst our Hope is a
bird that can fly very high, it cannot (in matters dependent
on intellect) outsoar the limits of our own ignorance. For
our fallibility of knowledge keeps the bird pinioned to the
earth. The Ethical Beauty of the Passion of Fear is when
its concern is for another. We project the floating night-
mists of our own Fear over the river of Another's Sorrow
when our Fear is born of Love. The Fear for Self is a
fluctuating Grief simply arising from a probable decrease of
our own animal or mental welfare; so that poisonous moon-
beams of morbid imagining flash through the windows of
the Soul, creating weird figures of an ever shuddering cruel


PASSIONS OF HOPE AND FEAR. 227
anxiety for Self. All cowards are selfish. Business Fear
always places the Self first. The Hope of Love for another's
welfare does not grow on the same stem as the Hope of the
returns of Prudence. The rich passion of the Hope of
Love buds with the roses of Love. Constant Fear for the
Body creates gloomy ideas of life, dejected spirits, laziness,
indisposition to activity, and suicidal insanity. The
Passion of Religious Hope is a mighty force; but as a man
is intrinsically greater than the flaming torch which lights
him through a dark forest, so is the light of his own divine
Soul greater than that of all his Bibles. The Hope founded
in the nobler passions of the Self is the strength of all moral
grandeur. Distrust of the Nobler Self never won a battle.
So far as the telepathic transmission of thoughts as a means
of changing the Hopes and Fears of another are concerned,
and as possessing therapeutic value, the condition of the
person desiring to be helped is in a state of suppressed
Hope or expectancy. The message intensifies faith, trust,
and confidence in the Good. The mental forces receive
strength and in their turn promptly act on the nervous
system. The relative truth is accepted as divine and
infallible. Hope always implies credulity. The effect is
produced because the Soul accepts a relative truth as an
absolute one. Only in this way can Hope be triumphant
in death; for the Soul passes out with but the relative
truths of Earth's experience. As Campbell sings:
“Unfading Hope 1 when life's last embers burn—
When soul to soul and dust to dust return.—
Heaven to thy charge resigns the awful hour !
Oh! then thy Kingdom comes, Immortal Power!
What though each spark of earth-born rapture fly
The quivering lip, pale cheek, and closing eye
Bright to the soul thy seraph hands convey
The morning dream of life's eternal day.”
Hope expects and prepares for the coming of all Life out
of Death. Hope knew that an ear would one day catch the


228 THE wisDOM OF PASSION.
harmony bubbling from the woodland songster's throat and
she taught the bird the liquid silvery notes of its song
Hope knew the fragrance of the violet would be sweet and
a thing to be desired and lo! its delicate perfume filled th
forest. Hope taught the rose to color itself for the coming
of the poet and the humming bird.
The Noblest Religions have had their origin in those law
of Psychology which are common to Moral Philosophy
God's greatest revelation to man is the revelation of hi
Own Soul. The Soul is the only infallible Bible. Conway
the president of the Catholic University, Washington
recently asked in a sermon: “How expect to form Chris
tians in systems of education which are built upon
philosophy without God, and a psychology which i
ignorant of the immortal Soul?” But suppose a Psycholog
of the Grander Passions to give us a philosophy of God
Shall we burn and destroy the spiritual scientific proofs o
such a Psychology in order to support the ancient creed
by which the Puritan burnt his witches or the Church it
heretics? Assuming the Human Soul to be God's Divin
Child are we willing to travel with the Psychological Mag
to its old or new Bethlehem? An assumed divine belie
never grows. On all planes the Soul is a receptacle fo
forms of growth. Evidently the stomach is a receptacl
for the evolution of dead food into forms and germ
of new organic life. The womb is the receptacle fo
the evolution of the forms and germs of this nev
formed organic life into species of yet higher and newe
organic form. The brain is the receptacle for the ments
evolution of the images of the Senses into newer and grande
spiritual form. What was the Plague of the Fiery Serpent
but a mystical allegory setting forth the plague of our Lowe
Fiery Passions in their first growths? And what was th
Lifted up Serpent but a type of an ideal for our Grande


PASSIONS OF HOPE AND FEAR. 229
Passion and Loftier Love? This ideal of Loftier Love
being our Mystical Salvation and growth to a Higher
Life. The Hope of Love knows nothing of Compensa-
tion. Doth the tall pine expect recompense from the violet
it shades? The dews of affection from a good heart water
the parched flowers of Human Souls because it is their
Nature and they cannot help it. Not because the human
flower shall one day repay in perfume. There is no barter
in the passion of Hope that makes up the divine anxiety of
Love. The Hope of Love for another's welfare does not
grow on the same stem as the Hope of Prudence. The
Hope of Love buds with the Roses of Love. The greatest
spiritual battles of the ages have been the battles of Love
and Prudence. Love's
“— banner, torn but flying
Streams like the thunder storm against the wind,
Thy trumpet voice, though broken now and dying,
The loudest still, the tempest leaves behind;
Thy tree hath lost its blossoms and the rind
Chopped by the axe looks rough and little worth.
But the sap lasts—and still the seed we find
Sown deep, even in the bosom of the North;
So shall a better spring less bitter fruit bring forth.”
A study of the Passions of Hope and Fear in their
relations to such organized forms of Society as claim
Disinterestedness as their Cardinal Virtue, is interesting.
Looked at in their spiritual relation to perfect laws of morals,
spirituality, and ethics, and judged by such it will be seen
that all organizations whatsoever, professing mystical,
theosophic, or religious spirituality, or ethics, are domi-
nated by one principle, viz, Prudence; which is the pas-
sion of Fear exercising itself for the protection of Self.
The forms of the Passions of Hope dominating such organ-
izations are forms of expectation exercised solely for the
purpose of attracting others to the Organized Self. That is,


230 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
for the object of enlarging the Society Self or protecting it
Such an organization loves itself; not another. Neithe
does it give itself for the benefit of another, not identifie
with it. It is always the secret foe to any lofty progres
of thought which imply clearer ideas than its own. Fo
Prudence and the passion of Fear dictate clearly that fo
an organization to give up its particular ideas would be t
give up its only means by which it attracts others to th
Self. An unconquerable belief in the enduring Moral Law
of the Soul of Man creates a condition of Ethical Hop
which is both world-cheering and philosophical. It is
healthy appeal to his Natural Moral Dignity to say the
as a man is greater than the rain storm that passes ove
him, so is his Soul greater than the temporary advers
criticisms of his enemies. The Hope founded in the Noble
Self is the secret of Moral Grandeur. As the Spirit of th
Beautiful is more beautiful than its descriptions; so is one'
Own Soul more beautiful than the ornate words of it
Teachers. Evil is sometimes Good in the making. As a ma
is greater than the Shadows cast by his own Body, so is hi
Soul greater than all its blunders, mistakes, and crimes
Anything that will help us to Hope for better things from
ourselves; anything which inspires a profounder Self-Trus
in the Best within us, makes us better; and possesses a fa
reaching spiritual value. As a man is greater than th
raiment that covers him, so is his Soul greater than all it
past learning. Its possibility to live and learn never ends
Adage, aphorism, any saying helping us to conserve an
trust in our own Moral Values is a help in life. If a cree
does not teach me to believe and trust more deeply in m
Nobler Self it only adds to my weakness. The strength mus
come from within. As a man's own wisdom is more pre
cious than the gossip of his neighbors, so is the wisdom c
a man's own Soul more precious than the Creeds of Council:


PASSIONS OF HOPE AND FEAR. 231
Trust yourself and your life will always be spherical and a
thing of harmony. Here are Ribot's four theories of the
origin of the feelings of Hope and Fear and of feeling in
general.
(1) What is advantageous to the organism is felt to be
agreeable; that which injures it disagreeable. (Wolff,
Kant, Lotz with modifications.)
(2) Feeling arises from Contrast (Wundt, Stiedewroth).
(3) The basis of all Desire is lack, privation (Schopen-
hauer, Hartman).
(4) Feeling results from molecular equilibrium, and is
therefore physiological. (Horwitcz).
Looking at these views from an eclectic standpoint every
one of them is capable of being reconciled with the other.
As stated before, the Passion of Fear implies a self-dissatis-
faction of the Soul because of the belief in one's own
inability to overcome dreaded persons, objects, forces, con-
ditions and ideas. However, America seems to be waking
up to the necessities of these psychological and philo-
sophical studies. The Boston Herald has in it at this
date the following significant paragraph:
“Dr. Muensterberg's elaborate appeal for a new building
at Harvard, especially for the work of the department of
philosophy, is a strong presentation of the need, strong
because he shows that the interest in philosophy as a special
study has grown in such a degree that it attracts a body of
special students who cannot be adequately served under
present conditions. They need a building of their own,
with equipment and conveniences that will enable the work
of instruction and of original investigation to be well done.”
The human body does not become the less mechanically
perfect through the Passion of Fear; but the more incapa-
citated. An engine is none the less mechanically perfect
because the steam has been shut off by which it travels.
It is simply incapacitated because the force of the steam


232 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
cannot be applied to the wheels. I insist that th
Soul and its Passions are to the body what the force
of steam are to an engine. The Passion of Fear shuts o
the steam of the other great propelling Passions from th
wheels or organs of the human body, thereby renderin
it incapable of action. The transition of the steam of th
mental forces by the Will to all parts of the human bod
through the nervous system being the only means by whic
the human body can acquire motion. I also repeat that th
aim of the Christian Scientist and other Mental Healers is
wholly subdue the Passion of Fear. This they attempt to d
by projecting ideas and concepts of their own beliefs. Pri
dent Fear is never exercised for the welfare of Another saw
as an indirect means to gain our own ends. The Anxiety
Fear of Love is wholly disinterested and always sets u
conditions for the welfare of Another without any hope
financial or other secret return. Prudence is the passion
Fear exercised to get protection for Our Own future anima
and mental, and social interests. Hope is the infallib
prophecy of all Life. Up from the teeming soil of Hol
sprang the world's golden crops of higher Faith. Yeaſ a
the fruits and flowers of all noble beings in all ages are i
upgrowths Slowly we learn to understand that both t
rose of Hope and the night-blooming flower of Fear gro
in a garden tilled by Reason. A life of Fear is a life
mental pain. When the door of Life swings perennial
on the rusty hinges of Fear there is always the groaning
dismal Sorrow. Hope is the passion of the evolvir
expectations hidden in all living things. The ovum blind
expects to be an egg; and the egg expects as blindly to 1
a song bird; and the song bird expects to flood the woo
land with its song; as Hope sings to its mate of Love
The power of the passion of Hope is the power of th
passion of the creation and re-creation of all thing


PASSIONS OF HOPE AND FEAR. 233
Hope nestled in the rosebud and taught it how to color
itself for the eye of the humming bird and the poet; for
Hope knew of their future coming. Hope in its perfect
flowering is the expectation of the loftiest universal Reason;
which is a knowledge of the rational limitations of the
forms and forces of universal Truth and Beauty' Hope
expects and prepares for the coming of all things. Hope
knew the eye of man and beast would gaze at the meadow,
and the valley and the hillside; and she painted them a
living green. So far as the passion of Fear is exercised
for another's interest so far is the passion of Fear divine;
and so far as the passion of Fear is exercised for our own
interest so far is it human and animal. The same is true
of the passion of Hope. The only divinity is universal
sympathetic disinterestedness. Inasmuch as a thing be-
comes an object of Fear so far is it an object of Evil.
An Evil Imagination is one in which thoughts and figures
exist which are disliked by standards of mental pain, and
forms of moral choice.
I cannot forbear referring again to Harvard's recent
enthusiasm for its department of philosophy. Dr. Muens-
terberg deserves the nation's thanks for his efforts. No
one can adequately estimate the sublime influence that such
a department of philosophy will have in elevating and
strengthening the scientific mind of America. Here is
what a leading Boston paper has to say about Harvard's
enterprise in the line of philosophy, in the year 1901:
“It will come as a surprise to graduates who have been
more than a few years out of the university that this
department has become popular, employing twenty teachers,
offering thirty-two courses, and with an aggregate attend-
ance on all courses last year of 1000 students, 400 of them
in the introductory courses, and nearly 100 in the graduate
courses, seventy-one of the latter pursuing “research
courses,’ as distinguished from “lecture courses.’ This is


238 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
advanced questions relating to the perception of Time ha
been mainly the work of the Germans. In the America
city where I am writing this book, how many persons d
you suppose exist here in 1901 among its 20,000 people
who are self-cultured sufficiently to admire, or even pa
decent respect to a depth of scholarship which would imply
production of some great specific contribution to the world'
knowledge. The profound scholar where I live is tolerated
but there are few anxious demands for the uprising of an
Newtons or Galileos. The most that would be said o
Copernicus here in 1901 would be that he was “a cran
who had better have been hustling making a dollar.” An
the women, with the exception of possibly two hundred
would have entertained a discreet, scornful pity for him
That is, if he was unknown to fame, and no one ra
after him. But we are wandering from our topic c
The Passions and Time. I have indirectly shown tha
the psychological treatment of Time, according to th
methods of modern psychologists, implies for its object
the discovery of our power to know the relations o
Physical Time, so far as the successions and changes c
vibrations: of Matter in their relation to our Senses ar
concerned. Of the successive laws of those conscious an
subconscious psychic forces of Passion creative of th
elementary conditions of Psychological or Biological Time
or the timal successions and changes of Life itself, moder
science has said nothing. Now, in so far as the organs o
Senses have appeared in the evolution of Organic Life, and
were developed for the use of the lower and nobler Passion
so that the Passions could reach their affinities, just in s
far have the Passions proved the conditions for the creation
of the successions of Psychological time in its relation t
the successions of Physical time. The common mistake i
studying the Passions is, that they are always treated a


THE PASSIONS AND TIME. 239
mere reflex psychological factors. But a Passion is only
reflex when it is passive; that is, when it is aroused by
special outside stimuli. The Passion may then be con-
trolled by forces connected with the successions of Matter.
But Passions are by no means always passive and latent.
When they act spontaneously from innate desire and
struggle out in millions of successive dumb inarticulate
ways to find in Nature their affinities of form, they imply
psychological successive forces of Psychic Time having
their sole origin from within ; thereby making the rest of
experience possible as subsidiary. The Senses, Muscles,
Nerves, Tissues, all assume their proper places as servants
of the successive timal efforts of the Grander Passions.
Then comes into play, as distinguished from Physical Time,
a revelation of that eternal law of Psychological or Biologi-
cal Time whose undercurrents of conscious and sub-
conscious psychic force imply the successions and changes
of Life as distinct from Matter. When the Passions act
spontaneously, they make the Senses, Nerves, Tissues,
Muscles, to all inductively conform to their inverse suc-
cessions of Time. They govern the successive way the
Senses shall look and know. The Senses and Muscles are
made to assume the timal order of the purposes of the
Passions. We must look for the cause of our Life move-
ments not in the Senses but in the Passions. This grand
law of Time is inductive. The perception of Time accord-
ing to the psycho-physic method is deductive. Therefore
the labors of Helmholtz, Wundt, and Fechner have thrown
no light on that Grander Law of Inductive Psychological
or Biological Time whose innate activities imply the
successions and changes of those conscious and sub-
conscious forces whose aggregated results, we call forms of
Life. Psychology, by emphasizing the reflex side of things,
would make us believe that the Soul per se is merely a


240 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
deductive something without desire for affinities of form,
or anything else. But the Law of Psychological or Biolog-
ical Time, as implying the successions and changes of Life,
is inductively operative of Laws of Passion, as laws of
Psychic Force. So averse are American philosophers to the
consideration of the Passions, as being in any way Psychical
Forces, that many of them would prefer even the most sillily
effete interpretations of Spiritualism, as an explanation of
phases of psychic phenomena, rather than to admit the prin-
ciple of the Causality of Life through Laws of Passion.
But if Life be Causal, it must represent forms of Psychic
Force. Nothing is a Cause that is not a Force. The cardi-
nal error of philosophy has been the persistent attempt by
the ancients and moderns to sustain a strained, false, and
divorced relation between the Senses and the Passions as
sources of human knowledge. But I have shown that
certain Passions are elective of classified forms of knowl-
edge. Our Elective Passions with their Inductive Sensa-
tions must, therefore, be classed among the distinctively
knowing faculties; and not as mere reflexes. Before
affinitive objects have come under the cognizance of the
Senses, our Elective Passions, and their Inductive Sensa-
tions seek to attract to themselves beforehand such affinitive
objects in Nature. Reason (in man) considered as the
loftiest intellectual form of judgment is the evolved product
of his experience. Reason simply means the unity of the
judgments arising from the past experience of the Passions,
Instincts, and Senses, and as embodied in spontaneous
Intellectual Intuitions and Universal Class Conceptions.
Reason is the blossom, not the root of the Soul. All
Spiritual and Moral Reason has its primary origin in
Elective Moral Feeling which is Moral Passion. The most
of the logomachies of philosophy have grown out of this
hypostasis of human “Reason,” as if it were the primary


THE PASSIONS AND TIME. 241
mental entity, psychic essence, and causal power of the
Soul, by which all its distinct orders of mental phenomena
were produced. But with Jesus, Buddha, and Schopen-
hauer—an ample trinity—I have reasserted the realism of
the Will to Love, as the road to the Will to Live: and
whose gospel reads, “In the beginning was Appetite,
Passion, Will; ” and as Appetite, and Passion evolves
above the lower animal states, does it furnish the condition
for the advent of “Reason.” So that I antagonize the
popular and doctrinaire belief that ideas—apart from the
lofty or lower Passions which they represent—have any
original force of their own. On the other hand I believe
with Darwin, that,
“Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having
risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very
summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having
thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there,
may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant
future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears,
only with the truth as far as our reason permits us to dis-
cover it; and I have given the evidence to the best of my
ability. We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to
me, that man, with all his noble qualities, with sympathy
which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which
extends not only to other men but to the humblest living
creature, with his godlike intellect which has penetrated
into the movements and constitution of the solar system—
with all these exalted powers—man still bears in his bodily
frame the indellible stamp of his lowly origin.”
The fact of the Immortality of the Soul depends wholly
on the permanency of the application of distinctly psycho-
logical forces per se to the chemical, mental, and moral
forms of the Universe. Both our Passions and Senses
imply durations of classified psychic force to involve,
dissolve, and evolve physical forms, in successions and
co-existences. But to dissolve and evolve forms is to


242 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
change them. My immortality of consciousness can exist,
therefore, only in so far as the psychic forces of my nature
can continue to permanently change the nature of the forms
involved by me. The duration of these psychic capacities
to change their affinities of form are, therefore, the perma-
nent or immortal forces of the Soul. To change a form is
either to improve or to degrade it. There can be no
improvement without change. To improve a form is to
evolve it. Evolution, or a bias to self-improvement, in
some way or the other, is the law of all Life; as Dissolu-
tion is the law of all Death. There can be no improvement
without the capacity for Evolution. The Immortality of
the Soul depends, therefore, on the permanency of its
capacity to change the permanence of the forms of Nature
according to the Soul's own ever-expanding powers of ideal
self-construction. But these forms of Nature must be
fixed and permanent; otherwise its forms could not be
classified for selection and higher changes by the Soul.
And for these forms of Nature to be classified, fixed and
permanent, they must possess their own laws of Time
and Space; or, of permanent succession and -co-exist-
ence. Therefore, Nature must have for a foundation
something that exists always. “That is, something
fixed and permanent. Of the existence of which all
succession and co-existence are nothing but so many modes.’
Our knowledge of Nature “is always successive; is conse.
quently always changing.” By these changes, however, in
Nature, we could never determine whether Nature is
co-existent or successive, unless the strictly physical Uni-
verse “had for a foundation something that exists always.
That is, something fixed and permanent; of the existence
of which all succession and co-existence are nothing but so
many modes.” For, to know that certain forms co-exist or
succeed each other is to know that such forms possess perma-
t


244 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
able, within the length of a second, to note 10,000 events
distinctly, instead of barely 10, as now. If our life were
then destined to hold the same number of impressions, it
might be 1000 times as short. We should live less than a
month, and personally know nothing of the change of
seasons.” Now all of this marvellous knowledge in its
infinite degrees would be based on deductional inferences.
But in order for such deductional inferences to be at all
possible, I must first of all posit a Time succession of Life-
forces of Inductive Power; a Life order of Inductive Time
which precedes and makes possible to me my conditions for
the deductional inferences which I am able to note in
Nature. It is only in accordance with the possibility of
the prior existence of an Inductive Power of Life-Succes-
sions, or of Psychological or Biological Time per se that
any sort of harmony can be arranged between the laws and
nature of my Soul, and the laws and nature of the World;
the existence of whose objects I learn, in so far as its laws
of Time lead me to the deductional inferences of my Senses.
Attention, awaiting a signal to a Sense, as of Sight or
Hearing, implies an inductive succession of Psychological
or Biological Time. The signal itself belongs to a series of
deductional successions. The inductional law of Time sets
up the prior conditions for the deductional series. Other-
wise Sensation would be impossible. Consciousness, and
Life are, therefore, obviously controlled by both induc-
tional and deductional laws of Time; implying that my Life
and the Matter of the World are preserved by the concur-
rence of these Two principles of succession, equally neces-
sary and independent. The Unitary or Monistic conception
of Idealistic Time as urged by Kant is untenable. Equally
so is the Unitary or Monistic conception of Time, as believed
in by the Materialist. Pantheism is based on the Unitary
conception of Time. Christian Science is Idealistic Panthe-


THE PASSIONS AND TIME. 245
ism. Eddyism practically implies the absolute consubstan-
tiality of God and Nature; considered as two different but
inseparable aspects of universal existence. It denies the
existence of the World. My Life, and the Matter of the
World are not preserved by the concurrence of Two prin-
ciples of Succession equally necessary and independent,
according to Eddyism. With the sweet souled yet mis-
taken Mrs. Eddy, the human Soul is not God's Son; but
—God The Matter of the World is not the Matter of the
World; but—God | The Universe is not the Universe;
but — God “If I allow of no God distinct from the
aggregate of the universe, myself included, what object
have I of worship? If according to the latter manifesta-
tions of Pantheism the Divine Mind is but the sum total of
every human consciousness, my own included, what relig-
ious relation between God and Man is compatible with the
theory?” Obviously all notions of Personality, Liberty,
Development, and Moral Responsibility are sacrificed.
The Pantheists and Mrs. Eddy tell us that we run into
error when we divide the “One Soul into souls. -
God not only creates all that is ; He is all that is.” The
fact that Mrs. Eddy' denies being a Pantheist, is to be
accepted with as much grace as if she denied being a
sweet lovely woman. That everything conscious and
unconscious is subject to a principle of change and
motion, is due to the deeper underlying fact of the
successions and changes of two classes of force as the
cause of this Dualism of Motion in Life and Matter. To
divorce Life from Force is to leave the Soul where the old
theories love to retain it. But Physical Time, in so far as
it implies the successions and changes of Matter; implies
as its cause of change, the perpetual motion of Physical
Forces. So, on the other hand, Psychological or Biological
Time, in so far as Life implies the successions and changes


246 THE WISDOM OF PASSION.
of Consciousness; implies as its cause, the perpetu
motion of Psychical Forces. I know that I am behind t
times in announcing my preference for the Dualism
Zoroaster, Descartes, and the Scottish Philosophy rath
than for that of the crude Monistic Pantheism of ol
more modern Spinozism and sweet pietistic Eddyism
But one cannot afford to be modern in all things. T
distinctive difference between Biological or Psychologic
Time and Physical Time, is, that, in Biological Time th
vital successions in consciousness spontaneously origina
of themselves in sub-conscious psychological law
Analyze in a spirit of laughing good humor the mov
ments of an elephant, who, all the time long at
circus keeps his trunk in perpetual motion for apples ar
peanuts. These movements are not reflex. They preced
his Deductive Sensations. That is ; all these motions
his trunk are a series of prior or successive conditions
Inductive Sensations of Touch. The successions of Biolo
ical movements precede and are essential to the speci
Deductive Sensations which come when his trunk is afte
wards in actual Touch with the objects. These pri
movements are therefore those of Biological Tim
per se. In the strict order of the time of their Ps,
chological or Biological successions, the Passion
Hunger first awakens the successions of Instincts col
nected with the motions of the elephant's trunk; secondl.
the successions of the Instincts make possible the I
ductive Successions of Sensation; and Touch or Dedu
tional Sensation as the fourth factor in the series. T
reflex theory reverses all this. It places the Sensatic
first, the Instinct second, and the Passion third
the order of time. The reflex theory is a half truth
and only a whole truth when the common law
Biological time is reversed; as in cases of arousing Pa


THE PASSIONS AND TIME. 247
sions by objects of Deductional Sensation. The law of
Biological or Psychological forces of succession seeking
their affinities in the successions of Matter. To render
intelligible such a psychic force seeking affinities in Matter
we may compare it vaguely and roughly to certain chemical
gases which “for medicinal uses, as also for preservation or
transmission must be bound to a stable, solid base, because
they would otherwise volatilize. Chlorine gas, for example,
is for all purposes applied only in the form of chlorides.’
Now, the reflex theory of Time, inasmuch as it always
makes the Senses, and not the Passions, the first in the
causal series, thereby reduces all Sensations to the deduc-
tional type. It thereby sustains the old unitary, or
monistic principle of physical time; because the deductions
are always of the physical successions of physical objects.
The half truth of the reflex theory in this way is made to
support an error. An error is a half truth. By frankly
admitting, that, according to the law of Biological time, we
have the Passion as the first cause, the Instinct as the second
cause, and the Sensation as the third cause in the succes-
sion of consciousness, we do not prove the absolute
fallaciousness of the reflex theory; but only its relativity.
Both of these truths are half-truths; but both half-truths
are necessary to our comprehension of the whole truth.
The trouble with the reflex theory has been, that undue
importance has been placed on Deductive Sensation. All
moral passions as modes of moral choice or induction
were crushed. The ecclesiastics of the state Church of
England and the Vatican approved of Locke's theory
because it supported the idea of the necessity for the
existence of their church to put their ideas into the
people. The English were not assumed to possess any
moral passion acting from within, out; first, through
instinct; and second, through their instincts to the percep-





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