I, On My Side, Had Been Equally
Surprised At His Quiet Way Of Reasoning With Me, With None Of The Old
Scornful Spirit Flaming Out.
He was gentle with me, knowing that I had
suffered much, and was not free yet.
I read it again in the way he had counselled, and then refused to
think any more on the subject. I was sick of thinking. Like the wretch
who long has tossed upon the thorny bed of pain, I only wanted to
repair my vigour lost and breathe and walk again. To be on horseback,
galloping over the green pampas, in sun and wind. For after all it was
only a reprieve, not a commutation of sentence - though one of a kind
unknown in the Courts, in which the condemned man is allowed out on
bail. My pardon was not received until a few years later. I returned
with a new wonderful zest to my old sports, shooting and fishing, and
would spend days and weeks from home, sometimes staying with old
gaucho friends and former neighbours at their ranches, attending
cattle-markings and partings, dances, and other gatherings, and also
made longer expeditions to the southern and western frontiers of the
province, living out of doors for months at a time.
Despite my determination to put the question off, my mind, or sub-
conscious mind, like a dog with a bone which it refuses to drop in
defiance of its master's command, went on revolving it. It went to bed
and got up with me, and was with me the day long, and whenever I had a
still interval, when I would pull up my horse to sit motionless
watching some creature, bird or beast or snake, or sat on the ground
poring over some insect occupied with the business of its little life,
I would become conscious of the discussion and argument going on. And
every creature I watched, from the great soaring bird circling in the
sky at a vast altitude to the little life at my feet, was brought into
the argument, and was a type, representing a group marked by a family
likeness not only in figure and colouring and language, but in mind as
well, in habits and the most trivial traits and tricks of gesture and
so on; the entire group in its turn related to another group, and to
others, still further and further away, the likeness growing less and
less. What explanation was possible but that of community of descent?
How incredible it appeared that this had not been seen years ago - yes,
even before it was discovered that the world was round and was one of
a system of planets revolving round the sun. All this starry knowledge
was of little or no importance compared to that of our relationship
with all the infinitely various forms of life that share the earth
with us. Yet it was not till the second half of the nineteenth century
that this great, almost self-evident truth had won a hearing in the
world!
No doubt this is a common experience: no sooner has the inquirer been
driven to accept a new doctrine than it takes complete possession of
his mind, and has not then the appearance of a strange and unwelcome
guest, but rather that of a familiar friendly one, and is like a long-
established housemate. I suppose the explanation is that when we throw
open the doors to the new importunate visitor, it is virtually a
ceremony, since the real event has been already accomplished, the
guest having stolen in by some other way and made himself at home in
the sub-conscious mind. Insensibly and inevitably I had become an
evolutionist, albeit never wholly satisfied with natural selection as
the only and sufficient explanation of the change in the forms of
life. And again, insensibly and inevitably, the new doctrine has led
to modifications of the old religious ideas and eventually to a new
and simplified philosophy of life. A good enough one so far as this
life is concerned, but unhappily it takes no account of another, a
second and perdurable life without change of personality.
This subject has been much in men's minds during the past two or three
dreadful years, often reminding me of that shock I received as a boy
of fourteen at the old gaucho's bitter story of his soul; I have also
again been reminded of the theory in which that younger and greatly-
loved brother of mine was able to find comfort. He had become deeply
religious, and after much reading in Herbert Spencer and other modern
philosophers and evolutionists, he told me he thought it was idle for
Christians to fight against the argument of the materialists that the
mind is a function of the brain. Undoubtedly it was that, and our
mental faculties perished with the brain; but we had a soul that was
imperishable as well. _He knew it_, which meant that he too was a
mystic, and being wholly preoccupied with religion, his mystical
faculty found its use and exercise there. At all events, his notion
served to lift him over _his_ difficulties and to get him out of
_his_ mangrove swamp - a way perhaps less impossible than the one
recently pointed out by William James.
Thus I came out of the contest a loser, but as a compensation had the
knowledge that my physicians were false prophets; that, barring
accidents, I could count on thirty, forty, even fifty years with their
summers and autumns and winters. i And that was the life I desired -
the life the heart can conceive - the earth life. When I hear people
say they have not found the world and life so agreeable or interesting
as to be in love with it, or that they look with equanimity to its
end, I am apt to think they have never been properly alive nor seen
with clear vision the world they think so meanly of, or anything in
it - not a blade of grass.
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