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. Only I know that mine is an exceptional
case, that the visible world is to me more beautiful and interesting
than to most persons, that the delight I experienced in my communing
with Nature did not pass away, leaving nothing but a recollection of
vanished happiness to intensify a present pain. The happiness was
never lost, but owing to that faculty I have spoken of, had a
cumulative effect on the mind and was mine again, so that in my worst
times, when I was compelled to exist shut out from Nature in London
for long periods, sick and poor and friendless, I could yet always
feel that it was infinitely better to be than not to be.
THE END
*** END OF FAR AWAY AND LONG AGO by W. H. Hudson ***
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