The Anaesthetic Revelation, from Pluriverse

I HAVE made the preceding digest of current philosophy in the hope of familiarizing its mental spectres, and of authenticating if not justifying the halting discomfiture of even the most cultured patients of the anaesthetic revelation. If I have rightly indicated the obstacles and pitfalls which disrupt the course of satisfactory explanation, and have sufficiently emphasized the confessed failures of philosophical endeavor, the reader should foresee that the seemingly promising rubric, "Anaesthetic Revelation," may forecast rather unutterable Mystery than satisfaction, although our better insight of the dialectic shifts, and the more familiar use of the logical conventions, may clear, to some extent, the mental area in which the Mystery is encountered.

Our hope is not so much to philosophize the Mystery as it is to signalize in it an unequivocal impasse whose obstruction can be neither obviated nor defined — if the confusion of philosophy may attest the fact.

The illumination, or the obsession, which has prompted this treatise, will have rarely arrested the attention of the boor or the bigot; but for the world-wise it will determine as his ultimate and only possible insight of the genius of being and the secret of the world. Any essay upon the anaesthetic (or presumptively any other) revelation, as proposing a detail of what it is or is like, is immediately baffled by the consideration that its topic is and must be unique. It has no class, no relation to any comparable fact or theory whatsoever. Its best remembered impression is the sense of initiation, as into the immemorial, the inevitable, the time-out-of-mind, the something of fate or destiny which, in even justice, at least for once every sane consciousness should realize.

All analogies anticipate the concession that the unique cannot be articulate. Nor does the revelation require for its reception, however it may for its entertainment, the thoughts of language, wherein man excels the beasts of the field. One may be advised of a handicap which the lack of conventional language imposes upon a dumb intelligence, potentially as apprehensive, possibly, as his own.

An English dictionary, with its 2,000 pages, carries some 350,000 different words, of whose meanings the average citizen may know one tenth. Our Indians, of the time of Columbus, may have had 200 words, among which were a few adjectives, but no sign of an abstraction. Conceive then the utter latency — saying nothing of the potentiality — in the Indian mind, of such meanings as memory, objectivity, veracity, heredity, and ten thousand of the like, which were wholly beyond his faculty of expression, or even of focalization in his attention. Under strong emotion he could merely contort his habitually immobile visage, or gesticulate in rude imitation, while his heart might be voluble of an inarticulate and helpless meaning. He could not know, he could not connectedly think, he could not be said to feel the meanings which only culture could educate up to sane and conventional expression, even to himself. Yet the basis for all this exploitation was within him, his birthright as a monad and a soul; he was not a stock or a stone, but counted as one in the spirit world, where even the beast is open to some revelation which in the instant shall carry, however cryptically, the hint of initiation — the hint that Now You Know.

I have wondered at psychology and "natural history," that they have nowhere noticed or identified what has been long known to me as the voice of the blood. They should have heeded the injunction, to "search the Scriptures." For centuries ago, when there were cattle upon a thousand hills, and the patriarchs dwelt in tents, and had no abattoirs for slaughtering purposes, they bled the stalled ox and the fatted calf in the open field, and the blood sank directly into the grassy ground, where it must have frequently occasioned the metaphysical phenomenon which I have mentioned as the voice of the blood, so impressively quoted in Genesis, in these words:

"And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel, thy brother? And he said, I know not. Am I my brother's keeper? — And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground."

The dwellers in cities may live and die with no pathetic suggestion from this incident, they regarding its language as merely poetic and symbolical; but it undoubtedly grew out of a peculiarity well known to every plainsman, and which shall have been observed, however carelessly, by many a farmer's boy — a peculiarity of the following character: Where the blood of an animal has been freshly shed upon the ground — particularly, in my own experience, the blood of an ox, or of a cow or a calf — any other member of the herd passing over the fatal spot will be arrested and entranced, seemingly by some exhalation from the vital fluid. The animal stares, with a rapt and distracted expression, moaning and pawing the ground, as if in fierce remonstrance, though apparently "more in sorrow than in anger." This abstraction may last for several seconds; but any noise or intrusion which would ordinarily call attention will break the spell, which, as in the case of "bearing pain," seems to be instantly gone and forgotten. Having had largely to do with flocks and herds I have witnessed this wonder many times; but after all our Psychical Research I have never seen it in secular print.

I cannot make less of this phenomenon than a revelation, addressed to some atavism of the bovine race, wherein it is as susceptible of the genius of being as man himself has proved it. Of what cataclysm in the history of the creature's species may not this trance afford a reminiscence. The animal has no formal or consecutive thought, probably, but neither, so far as I have gathered, has the anaesthetic patient, save as an informal memory that baffles recollection.

One may ponder long the manifest elements of animal mentality, as transcending the passive receptivity of native instinct — considering not only how much the dumb creatures may be taught, but how many æsthetic traits they show, in the vanity of play and imitation and rivalry, and how deep and lasting their affections are — before he will attain any clear conception of the metaphysical possibilities of this animal trance, or reverie, or illumination, or whatever it may be called — learn, for instance, if it has any imagination, any hint of palingenesis, or metempsychosis, or any [scintilla?] of a past, or of being itself, or fate. Very probably it is the creature's supreme moment, his nearest relation to what we think of as spiritual life. And it is so pronounced, so wholly unique in scientific metaphysics, that I have come to regard it as the monad's most palpable connection with an unseen world.

There are various other instinctual obsessions or possessions which lend a superstitious atmosphere to animal life. A cow, when she leaves her calf resting while she roams in pursuit of her own forage, seems to have left a spell upon it that holds it motionless against her return. It will not leave the spot save for some extraordinary and threatening intrusion; but if really driven by some compelling apprehension to escape, it will run as for its life, and recall the mother with frantic and pitiful appeals.

So a brooding hen, however timid has been her previous habits, is so inspired by a courage and loyalty to her eggs — which must not be allowed to cool — that she will not budge for man or beast. We may easily generalize these instances as provisions of nature, and so forth, but they have a mystical appeal.

There is another supreme instant, often noticed of the dying patient — a stare of seeming recognition, as of some wonderful import, just before but distinctly not inclusive with the "setting" of the eyes. We should consent that the meanest creature ever favored with this miracle of consciousness, this flower of all evolution, may well be given, at least for once, a glimpse of history, or some abnormal reality.

And here, again, the most astute and critical may need warning, against any skeptical and peremptory demand upon the mystic, as to what he knows or sees. This what gives the skeptic away, in his naive presumption that the world-mystery can be of a class, and so comparable and definable. But the basis of all metaphysical insight is the primary fact that being is unique. Until one can identify this logical necessity he is not of the illuminati, although he may be wearing the broadest horns of the herd. He should see that this import cannot be writ on any scroll; he must have the background of its meaning in himself — if indeed he ever may, after our hopeless account, or discount of self-relation. Nevertheless, although we may not profane the one mystery as a topic among others, it seems possible that we should rise to it at our best, and learn that it is a mystery only because we are living on a plane below our best, while its higher sanity is still within the homogeneity of an intelligence which transcends the portals of formal enunciation.

It were manifestly absurd, claiming a "revelation" not amenable to intelligence; but if we may understand Socrates' proof that Meno's slave had latent geometry in his mind, or believe that a proud and sulky Indian may be chafing under the pressure of abstractions so easily connoted by us, the reader may at least "believe in" a revelation unique and manageable, and withheld from popular appreciation not only, but instantly unthinkable by the most profound of mental experts. The latter will claim, under his modern lights (which reveal below the "threshold") that he may live the secret although he has not yet language in which to formulate it, and so hold the world to the rule of reason, pound for pound. But it is peculiarly this flippant and chipper rationality and "matter of course" that the revelation embarrasses and disconcerts. Here is no static accountable equation, but rather a constant excess, and a going on simply because it is going on, in which the natural endeavor to account for itself proves to be of a piece with and continuing the same stuff that it is meant to account for. Strong in the revelation is this sense of an inevitable going on "because of" the curious interest in the fact that it is going on, helplessly and fatedly going on, with a sense of immemorial initiation into the truth that this is the inevitable and eternal world-condition, and however piquant or unique, as what inevitably and of course must be, and ever must have been. There never was a time that did not recognize the presumption of time and the push of its own necessity, and also that any question of its motive was itself a sufficient reason at once for its continuance and for its precedence, but with no relation to a beginning. This is what stultifies the argument for cause: that there is no possibility of a beginning, and therefore no place in which to locate a cause. Above all, it is a revelation of the one truth that is supremely "worth while," but baffled of content by the too-evident fatuity of turning upon itself to achieve a self-relation — a real self-consciousness, in which concept and percept should unite in a whole cognition.

It is fairly presumptive that thought, newly wrought to its highest tension, should revert with curious interest to its remembered experience (or its self) and be baffled in its attempts at instant self-relation, while realizing at the same time that the effort of understanding is itself continuing (and in a certain sense accounting for) the very activity which arrests its attention — affording a presumption from the past as enforcing time's continuance.

With this sense of an effort of the soul to turn upon itself for an escaping and unachievable self-knowledge, the anaesthetic insight attests the only presumable or possible first principle of thought and being, namely, fact, philosophy, explanation, "cause" — all this curiosity and discontent, is to get before the fact, to surround and comprehend the fact of consciousness; and it discovers at last that, in a process of factual thought beginning is impossible, and hence fact is a foregone conclusion, or necessary presumption; and since here is everywhere, comprehension is inconceivable save as in this vain and continuous obsession of self-relation, which keeps the Hound of Heaven on his own trail.

"The wonderful thing is fact" said Carlyle. The gritty Scot was very near to the mystic sanity. And all through German philosophy crops out this desperate and illogical finality of fact, in such sayings as "it is because it is" — using the given fact of knowledge (or of process) as the "cause" of it, and as objectively before it — whereas (as I have laboriously sought to show) the cause is subjectively and miraculously given as the first of facts, and fact (not cause) is the prime reality of being as experience — the given percept which must ground all conception.

Now if this necessary analysis were all — this secular Kantian thought, which thousands of introspective people have revolved as the puzzle and crux of philosophy — our "revelation" would be none such! But the immemorial atavism, the sense of initiation, the voice of the blood, the unique assurance that it is a revelation of the historical and inevitable and the time out of mind — all this admonishes the philosophical parasite that he is not here as a cosmopolitan critic of worlds, with a vocation to put this being in its class, but rather that there is but this; and that, for his once and all, he knows reality. It was a strong saying of William James: "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear: for me the living sense of reality comes only in the artificial-mystic state of mind."

It should be obvious that a generalization of such an experience — involving as it must all the ancillary shadings of the present tense — would have to be told in tentative and provisional and poetical rather than factual terms. Continuous but reverting, sure and yet questioning, at once real, reminiscent and expectant, the genius of it might well regard sardonically any attempt at its factual expression.

[Chapter IX continues in the original.]