The Portable Edgar Allan Poe
Page 67
—Southern Literary Messenger, June 1849
MATTER, SPIRIT, AND DIVINE WILL
(from Eureka)
I have already alluded to that absolute reciprocity of adaptation which is the idiosyncrasy of the Divine Art—stamping it divine. Up to this point of our reflections, we have been regarding the electrical influence as a something by dint of whose repulsion alone Matter is enabled to exist in that state of diffusion demanded for the fulfilment of its purposes:—so far, in a word, we have been considering the influence in question as ordained for Matter’s sake—to subserve the objects of matter. With a perfectly legitimate reciprocity, we are now permitted to look at Matter, as created solely for the sake of this influence—solely to serve the objects of this spiritual Ether. Through the aid—by the means—through the agency of Matter, and by dint of its heterogeneity—is this Ether manifested—is Spirit individualized. It is merely in the development of this Ether, through heterogeneity, that particular masses of Matter become animate—sensitive—and in the ratio of their heterogeneity;—some reaching a degree of sensitiveness involving what we call Thought and thus attaining obviously Conscious Intelligence.
In this view, we are enabled to perceive Matter as a Means—not as an End. Its purposes are thus seen to have been comprehended in its diffusion; and with the return into Unity these purposes cease. The absolutely consolidated globe of globes would be objectless:—therefore not for a moment could it continue to exist. Matter, created for an end, would unquestionably, on fulfilment of that end, be Matter no longer. Let us endeavor to understand that it would disappear, and that God would remain all in all.
That every work of Divine conception must cöexist and cöexpire with its particular design, seems to me especially obvious; and I make no doubt that, on perceiving the final globe of globes to be objectless, the majority of my readers will be satisfied with my “therefore it cannot continue to exist.” Nevertheless, as the startling thought of its instantaneous disappearance is one which the most powerful intellect cannot be expected readily to entertain on grounds so decidedly abstract, let us endeavor to look at the idea from some other and more ordinary point of view:—let us see how thoroughly and beautifully it is corroborated in an à posteriori consideration of Matter as we actually find it.
I have before said that “Attraction and Repulsion being undeniably the sole properties by which Matter is manifested to Mind, we are justified in assuming that Matter exists only as Attraction and Repulsion—in other words that Attraction and Repulsion are Matter; there being no conceivable case in which we may not employ the term ‘Matter’ and the terms ‘Attraction’ and ‘Repulsion’ taken together, as equivalent, and therefore convertible, expressions in Logic.”
Now the very definition of Attraction implies particularity—the existence of parts, particles, or atoms; for we define it as the tendency of “each atom &c. to every other atom” &c. according to a certain law. Of course where there are no parts—where there is absolute Unity—where the tendency to oneness is satisfied—there can be no Attraction:—this has been fully shown, and all Philosophy admits it. When, on fulfilment of its purposes, then, Matter shall have returned into its original condition of One—a condition which presupposes the expulsion of the separative Ether, whose province and whose capacity are limited to keeping the atoms apart until that great day when, this Ether being no longer needed, the overwhelming pressure of the finally collective Attraction shall at length just sufficiently predominate and expel it:—when, I say, Matter, finally, expelling the Ether, shall have returned into absolute Unity,—it will then (to speak paradoxically for the moment) be Matter without Attraction and without Repulsion—in other words, Matter without Matter—in other words, again, Matter no more. In sinking into Unity, it will sink at once into that Nothingness which, to all finite perception, Unity must be—into that Material Nihility from which alone we can conceive it to have been evoked—to have been created by the Volition of God.
I repeat then—Let us endeavor to comprehend that the final globe of globes will instantaneously disappear, and that God will remain all in all.
But are we here to pause? Not so. On the Universal agglomeration and dissolution, we can readily conceive that a new and perhaps totally different series of conditions may ensue—another creation and radiation, returning into itself—another action and reaction of the Divine Will. Guiding our imaginations by that omniprevalent law of laws, the law of periodicity, are we not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief—let us say, rather, in indulging a hope—that the processes we have here ventured to contemplate will be renewed forever, and forever, and forever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine?
And now—this Heart Divine—what is it? It is our own.
Let not the merely seeming irreverence of this idea frighten our souls from that cool exercise of consciousness—from that deep tranquility of self-inspection—through which alone we can hope to attain the presence of this, the most sublime of truths, and look it leisurely in the face.
The phænomena on which our conclusions must at this point depend, are merely spiritual shadows, but not the less thoroughly substantial.
We walk about, amid the destinies of our world-existence, encompassed by dim but ever present Memories of a Destiny more vast—very distant in the by-gone time, and infinitely awful.
We live out a Youth peculiarly haunted by such shadows; yet never mistaking them for dreams. As Memories we know them. During our Youth the distinction is too clear to deceive us even for a moment.
So long as this Youth endures; the feeling that we exist, is the most natural of all feelings. We understand it thoroughly. That there was a period at which we did not exist—or, that it might so have happened that we never had existed at all—are the considerations, indeed, which during this Youth, we find difficulty in understanding. Why we should not exist, is, up to the epoch of our Manhood, of all queries the most unanswerable. Existence—self-existence—existence from all Time and to all Eternity—seems, up to the epoch of Manhood, a normal and unquestionable condition:—seems, because it is.
But now comes the period at which a conventional World-Reason awakens us from the truth of our dream. Doubt, Surprise and Incomprehensibility arrive at the same moment. They say:—“You live and the time was when you lived not. You have been created. An Intelligence exists greater than your own; and it is only through this Intelligence you live at all.” These things we struggle to comprehend and cannot:—cannot, because these things, being untrue, are thus, of necessity, incomprehensible.
No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding, or believing, that anything exists greater than his own soul. The utter impossibility of any one’s soul feeling itself inferior to another; the intense, overwhelming dissatisfaction and rebellion at the thought;—these, with the omniprevalent aspirations at perfection, are but the spiritual, coincident with the material, struggles towards the original Unity—are, to my mind at least, a species of proof far surpassing what Man terms demonstration, that no one soul is inferior to another—that nothing is, or can be, superior to any one soul—that each soul is, in part, its own God—its own Creator:—in a word, that God—the material and spiritual God—now exists solely in the diffused Matter and Spirit of the Universe; and that the regathering of this diffused Matter and Spirit will be but the re-constitution of the purely Spiritual and Individual God.
In this view, and in this view alone, we comprehend the riddles of Divine Injustice—of Inexorable Fate. In this view alone the existence of Evil becomes intelligible; but in this view it becomes more—it becomes endurable. Our souls no longer rebel at a Sorrow which we ourselves have imposed upon ourselves, in furtherance of our own purposes—with a view—if even with a futile view—to the extension of our own Joy.
I have spoken of Memories that h
aunt us during our Youth. They sometimes pursue us even into our Manhood:—assume gradually less and less indefinite shapes:—now and then speak to us with low voices, saying:
“There was an epoch in the Night of Time, when a still-existent Being existed—one of an absolutely infinite number of similar Beings that people the absolutely infinite domains of the absolutely infinite space. It was not and is not in the power of this Being—any more than it is in your own—to extend, by actual increase, the joy of his Existence; but just as it is in your power to expand or to concentrate your pleasures (the absolute amount of happiness remaining always the same) so did and does a similar capability appertain to this Divine Being, who thus passes his Eternity in perpetual variation of Concentrated Self and almost Infinite Self-Diffusion. What you call The Universe of Stars is but his present expansive existence. He now feels his life through an infinity of imperfect pleasures—the partial and pain-intertangled pleasures of those inconceivably numerous things which you designate as his creatures, but which are really but infinite individualizations of Himself. All these creatures—all—those whom you term animate, as well as those to which you deny life for no better reason than that you do not behold it in operation—all these creatures have, in a greater or less degree, a capacity for pleasure and for pain:—but the general sum of their sensations is precisely that amount of Happiness which appertains by right to the Divine Being when concentrated within Himself. These creatures are all, too, more or less, and more or less obviously, conscious Intelligences; conscious, first, of a proper identity; conscious, secondly and by faint indeterminate glimpses, of an identity with the Divine Being of whom we speak—of an identity with God. Of the two classes of consciousness, fancy that the former will grow weaker, the latter stronger, during the long succession of ages which must elapse before these myriads of individual Intelligences become blended—when the bright stars become blended—into One. Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness—that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah. In the meantime bear in mind that all is Life—Life—Life within Life—the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine.”e
THE END
Notes
TALES
Predicaments
MS. Found in a Bottle
1 He who has only a moment to live has nothing more to hide. Philippe Quinault wrote the lyrics for Lully’s opera Atys.
2 Extreme skepticism.
3 Poe alludes here to the theory of Captain John Cleves Symmes (1779-1829), who believed that at the poles, gigantic vortices opened upon concentric spheres within the hollow, habitable center of the Earth.
4 This note appears for the first time in the Griswold edition of 1850; the actual publication date of Poe’s story is 1833.
A Descent into the Maelström
1 Al Idrisi, in Geographia Nubiensis (1619), refers to the Atlantic Ocean as the “Mare Tenebrarum,” or sea of darkness.
2 Poe’s several incorrect renderings of island names have been corrected.
The Masque of the Red Death
1 At the notorious debut of Victor Hugo’s play Hernani in 1830, supporters of Hugo proclaimed the triumph of romanticism over classicism at the Comédie Française by dressing in outlandish costumes and shouting down irate traditionalists.
The Pit and the Pendulum
1 Here the furious, insatiable mob long embraced a hatred of innocent blood. Now that the nation is saved, and the fatal cave destroyed, life and health shall be where fearful death has been.
2 Literally, “act of faith.” The term refers to the public condemnation and execution of those accused of heresy by the Spanish Inquisition.
3 General Colbert, Comte de Lasalle, entered Toledo in 1808, putting a temporary halt to the Inquisition that began in 1478. Trials resumed a few years later but came to a definitive end in 1834.
The Premature Burial
1 Among these famous disasters and massacres, the most recent event was Napoleon’s loss in 1812 of roughly twenty-five thousand troops and at least that many civilian stragglers as his army attempted to cross makeshift bridges spanning the Beresina River in Russia.
2 William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine (1769) went through many editions and would have encouraged the narrator’s preoccupation with physical symptoms; Edward Young’s The Complaint; or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742) was typical of the “graveyard school” of melancholy poetry.
3 Carathis explores Hell in William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) and Afrasiab figures in Persian mythology—as does the River Oxus—but the reference is unlocated.
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
1 At the point of death.
Bereavements The Assignation
1 Propriety.
2 Poe refers, apparently, to a sixteenth-century scholar named Jean Tixtier, but no work by this title has been found.
3 The best sculptor has never had an idea that a block of marble did not contain.
Berenice
1 My companions told me that if I visited the tomb of my beloved, my grief would be in some measure relieved.
2 The “paradoxical sentence” of Tertullian may be translated: The son of God is dead; believable is that which is beyond belief; he is risen from the tomb; certain is that which is impossible.
3 Of Madame Sallé, a ballerina, it was said that every step was an emotion; the narrator says of Berenice that all of her teeth were ideas.
Morella
1 Through its association with the sacrifice of children to the god Moloch, the Valley of Hinnon near Jerusalem was renamed Gehenna (hell).
2 Reincarnation.
Ligeia
1 Poe possibly invented this quotation from Glanvill; the textual source has never been located.
The Fall of the House of Usher
1 His heart is a suspended lute; as soon as it is touched, it resonates.
2 The Latin title is Vigils for the Dead according to the Church at Mainz. The esoteric works cited here all allude to real books.
3 The author and volume, as well as the cited passages, were invented by Poe.
Eleonora
1 Under care of a certain sort the soul is safe.
2 Poe cites the same ancient geographer, Al Idrisi, in “A Descent into the Maelström.” The quotation may be translated, They went upon the Sea of Darkness so that it might be explored.
Antagonisms Metzengerstein
1 Living I was your plague, dying I will be your death. Luther addressed these lines to the Pope.
2 Comes from the inability to be alone.
3 The quotation, probably devised by Poe, does not make complete sense in French but suggests that although the soul inhabits a human body only once, it may, as an intangible likeness, take an animal form.
William Wilson
1 Poe apparently invented this passage, which does not appear in Chamberlayne’s verse narrative, Pharonnida (1659).
2 Punishment strong and severe, which traditionally meant being pressed or crushed to death.
3 The quotation from Voltaire may be translated, Oh, what a good time it was, that age of iron.
The Tell-Tale Heart
1 A species of beetle that produces a clicking or ticking sound as it burrows into walls.
The Imp of the Perverse
1 In this discussion of the first causes (prima mobile) of human behavior, Poe includes among those explanations constructed upon theory and empirically unverifiable (hence à priori), the nineteenth-century “science” of phrenology, developed by Gall and Spurzheim, which analyzed human character based on the shape of the cranium.
The Cask of Amontillado
1 No one injures me with impunity.
2 Rest in peace.
Hop-Frog
1 Rare bird on earth.
Mysteries The Man of the Crowd
2 It does not permit itself to be read.
3 The darkness that was once upon them.
4 Poe alludes to an obscure devotional text from 1500 (“The Spirit of the Garden”) said by Isaac D’Israeli to contain unseemly illustrations.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
1 And all that sort of thing.
2 The first letter has lost its original sound.
3 Poe evokes a character in Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme who absurdly calls for his dressing gown so that he can better hear the music.
4 A former criminal who became the head of Napoleon’s security forces, François Eugène Vidocq later published a memoir, which in translation was adapted and serialized in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine.
5 A plausible equivalent would be, I tended to them.
6 After the fact, from effect to cause.
7 Of denying that which is, and explaining that which is not.
The Gold-Bug
1 Swammerdamm was a seventeenth-century Dutch naturalist and collector of entomological specimens; the title of his major work might be translated The Bible of Nature; or The History of Insects.