passion, feels and knows that only love gives the secret of the universe. In each case the result is perfectly in order, but one hardly sees why it should be called metaphysics.
And we shall make no advance, if we pass from will proper where an idea is realized, and fall back on an obscurer revelation of energy. In the experience of activity, or resistance, or will, or force (or whatever other phrase seems most oracular), we are said to come at last down to the rock of reality. And I am not so ill-advised as to offer a disproof of the message revealed. It is doubtless a mystery, and hence those who could inform the outer world of its meaning, are for that very reason compelled to be silent and to seem even ignorant. What I can do is to set down briefly the external remarks of one not initiated.
In the first place, taken psychologically, the revelation is fraudulent. There is no original experience of anything like activity, to say nothing of resistance. This is quite a secondary product, the origin of which is far from mysterious, and on which I have said something in the preceding chapter.[1] You may, doubtless, point to an outstanding margin of undetermined sensations, but these will not contain the essence of the matter. And I do not hesitate to say this: Where you meet a psychologist who takes this experience as elementary, you will find a man who has not ever made a serious attempt to decompose it, or ever resolutely faced the question as to what it contains. And in the second place, taken metaphysically, these tidings, given from whatever source, are either meaningless or false. And here once again we have the all-important point. I do not care what your oracle is, and your
- ↑ I have touched the question only in its general form. As to the special source from which come the elements of this or that perception of activity, I have not said anything. This is a matter for psychology.
