XVIII
CONSCIOUSNESS, THE REALITY

 

WE did not talk with Stephen again for more than a week; Joan and I spent the holidays away from home. I was eager, during the entire time, to be back, so that we might continue our ouija­board conversations. But Joan, I noted, seemed to be losing interest. I asked her why.

 

"Well," she said, "the philosophy is quite remarkable, of course. But where does it lead to? So much theorizing without a practical end in sight! I'll tell you, Darby: If when we die, we don't—why, that's just a fact. If it's fact, it can be allowed to take care of itself."

 

"But," said the Adam in me, "it was you who were curious about 'quality of consciousness.'"

 

"But I'm not," she answered, "not unless it gets me somewhere. As far as life after death is concerned, if there is such a thing, we'll know all about it soon enough—we need only wait."

 

Nonetheless when we got home Joan brought the ouija­board from its hiding—place behind the trunk.

 

"Hello, people!" was Stephen's greeting. "Shall we go on with the discussion?"

"The discussion" evidently meant "the revelation." We told Stephen to proceed.

"Well, then," the tripod spelled, "I have said that consciousness is. It is the one and only reality. Now, consciousness has many attributes, two of which are so basic that all others are servants to them. Reason, will, matter—these and a host of other attributes are servants to the two fundamentals I have already spoken of—quality and quantity."

"Define the quality and quantity of consciousness," I said.

Stephen answered: "Quality is soul, as when you say a person has a beautiful or sensitive soul. Soul is the best word for our present purpose, though character would in a measure express the thought. I have told you that graduated consciousness is, in part, reborn into your world. I tell you now that the part so reborn is the quality, the soul."

"Your definition," I said, "is not as opaque as a brick wall, nor is it as clear as a windowpane."

"Later the thought will shape itself," Stephen assured me. "And now for quantity.

 

Quantity is that development which results from the use an individual makes of his quality of consciousness."

 

"Do you mean growth of character?" asked Joan.

 

"Exactly," Stephen replied. "My renewed reference to the quality and quantity of consciousness is not for the purpose of making the terms wholly understandable to you at this time; I wish simply to keep them before you. Suppose now, Darby, you tell me what you understand by consciousness."

 

I said, "Consciousness is awareness of self."

 

"Well, yes," Stephen half assented; and added, "It is in degrees."

 

Recalling a phrase from the old French philosopher, I remarked: "As Descartes said, 'I think; therefore I am.' By the way, Stephen, do you know the philosophy of Descartes?"

 

"Not very well," he answered. Descartes would hold now that consciousness is more than thought. In the same way an insect, if you could interview the thing, would tell you that consciousness is less than thought. Listen! Consciousness is. It is the all. It is the one and only reality, though its degrees and the attributes thereof are many. Without suggestion from me evolution should indicate to you that the degrees are not fixed.

 

Out of the lower, remember, the higher; out of the simple, the complex."

 

Suddenly, as though by a burst of light, my understanding was illumined. Even as Stephen spoke there was answered for me the earth-old riddle—what is reality?

 

At this point I wish to outline the metaphysical equipment I brought to the ouija-board. This digression is not necessitated by possibility of my subliminal authorship of the Stephen philosophy. The subconscious theory of psychic communication would absolutely demand examination of Joan's metaphysical interest, had she possessed either philosophic bent or knowledge; but no such demand is made in my own case. The reason for intruding my pre-Stephen thought lies simply in the chance that it may offer others, as it offered me, an approach to Stephen's viewpoint.

 

Some years ago, in a certain Western university, I took a brief course in philosophy, from which I learned only the asking of a riddle, What is the basic reality?

 

I found myself soon inclined to reject the so-called common-sense, or dualistic, answer, which says: "The material world is real; so is the spiritual. Reality is twofold." To me it seemed that reality could not be other than one. Therefore, I was attracted to monism, of whatever stripe.

 

Under the influence of idealistic monists—a Bishop Berkeley, for instance—I said: "Matter is a mere combination of properties. Place a pinch of sugar in a man's hand. Through the medium of his senses he will identify it. But let the man become blind; no longer can he identify the sugar by its color. Let him also lose his sense of taste, next his sense of smell, now his touch, and finally his hearing. It is apparent that for the man so bereft the sugar has ceased to exist. If, then, in all the universe there were no mind to perceive, there could be nothing to be perceived. Matter has no reality outside the mind."

 

Then under the influence of materialistic monists—Haeckel and other exponents of science—I said: "Thought is a function of the material brain. Mind, spirit, is but a property of matter. Matter is the only reality."

 

Next I connected with the seeming sanity of Kant. Under his influence I said: "Berkeley is right when he asserts that all the mind knows of external objects is its own sense-perceptions of them and the resulting ideas. But from this it does not follow that the external world in and of itself is other than real. Mind is real; so also is the thing-in-itself of matter. But what that thing-in-itself is, mind, knowing perceptions only, cannot determine."

 

The sanity of Kant was attractive, but in the end the hopeless skepticism of his position repelled me. And so I sought for a tertium, quid, a third something, a fundamental of which mind and matter were mere expressions. Under the influence of Schopenhauer I said, "Will is the only real, appearing in one activity as mind, and in another as material force."

 

And thus I was accustomed to find my one reality to-day in mind and to-morrow in matter, though feeling all the while that somehow total rejection of dualism was as close to error as its acceptance. And the next day I found reality in "will-to-live," only to reject it the day following; I could not bring myself to believe with the arch-pessimist that life is but blind, purposeless struggle, whose proper ideal is an automaton.

 

And then finally the riddle I could not solve ceased to interest me. I closed the chapter, five years before the coming of Stephen, by saying: "Doubtless there is but one reality. Science would suggest that it is a colossal, absorbing force of which matter and its energies constitute one phase, and life another. It is neither of these fundamentally. What it is, in a final analysis, is beyond determination. A skepticism wider even than Kant's is justified, with but one offsetting hope— evolution, which, however, to the individual promises nothing.

 

As for personal immortality, that is beyond the bounds of the possible. Individuality is but a tarrying on the way to union with the unknown and unknowable One."

 

Mrs. K., I think, came to Joan and me beset by a somewhat similar belief, whether or no she reached it by the route I had traveled. Her grief, however, was causing her to seek a way out. I, at the time of Stephen's coming, was five years removed from any wish to circumvent my conclusions. For five years I had not read a single work directly touching on metaphysics; indeed, the once attractive riddle had become unattractive, seldom occurring to my thought save as an occasional "fallen man" sermon might stir me to protest the church's ignoring of evolution, my one ray of light.

 

And yet all the while I knew that I was real. And in a way I had analyzed my own reality. In myself I recognized two selves, the self that thinks, that wills, that does, and that other self—the sitter-behind and looker-on. Just as I might see Joan turn the leaves of a book, so I saw myself seeing her. I spoke always of my thought, my will, my act. The thinker, the willer, the doer of me was quite as much under my own observation as under Joan's.

 

"Consciousness is," Stephen spelled that night following the holidays. "It is the one and only reality, though its degrees and the attributes thereof are many."

 

Attributes? Why, of course! The so-to-speak self that thinks, that wills, that does, is but an aggregate of attributes that belong to that other self, that sitter-behind and looker-on, in short the me of me, consciousness.

 

How simple it is! Where else should we look for reality except in the only thing that is truly real to us? Our senses may deceive us; we may doubt them. Our reason is altogether fallible, reaching conclusions which later are shown to be false. Our will may lead us aright or astray. All of these we can doubt, do doubt. Man doubts all things except the fact of his own being, his own consciousness.

 

But, even so, I would not have fully understood Stephen save for his word "degree."

 

"Does it follow that because man's only reality is his own consciousness that consciousness is the all?" I asked the ouija­board.

 

"But," answered Stephen, "consciousness is in degrees. The individual consciousnesses which you associate with what you call life constitute but the higher earth-plane degrees, study of which, from the lowest degree to man, has produced the theory of natural evolution. Must it not be that life evolved from degrees lower than its own? The sting of this thought will be gone once men know that my development here is a parallel to natural evolution, that I am a combination of life quite as they know it, governed by laws that parallel the natural world—I am tempted to say, by the same laws in a higher and more potentially refined form.

 

"Listen! The supreme degree of consciousness is no different in kind from the consciousness that is within me, and that which is within me is no different in kind from the consciousness that is within you. There is no difference in kind between the consciousness within you and that within the bat, between the consciousness within the bat and that within the weed. And the consciousness of the weed is no different in kind from that which manifests itself as an electrical current, and the consciousness manifested by the electrical current is no different in kind from that which manifests itself as what you call inanimate, inorganic matter. Consciousness is. It is the one and only reality, alike always in kind, though its degrees are many."

 

Joan stirred uneasily. "But suppose all that you say is true," she protested. "How will it help me to live?"

 

"Be patient, Joan," spelled the tripod, and, ignoring Joan's question, continued: "Your men of the books and laboratories, once they become monists, all seek to find a fundamental in their favorite attribute of reality. The idealist has made mind supreme, denying the existence of matter; and the materialist has made matter supreme, denying the existence of mind; whereas the truth is that both mind and matter are real, though not dualistically so. Both are attributes of one that is a greater than either. Other thinkers, realizing that somewhere in the backward of things living there is a reality more fundamental than mind, a reality that links matter and spirit in an evolutional chain, probe deep; yet, like the idealists and materialists, they, too, have been content with a mere attribute—a primitive attribute, such as will, yet only an attribute.