Besides in many cases captivity will certainly prove an advantage ; and those that suffer have their freedom in their hands : if they stay, either there is reason in their staying, and then they have no real grievance, or they stay against reason, when they should not, and then they have themselves to blame. Clearly the absurdities of his neigh- bours, however near, cannot plunge the Sage into evil : his state cannot hang upon the fortunes good or bad of any other men.
As for violent personal sufferings, he will carry them off as well as he can ; if they overpass his endurance they will carry him off.
And so in all his pain he asks no pity : there is always the radiance in the inner soul of the man, untroubled like the light in a lantern when fierce gusts beat about it in a wild turmoil of wind and tempest.
But what if he be put beyond himself ? What if pain grow so intense and so torture him that the agony all but kills ? Well, when he is put to torture he will plan what is to be done ; he retains his freedom of action.
Besides we must remember that the Sage sees things very differently from the average man ; neither ordinary experiences nor pains and sorrows, whether touching himself or others, pierce to the inner hold. To allow them any such passage would be a weakness in our soul.
And it is a sign of weakness, too, if we should think it gain not to hear of miseries, gain to die before they come : this is not concern for others’ welfare but for our own peace of mind. Here we see our imper- fection : we must not indulge it, we must put it from us and cease to tremble over what perhaps may be.
Anyone that says that it is in human nature to grieve over mis-
fortune to our household must learn that this is not so with all, and that, precisely, it is virtue’s use to raise the general level of nature towards the better and finer, above the mass of men. And the finer is to set at nought what terrifies the common mind.
We cannot be indolent ; this is an arena for the powerful combatant holding his ground against the blows of fortune, and knowing that, sore though they be to some natures, they are little to his, nothing dreadful, nursery terrors.
So, the Sage would have desired misfortune ?
It is precisely to meet the undesired when it appears that he has the virtue which gives him, to confront it, his passionless and unshakeable soul.
But when he is out of himself, reason quenched by sickness or by magic arts ?
If it be allowed that in this state, resting as it were in a slumber, he remains a Sage, why should he not equally remain happy ? No one rules him out of felicity in the hours of sleep ; no one counts up that time and so denies that he has been happy all his life.
If they say that, failing consciousness, he is no longer the Sage, then they are no longer reasoning about the Sage : but we do suppose a Sage, and are enquiring whether, as long as he is the Sage, he is in the state of felicity.
“ Well, a Sage let him remain,” they say, “ still, having no sensation and not expressing his virtue in act, how can he be happy ? ”
But a man unconscious of his health may be, none the less, healthy : a man may not be aware of his personal attraction, but he remains handsome none the less : if he has no sense of his wisdom, shall he be any the less wise ?
It may perhaps be urged that sensation and consciousness are essential to wisdom and that happiness is only wisdom brought to act.
Now, this argument might have weight if prudence, wisdom, were something fetched in from outside : but this is not so : wisdom is, in its
essential nature, an Authentic-Existence, or rather is The Authentic- Existent — and this Existent does not perish in one asleep or, to take the particular case presented to us, in the man out of his mind : the Act of this Existent is continuous within him ; and is a sleepless activity : the Sage, therefore, even unconscious, is still the Sage in Act.
This activity is screened not from the man entire but merely from one part of him ; we have here a parallel to what happens in the activity of the physical or vegetative life in us which is not made known by the sensitive faculty to the rest of the man : if our physical life really constituted the “ We,” its Act would be our Act : but, in the fact, this physical hfe is not the “ We ” ; the “ We ” is the activity of the Intellectual-Principle so that when the Intellective is in Act we are in Act.
Perhaps the reason this continuous activity remains unperceived is that it has no touch whatever with things of sense. No doubt action upon material things, or action dictated by them, must proceed through the sensitive faculty which exists for that use : but why should there not be an immediate activity of the Intellectual-Principle and of the soul that attends it, the soul that antedates sensation or any perception ? For, if Intellection and Authentic-Existence are identical, this “ Earlier-than- perception ” must be a thing having Act.
Let us explain the conditions under which we become conscious of this Intellective- Act.
When the Intellect is in upward orientation that (lower part of it) which contains (or, corresponds to) the life of the Soul, is, so to speak, flung down again and becomes like the reflection resting on the smooth and shining surface of a mirror ; in this illustration, when the mirror is in place the image appears but, though the mirror be absent or out of gear, all that would have acted and produced an image still exists ; so in the case of the Soul ; when there is peace in that within us which is capable of reflecting the images of the Rational and Intellectual- Principles these images appear. Then, side by side with the primal
knowledge of the activity of the Rational and the Intellectual-Principles, we have also as it were a sense-perception of their operation.
When, on the contrary, the mirror within is shattered through some disturbance of the harmony of the body, Reason and the Intellectual- Principle act unpictured : intellection is unattended by imagination.
In sum we may safely gather that while the Intellective-Act may be attended by the Imaging Principle, it is not to be confounded with it.
And even in our conscious life we can point to many noble activities, of mind and of hand alike, which at the time in no way compel our con- sciousness. A reader will often be quite unconscious when he is m.ost intent : in a feat of courage there can be no sense either of the brave action or of the fact that all that is done conforms to the rules of courage. And so in cases beyond number.
So that it would even seem that consciousness tends to blunt the activities upon which it is exercised, and that in the degree in which these pass unobserved they are purer and have more effect, more vitality, and that, consequently, the Sage arrived at this state has the truer fulness of life, life not spilled out in sensation but gathered closely within itself.
We shall perhaps be told that in such a state the man is no longer alive : we answer that these people show themselves equally unable to understand his inner life and his happiness.
If this does not satisfy them, we must ask them to keep in mind a living Sage and, under these terms, to enquire whether the man is in happiness : they must not whittle away his life and then ask whether he has the happy life ; they must not take away the man and then look for the happiness of a man : once they allow that the Sage lives within, they must not seek him among the outer activities, still less look to the outer world for the object of his desires. To consider the outer world to be a field to his desire, to fancy the Sage desiring any good external, would be to deny Substantial-Existence to happiness ; for the Sage would like to see all men prosperous and no evil befalling anyone ; but though it prove otherwise, he is still content.
If it be admitted that such a desire would be against reason, since evil cannot cease to be, there is no escape from agreeing with us that the Sage's will is set always and only inward.
The pleasure demanded for the Sage’s life cannot be in the enjoy- ments of the licentious or in any gratifications of the body — there is no place for these, and they stifle happiness — nor in any violent emotions — what could so move the Sage ? — it can be only such pleasure as there must be where Good is, pleasure that does not rise from movement and is not a thing of process, for all that is good is immediately present to the Sage and the Sage is present to himself : his pleasure, his contentment, stands, immovable.
Thus he is ever cheerful, the order of his life ever untroubled : his state is fixedly happy and nothing whatever of all that is known as evil can set it awry — given only that he is and remains a Sage.
If anyone seeks for some other kind of pleasure in the life of the Sage, it is not the life of the Sage he is looking for.
The characteristic activities are not hindered by outer events but merely adapt themselves, remaining always fine, and perhaps all the finer for dealing with the actual. When he has to handle particular cases and things, he may not be able to put his vision into act without searcliing and thinking, but the one greatest principle is ever present to him, like a part of his being — most of all present, should he be even a victim in the much-talked-of Bull of Phalaris. No doubt, despite all that has been said, it is idle to pretend that this is an agreeable lodging ; but what cries in the Bull is the thing that feels the torture ; in the Sage there is something else as well. The Self-Gathered which, as long as it holds itself by main force within itself, can never be robbed of the vision of the All-Good.
For man, and especially the Sage, is not the Couplement of soul and body : the proof is that man can be disengaged from the body and disdain its nominal goods.
It would be absurd to think that happiness begins and ends with the living-body : happiness is the possession of the good of life : it is centred therefore in Soul, is an Act of the Soul — and not of all the Soul at that : for it certainly is not characteristic of the vegetative soul, the soul of growth ; that would at once connect it with the body.
A powerful frame, a healthy constitution, even a happy balance of temperanient, these surely do not make felicity ; in the excess of these advantages there is, even, the danger that the man be crushed down and forced more and more within their power. There must be a sort of counter-pressure in the other direction, towards the noblest : the body must be lessened, reduced, that the veritable man may show forth, the man behind the appearances.