Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/31

Rh are oppositions denoting something that in its very nature "passeth all understanding" and must therefore (from the point of view of the understanding) contain an absurdity. For is that a fact at all which proves to be incapable of distillation from the sense-world in the form of a truth? On the other hand, though the world is cognized as timeless, a time element nevertheless adheres to it — tensions appear as beat, and direction associates itself with extension. And so all that is problematical for the understanding consciousness somehow gathers itself together in one last and gravest problem, the problem of motion. And on that problem free and abstract thought breaks down, and we begin to discern that the microcosmic is after all as dependent as ever upon the cosmic, just as the individualness of a being from its first moment is constituted not by a body, but by the sheath of a body. Life can exist without thought, but thought is only one mode of life. High as may be the objectives that thought sets before itself, in actuality life makes use of thought for its ends and gives it a living objective quite apart from the solution of abstract problems. For thought the solutions of problems are correct or erroneous — for life they are valuable or valueless, and if the will-to-know breaks down on the motion problem, it may well be because life's purpose has at that point been achieved. In spite of this, and indeed because of this, the motion problem remains the centre of gravity of all higher thought. All mythology and all natural science has arisen out of man's wonder in the presence of the mystery of motion.

The problem of motion touches, at once and immediately, the secrets of existence, which are alien to the waking-consciousness and yet inexorably press upon it. In posing motion as a problem we affirm our will to comprehend the incomprehensible, the when and wherefore, Destiny, blood, all that our intuitive processes touch in our depths. Born to see, we strive to set it before our eyes in the light, so that we may in the literal sense grasp it, assure ourselves of it as of something tangible.

For this is the decisive fact, of which the observer is unconscious — his whole effort of seeking is aimed not at life, but at the seeing of life, and not at death, but at the seeing of death. We try to grasp the cosmic as it appears in the macrocosm to the microscosm, as the life of a body in the light-world between birth and death, generation and dissolution, and with that differentiation of body and soul that follows of deepest necessity from our ability to experience the inward-proper as a sensuous alien.

That we do not merely live but know about "living" is a consequence of our bodily existence in the light. But the beast knows only life, not death. Were we pure plantlike beings, we should die unconscious of dying, for to feel death and to die would be identical. But animals, even though they hear the death-cry, see the dead body, and scent putrefaction, behold death with-