Anima Mundi (Chap.20)

The old theological conception of the individual soul as bodiless or abstract led to what Henry More calls “contradictory debate” as to how many angels “could dance booted and spurred upon the point of a needle,” and made it possible for rationalist physiology to persuade us that our thought has no corporeal existence but in the molecules of the brain. Shelley was of opinion that the “thoughts which are called real or external objects” differed but in regularity of occurrence from “hallucinations, dreams and ideas of madmen,” and noticed that he had dreamed, therefore lessening the difference, “three several times between intervals of two or more years the same precise dream.” If all our mental images no less than apparitions (and I see no reason to distinguish) are forms existing in the general vehicle of Anima Mundi, and mirrored in our particular vehicle, many crooked things are made straight. I am persuaded that a logical process, or a series of related images, has body and period, and I think of Anima Mundi? as a great pool or garden where it spreads through allotted growth like a great water plant or branches more fragrantly in the air. Indeed as Spenser’s Garden of Adonis:

“There is the first seminary
Of all things that are born to live and die
According to their kynds.”

The soul by changes of “vital congruity,” More says, draws to it a certain thought, and this thought draws by its association the sequence of many thoughts, endowing them with a life in the vehicle meted out according to the intensity of the first perception. A seed is set growing, and this growth may go on apart from the power, apart even from the knowledge of the soul. If I wish to “transfer” a thought I may think, let us say, of Cinderella’s slipper, and my subject may see an old woman coming out of a chimney; or going to sleep I may wish to wake at seven o’clock and, though I never think of it again, I shall wake upon the instant. The thought has completed itself, certain acts of logic, turns, and knots in the stem have been accomplished out of sight and out of reach as it were. We are always starting these parasitic vegetables and letting them coil beyond our knowledge, and may become, like that lady in Balzac who, after a life of sanctity, plans upon her deathbed to fly with her renounced lover. After death a dream, a desire she had perhaps ceased to believe in, perhaps ceased almost to remember, must have recurred again and again with its anguish and its happiness. We can only refuse to start the wandering sequence or, if start it does, hold it in the intellectual light where time gallops, and so keep it from slipping down into the sluggish vehicle. The toil of the living is to free themselves from an endless sequence of objects, and that of the dead to free themselves from an endless sequence of thoughts. One sequence begets another, and these have power because of all those things we do, not for their own sake but for an imagined good.