Select Works, Section 337

Section 17 17. But how comes it that the intuitions and the Reason-Principles of the soul are not in the same timeless fashion within ourselves, but that here the later of order is converted into a later of time- bringing in all these doubts? Is it because in us the governing and the answering principles are many and there is no sovereign unity? That condition; and, further, the fact that our mental acts fall into a series according to the succession of our needs, being not self-determined but guided by the variations of the external: thus the will changes to meet every incident as each fresh need arises and as the external impinges in its successive things and events. A variety of governing principles must mean variety in the images formed upon the representative faculty, images not issuing from one internal centre, but, by difference of origin and of acting- point, strange to each other, and so bringing compulsion to bear upon the movements and efficiencies of the self. When the desiring faculty is stirred, there is a presentment of the object- a sort of sensation, in announcement and in picture, of the experience- calling us to follow and to attain: the personality, whether it resists or follows and procures, is necessarily thrown out of equilibrium. The same disturbance is caused by passion urging revenge and by the needs of the body; every other sensation or experience effects its own change upon our mental attitude; then there is the ignorance of what is good and the indecision of a soul [a human soul] thus pulled in every direction; and, again, the interaction of all these perplexities gives rise to yet others. But do variations of judgement affect that very highest in us? No: the doubt and the change of standard are of the Conjoint [of the soul-phase in contact with body]; still, the right reason of that highest is weaker by being given over to inhabit this mingled mass: not that it sinks in its own nature: it is much as amid the tumult of a public meeting the best adviser speaks but fails to dominate; assent goes to the roughest of the brawlers and roarers, while the man of good counsel sits silent, ineffectual, overwhelmed by the uproar of his inferiors. The lowest human type exhibits the baser nature; the man is a compost calling to mind inferior political organization: in the mid-type we have a citizenship in which some better section sways a demotic constitution not out of control: in the superior type the life is aristocratic; it is the career of one emancipated from what is a base in humanity and tractable to the better; in the finest type, where the man has brought himself to detachment, the ruler is one only, and from this master principle order is imposed upon the rest, so that we may think of a municipality in two sections, the superior city and, kept in hand by it, the city of the lower elements.