Alexander Strahan

“ Art always stirs the ultimate sense of the human fortune, by either pretending that the world is lighter, gayer, easier than it had before seemed, or by arousingly challenging us ourselves to be nobler, larger, gigantic, in facing its difficulties. In both these cases, though in different ways, what is vitally concerned is the efferent-activity..... ”

“ All that can be said on the other hand is, that universal experience shows this artificiality to be in a manner natural; since alongside the world of business and of practical life, a long-descended, shining, holiday tradition of an opposite, unserious sphere, wholly unlike common reality, has had to be kept up by sheer way of balance. Periodically, the artificiality grows ridiculously elaborate; amusement becomes more laborious than work,—the two almost exchange places. ”

“ They only occupy the intervals between man's better living. Not only cannot Art give the very highest complexities of sentiency, substituting the egoistic-actualisations which are rendered by Conduct, but at the times it is having sway, it must preclude these by a preoccupation of the sensory apparatus peripherally. The nervous system has to work the other way—from the interior—in all heightenings of character. As compared with Conduct, Art has small subtlety, little intricacy of inter-appeal to the consciousness, but only masses some simpler forms of sentiency ”

“ In reminiscence and imagination, we can have repetition of sensations without the events in the larger Executive-System with which they primarily occurred, and indeed they can exist along with very different events there happening. We can in dream see the sun in the sky at midnight; by means of waking fancies, we can at any time, with more or less of completeness, subjectively enjoy tastes, odours, contacts, sounds.... ”

“ So long as Art keeps the sense-impressions on which it relies large and noble, and does not carry them into such grouped detail as to give precise cues to the efferent impulses, the question of morality has no relevancy to it. ”

“ In his peculiar terminology, all that we know of it is that it is an "Executive System," extending beyond ourselves, in connection with some of whose events, and only with some of them, sensations, &c., happen to us. But all our consciousness, he resolutely argues, is, whenever it arises, so much addition to the sum-total of Being otherwise existing; neither the beginnings nor the ceasings of consciousness having any effect quantitatively upon the operations of the Executive System of Nature. ”

“ The efferent-activity must preserve its own real reminiscences intact; Art, or what passes for it, cannot touch those without killing them. Nor can Art be saved from its own corruption but by timely periodical infusions of the Sublime. ”

“ The experience of fatigue, or tiring, offers a striking example of the law. It is an experiment within everybody's power. Put out the arm, leaving it to sustain its own weight. It will not be long before the not unsatisfactory sensation got from integrating the vigorous muscular co-ordinations decreases; the feeling will shortly turn into one of discomfort; if the position be preserved it will become painful. Rapidly the experience will be that of torment, and it is possible to make the pain acummulate to agony. What has happened to cause this alteration of experience? ”

“ The proper test is, whether the influence of the artificiality is to really lighten the spirits; if so, this second function of Art is discharged by it. Criticism must wait for depression setting in—the ceasing of a light, natural laughter is Satire's due signal. ”

“ He says that some injuries and some diseases do not cause pain in anything like a degree proportionate to their abatement of vitality; while, on the other hand, the tortures of corns and toothache are, he affirms, penalties great enough for bad emperors who have abused the purple by all excesses of wrong indulgence. He points also to the fact, that anæsthetics, &c, can blot out pain. The hypothesis put forward by himself is to the effect that pain arises whenever a nervous grouping is "disintegrated" by being made to act in a way of partial non-repetition of its former full activity. ”

“ It is mathematically demonstrable that any arrest, alteration, or extra occurrence of a physical process necessarily implies increase of Energy, and ultimately of mass of Matter in the world.... Any conceivable alteration in the prior order of atoms, centres of force, or elemental activities, reckoned in any terms of Motion, must, in fact, have the effect of increasing the sum total. ”

“ He explains that the fundamental process of the Intellect consists in our making our own "efferent-activities" represent, and practically measure, the larger operations of the physical world; he seems, in considering the difficult question of Attention, to establish as a fact that the "unit of impression" and "the unit of consciousness" are not the same; in his detailed inquiry into the Laws of the Succession of Ideas, he formulates no fewer than fifteen generalizations, as explaining what he terms the permutation of thought. ”

“ Cyples's hypothesis of Pain, in a word, affects all the controversial reasoning of these subjects.
He has a related theory of Pleasure which, in the case of "sensory-experience," he works out into what he proposes as a strict Law of the Beautiful. In the case of all the specific kinds of sensations, whether in colours, odours, taste, touch, &c., he affirms that the secret of their pleasurableness consists in their offering "accumulation of consciousness by multiplying identical impression." ”

“ Though Art, using the term with the above understood limitation, and reserving Literature, is able to give prompt, large actualisations of the Ego at an easy low level of untransformed, or very little transformed sensory experience, yet, apart from the provisional uses we have spoken of,—viz., filling up otherwise empty spaces in life, restfully alternating attention, &c.,—none of these egoistic-actualisations can be estimated as of much intrinsic value. ”

“ It is easy to see that all who hold orthodox views will be certain to be honestly dissatisfied by what will appear to them the altogether too large admissions it makes of the scientists' explanations of the physiological process of human consciousness, and of the reign of physical law in the world. ”

“ He says that if the increments of energy needed to make valid the persuasion we have of physical sequence being altered in our activity in Conduct, be below a certain limit of size and frequency, the present calculus cannot pronounce that the increments are not "masked" in the ordinary mundane dynamics. Next he makes a curious inquiry into the size and the frequency of the increments of energy which might subserve the needs of a Conduct that should be definable as moral in the old meaning of the word. ”

“ Cyples seems to me to indulge much too freely in hypothesis, and has, by the adoption of a difficult technology, placed a huge obstacle in the way of the popularization of his book, yet I believe no one who is a professed student in the higher fields of thought can neglect his volume, save at the risk of not being acquainted with some of the most laboriously worked-out philosophical thinking done for some time past. ”

“ Either the added event of our consciousness is given by an increase of efficacy which developes in or along with Matter's activity within our bodily frame, or else it is assignable to such an increase occurring along with Matter's activity in certain larger, extra-bodily situations of the Cosmical Executive-System, operating at the same time on, in, and through the body. ”

“ Take two or three specimens:—
"Scientifically regarded, the evil of falsehood is, that it is always in some degree destructive of reminiscence, which is the very stuff of our life."
"Bare potentiality is the conception of all others most native to man."
"A man may know whether or not he is improving or degenerating in conduct by noting if the emotions require larger or smaller sensory-cues. ”

“ The author is a Realist in so far that he recognizes a physical system which exists independently of our consciousness, and gives, indeed, the occasions for the consciousness; but he says that this physical world is only "intellectually inferred" by us, not sensorially cognized. ”

“ Lewes's remark, that there is a strong tendency in some modern thinkers to assume a much more detailed knowledge of cerebral operations than it is possible for them or for anybody, really to possess in the present state of physiological science. It is true that Mr. Cyples may say that in a case where experiment is so greatly barred as it is in the case of the brain, hypothesis is the only tool left for an inquirer to work with. ”

“ It needs here-and-there singeing and seaming with traces of the flaming thunderbolt; fringes of black struggling pines must show dwarfed and painful on the narrow edges of its unsheltering cliffs; you must hang somewhere amidst its higher snows the fatal avalanche, held only by creaking faulty chains of ice; the beaked-and-taloned eagle has to sweep and soar about its cliffs ”

“ It is owing to this deficiency that many men seeking after what is termed spirituality are prompted so greatly to dispense with Art; though, let us hasten to add, if they neglect it wholly they do so at the risk of becoming narrow from the sheer lack of the larger habituations of the nervous-apparatus which it gives—these being always needed at some points. ”

“ As matter of fact, he points out that all the men in whom experience rises highest, affirm that if "aspiration" be exercised, a law or a Force comes into play by which a positive increase of energy is given from and by a Creative Source. ”

“ Non-impression affects us, and becomes a real event in our experience."
"The egoistic experience, in cases of pain, is not merely made feeble, or faint, or narrow; it is vividly ill, intensely self-unsatisfactory." ”

“ Throughout this chapter, great use is made of the function ascribed to "the efferent-activity." For instance, our author, in considering the question which has bulked rather largely in critical literature of late, what bearings morality has on Art, thus speaks:—
"Before Art can effeminate, it must become petty; before it can make us morbid, it must descend to gross realism. ”

“ Then, Satire finds its true duty in exposing the failure, and effecting a sobering through the freshness of a return to plain reality; the laying aside the ponderous triviality being a temporary relief and recreation. ”

“ Literature he styles the final department of Art, doing so on the ground that, by employing words as its medium, "it alone can use multiformity of associations, being able in a single phrase to mix the cues for starting several senses." But it may take some readers by surprise to find what is the writer's last word on this subject of Art: it is a long way from being wholly eulogistic. ”

“ But each of them is found to be singly ineffective for conditioning consciousness." Here, again, it is obvious that if this reasoning can be fully established, it makes a great breach in Materialism; rendering it necessary, in order to account for the human Ego and its experience, to bring in a potentiality for varying the quantity of phenomena in a way which limits physical conceptions to their own field, and adds another field beyond. ”

“ Adequately to notice in a single article a volume dealing connectedly with all the fundamental questions of philosophy, and which in doing so itself occupies over eight hundred pages, is not easy. It is made the harder by the unusually large claims the author puts forward for originality, alike in matters of observed facts and of explanatory hypotheses. ”

“ It is true, it must not present the world as really gay and light, having the appearance of being wholly trivial—that—would give no comicality at all. On the other hand, its rough catastrophes must not fully challenge right sympathetic activity in us. ”

“ Strictly speaking, it is not the whole of the executive-operation in the volume, rate, &c., with which our consciousness arises, that connects causatively with the enlargement of efficacy giving it, but only the small differentiating quantity which heightens or abates the prior existing dynamics to just the specific volume, rate, &c., that is effective. ”

“ It is easy to ridicule the circumstance of the chief room in every house being tricked out in a style which would seem to be only befitting if we were sophisticated fairies playing at an ornamental domesticity for a few hours now-and-again of an evening ”

“ Its true purpose is then seen clear and full—that of habituating us to larger living by fragmentary exercises of the actualising-process on a scale more magnificent than the previous practical experiences. But, for this, the inflations of the personality must be general: the Art inspirations must be left broad and anonymous, to be allotted definitely hereafter in some way of conduct. ”

“ In my own opinion, too, there are special difficulties just now hindering the success of such an experiment, owing to the thinkers in the realm of English philosophy who for more than a generation just have had the public ear, studiously avoiding technology in their works. ”

“ Each of the senses is always being acted upon; the skin never fails to be in contact with something; there is no door to the passage of the ear; light can penetrate the eyelid when dropped; and the temperature of the air surrounding us is ever rising and falling. ”