impeded, of that which most delights the soul. If now we eliminated the last faint source of trouble and unrest and disturbance, which prevented us from concentrating our attention wholly upon what it most loves to dwell on, why should consciousness go out rather than go on? Will it not become rather absolutely constant and continuous, and remain conscious sensu eminentiori?
The Ἐνέργεια Ἀκινησίας then is conceivable, if we choose to understand it. Indeed one might proceed to maintain that ultimately it alone is conceivable as the ideal of Being.
Of its rivals, the conception of Becoming, as philosophers have had to recognise from Parmenides to Hegel, is infected with insoluble contradictions, which disappear only if we follow Aristotle in conceiving it as ἐνέργεια ἀτελής. For in this event all the processes we actually observe may be regarded as pointing forward to an ideal of a perfectly and equably self-sustaining activity, to attain which would relieve them of their contradictions.
The ideal of Rest, on the other hand, is wholly illusory: there is no rest anywhere attainable for the wicked or the virtuous. It is non-existent as a fact, and it is non-existence as a conception. For if anything could really cease to be active, it would cease to be. We cannot, therefore, interpret existence by the conception of Rest, unless, indeed, it pleases us (with Mainländer) to regard the history of the world as the protracted agony of the Absolute’s suicide.
Compared with these, the advantages of the conception of Ἐνέργεια Ἀκινησίας are manifest.
It enables us to give a scientific interpretation of the religious conception of Heaven and to differentiate it from that of Nirvâna ( = ‘bliss conceived as rest’). It involves a positive conception of Eternity and explains the transition from ‘Time’ to Eternity.
We avoid, moreover, sundry difficulties. We may dismiss the apprehension of an equilibration of cosmic energy to be regarded as the final destruction of cosmic activity. We may thus avoid henceforth Spencer’s inconsistency in regarding equilibration now as universal death, now as perfect life, according as physical or biological analogies come uppermost in his mind.[1]
- ↑ As the chapter on the subject in First Principles affords an admirable example of the confusion engendered by a lack of the conception of ἐνέργειαι ἀκινησίας, it may be useful to trace Mr. Spencer’s utterances in detail. It will be seen that he keeps on contradicting himself as to the character of equilibration on alternate pages, and speaks with a double voice throughout.
(a) By the first voice it is conceived as death or cessation of activity. Thus § 173: “there finally results that complete equilibration we call death”. § 176: “the final question of Evolution is . . . incidental to the universal process of equilibration; and if equilibration must end in complete rest . . . if the solar system is slowly dissipating its forces . . . are we not manifestly progressing towards omnipresent death?” He answers that even though the “proximate end of all the transformations we have traced is a state of quiescence,” an “ulterior process may reverse these changes and initiate a new life”. (Hence, too, the see-saw of Evolution and Dissolution is deduced in ch. 23.) Again in § 182 he asks “Does Evolution as a whole, like Evolution in detail, advance towards complete quiescence? Is that motionless state called death, which ends Evolution in organic bodies, typical of the universal death in which Evolution at large must end?” . . . “If, pushing to its extreme the argument that Evolution must come to a close in complete equilibration or rest, the reader suggests that, for aught which appears to the contrary, the Universal Death thus implied will continue indefinitely, it is legitimate to point out” that we may “infer a subsequent Universal Life” if we suppose equilibration to be again upset, or (more properly) unattainable. In short, equilibration = ‘death’.
(b) The above seems unequivocal enough until we listen to the second voice, which exactly inverts the valuation of equilibration and non-equilibration, and implies the equation, ‘equilibration = life’. E.g. § 173 (init.), death is explained as due to a failure of equilibration, § 173 (s.f.), the life of a species depends on an equilibration between the forces that tend to increase and to destroy it. § 174, an equilibration or correspondence between idea and fact is the end of mental evolution, and “equilibration can end only when each relation of things has generated in us a relation of thought” . . . and then “experience will cease to produce any further mental evolution—there will have been reached a perfect correspondence between ideas and facts; and the intellectual adaptation of man to his circumstances will be complete”. So, of moral and emotional adaptation—“the limit towards which emotional adaptation perpetually tends . . . is a combination of desires that corresponds to all the different orders of activity which the circumstances of life call for” . . . and this “progressive adaptation ceases only with the establishment of a complete equilibration between constitution and conditions”. Again, § 174 (s.f.), “Thus the ultimate state . . . is one in which the kinds and quantities of mental energy generated . . . are equivalent to, or in equilibrium with, the various orders ... of surrounding forces which antagonise such motions”, § 175, Equilibrium is held up as the economic ideal from which the fluctuations of over- and under-production depart. It is the all-inclusive ne plus ultra of the adaptation of “man’s nature and the conditions of his existence”. It is also the social ideal, and limits the process towards heterogeneity—“the ultimate abolition of all limits to the freedom of each, save those imposed by the like freedom of all, must result from the complete equilibration between man’s desires and the conduct necessitated by surrounding conditions”. And cf. lastly the sublime conclusion of the chapter (§ 176), in which equilibrium, guaranteed by the Persistence of Force, secures to us the prospect of perfect happiness by affording “a basis for the inference that there is a gradual advance towards harmony between man’s mental nature and the conditions of his existence,” and “we are finally bidden to believe that Evolution can end only in the establishment of the greatest perfection and most complete happiness”!
The italics, of course, are mine throughout. As for the contradiction, it is striking, but easily explicable. The suppressed middle term, which connects the two conflicting views of the value of perfect equilibration, is the absence of motion or change. This being a characteristic both of ‘death’ and complete adaptation, the interpretation wavers in the most tantalising way.
