Under the surface

From In Defence of Sensuality, by John Cowper Powys, 1930:

. . . To return to the lonely ichthyosaurus-ego.

This ichthyosaurus-ego exists in every man, woman, and child. It is the feeling of the soul in relation to its body and in relation to what surrounds its body. It is profoundly susceptible to moods of goodness and moods of evil. If it selects the former mood it grows slowly happier. If is selects the latter mood it grows slowly more miserable. But it has selected “the mood of good” if it feels kindly and acts pitifully to all that come near it. Apart from this, the more indolent, irresponsible, careless, profane, delicious sensations it can enjoy, the better for it, and the more luck to it!

Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life. I admit that if the lonely soul is to be a “good soul” it must put into action a certain modicum of its tender pitifulness for other, less lucky, souls. Fortunately there exists in the world a certain material, a certain stuff, a certain talisman, that makes it possible for well-intentioned people to do the maximum of good with the minimum of exertion. I refer to money. The busy-bodies who agitate themselves from morning to night in taking away our drugs, would do much better if they stinted themselves of a few comforts and handed us some cash ! What we all want is money. We don’t want to revolutionise our habits. We don’t want to drink the dregs of our responsibilities. A bolt from the blue may kill us tomorrow. A few hours, a few days, a few years of peace is what we crave ! Give unto us, O Haroun-al-Raschid, the golden ducats of a little freedom and a little rest!

If a bolt of catastrophic moral lightning, forked and terrible, were to shiver down through the psychic tissues of all layers of organic life, from the highest to the lowest, dividing the “good” from the “evil”, there would be found “good” angels, “good” dogs, “good” horses, “good” fishes, as well as “good” ichthyosaurus-egos, who have the same good-will to the sentiencies that approach them.

And of what ultimately consists the mood whose gesture is so healing to the touch ? It is the mood of acceptance. We need not love these other souls. Love is always an ambiguous thing, rarely free from a vicious itch of possessiveness, ever on the thin edge of turning into resentment and hatred. As our lonely self-awareness gathers together its strength to endure, its strength to select, to forget, to enjoy—as, in its hollow electric shell of isolation, with vibrant universes above it, beneath it, and around it, it casts its heavy-lidded, scale-slit, sleepy dragon’s-eye upon the dizzy abysses—its feeling toward other consciousnesses is one of cold, quiet, demonic acceptance. Why should it love them or hate them or seek to change them ? Absolute lord and god of its own happiness, independent of every external circumstance, it allows itself the last supreme self-deception of assuming that all these other lives are governed entirely by fate. “They are what they are,” so it thinks to itself ; “nor have they any chance of refusing to be what they are. I alone”—so doth the proud, sly, weary ichthyosaurus-soul soliloquise—“I alone am possessed of the godlike power of freewill.”

This deliberate self-deception about the responsibility of other entities is one of those noble illusions which, as Goethe says, Nature herself encourages us to cultivate. Nothing could be further from the truth than the lively contention one hears so glibly tossed off, that all the philosophies are false, and that the redemption of our race lies in science.

Never has our race been in greater need of a new philosophy; nor is there any doubt what instincts in us this new philosophy must satisfy. It must satisfy the religious instinct; and at the same time it must satisfy the sublimated sex-instinct. One might, indeed, maintain that it must satisfy the megalomania-instinct. For this last is a perfectly legitimate and entirely natural feeling.

All individual human souls, when left to themselves, indulge in megalomaniacal feelings; and they are entirely right to do so!