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THE MAGIC OF HUMAN NATURE
Unless you can muse in a crowd all day
On the absent face that fixed you;
Unless you can love, as the angels may,
With the breadth of heaven betwixt you;
Unless you can dream that his faith is fast,
Through behoving and unbehoving;
Unless you can die when the dream is past —
Oh, never call it loving!Elizabeth Barret Browning, A Woman's Shortcomings
Milord is an important executive, and his day at the office has been a particularly difficult one. Leaving early, he makes his way in weariness to his castle, which is a series of rooms in one among a cluster of tall apartment buildings. In clinging tightly to these special cells, by a long-term lease, he reveals a certain affinity to the bee, and his mood of the moment finds his world constricted, if not wholly boxed up by a technical civilization.
When milord enters his castle, however, the whole aspect of reality is changed. There at the twin windows of her bed-chamber, in the flooding warmth of an afternoon sun coming low across the park and its bordering mass of trees, is the lady of his life. She wears a yellow house-dress of no pretension, merely clean, and starched. Her hair, which holds its youth so strangely, is taken up off her face and ears in a style born of her insouciant happiness. She radiates a fullness of living with which an entire universe has come to endow her, in co-operation with her own special attitude. Occupying the little rocking chair he has had cut down and freshly upholstered, for the fine needlework which is her relaxation, she looks up to greet him with the smile which has long been her embarrassment because of its prodigality.
A day's weariness is lifted from the soul of the man. The daily apprehension on her part — a haunting fear that this might be a dream after all, with nothing left but to follow Mrs. Browning's suggestion, and die — evaporates completely. An alchemy is at work. It is legerdemain, miracle, occult intervention, not something to be put under a label, merely, or dismissed with an identifying word. What is it? Is it genuine, or only a phenomenon of the mind?
The executive would unquestionably sacrifice his own life for this bond in understanding, if the call upon him were direct and clear enough. He knows that an indissoluble companionship has become the very fiber of his conscious being. Wholly apart from the psychological factors which may have cradled the beginnings of the tie — irrespective of whatever may have constituted a private little symphony of moonlight and music, or of whatever form the age-old mysteries of Aphrodite may have taken in lace and lusciousness, in scent and special sympathy of soul and spirit — the cold, hard and statistical fact, to which all idealization must not altogether blind itself if it wishes to preserve its values, is that two individuals, with a persistent and slow care of which they probably were totally unaware, step by step and point by point through every variety of external experience, have found each other consistently unchanging in a basic mutuality of interest.
There have unquestionably been side issues, the continual distraction of individuality as it moved in and out of center in its necessary and unceasing reconstruction of its own world. There were quarrels, without doubt, and occasional periods of sharp emotional wrench, or the distraught agony of feelings when twisted out of the underlying at-one-ment. What alone was important, however, was the unswerving continuance of that which constituted the relationship. This is an otherwise unidentifiable something which exists for the simple reason, no more and no less, that it has persisted in its existence. There have been many threats to its being, but these have only strengthened it in the terms of what it is, all because it has continued to be, despite every one of them.
Here in simple essence is character, in one phase of itself as called forth and shared by two people in close contact with each other. It is the greatest of all possible intangibles, yet can anything else be cited of equal objectivity in human experience? Milord of the business world and his lady, in the high magic of their comaraderie, exhibit a commonplace of nature as far as usual description goes, since it is merely the mating instinct dignified by a seventh-house formalization. Their universally normal impulses have effected a graduation from the trial-and-error acquaintance at the fifth mansion. On his part, he is creating a sure place in life, such as has its measurement at the midheaven. Her little chair and the yellow dress are a symbol to him of what the two of them together have made their own at the nadir. The twelve houses of a horoscope, however, give no inkling of this new dimension in the constants of human existence. There are a million marriages without the particular alchemy of her Cheshire smile, or of his persistently prankish and original ways of showing her that his faith is fast indeed. By the same token, there are a myriad other ties between men and women where the mutual development or sustainment of genuine personal worth is no less marked, although identified by far different symbols and manifest under every variety of situation.
Characteristics are the measure of identity in what must be recognized as its complete transcendence of ordinary circumstances. The approach to an understanding of them must be from an entirely different point of view, and for this Thomas Carlyle, in his Heroes and Hero-Worship, provides a convenient starting point with a most epigrammatic and yet most accurate insight into human progress. "The history of the world," remarks the caustic Scotsman, "is but the biography of great men." Behind this fairly obvious fact lies the important principle recognized by Epictetus in his Discourses. "Nothing great comes into being all at once," explains the famous slave, "not even the grape or the fig." Character is consistently cumulative, gathering its own fiber out of what has proved of value to the race through its survival. Thus it constitutes and supports the species of living things, as Charles Darwin saw perhaps more clearly than anyone else in recent times.
Personality in its continual refinement is the hope of civilization because the outstanding individuals, in any context of time and place, always become the mainstay of their fellows. They are more able and eager to draw the constants of experience to a center in themselves, and thus to dramatize them, and facilitate a selection of the best potentials of human nature for support and emulation. This process creates a higher or psychological species as a sure matrix, ultimately, for themselves as well as everyone else. Every man, whether on a greater scale or lesser, is a type in social reality, and he serves his fellows in precisely the same way that they serve him, namely, through the statistical sorting out of the mutual conveniences, or circumstances, to which the first part of this text has been devoted. The superficial divisions of labor among men reflect the individual's special capacity in each case, and it is here that characteristics become personal distinctiveness, revealing life in the dimension above situation per se.
Individual differences, whereby personality becomes distinct in this manner, are very slight in primitive or tribal living. Courtship takes place, measured by the fifth house, and marriage has its indication at the descendant. There is a patriarch to grace the midheaven, exactly as there are thatched huts or tents of skin to give as much implication to the nadir as the city tower of steel and cement. When shoes become useful there is a cobbler — to use the illustration employed by Socrates in Plato's Republic — but the men are fighters for most of their days, and the women are held to a primitive non-distinctiveness by the exactions of carding, weaving, milling and a host of home crafts and chores. Each individual of the clan has character, naturally, but it has relatively few facets. There is little scope for one of them to assimilate himself into the person of another through vicarious experience, and so but a minimal substance for the cultural complexity which establishes civilization with its literal cities, its immensely ramifying communities of mental interests and spiritual insights. The beginning of a true human evolution is in the rise of a personal identity capable of expanding the horizons of the group, and enabling the masses to visualize themselves in a larger potential through the dramatization of their characteristics by the great ones of their own blood.
The exaltation of character is the positive dynamic in all self-realization, and in all social progress. Human beings gain stature, or acquire power, as they are able to establish a reality through which they can feel themselves reassured. This may be either an inspiration by greatness, or else a successful calling forth of exceptional effort from others. Thus simple people look for a savior, while those of greater capacity champion the less fortunate about them. No individual can be everything in and of himself, but must instead complete his own existence by his fellowship with others. Human nature becomes the act of being one's self on the practical as against that relatively solipsistic side of things which, in astrology, is measured by the houses. This presents the factor of FUNCTION, in contrast with circumstances, and introduces the zodiacal signs as differentiated from the equatorial mansions.
Character is Destiny
The problem in an estimation of character is not a charting of the possible co-operation between an antithetical free will and order — as is the case in any analysis of circumstances — but rather is the recognition of a somewhat parallel interaction between (1) purely organic and (2) wholly social potentials. The manner or nature of act in a particular frame of reference must be viewed in the light of the personal specialization or individual preparation for participation in the given experience. The initial perspective in the horoscope, provided by the houses, measures man through the total complex of affairs in which he is found, using various dichotomies to isolate everything of pertinence in a single point of time and space. The basic procedure through the signs is almost exactly contrary, since each relevant phase of personality is taken as the culmination of the native's entire past and present reality, as well as that of the race which lives through him. The world is centered in this individual according to various illimitable characteristics. These enable him to assimilate, into his own nature, everything of importance to himself. Thus character is destiny, as Heraclitus long ago claimed. Human nature is not merely something that has being, it is also the living personality which can do things.
No one lives for himself alone, however. Destiny is social, inherent in the characteristics of high and low alike. The most exalted men and women must of necessity look to others for their personal self-certification. William Hazlitt in consequence, in his Table Talk, is able to affirm that "no really great man ever thought himself so." Probably the most dramatic example of this projection of self into others who may, for the moment, typify certain desired potentials of the race, was provided by the usually quite self-sufficient Bonaparte at Erfurt, a story which Emil Ludwig tells graphically in his Napoleon. The Corsican was seated at breakfast when he looked up and saw Goethe in the doorway. Viewing the sexagenarian poet for the first time, he was unable to speak for the moment. Then, more to himself than his companions, he exclaimed, "Voila un homme!"
Superlative personality, which Ludwig terms the "godlike kinship of a genius with his fellow genius," provides the strongly knit warp of constancies on which the filling threads of history have been woven through all the ages. Life in its everyday channeling, however, does not reach to these out-standing people, except most remotely. The catalysis of character operates on a practical plane, even though the principles are always best exhibited in the extraordinary instance. Mr. Downstreet extends himself a little in order to match the example of Mr. Upstreet, and the community thereby is bettered, although both these men may be quite obscure. When it comes to an estimation of personal worth in normal affairs, custom decrees an examination of actual performance in a commonplace community, and it is here that the real integration of human individuality is best observed. Fundamentally the idea is that nature tends to repeat itself, and that a man will usually act in the future as he has in the past. When his recommendations show him honest and conscientious for many years back, it is presumed that he will continue to be just that. His functioning, as in contrast with his circumstances, is his general persistence in certain ways of acting. Character is cumulative in every way. What it develops is an organic and psychological constancy.
The question might be asked, why does a kitten lick herself? From the day of her birth the little creature has been cleaned in this way by a solicitous mother cat, and the process in time inevitably engenders an appetite which, like the habits of all higher creatures, demands its satisfaction. When the day comes for the feline youngster to do her own grooming, the developing psyche is at the point where the fur hurts, in a sense, unless it is stroked by the loving if file-like surface of the tiny tongue, and so Miss Felis takes over the function herself. Through all her later life this care becomes a necessity which only the most dire of calamity will drive out of consideration. So ingrained into the very fiber of her being is the Narcissus-like self-stroking that it becomes almost a matter of instinct, perhaps an actual inheritance of acquired characteristics. Functions are these necessities of being.
Why does man have personality? Because, like the kitten, he must give expression to the necessary narcissism of his own nature. He is useful to himself and his fellows, superficially in the terms of the general circumstances to which attention has already been given, but more importantly on the basis of what he makes of himself in his development of enduring characteristics, as already suggested. The scope of his influence may be great or small, the distinction of his personality much or little, but he smooths his own fur in this way, psychologically speaking, whenever and as ever he can, and thereby continues to be what he is. Moreover, he does this in many different areas of experience, and with highly varying degrees of import to his own identity and to the place he makes for himself in the world.
Here as an example is the gum-chewing stenographer whose hair needs attention, and whose suit should go to the cleaner, but she has a voice which conjures orders over the telephone, and a gay spirit which creates an exceptional morale in the office. She ungrudgingly shoulders the support of a helpless parent while her sister, who smells only of Shalimar, has not been home for a month, nor brought in a dime towards its support for six. And here is Old Man Forester, a periodical drunkard who has put his wife in the hospital some four or five times, but who in fifty years has never failed to get his bills paid somehow, and to see to it that his brace of boys got a better chance than any of the dead-enders with whom they were raised. These illustrations can be multiplied, endlessly.
People have recognized the ridiculous admixture of traits in themselves for centuries, and have sought to screen out whatever characteristics might be the most significant in any general scheme of things. In trying to identify each other in terms of their most promising potentials, they have facilitated human co-operation and understanding. While the obvious classifications of family and clan, race and nation, have served in part, these have always been lines of division or separation. The problem demands a deeper analysis. What human temperaments will work together across all superficial lines? What types of people can best co-operate with each other for their common interest? What are the most universal elements of affinity among men, and how can they be recognized other than by trial and error?
Such considerations have given rise to the most popular if most shallow form of astrology, dealing with the sun signs and the twelve groups of people created by the zodiacal months of birth. The general public has realized that there are simple or fundamental sets of character which ought to be taken into account in everyday human relations, and this has been one way to identify them. Fortune-tellers have capitalized on the solar indications to warn Aries people from marrying Capricorn natives, and to suggest that Gemini individuals fraternize with the children of Aquarius. A very deep truth is expressed, by and large, but with great weight upon too weak a straw. Exactly as each horoscope has a dozen houses, despite the difference of emphasis upon various ones through the circumstances of life, so every man has all twelve signs in his make-up, irrespective of what may turn out to be the greater importance of one or more among them. The next and necessary step in this presentation, therefore, is to get behind mere superficiality, and to see how the zodiacal symbolism arises, and how each of these ecliptical divisions gains its fundamental relation to the native and his horoscope. To chart the functional role of characteristics in everyday experience will be the task for several following chapters.
Astrology, How and Why it Works