AT WAR WITH TIME
459
it is better to kill others than to die ourselves. Yet we are all going
to die anyway, and surely it is better, while we are alive, to fill our–
selves with love, which
is
close to darkness and eternity, than to fill
ourselves with hatred, which is a violent discomfort wrapped in the
painfulness of time.
Professional philosophers do not consider Schopenhauer to be
one of the greatest philosophers because of certain faults in his logic,
but that does not prevent him from being one of the greatest thinkers.
Schopenhauer, greatly influenced by Vedanta and Buddhist philoso–
phy, carried his thought forward from that ancient point of de–
parture. According to him the Will was both the cause of life, and
the supreme evil from which we must escape. This is entirely in accord
with the teaching of the three great Prophets of Return.
Schopenhauer was the first to point out that the wonderful
feeling of release from the self which can be experienced in the
presence of great works of
art,
and particularly of great music, is
analogous to the unattached condition of the mystic-that blissful
state of freedom from
all
want of any kind. Art, like love and sleep,
can put us in touch with the eternal.
We have now reached the point where the idea of evolution
entered the air of the times. Darwin and Wallace worked on it
simultaneously, and Haeckel soon followed with his theory of bio–
genesis. Here was a new linking up of life, and a new way to think
of history and pre-history. Here was more than a mere sequence of
events; here was development; not only cause and effect, but a slow
growth of all forms of life from the simple to the complex.
The theory of evolution
is
definitely three-dimensional in its
conception of time as well as of space. Time has come forward all the
way from the no-dimensional point (the timeless, the eternal),
through the one-dimensional line-sequence, and the two-dimensional
circle, or wheel of time, to time the sphere.
But Darwin did not push his thought far enough. Evolution,
the movement from the simple to the complex, is only the lower half
of the sphere. The upper half
is
the movement back from the com–
plex to the simple. This is involution, the soul-movement, the move–
ment from life back to death; the Buddha's movement along the
eight-fold path to Nirvana; the great way, or Tao, of Lao-tze; the
losing of one's life that Jesus made peremptory.
