BY PROF. V. SARANATHAN M.A.

There are two principles in a man's personal life, both related to the ardours and the exquisite labours of his mind, bringing him the joy of an intellectual peace in the end. These may be called Materialism and Spiritual Life respectively. Gains, loves, riches, antipathies, complacencies,–these affect a man both materially and spiritually. The comforts of the body, and the hundred cries and alarms and longings of the mind require an active mental life, a process of fashioning personality, out of which what is called personal religion arises.

A man, however commonplace, may hope to find some truth that bears relation to the mind among the ardours and pleasures of his life, in the pursuit of fame, in the obscure desire of beauty, and even in some humble, self-sustaining duty to which his days and hours are devoted. "His heart forebodes a mystery, He names the name Eternity." This is idealism, "some yearning toward the lamps of night," the origin of spiritual life in him. Though the gifts of this world are precious to Man, because he is of the stuff of which they are made, yet in the core of his mind is the denial of the power of Matter, the denial to oneself, with a grave consistency of spirit, of possessions, sensual enjoyments, exquisite impressions, and "the service to the flesh" generally. The mind selects objects of pleasure or interest in that mood in which it sets less importance on things, possessions and so on, than on attitudes and glimpses of the Universal Life. The life of the appetites is no doubt very strong in a healthy man, but he has to carry out simultaneously the dictates of a materialism concerned with the appetites, and of an enlightened mind which cultivates tastes and is attuned to the spiritual life.

There is an art of living as well as of education which enables our soul to paint its outward walls so costly gay, but also thrive in fidelity, modesty, truth, law, happiness. Marcus Aurelius aspired to such an understanding inward and outward; and self-culture like this is the theme of every great scripture, is at the heart of the poet's cry, and is the principle of what unity a man may achieve in his own life.

The youthful poet, Milton, stressing the need of Temperance for one who striveth for mastery, said

Milton's religion in youth, a thing like some warm, animated Love, helped him to achieve an exquisite valour of spirit and also clearness. In every age, however, there have been men who without the help of religious faith, achieved the unity of their outward and inward lives, as the result of humane studies and also of a certain happiness of constitution, a kind of bodily luck, sometimes. But every cultivated man should keep before himself the ideal which Sir Joshua Reynolds made popular in Art, "Beauty is the medium (the middle or the golden mean) of form." To keep proportion in the activities of one's life, in rest as in endeavour in possession and in self-denial, in mental indulgence and in the habit of moral recovery, "dwelling within the walls of a city as in a shepherd's fold on a mountain,"–this is the moral crown, the intellectual peace which the humanist looks for, pursuing Life as Art, as a personal craft of soul, incommunicable except when one is a gifted writer.

But, within himself, he is content to rule, and achieve the golden life, trimming the lamp of endeavour and soothing the Spirit of Night at the close of each short day. Those interests which lie apart from the pursuit of success, the personal morality made up of light and cloud inherent in a creature with a mind, the clatter of arms and weapons within the stronghold of one's personality as well as elemental things like hunger and sex, need to be realised and understood by oneself, if one is to have the gift of the golden life. The mystical attitude to oneself arises just in this way,–the mood of a free religion which brings inward music. But the seeker, of intellectual peace may also go to the spirit of Irony for a teacher; his mind learns to disenchant itself and not be fascinated or be thrown into ecstasy. W. B. Yeats writes that Synge once said to him, "We should unite stoicism, asceticism, and ecstasy. Two of them have come together, but the three never." The man who seeks to live the golden life unites all the three, occasionally, but comes by Irony always; and, I guess, Plato made a beautiful thing of the last, an element of harmony.

The essence of the golden life, intellectual peace with an element of irony, is not inconsistent with the appreciation of the beauty of the material world, even with a mild rapture in "the impressions through the senses and the service to the flesh" which we call existence. Indeed, has not every worldly thing strong toils of grace for the modern kinds of men that they are not to blame if they worship it with beauty of their minds and strength and skill? There is a golden materialism also in the life and thought of a people, which admits of "tasks in hours of insight will’d" and enterprises of great pitch and moment, and heard melodies and those unheard which are sweeter.

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