Its worship was a

worship of the form. It missed the essential inner truth because such

inner truth could be known only by being it, feeling it. The

intellectual attitude of mind, in a word, was critical, not creative,

and to be unimaginative seemed to him, therefore, the worst form of

unintelligence.

“The arid, sterile minds!” he would cry in a burst of his Celtic

enthusiasm. “Where, I ask ye, did the philosophies and sciences of the

world assist the progress of any single soul a blessed inch?”

Any little Dreamer in his top-floor back, spinning by rushlight

his web of beauty, was greater than the finest critical intelligence

that ever lived. The one, for all his poor technique, was stammering

over something God had whispered to him, the other merely destroying

thoughts invented by the brain of man.

And this attitude of mind, because of its interpretative effect

upon what follows, justifies mention. For to O’Malley, in some way

difficult to explain, Reason and Intellect, as such, had come to be

worshipped by men to-day out of all proportion to their real value.

Consciousness, focussed too exclusively upon them, had exalted them

out of due proportion in the spiritual economy. To make a god of them

was to make an empty and inadequate god. Reason should be the guardian

of the soul’s advance, but not the object. Its function was that of a

great sandpaper which should clear the way of excrescences, but its

worship was to allow a detail to assume a disproportionate

importance.

Not that he was fool enough to despise Reason in what he called

its proper place, but that he was “wise” enough—not that he was

“intellectual” enough!—to recognize its futility in measuring the

things of the soul. For him there existed a more fundamental

understanding than Reason, and it was, apparently, an inner and

natural understanding.

“The greatest Teacher we ever had,” I once heard him say, “ignored

the intellect, and who, will ye tell me, can by searching find out

God? And yet what else is worth finding out? … Isn’t it only by

becoming as a little child—a child that feels and never reasons

things—that any one shall enter the kingdom? … Where will the

giant intellects be before the Great White Throne when a simple man

with the heart of a child will top the lot of ‘em?”

“Nature, I’m convinced,” he said another time, though he said it

with puzzled eyes and a mind obviously groping, “is our next step.

Reason has done its best for centuries, and gets no further. It can

get no further, for it can do nothing for the inner life which is the

sole reality. We must return to Nature and a purified intuition, to a

greater reliance upon what is now subconscious, back to that sweet,

grave guidance of the Universe which we’ve discarded with the

primitive state—a spiritual intelligence, really, divorced from mere

intellectuality.”

And by Nature he did not mean a return to savagery. There was no

idea of going backwards in his wild words. Rather he looked forwards,

in some way hard to understand, to a state when Man, with the best

results of Reason in his pocket, might return to the instinctive

life—to feeling with—to the sinking down of the modern, exaggerated

intellectual personality into its rightful place as guide instead of

leader. He called it a Return to Nature, but what he meant, I always

felt, was back to a sense of kinship with the Universe which men,

through worshipping the intellect alone, had lost. Men to-day prided

themselves upon their superiority to Nature as beings separate and

apart. O’Malley sought, on the contrary, a development, if not a

revival, of some faultless instinct, due to kinship with her,

which—to take extremes—shall direct alike the animal and the

inspired man, guiding the wild bee and the homing pigeon, and—the

soul towards its God.

This clue, as he called it, crystallized so neatly and so

conclusively his own mental struggles, that he had called a halt, as

it were, to his own intellectual development… . The name and

family of the snake, hence, meant to him the least important things

about it. He caught, wildly yet consistently, at the psychic links

that bound the snake and Nature and himself together with all

creation. Troops of adventurous thoughts had all his life “gone west”

to colonize this land of speculative dream. True to his idea, he

“thought” with his emotions as much as with his brain, and in the

broken record of the adventure that this book relates, this strange

passion of his temperament remains the vital clue. For it happened in,

as well as to, himself. His Being could include the Earth by feeling

with her, whereas his intellect could merely criticize, and so

belittle, the details of such inclusion.