The Supreme Progress

by Brian Stableford

  “Materialism arrests the independent flight of the Idea by restricting itself to the evident realities of substance. Spiritualism only builds its faith on the unstable imagery of phrases. The negations of the former rest on the facts; the latter bases its affirmations in the void. The principal objective of the two methods seems, therefore, to be to demonstrate their reciprocal insufficiency and, leaving us to our intimate manner of appreciating our present existence, they plunge us to a similar extent into the most frightful uncertainty regarding the necessity of living or having lived!”

  “Certainly. The stupid affirmation of one or other of these theories does not stand up to examination,” Dr. Fauber agreed, cynically, “and it’s doubtless the humiliation of having cultivated the ineptitude of one of them for too long that creates a vindictive pleasure in preaching the other.”

  “Quint and quatorze!” the piquet table cut in, the players feigning total monopolization by the fascination of the game, but perhaps using that cry of victory as a kind of anathema against these fallacious dialectical absurdities.

  It is true that one could not more deeply offend the sentiments of the honorable assembly, composed, as it usually was, of facile freethinkers in the anticlerical mode, partisans of returning “politely” to the oblivion from which one has come, or sectarians of a good God without hindrance who is supposed to protect for as long as possible the existence of his worshipers in modest little towns, demanding nothing more, via the voices of parish priests, than a formal adhesion, and promising them in exchange a happy perpetuity in future worlds full of honest bourgeois folk.

  “Yes, such was the horror of my doubts!” Brunel went on, his acrimony increasing and his melancholy becoming more contagious as the extinction of another gas-lamp by the manager propagated the gloom within the room more harshly. “Such as my intolerable oscillation between those systems, which bring us no assurance with respect to what will become of us and do not present us with any plausible explanation of our present necessity. It was necessary, in consequence, for me to try to extract a truth from these various contradictions in correcting each of them by means of the other—and, after a thousand efforts to avoid a superficial eclecticism, I then arrived at what I call my own formula, my fixed principle, the definitive compass of my judgment.”

  “Let’s have it,” cried Dr. Fauber, widening his enthusiastic eyes in the thickening obscurity. “Let’s have it!”

  “And since then,” Brunel went on, “I permit myself to say to Messieurs the materialists: we have a soul and it exists in parallel, if you please, with our substantial and vital mechanism. At the same time, however, I proclaim in the face of spiritualism that that soul, being wedded to matter, must necessarily be subject to material modifications. It’s as simple as saying hello. It is necessary, come what may, that the soul in question is extinguished, disaggregated and volatilized in order to be resuscitated, with us and like us, in the various chemical, vegetable or gaseous particles into which we are destined to be redistributed. Consequently, and contrary to the obsolete claims of the Schools, we should—listen carefully; this is my formula—we should finally announce, affirm, extol and impose the mortality of the soul!” Brunel, finally sublime in his cold mockery, was resounding: “Yes! A thousand times yes! We need the mortality of the soul. We need it. It is high time!”

  “Superb!” proclaimed Fauber, excitedly. “Superb!”

  “Having understood this,” Brunel continued, “and being fortified by the fact that nothing in nature can disappear, death becomes, logically, the phenomenon of transformation which melts a corporeal human being, soul included, back into a spiritualized matter in which his sensations—and, perhaps, his individual consciousness of a continuation of his being in eternity—reside. It is thus perfectly foolish to repeat that ‘philosophizing is learning to die.’54 Such a study is merely one way among so many others of killing time, and we would establish a more useful precept in declaring that it is necessary to learn to die in order to enter into philosophy. A similar rule, in practice, would teach us the art of dying progressively and continuously, and about a radically intrinsic death—which is to say, one delimited by its exclusive and evident properties, beyond imaginative appreciations of belief or doubt.

  “To that effect, we would analyze precisely the daily sum of proportional decline that every one of our plastic actions and intellectual efforts determines within us. We would keep an orderly account of our expenditure of life in the petty coin of muscular and cerebral activity, or even mere idling. ‘Time is life,’55 the English would as well be able to say. Each blow struck upon the anvil of time detaches a spark from the vital block.

  “The scientific world will, I hope, admit as new and useful my idea of little quotidian death-throes, measured in proportion to the probability of our existence. But what am I saying? Quotidian? It is from hour to hour and minute to minute that we collect these delicate indications of continual death; we shall employ in grasping them all the known resources of histology and physiology, scrutinizing its progress with the most inflexible rigor, in order to advance gradually and in full knowledge of causality toward the form of material and mental immortality that we retain in infinity…”

  “An odd play!” observed the bézique table, without being precise as to whether the allusion referred to the curiosity of a “500” or old Brunel’s deplorable necrological buffooneries.

  “It’s magnificent!” insisted Dr. Fauber, in a voice tremulous with funereal admiration. “It’s magnificent! One may affirm, in consequence, that ‘the art of dying,’ so neglected and so stupidly feared until now, will henceforth be informed in a clear and practical manner, which will bring it within everyone’s range.”

  “Let us assume so!” M. Brunel conceded. “But have you not, my dear doctor, introduced a few good ideas yourself into the same category of ideas?—which, moreover, are admirably concordant with my theories. Eh, my lad? Rumors to that effect are running around the medical world! There’s talk of a new ‘Method of Pathology’, by means of which you will demonstrate the incessant and congenital presence of morbid alterations latent and in development in all organized beings—something that might be called, democratically, ‘the universal disease’.”

  “I cannot deny that my studies have, in recent times, headed in that direction,” Fauber confessed. “According to my calculations, based on practice and in accordance with the evidence, there is reason to assign to each of our vital actions a proportional fraction of the quantity of successive alterations of which our death indicates the total. We therefore decline constantly, and by virtue of that fact are destined to perish. Now, each of these minuscule alterations—activated by its particular microbes—is necessarily accompanied by a relative measure of pain and, for their part, these sequences of pains realize the particular and regularly lethiferous56 unhealthiness that each particular temperament possesses at birth.

  “The most undisputable of philosophical observations is the one that sees our progress toward the grave commencing in the cradle—but why do the vulgar so willingly lose sight of the necessary consequence of that axiom, the knowledge that, between the point of departure and the terminus, the morbid principle innate within us follows is natural progression with no possible pause? Strong in their vigor and insouciant as to the question, human beings admit as healthy and intrinsically vivified the period of growth up to and including adulthood. Error, my friends! The vital fluid of an organized being, like the sap of plants, embodies the necessary against of degradation in its original essence. That is a simple truism. There is, therefore, strictly speaking, no fixed and integral health. It is pure infatuation that makes people believe that they possess it. There is always something in one fraction or other of our existence that is, insensibly but irremediably ‘getting worse.’

  “Note that, in response to the ordinary question ‘How are you?’ people instinctively offer replies that are exceedingly banal but nevertheless lugubrious: ‘not bad;’ ‘so-so,’ etc.�
�which is to say: ‘I’m pursuing, without any deleterious breakdown or murderous accident, my punctual process of decomposition.’ That is how one considers one’s health, for want of knowing one’s personal constitutional disposition. And one flatters oneself on being the target of, or succumbing to, some indisposition or other exploited by the cunning of some modern Aesculapius, or even believing oneself to be a victim of some epidemic that has become fashionable on the word of journalists. Well, those are only superficial effects, pathological exteriorizations that merely translate the imperfection of certain fundamental—by which I mean constitutional—infirmities.”

  “So fevers,” Brunel helped him, slyly, “consumptions, ataxias, apoplexies…”

  “Are nothing but masks,” attested Dr. Fauber. “Nothing more I tell you, than the various peripheral expressions of mortal elements that every one of us is fomenting internally. Ah! Nature, providence or fatality, is an absolute joke!”

  It seemed that the doctor’s laughter had passed like a gust of wind over the last gas-lamp, which the manager had just extinguished. Nothing remained lit but the fantail burner of the central reflector, whose exceedingly pale radiance was dancing over the irritated stupefaction of the card-players.”

  “It is only fair to recognize, however,” M. Fauber continued, “that Science had singularly neglected this field of investigation until now. The docile credulity of patients is, therefore, to a great extent excusable. They have hardly any means of control in such matters, and are constrained to allow their diagnoses to be orientated toward a small number of maladies that are, so to speak, officially imposed upon them. I conclude, in consequence, that a pathologist has a rigorous duty to extend his discoveries as far as he can into that inexhaustible repertoire of infirmities of every sort.

  “Agronomists, carefully increasing our means of leguminary nutrition, searched among as-yet-uncultivated vegetables for new comestible resources. In the same way, within his entirely contrary art, the medical investigator, disdaining the all-too-easy observations of collective affectations—which is to say, adventitious maladies not inherent to his client—will try to extract from the human plant the radical secret of its auto-destructive virtualities, and will only try to lead his invalid toward a decease that will allow him personally and—if you will allow me to us the word—legitimately to pass over.

  “I am devoting myself to this task, in my modest fashion, and what an inexhaustible mine I have immediately glimpsed of as-yet-unanalyzed deteriorations and breakdowns. Nothing is stable, in sanitary terms; nothing, I tell you, is unscathed by the exacerbation and usury of the mechanism of death that operated within the physiological individual unremittingly. There is not a single one of the 1000 fibers of the living body that is not making a contribution to the work of final degradation. The most infinitesimal nerve embodies its special disorder, which it communicates to the entire system and impacts upon the brain. The muscular tissue weaves a perpetual alternation of atrophy and hypertrophy. The skin, in its entirety, is nothing but a porous filter for the absorption of subtle rheumatizing and microbial agents from the atmosphere. The bones, in their apparent opacity, are perforated by myriads of microscopic channels infiltrated by the intoxications that our humors pour out. Embryonic sensitivities—which is to say, vital sacrifices—operate at the root of every fingernail and hair of any sort.

  “It is admirable, given all this, to think that the most minimal irritation of the surface provokes, by a mysterious process of transmission, shooing pains in the profound layers. What prodigious artistry! What humorless fatality! What mistaken damage inflicted by nature of things on the extollers of final causes! And I need not mention, after you, my dear M. Brunel, the continual current of deleterious impressions that flow from thought to the cerebral substance, and from there to the rest of the economy. I shall limit myself to recalling incidentally the impotence of the imagination to concentrate its own unease without projecting anxiety to other sensitive regions. But let us not omit to specify that the brain itself is modified according to the character of the emotion appropriate to every thought, and that it localizes in the organs the subsequent anomalies of perturbations.

  “Who can say, for example, whether a cardiac affection57 determined by political deceptions is entirely similar to a similar infirmity produced by the frustration of literary ambition or disappointment in love? It is no longer a matter, you see, in all of this, of that meager half-dozen classic maladies by which the coterie of orthodox physicians claims that everything is circumscribed. In my opinion, I have begun to establish, at least in its general outlines, the nomenclature of these innumerable causes of irrepressible alternations, which it is necessary to specify nerve by nerve, globule by globule and atom by atom—each one of which, according to its virulence, is susceptible of supplementation by the diseases that surround it. Members of the public, thus informed, nothing less than liberated from their hygienic illusions, will then only have to observe themselves in order to determine exactly what sort of life will lead to their death.”

  “Avons le mort,”58 said the three-handed whist table, whose tenants abruptly changed seats.

  “That’s exquisite!” Brunel supplied, compliantly. “You will leave behind a renown exceptional in science: that of an inventor of diseases.”

  “One invents nothing; one merely discovers,” Dr. Fauber temporized, “but I shall, at least, have revealed the art of being ill in order better to die, as you are revealing the art of dying in order better to philosophize…”

  “And I have found something better!” interjected a newcomer whose entrance had passed unnoticed, and in whose configuration the club believed that it recognized one or other fraternal exemplar of the rare Monsieur Bonsor.

  The last gas-jet still alight did not illuminate the corner in which the conversationalists were sitting. Monsieur Bonsor could be seen sitting down in the moonlight filtering in from outside—which, enveloping him with vague light, projected an exact shadow of his person on to a neighboring seat, almost a disquieting silhouette of a second “Bonsor brothers.”

  “Is that the important communication for which you summoned us?” asked Brunel.

  “We’ve been waiting for you impatiently,” Fauber assured him.

  “Yes, Messieurs,” said one or the other Bonsor. “I willingly render homage to the progress resulting from your work, but I repeat that I have found something better than cultivating the philosophy of dying or detailing the disease of living; I have acquired the means of living without existing, or, if you prefer, bearing witness as a mere spectator to my entire and positive non-existence.”

  A study in length and weakness of profile, tightly costumed in the anglomaniac style, Monsieur Bonsor brothers punctuated his words sarcastically with a tremulous elevation of the index finger, which caused the shadow sitting beside him to tremble in parallel.

  “Non-existence! Damn it, that’s saying a lot,” M. Brunel remarked.

  “That would require very assiduous study,” opined M. Fauber.

  “I shall not deny,” said M. Bonsor, “that before attaining my goal, I was obliged to dedicate myself for a very long time to the most subtle experiments of ‘automentalhypnosis’—which is to say, the art of hypnotizing oneself mentally.” The wagging of the index finger separated every syllable of these great words to signify their importance. “My God!” he added. “One can say that in all modesty. The science is nothing very new. The Buddhists of India procure a state of abstraction of that sort called nirvana, thanks to practices of autosuggestion whose traditional formulae go back to the remotest antiquity. The profundity of the catalepsies obtained by that method is such—as travelers believed to be reliable report—that the ecstasized can be subjected to an astonishingly prolonged temporary burial. During their reclusion in the grave, these Buddhists, by the application of powers of astrality—forces still obscure for us—disengage some sort of vaporous tissue imitative of their corporeal structure, and achieve in that way the visible and
tangible flight of a part of their soul.

  “At this point, I ought to remark that during their burial, it is the essential part of their soul to which these strange individuals release, while they simultaneously immobilize the part of their soul that remains terrestrial. I mean by ‘terrestrial’ the amalgam of education and instruction that familial and social authority instills in us; it is the fraction of the adventitious soul by means of which we cease to be ourselves to become ‘others,’ by means of which, in the enigmatic drama of consciousness, a person incessantly remains the disconcerted interrogator of his own role In other words. It is the ‘acquired’ soul or, if you wish, the supplement of experimental intellectuality that we receive from objective—which is to say, material and external—interventions. It is therefore natural that it shares in the somnolence of the purely physical faculties that bring it into play.

  “As for the part of the soul freed from its carnal prison during these brahmanic lethargies, that is our original soul, liminally innate within us—what philosophers have called ‘the soul of our soul.’ It is the ‘native’ soul that ordinarily complicates the ‘acquired’ soul, without ever reaching the point of knowing it well or being in complete accord with it. It is the arcane element of the soul, in which our primal aspiration, our suddenly emergent passions and our exclusive and irreducible entity are fomented. It is, in fact, the only aspect of our formation in which we are autonomously free, where our thought finds the security of its own reason for being, but which mercilessly steers the other half of the indoctrinated soul to obedience and imitation.

  “This primordial fraction of the soul—or, if you wish, this autopsychy—is the one that the Hindus disengage from its corporeal anesthesia in order to free it, without substantial shackles, from contact with the ambient world. In contrast to these Indian mores, however it is the “self” of our soul, the “elementary self” that is amenable, among we Europeans, to occlusion in the impassive meditation of nirvana. On the contrary, it is the other half of us, the mechanical, educable, intractable, active and reproductive individual that it is necessary to expel from thought and deliberately abandon to its animal task of pure imitation.