LITMIR.BIZ

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machine appears

      To her eye’s eager and admiring stare,

      An intricate and meaningless enginery

      Of ordered fateful and unfailing Chance:

      Ingenious and meticulous and minute,

      Its brute unconscious accurate device

      Unrolls an unerring march, maps a sure road;

      It plans without thinking, acts without a will,

      A million purposes serves with purpose none

      And builds a rational world without a mind.

      It has no mover, no maker, no idea:

      Its vast self-action toils without a cause;

      A lifeless Energy irresistibly driven,

      Death’s head on the body of Necessity,

      Engenders life and fathers consciousness,

      Then wonders why all was and whence it came.

      Our thoughts are parts of the immense machine,

      Our ponderings but a freak of Matter’s law,

      The mystic’s lore was a fancy or a blind;

      Of soul or spirit we have now no need:

      Matter is the admirable Reality,

      The patent unescapable miracle,

      The hard truth of things, simple, eternal, sole.

      A suicidal rash expenditure

      Creating the world by a mystery of self-loss

      Has poured its scattered works on empty Space;

      Late shall the self-disintegrating Force

      Contract the immense expansion it has made:

      Then ends this mighty and unmeaning toil,

      The Void is left bare, vacant as before.

      Thus vindicated, crowned, the grand new Thought

      Explained the world and mastered all its laws,

      Touched the dumb roots, woke veiled tremendous powers;

      It bound to service the unconscious djinns

      That sleep unused in Matter’s ignorant trance.

      All was precise, rigid, indubitable.

      But when on Matter’s rock of ages based

      A whole stood up firm and clear-cut and safe,

      All staggered back into a sea of doubt;

      This solid scheme melted in endless flux:

      She had met the formless Power inventor of forms;

      Suddenly she stumbled upon things unseen:

      A lightning from the undiscovered Truth

      Startled her eyes with its perplexing glare

      And dug a gulf between the Real and Known

      Till all her knowledge seemed an ignorance.

      Once more the world was made a wonder-web,

      A magic’s process in a magical space,

      An unintelligible miracle’s depths

      Whose source is lost in the Ineffable.

      Once more we face the blank Unknowable.

      In a crash of values, in a huge doom-crack,

      In the sputter and scatter of her breaking work

      She lost her clear conserved constructed world.

      A quantum dance remained, a sprawl of chance

      In Energy’s stupendous tripping whirl:

      A ceaseless motion in the unbounded Void

      Invented forms without a thought or aim:

      Necessity and Cause were shapeless ghosts;

      Matter was an incident in being’s flow,

      Law but a clock-work habit of blind force.

      Ideals, ethics, systems had no base

      And soon collapsed or without sanction lived;

      All grew a chaos, a heave and clash and strife.

      Ideas warring and fierce leaped upon life;

      A hard compression held down anarchy

      And liberty was only a phantom’s name:

      Creation and destruction waltzed inarmed

      On the bosom of a torn and quaking earth;

      All reeled into a world of Kali’s dance.

      Thus tumbled, sinking, sprawling in the Void,

      Clutching for props, a soil on which to stand,

      She only saw a thin atomic Vast,

      The rare-point sparse substratum universe

      On which floats a solid world’s phenomenal face.

      Alone a process of events was there

      And Nature’s plastic and protean change

      And, strong by death to slay or to create,

      The riven invisible atom’s omnipotent force.

      One chance remained that here might be a power

      To liberate man from the old inadequate means

      And leave him sovereign of the earthly scene.

      For Reason then might grasp the original Force

      To drive her car upon the roads of Time.

      All then might serve the need of the thinking race,

      An absolute State found order’s absolute,

      To a standardised perfection cut all things,

      In society build a just exact machine.

      Then science and reason careless of the soul

      Could iron out a tranquil uniform world,

      Aeonic seekings glut with outward truths

      And a single-patterned thinking force on mind,

      Inflicting Matter’s logic on Spirit’s dreams

      A reasonable animal make of man

      And a symmetrical fabric of his life.

      This would be Nature’s peak on an obscure globe,

      The grand result of the long ages’ toil,

      Earth’s evolution crowned, her mission done.

      So might it be if the spirit fell asleep;

      Man then might rest content and live in peace,

      Master of Nature who once her bondslave worked,

      The world’s disorder hardening into Law, –

      If Life’s dire heart arose not in revolt,

      If God within could find no greater plan.

      But many-visaged is the cosmic Soul;

      A touch can alter the fixed front of Fate.

      A sudden turn can come, a road appear.

      A greater Mind may see a greater Truth,

      Or we may find when all the rest has failed

      Hid in ourselves the key of perfect change.

      Ascending from the soil where creep our days,

      Earth’s

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