The New Mythology of John Cowper Powys

ticular observation in a wholly new and striking way. Nor was Powys any more deceived by the superstition of matter and the so-called real objective world than he was by superstitions about the supernatural, or naive ideas about God. Nevertheless, he lived more firmly in the physical world than many so-called realists and more easily in the imaginative world than many of those who talk about the human spirit. The physical world was not for him the abstraction that it is for the philosophers or scientists but something which he perceived with his actual senses. Similarly the imaginative world was not a remote speculative realm but one which was real in so far as he experienced it in his own consciousness. The particular current of thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to which I referred earlier, has as its starting point the refusal to accept as a basis for thinking about life any speculative abstractions which cannot enter into Man’s actual experience. It includes such men as Stirner, Nietzsche and Weininger, the great psycho-analysts and some of the best of modern scientists. The groundwork for this view was achieved by Immanual Kant when he dethroned the naive conception of God, and of an outer world which could exist outside experience or an ego which could exist other than as the ‘subject’ of experience. From this, Hegel came to the notion that Man’s experience is the world’s own experience of itself or that, as Mitrinovic put it, ‘our kingdom is the worldorgan of truth-knowing.’ And Powys was expressing the same thought when he called the self ‘the only kind of sensitive plate by which the whole universe can record its impressions of itself’ 1°

Those of you who are acquainted with earlier New Atlantis Foundation lectures may recognise in such thinking that whole approach which we have called the Third Revelation. For those who do not know Mitrinovic’s notion of the Three Revelations or the Triune Revelation, I will digress for a moment and try to summarise it very briefly. It is that there are three fundamental ways of viewing the world and life, each radically different from the other two. Each has been predominant at a different period of history, so that there appears to be a succession in which the first was superseded by the second and the second by the third. Nevertheless in some way or other all these three attitudes or approaches

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