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PUBLISHERS’ ANNOUNCEMENT.

IN this Complete Edition of the Poems of Constance Naden it has been deemed advisable that the two volumes, “Songs and Sonnets of Springtime” and “A Modern Apostle; The Elixir of Life; The Story of Clarice, and other Poems,” should appear in the order in which they were originally published. No attempt at re‐arrangement has been made. The only additions are “The Better World “ (which is printed on p. 172, immediately after the conclusion of what formed Miss Naden’s first volume of poems) and three miscellaneous pieces, “Winter and Spring,” “The Priest’s Warning,” and “ Night and Morning” (which are printed last of all).

Appended to the present volume will be found a selection of Personal and Press Opinions on the Works of Constance Naden.

FOREWORD.

I DO not think I can submit to contemporary readers and serious students of common‐sense philosophy a better précis of the principle underlying both Miss Constance Naden’s verses and prose than by reproduction of the following curt and concise exposition, which adequately expresses the scope and gist both of her Poetry and Philosophy—the former in a more or less informal and cryptic manner, the latter in a more formal and implicit one. The very simplicity of the subject‐matter is the principal obstacle to its acceptance. It resolves all objects into the subject self, and thus deals the coup de grâce to all Dualism whatsoever. So that Anima, an ambiguous misnomer, signifying both Life and Mind, or soul, is shown to be the product, not the germ or source, of the Hyle or Matter—the Brain, by its function, being the sole cause of consciousness, without which all is blank nullity and nihility.

THE UNITY AND IDENTITY OF THOUGHT AND THING. *

Nemo potest exuere seipsum.

“Philosophy tells us that the world is a picture which we ourselves make. There is nothing in the world [including that object itself] which we do not put there. Our whole life, then, is one creative process.”

The above affirmation of Monism and denial of dual subject and object is taken from T. Bailey Saunders’s, M.A. (Oxon.), profound article on “The Origin of Reason,” in No. 160 of the Open Court*. It seems completely to bear out the scientific veridity of my title, and of Hylo‐Idealism, that on the apparitional, phenomenal, or relative theory of the universe, to which we have alone access, Self is to Self, further than which research is vain, the Be‐all and End‐all of sentient and non‐sentient existence. Hence religion is seen to have run its baneful course, and to be superseded by reason,

Reprinted (revised) from theMonist, of Chicago, for January, 1894, edited by Dr. Paul Carus, Ph.D.

See also a lengthy and serious review of that able thinker’s “Translations from Schopenhauer” in the London Athenæum for October 4th, 1890.

We are thus thrown back on, and face to face with, mere physical conditions, out of which ideal concepts proceed, while rigidly excluding all those misnamed “spiritual” ones, which hitherto have played so momentous a rôle in the destiny of humanity *. We thus make hygiene, as defined by Dr. Parkes in the solemn introduction to his manual of that last (and first) of the sciences, as not merely bodily sanitation, though that is already much, but as supreme culture of mind and body (or, to be more scientifically precise, of body merely, including brain), the all‐sufficing surrogate of Divine worship. The old adage, mens sana in corpore sano, should thus read corpus sanum = mens sana, merely. This Volte face turns every extant ethical and mental view topsy‐turvy. As it must do by exploding “thing” altogether, and by substituting our own thoughts for objects of all kinds. It is true, or it may be granted, that there is an objective or distal aspect of subjective thought. But that fact, or admission, in no degree in‐

It is significant and suggestive that no terms have ever been coined to express animistic concepts. Even Spirit, Soul, Lord, God, etc., are purely materialistic ones.

page: x validates the position that the only objects cognisable are those incorporated with, and by, the subject self, from which all “things” proceed. This interpretation of the universe is, inter alia multa, that of the emancipated Baccalaureus in the second part of Goethe’s “Faust,” as enunciated in the lines thus translated by the late Constance Naden:—

“I tell you this is Youth’s [Man’s] supreme vocation! Before me was no world—’tis my creation: ’Twas I who raised the Sun from out the sea; The Moon began her changeful course with me. I gave the signal on that primal night When all the host of heaven burst forth in light. Who but MYSELF saves Man from the dominion Of dogmas cramping, crushing, Philistianian?”

Indeed, it is the very first and last principle of common sense and common place that, before a “thing” is perceptible, it must be made sensible, and where can sensibility (consciousness) lie except in the sensorium which manifests that property? On the ground alone of consciousness or sensation being a somatic office or function it can only be, like all other organic functions, an emanation of the self, and hence we are coerced into the conclusion that all things are but forms of the Ego itself, at once both Creator and Creation.

This non‐animism thus makes each unit of humanity all that has, in pre‐scientific minds where Absolutism page: xi and Dualism is the watchword of the intellect, been predicated as Divine. Where reason, based on positive science, comes into play, or, in other words, when man ceases to be an infant, religion or Theism disappears as a childish illusion utterly incompatible with right reason and rational ethics. All religious ideals and systems— none more than the Christian—are based on hideous immorality. For what can be more iniquitous than the doctrine of the Atonement— i.e. id est , of the vicarious sacrifice of a sinless victim for a sinful criminal? But preceding this ethical crux is the logical fiction. For how can the Parthenogenetic birth of Christ redeem him from the primeval “curse” entailed on all mankind by the mythical “disobedience” of our federal head and representative? From this “curse” virgins are no more exempt than their grandmothers, and thus, on its own data, Christianity is “hoist with its own petard.” Indeed, a replica of Adam’s abiogenetic “creation” would not serve, since earth and air partook of the “curse” entailed on our “first parents.” No God is needed since man is seen to be an Autochthon, and, as such, an Anteus, who derives all the faculties required for existence out of the telluric matrix or humus (living earth) from which he sprang.

As long as the absolute doctrine of dual existence vitiated philosophy—a dual factor, in the guise of an animating principle was, or seemed, a desideratum. But page: xii since the inductive biological theory, which defines life as the sum of the organic functions and a physiological state, was established, man can quite rest content in the satisfactory creed that he himself—each for each— is his own law, standard, criterion, and final court of appeal. Clericals of all denominations are then seen to be self‐evidently “kicking against the pricks,” when, in our fin de siècle age, they attempt to bolster up the obsolete anachronism of animism (Dualism)—a quite impossible task, as I have before shown—from the incompatibility of two such factors as matter, and what they are pleased to call “spirit,” re‐acting on each other.

It is, I repeat, a case of pure fetishism fetichism or ghostism—the same in essence that induced the ancients to formulate their Lares and Penates, Dryads, etc., and, in short, to feign a god, or goddess, for every phenomenon from Jove, launcher of the thunderbolts, to Cloacina of the sewers!

Pope, even, in his “Essay on Man,” written many years after the appearance of Newton’s “Principia,” could not rid himself of the notion that “ruling angels” were required to regulate the spheres. And, long after Pope, poets invoked their muse as a source of inspiration separate from themselves! But, in our age, all such confusion of thought is a really inexcusable blunder, which must, sooner or later, prove a Nemesis to that vicious civilisation which fosters so palpable a delusion. page: xiii Assume, as now we must do, that all objects and ideas, great and small, including the abstract terms, Time, Space, and Immortality, etc., are Brain products, that Cerebration and Thought, or Mind, are one, and the seemingly paradoxical Unity and Identity for which I plead in the title of this exordium is seen to be a categoric imperative. It really is a physiological version of Kant’s negation of Thing in Itself, from which, how ever, he recanted in all his works subsequent to the first edition of the “Critique of Pure Reason.” It was rendered perfectly certain more than sixty years ago—a full lustre before its present opponent, Mr. Gladstone, entered public life—by Wöhler, when he artificially manufactured organic— i.e. id est , “living” out of inorganic— i.e. id est , pseudo‐dead, compounds; a perfect proof that a vital Principle or Anima, in the sense of what is falsely interpreted as “Soul,” in the religious sense of the Anglo‐Saxon term for Life, is a fiction of the human imagination. An omnipotent, disposing Deity must be as much of a fetish as the Pantheon of Olympus. As is clearly seen from so many of these dispositions being failures, as lunacy, suicide, disease, premature death, and other multiform forms of Demoniac Evil. Anti‐theism, therefore, not merely Atheism, as in the eighteenth century, ought to be the charter of our present state; the Latin motto at the head of this Foreword being perfectly expugnable.

Devout nations and communities— i.e. id est , in which the public mind is addicted to religious exercises of Prayer, Praise, and Spiritualism (other‐worldism) generally, are always tardigrade, and even retrograde. This rule is well exemplified in the records of the Protestant Reformation. When Luther visited Rome, saturated as he was with the diabolic and other superstitions of a Thuringian forest coal‐burner, he was filled with disgust at the Atheism then prevalent amid the priesthood and cultured classes. The former openly scoffed at the Christian mysteries as cochonerie. He introduced into his creed, which so long has imposed on Northern Europe and New England, all these degrading arcana. So that, for more than two hundred years, Germany, especially, fell quite to the rear, as compared with France and England, in ethical and intellectual progress. Till the peace of Westphalia in 1648, at the close of the Thirty Years’ War, all was, in that vast region, pure chaos. Indeed, till Frederic the Great’s time, a century later, things were little better. Even to the very close of his reign that “first of German sons,” who was himself a noted Voltairean, as Schiller pathetically laments in his fine poem, “The German Muse,” cherished the opinion, which subsequent events have proved so delusive, that the Germans were “irreclaimable barbarians,” as he also held Shakespeare to be, whose dramas he thought only fit for the savages of Canada. And this though in his page: xv own lifetime Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Bürger, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Richter, and Schiller’s “Robbers,” which last, no doubt, was especially distasteful to the great king, were already above the horizon. David Hume, it will be remembered, delivered a similar verdict upon the English “barbarians on the banks of the Thames.” He held them as already quite below the pale of Philosophy—a verdict fully corroborated by Lord Bacon in his essay on “The True Greatness of Kingdoms,” and on “The Wisdom of the Ancients.” Commerce he especially held to flourish during the disruption and decay of nations.

CONTENTS.

• THE ASTRONOMER, Etc.
  • The Astronomer 3
  • The Confession 11
  • The Roman Philosopher To Christian Priests 16
  • The Last Druid 19
  • The Carmelite Nun 22
  • The Alchemist 25
  • The Sculptor 27
  • The Sister of Mercy 29
  • The Wife’s Song 31
  • A Letter 34
  • The Mystic’s Prayer 36
  • The Pilgrim 39
  • The Pantheist’s Song Of Immortality 43
  • Light At Eventide 46
  • Books 48
  • Memory 50
  • Light‐Born Sorrows 53
  • On The Malvern Hills 55
  • page: xviii
  • January 28th, 1880 57
  • Springtide 59
  • Noonday 61
  • Twilight 63
  • Yearning 66
  • Changed 67
  • Sir Lancelot’s Bride 69
  • The Abbot 73
  • Das Ideal 76
• THE LADY DOCTOR, Etc.
  • The Lady Doctor 81
  • The Old Love‐Letters 85
  • Love Versus Learning 88
  • Moonlight and Gas 91
  • The Two Artists 93
  • Maiden Meditation 95
  • Lament of the Cork‐Cell 98
  • Six Years Old 101
• SONNETS.
  • January, 1879 109
  • To a Hyacinth In January 110
  • To The First Snowdrop 111
  • March, 1878 112
  • March, 1879 113
  • April, 1879 114
  • page: xix
  • May, 1879 115
  • Stratford‐On‐Avon, May 14th, 1880 116
  • In The Lanes Between Stratford and Shottery, May 14th, 1880 117
  • Sunshine 118
  • In The Garden 119
  • Yellow Roses 120
  • July, 1878 121
  • Sunset 122
  • September, 1880 123
  • Songs Before Daybreak 124
  • The Seed 125
  • October, 1879 126
  • November, 1878 127
  • December, 1879 128
  • Undiscerned Perfection 129
  • The Painter To The Musician 130
  • Speech And Silence 131
  • Beauty 132
  • The Mystery Of Light 133
  • Illusions 134
  • Day‐Dreams 135
  • Morning Twilight 136
  • Semele 137
  • The Priest’s Prayer 138
  • Weariness 139
  • The Agnostic’s Psalm 140
  • To Amy, On Receiving Her Photograph 141
  • Starlight. I. 142
  • Starlight. II. 143
• page: xx
• TRANSLATIONS (see also p. xxii.).
  • The Knight of Toggenburg. From the German of Schiller 147
  • The Maiden’s Lament. From the German of Schiller 152
  • The Sharing Of Earth. From the German of Schiller 154
  • Comfort in Tears. From the German of Goethe 156
  • The Wanderer’s Night‐Song. From the German of Goethe 158
  • Evening. From the German of Goethe 159
  • Bury The Dead Thou Lovest. From the German of Carl Siebel 160
  • Spring. From the German of Ernst Schulze 161
  • The Ruined Mill. From the German Julius Sturm162
  • The Fir‐Tree. From the German of Luise von Ploennies 163
  • The Well. From the German of Paul Heyse 165
  • An Evening Song. From the German of Rückert. 167
  • My Only One. From the German of J.G. Fischer 169
  • Farewell. From the German of Emmanuel Geibel 170
  • The Better World. From the German of Hieronymus Lorm 172
• A MODERN APOSTLE, Etc.
  • A Modern Apostle 175
  • The Elixir Of Life 239
  • The Story of Clarice 271
• page: xxi
• RESIPISCENTIA, Etc.
  • Resipiscentia 291
  • The Recluse 297
  • Love’s Mirror 298
  • Friendship 300
  • Christ, The Nazarene 302
  • Song 303
  • Time And Love 304
• EVOLUTIONAL EROTICS.
  • Scientific Wooing 307
  • The New Orthodoxy 311
  • Natural Selection 314
  • Solomon Redivivus 316
• SONNETS.
  • • I. Bride 323
    • II. Nun 324
    • III. Abbess 325
  • Hercules 326
  • Prometheus And Pandora 327
  • The Nebular Theory 328
  • page: xxii
  • The Pessimist’s Vision 329
  • The Gift 330
  • Andrew Marvell’s “Definition Of Love” 331
  • Poet and Botanist 332
  • Science and Philosophy 333
  • The Double Rainbow 334
  • Recompense 335
• TRANSLATIONS. (see also p. xx.)
  • Ideals. From the German of Schiller 339
  • • Mephistopheles on Logic 343
    • The Baccalaureus 345
  • The Eye. From the German of Emil Rittershaus 346
  • On The Water. From the German of Geibel 347
  • Dante and Nino. From the Italian of Dante 348
• FRAGMENTS.
  • Winter And Spring 353
  • A Priest’s Warning 356
  • Night And Morning 360

DEDICATION.*

To J. C. and Caroline Woodhill.

• YE who received me, when your hearts were sore,
• With double welcome, since I came in lieu
• Of one whose fond embrace I never knew—
• Your child, my mother, dear for evermore—
• Who scarce had time to greet the babe she bore,
• But, dying in her spring, bequeathed to you,
• Her father and her mother, guardians true,
• One little life, to tend when hers was o’er:

• Ye who have watched me from my infant days
• With tenderest love and care, who treasure yet
• Quaint sayings, sketches rude, and childish lays;
• Accept this wreath, entwined in April hours:
• Yours was the garden where the seed was set,
• To you I dedicate the opening flowers.

This Dedication and the Motto on the next page were originally prefixed to Miss Naden’s first volume of poems, “Songs and Sonnets of Springtime.”