Aside from a literary legacy of seven novels, David Lindsay left behind a set of philosophical notes, a sample of which were published in 'Lines Review' several years ago. The full manuscript may be found in Edinburgh Library and at least 450 of the maxims, aphorisms and observations remain unpublished. His insights are powerful feats of intellectual compression, yet he is not always systematic or consistent; one aphorisms tells us that genius can be recognised by the way it is able to consistently stun us with fruitful surprises, but later we are informed that the ability to surprise is indicative of lesser talents - here equating surprise with novelty or inventiveness. What follows is the 'Lines' selection keeping to Lindsay's original numbering.
12. Emotion resembles a wheel spinning free. When the cogs work, action begins, emotion ceases.
21. Strange and unusual actions should sometimes be practised in order to free the mind from its conventional trammels. The great world will then become visible.
26. Women are small wholes; men are large parts. Hence the nature of the first is harmony, of the second emphasised tendency.
27. There are two ways of treating an intellectual opposite; either by arguing with him, or by understanding him.
28. The more grace, the less honesty.
44. In certain states of the body, one sometimes has a vivid dream, which reveals the world cast in the minor key; moonlight, as contrasted with the sunlight of everyday life. Everything in it is solemn, sacred, and sad, like a life after death. On waking, one thinks it a morbid experience. Yet this mordidity may be only relative - compared with real life: not actual, in itself.
45. In the State, in languages, in Art, and in morality, the most settled laws give way in the long run to nature; all actions slope downward towards freedom.
48. The philospher moulds his life so as to make the best of a bad bargain. The saint, ascetic, or true pessimist, turns his back on the bargain altogether. The ordinary man makes himself believe that the bargain is a good one.
49. Asceticism may be only the attempt to escape from unpleasant emotions, such as compassion, sympathy, grief. etc.
51. Children should be educated to understand that to deserve and to enjoy, are two conceptions which have nothing in common.
65. A man must acquire freedom, emotionally, intellectually and personally; but when free, he is only half-way to wisdom; he must now learn suffering and humiliation. And this signifies that he must renounce a great part of the freedom he has won.
65. Just as the Holy Trinity is a mystery only to Christians, so women are mysterious only to admirers.
71. For anyone without creative intellect, true culture is impossible; the reason is that he must by his inability to think for himself, defer to the authority of some other man, thereby shutting himself off from numerous other sides of thought.
79. Schopenhauer's definition of the Sublime is the contemplation of Beauty under threatening circumstances. But one may gaze at a beautiful girl in a thunderstorm, and that would not be the Sublime...The Sublime is not Beauty, but something else, which is related to Beauty, yet transcends it.
103. For a man of active intelligence, ennui is so real an evil, that he will prefer the society of those with intellect but not morality, to that of other with morality but not intellect; this even if he is moral himself.
111. If there were a Devil, of his inventions ennui might be the one on which he would chiefly pride himself.
114. Women's faces seem a sort of crystallization, a spontaneous springing-together, as the effect of a single interior idea. Each part is harmonious, and belongs as much to the whole as to itself. Men's faces seem built-up; the parts are irregular, and have nothing to do with each other.
118. The conditions for extreme mental suffering are these; a strong will, a tender heart, and a clear intellect.
133. There is one thing worse than pain, and that is pleasure. So long as men suffer, there is still room for sublimity, but in the happy society of the sociologists, men will think and feel in battalions, and no one will any more feel himself an individual, rooted in Eternity.
135. Just as commplace scenery requires bad weather to redeem its sordid vulgarity, so commonplace men and women require strokes of fate, before they can become interesting.
138. Man must unite himself to something. In solitude, to the unseen world, resulting in the Sublime; in society, to his fellow-men, resulting in the vulgar. Tolstoy's touchstone of Art therefore proves to be diametrically opposite to the fact. The use of Art lies not in its power of uniting men, but in its efforts to disunite them. The noblest art will produce in us disgust at the presence of our fellow-creatures; and the best artists are those who love solitude.
170. Other books may instruct, interest, or amuse us; it is the test of a work of art that it leaves behind in us a productive frame of mind.
177. Just as complementary colours joined together form white light, so by the prism of individuality, the Sublime is split into Pleasure and Pain. This is why any strong emotional feeling includes both exaltation and grief. It also renders Schopenhauer's question unnecessary, which is positive and negative, of pleasure and pain. Pain must not be regarded as expiation, education, or anything of the sort, but as the indivisible companion of pleasure; just as after staring intently at red, we then see green. And in experiencing sublime feelings, we discover both elements, because both must be present.
196. Emotions belong to Individuality. The Sublime is an undivided complex; this feeling is most perceptible in the higher grades of music. We do not then feel single emotions but a swelling Whole, which we cannot analyse for ourselves. The Sublime is thus like Light, the emotions like colours.
200. Turgenev was a great man, but an Artist - that is, not quite sincere.
216. The individualising principle is not the cause of the anti-sublime, but the attempt to escape from the anti-sublime towards freedom. This attempt is known biologically as variety.
216. The historical progression is not from the One to the Many, but from nothing-at-all to the Many. What did not exist before, is continually coming into existence. This manifold variety of nature cannot be traced back to an original unity, but to an original variety, which is concealed from our knowledge.
218. Unity is chaos. Things separate in their nature are forced to live and act together. A resulting existence is secured, but this existence is false and painful; and to escape from it, the component parts seek wrong openings.
219. From the preceding paragraph, it will be seen that a true ethical system will endeavour to promulgate variety of life; activity, objectivity, and intelligence, as opposed to soul-deadening tradition, formalism and meek stupidity.
220. It may be asked, however, how variety can exist without unity; for how could things otherwise live together? Derived variety (as it exists in nature) certainly requires unity; but original variety must be supposed not to require it, for variety in unity implies limitation and mutual destruction of the component parts for their own particular ends.
221. When variation ceases, Species arise. Animals and plants are tombstone on the road to evolution.
263. Deep depression, even to the extent of a breaking heart; then a sudden flashing light of joy and defiance - that is whent he Sublime appears in its elemental purity.
268. Our friends do not wish to help us, but to help themselves through us. That is why there is so much love and so little sympathy in the world. It also explains why we mourn the dead, who are certainly not in the worse place.
274. In art, in life, in love, surprises should be taken as a token of vitality. As men of genius have more vitality than others, so they are more fruitful in surprises. In this sense, plants which sport may be considered the geniuses of the vegetable world.
276. Blessed is he who looks in the hand-glass, and finds himself repulsive: for he shall thereby be driven to activity.
285. The Idea is the soul of a book, and books without an Idea are living corpses. By Idea I mean that which binds all together, but which is not immediately perceptible, but becomes so little by little, with ever-increasing distinctness. The brilliant book of epigrams has no soul, but is a mere aggregate of minute souls. An aggregate of small Ideas cannot contain a large general Idea; the latter require for its existence a body; of facts, events and circumstances.
287. The Sublime world must not be imagined as thin, incorporeal and grey - a land of ghosts and phantoms; but as far more real and solid than this coloured cubic and heavy world of ours.
320. Pure breeds and races of mankind stand to cross-breeds in the same relation as the animal-species stand to man. They are stationary and crystallised; no longer in the main trunk of progress. The cross-breed is the free and fluid creature, from whom all is to be hoped. It follows that nationalities, and the patriotism that attends nationalities, are inconsistent with true mental freedom and progress.
330. Mental anguish is a certificate of a living nature, and one should just as much congratulate oneself on capacity of feeling it, as the unparalysed man should congratulate himself whenever he feels pain in his limbs.
337. The Sublime is not a theory, but a terrible fact, which stands above and behind the world, and governs all its manifestations.
338. To those who realise the Sublime, a beautiful person is only a living corpse; for an individual is only a branch lopped off from the Eternal, and is already dying.
339. So-called morbid ideas - death, ghosts, the spirit-world, etc. - correspond to nothing real. It is the Sublime life calling us, which our individualistic nature mistranslates in this fashion.
341. The unexpected movements of genius are angular; that is centrifugal and unexpected.
352. Of all the writers, Dostoevsky is perhaps the greatest. Not one of his characters is real and life-like; they are simply carriers of emotions. This makes his books dull and boring. But after yawning through a hundred pages, suddenly a passage arrives which is not only pure gold itself, but which makes one realise that the previous hundred pages have been pure gold. One has not seen the mountain because one has been on it. No parallel with this occurs to me except in Brahms, whose longer works have the same peculiarity; the beauties are scarce, but when they occur, they beautify the rest.
386. In so far as a living being resembles another it is dead. The test of real life is originality, and all that part of us that does not create and branch out into unique forms, is already crystallised.
444. Real sublimity consists always in active energy. Thus the sea and music are sublime, but mountains and architecture are pseudo-sublime.
456. After a course of years, every soldier acquires more or less insanity: the result of his moral training.
483. To be a 'thoroughbred', to be a perfect specimen of a race, is to be a perfect crystal. The races of mankind are the backwaters of the great vital torrent; the main stream is to be looked for in the nation with the most varied assortment of individuals.
490. Music is the experience of the supernatural world. The attempt to identify it with world-experience, is a proof of the practical utilitarian nature of man, which always tries to change the wild into the domestic.
492. Adjectives only exist for the rough-and-ready convenience of man. They are unknown in nature, which consists only of nouns, or rather pronouns. The adjective is a shot which cannot hit the 'bull', for it gives the relation of likeness of one thing to others, but not its individuality, or unlikeness.
502. Harmony, symmetry, rhythm, and numbers, imply internal relationship. When this relatioship is rudely interrupted by a force from outside, reality it felt.
523. In quitting Hell, one does not avoid rotten bridges.
530. The nearer a man draws towards perfection in his art, the less inventiveness he displays; because his facility of execution makes all themes of equal value to him. For surprises one must look to men who have not yet acquired this self-confidence.