Fundamentally, all deal with the one matter, that of the moral lawgiver, the mind of man within, to which in its infinity of wonder and complexity there is, to paraphrase Kant, but one parallel-"the law governing the starry heavens without". In that mystical-minded age of great poets and great adventurers, in life as in thought, the two were inextricably interlinked; indeed, they were the One and its reflection. The Astrologers read the life, habit, and mind of man from the stars, and to them the hour of his birth showed his relation. The Alchemists, who sought for a soul in all matter and endeavoured to regenerate a baser metal to the quality of gold, did so on grounds of analogy, the end of which was-in those Alchemists of real intelligence-to define the parallel transmutation of the soul of man by image, figure, and correspondence, with the protean force that they found in their philosophic chemistry.
A typical alchemical work, "L'Oevre Royalle de Charles VI", describes the Dragon as "the Sun resolved into humidity and the Moon his wife pregnant of the Sun". whatever this may otherwise have meant, one learns from the phrase that in the opinion of the alchemical writers, the Deagon was significant of the Sun and the Moon in a state of change. The Dragon held the same mysterious importance in their philosophical system as it held in all myths, as it holds in the story of the "fall of man" in the history of Hercules, Siegfried, St. George, and Perseus. As the serpent in the dream life of to-day, it maintains the same fascination of terror and formidable knowledge. He who can hold and examine the history of this baleful changing monster, still hidden in the strange deep of the universal psyche, may find, so the stories promise, by its mastery, strange and marvellous treasure, and knowledge beyond that of the magicians of the market place.
It is at last recognised that the Alchemists truly strove to find a path through the labyrinth of the interior life of the mind-and as they were assidious students of the ancient authors and professed to obtain deeper meanings from myths, meanings related to the soul, therefore are they to be taken seriously as being of the succession of psychologists. As to the accuracy or otherwise of their philosopy, that is not easy to estimate, owing to the fearful care with which they concealed the full meaning of their writings, and so tangled and perplexing are these, that it is hardly given to any man to declare that he expounds their true thought. Yet, in spite of this veil of obscurity, there is much to be gleaned therefrom, and that of threefold interest-as being of the history of psychology, as illustrative of its contemporary expression in thought and literature, and lastly as a manifestation of a study of mythd-that is, as enlightening an universal system of symbol.
And moreover, in examining the life of dreams, one may cry brother to all who attempt to set dream images and symbols in definite order and relation: therefore, whether they worked in truth or in error, it is well to take some regard to their system.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were Platonist rather than Aristotelian in imagination and philosophy. In that day a great attempt was made to reassemble and bring to common use the myths of the classical world and to set them in the current of thought, side by side with the traditions living in the tales of the folk and their lore, weaving the whole into one imaginative body of art. This was done, however in an order and system which is now dim and vague, for the reason, perhaps, that much of its basic pattern was not put into writing. It was an age of secrecy ensuing on the violence of the political and religious quarrels preceding these times, and on the growth of the new tyrannies of centralised states and powers, each acting drastically and bloodily in all political and religious issues: yet amid it all there endured a riot of imaginative freedom in persons and in art. The times were those of hidden societies, of mystical thinkers and experimenters in magic, or charlatans of genius; and there were saintly men of genius also who lived happily outcast from power, place, or even respectability. Cosmogenic theories were elaborated in secrecy and silence, and the fruits of contemplation were given forth in strange and cryptic words, as in pamphlets upon the chemistry of the Soul in a Universe of Wrath, Love, and Anguish. Some key to these strange orders of thought once common, must have made them intelligible to their contemporary readers. An avid public bought the books and pamphlets of Rosicrucian, of Astrologer, and of Alchemystical philosopher, a large body of purchasers who must have been learned in sign and symbol, in classical myth, in kabbalistical notation and permutation, in the planets and their metals, and instructed in the mysterious properties of the four elements of earth, and air, fire, and water.
The study of psychology, even in our day, requires to proffer apology for its necessary use of spatial comparison; so also, as our rules and fashion of learning and instruction change, we require for the explanation of interior mental processes, words, formulæ, images, suited to our habit of thought and mode of understanding. Those older days of speculation in the hidden interior life of the mind had other terms, another cosmos, for comparison, and it may well be that even now we can, by striving to elucidate their method, come upon some knowledge, yet unfamiliar, which was theirs.
The older cosmos is no longer regarded with other than vague antiquitarian interest, for their method had been to apply a system better adapted to theology (which is psychology in other guise) than to physical investigation. So the triumph of the scientist broke down all regard for a system which was, and is, of primary importance in understanding the old mode of thought. Their order of elements, their ascending scale of heavens were in origin purely mental and were used as a pattern of mind and for the imagination; their spheres were spheres of thought, their planets an order of mental qualities, although they were applied also to the heavenly system and to the metals of the earth beneath. To most readers of our day these absurd superstitions in things alchemical and astrological are of little consequence, and far out of their habit of mind, even though based on two thousand years of historical tradition, and, indeed, part of the foundation of the formative mass of thought at the base of our writings and means of expression in Art. The greatest complete and co-ordinate school of English literature, the Elizabethan, is, so far as concerns certain of its essential correspondences of analogy and association, its imagery and metaphor, to-day shorn of meaning, and a rattle of vain and random words.
To know the psychological machinery or formulæ of the writers of many of the most splendid and profound works in our language, it is necessary to apprehend the basic order of their ideas upon man's relation to the universe. That the stars were much in their thought it is unnecessary to prove; quotation could be piled on quotation to show how freely and closely astrological terms and their readiest comparisons came together. The monument of Shakespeare alone is itself a storehouse of imagery, and might in a future far-off age prove as significant as the "Mithraic Bull-slaying".
To-day it is maintained that a certain morbid psychological alteration in what is called "the function of reality" bears traces of archaic thought: though what is called archaic may be basic and independent of morbidity. It was accepted without hesitation in the Renaissance that myth extended the range of mental vision, and mythical incidents and classical names were so used until that mode of metaphorical expression became stereotyped. The subjective response and understanding died; a rationalised meaning took its place and nullified its appeal. But the "libido" was then, and is yet, capable of being led into sublimer paths by the use of myth, image, and metaphor: a sound mode of analogy had, as it ever has had, an impetus and a power of moving the mind that brings poetry to life. The poet was a stargazer, and found in his heaven the images of perfection.