Phase Twenty-Four


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The attributes of the Faculties when Will is at Phase 24derived frommodified byfromdescription
Will The end of ambition 24
MaskTrue Self-reliance 10BF 6 Enforced emotion
False Isolation CM 20 Domination through emotional construction
Creative MindTrue Constructive emotion 6BF 10 Humanity
False Authority FCM 24 Derision
Body of Fate Objective action 20
Composite of Faculties
trueThe end of ambition seeks to deliver constructive emotion, modified by humanity, from self-reliance, modified by enforced emotion, with the help of objective action.
falseThe end of ambition is misdirected to authority, modified by derision, bringing isolation, modified by domination through emotional construction, separated from objective action.
The disposition of the FacultiesAttributes of Phase 24affectsmodifies
Will The end of ambition 24-
MaskT: Organisation
F: Inertia
10-
Creative MindT: Ideality
F: Derision
6 20 TM

24 FCM
Body of Fate Enforced success of action 20 10 FCM
6 TM

See AV B 169-72 & 99.


Queen Victoria, Galsworthy, Lady Gregory


Yeats’s description of the phase from A Vision

As the Mask now seems the natural self, which he must escape, the man labours to turn all within him that is from Phase 10 into some quality of Phase 24. At Phase 23, when in what seemed the natural self, the man was full of gloomy self-absorption and its appropriate abstractions, but now the abstractions are those that feed self-righteousness and scorn of others, the nearest the natural self can come to the self-expressing mastery of Phase 10. Morality, grown passive and pompous, dwindles to unmeaning forms and formulae. Under the influence of the Body of Fate, the unweaver and discord of Phase 10, the man frees the intellect from the Mask by unflagging impersonal activity. Instead of burning, as did Phase 23, intellectual abstraction in a technical fire, it grinds moral abstraction in a mill. This mill, created by the freed intellect, is a code of personal conduct, which, being formed from social and historical tradition, remains always concrete in the mind. All is sacrificed to this code; moral strength reaches its climax; the rage of Phase 10 to destroy all that trammels the being from without is now all self-surrender. There is great humility—'she died every day she lived'—and pride as great, pride in the code's acceptance, an impersonal pride, as though one were to sign 'servant of servants'. There is no philosophic capacity, no intellectual curiosity, but there is no dislike for either philosophy or science; they are a part of the world and that world is accepted. There may be great intolerance for all who break or resist the code, and great tolerance for all the evil of the world that is clearly beyond it whether above it or below. The code must rule, and because that code cannot be an intellectual choice, it is always a tradition bound up with family, or office, or trade, always a part of history. It is always seemingly fated, for its subconscious purpose is to compel surrender of every personal ambition; and though it is obeyed in pain—can there be mercy in a rigid code?—the man is flooded with the joy of self-surrender; and flooded with mercy—what else can there be in self-surrender?—for those over whom the code can have no rights, children and the nameless multitude. Unmerciful to those who serve and to himself, merciful in contemplating those who are served, he never wearies of forgiveness.

Men and women of the phase create an art where individuals only exist to express some historical code, or some historical tradition of action and of feeling, things written in what Raftery called the Book of the People, or settled by social or official station, even as set forth in Directory or Peerage. The judge upon the bench is but a judge, the prisoner in the dock is but the eternal offender, whom we may study in legend or in Blue Book. They despise the Bohemian above all men till he turns gypsy, tinker, convict, or the like, and so finds historical sanction, attains as it were to some inherited code or recognised relation to such code. They submit all their actions to the most unflinching examination, and yet are without psychology, or self-knowledge, or self-created standard of any kind, for they but ask without ceasing, 'Have I done my duty as well as So-and-so?' 'Am I as unflinching as my fathers before me?' and though they can stand utterly alone, indifferent though all the world condemn, it is not that they have found themselves, but that they have been found faithful. The very Bohemians are not wholly individual men in their eyes, and but fulfil the curse, laid upon them before they were born, by God or social necessity.

Out of phase, seeking emotion instead of impersonal action, there is—desire being impossible—self-pity, and therefore discontent with people and with circumstance, and an overwhelming sense of loneliness, of being abandoned. All criticism is resented, and small personal rights and predilections, especially if supported by habit or position, are asserted with violence; there is great indifference to others' rights and predilections; we have the bureaucrat or the ecclesiastic of satire, a tyrant who is incapable of insight or of hesitation.

Their intellect being from Phase 6, but their energy, or will, or bias, from Phase 24, they must, if in phase, see their code expressed in multiform human life, the mind of Victoria at its best, as distinguished from that of Walt Whitman. Their emotional life is a reversal of Phase 10, as what was autocratic in Victoria reversed the personal autocracy of Parnell. They fly the Mask, that it may become, when enforced, that form of pride and of humility that holds together a professional or social order.

When out of phase they take from Phase 10 isolation, which is good for that phase but destructive to a phase that should live for others and from others; and they take from Phase 6 a bundle of race instincts, and turn them to abstract moral or social convention, and so contrast with Phase 6, as the mind of Victoria at its worst contrasts with that of Walt Whitman. When in phase they turn these instincts to a concrete code, founded upon dead or living example.

That which characterises all phases of the last quarter, with an increasing intensity, begins now to be plain: persecution of instinct—race is transformed into a moral conception—whereas the intellectual phases, with increasing intensity as they approached Phase 22, persecuted emotion. Morality and intellect persecute instinct and emotion respectively, which seek their protection.

(AV B 169-72)


Symbol of Phase 24: ‘woman, cup & boar’ (see YVP 3 400-01)

See a broader view of the Phase in the consideration of the Phase Triads.


The Faculties

The Wheel

Geometry

The Phases in History

Terminology


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