Phase Seven


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The attributes of the Faculties when Will is at Phase 7derived frommodified byfromdescription
Will Assertion of Individuality 7
MaskTrue Altruism 21BF 23 Enforced triumph of achievement
False Efficiency CM 9 Domination of the intellect
Creative MindTrue Heroic sentiment 23BF 21 Success
False Dogmatic sentimentality FCM 7 Self-driven desire
Body of Fate Adventure that excites the individuality 9
Composite of Faculties
trueAssertion of individuality seeks to deliver heroic sentiment, modified by success, from altruism, modified by enforced triumph of achievement, with the help of adventure that excites individuality.
falseAssertion of individuality is misdirected to dogmatic sentimentality, modified by self-driven desire, bringing efficiency, modified by domination of the intellect, separated from adventure that excites individuality.
The disposition of the FacultiesAttributes of Phase 7affectsmodifies
Will Assertion of individuality 7-
MaskT: Self-analysis
F: Self-adaptation
21-
Creative MindT: Creation through pity
F: Self-driven desire
23 9 TM

7 FCM
Body of Fate Enforced sensuality 9 21 FCM
23 TM

See AV B 114-16 & 96.


George Borrow, Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Carlyle, James Macpherson


Yeats’s description of the phase from A Vision

At Phases 2, 3 and 4 the man moved within traditional or seasonable limits, but since Phase 5 limits have grown indefinite; public codes, all that depend upon habit, are all but dissolved, even the catalogues and categories of Phase 6 are no longer sufficient. If out of phase the man desires to be the man of Phase 21; an impossible desire, for that man is all but the climax of intellectual complexity, and all men, from Phase 2 to Phase 7 inclusive, are intellectually simple. His instincts are all but at their apex of complexity, and he is bewildered and must soon be helpless. The dissolving character, out of phase, desires the breaking personality, and though it cannot possess or even conceive of personality, seeing that its thoughts and emotions are common to all, it can create a grandiloquent phantom and by deceiving others deceive itself; and presently we shall discover Phase 21, out of phase, bragging of an imaginary naïveté.

Phase 7 when true to phase surrenders to the Body of Fate which, being derived from the phase where personality first shows itself, is excited into forms of character so dissolved in Will, in instinct, that they are hardly distinguishable from personality. These forms of character, not being self-dependent like personality, are, however, inseparable from circumstance: a gesture or a pose born of a situation and forgotten when the situation has passed; a last act of courage, a defiance of the dogs that must soon tear the man into pieces. Such men have a passion for history, for the scene, for the adventure. They delight in actions, which they cannot consider apart from setting sun or a storm at sea or some great battle, and that are inspired by emotions that move all hearers because such that all understand.

Alexandre Dumas was the phase in its perfection, George Borrow when it halts a little, for Borrow was at moments sufficiently out of phase to know that he was naïve and to brag of imaginary intellectual subjectivity, as when he paraded an unbelievable fit of the horrors, or his mastery of many tongues. Carlyle like Macpherson showed the phase at its worst. He neither could nor should have cared for anything but the personalities of history, but he used them as so many metaphors in a vast popular rhetoric, for the expression of thoughts that seeming his own were the work of preachers and angry ignorant congregations. So noisy, so threatening that rhetoric, so great his own energy, that two generations passed before men noticed that he had written no sentence not of coarse humour that clings to the memory. Sexual impotence had doubtless weakened the Body of Fate and so strengthened the False Mask, yet one doubts if any mere plaster of ant's eggs could have helped where there was so great insincerity.

(AV B 114-16)

Symbol of Phase 7: ‘satyr (goat leggs) followed own image or mask’ (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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