In Part III, I attempt inadequately to sketch out how one copes with this in practice, by the growth of one’s strength of character as one has to shoulder ever greater responsibility. With this burden comes the challenge of meeting the ever greater sophistication of the evils that come with it, which require every ounce of character to cope with them at all. Many Judges develop “judgitis”, which may take the form of a prickly awareness of their self-importance, or a pomposity that would be funny if it were not for their power. This may be their attempt to cope with the burden of evils that are hopelessly beyond them. But it suggests to me that they were keener on obtaining the job, than on learning to cope with the burden that went with it.
If the “Epilogue” of my book is a hymn of praise at the journey’s end, as I suggest, it also hints at the fearful cost I had to pay to create this outline of a theory of consciousness at all. No-one creates anything new and worthwhile without great spiritual turmoil first. And I suggest that my experience was a tiny microcosm of what society had to endure, before it became capable of abstract thought. It must have taken a long time, and been achieved at fearful cost.
For primitive man, this is essentially a world of spirits. There are spirits everywhere, in every brook and wood. And if one lived in the jungle or in the bleak forests of Northern Europe, it would be natural to find every coincidence an omen for good or ill. It must have been an extraordinarily slow progress from the belief that there were spirits everywhere to the belief that there was one supreme spirit, and from there to the belief that this spirit was good rather than evil, loving as well as righteous. The Jews, to their eternal credit, were the first to make this mental journey. A few great men in every civilised community, probably, believed in the one Supreme Being, amidst the polytheism of the common people. But the Jews were the first nation to do so; although if one reads the minor prophets, they kept reverting to polytheism with painful regularity. And part of the process of recognising the Supreme Being was to credit Him with the creation of the Universe.
So the Religions of the Book accept the account of Creation in Genesis as the finest prose-poetry that it is possible to write. Science alas is speechless. It talks about the Big-Bang as the fashionable description now-a-days of what happened in the moments after Creation. But it is ignorant and inarticulate as to how you create something out of nothing.