October 3, 1918 
LAND &> WATER 
11 
The Two Lobes* : By Maurice Maeterlinck 
I. , . 
A SOLDIER, writing from the 'front, sends me the 
following letter, of which I omit only that which 
was meant for myself alone : 
" There are quagmires and skeletons in the 
forest. I have discovered and wondered at the 
ruined gods under the still living and wonderful vegetation : 
their spirit has evaporated. The odour of Christ has little 
charm for me ; I prefer that of Buddha. What I adore in 
him is the fundamental contradiction that seeks to assure us 
of our immortality by proving our inevitable annihilation. 
He- taught, in the same breath, the illusion of the Ego and 
its periodical reincarnation, an obvious absurdity which 
implies a knowledge of the profoundest truth, of the very 
nature of being, at the same time and alternately collective 
and individual. This discovery which he did not formulate 
should have led him elsewhere than to Nirvana, that paradise 
of unripe fruits. ... • 
"Man is so fashioned as to perceive only one-half of the 
universe ; and the mind of ordinary texture sees barely a 
hemisphere of taith. Afflicted with a congenital 'nervous 
headache,' humanity thinks with only one-half of its brain ; 
with the eastern lobe, or the western, the ancient or the 
modern ; its mind nibbles its own tail ; the antinomies 
pursue one another in an endless circle, which Kant believed 
that he had discovered, but which Buddha had striven to 
open. He possessed the complementary virtues ; he was 
religious and rational ; while he summed up within himself 
the mysticism of the East, his was the most scientific of the 
minds of antiquity, at a time when science did not exist, 
but was merged in philosophy. The moderns wfio have 
sought to condense into a system the collective and hardly 
initiated effort of science have pitiably failed, for they have 
thought only as Westerners, entangled in the contradiction 
of idealistic aspirations and materialistic arguments ; while 
the formula of Buddha might still, almost without giving 
way, contain this gigantic effort, and yet not hamper it. 
From the death of the prince-philosopher down to the flights 
of contemporary science, true philosophy has not advanced 
one step ; Arab or Christian spiritualism and its reagent, 
positivist or scientific materialism, are recoils in contrary 
directions, false monisms which, taking the extreme for the 
supreme, seek to fix the centre of gravity on the circumfer- 
ence of the wheel. The explorers of the Beyond must set 
out from the cross-roads of religious synthesis and scientific 
analysis and drag these rival sisters along by the hand. 
"Truth blazes at the centre of a circle of onlookers, and 
we must pass through its flame to recognise a brother in the 
adversary opposite. We must reach the centre of space to 
discern the identity of its cardinal points : ' Totum et Nihil, 
Alter el Ego.' \The longing to convert others must yield to 
the need of completing and balancing our own point of view. 
In the sacred forest, which pioneers have penetrated on all 
sides and in all ages, the more greatly daring must ndtessarily 
draw nearer one to the other. Even if they cannot meet, 
they can hear one another and give one another mutual 
encouragement. The most modest cry of discovery may 
be welcome in the solitude and silence in which the truth 
of the future is ripening. . . ." 
I thought it well to preserve this page. It sets forl^, in a 
remarkable, though perhaps too rapid summary, two or 
thres of the great problems which in reality are only one 
and to which, unless we give up everything, we are bound to 
attempt the answer : the problems of immortality or anni- 
hilation, of flux, and reflux, of existence alternatively collec- 
tive and individual, of exteriorisation and interiorisation, 
which make up the mighty rhythm of existence, of which our 
life and death are merely infinitesimal pulsations. 
n 
II. 
But let us begin by observing that the fundamental contra- 
diction which seeks to assure us of our immortality by proving 
our inevitable annihilation is by no means to be found in 
Buddha, and that it is not true to say that he teaches in the 
same breath the illusion of the Ego and its periodical rein- 
carnation. The doctrine of the reincarnation is not Buddha's. 
He found it ready made ; it existed before him, and was so 
deeply rooted in his people that he does not even dream of 
disputing it. He tries only to disarm it, to deprive it of its 
sting, to render it harmless. He tries to reduce life to. the 
• Translated by Alexander Teixcira dc Mattos, Copyright U.S.A. 
1918. All rights reserved. 
point where nothing is left to be reincarnated. According 
to Buddha, life contains naught but suffering ; and the 
sole aim of life is the redemption or, to probe this thought 
to the very bottom, the extinction of, suffering. This ex- 
tinction is to be found in death or annihilation. But mere 
death, by reason of the eternal reincarnation of the same 
individual, cannot suppress suffering. We must therefore 
find a sort of transcendental death, which makes any rein- 
carnation impossible ; and this transcendental death can 
be achieved only by the man who has been striving to die 
all his life long and who has deliberately cut off all the ties 
that bind him to existence : all love, all hope, all desire, all 
possession.' When, at the end of this systematic and volun- 
tary death, the actual death arrives, it will no longer find a 
hving germ capable of achieving reincarnation. A living 
death, an incessant suicide : that is the essence of Buddhism. 
Buddha lives solely and exclusively to die, and to' die more 
certainly, more wholly, more absolutely than any other . 
creature, in order at length to enter Nirvana, that is to-day, 
total extinction. 
This doctrine, as we see, is exactly the reverse of that of 
Christ. With Buddha, life is only the gate of death ; with ' 
Christ, death is the gate of life. 
Here we have the solution offered to us by the most won- 
derful mind, the greatest sage that humanity has ever known ; 
by one who knew things which we no longer know, and 
which, it may be, we shall never recover. It is the founda- 
tion of the religion of five hundred milhons of men. There 
is nothing more terrifying ; but there is perhaps nothing 
that comes closer to the ultimate truth. 
III. 
Let us observe, on the other hand- — and this remark applies 
equally to the Buddhistic Nirvana, or extinction- — that the 
problem of immortality or annihilation ought no longer to 
be set in these terms ; since the word annihilation cannot be ' 
employed, save in a metaphorical sense, to denote a life which 
we no longer comprehend, seeing that Nihil or nothingness 
is the one thing whose existence is utterly impossible and 
whose non-existence is absolutely certain. 
As for immortality, here again there is ambiguity, for, as 
annihilation cannot exist, immortality is inevitable ; and 
the only question that remains to be solved is whether this 
immortality will or will not be accompanied by some sort of 
continuance of our present consciousness. 
But, while it is probable that the problem of immortality, 
more or less accompanied by consciousness, will long remain 
in suspense, the answer to the problem of the "nervous 
headache" — or, rather, -of congenital hemiplegia— is doubt- 
less easier to find. In any case, it occupies a domain which 
our direct investigations are able to explore. It is, after all, 
an historical and geographical question. It seems that there 
are in fact in the human brain an eastern lobe and a western 
lobe, which have never acted at the same time. The one 
produces, here, reason, science, and consciousness ; the 
other secretes yonder, intuition, religion, and subconscious- 
ness. One reflects only the infinite and the unknowable ; 
the other is interested only in what it is able to delimit, in 
what it may hope to understand. They represent, employ- 
ing a perhaps imaginary image, the conflict between the 
material and the moral ideal of humanity. They have 
more than once endeavoured to penetrate each other, to 
mingle and to work in concert ; but the western lobe — at 
least, over the most active part of the world, has hitherto 
paralysed and almost annihilated the efforts of the other; 
We are indebted to it for extraordinary progress in all the 
material sciences, but also for such catastrophes as those 
which we are undergoing to-day — catastrophes which, it we 
are not careful, wiU not be the last nor the worst. The time 
would seem to have come to awaken the paralysed lobe ; 
but we have neglected it so greatly that we no longer quite ■ 
know what it is capable of doing. 
IV. 
The same soldier, who has become mj' war-time, "god- 
child," writes to me again : 
" I experience an ineffable delight in remaining the average 
man and in professing emptiness. I felt a great peace descend 
within me on the day when I resigned myself to the common 
lot — that is, to ignorance and death. I have found life by 
renouncing it and, now that I am no longer anything, I feel 
rich indeed. Do not tempt me in the direction of that, subtle 
