Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesCanadian Association of Irish Studies

W. B. Yeats: More Realist than IdealistAuthor(s): Heather MartinSource: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Dec., 1983), pp. 77-80Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25512575 .

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Notes & Queries 77

Notes & Queries

W.B. Yeats: More Realist than Idealist

by Heather Martin

W.B. Yeats's position on the realist versus idealist philosophical contro

versy of the 1920s and '30s is central to his philosophy. Yeats is often spoken of as an idealist, as one who believed, with Mclagan in The Speckled Bird, that

"the circumstances of life are merely thought."1 Although there is considerable

justification for this in Yeats's work, Yeats himself did not consider himself

primarily an idealist. Indeed, in his correspondence with T. Sturge Moore, Yeats claimed to be as much a realist as an idealist: "I think my own position is

more realist than idealist. I do not however see any final contradiction."2

Yeats's understanding of the nature of reality begs for clarification. I find myself compelled to begin my argument by refuting, however

belatedly, R.N. Snukal's discussion of the subject in his book High Talk. Mr.

Snukal contends that Yeats was above all things an idealist, and an idealist

not in the school of Plato or Plotinus or even of Bishop Berkeley, but in that of

Kant and Hegel. Snukal argues that Yeats, with Kant, understood the world as a "product of the human mind"3:

In Yeats's cosmology . . . there is nothing beyond the human mind. The suprasensual world is simply the mind, and this

mind cannot be confused with another greater mind.4

Following this line of reasoning, Snukal insists that Yeats "repudiated" Berkeley's thought with his statement that Berkeley "was idealist and realist alike."5 While Yeats's understanding of Berkeley's position on the nature of

reality is highly novel, it is a position that he clearly sided with. As Yeats understood it, realists believe that the external world is

objective, and therefore permanent, while idealists believe that it is subjective, and therefore exists or seems to exist only while it is being perceived. The

difficulty facing idealists is how to explain the fact that much of this external

world can be proven to remain the same no matter when or by whom it is

perceived. Berkeley solved this problem by claiming that not only the human

mind, but God himself continually perceives, and therefore creates, a stable universe. Sturge Moore was somewhat disdainful of this explanation, and dared Yeats to find a better one:

Berkeley had to resort to God to explain objective reality; God went on thinking and so his thought remained just as the

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78 Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

objective reality does... You must find a definition that, unlike

Berkeley's, is not merely verbally different from the view that

calls one subjective and the other objective.6

Yeats replied, "The essential sentence is of course 'things only exist in being

perceived,' and I can only call perception God's when I add Blake's 'God only acts or is in existing beings or men'."7 Yeats continued this argument in his

essay "Bishop Berkeley," where he stated that the real Berkeley, the

unfettered Berkeley of the Commonplace Book, seemed to posit a hierarchy of

being connecting God's act of creation with that of man:

he thought of God as a pure indivisible act... which... creates

passive 'ideas' - sensations - thrusts them as it were outside

itself; and in this act all beings - from the hierarchy of Heaven to

man and woman and doubtless to all lives - share in the

measure of their worth . . .8

Yeats was arguing that, since perception is creation, the external universe

is constant as long as it is perceived by one or another of the beings who make

up the hierarchy between God and man. The question then, for Yeats as much

as for Berkeley, is not whether it is man or God who perceives and this creates

the universe: the external universe is perceived by beings on different levels of

existence at all times during creation. The belief in a hierarchy of being

proceeding from man to God, and connecting all beings within creation, is

central to Yeats's work. His plays, for example, present a bewildering array of

gods, discarnate spirits, half-gods and mortals, all of whom interact, and all of

whom have the power to create, and to transcend their creation.

The statement that "God only acts or is in existing beings or men" adds

another dimension to the argument. All beings within creations are separate but

equal, and together they form reality. God is simply a name for the unity of all

things before creation, a complete and undifferentiated unity (the Phaseless

Sphere of A Vision) or emptiness (the Nothing of the plays) out of which, at

creation, stream the spirits who, being separate, perceive each other and thus

create the universe. The emptiness or unity may be called God, but it is

outside creation, and therefore neither "is" nor "acts" - this is reserved for

the diverse spirits who make up, and therefore in some senses equal, the one

God outside time.

Yeats argued, quite seriously, that the contradiction between the realist

and idealist philosophical positions would be resolved were other modern

philosophers to espouse this belief. As he wrote to Joseph Hone,

I think that much of the confusion of modern philosophy,

perhaps the whole realism versus idealism quarrel, comes from

our renouncing the ancient hierarchy of beings from man up to

the One. What I do not see but may see or have seen, is

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Notes & Queries 79

perceived by another being. I remember what he forgets, he

remembers what I forget. We are in the midst of life and there is

nothing but life.9

Yeats's thoughts on this subject are most succintly, if rather cryptically,

expressed in "The Seven Propositions" of 1937, in which he outlined what he

understood to be the nature of reality after creation, "a timeless and spaceless

community of Spirits which perceive each other." States Proposition II,

When these Spirits reflect themselves in time and space they still determine each other, and each Spirit sees the others as

thoughts, images, objects of sense. Time and space are

unreal.10

Yeats understood the realist and idealist arguments to be merely different

ways of stating the same truth. The world has indeed an objective reality -

"we are in the midst of life and there is nothing but life." This world, which

includes thoughts as much as objects of sense, Ruskin's cat and other ghostly emanations as much as the desk at which the poet sits, exists while it is being

perceived by any one of the spirits, on any level of creation, who together form

creation. And since creation is a continuum - spirits constantly ascend and

descend the hierarchy of being - what has once been thought or perceived

continues to be perceived. At the same time, the world is merely an illusion.

Time and space are, after all, unreal, and even the spirits in this "timeless and

spaceless community" who create this illusion are themselves temporarily

separated fragments of a unity which is itself devoid of all attributes. Nothing is real save the One, or rather Nothing is real: "Where there is Nothing, there

is God."

NOTES

1 W.B. Yeats, The Speckled Bird, ed. W. H. O'Donnell (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976), p. 209. 2 Ursula Bridge, ed., W.B. Yeats and T Sturge Moore, Their Correspondence, 1901-1937 (New York: New York University Press, 1953), p.99. 3 R.N. Snukal, High Talk: the Philosophical Poetry of W.B. Yeats (Cambridge at the University Press, 1973), P. 7. 4

Snukal, P. 29. 5

Snukal, p. 1; quoted from Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier Books, 1969), p. 405. 6

Bridge, op. cit, pp. 78-80.

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80 Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

7 Bridge, p. 80.

8 Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 408.

9 Allan Wade, ed., The Letters of W.B. Yeats (London: Rupert Hart-Davis,

1954), p. 728. 10 First quoted in Virginia Moore, The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats's

Search for Reality (New York: Macmillan Co., 1954), pp. 378-80.

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