7 - The Faculties: Action and Pursuit

Summary

Overview

The Faculties dominate the waking life of the human being and they dominate A Vision. They were the first major part of the system that Yeats mastered, and he wrote “The Phases of the Moon” and the delineations of the phases’ characteristics that became “The Twenty-Eight Embodiments” of A Vision in “my first excitement when it seemed that I understood human nature for the first time… .” For readers too, they are one of the more accessible aspects of the system, although the geometry and “rules for finding” that Yeats uses to expound their development and variations can appear arbitrary, too complex for ready understanding and too simplistic to describe the human psyche.

As explained in the previous chapter, the Faculties, existing within the psyche and experience, are reflections of aspects of the spiritual human being, the Principles, products of their incarnation. The Faculties are acquired, in the sense that they are not part of the individual essence and are specific to a single incarnation, though their characteristics follow inevitably from previous lives.

One of the problems facing readers is grasping what these Faculties represent and what that representation implies. They are roughly similar to the traditional “trilogy of mind”—the cognitive, affective, and conative faculties— plus immediate environment. The fact that they are four rather than three is fundamental to the dynamics of Yeats's system, part of its intrinsic duality and emphasis on antithesis.

Yeats's clearest single description of the Faculties probably comes in the first version of A Vision:

By Will is understood feeling that has not become desire because there is no object to desire; a bias … which as yet is without result in action; an energy as yet uninfluenced by thought, action, or emotion; the first matter of a certain personality—choice… . By Mask is understood the image of what we wish to become, or of that to which we give our reverence… . By Creative Mind is meant intellect. … all the mind that is consciously constructive. By Body of Fate is understood the physical and mental environment, the changing human body, the stream of Phenomena as this affects a particular individual, all that is forced upon us from without, Time as it affects sensation. (AVA 14–15; CW13 15)