Phase Four

Yeats’s description of the phase from A Vision

When out of phase he attempts antithetical wisdom (for reflection has begun), separates himself from instinct (hence 'mutilation'), and tries to enforce upon himself and others all kinds of abstract or conventional ideas which are for him, being outside his experience, mere make-believe. Lacking antithetical capacity, and primary observation, he is aimless and blundering, possesses nothing except the knowledge that there is something known to others that is not mere instinct. True to phase, his interest in everything that happens, in all that excites his instinct ('search'), is so keen that he has no desire to claim anything for his own will; nature still dominates his thought as passion; yet instinct grows reflective. He is full of practical wisdom, a wisdom of saws and proverbs, or founded upon concrete examples. He can see nothing beyond sense, but sense expands and contracts to meet his needs, and the needs of those who trust him. It is as though he woke suddenly out of sleep and thereupon saw more and remembered more than others. He has 'the wisdom of instinct', a wisdom perpetually excited by all those hopes and needs which concern his well-being or that of the race (Creative Mind from Phase 12 and so acting from whatever in race corresponds to personality unified in thought). The men of the opposite phase, or of the phases nearly opposite, worn out by a wisdom held with labour and uncertainty, see persons of this phase as images of peace. Two passages of Browning come to mind:

(AV B 109-10)