IV

BACK of all this absorption in physical and material welfare lies,

of course, the preponderating intellectual influence of the century

just past, with its passionate pursuit of truth through matter. No

one wishes to decry the services of science to our knowledge of the

physical world; the great discoveries in the theoretical field, the

great inventions in the applied. It is one of the profoundest ironies

of human existence that our blessings and our curses come subtly

intertwined; we mortals forget that one seldom comes without the other,

and are prone to take as pure blessing that which is new. The measure

of curse in our latest great achievements may be greater than we

dream, although it is difficult for people to believe, in the sweep

of a great movement, that it can mean anything but pure progress in

a straight line. Yet we move ever by zigzags, this extreme and that.

When will the race ever learn the art of mental equilibrium, of steady

advance, employing all the human faculties, instead of exploiting a few?

The many subtle wrongs done the human spirit by this complete surrender

to the world of matter, it would be difficult to enumerate. I recall

the emphatic assertion of one of the new thinkers, arguing with one

who held in all sincerity the old, simple faith: “The only subject

worth study is man, man considered from a biological point of view.”

The initial genesis, the growth, the inevitable end, the physical

actions and reactions,--that is man from the biological point of

view. In the presence of people who hold this belief I feel as if

an extinguisher were coming down, slowly smothering my very flame of

life. You doubtless recall that iron chamber of Spanish Inquisition

times, so fashioned that it closed in, day by day, a few inches upon

the unfortunate inmate? So life to-day, for unnumbered people, grows

narrower, threatening extinction. That earlier victim had no choice;

one can but marvel at the modern folk, who themselves turn the key that

shuts them in, and are content with their lessening world.

The voices of those who claim that mind is a secretion of matter,

of those who find the way to truth through matter only, though not

representing the wisest in our intellectual vanguard, have been heard

above the others, and humanity is prone to follow where the loud

voices call. Whether it is the fault of the leaders, or of the forlorn

camp-followers who trail after the victorious army, picking up and

misusing scraps of information; whether it is the fault of passive

on-lookers, ready to believe anything that is told by anybody,--be it

professional utterance or popular inferences therefrom, in many cases

unwarranted,--certain it is that we have spent the greater part of

our lives in the shadow of the crass materialism which is one of the

by-products of the machinery, intellectual and other, of the period

just drawing to a close. It is a doctrine which fits absolutely the

great and sudden influx of wealth during the last decades, pandering

to the same tendencies, the same blindnesses, a twofold materialism of

theory and practice.

It is a materialism stupid, unfounded, turning its back upon the

earlier idealisms of poet, philosopher, religious believer, not so

much because of reasoning processes as because of a sudden shifting

of attention. Wonderful things may be observed under the microscope,

wonderful things through the telescope; wonderful things are day by

day invented. Is it likely that there is anything beyond all this? To

recent generations, as to that progressive dog, the reflection in the

water seemed for the moment, as is often the case, more real than the

reflected object; hence this tragedy of loss.

The human mind has been suddenly diverted by a loud noise outside; a

sudden change of tension results. Where one looks quickly, all heads

are turned. It is a noise of motor-boats, aeroplanes, engines of all

kinds; a sight of airships, flying like birds; of submarines, diving

like fish; of moving pictures with their endless panorama. Mankind

is childishly diverted; the hearing of the ears, the seeing of the

eyes,--it is enough. The skepticisms of the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries tried to reason out their origins, to explain upon what

they were based; not so here. This is the most unthinking of systems,

not troubling to give a rational account of itself. Thought is out of

fashion: nowadays we observe! Through this preponderance of observation

over thought in this great period, the human mind has greatly suffered

in surety of process, in logic, in differentiation of mental processes.

The exercise of pure reason has become almost obsolete; the idea that

thought can be exercised apart from sense, from study of phenomena,

is all but forgotten. Whether or not we assume that matter is the

origin and the end of all things, the world of to-day thinks in terms

of matter; is content to live and breathe and have its being in matter;

hopes, aspires, and prays, if it hope, aspire, and pray at all, in

terms of matter.

Our very vocabulary is degraded; the most far-reaching symbols of our

language come seldom into use, or appear with diminished meaning.

Follow, for instance, the course of the word “infinite” through the

antics of contemporary literature. Our phraseology has become carnal;

our vital terms are terms of physical life. Nowhere is the limitation

of contemporary thought more apparent than in these instruments of

speech. One must read again Wordsworth, Shelley, Carlyle, Ruskin,

Arnold, Meredith, to meet great words, now little employed, that make

you realize the utmost reach of life; in so doing, one pauses in

dismay, realizing how full contemporary speech is of lesser terms, how

few employ the greater words that tell the inner life of the soul.

All forms of idealism have suffered during the past century of

progress, more through being ignored than through being refuted; there

still are thinkers who consider Kant, with his demonstration of the

universe mind-made, a wiser teacher than any who have followed him,

yet these have few disciples. Of the two old hypotheses, that this is

a world of spirit, that it is a world of matter, the latter has been

the predominant choice of our time. That choice has been reinforced

by the impact of a wonderful physical and material development, while

there has been no corresponding gain in the spiritual and the purely

intellectual; for many years the best of the fine young energy of

the race has busied itself, either in investigation or in invention,

with the world of matter. We hear endlessly of the great advance of

our time, of the surety of its knowledge, the doing away with baseless

old idealisms. What, after all, has been achieved? The origin of human

thought, the destination of the human thinker, are as profound a secret

as before this unparalleled progress. Science, which has been the great

intellectual adventure of the last century,--to what has it led us?

Only again to that edge of the unknown, where we confront the infinite.

It has not gained by one hair’s breadth upon the encompassing mystery

of our lives.

V

THE special form of idealism held by our forefathers, the Christian

faith, with its great central tenets of God, immortality, the

necessity of right-doing in the light of these faiths, has suffered

with the other forms of idealism during the last decades. Those who,

intentionally or unintentionally, have attacked, many of those who have

defended, have alike done it injury. Of our intellectual vanguard,

some have denied, some have ignored, some have been wisely patient

and silent, awaiting the adjustment of new wisdom to old. As for the

first,--surely those who hold sense-observation to be the basis of all

knowledge should take no such vast leap into the dark as that involved

in denial of these old beliefs. It is when certain of these new

thinkers slip beyond their own self-defined province, and philosophize

in ways contradicting their own premises, that one fails to follow

them; when, grown bold with their conquest of physical nature, they

make a vast leap from observation of phenomena into metaphysical

statement, without consciousness of what they are doing, that one

listens with profound distrust. Doubtless we have all known one or two,

ready to make assertions dogmatic beyond the dogmatism of old theology,

founded upon nothing but the assumption that they, who can truly

observe facts in the physical world, could assert nothing but fact. I

respect them when they observe; I tremble when they begin to generalize.

It is indeed a crowning irony when one is called upon to believe, in

the name of discoveries in the world of phenomena, that faith in God

and in immortality is untenable. Because it is possible to see with the

aided eye organisms unsuspected before our day,--this does not prove

that the immemorial spiritual instincts of humanity have no foundation.

The assumption that the great hopes of mankind cannot be true because

they cannot be detected under microscope or through telescope, has

floated in the air, darkening wise counsel, has assumed an authority

never won; the present is full of unnecessary renunciations and

unproved denials. In the intoxication of new discovery regarding the

laws of organic growth, the leap from belief in unseen realities to

doubt or to denial has been too swift and too absolute. Probably, in

a great majority of cases, thought, intellectual process, has had

little to do with the change. Humanity has lost hope without knowing

why; the air has been thick with doubt and fear. Hearing a great noise

in the dark, aware of attack, many have rushed away, leaving great

treasure, while the enemy was still far from taking the stronghold.

This new poverty of life which we call Progress is thus, in many cases,

the misfortune, but not the fault, of those who, unable to think for

themselves, take for granted that the most insistent voice must be the

right voice.

How greatly the defenders of the faith, in much of the warfare, have

missed the issue! The time that has been lost, the good territory

yielded in contesting the literal interpretation of Genesis, may well

fill us with shame. If the story of the serpent of Eden must slip from

dogma to myth, must faith in the unseen realities therefore go? If our

forefathers were wrong in linking the large faith of their spiritual

lives indissolubly with the story of Adam and that of Jonah, we must

discriminate where they failed to discriminate, remembering in all

humility that with their smaller knowledge of external things went a

far profounder knowledge than ours of things spiritual. We must keep

the greater; the less is not to us the sacrifice it was to them; let it

go!

If we ask, why this close linking with myth, who can answer? We

know only that the human soul develops slowly; shade by shade the

truth grows clear. We, who have learned something of the incredible

slowness of physical development, can afford to have patience with the

spiritual, but we cannot afford to let slip back anything that the soul

has achieved, proved, made its own. In the long quarrels over the husk,

the kernel has too often slipped out of sight; essentials have gone

with unessentials. We can no longer in good faith teach the young that

the misfortune of our present predicament may be traced to eating an

apple; but those of us who are unable to step to the marching music of

our time may, in impassioned good faith, until modern thinkers make a

better case against us than they have yet made, teach the young that

the great realities of life are of mind and soul, not body; that growth

and change are necessary, fundamental, vital, the very condition of

life; that it is for them to remove reverently whatever outer veil may

have obscured their forefathers’ great light of faith; but that doom is

upon them if they lose the light.

Doubtless the greatest wrong done the Christian faith by its defenders

was the attempt to reduce it to a mere matter of reasoning. The

pity of it is that, at a time when the whole fabric of Christianity

was shaken and the whole spiritual life was at stake, theologians

should so have emphasized fact, clinging to a dead literalness of

interpretation! Through the long decades of the nineteenth century,

trying to meet the geologists upon their own ground, they were very

properly worsted. Why borrow, and use weakly, weapons which belong

to a different warfare, knowledge? Sense-perception, playing a large

part, and rightly, in science, is neither starting-point nor goal here,

nor is historical fact. Proofs of a real religion are not limited

to repetition of fact. When they imitated the scientists, in their

demand for external evidence, and imitated them badly, the inevitable

happened. More and more their own great world of spiritual aspiration

and endeavor was ignored by those whose high privilege it was to make

known the vitalizing power of the faith they held, its subtle answer

to the soul’s deepest need. The doom of a faith is its loss of inner

sources of vitality, its “materialization in fact,” and perhaps the

Church has been rightly punished for forgetting that its weapons should

be primarily weapons of the spirit, its world the world of divine

endeavor. This is no time to haggle over theology; the object is not to

save the church, but to save alive the souls of men.

Myth could go; dogma itself could go; Christianity would still be.

Milestones in the path of the human spirit, dogmas have done great

service, but none have been great enough to express the potential

greatness of the spiritual life of the human race. Greatly have they

helped; at times they have greatly hindered. Seemingly necessary

bulwarks in time of stress and siege, the human soul has lived on

after their demolishing; the human spirit is greater than they. Modern

warfare has demonstrated that great forts and intrenchments are

useless; that does not mean that there is to be no fighting. Faiths,

beliefs, patriotisms are still there, but the fighting is to be in the

open, a matter of life and death, the issue an issue of vitality.