impossible to distinguish mental response from physiological reaction,
up to the intensity and complexity of our own emotions and intellect.
Since all material developments in evolution can be traced back step by
step and shown to be specializations of one or more of the primitive
properties of living matter, it is not only an economy of hypothesis,
but also, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the proper
conclusion, that mental properties also are to be traced back to the
simplest and most original forms of life. What exact significance is
to be attached to the term “mental properties” in such organisms, it
is hard to say; we mean, however, that something of the same general
nature as mind in ourselves is inherent in all life, something standing
in the same relation to living matter in general as do our minds to the
particular living matter of our brains.
But there can be no reasonable doubt that living matter, in due
process of time, originated from non-living; and if that be so, we must
push our conclusion farther, and believe that not only living matter,
but all matter, is associated with something of the same general
description as mind in higher animals. We come, that is, to a monistic
conclusion, in that we believe that there is only one fundamental
substance, and that this possesses not only material properties, but
also properties for which the word _mental_ is the nearest approach. We
want a new word to denote this _X_, this world-stuff; _matter_ will not
do, for that is a word which the physicists and chemists have moulded
to suit themselves, and since they have not yet learned to detect or
measure mental phenomena, they restrict the word “material” to mean
“non-mental,” and “matter” to mean that which has such “material”
properties.
You will remember William of Occam’s razor; “Entia non multiplicanda
praeter necessitatem”; when we are monists in the sense I have just
outlined, we are using that weapon to shave away a very unrestrained
growth of hair which has long obscured the features of reality.
Holding to these principles, we must, until evidence to the contrary
is produced, reject any explanation which proceeds by cataclysms, or
by miracles; a miracle becomes (when not an illusion) simply an event
which is on the one hand uncommon, and for which, on the other, there
has been found no explanation. Revelation too goes by the board--save
a revelation which is simply a name for the progressive increase of
knowledge and insight.
Last, but not least, we do not pretend to know the Absolute. We
know phenomena, and our systems, in so far as scientific, are
interpretations of phenomena.
* * * * * * *
Religion has been defined in a hundred different ways. It has been
defined intellectually--as a creed; as myth; as a view of the universe;
it has been defined emotionally as consisting in awe; in fear; in love;
in mystical exaltation or communion. It has been defined from the
standpoint of action--as worship; as ritual; as sacrifice; as morality.
Matthew Arnold called it “morality tinged with emotion”; Salomon
Reinach “a sum of scruples impeding the free use of human faculties.”
Jevons makes the experiencing of God the central feature; and so on
and so forth. Is it possible to find any common measure for all these
statements? Would it not be better to unite with those who cut the
Gordian knot by writing down all religion simply as illusion? No. For
their point of view is meaningless. Even illusions are, in themselves,
facts to be investigated; and even illusions have a basis.
But it is not necessary to believe that it is an illusion; the knot may
be untied. Ritual, Creed, Morality, Mystical Experience--all these are
manifestations of religion, but not religion itself. Religion itself
is the reaction between man as a personality on the one side, and, on
the other, all of the universe with which he comes in contact. It is
not only ritual, for you may have obviously non-religious ritual, as
in a court ceremonial or a legal function: it is not merely morality,
for men may practise morality, the most austere or the most _terre à
terre_, uninspired by anything that could remotely be called religious:
it is not belief, for we may have beliefs of all kinds, even to the
most complex scientific beliefs concerning the universe, which have yet
no connection with religion: it is neither communion in itself, nor
ecstasy in itself, as many lovers and poets could tell you.
But because it is a reaction of the whole personality, it must involve
intellectual _and_ practical _and_ emotional processes: and because man
has the powers of abstraction and association, or rather because his
mind in most cases cannot help making associations and abstractions,
it follows that it will inevitably concern itself, consciously or
subconsciously, with all the phenomena that it encounters, will try to
bring them all into its scheme, and will try to unify them and frame
concepts to deal with them as a whole.
Some men will be more concerned on the emotional, others on the
intellectual, others again on the moral side: but it is impossible to
separate any one of the three aspects entirely from the others.
We will begin with and treat mainly of the intellectual aspect of
the problem, the credal side. For one thing, science has more direct
concern with it than with the others; for another, more continuous
and startling alterations have had to be made in it; and finally, the
actual problem is there felt most acutely at the present moment.
What, then, is the problem? In the terms of our definition of religion,
it is in its most general terms as follows: Man has to live his life
in a world in which he is confronted with forces and powers other than
his own. He is a mere animalcule in comparison with the totality of
these forces, his life a second in comparison with their centuries. By
his mental constitution, he of necessity attempts to formulate some
intelligible account of the constitution of the world and its relation
to himself--or should we rather say in so far as it is in relation to
himself?--and so we have a myth, a doctrine, or a creed.
At the present moment, as we have already seen, there appears to be
an irreconcilable conflict between orthodox Christianity and orthodox
Natural Science. The one asserts the existence of an omnipotent,
omniscient, personal God--creator, ruler, and refuge. The other, by
reducing ever more and more of natural phenomena to what we please to
call natural laws--in other words, to orderly processes proceeding
inevitably from the known constitution and properties of matter--has
robbed such a God of ever more and more of his realm and possible
power; until finally, with the rise of evolutionary biology and
psychology, there seems to be no place any more for a God in the
universe.
Stated thus, the opposition is complete. But let us return on our
footsteps, and trace for one thing some of the history of religious
beliefs, for another re-investigate, from a slightly unusual
standpoint, the actual knowledge of the Universe which science has
given us.
Man has developed: in early stages, his physical and mental capacities
developed; in later stages development has been mainly restricted to
his traditions, ideas, and achievements. As part of his development,
his religious ideas have altered too.
At the beginning, he appears to have no ideas of a God of Gods at
all--merely of influences and powers, obviously (he would say) inherent
in the forces of Nature, magically inherent in certain objects and
actions--fetishes and incantations. He seems scarcely to have been
conscious of himself as an individual, or of the full distinction
between self and the external world.
Later, perhaps as the idea of his own personality grew, he began to
ascribe a more personal existence to the forces with which he came
into contact, and so to turn them more and more into beings that can
properly be called Gods: polydaemonism arose and in its turn gave place
to polytheism.
But while rigid custom was at first the only morality, and each
external power and each human activity was regarded separately,
later the rise of civilization led to a modification of custom, to a
reference of action and belief to the standards of pure reason, and to
an attempt at unification. Once this occurred, and equally so whether
the attempt at unification had an intellectual or a moral basis,
polytheism was doomed. Its downfall has been often described; the
reasons for it are suggestively put by Jevons in his little book, “The
Idea of God.” It passes through a stage where one among the gods is
pre-eminent: but finally even that does not suffice, and in its place
arises a monotheistic creed.
Monotheism may start as a purely local or tribal affair--my one God
against yours. It may not only start, but long continue so. Readers of
Mr. Bang’s collection of startling German war-sayings will remember the
superbly national prayer of the Prussian pastor who addressed his God
(I quote from memory) as “Du, der hoch über Cherubinen, Seraphinen,
und Zeppelinen ewig trönst.” (J. P. Bang, _Hurrah and Hallelujah_.
London, 1916.) But this idea, too, is self-contradictory, and merges
into that of one God for all men. The primitive anthropomorphism
which had invested the first vague and mysterious spirits with human
parts and passions, human speech and thought, also fell into gradual
desuetude. It was kept up as a symbol, or because of the difficulty of
describing a God except in terms human individuality, but its literal
truth was deliberately denied. God became different from and more
than man--omnipotent, omniscient, with no parts, with no limitations:
but he retained personality--in other words, a mental or spiritual
organization of the same general kind as man’s, however superior in
degree. With time, the divine personality became compounded more and
more of man’s ideals instead of his everyday thoughts and attributes.
And thus and that God remains. He has created everything; he is in
some sense immanent in the world, in some sense apart from it as its
ruler--you take your choice according to your philosophic preferences.
Beyond that, organized religious thought has not gone; and now it finds
itself fronting science in an impasse.
That, very briefly and roughly, is how man’s idea of God has developed.
But how have man’s knowledge and ideas of the natural universe
developed? What has Science to say to the impasse?
Man has to deal with three great categories of phenomena--the
inorganic, the organic, and the psychic. In the inorganic, chemistry
first and then physics have given us a picture whose broad outlines
are now familiar. There is but one type and store of energy in Nature,
whether it drives a train, animates a man, radiates in heat or light,
inheres in a falling stone. There is but one substance. All bodies of
trees, of men, rivers and rocks, the clouds in the air and the air
itself, precious stones and common clay--all can be resolved into a
limited number of elements. And these elements in their turn can be
resolved into combinations, differing, it appears, only quantitatively
from each other, of electrical charges; so that at the last all matter
is one, and becomes perhaps indistinguishable, or at least inseparable,
from energy. There is no personal operator for particular happenings;
the lightning and the volcano are the inevitable outcome of the
material constitution of things, equally with the form and colour of a
pebble and with the fact that it will drop to the ground if it is let
fall. All is impersonal order and unity.
There is, however, one other great fact about the system of inorganic
matter. The energy contained in it tends to be degraded, as the
physicists say--in other words to become less readily available. There
is available energy in moving matter. There is potential energy in all
matter, dependent upon whether it can be set in motion. But if the sea
were to cover the whole surface of the globe, it would be impossible to
extract energy from running water as we do now, because no water would
be running. So too heat is energy; but it is only available when it
can flow, when there are hotter and colder bodies. The law under which
transformations of energy operate has now been investigated, and it has
been established that in every energy-transaction a certain modicum
goes to waste as unavailable heat, so that, unless some at present
unforeseen change occurs, the last state of the universe, considered
as a purely physico-chemical mechanism, will be one of death, of
inactivity, with all matter at a uniform low temperature and the whole
stock of energy locked up and unavailable in this sea of tranquillity.
True for one thing that an almost inconceivable number of millions
of years must elapse before this “death of matter” is realized; and
for another that we are unable to understand how such a progressive
degradation could have been in operation from all eternity. We must
not expect complete knowledge within a few years or a few centuries;
but even if the beginning is veiled--for there is no more evidence for
a “creation” than for (say) a rhythmic reversal of the direction of
energy-availability--and if it is always possible that some unforeseen
change in the process should occur before the whole runs down, yet
it is a fact (and we are resolved to be agnostic save about facts)
that, here and now, a direction is to be observed in the evolution of
inorganic matter, by which natural operations are tending to become
less active, and the amount of available energy is diminishing. If
it continues indefinitely, first life, and later on all activity and
change whatsoever will cease. There is a tendency towards death and
towards unchanging inactivity.
The next great category is that of the organic, of living matter. We
have to consider its origin and later history. So far as constitution
goes, living matter is merely a special and highly complicated form
of ordinary matter; and there can be no reasonable doubt that it has
originated naturally from non-living matter.
While the _main_ direction of the inorganic has been towards
degradation of energy, it has shown another subsidiary direction
towards the production of more and more complex forms of matter. If our
general ideas are correct, there must have been a time when matter in
our ordinary sense of the word did not exist--there can have been no
atoms, only free electrons. From this state, there evolved one in which
the various electron-systems that we call atoms first appeared; later
still, atoms could join with atoms to produce molecules. Leaping over
vast periods, we would come to the time when radiation had brought the
temperature of the earth surface below 100 degrees centigrade; water
then could form from steam and solution occur. Through solution, all
soluble elements, which would otherwise remain locked in the inactivity
of the solid state, are enabled to enter upon a new phase of mobility,
of chemical life, as we may say. Only in water could colloid carbon
compounds first be built up, and only from such substances could life
originate.
Living substance, or at least much of it, must be formed of molecules
containing thousands of atoms, each atom in its turn a system of
circling electrons. Here already is a vast increase of complexity: it
remains to be seen whether the same tendency is perpetuated later.
The evolutionary concept is to biology what the doctrine of the
conservation of energy has been in the physico-chemical sciences--an
indispensable preliminary to proper methods of attack. But while great
stress has been laid on the various _methods_ by which evolution
may be supposed to have taken place--natural selection, Lamarckism,
orthogenesis and the rest--biology has concerned herself comparatively
little with the _form_ of the process in itself. But it is here that
evolution becomes of value to us in our present search; for once more
we become aware of a direction. Partly from the direct evidence of
palaeontology, partly from indirect evidence, but along many converging
lines, we can form an idea of this direction which in broad outlines is
unassailable.
During life’s existence on earth--a period to be reckoned in hundreds
and probably in thousands of millions of years--there has been an
increase in various of its attributes. But just as in the inorganic
world electrons and atoms still exist as such side by side with
molecules, so also the earlier types of living matter continue to
exist side by side with the later. The increase is not therefore
seen uniformly in all forms at once, but is most easily observed by
studying the _maximum_ level attained. Size, for instance, is one of
these attributes; and whereas to-day all variations are to be found
between ultra-microscopic disease-germs and vast organisms like whales
and elephants, there has been a gradual steadying increase (tending to
a limit) in the size of the _largest_ organisms existing at any one
period.
If we confine ourselves for the moment to the material side, we find
that the directional change in organic evolution can be reduced to
this--to an increase of the control exercised by living matter over
the environment, and of its independence of the environment--two
reciprocal aspects of a single process. When we look more closely into
the means by which this has been achieved, we shall see an increase of
the maximum not only in size, but in complexity, in length of life,
in efficiency of particular organs, in co-ordination of parts and
general harmony, in improvement of sense-organs, and, continuing even
after other tendencies have reached their limits, in brain-size and
consequently in complexity of mode of reaction and behaviour.
If we turn to the psychological side, we find that there has been an
increase in the intensity of mental process. This is apparent in all
aspects of mind, on that of emotion equally with that of knowledge,
of volition equally with that of emotion. To be an amoeba or a worm
is to live a life almost without windows. Perfection of sense-organs
makes it possible for life to be aware of the different types of
outer events, whilst memory and, later, associative memory give the
possibility of understanding their history. In higher forms volition
can be maintained for longer and longer intervals, can attain greater
intensity, and can fix itself upon ever more and more distant objects.
With depth of feeling comes also differentiation, so that finally we
find in ourselves the possibility of organizing various blends of the
simple emotions into the compound emotional forms such as reverence
and admiration, called _sentiments_ by McDougall.
Biologically speaking, therefore, the direction observable in
mental evolution is again towards increased control and increased
independence; by mental and cerebral improvement there is introduced
a greater accuracy and a greater range of control, as well as better
adjustment between organisms and environment, than would be otherwise
possible to the same bodily organs.
The direction of life may therefore be roughly summed up in the two
words “more life”--more both in quantity (have not both land and air
been colonized during evolution?) and also in quality. More matter
has been stolen from the lifeless and embodied in the living; and the
living begins to be less helpless in face of the lifeless.
The direction of living matter is thus in many ways opposed to the
direction to be seen in inorganic matter; yet not only has the organic
arisen from the inorganic, but its direction continues one direction
already traceable before the appearance of life.[46]
Finally, we come to the psychological aspect of the universe. We have
already touched on it in connection with biology, and found that in
many ways at least the development of mind follows the same lines as
that of living matter, and helps forward the general trend of life.
But finally a kink occurs, a critical point similar to that seen at the
origin of living from non-living matter. There the attributes of living
matter which mark it off from inorganic matter become dominant--its
capacity for self-reproduction, its tendency to organization. The
colloid carbon compound had been the highest known independent unit;
from now on this place was taken by the organism.
In exactly the same way, in the final stages of evolution (as witnessed
abundantly by fossil mammals) complexity of purely bodily organization
had reached a limit, and survival, as is evidenced by increasing size
of brain, came to be determined more and more by mental qualities.
Finally the curve of mental development caught up with that of body,
and intersected it: mind became the dominant factor in the new type of
organism, and in the subsequent history of the evolutionary process.
The _organism_ ceased to be the highest unit, and gave place to the
_person_, or self-conscious individual with organized mind.
This new critical point was reached when man arose; many authors
recognize it for what it is, the beginning of a new era, by christening
the subsequent geological period the Psychozoic. That period,
geologically speaking, has not yet run but a tiny span; and we are
no more entitled to think that we have reached or even imagined the
possibilities of its future evolution than we should have been entitled
to regard the possibilities of purely biological evolution as having
been exhausted after the far longer period needed to give rise to a
coral polyp or a jelly-fish as highest existing types of organism. Even
man as a biological species is in his infancy, not to speak of other
psychozoic types that may be waiting in the womb of time.
But what are the characteristics of this new phase? In the first
place, mind has become self-conscious; thus the evolutionary methods
of psychozoic organisms may become conscious, and they come to direct
their own evolution instead of having their destinies shaped by the
blind forces of natural selection.
In most respects the same direction as before is pursued, but new
methods are introduced. The rate of change, of movement in that
direction, is accelerated; and the possibility is given of eliminating
a vast deal of waste. A watchmaker sends out very few defective
watches: why? because he makes his watches on a preconceived plan.
Even when an improvement in watch construction is introduced, he can
draw up his plan beforehand, and at the worst, waste only time and
paper, instead of metal and far more time. Ideas do not need to be
embodied before selection can act upon them; thus an increasing amount
of evolutionary change will take place through the natural selection
of ideas than through the older and far more wasteful process, natural
selection of individuals and species.
Finally, values appear upon the scene. If we could ask a wild animal
such as a fox what gave value to its life, and it could answer us, it
would doubtless say food, sleep, comfort, hunting, sexual pleasure, and
family companionship. But it cannot answer; nor can it know the value
of what it pursues, but only appreciate the result. Strictly speaking,
values do not exist for it. However, even if we allow ourselves to
speak of values in the life of pre-human organisms, we see immediately
that wholly new values are introduced after the critical point.