dominance, various activities of mind come to be pursued for their
own sake, to have value in themselves. Our life is worth living not
only for the sake of eating and drinking, sleeping, athletics, and
sexual pleasure. There is a value attached to knowledge for its own
sake, apart from the possible access of control that it may bring.
But this is new, a property of man alone; not even Athena’s owl will
exert itself through laborious years to understand celestial mechanics
or physiology. The highest anthropoids do not attempt to create works
of art, which for man come to have value in themselves. Natural
beauty comes to have its value too; a cow (so far as known!) does not
interrupt the business of its life to admire the sunset, whereas men
may and do. Behaviour also is implicated; with the entry upon the scene
of that practically unlimited number of possible reactions which give
us what we call free will and choice, there comes a conviction that
some modes of action are higher than others; and so a scale of moral
values comes into being.[47]
Nor is it merely that values, in the strict sense, are created; nor
that new values come into being. But with the enlargement of mind and
its more perfect organization, there arises a new method of appraising
values, and so a new type of value altogether. I mean of course the
so-called _absolute values_. Absolute values are never absolute in the
sense of absolute completeness; they are relative to two things--to
external reality and to our mental powers and organization.[48] They
are abstractions; we generalize the value in our minds, and at the same
time raise it to the highest pitch of intensity we can. An interesting
point arises from this way of thinking. Apart from the guarantee of
our own convictions, the observable direction of living nature is
our guarantee of right: or one had better say that it is at once the
guarantee and the touchstone of our convictions. But two things may be
moving in the same direction, and, if one be moving much slower than
the other, the slower may impede the faster; a pedestrian procession
making eastward along Fleet Street will hold up the life of the city
for a time, and cows walking along railways are treated as obstacles by
trains proceeding in the same direction. So it comes about that much
that was once progressive in organic evolution has become an obstacle
or a drag to psychozoic evolution; it is _relatively_ retrogressive,
and, from our present standpoint, bad. To take the simplest and most
fundamental example: evolution by blind natural selection was the
method of progress for organisms below man. Unceasing struggle and
courage was the chief factor in producing the grandeur and strength of
the lion, the swiftness and grace of deer, the brilliance and lightness
of the birds. But if the same end can be obtained both more quickly
and more bloodlessly by new methods, then the old stands condemned.
Here lies the key to the problem propounded by Huxley in his Romanes
Lecture--the problem of man’s relation to the rest of the cosmic
process, at once sprung from it by gradual generation and separated
from it by an absolute and unbridgeable chasm, at once one with it and
in deadly combat with it and all its ways.
Our mode of envisaging the problem illuminates it, and shows it as
inevitable and intelligible instead of insoluble and tormenting; and
illuminates too many other minor problems of good and evil. But all
this is a side-issue: _revenons à nos moutons_.
Unknown, or neutral, or hostile power: a movement similar in direction
to the direction in which history on the whole shows we are moving, and
to that which we desire with our highest aspirations, but operating
blindly; an acceleration of that movement by the coming of mind to
biological predominance, with certain consequent minor changes in
direction by major changes in speed and in methods. Three tendencies,
but all founded in one unity, and each arising out of the other--that
is the picture drawn for us by the present state of science. In this
sense, and in this only, can it be said that “all things work together
for righteousness.”
One word on an important side-issue--the problem of evil in man, of
stagnancy and degeneration in organic evolution. Degeneration often
does occur--a reversal, in other words, of the main tendency. But the
positive fact remains that the _maximum_ level is progressively raised,
and that we find that stagnation of development and even sometimes
degeneration have been factors indirectly helping on the main direction.
We must accept the positive main direction for what it is--an external
sanction of faith; confess that we do not understand the detailed
working of the whole, but see in the change of methods brought about
by the rise of mind a hope that we shall gradually learn at least to
dispense with much waste and evil and degeneration in the further
course of evolution.
This main direction gives us cause for optimism. The exceptions to it
temper that optimism. But the direction is there.
As we shall see later, we may either call the sum of the forces acting
in the cosmos the manifestations of God, who in this case must be the
Absolute God, and unknowable except through these manifestations. Or we
may confine the term God to its anthropological usage, as denoting the
objects of human religion, in which case we must admit that the term
God as understood by man is constituted by _man’s idea of_ the forces
acting in the cosmos, so that not only are these forces involved, not
only a possible Absolute God behind them, but also the organizing power
of human mind.
I wish you here to agree to my adopting the second alternative and
giving the name of God to the sum of the forces acting in the cosmos as
perceived and grasped by human mind. We can therefore now say that God
is one, but that though one, has several aspects. There is one aspect
of God which is neutral to us, in a way hostile, mere Power operating
in the vastness of the stellar universes, apprehended only as orderly,
tending in a direction which appears to be in the long run inimical.
It is to this aspect of God that Mr. Wells has given the name of the
Veiled Being--a somewhat primitive term for a true idea. There is
another aspect, which is the one seen operating in that sphere which
comprises the whole of life upon this earth--a sphere infinitesimal
in relation to the whole, yet still vast in relation to ourselves.
This aspect of God is our refuge and guarantee, for here we find
our assurance that our human life is a part of a whole that is not
antagonistic, but moves in the same general direction as do our history
and our aims. There does exist, in Matthew Arnold’s words, “a power,
not ourselves, that makes for righteousness.” And this second aspect
is not wholly separate from the first, in spite of its difference of
direction; for the first is its parent, physically and temporally, and
the direction of biological progress is the continuation of a line of
development marked out, within the opposed inorganic direction, even
from the first.
Next, there is a more immediate and more often demanded assurance that
we, as individuals or as single communities in space or time, are at
one with humanity as a whole. Here it is that we look to the third
aspect of God, which enshrines the directive forces operating in man.
These directive forces are our instincts, our needs, our values, our
ideals. When those are harmonized with each other and with the outer
world by reason and experience, they form a power which we can see
has been directive, normative in the past, and will continue to be so
in the future. It alters with man’s development; but after a first
rudimentary phase, its main outlines, its type of organization remain
the same, for man’s instincts and ideals do not greatly change, and
their harmonization with each other and with experience will generally
proceed in the same broad way. Although in a sense this aspect is the
smallest, as comprising the smallest physical field, yet in another
it is the largest, since man’s ideals are in themselves unlimited,
non-finite; and the values involved, to our present type of mind,
appear ultimate. This third aspect of God is again historically the
offspring of the second, and through the second of the first.
Matter, life, mind--this is the simplest classification of phenomena.
By means of processes analogous to obtaining a resultant by the
parallelogram of forces, we can obtain a resultant of material
operations in general, vital operations in general, and mental
operations in general, numerous and varied in direction though they be.
Life is the link between the other two. Living matter is so definitely
one with non-living matter, not at all obviously one with mind; yet the
direction of living matter is obviously similar to that of mind, not at
all obviously one with that of non-living matter.
* * * * * * *
It is a simple fact that the conception which man has of the universe
and its relation to himself exercises important effects upon his
life. A name therefore is needed for this anthropological phenomenon.
_God_ is the usual name applied, and we shall retain it in default
of another, premissing that the word, like many similar general
terms--“love,” or “life,” or “beauty,” say--can be defined and applied
in many ways, and that we apply it here in a particular and perhaps
somewhat novel sense.
God in this sense is the universe, not as such, but so far as grasped
as a whole by a mind, embodied in an idea,[49] and in consequence
capable of influencing that mind, and through it the whole course
of events. It is not grasped as a mere sum of details, but, however
vaguely and imperfectly, as a single idea, unitary in spite of its
complexity. Nor is it the universe in itself, but only so far as it
has been thus grasped by mind. There exists no other meaning of the
term which, on analysis, is found to convey anything, or at least
anything scientific or comprehensible, to us. We may reason that there
is an Absolute God behind the universe and our idea of it. But we have
no proof of this statement, and such an Absolute God is, as Spencer
pointed out, an Unknowable, and accordingly no concern of ours. That
part and these aspects of the universe which have been grasped by us
may prove to contain the key to many of our difficulties; meanwhile
we can only be humble and admit that our idea of God, even in this
restricted sense, is still extremely incomplete: and in this sense
there is a God far greater than our present idea and knowledge of God,
only waiting to be discovered.
That which it is essential to establish is our way of looking at the
problem. The universe does come into relation with our minds, and
there, owing to the way it and our minds are organized, generates an
idea which exerts an influence upon us.
The external basis of the idea of God is thus constituted by the forces
operating in the universe. The universe is a unitary whole, greater and
more powerful than ourselves, and its operations have resultants in
certain main directions--these are phenomena which we constatate like
any other phenomena. They, and that other phenomenon of our contact
with the Universe and our exposure to the play of its forces, give us
our objective knowledge of God. The rest of our idea of God, the inner
component, depends upon the mode of action of our minds.
So far, then, we have shown that recent advance in science,
particularly in our understanding of evolution, has enabled us to give
a more objective account than ever before of what is involved in the
concept _God_, and so to pave the way for a consensus of thought on the
question.
It will be observed that there is no idea of personality implicit in
this conception of God--God may or may not possess personality. It will
be for us later to investigate that particular aspect of the problem.
It now remains to deal with the inner reality. Man has a wholly new
type of mind. He is social and capable of speech. He generalizes, and
he has a very highly developed power of association. This combination
gives him a great many possibilities hitherto denied to life. In the
first place, he is able to order his experiences in a totally new way,
differing from the old very much as a classified card-index differs
from a rough diary-record of events. The organization of his mind is
elastic, capable of indefinite expansion and of specialization in any
direction.
That being so, there will be always parts of his mind wholly or at
least partially undeveloped; and in any case the capacities which he
must employ in his everyday life, the region of his mind illuminated by
the attention needed in the struggle for existence, constitute but a
fraction of his mental self and its potentialities.
This brings us on to one of the most important achievements of modern
psychology--the discovery and analysis of the subconscious. Impossible
here to go into detail; we must content ourselves with a few broad
statements. When we speak of the subconscious mind, we mean that in
man there exist processes which appear for many reasons to be of the
same nature as those of the normal mind (in that they are associated
with the same parts of the nervous system, fulfil the same general
biological functions, and probably operate through similar mechanisms),
with the single exception that we are not conscious of them as such.[50]
The conscious mind, that which we think of as the basis of our mental
individuality, as our personal being, is the result of a long process
of organization. We come into the world with a set of instinctive and
emotional reactions only waiting their proper stimuli to be fired
off, with a capacity for learning, for amassing experience, and a
capacity for modifying our instincts and our behaviour according to our
experience. We incorporate experience in ourselves, and in so doing
we alter the original basis of our reactions; a strongly emotional
experience colours all that is closely associated with it; and so after
birth we are continually making our mental microcosm not only larger
but qualitatively more complex, in exactly the same way as before birth
our body grew not only in size, but also in complexity of organization.
Parts of experience or of inherited tendencies may fail to become
organically connected with the main parts of our minds, simply because
attention has never been focussed on them, or has not attempted to
bring them into relation with the rest. They are, shall we say, like
bricks which might have been used in a building, but have been left
lying on the ground by the workmen.
Still more remarkable are the methods by which harmony is achieved
in the personal mind. It is obvious that a conflict of any sort
between parts of the mind will waste energy, will prevent a clear-cut
reaction being given in either direction, and so constitute a grave
biological disadvantage by making us fall between two stools. If a
child gets a serious fright in the dark, darkness will tend to arouse
fear. But darkness also comes with evening and with the time for
sleep. Two modes of reaction to darkness are therefore given, and they
are self-contradictory. One part of the mind comes down its pathway
towards action, and finds itself met by another which is coming along
the same path in the opposite direction. If neither moves, there is a
conflict; in our hypothetical case sleep is delayed; and if it comes,
is disturbed by nightmares--the echoes of the fright--and the childish
organism suffers.
Exactly similar conflicts in which fear plays a part may occur in adult
life, e.g., in so-called “shell-shock”; or the sex-instinct may come
into conflict with other parts of the personality.
These conflicts are resolved through one tendency or part of
experience being passed into the subconscious, where it no longer can
meet its opponent on the path to action. And this passage into the
subconscious can be apparently automatic, unwitting, when it is called
_suppression_, or performed only by voluntary effort, when it is called
_repression_. In the former case, it would appear that the conflict may
wholly or almost wholly cease; whereas in the second, the repressed
portion of mind is perpetually striving to come to the surface again,
and must thus perpetually be held down by force.
If we hold by our metaphor of the building, then in suppression,
bricks which would not go well with the rest are stacked quietly in
the cellars; while in repression, part of the workmen want to build a
different sort of building, and have to be forcibly held down by some
of the rest to prevent their doing so.
But in whatever way the subconscious may be organized it is always
with us, and there will always be a remainder of our soul, or of its
possibilities, which is not incorporated in our personal life at all,
as well as much which is not closely organized with the main everyday
personality, but is connected with it only by vague and loose bonds,
approachable only by narrow pathways instead of by broad roads.
There is another process at work in the human mind which is of the
utmost importance for our problem. I mean the process of sublimation.
If it is not easy to give a short and clear definition of sublimation,
at least the process is familiar to all. The commonest example is
“falling in love,” where the simple sex-instinct becomes intertwined
with other instincts and with past emotional experience, and projects
itself in wholly new guise upon its object. We may perhaps best say
that a sublimated instinct has more and higher values attached to its
satisfaction than one unsublimated. The mere satisfaction of the sexual
impulse need be little more than a physiological desirability; but the
satisfaction of passionate love involves every fibre of the mental
organism, hopes and ideals converging with memories and instincts on to
the highest pitch of being.
In such a case sublimation occurs with the normal object of the
instinct. But the elasticity of man’s mind permits of further
complication; the instinct may be not only sublimated but attached
to new objects. Through the cogs and spirals of the mind, the sexual
instinct may find an outlet at higher levels, and contribute to the
driving force of adventurous living, of art, or as we may see in many
mystics--St. Teresa for example--of religious ecstasy.
It is as if a swift stream were falling into underground channels below
the mill of our being, where it could churn and roar away to waste. But
some of it is led off at a higher level, and we can learn to lead off
still more; and we can make an installation of pipes whereby it can be
taken up to the original level, and made to fall through new machines
and do any work we may ask of it.
The mechanism of sublimation, however, deserves a few more words.
Recent work in biology has shown that in low forms of animals and in
early stages of high forms, the head-region is in a certain sense
dominant to the rest, in that it forms first and independently; but
that, once present, it exerts a formative influence upon the rest
of the body, keeping the various organs in some way under control,
making them different from what they would otherwise have been, and so
moulding them to the part of a single and higher whole.
An extremely similar process is at work in sublimation. Ideas and
ideals can be naturally dominant over others, or they can become
dominant through becoming associated with primarily dominant ideas, or
by receiving a larger share of attention. Attention, concentration,
what you will, is one of the most remarkable mental functions. Not
only can the metaphor of intense illumination of a particular field be
justly used of it, but we may say that it seems to accelerate the flow
of mental process through a particular channel, and so to draw into
that channel the contents of other channels in connection with it, just
as a rapid flow of water through a pipe sucks in water from connected
pipes.
As a result of this, sublimation involves not the suppression or
repression of instincts and emotional experiences, nor merely the
summation of them with another instinct, but their utilization as parts
of a new whole, of which the dominant instinct is like the controlling
head.
When the sex-instinct is repressed, the emotional and religious life is
meagre, though often violent. When the sex-instinct and the religious
feeling exist side by side, without conflict but without union, you
have “the natural man” of St. Paul; but when the religious ideals are
dominant, and can catch up the sex-instinct into themselves, and in
so doing give it a new form and a new direction, then you get one of
the highest types of emotional lives. Or fear may be sublimated to
reverence; or sex again to art or to philanthropy.
In every case, a new and more complicated mental activity or organ
is arrived at; and the same process that we saw at work in biological
evolution--the creation of ever more complex units--is thereby
continued.
Then we come to the fact that man displays disharmonies of mental
construction, together with an innate hankering after harmony. The
most obvious disharmony is that between the instincts that are
self-regarding and those that are other-regarding--between man’s
egotistic and his social tendencies.
It appears that man became gregarious quite late in evolutionary
history. Through natural selection, sufficient “herd-instinct” was
developed to ensure that men would on the whole stand by the tribe in
danger, that the tribe should become a real biological unit. But it
was impossible wholly to harmonize these new social instincts, even
in the simplest societies, with the old, deeper-rooted, individualist
tendencies; and as life became more complex and choice wider, conflict
grew more and more frequent.[51]
Another obvious disharmony in modern civilized communities is the
fact that sexual maturity occurs long before marriage is possible or
desirable.
In all this, there is inevitably a field for all the various
combinations of suppression, or repression, or sublimation.
Man’s gregariousness, together with his power of speech, learning,
and generalization, have led to the development of a new thing in the
world--persistent and cumulative tradition. I use tradition in the
broadest sense, as denoting all that owes its being to the mind of
man, and is handed down, by speech or imitation or in some permanent
record, from generation to generation. Language, general ideas of right
and wrong, convention, invention, national feeling--all this and much
more, constituting the more important part of the human individual’s
environment--is part of tradition; and tradition is pre-eminently and
inevitably social. However individualistic we may wish to be we cannot
escape modelling by this social environment.
The general effect of man’s gregarious instinct is that he desires
to find himself in harmony with some traditions, with the ideas that
modern jargon likes to call the herd to which he belongs. The herd
ideas, the traditions, may be those of a nation or of a stratum within
the nation; of a whole class or of a clique; of science or of art; of
a retired monasticism, or of an all-embracing world-civilization. But
they are always herd ideas, and through them man is always member of
some community, even though that community be tiny, or consist mainly
of writers dead and gone; and he always strives to put himself in
harmony with the traditions of that community.
* * * * * * *
A long-winded introduction enough; now for the bearing of it. One of
the essentials of every religion is its treatment of the subconscious,
is its view and its practice as regards the relation between the
personally-organized part of the mind to the remaining non-personal
reservoirs. At first the non-personal part is regarded as being wholly
outside the organism, and its occasional flooding up into the narrower
ego is regarded as an operation of an external personality, a spirit, a
God. Comparatively late, it is recognized as part of the organism, but
the process by which connection is made is still regarded as divine,
and called inspiration. Such ideas belong to the adolescence of the
race, in precisely the same way as the discovery and acquisition of
great tracts of this subconscious territory will always necessarily
constitute part of the adolescence of the individual. But any developed
religion must always in some way help to make these great reserves of
power accessible, always teach the enlargements of the personal ego
which their conquest brings about. This is one of the ways in which, to
use current religious phraseology, self may be lost, and found again on
a different plane.