The new religion will base itself upon the facts of life, as
demonstrated by experience and reason; for to the modern thinker
the basis of all interest is truth, and the wonders of the
microscope and the telescope, of the new psychology and the new
sociology are more wonderful than all the magic recorded in
ancient Mythologies. And even if this were not so, the business
of the thinker is to follow the facts. The history of all
philosophy might be summed up in this simile: The infant opens
his eyes and sees the moon, and stretches out his hands and cries
for it, but those in charge do not give it to him, and so after a
while the infant tires of crying, and turns to his mother's
breast and takes a drink of milk.
Man demands to know the origin of life; it is intolerable for him
to be here, and not know how, or whence, or why. He demands the
knowledge immediately and finally, and invents innumerable
systems and creeds. He makes himself believe them, with fire and
torture makes other men believe them; until finally, in the
confusion of a million theories, it occurs to him to investigate
his instruments, and he makes the discovery that his tools are
inadequate, and all their products worthless. His mind is finite,
while the thing he seeks is infinite; his knowledge is relative,
while the First Cause is absolute.
This realization we owe to Immanuel Kant, the father of modern
philosophy. In his famous "antinomies", he proved four
propositions: first, that the universe is limitless in time and
space; second, that matter is composed of simple, indivisible
elements; third, that free will is impossible; and fourth, that
there must be an absolute or first cause. And having proven these
things, he turned round and proved their opposites, with
arguments exactly as unanswerable. Any one who follows these
demonstrations and understands them, takes all his metaphysical
learning and lays it on the shelf with his astrology and magic.
It is a fact, which every one who wishes to think must get clear,
that when you are dealing with absolutes and ultimates, you can
prove whatever you want to prove. Metaphysics is like the fourth
dimension; you fly into it and come back upside down, hindside
foremost, inside out; and when you get tired of this condition,
you take another flight, and come back the way you were before.
So metaphysical thinking serves the purpose of Catholic cheats
like Cardinal Newman and Professor Chatterton-Hill; it serves
hysterical women like "Mother" Eddy; it serves the
New-thoughters, who wish to fill their bellies with wind; it
serves the charlatans and mystagogs who wish to befuddle the wits
of the populace. Real thinkers avoid it as they would a
bottomless swamp; they avoid, not merely the idealism of
Platonists and Hegelians, but the monism of Haeckel, and the
materialism of Buechner and Jacques Loeb. The simple fact is that
it is as impossible to prove the priority of origin and the
ultimate nature of matter as it is of mind; so that the scientist
who lays down a materialist dogma is exactly as credulous as a
Christian.
How then are we to proceed? Shall we erect the mystery into an
Unknowable, like Spencer, and call ourselves Agnostics with a
capital letter, like Huxley? Shall we follow Frederic Harrison,
making an inadequate divinity out of our impotence? I have read
the books of the "Positivists", and attended their imitation
church in London, but I did not get any satisfaction from them.
In the midst of their dogmatic pronouncements I found myself
remembering how the egg falls apart and reveals a chicken, how
the worm suddenly discovers itself a butterfly. The spirit of man
is a breaker of barriers, and it seems a futile occupation to set
limits upon the future. Our business is not to say what men will
know ten thousand years from now, but to content ourselves with
the simple statement of what men know now. What we know is a
procession of phenomena called an environment; our life being an
act of adjustment to its changes, and our faith being the
conviction that this adjustment is possible and worth while.
In the beginning the guide is instinct, and the act of trust is
automatic. But with the dawn of reason the thinker has to justify
his faith; to convince himself that life is sincere, that there
is worth-whileness in being, or in seeking to be; that there is
order in creation, laws which can be discovered, processes which
can be applied. Just as the babe trusts life when it gropes for
its mother's breast, so the most skeptical of scientists trusts
it when he declares that water is made of two parts hydrogen and
one part oxygen, and sets it down for a certainty that this will
always be so--that he is not being played with by some sportive
demon, who will today cause H2O to behave like water, and
tomorrow like benzine.