A FUNDAMENTAL SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK
The most important constructive work just now laid upon us is the serious
task of helping to restore faith in the actual reality of God and in the
fundamental spiritual nature of our world. There is no substitute for
the transforming power and inward depth which an irresistible first-hand
conviction of God gives a man. Carlyle, in his usual vivid fashion, says
that one man with faith in God is “stronger, not than ten men that have
it not, or than ten thousand, but than _all_ men that have it not!” A man
can face anything when he knows absolutely that at bottom the universe
is not force nor mechanism but intelligent and loving purpose, and that
through the seeming confusion and welter there is a loving, throbbing,
personal Heart answering back to us. The cultivation of this experience
is the greatest prophetic mission laid upon the spiritual leaders of
any age. Isaiah is at his fullest stature when in a fearful crisis he
calls his nation from a military _alliance_ with Egypt, whose people, he
says, are “men and not God and whose horses are flesh and not spirit,”
to a _reliance_ on God and on eternal resources: “In returning and rest
shall ye be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength.”
George Fox is most clearly a prophet when he reports his own experience
of God: “I saw that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but that an
infinite ocean of light and love flowed over the ocean of darkness. In
_that_ I saw the infinite love of God.”
If we are to assist in the creation of a higher civilization than that
against which the hand on the wall is writing “mene,” we must speak
of God in the present tense, we must live by truths and convictions
that are grounded in our own experience, and we must endeavor to find a
spiritual basis underlying all the processes of the world. Men have been
living for a generation—or at least trying to live—on a naturalistic
interpretation of the universe which chokes and stifles the higher
spiritual life of man. We must help those who have been caught in this
drift of materialism to find their way back to the spiritual meaning of
the world.
We get a vivid impression of the stern and iron character of this
materialistic universe from the writings of Bertrand Russell. Here are
two extracts:
“Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the
end they were achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes
and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of
accidental collocations of atoms; no fire, no heroism, no
intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual
life beyond the grave; all the labours of the ages, all the
devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of
human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of
the solar system, and the whole temple of man’s achievement
must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in
ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so
nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope
to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only
on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s
habitation henceforth be safely built.”[5]
“Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race
the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and
evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its
relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest,
to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it
remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty
thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward
terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that
his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance,
to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his
outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that
tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to
sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that
his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of
unconscious power.”[6]
Much of the present confusion has been due to a false interpretation of
the doctrine of evolution. It has been assumed—not indeed by scientists
of the first rank, but by a host of influential interpreters—that the
basis of evolution, the law which runs the cosmic train, is competitive
struggle for existence, that is to say the natural selection of the
fittest to survive, and the fittest on this count are of course the
physically fittest, the most efficient. This principle, used first to
explain biological development, has been taken up and expanded and used
to explain all ethical and social progress. Any nation that has won
out and prevailed has done so, on this theory, because it made itself
stronger than those nations with which it competed. This theory has
contributed immensely toward bringing on the catastrophe in Europe. It
is a breeder of racial rivalries, it is loaded with emotional stress, it
cultivates fear, one of the main causes of war, and it runs on all fours
with materialism.
But it does not fit the facts of life and it is as much a mental
construction and as untrue to the complete nature of things as were the
popular pre-evolution theories. Here, as everywhere else, the truth is
the only adequate remedy, and the truth would set men free. Biologists
of the most eminent rank have all along been insisting that life has not
evolved through the operation of one single factor; for example, the
law of competing struggle. Everywhere in the process, from lowest to
highest, there has been present the operation of another force as primary
as the egoistic factor, namely the operation of mutual aid, coöperation,
struggle for the life of others, mother-traits and father-traits,
sacrifice of self for the group, a love-factor implicit at the bottom but
gloriously conscious and consecrated at the top. Nature has always been
forerunning and crying in the wilderness that the way of _love_ will work.
It is impossible to account for a continuously progressive evolution on
any mechanical basis. As soon as life appeared there came into play some
degree of spontaneity, something unpredictable; something which is not
mechanism. The future in any life-series is never an equation with the
past. What has been, does not quite determine what will be. Life carries
in itself a creative tendency—a tendency to exhibit surprises, novelties,
variations, mutations, unpredictable leaps. We can name this tendency,
this upward-changing drive, “vital impulse,” but however we name it, we
cannot explain it. The variation which raises the entire level of life is
as mysterious as a virgin birth, or a resurrection from the dead. There
is no help in the word “fortuitous,” or “accidental,” there is no answer
when the appeal is made either to heredity or to physical environment.
There is in favorable mutations a revelation of some kind of intelligent
push, a power of life working toward an end. The end or goal of the
process seems to be an operative factor _in_ the process. Evolution seems
to be due to a mighty living, conscious, spiritual driving force, that
is pouring itself forth in ever-heightening ways of manifestation and
that differentiates itself into myriad varieties of form and activity,
each one with its own peculiar potency of advance. Consciousness, in
Henri Bergson’s illuminating interpretation of evolution, is the original
creative cosmic force. It is before matter, and its onward destiny is
not bound up with matter. Wherever it appears there is vital impulse,
upward-pointing mutations, free action, and potency. But no life is
isolated or cut apart. Each particular manifestation of life is one of
the rills into which the immense river of consciousness divides, and this
irresistible river with its onward leaps seems able to beat down every
resistance and clear away the most formidable obstacles—perhaps even
death itself.
But it is not merely in the evolutionary process that we need to
reinterpret the spiritual factor; it is urgently called for in our
dealing with the whole of nature. We must learn how to interpret the
fundamental spiritual implications involved in the nature of beauty, of
moral goodness, of verifiable knowledge, and of personality itself.
In an impressive way Arthur Balfour in his _Theism and Humanism_ has
pointed out that it is impossible to find any adequate rational basis
for our experience of beauty, or for our pursuit of moral ends of
goodness, or for our confidence in the validity of knowledge or truth,
unless we assume the reality of an underlying spiritual universe as
the root and ground both of nature without us and of mind within us.
“Æsthetic values,” Balfour says, “are in part dependent upon a spiritual
conception of the world in which we live.”[7] “Ethics,” again he says,
“must have its roots in the divine; and in the divine it must find its
consummation”[8] and, finally, he says that if rational values are to
remain undimmed and unimpaired, God must be treated as real—“He is
Himself the condition of scientific knowledge.”[9]—“We must hold that
reason and the works of reason have their source in God: that from Him
they draw their inspiration, and that if they repudiate their origin, by
this very act they proclaim their own insufficiency.”[10]
Personality carries in all its larger aspects inevitable implications
of a spiritual universe. In the first place, it is forever utterly
impossible to find a materialistic or naturalistic _origin_ for
personality. Whenever we deal with “matter” or with “nature,”
consciousness is always presupposed, and the “matter” we talk about,
or the “nature” we talk about, is “matter” or “nature” as existing for
consciousness or as conceived by consciousness. It is impossible to get
any world at all without a uniting, connecting principle of consciousness
which binds fact to fact, item to item, event to event, into a whole
which is known to us through the action of our organizing consciousness.
Since it is through consciousness that a connected universe of experience
is possible it seems absurd to suppose that consciousness is a product
of matter or of any natural, mechanical process. Every effort to find a
genesis of knowledge in any other source than spirit, derived in turn
from self-existing Spirit, has always failed and from the logical nature
of the case must fail. There is no answer to the question, how did we
begin to be persons? which does not refer the genesis to an eternal
spiritual Principle in the universe, transcending space and time, life
and death, matter and motion, cause and effect—a Principle which itself
is the condition of temporal beginnings and temporal changes or ends.
Normal human experience is, too, heavily loaded with further inevitable
implications of an environing spiritual world. The consciousness of
finiteness with which we are haunted presupposes something infinite
already in consciousness, just as our knowledge of “spaces” presupposes
_space_, of which definite spaces are determinate parts. That we are
oppressed with our own littleness, that we revolt from our meannesses,
that we “look before and after, and sigh for what is not,” that we are
never satisfied with any achievement, that each attainment inaugurates a
new drive, that we feel “the glory of the imperfect,” means that in some
way we partake of an infinite revealed in us by an inherent necessity of
self-consciousness. We are made for something which does not yet appear,
we are inalienably kin to the perfect that always draws and attracts us.
We are forever seeking God because, in some sense, however fragmentary,
we have found Him.
“Here sits he shaping wings to fly;
His heart forbodes a mystery:
He names the name Eternity.
“That type of Perfect in his mind
In Nature can he nowhere find.
He sows himself on every wind.
“He seems to hear a heavenly Friend,
And through thick veils to apprehend
A labor working to an end.”[11]
The most august thing in us is that creative center of our being, that
autonomous citadel of personality, where we form for ourselves ideals of
beauty, of truth, and of goodness by which we live. This power to extend
life in ideal fashion is the elemental moral fact of personal life. These
ideals which shape our life are manifestly things which cannot be “found”
anywhere in our world of sense experience. They are not on land or sea.
We live, and, when the call for it comes, we joyously _die_ for things
which our eyes have never seen in this world of molecular currents, for
things which are not here in the world of space, but which are not on
that account any less _real_. We create, by some higher drive of spirit,
visions of _a world that ought to be_ and these visions make us forever
dissatisfied with _the world that is_, and it is through these visions
that we reshape and reconstruct the world which is being made. The
elemental spiritual core in us which we call conscience can have come
from nowhere but from a deeper spiritual universe with which we have
relations. It cannot be traced to any physical origin. It cannot be
reduced to any biological function. It cannot be explained in utilitarian
terms. It is an august and authoritative loyalty of soul to a Good that
transcends all goods and which will not allow us to substitute prudence
for intrinsic goodness. This inner imperative overarches our moral life,
and it rationally presupposes a spiritual universe with which we are
allied.
There is, too, an immense interior depth to our human personality. Only
the surface of our inner self is lighted up and is brought into clear
focal consciousness. There are, however, dim depths underlying every
moment of consciousness and these subterranean deeps are all the time
shaping or determining the ideas, emotions, and decisions which surge up
into the illuminated apex of consciousness. This submerged life is in
part, no doubt, the slow deposit of previous experiences, the gathered
wisdom of the social group in which we are imbedded, the residual savings
from unuttered hopes and wishes, aspirations and intentions,
“All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me.”
But at times our interior deep seems to be more than a deposit of the
past. Incursions from beyond our own margin seem to occur. Inrushes from
a wider spiritual world seem to take place. Vitalizing, energizing,
constructive forces come from somewhere into men, as though another
universe impinged upon our finite spirits. We cannot _prove_ by these
somewhat rare and unusual mystical openings that there is an actual
spiritual environment surrounding our souls, but there are certainly
experiences which are best explained on that hypothesis, and there is no
good reason for drawing any impervious boundary around the margins of
the spiritual self within us.
All attempts to reduce man’s inner spiritual life to the play of
molecular forces have fallen through. Correlation between mind and
brain cortex there certainly is and spirit, as we know it, expresses
itself under, or in relation to, certain physical conditions. But it is
impossible to establish a complete parallelism between mind-functions and
brain-functions. The psychical, that is to say spirit, seems immensely to
outrun its organ and to use brain as a musician uses an instrument.
The psychological studies of Henri Bergson in France and of Dr. William
McDougall at Oxford make a very strong argument for the view that the
higher forms of consciousness cannot be explained in terms of brain
action and that there is no well-defined physical correlate to the
highest and most central psychical processes. I shall follow in the main
the positions of my old teacher, Dr. McDougall, as worked out in his
_Body and Mind_.
One of the most important differences between human and animal
consciousness comes to light in the appearance of “meaning” which is
a differentiating characteristic of _personal_ consciousness. We pass
“a great divide” when we pass from bare sensory experience, common to
all higher animals, to _consciousness of “meaning,”_ which is a trait
common only to persons. We all know what it is to hear words which
make a clear impression and which yet arouse no “meaning.” We often
gaze at objects and yet, like Macbeth, have “no speculation in our
eyes”—we apprehend no significant “meaning” in the thing upon which we
are looking. We sometimes catch ourselves in the very act of passing
from mere sense or bare image to the higher level of “meaning.” While
we gaze or while we listen we suddenly feel the “meaning” flood in and
transform the whole content of consciousness. All the higher ranges of
experience depend on this unique feature which is something over and
above the mere sensory stage. The words, “the quality of mercy is not
strain’d” remain just word-sounds until in a flash one sees that mercy
is “not something that comes out grudgingly in drops,” and then the mind
rises to “a consciousness of meaning.”[12] In this higher experience,
“meaning” stands vividly in the focus of consciousness and, in a case,
for instance, of grasping a long sentence, or of appreciating a piece
of music, consciousness of “meaning” is an integral unitary whole.
Now there is no corresponding unitary whole in the brain which could
stand as the physical correlate to this consciousness of “meaning.” The
simple sensational experiences correspond in some way to parallel brain
processes but these elemental experiences are merely cues which evoke
higher forms of psychical “meaning,” that have no physical or mechanical
correlate in the brain.
This is still more strikingly the case in the higher forms of memory.
The lower and more mechanical forms of memory may be treated as a
habit-sequence, linked up with permanent brain paths. But memory proper
depends, as does “meaning,” upon a single act of mental apprehension. As
McDougall well says: “the whole process and effect, the apprehension and
the retention and the remembering, are absolutely unique and distinct
from all other apprehensions and retentions and rememberings.”[13] The
higher kind of memory involves “meaning” and, the moment “meaning” floods
in, vast and complicated wholes of experience tend to become a permanent
possession, while only with multitudinous repetitions can we fix and keep
processes that are meaningless and without psychical significance. But
here once more this higher unitary consciousness of a remembered whole of
experience has no assignable physical correlate in the brain-processes.
Certain sensory cues evoke or recall a synthetic whole of consciousness
which has no parallel in the material world.
Still more obviously in the higher æsthetic sentiments and volitional
processes is there a spiritual activity which transcends the mechanical
and physical order. Æsthetic joy depends upon a spiritual power to
combine many elements of experience to form an object of a higher order
than any object given to sense. It is particularly true of the highest
æsthetic joy, for example, enjoyment of poetic creations where the
ideal and intellectual element vastly overtops the sensuous, and where
the words and imagery really carry the reader on into another world
than the one of sight and sound. Here in a very high degree we attain a
unified whole of consciousness that has no physical correlate among the
brain-processes. It is further apparent that the higher forms of pleasure
somehow exert an effective influence upon the physical system itself as
though some new and heightening energy poured back from consciousness
into the cerebral processes and drained down through the system. William
James has given a very successful account of the way in which pleasure
and pain as spiritual energies reinforce or damp the physical activities,
so that the personal soul seems to take a unique part from within in
determining the physical process. Here are his words:
“Tremendous as the part is which pleasure and pain play in our
psychic life, we must confess that absolutely nothing is known
of their cerebral conditions. It is hard to imagine them as
having special centres; it is harder still to invent peculiar
forms of process in each and every centre, to which these
feelings may be due. And let one try as one will to represent
the cerebral activity in exclusively mechanical terms, I, for
one, find it quite impossible to enumerate what seem to be the
facts and yet to make no mention of the psychic side which
they possess. However it be with other drainage currents and
discharges, the drainage currents and discharges of the brain
are not purely physical facts. They are _psycho-physical_
facts, and the spiritual quality of them seems a codeterminant
of their mechanical effectiveness. If the mechanical activities
in a cell, as they increase, give pleasure, they seem to
increase all the more rapidly for that fact; if they give
displeasure, the displeasure seems to damp the activities. The
psychic side of the phenomenon thus seems somewhat like the
applause or hissing at a spectacle, to be an encouraging or
adverse _comment_ on what the machinery brings forth.”[14]
The unifying effect and the dynamic quality of a persistent resolution
of will is another case in point which seems to show that the psychical
reality in us vastly overtops the mechanism through which it works. A
fixed purpose, a moral ideal, a determined intention, work far-reaching
results and in some way organize and reinforce the entire nervous
mechanism. The whole phenomenon of _attention_ which has a primary
importance for decisions of will and immense bearing on the problem of
freedom of will is something which cannot be worked out in brain-terms.
There seems to be some unifying central psychical core within us that
raises us out of the level of mechanism and makes us autonomous creative
beings. Once more I quote William James, whom many of us of this
generation revere both as teacher and friend:
“It often takes effort to keep the mind upon an object. We
feel that we can make more or less of effort as we choose. If
this feeling be not deceptive, if our effort be a spiritual
force, and an indeterminate one, then of course it contributes
coequally with the cerebral conditions to the result. Though it
_introduce_ no new idea, it will deepen and prolong the stay in
consciousness of innumerable ideas which else would fade more
quickly away. The delay thus gained might not be more than a
second in duration—but that second may be _critical_; for in
the constant rising and falling of considerations in the mind,
where two associated systems of them are nearly in equilibrium
it is often a matter of but a second more or less of attention
at the outset, whether one system shall gain force to occupy
the field and develop itself, and exclude the other, or be
excluded itself by the other. When developed, it may make us
act; and that act may seal our doom. The whole drama of the
voluntary life hinges on the amount of attention, slightly
more or slightly less, which rival motor ideas receive. But
the whole feeling of reality, the whole sting and excitement
of our voluntary life, depends on our sense that in it things
are _really being decided_ from one moment to another, and
that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was
forged innumerable ages ago. This appearance, which makes
life and history tingle with such a tragic zest, _may_ not be
an illusion. Effort may be an original force and not a mere
effect, and it may be indeterminate in amount.”[15]
There are thus a number of modes of consciousness, and I have mentioned
only a few of them, which have no traceable counterpart in the physical
sphere, and which presuppose a spiritual reality at the center of
our personal life, and this spiritual reality, as we have seen, can
trace its origin only to a self-existing, self-explanatory, environing
consciousness, sufficiently personal to be the source of our developing
personality. If this view is correct and sound, there is no scientific
argument against the continuation of life after death. If personality is
fundamentally a spiritual affair and the body is only a medium and organ
here in space and time of a psychical reality, there are good grounds and
solid hopes of permanent conservation.
But after all the supreme evidence that the universe is fundamentally
spiritual is found in the revelation of personal life where it has
appeared at its highest and best in history, that is in Jesus Christ. In
Him we have a master manifestation of that creative upward tendency of
life, a surprising mutation, which in a unique way brought into history
an unpredictable inrush of life’s higher forces. The central fact which
concerns us here is that He is the revealing organ of a new and higher
order of life. We cannot appropriate the gospel by reducing it to a
doctrine, nor by crystallizing it into an institution, nor by postponing
its prophesies of moral achievement to some remote world beyond the
stars. We can appropriate it only when we realize that this Christ is
a revelation here in time and mutability of the eternal nature and
character of that conscious personal Spirit that environs all life and
that steers the entire system of things, and that He has come to bring us
all into an abundant life like His own. Here in Him the love-principle
which was heralded all through the long, slow process has come into full
sight and into full operation as the way of life. He shows us the meaning
and possibility of genuine spiritual life. He makes us sure that His kind
of life is divine, and that in His face we are seeing the heart and mind
and will of God. Here at least is one place in our mysterious world where
love breaks through—the love that will not let go, the love that suffers
long and is kind. He makes the eternal Father’s love visible and vocal
in a life near enough to our own to move us with its appeal and enough
beyond us to be forever our spiritual goal. We have here revealed a
divine-human life which we can even now in some measure live and in which
we can find our peace and joy, and through which we can so enter into
relation with God that life becomes a radiant thing, as it was with Him,
and death becomes, as with Him, a way of going to the Father.