end so great an adventure. This Time which rushes past us, blotting
out everything it creates, leaving us ever suspended on a Present,
which, as we turn to look at it, has melted away,--how are we to
comprehend it? The thin, fragile and uncertain stream of our memory
seems insufficient to give any satisfaction of permanence. I like to
think of a world-memory that retains the past. Physical things that
change or perish continue to live psychically in memory; why may not
all that passes, not only in our minds, but unknown to us, be carried
along in a great world-mind of whose nature we get a dim inkling
even now in certain latent mental powers of ours which are sometimes
revealed, and seem to let down bars into a boundless sea of knowledge.
The world is a great, rushing, irreversible life, not predestined in
its workings, but free like ourselves. The accumulating past seems to
cut into the future, and create it as it goes along. Nothing is then
lost, and we, although we had no existence before we were born,--how
could we have, since that moving Present had not created us?--would
yet, having been born, continue to exist in that world-memory. We do
not need to reëcho the sadness of the centuries,--“Everything passes;
nothing remains!” For even if we take this world-memory at its lowest
terms as a social memory, the effects of the deeds of men, for good or
for evil, remain. And their words remain, the distillation of their
thought and experience. This we know, and we know, moreover, that “one
thing at least is certain,” not that “this life dies”--for that has yet
to be proved--but that “the race lives!” Nature is so careless about
the individual life, so careful for the species, that it seems as if
it were only the latter that counted, that her only purpose was the
eternal continuation of life. And many to-day find a satisfaction for
their cravings for immortality in the thought that they will live in
their children and so on immortally as long as their line continues.
But we have a right to make greater hazards of faith than this. Might
it not be that, although nature never purposed that the individual soul
should live, man has outwitted her? He has certainly outwitted her in
regard to his bodily life. There was no provision in nature for man’s
living by tillage of the soil and domestication of animals, or for his
dwelling in houses built with tools in his hands, or for traveling
at lightning speed, or for harnessing her forces to run for him the
machines that should turn out the luxuries and utilities of life. All
these were pure gratuities, devised by man and wrested from nature’s
unwilling hands. She was satisfied with primitive, animal-like man,
as she is satisfied with him in some parts of the world to-day. We
have simply got ahead of her. All the other animals are still under
her dominion, but man has become the tool-maker and the partial master
of nature herself. Although still far from thoroughly taming her, he
finds in the incessant struggle his real life purpose, his inspiration,
and his work, and still brighter promises for his children’s children.
For the race lives and takes advantage of all that has been discovered
before.
Now, since nature has seemed to care as little about the continuation
of life beyond death as she has of man’s comfort upon earth, might
it not be that, just as we have outwitted her in the physical sphere
and snatched comfort and utility by our efforts, so we may, by the
cultivation of our intelligence and sentiments and whole spiritual
life, outwit her in this realm and snatch an immortality that she has
never contemplated? She never intended that we should audaciously read
her secrets and speculate upon her nature as we have done. Who knows
whether, by our hardihood in exploring the uncharted seas of the life
of feeling and thought, we may have over-reached her again and created
a real soul, which we can project beyond death? We are provided with
the raw material of our spiritual life in the world, as we are provided
with the raw material to build houses, and it may be our power and
our privilege to build our immortal souls here on earth, as men have
built and are still building the civilization of this world of ours.
This would not mean that we could all attain, any more than that all
men have the creative genius or the good-will for the constructive
work of civilization; there may be “real losses and real losers” in
the adventure for immortality, but to the stout-hearted and the wise
it will be possible. We shall need, as builders need the rules of the
craft, the aid and counsel of the spiritually gifted who have gone
before us. It has been no mistake that we have prized them higher
even than our material builders, for we have felt instinctively the
spiritual power with which they have endowed us in the contest for the
mighty stake of immortality. They are helping us to it, and we have the
right to rely on their visions and trusts and beliefs in this supremest
and culminating episode of the adventure of life.
Are all such speculations idle and frivolous? Have they no place on
the mental horizon of a youth of to-day, living in a world whose
inner nature all the mighty achievements of the scientists, fruitful
as they have been in their practical effects, have tended rather to
obscure than to illumine? Well, a settled conviction that we live in
a mechanical world, with no penumbra of mystery about us, checks the
life-enhancing powers, and chills and depresses the spirit. A belief
in the deadness of things actually seems to kill much of the glowing
life that makes up our appreciation of art and personality in the
world. The scientific philosophy is as much a matter of metaphysics, of
theoretical conjecture, as the worst fanaticisms of religion. We have
a right to shoot our guesses into the unknown. Life is no adventure
if we let our knowledge, still so feeble and flickering, smother us.
In this scientific age there is a call for youth to soar and paint a
new spiritual sky to arch over our heads. If the old poetry is dead,
youth must feel and write the new poetry. It has a challenge both to
transcend the physical evil that taints the earth and the materialistic
poison that numbs our spirits.
The wise men thought they were getting the old world thoroughly charted
and explained. But there has been a spiritual expansion these recent
years which has created new seas to be explored and new atmospheres
to breathe. It has been discovered that the world is alive, and that
discovery has almost taken away men’s breaths; it has been discovered
that evolution is creative and that we are real factors in that
creation. After exploring the heights and depths of the stars,
and getting ourselves into a state of mind where we saw the world
objectively and diminished man and his interests almost to a pin-point,
we have come with a rush to the realization that personality and values
are, after all, the important things in a living world. And no problem
of life or death can be idle. A hundred years ago it was thought
chastening to the fierce pride of youth to remind it often of man’s
mortality. But youth to-day must think of everything in terms of life;
yes, even of death in terms of life. We need not the chastening of
pride, but the stimulation to a sense of the limitless potentialities
of life. No thought or action that really enhances life is frivolous or
fruitless.
What does not conduce in some way to men’s interests does not enhance
life. What decides in the long run whether our life will be adventurous
or not is the direction and the scope of our interests. We need a
livelier imaginative sympathy and interest in all that pertains to
human nature and its workings. It is a good sign that youth does
not need to have its attention called to the worthy and profitable
interest of its own personality. It is a healthy sign that we are
getting back home again to the old endeavor of “Know thyself!” Our
widening experience has shifted the centre of gravity too far from
man’s soul. A cultivation of the powers of one’s own personality is
one of the greatest needs of life, too little realized even in these
assertive days, and the exercise of the personality makes for its most
durable satisfactions. Men are attentive to their business affairs, but
not nearly enough to their own deeper selves. If they treated their
business interests as they do the interests of their personality, they
would be bankrupt within a week. Few people even scratch the surface,
much less exhaust the contemplation, of their own experience. Few know
how to weave a philosophy of life out of it, that most precious of all
possessions. And few know how to hoard their memory. For no matter what
we have come through, or how many perils we have safely passed, or how
imperfect and jagged--in some places perhaps irreparably--our life has
been, we cannot in our heart of hearts imagine how it could have been
different. As we look back on it, it slips in behind us in orderly
array, and, with all its mistakes, acquires a sort of eternal fitness,
and even, at times, of poetic glamour.
The things I did, I did because, after all, I am that sort of a
person--that is what life is;--and in spite of what others and what I
myself might desire, it is that kind of a person that I am. The golden
moments I can take a unique and splendid satisfaction in because they
are my own; my realization of how poor and weak they might seem, if
taken from my treasure-chest and exposed to the gaze of others, does
not taint their preciousness, for I can see them in the larger light
of my own life. Every man should realize that his life is an epic;
unfortunately it usually takes the onlooker to recognize the fact
before he does himself. We should oftener read our own epics--and write
them. The world is in need of true autobiographies, told in terms of
the adventure that life is. Not every one, it is said, possesses the
literary gift, but what, on the other hand, is the literary gift but an
absorbing interest in the personality of things, and an insight into
the wonders of living? Unfortunately it is usually only the eccentric
or the distinguished who reveal their inner life. Yet the epic of the
humblest life, told in the light of its spiritual shocks and changes,
would be enthralling in its interest. But the best autobiographers are
still the masters of fiction, those wizards of imaginative sympathy,
who create souls and then write their spiritual history, as those
souls themselves, were they alive, could perhaps never write them.
Every man, however, can cultivate this autobiographical interest in
himself, and produce for his own private view a real epic of spiritual
adventure. And life will be richer and more full of meaning as the
story continues and life accumulates.
Life changes so gradually that we do not realize our progress. This
small triumph of yesterday we fail to recognize as the summit of the
mountain at whose foot we encamped several years ago in despair. We
forget our hopes and wistfulness and struggles. We do not look down
from the summit at the valley where we started, and thus we lose the
dramatic sense of something accomplished. If a man looking back sees
no mountain and valley, but only a straight level plain, it behooves
him to take himself straight to some other spiritual country where
there is opportunity for climbing and where five years hence will
see him on a higher level, breathing purer air. Most people have no
trouble in remembering their rights and their wrongs, their pretensions
and their ambitions,--things so illusory that they should never even
have been thought of. But to forget their progress, to forget their
golden moments, their acquisitions of insight and appreciation, the
charm of their friends, the sequence of their ideals,--this is indeed
a deplorable aphasia! “The days that make us happy make us wise!”
Happiness is too valuable to be forgotten, and who will remember yours
if you forget it? It is what has made the best of you; or, if you have
thrown it away from memory, what could have made you, and made you
richer than you are. If you have neglected such contemplation, you are
poor, and that poverty will be apparent in your daily personality.
Life in its essence is a heaping-up and accumulation of thought and
insight. It should mount higher and higher, and be more potent and
flowering as life is lived. If you do not keep in your memory and
spirit the finer accumulations of your life, it will be as if you had
only partly lived. Your living will be a travesty on life, and your
progress only a dull mechanical routine. Even though your life may be
outwardly routine, inwardly, as moralists have always known, it may
be full of adventure. Be happy, but not too contented. Contentment
may be a vice as well as a virtue; too often it is a mere cover for
sluggishness, and not a sign of triumph. The mind must have a certain
amount of refreshment and novelty; it will not grow by staying too
comfortably at home, and refusing to put itself to the trouble of
travel and change. It needs to be disturbed every now and then to keep
the crust from forming. People do not realize this, and let themselves
become jaded and uninterested--and therefore uninteresting--when such
a small touch of novelty would inspire and stimulate them. A tired
interest, in a healthy mind, wakes with as quick a response to a new
touch or aspect as does a thirsty flower to the rain. Too many people
sit in prison with themselves until they get meagre and dull, when the
door was really all the time open, and outside was freshness and green
grass and the warm sun, which might have revived them and made them
bright again. Listlessness in an old man or woman is often the telltale
sign of such an imprisonment. Life, instead of being an accumulation
of spiritual treasure, has been the squandering of its wealth, in a
lapse of interest, as soon as it was earned. Even unbearable sorrow
might have been the means, by a process of transmutation, of acquiring
a deeper appreciation of life’s truer values. But the squanderer has
lost his vision, because he did not retain on the background of memory
his experience, against which to contrast his new reactions, and
did not have the emotional image of old novelties to spur him to the
apprehension and appreciation of new ones.
More amazing even than the lack of a healthy interest in their own
personalities is the lack of most people of an interest, beyond one
of a trivial or professional nature, in others. Our literary artists
have scarcely begun to touch the resources of human ways and acts.
Writers surrender reality for the sake of a plot, and in attempting to
make a point, or to write adventure, squeeze out the natural traits
and nuances of character and the haphazardnesses of life that are the
true adventure and point. We cannot know too much about each other.
All our best education comes from what people tell us or what we
observe them do. We cannot endure being totally separated from others,
and it is well that we cannot. For it would mean that we should have
then no life above the satisfaction of our crudest material wants.
Our keenest delights are based upon some manifestation or other of
social life. Even gossip arises not so much from malice as from a real
social interest in our neighbors; the pity of it is, of course, that
to so many people it is only the misfortunes and oddities that are
interesting.
Let our interests in the social world with which we come in contact be
active and not passive. Let us give back in return as good an influence
and as much as is given to us. Let us live so as to stimulate others,
so that we call out the best powers and traits in them, and make them
better than they are, because of our comprehension and inspiration.
Our life is so bound up with our friends and teachers and heroes
(whether present in the flesh or not), and we are so dependent upon
them for nourishment and support, that we are rarely aware how little
of us there would be left were they to be taken away. We are seldom
conscious enough of the ground we are rooted in and the air we breathe.
We can know ourselves best by knowing others. There are adventures of
personality in acting and being acted upon, in studying and delighting
in the ideas and folkways of people that hold much in store for those
who will only seek them.
Thus in its perils and opportunities, in its satisfactions and
resistances, in its gifts and responsibilities, for good or for evil,
life is an adventure. In facing its evil, we shall not let it daunt
or depress our spirits; we shall surrender some of our responsibility
for the Universe, and face forward, working and encouraging those
around us to coöperate with us and with all who suffer, in fighting
preventable wrong. Death we shall transcend by interpreting everything
in terms of life; we shall be victorious over it by recognizing in it
an aspect of a larger life in which we are immersed. We shall accept
gladly the wealth of days poured out for us. Alive, in a living world,
we shall cultivate those interests and qualities which enhance life.
We shall try to keep the widest possible fund of interests in order
that life may mount ever richer, and not become jaded and wearied in
its ebb-flow. We shall never cease to put our questions to the heart
of the world, intent on tracking down the mysteries of its behavior
and its meaning, using each morsel of knowledge to pry further into
its secrets, and testing the tools we use by the product they create
and the hidden chambers they open. To face the perils and hazards
fearlessly, and absorb the satisfactions joyfully, to be curious and
brave and eager,--is to know the adventure of life.
VII
SOME THOUGHTS ON RELIGION
In youth we grow and learn and always the universe widens around us.
The horizon recedes faster than we can journey towards it. There comes
a time when we look back with longing to the days when everything we
learned seemed a fast gaining upon the powers of darkness, and each new
principle seemed to illuminate and explain an immense region of the
world. We had only to keep on learning in steady progress, it seemed,
until we should have dominion over the whole of it. But there came a
time, perhaps, when advance halted, and our carefully ordered world
began to dissipate and loose ends and fringes to appear. It became a
real struggle to keep our knowledge securely boxed in our one system,
indeed, in any system, as we found when we restlessly tried one dogma
after another as strong-boxes for our spiritual goods. Always something
eluded us; it was “ever not quite.” Just when we were safest, some
new experience came up to be most incongruously unaccounted for.
We had our goods, for instance, safely stowed away in the box of
“materialism,” when suddenly we realized that, on its theory, our whole
life might run along precisely as we see it now, we might talk and love
and paint and build without a glimmer of consciousness, that wondrous
stuff which is so palpably our light and our life. The materialist
can see in us nothing but the inert accompaniment of our bodies, the
helpless, useless, and even annoying spectators of the play of physical
forces through these curious compounds of chemical elements that we
call our bodies. Or if, filled with the joy of creation, we tried to
pack our world into the dogma of “idealism” and see all hard material
things as emanations from our spiritual self and plastic under our
hand, we were brought with a shock against some tough, incorrigible
fact that sobered our elation, and forced the unwilling recognition of
our impotence upon us again.
It is not, however, from an excess of idealism that the world suffers
to-day. But it is sick rather with the thorough-going and plausible
scientific materialism with which our philosophy and literature seem to
reek. Pure idealism has long ago proved too intoxicating a confirmation
of our hopes and desires to seduce for long our tough-mindedness.
Science has come as a challenge to both our courage and our honesty.
It covertly taunts us with being afraid to face the universe as it is;
if we look and are saddened, we have seemed to prove ourselves less
than men. For this advance of scientific speculation has seemed only
to increase the gulf between the proven and certain facts, and all the
values and significances of life that our reactions to its richness
have produced in us. And so incorrigibly honest is the texture of the
human mind that we cannot continue to believe in and cultivate things
that we no longer consider to be real. And science has undermined our
faith in the reality of a spiritual world that to our forefathers
was the only reality in the universe. We are so honest, however,
that when the scientist relegates to a subjective shadowy realm our
world of qualities and divinities, we cannot protest, but only look
wistfully after the disappearing forms. A numbness has stolen over
our religion, art, and literature, and the younger generation finds a
chill and torpor in those interests of life that should be the highest
inspiration.
Religion in these latter days becomes poetry, about which should never
be asked the question, “Is it true?” Art becomes a frivolous toy;
literature a daily chronicle.
There is thus a crucial intellectual dilemma that faces us to-day. If
we accept whole-heartedly the spiritual world, we seem to be false to
the imposing new knowledge of science which is rapidly making the world
comprehensible to us; if we accept all the claims and implications of
science, we seem to trample on our own souls. Yet we feel instinctively
the validity of both aspects of the world. Our solution will seem to
be, then, to be content with remaining something less than monists.
We must recognize that this is an infinite universe, and give up our
attempt to get all our experience under one roof. Striving ever for
unity, we must yet understand that this “not-quite-ness” is one of
the fundamental principles of things. We can no longer be satisfied
with a settlement of the dreary conflict between religion and science
which left for religion only the task of making hazardous speculations
which science was later to verify or cast aside, as it charted the seas
of knowledge. We cannot be content with a religion which science is
constantly overtaking and wiping out, as it puts its brave postulates
of faith to rigorous test.
The only view of religion and science that will satisfy us is one
that makes them each the contemplation of a different aspect of the
universe,--one, an aspect of quantities and relations, the other, an
aspect of qualities, ideals, and values. They may be coördinate and
complementary, but they are not expressible in each others’ terms.
There is no question of superior reality. The blue of a flower is just
as real as the ether waves which science tells us the color “really”
is. Scientific and intuitive knowledge are simply different ways of
appreciating an infinite universe. Scientific knowledge, for all its
dogmatic claims to finality, is provisional and hypothetical. “If
we live in a certain kind of a world,” it says, “certain things are
true.” Each fact hinges upon another. Yet these correlations of the
physical world are so certain and predictable that no sane mind can
doubt them. On the other hand, our knowledge of qualities is direct and
immediate, and seems to depend on nothing for its completeness. Yet it
is so uncertain and various that no two minds have precisely the same
reactions, and we do not ourselves have the same reactions at different
times.
And these paradoxes give rise to the endless disputes as to which
gives the more real view of the universe in which we find ourselves
living. The matter-of-fact person takes the certainty and lets the
immediacy go; the poet and the mystic and the religious man choose the
direct revelation and prize this vision far above any logical cogency.
Now it will be the task of this intellectual generation to conquer
the paradoxes by admitting the validity of both the matter-of-fact
view and the mystical. And it is the latter that requires the present
emphasis; it must be resuscitated from the low estate into which it has
fallen. We must resist the stern arrogances of science as vigorously
as the scientist has resisted the allurements of religion. We must
remind him that his laws are not visions of eternal truth, so much as
rough-and-ready statements of the practical nature of things, in so
far as they are useful to us for our grappling with our environment
and somehow changing it. We must demand that he climb down out of the
papal chair, and let his learning become what it was meant to be,--the
humble servant of humanity. Truth for truth’s sake is an admirable
motto for the philosopher, who really searches to find the inner nature
of things. But the truth of science is for use’s sake. To seek for
physical truth which is irrelevant to human needs and purposes is as
purely futile an intellectual gymnastic as the logical excesses of the
schoolmen. The scientist is here to tell us the practical workings of
the forces and elements of the world; the philosopher, mystic, artist,
and poet are here to tell us of the purposes and meanings of the world
as revealed directly, and to show us the ideal aspect through their own
clear fresh vision.