PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
I
Twenty years ago in _A Dynamic Faith_, after reviewing the new questions
which the great sciences had raised for religion, I said: “There are
still harder problems than any of these. Psychology has opened a series
of questions which make the boldest tremble for his faith in an endless
life or in any spiritual reality.” The twenty years that have intervened
have made my point much more clear. It is now pretty generally recognized
that the deepest issues of the faith are to be settled in this field.
The problem of the real nature of the human soul is at the present
moment probably the most important religious question before us, for
upon the answer to it all our vital spiritual interests depend. If man
has no unique interior domain, if he is only a tiny bit of that vast
system of naturalism in which every curve of process and development is
rigidly determined by antecedent causes, then “spiritual” is only a
high-sounding word with a metaphorical significance, but with no basis
of reality in the nature of things. There is certainly no “place” in the
external world of space where we can expect to find spiritual realities.
They are not to be found by going “somewhere.” Olympus has been climbed,
and it was as naturalistic as any other mountain peak. Eden is only a
defined area of Mesopotamia, and that blessed word can work no miracles
for us now. The dome of the sky is only an optical illusion. It is no
supersensuous realm on which we can build our hopes. The beyond as a
spiritual reality is within, or it is nowhere. Psychology, however, has
not been very encouraging in promises of hope. It has gone the way of the
other sciences and has taken an ever increasing slant toward naturalism.
The result is that most so-called “psychologies of religion” reduce
religion either to a naturalistic or to a subjective basis, which means
in either case that religion as a way to some objective spiritual reality
has eluded us and has disappeared as a constructive power. Many a modern
psychologist can say with Browning’s Cleon:
“And I have written three books on the soul,
Proving absurd all written hitherto,
And putting us to ignorance again.”
Two of the main tendencies in what is usually called scientific
psychology are (1) the “behaviorist” tendency and (2) the tendency to
reduce the inner life to a series of “mind states.” Let us consider
behaviorism first. This turns psychology into “a purely objective
experimental branch of natural science.”[9] It aims at “the prediction
and control of behavior.” “Introspection forms no essential part of
its method.” One is not concerned with “interpretation in terms of
consciousness,” one is interested only in reactions, responses—in short,
in _behavior_ in the presence of stimuli which produce movements. The
body is a complicated organ and “mind” is merely a convenient term to
express its “activities.”[10] The behaviorist “recognizes no dividing
line between man and brute.” Psychology becomes “the science of
behavior,”[11] the study of “the activity of man or animal as it can be
observed from the outside, either with or without attempting to determine
the mental states by inference from these acts.” Emotions become reduced
forthwith to “the bodily resonance” set up in the muscular and visceral
systems by instinctive movements in the presence of objects, these
curious movements being due entirely to the inheritance of physiological
structure adapted at least in the early stages to aid survival. There is
no way by which behaviorist psychology can give any standing to religion
or to any type of spiritual values. “Æsthetics is the study of the
useless,” as William James baldly states the case. Conscience disappears
or becomes another name for the inheritance or acquisition of certain
types of social behavior. Everything which we call ethics or morality
changes into well-defined and rigidly determined behavior. There is
nothing more “spiritual” about it than there is in the fall of a raindrop
or in the luminous trail of a meteor, or in any form of what has happily
been called “cosmic weather.”
This reduction of personality to a center of activity is a reaction from
the dualistic sundering of mind and body inherited from Descartes. The
theory of psycho-physical parallelism is utterly bankrupt. Idealism,
which is an attempt to get round the _impasse_ of dualism by treating
mind as the only reality, is abhorrent to scientists and unpopular
with young philosophers, especially in America. Some other solution
is therefore urgent. The easiest one at hand, though it is obviously
temporary and superficial, is to cut across the mind loop, ignore its
unique, originative, creative capacity and its interior depth, to deal
only with body plus body’s activities, and to call that “psychology.”
The “mind-state” psychology takes us little farther on. It also is a
form of naturalism. “Mind-state” psychology makes more of introspection
than behaviorist psychology does, and it works more than the latter
does in terms of consciousness, which for the behaviorist can be almost
ignored or questioned as an existing reality. According to this view,
mind or consciousness is composed of a vast number of “elemental units,”
and the business of psychology is to analyze and describe these units
or states and to discover the laws of their arrangement or succession.
Mind, on this theory, is an aggregate or sum total of “states.” Professor
James, who gives great place to “mind states,” will, however, not admit
that they are permanent and repeatable “units,” passing and returning
unaltered. In his usual vivid way he says that “a permanently existing
‘idea’ [i.e., mental unit] which makes its appearance before the
footlights of consciousness at periodical intervals is as mythological
an entity as the Jack of Spades.”[12] And yet he continues to deal with
mind as a vast series of more or less describable states. Some states are
“substantive,” such as our “perceptions,” our “memories,” or our definite
“images,” when the mind perches and rests upon some clear and describable
thought, and on the other hand there are “transitive states” which are
vague, hard to catch or hold or express, and which reveal the mind in
flight, in passage, on the way from one substantive state to another.
When we ask the “mind-state” psychologist to tell us about the soul or to
supply us with a working substitute for it, he relegates it to the scrap
heap where lie the collected rubbish and the antiquated mental furniture
of the medieval centuries. We have no need of it. It is only a _word_
anyhow. It has always been an expensive luxury and a continual bother. We
are better off with it gone. When we look about for a “self as knower,”
or for a guardian of our identity, we find all that we need in these same
“passing states of consciousness.” They not only know things and facts,
but they also know themselves, and successively inherit and adapt all the
preceding “states” have gained and acquired. The state of the present
moment owns the thoughts and experiences which preceded it, for “what
possesses the possessor possesses the possessed.” “In our waking hours,”
Professor James says, “though each pulse of consciousness dies away and
is replaced by another, yet that other, among the things it knows, knows
its own predecessor and finding it ‘warm,’ greets it saying, ‘Thou art
_mine_ and part of the same self with me.’” It seems, then, this famous
writer concludes, that “states of consciousness are all that psychology
needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the soul to
exist; but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle
of unity is superfluous.”[13] We are certainly hard up if we must depend
on proofs which theology can give us!
We are thus once more reduced to a condition of sheer naturalism. Our
stream of consciousness is only a rapid succession of passing states,
each “state” causally attached to a molecular process in the brain.
“Every _psychosis_ is the result of a _neurosis_.” There is no soul,
there is no creative spiritual pilot of the stream, there is no freedom,
there are no moral values, there is nothing but passing “cosmic weather,”
sometimes peeps of sunshine, sometimes moonshine, sometimes drizzle or
blizzard, and sometimes cyclone or waterspout! To meet the appalling
thinness of this “cinema” of mind states, we are given the comfort of
believing that there is an under-threshold world within, possibly more
real and surely more important than this little rivulet of states which
make up our conscious life. There is a “fringe” to consciousness more
wonderful than that which adorned the robe of the high priest. This
“fringe” defies description and baffles all analysis. It is a halo or
penumbra which surrounds every “state” and holds all the states vitally
together, so that “states” turn out to be unsundered in some deeper
mysterious currents of being. Others would call this same underlying,
mysterious part of us the subliminal “self,” i.e., under-threshold
“self.” It is a kind of semi-spiritual matrix where the states of
consciousness are formed and gestated. It is the source to which we
may trace everything that can not be explained by the avenues of the
senses. Demons and divinities knock at its doors and visitants from
superterrestrial shores peep in at its windows. It is often treated,
especially of course by Frederic Myers, as a deeper “self,” more or less
discontinuous with our conscious upper self, the self of mind states.
All work of genius is due to “subliminal uprushes,” “an emergence into
the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other
ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped
themselves beyond his will in profounder regions of his being.” As is
well known, Professor James resorts to these “subliminal uprushes” for
his explanation of all the deeper religious experiences and he has done
much to give credit to these “profounder regions of our being” and to
make the subliminal theory popular. He does not, however, as Myers does,
treat it as another “self,” an intermediary between earth and heaven, a
messenger and a mediator of all those higher and diviner aspects of life
which transcend the sphere of sense and of the empirical world.
II
No theory certainly is sound which begins by cutting the subconscious
and the conscious life apart into two more or less dissociated selves.
There is every indication and evidence of continuity and correlation
between what is above and what is below the threshold which in any case
is as relative and artificial a line as is the horizon. The so-called
“uprushes” of the genius are finely correlated with his normal experience
into which they “uprush.” The “uprushes” which convey truth to Socrates
beautifully fit, first, the character of the man and, secondly, the
demands of the temporal environment. Dante’s “uprushes” correspond to
the psychological climate of the medieval world, and Shakespeare’s
“uprushes” are well suited to the later period of the Renaissance. All
subliminal communications are congruent and consonant with the experience
of the person who receives them. The visions of apocalyptic seers are
all couched in the imagery of the apocalyptic schools, and so, too, the
reports of mediums are all in terms of spiritualistic beliefs. We shall
never find the solution of our religious problems by dividing the inner
life of man into two unrelated selves, by whatever name we call them,
for any religion that is to be real must go all the way through us, must
unify all our powers, and must furnish a spring and power by which we
live here and now in the sphere of our consciousness, our character, and
our will.
It proves to be just as impossible to cut consciousness up into the
fragmentary bits or units called mind states, or to sunder it into
a so-called “self as knower” and “self as known.” Consciousness is
never a shower of shot—a series of discontinuous units. It is the most
completely integral unity known to us anywhere in the universe. There
are no “parts” to it; it is without breaks or gaps. It is one undivided
whole. The only unit we can properly talk about is our unique persisting
personal self in conscious relation to an environment. We can, of course,
treat consciousness in the abstract as an aggregate of states and we can
formulate a scientific account of this constructed entity as we can of
any other abstracted section of reality. But this abstracted entity is
forever totally different from the warm and intimate inner life within
us, as we actually live it and feel its flow. Any state or process which
we may talk about is only an artificial fragment of a larger, deeper
reality which gives the “fragment” its peculiar being and makes it what
it is. Underneath all that appears and happens in the conscious flow is
the personal self for whom the appearances occur. Any psychologist who
explicitly leaves this out of his account always implicitly smuggles it
in again.
The most striking fact of experience is _knowing that we know_. The
same consciousness which knows any given object in the same pulse of
consciousness knows itself as knowing it. Self-consciousness is present
in all consciousness of objects. The thinker that thinks is involved in
and is bound up with all knowledge, even of the simplest sort. Every
idea, every feeling, and every act of will is what it is because it
is in living unity with our entire personal self. If any such “state”
got dissociated, slipped away and undertook to do business on its own
hook, it would be as unknown to us as our guardian angel is. The mind
that knows can never be separated from the world that is known. One can
think in abstraction of a mind apart by itself and of a world equally
isolated—but no such mind and no such world actually exist. To be a
real mind, a real self, is to be in active commerce with a real world
given in experience. One thinks his object in the same unified pulse
of consciousness in which he thinks himself and vice versa. There is
no self-consciousness without object-consciousness, and there is no
object-consciousness without self-consciousness. Outer and inner, knower
and known, are not two but forever one. The “soul,” therefore, is not
something hidden away in behind or above and beyond our ideas and
feelings and will activities. It is the active living unity of personal
consciousness—the one psychic integer and unit for a true psychology. It
binds all the items of experience into one indivisible unity, one organic
whole through which our personal type of life is made possible. At every
moment of waking, intelligent life we look out upon each fact, each
event, each experience from a wider self which organizes the new fact in
with its former experiences, weaves it into the web of its memories and
emotions and purposes, makes the new fact a part of itself, and yet at
the same time knows itself as transcending and outliving the momentary
fact.
When we study the personal self deeply enough, not as cut up into
artificial units, but as the living, undivided whole, which is implied in
all coherent experience, we find at once a basis for those ideal values
that are rightly called spiritual and for “those mighty hopes that make
us men.” The first step toward a genuine basis of spiritual life is to
be found in the restoration of the personal self to its true place as
the ultimate fact, or datum, of self-conscious experience. As soon as
we come back to this central reality, our unified, unique, self-active
personality, we find ourselves in possession of material enough; as
Browning would say,
“For fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature’s self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,
Round the ancient idol, on his base again,—
The grand Perhaps!”
What we find at once, even without a resort to a subliminal self, or to
“uprushes,” is that our normal, personal self-consciousness is a unique,
living, self-active, creative center of energies, dealing not only with
space and time and tangible things, but dealing as well with realities
which are space- and time-transcending. “The things that are not” prove
to be immense factors in our lives and constantly “bring to naught the
things that are.” The greatest events of history have not been due to
physical forces; they have been due to plans and ideals which were real
only in the viewless minds of men. What _was not yet_ brought about what
was to be. Alexander the Great with his physical forces, sweeping across
the ancient world like a cataclysm of nature, was certainly no more truly
a world-builder than was Jesus, who had no armies, who used no tangible
forces, but merely put into operation those “things that were not,” i.e.,
his ideas of what ought to be and his conviction that love is stronger
than Roman legions. The simplest and humblest of us, like the Psalmist,
find the Meshech where we sojourn too straitened and narrow for us. We
have all cried, “Woe is me that I sojourn in Meshech!” The reason that
we discover the limits and bounds of our poor Meshech is that we are all
the time going beyond the hampering Meshech that tries to contain and
imprison us.
The thing which spoils all our finite camping places is our unstilled
consciousness that we are made for something more than we have yet
realized or attained. Our ideals are an unmistakable intimation of our
time-transcending nature. We can no more stop with _that which is_ than
Niagara can stop at the fringe of the fall. All consciousness of the
higher rational type is continually carried forward toward the larger
whole that would complete and fulfill its present experience. We are
aware of the limit only because we are already beyond it. The present is
a pledge of more; the little arc which we have gives us a ground of faith
in the full circle which we seek. A study of man’s life which does not
deal with this inherent idealizing tendency is like _Hamlet_ with Hamlet
left out. Martineau declared:
“Amid all the sickly talk about ‘ideals’ which has become the
commonplace of our age, it is well to remember that so long
as they are dreams of future possibility and not faiths in
present realities, so long as they are a mere self-painting
of the yearning spirit and not its personal surrender to
immediate communion with an infinite Perfection, they have no
more solidity or steadiness than floating air-bubbles, gay in
the sunshine and broken by the passing wind.... The very gate
of entrance to religion, the moment of its new birth, is the
discovery that your ideal is the everlasting Real, no transient
brush of a fancied angel wing, but the abiding presence and
persuasion of the Soul of souls.”[14]
In the same vein Pringle-Pattison, one of the wisest of our living
teachers, has said:
“Consciousness of imperfection, the capacity for progress,
and the pursuit of perfection, are alike possible to man only
through the universal life of thought and goodness in which
he shares and which, at once an indwelling presence and an
unattainable ideal, draws him ‘on and always on.’”[15]
It is here in these experiences of ours which spring out of our real
nature, but which always carry us beyond _what is_ and which make it
impossible for us to live in a world composed of “things,” no matter
how golden they are, that we have the source of our spiritual values.
When we talk about values we may use the word in two senses. In the
ordinary sense we mean something extrinsic, utilitarian. We mean that
we possess something which can be exchanged for something else. It is
precious because we can sell it or swap it or use it to keep life going.
In the other sense we see value in reference to something which _ought
to be_, whether it now is or not. It is _fit_ to be, it would justify
its being in relation to the whole reality. When we speak of ethical or
spiritual values we are thinking of something that will minister to the
highest good of persons or of a society of persons. Value in this loftier
meaning always has to do with ideals. A being without any conscious
end or goal, i.e., without an ideal, would have no sense of worth, no
spiritual values. It does not appear on the level of instinct. It arises
as an appreciation of what ought to be realized in order to complete and
fulfill any life which is to be called good. Obviously a person with
rich and complex interests will have many scales of value, but lower and
lesser ones will fall into place under wider and higher ones, so that one
forms a kind of hierarchical system of values with some overtopping end
of supreme worth dominating the will.
It becomes one of the deepest questions in the world what connection
there is between man’s spiritual values or ideals and the eternal nature
of things in the universe. Are these ideals of ours, these values which
seem to raise us from the naturalistic to the spiritual level, just
our subjective creations, or are they expressions of a coöperating and
rational power beyond us and yet in us, giving us intimations of what
is true and best in a world more real than that of matter and motion?
These ideal values, such as our appreciation of beauty, our confidence
in truth, our dedication to moral causes, our love for worthy persons,
our loyalty to the Kingdom of God, are not born of selfish preference
or individual desire. They are not capricious like dreams and visions.
They attach to something deeper than our personal wishes, in fact our
faith in them and our devotion to them often cause us to take lines of
action straight against our personal wishes and our individual desires.
They stand the test of stress and strain, they weather the storms of time
which submerge most things, they survive all shock and mutations and only
increase in worth with the wastage of secondary goods. They rest on no
mere temporary impulse or sporadic whim. They have their roots deep in
the life of the race. They have lasted better than Andes or Ararat, and
they are based upon common, universal aspects of rational life. They are
at least as sure and prophetic as are laws of triangles and relations of
space. If we can count on the permanence of the multiplication table and
on the continuity of nature, no less can we count on the conservation of
values and the continued significance of life.
They seem thus to belong to the system of the universe and to have the
guardianship of some invisible Pilot of the cosmic ship. The streams
of moral power and the spiritual energies that have their rise in good
persons are as much to be respected facts of the universe as are the
rivers that carry ships of commerce. Moral goodness is a factor in the
constitution of the world, and the eternal nature of the universe backs
it as surely as it backs the laws of hydrogen. It does not back every
ideal, for some ideals are unfit and do not minister to a coherent and
rationally ordered scheme of life. Those ideals only have the august
sanction and right of way which are born out of the age-long spiritual
travail of the race and which tend to organize men for better team
efforts, i.e., which promote the social community life, the organism of
the Spirit. Through these spiritual forces, revealed in normal ethical
persons, we are, I believe, nearer to the life of God and closer to
the revealing centers of the universe than we are when we turn to the
subliminal selves of hysterics. The normal interior life of man is
boundless and bottomless. It is not a physical reality, to be measured by
foot rules or yardsticks. It is a reality of a wholly different order.
It is essentially spiritual, i.e., of spirit. In its organized and
differentiated life this personal self of ours is often weak and erratic.
We feel the _urge_ which belongs to the very nature of _spirit_, but we
blunder in our direction, we bungle our aims and purposes, we fail to
discover what it is that we really want. But we are never insulated from
the wider spiritual environment which constitutes the true inner world
from which we have come and to which we belong. There are many ways of
correspondence with this environment. No way, however, is more vital,
more life-giving than this way of dedication to the advancement of the
moral ideals of the world.
FOOTNOTES
[1] 1 Cor. VI. 9-11.
[2] _Primary Factors of Organic Evolution_, p. 483.
[3] Bosanquet, _Value and Destiny of the Individual_, p. 320.
[4] F. C. S. Schiller, _Humanism_, pp. 228-9.
[5] Shaler, _The Individual_, p. 194.
[6] “The Flight of the Duchess.”
[7] _Letters of William James_, Vol. II. p. 76.
[8] _Ibid._, Vol. II. p. 269.
[9] Watson, _Behavior_, p. 1.
[10] See Ralph Barton Perry’s article “A Behavioristic View of Purpose”
in the _Journal of Philosophy_, February 17, 1921.
[11] Pillsbury, _Fundamentals of Psychology_, p. 4.
[12] _Psychology_ (Briefer Course), p. 197.
[13] _Ibid._, p. 203.
[14] Martineau, _A Study of Religion_ (2d ed.), I, 12.
[15] _The Philosophical Radicals_, pp. 97-98.
End of Project Gutenberg's Spiritual Energies In Daily Life, by Rufus M. Jones