RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY AND FICTION
The So-called Anglican Crisis--_Doctrine and Doctrinal
Disruption_--Three Novels: _A Human Document_, _The Heart of
Life_, _The Individualist_--Three Works on the Philosophy of
Religion: _Religion as a Creditable Doctrine_, _The Veil of the
Temple_, _The Reconstruction of Belief_--Passages from The
_Veil of the Temple_.
A year or so after the publication of _Aristocracy and Evolution_ I
found myself taking by accident quite a new departure. I was offered and
accepted a place on the board of a small company, and was thus abruptly
summoned from the world of economic philosophy to that of practical
action. The object of the company was to perfect and introduce an
invention which, had it been properly developed as a mechanism and
skillfully dealt with otherwise, might well have become popular. The
general idea was certainly sound enough. With regard to this all
concerned were unanimous. But as soon as the project assumed a minutely
practical form all sorts of difficulties arose. The mechanism was one
which might be constructed in a number of alternative ways, and,
according to the way chosen, the cost of manufacture would vary very
considerably, and its use to the general public would vary to a degree
still greater. Since the board comprised several engineers, a
successful manufacturer of pianos, and a lawyer highly respected in the
domain of local government, I imagined that these preliminary
difficulties would very soon be solved. I was, however, much mistaken.
Each director had some idea of his own, which clashed with the ideas of
others, not indeed as to fundamentals, but purely as to incidental
details. This rendered concerted action as impossible as it would have
been had the differences related not to means, but to ends; and nobody
united in himself sufficient technical knowledge with sufficient moral
initiative to harmonize these conflicting elements, and thus to render
concerted action practicable. The enterprise, in consequence, soon came
to an end, certain of the directors bearing most of the loss. But I, at
all events, got something for my money in the way of an instructive
experience. It was an experience which illustrated by fact what I had
previously insisted on as a matter of general theory--namely, that no
enterprise undertaken by a number of persons can possibly succeed unless
it has some man of exceptional strength at the head of it, who will use
the wits of others according to his own judgment; and, further, that
this man's strength must be of a very peculiar kind, which has nothing
to do with the qualities, moral or intellectual, which make their
possessors illustrious in other domains of life.
This taste of business experience did not heighten my appreciation of
the mental leisure which otherwise I now enjoyed. It was a leisure,
however, which before very long took the form of activity in a new
direction.
The more important questions which agitate the mind of an age, just like
those which agitate the mind of an individual, engross and affect it,
not simultaneously, but in alternation. One actor recedes for the moment
and makes way for another, and the newcomer is an old actor returning.
About the time of which I am now speaking there was--on the surface, at
all events--a lull in social controversy, and a new outbreak of
religious. An illustration of this fact may be found in the
extraordinary popularity achieved by a novel purely religious in
interest, its name being _Robert Elsmere_, and its authoress Mrs.
Humphry Ward. Its religious interest is of a highly specialized kind. It
is the story of an Anglican clergyman who starts as an earnest and
absolutely untroubled believer in the traditional dogmas which the
Church of England inculcates. He is thus at peace with himself till he
gradually becomes intimate with a certain distinguished scholar. This
scholar, who is the squire of his parish, is the possessor of an
enormous library, rich in the writings of continental and especially of
German skeptics. Having suggested to Robert Elsmere sundry disquieting
arguments, he turns him loose in his library, begging him to use it as
his own. The clergyman accepts the invitation. He soon is absorbed in
the works of such writers as Strauss and Renan; and little by little
their spirit becomes his own. Their eyes become his. Everything which
orthodoxy demands in the way of the supernatural disappears. The
sacraments become mummeries. Even Christ, in the ordinary sense, no
longer lives. The clergyman is left in desolation. How, he asks, can the
Church (by which he means the Anglican Church) help him? What evidence,
what shred even of probability, have its ministers to support their
teaching? They hardly, if closely pressed, know what they mean
themselves, and the supernatural teaching of one section of Anglicans
contradicts that of the others. The one moral which her hero draws from
his studies resolves itself into the words, "Miracles do not happen."
Mrs. Ward's novel was particularly appropriate to the time at which it
was published. The question of what a man, as a minister of the English
Church, might or might not teach without surrendering his office or
without abjuring his honesty was being hotly debated in reviews, in
Convocation, and at countless clerical Congresses; but these resulted in
no unanimous answer. The English Church, indeed, as a teaching body, was
held by many people to be on the very verge of disruption. The situation
was precisely similar to that which in my book, _Is Life Worth Living?_
I had myself predicted ten years before as inevitable. If Christianity
means anything definite--anything more than a mood of precarious
sentiment--the only logical form of it is that represented by the
Oecumenical Church of Rome. This had been my previous argument, and,
stimulated by current events, I felt impelled to restate it in greater
detail and with more pungent illustrations. I found particular
satisfaction in analyzing the utterances of dignitaries of the
Broad-Church party, such as Farrar and Wilberforce, whose plan for
rejuvenating the coherence of the Anglican Church was to reduce all its
doctrine which savored of the supernatural to symbols. One of them
proposed, for example, to salvage the doctrine of the Ascension by
maintaining that its true meaning is, not that Christ rose from the
earth vertically (which would indeed be absurd), but that he
disappeared, as it were, laterally, by withdrawing himself somehow or
other into the fourth dimension of space. According to another, the
statement that Christ on a specified day ascended was merely a
symbolical way of saying that about the time in question his work on
earth was finished, and that he had, like Sir Peter Teazle, taken leave
of his disciples with the words, "Gentlemen, I leave my character in
your hands." On the basis of such an exegesis they managed to raise a
superstructure of sentiment which had, until it was touched, some
likeness to the old fabric, but which a breath of air would dissipate,
and unmask the ruins within. Canon Farrar's _Life of Christ_ was a work
of this description. The work had an enormous sale, and the author, at
an Oxford dinner, confided somewhat ruefully to a neighbor that all he
got for it himself was not more than three hundred pounds. Another
neighbor, overhearing this remark, murmured to somebody else, "He
forgets that in the good old days the same job was done for thirty
pieces of silver."
A criticism of the clerical rationalists, not dissimilar in its purport,
was administered to Jowett by a certain Russian thinker, who knew little
as to Jowett's opinions, and had no intention of rebuking them. He was
describing, as an interesting event, the development of a religion in
Russia which claimed to be Christian and at the same time purely
rational. "Was it a good religion?" asked Jowett, with a somewhat curt
civility. "No," said the Russian, reflectively, "it was not a good
religion. It was schlim-schlam. It was veesh-vash. It was vot you call
'Broad Church.'"
Mrs. Ward, who may fairly be described as the best educated woman
novelist of her generation, endeavored, in the disguise of her hero, to
found a rationalized Christianity on her own account, and her
distinction as a scholar and a reasoner makes this experiment
interesting. But the kind of Christianity in which Robert Elsmere takes
refuge, and of which he officiates as the self-appointed primate, has no
foundation but sentiment and certain _tours de force_ of the
imagination. As soon as it resolves itself into any definite
propositions with regard to objective fact it is evident that these
have no authority at the back of them. Without some authority at the
back of it, unified by a coherent logic, no religion can guide or curb
mankind or provide them with any hopes that the enlightened intellect
can accept. It is precisely this sort of authority which, for those who
can accept its doctrines, the Church of Rome possesses, and is possessed
by that Church alone. Here is the argument in which _Is Life Worth
Living?_ culminated. The detailed processes by which the authority and
the teaching of Rome have developed themselves I had cited in
_Aristocracy and Evolution_ as an example of evolution in general. In a
new volume, _Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption_, I dealt with it once
again, having before me the example of what was then being called "The
Great Anglican Crisis." That this book was not written wholly in vain I
have sufficient reason to know, for a variety of correspondents assured
me that it put into clear form what had long been their unexpressed
convictions--certain of these persons--serious Anglicans--having joined,
since then, the Church of Rome in consequence.
But the thoughts of which this work was the result were not appeased by
its publication. They began to germinate afresh in a kindred, but in a
different form. _Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption_ had for its
immediate subject a position which was mainly insular--that is to say,
the position, not of religion in general, but of the formal
interpretations of Christianity which were at that time colliding with
complete unbelief in England. But I had from the first--from the days
when I was planning _The New Republic_ onward--urged that all doctrines
pertaining to particular forms of Christianity were merely parts of a
wider question--namely, that of the credibility of supernatural religion
of any kind, and that this credibility must be tested, not by an
examination of religious doctrines as such, or even of religious emotion
in the purer and more direct manifestations of it, but in the indirect
effects produced by it on the quality of life generally. Thus merely in
the capacity of a thinker I felt myself presently impelled to a
reconsideration of the contents of the life of the individual; and this
impulsion was aggravated by certain domestic dramas which, in one way or
another, came to my own knowledge.
In describing my visit to Hungary I mentioned a young and extremely
engaging lady, who looked as though she were made for happiness, but
whose life, though prematurely ended, had had time since then to become
entangled in tragedy. I had often, since I left Hungary, wondered what
had become of her; but not till some years later did I learn, quite
accidentally, what her story and her end had been. I was told few
details, but these sufficed to enable me, by a mere use of the
imagination, to reconstruct it, and see in it certain general meanings.
Of this reconstructive process the result was my novel, _A Human
Document_. It was not, indeed, due to the stimulus of this story alone,
and of the philosophic meanings which I read either in or into it. It
was partly due, I must confess, to the effects which Hungarian life had
on my imagination generally--effects with which the affairs of this lady
had nothing at all to do--and to an impulse to reproduce these in some
sort of literary form. The castles, the armor, the shepherds playing to
their flocks, the wild gypsy music, the obeisances of the peasants, the
mysteries of the great forests--all these things, like an artist when he
paints a landscape, I longed to reproduce for the mere pleasure of
reproducing them. Such being the case, the heroine of my novel and her
experiences became unified with the scenes among which I had actually
known her.
For this work, as a picture of Hungary and Hungarian life, I am well
supported in claiming one merit, at all events. Count Deym, who at that
time was Austrian Ambassador in London, told a friend of mine that my
picture in these respects could not have been more accurate had I known
Hungary for a lifetime. Of its merits as a study of human nature, and an
essay on the philosophy of life, it is not my province to speak. I
merely indicate the conclusion to which, as an attempt at philosophic
analysis, it leads. It leads, although by a quite different route, to
the same conclusion as that suggested in _The Old Order Changes_ and in
_A Romance of the Nineteenth Century_--namely, that in all the higher
forms of affection a religious belief is implicit, which connects the
lovers with the All, and establishes between them and It some conscious
and veritable communion.
The hero gives expression to this conclusion thus: On the evening after
that on which the heroine had made herself wholly his the two are
together in a boat on a forest lake. She does not regard her surrender
as the subject of ordinary repentance. On the contrary, she regards it
as justified by the cruelty and neglect of her husband, and yet she is
beset by a sense that, nevertheless, she may have outraged something
which for some reason or other she ought to have held sacred. Her
companion divines this mood, and does what he can to reassure her.
"See," he says, "the depths above us, and the depths reflected under us,
holding endless space and all the endless ages, and ourselves like a
ball of thistledown floating between two eternities. From some of these
stars the arrows of light that reach us started on their vibrating way
before Eve's foot was in Eden. Where that milky light is new universes
are forming themselves. The book of their genesis yet remains to be
written. Think of the worlds forming themselves. Think of the worlds
shining, and the darkened suns and systems mute in the night of time. To
us--to us--what does it all say more than the sea says to the rainbow in
one tossed bubble of foam? And yet to us it must say something, seeing
that we are born of it, and how can we be out of tune with it, seeing
that it speaks to us now?"
The moral of this mysticism is that no affection is complete unless it
is in harmony with some cosmic will which takes cognizance of the doings
of the individual, and gives to them individually something of its own
eternity; but that, in so far as the two are at variance, the individual
must pay the price. In _A Human Document_ this price is paid
deliberately by the man, and ultimately the woman shares in it, like a
character in a Greek tragedy.
This novel was followed by another, _The Heart of Life_, which was more
or less constructed on the same lines, and also in response to a similar
dual impulse. The scenery and the setting were those of my own early
days in Devonshire. The home of the principal actors, as there depicted,
is a compound of Glenthorne--I have mentioned its situation already, on
the seaward borders of Exmoor--and of Denbury. Several of the characters
are clergymen with whom I was once familiar. Mixed with these elements
are certain scenes of fashionable life. All these accessories are almost
photographically accurate; and the mere pleasure of reproducing
them--or, as boys would say, the mere fun of reproducing them--was one
of the motives which actuated me in writing this novel and rewriting
it--for most of it was written over and over again. The main action, as
in _A Human Document_, turned on the nature of the affections and the
pangs of unhappy matrimony, these last conducting the two principal
personages to a rest in which the heart of life, self-purified, is
hardly distinguishable from the content of a Christian child's prayer.
A third novel followed. This novel was _The Individualist_, of which the
underlying subject was still the relation of religion to life, but the
subject was handled in a spirit less of emotion than of pure social
comedy. It was suggested by the movement, then beginning to effervesce,
in favor of the rights of women, and by the semi-Socialist hysteria with
which some of its leaders associated it, and in which many of them
thought that they had discovered the foundations of a new faith. The
most prominent character, though she is not in the ordinary sense the
heroine, is Mrs. Norham, an ornament of intellectual Bloomsbury. Having
certain independent means, she is far from being an opponent of private
property as such. Her _bete noire_ is the fashionable or aristocratic
classes, these being the true Antichrist; and she has founded a church
whose main spiritual mission is to instigate an _elite_ of the obscure
and earnest to despise them. By and by she meets some members of this
despicable class herself. Among them is a Tory Prime Minister, who joins
with his sister, an exceedingly fine lady, in expressing a respectful
and profound admiration of her intellect. Mrs. Norham's philosophy of
social religion hereupon undergoes such an appreciable change that she
ultimately finds salvation in winding wool for a peeress, the only
surviving thorns in her original crown of martyrdom being the loss of
some money in a company formed for the production of a perpetual
motion, and her discovery that a certain dinner party to which she has
been asked is not sufficiently fashionable. This book, though in many
respects a mere comedy of manners and characters--among the characters
was a South African millionaire and his wife--was under the surface
permeated by a serious meaning, being in effect an exhibition of the
"fantastic tricks" which those who reject the supernatural are driven to
play in their attempts to provide the world with a substitute.
But every general event must have a general cause, for which individuals
are not alone responsible; and the fantastic tricks of the people who
try to make religions for themselves cannot be due merely to the
idiosyncrasies of exceptionally foolish persons. There must be causes at
the back of them of a deeper and a wider kind. The first of these causes
is obviously the fact that, for some reason or other, multitudes who
know nothing of one another are independently coming to the conclusion
that supernaturalism, which was once accepted without question as the
main content or substratum of human life, rests on postulates which to
them are no longer credible. Why is this the case to-day, when it was
not the case yesterday? Of these necessary postulates two are the same
for all men--namely, an individual life which survives, the individual
body, and the moral responsibility of the individual, or his possession
of a free will. A third postulate, which is the same for all orthodox
Christians, is the miraculous inspiration of the Bible, whatever the
precise nature of this inspiration may be. Of these three postulates the
last has been discredited all over the world by biblical criticism and
scientific comparisons of one religion with another. The first and the
second have been discredited by advances in the science of biological
physics which has, with increasing precision, exhibited human life and
thought as mere functions of the physical organism, the organism itself
being, in turn, a part of the cosmic process. If this be the case, what
religious significance can attach to the individual as such? His
thoughts, his emotions, his actions, are no more his own than the action
of a windmill's sails or the antics of scraps of paper gyrating at a
windy corner.[3] The first license to men to construct a religion is a
license given them by reason to admit the proposition that the
individual will is free. The primary obstacle to religious belief to-day
is the difficulty of finding in this universe a rational place for
freedom--a "_voluntas avolsa fatis_." How is this obstacle to be
surmounted?
To this question I attempted an answer in a new philosophical book,
_Religion as a Credible Doctrine_, of which the general contention is as
follows. If we trust solely to science and objective evidence, the
difficulty in question is insuperable. There is no place for individual
freedom in the universe, and apologists who attempt to find one are no
better than clowns tumbling in the dust of a circus. If they try to
smuggle it in through some chink in the _moenia mundi_, these ageless
walls are impregnable, or if here and there some semblance of a gate
presents itself, each gate is guarded, like Eden, by science with its
flaming swords.
The argument of this book, then, is in the main negative. But in dealing
with the problem thus it is not negative in its tendency, for it carries
the reader to the verge of the only possible solution. For pure reason,
as enlightened by modern knowledge, human freedom is unthinkable, and
yet for any religion by which the pure reason and the practical reason
can be satisfied the first necessity is that men should accept such
freedom as a fact. But this argument does not apply to the belief in
human freedom only. It applies to all the primary conceptions which men
assume, and are bound to assume, in order to make life practicable. If
we follow pure reason far enough--if we follow it as far as it will
go--not only freedom is unthinkable, but so are other things as well.
Space is unthinkable, time is unthinkable, and so (as Herbert Spencer
elaborately argued) is motion. In each of these is involved some
self-contradiction, some gap which reason cannot span; and yet, as Kant
said, unless we do assume them, rational action, and even thought
itself, are impossible. If the difficulty, then, of conceiving human
freedom is the only difficulty which religious belief encounters, we may
trust that in time such belief will reassert itself, and a definite
religion of some sort acquire new life along with it.
But religion does not logically depend on the postulate of freedom
alone. Moral freedom, in a religious sense, requires, not the postulate
of individual freedom only, but also of a Supreme or Cosmic Being, to
whose will it is the duty of the individual will to attune itself, and
it further requires the postulate that this Being is good in respect of
its relations to all individuals equally--that it represents, in short,
a multitude of individual benevolences. Nor does the matter end here.
Any definite religion postulates some recognized means by which the will
of this Being may be made known. I had hardly completed _Religion as a
Credible Doctrine_ before questions such as these, which there had been
hardly touched, began to impress themselves with new emphasis on my
mind. My desire was to take these questions in combination, and it
seemed to me that this could best be done by adopting a method less
formal than that which I had just pursued. I returned accordingly to the
methods of _The New Republic_.
In this new work, called _The Veil of the Temple_, the action begins at
a party in a great London house, where Rupert Glanville, a politician
who has just returned from the East, invites some friends to cut their
London dissipations short and pay him a visit at a curious marine
residence which a Protestant bishop, his ancestor, had constructed in
classical taste on the remotest coast of Ireland. A party is got
together, including a bishop of to-day and two ornaments of the Jockey
Club, together with some fashionable ladies and a Hegelian philosopher
educated at Glasgow and Oxford.
The intellectual argument of the book takes up the threads where
_Religion as a Credible Doctrine_ dropped them. It begins at the dinner
table, where a well-known case of cheating at cards is discussed, and
the issue is raised of whether, or how far, a rich man who cheats at
cards is the master of his own actions or the pathological victim of
kleptomania. One of the lights of the Jockey Club is indignant at the
idea that the matter can be open to doubt. "If a gentleman," he says,
"is not free to abstain from cheating, what would become of the turf?
Eh, bishop--what would become of the Church? What would become of
anything?" Thus the question of free will is once again in the air, and
the more serious of the guests, as soon as the others depart, set
themselves to discuss both this and other questions kindred to it.
Of such other questions the most obvious is this: "How far do educated
persons, who are nominally 'professing Christians,' really believe in
doctrines of Christian orthodoxy, and more particularly in the authority
and supernatural inspiration of the Bible?" Most of them are obliged to
confess that at best they are in a state of doubt. On Sunday three
Anglican clergymen are imported on a steam launch from a watering place
some ten miles off, where they are attending a clerical Congress--an
Evangelical, a Broad Churchman, and a Ritualist; and they administer to
the company three competitive sermons.
These performances leave confusion worse confounded; and the guests
during the following days set themselves to pick their own beliefs to
pieces. At last they come back to the question of free will, especially
as related to science and what is called scientific materialism. Then
the question arises of "What do we mean by matter?" and then the
question of the possible goodness of a God who, if he is really the
power behind evolution, is constantly sacrificing the unit to the
development of the race or species. This last difficulty is expressed by
one of the disputants in a poem which had been written many years ago,
and which, by request of the company, he recites. In this poem the man,
who is vowed to abandon every belief for which science can make no room,
is represented by a wanderer who finds himself at last conducted to a
bare region where no living thing is discernible, but one shining
apparition standing on the brink of a promontory which juts into a
sailless sea. He approaches, and addresses it thus:
"Oh, angel of the heavenly glow,
Behold I take thine hands and kneel.
But what is this? Thy brows are snow,
Thy hands are stone, thy wings are steel.
"The radiant pureness of thy face
Has not the peace of Paradise,
Those wings within the all-holy place
Were never folded o'er thine eyes.
"And in thine eyes I see no bliss,
Nor even the tenderness of tears.
I see the blueness of the abyss,
I see the icebergs and the spheres.
"Angel whose hand is cold in mine,
Whose seaward eyes are not for me,
Why do I cry for wings like thine?
I would leave all and follow thee."
To this the apparition, who is the Spirit of Science, replies:
"Ah, rash one, pause and learn my name.
I know not love, nor hate, nor ruth.
I am that heart of frost and flame
That knows but one desire--the Truth.
"Thou shalt indeed be lifted up
On wings like mine, 'twixt seas and sky.
But can'st thou drink with me my cup,
And can'st thou be baptized as I?
"The cup I drink of does but rouse
The thirst it slakes not, like the sea;
And lo, my own baptismal brows
Must be their own Gethsemane.
"Across the paths where I must go
The shuttles of the lightning fly
From pole to pole, and strike, nor know
If Christs and kingdoms live or die.
"How wilt thou bear the worlds of fire,
The worlds of snow, or dare to mark
On each some ratlike race expire
That cannot leave its foundering bark?
"Oh, you, for whom my robes are bright,
For whom my clear eyes in the gloom
Are lamps--you who would share my flight,
Be warned in time. I know my doom.
"I shall become the painless pain,
The soundless sound, as, deaf and dumb,
The whole creation strives in vain
To sing the song that will not come.
"Till maimed and weary, burnt and blind,
I am made one with God, and feel
The tumult of the mindless mind
Torn on its own eternal wheel."
The suppliant replies that he knows from his own experience what such a
counsel means, but has found it himself to be no longer practicable.
There was a time, he says, when he found the perfect peace in kneeling
before the Christian altar, but what is the Eucharist for him who can no
longer believe in it? He still is prepared to follow the Spirit of Truth
at all costs. "For me," he says:
"For me the kneeling knees are vain,
In vain for me the sacred dew.
I will not drink that wine again
Unless with thee I drink it new.
"Give me thy wings, thy wings of steel,
And I with thee will cleave the skies,
And broken on the eternal wheel
My God may take his sacrifice."
"And yet," he says in conclusion, "Truth, to those who follow it, may at
last bring its own reward."
"Though storms may blow, though waves may roar,
It may be, ere the day is done,
Mine eyes shall turn to thine once more,
And learn that thine and his are one."
_The Veil of the Temple_ winds up, in short, with the indication that,
if both are completely thought out, the gospel of Faith is no more
irrational than the gospel of scientific negation, and that the former
can be a guide to action, whereas, if thought out completely, this is
precisely what the latter cannot be.
_The Reconstruction of Belief_ is a synthesis of the main arguments
urged or suggested in these two preceding volumes. The necessity of
religious belief as a practical basis of civilization is restated. The
absurdity of all current attempts on the part of clerical apologists to
revindicate it by scientific reason is set forth in detail. The true
vindication is shown to reside in the fact that religious belief works,
and that scientific negation does not work, and that here we have the
practical test by which the validity of the former is to be established,
though the process by which this fact will be apprehended by the modern
world may be slow.
[3] In an early chapter of _The Veil of the Temple_ one of the
characters describes the situation as follows:
"(For a long time after the death of Hegel) these separate living
species seemed radically separated from one another, or connected only
as contrivances of the same deity. Thus the different kinds of life--in
especial the life of man--seemed to stand up alone above the waters of
science, like island peaks above the sea, the objects of a separate
knowledge. But all this while the waters of science were rising slowly
like a flood, and were signalizing their rise by engulfing from time to
time some stake or landmark that a moment before was protruding from
them, or by suddenly pouring over a barrier and submerging some new
area. No doubt even by this process many people were frightened, but
there was no more general panic than there was in the days of Noah. Men
from their superior status watched the tide in security. They ate, they
drank at their old sacramental altars. They were married before them and
given in marriage. But one fine day--as we look back on it now it seems
the work of a moment--something happened which, as I often amused myself
by thinking, would have been for a transhuman spectator the finest stage
effect in the world. The gradual rise of the waters gave place to a
cataclysm. The fountains of the great deep were broken up when Darwin
struck the rock, and an enormous wave washed over the body of man,
covering him up to his chin, leaving only his head visible, while his
limbs jostled below against the carcasses of the drowned animals. His
head, however, was visible still, and in his head was his mind--that
mind antecedent to the universe--that redoubtable, separate
entity--staring out of his eyes over the deluge, like a sailor on a
sinking ship. Then came one crisis more. The waters rose an inch or two
higher, and all at once, like a sponge, the substance of his head had
begun to suck them up--suck them up into the very home of life and
thought; and the mind, sodden all through, was presently below the
surface, sharing the doom of limpets, and weeds, and worlds."