emotion” inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom. I
speak not only of those who are animally happy. I mean those who, when
unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it,
as if it were something mean and wrong. We find such persons in every age,
passionately flinging themselves upon their sense of the goodness of life,
in spite of the hardships of their own condition, and in spite of the
sinister theologies into which they may be born. From the outset their
religion is one of union with the divine. The heretics who went before the
reformation are lavishly accused by the church writers of antinomian
practices, just as the first Christians were accused of indulgence in
orgies by the Romans. It is probable that there never has been a century
in which the deliberate refusal to think ill of life has not been
idealized by a sufficient number of persons to form sects, open or secret,
who claimed all natural things to be permitted. Saint Augustine’s maxim,
_Dilige et quod vis fac_,—if you but love [God], you may do as you
incline,—is morally one of the profoundest of observations, yet it is
pregnant, for such persons, with passports beyond the bounds of
conventional morality. According to their characters they have been
refined or gross; but their belief has been at all times systematic enough
to constitute a definite religious attitude. God was for them a giver of
freedom, and the sting of evil was overcome. Saint Francis and his
immediate disciples were, on the whole, of this company of spirits, of
which there are of course infinite varieties. Rousseau in the earlier
years of his writing, Diderot, B. de Saint Pierre, and many of the leaders
of the eighteenth century anti‐christian movement were of this optimistic
type. They owed their influence to a certain authoritativeness in their
feeling that Nature, if you will only trust her sufficiently, is
absolutely good.
It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often
feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this sky‐
blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all
enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill
of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from
the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden.
“God has two families of children on this earth,” says Francis W.
Newman,(33) “_the once‐born_ and _the twice‐born_,” and the once‐
born he describes as follows: “They see God, not as a strict
Judge, not as a Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of
a beautiful harmonious world, Beneficent and Kind, Merciful as
well as Pure. The same characters generally have no metaphysical
tendencies: they do not look back into themselves. Hence they are
not distressed by their own imperfections: yet it would be absurd
to call them self‐righteous; for they hardly think of themselves
_at all_. This childlike quality of their nature makes the opening
of religion very happy to them: for they no more shrink from God,
than a child from an emperor, before whom the parent trembles: in
fact, they have no vivid conception of _any_ of the qualities in
which the severer Majesty of God consists.(34) He is to them the
impersonation of Kindness and Beauty. They read his character, not
in the disordered world of man, but in romantic and harmonious
nature. Of human sin they know perhaps little in their own hearts
and not very much in the world; and human suffering does but melt
them to tenderness. Thus, when they approach God, no inward
disturbance ensues; and without being as yet spiritual, they have
a certain complacency and perhaps romantic sense of excitement in
their simple worship.”
In the Romish Church such characters find a more congenial soil to grow in
than in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set by minds of
a decidedly pessimistic order. But even in Protestantism they have been
abundant enough; and in its recent “liberal” developments of Unitarianism
and latitudinarianism generally, minds of this order have played and still
are playing leading and constructive parts. Emerson himself is an
admirable example. Theodore Parker is another,—here are a couple of
characteristic passages from Parker’s correspondence.(35)
“Orthodox scholars say: ‘In the heathen classics you find no
consciousness of sin.’ It is very true—God be thanked for it. They
were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust,
sloth, cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got
rid of the deformities, but they were not conscious of ‘enmity
against God,’ and didn’t sit down and whine and groan against non‐
existent evil. I have done wrong things enough in my life, and do
them now; I miss the mark, draw bow, and try again. But I am not
conscious of hating God, or man, or right, or love, and I know
there is much ‘health in me’; and in my body, even now, there
dwelleth many a good thing, spite of consumption and Saint Paul.”
In another letter Parker writes: “I have swum in clear sweet
waters all my days; and if sometimes they were a little cold, and
the stream ran adverse and something rough, it was never too
strong to be breasted and swum through. From the days of earliest
boyhood, when I went stumbling through the grass,... up to the
gray‐bearded manhood of this time, there is none but has left me
honey in the hive of memory that I now feed on for present
delight. When I recall the years ... I am filled with a sense of
sweetness and wonder that such little things can make a mortal so
exceedingly rich. But I must confess that the chiefest of all my
delights is still the religious.”
Another good expression of the “once‐born” type of consciousness,
developing straight and natural, with no element of morbid compunction or
crisis, is contained in the answer of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, the eminent
Unitarian preacher and writer, to one of Dr. Starbuck’s circulars. I quote
a part of it:—
“I observe, with profound regret, the religious struggles which
come into many biographies, as if almost essential to the
formation of the hero. I ought to speak of these, to say that any
man has an advantage, not to be estimated, who is born, as I was,
into a family where the religion is simple and rational; who is
trained in the theory of such a religion, so that he never knows,
for an hour, what these religious or irreligious struggles are. I
always knew God loved me, and I was always grateful to him for the
world he placed me in. I always liked to tell him so, and was
always glad to receive his suggestions to me.... I can remember
perfectly that when I was coming to manhood, the half‐
philosophical novels of the time had a deal to say about the young
men and maidens who were facing the ‘problem of life.’ I had no
idea whatever what the problem of life was. To live with all my
might seemed to me easy; to learn where there was so much to learn
seemed pleasant and almost of course; to lend a hand, if one had a
chance, natural; and if one did this, why, he enjoyed life because
he could not help it, and without proving to himself that he ought
to enjoy it.... A child who is early taught that he is God’s
child, that he may live and move and have his being in God, and
that he has, therefore, infinite strength at hand for the
conquering of any difficulty, will take life more easily, and
probably will make more of it, than one who is told that he is
born the child of wrath and wholly incapable of good.”(36)
One can but recognize in such writers as these the presence of a
temperament organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally
forbidden to linger, as those of opposite temperament linger, over the
darker aspects of the universe. In some individuals optimism may become
quasi‐pathological. The capacity for even a transient sadness or a
momentary humility seems cut off from them as by a kind of congenital
anæsthesia.(37)
The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of
course Walt Whitman.
“His favorite occupation,” writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke, “seemed
to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking
at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the
varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the
crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds.
It was evident that these things gave him a pleasure far beyond
what they give to ordinary people. Until I knew the man,”
continues Dr. Bucke, “it had not occurred to me that any one could
derive so much absolute happiness from these things as he did. He
was very fond of flowers, either wild or cultivated; liked all
sorts. I think he admired lilacs and sunflowers just as much as
roses. Perhaps, indeed, no man who ever lived liked so many things
and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed to
have a charm for him. All sights and sounds seemed to please him.
He appeared to like (and I believe he did like) all the men,
women, and children he saw (though I never knew him to say that he
liked any one), but each who knew him felt that he liked him or
her, and that he liked others also. I never knew him to argue or
dispute, and he never spoke about money. He always justified,
sometimes playfully, sometimes quite seriously, those who spoke
harshly of himself or his writings, and I often thought he even
took pleasure in the opposition of enemies. When I first knew
[him], I used to think that he watched himself, and would not
allow his tongue to give expression to fretfulness, antipathy,
complaint, and remonstrance. It did not occur to me as possible
that these mental states could be absent in him. After long
observation, however, I satisfied myself that such absence or
unconsciousness was entirely real. He never spoke deprecatingly of
any nationality or class of men, or time in the world’s history,
or against any trades or occupations—not even against any animals,
insects, or inanimate things, nor any of the laws of nature, nor
any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity, and
death. He never complained or grumbled either at the weather,
pain, illness, or anything else. He never swore. He could not very
well, since he never spoke in anger and apparently never was
angry. He never exhibited fear, and I do not believe he ever felt
it.”(38)
Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion
from his writings of all contractile elements. The only sentiments he
allowed himself to express were of the expansive order; and he expressed
these in the first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited
individual might so express them, but vicariously for all men, so that a
passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words, and ends by
persuading the reader that men and women, life and death, and all things
are divinely good.
Thus it has come about that many persons to‐day regard Walt Whitman as the
restorer of the eternal natural religion. He has infected them with his
own love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist.
Societies are actually formed for his cult; a periodical organ exists for
its propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are
already beginning to be drawn;(39) hymns are written by others in his
peculiar prosody; and he is even explicitly compared with the founder of
the Christian religion, not altogether to the advantage of the latter.
Whitman is often spoken of as a “pagan.” The word nowadays means sometimes
the mere natural animal man without a sense of sin; sometimes it means a
Greek or Roman with his own peculiar religious consciousness. In neither
of these senses does it fitly define this poet. He is more than your mere
animal man who has not tasted of the tree of good and evil. He is aware
enough of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it,
a conscious pride in his freedom from flexions and contractions, which
your genuine pagan in the first sense of the word would never show.
“I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self‐
contained,
I stand and look at them long and long;
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”(40)
No natural pagan could have written these well‐known lines. But on the
other hand Whitman is less than a Greek or Roman; for their consciousness,
even in Homeric times, was full to the brim of the sad mortality of this
sunlit world, and such a consciousness Walt Whitman resolutely refuses to
adopt. When, for example, Achilles, about to slay Lycaon, Priam’s young
son, hears him sue for mercy, he stops to say:—
“Ah, friend, thou too must die: why thus lamentest thou? Patroclos
too is dead, who was better far than thou.... Over me too hang
death and forceful fate. There cometh morn or eve or some noonday
when my life too some man shall take in battle, whether with spear
he smite, or arrow from the string.”(41)
Then Achilles savagely severs the poor boy’s neck with his sword, heaves
him by the foot into the Scamander, and calls to the fishes of the river
to eat the white fat of Lycaon. Just as here the cruelty and the sympathy
each ring true, and do not mix or interfere with one another, so did the
Greeks and Romans keep all their sadnesses and gladnesses unmingled and
entire. Instinctive good they did not reckon sin; nor had they any such
desire to save the credit of the universe as to make them insist, as so
many of _us_ insist, that what immediately appears as evil must be “good
in the making,” or something equally ingenious. Good was good, and bad
just bad, for the earlier Greeks. They neither denied the ills of
nature,—Walt Whitman’s verse, “What is called good is perfect and what is
called bad is just as perfect,” would have been mere silliness to
them,—nor did they, in order to escape from those ills, invent “another
and a better world” of the imagination, in which, along with the ills, the
innocent goods of sense would also find no place. This integrity of the
instinctive reactions, this freedom from all moral sophistry and strain,
gives a pathetic dignity to ancient pagan feeling. And this quality
Whitman’s outpourings have not got. His optimism is too voluntary and
defiant; his gospel has a touch of bravado and an affected twist,(42) and
this diminishes its effect on many readers who yet are well disposed
towards optimism, and on the whole quite willing to admit that in
important respects Whitman is of the genuine lineage of the prophets.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
If, then, we give the name of healthy‐mindedness to the tendency which
looks on all things and sees that they are good, we find that we must
distinguish between a more involuntary and a more voluntary or systematic
way of being healthy‐minded. In its involuntary variety, healthy‐
mindedness is a way of feeling happy about things immediately. In its
systematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving things as good.
Every abstract way of conceiving things selects some one aspect of them as
their essence for the time being, and disregards the other aspects.
Systematic healthy‐mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and
universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of
vision; and although, when thus nakedly stated, this might seem a
difficult feat to perform for one who is intellectually sincere with
himself and honest about facts, a little reflection shows that the
situation is too complex to lie open to so simple a criticism.
In the first place, happiness, like every other emotional state, has
blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive
weapon for self‐protection against disturbance. When happiness is actually
in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of
reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules.
To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then
and there be believed in. He must ignore it; and to the bystander he may
then seem perversely to shut his eyes to it and hush it up.
But more than this: the hushing of it up may, in a perfectly candid and
honest mind, grow into a deliberate religious policy, or _parti pris_.
Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the
phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by
a simple change of the sufferer’s inner attitude from one of fear to one
of fight; its sting so often departs and turns into a relish when, after
vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it cheerfully,
that a man is simply bound in honor, with reference to many of the facts
that seem at first to disconcert his peace, to adopt this way of escape.
Refuse to admit their badness; despise their power; ignore their presence;
turn your attention the other way; and so far as you yourself are
concerned at any rate, though the facts may still exist, their evil
character exists no longer. Since you make them evil or good by your own
thoughts about them, it is the ruling of your thoughts which proves to be
your principal concern.
The deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind thus makes its
entrance into philosophy. And once in, it is hard to trace its lawful
bounds. Not only does the human instinct for happiness, bent on self‐
protection by ignoring, keep working in its favor, but higher inner ideals
have weighty words to say. The attitude of unhappiness is not only
painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the
pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have
been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a
way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble
which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all
costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout
it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance. But it is
impossible to carry on this discipline in the subjective sphere without
zealously emphasizing the brighter and minimizing the darker aspects of
the objective sphere of things at the same time. And thus our resolution
not to indulge in misery, beginning at a comparatively small point within
ourselves, may not stop until it has brought the entire frame of reality
under a systematic conception optimistic enough to be congenial with its
needs.
In all this I say nothing of any mystical insight or persuasion that the
total frame of things absolutely must be good. Such mystical persuasion
plays an enormous part in the history of the religious consciousness, and
we must look at it later with some care. But we need not go so far at
present. More ordinary non‐mystical conditions of rapture suffice for my
immediate contention. All invasive moral states and passionate enthusiasms
make one feelingless to evil in some direction. The common penalties cease
to deter the patriot, the usual prudences are flung by the lover to the
winds. When the passion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in,
provided it be for the ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave
its victory. In these states, the ordinary contrast of good and ill seems
to be swallowed up in a higher denomination, an omnipotent excitement
which engulfs the evil, and which the human being welcomes as the crowning
experience of his life. This, he says, is truly to live, and I exult in
the heroic opportunity and adventure.
The systematic cultivation of healthy‐mindedness as a religious attitude
is therefore consonant with important currents in human nature, and is
anything but absurd. In fact, we all do cultivate it more or less, even
when our professed theology should in consistency forbid it. We divert our
attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter‐
houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are
huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize
officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer
and cleaner and better than the world that really is.(43)
The advance of liberalism, so‐called, in Christianity, during the past
fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy‐mindedness within
the church over the morbidness with which the old hell‐fire theology was
more harmoniously related. We have now whole congregations whose
preachers, far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, seem devoted
rather to making little of it. They ignore, or even deny, eternal
punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man.
They look at the continual preoccupation of the old‐fashioned Christian
with the salvation of his soul as something sickly and reprehensible
rather than admirable; and a sanguine and “muscular” attitude, which to
our forefathers would have seemed purely heathen, has become in their eyes
an ideal element of Christian character. I am not asking whether or not
they are right, I am only pointing out the change.
The persons to whom I refer have still retained for the most part their
nominal connection with Christianity, in spite of their discarding of its
more pessimistic theological elements. But in that “theory of evolution”
which, gathering momentum for a century, has within the past twenty‐five
years swept so rapidly over Europe and America, we see the ground laid for
a new sort of religion of Nature, which has entirely displaced
Christianity from the thought of a large part of our generation. The idea
of a universal evolution lends itself to a doctrine of general meliorism
and progress which fits the religious needs of the healthy‐minded so well
that it seems almost as if it might have been created for their use.
Accordingly we find “evolutionism” interpreted thus optimistically and
embraced as a substitute for the religion they were born in, by a
multitude of our contemporaries who have either been trained
scientifically, or been fond of reading popular science, and who had
already begun to be inwardly dissatisfied with what seemed to them the
harshness and irrationality of the orthodox Christian scheme. As examples
are better than descriptions, I will quote a document received in answer
to Professor Starbuck’s circular of questions. The writer’s state of mind
may by courtesy be called a religion, for it is his reaction on the whole
nature of things, it is systematic and reflective, and it loyally binds
him to certain inner ideals. I think you will recognize in him, coarse‐
meated and incapable of wounded spirit as he is, a sufficiently familiar
contemporary type.
Q. _What does Religion mean to you?_
A. It means nothing; and it seems, so far as I can observe,
useless to others. I am sixty‐seven years of age and have resided
in X. fifty years, and have been in business forty‐five,
consequently I have some little experience of life and men, and
some women too, and I find that the most religious and pious
people are as a rule those most lacking in uprightness and
morality. The men who do not go to church or have any religious
convictions are the best. Praying, singing of hymns, and
sermonizing are pernicious—they teach us to rely on some
supernatural power, when we ought to rely on ourselves. I
_tee_totally disbelieve in a God. The God‐idea was begotten in
ignorance, fear, and a general lack of any knowledge of Nature. If
I were to die now, being in a healthy condition for my age, both
mentally and physically, I would just as lief, yes, rather, die
with a hearty enjoyment of music, sport, or any other rational
pastime. As a timepiece stops, we die—there being no immortality
in either case.
Q. _What comes before your mind corresponding to the words God,
Heaven, Angels, etc.?_
A. Nothing whatever. I am a man without a religion. These words
mean so much mythic bosh.
Q. _Have you had any experiences which appeared providential?_
A. None whatever. There is no agency of the superintending kind. A
little judicious observation as well as knowledge of scientific
law will convince any one of this fact.
Q. _What things work most strongly on your emotions?_
A. Lively songs and music; Pinafore instead of an Oratorio. I like
Scott, Burns, Byron, Longfellow, especially Shakespeare, etc.,
etc. Of songs, the Star‐spangled Banner, America, Marseillaise,
and all moral and soul‐stirring songs, but wishy‐washy hymns are
my detestation. I greatly enjoy nature, especially fine weather,
and until within a few years used to walk Sundays into the
country, twelve miles often, with no fatigue, and bicycle forty or
fifty. I have dropped the bicycle. I never go to church, but
attend lectures when there are any good ones. All of my thoughts
and cogitations have been of a healthy and cheerful kind, for
instead of doubts and fears I see things as they are, for I
endeavor to adjust myself to my environment. This I regard as the
deepest law. Mankind is a progressive animal. I am satisfied he
will have made a great advance over his present status a thousand
years hence.
Q. _What is your notion of sin?_
A. It seems to me that sin is a condition, a disease, incidental
to man’s development not being yet advanced enough. Morbidness
over it increases the disease. We should think that a million of
years hence equity, justice, and mental and physical good order
will be so fixed and organized that no one will have any idea of
evil or sin.
Q. _What is your temperament?_