IV

_The Dramatic Unity of Nature_

Now in these strong assertions it seems to me that the Calvinist is much

more nearly in accord with our modern knowledge than are Plato and Mill.

It is not wise to hazard statements as to what the future may bring

forth, but I do not see how the dualism implied in all these attempts to

refer good and evil to different creative sources can ever be seriously

maintained again. The advance of modern science carries us irresistibly

to what some German philosophers call monism, but I prefer to call it

monotheism. In getting rid of the Devil and regarding the universe as

the multiform manifestation of a single all-pervading Deity, we become

for the first time pure and uncompromising monotheists,--believers in

the ever-living, unchangeable, and all-wise Heavenly Father, in whom we

may declare our trust without the faintest trace of mental reservation.

If we can truly take such a position, and hold it rationally, it is the

modern science so apt to be decried by the bats and owls of orthodoxy

that justifies us in doing so. For what is the philosophic purport of

these beautiful and sublime discoveries with which the keen insight and

patient diligence of modern students of science are beginning to be

rewarded? What is the lesson that is taught alike by the correlation of

forces, by spectrum analysis, by the revelations of chemistry as to the

subtle behaviour of molecules inaccessible to the eye of sense, by the

astronomy that is beginning to sketch the physical history of countless

suns in the firmament, by the palŠontology which is slowly unravelling

the wonders of past life upon the earth through millions of ages? What

is the grand lesson that is taught by all this? It is the lesson of the

unity of nature. To learn it rightly is to learn that all the things

that we can see and know, in the course of our life in this world, are

so intimately woven together that nothing could be left out without

reducing the whole marvellous scheme to chaos. Whatever else may be

true, the conviction is brought home to us that in all this endless

multifariousness there is one single principle at work, that all is

tending toward an end that was involved from the very beginning, if one

can speak of beginnings and ends where the process is eternal. The whole

universe is animated by a single principle of life, and whatever we see

in it, whether to our half-trained understanding and narrow experience

it may seem to be good or bad, is an indispensable part of the

stupendous scheme. As Aristotle said, so long ago, in one of those

characteristic flashes of insight into the heart of things in which no

one has ever excelled him, in nature there is nothing that is out of

place or interpolated, as in an ill-constructed drama.

To-day we can begin to realize how much was implied in this prophetic

hint of Aristotle's, for we are forced to admit that whatever may be the

function of evil in this world, it is unquestionably an indispensable

function, and not something interpolated from without. Whatever exists

is part of the dramatic whole, and this can quickly be proved. The

goodness in the world--all that we love and praise and emulate--we are

ready enough to admit into our scheme of things, and to rest upon it our

belief in God. The misery, the pain, the wickedness, we would fain leave

out. But if there were no such thing as evil, how could there be such a

thing as goodness? Or to put it somewhat differently, if we had never

known anything but goodness, how could we ever distinguish it from evil?

How could we recognize it as good? How would its quality of goodness in

any wise interest or concern us? This question goes down to the bottom

of things, for it appeals to the fundamental conditions according to

which conscious intelligence exists at all. Its answer will therefore

be likely to help us. It will not enable us to solve the problem of

evil, enshrouded as it is in a mystery impenetrable by finite

intelligence, but it will help us to state the problem correctly; and

surely this is no small help. In the mere work of purifying our

intellectual vision there is that which heals and soothes us. To learn

to see things without distortion is to prepare one's self for taking the

world in the right mood, and in this we find strength and consolation.

[Illustration]

V

_What Conscious Life is made of_

To return to our question, how could we have good without evil, we must

pause for a moment and inquire into the constitution of the human mind.

What we call the soul, the mind, the conscious self, is something

strange and wonderful. In our ordinary efforts to conceive it, invisible

and impalpable as it is, we are apt to try so strenuously to divorce it

from the notion of substance that it seems ethereal, unreal, ghostlike.

Yet of all realities the soul is the most solid, sound, and undeniable.

Thoughts and feelings are the fundamental facts from which there is no

escaping. Our whole universe, from the sands on the seashore to the

flaming suns that throng the Milky Way, is built up of sights and

sounds, of tastes and odours, of pleasures and pains, of sensations of

motion and resistance either felt directly or inferred. This is no

ghostly universe, but all intensely real as it exists in that intensest

of realities, the human soul! Consciousness, the soul's fundamental

fact, is the most fundamental of facts. But a truly marvellous affair is

consciousness! The most general truth that we can assert with regard to

it is this, that it exists only by virtue of incessant change. A state

of consciousness that should continue through an appreciable interval of

time without undergoing change would not be a state of consciousness. It

would be unconsciousness.

This perpetual change, then, is what makes conscious life. It is only by

virtue of this endless procession of fleeting phases of consciousness

that the human soul exists at all. It is thus that we are made. Why we

should have been made thus is a question aiming so far beyond our ken

that it is idle to ask it. We might as well inquire whether Infinite

Power could have made twice two equal five. We must rest content with

knowing that it is thus we were created; it is thus that the human soul

exists. Just as dynamic astronomy rests upon the law of gravitation,

just as physics is based upon the properties of waves, so the modern

science of mind has been built upon the fundamental truth that

consciousness exists only by virtue of unceasing change. Our conscious

life is a stream of varying psychical states which quickly follow one

another in a perpetual shimmer, with never an instant of rest. The

elementary psychical states, indeed, lie below consciousness, or, as we

say, they are sub-conscious. We may call these primitive pulsations the

psychical molecules out of which are compounded the feelings and

thoughts that well up into the full stream of consciousness. Just as in

chemistry we explain the qualitative differences among things as due to

diversities of arrangement among compounded molecules and atoms, so in

psychology we have come to see that thoughts and feelings in all their

endless variety are diversely compounded of sub-conscious psychical

molecules.

Musical sounds furnish us with a simple and familiar illustration of

this. When the sounds of taps or blows impinge upon the ear slowly, at

the rate of not more than sixteen in a second, they are cognized as

separate and non-musical noises. When they pass beyond that rate of

speed, they are cognized as a continuous musical tone of very low pitch;

a state of consciousness which seems simple, but which we now see is

really compound. As the speed of the blows increases, further

qualitative differences arise; the musical tone rises in pitch until it

becomes too acute for the ear to cognize, and thus vanishes from

consciousness. But this is far from being the whole story; for the

series of blows or pulsations make not only a single vivid fundamental

tone, but also a multifarious companion group of fainter overtones, and

the diverse blending of these faint harmonics constitutes the whole

difference in tone quality between the piano and the flute, the violin

and the trumpet, or any other instruments. If you take up a violin and

sound the F one octave above the treble staff, there are produced, in

the course of a single second, several thousand psychical states which

together make up the sensation of pitch, fifty-five times as many

psychical states which together make up the sensation of tone quality,

and an immense number of other psychical states which together make up

the sensation of intensity. These psychical states are not, in any

strict sense of the term, states of consciousness; for if they were to

rise individually into consciousness, the result would be an immense

multitude of sensations, and not a single apparently homogeneous

sensation. There is no alternative but to conclude that in this case a

seemingly simple state of consciousness is in reality compounded of an

immense multitude of sub-conscious psychical changes.

Now, what is thus true in the case of musical sounds is equally true of

all states of consciousness whatever, both those that we call

intellectual and those that we call emotional. All are highly compounded

aggregates of innumerable minute sub-conscious psychical pulsations, if

we may so call them. In every stream of human consciousness that we call

a soul each second of time witnesses thousands of infinitely small

changes, in which one fleeting group of pulsations in the primordial

mind-stuff gives place to another and a different but equally fleeting

group. Each group is unlike its immediate predecessor. The absence of

difference would be continuance, and continuance means stagnation,

blankness, negation, death. That ceaseless flutter, in which the

quintescence of conscious life consists, is kept up by the perpetual

introduction of the relations of likeness and unlikeness. Each one of

the infinitesimal changes is a little act of discrimination, a

recognition of a unit of feeling as either like or unlike some other

unit of feeling. So in these depths of the soul's life the arrangements

and re-arrangements of units go on, while on the surface the results

appear from moment to moment in sensations keen or dull, in perceptions

clear or vague, in judgments wise or foolish, in memories gay or sad, in

sordid or lofty trains of thought, in gusts of anger or thrills of love.

The whole fabric of human thought and human emotion is built up out of

minute sub-conscious discriminations of likenesses and unlikenesses,

just as much as the material world in all its beauty is built up out of

undulations among invisible molecules.

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