THE ART OF RELIGION
I
RELIGION is a large word, of good import and of evil import, and with
the general discussion of religion we are not in this place concerned.
Its quintessential core—which is the art of finding our emotional
relationship to the world conceived as a whole—is all that here matters,
and it is best termed “Mysticism.” No doubt it needs some courage to use
that word. It is the common label of abuse applied to every
pseudo-spiritual thing that is held up for contempt. Yet it would be
foolish to allow ourselves to be deflected from the right use of a word
by the accident of its abuse. “Mysticism,” however often misused, will
here be used, because it is the correct term for the relationship of the
Self to the Not-Self, of the individual to a Whole, when, going beyond
his own personal ends, he discovers his adjustment to larger ends, in
harmony or devotion or love.
It has become a commonplace among the unthinking, or those who think
badly, to assume an opposition of hostility between mysticism and
science.[70] If “science” is, as we have some reason to believe, an art,
if “mysticism” also is an art, the opposition can scarcely be radical
since they must both spring from the same root in natural human
activity.
II
IF, indeed, by “science” we mean the organisation of an intellectual
relationship to the world we live in adequate to give us some degree of
power over that world, and if by “mysticism” we mean the joyful
organisation of an emotional relationship to the world conceived as a
whole,[71] the opposition which we usually assume to exist between them
is of comparatively modern origin.
Among savage peoples such an opposition can scarcely be said to have any
existence. The very fact that science, in the strict sense, seems often
to begin with the stars might itself have suggested that the basis of
science is mystical contemplation. Not only is there usually no
opposition between the “scientific” and the “mystical” attitude among
peoples we may fairly call primitive, but the two attitudes may be
combined in the same person. The “medicine-man” is not more an embryonic
man of science than he is an embryonic mystic; he is both equally. He
cultivates not only magic but holiness, he achieves the conquest of his
own soul, he enters into harmony with the universe; and in doing this,
and partly, indeed, through doing this, his knowledge is increased, his
sensations and power of observation are rendered acute, and he is
enabled so to gain organised knowledge of natural processes that he can
to some extent foresee or even control those processes. He is the
ancestor alike of the hermit following after sanctity and of the
inventor crystallising discoveries into profitable patents. Such is the
medicine-man wherever we may find him in his typical shape—which he
cannot always adequately achieve—all over the world, around Torres
Straits just as much as around Behring’s Straits. Yet we have failed to
grasp the significance of this fact.
It is the business of the _Shaman_, as on the mystical side we may
conveniently term the medicine-man, to place himself under the
conditions—and even in primitive life those conditions are varied and
subtle—which bring his will into harmony with the essence of the world,
so that he grows one with that essence, that its will becomes his will,
and, reversely, that, in a sense, his will becomes its. Herewith, in
this unity with the spirit of the world, the possibility of magic and
the power to control the operation of Nature are introduced into human
thought, with its core of reality and its endless trail of absurdity,
persisting even into advanced civilisation.
But this harmony with the essence of the universe, this control of
Nature through oneness with Nature, is not only at the heart of
religion; it is also at the heart of science. It is only by the
possession of an acquired or inborn temperament attuned to the
temperament of Nature that a Faraday or an Edison, that any scientific
discoverer or inventor, can achieve his results. And the primitive
medicine-man, who on the religious side has attained harmony of the self
with the Not-Self, and by obeying learnt to command, cannot fail on the
scientific side also, under the special conditions of his isolated life,
to acquire an insight into natural methods, a practical power over human
activities and over the treatment of disease, such as on the imaginative
and emotional side he already possesses. If we are able to see this
essential and double attitude of the _Shaman_—medicine-man—if we are
able to eliminate all the extraneous absurdities and the extravagancies
which conceal the real nature of his function in the primitive world,
the problem of science and mysticism, and their relationship to each
other, ceases to have difficulties for us.
It is as well to point out, before passing on, that the investigators of
primitive thought are not altogether in agreement with one another on
this question of the relation of science to magic, and have complicated
the question by drawing a distinction between magic (understood as man’s
claim to control Nature) and religion (understood as man’s submission to
Nature). The difficulties seem due to an attempt to introduce clear-cut
definitions at a stage of thought where none such existed. That
medicine-men and priests cultivated science, while wrapping it up in
occult and magical forms, seems indicated by the earliest historical
traditions of the Near East. Herbert Spencer long ago brought together
much of the evidence on this point. McDougall to-day in his “Social
Psychology” (Chapter XIII) accepts magic as the origin of science, and
Frazer in the early edition of his “Golden Bough” regarded magic as “the
savage equivalent of our natural science.” Marett[72] “profoundly
doubts” this, and declares that if we can use the word “science” at all
in such a context, magic is occult science and the very antithesis of
natural science. While all that Marett states is admirably true on the
basis of his own definitions, he scarcely seems to realise the virtue of
the word “equivalent,” while at the same time, it may be, his definition
of magic is too narrow. Silberer, from the psycho-analytic standpoint,
accepting the development of exact science from one branch of magic,
points out that science is, on the one hand, the recognition of
concealed natural laws and, on the other, the dynamisation of psychic
power,[73] and thus falls into two great classes, according as its
operation is external or internal. This seems a true and subtle
distinction which Marett has overlooked. In the latest edition of his
work,[74] Frazer has not insisted on the relation or analogy of science
to magic, but has been content to point out that Man has passed through
the three stages of magic, religion, and science. “In magic Man depends
on his own strength to meet the difficulties and dangers that beset him
on every side. He believes in a certain established order of Nature on
which he can surely count, and which he can manipulate for his own
ends.” Then he finds he has overestimated his own powers and he humbly
takes the road of religion, leaving the universe to the more or less
capricious will of a higher power. But he finds this view inadequate and
he proceeds to revert in a measure to the older standpoint of magic by
postulating explicitly what in magic had only been implicitly assumed,
“to wit, an inflexible regularity in the order of natural events which,
if carefully observed, enables us to foresee their course with
certainty, and to act accordingly.” So that science, in Frazer’s view,
is not so much directly derived from magic as itself in its original
shape one with magic, and Man has proceeded, not in a straight line, but
in a spiral.
The profound significance of this early personage is, however, surely
clear. If science and mysticism are alike based on fundamental natural
instincts, appearing spontaneously all over the world; if, moreover,
they naturally tend to be embodied in the same individual, in such a way
that each impulse would seem to be dependent on the other for its full
development; then there can be no ground for accepting any disharmony
between them. The course of human evolution involves a division of
labour, a specialisation of science and of mysticism along special lines
and in separate individuals.[75] But a fundamental antagonism of the
two, it becomes evident, is not to be thought of; it is unthinkable,
even absurd. If at some period in the course of civilisation we
seriously find that our science and our religion are antagonistic, then
there must be something wrong either with our science or with our
religion. Perhaps not seldom there may be something wrong with both. For
if the natural impulses which normally work best together are separated
and specialised in different persons, we may expect to find a
concomitant state of atrophy and hypertrophy, both alike morbid. The
scientific person will become atrophied on the mystical side, the
mystical person will become atrophied on the scientific side. Each will
become morbidly hypertrophied on his own side. But the assumption that,
because there is a lack of harmony between opposing pathological states,
there must also be a similar lack of harmony in the normal state, is
unreasonable. We must severely put out of count alike the hypertrophied
scientific people with atrophied religious instincts, and the
hypertrophied religious people with atrophied scientific instincts.
Neither group can help us here; they only introduce confusion. We have
to examine the matter critically, to go back to the beginning, to take
so wide a survey of the phenomena that their seemingly conflicting
elements fall into harmony.
The fact, in the first place, that the person with an overdeveloped
religious sense combined with an underdeveloped scientific sense
necessarily conflicts with a person in whom the reverse state of affairs
exists, cannot be doubted, nor is the reason of it obscure. It is
difficult to conceive a Darwin and a St. Theresa entering with full and
genuine sympathy into each other’s point of view. And that is so by no
means because the two attitudes, stripped of all but their essentials,
are irreconcilable. If we strip St. Theresa of her atrophied
pseudo-science, which in her case was mostly theological “science,”
there was nothing in her attitude which would not have seemed to
harmonise and to exalt that absolute adoration and service to natural
truth which inspired Darwin. If we strip Darwin of that atrophied sense
of poetry and the arts which he deplored, and that anæmic secular
conception of the universe as a whole which he seems to have accepted
without deploring, there was nothing in his attitude which would not
have served to fertilise and enrich the spiritual exaltation of Theresa
and even to have removed far from her that temptation to _acedia_ or
slothfulness which all the mystics who are mystics only have recognised
as their besetting sin, minimised as it was, in Theresa, by her
practical activities. Yet, being as they were persons of supreme genius
developed on opposite sides of their common human nature, an impassable
gulf lies between them. It lies equally between much more ordinary
people who yet show the same common character of being undergrown on one
side, overgrown on the other.
This difficulty is not diminished when the person who is thus
hypertrophied on one side and atrophied on the other suddenly wakes up
to his one-sided state and hastily attempts to remedy it. The very fact
that such a one-sided development has come about indicates that there
has probably been a congenital basis for it, an innate disharmony which
must require infinite patience and special personal experience to
overcome. But the heroic and ostentatious manner in which these
ill-balanced people hastily attempt the athletic feat of restoring their
spiritual balance has frequently aroused the interest, and too often the
amusement, of the spectator. Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most
quintessentially scientific persons the world has seen, a searcher who
made the most stupendous effort to picture the universe intelligently on
its purely intelligible side, seems to have realised in old age, when he
was, indeed, approaching senility, that the vast hypertrophy of his
faculties on that side had not been compensated by any development on
the religious side. He forthwith set himself to the interpretation of
the Book of Daniel and puzzled over the prophecies of the Book of
Revelation, with the same scientifically serious air as though he were
analysing the spectrum. In reality he had not reached the sphere of
religion at all; he had merely exchanged good science for bad science.
Such senile efforts to penetrate, ere yet life is quite over, the
mystery of religion recall, and, indeed, have a real analogy to, that
final effort of the emotionally starved to grasp at love which has been
called “old maid’s insanity”; and just as in this aberration the woman
who has all her life put love into the subconscious background of her
mind is overcome by an eruption of the suppressed emotions and driven to
create baseless legends of which she is herself the heroine, so the
scientific man who has put religion into the subconscious and scarcely
known that there is such a thing may become in the end the victim of an
imaginary religion. In our own time we may have witnessed attempts of
the scientific mind to become religious, which, without amounting to
mental aberration, are yet highly instructive. It would be a
double-edged compliment, in this connection, to compare Sir Oliver Lodge
to Sir Isaac Newton. But after devoting himself for many years to purely
physical research, Lodge also, as he has confessed, found that he had
overlooked the religious side of life, and therefore set himself with
characteristic energy to the task—the stages of which are described in a
long series of books—of developing this atrophied side of his nature.
Unlike Newton, who was worried about the future, Lodge became worried
about the past. Just as Newton found what he was contented to regard as
religious peace in speculating on the meaning of the Books of Daniel and
Revelation, so Lodge found a similar satisfaction in speculations
concerning the origin of the soul and in hunting out tags from the poets
to support his speculations. So fascinating was this occupation that it
seemed to him to constitute a great “message” to the world. “My message
is that there is some great truth in the idea of preëxistence, not an
obvious truth, nor one easy to formulate—a truth difficult to
express—not to be identified with the guesses of reincarnation and
transmigration, which may be fanciful. We may not have been individuals
before, but we are chips or fragments of a great mass of mind, of
spirit, and of life—drops, as it were, taken out of a germinal reservoir
of life, and incubated until incarnate in a material body.”[76] The
genuine mystic would smile if asked to accept as a divine message these
phraseological gropings in the darkness, with their culmination in the
gospel of “incubated drops.” They certainly represent an attempt to get
at a real fact. But the mystic is not troubled by speculations about the
origin of the individual, or theories of preëxistence, fantastic myths
which belong to the earlier Plato’s stage of thought. It is abundantly
evident that when the hypertrophied man of science seeks to cultivate
his atrophied religious instincts it is with the utmost difficulty that
he escapes from science. His conversion to religion merely means, for
the most part, that he has exchanged sound science for pseudo-science.
Similarly, when the man with hypertrophied religious instincts seeks to
cultivate his atrophied scientific instincts, the results are scarcely
satisfactory. Here, indeed, we are concerned with a phenomenon that is
rarer than the reverse process. The reason may not be far to seek. The
instinct of religion develops earlier in the history of a race than the
instinct of science. The man who has found the massive satisfaction of
his religious cravings is seldom at any stage conscious of scientific
cravings; he is apt to feel that he already possesses the supreme
knowledge. The religious doubters who vaguely feel that their faith is
at variance with science are merely the creatures of creeds, the product
of Churches; they are not the genuine mystics. The genuine mystics who
have exercised their scientific instincts have generally found scope for
such exercise within an enlarged theological scheme which they regarded
as part of their religion. So it was that St. Augustine found scope for
his full and vivid, if capricious, intellectual impulses; so also
Aquinas, in whom there was doubtless less of the mystic and more of the
scientist, found scope for the rational and orderly development of a
keen intelligence which has made him an authority and even a pioneer for
many who are absolutely indifferent to his theology.
Again we see that to understand the real relations of science and
mysticism, we must return to ages when, on neither side, had any
accumulated mass of dead traditions effected an artificial divorce
between two great natural instincts. It has already been pointed out
that if we go outside civilisation the divorce is not found; the savage
mystic is also the savage man of science, the priest and the doctor are
one.[77] It is so also for the most part in barbarism, among the ancient
Hebrews for instance, and not only among their priests, but even among
their prophets. It appears that the most usual Hebrew word for what we
term the “prophet” signified “one who bursts forth,” presumably into the
utterance of spiritual verities, and the less usual words signify
“seer.” That is to say, the prophet was primarily a man of religion,
secondarily a man of science. And that predictive element in the
prophet’s function, which to persons lacking in religious instinct seems
the whole of his function, has no relationship at all to religion; it is
a function of science. It is an insight into cause and effect, a
conception of sequences based on extended observation and enabling the
“prophet” to assert that certain lines of action will probably lead to
the degeneration of a stock, or to the decay of a nation. It is a sort
of applied history. “Prophecy” has no more to do with religion than have
the forecasts of the Meteorological Bureau, which also are a kind of
applied science in earlier stages associated with religion.
If, keeping within the sphere of civilisation, we go back as far as we
can, the conclusion we reach is not greatly different. The earliest of
the great mystics in historical times is Lao-tze. He lived six hundred
years earlier than Jesus, a hundred years earlier than Sakya-Muni, and
he was more quintessentially a mystic than either. He was, moreover,
incomparably nearer than either to the point of view of science. Even
his occupation in life was, in relation to his age and land, of a
scientific character; he was, if we may trust uncertain tradition,
keeper of the archives. In the substance of his work this harmony of
religion and science is throughout traceable, the very word “Tao,” which
to Lao-tze is the symbol of all that to which religion may mystically
unite us, is susceptible of being translated “Reason,” although that
word remains inadequate to its full meaning. There are no theological or
metaphysical speculations here concerning God (the very word only occurs
once and may be a later interpolation), the soul, or immortality. The
delicate and profound art of Lao-tze largely lies in the skill with
which he expresses spiritual verities in the form of natural truths. His
affirmations not only go to the core of religion, but they express the
essential methods of science. This man has the mystic’s heart, but he
has also the physicist’s touch and the biologist’s eye. He moves in a
sphere in which religion and science are one.
If we pass to more modern times and the little European corner of the
world, around the Mediterranean shores, which is the cradle of our
latter-day civilisation, again and again we find traces of this
fundamental unity of mysticism and science. It may well be that we never
again find it in quite so pure a form as in Lao-tze, quite so free from
all admixture alike of bad religion and bad science. The exuberant
unbalanced activity of our race, the restless acquisitiveness—already
manifested in the sphere of ideas and traditions before it led to the
production of millionaires—soon became an ever-growing impediment to
such unity of spiritual impulses. Among the supple and yet ferocious
Greeks, indeed, versatility and recklessness seem at a first glance
always to have stood in the way of approach to the essential terms of
this problem. It was only when the Greeks began to absorb Oriental
influences, we are inclined to say, that they became genuine mystics,
and as they approached mysticism they left science behind.
Yet there was a vein of mysticism in the Greeks from the first, not
alone due to seeds from the East flung to germinate fruitfully in Greek
soil, though perhaps to that Ionian element of the Near East which was
an essential part of the Greek spirit. All that Karl Joël of Basel has
sought to work out concerning the evolution of the Greek philosophic
spirit has a bearing on this point. We are wrong, he believes, to look
on the early Greek philosophers of Nature as mainly physicists, treating
the religious and poetic mystic elements in them as mere archaisms,
concessions, or contradictions. Hellas needed, and possessed, an early
Romantic spirit, if we understand the Romantic spirit, not merely
through its reactionary offshoots, but as a deep mystico-lyrical
expression; it was comparable in early Greece to the Romantic spirit of
the great creative men of the early Renaissance or the early nineteenth
century, and the Apollinian classic spirit was developed out of an
ordered discipline and formulation of the Dionysian spirit more
mystically near to Nature.[78] If we bear this in mind we are helped to
understand much in the religious life of Greece which seems not to
harmonise with what we conventionally call “classic.”
In the dim figure of Pythagoras we perhaps see not only a great leader
of physical science, but also a great initiator in spiritual mystery. It
is, at any rate, fairly clear that he established religious brotherhoods
of carefully selected candidates, women as well as men being eligible,
and living on so lofty and aristocratic a level that the populace of
Magna Grecia, who could not understand them, decided out of resentment
to burn them alive, and the whole order was annihilated about B.C. 500.
But exactly how far these early Pythagoreans, whose community has been
compared to the mediæval orders of chivalry, were mystics, we may
imagine as we list, in the light of the Pythagorean echoes we find here
and there in Plato. On the whole we scarcely go to the Greeks for a
clear exposition of what we now term “mysticism.” We see more of it in
Lucretius than we can divine in his master Epicurus. And we see it still
more clearly in the Stoics. We can, indeed, nowhere find a more pure and
concise statement than in Marcus Aurelius of the mystical core of
religion as the union in love and harmony and devotion of the self with
the Not-Self.
If Lucretius may be accounted the first of moderns in the identification
of mysticism and science, he has been followed by many, even though, one
sometimes thinks, with an ever-increasing difficulty, a drooping of the
wings of mystical aspiration, a limping of the feet of scientific
progress. Leonardo and Giordano Bruno and Spinoza and Goethe, each with
a little imperfection on one side or the other, if not on both sides,
have moved in a sphere in which the impulses of religion are felt to
spring from the same centre as the impulses of science. Einstein, whose
attitude in many ways is so interesting, closely associates the longing
for pure knowledge with religious feeling, and he has remarked that “in
every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence.”
He is inclined to attach significance to the fact that so many great men
of science—Newton, Descartes, Gauss, Helmholtz—have been in one way or
another religious. If we cannot altogether include such men as
Swedenborg and Faraday in the same group, it is because we cannot feel
that in them the two impulses, however highly developed, really spring
from the same centre or really make a true harmony. We suspect that
these men and their like kept their mysticism in a science-proof
compartment of their minds, and their science in a mysticism-proof
compartment; we tremble for the explosive result, should the wall of
partition ever be broken down.
The difficulty, we see again, has been that, on each hand, there has
been a growth of non-essential traditions around the pure and vital
impulse, and the obvious disharmony of these two sets of accretions
conceals the underlying harmony of the impulses themselves. The
possibility of reaching the natural harmony is thus not necessarily by
virtue of any rare degree of intellectual attainment, nor by any rare
gift of inborn spiritual temperament,—though either of these may in some
cases be operative,—but rather by the happy chance that the burden of
tradition on each side has fallen and that the mystical impulse is free
to play without a dead metaphysical theology, the scientific impulse
without a dead metaphysical formalism. It is a happy chance that may
befall the simple more easily than the wise and learned.
III
THE foregoing considerations have perhaps cleared the way to a
realisation that when we look broadly at the matter, when we clear away
all the accumulated superstitions, the unreasoned prepossessions, on
either side, and so reach firm ground, not only is there no opposition
between science and mysticism, but in their essence, and at the outset,
they are closely related. The seeming divorce between them is due to a
false and unbalanced development on either side, if not on both sides.
Yet all such considerations cannot suffice to make present to us this
unity of apparent opposites. There is, indeed, it has often seemed to
me, a certain futility in all discussion of the relative claims of
science and religion. This is a matter which, in the last resort, lies
beyond the sphere of argument. It depends not only on a man’s entire
psychic equipment, brought with him at birth and never to be
fundamentally changed, but it is the outcome of his own intimate
experience during life. It cannot be profitably discussed because it is
experiential.
It seems to me, therefore, that, having gone so far, and stated what I
consider to be the relations of mysticism and science as revealed in
human history, I am bound to go further and to state my personal grounds
for believing that the harmonious satisfaction alike of the religious
impulse and the scientific impulse may be attained to-day by an
ordinarily balanced person in whom both impulses crave for satisfaction.
There is, indeed, a serious difficulty. To set forth a personal
religious experience for the first time requires considerable
resolution, and not least to one who is inclined to suspect that the
experiences usually so set forth can be of no profound or significant
nature; that if the underlying motives of a man’s life can be brought to
the surface and put into words their vital motive power is gone. Even
the fact that more than forty years have passed since the experience
took place scarcely suffices to make the confession of it easy. But I
recall to mind that the first original book I ever planned (and in fact
began to write) was a book, impersonal though suggested by personal
experience, on the foundations of religion.[79] I put it aside, saying
to myself I would complete it in old age, because it seemed to me that
the problem of religion will always be fresh, while there were other
problems more pressingly in need of speedy investigation. Now, it may
be, I begin to feel the time has come to carry that early project a
stage further.
Like many of the generation to which I belonged, I was brought up far
from the Sunday-school atmosphere of conventional religiosity. I
received little religious instruction outside the home, but there I was
made to feel, from my earliest years, that religion is a very vital and
personal matter with which the world and the fashion of it had nothing
to do. To that teaching, while still scarcely more than a child, I
responded in a wholehearted way. Necessarily the exercise of this early
impulse followed the paths prescribed for it by my environment. I
accepted the creed set before me; I privately studied the New Testament
for my own satisfaction; I honestly endeavoured, strictly in private, to
mould my actions and impulses on what seemed to be Christian lines.
There was no obtrusive outward evidence of this; outside the home,
moreover, I moved in a world which might be indifferent but was not
actively hostile to my inner aspirations, and, if the need for any
external affirmation had become inevitable, I should, I am certain, have
invoked other than religious grounds for my protest. Religion, as I
instinctively felt then and as I consciously believe now, is a private
matter, as love is. This was my mental state at the age of twelve.
Then came the period of emotional and intellectual expansion, when the
scientific and critical instincts began to germinate. These were
completely spontaneous and not stimulated by any influences of the
environment. To inquire, to question, to investigate the qualities of
the things around us and to search out their causes, is as native an
impulse as the religious impulse would be found to be if only we would
refrain from exciting it artificially. In the first place, this
scientific impulse was not greatly concerned with the traditional body
of beliefs which were then inextricably entwined in my mind with the
exercise of the religious instinct. In so far, indeed, as it touched
them it took up their defence. Thus I read Renan’s “Life of Jesus,” and
the facile sentiment of this book, the attitude of artistic
reconstruction, aroused a criticism which led me to overlook any
underlying sounder qualities. Yet all the time the inquiring and
critical impulse was a slowly permeating and invading influence, and its
application to religion was from time to time stimulated by books,
although such application was in no slightest degree favoured by the
social environment. When, too, at the age of fifteen, I came to read
Swinburne’s “Songs before Sunrise,”—although the book made no very
personal appeal to me,—I realised that it was possible to present in an
attractively modern emotional light religious beliefs which were
incompatible with Christianity, and even actively hostile to its creed.
The process of disintegration took place in slow stages that were not
perceived until the process was complete. Then at last I realised that I
no longer possessed any religious faith. All the Christian dogmas I had
been brought up to accept unquestioned had slipped away, and they had
dragged with them what I had experienced of religion, for I could not
then so far analyse all that is roughly lumped together as “religion” as
to disentangle the essential from the accidental. Such analysis, to be
effectively convincing, demanded personal experiences I was not
possessed of.
I was now seventeen years of age. The loss of religious faith had
produced no change in conduct, save that religious observances, which
had never been ostentatiously performed, were dropped, so far as they
might be without hurting the feelings of others. The revolution was so
gradual and so natural that even inwardly the shock was not great, while
various activities, the growth of mental aptitudes, sufficiently served
to occupy the mind. It was only during periods of depression that the
absence of faith as a satisfaction of the religious impulse became at
all acutely felt. Possibly it might have been felt less acutely if I
could have realised that there was even a real benefit in the cutting
down and clearing away of traditional and non-vital beliefs. Not only
was it a wholesome and strenuous effort to obey at all costs the call of
what was felt as “truth,” and therefore having in it a spirit of
religion even though directed against religion, but it was evidently
favourable to the training of intelligence. The man who has never
wrestled with his early faith, the faith that he was brought up with and
that yet is not truly his own,—for no faith is our own that we have not
arduously won,—has missed not only a moral but an intellectual
discipline. The absence of that discipline may mark a man for life and
render all his work in the world ineffective. He has missed a training
in criticism, in analysis, in open-mindedness, in the resolutely
impersonal treatment of personal problems, which no other training can
compensate. He is, for the most part, condemned to live in a mental
jungle where his arm will soon be too feeble to clear away the growths
that enclose him and his eyes too weak to find the light.
While, however, I had adopted, without knowing it, the best course to
steel the power of thinking and to render possible a patient, humble,
self-forgetful attitude towards Nature, there were times when I became
painfully, almost despairingly, conscious of the unsatisfied cravings of
the religious impulse. These moods were emphasised even by the books I
read which argued that religion, in the only sense in which I understood
religion, was unnecessary, and that science, whether or not formulated
into a creed, furnished all that we need to ask in this direction. I
well remember the painful feelings with which I read at this time D. F.
Strauss’s “The Old Faith and the New.” It is a scientific creed set down
in old age, with much comfortable complacency, by a man who found
considerable satisfaction in the evening of life in the enjoyment of
Haydn’s quartets and Munich brown beer. They are both excellent things,
as I am now willing to grant, but they are a sorry source of inspiration
when one is seventeen and consumed by a thirst for impossibly remote
ideals. Moreover, the philosophic horizon of this man was as limited and
as prosaic as the æsthetic atmosphere in which he lived. I had to
acknowledge to myself that the scientific principles of the universe as
Strauss laid them down presented, so far as I knew, the utmost scope in
which the human spirit could move. But what a poor scope! I knew nothing
of the way that Nietzsche, about that time, had demolished Strauss. But
I had the feeling that the universe was represented as a sort of factory
filled by an inextricable web of wheels and looms and flying shuttles,
in a deafening din. That, it seemed, was the world as the most competent
scientific authorities declared it to be made. It was a world I was
prepared to accept, and yet a world in which, I felt, I could only
wander restlessly, an ignorant and homeless child. Sometimes, no doubt,
there were other visions of the universe a little less disheartening,
such as that presented by Herbert Spencer’s “First Principles.” But the
dominant feeling always was that while the scientific outlook, by which
I mainly meant the outlook of Darwin and Huxley, commended itself to me
as presenting a sound view of the world, on the emotional side I was a
stranger to that world, if, indeed, I would not, with Omar, “shatter it
to bits.”
At the same time, it must be noted, there was no fault to find with the
general trend of my life and activities. I was fully occupied, with
daily duties as well as with the actively interested contemplation of an
ever-enlarging intellectual horizon. This was very notably the case at
the age of nineteen, three years after all vestiges of religious faith
had disappeared from the psychic surface.
I was still interested in religious and philosophic questions, and it so
chanced that at this time I read the “Life in Nature” of James Hinton,
who had already attracted my attention as a genuine man of science with
yet an original and personal grasp of religion. I had read the book six
months before and it had not greatly impressed me. Now, I no longer know
why, I read it again, and the effect was very different. Evidently by
this time my mind had reached a stage of saturated solution which needed
but the shock of the right contact to recrystallise in forms that were a
revelation to me. Here evidently the right contact was applied. Hinton
in this book showed himself a scientific biologist who carried the
mechanistic explanation of life even further than was then usual.[80]
But he was a man of highly passionate type of intellect, and what might
otherwise be formal and abstract was for him soaked in emotion. Thus,
while he saw the world as an orderly mechanism, he was not content, like
Strauss, to stop there and see in it nothing else. As he viewed it, the
mechanism was not the mechanism of a factory, it was vital, with all the
glow and warmth and beauty of life; it was, therefore, something which
not only the intellect might accept, but the heart might cling to. The
bearing of this conception on my state of mind is obvious. It acted with
the swiftness of an electric contact; the dull aching tension was
removed; the two opposing psychic tendencies were fused in delicious
harmony, and my whole attitude towards the universe was changed. It was
no longer an attitude of hostility and dread, but of confidence and
love. My self was one with the Not-Self, my will one with the universal
will. I seemed to walk in light; my feet scarcely touched the ground; I
had entered a new world.
The effect of that swift revolution was permanent. At first there was a
moment or two of wavering, and then the primary exaltation subsided into
an attitude of calm serenity towards all those questions that had once
seemed so torturing. In regard to all these matters I had become
permanently satisfied and at rest, yet absolutely unfettered and free. I
was not troubled about the origin of the “soul” or about its destiny; I
was entirely prepared to accept any analysis of the “soul” which might
commend itself as reasonable. Neither was I troubled about the existence
of any superior being or beings, and I was ready to see that all the
words and forms by which men try to picture spiritual realities are mere
metaphors and images of an inward experience. There was not a single
clause in my religious creed because I held no creed. I had found that
dogmas were—not, as I had once imagined, true, not, as I had afterwards
supposed, false,—but the mere empty shadows of intimate personal
experience. I had become indifferent to shadows, for I held the
substance. I had sacrificed what I held dearest at the call of what
seemed to be Truth, and now I was repaid a thousand-fold. Henceforth I
could face life with confidence and joy, for my heart was at one with
the world and whatever might prove to be in harmony with the world could
not be out of harmony with me.[81]
Thus, it might seem to many, nothing whatever had happened; I had not
gained one single definite belief that could be expressed in a
scientific formula or hardened into a religious creed. That, indeed, is
the essence of such a process. A “conversion” is not, as is often
assumed, a turning towards a belief. More strictly, it is a turning
round, a revolution; it has no primary reference to any external object.
As the greater mystics have often understood, “the Kingdom of Heaven is
within.” To put the matter a little more precisely, the change is
fundamentally a readjustment of psychic elements to each other, enabling
the whole machine to work harmoniously. There is no necessary
introduction of new ideas; there is much more likely to be a casting out
of dead ideas which have clogged the vital process. The psychic
organism—which in conventional religion is called the “soul”—had not
been in harmony with itself; now it is revolving truly on its own axis,
and in doing so it simultaneously finds its true orbit in the cosmic
system. In becoming one with itself, it becomes one with the
universe.[82]
The process, it will be seen, is thus really rather analogous to that
which on the physical plane takes place in a person whose jaw or arm is
dislocated, whether by some inordinate effort or some sudden shock with
the external world. The miserable man with a dislocated jaw is out of
harmony with himself and with the universe. All his efforts cannot
reduce the dislocation, nor can his friends help him; he may even come
to think there is no cure. But a surgeon comes along, and with a slight
pressure of his two thumbs, applied at the right spot, downwards and
backwards, the jaw springs into place, the man is restored to
harmony—and the universe is transformed. If he is ignorant enough, he
will be ready to fall on his knees before his deliverer as a divine
being. We are concerned with what is called a “spiritual” process,—for
it is an accepted and necessary convention to distinguish between the
“spiritual” and the “physical,”—but this crude and imperfect analogy may
help some minds to understand what is meant.
Thus may be explained what may seem to some the curious fact that I
never for a moment thought of accepting as a gospel the book which had
brought me a stimulus of such inestimable value. The person in whom
“conversion” takes place is too often told that the process is connected
in some magical manner with a supernatural influence of some kind, a
book, a creed, a church, or what not. I had read this book before and it
had left me unmoved; I knew that the book was merely the surgeon’s
touch, that the change had its source in me and not in the book. I never
looked into the book again; I cannot tell where or how my copy of it
disappeared; for all that I know, having accomplished its mission, it
was drawn up again to Heaven in a sheet. As regards James Hinton, I was
interested in him before the date of the episode here narrated; I am
interested in him still.[83]
It may further be noted that this process of “conversion” cannot be
regarded as the outcome of despair or as a protective regression towards
childhood. The unfortunate individual, we sometimes imagine, who is
bereft of religious faith sinks deeper and deeper into despondency,
until finally he unconsciously seeks the relief of his woes by plunging
into an abyss of emotions, thereby committing intellectual suicide. On
the contrary, the period in which this event occurred was not a period
of dejection either mental or physical. I was fully occupied; I lived a
healthy, open-air life, in a fine climate, amid beautiful scenery; I was
revelling in new studies and the growing consciousness of new powers.
Instead of being the ultimate stage in a process of descent, or a return
to childhood, such psychic revolution may much more fittingly be
regarded as the climax of an ascensional movement. It is the final
casting off of childish things, the initiation into complete manhood.
There is nothing ascetic in such a process. One is sometimes tempted to
think that to approve mysticism is to preach asceticism. Certainly many
mystics have been ascetic. But that has been the accident of their
philosophy, and not the essence of their religion. Asceticism has,
indeed, nothing to do with normal religion. It is, at the best, the
outcome of a set of philosophical dogmas concerning the relationship of
the body to the soul and the existence of a transcendental spiritual
world. That is philosophy, of a sort, not religion. Plotinus, who has
been so immensely influential in our Western world because he was the
main channel by which Greek spiritual tendencies reached us, to become
later embodied in Christianity, is usually regarded as a typical mystic,
though he was primarily a philosopher, and he was inclined to be
ascetic. Therein we may not consider him typically Greek, but the early
philosophical doctrine of Plato concerning the transcendental world of
“Ideas” easily lent itself to developments favourable to an ascetic
life. Plotinus, indeed, was not disposed to any extreme ascetic
position. The purification of the soul meant for him “to detach it from
the body, and to elevate it to a spiritual world.” But he would not have
sympathised with the harsh dualism of flesh and spirit which often
flourished among Christian ascetics. He lived celibate, but he was
willing to regard sex desire as beautiful, though a delusion.[84] When
we put aside the philosophic doctrines with which it may be associated,
it is seen that asceticism is merely an adjuvant discipline to what we
must regard as pathological forms of mysticism.
People who come in contact with the phenomenon of “conversion” are
obsessed by the notion that it must have something to do with morality.
They seem to fancy that it is something that happens to a person leading
a bad life whereby he suddenly leads a good life. That is a delusion.
Whatever virtue morality may possess, it is outside the mystic’s sphere.
No doubt a person who has been initiated into this mystery is likely to
be moral because he is henceforth in harmony with himself, and such a
man is usually, by a natural impulse, in harmony also with others. Like
Leonardo, who through the glow of his adoration of Nature was as truly a
mystic as St. Francis, even by contact with him “every broken heart is
made serene.” But a religious man is not necessarily a moral man. That
is to say that we must by no means expect to find that the religious
man, even when he is in harmony with his fellows, is necessarily in
harmony with the moral laws of his age. We fall into sad confusion if we
take for granted that a mystic is what we conventionally term a “moral”
man. Jesus, as we know, was almost as immoral from the standpoint of the
society in which he moved as he would be in our society. That, no doubt,
is an extreme example, yet the same holds good, in a minor degree, of
many other mystics, even in very recent times. The satyrs and the fauns
were minor divinities in antiquity, and in later times we have been apt
to misunderstand their holy functions and abuse their sacred names.
Not only is there no necessary moral change in such a process, still
less is there any necessary intellectual change. Religion need not
involve intellectual suicide. On the intellectual side there may be no
obvious change whatever. No new creed or dogma had been adopted.[85] It
might rather be said that, on the contrary, some prepossessions,
hitherto unconscious, had been realised and cast out. The operations of
reason, so far from being fettered, can be effected with greater freedom
and on a larger scale. Under favourable conditions the religious
process, indeed, throughout directly contributes to strengthen the
scientific attitude. The mere fact that one has been impelled by the
sincerity of one’s religious faith to question, to analyse, and finally
to destroy one’s religious creed, is itself an incomparable training for
the intelligence. In this task reason is submitted to the hardest tests;
it has every temptation to allow itself to be lulled into sleepy repose
or cajoled into specious reconciliations. If it is true to itself here
it is steeled for every other task in the world, for no other task can
ever demand so complete a self-sacrifice at the call of Truth. Indeed,
the final restoration of the religious impulse on a higher plane may
itself be said to reënforce the scientific impulse, for it removes that
sense of psychic disharmony which is a subconscious fetter on the
rational activity. The new inward harmony, proceeding from a psychic
centre that is at one alike with itself and with the Not-Self, imparts
confidence to every operation of the intellect. All the metaphysical
images of faith in the unseen—too familiar in the mystical experiences
of men of all religions to need specification—are now on the side of
science. For he who is thus held in his path can pursue that path with
serenity and trust, however daring its course may sometimes seem.
It appears to me, therefore, on the basis of personal experience, that
the process thus outlined is a natural process. The harmony of the
religious impulse and of the scientific impulse is not merely a
conclusion to be deduced from the history of the past. It is a living
fact to-day. However obscured it may sometimes be, the process lies in
human nature and is still open to all to experience.
IV
IF the development of the religious instinct and the development of the
scientific instinct are alike natural, and if the possibility of the
harmony of the two instincts is a verifiable fact of experience, how is
it, one may ask, that there has ever been any dispute on the matter? Why
has not this natural experience been the experience of all?
Various considerations may help to make clear to us how it has happened
that a process which might reasonably be supposed to be intimate and
sacred should have become so obscured and so deformed that it has been
fiercely bandied about by opposing factions. At the outset, as we have
seen, among comparatively primitive peoples, it really is a simple and
natural process carried out harmoniously with no sense of conflict. A
man, it would seem, was not then overburdened by the still unwritten
traditions of the race. He was comparatively free to exercise his own
impulses unfettered by the chains forged out of the dead impulses of
those who had gone before him.
It is the same still among uncultivated persons of our own race in
civilisation. I well remember how once, during a long ride through the
Australian bush with a settler, a quiet, uncommunicative man with whom I
had long been acquainted, he suddenly told me how at times he would
ascend to the top of a hill and become lost to himself and to everything
as he stood in contemplation of the scene around him. Those moments of
ecstasy, of self-forgetful union with the divine beauty of Nature, were
entirely compatible with the rational outlook of a simple, hard-working
man who never went to church, for there was no church of any kind to go
to, but at such moments had in his own humble way, like Moses, met God
in a mountain. There can be no doubt that such an experience is not
uncommon among simple folk unencumbered by tradition, even when of
civilised race.
The burden of traditions, of conventions, of castes has too often proved
fatal alike to the manifestation of the religious impulse and the
scientific impulse. It is unnecessary to point out how easily this
happens in the case of the religious impulse. It is only too familiar a
fact how, when the impulse of religion first germinates in the young
soul, the ghouls of the Churches rush out of their caverns, seize on the
unhappy victim of the divine effluence and proceed to assure him that
his rapture is, not a natural manifestation, as free as the sunlight and
as gracious as the unfolding of a rose, but the manifest sign that he
has been branded by a supernatural force and fettered for ever to a dead
theological creed. Too often he is thus caught by the bait of his own
rapture; the hook is firmly fixed in his jaw and he is drawn whither his
blind guides will; his wings droop and fall away; so far as the finer
issues of life are concerned, he is done for and damned.[86]
But the process is not so very different on the scientific side, though
here it is more subtly concealed. The youth in whom the natural impulse
of science arises is sternly told that the spontaneous movement of his
intelligence towards Nature and truth is nothing, for the one thing
needful is that he shall be put to discipline, and trained in the
scientific traditions of the ages. The desirability of such training for
the effective questioning of Nature is so clear that both teacher and
pupil are apt to overlook the fact that it involves much that is not
science at all: all sorts of dead traditions, unrealised fragments of
ancient metaphysical systems, prepossessions and limitations, conscious
or unconscious, the obedience to arbitrary authorities. It is never made
clear to him that science also is an art. So that the actual outcome may
be that the finally accomplished man of science has as little of the
scientific impulse as the fully fledged religious man need have of the
religious impulse; he becomes the victim of another kind of
ecclesiastical sectarianism.
There is one special piece of ancient metaphysics which until recently
scientific and religious sects have alike combined to support: the
fiction of “matter,” which we passingly came upon when considering the
art of thinking. It is a fiction that has much to answer for in
distorting the scientific spirit and in creating an artificial
opposition between science and religion. All sorts of antique
metaphysical peculiarities, inherited from the decadence of Greek
philosophy, were attributed to “matter” and they were mostly of a bad
character; all the good qualities were attributed to “spirit”; “matter”
played the Devil’s part to this more divine “spirit.” Thus it was that
“materialistic” came to be a term signifying all that is most heavy,
opaque, depressing, soul-destroying, and diabolical in the universe. The
party of traditionalised religion fostered this fiction and the party of
traditionalised science frequently adopted it, cheerily proposing to
find infinite potentialities in this despised metaphysical substance. So
that “matter” which was on one side trodden underfoot was on the other
side brandished overhead as a glorious banner.
Yet “matter,” as psychologically minded philosophers at last began to
point out, is merely a substance we have ourselves invented to account
for our sensations. We see, we touch, we hear, we smell, and by a
brilliant synthetic effort of imagination we put together all those
sensations and picture to ourselves “matter” as being the source of
them. Science itself is now purging “matter” of its complicated
metaphysical properties. That “matter,” the nature of which Dr. Johnson,
as Boswell tells us, thought he had settled by “striking his foot with
mighty force against a large stone,” is coming to be regarded as merely
an electrical emanation. We now accept even that transmutation of the
elements of which the alchemists dreamed. It is true that we still think
of “matter” as having weight. But so cautious a physicist as Sir Joseph
Thomson long ago pointed out that weight is only an “apparently”
invariable property of matter. So that “matter” becomes almost as
“ethereal” as “spirit,” and, indeed, scarcely distinguishable from
“spirit.” The spontaneous affirmation of the mystic that he lives in the
spiritual world here and now will then be, in other words, merely the
same affirmation which the man of science has more laboriously reached.
The man, therefore, who is terrified by “materialism” has reached the
final outpost of absurdity. He is a simple-minded person who places his
own hand before his eyes and cries out in horror: The Universe has
disappeared!
We have not only to realise how our own prepossessions and the
metaphysical figments of our own creation have obscured the simple
realities of religion and science alike; we have also to see that our
timid dread lest religion should kill our science, or science kill our
religion, is equally fatal here. He who would gain his life must be
willing to lose it, and it is by being honest to one’s self and to the
facts by applying courageously the measuring rod of Truth, that in the
end salvation is found. Here, it is true, there are those who smilingly
assure us that by adopting such a method we shall merely put ourselves
in the wrong and endure much unnecessary suffering. There is no such
thing as “Truth,” they declare, regarded as an objective impersonal
reality; we do not “discover” truth, we invent it. Therefore your
business is to invent a truth which shall harmoniously satisfy the needs
of your nature and aid your efficiency in practical life. That we are
justified in being dishonest towards truth has even been argued from the
doctrine of relativity by some who failed to realise that that doctrine
is here hardly relative. Certainly the philosophers of recent times,
from Nietzsche to Croce, have loved to analyse the idea of “truth” and
to show that it by no means signifies what we used to suppose it
signified. But to show that truth is fluid, or even the creation of the
individual mind, is by no means to show that we can at will play fast
and loose with it to suit our own momentary convenience. If we do we
merely find ourselves, at the end, in a pool where we must tramp round
and round in intellectual slush out of which there is no issue. One may
well doubt whether any Pragmatist has ever really invented his truth
that way. Practically, just as the best result is attained by the man
who acts as though free-will were a reality and who exerts it, so in
this matter, also, practically, in the end the best result is attained
by assuming that truth is an objective reality which we must patiently
seek, and in accordance with which we must discipline our own wayward
impulses. There is no transcendent objective truth, each one of us is an
artist creating his own truth from the phenomena presented to him, but
if in that creation he allows any alien emotional or practical
considerations to influence him he is a bad artist and his work is
wrought for destruction. From the pragmatic point of view, it may thus
be said that if the use of the measuring-rod of truth as an objective
standard produces the best practical results, that use is pragmatically
justified. But if so, we are exactly in the same position as we were
before the pragmatist arrived; we can get on as well without him, if not
better, for we run the risk that he may confuse the issues for us. It is
really on the theoretic rather than the practical side that he is
helpful.
It is not only the Pragmatist whose well-meant efforts to find an easy
reconciliation of belief and practice, and indirectly the concord of
religion and science, come to grief because he has not realised that the
walls of the spiritual world can only be scaled with much expenditure of
treasure, not without blood and sweat, that we cannot glide luxuriously
to Heaven in his motor-car. We are also met by the old-fashioned
Intuitionist.[87] It is no accident that the Intuitionist so often walks
hand in hand with the Pragmatist; they are engaged in the same tasks.
There is, we have seen, the impulse of science which must work through
intelligence; there is, also, the impulse of religion in the
satisfaction of which intelligence can only take a very humble place at
the antechamber of the sanctuary. To admit, therefore, that reason
cannot extend into the religious sphere is absolutely sound so long as
we realise that reason has a coordinate right to lay down the rules in
its own sphere of intelligence. But in men of a certain mental type the
two tendencies are alike so deeply implanted that they cannot escape
them: they are not only impelled to go beyond intelligence, but they are
also impelled to carry intelligence with them outside its sphere. The
sphere of intelligence is limited, they say, and rightly; the soul has
other impulses besides that of intelligence and life needs more than
knowledge for its complete satisfaction. But in the hands of these
people the faculty of “intuition,” which is to supplant that of
intelligence, itself results in a product which by them is called
“knowledge,” and so spuriously bears the hall-mark which belongs to the
product of intelligence.
But the result is disastrous. Not only is an illegitimate confusion
introduced, but, by attributing to the impulse of religion a character
which it is neither entitled to nor in need of, we merely discredit it
in the eyes of intelligence. The philosopher of intuition, even in
denying intelligence, is apt to remain so predominantly intelligent
that, even in entering what is for him the sphere of religion, he still
moves in an atmosphere of rarefied intelligence. He is farther from the
Kingdom of Heaven than the simple man who is quite incapable of
understanding the philosopher’s theory, but yet may be able to follow
his own religious impulse without foisting into it an intellectual
content. For even the simple man may be one with the great mystics who
all declare that the unspeakable quality they have acquired, as Eckhart
puts it, “hath no image.” It is not in the sphere of intellection, it
brings no knowledge; it is the outcome of the natural instinct of the
individual soul.
No doubt there really are people in whom the instincts of religion and
of science alike are developed in so rudimentary a degree, if developed
at all, that they never become conscious. The religious instinct is not
an essential instinct. Even the instinct of sex, which is much more
fundamental than either of these, is not absolutely essential. A very
little bundle of instincts and impulses is indispensable to a man on his
way down the path of life to a peaceful and humble grave. A man’s
equipment of tendencies, on the lowest plane, needs to be more complex
and diverse than an oyster’s, yet not so very much more. The equipment
of the higher animals, moreover, is needed less for the good of the
individual than for the good of the race. We cannot, therefore, be
surprised if the persons in whom the superfluous instincts are
rudimentary fail to understand them, confusing them and overlaying them
with each other and with much that is outside both. The wonder would be
if it were otherwise.
When all deduction has been made of the mental and emotional confusions
which have obscured men’s vision, we cannot fail to conclude, it seems
to me, that Science and Mysticism are nearer to each other than some
would have us believe. At the beginning of human cultures, far from
being opposed, they may even be said to be identical. From time to time,
in later ages, brilliant examples have appeared of men who have
possessed both instincts in a high degree and have even fused the two
together, while among the humble in spirit and the lowly in intellect it
is probable that in all ages innumerable men have by instinct harmonised
their religion with their intelligence. But as the accumulated
experiences of civilisation have been preserved and handed on from
generation to generation, this free and vital play of the instincts has
been largely paralysed. On each side fossilised traditions have
accumulated so thickly, the garments of dead metaphysics have been
wrapped so closely around every manifestation alike of the religious
instinct and the scientific instinct—for even what we call “common
sense” is really a hardened mass of dead metaphysics—that not many
persons can succeed in revealing one of these instincts in its naked
beauty, and very few can succeed in so revealing both instincts. Hence a
perpetual antagonism. It may be, however, we are beginning to realise
that there are no metaphysical formulas to suit all men, but that every
man must be the artist of his own philosophy. As we realise that, it
becomes easier than it was before to liberate ourselves from a dead
metaphysics, and so to give free play alike to the religious instinct
and the scientific instinct. A man must not swallow more beliefs than he
can digest; no man can absorb all the traditions of the past; what he
fills himself with will only be a poison to work to his own
auto-intoxication.
Along all these lines we see more clearly than before the real harmony
between Mysticism and Science. We see, also, that all arguments are
meaningless until we gain personal experience. One must win one’s own
place in the spiritual world painfully and alone. There is no other way
of salvation. The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a
wilderness.
V
IT may seem that we have been harping overmuch on a single string of
what is really a very rich instrument, when the whole exalted art of
religion is brought down to the argument of its relationship to science.
The core of religion is mysticism, it is admitted. And yet where are all
the great mystics? Why nothing of the Neo-Platonists in whom the whole
movement of modern mysticism began, of their glorious pupils in the
Moslem world, of Ramon Lull and Francis of Assisi and François Xavier
and John of the Cross and George Fox and the “De Imitatione Christi” and
“Towards Democracy”? There is no end to that list of glorious names, and
they are all passed by.
To write of the mystics, whether Pagan or Christian or Islamic, is a
most delightful task. It has been done, and often very well done. The
mystics are not only themselves an incarnation of beauty, but they
reflect beauty on all who with understanding approach them.
Moreover, in the phenomena of religious mysticism we have a key—if we
only knew it—to many of the most precious human things which on the
surface may seem to have nothing in them of religion. For this is an art
which instinctively reveals to us the secrets of other arts. It presents
to us in the most naked and essential way the inward experience which
has inspired men to find modes of expression which are transmutations of
the art of religion and yet have on the surface nothing to indicate that
this is so. It has often been seen in poetry and in music and in
painting. One might say that it is scarcely possible to understand
completely the poetry of Shelley or the music of César Franck or the
pictures of Van Gogh unless there is somewhere within an intimation of
the secret of mysticism. This is so not because of any imperfection in
the achieved work of such men in poetry and in music and in
painting,—for work that fails to contain its own justification is always
bad work,—but because we shall not be in possession of the clue to
explain the existence of that work. We may even go beyond the sphere of
the recognised arts altogether, and say that the whole love of Nature
and landscape, which in modern times has been so greatly developed,
largely through Rousseau, the chief creator of our modern spiritual
world, is not intelligible if we are altogether ignorant of what
religion means.
But we are not so much concerned here with the rich and variegated
garments the impulse of religion puts on, or with its possible
transmutations, as with the simple and naked shape of those impulses
when bared of all garments. It was peculiarly important to present the
impulse of mysticism naked because, of all the fundamental human
impulses, that is the one most often so richly wrapped round with
gorgeous and fantastic garments that, alike to the eye of the ordinary
man and the acute philosopher, there has seemed to be no living thing
inside at all. It was necessary to strip off all these garments, to
appeal to simple personal direct experience for the actual core of fact,
and to show that that core, so far from being soluble by analysis into
what science counts as nothing, is itself, like every other natural
organic function, a fact of science.
It is enough here, where we are concerned only with the primary stuff of
art, the bare simple technique of the human dance, to have brought into
as clear a light as may be the altogether natural mechanism which lies
behind all the most magnificent fantasies of the mystic impulse, and
would still subsist and operate even though they were all cast into the
flames. That is why it has seemed necessary to dwell all the time on the
deep-lying harmony of the mystic’s attitude with the scientific man’s
attitude. It is a harmony which rests on the faith that they are
eternally separate, however close, however intimately coöperative. When
the mystic professes that, as such, he has knowledge of the same order
as the man of science, or when the scientist claims that, as such, he
has emotion which is like that of the man of religion, each of them
deceives himself. He has introduced a confusion where no confusion need
be; perhaps, indeed, he has even committed that sin against the Holy
Ghost of his own spiritual integrity for which there is no forgiveness.
The function of intellectual thought—which is that of the art of
science—may, certainly, be invaluable for religion; it makes possible
the purgation of all that pseudo-science, all that philosophy, good or
bad, which has poisoned and encrusted the simple spontaneous impulse of
mysticism in the open air of Nature and in the face of the sun. The man
of science may be a mystic, but cannot be a true mystic unless he is so
relentless a man of science that he can tolerate no alien science in his
mysticism. The mystic may be a man of science, but he will not be a good
man of science unless he understands that science must be kept for ever
bright and pure from all admixture of mystical emotion; the fountain of
his emotion must never rust the keenness of his analytic scalpel. It is
useless to pretend that any such rustiness can ever convert the scalpel
into a mystical implement, though it can be an admirable aid in cutting
towards the mystical core of things, and perhaps if there were more
relentless scientific men there would be more men of pure mystic vision.
Science by itself, good or bad, can never be religion, any more than
religion by itself can ever be science, or even philosophy.
It is by looking back into the past that we see the facts in an
essential simplicity less easy to reach in more sophisticated ages. We
need not again go so far back as the medicine-men of Africa and Siberia.
Mysticism in pagan antiquity, however less intimate to us and less
seductive than that of later times, is perhaps better fitted to reveal
to us its true nature. The Greeks believed in the spiritual value of
“conversion” as devoutly as our Christian sects and they went beyond
most such sects in their elaborately systematic methods for obtaining
it, no doubt for the most part as superficially as has been common among
Christians. It is supposed that almost the whole population of Athens
must have experienced the Eleusinian initiation. These methods, as we
know, were embodied in the Mysteries associated with Dionysus and
Demeter and Orpheus and the rest, the most famous and typical being
those of Attic Eleusis.[88] We too often see those ancient Greek
Mysteries through a concealing mist, partly because it was rightly felt
that matters of spiritual experience were not things to talk about, so
that precise information is lacking, partly because the early
Christians, having their own very similar Mysteries to uphold, were
careful to speak evil of Pagan Mysteries, and partly because the Pagan
Mysteries no doubt really tended to degenerate with the general decay of
classic culture. But in their large simple essential outlines they seem
to be fairly clear. For just as there was nothing “orgiastic” in our
sense in the Greek “orgies,” which were simply ritual acts, so there was
nothing, in our sense, “mysterious” in the Mysteries. We are not to
suppose, as is sometimes supposed, that their essence was a secret
doctrine, or even that the exhibition of a secret rite was the sole
object, although it came in as part of the method. A mystery meant a
spiritual process of initiation, which was, indeed, necessarily a secret
to those who had not yet experienced it, but had nothing in itself
“mysterious” beyond what inheres to-day to the process in any Christian
“revival,” which is the nearest analogue to the Greek Mystery. It is
only “mysterious” in the sense that it cannot be expressed, any more
than the sexual embrace can be expressed, in words, but can only be
known by experience. A preliminary process of purification, the
influence of suggestion, a certain religious faith, a solemn and
dramatic ritual carried out under the most impressive circumstances,
having a real analogy to the Catholic’s Mass, which also is a function,
at once dramatic and sacred, which culminates in a spiritual communion
with the Divine—all this may contribute to the end which was, as it
always must be in religion, simply a change of inner attitude, a sudden
exalting realisation of a new relationship to eternal things. The
philosophers understood this; Aristotle was careful to point out, in an
extant fragment, that what was gained in the Mysteries was not
instruction but impressions and emotions, and Plato had not hesitated to
regard the illumination which came to the initiate in philosophy as of
the nature of that acquired in the Mysteries. So it was natural that
when Christianity took the place of Paganism the same process went on
with only a change in external circumstances. Baptism in the early
Church—before it sank to the mere magical sort of rite it later
became—was of the nature of initiation into a Mystery, preceded by
careful preparation, and the baptised initiate was sometimes crowned
with a garland as the initiated were at Eleusis.
When we go out of Athens along the beautiful road that leads to the
wretched village of Eleusis and linger among the vast and complicated
ruins of the chief shrine of mysticism in our Western world, rich in
associations that seem to stretch back to the Neolithic Age and suggest
a time when the mystery of the blossoming of the soul was one with the
mystery of the upspringing of the corn, it may be that our thoughts by
no unnatural transition pass from the myth of Demeter and Kore to the
remembrance of what we may have heard or know of the manifestations of
the spirit among barbarian northerners of other faiths or of no faith in
far Britain and America and even of their meetings of so-called
“revival.” For it is always the same thing that Man is doing, however
various and fantastic the disguises he adopts. And sometimes the
revelation of the new life, springing up from within, comes amid the
crowd in the feverish atmosphere of artificial shrines, maybe soon to
shrivel up, and sometimes the blossoming forth takes place, perhaps more
favourably, in the open air and under the light of the sun and amid the
flowers, as it were to a happy faun among the hills. But when all
disguises have been stripped away, it is always and everywhere the same
simple process, a spiritual function which is almost a physiological
function, an art which Nature makes. That is all.
Footnote 70:
It is scarcely necessary to remark that if we choose to give to
“mysticism” a definition incompatible with “science,” the opposition
cannot be removed. This is, for example, done by Croce, who yet
recognises as highly important a process of “conversion” which is
nothing else but mysticism as here understood. (See, e.g., Piccoli,
_Benedetto Croce_, p. 184.) Only he has left himself no name to apply
to it.
Footnote 71:
“The endeavour of the human mind to enjoy the blessedness of actual
communion with the highest,” which is Pringle Pattison’s widely
accepted definition of mysticism, I prefer not to use because it is
ambiguous. The “endeavour,” while it indicates that we are concerned
with an art, also suggests its strained pathological forms, while
“actual communion” lends itself to ontological interpretations.
Footnote 72:
_The Threshold of Religion_ (1914), p. 48.
Footnote 73:
_Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse_ (1911), p. 272.
Footnote 74:
_Golden Bough_, “Balder the Beautiful,” vol. II, pp. 304-05.
Footnote 75:
Farnell even asserts (in his _Greek Hero Cults_) that “it is
impossible to quote a single example of any one of the higher
world-religions working in harmony with the development of physical
science.” He finds a “special and unique” exception in the cult of
Asclepios at Cos and Epidauros and Pergamon, where, after the fourth
century B.C., were physicians, practising a rational medical science,
who were also official priests of the Asclepios temples.
Footnote 76:
Sir Oliver Lodge, _Reason and Belief_, p. 19.
Footnote 77:
It is scarcely necessary to point out that a differentiation of
function has to be made sooner or later, and sometimes it is made
soon. This was so among the Todas of India. “Certain Todas,” says Dr.
Rivers (_The Todas_, 1906, p. 249), “have the power of divination,
others are sorcerers, and others again have the power of curing
diseases by means of spells and rites, while all three functions are
quite separate from those of the priest or sharman. The Todas have
advanced some way towards civilisation of function in this respect,
and have as separate members of the community their prophets, their
magicians, and their medicine-men in addition to their priests.”
Footnote 78:
Joël, _Ursprung der Naturphilosophie aus dem Geiste der Romantik_
(1903); _Nietzsche und die Romantik_ (1905). But I am here quoting
from Professor Joël’s account of his own philosophical development in
_Die Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart_, vol. I (1921).
Footnote 79:
In connection with this scheme, it may be interesting to note, I
prepared, in 1879, a _questionnaire_ on “conversion,” on the lines of
the investigations which some years later began to be so fruitfully
carried out by the psychologists of religion in America.
Footnote 80:
It must be remembered that for science the mechanistic assumption
always remains; it is, as Vaihinger would say, a necessary fiction. To
abandon it is to abandon science. Driesch, the most prominent vitalist
of our time, has realised this, and in his account of his own mental
development (_Die Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart_, vol. I, 1921)
he shows how, beginning as a pupil of Haeckel and working at zoölogy
for many years, after adopting the theory of vitalism he abandoned all
zoölogical work and became a professor of philosophy. When the
religious spectator, or the æsthetic spectator (as is well illustrated
in the French review _L’Esprit Nouveau_), sees the “machinery” as
something else than machinery he is legitimately going outside the
sphere of science, but he is not thereby destroying the basic
assumption of science.
Footnote 81:
Long ago Edith Simcox (in a passage of her _Natural Law_ which chanced
to strike my attention very soon after the episode above narrated)
well described “conversion” as a “spiritual revolution,” not based on
any single rational consideration, but due to the “cumulative evidence
of cognate impressions” resulting, at a particular moment, not in a
change of belief, but in a total rearrangement and recolouring of
beliefs and impressions, with the supreme result that the order of the
universe is apprehended no longer as hostile, but as friendly. This is
the fundamental fact of “conversion,” which is the gate of mysticism.
Footnote 82:
How we are to analyse the conception of “universe”—apart from its
personal emotional tone, which is what mainly concerns us—is, of
course, a matter that must be left altogether open and free. Sir James
Frazer at the end of his _Golden Bough_ (“Balder the Beautiful,” vol.
II, p. 306) finds that the “universe” is an “ever-shifting
phantasmagoria of thought,” or, he adds, suddenly shifting to a less
idealistic and more realistic standpoint, “shadows on the screen.”
That is a literary artist’s metaphysical way of describing the matter
and could not occur to any one who was not familiar with the magic
lantern which has now developed into the cinema, beloved of
philosophers for its symbolic significance. Mr. Bertrand Russell, a
more abstract artist, who would reject any such “imaginative
admixture” as he would find in Frazer’s view, once severely refused to
recognise any such thing as a “universe,” but has since less austerely
admitted that there is, after all, a “set of appearances,” which may
fairly be labelled “reality,” so long as we do not assume “a
mysterious Thing-in-Itself behind the appearances.” (_Nation_, 6th
January, 1923.) But there are always some people who think that an
“appearance” must be an appearance of _Something_, and that when a
“shadow” is cast on the screen of our sensory apparatus it must be
cast by _Something_. So every one defines the “universe” in his own
way, and no two people—not even the same person long—can define it in
the same way. We have to recognise that even the humblest of us is
entitled to his own “universe.”
Footnote 83:
The simple and essential outlines of “conversion” have been obscured
because chiefly studied in the Churches among people whose
prepossessions and superstitions have rendered it a highly complex
process, and mixed up with questions of right and wrong living which,
important as they are, properly form no part of religion. The man who
waits to lead a decent life until he has “saved his soul” is not
likely to possess a soul that is worth saving. How much ignorance
prevails in regard to “conversion,” even among the leaders of
religious opinion, and what violent contrasts of opinion—in which
sometimes both the opposing parties are mistaken—was well illustrated
by a discussion on the subject at the Church Congress at Sheffield in
1922. A distinguished Churchman well defined “conversion” as a
unification of character, involving the whole man,—will, intellect,
and emotion,—by which a “new self” was achieved; but he also thought
that this great revolutionary process consisted usually in giving up
some “definite bad habit,” very much doubted whether sudden conversion
was a normal phenomenon at all, and made no attempt to distinguish
between that kind of “conversion” which is merely the result of
suggestion and auto-suggestion, after a kind of hysterical attack
produced by feverish emotional appeals, and that which is spontaneous
and of lifelong effect. Another speaker went to the opposite extreme
by asserting that “conversion” is an absolutely necessary process, and
an Archbishop finally swept away “conversion” altogether by declaring
that the whole of the religious life (and the whole of the irreligious
life?) is a process of conversion. (_The Times_, 12th October, 1922.)
It may be a satisfaction to some to realise that this is a matter on
which it is vain to go to the Churches for light.
Footnote 84:
Dean Inge (_Philosophy of Plotinus_, vol. II, p. 165) has some remarks
on Plotinus in relation to asceticism.
Footnote 85:
Jules de Gaultier (_La Philosophie officielle et la Philosophie_, p.
150) refers to those Buddhist monks the symbol of whose faith was
contained in one syllable: _Om_. But those monks, he adds, belonged to
“the only philosophic race that ever existed” and by the aid of their
pure faith, placed on a foundation which no argumentation can upset,
all the religious philosophies of the Judeo-Helleno-Christian
tradition are but as fairy-tales told to children.
Footnote 86:
We must always remember that “Church” and “religion,” though often
confused, are far from being interchangeable terms. “Religion” is a
natural impulse, “Church” is a social institution. The confusion is
unfortunate. Thus Freud (_Group Psychology_, p. 51) speaks of the
probability of religion disappearing and Socialism taking its place.
He means not “religion,” but a “Church.” We cannot speak of a natural
impulse disappearing, an institution easily may.
Footnote 87:
It must be remembered that “intuition” is a word with all sorts of
philosophical meanings, in addition to its psychological meanings
(which were studied some years ago by Dearborn in the _Psychological
Review_). For the ancient philosophic writers, from the Neo-Platonists
on, it was usually a sort of special organ for coming in contact with
supernatural realities; for Bergson it is at once a method superior to
the intellect for obtaining knowledge and a method of æsthetic
contemplation; for Croce it is solely æsthetic, and art is at once
“intuition” and “expression” (by which he means the formation of
internal images). For Croce, when the mind “intuits” by “expressing,”
the result is art. There is no “religion” for Croce except philosophy.
Footnote 88:
The modern literature of the Mysteries, especially of Eleusis, is very
extensive and elaborate in many languages. I will only mention here a
small and not very recent book, Cheetham’s Hulsean Lectures on _The
Mysteries Pagan and Christian_ (1897) as for ordinary readers
sufficiently indicating the general significance of the Mysteries.
There is, yet briefer, a more modern discussion of the matter in the
Chapter on “Religion” by Dr. W. R. Inge in R. W. Livingstone’s useful
collection of essays, _The Legacy of Greece_ (1921).