because we divine its relativity. As every new category, however, must
share this reproach, the mystic is obliged in the end to give them all
up, the poetic and moral categories no less than the physical, so that
the end of his purification is the atrophy of his whole nature, the
emptying of his whole heart and mind to make room, as he thinks, for
God. By attacking the authority of the understanding as the organon
of knowledge, by substituting itself for it as the herald of a deeper
truth, the imagination thus prepares its own destruction. For if the
understanding is rejected because it cannot grasp the absolute, the
imagination and all its works--art, dogma, worship--must presently be
rejected for the same reason. Common sense and poetry must both go by
the board, and conscience must follow after: for all these are human
and relative. Mysticism will be satisfied only with the absolute, and
as the absolute, by its very definition, is not representable by any
specific faculty, it must be approached through the abandonment of all.
The lights of life must be extinguished that the light of the absolute
may shine, and the possession of everything in general must be secured
by the surrender of everything in particular.
The same diffidence, however, the same constant renewal of sincerity
which kept Emerson's flights of imagination near to experience, kept
his mysticism also within bounds. A certain mystical tendency is
pervasive with him, but there are only one or two subjects on which
he dwells with enough constancy and energy of attention to make his
mystical treatment of them pronounced. One of these is the question
of the unity of all minds in the single soul of the universe, which
is the same in all creatures; another is the question of evil and
of its evaporation in the universal harmony of things. Both these
ideas suggest themselves at certain turns in every man's experience,
and might receive a rational formulation. But they are intricate
subjects, obscured by many emotional prejudices, so that the labour,
impartiality, and precision which would be needed to elucidate them are
to be looked for in scholastic rather than in inspired thinkers, and in
Emerson least of all. Before these problems he is alternately ingenuous
and rhapsodical, and in both moods equally helpless. Individuals
no doubt exist, he says to himself. But, ah! Napoleon is in every
schoolboy. In every squatter in the western prairies we shall find an
owner--
"Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain."
But how? we may ask. Potentially? Is it because any mind, were it
given the right body and the right experience, were it made over, in a
word, into another mind, would resemble that other mind to the point
of identity? Or is it that our souls are already so largely similar
that we are subject to many kindred promptings and share many ideals
unrealizable in our particular circumstances? But then we should simply
be saying that if what makes men different were removed, men would be
indistinguishable, or that, in so far as they are now alike, they can
understand one another by summoning up their respective experiences
in the fancy. There would be no mysticism in that, but at the same
time, alas, no eloquence, no paradox, and, if we must say the word, no
nonsense.
On the question of evil, Emerson's position is of the same kind. There
is evil, of course, he tells us. Experience is sad. There is a crack
in everything that God has made. But, ah! the laws of the universe
are sacred and beneficent. Without them nothing good could arise. All
things, then, are in their right places and the universe is perfect
above our querulous tears. Perfect? we may ask. But perfect from what
point of view, in reference to what ideal? To its own? To that of a
man who renouncing himself and all naturally dear to him, ignoring
the injustice, suffering, and impotence in the world, allows his will
and his conscience to be hypnotized by the spectacle of a necessary
evolution, and lulled into cruelty by the pomp and music of a tragic
show? In that case the evil is not explained, it is forgotten; it is
not cured, but condoned. We have surrendered the category of the better
and the worse, the deepest foundation of life and reason; we have
become mystics on the one subject on which, above all others, we ought
to be men.
Two forces may be said to have carried Emerson in this mystical
direction; one, that freedom of his imagination which we have already
noted, and which kept him from the fear of self-contradiction; the
other the habit of worship inherited from his clerical ancestors and
enforced by his religious education. The spirit of conformity, the
unction, the loyalty even unto death inspired by the religion of
Jehovah, were dispositions acquired by too long a discipline and rooted
in too many forms of speech, of thought, and of worship for a man like
Emerson, who had felt their full force, ever to be able to lose them.
The evolutions of his abstract opinions left that habit unchanged.
Unless we keep this circumstance in mind, we shall not be able to
understand the kind of elation and sacred joy, so characteristic of
his eloquence, with which he propounds laws of Nature and aspects of
experience which, viewed in themselves, afford but an equivocal support
to moral enthusiasm. An optimism so persistent and unclouded as his
will seem at variance with the description he himself gives of human
life, a description coloured by a poetic idealism, but hardly by an
optimistic bias.
We must remember, therefore, that this optimism is a pious tradition,
originally justified by the belief in a personal God and in a
providential government of affairs for the ultimate and positive good
of the elect, and that the habit of worship survived in Emerson as an
instinct after those positive beliefs had faded into a recognition
of "spiritual laws." We must remember that Calvinism had known how
to combine an awestruck devotion to the Supreme Being with no very
roseate picture of the destinies of mankind, and for more than two
hundred years had been breeding in the stock from which Emerson came
a willingness to be, as the phrase is, "damned for the glory of God."
What wonder, then, that when, for the former inexorable dispensation
of Providence, Emerson substituted his general spiritual and natural
laws, he should not have felt the spirit of worship fail within him?
On the contrary, his thought moved in the presence of moral harmonies
which seemed to him truer, more beautiful, and more beneficent than
those of the old theology. An independent philosopher would not have
seen in those harmonies an object of worship or a sufficient basis
for optimism. But he was not an independent philosopher, in spite
of his belief in independence. He inherited the problems and the
preoccupations of the theology from which he started, being in this
respect like the German idealists, who, with all their pretence of
absolute metaphysics, were in reality only giving elusive and abstract
forms to traditional theology. Emerson, too, was not primarily a
philosopher, but a Puritan mystic with a poetic fancy and a gift for
observation and epigram, and he saw in the laws of Nature, idealized by
his imagination, only a more intelligible form of the divinity he had
always recognized and adored. His was not a philosophy passing into a
religion, but a religion expressing itself as a philosophy and veiled,
as at its setting it descended the heavens, in various tints of poetry
and science.
If we ask ourselves what was Emerson's relation to the scientific and
religious movements of his time, and what place he may claim in the
history of opinion, we must answer that he belonged very little to the
past, very little to the present, and almost wholly to that abstract
sphere into which mystical or philosophic aspiration has carried a few
men in all ages. The religious tradition in which he was reared was
that of Puritanism, but of a Puritanism which, retaining its moral
intensity and metaphysical abstraction, had minimized its doctrinal
expression and become Unitarian. Emerson was indeed the Psyche of
Puritanism, "the latest-born and fairest vision far" of all that "faded
hierarchy." A Puritan whose religion was all poetry, a poet whose
only pleasure was thought, he showed in his life and personality the
meagreness, the constraint, the frigid and conscious consecration which
belonged to his clerical ancestors, while his inmost impersonal spirit
ranged abroad over the fields of history and Nature, gathering what
ideas it might, and singing its little snatches of inspired song.
The traditional element was thus rather an external and unessential
contribution to Emerson's mind; he had the professional tinge, the
decorum, the distinction of an old-fashioned divine; he had also the
habit of writing sermons, and he had the national pride and hope of a
religious people that felt itself providentially chosen to establish a
free and godly commonwealth in a new world. For the rest, he separated
himself from the ancient creed of the community with a sense rather of
relief than of regret. A literal belief in Christian doctrines repelled
him as unspiritual, as manifesting no understanding of the meaning
which, as allegories, those doctrines might have to a philosophic and
poetical spirit. Although as a clergy-man he was at first in the habit
of referring to the Bible and its lessons as to a supreme authority, he
had no instinctive sympathy with the inspiration of either the Old or
the New Testament; in Hafiz or Plutarch, in Plato or Shakespeare, he
found more congenial stuff.
While he thus preferred to withdraw, without rancour and without
contempt, from the ancient fellowship of the church, he assumed an
attitude hardly less cool and deprecatory toward the enthusiasms of the
new era. The national ideal of democracy and freedom had his entire
sympathy; he allowed himself to be drawn into the movement against
slavery; he took a curious and smiling interest in the discoveries of
natural science and in the material progress of the age. But he could
go no farther. His contemplative nature, his religious training, his
dispersed reading, made him stand aside from the life of the world,
even while he studied it with benevolent attention. His heart was fixed
on eternal things, and he was in no sense a prophet for his age or
country. He belonged by nature to that mystical company of devout souls
that recognize no particular home and are dispersed throughout history,
although not without intercommunication. He felt his affinity to the
Hindoos and the Persians, to the Platonists and the Stoics. Like them
he remains "a friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit."
If not a star of the first magnitude, he is certainly a fixed star
in the firmament of philosophy. Alone as yet among Americans, he may
be said to have won a place there, if not by the originality of his
thought, at least by the originality and beauty of the expression he
gave to thoughts that are old and imperishable.
IX
A RELIGION OF DISILLUSION
_Man has henceforth this cause of pride: that he has bethought
himself of justice in a universe without justice, and has put justice
there_.--JEAN LAHOR.
The break-up of traditional systems and the disappearance of a
recognized authority from the religious world have naturally led to
many attempts at philosophic reconstruction. Most of these are timid
compromises, which leave first principles untouched and contain in a
veiled form all the old contradictions. Others are advertisements of
some personal notion, some fresh discovery, proposed as a panacea and
as an equivalent for all the heritage of human wisdom. A few thinkers,
however, inspired by more comprehensive sympathies, and at the same
time free from preconceptions, have come nearer to the fundamental
elements of the problem and have given out suggestions which, even if
not satisfactory in their actual form, are helpful and interesting in
their tendency. Such a thinker is the contemporary French poet, Jean
Lahor, who, in a volume of thoughts entitled "La gloire du néant," has
gathered together three philosophical points of view, we might almost
say three religions, and combined their issues in a way which may now
seem again new, but which in reality is as old as wisdom.
The form is literary and the outcome in a sense negative; there is
no attempt to put new wine into old bottles, no apologetic tone, no
unction. Experience is consulted afresh, without preoccupation as to
the results of reflection; and if these results are religious, it is
because any reasoned appreciation of life is bound to be a religion,
even if no conventionally religious elements are imported into the
problem. In fact, those prophets who have said that the Sabbath was
made for man and who have given moral functions to historical religion,
as well as those philosophers who have best understood its nature, have
seemed irreligious to their contemporaries, because they have looked
upon religion as an interpretation of reality, not as a quasi-reality
existing by itself and vouched for merely by tradition and miracle.
Religion is an imaginative echo of things natural and moral: and if
this echo is to be well attuned, our ear must first be attentive to the
natural sounds of which, in religion, we are to develop the harmony.
It is, therefore, not an objection to Jean Lahor's competence to
gather for us the elements of a religion that he is a poet rather
than a theologian and an observer rather than a philosopher, or that
he presents his intuitions without technical apparatus in a series of
highly coloured epigrams and little pictures. On the contrary such
simplicity and directness are an advantage when, as in this case, the
guiding inspiration is religious. It is religious because, on the one
hand, it is imaginative; we are asking ourselves everywhere what Nature
says to us and what we are to say in reply; and on the other hand,
because it is rational, and these messages and reactions are to be
unified into a single science and a single morality. The logical scheme
of the system is not made explicit: there is no argumentation and no
answers are offered to the objections that might naturally suggest
themselves. But the sayings are so arranged and made so to progress
in tone and subject that a system of philosophy is clearly implied in
them; and the essence of this system is at times briefly expressed.
All, as it behooves a poet, is the transcript of personal experience.
We must not look for the inclusion of elements, however important
in themselves, which the author has not found in his own life. The
omissions are in this case as characteristic as the inclusions. We
look in vain, for instance, for any appreciation of Christianity or
of all that side of human nature and experience on which faith in
Christianity rests; we hear nothing of love and its ideal suggestions,
nothing of the aspiration to immortality, nothing of the whole
transcendental attitude toward experience. These are grave omissions.
They may seem to condemn Jean Lahor, if not as a general philosopher,
at least as a representative of an age in which religious thought has
so largely centred about these very questions. But our century has
been an age of confusion; and a man who at its end wishes to attain
some coherence of life and mind, must begin by letting drop much that
the age has held in solution. It is by not being an average that a man
may become a guide. Only by manifesting the direction of change and
embodying that change in his own person can he be a sign of progress.
It remains for time to show whether what survives in a given man has
fortune on its side and contains the inward elements of vitality.
The presumption in this case, when we abstract from our personal
prejudices, will seem to be wholly in favour of our author.
The three influences to which he has yielded and which have moulded
his mind are the pantheism of the Hindoos, our contemporary natural
science, and the ideal of Greek civilization. These three elements
might at first sight seem incongruous, and the principle of selection
by which they are preferred above all others might seem as hard
to find as the principle of union by which they are to be welded
into one philosophy. But a little study of these maxims and of the
autobiographical sketch which precedes them will, I think, enable
us to discover both the principles we miss. The selection of the
three influences in question is due to the poetical temperament and
scientific tastes of the author, to an individual disposition and to
studies which drew him successively to these different sources of
instruction. The principle of synthesis, or rather, we should perhaps
say, of subordination, by which these various habits of thought are
combined in one philosophy, is a moral principle. It is a native power
to conceive the ideal and a native loyalty to the ideal when once
conceived. This moral enthusiasm is in no sense vapid or sentimental;
it hardly comes to the surface in any direct or enthusiastic
expression; but it is betrayed and proved to be sincere, now by a
passionate pessimism about the natural world, now in detailed and
practical demands for a better state of society. A genial individuality
and a well-reasoned form of pessimism are, then, the two factors in the
development of this interesting thinker, the two keys to the apparently
contradictory affinities of his mind.
Our author, as we have said, is a poet, and even if his verses seem
at times a little thin and rhetorical, they prove abundantly what is
evident also in his prose, namely, that he has keen sensations, that
images impress themselves upon him with force, and that any scene
whose elements are gorgeous and picturesque or which is weighted with
tragic emotion, holds his attention and awakens in him the impulse to
literary expression. But this plastic impulse is not powerful, or finds
in the environment insufficient support. Great art and great creative
achievements are rare in the world, and come for the most part only
in those moments and in those places where an unusual concentration
of mental energy and the friction of many kindred minds allow the
scattered sparks of inspiration to merge and to leap into flame. We
need not wonder, therefore, that the æsthetic sensibility of our author
is greater than his artistic success. Of which of our contemporaries
might we not say the same thing? Jean Lahor's attention is analytic; he
is absorbed by his model, he does not absorb it and master it by his
art. He has not enough vigour and determination of thought to create
eternal forms out of the swift hints of perception. He watches rather
passively the flight of his ideas, conscious of their vivacity, of
their beauty, but most of all, alas! of their flight. His last word as
an observer, his message as a poet, is that all things are illusion.
They fade, they pass into one another, the place thereof knows them no
more. Nothing of them remains, absolutely nothing, save the universal
indeterminate force that breeds and devours them perpetually.
A mind thus gifted and thus limited would naturally feel its affinity
to Oriental pantheism as soon as that phase of thought and feeling came
within the radius of its vision. Jean Lahor seems early to have felt an
attraction toward the speculation of the East, and his prolonged study
of that literature could of course only intensify the natural bent of
his mind, and give his thought a more pronounced pantheistic colouring.
Had he been wholly absorbed, however, in such mystical contemplation,
we should have had little to study in him that was new; only one more
case of sensibility and fancy overpowering a timid intellect, one more
gifted nature arrested at the stage of bewilderment.
But as Jean Lahor is only a pseudonym for the man, so the sympathy with
India which that name indicates is only one phase of the thinker. Our
poet pursued the study of medicine; he realized in the concrete the
orderly complexities of natural law and the sordid realities of human
life. The vague, sensuous enthusiasm with which he had followed the
flux of images in his fancy was now sobered by an accurate knowledge
of the miseries, the defeats, the shames that lie beneath. His poetic
sense of illusion was deepened into a moral sense of wrong. The same
keenness of perception, the same power of graphic expression, which
had made him dwell on the luxuriance of Nature now made him paint
the irony and brutality of life. There is here and there a touch of
bitterness and exaggeration in the satire, as if the man of science
felt a personal resentment against a world that had so cheated the poet.
Yet the two descriptions are far from inconsistent; we have merely
learned to understand as a process and to conceive as an inner
experience what before we had admired as a spectacle. A scientific
view has come to give definition and coherence to phenomena which a
poetical pantheism merely saluted as they passed and disappeared into
the primordial darkness, or, if you like, into the primordial light.
The two systems differ in tone and in method, but not in result.
Natural science, like pantheism, presents us with a universal flux, in
which something, we known not what, moves, we know not why, we know
not whither. The method of this transformation may be more or less
accurately described, the general sense of continuity and necessity
may find a more or less specific expression in the various fields
of experience; yet the outcome is still the same whirligig. We find
ourselves in either case confronted by the same _gloire du néant_, by a
nothing that lives and that is beautiful in its nothingness.
These two elements in Jean Lahor's philosophy, the Oriental and
the scientific, would thus tend alike to represent man with his
intelligence as the product and the captive of an irrational engine
called the universe. Many a man accepts this solution and reconciles
himself as best he can to the truth as it appears to him. What is
there, he may say, so dreadful in mutability? What so intolerable in
ultimate ignorance? We know what we need to know, and things last,
perhaps, as long as they deserve to last. So, once convinced that his
naturalistic philosophy is final, a man will silence the demands of
his own reason and call them chimerical. There is nothing to which
men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves. They
will put up with present suffering, with the certainty of death, with
solitude, with shame, with wrong, with the expectation of eternal
damnation. In the face of such things, they can not only be happy
for the moment, but solemnly thank God for having brought them into
existence. Habit is stronger than reason, and the respect for fact
stronger than the respect for the ideal; nor would the ideal and reason
ever prevail did they not make up in persistence what they lack in
momentary energy.
It would have been easy, therefore, for Jean Lahor, as for the rest
of us, to remain in the naturalistic world, had he had only poetical
intuition, or only scientific training, or only both. But there was
also in him a third and a moral element, an impulse toward ideal
creation, a spark of Promethean fire. He felt a genuine admiration
for that humane courage which made the Greeks, for all their clear
consciousness of fate, hopeful without illusions and independent
without rebellion. In the bosom of the intractable infinite he still
distinguished the work of human reason--the cosmos of society,
character, and art--like a Noah's ark floating in the Deluge. His
imagination had succumbed to the dream of sense; his art had not
attempted the task of imposing a meaning or an immortal form upon
Nature: but his conscience and his political instinct had held out
against the fascinations of Maya. The Greek asserted himself here
against the barbarian, the moralist against the naturalist. Nor was
this a merely accidental addition or an inconsistency. It was the
explicit expression of that creative reason which had all along chafed
under the dominion of brute fact and of perpetual illusion. The same
moral energy which had made him a pessimist in the presence of Nature
made him an idealist at the threshold of life.