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GOD AND MR. WELLS
A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF
"GOD THE INVISIBLE KING"
GOD AND MR. WELLS
A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF
"GOD THE INVISIBLE KING"
By WILLIAM ARCHER
NEW YORK . ALFRED A. KNOPF . 1917
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF
_Published, September, 1917_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FOREWORD
As I look through the proofs of this little treatise, a twinge of
compunction comes upon me. That humane philosopher Mr. Dooley has
somewhere a saying to this effect: "When an astronomer tells me that
he has discovered a new planet, I would be the last man to brush the
fly off the end of his telescope." Would not this have been a good
occasion for a similar exercise of urbanity? Nay, may it not be said
that my criticism of _God the Invisible King_ is a breach of
discipline, like duelling in the face of the enemy? I am proud to
think that Mr. Wells and I are soldiers in the same army; ought we not
at all costs to maintain a united front? On the destructive side
(which I have barely touched upon) his book is brilliantly effective;
on the constructive side, if unconvincing, it is thoughtful,
imaginative, stimulating, a thing on the whole to be grateful for.
Ought one not rather to hold one's peace than to afford the common
enemy the encouragement of witnessing a squabble in the ranks?
But we must not yield to the obsession of military metaphor. It is not
what the enemy thinks or what Mr. Wells or I think that matters--it is
what the men of the future ought to think, as being consonant with
their own nature and with the nature of things. Ideas, like organisms,
must abide the struggle for existence, and if the Invisible King is
fitted to survive, my criticism will reinforce and not invalidate him.
Even if he should come to life in a way one can scarcely anticipate,
his proceedings will have to be carefully watched. He cannot claim the
reticences of a "party truce." He will be all the better for a candid,
though I hope not captious, Opposition.
I thought of printing on my title-page a motto from Mr. Bernard Shaw;
but it will perhaps come better here. "The fact," says Mr. Shaw, "that
a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the
fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of
credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no
means a necessity of life. Whether Socrates got as much happiness out
of life as Wesley is an unanswerable question; but a nation of
Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a nation of Wesleys;
and its individuals would be higher in the evolutionary scale. At all
events, it is in the Socratic man and not in the Wesleyan that our
hope lies now."
Besides, it has yet to be proved that the believer in the Invisible
King is happier than the sceptic.
LONDON, _May_ 24, 1917.
CONTENTS
I The Great Adventurer 1
II A God Who "Growed" 3
III New Myths for Old 8
IV The Apostle's Creed 32
V When Is a God Not a God? 47
VI For and Against Personification 73
VII Back to the Veiled Being 101
GOD AND MR. WELLS
I
THE GREAT ADVENTURER
When it was known that Mr. H. G. Wells had set forth to discover God,
all amateurs of intellectual adventure were filled with pleasurable
excitement and anticipation. For is not Mr. Wells the great Adventurer
of latter-day literature? No quest is too perilous for him, no
forlorn-hope too daring. He led the first explorers to the moon. He
it was who lured the Martians to earth and exterminated them with
microbes. He has ensnared an angel from the skies and expiscated a
mermaid from the deep. He has mounted a Time Machine (of his own
invention) and gone careering down the vistas of the Future. But these
were comparatively commonplace feats. After all, there had been a
Jules Verne, there had been a Gulliver and a Peter Wilkins, there had
been a More, a Morris and a Bellamy. It might be that he was fitted
for far greater things. "There remains," we said to ourselves, "the
blue ribbon of intellectual adventure, the unachieved North Pole of
spiritual exploration. He has had countless predecessors in the
enterprise, some of whom have loudly claimed success; but their
log-books have been full of mere hallucinations and nursery tales.
What if it should be reserved for Mr. Wells to bring back the first
authentic news from a source more baffling than that of Nile or
Amazon--the source of the majestic stream of Being? What if it should
be given him to sign his name to the first truly-projected chart of
the scheme of things?"
We almost held our breath in eager anticipation, just as we did when
there came from America a well-authenticated rumor that the problem of
flying had at last been solved. Were we on the brink of another and
much more momentous discovery? Was Mr. Wells to be the Peary of the
great quest? Or only the last of a thousand Dr. Cooks?
II
A GOD WHO "GROWED"
Our excitement, our suspense, were so much wasted emotion. Mr. Wells's
enterprise was not at all what we had figured it to be.
GOD
THE INVISIBLE KING
is a very interesting, and even stimulating disquisition, full of a
fine social enthusiasm, and marked, in many passages, by deep poetic
feeling. But it is not a work of investigation into the springs of
Being. Mr. Wells explicitly renounces from the outset any dealings
with "cosmogony." It is a description of a way of thinking, a system
of nomenclature, which Mr. Wells declares to be extremely prevalent in
"the modern mind," from which he himself extracts much comfort and
fortification, and which he believes to be destined to regenerate the
world.
But Mr. Wells will not have it that what is involved is a mere system
of nomenclature. He avers that he, in common with many other
like-minded persons, has achieved, not so much an intellectual
discovery as an emotional realisation, of something actual and
objective which he calls God. He does not, so far as I remember, use
the term "objective"; but as he insists that God is "a spirit, a
person, a strongly marked and knowable personality" (p. 5), "a single
spirit and a single person" (p. 18), "a great brother and leader of
our little beings" (p. 24) with much more to the same purpose, it
would seem that he must have in his mind an object external to us, no
mere subjective "stream of tendency," or anything of that sort. It
would of course be foolish to doubt the sincerity of the conviction
which he so constantly and so eagerly asserts. Nevertheless, one
cannot but put forward, even at this stage, the tentative theory that
he is playing tricks with his own mind, and attributing reality and
personality to something that was in its origin a figure of speech. He
has been hypnotized by the word God:
As when we dwell upon a word we know,
Repeating, till the word we know so well
Becomes a wonder, and we know not why.
At all events, "God the Invisible King" is not the creator and
sustainer of the universe. As to the origin of things Mr. Wells
professes the most profound agnosticism. "At the back of all known
things," he says, "there is an impenetrable curtain; the ultimate of
existence is a Veiled Being, which seems to know nothing of life or
death or good or ill.... The new religion does not pretend that the
God of its life is that Being, or that he has any relation of control
or association with that Being. It does not even assert that God knows
all, or much more than we do, about that ultimate Being" (p. 14). Very
good; but--here is the first question which seems to arise out of the
Wellsian thesis--are we not entitled to ask of "the new religion" some
more definite account of the relation between "God" and "the Veiled
Being"? Surely it is not enough that it should simply refrain from
"asserting" anything at all on the subject. If "God" is outside
ourselves ("a Being, not us but dealing with us and through us," p. 6)
we cannot leave him hanging in the void, like the rope which the
Indian conjurer is fabled to throw up into the air till it hooks
itself on to nothingness. If we are to believe in him as a lever for
the righting of a world that has somehow run askew, we want to know
something of his fulcrum. Is it possible thus to dissociate him from
the Veiled Being, and proclaim him an independent, an agnostic God? Do
we really get over any difficulty--do we not rather create new
difficulties,--by saying, as Mr. Wells practically does, "Our God is
no metaphysician. He does not care, and very likely does not know, how
this tangle of existence came into being. He is only concerned to
disentangle it a little, to reduce the chaos of the world to some sort
of seemliness and order"? Is it an idle and presumptuous curiosity
which enquires whether we are to consider him co-ordinate with the
Veiled Being, and in that case probably hostile, or subordinate, and
in that case instrumental? Are we, in a word, to consider the earth a
little rebel state in the gigantic empire of the universe, working out
its own salvation under its Invisible King? Or are we to regard God as
the Viceroy of the Veiled Being, to whom, in that case, our ultimate
allegiance is due?
I talked the other day to a young Australian who had been breaking new
land for wheat-growing. "What do you do?" I asked, "with the stumps of
the trees you fell? It must be a great labour to clear them out." "We
don't clear them out," he replied. "We use ploughs that automatically
rise when they come to a stump, and take the earth again on the other
side." I cannot but conjecture that Mr. Wells's thinking apparatus is
fitted with some such automatic appliance for soaring gaily over the
snags that stud the ploughlands of theology.
III
NEW MYTHS FOR OLD
Before examining the particular attributes and activities of the
Invisible King, let us look a little more closely into the question
whether a God detached alike from man below and (so to speak) from
heaven above, is a thinkable God in whom any satisfaction can be
found. Mr. Wells must not reply (he probably would not think of doing
so) that "satisfaction" is no test: that he asserts an objective truth
which exists, like the Nelson Column or the Atlantic Ocean, whether we
find satisfaction in it or not. Though he does not mention the word
"pragmatism," his standards are purely pragmatist. He offers no jot or
tittle of evidence for the existence of the Invisible King, except
that it is a hypothesis which he finds to work extremely well.
Satisfaction and nothing else is the test he applies. So we have every
right to ask whether the renunciation of all concern about the Veiled
Being, and concentration upon the thought of a finite God, practically
unrelated to the infinite, can bring us any reasonable sense of
reconciliation to the nature of things. For that, I take it, is the
essence of religion.
It was in no spirit of irony that I began this essay by expressing the
lively interest with which I learned that Mr. Wells was setting out on
the quest for God. The dogmatic agnosticism which declares it
impossible ever to know anything about the whence, how and why of the
universe does not seem to me more rational than any other dogma which
jumps from "not yet" to "never." Mr. Wells himself disclaims that
dogma. He says: "It may be that minds will presently appear among us
of such a quality that the face of that Unknown will not be altogether
hidden" (p. 108). And in another place (p. 15) he suggests that "our
God, the Captain of Mankind," may one day enable us to "pierce the
black wrappings," or, in other words, to get behind the veil. There is
nothing, then, unreasonable or absurd in man's incurable
inquisitiveness as to God, in the non-Wellsian sense of the term. God
simply means the key to the mystery of existence; and though the keys
hitherto offered have all either jammed or turned round and round
without unlocking anything, it does not follow that no real key exists
within the reach of human investigation or speculation. Therefore one
naturally feels a little stirring of hope at the news that a fresh and
keen intellect, untrammelled by the folk-lore theologies of the past,
is applying itself to the problem. It is always possible, however
improbable, that we may be helped a little forwarder on the path
towards realization. One comes back to the before-mentioned analogy of
flying. We had been assured over and over again, on the highest
authority, that it was an idle dream. When we wanted to express the
superlative degree of the impossible, we said "I can no more do it
than I can fly." But the irrepressible spirit of man was not to be
daunted by _a priori_ demonstrations of impossibility. One day there
came the rumour that the thing had been achieved, followed soon by
ocular demonstration; and now we rub shoulders every day with men who
have outsoared the eagle, and--alas!--carried death and destruction
into the hitherto stainless empyrean.
It would seem, then, that there is no reason absolutely to despair of
some advance towards a conception of the nature and reason of the
universe. And it is certain that Mr. Wells's God would stand a better
chance of satisfying the innate needs of the human intelligence if he
had not (apparently) given up as a bad job the attempt to relate
himself to the causal plexus of the All. Is he outside that causal
plexus, self-begotten, self-existent? Then he is the miracle of
miracles, a second mystery superimposed on the first. If, on the other
hand, he falls within the system, he might surely manage to convey to
his disciples some glimmering notion of his place in it. The
birth-stories of Gods are always grotesque and unedifying, but that is
because they belong to folk-lore. If this God does not belong to
folk-lore, surely his relation to the Veiled Being might be indicated
without impropriety. Mr. Wells, as we have seen, hints that his
reticence may be due to the fact that he does not know. In that case
this "modern" God is suspiciously like all the ancient Gods, whose
most unfortunate characteristic was that they never knew anything more
than their worshippers. The reason was not far to seek--namely, that
they were mere projections of the minds of these worshippers,
fashioned in their own image. But Mr. Wells assures us that this is
not the case of the Invisible King.
Mr. Wells will scarcely deny that if it were possible to compress his
mythology and merge his Invisible King in his Veiled Being, the result
would be a great simplification of the problem. But this is not, in
fact, possible; for it would mean the positing of an all-good and
all-powerful Creator, which is precisely the idea which Mr. Wells
rebels against,[1] in common with every one who realizes the facts of
life and the meaning of words. Short of this, however, is no other
simplification possible? Would it not greatly clarify our thought if
we could bring the Invisible King into action, not, indeed, as the
creator of all things, but as the organizer and director of the
surprising and almost incredible epiphenomenon which we call life? Our
scheme would then take this shape: an inconceivable unity behind the
veil, somehow manifesting itself, where it comes within our ken, in
the dual form of a great Artificer and a mass of terribly recalcitrant
matter--the only medium in which he can work. In other words, the
Veiled Being would be as inscrutable as ever, but the Invisible King,
instead of dropping in with a certain air of futility, like a doctor
arriving too late at the scene of a railway accident, would be placed
at the beginning, not of the universe at large, but of the atomic
re-arrangements from which consciousness has sprung. Can we, on this
hypothesis (which is practically that of Manichaeanism) hazard any
guess at the motives or forces actuating the Invisible King,--or, to
avoid confusion, let us say the Artificer--which should acquit him of
the charge of being a callous and mischievous demon rather than a
well-willing God? Can we not only place pain and evil (a tautology) to
the account of sluggish, refractory matter, but also conjecture a
sufficient reason why the Artificer should have started the painful
evolution of consciousness, instead of leaving the atoms to whirl
insentiently in the figures imposed on them by the stupendous
mathematician behind the veil?
[1] In _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_, which is in some sense
a prologue to _God the Invisible King_, we find an emphatic
renunciation of the all-good and all-powerful God. "The
theologians," says Mr. Britling, "have been extravagant about
God. They have had silly, absolute ideas--that he is all
powerful. That he's omni-everything.... Why! if I thought
there was an omnipotent God who looked down on battles and
deaths and all the waste and horror of this war--able to
prevent these things--doing them to amuse himself--I would
spit in his empty face" (p. 406).
A complete answer to this question would be a complete solution of the
riddle of existence. That, if it be ever attainable, is certainly far
enough off. But there are some considerations, not always sufficiently
present to our minds, which may perhaps help us, not to a solution,
but to a rational restatement, of the riddle.
It is possible to suppose, in the first place, that the Artificer,
though entirely well-meaning, was not a free agent. We can construct a
myth in which an Elder Power should announce to a Younger Power his
intention of setting a number of sentient puppets dancing for his
amusement, and regaling himself with the spectacle of their antics, in
utter heedlessness of the agonies they must endure, which would,
indeed, lend an additional savor to the diversion. This Elder Power,
with the "sportsman's" preference for pigeons as against clay balls,
would be something like the God of Mr. Thomas Hardy. Then we can
imagine the Younger Power, after a vain protest demanding, as it were,
the vice-royalty of the new kingdom, in order that he might shape its
polity to high and noble ends, educe from tragic imperfection some
approach to perfection, and, in short, make the best of a bad
business. We should thus have (let us say) Marcus Aurelius claiming a
proconsulate under Nero, and, with very limited powers, gradually
substituting order and humanity for oppression and rapine. This
fairy-tale is not unlike Mr. Wells's; but I submit that it has the
advantage of placing the Invisible King, or his equivalent, in a
conceivable relation to the whole mundane process.
Now let us proceed to the alternative hypothesis. Let us suppose that
the Artificer was a free agent, and that he voluntarily, and in full
view of the consequences, engineered the conjunction of atoms from
which consciousness arose. He could have let it alone, he could have
suffered life to remain an abortive, slumbering potentiality, like the
fire in a piece of flint; yet he deliberately clashed the flint and
steel and kindled the torch which was to be handed on, not only from
generation to generation, but from species to species, through all the
stages of a toilsome, slaughterous, immeasurable ascent. If we accept
this hypothesis, can we acquit the Artificer of wanton cruelty? Can we
view his action with approval, even with gratitude? Or must we, like
Mr. Wells, if we wish to find an outlet for religious emotion,
postulate another, subsequent, intermeddling Power--like, say, an
American consul at the scene of the Turkish massacre--wholly guiltless
of the disaster of life, and doing his little best to mitigate and
remedy it?
In the present state of our knowledge, it is certainly very difficult
to see how the kindler of the _vitai lampada_, supposing him to have
been responsible for his actions, can claim from a jury of human
beings a verdict of absolute acquittal. But we can, even now, see
certain extenuating circumstances, which evidence not yet available
may one day so powerfully reinforce as to enable him to leave the
Court without a stain on his character.
For one thing, we are too much impressed and oppressed by the ideas of
magnitude and multitude. Since we have realized the unspeakable
insignificance of the earth in relation to the unimaginable vastness
of star-sown space, we have come to feel such a disproportion between
the mechanism of life and its upshot, as known in our own experience,
that we have a vague sense of maleficence, or at any rate of brutal
carelessness, in the responsible Power, whoever that may be. "What is
it all," we say, "but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million
million of suns?" We feel like insects whom the foot of a heedless
giant may at any moment crush. We dream of the swish of a comet's tail
wiping out organic life on the planet, and we see, as a matter of
fact, great natural convulsions, such as the earthquake of Lisbon or
the eruption of Mont Pelee, treating human communities just as an
elephant might treat an ant-hill. It is this sense of the immeasurable
disproportion in things that a pessimist poet has expressed in the
well-known sonnet:--
Know you, my friend, the sudden ecstasy
Of thought that time and space annihilates,
Creation in a moment uncreates,
And whirls the mind, from secular habit free,
Beyond the spheres, beyond infinity,
Beyond the empery of the eternal Fates,
To where the Inconceivable ruminates,
The unthinkable "To be or not to be?"
Then, as Existence flickers into sight,
A marsh-flame in the night of Nothingness--
The great, soft, restful, dreamless, fathomless night--
We know the Affirmative the primal curse,
And loathe, with all its imbecile strain and stress,
This ostentatious, vulgar Universe.
The mood here recorded is one that must be familiar to most thinking
people. "The undevout astronomer is mad," said eighteenth-century
deism: to-day we are more apt to think that the uncritical astronomer
is dense. There is a sort of colossal stupidity about the stars in
their courses that overpowers and disquiets us. If (as Alfred Russel
Wallace has argued) the geocentric theory was not so far out after
all, and the earth, holding a specially favored place in the universe,
is the only home of life, then the disproportion of mechanism to
result seems absolutely appalling. If, on the other hand, all the
million million of suns are pouring out vital heat to a like number
of inhabited planetary systems, the sheer quantity of life, of
struggle, of suffering implied, seems a thought at which to shudder.
We are inclined to say to the inventor of sentience: "Since this
ingenious combination of yours was at best such a questionable boon,
surely you might have been content with one experiment."
But all such criticism rests upon a fallacy, or rather a brace of
interrelated fallacies. There can be no disproportion between
consciousness and the unconscious, because they are absolutely
incommensurable; and number, in relation to consciousness, is an
illusion. Consciousness, wherever it exists, is single, indivisible,
inextensible; and other consciousnesses, and the whole external
universe, are, to the individual percipient, but shapes in a more or
less protracted dream.
Why should we trouble about vastness--mere extension in space? There
is a sense in which the infinitesimally small is more marvellous, more
disquieting, than the infinitely great. The ant, the flea, nay, the
phagocyte in our blood, is really a more startling phenomenon than all
the mechanics and chemistry of the heavens. In worrying about the
bigness and the littleness of things, we are making the human body
our standard--the body whose dimensions are no doubt determined by
convenience in relation to terrestrial conditions, but have otherwise
no sort of sanctity or superiority, rightness or fitness. It happens
to be the object to which is attached the highest form of
consciousness we know; but consciousness itself has neither parts nor
magnitude. And consciousness itself is essentially greater than the
very vastness which appals us, seeing that it embraces and envelops
it. Enormous depths of space are pictured in my brain, through my
optic nerve; and what eludes the magic mirror of my retina, my mind
can conceive, apprehend, make its own. It is not even true to say that
the mind cannot conceive infinity--the real truth (if I may for once
be Chestertonian), the real truth is that it can conceive nothing
else. "When Berkeley said there was no matter"--it mattered greatly
what he said. Nothing can be more certain than that, apart from
percipience, there is no matter that matters. From the point of view
of pantheism (the only logical theism) God, far from being a Veiled
Being, or an Invisible King, is precisely the mind which translates
itself into the visible, sensible universe, and impresses itself, in
the form of a never-ending pageant, upon our cognate minds. It has
been thought that human consciousness may have come into being because
God wanted an audience. He was tired of being a cinematograph-film
unreeling before empty benches. Some people have even carried the
speculation further, and wondered whether the attachment of
percipience to organized matter, as in the case of human beings, may
not be a necessary stage in the culture of a pure percipience, capable
of furnishing the pageant of the universe with a permanent and
appreciative audience. In that case the Scottish Catechism would be
justified, which asks "What is the chief end of man?" and answers (as
Stevenson says) nobly if obscurely: "To glorify God and to enjoy Him
forever." But enough of these idle fantasies. What is certain is that
we can hold up our heads serenely among the immensities, knowing that
we are immenser than they. Even if they were malevolent--and that they
do not seem to be--they are no more terrible than the familiar dangers
of our homely earth. They cannot hurt us more than we can be hurt--an
obvious truism but one which is often overlooked. And this brings us
to the consideration of the second fallacy which sometimes warps our
judgment as to the responsibility of the Power which invented life.
We are all apt to speak and think as though sentience were an article
capable of accumulation, like money or merchandise, in enormous
aggregates--as though pleasure, and more particularly pain, were
subject to the ordinary rules of arithmetic, so that minor quantities,
added together, might mount up to an indefinitely gigantic total.
Poets and philosophers, time out of mind, have been heartbroken over
the enormous mass of evil in the world, and have spoken as though
animated nature were one great organism, with a brain in which every
pang that afflicted each one of its innumerable members was piled up
into a huge, pyramidal agony. But this is obviously not so. That very
"individuation" which to some philosophies is the primal curse--the
condition by all means to be annulled and shaken off[2]--forbids the
adding up of units of sentience. If "individuation" is the source of
human misery (which seems a rather meaningless proposition) it is
beyond all doubt its boundary and limit. We are each of us his own
universe. With each of us the universe is born afresh; with each of us
it dies--assuming, that is to say, that consciousness is extinguished
at death. There never has been and never can be in the world more
suffering than a single organism can sustain--which is another way of
saying that nothing can hurt us more than we can be hurt. Is this an
optimistic statement? Far from it. The individual is capable of great
extremities of suffering; and though not all men, or even most, are
put to the utmost test in this respect, there are certainly cases not
a few in which a man may well curse the day he was born, and see in
the universe that was born with him nothing but an instrument of
torture. But such an one must speak for himself. It is evident that,
take them all round, men accept life as no such evil gift. It cannot
even be said that, in handing it on to others, they are driven by a
fatal instinct which they know in their hearts to be cruel, and would
resist if they could. The vast majority have been, and still are,
entirely light-hearted about the matter, thus giving the best possible
proof that they cherish no grudge against the source of being, but
find it, on the balance, acceptable enough. If it be said that this is
due to stupidity, then stupidity is one of the factors in the case
which the great Artificer must be supposed to have foreseen and
reckoned upon. All these considerations must be taken into account
when we try to sum up the responsibility of an organizer and director
of life, acting of his own free will, although he knew that the
conditions under which he had to work would make the achievement of
any satisfactory result a slow, laborious and painful business.
[2] Mr. Wells himself is not far from this view. See _God the
Invisible King_, pp. 73, 76, and this book, pp. 39-40.
"But sympathy!" it may be said--"You have left sympathy out of the
reckoning. Unless we are not only 'individuals' but iron-clad
egotists, we suffer with others more keenly, sometimes, than in our
own persons." Sympathy, no doubt, is, like the summer sun and the
frost of winter, a fact of common experience causing us alternate joy
and pain; but it means no sort of breach in the wall of
"individuation." Our nearest and dearest are simply factors in our
environment, most influential factors, but as external to us as the
trees or the stars. We cannot, in any real sense, draw away their
pains and add them to our own, any more than they, in their turn, can
relieve us of our toothache or our sciatica. They are the points,
doubtless, at which our environment touches us most closely, but
neither incantation nor Act of Parliament, neither priest nor
registrar, can make even man and wife really "one flesh." It was
necessary for the conservation of the species that a strict limit
should be set to the operation of sympathy. Had that emotion been
able to pierce the shell of individuality, so that one being could
actually add the sufferings of another, or of many others, to his own,
life would long ago have come to an end. As it is, sympathy implies an
imaginative extension of individuality, which is of enormous social
value. But we remain, none the less, isolated each in his own
universe, and our fellow-men and women are but shapes in the panorama,
the strange, fantastic dream, which the Veiled Showman unrolls before
us.
In these post-Darwinian days, moreover, we are inclined to give way to
certain morbid and sentimental exaggerations of sympathy, which do
some injustice to the great Artificer whom we are for the moment
assuming to be responsible for sentient life. Many of us are much
concerned about "nature, red in tooth and claw." It is a sort of
nightmare to us to think of the tremendous fecundity of swamp and
jungle, warren and pond, and of the ruthless struggle for existence
which has made earth, air, and sea one mighty battle-ground. In this
we are again letting the fallacy of number take hold of us. There can
be no aggregate of suffering among lower, any more than among higher,
organisms; and the amount of pain which individual animals have to
endure--even animals of those species which we can suppose to possess
a certain keenness of sensibility--is probably, in the vast majority
of cases, very trifling. Half the anguish of humanity proceeds from
the power of looking before and after. The animal, though he may
suffer from fear of imminent, visible danger, cannot know the torture
of long-drawn apprehension. For most of his life he is probably aware
of a vague well-being; then of a longer or shorter--often a very
short--spell of vague ill-being; and so, the end. Nor is it possible
to doubt that the experience of some animals includes a great deal of
positive rapture. If the lark be not really the soul of joy, he is the
greatest hypocrite under the sun. Many insects seem to be pin-points
of vibrant vitality which we can scarcely believe to be unaccompanied
by pleasurable sensation. The mosquito which I squash on the back of
my hand, and which dies in a bath of my own blood, has had a short
life but doubtless a merry one. The moths which, in a tropic night,
lie in calcined heaps around the lamp, have probably perished in
pursuit of some ecstatic illusion. It does not seem, on the whole,
that we need expend much pity on the brute creation, or make its
destinies a reproach to the great Artificer. Which is not to say, of
course, that we ought not to detest and try with all our might to
abolish the cruelties of labor, commerce, sport and war.
Again, as to the great calamities--the earthquakes, shipwrecks,
railway accidents, even the wars--which are often made a leading count
in the arraignment of the Author of Sentience, we must not let
ourselves be deceived by the fallacy of number. Their spectacular,
dramatic aspect naturally attracts attention; but the death-roll of a
great shipwreck is in fact scarcely more terrible than the daily bills
of mortality of a great city. It is true that a violent death,
overtaking a healthy man, is apt to involve moments, perhaps hours, of
acute distress which he might have escaped had he died of gradual
decay or of ordinary well-tended disease; and a very short space of
the agony sometimes attendant upon (say) a railway accident, probably
represents itself to the sufferer as an eternity. But there is also
another side to the matter. Instantaneous death in a great catastrophe
must be reckoned as mere euthanasia; and even short of this, the
attendant excitement has often the effect of an anodyne. In the
upshot, no doubt, such occurrences are rightly called disasters, since
their tendency is to cause needlessly painful death, under
circumstances, which in the main, enhance its terrors; but the
sufferings of the victims cannot be added together because they occur
within a limited area, any more than if they had been spread over an
indefinite tract of space. As for war, it increases the liability of
every individual who comes within its wide-flung net to intense bodily
and mental suffering, and to premature and painful death. Moreover, it
destroys social values which _can_ be added up. In this respect it
leaves the world face to face with an appalling deficit. But we must
not let it weigh upon us too heavily, or make it too great a reproach
to the Artificer of human destiny. For the soldier, like every other
sentient organism, is immured in his own universe, and his individual
debit-and-credit account with the Power which placed him there would
be no whit different if he were indeed the only real existence, and
the world around him were naught but a dance of shadows.
If there were a country of a hundred million people, in which every
citizen was born to an allowance of five pounds, which in all his life
he could not possibly increase, or invest in joint-stock enterprises,
though he might leave some of it unexpended--we should not, in spite
of the L500,000,000 of its capital, call that a wealthy country. Its
effective wealth would be precisely a five-pound note. Similarly,
given a world in which every one is born with a limited capacity of
sentience, inalienable, incommunicable, unique, we should do wrong to
call that world a multi-millionaire in misery, even if it could be
proved that in each individual account the balance of sensation was on
the wrong side of the ledger. It is true that if, in one man's
account, the balance were largely to the bad, he would be entitled to
reproach the Veiled Banker, even though five hundred or five thousand
of his fellows declared themselves satisfied with the result of their
audit. But if the Banker, in opening business, had good reason to
think that, in the long run, the contents would largely outvote the
non-contents, we could scarcely blame him for going ahead. And what
if, for contents and malcontents alike, he had an uncovenanted bonus
up his sleeve?
* * * * *
In this disquisition, with its shifting personifications, its
Artificer, Author, Banker and the like, we may seem to have wandered
far away from Mr. Wells and his Invisible King; but I hope the reader
has not wholly lost the clue. Let us recapitulate. Starting from the
idea that its total renunciation of metaphysics, its incuriousness as
to causation, was a weakness in Mr. Wells's system, inasmuch as an
eager curiosity as to these matters is an inseparable part of our
intellectual outfit, we set about enquiring whether it might not be
possible to abandon the notions of omnipotence, omniscience and
omni-benevolence, and yet to conceive a doctrine of origins into which
a well-willing God should enter, not, like the Invisible King, as a
sort of remedial afterthought, but as a prime mover in this baffling
business of life. We put forward two hypotheses, each of which seemed
more thinkable, less in the air, so to speak, than Mr. Wells's scheme
of things. We imagined a wholly callous, unpitying Power, wantonly
setting up combinations in matter which it knew would work out in
cruelty and misery, and another co-ordinate though not quite equal
Power interfering from the first to introduce into the combinations of
the Elder Deity a slow but sure bias towards the good. Then we
proposed an alternative hypothesis, logically simpler, though more
difficult from the moral point of view. We conceived at the source of
organic life an intelligent and well-willing Power constrained, by
some necessity "behind the veil," to carry out his purposes through
the sluggish, refractory, hampering medium of matter. Supposing this
Power free to act or to refrain from acting, we asked whether he could
take the affirmative course--choose the "Everlasting Yea" as Carlyle
would phrase it--without forfeiting our esteem and disqualifying for
the post of Invisible King in the Wellsian sense of the term. In a
tentative way, not exempt, perhaps, from a touch of special pleading,
we advanced certain considerations which seemed to suggest that his
decision to kindle the torch of life might, after all, be justified.
Our provisional conclusion was that though, as at present advised, we
might not quite see our way to hail him as a beneficent Invisible
King, yet we need not go to the opposite extreme of writing him down a
mere Ogre God, indifferent to the vast and purposeless process of
groaning and travail, begetting and devouring, which he had wantonly
initiated. That is the point at which we have now arrived.
I hope it need not be said I do not attribute any substantive value to
the hypothetical myths here put forward and discussed--that I do not
accept either of them, or propose that anyone else should accept it,
as a probable adumbration of what actually occurred "in the
beginning"--a first chapter in a new Book of Genesis. My purpose was
simply, since myth-making was the order of the day, to hint a
criticism of Mr. Wells's myth, by placing beside it one or two other
fantasies, perhaps as plausible as his, which had the advantage of not
entirely eluding the question of origins. I submit, with great
respect, that my Artificer comes a little less out of the blue than
his Invisible King--that is all I claim for him.
But here Mr. Wells puts in a protest, not without indignation.
Myth-making, he declares, is _not_ the order of the day. Had he wanted
to indulge in myth-making, he could easily have found some
metaphysical affiliation for his Invisible King. What he has done is
to record a profound spiritual experience, common to himself and many
other good men and true, which has culminated in the recognition of an
actual Power, objectively extant in the world, to which he has felt it
a sacred duty to bear witness. Very good; so be it; let us now look
more in detail into the gospel according to Wells.
IV
THE APOSTLE'S CREED
A gospel it is, in all literalness; an evangel; a message of glad
tidings. It is not merely _a_ truth, it is "the Truth" (p. 1). Let
there be no mistake about it: Mr. Wells's ambition is to rank with St.
Paul and Mahomet, as the apostle of a new world-religion. He does not
in so many words lay claim to inspiration, but it is almost inevitably
deducible from his premises. He is uttering the first clear and
definite tidings of a God who is endowed with personality, character,
will and purpose. To that Deity he has submitted himself in
enthusiastic devotion. If the God does not seize the opportunity to
speak through such a marvellously suitable, such an ideal, mouthpiece,
then practical common-sense cannot be one of his attributes. Which of
the other Gods who have announced themselves from time to time has
found such a megaphone to reverberate his voice? St. Paul was a poor
tent-maker, whose sermons were not even reported in the religious
press, while his letters probably counted their public by scores, or
at most by hundreds. Mr. Wells, from the outset of his mission, has
the ear of two hemispheres.
What, then, does he tell us of his God? The first characteristic which
differentiates him from all the other Gods with a big G--for of course
we pay no heed to the departmental gods of polytheism--the first fact
we must grasp and hold fast to, is that he lays no claim to infinity.
"This new faith ... worships _a finite God_" (p. 5; Mr. Wells's
italics). "He has begun and he never will end" (p. 18). "He is within
time and not outside it" (p. 7). Nothing can be more definite than
that. There was a time when God did not exist; and then somehow,
somewhen, he came into being.
Perhaps to ask "When?" would be to trespass on the department of
origins, from which we are explicitly warned off. It would be to
trench upon "cosmogony." Yet we are not quite without guidance. "The
renascent religion," we are told, "has always been here; it has always
been visible to those that had eyes to see" (p. 1). "Always," in this
context, can only mean during the whole course of human history.
Therefore God must have come into being some time between the issue
of the creative fiat and the appearance of man on the planet. This is
a pretty wide margin, but it is something to go upon. He may have been
contemporary with the amoeba, or with the ichthyosaurus, or haply
with the earliest quadrumana. At the very latest (if "always" is
accurate) he must have made his appearance exactly at the same time as
man; and if I were to give my opinion, I should say that was extremely
probable. At all events, even if he preceded man by a few thousand or
million years, we are compelled to assume that he came in preparation
for the advent of the human species, determined to be on hand when
wanted. For we do not gather that the lower animals stand in need of
his services, or are capable of benefiting by them. One might be
tempted to conceive him as guiding the course of evolution and
hastening its laggard process; but (as we shall see) he scorns the
role of Providence, and resolutely abstains from any intromission in
organic or meteorological concerns. It would be pleasant to think that
he had something to do with (for instance) the retreat of the ice-cap
in the northern hemisphere; but we are not encouraged to indulge in
any such speculation. It would appear that the activity of God is
purely psychical and moral--that he has no interest in biology, except
as it influences, and is influenced by, sociology. In short, from all
that one can make out, this God is strictly correlative to Man; and
that is a significant fact which we shall do well to bear in mind.
As we have already seen, the Infinite (or Veiled) Being is not God (p.
13); nor is God the Life Force, the "impulse thrusting through matter
and clothing itself in continually changing material forms ... the
Will to Be" (pp. 15-16). As we have also seen, Mr. Wells refuses to
define the relation of his God, this "spirit," this "single spirit and
single person," to either of these inscrutable entities. "God," he
says, "comes to us neither out of the stars nor out of the pride of
life, but as a still small voice within" (p. 18). It is by "faith"
that we "find" him (p. 13); but Mr. Wells "doubts if faith can be
complete and enduring if it is not secured by the definite knowledge
of the true God" (p. 135). What, then, is "faith" in this context? It
would be too much to say, with the legendary schoolboy, that it is
"believing what you know isn't true." The implication seems rather to
be that if you begin by believing on inadequate grounds, you will
presently attain to belief on adequate grounds, or, in other words,
knowledge. Thus, when you go to a spiritual seance in a sceptical
frame of mind, the chill of your aura frightens the spirits away, and
you obtain no manifestations; but if you go in a mood of faith, which
practically means confident expectation, the phenomena follow, and you
depart a convert. I use this illustration in no scoffing spirit. The
presupposition is not irrational. It amounts, in effect, to saying
that you must go some way to meet God before God can or will come to
you. This seems a curious coyness; but as God is finite and
conditioned, a bit of a character ("a strongly marked and knowable
personality," p. 5), there is nothing contradictory in it. Even when
we read that "the true God goes through the world like fifes and drums
and flags, calling for recruits along the street" (p. 40), we must not
seize upon the letter of a similitude, and talk about inconsistency.
You must go out to meet even the Salvation Army. It offers you
salvation in vain if you obstinately bolt your door, and insist that
an Englishman's house is his castle.
The finding of this God is very like what revivalists call
"conversion" (p. 21). You are oppressed by "the futility of the
individual life"; you fall into "a state of helpless self-disgust"
(p. 21); you are, in short, in the condition described by Hamlet when
he says: "It goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly
frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent
canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this
majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other
thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors." The
condition may result, as in Hamlet's case, from an untoward
conjunction of outward circumstances; or it may be of physiological
(liverish) origin. The methods of treatment are many--some of them
(such as the administration of alcohol in large doses) disastrously
unwise. In some states of society and periods of history, religion is
the popular specific; and there have been, and are, forms of religion
to which alcohol would be preferable. Fortunately, one can say without
a shadow of hesitancy that "the modern religion" lies under no such
suspicion. As dispensed by Mr. Wells, it is entirely wholesome. If it
is found to cheer, it will certainly not inebriate. Indeed, the doubt
one feels as to its popular success lies in the very fact that it
contains but an innocuous proportion of alcohol.
You find yourself, then, in the distressful case described by Hamlet
and Mr. Wells. "Man delights you not, no, nor woman neither." You
cannot muster up energy even to kill King Claudius. You go about
gloomily soliloquizing on suicide and kindred topics. Then, "in some
way the idea of God comes into the distressed mind" (p. 21). It
develops through various stages, outlined by Mr. Wells in the passage
cited. In the modern man, it would seem, one great difficulty lies in
"a curious resistance to the suggestion that God is truly a person"
(p. 22). It is here, no doubt, that faith comes in; at all events, you
ultimately get over this stumbling-block. "Then suddenly, in a little
while, in his own time, God comes. The cardinal experience is an
undoubting immediate sense of God. It is the attainment of an absolute
certainty that one is not alone in oneself" (p. 23). You have come, in
fact, to the gate of Damascus. You have found salvation.