that gives rise to our anthropomorphism. We recognize in the living
world about us the use of specific means to specific ends, and this
we call intelligence. It differs from our own in that it is not
selective and intensive in the same way. It does not take short cuts;
it does not aim at human efficiency; it does not cut out waste and
delay and pain. It is the method of trial and error. It hits its
mark because it hits all marks. Species succeed because the tide
that bears them on is a universal tide. It is not a river, but an
ocean current. Nature progresses, but not as man does by discarding
one form and adapting a higher. She discards nothing; she keeps all
her old forms and ways and out of them evolves the higher; she keeps
the fish’s fin, while she perfects the bird’s wing; she preserves the
invertebrate, while she fashions the vertebrate; she achieves man,
while she preserves the monkey. She gropes her way like a blind man,
but she arrives because all goals are hers. Perceptive intelligence
she has given in varying degrees to all creatures, but reasoning
intelligence she has given to man alone. I say “given,” after our
human manner of speaking, when I mean “achieve.” There is no giving
in Nature--there is effort and development. There is interchange and
interaction, but no free gifts. Things are bought with a price. The
price of the mind of man--who can estimate what it has been through
the biological and geological ages?--a price which his long line
of antecedent forms has paid in struggle and suffering and death.
The little that has been added to the size of his brain since the
Piltdown man and the Neanderthal man--what effort and pain has not
that cost? We pay for what we get, or our forbears paid for it. They
paid for the size of our brains, and we pay for our progress in
knowledge.
V
The term “religion” is an equivocal and much-abused word, but I am
convinced that no man’s life is complete without some kind of an
emotional experience that may be called religious. Not necessarily
so much a definite creed or belief as an attraction and aspiration
toward the Infinite, or a feeling of awe and reverence inspired
by the contemplation of this wonderful and mysterious universe,
something to lift a man above purely selfish and material ends, and
open his soul to influences from the highest heavens of thought.
Religion in some form is as natural to man as are eating and
sleeping. The mysteries of life and the wonder and terror of the
world in which he finds himself, arouse emotions of awe and fear
and worship in him as soon as his powers of reflection are born. In
man’s early history religion, philosophy, and literature are one.
He worships before he investigates; he builds temples before he
builds schoolhouses or civic halls. He is, of course, superstitious
long before he is scientific; he trembles before the supernatural
long before he has mastered the natural. The mind of early man was
synthetic as our emotions always are; it lumped things, it did not
differentiate and classify. The material progress of the race has
kept pace with man’s power of analysis--the power to separate one
thing from another, to resolve things into their component parts
and recombine them to serve his own purposes. He gets water power,
steam power, electric power, by separating a part from the whole and
placing his machinery where they tend to unite again.
Science tends more and more to reveal to us the unity that underlies
the diversity of nature. We must have diversity in our practical
lives; we must seize Nature by many handles. But our intellectual
lives demand unity, demand simplicity amid all this complexity. Our
religious lives demand the same. Amid all the diversity of creeds
and sects we are coming more and more to see that religion is one,
that verbal differences and ceremonies are unimportant, and that
the fundamental agreements are alone significant. Religion as a key
or passport to some other world has had its day; as a mere set of
statements or dogmas about the Infinite mystery it has had its day.
Science makes us more and more at home in this world, and is coming
more and more, to the intuitional mind, to have a religious value.
Science kills credulity and superstition, but to the well-balanced
mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship
which we feel in the presence of the marvelous universe. It quiets
our fears and apprehensions, it pours oil upon the troubled waters
of our lives, and reconciles us to the world as it is. The old
fickle and jealous gods begotten by our fears and morbid consciences
fall away, and the new gods of law and order, who deal justly if
mercilessly, take their places.
“The mind of the universe which we share,” is a phrase of
Thoreau’s--a large and sane idea which shines like a star amid his
many firefly conceits and paradoxes. The physical life of each of us
is a part or rill of the universal life about us, as surely as every
ounce of our strength is a part of gravity. With equal certainty,
and under the same law, our mental lives flow from the fountain of
universal mind, the cosmic intelligence which guides the rootlets of
the smallest plant as it searches the soil for the elements it needs,
and the most minute insect in availing itself of the things it needs.
It is this primal current of life, the two different phases of which
we see in our bodies and in our minds, that continues after our own
special embodiments of it have ceased; in it is the real immortality.
The universal mind does not die, the universal life does not go out.
The jewel that trembles in the dewdrop, the rain that lends itself
to the painting of the prismatic colors of the bow in the clouds,
pass away, but their fountainhead in the sea does not pass away. The
waters may make the wonderful circuit through the clouds, the air,
the earth, and the cells and veins of living things, any number of
times--now a globule of vapor in the sky, now a starlike crystal
in the snow, now the painted mist of a waterfall, then the limpid
current of a mountain brook--and still the sea remains unchanged.
And though the life and mentality of the globe passes daily and is
daily renewed, the primal source of those things is as abounding as
ever. It is not you and I that are immortal; it is Creative Energy,
of which we are a part. Our immortality is swallowed up in this.
The poets, the prophets, the martyrs, the heroes, the saints--where
are they? Each was but a jewel in the dew, the rain, the
snowflake--throbbing, burning, flashing with color for a brief time
and then vanishing, adorning the world for a moment and then caught
away into the great abyss. “O spendthrift Nature!” our hearts cry
out; but Nature’s spending is only the ceaseless merging of one
form into another without diminution of her material or blurring
of her types. Flowers bloom and flowers fade, the seasons come and
the seasons go, men are born and men die, the world mourns for its
saints and heroes, its poets and saviors, but Nature remains and is
as young and spontaneous and inexhaustible as ever. Where is the
comfort in all this to you and to me? There is none, save the comfort
or satisfaction of knowing things as they are. We shall feel more at
ease in Zion when we learn to distinguish substance from shadow, and
to grasp the true significance of the world of which we form a part.
In the end each of us will have had his day, and can say as Whitman
does,
“I have positively appeared. That is enough.”
In us or through us the Primal Mind will have contemplated and
enjoyed its own works and will continue to do so as long as human
life endures on this planet. It will have achieved the miracle of the
Incarnation, and have tasted the sweet and the bitter, the victories
and the defeats of evolution. The legend of the birth and life of
Jesus is but this ever-present naturalism written large with parable
and miracle on the pages of our religious history. In the lives of
each of us the supreme reality comes down to earth and takes on the
human form and suffers all the struggles and pains and humiliations
of mortal, finite life. Even the Christian theory of the vicarious
atonement is not without its basis of naturalism. Men, through
disease and ignorance and half knowledge, store up an experience that
saves future generations from suffering and failure. We win victories
for our descendants, and bring the kingdom nearer for them by the
devils and evil spirits we overcome.
VII
THE FAITH OF A NATURALIST
I
To say that man is as good as God would to most persons seem like
blasphemy; but to say that man is as good as Nature would disturb
no one. Man is a part of Nature, or a phase of Nature, and shares
in what we call her imperfections. But what is Nature a part of,
or a phase of?--and what or who is its author? Is it not true that
this earth which is so familiar to us is as good as yonder morning
or evening star and made of the same stuff?--just as much in the
heavens, just as truly a celestial abode as it is? Venus seems to us
like a great jewel in the crown of night or morning. From Venus the
earth would seem like a still larger jewel. The heavens seem afar off
and free from all stains and impurities of earth; we lift our eyes
and our hearts to them as to the face of the Eternal, but our science
reveals no body or place there so suitable for human abode and human
happiness as this earth. In fact, this planet is the only desirable
heaven of which we have any clue. Innumerable other worlds exist in
the abysses of space which may be the abodes of beings superior, and
of beings inferior, to ourselves. We place our gods afar off so as
to dehumanize them, never suspecting that when we do so we discount
their divinity. The more human we are,--remembering that to err is
human,--the nearer God we are. Of course good and bad are human
concepts and are a verdict upon created things as they stand related
to us, promoting or hindering our well-being. In the councils of the
Eternal there is apparently no such distinction.
Man is not only as good as God; some men are a good deal better,
that is, from our point of view; they attain a degree of excellence
of which there is no hint in nature--moral excellence. It is
not until we treat man as a part of nature--as a product of the
earth as literally as are the trees--that we can reconcile these
contradictions. If we could build up a composite man out of all
the peoples of the earth, including even the Prussians, he would
represent fairly well the God in nature.
Communing with God is communing with our own hearts, our own best
selves, not with something foreign and accidental. Saints and
devotees have gone into the wilderness to find God; of course they
took God with them, and the silence and detachment enabled them to
hear the still, small voice of their own souls, as one hears the
ticking of his own watch in the stillness of the night. We are not
cut off, we are not isolated points; the great currents flow through
us and over us and around us, and unite us to the whole of nature.
Moses saw God in the burning bush, saw him with the eyes of early
man whose divinities were clothed in the extraordinary, the fearful,
or the terrible; we see him in the meanest weed that grows, and hear
him in the gentle murmur of our own heart’s blood. The language of
devotion and religious conviction is only the language of soberness
and truth written large and aflame with emotion.
Man goes away from home searching for the gods he carries with him
always. Man can know and feel and love only man. There is a deal of
sound psychology in the new religion called Christian Science--in
that part which emphasizes the power of the mind over the body,
and the fact that the world is largely what we make it, that evil
is only the shadow of good--old truths reburnished. This helps us
to understand the hold it has taken upon such a large number of
admirable persons. Good and evil are relative terms, but evil is only
the shadow of good. Disease is a reality, but not in the same sense
that health is a reality. Positive and negative electricity are both
facts, but positive and negative good belong to a different order.
Christian Science will not keep the distemper out of the house if
the sewer-gas gets in; inoculation will do more to prevent typhoid
and diphtheria than “declaring the truth” or saying your prayers or
counting your beads. In its therapeutical value experimental science
is the only safe guide in dealing with human corporal ailments.
We need not fear alienation from God. I feed Him when I feed a
beggar. I serve Him when I serve my neighbor. I love Him when I love
my friend. I praise Him when I praise the wise and good of any race
or time. I shun Him when I shun the leper. I forgive Him when I
forgive my enemies. I wound Him when I wound a human being. I forget
Him when I forget my duty to others. If I am cruel or unjust or
resentful or envious or inhospitable toward any man, woman, or child,
I am guilty of all these things toward God: “Inasmuch as ye have done
it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto
me.”
II
I am persuaded that a man without religion falls short of the proper
human ideal. Religion, as I use the term, is a spiritual flowering,
and the man who has it not is like a plant that never blooms. The
mind that does not open and unfold its religious sensibilities in the
sunshine of this infinite and spiritual universe, is to be pitied.
Men of science do well enough with no other religion than the love
of truth, for this is indirectly a love of God. The astronomer, the
geologist, the biologist, tracing the footsteps of the Creative
Energy throughout the universe--what need has he of any formal,
patent-right religion? Were not Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and Lyell,
and all other seekers and verifiers of natural truth among the most
truly religious of men? Any of these men would have gone to hell for
the truth--not the truth of creeds and rituals, but the truth as it
exists in the councils of the Eternal and as it is written in the
laws of matter and of life.
For my part I had a thousand times rather have Huxley’s religion than
that of the bishops who sought to discredit him, or Bruno’s than that
of the church that burnt him. The religion of a man that has no other
aim than his own personal safety from some real or imaginary future
calamity, is of the selfish, ignoble kind.
Amid the decay of creeds, love of nature has high religious
value. This has saved many persons in this world--saved them from
mammon-worship, and from the frivolity and insincerity of the crowd.
It has made their lives placid and sweet. It has given them an
inexhaustible field for inquiry, for enjoyment, for the exercise
of all their powers, and in the end has not left them soured and
dissatisfied. It has made them contented and at home wherever they
are in nature--in the house not made with hands. This house is
their church, and the rocks and the hills are the altars, and the
creed is written in the leaves of the trees and in the flowers of
the field and in the sands of the shore. A new creed every day and
new preachers, and holy days all the week through. Every walk to
the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving
ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine
are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth. There are no heretics
in Nature’s church; all are believers, all are communicants. The
beauty of natural religion is that you have it all the time; you do
not have to seek it afar off in myths and legends, in catacombs, in
garbled texts, in miracles of dead saints or wine-bibbing friars.
It is of to-day; it is now and here; it is everywhere. The crickets
chirp it, the birds sing it, the breezes chant it, the thunder
proclaims it, the streams murmur it, the unaffected man lives it.
Its incense rises from the plowed fields, it is on the morning
breeze, it is in the forest breath and in the spray of the wave. The
frosts write it in exquisite characters, the dews impearl it, and
the rainbow paints it on the cloud. It is not an insurance policy
underwritten by a bishop or a priest; it is not even a faith; it is a
love, an enthusiasm, a consecration to natural truth.
The God of sunshine and of storms speaks a less equivocal language
than the God of revelation.
Our fathers had their religion and their fathers had theirs, but
they were not ours, and could not be in those days and under those
conditions. But their religions lifted them above themselves; they
healed their wounds; they consoled them for many of the failures
and disappointments of this world; they developed character; they
tempered the steel in their nature. How childish to us seems the plan
of salvation, as our fathers found it in the fervid and, I freely
say, inspired utterances of Saint Paul! But it saved them, it built
character, it made life serious, it was an heroic creed which has
lost credence in our more knowing and more frivolous age. We see how
impossible it is, but we do not see the great natural truths upon
which it rests.
A man is not saved by the truth of the things he believes, but by the
truth of his belief--its sincerity, its harmony with his character.
The absurdities of the popular religions do not matter; what matters
is the lukewarm belief, the empty forms, the shallow conceptions of
life and duty. We are prone to think that if the creed is false, the
religion is false. Religion is an emotion, an inspiration, a feeling
of the Infinite, and may have its root in any creed or in no creed.
What can be more unphilosophical than the doctrines of the Christian
Scientists? Yet Christian Science is a good practical religion.
It makes people cheerful, happy, and helpful--yes, and helps make
them healthy too. Its keynote is love, and love holds the universe
together. Any creed that ennobles character and opens a door or a
window upon the deeper meanings of this marvelous universe is good
enough to live by, and good enough to die by. The Japanese-Chinese
religion of ancestor worship, sincerely and devoutly held, is better
than the veneer of much of our fashionable well-dressed religion.
Guided by appearances alone, how surely we should come to look upon
the sun as a mere appendage of the earth!--as much so as is the moon.
How near it seems at sunrise and sunset, and as if these phenomena
directly involved the sun, extending to it and modifying its light
and heat! We do not realize that these are merely terrestrial
phenomena, and that the sun, so to speak, knows them not.
Viewed from the sun the earth is a mere speck in the sky, and the
amount of the total light and heat from the sun that is received on
the earth is so small that the mind can hardly grasp it. Yet for all
practical purposes the sun shines for us alone. Our relation to it
could not be any more direct and sustaining if it were created for
that purpose. It is immanent in the life of the globe. It is the
source of all our energy and therefore of our life. Its bounties are
universal. The other planets find it is their sun also. It is as
special and private to them as to us. We think the sun paints the bow
on the cloud, but the bow follows from the laws of optics. The sun
knows it not.
It is the same with what we call God. His bounty is of the same
universal, impersonal kind, and yet for all practical purposes it
exists especially for us, it is immanent every moment in our lives.
There is no special Providence. Nature sends the rain upon the just
and the unjust, upon the sea as upon the land. We are here and
find life good because Providence is general and not special. The
conditions are not too easy, the struggle has made men of us. The
bitter has tempered the sweet. Evil has put us on our guard and keeps
us so. We pay for what we get.
III
That wise old Roman, Marcus Aurelius, says, “Nothing is evil which
is according to nature.” At that moment he is thinking especially of
death which, when it comes in the course of nature, is not an evil,
unless life itself is also an evil. After the lamp of life is burned
out, death is not an evil, rather is it a good. But premature death,
death by accident or disease, before a man has done his work or used
up his capital of vitality, is an evil. Disease itself is an evil,
but if we lived according to nature there would be no disease; we
should die the natural, painless death of old age. Of course there
is no such thing as absolute evil or absolute good. Evil is that
which is against our well-being, and good is that which promotes
it. We always postulate the existence of life when we speak of good
and evil. Excesses in nature are evil to us because they bring
destruction and death in their train. They are disharmonies in the
scheme of things, because they frustrate and bring to naught. The war
which Marcus Aurelius was waging when he wrote those passages was an
evil in itself, though good might come out of it.
Everything in organic nature--trees, grasses, flowers, insects,
fishes, mammals--is beset by evil of some kind. The natural order
is good because it brought us here and keeps us here, but evil has
always dogged our footsteps. Leaf-blight is an evil to the tree,
smallpox is an evil to man, frost is an evil to the insects, flood an
evil to the fishes.
Moral evil--hatred, envy, greed, lying, cruelty, cheating--is of
another order. These vices have no existence below the human sphere.
We call them evils because they are disharmonies; they are inimical
to the highest standard of human happiness and well-being. They make
a man less a man, they work discord and develop needless friction.
Sand in the engine of your car and water in the gasoline are evils,
and malice and jealousy and selfishness in your heart are analogous
evils.
In our day we read the problem of Nature and God in a new light, the
light of science, or of emancipated human reason, and the old myths
mean little to us. We accept Nature as we find it, and do not crave
the intervention of a God that sits behind and is superior to it. The
self-activity of the cosmos suffices. We accept the tornadoes and
earthquakes and world wars, and do not lose faith. We arm ourselves
against them as best we can. We accept the bounty of the rain, the
sunshine, the soil, the changing seasons, and the vast armory of
non-living forces, and from them equip or teach ourselves to escape,
endure, modify, or ward off the destructive and non-human forces that
beset our way. We draw our strength from the Nature that seems and
is so regardless of us; our health and wholeness are its gifts. The
biologic ages, with all their carnival of huge and monstrous forms,
had our well-being at heart. The evils and dangers that beset our
way have been outmatched by the good and the helpful. The deep-sea
fish would burst and die if brought to the surface; the surface life
would be crushed and killed in the deep sea. Life adapts itself
to its environment; hard conditions make it hard. Winds, floods,
inclement seasons, have driven it around the earth; the severer the
cold, the thicker the fur; compensations always abound. If Nature
is not all-wise and all-merciful from our human point of view, she
has placed us in a world where our own wisdom and mercy can be
developed; she has sent us to a school in which we learn to see her
own shortcomings and imperfections, and to profit by them.
The unreasoning, unforeseeing animals suffer more from the accidents
of nature--drought, flood, lightning--than man does; but man suffers
more from evils of his own making--war, greed, intemperance,
pestilence--so that the development in both lines goes on, and life
is still at the flood.