not be able to form a concept of it as we do of matter. We cannot
visualize it. We know it only through its effects upon tangible
bodies. Why may there not be a principle of life or vitality as
real as is energy--another form of energy which we can know only
through its effects upon matter; inseparably bound up with matter as
energy is; not with all matter, but with a limited amount of matter,
as is magnetism--a peculiar form of force or energy, dependent
for its manifestations upon well-defined conditions and reaching
its highest manifestations in the mind or consciousness of man.
Spirit, as we name it, is only a word which stands for no verifiable
reality--something separable from matter and independent of it.
What victims we are of words! When we get a name for a thing we are
persuaded the thing exists. The vital process is inseparable from
the physical processes; it supplements or controls them, but is more
than they are. Life is not a spirit, but a form of energy potential
in matter, and developed and active when the conditions are right.
A living body is moved by a new force just as truly as a piece of
magnetized steel is moved by a new force, or as truly as a new force
streams through the telegraph-wires--a transformation of other
forces, and behaving in a new way, and producing new results. There
is nothing new under the sun; all are made of one stuff; but there
are endless transformations and permutations of this one stuff, and
one of them is the phenomenon of life, or vitality.
Electricity is not matter, but it is the most unmistakable and
ubiquitous form of energy known to us. The human mind is a phenomenon
of matter; how related to the electro-magnetic world we know not, but
undoubtedly in some way bound up with it.
To discuss the soul or attempt to interpret it in terms of these
mundane forces will, of course, offend the so-called spiritualists.
So long have we been taught to look upon the soul as belonging to
another world, another order of things from that of the body. Whitman
says that soul and body are one, and leaves his puzzled reader to
solve the riddle as best he can. Heaven and earth are one in the same
sense--there is nothing alien or irreconcilable between them. The
flower and its stalk, the perfume and the root, are one in the same
sense. The mind resides in the gray matter of the brain, and depends
upon the food we eat as truly as does the body.
When we discuss these questions in terms of our religious training
we reach far different conclusions, or, rather, we start with far
different conclusions; but how can we relate these conclusions to the
concrete facts as we know them?
There is enough that is verifiable in clairvoyance and mind-reading
and mental healing to convince us that we are immersed in a world
of subtle forces that ordinarily we wot not of; that in some way a
process of give and take between us and these things is constantly
going on, and that our relation to them is at least one form or
suggestion of our immortality. We are a part of the wave of energy
that sweeps through the cosmos, as truly as the drops of the sea hold
and convey the tidal impulse. We know, or think we know, the sources
of this tidal impulse, but the attraction between earth and moon and
sun is reciprocal--a give-and-take process--and is only a phase of
the sum total (if the Infinite can be said to have a sum total) of
the energy of the cosmos.
The magnet and magnetism are one. If you melt or pulverize the
magnet, you dissipate, but do not destroy the magnetism. The clouds
come and go; now we see them, and then there is only blue sky where
they were. Change, but not destruction. When the thunder-cloud
disperses, where are its terrible bolts? Withdrawn, probably, or
redistributed into the inmost recesses of matter or of the ether. The
energy of the human brain and body cannot be destroyed by death, only
changed. If consciousness is a force, then it, too, must persist. It
seems, in some way, the equivalent of the force of the body, at least
one of its phenomena. But is it anything more than the analogue of
the light which the electric spark emits, and which is light only
to the eye? Consciousness is such only to itself; it cannot be seen
or felt or known by other consciousnesses. What we know about the
consciousnesses of others, we know through our own.
In the presence of the death of our friends no doubt this is a
cheerless and depressing kind of philosophy, but in the pursuit of
truth, if we are sincere, we do not seek to administer to, or to warm
and cheer our human affections. Our seriousness will be measured
by the extent to which we put all these things behind us. Heroic
self-denial finds a field here as well as in the struggles of life.
We do not want to cheer ourselves with illusions, no matter how
welcome they are. “All’s right with the world.” The laws of life and
death are as they should be. The laws of matter and force are as they
should be; and if death ends my consciousness, still is death good.
I have had life on those terms, and somewhere, somehow, the course
of nature is justified. I shall not be imprisoned in that grave where
you are to bury my body. I shall be diffused in great Nature, in the
soil, in the air, in the sunshine, in the hearts of those who love
me, in all the living and flowing currents of the world, though I may
never again in my entirety be embodied in a single human being. My
elements and my forces go back into the original sources out of which
they came, and these sources are perennial in this vast, wonderful,
divine cosmos.
XIV
SOUNDINGS
I. THE GREAT MYSTERY
No man in his senses can fail to grant the reality of the Great
Mystery, the inscrutable and unspeakable Something which lies back of
us and works in and through us, the vast Cosmic Energy of which we
and all forms of life are manifestations, and in which we live and
move and have our being, call it physical energy or psychic power, or
what you will.
We are not here by our wills; we do not have our eyes and ears,
and the other wonderful mechanisms of our bodies, and all our
varied instincts and capacities and aspirations of our own will and
invention. We have little or nothing to do with the functioning of
our various bodily organs, scarcely more than we have to do with the
color of our eyes, our innate dispositions, and our mental aptitudes.
In something not of us, at least not subject to our wills and
wishes, is to be sought the explanation of our appearance, and that
of all other forms of life, in this world. In other words, we are
an integral part of a system of things which transcends our powers
and baffles our understanding. After we have granted all this, can
we still feel the solid ground beneath our feet in accepting the
explanation and interpretation which any of the formal religious
systems, old or new, place upon it? I think not.
In the presence of the midnight skies, of the creative and
destructive cosmic processes constantly going on in the awful depths
of the sidereal space, of suns and systems coming in and going out
like blooming and fading flowers, in the presence of the geological
and biological histories of the globe, or of the histories of the
different nations and races of the globe, does not most of our
Christian mythology seem utterly childish?
How strange that we should crave a creed or a belief that goes
outside of our experimental knowledge; that is independent of it,
not subject to its tests and limitations; something afar off and
irrational and inexplicable, and beyond the reach of time and change!
Who is the philosopher who said that we are guided by our common
sense in everything but our religious beliefs?
We can taste and see and touch and smell and eat and drink and
measure and accumulate and organize and assimilate scientific
knowledge; it gives us a place whereon to stand our Archimedean lever
with which we can move the world and the whole sidereal system of
worlds. But with our so-called theological knowledge, and with much
of our metaphysical knowledge, it is like trying to move with a lever
the mountain upon which one stands.
Furthermore, grant that the religious sense of mankind is real, one
of the most real things in life,--so real and valuable that the
life, the literature, and the art which have it not seem shallow
and ephemeral,--a living sense of the Infinite Mystery in which we
are embosomed and our constant relation to it,--grant this, I say,
and yet our creeds and systems of salvation do not minister to it.
They are too legal; they know and explain too much. With them the
administration of the universe is as simple and judicial as a police
court, save that in human courts of justice there is no deputed sin
or atonement. This is a gratuitous, manufactured mystery of the
theologians, as are the Trinity and the saving grace of rites and
ceremonies.
Science has real mysteries. Catalysis is one. How or why the presence
of one body should cause two other bodies to unite chemically without
parting with an atom of their own substance--as in several cases in
industrial chemistry--is certainly a mystery. On the strength of such
and similar facts in chemistry, shall we image or invent a whole
category of mysteries which are beyond the reach of verification?
What mystery hovers about all chemical reactions! What a miracle
that two invisible gases, such as oxygen and hydrogen, should, when
chemically united, produce a body so utterly unlike either as is
water! The turning of water into wine is as nothing in comparison,
but even that feat we want to see done if we are to believe it.
What a mystery shrouds the whole subject of electricity and
electro-magnetism! A sort of disembodied force, working its will upon
matter and yet subject to none of the laws of matter. Spirit?--but a
spirit we can evoke at will, and make to do our bidding, to run our
errands, a spirit more friendly than unfriendly. How prone the common
mind is to think that because a thing is mysterious it must be true!
As I have already emphasized, as man is a part of Nature, so are all
his creeds and myths, his religions and his philosophies, a part of
Nature. What validity does that give them? What support is lent to
our creed by the fact that it has been slowly evolved out of the
religious experiences of the centuries? Our sense of truth is also
an evolution, and varies from age to age. That a thing is a part
of Nature does not settle its value. Shadows are a part of Nature;
puff-balls, fungi, marsh-gas, disease-germs, and a thousand other
undesirable things are a part of Nature.
Although the various religious systems of mankind must have their
natural history, I regard them only as so many diverse attempts to
clothe the spirit against the cosmic chill of the vast, unhoused,
unsanctified, immeasurable out-of-doors of the universe. This they
do in varying degrees, and will continue to do, some appealing to
one type of mind, or--shall we say?--one stage of development, some
to another. The philosopher looks on and smiles, or pities, and is
content.
II. THE NATURAL ORDER
Even great thinkers like Mr. Balfour recoil from naturalism and
cheerfully embrace supernaturalism. Mr. Balfour finds the key to the
fundamental problems of life in the miracle of the Incarnation. He
injects into the natural order a theological concept, and the riddle
of man’s life is solved. To the naturalist such a conclusion is as
impossible as to hope to quench his thirst with the symbols, H_{2}O.
We may say every man born of woman is an incarnation of the
Infinite spirit, and the hyperbole may stand, but to affirm that
one particular man in the historic period was an incarnation in an
entirely other and more significant sense, is to read magic into
matters of common sense. It is an imaginary solution. It is an appeal
from the natural to the non-natural. It is offering an artificial
solution to a natural problem. One might as well attribute a failure
of the crops to one of the political parties, or an epidemic of
disease to an historical document. The doctrine of the Incarnation
is as far outside the realm of natural law as is magic, and to see
in this the master key to creation is like ascribing all the sin
and misery of the world to Adam’s transgression in the Garden of
Eden. The childish plan of salvation of our fathers is as good as
any other so long as it holds men up to higher standards of life and
of thought; but the day is fast passing when it can do this; natural
standards must in the end as surely prevail in religion as in our
daily lives.
The nature that we see about us is enough for all forms of life
except man; why should he flatter himself that his appearance and
life demand something extra, some miracle, something mysterious and
incomprehensible? Why not invest the gods we have and know with the
extra power demanded, rather than appeal to gods we know not? How
the fire warms us, how our food nourishes us, how we sprang from a
microscopic germ and grew to be the men we are, are miracles enough.
Every living thing is a miracle as wonderful as the Immaculate
Conception or the Incarnation, but of a different order. If I knew
how the meat and bread which the poet eats is turned into poetry,
or how the pond-lily weaves its satin and gold out of the muck and
slime of the creek-bottom, I should possess a secret that would make
me cease to wonder at the so-called “miracles.” In the face of the
marvels we hourly see about us in living Nature, why should we look
afar off and invent marvels of a new order? Why should we invent
impossible problems, and then invent impossible explanations of them?
The nature gods we know; we live in daily and hourly converse with
them; we see and know that we are dependent upon them every moment
of our lives. These gods--air, water, fire, earth--and the greater
gods whose eyes blink to us in the midnight skies, why not credit
them with the gifts that we ascribe to the imaginary gods of the
supernatural?
The more we search into the ways of Nature, the more wonderful and
potent we find them to be. It may be that if we could penetrate to
the true inwardness of matter, we should find the key to the mystery
of the soul and the master key to all our problems. But we feel that
we must look afar off, we must have recourse to the strange and the
miraculous. How the impossible does attract us! Even the fantastic
may be made the basis of a religious cult. In Florida, in a remote,
secluded place we found a religious sect, embracing men and women
of culture and refinement, who upheld the social and civic virtues
and cultivated the industrial arts, yet who deemed it essential for
their soul’s salvation to disbelieve all our popular astronomy, and
hold to the idea that, instead of living on the outside of a globe,
we live inside of a hollow sphere, and that the sun, moon, and stars
are appendages of this sphere, and not at all what we ordinarily take
them to be. The expounders of this faith are not at all disturbed by
such facts as a ship at sea dropping below the horizon, or an eclipse
of the moon showing the shadow of a round body falling upon it.
Such appearances only confirm their theory. These Florida fanatics
defy common sense and the exact demonstrations of science. Our
supernaturalists superinduce another order above and around the order
we call “natural,” and in a theological concept, the Incarnation,
link the two together. That they are linked at any other point is not
claimed. In the age of miracles they were linked at many points and
on many occasions. Any saint could link them together at will, and
reverse or hold up the processes of the natural order and substitute
those of the supernatural.
Such events as miracles come very easy to the mind imbued with the
old theological concepts. Why should not this omnipotent being who
made and rules the world and all that it holds, and who has a scheme
of his own to carry out with regard to man, step in at any time and
annul natural law or link it up with the supernatural? Belief in the
theory of such a being cuts many knots, while it ties others that
defy all our wits.
Life is so great a mystery that we need not invent others. We have
the proof of life always, what proof have we of the Incarnation? We
know what destroys life, what favors it, what conserves it, but we
do not know its origin. We know something about the stars, and we
know the constellations are only imaginary groupings. The historical
events upon which our creeds are founded are of the same character.
The Trinity is a constellation. The miraculous birth of Christ is a
constellation. The fixed stars of man’s moral nature and religious
aspirations are alone real. All the mythologies built upon them are
as fanciful as Orion and the Big Dipper. All the various religions of
the world, with all their supernatural features, are a part of the
natural history of man’s religious instincts. Man’s craving for the
supernatural is as natural as our discounting of the present moment,
and no more significant. The natural becomes trite and commonplace
to us and we take refuge in an imaginary world above and beyond it.
The understanding becomes sated, and we long for something we cannot
understand.
III. LOGIC AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS
Of late years I am often moved to say to myself: “Why kick the old
theology after it is dead?”--as I have often been tempted to do.
It is almost like spurning the bodies of one’s father and mother.
The old creeds may be outworn, but they have fathered and mothered
us all. They have served and saved untold generations of men.
Christianity, mythical and irrational as much of it is, has yet been
the salvation of the world for nineteen centuries. Of course it has
been a source of evil as well as of good, as all religions are, but
the good has greatly predominated. In fact, it is the bed-rock upon
which our civilization is founded. It has saved men in this world by
inspiring them with the desire to be worthy of a better and future
world.
We are saved, I often say, not so much by the truth of what we
believe, as by the truth of our belief, by its genuineness, its power
over our imaginations, its hold upon our character, its fostering
of an incentive to right conduct and noble deeds. Whether it be
Catholicism or Calvinism or Methodism or Quakerism or Christian
Science or the Japanese ancestor worship or Buddhism, if it holds us
to higher ideals and gives sobriety and sincerity to our lives, that
is its true function.
In fact, any religion is good which supplies a man or a people with
a workable theory of the universe. In practical matters, in dealing
with real facts and forces, man is compelled to be logical or he
comes to grief--he must keep fire and powder apart. But in his
religion and speculations he is bound by no such necessity; he is
free to indulge the wildest dreams.
Man does not expect fire or flood or frost or wind or rain to favor
him. He does not put fluids in leaky vessels, nor a leaky roof
over his head, nor plant his house on a foundation of sand. His
carpenter’s level does not lie, nor his plumb-line make a mistake.
But in his religion he may be as capricious and fantastic as he
pleases; he has a free hand; he may even flog his gods if they
displease him, and it is all the same. His creed is a passport to an
entirely different world.
The religious sect which I visited in Florida, which held that we
live upon the inside of a hollow sphere, treated our astronomy with
scorn, yet seemed to live sober, sane lives, and to do honest work.
But if they carried out the theory of the hollow sphere in practice,
in their navigation, in their clocks and sun-dials, or in anything
else, how quickly they would come to grief!
Christianity is a workable hypothesis; it solves the problem of
life to vast numbers of persons; but how irrational and puerile its
philosophy, founded upon the myth of the fall of Adam in the Garden
of Eden! Destroy this myth and you have cut off the tap-root of
Christianity. But do we not know, in the light of evolution, that
man’s course has been upward and not downward, that his “fall” was,
in fact, development into a higher state of being?
Thinking men must find some sort of a solution of the problems of the
universe, and feeling men and women must have some tangible, concrete
thing that in a measure satisfies their emotional natures. The human
heart cannot live on cold philosophical abstractions. The ceremonies
and observances and rituals of the Church give one something he can
see and feel. For my own part I do not need this sort of thing. Every
day is a Sabbath day to me. All pure water is holy water, and this
earth is a celestial abode. It has not entered into the mind of any
man to see and feel the wonders and the mysteries and the heavenly
character of this world.
All religions look away from the earth to some fairer and better
abode, quite oblivious of the fact that heaven, wherever we find it,
will be of our own making. If we do not find it here, we shall not
find it anywhere. But the great mass of struggling, toiling, human
kind must be comforted and encouraged by the prospect of emancipation
from the grossness and suffering of this world. Goethe acutely said
to let those who could not have literature or art or science, have
religion.
Think of the many sturdy, God-fearing, church-going, simple folk one
has known in his youth--how impossible their creeds, but how worthy
their lives! It requires the heroic fiber to accept the creed of
Calvinism; it is a proposition that tries a man’s mettle. The current
generation is too frivolous and empty to be impressed by it; not
one in a thousand is man enough to accept it. The movies suit them
better. But what granite stuff went to the making of our Pilgrim
fathers!
Cease all Christian effort, all organized Christian charities, all
Christian enterprises in the fields of education, social betterment,
sanitation, amelioration of the masses, and our civilization would
suffer. Then why rail at the old creeds, I say again. They prepared
the way for science, and for the religion of nature. Carlyle said
to Emerson on that memorable day in 1833 when the two sat down in
their walk over the Scottish hills, “Christ died on the tree: that
built Dunscore kirk yonder: that brought you and me together.” The
old creeds nursed heroic, God-fearing and God-loving men. True, they
sometimes disguised the wolf in sheep’s clothing also, but that is
the fault of human nature.
Let us be as faithful to our day and generation as our fathers were
to theirs. Wendell Phillips said that to be as good as our fathers
were, we must be a good deal better. Shall we rail at our Puritan
ancestors for the hardness of their creeds? Although the Pauline plan
of salvation seems childish to us, it seemed the foundation of the
universe for our fathers. To clinch a nail you need something hard,
and the Calvinistic creed has clinched the resolution of many a man.
IV. A CHIP FROM THE OLD BLOCK
It makes me more charitable toward my neighbor’s creed, childish
though I think it is, to remember that it came out of his life,
or out of the life around him, as truly as did my own. We cannot
separate man, and all that revolves around him, from the totality
of things. There is no depravity or cruelty or perversion in the
world that is not fed by the life of the world. The war that has
depopulated and devastated Europe is just as legitimate a part
of total Nature as were all the fruits of the ages of peace and
prosperity. Everything in the woods is a part of the woods, and bears
their stamp; everything in the sea is a part of the sea. The tumor,
the ulcer, and the disease, are a part of our bodies, and are fed by
its vitality. In our practical lives we are compelled to separate
a part from the whole, to accept this and reject that, but when we
essay to comprehend the whole we must see that all are but parts, and
that our philosophy is lame if it does not see that the so-called
good and the so-called bad are fruit of the same tree.
We are prone to separate ourselves from the rest of Nature and to
claim for ourselves much that we deny to all other animals, such as
the existence of the soul, and its immortality. But we are all of
one stuff. Out of the earth has come a creature that has changed the
surface of the earth over vast areas; that has changed the course of
rivers, and the face of continents; that has harnessed the forces of
the earth and turned them against themselves. How the earth elements
came to organize themselves into this creature--here we can take no
step!
V. A PERSONAL GOD
I once heard an Irish laborer refer solemnly, with an upward lift
of the head, to the man up above. He did not refer to the man down
below, but no doubt might have done so had occasion required. If we
have one, we must have the other to keep the balance. The man up
above must keep his skirts clean, and to admit of this the man down
below must be the scapegoat.
How long has the belief in the reality of these two manlike beings,
the one all good, the other all evil, ruled in the minds and hearts
of men! The old Hebrew prophets were drunk with the idea of a manlike
Jehovah. A terrible man they made of him--a cruel, despotic ruler,
wreaking his vengeance on his enemies, exacting an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth, a lover of righteousness, but a vengeful,
jealous, angry God. And the man down below was his fit counterpart,
blocking and marring or defeating the plans of the man up above.
These conceptions go with the infancy of the human reason.