through supernatural ones, but when we state these processes in the
only terms in which they can be stated, the religious soul feels
hurt and orphaned. All our religious or theological explanations of
things discredit matter and the material world, discredit Nature and
all her processes. Evolution is anti-religious; that man is of animal
origin is still a hard doctrine to the old-fashioned theologian. Why
is it not equally a hard doctrine to him that we were ever babies
or embryos, carried about and associated with the viscera of our
mothers’ bodies? We have got to exalt the natural, the material, and
free our minds from the illusions of the old theologies before we can
see the truth and beauty of naturalism. The sacred, the celestial,
the divine, the holy, all are terms that date from a prescientific
age, before man’s relation to the universe was understood. They are
significant only in reference to another world and another life of an
entirely different order.
The eternal, immutable moral law to which Balfour refers, what is
it? Who instituted it? Is it other than the law of right and wrong
which mankind is coming more and more clearly to see, and more and
more fully to value in the course of evolution? You may set the
seal of some hypothetical, supernatural power upon it, but what
about supernatural powers in a universe governed by natural laws?
The religious enthusiasm of the race, the saints, the devotees, the
so-called holy ones, have doubtless had their value; they have helped
lubricate the grinding machinery of life; but their day is at an end.
We must invest our fund of love, our veneration, our heroism, our
martyrdom in this world, and not look to the next.
That Nature is irrational, unhuman, no one can deny, not because she
is less, but because she is more; she is above reason, above man.
Our reason calls Nature irrational because the reason is a special
faculty, and is limited; it takes in the arc, so to speak, but
not the full circle. Nature is irrational, not because she is not
suffused with mind, but because she does not count the cost, because
our economies do not fit her especial scheme. Life is synonymous
with intelligence; all organic nature shows the working of the primal
mind--the adaptation of means to specific ends, and the steady
improvement from lower to higher.
What we think, when trying to render an account to the reason of
the enigma of life, often has little relation to what we do, as
practical, struggling beings. We are free to think in all directions,
free to move in but few. Our thoughts are like the vapors that drift
with the winds, or that expand equally in all directions. Our actual
lives are like the waters that must flow in definite channels,
and turn some wheel or irrigate some tract of land, or quench
some creature’s thirst. That naturalism, with minds which take an
interest in it, should result in low standards of life, or in any
form of disorder or failure, I do not believe. Only clear, strong,
truth-loving spirits can accept this explanation of things. Much more
mentality is demanded than is demanded by the old conceptions. Hence
one has to face the terrible realities and discipline the spirit to
accept them. In the old views, in supernaturalism, all this is done
for one by the Church and one is a member of a personally conducted
party to heaven.
XIV. THE TIDE OF LIFE
We cannot find God by thinking. Thinking starts us on an endless
quest. We can find neither end nor beginning to the sequence of
cause and effect. It is a circle that ends and begins forever in
itself. Men find what they call God in action, in experience, because
in these practical dealings with the forces of this world they are
under the law of cause and effect. They find beginnings and endings,
they find an upper and an under side, they find a lower and a higher,
a greater and a smaller: but in thought all things are relative. Some
wise man has said that if there were no God, we should have to invent
one--invent one if we wish to explain the world in the terms of human
experience. Thinking turns the world topsy-turvy.
Our religious natures are still Ptolemaic. The heavens still revolve
around us. We do not with the eye of the flesh see ourselves in this
world as on a sphere--on a celestial body floating in space; we see
ourselves as on an endless plain over and under which the heavenly
bodies pass. It is only with the eye of the mind that we see things
in their true relation and see that there is no up and no down, no
under and no over, apart from the earth, and no God who rules as
a ruler rules. We do not gain the tremendous facts of astronomy
through our everyday experience; our search after scientific truth
reveals them to us. Through this inquiry we see the grand voyage we
are making among the stars, and see that the heavens are not a realm
apart from us, the abode of superior beings, but are our veritable
habitat; that our earth is a celestial body among myriads of others,
and that when we solemnly lift our eyes heavenward, we are lifting
them to other worlds made of the same stuff as our own. Our religious
emotions and aspirations lead us to look away from the earth and
to imagine finer and fairer realms, but disinterested science does
not humor our illusions; it brings us back to earth again, back
to the heaven we despise. Hence the trouble the narrow religious
nature has with science. It experiences a cold shudder before its
revelations and will none of it. It will have beginnings and endings,
boundaries and limitations, heavenly and earthly, and will read the
impersonal laws of the universe in terms of our personal human needs
and relations. It sets up a judge and ruler of creation modeled on
our human plan, and then to get out of the dilemma in which it finds
itself, with all the sin and misery and injustice of the world which
it finds upon its hands, and which omnipotent love and mercy could
never tolerate, dopes itself with theological casuistry that seeks
to justify the ways of God to man. It is a world-old problem. The
only way I see out of it is by purging our minds of the old dogmas
and boldly facing the reality as science shows it to us. Religion
as the world has so long used the term--that human mixture of fear,
reverence, superstition, and selfish desire--has had its day. We
may still marvel and love and admire and rejoice, but let us fear
and plead and tremble no more. There is nothing to be afraid of
worse than ourselves, and nothing to implore and propitiate farther
removed from us than the rain and the sunshine. In the end all things
work together for our good--not always for the good of to-day, or
of to-morrow, or for this man or that man, but for the good of all,
for the good which evolution brings in its train. Evolution brings
what we call evil also, but evil is a term of our human experience,
and the Infinite, the Eternal, knows it not. What is evil to one
creature in the struggle for life we have seen to be good to another,
and often what our religious fears recoil from, science sees as
the beneficent operation of law. In Nature nothing is unclean; her
chemistry meets and appropriates all, even when we flee or faint. Our
physical well-being forces upon us the conception of the clean and
the unclean, but in the processes of the Nature that sustains us both
are one.
We are adjustable creatures. We are neither sugar nor salt, neither
round nor square, neither iron nor lead; we yield and we resist,
we melt and we freeze. We are as adjustable and as adaptive as the
leaves of the forest. The firmly woven texture of the leaf, its
mobile stem, the flexible branch to which it clings, make it secure
against the ordinary vicissitudes to which it is subject.
Man is the most adaptive of all creatures; he is as local as the
turtle, and as cosmopolitan as the eagle. All climes, all conditions
of wet and dry, of plain and mountain, of sea and shore, of island
and continent, are his. His home is the world. Lately he has
conquered the air with forces of the earth. Will he yet conquer the
ether with forces of the air? Already the ether conveys his messages,
but no mechanical contrivance of his can yet lay hands upon it.
Let me again say that by the Natural Providence I mean the general
beneficence of Nature, the blind, undiscriminating, uncalculating,
inevitable beneficence which brought us here and keeps us here,
and makes it good for us to be alive, despite the vicissitudes and
the occasional apparently lesser phases of malevolence to which we
are subject. The changing seasons, the fertile soils, the rains,
the dews, the snows, the blue skies, the green earth, the flowing
streams, the gentle winds, in fact all the conditions that make life
possible and permanent, are expressions of this beneficence. The
whole movement of evolution, with all its dark and forbidding phases,
is an expression of it. Allow time enough and the turbid stream
flows itself clear, and the stream of evolution is fast losing, has
lost, most of its terrible and repellent features. At its flood, in
earlier geologic times, one may say that its waters were charged
with the elements of huge, uncouth, and terrible forms which have
been mostly eliminated; the current has cleared and purified as
it advanced; the dragons and monsters have nearly disappeared; the
reptiles have receded and left the fowl and birds; the saurians are
gone, and in their stead we have the more comely and useful forms
of mammalian life. From our human point of view--and we can have
no other--creation has refined. The tide of life is still like a
river that has its noisome and unlovely margins, but how has it
cleared and sweetened since Permian and Jurassic times! The scale
of animal life has changed, less bone and muscle and more nerve and
brains, less emphasis laid upon size and more upon wit. Only in
the insect world are the dragons and monsters, and the carnival of
blood and slaughter, repeated. In the shade of a summer tree, or in
a clover-field, one may see minute creatures pursuing or devouring
one another which, if enough times magnified, would rival any of the
dragons of the prime.
XV. FAITH FOUNDED UPON A ROCK
I
Probably that overwhelming calamity, the World War, set more good
people adrift upon the sea of religious doubt and skepticism than all
the accumulated evils of the past ten centuries. Men were everywhere
outspoken in their want of faith in the Providence in which they
had so long trusted. I heard of an English clergyman who declared
that if the Germans won in the war he would never open his Bible
again. Another English parson, with the thought of the war weighing
upon him, published a volume of discourses which he called “The
Justification of God.” But judging from my own experiences with the
book, the lay mind will find the grounds for justification as hard a
riddle to read as the original one.
Only a faith founded upon the rock of natural law can weather such a
storm as the world passed through in the Great War, but unfortunately
such a faith is possible to comparatively few--the faith that the
universe is radically good and beneficent, and that the evils of life
grow upon the same tree with the good, and that the fruits called
evil bear only a small proportion to those called good. Persons who
do not read the book of nature as a whole, who do not try their
faith by the records of the rocks and the everlasting stars, who
are oblivious to the great law of evolution which has worked out
the salvation of man and of all living things, through good and ill
report, through delays and sufferings and agonies incalculable, but
the issues of which have been unfailing, who do not see the natural
universal order working in the fiery ordeal through which all nations
during the historic period have passed, who have not learned that
the calamities of men and of peoples are not the result of the wrath
of some offended divinity, but the ups and downs in the long, hard
road of human development, and that, in the nature of things, justice
is meted out to all men--if not in a day, then in a year, or in a
thousand years; if not to the individual, then to his family, or to
his race--those who take no account of all these things soon lose
their reckoning in times like ours.
Every good deed, every noble thought, counts in the counsels of the
Eternal. Every bad deed, every ignoble thought, counts also. But the
stream tends to purify itself; the world is thus made; evil is real,
but short-lived; the remedial forces of life and nature burn it up or
convert it into good. Our fertile landscapes are the result of the
wear and tear of geologic ages; fire, flood, tornadoes, earthquakes,
volcanoes, have all had a share in shaping them. Decay and death have
fed the sources of life. Our own history as a people and the history
of the European countries exhibit a like contrast and mingling of
good and evil. We are too personal in our estimates, too limited in
our perspectives; thoughts of our own comforts and private aims are
too much with us. We must give Providence the advantage of a wiser
perspective.
The thoughtful mind, capable of viewing these things on a bigger
scale, does not need a world calamity to reveal the unsatisfactory
character of the reigning gods. The daily course of events does
that. Infantile paralysis, for example, with its long train of the
crippled, unoffending children, or a man being slowly eaten up with
cancer, or a mother losing her life in trying to save her child from
flood and fire, and scores of other similar things, show what a thin
veneer our theology puts upon ugly facts.
Our ecclesiastical faith must be housed in churches and kept warm
by vestments. The moment we take it out into the open and expose it
to unroofed and unwarmed universal nature, it is bound to suffer
from the cosmic chill. For my part, I do not have to take my
faith in out of the wet and the cold. It is an open-air faith, an
all-the-year-round faith; neither killing frosts nor killing heats
disturb it; not tornadoes nor earthquakes nor wars nor pestilence nor
famine make me doubt for one moment that the universe is sound and
good. The forces which brought us here and provided so lavishly for
our sustenance and enjoyment; that gave us our bodies and our minds;
that endowed us with such powers; that surrounded us with such beauty
and sublimity; that brought us safely through the long and hazardous
journey of evolution; that gave us the summer sun, the midnight
skies, and the revolving seasons; that gave human love and fellowship
and coöperation, childhood, motherhood, and fatherhood, and the sense
of justice and mercy, are beneficent and permanent forces. They are
directed to me personally because they are directed to all that live;
they are the cause of the living, the essence and the sum of all
life of the globe. I do not mind if you call them terrestrial forces;
the terrestrial and the celestial are one. I do not mind if you call
them material forces; the material and the spiritual are inseparable.
I do not mind if you call this view the infidelity (or atheism) of
science; science, too, is divine; all knowledge is knowledge of God.
I have never taken shelter in any form of ecclesiasticism. I
have never tried to clothe myself in the delusive garments of a
superstitious age. I have never pinned my faith to a man-made God,
however venerable. I have inured my mind to the open air of the
universe, to things as they are, to the dealings of a Power that
exacts an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; a power that deals
on the square. Those apparent outlaws of the heavens, the comets, do
not disturb the naturist; sidereal space strewn with dead worlds and
burnt-out suns do not disturb him; the spectacle of the great planets
rolling through space void of life for untold millions of years, does
not disturb him; and if life should never come to them, and should
ultimately disappear from the earth, he would not lose faith; he
could behold Europe drenched with the blood of a needless, wicked war
and not lose faith; he could see civilization retarded and the unjust
cause triumph, and still know that the Creative Energy has our good
at heart and always will have it.
II
The demand of our day is for a scientific religion--an attitude of
mind toward creation begotten by knowledge, in which fear, personal
hopes, individual good, and the so-called “other world,” play little
part. Virtuous actions, upright conduct, heroic character, the
practice of the Golden Rule, are seen to be their own reward, and
the security of the future is in well-doing and well-being in the
present. This is not religion in the old ecclesiastical sense, but
in the new scientific sense; a religion that moves us to fight vice,
crime, war, intemperance, for self-preservation and in brotherly
love, and not in obedience to theological dogma or the command of a
God; a religion that opens our eyes to the wonder and beauty of the
world, and that makes us at home in this world. The old religion is a
tree that has borne its fruit. It is dying at the top; it is feeble
at the root. It no longer touches men’s lives as of old. The great
things that are done to-day are not done in the name of religion, but
in the name of science, of humanity, of civilization. The brotherhood
that has force and meaning is no longer a sectarian brotherhood; it
is larger than all the churches combined.
The naturist must see all things in the light of his experiences in
this world. He experiences no miracles; he sees the cosmic energy as
no respecter of persons; he sees the rains falling alike upon the
just and the unjust; he sees the vast, impartial, undiscriminating
movements of Nature all about him; he learns that the land cannot
sustain life without the fertilizing rains, yet he beholds the clouds
pouring out their bounty into the sea just as freely as upon the
land; he beholds the inorganic crushing the organic all about him,
and yet he knows that the latter is nothing without the former.
If God and the universal cosmic forces are one, how surely is God
on both sides in all struggles, all causes, all wars, righteous and
unrighteous! We behold warring nations praying to the same God for
victory; we see this same God now apparently favoring one side,
now the other, and we are bewildered. Our theology takes us beyond
soundings. But the naturist is not bewildered; he can read the riddle
and reconcile the contradictions. Napoleon (if it was Napoleon)
was right when he said that God was on the side of the heaviest
artillery--the more power, the more God.
This may be a hard, chilling gospel; it is like going naked into the
storm; but how can we deny it? Can we refuse to face it?
XV
THE POET OF THE COSMOS
The world has had but one poet of the cosmos, and that was Whitman.
His mind, his sympathies, sweep through a wider orbit than those of
any other. I am bold enough to say frankly that I look upon him as
the greatest personality--not the greatest intellect, but the most
symbolical man, the greatest incarnation of mind, heart, and soul,
fused and fired by the poetic spirit--that has appeared in the world
during the Christian era.
In his lines called “Kosmos” he describes himself:
“Who includes diversity, and is Nature,
Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and
sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the
earth, and the equilibrium also,
Who has not look’d forth from the windows, the eyes, for
nothing, or whose brain held audience with messengers
for nothing,
Who contains believers and disbelievers, who is the most
majestic lover,
Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism,
spiritualism, and of the esthetic, or intellectual,
Who, having consider’d the body, finds all its organs and
parts good,
Who, out of the theory of the earth, and of his or her body,
understands by subtle analogies all other theories,
The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of
these States;
Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but
in other globes with their suns and moons,
Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day
but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations,
The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable
together.”
Let me say at once that, whatever else “Leaves of Grass” may
be, it is not poetry as the world uses that term. It is an
inspired utterance, but it does not fall under any of the usual
classifications of poetry. Lovers of Whitman no more go to him for
poetry than they go to the ocean for the pretty shells and pebbles on
the beach. They go to him for contact with his spirit; to be braced
and refreshed by his attitude toward life and the universe; for his
robust faith, his world-wide sympathies, for the breadth of his
outlook, and the wisdom of his utterances.
Whitman is first and last a seer and a philosopher, but his
philosophy is incarnated in a man; it is fluid and alive; it breathes
and talks, and loves and breeds; it nurses the sick and wounded
soldiers in the hospitals; it makes him the friend and brother of all
types of humanity, of the outcast woman not less than of the man or
woman of perfect blood:
“Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you.
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves
to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and
rustle for you.
* * * * *
“Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid
and liquid,
You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky,
For none more than you are the present and the past,
For none more than you is immortality.”
My studies of nature and of the universe help me to understand
Whitman much more than does my reading of literature itself.
Whitman is rapt and thrilled when he looks up to the midnight sky.
His very style is orbicular and concentric. The scientific aspects
of astronomy do not engage him for a moment, any more than they did
the old Hebrew prophets; his science becomes human emotion. He is the
human soul matching itself against the starry hosts, coping with them
and absorbing them:
“This day before dawn I ascended the hill and look’d at the
crowded heaven,
And I said to my spirit, _When we become the enfolders of those
orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in
them, shall we be filled and satisfied then?_
And my spirit said, _No, we but level that lift to pass and
continue beyond._”
Is there not more than astronomy in these passages?
“I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
And all I can see multiplied as high as I can cypher edges but
the rim of the farther system.
Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
Outward and outward and forever outward.
My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside
them.”
Again he says:
“It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe, moving
so exactly in its orbit for ever and ever, without one
jolt, or the untruth of a single second.”
He is filled with “the great thoughts of space and eternity,” and
common things assume new meanings in his eyes:
“I lie abstracted and hear the meanings of things and the
reason of things.
They are so beautiful I nudge myself to listen.”
Who before Whitman ever drew his poetic, his æsthetic, and ethical
standards from the earth, from the sexuality, from the impartiality
of the earth, or his laws for creations from the earth? Only the
wisest readers are prepared for their unliterary flavor:
“I swear there can be no greatness or power that does not
emulate those of the earth.
There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborates
the theory of the earth.
No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of
account, unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude
of the earth.”
We all see in Whitman, as we see in Nature, what we bring the means
of seeing. Readers of him are likely to see their own limitations
for the limitations of Whitman. It is as if we thought that the
length of our sounding-line was the measure of the ocean’s depth. It
may be so, but it is not always so. A man of strict moral and ethical
ideas, according to conventional standards, will find Whitman rank
with original sin. Is not Nature rank with the same form of evil?
Whitman did not shrink from natural tests. Naturalism was the essence
of his religion.
“Nothing out of place is good, nothing in its place is bad.”
But the good in Nature is vastly more than the evil, else you and I
would not be here, and the good in Whitman is vastly more than the
evil, or he would have been forgotten long ago.