which calls out this response. To certain finely-tempered spirits no
human thing is too mean to fail in making this emotional appeal. The
chief religious significance of Walt Whitman lies in his revelation
of the emotional value of the entire common human personality and
all that belongs to it. The later Athenians (as also Goethe) placed
above all things the harmonious development of the individual in its
higher forms. It still remained to show the loveliness of the complete
ordinary personality. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” cannot in this respect
be over-estimated.[14]
[14] The late William Cyples, in his charming and neglected _magnum
opus_, “The Process of Human Experience” (p. 462), rightly traces this
form of religion to the feeling generated between lovers, friends,
parent and children. “A few have at intervals walked in the world,” he
adds, “who have, each in his own original way, found out this marvel
... it has proved sufficient for them even to wish enough to help their
race; instantly these secret delights have risen in their hearts.
Straightway man in general has become to them so sweet a thing that the
infatuation has seemed to the rest of their fellows to be a celestial
madness. Beggars’ rags to their unhesitating lips grew fit for kissing,
because humanity had touched the garb; there were no longer any menial
acts, but only welcome services. It was the humblest, the easiest, the
readiest of duties to lay down life for the ignorant, the ill-behaved,
the unkind,--for any and all who did but wear the familiar human shape.
That this ecstasy of humanity should rise so much higher than any other
is according to the plain working of the law of accumulation of finer
consciousness by complexity in the occasioning activity. Remember by
how much man is the subtlest circumstance in the world; at how many
points he can attach relationships; how manifold and perennial he is in
his results. All other things are dull, meagre, tame beside him. If the
most part of us are only as dross to one another, in place of being of
this priceless value, it can only be from the lack of mutual services
among us. Without these how can we but want sufficient adaptiveness
of mood,--how can we help groaning under the weight of instincts half
organized or wholly unfulfilled?”
(3.) There is a religion of science. It is rarer than has sometimes
been supposed, and among men of science, probably, it is seldom
found. Strauss’s “Old Faith and New” is one of the chief attempts
by a man of science to present the scientific attitude as food for
the religious consciousness. The result is dreary in the extreme,
in the end almost ludicrous. Herbert Spencer’s attitude towards the
Unknowable is a distinct though faint approximation to the religious
relationship. Positivism, with its quasi-scientific notions, was
founded on a curiously narrow conception of the nature of religion,
and its religious sterility is probably inevitable. The man of science
has little to do with magnificent generalizations; he is concerned
chiefly with the patient investigation of details; it is but rarely
that he feels called upon, like Kepler or Newton, for any emotional
response to the grandeur and uniformity of law. Yet to many this vision
of universal law has come as a light moving over chaos, a glad new
discovery of the vastness and yet the homeliness of the world.
An æsthetic emotion is not necessarily religious, even within the field
of inanimate nature. So also the elusive tints, the subtle perfumes
of things, so far from liberating the soul, may excite a tormenting
desire to grasp and appropriate what is so lovely and so intangible.
Still, there is a distinct class of emotions aroused by nature which
is of the religious order. A large expanse of air or sea or undulating
land, or the placid infinity of the star-lit sky, seems necessary to
impart that enlarging and pacifying sense of nature alike to poets
and peasants. Some sight or sound of nature, either habitually, or
under some special conditions in the percipient, may strike upon the
soul and liberate it at once from the bonds of commonplace actuality.
Perhaps no modern man has better expressed the religious aspects of
nature than Thoreau. Of the American wood-thrush Thoreau can rarely
speak without using the language of religion. “All that was ripest and
fairest in the wilderness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted
to us in the strain of the wood-thrush.... Whenever a man hears it,
he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Wherever he hears it, there
is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not
shut against him. Most other birds sing, from the level of my ordinary
cheerful hours, a carol, but this bird never fails to speak to me out
of an ether purer than that I breathe, of immortal vigour and beauty.”
Generally, however, this emotion appears to be associated, not so much
with isolated beautiful objects, as with great vistas in which beauty
may scarcely inhere--
“all waste
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.”
It is indeed myself that I unconsciously project into the large and
silent world around me; the exhilaration I feel is a glad sense of the
vast new bounds of my nature. That is why, at the appearance of another
human being, I sink back immediately into the limits of my own normal
individuality. I am no longer conterminous with the world around me; I
cannot absorb or control another individuality like my own. I become a
self-conscious human being in the presence of another self-conscious
human being.
(4.) The supreme expression of the religious consciousness lies always
in an intuition of union with the world, under whatever abstract or
concrete names the infinite not-self may be hidden. The perpetual
annunciation of this union has ever been the chief gladness of life.
It comes in the guise of a κάθαρσις of egoism, a complete renunciation
of the limits of individuality--of all the desires and aims that seem
to converge in the single personality--and a joyous acceptance of what
has generally seemed an immense external Will, now first dimly or
clearly realized. In every age this intuition has found voice--voice
that has often grown wild and incoherent with the torrent of expansive
emotion that impelled it. It is this intuition which is the “emptiness”
of Lâo-tsze, the freedom from all aims that centre in self: “It is
only by doing nothing that the kingdom can be made one’s own.” This
is the great good news of the Upanishads: the _âtman_, the soul, may
attain to a state of _yoga_, of union, with the supreme _âtman_; free,
henceforth, from doubts and desires which pass over it as water passes
over the leaf of the lotus without wetting it; acting, henceforth, only
as acts the potter’s wheel when the potter has ceased to turn it: “If
I know that my own body is not mine, and yet that the whole earth is
mine, and again that it is both mine and thine--no harm can happen
then.” The Buddhist’s Nirvana, whether interpreted as a state to be
attained before or after death, has the same charm; it opens up the
kingdom of the Universe to man; it offers to the finite a home in the
infinite. This is the great assertion of Christ, “I and my Father are
one;” and whenever Christianity has reached its highest expression,
from Paul’s day to our own, it has but sung over again the old refrain
of joy at the “new birth” into eternal life--the union, as it is
said, of the soul through Christ with God--a tender Father, a great
sustaining Power on which the soul may rest and be at peace:
“E la sua volontade è nostra pace.”
And that again is but in another form the Sufiism of Jelal-ed-din--the
mystic union of the human bridegroom with the Divine Bride. Even the
austere Imperial Stoic becomes lyrical as this intuition comes to
him: “Everything is harmonious with me which is harmonious to thee,
O Universe!” As far back as we can trace, the men of all races, each
in his own way and with his own symbols, have raised this shout of
exultation. There is no larger freedom for man.
* * * * *
It seemed well to name at least the chief implications contained in
a broadly generalized statement of man’s religious relation to the
universe. It is important to remember that they are but an individual
mode of representation. I can only say that I am conscious of myself
in varying attitudes or relations. The terms of those relationships,
stated with however much probability, will ever remain matter for
dispute. Moreover, various attitudes reveal various metaphysical
implications.
The scientific attitude, for example, has a series of implications of
its own. In its solvents all things are analyzed and atomized; the
“soul” of our religious world--the vast pulsating centre, at the bottom
of which, according to the profound saying of the old mystic, lies
that unutterable sigh which we call God--is resolved into a momentary
focus of ever-shifting rays of force; it is but an incident in a huge
evolution of shifting forces which we may, if we like, personify as
Nature, but which, none the less, we cannot conceive as a whole. The
scientific attitude has its own implications, and their far-reaching
significance, their immense value for the individual and for the race,
can scarcely be overrated.
Again, the moral attitude is equally distinct. The criminal after a
successful piece of villainy may feel a thrill of ecstasy. It is indeed
well known that criminals in every country are the children of (more
or less superstitious) religion. We may regard morality as grounded
in the sense of personality, gradually extending by imagination and
sympathy to every individual. Or we may regard it as springing, in a
sense of adhesiveness, from the family and resulting relationships,
and thence growing into a consciousness of the oneness of all human
interests, the individuals finding themselves to be, according to
that Stoic conception which has moulded European laws and is still a
leavening influence in European ethics, members one with another in
the same natural body of humanity. In any case, as a moral being the
individual finds himself dependent on other individuals, and with
a duty, therefore, laid upon him to live harmoniously with those
individuals; there being no response forthcoming to the demands of his
own nature unless he also responds to the demands of other natures.
Religion, however, knows nothing of the scientific “nature” or of the
ethical “man;” its impulse is from within and of free grace.
At the dawn of civilization, it is true, religion and morals are
inextricably mingled; they only become disentangled by a gradual
evolution. The Toda who regards as sacred an ancient cattle-bell is
obeying an impulse of adoration whose foundation is, probably, largely
ethical, for the bull is intimately connected with the beginnings of
civilization. A religious impulse will sometimes have an ethical
element; morals will sometimes find an ally in religion. But religion
with its internal criterion and morals with its more external criterion
remain essentially distinct, sometimes antagonistic: “to reject
religion,” Thoreau said, “is the first step towards moral excellence.”
That is but a puny religion that is based on morals; on the other hand,
the morals that rests on religion will sooner or later collapse with it
in a common ruin. That has been too often seen. Religions change: every
man is free to have his own, or to have none. No man, scarcely even a
Crusoe, is free to have no morals, and the ideal morality cannot widely
vary for any two societies.
Yet religion cannot live nobly without science or without morals. It is
only by a strenuous devotion to science, by a perpetual reference to
the moral structure of life, that religion--so made conscious of its
nature and its limits--can be rendered healthful.
“None can usurp this height....
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest;”
so spake Moneta to Keats, among all English poets the purest artist.
A man takes sides with religion, or with science, or with
morals; oftener he spends the brief moments of his existence in
self-preservation, fighting now on one side, now on the other. But
for a little while we are allowed to enter the house of life and to
gather around its fire. Why pull each other’s hair and pinch each
other’s arms like naughty children? Well would it be to warm ourselves
at the fire together, to clasp hands, to gain all the joy that comes of
comradeship, before we are called out, each of us, into the dark, alone.
The other elements fall away from religion, leaving the emotional,
deeper and more fundamental than either of the others; just as the
brain itself is controlled by the sympathetic system which outlives it
and holds in its hands the centres of life. That element underlay the
crude imaginings of the primitive man who first created a spiritual
world out of the stuff of his dreams and his primitive delight in the
most marvellous object he saw, the sun, that as he truly divined is the
source not only of light but of life; just as it underlies also our
more complex imaginings to-day. In religion, we are appealing not to
any narrow or superficial element of the man, but to something which is
more primitive than the intellectual efflorescence of the brain, the
central fire of life itself.
Our supreme business in life--not as we made it, but as it was made
for us when the world began--is to carry and to pass on as we received
it, or better, the sacred lamp of organic being that we bear within
us. Science and morals are subservient to the reproductive activity;
that is why they are so imperative. The rest is what we will, play,
art, consolation--in one word, religion. If religion is not science
or morals, it is the sum of the unfettered expansive impulses of our
being. Life has been defined as, even physically and chemically, a
tension. All our lives long we are struggling against that tension, but
we can truly escape from it only by escaping from life itself. Religion
is the stretching forth of our hands toward the illimitable. It is an
intuition of the final deliverance, a half-way house on the road to
that City which we name mysteriously Death.
THE WALTER SCOTT PRESS, NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE.
PRESS OPINIONS ON “THE NEW SPIRIT.”
“It is easy to dislike his book, it is possible to dislike it
furiously; but the book is so honest, so earnest, so stimulating in its
tolerant but convinced unconventionality, that it claims for itself a
like sincerity and seriousness in the reader.... Mr. Ellis has produced
a book which will be hotly discussed, no doubt, for it is nothing if
not initiative, we might almost say revolutionary; but it is not a book
to be disregarded.... It has sincerity and it has power; and sincerity
and power compel at least attention.”--_Speaker._
“Mr. Havelock Ellis has discovered a ‘New Spirit.’ We have read him
with care and patience, and we should be sorry to describe it; we only
know that it is not intoxicating.”--_Scots Observer._
“Welcome is warmly due to this fresh, buoyant, and sincere volume of
essays by Mr. Havelock Ellis.... There are parts of the study of Heine
which are not unworthy to be named--it is high praise--with Matthew
Arnold’s inimitable paper upon that writer, a paper almost as classic
as Heine himself.... The last word upon so suggestive and finished a
piece of work ought to be one of ungrudging praise.”--_Academy._
“Mr. Carlyle described, it seems to us, Mr. Havelock Ellis himself with
great exactness in the person of a certain biographer of Voltaire, ‘an
inquiring, honest-hearted character, many of whose statements must have
begun to astonish even himself.’ Mr. Ellis must be very ‘inquiring,’
for we have seldom met with one who knows so many things that other
people do not know.”--_Athenæum._
“Each of these essays is a thorough and well-considered piece of
work, admirable in information, firm in grasp, stimulating in style,
appreciative in matter, and the survey afforded is broad.... It
is an altogether unusual work, both for its ambition and for its
matter; it brings the reader near to some of the marked ideas of the
time.”--_Nation._
“The points of the New Spirit are its passion for getting things
right in the matter of property and in the matter of true human
worth.”--_Daily News._
“The only coherent constituent of the New Spirit which this book
professes to set forth, is a vehement hatred, amounting to a passion,
against conventional unveracities, and a determination that they should
be swept away.... We cannot imagine anything of which it could be more
necessary for human nature, so taught [by our Lord], to purge itself,
than the New Spirit of Havelock Ellis.”--_Spectator._
“Mr. Havelock Ellis has written an interesting and significant book,
which it is quite easy to ridicule, but which certainly deserves a fair
hearing.... Apparently these writers are chosen because they all agree
in a hatred of shams, in looking facts in the face, and in demanding
provision for the healthy satisfaction of animal wants.... Mr. Ellis
writes with force and insight; but, whether from brevity or want of
caution, he leaves with regard to these subjects an impression which he
would probably not himself desire to produce.”--_Murray’s Magazine._
“The concluding chapter, wherein Mr. Ellis expresses his own ‘intimate
thought and secret emotion,’ is one of the best utterances of the New
Spirit which we have ever read.”--_Echo._
“Un volume de haute critique littéraire qui rappelle le style fort et
la méthode stricte de Hennequin.”--_Mercure de France._
“A more foolish, unwholesome, perverted piece of sentimental cant we
have never wasted our time over.”--_World._
“Excellent examples of appreciative criticism of an exceedingly
interesting series of authors, of whom every one ought to know
at least as much as Mr. Ellis here tells us so freshly and
vivaciously.”--_Scottish Leader._
“We only refer to this unpleasant compilation of cool impudence and
effrontery to warn our readers against it.”--_Dundee Advertiser._
“Beautiful both in thought and expression. But Mr. Ellis seems to have
laid aside altogether the wise restraint which characterises his volume
on ‘The Criminal.’... The scientific spirit, of which at other times he
has shown himself a distinguished exponent, should have prevented him
from such error.”--_Arbroath Herald._
“Ardent, enthusiastic, and eloquent.”--_Boston Literary World._
“It is not often that the weary and heart-sore reviewer, struggling to
keep abreast of the Protean outpourings of the press, falls in with
anything so well informed, so rich in thought and suggestion as _The
New Spirit_.”--_Wit and Wisdom._
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