Let me now quote and discuss a very beautiful passage from a lecture
upon Stoicism by Professor Gilbert Murray, which also displays the same
characteristic of an involuntary shaping out of God in the forms of
denial. It is a passage remarkable for its conscientious and resolute
Agnosticism. And it is remarkable too for its blindness to the
possibility of separating quite completely the idea of the Infinite
Being from the idea of God. It is another striking instance of that
obsession of modern minds by merely Christian theology of which I have
already complained. Professor Murray has quoted Mr. Bevan’s phrase for
God, “the Friend behind phenomena,” and he does not seem to realise that
that phrase carries with it no obligation whatever to believe that this
Friend is in control of the phenomena. He assumes that he is supposed to
be in control as if it were a matter of course:
“We do seem to find,” Professor Murray writes, “not only in all
religions, but in practically all philosophies, some belief that man is
not quite alone in the universe, but is met in his endeavours towards
the good by some external help or sympathy. We find it everywhere in the
unsophisticated man. We find it in the unguarded self-revelations of the
most severe and conscientious Atheists. Now, the Stoics, like many other
schools of thought, drew an argument from this consensus of all mankind.
It was not an absolute proof of the existence of the Gods or Providence,
but it was a strong indication. The existence of a common instinctive
belief in the mind of man gives at least a presumption that there must
be a good cause for that belief.
“This is a reasonable position. There must be some such cause. But it
does not follow that the only valid cause is the truth of the content of
the belief. I cannot help suspecting that this is precisely one of those
points on which Stoicism, in company with almost all philosophy up to
the present time, has gone astray through not sufficiently realising its
dependence on the human mind as a natural biological product. For it is
very important in this matter to realise that the so-called belief is
not really an intellectual judgment so much as a craving of the whole
nature.
“It is only of very late years that psychologists have begun to realise
the enormous dominion of those forces in man of which he is normally
unconscious. We cannot escape as easily as these brave men dreamed from
the grip of the blind powers beneath the threshold. Indeed, as I see
philosophy after philosophy falling into this unproven belief in the
Friend behind phenomena, as I find that I myself cannot, except for a
moment and by an effort, refrain from making the same assumption, it
seems to me that perhaps here too we are under the spell of a very old
ineradicable instinct. We are gregarious animals; our ancestors have
been such for countless ages. We cannot help looking out on the world as
gregarious animals do; we see it in terms of humanity and of fellowship.
Students of animals under domestication have shown us how the habits
of a gregarious creature, taken away from his kind, are shaped in
a thousand details by reference to the lost pack which is no longer
there--the pack which a dog tries to smell his way back to all the time
he is out walking, the pack he calls to for help when danger threatens.
It is a strange and touching thing, this eternal hunger of the
gregarious animal for the herd of friends who are not there. And it may
be, it may very possibly be, that, in the matter of this Friend behind
phenomena our own yearning and our own almost ineradicable instinctive
conviction, since they are certainly not founded on either reason or
observation, are in origin the groping of a lonely-souled gregarious
animal to find its herd or its herd-leader in the great spaces between
the stars.
“At any rate, it is a belief very difficult to get rid of.”
There the passage and the lecture end.
I would urge that here again is an inadvertent witness to the reality of
God.
Professor Murray writes of gregarious animals as though there existed
solitary animals that are not gregarious, pure individualists,
“atheists” so to speak, and as though this appeal to a life beyond one’s
own was not the universal disposition of living things. His classical
training disposes him to a realistic exaggeration of individual
difference. But nearly every animal, and certainly every mentally
considerable animal, begins under parental care, in a nest or a litter,
mates to breed, and is associated for much of its life. Even the great
carnivores do not go alone except when they are old and have done with
the most of life. Every pack, every herd, begins at some point in a
couple, it is the equivalent of the tiger’s litter if that were to
remain undispersed. And it is within the memory of men still living
that in many districts the African lion has with a change of game and
conditions lapsed from a “solitary” to a gregarious, that is to say a
prolonged family habit of life.
Man too, if in his ape-like phase he resembled the other higher apes,
is an animal becoming more gregarious and not less. He has passed
within the historical period from a tribal gregariousness to a nearly
cosmopolitan tolerance. And he has his tribe about him. He is not, as
Professor Murray seems to suggest, a solitary LOST gregarious beast. Why
should his desire for God be regarded as the overflow of an unsatisfied
gregarious instinct, when he has home, town, society, companionship,
trade union, state, INCREASINGLY at hand to glut it? Why should
gregariousness drive a man to God rather than to the third-class
carriage and the public-house? Why should gregariousness drive men out
of crowded Egyptian cities into the cells of the Thebaid? Schopenhauer
in a memorable passage (about the hedgehogs who assembled for warmth) is
flatly opposed to Professor Murray, and seems far more plausible when
he declares that the nature of man is insufficiently gregarious. The
parallel with the dog is not a valid one.
Does not the truth lie rather in the supposition that it is not the
Friend that is the instinctive delusion but the isolation? Is not the
real deception, our belief that we are completely individualised, and
is it not possible that this that Professor Murray calls “instinct”
is really not a vestige but a new thing arising out of our increasing
understanding, an intellectual penetration to that greater being of the
species, that vine, of which we are the branches? Why should not the
soul of the species, many faceted indeed, be nevertheless a soul like
our own?
Here, as in the case of Professor Metchnikoff, and in many other cases
of atheism, it seems to me that nothing but an inadequate understanding
of individuation bars the way to at least the intellectual recognition
of the true God.