My present and concluding lecture must begin with some explanations of
what I mean by the term "The Unity of the Spirit." Then I shall have
to define my use of the term "The Invisible Church." Thereafter, we
shall be free to devote ourselves to the consideration of a source of
religious insight as omnipresent as it is variously interpreted by
those who, throughout all the religious world, daily appeal to its
guidance. The outcome of our discussion may help some of you, as I
hope, to turn your attention more toward the region where the greatest
help is to be found in the cultivation of that true loyalty which, if
I am right, is the heart and core of every higher religion.
I
In these lectures I have repeatedly called the religious objects, that
is, the objects whereof the knowledge tends to the salvation of man,
"superhuman" and "supernatural" objects. I have more or less fully
explained, as I went, the sense in which {258} I hold these objects to
be both superhuman and supernatural. But every use of familiar
traditional terms is likely to arouse misunderstandings. I have
perfectly definite reasons for my choice of the traditional words in
question as adjectives wherewith to characterise the religious
objects. But I do not want to leave in your minds any doubts as to
what my usage is deliberately intended to imply. I do not want to seem
to make any wrong use of the vaguer associations which will be in your
minds when something human is compared with something superhuman, and
when the natural and the supernatural are contrasted. This closing
lecture, in which I am to deal with an aspect of spiritual life which
we have everywhere in our discourse tacitly presupposed, but which now
is to take its definitive place on our list of sources of religious
insight, gives me my best opportunity to forestall useless
misunderstandings by putting myself upon record as to the precise
sense in which both the new source itself and everything else
superhuman and supernatural to which religion has a rational right to
appeal is, to my mind, a reality, and is a source or an object of
human insight. I shall therefore explain the two adjectives just
emphasised by giving you a somewhat fuller account of their sense than
I have heretofore stated. If the new account touches upon technical
matters, I hope that, by our long list of illustrations of the
superhuman and of the supernatural, we have now sufficiently prepared
the way.
{259}
In my general sketch of the characteristics of human nature which
awaken in us the sense of our need for salvation, I laid stress, both
in our first and in our second lectures, upon our narrowness of
outlook as one principal and pervasive defect of man as he naturally
is constituted. I illustrated this narrowness by some of its most
practically noteworthy instances. Repeatedly I returned, in later
discussions, to this same feature of our life. Now man's narrowness of
natural outlook upon life is first of all due to something which I
have to call the "form" of human consciousness. What I mean by this
form, I have already illustrated to you freely by the very instances
to which I have just referred. But technical clearness as to such
topics is hard to attain. Allow me, then, to insist with some care
upon matters which are as influential in moulding our whole destiny as
they are commonly neglected in our discussions of the problems of life
and of reality.
_Man can attend to but a very narrow range of facts at any one
instant._ Common-sense observation shows you this. Psychological
experiment emphasises it in manifold ways. Listen to a rhythmic series
of beats--drum beats--or the strokes of an engine, or the feet of
horses passing by in the street. You cannot directly grasp with entire
clearness more than a very brief sequence of these beats, or other
sounds, or of rhythmic phrases of any kind. If the rhythm of a
regularly repeated set of sounds is too {260} long, or too complex, it
becomes confused for you. You cannot make out by your direct attention
what it is at least until it has by repetition grown familiar. Let
several objects be brought before you at once. You can attend to one
and then to another at pleasure if only they stay there to be attended
to. But only a very few distinct objects can be suddenly seen at once,
and at a single glance, and recognised, through that one instantaneous
presentation, for what they are. If the objects are revealed to you in
the darkness by an electric spark, or are seen through a single slit
in a screen that rapidly moves before your eyes--so that the objects
are exposed to your observation only during the extremely brief time
when the slit passes directly between them and your eyes--this limit
of your power to grasp several distinct objects at once, upon a single
inspection, can be experimentally tested. The results of such
experiments concern us here only in the most general way. Enough--as
such tests show--what one may call the span of our consciousness, its
power to grasp many facts in any one individual moment of our lives,
is extremely limited. It is limited as to the number of simultaneously
presented facts that we can grasp at one view, can distinguish, and
recognise, and hold clearly before us. It is also limited with regard
to the number and the duration of the successive facts that we can so
face as directly to grasp the character of their succession, rhythmic
or otherwise.
{261}
Now this limitation of the span of our consciousness is, I repeat, an
ever-present defect of our human type of conscious life. That is why I
call it a defect in the "form" of our conscious life. It is not a
defect limited to the use of any one of our senses. It is not a
failure of eyes or of ears to furnish to us a sufficient variety of
facts to observe. On the contrary, both our eyes and our ears almost
constantly rain in upon us, especially during our more desultory
waking life, an overwealth of impressions. If we want to know facts,
and to attain clearness, we have to pick out a few of these
impressions, from instant to instant, for more careful direct
inspection. In any case, then, this limitation is not due to the
defects of our senses. It is our whole conscious make-up, our
characteristic way of becoming aware of things, which is expressed by
this limitation of our conscious span. On this plan our human
consciousness is formed. Thus our type of awareness is constituted. In
this way we are all doomed to live. It is our human fate to grasp
clearly only a few facts or ideas at any one instant. And so, being
what we are, we have to make the best of our human nature.
Meanwhile, it is of our very essence as reasonable beings that we are
always contending with the consequences of this our natural narrowness
of span. We are always actively rebelling at our own form of
consciousness, so long as we are trying to know or to do anything
significant. We want to grasp {262} many things at once, not merely a
few. We want to survey life in long stretches, not merely in
instantaneous glimpses. We are always like beings who have to see our
universe through the cracks that our successive instants open before
us, and as quickly close again. And we want to see things, not through
these instantaneous cracks, but without intervening walls, with wide
outlook, and in all their true variety and unity. Nor is this
rebellion of ours against the mere form of consciousness any merely
idle curiosity or peevish seeking for a barren wealth of varieties.
Salvation itself is at stake in this struggle for a wider clearness of
outlook. The wisest souls, as we have throughout seen, agree with
common-sense prudence in the desire to see at any one instant greater
varieties of ideas and of objects than our form of consciousness
permits us to grasp. To escape from the limitations imposed upon us by
the natural narrowness of our span of consciousness--by the form of
consciousness in which we live--this is the common interest of science
and of religion, of the more contemplative and of the more active
aspects of our higher nature. _Our form of consciousness is one of our
chief human sorrows._
By devices such as the rhythmic presentation of facts to our attention
we can do something--not very much--to enlarge our span of
consciousness. But for most purposes we can make only an _indirect,_
not a _direct,_ escape from our limitations of span. Our salvation
depends upon the winning of such {263} indirect successes. Indirectly
we escape, in so far as we use our powers of habit-forming, of memory,
and of abstraction, to prepare for us objects of momentary experience
such as have come to acquire for us a wide range of meaning, so that,
when we get before our momentary attention but a few of these objects
at once, we still are able to comprehend, after our human fashion,
ranges and connections and unities of fact which the narrow form of
our span of consciousness forbids us to grasp with directness. Thus,
the repetition of similar experiences forms habits such that each
element of some new instant of passing experience comes to us
saturated with the meaning that, as we look back upon our past life,
we suppose to have resulted from the whole course of what has
happened. And through such endlessly varied processes of
habit-forming, we come to reach stages of insight in which the
instantaneous presentation of a few facts gets for us, at a given
moment, the value of an indirect appreciation of what we never
directly grasp--that is, the value of a wide survey of life. All that
we usually call knowledge is due to such indirect grasping of what the
instant can only hint to us, although we usually feel as if this
indirect presentation were itself a direct insight. Let me exemplify:
The odour of a flower may come to us burdened with a meaning that we
regard as the total result of a whole summer of our life. The wrinkled
face of an old man reveals to us, in its momentarily presented {264}
traces, the signs of what we take to have been his lifetime's
experience and slowly won personal character. And, in very much the
same way, almost any passing experience may seem to us to speak with
the voice of years, or even of ages, of human life. To take yet
another instance: a single musical chord epitomises the result of all
our former hearings of the musical composition which it introduces.
In this way we live, despite our narrowness, _as if_ we saw widely;
and we constantly view _as if it were_ our actual experience, a sense
and connection of things which actually never gets fully translated in
any moment of our lives, but is always simply presupposed as the
interpretation which a wider view of life _would_ verify. Thus bounded
in the nutshell of the passing instant, we count ourselves (in one way
or another, and whatever our opinions), kings of the infinite realm of
experience, or would do so were it not that, like Hamlet, we have so
many "bad dreams," which make us doubt the correctness of our
interpretations, and feel our need of an escape from this stubborn
natural prison of our own form of consciousness. We therefore appeal,
in all our truth-seeking, to a wider view than our own present view.
Our most systematic mode of indirect escape from the consequences of
our narrow span of consciousness, is the mode which our thinking
processes, that is, our dealings with abstract and general ideas
exemplify.
{265}
Such abstract and general ideas, as we earlier saw, are means to
ends--never ends in themselves. By means of generalisation or
abstraction we can gradually come to choose signs which we can more or
less successfully substitute for long series of presented objects of
experience; and we can also train ourselves into active ways of
estimating or of describing things--ways such, that by reminding
ourselves of these our active attitudes toward the business of life,
we can seem to ourselves to epitomise in an instant the sense of years
or even of ages of human experience. Such signs and symbols and
attitudes constitute our store of general and abstract ideas. Our more
or less systematic and voluntary thinking is a process of observing,
at one or another instant, the connections and the meanings of a very
few of these our signs and attitudes at once. We actively put together
these ideas of ours, and watch, at the instant, the little connections
that then and there are able to appear, despite the narrowness of our
span of consciousness. That, for instance, is what happens when we add
up columns of figures, or think out a problem, or plan our practical
lives. But because each of the ideas used, each of these signs or
symbols or attitudes, can be more or less safely substituted for some
vast body of facts of experience, what we observe only in and through
our narrow span can indirectly help us to appreciate something whose
real meaning only a very wide range of experience, a consciousness
whose {266} span is enormously vaster than ours, could possibly
present directly.
Thus, confined to our own form and span of consciousness as we are, we
spend our lives in acquiring or devising ways to accomplish indirectly
what we are forbidden directly to attain, namely, the discovery of
truth and of meaning such as only a consciousness of another form than
ours can realise. Now, as I maintained in our third and fourth
lectures, _the whole validity and value of this indirect procedure of
ours depends upon the principle that such a wider view of things, such
a larger unity of consciousness, such a direct grasp of the meanings
at which we indirectly but ceaselessly aim is a reality in the
universe._ As I there maintained, _the whole reality of the universe
itself must he defined, in terms of the reality of such an inclusive
and direct grasp of the whole sense of things._ I can here only repeat
my opinion that this thesis is one which nobody can deny without
self-contradiction.
Now the difference between the narrow form of consciousness that we
human beings possess and the wider and widest forms of consciousness
whose reality every common-sense effort to give sense to life, and
every scientific effort to discover the total verdict of experience
presupposes--the difference, I say, between these two forms of
consciousness is _literally_ expressed by calling the one form (the
form that we all possess) _human,_ and by calling the other form (the
form of a wider consciousness which views {267} experience as it is)
_superhuman._ The wider conscious view of things that we share only
indirectly, through the devices just pointed out, is certainly not
human; for no mortal man ever directly possesses it. It is real; for,
as we saw in our study of the reason, if you deny this assertion in
one shape, you reaffirm it in another. For you can define the truth
and falsity of your own opinions only by presupposing a wider view
that sees as a whole what you see in fragments. That unity of
consciousness which we presuppose in all our indirect efforts to get
into touch with its direct view of truth is above our level. It
includes what we actually get before us in our form of consciousness.
It also includes all that we are trying to grasp indirectly. Now what
is not human, and is above our level, and includes all of our insight,
but transcends and corrects our indirect efforts by its direct grasp
of facts as they are, can best be called superhuman. _The thesis that
such a superhuman consciousness is a reality is a thesis precisely
equivalent to the assertion that our experience has any real sense or
connection whatever_ beyond the mere fragment of connectedness that,
at any one instant, we directly grasp.
Furthermore, to call such a larger consciousness--inclusive of our
own, but differing from ours, in form, by the vastness of its span and
the variety and completeness of the connections that it surveys--to
call it, I say, a _supernatural_ consciousness is to use a phraseology
that can be very {268} deliberately and, if you choose, technically
defended. By "natural" we mean simply: Subject to the laws which hold
for the sorts of beings whose character and behaviour our empirical
sciences can study. If you suddenly found that you could personally
and individually and clearly grasp, by an act of direct attention, the
sense and connection of thousands of experiences at once, instead of
the three or four presented facts of experience whose relations you
can now directly observe in any one of your moments of consciousness,
you would indeed say that you had been miraculously transformed into
another type of being whose insight had acquired an angelic sort of
wealth and clearness. But whenever you assert (as every scientific
theory, and every common-sense opinion, regarding the real connections
of the facts of human experience requires you to assert), that not
only thousands, but a countless collection of data of human experience
actually possess a perfectly coherent total sense and meaning, such as
no individual man ever directly observes, this your assertion, which
undertakes to be a report of facts, and which explicitly relates to
facts of experience, implies the assertion that there exists such a
superhuman survey of the real nature and connection of our own natural
realm of conscious life. We ourselves are strictly limited by the
natural conditions that determine our own form of consciousness. And
no conditions can be regarded by us as more characteristically natural
than are these. For {269} us human beings to transcend those
conditions, by surveying countless data at once, would require an
uttermost exception to the natural laws which are found to govern our
human type of consciousness. To believe that any man ever had
accomplished the direct survey of the whole range of the physical
connections of the solar and stellar systems at once--in other words,
had grasped the whole range of astronomical experience in a single act
of attention--would be to believe that a most incredible miracle had
at some time taken place--an incredible miracle so far as any
knowledge that we now possess enables us to foresee what the natural
conditions under which man lives, and is, in human form, conscious,
permit. But, on the other hand, to accept, as we all do, the validity
of that scientific interpretation of the data of human experience
which astronomy reports is to acknowledge that such an interpretation
more or less completely records a system of facts which are nothing if
they are not in some definite sense empirical, although, in their
wholeness, they are experienced by no man. That is, the acceptance of
the substantial truth of astronomy involves the acknowledgment that
some such, to us simply superhuman, consciousness is precisely as real
as the stars are real, and as their courses, and as all their
relations are real. Yet, of course, we cannot undertake to investigate
any process such as would enable us to define the natural conditions
under which any such superhuman {270} survey of astronomical facts
would become psychologically possible.
The acceptance of our natural sciences, as valid interpretations of
connections of experience which our form of consciousness forbids us
directly to verify, logically presupposes, at every step, that such
superhuman forms and unities of consciousness are real. For the facts
of science are indefinable except as facts in and for a real
experience. But, on the other hand, we can hope for no advance in
physical or in psychological knowledge which would enable us to bring
these higher forms of consciousness under what we call natural laws.
So the superhuman forms of consciousness remain for us also
supernatural. _That_ they are, we must acknowledge, if any assertion
whatever about our world is to be either true or false. For all
assertions are made about experience, and about its real connections,
and about its systems. But _what_ conditions, _what_ natural causes,
bring such superhuman forms of consciousness into existence we are
unable to investigate. For every assertion about nature or about
natural laws presupposes that natural facts and laws are real only in
so far as they are the objects known to such higher unities of
consciousness. The unities in question are themselves no natural
objects; while all natural facts are objects for them and are
expressions of their meaning.
Thus definite are my reasons for asserting that forms of consciousness
superior to our own are real, {271} and that they are all finally
united in a single, world-embracing insight, which has also the
character of expressing a world-will. Thus definite are also my
grounds for calling such higher unities of consciousness both
superhuman and supernatural. By the term "The unity of the spirit" I
name simply _the unity of meaning which belongs to these superhuman
forms of consciousness._ We ourselves partake of this unity, and share
it, in so far as, in our lives also, we discover and express, in
whatever way our own form of consciousness permits, truth and life
that bring us into touch and into harmony with the higher forms of
consciousness, that is, with the spirit which, in its wholeness, knows
and estimates the world, and which expresses itself in the life of the
world.
Thus near are we, in every exercise of our reasonable life, to the
superhuman and to the supernatural. Upon the other hand, there is
positively no need of magic, or of miracle, or of mysterious
promptings from the subconscious, to prove to us the reality of the
human and of the supernatural, or to define our reasonable relations
with it. And the essential difference between our own type of
consciousness and this higher life is a difference of form, and is
also a difference of content precisely in so far as its wider and
widest span of conscious insight implies that the superhuman type of
consciousness possesses a depth of meaning, a completeness of
expression, a wealth of facts, a clearness of vision, a successful
{272} embodiment of purpose which, in view of the narrowness of our
form of consciousness, do not belong to us.
Man needs no miracles to show him the supernatural and the superhuman.
You need no signs and wonders, and no psychical research, to prove
that the unity of the spirit is a fact in the world. Common-sense
tacitly presupposes the reality of the unity of the spirit. Science
studies the ways in which its life is expressed in the laws which
govern the order of experience. Reason gives us insight into its real
being. Loyalty serves it, and repents not of the service. Salvation
means our positive harmony with its purpose and with its
manifestation.