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, H2O.
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.
So many phases of our religious belief are the result of imperfect knowledge and false conceptions of the world in which we live! They come down to us from an earlier time, when the earth was regarded as the center of the universe, all other bodies revolving around it. Man lifted his eyes and his hands to heaven in an appeal to the heavenly powers.
It seems as if the religious sense of the mass of mankind was, by the operation of some psychological law, forced to externize and visualize, yes, and humanize, the object upon which its interest centers. Orthodox religion, while proclaiming that God is a spirit, that He is everywhere, that He fills all nature, that not a sparrow falls to the ground without his notice, and that heaven is not a place, but a state of mind, yet makes its God a personal being, endowed with our human attributes, with likes and dislikes, sorely tried by our sins and weaknesses; nearer us sometimes than at others, present everywhere, yet abiding in one particular place called heaven—these and many other childish and contradictory things.
That keen, clear-minded man, Cardinal Newman, regarded God under the image of a maker, detached absolutely like any human workman from the work of his hand. He is the Eternal King, absolutely distinct from the world as being its center,—“Upholder, Governor, and Sovereign Lord.” “He created all things out of nothing, and preserves them every moment, and could destroy them as He made them.” “He is separated from them by an abyss, and is incommunicable in all his attributes.” This being is always described and interpreted in terms of man, or of our own finite human nature, reflecting in his outlines human history, human political and social institutions, and the aims and objects of concrete human beings. He does not hesitate to relate this God to “every movement which has convulsed and refashioned the surface of the earth,” and hence to make him responsible for the death and destruction and misery which have attended earthquakes and have set back the tide of human progress. Of course every noxious insect, every noxious plant and beast and death-dealing germ is from Him also. “Wars when just” are from Him also. Who or what are they from when they are not just, the great Cardinal does not say. Can both sides be just? Into such absurdities does the conception of a manlike God lead us.
The modern scientific mind, quite as imaginative—if not more so—as the typical theological mind, never gets mired in such contradictions or tangled up in such childish anthropomorphism. Such confusion arises out of the habit of mind which sees the whole creation directed to man; his good is its one object and aim, and when his good suffers, something has miscarried. The cruel and destructive things in nature can only be accounted for on the theory that some aboriginal calamity, like the fall of man, had visited the world before God took charge of things.
The naturalist sees this as the best possible world, sees that Nature is not an indulgent stepmother, but a strict disciplinarian; that the good and well-being of all is her aim; that suffering and defeat are relative; that God’s ways to man are not justified in a day or a week, or in this place or that, but require ages and continents to come to their full fruition. The good and the evil that will come out of the terrible World War will not all be apparent this year, or next, but only in the perspective of history—in the sum total of human progress of the ages. Such a view is a slap in the face of our egotism which demands instant returns, and which makes the individual supreme.
With Nature, as I have so often said, our standards of good and evil apply to us alone, and they change with the changing years. The naturalist sees that pain and delay and defeat are the price of development; that the world is imperfect, and man is imperfect, because growth and development are the law of nature; that there is always a higher level, and always will be, which we realize only when we look back. A perfect world, as we use the term, would mean the end of all development.
VI. THE ETERNAL
How much is in a name! When we call the power back of all God, it smells of creeds and systems, of superstition, intolerance, persecution; but when we call it Nature, it smells of spring and summer, of green fields and blooming groves, of birds and flowers and sky and stars. I admit that it smells of tornadoes and earthquakes, of jungles and wildernesses, of disease and death, too, but these things make it all the more real to us.
The word “God” has so long stood for the conception of a being who sits apart from Nature, who shapes and rules it as its maker and governor. It is part of the conception of a dual or plural universe, God and Nature. This offends my sense of the oneness of creation. It seems to me that there is no other adequate solution of the total problem of life and Nature than what is called “pantheism,” which identifies mind and matter, finite and Infinite, and sees in all these diverse manifestations one absolute being. As Emerson truly says, pantheism does not belittle God, it magnifies him. God becomes the one and only ultimate fact that fills the universe and from which we can no more be estranged than we can be estranged from gravitation.
The moment we seek to interpret the Eternal in terms of our own psychology, we get into trouble. We cannot measure the Infinite by the standards of the finite. Our economies, our methods, our aims are not those of Nature. God, in the sense in which I use the term, does not plan and design and adapt means to ends as does man. God is no more the maker than He is the thing made. How natural for us to think that the air was made for us to breathe, the water for us to drink, the light for us to see, and the earth for us to inhabit! But these things are older than we are. I have seen a pumpkin growing in the fence and fitting exactly into the niche amid the rails, but was not the fence there before it was?
There is design in Nature, but not in the sense that there is design in human affairs and contrivances. There is no designer. There are living machines, but no machinist. Things grow. Evolution is a vital process. Man’s course is a right line, Nature’s is a circle. Man aims to cut out the waste, the pain, the failures. How does Nature trim her trees or renew her forests or weed her gardens? Only by a survival of the fittest or the luckiest. Every branch that dies and decays and falls from the tree does so at the risk of the health and well-being of the whole tree. Often the decayed branch leaves a hole that in time causes the death of the tree. See how evenly the pine and spruce and hemlock and oak forests get planted by Nature’s haphazard method, but think of the time involved! But what is time to the Eternal? Man cuts out the time and gets his forest quickly. He trims his wood and avoids the danger of delays and decaying wood. He selects such plants for his garden as he desires, and avoids the dangers of the struggle to survive. He takes the side of the weak against the strong, but Nature favors only the strong.
The rain falls upon the just and the unjust. The weather goes its way irrespective of you and me. Storm, tempest, frost, drought, sunshine, are no respecters of persons. The seasons came and went before man appeared, just as they do now. The Eternal never takes sides as man takes sides, but because it does not, should we lose faith? The Eternal takes sides as the sun takes sides, and not otherwise. The light shines for all. Providence is a universal beneficence. The clouds go their way. The beneficence is seen in the slow amelioration of meteoric conditions through countless æons, till the cloud and the bow appeared, and with them conditions favorable to life. The impartial rains are oblivious to our human needs, but, as I so often say, they are on the side of life. They are on the side of development. They made the sublime drama of evolution possible.
The weather favored us æons before we were born, because it favored life. Therefore, when we say that the Eternal is neither for us nor against us, we mean in our special human sense. He is on the side of the righteous only when the righteous live according to the rule of Nature or rightness, or in harmony with the eternal order. And he is against the unrighteous when they transgress this order. In vain do we pray for victory on the eve of battle, except in so far as prayer puts courage into our hearts. Victory is for him who marshals the physical and moral forces the most skillfully. The victory is from the Eternal whoever wins, because it is the fruit of the order which It established, or, rather, which It is.
As we cannot get away from Nature, we cannot get away from the Eternal. He sticketh closer than a brother, closer than the blood in our own hearts, not always to bless and to cheer, often to hinder and depress. Not all ease and joy is life; it is as often struggle, tears, defeat.
Not by placing God afar off in the heavens—a supersensuous, supermundane, supernatural being—do we make the problem easier. Not till we bring Him down to earth and incarnate Him (the old myth of Christ again), and identify Him with everything without us and within—not till God becomes man—do we see a light under the feet of Fate; not till then do we see love and fatherhood and brotherhood and sacrifice and humility and beneficence and altruism in Nature. When we see man as a part of Nature, we see him as a part of God.
In humanity alone do we see the face of justice, of mercy, of charity, of forgiveness, of reverence, of renunciation—human virtues, they, too, come out of the heart of Nature. If this is a hard gospel, still it is tangible, real, livable. We cannot live other than on familiar terms with Nature. In her we see the sources of our power, our help, our health. We know the conditions of our well-being. We know the price we have to pay for each blessing. Our reason, our intelligence, we come by honestly and inevitably. Their fountainhead is in Nature.
Amid the agony and turmoil of war we need not lose faith. We know that Nature is still Nature. If disease and pestilence and famine rage, we know that there are weapons with which to fight them. We know that order comes out of chaos, that life comes out of death. We have neither to curse our gods nor to praise them, neither to do penance nor to offer burnt offerings, but only to take and use wisely the gifts they bestow.
VII. AN IMPARTIAL DEITY
What difficulties and contradictions we fall into the moment we identify Nature with God, and what equal or greater difficulties we fall into if we refuse to identify Nature with God! True it is that in the former case we bring God very near and make him very real; we see and feel our direct and continuous dependence upon Him—indeed, that we are a part of Him; that every breath we draw, and every thought we think, and every pound of energy we put forth is in and through Him; and that we can no more wander or escape from Him than we can escape gravity or chemical affinity. There are no skeptics or atheists in regard to Nature. It alone exists and goes on forever. But here comes the pinch! God as Nature is not only the author of the good, He is the author of what we call evil also; He is as many-sided as Nature is. The savage and merciless aspects of Nature are of Him also; He is in the jungles of Africa, as well as in the walks of culture and refinement; in the destroying tornado as well as in the gentle summer breeze; in the overwhelming floods as well as in the morning dews. He is as much the author of disease as He is of health; of war, pestilence, famine, as He is of peace, plenty, and the progress of the world. He is in the trenches and the slaughter of the contending armies as truly as in the most peaceful and pious family or social circle in the world. The asphyxiating gases are his, and the bursting bombs, no less than the breaking hearts and the prayerful souls at home. The comets that come like apparitions in the heavens, and then are gone, and the stars that shine steadfastly, are all a part of the same scheme. The dragons and monsters that possessed the earth and the fruits thereof for millions of years in geologic time were the work of that divinity which shapes our ends to-day.
We separate ourselves from Nature and flatter ourselves that we belong to another and higher order; that we alone are of divine origin, and not involved in the fate of the rest of Creation; but we are fragments of the same granite that forms the foundation of the earth. “I am stuccoed with birds and quadrupeds all over,” says Whitman. The reptile was our ancestor; we were cradled in the old seas; we are kin to the worm and the mollusk; we derive from creeping, swimming, noisome things, from the slime and mud of the old sea bottoms, from the cosmic dust and the solar radiations. Why should we put on superior airs when not one atom of matter will turn aside for us, not one law of physics cease to operate to save us from destruction? The vast army of elemental forces knows us not. We may divert them and bend them to our will, but they heed us not; they destroy us the moment we lose control.
Nature does not love us any more than she hates us; she goes her way, indifferent.
The best we can say about it all is that Nature, or the Natural Providence, is too big for us to grasp; that in these seas we can find no soundings. But we are here, the world is beautiful, life is worth living, love always pays; Nature serves us when we know how to use her; when we plant and sow wisely God will send the increase. Friendly or unfriendly, of God or of the Devil, the physical forces have ministered to us. More things have been for us than have been against us; more winds have blown our barks into safe harbors than have dashed us upon the rocks. There are more refreshing showers than devastating tornadoes; more sunshine than forked lightning; more fertile land upon the earth than parched deserts; a broader belt of genial climates than of frigid zones. Thorns and spines and nettles are the exception in vegetation; stings and venomous fangs are the exception in animal life. Hawks can catch the smaller birds, yet there are vastly more small birds than hawks. The weasel can catch the rabbit and the squirrel and the rat, yet there are ten-fold, fifty-fold, more of these rodents than there are weasels. The carnivorous beasts of the plains and of the jungle do not exterminate the herbivorous; there is more good than evil everywhere; more peace than war; more kindness than cruelty. The God of Nature goes his way, but his way is our way; we have arisen out of Nature; as it is, the chances of life have been in our favor; the stream makes its own channel; the waters find their way to the sea; they do not all stagnate on the way. Some of the seed which the winds sow falls upon barren places, but not the most of it. Some men are born criminals or cripples or malformed, but not the majority. The creatures preyed upon always vastly outnumber the creatures that prey upon them. And in truth, in the whole realm of Nature more things wait upon man than war upon him.
VIII. FINITE AND INFINITE
The unnamable, the unthinkable, the omnipotent, the omnipresent, we cannot discuss or define in terms of our humanity. The moment we try to do so we are involved in contradictions, just as we are when we try to define the sphere in terms of the plane. The sphere has no length, it has no breadth, it has no thickness, in the sense that bodies upon its surface have. It has no weight, and it has no beginning and no end, and we may say that its motion is eternal rest; yet rest implies motion, and motion implies rest.
When we say that there is no God, we only mean that there is no being that we can define or conceive of in terms of man. Nothing in the finite can help us in dealing with the infinite. The Infinite, the Omnipotent, the Omnipresent, cannot be a being without sharing the limitations of being, or without being subject to the bounds of time and space. If God is everywhere, He is nowhere; if He is all-powerful, his power has no contrary, and hence ceases to exist. One after another the human and personal attributes we ascribe to Him disappear when we try to conceive of Him in terms of the infinite. The infinite is equivalent to negation. There are no terms in which we can define the ether; it is the negative of all things that have length and breadth and thickness, or motion or rest or substance, or friction or cohesion, or place or power. An infinite being is as much a contradiction of terms as a square or plane sphere would be. If God is a person, with human-like attributes and emotions,—though we call them divine,—it is legitimate to ask, Where is He? where was He before the solar systems took form? where will He be after they have again become formless?
Our inevitable anthropomorphism prefigures the Infinite as superman; He is man magnified to infinity. He is the supreme king or ruler of the universe. We dream of seeing Him face to face; He has eyes, ears, hands, feet, and the emotions of love, anger, pity, and the like. Man thus imposes his own form upon the power that is and upholds the cosmos. He carves it into his own image, and then seeks to propitiate it and influence it as He Himself is propitiated and influenced. Praise is sweet to it, honor is sweet, revenge is sweet, because these things are sweet to man.
When we call this force Nature, we bring it near to us and can see and feel our direct relation to it. We are bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. We see its impersonal or unpersonal character. We get light on the vexed problem of good and evil which is such an insoluble enigma to the theologians.
Nature embraces all; she fathers and mothers all; has no partialities, knows no exceptions, no miracles, no deputied atonements, no evil apart from the good and no good apart from the evil, no life without death and no death without life.
IX. THE INSOLUBLE
What desperate efforts mankind has made to shape this vast, blind, unconscionable power we call Nature into an image of a God that would satisfy our moral and spiritual wants and aspirations! Where did men get their standards of such a God? They have evidently been slowly evolved through the friction of man with man. They have possessed survival value. Love, truth, justice, mercy, have contributed to the fullness of life and to length of days. One may adopt Biblical language and say that righteousness endureth forever. The triumph of the wicked is only for a season; it may be a long season, it may embrace whole periods of human history, and entail measureless suffering on the human race, but change and retribution surely come. The way of man’s moral and material progress is like the stream that now hurries, now tarries, is now disrupted and noisy in rapids and falls, now sluggish and almost stagnant in long level reaches, but which does go forward and reach its goal at last. But is there not some predetermined bent toward righteousness,—not of the ecclesiastical sort, but of the scientific sort,—toward the relations of man with man, that results in the greatest good to the greatest number,—a bent inherent in the nature of things? Would evolution have taken the road toward man and all the other forms of life blindly, accidentally? Would it have started at all had there not been some initial impulse, or some thought, somewhere, of all that was to follow?
The doctrine of design does not meet the problem; the doctrine of chance does not meet it. Design in our human world means a designer. What, then, does it mean in the non-human world? There can be no design in such a world, because the human mind is not present. There can be no chance, because a chance jumbling and collision of the primordial elements could not result in the organized matter that is life, any more than a thousand of brick dumped upon the ground can take the form of a house. The brick and mortar demand an architect, and organized matter demands an organizing principle. Whence its source? There we are where no further step can be taken. What about the divine mind? But that is jumping the whole question. If you place your God here, I shall ask him some embarrassing questions, such as, Where did you come from? Where have you been all these æons? Why are you so wasteful and dilatory in your methods? Why have you made the world so full of misery? Or, I might ask the question a little boy asked his father: “Why did God make Satan?” The problem, it seems to me, is quite as embarrassing to us mortals with a God as without one. It is just as hard to account for a God as to account for the initial impulse. In both cases we have in our hands a rope with only one end. In trying to find the other end, we only get ourselves hopelessly tied up.
X. PAYING THE DEBT
In my youth I often heard the old people speak of death as “paying the debt of Nature”—“He has paid the debt.” Life puts us in debt to Nature—the earth, the air, the water—for the elements of our bodies and the powers of our minds, and the time inevitably comes when we must settle the account. That we are going to have something left over—that we have only to pay the debt of the body, and not of the mind—is one of the dreams that it is hard for most persons to give up. Will not then the universal mind that pervades Nature claim its own also? Can you and I hope to remain detached from it forever? Is that a consummation devoutly to be wished?
Be assured that no particle of soul or body can be lost. But processes may cease; the flame of the lamp may go out, and the sum total of force and matter remain the same. When a blade of grass dies, a process has ended, and as mysterious a process as went on in Cæsar’s brain and body. And when all life on the earth and in our universe ceases, if it ever does, the problem would remain just as puzzling, if we can fancy ourselves still here to puzzle over it. We are links in an endless cycle of change in which we cannot separate the material from what we call the spiritual.
The water in our bodies to-day may have flashed as a dewdrop yesterday, or lent itself to the splendor of the sunrise or sunset, or played a part in the bow in the clouds. To-morrow it may be whirling in the vortex of a tornado, or helping to quench the life of a drowning man, or glistening in the frost figures on the window-pane. The movements of the brain molecules in which the phenomena of thought and consciousness are so mysteriously involved, they, too, are links in the cycle of change.
One of our younger poets, John Russell McCarthy, has had the courage to say:
The reverent old people to whom I just referred paid the debt long ago, and the day of reckoning for some of us cannot be far off. After the account is closed who or what has profited by the transaction? We are prone to put such questions to Nature, but they are irrelevant. The universe is not run for profit, as we use the term. So far as we can see, it is run just to satisfy the æsthetic and creative feeling of the Eternal. When the sidereal systems in space run down, they are wound up again, and suns and planets are started anew. The great game never comes to an end; in fact, it is unthinkable that it should ever have begun, except as the flowers begin in spring, or as a man begins when he is born. Antecedents! Antecedents!—always. We cannot apply our standards of loss and gain to the dealings of the Eternal with us. “That I have positively appeared,” says Whitman, “that is enough.”
Each of us is an incarnation of the universal mind, as is every beast of the field and jungle, and every fowl of the air, and every insect that creeps and flies; and we can only look upon creation as an end in itself. To ask what the great spectacle is for, is to betray our tradesman habit of mind. Man is a link in an endless chain of being. If we ask what he is for, the old answer of the catechism is as good as any—“To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” In other words, to make the most of his life and strive for the highest happiness, which is knowledge and appreciation of the universal. Coleridge says we glorify God when we work for the well-being of mankind.
How quite impossible it is for us to adjust our minds to the thought of death—to the thought of the absolute negation of life! When we torment ourselves about death, about the coldness and darkness of the grave, about being cut off from all the warm and happy currents of life that flow about us, we are unconsciously thinking of ourselves as still living, or as conscious of the gloom and negation that await us. Thus, when Huxley wrote to a friend (John Morley) that the thought of extinction disturbed him more and more as he neared the end of life, he fell into this common fallacy, or contradiction. “It flashes across me,” he writes, “at all sorts of times with a sort of horror that in 1900 I shall probably know no more of what is going on than I did in 1800. I had sooner be in hell, a good deal—” as if he expected to lie awake nights in his grave lamenting his sad fate and saying to himself, “I had sooner be in hell,” where also he expected he would be conscious of his improved condition!
What possible difference could it make to him if he did not know any more in 1900 than he did in 1800? Did he expect to enjoy his knowledge in 1900? If not, why worry about it? What he was really lamenting was that he did not know then and there what he might know if he lived till 1900. He knew that human knowledge was making tremendous strides, and the thought that he should not share in its advancement chilled him.
It is all very human, but very childish. We may to-day dread some task or ordeal that we are to face to-morrow, because to-morrow we expect to be alive, but shall we shrink from the to-morrow of death on the same grounds?
There is wisdom as well as wit in the epitaph in dialogue which a clever Greek Byzantine composed for Pyrrho:
“Art thou dead, Pyrrho?”
“I do not know.”
If we put the same question to our own dead, if they could answer, they would say, “We do not know.” If they knew, would not that be proof that they were not dead? May we not answer Huxley that if consciousness is extinguished with life, he is not going to lie awake nights in his grave worrying about it? There is comfort in the thought that if there is no immortality, we shall not know it.
Rereading that wise and delightful old Frenchman, Montaigne, I find that more than three hundred years ago he was of the same mind that I am in this matter: “Why should we fear a thing whose being lost cannot be lamented?” “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.”
An avaricious man might worry if he knew he would have no more money on the next Christmas than he had on the last, unless his physician had assured him that he could not be alive on the next Christmas. Then, if he worried, it would be on account of his heirs. But one’s heirs cannot inherit his wisdom; it dies with him.
Death is such an extraordinary, such an unspeakable event that we cannot think of ourselves as non-existent. When you try to see yourself in your own coffin, or standing beside your own grave, it is still as a living man that you thus behold yourself. It is, of course, as living men and women that we are disturbed over thoughts of the grave. The future is just as secure for us all as is the past. A moment between two eternities is life; a spark that draws a brief line upon the darkness and is gone. The spark has its antecedent condition in the wood and coal and the processes of combustion from which it sprang, and it has its subsequent conditions in the invisible gases into which it has vanished, but as a point of heat and light, it exists no more. Our wise attitude toward death is, I think, to forget or ignore it entirely. We shall not know it when it overtakes us. “Avida nunquam desinere mortalitas.” “Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither—ripeness is all.”
XI. DEATH
I
In death the elements of the body are not changed—oxygen is still oxygen, carbon still carbon. What has happened, then? Can it be explained by saying that a process has been reversed? Does it bear any true analogy to the redistribution of type after the printer has set it up and printed his book? The type is the same, but the relation of all the units has been changed. The printer has arranged them so that collectively they expressed to him certain meanings or ideas. These ideas did not exist in the type, but in the order of its arrangement. In one order or combination the letters meant one thing; in another order or combination they expressed quite another. The same type will spell dog or God. When redistributed and returned to the different fonts, the letters express nothing but themselves. If this is a true analogy, then, in the case of the living book, man, what stands for the compositor and printer? We can only call the compositor the organizing impulse; but whence this impulse, and whose idea is it trying to express? The redistribution of the elements of the body is done through the activity of other forms of life—the micro-organisms—those minute forms reduce the body to its original elements. As we thus have life at the end of the life of an organism, do we also have life at the beginning of the organism? Ancestral life certainly, or the primordial germ; but is there a living principle back of and before all? Does the logic of the situation force us to the belief in an original Creator? The human mind is so constituted that in some form or under definite concepts, we have to postulate a first or primal Cause; we have to think of a beginning; but is there any beginning to a circle, or any center to the surface of a sphere? There may be no beginning or no limit in time or space to the cosmos. This is unthinkable to us in our present state. Yet in making that statement I am thinking of the unthinkable. We can deal only with parts of Nature; as a whole it is beyond our power to grasp. All bodies on the earth’s surface unsupported fall; this is our universal experience. All moving bodies come to a standstill unless power from without is constantly supplied. Perpetual motion is impossible, but the earth and the other planets are unsupported, and their motion is perpetual. Or we may say that they fall forever toward the sun and never reach it, and that the sun falls forever toward some other sun or system and never reaches it. The laws of force and matter as we contend with them in our experiences are inoperative in sidereal space; there is motion without friction, energy without waste, dissipation without exhaustion. Neither upper nor under, neither falling nor rising, neither end nor beginning. Cause and effect, rest and motion, are one. The self-activity of the universe quite transcends our experiences; the self-maintenance of living bodies is far beyond our reach; any end to the chain of causal sequence is quite unthinkable to us. Our minds are made in that way. They are fashioned in the school of cause and effect.
Nothing can get out of the universe because there is no out to the universe. Can that which has no ending have a beginning? Can that which has no circumference have a center? Can we think of anything so hot that it could not be hotter? Or so small that it could not be smaller? Or so big that it could not be bigger? No, because our minds have been schooled in this comparative method. Our sense shows us a world of degrees. We can think of absolute darkness, but not of absolute light. In the Mammoth Cave you may realize absolute darkness; but even on the sun itself would you experience absolute light? We seem to be able to find an end to the negative, but not to the positive. We can think of a body as at absolute rest, but can we conceive of it going so fast that it could not go faster?
Death is our consciousness of a peculiar change in matter, just as life is our consciousness of the opposite change—one destructive, the other constructive. The constituents of the body remain unchanged, but a peculiar activity set up among the particles, by what, we know not, is instituted in life and ceases in death. An organism is made up of organs, all working together, but each subordinated to the whole. The whole, this concerted action, may cease, and the individual dies, as we say, and yet the minute subdivisions, the cells, may be alive. Certain ferments in the body may go on for some time after the life of the man has gone out. And living cells may go on multiplying endlessly without producing an organized being.
II
“It is all right,” said Walt Whitman to me as I was leaving his death-bed and hearing his voice for the last time—“It is all right.” Of course it was all right, and it will be all right when each and all of us fall into the last eternal sleep. Else it would not be. Our being here is all right, is it not? “Friendly and faithful,” says Whitman, “are the arms that have helped me,” and friendly and faithful must be the arms that bear us away. If it was good to come, it will be good to go—good in the large, cosmic sense, good in that it is in keeping with the spirit of the All. Not the good of our brief personal successes and triumphs, but good as evolution is good, as the processes of growth and decay are good. If life is good, death must be equally good, as each waits upon the other. From what point of view can we say that death is not all right? Certainly not from the point of view of this universe. Archimedes could have moved the world had he had some other world upon which to place his lever, and we must have some other universe to plant our feet upon to condemn death.
As I have already said, we look upon death as an evil because we look upon it from the happy fields of life, and see ourselves as alive in our graves and lamenting that we are shut off from all the light and love and movement of the world. Does our prenatal state seem an evil?
Did anything begin de novo, when we came into being? Not the elements of our bodies surely; they were as old as the cosmos; not the germ of our minds and souls; they were as old as the human race and older—old as the first dawn of life. Is it the I that is new?—that which makes you you and me me? And that is probably nothing more than a new distribution and arrangement of the physical and psychical elements and forces of which and by which we are made. The pattern of our personality is new; each of us differs somewhat from all the myriads of human beings who have lived upon the earth; but is form, pattern, personality, separable from the material that composes it?
It may be cheerfully admitted that when we look at the question in this light, we are whistling to keep our courage up. What of it? The band plays to keep the courage of the soldiers up when they go into battle, and what are we but soldiers fighting the good fight of truth against error, of courage against fear, of the heroic against the pusillanimous? The whole is greater than any of its parts. Nature is more than man. We must learn to efface ourselves. The soul knows no rewards or punishments. If it be heroic to sacrifice life in this world, it may be equally heroic to sacrifice life in any other world, so that we prove ourselves worthy of the gods.
XII. HEAVEN AND EARTH
Truly things are not what they seem. When we put heaven and earth far apart, we think as children. Heaven and earth are pretty close together. The shortest arm can reach from one to the other. When we go to heaven we shall not have far to travel, and I dare say the other place is quite as near, and, if reports be true, the road is broader and easier to travel. What children we are in such matters! The wisest men have the language of ignorance and superstition imposed upon them. How difficult it is not to think of the heavens up there as a reality, something above us and superior to us, a finer world, nearer God, lighted by the stars, the abode of spirits, the source of all good, our final celestial home. Did not Elijah ascend into heaven? Did not Paul have heavenly visions? Have not the saints in all ages turned their faces and lifted imploring hands to heaven? How these things have burnt themselves into our minds! We cannot escape them.
In our floods of religious emotion we instinctively look away from the earth. The mystery, the immensity, the purity of the heavens above us make us turn our faces thitherward, and as naturally make us turn downward when we consider the source of evil. The poor old earth which has mothered us and nursed us we treat with scant respect. Our awe and veneration we reserve for the worlds we know not of. Our senses sell us out. The mud on our shoes disenchants us. It is only Whitman with his cosmic consciousness that can closely relate the heavens and the earth: