Many, observing only the satisfactory results of harmony or equation or balance, and entirely failing to note the essential disharmonies out of which alone harmonies may take their rise, have assumed the existence of an emasculate God whose virtues are all negative, ignoring the positive horrors by which we live and progress. For them the cataclysms of physics, the fumbling failures of biology, are meaningless, if they exist at all. Yet plainly the creative force is neither as generous nor as amiable as they think. Rather, brilliant as is all this evolutionary process, and it reveals startling harmonies, beauties and seeming intelligence, it still only argues some such fumbling hit-or-miss mechanistic scheme as the chemists and physicists are beginning to outline and which allows for far more latitude in morals and conduct, as well as invention and discovery even, than the religionist has hitherto been willing to grant. The only one who appears to sense the true process or processes of Nature is the mechanistic chemist or physicist, who does not deny the possibility of extremes and horrors existing in the Divine mind or will of the creative impulse. “Murder,” say these scientific seekers after truth, or at least their facts point to this, “is a disturbing and disrupting process. It destroys the equation best expressed in ‘Live and let live.’ It affects individual peace. If you do so unto others they will do the same unto you. Chemically and physically, according to the law of reaction or equation, they cannot very well avoid it. Therefore do not murder.” Yet where is there any Divine command in that? Is it not rather a simple and easily understandable interpretation of a very obvious and inescapable law of equation, under which nevertheless, so roughly is this law adjusted and so casually does it work, murder and many other forms of non-equation may and do take their rise and do persist? If that is God or Good, then God permits murder, repays with murder, or asks you to be the judge as to whether you will tolerate murder in your State. Rather, to the physicist and chemist, it appears to be not so much a Divine command as an accidental and inescapable condition of equation.

We are told, by way of dogmatic moral comfort, that man has achieved somewhat that the animals have not, and that therefore he is superior. But also, as is now becoming perfectly plain, he has been able to discover and perpetuate for his own satisfaction crimes and iniquities for which no animal apparently within its small range of instinct or mechanistic control has the skill. Nature makes both, yet she does not, or cannot, or at least has not, made the animals as delicately and resourcefully evil in some things as is man. That is why he is able to dominate them. In one way, then, man is worse than the animals, and in another better—a balance presumably in the favor of man, though not necessarily so. The truth is that most of the ways wherein man has been differentiated from the animals by forces over which he has no control concern not ethics, as we understand and act upon them, but mechanical articulations and utilitarian comforts, the construction and normal use of which lie entirely apart from the realm of ethics. There is nothing either moral or immoral in the development and use or non-use of steam, electricity, plumbing, the tractor engine, automobiles and so on. They are mechanistic and non-moral. Thus we have developed architecture, machinery and the arts. It is true that in so far as man himself is concerned these are helpful to him in his mass phase and provide a larger freedom, which has resulted in a large experience, hence intelligence or comprehension in every direction. Yet have they improved his morals? Or lowered them? Who would say so? Yet perceiving this development or change, and, more faintly, the need of balance and equation which runs through all and underlies all, man has set about the task of writing about it, framing the inescapable equational laws which all changes suggest and compel into definite unbreakable commands from a definite God, singing songs about Him, painting pictures of Him, and directing attention to what man has ignorantly assumed to be a universal source of supply which will or should permit the greatest possible number to live under some such scheme of equation as is here suggested. Unfortunately this has not been proved as yet, and at any rate it is not the same as the presumably provable scheme of moral order which has been foisted upon man by the dull, designing or poetically enthusiastic of all ages, and which involves the laying aside of nearly every forceful, vigorous, natural, or human or pagan, attribute. Quite the contrary.

In this connection I should like to reiterate that to the Christian and other metaphysical idealists neither dishonesty nor vice nor any crime is contemplated by God, and therefore should not exist, any more than any other variation from that perfect state, best indicated perhaps by what the Ten Commandments forbid and the Beatitudes imply. God does not will them. He personally resents and will punish their appearance. The first part of this (i. e., that He does not will them) might be accepted as true if the fact that he permits them, or at least that they are, in spite of Him, not denied. But of course religion, as all those who philosophically struggle with life now know or should, is an abstraction, an ideal, whose dogmas can only in part be approximated in life. For life, as we nearly all know by now or should, is a shifty and evasive mechanism, chemic in part at least, and material and inscrutable, with which the abstractions of the religionist have little if anything in common. The best that religion and ethics have so far done is to take credit for the inherent and necessary tendency to compromise which has previously been indicated and which is manifested by all phases of natural energy, as much by that shown in our body politic as anywhere else. Indeed, the very best that religion can show is no better than that which life, or Nature Herself, could and did long before any religion appeared, namely, a rough equation, a balance struck; so that if a man had done a consciously wrong thing in one place he was chemically or emotionally moved to do a right thing in another, and if his actions were bad in one way it might be that he was compelled by forces outside his control to counterbalance them by good ones in another. All animal forms above those merely mechanistic or tropic (those governed by tropisms of various kinds) appear to display most of the virtues exercised by humans—the care of their young, for instance, distress at their loss, loyalty, ability to organize and so observe group laws; characteristics celebrated by man, where exercised by him, as virtues, beatitudes and what not else. Yet these lower forms cannot possibly know of religious or moral precepts in any revealed or instructed sense, via a Messiah or Redeemer. Instincts or tropisms as developed and verified by oppositions or aids (accidental or otherwise)—once more the law of balance or equation—appear to have been their sole guides. Hence to the religionist and moralist, thus far at least, they have been beyond the pale of ethical consideration, things almost beyond the willing, and so beyond the care, of the Creator Himself. An especial opponent of God or Good had to be devised in order to take care of them. And yet are they not an excellent illustration of this same creative and governing force in Nature which, while apparently seeking variety in unity, is itself subject to a law of balance or harmony as well as one of disharmony or change, and this without any evidence self-conscious on its part? At least the investigations of the chemists and the physicists thus far appear to indicate as much. “Vengeance is mine” declared the old Hebraic Jahveh, and by that very assertion he admitted that he did not expect to establish the abstractions of right, truth, justice and mercy on earth but rather, since he could not, he would at least attempt to strike a balance and would exact, in the form of pain or disaster, repayment for things done in opposition to his code.

Well, that requires no Sinaitic command or religious law to make it true. It is not a matter for great churches and confessionals and pence and genuflections—or is it? It is true, whether God or Moses or any one else ever said so or not. It is a material and an economic fact as well as a chemic or psychic law. If you wish to glorify God or Nature for that, well and good. Your mood may be admirable or interesting, if not exactly necessary. But certainly, whether one admits the existence of a self-willing Creator or not, it is too much to say that man obtains exact justice or that an exact return is made anywhere for energies expended, ideals struggled for, efforts, good, bad or indifferent, made. We know that is not true. Nor is it true that there is not a counter impulse to withhold it. There is. And men, fellow-units in the great self-balancing cosmos, all too frequently reflect that impulse. Man is no more essentially just than he is unjust. He is an impulse, a will to live, a sharply reflected chemical and physical impulse in Nature, which acts or reacts as the nature of other chemical and physical stimuli in immediate contact with him suggests or compels, and which same may be by no means as moral as we think. Man, as a representation of chemical and physical impulses coming from somewhere, has an innate desire for power for extreme movement for himself; but so have all other mechanical or physical representations of that impulse. And it is but the balancing pressure of his fellows which keeps him in position at or near a median line. If you examine him carefully you will find that in the main he desires so-called “justice” for himself only, a fair balance for himself, liberty for himself, or that which is related to him via pleasure or profit, and so on ad infinitum. At the same time he is a slave, a tool, a medium for something, an intruded if not self-intruding, self-seeking insect, but without power to control or fend against major impulses and powers. Still, between man and man, tribe and tribe, nation and nation, there are these necessary equations or balances plus their internal hopes or chemic tendencies, each one for himself, to change and achieve; yet the same being but roughly worked out; on the one hand to balance or equation in favor of all the others, on the other hand to supremacy or extreme liberty of movement for each. Where only failure is achieved there is either a lull, temporary only, or a storm soon or late (revolution), or periods of horror in which chaos rules, or peace in which nothing is achieved. The world is sad over its inability to obtain freedom, great scope of emotion, for itself, or gleeful because of its triumph in this direction. But all the time it is struggling and maintaining but a rough and in the main brief balance, part with part or unit with unit.

One might go on indefinitely contemplating other phases of this same equational law, its relation to love of parents, love of country, love of home, love of one’s neighbor, love of this, love of that. Are not all of these held up as duties, virtues, perfections even Sinaitic commands, as in “Honor thy father and thy mother,” when as a matter of fact and inwardly we know that this is a matter of equation or balance and cannot absolutely as a commandment from on high exist where no reasonable return in kind is predicated. What, love a shameless, brutal, unparental or non-filial father or mother, son or daughter, in whom, let us say, exists not one redeeming trait or quality of all that we consider essential to or characteristic of those states? It is not chemically therefore not humanly possible. What is meant is that it is not only possible but natural to make a reasonable return where affection, kindness or care has been extended. Now while it is entirely conceivable that one might love one who was cruel to oneself and generous to others, or generous to oneself and cruel to others, who in some way or some one direction fulfilled some phases of balance or equation, in however weak or impossible a way, still one could not possibly love one who was in no wise kind or generous to any one, a thing without reciprocal or balancing relations in some direction. The law of balance or equation which governs in all processes, even thought, will not permit it. There must be something given in some way, directly or indirectly, before anything can be returned or evolved, even in thought. And if one reverses the picture and attempts to conceive of hating some one or thing equationally just, fair or balanced, not attempting to take from any one or thing too much and not withholding from any one or thing that which is equationally his, it is quite as psychically impossible. One cannot cerebrate inimically toward that person or thing as being evil, reprehensible or what not. It cannot be done. Sometimes, where by reason of plenty or inherent weakness of mind or force, or carelessness of thought or interest, an individual is in any way indifferent to a “reasonable” or balanced return to himself for effort made, labor given, thought expended and what not, and where this results in no injury to himself or others, it is entirely possible to look upon him with indifference or as a fool, or as one who is weak-minded or not capable of balancing himself against the shrewd and self-interested minds of others. But such indifference or lack of self-interest would not indicate that one looked upon him as being evil, scarcely even a discreditable force, save possibly where his operations, or lack of them, affected the interests or rights or privileges of another or others.

Not love of God, then, it would seem, nor fear of God, although these abstractions have come to be real enough to some minds, prevents one individual from overriding the dreams and hopes of his neighbor, but fear of retaliation which his selfishness might produce. “Thou shalt not” springs plainly from “Thou hadst best not, it is dangerous,” to which might be added the strangest quality of all, the tendency in large or small bodies or masses to quiescence, the love of peace, or inertia. Our evoluted mechanistic chemism has become so diffused or varied that we may even now speak of such intangible and yet vital forces as love of the fixed scene, which appears to be little more than a reflected form of helio, or ego, or someother form of tropism, the inherent power in everything to attract something to itself and so maintain itself, for the time being anyhow. That things are inclined to a static or inert state or to congeal and so stratify and endure in that form (Nirvana?) is as true as that they must change; and, under certain conditions, Nature seems to abhor too much speed, as too little.

Is there anywhere in this to be found that universal right, truth, justice, mercy, as we have hitherto deemed it or them to be or exist? Perhaps not, but it is all of so-called right, truth, mercy or justice, universal or otherwise, that we will ever know, all of it that is involved with life. Does this, by any chance, contain truth? Yes, indeed, it is truth, for it is a fact. Is it right? Well, for life as we find it conditioned it is apparently the only way. Who can suggest a better? Should the fact that we find ourselves thus conditioned, confronted by Nature in all Her complexity and with only this necessity for equation to fall back on, disconcert or dishearten us? Need it or must it take the savor out of life? No; not, at least, in my judgment. Life in its most terrible as well as its most halcyon aspects is at once an enticing and a fit game. It seems well enough suited to our capacities, and we to it, since essentially we are of it—it, in fact. At least it leaves or provides us much to strive for, and strife is the only key to knowledge or sensation and life that we have. Abstractions and theories are good as games at which the human mind may play if it chooses, and whenever life becomes too severe for any group or part of it it is easy enough to invent a theory or abstraction which will then make it seem different. And this is almost invariably done, as witness all the impossible religions and theories that at one time and another have filled the world. Like chess or checkers, they furnish a diversion or relief to life-weary minds. If you have nothing better to do even a religion may be worth while. At worst it can only narrow your vision, and if that is a comfort—well, it is a comfort, but you do not thus escape the essential facts of life. You merely invent a shield against their too-sharp blows. Regardless of whatever dogmatic moralities may have been dreamed, or yet may be, or attempted, life is still avid, treacherous, astounding. Our little safety, if we have any, lies not in the desires or intentions of our fellow-mortals, good, bad or indifferent, or in their churches or creeds, or ours really, but in their limitations. They dare not do unto us for fear of what we will do to them, or of what the machinery of equation which life has set up or is conditioned by and now operates, will do to them. All else is a poet’s dream.

What, then, shall man do? Weep for that? Shall he despair and call life a failure and a torment? Shall he say that it is limited, that there is no opportunity for progress, or that the sweetness of those things defined as love, charity, mercy, neighborliness and race sociability are by such a governing condition destroyed? Not at all. Wherein is the temperament of Nature Herself, Her sweetness, if such there be; Her romance, if such there be; Her beauty, if such there be, altered by this? Life is as it is—active, dancing, changeful, beautiful, at once brutal and tender—regardless of how our theories would seek to make it seem, and though it does as it chooses at times, or appears to, and invents or assumes various guises of perfection, it is as it has always been, both good and bad, yet held in a kind of equational vise or harmony—neither too good nor too bad—or we would not now be here at all, any of us, to tell the tale. As it is, and well within its equational swing or law, there is room for the will to superiority in the super-man as well as the trembling fears of the least of created creatures. Nor is it impossible for man, with his puny strength or with such force as he may gather, to attempt to upset this very equation and so rule all; or, on the contrary, choose to live in sweetest peace with his neighbor, if he can. He may, and great will be the wonder and charm of his existence if he no more than try. But that he should succeed in permanently so doing is not within his scope unless he should grow to be the universe itself. On the other hand, under this same controlling equation, a man may be a Colossus and bestride the world without upsetting the equation ultimately. Like Alexander, he may sigh for more worlds to conquer; or, like Hannibal, take refuge in despair and death. Or, better yet, like some forceful and yet humble laborer at some small task, he may seek to hide himself away in some simple peaceful realm, free of the storms which rock these greater worlds, and still be secure in one of those minor equilibriums which in the shadow of some of the greater ones are always holding somewhere in part. For, roughly, equation is always holding in one or many forms—dependent equations, which consist of many, many equations or balances, joined in some still greater one or synthesis—and apparently always will. Who shall say? To our present senses the ultimate facts of life are not altering; although that is not for petty man to know.

On the other hand, I should say that the condition of equation which is everywhere evident does not deny or belie any elements of softness, color, beauty or art which now sweeten, or seem, to, a picture which must seem to many inherently grim. God, Good, Nature, Force, is not now, and never has been apparently, without some of these aspects in part, nor bare of the easing limitations indicated by the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule and the Beatitudes. For before these were it was, and if they are or ever were true they still are so, for they took their rise out of it and so must be and remain in it, forever and ever, emanations or adjustments (equation, no doubt) suggested by the desire for expression on the part of the cosmos as a whole. Yet the knowledge that they are the result of a condition or equation which the universe, the life force itself, cannot escape, is or should be most encouraging. Nature must let many things live in reasonable equation or peace, for it is in them and they in it. “I am in the Father; the Father is in me.”

If, then, man is savage he is also tender, inherently so apparently, for by what measure would he measure savageness if not by its contrary? And if he is avid, centripetal, individual, is he not somewhat of their contrary also? In truth, somewhere in the scheme of things is implanted a love of beauty and order as well as their contraries, which can only find expression via equation, and this it is, chemical, inherent awareness of it no doubt, which eases the ache of existence for us all (God, man, devil). For if life loves change, movement, difference, contest, it also plainly loves their contraries, for these exist, and we could not know the one without the other. Order exists as a half of its opposite, disorder, and the one could not well be without the other, and peace exists, if at all, as the complement or antithesis of what is not peaceful. Yet through all and all, and in all and all, are the sting and gayety of change and the consciousness of it, and these remain, possibly forever and ever, outside Nirvana, which Nature may never wish to see or know. It may be impossible for Her to die or be still.

Equation, then, is that which is involved in the lust of the lover for his sweetheart, and her acceptance; the husband for his wife, and her faith; the mother for her child, and its love; the citizen for his neighbor; the individual for his friend. Art, the love of life for itself, is nothing more than a synthesis of many equations whereby many lovely harmonies and their opposites are expressed or implied. Hunger, balanced against satiation, creates more beauty. Life builds and wills far beyond the ken of man or his companion animals, and all that he can know is the chemic thrill of life, its joys, the necessity of equation and so-called fair play, or rhythm and balance. For, behold, life is ever dancing and does not will to be still. Not to want too much, because one cannot get too much; not to seek to devour the whole world, because one cannot; not to threaten, because of vanity and self-appreciation, all else with extermination, because one cannot possibly exterminate all else without disturbing the general balance and so bring the weight, the conditioning and crushing force of equation itself upon oneself, is to say what may offend the individual life-lover but which nevertheless produces the only condition in which the general totality in all its glittering variety, which it appears to crave, can best express itself outside Nirvana. And this it is which should drive the fog of religious theory out of our minds.

For why pray in beggarly fashion for that which will be, whether we pray or not—which, as the mechanists believe and show cannot escape its own destiny? Rather sing and be joyful, I should say, for one’s unescapable share in so great a spectacle. The game is open, free, a thrashing, glorious scene. Our God, if we have one, is not a namby-pamby, milk-and-water solution, suitable for the stomachs and optics of still more namby-pamby men, but a vast somewhat which offers a splendid universe-eating career to the giant, if he wills, an opportunity to thrive and grow to even the most spindling of beginners. Our God, if we have one, is a vast somewhat too great for the perception or understanding or destruction or solution of any minor portion of Him, such as we are. He is a creator of spectacles, a slinger of thunder-bolts, a breather of fire, a master of cataclysm. His, or Its, least breath is storm. Its sigh is earthquake or orbital derangement. No attributes such as man can conceive can apply—neither good nor evil, virtue or its opposite—for these apply only as mild suggestions at moments of equation in one minor part of the great whole or another. Our God is tragedy and comedy, terror and delight. He is limitless opportunity and endless opposition and destruction, for His way is extremes in equation, and nothing more and nothing less.

What then? Despair over that? Is there not, in all conscience, under a loose equation (loose and operative only in extremes) room for all the lusts, the terrors, the wonders, the simplicities of the greatest as well as the least? Alexander may yet be again, or the devil himself in all his power and lurid glory, before he is crushed and set aside, for the time being, by his inherent antithesis, the thing which is not devil.

And as for the religionist, may not Jesus, St. Francis, St. Simon Stylites come again? Let man fight for their return if he will. Who is to gainsay him?—not God, Force, the Universal Substance. Obviously it does not care how it expresses itself, so long as it achieves avid, forceful, artistic expression.

PHANTASMAGORIA.

ASHTORETH

And the ways without—are they crowded with the aged, the worn, the soul-weary? Here and there, perhaps, a halting, bent or time-worn specimen that attracts attention for its age! In the main, at every turn, youth is in charge, laughing, singing, whistling, the newest modes of the Zeitgeist adorning it, the latest coats, the latest hats, the latest shoes heightening the charm of bodies utterly evanescent. The percentage of the really aged abroad is as one to one hundred—one thousand. Viewing the swift tides of life as they burble in the great thoroughfares they are utterly negligible. And it is always so. A large crowd of the old and the weak and the defective would be an astounding sight anywhere in life that is so old.

Yes, life is careful to do away with all evidences of age in the public places where it runs so gaily. The sick—are they here or in hospitals or darkened bedrooms? The maimed, the blind, the defective in any way—are they here, or hidden away in institutions where the young and the hopeful may not see? Life apparently resents them. It will not have its ways bestrewn by its discarded implements and shells. Out, out, since it is done with them. Away! There is much talk of charity and the beatitudes, but let one lose an arm, a leg, an eye, a hand. Practically the entire world shudders and withdraws. Better, indeed, a criminal, whole and exhibiting that self-sufficiency which the life impulse demands, than to have been injured in any worthy or even glorious contest. Rarely if ever, and never willingly, does Life obtrude upon our unwilling gaze a suggestion of the brevity of our own strength or charm, or present to the eye even a faint suggestion of the inscrutable and astounding and even wholesale cruelty of itself. Indeed, where Nature with her illusions has her way, pain, weariness and death are never to be accepted as the huge controlling facts that they are.

What—Nature cruel? Look at the freshness of Her face, the joy of Her perpetual youth, the glory of Her springs, the richness and variety of Her facets and changes! Quite so. She is the subtlest of all our enemies, the wisest of all our craftsmen and managers. Her instinct and therefore Her business is to keep the eternal freshness and durability and zest of life uppermost, and this She does with unbelievable skill. For although we are here, young and new, believing vigorously in our destiny, the grand sum of our future and its durability, still only forty or fifty years ago there were all of a billion people here who were as fresh and as vigorous and as youthful as we are now. They believed in their grand destinies as we believe in ours, and where are they? Gone. No trace—no memory even—no care. Only we are what is left of what was them, their descendants. And the astonishing tragedies, the painful diseases, the most grinding and wearing of denied hopes, by reason of which they are no longer here and we are—how adroitly even the memory of these have been removed! The wonder! Yet life is as fresh now as it was then. It has not aged. It has not gone. The endless chain is as bright and strong as ever—stronger, maybe. To-morrow when we are where they are it will be as taut and shining and swift-moving and as new as ever.

But these young bustling souls swinging their canes, lighting their cigarettes, whistling and dreaming of a perfect to-morrow—do they know aught of this? Not a word. And will they? Not, in the main, until it is too late to affect their lives. And, better yet, and what is really more important, they do not care. Life has one admirable trait: it limits the sensibility of many. “Never mind, dearie,” it seems to say, “do not worry about me, or older days. The old was nothing, the new is all. Eat, drink, be merry and forget. It is best.” Thus life, and it is her intention that they shall. Each sorrow or deprivation or disaster as it befalls them is painted in their consciousness as special to them. Never before was there one such to equal this. No, no. Life would not be so cruel. She would not intentionally do this to any one. “What!” she whispers artfully and convincingly, “life induce such bitter tears? Life ruthlessly and cruelly deprive any one of a hand? an eye? of life itself? Never. To be injured thus indifferently, when so many are not, was never intended by her for you, as you can see. If that is not so, why is it so many are well, hale, happy?” So she lies, for well she knows that each can know but a very little, has no time to learn more. And she sees that he has not.

But in the dark places, the back rooms, the upper floors or cellars of tenements or great houses, the hospitals, the asylums, the jails, the farms and homes for the aged—and the enormous graveyards! Look and see. Here are those who but a little while since were a part of this pell-mell vigorous scene. They were her tools, as you are now, her victims. She fashioned them as one might a small machine, used them for a while for something and then threw them aside. Like a knife or any tool, they grew a little dull, and it is so much easier to fashion a new one. We are intended to last only a little while. While your strength is budding that of others is failing. While your cheeks are reddening theirs are paling. While your eyes are sharpening in shrewdness theirs are weakening to a dim myopia, and you may soon out-see them and push them aside. Yet the bodies of the old that so offend you now were as lithe as your own, and they in their hour were grumbling at the ineffectiveness of age.

But the darkest part of it is that aside from the small modicum of service which you may render at top speed and with the utmost enthusiasm, Nature has not the slightest care for you or yours. With the same cavalier air with which She provides a hundred drones for the single love-flight of the queen bee, all the failures to die, so She provides a thousand, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, that one—and only one—may think the necessary thought, invent the necessary machine, build the necessary bridge or lead the necessary army. The rest may die as they will. They are chaff. Lay them out in hundreds—in millions—to be blown whithersoever the wind listeth, to poverty, to death, perchance even to fortune, a brief hour. Who cares? Not She. Only the ways of life must be kept fresh and new, the illusion of newness and vigor maintained. Only through new bright instruments will She work, and none other. A tasteful maid. In the blood-stream of your body are quadrillions of little entities—so many millions to the single blood drop—whose total destiny, apparently, is to your life about as yours is to the race—and no more. They hurry that you may live. They toil that you may smile, seek, yearn, blaze with ecstasy. A fraction of a minute each, and their little cycles have been run. So yours here. But do they know? Or care? Or do you? There is that much wisdom or tenderness or practicality in Nature, that for the majority She inhibits the power of memory or perspective or too great sensitiveness to joy or pain. Else what a cursing, else what a wailing, else what a ceasing—even in the face of Her imperial will.