§3
The theological bickerings of our time and their “tincture of choler,” as Hobbes would say, are due perhaps to the uneven progress of a great shift in the human notion of God. The primitive imagination of Deity is often of a gigantic omnipotent and omnipresent personality. Then, later, men come to think of God as a kind of force or law, or a harmony among infinite laws and forces. This process of magnifying God from a person to a “far-off Divine Event” proceeds unevenly, as do all ideas. And there is no squabbling so violent as that between people who accepted an idea yesterday and those who will accept the same idea to-morrow. More important than the novelty of ideas is the differential in the rate at which people accept them. Or it might even be put the other way round—the rate at which ideas accept people as vehicles. An idea often hops into a person and uses him, more or less as we hop into taxicabs. Bernard Shaw remarked, not unwisely, that his “Irrational Knot” was a first try (on the part of “the Life Force”) to get the theme of “A Doll’s House” written in English.
Robinson Crusoe’s religion was merely a calculus of personal benefit. When he found that the seeds he threw away had sprouted and come up, he suddenly remembered the goodness of God. But gradually men tend to rise sufficiently above their own pangs and pleasures to relish the conception of a vaster God—a God who does not even know that we exist. There are still, astounding as it seems, actual and living parsons who tell us that the Museum of Natural History is an affront to the Deity. Their simplicity is as delightful as that of Edmund Gosse’s father (if you remember that great book, “Father and Son”). The rock that his reason split upon was the problem whether Adam and Eve, created de novo, had navels. There are others who find in the spider webs and redwood rings of the museum a powerful impulse to wonder and praise. At any rate, this process of magnifying God from an invisible bishop of friable temper to a universal phantom of legality is what Thomas Hardy had in mind when he urged “the abandonment of the masculine pronoun in allusions to the Fundamental Energy.” Nor, on consideration, do we find the masculine pronoun a symbol of such benevolent majesty that it need much longer be retained as spokesman for Deity. It is necessary for man to know, as astronomers do, the inconceivable minuteness of himself and his affairs.
Yet, knowing his unimportance, it is equally urgent for man to act as though his business were momentous. For the whole intellectual life is based upon paradox and dainty artifice. And here we encounter some fundamental characteristics of human behaviour which are highly interesting.
First of all, man is orderly. Finding himself in a grotesquely complicated universe, he hastily tries to reduce what he sees to some general principles. He concocts helpful formulæ, rules of thumb, mnemonic rhymes, all sorts of proverbs, to simplify matters. There has been a rather absurd eagerness on the part of the newspapers to reproach the church for its adherence to formalism. But man is a formula-bearing animal. And I doubt if the most rigid bishop who ever lived was more at the mercy of ritual and formulated ways of expression than the average city editor. An incident may be as interesting as you please, but unless it fits into his carefully ratiocinated scheme of what constitutes a “story” and how it should be “played,” it gets little attention. I have mentioned the Museum of Natural History; let’s take it again as an illustration. I took there a small girl four years old. At first she was appalled and horrified by the things she saw. Live animals, at the zoo, she was familiar with. But these so genuine-looking and yet motionless creatures, plausible enough in their synthetic facsimile surroundings, yet with a gruesome air of not-quite-rightness—she was badly puzzled. They fitted into no preconceived frame in her small mind.
“Are they real, Daddy?” she inquired.
“They were once real, and now are stuffed,” I said.
Her eager mind leaped at this. Here was a happy little formula. And at every succeeding specimen, whether a wolf or a puma or a walrus or a whale, with monotonous insistence she asked, “Is it real and stuffed?” To which I replied, each time, with patient repetition, “Yes, real and stuffed.” It satisfied her perfectly until we came to the figures of Indians and Eskimos. Here a new formula had to be devised, that they were “Not real, but made to look like it.” These trifling statements made the museum, for her, a rational and not too terrifying place.
Once in a while, if you are fond of self-scrutiny, you will catch yourself in the very act of creating or parroting some useful formula. Formulæ swarm in the mind just as birds do in an orchard. And though they destroy some fruit, they also help to exterminate lesser vermin which might do much harm. For the most part we are all mercifully unaware of our dependence on them.
Secondly, then, once formulæ are made, another subtle trick of the mind enters into function. Man’s sovereign faculty of pretense works upon them. He persuades himself that these little rites and short-cuts are not really made by himself, but that they are sacred. Man’s capacity for pretense, I dare say, has been the only thing that has kept him going in a rough, bruising world. He has found, throughout history, that the percolation of certain fictions into affairs made order and government more easy. Indeed the number of generally accepted fictions in currency is not such a bad test of civilization: the more such harmless pretenses, the pleasanter life is. The divine right of kings was one great fiction that had a long serial career and gradually tapered off. Oliver Cromwell “Garred kings ken they had a lith in their necks”; the Prince of Wales’s horses seem to have suggested the same thing. That adorable old shrew, Thomas Hobbes, whose wise and racy survey of human foibles might almost have made any subsequent palaver unnecessary, had people patience to read “Leviathan” nowadays, is copious in instance of men’s love of standing “in awe of their own imaginations.” We are all quick to believe anything, he remarks, from teachers who can “with gentleness and dexterity take hold of our fear and ignorance.” Whereas any truth, no matter how rationally arrived at, that counters our passion and interest, we naturally reject. “I doubt not but,” says the darling old cynic, “if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry, suppressed.”
Master Hobbes is very jolly, too, on a matter that has interested every thoughtful observer since civilization began—that religion is always heartily favoured by prosperous people. Obviously; for it is a stabilizing force. I was greatly struck, approaching Pittsburgh on the train, passing through a black, cindered region where life must lack many of its most harmless pleasures, to notice the astounding number of churches. These, surely, are not there without some sound social reason. There are three prime consolations known to man in the difficulty of his life, God, love, and money. Of any two of these you may deprive him without hearing much grumble, provided he has plenty of the third. But if he lacks all three, there is sure to be trouble.
I have often noticed, in burning a pile of dead leaves, that the mass that seems burned through will, if turned over with the rake, burst into fresh flame. Down under the mound, smothered by weight and closeness, were many fragments that needed only air and freedom to burst into golden blaze. Perhaps it is so with any industrial society. To turn it top to bottom now and then would liberate brilliant human combustions that now lie choked. It is a dangerous doctrine, but so are all doctrines that are any fun. It is a thoroughly Christian doctrine, too.
Before we leave the topic of human relish in pretense, let’s mention one very innocent and amusing example. One of the gay hilarities of existence is the way the current social pretenses shift and vary and move in recurring orbits. The négligé of one period becomes the haut ton of the next. A few years ago, during a very severe winter, it became the mode for young women to go trapesing about in galoshes which were left floppingly unbuckled. What, then, do we see? A year or so later galoshes are put on the market, very cunningly devised with drooping webbed tops to look as though they were carelessly left undone. These at once became, particularly in rustic high schools, excellently de rigueur. It was a daintily accurate exposition of our human taste for illusion.
And the third fundamental characteristic that I am thinking of is our universal liability to habit. This is too familiar for comment. Take merely one instance which has pleasing analogies. Suppose you go to a small haberdasher to buy a pair of socks. In payment, you give him a five-dollar gold piece. As he makes change, he is obscurely troubled. He will ask if you haven’t a bill instead. He doesn’t relish that coin, because he isn’t used to it. Yet, if I understand correctly, gold is the only genuine money there is; all the other stuff is merely money by convention. And how beautifully valid in regard to truth as well. Half-truths to which men are accustomed are so much easier to pass than the golden mintage they rarely encounter! What was it Mr. Don Marquis has remarked: “If you make people think they think, they’ll love you. If you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”