II
If, indeed, by “science” we mean the organisation of an intellectual relationship to the world we live in adequate to give us some degree of power over that world, and if by “mysticism” we mean the joyful organisation of an emotional relationship to the world conceived as a whole,[[71]] the opposition which we usually assume to exist between them is of comparatively modern origin.
Among savage peoples such an opposition can scarcely be said to have any existence. The very fact that science, in the strict sense, seems often to begin with the stars might itself have suggested that the basis of science is mystical contemplation. Not only is there usually no opposition between the “scientific” and the “mystical” attitude among peoples we may fairly call primitive, but the two attitudes may be combined in the same person. The “medicine-man” is not more an embryonic man of science than he is an embryonic mystic; he is both equally. He cultivates not only magic but holiness, he achieves the conquest of his own soul, he enters into harmony with the universe; and in doing this, and partly, indeed, through doing this, his knowledge is increased, his sensations and power of observation are rendered acute, and he is enabled so to gain organised knowledge of natural processes that he can to some extent foresee or even control those processes. He is the ancestor alike of the hermit following after sanctity and of the inventor crystallising discoveries into profitable patents. Such is the medicine-man wherever we may find him in his typical shape—which he cannot always adequately achieve—all over the world, around Torres Straits just as much as around Behring’s Straits. Yet we have failed to grasp the significance of this fact.
It is the business of the Shaman, as on the mystical side we may conveniently term the medicine-man, to place himself under the conditions—and even in primitive life those conditions are varied and subtle—which bring his will into harmony with the essence of the world, so that he grows one with that essence, that its will becomes his will, and, reversely, that, in a sense, his will becomes its. Herewith, in this unity with the spirit of the world, the possibility of magic and the power to control the operation of Nature are introduced into human thought, with its core of reality and its endless trail of absurdity, persisting even into advanced civilisation.
But this harmony with the essence of the universe, this control of Nature through oneness with Nature, is not only at the heart of religion; it is also at the heart of science. It is only by the possession of an acquired or inborn temperament attuned to the temperament of Nature that a Faraday or an Edison, that any scientific discoverer or inventor, can achieve his results. And the primitive medicine-man, who on the religious side has attained harmony of the self with the Not-Self, and by obeying learnt to command, cannot fail on the scientific side also, under the special conditions of his isolated life, to acquire an insight into natural methods, a practical power over human activities and over the treatment of disease, such as on the imaginative and emotional side he already possesses. If we are able to see this essential and double attitude of the Shaman—medicine-man—if we are able to eliminate all the extraneous absurdities and the extravagancies which conceal the real nature of his function in the primitive world, the problem of science and mysticism, and their relationship to each other, ceases to have difficulties for us.
It is as well to point out, before passing on, that the investigators of primitive thought are not altogether in agreement with one another on this question of the relation of science to magic, and have complicated the question by drawing a distinction between magic (understood as man’s claim to control Nature) and religion (understood as man’s submission to Nature). The difficulties seem due to an attempt to introduce clear-cut definitions at a stage of thought where none such existed. That medicine-men and priests cultivated science, while wrapping it up in occult and magical forms, seems indicated by the earliest historical traditions of the Near East. Herbert Spencer long ago brought together much of the evidence on this point. McDougall to-day in his “Social Psychology” (Chapter XIII) accepts magic as the origin of science, and Frazer in the early edition of his “Golden Bough” regarded magic as “the savage equivalent of our natural science.” Marett[[72]] “profoundly doubts” this, and declares that if we can use the word “science” at all in such a context, magic is occult science and the very antithesis of natural science. While all that Marett states is admirably true on the basis of his own definitions, he scarcely seems to realise the virtue of the word “equivalent,” while at the same time, it may be, his definition of magic is too narrow. Silberer, from the psycho-analytic standpoint, accepting the development of exact science from one branch of magic, points out that science is, on the one hand, the recognition of concealed natural laws and, on the other, the dynamisation of psychic power,[[73]] and thus falls into two great classes, according as its operation is external or internal. This seems a true and subtle distinction which Marett has overlooked. In the latest edition of his work,[[74]] Frazer has not insisted on the relation or analogy of science to magic, but has been content to point out that Man has passed through the three stages of magic, religion, and science. “In magic Man depends on his own strength to meet the difficulties and dangers that beset him on every side. He believes in a certain established order of Nature on which he can surely count, and which he can manipulate for his own ends.” Then he finds he has overestimated his own powers and he humbly takes the road of religion, leaving the universe to the more or less capricious will of a higher power. But he finds this view inadequate and he proceeds to revert in a measure to the older standpoint of magic by postulating explicitly what in magic had only been implicitly assumed, “to wit, an inflexible regularity in the order of natural events which, if carefully observed, enables us to foresee their course with certainty, and to act accordingly.” So that science, in Frazer’s view, is not so much directly derived from magic as itself in its original shape one with magic, and Man has proceeded, not in a straight line, but in a spiral.
The profound significance of this early personage is, however, surely clear. If science and mysticism are alike based on fundamental natural instincts, appearing spontaneously all over the world; if, moreover, they naturally tend to be embodied in the same individual, in such a way that each impulse would seem to be dependent on the other for its full development; then there can be no ground for accepting any disharmony between them. The course of human evolution involves a division of labour, a specialisation of science and of mysticism along special lines and in separate individuals.[[75]] But a fundamental antagonism of the two, it becomes evident, is not to be thought of; it is unthinkable, even absurd. If at some period in the course of civilisation we seriously find that our science and our religion are antagonistic, then there must be something wrong either with our science or with our religion. Perhaps not seldom there may be something wrong with both. For if the natural impulses which normally work best together are separated and specialised in different persons, we may expect to find a concomitant state of atrophy and hypertrophy, both alike morbid. The scientific person will become atrophied on the mystical side, the mystical person will become atrophied on the scientific side. Each will become morbidly hypertrophied on his own side. But the assumption that, because there is a lack of harmony between opposing pathological states, there must also be a similar lack of harmony in the normal state, is unreasonable. We must severely put out of count alike the hypertrophied scientific people with atrophied religious instincts, and the hypertrophied religious people with atrophied scientific instincts. Neither group can help us here; they only introduce confusion. We have to examine the matter critically, to go back to the beginning, to take so wide a survey of the phenomena that their seemingly conflicting elements fall into harmony.
The fact, in the first place, that the person with an overdeveloped religious sense combined with an underdeveloped scientific sense necessarily conflicts with a person in whom the reverse state of affairs exists, cannot be doubted, nor is the reason of it obscure. It is difficult to conceive a Darwin and a St. Theresa entering with full and genuine sympathy into each other’s point of view. And that is so by no means because the two attitudes, stripped of all but their essentials, are irreconcilable. If we strip St. Theresa of her atrophied pseudo-science, which in her case was mostly theological “science,” there was nothing in her attitude which would not have seemed to harmonise and to exalt that absolute adoration and service to natural truth which inspired Darwin. If we strip Darwin of that atrophied sense of poetry and the arts which he deplored, and that anæmic secular conception of the universe as a whole which he seems to have accepted without deploring, there was nothing in his attitude which would not have served to fertilise and enrich the spiritual exaltation of Theresa and even to have removed far from her that temptation to acedia or slothfulness which all the mystics who are mystics only have recognised as their besetting sin, minimised as it was, in Theresa, by her practical activities. Yet, being as they were persons of supreme genius developed on opposite sides of their common human nature, an impassable gulf lies between them. It lies equally between much more ordinary people who yet show the same common character of being undergrown on one side, overgrown on the other.
This difficulty is not diminished when the person who is thus hypertrophied on one side and atrophied on the other suddenly wakes up to his one-sided state and hastily attempts to remedy it. The very fact that such a one-sided development has come about indicates that there has probably been a congenital basis for it, an innate disharmony which must require infinite patience and special personal experience to overcome. But the heroic and ostentatious manner in which these ill-balanced people hastily attempt the athletic feat of restoring their spiritual balance has frequently aroused the interest, and too often the amusement, of the spectator. Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most quintessentially scientific persons the world has seen, a searcher who made the most stupendous effort to picture the universe intelligently on its purely intelligible side, seems to have realised in old age, when he was, indeed, approaching senility, that the vast hypertrophy of his faculties on that side had not been compensated by any development on the religious side. He forthwith set himself to the interpretation of the Book of Daniel and puzzled over the prophecies of the Book of Revelation, with the same scientifically serious air as though he were analysing the spectrum. In reality he had not reached the sphere of religion at all; he had merely exchanged good science for bad science. Such senile efforts to penetrate, ere yet life is quite over, the mystery of religion recall, and, indeed, have a real analogy to, that final effort of the emotionally starved to grasp at love which has been called “old maid’s insanity”; and just as in this aberration the woman who has all her life put love into the subconscious background of her mind is overcome by an eruption of the suppressed emotions and driven to create baseless legends of which she is herself the heroine, so the scientific man who has put religion into the subconscious and scarcely known that there is such a thing may become in the end the victim of an imaginary religion. In our own time we may have witnessed attempts of the scientific mind to become religious, which, without amounting to mental aberration, are yet highly instructive. It would be a double-edged compliment, in this connection, to compare Sir Oliver Lodge to Sir Isaac Newton. But after devoting himself for many years to purely physical research, Lodge also, as he has confessed, found that he had overlooked the religious side of life, and therefore set himself with characteristic energy to the task—the stages of which are described in a long series of books—of developing this atrophied side of his nature. Unlike Newton, who was worried about the future, Lodge became worried about the past. Just as Newton found what he was contented to regard as religious peace in speculating on the meaning of the Books of Daniel and Revelation, so Lodge found a similar satisfaction in speculations concerning the origin of the soul and in hunting out tags from the poets to support his speculations. So fascinating was this occupation that it seemed to him to constitute a great “message” to the world. “My message is that there is some great truth in the idea of preëxistence, not an obvious truth, nor one easy to formulate—a truth difficult to express—not to be identified with the guesses of reincarnation and transmigration, which may be fanciful. We may not have been individuals before, but we are chips or fragments of a great mass of mind, of spirit, and of life—drops, as it were, taken out of a germinal reservoir of life, and incubated until incarnate in a material body.”[[76]] The genuine mystic would smile if asked to accept as a divine message these phraseological gropings in the darkness, with their culmination in the gospel of “incubated drops.” They certainly represent an attempt to get at a real fact. But the mystic is not troubled by speculations about the origin of the individual, or theories of preëxistence, fantastic myths which belong to the earlier Plato’s stage of thought. It is abundantly evident that when the hypertrophied man of science seeks to cultivate his atrophied religious instincts it is with the utmost difficulty that he escapes from science. His conversion to religion merely means, for the most part, that he has exchanged sound science for pseudo-science.
Similarly, when the man with hypertrophied religious instincts seeks to cultivate his atrophied scientific instincts, the results are scarcely satisfactory. Here, indeed, we are concerned with a phenomenon that is rarer than the reverse process. The reason may not be far to seek. The instinct of religion develops earlier in the history of a race than the instinct of science. The man who has found the massive satisfaction of his religious cravings is seldom at any stage conscious of scientific cravings; he is apt to feel that he already possesses the supreme knowledge. The religious doubters who vaguely feel that their faith is at variance with science are merely the creatures of creeds, the product of Churches; they are not the genuine mystics. The genuine mystics who have exercised their scientific instincts have generally found scope for such exercise within an enlarged theological scheme which they regarded as part of their religion. So it was that St. Augustine found scope for his full and vivid, if capricious, intellectual impulses; so also Aquinas, in whom there was doubtless less of the mystic and more of the scientist, found scope for the rational and orderly development of a keen intelligence which has made him an authority and even a pioneer for many who are absolutely indifferent to his theology.
Again we see that to understand the real relations of science and mysticism, we must return to ages when, on neither side, had any accumulated mass of dead traditions effected an artificial divorce between two great natural instincts. It has already been pointed out that if we go outside civilisation the divorce is not found; the savage mystic is also the savage man of science, the priest and the doctor are one.[[77]] It is so also for the most part in barbarism, among the ancient Hebrews for instance, and not only among their priests, but even among their prophets. It appears that the most usual Hebrew word for what we term the “prophet” signified “one who bursts forth,” presumably into the utterance of spiritual verities, and the less usual words signify “seer.” That is to say, the prophet was primarily a man of religion, secondarily a man of science. And that predictive element in the prophet’s function, which to persons lacking in religious instinct seems the whole of his function, has no relationship at all to religion; it is a function of science. It is an insight into cause and effect, a conception of sequences based on extended observation and enabling the “prophet” to assert that certain lines of action will probably lead to the degeneration of a stock, or to the decay of a nation. It is a sort of applied history. “Prophecy” has no more to do with religion than have the forecasts of the Meteorological Bureau, which also are a kind of applied science in earlier stages associated with religion.
If, keeping within the sphere of civilisation, we go back as far as we can, the conclusion we reach is not greatly different. The earliest of the great mystics in historical times is Lao-tze. He lived six hundred years earlier than Jesus, a hundred years earlier than Sakya-Muni, and he was more quintessentially a mystic than either. He was, moreover, incomparably nearer than either to the point of view of science. Even his occupation in life was, in relation to his age and land, of a scientific character; he was, if we may trust uncertain tradition, keeper of the archives. In the substance of his work this harmony of religion and science is throughout traceable, the very word “Tao,” which to Lao-tze is the symbol of all that to which religion may mystically unite us, is susceptible of being translated “Reason,” although that word remains inadequate to its full meaning. There are no theological or metaphysical speculations here concerning God (the very word only occurs once and may be a later interpolation), the soul, or immortality. The delicate and profound art of Lao-tze largely lies in the skill with which he expresses spiritual verities in the form of natural truths. His affirmations not only go to the core of religion, but they express the essential methods of science. This man has the mystic’s heart, but he has also the physicist’s touch and the biologist’s eye. He moves in a sphere in which religion and science are one.
If we pass to more modern times and the little European corner of the world, around the Mediterranean shores, which is the cradle of our latter-day civilisation, again and again we find traces of this fundamental unity of mysticism and science. It may well be that we never again find it in quite so pure a form as in Lao-tze, quite so free from all admixture alike of bad religion and bad science. The exuberant unbalanced activity of our race, the restless acquisitiveness—already manifested in the sphere of ideas and traditions before it led to the production of millionaires—soon became an ever-growing impediment to such unity of spiritual impulses. Among the supple and yet ferocious Greeks, indeed, versatility and recklessness seem at a first glance always to have stood in the way of approach to the essential terms of this problem. It was only when the Greeks began to absorb Oriental influences, we are inclined to say, that they became genuine mystics, and as they approached mysticism they left science behind.
Yet there was a vein of mysticism in the Greeks from the first, not alone due to seeds from the East flung to germinate fruitfully in Greek soil, though perhaps to that Ionian element of the Near East which was an essential part of the Greek spirit. All that Karl Joël of Basel has sought to work out concerning the evolution of the Greek philosophic spirit has a bearing on this point. We are wrong, he believes, to look on the early Greek philosophers of Nature as mainly physicists, treating the religious and poetic mystic elements in them as mere archaisms, concessions, or contradictions. Hellas needed, and possessed, an early Romantic spirit, if we understand the Romantic spirit, not merely through its reactionary offshoots, but as a deep mystico-lyrical expression; it was comparable in early Greece to the Romantic spirit of the great creative men of the early Renaissance or the early nineteenth century, and the Apollinian classic spirit was developed out of an ordered discipline and formulation of the Dionysian spirit more mystically near to Nature.[[78]] If we bear this in mind we are helped to understand much in the religious life of Greece which seems not to harmonise with what we conventionally call “classic.”
In the dim figure of Pythagoras we perhaps see not only a great leader of physical science, but also a great initiator in spiritual mystery. It is, at any rate, fairly clear that he established religious brotherhoods of carefully selected candidates, women as well as men being eligible, and living on so lofty and aristocratic a level that the populace of Magna Grecia, who could not understand them, decided out of resentment to burn them alive, and the whole order was annihilated about B.C. 500. But exactly how far these early Pythagoreans, whose community has been compared to the mediæval orders of chivalry, were mystics, we may imagine as we list, in the light of the Pythagorean echoes we find here and there in Plato. On the whole we scarcely go to the Greeks for a clear exposition of what we now term “mysticism.” We see more of it in Lucretius than we can divine in his master Epicurus. And we see it still more clearly in the Stoics. We can, indeed, nowhere find a more pure and concise statement than in Marcus Aurelius of the mystical core of religion as the union in love and harmony and devotion of the self with the Not-Self.
If Lucretius may be accounted the first of moderns in the identification of mysticism and science, he has been followed by many, even though, one sometimes thinks, with an ever-increasing difficulty, a drooping of the wings of mystical aspiration, a limping of the feet of scientific progress. Leonardo and Giordano Bruno and Spinoza and Goethe, each with a little imperfection on one side or the other, if not on both sides, have moved in a sphere in which the impulses of religion are felt to spring from the same centre as the impulses of science. Einstein, whose attitude in many ways is so interesting, closely associates the longing for pure knowledge with religious feeling, and he has remarked that “in every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence.” He is inclined to attach significance to the fact that so many great men of science—Newton, Descartes, Gauss, Helmholtz—have been in one way or another religious. If we cannot altogether include such men as Swedenborg and Faraday in the same group, it is because we cannot feel that in them the two impulses, however highly developed, really spring from the same centre or really make a true harmony. We suspect that these men and their like kept their mysticism in a science-proof compartment of their minds, and their science in a mysticism-proof compartment; we tremble for the explosive result, should the wall of partition ever be broken down.
The difficulty, we see again, has been that, on each hand, there has been a growth of non-essential traditions around the pure and vital impulse, and the obvious disharmony of these two sets of accretions conceals the underlying harmony of the impulses themselves. The possibility of reaching the natural harmony is thus not necessarily by virtue of any rare degree of intellectual attainment, nor by any rare gift of inborn spiritual temperament,—though either of these may in some cases be operative,—but rather by the happy chance that the burden of tradition on each side has fallen and that the mystical impulse is free to play without a dead metaphysical theology, the scientific impulse without a dead metaphysical formalism. It is a happy chance that may befall the simple more easily than the wise and learned.