VII RELIGION AND SCIENCE: OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES
GOD AND MAN
The world of things entered your infant mind
To populate that crystal cabinet.
Within its walls the strangest partners met,
And things turned thoughts did propagate their kind.
For, once within, corporeal fact could find
A spirit. Fact and you in mutual debt
Built there your little microcosm—which yet
Had hugest tasks to its small self assigned.
Dead men can live there, and converse with stars:
Equator speaks with Pole, and Night with Day:
Spirit dissolves the world’s material bars—
A million isolations burn away.
The Universe can live and work and plan,
At last made God within the mind of man.
RELIGION AND SCIENCE:
OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES
“In la sua volontade è nostra pace.”
—Dante.
“Ye are the Gods if ye did but realize it.”—Carlyle.
“The next great task of Science is to create a religion for humanity.” So says Lord Morley in one of his essays. It is a striking saying, coming as it does from one in whom thought and action have been so intertwined, one to whom reason, not dogma, is the basis of morality, achievement, not emotion, its justification.
Let those words be my encouragement; for they challenge at the outset, and to my mind rightly, two of the most persistent difficulties that confront one who tries to write of the relations between Science and Religion. The man of science too often asks what science can have to do with what he brands as utterly and wholly unscientific; the religiously-minded man demands what gain can follow from contact with the cold and inhuman attitude of pure reason. To those questions I hope that this essay will provide a partial answer. Meanwhile I shall begin with a perhaps less ultimate but more pressing question. That question is asked by many men and women of to-day, who on the one hand feel as it were instinctively that religion of some sort is necessary for life, yet on the other are unable to do violence to their intellectual selves by denying the facts that reason and scientific inquiry reveal, or by closing their eyes to them.
The question, in briefest form, is this: “What room does science leave for God?”
To the savage, all is spirit. The meanest objects are charged with influence, the commonest actions fraught with spiritual possibilities, the operations of nature one and all are brought about by spiritual powers—but powers multifarious and conflicting. “Nature can have little unity for savages. It is a Walpurgis-nacht procession, a checkered play of light and shadow, a medley of impish and elfish, friendly and inimical powers.”[44]
But with ordered civilization and dispassionate observation a network of material cause and effect invaded this spiritual domain. The mysterious influences, for example, believed to be inherent in springs and running rivers became personified, and, anthropomorphized as nymphs or gods, were removed into a seclusion more remote from practical and everyday life than their unpersonified predecessors. Later, they retreated still farther from actuality into a half-believed mythology, and then passed away into the powerlessness of avowed fairy-story or literary symbolism, while the rivers, perceived as the resultant of natural forces, were more and more harnessed to man’s use. So with the wind and the rain, the growth of crops, the storms of the sea. So, in due time, with the thunder and the lightning, with earthquakes, eruptions, comets, eclipses, pestilences.
This process of liberating matter from arbitrary and mysterious power, of perceiving it as orderly and endowed with regularity of natural law, of bringing it more and more beneath human control, was, on the other hand, accompanied by what may be called a combined condensation and sublimation of the spiritual forces accepted by human faith. They are built up from spirit to spirits, spirits to gods, gods to God. But now it seems as if this condensation had reached its limit, and the sublimation could only go farther by resolving the one God into an empty name or the vaguest unreality.
We look back and see the Gods of early man, and are complacently prepared to believe that they were based in error, products of mental immaturity, to be relegated to limbo without regret. But what about the present? Why should we shrink from applying the same process to the God of to-day?
Is it then to be so with every God? Is God only a personified symbol of our residuum of ignorance? Is to hold the idea of God in any form to be, as Salomon Reinach believes, in an infantile stage of human development, and must we with him define religion as “a sum of beliefs impeding the free use of human faculty”?
I think not; and I shall endeavour to justify my belief to you, and to show that, albeit much alteration and a thorough revision of ideas is needed, the term God has an important scientific connotation, and further that the present stagnation of religion can be remedied if, as has happened again and again in biological evolution, the old forms become extinct or subordinate, and a new dominant type is developed along quite fresh lines.
In any case the man of science must obviously, if he face the problem at all, take up a scientific attitude of mind towards it. He cannot say that there is no such thing as religion; or try to whittle it away by explaining that it is something else—a complicated fear, or a sublimated sex-instinct, or a combination of credulity and duplicity. A thing, if it is a thing at all, is never merely something else. Nor can he submit to the pretensions of those who assert that it is too sacred to be touched, or that its certainties are greater than those of science. No—he must treat it for what it is—a fact, and a very important fact at that, in human history: and he must see whether the application of scientific method to its study—in other words, its illumination by the faculty of pure intellect—will help not only our comprehension of religion in the past, but its actual development in the future.
He can study it in various ways. He can use the method of observation and comparison, collecting and collating facts until he is able to give a connected account of the manifestations of religion and of their past history; he can study it physiologically, so to speak, to see what part it plays in the body politic, and how that part may alter with circumstances; or he may seek to investigate its essence, to discover not only how it appears and what it does, but what it is.
Further, he must have some general principles to lean on in his search, principles both positive and negative. He must be content to leave certain possibilities out of account because as yet he cannot see how they can be connected with his organized scheme of things; in other words, he has to be content to build slowly and imperfectly in order that he may be sure of building soundly. This is the principle which we may call positive agnosticism.
This very fact has been in the past one of the great obstacles in the way of successful treatment of religion by science. One of the attributes of man is his desire for a complete explanation, or at least a complete view, of his universe, and this has been at the bottom of much doctrine and many creeds. But before Kepler and Newton, no truly scientific account could be given of celestial phenomena; before Darwin, none of Natural History; before the recent revival in psychology, none of the mind and its workings. In the second half of the nineteenth century, for instance, science could give an adequate account of most inorganic phenomena, and, in broad outline, of evolutionary geology and biology; but mind was still refractory. Accordingly, the philosophy of science was mainly materialist. But the common man felt that mind was not the empty epiphenomenon that orthodox science would have it; and he desired a scheme of things in which mind should be more adequately explained than it could be by science at its then stage of development. Hinc illae lacrimae.
To-day it is at least possible to link up, not only physics and chemistry and geology and evolutionary biology, but also anthropology and psychology, into a whole which, though far from complete, is at least organized and coherent with itself. If the seventeenth century cleared the ground for that dwelling-place of human mind which we call the scientific view of things, if the eighteenth century laid the foundations and the nineteenth built the walls, the twentieth is already fitting up some of the rooms for actual habitation.
There are certain other domains of reality which have not yet been properly investigated by science. Telepathy, for instance, and the whole mass of phenomena included broadly under the term spiritualism, are in about the some position with regard to organized scientific thought to-day as was astronomy before astrology’s collapse, as was the study of electricity in the eighteenth century, or that of hypnotism in the middle of the nineteenth. What is more, the average man demands that phenomena of this order shall be included in his scheme of things. Science cannot yet do this for him; and accordingly the dwelling-place that we are building must still be incomplete; it is for those who come after to build the upper stories.
This cannot be helped. What we build, we must build firmly; on what is yet to be built, science cannot pronounce, except to say that she knows that it will be congruous with what has gone before.
What general principles, then, do we assume? We assume that the universe is composed throughout of the same matter, whose essential unity, in spite of the diversity of its so-called elements, the recent researches of physicists are revealing to us; we assume that matter behaves in the same way wherever it is found, showing the same mode of sequence of change, of cause and effect. We assume, on fairly good although indirect evidence, that there has been an evolution of the forms assumed by matter; that, in this solar system of ours, for instance, matter was once all in electronic form, that it then attained to the atomic and the molecular; that later, colloidal organic matter of a special type made its appearance, and later still, living matter arose. That the forms of life, simple at first, attained progressively to greater complexity; that mind, negligible in the lower forms, became of greater and greater importance, until it reached its present level in man.[45]
Unity, uniformity, and development are the three great principles that emerge. We know of no instance where the properties of matter change, though many where a new state of matter develops. The full properties of a molecular compound such as water, for instance, cannot be deduced at present from what we know about the properties of its constituent atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. The properties of the human mind cannot be deduced from our present knowledge of the minds of animals. New combinations and properties thus arise in time. Bergson miscalls such evolution “creative.” We had better, with Lloyd Morgan, call it “emergent.”
With mind, we find a gradual evolution from a state in which it is impossible to distinguish mental response from physiological reaction, up to the intensity and complexity of our own emotions and intellect. Since all material developments in evolution can be traced back step by step and shown to be specializations of one or more of the primitive properties of living matter, it is not only an economy of hypothesis, but also, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the proper conclusion, that mental properties also are to be traced back to the simplest and most original forms of life. What exact significance is to be attached to the term “mental properties” in such organisms, it is hard to say; we mean, however, that something of the same general nature as mind in ourselves is inherent in all life, something standing in the same relation to living matter in general as do our minds to the particular living matter of our brains.
But there can be no reasonable doubt that living matter, in due process of time, originated from non-living; and if that be so, we must push our conclusion farther, and believe that not only living matter, but all matter, is associated with something of the same general description as mind in higher animals. We come, that is, to a monistic conclusion, in that we believe that there is only one fundamental substance, and that this possesses not only material properties, but also properties for which the word mental is the nearest approach. We want a new word to denote this X, this world-stuff; matter will not do, for that is a word which the physicists and chemists have moulded to suit themselves, and since they have not yet learned to detect or measure mental phenomena, they restrict the word “material” to mean “non-mental,” and “matter” to mean that which has such “material” properties.
You will remember William of Occam’s razor; “Entia non multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”; when we are monists in the sense I have just outlined, we are using that weapon to shave away a very unrestrained growth of hair which has long obscured the features of reality.
Holding to these principles, we must, until evidence to the contrary is produced, reject any explanation which proceeds by cataclysms, or by miracles; a miracle becomes (when not an illusion) simply an event which is on the one hand uncommon, and for which, on the other, there has been found no explanation. Revelation too goes by the board—save a revelation which is simply a name for the progressive increase of knowledge and insight.
Last, but not least, we do not pretend to know the Absolute. We know phenomena, and our systems, in so far as scientific, are interpretations of phenomena.
* * * * * * *
Religion has been defined in a hundred different ways. It has been defined intellectually—as a creed; as myth; as a view of the universe; it has been defined emotionally as consisting in awe; in fear; in love; in mystical exaltation or communion. It has been defined from the standpoint of action—as worship; as ritual; as sacrifice; as morality. Matthew Arnold called it “morality tinged with emotion”; Salomon Reinach “a sum of scruples impeding the free use of human faculties.” Jevons makes the experiencing of God the central feature; and so on and so forth. Is it possible to find any common measure for all these statements? Would it not be better to unite with those who cut the Gordian knot by writing down all religion simply as illusion? No. For their point of view is meaningless. Even illusions are, in themselves, facts to be investigated; and even illusions have a basis.
But it is not necessary to believe that it is an illusion; the knot may be untied. Ritual, Creed, Morality, Mystical Experience—all these are manifestations of religion, but not religion itself. Religion itself is the reaction between man as a personality on the one side, and, on the other, all of the universe with which he comes in contact. It is not only ritual, for you may have obviously non-religious ritual, as in a court ceremonial or a legal function: it is not merely morality, for men may practise morality, the most austere or the most terre à terre, uninspired by anything that could remotely be called religious: it is not belief, for we may have beliefs of all kinds, even to the most complex scientific beliefs concerning the universe, which have yet no connection with religion: it is neither communion in itself, nor ecstasy in itself, as many lovers and poets could tell you.
But because it is a reaction of the whole personality, it must involve intellectual and practical and emotional processes: and because man has the powers of abstraction and association, or rather because his mind in most cases cannot help making associations and abstractions, it follows that it will inevitably concern itself, consciously or subconsciously, with all the phenomena that it encounters, will try to bring them all into its scheme, and will try to unify them and frame concepts to deal with them as a whole.
Some men will be more concerned on the emotional, others on the intellectual, others again on the moral side: but it is impossible to separate any one of the three aspects entirely from the others.
We will begin with and treat mainly of the intellectual aspect of the problem, the credal side. For one thing, science has more direct concern with it than with the others; for another, more continuous and startling alterations have had to be made in it; and finally, the actual problem is there felt most acutely at the present moment.
What, then, is the problem? In the terms of our definition of religion, it is in its most general terms as follows: Man has to live his life in a world in which he is confronted with forces and powers other than his own. He is a mere animalcule in comparison with the totality of these forces, his life a second in comparison with their centuries. By his mental constitution, he of necessity attempts to formulate some intelligible account of the constitution of the world and its relation to himself—or should we rather say in so far as it is in relation to himself?—and so we have a myth, a doctrine, or a creed.
At the present moment, as we have already seen, there appears to be an irreconcilable conflict between orthodox Christianity and orthodox Natural Science. The one asserts the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, personal God—creator, ruler, and refuge. The other, by reducing ever more and more of natural phenomena to what we please to call natural laws—in other words, to orderly processes proceeding inevitably from the known constitution and properties of matter—has robbed such a God of ever more and more of his realm and possible power; until finally, with the rise of evolutionary biology and psychology, there seems to be no place any more for a God in the universe.
Stated thus, the opposition is complete. But let us return on our footsteps, and trace for one thing some of the history of religious beliefs, for another re-investigate, from a slightly unusual standpoint, the actual knowledge of the Universe which science has given us.
Man has developed: in early stages, his physical and mental capacities developed; in later stages development has been mainly restricted to his traditions, ideas, and achievements. As part of his development, his religious ideas have altered too.
At the beginning, he appears to have no ideas of a God of Gods at all—merely of influences and powers, obviously (he would say) inherent in the forces of Nature, magically inherent in certain objects and actions—fetishes and incantations. He seems scarcely to have been conscious of himself as an individual, or of the full distinction between self and the external world.
Later, perhaps as the idea of his own personality grew, he began to ascribe a more personal existence to the forces with which he came into contact, and so to turn them more and more into beings that can properly be called Gods: polydaemonism arose and in its turn gave place to polytheism.
But while rigid custom was at first the only morality, and each external power and each human activity was regarded separately, later the rise of civilization led to a modification of custom, to a reference of action and belief to the standards of pure reason, and to an attempt at unification. Once this occurred, and equally so whether the attempt at unification had an intellectual or a moral basis, polytheism was doomed. Its downfall has been often described; the reasons for it are suggestively put by Jevons in his little book, “The Idea of God.” It passes through a stage where one among the gods is pre-eminent: but finally even that does not suffice, and in its place arises a monotheistic creed.
Monotheism may start as a purely local or tribal affair—my one God against yours. It may not only start, but long continue so. Readers of Mr. Bang’s collection of startling German war-sayings will remember the superbly national prayer of the Prussian pastor who addressed his God (I quote from memory) as “Du, der hoch über Cherubinen, Seraphinen, und Zeppelinen ewig trönst.” (J. P. Bang, Hurrah and Hallelujah. London, 1916.) But this idea, too, is self-contradictory, and merges into that of one God for all men. The primitive anthropomorphism which had invested the first vague and mysterious spirits with human parts and passions, human speech and thought, also fell into gradual desuetude. It was kept up as a symbol, or because of the difficulty of describing a God except in terms human individuality, but its literal truth was deliberately denied. God became different from and more than man—omnipotent, omniscient, with no parts, with no limitations: but he retained personality—in other words, a mental or spiritual organization of the same general kind as man’s, however superior in degree. With time, the divine personality became compounded more and more of man’s ideals instead of his everyday thoughts and attributes. And thus and that God remains. He has created everything; he is in some sense immanent in the world, in some sense apart from it as its ruler—you take your choice according to your philosophic preferences. Beyond that, organized religious thought has not gone; and now it finds itself fronting science in an impasse.
That, very briefly and roughly, is how man’s idea of God has developed. But how have man’s knowledge and ideas of the natural universe developed? What has Science to say to the impasse?
Man has to deal with three great categories of phenomena—the inorganic, the organic, and the psychic. In the inorganic, chemistry first and then physics have given us a picture whose broad outlines are now familiar. There is but one type and store of energy in Nature, whether it drives a train, animates a man, radiates in heat or light, inheres in a falling stone. There is but one substance. All bodies of trees, of men, rivers and rocks, the clouds in the air and the air itself, precious stones and common clay—all can be resolved into a limited number of elements. And these elements in their turn can be resolved into combinations, differing, it appears, only quantitatively from each other, of electrical charges; so that at the last all matter is one, and becomes perhaps indistinguishable, or at least inseparable, from energy. There is no personal operator for particular happenings; the lightning and the volcano are the inevitable outcome of the material constitution of things, equally with the form and colour of a pebble and with the fact that it will drop to the ground if it is let fall. All is impersonal order and unity.
There is, however, one other great fact about the system of inorganic matter. The energy contained in it tends to be degraded, as the physicists say—in other words to become less readily available. There is available energy in moving matter. There is potential energy in all matter, dependent upon whether it can be set in motion. But if the sea were to cover the whole surface of the globe, it would be impossible to extract energy from running water as we do now, because no water would be running. So too heat is energy; but it is only available when it can flow, when there are hotter and colder bodies. The law under which transformations of energy operate has now been investigated, and it has been established that in every energy-transaction a certain modicum goes to waste as unavailable heat, so that, unless some at present unforeseen change occurs, the last state of the universe, considered as a purely physico-chemical mechanism, will be one of death, of inactivity, with all matter at a uniform low temperature and the whole stock of energy locked up and unavailable in this sea of tranquillity. True for one thing that an almost inconceivable number of millions of years must elapse before this “death of matter” is realized; and for another that we are unable to understand how such a progressive degradation could have been in operation from all eternity. We must not expect complete knowledge within a few years or a few centuries; but even if the beginning is veiled—for there is no more evidence for a “creation” than for (say) a rhythmic reversal of the direction of energy-availability—and if it is always possible that some unforeseen change in the process should occur before the whole runs down, yet it is a fact (and we are resolved to be agnostic save about facts) that, here and now, a direction is to be observed in the evolution of inorganic matter, by which natural operations are tending to become less active, and the amount of available energy is diminishing. If it continues indefinitely, first life, and later on all activity and change whatsoever will cease. There is a tendency towards death and towards unchanging inactivity.
The next great category is that of the organic, of living matter. We have to consider its origin and later history. So far as constitution goes, living matter is merely a special and highly complicated form of ordinary matter; and there can be no reasonable doubt that it has originated naturally from non-living matter.
While the main direction of the inorganic has been towards degradation of energy, it has shown another subsidiary direction towards the production of more and more complex forms of matter. If our general ideas are correct, there must have been a time when matter in our ordinary sense of the word did not exist—there can have been no atoms, only free electrons. From this state, there evolved one in which the various electron-systems that we call atoms first appeared; later still, atoms could join with atoms to produce molecules. Leaping over vast periods, we would come to the time when radiation had brought the temperature of the earth surface below 100 degrees centigrade; water then could form from steam and solution occur. Through solution, all soluble elements, which would otherwise remain locked in the inactivity of the solid state, are enabled to enter upon a new phase of mobility, of chemical life, as we may say. Only in water could colloid carbon compounds first be built up, and only from such substances could life originate.
Living substance, or at least much of it, must be formed of molecules containing thousands of atoms, each atom in its turn a system of circling electrons. Here already is a vast increase of complexity: it remains to be seen whether the same tendency is perpetuated later.
The evolutionary concept is to biology what the doctrine of the conservation of energy has been in the physico-chemical sciences—an indispensable preliminary to proper methods of attack. But while great stress has been laid on the various methods by which evolution may be supposed to have taken place—natural selection, Lamarckism, orthogenesis and the rest—biology has concerned herself comparatively little with the form of the process in itself. But it is here that evolution becomes of value to us in our present search; for once more we become aware of a direction. Partly from the direct evidence of palaeontology, partly from indirect evidence, but along many converging lines, we can form an idea of this direction which in broad outlines is unassailable.
During life’s existence on earth—a period to be reckoned in hundreds and probably in thousands of millions of years—there has been an increase in various of its attributes. But just as in the inorganic world electrons and atoms still exist as such side by side with molecules, so also the earlier types of living matter continue to exist side by side with the later. The increase is not therefore seen uniformly in all forms at once, but is most easily observed by studying the maximum level attained. Size, for instance, is one of these attributes; and whereas to-day all variations are to be found between ultra-microscopic disease-germs and vast organisms like whales and elephants, there has been a gradual steadying increase (tending to a limit) in the size of the largest organisms existing at any one period.
If we confine ourselves for the moment to the material side, we find that the directional change in organic evolution can be reduced to this—to an increase of the control exercised by living matter over the environment, and of its independence of the environment—two reciprocal aspects of a single process. When we look more closely into the means by which this has been achieved, we shall see an increase of the maximum not only in size, but in complexity, in length of life, in efficiency of particular organs, in co-ordination of parts and general harmony, in improvement of sense-organs, and, continuing even after other tendencies have reached their limits, in brain-size and consequently in complexity of mode of reaction and behaviour.
If we turn to the psychological side, we find that there has been an increase in the intensity of mental process. This is apparent in all aspects of mind, on that of emotion equally with that of knowledge, of volition equally with that of emotion. To be an amoeba or a worm is to live a life almost without windows. Perfection of sense-organs makes it possible for life to be aware of the different types of outer events, whilst memory and, later, associative memory give the possibility of understanding their history. In higher forms volition can be maintained for longer and longer intervals, can attain greater intensity, and can fix itself upon ever more and more distant objects. With depth of feeling comes also differentiation, so that finally we find in ourselves the possibility of organizing various blends of the simple emotions into the compound emotional forms such as reverence and admiration, called sentiments by McDougall.
Biologically speaking, therefore, the direction observable in mental evolution is again towards increased control and increased independence; by mental and cerebral improvement there is introduced a greater accuracy and a greater range of control, as well as better adjustment between organisms and environment, than would be otherwise possible to the same bodily organs.
The direction of life may therefore be roughly summed up in the two words “more life”—more both in quantity (have not both land and air been colonized during evolution?) and also in quality. More matter has been stolen from the lifeless and embodied in the living; and the living begins to be less helpless in face of the lifeless.
The direction of living matter is thus in many ways opposed to the direction to be seen in inorganic matter; yet not only has the organic arisen from the inorganic, but its direction continues one direction already traceable before the appearance of life.[46]
Finally, we come to the psychological aspect of the universe. We have already touched on it in connection with biology, and found that in many ways at least the development of mind follows the same lines as that of living matter, and helps forward the general trend of life.
But finally a kink occurs, a critical point similar to that seen at the origin of living from non-living matter. There the attributes of living matter which mark it off from inorganic matter become dominant—its capacity for self-reproduction, its tendency to organization. The colloid carbon compound had been the highest known independent unit; from now on this place was taken by the organism.
In exactly the same way, in the final stages of evolution (as witnessed abundantly by fossil mammals) complexity of purely bodily organization had reached a limit, and survival, as is evidenced by increasing size of brain, came to be determined more and more by mental qualities. Finally the curve of mental development caught up with that of body, and intersected it: mind became the dominant factor in the new type of organism, and in the subsequent history of the evolutionary process. The organism ceased to be the highest unit, and gave place to the person, or self-conscious individual with organized mind.
This new critical point was reached when man arose; many authors recognize it for what it is, the beginning of a new era, by christening the subsequent geological period the Psychozoic. That period, geologically speaking, has not yet run but a tiny span; and we are no more entitled to think that we have reached or even imagined the possibilities of its future evolution than we should have been entitled to regard the possibilities of purely biological evolution as having been exhausted after the far longer period needed to give rise to a coral polyp or a jelly-fish as highest existing types of organism. Even man as a biological species is in his infancy, not to speak of other psychozoic types that may be waiting in the womb of time.
But what are the characteristics of this new phase? In the first place, mind has become self-conscious; thus the evolutionary methods of psychozoic organisms may become conscious, and they come to direct their own evolution instead of having their destinies shaped by the blind forces of natural selection.
In most respects the same direction as before is pursued, but new methods are introduced. The rate of change, of movement in that direction, is accelerated; and the possibility is given of eliminating a vast deal of waste. A watchmaker sends out very few defective watches: why? because he makes his watches on a preconceived plan. Even when an improvement in watch construction is introduced, he can draw up his plan beforehand, and at the worst, waste only time and paper, instead of metal and far more time. Ideas do not need to be embodied before selection can act upon them; thus an increasing amount of evolutionary change will take place through the natural selection of ideas than through the older and far more wasteful process, natural selection of individuals and species.
Finally, values appear upon the scene. If we could ask a wild animal such as a fox what gave value to its life, and it could answer us, it would doubtless say food, sleep, comfort, hunting, sexual pleasure, and family companionship. But it cannot answer; nor can it know the value of what it pursues, but only appreciate the result. Strictly speaking, values do not exist for it. However, even if we allow ourselves to speak of values in the life of pre-human organisms, we see immediately that wholly new values are introduced after the critical point.
Putting it summarily, we can say that, with the rise of mind to dominance, various activities of mind come to be pursued for their own sake, to have value in themselves. Our life is worth living not only for the sake of eating and drinking, sleeping, athletics, and sexual pleasure. There is a value attached to knowledge for its own sake, apart from the possible access of control that it may bring. But this is new, a property of man alone; not even Athena’s owl will exert itself through laborious years to understand celestial mechanics or physiology. The highest anthropoids do not attempt to create works of art, which for man come to have value in themselves. Natural beauty comes to have its value too; a cow (so far as known!) does not interrupt the business of its life to admire the sunset, whereas men may and do. Behaviour also is implicated; with the entry upon the scene of that practically unlimited number of possible reactions which give us what we call free will and choice, there comes a conviction that some modes of action are higher than others; and so a scale of moral values comes into being.[47]
Nor is it merely that values, in the strict sense, are created; nor that new values come into being. But with the enlargement of mind and its more perfect organization, there arises a new method of appraising values, and so a new type of value altogether. I mean of course the so-called absolute values. Absolute values are never absolute in the sense of absolute completeness; they are relative to two things—to external reality and to our mental powers and organization.[48] They are abstractions; we generalize the value in our minds, and at the same time raise it to the highest pitch of intensity we can. An interesting point arises from this way of thinking. Apart from the guarantee of our own convictions, the observable direction of living nature is our guarantee of right: or one had better say that it is at once the guarantee and the touchstone of our convictions. But two things may be moving in the same direction, and, if one be moving much slower than the other, the slower may impede the faster; a pedestrian procession making eastward along Fleet Street will hold up the life of the city for a time, and cows walking along railways are treated as obstacles by trains proceeding in the same direction. So it comes about that much that was once progressive in organic evolution has become an obstacle or a drag to psychozoic evolution; it is relatively retrogressive, and, from our present standpoint, bad. To take the simplest and most fundamental example: evolution by blind natural selection was the method of progress for organisms below man. Unceasing struggle and courage was the chief factor in producing the grandeur and strength of the lion, the swiftness and grace of deer, the brilliance and lightness of the birds. But if the same end can be obtained both more quickly and more bloodlessly by new methods, then the old stands condemned. Here lies the key to the problem propounded by Huxley in his Romanes Lecture—the problem of man’s relation to the rest of the cosmic process, at once sprung from it by gradual generation and separated from it by an absolute and unbridgeable chasm, at once one with it and in deadly combat with it and all its ways.
Our mode of envisaging the problem illuminates it, and shows it as inevitable and intelligible instead of insoluble and tormenting; and illuminates too many other minor problems of good and evil. But all this is a side-issue: revenons à nos moutons.
Unknown, or neutral, or hostile power: a movement similar in direction to the direction in which history on the whole shows we are moving, and to that which we desire with our highest aspirations, but operating blindly; an acceleration of that movement by the coming of mind to biological predominance, with certain consequent minor changes in direction by major changes in speed and in methods. Three tendencies, but all founded in one unity, and each arising out of the other—that is the picture drawn for us by the present state of science. In this sense, and in this only, can it be said that “all things work together for righteousness.”
One word on an important side-issue—the problem of evil in man, of stagnancy and degeneration in organic evolution. Degeneration often does occur—a reversal, in other words, of the main tendency. But the positive fact remains that the maximum level is progressively raised, and that we find that stagnation of development and even sometimes degeneration have been factors indirectly helping on the main direction.
We must accept the positive main direction for what it is—an external sanction of faith; confess that we do not understand the detailed working of the whole, but see in the change of methods brought about by the rise of mind a hope that we shall gradually learn at least to dispense with much waste and evil and degeneration in the further course of evolution.
This main direction gives us cause for optimism. The exceptions to it temper that optimism. But the direction is there.
As we shall see later, we may either call the sum of the forces acting in the cosmos the manifestations of God, who in this case must be the Absolute God, and unknowable except through these manifestations. Or we may confine the term God to its anthropological usage, as denoting the objects of human religion, in which case we must admit that the term God as understood by man is constituted by man’s idea of the forces acting in the cosmos, so that not only are these forces involved, not only a possible Absolute God behind them, but also the organizing power of human mind.
I wish you here to agree to my adopting the second alternative and giving the name of God to the sum of the forces acting in the cosmos as perceived and grasped by human mind. We can therefore now say that God is one, but that though one, has several aspects. There is one aspect of God which is neutral to us, in a way hostile, mere Power operating in the vastness of the stellar universes, apprehended only as orderly, tending in a direction which appears to be in the long run inimical. It is to this aspect of God that Mr. Wells has given the name of the Veiled Being—a somewhat primitive term for a true idea. There is another aspect, which is the one seen operating in that sphere which comprises the whole of life upon this earth—a sphere infinitesimal in relation to the whole, yet still vast in relation to ourselves. This aspect of God is our refuge and guarantee, for here we find our assurance that our human life is a part of a whole that is not antagonistic, but moves in the same general direction as do our history and our aims. There does exist, in Matthew Arnold’s words, “a power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness.” And this second aspect is not wholly separate from the first, in spite of its difference of direction; for the first is its parent, physically and temporally, and the direction of biological progress is the continuation of a line of development marked out, within the opposed inorganic direction, even from the first.
Next, there is a more immediate and more often demanded assurance that we, as individuals or as single communities in space or time, are at one with humanity as a whole. Here it is that we look to the third aspect of God, which enshrines the directive forces operating in man. These directive forces are our instincts, our needs, our values, our ideals. When those are harmonized with each other and with the outer world by reason and experience, they form a power which we can see has been directive, normative in the past, and will continue to be so in the future. It alters with man’s development; but after a first rudimentary phase, its main outlines, its type of organization remain the same, for man’s instincts and ideals do not greatly change, and their harmonization with each other and with experience will generally proceed in the same broad way. Although in a sense this aspect is the smallest, as comprising the smallest physical field, yet in another it is the largest, since man’s ideals are in themselves unlimited, non-finite; and the values involved, to our present type of mind, appear ultimate. This third aspect of God is again historically the offspring of the second, and through the second of the first.
Matter, life, mind—this is the simplest classification of phenomena. By means of processes analogous to obtaining a resultant by the parallelogram of forces, we can obtain a resultant of material operations in general, vital operations in general, and mental operations in general, numerous and varied in direction though they be. Life is the link between the other two. Living matter is so definitely one with non-living matter, not at all obviously one with mind; yet the direction of living matter is obviously similar to that of mind, not at all obviously one with that of non-living matter.
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It is a simple fact that the conception which man has of the universe and its relation to himself exercises important effects upon his life. A name therefore is needed for this anthropological phenomenon. God is the usual name applied, and we shall retain it in default of another, premissing that the word, like many similar general terms—“love,” or “life,” or “beauty,” say—can be defined and applied in many ways, and that we apply it here in a particular and perhaps somewhat novel sense.
God in this sense is the universe, not as such, but so far as grasped as a whole by a mind, embodied in an idea,[49] and in consequence capable of influencing that mind, and through it the whole course of events. It is not grasped as a mere sum of details, but, however vaguely and imperfectly, as a single idea, unitary in spite of its complexity. Nor is it the universe in itself, but only so far as it has been thus grasped by mind. There exists no other meaning of the term which, on analysis, is found to convey anything, or at least anything scientific or comprehensible, to us. We may reason that there is an Absolute God behind the universe and our idea of it. But we have no proof of this statement, and such an Absolute God is, as Spencer pointed out, an Unknowable, and accordingly no concern of ours. That part and these aspects of the universe which have been grasped by us may prove to contain the key to many of our difficulties; meanwhile we can only be humble and admit that our idea of God, even in this restricted sense, is still extremely incomplete: and in this sense there is a God far greater than our present idea and knowledge of God, only waiting to be discovered.
That which it is essential to establish is our way of looking at the problem. The universe does come into relation with our minds, and there, owing to the way it and our minds are organized, generates an idea which exerts an influence upon us.
The external basis of the idea of God is thus constituted by the forces operating in the universe. The universe is a unitary whole, greater and more powerful than ourselves, and its operations have resultants in certain main directions—these are phenomena which we constatate like any other phenomena. They, and that other phenomenon of our contact with the Universe and our exposure to the play of its forces, give us our objective knowledge of God. The rest of our idea of God, the inner component, depends upon the mode of action of our minds.
So far, then, we have shown that recent advance in science, particularly in our understanding of evolution, has enabled us to give a more objective account than ever before of what is involved in the concept God, and so to pave the way for a consensus of thought on the question.
It will be observed that there is no idea of personality implicit in this conception of God—God may or may not possess personality. It will be for us later to investigate that particular aspect of the problem.
It now remains to deal with the inner reality. Man has a wholly new type of mind. He is social and capable of speech. He generalizes, and he has a very highly developed power of association. This combination gives him a great many possibilities hitherto denied to life. In the first place, he is able to order his experiences in a totally new way, differing from the old very much as a classified card-index differs from a rough diary-record of events. The organization of his mind is elastic, capable of indefinite expansion and of specialization in any direction.
That being so, there will be always parts of his mind wholly or at least partially undeveloped; and in any case the capacities which he must employ in his everyday life, the region of his mind illuminated by the attention needed in the struggle for existence, constitute but a fraction of his mental self and its potentialities.
This brings us on to one of the most important achievements of modern psychology—the discovery and analysis of the subconscious. Impossible here to go into detail; we must content ourselves with a few broad statements. When we speak of the subconscious mind, we mean that in man there exist processes which appear for many reasons to be of the same nature as those of the normal mind (in that they are associated with the same parts of the nervous system, fulfil the same general biological functions, and probably operate through similar mechanisms), with the single exception that we are not conscious of them as such.[50]
The conscious mind, that which we think of as the basis of our mental individuality, as our personal being, is the result of a long process of organization. We come into the world with a set of instinctive and emotional reactions only waiting their proper stimuli to be fired off, with a capacity for learning, for amassing experience, and a capacity for modifying our instincts and our behaviour according to our experience. We incorporate experience in ourselves, and in so doing we alter the original basis of our reactions; a strongly emotional experience colours all that is closely associated with it; and so after birth we are continually making our mental microcosm not only larger but qualitatively more complex, in exactly the same way as before birth our body grew not only in size, but also in complexity of organization.
Parts of experience or of inherited tendencies may fail to become organically connected with the main parts of our minds, simply because attention has never been focussed on them, or has not attempted to bring them into relation with the rest. They are, shall we say, like bricks which might have been used in a building, but have been left lying on the ground by the workmen.
Still more remarkable are the methods by which harmony is achieved in the personal mind. It is obvious that a conflict of any sort between parts of the mind will waste energy, will prevent a clear-cut reaction being given in either direction, and so constitute a grave biological disadvantage by making us fall between two stools. If a child gets a serious fright in the dark, darkness will tend to arouse fear. But darkness also comes with evening and with the time for sleep. Two modes of reaction to darkness are therefore given, and they are self-contradictory. One part of the mind comes down its pathway towards action, and finds itself met by another which is coming along the same path in the opposite direction. If neither moves, there is a conflict; in our hypothetical case sleep is delayed; and if it comes, is disturbed by nightmares—the echoes of the fright—and the childish organism suffers.
Exactly similar conflicts in which fear plays a part may occur in adult life, e.g., in so-called “shell-shock”; or the sex-instinct may come into conflict with other parts of the personality.
These conflicts are resolved through one tendency or part of experience being passed into the subconscious, where it no longer can meet its opponent on the path to action. And this passage into the subconscious can be apparently automatic, unwitting, when it is called suppression, or performed only by voluntary effort, when it is called repression. In the former case, it would appear that the conflict may wholly or almost wholly cease; whereas in the second, the repressed portion of mind is perpetually striving to come to the surface again, and must thus perpetually be held down by force.
If we hold by our metaphor of the building, then in suppression, bricks which would not go well with the rest are stacked quietly in the cellars; while in repression, part of the workmen want to build a different sort of building, and have to be forcibly held down by some of the rest to prevent their doing so.
But in whatever way the subconscious may be organized it is always with us, and there will always be a remainder of our soul, or of its possibilities, which is not incorporated in our personal life at all, as well as much which is not closely organized with the main everyday personality, but is connected with it only by vague and loose bonds, approachable only by narrow pathways instead of by broad roads.
There is another process at work in the human mind which is of the utmost importance for our problem. I mean the process of sublimation. If it is not easy to give a short and clear definition of sublimation, at least the process is familiar to all. The commonest example is “falling in love,” where the simple sex-instinct becomes intertwined with other instincts and with past emotional experience, and projects itself in wholly new guise upon its object. We may perhaps best say that a sublimated instinct has more and higher values attached to its satisfaction than one unsublimated. The mere satisfaction of the sexual impulse need be little more than a physiological desirability; but the satisfaction of passionate love involves every fibre of the mental organism, hopes and ideals converging with memories and instincts on to the highest pitch of being.
In such a case sublimation occurs with the normal object of the instinct. But the elasticity of man’s mind permits of further complication; the instinct may be not only sublimated but attached to new objects. Through the cogs and spirals of the mind, the sexual instinct may find an outlet at higher levels, and contribute to the driving force of adventurous living, of art, or as we may see in many mystics—St. Teresa for example—of religious ecstasy.
It is as if a swift stream were falling into underground channels below the mill of our being, where it could churn and roar away to waste. But some of it is led off at a higher level, and we can learn to lead off still more; and we can make an installation of pipes whereby it can be taken up to the original level, and made to fall through new machines and do any work we may ask of it.
The mechanism of sublimation, however, deserves a few more words. Recent work in biology has shown that in low forms of animals and in early stages of high forms, the head-region is in a certain sense dominant to the rest, in that it forms first and independently; but that, once present, it exerts a formative influence upon the rest of the body, keeping the various organs in some way under control, making them different from what they would otherwise have been, and so moulding them to the part of a single and higher whole.
An extremely similar process is at work in sublimation. Ideas and ideals can be naturally dominant over others, or they can become dominant through becoming associated with primarily dominant ideas, or by receiving a larger share of attention. Attention, concentration, what you will, is one of the most remarkable mental functions. Not only can the metaphor of intense illumination of a particular field be justly used of it, but we may say that it seems to accelerate the flow of mental process through a particular channel, and so to draw into that channel the contents of other channels in connection with it, just as a rapid flow of water through a pipe sucks in water from connected pipes.
As a result of this, sublimation involves not the suppression or repression of instincts and emotional experiences, nor merely the summation of them with another instinct, but their utilization as parts of a new whole, of which the dominant instinct is like the controlling head.
When the sex-instinct is repressed, the emotional and religious life is meagre, though often violent. When the sex-instinct and the religious feeling exist side by side, without conflict but without union, you have “the natural man” of St. Paul; but when the religious ideals are dominant, and can catch up the sex-instinct into themselves, and in so doing give it a new form and a new direction, then you get one of the highest types of emotional lives. Or fear may be sublimated to reverence; or sex again to art or to philanthropy.
In every case, a new and more complicated mental activity or organ is arrived at; and the same process that we saw at work in biological evolution—the creation of ever more complex units—is thereby continued.
Then we come to the fact that man displays disharmonies of mental construction, together with an innate hankering after harmony. The most obvious disharmony is that between the instincts that are self-regarding and those that are other-regarding—between man’s egotistic and his social tendencies.
It appears that man became gregarious quite late in evolutionary history. Through natural selection, sufficient “herd-instinct” was developed to ensure that men would on the whole stand by the tribe in danger, that the tribe should become a real biological unit. But it was impossible wholly to harmonize these new social instincts, even in the simplest societies, with the old, deeper-rooted, individualist tendencies; and as life became more complex and choice wider, conflict grew more and more frequent.[51]
Another obvious disharmony in modern civilized communities is the fact that sexual maturity occurs long before marriage is possible or desirable.
In all this, there is inevitably a field for all the various combinations of suppression, or repression, or sublimation.
Man’s gregariousness, together with his power of speech, learning, and generalization, have led to the development of a new thing in the world—persistent and cumulative tradition. I use tradition in the broadest sense, as denoting all that owes its being to the mind of man, and is handed down, by speech or imitation or in some permanent record, from generation to generation. Language, general ideas of right and wrong, convention, invention, national feeling—all this and much more, constituting the more important part of the human individual’s environment—is part of tradition; and tradition is pre-eminently and inevitably social. However individualistic we may wish to be we cannot escape modelling by this social environment.
The general effect of man’s gregarious instinct is that he desires to find himself in harmony with some traditions, with the ideas that modern jargon likes to call the herd to which he belongs. The herd ideas, the traditions, may be those of a nation or of a stratum within the nation; of a whole class or of a clique; of science or of art; of a retired monasticism, or of an all-embracing world-civilization. But they are always herd ideas, and through them man is always member of some community, even though that community be tiny, or consist mainly of writers dead and gone; and he always strives to put himself in harmony with the traditions of that community.
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A long-winded introduction enough; now for the bearing of it. One of the essentials of every religion is its treatment of the subconscious, is its view and its practice as regards the relation between the personally-organized part of the mind to the remaining non-personal reservoirs. At first the non-personal part is regarded as being wholly outside the organism, and its occasional flooding up into the narrower ego is regarded as an operation of an external personality, a spirit, a God. Comparatively late, it is recognized as part of the organism, but the process by which connection is made is still regarded as divine, and called inspiration. Such ideas belong to the adolescence of the race, in precisely the same way as the discovery and acquisition of great tracts of this subconscious territory will always necessarily constitute part of the adolescence of the individual. But any developed religion must always in some way help to make these great reserves of power accessible, always teach the enlargements of the personal ego which their conquest brings about. This is one of the ways in which, to use current religious phraseology, self may be lost, and found again on a different plane.
Religion must further always provide some internal harmony, in counterpart to the harmony demanded in the unitary comprehension of external reality. The various activities and experiences of life, as they are originally given by heredity to the child, are either independent, or else antagonistic and disharmonious. There must be some means provided for bringing all of them into a true organization—in other words into a whole which, though yet single, is composed of co-operating parts. Here again the actual responses of actual religions have been many and various; but they all operate by suppression, repression, and sublimation, or by a combination of these.
It can at once be said that sublimation is the right and highest way, and that two of the criteria of religious progress are to be found in the stress laid upon sublimation, and in the enlargement and the elevation of the dominant ideas at work in the sublimating process. It is the right and highest way because through it no spiritual energy is wasted, and the age-long path of progress towards ever higher levels of complexity in organization is still continued. Among religious teachers, both Jesus and Paul laid great stress on this—on the freedom, the emancipation from the shackles of an external law made possible by the apprehension of some highest harmonizing principle and the subordination of all other ideas and desires to it. Once one can see and learn to follow such a principle, whatever one does is in a sense right, because one’s desires are all subordinate to a desire for right, and to something which is right. Perhaps it would be better to say that they appear right to oneself, that the haunting, terrible sense of sin is laid to rest, and one’s life liberated into free activity, one’s energy made all available for achievement.
The sense of sin, if not universal at one or other period of life, is almost so, and comes from an apprehension of inner disharmony. As one would expect, selfishness and sex are its most common roots; and whenever it exists, then the necessary preliminary to any further progress of one’s being is that it should be made to disappear. It can disappear, as in St. Paul’s natural man, by a suppression of part of the mind or of the connection between parts, or by a failure to make certain connections, or it can be eradicated by a growth of callousness; or—and I take it that this is the proper religious solution—by discovering a clue which will harmonize the two apparently opposed sections of experience, the two antagonistic tendencies, and so resolve the problem with no loss of energy or of vital possibilities.
* * * * * * *
Finally, there remains to be considered the mode in which the mind may best organize the ideas of external reality given to it by its pure cognitive and intellectual faculties.
Even from the purely scientific point of view, generalization is obviously of value. When we have found unity in the outer world’s apparent diversity, direction in its apparent disorderliness, we have obviously achieved a great gain. But religion appears to demand something more. If for a moment we look at the matter pragmatically, we shall find that a number of the great mystics (and a large majority of those of our own occidental type and tradition) speak of their experiences of “divine communion” as being communion with a person.
What does this mean? We have seen that a purely intellectual analysis gives us no handle for finding personality in God. Can we suppose that this direct intuition gives us that handle? To say so, to my mind, would be simple obscurantism. Intuition, if it shows us reality, can only show a reality capable in the long run of intellectual analysis; to deny this is to deny all our premisses. No: their intuition shows us that something akin to personality is perceived, but permits no pronouncement as to whether its resemblance to personality is given in its real nature, or introduced into it by their thought.
If we look into the history of religion, we find over and over again that man has taken something from his own mind and projected it into the external world. The magic power of fetishes, the tabus incurred by contact with certain objects, the endowment of the idea of external powers, of God, with human form, the ascription of miraculous influence to places or things—in every case there has been this projection. And there is no reason to doubt that here again there has been a similar occurrence, that man has organized his idea of external power after the pattern of a personality, and has then ascribed this type of organization to the external power itself. This projection Blake symbolized in a sentence: “Thus men forgot that All Deities reside in the Human breast.”
The rival schools of psychology may disagree: but all are agreed that some modes of thinking are more primitive than others, and even in the most educated amongst us tend to persist, often in the subconscious, side by side with more developed methods that have arisen later.
The use of concrete symbols or images is the most widespread of these primitive modes of thought. It is natural that the more complex should at the first be described in terms of the less complex, that those experiences for which no proper terminology has been hammered out should be given names out of man’s existing vocabulary. That is inevitable: but there is an even more fundamental process at work. It seems as if the human mind works, on its most primitive levels, by means of image-formation, and that emotions and concepts for which no simple image exist may call up symbolic images by association and indeed often dress themselves in these new clothes before they present themselves to consciousness. Some such process appears to take place in dreams (including day-dreams!) and possibly in the ordinary thought-processes of savages. More advanced modes of thought substitute the currency of an arbitrary token such as a word or a formula for the barter of images and concrete symbols; the freshness and vividness of the image is lost, but more efficient and speedier working is attained. However, in most of us the concrete image-using mode of thought is a relief from the apparently less natural and more artificial (though more efficient) operations of reason, and we relapse into it, wholly or partially, more often than we realize.
This unconscious irrational tendency to symbolism, together with the other tendency to project ideas properly attaching to the subjective world into external objects and processes—these between them account for much of the modes of expression so far found for religious belief; and, since the majority of human beings have a profound distaste for sustained or difficult thought, it is likely that they will continue to account for much in the future.
These are facts of extreme importance. The professional sceptic is at once tempted to exclaim that every such projection and illogical symbolism is illusion through and through, and must be wholly swept aside. He would be wrong. We each of us must know from our own experience the “influence” (to use a general term) which may inhere in certain things and places. True that the influence is of our own mind’s making; but it is none the less real, not only as a momentary existence, but, as the term implies, as exerting a definite and often a great effect upon our lives. The lover who cherishes a ring or a lock of hair; the man who is drawn back to the haunts of his childhood or his youth; the mind refreshing itself with some loved poem or picture;—what do we have in these and innumerable other instances but a peculiarity of mind whereby it may take external objects into itself and invest them with its own emotions and ideas, in such a way that those same objects may later reflect their stored-up emotion back again into the mind? It operates by a form of association; but the actual working resembles the charging of a battery, which may subsequently discharge back. We have in it, in fact, a special faculty which, if rightly used, is of the greatest practical value. Further, the symbol, if rightly used and rightly limited, is of service to most minds in giving a more or less concrete cage for the winged, elusive, and hardly-retained creatures of abstract thought.
So too, the organization of the idea of God into a form resembling a personality appears definitely to have, at least with the majority of people belonging to what we call “Western civilization,” a real value.
Biologically, the essence of real personality is first that it is organized, and secondly that on each of its many faces it can, if I may put it metaphorically, enter into action at a single point, but with its whole content of energy available behind the point. In other words, man as a personality can concentrate his mind on one particular problem of one special aspect of reality; but he is able, if need be, to summon up ever fresh reinforcements if he cannot carry the position—more facts, other ways of thinking and feeling, memories, reserves of will. In a properly organized personality, it is possible to bring the whole to bear upon any single object.
Now when the idea which man makes for himself of outer reality is organized after the same general pattern as a personality, it too will be able to act in this same sort of way.
When man in perplexity interrogates the idea he has of external reality, he is anxious to put his little individual self in harmonious relation with the whole of reality that he knows. Therefore he should organize that reality as a whole, and in such a way that it can all be brought to bear through any single point. The relation between the self and the idea of outer reality is, for any one problem, that of two pyramids touching by their points only; but the points of contact can shift as by miracle over their surfaces as the problem is changed.
But another power of personalities is their power of interpenetration. The purely material cannot do this. One portion of matter cannot occupy the same space as a second portion. It is another of the great differences between the psychozoic and all previous stages of evolution, between man and all else that we know in the universe, that the discrete units reached at this level of organization, the individual human beings, can achieve interpenetration by means of their minds. When you expound a new idea to me, and I grasp it, our minds have obviously interpenetrated. This is a simple case; but there may be an intimate union of mind with mind which is the basis of the highest spiritual achievement and the greatest happiness. If mind and matter are two properties of the same world-substance, then the rise of mind to dominance has enabled this basic substance to escape from some of the imprisoning limitations which confined it at lower levels of its development; do we not all know that despair at being boxed up, that craving for communion? Using our previous line of argument, we see that the interpenetration of personalities is right, implies a further step in progress, must be part of the basis on which future advance in evolution is to build.
But to apply this to our present point. By organizing our knowledge of outer reality after the pattern of a personality, we make it possible for it to interpenetrate our private personality. If, therefore, we have, in any true sense of the word, “found religion,” it means that we shall so have organized our minds that, for flashes at least, we attain to a sense of interpenetration with the reality around us—that reality which includes not only the celestial bodies, or the rocks and waters, not only evolving life, but also other human beings, also ideas, also ideals.
This, to my mind, is what actually happens when men speak of communion with God. It is a setting, an organizing of our experiences of the universe in relation with the driving forces of our soul or mental being, so that the two are united and harmonized. There is a resolution of conflicts, an attainment of a profound serenity, a conviction that the experience is of the utmost value and importance.
Up till now, we have been defining and analysing: here we see religion in operation. It is a relation of the personality as a unit to external reality as a unit—and a relation of harmony. First, the inner structure of the mind must be organized into a harmonious unit, then our knowledge of outer reality organized similarly, and finally, in religious experience, the two must be harmonized in interpenetrating union.
Once this harmony has been achieved, it is for one thing so precious in itself that it will be sought for again; the knowledge that we have once reached the stage at which difficulties and doubts are resolved in what the philosophers would perhaps call a higher unity, but which I should prefer to call an organic harmony, is always there to fall back upon in times of discouragement; and finally the harmony is actually woven into the tissue of our mind, just as the amazing physical harmony revealed by physiology has, in the course of evolution, been woven into the structure and working of living bodies; and it can remain there as the dominant idea to which the rest of our ideas, and consequently our actions, are brought into subordinate relation. In other words, it becomes the dominant sublimating principle. Once more, however, the subordination is not forced, but free—we find that what we once thought obstacles are aids, what once seemed sin is now the willing and efficient handmaid of good. That is the fundamental fact in all genuine and valuable religious experience as such—the resolution of conflict and the losing, or enlarging as you will, of the private personality, the mere “self.” You will find this set out more fully, though in different terminology, in Miss Underhill’s books on mysticism, or in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, or in Thouless’s Psychology of Religion.
One side-issue. Such experience, if not absolute in the philosophical sense, is absolute for us. If I may be Irish, its absoluteness is relative to our organization and to reality as we perceive it. We cannot perceive anything fuller, more absolute—until perhaps one day, with the growth of our minds, we come to have some still richer and more complete experience. As William James was so fond of reminding the world, we have no right to assume that our minds are, much less that they must be, the highest type of mind realized in the universe—no more right than our domestic animals have, although our minds to them could only be measured by their own standards.
What is more, owing to our power of framing general concepts and ideals, and of accumulating past and future in our present, we can focus a vast deal to one point. In such experiences, whether they come through religion, or love, or art, we may say that although we are but a system of relations, we touch the Absolute—although we are mortal, we mount to the Eternal for a moment. Only, to guard against error, we must remember that it is obviously not in reality the Absolute or the Eternal that we attain to, but only the nearest approximation to them of which we are capable.
We can therefore sum up this second part of our investigation by saying that religion, to be more than mere ritual, must involve the possibility of harmonizing the parts of the soul, of wiping out the sense of sin, of sublimating instinct, of rendering the subconscious reservoirs of energy and being available for the personal self, and of organizing the ideas of external reality into a single organized mental whole—the idea of God—capable of reacting with the personal self by interpenetration.
Although he was moving to quite other conclusions, it is worth recalling James’s ideas. For instance, “The line of least resistance ... is to accept the notion ... that there is a God, but that he is finite.... These, I need hardly tell you, are the terms in which common men have usually carried on their active commerce with God; and the Monistic” [sc. Absolutist] “perfections that make the notion of him so paradoxical practically and morally are the colder addition of remote professorial minds operating in distans upon conceptual substitutes for him alone.” (James,’09, p. 311.)
I may perhaps be rebuked for trying to analyse the unanalysable, for neglecting the supreme and sufficing fact of experience of God in favour of the unprofitable and impossible task of catching the infinite in an intellectual net. There are two answers to this. One is that unanalysed experience is selfish because less communicable: with that we deal later. The other is even more important: it is this. Humanity at large is not content with emotional experience alone, however complete and apparently satisfying: it has always demanded an intellectual formulation of the reality with which it is in contact, as well as emotional experience of it, and so far as we can judge it will always continue to do so.
But it is further found, as matter again of general experience, that such formulations do not remain innocuous in the vacuum of pure intellect, but reverberate upon action and influence conduct. When men believe that they are surrounded with magical powers, they spend half their lives in ritual designed to affect the operations of these (wholly hypothetical) influences. When they worship a God whom they rationalize as man-like, they sacrifice a large proportion of their produce on his altars, and may even kill their fellow-creatures to placate his (again imaginary) passions. When they believe in a Divine Revelation, they think that they possess complete enlightenment on the great problems of life and death; and they will then cheerfully burn those who differ from them, or embark upon the bloodiest wars in defence of this imaginary certainty. When they worship God as absolute and as a person, they cannot help making deductions that lead them into absurdities of thought and of conduct: they deny or oppose ideas derived from a study of nature, the only actual source of knowledge, because they conflict with what they believe to be immutable truths, but are in reality conclusions drawn from false premisses; they tend to an acquiescent and obscurantist spirit in the belief that such moral and intellectual laziness is “doing God’s will,” when that will is in reality their own personification of cosmic direction.
Sooner or later, false thinking brings wrong conduct. Man can perhaps get along with empirical methods and ideas which turn out on analysis to be only symbols, provided that he does not attempt difficult construction. He can have some sort of a religion, which will be some sort of a help to him, even when its so-called certitudes are only a collection of mixed metaphors, in the same way as he can practise agriculture on a basis of mingled empiricism and superstition. But just as he is finding that he is only able to raise agricultural efficiency to its highest pitch by relying on the result of scientific method, as when he uses synthetic nitrates instead of ploughing in a leguminous crop, or just as a power-station would be very difficult to run if the staff had only symbolic ideas on the nature of electricity no closer to the real than is the symbolism of most religions, so if he does not bring scientific analysis into the intellectual side of his religion, he cannot realize religious possibilities. True that in a sense all knowledge and intellectual presentation is symbolic: but there is the world of difference between the merely analogical symbolism which takes one idea or thing as symbolic of another because there is some degree of similarity between the two and the first is more familiar, and the scientific symbolism which strives to find a scientific counter, so to speak, which shall represent particular phenomena as closely as possible, and them alone.
Not only this, but religion unillumined by reason degenerates into an evil thing. Religion seems to be a natural activity and need of the average human mind. But when its more primitive components are allowed to dominate, when the instinctive and emotional in it are unchecked by reflection and rational thought, then, as history too clearly shows us, it becomes a cruel and obstructive power. To the fine mind of Lucretius, the religion that he knew was the greatest enemy:—
“Quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat
Horribili super aspecta mortalibus instans.”
And he replies to the charge of impiety by pointing to the foul deeds perpetrated by religion:
“—Quod contra saepius illa
Religio peparit scelerosa atque impia facta.”
Many another thinker and reformer has felt the same.
There are those who, like Jung, believe that religion is an illusion but also a necessity to the bulk of mankind, and therefore should be encouraged. But the broader and truer view, I believe, is the one we have adopted. We have seen that, in man, evolution has reached a new plane, on which not only have new aims and values appeared, but the possibility of new and better evolutionary methods has arisen. These new methods are only possible, however, in so far as life, in man, uses her new gifts. The progress of civilization is a constant conflict between that part of man which he shares with the beasts and that part which is his alone—between man as no more than a new kind of animal and man as a rational and spiritual being. In so far as religion is irrational, it is no more than a dog baying the moon, no higher activity than the nocturnal concerts of Howler monkeys, no more and no less moral than the nobility of birds or beasts to a strangely-marked or unusually-built member of their species, or the sense of being a trespasser so often shown by a bird that has ventured upon the nesting-territory of another. Recall the “Natural Religion” of Robert Browning’s Caliban; on which plane did that grow? But when we have discovered its real bases, and subordinated its impulsive promptings to the control of reason and of the new, higher values in which reason must always share—then it becomes an instrument for helping in the conquest of the new regions which lie open to man as individual and as species. And in this it resembles every other human activity without exception.
In religion the danger has always been that analogy and symbolism be taken for more than they are—for scientific knowledge, or even for an absolute certainty of some still higher order—and conclusions then drawn from it. The conclusions follow with full syllogistic majesty: but their feet are of clay—their premisses are false.
If we find that this is the case to-day, we not only may but we must endeavour to make our formulation correspond more closely with reality, must not be content to take one thing in place of another, the familiar for the unfamiliar, must set about destroying the old false formulation for fear of the further harm that it will do by its hold upon man’s incurable habit of drawing conclusions.
Nor does this in any way interfere with or detract from the private and unique experiences that in the long run are religion. They remain; but they are thus hindered from becoming draped with delusion, from leading their possessor into false courses.
We may put it in another way. Too often in the past, religious experience has been one-sided—one-or-other-sided instead of two-sided. The intellectually-inclined, the theologians, frame more or less adequate ideas of external reality, but fail in the majority of cases to set their own house in order, to organize the inner reality to react with the outer; they have theory without practice, are Dry-as-dusts. On the other hand, the emotionally-minded who are gifted besides with organizing and intuitive power, the mystics—they build up their own souls into a desired and lovely edifice, in which too they have constructed a spiritual machinery capable of viewing external realities on a new plane, under a more highly synthesized aspect; but they neglect the precise analysis of that outer reality, and so can only speak in the barest symbols and metaphors, and cannot put their hard-won knowledge into a form available for others. They have that non-communicable skill which is that of the craftsman alone as opposed to the craftsman who is also in some degree a scientist. We know good mysticism from bad, as we know good art from bad—as definitely and as personally. And we are sure that good mysticism, like good art, is somehow of supreme, transcendent importance; but almost always it has remained like a purely symbolic art, not having for others the value which it should have or did have for the mystic himself, because not properly enchained, as the French say, with stern and immutable fact. And of the theologian we feel that he gives us the grammar, not the spirit, that he does not help us toward the supremely important act of experiencing, but only to understanding experience if we chance to have had it.
One word on the problem of transcendence. The mystic will tell us that transcendence is a hall-mark of religion at its highest. His mode of experience transcends normal experience; things of everyday life become surcharged with new, transcendent values; he has transcended from a plane of disharmony to one of harmony. But the mystic is not alone in this. Familiar examples are best examples: and the transcendence of the lover’s experience is so familiar that all mankind is divided into those who have it, those who long for it, and those who laugh at it. But the great philosopher too must mediate between the transcendent and mankind, and the true artist also, and the moralist worthy of the name.
What goes under this technical name of transcendence, therefore, is the product of some special psychological mechanism which may be at work in the most diverse spheres. It we wish to substitute one technical phrase for another, we can say that it consists in the successful attachment of what we have called absolute value to some human activity, so as to make it for the time at least unitary, dominant, and all-embracing. But psychologically speaking the genesis of “absolute values” depends upon the generalizing of particular values; the raising of them to the highest possible pitch; and the putting of them and the rest of the mental organization into a relation in which they are permanently or temporarily the dominating head and front, and are connected with and gain strength and support from all the rest of the mind.
The problem of transcendence, in other words, is not one of divine inspiration, of wholly mysterious experience, but one special case of the problem of sublimation; and as such it is to be investigated by psychological science, to be understood, to be democratized, to be made more available to all who wish for it.
The most ardent enemies of traditional religion have often professed the most transcendental type of morality. Some men are pragmatic and utilitarian in regard to Truth; by others she is worshipped as fanatically as any goddess. So some men deliberately make mariages de convenance; to others, the transcendence of their love is such that they precipitate themselves into what can only be described as mariages d’inconvenance.
I have dilated upon this at some length, because those whom we may call the religious writers on religion so often lay such stress on this question of transcendence and its special value and importance. But you do not—in the long run at least—make a thing more important by giving it an imposing title; you only give it a false exclusiveness.
Transcendence is the experimental side of what we have been describing all along: it is the finding of unity in diversity, the synthesis of discord in harmony and in especial the finding of something of supreme value (and therefore dominant) which can be linked up with the whole extent of our mental being. Transcendence in religion differs from transcendence in art or love only in its objects. In love the discrepancy between the object and the ideal values hung round it is often so glaring as to provoke laughter from cynics, compassion from the rest. In art, the operations by which an artist turns a collection of mean and commonplace objects into a beautiful and single whole, a poet invests failure and death with authentic tragedy, or drags every-day to a seat in eternity, are just as transcendent as that by which the mystic converts the relation between the warring passions of his soul and the infinite catalogue of differences which he finds around him into what he can only speak of as a divine communion, all-satisfying in itself, all-important for the conduct of his life. Science can here help religion by analysing and interpreting phenomena such as transcendence, paring the false from the true, cutting down false claims, substituting the hopefulness of natural causation for the illogical vagaries of supernaturalism and incommunicability.
* * * * * * *
I may perhaps be allowed to close with a few more practical aspects of the problem.
Many religious ideas and practices, as man’s thought clarified itself, have proved to be unserviceable, and have been thrown on the lumber-heap, or left only with the losers in the race. It is impossible for any educated man nowadays to believe in the efficacy of magic, or of animal sacrifice; to accept the first chapter of Genesis as literally true; or to believe that God has human parts and passions. But there was a time when all these could be, and were, believed.
The time is obviously coming when a great many other ideas must be cast aside in favour of new ones. If you have followed me, you will agree that it is impossible for me and those who think like me to believe in God as a person, a ruler, to continue to speak of God as a spiritual Being in the ordinary way. Consequently, although the value of prayer persists in so far as it is meditative and a self-purification of the mind, yet its commonly accepted petitive value must fall to the ground;[52] so must all idea of miracle and of direct inspiration; so must all that is involved in the ordinary materialist ideas of ritual, self-denial, and worship as merely propitiation or “acceptable incense”; so must all the externally-projected parts of the ideas concerning the ordaining of special priests; so must all notion of our having a complete, peculiar, or absolute knowledge of God, or of there being a divinely-appointed rule of conduct or a divinely-revealed belief.
On such matters, most advanced thinkers have been long in general agreement. But there is one very important point which, so far as I know, has been very little touched upon—chiefly, I think, because such radical thinkers have been for the most part destructive, and so have not envisaged this particular side of the question.
I hope I have been able to convince you that the scientific manner of thinking can lay the foundation for something constructive in religion: this great problem, however, remains: what sort of form or organization shall any such new-moulded religion take on itself?
We have just decided that fixed and rigid dogma is impossible, and that completeness is out of the question. Yet humanity craves for certainty and is not content to leave any factor out of the scheme of things.
To this we answer that it is here that real faith enters. We cannot know the absolute, nor have we discovered a goal for our efforts. But we have discovered a unity embracing all that we know, and a direction starting at the first moment to which our reconstructive thought can penetrate, continuing till to-day, and showing an acceleration of speed on which we may raise our hopes for the future.
We do not know all. For instance, I have studiously avoided ever mentioning the word immortality, since I believe that Science cannot yet profitably discuss that question. But the discovery of unity in all that has so far been studied gives us reasonable faith that its wings will reach out to cover all that we shall still be enabled to learn, while the unbroken continuity of evolutionary direction gives us the same sort of right to believe that it will continue to-morrow and on into time as we have to believe that apples will continue to fall to the earth.
The study of evolution may give us a further help. We have seen how the final steps of the highest forms of animals have been in the direction of plasticity of organization: we see it in the rise of man from mammals, in higher as against more primitive levels of human culture, in great men as against ordinary men. There can be no doubt that its acquisition constitutes a step in evolutionary progress. Plasticity is needed in any new religion. And plasticity means tolerance, means the reduction of fixity of ritual, of convention, of dogma, of clericalism.
It is clear that, as complexity increases, need will be felt for a finer adjustment of satisfaction to mood, a more delicate adaptation of religion to the individual. A few types of ceremony satisfied primitive races: an elaborate system, fixed in essence, fluctuating in detail, has grown up in modern Christianity. But the more complex the mind, the less does it like to have to “wait till Sunday”—the less is it satisfied with the solely biblical point of view, or the literary and musical level of Hymns A. and M.
The less also is it satisfied with the mediation of a priest. Priest (or Priest-King) is sole mediator in most savage tribes: his mediation is enormously important in the Roman Catholic Church: less so in Protestant Churches: until with the progressive raising of the spiritual and cultural level, it is perhaps possible that he may become an obstacle instead of a help. Mediators there must always be. They are the great ones—prophets and poets, heroes, philosophers, musicians, artists, and all who discover or interpret or display what for the ordinary man is hidden or difficult or rare. They mediate between the utmost attainable by man and man in the lump. As Hegel says of one group of these mediators, the artists, it is the function of their art to deliver to the domain of feeling and delight of vision all that the mind may possess of essential and transcendent Being. But, with the spread of invention and the change of civilization, their mediations are becoming more and more readily accessible to all. I can get, on the whole, more satisfactory mediation from three or four feet of properly filled bookshelf than from a dozen priests. Milton will give me doctrine if I want it, but stupendously: Wordsworth will reveal nature: Shakespeare the hearts of men: Blake can put men into a mystical, Shelley into an intellectual ecstasy, while Keats and a dozen others can open universal doors of beauty. What is more, if I have had the mediation of wise parents and good teachers, or to be so fortunate as to be enthusiastic, I find that in many things I can be my own mediator, in the same way as the Protestant found that he could read his Bible and eat the holy bread and wine for himself as well or better than the priest could do it for him.
Whatever we may say or like, it is an obvious fact that much of what is essential in religious experience, which in a simpler society was only attainable in prayer and sacrifice, communal ceremony or ritual worship, is now attainable to an increasing degree through literature, music, drama, art, and is, again, as a matter of fact, so attained by an increasing number of people who do not profess a creed or belong to a church. So that, as regards the personal, individual side of religion, many of the functions of Churches will inevitably be better performed through direct contact between the individual and the mediator—philosopher, poet, artist, or whatever he be—who provides the experience.
There remains public worship and community-religion. It is clear that whereas a Church in the Middle Ages was not only Church but also Museum of curiosities, Art-gallery and Theatre, and in large measure also took the place of our press and public libraries, now it is none of these things. There is now less reason for public worship, fewer functions for it to perform. On the other hand a religion is essentially in one aspect social, and not only does the unity of nature demand a unity of religion, but such unity of religion would be of the highest importance as a bond of civilization and a guarantee of the federalist as against the solely nationalist ideal. Moreover, to many types of mind, and to almost all men in certain circumstances, the partaking in a public religious ceremony in common with others is of real importance. It is safe to say, therefore, that these ceremonies will continue, however much modified, and that for them a mediator or priest, even if but temporarily acting as such, will be needed. The problem is largely that of combining in public worship the religious effectiveness of the simple, the hallowed, and the universally familiar—such as inheres in many of the prayers, psalms, and hymns of the Church to-day—with the spontaneity and immediacy which, for instance, are to be found at a devotional meeting of the Society of Friends.
In any case, the new intellectual premisses once granted, the limitations imposed on human mind once understood, the important thing is to give a greater vigour and reality to religious experience itself, whether personal and private or social and public. It is just here that Science may help, where knowledge may be power. Atonement, conversion, sense of grace, ecstasy, prayer, sacrifice—the meaning and value of these and of other religious acts and experiences can be put on a proper psychological basis, they can be shorn of excrescences, and their practice take its place in normal spiritual development. That is of the essence of any religion rooted in scientific ideas—that comprehension should make practice easier and better worth while.
I am only too painfully aware of the omissions which such a cursory treatment of the subject inevitably involves. I have given you, I know, little but dry bones; but bones are the framework necessary before impatient life can animate a new form. If Science can construct that form, the emotions and hopes and energies of humanity will vivify and clothe it. It is with the aid of such intellectual scaffolding that the common mind of humanity in the future, inevitably rooted in scientific conceptions as it will be, must try to raise that much-desired building, a religion common to all.
In any case, I shall be more than content if I have been able to persuade you first that the term God, just as much as the terms Energy, say, or Justice, has a real meaning and scientifically-based sense. Second, that the idea of God has and will continue to have an important biological function in man as denoting an idea, organized in a particular way, of the whole of the reality with which he is in contact. Thirdly, that the physical and biological sciences, in discovering the unity of matter and energy, and the direction operating in cosmic evolution, have provided a real basis for what up till now have been only theological speculations. Fourthly, that psychological science, in revealing some of the mechanism of mind, is helping us to appreciate the value of so-called mystical experience, is laying a foundation for the proper spiritual training and development of human mind, and shows us how the idea of God may be efficacious as a dominant idea in the all-important process of sublimation. And finally that, since the scientific mode of thought is of general and not merely local or temporary validity, to build a religion on its basis is to make it possible for that religion to acquire a stability, a universality, and a practical value hitherto unattained.
We are yet at the very beginning of that task, but I cannot close better than by reminding you of another biological fact of importance, that from all analogy the human species is yet near the beginning of its evolutionary career, and that man has before him vast tracts of time to set against the vastness of his tasks.
A chapter in the history of Earth closed with the appearance of Man. In man, the Weltstoff had been made able to think and feel, to love beauty and truth—the cosmos had generated soul. A new chapter then began, a chapter in which we all are characters. Matter had flowered in soul. Soul has now to mould matter.
That moulding of matter by spirit is, under one aspect, Science; under another, Art; under still another, Religion. Let us be careful not to allow the moulding forces to counteract each other when they might be made to co-operate.