Now, how is that to be done? It has been done in the past by religion to a very great extent. Can society afford to try to teach morals apart from religion? Difficulties naturally arise here, and the Bishop of Tasmania has very bravely drawn the attention of the empire to the difficulty which is in the face of religious teaching. He points out that the Old Testament is not a book which, as a whole, can be used for the instruction in morals of the Christian child. Can the Old Testament, he asks, be used in that way? and the answer is in the negative. He points out that you can find in the Old Testament magnificent moral passages and splendid moral inspiration, but that is by a process of selection, in which you apply the moral conscience to discrimination in ancient writings. Bishop as he is, he is brave enough to declare that the Old Testament as a whole ought not to find its place in the education of the child. Now, suppose that we admit—and most thoughtful people would admit—that you must select and choose carefully, that is not a sufficient answer to the question. Can you effectively teach the child morals without falling back upon religion? Are you prepared to admit that you can teach a certain class of virtues without religious sanction; not those which are the favourite virtues, we may say, of the present day of competition and of struggle? You can teach a child to be prudent, thrifty, cautious; you can teach him the value of acquisitiveness, and the duty of providing for the future. All that kind of virtue you may be able to teach on a purely utilitarian ground, as it is called, but, as is again pointed out in a remarkably able article on “The Social Conscience of the Future,” certain old-fashioned traits, once considered to be virtues, are now commonly accounted to men for vices. Non-resistance, for example, “is now considered cowardice; meekness to-day is usually spelt weakness; taking no thought for the morrow is known as improvidence; unworldliness is generally viewed as a phase of sentimentality.” That is all quite true. But how are you going to teach the virtues that hitherto have been rooted in religion—virtues without which no State can endure? For you cannot teach the civic virtues on a basis of enlightened selfishness. That is a point that all educators of the young must remember. Self-sacrifice, compassion, the willingness to endure for the sake of others, the taking of the burden of the weak on the shoulders that are strong, the realisation that duty is greater than rights, and responsibility more vital than self-protection—how are you going to teach those virtues on the basis of selfishness? Now I have argued that in the old days, and have tried to show, in the time when I was a sceptic, that you might train people to self-sacrifice and self-surrender by an appeal to the humanity within them, and the sense of duty to the race; but that appeal fails the most readily in the cases where the virtues are most required.
It appeals to the noble, but the majority are not noble; it appeals to the unselfish and the heroic, but the majority are of mediocre courage and of very limited unselfishness; it appeals to those who do not need it, and it leaves cold and unmoved those who need it most. Will you go to the millionaire who has built up his vast fortune by the ruin of hundreds of families, and speak to him of the beauty of self-sacrifice and the splendour of self-surrender? The answer of people of the selfish type is: Why should I sacrifice myself for the future? or, as the witty Frenchman put it: “What has posterity done for me that I should sacrifice myself for posterity?” You may say that is very mean, very selfish. It is; but then, those are the people who want the compulsory force of moral strength applied to them. Where are you going to find it? For without self-sacrifice no society is secure; without self-surrender of the small to the great, of the individual to the social self, there is no possibility of national life, no stability in the social system; and those are virtues that grow out of religion, not out of what is falsely called utility. The greatest utility for the nation is that which understands the relationship between the part and the whole, and that is only taught by religion which knows the larger Self, which knits man to the whole, makes him realise relationships, makes him know he is not a creature of one little globe, but a creature of the universe; that he is a cosmic life, and not a planetary. That is learned by religion only, and by the deathless immortality of the divine Spirit in man; without that, no morality will endure; and you will make a fatal blunder if, because of the passing follies of religionists, you throw religion out of its place in education, of which it is the inspiration and the strength.
These are some of the problems you have to deal with in this deadlock, as I have called it, of religion. In fact, you want a new religious and moral synthesis; and you cannot find that without the higher inspiration for which man is groping now.
II.—Science.
Let us leave that deadlock—(I will try to solve it in another lecture)—and let us take the deadlock in science. Now that is very curious at the present time. Science is essentially in the West, as it is everywhere, a matter of observation, of measurement, of estimating quantities and understanding relations. But our science is coming to the end of its powers along these lines in a very curious and marked way. It cannot get its apparatus more delicate than it has got it; its balances are marvels, measuring inappreciable parts of an almost inappreciable grain. Nothing more exquisite than the delicacy of scientific apparatus, nothing more a testimony to the accuracy of the scientific mind. And yet how the apparatus is failing the scientist! how his observations are becoming increasingly difficult! What can he do with the atom? The chemist, the physicist, can he follow the atom and make that still a matter of observation, or does it wholly escape him? is the chemist, the physicist, now obliged to turn to the mathematician to make for him an atom which will answer the demands of the science which is unable to discover it for itself? All the later arguments on the atom, if you notice, are based on mathematical formulæ; they cannot observe; it is too fine, delicate, minute—it escapes them. Even the chemical atom, which is four degrees below the ultimate physical atom, is a matter on which they are compelled to reason because they cannot observe. But a science which reasons without those reasons being based on observations is no science as the West has known it up to the present time. All scientific reasoning is supposed to be based on observation; and if, instead of that, scientists have to fall back on reason where observation fails them, then a new method must be discovered, and new ways must be trodden. I do not say there is no new method; I do not say there are not new ways; but they are not the methods and the ways of the science of our own time. And there comes in this difficulty: the minute is escaping science by its minuteness, the subtle is too subtle for its investigation. If that be true—and it is true of chemistry and physics, and true also to a very great extent of electricity—we find that all the sciences are coming up to the borderland in which their methods fail them, and their senses no longer answer to the delicacy of the waves that beat upon them from the outer world. They are leaving behind them the gross and the dense; that is conquered, it is theirs; the subtle and the rare, those escape them; and the instruments of brass, of glass, nay, even of sensitive needles, they are not fine enough nor subtle enough to carry investigation further.
In other realms of science the same difficulties are arriving. Psychology—where have all the facts of the new psychology come from? From scientific men? Not a bit of it! From frauds and charlatans, from mesmerists and spiritualists and theosophists, and all these “ists” that popular science looks down upon and says are entirely outside the pale of scientific respect. And yet from these they gather their facts, from these they are obliged to take the strange new psychological facts that are revolutionising all the ideas of consciousness and the powers which lie hidden in the human mind. Those facts are accumulating from the hands of all these improper people, and when science gets them it cannot explain them. It can only rearrange them and rename them, and call mesmerism “hypnotism,” and clairvoyance “autoscopy.” But all that relabelling and all that rearranging cannot veil the fundamental fact that it has no theory into which these facts can fit, and no explanation which arranges them in a rational order. In psychology, as in chemistry, physics, and electricity, there is a deadlock.
And medicine, what about that? Doctors are beginning to think less and less of drugs. In my young days an honest doctor once told me that he sometimes gave coloured water and bread pills to people whom he knew would get on much better if they did not have drugs, but they were so determined to have them that he was obliged to give them something so he gave them harmless things. That idea has grown. Doctors have less and less faith in drugs, and they admit more and more widely that their medical science is very largely a hand-to-mouth thing, empirical, based on no true theory—experimental, as they say. But, in despair of finding the right road to health, they have gone down the terrible byway of Vivisection, trying to wring from Nature, by the torture of her more helpless children, the secrets which otherwise they were unable to find. But that is a fatal road; it is leading medicine further and further away from any true science of healing, and is turning it into a science of poisoning instead; medicine is becoming a matter of balancing one poison against another, so that in the middle of the balanced poisons you may be able to get some miserable remnant of health. When doctors find something they do not understand, they say: “Oh, let us try it on an animal; better try it on an animal than a man.” Yes; but if the animal does not give the same result, and if that which is poison to man is not poison to the animal, then the results of your experiment may be a widespread, unintentional poisoning added to the intentional poisonings of the day. There comes in one danger, that perhaps may make people rather less ready to take the results of vivisection. Take henbane: goats feed quite comfortably on henbane; it would kill you. If, when people wanted to know the effects of henbane on the human system, they tried it on goats, many human deaths would have followed on the result of that particular use of the experimental method. What is being done with all these miserable results of this mistaken and blinded science, all these serums and toxins, and all the rest of the things which they are now pouring into the human body? They are lowering the vitality of the race; they are diminishing the disease-resisting power of the man. I do not say that you cannot make a man immune for a time by slowly poisoning him, so that when a dose of the poison comes it will have no effect. You can do it with arsenic; you can put so much arsenic into a human body that the arsenic-poisoned person can take a dose of arsenic without death. Do you tell me that is health? I say it is disease, and that all these miserable methods are lowering the vitality of the human body, and making it a prey to innumerable diseases under the pretence of saving it from a few. Health is not got by poisonings, however carefully graduated. Health is brought about by pure living, pure food, moral self-control, and by becoming the master and not the slave of your appetites and passions. It is a road that leads to death, and not to life, when you want to live evilly, and be cured of the results of evil living out of the things which are wrung from the tortured bodies of the animal kingdom. And so there again there is a deadlock, for even the vivisectionists are beginning to be a little afraid of the results that they have drawn from their investigations. There are answers to the problems of disease, but they do not lie along this line.
III.—Art.
What of art? Now, very many people, I am afraid, in this and other countries, do not realise that beauty is a necessity of daily life for the human being, and when he does not get it he is less man, less woman, than he ought to be. It is not a question as to whether you should have a beautiful thing as a luxury; it is a necessity, and it should be the daily bread of life. Nations which knew the value of beauty made their towns beautiful; their works of art were made common property, their buildings were exquisitely proportioned, their architecture magnificent, and out of all that, open always to the masses of the people, grew a beauty of form and a beauty of mind that cannot possibly grow up in a nation where the towns are allowed to be hideous, where the air is poisoned, and where all the common things of life are ugly instead of beautiful. There is one thing in India that I have often complained of; it will not strike you here so much as it would inevitably strike you there. The old Indian life was a life full of beauty. Even now, out in the villages, life is beautiful. The garments of men and women alike are graceful, flowing, exquisite in colour. If you see an Indian peasant woman working in the fields she is a picture to paint, for the grace of her drapery, for the beauty of the colours that she wears; and if you see her going to the village well to draw water, she will carry on her head some vessel, it may be of beaten bronze or copper, it may be of kneaded clay, it will always be beautiful in form and exquisite in colour, Nowadays, since our civilisation has spread its power through India, things are changing; aniline dyes are replacing vegetable dyes; kerosene oil tins are replacing the exquisite vessels of the older days. In the old days in a village, when there was a wedding, every house contributed some of its beautiful vessels for the village festival; but now those have been cast aside, and miserable tin vessels take their place. It is only a small thing, you may say; I assure you it is a very great thing; for to kill out the sense of beauty which comes by living in contact with Nature—for Nature is beautiful everywhere, and contact with her beautifies the human face and form and mind—the killing-out of that sense of beauty which grows out of the mountains and the rivers, and the meadows and the groves, that is a national loss, and spells national decay. The garden cities you are beginning to build, those are not mere fancies of fanciful people, but a wise attempt to get the people out of the hideousness of bricks and mortar as they are used in England, into the country, where life still is fair, and where sunshine and colour are supreme. The life is poor where there is no beauty, and life itself grows common, vulgar, where beauty is not a dominating force. It is one of the great revelations of God Himself, for beauty lies in perfection of harmony, in exquisiteness of outline, in loveliness of colour, and all those things are characteristics of the Divine Workman, whose manifestation is always in beauty, while wisdom and power underlie it. You may see it in your own works of art. They are not creative but imitative, and that is the sign that art along that line has reached its ending and must find a new inspiration. Sometimes people say you cannot improve upon Nature; but you can show them what there is in Nature which the blinded eyes of ordinary people do not see. Take a flower: true, the flower is beautiful; a little nature-spirit made it, and caught as much of the divine thought of beauty as that small intelligence was able to conceive; do you tell me that when the artist comes the divine life is not far more largely evolved in him than in that little nature-spirit, that he cannot catch more of God’s thought in the flower than the nature-spirit was able to express? And that is what the great painter, poet, musician does; he hears and sees and tells the thoughts of God more fully than you and I can do with our dull ears and our limited vision and our clumsy tongues. It is there, but we cannot see it. The artist is the revealer of the divine beauty in form, and unless he can do that he is no true artist at all. The artist has yet to come to this civilisation—the man who can see through the forms of the present the divine idea which is striving to express itself in new ideals, new hopes, new powers. These are wanted for art, and these shall come in the days that are dawning; and a new art shall be found in the new heavens and the new earth.
So, although I have taken you to-day along a dreary path—for I have been speaking of the passing, and not the coming—it is because I want you to realise in the signs of the world around you that you are in the midst of a closing age; not only that you may know it—that is little—but that out of the knowledge of the closing you may prepare for the race which is to be born. For unless you understand, you cannot guide your steps aright; unless you understand, the world will be a mere puzzle, and not an expression of the divine thought. The age that is closing has done its work, has trained the concrete mind, has trained the scientific thought, has developed power and strength and energy—all good gifts of God, to be used for nobler purposes than they are used for to-day. There is nothing to regret, nothing to be sorry for, nothing to wish otherwise in the world that is dying. It has done its work; but it is ours to come out of the dying world into a world that is new, and it is out of the dying into the coming world that I would fain try to lead your thoughts, and perhaps your lives as well.