CHAPTER III
THE MODERN SPIRIT
The need of mastering life, of reducing its multitudinous, thronging details to some sort of order, that shall lack neither the unity which alone can satisfy the mind, nor the variety requisite to do justice to the complexity of experience, is the one perennial need of humanity. The aim of all the chief human undertakings is to find schemes of order: physical science is the quest of order in the material world; morality is the quest of coordination and balance between many individual wills; religion is the search for the One Spirit which contains and fuses together all finite souls; art is the pursuit of that organization of diverse elements, of whatever sort, in one sensible whole, in which we perceive beauty. But since experience is bewilderingly many-sided and complex, one scheme after another is made only to be discarded as inadequate, and progress entails the constant substitution of more inclusive for less inclusive syntheses. Our most catholic formulas are provisional and temporary; “opinions are but stages on the road to truth.”
Such a word as “modern” can therefore have but a relative meaning. What is modern to-day will be archaic a hundred years hence. Our contemporary ideas are more liberal than those of our grandfathers, but they will likely appear as the rigid superstitions of a dark age to our still more enlightened descendants. When we speak of the modern spirit we say nothing in regard to the future; we name simply the attitude of mind which characterizes the present as contrasted with the past. That new vision or intuition or instinct of truth by which we of to-day reinterpret in more liberal wise the elements of experience either interpreted too narrowly or quite ignored by the earlier generations—that is the “modern spirit.”
We have been considering at some length, in the foregoing chapter, the characteristic mystical attitude of the mediæval mind. We have seen how the typical thinkers of the middle age, aware of good but unable to identify it with an actual world so full of evil, made a sharp division, a total breach, between the actual and the divine. The mystic cut the Gordian knot of the world-problem by rejecting the actual altogether from his house of life. His scheme had its own harmony, unity, rationality; but being built upon an exclusion, it had in the nature of things to give place in course of time to a scheme less disregardful of the true wealth and reality of experience. The modern mind turned away from mysticism, envisaged the world afresh, and reinterpreted truth in terms of idealism.
Idealism is, in essence, a belief in the possibility of attaining the divine through a selective manipulation of the actual. In the respect it pays to finite life lies its sharp contrast with mysticism. It has gone far to obliterate the breach between the actual and the divine which the mystic had made so wide; it has tried to find the eternal in the temporal, and to nourish the spirit by guiding and developing, rather than by mortifying, the flesh.[15] Mysticism spurned the “this,” the “here,” the “now;” idealism, on the contrary, is on its hither side, so to speak, identical with realism. The idealist believes in the immediate, and loves the finite, as much as the crassest realist. He finds in it the point of departure of all desirable truths, the scaffolding for all mansions of the spirit. But he differs from the realist in that he does not stop with the real, but, using it as material for idealism, selects from it the elements of his heart’s desire. The actual world is to him a sort of keyboard on which he strikes those chords, and those only, which he wishes to hear. He is, indeed, an artist in life, and his method is the true artistic method of selection and synthesis. But on the other hand, he differs even more radically from the mystic, in that he makes the very materials of his Celestial City out of those earthly, momentary, and finite experiences that the latter rejects as dross. All three types of thought find themselves confronted by the opposition between actual facts and spiritual desires which is so characteristic of our world: the mystic repudiates the facts; the realist discredits the desires; the idealist sets out to win, by a selective or artistic manipulation of the facts, the satisfaction of the desires.
Characteristic of idealism is therefore its respect for the actual, in all its phases. It respects, to begin with, the human body. The tendency of modern thought is towards a wise paganism in physical life, towards a substitution of hygiene for mortification, of moderation for abstinence, of the liberal conception of “mens sana in corpore sano” for the monkish ideal of a soul gradually burning up and sloughing off its tenement. Development of the body is increasingly manifesting its true relation to the spiritual enterprises of men—a relation that repression of it only obscured and distorted. The Hermit of Carmel, in the poem of that name,[16] spends his days in a painful, endless, and futile struggle to eradicate fleshly lusts; the young knight knows another sort of purity, more joyful and bountiful, the purity of the lover who remembers his beloved. Idealism, like that happy knight, remembers that it is the mission and destiny of flesh to wait on spirit.
Again, idealism respects the intellect. The great development of the physical sciences, generally considered the most striking fact in nineteenth century history, is the necessary result of an idealistic faith in the powers of human observation and reason. The modern mind, believing in its own ability to interrogate nature, has done so with tireless energy, recording the answers obtained in half a hundred special “sciences,” ranging from histology to psychology. It has applied the same method introspectively to such good purpose that metaphysics, in the hands of Kant and his successors, has radically altered our conception of how we know truth, and what sort of truth it is that we know. Nor have the contributions of the enfranchised intellect stopped with philosophy; they have immensely deepened and vivified religion. The doctrine of evolution, for example, a product of the most remarkable keenness, liberality, and patience in intellectual research, has substituted for the childish anthropomorphic doctrine of creation the wondrously vital modern conception of a God not remote and detached, but nearer than thought and more enveloping than the atmosphere, incarnate in every atom and regnant in every mind.