“Je ne me plains pas de cette sécheresse, je la bénis. C’est un plaisir, devenu si rare aujourd’hui, de pouvoir lire un livre sans en connaître l’auteur: de juger une œuvre directement et en elle-même, sans avoir à étudier ce composé d’organes et de tissus, de nerfs et de muscles, d’où elle est sortie: sans la commenter à l’aide de la physiologie, de l’ethnographie, et de la climatologie: sans mettre en jeu l’atavisme et les diathèses héréditaires!”[[7]]
Turn we lastly to the influences of the Scientific Spirit on Religion. It is hardly too much to affirm that the advance of that Spirit has been to individuals and classes the signal for a subsidence of religious faith and religious emotion.[[8]] Judging from Darwin’s experience, as that of a typical man of science, just as such a one becomes an embodiment of the Scientific Spirit, this religious sentiment flickers and expires, like a candle in an airless vault. Speaking of his old feelings of “wonder, admiration, and devotion” experienced while standing amid the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, he wrote in later years, when Science had made him all her own: “Now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colorblind” (Life, vol. i. p. 311). Nor did the deadening influences stop at his own soul. As one able reviewer of his “Life” in the Spectator wrote: “No sane man can deny Darwin’s influence to have been at least contemporaneous with a general decay of belief in the unseen. Darwin’s Theism faded from his mind without disturbance, without perplexity, without pain. These words describe his influence as well as his experience.”
The causes of the anti-religious tendency of modern science may be found, I believe: 1st, in the closing up of that “Gate called Beautiful,” through which many souls have been wont to enter the Temple; 2d, in the diametric opposition of its method to the method of spiritual inquiry; and, 3d, to the hardness of character frequently produced (as we have already noted) by scientific pursuits. These three causes, I think, sufficiently account for the antagonism between the modern Scientific and the Religious Spirits, quite irrespectively of the bearings of critical or philosophical researches on the doctrines of either natural or traditional religion. Had Science inspired her votaries with religious sentiment, they would have broken their way through the tangle of theological difficulties, and have opened for us a highway of Faith at once devout and rational. But of all improbable things to anticipate now in the world is a Scientific Religious Reformation. Lamennais said there was one thing worse than Atheism; namely, indifference whether Atheism be true. The Scientific Spirit of the Age has reached this point. It is contented to be Agnostic, not Atheistic. It says aloud, “I don’t know.” It mutters to those who listen, “I don’t care.”
The Scientific Spirit has undoubtedly performed prodigies in the realms of physical discovery. Its inventions have brought enormous contributions to the material well-being of man, and it has widened to a magnificent horizon the intellectual circle of his ideas. Yet notwithstanding all its splendid achievements, if it only foster our lower mental faculties while it paralyzes and atrophies the higher; if Reverence and Sympathy and Modesty dwindle in its shadow; if Art and Poetry shrink at its touch; if Morality be undermined and perverted by it; and if Religion perish at its approach as a flower vanishes before the frost,—then, I think, we must deny the truth of Sir James Paget’s assertion, that “nothing can advance human prosperity so much as science.” She has given us many precious things; but she takes away things more precious still.
ESSAY II.
THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS.
Human Emotions—the most largely effective springs of human conduct—arise either at first hand on the pressure of their natural stimuli, or at second hand by the contagion of sympathy with the emotions of other men. This last source of emotion has not, I conceive, received sufficient attention in practical systems of education, and to the consideration of it the present paper will be chiefly devoted.
Every human emotion appears to be transmissible by contagion, and to be also more often so developed than it is solitarily evolved. For once that Courage or Terror, Admiration or Contempt, or even Good-will and Ill-will, spring of themselves in the breast of man, woman, or child, each is many times caught from another mind possessed of the same feeling. By a subtle sympathy, not unshared by the lower animals, a sympathy which sometimes works slowly and imperceptibly and is sometimes communicated with electric velocity, one man conveys to another, as if it were a flame, the emotion which burns in his own soul. Thenceforth the recipient becomes a fresh propagator of the emotion to those with whom he in his turn comes into physical contact. A few instances may be named to make clear my meaning.
The most familiar example of the contagiousness of the emotions, as the reader will instantly recall, is that of Fear, which has often spread through whole armies with such inexplicable celerity and fatal results that the ancients were fain to attribute the frenzy to the malevolence of a god, and called such terrors “Panic.” The disasters which have occurred during the last few years in so many European and American theatres and churches afford sad evidence that, though “great Pan is dead,” our liability to succumb to such waves of fear has not been diminished by modern civilization. The proof of the special power of the contagion lies in this: that there is every reason to believe that the majority of the persons constituting the terror-stricken crowd would, if alone, have met the danger with reasonable composure. There is also happily, we may remember, such a thing as the contagion of Courage as well as that of Terror. And many a time and oft in our history the captain of a sinking ship, the commander of a retreating regiment, has, by his individual intrepidity, restored the morale of his men. Again, a remarkable instance of the contagiousness of emotion is afforded by the Popularity of the men who become in any country the idols of the hour. The fact is very well known to the organizers of claques and réclames in theatres, and of ovations in political life, that it is enough for a small band of friends in an assembly to cheer and clap hands, to induce hundreds, who had previously little interest in the work or person praised, to join the hosannas. When a statesman has succeeded in arousing enthusiasm for himself (possibly by persuading scores of people and associations that “all his sympathies are with their”—totally opposite aims), he may then safely disappoint each in turn and veer round to the opposite point of the political and theological compass from which he sailed with flowing canvas. His popularity will not be forfeited or even lessened; for it is a mere contagion of sentiment, not a rational or critical judgment. Herein lies the special peril of democracies, that this kind of contagion of personal enthusiasm rapidly becomes the largest factor in their politics. From the nature of things, the masses cannot form judgments on questions of state, referring, perhaps, to countries of which the very names are unknown to them; and, therefore, they must of necessity choose Men, not Measures. When we further examine who are the Men so chosen and why, we arrive at the startling discovery that it is exclusively by rhetoric that the contagious admiration and sympathy of the masses can be roused. Not sound statesmanship, not wise patriotism, not incorruptible fidelity, not dignified consistency, not, in short, any one quality fitting a man to be a safe or able minister, attracts the enthusiasm of the multitude, or is even estimated at all by them. The only gift they can appreciate is that which they themselves would designate “the Gift of the Gab.” The lesson is a grave one for all free countries. By such popular idolatry of great talkers were all the old republics of Greece and Magna Graecia brought to destruction; and the men who by such means acquired a bastard royalty over them so exercised it as to make the name of “Tyrant” for ever abominable.
As concerns emotions connected with Religion, the contagion of them has been notorious in all ages, for good or evil, according to the character of the religion in question. The intoxication of the dances of old Mænads and the modern Dervishes, the shrieks and self-woundings of the priests of Baal and Cybele, the frenzied scenes of sacrifice to Moloch and the Aztec gods, and a hundred other examples will occur to every reader. Probably those on the largest scale of all recorded in history were the first Crusades, when “Europe precipitated itself on Asia” in a delirium of religious enthusiasm caught from Peter the Hermit and Bernard of Clairvaux. The outbursts of the Anabaptists, the Flagellants and Prophets of the Cevennes, in Christendom, and of Moslem fanatics under Prophets and Mahdis (of which we have probably by no means heard the last), and finally the Revivals of various sects in England and America, and the triumphs of the Salvation Army, are all instances of the part played by the contagion of emotion in the religion of the community at large. I shall speak hereafter of its share in personal religious experience.
In much smaller matters than religion, and where no explosion reveals the contagion of sentiments, it is yet often possible to trace the spread of an emotion, good or bad, from one individual of a family or village to all the other members or inhabitants. It suffices for some spiteful boy or idle girl to call a miserable old woman a witch, or to express hatred of some foreigner or harmless eccentric, to set afloat prejudices which end in something approaching to persecution of the victims, who may be thankful they did not live two hundred years ago, when, instead of being boycotted, they would have been burned. A child in a school or large household who has the misfortune to be lame or ugly, or to exhibit any peculiarity physical or mental, may, without any fault on its side, become obnoxious to the blind dislike of a stupid servant or jealous step-mother, and then—the contagion spreading and intensifying as it extends—to the common hatred of the little community,—a hatred justifying itself by the sullenness or deceptions to which the poor victim at last is driven. Even domestic animals suffer from this kind of contagious dislike, and benefit on the other hand by contagious admiration and fondness.[[9]] “Give a dog a bad name and hang him” is true in more senses than one.