Sources on Ralph Connor
Ralph Connor, the Well-Beloved. Booklet published in 1914 by George H. Doran Company. Now out of print.
Silver Jubilee, 1895-1920, of St. Stephen’s, Winnipeg. Booklet published by the congregation of St. Stephen’s Presbyterian Church, Winnipeg, Manitoba.
II. Here, There and Everywhere
i
IN his new book, The Humanizing of Knowledge, the author of that fascinating study, The Mind in the Making, James Harvey Robinson, says: “Personally I have reached the conclusion, after many years of teaching, that one should choose for instruction, whether one be dealing with young or old, some phase of human interest rather than some field of scientific investigation”—and he goes on with force and plainness to point out the defect of an educational scheme in which knowledge is imparted by going in and out of great numbers of pigeonholes. He is really pleading for methods of instruction that shall take account of the ordinary man’s interest in his world, and shall proceed by the natural process of mental associations instead of by artificial and arbitrary tetherings to the post of this and that “subject.” Seldom has the difficulty been put with more brevity, simplicity and general sweetness of temper, or in a way to give such decent courage to individual self-respect. “We are not many of us interested in isolated scientific facts of any kind. That species of interest, as we have seen, is reserved for the few. But all of us are open to the effects of such new knowledge as gets under our skins. And the great art is not to exhibit our own insight and learning but really to influence those whom we are aiming to influence.” There could be no better text or opening for a chapter devoted to books of many varieties, inasmuch as books have always taken, except where restricted by school formulas, the lines of human interests and the path of some natural association of ideas. In this sense, though teaching may need to be humanised, knowledge has never been without its humanisation. A James Harvey Robinson cannot write about science without being led into the absorbing history of the mind that is slowly achieving science. A Camille Flammarion, discussing astronomy, finds it above all things natural to relate his knowledge with man’s religious ideas. An L. P. Jacks, analysing religious doubts, moves directly over the border of so-called psychology into the sphere of conduct and behaviour, because the answer lies over there. A George Santayana employs poetry to state those portions of his philosophy which prose can scarcely embody with sufficient expressiveness; bases criticism on his philosophy and distils or re-distils philosophical ideas from all the varieties of his learning.
To take M. Flammarion, for example. His new work, Dreams of an Astronomer, could without any essential inaccuracy be styled “A Humanisation of Astronomy.” Here is a book produced in this French scientist’s eighty-first year, at an age where “isolated scientific facts” had lost all fanciful meanings and were seen only in their warm and present human significance. The point with M. Flammarion was not that we live on a poor little world in a vast universe composed of worlds within worlds and flaming suns and revolving planets, nor that this universe so immense is but an item of larger immensities. The point was in the significance of these facts to the heart and mind of a man or a woman. What does it mean as regards our attempt to know God? In what perspective does it place our aspirations and our efforts toward what we sometimes call “righteousness”? Flammarion gives the richness of his physical knowledge in untechnical language; in words that summon the imagination he constructs pen pictures of other worlds than ours. That we may have the value of comparison, he describes Venus and Mars—the latter possibly inhabited by creatures millions of years ahead of us in their development. This moving and inspiring book ends with a sentence that might serve as the quiet challenge of science to much of philosophy and religion. Says M. Flammarion: “Let us not be personal, like infants or the aged, who see only their own room, let us know how to live in the infinite and in the eternal.”
But this lofty idea needs translation into the terms of our finite existence and our character of religious beliefs. It finds it in such a book as L. P. Jacks’s Religious Perplexities. Like The Humanizing of Knowledge, this is a slender book that can be read through in about an hour and it is equally a book that is likely to influence a lifetime. It is beside my point that Professor Jacks is one of the greatest living philosophers and religionists; but it is a fact of the highest relevance that he writes as no one writing on these subjects has written since William James. The same power to pierce to fundamental questions—and answer them; the same lucidity of thought and expression are characteristic of the two men. Jacks exhibits the same tolerance of the forms of religious belief; and it is only after a discussion of “Religious Perplexities in General” that he closes with a talk about “Perplexity in the Christian Religion.” He says: “Far be it from me to set up an exclusive claim for Christianity. Anyone who does that goes a long way towards forfeiting his title to be called a Christian. Let each of us look for truth where it is most accessible and where it speaks the language he best understands.” He begins with the two ultimate questions that man asks himself: “Why are we here?” followed by, “Why am I—I, and not John Jones or James Smith—here and now?” The answer to the first is the need of the One to differentiate itself into the Many, proving its universality and its power to integrate and raise up the good. But, he shows, the answer to the second question is in the conduct of the individual. Insofar as I by my courage in the face of life justify my particular existence, I supply the reason why myself, rather than Jones or Smith, exists in my place, here and now. Faith is not a new faculty added to us, it is simply our reason grown courageous. As Carlyle repeated, we all must answer the alternative: “Wilt thou be a hero or a coward?” Professor Jacks adds: “No philosophy can relieve us from the responsibility of having to make that choice”—and religion, telling us our choice must be the heroic one, strengthens us in making it.
It is religion, I think, that George Santayana represents—Santayana who contrasts for me with that rooted countryman of his, Miguel de Unamuno. I have a love for both, the one tenacious of his soil and its traditions, the other early detached, flung into the New England of Harvard and William James, now lodged in Paris, and always with his roots feeding orchid-like on the air. It is inevitable that one like Santayana should bear his blossom in poetry and criticism and his fruit in philosophy-religion, or religious philosophy. Thus he calls his Scepticism and Animal Faith, “an introduction to a system of philosophy,” but it is so only in the literal sense probably necessary to secure the proper recognition from a too unimaginative world. The book, which has a charm unbecoming a philosophical overture, can be read independently of the volumes that are to follow it; but who reads it may be trusted to put independence on one side and “follow, follow.” Santayana as poet is possibly matter to consider in a later chapter of our book, but since, as he says in the preface to his Poems, their subject “is simply my philosophy in the making,” we should be privileged to a passing consideration here. “I see no reason why a philosopher should be puzzled. What he sees he sees; of the rest he is ignorant; and his sense of this vast ignorance (which is his natural and inevitable condition) is a chief part of his knowledge and of his emotion. Philosophy is not an optional theme that may occupy him on occasion. It is his only possible life, his daily response to everything”—call it religion, if you please, and regard its expression:
O world, thou choosest not the better part!