Religion is a large word, of good import and of evil import, and with the general discussion of religion we are not in this place concerned. Its quintessential core—which is the art of finding our emotional relationship to the world conceived as a whole—is all that here matters, and it is best termed “Mysticism.” No doubt it needs some courage to use that word. It is the common label of abuse applied to every pseudo-spiritual thing that is held up for contempt. Yet it would be foolish to allow ourselves to be deflected from the right use of a word by the accident of its abuse. “Mysticism,” however often misused, will here be used, because it is the correct term for the relationship of the Self to the Not-Self, of the individual to a Whole, when, going beyond his own personal ends, he discovers his adjustment to larger ends, in harmony or devotion or love.
It has become a commonplace among the unthinking, or those who think badly, to assume an opposition of hostility between mysticism and science.[[70]] If “science” is, as we have some reason to believe, an art, if “mysticism” also is an art, the opposition can scarcely be radical since they must both spring from the same root in natural human activity.
II
If, indeed, by “science” we mean the organisation of an intellectual relationship to the world we live in adequate to give us some degree of power over that world, and if by “mysticism” we mean the joyful organisation of an emotional relationship to the world conceived as a whole,[[71]] the opposition which we usually assume to exist between them is of comparatively modern origin.
Among savage peoples such an opposition can scarcely be said to have any existence. The very fact that science, in the strict sense, seems often to begin with the stars might itself have suggested that the basis of science is mystical contemplation. Not only is there usually no opposition between the “scientific” and the “mystical” attitude among peoples we may fairly call primitive, but the two attitudes may be combined in the same person. The “medicine-man” is not more an embryonic man of science than he is an embryonic mystic; he is both equally. He cultivates not only magic but holiness, he achieves the conquest of his own soul, he enters into harmony with the universe; and in doing this, and partly, indeed, through doing this, his knowledge is increased, his sensations and power of observation are rendered acute, and he is enabled so to gain organised knowledge of natural processes that he can to some extent foresee or even control those processes. He is the ancestor alike of the hermit following after sanctity and of the inventor crystallising discoveries into profitable patents. Such is the medicine-man wherever we may find him in his typical shape—which he cannot always adequately achieve—all over the world, around Torres Straits just as much as around Behring’s Straits. Yet we have failed to grasp the significance of this fact.
It is the business of the Shaman, as on the mystical side we may conveniently term the medicine-man, to place himself under the conditions—and even in primitive life those conditions are varied and subtle—which bring his will into harmony with the essence of the world, so that he grows one with that essence, that its will becomes his will, and, reversely, that, in a sense, his will becomes its. Herewith, in this unity with the spirit of the world, the possibility of magic and the power to control the operation of Nature are introduced into human thought, with its core of reality and its endless trail of absurdity, persisting even into advanced civilisation.
But this harmony with the essence of the universe, this control of Nature through oneness with Nature, is not only at the heart of religion; it is also at the heart of science. It is only by the possession of an acquired or inborn temperament attuned to the temperament of Nature that a Faraday or an Edison, that any scientific discoverer or inventor, can achieve his results. And the primitive medicine-man, who on the religious side has attained harmony of the self with the Not-Self, and by obeying learnt to command, cannot fail on the scientific side also, under the special conditions of his isolated life, to acquire an insight into natural methods, a practical power over human activities and over the treatment of disease, such as on the imaginative and emotional side he already possesses. If we are able to see this essential and double attitude of the Shaman—medicine-man—if we are able to eliminate all the extraneous absurdities and the extravagancies which conceal the real nature of his function in the primitive world, the problem of science and mysticism, and their relationship to each other, ceases to have difficulties for us.
It is as well to point out, before passing on, that the investigators of primitive thought are not altogether in agreement with one another on this question of the relation of science to magic, and have complicated the question by drawing a distinction between magic (understood as man’s claim to control Nature) and religion (understood as man’s submission to Nature). The difficulties seem due to an attempt to introduce clear-cut definitions at a stage of thought where none such existed. That medicine-men and priests cultivated science, while wrapping it up in occult and magical forms, seems indicated by the earliest historical traditions of the Near East. Herbert Spencer long ago brought together much of the evidence on this point. McDougall to-day in his “Social Psychology” (Chapter XIII) accepts magic as the origin of science, and Frazer in the early edition of his “Golden Bough” regarded magic as “the savage equivalent of our natural science.” Marett[[72]] “profoundly doubts” this, and declares that if we can use the word “science” at all in such a context, magic is occult science and the very antithesis of natural science. While all that Marett states is admirably true on the basis of his own definitions, he scarcely seems to realise the virtue of the word “equivalent,” while at the same time, it may be, his definition of magic is too narrow. Silberer, from the psycho-analytic standpoint, accepting the development of exact science from one branch of magic, points out that science is, on the one hand, the recognition of concealed natural laws and, on the other, the dynamisation of psychic power,[[73]] and thus falls into two great classes, according as its operation is external or internal. This seems a true and subtle distinction which Marett has overlooked. In the latest edition of his work,[[74]] Frazer has not insisted on the relation or analogy of science to magic, but has been content to point out that Man has passed through the three stages of magic, religion, and science. “In magic Man depends on his own strength to meet the difficulties and dangers that beset him on every side. He believes in a certain established order of Nature on which he can surely count, and which he can manipulate for his own ends.” Then he finds he has overestimated his own powers and he humbly takes the road of religion, leaving the universe to the more or less capricious will of a higher power. But he finds this view inadequate and he proceeds to revert in a measure to the older standpoint of magic by postulating explicitly what in magic had only been implicitly assumed, “to wit, an inflexible regularity in the order of natural events which, if carefully observed, enables us to foresee their course with certainty, and to act accordingly.” So that science, in Frazer’s view, is not so much directly derived from magic as itself in its original shape one with magic, and Man has proceeded, not in a straight line, but in a spiral.
The profound significance of this early personage is, however, surely clear. If science and mysticism are alike based on fundamental natural instincts, appearing spontaneously all over the world; if, moreover, they naturally tend to be embodied in the same individual, in such a way that each impulse would seem to be dependent on the other for its full development; then there can be no ground for accepting any disharmony between them. The course of human evolution involves a division of labour, a specialisation of science and of mysticism along special lines and in separate individuals.[[75]] But a fundamental antagonism of the two, it becomes evident, is not to be thought of; it is unthinkable, even absurd. If at some period in the course of civilisation we seriously find that our science and our religion are antagonistic, then there must be something wrong either with our science or with our religion. Perhaps not seldom there may be something wrong with both. For if the natural impulses which normally work best together are separated and specialised in different persons, we may expect to find a concomitant state of atrophy and hypertrophy, both alike morbid. The scientific person will become atrophied on the mystical side, the mystical person will become atrophied on the scientific side. Each will become morbidly hypertrophied on his own side. But the assumption that, because there is a lack of harmony between opposing pathological states, there must also be a similar lack of harmony in the normal state, is unreasonable. We must severely put out of count alike the hypertrophied scientific people with atrophied religious instincts, and the hypertrophied religious people with atrophied scientific instincts. Neither group can help us here; they only introduce confusion. We have to examine the matter critically, to go back to the beginning, to take so wide a survey of the phenomena that their seemingly conflicting elements fall into harmony.
The fact, in the first place, that the person with an overdeveloped religious sense combined with an underdeveloped scientific sense necessarily conflicts with a person in whom the reverse state of affairs exists, cannot be doubted, nor is the reason of it obscure. It is difficult to conceive a Darwin and a St. Theresa entering with full and genuine sympathy into each other’s point of view. And that is so by no means because the two attitudes, stripped of all but their essentials, are irreconcilable. If we strip St. Theresa of her atrophied pseudo-science, which in her case was mostly theological “science,” there was nothing in her attitude which would not have seemed to harmonise and to exalt that absolute adoration and service to natural truth which inspired Darwin. If we strip Darwin of that atrophied sense of poetry and the arts which he deplored, and that anæmic secular conception of the universe as a whole which he seems to have accepted without deploring, there was nothing in his attitude which would not have served to fertilise and enrich the spiritual exaltation of Theresa and even to have removed far from her that temptation to acedia or slothfulness which all the mystics who are mystics only have recognised as their besetting sin, minimised as it was, in Theresa, by her practical activities. Yet, being as they were persons of supreme genius developed on opposite sides of their common human nature, an impassable gulf lies between them. It lies equally between much more ordinary people who yet show the same common character of being undergrown on one side, overgrown on the other.