This difficulty is not diminished when the person who is thus hypertrophied on one side and atrophied on the other suddenly wakes up to his one-sided state and hastily attempts to remedy it. The very fact that such a one-sided development has come about indicates that there has probably been a congenital basis for it, an innate disharmony which must require infinite patience and special personal experience to overcome. But the heroic and ostentatious manner in which these ill-balanced people hastily attempt the athletic feat of restoring their spiritual balance has frequently aroused the interest, and too often the amusement, of the spectator. Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most quintessentially scientific persons the world has seen, a searcher who made the most stupendous effort to picture the universe intelligently on its purely intelligible side, seems to have realised in old age, when he was, indeed, approaching senility, that the vast hypertrophy of his faculties on that side had not been compensated by any development on the religious side. He forthwith set himself to the interpretation of the Book of Daniel and puzzled over the prophecies of the Book of Revelation, with the same scientifically serious air as though he were analysing the spectrum. In reality he had not reached the sphere of religion at all; he had merely exchanged good science for bad science. Such senile efforts to penetrate, ere yet life is quite over, the mystery of religion recall, and, indeed, have a real analogy to, that final effort of the emotionally starved to grasp at love which has been called “old maid’s insanity”; and just as in this aberration the woman who has all her life put love into the subconscious background of her mind is overcome by an eruption of the suppressed emotions and driven to create baseless legends of which she is herself the heroine, so the scientific man who has put religion into the subconscious and scarcely known that there is such a thing may become in the end the victim of an imaginary religion. In our own time we may have witnessed attempts of the scientific mind to become religious, which, without amounting to mental aberration, are yet highly instructive. It would be a double-edged compliment, in this connection, to compare Sir Oliver Lodge to Sir Isaac Newton. But after devoting himself for many years to purely physical research, Lodge also, as he has confessed, found that he had overlooked the religious side of life, and therefore set himself with characteristic energy to the task—the stages of which are described in a long series of books—of developing this atrophied side of his nature. Unlike Newton, who was worried about the future, Lodge became worried about the past. Just as Newton found what he was contented to regard as religious peace in speculating on the meaning of the Books of Daniel and Revelation, so Lodge found a similar satisfaction in speculations concerning the origin of the soul and in hunting out tags from the poets to support his speculations. So fascinating was this occupation that it seemed to him to constitute a great “message” to the world. “My message is that there is some great truth in the idea of preëxistence, not an obvious truth, nor one easy to formulate—a truth difficult to express—not to be identified with the guesses of reincarnation and transmigration, which may be fanciful. We may not have been individuals before, but we are chips or fragments of a great mass of mind, of spirit, and of life—drops, as it were, taken out of a germinal reservoir of life, and incubated until incarnate in a material body.”[[76]] The genuine mystic would smile if asked to accept as a divine message these phraseological gropings in the darkness, with their culmination in the gospel of “incubated drops.” They certainly represent an attempt to get at a real fact. But the mystic is not troubled by speculations about the origin of the individual, or theories of preëxistence, fantastic myths which belong to the earlier Plato’s stage of thought. It is abundantly evident that when the hypertrophied man of science seeks to cultivate his atrophied religious instincts it is with the utmost difficulty that he escapes from science. His conversion to religion merely means, for the most part, that he has exchanged sound science for pseudo-science.
Similarly, when the man with hypertrophied religious instincts seeks to cultivate his atrophied scientific instincts, the results are scarcely satisfactory. Here, indeed, we are concerned with a phenomenon that is rarer than the reverse process. The reason may not be far to seek. The instinct of religion develops earlier in the history of a race than the instinct of science. The man who has found the massive satisfaction of his religious cravings is seldom at any stage conscious of scientific cravings; he is apt to feel that he already possesses the supreme knowledge. The religious doubters who vaguely feel that their faith is at variance with science are merely the creatures of creeds, the product of Churches; they are not the genuine mystics. The genuine mystics who have exercised their scientific instincts have generally found scope for such exercise within an enlarged theological scheme which they regarded as part of their religion. So it was that St. Augustine found scope for his full and vivid, if capricious, intellectual impulses; so also Aquinas, in whom there was doubtless less of the mystic and more of the scientist, found scope for the rational and orderly development of a keen intelligence which has made him an authority and even a pioneer for many who are absolutely indifferent to his theology.
Again we see that to understand the real relations of science and mysticism, we must return to ages when, on neither side, had any accumulated mass of dead traditions effected an artificial divorce between two great natural instincts. It has already been pointed out that if we go outside civilisation the divorce is not found; the savage mystic is also the savage man of science, the priest and the doctor are one.[[77]] It is so also for the most part in barbarism, among the ancient Hebrews for instance, and not only among their priests, but even among their prophets. It appears that the most usual Hebrew word for what we term the “prophet” signified “one who bursts forth,” presumably into the utterance of spiritual verities, and the less usual words signify “seer.” That is to say, the prophet was primarily a man of religion, secondarily a man of science. And that predictive element in the prophet’s function, which to persons lacking in religious instinct seems the whole of his function, has no relationship at all to religion; it is a function of science. It is an insight into cause and effect, a conception of sequences based on extended observation and enabling the “prophet” to assert that certain lines of action will probably lead to the degeneration of a stock, or to the decay of a nation. It is a sort of applied history. “Prophecy” has no more to do with religion than have the forecasts of the Meteorological Bureau, which also are a kind of applied science in earlier stages associated with religion.
If, keeping within the sphere of civilisation, we go back as far as we can, the conclusion we reach is not greatly different. The earliest of the great mystics in historical times is Lao-tze. He lived six hundred years earlier than Jesus, a hundred years earlier than Sakya-Muni, and he was more quintessentially a mystic than either. He was, moreover, incomparably nearer than either to the point of view of science. Even his occupation in life was, in relation to his age and land, of a scientific character; he was, if we may trust uncertain tradition, keeper of the archives. In the substance of his work this harmony of religion and science is throughout traceable, the very word “Tao,” which to Lao-tze is the symbol of all that to which religion may mystically unite us, is susceptible of being translated “Reason,” although that word remains inadequate to its full meaning. There are no theological or metaphysical speculations here concerning God (the very word only occurs once and may be a later interpolation), the soul, or immortality. The delicate and profound art of Lao-tze largely lies in the skill with which he expresses spiritual verities in the form of natural truths. His affirmations not only go to the core of religion, but they express the essential methods of science. This man has the mystic’s heart, but he has also the physicist’s touch and the biologist’s eye. He moves in a sphere in which religion and science are one.
If we pass to more modern times and the little European corner of the world, around the Mediterranean shores, which is the cradle of our latter-day civilisation, again and again we find traces of this fundamental unity of mysticism and science. It may well be that we never again find it in quite so pure a form as in Lao-tze, quite so free from all admixture alike of bad religion and bad science. The exuberant unbalanced activity of our race, the restless acquisitiveness—already manifested in the sphere of ideas and traditions before it led to the production of millionaires—soon became an ever-growing impediment to such unity of spiritual impulses. Among the supple and yet ferocious Greeks, indeed, versatility and recklessness seem at a first glance always to have stood in the way of approach to the essential terms of this problem. It was only when the Greeks began to absorb Oriental influences, we are inclined to say, that they became genuine mystics, and as they approached mysticism they left science behind.
Yet there was a vein of mysticism in the Greeks from the first, not alone due to seeds from the East flung to germinate fruitfully in Greek soil, though perhaps to that Ionian element of the Near East which was an essential part of the Greek spirit. All that Karl Joël of Basel has sought to work out concerning the evolution of the Greek philosophic spirit has a bearing on this point. We are wrong, he believes, to look on the early Greek philosophers of Nature as mainly physicists, treating the religious and poetic mystic elements in them as mere archaisms, concessions, or contradictions. Hellas needed, and possessed, an early Romantic spirit, if we understand the Romantic spirit, not merely through its reactionary offshoots, but as a deep mystico-lyrical expression; it was comparable in early Greece to the Romantic spirit of the great creative men of the early Renaissance or the early nineteenth century, and the Apollinian classic spirit was developed out of an ordered discipline and formulation of the Dionysian spirit more mystically near to Nature.[[78]] If we bear this in mind we are helped to understand much in the religious life of Greece which seems not to harmonise with what we conventionally call “classic.”
In the dim figure of Pythagoras we perhaps see not only a great leader of physical science, but also a great initiator in spiritual mystery. It is, at any rate, fairly clear that he established religious brotherhoods of carefully selected candidates, women as well as men being eligible, and living on so lofty and aristocratic a level that the populace of Magna Grecia, who could not understand them, decided out of resentment to burn them alive, and the whole order was annihilated about B.C. 500. But exactly how far these early Pythagoreans, whose community has been compared to the mediæval orders of chivalry, were mystics, we may imagine as we list, in the light of the Pythagorean echoes we find here and there in Plato. On the whole we scarcely go to the Greeks for a clear exposition of what we now term “mysticism.” We see more of it in Lucretius than we can divine in his master Epicurus. And we see it still more clearly in the Stoics. We can, indeed, nowhere find a more pure and concise statement than in Marcus Aurelius of the mystical core of religion as the union in love and harmony and devotion of the self with the Not-Self.
If Lucretius may be accounted the first of moderns in the identification of mysticism and science, he has been followed by many, even though, one sometimes thinks, with an ever-increasing difficulty, a drooping of the wings of mystical aspiration, a limping of the feet of scientific progress. Leonardo and Giordano Bruno and Spinoza and Goethe, each with a little imperfection on one side or the other, if not on both sides, have moved in a sphere in which the impulses of religion are felt to spring from the same centre as the impulses of science. Einstein, whose attitude in many ways is so interesting, closely associates the longing for pure knowledge with religious feeling, and he has remarked that “in every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence.” He is inclined to attach significance to the fact that so many great men of science—Newton, Descartes, Gauss, Helmholtz—have been in one way or another religious. If we cannot altogether include such men as Swedenborg and Faraday in the same group, it is because we cannot feel that in them the two impulses, however highly developed, really spring from the same centre or really make a true harmony. We suspect that these men and their like kept their mysticism in a science-proof compartment of their minds, and their science in a mysticism-proof compartment; we tremble for the explosive result, should the wall of partition ever be broken down.
The difficulty, we see again, has been that, on each hand, there has been a growth of non-essential traditions around the pure and vital impulse, and the obvious disharmony of these two sets of accretions conceals the underlying harmony of the impulses themselves. The possibility of reaching the natural harmony is thus not necessarily by virtue of any rare degree of intellectual attainment, nor by any rare gift of inborn spiritual temperament,—though either of these may in some cases be operative,—but rather by the happy chance that the burden of tradition on each side has fallen and that the mystical impulse is free to play without a dead metaphysical theology, the scientific impulse without a dead metaphysical formalism. It is a happy chance that may befall the simple more easily than the wise and learned.