Various considerations may help to make clear to us how it has happened that a process which might reasonably be supposed to be intimate and sacred should have become so obscured and so deformed that it has been fiercely bandied about by opposing factions. At the outset, as we have seen, among comparatively primitive peoples, it really is a simple and natural process carried out harmoniously with no sense of conflict. A man, it would seem, was not then overburdened by the still unwritten traditions of the race. He was comparatively free to exercise his own impulses unfettered by the chains forged out of the dead impulses of those who had gone before him.
It is the same still among uncultivated persons of our own race in civilisation. I well remember how once, during a long ride through the Australian bush with a settler, a quiet, uncommunicative man with whom I had long been acquainted, he suddenly told me how at times he would ascend to the top of a hill and become lost to himself and to everything as he stood in contemplation of the scene around him. Those moments of ecstasy, of self-forgetful union with the divine beauty of Nature, were entirely compatible with the rational outlook of a simple, hard-working man who never went to church, for there was no church of any kind to go to, but at such moments had in his own humble way, like Moses, met God in a mountain. There can be no doubt that such an experience is not uncommon among simple folk unencumbered by tradition, even when of civilised race.
The burden of traditions, of conventions, of castes has too often proved fatal alike to the manifestation of the religious impulse and the scientific impulse. It is unnecessary to point out how easily this happens in the case of the religious impulse. It is only too familiar a fact how, when the impulse of religion first germinates in the young soul, the ghouls of the Churches rush out of their caverns, seize on the unhappy victim of the divine effluence and proceed to assure him that his rapture is, not a natural manifestation, as free as the sunlight and as gracious as the unfolding of a rose, but the manifest sign that he has been branded by a supernatural force and fettered for ever to a dead theological creed. Too often he is thus caught by the bait of his own rapture; the hook is firmly fixed in his jaw and he is drawn whither his blind guides will; his wings droop and fall away; so far as the finer issues of life are concerned, he is done for and damned.[[86]]
But the process is not so very different on the scientific side, though here it is more subtly concealed. The youth in whom the natural impulse of science arises is sternly told that the spontaneous movement of his intelligence towards Nature and truth is nothing, for the one thing needful is that he shall be put to discipline, and trained in the scientific traditions of the ages. The desirability of such training for the effective questioning of Nature is so clear that both teacher and pupil are apt to overlook the fact that it involves much that is not science at all: all sorts of dead traditions, unrealised fragments of ancient metaphysical systems, prepossessions and limitations, conscious or unconscious, the obedience to arbitrary authorities. It is never made clear to him that science also is an art. So that the actual outcome may be that the finally accomplished man of science has as little of the scientific impulse as the fully fledged religious man need have of the religious impulse; he becomes the victim of another kind of ecclesiastical sectarianism.
There is one special piece of ancient metaphysics which until recently scientific and religious sects have alike combined to support: the fiction of “matter,” which we passingly came upon when considering the art of thinking. It is a fiction that has much to answer for in distorting the scientific spirit and in creating an artificial opposition between science and religion. All sorts of antique metaphysical peculiarities, inherited from the decadence of Greek philosophy, were attributed to “matter” and they were mostly of a bad character; all the good qualities were attributed to “spirit”; “matter” played the Devil’s part to this more divine “spirit.” Thus it was that “materialistic” came to be a term signifying all that is most heavy, opaque, depressing, soul-destroying, and diabolical in the universe. The party of traditionalised religion fostered this fiction and the party of traditionalised science frequently adopted it, cheerily proposing to find infinite potentialities in this despised metaphysical substance. So that “matter” which was on one side trodden underfoot was on the other side brandished overhead as a glorious banner.
Yet “matter,” as psychologically minded philosophers at last began to point out, is merely a substance we have ourselves invented to account for our sensations. We see, we touch, we hear, we smell, and by a brilliant synthetic effort of imagination we put together all those sensations and picture to ourselves “matter” as being the source of them. Science itself is now purging “matter” of its complicated metaphysical properties. That “matter,” the nature of which Dr. Johnson, as Boswell tells us, thought he had settled by “striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone,” is coming to be regarded as merely an electrical emanation. We now accept even that transmutation of the elements of which the alchemists dreamed. It is true that we still think of “matter” as having weight. But so cautious a physicist as Sir Joseph Thomson long ago pointed out that weight is only an “apparently” invariable property of matter. So that “matter” becomes almost as “ethereal” as “spirit,” and, indeed, scarcely distinguishable from “spirit.” The spontaneous affirmation of the mystic that he lives in the spiritual world here and now will then be, in other words, merely the same affirmation which the man of science has more laboriously reached. The man, therefore, who is terrified by “materialism” has reached the final outpost of absurdity. He is a simple-minded person who places his own hand before his eyes and cries out in horror: The Universe has disappeared!
We have not only to realise how our own prepossessions and the metaphysical figments of our own creation have obscured the simple realities of religion and science alike; we have also to see that our timid dread lest religion should kill our science, or science kill our religion, is equally fatal here. He who would gain his life must be willing to lose it, and it is by being honest to one’s self and to the facts by applying courageously the measuring rod of Truth, that in the end salvation is found. Here, it is true, there are those who smilingly assure us that by adopting such a method we shall merely put ourselves in the wrong and endure much unnecessary suffering. There is no such thing as “Truth,” they declare, regarded as an objective impersonal reality; we do not “discover” truth, we invent it. Therefore your business is to invent a truth which shall harmoniously satisfy the needs of your nature and aid your efficiency in practical life. That we are justified in being dishonest towards truth has even been argued from the doctrine of relativity by some who failed to realise that that doctrine is here hardly relative. Certainly the philosophers of recent times, from Nietzsche to Croce, have loved to analyse the idea of “truth” and to show that it by no means signifies what we used to suppose it signified. But to show that truth is fluid, or even the creation of the individual mind, is by no means to show that we can at will play fast and loose with it to suit our own momentary convenience. If we do we merely find ourselves, at the end, in a pool where we must tramp round and round in intellectual slush out of which there is no issue. One may well doubt whether any Pragmatist has ever really invented his truth that way. Practically, just as the best result is attained by the man who acts as though free-will were a reality and who exerts it, so in this matter, also, practically, in the end the best result is attained by assuming that truth is an objective reality which we must patiently seek, and in accordance with which we must discipline our own wayward impulses. There is no transcendent objective truth, each one of us is an artist creating his own truth from the phenomena presented to him, but if in that creation he allows any alien emotional or practical considerations to influence him he is a bad artist and his work is wrought for destruction. From the pragmatic point of view, it may thus be said that if the use of the measuring-rod of truth as an objective standard produces the best practical results, that use is pragmatically justified. But if so, we are exactly in the same position as we were before the pragmatist arrived; we can get on as well without him, if not better, for we run the risk that he may confuse the issues for us. It is really on the theoretic rather than the practical side that he is helpful.
It is not only the Pragmatist whose well-meant efforts to find an easy reconciliation of belief and practice, and indirectly the concord of religion and science, come to grief because he has not realised that the walls of the spiritual world can only be scaled with much expenditure of treasure, not without blood and sweat, that we cannot glide luxuriously to Heaven in his motor-car. We are also met by the old-fashioned Intuitionist.[[87]] It is no accident that the Intuitionist so often walks hand in hand with the Pragmatist; they are engaged in the same tasks. There is, we have seen, the impulse of science which must work through intelligence; there is, also, the impulse of religion in the satisfaction of which intelligence can only take a very humble place at the antechamber of the sanctuary. To admit, therefore, that reason cannot extend into the religious sphere is absolutely sound so long as we realise that reason has a coordinate right to lay down the rules in its own sphere of intelligence. But in men of a certain mental type the two tendencies are alike so deeply implanted that they cannot escape them: they are not only impelled to go beyond intelligence, but they are also impelled to carry intelligence with them outside its sphere. The sphere of intelligence is limited, they say, and rightly; the soul has other impulses besides that of intelligence and life needs more than knowledge for its complete satisfaction. But in the hands of these people the faculty of “intuition,” which is to supplant that of intelligence, itself results in a product which by them is called “knowledge,” and so spuriously bears the hall-mark which belongs to the product of intelligence.
But the result is disastrous. Not only is an illegitimate confusion introduced, but, by attributing to the impulse of religion a character which it is neither entitled to nor in need of, we merely discredit it in the eyes of intelligence. The philosopher of intuition, even in denying intelligence, is apt to remain so predominantly intelligent that, even in entering what is for him the sphere of religion, he still moves in an atmosphere of rarefied intelligence. He is farther from the Kingdom of Heaven than the simple man who is quite incapable of understanding the philosopher’s theory, but yet may be able to follow his own religious impulse without foisting into it an intellectual content. For even the simple man may be one with the great mystics who all declare that the unspeakable quality they have acquired, as Eckhart puts it, “hath no image.” It is not in the sphere of intellection, it brings no knowledge; it is the outcome of the natural instinct of the individual soul.
No doubt there really are people in whom the instincts of religion and of science alike are developed in so rudimentary a degree, if developed at all, that they never become conscious. The religious instinct is not an essential instinct. Even the instinct of sex, which is much more fundamental than either of these, is not absolutely essential. A very little bundle of instincts and impulses is indispensable to a man on his way down the path of life to a peaceful and humble grave. A man’s equipment of tendencies, on the lowest plane, needs to be more complex and diverse than an oyster’s, yet not so very much more. The equipment of the higher animals, moreover, is needed less for the good of the individual than for the good of the race. We cannot, therefore, be surprised if the persons in whom the superfluous instincts are rudimentary fail to understand them, confusing them and overlaying them with each other and with much that is outside both. The wonder would be if it were otherwise.