Even stronger than this motor instinct of art is the sensory delight in beauty which has its root in the attraction of sex. Not indeed the only root; all the things in the world that give light and heat and food and shelter and help gather around themselves some garment of loveliness, and so become the stuff of art; the sun and the reindeer are among the very first things to which men tried to give artistic expression. But the sexual instinct is more poignant and overmastering, more ancient than any as a source of beauty. Colour and song and strength and skill—such are the impressions that male and female have graved on each other’s hearts in their moments of most intense emotional exaltation. Their reflections have been thrown on the whole world. When the youth awakes to find a woman is beautiful, he finds, to his amazement, that the world also is beautiful. Who can say in what lowly organism was stored the first of those impressions of beauty, the reflections of sexual emotion, to which all creators of beauty—whether in the form of the Venus of Milo, the Madonna di San Sisto, Chopin’s music, Shelley’s lyrics—can always appeal, certain of response? One might name finally as the highest, most complex summit of art reached in our own time—a summit on which art is revealed in its supreme religious form—Wagner’s “Parsifal.” These things sprang from love, as surely as the world would have been wellnigh barren of beauty had the sexual method of reproduction never replaced all others. Beauty is the child of love; the world, at least all in it worth living for, was the creation of love.
Yet another art, more subtle and complex, has played a large part in the history of religion—the art of metaphysic. The savage finds religious gratification in the exercise of his coarser senses, in singing or dancing or drinking; the man of large and refined intellectual development, a Plato, a Spinoza, a Kant, finds it in philosophy. Such men, indeed, are few, but by force of intelligence they have been enabled to thrust their pictures of the world on inferior minds; their arts have become articles. But every man who has reached the stage of development in which he can truly experience the joy of the philosophic emotion will construct his own philosophy. A philosophy is the house of the mind, and no two philosophies can be alike because no two minds are alike. But the emotion is the same, the emotion of expansive joy in a house not built with hands, in which the soul has made for herself a large and harmonious dwelling.
(2.) It is true that souls remain for ever apart. The lover seeks to be absorbed altogether in the heaven of the loved personality, but in the end the heaven remains unsealed.
“Adfigunt avide corpus junguntque salivas oris et inspirant pressantes dentibus ora, nequiquam.”
And yet a large or lovely personality is not the less an outlook towards the infinite. We cannot think of certain men of immense range or power or sweetness—St. Francis, Leonardo, Napoleon, Darwin—without experiencing a movement of liberation. To pronounce the names of such men is of the nature of an act of worship. I cannot for a moment think of Shakespeare without a thrill of exultation at such gracious plenitude of power. No person, probably, ever made so ardent a personal appeal to men as Jesus. He discovered a whole new world of emotional life, a new expansion of joy, a kingdom in which slave and harlot took precedence of priest and king. To the men for whom that new emotional world was fresh and living, torture and shame and death counted as nothing beside so large a possession of inward gladness. The weakest and lowest became heroes and saints in the effort to guard a pearl of so great price. There are few more inspiring figures in the history of man than the white body of the slave-girl Blandina, that hung from the stake day after day with the beasts in the amphitheatre at Lyons, torn and bleeding, yet, instar generosi cujusdam athletæ, with the undying cry on her lips, Christiana sum! It is open to everyone to give liberating impulses to his fellows. It is the distinction of Jesus that he has, for us, permanently expanded the bounds of individuality. We all breathe deeper and freer because of that semi-ideal carpenter’s son. “Fiat experimentum in corpore vili,” said the physician in the old story, by the bedside of a wretched patient. “Non est corpus tam vile pro quo mortuus est Christus,” unexpectedly returned the dying man. The charm of Jesus can never pass away when it is rightly apprehended.
But it is not alone the large mystery of exceptional personalities which calls out this response. To certain finely-tempered spirits no human thing is too mean to fail in making this emotional appeal. The chief religious significance of Walt Whitman lies in his revelation of the emotional value of the entire common human personality and all that belongs to it. The later Athenians (as also Goethe) placed above all things the harmonious development of the individual in its higher forms. It still remained to show the loveliness of the complete ordinary personality. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” cannot in this respect be over-estimated.[14]
(3.) There is a religion of science. It is rarer than has sometimes been supposed, and among men of science, probably, it is seldom found. Strauss’s “Old Faith and New” is one of the chief attempts by a man of science to present the scientific attitude as food for the religious consciousness. The result is dreary in the extreme, in the end almost ludicrous. Herbert Spencer’s attitude towards the Unknowable is a distinct though faint approximation to the religious relationship. Positivism, with its quasi-scientific notions, was founded on a curiously narrow conception of the nature of religion, and its religious sterility is probably inevitable. The man of science has little to do with magnificent generalizations; he is concerned chiefly with the patient investigation of details; it is but rarely that he feels called upon, like Kepler or Newton, for any emotional response to the grandeur and uniformity of law. Yet to many this vision of universal law has come as a light moving over chaos, a glad new discovery of the vastness and yet the homeliness of the world.
An æsthetic emotion is not necessarily religious, even within the field of inanimate nature. So also the elusive tints, the subtle perfumes of things, so far from liberating the soul, may excite a tormenting desire to grasp and appropriate what is so lovely and so intangible. Still, there is a distinct class of emotions aroused by nature which is of the religious order. A large expanse of air or sea or undulating land, or the placid infinity of the star-lit sky, seems necessary to impart that enlarging and pacifying sense of nature alike to poets and peasants. Some sight or sound of nature, either habitually, or under some special conditions in the percipient, may strike upon the soul and liberate it at once from the bonds of commonplace actuality. Perhaps no modern man has better expressed the religious aspects of nature than Thoreau. Of the American wood-thrush Thoreau can rarely speak without using the language of religion. “All that was ripest and fairest in the wilderness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted to us in the strain of the wood-thrush.... Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Wherever he hears it, there is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him. Most other birds sing, from the level of my ordinary cheerful hours, a carol, but this bird never fails to speak to me out of an ether purer than that I breathe, of immortal vigour and beauty.” Generally, however, this emotion appears to be associated, not so much with isolated beautiful objects, as with great vistas in which beauty may scarcely inhere—
“all waste