Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

I

THE BATTLE OF MIND AND SPIRIT

During the nineteenth century, which has already receded far enough into the perspective of the past for us to be able to take a comprehensive view of it, the advance guard of the human race found itself in a position entirely different from that ever before occupied by it. Through the knowledge of cosmic, animal, and social evolution gradually accumulated by the laborious and careful studies of special students in every department of historical research and scientific experiment, a broader and higher state of self-consciousness was attained. Mankind, on its most perceptive plane, no longer pinned its faith to inherited traditions, whether of religion, art, or morals. Every conceivable fact and every conceivable myth was to be tested in the laboratory of the intellect, even the intellect itself was to undergo dissection, with the result that, once for all, it has been decided what particular range of human knowledge lies within the reach of mental perception, and what particular range of human knowledge can be grasped only through spiritual perception.

Such a momentous decision as this in the history of thought has not been reached without a long and protracted struggle extending back into the early days of Christianity, nor, it may be said, is the harmony as yet complete, for there are to-day, and perhaps always will be, human beings whose consciousness is not fully orbed and who either seek their point of equilibrium too entirely in the plane of mind or too entirely in the plane of spirit.

In the early days, before Christianity came to bring its “sword upon earth,” there seems to have been little or no consciousness of such a struggle. The ancient Hindu, observing Nature and meditating upon the universe, arrived intuitively at a perception of life and its processes wonderfully akin to that later experimentally proved by the nineteenth century scientist, nor did he have a suspicion that such truth was in any way antagonistic to religious truth. On the contrary, he considered that, by it, the beauty and mystery of religion was immeasurably enhanced, and, letting his imagination play upon his intuition, he brought forth a theory of spiritual evolution in which the world to-day is bound to recognize many elements of beauty and power necessary to any complete conception of religion in the future.

Even the Babylonians made their guesses at an evolutionary theory of the universe. Greek philosophy, later, was permeated with the idea, it having been derived by them perhaps from the Chaldeans through the Phœnicians, or if the theories of Aryan migrations be correct, perhaps through inheritance from a remote Aryan ancestry.

When Christian thought gained its hold upon the world, the account of creation given in Genesis became so thoroughly impressed upon the minds of men that it was regarded as the orthodox view, rooted in divine revelation, and to question it was to incur the danger of being called an atheist, with its possibly uncomfortable consequences of being martyred.

Strangely enough, the early Church adopted into its fold many pagan superstitions, such as a belief in witchcraft and in signs and wonders, as well as some myths, but this great truth upon which the pagan mind had stumbled, it would have none of.

These two circumstances—the adoption on the part of Christianity of pagan superstitions and its utter repudiation of the pagan guesses upon evolution, carrying within it the germs of truth, later to be unearthed by scientific research—furnished exactly the right conditions for the throwing down of the gauntlet between the mind and the spirit. The former, following intellectual guidance, found itself coming more and more into antagonism with the spirit, not yet freed from the trammels of imagination. The latter, guided by imagination, continued to exercise a mythopœic faculty, which not only brought it more and more into antagonism with the mind, but set up within its own realm an internecine warfare which has blackened the pages of religious history with crimes and martyrdoms so terrible as to force the conviction that the true devil in antagonism to spiritual development has been the imagination of mankind, masquerading as verity, and not yet having found its true function in art.