The geologist might say: To me the grandeur of the mountain means nothing; I know how it was made. The cooling and contraction of the earth, the crushing and uplifting of strata, the action of air, wind, and water, the sculpturing of time, the planting of vegetation by a chance breeze—and you have your mountain, a thing of science. Yet Coleridge, standing in the vale of Chamounix and gazing on Mont Blanc,
“Till the dilating Soul, enrapt, transfused,
Into the mighty Vision passing—there,
As in her natural form, swelled vast to Heaven,”
found it an emblem of sublimity, a voice from the throne of God. We shall find it hard to believe that the poetry of science can be explained on a merely physical basis. One may say: The religious sentiment means nothing to me; I know its origin; it is the result of bad dreams. A primitive ancestor, after a successful hunt, ate too much raw meat and dreamed of his grandfather. Thus arose the belief in disembodied spirits and a whole train of false conceptions. Yet we shall hardly grant that the religious feeling of the martyrs, which enabled the exalted spirit to lose the sense of unutterable physical torture, is adequately explained by the dream hypothesis.
A Beethoven string orchestra, to the musical mind, discourses most excellent music. It is a connected series of sublimated and elusive metaphors, arousing the harmonies of the soul, touching its chords of sweetness, purity, beauty, and nobility. Yet there are minds that find in it nothing—pardon the quotation—but the friction of horsehair on catgut. There are minds to which these grand mountains, this deep sky, these groves of pine are nothing but rock and vapor and wood. The elements make no sweet tones for them; they can not hear the music of the spheres. To them honor, courage, morality, beauty, religion, are but refined forms of crude animal instincts, by aid of which the race has survived in its struggle for existence. There are no soul harmonies—nothing but the beating of the primitive tom-tom. They believe nothing which can not be verified by the methods of physical science. They have no faith.
How many a man of science, on some slight hint pointing in a given direction, with faith and courage has pursued his investigations, adopting hypothesis after hypothesis, rejecting, adjusting, the world meanwhile laughing at his folly and credulity, until he has discovered and proclaimed a great truth. When in the world of mind we find phenomena calling for explanation, needs that can be met in only a certain way, higher impulses reaching out toward objects whose existence they prove and whose nature they define, shall we show less faith and courage because of some dogmatic view that there is no reality beyond the world of material existence? In this universe of mystery, anything may be supposed possible for which there is evidence, and any theory is rational that will best explain the facts. If we have not the sense to understand the deepest conceptions of philosophy, let us at least have the sense to stick to that common sense with which God has endowed us in order that we may know by faith the supreme truths concerning man.
Somewhere and somehow in the nature of things is an ideal that made us as we are—an ideal that is adequate to our nature, need, and conception. God at the beginning and God at the end of the natural world, and the world of consciousness seems a postulate that is necessary and warranted. Professor James writes of an old lady who believed that the world rests on a great rock, and that the first rock rests on a rock; being urged further, she exclaimed that it was rocky all up and down. Unless we postulate a spiritual foundation of things that is self-active and rational, we are no better off than the old lady. This appears to be a rational world, for it is a world that makes science possible; we believe it has a rational Creator.
We commonly account for our ideals as constructed in a simple, mechanical way; but the explanation will fail to satisfy the mind of artist or saint in his exalted moments when he has visions of perfection. He must conceive of a Being who possesses the attributes of perfect beauty and goodness. Belief in God consecrates man’s endeavor to attain the highest standards. Without God the world has not a home-seeming for man. As in the dream in Vergil, always he seems to be left alone, always to be going on a long journey in a desert land, unattended.
Philosophy has spent much time and energy to discover the origin of evil; a saner quest would be the origin of good in the world. We know that in accounting for evil there is always an unexplained remainder—the righteous suffering, and the weak crushed under burdens too heavy. It may be that Spencer’s age of perfection, seen away down the vista of evolution, will, when realized, not be inviting. Some one suggests that then men will be perfect, but perfectly idiotic. It is the great moral paradox that perfection must be obtained through struggle with imperfection. Laurels worn but not won are but a fool’s cap. Freedom is possible only in a world of good and evil, a world of choice, and with freedom the humblest creature is infinitely above the most perfect mechanism made and controlled by a blind necessity. Cease to prate of a life of perennial ease under June skies; the divinity within us rises in majesty and will not have it so. After all, those who are overcome in the struggle may have their reward; at Thermopylæ the Persians won the laurels, the Spartans the glory.