To feel this cosmic quality of a divine personality, in whom we live, move, and have our being, is to know religion. The ordinary world we live in is incurably dynamic; we are forced to think and act in terms of energy and change and constant rearrangement and flux of factors and elements. And we live only as we give ourselves up to that stream and play of forces. Throughout all the change, however, there comes a sense of this eternal quality. In the persistence of our own personality, the humble fragment of a divine personality, we get the pattern of its permanence. The Great Companion is ever with us, silently ratifying our worthy deeds and tastes and responses. The satisfactions of our spiritual life, of our judgments and appreciations of morality and art and any kind of excellence, come largely from this subtle corroboration that we feel from some unseen presence wider than ourselves. It accompanies not a part but the whole of our spiritual life, silently strengthening our responses to personality and beauty, our sense of irony, the refinement of our taste, sharpening our moral judgment, elevating our capacities for happiness, filling ever richer our sense of the worth of life. And this cosmic influence in which we seem to be immersed we can no more lose or doubt—after we have once felt the rush of time past us, seen a friend die, or brooded on the bitter thought of our personal death, felt the surge of forces of life and love, wondered about consciousness, been melted before beauty—than we can lose or doubt ourselves. The wonder of it is exhaustless,—the beneficence over whose workings there yet breathes an inexorable sternness, the mystery of time and death, the joy of beauty and creative art and sex, and sheer consciousness.
Against this scenic background, along this deep undercurrent of feeling, our outward, cheerful, settled, and orderly life plays its part. That life is no less essential; we must be willing to see life in two aspects, the world as deathless yet ever-creative, evolution yet timeless eternity. To be religious is to turn our gaze away from the dynamic to the static and the permanent, away from the stage to the scenic background of our lives. Religion cannot, therefore, be said to have much of a place in our activity of life, except as it fixes the general emotional tone. We have no right to demand that it operate practically, nor can we call altruistic activity, and enthusiasm for a noble cause, religion. Moral action is really more a matter of social psychology than of religion. All religions have been ethical only as a secondary consideration. Religion in and for itself is something else; we can enjoy it only by taking, as it were, the moral holiday into its regions when we are weary of the world of thinking and doing. It is a land to retreat into when we are battered and degraded by the dynamic world about us, and require rest and recuperation. It is constantly there behind us, but to live in it always is to take a perpetual holiday.
At all times we may have its beauty with us, however, as we may have prospects of far mountains and valleys. As we go in the morning to work in the fields, religion is this enchanting view of the mountains, inspiring us and lifting our hearts with renewed vigor. Through all the long day’s work we feel their presence with us, and have only to turn around to see them shining splendidly afar with hope and kindliness. Even the austerest summits are warm in the afternoon sun. Yet if we gaze at them all day long, we shall accomplish no work. Nor shall we finish our allotted task if we succumb to their lure and leave our fields to travel towards them. As we return home weary at night, the mountains are still there to refresh and cheer us with their soft colors and outline blended in the purple light. When our task is entirely done, it has been our eternal hope to journey to those far mountains and valleys; if this is not to be, at least their glorious view will be the last to fall upon us as we close our eyes. But we know that, whatever happens, if we have done our work well, have performed faithfully our daily tasks of learning to control and manage and make creative the tough soil of this material world in which we find ourselves, if we have neither allowed its toughness to distract us from the beauty of the eternal background, nor let those far visions slow down the wheels of life, distract us from our work, or blur our thought and pale by their light the other qualities and beauties around us—we shall attain what is right for us when we lay down our tools. In a living world, death can be no more than an apparition.
VIII
THE MYSTIC TURNED RADICAL
The mystical temperament is little enough popular in this workaday modern world of ours. The mystic, we feel, comes to us discounted from the start; he should in all decency make constant apologies for his existence. In a practical age of machinery he is an anomaly, an anachronism. He must meet the direct challenge of the scientist, who guards every approach to the doors of truth and holds the keys of its citadel. Any thinker who gets into the fold by another way is a thief and a robber.
The mystic must answer that most heinous of all charges,—of being unscientific. By tradition he is even hostile to science. For his main interest is in wonder, and science by explaining things attacks the very principle of his life. It not only diminishes his opportunities for wonder, but threatens to make him superfluous by ultimately explaining everything.
The scientist may say that there is no necessary antithesis between explanation and that beautiful romance of thought we call wonder. The savage, who can explain nothing, is the very creature who has no wonder at all. Everything is equally natural to him. Only a mind that has acquaintance with laws of behavior can be surprised at events.
The wonder of the scientist, however, although it be of a more robust, tough-minded variety, is none the less wonder. A growing acquaintance with the world, an increasing at-homeness in it, is not necessarily incompatible with an ever-increasing marvel both at the beautiful fitness of things and the limitless field of ignorance and mystery beyond. So the modern mystic must break with his own tradition if he is to make an appeal to this generation, and must recognize that the antithesis between mystic and scientific is not an eternally valid one.
It is just through realization of this fact that Maeterlinck, the best of modern mystics, makes his extraordinary appeal. For, as he tells us, the valid mystery does not begin at the threshold of knowledge but only after we have exhausted our resources of knowing. His frank and genuine acceptance of science thus works out a modus vivendi between the seen and the unseen. It allows many of us who have given our allegiance to science to hail him gladly as a prophet who supplements the work of the wise men of scientific research, without doing violence to our own consciences. For the world is, in spite of its scientific clamor, still far from ready really to surrender itself to prosaicness. It is still haunted with the dreams of the ages—dreams of short roads to truth, visions of finding the Northwest passage to the treasures of the Unseen. Only we must go as far as possible along the traveled routes of science.
Maeterlinck is thus not anti-scientific or pseudo-scientific, but rather sub-scientific. He speaks of delicately felt and subtle influences and aspects of reality that lie beneath the surface of our lives, of forces and shadows that cannot be measured quantitatively or turned into philosophical categories. Or we may say that he is ultra-scientific. As science plods along, opening up the dark wilderness, he goes with the exploring party, throwing a search-light before them; flickering enough and exasperatingly uncertain at times, but sufficiently constant to light up the way, point out a path, and give us confidence that the terrors before us are not so formidable as we have feared. His influence on our time is so great because we believe that he is a seer, a man with knowledge of things hidden from our eyes. We go to him as to a spiritual clairvoyant,—to have him tell us where to find the things our souls have lost.