The simile of an instrument and the master who plays upon it, which is often used of the relation between body and mind, is in many respects a very imperfect one; for the master does not develop with and in his instrument. But in regard to the most oppressive arguments of naturalism, the influence of disease, of old age, of mental disturbances due to brain changes, the comparison serves our turn well enough, for undoubtedly the master is dependent upon his instrument; upon an organ which is going more and more out of tune, rusting, losing its pipes, his harmonies will become poorer, more imperfect. And if we think of the association between the two as further obstructed, [pg 356] the master becoming deaf, the stops confused, the relation between the notes and pipes altered, then what may still live within him in perfect and unclouded purity, and in undiminished richness, may present itself outwardly as confused and unintelligible, may even find only disconnected expression, and finally cease altogether; so that no conclusion would be possible except that the master himself had become different or poorer. The melancholy field of mental diseases perhaps yields proofs against naturalism to an even greater degree than for it. It is by no means the case that all mental diseases are invariably diseases of the brain, for even more frequently they are real sicknesses of the mind, which yield not to physical but to psychical remedies. And the fact that the mind can be ill, is a sad but emphatic proof that it goes its own way.
Immortality.
It is in a faith in a Beyond, and in the immortality of our true being, that what lies finely distributed through all religion sums itself up and comes to full blossoming: the certainty that world and existence are insufficient, and the strong desire to break through into the true being, of which at the best we have here only a foretaste and intuition. The doctrine of immortality stands by itself as a matter of great solemnity and deep rapture. If it is to be talked about, both speaker and hearers ought to be in an exalted mood. It is the conviction which, of all religious convictions, [pg 357] can be least striven for consciously; it must well forth from devotional personal experience of the spirit and its dignity, and thus can maintain itself without, and indeed against much reasoning. To educate and cultivate it in us requires a discipline of meditation, of concentration, and of spiritual self-culture from within outwards. If we understood better what it meant to “live in the spirit,” to develop the receptivity, fineness, and depth of our inner life, to listen to and cultivate what belongs to the spirit, to inform it with the worth and content of religion and morality, and to integrate it in the unity and completeness of a true personality, we should attain to the certainty that personal spirit is the fundamental value and meaning of all the confused play of evolution, and is to be estimated on quite a different scale from all other being which is driven hither and thither in the stream of Becoming and Passing away, having no meaning or value because of which it must endure. And it would be well also if we understood better how to listen with keener senses to our intuitions, to the direct self-consciousness of the spirit in regard to itself, which sleeps in every mind, but which few remark and fewer still interpret. Here, where the gaze of self-examination reaches its horizon, and can only guess at what lies beyond, but can no longer interpret it, lie the true motives and reasons for our conviction of immortality. An apologetic cannot do more than clear away obstacles, nor need it do much more than has hitherto been done. It reminds us, as we have [pg 358] already seen, that the world which we know and study, and which includes ourselves, does not show its true nature to us; hidden depths lie behind appearances. And it gathers together and sums up all the great reasons for the independence and underivability of the spiritual as contrasted with the corporeal. The spiritual has revealed itself to us as a reality in itself, which cannot be explained in terms of the corporeal, and which has dominion over it. Its beginning and its end are wholly unfathomable. There is no practical meaning in discussing its “origin” or its “passing away,” as we do with regard to the corporeal. Under certain corporeal conditions it is there, it simply appears. But it does not arise out of them. And as it is not nothing, but an actual and effective reality, it can neither have come out of nothing nor disappear into nothing again. It appears out of the absolutely transcendental, associates itself with corporeal processes, determines these and is determined by them, and in its own time passes back from this world of appearance to the transcendental again. It is like a great unknown sea, that pours its waters into the configuration of the shore and withdraws them again. But neither the flowing in nor the ebbing again is of nothing or in nothing. Whether and how it retains the content, form, and structure that it assumes in other spheres of animate and conscious nature, when it retires into the transcendental again; or whether it dissolves and breaks up into the universal we do not know; nor do we attribute everlastingness [pg 359] to those individual forms of consciousness which we call animal souls. But of the self-conscious, personal spirit religion knows that it is everlasting. It knows this from its own sources. In its insight into the underivability and autonomy of the spiritual it finds warrant and freedom to maintain this knowledge as something apart from or even in contrast to the general outlook on the world.
Chapter XII. The World And God.
The world and nature are marvellous in their being, but they are not “divine”! The formula “natura sive deus” is a monstrous misuse of the word “deus,” if we are to use the words in the sense which history has given to them. God is the Absolute Being, perfect, wholly independent, resting in Himself, and necessary; nature is entirely contingent and dependent, and at every point of it we are impelled to ask “Why?” God is the immeasurable fulness of Being, nature is indeed diverse in the manifoldness of her productions, but she is nevertheless limited, and her possibilities are restricted within narrow limits. God is the unrestrained, and everlasting omnipotence itself, and the perfect wisdom; nature is indeed mighty enough in the attainment of her ends, but how often is she obstructed, how often does she fail to reach them, and how seldom does she do so perfectly and without mistakes? She shows wisdom, indeed, cunning in her products, subtlety and daintiness, taste and beauty, all these often in an overwhelming degree, yet just as often she brings forth what [pg 361] is meaningless, contradictory and mutually hurtful, traverses her own lines, and bewilders us by the brutality, the thoughtlessness, and purposelessness, the crookedness, incompleteness, and distortedness of her operations. And what is true of the world of external nature is true in a far greater degree of the world of history. Nature is not a god, but a demigod, says Aristotle. And on this, Pantheism with its creed, “natura sive deus,” makes shipwreck. The words of this credo are either a mere tautology, and “deus” is misused as a new name for nature; or they are false. It is not possible to transfer to nature and the world all the great ideas and feelings which the religious mind cherishes under the name of “God.”
On the other hand, nature is really, as Aristotle said, δαιμονία, that is, strange, mysterious, and marvellous, indicating God, and pointing, all naturalism and superficial consideration notwithstanding, as we have seen, to something outside of and beyond itself. Religion demands no more than this. It does not insist upon finding a solution for all the riddles of theoretical world-lore. It is not distressed because the course of nature often seems to our eyes confused, and to our judgment contradictory and unintelligible at a hundred places and in a hundred respects. On the contrary, that this is the case is to religion in another aspect a strong stimulus and corroboration. “The world is an odd fellow; may God soon make an end of it,” said Luther, and thus gave a crude but truly religious [pg 362] parallel to the words of Aristotle, ἡ γἀρ φύσις δαιμονία ἀλλ᾽ οὐ θεία, (Aristot. “De Divin. in Somn.,” c. ii.). It is part of the very essence of religion, as we have seen, to read in the pages of nature, insufficiency, illusion, and perplexities, and to be made thereby impatient and desirous of penetrating to the true nature of things. Religion does not claim to be directly deducible out of a consideration of nature; it demands only the right and freedom to interpret the world in its own way. And for this it is sufficient that this world affords those hints and suggestions for its convictions that we have seen it does afford. To form clear ideas in regard to the actual relations of the infinite to the finite, and of God to the world, and of what religion calls creation, preservation, and eternal providence, self-revelation in the world and in history, is hardly the task of religion at all, but rather pertains to our general speculative instinct, which can only satisfy itself with the help of imagination. Attempts of this kind have often been made. They are by no means valueless, for even if no real knowledge can be gained by this method, we may perhaps get an analogue of it which will help us to understand existence and phenomena, and to define our position, as well as to give at least provisional answers to many pressing questions (such, for instance, as the problem of theodicy).
If we study the world unprejudiced by the naturalistic interpretation, or having shaken ourselves free from it, we are most powerfully impressed by one fundamental [pg 363] phenomenon in all existence: it is the fact of evolution. It challenges attention and interpretation, and analogies quickly reveal themselves which give something of the same trend to all such interpretations. From stage to stage existence advances onwards, from the world of large masses subject only to the laws of mechanics, to the delicately complex play of the forces of development in growth and other vital processes. The nature of the forces is revealed in ever higher expression, and at the same time in ever more closely connected series of stages. Even between the inorganic and the organic there is an intermediate stage—crystal formation—which is no longer entirely of the one, yet not of the other. And in the organic world evolution reveals itself most clearly of all; from the crudest and simplest it presses onwards to the most delicate and complex. In the corporeal as in the psychical, in the whole as in each of its parts, there are ever higher stages, sometimes far apart, sometimes close together. However we picture to ourselves the way in which evolution accomplishes itself in time, we can scarcely describe it without using such expressions as “nature advances upwards step by step,” “it presses and strives upwards and unfolds itself stage by stage.”