Consciousness of beauty or of truth or of goodness baffles analysis as much as consciousness of God does. These values have no objective standing ground in current psychology. They are not things in the world of space. They submit to no adequate casual explanation. They have their ground of being in some other kind of world than that of the mechanical order, a world composed of quantitative masses of matter in motion. These experiences of value, which are as real for consciousness as stone walls are, make very clear the fact that there are depths and capacities in the nature of the normal human mind which we do not usually recognize and of which we have scant and imperfect accounts in our text-books. Our minds taken in their full range, in other words, have some sort of contact and relationship with an eternal nature of things far deeper than atoms and molecules. Only very slowly and gradually has the race learned through finite symbols and temporal forms to interpret beauty and truth and goodness which in their essence are as ineffable and indescribable as the mystic’s experience of God is. Plato often speaks as though he had high moments of experience when he rose to the naked vision of beauty—beauty “alone, separate and eternal,” as he says, and his myths are very likely told, as J. A. Stewart believes, to assist others to experience this same vision—a beauty which “does not grow nor perish, is without increase or diminution and endures for everlasting.” But as a matter of fact, however exalted heavenly and enduring beauty may be in its essence we know what it is only as it appears in fair forms of objects, of body, of soul, of actions; in harmonious blending of sounds or colors; in well-ordered or happily-combined groupings of many aspects in one unity which is as it ought to be. Truth and moral goodness always transcend our attainments and we sometimes feel that the very end and goal of life is the pursuit of that truth or that goodness which eye hath not seen nor ear heard. But whatever truth we do attain or whatever goodness we do achieve is always concrete. Truth is just this one more added fact that resists all attempts to doubt it. Goodness is just this simple everyday deed that reveals a heroic spirit and a brave venture of faith in the midst of difficulties. So, too, the mystic knowledge of God is not some esoteric communication, supplied through trance or ecstasy; it is an intuitive personal touch with God, felt to be the essentially real, the bursting forth of an intense love for him which heightens all the capacities and activities of life, followed by the slow laboratory results which verify it. “All I could never be” now is. It seems possible to stand the universe—even to do something toward the transformation of it. The bans are read for that most difficult of all marriages, the marriage of the possible with the actual, the ideal with the real. And if the experience does not prove that the soul has found God, it at least does this: it makes the soul feel that proofs of God are wholly unnecessary.
CHAPTER X
PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
I
Twenty years ago in A Dynamic Faith, after reviewing the new questions which the great sciences had raised for religion, I said: “There are still harder problems than any of these. Psychology has opened a series of questions which make the boldest tremble for his faith in an endless life or in any spiritual reality.” The twenty years that have intervened have made my point much more clear. It is now pretty generally recognized that the deepest issues of the faith are to be settled in this field. The problem of the real nature of the human soul is at the present moment probably the most important religious question before us, for upon the answer to it all our vital spiritual interests depend. If man has no unique interior domain, if he is only a tiny bit of that vast system of naturalism in which every curve of process and development is rigidly determined by antecedent causes, then “spiritual” is only a high-sounding word with a metaphorical significance, but with no basis of reality in the nature of things. There is certainly no “place” in the external world of space where we can expect to find spiritual realities. They are not to be found by going “somewhere.” Olympus has been climbed, and it was as naturalistic as any other mountain peak. Eden is only a defined area of Mesopotamia, and that blessed word can work no miracles for us now. The dome of the sky is only an optical illusion. It is no supersensuous realm on which we can build our hopes. The beyond as a spiritual reality is within, or it is nowhere. Psychology, however, has not been very encouraging in promises of hope. It has gone the way of the other sciences and has taken an ever increasing slant toward naturalism. The result is that most so-called “psychologies of religion” reduce religion either to a naturalistic or to a subjective basis, which means in either case that religion as a way to some objective spiritual reality has eluded us and has disappeared as a constructive power. Many a modern psychologist can say with Browning’s Cleon:
“And I have written three books on the soul,
Proving absurd all written hitherto,
And putting us to ignorance again.”