“He seems to hear a heavenly Friend,
And through thick veils to apprehend
A labor working to an end.”[11]
The most august thing in us is that creative center of our being, that autonomous citadel of personality, where we form for ourselves ideals of beauty, of truth, and of goodness by which we live. This power to extend life in ideal fashion is the elemental moral fact of personal life. These ideals which shape our life are manifestly things which cannot be “found” anywhere in our world of sense experience. They are not on land or sea. We live, and, when the call for it comes, we joyously die for things which our eyes have never seen in this world of molecular currents, for things which are not here in the world of space, but which are not on that account any less real. We create, by some higher drive of spirit, visions of a world that ought to be and these visions make us forever dissatisfied with the world that is, and it is through these visions that we reshape and reconstruct the world which is being made. The elemental spiritual core in us which we call conscience can have come from nowhere but from a deeper spiritual universe with which we have relations. It cannot be traced to any physical origin. It cannot be reduced to any biological function. It cannot be explained in utilitarian terms. It is an august and authoritative loyalty of soul to a Good that transcends all goods and which will not allow us to substitute prudence for intrinsic goodness. This inner imperative overarches our moral life, and it rationally presupposes a spiritual universe with which we are allied.
There is, too, an immense interior depth to our human personality. Only the surface of our inner self is lighted up and is brought into clear focal consciousness. There are, however, dim depths underlying every moment of consciousness and these subterranean deeps are all the time shaping or determining the ideas, emotions, and decisions which surge up into the illuminated apex of consciousness. This submerged life is in part, no doubt, the slow deposit of previous experiences, the gathered wisdom of the social group in which we are imbedded, the residual savings from unuttered hopes and wishes, aspirations and intentions,
“All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me.”
But at times our interior deep seems to be more than a deposit of the past. Incursions from beyond our own margin seem to occur. Inrushes from a wider spiritual world seem to take place. Vitalizing, energizing, constructive forces come from somewhere into men, as though another universe impinged upon our finite spirits. We cannot prove by these somewhat rare and unusual mystical openings that there is an actual spiritual environment surrounding our souls, but there are certainly experiences which are best explained on that hypothesis, and there is no good reason for drawing any impervious boundary around the margins of the spiritual self within us.
All attempts to reduce man’s inner spiritual life to the play of molecular forces have fallen through. Correlation between mind and brain cortex there certainly is and spirit, as we know it, expresses itself under, or in relation to, certain physical conditions. But it is impossible to establish a complete parallelism between mind-functions and brain-functions. The psychical, that is to say spirit, seems immensely to outrun its organ and to use brain as a musician uses an instrument.
The psychological studies of Henri Bergson in France and of Dr. William McDougall at Oxford make a very strong argument for the view that the higher forms of consciousness cannot be explained in terms of brain action and that there is no well-defined physical correlate to the highest and most central psychical processes. I shall follow in the main the positions of my old teacher, Dr. McDougall, as worked out in his Body and Mind.