Every evil [has] its good.
If the intuitions of these men in advance of the race are not foolishness, this matter must be regulated by some great principle—perhaps some corollary of “the law of compensation,” that has been so generally guessed at—notably by Emerson, and which seems closely akin to the Law of Equilibration, whose demonstration by Spencer has no small claim to be considered the highest reach of the human mind.
Few men have given, or even recognized, an answer from their own experience. Few men, even, live long enough for experience to give very full indication. Whatever may be the egotism of obtruding here personal experience on a point so intimate, I follow what in this connection seems almost a duty, in stating the conviction of a very long life which has known its share of shadow, that in the average man under average circumstances the Divine Law does go down farther into the details of our lives than we can realize, and there work out good from apparent evil. Yet though the question as we stated it above, in terms of Law instead of Providence, is not entirely new to thinkers, before the latter part of the last century it had been as vague as had been the conceptions of Evolution. It seems but yesterday, and it is with a start that one realizes that this epoch is already superseded by one where the range of mind must be mapped out anew, and where reaches of it that Fiske pronounced impossible are declared by no mean observers to have actually been accomplished.
It is, however, questionable how far the testimony of poets and imaginative thinkers is the result of optimistic generalization, and how far the result of strict experience. As sober a man as Socrates said that his attendant monitor always kept him right. Had he had the modern conception of the universal beneficent Law, and the very modern conception of impressions, under Law, from discarnate intelligences, perhaps he would have regarded that attendant of his as a manifestation from the source of all Law—of that Law whose penetration into the minutiæ of our lives we are now considering.
Now if you are in the habit of testing questions by the law of Evolution, ask yourself (if you have not already done so and obtained a satisfactory answer), at what point in your processes and the processes of your environment, the operation of Law, and the resulting evolution, stops. Don’t bother with the paradox of Free Will and Determinism, or any other paradox that proves a question to be beyond the range of our faculties, but accept the fact which you cannot escape, that your life is the result of the interaction of two processes of Law that manifestly tend on the whole to happiness, and perhaps you will find it as hard not to believe that the beneficent Law goes down to the minutest details of your life, as it is to believe a conception so novel and so tremendous.
It may not be unthinkable under average circumstances, but when the world is cursed as never before with carnage and outrage, in relation to the millions suffering one hesitates even to suggest such an idea. But this is hardly the time to pass upon it. And yet many sane people do pass upon it, and believe that out of all this agony more good than evil is to come, and to come to each person concerned. Such a belief, however, is generally based on faith in the immortality of the soul. Here comes in the pragmatic argument, never so strong as now. If these millions of bright young lives have been developed merely to be prematurely snuffed out at the behest of a barbarian mad with the lust of conquest, the universe is pro tanto a farce. But if, in the glory of heroism and self-sacrifice, they are advanced to a higher stage of being, the sanity and beneficence of the universe are vindicated. True, the pragmatic argument is a dangerous thing, but in this most important particular, it never had so much support from positive evidence as now. It looks as if humanity were at last evolved to the point where the intuitions of the gifted of the ages, from Socrates to Swedenborg, may soon be supported by experience open to the observation of all.
In his day, Fiske did probably more than any other man to rationalize these leading ideas that are still little more than faiths, and to keep men’s minds open to the best within our knowledge, and the influences that must exist beyond it.
PLEASE EXPLAIN THESE DREAMS
Your travels, your babies, and your dreams,—these, it is said, you may talk of only at your peril. And yet I am emboldened in this instance to defy the adage, though in general I believe it to be nearly incontestable, because I think I may excite a certain curiosity by recounting a kind of dream that comes to me occasionally, a dream not wonderful in substance but one that raises a question in psychology, or in common sense, to which I know no answer. I may say at once that there is nothing preternatural about the dream, nor anything, I think, that Freudian analysts will revel in. But there is none the less a puzzle which for me and for the persons whom I have consulted has remained completely baffling. What the puzzle is had best be stated at the outset.
Everybody is familiar with the kind of story that depends for its effect upon a surprising “point” that comes at the end, unanticipated by the hearer and amusing to him largely in proportion as it is unexpected. Stories of this kind are frequently elaborate; a great deal of detail is introduced, as artfully as possible, every bit of which must tantalizingly lead towards the point that is coming, but no word of which must really divulge that point until the moment when the raconteur is ready to “spring” it, as we say, with a sudden burst. Obviously the listener must not guess the point before that moment, or the story will fall flat, and just as obviously the narrator must have it in mind continually, or he could not tell the story. He could hardly recount a tale of this variety unless he knew how it was “coming out.” Especially if it were considerably involved, he could scarcely pick his way through it step by step towards an end that he did not himself foresee, arranging in their places dozens of details leading he knew not where, and then come nicely to a climax that he himself did not anticipate—a climax which, in this hardly conceivable case, would obviously surprise him as much as it could his listener. The waking mind, unless by the rarest of accidents, cannot work in such a fashion. And my puzzle is, how can the dreaming mind do so? For I, at least, do dream occasionally in just this manner. I make up a story of this species in my dream, and usually a complicated story. In it I proceed from point to point without having any notion of my destination; I string together a small host of details, though I remain ignorant of their meaning and unsuspicious of any climax that is coming later to explain them; and when finally I reach that climax, and see the joke that I have plotted so unwittingly, I am myself ingenuously amused by it. And how I manage to do this is my enigma. For obviously I either do foresee the point of the story or I do not. If I do, how can I be surprised when it arrives? If I do not, how can I prepare for it so carefully? Either case supposes a manner of mentation hardly comprehensible.