Morality as a Religion / An exposition of some first principles

by W. R. Washington Sullivan

After two centuries the teaching reappears, not in the pages of professional divines, or the denizens of the cloister, but in the philosophy of modern Germany. Schelling carries it still farther by pronouncing that there is but one reason, one mind, the human and the Divine being identical. The lines of Paracelsus are inevitably suggested:—

O God, Thou art Mind!
Crush not my mind, O God!

Fichte, in his Characteristics of the Present Age, pronounces the individual to be but "a single ray of the one universal and necessary thought". "There is but One Life, one animating power, one Living Reason . . . of which all that seems to us to exist and live is but a modification, definition, variety and form." And, finally, he goes so far as to say that it is only by, and to, mere earthly and finite perception, that this one and homogeneous life of reason is broken up and divided into separate individual persons. What a piercing thought! Surely it is almost past believing that the eternal Life is itself in us, nay, that it is we; that in very literal truth we may say, "I and the Infinite are One". Only one who could speak in tongues of men and angels is fit to hold discourse on thoughts so sublime, but it is difficult to discern a flaw in the arguments of these prophetic souls who have dared to believe and to preach to men, "Ye are gods, and sons of the Most High, every one".

It is a doctrine we learn only from the new masters. Nothing half so fair, so radiant, did we hear in days of old, so rich in promise, so full of inspiration and helpfulness. "You are an adopted son of God," it was said. There is but one natural son, the Messiah and Logos, Jesus Christ. Through him alone we have access to the Divine, apart from him we are children of wrath; only in him are we "light in the Lord". "He that believeth not the Son hath not life, but the wrath of God abideth with him." To this hour do they say these things, but we who have been privileged to hear wiser words, diviner voices, know that nothing can come between our lonely spirits and the Great Alone—no Church, no Book, no Messiah, or Saviour. We are greater than all that, for the eternal soul of man is within us, heir-at-law divine of the promises, and in its own right a natural son of God.

But to continue. The scattered rays of this wonderful gospel are focussed in the transcendental teaching of the last of the ethical prophets, Waldo Emerson. In him the truth shines forth as the sun. We have seen the germ of the doctrine in the fourteenth and fifteenth century mystics, its resurrection in the noble school of German idealism which grew out of the teaching of the great master himself, Immanuel Kant. The man who introduced it to England, the link, so to speak, between Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and Emerson, was Coleridge, for whom there is but one reason, shared in by all intelligent beings, which is in itself the universal soul. To this profoundly reverent thinker reason is not a faculty, much less a property of the human mind. Man cannot be said so much to possess reason as to partake of it. He in whom reason dwells can as little appropriate it as his own possession, as he can claim ownership in the breathing air or take in the canopy of heaven.

Now, this is essentially what Emerson means by the Over-soul. It is the universal mind, the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. It is one and identical in all men, even as the sun in the high heavens is one and the same for every dweller in the solar system. Yea, more than this, we cannot shrink from the consequences of our affirmation, the mind in man is not conceivably other than the Mind which is self-subsistent and infinite. After what manner shall we conceive of the intelligence which laid down the foundations of the world, traced the pathway of the stars, fixed the laws which nature has immutably obeyed from the eternal past even to this hour, if we conceive it not after the manner of the mind in us which has at length discovered these laws? How can we hold one intelligence to know and another to originate them? As truth is one and identical for all minds, so must be the intelligences which know and originate that truth. Hence, you will see that for thinkers[4] such as these agnosticism is the plainest of paradoxes—a bald contradiction in terms. It affects to be unable to discern Mind in the cosmos when it is exercising that very mind in formulating its doubts. It is as though a man should go hunting his house for a light with a candle burning in his hand. What on earth can we be searching for when the "candle of the Lord," as Locke called it, is the very illuminant we must employ in our search? "Tell me," Emerson would ask, "the truths your sciences establish, the principle of your philosophies, are they valid for all intelligences or only some?" Surely, for all intelligences, you will reply. "Then, I will urge, these truths must be one and identical if all intelligences admit them." Certainly. "How, then, can there be any doubt but that intelligence itself, mind itself, is one and identic in all men, since all think alike of the cosmos, and one and identic also in that everlasting Cause of the cosmos whence, you yourselves admit, all things derive their being?"

Are we asked for the supreme object of religion? Here it is, unveiled so far as mind and speech of man may discover the great reality. It is the God, not "who dwelleth in inaccessible light, who is enthroned on the floors of the heavens," or "walks on the wings of the winds"; it is the God who is "not very far from any one of us," for he is in us, in very deed and truth; he is the mind, the intelligence; he is the soul of man, and yet the "Over-soul," the soul of all souls, and we are not so much made in his image, as it was taught of old, but we are he, we are the Divine, there is no line of division 'twixt us and him; the light in man, the good in man is God.

Pray no more, then, we urge, to the skies, nor in a holy city or consecrated shrine, a temple, though it were of gold. Like the angels that stood by the open, empty grave of the Christ and said, "he is not here," your souls cry aloud that therein alone is the infinite Soul whose truth and being alone can satisfy your own. This is the temple not made with hands of man, in which alone the Supreme can be enshrined and worshipped, "Foolish doctor, foolish doctor," says Carlyle of Johnson, who went tapping for ghosts in Cock Lane, "thou thyself art a ghost!" Foolish and superstitious beyond bounds, we may say, is the man that thinketh to find the light of life in a church when it cannot be found within himself.

He who has steeped his soul in this teaching will need no more to commune with an imagination in the heavens, an anthropomorphic deity in the skies—it is a merciful thing we see no more of these painful profanities upon the canvases of our artists—nor will he need that his soul should rise on wings of fasting and prayer "to pierce the clouds" with his importunings and entreaties. No, his communings will be with himself, his worship of the silent sort, for he knows now that there is no God anywhere who is not within him. He will need no Chrishna, Buddha or Christ to "make intercession with the Father" for him, no god-babe in a manger or deity walking the earth in sorrow or expiring in shame, for lo! the Divinity is also every son of God, and suffering humanity is ever with us, the repression of the flesh is an unceasing sacrifice which we offer up in the temple of our bodies out of reverence for the Divinity within them.

NOTE.—The best account of Emerson's ethical and speculative teaching is to be found in Cooke's Life of Emerson, obtainable through Green & Co., Essex Hall, Strand. I am indebted to it for much of the expository portion of this chapter.