Church and Nation / The Bishop Paddock Lectures for 1914-15

by William Temple

Now the principle of this whole spiritual life is precisely the principle of unity, not as distinct from variety but as distinct either from antagonism or transitoriness. The two things that distress the soul of man are enmities, and the passing away of that which he loves. It is by rising above these evils, which beset us in this earthly state, that the satisfaction of the soul is found.

There are four main departments of the spiritual life which aspire in this way to rise above the evils which beset our mortal state. They are Science and Art and Morality and Religion. As we know them in our experience, they are all of them due on the human side to a dissatisfaction with our experience as we find it. The scientific man is disturbed by the apparent chaos in his experience, and he sets out to give order to it, and he is satisfied in so far as he discovers that all the while it was not chaotic, as it seemed, but orderly. The artist is craving for a beauty which, in his ordinary experience, he does not find. He selects, he concentrates attention on certain aspects, to reach a satisfaction which the world otherwise seems not to give. The man of moral aspiration is dissatisfied with the world as he sees it, and he sets himself therefore to alter both himself and it, that it may be modelled more in accordance with the heart's desire. And the religious man finds all of these sources of dissatisfaction working together within his soul; he seeks, and in faith finds, that which gives him both peace and power.

Let us then begin with what is in itself the least rich of these forms of human activity, and consider how it is that Science reaches its unity. Let us first recall that there are two forms of multiplicity or division which we are seeking to overcome: that which arises from the clash of various ideals or desires, the antagonism of man with man; and that which arises from the changeableness of the world as we see it. With regard to the latter, science does indeed reach real unities; but they are unities which leave Time out of sight. Sometimes, no doubt, the subject matter which is handled is itself non-temporal, but not in the sense of being eternal. So, for example, geometry is entirely without relation to time. There is no temporal sequence between the equality of the sides and the equality of the angles in the isosceles triangle. But where the subject studied is something that changes in Time, it remains true that the aim of science is to reach an unchanging principle. So, for example, the student of biology may be trying to discover the unchanging principle which governs the successive variations of species. But when he has found it he has not really mastered the transitoriness; he has not in any way gathered up the past and dead into his present experience; he has merely found the principle which applies to every stage as that stage comes. He reaches some superiority to the transitoriness of things, only by abstracting from Time altogether.

And, similarly, the unity between men which is produced by a common absorption in such pursuits does not strike very deep. For a man's temperament has nothing in the world to do with his scientific conclusions, or at least ought not to have. In the ideal pursuit of knowledge, all of the things that set men at variance count for nothing whatever. Consequently the differences, just because they are ignored, are not overcome, with the result that, as at the beginning of this war, we may find professors of the various nations, who had been linked together, as one might think, closely enough in the pursuit of knowledge, hurling manifestoes at one another across their national frontiers.

When we pass to the second of the great departments, a real progress may be noted in just these points. For in the experience of the artist Time is genuinely mastered. We get some illustration of this from the absorption which marks the aesthetic contemplation of a picture or a statue. For the time that we are really held by it, we forget about time altogether. But the case is clearer with regard to those arts which handle temporal processes—music and poetry. For it is the whole point, let us say, of a drama, that it shall follow a certain succession; it is vital to its significance that the scenes shall be in that order and no other. If you have two plays, each in three acts, in one of which the first act is cheerful in tone, and the second is neutral, and the third depressing, while in the other the first act is depressing, the second neutral, and the third cheerful, the total effect of the two plays is not the average of the three acts in each case, which would be neutral for both, but is in the one particularly depressing, and in the other particularly cheering. For the play is grasped as a whole. It makes a single impression, if it is a good play. We know what it means—not indeed because we can state it in other words, for it is the only expression of its own meaning; but it has a definite significance for us. And the name of the play comes to stand for that significance. This is especially noticeable in tragedy, where the Greeks, with their sure instinct, chose a story whose plot is known to the spectator in advance, so that we have throughout the play both the impression of the entire story and the particular impression of each scene as it comes and passes. It is significant that the Greeks did so choose for tragedy stories whose plot was known, while their comedians invented their own plots. And most will agree that we enjoy a great play better when we have read it in advance, or when we have already seen it on the stage before; because then we do reach something that may serve perhaps as the nearest image that we can get for eternity—a grasp of the whole stretch of time, realised in its successiveness and in the meaning which that successiveness gives to it, and having the sense of the whole throughout and seeing each moment, as it comes, in the light not only of the past but of the future too.

On this side, then, art is able, for the moment at least, and with regard to a period definitely limited by our capacities of comprehension, to master Time and give us a unity which includes its successiveness within it; so that the past, and even the future, are gathered up into the real experience of the present, and we are not only conscious of what is before our eyes, but are conscious of it as a part of the whole to which it belongs.

In a similar way we notice that while different temperaments are needed for the production of different types of art, yet in appreciation all are united. For example, it would be quite impossible for the great Russian novels to be produced in any other country than Russia; it would have been quite impossible for the great German philosophy to have been produced in any other nation than Germany; it would have been quite impossible for the great English poetry to have been produced in any other nation than England. These literatures belong to the soil out of which they spring. But the people of all the other nations can appreciate them, and all are glad because they are different. And so far as the artistic side of our nature governs our whole being, it is capable of linking us together in a real fellowship, which includes and is based upon our differences and the appreciation of them, and is therefore firmly rooted, because what might have been the source of antagonism is become itself the bond of unity.

But we must notice that each of these only reaches a very provisional attainment. If science likes to mark off a certain department of reality for its investigation, it can reach something like finality concerning just that department. I suppose that mechanics is something like a complete system of truth, so far as the mechanical aspect of things can be isolated from all other aspects. But then, nothing in the world is mechanical and only mechanical. Nothing in the world is chemical and only chemical. There are always other qualities there, from which abstraction has been made. Science therefore inevitably sets before itself as its goal the understanding of the universe, and it could not reach any absolute certainty concerning any real fact except so far as it had obtained omniscience. In mathematics it reaches certainty, because in mathematics the object is what it is defined to be, and nothing else. But no given material thing is just a triangle. It may even be disputed whether any given thing can be, according to the definition, a triangle at all.

Science then is marked by a restlessness until it reaches this omniscience. It began when the first man said "Why?" The moment that question is asked, Science is launched upon its course. But the answer to that question merely prompts anyone of scientific instincts to say "Why?" to the answer. Why is there a war? Historical science will point to the diplomatic documents, and from them to the course of history moulding national aspiration. Then if we say, "Why was the cause of war such? And, why were there such national aspirations?" we shall find ourselves soon investigating the literature of the countries and then their climates; from this we are shortly involved in astronomy and geology and all the other sciences. You can have nothing that is final until you reach omniscience. And so Science moves, perpetually saying "Why?" to every statement that is made. Far in the distance, in the infinite distance, is its goal of a complete satisfaction gained through understanding the universe in its entirety.

Art can similarly only achieve a provisional attainment of its goal; but the attainment while it lasts is more substantial. Its method, as distinct from that of science, is mental rest. The aim of the artist is to concentrate attention upon the object, holding it there by various devices. That is why pictures are put into frames. Something abruptly irrelevant, although not discordant, is put round the object to help us fix our minds upon it. That is why poetry is written in metre. The mind is abruptly brought back by the recurrence of the rhythm or the recurrence of the sound in rhyme, and held within the total composition. We notice that it is precisely where the subject matter of the poem is slight that the rhythm needs to be strongly marked or the system of rhyme complicated; where the subject matter itself has a strong appeal, any rhyming seems to be out of place and tiresome. The aim is simply to grip the attention and hold it upon the object and make us see it as it is; not after the fashion of science, connecting it with other things, but understanding it by getting to know it in and for itself as thoroughly as may be.[#] Now in thus concentrating attention upon some one object and claiming complete absorption in that object, art is implicitly claiming to give a perfect mental satisfaction and an absolute peace. But it can never succeed in that unless the object upon which it is concentrating our attention is an adequate symbol for the whole truth of things in which the whole of our nature will find such satisfaction.