Part 2

It is a materialism stupid, unfounded, turning its back upon the earlier idealisms of poet, philosopher, religious believer, not so much because of reasoning processes as because of a sudden shifting of attention. Wonderful things may be observed under the microscope, wonderful things through the telescope; wonderful things are day by day invented. Is it likely that there is anything beyond all this? To recent generations, as to that progressive dog, the reflection in the water seemed for the moment, as is often the case, more real than the reflected object; hence this tragedy of loss.

The human mind has been suddenly diverted by a loud noise outside; a sudden change of tension results. Where one looks quickly, all heads are turned. It is a noise of motor-boats, aeroplanes, engines of all kinds; a sight of airships, flying like birds; of submarines, diving like fish; of moving pictures with their endless panorama. Mankind is childishly diverted; the hearing of the ears, the seeing of the eyes,--it is enough. The skepticisms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tried to reason out their origins, to explain upon what they were based; not so here. This is the most unthinking of systems, not troubling to give a rational account of itself. Thought is out of fashion: nowadays we observe! Through this preponderance of observation over thought in this great period, the human mind has greatly suffered in surety of process, in logic, in differentiation of mental processes. The exercise of pure reason has become almost obsolete; the idea that thought can be exercised apart from sense, from study of phenomena, is all but forgotten. Whether or not we assume that matter is the origin and the end of all things, the world of to-day thinks in terms of matter; is content to live and breathe and have its being in matter; hopes, aspires, and prays, if it hope, aspire, and pray at all, in terms of matter.

Our very vocabulary is degraded; the most far-reaching symbols of our language come seldom into use, or appear with diminished meaning. Follow, for instance, the course of the word “infinite” through the antics of contemporary literature. Our phraseology has become carnal; our vital terms are terms of physical life. Nowhere is the limitation of contemporary thought more apparent than in these instruments of speech. One must read again Wordsworth, Shelley, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Meredith, to meet great words, now little employed, that make you realize the utmost reach of life; in so doing, one pauses in dismay, realizing how full contemporary speech is of lesser terms, how few employ the greater words that tell the inner life of the soul.

All forms of idealism have suffered during the past century of progress, more through being ignored than through being refuted; there still are thinkers who consider Kant, with his demonstration of the universe mind-made, a wiser teacher than any who have followed him, yet these have few disciples. Of the two old hypotheses, that this is a world of spirit, that it is a world of matter, the latter has been the predominant choice of our time. That choice has been reinforced by the impact of a wonderful physical and material development, while there has been no corresponding gain in the spiritual and the purely intellectual; for many years the best of the fine young energy of the race has busied itself, either in investigation or in invention, with the world of matter. We hear endlessly of the great advance of our time, of the surety of its knowledge, the doing away with baseless old idealisms. What, after all, has been achieved? The origin of human thought, the destination of the human thinker, are as profound a secret as before this unparalleled progress. Science, which has been the great intellectual adventure of the last century,--to what has it led us? Only again to that edge of the unknown, where we confront the infinite. It has not gained by one hair’s breadth upon the encompassing mystery of our lives.

V

THE special form of idealism held by our forefathers, the Christian faith, with its great central tenets of God, immortality, the necessity of right-doing in the light of these faiths, has suffered with the other forms of idealism during the last decades. Those who, intentionally or unintentionally, have attacked, many of those who have defended, have alike done it injury. Of our intellectual vanguard, some have denied, some have ignored, some have been wisely patient and silent, awaiting the adjustment of new wisdom to old. As for the first,--surely those who hold sense-observation to be the basis of all knowledge should take no such vast leap into the dark as that involved in denial of these old beliefs. It is when certain of these new thinkers slip beyond their own self-defined province, and philosophize in ways contradicting their own premises, that one fails to follow them; when, grown bold with their conquest of physical nature, they make a vast leap from observation of phenomena into metaphysical statement, without consciousness of what they are doing, that one listens with profound distrust. Doubtless we have all known one or two, ready to make assertions dogmatic beyond the dogmatism of old theology, founded upon nothing but the assumption that they, who can truly observe facts in the physical world, could assert nothing but fact. I respect them when they observe; I tremble when they begin to generalize.

It is indeed a crowning irony when one is called upon to believe, in the name of discoveries in the world of phenomena, that faith in God and in immortality is untenable. Because it is possible to see with the aided eye organisms unsuspected before our day,--this does not prove that the immemorial spiritual instincts of humanity have no foundation. The assumption that the great hopes of mankind cannot be true because they cannot be detected under microscope or through telescope, has floated in the air, darkening wise counsel, has assumed an authority never won; the present is full of unnecessary renunciations and unproved denials. In the intoxication of new discovery regarding the laws of organic growth, the leap from belief in unseen realities to doubt or to denial has been too swift and too absolute. Probably, in a great majority of cases, thought, intellectual process, has had little to do with the change. Humanity has lost hope without knowing why; the air has been thick with doubt and fear. Hearing a great noise in the dark, aware of attack, many have rushed away, leaving great treasure, while the enemy was still far from taking the stronghold. This new poverty of life which we call Progress is thus, in many cases, the misfortune, but not the fault, of those who, unable to think for themselves, take for granted that the most insistent voice must be the right voice.

How greatly the defenders of the faith, in much of the warfare, have missed the issue! The time that has been lost, the good territory yielded in contesting the literal interpretation of Genesis, may well fill us with shame. If the story of the serpent of Eden must slip from dogma to myth, must faith in the unseen realities therefore go? If our forefathers were wrong in linking the large faith of their spiritual lives indissolubly with the story of Adam and that of Jonah, we must discriminate where they failed to discriminate, remembering in all humility that with their smaller knowledge of external things went a far profounder knowledge than ours of things spiritual. We must keep the greater; the less is not to us the sacrifice it was to them; let it go!

If we ask, why this close linking with myth, who can answer? We know only that the human soul develops slowly; shade by shade the truth grows clear. We, who have learned something of the incredible slowness of physical development, can afford to have patience with the spiritual, but we cannot afford to let slip back anything that the soul has achieved, proved, made its own. In the long quarrels over the husk, the kernel has too often slipped out of sight; essentials have gone with unessentials. We can no longer in good faith teach the young that the misfortune of our present predicament may be traced to eating an apple; but those of us who are unable to step to the marching music of our time may, in impassioned good faith, until modern thinkers make a better case against us than they have yet made, teach the young that the great realities of life are of mind and soul, not body; that growth and change are necessary, fundamental, vital, the very condition of life; that it is for them to remove reverently whatever outer veil may have obscured their forefathers’ great light of faith; but that doom is upon them if they lose the light.

Doubtless the greatest wrong done the Christian faith by its defenders was the attempt to reduce it to a mere matter of reasoning. The pity of it is that, at a time when the whole fabric of Christianity was shaken and the whole spiritual life was at stake, theologians should so have emphasized fact, clinging to a dead literalness of interpretation! Through the long decades of the nineteenth century, trying to meet the geologists upon their own ground, they were very properly worsted. Why borrow, and use weakly, weapons which belong to a different warfare, knowledge? Sense-perception, playing a large part, and rightly, in science, is neither starting-point nor goal here, nor is historical fact. Proofs of a real religion are not limited to repetition of fact. When they imitated the scientists, in their demand for external evidence, and imitated them badly, the inevitable happened. More and more their own great world of spiritual aspiration and endeavor was ignored by those whose high privilege it was to make known the vitalizing power of the faith they held, its subtle answer to the soul’s deepest need. The doom of a faith is its loss of inner sources of vitality, its “materialization in fact,” and perhaps the Church has been rightly punished for forgetting that its weapons should be primarily weapons of the spirit, its world the world of divine endeavor. This is no time to haggle over theology; the object is not to save the church, but to save alive the souls of men.

Myth could go; dogma itself could go; Christianity would still be. Milestones in the path of the human spirit, dogmas have done great service, but none have been great enough to express the potential greatness of the spiritual life of the human race. Greatly have they helped; at times they have greatly hindered. Seemingly necessary bulwarks in time of stress and siege, the human soul has lived on after their demolishing; the human spirit is greater than they. Modern warfare has demonstrated that great forts and intrenchments are useless; that does not mean that there is to be no fighting. Faiths, beliefs, patriotisms are still there, but the fighting is to be in the open, a matter of life and death, the issue an issue of vitality.

VI

WE have our choice; both propositions have been made: we are all body, wholly involved in a mechanical scheme of things, or we are partly free, recognizing within us faculties not wholly subordinated to the rigid physical law of necessity, free to choose, to struggle toward high aims, to succeed in part, in part, perhaps, fail. Pending proof to the contrary, let us assume that our wills have a certain freedom. It is at least better “strategy and tactics” in the battle of life than the reverse. In the absence of a microscopic test to determine the matter, it may be well to demonstrate the existence of the power by using it, making decisive choice of the finer hypothesis, and asserting our right to do so. Perhaps the trouble has come not wholly from the activity of the materialists, but partly from the failure of the idealists to stand by their guns. The folly of perpetual defensive on the part of the idealist has been abundantly demonstrated in late years; it is for him to take the offensive, to claim and hold his own, ceasing to be shame-faced, explanatory, apologetic! Whatever special form our denial of the supremacy of matter may take, whether philosophic or religious, of Plato and Kant, or of Christ, we should band together against this tyranny that threatens the inner life of the race, and affirm the supremacy of spirit.

Consider our forefathers’ faith in the light of a working hypothesis, if you will. It is an age of hypotheses; science is ceaselessly busy with them. Its finest achievements have followed great imaginative conceptions, some of which have been verified by observed fact, some of which have been disproved, some of which, neither proved nor disproved, are still looked upon as a firm basis of knowledge.

The odd thing is that, in science, a whole fundamental assumption may go without interfering with the validity of the information based thereon; disproving one hypothesis, science goes serenely on. They taught me in my college days the indivisible atom quite as dogmatically as, earlier, I had been taught the literal reality of the story of Eve and the serpent. The fact that the atomic theory is now questioned, if not overthrown, in no way invalidates the truths of chemistry, while the passing of the serpent has, in some strange fashion, meant for many people the passing of the Christian faith. It has, in reality, nothing to do with the central tenets of the Christian faith, which are: that the universe is a universe of spirit, controlled by a great spiritual force, for great ends; that, for the guidance of stumbling humanity, the great spiritual force took human form; that mere human beings, keeping mind and soul intent upon that great example, may work out through love and sacrifice immortal meanings in their lives. Has any better working hypothesis ever been suggested to humankind?

Science says, “Here are certain phenomena which we can explain in no other way”; and gives its splendid guess. Why deny to our spiritual life a method freely used in science, the assumption of an hypothesis that most nearly explains observed facts, with the hope of proving it true as knowledge grows more profound? Why may we not say, “Here are certain persistent hopes, inner needs, longings, which we can explain only on the assumption that the universe is a universe of spirit”? These beliefs have been associated with the age-long growth of the race, and are perhaps the very condition of its mental and spiritual development. These facts of the inner life are as truly facts as are those of the outer world, though scientific absorption in matter has made mankind forget this. It is strange that a generation so fond of emphasizing fact should have ignored or even denied the most important facts of all, and so have brought about a crushing limitation to our endeavor. Not only in the external world are facts to be found: the hope, the faith, the long aspiration of the race, those persistent convictions of enlarging destiny which have played so great a part in human growth,--shall these be of no account? When such immense importance is attached to every phase of physical growth in the past, how can we deny the wealth of spiritual experience without being false to the very laws of thought?

So we ask, not what happened to our remotest forbears in the Garden of Eden, but what has happened to our nearer forefathers, whose needs were akin to our own, that will help our human existence. To what have they gallantly held? To what have they come back? To what did they inevitably turn in cruel times of suffering? What are the hopes they could not forget, slow century by century of trial, disappointment, aspiration, agony? Persistent faith in unending life, in which should come the crowning of the spiritual endeavor of this; indomitable belief in righteousness, in distinction between right and wrong; God, a divine wisdom working through all the show of things,--such was their faith. Our forefathers tried and proved it and found it good, living difficult lives and dying hard deaths full of a sense of conquest, of triumph. Their working hypothesis has yet to be surpassed.

The old teaching--whether or not we share the exact shade of intellectual interpretation of ultimate mystery--brought a better sense of relative values than we have now, and a far greater chance of progress. Faith in soul is a better working programme than faith in body. Working forward, however eugenically, toward the Perfect Brute is a poor hope at best. There can be no growth without the boundless, the illimitable, ahead, and the great hopes, undisproved, still shine before us. Life must be made great in its scope, its demand, if it is to achieve greatly. It is a sorry thing to have the guiding forces mere shallow intellectual forces,--mere intellectualism is always shallow,--to reduce the whole of the hope and the wonder and the terror of life to the seeing of the eye, the hearing of the ear, the mere logical deduction, while the larger nature sleeps abashed. A sound hypothesis must cope with all the facts involved; our working hypothesis of life must reckon with the deepest striving of our nature, its furthest longing, its most imaginative reach. There has been great waste of unused powers in these later decades of our period of progress. Half only, and the lesser half, of the human being has been called into activity; the better part of the human faculties have been among the “unemployed.”

Is it not time for the sleepers to waken, rub their eyes, and say, “There is a greater in us than you have let us recognize. This attempt to solve the problems of human nature while leaving the best of human nature out of account has shown its inadequacy. The materialistic interpretation of the universe with its attendant cult of the body is a _cul-de-sac_. Life, personality, are full of larger needs and larger powers than the present trend of thought permits us to recognize; and life must know the diviner hunger, the deeper thirst, if it is to win significance.” This progress, which ignores the higher aspiration, the profounder stirring of the nature,--shall we be therewith content?

Through hope, through faith, through love’s transcendant dower We feel that we are greater than we know,

wrote a poet-philosopher who dared trust his soul as leader. In this mathematical and scientific age there is a dread of feeling, of impulse; a fear of this greater self that hopes and fears and prays. We recognize the great part that feeling and impulse play in the evolution of the world of living creatures; yet man, in trying to solve the riddle of his destiny, is forever searching for some narrow rationalistic explanation which will shut these large factors out. There is great distrust of intuition, of the imaginative faculty, when dealing with the inner life; yet imagination, intuition, hold an important place in the study of the outer world; the greatest discoveries in science are, no less than the great achievements of creative art, the result of imaginative grasp of the unrealized. If intuition, daring conjecture, afford such signal service in winning knowledge of the world of matter, why should we, who wish to believe something deeper than that world can ever teach us, be deprived of the use of our larger faculties? Feeling, emotion, play a large part, perhaps the best part, in our sum of human wisdom; passion is a fine instrument of discovery,--spiritual passion, of spiritual truth. Of the utmost help these can give us we have utmost need, as we have of imagination, the divining power, that seer into the inner realities of things, and of “the will as vision.”

VII

IT is partly because of the largeness of its scope for activity of the entire man, the fullness of its appeal to the whole human being, that Christianity surpasses other idealisms as a working basis of life, proves itself the flower of them all. Sharing with others a purely idealistic theory, faith in the spiritual nature of the universe, it brings home that faith in ways unknown to other systems, makes it human, a matter of the hearth, of daily life. It is an idealism which is within the reach of the humblest intelligence; in its humanness, its simplicity, its nearness to the least, it may almost be said to be the only working idealism of all time. The vision of the Perfect Man appeals to the larger self; feeling is stirred by it, passion touched, and imagination, that power through which alone creative work is done, forever shapes fairer and fairer conceptions. No other idealism has the compelling power which brings the whole nature into play; so many elements to quicken the will and release hidden stores of energy. In all creative work, mere reasoning process lags behind; life, with its high spiritual possibilities, is creative work. It is for us to fashion it in accordance with our clearest vision of perfection; we have need of the largest hope that we can muster, the loftiest aim. For shaping life to great ends, for employment of all the faculties in the service of a great idealism, impulse, intuition, will, there is nothing that can match the Christian faith in the greatness of its simplicity.

The old, old needs of life are always with us, the necessity of consolation in grief and loss, of hope enough to keep us trudging along our path. Perhaps not even in its swift response to these great needs of the human being comes the profoundest proof of its supremacy. From the point of view of potential evolution, from the greatness and depth of its challenge, we know its greatness. Christianity, with the sting of its challenge for eternity, suggests enough of progress to satisfy the human soul once started on its way. What deeper appeal has ever come than the thought of endless destiny, bringing the awful necessity of living in the light of it?

Not long since, I read in some journal an article in which a writer speaks wistfully of our lost hope in immortality, but adds that we do not so greatly mind, and that our children will mind still less. If this faith is indeed gone, what has happened to rob us of so great a hope, once entertained? How the demonstration of organic processes in the physical world, which has been the great achievement of our time, can be assumed to reach to that which is beyond sense is hard to say; it would need eternity to disprove the belief, as it needs eternity to prove it. When you try with finite means to define the infinite you make trouble for yourself, and perhaps rob the young of inherited hopes. If our children do not mind, it will show a phase of degeneracy in them, of willful shutting off of light and life already attained. We shall count them craven if they let go any high ideal once conceived, for that means inevitable retrogression; this should be held as the unforgotten and unforgettable hope of the race. What mortal, when the splendor of such a thought had dawned on him, could let it go? The endless possibility, the infinite opportunity for growth, the challenge for eternity,--who dare take it, and order his life in accordance with it?