“The Gods are happy.They turn on all sidesTheir shining eyes,And see below themThe earth and men.”
“The Gods are happy.They turn on all sidesTheir shining eyes,And see below themThe earth and men.”
“The Gods are happy.They turn on all sidesTheir shining eyes,And see below themThe earth and men.”
“The Gods are happy.
They turn on all sides
Their shining eyes,
And see below them
The earth and men.”
This being so, what is to prevent us from believing that, once certain adjustments are made in the mental sausage-machine, we shall discover that what we once found impossibly tough meat will pass smoothly through and become done up into the most satisfactory of sausages? In other words, that the values are there if we choose to make them—an Euckenish doctrine which, for all that it arouses instinctive suspicion, may none the less be true.
But even when we have made all possible discounts of this kind, evolved the smoothest-running machinery, converted the raw and meaty material of being into every conceivable kind of tidy sausage, the fact remains that there are feats beyond the power of our machine—beyond its power because of the very quality of its being.
We live at a certain rhythm in time, at a certain level of size and space; beyond certain limits, events in the outer world are not directly appreciable by the ordinary channels of sense, although a symbolic picture of them may be presented to us by the intellect.
When we are listening to the organ, sometimes there come notes which are on the border-line between sound and feeling: their separate vibrationsare distinguishable and pulse through us, and the more the vibrations are separable, the more they are felt as mechanical shocks, the less as sound. However, we know perfectly well that all sounds as a matter of fact depend on vibratory disturbance, and that it is only some peculiarity of the registering machinery, in ear or brain, which enables us to hear a note as continuous.
Still more remarkable are the facts of vision. As I write I see the tulips in my garden, red against the green grass: the red is a continuous sensation; but the physicists appear to be justified in telling us that the eye is being bombarded every second with a series of waves, not the few hundred or thousand that give us sound, but the half-billion or so which conspire to illuminate our vision.
With sound, we alter the frequency of the waves and we get a difference of tone which seems to be merely a difference of more or less: but alter the frequency of light-waves, and the whole quality of the sensation changes, as when I look from the tulips to the sky. The change of registering mechanism is here more profound than the change in outer event.
Or again, to choose an example that depends more on size than rhythm, how very difficult it is to remember that the pressure of air on our bodies is not the uniform gentle embrace of some homogeneous substance, but the bombardment of an infinity of particles. The particles are not even all alike: some are of oxygen, others of nitrogen, of carbonic acidgas, of water vapour. They are not all travelling at uniform speeds; collisions are all the time occurring, and the molecules are continuously changing their rate of travel as they clash and bump.
We have only to look down a microscope to convince ourselves of the alteration in our experience that it would mean if we were to become sufficiently diminished. The tiniest solid particles in fluids can be seen to be in a continuous state of agitation—inexplicable until it was pointed out that this mysterious “Brownian” movement was the inevitable result of impacts by the faster-moving molecules of the fluid. Many living things that we can still see are small enough to live permanently in such agitation; the longest diameter of many bacteria is but half a micron (a two-thousandth of a millimetre), and there are many ultra-microscopic organisms which, owing to their closer approximation to molecular dimensions, must pass their lives in erratic excursions many times more violent than any visible Brownian motion.
If we could shrink, like Alice, at the persuasion of some magic mushroom, the rain of particles on our skin, now as unfelt as midges by a rhinoceros, would at last begin to be perceptible. We should find ourselves surrounded by an infinity of motes; titillated by a dance of sand-grains; bruised by a rain of marbles; pounded by flights of fives-balls. What is more, the smaller we became, the more individuality and apparent free-will should we detect in thesurrounding particles. As we got still smaller, we should, now and again, find the nearly uniform bombardment replaced by a concerted attack on one side or the other, and we should be hurled for perhaps double our own length in one direction. If we could conceivably enter into a single inorganic molecule, we should find ourselves one of a moving host of similar objects: and we should further perceive that these objects were themselves complex, some like double stars, others star-clusters, others single suns, and all again built of lesser units held in a definite plan, in an architecture reminding us (if we still had memory) of a solar systemin petto. If we were lucky enough to be in a complicated fluid like seawater, we should be intrigued by the relations of the different kinds of particles. They would be continually coming up to other particles of different kinds, and would then sometimes enter into intimate union with them. If we could manage to follow their history, we should find that after a time they would separate, and seek new partners, of the same or of different species. Some kinds of the units, or people as we should be inclined to call them, would spend most of their existence in the married state, others would apparently prefer to remain single, or, if they married, would within no long time obtain divorce.
We should be forcibly reminded of life in some cosmopolitan city like London or New York. If there existed a registrar to note down the events of these little beings’ existence, and we were privilegedto inspect the register, we should find that each had its own history, different from that of every other in its course and its matrimonial adventures.
If we were near the surface we should find that the outer beings always arranged themselves in a special and coherent layer, apparently to protect themselves against the machinations of the different beings inhabiting the region beyond; for every now and again one would seem to be pulled from the water and be lost among the more scattered inhabitants of the air.
If we could now revert to our old size, we might remember, as we listened to the scientist enunciating the simple formulæ of the gas-laws, or giving numerical expression to vapour-pressures and solubilities, that this simplicity and order which he enabled us to find in inorganic nature was only simplicity when viewed on a large enough scale, and that it was needful to deal in millions and billions before chance aberrations faded into insignificance, needful to experience molecules from the standpoint of a unit almost infinitely bigger before individual behaviour could be neglected and merged in the orderly average. And we might be tempted to wonder how the personal idiosyncrasies of our human units might appear to a being as much larger than we as we are larger than a molecule—whether kings and beggars would not fare alike, and all the separate, striving, feeling, conflicting personalities, with their individual histories, their ancestors, successes, marriages, friendships, pains, and pleasures, be merged in somehomogeneous and simple effect, altering in response to circumstances, with changes capable of expression in some formula as simple as Boyle’s or Avogadro’s Law.
Almost more startling might be the effect of altering the rhythm at which we live, or rather at which we experience events.
If only I were Mr. H. G. Wells, I could make a mint of money by a story based on this idea of rhythm of living.[42]Let us see.... First there would be Mercaptan the distinguished inventor, who would lead me (lay, uninstructed, Watsonish me, after the fashion of narrators) into his laboratory. There on the table would be the machine—all but complete: handles, coils of wire, quartz terminals, gauges of rock-crystal in which oscillated coloured fluids, platinum cogwheels ... dot ... dot ... dot ... dot.... He hardly dared to make the final connections, all clear and calculable though they were. He had put so much of himself into it: so many hopes ... fears ... dots....
Then there would be the farewell dinner-party—first the inventor’s voice on the wireless telephone,summoning Wagrom the explorer, Glosh of theEvening Post, Stewartson Ampill the novelist, and the rest of our old friends: then the warm friendly light of the candles, the excellent port, the absence of women, the reminiscences, the asterisks, the....
Mercaptan refuses to allow the rest to come into the laboratory, in case something should go wrong. He straps the machine on his shoulders, makes a final connection; his life processes begin to work faster, faster, ever faster. The first effect of course was a change of colour. The blue oblong of the window became green—yellow—orange—red. Meanwhile each wave-length of the ultra-violet became blue, and itself ran down the gamut of colour. Then came the turn of the X-rays—by their dim light he groped about, till they too became relatively too slow for his retina. That ought to make him blind, of course—but no! Mr. Wells had thought that all out; and he came into a state of nearly maximum speed where he perceived a brilliant, phosphorescent light given out by all objects, generated by disturbances of a wave-length unimaginably, undiscoverably small. Meanwhile he had passed through an amazing experience—he had heard the veritable music of the spheres! That had happened when in his acceleration he had, so to speak, caught up with the light-waves, until they were tuned to his ear’s organ of Corti: and all that had been visible in his ordinary life was now to be appreciated by hearing. Unfortunately, as his ears possessed no lens, thisuniversal music was to him of course merely a hideous babel of sound.
At last, as the workings of his body approached the rapidity of light’s own oscillations, he entered on a new phase—surrounded on every side by an ocean of waves which lapped softly against his body—waves, waves, and still more waves....
He was in that region not unlike that from which life has escaped when it ceased to be infinitely little, a region in which none of the events that make up our ordinary life, none of the bodies that are our normal environment, have existence any more—all reduced to a chaos of billows ceaselessly and meaninglessly buffeting his being.
“Mi ritrovai in una selva oscura.”
Life is a wood, dark and trackless enough to be sure; but Mercaptan could not even see that it was a wood—for the trees.
Yet it was soothing: the very meaninglessness of the wave-rocking released one of responsibility, and it was delicious to float upon this strange etheric sea.
Then his scientific mind reasserted itself. He realized that he had magnified his rate of life and was consuming his precious days at an appalling speed. The lever was thrown into reverse, and he passed gradually back to what he had been accustomed to think of as reality.
Back to it; and then beyond it, slowing his vital rhythm. This time he was able by an ingenious arrangement to eliminate much of the disturbingeffect of his rhythm-change on his vision. It was an idea of which he was very proud: every alternate light-wave was cut out when he doubled the capacity of each process of life, and so on in automatic correspondence. As a result he was enabled to get a picture of the outer world very similar to that obtained in the ordinary accelerations of slow processes that are made possible by running slow-taken cinema records at high speed. He saw the snowdrops lift their matutinal heads and drop them again at evening—an instant later; the spring was an alarming burst of living energy, the trees’ budding and growth of leaves became a portent, like the bristling of hairs on the backs of vegetable cats. As his rate changed and he comprehended more and more in each pulse, the flowers faded and fell before he could think of plucking them, autumnal apples rotted in his grasp, day was a flash and night a wink of the eye, the two blending at last in a continuous half-light.
After a time ordinary objects ceased to be distinguishable; then the seasons shared the fate of day and night. The lever was now nearly hard over, and the machine was reaching its limits. He was covering nearly a thousand of men’s years with each of his own seconds.
The cinema effect was almost useless to him now; and he discarded this apparatus. Now followed what he had so eagerly awaited, something deducible in general but unpredictable in all particulars. As the repeated separate impacts of the ether waves hadcondensed, at his old ordinary rate, to form the continuous sensation of light, so now the events of nature coalesced to give new objects, new kinds of sensation. Especially was this so with life: the repeated generations seemed to act like separate repeated waves of light, blending to give a picture of the species changing and evolving before his eyes.
Other experiences he could explain less well. He was conscious of strange sensations that he thought were probably associated with changes in energy-distribution, in entropy; others which he seemed to perceive directly, by some form of telepathy, concerning the type of mental process occurring around him. It was all strange: but of one thing he was sure—that if only he could find a way of nourishing and maintaining himself in this new state, he would be able, as a child does in the first few years of life, to correlate his puzzling new sensations, and that when he had done this he would obtain a different and more direct view of reality than any he had ever obtained or thought of obtaining before.
As the individual light-waves were summed to give light, as the microcosm of gas-molecules cancelled out to give a uniformity of pressure, so now the repetition of the years coalesced into what could be described as visible time, a sensation of cosmic rate; the repeated pullulations of living things fused into something perceived as organic achievement: and the infinite variety of organisms, their conflicts and interactions, resolved itself, through themediation of his sense-organs and brain at their new rhythm, into a direct perception of life as a whole, an entity with a pressure on its environment, a single slowly-evolving form, a motion and direction.
He put the lever to its limit: the rhythm of the cosmos altered again in relation to his own. He had an extraordinary sense of being on the verge of a revelation. The universe—that was the same; but what he experienced of it was totally different. He had immediate experience of the waxing and waning of suns, of the condensation of nebulæ, the slowing down and speeding up of evolutionary processes.
The curious, apparently telepathic sense which he had had of the mental side of existence was intensified. Through it, the world began to be perceived as a single Being, with all its parts in interaction. The shadowy lineaments of this being were half seen by his mental vision—vast, colossal, slowly changing; but they appeared only to disappear again, like a picture in the fire.
Strive as he might, he could not see its real likeness. Now it appeared benign; at its next dim reappearance there would be a feeling of capricious irresponsibility about it: at another instant it was cold, remote; once or twice terrible, impending over and filling everything with a black demoniacal power which brought only horror with it.
If he could but accelerate the machine! Hewanted toknow—to know whether this phantom were a reality, to know above all if it were a thing of evil or of good: and he could not know unless he could advance that last final step necessary to fuse the rhythm of separate events into the sensation of the single whole.
He sat straining all his faculties: the machine whirred and rocked: but in vain. And at last, feeling desperately hungry, for he had forgotten to take food with him, he gradually brought back the lever to its neutral-point.
* * * * * * *
Of course, Mr. Wells would have done it much better than this.
* * * * * * *
And then there would have to be an ending. I think the newspaper man would take his opportunity to slink off into the laboratory and get on the machine with the idea of making a scoop for his paper; ... and then he would put the lever in too violently, and be thrown backwards. His head hit the corner of a bench, and he remained stunned; but by evil chance, the handles of the machine still made connection with his body after the fall. The machine was making him adjust his rhythm to that of light; so that he was living at an appalling rate. He had gone into the laboratory late at night. Next morning they found him—dead:and dead of senile decay—grey-haired, shrivelled, atrophic.
Then of course the machine is smashed up; and Mr. Wells begins to write another book.
* * * * * * *
I have spent so much time in frivolous discussion of rhythm and size and commonplaces that I have not pointed out another fundamental fact of biological relativity—to wit, that we are but parochial creatures endowed only with sense-organs giving information about the agencies normally found in our own little environment. Mind without the objects of mind is the very Chimaera bombinatingin vacuo.
Out of all the ether waves we are sensitive to an octave as light, and some few others as heat. X-rays and ultra-violet destroy us, but we know nothing about them until they begin to give us pain; while the low swell of Hertzian waves passes by and through us harmless and unheeded. Electrical sense again we have none.
Imagine what it would be for inhabitants of another planet where changes in Hertzian waves were the central, pivotal changes in environment, where accordingly life had become sensitive to “wireless” and to nought else save perhaps touch—imagine such beings broadcast upon the face of the Earth. With a little practice and ingenuity they would no doubt be able to decipher the messages floating through our atmosphere, would feel the rhythms of the Black Hamitic Band transmitting Jazz to a million homes,and be able to follow, night by night, the soporific but benevolent fairy-stories of Uncle Archibald. I wonder what they would make of it all. They would at intervals, of course, be bumping into things and people. But would touch and radio-sense alone make our world intelligible? I wonder....
When we begin trying to quit our anthropocentry and discover what the world might be like if only we had other organs of body and mind for its assaying, we must flounder and bump in a not dissimilar fashion.
Even the few senses that we do possess are determined by our environment. Sweet things are pleasant to us: sugar is sweet: so is “sugar of lead”—lead acetate; sugar is nutritious, lead acetate a poison. The biologist will conclude, and with perfect reason, that if sugar was as rare as lead acetate in nature, lead acetate as common as sugar, we should then abominate and reject sweet things as emphatically as we now do filth or acids or over-hot liquids.
But I must pause, and find a moral for my tale; for all will agree that a moral has been so long out of fashion that it is now fast becoming fashionable again.
Every schoolboy, as Macaulay would say, knows William of Occam’s Razor—that philosophical tool of admirable properties:—“Entia non multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.”
We want another razor—a Relativist Razor; and with that we will carry out barbering operationsworthy of another Shaving of Shagpat: we will shave the Absolute.
The hoary Absolute, enormous and venerable, grey-bearded and grey-locked—he sits enthroned, wielding tremendous power, filling young minds with fear and awe.
Up, barbers, and at him! Heat the water of your enthusiasm: lather those disguising appurtenances. See the tufts collapse into the white foam—feel the hairy jungles melt away before your steel! And at the end, when the last hair falls, you will wipe away the lather, and look upon that face and see—ah, what indeed?
I will not be so banal as to attempt to describe that sight in detail. You will have seen it already in your mind’s eye: “or else” (to quote Mr. Belloc)—“or else you will not; I cannot be positive which.” If not, you never will; if yes, what need to waste more of the compositor’s time? But of him who forges that razor, who arms those barbers, who gives them courage for their colossal task, of him shall a new Lucretius sing.
Belloc, H. “The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts.”Bergson, H. “Time and Free-Will.”Carroll, L. “Alice in Wonderland.”—— —— “Alice Through the Looking Glass.”Clerk Maxwell. “Collected Papers.”Einstein. See Kant.Hegel. See Einstein.Kant. See Hegel.Lear, E. “Nonsense Songs and Stories.”Lucretius. “De Rerum Natura.”Macaulay, Lord. “Essays.”Mee, A. “Children’s Encyclopædia.”Meredith, G. “The Shaving of Shagpat.”Occam, W. de. “Opera Omnia.”Shapley. Proc. Nat. Ac. Sci., 6, 204.Swift, J. “Gulliver’s Travels.”Wells, H. G. “The New Accelerator.”Wheeler, W. M. “Ants” (Columbia University Series).
Belloc, H. “The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts.”
Bergson, H. “Time and Free-Will.”
Carroll, L. “Alice in Wonderland.”
—— —— “Alice Through the Looking Glass.”
Clerk Maxwell. “Collected Papers.”
Einstein. See Kant.
Hegel. See Einstein.
Kant. See Hegel.
Lear, E. “Nonsense Songs and Stories.”
Lucretius. “De Rerum Natura.”
Macaulay, Lord. “Essays.”
Mee, A. “Children’s Encyclopædia.”
Meredith, G. “The Shaving of Shagpat.”
Occam, W. de. “Opera Omnia.”
Shapley. Proc. Nat. Ac. Sci., 6, 204.
Swift, J. “Gulliver’s Travels.”
Wells, H. G. “The New Accelerator.”
Wheeler, W. M. “Ants” (Columbia University Series).
[41]Read before the Heretics Club, Cambridge, May 1922.
[42]The reading of this paper brought a string of informants eager to let me know that Mr. Wells had already written a story on this theme. I was grateful to them for having caused me to read theNew Accelerator, which by some strange chance I had managed to miss: but Mr. Wells’s treatment is so wholly different from that which I have sketched that I feel no scruples in letting it stand: and, if amends are needed, at least I make him a present of the germ of a new tale, and so feel that honour should be satisfied.
GODS
Surprised by doubt, and longing but to know,I asked of men and books what God might be:—“An immanent spirit, clothed with the world we see”—“A King of kings, ruler of all below”—“Pure Love”—“A golden calf set up for show”—“A jealous chief and tribal sectary”—“Figment of fear and Man’s servility”—“The final Judge that dooms to joy or woe” ...I turned away; and found my God alone.God is the world—yet captive in our thought:Our thought—when it the head of the world is grown:Love—with what love we to ourselves have taught.The Soul must incarnate Divinity,And God in each anew must builded be.
Surprised by doubt, and longing but to know,I asked of men and books what God might be:—“An immanent spirit, clothed with the world we see”—“A King of kings, ruler of all below”—“Pure Love”—“A golden calf set up for show”—“A jealous chief and tribal sectary”—“Figment of fear and Man’s servility”—“The final Judge that dooms to joy or woe” ...I turned away; and found my God alone.God is the world—yet captive in our thought:Our thought—when it the head of the world is grown:Love—with what love we to ourselves have taught.The Soul must incarnate Divinity,And God in each anew must builded be.
Surprised by doubt, and longing but to know,I asked of men and books what God might be:—“An immanent spirit, clothed with the world we see”—“A King of kings, ruler of all below”—“Pure Love”—“A golden calf set up for show”—“A jealous chief and tribal sectary”—“Figment of fear and Man’s servility”—“The final Judge that dooms to joy or woe” ...
Surprised by doubt, and longing but to know,
I asked of men and books what God might be:—
“An immanent spirit, clothed with the world we see”—
“A King of kings, ruler of all below”—
“Pure Love”—“A golden calf set up for show”—
“A jealous chief and tribal sectary”—
“Figment of fear and Man’s servility”—
“The final Judge that dooms to joy or woe” ...
I turned away; and found my God alone.God is the world—yet captive in our thought:Our thought—when it the head of the world is grown:Love—with what love we to ourselves have taught.The Soul must incarnate Divinity,And God in each anew must builded be.
I turned away; and found my God alone.
God is the world—yet captive in our thought:
Our thought—when it the head of the world is grown:
Love—with what love we to ourselves have taught.
The Soul must incarnate Divinity,
And God in each anew must builded be.
RATIONALISM AND THE IDEA OF GOD
“Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst.”—Goethe.
“Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst.”—Goethe.
“Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst.”—Goethe.
“Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst.”
—Goethe.
“Nowadays, matters of national defence, of politics, of religion, are still too important for Knowledge, and remain subjects for certitude; that is to say, in them we still prefer the comfort of instinctive belief because we have not learnt adequately to value the capacity to foretell.”—W. Trotter.
“Nowadays, matters of national defence, of politics, of religion, are still too important for Knowledge, and remain subjects for certitude; that is to say, in them we still prefer the comfort of instinctive belief because we have not learnt adequately to value the capacity to foretell.”—W. Trotter.
No one who has read Flaubert’sTentation de St. Antoinewill be likely to forget that amazing procession of Gods, hundreds upon hundreds, in every diversity of form, defiling past the visionary Saint to topple over into the abyss of nothingness and be for ever destroyed—the doomed and outworn divinities of man’s childhood and adolescence, put away as he came to maturity. “Man created God in his own image,” wrote the irrepressible pen of Voltaire; and if it is not always true that Gods have been in his own image, but also in the image of animals and monsters, of embodied fears and hopes, it is indubitable that man has created God after God, only to throw them on the scrapheap as he outgrows them, like a child rejecting his old toys for new.
Indubitable—in a sense; indubitable that he has given each of them their peculiar and characteristicform, endowed this and that God with different qualities. But there is another part which he has not created, which he can only perceive, mould, clothe. The raw material of Divinity and its elemental attributes are given—man can but take it or leave it; and, what is more, it is difficult for him to leave it. It is given as the raw material and elemental attributes of life are given, and the evolutionary process can but take them. Man moulds and forms; but evolution has no more created living matter than he Divinity.
* * * * * * *
I propose, then, to lay down as my main point that the idea of God is an inevitable product of biological evolution, arising when the human type of mind first came into being, and taking shape and form as a definite God or Gods. That the Gods who thus arise, although of course they play a rôle in the affairs of the human species only, have a definite biological function. That the term God can still be properly and profitably employed to denote a certain complex of phenomena, with a certain function in human evolution.
What, then, do we mean by saying that the idea of God arises inevitably with the appearance of man upon the evolutionary scene? How can the appearance of man account for such a curious phenomenon?
With man, for the first time in the history of life upon the earth, an organism appeared capable of generalizing, of framing concepts, and ofcommunicating them to his fellows. Through sense-organs and brain, an organism reflects in its mind some of the events of the world outside, creates some sort of a microcosm over against the macroscosm. But the animal with no more than associative memory can at best create a haphazard microcosm, a mere cinema record, and incomplete at that, of the most elementary organization; while all one can say of its power of profiting by experience is that a certain primitive plot is thus provided for the series of adventures which make up the scenario.
With an organism like man, however, in which to the faculty of associative memory there has been superadded the power of framing concepts and of accumulating experience by tradition, the picture is altogether changed. The microcosm becomes more highly organized; from rough-and-tumble cinema it develops into an elaborate drama, whose plot is knotted up in the same general way as that of the great macrocosmic drama unrolling itself outside. Microcosm images macrocosm more nearly, both in its form and in its scope. As result of this, life is for the first time enabled in man’s person to frame some general ideas of the outer world. Not only is it enabled, it cannot help but do so. The outer world is there; it impinges through man’s sense-organs on his mind, and his mind is so constructed that, if it thinks at all, it must think in general terms.
For the first time, life becomes aware of something more than a set of events; it becomes aware of asystem of powers operating in events. These powers (to use a general, and what is intended to be a non-committal, term) are in constant action upon man’s life. There is a power in the sun, a power in the storm, in the growth of crops, in wild beasts, in strange tribes, in the unrealized recesses of man’s own heart; and in the course of his life man is brought into contact with these powers, which may act with him or against him. Man frames his own idea of these powers; and once that idea is framed, it exerts an effect upon the rest of his ideas, upon his emotions, upon his conduct. The more strongly the idea is held, the greater the effect.
But the idea may obviously be held and organized in many different ways. It is when the idea is organized in one particular way that we call it religious. We call it religious when on the one hand it involves some recognition of powers operating so as to underlie the general operations of the world; and, on the other hand, when it involves the emotions. It must involve the idea of the general powers operating in the outer world; so that an emotional reaction entirely limited to a single human being, or to beauty, or to a single event, is not religious. And it must involve the emotional nature of man, so that a purely intellectual investigation of the powers in operation, or a purely practical response, a purely moral reaction to them, is again not religious.
* * * * * * *
In primitive societies, as the studies of a Frazeror a Rivers have shown us, the whole of life is enmeshed with religion, and there is scarcely an activity of man which is not spun round with religious emotion and ritual. Very often the idea of God has not in this stage been clearly formulated; there is simply a notion ofpower, of mysterious influence, sometimes partly crystallized round a primitive deity. Later, however, the power became frankly anthropomorphic, and Gods came into being—many or one. Man had projected the idea of that active agency he knew best—human personality—into his idea of cosmic powers.
Into the God thus fashioned there are always projected, to greater or less degree, the ideals of the community; and thus, at a certain stage of development, we find definitely tribal Gods. Here the biological function of Gods becomes extremely obvious. The God, by his inspired prophets and priests, orders the destruction of his rivals—the false Gods of neighbouring tribes—or of his enemies, the members of those tribes.
The people of the tribe, however the result may have been brought about, do as a matter of fact find themselves, all unconsciously, caught up in the system which they and their forefathers have made. They have fashioned their God so that their inmost life is joined to him. When they sin, they fear him; when they look into their own hearts to take stock of their ultimate ideals, they find that these are attached, through the impalpable but infinitelyresistant fibres of tradition, of childish memory and of education, to him; he is on their side against their enemies, so that their advantage is on the whole his.
Whatever, therefore, arouses the idea of God in their minds will send messages into every corner of their being. And if they can be firmly persuaded that God wishes something done, the call will pull at their heart-strings and bring them to convinced and united action.
The most familiar example of this type of effect is to be found in the history of the Jews in the Old Testament. But even to-day such tribal ideas are not extinct: an educated and charming lady said to me during the war—“I am convinced that if Jesus Christ were alive to-day He would be fighting on the side of the Allies.” ...
* * * * * * *
In our further analysis we must carefully distinguish between the outer and inner components of the idea of God. The outer components are the powers acting upon man. Some of these are inorganic—storms, winds, floods, the sun and moon; others are organic—wild beasts, pestilence, crops, and fruits, domesticated animals; others again are human—personal or national enemies, the community in which the individual lives. And they may act upon man’s body or upon his mind. The sun warms his body, but makes an impression on his mind as well. The practice of astrology shows what power can be exerted on the mind by quite imaginary properties ofexternal reality. But, whatever we may think of these outer components, there they are, and they do affect us for better or for worse. Before such a heterogeneous assemblage as is constituted by the outer components can operate as a single idea, can deserve a single name such as God, they must be elaborately organized.
The contribution to the idea of God from within, from the mind of man himself, is its form; and this form is the outcome of a process of mental organization every bit as real as the physical organization occurring in the unborn embryo.
The essential thing about both is, as we have indicated, that unity should arise in spite of diversity, and the resulting entity—organism in the one case, organized idea in the other—should thus be able to act as a single whole.
The system of ideas which man holds concerning external powers may be thus organized by thinking of it in terms of magic, of “influence,” manifesting itself in different ways in different operations of Nature; or in terms of personality, the manifestations of power being supposed to result from the activities of a being or beings more or less similar to ourselves; or it may be organized, as we shall see, on more scientific lines, by carefully pruning away all parts of it which are either definitely the mere product of our own imaginations, or else are not proven.
Thus what we have called the raw material of Divinity is given in the outer forces of nature, whichnot only act upon man as they act upon all organisms, but are by him perceived so to act in a way special and peculiar to man alone.
But, being so perceived, they are inevitably taken up into his mental life and made part of his mental organization. They are often perceived emotionally—to take the simplest examples, pestilence with horror, storm with fear, the growing of crops with gratitude. They are bound to enter into relation with his emotions, with his ideals and hopes; bound also to be in some degree generalized intellectually. When thus emotionally and intellectually built up so as to form a coherent and unitary idea, then only do they deserve the name of a God.
In parenthesis, let us make it quite clear that we are speaking of God and Gods as they operate in human affairs, as they can be classified by the anthropologist, analysed by the philosopher, experienced by the mystic. These have always been constituted as we have described—as a particularideaof the powers of nature, the cosmic forces taking shape through the moulding and organizing capacity of human thought, or, if you prefer it, as an interpretation and unification of outer and inner reality. The Absolute God, on the other hand, may be one—may, in fact, operate as a unitary whole in the same sense as this extraordinary product of the evolutionary process, this anthropological God; but we can never know it as such in the same sense as we know a person to be one.
This may be illustrated by a common fallacy—the ascription of personality to God on the ground that a purpose exists in the universe. Paley saw proof of this purpose in adaptations among organisms. Modern theologians, driven from this position by Darwin, take refuge with Bergson in the fact of biological progress. But this, too, can be shown to be as natural and inevitable a product of the struggle for existence as is adaptation, and to be no more mysterious than, for instance, the increase in effectiveness both of armour-piercing projectile and armour-plate during the last century. The time has gone by when a Paley could advance his “carpenter” view of God; when a Fellow of the Royal Society could be sure of general approval, as could D. Pront in his Bridgewater Treatise, with a work entitledChemistry, Meteorology, and the Function of Digestion, considered with reference to Natural Theology, or when a distinguished geologist like Buckland (almost foreshadowing later writers of a certain type on labour questions) could ascribe to a Beneficent Designer the existence of Carnivora, as a means to the increase of the “Aggregate of Animal Enjoyment,” and solemnly open a sentence such as “while each suffering individual is soon relieved from pain, it contributes its enfeebled carcass to the support of its carnivorous benefactors.”
No—purpose is a psychological term; and to ascribe purpose to a process merely because its results are somewhat similar to those of a true purposefulprocess, is completely unjustified, and a mere projection of our own ideas into the economy of nature. Where we experience only phenomena of one order we cannot hope to reach behind them to phenomena of another order, or to the Absolute.
The ground is now cleared for our real investigation—our inquiry into the task which Rationalism has before it in finding how best what we have called the raw material of Divinity may be organized by the mind’s activity, how best clothed with word or symbol to make it more the common property of mankind as a whole.
The current Christian conception of God is of a person who is also the creator and the ruler of the universe. This person has certain attributes—is omnipotent, omniscient, and somehow, in spite of all the unhappiness and squalor and cruelty in the world, all-loving. He has personal qualities—he created the universe, and all that is in it; he takes pleasure in being worshipped; is displeased when men or women neglect him, or commit crimes or sins; takes pity on the follies and sufferings of man; and was so moved by them (albeit after a very considerable period had elapsed since man had first appeared upon the scene) that he sent his son into the world as a redeemer. (For simplicity’s sake, I omit all reference to the complexities of Trinitarian doctrine, which, however important in distinguishing Christianity from other religions envisaging an omnipotent personal God, do not affect the essential point atissue.) Further, he grants petitions, reveals himself to certain chosen persons, and is enthroned in a somewhat elusive heaven, where he is (or will be after the Day of Judgment—opinions seem to differ somewhat on the subject) surrounded by the immortal souls of the elect.
Now this view, or any view of God as a personal being, is becoming frankly untenable. The difficulty of understanding the functions of a personal ruler in a universe which the march of knowledge is showing us ever more clearly as self-ordered and self-ordering in every minutest detail is becoming more and more apparent. Either a personal God is a ruler without power, or heisthe universe. In the former case he becomes a mere fly on the wheel; in the latter we revert to a frank pantheism, in which the idea of a personal Being can no longer properly be upheld. A personal creation of the world, in any reasonable sense of that term, is now meaningless except for a hypothetical creation of the original substance of the cosmos in the first instance. Creation of earth and stars, plants, animals, and man—Darwin swept the last vestiges of that into the waste-paper basket of outworn imaginations, already piled high with the debris of earlier ages. After the psychological insight which the last half-century has given us, miracles have ceased to be miracles, and have become either delusions, or, more frequently, unusual phenomena for which a cause has not yet been found. The immutability of the fundamental laws of matterand motion, more particularly the grand generalization of the conservation of energy and the substitution by science of an orderly for a disorderly conception of nature, make it impossible to think of occasional interference by God with this world’s affairs. Accordingly the value of petitionary prayer falls to the ground. Revelation and inspiration have resolved themselves into exceptional mental states, and are no longer looked upon as a sort of telepathy between divine and human minds. If we reflect, we see that all these intellectual difficulties in modern theology arise from the advance of scientific knowledge, which has shown that the older ideas of God were only symbolic, and therefore false when the attempt was made to give real value to them.
That being the quagmire in which traditional Christian theology is floundering, it behoves us to discuss the opposite side of the question, and to see whether the very advance of science which has seemed to exert only a destructive influence may not have made it possible to build up new and sounder conceptions of fundamental religious ideas.
We have already seen that the conception of God always represents man’s idea of the powers operating in the universe; that it has two components—the outer consisting of these powers so far as they are known to man, the inner consisting in the mode in which the conception is organized and the way it is related to the rest of the personality. It is obvious that both man’s knowledge of the cosmic powers aswell as his method of organizing them in his mind can grow and change; and man’s Gods can—and do—grow and change accordingly.
The growth of science in the last few centuries has radically altered our knowledge of the outer world. It has shown us, in the first place, a fundamental unity of all phenomena, however apparently diverse. It has shown us the inorganic part of the cosmos pursuing a direction—the progressive degradation of energy—which, if it is carried to its limit, will result in the extinction not only of life, but of all activity. It has next shown us the organic part, sprung from the inorganic but running a different course, ascending during evolutionary time to increasing heights of complexity and to increasing control over its inorganic environment.
Finally, we have the psychozoic or human portion—that minute fraction of the cosmos which yet is of a preponderant importance, since it definitely represents the highest level yet reached by evolutionary progress. In this sphere mind is the dominant partner, biologically speaking, in the mind-matter partnership; evolution can begin to be conscious instead of fortuitous; and truevaluesarise which, incorporated in ideals and purposes, exert an effect upon events.
As regards our own mental organization, psychological science has recently shown us the enormous importance of what we may call the extra-personal portion of our mind—all that which is normallysubconscious, or has not been during our mental growth incorporated to form an integral part of our private personality. But this extra-personal part of the mind may from time to time irrupt into the personal, and does normally do so at some period of life. It is the merit of psychology to have shown the true nature of this relationship between personal and extra-personal, which was in the past a source of an infinity of mistaken ideas—revelation, inspiration, possession, direct communion with angels, saints, gods, or devils, and so forth.
Thus the powers operating in the cosmos are, though unitary, yet subdivisible; and, though subdivisible, yet related. There are the vast powers of inorganic nature, neutral or hostile to man. Yet they gave birth to evolving life, whose development, though blind and fortuitous, has tended in the same general direction as our own conscious desires and ideals, and so gives us an external sanction for our directional activities. This again gave birth to human mind, which, in the race, is changing the course of evolution by acceleration, by the substitution of new methods for old, and by introducing values which are ultimate for the human species; and, in the individual, provides, in the interplay of conscious and subconscious, unbounded possibilities of the invasion of the ordinary and humdrum personality of every day by ideas apparently infinite, emotions the most disinterested and overwhelming.
Still other light has of late years been thrown by psychology upon the inner component of the idea of God. Recent work has shown, for instance, that the mind, unless deliberately corrected and trained, tends to think in terms of symbols instead of along the more arduous paths of intellectual reasoning, tends to explain the unknown in terms of the known, tends accordingly to project the familiar ideas of its own personality as symbols for the explanation of the most varied phenomena. The science of comparative religion has shown us an early stage of religious belief in which but one idea held sway—the idea of a magical influence residing in all things potent for good or ill: the projection was so complete that no distinction whatever was made between the personal and the impersonal. Later, the idea of particular divine beings or Gods arose; and in early stages man still continued to project not only his own passions, but even his own form, into these divinities. The statement of Genesis that God made man in his own image is in reality an admission of the converse process. Still later, the divinity was purged of the grossness of human form and members, and, gradually, of characteristically human passions; but God remained personal, although the personality was now organized chiefly of ideals.
There is, however, no reason whatever to admit that personality is a genuine characteristic of any knowable God; but every reason to suspect that it is, as a matter of hard fact, merely another productof this property of projection so strong in the human mind.
On the other hand, an analysis of religious experience as a phenomenon, as something equally worthy of patient and scientific study as the gas-laws or the methods of evolution, shows that the powers which move in the universe, when organized by thought into a God, are apprehended by the majority of the great mystics and those to whom religious experience has been richly granted as in some way personal. Although, if our line of argument is valid, this will be partly due to a projection of the idea of personality into the idea of God, yet it is clearly in part due to the idea of God being organized by our mental activity to be of the same general type as is a normal personality—as something into which concepts of power, of knowledge, and of feeling and will all enter, with such interconnections between its parts that, like a personality, all of its resources are capable of mobilization at any one point. It will be one of the great constructive tasks of psychology to ascertain just how such a conception is organized, and how it operates to produce the experiences, often of overpowering intensity and lasting value, which as a matter of record it often does.[43]
Put broadly and roughly, there are, then, three main accounts possible, or at any rate actually found in occidental civilization to-day, of the phenomenagenerally known as religious. The first is that of the out-and-out sceptic—that they are all illusions, imaginations of the childhood of the race. This is an extreme view which I do not feel called upon to discuss. The second is the view of almost every existing religious denomination in Europe—that God is a personal being. And the third is one, only just beginning to take shape, which I have endeavoured, with every consciousness of inadequacy, to outline—the account made possible by a radically scientific view of the universe.
Those who adopt the third attitude believe that the second is a purely symbolic and not very accurate presentation of certain fundamental facts, of which they are attempting to give what seems to them an account which is closer to reality. Before the scientific work of the last three or four centuries, it was impossible to attempt what we may call a realistic account of this nature, so that symbols were perforce adopted. In Christian theology man formulated a coherent scheme, which, however, was purely symbolic, to account for the facts we have just been considering. The chief feature in any such scheme must be the conception of the powers with which man feels himself in relation; and in this particular formulation his conception of these powers was that of a God who was also a person.
Now, the danger of symbols and symbolic thinking comes when the symbols are accepted for real, and taken as they stand for bases from whichconclusions shall be drawn. The Christian theologians did not hesitate—why should they, in their position?—to use the personal nature of the Deity as one premiss in a whole series of syllogisms, and to accept at their full face value the conclusions which emerged from these syllogisms.
If a personal God was ruler of the universe, then he must be omnipotent; if truly divine, then omniscient; if worthy of worship, then all-wise. He must be capable of interfering with the course of events by “miracles,” of granting our prayers, of communicating directly with us, of deciding our fate in afterlife. From these conclusions yet further conclusions were drawn. If God revealed himself in the Bible, then the Bible was “true” ... with all that this in its turn involved as to our beliefs concerning natural causation, creation, our relations with God, or personal immortality. The whole scheme was self-consistent, and worked as well as many other human schemes. But what if the whole premiss, of God as a personal being, ruler and father and judge—what if this were not in fact tenable? Then, of course, the whole edifice itself would come toppling down. That is what is actually happening to-day. God, as personal ruler, is being slowly driven out of the universe, but returning as this organized idea of which we have spoken.
Another cardinal point in the older systems has always been its claim to possess a revelation of Truth which is in some real ways complete and absolute.
This leads us on immediately to a subject of especial interest to us as rationalists—namely, the relation of religion to science and to free inquiry. Religious beliefs, if they are really believed with any conviction, will be to a greater or less extent dominant beliefs, because by their nature they concern the general relationship between man and his surroundings, which must bulk large in all our lives; and it is matter of common experience with what obstinacy and fanaticism they may be held. If therefore a system of religious belief includes the belief that it is revealed, and therefore true with a more ultimate and complete truth than the truths of observation or experiment, any fact or idea which conflicts with any part of the system will be inevitably treated not only as dangerous to the system, but as actually evil: and this tendency is reinforced by the craving of the average man for certainty, for intellectual satisfaction without undue intellectual effort. The cynic who said that beliefs are generally held with an intensity inversely proportional to the amount of evidence which can be adduced in their support was not wholly or only cynical.
Since, however, the progress of modern science, in addition to the discovery of many wholly new facts, has largely consisted in a proper investigation and a revaluation of the facts subsumed without full analysis into the symbolism of theology, the inevitable result has been for the two to find each other in constant antagonism. But be it noted that it is notscience and religion which are in conflict, but science and a particular brand of religion.
The essence of science is free inquiry combined with experimental testing. The result is a body of knowledge, of fact, and explanatory theory, which can properly be regarded as established. Byestablished, however, we do not mean that it is absolute or immutable—we expect addition and modification. But we also expect that, in the future as in the past, the additions and alterations will not involve the scrapping and rebuilding of the whole edifice, but that it will continue to be harmonious with itself, and to undergo a gradual evolution. This has been so even with such marked changes as the discovery of radioactivity, the new outlook in psychology, or the rediscovery of Mendelism—the new, after apparent contradiction, has been or is being harmoniously incorporated and organized with the old.
This in its turn implies that toleration should ever be encouraged by the scientist. Humility cannot be genuine if combined with unsupported dogmatic assertion: and the recognition that the ideas of revelation and divine personality are such dogmatic assertions brings a whole new outlook into being.
Putting matters in a nutshell, we can say that a system based on revelation or on the pushing of unsupported premisses concerning the nature of God to their complete logical conclusions is bound to result in some degree of hostility to the pursuit of truth for its own sake; whereas a religious system basingitself on scientific method, while it must resign itself to being unable to produce a complete, ready-made, and immutable scheme, however beloved of the multitude (and indeed so beloved because it satisfies a lower and more primitive mode of thinking only), on the other hand can be assured that its knowledge and effectiveness will increase, and that contradictions will resolve themselves, provided that free inquiry, free speech, and tolerance are allowed and practised. Attempts to reconcile the old formulation with the new facts and ideas, when not insincere, are doomed to failure because the premisses of the two systems are different.
In conclusion, we may perhaps point out some of the bearings of such a change. In the first place, the change in our conception of God necessitates the stressing of religious experience, as such, as against belief in particular dogma, or in the efficacy of special ritual.
Secondly, it emphasizes the need for tolerance and enlightenment. The scientific view asserts not that its knowledge is absolute or complete, but that, although relative and partial, it will indubitably continue to grow harmoniously along the general lines already laid down.
Another change wrought by the inclusion of all phenomena under one head and the banishment of the supernatural is the inestimable advantage that we thereby find the possibility of constructing a single general view of the universe for civilization. Atpresent there are two that matter—the orthodox religious and the scientific. The religious starts from the top, the scientific from the bottom; but the scientific has been creeping up, and now that it has begun to attack the problem of mind it will be able to drown the other out. Since the current religious formulation is only symbolic, it cannot become scientific; but since the scientific is based on the closest possible analysis of reality, it can become religious so far as it investigates the realities of religious experience.
Once it has done this, we shall be able to construct aWeltanschauungsuch as never before, with roots in the ordered reactions of inorganic matter, trunk strong with the steady progress of evolving life, and branches reaching up into the highest realities of the spirit. Union is strength; and it is one of the prime duties of educated men and women to see that the present duality and antagonism at the heart of what should be the central unity of civilization—of its most fundamental idea, its conception of the universe—should be terminated.
The new outlook will also interlock with the youthful science of psychology to produce great results. Much of what now is interpreted, by all save the few experts, in supernatural terms of the old theology will become intelligible as a product of the natural workings of that amazing thing, the human mind. We shall not have sects trying to exploit the normal dissatisfactions and disharmonies of adolescence in order to secure “conversions”; repressed tendencieswill not be thought to be the voice of a personal Devil, nor neglected ideals the voice of a personal God. Irrational fear, to-day still the greatest enemy of mankind and most potent annihilator of happiness, will, by comprehension of its curious mechanism and its persistence, often transformed, from childhood to adult life, become amenable to treatment and be made more and more to disappear. Proper analysis of mental processes such as repression, suppression, and sublimation will enable us to make better use of our faculties, and deliberately to build up treasures of spiritual experience now attainable only by the lucky few in whom temperament and circumstances accidentally conspire.
On the moral side, the idea that a Divine command has, at some remote period in the past, provided a fixed code, and the belief in the immutable truth of certain dogmas—these will happily disappear. Morals, like all else, not only have evolved, but should evolve. We shall find, for instance, that no excuse will be left for the common horrified (and horrible) views of sex, as of something inherently hateful, of all its pleasures as involving sin; for it will be realized that too much of the present attitude is due to the projection of our own conflicts and complexes, our own pruriences and pruderies, into what might be innocent and joyous. But this merits a fuller discussion than we can here allot.
Again, if I had space at my disposal, I would write of the changes in the position and constitution ofreligion brought about by changes other than those in religious beliefs themselves. Most important, of course, are the spread of education on the one hand, and the spread of the facilities for the most varied spiritual enjoyment on the other. If the people is educated to a point at which it can judge for itself, it wants no special priests or clerical mediators; its mediators are those who are specially fitted to unravel the intellectual, emotional, and moral difficulties of its own day and for all time—poets, philosophers, and men of science. The spread of facilities for reading, for seeing plays and works of art, and hearing good music, means of course that, whereas in ruder epochs the Church provided the principal way of psychological sublimation, now sublimation and spiritual refreshment can be achieved equally or more effectively (and every whit as religiously) without ever frequenting a “place of worship” or belonging to any denomination. This tendency towards fluidity and plasticity, towards many possibilities of sublimation instead of one, may by some be lamented. But, as a matter of fact, it is in full accord with all we know of biological progress. Man has attained his position of biological pre-eminence simply and solely by virtue of the plasticity of his mind, which substitutes infinitude of potentiality for the limited range of actuality given by the instinctive reactions of lower forms. Humanity will always have some religion, and it will always be of the utmost importance to man, both as individual and asspecies. But the possibility of satisfying his religious tendencies intellectually, emotionally, and morally, without rigid creed, limited ritual, and iron-bound code of morals, will mean the liberation of all that is best in religion from too narrow shackles, and the lifting it on to a plane where it may be not only more free, but more rich.
It is the task of Rationalism to see that religion, this fundamental and important activity of man, shall neither be allowed to continue in false or inadequate forms, nor be stifled or starved, but made to help humanity in a vigorous growth that is based on truth and in constant contact with reality.
(For bibliography, see the end of the next essay.)
[43]See W. James,Varieties of Religious Experience; E. Underhill,Essentials of Mysticism.