“I stood at Naples once, a night so darkI could have scarce conjectured there was earthAnywhere, sky or sea or world at all:But the night’s black was burst through by a blaze—Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,Through her whole length of mountain visible:There lay the city thick and plain with spires,And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.So may the truth be flashed out by one blow.”
“I stood at Naples once, a night so darkI could have scarce conjectured there was earthAnywhere, sky or sea or world at all:But the night’s black was burst through by a blaze—Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,Through her whole length of mountain visible:There lay the city thick and plain with spires,And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.So may the truth be flashed out by one blow.”
“I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:
But the night’s black was burst through by a blaze—
Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
Through her whole length of mountain visible:
There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.
So may the truth be flashed out by one blow.”
To some the truth of God never comes closer than a logical conclusion. He is held to be as a living item in a creed. To the mystic he becomes real in the same sense that experienced beauty is real, or the feel of spring is real, or that summer sunlight is real—he has been found, he has been met, he is present.
Before discussing the crucial question whether these experiences are evidential and are worthy of consideration as an addition to the world’s stock of truth and knowledge I must say a few words about the normality or abnormality of them. Nothing of any value can be said on this point of mystical experience in theabstract. One must first catch his concrete case. Some instances are normal and some are undoubtedly abnormal. Trance, ecstasy and rapture are unusual experiences and in that sense not normal occurrences. They usually indicate, furthermore, a pathological condition of personality and are thus abnormal in the more technical sense. There is, however,something more to be said on this point. It seems pretty well established that some persons—and they have often been creative leaders and religious geniuses—have succeeded in organizing their lives, in finding their trail, in charging their whole personality with power, in attaining a moral dynamic and in tapping vast reservoirs of energy by means of states which, if occurring in other persons, would no doubt be called pathological. The real test here is a pragmatic one. It seems hardly sound to call a state abnormal if it has raised the experiencer, as a mystic experience often does, into a hundred horse-power man and through his influence has turned multitudes of other men and women into more joyous, hopeful and efficient persons. This question of abnormality and reality is thus not one to be settled off-hand by a superficial diagnosis.
An experience which brings spaciousness of mind, new interior dimensions, ability to stand the universe—and the people in it—and capacity to work at human tasks with patience, endurance and wisdom may quite intelligently be called normal, though to an external beholder it may look like what he usually calls a trance of hysteria, a state of dissociation, or hypnosis by auto-suggestion. It should be added, however, as I havealready said, that mystical experience is not confined to these extremer types. They may or may not be pathological. The calmer and more restrained stages of mysticism are more important and significant and are no more marked with the stigma of hysteria than is love-making, enjoyment of music, devotion to altruistic causes, risking one’s life for country, or any lofty experience ofvalue.
We come at length to the central question of our consideration: Do mystical experiences settle anything? Are they purely subjective and one-sided, or do they prove to have objective reference and so to be two-sided? Do they take the experiencer across the chasm that separates “self” from “Other”? Mystical experience undoubtedly feels as though it had objective reference. It comes to the individual with indubitable authority. He is certain that he has found some thing other than himself. He has an unescapable conviction that he is in contact and commerce with reality beyond the margins of his personal self. “A tremendous muchness is suddenly revealed,” as William James once put it.
We do not get very far when we undertake toreduce knowledge to an affair of sense-experience. “They reckon ill who leave me out,” can be said by the organized, personal, creative mind as truly as by Brahma. There are many forms of human experience in which the data of the senses are so vastly transcended that they fail to furnish any real explanation of what occurs in consciousness. This is true of all our experiences ofvalue, which apparently spring out of synthetic or synoptic activities of the mind, i.e., activities in which the mind is unified and creative. The vibrations of ether which bombard the rods and cones of the retina may be the occasion for the appreciation of beauty in sky or sea or flower, but they are surely not thecauseof it. The concrete event which confronts me is very likely the occasion for the august pronouncement of moral issues which my conscience makes, but it can not be said that the concrete event in any proper sensecausesthis consciousness of moral obligation. The famous answer of Leibnitz to the crude sense-philosophy of his time is still cogent. To the phrase: “There is nothing in the mind that has not come through the senses,” Leibnitz added, “except the mind itself.” That means that the creative activity of the mind is always an important factor in experience and one that can not be ignored in anyof the processes of knowledge. Unfortunately we have done very little yet in the direction of comprehending the interior depth of the personal mind or of estimating adequately the part which mind itself in its creative capacity plays in all knowledge functions. It will only be when we have succeeded in getting beyond what Plato called the bird-cage theory of knowledge to a sound theory of knowledge and to a solid basis for spiritual values that we shall be able to discuss intelligently the “findings” of the mystic.
The world at the present moment is pitiably “short” in its stock of sound theories of knowledge. The prevailing psychologies do not explain knowledge at all. The behaviorists do not try to explain it any more than the astronomer or the physicist does. The psychologist who reduces mind to an aggregation of describable “mind-states” has started out on a course which makes an explanation forever impossible, since knowledge can be explained only through unity and integral wholeness, never through an aggregation of parts, as though it were a mental “shower of shot.” If we expect to talk aboutknowledgeand seriously propose to use that great wordtruth, we must at least begin with the assumption of an intelligent, creative, organizing center ofself-consciousness which can transcend itself and canknowwhat is beyond and other than itself. In short, the talk about a “chasm” between subject and object—knower and thing known—is as absurd as it would be to talk of a chasm between the convex and the concave sides of a curve. Knowledge is always knowledge of an object and mystical experience has all the essential marks of objective reference, as certainly as other forms of experience have.
Professor J. M. Baldwin very well says that there is a form of contemplation in which, as in æsthetic experience, the strands of the mind’s diverging dualisms are “merged and fused.” He adds: “In this experience of a fusion which is not a mixture but which issues in a meaning of its own sort and kind, an experience whose essential character is just this unity of comprehension, consciousness attains its completest, its most direct, and its final apprehension of what Reality is and means.” It really comes round to the question whether the mind of a self-conscious person has any way of approach, except by way of the senses, to any kind of reality. There is noa priorianswer to that question. It can only be settled by experience. It is, therefore, pure dogmatism to say, as Professor Dunlap in his recent attack onmysticism does, that all conscious processes are based on sense-stimulation and all thought as well as perception depends on reaction to sense-stimulus. It is no doubt true that behavior psychology must resort to some such formula, but that only means that such psychology is always dealing with greatly transformed and reduced beings, when it attempts to deal with persons like us who, in the richness of our concrete lives, are never reduced to “behavior-beings.” We have interior dimensions and that is the end on’t! Some persons—and they are by no means feeble-minded individuals—are as certain that they have commerce with a world within as they are that they have experiences of a world outside in space. Thomas Aquinas, who neither in method nor in doctrine leaned toward mysticism, though he was most certainly “a harmonized man,” and who in theory postponed the vision of God to a realm beyond death, nevertheless had an experience two years before he died which made him put his pen and inkhorn on the shelf and never write another word of hisSumma Theologiae. When he was reminded of the incomplete state of his great work and was urged to go on with it, he only replied, “I have seen that which makes all that I have written look small to me.”
It may be just possible that there is a universe of spiritual reality upon which our finite spirits open inward as inlets open into the sea.
“Like the tides on the crescent sea-beachWhen the moon is new and thinInto our hearts high yearningsCome welling and surging in;Come from that mystic oceanWhose rim no foot has trod.Some call it longingBut others call it God.”
“Like the tides on the crescent sea-beachWhen the moon is new and thinInto our hearts high yearningsCome welling and surging in;Come from that mystic oceanWhose rim no foot has trod.Some call it longingBut others call it God.”
“Like the tides on the crescent sea-beach
When the moon is new and thin
Into our hearts high yearnings
Come welling and surging in;
Come from that mystic ocean
Whose rim no foot has trod.
Some call it longing
But others call it God.”
Such a view is perfectly sane and tenable; it conflicts with no proved and demonstrated facts either in the nature of the universe or of mind. It seems anyway to the mystic that there is such a world, that he has found it as surely as Columbus found San Salvador, and that his experience is a truth-telling experience.
But granting that it is truth-telling and has objective reference, is the mystic justified in claiming that he has found and knows God? One does not need to be a very wide and extensive student of mystical experience to discover what a meagerstock of knowledge the genuine mystic reports. William James’ remarkable experience in the Adirondack woods very well illustrates the type. It had, he says, “an intense significance of some sort, if one could onlytellthe significance.... In point of fact, I can’t find a single word for all that significance and don’t know what it was significant of, so that it remains a mere boulder of impression.”[7]At a later date James refers to that “extraordinary vivacity of man’s psychological commerce with something Ideal thatfeels as ifit were also actual.”[8]The greatest of all the fourteenth century mystics, Meister Eckhart, could not put hisimpressioninto words or ideas. What he found was a “wilderness of the Godhead where no one is at home,” i.e., an Object with no particular differentiated, concrete characteristics. It was not an accident that so many of the mystics hit upon thevia negativa, the way of negation, or that they called their discovery “the divine Dark.”
“Whatever your mind comes atI tell you flatGod is not that.”
“Whatever your mind comes atI tell you flatGod is not that.”
“Whatever your mind comes at
I tell you flat
God is not that.”
Mystical experience does not supply concrete information. It does not bring new finite facts, new items that can be used in a description of “the scenery and circumstance” of the realm beyond our sense horizons. It is the awareness of a Presence, the consciousness of a Beyond, the discovery, as James puts it, that “we are continuous with a More of the same quality, which is operative in us and in touch with us.”
The most striking effect of such experience is not new fact-knowledge, not new items of empirical information, but new moral energy, heightened conviction, increased caloric quality, enlarged spiritual vision, an unusual radiant power of life. In short, the whole personality, in the case of the constructive mystics, appears to be raised to a new level of life and to have gained from somewhere many calories of life-feeding, spiritual substance. We are quite familiar with the way in which adrenalin suddenly flushes into the physical system and adds a new and incalculable power to brain and muscle. Under its stimulus a man can carry out a piano when the house is on fire. May not, perhaps, some energy from some Source with which our spirits are allied flush our inner being with forces and powers by which we can be fortified to stand the universe and more than standit! “We are more than conquerors through Him that loved us,” is the way one of the world’s greatest mystics felt.
Mystical experience—and we must remember as Santayana has said, that “experience is like a shrapnel shell and bursts into a thousand meanings”—does at least one thing. It makes God sure to the person who has had the experience. It raises faith and conviction to the nth power. “The God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shined into my heart to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God,” is St. Paul’s testimony. “I knew God by revelation,” declares George Fox. “I was as one who hath the key and doth open.” “The man who has attained this felicity,” Plotinus says, “meets some turn of fortune that he would not have chosen, but there is not the slightest lessening of his happiness for that” (En. I: iv. 7). But this experience, with its overwhelming conviction and its dynamic effect, can not be put into the common coin of speech. Frederic Myers has well expressed the difficulty:
“Oh could I tell ye surely would believe it!Oh could I only say what I have seen!How should I tell or how can ye receive it,How, till He bringeth you where I have been?”
“Oh could I tell ye surely would believe it!Oh could I only say what I have seen!How should I tell or how can ye receive it,How, till He bringeth you where I have been?”
“Oh could I tell ye surely would believe it!
Oh could I only say what I have seen!
How should I tell or how can ye receive it,
How, till He bringeth you where I have been?”
There is no concrete “information” which can be shared with others.
When Columbus found San Salvador he was able to describe it to those who did not sail with him in the Santa Maria, but when the mystic finds God he can not give us any “knowledge” in plain words of everyday speech. He can only refer to his boulder, or his Gibraltar, ofimpressionThat situation is what we should expect. We can not, either, describe any of our great emotions. We can not impart what flushes into our consciousness in moments of lofty intuition. We have a submerged life within us which is certainly no less real than our hand or foot. It influences all that we do or say, but we do not find it easy to utter it. In the presence of the sublime we have nothing to say—or if we do say anything it is a great mistake! Language is forged to deal with experiences which are common to many persons, i.e., to experiences which refer to objects in space. We have no vocabulary for the subtle, elusive flashes of vision which are unique, individual and unsharable, as for instance is our personal sense of “the tender grace of a day that is dead.” We are forced in all these matters to resort to symbolic suggestion and to artistic devices. Coventry Patmore said with much insight:
“In divinity and loveWhat’s best worth saying can’t be said.”
“In divinity and loveWhat’s best worth saying can’t be said.”
“In divinity and love
What’s best worth saying can’t be said.”
I believe that mystical experiences do in the long run expand our knowledge of God and do succeed in verifying themselves. Mysticism is a sort of spiritual protoplasm that underlies, as a basic substance, much that is best in religion, in ethics and in life itself. It has generally been the mystic, the prophet, the seer that has spotted out new ways forward in the jungle of our world, or lifted our race to new spiritual levels. Their experiences have in some way equipped them for unusual tasks, have given supplies of energy to them which their neighbors did not have, and have apparently brought them into vital correspondence with dimensions and regions of reality that others miss. The proof that they have found God, or at least a domain of spiritual reality, does not lie in some new stock of knowledge, not in some gnostic secret, which they bring back; it is to be seen rather in the moral and spiritual fruits which test out and verify the experience.
Consciousness of beauty or of truth or of goodness baffles analysis as much as consciousness of God does. These values have no objective standing ground in current psychology. They are notthings in the world of space. They submit to no adequate casual explanation. They have their ground of being in some other kind of world than that of the mechanical order, a world composed of quantitative masses of matter in motion. These experiences of value, which are as real for consciousness as stone walls are, make very clear the fact that there are depths and capacities in the nature of the normal human mind which we do not usually recognize and of which we have scant and imperfect accounts in our text-books. Our minds taken in their full range, in other words, have some sort of contact and relationship with an eternal nature of things far deeper than atoms and molecules. Only very slowly and gradually has the race learned through finite symbols and temporal forms to interpret beauty and truth and goodness which in their essence are as ineffable and indescribable as the mystic’s experience of God is. Plato often speaks as though he had high moments of experience when he rose to the naked vision of beauty—beauty “alone, separate and eternal,” as he says, and his myths are very likely told, as J. A. Stewart believes, to assist others to experience this same vision—a beauty which “does not grow nor perish, is without increase or diminution and endures for everlasting.”But as a matter of fact, however exalted heavenly and enduring beauty may be in its essence we knowwhat it isonly as it appears in fair forms of objects, of body, of soul, of actions; in harmonious blending of sounds or colors; in well-ordered or happily-combined groupings of many aspects in one unity which is as it ought to be. Truth and moral goodness always transcend our attainments and we sometimes feel that the very end and goal of life is the pursuit of that truth or that goodness which eye hath not seen nor ear heard. But whatever truth we do attain or whatever goodness we do achieve is always concrete. Truth is just this one more added fact that resists all attempts to doubt it. Goodness is just this simple everyday deed that reveals a heroic spirit and a brave venture of faith in the midst of difficulties. So, too, the mystic knowledge of God is not some esoteric communication, supplied through trance or ecstasy; it is an intuitive personal touch with God, felt to be the essentially real, the bursting forth of an intense love for him which heightens all the capacities and activities of life, followed by the slow laboratory results which verify it. “All I could never be” now is. It seems possible to stand the universe—even to do something toward the transformationof it. The bans are read for that most difficult of all marriages, the marriage of the possible with the actual, the ideal with the real. And if the experience does not prove that the soul has found God, it at least does this: it makes the soul feel that proofs of God are wholly unnecessary.
Twenty years ago inA Dynamic Faith, after reviewing the new questions which the great sciences had raised for religion, I said: “There are still harder problems than any of these. Psychology has opened a series of questions which make the boldest tremble for his faith in an endless life or in any spiritual reality.” The twenty years that have intervened have made my point much more clear. It is now pretty generally recognized that the deepest issues of the faith are to be settled in this field. The problem of the real nature of the human soul is at the present moment probably the most important religious question before us, for upon the answer to it all our vital spiritual interests depend. If man has no unique interior domain, if he is only a tiny bit of that vast system of naturalism in which every curve of process and development is rigidly determined by antecedent causes, then “spiritual”is only a high-sounding word with a metaphorical significance, but with no basis of reality in the nature of things. There is certainly no “place” in the external world of space where we can expect to find spiritual realities. They are not to be found by going “somewhere.” Olympus has been climbed, and it was as naturalistic as any other mountain peak. Eden is only a defined area of Mesopotamia, and that blessed word can work no miracles for us now. The dome of the sky is only an optical illusion. It is no supersensuous realm on which we can build our hopes. The beyond as a spiritual reality is within, or it is nowhere. Psychology, however, has not been very encouraging in promises of hope. It has gone the way of the other sciences and has taken an ever increasing slant toward naturalism. The result is that most so-called “psychologies of religion” reduce religion either to a naturalistic or to a subjective basis, which means in either case that religion as a way to some objective spiritual reality has eluded us and has disappeared as a constructive power. Many a modern psychologist can say with Browning’s Cleon:
“And I have written three books on the soul,Proving absurd all written hitherto,And putting us to ignorance again.”
“And I have written three books on the soul,Proving absurd all written hitherto,And putting us to ignorance again.”
“And I have written three books on the soul,
Proving absurd all written hitherto,
And putting us to ignorance again.”
Two of the main tendencies in what is usually called scientific psychology are (1) the “behaviorist” tendency and (2) the tendency to reduce the inner life to a series of “mind states.” Let us consider behaviorism first. This turns psychology into “a purely objective experimental branch of natural science.”[9]It aims at “the prediction and control of behavior.” “Introspection forms no essential part of its method.” One is not concerned with “interpretation in terms of consciousness,” one is interested only in reactions, responses—in short, inbehaviorin the presence of stimuli which produce movements. The body is a complicated organ and “mind” is merely a convenient term to express its “activities.”[10]The behaviorist “recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.” Psychology becomes “the science of behavior,”[11]the study of “the activity of man or animal as it can be observed from the outside, either with or without attempting to determine the mental states by inference from these acts.” Emotions become reduced forthwith to “the bodily resonance” set up in the muscular and visceral systems by instinctive movements inthe presence of objects, these curious movements being due entirely to the inheritance of physiological structure adapted at least in the early stages to aid survival. There is no way by which behaviorist psychology can give any standing to religion or to any type of spiritual values. “Æsthetics is the study of the useless,” as William James baldly states the case. Conscience disappears or becomes another name for the inheritance or acquisition of certain types of social behavior. Everything which we call ethics or morality changes into well-defined and rigidly determined behavior. There is nothing more “spiritual” about it than there is in the fall of a raindrop or in the luminous trail of a meteor, or in any form of what has happily been called “cosmic weather.”
This reduction of personality to a center of activity is a reaction from the dualistic sundering of mind and body inherited from Descartes. The theory of psycho-physical parallelism is utterly bankrupt. Idealism, which is an attempt to get round theimpasseof dualism by treating mind as the only reality, is abhorrent to scientists and unpopular with young philosophers, especially in America. Some other solution is therefore urgent. The easiest one at hand, though it is obviously temporary and superficial, is to cut acrossthe mind loop, ignore its unique, originative, creative capacity and its interior depth, to deal only with body plus body’s activities, and to call that “psychology.”
The “mind-state” psychology takes us little farther on. It also is a form of naturalism. “Mind-state” psychology makes more of introspection than behaviorist psychology does, and it works more than the latter does in terms of consciousness, which for the behaviorist can be almost ignored or questioned as an existing reality. According to this view, mind or consciousness is composed of a vast number of “elemental units,” and the business of psychology is to analyze and describe these units or states and to discover the laws of their arrangement or succession. Mind, on this theory, is an aggregate or sum total of “states.” Professor James, who gives great place to “mind states,” will, however, not admit that they are permanent and repeatable “units,” passing and returning unaltered. In his usual vivid way he says that “a permanently existing ‘idea’ [i.e., mental unit] which makes its appearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodical intervals is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades.”[12]And yet he continuesto deal with mind as a vast series of more or less describable states. Some states are “substantive,” such as our “perceptions,” our “memories,” or our definite “images,” when the mind perches and rests upon some clear and describable thought, and on the other hand there are “transitive states” which are vague, hard to catch or hold or express, and which reveal the mind in flight, in passage, on the way from one substantive state to another.
When we ask the “mind-state” psychologist to tell us about the soul or to supply us with a working substitute for it, he relegates it to the scrap heap where lie the collected rubbish and the antiquated mental furniture of the medieval centuries. We have no need of it. It is only awordanyhow. It has always been an expensive luxury and a continual bother. We are better off with it gone. When we look about for a “self as knower,” or for a guardian of our identity, we find all that we need in these same “passing states of consciousness.” They not only know things and facts, but they also know themselves, and successively inherit and adapt all the preceding “states” have gained and acquired. The state of the present moment owns the thoughts and experiences which preceded it, for “what possessesthe possessor possesses the possessed.” “In our waking hours,” Professor James says, “though each pulse of consciousness dies away and is replaced by another, yet that other, among the things it knows, knows its own predecessor and finding it ‘warm,’ greets it saying, ‘Thou artmineand part of the same self with me.’” It seems, then, this famous writer concludes, that “states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the soul to exist; but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous.”[13]We are certainly hard up if we must depend on proofs which theology can give us!
We are thus once more reduced to a condition of sheer naturalism. Our stream of consciousness is only a rapid succession of passing states, each “state” causally attached to a molecular process in the brain. “Everypsychosisis the result of aneurosis.” There is no soul, there is no creative spiritual pilot of the stream, there is no freedom, there are no moral values, there is nothing but passing “cosmic weather,” sometimes peeps of sunshine, sometimes moonshine, sometimes drizzle or blizzard, and sometimes cycloneor waterspout! To meet the appalling thinness of this “cinema” of mind states, we are given the comfort of believing that there is an under-threshold world within, possibly more real and surely more important than this little rivulet of states which make up our conscious life. There is a “fringe” to consciousness more wonderful than that which adorned the robe of the high priest. This “fringe” defies description and baffles all analysis. It is a halo or penumbra which surrounds every “state” and holds all the states vitally together, so that “states” turn out to be unsundered in some deeper mysterious currents of being. Others would call this same underlying, mysterious part of us the subliminal “self,” i.e., under-threshold “self.” It is a kind of semi-spiritual matrix where the states of consciousness are formed and gestated. It is the source to which we may trace everything that can not be explained by the avenues of the senses. Demons and divinities knock at its doors and visitants from superterrestrial shores peep in at its windows. It is often treated, especially of course by Frederic Myers, as a deeper “self,” more or less discontinuous with our conscious upper self, the self of mind states. All work of genius is due to “subliminal uprushes,” “an emergenceinto the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will in profounder regions of his being.” As is well known, Professor James resorts to these “subliminal uprushes” for his explanation of all the deeper religious experiences and he has done much to give credit to these “profounder regions of our being” and to make the subliminal theory popular. He does not, however, as Myers does, treat it as another “self,” an intermediary between earth and heaven, a messenger and a mediator of all those higher and diviner aspects of life which transcend the sphere of sense and of the empirical world.
No theory certainly is sound which begins by cutting the subconscious and the conscious life apart into two more or less dissociated selves. There is every indication and evidence of continuity and correlation between what is above and what is below the threshold which in any case is as relative and artificial a line as is the horizon. The so-called “uprushes” of the genius are finely correlated with his normal experience into whichthey “uprush.” The “uprushes” which convey truth to Socrates beautifully fit, first, the character of the man and, secondly, the demands of the temporal environment. Dante’s “uprushes” correspond to the psychological climate of the medieval world, and Shakespeare’s “uprushes” are well suited to the later period of the Renaissance. All subliminal communications are congruent and consonant with the experience of the person who receives them. The visions of apocalyptic seers are all couched in the imagery of the apocalyptic schools, and so, too, the reports of mediums are all in terms of spiritualistic beliefs. We shall never find the solution of our religious problems by dividing the inner life of man into two unrelated selves, by whatever name we call them, for any religion that is to be real must go all the way through us, must unify all our powers, and must furnish a spring and power by which we live here and now in the sphere of our consciousness, our character, and our will.
It proves to be just as impossible to cut consciousness up into the fragmentary bits or units called mind states, or to sunder it into a so-called “self as knower” and “self as known.” Consciousness is never a shower of shot—a series of discontinuous units. It is the most completelyintegral unity known to us anywhere in the universe. There are no “parts” to it; it is without breaks or gaps. It is one undivided whole. The only unit we can properly talk about is our unique persisting personal self in conscious relation to an environment. We can, of course, treat consciousness in the abstract as an aggregate of states and we can formulate a scientific account of this constructed entity as we can of any other abstracted section of reality. But this abstracted entity is forever totally different from the warm and intimate inner life within us, as we actually live it and feel its flow. Any state or process which we may talk about is only an artificial fragment of a larger, deeper reality which gives the “fragment” its peculiar being and makes it what it is. Underneath all that appears and happens in the conscious flow is the personal self for whom the appearances occur. Any psychologist who explicitly leaves this out of his account always implicitly smuggles it in again.
The most striking fact of experience isknowing that we know. The same consciousness which knows any given object in the same pulse of consciousness knows itself as knowing it. Self-consciousness is present in all consciousness of objects. The thinker that thinks is involved in andis bound up with all knowledge, even of the simplest sort. Every idea, every feeling, and every act of will is what it is because it is in living unity with our entire personal self. If any such “state” got dissociated, slipped away and undertook to do business on its own hook, it would be as unknown to us as our guardian angel is. The mind that knows can never be separated from the world that is known. One can think in abstraction of a mind apart by itself and of a world equally isolated—but no such mind and no such world actually exist. To be a real mind, a real self, is to be in active commerce with a real world given in experience. One thinks his object in the same unified pulse of consciousness in which he thinks himself and vice versa. There is no self-consciousness without object-consciousness, and there is no object-consciousness without self-consciousness. Outer and inner, knower and known, are not two but forever one. The “soul,” therefore, is not something hidden away in behind or above and beyond our ideas and feelings and will activities. It is the active living unity of personal consciousness—the one psychic integer and unit for a true psychology. It binds all the items of experience into one indivisible unity, one organic whole through which our personal typeof life is made possible. At every moment of waking, intelligent life we look out upon each fact, each event, each experience from a wider self which organizes the new fact in with its former experiences, weaves it into the web of its memories and emotions and purposes, makes the new fact a part of itself, and yet at the same time knows itself as transcending and outliving the momentary fact.
When we study the personal self deeply enough, not as cut up into artificial units, but as the living, undivided whole, which is implied in all coherent experience, we find at once a basis for those ideal values that are rightly called spiritual and for “those mighty hopes that make us men.” The first step toward a genuine basis of spiritual life is to be found in the restoration of the personal self to its true place as the ultimate fact, or datum, of self-conscious experience. As soon as we come back to this central reality, our unified, unique, self-active personality, we find ourselves in possession of material enough; as Browning would say,
“For fifty hopes and fearsAs old and new at once as nature’s self,To rap and knock and enter in our soul,Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,Round the ancient idol, on his base again,—The grand Perhaps!”
“For fifty hopes and fearsAs old and new at once as nature’s self,To rap and knock and enter in our soul,Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,Round the ancient idol, on his base again,—The grand Perhaps!”
“For fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature’s self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,
Round the ancient idol, on his base again,—
The grand Perhaps!”
What we find at once, even without a resort to a subliminal self, or to “uprushes,” is that our normal, personal self-consciousness is a unique, living, self-active, creative center of energies, dealing not only with space and time and tangible things, but dealing as well with realities which are space- and time-transcending. “The things that are not” prove to be immense factors in our lives and constantly “bring to naught the things that are.” The greatest events of history have not been due to physical forces; they have been due to plans and ideals which were real only in the viewless minds of men. Whatwas not yetbrought about what was to be. Alexander the Great with his physical forces, sweeping across the ancient world like a cataclysm of nature, was certainly no more truly a world-builder than was Jesus, who had no armies, who used no tangible forces, but merely put into operation those “things that were not,” i.e., his ideas of what ought to be and his conviction that love is stronger than Roman legions. The simplest and humblest of us, like the Psalmist, find theMeshech where we sojourn too straitened and narrow for us. We have all cried, “Woe is me that I sojourn in Meshech!” The reason that we discover the limits and bounds of our poor Meshech is that we are all the time going beyond the hampering Meshech that tries to contain and imprison us.
The thing which spoils all our finite camping places is our unstilled consciousness that we are made for something more than we have yet realized or attained. Our ideals are an unmistakable intimation of our time-transcending nature. We can no more stop withthat which isthan Niagara can stop at the fringe of the fall. All consciousness of the higher rational type is continually carried forward toward the larger whole that would complete and fulfill its present experience. We are aware of the limit only because we are already beyond it. The present is a pledge of more; the little arc which we have gives us a ground of faith in the full circle which we seek. A study of man’s life which does not deal with this inherent idealizing tendency is likeHamletwith Hamlet left out. Martineau declared:
“Amid all the sickly talk about ‘ideals’ which has become the commonplace of our age, it is well to rememberthat so long as they are dreams of future possibility and not faiths in present realities, so long as they are a mere self-painting of the yearning spirit and not its personal surrender to immediate communion with an infinite Perfection, they have no more solidity or steadiness than floating air-bubbles, gay in the sunshine and broken by the passing wind.... The very gate of entrance to religion, the moment of its new birth, is the discovery that your ideal is the everlasting Real, no transient brush of a fancied angel wing, but the abiding presence and persuasion of the Soul of souls.”[14]
“Amid all the sickly talk about ‘ideals’ which has become the commonplace of our age, it is well to rememberthat so long as they are dreams of future possibility and not faiths in present realities, so long as they are a mere self-painting of the yearning spirit and not its personal surrender to immediate communion with an infinite Perfection, they have no more solidity or steadiness than floating air-bubbles, gay in the sunshine and broken by the passing wind.... The very gate of entrance to religion, the moment of its new birth, is the discovery that your ideal is the everlasting Real, no transient brush of a fancied angel wing, but the abiding presence and persuasion of the Soul of souls.”[14]
In the same vein Pringle-Pattison, one of the wisest of our living teachers, has said:
“Consciousness of imperfection, the capacity for progress, and the pursuit of perfection, are alike possible to man only through the universal life of thought and goodness in which he shares and which, at once an indwelling presence and an unattainable ideal, draws him ‘on and always on.’”[15]
“Consciousness of imperfection, the capacity for progress, and the pursuit of perfection, are alike possible to man only through the universal life of thought and goodness in which he shares and which, at once an indwelling presence and an unattainable ideal, draws him ‘on and always on.’”[15]
It is here in these experiences of ours which spring out of our real nature, but which always carry us beyondwhat isand which make it impossible for us to live in a world composed of “things,” no matter how golden they are, thatwe have the source of our spiritual values. When we talk about values we may use the word in two senses. In the ordinary sense we mean something extrinsic, utilitarian. We mean that we possess something which can be exchanged for something else. It is precious because we can sell it or swap it or use it to keep life going. In the other sense we see value in reference to something whichought to be, whether it now is or not. It isfitto be, it would justify its being in relation to the whole reality. When we speak of ethical or spiritual values we are thinking of something that will minister to the highest good of persons or of a society of persons. Value in this loftier meaning always has to do with ideals. A being without any conscious end or goal, i.e., without an ideal, would have no sense of worth, no spiritual values. It does not appear on the level of instinct. It arises as an appreciation of what ought to be realized in order to complete and fulfill any life which is to be called good. Obviously a person with rich and complex interests will have many scales of value, but lower and lesser ones will fall into place under wider and higher ones, so that one forms a kind of hierarchical system of values with some overtopping end of supreme worth dominating the will.
It becomes one of the deepest questions in the world what connection there is between man’s spiritual values or ideals and the eternal nature of things in the universe. Are these ideals of ours, these values which seem to raise us from the naturalistic to the spiritual level, just our subjective creations, or are they expressions of a coöperating and rational power beyond us and yet in us, giving us intimations of what is true and best in a world more real than that of matter and motion? These ideal values, such as our appreciation of beauty, our confidence in truth, our dedication to moral causes, our love for worthy persons, our loyalty to the Kingdom of God, are not born of selfish preference or individual desire. They are not capricious like dreams and visions. They attach to something deeper than our personal wishes, in fact our faith in them and our devotion to them often cause us to take lines of action straight against our personal wishes and our individual desires. They stand the test of stress and strain, they weather the storms of time which submerge most things, they survive all shock and mutations and only increase in worth with the wastage of secondary goods. They rest on no mere temporary impulse or sporadic whim. They have their roots deep in the life of the race.They have lasted better than Andes or Ararat, and they are based upon common, universal aspects of rational life. They are at least as sure and prophetic as are laws of triangles and relations of space. If we can count on the permanence of the multiplication table and on the continuity of nature, no less can we count on the conservation of values and the continued significance of life.
They seem thus to belong to the system of the universe and to have the guardianship of some invisible Pilot of the cosmic ship. The streams of moral power and the spiritual energies that have their rise in good persons are as much to be respected facts of the universe as are the rivers that carry ships of commerce. Moral goodness is a factor in the constitution of the world, and the eternal nature of the universe backs it as surely as it backs the laws of hydrogen. It does not back every ideal, for some ideals are unfit and do not minister to a coherent and rationally ordered scheme of life. Those ideals only have the august sanction and right of way which are born out of the age-long spiritual travail of the race and which tend to organize men for better team efforts, i.e., which promote the social community life, the organism of the Spirit. Through these spiritualforces, revealed in normal ethical persons, we are, I believe, nearer to the life of God and closer to the revealing centers of the universe than we are when we turn to the subliminal selves of hysterics. The normal interior life of man is boundless and bottomless. It is not a physical reality, to be measured by foot rules or yardsticks. It is a reality of a wholly different order. It is essentially spiritual, i.e., of spirit. In its organized and differentiated life this personal self of ours is often weak and erratic. We feel theurgewhich belongs to the very nature ofspirit, but we blunder in our direction, we bungle our aims and purposes, we fail to discover what it is that we really want. But we are never insulated from the wider spiritual environment which constitutes the true inner world from which we have come and to which we belong. There are many ways of correspondence with this environment. No way, however, is more vital, more life-giving than this way of dedication to the advancement of the moral ideals of the world.