CHAPTER XII.
THE RELIGIOUS INSIGHT.
If thou betake thyself to the ever-living and abiding Truth, the desertion or death of a friend shall not make thee sad. — Imitation of Christ.
Cum contra sapiens, quatenus ut talis consideratur, vix animo movetur, sed sui et Dei et rerum aeterna quadam necessitate conscius, nunquam esse desinit, sed semper vera animi acquiescentia potitur. — Spinoza, Ethica.
We are in a new world of Divine Life. The dark
world of the powers has passed away from our
thought. Here is the Eternal, for which all these
powers exist, in which they dwell. Here we are in
the presence of the Ideal Judge who knows all Good
and Evil. From the other side the world as we
approached it had seemed so restless, so disheartening,
so deaf. The world of our postulates was a brighter
one only because we determined to make it so. But
there was something lonesome in the thought that
the postulates got, as answer from the real world,
only their own echo, and not always that. Their
world was rather their own creation than an
external something that gave them independent support.
Sometimes there seemed to be nothing solid that
could echo back anything at all. Now we seem to
look upon a truth that satisfies indeed no selfish
longings of ours, no whims of theological tradition, no demands of our personal narrow lives. We shall
not learn in this way who is first in the kingdom of
heaven, nor how the dead are raised, nor any answer
to any other special demand of any set of men. We
learn, however, this at least: All truth is known to
One Thought, and that Infinite. What does that
imply? Let us see.
I.
Our argument is somewhat near to the thought
that partially satisfied St. Augustine when he found
it in his Plato. That there should be a truth at all
implies, we have seen, that there should be an
Infinite Truth, known to an Infinite Thought; or, in
other words, that all is for thought, and without
thought is nothing that is. We also are a part of
this infinite thought. We know not yet more of the
nature of this thought, save that it must be eternal,
all-embracing, and One. What then shall we be
able further to say about it?
To answer would be to expound a system of
philosophy. But we must limit ourselves here to the
necessary. And so, for the first, we shall try to
point out what this ideal and infinite life of thought
that we have found as the eternal truth of things
cannot be expected to accomplish for the purposes
of our religion, and then to consider what we may
nevertheless dare to hope from it.
It cannot be expected to furnish us an a priori
knowledge of any fact of experience, of any
particular law of nature, of the destiny of any one finite
being. All that remains just as dark as it was before. We neither rejoice in this result, nor lament it.
Nobody who wanders into the ideal world may expect
to find it ordered for his individual advantage; nor
need he try to find there good investments for his
money. The Infinite does not wait for his
individual approval; although morally speaking he may do
well to get the approval of the Infinite. The
Infinite was not elected to office by his vote, and he
may not impeach it for disregard of his humble
petitions for good things, nor threaten it with want of
confidence because it does not secure passage for his
private bills. In so far as to say this is to condemn
the Real, we unhesitatingly do so. But then, as we
saw in our ethical discussion, the moral insight is not
so much concerned with private bills, as with certain
greater matters. If the moral insight wants
religious support, possibly the failure of all these
personal concerns of ours to find any hint of response
from the Absolute, may not render impossible the
ethical undertakings of the human spirit. If as
individuals we must hear the dreadful words from the
spirit of nature: Du gleichst dem Geist den du
begreifst nicht mir; still it is possible that with a
higher insight, looking upon this same spirit in its
eternal and inmost nature, we may yet come with
full reason at last to say: Erhabner Geist, du gabst
mir, gabst mir alles, warum ich bat. For there are
demands and demands. Man, as lover, demands
success in love, and the course of the world may thwart
him; as toiler, he demands for himself personal
immortality, and the course of the world may care
naught for his individual life; as bereaved, as mourner over his dead, he may demand for his loved
ones also this immortality, and the course of the
world may leave the fate of all his loved ones
mysterious forever; as lover of mankind, he may
demand an infinite future of blessed progress for his
race, and the law of the dissipation of energy may
give him the only discoverable physical answer to
his demand; as just man, he may cry aloud that evil
shall cease from among men, and the wicked may
still laugh in triumph unpunished. And yet for all
this he may find some higher compensation.
Agnostic as he will remain about all the powers of this
world, about the outcome of all finite processes, he
will take comfort in the assurance that an Infinite
Reason is above all and through all, embracing
everything, judging everything, infallible, perfect.
To this Thought he may look up, saying: “Thou
All-Knowing One seest us, what we are, and how we
strive. Thou knowest our frame, and rememberest
that we are as dust. In thy perfection is our Ideal.
That thou art, is enough for our moral comfort.
That thou knowest our evil and our good, that gives
us our support in our little striving for the good.
Not worthless would we be in thy sight; not of the
vile, the base, the devilish party in the warfare of
this world. Thou that judgest shalt say that we,
even in our poor individual lives, are better than
naught. Thou shalt know that in our weakness and
blindness, in our pain and sorrow, in our little days,
in our dark world, ignorant as to the future,
confused with many doubts, beset with endless
temptations, full of dread, of hesitation, of sloth, we yet sought, such as we were, to be in our own fashion
like thee; to know the truth as thou knowest it, to
be full of higher life as thou art full, to be above
strife as thou art above it, to be of one Spirit as
thou art One, to be perfect as thou art perfect. This
thou shalt see in us, and this record shall be eternal,
like our knowledge. In thee what we vaguely aim
to conceive is clear light. In thee the peace that we
strive to find is experienced. And when we try to do
right, we know that thou seest both our striving and
our successes and our failures. And herein we have
comfort. We perish, but thou endurest. Ours is
not thy eternity. But in thy eternity we would be
remembered, not as rebels against the good, but as
doers of the good; not as blots on the face of this
part of thy infinite reality, but as healthy leaves that
flourished for a time on the branches of the eternal
tree of life, and that have fallen, though not into
forgetfulness. For to thee nothing is forgotten.”
This thought, of the Judge that never ceases to
think of us and of all things, never changes, never
mistakes, and that knows the Good simply because
that Good is an clement of the Truth — perhaps this
can sustain us when all else fails. Nothing but this
may be certain; but this, if it be not all that some
people have sought, may be a help to us. This
Religion may have no such hot little fires on its altars
as we at first longed for; but then it is a very old
objection to the stars to say that they bake us no
bread, and only glitter up there in the dark to be
looked at. Yet even the stars are worth something
to us.
II.
But if we leave these limitations of our view, and
pass to its positive religious value, our first sense is
one of joy and freedom to find that our long sought
ideal of a perfect unity of life is here attained. Let
us look away for a moment from our finite existence,
with its doubts and its problems, to the conception
of that infinite life. In that life is all truth, fully
present in the unity of one eternal moment. The
world is no mass of separate facts, stuck one to
another in an external way, but, for the infinite, each
fact is what it is only by reason of its place in the
infinite unity. The world of life is then what we
desired it to be, an organic total; and the
individual selves are drops in this ocean of the absolute
truth.
Thus then, seen in the light of this our result,
the human tasks that we sketched in our ethical
discussion find their place in the objective world.
Now, and in fact for the first time, we can see what
we were really trying to accomplish through our
ideal. We were trying in a practical way to
realize what we now perceive to be the fullness of the
life of God. So that the one highest activity, in
which all human activities were to join, is known to
us now as the progressive realization by men of the
eternal life of an Infinite Spirit. So whereas we
formerly had to say to men: Devote yourselves to
art, to science, to the state, or to any like work that
does tend to organize your lives into one life, we
may now substitute one absolute expression for all those accidental expressions, and may say: Devote
yourselves to losing your lives in the divine life.
For all these special aims that we have mentioned
are but means of accomplishing the knowledge of
the fullness of the truth. And Truth is God.
Now this precept is no barren abstraction. It
means to take hold of every act of life, however
humble and simple. “Where art thou, O man?”
our ideal says to us. “Art thou not in God? To
whom dost thou speak? With whom dost thou walk?
What life is this in whose midst thou livest? What
are all these things that thou seemest to touch?
Whose is all this beauty that thou enjoyest in art,
this unity that thou seekest to produce in thy state,
this truth that thou pursuest in thy thought? All
this is in God and of God. Thou hast never seen,
or heard, or touched, or handled, or loved anything
but God. Know this truth, and thy life must be
transformed to thee in all its significance. Serve
the whole God, not the irrationally separate part
that thy delusions have made thee suppose to be an
independent thing. Live out thy life in its full
meaning; for behold, it is God’s life.”
So, as it seems, the best that we could have wished
from the purely moral side is attained. The
Divine Thought it is that actually accomplishes what
we imperfectly sought to attain, when we defined
for ourselves Duty. In the Divine Thought is
perfectly and finally realized the Moral Insight and the
Universal Will of our ethical discussion. And this
insight and will are not realized as by some Power,
that then should set about to accomplish their fulfillment externally. But in the infinite, where all is
eternally complete, the insight is both present and
fulfilled; the universal will gets what it seeks.
There is no lack there, nor hesitation, nor striving,
nor doubt, nor weariness; but all is eternally
perfect triumph.
Now this, though it sounds mystical enough to
our untrained common sense, is no mere poetry of
thought. It is the direct philosophical outcome of
what we have found by a purely logical process.
The driest thought, the simplest fragment of
rationality, involves this absolute, infinite, and perfect
thought. And this it involves because it involves
the possibility of error, and because, as separate from
the infinite, this possibility of error in a single thought
becomes unintelligible and contradictory. We did
all that we could to escape this conclusion. We
wandered in the thickets of confusion and
contradiction, until there was no chance of finding there a
further pathway. And then we turned to see, and
behold, God was in this place, though we had known
it not. The genuine God that we thus found was no
incomplete, struggling God, whom we might pity in
his conflict with evil, but the all-embracing thought,
in which the truth is eternally finished. And this
God it is that we now see as the complete realization
of our own ideal, as of all worthy ideals.
For consider if you will this element in our
conception of this Thought. Can this infinite know
itself as imperfect, or as not possessing some object
that it knows to be good? This is impossible, and
doubly so. Not only does the conception of an Infinite, in which and for which are all things, wholly
exclude the possibility of any good thing beyond
the Infinite itself, but also in still another way does
the same truth appear. For if you suppose that this
infinite thought desires some perfection G, that it
has not, then either it is right in supposing this
perfection to be truly desirable, or it is wrong. In
either case the previous argument of Chapter XI.
shows us that the truth or the falsity of this
judgment of desire about G must exist as known truth
or falsity for a higher thought, which, including the
thought that desires, and itself actually having this
desired good thing, compares the desired object with
the conception of the thought that desires it, and
judges of them both. Above the desire, then, must
in every case exist the satisfaction of the desire in a
higher thought. So that for the Infinite there can
be no unsatisfied desire. Unsatisfied desire exists
only in the finite beings, not in the inclusive Infinite.
The world then, as a whole, is and must be
absolutely good, since the infinite thought must know
what is desirable, and knowing it, must have present
in itself the true objects of desire. The existence
of any amount of pain or of other evil, of crime or
of baseness in the world as we see it, is, thus viewed,
no evidence against the absolute goodness of things,
rather a guaranty thereof. For all evil viewed
externally is just an evidence to us finite beings that
there exists something desirable, which we have not,
and which we just now cannot get. However
stubborn this evil is for us, that has naught to do with
the perfection of the Infinite. For the infinite did not make this evil, but the evil, together with the
making of it, which indeed was also in its separateness
evil, — all this is a phenomenon for the infinite
thought, which, in knowing this evil, merely knows
the absolute desirableness of that which it also
possesses, namely, the absolutely good.
We have used here an argument that could not be
used in our study of the “World of Doubt.” When
we there thought evil to be possible for the world as
a whole, we conceived that a being who knew all the
world would yet desire something better. But what
would this imply? It implies that this being would
desire a state of things different from the existing
one, and would do so believing that state to be better
than the existing one. But would he truly know
this desired state to be better, or would he only hope
so? Who truly knows the value of a state save the
one that possesses it? Knowledge is of the present.
Therefore this being would not really know the
better state, unless it were already actual for him. But
in that case he would include not only the present
world, but the perfect world, and his total state
could not be one of discontent. So the other
alternative remains. Our supposed being would only
hope the desired state to be better than what was
real already for him. But would his hope be a true
one? If so, then it could only be true in case this
perfection is already realized in a higher thought.
For the Infinite then the question, “Is there
anything better than what exists?” must be nonsense.
For him the actual and the possible fall together in
one truth; and this one truth cannot be evil.
On another side, our conception gives us religious
support. The imperfection of the purely moral view
lay in part in the fact that there was an inner
incompleteness about the very definition of our ideal, as
well as a doubt about its attainability. This inner
incompleteness must however be removed in and for
the Infinite Mind. In dealing with the work of life,
we came to a point where we said, thus far we can
see our way, but beyond that our ideal remains
incomplete. We must have faith, so we implied, that
if we attained so much of the ideal social condition,
the way from that point onward would become
clear. But now we see why the way would of
necessity become clear to one whose knowledge of life
were broad enough and deep enough. For in the
Infinite that includes all life, that rests above all
finite strife in the absolute attainment of the ideal,
there can be no incompleteness, no torso of an ideal,
but a perfect knowledge of what is most excellent.
Those faint foreshadowings of a perfect life that art
and science and social work show to us, must be for
the Infinite no faint foreshadowings, but absolute
certainty and perfect clearness. Hence by our
religious doctrine we get not merely the assurance that
such ideals as we have are realized for the Infinite;
but, better than this, we get our first full assurance
that our incomplete ideals have an actual completion
as ideals. For we thus get our first full assurance
that there is in the highest sense any definite ideal
at all. Pessimism, as we have seen, implies either
doubt about what the ideal state is, or unavoidable
lack of that state. And the Infinite can be no
Pessimist in either sense.
The religious comfort that a man can get from
contemplating all this truth is indeed very different
from the consolation of the separate individual as
such that many people want their religion to give
them. And this very fact furnishes us a good test
of moral sincerity. The religious comfort that we
find is no comfort save to the truly religious spirit in
us. It says to us: “You that have declared your
willingness to serve moral ideals because they are
such, does this help you to know, not of a goodly
place where you personally and individually shall
live without tears forever as a reward for your
services, but of an eternal Judge that respects in no
whit your person, before whom and in whom you are
quite open and perfectly known, who now and for
all eternity sees your good and your evil, and
estimates you with absolute justice? This blaze of
infinite light in which you stand, does it cheer you?
If it does, then you are glad to learn that above all
your struggles there is the eternal Victory, amid all
your doubts there is the eternal Insight, and that
your highest triumph, your highest conception, is
just an atom of the infinite truth that all the time is
there. But if all this is true of you, then you do love
the ideal for its own sake. Then it is not your
triumph that you seek, but the triumph of the Highest.
And so it is that you rejoice to learn how this that is
best in the world not only will triumph, but always
has triumphed, since, as you now learn, for God the
highest good is thus a matter of direct experience.”
The writer remembers well, how some years since,
while all this doctrine seemed to him shrouded in doubt, he heard a very thoughtful and pious friend
maintain that the greatest comfort to be got from a
belief in God is the sense that however much the
world may misjudge us, however much even our best
and closest friends may misunderstand us, there is
one perfect all-knowing Thought that comprehends
us far better than we comprehend ourselves.
Goodness is, in that thought, estimated at its full worth.
Nothing is hidden from the Judge. And what we
are, He knoweth it altogether. The present view
seems to the author to meet the conditions that his
friend here had in mind. Theism as a doctrine that
there is a big power that fights and beats down
other powers in the service of the good, is open to all
the objections before suggested. This warrior, why
does he not win? This slayer of evil things, this
binder of Satan, who boasts that all things will yet
be put under his feet, — has he not had all eternity
in which to put all things under his feet, and has
he done it yet? He may be indeed good, but
somehow disaster seems to pursue him. Religious
comfort in contemplating him you can have if you
believe in him, but always you feel that this comfort is
shadowed by the old doubt; is he after all what we
want him to be, the victorious ruler of the world?
But if we leave the eternally doubtful contemplation
of the world as a heap of powers, and come to the
deeper truth of the world as Thought, then these
doubts must disappear.
Yet to show that this is true, we must dwell upon
doubts a little longer, and must compare our present
view of the solution of the problem of evil with the
views condemned in Chap. VIII.
III.
So far we have come in joyful contemplation of the Divine Truth. But now is there not a serpent in this Eden also? We have been talking of the infinite goodness; but after all, what shall we still say of that finite "partial evil" of life? We seem to have somehow proved a priori that it must be "universal good." For, as we have said, in the Infinite Life of our ideal there can be no imperfection. This, we have said, is the demonstration that we missed all through our study of the world of the Powers. Since we approached that world from without, and never felt the pulse of its heart's blood, we had nothing but doubt after doubt when we contemplated the evil that seemed to be in it. Our efforts to explain evil seemed hollow and worthless. There might be some deeper truth involved in these efforts; but we knew it not. Well, are we right in declaring that we have altogether overcome our difficulty now? Apparently we are as far as ever from seeing how the partial evil can be the universal good; we only show, from the conception of the infinite itself, that the partial evil must be the universal good. God must see how; and we know this because we know of God. More than this we seem to be unable to suggest.
But will this do? Have we not forgotten one terrible consequence of our doctrine? The partial evil is universal good, is it? There is no evil? All apparent imperfection is an illusion of our partial view? So then where is the chance to be in a free way and of our own choice better than we otherwise
in truth should be? Is not the arm that is raised
to strike down wickedness paralyzed by the very
thought that was to give it divine strength? This
evil that I fight here in this finite world is a
delusion. So then, why fight it? If I do good works,
the world is infinitely good and perfect. If I seem
to do evil works, the world is in truth no worse.
Seeming good is not better than seeming evil, for if
it were, then the seeming evil would be a real defect
in God, in whose life is everything. If I have never
loved aught but God, even so I have never hated
aught but God. It is all alike. God does not need
just me. Or rather I may say, in so far as he needs
me to complete his infinite truth, he already has me
from all eternity. I have nothing to do with the
business, save to contemplate in dizzy indolence the
whirling misty masses of seeming evil, and to say
with a sort of amused reverence that they look very
ill and opaque to me, but that of course God sees
through them clearly enough somehow. The mist is
in truth crystalline water, and he has so quick a
sense as to look beyond the drops as easily as if they
were in the calm unity of a mountain lake. And
so, my religion is simply a contemplation of God’s
wisdom, but otherwise an idle amusement.
So says the man who sees only this superficial
view of our doctrine. In so far as, standing once
more outside of some evil thing, we say: “That
thing yonder looks bad, but God must see it to be
good,” we do indeed remain indolent, and our
religion simply means a sort of stoical indifference to the apparent distinction of good and evil. This is in
fact the proper practical attitude of even the most
earnest man in the presence of evil that he cannot
understand and cannot affect. In such matters we
must indeed be content with the passive knowledge.
Death and the unavoidable pains of life, the
downfall of cherished plans, all the cruelty of fate, we
must learn to look at as things to us opaque, but to
God, who knows them fully, somehow clear and
rational. So regarding them, we must aim to get to
the stage of stoical indifference about them. They
are to us the accidents of existence. We have no
business to murmur about them, since we see that
God, experiencing them, somehow must experience
them as elements in an absolutely perfect life. For
God we regard not as the mysterious power who
made them, and who then may have been limited to
the use of imperfect means, but as the absolute
thought that knows them; so that, however
inexplicable they must now be to us, they are in themselves
nothing that God vainly wishes to have otherwise,
but they are organically joined with the rest of the
glorious Whole.
Such is indeed the only present word for us finite
minds about many of the shadows of seeming evil
that we have to behold in the world of the
apparently external facts. Such however is not the last
word for us about the only evil that has any
immediate moral significance, namely, the evil that we see,
not as an external, shadowy mist, but as a present
fact, experienced in us. Here it is that the objector
just mentioned seems really formidable to us. But just here it is that we find the answer to him. For
in the world of our own acts we have a wondrous
experience. We realize evil, we fight it, and, at the
same time, we realize our fragment of the perfect
divine life in the moment itself of struggling with
the evil. And in this wondrous experience lies the
whole solution of the ancient problem of the existence
of moral evil. For instance, I find in myself a
selfish impulse, trying to destroy the moral insight.
Now of this evil impulse I do not say, looking at it
objectively: “It is somehow a part of the universal
good;” but, in the moment of moral action I make
it, even in the very moment of its sinfulness, a part
of my good consciousness, in overcoming it. The
moral insight condemns the evil that it experiences;
and in condemning and conquering this evil it forms
and is, together with the evil, the organic total that
constitutes the good will. Only through this inner
victory over the evil that is experienced as a
conquered tendency does the good will have its being.
Now since the perfect life of God must have the
absolutely good will, therefore it also must be conscious
of such a victory. Thus the solution of our
difficulty begins to appear. And thus we reap a new
religious fruit from our ethical doctrine, to whose
main principles we must once more here refer the
reader.
When I experience the victory of the moral
insight over the bad will, I experience in one
indivisible moment both the partial evil of the selfish
impulse (which in itself as a separate fact would be
wholly bad) and the universal good of the moral victory, which has its existence only in the
overwhelming of the evil. So, in the good act, I
experience the good as my evil lost in goodness, as a
rebellion against the good conquered in the moment of its
birth, as a peace that arises in the midst of this
triumphant conflict, as a satisfaction that lives in this
restless activity of inner warfare. This child of inner
strife is the good, and the only moral good, we know.
What I here have present in me when I do a good
act is an element of God’s life. I here directly
experience how the partial moral evil is universal
good; for so it is a relatively universal good in me
when, overcoming myself, I choose the universal
will. The bad impulse is still in me, but is defeated.
In the choice against evil is the very life of goodness,
which would be a pale, stupid abstraction otherwise.
Even so, to take another view, in the overcoming of
our separateness as individuals lies, as we saw in the
previous book, our sense of the worth of the
universal life. And what we here experience in the single
moment of time, and in the narrowness of our finite
lives, God must experience, and eternally. In our
single good acts we have thus the specimen of the
eternal realization of goodness.
But now how simple becomes the answer to that
terrible suggestion of a moment since! How simple
also the solution of the problem of evil! “If I want
to do evil, I cannot,” said the objector; “for God
the perfect one includes me with the rest, and so
cannot in his perfection be hurt by me. Let me do
what I will, my act can only seem bad, and cannot
be bad. All evil is illusion, hence there is no moral
difference in action possible.”
“Right indeed,” we answer, “but also wrong,
because half the truth. The half kills, the whole gives
life. Why canst thou not do any absolute evil?
Because thy evil intent, which, in its separateness,
would be unmixed evil, thy selfish will, thy struggle
against the moral insight, this evil will of thine is no
lonesome fact in the world, but is an element in the
organic life of God. In him thy evil impulse forms
part of a total good will, as the evil impulse of the
good man forms an element in his realization of
goodness. In God thy separateness is destroyed,
and with it thy sin as evil. For good will in the
infinite is what the good man finds the good will to be
in himself, namely, the organic total whose truth is
the discovery of the evil. Therefore is God’s life
perfect, because it includes not only the knowledge
of thy finite wicked will, but the insight into its truth
as a moment in the real universal will.
If then thou wert good, thou wouldst be good by
including the evil impulse in a realization of its
evil, and in an acceptance of the higher insight. If
thou art evil, then in thyself, as separate being, thou
art condemned, and just because thy separate evil
is condemned, therefore is the total life of God, that
includes thee with thy condemnation and with the
triumph over thee, good.
This is the ground for the solution of the problem.
To go more into detail: Evil is for us of two classes:
the external seeming evil, such as death, pain, or
weakness of character; and internal evil, namely the
bad will itself. Because we know so little, therefore
we can never tell whether those externally seen seeming evils are blessings in disguise, or expressions
of some wicked diabolical will-power at work about
us. Somehow then, we never know exactly how,
these seeming great evils must be in God universal
good. But with regard to the only evil that we know
as an inward experience, and so as a certain reality,
namely, the Evil Will, we know both the existence of
that, and its true relation to universal goodness,
because and only because we experience both of them
first through the moral insight, and then in the good
act. Goodness having its very life in the insight
and in its exercise, has as its elements the evil
impulse and its correction. The evil will as such may
either be conquered in our personal experience, and
then we are ourselves good; or it may be conquered
not in our thought considered as a separate thought,
but in the total thought to which ours is so related,
as our single evil and good thoughts are related to
the whole of us. The wicked man is no example of
God’s delight in wickedness, just as the evil impulse
that is an element in the good man’s goodness, and
a very real element too, is no proof that the good
man delights in evil. As the evil impulse is to the
good man, so is the evil will of the wicked man to
the life of God, in which he is an element. And
just because the evil will is the only evil that we are
sure of, this explanation is enough.
Thus the distinction between good and evil
remains as clear as ever. Our difficulty about the
matter is removed, not by any barren external
theodicy, such as were the forms of guess-work that we
criticised in a previous chapter, but by a plain reflection on the moral experience itself. Goodness as a
moral experience is for us the overcoming of
experienced evil; and in the eternal life of God the
realization of goodness must have the same sort of
organic relation to evil as it has in us. Goodness is
not mere innocence, but realized insight. To the
wicked man we say: God is good because in
thinking thee he damns thy evil impulse and overwhelms
it in a higher thought of which thou art a part. And
in so far as thy will is truly evil, thou art in God
just as the evil is in the good man; thou art known
only to be condemned and overcome. That is thy
blessed mission; and this mission of evil such as
thine is indeed an eternal one. So that both things
are true. The world is wholly good, and thou, such
as thou individually art, mayest be damnably evil if
so thou desirest.
We do not say then that evil must exist to set the
good off by way of external contrast. That view we
long since justly rejected. We say only that the
evil will is a conquered element in the good will, and
is as such necessary to goodness. Our conception of
the absolute unity of God’s life, and that conception
alone, enables us to apply this thought here. No
form of dualistic Theism has any chance to apply
this, the only satisfactory theodicy. If God were
conceived as external to his creatures, as a power
that made them beyond himself, the hopeless
problems and the unworthy subterfuges of the older
theodicies would come back to torment us. As it is,
the solution of the problem of evil is given us in the
directest and yet in the most unexpected way.
Let us compare this solution with others. Evil,
said one thought, before expounded, is an illusion of
the partial view, as the shapelessness of the
fragment of a statue is no disproof of the real beauty of
the whole. We replied in a previous chapter to this
notion, by saying that evil seems so positive an
element in the world as to make very hard this
conception of the partial evil as good universally in the
aesthetic sense in which shapelessness of parts may
coexist with a total beauty of the statue. For the
fragment of the statue is merely an indifferent bit of
stone without character. But the evil in the world
seems in positive crying opposition to all goodness.
Yet now, in the moral experience, we have found a
wholly different relation of evil part to good whole.
My good act is good just because of the evil that
exists in it as conquered element. Without the evil
moment actual in it, the total act could be at best
innocent, not good. It is good by reason of its
structure. That structure includes the evil all, but
so includes it that the whole act is good. Even so,
as we declare, God’s life includes, in the organic
total of one conscious eternal instant, all life, and
so all goodness and evil. To say that God is
nevertheless perfectly good is to say, not that God is
innocent, knowing of no evil whatever, and
including none; but that he so includes the evil will in
the structure of his good will, as the good man, in
one indivisible moment, includes his evil will in his
good will; and that God is good only because he
does so.
Again, to pass to another explanation, it has been said that evil exists in the world as a means to goodness. We objected to this that it puts the evil and the good first in separate beings, in separate acts or moments, and then makes the attainment of the good result dependent on the prior attainment of the separate and independently present evil. Now all that explanation could only explain and justify the acts of a finite Power, which, not yet possessing a given good thing, seeks it through the mediation of some evil. In no wise can this explanation apply to God as infinite. He is no finite Power, nor does he make or get things external to himself. Hence he cannot be said to use means for the attainment of ends. But our explanation does not make evil a means to get the separate end, goodness. We say that the connection is one of organic part with organic whole; that goodness has its life only in the instant of the discovery and inner overcoming of the evil will; and that therefore any life is good in which the evil will is present only as overcome, and so as lost in the good will. We appeal to the moral experience to illustrate how, when we do good, the evil will is present as a real fact in us, which yet does not make us as a whole bad, but just because it is present as an overcome element, is, even for that very reason, necessary to make us good. And we go on to say that even so in God the evil will of all who sin is present, a real fact in the Divine Life, no illusion in so far as one sees that it exists in God and nowhere else, but for that very reason an element, and a necessary element, in the total goodness of the Universal Will, which, realized in God, is related to the wills of the sinners as the wills of the good men are
related to their evil impulses.
The explanation that evil is needed to contrast
with goodness has already been mentioned.
Evil therefore, as a supposed real fact, separate
from goodness, and a totally independent entity, is
and must be an illusion. The objections to this
view that we previously urged in Chapter VIII. were
all applicable to the world of powers, which we
viewed and had to view externally. God’s life,
viewed internally, as philosophy must view it, is not
subject to these criticisms. And the moral
experience has taught us how we are to explain the
existence of the only partial evil that we clearly know to
be even a partial evil, namely, the evil will. The
explanation is that the good act has its existence and
life in the transcending of experienced present evil.
This evil must not be an external evil, beyond the
good will, but must be experienced in the same
indivisible moment in which it is transcended. That
this wondrous union is possible, we simply find as
fact in the moral experience. No genuine moral
goodness is possible save in the midst of such inner
warfare. The absence of the evil impulse leaves naught
but innocence or instinct, morally insipid and
colorless. Goodness is this organism of struggling
elements. Now, as we declare, in the infinite and united
thought of God this unity of goodness is eternally
present. God’s life is this infinite rest, not apart
from but in the endless strife, as in substance
Heraclitus so well and originally taught.
IV.
The problem of the existence of evil thus treated
as our limits allow, we must return to a study of the
visible world. That we formerly refused to find
religious comfort in that world, depended upon our
previous manner of approaching it. It was, so
approached, the world of doubt; but now it may
prove no longer disheartening, so that we may be
able to get in it a concrete hold of useful truth. We
must briefly sketch the process of return. Our
Infinite, once known, is known not as an abstraction,
but as an immediately actual object of knowledge.
His then is this visible world; and, knowing the
fact, we return cheerfully and courageously among
the facts that before seemed dead externalities, to
find his truth in them. For our general belief in the
infinite rationality of things is useless to supersede
any jot or tittle of careful scientific study of the
common world of experience. Be this aspect of the
matter well understood. Some older forms of idealism
have looked coldly on experience. Ours does not.
To us, if you want to realize your ideal you must
know the means, you must study applied ethics as
well as the ideal itself; and only from science, from
hard, dry, careful collection and collaboration of
facts, from cautious generalizations, from endless
experiments, observations, calculations, can mankind
hope to learn the means of realizing their ideals.
Yet more, only from exact science can you get the
best concrete examples of that unity of conception,
that mastery of complex details, that exhaustive perfection of insight, that we must attribute in an
infinitely complete form to our all-embracing Ideal
Thought, now that we have got it before us as our
Ideal. That all facts and relations of facts should
appear in one moment of insight to the all-knowing
thought is our postulate, and, as we have shown, it is
no mere postulate, but a necessary and absolute
principle of philosophy. We must go to exact science to
find illustrations of how all this can be in particular
cases realized. As the equation of a curve expresses
in one thought all the properties of the curve, as the
law of a physical process includes all the cases of
that process under any of the supposed conditions,
as a function of a variable may be the sum of a long
series of quantities, each one of which is a derived
function of the first multiplied by a particular
coefficient, so that the one function is the united
expression of the numerous separate functions: even in
such wise must the Infinite thought comprehend in
some supreme highest unity all the facts and
relations of facts that are in the world of truth. For
us then the highest achievements of science are the
dim shadow of the perfection of the infinite thought.
And to science, accordingly, we must go, not for the
invention, but for the intellectual illustration of our
ideal. And science we must treat as absolute
mistress of her own domain. Of the world as a whole,
of the eternal as such, of infinite past time, of the
inner truth of things, science pretends to tell and
can tell nothing. Nor does science invent, nor yet
can she prove, her own postulates, as we previously
defined them. But in the application of her postulates to the facts, in the discovery of particular laws,
science is almighty. To doubt her capacity as
highest judge in this field is flagrant contempt of court.
Science is just the Infinite Thought as far as it is
yet by us realized in the facts of nature. A priori
we can realize nothing about finite facts, save that
they must be capable of rational comprehension.
We know that the Infinite thinks them, and this is
all that we know about them. What they are,
experience must tell us.
Such then are some of the restrictions imposed
upon our thought. We must now consider more
carefully how we must treat the scientific postulates
that were our only comfort in studying reality before
we reached our present insight.
When we postulated that the world must in the
best sense satisfy our fundamental intellectual needs,
we assumed what is necessary for science, but what
science itself does not satisfactorily explain. Have
we now reached any foundation for this theoretical
postulate? We have in fact reached one. The
postulate of science amounts to this, that the real
connections among facts must be such as would be
rationally comprehensible if they were known. But
we have found in fact that all facts not only must
be rationally comprehensible, but are rationally
comprehended, in and by the one Divine Mind. The
postulate of science expresses therefore in part and
as a mere assumption, what we now know as a whole,
and as a result of demonstration. The unity of the
Divine Thought implies that all facts, if we knew
them well enough, would appear rationally interdependent, reducible to unity, a total of realities
expressible as one truth. Just as in the one concept of
the nature of number is implied all the infinite series
of properties that a complete Theory of Numbers
would develop, so in the one concept of the universe,
which constitutes the Divine Mind, all the facts of
all possible experience are comprehended and are
reduced to perfect unity. There must be then in fact a
universal formula. What this formula is we do not
see, and just because we do not see it, we have to
look here and there in experience for any traces of
the unity and rational connection of facts. Nor can
we ever be sure that a connection surmised by us is
the really rational connection of things. A law
discovered by us is only our attempt to imitate the
Divine Thought. Our attempt may in a given case
fail; our induction may be mistaken. But the
foundation of our inductive processes is the thought
that, since the real world is a perfectly rational and
united body of truth, that hypothesis which reduces
to relatively rational unity the greatest number of
facts is more apt to represent the truth of things
than any hypothesis of less scope, and of less rational
significance. Just because this natural dualism with
which we set out is a blunder, just because in fact
the world is not rent in twain by our arbitrary
distinction of object and subject, but is in deepest truth
one united world, a single thought; therefore it is
that when we consider those facts which we have
from moment to moment to regard as external, we
can be assured that there is a certain and not an
arbitrary basis for our views about them. The visible world becomes again hard reality, which we
experience and try to comprehend, just because we
know that in itself this world is once for all
comprehended.
Practically then, in dealing with the world of
concrete facts, we must be realistic. It is our duty, for
humanity’s sake, to study and to believe in this
external world, to have faith in the great postulates of
common sense, to use all the things of the world.
But the basis of this faith common sense can never
find. And we have found it in the Absolute.
V.
Have we then discovered that something of
infinite religious worth of which we went in quest? Or
can we say that our life is in vain in such a world?
Truly our religious longing has met with a genuine
response, but it was not such a response as we at
first expected, nor such as most systems appear to
desire. Personal needs and hopes apart, most men
who make systems to satisfy the impersonal religious
longing, seek to prove that the world as a whole
progresses towards goodness, so that, in the great
consummation of this progress, evil shall certainly
and finally disappear, leaving the world as innocent
and insipid as in the days of Eden. Now we have
found a thought that makes this concept of progress
not only wholly inapplicable to the world of the
infinite life, but wholly superfluous. If, as we insisted
above, moral goodness is not the absence, but the
organic subordination, of the evil will, its overthrow in the good will, in which it is still actually present
as subdued, then, whenever the world contains any
moral goodness, it also, and for that very reason,
contains, in its organic unity, moral evil. The
world is morally good in spite of the evil will, and
yet because of the evil will, since, as every moral
experience shows us, the good will is just this
triumphant rest in strife above the evil will. Therefore
we have no sympathy with those who expect the
future “salvation” of the world as a whole in time
through any all-pervading process. The only
destruction of moral evil that ever takes place or can
take place is the transcendence of the evil will by
the good will in the very moment of the life of the
evil will. If moral evil were to be, as the older
systems often expect, absolutely destroyed, and the
world so freed therefrom that the evil will was totally
forgotten, then what remained would be no moral
good any more, only the laziness of an infinitely
vacant life. Not indeed to set off the good by any
external contrast, but to constitute a moment in the
organic unity of the good act, is this evil in the world.
And the whole vast trouble about understanding its
presence arises because we usually separate it from
the very unity with goodness in which we find it
whenever we consciously do right ourselves. Then
when so separated, as we separated it in a former
chapter, moral evil, viewed as an external opaque
fact, is inexplicable, disheartening, horrible. Only
when we do right ourselves do we practically get the
solution of the problem. Only the moral man knows
how and why evil exists. For in him the evil will is an essential element of his goodness. The conflicts
of morality are and must be eternal.
Our present explanation of evil in the world is,
we have seen, the only one that can both give us
the absolute religious comfort, and save us from the
terrible moral paralysis involved in destroying, for
the Infinite, the distinction between good and evil.
The moral experience itself contains the miracle of
this solution in the simplest and clearest shape.
And it relieves us of any need to long for an
absolute peace. For in it the distinction of good and
evil is the sharpest, the significance of the strife is
the most vivid, at the very instant when, in the strife,
the evil will, present and real still, is yet conquered
by the good will, and so lost in the universal
goodness of the total good act. The distinction of good
will and evil will becomes thus the greatest possible;
and yet only through the reality of this distinction in
the unity of the moral life is goodness present and
triumphant. Progress in this world as a whole is
therefore simply not needed. The good is eternally
gained even in and through the evil. How far the
actual process of evolution may in our part of the
universe extend is a matter for empirical science.
But our own ideal of human life as a
“progressive realization of the good,” — what of that? The
answer is obvious. The good will that is in us as a
temporal fact, not being yet fully realized or
triumphant in us as we are in ourselves as mere finite
beings, must aim at complete expression of itself in
time and in us, and through us in those whom we
seem to influence. For only in so seeking to perfect us in whom it exists, is this good will in us good
at all. In so far as we, viewed abstractly, in our
separateness from God, are good, we then do indeed
try to realize that life of God in which we are all
the time an element. For us this is progress. This
progress is the form taken temporarily in us by the
good will. But for God this is no real progress.
Therefore is it indeed true that the moral insight in
us must lead us to aim at progress in goodness, just
as, on the other side, the rational element in us leads
us to aim at progress in knowledge. But, meanwhile,
our moral progress and our rational progress, mere
minor facts happening at a moment of time, are but
insignificant elements in the infinite life in which, as
a whole, there is and can be no progress, but only
an infinite variety of the forms of the good will and
of the higher knowledge.
And so consciousness has given us in concrete
form solutions of our two deepest philosophic
problems. The possibility of error, necessitating an
inclusive thought, is illustrated for us by our own
conscious thought, which can include true and false
elements in the unity of one clear and true thought at
any moment. And the possibility and necessity of
moral evil, demanding a real distinction between
good and evil, a hateful opposition that seems at first
sight fatal to our religious need for the supremacy
of goodness in the united world, is illustrated for us
in a way that solves this whole trouble, namely, in
the unity of the conscious moral act. There at the
one moment are good and evil, warring, implacable,
yet united in the present momentary triumph of the good will. A world in which this strife, this victory,
this absolute rest above the real strife and in
the midst of the real strife, is the supreme fact, is
the perfect world that religion needs. It is a world
of the true Life of God.
VI.
And our insight appeals not only to our general
religious needs. It comes with its truth home to the
individual man. It demands that we consider what
our individual life is really worth when it is lived in
the presence of this Infinite Judge. O man, what
is this thy daily life! Thou livest for the applause
or in fear of the blame of thy neighbors. An unkind
word cuts thee to the quick. A little public favor,
or the approving word of a friend, is worth half thy
soul to thee. And all the while thou knowest not
that One infinitely greater than multitudes of
neighbors is here, not above thee only, nor afar in the
heavens, but pervading thy every thought. And that
all-pervading Thought judges thee as these
neighbors never can. Myriads of their blunders about
thee are as nothing to an atom of this infinite Truth.
That rain-drop yonder in the sunshine is not more
filled with the light, than are all the most hidden
recesses of thy heart filled with that Infinite Presence.
No one of us is more famous than his neighbor; for
no one is known save by God, and to him all alike
are known. To be sure, to know this is the same
as understanding rightly, that thou art in truth what
thou art. All truth is truth because it is known by a conscious Thought: therefore whatsoever thou art,
whether it is consciously or unconsciously existent in
thee, is known to the all-seeing Universal
Consciousness. But commonplace as this seems to the
philosopher, is it not more than a mere commonplace to
thee, if thou lovest genuine righteousness? For is it
not something to feel that thy life is, all of it, in
God and for God? No one else knows thee. Alone
thou wanderest in a dead world, save for this
Presence. These other men, how can they know thee?
They love thee or scorn thee or hate thee, but none
of them love or scorn or hate thee for what thou art.
Whatever they hold of thee, it is an accident. If
they knew more of thee, doubtless they would think
otherwise of thee. Do they love thee? Then they
know thee not well enough, nor do they see thy
meanness and thy vileness, thy selfishness and thy
jealousy and thy malice. If they saw these, surely
they would hate thee. But do they hate thee?
Then thou callest them unjust. Doubtless they are
so. Some chance word of thine, a careless look or
gesture, an accident of fortune, a trifling fault, these
they have remembered; and therefore do they hate
thee. If they knew better things of thee, perhaps
they would love thee.
Thus contradictory is thy life with them. And yet
thou must labor that the good may triumph near
thee by thy effort. Now in all this work who shall
be thy true friend? Whose approval shall
encourage thee? Thy neighbor’s? Nay, but it is thy duty
always to suspect thy neighbor’s opinion of thee.
He is a corrupt judge, or at best an ignorant judge. He sees not thy heart. He is a respecter of persons.
He is too often a bundle of whims. If he also professes
to be trying to serve righteousness, it is thy
duty to have ready faith in his good intent, if that
be possible for thee; but by all means doubt his
wisdom about thee, and thine about him. If he
praises thee for thy righteousness, listen not willingly
to his praise. It will deceive thee. He will most
praise thee when thou inwardly art not righteous.
If he blames thee for evil, let it warn thee; for if
he is not right now, he doubtless soon will be. But
take it not too much to heart. He is ignorant of
thee. He talks of thee as he might talk of the other
side of the moon, unless indeed he talks of thee just
as man in general, and not as to thy particular acts.
Trust him not in all these things. Realize his needs
as thou canst, strive to aid him in being righteous,
use him as an instrument for the extension of
goodness; but trust not his judgment of thee. Who
then is, as the true judge of thy worthy thy only
perfect friend?
The Divine Thought. There is the opinion of
thee to which thou canst look up. To be sure it is
revealed to thee only in thy consciousness of what
righteousness is and of what truth is. Nowhere else
hast thou a guide that can do more for thee than to
help to quicken thy insight. But, then, thy
religious comfort is to be, not that the moral law is
thundered down from mountain-tops as if some vast
town-crier were talking, but that when thou seekest
to do right, the Infinite all-seeing One knows and
approves thee. If thou lovest righteousness for its own sake, then this will comfort thee. If not, if
thou seekest sugar-plums, seek them not in the home
of the Infinite. Go among thy fellow-men and be a
successful hypocrite and charlatan, and thou shalt
have gaping and wonderment and sugar-plums
enough.
Herein then lies the invitation of the Infinite to
us, that it is, and that it knows us. No deeper
sanction is there for true righteousness than this
knowledge that one is serving the Eternal. Yet when we
say all this, are we simply doing that which we spoke
of in the opening chapter of this work? Are we
but offering snow to appease the religious hunger?
Is this doctrine too cold, too abstract, too far-off?
Cold and abstract and far-off is indeed the proof of
it. But that was philosophy. That was not the
religious aspect of our doctrine, but only the
preparation for showing the religious aspect of philosophy.
Is the doctrine itself, however, once gained, so
remote from the natural religious emotion? What
does a man want when he looks to the world for
religious support? Does he want such applause as
blind crowds give men, such flattery as designing
people shower upon them, such sympathy as even the
cherished but prejudiced love of one’s nearest friends
pours out for him? Nay, if he seeks merely this,
is he quite unselfishly righteous? Can he not get
all that if he wants it, wholly apart from religion?
And if he looks for reward, can he not get that also
otherwise? But what his true devotion to the moral
law ardently desires is not to be alone. Approval
for what really deserves approval he needs, approval from one who truly knows him. Well, our doctrine
says that he gets it. Just as deep, as full, as rich,
as true approval as expresses the full worth of his
act, — this he has for all eternity from the Infinite.
To feed upon that truth is to eat something better
than snow, but as pure as the driven snow. To love
that truth is to love God.
We spoke in the former book of the boundless
magnitude of human life as it impresses itself upon
one who first gains the moral insight. To many
this first devotion to human life seems itself enough
for a religion. But then one goes beyond this point,
and says that human life has, after all, very much
that is base and petty in it. Here is not the ideal.
“Would that there were a higher life! To that we
would devote ourselves. We will serve humanity,
but how can we worship it?” Such is the thought
of many an ardent soul that seeks no personal
rewards in serving the good, but that does seek some
great Reality that shall surely be worthy of service.
To such, our religious insight points out this higher
reality. You that have been willing to devote
yourselves to humanity, here is a Life greater in infinite
degree than humanity. And now is it not a help to
know that truly to serve humanity is just the same
as to serve this Infinite? For whatever had seemed
disheartening in the baseness and weakness of man
loses its discouraging darkness now that all is
transfigured in this Infinite light.
Let us then be encouraged in our work by this
great Truth. But let us not spend too much time
in merely contemplating this Truth. We, whose lives are to be lived in toil, — it is not good that we
should brood over even an infinite Thought. For in
our finite minds it will soon become petty, unless we
realize it chiefly through our acts. Let us then go
about our business. For every man has business
and desire, such as they are.
As we turn away then for the time from our
contemplation, we have one last word yet as to these
practical consequences of our view. If the reader
follows us at ail in our argument, we want him also
to follow us into the practical application of it to
life. To work for the extension of the moral insight
is, we have said, the chief present duty of man in
society. All else is preparation for this work, or else
is an anticipation of the higher stage when, if we
ever grow up to that level, we shall have our further
work to do in the light of the insight itself. But
this chief present work of ours, this extension of the
moral insight, is best furthered by devotion to our
individual vocations, coupled with strict loyalty to
the relations upon which society is founded. The
work thus set before us demands the sacrifice of
many ideal emotional experiences to the service of
the Highest. Our comfort however in it all must be
that the Highest is there above us, forget it as we
may. If the reader accepts all this, then with us
he has the assurance that, whatever becomes of the
old creeds in the present religious crisis, the
foundations of genuinely religious faith are sure.
Whenever we must pause again in our work for
religious support, and whenever we are worn out
with the jargon of the schools, we can rest once more for a time in this contemplation of the Eternal
Truth. Hic breve plangitur. But not so is it in
God’s life. Our problems may be hard, but there
all is solved. Our lives may be poor and
contemptible, but there all is wealth and fullness of worth.
Our efforts may often prove vain, but there naught
exists that is vanity. For the imperfection of the
finite is but the fragment of the Infinite Whole
where there is no true imperfection. Is it not a
Religion to feel this? And we shall then turn from
such a contemplation once again as we do now, to
look with fresher courage at this boundless, tossing
sea of human life about us. This is not itself the
Divine, but over it all God’s winds are blowing.
And to our eyes it is boundless. Let us go down
into this great sea and toil, fearing no storm, but
seeking to find there treasures that shall be copies,
however faint, of that which is Eternal.
Uncharted Knowledge
Wisdom From Previous Realities
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