CHAPTER VIII.
THE WORLD OF DOUBT.
When we turn from our world of ideals to the
world actually about us, our position is not at once
a happy position. These ideals that we have agreed
upon, in so far as they are our own, do not make the
world, and people differ endlessly about what the
world is and means. Very naturally, then, we also
must ourselves begin with difficulties and doubts.
For if we want a religious doctrine that in these days
can stand us in good stead, we must fear nothing,
and must run the risk of all the disasters of thought.
The warfare of faiths is so angry and ancient, that
we must be content if, with our best efforts, we get
anything out of it at all. As millions of brains must
toil, doubtless, for centuries before any amount of
ideal agreement among men is attained or even
approximated, we must be content if we do very little
and work very hard. We can be tolerably certain
that in a world where nearly all is dark very much
of our labor will be wasted. But this is natural.
There is the delight of activity in truth-seeking; but
when, at the outset, you compare your hopes and
claims with the shadowy and doubtful results that
you may reach, the comparison cannot seem
otherwise than melancholy. Through the failures of millions of devoted servants, the humanity of the future
may possibly (we do not, at least at this point in our
study, know that it will certainly) be led to a grand
success. This far-off divine event to which, for all
we know, our fragment of creation may be moving,
but which at any rate we regard with longing and
delight, constitutes the moral aim of our philosophic
studies. It is good to strive.
In the present chapter, therefore, we shall devote
ourselves for the most part to negative criticism of
certain views that are or may be held about the real
world.
I.
That skepticism in studying reality is to some
extent useful, most people will admit. But not every
one will follow us at once into the thorough-going
and uncompromising skepticism that we shall have
to present in the following as the very basis of our
positive doctrine. It is surprising how easily the
philosophic need is satisfied in the minds of most
persons, even in the minds of many professed
philosophic students. A few very complacent questions,
readily if unintelligibly answered, put to rest the
whole desire that such people feel to cross-examine
reason. In fact they seem to hold that a certain
disrespect would be shown by questioning reason
any more sharply; and so their philosophy is like a
Congressional investigation of the doings of a
politician, conducted by his fellow-partisans. But we feel,
in writing this book, that such a philosophy, whose
only business it is to “whitewash” reason, is an insuit to reason. Reason’s investigations of its own
nature are not partisan affairs conducted for the sake
of effect; nor does reason seek, like a demagogue, to
get a popular “vindication,” but solely to reach the
deepest possible insight into its own absolute truth.
Hence we refuse utterly to have the following
regarded as in any narrower sense an “apology” for
any religious truth, since the defensive or apologetic
attitude in presence of religious problems is once for
all an insult to genuine religion. If there is truth
absolute, we desire to know the same, and if we ever
get a glimpse of it, doubtless it will need very little
apology from us. But meanwhile we propose to
doubt fearlessly and thoroughly. If our limits
prevent here the proper exhaustive search for all the
actual difficulties of the views that we present, still
we want to have, and as far as may be to show, the
spirit of honest, determined, conscientious
skepticism. A clerical friend of the author’s impressed
him very much in early youth by the words: “God
likes to have us doubt his existence, if we do so
sincerely and earnestly.” These words are almost a
truism; they surely ought to be a truism. Yet they
have been forgotten in many a controversy. Surely
if God exists, he knows at least as much about
philosophy as any of us do; he has at least as much
appreciation for a philosophic problem as we can have.
And if his own existence presents a fine philosophic
problem, he delights therein at least as much as we
do. And he then does not like to see that problem
half-heartedly handled by timid, whining, trembling
men, who constantly apologize to God because the existence of certain fools called atheists forces them
to present in very pious language certain traditional
proofs of his existence. No, surely not in this spirit
would a rational God, if he exists, have us approach
the question. But with at least as much coolness and
clearness of head as we try to have when we toil over
a problem in mathematics; with at least as merciless
an analysis of all that is obscure and doubtful and
contradictory in our own confused ideas as we should
use in studying science; with at least as much
eagerness in finding out the weakness and the uncertainty
of men’s wavering and ill-trained judgments as we
should bring to the examination of an important
commercial investment, — with at least so much of
caution, of diligence, and of doubt we should
approach the rational study of the Highest. For what
can insult God more than careless blundering? It
is shameful that men should ever have treated this
matter as if it were the aim of religious philosophy
to have a store-house of formulated traditional
answers ready wherewith to silence certain troublesome
people called doubters. In these matters the truly
philosophic doubt is no external opinion of this or
that wayward person; this truly philosophic doubt
is of the very essence of our thought. It is not to
be “answered” or “silenced” by so and so much
apologetic pleading. The doubt is inherent in the
subject-matter as we must in the beginning regard
the same. This doubt is to be accepted as it comes,
and then to be developed in all its fullness and in all
its intensity. For the truth of the matter is
concealed in that doubt, as the fire is concealed in the stony coal. You can no more reject the doubt and
keep the innermost truth, than you can toss away the
coal and hope to retain its fire. This doubt is the
insight partially attained.
Such must be our spirit. And now, to apply it
at once to the problems before us, where shall we
begin our search for a religious truth? We are to find,
if possible, some element in Reality that shall have
religious significance. But how shall we do this
unless we have made clear to ourselves in what sense
we know Reality at all? It would seem that our
religious philosophy must begin with the problem of all
theoretical philosophy: What can be our knowledge
of this world, and whereon can this knowledge be
founded?
A dark and dismal topic, one may say. But
remember, here and here only can our beloved treasure
be found buried. Either there is no religious
philosophy possible, or it is here; and here we must
delve for it. Nor let one be too much terrified at
once by the forbidding aspect of the question. It is
indeed no easy one; yet to answer it is but to know
the real meaning of our own thoughts. This truth
that we seek is not in the heavens, nor in the depths;
it is nigh us, even in our hearts. Only inattention
can be hiding it from us. Let us look closer.
This real world that popular thought declares to
exist outside of us — we have so far taken it on
trust. But now, what right have we so to take it?
What do we mean by it? When we say that we
can know it, do we not mean that it is in some way
bound to conform to some of our thoughts? Or, if you will put the matter in the reverse order, and
will say, with seeming modesty, that our thought is
so constituted as to have a certain likeness to
reality, do you really make the matter clearer? The
mysterious conformity between our thought and
what is no thought of ours remains, and we have to
make clear our assurance of that. This assurance
itself, if we got it, would seem to be in just the same
position as is the conformity of which it is to assure
us. Itself again would be outside of the external real
world, and in our thought. Yet this assurance is to
tell us something about that external world, namely,
its conformity to certain of our thoughts. What
can we thus know about any external object at all?
The difficulty is an old one. Our solution of it,
if we get any, must determine the whole of our
religious thought. Let us see at all events where the
difficulty arises, and why. Whether or no there is
possible any solution, the difficulty plainly lies in a
certain conceived relation between us and the world.
All the common metaphysical and religious doctrines
begin by setting a thinker over against an external
world, which is declared independent of his thought,
and which his thought is then required to grasp and
know. This supposed relation of subject and object
gives metaphysics its seemingly insoluble problems.
This thinker, whose thought is one fact, while that
world out there is another fact, how can he learn by
what takes place in his thought, that is, in the one
of these two supposed entities, what goes on in the
other of these entities, namely, in the world? Once
for all, this marvelous relation of preëstablished harmony between these supposed separate entities
demands philosophic deduction. The relation, to be
sure, may be itself a metaphysical figment. We
hold that it is. We shall try to show hereafter the
baselessness of this notion of a world of external
fact on one side, in the barren isolation of its
transcendental reality, with an equally lonesome thinker
on the other side, somehow magically bound to
follow after the facts of that world. We hold, to put
it in plain language, that neither the external world
nor the individual thinker has any such reality as
traditional popular beliefs, together with most
metaphysical schools, have desired us to assume. But,
for the first, we cannot yet undertake to trouble the
reader with this our philosophic speculation. That
will come in its good time, we hope not too
unintelligibly, and it will have its place in our religious
doctrine.
We begin, however, with the popular metaphysical
concept, of a separate external world, and of a
thinker bound somehow to repeat the facts of it in
his thought. We ask, with popular metaphysics:
How can we be sure that he does this? And from
metaphysical systems, both popular and unpopular,
we get an amazing jargon of answers.
The most popular answer, after all, is a threat, a
threat repeated endlessly in all sorts of apologetic
books, but still a mere base, abject, wholly
unphilosophical threat. It is said to us that we must
believe our human thinker to be capable of thinking
correctly the facts of this supposed external world,
because, if he does not, the result will be disastrous to the whole common sense conception of the world.
If this thinker does not somehow magically
reproduce external facts in his private mind, then is our
faith vain, and we are all very miserable. It is
astonishing how this, the most helpless abandonment
of all philosophic thought, is constantly reiterated
by certain of those who pretend to be philosophers.
Can a threat scare us from philosophy? To get a
sure foundation for our religion, we begin by asking
how a man can really know the external world at
all. We get as reply the threat that, unless we
admit the knowledge of the external world, we must
be in eternal doubt, and therefore wretched. To
doubt this knowledge, we are told, would be to
doubt all that makes life worth living. But it is
just because we want to find a sure basis for what
makes life worth living that we begin with this
doubt. We are determined to get at the root of
this matter, however bitter may be the evil that will
befall us if our skepticism does not succeed in
getting past this guarded gateway of philosophy. We
persist in asking, all threats to the contrary
notwithstanding, just how and why and in what sense the
external world can be known to us, if indeed this
conception itself of an external world is justly
formed at all.
Yet we grant that the full force and need and
bitterness of our problem may not be plain to the
reader, unless he has first undertaken to examine
with us at some length the philosophic character
and consequences of this popular metaphysical
conception of the external world. To get him to share well our doubt, we must first provisionally accept
this notion of popular metaphysics itself. We must
waive for the moment our difficulty, that it may
recur to us with greater importance by and by. Let
the reader once come to see that this popular notion
of an external world is an utterly vague conception,
capable of numberless forms, and religiously
unsatisfactory in all of them, and then we shall expect
him to feel the force of the deeper philosophic problems
involved. This present chapter will therefore
proceed directly to an examination of the popular
notions about the external world. We shall
examine them, namely, to find whether they offer any
religious aspect. We shall find that they do not
offer any such aspect in any satisfactory sense.
That the good is supreme in the external world as
popularly conceived, nobody can establish. This
supposed external world is once for all a World of
Doubt, and in it there is no abiding place. When
the reader has come to feel with us this truth, then
he will be ready to look deeper into the matter.
Then some other more genuinely philosophic
conception of Reality will have its place. Hence in
the rest of this chapter we shall be accepting
provisionally notions that we are hereafter to reject,
and assuming much on trust that is at best very
doubtful. We shall show that, even so aided, the
popular notions about the religious aspect of this
world cannot bear criticism. This visible world of
popular faith will lose its worth for us. We shall
have to look elsewhere.
The religious significance once removed from the popular realistic philosophy, with its crudely
metaphysical notion of things, we shall be ready to listen
to skepticism about the foundations of this notion;
and we shall be ready for some new conception.
This new conception will indeed not falsify the true
moral meaning of that innocent faith in a real world
upon which we have so far depended in our research.
The popular notion of an external world, practically
useful for many purposes, and sufficient for many
scientific ends, will be refuted and rejected in its
contradictions and in its absurdities, but the soul of
truth that is in it will be absorbed into a higher
conception both of the eternal Reality and of our
relation thereto. Our seeming loss will become our
gain. That bad dream, the dead and worthless
World of Doubt in which most of our modern
teachers remain stuck fast, will be transformed for us.
We shall see that the truth of it is a higher World,
of glorious religious significance.
So for the first we turn to that supposed world of
popular metaphysics, to test its religious value. It is
conceived as a world existent in space and time, and
as a world of real things which act and interact. For
convenience sake, we shall in the following use the
word Power to mean any one of these things, or any
group of them, that in this external world may be
supposed to produce effects upon any other thing or
group of things. However these Powers get their
efficiency, the religious significance of the supposed
external world, if it has any, must lie in the supremacy
of the Good in this world of the Powers. One must
then view this external world historically as a mass of Powers, which work together in harmony or in
discord, and which give you Products. The religious
ideals must find satisfaction here, if at all, in
contemplating the goodness of these powers and of their
works. If the religious ideals here fail, there will
be the other aspect open. Regarded in a truly
philosophical way, and in its eternal nature, the world,
as we shall hereafter come to see, cannot be supposed
to be either a power or a heap of powers. For powers
have their being only in time, and only in relation
to one another. If then all fails when we consider
this external world of powers, this figment of
popular metaphysics, the eternal nature of reality in
some deeper view of that nature may still be found
of infinite value to us. In fact we shall find the
search for a religious truth, among the powers of this
popularly conceived external world, very disheartening.
The jargon of their contending voices will not
unite into any religious harmony. We shall find
these powers like the thunder and the fire. The still
small voice is not in them. We shall be driven to
some other aspect of the world. We shall approach
that aspect in ways that imply no disrespect to those
who have been so long scientifically studying the
history and forces of the assumed external world.
Their results, with the practical consequences in daily
life, and with all that Agnosticism about the nature
and purposes of the powers of this visible world
which such men nowadays feel bound to proclaim,
we shall on the whole accept. We too shall be
Agtics, namely, as to the powers that rule the visible
world. But we shall find a very different way, untrodden by scientific research, and yet, we hope, not
a way of mere dreams, not a way into a world of
fancy, but a way that leads us to a point whence we
get a glimpse into that other aspect of things. This
way Modern Idealism since Kant has been busy in
finding and clearing. How wearisome some of the
exploring expeditions have been, we well know. Our
search also may end in a wilderness; but we fancy
ourselves to have found an open path that to some
readers will seem at least in part new. And some
of the prospects on that road may not be wholly
disheartening, even to the most exacting religious
seeker. But all this is anticipation. First then:
The World as a theatre for the display of power,
physical or metaphysical. This is the World of
Doubt.
II.
Let us begin our study of the powers that work
together in the supposed external reality, by accepting
for a moment, without criticism, the notion of this
supposed external world from which scientific experience
sets out. Let us say: there it is, an objective
world of moving matter, subject to certain laws. All
the powers are but manifestations or forms of
matter in motion. Planets revolve, comets come and go,
tides swell and fall, clouds rise and rivers flow to the
sea, lightning flashes, volcanoes are active, living
beings are born, live, and die, all exemplifying certain
universal principles, that are discoverable by
experience, that are capable of being used to predict the
future, and that are related to one another in such a way as to show us a vast connected whole, the natural
universe. This matter however is dead; these
laws are ultimate given truths. We did not make
them, cannot see why just they and none other were
from the beginning; we must accept them as they
are. The whole world is a vast machine. A mind
powerful enough might be possessed of the knowledge
that La Place, and, in our own generation. Prof.
Du Bois Reymond, have so finely described as the
scientific ideal. Such a mind might have an universal
formula, in its possession, a key to the mysteries
of the succession of phenomena. Such a being could
then, using this formula, calculate all events, as
astronomers now predict eclipses. At every instant
multitudes of air pulsations quiver about us. These,
in all their forms, our mind possessed of this universal
formula, would have been able to predict ages
ago, just as certainly as you now can predict that the
sun will rise to-morrow morning. All is predetermined:
the glitter of every ice crystal on your frozen
window-panes on a winter morning, the quiver of
every muscle in the death agony of the fish that you
pull out of a mountain-stream, the falling of every
yellow leaf in the autumn woods, — each of these
events could have been foreseen, mathematically
calculated, and fully described, by one able to use the
universal formula, and possessed, myriads of aeons
ago, of an exact knowledge of the positions of the
atoms of the original nebula from which our great
stellar system condensed. Such is the natural world.
What religious aspect can this vast machine possess?
What room is there for a higher element to be introduced into this mass of dead mathematical
facts? The answer of some representatives of
science in our day is well known to us. Whatever else
is doubtful, say such men, there stands fast the great
law of progress. Evolution in the physical world
becomes actual progress in the world of human life.
The world, under the influence of all these far-reaching
laws, is actually growing forever better. Thus
natural law agrees with morality. Thus there is a
religious aspect to the mechanical laws of the universe.
Let us consider once more the law of progress.
We spoke of it in a previous chapter. There it did
not help us. For we wanted to agree upon the
nature of morality. We were not helped towards such
agreement by the knowledge that there is in the
world a physical evolution. For we could not tell
what ought to be, merely by considering what is.
We had first to agree upon a moral law, before we
could decide whether evolution is actually progress.
But now, perhaps, we can make use of the law of
evolution to aid our inquiry into the religious aspect
of reality. For now, having defined what the good
is, we may estimate whether the world is growing
toward the good. And if the world is morally
progressing, then one great demand of the religious
consciousness is fulfilled. Then there is a power not
ourselves that works for righteousness. Or is this
really the consequence of the law of evolution?
The first answer is that if there is any tendency
at work in the world that as time goes on more and
more helps men in their struggle towards morality,
this tendency is indeed, as far as it goes, what we want to find. And if such a tendency is found, as
we are told, in evolution, the result is in just so
far encouraging. Although the external world still
often hinders moral growth, yet, we are told, as
evolution reaches higher and higher stages, the world
comes to harmonize more and more with man’s moral
growth. This also seems to be what we seek. In
time morality will become a natural product of early
childhood. Men will be born with characters that
we now seek in vain to develop by a life-time of
labor. Natural evolution, then, does help moral progress,
and the world is more moral to-day than ever
before. This then is to be the religious aspect of
the outer world. Does it contain enough of the truth
of things to content us?
We are far from doubting the scientific worth of
the natural laws that have been discovered of late
years, and that have made so clear to us the great
truth of far-reaching physical evolution. But let us
reflect before we accept these facts as furnishing any
deeply important contribution to our present
problem. We thoroughly believe in evolution; but we
must take, in these matters, a very high position.
If the world of powers apart from man is to have a
religious aspect, then this aspect must belong to this
world as a whole. A minor power for good is not
enough. It will not suffice to find that one bit of
reality fights for our moral needs while another bit
of reality fights against them, unless we can in some
way harmonize these conflicting aspects, or unless
we can show that they that be with us are not only
more important or significant than they that be against us, but are really the deepest truth of things.
Else we shall be left face to face with a gloomy world
of conflict, where the good and bad are mingled in
hopeless confusion. If such a world is the fact, we
must accept that fact; but we cannot then say that
we have made sure of an answer to our religious
needs. Now suppose that in examining the world
we found two tendencies at work, equally
fundamental, equally active, fairly balanced in power,
producing in the long run equally permanent, equally
transient results, but always in deadly antagonism to each
other, the one making for moral goodness, the other
for moral evil. Suppose that the world appeared as
the theatre and the result of this struggle of the good
and of the evil principles, could we say that we had
found in these facts a religious aspect of reality?
We should hardly answer in the affirmative. So
long as we must fix our minds on this struggle of
equally balanced powers, we could not find the world
a religiously encouraging vision. We should either
have to regard the world in some other and higher
aspect, or we should have to give up regarding it as
religiously interesting. An answer to our moral
needs that is drowned by a hubbub of opposing
noises can be no harmonious song. Now we affirm
that so long as you look upon the world as a growth
in time, as a product of natural forces, as an historical
development, you can never make it certain, or
even probable, that this world is not such a scene of
endless warfare. Hence the progress that you may
observe can never overbalance the probability that
this progress is a transient and insignificant fact, in the midst of a chaos of confused tendencies.
Therefore progress on this planet for a few thousands or
millions of years indicates nothing about any true
harmony between nature and morality.
Let us call attention to one aspect, well-known,
yet often neglected in recent discussions of a few
familiar facts. Modern science is justly sure of
physical evolution, but is no less sure that
evolution on this planet is a process that began at a
period distant by a finite and in fact by a not very
great time from the present moment. That our
planet was a nebulous mass at a date at most
somewhere between twenty millions and one hundred
millions of years ago, we have all heard, and we have
also had explained to us some of the proofs of this
fact. Our planet is still imperfectly cooled. At a
comparatively recent period in the history of this
stellar universe, this little point of it was a spheroid
of glowing vapor, from which the moon had not yet
been separated. The present heat of the earth is an
indication of its youth. Furthermore, what our
planet is to become in time, the moon itself tells us,
having cooled, by reason of its small size, more
rapidly than we have done. Cold and dead, waterless,
vaporless, that little furrowed mass of rock
desolately rolls through its slow days, looking with
passionless stare at our stormy, ardent earth, full of
motion and of suffering. What that mass is, our earth
shall become. And progress here will cease with
the tides. All these are the commonplaces of
popular science. Progress then, as we know it here, is
a fact of transient significance. Physical nature permits progress rather than renders it necessary.
Progress is an incident of a certain thermal process,
a kind of episode in the history of the dissipation
of the energy of our particular mass of matter, and
thus, in so far as we yet know, a present occurrence
just in our neighborhood, a local item in the news of
the universe. Now these are the familiar facts whose
meaning we want to enforce in an often neglected
aspect.
But, one says, all this has been anticipated
hundreds of times. It is really unfair to insist upon
such things. For at least here, at least now, the
world does realize our moral needs by showing us
progress. Is not this all that we need? May we
not be content with the few millions of years of
growth that remain to our race before the earth
grows cold? Is it not foolish to look into futurity
so curiously? What matters it whether chaos comes
again in far-off ages?
But we still insist. We desire, vainly or justly,
yet ardently, that the world shall answer to our
moral needs not by accident, not by the way, not for
a time, but from its own nature and forever. If we
can see that present progress is an indication of the
nature of the universe, that the present is a symbol
or a specimen of eternity, we shall be content. But
if this is not so, if present progress is seen to be a
mere accident, an eddy in the stream of atoms, then
present progress is a pleasant fact to contemplate,
but not a fact of any deep significance. Still we
shall be crying in the darkness for support and
finding none. For nature will say to each of us; “I give support to thy moral needs so long as the
temperature of thy earth crust is high enough to prevent
thy oceans from being absorbed, so long as the
radiant heat of the sun is given out in sufficient
quantities to keep thee warm. When the next stage is
reached, I propose to freeze and to dry thy fair
home and all thy moral needs, until there shall be
nothing found on thy planet lovelier than the ruined
crags of thy hills as they glimmer in the last red
rays of a torpid sun. What is thy progress to me?”
Notice then where our real difficulty lies. The
aspect of the facts that we now mean is this. It is
not because progress is to endure on this planet for
a short or for a long time, but because the world in
which this progress is so to end seems, thus
regarded, wholly indifferent to progress, — this is the
gloomy aspect. To-day, even while progress is so
swift and sure, at this moment, we are living in a
world for which, as science displays it to us, this
progress is as indifferent and unessential as the
fleeting hues of an evaporating soap-bubble. Is the
physical fact of progress, thus regarded, a moral
help to us?
Yet men turn away from these plain and often-mentioned
facts to all sorts of fantastic dreams of a
coming golden age. They make of future humanity
a saintly people, living in devotion, or a merry
people, always dancing to waltzes yet undreamt of, or a
scientific people, calculating by some higher algebra
the relative positions and motions of the molecules
in the rocks on the other side of the moon. Every
dream of progress is to be realized in that blessed time, and we are invited to praise a nature that
could produce all this blessedness by pure physical
law. Now we must indeed wish well for the men of
the year a. d. 1,000,000, but we can receive no
religious support from the knowledge that if all goes
right and if the sun keeps well at work, the men of
that time will be better than we are. For still the
world as a whole gives no support to our real moral
needs, for only by a happy accident will this
blessedness be possible. Or, in short, two tendencies are
seen before us in the world, one working for
evolution, for concentration of energy in living beings,
for increase of their powers, for progress; the other
for dissipation of energy, for death, for the
destruction of all that is valuable on our earth. We learn
that the latter tendency has triumphed quite near
us, on the moon. We hear that it is certain in
time to triumph on the earth, and that the other
tendency is to be only of transient superiority. We
know that its present predominance here is,
physically speaking, a happy accident, which a cosmical
catastrophe might at any moment bring to an end.
And now we are asked to see in this combination of
facts a religious aspect. For the writer’s part, he
refuses to regard it as anything but an interesting
study in physics. He delights in it as science, but
it has nothing to do with religion. Yet some people
talk of a Religion of Evolution.
But no doubt believers in universal progress are
ready with hypotheses that shall show how
significant a fact progress really is. A world that has
progressed so many millions of years doubtless has resources of which we know nothing. There are all
the stars with their vast stores of energy. Possibly
they are infinite in number. Progress ceasing just
here may flash out in renewed brilliancy elsewhere.
Who knows what is in store for the future, when
the present seemingly chaotic arrangement of the
stars gives way to vastly higher organized systems
of interacting bodies, in whose light life shall flourish
eternally?
Well, all this we can all fancy as well as our
scientific neighbors. Nobody would call such dreams
scientific, but they are logically possible dreams,
and they are very beautiful. But they have one
terrible negative consideration against them. This
progress is either conceived as having gone on
through infinite past time, or else it has no genuine
significance for the true nature of the universe. A
world that has now grown, now decayed, that has
sometimes progressed, sometimes become worse, is a
world in which progress is an accident, not an essential
feature. But now, if progress has gone on
through infinite time, it has so gone on as to make
possible, after all this infinite time, just the misery
and imperfection that we see about us. Let us
remember that fact. This poor life of ours is in the
supposed case the outcome of infinite ages of growth.
That must be our hypothesis, if we are to cling to
progress as an essential truth about the world. Very
well then, all our temptations, all our weakness, our
misery, our ignorance — the infinite past ages have
ended in fashioning them. Our diseases, our fears,
and our sins — are they perfect ? If not, then what is the meaning of endless progress toward perfection? For we are an outcome of this infinite progress. Another infinity of progress is not certain then to remove such imperfections. Here is progress put to the simple test. Is it the removal of evil? Then can infinite progress, as facts show us, pass by with evil yet unremoved. And if progress is not the removal of evil, then what means progress? Is not the temporary removal of evil more probably a mere occasional event in the history of the world?
It is surprising that we ever think of talking about universal progress as an essential fact of the popularly conceived external world. If nothing certain can be made out about it, still the world as a whole seems, as far as we can judge by the above considerations, so indifferent to progress, that it is marvelous to behold the religious comfort that, in their shallow optimistic faith, so many amiable people take, while they wax fervent over the thought of progress. Let us have clear ideas about the matter. What is in the true nature of reality is as eternal as reality itself. Then progress is either an unessential, insignificant aspect of reality, or it is eternal. If progress has been eternal, then either the world was in the beginning infinitely bad, or else infinite progress has been unable to remove from the world the finite quantity of evil that was always in it. For here in the empirical world is evil now—if indeed there is any empirical world at all—plenty of evil unremoved.
If you found a man shoveling sand on the seashore, and wheeling it away to make an embankment, and if you began to admire his industry, seeing how considerable a mass of sand he had wheeled away, and how little remained in the sand-hill on which he was working, you might still check yourself to ask him: "How long, O friend, hast thou been at work?" And if he answered that he had been wheeling away there from all eternity, and was in fact an essential feature of the universe, you would not only inwardly marvel at his mendacity, but you would be moved to say: "So be it, O friend, but thou must then have been from all eternity an infinitely lazy fellow." Might we not venture to suspect the same of our law of universal physical progress?
But let us already hint by anticipation one further thought. Why is not any purely historical view of the world open to the same objection? If the history began by some arbitrary act of will at some time not very long since, then this history, viewed by itself apart from the creative act, may be intelligible enough in its inner unity and significance, although an arbitrary act of will can be no true explanation. But the whole physical world cannot be regarded at once as a complete, self-existent whole, with an eternity of past life, and as, in its deepest truth, an historical process of any sort. For it is of the essence of an intelligible historical process to have, like a tragedy in Aristotle's famous account of tragedy, a beginning, a middle, and an end. An infinite series of successive acts cannot be one organic historical process. Either this everlasting series of facts has no significance at all, or else it must have had essentially the same significance all the way
along. So, if the world is infinite in time, it
cannot as a whole have, strictly speaking, any history.
The longest continued story in the most thrilling of
the cheap weeklies reaches, as we are given to
understand, a conclusion at some time. Imagine an
infinite continued story, with the poor lovers
eternally weeping and quarreling, and you will see what
an infinite historical process in the world would
mean. It would of course be an eternal repetition
of the same thing, no story at all. If the world,
regarded in time, cannot as a whole have any genuine
history at all, it is then hopeless to look in the
world’s history, as distinct from the world’s nature,
for anything of fundamental religious significance.
And so we are thrown back to our starting-point.
This splendid conception of science, this world of
unalterable mechanical law, in which all things that
happen are predetermined from all eternity, this
mathematical machine, has a real history no more
than the ebbing and flowing sea-tides would have
from day to day any history, apart from the fact
that they once did not so ebb and flow at all.
Eternally repeated rhythms, or ceaseless new
combinations of elements, clash of atoms, quiver of ether
waves, mechanical changes forever; but no eternal
progress, no historical sense to the whole, — that
seems the conception of the physical world as a
whole to which we are driven. It is a strictly
mathematical, a physically intelligible, conception, but
what religious significance has it? Yet such is the
conception that we must have of any eternal
physical process.
We have gone through this thorny path of
problems, because we want already to indicate one thing
as the result of it all, namely, that not what the
present world has come from, not what it is
becoming, not what it will be by and by, but what it
eternally is, must furnish us with the deepest religious
aspect of reality. All else is subordinate. We do
not care so much to know what story anybody has
to tell us about what has happened in the world, as
to know what of moral worth always is in the world,
so that whatever has happened or will happen may
possess a religious significance dependent on its
relation to this reality. That which changes not, wherein
is no variableness, neither shadow of turning, that
must give us the real religious truth upon which all
else will depend. A particular event in the world
may have a religious significance, but that
significance will depend on the relation of this event to
eternal truth. And the eternal truth is what we
want to know.
Therefore our search will become somewhat
narrowed, whenever at least we grow fully convinced of
this truth. The “power that makes for righteousness”
will become a conception of doubtful religious
value. An eternal power, that with all its past
eternity of work cannot yet quite vindicate
righteousness? Perhaps we shall have to find the
religious aspect of things elsewhere. But let us leave, at
all events, the world of pure science.
As we do so some objector may interpose the
assertion that we have generalized too hastily in speak-
ing of the insignificance of the historical aspect of things; for, after all, we have been talking of
natural science. Let us turn then to the more
philosophical theories of the powers that are at work in
this supposed external world of metaphysics. There
are philosophical theories that try to show us of what
hidden reality this mechanical world of ours is the
mere appearance, or phenomenal symbol. Let us
see if any of them can give a religious interpretation
to the powers that rule the world.
III.
We pass, then, from the scientific to the more
metaphysical view of the world. What can we hope
from realistic metaphysics? Let us first consider
the value of that philosophic view nowadays most
frequently held, namely, what in general is called
Monism. We hear nowadays, with almost wearisome
repetition, of Matter and Spirit, of Force and
Intelligence, of Motion and Sensation, as being
opposite aspects, or faces, or manifestations, of one
ultimate Reality, until we wonder whether clear
thinking is not in danger of losing itself altogether in
the contemplation of a mere empty form of words.
From whispers and low mutterings with bated breath
about the inscrutable mystery of the ultimate unity
of Being, one turns with satisfaction to efforts
towards some intelligible account of the sense in which
all things can be regarded as manifestations of one
Power or actual Existent. Yet in truth even these
efforts, in so far as they consider the world of the
Powers, have thus far failed to satisfy the demands of criticism. Where they are clearly stated they are
inadequate. Where they resort to figures of speech
and tell us about the two sides of the shield, or the
convexity and concavity of the same curve, as
illustrations of the ultimate oneness of nature amid the
various manifestations of experience, there these
efforts merely sink back into the primitive incoherency
so dear to all pre-Kantian metaphysics. The same
curve is, indeed, convex and concave; but matter
and spirit are simply not the two faces of a curve,
and the relevant circumstance on which this
metaphor turns will never be clear to us until we learn,
quite literally, wholly apart from fables about shields,
just how, in what sense, and by what evidence,
matter and mind are known to be of like substance.
And that we must do, ere this hypothesis can have
for us a religious value. The failure of dogmatic
Monism, if it should take place, ought, indeed, not
to throw us over into the arms of an equally
dogmatic Dualism; but we must refuse to accept the
monistic hypothesis until it has been freed from all
trace of mysticism. We shall here follow the plan
announced at the outset of the chapter, and confine
our attention to the realistic Monism, that regards
the events in the external world as the results of the
action of the one Power. A very different form of
monism we shall ourselves hereafter maintain. But
just now we deal in negations.
Let us begin with the attempts that have been
made to interpret the results of modern physical
science in a monistic sense, by regarding the ultimate
physical or chemical units as endowed with some form of actual or potential consciousness.
Organisms of the highest sort are combinations of atoms.
The whole is the sum of its parts. Why may not
the mental possessions of these highest organisms
be the sum of the indefinitely small mental powers
of the atoms? An atom in motion may be a thought,
or, if that bo saying far too much of so simple a
thing, an atom in motion may be, or may be endowed
with, an infinitesimal consciousness. Billions of
atoms in interaction may have as their resultant quite
a respectable little consciousness. Sufficiently
complex groups of these atoms of Mind-Stuff (to use
Professor Clifford’s ingenious terminology) might
produce a great man. One shudders to think of the
base uses to which the noble mind-stuff of
Shakespeare might return; but the theory tries to be an
expression of natural phenomena, not merely an
æsthetic creation, and must not pause before such
consequences. And, if it be the truth, might it not
somehow, no matter in what way, be made of
religious value? Or otherwise, if true, might it not end
our vain search for a religion?
Such is an outline that will suggest to the initiated
thoughts common to several modern theories of
being. Are these theories in a fair way to satisfy
critical needs? The writer is not satisfied that they
are. Time does not permit any lengthy discussion
of the matter here, but let us remind ourselves of the
considerations that will most readily occur to any
one that is disposed for a moment to accept one of
these modern forms of monism. Even if they
promised us the religious aspect that we seek, we could
not accept them. As it is, we need not fear them.
Can our consciousness be regarded as an
aggregate of elementary facts, such as sensations or as
atoms of pleasure and pain? If so, what aggregate
of sensations forms a judgment, such as, “This man
is my father?” Evidently here is indeed an aggregate
of sensations represented, but also something
more. What is this more? A product, it may be
said, formed through association from innumerable
past experiences. Granted for the moment; but the
question is not as to the origin of this consciousness,
but as to its analysis. This judgment, whereby a
present sensation is regarded as in definite relation
to real past experiences, as a symbol, not merely of
actual sensations now remembered, not merely of
future sensations not yet experienced, but of a reality
wholly outside of the individual consciousness, this
fact of acknowledging something not directly
presented as nevertheless real — is this act possibly to
be regarded as a mere aggregate of elementary mental
states? Surely, at best, the act can be so regarded
only in the sense in which a word is an
aggregate of letters. For and in the one simple
momentary consciousness, all these elements exist as
an aggregate, but as an aggregate formed into one
whole, as the matter of a single act. But in
themselves, without the very act of unity in which they
are one, these elements would be merely an aggregate,
or, in Mr. Gurney’s apt words, “a rope of
sand.” Our mental life then, as a union of innumerable
elements into the one Self of any moment, is
more than an aggregate, and can never be explained
as an aggregate of elementary atoms of sensation. Nor may we say that the ultimate atomic states of
consciousness may be, as it were, chemically united
into a whole that is more than an aggregate.
Physical atoms in space, if endowed with sufficiently
numerous affinities, may unite into what wholes you
will; but a mental fact is a mental fact, and no
more. An ultimate independent unit of consciousness,
conceived after the analogy of a sensation, can
have to another like unit only one of three relations;
it may coexist with this other unit, or it may
precede or follow it in time. There is no other relation
possible. Affinity, or attraction, or approach of one
pain or pleasure, of one sensation of pressure or of
motion to another, is a meaningless jingle of words,
unless, indeed, such an expression is used to name
figuratively the relations that in and for a comparing,
contrasting, uniting, and separating active
consciousness, two ideas are made to bear. Thus, then,
this atomic monism brings us no nearer than before
to the relation between the data of consciousness and
the facts of physical nature. For the rest, how
mechanical science can be satisfied to regard its
material points as nothing but independently existing
fragments of mind, whose whole being is intensive;
how, out of these intensive units, space-relations are
to be constructed at all — these questions we may
for the present neglect. Atomic monism, a synthesis,
or, rather, a jumble of physiological psychology
with doctrines that are incompatible with any
science whatever, has never answered these questions,
and doubtless never will.
But let us not be over-hasty. There are other forms of monism now extant. The purely materialistic
monism, for which the hard and extended atoms
of naive realism are already and in themselves
potentially mind, the old-fashioned materialism of days
when Mind-Stuff and physiological psychology were
alike undreamed of, may indeed be neglected.
That doctrine needed not critical philosophy, of more
than a very undeveloped sort, to do away with it
once for all. Modern monism knows of supposed
atoms that are in their ultimate nature psychical;
and of supposed psychical forces or agents that, when
seen from without, behave much like extended atoms.
But the old fragment of matter that, being no more
than what every blacksmith knows as matter, was
yet to be with all its impenetrability and its inertia
a piece of the soul, has been banished from the talk
of serious philosophers. There remain, then, the
numerous efforts that see in the world the expression
of psychical powers as such, not mere mind-stuff
atoms, but organized wholes, related in nature to
what we know by internal experience as mind, yet
higher or lower, subtler or mightier, wiser or more
foolish, than the human intelligence. These views
may be divided into two classes: those that see in
nature the manifestations of a logical or intelligent
power, and those that see in it the manifestations of
an alogical or blind, though still psychical power.
Each of these classes again may be subdivided
according as the power is conceived as conscious or as
unconscious in its working. How do these ontological
efforts stand related to critical thought?
First let us consider logical monism. Since human intelligence is itself an activity, a working
towards an end, and since the logical monist thinks
the external universe after the analogy of the human
reason, the constant tendency is for him to conceive
the world as a process whereby his World Spirit
makes actual what was potential. Modern science,
in fact, when viewed speculatively, though it does not
confirm, yet lends itself easily to such efforts, and
we can always, if we choose, imagine the evolution
of the organic kingdom as possibly the process of
self-manifestation of one eternal rational Power.
Only in this way we are very far from a satisfactory
ontology. A world, the work or the child of the
universal reason, developing in time, how can any
reflective mind be content with this account of things?
The universal reason surely means something by its
process, surely lacks something when it seeks for
higher forms. Now, on a lower stage the universal
reason has not yet what it seeks, on the higher stage
it attains what it had not. Whence or how does it
obtain this something? What hindered the possible
from being forthwith actual at the outset? If there
was any hindrance, was this of the same nature with
the universal reason, or was it other? If other,
then we are plunged into a Dualism, and the good
and evil principles appear once more. But if there
was no external hindrance, no illogical evil principle
in existence, then the universal reason has irrationally
gone without the possible perfection that it
might possess, until, after great labor, it has made
actual what it never ought to have lacked. The
infinite Logos thus becomes no more than the “child playing with bubbles” of the old philosopher.
Everything about the process of evolution becomes
intelligible and full of purpose — except the fact
that there should be any process at all where all was
in, and of, and for the universal reason at the outset.
The infinite power has been playing with perfection
as a cat with a mouse, letting it run away a few
aeons in time, that it might be caught once more in a
little chase, involving the history of some millions of
worlds of life. Is this a worthy conception? Nay,
is it not a self-contradictory one? Evolution and
creative Reason — are they compatible? Yes,
indeed, when the evolution is ended, the hurly-burly
done, the battle lost and won; but meanwhile — ?
In short, either evolution is a necessity, one of the
twelve labors of this Hercules-Absolute, or else it is
irrational. In the one case the Absolute must be
conceived as in bonds, in the other case the Logos
must be conceived as blundering. Both conceptions
are rank nonsense. This kind of Monism will not
satisfy critical demands.
And then there is the objection, stated by
Schopenhauer, and by we know not how many before
him, and that we have already insisted upon, namely,
that every historical conception of the world as a
whole, every attempt to look upon Being as a
rational process in time, as a perpetual evolution from
a lower to a higher, is beset by the difficulty that
after an infinite time the infinite process is still in
a very early stage. Infinitely progressing, always
growing better, and yet reaching after all this
eternity of work only the incoherent, troublous, blind imperfection that we feel in ourselves, and that we
see in every dung-heap and sick-room and government
on the earth, in every scattered mass of nebulous
matter, in every train of meteor-fragments in
the heavens — what is this but progress without a
goal, blind toil? The world would be, one might
think, after an infinity of growth, intensively
infinite at every point of its extent. We mortals see
no one point in the physical universe where one
viewing things as we in this chapter have chosen to
do, namely, from outside, might lay his hand and
say: Here the ideal is attained.
Yet we should be very far from dreaming of
accepting the opposing dogmatic theorem, the antithesis
of this sublime Antinomy, namely, “The world
is the product of an irrational force. The One is
blind.” Schopenhauer undertook the defense of
this antithesis, and, in bad logic, as we all know, he
somewhat surpassed even that arch blunderer, the
universal Will of his own system. This Will, after
all, desired a good deal of trouble, and got his wish.
But Schopenhauer desired a consistent statement,
and, with all his admirable ingenuity and learning,
he produced a statement whose inconsistencies have
been exposed too often to need much more discussion.
No; to the defenders of the alogical hypothesis,
as a dogmatic doctrine, it has not yet been
given to make out more than the purely negative
case that we have stated above. Dogmatic
panlogism can be assaulted, with much show of success.
The opposite doctrine has not yet been dogmatically
maintained without even worse confusion. Panlogism and Alogism are difficult enough in
themselves, but how much worse becomes their
condition when, as in the “Philosophy of the Unconscious,”
of Von Hartmann, either one of them, or a
hybrid of the two, is burdened with yet another
hypothesis, namely, that the One Being is unconscious,
and yet in nature psychical. Founding himself on
certain physiological facts, very doubtfully
interpreted, on a monstrous perversion of the
mathematical theory of probabilities, on an ingenious view of
the history of philosophy, on a like ingenious
criticism of Kant, Von Hartmann has expounded an
ontological doctrine of which, after all, serious thought
can make nothing. This unconscious being, existent
not for itself, for it is conscious of nothing, nor
for others, because all else is a part of it (and, for
the rest, nobody ever thought of it before Von
Hartmann), shall be the maker and upholder of the
universe. Surely all this is a philosophy of round
squares, and is not to be taken very seriously.
Of course the previous criticism is absurdly
inadequate to the magnitude of the problems involved,
and is intended only as the merest sketch,
dogmatically stated, of critical objections to certain
ontologies. Seeming irreverence, in this hasty style of
doing battle, must be pardoned. Only against
imperfect metaphysic as such do we war. Critical
philosophy holds no theoretical opinion sacred, just
as it regards no earnest practical faith as other than
sacred. The question is here not yet what we are
to believe, but what we can in argument maintain,
and what our method of search ought to be. Absolute and Infinite, Logos and not Logos, Mind-Stuff
and Spirit — what are they all for critical philosophy,
but, in the first place, mere ideas, conceptions
of reason, to be mercilessly analyzed without regard
for consequences?
One way remains whereby this realistic monism
can still hope to reach a satisfactory statement of the
world-problem. Suppose that, once for all, the
historical form of statement is abandoned, while the
notion of the Reason as a power is retained. This may
be done in either of two ways. The universal reason
may be conceived as manifesting itself in time, but
not in a series of events that are united as the parts
of a single process. The world-life may be conceived
not as a single history, but as an eternally repeated
product of the One reason, a process ever renewed
as soon as finished, an infinite series of growing and
decaying worlds — worlds that are like the leaves
of the forest, that spring and wither through an
eternity of changing seasons. The rationality of the
world-process is thus saved for our thought by the
hypothesis that reason is not like a belated traveler,
wandering through the night of time, seeking for
a self-realization that is never reached, but, rather,
like the sun that each day begins afresh his old
task, rejoicing as a giant in the fullness of his
attained power. Whoever regards the world as it now
is as plainly a sufficient expression of infinite
rational power, is at liberty to accept this hypothesis;
but he must prepare to answer those of his objectors
to whom reason means perfection, and to whom
the world of sense will not appear as just at present
more perfect than the world of Candide’s experiences. For every one but the blind optimist there
is difficulty in regarding this wind-swept battle-field
of human action as obviously and altogether a drama
of unhindered infinite reason, to be repeated with
unwearying tautology through an unending future.
Thus, then, we are tossed back and forth between
the possibilities suggested by our hypothesis.
“The world is the manifestation of infinite reason;”
good, then, but how? “The world is a rational
growth from lower to higher.” How, then, is this
possible if the infinite reason rules all and desires
the higher? Was it not always at the goal? So,
then: “The world is not one process merely, but
an eternal repetition of the drama of infinite reason,
which, as infinite, is thus always active and always
at the goal.” But this hypothesis is seemingly
overthrown by the appearance of the least imperfection
or irrationality in nature. The first starving
family, or singed moth, or broken troth, or wasted
effort, or wounded bird, is an indictment of the
universal reason, that, always at the goal, has wrought
this irrational wrong. The other possible
hypothesis leaves us, after all, in the same quandary. Time
may be a mere “mirage.” For the eternal One
there is, then, no process; only fact. This notion
of a timeless Being is, no doubt, very well worth
study. But, then, the eternal One is thus always at
the goal, just as in the other case. The One, we
should think, cannot be infinite and rational and yet
productive of the least trace of wrong, absurdity,
error, falsehood. Again our Monism fails. For,
after all, the world has been viewed by us only from
without; and so remains dark.
IV.
Our monism fails, namely, to establish itself on
any ground of experience. Absolute refutation is
indeed not yet thus attained, for the defender of
the hypothesis of an infinite reason always has at
his disposal the suggestions of the ancient theodicy,
modified to suit his needs. He can say: “The partial
evil is, somehow, we cannot see how, universal
good.” Or, again, “Evil results from the free-will
of moral agents, who have to suffer for their own
chosen sins.” The latter answer, a very plausible one
in its own sphere, is for the general problem
insignificant. That there is free-will we do not dispute,
and that free-will, if it exists, is a cause of much
mischief is undoubted. Yet if the universe is so
made that the free-will of the slave-driver, or of the
murderer, or of the seducer, or of the conqueror,
works untold ill to innocent victims, then the fault
of the suffering of the victims rests not wholly with
the evil-doer, but partly with the order of the world,
which has given him so much power, such a wide
freedom to do the mischief that he desires. The
world in which such things happen must justify its
religiously inspiring nature in some other way.
The other answer, that partial evil is universal good,
we have to regard as a much deeper answer,
shallow as have been the uses often made of it in the
past. But if it is to be a valid answer, it must take
a particular form. The words are usually spoken
too glibly. Their meaning, if they are to have any,
we must very carefully consider, ere we can dare to accept them. Only from a higher point of view
shall we in fact be able to apply them. In the
world of the Powers they find no resting-place.
How can a partial evil be an universal good?
Only in certain cases. The notion plainly is that
the evil in the external world of popular thought
is, as known to us, only a part of the whole, and
the whole, it is said, may be in character opposed to
the part. This must indeed be the case, if the world
as a whole is to be the work of an Infinite Reason.
For if so, the evil must be, not merely a bad lesser
part that is overbalanced by the goodness of the
larger half of the world, but non-existent, save as a
separate aspect of reality, so that it would vanish
if we knew more about the truth. This is what the
saying asserts: not that evil is overbalanced by good
(for that would leave the irrational still real), but
that evil is only a deceitful appearance, whose true
nature, if seen in its entirety, would turn out to be
good. One could not say of a rotting apple, however
small the rotten spot as yet is, that the partial
rottenness is the universal soundness of the apple. If
I have but one slight disorder in but one of my
organs, still you cannot say that my partial disorder
must be universal health. The old optimists did not
mean anything so contradictory as that. They meant
that there is no real evil at all; that what seems to
me to be evil, say toothaches, and broken households,
and pestilences, and treasons, and wars, all that
together is but a grand illusion of my partial view.
As one looking over the surface of a statue with a
microscope, and finding nothing but a stony surface, might say, how ugly! but on seeing the whole at a
glance would know its beauty; even so one seeing
the world by bits fancies it evil, but would know it
to be good if he saw it as a whole. And the seeming
but unreal evil of the parts may be necessary in
order that the real whole should be good. Such is
the position of our optimists. This is the Platonic-Augustinian
doctrine of the unreality of evil.
The logical possibility of ail this we do not for the
first either dispute or affirm. But we are dealing
with a world of difficulties, and we can only point
out the antecedent difficulty of this theory. If the
world of experience simply lacked here and there
interest, or positive signs of rational perfection, then
one might well compare it to the statue, that seen
only piecemeal, and through a microscope applied
to its surface, would wholly lack the beauty that
appears when all is viewed at once. Then one might
say, with great plausibility, that if perceptible
harmony is simply lacking to our partial view, the great
whole may still be a grand harmony. But the
trouble lies in the seemingly positive character of
evil. Not simple lack of harmony, but horrible
discord, is here. How the tortures of the wounded on
a field of battle can anyhow enter into a whole in
which, as seen by an absolute judge, there is actually
no trace of evil at all, this is what we cannot
understand. It seems very improbable. Only absolute
proof will satisfy us. And of course, as has been
indicated, by some of our examples above, it is not
the quantity of any evil (if an evil be a quantity at
all), but the quality of it, that makes us urge it in opposition to the claims of reason to be the ruler of
all things. Any evil will do, if it seems to be a real
and positive evil. For then it seems positively at
war with reason.
Actually, however, theodicies and kindred efforts,
whether monistic or not, in trying to vindicate the
rational in the world have seldom consistently
maintained this high and slippery ground of the theory
of Plato and of St. Augustine. Far from declaring
that all physical evil is and must be apparent, the
popular theodicies have often consented to accept
the reality of this positive evil, and to minimize its
significance by certain well-worn, and, for the
purposes of this argument, contemptible devices. They
have pointed out that the evil in the world, though
a reality separate from the good, exists as a means to
good. Or, again, they have said that evil is
necessary as something outside of the good, setting it off
by way of contrast. Both devices, if applied to a
world in which good and evil are conceived as
separate entities, are unworthy of philosophic thinkers.
For consider the first device. “Evil is a reality,
not an illusion, but it is a means to good.
Therefore in the world as a whole, good triumphs.
Therefore reason, which desires the good, is the One
Ruler.” But first, to mention a lesser objection,
the basis in experience for this view is surely very
narrow. Much evil exists whose use as a means we
cannot even faintly conceive. But grant this point.
Then the real evil is a means to a separate and
external good end. But if the end was good, why was
it not got without the evil means? Only two answers are possible to this, in case the evil is separate from
the good. Either the One Reason was driven to
take just this way, and could take no less expensive
one; or the One Reason, not being bound to this
road, still arbitrarily chose to take it instead of a
better. But either answer is fatal. Was the One
Reason unable to do better? Then it is not the only
power at work. The Monism fails. The Reason
was bound. But he who binds the strong man is
stronger than he. If, however, the One chose this
way rather than a better, then the One chose evil for
its own sake. The dilemma is inevitable.
To exemplify: If pain is an evil, and if the evil
of the pain caused you by a burn, or cut, or bruise
is justified by saying that all-wise nature makes your
skin sensitive to the end that you may be helped in
keeping it whole; then the obvious answer is, that
if nature is all-wise and all-powerful and benevolent
towards you, it was her business to find a way of
keeping your skin in general whole, without
entailing upon you the tortures of this present injury. If
a machine that we make runs poorly, we are not
disposed to blame ourselves, in case we are sure that
we have done our very best with it. But the
machines of all-wise nature must not run with
destructive friction, unless all-wise nature intends
destructive friction. The same remark applies to all the
eloquent speeches about the educative value of our
sufferings. If nature could make us perfect without
suffering, and if suffering is not itself an organic
part of our perfection, but only an external means
thereto, then it was nature’s rational business to develop us differently. But if nature could not perfect
our characters save through this imperfect means,
then nature’s means were limited. Nature was not
all-powerful. Reason had some irrational power
beyond it that it could not conquer. Even so we
cannot yet run certain engines without smoke. When
we are more civilized, we shall abolish smoke,
because we shall get more power over the processes of
combustion. At present, by this hypothesis, nature
can only make characters perfect through suffering,
this smoke of the engine of life. So much the worse
for nature, unless indeed, in some unknown way,
suffering is really no true evil at all, but itself a
perfection that, if seen from above, would become
plainly universal good. And does that as yet look
probable?
Even worse is the other device often suggested
for explaining evil. “Evil is a reality, but it is
useful as a foil to good. The two separate facts, good
and evil, set each other off. By its contrast, evil
increases the importance of good.” When this
remark is made about us personally with our
limitations of body and circumstance, with our relativity
of feeling and of attention, the remark has some
psychological interest. Made to justify the supposed
universal reason, the remark is childish. Always,
indeed, it is possible that evil as a separate entity
may be made out to be an illusion; and that good
and evil have some higher unity that involves the
perfection of the world. But if evil is real, and
separate from goodness, then the talk about explaining
it as a useful contrast is of no worth in the present argument. For we ask: Could not the One create
a perfect good save by making good more attractive
as set off against the foil evil? Shall we say that
Reason could do better than to depend upon this
contrast? Then why the evil? If, however, the
One Reason could not do better, but had to use the
contrast, then the One was less powerful in its
devices than is the maker of a concert-programme,
who has no need to introduce into his concert any
saw-filing or tin-trumpeting or pot-scraping to set off
the beauty of his songs and symphonies. But as a
fact of experience, is most evil seemingly even thus
useful? Are the sick needed to make the healthy
joyous? Was Judas necessary in order that Jesus
should show himself wholly good? Tradition, in
this latter case, says yes, and adds the mystical
speech about the need that the offense should come.
But what enlightened man nowadays will have it
that, supposing good and evil to be separate facts,
there can be logically possible nothing thoroughly
good, in case some of this evil were removed? Could
not Jesus have been what he was without Judas?
One doubts here the fact of the necessity of the evil,
even in our own little lives; and one is indignant
at the trifling that supposes so weak a device as
mere external contrast to be the sole device at the
disposal of the One Reason. Yet this weak
hypothesis of good and evil as externally contrasting
separate entities is, after all, provokingly near in form
to what we shall hold to be the true solution of the
great problem. But that solution is still far away
from us and from this world of sense. Thus far, then, monism seems, if not an impossible,
still a decidedly doubtful, view of the world.
Its value as furnishing religious support seems small.
We cannot yet by experience prove that the rational
power is supreme in the world; and we fail to make
clear to ourselves a priori how it should be supreme.
So far we remain agnostics. Our only escape would
seem to be through the still doubtful doctrine of the
unreality of Evil. And that way seems very dark.
V.
Dualistic Theism here confronts us, the doctrine
in which the wise of so many ages have found so
much support, the doctrine of a Father, separate
from the world of created finite beings, who directs
all things, pities and loves his children, and judges
with supreme truthfulness all human acts. The
religious value of this doctrine, on one side at least,
nobody can possibly question. The Father, as Jesus
conceives him, has in a very high sense the character
that we desire to find in reality. To be sure,
there is the other side. This God of the dualistic
view is seemingly limited. As a Father pitieth his
children, so this God pitieth. But this pity seems to
be the love of one who yet cannot or will not save
us from all our evil. And if the evil is a reality,
and is meant to work for our good, still there is the
unanswerable objection that if the Father is not
bound by an irrational power beyond him, he need
not have put us into so evil a state, but might have
wrought us our good in some less painful and dangerous way. In fact, the only plausible explanation
of real evil, in case there is separate evil in the
world, an explanation which shall yet be consistent
with the Father’s power and goodness, is the
previously mentioned explanation, that, if beings were
created, as we are, free, they must needs be also
free to choose the evil. But this explanation only
serves to explain the evil that has directly resulted
from free choice, that directly affects those who
made the choice, and that was distinctly foreseen
by them when they chose it. No other evil is
justifiable as a result of free-will; all other evil seems
absolutely mysterious, when viewed with reference
to God’s goodness; and very little of the evil that
we experience in this world is the direct result of
the deliberate choice of those who suffer it. It is
hardly necessary to illustrate these facts, which, like
the most of the present chapter, belong to the best-known
and most frequently misrepresented of the
matters of human controversy. The poor of great
cities, the men who inherit loathsome diseases, the
naturally weak of will, the insane, the sufferers in
accidents, the soldiers led to slaughter, the slaves,
the down-trodden peasants and laborers of the world:
all these, whose ills are simply inconceivable in
might, have no more brought all this on themselves
of their own free-will, than have the healthy and
happy, the heirs of wealth, the ever-joyous, earned
for themselves the good fortune to which they are
born. A man can do much with and for himself;
but the best part of him, and commonly of his
environment, is determined by birth. And for most of that “with which the face of man is blackened,” the
power is thus responsible which no free-will of man
has made. This evil must either be an organic
element in a real higher perfect unity of the world, or
else free-will is no explanation or justification for its
existence.
But really, the intelligent reader needs, when we
get to this most familiar part of our discussion, no
very lengthy repetition of the old story. His mind
is doubtless made up already, and he will desire only
a brief reminder of the chief points that have to do
with this question and with those questions most
nearly related thereto.
If, then, the doctrine of God’s Fatherhood is to
be religiously useful to us, we must make up our
minds whether the Father that we seek is to be the
omnipotent Ruler of things, or only a limited Power,
or again, something else that is not power. In the
last mentioned case, he belongs to that aspect of the
world which we just now purposely exclude from
consideration. If the Father is a Power, then we
all know the old but eternally fresh dilemma about
his nature. He is either infinite or limited. If he
is infinite, we find arising all the difficulties just
suggested in our consideration of the hypothesis of an
Infinite Reason, and one other difficulty, worse, if
anything, than they all. That difficulty we shall
mention soon again. But if, on the other hand, the
Father is to be conceived as a limited power, if we
are to accept some sort of modern Manicheanism,
then no a priori disproof of the possibility of the
hypothesis can be offered; since, a priori. any finite power you please is a possibility; but our great
trouble will then lie in the fact that only experience
can establish such an hypothesis, which by its very
nature needs a posteriori proof. And experience,
as summed up in science, has in fact simply no need
of that hypothesis. Hence we shall be left
altogether in doubt, at least while we study the World
as Power.
Such is the argument in its most general
statement. Now as to the points in greater detail. The
great difficulty mentioned above as lying in the way
of the hypothesis of an infinite creative power is a
difficulty in the conception of creation itself.
Creation, for the popular conception, certainly involves
producing a thing of some kind by a creative act,
the thing produced existing forthwith outside of the
creator. To give up this separation of creator and
product is to become pantheistic. And with monism
we are not here concerned. But now the idea of
an infinite creative Power outside of his products
involves more than one difficulty. We shall not
dwell on the old difficulty that this infinite Power
would become finite as soon as there was in existence
something outside of it. We shall proceed at once
to a more fruitful and serious difficulty, which we
find in the fact that the concept of producing an
external thing involves, of necessity, a relation to a
Law, above both producer and product, which
determines the conditions under which there can be
a product at all. The creative power must then
work under conditions, however magical and
mysterious its acts may be. And working under conditions, it must be finite. No device for minimizing
the meaning of this separation of creative power and
created thing will really escape the difficulty
resulting. And this difficulty will appear in all cases
of supposed creation. It may be summed up once
more in the statement that any creative power in act,
just as much needs explanation in some higher law
and power as does the thing created itself, so that
whatever creates a product external to itself becomes
thereby as truly dependent a power as we ourselves
are. Let us exemplify.
“Let there he light,” shall represent a creative
act. If the light that results is simply a fact in God,
then our difficulty is avoided, but the very
conception of a power creating anything external to itself
is abandoned. Then one becomes frankly
pantheistic, and identifies all things with the creative power.
But if the light is not the creative act, but
separate from it, then you have an insurmountable
difficulty in the conception. For the power that makes
the fiat is not itself the created thing, but, as it were,
this power finds the product as a result of the fiat,
God saying. Fiat lux, finds that this act, this word,
or whatever process it symbolizes as actually
happening in the divine mind, is followed by the external
appearance of something, namely, light. Now as
creator of light, God is not yet conceived as the
creator of those conditions under which just this
fiat could be followed by just these consequences.
But the external success of the fiat presupposes
external conditions under which the fiat can succeed.
Just as when I say, “let there be light,” and produce it by my own fiat plus the necessary physical
acts, even so the conceived Deity in the conceived
case, though needing no other means save his fiat,
has yet needed that, and has found his fiat a
sufficient cause of this external change from darkness to
light. But just as my success in making light needs
explanation by the laws of an external world, so
God’s success in making it also needs explanation, in
the case thus conceived, although his means are
supposed to have been less complex than mine have to
be. He too is put by this conception in a world of
law external to himself, the laws of this world being
such as require that, in order to produce light as an
external fact he shall perform a certain act, the fiat.
These laws secure him success, in the supposed case,
under just these conditions. The fiat may itself be
whatever process you will.
But how then did these conditions arise? How
is it that God is able to make light as an existence
external to himself? The external conditions on
which his present success depends may indeed have
been again created by himself. Even so a man could
now possibly make some ingenious mechanism, com-
pounded of telephones and what else you will, so as
to be able to light a whole building by the impulse
produced by some very simple act, e.g., by speaking
the words, “Let there be light,” against some
prepared membrane. But then we are involved in just
the same difficulties. As the man’s mechanical skill
would imply a conformity to laws of nature
preceding his present power to make light by the word of
his mouth, even so, if God’s creative power has previously created the conditions of the success of this
his present fiat, the same questions would arise about
those conditions, and so on ad infinitum. Always
even the infinite series of acts would imply, at every
step of the regress, God working upon a nature
external to himself, and so God as a finite power,
subject to the laws that let him work.
But then may we not hereupon accept the doctrine
of God's infinity, and say that this infinite power is
identical with its products? Shall we not be
pantheists of the old-fashioned sort, and yet keep the
doctrine of God’s Fatherhood? The attempt is
hopeless. And the difficulties in the way of the religious
use of the pantheistic hypotheses have already been
considered. Furthermore, many theistic thinkers
have felt the force of an old set of arguments that,
in this country and recently. Professor Bowne, in his
“Metaphysics,” has more than once set forth at
length, namely, the thought that, if God can be as
Creator identical with his other creations, he cannot
as a Power well be identical with us, who feel
ourselves to be also creative powers, and not mere forms
or acts in any other power. But if we are separate
from God, then in this class of cases his creation of
us involves all the difficulties before pointed out.
When he made us, his fiat was successful beyond
himself. The success needs a preexistent law, or, if
you will, a preëxistent power outside of him, to
explain it; just exactly as my power to move my hand
or to wink my eye implies a whole universe of being
outside of me in order to give my will just this
position of authority. Merely assume in your thought these conceptions, namely, a power that acts and an
external product resulting from its acts; and at once
you need a higher power and a higher law, external
to the first power, to explain how the first power,
acting in just this way, could achieve just this
external result. Hence either God creates nothing
external to himself, or else, in creating, he works under
the laws that presuppose a power higher than
himself, and external to himself. In the briefest form:
Acts that produce external changes imply
adjustment of means to ends. The creation of external
things is such an act. Unless an actor is identical
with the product itself, he must therefore be subject
to the external conditions of adjustment, i.e., he
must be finite.
Certain thinkers are accustomed to suppose that
they honor God by having obscure and self-contradictory
ideas about him. Hence they avoid all of
the foregoing difficulties by calling the creative act
a mystery. Now there are mysteries and mysteries.
We do not know how trees grow, nor why the planets
obey the law of gravitation. But we are sure that
they do. On the other hand, we do not know how
squares can be round; but we happen in this case
to perceive that squares cannot be round. Now if
somebody tells me that God is a round square, and
appeals to me to consider reverently whether piety
allows me to assert, in view of the mystery of God’s
being, that God is not a round square, my answer is
very plain. I say at once that it must be as
irreverent to call God absurd and self-contradictory in his
nature as to call him anything else discreditable; and that I, for my part, hesitate not to declare very
frankly that though I know very little about God, I
am sure that he is no round square. Now even so,
an absurd and self-contradictory account of the act
of creation must not be allowed to escape us by
pleading that creation is a mystery, and that nobody
can see how God makes things. For, mysterious as
creation may be, we can be sure that if creation is of
such a nature as to involve an external power and an
external law, outside of God’s creative power itself,
then God is himself not infinite. And we can be
equally sure that unless God as creator is identical
with his products, the idea of a creative act does
involve just such a power preceding the act and
outside of God himself. The device then by which so
many thinkers seek to escape from this well-known
and ancient net of dialectics, seems for us necessarily
unsuccessful. There are mysteries that we have
reverently to accept, and before long we ourselves shall
find such, and we shall be glad to bow before them.
But if creation is indeed such a mystery, at all events
a self-contradiction about creation is not such a
mystery.
VI.
We have dwelt at length on one of the
alternatives of Theism. Disheartened, and without any
enthusiasm, we turn to the other. Must we after all
remain content in our religion without any
assurance of the supremacy of the good? Must we be
content with this halting half Theism of the empirical
Design- Argument? If we must be, we must be. But what if that too should fail us? Let us at least try
it. This unsatisfactory view says: “What powers
there may be in the world we can never wholly know.
But we think that there is evidence that they that
be for the moral law are more than they that be
against it. And this evidence is given us by the
empirically discerned marks of benevolent design about
us in the world.” This view, whatever its religious
worth, is at all events capable only of empirical
proof, and pretends only to such a rank. And it is
in discussing this hypothesis, in the dim light of the
weary centuries of dispute about it, that one comes
at last fully to feel the bitterness of the doubt that,
like a tormenting disease, assails and eternally must
assail one who tries to be content with this dreary visible
world in which we have been so far vainly seeking
for comfort. Wrangle upon wrangle, ceaseless
balancing of probabilities this way and that, opinions
and ridicule and abuse forever, and no result: such
is this empirical teleology that seeks a world-manufacturer,
and cannot discover him. Let us take up
the miserable business just where we happen to
find it.
There is no doubt about this, that the doctrine of
evolution has rendered the popular empirical proof
of a special designing power much harder than we
used to suppose. And when we pass to this aspect
of our question, we must confess at once that we have
nothing to say which can be new to any reader of
modern discussion. This empirical teleology will
always remain a doubtful subject for human inquiry.
Any dogmatic disproof of intelligent finite powers or daemons above us must be regarded as impossible.
The only question to be here solved is the
possibility of purely inductive proof of the existence
of such higher intelligent agencies. And here, as
we hold, just the ancient difficulties as to the proof
of any empirical teleological theory survive, and are,
in spite of all that recent writers have done, rather
increased by our knowledge of the facts of evolution.
Especially does evolution make the empirical hypothesis
of the existence of any finite and good daemonic
power, intelligently and morally working in the
world, continually more and more obscure. For
first, as to the intelligence of the higher powers, what
the theory of evolution has done for us in this
respect is simply to make us feel that we know not,
and cannot yet even guess, how much what we
empirically call bare mechanism can do to simulate the
effects of what, in an equally empirical and blind
way, men call intelligence. Therefore no empirical
design-argument has longer anywhere nearly the
same amount of persuasive power that it once seemed
to have. The matter stands thus: An empirical
design-argument might very plausibly reason that, if I
find a child’s blocks arranged to make a house or to
spell words, I can assume that some designing human
hand has so placed them. But the inductive force
of the argument rests on my previous knowledge
that nothing is so apt to put blocks in that order,
in this present visible world, as just a designing
human hand. But if I discovered certain physical
conditions that did very frequently work, and that
did often so arrange blocks, then I should no longer consider the given arrangement good proof of human
design. Even so, until I see that natural selection
can simulate the designing power of human beings,
I may be disposed to regard a given case of
apparent design in nature as a fair inductive proof of
some great carpenter or watch-maker working there.
But the induction, never overwhelming, becomes very
weak when I learn that there are so-called physical
conditions such as we or chance can produce, which,
however, do nevertheless result in things that my eye
woidd have called full of design. For then I am led
to feel as if I could pass no judgment at all upon
concrete cases. Yet only by concrete cases can an
empirical hypothesis be proved. Therefore unless a
pebble proves design an eye does not prove design.
But design, we hear, is not incompatible with
evolution. Of course not. And if there is a designer,
who works through evolution, then indeed he shows
wonderful foresight and mastery. But the question
is, not what is compatible with evolution, but what
can be proven from bare experience. And what the
modern man has very justly come to see is that mere
experience must leave him in utter doubt about
what powers, intelligent or not intelligent, are the
sources of all our experience. We can find laws;
but they take us only a short way. And the more
we know about nature, the less inclined we feel to
dogmatize on the basis of mere experience about
what powers are behind the scenes. They may be
intelligent, and they may be what we call in this
world of sense mechanical. But as finite powers,
given in experience, we men know them solely by their effects. And their effects are very remote
hints of their real nature. It is really painful to
read the elaborate wastes of effort made in our day
to prove that some theological dogma about some
power beyond experience is not refuted by
experience. As if such proof made anybody’s creed
either more or less doubtful. A really well-founded
Theism would not be, in this tedious way, eternally
on the defensive.
But there is the other aspect of the matter. An
intelligent power, were it admitted, would not need to
be moral. If there is design, is the designer
demonstrably good? Let us pass over to that question.
VII.
If evolution has done anything for us, it has
tended to increase our sense of the mystery of the
world of experience, and therefore the
philosophically minded religious student is in truth, for yet
this other reason, weary of all this empirical Theism,
namely, because he despairs of finding out, by such
an empirical process, anything about the actual
purposes of any designer, even if there be a designer.
To study English literature in the rubbish heaps of
a book-binder’s work-shop, would seem to a wise man
a much more hopeful undertaking than to seek any
one notion of the real plan on which this world is
made from a merely empirical study of our little
fragment of nature. Science is right in abandoning
such undertakings wholly and for all its now
probable future work. Religion must find the religious aspect of reality in a totally different direction. The
higher the realities that we study, the harder the
task. The heavens declare very many things not
wholly clear to us; but the earth and man declare,
as natural facts, very many more and more confusing
things. Only a poetical abstraction can show us any
one plan of religious value in the world of sense,
any one declaration of anybody’s glory therein. An
equally strong opposing interest would find just as
good evidence for what it sought if it should hold
another view of what is designed. Nature is, so
regarded, a confused hum of voices. “Nature,” says
one voice, “is meant to provide bountifully for the
wants of sentient life.” “Therefore,” says another
voice, “all the weak, the sick, the old, must starve,
and all the carnivorous destroy their neighbors.”
“Nature aims at the evolution of the highest type of
life,” says the first voice. “Therefore,” it is replied,
“she bountifully provides swarms of parasites of all
sorts to feed on higher life.” “Nature desires
order and unity,” says the voice from the heavens.
“Therefore she makes meteors and comets,” replies
the echoing voice. — And if now the Fiend appears,
and suggests, as the only satisfactory design-hypothesis,
something of this sort, how could experience
answer him? — “Nature,” he says, “is designed by
a being who delights in manifold activity of all sorts,
in variety of organization throughout the world, in
the fine contrasts of the numberless forms of sentient
life, and in whatever means vigor. He likes to see
many living creatures, and he likes to see them fight.
He likes the sight of suffering, as well as of joy; because both mean variety of action. He delights in
the triumphs of the victors, in the groans of the
conquered, in the sportiveness of young animals, in the
writhing of a poor beast that dies in torture, in the
insidious struo-o-le for existence that the Entozoa
carry on, in the hopeless sighs that men send up to
him in their woe, and in the ideal raptures and
agonies of saints, artists, and lovers. All these things
he likes, because they are just so many forms of
existence. He wants plenty of life and vigor to
contemplate, as a boy wants stiff soap-suds to make
pretty bubbles for his pleasure as he lies idle. This
being is doubtless finite (like his brother, the
Setebos of the inimitable monologue that Browning has
put into Caliban’s mouth). But just now he reigns
hereabouts, even as Caliban’s Setebos reigned in the
island. And his designs are so obviously shown in
nature, that anybody ought to believe in him who
simply looks at the facts of experience.”
Of this horrible doctrine we apprehend that
experience as such offers no disproof. For all that
science can say, we might be in the hands of just
such a demon. Hence it behooves religious students
to cease looking for the living God among the dead
facts of physical science, and to betake themselves
to their own proper field. Science simply leaves all
such hypotheses utterly doubtful. Our little corner
of the world may have become what it is in any one
of numberless physically definable ways. And, if
designed, its immediate purpose may be any one of
numberless purposes. It is not probable that
experience can tell us much about that matter. Science is very right in appealing to experience with wholly
different aims, namely, for the sake of understanding
the laws of the sequence of phenomena, to the end
that we may be able to know what the world-plan,
however it may be formed, does actually render us
capable of accomplishing just now and here in our
concrete dealings with things. And if science, in
doing all this, has to make certain postulates, and to
accept them on faith, then such faith, though it needs
indeed a deeper foundation, is at least not identical
with the presumption that, undertaking not simply
to postulate, but to prove beyond doubt, pretends to
discover with certainty, from bare experience, that
the world-maker’s plans do agree with our plans.
After all, such empirical Theism is assuming its
safest and most characteristic form when it appears
no longer as a genuine investigator, but poses as the
defendant’s attorney, takes prudent refuge behind the
rules of debate, and demands that other people shall
assume the burden of proof, and either show it to be
certainly false, or else accept it for the sake of
propriety.
VIII.
We turned to the supposed external World of
Powers, and we have found it either dumb, or else
given to dark and doubtful speeches. The Powers
may indeed be somehow of the highest worth. But
to us, even if we accept unquestioningiy the supposed
external world, the worth of it all seems doubtful,
and more so the longer we study the matter. The
partial evil may be universal good; but we could not in this external world see how, nor could we find
proof of the fact. What a Power causes, that the
power seems responsible for. And so the Powers
that cause the inestimable might of evil in the world
seem of very doubtful religious worth.
We have already suggested in outline why this
doubtful residt was to be expected. These Powers
were assumed to exist apart from our thought, in
tiuie and space, and to work in time. They have,
as workers in time, no certain and eternal
significance. A single Infinite Power is, properly
speaking, a misnomer. If a power produces something
that is external to itself, then the very idea of such
an occurrence implies another power, separate from
the first, and therefore limiting it. If however the
power is identical with its own products, then the
name power no longer properly belongs to it. For,
as we shall see when we come to speak of the world
in its other aspect, namely, as eternal, the conceptions
of power and product, of cause and effect, and of
all like existences, are found to be only subordinate
to the highest conception of the world as Thought.
For the Eternal Thought are all these powers; but
in themselves they belong to the flux of things.
Each one of them says. Not in me, when you ask it
for the significance of the world as a whole. Each
power says: “I work here along with the others.
I fight, I strive, I conquer, I obey, I seek my ends
as I can. But beyond me are the conditions that
limit me.” And these conditions are the other
powers. The world of powers is the world of the
children of the dragon’s teeth. Their struggles are endless. The only religion that they can teach is the
religion of endurance and of courage. Or one may
compare them to the warriors in king Atli’s house.
Only the all-seeing Eternal Thought can possibly
discover their significance. Of themselves they are
just the fighters in the blood and dust of the
banqueting hall.
All this we just now affirm without full proof.
But our previous discussion has been one long
illustration of it. You find or think you find in the
world a religiously valuable power or tendency at
work. But at once there stands beside it its sworn
foe. Is it Evolution that you have found? There
stands beside it Dissolution. Is it the tender care of
a fatherly nature for the very sparrows? Then
appears beside it the cruelty and deceit of nature. Is
it the beauty of the world that suggests a power-loving
beauty? Nay, but the rottenness and the
horror of natural disease and decay assert as boldly
the workings of a power that hates beauty. Are
all these seeming powers just mere phantoms, whose
truth is in the laws of physics? Then the world is
a vast wreck of colliding molecules. Are these powers
real tendencies? Then their fight is seemingly
endless. The world of the powers is indeed full of
physical law, because and only because its facts are
found, by means of thought that has a deeper
foundation, to be cases of certain general rules. But
for our religious purpose, this world of the powers
seems a chaos.
“But,” says some one, “all this is no disproof of
the existence of a real but to us not perfectly clear harmony of all the powers. This is simply absence
of proof.” Yes; but if proof is what we want, and
if every single power sends us beyond itself for the
interpretation of the meaning of the whole, we
cannot hope to grasp that meaning so long as we avoid
studying the world in its eternal aspect. The
powers themselves make and unmake. We understand
them not. They remind us of the night-scene of
Faust: —
Faust. Was weben die dort um den Rabenstein?
Mephistopheles. Weiss nicht was sie kochen uud schaffen.
Faust. Schweben auf, schweben ab, neigen sich, beugen sich.
Mephistopheles. Eine Hexenkunst.
Faust. Sie streuen und weihen.
Mephistopheles. Vorbei! Vorbei!
And if we will hear the wisdom of Mephistopheles
about all this, he has elsewhere given his view, which,
as an opinion about the world of powers by one of
the more authoritative powers in it, is worthy of
as much respect as any other suggestion from an
equally limited being: —
“Was soll uns dann das ewige Schaffen!
Gescbaffenes zu nichts hinwegzuraffen!
‘Da ist’s vorbei!’ Was ist daran zu lesen?
Es ist so gut als wär’es nicht gewesen.
Und treibt sich doch im Kreis, als wenn es wäre.
Ich liebte mir dafür das Ewig-Leere.”
And possibly it would be hard for us to be sure of
much more meaning in this world of powers as such,
than Mephistopheles has found.
For us, we turn, not with despair, but with hope,
elsewhere. We go to seek the Eternal, not in
experience, but in the thought that thinks experience. Our hope is not less because we have found in the
temporal a world of doubt. Our song is simply
the “Good-by proud world, I’m going home,” of
the religious minds of all ages. The truly religious
elements of theism are not hurt by the destruction
of traditions about theistic arguments. It is only an
example of shallow thought when either the
destructive or the constructive thinkers imagine that the
battle is decided if the world of the powers is judged
in one way or in another. Religion is as independent
of all that as Sirius is independent of the north
wind.
Notes
Uncharted Knowledge
Wisdom From Previous Realities
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