The material of our study of human nature is now spread before
us; and in this parting hour, set free from the duty of description, we can draw
our theoretical and practical conclusions. In my first lecture, defending the
empirical method, I foretold that whatever conclusions we might come to could
be reached by spiritual judgments only, appreciations of the significance for
life of religion, taken 'on the whole.' Our conclusions cannot be as sharp as
dogmatic conclusions would be, but I will formulate them, when the time comes,
as sharply as I can. Summing up in the broadest possible way the characteristics
of the religious life, as we have found them, it includes the following beliefs:
1. That the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which
it draws its chief significance;
2. That union or harmonious relation with
that higher universe is our true end;
3. That prayer or inner communion with
the spirit thereof- be that spirit 'God' or 'law'- is a process wherein work is
really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological
or material, within the phenomenal world.
Religion includes also the following
psychological characteristics:
4. A new zest which adds itself like a gift
to life, and takes the form either of lyrical enchantment or of appeal to earnestness
and heroism.
5. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relation
to others, a preponderance of loving affections.
In illustrating these characteristics
by documents, we have been literally bathed in sentiment. In re-reading my manuscript,
I am almost appalled at the amount of emotionality which I find in it. After so
much of this, we can afford to be dryer and less sympathetic in the rest of the
work that lies before us.
The sentimentality of many of my documents is a
consequence of the fact that I sought them among the extravagances of the subject.
If any of you are enemies of what our ancestors used to brand as enthusiasm, and
are, nevertheless, still listening to me now, you have probably felt my selection
to have been sometimes almost perverse, and have wished I might have stuck to
soberer examples. I reply that I took these extremer examples as yielding the
profounder information. To learn the secrets of any science, we go to expert specialists,
even though they may be eccentric persons, and not to commonplace pupils. We combine
what they tell us with the rest of our wisdom, and form our final judgment independently.
Even so with religion. We who have pursued such radical expressions of it may
now be sure that we know its secrets as authentically as any one can know them
who learns them from another; and we have next to answer, each of us for himself,
the practical question: what are the dangers in this element of life? and in what
proportion may it need to be restrained by other elements, to give the proper
balance?
But this question suggests another one which I
will answer immediately and get it out of the way, for it has more than once already
vexed us. Ought it to be assumed that in all men the mixture of religion with
other elements should be identical? Ought it, indeed, to be assumed that the lives
of all men should show identical religious elements? In other words, is the existence
of so many religious types and sects and creeds regrettable?
To these questions
I answer 'No' emphatically. And my reason is that I do not see how it is possible
that creatures in such different positions and with such different powers as human
individuals are, should have exactly the same functions and the same duties. No
two of us have identical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical
solutions. Each, from his peculiar angle of observation, takes in a certain sphere
of fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a unique manner. One of us must
soften himself, another must harden himself; one must yield a point, another must
stand firm,- in order the better to defend the position assigned him. If an Emerson
were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced to be a Whitman, the total human
consciousness of the divine would suffer. The divine can mean no single quality,
it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation,
different men may all find worthy missions. Each attitude being a syllable in
human nature's total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out
completely. So a 'god of battles' must be allowed to be the god for one kind of
person, a god of peace and heaven and home, the god for another. We must frankly
recognize the fact that we live in partial systems, and that parts are not interchangeable
in the spiritual life. If we are peevish and jealous, destruction of the self
must be an element of our religion; why need it be one if we are good and sympathetic
from the outset? If we are sick souls, we require a religion of deliverance; but
why think so much of deliverance, if we are healthy-minded? * Unquestionably,
some men have the completer experience and the higher vocation, here just as in
the social world; but for each man to stay in his own experience, whate'er it
be, and for others to tolerate him there, is surely best.
* From this point
of view, the contrasts between the healthy and the morbid mind, and between the
once-born and the twice-born types, of which I spoke in earlier lectures cease
to be the radical antagonisms which many think them. The twice-born look down
upon the rectilinear consciousness of life of the once-born as being 'mere morality,'
and not properly religion. "Dr. Channing," an orthodox minister is reported to
have said, "is excluded from the highest form of religious life by the extraordinary
rectitude of his character." It is indeed true that the outlook upon life of the
twice-born- holding as it does more of the element of evil in solution- is the
wider and completer. The 'heroic' or 'solemn' way in which life comes to them
is a 'higher synthesis' into which healthy-mindedness and morbidness both enter
and combine. Evil is not evaded, but sublated in the higher religious cheer of
these persons. But the final consciousness which each type reaches of union with
the divine has the same practical significance for the individual; and individuals
may well be allowed to get to it by the channels which lie most open to their
several temperaments. In the cases which were quoted in Lecture IV, of the mind-cure
form of healthy-mindedness, we found abundant examples of regenerative process.
The severity of the crisis in this process is a matter of degree. How long one
shall continue to drink the consciousness of evil, and when one shall begin to
short-circuit and get rid of it, are also matters of amount and degree, so that
in many instances it is quite arbitrary whether we class the individual a once-born
or a twice-born subject.
But, you may now ask, would not this one-sidedness
be cured if we should all espouse the science of religions as our own religion?
In answering this question I must open again the general relations of the theoretic
to the active life.
Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself. You remember
what Al-Ghazzali told us in the Lecture on Mysticism,- that to understand the
causes of drunkenness, as a physician understands them, is not to be drunk. A
science might come to understand everything about the causes and elements of religion,
and might even decide which elements were qualified, by their general harmony
with other branches of knowledge, to be considered true; and yet the best man
at this science might be the man who found it hardest to be personally devout.
Tout savoir c'est tout pardonner. The name of Renan would doubtless occur to many
persons as an example of the way in which breadth of knowledge may make one only
a dilettante in possibilities, and blunt the acuteness of one's living faith.
* If religion be a function by which either God's cause or man's cause is to be
really advanced, then he who lives the life of it, however narrowly, is a better
servant than he who merely knows about it, however much. Knowledge about life
is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents
passing through your being, is another.
* Compare, e.g., the quotation from
Renan in Lecture II, above.
For this reason, the science
of religions may not be an equivalent for living religion; and if we turn to the
inner difficulties of such a science, we see that a point comes when she must
drop the purely theoretic attitude, and either let her knots remain uncut, or
have them cut by active faith. To see this, suppose that we have our science of
religions constituted as a matter of fact. Suppose that she has assimilated all
the necessary historical material and distilled out of it as its essence the same
conclusions which I myself a few moments ago pronounced. Suppose that she agrees
that religion, wherever it is an active thing, involves a belief in ideal presences,
and a belief that in our prayerful communion with them, * work is done, and something
real comes to pass. She has now to exert her critical activity, and to decide
how far, in the light of other sciences and in that of general philosophy, such
beliefs can be considered true.
* 'Prayerful' taken in the broader sense explained
above in Lecture XIX.
Dogmatically to decide this is an impossible task. Not
only are the other sciences and the philosophy still far from being completed,
but in their present state we find them full of conflicts. The sciences of nature
know nothing of spiritual presences, and on the whole hold no practical commerce
whatever with the idealistic conceptions towards which general philosophy inclines.
The scientist, so-called, is, during his scientific hours at least, so materialistic
that one may well say that on the whole the influence of science goes against
the notion that religion should be recognized at all. And this antipathy to religion
finds an echo within the very science of religions itself. The cultivator of this
science has to become acquainted with so many groveling and horrible superstitions
that a presumption easily arises in his mind that any belief that is religious
probably is false. In the 'prayerful communion' of savages with such mumbo-jumbos
of deities as they acknowledge, it is hard for us to see what genuine spiritual
work- even though it were work relative only to their dark savage obligations-
can possibly be done.
The consequence is that the conclusions
of the science of religions are as likely to be adverse as they are to be favorable
to the claim that the essence of religion is true. There is a notion in the air
about us that religion is probably only an anachronism, a case of 'survival,'
an atavistic relapse into a mode of thought which humanity in its more enlightened
examples has outgrown; and this notion our religious anthropologists at present
do little to counteract.
This view is so widespread at the present day that
I must consider it with some explicitness before I pass to my own conclusions.
Let me call it the 'Survival theory,' for brevity's sake.
The
pivot round which the religious life, as we have traced it, revolves, is the
interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, in short,
is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. The gods believed in-
whether by crude savages or by men disciplined intellectually- agree with each
other in recognizing personal calls. Religious thought is carried on in terms
of personality, this being, in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact.
To-day, quite as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you
that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns.
Science,
on the other hand, has ended by utterly repudiating the personal point of
view. She catalogues her elements and records her laws indifferent as to what
purpose may be shown forth by them, and constructs her theories quite careless
of their bearing on human anxieties and fates. Though the scientist may individually
nourish a religion, and be a theist in his irresponsible hours, the days are over
when it could be said that for Science herself the heavens declare the glory of
God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies,
is seen now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in
the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds
where no life can exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will count
but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of chance production,
and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well
as to the smallest facts. It is impossible, in the present temper of the scientific
imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms, whether they work on
the universal or on the particular scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather,
doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature
has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel
a sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes, as the scientific mind now follows
them, she appears to cancel herself. The books of natural theology which satisfied
the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque, * representing,
as they did, a God who conformed the largest things of nature to the paltriest
of our private wants. The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal
laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot
accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the
foam which coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces
of the wind and water. Our private selves are like those bubbles,- epiphenomena,
as Clifford, I believe, ingeniously called them; their destinies weigh nothing
and determine nothing in the world's irremediable currents of events.
* How
was it ever conceivable, we ask, that a man like Christian Wolff, in whose dry-as-dust
head all the learning of the early eighteenth century was concentrated, should
have preserved such a baby-like faith in the personal and human character of Nature
as to expound her operations as he did in his work on the uses of natural things?
This, for example, is the account he gives of the sun and its utility:
"We
see that God has created the sun to keep the changeable conditions on the earth
in such an order that living creatures, men and beasts, may inhabit its surface.
Since men are the most reasonable of creatures, and able to infer God's invisible
being from the contemplation of the world, the sun in so far forth contributes
to the primary purpose of creation: without it the race of man could not be preserved
or continued.... The sun makes daylight, not only on our earth, but also on the
other planets; and daylight is of the utmost utility to us; for by its means we
can commodiously carry on those occupations which in the night-time would either
be quite impossible, or at any rate impossible without our going to the expense
of artificial light. The beasts of the field can find food by day which they would
not be able to find at night. Moreover we owe it to the sunlight that we are able
to see everything that is on the earth's surface, not only near by, but also at
a distance, and to recognize both near and far things according to their species,
which again is of manifold use to us not only in the business necessary to human
life, and when we are traveling, but also for the scientific knowledge of Nature,
which knowledge for the most part depends on observations made with the help of
sight, and, without the sunshine, would have been impossible. If any one would
rightly impress on his mind the great advantages which he derives from the sun,
let him imagine himself living through only one mouth, and see how it would be
with all his undertakings, if it were not day but night. He would then be sufficiently
convinced out of his own experience, especially if he had much work to carry on
in the street or in the fields.... From the sun we learn to recognize when it
is midday, and by knowing this point of time exactly, we can set our clocks right,
on which account astronomy owes much to the sun.... By help of the sun one can
find the meridian.... But the meridian is the basis of our sun-dials, and generally
speaking, we should have no sun-dials if we had no sun." Vernunftige Gedanken
von den Absichten der naturlichen Dinge, 1782, pp. 74-84.
Or read the account
of God's beneficence in the institution of "the great variety throughout the world
of men's faces, voices, and handwriting," given in Derham's Physico-theology,
a book that had much vogue in the eighteenth century. "Had Man's body," says Dr.
Derham, "been made according to any of the Atheistical Schemes, or any other Method
than that of the infinite Lord of the World, this wise Variety would never have
been: but Men's Faces would have been cast in the same, or not a very different
Mould, their Organs of Speech would have sounded the same or not so great a Variety
of Notes; and the same Structure of Muscles and Nerves would have given the Hand
the same Direction in Writing. And in this Case, what Confusion, what Disturbance,
what Mischiefs would the world eternally have lain under! No Security could have
been to our persons; no Certainty, no Enjoyment of our Possessions; no Justice
between Man and Man; no Distinction between Good and Bad, between Friends and
Foes, between Father and Child, Husband and Wife, Male or Female; but all would
have been turned topsy-turvy, by being exposed to the Malice of the Envious and
ill-Natured, to the Fraud and Violence of Knaves and Robbers, to the Forgeries
of the crafty Cheat, to the Lusts of the Effeminate and Debauched, and what not!
Our Courts of Justice can abundantly testify the dire Effects of Mistaking Men's
Faces, of counterfeiting their Hands, and forging Writings. But now as the infinitely
wise Creator and Ruler hath ordered the Matter, every man's Face can distinguish
him in the Light, and his Voice in the Dark; his Hand-writing can speak for him
though absent, and be his Witness, and secure his Contracts in future Generations.
A manifest as well as admirable Indication of the divine Superintendence and Management."
A God so careful as to make provision even for the unmistakable signing of
bank checks and deeds was a deity truly after the heart of eighteenth century
Anglicanism.
I subjoin, omitting the capitals, Derham's 'Vindication of God
by the Institution of Hills and Valleys,' and Wolff's altogether culinary account
of the Institution of Water:
"The uses," says Wolff, "which water serves in
human life are plain to see and need not be described at length. Water is a universal
drink of man and beasts. Even though men have made themselves drinks that are
artificial, they could not do this without water. Beer is brewed of water and
malt, and it is the water in it which quenches thirst. Wine is prepared from grapes,
which could never have grown without the help of water; and the same is true of
those drinks which in England and other places they produce from fruit.... Therefore
since God so planned the world that men and beasts should live upon it and find
there everything required for their necessity and convenience, he also made water
as one means whereby to make the earth into so excellent a dwelling. And this
is all the more manifest when we consider the advantages which we obtain from
this same water for the cleaning of our household utensils, of our clothing, and
of other matters.... When one goes into a grinding-mill one sees that the grindstone
must always be kept wet and then one will get a still greater idea of the use
of water."
Of the hills and valleys, Derham, after praising their beauty,
discourses as follows: "Some constitutions are indeed of so happy a strength,
and so confirmed an health, as to be indifferent to almost any place or temperature
of the air. But then others are so weakly and feeble, as not to be able to bear
one, but can live comfortably in another place. With some the more subtle and
finer air of the hills doth best agree, who are languishing and dying in the feculent
and grosser air of great towns, or even the warmer and vaporous air of the valleys
and waters. But contrariwise, others languish on the hills, and grow lusty and
strong in the warmer air of the valleys.
"So that this opportunity of shifting
our abode from the hills to the vales, is an admirable easement, refreshment,
and great benefit to the valetudinarian, feeble part of mankind; affording those
an easy and comfortable life, who would otherwise live miserably, languish, and
pine away.
"To this salutary conformation of the earth we may add another
great convenience of the hills, and that is affording commodious places for habitation,
serving (as an eminent author wordeth it) as screens to keep off the cold and
nipping blasts of the northern and easterly winds, and reflecting the benign and
cherishing sunbeams, and so rendering our habitations both more comfortable and
more cheerly in winter.
"Lastly, it is to the hills that the fountains owe
their rise and the rivers their conveyance, and consequently those vast masses
and lofty piles are not, as they are charged, such rude and useless excrescences
of our ill-formed globe; but the admirable tools of nature, contrived and ordered
by the infinite Creator, to do one of its most useful works. For, was the surface
of the earth even and level, and the middle parts of its islands and continents
not mountainous and high as now it is, it is most certain there could be no descent
for the rivers, no conveyance for the waters; but, instead of gliding along those
gentle declivities which the higher lands now afford them quite down to the sea,
they would stagnate and perhaps stink, and also drown large tracts of land.
"[Thus] the hills and vales, though to a peevish and weary traveler they may seem
incommodious and troublesome, yet are a noble work of the great Creator, and wisely
appointed by him for the good of our sublunary world."
You see how natural
it is, from this point of view, to treat religion as a mere survival, for religion
does in fact perpetuate the traditions of the most primeval thought. To coerce
the spiritual powers, or to square them and get them on our side, was, during
enormous tracts of time, the one great object in our dealings with the natural
world. For our ancestors, dreams, hallucinations, revelations, and cock-and-bull
stories were inextricably mixed with facts. Up to a comparatively recent date
such distinctions as those between what has been verified and what is only conjectured,
between the impersonal and the personal aspects of existence, were hardly suspected
or conceived. Whatever you imagined in a lively manner, whatever you thought fit
to be true, you affirmed confidently; and whatever you affirmed, your comrades
believed. Truth was what had not yet been contradicted, most things were taken
into the mind from the point of view of their human suggestiveness, and the attention
confined itself exclusively to the aesthetic and dramatic aspects of events. *
* Until the seventeenth century this mode of thought prevailed. One need only
recall the dramatic treatment even of mechanical questions by Aristotle, as, for
example, his explanation of the power of the lever to make a small weight raise
a larger one. This is due, according to Aristotle, to the generally miraculous
character of the circle and of all circular movement. The circle is both convex
and concave; it is made by a fixed point and a moving line, which contradict each
other; and whatever moves in a circle moves in opposite directions. Nevertheless,
movement in a circle is the most 'natural' movement; and the long arm of the lever,
moving, as it does, in the larger circle, has the greater amount of this natural
motion, and consequently requires the lesser force. Or recall the explanation
by Herodotus of the position of the sun in winter: It moves to the south because
of the cold which drives it into the warm parts of the heavens over Libya. Or
listen to Saint Augustine's speculations: "Who gave to chaff such power to freeze
that it preserves snow buried under it, and such power to warm that it ripens
green fruit? Who can explain the strange properties of fire itself, which blackens
all that it burns, though itself bright, and which, though of the most beautiful
colors, discolors almost all that it touches and feeds upon, and turns blazing
fuel into grimy cinders?... Then what wonderful properties do we find in charcoal,
which is so brittle that a light tap breaks it, and a alight pressure pulverizes
it, and yet is so strong that no moisture rots it, nor any time causes it to decay."
City of God, book xxi. ch. iv.
Such aspects of things as these, their naturalness
and unnaturalness, the sympathies and antipathies of their superficial qualities,
their eccentricities, their brightness and strength and destructiveness, were
inevitably the ways in which they originally fastened our attention.
If you
open early medical books, you will find sympathetic magic invoked on every page.
Take, for example, the famous vulnerary ointment attributed to Paracelaus. For
this there were a variety of receipts, including usually human fat, the fat of
either a bull, a wild boar, or a bear; powdered earthworms, the usnia, or mossy
growth on the weathered skull of a hanged criminal, and other materials equally
unpleasant- the whole prepared under the planet Venus if possible, but never under
Mars or Saturn. Then, if a splinter of wood, dipped in the patient's blood, or
the bloodstained weapon that wounded him, be immersed in this ointment, the wound
itself being tightly bound up, the latter infallibly gets well,- I quote now Van
Helmont's account,- for the blood on the weapon or splinter, containing in it
the spirit of the wounded man, is roused to active excitement by the contact of
the ointment, whence there results to it a full commission or power to cure its
cousin-german, the blood in the patient's body. This it does by sucking out the
dolorous and exotic impression from the wounded part. But to do this it has to
implore the aid of the bull's fat, and other portions of the unguent. The reason
why bull's fat is so powerful is that the bull at the time of slaughter is full
of secret reluctancy and vindictive murmurs, and therefore dies with a higher
flame of revenge about him than any other animal. And thus we have made it out,
says this author, that the admirable efficacy of the ointment ought to be imputed,
not to any auxiliary concurrence of Satan, but simply to the energy of the posthumous
character of Revenge remaining firmly impressed upon the blood and concreted fat
in the unguent. J.B. VAN HELMONT: A Ternary of Paradoxes, translated by WALTER
CHARLETON, London, 1650.- I much abridge the original in my citations.
The
author goes on to prove by the analogy of many other natural facts that this sympathetic
action between things at a distance is the true rationale of the case. "If," he
says, "the heart of a horse, slain by a witch, taken out of the yet reeking carcase,
be impaled upon an arrow and roasted, immediately the whole witch becomes tormented
with the insufferable pains and cruelty of the fire, which could by no means happen
unless there preceded a conjunction of the spirit of the witch with the spirit
of the horse. In the reeking and yet panting heart, the spirit of the witch is
kept captive, and the retreat of it prevented by the arrow transfixed. Similarly
hath not many a murdered carcase at the coroner's inquest suffered a fresh hemorrhage
or cruentation at the presence of the assassin?- the blood being, as in a furious
fit of anger, enraged and agitated by the impress of revenge conceived against
the murderer, at the instant of the soul's compulsive exile from the body. So,
if you have dropsy, gout, or jaundice, by including some of your warm blood in
the shell and white of an egg, which, exposed to a gentle heat, and mixed with
a bait of flesh, you shall give to a hungry dog or hog, the disease shall instantly
pass from you into the animal, and leave you entirely. And similarly again, if
you burn some of the milk either of a cow or of a woman, the gland from which
it issued will dry up. A gentleman at Brussels had his nose mowed off in a combat,
but the celebrated surgeon Tagliacozzus digged a new nose for him out of the skin
of the arm of a porter at Bologna. About thirteen months after his return to his
own country, the engrafted nose grew cold, putrefied, and in a few days dropped
off, and it was then discovered that the porter had expired, near about the same
punctilio of time. There are still at Brussels eye-witnesses of this occurrence,"
says Van Helmont; and adds, "I pray what is there in this of superstition or of
exalted imagination?"
Modern mind-cure literature- the works of Prentice Mulford,
for example- of sympathetic magic.
How indeed could it be otherwise? The extraordinary
value, for explanation and prevision, of those mathematical and mechanical modes
of conception which science uses, was a result that could not possibly have been
expected in advance. Weight, movement, velocity, direction, position, what thin,
pallid, uninteresting ideas! How could the richer animistic aspects of Nature,
the peculiarities and oddities that make phenomena picturesquely striking or expressive,
fail to have been first singled out and followed by philosophy as the more promising
avenue to the knowledge of Nature's life? Well, it is still in these richer animistic
and dramatic aspects that religion delights to dwell, It is the terror and beauty
of phenomena, the 'promise' of the dawn and of the rainbow, the 'voice' of the
thunder, the 'gentleness' of the summer rain, the 'sublimity' of the stars, and
not the physical laws which these things follow, by which the religious mind still
continues to be most impressed; and just as of yore, the devout man tells you
that in the solitude of his room or of the fields he still feels the divine presence,
that inflowings of help come in reply to his prayers, and that sacrifices to this
unseen reality fill him with security and peace.
Pure anachronism! says the
survival-theory;- anachronism for which deanthropomorphization of the imagination
is the remedy required. The less we mix the private with the cosmic, the more
we dwell in universal and impersonal terms, the truer heirs of Science we become.
In spite of the appeal which this impersonality of the
scientific attitude makes to a certain magnanimity of temper, I believe it to
be shallow, and I can now state my reason in comparatively few words. That reason
is that, so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with
the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena
as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term. I think I
can easily make clear what I mean by these words.
The world
of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective
part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter,
and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the
sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective
part is the inner 'state' in which the thinking comes to pass. What we think of
may be enormous, the cosmic times and spaces, for example,- whereas the inner
state may be the most fugitive and paltry activity of mind. Yet the cosmic objects,
so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose
existence we do not inwardly possess but only point at outwardly, while the inner
state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our experience are
one. A conscious field plus its object as felt or thought of plus an attitude
towards the object plus the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs- such
a concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit
as long as it lasts; not hollow, not a mere abstract element of experience, such
as the 'object' is when taken all alone. It is a full fact, even though it be
an insignificant fact; it is of the kind to which all realities whatsoever must
belong; the motor currents of the world run through the like of it; it is on the
line connecting real events with real events. That unsharable feeling which each
one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately feels it
rolling out on fortune's wheel may be disparaged for its egotism, may be sneered
at as unscientific, but it is the one thing that fills up the measure of our concrete
actuality, and any would-be existent that should lack such a feeling, or its analogue,
would be a piece of reality only half made up. *
* Compare Lotze's doctrine
that the only meaning we can attach to the notion of a thing as it is 'in itself'
is by conceiving it as it is for itself; i. e., as a piece of full experience
with a private sense of 'pinch' or inner activity of some sort going with it.
If this be true, it is absurd for science to say that the
egotistic elements of experience should be suppressed. The axis of reality runs
solely through the egotistic places,- they are strung upon it like so many beads.
To describe the world with all the various feelings of the individual pinch of
destiny, all the various spiritual attitudes, left out from the description- they
being as describable as anything else- would be something like offering a printed
bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal. Religion makes no such blunder.
The individual's religion may be egotistic, and those private realities which
it keeps in touch with may be narrow enough; but at any rate it always remains
infinitely less hollow and abstract, as far as it goes, than a science which prides
itself on taking no account of anything private at all.
A bill of fare with
one real raisin on it instead of the word 'raisin,' with one real egg instead
of the word 'egg,' might be an inadequate meal, but it would at least be a commencement
of reality. The contention of the survival-theory that we ought to stick to non-personal
elements exclusively seems like saying that we ought to be satisfied forever with
reading the naked bill of fare. I think, therefore, that however particular questions
connected with our individual destinies may be answered, it is only by acknowledging
them as genuine questions, and living in the sphere of thought which they open
up, that we become profound. But to live thus is to be religious; so I unhesitatingly
repudiate the survival-theory of religion, as being founded on an egregious mistake.
It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed
them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at
all. * By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality
at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern
is with our private destiny, after all.
* Even the errors of fact may possibly
turn out not to be as wholesale as the scientist assumes. We saw in Lecture IV
how the religious conception of the universe seems to many mind-curers 'verified'
from day to day by their experience of fact. 'Experience of fact' is a field with
so many things in it that the sectarian scientist, methodically declining, as
he does, to recognize such 'facts' as mind-curers and others like them experience,
otherwise than by such rude heads of classification as 'bosh,' 'rot,' 'folly,'
certainly leaves out a mass of raw fact which, save for the industrious interest
of the religious in the more personal aspects of reality, would never have succeeded
in getting itself recorded at all. We know this to be true already in certain
cases; it may, therefore, be true in others as well. Miraculous healings have
always been part of the supernaturalist stock in trade, and have always been dismissed
by the scientist as figments of the imagination. But the scientist's tardy education
in the facts of hypnotism has recently given him an apperceiving mass for phenomena
of this order, and he consequently now allows that the healings may exist, provided
you expressly call them effects of 'suggestion.' Even the stigmata of the cross
on Saint Francis's hands and feet may on these terms not be a fable. Similarly,
the time-honored phenomenon of diabolical possession is on the point of being
admitted by the scientist as a fact, now that he has the name of 'hystero-demonopathy'
by which to apperceive it. No one can foresee just how far this legitimation of
occultist phenomena under newly found scientist titles may proceed- even 'prophecy,'
even 'levitation,' might creep into the pale.
Thus the divorce between scientist
facts and religious facts may not necessarily be as eternal as it at first sight
seems, nor the personalism and romanticism of the world, as they appeared to primitive
thinking, be matters so irrevocably outgrown. The final human opinion may, in
short, in some manner now impossible to foresee, revert to the more personal style,
just as any path of progress may follow a spiral rather than a straight line.
If this were so, the rigorously impersonal view of science might one day appear
as having been a temporarily useful eccentricity rather than the definitively
triumphant position which the sectarian scientist at present so confidently announces
it to be.
You see now why I have been so individualistic throughout these
lectures, and why I have seemed so bent on rehabilitating the element of feeling
in religion and subordinating its intellectual part. Individuality is founded
in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character,
are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and
directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done. * Compared
with this world of living individualized feelings, the world of generalized objects
which the intellect contemplates is without solidity or life. As in stereoscopic
or kinetoscopic pictures seen outside the instrument, the third dimension, the
movement, the vital element, are not there. We get a beautiful picture of an express
train supposed to be moving, but where in the picture, as I have heard a friend
say, is the energy or the fifty miles an hour? *(2)
* Hume's criticism has
banished causation from the world of physical objects, and 'Science' is absolutely
satisfied to define cause in terms of concomitant change- read Mach, Pearson,
Ostwald. The 'original' of the notion of causation is in our inner personal experience,
and only there can causes in the old-fashioned sense be directly observed and
described.
*(2) When I read in a religious paper words like these: "Perhaps
the best thing we can say of God is that he is the Inevitable Inference," I recognize
the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual terms. Would martyrs have
sung in the flames for a mere inference, however inevitable it might be? Original
religious men, like Saint Francis, Luther, Behmen, have usually been enemies of
the intellect's pretension to meddle with religious things. Yet the intellect,
everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect. See how the ancient
spirit of Methodism evaporates under those wonderfully able rationalistic booklets
(which every one should read) of a philosopher like Professor Bowne (The Christian
Revelation, The Christian Life, The Atonement: Cincinnati and New York, 1898,
1899, 1900). See the positively expulsive purpose of philosophy properly so called:
"Religion," writes M. Vacherot (La Religion, Paris, 1869, pp. 313, 436, et
passim), "answers to a transient state or condition, not to a permanent determination
of human nature, being merely an expression of that stage of the human mind which
is dominated by the imagination.... Christianity has but a single possible final
heir to its estate, and that is scientific philosophy."
In a still more radical
vein, Professor Ribot (Psychologie des Sentiments, p. 310) describes the evaporation
of religion. He sums it up in a single formula- the ever-growing predominance
of the rational intellectual element, with the gradual fading out of the emotional
element, this latter tending to enter into the group of purely intellectual sentiments.
"Of religions sentiment properly so called, nothing survives at last save a vague
respect for the unknowable x which is a last relic of the fear, and a certain
attraction towards the ideal, which is a relic of the love, that characterized
the earlier periods of religious growth. To state this more simply, religion tends
to turn into religious philosophy.- These are psychologically entirely different
things, the one being a theoretic construction of ratiocination, whereas the other
is the living work of a group of persons, or of a great inspired leader, calling
into play the entire thinking and feeling organism of man."
I find the same
failure to recognize that the stronghold of religion lies in individuality in
attempts like those of Professor Baldwin (Mental Development, Social and Ethical
Interpretations, ch. x.) and Mr. H. R. Marshall (Instinct and Reason, chaps. viii.
to xii.) to make it a purely 'conservative social force.'
Let us agree, then,
that Religion, occupying herself with personal destinies and keeping thus in contact
with the only absolute realities which we know, must necessarily play an eternal
part in human history. The next thing to decide is what she reveals about those
destinies, or whether indeed she reveals anything distinct enough to be considered
a general message to mankind. We have done as you see, with our preliminaries,
and our final summing up can now begin.
I am well aware that after all the
palpitating documents which I have quoted, and all the perspectives of emotion-inspiring
institution and belief that my previous lectures have opened, the dry analysis
to which I now advance may appear to many of you like an anti-climax, a tapering-off
and flattening out of the subject, instead of a crescendo of interest and result.
I said awhile ago that the religious attitude of Protestants appears poverty-stricken
to the Catholic imagination. Still more poverty-stricken, I fear, may my final
summing up of the subject appear at first to some of you. On which account I pray
you now to bear this point in mind, that in the present part of it I am expressly
trying to reduce religion to its lowest admissible terms, to that minimum, free
from individualistic excrescences, which all religions contain as their nucleus,
and on which it may be hoped that all religious persons may agree. That established,
we should have a result which might be small, but would at least be solid; and
on it and round it the ruddier additional beliefs on which the different individuals
make their venture might be grafted, and flourish as richly as you please. I shall
add my own over-belief (which will be, I confess, of a somewhat pallid kind, as
befits a critical philosopher), and you will, I hope, also add your over-beliefs,
and we shall soon be in the varied world of concrete religious constructions once
more. For the moment, let me dryly pursue the analytic part of the task.
Both
thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may
be determined either by feeling or by thought. When we survey the whole field
of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there;
but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always
the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable
in their lives. The theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are
secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings
and the conduct as being the more constant elements. It is between these two elements
that the short circuit exists on which she carries on her principal business,
while the ideas and symbols and other institutions form loop-lines which may be
perfections and improvements, and may even some day all be united into one harmonious
system, but which are not to be regarded as organs with an indispensable function,
necessary at all times for religious life to go on. This seems to me the first
conclusion which we are entitled to draw from the phenomena we have passed in
review.
The next step is to characterize the feelings. To what psychological
order do they belong?
The resultant outcome of them is in any case what Kant
calls a 'sthenic' affection, an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, 'dynamogenic'
order which, like any tonic, freshens our vital powers. In almost every lecture,
but especially in the lectures on Conversion and on Saintliness, we have seen
how this emotion overcomes temperamental melancholy and imparts endurance to the
Subject, or a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the common objects
of life. The name of 'faith-state,' by which Professor Leuba designates it, is
a good one. * It is a biological as well as a psychological condition, and Tolstoy
is absolutely accurate in classing faith among the forces by which men live. *(2)
The total absence of it, anhedonia, *(3) means collapse.
* American Journal
of Psychology, vii. 345.
*(2) Above, Lecture VIII.
*(3) Above, Lectures
VI and VII.
The faith-state may hold a very minimum of intellectual content.
We saw examples of this in those sudden raptures of the divine presence, or in
such mystical seizures as Dr. Bucke described. * It may be a mere vague enthusiasm,
half spiritual, half vital, a courage, and a feeling that great and wondrous things
are in the air. *(2)
* Above, Lectures XVI and XVII.
*(2) Example: Henri
Perreyve writes to Gratry: "I do not know how to deal with the happiness which
you aroused in me this morning. It overwhelms me; I want to do something, yet
I can do nothing and am fit for nothing.... I would fain do great things." Again,
after an inspiring interview, he writes: "I went homewards, intoxicated with joy,
hope, and strength. I wanted to feed upon my happiness in solitude, far from all
men. It was late; but, unheeding that, I took a mountain path and went on like
a madman, looking at the heavens, regardless of earth. Suddenly an instinct made
me draw hastily back- I was on the very edge of a precipice, one step more and
I must have fallen. I took fright and gave up my nocturnal promenade." A. GRATRY:
Henri Perreyve, London, 1872, pp. 92, 89.
This primacy, in the faith-state,
of vague expansive impulse over direction is well expressed in Walt Whitman's
lines (Leaves of Grass, 1872, p. 190):
"O to confront night, storms, hunger,
ridicule, accidents,
rebuffs, as the trees and animals do...
Dear Camerado!
I confess I have urged you onward with me, and
still urge you, without the
least idea what is our
destination,
Or whether we shall be victorious,
or utterly quell'd and
defeated."
This readiness for great things, and
this sense that the world by its importance, wonderfulness, etc., is apt for their
production, would seem to be the undifferentiated germ of all the higher faiths.
Trust in our own dreams of ambition, or in our country's expansive destinies,
and faith in the providence of God, all have their source in that onrush of our
sanguine impulses, and in that sense of the exceedingness of the possible over
the real.
When, however, a positive intellectual content is associated with
a faith-state, it gets invincibly stamped in upon belief, * and this explains
the passionate loyalty of religious persons everywhere to the minutest details
of their so widely differing creeds. Taking creeds and faith-state together, as
forming 'religions,' and treating these as purely subjective phenomena, without
regard to the question of their 'truth,' we are obliged, on account of their extraordinary
influence upon action and endurance, to class them amongst the most important
biological functions of mankind. Their stimulant and anaesthetic effect is so
great that Professor Leuba, in a recent article, *(2) goes so far as to say that
so long as men can use their God, they care very little who he is, or even whether
he is at all. "The truth of the matter can be put," says Leuba, "in this way:
God is not known, he is not understood; he is used- sometimes as meat-purveyor,
sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometimes as an object of love.
If he proves himself useful, the religious consciousness asks for no more than
that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant
questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life,
is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every
level of development, is the religious impulse. *(3)
* Compare LEUBA: Loc.
Cit., pp. 346-349.
*(2) The Contents of Religious Consciousness, in The Monist,
xi. 536, July, 1901.
*(3) Loc. cit., pp. 571, 572, abridged. See, also, this
writer's extraordinarily true criticism of the notion that religion primarily
seeks to solve the intellectual mystery of the world. Compare what W. BENDER says
(in his Wesen der Religion, Bonn, 1888, pp. 85, 38): "Not the question about God,
and not the inquiry into the origin and purpose of the world is religion, but
the question about Man. All religious views of life are anthropocentric." "Religion
is that activity of the human impulse towards self-preservation by means of which
Man seeks to carry his essential vital purposes through against the adverse pressure
of the world by raising himself freely towards the world's ordering and governing
powers when the limits of his own strength are reached." The whole book is little
more than a development of these words.
At this purely subjective rating,
therefore, Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks
of her critics. It would seem that she cannot be a mere anachronism and survival,
but must exert a permanent function, whether she be with or without intellectual
content, and whether, if she have any, it be true or false.
We must next pass
beyond the point of view of merely subjective utility, and make inquiry into the
intellectual content itself.
First, is there, under all the discrepancies
of the creeds, a common nucleus to which they bear their testimony unanimously?
And second, ought we to consider the testimony true?
I will
take up the first question first, and answer it immediately in the affirmative.
The warring gods and formulas of the various religions do indeed cancel each other,
but there is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet.
It consists of two parts:
1. An uneasiness; and
2. Its solution.
1.
The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something
wrong about us as we naturally stand.
2. The solution is a sense that we are
saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.
In those more developed minds which alone we are studying, the wrongness takes
a moral character, and the salvation takes a mystical tinge. I think we shall
keep well within the limits of what is common to all such minds if we formulate
the essence of their religious experience in terms like these:
The individual,
so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticises it, is to that extent consciously
beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher
exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though
it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real
being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution
or salvation) arrives, * the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher
part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this
higher part is conterminous and continuous with a MORE of the same quality, which
is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working
touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower
being has gone to pieces in the wreck.
* Remember that for some men it arrives
suddenly, for others gradually, whilst others again practically enjoy it all their
life.
It seems to me that all the phenomena are accurately describable in
these very simple general terms. * They allow for the divided self and the struggle;
they involve the change of personal centre and the surrender of the lower self;
they express the appearance of exteriority of the helping power and yet account
for our sense of union with it; *(2) and they fully justify our feelings of security
and joy. There is probably no autobiographic document, among all those which I
have quoted, to which the description will not well apply. One need only add such
specific details as will adapt it to various theologies and various personal temperaments,
and one will then have the various experiences reconstructed in their individual
forms.
* The practical difficulties are: 1, to 'realize the reality' of one's
higher part; 2, to identify one's self with it exclusively; and 3, to identify
it with all the rest of ideal being.
*(2) "When mystical activity is at its
height, we find consciousness possessed by the sense of a being at once excessive
and identical with the self: great enough to be God; interior enough to be me.
The 'objectivity' of it ought in that case to be called excessivity, rather, or
exceedingness." RECEJAC: Essai sur les fondements de la conscience mystique, 1897,
p. 46.
So far, however, as this analysis goes, the experiences are only psychological
phenomena. They possess, it is true, enormous biological worth. Spiritual strength
really increases in the subject when he has them, a new life opens for him, and
they seem to him a place of conflux where the forces of two universes meet; and
yet this may be nothing but his subjective way of feeling things, a mood of his
own fancy, in spite of the effects produced. I now turn to my second question:
What is the objective 'truth' of their content? *
* The word 'truth' is here
taken to mean something additional to bare value for life, although the natural
propensity of man is to believe that whatever has great value for life is thereby
certified as true.
The part of the content concerning which the question of
truth most pertinently arises is that 'MORE of the same quality' with which our
own higher self appears in the experience to come into harmonious working relation.
Is such a 'more' merely our own notion, or does it really exist? If so, in what
shape does it exist? Does it act, as well as exist? And in what form should we
conceive of that 'union' with it of which religious geniuses are so convinced?
It is in answering these questions that the various theologies
perform their theoretic work, and that their divergencies most come to light.
They all agree that the 'more' really exists; though some of them hold it to exist
in the shape of a personal god or gods, while others are satisfied to conceive
it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in the eternal structure of the world.
They all agree, moreover, that it acts as well as exists, and that something really
is effected for the better when you throw your life into its hands. It is when
they treat of the experience of 'union' with it that their speculative differences
appear most clearly. Over this point pantheism and theism, nature and second birth,
works and grace and karma, immortality and reincarnation, rationalism and mysticism,
carry on inveterate disputes.
At the end of my lecture on Philosophy * I held
out the notion that an impartial science of religions might sift out from the
midst of their discrepancies a common body of doctrine which she might also formulate
in terms to which physical science need not object. This, I said, she might adopt
as her own reconciling hypothesis, and recommend it for general belief. I also
said that in my last lecture I should have to try my own hand at framing such
an hypothesis.
* Above, Lecture XVIII.
The time has now
come for this attempt. Who says 'hypothesis' renounces the ambition to be coercive
in his arguments. The most I can do is, accordingly, to offer something that may
fit the facts so easily that your scientific logic will find no plausible pretext
for vetoing your impulse to welcome it as true.
The 'more,' as we called it,
and the meaning of our 'union' with it, form the nucleus of our inquiry. Into
what definite description can these words be translated, and for what definite
facts do they stand? It would never do for us to place ourselves offhand at the
position of a particular theology, the Christian theology, for example, and proceed
immediately to define the 'more' as Jehovah, and the 'union' as his imputation
to us of the righteousness of Christ. That would be unfair to other religions,
and, from our present standpoint at least, would be an over-belief.
We must
begin by using less particularized terms; and, since one of the duties of the
science of religions is to keep religion in connection with the rest of science,
we shall do well to seek first of all a way of describing the 'more,' which psychologists
may also recognize as real. The subconscious self is nowadays a well-accredited
psychological entity; and I believe that in it we have exactly the mediating term
required. Apart from all religious considerations, there is actually and literally
more life in our total soul than we are at any time aware of. The exploration
of the transmarginal field has hardly yet been seriously undertaken, but what
Mr. Myers said in 1892 in his essay on the Subliminal Consciousness * is as true
as when it was first written: "Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity
far more extensive than he knows- an individuality which can never express itself
completely through any corporeal manifestation. The Self manifests through the
organism; but there is always some part of the Self unmanifested; and always,
as it seems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve." *(2) Much
of the content of this larger background against which our conscious being stands
out in relief is insignificant. Imperfect memories, silly jingles, inhibitive
timidities, 'dissolutive' phenomena of various sorts, as Myers calls them, enter
into it for a large part. But in it many of the performances of genius seem also
to have their origin; and in our study of conversion, of mystical experiences,
and of prayer, we have seen how striking a part invasions from this region play
in the religious life.
* Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research,
vol. vii. p. 305. For a full statement of Mr. Myers's views, I may refer to his
posthumous work, 'Human Personality in the Light of Recent Research,' which is
already announced by Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. as being in press. Mr. Myers
for the first time proposed as a general psychological problem the exploration
of the subliminal region of consciousness throughout its whole extent, and made
the first methodical steps in its topography by treating as a natural series a
mass of subliminal facts hitherto considered only as curious isolated facts, and
subjecting them to a systematized nomenclature. How important this exploration
will prove, future work upon the path which Myers has opened can alone show. Compare
my paper: 'Frederic Myers's Services to Psychology,' in the said Proceedings,
part xlii., May, 1901.
*(2) Compare the inventory given above, Lecture XIX,
and also what is said of the subconscious self in Lecture X.
Let me then propose,
as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the 'more' with
which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side
the subconscious continuation of our conscious life. Starting thus with a recognized
psychological fact as our basis, we seem to preserve a contact with 'science'
which the ordinary theologian lacks. At the same time the theologian's contention
that the religious man is moved by an external power is vindicated, for it is
one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to take on
objective appearances, and to suggest to the Subject an external control. In the
religious life the control is felt as 'higher'; but since on our hypothesis it
is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden mind which are controlling,
the sense of union with the power beyond us is a sense of something, not merely
apparently, but literally true.
This doorway into the subject seems to me
the best one for a science of religions, for it mediates between a number of different
points of view. Yet it is only a doorway, and difficulties present themselves
as soon as we step through it, and ask how far our transmarginal consciousness
carries us if we follow it on its remoter side. Here the over-beliefs begin: here
mysticism and the conversion-rapture and Vedantism and transcendental idealism
bring in their monistic interpretations * and tell us that the finite self rejoins
the absolute self, for it was always one with God and identical with the soul
of the world. *(2) Here the prophets of all the different religions come with
their visions, voices, raptures, and other openings, supposed by each to authenticate
his own peculiar faith.
* Compare above, Lectures XVI and XVII.
*(2) One
more expression of this belief, to increase the reader's familiarity with the
notion of it:
"If this room is full of darkness for thousands of years, and
you come in and begin to weep and wail, 'Oh, the darkness,' will the darkness
vanish? Bring the light in, strike a match, and light comes in a moment. So what
good will it do you to think all your lives, 'Oh, I have done evil, I have made
many mistakes'? It requires no ghost to tell us that. Bring in the light, and
the evil goes in a moment. Strengthen the real nature, build up yourselves, the
effulgent, the resplendent, the ever pure, call that up in every one whom you
see. I wish that every one of us had come to such a state that even when we see
the vilest of human beings we can see the God within, and instead of condemning,
say, 'Rise, thou effulgent One, rise thou who art always pure, rise thou birthless
and deathless, rise almighty, and manifest your nature.'... This is the highest
prayer that the Advaita teaches. This is the one prayer: remembering our nature."...
"Why does man go out to look for a God?... It is your own heart beating, and you
did not know, you were mistaking it for something external. He, nearest of the
near, my own self, the reality of my own life, my body and my soul.- I am Thee
and Thou art Me. That is your own nature. Assert it, manifest it. Not to become
pure, you are pure already. You are not to be perfect, you are that already. Every
good thought which you think or act upon is simply tearing the veil, as it were,
and the purity, the Infinity, the God behind, manifests itself- the eternal Subject
of everything, the eternal Witness in this universe, your own Self. Knowledge
is, as it were, a lower step, a degradation. We are It already; how to know It?"
SWAMI VIVEKANANDA: Addresses, No. XII., Practical Vedanta, part iv. pp. 172, 174,
London, 1897; and Lectures, The Real and the Apparent Man, p. 24, abridged. -
Those of us who are not personally favored with such specific revelations
must stand outside of them altogether and, for the present at least, decide that,
since they corroborate incompatible theological doctrines, they neutralize one
another and leave no fixed result. If we follow any one of them, or if we follow
philosophical theory and embrace monistic pantheism on non-mystical grounds, we
do so in the exercise of our individual freedom, and build out our religion in
the way most congruous with our personal susceptibilities. Among these susceptibilities
intellectual ones play a decisive part. Although the religious question is primarily
a question of life, of living or not living in the higher union which opens itself
to us as a gift, yet the spiritual excitement in which the gift appears a real
one will often fail to be aroused in an individual until certain particular intellectual
beliefs or ideas which, as we say, come home to him, are touched. * These ideas
will thus be essential to that individual's religion;- which is as much as to
say that over-beliefs in various directions are absolutely indispensable, and
that we should treat them with tenderness and tolerance so long as they are not
intolerant themselves. As I have elsewhere written, the most interesting and valuable
things about a man are usually his overbeliefs.
* For instance, here is a
case where a person exposed from her birth to Christian ideas had to wait till
they came to her clad in spiritistic formulas before the saving experience set
in:-
"For myself I can say that spiritualism has saved me. It was revealed
to me at a critical moment of my life, and without it I don't know what I should
have done. It has taught me to detach myself from worldly things and to place
my hope in things to come. Through it I have learned to see in all men, even in
those most criminal, even in those from whom I have most suffered, undeveloped
brothers to whom I owed assistance, love, and forgiveness. I have learned that
I must lose my temper over nothing, despise no one, and pray for all. Most of
all I have learned to pray! And although I have still much to learn in this domain,
prayer ever brings me more strength, consolation, and comfort. I feel more than
ever that I have only made a few steps on the long road of progress; but I look
at its length without dismay, for I have confidence that the day will come when
all my efforts shall be rewarded. So Spiritualism has a great place in my life,
indeed it holds the first place there." Flournoy Collection.
Disregarding
the over-beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common and generic, we have
in the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through
which saving experiences come, * a positive content of religious experience which,
it seems to me, is literally and objectively true as far as it goes. If I now
proceed to state my own hypothesis about the farther limits of this extension
of our personality, I shall be offering my own over-belief- though I know it will
appear a sorry under-belief to some of you- for which I can only bespeak the same
indulgence which in a converse case I should accord to yours.
* "The influence
of the Holy Spirit, exquisitely called the Comforter, is a matter of actual experience,
as solid a reality as that of electro-magnetism." W. C. BROWNELL, Scribner's Magazine,
vol. xxx. p. 112.
The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me,
into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely 'understandable'
world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you
choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them
do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot
articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which
we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever
our ideals belong. Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for
it produces effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done
upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences
in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change.
* But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality
itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or
mystical world unreal.
* That the transaction of opening ourselves, otherwise
called prayer, is a perfectly definite one for certain persons, appears abundantly
in the preceding lectures. I append another concrete example to reinforce the
impression on the reader's mind:
"Man can learn to transcend these limitations
[of finite thought] and draw power and wisdom at will.... The divine presence
is known through experience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act of
consciousness. It is not a vague, twilight or semi-conscious experience. It is
not an ecstasy; it is not a trance. It is not super-consciousness in the Vedantic
sense. It is not due to self-hypnotization. It is a perfectly calm, sane, sound,
rational, common-sense shifting of consciousness from the phenomena of sense-perception
to the phenomena of seership, from the thought of self to a distinctively higher
realm.... For example, if the lower self be nervous, anxious, tense, one can in
a few moments compel it to be calm. This is not done by a word simply. Again I
say, it is not hypnotism. It is by the exercise of power. One feels the spirit
of peace as definitely as heat is perceived on a hot summer day. The power can
be as surely used as the sun's rays can be focused and made to do work, to set
fire to wood." The Higher Law, vol. iv. pp. 4, 6, Boston, August, 1901.
God
is the natural appellation, for us Christians at least, for the supreme reality,
so I will call this higher part of the universe by the name of God. * We and God
have business with each other; and in opening ourselves to his influence our deepest
destiny is fulfilled. The universe, at those parts of it which our personal being
constitutes, takes a turn genuinely for the worse or for the better in proportion
as each one of us fulfills or evades God's demands. As far as this goes I probably
have you with me, for I only translate into schematic language what I may call
the instinctive belief of mankind: God is real since he produces real effects.
* Transcendentalists are fond of the term 'Over-soul,' but as a rule they
use it in an intellectualist sense, as meaning only a medium of communion. 'God'
is a causal agent as well as a medium is communion, and that is the aspect which
I wish to emphasize.
The real effects in question, so far
as I have as yet admitted them, are exerted on the personal centres of energy
of the various subjects, but the spontaneous faith of most of the subjects is
that they embrace a wider sphere than this. Most religious men believe (or 'know,'
if they be mystical) that not only they themselves, but the whole universe of
beings to whom the God is present, are secure in his parental hands. There is
a sense, a dimension, they are sure, in which we are all saved, in spite of the
gates of hell and all adverse terrestrial appearances. God's existence is the
guarantee of an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. This world may
indeed, as science assures us, some day burn up or freeze; but if it is part of
his order, the old ideals are sure to be brought elsewhere to fruition, so that
where God is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution
are not the absolutely final things. Only when this farther step of faith concerning
God is taken, and remote objective consequences are predicted, does religion,
as it seems to me, get wholly free from the first immediate subjective experience,
and bring a real hypothesis into play. A good hypothesis in science must have
other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain,
otherwise it is not prolific enough. God, meaning only what enters into the religious
man's experience of union, falls short of being an hypothesis of this more useful
order. He needs to enter into wider cosmic relations in order to justify the subject's
absolute confidence and peace.
That the God with whom, starting from the hither
side of our own extra-marginal self, we come at its remoter margin into commerce
should be the absolute world-ruler, is of course a very considerable over-belief.
Over-belief as it is, though, it is an article of almost every one's religion.
Most of us pretend in some way to prop it upon our philosophy, but the philosophy
itself is really propped upon this faith. What is this but to say that Religion,
in her fullest exercise of function, is not a mere illumination of facts already
elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like love, which views things in a rosier
light. It is indeed that, as we have seen abundantly. But it is something more,
namely, a postulator of new facts as well. The world interpreted religiously is
not the materialistic world over again, with an altered expression; it must have,
over and above the altered expression, a natural constitution different at some
point from that which a materialistic world would have. It must be such that different
events can be expected in it, different conduct must be required.
This thoroughly
'pragmatic' view of religion has usually been taken as a matter of course by common
men. They have interpolated divine miracles into the field of nature, they have
built a heaven out beyond the grave. It is only transcendentalist metaphysicians
who think that, without adding any concrete details to Nature, or subtracting
any, but by simply calling it the expression of absolute spirit, you make it more
divine just as it stands. I believe the pragmatic way of taking religion to be
the deeper way. It gives it body as well as soul, it makes it claim, as everything
real must claim, some characteristic realm of fact as its very own. What the more
characteristically divine facts are, apart from the actual inflow of energy in
the faith-state and the prayer-state, I know not. But the over-belief on which
I am ready to make my personal venture is that they exist. The whole drift of
my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is
only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other
worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that
although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete,
yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.
By being faithful in my poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to myself to
keep more sane and true. I can, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist's
attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of scientific laws
and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor of
which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word 'bosh!' Humbug is humbug,
even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience,
as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow scientific bounds.
Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperament,- more intricately built
than physical science allows. So my objective and my subjective conscience both
hold me to the over-belief which I express. Who knows whether the faithfulness
of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help
God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?