the most important constructive work just now laid upon us is the serious task of helping to restore faith in the actual reality of god and in the fundamental spiritual nature of our world. there is no substitute for the transforming power and inward depth which an irresistible first-hand conviction of god gives a man. carlyle, in his usual vivid fashion, says that one man with faith in god is “stronger, not than ten men that have it not, or than ten thousand, but than all men that have it not!” a man can face anything when he knows absolutely that at bottom the universe is not force nor mechanism but intelligent and loving purpose, and that through the seeming confusion[139] and welter there is a loving, throbbing, personal heart answering back to us. the cultivation of this experience is the greatest prophetic mission laid upon the spiritual leaders of any age. isaiah is at his fullest stature when in a fearful crisis he calls his nation from a military alliance with egypt, whose people, he says, are “men and not god and whose horses are flesh and not spirit,” to a reliance on god and on eternal resources: “in returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength.” george fox is most clearly a prophet when he reports his own experience of god: “i saw that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but that an infinite ocean of light and love flowed over the ocean of darkness. in that i saw the infinite love of god.”
if we are to assist in the creation of a higher civilization than that against which the hand on the wall is writing “mene,” we must speak of god in the present tense, we must live by truths and convictions[140] that are grounded in our own experience, and we must endeavor to find a spiritual basis underlying all the processes of the world. men have been living for a generation—or at least trying to live—on a naturalistic interpretation of the universe which chokes and stifles the higher spiritual life of man. we must help those who have been caught in this drift of materialism to find their way back to the spiritual meaning of the world.
we get a vivid impression of the stern and iron character of this materialistic universe from the writings of bertrand russell. here are two extracts:
“man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the[141] solar system, and the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”[5]
“brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.”[6]
[142]
much of the present confusion has been due to a false interpretation of the doctrine of evolution. it has been assumed—not indeed by scientists of the first rank, but by a host of influential interpreters—that the basis of evolution, the law which runs the cosmic train, is competitive struggle for existence, that is to say the natural selection of the fittest to survive, and the fittest on this count are of course the physically fittest, the most efficient. this principle, used first to explain biological development, has been taken up and expanded and used to explain all ethical and social progress. any nation that has won out and prevailed has done so, on this theory, because it made itself stronger than those nations with which it competed. this theory has contributed immensely toward bringing on the catastrophe in europe. it is a breeder of racial rivalries, it is loaded with emotional stress, it cultivates fear, one of the main causes of war, and it runs on all fours with materialism.
[143]
but it does not fit the facts of life and it is as much a mental construction and as untrue to the complete nature of things as were the popular pre-evolution theories. here, as everywhere else, the truth is the only adequate remedy, and the truth would set men free. biologists of the most eminent rank have all along been insisting that life has not evolved through the operation of one single factor; for example, the law of competing struggle. everywhere in the process, from lowest to highest, there has been present the operation of another force as primary as the egoistic factor, namely the operation of mutual aid, co?peration, struggle for the life of others, mother-traits and father-traits, sacrifice of self for the group, a love-factor implicit at the bottom but gloriously conscious and consecrated at the top. nature has always been forerunning and crying in the wilderness that the way of love will work.
it is impossible to account for a continuously progressive evolution on any[144] mechanical basis. as soon as life appeared there came into play some degree of spontaneity, something unpredictable; something which is not mechanism. the future in any life-series is never an equation with the past. what has been, does not quite determine what will be. life carries in itself a creative tendency—a tendency to exhibit surprises, novelties, variations, mutations, unpredictable leaps. we can name this tendency, this upward-changing drive, “vital impulse,” but however we name it, we cannot explain it. the variation which raises the entire level of life is as mysterious as a virgin birth, or a resurrection from the dead. there is no help in the word “fortuitous,” or “accidental,” there is no answer when the appeal is made either to heredity or to physical environment. there is in favorable mutations a revelation of some kind of intelligent push, a power of life working toward an end. the end or goal of the process seems to be an operative factor in the process. evolution seems to[145] be due to a mighty living, conscious, spiritual driving force, that is pouring itself forth in ever-heightening ways of manifestation and that differentiates itself into myriad varieties of form and activity, each one with its own peculiar potency of advance. consciousness, in henri bergson’s illuminating interpretation of evolution, is the original creative cosmic force. it is before matter, and its onward destiny is not bound up with matter. wherever it appears there is vital impulse, upward-pointing mutations, free action, and potency. but no life is isolated or cut apart. each particular manifestation of life is one of the rills into which the immense river of consciousness divides, and this irresistible river with its onward leaps seems able to beat down every resistance and clear away the most formidable obstacles—perhaps even death itself.
but it is not merely in the evolutionary process that we need to reinterpret the spiritual factor; it is urgently called for in our dealing with the whole of nature.[146] we must learn how to interpret the fundamental spiritual implications involved in the nature of beauty, of moral goodness, of verifiable knowledge, and of personality itself.
in an impressive way arthur balfour in his theism and humanism has pointed out that it is impossible to find any adequate rational basis for our experience of beauty, or for our pursuit of moral ends of goodness, or for our confidence in the validity of knowledge or truth, unless we assume the reality of an underlying spiritual universe as the root and ground both of nature without us and of mind within us. “?sthetic values,” balfour says, “are in part dependent upon a spiritual conception of the world in which we live.”[7] “ethics,” again he says, “must have its roots in the divine; and in the divine it must find its consummation”[8] and, finally, he says that if rational values are to remain undimmed and unimpaired,[147] god must be treated as real—“he is himself the condition of scientific knowledge.”[9]—“we must hold that reason and the works of reason have their source in god: that from him they draw their inspiration, and that if they repudiate their origin, by this very act they proclaim their own insufficiency.”[10]
personality carries in all its larger aspects inevitable implications of a spiritual universe. in the first place, it is forever utterly impossible to find a materialistic or naturalistic origin for personality. whenever we deal with “matter” or with “nature,” consciousness is always presupposed, and the “matter” we talk about, or the “nature” we talk about, is “matter” or “nature” as existing for consciousness or as conceived by consciousness. it is impossible to get any world at all without a uniting, connecting principle of consciousness which binds fact to fact, item to item, event to event, into a whole which is known to us through[148] the action of our organizing consciousness. since it is through consciousness that a connected universe of experience is possible it seems absurd to suppose that consciousness is a product of matter or of any natural, mechanical process. every effort to find a genesis of knowledge in any other source than spirit, derived in turn from self-existing spirit, has always failed and from the logical nature of the case must fail. there is no answer to the question, how did we begin to be persons? which does not refer the genesis to an eternal spiritual principle in the universe, transcending space and time, life and death, matter and motion, cause and effect—a principle which itself is the condition of temporal beginnings and temporal changes or ends.
normal human experience is, too, heavily loaded with further inevitable implications of an environing spiritual world. the consciousness of finiteness with which we are haunted presupposes something infinite already in consciousness, just as our knowledge[149] of “spaces” presupposes space, of which definite spaces are determinate parts. that we are oppressed with our own littleness, that we revolt from our meannesses, that we “look before and after, and sigh for what is not,” that we are never satisfied with any achievement, that each attainment inaugurates a new drive, that we feel “the glory of the imperfect,” means that in some way we partake of an infinite revealed in us by an inherent necessity of self-consciousness. we are made for something which does not yet appear, we are inalienably kin to the perfect that always draws and attracts us. we are forever seeking god because, in some sense, however fragmentary, we have found him.
“here sits he shaping wings to fly;
his heart forbodes a mystery:
he names the name eternity.
“that type of perfect in his mind
in nature can he nowhere find.
he sows himself on every wind.
[150]
“he seems to hear a heavenly friend,
and through thick veils to apprehend
a labor working to an end.”[11]
the most august thing in us is that creative center of our being, that autonomous citadel of personality, where we form for ourselves ideals of beauty, of truth, and of goodness by which we live. this power to extend life in ideal fashion is the elemental moral fact of personal life. these ideals which shape our life are manifestly things which cannot be “found” anywhere in our world of sense experience. they are not on land or sea. we live, and, when the call for it comes, we joyously die for things which our eyes have never seen in this world of molecular currents, for things which are not here in the world of space, but which are not on that account any less real. we create, by some higher drive of spirit, visions of a world that ought to be and these visions make us forever dissatisfied with the world that is, and it is through these visions that[151] we reshape and reconstruct the world which is being made. the elemental spiritual core in us which we call conscience can have come from nowhere but from a deeper spiritual universe with which we have relations. it cannot be traced to any physical origin. it cannot be reduced to any biological function. it cannot be explained in utilitarian terms. it is an august and authoritative loyalty of soul to a good that transcends all goods and which will not allow us to substitute prudence for intrinsic goodness. this inner imperative overarches our moral life, and it rationally presupposes a spiritual universe with which we are allied.
there is, too, an immense interior depth to our human personality. only the surface of our inner self is lighted up and is brought into clear focal consciousness. there are, however, dim depths underlying every moment of consciousness and these subterranean deeps are all the time shaping or determining the ideas, emotions, and decisions which surge up into the[152] illuminated apex of consciousness. this submerged life is in part, no doubt, the slow deposit of previous experiences, the gathered wisdom of the social group in which we are imbedded, the residual savings from unuttered hopes and wishes, aspirations and intentions,
“all i could never be,
all, men ignored in me.”
but at times our interior deep seems to be more than a deposit of the past. incursions from beyond our own margin seem to occur. inrushes from a wider spiritual world seem to take place. vitalizing, energizing, constructive forces come from somewhere into men, as though another universe impinged upon our finite spirits. we cannot prove by these somewhat rare and unusual mystical openings that there is an actual spiritual environment surrounding our souls, but there are certainly experiences which are best explained on that hypothesis, and there is no good reason for drawing any impervious[153] boundary around the margins of the spiritual self within us.
all attempts to reduce man’s inner spiritual life to the play of molecular forces have fallen through. correlation between mind and brain cortex there certainly is and spirit, as we know it, expresses itself under, or in relation to, certain physical conditions. but it is impossible to establish a complete parallelism between mind-functions and brain-functions. the psychical, that is to say spirit, seems immensely to outrun its organ and to use brain as a musician uses an instrument.
the psychological studies of henri bergson in france and of dr. william mcdougall at oxford make a very strong argument for the view that the higher forms of consciousness cannot be explained in terms of brain action and that there is no well-defined physical correlate to the highest and most central psychical processes. i shall follow in the main the positions of my old teacher, dr. mcdougall,[154] as worked out in his body and mind.
one of the most important differences between human and animal consciousness comes to light in the appearance of “meaning” which is a differentiating characteristic of personal consciousness. we pass “a great divide” when we pass from bare sensory experience, common to all higher animals, to consciousness of “meaning,” which is a trait common only to persons. we all know what it is to hear words which make a clear impression and which yet arouse no “meaning.” we often gaze at objects and yet, like macbeth, have “no speculation in our eyes”—we apprehend no significant “meaning” in the thing upon which we are looking. we sometimes catch ourselves in the very act of passing from mere sense or bare image to the higher level of “meaning.” while we gaze or while we listen we suddenly feel the “meaning” flood in and transform the whole content of consciousness. all the higher ranges of experience[155] depend on this unique feature which is something over and above the mere sensory stage. the words, “the quality of mercy is not strain’d” remain just word-sounds until in a flash one sees that mercy is “not something that comes out grudgingly in drops,” and then the mind rises to “a consciousness of meaning.”[12] in this higher experience, “meaning” stands vividly in the focus of consciousness and, in a case, for instance, of grasping a long sentence, or of appreciating a piece of music, consciousness of “meaning” is an integral unitary whole. now there is no corresponding unitary whole in the brain which could stand as the physical correlate to this consciousness of “meaning.” the simple sensational experiences correspond in some way to parallel brain processes but these elemental experiences are merely cues which evoke higher forms of psychical “meaning,” that have no physical or mechanical correlate in the brain.
this is still more strikingly the case in[156] the higher forms of memory. the lower and more mechanical forms of memory may be treated as a habit-sequence, linked up with permanent brain paths. but memory proper depends, as does “meaning,” upon a single act of mental apprehension. as mcdougall well says: “the whole process and effect, the apprehension and the retention and the remembering, are absolutely unique and distinct from all other apprehensions and retentions and rememberings.”[13] the higher kind of memory involves “meaning” and, the moment “meaning” floods in, vast and complicated wholes of experience tend to become a permanent possession, while only with multitudinous repetitions can we fix and keep processes that are meaningless and without psychical significance. but here once more this higher unitary consciousness of a remembered whole of experience has no assignable physical correlate in the brain-processes. certain sensory cues evoke or recall a synthetic whole[157] of consciousness which has no parallel in the material world.
still more obviously in the higher ?sthetic sentiments and volitional processes is there a spiritual activity which transcends the mechanical and physical order. ?sthetic joy depends upon a spiritual power to combine many elements of experience to form an object of a higher order than any object given to sense. it is particularly true of the highest ?sthetic joy, for example, enjoyment of poetic creations where the ideal and intellectual element vastly overtops the sensuous, and where the words and imagery really carry the reader on into another world than the one of sight and sound. here in a very high degree we attain a unified whole of consciousness that has no physical correlate among the brain-processes. it is further apparent that the higher forms of pleasure somehow exert an effective influence upon the physical system itself as though some new and heightening energy poured back from consciousness into the[158] cerebral processes and drained down through the system. william james has given a very successful account of the way in which pleasure and pain as spiritual energies reinforce or damp the physical activities, so that the personal soul seems to take a unique part from within in determining the physical process. here are his words:
“tremendous as the part is which pleasure and pain play in our psychic life, we must confess that absolutely nothing is known of their cerebral conditions. it is hard to imagine them as having special centres; it is harder still to invent peculiar forms of process in each and every centre, to which these feelings may be due. and let one try as one will to represent the cerebral activity in exclusively mechanical terms, i, for one, find it quite impossible to enumerate what seem to be the facts and yet to make no mention of the psychic side which they possess. however it be with other drainage currents and discharges, the drainage currents and discharges of the brain are not purely physical facts. they are psycho-physical facts, and the spiritual quality of them seems a codeterminant of their mechanical effectiveness. if the mechanical activities in a cell, as they increase, give pleasure, they seem to increase all the more rapidly for that[159] fact; if they give displeasure, the displeasure seems to damp the activities. the psychic side of the phenomenon thus seems somewhat like the applause or hissing at a spectacle, to be an encouraging or adverse comment on what the machinery brings forth.”[14]
the unifying effect and the dynamic quality of a persistent resolution of will is another case in point which seems to show that the psychical reality in us vastly overtops the mechanism through which it works. a fixed purpose, a moral ideal, a determined intention, work far-reaching results and in some way organize and reinforce the entire nervous mechanism. the whole phenomenon of attention which has a primary importance for decisions of will and immense bearing on the problem of freedom of will is something which cannot be worked out in brain-terms. there seems to be some unifying central psychical core within us that raises us out of the level of mechanism and makes us autonomous creative beings. once more i quote william james, whom many[160] of us of this generation revere both as teacher and friend:
“it often takes effort to keep the mind upon an object. we feel that we can make more or less of effort as we choose. if this feeling be not deceptive, if our effort be a spiritual force, and an indeterminate one, then of course it contributes coequally with the cerebral conditions to the result. though it introduce no new idea, it will deepen and prolong the stay in consciousness of innumerable ideas which else would fade more quickly away. the delay thus gained might not be more than a second in duration—but that second may be critical; for in the constant rising and falling of considerations in the mind, where two associated systems of them are nearly in equilibrium it is often a matter of but a second more or less of attention at the outset, whether one system shall gain force to occupy the field and develop itself, and exclude the other, or be excluded itself by the other. when developed, it may make us act; and that act may seal our doom. the whole drama of the voluntary life hinges on the amount of attention, slightly more or slightly less, which rival motor ideas receive. but the whole feeling of reality, the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life, depends on our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to[161] another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago. this appearance, which makes life and history tingle with such a tragic zest, may not be an illusion. effort may be an original force and not a mere effect, and it may be indeterminate in amount.”[15]
there are thus a number of modes of consciousness, and i have mentioned only a few of them, which have no traceable counterpart in the physical sphere, and which presuppose a spiritual reality at the center of our personal life, and this spiritual reality, as we have seen, can trace its origin only to a self-existing, self-explanatory, environing consciousness, sufficiently personal to be the source of our developing personality. if this view is correct and sound, there is no scientific argument against the continuation of life after death. if personality is fundamentally a spiritual affair and the body is only a medium and organ here in space and time of a psychical reality, there are good grounds and solid hopes of permanent conservation.
[162]
but after all the supreme evidence that the universe is fundamentally spiritual is found in the revelation of personal life where it has appeared at its highest and best in history, that is in jesus christ. in him we have a master manifestation of that creative upward tendency of life, a surprising mutation, which in a unique way brought into history an unpredictable inrush of life’s higher forces. the central fact which concerns us here is that he is the revealing organ of a new and higher order of life. we cannot appropriate the gospel by reducing it to a doctrine, nor by crystallizing it into an institution, nor by postponing its prophesies of moral achievement to some remote world beyond the stars. we can appropriate it only when we realize that this christ is a revelation here in time and mutability of the eternal nature and character of that conscious personal spirit that environs all life and that steers the entire system of things, and that he has come to bring us all into an abundant life like his own.[163] here in him the love-principle which was heralded all through the long, slow process has come into full sight and into full operation as the way of life. he shows us the meaning and possibility of genuine spiritual life. he makes us sure that his kind of life is divine, and that in his face we are seeing the heart and mind and will of god. here at least is one place in our mysterious world where love breaks through—the love that will not let go, the love that suffers long and is kind. he makes the eternal father’s love visible and vocal in a life near enough to our own to move us with its appeal and enough beyond us to be forever our spiritual goal. we have here revealed a divine-human life which we can even now in some measure live and in which we can find our peace and joy, and through which we can so enter into relation with god that life becomes a radiant thing, as it was with him, and death becomes, as with him, a way of going to the father.
