We have not only to realise how our own prepossessions and the metaphysical figments of our own creation have obscured the simple realities of religion and science alike; we have also to see that our timid dread lest religion should kill our science, or science kill our religion, is equally fatal here. He who would gain his life must be willing to lose it, and it is by being honest to one’s self and to the facts by applying courageously the measuring rod of Truth, that in the end salvation is found. Here, it is true, there are those who smilingly assure us that by adopting such a method we shall merely put ourselves in the wrong and endure much unnecessary suffering. There is no such thing as “Truth,” they declare, regarded as an objective impersonal reality; we do not “discover” truth, we invent it. Therefore your business is to invent a truth which shall harmoniously satisfy the needs of your nature and aid your efficiency in practical life. That we are justified in being dishonest towards truth has even been argued from the doctrine of relativity by some who failed to realise that that doctrine is here hardly relative. Certainly the philosophers of recent times, from Nietzsche to Croce, have loved to analyse the idea of “truth” and to show that it by no means signifies what we used to suppose it signified. But to show that truth is fluid, or even the creation of the individual mind, is by no means to show that we can at will play fast and loose with it to suit our own momentary convenience. If we do we merely find ourselves, at the end, in a pool where we must tramp round and round in intellectual slush out of which there is no issue. One may well doubt whether any Pragmatist has ever really invented his truth that way. Practically, just as the best result is attained by the man who acts as though free-will were a reality and who exerts it, so in this matter, also, practically, in the end the best result is attained by assuming that truth is an objective reality which we must patiently seek, and in accordance with which we must discipline our own wayward impulses. There is no transcendent objective truth, each one of us is an artist creating his own truth from the phenomena presented to him, but if in that creation he allows any alien emotional or practical considerations to influence him he is a bad artist and his work is wrought for destruction. From the pragmatic point of view, it may thus be said that if the use of the measuring-rod of truth as an objective standard produces the best practical results, that use is pragmatically justified. But if so, we are exactly in the same position as we were before the pragmatist arrived; we can get on as well without him, if not better, for we run the risk that he may confuse the issues for us. It is really on the theoretic rather than the practical side that he is helpful.
It is not only the Pragmatist whose well-meant efforts to find an easy reconciliation of belief and practice, and indirectly the concord of religion and science, come to grief because he has not realised that the walls of the spiritual world can only be scaled with much expenditure of treasure, not without blood and sweat, that we cannot glide luxuriously to Heaven in his motor-car. We are also met by the old-fashioned Intuitionist.[87] It is no accident that the Intuitionist so often walks hand in hand with the Pragmatist; they are engaged in the same tasks. There is, we have seen, the impulse of science which must work through intelligence; there is, also, the impulse of religion in the satisfaction of which intelligence can only take a very humble place at the antechamber of the sanctuary. To admit, therefore, that reason cannot extend into the religious sphere is absolutely sound so long as we realise that reason has a coordinate right to lay down the rules in its own sphere of intelligence. But in men of a certain mental type the two tendencies are alike so deeply implanted that they cannot escape them: they are not only impelled to go beyond intelligence, but they are also impelled to carry intelligence with them outside its sphere. The sphere of intelligence is limited, they say, and rightly; the soul has other impulses besides that of intelligence and life needs more than knowledge for its complete satisfaction. But in the hands of these people the faculty of “intuition,” which is to supplant that of intelligence, itself results in a product which by them is called “knowledge,” and so spuriously bears the hall-mark which belongs to the product of intelligence.
But the result is disastrous. Not only is an illegitimate confusion introduced, but, by attributing to the impulse of religion a character which it is neither entitled to nor in need of, we merely discredit it in the eyes of intelligence. The philosopher of intuition, even in denying intelligence, is apt to remain so predominantly intelligent that, even in entering what is for him the sphere of religion, he still moves in an atmosphere of rarefied intelligence. He is farther from the Kingdom of Heaven than the simple man who is quite incapable of understanding the philosopher’s theory, but yet may be able to follow his own religious impulse without foisting into it an intellectual content. For even the simple man may be one with the great mystics who all declare that the unspeakable quality they have acquired, as Eckhart puts it, “hath no image.” It is not in the sphere of intellection, it brings no knowledge; it is the outcome of the natural instinct of the individual soul.
No doubt there really are people in whom the instincts of religion and of science alike are developed in so rudimentary a degree, if developed at all, that they never become conscious. The religious instinct is not an essential instinct. Even the instinct of sex, which is much more fundamental than either of these, is not absolutely essential. A very little bundle of instincts and impulses is indispensable to a man on his way down the path of life to a peaceful and humble grave. A man’s equipment of tendencies, on the lowest plane, needs to be more complex and diverse than an oyster’s, yet not so very much more. The equipment of the higher animals, moreover, is needed less for the good of the individual than for the good of the race. We cannot, therefore, be surprised if the persons in whom the superfluous instincts are rudimentary fail to understand them, confusing them and overlaying them with each other and with much that is outside both. The wonder would be if it were otherwise.
When all deduction has been made of the mental and emotional confusions which have obscured men’s vision, we cannot fail to conclude, it seems to me, that Science and Mysticism are nearer to each other than some would have us believe. At the beginning of human cultures, far from being opposed, they may even be said to be identical. From time to time, in later ages, brilliant examples have appeared of men who have possessed both instincts in a high degree and have even fused the two together, while among the humble in spirit and the lowly in intellect it is probable that in all ages innumerable men have by instinct harmonised their religion with their intelligence. But as the accumulated experiences of civilisation have been preserved and handed on from generation to generation, this free and vital play of the instincts has been largely paralysed. On each side fossilised traditions have accumulated so thickly, the garments of dead metaphysics have been wrapped so closely around every manifestation alike of the religious instinct and the scientific instinct—for even what we call “common sense” is really a hardened mass of dead metaphysics—that not many persons can succeed in revealing one of these instincts in its naked beauty, and very few can succeed in so revealing both instincts. Hence a perpetual antagonism. It may be, however, we are beginning to realise that there are no metaphysical formulas to suit all men, but that every man must be the artist of his own philosophy. As we realise that, it becomes easier than it was before to liberate ourselves from a dead metaphysics, and so to give free play alike to the religious instinct and the scientific instinct. A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest; no man can absorb all the traditions of the past; what he fills himself with will only be a poison to work to his own auto-intoxication.
Along all these lines we see more clearly than before the real harmony between Mysticism and Science. We see, also, that all arguments are meaningless until we gain personal experience. One must win one’s own place in the spiritual world painfully and alone. There is no other way of salvation. The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.
V IT may seem that we have been harping overmuch on a single string of what is really a very rich instrument, when the whole exalted art of religion is brought down to the argument of its relationship to science. The core of religion is mysticism, it is admitted. And yet where are all the great mystics? Why nothing of the Neo-Platonists in whom the whole movement of modern mysticism began, of their glorious pupils in the Moslem world, of Ramon Lull and Francis of Assisi and François Xavier and John of the Cross and George Fox and the “De Imitatione Christi” and “Towards Democracy”? There is no end to that list of glorious names, and they are all passed by.
To write of the mystics, whether Pagan or Christian or Islamic, is a most delightful task. It has been done, and often very well done. The mystics are not only themselves an incarnation of beauty, but they reflect beauty on all who with understanding approach them.
Moreover, in the phenomena of religious mysticism we have a key—if we only knew it—to many of the most precious human things which on the surface may seem to have nothing in them of religion. For this is an art which instinctively reveals to us the secrets of other arts. It presents to us in the most naked and essential way the inward experience which has inspired men to find modes of expression which are transmutations of the art of religion and yet have on the surface nothing to indicate that this is so. It has often been seen in poetry and in music and in painting. One might say that it is scarcely possible to understand completely the poetry of Shelley or the music of César Franck or the pictures of Van Gogh unless there is somewhere within an intimation of the secret of mysticism. This is so not because of any imperfection in the achieved work of such men in poetry and in music and in painting,—for work that fails to contain its own justification is always bad work,—but because we shall not be in possession of the clue to explain the existence of that work. We may even go beyond the sphere of the recognised arts altogether, and say that the whole love of Nature and landscape, which in modern times has been so greatly developed, largely through Rousseau, the chief creator of our modern spiritual world, is not intelligible if we are altogether ignorant of what religion means.
But we are not so much concerned here with the rich and variegated garments the impulse of religion puts on, or with its possible transmutations, as with the simple and naked shape of those impulses when bared of all garments. It was peculiarly important to present the impulse of mysticism naked because, of all the fundamental human impulses, that is the one most often so richly wrapped round with gorgeous and fantastic garments that, alike to the eye of the ordinary man and the acute philosopher, there has seemed to be no living thing inside at all. It was necessary to strip off all these garments, to appeal to simple personal direct experience for the actual core of fact, and to show that that core, so far from being soluble by analysis into what science counts as nothing, is itself, like every other natural organic function, a fact of science.
It is enough here, where we are concerned only with the primary stuff of art, the bare simple technique of the human dance, to have brought into as clear a light as may be the altogether natural mechanism which lies behind all the most magnificent fantasies of the mystic impulse, and would still subsist and operate even though they were all cast into the flames. That is why it has seemed necessary to dwell all the time on the deep-lying harmony of the mystic’s attitude with the scientific man’s attitude. It is a harmony which rests on the faith that they are eternally separate, however close, however intimately coöperative. When the mystic professes that, as such, he has knowledge of the same order as the man of science, or when the scientist claims that, as such, he has emotion which is like that of the man of religion, each of them deceives himself. He has introduced a confusion where no confusion need be; perhaps, indeed, he has even committed that sin against the Holy Ghost of his own spiritual integrity for which there is no forgiveness. The function of intellectual thought—which is that of the art of science—may, certainly, be invaluable for religion; it makes possible the purgation of all that pseudo-science, all that philosophy, good or bad, which has poisoned and encrusted the simple spontaneous impulse of mysticism in the open air of Nature and in the face of the sun. The man of science may be a mystic, but cannot be a true mystic unless he is so relentless a man of science that he can tolerate no alien science in his mysticism. The mystic may be a man of science, but he will not be a good man of science unless he understands that science must be kept for ever bright and pure from all admixture of mystical emotion; the fountain of his emotion must never rust the keenness of his analytic scalpel. It is useless to pretend that any such rustiness can ever convert the scalpel into a mystical implement, though it can be an admirable aid in cutting towards the mystical core of things, and perhaps if there were more relentless scientific men there would be more men of pure mystic vision. Science by itself, good or bad, can never be religion, any more than religion by itself can ever be science, or even philosophy.
It is by looking back into the past that we see the facts in an essential simplicity less easy to reach in more sophisticated ages. We need not again go so far back as the medicine-men of Africa and Siberia. Mysticism in pagan antiquity, however less intimate to us and less seductive than that of later times, is perhaps better fitted to reveal to us its true nature. The Greeks believed in the spiritual value of “conversion” as devoutly as our Christian sects and they went beyond most such sects in their elaborately systematic methods for obtaining it, no doubt for the most part as superficially as has been common among Christians. It is supposed that almost the whole population of Athens must have experienced the Eleusinian initiation. These methods, as we know, were embodied in the Mysteries associated with Dionysus and Demeter and Orpheus and the rest, the most famous and typical being those of Attic Eleusis.[88] We too often see those ancient Greek Mysteries through a concealing mist, partly because it was rightly felt that matters of spiritual experience were not things to talk about, so that precise information is lacking, partly because the early Christians, having their own very similar Mysteries to uphold, were careful to speak evil of Pagan Mysteries, and partly because the Pagan Mysteries no doubt really tended to degenerate with the general decay of classic culture. But in their large simple essential outlines they seem to be fairly clear. For just as there was nothing “orgiastic” in our sense in the Greek “orgies,” which were simply ritual acts, so there was nothing, in our sense, “mysterious” in the Mysteries. We are not to suppose, as is sometimes supposed, that their essence was a secret doctrine, or even that the exhibition of a secret rite was the sole object, although it came in as part of the method. A mystery meant a spiritual process of initiation, which was, indeed, necessarily a secret to those who had not yet experienced it, but had nothing in itself “mysterious” beyond what inheres to-day to the process in any Christian “revival,” which is the nearest analogue to the Greek Mystery. It is only “mysterious” in the sense that it cannot be expressed, any more than the sexual embrace can be expressed, in words, but can only be known by experience. A preliminary process of purification, the influence of suggestion, a certain religious faith, a solemn and dramatic ritual carried out under the most impressive circumstances, having a real analogy to the Catholic’s Mass, which also is a function, at once dramatic and sacred, which culminates in a spiritual communion with the Divine—all this may contribute to the end which was, as it always must be in religion, simply a change of inner attitude, a sudden exalting realisation of a new relationship to eternal things. The philosophers understood this; Aristotle was careful to point out, in an extant fragment, that what was gained in the Mysteries was not instruction but impressions and emotions, and Plato had not hesitated to regard the illumination which came to the initiate in philosophy as of the nature of that acquired in the Mysteries. So it was natural that when Christianity took the place of Paganism the same process went on with only a change in external circumstances. Baptism in the early Church—before it sank to the mere magical sort of rite it later became—was of the nature of initiation into a Mystery, preceded by careful preparation, and the baptised initiate was sometimes crowned with a garland as the initiated were at Eleusis.
When we go out of Athens along the beautiful road that leads to the wretched village of Eleusis and linger among the vast and complicated ruins of the chief shrine of mysticism in our Western world, rich in associations that seem to stretch back to the Neolithic Age and suggest a time when the mystery of the blossoming of the soul was one with the mystery of the upspringing of the corn, it may be that our thoughts by no unnatural transition pass from the myth of Demeter and Kore to the remembrance of what we may have heard or know of the manifestations of the spirit among barbarian northerners of other faiths or of no faith in far Britain and America and even of their meetings of so-called “revival.” For it is always the same thing that Man is doing, however various and fantastic the disguises he adopts. And sometimes the revelation of the new life, springing up from within, comes amid the crowd in the feverish atmosphere of artificial shrines, maybe soon to shrivel up, and sometimes the blossoming forth takes place, perhaps more favourably, in the open air and under the light of the sun and amid the flowers, as it were to a happy faun among the hills. But when all disguises have been stripped away, it is always and everywhere the same simple process, a spiritual function which is almost a physiological function, an art which Nature makes. That is all.
Footnote 70: Footnote 70: It is scarcely necessary to remark that if we choose to give to “mysticism” a definition incompatible with “science,” the opposition cannot be removed. This is, for example, done by Croce, who yet recognises as highly important a process of “conversion” which is nothing else but mysticism as here understood. (See, e.g., Piccoli, _Benedetto Croce_, p. 184.) Only he has left himself no name to apply to it.
Footnote 71: “The endeavour of the human mind to enjoy the blessedness of actual communion with the highest,” which is Pringle Pattison’s widely accepted definition of mysticism, I prefer not to use because it is ambiguous. The “endeavour,” while it indicates that we are concerned with an art, also suggests its strained pathological forms, while “actual communion” lends itself to ontological interpretations.
Footnote 72: Footnote 73: Footnote 74: Footnote 75: Farnell even asserts (in his _Greek Hero Cults_) that “it is impossible to quote a single example of any one of the higher world-religions working in harmony with the development of physical science.” He finds a “special and unique” exception in the cult of Asclepios at Cos and Epidauros and Pergamon, where, after the fourth century B.C., were physicians, practising a rational medical science, who were also official priests of the Asclepios temples.
Footnote 76: Sir Oliver Lodge, _Reason and Belief_, p. 19.
Footnote 77: It is scarcely necessary to point out that a differentiation of function has to be made sooner or later, and sometimes it is made soon. This was so among the Todas of India. “Certain Todas,” says Dr. Rivers (_The Todas_, 1906, p. 249), “have the power of divination, others are sorcerers, and others again have the power of curing diseases by means of spells and rites, while all three functions are quite separate from those of the priest or sharman. The Todas have advanced some way towards civilisation of function in this respect, and have as separate members of the community their prophets, their magicians, and their medicine-men in addition to their priests.”
Footnote 78: Footnote 78: Joël, _Ursprung der Naturphilosophie aus dem Geiste der Romantik_ (1903); _Nietzsche und die Romantik_ (1905). But I am here quoting from Professor Joël’s account of his own philosophical development in _Die Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart_, vol. I (1921).
Footnote 79: In connection with this scheme, it may be interesting to note, I prepared, in 1879, a _questionnaire_ on “conversion,” on the lines of the investigations which some years later began to be so fruitfully carried out by the psychologists of religion in America.
Footnote 80: It must be remembered that for science the mechanistic assumption always remains; it is, as Vaihinger would say, a necessary fiction. To abandon it is to abandon science. Driesch, the most prominent vitalist of our time, has realised this, and in his account of his own mental development (_Die Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart_, vol. I, 1921) he shows how, beginning as a pupil of Haeckel and working at zoölogy for many years, after adopting the theory of vitalism he abandoned all zoölogical work and became a professor of philosophy. When the religious spectator, or the æsthetic spectator (as is well illustrated in the French review _L’Esprit Nouveau_), sees the “machinery” as something else than machinery he is legitimately going outside the sphere of science, but he is not thereby destroying the basic assumption of science.
Footnote 81: Footnote 81: Long ago Edith Simcox (in a passage of her _Natural Law_ which chanced to strike my attention very soon after the episode above narrated) well described “conversion” as a “spiritual revolution,” not based on any single rational consideration, but due to the “cumulative evidence of cognate impressions” resulting, at a particular moment, not in a change of belief, but in a total rearrangement and recolouring of beliefs and impressions, with the supreme result that the order of the universe is apprehended no longer as hostile, but as friendly. This is the fundamental fact of “conversion,” which is the gate of mysticism.
Footnote 82: How we are to analyse the conception of “universe”—apart from its personal emotional tone, which is what mainly concerns us—is, of course, a matter that must be left altogether open and free. Sir James Frazer at the end of his _Golden Bough_ (“Balder the Beautiful,” vol. II, p. 306) finds that the “universe” is an “ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought,” or, he adds, suddenly shifting to a less idealistic and more realistic standpoint, “shadows on the screen.” That is a literary artist’s metaphysical way of describing the matter and could not occur to any one who was not familiar with the magic lantern which has now developed into the cinema, beloved of philosophers for its symbolic significance. Mr. Bertrand Russell, a more abstract artist, who would reject any such “imaginative admixture” as he would find in Frazer’s view, once severely refused to recognise any such thing as a “universe,” but has since less austerely admitted that there is, after all, a “set of appearances,” which may fairly be labelled “reality,” so long as we do not assume “a mysterious Thing-in-Itself behind the appearances.” (_Nation_, 6th January, 1923.) But there are always some people who think that an “appearance” must be an appearance of _Something_, and that when a “shadow” is cast on the screen of our sensory apparatus it must be cast by _Something_. So every one defines the “universe” in his own way, and no two people—not even the same person long—can define it in the same way. We have to recognise that even the humblest of us is entitled to his own “universe.”
Footnote 83: The simple and essential outlines of “conversion” have been obscured because chiefly studied in the Churches among people whose prepossessions and superstitions have rendered it a highly complex process, and mixed up with questions of right and wrong living which, important as they are, properly form no part of religion. The man who waits to lead a decent life until he has “saved his soul” is not likely to possess a soul that is worth saving. How much ignorance prevails in regard to “conversion,” even among the leaders of religious opinion, and what violent contrasts of opinion—in which sometimes both the opposing parties are mistaken—was well illustrated by a discussion on the subject at the Church Congress at Sheffield in 1922. A distinguished Churchman well defined “conversion” as a unification of character, involving the whole man,—will, intellect, and emotion,—by which a “new self” was achieved; but he also thought that this great revolutionary process consisted usually in giving up some “definite bad habit,” very much doubted whether sudden conversion was a normal phenomenon at all, and made no attempt to distinguish between that kind of “conversion” which is merely the result of suggestion and auto-suggestion, after a kind of hysterical attack and of lifelong effect. Another speaker went to the opposite extreme by asserting that “conversion” is an absolutely necessary process, and an Archbishop finally swept away “conversion” altogether by declaring that the whole of the religious life (and the whole of the irreligious life?) is a process of conversion. (_The Times_, 12th October, 1922.) It may be a satisfaction to some to realise that this is a matter on which it is vain to go to the Churches for light.
Footnote 84: Dean Inge (_Philosophy of Plotinus_, vol. II, p. 165) has some remarks on Plotinus in relation to asceticism.
Footnote 85: Jules de Gaultier (_La Philosophie officielle et la Philosophie_, p. 150) refers to those Buddhist monks the symbol of whose faith was contained in one syllable: _Om_. But those monks, he adds, belonged to “the only philosophic race that ever existed” and by the aid of their pure faith, placed on a foundation which no argumentation can upset, all the religious philosophies of the Judeo-Helleno-Christian tradition are but as fairy-tales told to children.
Footnote 86: Footnote 86: We must always remember that “Church” and “religion,” though often confused, are far from being interchangeable terms. “Religion” is a natural impulse, “Church” is a social institution. The confusion is unfortunate. Thus Freud (_Group Psychology_, p. 51) speaks of the probability of religion disappearing and Socialism taking its place. He means not “religion,” but a “Church.” We cannot speak of a natural impulse disappearing, an institution easily may.
Footnote 87: It must be remembered that “intuition” is a word with all sorts of philosophical meanings, in addition to its psychological meanings (which were studied some years ago by Dearborn in the _Psychological Review_). For the ancient philosophic writers, from the Neo-Platonists on, it was usually a sort of special organ for coming in contact with supernatural realities; for Bergson it is at once a method superior to the intellect for obtaining knowledge and a method of æsthetic contemplation; for Croce it is solely æsthetic, and art is at once “intuition” and “expression” (by which he means the formation of internal images). For Croce, when the mind “intuits” by “expressing,” the result is art. There is no “religion” for Croce except philosophy.
Footnote 88: Footnote 88: The modern literature of the Mysteries, especially of Eleusis, is very extensive and elaborate in many languages. I will only mention here a small and not very recent book, Cheetham’s Hulsean Lectures on _The Mysteries Pagan and Christian_ (1897) as for ordinary readers sufficiently indicating the general significance of the Mysteries. There is, yet briefer, a more modern discussion of the matter in the Chapter on “Religion” by Dr. W. R. Inge in R. W. Livingstone’s useful collection of essays, _The Legacy of Greece_ (1921).
CHAPTER VI THE ART OF MORALS I NO man has ever counted the books that have been written about morals. No subject seems so fascinating to the human mind. It may well be, indeed, that nothing imports us so much as to know how to live. Yet it can scarcely be that on any subject are the books that have been written more unprofitable, one might even say unnecessary.
For when we look at the matter objectively it is, after all, fairly simple. If we turn our attention to any collective community, at any time and place, in its moral aspect, we may regard it as an army on the march along a road of life more or less encompassed by danger. That, indeed, is scarcely a metaphor; that is what life, viewed in its moral aspect, may really be considered. When thus considered, we see that it consists of an extremely small advance guard in front, formed of persons with a limited freedom of moral action and able to act as patrols in various directions, of a larger body in the rear, in ancient military language called the blackguard and not without its uses, and in the main of a great compact majority with which we must always be chiefly concerned since they really are the army; they are the community. What we call “morals” is simply blind obedience to words of command—whether or not issued by leaders the army believes it has itself chosen—of which the significance is hidden, and beyond this the duty of keeping in step with the others, or of trying to keep in step, or of pretending to do so.[89] It is an automatic, almost unconscious process and only becomes acutely conscious when the individual is hopelessly out of step; then he may be relegated to the rear blackguard. But that happens seldom. So there is little need to be concerned about it. Even if it happened very often, nothing overwhelming would have taken place; it would merely be that what we called the blackguard had now become the main army, though with a different discipline. We are, indeed, simply concerned with a discipline or routine which in this field is properly described as _custom_, and the word _morals_ essentially means _custom_. That is what morals must always be for the mass, and, indeed, to some extent for all, a discipline, and, as we have already seen, a discipline cannot properly be regarded as a science or an art. The innumerable books on morals, since they have usually confused and befogged this simple and central fact, cannot fail to be rather unprofitable. That, it would seem, is what the writers thought—at all events about those the others had written—or else they would not have considered it necessary for themselves to add to the number. It was not only an unprofitable task, it was also—except in so far as an objectively scientific attitude has been assumed—aimless. For, although the morals of a community at one time and place is never the same as that of another or even the same community at another time and place, it is a complex web of conditions that produces the difference, and it must have been evident that to