THE WORLD OF DOUBT the midst of a chaos of confused tendencies. There¬ fore progress on this planet for a few thousands or millions of years indicates nothing about any true harmony between nature and morality.
Let us call attention to one aspect, well-known, yet often neglected in recent discussions of a few familiar facts. Modern science is justly sure of physical evolution, but is no less sure that evolu¬ tion on this planet is a process that began at a period distant by a finite and in fact by a not very great time from the present moment. That our planet was a nebulous mass at a date at most some¬ where between twenty millions and one hundred mil¬ lions of years ago, we have all heard, and we have also had explained to us some of the proofs of this fact. Our planet is still imperfectly cooled. At a comparatively recent period in the history of this stellar universe, this little point of it was a spheroid of glowing vapor, from which the moon had not yet been separated. The present heat of the earth is an indication of its youth. Furthermore, what our planet is to become in time, the moon itself tells us, having cooled, by reason of its small size, more rap¬ idly than we have done. Cold and dead, waterless, vaporless, that little furrowed mass of rock deso¬ lately rolls through its slow days, looking with pas¬ sionless stare at our stormy, ardent earth, full of mo¬ tion and of suffering. What that mass is, our earth shall become. And progress here will cease with the tides. All these are the commonplaces of pop¬ ular science. Progress then, as we know it here, is a fact of transient significance. Physical nature 244 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY permits progress rather than renders it necessary. Progress is an incident of a certain thermal process, a kind of episode in the history of the dissipation of the energy of our particular mass of matter, and thus, in so far as we yet know, a present occurrence just in our neighborhood, a local item in the news of the universe. Now these are the familiar facts whose meaning we want to enforce in an often neglected aspect.
But, one says, all this has been anticipated hun¬ dreds of times. It is really unfair to insist upon such things. For at least here, at least now, the world does realize our moral needs by showing us progress. Is not this all that we need? May we not be content with the few millions of years of growth that remain to our race before the earth grows cold? Is it not foolish to look into futurity so curiously? What matters it whether chaos comes again in far-off ages?
But we still insist. We desire, vainly or justly, yet ardently, that the world shall answer to our moral needs not by accident, not by the way, not for a time, but from its own nature and forever. If we can see that present progress is an indication of the nature of the universe, that the present is a symbol or a specimen of eternity, we shall be content. But if this is not so, if present progress is seen to be a mere accident, an eddy in the stream of atoms, then present progress is a pleasant fact to contemplate, but not a fact of any deep significance. Still we shall be crying in the darkness for support and find¬ ing none. For nature will say to each of us: “I THE WORLD OF DOUBT THE WORLD OF DOUBT give support to thy moral needs so long as the tem¬ perature of thy earth crust is high enough to prevent thy oceans from being absorbed, so long as the ra¬ diant heat of the sun is given out in sufficient quan¬ tities to keep thee warm. When the next stage is reached, I propose to freeze and to dry thy fair home and all thy moral needs, until there shall be nothing found on thy planet lovelier than the ruined crags of thy hills as they glimmer in the last red rays of a torpid sun. What is thy progress to me?” Notice then where our real difficulty lies. The as¬ pect of the facts that we now mean is this. It is not because progress is to endure on this planet for a short or for a long time, but because the world in which this progress is so to end seems, thus re¬ garded, wholly indifferent to progress, — this is the gloomy aspect. To-day, even while progress is so swift and sure, at this moment, we are living in a world for which, as science displays it to us, this progress is as indifferent and unessential as the fleeting hues of an evaporating soap-bubble. Is the physical fact of progress, thus regarded, a moral help to us?
Yet men turn away from these plain and often- mentioned facts to all sorts of fantastic dreams of a coming golden age. They make of future humanity a saintly people, living in devotion, or a merry peo¬ ple, always dancing to waltzes yet undreamt of, or a scientific people, calculating by some higher algebra the relative positions and motions of the molecules in the rocks on the other side of the moon. Every dream of progress is to be realized in that blessed 246 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY time, and we ave invited to praise a nature that could produce all this blessedness by pure physical law. Now we must indeed wish well for the men of the year a. d. 1,000,000, but we can receive no re¬ ligious support from the knowledge that if all goes right and if the sun keeps well at work, the men of that time will be better than we are. For still the world as a whole gives no support to our real moral needs, for only by a happy accident will this blessed¬ ness be possible. Or, in short, two tendencies are seen before us in the world, one working for evo¬ lution, for concentration of energy in living beings, for increase of their powers, for progress; the other for dissipation of energy, for death, for the destruc¬ tion of all that is valuable on our earth. We learn that the latter tendency has triumphed quite near us, on the moon. We hear that it is certain in time to triumph on the earth, and that the other ten¬ dency is to be only of transient superiority. We know that its present predominance here is, phys¬ ically speaking, a happy accident, which a cosmical catastrophe might at any moment bring to an end. And now we are asked to see in this combination of facts a religious aspect. For the writer’s part, he refuses to regard it as anything but an interesting study in physics. He delights in it as science, but it has nothing to do with religion. Yet some people talk of a Religion of Evolution.
But no doubt believers in universal progress are ready with hypotheses that shall show how signifi¬ cant a fact progress really is. A world that has progressed so many millions of years doubtless has THE WORLD OF DOUBT resources of which we know nothing. There are all the stars with their vast stores of energy. Possibly they are infinite in number. Progress ceasing just here may flash out in renewed brilliancy elsewhere. Who knows what is in store for the future, when the present seemingly chaotic arrangement of the stars gives way to vastly higher organized systems of interacting bodies, in whose light life shall flour¬ ish eternally?
Well, all this we can all fancy as well as our scientific neighbors. Nobody would call such dreams scientific, but they are logically possible dreams, and they are very beautiful. But they have one terrible negative consideration against them. This progress is either conceived as having gone on through infinite past time, or else it has no genuine significance for the true nature of the universe. A world that has now grown, now decayed, that has sometimes progressed, sometimes become worse, is a world in which progress is an accident, not an essen¬ tial feature. But now, if progress has gone on through infinite time, it has so gone on as to make possible, after all this infinite time, just the misery and imperfection that we see about us. Let us re¬ member that fact. This poor life of ours is in the supposed case the outcome of infinite ages of growth. That must be our hypothesis, if we are to cling to progress as an essential truth about the world. Very well then, all our temptations, all our weakness, our misery, our ignorance — the infinite past ages have ended in fashioning them. Our diseases, our fears, and our sins — are they perfect? If not, then what 248 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY is the meaning of endless progress toward perfec¬ tion? For we are an outcome of this infinite prog¬ ress. Another infinity of progress is not certain then to remove such imperfections. Here is prog¬ ress put to the simple test. Is it the removal of evil? Then can infinite progress, as facts show us, pass by with evil yet unremoved. And if progress is not the removal of evil, then what means prog¬ ress? Is not the temporary removal of evil more probably a mere occasional event in the history of the world?
It is surprising that we ever think of talking about universal progress as an essential fact of the popularly conceived external world. If nothing cer¬ tain can be made out about it, still the world as a whole seems, as far as we can judge by the above considerations, so indifferent to progress, that it is marvelous to behold the religious comfort that, in their shallow optimistic faith, so many amiable peo¬ ple take, while they wax fervent over the thought of progress. Let us have clear ideas about the matter. What is in the true nature of reality is as eternal as reality itself. Then progress is either an unes¬ sential, insignificant aspect of reality, or it is eter¬ nal. If progress has been eternal, then either the world was in the beginning infinitely bad, or else infinite progress has been unable to remove from the world the finite quantity of evil that was always in it. For here in the empirical world is evil now — if indeed there is any empirical world at all — plenty of evil unremoved.
If you found a man shoveling sand on the sea THE WORLD OF DOUBT shore, and wheeling it away to make an embank¬ ment, and if you began to admire his industry, see¬ ing how considerable a mass of sand he had wheeled away, and how little remained in the sand-hill on which he was working, you might still check your¬ self to ask him: “ How long, O friend, hast thou been at work? ” And if he answered that he had been wheeling away there from all eternity, and was in fact an essential feature of the universe, you would not only inwardly marvel at his mendacity, but you would be moved to say: “ So be it, O friend, but thou must then have been from all eternity an in¬ finitely lazy fellow.’’ Might we not venture to suspect the same of our law of universal physical progress?
But let us already hint by anticipation one fur¬ ther thought. Why is not any purely historical view of the world open to the same objection? If the his¬ tory began by some arbitrary act of will at some time not very long since, then this history, viewed by itself apart from the creative act, may be intelli¬ gible enough in its inner unity and significance, al¬ though an arbitrary act of will can be no true expla¬ nation. But the whole physical world cannot be regarded at once as a complete, self-existent whole, with an eternity of past life, and as, in its deepest truth, an historical process of any sort. For it is of the essence of an intelligible historical process to have, like a tragedy in Aristotle’s famous account of tragedy, a beginning, a middle, and an end. An in¬ finite series of successive acts cannot be one organic historical process. Either this everlasting series o; facts has no significance at all, or else it must have 250 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY had essentially the same significance all the way along. So, if the world is infinite in time, it can¬ not as a whole have, strictly speaking, any history. The longest continued story in the most thrilling of the cheap weeklies reaches, as we are given to un¬ derstand, a conclusion at some time. Imagine an infinite continued story, with the poor lovers eter¬ nally weeping and quarreling, and you will see what an infinite historical process in the world would mean. It would of course be an eternal repetition of the same thing, no story at all. If the world, re¬ garded in time, cannot as a whole have any genuine history at all, it is then hopeless to look in the world’s history, as distinct from the world’s nature, for anything of fundamental religious significance.
And so we are thrown back to our starting-point. This splendid conception of science, this world of unalterable mechanical law, in which all things that happen are predetermined from all eternity, this mathematical machine, has a real history no more than the ebbing and flowing sea-tides would have from day to day any history, apart from the fact that they once did not so ebb and flow at all. Eter¬ nally repeated rhythms, or ceaseless new combi¬ nations of elements, clash of atoms, quiver of ether waves, mechanical changes forever; but no eternal progress, no historical sense to the whole, — that seems the conception of the physical world as a whole to which we are driven. It is a strictly math¬ ematical, a physically intelligible, conception, but what religious significance has it? Yet such is the conception that we must have of any eternal phys¬ ical process.
THE WORLD OF DOUBT THE WORLD OF DOUBT We have gone through this thorny path of prob¬ lems, because we want already to indicate one thing as the result of it all, namely, that not what the present world has come from, not what it is becom¬ ing, not what it will be by and by, but what it eter¬ nally is, must furnish us with the deepest religious aspect of reality. All else is subordinate. We do not care so much to know what story anybody has to tell us about what has happened in the world, as to know what of moral worth always is in the world, so that whatever has happened or will happen may possess a religious significance dependent on its rela¬ tion to this reality. That which changes not, wherein is no variableness, neither shadow of turning, that must give us the real religious truth upon which all else will depend. A particular event in the world may have a religious significance, but that signifi¬ cance will depend on the relation of this event to eternal truth. And the eternal truth is what we want to know.
Therefore our search will become somewhat nar¬ rowed, whenever at least we grow fully convinced of this truth. The “ power that makes for righteous¬ ness ” will become a conception of doubtful religious value. An eternal power, that with all its past eternity of work cannot yet quite vindicate right¬ eousness? Perhaps we shall have to find the relig¬ ious aspect of things elsewhere. But let us leave, at all events, the world of pure science.
As we do so some objector may interpose the as¬ sertion that we have generalized too hastily in speak¬ ing of the insignificance of the historical aspect of 252 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY things; for, after all, we have ' been talking of nat¬ ural science. Let us turn then to the more philo¬ sophical theories of the powers that are at work in this supposed external world of metaphysics. There are philosophical theories that try to show us of what hidden reality this mechanical world of ours is the mere appearance, or phenomenal symbol. Let us see if any of them can give a religious interpretation to the powers that rule the world.
III.
III.
We pass, then, from the scientific to the more metaphysical view of the world. What can we hope from realistic metaphysics? Let us first consider the value of that philosophic view nowadays most frequently held, namely, what in general is called Monism. We hear nowadays, with almost weari¬ some repetition, of Matter and Spirit, of Force and Intelligence, of Motion and Sensation, as being op¬ posite aspects, or faces, or manifestations, of one ul¬ timate Reality, until we wonder whether clear think¬ ing is not in danger of losing itself altogether in the contemplation of a mere empty form of words. From whispers and low mutterings with bated breath about the inscrutable mystery of the ultimate unity of Being, one turns with satisfaction to efforts to¬ wards some intelligible account of the sense in which all things can be regarded as manifestations of one Power or actual Existent. Yet in truth even these efforts, in so far as they consider the world of the Powers, have thus far failed to satisfy the demands THE WORLD OF DOUBT of criticism. Where they are clearly stated they are inadequate. Where they resort to figures of speech and tell us about the two sides of the shield, or the convexity and concavity of the same curve, as illus¬ trations of the ultimate oneness of nature amid the various manifestations of experience, there these ef¬ forts merely sink back into the primitive incoherency so dear to all pre-Kantian metaphysics. The same curve is, indeed, convex and concave; but matter and spirit are simply not the two faces of a curve, and the relevant circumstance on which this meta¬ phor turns will never be clear to us until we learn, quite literally, wholly apart from fables about shields, just how, in what sense, and by what evidence, mat¬ ter and mind are known to be of like substance. And that we must do, ere this hypothesis can have for us a religious value. The failure of dogmatic Monism, if it should take place, ought, indeed, not to throw us over into the arms of an equally dog¬ matic Dualism; but we must refuse to accept the monistic hypothesis until it has been freed from all trace of mysticism. We shall here follow the plan announced at the outset of the chapter, and confine our attention to the realistic Monism, that regards the events in the external world as the results of the action of the one Power. A very different form of monism we shall ourselves hereafter maintain. But just now we deal in negations.
Let us begin with the attempts that have been made to interpret the results of modern physical sci¬ ence in a monistic sense, by regarding the ultimate physical or chemical units as endowed with some 254 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY form of actual or potential consciousness. Organ¬ isms of the highest sort are combinations of atoms. The whole is the sum of its parts. Why may not the mental possessions of these highest organisms be the sum of the indefinitely small mental powers of the atoms? An atom in motion may be a thought, or, if that bo saying far too much of so simple a thing, an atom in motion may be, or may be endowed with, an infinitesimal consciousness. Billions of atoms in interaction may have as their resultant quite a respectable little consciousness. Sufficiently com¬ plex groups of these atoms of Mind-Stuff (to use Professor Clifford’s ingenious terminology) might produce a great man. One shudders to think of the base uses to which the noble mind-stuff of Shake¬ speare might return; but the theory tries to be an expression of natural phenomena, not merely an aes¬ thetic creation, and must not pause before such con¬ sequences. And, if it be the truth, might it not somehow, no matter in what way, be made of relig¬ ious value? Or otherwise, if true, might it not end our vain search for a religion?
Such is an outline that will suggest to the initiated thoughts common to several modern theories of be¬ ing. Are these theories in a fair way to satisfy crit¬ ical needs? The writer is not satisfied that they are. Time does not permit any lengthy discussion of the matter here, but let us remind ourselves of the considerations that will most readily occur to any one that is disposed for a moment to accept one of these modern forms of monism. Even if they prom¬ ised us the religious aspect that we seek, we could not accept them. As it is, we need not fear them.
THE WORLD OF DOUBT Can our consciousness be regarded as an aggre¬ gate of elementary facts, such as sensations or as atoms of pleasure and pain? If so, what aggregate of sensations forms a judgment, such as, “ This man is my father? ” Evidently here is indeed an aggre¬ gate of sensations represented, but also something more. What is this more? A product, it maybe said, formed through association from innumerable past experiences. Granted for the moment; but the question is not as to the origin of this consciousness, but as to its analysis. This judgment, whereby a present sensation is regarded as in definite relation to real past experiences, as a symbol, not merely of actual sensations now remembered, not merely of fu¬ ture sensations not yet experienced, but of a reality wholly outside of the individual consciousness, this fact of acknowledging something not directly pre¬ sented as nevertheless real — is this act possibly to be regarded as a mere aggregate of elementary men¬ tal states? Surely, at best, the act can be so re¬ garded only in the sense in which a word is an ag¬ gregate of letters. For and in the one simple mo¬ mentary consciousness, all these elements exist as an aggregate, but as an aggregate formed into one whole, as the matter of a single act. But in them¬ selves, without the very act of unity in which they are one, these elements would be merely an aggre¬ gate, or, in Mr. Gurney’s apt words,1 “ a rope of sand.” Our mental life then, as a union of innum¬ erable elements into the one Self of any moment, is more than an aggregate, and can never be explained as an aggregate of elementary atoms of sensation, i Mind for April, 1881, article, “ Monism.”
256 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY Nor may we say that the ultimate atomic states of consciousness may be, as it were, chemically united into a whole that is more than an aggregate. Phys¬ ical atoms in space, if endowed with sufficiently numerous affinities, may unite into what wholes you will; but a mental fact is a mental fact, and no more. An ultimate independent unit of conscious¬ ness, conceived after the analogy of a sensation, can have to another like unit only one of three relations: it may coexist with this other unit, or it may pre¬ cede or follow it in time. There is no other relation possible. Affinity, or attraction, or approach of one pain or pleasure, of one sensation of pressure or of motion to another, is a meaningless jingle of words, unless, indeed, such an expression is used to name figuratively the relations that in and for a compar¬ ing, contrasting, uniting, and separating active con¬ sciousness, two ideas are made to bear. Thus, then, this atomic monism brings us no nearer than before to the relation between the data of consciousness and the facts of physical nature. For the rest, how me¬ chanical science can be satisfied to regard its mate¬ rial points as nothing but independently existing fragments of mind, whose whole being is intensive; how, out of these intensive units, space-relations are to be constructed at all — these questions we may for the present neglect. Atomic monism, a synthe¬ sis, or, rather, a jumble of physiological psychology with doctrines that are incompatible with any sci¬ ence whatever, has never answered these questions, and doubtless never will.