In youth we grow and learn and always the universe widens around us. The horizon recedes faster than we can journey towards it. There comes a time when we look back with longing to the days when everything we learned seemed a fast gaining upon the powers of darkness, and each new principle seemed to illuminate and explain an immense region of the world. We had only to keep on learning in steady progress, it seemed, until we should have dominion over the whole of it. But there came a time, perhaps, when advance halted, and our carefully ordered world began to dissipate and loose ends and fringes to appear. It became a real struggle to keep our knowledge securely boxed in our one system, indeed, in any system, as we found when we restlessly tried one dogma after another as strong-boxes for our spiritual goods. Always something eluded us; it was “ever not quite.” Just when we were safest, some new experience came up to be most incongruously unaccounted for. We had our goods, for instance, safely stowed away in the box of “materialism,” when suddenly we realized that, on its theory, our whole life might run along precisely as we see it now, we might talk and love and paint and build without a glimmer of consciousness, that wondrous stuff which is so palpably our light and our life. The materialist can see in us nothing but the inert accompaniment of our bodies, the helpless, useless, and even annoying spectators of the play of physical forces through these curious compounds of chemical elements that we call our bodies. Or if, filled with the joy of creation, we tried to pack our world into the dogma of “idealism” and see all hard material things as emanations from our spiritual self and plastic under our hand, we were brought with a shock against some tough, incorrigible fact that sobered our elation, and forced the unwilling recognition of our impotence upon us again.
It is not, however, from an excess of idealism that the world suffers to-day. But it is sick rather with the thorough-going and plausible scientific materialism with which our philosophy and literature seem to reek. Pure idealism has long ago proved too intoxicating a confirmation of our hopes and desires to seduce for long our tough-mindedness. Science has come as a challenge to both our courage and our honesty. It covertly taunts us with being afraid to face the universe as it is; if we look and are saddened, we have seemed to prove ourselves less than men. For this advance of scientific speculation has seemed only to increase the gulf between the proven and certain facts, and all the values and significances of life that our reactions to its richness have produced in us. And so incorrigibly honest is the texture of the human mind that we cannot continue to believe in and cultivate things that we no longer consider to be real. And science has undermined our faith in the reality of a spiritual world that to our forefathers was the only reality in the universe. We are so honest, however, that when the scientist relegates to a subjective shadowy realm our world of qualities and divinities, we cannot protest, but only look wistfully after the disappearing forms. A numbness has stolen over our religion, art, and literature, and the younger generation finds a chill and torpor in those interests of life that should be the highest inspiration.
Religion in these latter days becomes poetry, about which should never be asked the question, “Is it true?” Art becomes a frivolous toy; literature a daily chronicle.
There is thus a crucial intellectual dilemma that faces us to-day. If we accept whole-heartedly the spiritual world, we seem to be false to the imposing new knowledge of science which is rapidly making the world comprehensible to us; if we accept all the claims and implications of science, we seem to trample on our own souls. Yet we feel instinctively the validity of both aspects of the world. Our solution will seem to be, then, to be content with remaining something less than monists. We must recognize that this is an infinite universe, and give up our attempt to get all our experience under one roof. Striving ever for unity, we must yet understand that this “not-quite-ness” is one of the fundamental principles of things. We can no longer be satisfied with a settlement of the dreary conflict between religion and science which left for religion only the task of making hazardous speculations which science was later to verify or cast aside, as it charted the seas of knowledge. We cannot be content with a religion which science is constantly overtaking and wiping out, as it puts its brave postulates of faith to rigorous test.
The only view of religion and science that will satisfy us is one that makes them each the contemplation of a different aspect of the universe,—one, an aspect of quantities and relations, the other, an aspect of qualities, ideals, and values. They may be coördinate and complementary, but they are not expressible in each others’ terms. There is no question of superior reality. The blue of a flower is just as real as the ether waves which science tells us the color “really” is. Scientific and intuitive knowledge are simply different ways of appreciating an infinite universe. Scientific knowledge, for all its dogmatic claims to finality, is provisional and hypothetical. “If we live in a certain kind of a world,” it says, “certain things are true.” Each fact hinges upon another. Yet these correlations of the physical world are so certain and predictable that no sane mind can doubt them. On the other hand, our knowledge of qualities is direct and immediate, and seems to depend on nothing for its completeness. Yet it is so uncertain and various that no two minds have precisely the same reactions, and we do not ourselves have the same reactions at different times.
And these paradoxes give rise to the endless disputes as to which gives the more real view of the universe in which we find ourselves living. The matter-of-fact person takes the certainty and lets the immediacy go; the poet and the mystic and the religious man choose the direct revelation and prize this vision far above any logical cogency. Now it will be the task of this intellectual generation to conquer the paradoxes by admitting the validity of both the matter-of-fact view and the mystical. And it is the latter that requires the present emphasis; it must be resuscitated from the low estate into which it has fallen. We must resist the stern arrogances of science as vigorously as the scientist has resisted the allurements of religion. We must remind him that his laws are not visions of eternal truth, so much as rough-and-ready statements of the practical nature of things, in so far as they are useful to us for our grappling with our environment and somehow changing it. We must demand that he climb down out of the papal chair, and let his learning become what it was meant to be,—the humble servant of humanity. Truth for truth’s sake is an admirable motto for the philosopher, who really searches to find the inner nature of things. But the truth of science is for use’s sake. To seek for physical truth which is irrelevant to human needs and purposes is as purely futile an intellectual gymnastic as the logical excesses of the schoolmen. The scientist is here to tell us the practical workings of the forces and elements of the world; the philosopher, mystic, artist, and poet are here to tell us of the purposes and meanings of the world as revealed directly, and to show us the ideal aspect through their own clear fresh vision.
That vision, however, must be controlled and enriched by the democratic experience of their fellow men; their ideal must be to reveal meanings that cannot be doubted by the normal soul, in the same way that scientific formulations cannot be doubted by the normal mind. It is here that we have a quarrel with old religion and old poetry, that the vision which it brings us is not sufficiently purged of local discolorations or intellectualistic taints. But it is not a quarrel with religion and poetry as such; this age thirsts for a revelation of the spiritual meanings of the wider world that has been opened to us, and the complex and baffling anomalies that seem to confront us. It is our imperative duty to reëmphasize the life of qualities and ideals, to turn again our gaze to that aspect of the world from which men have always drawn what gave life real worth and reinstate those spiritual things whose strength advancing knowledge has seemed to sap. There is room for a new idealism, but an idealism that sturdily keeps its grip on the real, that grapples with the new knowledge and with the irrevocable loss of much of the old poetry and many of the old values, and wrests out finer qualities and a nobler spiritual life than the world has yet seen. It is not betrayal of our integrity to believe that the desires and interests of men, their hopes and fears and creative imaginings, are as real as any atoms or formulas.
Now the place of religion in this new idealism will be the same place that its essential spirit has always held in the spiritual life of men. Religion is our sense of the quality of the universe itself, the broadest, profoundest, and most constant of our intuitions. Men have always felt that, outside of the qualities of concrete things, there lay a sort of infinite quality that they could identify with the spirit of the universe, and they have called it God. To this quality men have always responded, and that response and appreciation is religion. To appreciate this cosmic quality is to be religious, and to express that appreciation is to worship. Religion is thus as much and eternally a part of life as our senses themselves; the only justification for making away with religion would be an event that would make away with our senses. The scientist must always find it difficult to explain why, if man’s mind, as all agree that it did, developed in adaptation to his environment, it should somehow have become adapted so perfectly to a spiritual world of qualities and poetic interpretation of phenomena, and not to the world of atomic motion and mechanical law which scientific philosophy assures us is the “real” world. Our minds somehow adapted themselves, not to the hard world of fact, but to a world of illusion, which had not the justification of being even practically useful or empirically true. If the real world is mechanical, we should have a right to expect the earliest thinking to be scientific, and the spiritual life to come in only after centuries of refinement of thought. But the first reactions of men were of course purely qualitative, and it is only within the last few minutes of cosmic time that we have known of the quantitative relations of things. Is it hard, then, to believe that, since we and the world have grown up together, there must be some subtle correlation between it and the values and qualities that we feel, that our souls must reflect—not faithfully, perhaps, because warped by a thousand alien compelling physical forces, and yet somehow indomitably—a spiritual world that is perhaps even more real, because more immediate and constant, than the physical? We may partially create it, but we partially reflect it too.
That cosmic quality we feel as personality. Not artificial or illusive is this deeply rooted anthropomorphic sense which has always been at the bottom of man’s religious consciousness. We are alive, and we have a right to interpret the world as living; we are persons, and we have a right to interpret the world in terms of personality. In all religions, through the encrustations of dogma and ritual, has been felt that vital sense of the divine personality, keeping clean and sweet the life of man. The definite appeal of the Church, in times like these, when the external props fall away, is to the incarnation of the divine personality, and the ideal of character deduced from it as a pattern for life. This is the religion of ordinary people to-day; it has been the heart of Christianity for nineteen hundred years. Our feeling of this cosmic quality may be vague or definite, diffused or crystallized, but to those of us who sense behind our pulsing life a mystery which perplexes, sobers, and elevates us, that quality forms a permanent scenic background for our life.
To feel this cosmic quality of a divine personality, in whom we live, move, and have our being, is to know religion. The ordinary world we live in is incurably dynamic; we are forced to think and act in terms of energy and change and constant rearrangement and flux of factors and elements. And we live only as we give ourselves up to that stream and play of forces. Throughout all the change, however, there comes a sense of this eternal quality. In the persistence of our own personality, the humble fragment of a divine personality, we get the pattern of its permanence. The Great Companion is ever with us, silently ratifying our worthy deeds and tastes and responses. The satisfactions of our spiritual life, of our judgments and appreciations of morality and art and any kind of excellence, come largely from this subtle corroboration that we feel from some unseen presence wider than ourselves. It accompanies not a part but the whole of our spiritual life, silently strengthening our responses to personality and beauty, our sense of irony, the refinement of our taste, sharpening our moral judgment, elevating our capacities for happiness, filling ever richer our sense of the worth of life. And this cosmic influence in which we seem to be immersed we can no more lose or doubt—after we have once felt the rush of time past us, seen a friend die, or brooded on the bitter thought of our personal death, felt the surge of forces of life and love, wondered about consciousness, been melted before beauty—than we can lose or doubt ourselves. The wonder of it is exhaustless,—the beneficence over whose workings there yet breathes an inexorable sternness, the mystery of time and death, the joy of beauty and creative art and sex, and sheer consciousness.
Against this scenic background, along this deep undercurrent of feeling, our outward, cheerful, settled, and orderly life plays its part. That life is no less essential; we must be willing to see life in two aspects, the world as deathless yet ever-creative, evolution yet timeless eternity. To be religious is to turn our gaze away from the dynamic to the static and the permanent, away from the stage to the scenic background of our lives. Religion cannot, therefore, be said to have much of a place in our activity of life, except as it fixes the general emotional tone. We have no right to demand that it operate practically, nor can we call altruistic activity, and enthusiasm for a noble cause, religion. Moral action is really more a matter of social psychology than of religion. All religions have been ethical only as a secondary consideration. Religion in and for itself is something else; we can enjoy it only by taking, as it were, the moral holiday into its regions when we are weary of the world of thinking and doing. It is a land to retreat into when we are battered and degraded by the dynamic world about us, and require rest and recuperation. It is constantly there behind us, but to live in it always is to take a perpetual holiday.
At all times we may have its beauty with us, however, as we may have prospects of far mountains and valleys. As we go in the morning to work in the fields, religion is this enchanting view of the mountains, inspiring us and lifting our hearts with renewed vigor. Through all the long day’s work we feel their presence with us, and have only to turn around to see them shining splendidly afar with hope and kindliness. Even the austerest summits are warm in the afternoon sun. Yet if we gaze at them all day long, we shall accomplish no work. Nor shall we finish our allotted task if we succumb to their lure and leave our fields to travel towards them. As we return home weary at night, the mountains are still there to refresh and cheer us with their soft colors and outline blended in the purple light. When our task is entirely done, it has been our eternal hope to journey to those far mountains and valleys; if this is not to be, at least their glorious view will be the last to fall upon us as we close our eyes. But we know that, whatever happens, if we have done our work well, have performed faithfully our daily tasks of learning to control and manage and make creative the tough soil of this material world in which we find ourselves, if we have neither allowed its toughness to distract us from the beauty of the eternal background, nor let those far visions slow down the wheels of life, distract us from our work, or blur our thought and pale by their light the other qualities and beauties around us—we shall attain what is right for us when we lay down our tools. In a living world, death can be no more than an apparition.