Part 23

When we say that there is no God, we only mean that there is no being that we can define or conceive of in terms of man. Nothing in the finite can help us in dealing with the infinite. The Infinite, the Omnipotent, the Omnipresent, cannot be a being without sharing the limitations of being, or without being subject to the bounds of time and space. If God is everywhere, He is nowhere; if He is all-powerful, his power has no contrary, and hence ceases to exist. One after another the human and personal attributes we ascribe to Him disappear when we try to conceive of Him in terms of the infinite. The infinite is equivalent to negation. There are no terms in which we can define the ether; it is the negative of all things that have length and breadth and thickness, or motion or rest or substance, or friction or cohesion, or place or power. An infinite being is as much a contradiction of terms as a square or plane sphere would be. If God is a person, with human-like attributes and emotions,--though we call them divine,--it is legitimate to ask, Where is He? where was He before the solar systems took form? where will He be after they have again become formless?

Our inevitable anthropomorphism prefigures the Infinite as superman; He is man magnified to infinity. He is the supreme king or ruler of the universe. We dream of seeing Him face to face; He has eyes, ears, hands, feet, and the emotions of love, anger, pity, and the like. Man thus imposes his own form upon the power that is and upholds the cosmos. He carves it into his own image, and then seeks to propitiate it and influence it as He Himself is propitiated and influenced. Praise is sweet to it, honor is sweet, revenge is sweet, because these things are sweet to man.

When we call this force Nature, we bring it near to us and can see and feel our direct relation to it. We are bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. We see its impersonal or unpersonal character. We get light on the vexed problem of good and evil which is such an insoluble enigma to the theologians.

Nature embraces all; she fathers and mothers all; has no partialities, knows no exceptions, no miracles, no deputied atonements, no evil apart from the good and no good apart from the evil, no life without death and no death without life.

IX. THE INSOLUBLE

What desperate efforts mankind has made to shape this vast, blind, unconscionable power we call Nature into an image of a God that would satisfy our moral and spiritual wants and aspirations! Where did men get their standards of such a God? They have evidently been slowly evolved through the friction of man with man. They have possessed survival value. Love, truth, justice, mercy, have contributed to the fullness of life and to length of days. One may adopt Biblical language and say that righteousness endureth forever. The triumph of the wicked is only for a season; it may be a long season, it may embrace whole periods of human history, and entail measureless suffering on the human race, but change and retribution surely come. The way of man’s moral and material progress is like the stream that now hurries, now tarries, is now disrupted and noisy in rapids and falls, now sluggish and almost stagnant in long level reaches, but which does go forward and reach its goal at last. But is there not some predetermined bent toward righteousness,--not of the ecclesiastical sort, but of the scientific sort,--toward the relations of man with man, that results in the greatest good to the greatest number,--a bent inherent in the nature of things? Would evolution have taken the road toward man and all the other forms of life blindly, accidentally? Would it have started at all had there not been some initial impulse, or some thought, somewhere, of all that was to follow?

The doctrine of design does not meet the problem; the doctrine of chance does not meet it. Design in our human world means a designer. What, then, does it mean in the non-human world? There can be no design in such a world, because the human mind is not present. There can be no chance, because a chance jumbling and collision of the primordial elements could not result in the organized matter that is life, any more than a thousand of brick dumped upon the ground can take the form of a house. The brick and mortar demand an architect, and organized matter demands an organizing principle. Whence its source? There we are where no further step can be taken. What about the divine mind? But that is jumping the whole question. If you place your God here, I shall ask him some embarrassing questions, such as, Where did you come from? Where have you been all these æons? Why are you so wasteful and dilatory in your methods? Why have you made the world so full of misery? Or, I might ask the question a little boy asked his father: “Why did God make Satan?” The problem, it seems to me, is quite as embarrassing to us mortals with a God as without one. It is just as hard to account for a God as to account for the initial impulse. In both cases we have in our hands a rope with only one end. In trying to find the other end, we only get ourselves hopelessly tied up.

X. PAYING THE DEBT

In my youth I often heard the old people speak of death as “paying the debt of Nature”--“He has paid the debt.” Life puts us in debt to Nature--the earth, the air, the water--for the elements of our bodies and the powers of our minds, and the time inevitably comes when we must settle the account. That we are going to have something left over--that we have only to pay the debt of the body, and not of the mind--is one of the dreams that it is hard for most persons to give up. Will not then the universal mind that pervades Nature claim its own also? Can you and I hope to remain detached from it forever? Is that a consummation devoutly to be wished?

Be assured that no particle of soul or body can be lost. But processes may cease; the flame of the lamp may go out, and the sum total of force and matter remain the same. When a blade of grass dies, a process has ended, and as mysterious a process as went on in Cæsar’s brain and body. And when all life on the earth and in our universe ceases, if it ever does, the problem would remain just as puzzling, if we can fancy ourselves still here to puzzle over it. We are links in an endless cycle of change in which we cannot separate the material from what we call the spiritual.

The water in our bodies to-day may have flashed as a dewdrop yesterday, or lent itself to the splendor of the sunrise or sunset, or played a part in the bow in the clouds. To-morrow it may be whirling in the vortex of a tornado, or helping to quench the life of a drowning man, or glistening in the frost figures on the window-pane. The movements of the brain molecules in which the phenomena of thought and consciousness are so mysteriously involved, they, too, are links in the cycle of change.

One of our younger poets, John Russell McCarthy, has had the courage to say:

“that we must look for life Hereafter, not by one and one,--your soul Alone among the souls of other men, Drifting and staying, a thing apart forever-- But we must see when all at last is counted And the great sum is made, how one by one We have returned to Her, the Mother of All,-- The bit of soul-stuff that She loaned us.

For we must live at last a part of Her-- For we shall be forever as one with Her.”

The reverent old people to whom I just referred paid the debt long ago, and the day of reckoning for some of us cannot be far off. After the account is closed who or what has profited by the transaction? We are prone to put such questions to Nature, but they are irrelevant. The universe is not run for profit, as we use the term. So far as we can see, it is run just to satisfy the æsthetic and creative feeling of the Eternal. When the sidereal systems in space run down, they are wound up again, and suns and planets are started anew. The great game never comes to an end; in fact, it is unthinkable that it should ever have begun, except as the flowers begin in spring, or as a man begins when he is born. Antecedents! Antecedents!--always. We cannot apply our standards of loss and gain to the dealings of the Eternal with us. “That I have positively appeared,” says Whitman, “that is enough.”

Each of us is an incarnation of the universal mind, as is every beast of the field and jungle, and every fowl of the air, and every insect that creeps and flies; and we can only look upon creation as an end in itself. To ask what the great spectacle is for, is to betray our tradesman habit of mind. Man is a link in an endless chain of being. If we ask what he is for, the old answer of the catechism is as good as any--“To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” In other words, to make the most of his life and strive for the highest happiness, which is knowledge and appreciation of the universal. Coleridge says we glorify God when we work for the well-being of mankind.

How quite impossible it is for us to adjust our minds to the thought of death--to the thought of the absolute negation of life! When we torment ourselves about death, about the coldness and darkness of the grave, about being cut off from all the warm and happy currents of life that flow about us, we are unconsciously thinking of ourselves as still living, or as conscious of the gloom and negation that await us. Thus, when Huxley wrote to a friend (John Morley) that the thought of extinction disturbed him more and more as he neared the end of life, he fell into this common fallacy, or contradiction. “It flashes across me,” he writes, “at all sorts of times with a sort of horror that in 1900 I shall probably know no more of what is going on than I did in 1800. I had sooner be in hell, a good deal--” as if he expected to lie awake nights in his grave lamenting his sad fate and saying to himself, “I had sooner be in hell,” where also he expected he would be conscious of his improved condition!

What possible difference could it make to him if he did not know any more in 1900 than he did in 1800? Did he expect to enjoy his knowledge in 1900? If not, why worry about it? What he was really lamenting was that he did not know then and there what he might know if he lived till 1900. He knew that human knowledge was making tremendous strides, and the thought that he should not share in its advancement chilled him.

It is all very human, but very childish. We may to-day dread some task or ordeal that we are to face to-morrow, because to-morrow we expect to be alive, but shall we shrink from the to-morrow of death on the same grounds?

There is wisdom as well as wit in the epitaph in dialogue which a clever Greek Byzantine composed for Pyrrho:

“Art thou dead, Pyrrho?”

“I do not know.”

If we put the same question to our own dead, if they could answer, they would say, “We do not know.” If they knew, would not that be proof that they were not dead? May we not answer Huxley that if consciousness is extinguished with life, he is not going to lie awake nights in his grave worrying about it? There is comfort in the thought that if there is no immortality, we shall not know it.

Rereading that wise and delightful old Frenchman, Montaigne, I find that more than three hundred years ago he was of the same mind that I am in this matter: “Why should we fear a thing whose being lost cannot be lamented?” “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.”

An avaricious man might worry if he knew he would have no more money on the next Christmas than he had on the last, unless his physician had assured him that he could not be alive on the next Christmas. Then, if he worried, it would be on account of his heirs. But one’s heirs cannot inherit his wisdom; it dies with him.

Death is such an extraordinary, such an unspeakable event that we cannot think of ourselves as non-existent. When you try to see yourself in your own coffin, or standing beside your own grave, it is still as a living man that you thus behold yourself. It is, of course, as living men and women that we are disturbed over thoughts of the grave. The future is just as secure for us all as is the past. A moment between two eternities is life; a spark that draws a brief line upon the darkness and is gone. The spark has its antecedent condition in the wood and coal and the processes of combustion from which it sprang, and it has its subsequent conditions in the invisible gases into which it has vanished, but as a point of heat and light, it exists no more. Our wise attitude toward death is, I think, to forget or ignore it entirely. We shall not know it when it overtakes us. “Avida nunquam desinere mortalitas.” “Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither--ripeness is all.”

XI. DEATH

In death the elements of the body are not changed--oxygen is still oxygen, carbon still carbon. What has happened, then? Can it be explained by saying that a process has been reversed? Does it bear any true analogy to the redistribution of type after the printer has set it up and printed his book? The type is the same, but the relation of all the units has been changed. The printer has arranged them so that collectively they expressed to him certain meanings or ideas. These ideas did not exist in the type, but in the order of its arrangement. In one order or combination the letters meant one thing; in another order or combination they expressed quite another. The same type will spell dog or God. When redistributed and returned to the different fonts, the letters express nothing but themselves. If this is a true analogy, then, in the case of the living book, man, what stands for the compositor and printer? We can only call the compositor the organizing impulse; but whence this impulse, and whose idea is it trying to express? The redistribution of the elements of the body is done through the activity of other forms of life--the micro-organisms--those minute forms reduce the body to its original elements. As we thus have life at the end of the life of an organism, do we also have life at the beginning of the organism? Ancestral life certainly, or the primordial germ; but is there a living principle back of and before all? Does the logic of the situation force us to the belief in an original Creator? The human mind is so constituted that in some form or under definite concepts, we have to postulate a first or primal Cause; we have to think of a beginning; but is there any beginning to a circle, or any center to the surface of a sphere? There may be no beginning or no limit in time or space to the cosmos. This is unthinkable to us in our present state. Yet in making that statement I am thinking of the unthinkable. We can deal only with parts of Nature; as a whole it is beyond our power to grasp. All bodies on the earth’s surface unsupported fall; this is our universal experience. All moving bodies come to a standstill unless power from without is constantly supplied. Perpetual motion is impossible, but the earth and the other planets are unsupported, and their motion is perpetual. Or we may say that they fall forever toward the sun and never reach it, and that the sun falls forever toward some other sun or system and never reaches it. The laws of force and matter as we contend with them in our experiences are inoperative in sidereal space; there is motion without friction, energy without waste, dissipation without exhaustion. Neither upper nor under, neither falling nor rising, neither end nor beginning. Cause and effect, rest and motion, are one. The self-activity of the universe quite transcends our experiences; the self-maintenance of living bodies is far beyond our reach; any end to the chain of causal sequence is quite unthinkable to us. Our minds are made in that way. They are fashioned in the school of cause and effect.