Part 24

Nothing can get out of the universe because there is no out to the universe. Can that which has no ending have a beginning? Can that which has no circumference have a center? Can we think of anything so hot that it could not be hotter? Or so small that it could not be smaller? Or so big that it could not be bigger? No, because our minds have been schooled in this comparative method. Our sense shows us a world of degrees. We can think of absolute darkness, but not of absolute light. In the Mammoth Cave you may realize absolute darkness; but even on the sun itself would you experience absolute light? We seem to be able to find an end to the negative, but not to the positive. We can think of a body as at absolute rest, but can we conceive of it going so fast that it could not go faster?

Death is our consciousness of a peculiar change in matter, just as life is our consciousness of the opposite change--one destructive, the other constructive. The constituents of the body remain unchanged, but a peculiar activity set up among the particles, by what, we know not, is instituted in life and ceases in death. An organism is made up of organs, all working together, but each subordinated to the whole. The whole, this concerted action, may cease, and the individual dies, as we say, and yet the minute subdivisions, the cells, may be alive. Certain ferments in the body may go on for some time after the life of the man has gone out. And living cells may go on multiplying endlessly without producing an organized being.

“It is all right,” said Walt Whitman to me as I was leaving his death-bed and hearing his voice for the last time--“It is all right.” Of course it was all right, and it will be all right when each and all of us fall into the last eternal sleep. Else it would not be. Our being here is all right, is it not? “Friendly and faithful,” says Whitman, “are the arms that have helped me,” and friendly and faithful must be the arms that bear us away. If it was good to come, it will be good to go--good in the large, cosmic sense, good in that it is in keeping with the spirit of the All. Not the good of our brief personal successes and triumphs, but good as evolution is good, as the processes of growth and decay are good. If life is good, death must be equally good, as each waits upon the other. From what point of view can we say that death is not all right? Certainly not from the point of view of this universe. Archimedes could have moved the world had he had some other world upon which to place his lever, and we must have some other universe to plant our feet upon to condemn death.

As I have already said, we look upon death as an evil because we look upon it from the happy fields of life, and see ourselves as alive in our graves and lamenting that we are shut off from all the light and love and movement of the world. Does our prenatal state seem an evil?

Did anything begin de novo, when we came into being? Not the elements of our bodies surely; they were as old as the cosmos; not the germ of our minds and souls; they were as old as the human race and older--old as the first dawn of life. Is it the I that is new?--that which makes you you and me me? And that is probably nothing more than a new distribution and arrangement of the physical and psychical elements and forces of which and by which we are made. The pattern of our personality is new; each of us differs somewhat from all the myriads of human beings who have lived upon the earth; but is form, pattern, personality, separable from the material that composes it?

It may be cheerfully admitted that when we look at the question in this light, we are whistling to keep our courage up. What of it? The band plays to keep the courage of the soldiers up when they go into battle, and what are we but soldiers fighting the good fight of truth against error, of courage against fear, of the heroic against the pusillanimous? The whole is greater than any of its parts. Nature is more than man. We must learn to efface ourselves. The soul knows no rewards or punishments. If it be heroic to sacrifice life in this world, it may be equally heroic to sacrifice life in any other world, so that we prove ourselves worthy of the gods.

XII. HEAVEN AND EARTH

Truly things are not what they seem. When we put heaven and earth far apart, we think as children. Heaven and earth are pretty close together. The shortest arm can reach from one to the other. When we go to heaven we shall not have far to travel, and I dare say the other place is quite as near, and, if reports be true, the road is broader and easier to travel. What children we are in such matters! The wisest men have the language of ignorance and superstition imposed upon them. How difficult it is not to think of the heavens up there as a reality, something above us and superior to us, a finer world, nearer God, lighted by the stars, the abode of spirits, the source of all good, our final celestial home. Did not Elijah ascend into heaven? Did not Paul have heavenly visions? Have not the saints in all ages turned their faces and lifted imploring hands to heaven? How these things have burnt themselves into our minds! We cannot escape them.

In our floods of religious emotion we instinctively look away from the earth. The mystery, the immensity, the purity of the heavens above us make us turn our faces thitherward, and as naturally make us turn downward when we consider the source of evil. The poor old earth which has mothered us and nursed us we treat with scant respect. Our awe and veneration we reserve for the worlds we know not of. Our senses sell us out. The mud on our shoes disenchants us. It is only Whitman with his cosmic consciousness that can closely relate the heavens and the earth:

“Underneath the divine soil, Overhead the sun.”

To most of us the morning stars that once sang together are of another stuff. The music of the spheres must be vastly different from the roar and grind of our old rusty and outworn planet. So we turn to the heavens, the abode of purity and light. So do we discount and black-list the earth where we have to pay in struggle and pain the price of our development. Think you we should not have to pay the same price in any other world worth living in?

Emerson in his Journal quotes his brother Charles as saying long ago that “the nap was worn off the earth”; it was become threadbare, like an outworn garment. Probably it seems so to each of us as time goes on. In places in Europe the nap must be very short at this time. But the nap will come again, even on those shell-swept regions, after Nature has had her way. Nature grows old in geologic or in cosmic time; the mountains decay, the waters recede; but in man’s time the earth is endowed with perennial youth.

Science strips us of our illusions and delusions; it strips us of most of the garments in which the spirit of man has sought in all ages to clothe itself against the chill of an impersonal universe; it takes down the protecting roof of the heavens above us and shows us an unspeakable void strewn with suns and worlds beyond numbers to compute, but nowhere any signs of the blessed abode to which our religious aspirations have pointed.

It is interesting, in this connection, to note the attitude of the old writers, such as Cornaro, the Italian, toward the heavens. They evidently look upon the heavens as outside of Nature. In speculating as to why it is that some persons have so little vitality, Cornaro reckons the influence of the heavens may be one cause. He says he never could persuade himself to believe that Nature, being the mother of all, could be so ungenerous to any of her children; hence it must be some hostile influence from above. Similar notions seem to have been held in Shakespeare’s time:

“It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our conditions; Else one self mate and make could not beget Such different issues.”

XIII. THINKING AND ACTING

It is true we do not, as a rule, act without thinking, or without some sort of psychic process, but thinking and acting are radically different. Or, we may say that the practical reason is alone concerned in action, and the abstract intellect in general reasoning. When we come to act, we know that we are free to choose between two or more objects or courses; when we think or reason abstractly, we know the will is not free. Every act has its antecedent cause. But we are practically free because we feel no restraint or compulsion. We feel responsible for our acts. We do not blame our red-haired father, or our grandfather of Irish blood, for our hasty temper; we feel that this is our very selves. What we call moral responsibility rests upon this sense of freedom. We are not aware of the fatality that binds us, any more than we are of the weight of the atmosphere that presses upon us so tremendously. At the court of absolute reason we see what puppets and automata we are, but at the court of practical justice we see and feel that we are free to do right as we see the right. The contradictions which Balfour sees, in his chapter on “Naturalism and Ethics,” between the results of practical life and of abstract reasoning is of a kind which one sees everywhere in the universe. The circle is a perpetual contradiction. How can a line go in all directions?--and in no direction? In our practical lives there is an upper and an under, an up and a down, but away from the earth, or considering the earth as a whole, there is no such thing.

Righteous indignation at the misconduct of others, or self-condemnation, repentance, remorse, are reasonable feelings because we actually feel them. We have no choice in the matter. To whatever conclusion abstract reason leads us in regard to them, it does not affect our practical conduct, because our conduct is founded upon the sense of freedom. We are here to act, to do, and not to reason abstractly. This is the tree of the forbidden fruit. When we eat of it we know things that may stand in the way of our practical living. Balfour should see that we are determinists or naturists when we reason, but free agents when we act, and that there is no getting away from the contradiction.

I may be the duplicate of my father, or of my grandfather; every one of my traits may be inherited; but that does not prevent me from feeling that they are my own; they are vital in me as they were in him, and I feel responsible for my own acts just as he did for his, though I could not act otherwise. I could not, but I did not know it. I thought I could act as I pleased.

The world which philosophy reveals to us is vastly different from the world practical life reveals. We are sure that light and sound are real entities, but philosophy tells us that one is the sensation which vibrations in the ether, set going by the sun, make upon the optic nerve, and that sound is the sensation which vibrations in the air make upon the auditory nerve. When we know this we do not change our action in reference to them--they are still just as real to our senses as ever they were. The moral law is not discredited or overthrown when we discover through the abstract reason that fate, or necessity, rules our lives. We made the moral law and we try to live up to it. We do not always succeed. All trees aim at the vertical position; it is the position which gravity imposes upon them; but owing to various accidents and conditions the trees are not all plumb. How free they seem to grow at almost any angle with the plane of the earth’s surface! How they run out their branches horizontally in defiance of the gravity that rules them and lift up in their trunks and leaves tons of water and other minerals against the pull of gravity! How free they seem, how they bend to the wind that would overthrow them, how various they are in form and habit of growth, in the shape of their leaves, the kinds of their fruits, the character of their roots! Yet science shows us how the unalterable physical laws rule them. They lean toward the light and the free air in obedience to physical and chemical laws. And yet, no doubt, if the trees were conscious of themselves, as we are, every oak-tree would say, “I feel free to be an oak,” and every pine-tree and beech and willow and maple would feel a like freedom. The Irishman feels no compulsion or necessity in being an Irishman, nor the Frenchman in being a Frenchman. All life is held in the leash of physical and chemical laws, and yet knows it not.

We feel that there is beauty in nature; when we reflect, we know that the feeling for beauty is an emotion of our own minds, and not a quality of outward things. Scenes radically different awaken the emotion in us, or may awaken it in one and not in another (see Emerson’s ecstasy on a bare moor). The world is what we make it, and duty is what we make it, and the ugly is what we make it. Putrefaction, repulsive to us, is to science a beautiful chemical process. Odors that are offensive to us are evidently agreeable to the dog. Sounds which please us seem to disturb him. The absolute is outside of life. If the orbs of the heavens were conscious, they would doubtless feel free to go where they do go; it would be their choice; it would pain them to do otherwise. The comet rushes toward the sun with joy; the music of the spheres is the expression of their freedom and contentment. Can you help winking when the flashlight goes off, or when a missile passes near your eyes? Our voluntary actions are equally based upon physical laws.

Balfour, in his “Foundation of Belief,” talks about the beauty of holiness, the beauty of sanctity, but these things are beautiful only to a certain type of mind. The time will come when they will not be looked upon as beautiful or desirable. These conceptions grew when men lived for another world, when this world stood to them as the sum of evil. Men then saw nothing holy or divine on earth except the denying of earth. That state of mind has largely passed. Holy men have had their day. We see now that this world is a celestial body, and that all our conceptions of heavenly abodes are untenable. For my part the most lovable and admirable men and women I have known had no savor of sanctity. They were wise, kind, helpful, loving, living with zest the life of every day, intent on making their earthly lives square with what is generally accepted as right conduct, and therefore comfortably indifferent to what the theologians are so concerned about--salvation after death, and the securing of their “mansions in the skies.” Martyrdom bravely faced excites our admiration, all heroic acts are beautiful and admirable, and there are good naturalistic reasons why this should be so. But our religious history has begotten a whole brood of ideas that must gradually fade and go out, and our standards will more and more be those of this world.

Mr. Balfour would hardly deny that the organ with which we do our thinking and reasoning and form our deductions, the organ which is the seat of our emotions of the beautiful and of religious aspirations, is a mass of gray and white matter, and that all these things are the result of certain molecular changes or movements in the fluids or solids of the brain substance; in other words, that there is a physical and physiological basis to all our mental and emotional life. Does this material side in any way discredit these faculties and feelings? Does not all that we call the spiritual adhere in the material? Can we find that inner world, or any clue to it, by dissecting the brain? Has it, therefore, any reality except in our imagination? Prove that it exists apart from or independent of the body, and there is no more to be said.

But what I wanted most to say is that the reason of things, or final explanation of things seems to take the poetry and romance out of them. Reduce religion or æsthetics or art to terms of psychology, and they no longer appeal to the emotions or stimulate the imagination. Naturalism is true--reason can reach no other conclusion--but the truths of naturalism do not satisfy the moral and religious nature.

The heart is a big, strong, self-acting, muscular pump, but when we lay our hand upon the heart and refer our emotions, our love, our aspirations, to it, we idealize it, we do not then think of its physical function and character. By this act we are still deferring to the ancient and outworn belief that in this region resides the soul--the part of man that loves and hates and hopes and fears.

The brain is the temple of the mind or the vestibule of the spiritual world, but we can explain it only in terms of anatomy, physiology, and physics which darken and chill our sensibilities.

Things and movements come about through natural processes, not through supernatural ones, but when we state these processes in the only terms in which they can be stated, the religious soul feels hurt and orphaned. All our religious or theological explanations of things discredit matter and the material world, discredit Nature and all her processes. Evolution is anti-religious; that man is of animal origin is still a hard doctrine to the old-fashioned theologian. Why is it not equally a hard doctrine to him that we were ever babies or embryos, carried about and associated with the viscera of our mothers’ bodies? We have got to exalt the natural, the material, and free our minds from the illusions of the old theologies before we can see the truth and beauty of naturalism. The sacred, the celestial, the divine, the holy, all are terms that date from a prescientific age, before man’s relation to the universe was understood. They are significant only in reference to another world and another life of an entirely different order.

The eternal, immutable moral law to which Balfour refers, what is it? Who instituted it? Is it other than the law of right and wrong which mankind is coming more and more clearly to see, and more and more fully to value in the course of evolution? You may set the seal of some hypothetical, supernatural power upon it, but what about supernatural powers in a universe governed by natural laws? The religious enthusiasm of the race, the saints, the devotees, the so-called holy ones, have doubtless had their value; they have helped lubricate the grinding machinery of life; but their day is at an end. We must invest our fund of love, our veneration, our heroism, our martyrdom in this world, and not look to the next.