Part 27

Another change wrought by the inclusion of all phenomena under one head and the banishment of the supernatural is the inestimable advantage that we thereby find the possibility of constructing a single general view of the universe for civilization. At present there are two that matter--the orthodox religious and the scientific. The religious starts from the top, the scientific from the bottom; but the scientific has been creeping up, and now that it has begun to attack the problem of mind it will be able to drown the other out. Since the current religious formulation is only symbolic, it cannot become scientific; but since the scientific is based on the closest possible analysis of reality, it can become religious so far as it investigates the realities of religious experience.

Once it has done this, we shall be able to construct a Weltanschauung such as never before, with roots in the ordered reactions of inorganic matter, trunk strong with the steady progress of evolving life, and branches reaching up into the highest realities of the spirit. Union is strength; and it is one of the prime duties of educated men and women to see that the present duality and antagonism at the heart of what should be the central unity of civilization--of its most fundamental idea, its conception of the universe--should be terminated.

The new outlook will also interlock with the youthful science of psychology to produce great results. Much of what now is interpreted, by all save the few experts, in supernatural terms of the old theology will become intelligible as a product of the natural workings of that amazing thing, the human mind. We shall not have sects trying to exploit the normal dissatisfactions and disharmonies of adolescence in order to secure “conversions”; repressed tendencies will not be thought to be the voice of a personal Devil, nor neglected ideals the voice of a personal God. Irrational fear, to-day still the greatest enemy of mankind and most potent annihilator of happiness, will, by comprehension of its curious mechanism and its persistence, often transformed, from childhood to adult life, become amenable to treatment and be made more and more to disappear. Proper analysis of mental processes such as repression, suppression, and sublimation will enable us to make better use of our faculties, and deliberately to build up treasures of spiritual experience now attainable only by the lucky few in whom temperament and circumstances accidentally conspire.

On the moral side, the idea that a Divine command has, at some remote period in the past, provided a fixed code, and the belief in the immutable truth of certain dogmas--these will happily disappear. Morals, like all else, not only have evolved, but should evolve. We shall find, for instance, that no excuse will be left for the common horrified (and horrible) views of sex, as of something inherently hateful, of all its pleasures as involving sin; for it will be realized that too much of the present attitude is due to the projection of our own conflicts and complexes, our own pruriences and pruderies, into what might be innocent and joyous. But this merits a fuller discussion than we can here allot.

Again, if I had space at my disposal, I would write of the changes in the position and constitution of religion brought about by changes other than those in religious beliefs themselves. Most important, of course, are the spread of education on the one hand, and the spread of the facilities for the most varied spiritual enjoyment on the other. If the people is educated to a point at which it can judge for itself, it wants no special priests or clerical mediators; its mediators are those who are specially fitted to unravel the intellectual, emotional, and moral difficulties of its own day and for all time--poets, philosophers, and men of science. The spread of facilities for reading, for seeing plays and works of art, and hearing good music, means of course that, whereas in ruder epochs the Church provided the principal way of psychological sublimation, now sublimation and spiritual refreshment can be achieved equally or more effectively (and every whit as religiously) without ever frequenting a “place of worship” or belonging to any denomination. This tendency towards fluidity and plasticity, towards many possibilities of sublimation instead of one, may by some be lamented. But, as a matter of fact, it is in full accord with all we know of biological progress. Man has attained his position of biological pre-eminence simply and solely by virtue of the plasticity of his mind, which substitutes infinitude of potentiality for the limited range of actuality given by the instinctive reactions of lower forms. Humanity will always have some religion, and it will always be of the utmost importance to man, both as individual and as species. But the possibility of satisfying his religious tendencies intellectually, emotionally, and morally, without rigid creed, limited ritual, and iron-bound code of morals, will mean the liberation of all that is best in religion from too narrow shackles, and the lifting it on to a plane where it may be not only more free, but more rich.

It is the task of Rationalism to see that religion, this fundamental and important activity of man, shall neither be allowed to continue in false or inadequate forms, nor be stifled or starved, but made to help humanity in a vigorous growth that is based on truth and in constant contact with reality.

(For bibliography, see the end of the next essay.)

FOOTNOTE:

See W. James, Varieties of Religious Experience; E. Underhill, Essentials of Mysticism.

VII

RELIGION AND SCIENCE: OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES

GOD AND MAN

The world of things entered your infant mind To populate that crystal cabinet. Within its walls the strangest partners met, And things turned thoughts did propagate their kind.

For, once within, corporeal fact could find A spirit. Fact and you in mutual debt Built there your little microcosm--which yet Had hugest tasks to its small self assigned.

Dead men can live there, and converse with stars: Equator speaks with Pole, and Night with Day: Spirit dissolves the world’s material bars-- A million isolations burn away. The Universe can live and work and plan, At last made God within the mind of man.

RELIGION AND SCIENCE:

OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES

“In la sua volontade è nostra pace.” --DANTE.

“Ye are the Gods if ye did but realize it.”--CARLYLE.

“The next great task of Science is to create a religion for humanity.” So says Lord Morley in one of his essays. It is a striking saying, coming as it does from one in whom thought and action have been so intertwined, one to whom reason, not dogma, is the basis of morality, achievement, not emotion, its justification.

Let those words be my encouragement; for they challenge at the outset, and to my mind rightly, two of the most persistent difficulties that confront one who tries to write of the relations between Science and Religion. The man of science too often asks what science can have to do with what he brands as utterly and wholly unscientific; the religiously-minded man demands what gain can follow from contact with the cold and inhuman attitude of pure reason. To those questions I hope that this essay will provide a partial answer. Meanwhile I shall begin with a perhaps less ultimate but more pressing question. That question is asked by many men and women of to-day, who on the one hand feel as it were instinctively that religion of some sort is necessary for life, yet on the other are unable to do violence to their intellectual selves by denying the facts that reason and scientific inquiry reveal, or by closing their eyes to them.

The question, in briefest form, is this: “What room does science leave for God?”

To the savage, all is spirit. The meanest objects are charged with influence, the commonest actions fraught with spiritual possibilities, the operations of nature one and all are brought about by spiritual powers--but powers multifarious and conflicting. “Nature can have little unity for savages. It is a Walpurgis-nacht procession, a checkered play of light and shadow, a medley of impish and elfish, friendly and inimical powers.”

But with ordered civilization and dispassionate observation a network of material cause and effect invaded this spiritual domain. The mysterious influences, for example, believed to be inherent in springs and running rivers became personified, and, anthropomorphized as nymphs or gods, were removed into a seclusion more remote from practical and everyday life than their unpersonified predecessors. Later, they retreated still farther from actuality into a half-believed mythology, and then passed away into the powerlessness of avowed fairy-story or literary symbolism, while the rivers, perceived as the resultant of natural forces, were more and more harnessed to man’s use. So with the wind and the rain, the growth of crops, the storms of the sea. So, in due time, with the thunder and the lightning, with earthquakes, eruptions, comets, eclipses, pestilences.

This process of liberating matter from arbitrary and mysterious power, of perceiving it as orderly and endowed with regularity of natural law, of bringing it more and more beneath human control, was, on the other hand, accompanied by what may be called a combined condensation and sublimation of the spiritual forces accepted by human faith. They are built up from spirit to spirits, spirits to gods, gods to God. But now it seems as if this condensation had reached its limit, and the sublimation could only go farther by resolving the one God into an empty name or the vaguest unreality.

We look back and see the Gods of early man, and are complacently prepared to believe that they were based in error, products of mental immaturity, to be relegated to limbo without regret. But what about the present? Why should we shrink from applying the same process to the God of to-day?

Is it then to be so with every God? Is God only a personified symbol of our residuum of ignorance? Is to hold the idea of God in any form to be, as Salomon Reinach believes, in an infantile stage of human development, and must we with him define religion as “a sum of beliefs impeding the free use of human faculty”?

I think not; and I shall endeavour to justify my belief to you, and to show that, albeit much alteration and a thorough revision of ideas is needed, the term God has an important scientific connotation, and further that the present stagnation of religion can be remedied if, as has happened again and again in biological evolution, the old forms become extinct or subordinate, and a new dominant type is developed along quite fresh lines.