Part 30

I wish you here to agree to my adopting the second alternative and giving the name of God to the sum of the forces acting in the cosmos as perceived and grasped by human mind. We can therefore now say that God is one, but that though one, has several aspects. There is one aspect of God which is neutral to us, in a way hostile, mere Power operating in the vastness of the stellar universes, apprehended only as orderly, tending in a direction which appears to be in the long run inimical. It is to this aspect of God that Mr. Wells has given the name of the Veiled Being--a somewhat primitive term for a true idea. There is another aspect, which is the one seen operating in that sphere which comprises the whole of life upon this earth--a sphere infinitesimal in relation to the whole, yet still vast in relation to ourselves. This aspect of God is our refuge and guarantee, for here we find our assurance that our human life is a part of a whole that is not antagonistic, but moves in the same general direction as do our history and our aims. There does exist, in Matthew Arnold’s words, “a power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness.” And this second aspect is not wholly separate from the first, in spite of its difference of direction; for the first is its parent, physically and temporally, and the direction of biological progress is the continuation of a line of development marked out, within the opposed inorganic direction, even from the first.

Next, there is a more immediate and more often demanded assurance that we, as individuals or as single communities in space or time, are at one with humanity as a whole. Here it is that we look to the third aspect of God, which enshrines the directive forces operating in man. These directive forces are our instincts, our needs, our values, our ideals. When those are harmonized with each other and with the outer world by reason and experience, they form a power which we can see has been directive, normative in the past, and will continue to be so in the future. It alters with man’s development; but after a first rudimentary phase, its main outlines, its type of organization remain the same, for man’s instincts and ideals do not greatly change, and their harmonization with each other and with experience will generally proceed in the same broad way. Although in a sense this aspect is the smallest, as comprising the smallest physical field, yet in another it is the largest, since man’s ideals are in themselves unlimited, non-finite; and the values involved, to our present type of mind, appear ultimate. This third aspect of God is again historically the offspring of the second, and through the second of the first.

Matter, life, mind--this is the simplest classification of phenomena. By means of processes analogous to obtaining a resultant by the parallelogram of forces, we can obtain a resultant of material operations in general, vital operations in general, and mental operations in general, numerous and varied in direction though they be. Life is the link between the other two. Living matter is so definitely one with non-living matter, not at all obviously one with mind; yet the direction of living matter is obviously similar to that of mind, not at all obviously one with that of non-living matter.

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It is a simple fact that the conception which man has of the universe and its relation to himself exercises important effects upon his life. A name therefore is needed for this anthropological phenomenon. God is the usual name applied, and we shall retain it in default of another, premissing that the word, like many similar general terms--“love,” or “life,” or “beauty,” say--can be defined and applied in many ways, and that we apply it here in a particular and perhaps somewhat novel sense.

God in this sense is the universe, not as such, but so far as grasped as a whole by a mind, embodied in an idea, and in consequence capable of influencing that mind, and through it the whole course of events. It is not grasped as a mere sum of details, but, however vaguely and imperfectly, as a single idea, unitary in spite of its complexity. Nor is it the universe in itself, but only so far as it has been thus grasped by mind. There exists no other meaning of the term which, on analysis, is found to convey anything, or at least anything scientific or comprehensible, to us. We may reason that there is an Absolute God behind the universe and our idea of it. But we have no proof of this statement, and such an Absolute God is, as Spencer pointed out, an Unknowable, and accordingly no concern of ours. That part and these aspects of the universe which have been grasped by us may prove to contain the key to many of our difficulties; meanwhile we can only be humble and admit that our idea of God, even in this restricted sense, is still extremely incomplete: and in this sense there is a God far greater than our present idea and knowledge of God, only waiting to be discovered.

That which it is essential to establish is our way of looking at the problem. The universe does come into relation with our minds, and there, owing to the way it and our minds are organized, generates an idea which exerts an influence upon us.

The external basis of the idea of God is thus constituted by the forces operating in the universe. The universe is a unitary whole, greater and more powerful than ourselves, and its operations have resultants in certain main directions--these are phenomena which we constatate like any other phenomena. They, and that other phenomenon of our contact with the Universe and our exposure to the play of its forces, give us our objective knowledge of God. The rest of our idea of God, the inner component, depends upon the mode of action of our minds.

So far, then, we have shown that recent advance in science, particularly in our understanding of evolution, has enabled us to give a more objective account than ever before of what is involved in the concept God, and so to pave the way for a consensus of thought on the question.

It will be observed that there is no idea of personality implicit in this conception of God--God may or may not possess personality. It will be for us later to investigate that particular aspect of the problem.

It now remains to deal with the inner reality. Man has a wholly new type of mind. He is social and capable of speech. He generalizes, and he has a very highly developed power of association. This combination gives him a great many possibilities hitherto denied to life. In the first place, he is able to order his experiences in a totally new way, differing from the old very much as a classified card-index differs from a rough diary-record of events. The organization of his mind is elastic, capable of indefinite expansion and of specialization in any direction.

That being so, there will be always parts of his mind wholly or at least partially undeveloped; and in any case the capacities which he must employ in his everyday life, the region of his mind illuminated by the attention needed in the struggle for existence, constitute but a fraction of his mental self and its potentialities.

This brings us on to one of the most important achievements of modern psychology--the discovery and analysis of the subconscious. Impossible here to go into detail; we must content ourselves with a few broad statements. When we speak of the subconscious mind, we mean that in man there exist processes which appear for many reasons to be of the same nature as those of the normal mind (in that they are associated with the same parts of the nervous system, fulfil the same general biological functions, and probably operate through similar mechanisms), with the single exception that we are not conscious of them as such.

The conscious mind, that which we think of as the basis of our mental individuality, as our personal being, is the result of a long process of organization. We come into the world with a set of instinctive and emotional reactions only waiting their proper stimuli to be fired off, with a capacity for learning, for amassing experience, and a capacity for modifying our instincts and our behaviour according to our experience. We incorporate experience in ourselves, and in so doing we alter the original basis of our reactions; a strongly emotional experience colours all that is closely associated with it; and so after birth we are continually making our mental microcosm not only larger but qualitatively more complex, in exactly the same way as before birth our body grew not only in size, but also in complexity of organization.

Parts of experience or of inherited tendencies may fail to become organically connected with the main parts of our minds, simply because attention has never been focussed on them, or has not attempted to bring them into relation with the rest. They are, shall we say, like bricks which might have been used in a building, but have been left lying on the ground by the workmen.

Still more remarkable are the methods by which harmony is achieved in the personal mind. It is obvious that a conflict of any sort between parts of the mind will waste energy, will prevent a clear-cut reaction being given in either direction, and so constitute a grave biological disadvantage by making us fall between two stools. If a child gets a serious fright in the dark, darkness will tend to arouse fear. But darkness also comes with evening and with the time for sleep. Two modes of reaction to darkness are therefore given, and they are self-contradictory. One part of the mind comes down its pathway towards action, and finds itself met by another which is coming along the same path in the opposite direction. If neither moves, there is a conflict; in our hypothetical case sleep is delayed; and if it comes, is disturbed by nightmares--the echoes of the fright--and the childish organism suffers.

Exactly similar conflicts in which fear plays a part may occur in adult life, e.g., in so-called “shell-shock”; or the sex-instinct may come into conflict with other parts of the personality.

These conflicts are resolved through one tendency or part of experience being passed into the subconscious, where it no longer can meet its opponent on the path to action. And this passage into the subconscious can be apparently automatic, unwitting, when it is called suppression, or performed only by voluntary effort, when it is called repression. In the former case, it would appear that the conflict may wholly or almost wholly cease; whereas in the second, the repressed portion of mind is perpetually striving to come to the surface again, and must thus perpetually be held down by force.

If we hold by our metaphor of the building, then in suppression, bricks which would not go well with the rest are stacked quietly in the cellars; while in repression, part of the workmen want to build a different sort of building, and have to be forcibly held down by some of the rest to prevent their doing so.

But in whatever way the subconscious may be organized it is always with us, and there will always be a remainder of our soul, or of its possibilities, which is not incorporated in our personal life at all, as well as much which is not closely organized with the main everyday personality, but is connected with it only by vague and loose bonds, approachable only by narrow pathways instead of by broad roads.

There is another process at work in the human mind which is of the utmost importance for our problem. I mean the process of sublimation. If it is not easy to give a short and clear definition of sublimation, at least the process is familiar to all. The commonest example is “falling in love,” where the simple sex-instinct becomes intertwined with other instincts and with past emotional experience, and projects itself in wholly new guise upon its object. We may perhaps best say that a sublimated instinct has more and higher values attached to its satisfaction than one unsublimated. The mere satisfaction of the sexual impulse need be little more than a physiological desirability; but the satisfaction of passionate love involves every fibre of the mental organism, hopes and ideals converging with memories and instincts on to the highest pitch of being.

In such a case sublimation occurs with the normal object of the instinct. But the elasticity of man’s mind permits of further complication; the instinct may be not only sublimated but attached to new objects. Through the cogs and spirals of the mind, the sexual instinct may find an outlet at higher levels, and contribute to the driving force of adventurous living, of art, or as we may see in many mystics--St. Teresa for example--of religious ecstasy.

It is as if a swift stream were falling into underground channels below the mill of our being, where it could churn and roar away to waste. But some of it is led off at a higher level, and we can learn to lead off still more; and we can make an installation of pipes whereby it can be taken up to the original level, and made to fall through new machines and do any work we may ask of it.

The mechanism of sublimation, however, deserves a few more words. Recent work in biology has shown that in low forms of animals and in early stages of high forms, the head-region is in a certain sense dominant to the rest, in that it forms first and independently; but that, once present, it exerts a formative influence upon the rest of the body, keeping the various organs in some way under control, making them different from what they would otherwise have been, and so moulding them to the part of a single and higher whole.

An extremely similar process is at work in sublimation. Ideas and ideals can be naturally dominant over others, or they can become dominant through becoming associated with primarily dominant ideas, or by receiving a larger share of attention. Attention, concentration, what you will, is one of the most remarkable mental functions. Not only can the metaphor of intense illumination of a particular field be justly used of it, but we may say that it seems to accelerate the flow of mental process through a particular channel, and so to draw into that channel the contents of other channels in connection with it, just as a rapid flow of water through a pipe sucks in water from connected pipes.

As a result of this, sublimation involves not the suppression or repression of instincts and emotional experiences, nor merely the summation of them with another instinct, but their utilization as parts of a new whole, of which the dominant instinct is like the controlling head.

When the sex-instinct is repressed, the emotional and religious life is meagre, though often violent. When the sex-instinct and the religious feeling exist side by side, without conflict but without union, you have “the natural man” of St. Paul; but when the religious ideals are dominant, and can catch up the sex-instinct into themselves, and in so doing give it a new form and a new direction, then you get one of the highest types of emotional lives. Or fear may be sublimated to reverence; or sex again to art or to philanthropy.

In every case, a new and more complicated mental activity or organ is arrived at; and the same process that we saw at work in biological evolution--the creation of ever more complex units--is thereby continued.