Part 8

“The prophet host, the martyr throng, Reckoned, the world as dross, Despised the shame, endured the wrong, Counting their gain, their loss; And He, to whom they sang their song, Was nailed upon the cross.”

Suffering, then, lies on the road to life, and one must expect to meet it if he would be happy. Many a person, when he sees this lion in his path, turns about and contents himself with something less than happiness. And yet it is also true, as experience teaches, that in our misfortunes, as in our enjoyments, imagination greatly outruns reality. Our pain is seldom as great as our imagination pictures it. Sorrow is often the gate which opens into great happiness. Thus the true life calls for a certain severity of dealing, as if one should say to himself: “You may like to do this thing, or you may not like to do it, but you must do it”; and true education rests on these two foundation stones,--love of truth and courage for the right. Without them, education is worthless. It is like the kingdom of God which is to be taken by violence, “And the violent take it with force.” And thus, of all the human qualities which lead to happiness, certainly the most essential is courage.

We look back, then, finally, over what has been said, and repeat what a gifted authoress of our time, Gisela Grimm, has said in her drama of Old Scotland: “Happiness is communion with God, and the central spiritual quality which attains this communion is courage.” Other happiness than this is not to be found on earth, and if there were happiness without these traits, it would not be the happiness we should desire. And this kind of happiness is real. It is not, like every other dream of happiness, an illusion from which sooner or later one must wake. It does not issue from our achievements or our compulsions. On the contrary, when we have once accepted and made our own the view of life which I have described, and have ceased to look about us for some other view, then happiness comes to us by the way. It is a stream of inward peace; broadening as we grow older, first enriching our own souls and then pouring itself forth to bless other lives.

This is the goal to which our life must attain, if it hope for happiness, and to this goal it can attain. Indeed, if once the first decision be made, and the first steps taken, then, as Dante says:

... “This mount is such, that ever At the beginning down below ’tis tiresome, And aye the more one climbs, the less it hurts. Therefore, when it shall seem so pleasant to thee, That going up shall be to thee as easy As going down the current in a boat, Then at this pathway’s ending thou wilt be.”

Below at the foot of the mountain the fixed decision is demanded. There one must absolutely determine to pay any price which shall be asked for the happiness which is real. No further step can be taken without this first resolution, and by no easier path has any one attained the happiness he sought. Goethe, the teacher of those who sought happiness in other ways, admitted--as I have said--that in seventy-five years of life he had had four weeks of content, and no one who has followed him can, at the end of life, when asked what his conscience testifies, make better reply. We, on the other hand, should be able, at the last, to say: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten, and though we be so strong as to come to fourscore years, and though there has been much labor and sorrow, still it has been a life of happiness.”

VII. THE MEANING OF LIFE

VII. THE MEANING OF LIFE

This is the question of questions. A man must be wholly superficial or wholly animal who does not at some time in his life ask what is the meaning of his life. Yet, sad to say, most men end their lives without finding an answer. Some repeat, in their darker moods, the melancholy confession of a mediæval philosopher: “I live, but know not how long; I die, but know not when; I depart, but know not whither. How is it possible for me to fancy myself happy!” Others drive from their minds these morbid reflections which, as they say, “lead to nothing,” and repeat: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”

Even among what we call cultivated people, where education has made a profounder view accessible, the number of those who find the meaning of life is by no means large. After some vain and superficial attempts to save themselves they yield at last, and often far too soon, to the pitiful programme of self-indulgence. And what is their next step? It is to pursue consistently this programme. But there is not long left the health which is necessary for this life of eating and drinking, and then in throngs they make their pilgrimages, the women at the front, to Pastor Kneipp, or Dr. Metzger, or some other infallible healer, hoping for a quick restoration and a second chance to waste their lives.

Still others there are who have not the means to adopt this plan of life. Many of these seek a substitute for it in some form of social scrambling; or if this fails, commit themselves to the new doctrine of economics, according to which the only real problem of life is the “stomach problem,” and which teaches that in satisfying the stomach the social ideals of the race will be also satisfied.

Still others there are who are more subtle and more critical. They have come to see how impracticable are all these schemes to redeem life from its troubles. Thus, after they have tried many half-way measures, they come at last to the confession of the wisest of kings: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” They commit themselves to scepticism concerning any meaning in life and to the worship of non-existence. To them the end of life is to be Nirvana, annihilation, the forgetfulness of that which life has been; and they fancy that they have attained a very noble attitude toward life when, after many years of sharp contention with their healthy human nature, which steadily protests against these subtle negations, they are able at last to repeat the words of the Hindoo sage:

“Through birth and rebirth’s endless round I ran and sought, but never found Who framed and built this house of clay. What misery!--birth for ay and ay!

O builder! thee at last I see! Ne’er shalt thou build again for me.

Thy rafters all are broken now, Demolished lies thy ridgepole, low.

My heart, demolished too, I ween, An end of all desire hath seen.”

Such is the final word of their philosophy. Neither light nor hope is left for human life. He does the best who earliest recognizes the hopelessness of life and hastens to its end.

Human nature, however, is so abounding in life and so eager for life that except in those transitory and morbid conditions which we have come to describe as fin de siècle moods, it is never long content to interpret experience in terms of universal bankruptcy. On the contrary, it insists that the problem of philosophy must be in the future, as it has been in the past, the shedding of light on the meaning of life. It is a problem which philosophy has often answered with mere phrases, which have brought no meaning or comfort to the troubled heart of man, and it is not surprising that since the climax of this hollow formalism was reached in Hegel, there has been a natural distrust of philosophy.

And what is it in this speculative philosophy which creates this distrust? It is its attempt to regard the universe as self-explanatory. Here, even at the present time, is one of the fundamental propositions of most philosophizing, against which no argument may be permitted. It seems an essential assumption of philosophy; since if other ways of explanation of the universe were superadded, philosophy as an independent science would seem to be superfluous. Is it certain, however, that the subordination of philosophy thus apprehended would be, after all, a great misfortune? What the human mind is concerned about is not the perpetuation of philosophy as a science, but the discovery of some meaning in life itself, its destiny, its past and its future; and one is quite justified in losing interest in any science which does not in the end contribute to the interpretation and amelioration of human life. We have a right to demand of philosophy that she contribute to this end, and that she shall speak also with some degree of simplicity of language, dismissing the attempt to satisfy with empty and unintelligible phrases the hunger of the soul for fundamental truth.

And yet, from the time of Plato to that of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, the making of phrases has been the special business of philosophy. It has created a language of its own, which separates it as by an impenetrable hedge from the region of men’s common talk; and when one translates such language into the familiar speech of his own time, where words have a definite meaning, it is as though he withdrew from a veiled goddess the disguise which gave her all her power and dignity. The fact is that abstract philosophy has never explained to any satisfaction either the existence or the development of the world; still less has philosophy brought into unity these two conceptions, and interpreted them through a single cause. On the contrary, the history of philosophy has been a history of words, conveying no real interpretation, and it would seem as if in the thousands of years of philosophic speculation either some interpretation should have been attained or that there should at last be heard the confession that philosophy can throw no further light on these fundamental facts. Here, it would seem, we should reach the end of philosophy, and should assume that the first cause of things is unknowable.

Philosophy, however, has seldom consented to this confession of impotence. On the contrary, it has repeatedly reverted to some absolute assumption of an adequate cause which lies behind the possibility of proof. Sometimes it is the assumption of a vital Substance, one and unchangeable; sometimes it is the assumption of an infinite concourse of atoms. Yet such conceptions are in the highest degree elusive, and force us to inquire whence such substance, be it simple or infinitely divided, comes, how it becomes quickened with life, and how it imparts the life it has. The transition from such mere movements of atoms to phenomena of feeling or thought or will, makes a leap in nature which no man has in the remotest degree proposed to explain. On the contrary, instead of bridging such a chasm the most famous inquirers simply record the melancholy confession: “Ignoramus, ignorabimus.”

Sometimes, again, philosophy has taught, with many and large words, that the meaning of the world resides in an opposition between Being and Not-being. This is no new doctrine and it is at least intelligent and intelligible. Yet what we really need to know concerns Being alone. It is the world that lies before our eyes that interests us. How has this world come to be, we ask, or is it perhaps a mere illusion, the mirage of our own thought, with no reality but that which our own minds assign, as people in their despair have sometimes believed it to be? As for Non-existence, what rational interest has this for us? Is it even an intelligible conception? Does it not rather set before us a contradiction which we may conceive, but can never verify, and which has for life itself no significance at all?

Still other philosophers invite us to turn from the outward world whose final cause thus eludes us, and to consider our own self-conscious nature, the Ego, concerning which no one can doubt and which no philosophy is needed to prove. Yet no sooner does this poor Ego issue from its own self-consciousness and, as it were, take a step into the outward world, as though to interpret through itself the meaning of life, than it becomes aware that some further and external cause is necessary to explain even the Ego to itself.

Finally, philosophy, in its search for the meaning of life, bows to the authority of natural science and proposes to interpret experience through some doctrine of development, or evolution, or heredity, or natural selection. All that exists, it announces, comes of some primitive protoplasm, or even of some single primitive cell. Yet still there presses the ancient question how such cells may have been made and how there has been imparted to them their infinite capacity for life and growth. It is the question which the keen and practical Napoleon asked as he stood a century ago under the mystery of the stars in Egypt. Turning to the scholar Monge, he said: “Qui a fait tout cela?” To such a question neither abstract philosophy nor natural science has as yet given and, so far as we can judge, will ever give any answer.

To interpret the world, then, by itself or through itself is impossible, for there is in the world itself no final cause. If the mind of man is the final interpreter of the world, then it becomes itself the God it seeks, and the philosophers become the object of a kind of worship. Here, indeed, is the outcome of much philosophy to-day. If, however, the philosophers have any power of observation, they soon discover one positive barrier to this excessive self-importance. It is the humbling consciousness of limitation in their own powers and in their own hold on life itself; the inevitable impression, which no human praise can remove, of their own defects; the impossibility of finding a meaning even for their own lives within those lives themselves.

Here is the weakness of that pantheism which, from the time of Spinoza, has so largely controlled speculative thought, and, from the time of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Goethe, has been the prevailing creed of cultivated people, so far as they concern themselves with philosophy. No form of philosophy is so demoralizing in its ethical consequences as this. It breeds contempt of moral activity; it forfeits the right of the will to oppose what is evil and to create what is good. Sooner or later the corollary of such a faith appears in some form of superstition, crude but compelling,--like hypnotism or spiritualism, or the vulgar and noisy substitutes for religion which are now so conspicuous. Thus the cycle of philosophical speculation fulfils itself, and returns after centuries to the same point at which it began. The final form of truth may come to be, not the systems of abstract philosophy or of speculative theology, which have proved so misleading and unsatisfying, but simply a summing-up of the experience of mankind, as it has affected human destiny through the history of the world; and in this experience we have a philosophy better than abstractions, and always within one’s reach.

And where do we find this philosophy which discovers the meaning of life not through speculative reasoning but through the interpretation of experience, and which observes in experience a spiritual power creating and maintaining both the world and the individual? This is the view of life which had its origin in Israel and was fulfilled in Christianity. It cannot indeed be called in the technical sense a philosophy, for philosophy would feel itself called upon to explain still further that Cause which it thus reached. Theology as a positive science meets the same fate as philosophy. It cannot prove its God, as philosophy cannot interpret the world or human life in or through themselves. What people call ontology, or the proofs of the being of God, is no real science, and convinces none but him who is already pledged. It is in the nature of God to be beyond our interpretations. A god who could be explained would not be God, and a man who could explain God would not be man. The legitimate aim of life is not to see God as He is, but to see the affairs of this world and of human life somewhat as God might see them. It is, therefore, no new thing to question whether theology can be fairly called a science at all. On this point, for instance, the evidence of Christ is in the negative, and the theological speculations of Christians are, in fact, not derived from him. They proceed, on the contrary, from the Apostle Paul, who applied to the proving of Christianity the subtlety of theological training which he had received under Judaism; and even in his case it must be remembered that his teaching was directed to convince those who had been, like him, trained in the theology of Israel.

It must not be imagined, therefore, that the final Cause of the world which we call God, can be philosophically proved. Faith in God is first of all a personal experience. Nothing should disguise this proposition, though it is the stone of offence where many stumble who are seeking an adequate meaning of life. Nothing can be done to help those who refuse this experience. No argument can convince them. There is no philosophical refutation of a determined atheism.