BL 181 .F74 1899
Fiske, John, 1842-1901
Through nature to God
ft? pix. JFfelte
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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY
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THROUGH NATURE
TO GOD
BY
JOHN FISKE
Soyez comme Voiseau pose pour un instant
Sur des rameaux tropfreles,
Qui sent ployer la branche et qui chante pourtant,
Sachant qti'il a des ailes !
Victor Hugo
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
(Cbe Ifftoennbe $rc?£, Cambn&0e
1899
COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY JOHN FISKK
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO THE BELOVED AND REVERED MEMORY
OF MY FRIEND
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
THIS BOOK IS CONSECRATED
PREFACE
SINGLE purpose runs throughout
this little book, though different
aspects of it are treated in the
three several parts. The first part, " The
Mystery of Evil," written soon after "The
Idea of God," was designed to supply some
considerations which for the sake of con-
ciseness had been omitted from that book.
Its close kinship with the second part,
"The Cosmic Roots of Love and Self-
Sacrifice," will be at once apparent to the
reader.
That second part is, with a few slight
changes, the Phi Beta Kappa oration de-
livered by me at Harvard University, in
June, 1895. Its original title was "Ethics
in the Cosmic Process," and its form of
statement was partly determined by the
fact that it was intended as a reply to
vi Preface
Huxley's famous Romanes lecture deliv-
ered at the University of Oxford in 1893.
Readers of " The Destiny of Man " will
observe that I have here repeated a portion
of the argument of that book. The detec-
tion of the part played by the lengthening
of infancy in the genesis of the human race
is my own especial contribution to the Doc-
trine of Evolution, so that I naturally feel
somewhat uncertain as to how far that sub-
ject is generally understood, and how far a
brief allusion to it will suffice. It therefore
seemed best to recapitulate the argument
while indicating its bearing upon the ethics
of the Cosmic Process.
I can never cease to regret that Huxley
should have passed away without seeing
my argument and giving me the benefit of
his comments. The subject is one of a
kind which we loved to discuss on quiet
Sunday evenings at his fireside in London,
many years ago. I have observed on Hux-
ley's part, not only in the Romanes lecture,
but also in the charming " Prolegomena,"
Preface vii
written in 1894, a tendency to use the
phrase " cosmic process " in a restricted
sense as equivalent to " natural selection ; "
and doubtless if due allowance were made
for that circumstance, the appearance of
antagonism between us would be greatly-
diminished. In our many talks, however,
I always felt that, along with abundant
general sympathy, there was a discernible
difference in mental attitude. Upon the
proposition that " the foundation of moral-
ity is to . . . give up pretending to believe
that for which there is no evidence," we
were heartily agreed. But I often found
myself more strongly inclined than my dear
friend to ask the Tennysonian question : —
" Who forged that other influence,
That heat of inward evidence,
By which he doubts against the sense ? "
In the third part of the present little
book, "The Everlasting Reality of Reli-
gion," my aim is to show that "that other
influence," that inward conviction, the crav-
ing for a final cause, the theistic assump-
viii Preface
tion, is itself one of the master facts of the
universe, and as much entitled to respect
as any fact in physical nature can possibly
be. The argument flashed upon me about
ten years ago, while reading Herbert Spen-
cer's controversy with Frederic Harrison
concerning the nature and reality of reli-
gion. Because Spencer derived historically
the greater part of the modern belief in an
Unseen World from the savage's primeval
world of dreams and ghosts, some of his
critics maintained that logical consistency
required him to dismiss the modern belief
as utterly false ; otherwise he would be
guilty of seeking to evolve truth from false-
hood. By no means, replied Spencer :
"Contrariwise, the ultimate form of the
religious consciousness is the final devel-
opment of a consciousness which at the
outset contained a germ of truth obscured
by multitudinous errors." This suggestion
has borne fruit in the third part of the
present volume, where I have introduced a
wholly new line of argument to show that
Preface ix
the Doctrine of Evolution, properly under-
stood, does not leave the scales equally
balanced between Materialism and Theism,
but irredeemably discredits the former,
while it places the latter upon a firmer
foundation than it has ever before occupied.
My reference to the French materialism
of the eighteenth century, in its contrast
with the theism of Voltaire, is intended to
point the stronger contrast between the
feeble survivals of that materialism in our
time and the unshakable theism which is in
harmony with the Doctrine of Evolution.
When some naturalist like Haeckel assures
us that as evolutionists we are bound to
believe that death ends all, it is a great
mistake to hold the Doctrine of Evolution
responsible for such a statement. Haeck-
el's opinion was never reached through a
scientific study of evolution ; it is nothing
but an echo from the French speculation
of the eighteenth century. Such a writer
as La Mettrie proceeded upon the assump-
tion that no belief concerning anything in
x Preface
the heavens above, or the earth beneath,
or the waters under the earth, is worthy
of serious consideration unless it can be
demonstrated by the methods employed in
physical science. Such a mental attitude
was natural enough at a time when the
mediaeval theory of the world was falling
into discredit, while astronomy and physics
were winning brilliant victories through the
use of new methods. It was an attitude
likely to endure so long as the old-fashioned
fragmentary and piecemeal habits of study-
ing nature were persisted in ; and the
change did not come until the latter half
of the nineteenth century.
The encyclopaedic attainments of Alex-
ander von Humboldt, for example, left him,
to all intents and purposes, a materialist of
the eighteenth century. But shortly before
the death of that great German scholar,
there appeared the English book which her-
alded a complete reversal of the attitude of
science. The " Principles of Psychology,"
published in 1855 by Herbert Spencer, was
Preface xi
the first application of the theory of evolu-
tion on a grand scale. Taken in connection
with the discoveries of natural selection, of
spectrum analysis, and of the mechanical
equivalence between molar and molecular
motions, it led the way to that sublime con-
ception of the Unity of Nature by which
the minds of scientific thinkers are now
coming to be dominated. The attitude of
mind which expressed itself in a great ency-
clopaedic book without any pervading prin-
ciple of unity, like Humboldt's "Kosmos,"
is now become what the Germans call ein
ueberzviindencr Staudptinkt, or something
that we have passed by and left behind.
When we have once thoroughly grasped
the monotheistic conception of the universe
as an organic whole, animated by the om-
nipresent spirit of God, we have forever
taken leave of that materialism to which
the universe was merely an endless multi-
tude of phenomena. We begin to catch
glimpses of the meaning and dramatic pur-
pose of things ; at all events we rest as-
xii Preface
sured that there really is such a meaning.
Though the history of our lives, and of all
life upon our planet, as written down by
the unswerving finger of Nature, may ex-
hibit all events and their final purpose in
unmistakable sequence, yet to our limited
vision the several fragments of the record,
like the leaves of the Cumaean sibyl, caught
by the fitful breezes of circumstance and
whirled wantonly hither and thither, lie in
such intricate confusion that no ingenuity
can enable us wholly to decipher the legend.
But could we attain to a knowledge com-
mensurate with the reality — could we
penetrate the hidden depths where, accord-
ing to Dante (Paradiso, xxxiii. 85).. the
story of Nature, no longer scattered in tru-
ant leaves, is bound with divine love in a
mystic volume, we should find therein no
traces of hazard or incongruity. From
man's origin we gather hints of his destiny,
and the study of evolution leads our thoughts
through Nature to God.
Cambridge, March 2, 1899.
CONTENTS
The Mystery of Evil
I. The Serpent's Promise to the Woman . 3
II. The Pilgrim's Burden .... 8
III. Manichceism and Calvinism . . . 14
IV. The Dramatic Unity of Nature . . 22
V. What Conscious Life is made of . -27
VI. Without the Element of Antagonism there
could be no Consciousness , and therefore
no World 34
VII. A Word of Caution . . . .40
VIII. The Hermit and the Angel . . . 43
IX. Man's Rise from the Innocence of Brute-
hood 48
X. The Relativity of Evil . ... 54
The Cosmic Roots of Love and Self-
Sacrifice
I. The Summer Field, and what it tells us . 59
I I . Seeming Wastefulness of the Cosmic Process 65
xiv , Contents
III. Caliban's Philosophy .... 72
IV. Can it be thai the Cosmic Process has no
Relation to Moral Ends ? . -74
V. First Stages in the Genesis of Man . 80
VI. The Central Fact in the Genesis of Man . 86
VII. The Chief Cause of Man's lengthened In-
fancy 88
VIII. Some of its Effects . ... 96
IX. Origin of Moral Ideas and Sentiments . 102
X. The Cosmic Process exists purely for the
Sake of Moral Ends . . . .109
XI. Maternity and the Evolution of Altruism . 1 ij
XII. The Omnipresent Ethical Trend . . 127
The Everlasting Reality of Religion
I. " Deo er exit Voltaire" . . . . 133
II. The Reign of Law, and the Greek Idea of
God 747
III. Weakness of Materialism . . .152
IV. Religion's First Postulate: the Quasi-Hu-
man God . . . . . .16)
V. Religion's Second Postulate: the undying
Human Soul 168
VI. Religion's Third Postulate: the Ethical Sig-
nificance of the Unseen World . . iyi
VII. Is the Substance of Religion a Phantom, or
an Eternal Reality ? . . • i"]4
Contents xv
VIII. The Fundamental Aspect of Life . . ljy
IX. How the Evolution of Senses expands the
World 182
X. Nature's Eternal Lesson is the Everlasting
Reality of Religion . . . .186
THE MYSTERY OF EVIL
I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light,
and create darkness ; I make peace, and create evil. I the
Lord do all these things. — Isaiah, xlv. 6, 7.
Did not our God bring all this evil upon us ? — Nehemiah,
xiii. 18.
Ovk eoaee 8' 17 (£v<ri? eTreio-ofiicoSrj; ovcra etc iw fyaivofxivaiv , iixrnep
juox^pa TpaywSi'a. — Aristotle, Metaphysicct, xiii. 3.
I
The Serpent's Promise to the Woman
" Your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, know-
ing good and evil." Genesis hi. 5.
HE legend in which the serpent is
represented as giving this counsel
to the mother of mankind occurs
at the beginning of the Pentateuch in the
form which that collection of writings as-
sumed after the return of the Jews from
the captivity at Babylon, and there is good
reason for believing that it was first placed
there at that time. Allusions to Eden in
the Old Testament literature are extremely
scarce, 1 and the story of Eve's temptation
first assumes prominence in the writings
of St. Paul. The marks of Zoroastrian
thought in it have often been pointed out.
This garden of Eden is a true Persian para-
1 Isaiah li. 3 ; Joel ii. 3 ; Ezekiel xxviii. 13, xxxi. 8, 9.
4 The Mystery of Evil
dise, situated somewhere in that remote
wonderland of Aryana Vaejo to which all
Iranian tradition is so fond of pointing
back. The wily serpent is a genuine Par-
see serpent, and the spirit which animates
him is that of the malicious and tricksome
Ahriman, who takes delight in going about
after the good creator Ormuzd and spoiling
his handiwork. He is not yet identified
with the terrible Satan, the accusing angel
who finds out men's evil thoughts and deeds.
He is simply a mischief-maker, and the
punishment meted out to him for his mis-
chief reminds one of many a curious pas-
sage in the beast epos of primitive peoples.
As in the stories which tell why the mole
is blind or why the fox has a bushy tail, the
serpent's conduct is made to account for
some of his peculiar attributes. As a pun-
ishment he is made to crawl upon his belly,
and be forever an object of especial dread
and loathing to all the children of Eve.
What, then, is the crime for which the
serpent Ahriman thus makes bitter expia-
The Mystery of Evil 5
tion ? In what way has he spoiled Or-
muzd's last and most wonderful creation ?
He has introduced the sense of sin : the
man and the woman are afraid, and hide
themselves from their Lord whom they
have offended. Yet he has been not alto-
gether a deceiving serpent. In one respect
he had spoken profound truth. The man
and the woman have become as gods. In
the Hebrew story Jehovah says, " Behold
the man is become as one of us ; " that is
to say, one of the Elohim or heavenly host,
who know the good and the evil. Man has
apparently become a creature against whom
precautions need to be taken. It is hinted
that by eating of the other tree and acquir-
ing immortal life he would achieve some
result not in accordance with Jehovah's
will, yet which it would then be too late to
prevent. Accordingly, any such proceed-
ings are forestalled by driving the man and
woman from the garden, and placing senti-
nels there with a fiery sword which turns
hither and thither to warn off all who would
6 The Mystery of Evil
tread the path that leads to the tree of life.
The anthropomorphism of the story is as
vivid as in those Homeric scenes in which
gods and men contend with one another in
battle. It is plainly indicated that Jeho-
vah's wrath is kindled at man's presump-
tion in meddling with what belongs only to
the Elohim ; man is punished for his arro-
gance in the same spirit as when, later on,
he gives his daughters in marriage to the
sons of the Elohim and brings on a deluge,
or when he strives to build a tower that
will reach to heaven and is visited with a
confusion of tongues. So here in Eden he
has come to know too much, and Ahriman's
heinous crime has consisted in helping him
to this interdicted knowledge.
The serpent's promise to the woman was
worthy of the wisest and most astute of
animals. But with yet greater subtlety he
might have declared, Except ye acquire
the knowledge of good and evil, ye cannot
come to be as gods ; divine life can never
be yours. Throughout the Christian world
The Mystery of Evil 7
this legend of the lost paradise has figured
as the story of the Fall of Man ; and nat-
urally, because of the theological use of it
made by St. Paul, who first lifted the story
into prominence in illustrating his theory
of Christ as the second Adam : since by
man came death into the world, by man
came also the resurrection from death and
from sin. That there is truth of the most
vital sort in the Pauline theory is unde-
niable ; but there are many things that will
bear looking at from opposite points of
view, for aspects of truth are often to be
found on both sides of the shield, and there k
is a sense in which we may regard the loss
of paradise as in itself the beginning of the
Rise of Man. For this, indeed, we have
already found some justification in the
legend itself. It is in no spirit of paradox
that I make this suggestion. The more pa-
tiently one scrutinizes the processes whereby
things have come to be what they are, the
more deeply is one impressed with its pro-
found significance.
II
The Pilgrim's Burden
UT before I can properly elucidate
this view, and make clear what is
meant by connecting the loss of
innocence with the beginning of the Rise of
Man, it is necessary to bestow a few words
upon a well-worn theme, and recall to mind
the helpless and hopeless bewilderment
into which all theologies and all philoso-
phies have been thrown by the problem of
the existence of evil. From the ancient
Greek and Hebrew thinkers who were sad-
dened by the spectacle of wickedness inso-
lent and unpunished, down to the aged
Voltaire and the youthful Goethe who felt
their theories of God's justice quite baffled
by the Lisbon earthquake, or down to the
atheistic pessimist of our own time who
asserts that the Power which sustains the
The Mystery of Evil 9
world is but a blind and terrible force with-
out concern for man's welfare of body or
of soul, — from first to last the history of
philosophy teems with the mournful in-
stances of this discouragement. In that
tale of War and Peace wherein the fervid
genius of Tolstoi has depicted scenes and
characters of modern life with truthful
grandeur like that of the ancient epic
poems, when our friend, the genial and
thoughtful hero of the story, stands in the
public square at Moscow, uncertain of his
fate, while the kindly bright-faced peasant
and the eager pale young mechanic are shot
dead by his side, and all for a silly sus-
picion on the part of Napoleon's soldiery ;
as he stands and sees the bodies, still warm
and quivering, tossed into a trench and
loose earth hastily shovelled over them, his
manly heart surges in rebellion against a
world in which such things can be, and a
voice within him cries out, — not in the
mood in which the fool crieth, but with the
anguish of a tender soul wrung by the sight
io The Mystery of Evil
of stupendous iniquity, — " There is no
God ! " It is but the utterance of an old-
world feeling, natural enough to hard-
pressed and sorely tried humanity in those
moments that have come to it only too
often, when triumphant wrong is dreadfully
real and close at hand, while anything like
compensation seems shadowy and doubtful
and far away.
It is this feeling that has created the
belief in a devil, an adversary to the good
God, an adversary hard to conquer or baffle.
The feeling underlies every theological
creed, and in every system of philosophy
we find it lurking somewhere. In these
dark regions of thought, which science has
such scanty means for exploring, the state-
ments which make up a creed are apt to
be the outgrowth of such an all-pervading
sentiment, while their form will be found
to vary with the knowledge of nature —
meagre enough at all times, and even in
our boasted time — which happens to char-
acterize the age in which they are made.
The Mystery of Evil 1 1
Hence, well-nigh universally has philosophy
proceeded upon the assumption, whether
tacit or avowed, that pain and wrong are
things hard to be reconciled with the theory
that the world is created and ruled by a
Being at once all-powerful and all-benevo-
lent. Why does such a Being permit the
misery that we behold encompassing us on
every side ? When we would fain believe
that God is love indeed, and love creation's
final law, how comes it that nature, red in
tooth and claw with ravine, shrieks against
our creed ? If this question could be fairly
answered, does it not seem as if the burden
of life, which so often seems intolerable,
would forthwith slip from our shoulders,
and leave us, like Bunyan's pilgrim, free
and bold and light-hearted to contend
against all the ills of the world ?
Ever since human intelligence became
enlightened enough to grope for a meaning
and purpose in human life, this problem of
the existence of evil has been the burden
of man. In the effort to throw it off, lead-
12 The Mystery of Evil
ers of thought have had recourse to almost
every imaginable device. It has usually
been found necessary to represent the Cre-
ator as finite either in power or in good-
ness, although the limitation is seldom
avowed, except by writers who have a lean-
ing toward atheism and take a grim plea-
sure in pointing out flaws in the constitu-
tion of things. Among modern writers the
most conspicuous instance of this temper
is afforded by that much too positive phi-
losopher Auguste Comte, who would fain
have tipped the earth's axis at a different
angle and altered the arrangements of na-
ture in many fanciful ways. He was like
Alphonso, the learned king of Castile, who
regretted that he had not been present
when the world was created, — he could
have given such excellent advice !
In a very different mood the great Leib-
nitz, in his famous theory of optimism,
argued that a perfect world is in the nature
of things impossible, but that the world in
which we live is the best of possible worlds.
The Mystery of Evil 13
The limitation of the Creator's power is
made somewhat more explicitly by Plato,
who regarded the world as the imperfect
realization of a Divine Idea that in itself is
perfect. It is owing to the intractableness
and vileness of matter that the Divine Idea
finds itself so imperfectly realized. Thus
the Creator's power is limited by the nature
of the material out of which he makes the
world. In other words, the world in which
we live is the best the Creator could make
out of the wretched material at his disposal.
This Platonic view is closely akin to that
of Leibnitz, but is expressed in such wise
as to lend itself more readily to myth-mak-
ing. Matter is not only considered as what
Dr. Martineau would call a "datum objec-
tive to God," but it is endowed with a dia-
bolical character of its own.
Ill
Manichceism and Calvinism
T is but a step from this to the com-
plicated personifications of Gnosti-
cism, with its Demiurgus, or in-
ferior spirit that created the world. By
some of the Gnostics the Creator was held
to be merely an inferior emanation from
God, a notion which had a powerful indi-
rect effect upon the shaping of Christian
doctrine in the second and third centuries
of our era. A similar thought appears in
the mournful question asked by Tennyson's
Arthur : —
" O me ! for why is all around us here
As if some lesser god had made the world
And had not force to shape it as he would? "
But some Gnostics went so far as to hold
that the world was originally created by the
Devil, and is to be gradually purified and
The Mystery of Evil 15
redeemed by the beneficent power of God
as manifested through Jesus Christ. This
notion is just the opposite to that of the
Vendidad, which represents the world as
coming into existence pure and perfect,
only to be forthwith defiled by the trail of
the serpent Ahriman. In both these oppos-
ing theories the divine power is distinctly
and avowedly curtailed by the introduction
of a rival power that is diabolical ; upon
this point Parsee and Gnostic are agreed.
Distinct sources are postulated for the evil
and the good. The one may be regarded
as infinite in goodness, the other as infi-
nite in badness, and the world in which we
live is a product of the everlasting conflict
between the two. This has been the fun-
damental idea in all Manichaean systems,
and it is needless to say that it has always
exerted a mighty influence upon Christian
theology. The Christian conception of the
Devil, as regards its deeper ethical aspect,
has owed much to the Parsee conception of
Ahriman. It can hardly be said, however,
1 6 The Mystery of Evil
that there has been any coherent, closely
reasoned, and generally accepted Christian
theory of the subject. The notions just
mentioned are in themselves too shadowy
and vague, they bear too plainly the marks
of their mythologic pedigree, to admit of
being worked into such a coherent and
closely reasoned theory. Christian thought
has simply played fast and loose with these
conceptions, speaking in one breath of di-
vine omnipotence, and in the next alluding
to the conflict between good and evil in
language fraught with Manichseism.
In recent times Mr. John Stuart Mill
has shown a marked preference for the
Manichaean view, and has stated it with
clearness and consistency, because he is not
hampered by the feeling that he ought to
reach one conclusion rather than another.
Mr. Mill does not urge his view upon the
reader, nor even defend it as his own view,
but simply suggests it as perhaps the view
which is for the theist most free from diffi-
culties and contradictions. Mr. Mill does
The Mystery of Evil 1 7
not, like the Manichaeans, imagine a per-
sonified principle of evil ; nor does he, like
Plato, entertain a horror of what is some-
times, with amusing vehemence, stigma-
tized as " brute matter." He does not un-
dertake to suggest how or why the divine
power is limited ; but he distinctly prefers
the alternative which sacrifices the attribute
of omnipotence in order to preserve in our
conception of Deity the attribute of good-
ness. According to Mr. Mill, we may re-
gard the all- wise and holy Deity as a crea-
tive energy that is perpetually at work in
eliminating evil from the universe. His
wisdom is perfect, his goodness is infinite,
but his power is limited by some inexplica-
ble viciousness in the original constitution
of things which it must require a long suc-
cession of ages to overcome. In such a
view Mr. Mill sees much that is ennobling.
The humblest human being who resists an
impulse to sin, or helps in the slightest
degree to leave the world better than he
found it, may actually be regarded as a
1 8 The Mystery of Evil
participator in the creative work of God ;
and thus each act of human life acquires a
solemn significance that is almost over-
whelming to contemplate.
These suggestions of Mr. Mill are ex-
tremely interesting, because he was the last
great modern thinker whose early training
was not influenced by that prodigious ex-
pansion of scientific knowledge which, since
the middle of the nineteenth century, has
taken shape in the doctrine of evolution.
This movement began early enough to de-
termine the intellectual careers of eminent
thinkers born between 1820 and 1830, such
as Spencer and Huxley. Mr. Mill was a
dozen years too old for this. He was born
at nearly the same time as Mr. Darwin, but
his mental habits were formed too soon for
him to profit fully by the new movement of
thought ; and although his attitude toward
the new ideas was hospitable, they never
fructified in his mind. While his thinking
has been of great value to the world, much
of it belongs to an era which we have now
The Mystery of Evil ig
left far behind. This is illustrated in the
degree to which he was influenced by the
speculations of Auguste Comte. Probably
no two leaders of thought, whose dates of
birth were scarcely a quarter of a century
apart, were ever separated by such a stu-
pendous gulf as that which intervenes be-
tween Auguste Comte and Herbert Spen-
cer, and this fact may serve as an index to
the rapidity of movement which has char-
acterized the nineteenth century. Another
illustration of the old-fashioned character
of Mill's philosophy is to be seen in his use
of Paley's argument from design in support
of the belief in a beneficent Creator. Mill
adopted this argument, and, as a professed
free-thinker, carried it to the logical con-
clusion from which Paley, as a churchman,
could not but shrink. This was the con-
clusion which I have already mentioned,
that God's creative power has been limited
by some inexplicable viciousness in the
original constitution of things.
I feel as if one could not be too grateful
20 The Mystery of Evil
to Mr. Mill for having so neatly and sharply
stated, in modern language and with mod-
ern illustrations, this old conclusion, which
after all is substantially that of Plato and
the Gnostics. For the shock which such a
clear, bold statement gives to our religious
feelings is no greater than the shock with
which it strikes counter to our modern sci-
entific philosophy. Suppose we could bring
back to earth a Calvinist of the seventeenth
century and question him. He might well
say that the God which Mr. Mill offers us,
shorn of the attribute of omnipotence, is no
God at all. He would say with the Hebrew
prophet, that God has created the evil along
with the good, and that he has done so for
a purpose which human reason, could it
once comprehend all the conditions of the
case, would most surely approve as infi-
nitely wise and holy. Our Calvinist would
ask who is responsible for the original con-
stitution of things if not the Creator him-
self, and in supposing anything essentially
vicious in that constitution, have not Plato
The Mystery of Evil 21
and the Gnostics and the Manichaeans and
Mr. Mill simply taken counsel of their igno-
rance ? Nay, more, the Calvinist would
declare that if we really understood the
universe of which humanity is a part, we
should find scientific justification for that
supreme and victorious faith which cries,
"Though he slay me, yet will I trust in
him ! " The man who has acquired such
faith as this is the true freeman of the uni-
verse, clad in stoutest coat of mail against
disaster and sophistry, — the man whom
nothing can enslave, and whose guerdon is
the serene happiness that can never be
taken away.
IV
The Dramatic Unity of Nature
OW in these strong assertions it
seems to me that the Calvinist is
much more nearly in accord with
our modern knowledge than are Plato and
Mill. It is not wise to hazard statements
as to what the future may bring forth, but
I do not see how the dualism implied in all
these attempts to refer good and evil to dif-
ferent creative sources can ever be seriously
maintained again. The advance of modern
science carries us irresistibly to what some
German philosophers call monism, but I
prefer to call it monotheism. In getting
rid of the Devil and regarding the universe
as the multiform manifestation of a single
all-pervading Deity, we become for the first
time pure and uncompromising monotheists,
— believers in the ever-living, unchange-
The Mystery of Evil 23
able, and all- wise Heavenly Father, in whom
we may declare our trust without the faint-
est trace of mental reservation.
If we can truly take such a position, and
hold it rationally, it is the modern science
so apt to be decried by the bats and owls of
orthodoxy that justifies us in doing so. For
what is the philosophic purport of these
beautiful and sublime discoveries with which
the keen insight and patient diligence of
modern students of science are beginning
to be rewarded ? What is the lesson that
is taught alike by the correlation of forces,
by spectrum analysis, by the revelations of
chemistry as to the subtle behaviour of mole-
cules inaccessible to the eye of sense, by
the astronomy that is beginning to sketch
the physical history of countless suns in the
firmament, by the palaeontology which is
slowly unravelling the wonders of past life
upon the earth through millions of ages ?
What is the grand lesson that is taught by
all this ? It is the lesson of the unity of
nature. To learn it rightly is to learn that
24 The Mystery of Evil
all the things that we can see and know,
in the course of our life in this world, are
so intimately woven together that nothing
could be left out without reducing the whole
marvellous scheme to chaos. Whatever else
may be true, the conviction is brought home
to us that in all this endless multifarious-
ness there is one single principle at work,
that all is tending toward an end that was
involved from the very beginning, if one
can speak of beginnings and ends where
the process is eternal. The whole universe
is animated by a single principle of life, and
whatever we see in it, whether to our half-
trained understanding and narrow expe-
rience it may seem to be good or bad, is
an indispensable part of the stupendous
scheme. As Aristotle said, so long ago,
in one of those characteristic flashes of in-
sight into the heart of things in which no
one has ever excelled him, in nature there is
nothing that is out of place or interpolated,
as in an ill-constructed drama.
To-day we can begin to realize how much
The Mystery of Evil 25
was implied in this prophetic hint of Aris-
totle's, for we are forced to admit that what-
ever may be the function of evil in this
world, it is unquestionably an indispensable
function, and not something interpolated
from without. Whatever exists is part of
the dramatic whole, and this can quickly be
proved. The goodness in the world — all
that we love and praise and emulate — we
are ready enough to admit into our scheme
of things, and to rest upon it our belief in
God. The misery, the pain, the wickedness,
we would fain leave out. But if there were
no such thing as evil, how could there be
such a thing as goodness ? Or to put it
somewhat differently, if we had never
known anything but goodness, how could
we ever distinguish it from evil ? How
could we recognize it as good ? How would
its quality of goodness in any wise interest
or concern us ? This question goes down
to the bottom of things, for it appeals to
the fundamental conditions according to
which conscious intelligence exists at all.
26 The Mystery of Evil
Its answer will therefore be likely to help
us. It will not enable us to solve the pro-
blem of evil, enshrouded as it is in a mystery
impenetrable by finite intelligence, but it
will help us to state the problem correctly ;
and surely this is no small help. In the
mere work of purifying our intellectual vis-
ion there is that which heals and soothes
us. To learn to see things without distor-
tion is to prepare one's self for taking the
world in the right mood, and in this we find
strength and consolation.
What Conscious Life is made of
O return to our question, how could
we have good without evil, we must
pause for a moment and inquire
into the constitution of the human mind.
What we call the soul, the mind, the con-
scious self, is something strange and won-
derful. In our ordinary efforts to conceive
it, invisible and impalpable as it is, we are
apt to try so strenuously to divorce it from
the notion of substance that it seems ethe-
real, unreal, ghostlike. Yet of all realities
the soul is the most solid, sound, and un-
deniable. Thoughts and feelings are the
fundamental facts from which there is no
escaping. Our whole universe, from the
sands on the seashore to the flaming suns
that throng the Milky Way, is built up of
sights and sounds, of tastes and odours, of
28 The Mystery of Evil
pleasures and pains, of sensations of mo-
tion and. resistance either felt directly or
inferred. This is no ghostly universe, but
all intensely real as it exists in that in-
tensest of realities, the human soul ! Con-
sciousness, the soul's fundamental fact, is
the most fundamental of facts. But a
truly marvellous affair is consciousness !
The most general truth that we can assert
with regard to it is this, that it exists only
by virtue of incessant change. A state of
consciousness that should continue through
an appreciable interval of time without un-
dergoing change would not be a state of
consciousness. It would be unconscious-
ness.
This perpetual change, then, is what
makes conscious life. It is only by virtue
of this endless procession of fleeting phases
of consciousness that the human soul ex-
ists at all. It is thus that we are made.
Why we should have been made thus is
a question aiming so far beyond our ken
that it is idle to ask it. We might as well
The Mystery of Evil 29
inquire whether Infinite Power could have
made twice two equal five. We must rest
content with knowing that it is thus we
were created ; it is thus that the human
soul exists. Just as dynamic astronomy
rests upon the law of gravitation, just as
physics is based upon the properties of
waves, so the modern science of mind
has been built upon the fundamental
truth that consciousness exists only by
virtue of unceasing change. Our con-
scious life is a stream of varying psy-
chical states which quickly follow one an-
other in a perpetual shimmer, with ■ never
an instant of rest. The elementary psy-
chical states, indeed, lie below conscious-
ness, or, as we say, they are sub-conscious.
We may call these primitive pulsations the
psychical molecules out of which are com-
pounded the feelings and thoughts that
well up into the full stream of conscious-
ness. Just as in chemistry we explain the
qualitative differences among things as due
to diversities of arrangement among com-
So The Mystery of Evil
pounded molecules and atoms, so in psy-
chology we have come to see that thoughts
and feelings in all their endless variety are
diversely compounded of sub-conscious
psychical molecules.
Musical sounds furnish us with a simple
and familiar illustration of this. When the
sounds of taps or blows impinge upon the
ear slowly, at the rate of not more than
sixteen in a second, they are cognized as
separate and non-musical noises. When
they pass beyond that rate of speed, they
are cognized as a continuous musical tone
of very low pitch ; a state of consciousness
which seems simple, but which we now see
is really compound. As the speed of the
blows increases, further qualitative differ-
ences arise ; the musical tone rises in
pitch until it becomes too acute for the ear
to cognize, and thus vanishes from con-
sciousness. But this is far from being the
whole story ; for the series of blows or pul-
sations make not only a single vivid funda-
mental tone, but also a multifarious com'
The Mystery of Evil 5/
panion group of fainter overtones, and the
diverse blending of these faint harmonics
constitutes the whole difference in tone
quality between the piano and the flute, the
violin and the trumpet, or any other instru-
ments. If you take up a violin and sound
the F one octave above the treble staff,
there are produced, in the course of a single
second, several thousand psychical states
which together make up the sensation of
pitch, fifty-five times as many psychical
states which together make up the sensa-
tion of tone quality, and an immense num-
ber of other psychical states which to-
gether make up the sensation of intensity.
These psychical states are not, in any
strict sense of the term, states of con-
sciousness ; for if they were to rise indi-
vidually into consciousness, the result
would be an immense multitude of sensa-
tions, and not a single apparently homo-
geneous sensation. There is no alterna-
tive but to conclude that in this case a
seemingly simple state of consciousness is
32 The Mystery of Evil
in reality compounded of an immense mul-
titude of sub-conscious psychical changes.
Now, what is thus true in the case of
musical sounds is equally true of all states
of consciousness whatever, both those that
we call intellectual and those that we call
emotional. All are highly compounded
aggregates of innumerable minute sub-con-
scious psychical pulsations, if we may so call
them. In every stream of human con-
sciousness that we call a soul each second
of time witnesses thousands of infinitely
small changes, in which one fleeting group
of pulsations in the primordial mind-stuff
gives place to another and a different but
equally fleeting group. Each group is un-
like its immediate predecessor. The absence
of difference would be continuance, and
continuance means stagnation, blankness,
negation, death. That ceaseless flutter,
in which the quintescence of conscious life
consists, is kept up by the perpetual intro-
duction of the relations of likeness and
unlikeness. Each one of the infinitesimal
The Mystery of Evil 33
changes is a little act of discrimination, a
recognition of a unit of feeling as either
like or unlike some other unit of feeling.
So in these depths of the soul's life the
arrangements and re-arrangements of units
go on, while on the surface the results
appear from moment to moment in sensa-
tions keen or dull, in perceptions clear or
vague, in judgments wise or foolish, in mem-
ories gay or sad, in sordid or lofty trains of
thought, in gusts of anger or thrills of love.
The whole fabric of human thought and
human emotion is built up out of minute
sub-conscious discriminations of likenesses
and unlikenesses, just as much as the ma-
terial world in all its beauty is built up out
of undulations among invisible molecules.
VI
Without the Element of Antagonism there
could he no Consciousness, and therefore
no World
E may now come up out of these
depths, accessible only to the plum-
met of psychologic analysis, and
move with somewhat freer gait in the re-
gion of common and familiar experiences.
It is an undeniable fact that we cannot
know anything whatever except as con-
trasted with something else. The contrast
may be bold and sharp, or it may dwindle
into a slight discrimination, but it must be
there. If the figures on your canvas are
indistinguishable from the background,
there is surely no picture to be seen. Some
element of unlikeness, some germ of antag-
onism, some chance for discrimination, is
essential to every act of knowing. I might
The Mystery of Evil 35
have illustrated this point concretely with-
out all the foregoing explanation, but I
have aimed at paying it the respect due to
its vast importance. I have wished to show
how the fact that we cannot know anything
whatever except as contrasted with some-
thing else is a fact that is deeply rooted in
the innermost structure of the human mind.
It is not a superficial but a fundamental
truth, that if there were no colour but red it
would be exactly the same thing as if there
were no colour at all. In a world of unqual-
ified redness, our state of mind with regard
to colour would be precisely like our state
of mind in the present world with regard to
the pressure of the atmosphere if we were
always to stay in one place. We are always
bearing up against the burden of this deep
aerial ocean, nearly fifteen pounds upon
every square inch of our bodies ; but until
we can get a chance to discriminate, as by
climbing a mountain, we are quite uncon-
scious of this heavy pressure. In the same
way, if we knew but one colour we should
36 The Mystery of Evil
know no colour. If our ears were to be
filled with one monotonous roar of Niagara,
unbroken by alien sounds, the effect upon
consciousness would be absolute silence.
If our palates had never come in contact
with any tasteful thing save sugar, we should
know no more of sweetness than of bitter-
ness. If we had never felt physical pain,
we could not recognize physical pleasure.
For want of the contrasted background its
pleasurableness would be non-existent. And
in just the same way it follows that without
knowing that which is morally evil we could
not possibly recognize that which is morally
good. Of these antagonist correlatives,
the one is unthinkable in the absence of
the other. In a sinless and painless world,
human conduct might possess more out-
ward marks of perfection than any saint
ever dreamed of ; but the moral element
would be lacking ; the goodness would have
no more significance in our conscious life
than that load of atmosphere which we are
always carrying about with us.
The Mystery of Evil 37
We are thus brought to a striking con-
clusion, the essential soundness of which
cannot be gainsaid. In a happy world there
must be sorrow and pain, and in a moral
world the knowledge of evil is indispensa-
ble. The stern necessity for this has been
proved to inhere in the innermost constitu-
tion of the human soul. It is part and par-
cel of the universe. To him who is disposed
to cavil at the world which God has in such
wise created, we may fairly put the ques-
tion whether the prospect of escape from
its ills would ever induce him to put off this
human consciousness, and accept in ex-
change some form of existence unknown
and inconceivable ! The alternative is clear :
on the one hand a world with sin and suf-
fering, on the other hand an unthinkable
world in which conscious life does not in-
volve contrast.
The profound truth of Aristotle's remark
is thus more forcibly than ever brought
home to us. We do not find that evil has
been interpolated into the universe from
38 The Mystery of Evil
without ; we find that, on the contrary, it
is an indispensable part of the dramatic
whole. God is the creator of evil, and from
the eternal scheme of things diabolism is
forever excluded. Ormuzd and Ahriman
have had their day and perished, along with
the doctrine of special creations and other
fancies of the untutored human mind.
From our present standpoint we may fairly
ask, What would have been the worth of
that primitive innocence portrayed in the
myth of the garden of Eden, had it ever been
realized in the life of men ? What would
have been the moral value or significance of
a race of human beings ignorant of sin, and
doing beneficent acts with no more con-
sciousness or volition than the deftly con-
trived machine that picks up raw material
at one end, and turns out some finished
product at the other ? Clearly, for strong
and resolute men and women an Eden
would be but a fool's paradise. How could
anything fit to be called c/iaracter have ever
been produced there ? But for tasting the
The Mystery of Evil 39
forbidden fruit, in what respect could man
have become a being of higher order than
the beasts of the field ? An interesting
question is this, for it leads us to consider
the genesis of the idea of moral evil in man.
VII
A Word of Caution
EFORE we enter upon this topic
a word of caution may be needed.
I do not wish the purpose of the
foregoing questions to be misunderstood.
The serial nature of human thinking and
speaking makes it impossible to express
one's thought on any great subject in a
solid block ; one must needs give it forth
in consecutive fragments, so that parts of
it run the risk of being lost upon the reader
or hearer, while other parts are made to
assume undue proportions. Moreover, there
are many minds that habitually catch at the
fragments of a thought, and never seize
it in the block ; and in such manner do
strange misconceptions arise. I never could
have dreamed, until taught by droll experi-
ence, that the foregoing allusions to the
The Mystery of Evil 41
garden of Eden could be understood as a
glorification of sin, and an invitation to my
fellow-men to come forth with me and be
wicked ! But even so it was, on one occa-
sion when I was trying, somewhat more
scantily than here, to state the present case.
In the midst of my endeavour to justify
the grand spirit of faith which our fathers
showed when from abysmal depths of afflic-
tion they never failed to cry that God doeth
all things well, I was suddenly interrupted
with queries as to just what percentage of
sin and crime I regarded as needful for the
moral equilibrium of the universe ; how
much did I propose to commit myself, how
much would I advise people in general to
commit, and just where would I have them
stop ! Others deemed it necessary to re-
mind me that there is already too much
suffering in the world, and we ought not
to seek to increase it ; that the difference
between right and wrong is of great practi-
cal importance ; and that if we try to treat
evil as good we shall make good no better
than evil.
4% The Mystery of Evil
When one has sufficiently recovered one's
gravity, it is permissible to reply to such
criticisms that the sharp antithesis between
good and evil is essential to every step of
my argument, which would entirely col-
lapse if the antagonism were for one mo-
ment disregarded. The quantity of suffer-
ing in the world is unquestionably so great
as to prompt us to do all in our power to
diminish it ; such we shall presently see
must be the case in a world that proceeds
through stages of evolution. When one
reverently assumes that it was through
some all-wise and holy purpose that sin was
permitted to come into the world, it ought
to be quite superfluous to add that the ful-
filment of any such purpose demands that
sin be not cherished, but suppressed. If
one seeks, as a philosopher, to explain and
justify God's wholesale use of death in the
general economy of the universe, is one
forsooth to be charged with praising mur-
der as a fine art and with seeking to found
a society of Thugs ?
VIII
The Hermit and the zAngel
HE simple-hearted monks of the
Middle Ages understood, in their
own quaint way, that God's meth-
ods of governing this universe are not al-
ways fit to be imitated by his finite crea-
tures. In one of the old stories that
furnished entertainment and instruction for
the cloister it is said that a hermit and an
angel once journeyed together. The angel
was in human form and garb, but had told
his companion the secret of his exalted
rank and nature. Coming at nightfall to a
humble house by the wayside, the two trav-
ellers craved shelter for the love of God.
A dainty supper and a soft, warm bed were
given them, and in the middle of the night
the angel arose and strangled the kind
host's infant son, who was quietly sleeping
44 The Mystery of Evil
in his cradle. The good hermit was para-
lyzed with amazement and horror, but dared
not speak a word. The next night the two
comrades were entertained at a fine man-
sion in the city, where the angel stole the
superb golden cup from which his host had
quaffed wine at dinner. Next day, while
crossing the bridge over a deep and rapid
stream, a pilgrim met the travellers. " Canst
thou show us, good father," said the angel,
" the way to the next town ? " As the
pilgrim turned to point it out, this terrible
being caught him by the shoulder and flung
him into the river to drown. " Verily,"
thought the poor hermit, " it is a devil that
I have here with me, and all his works are
evil ; " but fear held his tongue, and the
twain fared on their way till the sun had
set and snow began to fall, and the howling
of wolves was heard in the forest hard by.
Presently the bright light coming from a
cheerful window gave hope of a welcome
refuge ; but the surly master of the house
turned the travellers away from his door
The Mystery of Evil 45
with curses and foul gibes. " Yonder is
my pig-sty for dirty vagrants like you."
So they passed that night among the swine;
and in the morning the angel went to the
house and thanked the master for his hospi-
tality, and gave him for a keepsake (thrifty
angel !) the stolen goblet. Then did the
hermit's wrath and disgust overcome his
fears, and he loudly upbraided his com-
panion. " Get thee gone, wretched spirit ! "
he cried. " I will have no more of thee.
Thou pretendest to be a messenger from
heaven, yet thou requitest good with evil,
and evil with good ! " Then did the angel
look upon him with infinite compassion in
his eyes. " Listen," said he, " short-sighted
mortal. The birth of that infant son had
made the father covetous, breaking God's
commandments in order to heap up trea-
sures which the boy, if he had lived, would
have wasted in idle debauchery. By my
act, which seemed so cruel, I saved both
parent and child. The owner of the goblet
had once been abstemious, but was fast
46 The Mystery of Evil
becoming a sot ; the loss of his cup has set
him to thinking, and he will mend his ways.
The poor pilgrim, unknown to himself, was
about to commit a mortal sin, when I inter-
fered and sent his unsullied soul to heaven.
As for the wretch who drove God's chil-
dren from his door, he is, indeed, pleased
for the moment with the bauble I left in
his hands ; but hereafter he will burn in
hell." So spoke the angel ; and when he
had heard these words the hermit bowed
his venerable head and murmured, " For-
give me, Lord, that in my ignorance I mis-
judged thee."
I suspect that, with all our boasted sci-
ence, there is still much wisdom for us in
the humble childlike piety of the Gesta
Romanorum. To say that the ways of
Providence are inscrutable is still some-
thing more than an idle platitude, and
there still is room for the belief that, could
we raise the veil that enshrouds eternal
truth, we should see that behind nature's
cruelest works there are secret springs of
The Mystery of Evil 47
divinest tenderness and love. In this trust-
ful mood we may now return to the ques-
tion as to the genesis of the idea of moral
evil, and its close connection with man's
rise from a state of primeval innocence.
IX
Man's Rise from the Innocence of Brutebood
E have first to note that in various
ways the action of natural selec-
tion has been profoundly modified
in the course of the development of man-
kind from a race of inferior creatures. One
of the chief factors in the production of
man was the change that occurred in the
direction of the working of natural selec-
tion, whereby in the line of man's direct
ancestry the variations in intelligence came
to be seized upon, cherished, and enhanced,
to the comparative neglect of variations in
bodily structure. The physical differences
between man and ape are less important
than the physical differences between Afri-
can and South American apes. The latter
belong to different zoological families, but
the former do not. Zoologically, man is
The Mystery of Evil 49
simply one genus in the old-world family
of apes. Psychologically, he has travelled
so far from apes that the distance is
scarcely measurable. This transcendent
contrast is primarily due to the change in
the direction of the working of natural
selection. The consequences of this change
were numerous and far-reaching. One con-
sequence was that gradual lengthening of
the plastic period of infancy which enabled
man to became a progressive creature, and
organized the primeval semi-human horde
into definite family groups. I have else-
where expounded this point, and it is known
as my own especial contribution to the
theory of evolution.
Another associated consequence, which
here more closely concerns us, was the
partial stoppage of the process of natural
selection in remedying unfitness. A quo-
tation from Herbert Spencer will help us to
understand this partial stoppage : " As fast
as the faculties are multiplied, so fast does
it become possible for the several mem-
50 The Mystery of Evil
bers of a species to have various kinds of
superiorities over one another. While one
saves its life by higher speed, another does
the like by clearer vision, another by keener
scent, another by quicker hearing, another
by greater strength, another by unusual
power of enduring cold or hunger, another
by special sagacity, another by special timid-
ity, another by special courage. . . . Now
. . . each of these attributes, giving its pos-
sessor an extra chance of life, is likely to
be transmitted to posterity. But " it is not
nearly so likely to be increased by natural
selection. For " if those members of the
species which have but ordinary" or even
deficient shares of some valuable attribute
"nevertheless survive by virtue of other
superiorities which they severally possess,
then it is not easy to see how this particu-
lar attribute can be " enhanced in subse-
quent generations by natural selection. 1
These considerations apply especially to
the human race with its multitudinous capa-
i Biology, i. 454.
The Mystery of Evil % 5/
cities, and I can better explain the case by
a crude and imperfect illustration than by a
detailed and elaborate statement. If an
individual antelope falls below the average
of the herd in speed, he is sure to become
food for lions, and thus the high average of
speed in the herd is maintained by natural
selection. But if an individual man becomes
a drunkard, though his capabilities be ever
so much curtailed by this vice, yet the
variety of human faculty furnishes so many
hooks with which to keep one's hold upon
life that he may sin long and flagrantly
without perishing ; and if the drunkard sur-
vives, the action of natural selection in weed-
ing out drunkenness is checked. There is
thus a wide interval between the highest
and lowest degrees of completeness m liv-
ing that are compatible with maintenance
of life. Mankind has so many other quali-
ties beside the bad ones, which enable it to
subsist and achieve progress in spite of
them, that natural selection — which always
works* through death — cannot come into
play.
52 The Mystery of Evil
Now it is because of this interval between
the highest and lowest degrees of complete-
ness of living that are compatible with the
mere maintenance of life, that men can be
distinguished as morally bad or morally
good. In inferior animals, where there is
no such interval, there is no developed mo-
rality or conscience, though in a few of the
higher ones there are the germs of these
things. Morality comes upon the scene
when there is an alternative offered of lead-
ing better lives or worse lives. And just
as up to this point the actions of the fore-
fathers of mankind have been determined
by the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of
pain, so now they begin to be practically
determined by the pursuit of goodness and
avoidance of evil. This rise from a bes-
tial to a moral plane of existence involves
the acquirement of the knowledge of good
and evil. Conscience is generated to play a
part analogous to that played by the sense
of pain in the lower stages of life, and to
keep us from wrong doing. To the mere
The Mystery of Evil 53
love of life, which is the conservative force
that keeps the whole animal world in exist-
ence, there now comes gradually to be super-
added the feeling of religious aspiration,
which is nothing more nor less than the
yearning after the highest possible com-
pleteness of spiritual life. In the lower
stages of human development this religious
aspiration has as yet but an embryonic ex-
istence, and moral obligations are still but
imperfectly recognized. It is only after
long ages of social discipline, fraught with
cruel afflictions and grinding misery, that
the moral law becomes dominant and reli-
gious aspiration intense and abiding in the
soul. When such a stage is reached, we
have at last in man a creature different in
kind from his predecessors, and fit for an
everlasting life of progress, for a closer and
closer communion with God in beatitude
that shall endure.
X
The Relativity of Evil
S we survey the course of this won-
derful evolution, it begins to become
manifest that moral evil is simply
the characteristic of the lower state of liv-
ing as looked at from the higher state. Its
existence is purely relative, yet it is pro-
foundly real, and in a process of perpetual
spiritual evolution its presence in some hide-
ous form throughout a long series of upward
stages is indispensable. Its absence would
mean stagnation, quiescence, unprogressive-
ness. For the moment we exercise con-
scious choice between one course of action
and another, we recognize the difference
between better and worse, we foreshadow
the whole grand contrast between good and
bad. In the process of spiritual evolution,
therefore, evil must needs be present. But
The Mystery of Evil 55
the nature of evolution also requires that it
should be evanescent. In the higher stages
that which is worse than the best need no
longer be«positively bad. After the nature
of that which the upward-striving soul ab-
hors has been forever impressed upon it,
amid the long vicissitudes of its pilgrimage
through the dark realms of sin and expia-
tion, it is at length equipped for its final
sojourn
" In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love."
From the general analogies furnished in the
process of evolution, we are entitled to hope
that, as it approaches its goal and man
comes nearer to God, the fact of evil will
lapse into a mere memory, in which the
shadowed past shall serve as a background
for the realized glory of the present.
Thus we have arrived at the goal of my
argument. We can at least begin to realize
distinctly that unless our eyes had been
opened at some time, so that we might
come to know the good and the evil, we
should never have become fashioned in
$6 The Mystery of Evil
God's image. We should have been the
denizens of a world of puppets, where nei-
ther morality nor religion could have found
place or meaning. The mystery of evil
remains a mystery still, but it is no longer
a harsh dissonance such as greeted the
poet's ear when the doors of hell were
thrown open ; for we see that this mystery
belongs among the profound harmonies in
God's creation. This reflection may have
in it something that is consoling as we look
forth upon the ills of the world. Many are
the pains of life, and the struggle with
wickedness is hard ; its course is marked
with sorrow and tears. But assuredly its
deep impress upon the human soul is the
indispensable background against which
shall be set hereafter the eternal joys of
heaven !
THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE
AND SELF-SACRIFICE
O abbondante grazia, ond' io presunsi
Ficcar lo viso per la luce eterna
Tanto, che la veduta vi consunsi !
Nel suo profondo vidi che s' interna,
Legato con amore in un volume,
Cib che per 1' universo si squaderna.
Dante, Paradiso, xxxiii. 82.
The Summer Field, and what it tells us
HERE are few sights in Nature
more restful to the soul than a
daisied field in June. Whether it
be at the dewy hour of sunrise, with blithe
matin songs still echoing among the tree-
tops, or while the luxuriant splendour of
noontide fills the delicate tints of the early
foliage with a pure glory of light, or in that
more pensive time when long shadows are
thrown eastward and the fresh breath of
the sea is felt, or even under the solemn
mantle of darkness, when all forms have
faded from sight and the night air is musi-
cal with the murmurs of innumerable in-
sects, amid all the varying moods through
which the daily cycle runs, the abiding
sense is of unalloyed happiness, the pro-
60 Love and Self-Sacrifice
found tranquillity of mind and heart that
nothing ever brings save the contemplation
of perfect beauty. One's thought is carried
back for the moment to that morning of
the world when God looked upon his work
and saw that it was good. If in the infinite
and eternal Creative Energy one might
imagine some inherent impulse perpetually
urging toward fresh creation, what could it
be more likely to be than the divine con-
tentment in giving objective existence to
the boundless and subtle harmonies where-
of our world is made ? That it is a world
of perfect harmony and unsullied beauty,
who can doubt as he strolls through this
summer field ? As our thought plays lightly
with its sights and sounds, there is nothing
but gladness in the laugh of the bobolink ;
the thrush's tender note tells only of the
sweet domestic companionship of the nest ;
creeping and winged things emerging from
their grubs fill us with the sense of abound-
ing life; and the myriad buttercups, hal-
lowed with vague memories of June days in
Love and Self-Sacrifice 61
childhood, lose none of their charm in re-
minding us of the profound sympathy and
mutual dependence in which the worlds of
flowers and insects have grown up. The
blades of waving grass, the fluttering leaves
upon the lilac bush, appeal to us with rare
fascination ; for the green stuff that fills
their cellular tissues, and the tissues of all
green things that grow, is the world's great
inimitable worker of wonders ; its marvel-
lous alchemy takes dead matter and breathes
into it the breath of life. But for that ma-
gician chlorophyll, conjuring with sunbeams,
such things as animal life and conscious in-
telligence would be impossible ; there would
be no problems of creation, nor philosopher
to speculate upon them. Thus the delight
that sense impression gives, as we wander
among buttercups and daisies, becomes
deepened into gratitude and veneration, till
we quite understand how the rejuvenescence
of Nature should in all ages have aroused
men to acts of worship, and should call forth
from modern masters of music, the most
62 Love and Self-Sacrifice
religious of the arts of expression, outbursts
of sublimest song.
And yet we need but come a little closer
to the facts to find them apparently telling
us a very different story. The moment we
penetrate below the superficial aspect of
things the scene is changed. In the folk-
lore of Ireland there is a widespread belief
in a fairyland of eternal hope and bright-
ness and youth situated a little way below the
roots of the grass. From that land of Tir
nan Og, as the peasants call it, the secret
springs of life shoot forth their scions in
this visible world, and thither a few favoured
mortals have now and then found their way.
It is into no blest country of Tir nan Og
that our stern science leads us, but into a
scene of ugliness and hatred, strife and
massacre. Macaulay tells of the battlefield
of Neerwinden, that the next summer after
that frightful slaughter the whole country-
side was densely covered with scarlet pop-
pies, which people beheld with awe as a
token of wrath in heaven over the deeds
Love and Self-Sacrifice 63
wrought on earth by human passions. Any
summer field, though mantled in softest
green, is the scene of butchery as wholesale
as that of Neerwinden and far more ruth-
less. The life of its countless tiny denizens
is one of unceasing toil, of crowding and
jostling, where the weaker fall unpitied by
the way, of starvation from hunger and
cold, of robbery utterly shameless and mur-
der utterly cruel. That green sward in
taking possession of its territory has exter-
minated scores of flowering plants of the
sort that human economics and aesthetics
stigmatize as weeds ; nor do the blades of
the victorious army dwell side by side in
amity, but in their eagerness to dally with
the sunbeams thrust aside and supplant
one another without the smallest compunc-
tion. Of the crawling insects and those
that hum through the air, with the quaint
snail, the burrowing worm, the bloated toad,
scarce one in a hundred but succumbs to
the buffets of adverse fortune before it has
achieved maturity and left offspring to re-
64 Love and Self-Sacrifice
place it. The early bird, who went forth in
quest of the worm, was lucky if at the close
of a day as full of strife and peril as ever
knight-errant encountered, he did not him-
self serve as a meal for some giant foe in the
gloaming. When we think of the hawk's
talons buried in the breast of the wren,
while the relentless beak tears the little
wings from the quivering, bleeding body,
our mood toward Nature is changed, and we
feel like recoiling from a world in which
such black injustice, such savage disregard
for others, is part of the general scheme.
II
Seeming Wastefulness of the Cosmic Process
UT as we look still further into the
matter, our mood is changed once
more. We find that this hideous
hatred and strife, this wholesale famine and
death, furnish the indispensable conditions
for the evolution of higher and higher types
of life. Nay more, but for the pitiless de-
struction of all individuals that fall short of
a certain degree of fitness to the circum-
stances of life into which they are born, the
type would inevitably degenerate, the life
would become lower and meaner in kind.
Increase in richness, variety, complexity of
life is gained only by the selection of varia-
tions above or beyond a certain mean, and
the prompt execution of a death sentence
upon all the rest. The principle of natural
selection is in one respect intensely Calvin-
66 Love and Self -Sacrifice
istic ; it elects the one and damns the ninety
and nine. In these processes of Nature
there is nothing that savours of communis-
tic equality ; but "to him that hath shall be
given, and from him that hath not shall
be taken away even that which he hath."
Through this selection of a favoured few, a
higher type of life — or at all events a type
in which there is more life — is attained in
many cases, but not always. Evolution and
progress are not synonymous terms. The
survival of the fittest is not always a sur-
vival of the best or of the most highly
organized. The environment is sometimes
such that increase of fitness me.ans degener-
ation of type, and the animal and vegetable
worlds show many instances of degenera-
tion. One brilliant instance is that which
has preserved the clue to the remote ances-
try of the vertebrate type. The molluscoid
ascidian, rooted polyp-like on the sea beach
in shallow water, has an embryonic history
which shows that its ancestors had once
seen better days, when they darted to and
Love and Self-Sacrifice 67
fro, fishlike, through the waves, with the pro-
phecy of a vertebrate skeleton within them.
This is a case of marked degeneration.
More often survival of the fittest simply
preserves the type unchanged through long
periods of time. But now and then under
favourable circumstances it raises the type.
At all events, whenever the type is raised,
it is through survival of the fittest, implying
destruction of all save the fittest.
This last statement is probably true of
all plants and of all animals except that
as applied to the human race it needs some
transcendently important qualifications
which students of evolution are very apt to
neglect. I shall by and by point out these
qualifications. At present we may note
that the development of civilization, on its
political side, has been a stupendous strug-
gle for life, wherein the possession of cer-
tain physical and mental attributes has
enabled some tribes or nations to prevail
over others, and to subject or exterminate
them. On its industrial side the struggle
68 Love and Self-Sacrifice
has been no less fierce ; the evolution of
higher efficiency through merciless com-
petition is a matter of common knowledge.
Alike in the occupations of war and in those
of peace, superior capacity has thriven upon
victories in which small heed has been paid
to the wishes or the welfare of the van-
quished. In human history perhaps no re-
lation has been more persistently repeated
than that of the hawk and the wren. The
aggression has usually been defended as
in the interests of higher civilization, and
in the majority of cases the defence has
been sustained by the facts. It has indeed
very commonly been true that the survival
of the strongest is the survival of the
fittest.
Such considerations affect our mood to-
ward Nature in a way that is somewhat
bewildering. On the one hand, as we re-
cognize in the universal strife and slaughter
a stern discipline through which the stand-
ard of animate existence is raised and the
life of creatures variously enriched, we be-
Love and Self -Sacrifice 69
come to some extent reconciled to the facts.
Assuming, as we all do, that the attainment
of higher life is in itself desirable, our minds
cannot remain utterly inhospitable towards
things, however odious in 'themselves, that
help toward the desirable end. Since we
cannot rid the world of them, we acquiesce
in their existence as part of the machinery
of God's providence, the intricacies of which
our finite minds cannot hope to unravel.
On the other hand, a thought is likely to
arise which in days gone by we should have
striven to suppress as too impious for utter-
ance ; but it is wiser to let such thoughts
find full expression, for only thus can we be
sure of understanding the kind of problem
we are trying to solve. Is not, then, this
method of Nature, which achieves progress
only through misery and death, an exceed-
ingly brutal and clumsy method ? Life, one
would think, must be dear to the everlast-
ing Giver of life, yet how cheap it seems to
be held in the general scheme of things !
In order that some race of moths may at-
jo Love and Self-Sacrifice
tain a certain fantastic contour and marking:
of their wings, untold thousands of moths
are doomed to perish prematurely. Instead
of making the desirable object once for all,
the method of Nature is to make something
else and reject it, and so on through count-
less ages, till by slow approximations the
creative thought is realized. Nature is
often called thrifty, yet could anything be
more prodigal or more cynical than the
waste of individual lives? Does it not re-
mind one of Charles Lamb's famous story
of the Chinaman whose house accidentally
burned down and roasted a pig, whereupon
the dainty meat was tasted and its fame
spread abroad until epicures all over China
were to be seen carrying home pigs and
forthwith setting fire to their houses ? We
need but add that the custom thus estab-
lished lasted for centuries, during which
every dinner of pig involved the sacrifice of
a homestead, and we seem to have a close
parody upon the wastefulness of Nature, or
of what is otherwise called in these days
Love and Self-Sacrifice yi
the Cosmic Process. Upon such a view
as this the Cosmic Process appears in a
high degree unintelligent, not to say im-
moral.
Ill
Caliban's Philosophy
OLYTHEISM easily found a place
,, for such views as these, inasmuch
as it could explain the unseemly
aspects of Nature offhand by a reference to
malevolent deities. With Browning's Cali-
ban, in his meditations upon Setebos, that
god whom he conceived in his own image,
the recklessness of Nature is mockery en-
gendered half in spite, half in mere wanton-
ness. Setebos, he says,
" is strong and Lord,
Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea ;
Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty -first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off ;
Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
And two worms he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time, I do : So He."
Love and Self-Sacrifice 73
Such is the kind of philosophy that com-
mends itself to the beastly Caliban, as he
sprawls in the mire with small eft things
creeping down his back. His half-fledged
mind can conceive no higher principle of
action — nothing more artistic, nothing
more masterful — than wanton mockery,
and naturally he attributes it to his God ;
it is for him a sufficient explanation of that
little fragment of the Cosmic Process with
which he comes into contact.
IV
Can it he that the Cosmic Process has no
Relation to Moral Ends?
UT as long as we confine our at-
tention to the universal struggle
for life and the survival of the fit-
test, without certain qualifications presently
to be mentioned, it is difficult for the most
profound intelligence to arrive at conclu-
sions much more satisfactory than Cali-
ban's. If the spirit shown in Nature's
works as thus contemplated is not one of
wanton mockery, it seems at any rate to be
a spirit of stolid indifference. It indicates
a Blind Force rather than a Beneficent
Wisdom at the source of things. It is in
some such mood as this that Huxley tells
us, in his famous address delivered at Ox-
ford, in 1893, that there is no sanction for
morality in the Cosmic Process. " Men in
Love and Self-Sacrifice y$
society," he says, "are undoubtedly subject
to the cosmic process. As among other
animals, multiplication goes on without ces-
sation and involves severe competition for
the means of support. The struggle for
existence tends to eliminate those less
fitted to adapt themselves to the circum-
stances of their existence. The strongest,
the most self-assertive, tend to tread down
the weaker. . . . Social progress means a
checking of the cosmic process at every
step and the substitution for it of another,
which may be called the ethical process;
the end of which is not the survival of
those who may happen to be the fittest,
in respect of the whole of the conditions
which exist, but of those who are ethically
the best." Again, says Huxley, "let us
understand, once for all, that the ethical
progress of society depends, not on imi-
tating the cosmic process, still less in run-
ning away from it, but in combating it."
And again he tells us that while the moral
sentiments have undoubtedly been evolved,
J6 Love and Self-Sacrifice
yet since " the immoral sentiments have no
less been evolved, there is so far as much
natural sanction for the one as for the
other." And yet again, " the cosmic pro-
cess has no sort of relation to moral ends."
When these statements were first made
they were received with surprise, and they
have since called forth much comment, for
they sound like a retreat from the position
which an evolutionist is expected to hold.
They distinctly assert a breach of continu-
ity between evolution in general and the
evolution of Man in particular ; and thus
they have carried joy to the hearts of
sundry theologians, of the sort that like to
regard Man as an infringer upon Nature.
If there is no natural sanction for morality,
then the sanction must be supernatural,
and forthwith such theologians greet Hux-
ley as an ally !
They are mistaken, however. Huxley
does not really mean to assert any such
breach of continuity as is here suggested.
In a footnote to his printed address he
Love and Self-Sacrifice 77
makes a qualification which really cancels
the group of statements I have quoted.
"Of course," says Huxley, "strictly speak-
ing, social life and the ethical process, in
virtue of which it advances toward perfec-
tion, are part and parcel of the general pro-
cess of evolution." Of course they are;
and of course the general process of evo-
lution is the cosmic process, it is Nature's
way of doing things. But when my dear
Huxley a moment ago was saying that the
" cosmic process has no sort of relation to
moral ends," he was using the phrase in a
more restricted sense ; he was using it as
equivalent to what Darwin called " natural
selection," what Spencer called "survival of
the fittest," which is only one part of the
cosmic process. Now most assuredly sur-
vival of the fittest, as such, has no sort of
relation to moral ends. Beauty and ugli-
ness, virtue and vice, are all alike to it.
Side by side with the exquisite rose flour-
ishes the hideous tarantula, and in too many
cases the villain's chances of livelihood are
y8 Love and Self -Sacrifice
better than the saints. As I said a while
ago, if we confine our attention to the
survival of the fittest in the struggle for
existence, we are not likely to arrive at
conclusions much more satisfactory than
Caliban's
" As it likes me each time, I do : So He."
In such a universe we may look in vain
for any sanction for morality, any justifica-
tion for love and self-sacrifice ; we find no
hope in it, no consolation ; there is not
even dignity in it, nothing whatever but
resistless all-producing and all-consuming
energy.
Such a universe, however, is not the one
in which we live. In the cosmic process of
evolution, whereof our individual lives are
part and parcel, there are other agencies
at work besides natural selection, and the
story of the struggle for existence is far
from being the whole story. I have thus
far been merely stating difficulties ; it is
now time to point out the direction in
which we are to look for a solution of
Love and Self-Sacrifice jg
them. I think it can be shown that the
principles of morality have their roots in
the deepest foundations of the universe,
that the cosmic process is ethical in the
profoundest sense, that in that far-off morn-
ing of the world, when the stars sang to-
gether and the sons of God shouted for
joy, the beauty of self-sacrifice and disin-
terested love formed the chief burden of
the mighty theme.
First Stages in the Genesis of Man
ET us begin by drawing a correct
though slight outline sketch of
what the cosmic process of evolu-
tion has been. It is not strange that when
biologists speak of evolution they should
often or usually have in mind simply the
modifications wrought in plants and animals
by means of natural selection. For it was
by calling attention to such modifications
that Darwin discovered a true cause of the
origin of species by physiological descent
from allied species. Thus was demon-
strated the fact of evolution in its most
important province ; men of science were
convinced that the higher forms of life are
derived from lower forms, and the old no-
tion of special creations was exploded once
and forever. This was a great scientific
Love and Self-Sacrifice 81
achievement, one of the greatest known to
history, and it is therefore not strange that
language should often be employed as if
Evolutionism and Darwinism were synony-
mous. Yet not only are there extensive
regions in the doctrine of evolution about
which Darwin knew very little, but even as
regards the genesis of species his theory
was never developed in his own hands so
far as to account satisfactorily for the gen-
esis of man.
It must be borne in mind that while the
natural selection of physical variations will
go far toward explaining the characteristics
of all the plants and all the beasts in the
world, it remains powerless to account for
the existence of man. Natural selection
of physical variations might go on for a
dozen eternities without any other visible
result than new forms of plant and beast in
endless and meaningless succession. The
physical variations by which man is dis-
tinguished from apes are not great. His
physical relationship with the ape is closer
82 Love and Self-Sacrifice
than that between cat and dog, which be-
long to different families of the same order ;
it is more like that between cat and leopard,
or between dog and fox, different genera in
the same family. But the moment we con-
sider the minds of man and ape, the gap
between the two is immeasurable. Mr.
Mivart has truly said that, with regard to
their total value in nature, the difference
between man and ape transcends the dif-
ference between ape and blade of grass. I
should be disposed to go further and say,
that while for zoological man you can hardly
erect a distinct family from that of the
chimpanzee and orang, on the other hand,
for psychological man you must erect a dis-
tinct kingdom ; nay, you must even dichot-
omize the universe, putting Man on one
side and all things else on the other. How
can this overwhelming contrast between
psychical and physical difference be ac-
counted for? The clue was furnished by
Alfred Russel Wallace, the illustrious co-
discoverer of natural selection. Wallace
Love and Self -Sacrifice 83
saw that along with the general develop-
ment of mammalian intelligence a point
must have been reached in the history of
one of the primates, when variations of in-
telligence were more profitable to him than
variations in body. From that time forth
that primate's intelligence went on by slow
increments acquiring new capacity, while
his body changed but little. When once
he could strike fire, and chip a flint, and
use a club, and strip off the bear's hide to
cover himself, there was clearly no further
use in thickening his own hide, or length-
ening and sharpening his claws. Natural
selection is the keenest capitalist in the
universe; she never loses an instant in
seizing the most profitable place for invest-
ment, and her judgment is never at fault.
Forthwith, for a million years or more she
invested all her capital in the psychical
variations of this favoured primate, making
little change in his body except so far as to
aid in the general result, until by and by
something like human intelligence of a low
84 Love and Self-Sacrifice
grade, like that of the Australian or the
Andaman islander, was achieved. The
genesis of humanity was by no means yet
completed, but an enormous gulf had been
crossed.
After throwing out this luminous sugges-
tion Mr. Wallace never followed it up as it
admitted and deserved. It is too much to
expect one man to do everything, and his
splendid studies in the geographical distri-
bution of organisms may well have left him
little time for work in this direction. Who
can fail to see that the selection of psy-
chical variations, to the comparative neg-
lect of physical variations, was the opening
of a new and greater act in the drama of
creation? Since that new departure the
Creator's highest work has consisted not
in bringing forth new types of body, but in
expanding and perfecting the psychical at-
tributes of the one creature in whose life
those attributes have begun to acquire pre-
dominance. Along this human line of as-
cent there is no occasion for any further
Love and Self-Sacrifice 85
genesis of species, all future progress must
continue to be not zoological, but psycho-
logical, organic evolution gives place to
civilization. Thus in the long series of
organic beings Man is the last ; the cosmic
process, having once evolved this master-
piece, could thenceforth do nothing better
than to perfect him.
VI
The Central Fact in the Genesis of Man
HIS conclusion, which follows irre-
sistibly from Wallace's theorem,
that in the genesis of Humanity-
natural selection began to follow a new
path, already throws a light of promise over
our whole subject, like the rosy dawn of a
June morning. But the explanation of the
genesis of Humanity is still far from com-
plete. If we compare man with any of the
higher mammals, such as dogs and horses
and apes, we are struck with several points
of difference : first, the greater progressive-
ness of man, the widening of the interval
by which one generation may vary from its
predecessor ; secondly, the definite grouping
in societies based on more or less perma-
nent family relationships, instead of the in-
definite grouping in miscellaneous herds or
Love and Self-Sacrifice 8y
packs ; thirdly, the possession of articulate
speech ; fourthly, the enormous increase in
the duration of infancy, or the period when
parental care is needed. Twenty-four years
ago, in a course of lectures given yonder in
Holden Chapel, I showed that the circum-
stance last named is the fundamental one,
and the others are derivative. It is the
prolonged infancy that has caused the pro-
gressiveness and the grouping into definite
societies, while the development of language
was a consequence of the increasing intelli-
gence and sociality thus caused. In the
genesis of Humanity the central fact has
been the increased duration of infancy.
Now, can we assign for that increased dura-
tion an adequate cause ? I think we can.
The increase of intelligence is itself such a
cause. A glance at the animal kingdom
shows us no such thing as infancy among
the lower orders. It is with warm-blooded
birds and mammals that the phenomena
of infancy and the correlative parental care
really begin.
VII
The Chief Cause of Man's lengthened
Infancy
[j|HE reason for this is that any crea-
ture's ability to perceive and to
act depends upon the registration
of experiences in his nerve-centres. It is
either individual or ancestral experience that
is thus registered ; or, strictly speaking, it
is both. It is of the first importance that
this point should be clearly understood, and
therefore a few words of elementary ex-
planation will not be superfluous.
When you learn to play the piano, you
gradually establish innumerable associations
between printed groups of notes and the
corresponding keys on the key-board, and
you also train the fingers to execute a vast
number of rapid and complicated motions.
The process is full of difficulty, and involves
Love and Self-Sacrifice 89
endless repetition. After some years per-
haps you can play at sight and with almost
automatic ease a polonaise of Liszt or a
ballad of Chopin. Now this result is pos-
sible only because of a bodily change which
has taken place in you. Countless molec-
ular alterations have been wrought in the
structure of sundry nerves and muscles,
especially in the gray matter of sundry gan-
glia, or nerve-centres. Every ganglion con-
cerned in the needful adjustments of eyes
and fingers and wrists, or in the perception
of musical sounds, has undergone a change
more or less profound. The nature of the
change is largely a matter of speculation ;
but that point need not in any way concern
us. It is enough for us to know that there
is such a change, and that it is a registra-
tion of experiences. The pianist has regis-
tered in the intimate structure of his ner-
vous system a world of experiences entirely
foreign to persons unfamiliar with the piano ;
and upon this registration his capacity de-
pends.
go Love and Self-Sacrifice
Now the same explanation applies to all
bodily movements whatever, whether com-
plicated or simple. In writing, in walking,
in talking, we are making use of nervous
registrations that have been brought about
by an accumulation of experiences. To pick
up a pencil from the table may seem a very
simple act, yet a baby cannot do it. It has
been made possible only by the education
of the eyes, of the muscles that move the
eyes, of the arm and hand, and of the nerve-
centres that coordinate one group of move-
ments with another. All this multiform
education has consisted in a gradual regis-
tration of experiences. In like manner all
the actions of man upon the world about
him are made up of movements, and every
such movement becomes possible only when
a registration is effected in sundry nerve-
centres.
But this is not the whole story. The
case is undoubtedly the same with those
visceral movements, involuntary and in
great part unconscious, which sustain life ;
Love and Self -Sacrifice 91
the beating of the heart, the expansion and
contraction of the lungs, the slight changes
of calibre in the blood-vessels, even the
movements of secretion that take place in
glands. All these actions are governed by
nerves, and these nerves have had to be
educated to their work. This education has
been a registration of experiences chiefly
ancestral, throughout an enormous past,
practically since the beginnings of verte-
brate life.
With the earlier and simpler forms of ani-
mal existence these visceral movements are
the only ones, or almost the only ones, that
have to be made. Presently the movements
of limbs and sense organs come to be added,
and as we rise in the animal scale, these
movements come to be endlessly various and
complex, and by and by implicate the ner-
vous system more and more deeply in com-
plex acts of perception, memory, reasoning,
and volition. Obviously, therefore, in the
development of the individual organism
the demands of the nervous system upon
Q2 Love and Self-Sacrifice
the vital energies concerned in growth must
come to be of paramount importance, and
in providing for them the entire embryonic
life must be most profoundly and variously
affected. Though we may be unable to
follow the processes in detail, the truth of
this general statement is plain and undeni-
able.
I say, then, that when a creature's intelli-
gence is low, and its experience very meagre,
consisting of a few simple perceptions and
acts that occur throughout life with mono-
tonous regularity, all the registration of this
experience gets effected in the nerve-centres
of its offspring before birth, and they come
into the world fully equipped for the battle
of life, like the snapping turtle, which snaps
with decisive vigour as soon as it emerges
from the egg. Nothing is left plastic to be
finished after birth, and so the life of each
generation is almost an exact repetition of
its predecessor. But when a creature's in-
telligence is high, and its experience varied
and complicated, the registration of all this
Love and Self -Sacrifice 93
experience in the nerve-centres of its off-
spring does not get accomplished before
birth. There is not time enough. The
most important registrations, such as those
needed for breathing and swallowing and
other indispensable acts, are fully effected ;
others, such as those needed for handling
and walking, are but partially effected ;
others, such as those involved in the recog-
nition of creatures not important as ene-
mies or prey, are left still further from
completion. Much is left to be done by
individual experience after birth. The ani-
mal, when first born, is a baby dependent
upon its mother's care. At the same time
its intelligence is far more plastic, and it
remains far more teachable, than the lower
animal that has no babyhood. Dogs and
horses, lions and elephants, often increase
in sagacity until late in life ; and so do
apes, which, along with a higher intelligence
than any other dumb animals, have a much
longer babyhood.
We are now prepared to appreciate the
g4 Love and Self -Sacrifice
marvellous beauty of Nature's work in bring-
ing Man upon the scene. Nowhere is there
any breach of continuity in the cosmic pro-
cess. First we have natural selection at
work throughout the organic world, bring-
ing forth millions of species of plant and
animal, seizing upon every advantage, phy-
sical or mental, that enables any species
to survive in the universal struggle. So
far as any outward observer, back in the
Cretaceous or early Eocene periods, could
surmise, this sort of confusion might go on
forever. But all at once, perhaps some-
where in the upper Eocene or lower Mio-
cene, it appears that among the primates,
a newly developing family already distin-
guished for prehensile capabilities, one
genus is beginning to sustain itself more
by mental craft and shiftiness than by any
r physical characteristic. Forthwith does
natural selection seize upon any and every
advantageous variation in this craft and
shiftiness, until this favoured genus of pri-
mates, this Homo Alahis, or speechless
Love and Self-Sacrifice 95
man, as we may call him, becomes pre-
eminent for sagacity, as the mammoth is
preeminent for bulk, or the giraffe for
length of neck.
VIII
Some of its Effects
N doing this, natural selection has
unlocked a door and let in a new-
set of causal agencies. As Homo
Alalus grows in intelligence and variety of
experience, his helpless babyhood becomes
gradually prolonged, and passes not into
sudden maturity, but into a more or less
plastic intermediate period of youth. In-
dividual experience, as contrasted with an-
cestral experience, counts for much more
than ever before in shaping his actions, and
thus he begins to become progressive. He
can learn many more new ways of doing
things in a hundred thousand years than
any other creature could have done in a
much longer time. Thus the rate of pro-
gress is enhanced, the increasing intelli-
gence of Homo Alalus further lengthens
Love and Self-Sacrifice gj
his plastic period of life, and this in turn
further increases his intelligence and em-
phasizes his individuality. The evidence is
abundant that Homo Alalus, like his simian
cousins, was a gregarious creature, and it
is not difficult to see how, with increasing
intelligence, the gestures and grunts used
in the horde for signalling must come to be
clothed with added associations of meaning,
must gradually become generalized as signs
of conceptions. This invention of spoken
language, the first invention of nascent
humanity, remains to this day its most
fruitful invention. Henceforth ancestral
experience could not simply be transmitted
through its inheritable impress upon the
nervous system, but its facts and lessons
could become external materials and instru-
ments of education. Then the children of
Homo Alalus, no longer speechless, began
to accumulate a fund of tradition, which in
the fulness of time was to bloom forth in
history and poetry, in science and theology.
From the outset the acquisition of speech
g8 Love and Self-Sacrifice
must greatly have increased the rate of
progress, and enhanced the rudimentary
sociality.
With the lengthening of infancy the pe-
riod of maternal help and watchfulness
must have lengthened in correspondence.
Natural selection must keep those two
things nicely balanced, or the species would
soon become extinct. But Homo Alalus
had not only a mother, but brethren and
sisters ; and when the period of infancy be-
came sufficiently long, there were a series
of Homunculi Alali, the eldest of whom
still needed more or less care while the
third and the fourth were arriving upon
the scene. In this way the sentiment of
maternity became abiding. The cow has
strong feelings of maternal affection for
periods of a few weeks at a time, but lapses
into indifference and probably cannot dis-
tinguish her grown-up calves as sustaining
any nearer relation to herself than other
members of the herd. But Femina Alala,
with her vastly enlarged intelligence, is
Love and Self-Sacrifice 99
called upon for the exercise of maternal
affection until it becomes a permanent
part of her nature. In the same group of
circumstances begins the permanency of
the marital relation. The warrior -hunter
grows accustomed to defending the same
wife and children and to helping them in
securing food. Cases of what we may term
wedlock, arising in this way, occur sporad-
ically among apes ; its thorough establish-
ment, however, was not achieved until after
the genesis of Humanity had been com-
pleted in most other respects. The elabo-
rate researches of Westermarck have proved
that permanent marriage exists even among
savages ; it did not prevail, however, until
the advanced stage of culture represented
by the Aztecs in aboriginal America and
the Neolithic peoples of ancient Europe.
As for strict monogamy, it is a com-
paratively late achievement of civilization.
What the increased and multiplied dura-
tion of infancy at first accomplished was
the transformation of miscellaneous hordes
ioo Love and Self-Sacrifice
of Homines Alali into organized clans re-
cognizing kinship through the mother, as
exemplified among nearly all American
Indians when observed by Europeans.
Thus by gradual stages we have passed
from four-footed existence into Human So-
ciety, and once more I would emphasize
the fact that nowhere do we find any breach
of continuity, but one factor sets another
in operation, which in turn reacts upon the
first, and so on in a marvellously harmo-
nious consensus. Surely if there is any-
where in the universe a story matchless for
its romantic interest, it is the story of the
genesis of Man, now that we are at length
beginning to be able to decipher it. We
see that there is a good deal more in it
than mere natural selection. At bottom,
indeed, it is all a process of survival of the
fittest, but the secondary agencies we have
been considering have brought us to a point
where our conception of the Struggle for
Life must be enlarged. Out of the mani-
fold compounding and recompounding of
Love and Self -Sacrifice 101
primordial clans have come the nations of
mankind in various degrees of civilization,
but already in the clan we find the ethical
process at work. The clan has a code of
morals well adapted to the conditions amid
which it exists. There is an ethical senti-
ment in the clan ; its members have duties
toward it ; it punishes sundry acts even
with death, and rewards or extols sundry
other acts. We are, in short, in an ethical
atmosphere, crude and stifling, doubtless,
as compared with that of a modern Chris-
tian homestead, but still unquestionably
ethical.
IX
Origin of Moral Ideas and Sentiments
OW, here at last, in encountering
the ethical process at work, have
we detected a breach of continu-
ity ? Has the moral sentiment been flung
in from outside, or is it a natural result of
the cosmic process we have been sketch-
ing ? Clearly it is the latter. There has
been no breach of continuity. When the
prolongation of infancy produced the clan,
there naturally arose reciprocal necessities
of behaviour among the members of the
clan, its mothers and children, its hunters
and warriors. If such reciprocal necessi-
ties were to be disregarded the clan would
dissolve, and dissolution would be general
destruction. For, bear in mind, the clan,
when once evolved, becomes the unit whose
preservation is henceforth the permanent
Love and Self -Sacrifice 103
necessity. It is infancy that has made it
so. A miscellaneous horde, with brief in-
fancies for its younger members, may sur-
vive a very extensive slaughter; but in a
clan, where the proportion of helpless chil-
dren is much greater, and a considerable
division of labour between nurses and war-
riors has become established, the case is
different. An amount of degree of calam-
ity sufficient to break up its organization
will usually mean total ruin. Hence, when
Nature's travail has at length brought forth
the clan, its requirements forthwith become
paramount, and each member's conduct
from babyhood must conform to them.
Natural selection henceforth invests her
chief capital in the enterprise of preserving
the clan. In that primitive social unit lie
all the potentiality and promise of Human
Society through untold future ages. So
for age after age those clans in which the
conduct of the individuals is best subordi-
nated to the general welfare are sure to
prevail over clans in which the subordina-
104 Love and Self-Sacrifice
tion is less perfect. As the maternal in-
stinct had been cultivated for thousands
of generations before clanship came into
existence, so for many succeeding ages of
turbulence the patriotic instinct, which
prompts to the defence of home, was culti-
vated under penalty of death. Clans de-
fended by weakly loyal or cowardly war-
riors were sure to perish. Unflinching
bravery and devoted patriotism were virtues
necessary to the survival of the community,
and were thus preserved until at the dawn
of historic times, in the most grandly mili-
tant of clan societies, we find the word
virtus connoting just these qualities, and
no sooner does the fateful gulf yawn open
in the forum than a Curtius joyfully leaps
into it, that the commonwealth may be
preserved from harm.
Now the moment a man's voluntary ac-
tions are determined by conscious or un-
conscious reference to a standard outside
of himself and his selfish motives, he has
entered the world of ethics, he has begun
Love and Self-Sacrifice 105
to live in a moral atmosphere. Egoism has
ceased to be all in all, and altruism — it is
an ugly-sounding word, but seems to be the
only one available — altruism has begun to
assert its claim to sovereignty. In the ear-
lier and purely animal stages of existence
it was right enough for each individual to
pursue pleasure and avoid pain ; it did not
endanger the welfare of the species, but on
the contrary it favoured that welfare ; in its
origin avoidance of pain was the surest
safeguard for the perpetuation of life, and
with due qualifications that is still the case.
But as soon as sociality became established,
and Nature's supreme end became the
maintenance of the clan organization, the
standard for the individual's conduct be-
came shifted, permanently and forever
shifted. Lpiits were interposed at which
pleasure must be resigned and pain en-
dured, even certain death encountered, for
the sake of the clan ; perhaps the individ-
ual did not always understand it in that
way, but at all events it was for the sake
io6 Love and Self -Sacrifice
of some rule recognized in the clan, some
rule which, as his mother and all his kin
had from his earliest childhood inculcated
upon him, ought to be obeyed. This con-
ception of ought, of obligation, of duty, of
debt to something outside of self, resulted
from the shifting of the standard of con-
duct outside of the individual's self. Once
thus externalized, obj ectivized, the ethical
standard demanded homage from the indi-
vidual. It furnished the rule for a higher
life than one dictated by mere selfishness.
Speaking after the manner of naturalists, I
here use the phrase "higher life" advis-
edly. It was the kind of life that was
conducive to the preservation and further
development of the highest form of animate
existence that had been attained. It ap-
pears to me that we begin to fiad for ethics
the most tremendous kind of sanction in
the nature of the cosmic process.
A word of caution may be needed. It is
not for a moment to be supposed that when
primitive men began crudely shaping their
Love and Self -Sacrifice i oy
conduct with reference to a standard out-
side of self, they did so as the result of
meditation, or with any realizing sense of
what they were doing. That has never
been the method of evolution. Its results
steal upon the world noiselessly and unob-
served, and only after they have long been
with us does reason employ itself upon
them. The wolf does not eat the lamb be-
cause he regards a flesh diet as necessary
to his health and activity, but because he is
hungry, and, like Mr. Harold Skimpole, he
likes lamb. It was no intellectual percep-
tion of needs and consequences that length-
ened the maternal instinct with primeval
mothers as the period of infancy length-
ened. Nor was it any such intellectual
perception that began to enthrone " I
ought" in the place of "I wish." If in
the world's recurrent crises Nature had
waited to be served by the flickering lamp
of reason, the story would not have been
what it is. Her method has been, with the
advent of a new situation, to modify the
io8 Love and Self -Sacrifice
existing group of instincts ; and his work
she will not let be slighted ; in her train
follows the lictor with the symbols of death,
and there is neither pity nor relenting. In
the primeval warfare between clans, those
in which the instincts were not so modified
as to shift the standard of conduct outside
of the individual's self must inevitably have
succumbed and perished under the pressure
of those in which the instincts had begun
to experience such modification. The
moral law grew up in the world not because
anybody asked for it, but because it was
needed for the world's work. If it is not a
product of the cosmic process, it would be
hard to find anything that could be so
called.
The Cosmic Process exists purely for the Sake
of Moral Ends
HAVE not undertaken to make
my outline sketch of the genesis of
Humanity approach to complete-
ness, but only to present enough salient
points to make a closely connected argu-
ment in showing how morality is evolved in
the cosmic process and sanctioned by it.
In a more complete sketch it would be
necessary to say something about the gen-
esis of Religion. One of the most inter-
esting, and in my opinion one of the most
profoundly significant, facts in the whole
process of evolution is the first appearance
of religious sentiment at very nearly the
same stage at which the moral law began to
grow up. To the differential attributes of
Humanity already considered there needs
no Love and Self-Sacrifice
to be added the possession of religious sen-
timent and religious ideas. We may safely
say that this is the most important of all
the distinctions between Man and other
animals ; for to say so is simply to epito-
mize the whole of human experience as re-
corded in history, art, and literature. Along
with the rise from gregariousness to incipi-
ent sociality, along with the first stammer-
ings of articulate speech, along with the
dawning discrimination between right and
wrong, came the earliest feeble groping
toward a world beyond that which greets
the senses, the first dim recognition of the
Spiritual Power that is revealed in and
through the visible and palpable realm of
nature. And universally since that time
the notion of Ethics has been inseparably
associated with the notion of Religion, and
the sanction for Ethics has been held to be
closely related with the world beyond phe^
nomena. There are philosophers who
maintain that with the further progress of
enlightenment this close relation will cease
Love and Self -Sacrifice 1 1 1
to be asserted, that Ethics will be divorced
from Religion, and that the groping of the
Human Soul after its God will be condemned
as a mere survival from the errors of primi-
tive savagery, a vain and idle reaching out
toward a world of mere phantoms. I men-
tion this opinion merely to express unquali-
fied and total dissent from it. I believe it
can be shown that one of the strongest
implications of the doctrine of evolution is
the Everlasting Reality of Religion.
But we have not time at present for enter-
ing upon so vast a subject. Let this refer-
ence suffice to show that it has not been
passed over or forgotten in my theory of
the genesis of Humanity. In an account
of the evolution of the religious sentiment,
its first appearance as coeval, or nearly so,
with the beginnings of the ethical process
would assume great importance. We have
here been concerned purely with the ethi-
cal process itself, which we have found to
be — as Huxley truly says in his footnote
— part and parcel of the general process
H2 Love and Self-Sacrifice
of evolution. Our historical survey of the
genesis of Humanity seems to show very
forcibly that a society of Human Souls
living in conformity to a perfect Moral Law-
is the end toward which, ever since the
time when our solar system was a patch of
nebulous vapour, the cosmic process has
been aiming. After our cooling planet had
become the seat of organic life, the process
of natural selection went on for long ages
seemingly, but not really at random ; for
our retrospect shows that its ultimate ten-
dency was towards singling out one crea-
ture and exalting his intelligence.
Now we have seen that this increase of in-
telligence itself, by entailing upon Man the
helplessness of infancy, led directly to the
production of those social conditions that
called the ethical process into play and set
it actively to work. Thus we may see the
absurdity of trying to separate the moral
nature of Man from the rest of his nature,
and to assign for it a separate and inde-
pendent history. The essential solidarity
Love and Self -Sacrifice 113
in the cosmic process will admit of no
such fanciful detachment of one part from
another. All parts are involved one in
another. Again, the ethical process is not
only part and parcel of the cosmic process,
but it is its crown and consummation.
Toward the spiritual perfection of Hu-
manity the stupendous momentum of the
cosmic process has all along been tending.
That spiritual perfection is the true goal of
evolution, the divine end that was involved
in the beginning. When Huxley asks us to
believe that "the cosmic process has no
sort of relation to moral ends," I feel like
replying with the question, " Does not the
cosmic process exist purely for the sake of
moral ends ? " Subtract from the universe
its ethical meaning, and nothing remains
but an unreal phantom, the figment of false
metaphysics.
We have now arrived at a position from
which a glimmer of light is thrown upon
some of the dark problems connected with
the moral government of the world. We
/ 14 Love and Self-Sacrifice
can begin to see why misery and wrong-
doing are permitted to exist, and why the
creative energy advances by such slow and
tortuous methods toward the fulfilment of
its divine purpose. In order to understand
these things, we must ask, What is the
ultimate goal of the ethical process ? Ac-
cording to the utilitarian philosophy that
goal is the completion of human happiness.
But this interpretation soon refutes itself.
A world of completed happiness might well
be a world of quiescence, of stagnation, of
automatism, of blankness ; the dynamics of
evolution would have no place in it. But
suppose we say that the ultimate goal of
the ethical process is the perfecting of hu-
man character ? This form of statement
contains far more than the other. Con-
summation of happiness is a natural out-
come of the perfecting of character, but
that perfecting can be achieved only through
struggle, through discipline, through resist-
ance. It is for him that overcometh that
the crown of life is reserved. The con-
Love and Self-Sacrifice 1 15
summate product of a world of evolution is
the character that creates happiness, that is
replete with dynamic possibilities of fresh
life and activity in directions forever new.
Such a character is the reflected image of
God, and in it are contained the promise
and potency of life everlasting.
No such character could be produced by
any act of special creation in a garden of
Eden. It must be the consummate efflores-
cence of long ages of evolution, and a world
of evolution is necessarily characterized by
slow processes, many of which to a looker-
on seem like tentative experiments, with an
enormous sacrifice of ephemeral forms of
life. Thus while the Earth Spirit goes on,
unhasting, yet unresting, weaving in the
loom of Time the visible garment of God,
we begin to see that even what look like
failures and blemishes have been from the
outset involved in the accomplishment of
the all-wise and all-holy purpose, the per-
fecting of the spiritual Man in the likeness
of his Heavenly Father.
/ 1 6 Love and Self-Sacrifice
These points will receive further indi-
rect illustration as we complete our outline
sketch of the cosmic process in the past. It
is self-evident that in the production of an
ethical character, altruistic feelings and im-
pulses must cooperate. Let us look, then,
for some of the beginnings of altruism in
the course of the evolution of life.
XI
m
Maternity and the Evolution of Altruism
ROM an early period of the life-
history of our planet, the preserva-
tion of the species had obviously
become quite as imperative an end as the
preservation of individuals ; one is at first
inclined to say more imperative, but if we
pause long enough to remember that total
failure to preserve individuals would be
equivalent to immediate extinction of the
species, we see that the one requirement is
as indispensable as the other. Individuals
must be preserved, and the struggle for
life is between them ; species must be pre-
served, and in the rivalry those have the
best chance in which the offspring are
either most redundant in numbers or are
best cared for. In plants and animals of all
but the higher types, the offspring are spores
/ 1 8 Love and Self-Sacrifice
or seeds, larvae or spawn, or self-maturing
eggs. In the absence of parental care the
persistence of the species is ensured by the
enormous number of such offspring. A
single codfish, in a single season, will lay-
six million eggs, nearly all of which perish,
of course, or else in a few years the ocean
could not hold all the codfishes. But the
princess in the Arabian tale, who fought
with the malignant Jinni, could not for her
life pick up all the scattered seeds of the
pomegranate ; and in like manner of the
codfish eggs, one in a million or so escapes
and the species is maintained. But in
the highest types of animal life in birds
and mammals — with their four-chambered
hearts, completely arterialized blood, and
enhanced consciousness — parental care be-
comes effective in protecting the offspring,
and the excessive production diminishes.
With birds, the necessity of maintaining a
high temperature for the eggs leads to the
building of nests, to a division of labour in
the securing of food, to the development of
Love and Self-Sacrifice 1 1 9
a temporary maternal instinct, and to con-
jugal alliances which in some birds last for
a lifetime. As the eggs become effectively
guarded the number diminishes, till instead
of millions there are half a dozen. When
it comes to her more valuable products,
Nature is not such a reckless squanderer
after all. So with mammals, for the most
part the young are in litters of half a dozen
or so ; but in Man, with his prolonged and
costly infancy parental care reaches its
highest development and concentration in
rearing children one by one.
From the dawn of life, I need hardly say,
all the instincts that have contributed to
the preservation of offspring must have
been favoured and cultivated by natural
selection, and in many cases even in types
of life very remote from Humanity, such
instincts have prompted to very different
actions from such as would flow from the
mere instinct of self-preservation. If you
thrust your walking-stick into an ant-heap,
and watch the wild hurry and confusion that
120 Love and Self -Sacrifice
ensues when part of the interior is laid
bare, you will see that all the workers are
busy in moving the larvae into places of
safety. It is not exactly a maternal in-
stinct, for the workers are not mothers, but
it is an altruistic instinct involving acts of
self-devotion. So in the case of fish that
ascend rivers or bays at spawning time, the
actions of the whole shoal are determined
by a temporarily predominant instinct that
tends towards an altruistic result. In these
and lower grades of life there is already
something at work besides the mere strug-
gle for life between individuals ; there is
something more than mere contention and
slaughter ; there is the effort towards cher-
ishing another life than one's own. In
these regions of animate existence we
catch glimpses of the cosmic roots of love
and self-sacrifice. For the simplest and
rudest productions of Nature mere egoism
might suffice, but to the achievement of
any higher aim some adumbration of altru-
ism was indispensable.
Love and Self-Sacrifice 121
Before such divine things as love and
self-sacrifice could spring up from their
cosmic roots and put forth their efflores-
cence, it was necessary that conscious per-
sonal relations should become established
between mother and infant. We have al-
ready observed the critical importance of
these relations in the earliest stages of
the evolution of human society. We may
now add that the relation between mother
and child must have furnished the first
occasion for the sustained and regular de-
velopment of the altruistic feelings. The
capacity for unselfish devotion called forth
in that relation could afterward be utilized
in the conduct of individuals not thus re-
lated to one another.
Of all kinds of altruism the mothers was
no doubt the earliest ; it was the derivative
source from which all other kinds were by
slow degrees developed. In the evolution
of these altruistic feelings, therefore, —
feelings which are an absolutely indispen-
sable constituent in the process of ethical
122 Love and Self-Sacrifice
development, — the first appearance of real
maternity was an epoch of most profound
interest and importance in the history of
life upon the earth.
Now maternity, in the true and full sense
of the word, is something which was not
realized until a comparatively recent stage of
the earth's history. God's highest work is
, never perfected save in the fulness of time.
For countless ages there were parents and
offspring before the slow but never aimless
or wanton cosmic process had brought into
existence the conscious personal relation-
ship between mother and child. Protection
of eggs and larvae scarcely suffices for the
evolution of true maternity ; the relation
of moth to caterpillar is certainly very far
from being a prototype of it. What spec-
tacle could be more dreary than that of
the Jurassic period, with its lords of crea-
tion, the oviparous dinosaurs, crawling or
bounding over the land, splashing amid the
mighty waters, whizzing bat-like through
the air, horrible brutes innumerable, with
Love and Self -Sacrifice 123
bulky bodies and tiny brains, clumsy, coarse
in fibre, and cold-blooded.
" Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime."
The remnants of that far-off dismal age
have been left behind in great abundance,
and from them we can easily reconstruct
the loathsome picture of a world of domi-
nating egoism, whose redemption through
the evolution of true maternity had not
yet effectively begun. For such a world
might Caliban's theology indeed seem fitted.
Nearly nine tenths of our planet's past life-
history, measured in duration, had passed
away without achieving any higher result
than this, — a fact which for impatient re-
formers may have in it some crumbs of
consolation.
For, though the mills of God grind slowly,
the cosmic process was aiming at something
better than egoism and dinosaurs, and at
some time during the long period of the
Chalk deposits there began the tremendous
world-wide rivalry between these dragons
124 Love and Self-Sacriftce
and the rising class of warm-blooded vivip-
arous mammals which had hitherto played
an insignificant part in the world. The
very name of this class of animals is taken
from the function of motherhood. The off-
spring of these "mammas" come into the
world as recognizable personalities, so far
developed that the relation between mother
and child begins as a relation of personal
affection. The new-born mammal is not
an egg nor a caterpillar, but a baby, and
the baby's dawning consciousness opens up
a narrow horizon of sympathy and tender-
ness, a horizon of which the expansion shall
in due course of ages reveal a new heaven
and a new earth. At first the nascent al-
truism was crude enough, but it must have
sufficed to make mutual understanding: and
cooperation more possible than before ; it
thus contributed to the advancement of
mammalian intelligence, and prepared the
way for gregariousness, by and by to cul-
minate in sociality, as already described.
In the history of creation the mammals
Love and Self -Sacrifice 125
were moderns, equipped with more effec-
tive means of ensuring survival than their
oviparous antagonists. The development of
complete mammality was no sudden thing.
Some of the dinosaurs may have been ovo-
viviparous, like some modern serpents.
The Australian duck-bill, a relic of the
most ancient incipient mammality, is still
oviparous ; the opossum and kangaroo pre-
serve the record of a stage when vivipa-
rousness was but partially achieved ; but
with the advent of the placental mammals
the break with the old order of things was
complete.
The results of the struggle are registered
in the Eocene rocks. The ancient world
had found its Waterloo. Gone were the
dragons who so long had lorded it over
both hemispheres, — brontosaurs, iguano-
dons, plesiosaurs, laelaps, pterodactyls, —
all gone; their uncouth brood quite van-
ished from the earth, and nothing left alive
as a reminder, save a few degenerate col-
lateral kin, such as snakes and crocodiles,
126 Love and Self -Sacrifice
objects of dread and loathing to higher
creatures. Never in the history of our
planet has there been a more sweeping
victory than that of the mammals, nor has
Nature had any further occasion for vic-
tories of that sort. The mammal remains
the highest type of animal existence, and
subsequent progress has been shown in
the perfecting of that type where most per-
fectible.
XII
The Omnipresent Ethical Trend
ITH the evolution of true maternity
Nature was ready to proceed to her
highest grades of work. Intelli-
gence was next to be lifted to higher levels,
and the order of mammals with greatest
prehensile capacities, the primates with
their incipient hands, were the most favour-
able subjects in which to carry on this pro-
cess. The later stages of the marvellous
story we have already passed in review.
We have seen the accumulating intelligence
lengthen the period of infancy, and thus
prolong the relations of loving sympathy
between mother and child ; we have seen
the human family and human society thus
brought into existence ; and along therewith
we have recognized the necessity laid upon
each individual for conforming his conduct
128 Love and Self-Sacrifice
to a standard external to himself. At this
point, without encountering any breach of
continuity in the cosmic process, we crossed
the threshold of the ethical world, and en-
tered a region where civilization, or the
gradual perfecting of the spiritual qualities,
is henceforth Nature's paramount aim. To
penetrate further into this region would be
to follow the progress of civilization, while
the primitive canoe develops into the Cunard
steamship, the hieroglyphic battle-sketch
into epics and dramas, sun-catcher myths
into the Newtonian astronomy, wandering
tribes into mighty nations, the ethics of the
clan into the moral law for all men. The
story shows us Man becoming more and
more clearly the image of God, exercising
creative attributes, transforming his physi-
cal environment, incarnating his thoughts
in visible and tangible shapes all over the
world, and extorting from the abysses of
space the secrets of vanished ages. From
lowly beginnings, without breach of contin-
uity, and through the cumulative action of
Love and Self -Sacrifice i2g
minute and inconspicuous causes, the resist-
less momentum of cosmic events has tended
toward such kind of consummation ; and
part and parcel of the whole process, in-
separably wrapped up with every other part,
has been the evolution of the sentiments
which tend to subordinate mere egoism to
unselfish and moral ends.
A narrow or partial survey might fail to
make clear the solidarity of the cosmic pro-
cess. But the history of creation, when
broadly and patiently considered, brings
home to us with fresh emphasis the pro-
found truth of what Emerson once said, that
" the lesson of life ... is to believe what
the years and the centuries say against the
hours ; to resist the usurpation of partic-
ulars ; to penetrate to their catholic sense."
When we have learned this lesson, our mis-
givings vanish, and we breathe a clear atmo-
sphere of faith. Though in many ways God's
work is above our comprehension, yet those
parts of the world's story that we can de-
cipher well warrant the belief that while in
ijo Love and Self -Sacrifice
Nature there may be divine irony, there can
be no such thing as wanton mockery, for
profoundly underlying the surface entangle-
ment of her actions we may discern the
omnipresent ethical trend. The moral sen-
timents, the moral law, devotion to unself-
ish ends, disinterested love, nobility of
soul, — these are Nature's most highly
wrought products, latest in coming to ma-
turity ; they are the consummation, toward
which all earlier prophecy has pointed.
We are right, then, in greeting the rejuve-
nescent summer with devout faith and hope.
Below the surface din and clashing of the
struggle for life we hear the undertone of
the deep ethical purpose, as it rolls in
solemn music through the ages, its volume
swelled by every victory, great or small, of
right over wrong, till in the fulness of time,
in God's own time, it shall burst forth in
the triumphant chorus of Humanity purified
and redeemed.
THE EVERLASTING REALITY
OF RELIGION
Here sits he shaping wings to fly ;
His heart forebodes a mystery :
He names the name Eternity.
That type of Perfect in his mind
In Nature can he nowhere find,
He sows himself on every wind.
He seems to hear a Heavenly Friend,
And through thick veils to apprehend
A labour working to an end.
Tennyson, The Two Voices.
Deo erexit Voltaire
HE visitor to Geneva whose studies
have made him duly acquainted
with the most interesting human
personality of all that are associated with
that historic city will never leave the place
without making a pilgrimage to the chateau
of Ferney. In that refined and quiet rural
homestead things still remain very much as
on the day when the aged Voltaire left it
for the last visit to Paris, where his long
life was worthily ended amid words and
deeds of affectionate homage. One may
sit down at the table where was written the
most perfect prose, perhaps, that ever flowed
from pen, and look about the little room
with its evidences of plain living and high
thinking, until one seems to recall the eccen-
tric figure of the vanished Master, with his
i$4 Reality of Religion
flashes of shrewd wisdom and caustic wit,
his insatiable thirst for knowledge, his con-
suming hatred of bigotry and oppression,
his merciless contempt for shams, his bound-
less enthusiasm of humanity. As we stroll
in the park, that quaint presence goes along
with us till all at once in a shady walk we
come upon something highly significant and
characteristic, the little parish church with
its Latin inscription over the portal, Deo
erexit Voltaire, i. e. "Voltaire built it for
God," and as we muse upon it, the piercing
eyes and sardonic but not unkindly smile
seem still to follow us. What meant this
eccentric inscription ?
When Voltaire became possessor of the
manor of Ferney, the church was badly out
of repair, and stood where it obstructed the
view from certain windows of the chateau.
So he had it cleared away, and built in a
better spot the new church that is still
there. It was duly consecrated, and the
Pope further hallowed it with some relics
of ancient saints, and there for many a
Reality of Religion 135
year the tenants and dependents of the
manor assembled for divine service. No-
where in France had Voltaire ever seen a
church dedicated simply to God ; it was
always to Our Lady of This or Saint So-
and-so of That ; always there was some in-
termediary between the devout soul and the
God of its worship. Not thus should it be
with Voltaire's church, built upon his own
estate to minister to the spiritual needs of
his people. It should be dedicated simply
and without further qualification to the wor-
ship and service of God. Furthermore, it
was built and dedicated, not by any ecclesi-
astical or corporate body, but by the lord of
that manor, the individual layman, Voltaire.
This, I say, was highly characteristic and
significant. It gave terse and pointed ex-
pression to Voltaire's way of looking at
such things. Church and theology were
ignored, and the individual soul was left
alone with its God. The Protestant re-
formers and other freethinkers had stopped
far short of this. In place of an infallible
136 Reality of Religion
Church they had left an infallible Book ; if
they rejected transubstantiation, they re-
tained as obligatory such doctrines as those
of the incarnation and atonement ; if they
laughed at the miracles of mediaeval saints,
they would allow no discredit to be thrown
upon those of the apostolic age ; in short,
they left standing a large part, if not the
larger part, of the supernatural edifice
within which the religious mind of Europe
had so long been sheltered. But Voltaire
regarded that whole supernatural edifice as
so much rubbish which was impeding the
free development of the human mind, and
ought as quickly as possible to be torn to
pieces and cleared away. His emotions as
well as his reason were concerned in this
conclusion. Organized Christianity, as it
then existed in France, was responsible for
much atrocious injustice, and in neighbour-
ing lands the Inquisition still existed. Ec-
clesiastical bigotry, the prejudice of igno-
rance, whatever tended to hold people in
darkness and restrain them from the free
Reality of Religion 1 37
and natural use of their faculties, Voltaire
hated with all the intensity of which he
was capable. He summed it all up in one
abstract term and personified it as " The
Infamous," and the watchword of that life
of tireless vigilance was " Crush the In-
famous ! " Supernatural theology had been
too often pressed into the service of " The
Infamous," and for supernatural theology
Voltaire could find no place in his scheme
of things. He lost no chance of assailing
it with mockery and sarcasm made terrible
by the earnestness of his purpose, until he
came in many quarters to be regarded as
the most inveterate antagonist the Church
had ever known.
Yet among the great men of letters in
France contemporary with Voltaire, the
most part went immeasurably farther than
he, and went in a different direction withal,
for they denied the reality of Religion.
Few of them, indeed, believed in the exist-
ence of God, or would have had anything
to do with building a house of worship.
138 Reality of Religion
It is related of David Hume that when din-
ing once in a party of eighteen at the house
of Baron d'Holbach, he expressed a doubt
as to whether any person could anywhere
be found to avow himself dogmatically an
atheist. " Indeed, my dear sir," quoth the
host, " you are this moment sitting at table
with seventeen such persons." Among
that group of philosophers were men of
great intelligence and lofty purpose, such
as D'Alembert, Diderot, Helvetius, Con-
dorcet, Buffon, men with more of the real
spirit of Christianity in their natures than
could be found in half the churches of
Christendom. The roots of their atheism
were emotional rather than philosophical.
It was part of the generous but rash and
superficial impatience with which they dis-
owned all connection whatever with a
Church that had become subservient to so
much that was bad. Their atheism was
one of the fruits of the vicious policy which
had suppressed Huguenotism in France ; it
was an early instance of what has since
Reality of Religion 139
been often observed, that materialism and
atheism are much more apt to flourish in
Romanist than in Protestant countries.
The form of religion which is already to
some extent purified and rationalized awak-
ens no such violent revulsion in free-think-
ing minds as the form that is more heavily
encumbered with remnants of obsolete
primitive thought. Moreover, the ration-
alizing religion of Protestant countries is
commonly found in alliance with political
freedom. In France under the Old Regime,
the Catholic religion was stigmatized as an
ally of despotism, as well as a congeries of
absurd doctrines and ceremonies. The best
minds felt their common sense ' shocked
by it no less than their reason. No very
deep thinking was done on the subject ;
their treatment of it was in general ex-
tremely shallow.
The forms which religious sentiment had
assumed in the Middle Ages had become
unintelligible; the most highly endowed
minds were dead to the sublimity of Gothic
140 Reality of Religion
architecture, and saw nothing but grotesque
folly in Dante's poetry. They seriously
believed that religious doctrines and eccle-
siastical government were originally elabo-
rate systems of fraud, devised by sagacious
and crafty tyrants for the sole purpose of
enslaving the multitude of mankind. No
discrimination was shown. They were as
ready to throw away belief in God as in the
miracles of St. Columba, and to scout at
the notion of a future life in the same
terms as those in which they denounced the
forged donation of Constantine. The flip-
pant ease with which they disposed of the
greatest questions, in crass ignorance of the
very nature of the problem to be solved,
was well illustrated in the remark of the
astronomer Lalande, that he had swept the
entire heavens with his telescope and found
no God there. A similar instance of missing
the point was furnished about fifty years
ago by the eminent physiologist Moleschott,
when he exclaimed, "No thought without
phosphorus," and congratulated himself that
Reality of Religion 141
he had forever disposed of the human soul.
I am inclined to think that those are the
two remarks most colossal in their silliness
that ever appeared in print.
Very different in spirit was the acute
reply of Laplace when reminded by Napo-
leon that his great treatise on the dynam-
ics of the solar system contained no
allusion to God. " Sire," said Laplace, " I
had no need of that hypothesis." This
remark was profound in its truth, for it
meant that in order to give a specific ex-
planation of any single group of phenomena,
it will not do to appeal to divine action,
which is equally the source of all pheno-
mena. Science can deal only with secon-
dary causes. In the eighteenth century
men of science were learning that such is
the case ; men like Diderot and D' Alembert
had come to realize it, and they believed
that the logical result was atheism. This
was because the only idea of God which
they had ever been taught to entertain was
the Latin idea of a God remote from the
142 Reality of Religion
world and manifested only through occa-
sional interferences with the order of na-
ture. When they dismissed this idea they
declared themselves atheists. If they had
been familiar with the Greek idea of God
as immanent in the world and manifested
at every moment through the orderly se-
quence of its phenomena, their conclusions
would doubtless have been very different.
To these philosophers Voltaire's un-
shaken theism seemed a mere bit of eccen-
tric conservatism. But along with that
queer and intensely independent personal-
ity there went a stronger intellectual grasp
and a more calm intellectual vision than
belonged to any other Frenchman of the
eighteenth century. In the facts of Na-
ture, despite the lifeless piecemeal fashion
in which they were then studied, Voltaire
saw a rational principle at work which athe-
ism could in nowise account for. To him
the universe seemed full of evidences of
beneficent purpose, and more than once
he set forth with eloquence and power the
Reality of Religion 143
famous argument from design, which is as
old as Xenophon's Memorabilia, and which
received its fullest development at the
hands of Paley and the authors of the
Bridgewater Treatises. There is thus yet
another significance added to the little
church at Ferney. Not only was it the sole
church in France dedicated simply to God,
and not only was its builder a layman hos-
tile to ecclesiastical doctrines and methods,
but he was almost alone among the emi-
nent freethinkers of his age and country
in believing in God and asserting the ever-
lasting reality of religion.
It is therefore that I have cited Voltaire
as a kind of text for the present discourse ;
for it is my purpose to show that, apart
from all questions of revelation, the light
of nature affords us sufficient ground for
maintaining that religion is fundamentally
true and must endure forever. It appears
to me, moreover, that the materialism of
the present day is merely a tradition handed
down from the French writers whom Vol-
144 Reality of Religion
taire combated. When Moleschott made
his silly remark about phosphorus, it was
simply an inheritance of silliness from La-
lande. When Haeckel tells us that the
doctrine of evolution forbids us to believe
in a future life, it is not because he has
rationally deduced such a conclusion from
the doctrine, but because he takes his opin-
ions on such matters ready-made from Lud-
wig Biichner, who is simply an echo of the
eighteenth century atheist La Mettrie. We
shall see that the doctrine of evolution
has implications very different from what
Haeckel supposes.
But first let me observe in passing that
in the English-speaking world there has
never been any such divorce between ra-
tionalism and religion as in France, and
among the glories of English literature are
such deeply reverent and profoundly philo-
sophical writings as those of Hooker and
Chillingworth, of Bishop Butler and Jona-
than Edwards, and in our own time of Dr.
Martineau. Nowhere in history, perhaps,
Reality of Religion 145
have faith and reason been more harmo-
niously wedded together than in the his-
tory of English Protestantism. But the
disturbance that affected France in the age
of Voltaire now affects the whole Christian
world, and every question connected with
religion has been probed to depths of which
the existence was scarcely suspected a cen-
tury ago. One seldom, indeed, hears the
frivolous mockery in which the old French
writers dealt so freely ; that was an ebulli-
tion of temper called forth by a tyranny
that had come to be a social nuisance.
The scepticism of our day is rather sad
than frivolous ; it drags people from long
cherished notions in spite of themselves ; it
spares but few that are active-minded ; it
invades the church, and does not stop in
the pews to listen but ascends the pulpit
and preaches. There is no refuge any-
where from this doubting and testing spirit
of the age. In the attitude of civilized men
towards the world in which we live, the
change of front has been stupendous ; the
146 Reality of Religion
old cosmology has been overthrown in head-
long ruin, attacks upon doctrines have mul-
tiplied, and rituals, creeds, and Scriptures
are overhauled and criticised, until a young
generation grows up knowing nothing of
the sturdy faith of its grandfathers save by
hearsay ; for it sees everything in heaven
and earth called upon to show its creden-
tials.
II
The Reign of Law, and the Greek Idea of God
HE general effect of this intellect-
ual movement has been to discredit
more than ever before the Latin
idea of God as a power outside of the course
of nature and occasionally interfering with
it. In all directions the process of evolu-
tion has been discovered, working after
similar methods, and this has forced upon
us the belief in the Unity of Nature. We
are thus driven to the Greek conception of
God as the power working in and through
nature, without interference or infraction of
law. The element of chance, which some
atheists formerly admitted into their scheme
of things, is expelled. Nobody would now
waste his time in theorizing about a for-
tuitous concourse of atoms. We have so
far spelled out the history of creation as to
148 Reality of Religion
see that all has been done in strict accord-
ance with law. The method has been the
method of evolution, and the more we study
it the more do we discern in it intelligible
coherence. One part of the story never
gives the lie to another part.
So beautiful is all this orderly coherence,
so satisfying to some of our intellectual
needs, that many minds are inclined to
doubt if anything more can be said of the
universe than that it is a Reign of Law,
an endless aggregate of coexistences and
sequences. When we say that one star
attracts another star, we do not really know
that there is any pulling in the case ; all we
know is that a piece of cosmical matter in
the presence of another piece of matter
alters its space-relations in a certain speci-
fied way. Among the coexistences and
sequences there is an order which we can
detect, and a few thinkers are inclined to
maintain that this is the whole story. Such
a state of mind, which rests satisfied with
the mere content of observed facts, without
Reality of Religion 149
seeking to trace their ultimate implications,
is the characteristic of what Auguste Comte
called Positivism. It is a more refined
phase of atheism than that of the guests at
Baron d'Holbach's, but its adherents are
few ; for the impetus of modern scientific
thought tends with overwhelming force
towards the conception of a single First
Cause, or Prime Mover, perpetually mani-
fested from moment to moment in all the
Protean changes that make up the universe.
As I have elsewhere sought to show, this
is practically identical with the Athanasian
conception of the immanent Deity. 1 Mod-
ern men of science often call this view of
things Monism, but if questioned narrowly
■ concerning the immanent First Cause, they
reply with a general disclaimer of know-
ledge, and thus entitle themselves to
be called by Huxley's term " Agnostics."
Thirty-five years ago Spencer, taking a hint
from Sir William Hamilton, used the phrase
1 The Idea of God as affected by Modern Knowledge,
Boston, 1885.
i $0 Reality of Religion
"The Unknowable" as an equivalent for
the immanent Deity considered per se ; but
I always avoid that phrase, for in practice
it invariably leads to wrong conceptions,
and naturally, since it only expresses one
side of the truth. If on the one hand it is
impossible for the finite Mind to fathom
the Infinite, on the other hand it is prac-
tically misleading to apply the term Un-
knowable to the Deity that is revealed in
every pulsation of the wondrously rich and
beautiful life of the Universe. For most
persons no amount of explanation will pre-
vent the use of the word Unknowable from
seeming to remove Deity to an unapproach-
able distance, whereas the Deity revealed
in the process of evolution is the ever-pre-
sent God without whom not a sparrow falls
to the ground, and whose voice is heard in
each whisper of conscience, even while his
splendour dwells in the white ray from yon-
der star that began its earthward flight
while Abraham's shepherds watched their
flocks. It is clear that many persons have
Reality of Religion 151
derived from Spencer's use of the word
Unknowable an impression that he intends
by means of metaphysics to refine God
away into nothing ; whereas he no more
cherishes any such intention than did St.
Paul, when he asked, "Who hath known-
the mind of the Lord, or who hath been his
counsellor?" — no more than Isaiah did
when he declared that even as the heavens
are higher than the earth, so are Jehovah's
ways higher than our ways and his thoughts
than our thoughts.
Ill
Weakness of Materialism
UST here comes along the materi-
alist and asks us some questions,
tries to serve on us a kind of meta-
physical writ of quo warranto. If modern
physics leads us inevitably to the concep-
tion of a single infinite Power manifested
in all the phenomena of the knowable Uni-
verse, by what authority do we identify that
Power with the indwelling Deity as con-
ceived by St. Athanasius ? The Athanasian
Deity is to some extent fashioned in Man's
image; he is, to say the least, like the
psychical part of ourselves. After making
all possible allowances for the gulf which
separates that which is Infinite and Abso-
lute from that which is Finite and Relative,
an essential kinship is asserted between
God and the Human Soul. By what au-
Reality of Religion 153
thority, our materialist will ask, do we as-
sert any such kinship between the Human
Soul and the Power which modern physics
reveals as active throughout the universe ?
Is it not going far beyond our knowledge
to assert any such kinship ? And would it
not be more modest and becoming in us to
simply designate this ever active universal
Power by some purely scientific term, such
as Force ?
This argument is to-day a very familiar
one, and it wears a plausible aspect ; it is
couched in a spirit of scientific reserve,
which wins for it respectful consideration.
The modest and cautious spirit of science
has done so much for us, that it is always
wise to give due heed to its warnings. Let
us beware of going beyond our knowledge,
says the materialist. We know nothing
but phenomena as manifestations of an in-
dwelling force ; nor have we any ground
for supposing that there is anything psychi-
cal, or even quasi-psychical, in the universe
outside of the individual minds of men and
i$4 Reality of Religion
other animals. Moreover, continues the
materialist, the psychical phenomena of
which we are conscious — reason, memory,
emotion, volition — are but peculiarly con-
ditioned manifestations of the same indwell-
ing force which under other conditions ap-
pears as light or heat or electricity. All
such manifestations are fleeting, and be-
yond this world of fleeting phenomena we
have no warrant, either in science or in
common sense, for supposing that anything
whatever exists. This world that is cogni-
zable through the senses is all that there
is, and the story of it that we can decipher
by the aid of terrestrial experience is the
whole story ; the Unseen World is a mere
figment inherited from the untutored fancy
of primeval man. Such is the general view
of things which Materialism urges upon
us with the plea of scientific sobriety and
caution ; and to many minds, as already
observed, it wears a plausible aspect.
Nevertheless, when subjected to criti-
cism, this theory of things soon loses its
Reality of Religion 155
sober and plausible appearance and is seen
to be eminently rash and shallow. In the
first place, there is no such correlation or
equivalence as is alleged between physical
forces and the phenomena of consciousness.
The correlations between different modes
of motion have been proved by actual quan-
titative measurement, and never could have
been proved in any other way. We know,
for example, that heat is a mode of motion ;
the heat that will raise the temperature of
a pound of water by one degree of Fahren-
heit is exactly equivalent to the motion of
772 pounds falling through a distance of
one foot. In similar wise we know that
light, electricity, and magnetism are modes
of motion, transferable one into another ;
and, although precise measurements have
not been accomplished, there is no reason
for doubting that the changes in brain tis-
sue, which accompany each thought and
feeling, are also modes of motion, trans-
ferable into the other physical modes. But
thought and feeling themselves, which can
/ 56 Reality of Religion
neither be weighed nor measured, do not
admit of being resolved into modes of mo-
tion. They do not enter into the closed
circuit of physical transformations, but
stand forever outside of it, and concentric
with that segment of the circuit which
passes through the brain. It may be that
thought and feeling could not continue to
exist if that physical segment of the circuit
were taken away. It may be that they
could. To assume that they could not is
surely the height of rash presumption.
The correlation of forces exhibits Mind as
in nowise a product of Matter, but as some-
thing in its growth and manifestations out-
side and parallel. It is incompatible with
the theory that the relation of the human
soul to the body is like that of music to the
harp ; but it is quite compatible with the
time-honoured theory of the human soul as
indwelling in the body and escaping from
it at death.
In the second place, when we come to
the denial of all kinship between the hu-
Reality of Religion 137
man soul and the Infinite Power that is
revealed in all phenomena, the materialistic
theory raises difficulties as great as those
which it seeks to avoid. The difficulties
which it wishes to avoid are those which in-
evitably encumber the attempt to conceive
of Deity as Personality exerting volition
and cherishing intelligent purpose. Such
difficulties are undeniably great ; nay, they
are insuperable. When we speak of Intel-
ligence and Will and Personality, we must
use these words with the meanings in which
experience has clothed them, or we shall
soon find oitrselves talking nonsense. The
only intelligence we know is strictly serial
in its nature, and is limited by the exist-
ence of independent objects of cognition.
What flight of analogy can bear us across
the gulf that divides such finite intelligence
from that unlimited Knowledge to which
all things past and future are ever present ?
Volition, as we know it, implies alternative
courses of action, antecedent motives, and
resulting effort. Like intelligence, its op-
/5# Reality of Religion
erations are serial. What, then, do we
really mean, if we speak of omnipresent
Volition achieving at one and the same mo-
ment an infinite variety of ends ? So, too,
with Personality : when we speak of per-
sonality that is not circumscribed, by limits,
are we not using language from which all
the meaning has evaporated ?
Such difficulties are insurmountable.
Words which have gained their meanings
from finite experience of finite objects of
thought must inevitably falter and fail
when we seek to apply them to that which
is Infinite. But we do not mend matters
by employing terms taken from the inor-
ganic world rather than from human per-
sonality. To designate the universal Power
by some scientific term, such as Force, does
not help us in the least. All our experi-
ence of force is an experience of finite
forces antagonized by other forces. We
can frame no conception whatever of Infi-
nite Force comprising within itself all the
myriad antagonistic attractions and repul-
Reality of Religion 159
sions in which the dynamic universe con-
sists. We go beyond our knowledge when
we speak of Infinite Force quite as much
as we do when we speak of Infinite Person-
ality. Indeed, no word or phrase which we
seek to apply to Deity can be other than
an extremely inadequate and unsatisfactory
symbol. From the very nature of the case
it must always be so, and if we once under-
stand the reason why, it need not vex or
puzzle us.
It is not only when we try to speculate
about Deity that we find ourselves encom-
passed with difficulties and are made to
realize how very short is our mental tether
in some directions. This world, in its com-
monest aspects, presents many baffling pro-
blems, of which it is sometimes wholesome
that we should be reminded. If you look
at a piece of iron, it seems solid ; it looks
as if its particles must be everywhere in
contact with one another. And yet, by
hammering, or by great pressure, or by in-
tense cold, the piece of iron may be com-
160 Reality of Religion
pressed, so that it will occupy less space
than before. Evidently, then, its particles
are not in contact, but are separated from
one another by unoccupied tracts of envel-
oping space. In point of fact, these parti-
cles are atoms arranged after a complicated
fashion in clusters known as molecules.
The word atom means something that can-
not be cut. Now, are these iron atoms di-
visible or indivisible ? If they are divisible,
then what of the parts into which each one
can be divided ; are they also divisible ?
and so on forever. But if these iron atoms
are indivisible, how can we conceive such a
thing ? Can we imagine two sides so close
together that no plane of cleavage could
pass between them ? Can we imagine co-
hesive tenacity too great to be overcome
by any assignable disruptive force, and
therefore infinite ? Suppose, now, we heat
this piece of iron to a white heat. Scien-
tific inquiry has revealed the fact that its
atom-clusters are floating in an ocean of
ether, in which are also floating the atom-
Reality of Religion 161
clusters of other bodies and of the air about
us. The heating is the increase of wave
motion in this ether, until presently a sec-
ondary series of intensely rapid waves ap-
pear as white light. Now this ether would
seem to be of infinite rarity, since it does
not affect the weight of bodies, and yet its
wave-motions imply an elasticity far greater
than that of coiled steel. How can we im-
agine such powerful resilience combined
with such extreme tenacity ?
These are a few of the difficulties of con-
ception in which the study of physical sci-
ence abounds, and I cite them because it is
wholesome for us to bear in mind that such
difficulties are not confined to theological
subjects. They serve to show how our
powers of conceiving ideas are strictly lim-
ited by the nature of our experience. The
illustration just cited from the luminiferous
ether simply shows how during the past
century the study of radiant forces has in-
troduced us to a mode of material exist-
ence quite different from anything that had
1 62 Reality of Religion
formerly been known or suspected. In this
mode of matter we find attributes united
which all previous experience had taught
us to regard as contradictory and incom-
patible. Yet the facts cannot be denied ;
hard as we may find it to frame the con-
ception, this light-bearing substance is at
the same time almost infinitely rare and al-
most infinitely resilient. If such difficulties
confront us upon the occasion of a fresh
extension of our knowledge of the physical
world, what must we expect when we come
to speculate upon the nature and modes of
existence of God ? Bearing this in mind,
let us proceed to consider the assumption
that the Infinite Power which is manifested
in the universe is essentially psychical in its
nature ; in other words, that between God
and the Human Soul there is real kinship,
although we may be unable to render any
scientific account of it. Let us consider
this assumption historically, and in the light
of our general knowledge of Evolution.
IV
Religion's First Postulate : the Quasi-Human
God
T is with purpose that I use the
word assumption. As a matter of
history, the existence of a quasi-
human God has always been an assumption
or postulate. It is something which men
have all along taken for granted. It prob-
ably never occurred to anybody to try to
prove the existence of such a God until it
was doubted, and doubts on that subject
are very modern. Omitting from the ac-
count a few score of ingenious philosophers,
it may be said that all mankind, the wisest
and the simplest, have taken for granted
the existence of a Deity, or deities, of a
psychical nature more or less similar to
that of Humanity. Such a postulate has
formed a part of all human thinking from
164 Reality of Religion
primitive ages down to the present time.
The forms in which it has appeared have
been myriad in number, but all have been
included in this same fundamental assump-
tion. The earliest forms were those which
we call fetishism and animism. In fetish-
ism the wind that blows a tree down is
endowed with personality and supposed to
exert conscious effort ; in animism some
ghost of a dead man is animating that gust
of wind. In either case a conscious voli-
tion similar to our own, but outside of us,
is supposed to be at work. There has been
some discussion as to whether fetishism or
animism is the more primitive, and some
writers would regard fetishism as a special
case of animism ; but it is not necessary
to my present purpose that such questions
should be settled. The main point is this,
that in the earliest phases of theism each
operation of Nature was supposed to have
some quasi-human personality behind it.
Such phases we find among contemporary
savages, and there is abundant evidence of
Reality of Religion 165
their former existence among peoples now
civilized. In the course of ages there was
a good deal of generalizing done. Poseidon
could shake the land and preside over the
sea, angry Apollo could shoot arrows tipped
with pestilence, mischievous Hermes could
play pranks in the summer breezes, while
as lord over all, though with somewhat fitful
sway, stood Zeus on the summit of Olym-
pus, gathering the rain-clouds and wielding
the thunderbolt. Nothing but increasing
knowledge of nature was needed to convert
such Polytheism into Monotheism, even into
the strict Monotheism of our own time, in
which the whole universe is the multiform
manifestation of a single Deity that is still
regarded as in some real and true sense
quasi-human. As the notion of Deity has
thus been gradually generalized, from a
thousand local gods to one omnipresent
God, it has been gradually stripped of its
grosser anthropomorphic vestments. The
tutelar Deity of a savage clan is supposed
to share with his devout worshippers in the
1 66 Reality of Religion
cannibal banquet ; the Gods of Olympus
made war and love, and were moved to fits
of inextinguishable laughter. From our
modern Monotheism such accidents of hu-
manity are eliminated, but the notion of a
kinship between God and man remains, and
is rightly felt to be essential to theism.
Take away from our notion of God the hu-
man element, and the theism instantly van-
ishes ; it ceases to be a notion of God. We
may retain an abstract symbol to which
we apply some such epithet as Force, or
Energy, or Power, but there is nothing the-
istic in this. Some ingenious philosopher
may try to persuade us to the contrary, but
the Human Soul knows better; it knows
at least what it wants ; it has asked for
Theology, not for Dynamics, and it resents
all such attempts to palm off upon it stones
for bread.
Our philosopher will here perhaps lift up
his hands in dismay and cry, " Hold ! what
matters it what the Human Soul wants ?
Are cravings, forsooth, to be made to do
Reality of Religion i6y
duty as reasons ? " It is proper to reply
that we are trying to deal with this whole
subject after the manner of the naturalist,
which is to describe things as they exist
and account for them as best we may. I
say, then, that mankind have framed, and
for long ages maintained, a notion of God
into which there enters a human element.
Now if it should ever be possible to abolish
that human element, it would not be pos-
sible to cheat mankind into accepting the
non-human remnant of the notion as an
equivalent of the full notion of which they
had been deprived. Take away from our
symbolic conception of God the human ele-
ment, and that aspect of theism which has
from the outset chiefly interested mankind
is gone.
Religions Second Postulate : the undying Hu-
man Soul
HAT supremely interesting aspect
of theism belongs to it as part and
parcel of the general belief in an
Unseen World, in which human beings
have an interest. The belief in the per-
sonal continuance of the individual human
soul after death is a very ancient one. The
savage custom of burying utensils and
trinkets for the use of the deceased enables
us to trace it back into the Glacial Period.
We may safely say that for much more
than a hundred thousand years mankind
have regarded themselves as personally in-
terested in two worlds, the physical world
which daily greets our waking senses,
and another world, comparatively dim and
vaguely outlined, with which the psychical
Reality of Religion 169
side of humanity is more closely connected.
The belief in the Unseen World seems to
be coextensive with theism ; the animism
of the lowest savages includes both. No
race or tribe of men has ever been found
destitute of the belief in a ghost-world.
Now, a ghost-world implies the personal
continuance of human beings after death,
and it also implies identity of nature be-
tween the ghosts of man and the indwell-
ing spirits of sun, wind, and flood. It is
chiefly because these ideas are so closely
interwoven in savage thought that it is
often so difficult to discriminate between
fetishism and animism. These savage ideas
are of course extremely crude in their sym-
bolism. With the gradual civilization of
human thinking, the refinement in the con-
ception of the Deity is paralleled by the
refinement in the conception of the Other
World. From Valhalla to Dante's Para-
dise, what an immeasurable distance the
human mind has travelled ! In our modern
Monotheism the assumption of kinship be-
i jo Reality of Religion
tween God and the Human Soul is the as-
sumption that there is in Man a psychical
element identical in nature with that which
is eternal. Belief in a quasi-human God
and belief in the Soul's immortality thus
appear in their origin and development, as
in their ultimate significance, to be insepa-
rably connected. They are part and parcel
of one and the same efflorescence of the
human mind. Mankind has always enter-
tained them in common, and so entertains
them now ; and were it possible (which it
is not) for science to disprove the Soul's
immortality, a theism deprived of this ele-
ment would surely never be accepted as
an equivalent for the theism entertained
before. The Positivist argument that the
only worthy immortality is survival in the
grateful remembrance of one's fellow crea-
tures would hardly be regarded as anything
but a travesty and trick. If the world's
long cherished beliefs are to fall, in God's
name let them fall, but save us from the
•intellectual hypocrisy that goes about pre-
tending we are none the poorer !
VI
Religions Third Postulate : the Ethical Sig-
nificance of the Unseen World
;UR account of the rise and progress
of the general belief in an Unseen
World is, however, not yet com-
plete. No mention has been made of an
element which apparently has always been
present in the belief. I mean the ethical
element. The savage's primeval ghost-
world is always mixed up with his childlike
notions of what he ought to do and what
he ought not to do. The native of Tierra
del Fuego, who foreboded a snowstorm
because one of Mr. Darwin's party killed
some birds for specimens, furnishes an
excellent illustration. In a tribe living
always on the brink of starvation, any wan-
ton sacrifice of meat must awaken the
wrath of the tutelar ancestral ghost-deities
ij2 Reality of Religion
who control the weather. Notions of a simi-
lar sort are connected with the direful host
of omens that dog the savage's footsteps
through the world. Whatever conduct the
necessities of clan or tribe have prohibited
soon comes to wear the aspect of sacrilege.
Thus inextricably intertwined from the
moment of their first dim dawning upon the
consciousness of nascent Humanity, have
been the notion of Deity, the notion of an
Unseen World, and the notions of Right
and Wrong. In their beginnings theology
and ethics were inseparable ; in all the vast
historic development of religion they have
remained inseparable. The grotesque con-
ceptions of primitive men have given place
to conceptions framed after wider and
deeper experience, but the union of ethics
with theology remains undisturbed even
in that most refined religious philosophy
which ventures no opinion concerning the
happiness or misery of a future life, except
that the seed sown here will naturally de-
termine the fruit to be gathered hereafter.
Reality of Religion 1J3
All the analogies that modern knowledge
can bring to bear upon the theory of a
future life point to the opinion that the
breach of physical continuity is not accom-
panied by any breach of ethical continuity.
Such an opinion relating to matters be-
yond experience cannot of course be called
scientific, but whether it be justifiable or
not, my point is that neither in the crude
fancies of primitive men nor in the most
refined modern philosophy can theology
divorce itself from ethics. Take away the
ethical significance from our conceptions of
the Unseen World and the quasi-human
God, and no element of significance re-
mains. All that was vital in theism is
gone.
VII
Is the Substance of Religion a Phantom, or an
Eternal Reality ?
E are now prepared to see what is
involved in the Reality of Reli-
gion. Speaking historically, it may
be said that Religion has always had two
sides : on the one side it has consisted of a
theory, more or less elaborate, and on the
other side it has consisted of a group of
sentiments conformable to the theory.
Now in all ages and in every form of Reli-
gion, the theory has comprised three essen-
tial elements : first, belief in Deity, as
quasi-human ; secondly, belief in an Un-
seen World in which human beings con-
tinue to exist after death ; thirdly, recogni-
tion of the ethical aspects of human life as
related in a special and intimate sense to
this Unseen World. These three elements
Reality of Religion 175
are alike indispensable. If any one of the
three be taken away, the remnant cannot
properly be called Religion. Is then the
subject-matter of Religion something real
and substantial, or is it a mere figment of
the imagination ? Has Religion through
all these weary centuries been dealing with
an eternal verity, or has it been blindly
groping after a phantom ? Can that his-
tory of the universe which we call the Doc-
trine of Evolution be made to furnish any
lesson that will prove helpful in answering
this question ? We shall find, I think, that
it does furnish such a lesson.
But first let us remember that along with
the three indispensable elements here spe-
cified, every historic Religion has also con-
tained a quantity of cosmological specula-
tions, metaphysical doctrines, priestly rites
and ceremonies and injunctions, and a Very
considerable part of this structure has been
demolished by modern criticism. The de-
struction of beliefs has been so great that
we can hardly think it strange if some
iy6 Reality of Religion
critics have taken it into their heads that
nothing can be rescued. But let us see
what the doctrine of evolution has to say.
Our inquiry may seem to take us very far
afield, but that we need not mind if we
find the answer by and by directing us
homeward.
VIII
The Fundamental Aspect of Life
OFTEN think, when working over
my plants, of what Linnaeus once
said of the unfolding of a blossom :
" I saw God in His glory passing near me,
and bowed my head in worship." The sci-
entific aspect of the same thought has been
put into words by Tennyson : —
" Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower, — but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.*'
No deeper thought was ever uttered by
poet. For in this world of plants, which
with its magician chlorophyll conjuring
with sunbeams is ceaselessly at work bring-
ing life out of death, — in this quiet vege-
table world we may find the elementary
ij8 Reality of Religion
principles of all life in almost visible opera-
tion. It is one of these elementary princi-
ples — a very simple and broad one — that
here concerns us.
One of the greatest contributions ever
made to scientific knowledge is Herbert
Spencer's profound and luminous exposi-
tion of Life as the continuous adjustment
of inner relations to outer relations. The
extreme simplicity of the subject in its
earliest illustrations is such that the stu-
dent at first hardly suspects the wealth of
knowledge toward which it is pointing the
way. The most fundamental characteristic
of living things is their response to external
stimuli. If you come upon a dog lying by
the roadside and are in doubt whether he
is alive or dead, you poke him with a stick ;
if you get no response you presently con-
clude that it is a dead dog. So if the tree
fails to put forth leaves in response to the
rising vernal temperature, it is an indication
of death. Pour water on a drooping plant,
and it shows its life by rearing its head.
Reality of Religion 179
The growth of a plant is in its ultimate
analysis a group of motions put forth in
adjustment to a group of physical and
chemical conditions in the soil and atmos-
phere. A fine illustration is the spiral dis-
tribution of leaves about the stem, at dif-
ferent angular intervals in different kinds of
plants, but always so arranged as to ensure
the most complete exposure of the chlo-
rophyll to the sunbeams. Every feature
of the plant is explicable on similar prin-
ciples. It is the result of a continuous
adjustment of relations within the plant to
relations existing outside of it. It is im-
portant that we should form a clear concep-
tion of this, and a contrasted instance will
help us. Take one of those storm-glasses
in which the approach of atmospheric dis-
turbance sets up a feathery crystallization
that changes in shape and distribution as
the state of the air outside changes. Here
is something that simulates vegetable life,
but there is a profound difference. In
every one of these changes the liquid in
180 Reality of Religion
the storm-glass is passive ; it is changed and
waits until it is changed again. But in the
case of a tree, when the increased supply
of solar radiance in spring causes those in-
ternal motions which result in the putting
forth of leaves, it is quite another affair.
Here the external change sets up an in-
ternal change which leads to a second in-
ternal change that anticipates a second
external change. It is this active response
that is the mark of life.
All life upon the globe, whether physical
or psychical, represents the continuous ad-
justment of inner to outer relations. The
degree of life is low or high, according as
the correspondence between internal and
external relations is simple or complex,
limited or extensive, partial or complete,
perfect or imperfect. The relations estab-
lished within a plant answer only to the
presence or absence of a certain quantity
of light and heat, and to sundry chemical
and physical relations in atmosphere and
soil. In a polyp, besides general relations
Reality of Religion 181
similar to these, certain more special rela-
tions are established in correspondence
with the eternal existence of mechanical
irritants ; as when its tentacles contract on
being touched. The increase of extension
acquired by the correspondences as we
ascend the animal scale may be seen by
contrasting the polyp, which can simply
distinguish between soluble and insoluble
matter, or between opacity and translu-
cence in its environment, with the keen-
scented bloodhound and the far-sighted
vulture. And the increase of complexity
may be appreciated by comparing the mo-
tions respectively gone through by the
polyp on the one hand, and by the dog and
vulture on the other, while securing and
disposing of their prey. The more specific
and accurate, the more complex and exten-
sive, is the response to environing relations,
the higher and richer, we say, is the life.
IX
How the Evolution of Senses expands the
World
HE whole progression of life upon
the globe, in so far as it has been
achieved through natural selection,
has consisted in the preservation and the
propagation of those living creatures in
whom the adjustment of inner relations to
outer relations is most successful. This is
only a more detailed and descriptive way of
saying that natural selection is equivalent
to survival of the fittest. The shapes of
animals, as well as their capacities, have
been evolved through almost infinitely slow
increments of adjustment upon adjustment.
In this way, for instance, has been evolved
the vertebrate skeleton, through a process
of which Spencer's wonderful analysis is
as thrilling as a poem. Or consider the
Reality of Religion 183
development of the special organs of sense.
Among the most startling disclosures of
embryology are those which relate to this
subject. The most perfect organs of touch
are the vibrissa or whiskers of the cat,
which act as long levers in communicating
impulses to the nerve-fibres that terminate
in clusters about the dermal sacs in which
they are inserted. These cat-whiskers are
merely specialized forms of such hairs as
those which cover the bodies of most mam-
mals, and which remain in evanescent shape
upon the human skin imbedded in minute
sacs. Now in their origin the eye and ear
are identical with vibrissa. In the early
stages of vertebrate life, while the differen-
tiations of dermal tissue went mostly to
the production of hairs or feathers or
scales, sundry special differentiations went
to the production of ears and eyes. Em-
bryology shows that in mammals the bulb
of the eye and the auditory chamber are ex-
tremely metamorphosed hair-sacs, the crys-
talline lens is a differentiated hair, and the
184 • Reality of Religion
aqueous and vitreous humours are liquefied
dermal tissue! The implication of these
wonderful facts is that sight and hearing
were slowly differentiated from the sense
of touch. One can seem to discern how in
the history of the eye there was at first a
concentration of pigment grains in a par-
ticular dermal sac, making that spot excep-
tionally sensitive to light; then came by
slow degrees the heightened translucence,
the convexity of surface, the refracting
humours, and the multiplication of nerve-
vesicles arranging themselves as retinal
rods. And what was the result of all this
for the creature in whom organs of vision
were thus developed ? There was an im-
mense extension of the range, complexity,
and definiteness of the adjustment of inner
relations to outer relations ; in other words,
there was an immense increase of life.
There came into existence, moreover, for
those with eyes to see it, a mighty visible
world that for sightless creatures had been
virtually non-existent.
Reality of Religion 185
With the further progress of organic life,
the high development of the senses was
attended or followed by increase of brain
development and the correlative intelli-
gence, immeasurably enlarging the scope
of the correspondences between the living
creature and the outer world. In the case
of Man, the adjustments by which we meet
the exigencies of life from day to day are
largely psychical, achieved by the aid of
ideal representations of environing circum-
stances. Our actions are guided by our
theory of the situation, and it needs no
illustration to show us that a true theory is
an adjustment of one's ideas to the external
facts, and that such adjustments are helps
to successful living. The whole worth of
education is directed toward cultivating the
capacity of framing associations of ideas
that conform to objective facts. It is thus
that life is guided.
Nature's Eternal Lesson is the Everlasting
Reality of Religion
O as we look back over the marvel-
lous life-history of our planet, even
from the dull time when there was
no life more exalted than that of conferva
scum on the surface of a pool, through
ages innumerable until the present time
when Man is learning how to decipher Na-
ture's secrets, we look back over an infi-
nitely slow series of minute adjustments,
gradually and laboriously increasing the
points of contact between the inner Life
and the World environing. Step by step
in the upward advance toward Humanity
the environment has enlarged. The world
of the fresh-water alga was its tiny pool
during its brief term of existence ; the
world of civilized man comprehends the
Reality of Religion i8y
stellar universe during countless asons of
time. Every stage of enlargement has had
reference to actual existences outside. The
eye was developed in response to the out-
ward existence of radiant light, the ear in
response to the outward existence of acous-
tic vibrations, the mother's love came in
response to the infant's needs, fidelity and
honour were slowly developed as the nas-
cent social life required them ; everywhere
the internal adjustment has been brought
about so as to harmonize with some actually
existing external fact. Such has been Na-
ture's method, such is the deepest law of
life that science has been able to detect.
Now there was a critical moment in the
history of our planet, when love was begin-
ning to play a part hitherto unknown, when
notions of right and wrong were germinat-
ing in the nascent Human Soul, when the
family was coming into existence, when
social ties were beginning to be knit, when
winged words first took their flight through
the air. It was the moment when the pro-
j 88 Reality of Religion
cess of evolution was being shifted to a
higher plane, when civilization was to be
superadded to organic evolution, when the
last and highest of creatures was coming
upon the scene, when the dramatic purpose
of creation was approaching fulfilment.
At that critical moment we see the nascent
Human Soul vaguely reaching forth toward
something akin to itself not in the realm
of fleeting phenomena but in the Eternal
Presence beyond. An internal adjustment
of ideas was achieved in correspondence
with an Unseen World. That the ideas
were very crude and childlike, that they
were put together with all manner of gro-
tesqueness, is what might be expected.
The cardinal fact is that the crude child-
like mind was groping to put itself into
relation with an ethical world not visible to
the senses. And one aspect of this fact,
not to be lightly passed over, is the fact
that Religion, thus ushered upon the scene
coeval with the birth of Humanity, has
played such a dominant part in the subse-
Reality of Religion 189
quent evolution of human society that what
history would be without it is quite beyond
imagination. As to the dimensions of this
cardinal fact there can thus be no question.
None can deny that it is the largest and
most ubiquitous fact connected with the
existence of mankind upon the earth.
Now if the relation thus established in
the morning twilight of Man's existence
between the Human Soul and a world in-
visible and immaterial is a relation of which
only the subjective term is real and the ob-
jective term is non-existent, then, I say, it
is something utterly without precedent in
the whole history of creation. All the ana-
logies of Evolution, so far as we have yet
been able to decipher it, are overwhelming
against any such supposition. To suppose
that during countless ages, from the sea-
weed up to Man, the progress of life was
achieved through adjustments to external
realities, but that then the method was all
at once changed and throughout a vast
province of evolution the end was secured
igo Reality of Religion
through adjustments to external non-reali-
ties, is to do sheer violence to logic and to
common sense. Or, to vary the form of
statement, since every adjustment whereby
any creature sustains life may be called a
true step, and every maladjustment whereby
life is wrecked may be called a false step ;
if we are asked to believe that Nature, after
having throughout the whole round of her
inferior products achieved results through
the accumulation of all true steps and piti-
less rejection of all false steps, suddenly
changed her method and in the case of
her highest product began achieving results
through the accumulation of false steps ; I
say we are entitled to resent such a sug-
gestion as an insult to our understandings.
All the analogies of Nature fairly shout
against the assumption of such a breach of
continuity between the evolution of Man
and all previous evolution. So far as our
knowledge of Nature goes the whole mo-
mentum of it carries us onward to the
conclusion that the Unseen World, as the
Reality of Religion igi
objective term in a relation of fundamental
importance that has coexisted with the
whole career of Mankind, has a real exist-
ence ; and it is but following out the ana-
logy to regard that Unseen World as the
theatre where the ethical process is destined
to reach its full consummation. The les-
son of evolution is that through all these
weary ages the Human Soul has not been
cherishing in Religion a delusive phantom,
but in spite of seemingly endless groping
and stumbling it has been rising to the
recognition of its essential kinship with the
ever-living God. Of all the implications
of the doctrine of evolution with regard to
Man, I believe the very deepest and strong-
est to be that which asserts the Everlasting
Reality of Religion.
So far as I am aware, the foregoing argu-
ment is here advanced for the first time. It
does not pretend to meet the requirements
of scientific demonstration. One must not
look for scientific demonstration in pro-
blems that contain so many factors tran-
ig2 Reality of Religion
scending our direct experience. But as an
appeal to our common sense, the argument
here brought forward surely has tremen-
dous weight. It seems to me far more
convincing than any chain of subtle meta-
physical reasoning can ever be ; for such
chains, however, invincible in appearance,
are no stronger than the weakest of their
links, and in metaphysics one is always un-
easily suspecting some undetected flaw.
My argument represents the impression
that is irresistibly forced upon one by a
broad general familiarity with Nature's pro-
cesses and methods ; it therefore belongs
to the class of arguments that survive.
Observe, too, that it is far from being a
modified repetition of the old argument
that beliefs universally accepted must be
true. Upon the view here presented, every
specific opinion ever entertained by man
respecting religious things may be wrong,
and in all probability is exceedingly crude,
and yet the Everlasting Reality of Reli-
gion, in its three indispensable elements as
Reality of Religion 193
here set forth, remains unassailable. Our
common-sense argument puts the scientific
presumption entirely and decisively on the
side of religion and against all atheistic and
materialistic explanations of the universe.
It establishes harmony between our highest
knowledge and our highest aspirations by
showing that the latter no less than the
former are a normal result of the universal
cosmic process. It has nothing to fear
from the advance of scientific discovery, for
as these things come to be better under-
stood, it is going to be realized that the
days of the antagonism between Science
and Religion must by and by come to an
end. That antagonism has been chiefly
due to the fact that religious ideas were
until lately allied with the doctrine of spe-
cial creations. They have therefore needed
to be remodelled and considered from new
points of view. But we have at length
reached a stage where it is becoming daily
more and more apparent that with the
deeper study of Nature the old strife be-
ig4 Reality of Religion
tween faith and knowledge is drawing to a
close ; and disentangled at last from that
ancient slough of despond the Human
Mind will breathe a freer air and enjoy a
vastly extended horizon.
L'ENVOI
Yesterday, when weary with writing, and my mind quite
dusty with considering these atoms, I was called to supper, and
a salad I had asked for was set before me. " It seems, then,"
said I aloud, " that if pewter dishes, leaves' of lettuce, grains of
salt, drops of vinegar and oil, and slices of eggs, had been float-
ing about in the air from all eternity, it might at last happen
by chance that there would come a salad." " Yes," says my
wife, " but not so nice and well-dressed as this of mine is ! " —
Kepler, apud Tait and Stewart, Paradoxical Philosophy.
ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND CO.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A.
Princeton Theological Seminary Libraries
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